Alarmed, but not discouraged, she tried it another way; a bolt flew, and she believed herself successful; but how strangely mysterious!
It was not absolutely ebony and gold; but it was japan, black and yellow japan of the handsomest kind; and as she held her candle, the yellow had very much the effect of gold.
Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale.
In the pause which succeeded, a sound like receding footsteps and the closing of a distant door struck on her affrighted ear.
What could it contain?
With this spirit she sprang forward, and her confidence did not deceive her. Her resolute effort threw back the lid, and gave to her astonished eyes the view of a white cotton counterpane, properly folded, reposing at one end of the chest in undisputed possession!
A lamp could not have expired with more awful effect.
Till she had made herself mistress of its contents, however, she could have neither repose nor comfort; and with the sun's first rays she was determined to peruse it.
CHAPTER 21
I will look into it--cost me what it may, I will look into it--and directly too--by daylight.
The general's good humour increased.
Human nature could support no more.
Mamma says I am never within."
"But we have a charming morning after it," she added, desiring to get rid of the subject; "and storms and sleeplessness are nothing when they are over.
What beautiful hyacinths!
"Is it a pretty place?" asked Catherine.
I have just learnt to love a hyacinth."
This was the only comfort that occurred.
"A mother would have been always present.
It was a narrow winding path through a thick grove of old Scotch firs; and Catherine, struck by its gloomy aspect, and eager to enter it, could not, even by the general's disapprobation, be kept from stepping forward.
By accident or argument?"
Why was Miss Tilney embarrassed?
"But when?"
"Most probably."
Barbicane sought to restrain them.
"Just so," said Barbicane, "which for us has no meaning."
I ask the honorable commission, if the moon is not habitable, has she ever been inhabited, Citizen Barbicane?"
There remains but one hypothesis, that of a living race to which motion, which is life, is foreign."
"And I answer in the negative," continued Barbicane.
"At the terrestrial poles they last six months," said Michel.
I ask it to be put differently."
"Without a doubt!" answered Nicholl.
"Here it is," continued Barbicane.
"I think that we can answer," said Barbicane; "but according to my idea the question ought not to be put in that form.
"Certainly."
"The hand is not necessary," answered Nicholl, not at all confounded; "and as to the stone, let us suppose it to be a comet."
The actual state of this cracked, twisted, and burst disc abundantly proves this.
"I believe it," said Nicholl.
"By cooling?"
"And why?" asked Nicholl quickly.
"Now," said Nicholl, "let us attack the second question, an indispensable complement of the first.
"Make a sign to me, God," he cried.
"See, come here and look," cried the old man. "Grandfather Jesse's white mare has torn the black stocking she wears on her foot."
First there was the old thing in him.
"Wake up, little animal.
"Take me away.
When he awoke at dawn the barnyard back of the house also awoke.
Instead he prayed for it.
"Four, five, six, seven," he said slowly, wetting his finger and making straight up and down marks on the window ledge.
In the house people stirred about.
As he talked his left eyelid twitched.
They both expected her to make trouble but were mistaken.
The others were all obliged to retire to a distance, and when the peasant looked at the priest, he recognized the man who had been with the miller's wife.
Next morning when the cows were being driven out, the little peasant called the cow-herd in and said: 'Look, I have a little calf there, but it is still small and has to be carried.' The cow-herd said: 'All right,' and took it in his arms and carried it to the pasture, and set it among the grass.
There was a certain village wherein no one lived but really rich peasants, and just one poor one, whom they called the little peasant.
When she went home the mouse inquired: 'And what was the child christened?' 'Half-done,' answered the cat.
Let me go out today, and you look after the house by yourself.' 'Yes, yes,' answered the mouse, 'by all means go, and if you get anything very good to eat, think of me.
'Top off!' cried the mouse, 'that is a very odd and uncommon name, is it a usual one in your family?' 'What does that matter,' said the cat, 'it is no worse than Crumb-stealer, as your godchildren are called.'
CAT AND MOUSE IN PARTNERSHIP
She said to the mouse: 'You must do me a favour, and once more manage the house for a day alone.
'He is called All-gone.' 'All-gone,' cried the mouse 'that is the most suspicious name of all!
'Alas!' said the mouse, 'now I see what has happened, now it comes to light!
'Half-done!
I have never seen it in print.
All-gone; what can that mean?' and she shook her head, curled herself up, and lay down to sleep.
Then she took a walk upon the roofs of the town, looked out for opportunities, and then stretched herself in the sun, and licked her lips whenever she thought of the pot of fat, and not until it was evening did she return home. 'Well, here you are again,' said the mouse, 'no doubt you have had a merry day.' 'All went off well,' answered the cat.
She went straight to the church, stole to the pot of fat, began to lick at it, and licked the top of the fat off.
Then the cook sent three servants after them, who were to run and overtake the children.
Early next morning the forester got up and went out hunting, and when he was gone the children were still in bed.
The two children therefore got up, dressed themselves quickly, and went away.
And the one, which he had found on a tree was called Fundevogel, because a bird had carried it away.
The forester climbed up, brought the child down, and thought to himself: 'You will take him home with you, and bring him up with your Lina.' He took it home, therefore, and the two children grew up together.
But when she came in, and went to the beds, both the children were gone.
Then said Lina: 'Fundevogel, never leave me, and I will never leave you.' Then said Fundevogel: 'Neither now, nor ever.' Said Lina: 'Be a fishpond, and I will be the duck upon it.' The cook, however, came up to them, and when she saw the pond she lay down by it, and was about to drink it up.
Here were kept the stores for the crew.
He turned pale when he felt the floor shaken by your fall.
The one way of putting a stop to murdering mischief (if murdering mischief it might be) was to trust Miss Cristel.
Gloody at once acknowledged that we had no proof.
If I hadn't kept my temper, I might have killed him."
"I didn't dare speak to you about it; you wouldn't have believed me.
"And when you looked at Miss Cristel, and she was too busy with her brooch to notice you, was that another signal?"
"Flew into a furious rage.
"Do you think he saw through it?
Very good.
Mr. Roylake, he kicked me.
There!
I can't look you in the face, and tell you of it." He walked away to the window.
"I happened to look at the boat," he said, "and I missed the oars.
In two words, sir, if you mean to charge him before the magistrates with attempting your life, I'll take my Bible oath he did attempt it, and you may call me as your witness.
Had we any proof to justify us?
"Nothing, sir."
"Then sit down, Gloody, and make a clean breast of it."
I QUIT THE WRECK.
Indeed I understood that my only hope of deliverance lay in being picked up; and that, though by heading east I should be clinging to the stormy parts, I was more likely to meet with a ship hereabouts than by sailing into the great desolation of the north-west.
"She told them that if they didn't stop it instantly, the juniors would pick them up bodily, carry them downstairs to the classroom and lock them in until the game was over."
"That would fill her with joy."
"She can spout poetry without trying."
THE JUNIORS FOREVER
Just then the whistle blew, and there was a scramble for places.
He was filled with profound admiration for them.
It's a wonder she'd condescend to come and watch her mortal enemies play."
"But, O girls, I am so proud of our invincible team.
They were sitting down front on the same side as Eleanor's crowd.
They now sang with the utmost glee, and came out particularly strong on the chorus, which ran:
"We shall win," said Miriam Nesbit confidently.
"We shall manage to exist if she doesn't," said Jessica dryly.
"What a delicate way of reminding me that I once was a freshman!" she exclaimed.
"Eleanor is here.
The junior fans howled joyfully at the good work of their team.
When the king passed before him, the unknown, who had leant forward over the balcony to obtain a better view, and who had concealed his face by leaning on his arm, felt his heart swell and overflow with a bitter jealousy.
His minister heaps up millions, and conducts him to a rich bride.
Vive le Roi!'"
"My recital will be short, my lord; but in the name of Heaven do not tremble so."
The old man endeavored to change the conversation; it was leading to thoughts much too sinister.
The pomp was of a military character.
"Then the general sent me back the letter by an aide-de-camp, informing me that if I were found the next day within the circumscription of his command, he would have me arrested."
"My lord," said the old man, "do not hasten to alarm yourself; all is not lost, I hope.
"Yes, my lord; but I wrote him a letter."
You must employ energy, but more particularly resignation."
The young man leaned forward, thoughtful and sad.
"Well--then, Parry."
Chapter VII.
What are these people crying 'Vive le Roi!' for?
"My lord, in the name of Heaven--"
We are rich, as rich as kings!"
Cropole deposited a tolerably large bag as directed, after having taken from it the amount of his reckoning.
A sad smile passed over the lips of the gentleman.
"Arrested!" murmured the young man.
"Parry," said the young man, "I have reached this place through a thousand snares and after a thousand difficulties; can you doubt my energy?
The noise of the trumpets excited him--the popular acclamations deafened him: for a moment he allowed his reason to be absorbed in this flood of lights, tumult, and brilliant images.
No, no; I have two arms, Parry, and I have a sword." And he struck his arm violently with his hand, and took down his sword, which hung against the wall.
"You are right, Parry; I am a coward, and if I do nothing for myself, what will God do?
After this brief reply ensued a long interval of silence, broken only by the convulsive beating of the heel of the young man on the floor.
Happy mother!
"I thought it best to take them, monsieur; nevertheless, I made it a condition of the bargain, that if monsieur wished to keep his diamond, it should be held till monsieur was again in funds."
All these trumpets are his, all those gilded housings are his, all those gentlemen wear swords that are his.
"Well, well, my lord," said Parry, more uneasy at the turn the conversation had taken than at the other.
"Parry," cried the gentleman, "I beg you will; you come from England--you come so far.
Parry, are there not examples in which a man of my condition should himself--"
The stranger did not pay them the least attention; but Cropole approaching him respectfully, whispered, "Monsieur, the diamond has been valued."
I have meditated this journey ten years, in spite of all counsels and all obstacles--have you faith in my perseverance?
What every one in my family does.
After a company of musketeers, a closely ranked troop of gentlemen, came the litter of monsieur le cardinal, drawn like a carriage by four black horses.
The young prince exhibited, when bowing to some windows from which issued the most animated acclamations, a noble and handsome countenance, illuminated by the flambeaux of his pages.
The pages and people of the cardinal marched behind.
Come, what did the general say to you?"
"At first the general would not receive me."
"My good Parry," said he, "order a fire, drink, eat, sleep, and be happy; let us both be happy, my faithful friend, my only friend.
"Well?"
"Well?"
"And notwithstanding you had signed the name Parry?"
But at that moment the voice of the stranger was heard from the window.
Some of the courtiers--the elder ones, for instance--wore traveling dresses; but all the rest were clothed in warlike panoply.
"He read it, and received me, my lord."
"What! arrest you, my most faithful servant?"
"Parry, is that all?--is that all?"
"What am I going to do, Parry?
"Oh!" sighed the young man, clasping his neck convulsively with his hand, and with a sob.
"Yes, my lord; that is all."
I do not despair, Parry; have you faith in my resignation?"
"What are you going to do, my lord?"
"I have my reply to give your lordship, in the first place."
"Yes, my lord."
These cavaliers conducted me, in great haste, to the little port of Tenby, threw me, rather than embarked me, into a little fishing-boat, about to sail for Brittany, and here I am."
Then, before he had recovered from his sombre reverie, all the noise, all the splendor, had passed away.
"Pay yourself," added the unknown.
"He took you for a spy?"
My mother lives on public charity, my sister begs for my mother; I have, somewhere or other, brothers who equally beg for themselves; and I, the eldest, will go and do as all the rest do--I will go and ask charity!"
The stranger waited for him on the landing; he opened his arms to the old man, and led him to a seat.
Shortly after was heard a loud flourish of trumpets; cries arose in the distance, a confused buzzing filled the lower part of the city, and the first distinct sound that struck the ears of the stranger was the tramp of advancing horses.
"The king!" cried Cropole, abandoning his guest and his ideas of delicacy, to satisfy his curiosity.
"Place the money on that trunk," said he, turning round and pointing to the piece of furniture.
"Sit down in your presence?--never!"
The king then appeared, mounted upon a splendid horse of Saxon breed, with a flowing mane.
Cropole turned around, and, on seeing the old man, cleared a passage for him.
"To all my letters, my lord; and the aide-de-camp had known me at St. James's and at Whitehall, too," added the old man with a sigh.
"Let me know," said the stranger,--"disguise nothing from me--what has happened?"
"Well, monsieur, the jeweler of S. A. R. gives two hundred and eighty pistoles for it."
"Have you them?"
The window was instantly closed.
"But, privately--between you and him--what did he do?
His mother precedes him in a carriage magnificently encrusted with silver and gold.
"The king! the king!" repeated a noisy and eager crowd.
The unknown asked for a glass of wine, broke off a morsel of bread, and did not stir from the window whilst he ate and drank.
"A handsome likeness!" said Pittrino.
She had forgotten to ask for one, and the wicked dwarfs had carried out her orders to the letter!
Indeed, Barbaik had only to express a wish for it to be satisfied.
To be sure, Jegu only replied roughly that he didn't know what she was talking about, but this answer made her feel all the more certain that it was he and nobody else.
Morning and evening Barbaik found her earthen pots full of milk and a pound of butter freshly churned, ornamented with leaves.
Now Jegu had everything to see to himself, and somehow it did not seem so easy as when the farmer was alive.
To her great joy he consented, bidding her set out for the city of the dwarfs and to tell them exactly what she wanted.
The marriage took place the following month, and a few days later the old man died quite suddenly.
She had hardly spoken when the horse appeared, and mounting on his back she started for the village where the wedding was to be held.
Barbaik was furious.
'What is the matter, Jegu?
The same thing took place every day, and never had the cow-house been so clean nor the cows so fat.
'You won't forget that in a hurry,' she said, smiling grimly to herself, but in a moment they were back again with large pots of water, which they poured on the fire.
Of course, Jegu was only too pleased to be able to do anything for the brownie, and he ordered Barbaik to spread her best table-cloths in the barn, and to make a quantity of little loaves and pancakes, and, besides, to keep all the milk given by the cows that morning.
It was the spring, and just the time of year when the dwarfs held their fete, so one day the brownie asked Jegu if he might bring his friends to have supper in the great barn, and whether he would allow them to dance there.
If the wind was cold or the sun was hot and she was afraid to go out lest her complexion should be spoilt, she need only to run down to the spring close by and say softly, 'I should like my churns to be full, and my wet linen to be stretched on the hedge to dry,' and she need never give another thought to the matter.
She complained to Jegu of his laziness, and he only stared at her, not understanding what she was talking about.
'Because of a service you did me last winter, which I have never forgotten,' answered the little fellow.
She went first to the cow-house, which it was her duty to keep clean, but to her amazement she found fresh straw put down, the racks filled with hay, the cows milked, and the pails standing neatly in a row.
I can take,' he added proudly, 'any shape I choose, and even, which is much harder, be invisible if I want to.'
Still he would not leave the farm, and look for work elsewhere, as he might have done, for then he would never see Barbaik at all, and what was life worth to him without that?
Full of excitement, Barbaik started on her journey.
It was not long, and when she reached the town she went straight to the dwarfs, who were holding counsel in a wide green place, and said to them, 'Listen, my friends!
Yes; it was true.
'It is I, the brownie of the lake,' replied the voice.
In the evening she returned to the farm more angry than ever, and quite determined to revenge herself on the brownie whenever she had the chance, which happened to be very soon.
This transformation rather frightened Jegu, but the brownie bade him have no fears, for he would not do him any harm; indeed, he hoped that Jegu might find him of some use.
This, also, she thought was the work of Jegu, and she could not help feeling that a husband of this sort would be very useful to a girl who liked to lie in bed and to amuse herself.
She would wear the beautiful dresses that came when she wished for them, and visit her neighbours, who would be dying of envy all the while, and she would be able to dance as much as she wished.
At the end of a few weeks she grew so used to this state of affairs that she only got up just in time to prepare breakfast.
Her horse had no tail!
'But where are you?' inquired Jegu.
Oh, you wretched dwarf, I will never, never forgive you!'
'That is my affair.
And she believed that all this was owing to Jegu, and she could no longer do without him, even in her thoughts.
'But why should you take all this interest in me?' asked the peasant suspiciously.
While now I can receive no presents except from my husband.
But it was of no use; he declined to move out of a walk; and she was forced to hear all the jokes that were made upon her.
Perhaps I may tell you later.
But when she looked at Jegu and beheld his red face, squinting eyes, and untidy hair, her anger was doubled.
But in a moment they all sprang up with a cry, and ran away screaming, for Barbaik had placed pans of hot coals under their feet, and all their poor little toes were burnt.
Soon even this grew to be unnecessary, for a day arrived when, coming downstairs, she discovered that the house was swept, the furniture polished, the fire lit, and the food ready, so that she had nothing to do except to ring the great bell which summoned the labourers from the fields to come and eat it.
Then they joined hands and danced round it, singing:
We were therefore obliged to take refuge in distant lands, and to hide ourselves at first under different animal shapes. Since that time, partly from habit and partly to amuse ourselves, we have continued to transform ourselves, and it was in this way that I got to know you.'
'How?' exclaimed Jegu, filled with astonishment.
The young man glanced up in surprise, and asked who was there.
From the very day of her marriage Barbaik had noted with surprise and rage that things ceased to be done for her as they had been done all the weeks and months before.
Jegu would always be there to work for her and save for her, and watch over her.
'Certainly, if you wish,' and the frog jumped on the back of one of the horses, and changed into a little dwarf, all dressed in green.
'Ah! my little brownie, if you can do that, there is nothing I won't give you, except my soul.'
Meanwhile you just eat and sleep, and don't worry yourself about anything.'
Jegu declared that nothing could be easier, and then taking off his hat, he thanked the dwarf heartily, and led his horses back to the farm.
Next morning was a holiday, and Barbaik was awake earlier than usual, as she wished to get through her work as soon as possible, and be ready to start for a dance which was to be held some distance off.
And all the payment the brownie ever asked for was a bowl of broth.
'Why, the farmer's wife has sold her horse's tail!' and turned in her saddle.
He was tired with a long day's work, and stood with his hand on the mane of one of the animals, waiting till they had done, and thinking all the while of Barbaik, when a voice came out of the gorse close by.
At length she caught some words uttered by one man to another.
Fatigue and nervousness, expressed, breed fatigue and nervousness in a sympathetic audience.
But if John nurses hurt feelings whenever Mary punctures his vanity by suggesting that he presents to the world a less than perfect front, Mary may soon lose courage and relinquish her wifely job of husband improvement.
Staging a contest or a succession of small contests, for the sake of finding out who is boss builds up a habit of fighting that may lead to a bitter end.
The smaller issues on which this rests are the lively clashes of opposite desires, inevitable in the coming together of any two persons, intensified when those two persons are as different as a man and a woman, and unavoidable for two committed to a lifetime together in the close quarters of marriage.
Temperament, mannerisms, tastes--all that is implied in the distinct individuality of each person--make up the chief source of the advantages and disadvantages with which the couple enter marriage.
"Why doesn't his wife tell him of that unpleasant mannerism, so he can correct it?" bears witness to the universal appreciation of this function of married life.
And love is the motive that will make both try to keep open the pathway to marriage success.
For example, Mary wants to buy a car, just as John is reckoning that the time has come to build a house.
Stiff-minded people who are frank only when angry lose their case before they present it.
The marriage partner who is mature will maintain trust in the other's good intentions in the face of what might seem to be occasions for hurt feelings.
Nobody can suddenly change his personality at will, and the effort to do so to please the partner is liable to result in a topheavy hypocrisy--a superstructure calculated to impress the observer, but built on a shaky foundation of chaos.
And finally, they must know what constitutes a happy marriage--what to aim for in their day-to-day association.
Unworried by any fear of calamity, each marriage partner can turn to account his or her powers of discernment by learning to recognize the assets as well as the liabilities of the partnership.
At no point can the domination of either partner over the other take the place of adjustment.
Is the object of one's wishes as desirable as one had expected?
Not to happiness, as they may believe, but to the opportunity for gaining happiness.
To wait until they are beset by them is to beg for trouble.
Even the greatest love stagnates if it is kept out of the main current of life.
And your vexation terrifies you.
Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than an invitation to be lazy.
The choice that brings the larger advantage to the two persons in their common role of marriage partners is the one to be made.
Does this mean that you no longer love your mate as you did?
"I'm not so sure of that.
"It's my property, now," interposed the broker.
I write it to commemorate the spirit in which Mr Templeton met me.
"I didn't expect you would turn against your own churchwarden in the execution of his duty, sir," he said in an offended tone.
Speak that you do know and testify that you have seen.
"Possibly.
Without answering him--for I was more angry with him than I ought to have been--I repeated--
It will go to pay counsel, I give you my word, if you do not take it to quench strife."
I rang the bell for my boots, and, to the open-mouthed dismay of Mrs Pearson, left the vicarage leaning on Tom's arm.
They did so.
Now I do not write all this for the sake of the church-rate question.
There was a little chapel down a lane leading from the main street of the village, in which there was service three times every Sunday.
"FIFTY PER CENT. will be, I think, profit enough even on such a transaction."
"I did not offer you the table," returned the broker.
I have--"
But, having heard of it, he called himself upon the churchwarden--Mr Brownrigg still--and offered the money cheerfully.
I assure you I will prosecute you myself.
I had so far recovered that I was able to rise about noon and go into my study, though I was very weak, and had not yet been out, when one morning Mrs Pearson came into the room and said,--
And so we parted.
"Put that table down directly."
The porcine head of the churchwarden was not on his shoulders by accident, nor without significance.
This, I say, is what I had made out about him from what I had heard; and my reader will very probably be inclined to ask, "But why, with principles such as yours, should you have only hearsay to go upon?
"Put that table down, I tell you."
After this Mr Templeton and I found some opportunities of helping each other.
"Now," I said, "carry it back into the house."
I turned to Mr Brownrigg.
I hope I have some.
People will hear you who will not hear me.
"I assure you, sir, I have done everything according to law."
"Twenty shillings," returned he, sulkily, "and it won't pay expenses."
"Yes," I said, "as right as the devil would have it."
Why did you not make the honest man's acquaintance?
But I did not wait to understand all this now.
"What is the matter, Tom?" I said.
You take up that money, or I will.
You never seemed to care for business."
Indeed, Mr Brownrigg was not the man to have power in his hands unchecked.
The Church was his grandmother, not his mother, and he had not made any acquaintance with her till comparatively late in life.
"Twenty shillings!" I exclaimed; "for a table that cost three times as much at least!--What do you expect to sell it for?"
So little seemed to fall to the duty of the churchwarden that I regarded the neglect as a trifle, and was remiss in setting it right.
"I am not bound to sell except I please, and at my own price."
"What church-rate?" I cried, starting up from the sofa.
"Oh, sir, I know you would be vexed if you hadn't been told," he exclaimed, "and I am sure you will not be angry with me for troubling you."
It was enough for me that Tom bore witness to the fact that at that moment proceedings were thus driven to extremity.
People came to it from many parts of the parish, amongst whom were the families of two or three farmers of substance, while the village and its neighbourhood contributed a portion of the poorest of the inhabitants.
"I did not think you would stand upon ceremony about it, sir.
"I would have paid the church-rate for the whole parish ten times over before such a thing should have happened.
I need not say he never became a churchman, or that I never expected he would.
But Mr Brownrigg, who, I must say, had taken more pains than might have been expected of him to make himself acquainted with the legalities of his office, did not fail to call a vestry, to which, as usual, no one had responded; whereupon he imposed a rate according to his own unaided judgment.
I confess I was rather pleased; for I wanted my people to feel that the church was their property, and that it was their privilege, if they could regard it as a blessing to have the church, to keep it in decent order and repair.
Are there not countless modes of saying the truth?
You and I will help each other, in proportion as we serve the Master.
Now, before I go farther, it is necessary to explain some things.
"That's my business," answered the broker.
It was long before another church-rate was levied in Marshmallows.
I daresay, likewise, that the natural SHELLINESS of the English had something to do with it.
A year or two before I came, their minister died, and they had chosen another, a very worthy man, of considerable erudition, but of extreme views, as I heard, upon insignificant points, and moved by a great dislike to national churches and episcopacy.
You have some of them.
Nor did any one of my congregation throw the least difficulty in the churchwarden's way.--And now I must refer to another circumstance in the history of my parish.
"I never heard of a church-rate."
"But, bless my soul, how ill you look!"
I think I have already alluded to the fact that there were Dissenters in Marshmallows.
"If people could only meet, and look each other in the face," said Mr Templeton at length, "they might find there was not such a gulf between them as they had fancied."
This, I believe, he did during my illness, with the notion of pleasing me by the discovery that the repairs had been already effected according to my mind.
Preach to them in the name and love of God, Mr Templeton.
Hurrying on in more terror than I can well express lest I should be too late, I reached Mr Templeton's house just as a small mahogany table was being hoisted into a spring-cart which stood at the door.
I had, therefore, to suffer, as was just.
Once he came to me about a legal difficulty in connexion with the deed of trust of his chapel; and although I could not help him myself, I directed him to such help as was thorough and cost him nothing.
"I assure you I shall not be angry with you."
"Who told you they were?" asked Caroline.
"We had, indeed, sir," replied Mr. Yorke, advancing to take a seat near him.
We do not breakfast until nine, on account of Tom and Charley.
"Does she?
"I am responsible to One always, Lady Augusta.
I always do anything that William Yorke asks me; and I will do anything for you."
"I shall obey Lady Augusta, and decide upon the one who shall best merit it," smiled Constance.
"Annabel is fond of talking nonsense; but she is a good, loving child at heart.
Constance kissed her.
"I suppose this will only apply to the summer months.
"And these?" said Constance, touching the curl-papers.
"How very conscientious you are!" laughed Lady Augusta, her tone savouring of ridicule.
"I was mentioning your case to him," observed Mr. Yorke.
"Think of all that is at stake!
Fanny came running in, her hair in curl-papers, some bread and butter in her hand.
Constance then spoke of giving the children the extra two hours, from seven to nine: it was really necessary, she said, if she was to do her duty by them.
There was so much to do; so much to alter in so many ways.
Not only idleness, temper also.
She entered, took off her things in the room appropriated to her, and passed into the schoolroom.
"You are not leaving one of them at home to make room for me, I hope, Lady Augusta?"
You would be pleased to hear them."
"Suppose we are both good, and merit it equally?" suggested Fanny.
It will keep in curl all the better, Miss Channing; and perhaps I am going to the missionary meeting with mamma."
And let it be done in future, Martha, before she comes to me."
"He knows the lecturer well.
"Of course not," said Constance.
"Caroline, do you know that you have disobeyed me?"
Her name, as I afterward learned, was Sola, and she belonged to the retinue of Tars Tarkas.
The other nine hundred and seventy-nine die violent deaths in duels, in hunting, in aviation and in war; but perhaps by far the greatest death loss comes during the age of childhood, when vast numbers of the little Martians fall victims to the great white apes of Mars.
The principal chieftain then evidently signified a desire to see me perform, and, motioning me to follow, he started with Tars Tarkas for the open plaza.
She conducted me to a spacious chamber in one of the buildings fronting on the plaza, and which, from the litter of silks and furs upon the floor, I took to be the sleeping quarters of several of the natives.
But I was to learn that the Martian smile is merely perfunctory, and that the Martian laugh is a thing to cause strong men to blanch in horror.
At the time, this ceremony and the words they uttered meant nothing to me, but later I came to know that this was the customary greeting between green Martians.
With the exception of their ornaments all were naked.
I did not recognize the applause as such, but later, when I had become acquainted with their customs, I learned that I had won what they seldom accord, a manifestation of approbation.
On the platform proper squatted an enormous warrior heavily loaded with metal ornaments, gay-colored feathers and beautifully wrought leather trappings ingeniously set with precious stones.
The death agonies of a fellow being are, to these strange creatures, provocative of the wildest hilarity, while their chief form of commonest amusement is to inflict death on their prisoners of war in various ingenious and horrible ways.
The main entrance was some hundred feet in width and projected from the building proper to form a huge canopy above the entrance hall.
It was constructed of gleaming white marble inlaid with gold and brilliant stones which sparkled and scintillated in the sunlight.
Tars Tarkas and the chief exchanged a few words, and the former, calling to a young female among the throng, gave her some instructions and motioned me to accompany her.
Only about one Martian in a thousand dies of sickness or disease, and possibly about twenty take the voluntary pilgrimage.
In response to her call I obtained my first sight of a new Martian wonder.
CHAPTER IV
A word from the leader of the party stilled their clamor, and we proceeded at a trot across the plaza to the entrance of as magnificent an edifice as mortal eye has rested upon.
Again locking his arm in mine, we had proceeded into the audience chamber.
Sola motioned me to be seated upon a pile of silks near the center of the room, and, turning, made a peculiar hissing sound, as though signaling to someone in an adjoining room.
I replied in our good old English tongue merely to convince him that neither of us could understand the other; but I noticed that when I smiled slightly on concluding, he did likewise.
We had gone perhaps ten miles when the ground began to rise very rapidly.
I did not, of course, know the reason for which we had come to the open, but I was not long in being enlightened.
The adult females ranged in height from ten to twelve feet.
There were few formalities observed in approaching the Martian chieftain.
Our party had halted at the entrance to the building, and at a sign from the leader I had been lowered to the ground.
From his shoulders depended a short cape of white fur lined with brilliant scarlet silk.
The chieftain rose to his feet and uttered the name of my escort who, in turn, halted and repeated the name of the ruler followed by his title.
He evidently explained briefly the incidents connected with his expedition, including my capture, and when he had concluded the chieftain addressed me at some length.
Toward the center of the city was a large plaza, and upon this and in the buildings immediately surrounding it were camped some nine or ten hundred creatures of the same breed as my captors, for such I now considered them despite the suave manner in which I had been trapped.
My captor merely strode up to the rostrum, the others making way for him as he advanced.
As we neared the plaza and my presence was discovered we were immediately surrounded by hundreds of the creatures who seemed anxious to pluck me from my seat behind my guard.
Upon closer observation I saw as we passed them that the buildings were deserted, and while not greatly decayed had the appearance of not having been tenanted for years, possibly for ages.
My fair companion was about eight feet tall, having just arrived at maturity, but not yet to her full height.
As he sunk to the floor I wheeled around with my back toward the nearest desk, expecting to be overwhelmed by the vengeance of his fellows, but determined to give them as good a battle as the unequal odds would permit before I gave up my life.
The thing was about the size of a Shetland pony, but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp tusks.
My fears were groundless, however, as the other Martians, at first struck dumb with wonderment, finally broke into wild peals of laughter and applause.
It waddled in on its ten short legs, and squatted down before the girl like an obedient puppy.
We were, as I was later to learn, nearing the edge of one of Mars' long-dead seas, in the bottom of which my encounter with the Martians had taken place.
My captor, whose name was Tars Tarkas, was virtually the vice-chieftain of the community, and a man of great ability as a statesman and warrior.
Had the men been strangers, and therefore unable to exchange names, they would have silently exchanged ornaments, had their missions been peaceful--otherwise they would have exchanged shots, or have fought out their introduction with some other of their various weapons.
Their bodies were smaller and lighter in color, and their fingers and toes bore the rudiments of nails, which were entirely lacking among the males.
She was of a light olive-green color, with a smooth, glossy hide.
On the floor of this chamber, which was dotted with highly carved wooden desks and chairs, were assembled about forty or fifty male Martians around the steps of a rostrum.
This fact, and the similar occurrence during my first talk with Tars Tarkas, convinced me that we had at least something in common; the ability to smile, therefore to laugh; denoting a sense of humor.
The fellow whom I had struck lay where he had fallen, nor did any of his mates approach him.
The building was low, but covered an enormous area.
No water, and no other vegetation than the moss was in evidence, and as I was somewhat thirsty I determined to do a little exploring.
My muscles, perfectly attuned and accustomed to the force of gravity on Earth, played the mischief with me in attempting for the first time to cope with the lesser gravitation and lower air pressure on Mars.
I seemed to be lying in a deep, circular basin, along the outer verge of which I could distinguish the irregularities of low hills.
The eggs were nearly uniform in size being about two and one-half feet in diameter.
Their noses were but longitudinal slits in the center of their faces, midway between their mouths and ears.
He exchanged a few words with his men, motioned to me that I would ride behind one of them, and then mounted his own animal.
I alighted upon the soft moss easily and without mishap, and turning saw my enemies lined up along the further wall.
The metal of the barrel is an alloy composed principally of aluminum and steel which they have learned to temper to a hardness far exceeding that of the steel with which we are familiar.
"I am very stupid.
You pretended to be much disappointed at finding Moyne out--you had just come for a little social visit, to get better acquainted with the home life of your employees!
I've been waiting up for it--though I expected you would telephone rather than this.
I stole the money myself from the bank to-night. I guess it's all up.
An ex-convict from Sing Sing!
"In private, eh?"--he seemed to be sparring for time, as he smiled.
And then Jimmie Dale laughed--not pleasantly.
From his pocket he took out the thin metal insignia case, and with the tiny tweezers lifted up one of the gray-coloured, diamond-shaped paper seals.
"There's just one reason, only one, that keeps me from putting a bullet through you while you sit there. We'll get to that in a moment.
"Ah, quite so!" he observed.
"You lie!" Ashen to the lips, Carling had risen in his chair.
"I have not used this--yet.
Carling's hand dropped to his side.
Under the prolonged gaze, Carling's composure, in a measure at least, seemed to forsake him.
"I want you to listen to a little story first."
A little later in the evening, you took these two packages of banknotes from the rest, and with this steamship ticket--which you obtained yesterday while out at lunch by sending a district messenger boy with the money and instructions in a sealed envelope to purchase for you--you went up to the Moynes' flat in Harlem for the purpose of secreting them somewhere there.
"Well, it's about time!
Jimmie Dale still leaned over the desk, resting his weight on his right elbow, the automatic in his right hand covering Carling.
"Let me out of this--for God's sake, let me out of this!"
A bit melodramatic, isn't it?
Jimmie Dale slipped his mask into his pocket, and, with the parcel under his arm, stepped to the door and unlocked it.
The pen spluttered on the paper--a bead of sweat spurting from the man's forehead dropped to the sheet.
"Which I neglected to add," said Jimmie Dale, "was to be made in private."
"Yes, there's a way, Carling," he said grimly.
He had sunk a little deeper in his chair--a dawning look of terror in the eyes that held, fascinated, on Jimmie Dale.
Perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me who you are?"
He whispered:
The white in Carling's face had turned to gray, his lips were working--mechanically he sank down again in his chair.
"And yet--"
There are ten thousand here.
"Please don't do that," said Jimmie Dale softly.
A minute passed--another.
"That accounts for the mask.
It was enough, wasn't it?
Jimmie Dale was leaning back against the door that was closed now behind him--and on Jimmie Dale's face was a black silk mask.
The lavishness of this bachelor establishment of yours is common talk in New York--far in excess of a bank cashier's salary.
"Take a chair," he said, over his shoulder--and then, turning in the act of dropping into his own chair, grasped suddenly at the edge of the desk instead, and, with a low, startled cry, stared across the room.
He was an ex-convict, a hardened criminal caught red-handed with a portion of the proceeds of robbery--he had succeeded in hiding the remainder of it too cleverly, that was all."
"You cur, with your devil's work!
Carling's pen travelled haltingly across the paper then, with a queer, low cry as he signed his name, he dropped the pen from his fingers, and, rising unsteadily from his chair, stumbled away from the desk toward a couch across the room.
But if that happens, if any one enters this room, if you make a move to touch a button, or in any other way attempt to attract attention, I'll drop you where you stand!" His hand, behind his back, extracted the key from the door lock, held it up for the other to see, then dropped it into his pocket--and his voice, cold before, rang peremptorily now.
"It's rather a good make, that safe.
You've a strange method of securing privacy, haven't you?
He opened it there.
"Mr. Carling," said Jimmie Dale, in a low, even tone, "unless you moderate your voice some one in the house might hear you--I am quite well aware of that.
Carling, in a somewhat pompous fashion, walked straight ahead toward the carved-mahogany flat-topped desk, and, as he reached it, waved his hand.
Carling shivered, and passed a shaking hand across his face.
Jimmie Dale's lips parted ominously.
It was close upon one o'clock in the morning when Jimmie Dale stopped again--this time before a fashionable dwelling just off Central Park. And here, for perhaps the space of a minute, he surveyed the house from the sidewalk--watching, with a sort of speculative satisfaction, a man's shadow that passed constantly to and fro across the drawn blinds of one of the lower windows.
Come in!"
An instant Jimmie Dale watched the other, then he picked up the sheet of paper.
Your bank was robbed to-night of one hundred thousand dollars.
It was quite dark, too dark for either to distinguish the other's features--and Jimmie Dale's hat was drawn far down over his eyes.
"You were safe enough," he rasped on.
"What's this?" he demanded hoarsely.
Carling's hand reached out, still shaking, and took the pen; and his body, dragged limply forward, hung over the desk.
Carling was once more the pompous bank official.
"Come back to the desk and sit down in that chair!" he ordered.
"That's why I'm here." He picked up a sheet of writing paper and pushed it across the desk--then a pen, which he dipped into the inkstand, and extended to the other.
From headquarters with a report, I think you said?"
"I'm ruined--ruined as it is.
There was just an instant's silence; and then, with a strange, slow, creeping motion, as a panther creeps when about to spring, Jimmie Dale projected his body across the desk--far across it toward the other.
The rest of the house was in darkness.
The automatic lifted until the muzzle was on a line with Carling's eyes.
"I'm not sure enough myself--that I could keep my hands off you much longer.
Carling's face was ghastly.
"I won't have anything to do with it."
You were even generous in the amount you deprived yourself of out of the hundred thousand dollars--for less would have been enough.
The other two packages that he had brought with him he added to the rest.
"The servants are in bed, of course," he explained, as he led the way toward the lighted room.
She left you there for a moment to answer the door--and you--you"--Jimmie Dale's voice choked again--"you blot on God's earth, you slipped the money and ticket under the child's mattress!"
I tell you, you lie!"
The servants will have retired hours ago.
"From headquarters--with a report," he said, in a low tone.
"I want to see Mr. Thomas H. Carling, cashier of the Hudson-Mercantile National Bank--it's very important," said Jimmie Dale earnestly.
I suppose you want a reward--we'll attend to that, of course.
"You cur!" said Jimmie Dale again.
The actual details of how you stole the money to-day do not matter--NOW.
"Isn't--isn't there some--some way we can fix this?"
Your co-officials were opposed to his appointment, but you, do you remember how you pleaded to give the man his chance--and in your hellish ingenuity saw your way then out of the trap!
Under the circumstances, it is quite impossible that you should have stolen the money yourself, and--"
"In Moyne's home--up in Harlem."
I--" he had reached the other side of the room now--and with a quick, sudden movement jerked his hand to the dial of the safe that stood against the wall.
I compliment you!
Thank you.
"Yes," said Jimmie Dale, nodding his head, "I rather thought so.
"So!" he sneered.
From the paper, Jimmie Dale's eyes shifted to the figure by the couch--and the paper fluttered suddenly from his fingers to the desk. Carling was reeling, clutching at his throat--a small glass vial rolled upon the carpet.
Your bank was robbed this evening at closing time, I understand?"
"I am Mr. Carling," replied the other.
"Quite neat!
A year ago you saw this night coming--when you must have money, or face ruin and exposure.
What chance had he!" Jimmie Dale paused, his left hand clenched until the skin formed whitish knobs over the knuckles.
It was prussic, or hydrocyanic acid, probably the most deadly poison and the swiftest in its action that was known to science--Carling had provided against that "some day" in his confession!
That's what we suspected.
Why don't you tell me again that I lie--Carling?"
For an instant neither man spoke nor moved; then Carling, spare-built, dapper in evening clothes, edged back from the desk and laughed a little uncertainly.
That Billy was occupied with other thoughts than those of tuning was, however, apparent, for his lips continued to move rapidly; and at moments he was seen to beat time with his foot, as though measuring out the rhythm of a verse.
I never listened to such a voice before, so soft, so sweet, so musical, and the words came droppin' down, like the clear water filterin' over a rocky ledge, and glitterin' like little spangles over moss and wild-flowers.
"Well, one evening--it was in August--I came down by a narrow path to the side of a lake, where there was a stone seat, put up to see the view from, and in front was three wooden steps of stairs going down into the water, where a boat might come in.
Well, I put down my pack in the leaves, for I did n't like to see or think of it, and I stretched myself down at the water's edge, and I fell into a fit of musing.
"You're right, there, Jim Morris," said he, turning suddenly round towards one of the company; "you never said a truer thing than that. The poetic temperament is riches to a poor man.
"'Is it you,' said he, with a quiet laugh, 'that accuses Pope of a bull?'
By Jove! how they did sing--all together, like the swell of a church organ."
"'With brains reduced a doable debt to pay, To dream by night, sell Sheffield ware by day.'
"Or a song would be better," observed another.
And from musing I fell off asleep; and it was the sound of voices near that first awoke me!
"Didn't I tell you how it would be?" said Billy, as he re-entered the kitchen, now crowded by the workpeople, anxious for tidings of the sick man.
In the present case, it is but fair to say, there was neither comment nor impatience; on the contrary, they seemed to accept these convulsive throes of sound as an earnest of the grand flood of melody that was coming.
"And which is best, Billy?" asked one of the company.
I can bestow kingdoms.
"Yes, you're right," said Billy, but evidently yielding an unwilling assent to this doctrine.
Now for it, Billy.
"Spoke like a British Grenadier," cried Billy, with enthusiasm.
"Musha, but I 'm glad," muttered one; "he 'd be a great loss to us."
"I'll have to be up at the office for the bags at six o'clock."
"Before I knew where I was, the boat glided in to the steps, and a tall man, a little stooped in the shoulders, stood before me.
"The Lord forgive me, but when he came to the last words and said, 'useful light,' I couldn't restrain myself, but broke out, 'That's mighty like a bull, anyhow, and reminds me of the ould song,--
"Sorra taste of it," muttered another; "there's a sea runnin' outside now that would swamp a life-boat."
What do you think of him?" asked he, eagerly.
"Is it fever?" asked the sick man, in a faint but unfaltering accent.
"What do you mean by this, Craggs?" said the Viscount, trembling with passion.
When the Corporal, followed by Billy, entered the gloomy hall of the Castle, they found two or three country people conversing in a low but eager voice together, who speedily turned towards them, to learn if the doctor had come.
Watch what's coming, look out and see which way the mischief is brewin', and make your preparations. That's the great study of physic."
"Leave me, Craggs--leave me alone with him."
"What could I do, sir?" was the answer; "it was this fellow or nothing."
There's chaps, ay, and far from stupid ones either, that could n't compose you ten hexameters if ye'd put them on a hot griddle for it; and there's others that would talk rhyme rather than rayson!
It's just like weatherin' a point at say.
"Don't be hasty, your honor," said Billy, submissively, "and don't be unjust.
"What do you think of him?" asked the Corporal, eagerly.
"I took a bleeding from him, little short of sixteen ounces, from the temporial," said Billy, proudly, "and I'll give him now a concoction of meadow saffron with a pinch of saltpetre in it, to cause diaphoresis, d'ye mind?
"He's a sanguineous temperament, and he'll bear the lancet.
The boy listened patiently and even attentively to this speech, and when Billy had concluded, he turned to the Corporal and said, "Look to him, Craggs, and let him have his supper, and when he has eaten it send him to my room."
"He's getting weaker and weaker, sir; I believe he's sinking.
"Have you seen my father?
Section 5
"Absolutely nothing, Sir," said the agent, suddenly white to the lips....
Years of business experience, mitigated only by such exercise as the game of poker affords, had intensified an instinctive inexpressiveness.
"It was not only from England that America came," said Miss Grammont.
At the thought of a lover for V.V. a sudden flood of anger poured across the old man's mind, behind the still mask of his face.
What was afoot?
It is duty, his protective duty to them.
And although Mr. Lake was a man of vast activities and complicated engagements he was coming now to Europe for the express purpose of seeing V.V. and having things out with her fully and completely because, in spite of all that had happened, she made such an endless series of delays in coming to America.
I must wire them where I can pick up a telegram to-morrow."
His mind grew calmer.
"She gets away from me.
He explained that he wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury, perched on a hill, a Saxon town, where Alfred had gathered his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come near ruling a patch of America, had died.
It infuriated him even to think of V.V., his little V.V., his own girl, entertaining a lover, being possibly--most shameful thought--IN LOVE!
Once some woman in New York had ventured to hint something to him of some fellow, some affair with an artist, Caston; she had linked this Caston with V.V.'s red cross nursing in Europe....
Old Grammont dozed off into dreamland.
If there had been any talk that fact answered it.
He lay on his back and his bent knees lifted the bed-clothes into a sharp mountain.
And the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn. We will come right up to the present if we go through Bristol.
They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it.
They'd be like sweethearts together, he and his girl.
Until at last a day would come....
V.V. could stand alone.
Rome will be poorly represented, but that may come the day after at Bath.
He's arranged that.
How could one do it?
Like some ordinary silly female, sinking to kisses, to the deeds one could buy and pay for.
He fought against it as a possibility.
Of course it was all right.
It would be pleasant to go about with her on his right hand in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and unapproachable,--above that sort of nonsense, above all other masculine subjugation.
One was left at the mercy of V.V.'s character....
The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr. Grammont upon the Atlantic, were of a gentler, more romantic character.
Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters.
"I ought to see more of her," he thought.
It was a little sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views.
Under the most solitary circumstances old Grammont was still inexpressive, and the face that stared at the ceiling of his cabin and the problem of his daughter might have been the face of a pickled head in a museum, for any indication it betrayed of the flow of thought within.
When old Grammont's enquiry man had come back with his report, old Grammont had been very particular about that.
But suppose she was not all ordinary female person....
That affair was all right, quite all right.
Section 6
In previous meditations on his daughter's outlook old Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the precedent of Queen Victoria.
An interminable speech unfolded itself.
With her fortune and his--you could buy the world.
The London people think he will be off Falmouth in four days' time.
And now that Lake had served his purpose old Grammont did not care in the least if he was shelved.
But if it was for some other lover, some good-looking, worthless impostor, some European title or suchlike folly--!
In itself that wasn't a thing to break her father's heart.
Protect, guard, cherish...."
What did matter was not whether she threw Lake over but what she threw him over for.
Afterwards he had caused enquiries to be made about this Caston, careful enquiries. It seems that he and V.V. had known each other, there had been something.
His plans were already quite clear.
Old Grammont had made that woman sorry she spoke.
Why didn't the girl confide in her father at least about these things?
It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour problem.
Old Grammont had struck the table sharply and the eyes that looked out of his mask had blazed.
She had no doubt (though really I cannot think why) that the moment had come in which to use the nut which had been given her.
They were not allowed much time for their adieus; the Rainbow vanished, and the Princess, resolved to run all risks, started off at once, taking nothing with her but her dog, her cat, a sprig of myrtle, and the stone which the wife of Locrinos gave her.
Now this Locrinos was a cruel monster who devoured everyone he came across, and especially enjoyed a chance of catching and eating any young girls.
When Lagree became aware of her prisoner's flight she was furious, and set off at full speed in pursuit.
They shall be kept for you safely.'
So, lay down your body here; your bow and arrows, your skin and your dog.
'Yes,' he replied, 'I know enough, and can help myself splendidly.'
'Indeed! three soldiers!' said she.
'Did you pay attention to everything?'
They said at last, 'What use was it our deserting?
The two melancholy ones thought, 'That won't save us!' and they remained where they were.
If you can tell me what you will get for your roast meat, you shall be free, and shall also keep the whip.'
'I haven't had much luck to-day,' he said, 'but I have a tight hold on three soldiers.'
You can then live as great lords, keep horses, and drive about in carriages.
He gave them a little whip, saying, 'Whip and slash with this, and as much money as you want will jump up before you.
The army cannot come into it, and to-morrow it is to march on.'
In the North Sea lies a dead sea-cat--that shall be their roast meat; and the rib of a whale--that shall be their silver spoon; and the hollow foot of a dead horse--that shall be their wineglass.'
'I will tell you this.
But the three soldiers took the little whip, whipped as much money as they wanted, and lived happily to their lives end.
The Prince answered at once, 'I have heard so much of your beauty and kindness, that I would very much like to enter your service.'
Her appearance was a great shock to the Prince, and so was her voice, which was like the croaking of many ravens.
But no sooner had they reached the grass than she vanished.
The Prince replied, 'I have heard so much of the beauty and kindness of the Dragon's Mother, and would like to enter her service.'
Here, too, was the Flower Queen's beautiful daughter.
'Most certainly I would,' replied the Prince.
'No, I do not,' answered the old man.
I will summon all the eagles of the air together, and order them to catch the mare and bring her to you.' And with these words the King of the Eagles flew away.
This flattering speech pleased the dragons, and the eldest of them said, 'Well, you may come with me, and I will take you to the Mother Dragon.'
She was the ugliest woman under the sun, and, added to it all, she had three heads.
'You are a brave youth, and I will make you my body-servant.
As he sat thus lost in thought, he noticed an eagle flying over his head.
The Prince undertook the task and led the mare out to the meadow.
Then the Prince said to her, 'You can hardly walk; I will put you on my horse and lead you home.
He opened the big gate leading into the courtyard, and was just going to walk in, when seven dragons rushed on him and asked him what he wanted?
'Very well,' said the Mother Dragon; 'but if you wish to enter my service, you must first lead my mare out to the meadow and look after her for three days; but if you don't bring her home safely every evening, we will eat you up.'
But if you wish to see the Flower Queen's daughter go up the second mountain: the Dragon's old mother lives there, and she has a ball every night, to which the Flower Queen's daughter goes regularly.'
Now farewell, and heaven prosper your undertaking.' She handed him the little bell, and there disappeared hut and all, as though the earth had swallowed her up.
With these words the King of the Foxes disappeared, and in the evening many thousand foxes brought the mare to the Prince.
"Then it was necessary to rout the guides, you know, and the movement gave them the best possible opportunity to charge."
Even that perverse fellow, John Lawton, could not behave with more obstinacy."
In a few minutes the travelers approached the gate. It was thrown open by a dragoon who followed the carriage, and who had been the messenger dispatched by Dunwoodie to the father of Captain Singleton.
If you begin at the heel of life, well; but if you reckon downward, as is most common, I think she is nearer forty."
"On the march, Isabella?" eagerly inquired her brother.
The meeting between the brother and sister was warm, but, by an effort on the part of the lady, more composed than her previous agitation had given reason to expect.
His case, young lady, exceeds my art to heal; and I take it Sir Henry Clinton is the best adviser he can apply to; though Major Dunwoodie has made the communication with his leech rather difficult."
Her hair was luxuriant, and as it was without the powder it was then the fashion to wear, it fell in raven blackness. A few of its locks had fallen on her cheek, giving its chilling whiteness by the contrast a more deadly character.
"The tongue is well, and the pulse begins to lower again.
"You now have the fruits of rebellion brought home to you; a brother wounded and a prisoner, and perhaps a victim; your father distressed, his privacy interrupted, and not improbably his estates torn from him, on account of his loyalty to his king."
You must observe quiet, and prepare for a meeting with your own sister, who will be here within an hour."
While facing the northern entrance to the vale, her eyes were uniformly fastened on the point where the road was suddenly lost by the intervention of a hill; and at each turn, as she lost sight of the spot, she lingered until an impatient movement of her sister quickened her pace to an even motion with that of her own.
"We ought to be grateful that none of the patients it contains are dearer to us."
If," she added, with a tremulous lip, "this dreadful suspicion that is affixed to his visit were removed, I could consider his wound of little moment."
If it be not to enable us to decide in such matters, of what avail the lights of science?
The morning found them all restored, in some measure, to their former ease of body, with the exception of the youthful captain of dragoons, who had been so deeply regretted by Dunwoodie.
"It depends on the way you count.
"Your pulse even and soft, your skin moist, but your eye fiery, and cheek flushed.
She was young, and of a light and fragile form, but of exquisite proportions.
"She must be under twenty," said the other, quickly.
"It must have been Miss Jeanette Peyton--a lady of fine accomplishments, with--hem--with something of the kind of step you speak of--a very complacent eye; and as to the bloom, I dare say offices of charity can summon as fine a color to her cheeks, as glows in the faces of her more youthful nieces."
"The major."
"The excellent fellow is never weary of kind actions.
"And why not himself?"
"But I think Mr. Dunwoodie has taken a liberty that exceeds the rights of consanguinity; he has made our father's house a hospital."
But, Isabella, the meeting has been too much for you; you tremble."
Frances continued her walk in silence.
"Doubtless it is his duty.
The lady burst into a flood of tears.
I thought to have met him by the side of my brother's bed."
And who sent for her?"
"Dunwoodie!
"You must be silent!
"Growing symptoms of a febrile pulse--no, no, my dear George, you must remain quiet and dumb; though your eyes look better, and your skin has even a moisture."
"Had it petticoats, George?"
"True--true," cried the colonel, with animation.
Her eyes were large, full, black, piercing, and at times a little wild.
"That is a question the major can answer best; but you know the redcoats are abroad, and Dunwoodie commands in the county; these English must be looked to."
"At least they would have been, had they made an attack," said the captain, throwing the rest of his clothes within reach of the colonel.
"If you can pardon the rudeness," said the wounded officer, making a feeble effort to raise his body, "I would request to have Captain Lawton's company for a moment."
"He has duties that require his presence elsewhere; the English are said to be out by the way of the Hudson, and they give us light troops but little rest.
"Very true," replied the captain, kicking a slipper towards the bed. "Had we succeeded in getting a few good fires upon them in flank, we should have sent these brave Virginians to the right about."
"What, Isabella!
"Oh!
"As respectfully as you please, my dear sister; there is but little danger of exceeding the truth."
"Lawton," said the youth, impatiently, as the trooper entered, "hear you from the major?"
"Certainly," said Lawton, with unexpected condescension.
He was impelled, by a feeling that he could not conquer, however, to look Captain Lawton in the face.
"Quite probable."
Glancing her eye over the figure of this new acquaintance, Katy instinctively adjusting her dress, replied,--
"It is not only cruel to the sufferer, but sometimes unjust to others, to take human life where a less punishment would answer the purpose. Now, Jack, if you were only--move your arm a little--if you were only--I hope you feel easier, my dear friend?"
"I expect he has made his last will and testament."
He died about two hours and ten minutes before the cock crowed, as near as we can say." She was interrupted by the physician, who, approaching, inquired, with much interest, the nature of the disorder.
"Hearts," repeated Katy, catching her breath.
"Kindly, you may be certain," said Katy, rather tartly.
I wonder if I have no claim on the house and garden; though they say, now it is Harvey's, it will surely be confiscated." Turning to Lawton, who had been sitting in one posture, with his piercing eyes lowering at her through his thick brows, in silence, "Perhaps this gentleman knows--he seems to take an interest in my story."
Miss Peyton entered into the situation of things at the house of the peddler, with all the interest of her excellent feelings; she listened patiently while Katy recounted, more particularly, the circumstances of the past night as they had occurred.
Katy drew up in evident displeasure, and prompt to vindicate her character for more lofty acquirements, she said,--
Some time was occupied in joint attentions to the comfort of the wounded officer, and the doctor retired to an apartment prepared for his own accommodation; here, within a few minutes, he was surprised by the entrance of Lawton.
"Much."
Lawton, do you feel easy?"
"It is doubtless wise to be prepared for death.
"Katy, is he gone?"
The arrival of the peddler had altered the whole of this admirable treatment; and the consequences were expressed by Katy, as she concluded her narrative, by saying,--
"Perfectly well, Jack; it was bravely obtained, and neatly extracted; but don't you think I had better apply an oil to these bruises?"
"The doctor means medically, madam," observed Captain Lawton, with a face that would have honored the funeral of the deceased.
My brothers told me, again and again, to ask for my money; but I always thought accounts between relations were easily settled."
"Does Captain Lawton want anything at my hands?"
"Quite."
"Oh!" cried the maiden, again correcting herself, "for the best of all reasons; there was none to be had, so I took care of him myself.
"And care thrown away I may well call it; for Harvey is quite too despisable to be any sort of compensation at present."
"For, Miss Peyton," continued the housekeeper, after a pause to take breath, "I would have given up life before I would have given up that secret.
"But happily nothing is broken. It is wonderful how well you escaped!"
"If them lights he spoke of were what was called northern lights in these parts?"
"Very."
"I have been a tumbler from my youth, and I am past minding a few falls from a horse; but, Sitgreaves," he added with affection, and pointing to a scar on his body, "do you remember this bit of work?"
"I agree with you as a whole; but as matter is infinitely divisible, so no case exists without an exception.
"Why," returned the housekeeper, hesitating a little, "I thought we were as good as so.
"Were you related, then, to Birch?" asked Miss Peyton, observing her to pause.
The substance of her tale was, that a child who had been placed by the guardians of the poor in the keeping of Harvey, had, in the absence of its master, injured itself badly in the foot by a large needle.
"With simples," returned the surgeon.
"No one yet," said the housekeeper, with quickness.
"It is now too late; but a dose of oil would carry off the humors famously."
Who administered to the case?"
But it is my lot to meet with men, daily, who are equally perverse, and who show a still more culpable disrespect for the information that flows from the lights of science."
I was good enough not to contradict this startling assertion.
Therefore the genuineness of a fossil human relic of the quaternary period seemed to be incontestably proved and admitted.
Any one may now understand the frenzied excitement of my uncle, when, twenty yards farther on, he found himself face to face with a primitive man!
And unless he came here, like myself, as a tourist on a visit and as a pioneer of science, I can entertain no doubt of the authenticity of his remote origin."
But this dried corpse, with its parchment-like skin drawn tightly over the bony frame, the limbs still preserving their shape, sound teeth, abundant hair, and finger and toe nails of frightful length, this desiccated mummy startled us by appearing just as it had lived countless ages ago.
It might be so.
I have read the reports of the skeleton of Trapani, found in the fourteenth century, and which was at the time identified as that of Polyphemus; and the history of the giant unearthed in the sixteenth century near Palermo.
I know that Cuvier and Blumenbach have recognised in these bones nothing more remarkable than the bones of the mammoth and other mammals of the post-tertiary period.
It is nearly ninety degrees.
It is not a mere skeleton; it is an entire body, preserved for a purely anthropological end and purpose."
Eminent geologists have denied his existence, others no less eminent have affirmed it.
But I do not possess that valuable solvent.
I am quite aware that science has to be on its guard with discoveries of this kind.
It exhibits no prominent cheekbones, no projecting jaws.
Don't smile, gentlemen."
I make no rash assertions; but there is the man surrounded by his own works, by hatchets, by flint arrow-heads, which are the characteristics of the stone age.
My uncle, usually so garrulous, was struck dumb likewise.
Nobody was smiling; but the learned Professor was frequently disturbed by the broad smiles provoked by his learned eccentricities.
"Gigantosteologie," at last the Professor burst out, between two words which I shall not record here.
"Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things, and more.
We raised the body.
"The pamphlet entitled Gigan--"
The unlucky word would not come out.
But in the presence of this specimen to doubt would be to insult science.
We stood it up against a rock.
Another remarkable thing.
Here my uncle's unfortunate infirmity met him--that of being unable in public to pronounce hard words.
I stood mute before this apparition of remote antiquity.
I have perused a writing, entitled Gigan--"
It presents no appearance of that prognathism which diminishes the facial angle.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Such then was the state of palaeontological science, and what we knew of it was sufficient to explain our behaviour in the presence of this stupendous Golgotha.
There stands the body!
The noise of this discovery was very great, not in France alone, but in England and in Germany.
Not far distant were found stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads stained and encased by lapse of time with a uniform coat of rust.
It was the first fossil of this nature that had ever been brought to light.
Nor was this all.
I have gone through the treatises of Cassanion, and all those memoirs, pamphlets, answers, and rejoinders published respecting the skeleton of Teutobochus, the invader of Gaul, dug out of a sandpit in the Dauphine, in 1613.
It was a perfectly recognisable human body.
Here the Professor laid hold of the fossil skeleton, and handled it with the skill of a dexterous showman.
The skull of this fossil is a regular oval, or rather ovoid.
To understand this apostrophe of my uncle's, made to absent French savants, it will be necessary to allude to an event of high importance in a palaeontological point of view, which had occurred a little while before our departure.
But I will go further in my deductions, and I will affirm that this specimen of the human family is of the Japhetic race, which has since spread from the Indies to the Atlantic.
You know as well as I do, gentlemen, the analysis made at Lucerne in 1577 of those huge bones which the celebrated Dr. Felix Plater affirmed to be those of a giant nineteen feet high.
I feel pleased at the thought that it is sure not to be shut against us."
I was shattered with fatigue and excitement; I wanted a whole hour to recover even a little.
I followed him to a headland, after he had given his instructions to the hunter.
At the same time I cherished a trembling hope which was a fear as well.
Hans is a clever fellow, and I am sure he must have saved a large part of our cargo.
Hunger, the fresh air, the calm quiet weather, after the commotions we had gone through, all contributed to give me a good appetite.
All these painful reflections rapidly crossed my mind before I could answer my uncle's question.
"Delighted, my boy, delighted.
A few overhanging rocks afforded us some shelter from the storm.
We had all our instruments.
But they were forty leagues perpendicular of solid granite wall, and in reality we were a thousand leagues asunder!
"In the simplest way possible.
I ought by this time to have been quite accustomed to my uncle's ways; yet there was always something fresh about him to astonish me.
There preserved meat, biscuit, and tea made us an excellent meal, one of the best I ever remember.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
"That is right; and this would make three hundred leagues more."
"An idea of my own, my lad.
"Well," replied my uncle, "we may easily ascertain this by consulting the compass.
"No, I think not.
The brave Icelander carried me out of the reach of the waves, over a burning sand where I found myself by the side of my uncle.
Still there was the question of provisions to be settled, and I asked--"How are we off for provisions?"
"No, I only want to know how that is to be managed."
Alas! if the tempest had but sent the raft a little more east, we should have passed under Germany, under my beloved town of Hamburg, under the very street where dwelt all that I loved most in the world. Then only forty leagues would have separated us!
Surely, Axel, it may vie in size with the Mediterranean itself."
Let us go and see what it says."
Here I end what I may call my log, happily saved from the wreck, and I resume my narrative as before.
On my arrival on the shore I found Hans surrounded by an assemblage of articles all arranged in good order.
'Wouldn't what?--How do they know that I go there?'
'Oh, Gilbert!'
"That is right, dear," he said.
That she was going to him, Jane knew; but she felt utterly unable to arrange how or in what way her going could be managed.
Then she turned to the window.
"He will always be blind, dear.
This way.
"Seven pence 'apenny of this stuff ain't much for carrying all that along, I DON'T think!" grumbled his mate; and Jane's young porter experienced the double joy of faith confirmed, and willing service generously rewarded.
"Here! you have done very well for me.
"Here, somebody!
His sight is hopelessly gone, but the injured parts were progressing favourably, and all fear of brain complications seemed over.
But she knew an unbiased judgment, steadier than her own, must solve the problem; and that her surest way to Garth lay through the doctor's consulting-room.
She tore it open.
CHAPTER XIV
Just back from Scotland.
How like him to think of the coffee; and oh, how like him to be coming to the station.
"Here, my boy!
She took off her hat and leaned back against the cushions.
The train moved on, and the porter stood looking after it with tears in his eyes.
Jane pulled off her gloves, swallowed suddenly, then gripped the doctor's knee.
MY Garth!"
All beautiful sights brought this pang to her heart since the reading of that paragraph on the piazza of the Mena House Hotel.
Her mind leaped to enjoyment, then fell back stunned by the blow of quick remembrance, and Jane shut her eyes.
And New York harbour!
The turmoil of her soul was stilled; a great calm took its place, and Jane dropped quietly off to sleep.
WE were!' I feel tempted to wish, for one homicidal moment, that the earth would open her mouth and swallow them up.
The young porter, who still stood sentry at the door of Jane's compartment, dashed off to the refreshment room; and, just as the train began to move, handed a cup of steaming coffee and a plate of bread-and-butter in at the window.
Not of half-crowns; of those she had plenty.
"All fit and well, I can see.
The doctor was stationed exactly opposite the door when her carriage came to a standstill; mere chance, and yet, to Jane, it seemed so like him to have taken up his position precisely at the right spot on that long platform.
What a rabble!
So she telegraphed to Deryck from Paris, and at present her mind saw no further than Wimpole Street.
But life holds other things beside sight.
"Is there no hope, Deryck?"
That it was a complicated problem, her common sense told her; though her yearning arms and aching bosom cried out: "O God, is it not simple?
And here we are at Wimpole Street.
Jane gave a sudden sob; then turned to him, dry-eyed.
But above all else she needed just now a wise, strong, helpful friend, and Deryck had not failed her.
DERYCK."
Isn't she worth knowing?
"Oh, thank you, my good fellow," said Jane, putting the plate on the seat, while she dived into her pocket.
Coffee was the last thing she wanted; but it never occurred to any one to disobey the doctor, even at a distance.
Over the first half-crown he had said to himself: "Milk and new-laid eggs." Now, as he pocketed the second, he added the other two things mentioned by the parish doctor: "Soup and jelly"; and his heart glowed.
It was from the doctor.
Have coffee at Dover.
Then she saw behind him her aunt's footman, and her own maid, who had been given a place in the duchess's household.
She, also, had need of many things.
Coffee at a moment's notice should fetch a fancy price.
An hour after she had read it, she was driving down the long straight road to Cairo; embarked at Alexandria the next day; landed at Brindisi, and this night and day travelling had brought her at last within sight of the shores of England.
Come outside the barrier.
Did you ever see anything to equal it, as you steam away in the sunset?"
"Welcome home.
I telephoned the duchess to send some of her people to meet your luggage, and not to expect you herself until dinner time, as you were taking tea with us. Was that right?
"Deryck--I love him."
Fetch me a cup of coffee, will you?"
'What!
Nothing was left to each sheep but a wee little stump where a tail should be, and Little Bo-Peep was so heart-broken that she sat down beside them and sobbed bitterly.
"Of course; do not the sheep know you?"
And now
"But where is your crook?"
"Then will you begin by rising early, and being ready for me at seven?"
"And what remedies did he use?" eagerly asked Mr. Channing.
Mr. Channing was lying on his sofa underneath the other window, and now spoke to Mr. Yorke.
They had been speaking in an undertone, standing together at a window, apart from the rest.
"Not very early," answered Constance.
Nothing else.
I was in such a passion."
Martha withdrew with the child.
"Because I shall wear my new dress.
I should very much like to go."
And, just then, Caroline came in, full of eagerness.
People might say they took up the room of grown-up persons."
Lady Augusta was wont to say that she had too much expense with her boys to keep many servants; and the argument was a true one.
"Have the weeds destroyed the good seed?"
I think, perhaps, if I could keep her wholly with me for a twelvemonth or so, watching over her constantly, a great deal might be effected."
Constance coloured almost to tears with her emotion.
Constance rang the bell.
To set to work abruptly would never answer.
"His complaint was rheumatism, very much, as I fancy, the same sort of rheumatism that afflicts you.
CHAPTER XVI.
The boys are so unruly; and I do not get up to it half my time."
"Do not be impatient, or it will seem to be further off still.
Some of the anecdotes are beautiful."
"Why did you come down half-dressed, my dear?"
Strictly speaking, Lady Augusta did not personally try to get them up, for she generally lay in bed herself.
I should like to bring him here to call upon you."
"Very well," said Lady Augusta.
"A gentleman who has lived for some years amongst the poor heathens is to give a history of his personal experiences.
"Yes, I will," answered Caroline.
"I know," said Caroline, with some contrition.
"My frock's on, and so is my pinafore."
"Then why do you wish so much to attend this one?"
"Be so kind as to take the papers out of Miss Fanny's hair.
"No," said Caroline, sharply; "Miss Channing will fix upon me."
"Not quite destroyed it," replied Constance, though she sighed sadly as she spoke, as if nearly losing heart for the task she had undertaken. "There is so much ill to undo.
"She was lazy this morning!"
"I am quite dressed," responded Fanny.
"My dear, you are fifteen."
It must be commenced gradually, almost imperceptibly, little by little.
It took her scarcely two minutes to get there, for the houses were almost within view of each other.
"In what way, Miss Channing?"
Caroline drew a long face.
"My time now belongs to you."
"You had a treat, I hear, at the meeting to-day?"
"It is not for that I wish to go," said Caroline.
"A three months' residence at some medicinal springs in Germany.
At that moment Mr. Galloway entered: the subject was continued.
I should prefer to do so.
Lady Augusta freely confessed that to come earlier would be useless, for she could not get her daughters up.
"How shall you get on with them, Constance?" the Rev.
"Hitherto I have risen at seven, summer and winter.
It is the very thing, you see, sir, that has been ordered for you."
Alas for poor Caroline's resolution!
"I have heard so."
Caroline burst into tears.
She did not speak.
Gently as the words were spoken, there was no mistaking that the tone was one of authority, and not to be trifled with.
It was empty, though the children ought to have been there, preparing their lessons.
He is a doctor, you know.
MUCH TO ALTER.
Renewed health, exertion, happiness!
Mind you fix upon me!
"That is one of the habits I must alter in the children," thought Constance.
"If I were to come to you every morning at seven o'clock, would you undertake to get up and be ready for me?" asked Constance.
"Well?" responded Caroline.
Constance wondered where she should begin.
His experience is great, and his whole heart was in his subject.
"Carry has not finished her breakfast, Miss Channing," quoth she.
I have not had it on yet.
"I think it is possible that his experience in another line may be of service to you," continued Mr. Yorke.
"Did I not request you to have that exercise written out?"
I may not make mine only eye-service."
Dressing and reading takes me just an hour; for the other hour I find plenty of occupation.
"It is expected to be a very interesting meeting," observed Constance, making no reply to Miss Caroline's special request.
At the same moment Constance Channing was traversing the Boundaries, on her way to Lady Augusta Yorke's, where she had, some days since, commenced her duties.
"Whatever time do you get up?"
One of the girls shall go with us to-day; whichever deserves it best."
"Miss Channing, mamma says she shall take one of us to the missionary meeting, whichever you choose to fix upon.
"Oh, Martha got up late, and said she had no time to take them out.
Arthur, you did not urge it by a single word."
Annabel, who is a year younger than you, is twice as advanced."
"I should do better if mamma were not so cross with me, Miss Channing.
Constance would willingly have commenced the daily routine at an earlier hour.
"I intended to write it out this morning before you came; but somehow I lay in bed."
"Annabel says you worry her into learning."
And I will be here again at ten."
"It is not often we have the privilege of listening to so eloquent a speaker as Dr. Lamb.
"You will never put up with our scrambling breakfast, Miss Channing.
"It will be only right to do so."
Hamish and his difficulties were the dark shadow; though he could not tell this to Mr. Yorke.
She is too young to go."
He told me he came to Europe with very little hope: he feared his complaint had become chronic and incurable. But he has been restored in a wonderful manner, and is in sound health again."
Lady Augusta came in and proffered the invitation to Constance to accompany them.
She said something about it."
"Mr. Yorke," replied Constance, a pretty blush rising to her cheek.
Deficient in many ways, Caroline: in goodness, in thoughtfulness, and in other desirable qualities; and greatly so in education.
I shall rise at six now, and come here at seven."
She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do.
The two ladies accordingly embarked on this expedition, and spent three months in Greece, in Turkey, in Egypt.
CHAPTER XXXI
Her conception of human motives might, in certain lights, have been acquired at the court of some kingdom in decadence, and there were several in her list of which our heroine had not even heard.
She accomplished this journey without other assistance than that of her servant, for her natural protectors were not now on the ground. Ralph Touchett was spending the winter at Corfu, and Miss Stackpole, in the September previous, had been recalled to America by a telegram from the Interviewer.
Madame Merle remarked that her friend was restless, but she added that she herself had always been consumed with the desire to visit Athens and Constantinople.
Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval sufficiently replete with incident.
She made her way down to Rome without touching at Florence--having gone first to Venice and then proceeded southward by Ancona.
Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world.
A few days after her arrival Gilbert Osmond descended from Florence and remained three weeks, during which the fact of her being with his old friend Madame Merle, in whose house she had gone to lodge, made it virtually inevitable that he should see her every day.
She was alone on this occasion, in one of the smaller of the numerous rooms devoted by Mrs. Touchett to social uses, and there was that in her expression and attitude which would have suggested that she was expecting a visitor.
She was so fond of the spectacle of human life that she enjoyed even the aspect of gathering dusk in the London streets--the moving crowds, the hurrying cabs, the lighted shops, the flaring stalls, the dark, shining dampness of everything.
Come along, nobody'll tell tales."
I walked home with Antonia.
Guests felt that they were receiving, not conferring, a favor when they stayed at her house.
They separated and fled toward the kitchen, giggling.
"Oh, we'll make it all right with Molly.
Her manner was cold, and she talked little.
She was tall, dark, severe, with something Indian-like in the rigid immobility of her face.
Have I got you all straight?"
He wore his teachers out.
He was born in the Far South, on the d'Arnault plantation, where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted.
He thought about that, but he pulled in his other foot.
He could never learn like other people, never acquired any finish.
The doctor came and gave him opium.
Mary Dusak was broad and brown of countenance, slightly marked by smallpox, but handsome for all that.
Now, you're Lena, are you?--and you're Tony and you're Mary.
He was a popular fellow, but no manager.
No ladies here?
In the middle of a crashing waltz d'Arnault suddenly began to play softly, and, turning to one of the men who stood behind him, whispered, "Somebody dancing in there." He jerked his bullet head toward the dining-room.
"Oh, what do you care, Johnnie?
They found he had absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory.
The girls, still laughing, were trying to escape.
"She'd be awful mad if you was to come out here and dance with us."
Mrs. Gardener was admittedly the best-dressed woman in Black Hawk, drove the best horse, and had a smart trap and a little white-and-gold sleigh. She seemed indifferent to her possessions, was not half so solicitous about them as her friends were.
Get your back up, Johnnie."
He was always a negro prodigy who played barbarously and wonderfully.
Johnnie shook his head.
The windows were open.
One of these city gentlemen, I bet! Now, you girls, you ain't goin' to let that floor get cold?"
Whenever she caught him slipping away from the cabin, she whipped him unmercifully, and told him what dreadful things old Mr. d'Arnault would do to him if he ever found him near the "Big House." But the next time Samson had a chance, he ran away again.
Now, gentlemen, I expect you've all got grand voices.
He could always detect the presence of any one in a room.
Tiny looked alarmed. "Mrs. Gardener would n't like it," she protested.
"She seems all right, gentlemen.
Kirkpatrick caught Tiny by the elbows.
I learned that Mrs. Gardener had gone to Omaha to hear Booth and Barrett, who were to play there next week, and that Mary Anderson was having a great success in "A Winter's Tale," in London.
"You'll wake the cook, and there'll be the devil to pay for me.
He heard the door close after them.
When I stole into the parlor Anson Kirkpatrick, Marshall Field's man, was at the piano, playing airs from a musical comedy then running in Chicago. He was a dapper little Irishman, very vain, homely as a monkey, with friends everywhere, and a sweetheart in every port, like a sailor.
Then Mrs. Cutter told her story.
Antonia turned to me eagerly.
I was afraid to leave the window open last night."
She would be perfectly safe, he said, as he had just put a new Yale lock on the front door.
I could n't sleep much last night." She hesitated, and then told us how strangely Mr. Cutter had behaved before he went away.
The day after the Cutters left, Antonia came over to see us.
She saw him slip a twenty-dollar bill into her handbag with her ticket.
I held my breath and lay absolutely still.
He bought her ticket and put her on the train.
"I advised her to control herself, or she would have a stroke," grandmother said afterwards.
She had let me in for all this disgustingness.
The third night I spent at the Cutters', I awoke suddenly with the impression that I had heard a door open and shut.
Her cry of fright awakened me. Truly, I was a battered object.
I found that I slept there as well as anywhere, and when I got home in the morning, Tony had a good breakfast waiting for me.
Grandmother noticed that she seemed troubled and distracted.
The agent said his face was striped with court-plaster, and he carried his left hand in a sling.
A hand closed softly on my shoulder, and at the same moment I felt something hairy and cologne-scented brushing my face.
So long as Cutter had me by the throat, there was no chance for me at all. I got hold of his thumb and bent it back, until he let go with a yell.
"I feel as if he is up to some of his tricks again, and is going to try to scare me, somehow."
She had n't liked the way he kept coming into the kitchen to instruct her, or the way he looked at her.
I know your tricks! Wait till I get at you!
I'd make up my bed nice and fresh for you.
There stood Mrs. Cutter,--locked out, for she had no key to the new lock--her head trembling with rage.
She spent the whole morning bathing and poulticing me, and rubbing me with arnica.
Certainly Cutter liked to have his wife think him a devil.
The next thing I knew, I felt some one sit down on the edge of the bed.
My lip was cut and stood out like a snout.
She seemed to understand, though I was too faint and miserable to go into explanations.
They found the place locked up, and they had to break the window to get into Antonia's bedroom.
Where is she, you nasty whelp, where is she?
I was only half awake, but I decided that he might take the Cutters' silver, whoever he was.
Since the scandal about the Swedish girl, Wick Cutter could never get his wife to stir out of Black Hawk without him.
Under the bed, are you, hussy?
I caught a handful of whiskers and pulled, shouting something.
My nose looked like a big blue plum, and one eye was swollen shut and hideously discolored.
There is a similar falsification in the same play in the characterization of the newspaper man who is present at Dubedat's death and immediately afterwards is anxious to interview the widow.
He is something of a natural peacock. He is in the line of all those tramps and stage Irishmen who have gone through! life with so fine a swagger of words.
Mr. Shaw's comedies are repeatedly injured by a hurried alteration of atmosphere in this manner.
It contains, it must be confessed, a great deal that is not new to English readers, but then so do all books about Mr. Shaw.
Or, rather, when he is presenting a queer fizzing mixture of human nature and his opinions about it.
Look at Pears's Soap.
It is a vision of only one-half of the truth, and of the half that the average man always feels to be more or less irrelevant.
That view, I imagine, is seldom found nowadays, but even now many people do not realize that humour, and not wit, is the ruling characteristic of Mr. Shaw's plays.
This may be sometimes actually a virtue in his comedy.
"declare that Bernard Shaw does depict characters.
He has derided them with both an artistic and a moral energy.
He sees current history from the absolutely opposite point of view, say, to the lyric poet.
"Do you think," he asks, "she would give me a few words on 'How it Feels to be a Widow?' Rather a good title for an article, isn't it?" These sentences are bad because into an atmosphere of more or less naturalistic comedy they simply introduce a farcical exaggeration of Mr. Shaw's opinion of the incompetence and impudence of journalists.
BERNARD SHAW
His joy and his misery before the ludicrous spectacle of human life are his own, and his expression of them is his own.
But the claim is an arguable one.
Probably he was doomed to be a figure just as Dr. Johnson was.
And Mr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is an advertiser in an age of advertisement.
MR.
There is a solid house if you like, but every wall is still plastered with their advertisements.
Sims's ballads.
He has succeeded in the mere business of interesting us beyond any other writer of his time.
In Shaw's plays the characters are less representative of vices or passions than those of Moliere, and more representative of class, profession, or sect.
In reality I am simply a very careful writer of natural history." One is bound to contradict him.
He has brought them all into a Palace of Truth, where they have revealed themselves with an unaccustomed and startling frankness.
"Moliere and Shaw," as he puts it with quaint seriousness, "appear to be unaware of what a father is, what a father is worth."
It has been enormously exaggerated.
It is much more necessary that we should recognize that, amid all his falsifications, doctrinal and jocular, he has a genuine comic sense of character.
In Shaw's work we find few studied jests, few epigrams even, except those which are the necessary outcome of the characters and the situations.
"When I present true human nature," he observes in one of the many passages in which he justifies himself, "the audience thinks it is being made fun of.
His Broadbent is as wonderful a figure as his George Bernard Shaw.
Mr. Shaw's gift of infuriating people is unfailing.
Mr. Shaw was at one time commonly regarded as a wit of the school of Oscar Wilde.
He has never founded a church, however, because he has always been able to laugh at his disciples as unfeelingly as at anybody else.
The true things it contains, however, make it worth reading.
He has studied with his own eyes the swollen-bellied pretences of preachers and poets and rich men and lovers and politicians, and he has derided them as they have never been derided on the English stage before.
On the contrary, I must do it more than ever.
He does not hesitate to wound and he does not hesitate to misunderstand, but he is free from malice.
But it is not always a virtue.
Stop advertising myself!
Mr. Shaw often thinks he is presenting true human nature when he is merely presenting his opinions about human nature--the human nature of soldiers, of artists, of women.
But this is only the Billingsgate of our exasperation.
If I were to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall off.
The defence of Mr. Shaw, however, does not depend on any real or imaginary resemblance of his plays to Moliere's.
He is not content with witty conversation about life, as Wilde was: he has an actual comic vision of human society.
But his seriousness is essentially the seriousness of (in the higher sense of the word) the comic artist, of the disillusionist.
His humour, it is true, is not the sympathetic humour of Elia or Dickens; but then neither was Moliere's.
This is not to disparage Mr. Shaw's contributions to the discussion of politics.
Mr. Shaw is not a bore, whatever else he may be.
And, even at this, it is not infallible.
You blame me for having declared myself to be the most remarkable man of my time.
He has succeeded in interesting us largely by inventing himself as a public figure, as Oscar Wilde and Stevenson did before him.
One suspects that there is as much fun as commerce in Mr. Shaw's advertisement.
He saw, not the war so much as the international diplomacy that led up to the war, under the anti-romantic and satirical comic vision.
He is a doctrinaire, and his characters are often comic statements of his doctrines rather than the reflections of men and women.
Not that his portraiture is always faithful.
He has gone about, like a pickpocket of illusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and from the world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he has gone, an innumerable growl has followed him.
He is genial beyond the majority of inveterate controversialists and propagandists.
Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War.
Even his bitterness is never venomous, however.
It is this that has caused all the trouble about Mr. Shaw's writings on the war.
He sees men and women too frequently in the refracting shallows of theories.
Amen, Amen," these sentences are no more natural or naturalistic than the death-bed utterances in one of Mr. G.R.
Why should I not say it when I believe that it is true?
In the opinion of many people, it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw.
His critics often accuse him, in regard to the invention of the Shaw myth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait.
Comedy, as well as tragedy, must create some kind of illusion, and the destruction of the illusion, even for the sake of a joke, may mean the destruction of laughter.
Certainly, from the time of Aristophanes onwards, comedy has again and again been a vehicle of opinions as well as a branch of natural history.
But, compared with the degree of reality in his characterization, the proportion of unreality is not overwhelming.
Moliere depicts the miser, the jealous man, the misanthrope, the hypocrite; whereas Shaw depicts the bourgeois, the rebel, the capitalist, the workman, the Socialist, the doctor. A few only of these latter types are given us by Moliere.
He has done this sometimes with all the exuberance of mirth, sometimes with all the bitterness of a satirist.
A field used to produce food is not a direct want-gratifier until it is transformed into a residence site, a playground, or a tennis-court.
Man's senses were developed for the purpose of bringing him into relation with the outer world, of enabling him to survive in his struggle with the forces of nature.
But it is a need in the life of men that wants should recur after a time, otherwise there would be no motive for action.
If it is part of the sum of goods that flows in, that is newly available for the man's use, it is income.
But funded income is the more abiding, for income from wages stops when the man dies or fails to perform his work, while the income from wealth continues after he ceases to be active.
The goods that come into a man's possession in any period are of many sorts: to get some he has destroyed many previously existing goods; while to get others he has not needed to use up the accumulations of the past or to mortgage the future.
Men living in savagery and ignorance starve amid the possibilities of plenty.
It is true that everything called wealth is expected to contribute sooner or later in some way to the sum of gratifications.
So, when a good has been enjoyed, the utility to that person of that thing or service for that particular moment, falls, it may be even to zero.
Even the birds and the beasts adjust their lives to it either by travel or by toil.
Thus, families with equal incomes may differ greatly in wealth, the one depending entirely on salaries, the other on rents.
Usually many of these subtler utilities are overlooked and omitted from the recognized money income.
The money income is merely the money expression of the value of currently acquired goods, and it is the only medium through which such varied sources of gratification can be compared.
It is necessary therefore to recognize the distinction between present and future incomes.
1.
But many of them are so connected in his thought by chains of association with pleasures or uses, that almost instinctively and most intensely he attaches an importance to them.
The problem involved is complex because of differences in time, in place, and in the nature of the want-gratifiers.
Only the net increase in value can be accounted income in the second period.
A machine making cloth for next year is gratifying wants only in a metaphorical sense.
In most cases it would require close thought to see that the service attributed directly to them was but a reflection of that performed by some other good.
The distinction in question is not now made by economists, all labor that contributes to value being regarded as productive.
The savage dimly understands this need.
In order to produce some goods technically, men make use of other goods.
It is, however, a mere figure of speech to say indirect want-gratifiers become want-gratifying goods.
This constant inflow of goods is one of the fundamental needs of life.
The vineyard has no value to Tantalus, unable to reach its fruit.
The student should endeavor to reduce the problem of value to its simplest form by considering first the exchange, at the present moment, of immediately enjoyable goods.
CHAPTER 6
A captive, chained to a rock, attaches value only to the things within his reach.
We should not understand that either social or private objective incomes include only material goods, for many utilities and labor services that never take on a material or money expression are included in either case.
6.
The one kind is gross, the other net income.
This will be fully considered under the subject of capital.
The best results in reading or eating come from taking the right amount day by day.
The extension of man's view works a momentous change in his economic estimates.
But whether or not the service has for a moment embodied itself in material form is of no essential economic import.
3.
In this day the use of money is so common that we are sometimes led to ignore the value of things to which the money expression is not given.
Further, in the economic world there is much wealth that never can gratify any want directly; many forms of wealth never can be consumption goods.
Wants recur for the same reason that they first arose.
In this case, a gratification of the present moment is compared with a gratification of a very different kind at a future time.
Of the thousands of forms of matter in the world, only a comparatively few ever will make an immediate gratifying impression on man's senses.
If one discusses the trading of a bushel of grain, to be used by a hungry man for food, for a sheep to be kept for breeding, or for wool to be made into cloth next year, he may overlook the difference in the grade of wants compared.
The nature of the acquisition of objective incomes may, in some cases, be different if viewed from the social and individual standpoints.
The logical starting-point in the theory of value is in those goods that are in closest touch with feeling, and on this basis may be built up an explanation of values in which reason and forethought have a greater part.
Indeed, we are close here to the conception of psychic income which is to be developed more fully.
Material income and immaterial income are both related to and reducible to psychic income.
It is for that reason it is called wealth.
According to the distinction in question, he is a productive laborer because his services are embodied in material form, whereas the lecturer is regarded as an unproductive laborer because the results of his labor are not embodied in material form.
A crop of corn is not all income.
5.
The bartender mixing drinks, adds to the value of those ingredients; in a minute that value is dissipated.
The distinction led to some peculiar puzzles and paradoxes.
Some portions at least of the objective incomes of goods are continually by use becoming subjective incomes of enjoyment.
1.
Things outside of men cannot be feelings, they can only call out or occasion feeling, and it is the attainment of pleasurable conditions in mind or soul that is the aim of all economic activity.
Society, as a whole, may be said to acquire income only when goods are produced; individuals may acquire income by gift, bequest, theft, or other modes of transfer from other individuals.
While they are storing up a supply of wood or coal it may be looked upon as the income, but they may burn it to help grow hothouse plants.
Often the complex nature of the problem is ignored.
With increased intelligence the economic life of man expands, and he attaches importance to things which at the present moment have not, and cannot have, the slightest influence on his immediate gratification.
3.
The income arising from current labor is unfunded, because there is no permanent fund of accumulated wealth corresponding to it.
While they gather flowers with one hand, they destroy fuel with the other.
The spring and autumn migrations to new feeding grounds are the attempts of the bird to gratify this series of wants as they arise.
In a time of famine it could be used, but seed-corn was saved from last year, and some must be kept for next year.
The business man always is trying to trace a causal relation between things that do not and cannot themselves directly satisfy wants, and things that do.
PSYCHIC INCOME
Chained by their ignorance and improvidence to a little spot of earth, they do not see clearly, either in time or space, the economic relations about them.
The ant, the bee, and the squirrel anticipate, and work to fill their storehouses against the days of need.
But a similar distinction is inconsistently preserved by many writers in the case of material things.
To Ritzner, ever upon the lookout for the grotesque, his peculiarities had for a long time past afforded food for mystification.
He displayed, also, with much pomposity, Brantome's "Memoirs of Duels,"--published at Cologne, 1666, in the types of Elzevir--a precious and unique vellum-paper volume, with a fine margin, and bound by Derome.
That he was unique appeared so undeniable, that it was deemed impertinent to inquire wherein the uniquity consisted.
This gentleman, whom I shall call Hermann, was an original in every respect--except, perhaps, in the single particular that he was a very great fool.
This being done, there will be no difficulty whatever. I shall discharge this decanter of wine at your image in yonder mirror, and thus fulfil all the spirit, if not the exact letter, of resentment for your insult, while the necessity of physical violence to your real person will be obviated."
Turning to the passage specified, he read it with great care to himself, then closed the book, and desired me, in my character of confidential acquaintance, to express to the Baron von Jung his exalted sense of his chivalrous behavior, and, in that of second, to assure him that the explanation offered was of the fullest, the most honorable, and the most unequivocally satisfactory nature.
It will be perceived, no doubt, from what I have already said, that the Baron was one of those human anomalies now and then to be found, who make the science of mystification the study and the business of their lives.
To these Quixotic notions some recent Parisian publications, backed by three or four desperate and fatal conversation, during the greater part of the night, had run wild upon the all--engrossing topic of the times.
With sentiments of profound respect,
Your most humble servant,
The whole company at once started to their feet, and, with the exception of myself and Ritzner, took their departure.
But, letting this matter pass for the present, I will merely observe that, from the first moment of his setting foot within the limits of the university, he began to exercise over the habits, manners, persons, purses, and propensities of the whole community which surrounded him, an influence the most extensive and despotic, yet at the same time the most indefinite and altogether unaccountable.
To these the Baron replied at length (still maintaining his exaggerated tone of sentiment) and concluding, in what I thought very bad taste, with a sarcasm and a sneer.
As the former proceeded in his discourse, or rather monologue I perceived the excitement of the latter momently increasing.
About the mouth there was more to be observed.
With this answer he seemed flattered, and sat down to write a note to the Baron.
I truly think that no person at the university, with the exception of myself, ever suspected him to be capable of a joke, verbal or practical:--the old bull-dog at the garden-gate would sooner have been accused,--the ghost of Heraclitus,--or the wig of the Emeritus Professor of Theology.
Having finished reading, he begged me, with the blandest of all possible smiles, to be seated, while he made reference to the treatise in question.
As Hermann completed this equivocal sentence, all eyes were turned upon the Baron.
Looking around me during a pause in the Baron's discourse (of which my readers may gather some faint idea when I say that it bore resemblance to the fervid, chanting, monotonous, yet musical sermonic manner of Coleridge), I perceived symptoms of even more than the general interest in the countenance of one of the party.
He appeared to be stifling with passion, and his face was cadaverously white.
I did so, but to little purpose, not being able to gather the least particle of meaning.
VON JUNG.
Your most obedient servant,
They abounded in the most ultra German opinions respecting the duello.
I quaintly termed the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, ever rightly entered into the mystery which overshadowed his character.
He was a man of courage undoubtedly.
In later days this insight grew more clear, as the intimacy which had at first permitted it became more close; and when, after three years of the character of the Baron Ritzner von Jung.
Upon this hint he proceeded.
For a short time he remained silent, apparently striving to master his emotion.
To the Baron Ritzner von Jung,
In the event of your declining this request, Mr. P. will be happy to arrange, with any friend whom you may appoint, the steps preliminary to a meeting.
I remember still more distinctly, that while he was pronounced by all parties at first sight "the most remarkable man in the world," no person made any attempt at accounting for his opinion.
For a moment I even fancied that I had misconceived him, and that he was in sober earnest.
This, too, when it was evident that the most egregious and unpardonable of all conceivable tricks, whimsicalities and buffooneries were brought about, if not directly by him, at least plainly through his intermediate agency or connivance.
Sir,--My friend, M. P.-, will hand you this note.
The hobby of Hermann now took the bit in his teeth.
I can just remember the titles of some of the works.
The lips were gently protruded, and rested the one upon the other, after such a fashion that it is impossible to conceive any, even the most complex, combination of human features, conveying so entirely, and so singly, the idea of unmitigated gravity, solemnity and repose.
Having finished the chapter, he closed the book, and demanded what I thought necessary to be done. I replied that I had entire confidence in his superior delicacy of feeling, and would abide by what he proposed.
His last words I distinctly remember.
He was by no means a handsome man--perhaps the reverse.
Upon one occasion we had protracted our sitting until nearly daybreak, and an unusual quantity of wine had been drunk.
Having perused the cartel, he wrote the following reply, which I carried to Hermann.
With sentiments of perfect respect,
As Hermann went out, the Baron whispered me that I should follow him and make an offer of my services.
"Your opinions, allow me to say, Baron von Jung, although in the main correct, are, in many nice points, discreditable to yourself and to the university of which you are a member.
Thus the brief period of his residence at the university forms an era in its annals, and is characterized by all classes of people appertaining to it or its dependencies as "that very extraordinary epoch forming the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung." then of no particular age, by which I mean that it was impossible to form a guess respecting his age by any data personally afforded.
This I could discern by the studied hair-splitting farrago of his rejoinder.
After a tiresome harangue in his ordinary style, he took down from his book shelves a number of musty volumes on the subject of the duello, and entertained me for a long time with their contents; reading aloud, and commenting earnestly as he read.
My acquaintance with Ritzner commenced at the magnificent Chateau Jung, into which a train of droll adventures, not to be made public, threw a place in his regard, and here, with somewhat more difficulty, a partial insight into his mental conformation.
Some courtesy, nevertheless, is due to the presence of this company, and to yourself, at this moment, as my guest.
Somewhat amazed at all this, I made my retreat to the Baron.
As a duellist he had acquired who had fallen at his hands; but they were many.
The key to the whole was found in leaving out every second and third word alternately, when there appeared a series of ludicrous quizzes upon a single combat as practised in modern times.
In no instance before that of which I speak, have I known the habitual mystific escape the natural consequence of his manoevres--an attachment of the ludicrous to his own character and person.
It ran thus:
With these words he hurled the decanter, full of wine, against the mirror which hung directly opposite Hermann; striking the reflection of his person with great precision, and of course shattering the glass into fragments.
At length he spoke; offering some objection to a point insisted upon by R., and giving his reasons in detail.
I remember the buzz of curiosity which his advent excited within the college precincts on the night of the twenty-fifth of June.
--NED KNOWLES.
He contrived to bear, however, among a particular set at the university, a reputation for deep metaphysical thinking, and, I believe, for some logical talent.
Most of these were young men of wealth, of high connection, of great family pride, and all alive with an exaggerated sense of honor.
The adroitness, too, was no less worthy of observation by which he contrived to shift the sense of the grotesque from the creator to the created--from his own person to the absurdities to which he had given rise.
The company consisted of seven or eight individuals besides the Baron and myself.
His forehead was lofty and very fair; his nose a snub; his eyes large, heavy, glassy, and meaningless.
There were the "Ordonnance of Philip le Bel on Single Combat"; the "Theatre of Honor," by Favyn, and a treatise "On the Permission of Duels," by Andiguier.
The contour of his face was somewhat angular and harsh.
He became pale, then excessively red; then, dropping his pocket-handkerchief, stooped to recover it, when I caught a glimpse of his countenance, while it could be seen by no one else at the table. It was radiant with the quizzical expression which was its natural character, but which I had never seen it assume except when we were alone together, and when he unbent himself freely.
Upon due reflection I frankly admit the propriety of the explanation you suggest.
So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.
And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel--although he neither saw nor heard--to feel the presence of my head within the room.
They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things.
I took my visitors all over the house.
Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
There was nothing to wash out--no stain of any kind--no blood-spot whatever.
Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased.
Oh God! what could I do?
yes, it was this!
For his gold I had no desire.
He was stone dead.
Above all was the sense of hearing acute.
At length it ceased.
I was singularly at ease.
Hearken! and observe how healthily--how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
louder!
You fancy me mad.
I felt that I must scream or die! and now--again!--hark! louder!
I smiled,--for what had I to fear?
The old man's terror must have been extreme!
This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall.
I knew that sound well, too.
I gasped for breath--and yet the officers heard it not.
I went down to open it with a light heart,--for what had I now to fear?
A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.
He shrieked once--once only.
As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door.
I led them, at length, to his chamber.
I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart.
I admit the deed!--tear up the planks!
I heard many things in hell.
The old man's hour had come!
Passion there was none.
Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in!
Was it possible they heard not?
It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed.
The disease had sharpened my senses--not destroyed--not dulled them.
louder!
Almighty God!--no, no!
The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence.
But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound.
You should have seen how wisely I proceeded--with what caution--with what foresight--with what dissimulation I went to work!
I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes.
Yet the sound increased--and what could I do?
I talked more quickly--more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased.
I saw it with perfect distinctness--all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.
There was no pulsation.
It grew louder--louder--louder!
It was open--wide, wide open--and I grew furious as I gazed upon it.
Here all was changed.
From Nova Scotia to the St. Lawrence, there was no population worthy of the name.
Ascending the St. Lawrence, it was seldom that the sight of a human form gave relief to the loneliness, until, at Quebec, the roar of Champlain's cannon from the verge of the cliff announced that the savage prologue of the American drama was drawing to a close, and that the civilization of Europe was advancing on the scene.
Westward, the population thinned rapidly; northward, it soon disappeared.
We have said that this group of tribes was relatively very populous; yet it is more than doubtful whether all of them united, had union been possible, could have mustered eight thousand fighting men.
Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of humanity.
Here were Mohicans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Penacooks, thorns in the side of the Puritan.
Fear, too, drove, them eastward; for the Iroquois pursued them with an inveterate enmity.
Populous towns, rude fortifications, and an extensive, though barbarous tillage, indicated a people far in advance of the famished wanderers of the Saguenay, or their less abject kindred of New England.
Landing at Boston, three years before a solitude, let the traveller push northward, pass the River Piscataqua and the Penacooks, and cross the River Saco.
They owed much, also, to the bounty of the sea, and hence they tended towards the coast; which, before the epidemic, Champlain and Smith had seen at many points studded with wigwams and waving with harvests of maize.
To speak further of them is needless, for they were not within the scope of the Jesuit labors.
The true Iroquois, or Five Nations, extended through Central New York, from the Hudson to the Genesee.
Northern New Hampshire, the whole of Vermont, and Western Massachusetts had no human tenants but the roving hunter or prowling warrior.
Some paid yearly tribute to their tyrants, while others were still subject to their inroads, flying in terror at the sound of the Mohawk war-cry.
On the whole, these savages were favorable specimens of the Algonquin stock, belonging to that section of it which tilled the soil, and was thus in some measure spared the extremes of misery and degradation to which the wandering hunter tribes were often reduced.
The heresy of heresies had planted itself among them; and it was for the apostle Eliot, not the Jesuit, to essay their conversion.
From the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, the southern border of the great river had no tenants but hunters.
Here, a change of dialect would indicate a different tribe, or group of tribes.
The fear of the Iroquois was everywhere; and as the voyager passed some wooded point, or thicket-covered island, the whistling of a stone-headed arrow proclaimed, perhaps, the presence of these fierce marauders.
'Listen to that tiger!' remarked the king.
Help me! help me!'
'Nonsense!' snapped the queen.
'As you like,' answered the queen, 'there isn't any doubt which it was.'
'I tell you it was a tiger,' said the king.
'Tiger?' replied the queen.
'In prison,' replied the farmer; 'if your majesty will clear this court of the jackals I will explain.'
It was only a jackal.'
Help me! help me!'
"Around forty.
Trigger glanced down.
"Probably."
He became more cautious with it after that.
Nothing happened until he had finished.
"It was Fayle."
"Yes."
He does feel pleasant to touch.
"Well, suppose that key unit is lost and stays lost.
"Well," Trigger admitted, "I could get along without the things indefinitely."
"That," said Commissioner Tate, "is only a little of it."
"Tell you about that later."
Most of them didn't know a thing we could use.
"Wonderful!
"Good for Repulsive!
He did the same thing in one more place and then quit.
"Just wondering.
Very expensive hired hands, but still just that.
"And what's everybody concluded from that?"
"Very likely."
The door closed.
"What are you people doing?
How did you get a lead through him?"
"Right.
Mantelish talks of something he calls proximity influence.
Right here on the table.
She laughed delightedly.
Holati Tate said, "That's about it.
Then he touched the plasmoid, and it fed the whole charge back to him. Apparently it was a fairly hefty dose."
So they need it."
There was a pause.
Somebody's got it."
And that could take a few centuries."
Stood up for his rights, eh?"
"We haven't found out yet.
Kitty-cat pleasant!
They may be right."
The big one induces plasmoid activity, the little one modifies it.
What it seems to boil down to is that they might.
"Is that one of the things you can't tell me about?"
The Commissioner looked at her.
Now there's considerable doubt."
"In connection with the key unit?" Trigger asked.
Before you and I left Manon.
"In what way?" Trigger asked.
It didn't make much difference.
She looked into it.
"I can tell you most of what I know at the moment," said the Commissioner.
Then she smiled at Quillan.
There seem to be too many basic factors missing.
Quillan came back to his chair.
"Grab it, was the dead-brain report. Why?"
Each group works at its specialties, and the information gets correlated." He paused.
And then he learned something that should be important.
"You know," she said uncomfortably, "old Repulsive moved again while we were talking!
"One experiment was rather startling.
Right there on Harvest Moon!"
"Major," she said, "how about a tiny little refill on that Puya--about half?"
That was around five minutes ago."
What does Mantelish make of it?"
Which would be enough to tempt a lot of people to gamble very high for a chance to get control of the plasmoid process--and we know definitely that some people are gambling for it."
"Weird beasties! But--let's see.
"It was in connection with our second lead."
"Mantelish began to get results with it," the Commissioner said.
"Fayle's ship might have got wrecked accidentally, of course.
There was a little pause.
"Holati, could those things ever become as valuable as people keep saying?
The Feds got there, fast, and dead-brained the raider.
"Oh?" Trigger picked up the Puya glass.
Did they try again?"
Would make a difference, wouldn't it?
"That's a point the Council is nervous about," he said.
But it seems to be more than a spare--which brings us to that first lead we got.
"Uh-huh," Trigger said, lost in thought.
Did they want to kill it or grab it?"
"Moving where?" she asked.
7
"The Federation Council--they're the ones we're working for directly--the Council's biggest concern is the very delicate political situation that's involved.
It was just lying there in a cubicle.
"When was that?"
If the professor didn't mind, things were about that far along.
"Why, Mark, you are clean crazed!"
Awed by Mark's determined manner, the bystanders kept aloof.
"A foolish wish," cried Bryan.
In that year the young prince espoused Catherine of Arragon, our present queen, and soon afterwards died; whereupon the old king, not liking--for he loved his treasure better than his own flesh--to part with her dowry, gave her to his second son, Henry, our gracious sovereign, whom God preserve!
To the castle!
"Yield, fellow!"
Not a sound heard. 'Sylvie!' (a little louder, and less hoarsely spoken).
Several times that day, as he perceived Coulson's jealous sullenness, he thought in his heart that the consequence of the excessive confidence for which Coulson envied him was a burden from which he would be thankful to be relieved.
They had urged their correspondent to give them his name in confidence, and this morning's letter had brought it; but the name was totally unknown to them, though there seemed no reason to doubt the reality of either it or the address, the latter of which was given in full.
Daniel was deeply struck with the fact that he was talking to a man setting off for London at a day's notice.
She stooped for something she had dropped, and came up red as a rose.
'I'd like to bid good-by to Sylvie.
Certain circumstances were mentioned regarding the transactions between the Fosters and this manufacturer, which could be known only to those who were in the confidence of one or the other; and to the Fosters the man was, as has been said, a perfect stranger.
It's the Lord's doing, and luck's the devil's way o' putting it.
But the young man was there in presence; and John's will carried the day.
He loved her, and that was enough.
He was chafed and excited by Coulson's words, and the events of the day.
They had stopped talking; they had seen him already, or his impulse would have been to dodge behind the wall and avoid them; even though one of his purposes in going to Haytersbank had been to bid his uncle farewell.
As all this was being revealed to Philip, he sat apparently unmoved and simply attentive.
A minute ago Philip and he were on a level of ignorance, from which the former was evidently going to be raised. But he soon returned to his usual state of acquiescence in things as they were, which was partly constitutional, and partly the result of his Quaker training.
With a heavy, heavy heart he creaked down the stairs, felt for his cap, and left the house.
He said little; but what he did say was to the point, and satisfied both brothers.
Just at that moment the little casement window of Sylvia's room was opened, and she said--
She lifted up those eyes, usually so soft and serene; now they were full of the light of indignation shining through tears.
It's clean gone out of my mind,' said Philip, with true regret.
'It's none o' my doing,' said Philip; 'there's business to be done, and John Foster says I'm to do it; and I'm to start to-morrow.'
'Sylvie!
Of the number of letters that arrived in Monkshaven, the Fosters, shopkeepers and bankers, had the largest share.
One of these seemed of especial consequence to the good brothers. They each separately looked at the direction, and then at one another; and without a word they returned with it unread into the parlour, shutting the door, and drawing the green silk curtain close, the better to read it in privacy.
The letters hinted at the utter insolvency of this manufacturer.
Philip promised to do his best, and to write word to Robson, who, satisfied with his willingness to undertake the commission, bade him go on and see if he could not find the lass.
'What then? and yo'r mother away.
He sate till it grew dusk, dark; the wood fire, not gathered together by careful hands, died out into gray ashes.
As the door of communication shut the three in, Coulson felt himself a little aggrieved.
He would be patient with her; he could not be patient himself.
Sylvia did not want his penitence, did not care for her ribbon, was troubled by his earnestness of manner--but he knew nothing of all that; he only knew that she whom he loved had asked him to do something for her, and he had neglected it; so, anxious to be excused and forgiven, he went on with the apology she cared not to hear.
In his own mind he forestalled the instructions of his masters, and was silently in advance of John Foster's plans and arrangements, while he appeared to listen to all that was said with quiet business-like attention.
His feelings, disturbed on this one point, shook his judgment off its balance on another.
Coming along it, and so meeting him, advanced Daniel Robson, in earnest talk with Charley Kinraid.
Coulson sat still, penitent and ashamed; at length he stole a look at Hester.
It seemed from his account to Philip (explanatory of what he, in advance of his brother's slower judgment, thought to be a necessary step), that the Fosters had for some time received anonymous letters, warning them, with distinct meaning, though in ambiguous terms, against a certain silk-manufacturer in Spitalfields, with whom they had had straightforward business dealings for many years; but to whom they had latterly advanced money.
Surprise, and curiosity, and wonder; nothing more, as Philip's instinct told him.
The latter was silent, brooding over the confidence which Philip had apparently received, but which was withheld from him.
When he was once more behind the counter, he had leisure enough for consideration as far as Coulson could give it him.
Secure and exultant, his broad, handsome, weather-bronzed face was as great a contrast to Philip's long, thoughtful, sallow countenance, as his frank manner was to the other's cold reserve.
Yet it seemed as though he could not stir.
So they parted; but Philip had not gone many steps before his uncle called him back, Kinraid slowly loitering on meanwhile.
But he reasoned that first correct impression away with ingenious sophistry.
He would speak to her of his passionate attachment, before he left, for an uncertain length of time, and the certain distance of London.
At the time, in his agitation, he saw, but did not affix any meaning to it, that the half of some silver coin was among the contents thus turned over before the box was locked.
He waited patiently.
'No, I shan't,' he replied, shortly.
It was apparently by John Foster's wish that Philip had been summoned.
Philip knew the uselessness of remaining; the need for his departure; and yet he stood still for a little time like one entranced, as if his will had lost all power to compel him to leave the place.
The resolution he had deliberately formed of not speaking to Sylvia on the subject of his love till he could announce to her parents the fact of his succession to Fosters' business, and till he had patiently, with long-continuing and deep affection, worked his way into her regard, was set aside during the present walk.
Philip paid no attention to this half-uttered sentence; he was eager to tell Coulson, as far as he could do so without betraying his master's secret, how many drawbacks there were to his proposed journey, in the responsibility which it involved, and his unwillingness to leave Monkshaven: he said--
'Oh, yes,' said she.
Philip set his teeth and tightened his lips at the thought of it.
But fortunately there was little doing in the shop.
I'm going away; say good-by.' No answer.
'I'm not going by York; I'm going by a Newcastle smack.'
At length he raised his stiffened body, and stood up, dizzy.
Philip had the satisfaction of feeling himself employed on a mission which would call out his powers, and yet not exceed them.
He knew he ought to be going home, for he had much to do, and many arrangements to make.
Sylvia's galloping thoughts were pulled suddenly up by his silence; she felt that he wanted her to say something, but she could think of nothing besides an ambiguous--
CHAPTER XVII
I'm sorry I vexed yo'.'
Can she be wearied out, and gone to sleep, he wondered.
He's no company for such as thee, at no time, Sylvie.'
'Sylvie!
Coulson remained alone, feeling like a guilty child, but dismayed by Hester's words, even more than by his own regret at what he had said.
She had talked about it to Kinraid and her father in order to cover her regret at her lover's accompanying her father to see some new kind of harpoon about which the latter had spoken.
'To Lunnon!' exclaimed Alice.
'Sylvie, Sylvie,' cried poor Philip, as his offended cousin rushed past him, and upstairs to her little bedroom, where he heard the sound of the wooden bolt flying into its place.
Kinraid now seemed in a hurry; but Philip was stung with curiosity to ascertain his movements, and suddenly addressed him:
'It's fine talking,' said Coulson, half mollified, and yet not caring to show it.
He sate still in despair, his head buried in his two hands.
No reply.
In fact, he was giving all his mind to understanding the probabilities of the case, leaving his own feelings in the background till his intellect should have done its work.
If she had been less occupied with her own affairs, less engrossed with deep feeling, she would have reproached him, if only in jest, for his carelessness.
Philip, indeed, had nothing more to say to him: he had learned all he wanted to know.
Jeremiah, the less energetic and decided brother, was still discussing the propriety of the step when Philip entered.
Suddenly a light shone down into Philip's mind.
Philip had never had so much in his hands before, and hesitated to take it, saying it was more than he should require; but they repeated, with fresh urgency, their warnings about the terrible high prices of London, till he could only resolve to keep a strict account, and bring back all that he did not expend, since nothing but his taking the whole sum would satisfy his employers.
Is she at home?' he asked of her father.
Could he be playing the same game with Sylvia?
It was settled that the next morning he was to make his way northwards to Hartlepool, whence he could easily proceed either by land or sea to Newcastle, from which place smacks were constantly sailing to London.
Up the little wooden stairs he went, where he had never been before, to the small square landing, almost filled up with the great chest for oat-cake.
Yet once again--'Good-by, Sylvie, and God bless yo'!
'Good-by, Philip!'
"Now, what do you think of Miss Eleanor?" cried Nora.
As for the persons who told you about our plan, words cannot express my contempt for them, and right here I accuse Grace Harlowe and her sorority of getting the information from Mabel Allison yesterday and carrying it to you.
I am going to put every girl on her honor, and I expect absolutely truthful answers.
"Hurry up," she said.
I will not tolerate such behavior."
"It was abominable," said Eva Allen.
Her eyes wandered toward where Eleanor sat, looking bored and indifferent, and then she looked toward Grace, whose steady gray eyes were fixed on the principal's face with respectful attention.
"We'll talk when we get outside school.
"I certainly did not," responded Mabel.
You are both disrespectful and impertinent."
But Miss Thompson's anger toward Eleanor was nothing compared with the tempest that the principal had aroused in Eleanor.
"It was----" she stopped, then flushed.
It was therefore a distinct and not altogether pleasant surprise when Miss Thompson walked into the room, dismissed the senior class and requested the three lower classes to remain in their seats.
The eyes of Grace and her chums turned questioningly toward Mabel Allison, who nodded slightly in the affirmative.
"I hope you understand that I am not afraid of you or any other teacher in this school," she continued.
"This," she said, in a low tense voice, "is the paper you wish to see.
Still standing, she reached down, picked up a book from her desk and took from it a paper.
There was a moment of suspense, then Eleanor Savell proudly rose from her seat.
What I insist upon knowing now, is who are the real culprits, beginning with the girl who originated the paper to the last one who signed it.
She could not forgive Eleanor for having accused her and her friends of carrying tales before almost the entire school; therefore a forced apology would not appease her wounded pride. She drew a breath of relief when the eight girls were safely outside the study hall door.
Without a word Eleanor rose and walked haughtily out of the room.
Grace motioned the girls to hurry.
"Stop, Miss Savell," she commanded.
No one had ever before spoken so disrespectfully to their revered principal.
"Report says that this movement originated in the junior class, and that a paper has been circulated and signed by certain pupils, who pledged themselves to play truant and attend the matinee to-morrow."
"Miss Savell," said the principal quietly, although her flashing eyes and set lips showed that she was very angry, "if you have that paper in your possession, bring it to me at once, and never answer me again as you did just now.
"Then, of course, we won't ask you," said Anne Pierson quickly.
The girl who composed and wrote that agreement will now rise and explain herself."
Please make it a point to be on hand."
Miss Thompson paused and a number of girls stirred uneasily in their seats, while a few glanced quickly toward Eleanor, who was looking straight ahead, the picture of innocence.
The latter flushed, then turned perfectly white with rage.
Several times they caught sight of a folded paper being stealthily passed from one desk to another, but as to its contents they had no idea, as it was not handed to any one of them.
If it doesn't concern us we don't care, do we, girls?"
"No, indeed," was the reply.
"We shall understand each other a little better."
Such a decision is worse than disobedience--it is lawlessness.
There was a gasp of horror at Eleanor's assertion.
Therefore, I intend to sift this matter to the bottom and find out what mischievous influence prompted this act of insubordination.
"It isn't.
Such a thing had not happened since the basketball trouble the previous year.
On Wednesday, aside from a little more whispering and significant glances exchanged among the pupils, not a ripple disturbed the calm of the study hall.
Don't stop for a minute.
"She deserves to be punished.
The girls who signed the paper I have mentioned will rise."
I do not choose to let you see it, therefore I shall destroy it."
"I suppose it did look as though I told you girls," said Mabel Allison, who had joined them at the gate.
"We don't want you to tell.
About one third of the girls arose and prepared to leave the study hall, the Phi Sigma Tau being among the number.
"Your silence indicates that you are still insubordinate.
"You all know," continued the principal, "that it is strictly forbidden for any pupil to absent herself from school for the purpose of attending a circus, matinee or any public performance of this nature.
The things she said to Miss Thompson were disgraceful, and I shall never forgive her for the way she spoke of us."
Eleanor looked scornfully at the principal, and was silent.
They were spending a most uncomfortable half hour with Miss Thompson.
Her example was followed, until two thirds of the girls present were standing.
"Remember, girls, basketball practice again to-morrow, and the rest of the week.
"I have dismissed the senior class, because I have been assured of their entire ignorance of the plot.
With these words, Eleanor angrily flung the book she held on the desk and walked down the aisle toward the door, but Miss Thompson barred her way.
A WOULD-BE "LARK"
The girls silently donned their wraps and fled from the building like fugitives from justice.
"I don't believe Grace is guilty, at any rate," thought Miss Thompson; then she addressed the assembled girls.
"Here comes Mabel," said Jessica.
Even Mabel had refused to sign.
"Very likely," agreed Grace.
Mabel looked distressed for a moment then she said, "I wish I might tell you all about it, but I gave my word of honor before I read it that I wouldn't mention the contents to any one."
"It will have to be something remarkable in this instance," replied Grace grimly, as she bade the girls good-bye.
You may, therefore, choose between two things. You may apologize to me now, and to-morrow to the girls you have accused of treachery, or you may leave this school, not to return to it unless permitted to do so by the Board of Education."
"I have never been punished in my life, therefore I am not liable to give you the first opportunity.
"I wouldn't say that, Grace," remarked Anne.
"Those girls who are not in any way implicated in this matter are dismissed," she said.
"But tell us this much--is it about any of us?"
Without hesitating, Eleanor rose and regarded the principal with an insolent smile.
"Very well," continued Miss Thompson.
"Do you intend to obey me, Miss Savell?" asked Miss Thompson.
After the seniors had quietly left the study hall, Miss Thompson stood gravely regarding the rows of girls before her.
The principal stood silently regarding them with an expression of severity that was decidedly discomfitting.
"Let's take turns talking," cried Grace, laughing.
"No," replied Mabel.
Once on the street a lively confab ensued, all talking at once.
"That will do," she said curtly, after they had stood for what seemed to them an age, but was really only a couple of minutes.
"I can't bear to have secrets and not tell you."
The other girls expressed their disapproval in equally frank terms.
It was passed to me by mistake."
The majority, however, appeared to be highly delighted over what they heard, one group standing near one of the windows, of which Eleanor was the center, laughed so loudly that they were sent to their seats.
Just then the bell sounded and the girls returned to their seats with the riddle still unsolved.
She had been on the point of telling.
Miss Thompson has promised me the gymnasium.
I have so severely disciplined pupils for this offence that for a long time no one has disobeyed me.
It is something I was asked to sign."
At recess there was more grouping and whispering, and Grace was puzzled and not a little hurt over the way in which she and her friends were ignored.
"I wrote it, Miss Thompson," she said clearly.
For the first time since Eleanor had chosen to cut their acquaintance Grace was thoroughly angry with her.
"What are your claws for?
Simon Screecher was more than willing.
When he found no place to walk, he swam.
Solomon Owl stopped him quickly.
"That's easy," his cousin answered.
"This is my first winter," Master Meadow Mouse explained.
And the day came at last when it was well worth his while to take the little extra trouble of peeping out before he had his swim.
When Peter Mink wandered along a stream in winter he preferred to travel under the ice, rather than walk upon the upper side of it.
When he happened to go into the orchard one day, later, and saw tree after tree ruined, he was very, very much displeased.
Then--and not till then--did Master Meadow Mouse let him go.
Before he crept from the end of his tunnel, he stuck his head out and looked up and down and all around.
"I can't eat trees.
Eating a Tree
He peeped under the bank of the brook.
"The snow is three feet deep.
"I wish he'd wait a minute," Master Meadow Mouse grumbled as he tore after his cousin once more.
Now, Master Meadow Mouse had a tunnel that led right beneath the tree where the two cousins were sitting.
"Get more!" And then he hurried away, for he had important business to attend to.
It was he that Solomon heard.
If anybody asked his opinion he was ready to give it.
"Be quiet!" Solomon Owl thundered.
"I believe it is getting nearer, too."
For Master Meadow Mouse caught a glimpse of a snakelike head that darted out from under the bank of the brook and darted back again, out of sight.
"I ought to have put wire netting around those young trees," he told the hired man.
But Farmer Green didn't agree with him.
Simon Screecher was silenced for the time being.
He even stared into the water.
The days were cold.
And he went home feeling that the winter was not so hard as he had thought, after all.
I don't think there are many Mice left on Farmer Green's place. It's my opinion that they've moved away--most of them.
"But you didn't tell me where to get it."
He must be miles away.
He must be very hungry."
"I couldn't dig him out," Solomon Owl replied.
Master Meadow Mouse promised himself that he would not repeat it another time.
20
It was hard to follow his cousin through the winding galleries beneath the snow.
"How can I eat a tree?" Master Meadow Mouse demanded.
"Then explain what you mean!" Master Meadow Mouse cried.
It seemed as if there wasn't anything to eat anywhere except at the farm buildings, which Farmer Green had stuffed full of hay and grain during the summer and autumn.
I'll step right out of my tunnel and have my swim without taking a look-see first." But Master Meadow Mouse was never so lazy as that.
"Yes!"
"That's the reason why you can't catch more Mice," Solomon Owl snapped; for he was angry.
But of course you can't surprise them if you tell them you're coming.
If it hadn't been for the meadow mice perhaps he wouldn't have visited the brook so often.
But it hadn't been big enough.
What's your beak for?"
And he had strolled that way after scurrying under the snow when he heard Solomon Owl laughing in the woods earlier in the evening.
"You can't!" his cousin replied, struggling desperately to free himself, for he was too busy to stop long.
"Why didn't you grab him out of the snow?" Simon asked.
"In the orchard!" his cousin cried.
But he seldom gave any unsought advice.
Sometimes he lingered for days in the neighborhood of Black Creek.
It made little difference to him whether there was a dry strip along the edge of the stream, where he could steal silently along without wetting his feet.
Nor did he disdain so small a stream as the brook that crossed the meadow.
There must be something that my cousin forgot to explain.
If I knew where there was good mousing I'd move to-morrow."
Or maybe old Rough-leg, the Hawk, has caught more than his share.
"THERE'S no sense in wasting our time here," said Solomon Owl to his small cousin, Simon Screecher.
"That's easy," his cousin replied.
Many of the forest folk stole down from Blue Mountain after nightfall and visited the farmyard in the hope of getting a bite of something or other.
"Trees!" Master Meadow Mouse echoed.
It was he that stuck his head out of a hole in the snow and peeped up at the star-sprinkled sky.
And it has seven different crusts, one under another."
It was the first big meal he had enjoyed for weeks.
"I've been chasing you.
He was a person of few words.
19
"Trees!" Having said those three words he dashed off again even faster than before.
Unfortunately, all the promises in the world wouldn't give him a square meal when he needed one.
Master Meadow Mouse chased his cousin no more, but hurried away to Farmer Green's orchard, where he gnawed a ring all the way around one of the young fruit trees, at the top of the snow.
The cousin seemed surprised when Master Meadow Mouse overtook him.
So I suppose I'll have to run after him again and ask him what he meant."
21
And he dived out of the old oak straight at Master Meadow Mouse.
The snow was deep.
"I forgot," said Simon Screecher once more.
"I didn't suppose that chap would be here as soon as this," he gasped. "He must have hurried over here from the woods.
To be sure, Master Meadow Mouse tried to be careful.
"Don't do that!" he said sharply.
"I wish I'd gone South last fall.
"It's a fine night.
"I forgot," he murmured.
But no Meadow Mouse will ever venture out of doors if you're going to whistle."
And then he hurried away again.
And he knew that muskrats lived under its banks.
At that moment his cousin began to whistle again.
The mistake his depreciators make, however, is in thinking that his story ends here.
It is like a grin in church, a laugh at a marriage service.
The fact is, in war time more than at any other time, people dread the vision of the satirist and the sceptic.
He is one of those rare public men who can hardly express an opinion on potato-culture--and he does express an opinion on everything--without making a multitude of people shake their fists in impotent anger.
Whether he could have helped becoming a figure, even if he had never painted that elongated comic portrait of himself, it is difficult to say.
That contribution has been brilliant, challenging, and humane, and not more wayward than the contribution of the partisan and the sentimentalist.
The truth about Mr. Shaw is not quite so simple as that.
Nine people out of ten harp on Mr. Shaw's errors.
He has courted unpopularity as other men have courted popularity.
I do not mean that he was not intensely serious in all that he wrote about the war.
He does not labour to be witty, nor does he play upon words....
This only means that in his life he is an artist.
On hearing her story, it occurred to the Princess that so silly a lad might amuse her; so she gave the mother a golden florin, and took poor silly Bobo with her to be her page.
So Bobo went aboard the ship, and sailed out upon the dark sea.
Only one fragment of him, a tiny bit of a claw, was ever found.
He opened the cover of the ebony box.
"A half-hour," he roared.
The first person whom he thus questioned was an old man who was wandering down the high road that leads from the Kingdom of the East to the Kingdom of the West.
He found himself in a beautiful garden, lying between the castle walls and the rising slopes of a great mountain.
"Shall we send Bobo in search of the lost half-hour?" said the Princess to the courtiers.
At this idea of finding a lost half-hour, the Princess laughed, and found herself echoed by the company.
"What is the matter, my good woman?" said the King.
So Bobo rode over the hills and far away.
But they knew in their hearts that they were too late, and that poor Tilda had given herself to the dragon.
Though pounded and battered by the foaming waves, the simpleton at length managed to reach the beach, and took refuge in a crevice of the cliff during the stormy night.
It's about the size of a large melon and has sharp little points."
Things should be exactly as they were half an hour before.
"A lost half-hour?" said the old man.
The lost temper had finished him.
Princess Zenza and her court stood by wringing their jeweled hands.
All his mother's scoldings and beatings--and she smacked the poor lad soundly a dozen times a day--did him no good whatever.
After a week of almost constant progress (for the King was so anxious to see his beloved daughter that he would hardly give the cavalcade time to rest), they came to the frontiers of Princess Zenza's kingdom.
Don't try to peek at it or open the box until the right time has come.
"No," said the sailors, "but we are going to the Isles of Iron; suppose you go with us.
Bobo ran down into the field and stood beside Tilda, ready to defend her to the end.
As she came down the steps of the garden terrace, the Princess looked up at the castle clock to see how late she was, and said to her lady in waiting,--
It is almost two now.
His faithful white horse died, and he continued his way on foot.
Then, having got together a magnificent cohort of dukes, earls, and counts, all in splendid silks, and soldiers in shining armor, the delighted King rode off to claim his missing daughter from Princess Zenza.
And he told how the Princess herself had commanded him to seek the half-hour through the world, and promised to bring Tilda a splendid present when he returned.
So Bobo thanked Father Time, and at noon, Twelve O'Clock placed him behind him on the white charger, and hurried away.
"Bobo shall look for the lost half-hour."
Another day the simpleton encountered a tall, dark, fierce kind of fellow, who answered his polite question with a scream of rage.
This Bobo gave readily.
In the grass by the roadside, however, he did find the lost temper--a queer sort of affair like a melon of fiery red glass all stuck over with uneven spines and brittle thorns.
There was not a house, a road, or a path to be seen.
Of the man who had lost his temper, Bobo found no sign.
"Yes!
Something like a winged white flame escaped from it, and flew hissing through the air to the sun.
Hardly were the words out of her mouth, when the town bell struck twice, solemnly and sadly.
Suddenly a great booming bell struck seven o'clock; Bobo began to hear voices and sounds; and then, before the humming of the bell had died away, a youth mounted on a splendid black horse dashed at lightning speed out of the castle and disappeared in the wood.
So Bobo obediently let the shoes guide him.
Suddenly Bobo thought of the half-hour.
Courtiers, footmen, lackeys, turnspits even, were forever sending him off on ridiculous errands.
"Dear me--why, I've lost half an hour this morning!"
So on they rode, the harnesses jingling, the bridle-bells ringing, and the breastplates of the armed men shining in the sun.
So Twelve O'Clock, who was the youngest of the Hours, took him to the stables and showed him the little room in the turret that he was to have.
"Good-bye, Bobo," cried the assembled courtiers, who were almost beside themselves with laughter at the simpleton and his errand.
And so it proved.
Plucking up courage, Bobo came forward, fell on his knee before the old man, and told his story.
An old man with a white beard, accompanied by eleven young men, whom Bobo judged, from their expressions, to be brothers,--stood by the gate to see the horseman ride away.
The blade broke upon his steely scales.
Now just as the dragon's mouth was its widest, Bobo who had been searching his pockets desperately, hurled into it the lost temper.
Suddenly, angered by the sight of Bobo and his drawn sword, he roared angrily, but continued to approach. Bobo struck at him with his sword.
If you do, the half-hour will flyaway and disappear forever."
He had arrived half an hour late, but he could have that half-hour back again!
And so, in less time than it takes to tell about it, poor simpleton Bobo was made ready for his journey.
Seven O'clock has just ridden forth.
It was very dignified and wore tortoise-shell glasses."
"No, I have n't seen your half-hour; I would n't tell you if I had; what's more, I don't want to see it.
So fast they flew that Bobo, who was holding the ebony casket close against his heart, was in great danger of falling off.
His family was one of the most illustrious of the empire.
I mean it as synonymous with happiness.
In all other matters we are justly instructed to regard Nature as supreme.
It was Mr. Ellison who first suggested the idea that what we regarded as improvement or exaltation of the natural beauty, was really such, as respected only the mortal or human point of view; that each alteration or disturbance of the primitive scenery might possibly effect a blemish in the picture, if we could suppose this picture viewed at large from some remote point in the heavens.
There are the stately avenues and retirements of Versailles; Italian terraces; and a various mixed old English style, which bears some relation to the domestic Gothic or English Elizabethan architecture.
The slightest exhibition of art is an evidence of care and human interest."
Or it might have been that he became neither the one nor the other, in pursuance of an idea of his which I have already mentioned--the idea, that in the contempt of ambition lay one of the essential principles of happiness on earth. Is it not, indeed, possible that while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is invariably above that which is termed ambition?
"Its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it upon earth." In his explanation of this phraseology, Mr. Ellison did much towards solving what has always seemed to me an enigma.
"There are, properly," he writes, "but two styles of landscape-gardening, the natural and the artificial.
His bride was the loveliest and most devoted of women.
"From what I have already observed," said Mr. Ellison, "you will understand that I reject the idea, here expressed, of 'recalling the original beauty of the country.' The original beauty is never so great as that which may be introduced.
"The health," he said, "attainable by other means than this is scarcely worth the name." He pointed to the tillers of the earth--the only people who, as a class, are proverbially more happy than others--and then he instanced the high ecstasies of the fox-hunter.
Recourse was had to figures; and figures but sufficed to confound.
He comprehended, moreover, the true character, the august aims, the supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment.
'A mixture of pure art in a garden scene, adds to it a great beauty.' This is just; and the reference to the sense of human interest is equally so.
His second principle was the love of woman.
No such Paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed upon the canvass of Claude.
In the widest and noblest sense, he was a poet.
Men knew not what to imagine.
The proper gratification of the sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of Beauty.
It was seen, that even at three per cent, the annual income of the inheritance amounted to no less than thirteen millions and five hundred thousand dollars; which was one million and one hundred and twenty-five thousand per month; or thirty-six thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six per day, or one thousand five hundred and forty-one per hour, or six and twenty dollars for every minute that flew.
And I have now mentioned all the provinces in which even the most liberal understanding of the poetic sentiment has declared this sentiment capable of expatiating.
This is partly pleasing to the eye, by the show of order and design, and partly moral.
In the most rugged of wildernesses--in the most savage of the scenes of pure Nature--there is apparent the art of a Creator; yet is this art apparent only to reflection; in no respect has it the obvious force of a feeling.
Of course, much depends upon the selection of a spot with capabilities.
The artificial style has as many varieties as there are different tastes to gratify.
A terrace, with an old moss-covered balustrade, calls up at once to the eye, the fair forms that have passed there in other days.
The merit suggested is, at best, negative, and appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis.
It remains for a more profound analysis than the world has yet seen, fully to investigate and express them.
Mr. Ellison became neither musician nor poet; although no man lived more profoundly enamored both of Music and the Muse.
While the component parts may exceed, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of the parts will always be susceptible of improvement.
Yet his reasons have not yet been matured into expression.
In the brief existence of Ellison, I fancy, that I have seen refuted the dogma--that in man's physical and spiritual nature, lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of Bliss.
The possessor of any appreciable amount of money might have been imagined to perform any one of a thousand things.
The gigantic magnitude and the immediately available nature of the sum, dazzled and bewildered all who thought upon the topic.
And even far more than this, in remedy of the defective composition, each insulated member of the fraternity will suggest the identical emendation.
He was remarkable in the entire and continuous profusion of good gifts ever lavished upon him by fortune.
Byron, who often erred, erred not in saying, I've seen more living beauty, ripe and real, than all the nonsense of their stone ideal.
I was not surprised, however, to perceive that he had long made up his mind upon a topic which had occasioned so much of discussion to his friends.
In personal grace and beauty he exceeded all men.
I have said that Ellison was remarkable in the continuous profusion of good gifts lavished upon him by Fortune.
Nor was I greatly astonished at the nature of his decision.
I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute,) that no such combinations of scenery exist in Nature as the painter of genius has in his power to produce.
One seeks to recall the original beauty of the country, by adapting its means to the surrounding scenery; cultivating trees in harmony with the hills or plain of the neighboring land; detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion and color which, hid from the common observer, are revealed everywhere to the experienced student of nature.
No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path.
This act did not prevent young Ellison, upon his twenty-first birth-day, from entering into possession, as the heir of his ancestor, Seabright, of a fortune of four hundred and fifty millions of dollars.
But, for the inconceivable wealth in the actual possession of the young heir, these objects and all ordinary objects were felt to be inadequate.
In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess--many excesses and defects.
From his cradle to his grave, a gale of the blandest prosperity bore him along.
In truth, while that merit which consists in the mere avoiding demerit, appeals directly to the understanding, and can thus be foreshadowed in Rule, the loftier merit, which breathes and flames in invention or creation, can be apprehended solely in its results.
When it had become definitely known that such was the enormous wealth inherited, there were, of course, many speculations as to the mode of its disposal.
Beyond these the critical art can but suggest.
The result of the natural style of gardening, is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities--in the prevalence of a beautiful harmony and order, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles.
Rule applies but to the excellences of avoidance--to the virtues which deny or refrain.
That which he considered chief, was (strange to say!) the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air.
In the course of our discussion, my young friend took occasion to quote some passages from a writer who has been supposed to have well treated this theme.
I repeat that the principle here expressed, is incontrovertible; but there may be something even beyond it.
Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up.
Under other circumstances than those which invested him, it is not impossible that he would have become a painter.
Having, I say, felt its truth here.
That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles,' is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd, than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius.
The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations, than the sentiment of his Art yields to the artist.
Many futile attempts had been made to set aside this singular bequest; their ex post facto character rendered them abortive; but the attention of a jealous government was aroused, and a decree finally obtained, forbidding all similar accumulations.
His intellect was of that order to which the attainment of knowledge is less a labor than a necessity and an intuition.
The ideas of my friend may be summed up in a few words.
This gentlemen had amassed a princely fortune, and, having no very immediate connexions, conceived the whim of suffering his wealth to accumulate for a century after his decease.
It appears that about one hundred years prior to Mr. Ellison's attainment of his majority, there had died, in a remote province, one Mr. Seabright Ellison.
Let a composition be defective, let an emendation be wrought in its mere arrangement of form; let this emendation be submitted to every artist in the world; by each will its necessity be admitted.
He admitted but four unvarying laws, or rather elementary principles, of Bliss.
The sophists of the negative school, who, through inability to create, have scoffed at creation, are now found the loudest in applause.
With her details we shrink from competition.
After everybody crept out of his hiding-place some time afterward (everyone had to hide for a while, you know), there was Mr. Crow sitting upon one of the fallen trees.
A HOLIDAY
And it was quickly found that every vote was for Brownie Beaver.
"What do you mean?" Grandaddy Beaver asked.
That's why he put up that sign.
So they stopped working, for once, and began to plan the celebration. They thought that there ought to be swimming races and tree-felling contests.
And the whole village seemed greatly disappointed, until Grandaddy Beaver made a short speech.
And Mr. Crow began to laugh.
And that caused some trouble, too, because some claimed that their trees were of harder wood than others--and more difficult to gnaw--while others complained that the bark of their trees tasted very bitter, and of course that made their task unpleasant.
"What are you going to do next?" he asked.
There were six, including Brownie Beaver, that took part in it.
But nobody cared to go.
"No doubt!" Mr. Crow remarked.
"You're not going to cut down the whole forest, I hope."
Mr. Crow looked around.
"In the second place," he continued, "the sign doesn't mean that hunting and fishing are to be stopped.
But no one seemed to care about that.
"Say good-by to him then," said Mr. Crow, "for you'll never see him again."
Brownie Beaver himself passed his hat around to take up the votes.
But not before!" he insisted.
"Then--" said Mr. Crow--"then don't interrupt me again, please!
"At Farmer Green's hen-house," Mr. Crow explained.
A NEWFANGLED NEWSPAPER
Mr. Crow paused and looked at Brownie Beaver out of the corner of his eye.
He knew that Brownie would want to know what prevented the accident.
I'll tell you all the news I've brought.
"You've done just as I told you not to.
After Mr. Crow flew back to Pleasant Valley to gather news for him, Brownie Beaver carefully counted each day that passed.
Being a newspaper, he thought he ought to say nothing except what was news--not even "Good afternoon!"
An enjoyable time was had by all--except the pig."
"There you go again!" cried Mr. Crow.
"Another question!
"Fatty Coon--" Mr. Crow said--"Fatty Coon was confined to his house by illness Tuesday night.
And in a wonderfully short time his head appeared above the water and he soon crawled up beside Mr. Crow.
"What happened on Friday?"
And he went right on talking.
"Pig?" Brownie Beaver asked.
"What pig?"
Mrs. Woodchuck is worried."
"The pig they ate," said Mr. Crow.
He lighted right on top of Brownie Beaver's house and called "Paper!" down the chimney--just like that!
And then we can talk.
You see, you have a few things to learn about taking a newspaper." And 'he would give Brownie no more news that day.
Jimmy Rabbit almost cut off Frisky Squirrel's tail."
Whenever he saw a bird soaring above the tree-tops he couldn't help hoping it was Mr. Crow.
But Mr. Crow really came at last.
"Old dog Spot chased him," Mr. Crow replied.
"She's afraid he's coming back again," Mr. Crow explained.
But he didn't have a good time at all," Mr. Crow reported, "and he left faster than he came."
At least, it seemed so to him.
"On Thursday Mr. Woodchuck went to visit his cousins in the West.
"Tommy Fox made a visit.
A QUEER PLACE TO LIVE
There was a small stream, too, which was really the beginning of Swift River.
It was just like putting green things into a refrigerator, so they will keep.
Some of their food they carried into their houses through a straight hall which was made for that very purpose.
They would have had no place, either, to store their winter's food. For they were in the habit of cutting down trees and saving the bark and branches too, in order to have plenty to eat when cold weather came and the ice closed their pond.
Though he owned the land where it stood, those that lived there thought they had every right to stay there as long as they pleased, without being disturbed.
If Brownie Beaver and his friends had neglected their dam, they would have waked up some day and found that their pond was empty; and without any water to hide their doorways they would have been safe no longer.
Now you see why Brownie Beaver would no more have thought of building his house on dry land than you would think of building one in a pond. Everybody likes his own way best.
It was a different sort of town, too, from the one where Farmer Green went each week.
It was so old that trees were growing on it. And there was an odd thing about it: it was never finished.
The dam was there still.
"Down a romantic Swiss glen, where scores of sylvan nooks and rippling rills invite one to cast about for fairies and sprites," is the word descriptive of my route from Marcellus next morning.
Prominent among them stands the old Garfield homestead - a fine farm of one hundred and sixty-five acres, at present managed by Mrs. Garfield's brother.
Once again, on nearing the Camillus outlet from the narrow vale, I hear the sound of Sunday bells, and after the church-bell-less Western wilds, it seems to me that their notes have visited me amid beautiful scenes, strangely often of late.
It is at Otis, in the midst of these hills, that I first become acquainted with the peculiar New England dialect in its native home.
If so, however, Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada Mountains comes next, as it is about six thousand feet above the level of the sea, and has three steamers plying on its waters.
A fat, phlegmatic-looking baby is peacefully reposing in a cradle, which is simply half a monster pumpkin scooped out and dried; it is the most intensely rustic cradle in the world.
From the elevated road-bed I cast a longing, lingering look down the Hudson Valley, that stretches away southward like a heaven-born dream, and sigh at the impossibility of going two ways at once.
The Maumee River, winding through its splendid rich valley, seems to possess a peculiar beauty all its own, and my mind, unbidden, mentally compares it with our old friend, the Humboldt.
No wheelman has ever yet rode up this hill, save the muscular and gritty captain of the Fredonia Club, though several have attempted the feat.
At ten o'clock in the morning, July 17th, I bowl across the boundary line into Ohio.
The roads continue good, and after dinner I reach Westfield, six miles from the famous Lake Chautauqua, which beautiful hill and forest embowered sheet of water is popularly believed by many of its numerous local admirers to be the highest navigable lake in the world.
There is not even pity.
"I know that I've got to die," proceeds the prisoner, with an air of seeming recklessness.
He feels that there is no chance of escape; that he is standing by the side of his coffin--on the edge of an Eternity too terrible to contemplate.
All at once a light is seen to flask into his eyes--sunken as they are in the midst of two livid circles.
Its meaning is made clear by the act that accompanies it.
The condemned man looks up, as if in hopes that he has touched a chord of mercy.
There is no sign of it, on the faces that surround him--still solemnly austere.
Nor am I going to deny who it was.
I did.
To a conscience like his, it cannot be otherwise than appalling.
ATTEMPTED MURDER AND SUICIDE.
The declaration is answered by a cry from the crowd.
I didn't know myself till long after."
There was none."
The judge is the same, the jury the same, and the spectators as before; though with very different feelings in regard to the criminality of the accused.
He starts at the invitation--falling, as it does, like a death-knell upon his ear.
The motive both for the murder and the mutilation: for the testimony of Gerald has been confirmed by a subsequent examination of the dead body. The surgeon of the cantonment has pronounced the two distinct, and that Henry Poindexter's death must have ensued, almost instantaneously after his receiving the shot.
All appear to frown upon him.
I don't, by God!"
In the place late occupied by him another stands.
No one speaks, or in any way attempts interruption.
I acknowledge that I have forfeited my life, and deserve to lose it."
For all this, it is remarked as singular, that a storm should be coming at the time: since it symbolises the sentiment of the spectators, who look on with sullenness in their hearts, and gloom in their glances.
It was sure enough; and poor Henry dropped from his horse.
"No!" he replies, "I have not.
And not strange that he should.
"Yes, by mistake; and God knows I was sorry enough, on discovering that I had made it.
The "sensation" again expresses itself in shuddering and shouts--the latter prolonged into cries of retribution--mingled with that murmuring which proclaims a story told.
It would seem as if Heaven's wrath was acting in concert with the passions of Earth!
CHAPTER NINETY NINE.
The evidence is already before them; and though entirely circumstantial--as in most cases of murder--the circumstances form a chain irresistibly conclusive and complete.
Along with the oath it comes forth, holding a revolver.
No one expects him to do so--save to his Maker.
Cassius Calhoun is now the prisoner at the bar!
The spectators, guessing his intention, stand breathlessly observing him.
"You wonder at that.
While speaking he has kept his right hand under the left breast of his coat.
After its second involuntary recess--less prolonged than the first--the Court has once more resumed its functions under the great evergreen oak.
Despairingly: when on the faces that encircle him he sees not one wearing an expression of sympathy.
From the golden brightness, displayed by them at noon, they have changed to a lurid red--as if there was anger in the sky!
His demeanour is completely changed.
Why should Cassius Calhoun have killed his own cousin?
There is silence even among the cicadas.
It is but an accident of the atmosphere--the portent of an approaching storm.
The spectators have just time to see the pistol--as it glints under the slanting sunbeams--when two shots are heard in quick succession.
"After what I've confessed, it would be folly in me to expect pardon; and I don't.
No one can answer these questions, save the murderer himself.
With a like interval between, two men fall forward upon their faces; and lie with their heads closely contiguous!
It is broken by the formalised interrogatory of the judge?
I did take his life, as I've told you. You are all asking why, and conjecturing about the motive.
To this I agreed; not knowing precisely what to make of so ridiculous a piece of business.
SIR,--Through our common friend, Mr. P., I have received your note of this evening.
There are a few instances, as in the case of the ghost baby mentioned later, but very few.
The French and English selections in this volume are sufficient to prove the contrary.
HUMOROUS GHOST STORIES
He demands no rag nor bone nor clank of chain of his old equipment to start on his career.
Woman has always had the advantage over man in such emergency, in that her locks, being long and pinned up, are less easily moved--which may explain the fact (if it be a fact!) that in fiction women have shown themselves more self-possessed in ghostly presence than men.
But compare that usage with the rude freedom of some modern spooks, as John Kendrick Bangs's spectral cook of Bangletop, who lets fall her h's and twists grammar in a rare and diverting manner.
I should think that some of the futile, laggard messenger-boy ghosts that one reads about nowadays would blush with shame before the wholesome raillery of the porgy fisherman.
Zangwill has written engagingly of spooks, with a laughable story about Samuel Johnson.
Think what a solemn creature the Gothic ghost was!
They didn't know how to play at all.
He loves to shake the lugubrious terrors of the past before you, exposing their hollow futility, and he contrives to create new fears for you magically while you are laughing at him.
A ghost can call his shade his own now, and exhibit any mood he pleases.
He laughs at ghosts that aren't experts in efficiency haunting, and he has a lot of fun out of mortals for being scared of specters.
He needs no dungeon keeps and monkish cells to play about in--not he!
Nowadays haunters have more fun and freedom than the haunted.
Or possibly a woman knows that a masculine spook is, after all, only a man, and therefore may be charmed into helplessness, while the feminine can be seen through by another woman and thus disarmed.
Now it takes more than that to produce a panic.
Or perhaps the authors were doubtful as to the dialogue of shades, and compromised on a few stately ejaculations as being safely phantasmal speaking parts.
The majority of the comic apparitions, curiously enough, are masculine.
The stories by Eden Phillpotts and Richard Middleton in this collection show the diversity of the English humor as associated with apparitions, and are entertaining in themselves.
Think of having always--and always--to speak a dead language!
The modern humorous ghost satirizes everything from the old-fashioned specter (he's very fond of taking pot-shots at him) to the latest psychic manifestations.
He adds new horrors to being haunted, but new pleasures also.
The ghost of to-day touches the funny bone as well.
After that show of spirits, the turnips in that field tasted of rum, long after the ghost ship had sailed away into the blue.
In that we have a conventional young bachelor, engaged to a charming girl, who is entangled in social complications and made to suffer mental torment because, without his consent, he has been chosen as the nurse and guardian of a ghost baby that cradles after him wherever he goes.
He knows that there's no weapon, no threat, in horror, to be compared with ridicule.
Frank R. Stockton gave his to funny spooks with a riotous and laughing pen.
But the fact remains that in spite of conceded and admirable examples, the humorous ghost story is for the most part American in creation and spirit. Washington Irving might be said to have started that fashion in skeletons and shades, for he has given us various comic haunters, some real and some make-believe.
Ancient ghosts were a long-faced lot.
A mortal was expected to rise when a ghost entered the room, and in case he was slow about it, his spine gave notice of what etiquette demanded. In the event of outdoor apparition, if a man failed to bare his head in awe, the roots of his hair reminded him of his remissness.
The modern wraith has sold his sheet to the old clo'es man, and dresses as in life.
This travesty on the conventional traditions of the wraith is preposterously delightful, one of the cleverest ghost stories in our language.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
The spook of to-day enjoys making his haunted laugh even while he groans in terror.
The field is still comparatively limited, but a number of Americans have done distinctive work in it.
And suppose a ghost brought into court demanded trial by a jury of his peers?
His really electrical effects are his own inventions.
Some of these new spooks are notoriously good company.
The modern specter can be a joyous creature on occasion, as he can be, when he wishes, fearsome beyond the dreams of classic or Gothic revenant.
The new ghost hates conventionality and uses the old thrills only to show what dead batteries they come from.
The new ghost has a more nimble and versatile tongue as well as wit.
The marvel is that apparitions were so long in realizing their possibilities, in improving their advantages.
There are various English stories of whimsical haunting, some of actual spooks and some of the hoax type.
In early literature wraiths took themselves very seriously, and insisted on a proper show of respectful fear on the part of those whom they honored by haunting.
Many Americans there are to-day who would court being haunted by the captain and crew of Richard Middleton's Ghost Ship that landed in a turnip field and dispensed drink till they demoralized the denizens of village and graveyard alike.
And there are very few funny child-ghosts--you might almost say none, in comparison with the number of grown-ups.
He has a keen sense of humor and loves a good joke on a mortal, while he can even enjoy one on himself.
John Kendrick Bangs has made the darker regions seem comfortable and homelike for us, and has created ghosts so human and so funny that we look forward to being one--or more.
In fact, it's money in one's pocket these days to be dead, for ghosts have no rent problems, and dead men pay no bills.
The specters in classic and medieval literature were malarial, vaporous beings without energy to do anything but threaten, and mortals never would have trembled with fear at their frown if they had known how feeble they were.
Now the ghost has learned to have a variety of good times, and he can make the living squirm far more satisfyingly than in the past.
The modern spook is possessed not only of humor but of a caustic satire as well.
But in these days of individualism and radical liberalism, spooks as well as mortals are expanding their personalities and indulging in greater freedom.
Suppose each one of us were to be haunted by his own inane utterances?
No doubt they thought of men and women as mere youngsters that must be taught their place, since any living person, however senile, would be thought juvenile compared with a timeless spook.
Though his fun is of comparatively recent origin--it's less than a century since he learned to crack a smile--the laughing ghost is very much alive and sportively active.
They had been brought up in stern repression of frivolities as haunters--no matter how sportive they may have been in life--and in turn they cowed mortals into a servile submission.
BY
The up-to-date ghost keeps his skeleton in a garage or some place where it is cleaned and oiled and kept in good working order.
The humorous ghost is distinctly a modern character.
This is a LibriVox recording.
No--manifestly death has compensations not connected with the consolations of religion.
This is a rich story almost spoiled by being poorly told.
Or maybe the reason lies in the fact that men have written most of the comic or satiric ghost stories, and have chivalrously spared the gentler shades.
His sole appeal was to the spinal column.
Even young female wraiths, demanding latchkeys, refuse to obey the frowning face of the clock, and engage in light-hearted ebullience to make the ghost of Mrs. Grundy turn a shade paler in horror.
And there are others.
We feel downright neighborly toward such specters as the futile "last ghost" Nelson Lloyd evokes for us, as we appreciate the satire of Rose O'Neill's sophisticated wraith.
The daring Cyrus Field, who had risked his whole fortune to promote this undertaking, called for a new bond issue.
The sea was smooth, the skies clear.
IN THE AFTERMATH of this storm, we were thrown back to the east. Away went any hope of
"But what crowds of them!
It sold out immediately.
Besides, on this well-chosen plateau, the cable never lies at depths that could cause a break.
I didn't expect to find this electric cable in mint condition, as it looked on leaving its place of manufacture.
The operation proceeded apace.
The long snake was covered with seashell rubble and bristling with foraminifera; a crust of caked gravel protected it from any mollusks that might bore into it.
While the Nautilus was clearing a path through their tight ranks, Conseil couldn't refrain from making this comment:
As we swung around the Emerald Isle, I spotted Cape Clear for an instant, plus the lighthouse on Fastnet Rock that guides all those thousands of ships setting out from Glasgow or Liverpool.
Then we returned to the locality where the 1863 accident had taken place.
escaping to the landing places of New York or the St. Lawrence. In despair, poor Ned went into seclusion like Captain Nemo.
I returned to the lounge.
If it was going to enter the English Channel, it clearly needed to head east.
CHAPTER 20
On September 5, 1781, under the Count de Grasse, it took part in the Battle of Chesapeake Bay.
"Bah!
On July 4, 1779, as a member of the squadron under Admiral d'Estaing, it assisted in the capture of the island of Grenada.
But it would be less work to believe me. Besides, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, Danes, and Norwegians catch these cod by the thousands.
Sir, today is June 1, 1868, or the 13th day in the Month of Pasture.
"I'll go all out," Conseil replied.
"Why, I thought cod were flat, like dab or sole!"
"If all their eggs hatched, just four codfish could feed England, America, and Norway."
Because Newfoundland is simply an underwater peak, you could call these cod mountain fish.
Instead of continuing north, the Nautilus took an easterly heading, as if to go along this plateau on which the telegraph cable rests, where multiple soundings have given the contours of the terrain with the utmost accuracy.
Through the mists on the 27th, it sighted the port of Heart's Content.
"What's that?"
The next day, June 1, the Nautilus kept to the same tack. It was obviously trying to locate some precise spot in the ocean. Just as on the day before, Captain Nemo came to take the altitude of the sun.
"500,000."
All day long on May 31, the Nautilus swept around the sea in a series of circles that had me deeply puzzled.
Captain Nemo remained invisible. After giving the Canadian a glimpse of American shores, was he about to show me the coast of France?
Ned Land (who promptly reappeared after we hugged shore) never stopped questioning me. What could I answer him?
What swarms!"
But I'll make one comment."
Was it our proximity to these European shores?
After determining our position, the captain pronounced only these words:
Some minutes later it stopped at a depth of 833 meters and came to rest on the seafloor.
The undertaking had ended happily, and in its first dispatch, young America addressed old Europe with these wise words so rarely understood: "Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to men of good will."
But the Nautilus kept gravitating southward.
What ship was this?
I was on the platform just then.
Another cable was put down under better conditions.
"Mercy, look at these cod!" he said.
To be more accurate, I should have said to the northeast.
Remorse or regret? For a good while these thoughts occupied my mind, and I had a hunch that fate would soon give away the captain's secrets.
Eight miles to the east, a big steamship was visible on the horizon line. No flag was flapping from the gaff of its fore-and-aft sail, and I couldn't tell its nationality.
I looked to port and saw nothing but the immenseness of these tranquil waters.
He went down the hatch.
These banks are the result of marine sedimentation, an extensive accumulation of organic waste brought either from the equator by the Gulf Stream's current, or from the North Pole by the countercurrent of cold water that skirts the American coast. Here, too, erratically drifting chunks collect from the ice breakup. Here a huge boneyard forms from fish, mollusks, and zoophytes dying over it by the billions.
Would the Nautilus dare to tackle the English Channel?
They're eaten in prodigious quantities, and without the astonishing fertility of these fish, the seas would soon be depopulated of them.
Now then, on May 25 while submerged to a depth of 3,836 meters, the Nautilus lay in precisely the locality where this second cable suffered the rupture that ruined the undertaking. It happened 638 miles from the coast of Ireland.
But to the south there is a deep, suddenly occurring depression, a 3,000-meter pit.
An important question then popped into my head.
If so, what did he feel?
By July 23 the Great Eastern was lying no farther than 800 kilometers from Newfoundland when it received telegraphed news from Ireland of an armistice signed between Prussia and Austria after the Battle of Sadova.
The ceiling lights in the lounge then went out, the panels opened, and through the windows I saw, for a half-mile radius, the sea brightly lit by the beacon's rays.
Would Captain Nemo head up north and beach us on the British Isles? No. Much to my surprise, he went back down south and returned to European seas.
As I said, the Nautilus veered to the east.
"Count what?"
It seemed to be searching for a locality that it had some trouble finding. At noon Captain Nemo himself came to take our bearings. He didn't address a word to me.
"I'll take care of her.
"She won't like your going, either."
You are a smart child, Bab; and if I had enough I'd take you in myself," said Billy, heartily; for, having sisters of his own, he kept a soft place in his heart for girls, especially enterprising ones.
"'School is done, Now we'll have fun,"
Bab also longed to join in the fun, which suited her better than "stupid picnics" or "fussing over dolls;" but her heroes would not have her at any price; and she was obliged to content herself with sitting by Thorny, and watching with breathless interest the varying fortunes of "our side."
"Are you hungry?" asked Billy, fishing out several fragments of gingerbread.
"Perhaps Mrs. Moss would have planned somehow so we could all go, if I'd told her, I'd like to show her round, and she's been real good to me.
"Where did you get that?" he asked, poking it with his foot.
"Do, do take me, Ben!
"I'll bring you a roll of chickerberry lozengers, if you won't tease," whispered kind-hearted Billy, with a consoling pat on the crown of the shabby straw hat.
"Cricky! wouldn't I like to see that," said little Cyrus Fay, devoutly hoping that the cage, in which this pleasing spectacle took place, was a very strong one.
"I've got money enough to treat the whole crowd, if I choose to, which I don't."
"No; only a snake, and I don't care for snakes.
"I wish you'd hurry up, Sam.
Admission 50 cents, children half-price. Don't forget day and date.
"It's only squirrels; don't mind, but come along and be good; for I 'm so tired, I don't know what to do!" sighed Bab, trying to pull him after her as she trudged on, bound to see the outside of that wonderful tent, even if she never got in.
Bab scrubbed her face till it shone; and, pulling down her apron to wipe it, scattered a load of treasures collected in her walk.
The boys took to base-ball like ducks to water, and the common was the scene of tremendous battles, waged with much tumult, but little bloodshed.
"It's the meanest Fourth I ever saw.
That, now, is something like," and Ben, who had pricked up his ears at the word "circus," laid his finger on a smaller cut of a man hanging by the back of his neck with a child in each hand, two men suspended from his feet, and the third swinging forward to alight on his head.
"Nobody would do it; so you'd have to stay outside, you see."
Ben calmly produced a dollar bill and waved it defiantly before this doubter, observing with dignity:
"Much you know about it, old chap.
Thorny had gone out of town with his sister to pass the day, two of the best players did not appear, and the others were somewhat exhausted by the festivities, which began at sunrise for them.
I don't mind paying for her; it's getting her there and back.
Such a shabby, tired-looking couple as they were!
"I heard 'em roar just now;" and Billy stood up to gaze with big eyes at the flapping canvas which hid the king of beasts from his longing sight.
Sancho lapped eagerly, with his eyes shut; all his ruffles were gray with dust, and his tail hung wearily down, the tassel at half mast, as if in mourning for the master whom he had come to find.
Somehow those two figures seemed to go before Ben all along the pleasant road, and half spoilt his fun; for though he laughed and talked, cut canes, and seemed as merry as a grig, he could not help feeling that he ought to have asked leave to go, and been kinder to Bab.
"Foot it with Billy.
"What are you stopping for?" demanded Sam, ready to be off, that they might "take it easy."
I thought of that, and planned how I'd fix it if I didn't find Ben.
"Not for a day or so, I guess; but it's bad when it does come."
"When the circus comes here you shall go, certain sure, and Betty too," said Ben, feeling mean while he proposed what he knew was a hollow mockery.
"Can't wait for you to get ready."
I want to have a good go at every thing, especially the lions," said Sam, beginning on his last cookie.
I picked some of that, it was so green and pretty.
Ben said he didn't mind paying, if I could get there without bothering him, and I have; and I'll go home alone.
"Now, then, what's the matter?" demanded Ben, as the other came up grinning and puffing, but full of great news.
"Of Course it wouldn't.
No, Bab, you can't go. Travel right home and don't make a fuss.
"Your mother wouldn't like it."
So they lay about on the grass in the shade of the big elm, languidly discussing their various wrongs and disappointments.
The quiet town seemed suddenly inundated with children, all in such a rampant state that busy mothers wondered how they ever should be able to keep their frisky darlings out of mischief; thrifty fathers planned how they could bribe the idle hands to pick berries or rake hay; and the old folks, while wishing the young folks well, secretly blessed the man who invented schools.
"I'll go as I am.
It was a mistake on Ben's part, for while his eyes were on his work Bab's were devouring the bill which Sam still held, and her suspicions were aroused by the boys' faces.
Folks are going in now.
"I don't care, if I see the animals first.
We must have gone by them somewhere, for I don't see any one that way, and there isn't any other road to the circus, seems to me."
It was very warm; and just outside of the town they paused by a wayside watering-trough to wash their dusty faces, and cool off before plunging into the excitements of the afternoon.
Thorny was an excellent player, but, not being strong enough to show his prowess, he made Ben his proxy; and, sitting on the fence, acted as umpire to his heart's content.
"Course I do.
Miss Celia wouldn't care, and I'm going, any way."
"Catch me cuttin' away if I had such a chance as that!" answered Sam, trying to balance his bat on his chin and getting a smart rap across the nose as he failed to perform the feat.
"Well, he won't like that, nor you either; it's poisonous, and I shouldn't wonder if you'd got poisoned, Bab.
"Not much.
"I suppose so.
"But you don't think--it would be too awful!"
They say Felsenburgh's running the whole thing now.
"Are you too tired to talk, my dear?"
Mabel leaned forward---
She looked at him with kindling eyes.
"You poor dear!" she said.
"I said that Braithwaite had done more for the world by one speech than Jesus and all His saints put together." He was aware that the knitting-needles stopped for a second; then they went on again as before.
Besides, Christ! what do I care?
"If they would not be such heavy fools: they don't understand; they don't understand."
"Nothing more.
He was well dressed, though."
What is it?"
"Did you notice anything just now, sweetheart--when I said that about Jesus Christ?"
Military experts prophesied extravagantly, contradicting one another on vital points; the whole procedure of war was a matter of theory; there were no precedents with which to compare it.
"There was a rosary on him; and then he just had time to call on his God."
"It can be nothing but good.
"Well?"
But it is just as certain as it can be that this is the crisis.
"Yes, Oliver?"
"Yes?"
There was silence for a moment.
"I shall do very well now. He will be back to dinner, will he not?"
So the girl went downstairs once more, with a quiet little ache at her heart that refused to be still.
"It is nothing, my dear," said the old lady tremulously; and she added the description of a symptom or two.
"The best has happened.
She was not offended, for she trusted her husband too well; but she went on into the sick-room with her heart beating.
"She is a little better, I think," said Mabel.
He compressed his lips.
Tell no one.
He would be gone three days, he said.
"Oh, yes."
She asked the girl to read to her sometimes, and listened unblenching to whatever was offered her; she attended in the kitchen daily, organised varieties of food, and appeared interested in all that concerned her son.
" ... Yes, you must come.
"She must be very quiet all day."
"If the volor is not late.
"Yes?
Very well.
"Well, my dear?" she asked.
She pressed the corresponding button, and, her hand shaking so much that she could scarcely hold the receiver to her ear, she listened.
She went at last, hopelessly, to the telephone, and looked at it.
The secretary, who breakfasted with her in the parlour looking on to the garden, had appeared strangely excited.
"It is not Eastern news?" she asked.
"Don't trouble about me, my dear," she said.
Twenty o'clock came, but there was no sign of Oliver.
"Come then at once.
Mabel passed an afternoon of considerable agitation.
He seemed moved at something, and Mabel looked at him in astonishment.
"Don't excite yourself, mother.
"There is no need to telegraph for Mr. Brand?"
It was a peaceful Gospel; at least, it became peaceful as soon as the end had come.
You have not heard?"
It was certain that something had happened.
As she came in she took up the evening paper, but there was no news there except to the effect that the Convention would close that afternoon.
"Mr. Brand wired to me an hour ago."
Now listen.
"Yes, yes."
The old lady, too, seemed excited.
The doctor has seen her."
"Alone here."
Oliver will be back to-night."
"She wished to know whether Mr. Oliver would be back to-night."
"There are rumours," he said.
Felsenburgh will be there."
She, too, herself would cease one day, let her see to it that the tone was pure and lovely.
He had often been later than this: he might have missed the volor he meant to catch; the Convention might have been prolonged; he might be exhausted, and think it better to sleep in Paris after all, and have forgotten to wire. He might even have wired to Mr. Phillips, and the secretary have forgotten to pass on the message.
A couple of hours later, as Mabel went upstairs once more, she met Mr. Phillips coming down.
"Mrs. Brand sent for me," he said.
"Who is there?"
But there was nothing that alarmed her.
"And is there any other news?"
In half-an-hour the way will be stopped."
Can you hear?"
Now, mother, are you ready for breakfast?"
Quick."
"You must forgive me, Mrs. Brand," he said.
He will reach London at nineteen."
Can you hear?"
We are communicating with the Press. Come up here to me at once.
"How ill?"
"Mr. Brand said he would be here for a late dinner.
Shall I leave her?"
Felsenburgh has done it.
"He will, will he not?
Then, even as she turned away, the bell rang sharply, and a white label flashed into sight.--WHITEHALL.
"Mother is ill.
"Sir--We beg to inform you that the suit Carlyle vs. Carlyle, is at an end.
The outside of the letter was superscribed as the other, "F.
Lady Isabel Carlyle had spent it on the continent--that refuge for such fugitives--now moving about from place to place with her companion, now stationary and alone.
"A few days ago you put a letter, open on the table, I thought for me; but when I took it up you swore at me.
"Point de gazette, Pierre?" she said.
Compliments the very opposite to honey and sweetness have generally supervened long before.
Poor thing--poor Lady Isabel!
He quitted the room as he spoke, and Lady Isabel remained in it, the image of despair.
"I wish you would not talk nonsense, Isabel.
And all the time the sly fox had got the Times in his coat pocket.
"I cannot do otherwise," he answered.
"Have you no pity for your child?" she urged in agitation.
"Sir--After sending off our last, dated to-day, we received tidings of the demise of Sir Peter Levison, your grand-uncle.
Had he come?
"Of the divorce, I mean?"
Sir Francis swallowed down his coffee, and rang the table hand-bell--the only bell you generally meet with in France.
"At last, thank the pigs!" was the gentleman's euphonious expression, as he tossed the letter, open, on the breakfast-table.
It was over, then, and all claim to the name of Carlyle was declared to have been forfeited by the Lady Isabel forever.
He took a seat opposite to her, and began pushing the logs together with his boot, as he explained that he really could not get away from town before.
You must assure that, before all things.
For if you think my good reader, that the flattering words, the ardent expressions, which usually attend the first go-off of these promising unions last out a whole ten months, you are in egregious error.
Languidly she took her seat at the table, just as Captain Levison's servant, a Frenchman whom he had engaged in Paris, entered the room with two letters.
Besides, I should not choose for the old man's funeral to take place without me."
Had there been a necessity for your going, they would not have offered that."
"Chance it! chance the legitimacy of the child?
And we remain, sir, most faithfully yours,
"May I read the letter?
Is it my fault, if I am called suddenly to England?"
"You had better have written to the law lords to urge on the divorce," he returned.
"Francis, have you any consideration left for me--any in the world?"
The divorce was pronounced without opposition.
CHARMING RESULTS.
They were staying now at Grenoble.
"The divorce is granted!" feverishly uttered Lady Isabel.
He expired this afternoon in town, where he had come for the benefit of medical advice.
How many times am I to be compelled to beg that of you!
She had become painfully aware of the fact that the man for whom she had chosen to sacrifice herself was bad, but she had not learned all his badness yet.
Quite half the time--taking one absence with the other--he had been away from her, chiefly in Paris, pursuing his own course and his own pleasure.
Lady Isabel waited till the man was gone, and then spoke, a faint flush of emotion in her cheeks.
I own a better, now."
"It is very well," Pierre responded; and departed to do it.
"No, not yet.
Lady Isabel remonstrated; she wished to go farther on, where they might get quicker news from England; but her will now was as nothing.
He made no reply, but seated himself to breakfast.
Her face was white and worn, her hands were thin, her eyes were sunken and surrounded by a black circle--care was digging caves for them.
It instantly aroused her.
"Then I must accompany you," she urged.
Of course I have," he continued, in a peevish, though kind tone, as he took hold of her hands to raise her.
He will be a by-word amidst men throughout his life."
Taking that town on their way to Switzerland through Savoy, it had been Captain Levison's pleasure to halt in it.
"Now don't put yourself in a fever, Isabel.
"I start for England in an hour."
Is it for me to read?"
Captain Levison folded up the letter, and placed it securely in an inner pocket.
"Is there any news?" she asked.
Sir Francis Levison approached to greet her as he came in.
"Pierre says there are some letters," he began.
"You may drop that odious title, Isabel, which has stuck to me too long.
"There has been no delay; quite the contrary.
Resuming after a moment's pause-- "Were you to go to England, you might not be back in time."
She had forfeited her duty to God, had deliberately broken his commandments, for the one poor miserable mistake of flying with Francis Levison.
"F.
In time to make me your wife when the divorce shall appear."
"Oh, how can you ask?" she rejoined, in a sharp tone of reproach; "you know too well.
"Why did you come now?" she quietly rejoined.
Try it, if you don't believe me.
"Are these all the thanks a fellow gets for travelling in this inclement weather?
"Tush!" was the response of Captain Levison, as if wishing to imply that the divorce was yet a far-off affair, and he proceeded to open the other letter.
The very instant--the very night of her departure, she awoke to what she had done.
"MOSS & GRAB.
Never had she experienced a moment's calm, or peace, or happiness, since the fatal night of quitting her home.
"News!"
It had been Captain Levison's recent pleasure that the newspapers should not be seen by Lady Isabel until he had over-looked them.
She waved him off, begging him, in a subdued, quiet tone, not to draw too near, as any little excitement made her faint now.
"You can look and see."
"Who is it?" she asked of the nurse.
Neither would home be agreeable to you yet awhile."
"Why did I come?" repeated he.
It does no good.
The guilt, whose aspect had been shunned in the prospective, assumed at once its true frightful color, the blackness of darkness; and a lively remorse, a never-dying anguish, took possession of her soul forever.
"What a precious hot day it is!"
She had an invalid cap on, and a thick woolen invalid shawl, and she shook and shivered perpetually; though she had drawn so close to the wood fire that there was a danger of her petticoats igniting, and the attendant had frequently to spring up and interpose between them and the crackling logs.
Nearly an hour elapsed when she remembered the breakfast things, and rang for them to be removed.
She was anxious for it--anxious that Captain Levison should render her the only reparation in his power before the birth of her unhappy child.
Do you remember it Captain Levison?"
"Two letters," she continued, "and they are both in the same handwriting--your solicitors', I believe."
Another moment, and it was flung open.
Even in the first days of her departure, in the fleeting moments of abandonment, when it may be supposed she might momentarily forget conscience, it was sharply wounding her with its adder stings; and she knew that her whole future existence, whether spent with that man or without him, would be a dark course of gnawing retribution.
But it may be expected hourly now."
"Two," was her short reply, her tone sullen as his.
She was looking like the ghost of her former self.
A feeling, amounting to a conviction, rushed over the unhappy lady that she had seen him for the last time until it was too late.
Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake.
"Good-bye, Isabel," said he, without further circumlocution or ceremony.
He tried to make audible inquiries of what was required of him.
And the feet of the people were beating time--tramp, tramp.
"To prevent your interference."
He took the dose forthwith, and in a moment he was glowing.
The multitude, the gesture and song, all moved in that direction, the flow of people smote downward until the upturned faces were below the level of his feet.
This man was shouting close to his ear and yet what was said was indistinct because of the tremendous uproar from the great theatre.
His own mind, too, changed.
He met the wonder and expectation of the girl's eyes.
He glanced back across a flaming spaciousness of hall.
Why is he not here?"
Far away, high up, seemed the mouth of a huge passage full of struggling humanity.
The voices without explained their soundless lips.
The strength of that chant took hold of him, stirred him, emboldened him.
He watched the lips of the man in black and gathered that he was making some explanation.
Incontinently the mounting waves of the song broke upon his appearing, and flashed up into a foam of shouting. Guided by Lincoln's hand he marched obliquely across the centre of the stage facing the people.
Men and women mingled in the ranks; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. The whole world seemed marching.
The door opened, Lincoln's voice was swept away and drowned, and a rash of people followed on the heels of the tumult.
Most of the faces were flushed, but many were ghastly white.
"Tell me, tell me!" cried Graham.
He obeyed mechanically.
Heads, shoulders, hands clutching weapons, all were swinging with those marching cadences.
At last even--"
Master?"
CHAPTER IX
He was aware of a path before him, of a suite about him, of guards and dignities, and Lincoln on his right hand.
He noted two Chinamen.
Graham's mind was like a night of moon and swift clouds, now dark and hopeless, now clear and ghastly.
Behind the man was a girl in a silvery grey robe, whom Graham, even in this confusion, perceived to be beautiful.
Her dark eyes, full of wonder and curiosity, were fixed on him, her lips trembled apart. A partially opened door gave a glimpse of the crowded hall, and admitted a vast uneven tumult, a hammering, clapping and shouting that died away and began again, and rose to a thunderous pitch, and so continued intermittently all the time that Graham remained in the little room.
Why should they try to drug me?"
"The Council," he repeated blankly, and then snatched at a name that had struck him.
I have gone mad....
He lifted his voice again.
"They have told him nothing!" cried the girl.
Silence!"
Men were bawling for "Order!
He became aware of someone urging a glass of clear fluid upon his attention, looked up and discovered this was a dark young man in a yellow garment.
"No one expected you to wake.
No one expected you to wake.
He did not believe he heard aright.
He threw his arm free of this and followed Lincoln.
Damned tyrants!
He resisted the persuasion.
He raised his arm, and the roaring was redoubled.
These intruders came towards him and Lincoln gesticulating.
You are owner of the world."
They were cunning.
THE PEOPLE MARCH
"To keep you insensible," said the man in yellow.
He did not know whither he went; he did not want to know.
Lincoln was shouting in his ear, but Graham was deafened to that.
A leader.
He waved his arm again and pointed to the archway, shouting "Onward!"
Individual figures sprang out of the tumult, impressed him momentarily, and lost definition again. Close to the platform swayed a beautiful fair woman, carried by three men, her hair across her face and brandishing a green staff.
The other side had imprisoned him, debated his death.
How does it concern me?
But a moment that was near to panic passed.
It was not simply a song, the voices were gathered together and upborne by a torrent of instrumental music, music like the music of an organ, a woven texture of sounds, full of trumpets, full of flaunting banners, full of the march and pageantry of opening war.
My name!
He perceived the girl in grey close to him, her face lit, her gesture onward.
Their police have gone from the streets and are massed in the--" (inaudible).
"Show us the Sleeper, show us the Sleeper!" was the burden of the uproar.
Trust him.
Strange and incredible meeting! As the broad stream passed before him to the right, tributary gangways from the remote uplands of the hall thrust downward in an incessant replacement of people; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.
Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; at Lincoln's pressure he turned towards the archway, walking unconsciously in that rhythm, scarcely noticing his movement for the melody and stir of it.
"Ostrog is at the wind-vane offices ready--.
He perceived what had happened to the uproar.
"Yes," said the younger man.
"In my name?--And you?
"This," said a voice on the other side, "he must have this." Arms were about his neck detaining him in the doorway, and a black subtly-folding mantle hung from his shoulders.
He was dimly aware that the tumult outside had changed its character, was in some way beating, marching.
"And those who meet in the great hall with the white Atlas?
"The world is on your shoulders.
He was Master of the Earth, he was a man sodden with thawing snow.
"Tell me!" he cried.
"Wave your arm to them," said Lincoln.
I am his brother--his half-brother, Lincoln.
The multitude were beating time with their feet--marking time, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.
They rule it in your name."
The others came nearer to hear his words.
What did these people expect from him.
Then--"
"Wave your arm to them."
He emerged in the alcove again.
These shouting thousands beyond the little doorway had rescued him.
"He--has deputed us.
The hall was a vast and intricate space--galleries, balconies, broad spaces of amphitheatral steps, and great archways.
He perceived a blue-clad negro, a shrivelled woman in yellow, then a group of tall fair-haired, white-faced, blue-clad men pushed theatrically past him.
Attendants intervened, and ever and again blotted out the sight of the multitude to the left.
"We have arms," cried Lincoln.
"What do you mean?" she gasped.
And Lady Isabel?
"Don't I know it?
"Your words are not words of truth, but of deceit.
She thought she was back at East Lynne--not back, in one sense, but that she seemed never to have gone away from it--walking in the flower garden with Mr. Carlyle, while the three children played on the lawn.
That was the amount, was it not?"
"The excited state you then appeared to be in, would have precluded your listening to any sort of reason."
Remember, though, that it is your doing, not mine.
"Of course I meant to do so when I gave the promise," he interrupted.
"If you have put me beyond the pale of the world, I am still Lord Mount Severn's daughter!"
But you cannot think I am going to see you starve, Isabel.
"If you have taken this aversion to me, it cannot be helped," he coldly said, inwardly congratulating himself, let us not doubt, at being spared the work of trouble he had anticipated.
"Well, Isabel, you must be aware that it is an awful sacrifice for a man in my position to marry a divorced woman."
"Your clothes--those you left here when you went to England--you will have the goodness to order Pierre to take away this afternoon.
"They came by post."
When Lady Isabel lay down to rest, she sank into a somewhat calmer sleep than she had known of late; also into a dream.
In saying this, it ought to convince you that the topic may cease."
"What have you named that young article there?"
And then she sat, striving to calm herself, clasping together her shaking hands.
Then he paid a visit to the landlord, and handed him, likewise a year's rent in advance, making the same remark.
He spoke quietly now, quite in an equal tone of reasoning; it was his way when the ill-temper was upon him: and the calmer he spoke, the more cutting were his words.
"I wish you a good day."
You did not intend to be back in time for the marriage, or otherwise you would have caused it to take place ere you went at all."
"How did you know it?"
"What do you take me for?"
"What fancies you do take up!" uttered Francis Levison.
Is that to be it?"
It was the actual crying of her own child which awoke her--this last child--the ill-fated little being in the cradle beside her.
Take them!"
Why, how can you live?
Since we are mutually on this complimentary discourse, it is of no consequence to smooth over facts."
The injury to the child can never be repaired; and, for myself, I cannot imagine any fate in life worse than being compelled to pass it with you."
"But no sooner had I set my foot in London than I found myself overwhelmed with business, and away from it I could not get.
"In a little time you may probably wish to recall it; in which case a line, addressed to me at my banker's, will--"
"It must be."
I wish to deal with you quite unreservedly, without concealment, or deceit; I must request you so to deal with me."
"It is you who have thrown out the challenge, mind."
Lady Isabel continued,--
And then remembering the resolution marked out for herself, subsided outwardly into calmness again.
"You ladies should think of that beforehand."
"What was the secret?" she inquired, in a low tone.
He should have less trouble in throwing off the mask.
She shook her head.
And thus they parted.
I must request you to tell me."
She beat her hands before her, as if beating off the man and his words.
"He was born on the last day of August."
"I did not judge so," he replied.
"They had a secret between them--not of love--a secret of business; and those interviews they had together, her dancing attendance upon him perpetually, related to that, and that alone."
"Generous man!"
"Quite true," was her reply.
He took out his pocket-book and placed the bank notes within it.
"You made commotion enough once about me making you reparation."
She could not seek out Carlyle herself, so she sent the young lady.
Her heart beat a little quicker; but she stilled it.
"Not a farthing, now or ever.
Sir Francis left the room, but not immediately the house.
"These apartments are mine now; they have been transferred into my name, and they can never again afford you accommodation.
"May heaven help all to do so who may be tempted as I was."
"Well, if you will persist in this perverse resolution, I cannot mend it," resumed Sir Francis.
"I do not understand what you would imply," she said, drawing her shawl round her with a fresh shiver.
"I don't understand you."
She spoke so quietly, so apparently without feeling or passion, that Sir Francis was agreeably astonished.
"And never had the grace to acknowledge them," he returned, in a sort of mock reproachful tone.
I do not believe Mr. Carlyle ever thought of the girl--in that way."
"Some time subsequent to your departure," she quietly went on, "one of the maids was setting to rights the clothes in your dressing-closet, and she brought me a letter she found in one of the pockets.
That's all I know."
You need not have reminded me of the mistake."
He need not have told her this.
Whom do you take me for?
"I must confess I think it may be the wisest course, as things have come to this pass; for a cat and dog life, which would seemingly be ours, is not agreeable.
"You deem that it was not in reason that I should aspire to be the wife of Sir Francis Levison?"
"Your husband!" sarcastically rejoined Sir Francis.
They did not even take you; better, perhaps that they had though, as things have turned out, or seem to be turning.
"It would have been better to have undeceived me then; to have told me that the hopes I was cherishing for the sake of the unborn child were worse than vain."
He rose and began kicking at the logs; with the heel of his boot this time.
It and the effects must lie upon me forever."
"I had reason to think so."
"If you will accept nothing for yourself, you must for the child.
"I would prefer not."
The hectic flushed into her thin cheeks, but her voice sounded calm as before.
Count them."
"If you mean that as a reproach to me, it's rather out of place," chafed Sir Francis, whose fits of ill-temper were under no control, and who never, when in them, cared what he said to outrage the feelings of another.
"Allow me to return them to you.
He did not take the trouble to look at it.
"I am the representative now of an ancient and respected baronetcy," he resumed, in a tone as of apology for his previous heartless words, "and to make you my wife would so offend all my family, that--"
You were blindly, outrageously jealous of him."
"You told a different tale to me, Sir Francis," was her remark, as she turned her indignant eyes toward him.
"Stay," interrupted Lady Isabel, "you need not trouble yourself to find needless excuses.
Her arm was within her husband's, and he was relating something to her.
Her face was more flushed than it had been throughout the interview.
"What do you mean by 'deal?'" he asked, settling the logs to his apparent satisfaction.
"I should have said my late husband.
"Nay, I can't explain all; they did not take me into their confidence.
At noon on the first of January, 1863, William H. Seward, Secretary of State, with his son Frederick, called at the White House with the Emancipation document to be signed by the President.
To declare all the slaves down South freed, when the Government could not enforce such a statement and could not even win a battle, would be absurd.
At last the time had come to announce the freeing of the slaves that they might help in winning their liberties.
He patiently explained to them that his declaring them free would not make them free.
As you have read on an earlier page, when Abe grew to be a big, strong boy he saved a drunken man from freezing in the mud, by carrying him to a cabin, building a fire, and spent the rest of the night warming and sobering him up.
But the paper is to issue.'
President Lincoln was true and consistent in his temperance principles. In March, 1864, he went by steamboat with his wife and "Little Tad," to visit General Grant at his headquarters at City Point, Virginia.
Now the "chance to hit that thing"--the inhuman monster of human slavery--had come, and he was going to "hit it hard."
It cannot be.
It was just after the regular New Year's Day reception.
"Now, Sonny, keep that pledge and it will be the best act of your life."
It was a little book.
HOW EMANCIPATION CAME TO PASS
It was a fitting fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that:
He recognized his close relationship with the black man, and the bitterest name his enemies called him--worse in their minds than "fool," "clown," "imbecile" or "gorilla"--was a "Black Republican." That terrible phobia against the negro only enlisted Abraham Lincoln's sympathies the more.
"Not a member of the Cabinet smiled; as for myself, I was angry, and looked to see what the President meant.
Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, has described the scene:
"All men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
They could not know, for Mr. Lincoln dared not tell them, that he had the Emancipation Proclamation in his pocket waiting for a Federal victory before he could issue it!
He called the Cabinet together.
"'Mr.
"And as I look back upon it, I think the President was right."
In his first school "composition," on "Cruelty to Animals," his stepsister remembers this sentence: "An ant's life is as sweet to it as ours is to us."
"He then put his hand in his tall hat that sat upon the table, and pulled out a little paper.
CHAPTER XVIII
"'Gentlemen, did you ever read anything from "Artemus Ward?" Let me read you a chapter that is very funny.'
"'Well,' he said, 'let's have another chapter.'
It was young Lincoln's patriotic love for George Washington which did so much to bring about, in time, a double emancipation from white slavery and black.
The other party did not wish the matter tampered with, as cheap labor was necessary for raising cotton, sugar and other products on which the living of millions of people depended.
I have prepared a little paper of much significance.
I have made up my mind that this paper is to issue; that the time is come when it should issue; that the people are ready for it to issue.
The extreme Abolitionists, who wished slavery abolished, whether or no, sent men to tell the President that if he did not free the slaves he was a coward and a turncoat, and they would withhold their support from the Government and the Army.
Once, as President, he said to a boy who had just signed the temperance pledge:
"Here I am, studying this question, day and night, and God has placed it upon me, too.
President, if the reading of chapters of "Artemus Ward" is a prelude to such a deed as this, the book should be filed among the archives of the nation, and the author should be canonized.
Instead of leaving the drunkard to the fate the other fellows thought he deserved, Abe Lincoln, through pity for the helpless, rescued a fellow-being not only from mud and cold but also from a drunkard's grave.
Thus Abe helped him throw off the shackles of drink and made a man of him.
Turning back to the table, he took the pen again and wrote, deliberately and firmly, the "Abraham Lincoln" with which the world is now familiar. Looking up at the Sewards, father and son, he smiled and said, with a sigh of relief:
Secretary Stanton continued: "I have always tried to be calm, but I think I lost my calmness for a moment, and with great enthusiasm I arose, approached the President, extended my hand and said:
Let none attempt it.
"'He hesitated.'"
Turning to his Secretary of State, he said, to explain his hesitation:
THE PROCLAMATION
In solemn awe we pronounce the name and, in its naked, deathless splendor, leave it shining on."
"'It is due to my Cabinet that you should be the first to hear and know of it, and if any of you have any suggestions to make as to the form of this paper or its composition, I shall be glad to hear them.
"'I am not feeling very well.
He finally turned to us and said:
Henceforth I see the light and the country is saved.'
He appeared in court in behalf of colored people, time and again.
Mr. Lincoln seated himself at his table, took up the pen, dipped it in the ink, held the pen a moment, then laid it down.
THE QUESTION OF EMANCIPATION
Young though he was he could not sleep long at night.
The evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army (at Appomattox) give hope of a righteous and speedy peace whose joyous expression cannot be restrained.
It was Tuesday evening, April 11, 1865.
Then he fell into his first sweet sleep since that terrible night.
He takes our part.
"Yes, yes, I'm sure he's happy there, Taddie dear; now go to sleep."
To the few in the front of the crowd who witnessed this little by-play it seemed ridiculous that the President of the United States should allow any child to behave like that and hamper him while delivering a great address which would wield a national, if not world-wide influence. But little Tad did not trouble his father in the least.
A few days after the war ended at Appomattox, a great crowd came to the White House to serenade the President.
They have killed my Papa-day!"
In the midst of this, however, He from whom all blessings flow must not be forgotten.
"You must not be so careless.
For this, as for all the inequities the great heart of the White House was prepared.
When the pages came too slowly the boy pulled his father's coat-tail, piping up in a muffled, excited tone:
"Papa-day, where's my Papa-day.
Many laughed, but some spectators thought the boy ought to be punished for such a treasonable outbreak on the part of a President's boy in a soldier's uniform.
MR.
It was a part of the little game they were constantly playing together.
A friend stepped out on the northern portico with him to hold the candle by which Mr. Lincoln was to read his speech.
A word from his father would melt the lad to tears and submission, or bring him out of a nervous tantrum with his small round face wreathed with smiles, and a chuckling in his throat of "Papa-day, my papa-day!" No one knew exactly what the boy meant by papa-day.
But "bread" does not necessarily mean the wheat loaf.
The French housewife has no facilities for bread-making and the French woman does not know how and has not the time to learn.
Some people, disturbed either selfishly or patriotically by the failure of a neighbor to conserve wheat, have asked why the Food Administration trusts to voluntary methods, why it does not ration the country.
The bakeries have used 35,000,000 barrels of flour each year, so the importance of this field for conservation is plain.
Women doing their share in factories and workshops cannot get up earlier to make corn bread for breakfast.
A wheat ration which would be fair for the North might actually increase the consumption in the South.
FLOUR AND BREAD IN THE ALLIED COUNTRIES
Even such unbreadlike food as rice is to some races what bread is to us.
Both England and France have subsidized bread; the Government has set a price below cost and itself makes up the difference to the baker. England has appropriated $200,000,000 for the purpose.
Bread must not be sold to the retailer at unreasonable prices.
VICTORY BREAD
But for our ordinary loaf of bread, at least some wheat seems to be almost essential, though with skill in the making, rye can be made to serve in its place.
Even the sizes of the loaves are fixed, so that the extravagance of making and handling all sorts of fancy shapes and sizes may be avoided.
Products raised with baking-powder, for which our standard of lightness is different--"quick breads" like biscuits and muffins and cakes--do not require the gluten and can easily be made from substitute cereals.
Her bread system is voluntary like ours, but much more detailed.
They may not serve more than two ounces of bread and other wheat products to a guest at a meal.
WAR BREAD
Rationing may come yet, but any such system bristles with difficulties.
WHY WE IN THE UNITED STATES DO NOT HAVE BREAD CARDS
The voluntary ration allows one-half pound of bread a day for sedentary and unoccupied women and larger allowances up to a little over a pound for men doing heavy labor.
An extra potato or a serving of rice can be eaten instead of the usual two slices of bread and the body will be supplied with the same amount of energy.
England has compulsory rations for meat and butter or margarine and sugar, but not for bread.
Waste of any kind is very heavily punished--one woman was fined $500 for throwing away stale bread.
France has recently put her whole people on a rigorous ration which limits them to two-thirds of the amount of bread that they have been accustomed to.
Hotels and restaurants are required to make or serve bread containing at least as much of the wheat substitutes as Victory bread.
That means, of course, that only through intelligent effort can they serve yeast bread.
But they must have enough wheat to make a durable loaf of bread at the bakeshops, where for generations all the baking has been done.
Do not be the slave of old food habits.
CHAPTER III
The flour is required to be of high extraction--ordinarily from 81 per cent to 90 per cent, decidedly higher than our 74 per cent.
Victory bread is bread made in accordance with these regulations. The name "Victory" was chosen as representing the idea underlying the conservation of wheat.
The amount of wheat flour they are now permitted to have has been reduced: at present 80 per cent of their last year's quantity, or, if they are pastry and cracker bakers, 70 per cent.
Bread is the staff of life for all nations.
Hundreds in crowded city quarters have no facilities of their own for baking.
Rations are not a guarantee that the amount mentioned will be forthcoming; they only permit one to have it if it can be obtained.
This means practically all the commercial bakers of the country, and many hotels, clubs, and institutions.
Some substitute must be mixed with the wheat.
Victory bread must be saved for them.
In England there are local regulations on the use of mashed potato in bread.
BOTH BAKERS AND PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS HAVE THEIR SHARE IN SOLVING THE PROBLEM.
And you need no bread at all at some meals.
Their bread must be twelve hours old before it is sold, so that people will not be tempted to eat too much.
This includes wheat in the form of bread, pastry, macaroni, crackers, noodles, and breakfast foods.
THE BAKERS' REGULATIONS.
The durability is a very important consideration; crumbly corn bread cannot be distributed by bakers nor served to armies.
Even with this coarse, gray flour a large percentage of substitute must be mixed, usually 25 per cent.
In pies and cakes there must be at least one-third substitute.
About two-fifths of the bread in the United States is made in bakeries and three-fifths in the home.
OUR PRESENT PROBLEM, THEREFORE, IS TO MAKE THE MOST EFFECTIVE POSSIBLE USE OF OUR WHEAT GLUTEN, TO MAKE IT GO AS FAR AS POSSIBLE IN OUR BREADS.
The result is seldom palatable.
The answers are many.
Partly because wheat bread has been easy to get and we have grown to like the taste, but chiefly because wheat flour gives the lightest loaf.
WHEN ALL EUROPE IS EATING TO KEEP ALIVE, FASTIDIOUSNESS AND FOOD "NOTIONS" MUST PLAY NO PART IN THE DIETARY.
Wheat is the only one of the cereals that has much gluten; rye has a little and the others practically none.
Gluten seems to be essential to the making of a light, yeast-raised loaf.
Fifty per cent of the population could not be restrained in their consumption by rationing, for they are either producers or live in intimate contact with the producer.
They must make no bread wholly of wheat flour.
Probably no other food industry has been more vitally affected by the war.
All the Allied countries have been stretching their meagre wheat-supply to the limit and are enforcing the most stringent regulations.
UNTIL THE WHEAT-SUPPLY INCREASES AND THE FOOD ADMINISTRATION LESSENS RESTRICTIONS, USE NO WHEAT AT ALL IF YOU CAN POSSIBLY DO WITHOUT. Remember that you can make delicious muffins and other quick breads from the substitute flours.
Bread rations are in force in both France and Italy.
Bread has always been whatever cereal happened to be convenient.
The name is really a present to the Food Administration, having been used by two large firms who gave up all rights to their trade-mark.
To understand why, make a dough with a little white flour and water and then gently knead it in cold water.
When the regulation went into effect in February, 1918, 20 per cent was required and later, 25 per cent.
Then Oliver was forward again, pointing and crying out, for she could see his gestures; and she sank back quickly, the blood racing through her old veins, and her heart hammering at the base of her throat.
What was that?
There was a sharp crack, and the tiny gesticulating figure staggered back a step.
Then there came a retrospect, comparing the old state of England with the present.
The kingdom of God, it was said, lay within the human heart, and the greatest of all graces was Charity.
Old Mrs. Brand was in her best to-day, and looked out with considerable excitement at the huge throng gathered to hear her son speak.
Fifty years ago, the speaker said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer.
A platform was erected round the bronze statue at such a height that the statesman appeared to be one of the speakers, though at a slightly higher elevation, and this platform was hung with roses, surmounted by a sounding-board, and set with a chair and table.
Thus he had preluded his speech on the Poor Law question, pointing to the true charity that existed among Masons apart from religious motive, and appealing to the famous benefactions on the Continent; and in the enthusiasm of the Bill's success the Order had received a great accession of members.
The second part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as the Precursor of a movement that even now had begun.
"My dear, my dear, what is it?" she sobbed.
Ah! he was working up now to his panegyric!
It was through this alone that the false unity of the Church with its fantastic spiritual fraternity could be counteracted.
It was an inspiriting sight, this bright June morning, to see the crowds gathering round Braithwaite's statue.
They had a religious ring; the unintelligent Christian could sing them without a qualm; yet their sense was plain enough--the old human creed that man was all.
He knew this tender trait in her.
It is in the nick of time, too, just at the crisis.
"Isn't that very hopeful?"
Indignation of the country....
"If not, there will be a catastrophe such as never has been even imagined.
"He must have come ready, for his repeater was found loaded.
Mabel, do you think she is falling back?"
Oh! there was some passion and loyalty left in England!
It was as if archers disputed as to the results of cordite.
By the way ..."
The huge electric placards over London had winked out the facts in Esperanto as Oliver stepped into the train at twilight.
"Well?"
But after this---"
Well, I do not think I shall be again.
These new Benninschein explosives will make certain of that."
"Europe is arming as fast as possible.
I don't want to exaggerate; it is only a scratch--but it was so deliberate, and--and so dramatic.
"I did what I could: you saw me.
Besides, the troops don't disperse."
"Absolutely.
"She stopped knitting for a moment," said the girl.
Mabel sat up briskly.
People won't forget it."
There's no doubt that the Sufis are winning; but for how long is another question.
"But he must have meant to do it anyhow," continued Oliver.
"My arm must get well.
He was pleased, too, that he honestly had done his best to save the man. Even in that moment of sudden and acute pain he had cried out for a fair trial; but he had been too late.
But if not---"
Catholic assailant....
"He was killed--trampled and strangled instantly," said Oliver.
"Are you in pain?"
Oh, Oliver!"
"It would have been more perfect if they had not," she said.
Well, watch her, won't you?...
Oliver stirred presently.
He knew he was feverish and irritable, and made a great effort to drive it down.
"There is no more.
"Of course she looks back a little."
"But is it absolutely certain that the East has got them?"
She can't get it out of her head, even after fifty years.
"Why did he shoot just then?" she asked.
He opened his eyes.
She bent forward and kissed him suddenly.
Benninschein sold them simultaneously to East and West; then he died, luckily for him."
Oliver leaned back a little wearily and closed his eyes; his arm still throbbed intolerably.
It's just a little sentiment....
"And nothing more is known?"
After all, she was brought up a Catholic."
"The effect?" he said.
"What do you think will be the effect?"
It was time that something happened.
But he was very happy at heart.
"You saw that too, then....
Then she broke off and sat back.
"He was a Catholic," explained the drawn-faced Oliver.
I must go."
He nodded.
Not many speeches were made on the subject; it had been found inadvisable.
"I called out to them, mother, but they wouldn't hear me."
But that was all.
She loved to see him like this, his confident, flushed face, the enthusiasm in his blue eyes; and the knowledge of his pain pricked her feeling with passion.
It was true that he had been wounded by a fanatic, but he was not sorry to bear pain in such a cause, and it was obvious that the sympathy of England was with him.
"Your arm, my dear?"
I have been afraid sometimes that we were losing all our spirit, and that the old Tories were partly right when they prophesied what Communism would do.
But imagination simply refused to speak.
But haven't I told them a hundred times?"
He said nothing; but she could see what she loved to see, that response to her own heart; and so they sat in silence while the sky darkened yet more, and the click of the writer in the next room told them that the world was alive and that they had a share in its affairs.
"No, no, my dear; you're excited and tired.
"Well; we have shown that we can shed our blood too.
The Empire is sending him everywhere-- Tobolsk, Benares, Yakutsk--everywhere; and he's been to Australia."
"They don't understand what a glorious thing it all is Humanity, Life, Truth at last, and the death of Folly!
Oliver smiled at her.
The largest collection of this kind that I ever saw was in the court of a temple of the Jodo sect, at Hakata, in Kyushu: the mirrors had been given for the making of a bronze statue of Amida, thirty-three feet high.]
Evidently the woman who had given that mirror to the temple must have regretted the giving.
That is another kind of mimetic magic expressed by the term nazoraeru.
Now there are queer old Japanese beliefs in the magical efficacy of a certain mental operation implied, though not described, by the verb nazoraeru.
But the chance did not come; and she became very unhappy,--felt as if she had foolishly given away a part of her life.
She longed for some chance to steal the mirror, and hide it,--that she might thereafter treasure it always.
Of course, if she could have offered the priests a certain sum of money in place of the mirror, she could have asked them to give back her heirloom.
They felt sure that the spirit of the writer would give wealth to the breaker of the bell; and, as soon as the bell had been suspended in the court of the temple, they went in multitude to ring it.
But, to the person who breaks that bell by ringing it, great wealth will be given by the ghost of me."
Of course everybody heard of the matter, and everybody soon knew whose mirror it was that would not melt.
But she could not dare to speak of her pain to anybody.
Only its legend remains; and in that legend it is called the Mugen-Kane, or Bell of Mugen.
After the dead woman's mirror had been melted, and the bell had been successfully cast, people remembered the words of that letter.
But no!--I really cannot tell you with what it was filled.
Now, when all the mirrors contributed for the Mugenyama bell had been sent to the foundry, the bell-founders discovered that there was one mirror among them which would not melt.
He set down in front of her the covered jar,--which was heavy,--and they opened it together.
After this happening, the fame of the Mugen-Kane became great; and many people followed the example of Umegae,--thereby hoping to emulate her luck.
Whenever she went to the temple, she saw her mirror lying in the court-yard, behind a railing, among hundreds of other mirrors heaped there together.
And they found that it was filled, up to the very brim, with...
She knew it by the Sho-Chiku-Bai in relief on the back of it,--those three fortunate emblems of Pine, Bamboo, and Plumflower, which delighted her baby-eyes when her mother first showed her the mirror.
The merit of so offering the pebble becomes equal, or almost equal, to the merit of erecting a temple...
The magical meanings could not all be explained without a great variety of examples; but, for present purposes, the following will serve.
She had not presented her offering with all her heart; and therefore her selfish soul, remaining attached to the mirror, kept it hard and cold in the midst of the furnace.
[Even to-day, in the courts of certain Japanese temples, you may see heaps of old bronze mirrors contributed for such a purpose.
While the pair were traveling together, Kajiwara one day found himself in great straits for want of money; and Umegae, remembering the tradition of the Bell of Mugen, took a basin of bronze, and, mentally representing it to be the bell, beat upon it until she broke it,--crying out, at the same time, for three hundred pieces of gold.
Again and again they tried to melt it; but it resisted all their efforts.
Then, out of the ground before him, rose up the figure of a white-robed woman, with long loose-flowing hair, holding a covered jar.
The swamp was deep, and swallowed it up,--and that was the end of the bell.
OF A MIRROR AND A BELL
And because of this public exposure of her secret fault, the poor woman became very much ashamed and very angry.
Day after day, at all hours, they continued to ring the bell furiously,--caring nothing whatever for the protests of the priests.
So he made up his mind to take back the head to the place from which it had come, and to bury it with its body.
His body was iron; and he never troubled himself about dews or rain or frost or snow.
A day or two after leaving Suwa, Kwairyo met with a robber, who stopped him in a lonesome place, and bade him strip.
Then said the elder:--
On the contrary, the line of leverance was smooth as the line at which a falling leaf detaches itself from the stem...
"I am quite sure that the priest told us nothing but the truth.
Therefore, without further questioning, they decided to order his immediate execution,--all of them except one, a very old man.
As in other years he had laughed at peril, so now also he scorned danger; and in all weathers and all seasons he journeyed to preach the good Law in places where no other priest would have dared to go.
"I was not joking.
But that is not the worst of the matter.
As for lonesome places, I like them: they are suitable for meditation.
Well, Sir priest, I suppose we are of the same calling; and I must say that I admire you!...
I do not doubt that you have a good heart; and I hope that better fortune will come to you.
This woodcutter halted on seeing Kwairyo lying down, and, after a moment of silent observation, said to him in a tone of great surprise:--
As the Kwairyo, he only smiled and said nothing when they questioned him.
Kwairyo wondered that persons so poor, and dwelling in such a solitude, should be aware of the polite forms of greeting.
"Take the thing," said Kwairyo.
"From the kindness of your speech, and from the very polite welcome given me by your household, I imagine that you have not always been a woodcutter.
Therefore, although my house is only a wretched thatched hut, let me beg of you to come home with me at once.
And he proceeded to relate the whole of the adventure,--bursting into another hearty laugh as he told of his encounter with the five heads.
Kwairyo answered:--
After which he gathered together his few belongings, and leisurely descended the mountain to continue his journey.
"You kill men, and jest about it!...
AND THERE HE IS--behind that tree!--hiding behind that tree!
Then he was ordered to explain how he, a priest, had been found with the head of a man fastened to his sleeve, and why he had dared thus shamelessly to parade his crime in the sight of people.
He heard voices talking in the grove; and he went in the direction of the voices,--stealing from shadow to shadow, until he reached a good hiding-place.
When Kwairyo left Suwa, he was as happy as any priest is permitted to be in this transitory world.
They bowed low to the priest, and greeted him in the most respectful manner.
He called the attention of his colleagues to these, and also bade them observe that the edges of the neck nowhere presented the appearance of having been cut by any weapon.
Bring the head here!"
But in another moment he perceived that there was no blood, and that the headless necks did not look as if they had been cut.
In the same moment the head of the aruji, followed by the other four heads, sprang at Kwairyo.
Moreover, it is well known that such goblins have been dwelling in the mountains of the province of Kai from very ancient time...
But the strong priest had already armed himself by plucking up a young tree; and with that tree he struck the heads as they came,--knocking them from him with tremendous blows.
So he cut off his hair, and became a traveling priest,--taking the Buddhist name of Kwairyo.
To go near him while he is reciting would be difficult; and we cannot touch him so long as he is praying.
You can have my robe in exchange for your koromo; and I will give you five ryo for the head."
If the priest has spoken truth, the head itself should bear witness for him...
"You have guessed rightly, Sir," Kwairyo responded.
She had got so far about as to sit up in the windy chamber; and it seemed to be to her a matter of perfect indifference whether she ever got out of it.
Nearly a year went by.
Nearly a year went by, save some six or eight weeks, when, one morning in July, Lady Isabel made her appearance in the breakfast-room.
CHAPTER XXV.
She had sacrificed husband, children, reputation, home, all that makes life of value to woman.
"I cannot help the delay."
"Moss & Grab say they will act for you.
How fared it with Lady Isabel?
He broke from her and left the room, and in another minute had left the house, Pierre attending him.
Captain Levison, unwashed, unshaven, with a dressing-gown loosely flung on, lounged in to breakfast.
"We are, sir, faithfully yours,
"Pierre was making himself ready to attend monsieur to England."
"Nothing can repair the injury, if you once suffer it to come upon him.
He engaged apartments, furnished, in the vicinity of the Place Grenette.
"I cannot wait," he replied, his tone changing to one of determination.
I shall be back in time."
Just as it must be expected to fare, and does fare, when a high-principled gentlewoman falls from her pedestal.
You will not leave me yet?"
You will speedily gather his motive.
December came in.
It was known to her that Mr. Carlyle had not lost a moment in seeking a divorce and the announcement that it was granted was now daily expected.
"SIR FRANCIS LEVISON, Bart."
According to your request, we hasten to forward you the earliest intimation of the fact.
Oh, reader, believe me!
"MOSS & GRAB.
Are you in a state to travel night and day?
The decked-out dandies before the world are frequently the greatest slovens in domestic privacy.
We have much pleasure in congratulating you upon your accession to the title and estates, and beg to state that should it not be convenient to you to visit England at present, we will be happy to transact all necessary matters for you, on your favoring us with instructions.
"What one, pray?"
She felt the force of the objections.
Little did it seem to matter to Lady Isabel; she sat in one position, her countenance the picture of stony despair.
"For what else should I have thrown it there?" he said.
A stranger might have attributed these signs to the state of her health; she knew better- -knew that they were the effects of her wretched mind and heart.
The Alps were covered with snow; Grenoble borrowed the shade, and looked cold, and white, and sleety, and sloppy; the gutters, running through the middle of certain of the streets, were unusually black, and the people crept along especially dismal.
It was too late by weeks and months.
It was very late for breakfast, but why should she rise early only to drag through another endless day?
Lady--wife--mother!
This day she had partaken of her early dinner--such as it was, for her appetite failed--and had dozed asleep in the arm chair, when a noise arose from below, like a carriage driving into the courtyard through the porte cochere.
"You do not mean what you say?
She was right.
Even now I can only remain with you a couple of days, for I must hasten back to town."
"I overheard scraps of their conversation now and then in those meetings, and so gathered my information."
A flush, deep and painful, dyed her cheeks.
She passed her evening alone, sitting in the same place, close to the fire and the sparks.
After that, he ordered dinner at a hotel, and the same night he and Pierre departed on their journey home again, Sir Francis thanking his lucky star that he had so easily got rid of a vexatious annoyance.
My handsome self?"
They appeared to be interrupted by the crying of Archibald; and, in turning to the lawn to ask what was the matter, she awoke.
"Naked truth, unglossed over," she pursued, bending her eyes determinately upon him.
"I will not receive it from you.
"When I expected or wished, for the 'sacrifice,' it was not for my own sake; I told you so then.
"Take you for!
Alas!
But, for a single instant, she forgot recent events and doings, she believed she was indeed in her happy home at East Lynne, a proud woman, an honored wife.
You have no fortune--you must receive assistance from some one."
"So you will not even shake hands with me, Isabel?"
Sir Francis broke it, pointing with his left thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the cradle.
"To speak and act.
It contained the information that the divorce was pronounced."
"I believe so."
Had you taken this journey for the purpose of making me your wife, were you to propose to do so this day, and bring a clergyman into the room to perform the ceremony, it would be futile.
Will you be so obliging--I am not strong--as to hand me that writing case?"
"All the reparation in your power to make--all the reparation that the whole world can invent could not undo my sin.
"What reason?
There's some disreputable secret attaching to the Hare family, and Carlyle was acting in it, under the rose, for Mrs. Hare.
"The name which ought to have been his by inheritance--'Francis Levison,'" was her icy answer.
"I received these from you a month ago," she said.
Let there be plain truth between us at this interview, if there never has been before."
"With regard to your husband and that Hare girl.
And now, Sir Francis, I believe that is all: we will part."
What the news was, she could not remember afterward, excepting that it was connected with the office and old Mr. Dill, and that Mr. Carlyle laughed when he told it.
Sir Francis put the clothes back over the sleeping child, returned to the fire, and stood a few moments with his back to it.
Sir Francis threw up his arms and stretched himself, as if a fit of idleness had overtaken him; then advanced to the cradle and pulled down the clothes.
What do you take me for?" she repeated, rising in her bitter mortification.
"You did as much toward putting yourself beyond its pale as--"
I shall give you a few hundred a year with him."
Sir Francis walked to the table she indicated, which was at the far end of the great barn of a room, and taking the writing-case from it, gave it to her.
"How on the wrong scent?"
"Put away those notes, if you please," she interrupted, not allowing him to finish his sentence.
"You are breaking faith already," she said, after hearing him calmly to the end.
"Let's see--how old is he now?"
She reached her keys from the stand at her elbow, unlocked the case, and took from it some bank-notes.
She made no reply.
Do not make my arm ache, holding out these notes to you so long!
"All stratagems are fair in love and war."
"And I say I think you are on the wrong scent.
Have I not said so?" she sharply interrupted.
But he was an ill-tempered man; and to hear that the letter had been found to have the falseness of his fine protestations and promises laid bare, did not improve his temper now.
Lady Isabel drew herself up.
"I beg of you to cease," she passionately interrupted.
"Who is he like, Isabel?
"Forty pounds.
There he lies."
"The temptation to sin, as you call it, lay not in my persuasions half so much as in your jealous anger toward your husband."
"Return them to me--for what?" inquired Sir Francis, in amazement.
Even the complicated mythology of Peru yields to the judicious application of these principles of interpretation.
Our authorities on Iroquois traditions, though numerous enough, are not so satisfactory.
Cusic, who takes up the story of the Iroquois a thousand years before the Christian era, locates them first in the most eastern region they ever possessed.
So strong is the resemblance Ioskeha bears to Michabo, that what has been said in explanation of the latter will be sufficient for both.
There is a general resemblance between this story and that of Michabo. Both precede and create the sun, both journey to the west, overcoming opposition with the thunderbolt, both divide the world between the four winds, both were the fathers, gods, and teachers of their nations.
Who shall say that his instinct led him here astray?
The dawn rises above the horizon as the snowy foam on the surface of a lake.
The same dualism reappears in him that has been noted in his analogues elsewhere; He is both lord of the eastern light and the winds.
Michabo, I have shown, is the white spirit of the Dawn.
They rose together with him from the lake, or else were his first creations.
To the east, therefore, should these nations have pointed as their original dwelling place.
All these sentiments were linked to the dawn.
The victor returned to his grandmother, and established his lodge in the far east, on the borders of the great ocean, whence the sun comes.
The arrows which he shot transfixed great trees, the stones he threw levelled forests, and when he laid his hands on the rocks the mark was indelible. Yet as thus emblematic of the thunder-storm, he possessed in full measure its better attributes.
It reminds one of the white twin of Iroquois legend, and illustrates how the color white came to be intimately associated with the morning light and its beneficent effects.
Wherever he went all manner of singing birds bore him company, emblems of the whistling breezes.
"Light Sprang from the deep, and from her native east To journey through the airy gloom began."
But many insist that he was at first a man, some deified king.
Nor does it cease here.
Four personages, companions or sons, were closely connected with him.
Do not all those marvellous and subtle forces known to the older chemists as the imponderable elements, without which not even the inorganic crystal is possible, proceed from the rays of light?
In time he became the father of mankind, and special guardian of the Iroquois.
We cannot be too cautious in adopting such a conclusion.
It is the story of Sarama in the Rig Veda, and was written in Sanscrit, under the shadow of the Himalayas, centuries before Homer.
This they did in spite of history.
Fleeing for life, the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones.
Man, chiefly cognizant of his soul through his senses, thought with an awful horror of the night which deprived him of the use of one and foreshadowed the loss of all.
Yet I do not imagine that the one was copied or borrowed from the other.
Language itself is proof of it.
His emblematic name, the Bird-Serpent, and his rebus and cross at Palenque, I have already explained.
The two nations were remote in everything but geographical position.
The brothers quarrelled, and finally came to blows; the former using the horns of a stag, the latter the wild rose.
They were without flesh or blood, impalpable, invisible, and incredibly swift of foot.
His symbols were the bird, the serpent, the cross, and the flint, representing the clouds, the lightning, the four winds, and the thunderbolt.
Lands and herds were assigned to other gods to support their temples, and offerings were heaped on their altars, but to him none.
At last he disappeared in the western ocean.
He himself constructed these luminaries and placed them in the sky, and then peopled the earth with its present inhabitants.
"From night to light, From night to heavenly light;"
Such uniformity points not to a common source in history, but in psychology.
He was more than that, for in their creed he was creator and possessor of all things.
Irritated at his defeat he took with him the rain, and consequently to this day the sea-coast of Peru is largely an arid desert.
The central figure of Toltec mythology is Quetzalcoatl.
Con first possessed the land, but Pachacama attacked and drove him to the north.
Yet this is not Algonkin theology; nor is it at all related to that of the Iroquois.
When he finally disappeared in the far east, he sent back four trusty youths who had ever shared his fortunes, "incomparably swift and light of foot," with directions to divide the earth between them and rule it till he should return and resume his power.
He of the weaker weapon was very naturally discomfited and sorely wounded.
When, however, scorning such unequal combat, he had manifested his power by hurling the lightning on the hill-sides and consuming the forests, they recognized their maker, and humbled themselves before him.
King Manco, however, was a real character, the Rudolph of Hapsburg of their reigning family, and flourished about the eleventh century.
From the lake he journeyed westward, not without adventures, for he was attacked with murderous intent by the beings whom he had created.
For the wind and the light both depart when the gloaming draws near, or when the clouds spread their dark and shadowy webs along the mountains, and pour the vivifying rain upon the fields.
Its peculiar obscurity arises from the policy of the Incas to blend the religions of conquered provinces with their own.
By shaking his sandals he gave fire to men, and peace, plenty, and riches blessed his subjects.
In some cases, it is true, the demand may be due to some temporary cause, as in a period of unsound land speculation, but usually the growing value of location is due to a steady and abiding change in population or business.
One who improves the quality of a machine or the economy of a process may thus unintentionally injure some of the owners of low-rent agents, while unintentionally increasing the welfare of the mass of men for whom the margin of utilization is thus lifted.
INCREASE OF RENT-BEARERS AND OF RENTS
The two causes have in most cases the same result.
By the building of wharves, the dredging of harbors, and by many other methods, indirect agents are constantly growing in number and efficiency.
The term "unearned increment" has been frequently used in recent years.
As changes in the conditions of society may reduce rents, so other changes may increase them.
The discovery of building stone, coal, natural gas, or oil land may make the annual rent (or royalty) of land tenfold its former total value.
The owner of a large factory, moving it into the country, may buy up surrounding land and found a city, converting pasture lands and corn-fields into valuable building lots.
Numbers alone are not the measure of efficiency.
The horses in America have been remarkably improved of recent years by the importation of thoroughbred stock from Europe.
As population grows and groups about new industries, farm land is used for residence lots, and in turn for business purposes. Rents therefore rise, and this rise is reflected in the higher selling value of the land.
Such prosperous periods are the opportunity of the business man and of the promoter to sell the factory at its highest price.
As the number of agents increases they are distributed so as to be where most useful to the owner.
If a new demand arises for the product of any machine, its rent rises, although it may continue to turn out the same product as measured by number or quantity.
The increase of the efficiency of agents is usually the aim of the individual producer, and thus is brought about an increase of the stock of wealth.
This is done largely by mechanical agents, which capture the natural forces of the world, put them into the right place at the right time, and make them do the right thing, or which group and relate the materials of the world in the right ways.
Augustine, meanwhile, at Carthage, was justifying all the hopes that had been formed of him.
Licentius was to feel its effects more than once.
Augustine, who remained amongst them for nine years, thus describes them when writing to a friend:
There were certain good works which the Church gave to Christian widows to perform.
This was laid on the grave, after which the faithful would partake of what they had brought, while they thought and spoke of the noble lives of God's servants who had gone before.
With others she was serene and hopeful as of old, even joyous, always ready to help and comfort.
The hospitals, for instance, were entirely in their hands. They were small as yet, built according to the needs of the moment from the funds of the faithful, and held but few patients.
She would gather the orphan children at her knee to teach them the truths of their Faith.
"Such was my mind," he sums up later, looking back on this period of his life, "so weighed down, so blinded by the flesh, that I was myself unknown to myself."
The gratitude of both mother and son towards this generous friend and benefactor lasted throughout their lives.
But there was other work besides that at the hospital.
Romanianus divined her anxiety, and hastened to set it at rest.
These devoted women succeeded each other at intervals in their task of washing and attending to the sick, watching by their beds and cleaning their rooms.
He had promised that He would never fail those who put their trust in Him.
Its followers formed a secret society, with signs and passwords, grades and initiations.
"One thing cooled my ardour," he goes on to say; "it was that the Name of Christ was not there, and this Name, by Thy mercy, Lord, of Thy Son, my Saviour, my heart had drawn in with my mother's milk, and kept in its depths, and every doctrine where this Name did not appear, fluent, elegant, and truth-like though it might be, could not master me altogether."
His noble heart, his strong intelligence, would bring him back to God.
At His feet, and at His feet alone, Monica poured out her tears and her sorrow.
In Him she would trust, and in Him alone. He was infinite in mercy, and strong to save.
This extraordinary heresy had begun in the East, and had spread all over the civilized world.
Her love of prayer, too, could now find full scope.
Patricius had not much in the way of worldly goods to leave to his wife.
He had a gift of making true and faithful friends, a charm in conversation that drew his young companions and even older men to his side.
That was what the Manicheans promised.
If Monica would befriend his boy, they would be quits.
The great charm of Manicheism to Augustine was that it taught that a man was not responsible for his sins.
There were the poor to be helped, the hungry to be fed, the naked to be clothed.
"My pride," he writes, "despised the manner in which the things are said, and my intelligence could not discover the hidden sense.
A more worldly mother than Monica would have been thoroughly proud of her son.
You it was who, when I had the sorrow to lose my father, comforted me by your friendship, helped me with your advice, and assisted me with your fortune."
"They incessantly repeated to me, 'Truth, truth,' but there was no truth in them.
There was something strangely sympathetic and attractive about Augustine.
MONICA LIVED IN THE DAYS OF HER WIDOWHOOD, AND HOW SHE PUT ALL HER TRUST IN GOD
When they were very poor, she would keep them in her own house, feed them at her own table, and clothe them with her own hands.
This would settle the question of lodging.
He then turned to the Holy Scriptures, but they appeared to him inferior in style to Cicero.
His master had spoken to him of a certain treatise of Aristotle which he would soon be called upon to study.
Augustine, eager to make acquaintance with this wonderful work, procured it at once and read it.
It seemed to him perfectly simple; it was unnecessary, he found, to ask a single explanation.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them was their hatred of the Church.
It was a custom of the time on the feasts of saints and martyrs to make a pilgrimage to their tombs, with a little basket of food and wine.
She scarcely tasted of her offering herself, but gave it all away to the poor.
Every morning found her in her place in church for the Holy Sacrifice; every evening she was there again, silent, absorbed in God.
He was at the head of his class in rhetoric.
They called her "mother."
To some of the poor creatures, friendless slaves as they often were, who had known little sympathy or tenderness in their hard lives, it was a revelation of Christianity which taught them more than hours of preaching could have done.
He was born to something higher.
So much for their doctrines; as for the teachers themselves, he found them "carnal and loquacious, full of insane pride."
For what else induced me to abandon the faith of my childhood and follow these men for almost nine years, but their assertion that we were terrified by superstition into a faith blindly imposed upon our reason, while they urged no one to believe until the truth was fully discussed and proved?
CHAPTER VI
It was so profound, he said, that few could understand it, even with the help of the most learned professors.
It was said of her after her death that no one had such a gift of helping others as she.
He had a child of his own, a young son called Licentius.
This young genius of nineteen only discovered there were difficulties in the way when he had to teach others, and realized how hard it was to make them understand what was so exceedingly simple to himself.
"If I am a mother to these motherless ones," she would say to herself, "He will have mercy and give me back my boy; if I teach them to know and love Him as a Father, He will watch over my son."
His was not the nature to find contentment in the things of earth.
It seemed such a natural name to give her, for she was a mother to them all, and gave them a mother's love.
Often, indeed, she went cold and hungry that they might be clothed and fed.
Faith and virtue were alone weak and faint in that soul that could so ill do without them; but to her they were the one essential thing; the rest did not matter.
It was a happy moment for Monica when her turn came to serve the sick.
For the rest, continued Romanianus, as an old friend of Patricius he had the right to befriend his son, and Monica must grant him the privilege of acting a father's part to Augustine until he was fairly launched in life.
Who would not be seduced by such promises, especially if he were a proud, contentious young man, thirsting for truth, such as they then found me?"
He had even greater gifts, it seemed, than eloquence, feeling, and wit.
"You it was, Romanianus," wrote Augustine in his Confessions, "who, when I was a poor young student in Carthage, opened to me your house, your purse, and still more your heart.
It was the same with geometry, music, every science he took up.
"Thou knowest, Honoratus, that for this reason alone did we fall into the hands of these men--namely, that they professed to free us from all errors, and bring us to God by pure reason alone, without that terrible principle of authority.
She needed little, it is true, for herself, but there was Augustine.
It was at this moment that he came in contact with the Manicheans, whose errors attracted him at once.
No, there was no hope anywhere but with God.
Would it be possible for her, even if she practised the strictest economy, to keep him at Carthage, where he was doing so well?
She would kiss their sores for very pity as she washed and dressed them, and their faces grew bright at her coming.
And yet, and yet ... her heart sank as she thought of graces wasted, of conscience trampled underfoot, of light rejected.
The place where she knelt was often wet with her tears; the time passed by unheeded. Patricius, her husband, was safe in God's hands; but Augustine, her eldest-born, her darling, in what dark paths was he wandering?
This doctrine was convenient to one who could not find the strength to break with his bad habits.
It seems almost certain that these American Indians originally came across the narrow strip of water separating Asia from America.
At favorable points along the shore the Indians collected for their feasts, and these spots are now indicated by heaps of shells, in some places forming mounds of considerable size.
Some of the canoes which these tribes construct are over fifty feet long and will easily carry from fifty to one hundred persons.
Sometimes these figures are mounted upon the tops of tall poles.
When the Indians of central California were first seen, they wore but little clothing, and knew how to construct only the simplest dwellings for protection from the weather.
They seemed unable to adapt themselves to the white man and his ways, and in the older settled districts they have now nearly disappeared.
After being partly dried they were packed in bales for winter use.
Fish was their main article of diet.
The figures of animals and birds carved upon it represent the mythological ancestors of the family or clan in front of whose abode the pole stands.
Such a house is usually occupied by a number of families.
The Chinook Indians live upon the lower Columbia.
In the newer portions of the Northwest and along the coast toward Alaska the Indians have not yet come into so direct contact with the white men, and remain more nearly in their primitive condition.
They built better homes, took more pains with their clothing, were skilled in the making of canoes, and showed marked ability in navigating the stormy waters of the channels and sounds.
They did not cultivate the soil, nor did they hunt a great deal, although the country abounded with game.
These Indians, as might be supposed, live largely upon fish.
Bark was laid upon the outside, and earth was thrown over the whole structure.
It must require the united strength of many men to roll such a log into position.
"Sweat houses" were built in much the same manner, and were used chiefly during the winter.
As may be imagined, such a bath often resulted disastrously to the weak or sick.
Many of them were among the most degraded upon the continent.
The "Chinook" jargon is a strange sort of mixed language with which nearly all the tribes of the Northwest are familiar.
The "totem pole" is a most interesting affair.
One might suppose that the tribes possessing the fair and fertile valleys of California would be the most advanced in civilization, but such was not the case.
64).
The fact that the California Indians could support themselves without any great exertion undoubtedly had the effect of making them indolent, while in the desert regions of the Great Basin the struggle for something to eat was so severe that it kept the natives in a degraded condition.
These holes were made for the purpose of grinding acorns or nuts.
The fish thus prepared were considered very valuable and formed an article of trade with the tribes living farther from the river.
When they wished to go out upon the water they built rafts of bundles of rushes or tules tied together.
The explorers and early settlers found a native race occupying nearly every portion of our continent.
It is believed that they came originally from Asia, but their migration and scattering occurred so long ago that they have become divided into many groups, each having its own language and customs.
This deformity is produced by binding a piece of board upon the forehead in babyhood and leaving it there while the head is growing.
Many of the Indian tribes developed great skill in the weaving of baskets, which they used for many different purposes.
The villages are located in some protected spot where the canoes can lie in safety.
Through the influence of the trappers and traders the "Chinook" has come into wide use, so that by means of it conversation can be carried on with tribes speaking different languages.
Upon the framework thus constructed split cedar boards are fastened, and the building is practically finished.
The acorns were ground in stone mortars and made into soup or into a kind of bread.
It is one of the finest upon the north coast.
In the mountains the sites of the villages are marked by chips of obsidian (a volcanic glass used in making arrow-tips) and by holes in the flat surfaces of granitic rocks near some spring or stream.
This is sometimes two feet in diameter and from sixty to eighty feet long.
These represent men, birds and animals and have a religious significance.
The Indians inhabiting the coast northward from the mouth of the Columbia were different in many respects from those farther south or inland.
Such a canoe is hewn out of a single cedar log, and presents a very graceful appearance with its upward-curving bow.
Many interesting implements have been dug from these mounds, or kitchen middens as they are sometimes called.
These people had many characteristics in common and were all called Indians.
These two groups are very similar.
They live upon the shores of densely wooded, mountainous lands and travel little except by water.
After enduring this process as long as he desired, the Indian came out and plunged into the cold water of a near-by stream.
This wind is so named because it blows from the direction of the Chinook Indians' country.
The Vancouver Island Indians are called Nootkas, from the name of an important tribe upon the west coast.
In these boats the Indians take trips of hundreds of miles.
The Indians upon the Pacific slope were generally found to be inferior in most respects to those living in the central and eastern portions of the continent.
We do not know how long the Indians have occupied our country, but it has probably been several thousand years.
Although there are so many different tribes, with great diversities of language, throughout the West, they were probably all derived from the same source.
A ride in one of the large canoes is an interesting experience. When a party starts out to visit the neighboring villages, carrying invitations to a festival, the men are gayly dressed, and shout and sing in unison as they ply their paddles.
Berries are abundant during the summer and are also much used for food. The clothing of the Indians was originally a sort of blanket made of the woven fibres of cedar bark, or more rarely, of the skins of animals, although among the northern tribes skins were used almost exclusively.
The Indians often hunt similar animals to-day, but believe that their ancestors had supernatural power which raised them above the ordinary creatures.
As we go north the similarity between the coast Indians and the inhabitants of eastern Asia becomes more noticeable.
Upon Queen Charlotte Islands there is a dwelling of this kind large enough to hold seven hundred Indians.
When an Indian wished to take a sweat, hot stones were placed in one of these houses, and after he had entered and all openings were closed, he poured water upon the stones until the room was filled with steam.
It is formed of words from the Chinook language, together with others from different Indian languages, French-Canadian, and English.
In the western portion of the country, where the surface is broken by numerous barriers, such as mountains and deserts, almost every valley was found to be occupied by a distinct group of Indians called a "tribe." The language of each tribe differed so much from the languages of adjoining tribes that they could with difficulty understand one another.
The great canoe jumps up and onward like a living thing at every stroke of the paddles, which are dipped into the water all at once as the rowers keep time to their songs.
Some of the main groups have undoubtedly been here longer than others.
They are very solidly constructed, for these Indians do not move about as much as those farther south where the forests are less dense.
It would seem natural that about San Francisco Bay the natives should have used canoes, but, according to early travellers, they had none.
THE NATIVE INHABITANTS OF THE PACIFIC SLOPE
The fronts of the houses are ornamented with figures hewn out of wood.
The baskets are still made in some places, and are much sought after because of their beauty.
The buildings are strung along the shore close under the edge of the thick forest and just above the reach of the waves at high tide.
Where wood was abundant their homes were similar in some respects to those of the coast Indians north of the mouth of the Columbia.
The Indians of northern California in building their homes dug round, shallow holes, over which poles were bent in the form of a half-circle, and then tied together at the top.
These tribes were almost continually at war.
The name "chinook" has been given to a warm, dry wind which blows down the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and out upon the Great Plains.
And then--if he saw nobody that was fiercer than Paddy Muskrat--only then would he venture to skip to the water's edge and plunge in.
And that was a great mistake.
Master Meadow Mouse always had one ear that was listening for that slap. And when it sounded he never waited an instant, but darted into his tunnel without even stopping to shake the water off his coat.
And, worst of all, food became scarce.
"Missed him--didn't you?" he inquired.
He enjoyed swimming. And he spent a great deal of his time along the streams that threaded their way through Pleasant Valley.
Just because there was skating for Johnnie Green on top of the brook it mustn't be supposed that Master Meadow Mouse wasn't going to have a swim when he wanted one.
AS SIMON SCREECHER remarked to his cousin, Solomon Owl, it was a hard winter.
A Cold Dip
And the nights were colder.
When one of them caught sight of Peter Mink he never failed--if he was in the water--to give a loud slap upon the surface with his tail.
Let's go over and sit in that old oak on the edge of the meadow!"
So he ran one of his many snow tunnels to the brook, making a little opening that led under the ice, where the water had fallen away and left a cavern.
I heard him say, "Get up!
'I did not think of danger just then.
Not half as old as I felt just then; not half as uselessly wise as I knew myself to be.
'"How much more did you want?" I asked; but I think I spoke so low that he did not catch what I said.
I wasn't going to run away.
And I could think, too.
Surely in no other craft as in that of the sea do the hearts of those already launched to sink or swim go out so much to the youth on the brink, looking with shining eyes upon that glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances full of fire.
Yes . . .
I wasn't going to give in to such a beastly unfair thing.
"Don't you believe me?" he cried.
Men have been known to float for hours--in the open sea--and be picked up not much the worse for it.
I wasn't going to be frightened at what I had done.
He appeared changed, as if he had suddenly matured.
Wouldn't you?"
I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me--me!--of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour. "And so you cleared out--at once."
It was a distinct glimpse.
I am--I am--a gentleman too . . ." "Yes, yes," I said hastily.
You got me here to talk, and . . .
'"And be saved," I interjected.
And at the time . . ."
And, anyhow, if I had stuck to the ship I would have done my best to be saved.
I believe--I believe it would have--it would have ended--nothing."
I ought to have known . . .
A pause ensued, and suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body.
'He had been walking up and down, but with the last word he turned short at me.
"You are an awful good sort to listen like this," he said.
He fixed me with lowering eyes.
'"Suppose I had not--I mean to say, suppose I had stuck to the ship? Well.
"Not the breadth of a hair between this and that.
Perhaps I could not see then.
Nobody would know, of course, but this did not make it any easier for me.
It was the sort of thing one does not expect to happen to one.
"A hair's-breadth," he muttered.
Would have ended nothing," he muttered over me obstinately, after a little while.
'The mists were closing again.
'"Well, I wasn't," he said courageously.
He was there before me, believing that age and wisdom can find a remedy against the pain of truth, giving me a glimpse of himself as a young fellow in a scrape that is the very devil of a scrape, the sort of scrape greybeards wag at solemnly while they hide a smile.
What more natural!
I might have lasted it out better than many others. There's nothing the matter with my heart." He withdrew his right fist from his pocket, and the blow he struck on his chest resounded like a muffled detonation in the night.
In thirty seconds, as it seemed certain then, I would have been overboard; and do you think I would not have laid hold of the first thing that came in my way--oar, life-buoy, grating--anything?
He had found that to meditate about because he thought he had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the night.
'"Jumped," he corrected me incisively.
And he had been deliberating upon death--confound him!
"It was something like that wretched story they made up.
'"I would have meant to be," he retorted.
You said you would believe." "Of course I do," I protested, in a matter-of-fact tone which produced a calming effect. "Forgive me," he said.
He was a youngster of the sort you like to see about you; of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of heat! . . .
It was not a lie--but it wasn't truth all the same.
"Now you understand why I didn't after all . . . didn't go out in that way.
But I had plenty of time and any amount of light in that boat.
You've got to believe that, too. I did not want all this talk. . . .
"It does me good.
'"It was not," I admitted.
But I knew the truth, and I would live it down--alone, with myself.
You must! . . .
I was confoundedly cut up. Sick of life--to tell you the truth; but what would have been the good to shirk it--in--in--that way?
Say a minute--half a minute.
I was not going to give them that satisfaction.
That was not the way.
There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this affair."
What wonder that when some heavy prod gets home the bond is found to be close; that besides the fellowship of the craft there is felt the strength of a wider feeling--the feeling that binds a man to a child.
He was looking me squarely in the face, and withdrew his gaze slowly.
No! by heavens!
I won't lie . . .
It is so difficult--so awfully unfair--so hard to understand."
You were not sure," I said, and was placated by the sound of a faint sigh that passed between us like the flight of a bird in the night.
Come.
What did it prove after all?
What we get--well, we won't talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile?
He meditated, with his legs slightly apart and his chin sunk.
CHAPTER 11
"No! the proper thing was to face it out--alone for myself--wait for another chance--find out . . ."'
I don't know how old I appeared to him--and how much wise.
And I wasn't afraid to think either.
"Jumped--mind!" he repeated, and I wondered at the evident but obscure intention.
Confound it!
I wanted it: it is the very thing I wanted--there.
"Well, yes!
He had advanced his argument as though life had been a network of paths separated by chasms.
Do you think you or anybody could have made me if I . . .
I looked it in the face.
They made up a story, and believed it for all I know.
They had done enough.
"And that's more than I meant when I" . . . he shivered as if about to swallow some nauseous drug . . .
How much longer?
'"One couldn't be sure," he muttered.
It was not like a fight, for instance."
It was something. . . .
One knows a downright lie.
Don't you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft?
I am--I am not afraid to tell.
You don't" . . . words seemed to fail him.
'"It is difficult to see a hair at midnight," I put in, a little viciously I fear.
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9.
27.
The Master said, Neglect of the omens, that is all.
The Master said, The man of upright life is obeyed before he speaks; commands even go unheeded when the life is crooked.
19.
23.
What numbers!
13.
Are they worth reckoning?
10.
18.
21.
The Duke of She asked, What is kingcraft?
Why put them right?
20.
25.
28.
Teaching, said the Master.
The weights and measures men! said the Master.
16.
11.
8.
6.
He asked to be taught gardening.
Wealth, said the Master.
Household business, said the Master.
30.
15.
14.
Jan Yu said, Since numbers are here, what next is needed?
There is uprightness in this.
26.
And how are the crown servants of to-day?
29.
7.
24.
5.
What!
The boys took the "stump," one quickly cut up the unfortunate little animal and each boy swallowed a bit.
VARIOUS.
"Won't you let me see Diana just once to say farewell?" she implored.
"My heart is broken.
She went back to the kitchen with the wine bottle in her hand.
Where do you feel bad?"
There are so many responsibilities on a person's mind when they're keeping house, isn't there?"
Anne was watching for her coming and flew to the porch door to meet her.
I'm going to run out and stir the fire up.
Marilla said there was enough for another dinner and told me to set it on the pantry shelf and cover it.
"I must go home," repeated Diana, stupidly but determinedly.
She just laughed silly-like when her mother asked her what was the matter and went to sleep and slept for hours.
Into the kitchen she dashed and flung herself face downward on the sofa in an agony.
She had to sit with Gertie Pye and she hated it; Gertie squeaked her pencil all the time and it just made her--Diana's--blood run cold; Ruby Gillis had charmed all her warts away, true's you live, with a magic pebble that old Mary Joe from the Creek gave her.
Have you picked many of your apples yet?"
"Of all the unreasonable women I ever saw she's the worst.
"That's awfully nice raspberry cordial, Anne," she said.
I thought it was only raspberry cordial.
CHAPTER XVI.
Marilla, I do NOT think she is a well-bred woman.
But you keep your wits about you this time.
Mrs. Barry will think better of it when she finds you're not to blame.
"Mrs. Lynde was up to see Mrs. Barry today and Mrs. Barry was in an awful state," she wailed.
You know I never use that except for the minister or the Aids.
It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it?
And indeed, when she told the whole story to Matthew that night, she did laugh heartily over Anne's tribulations.
"Now, please help yourself, Diana," she said politely.
Her face was twitching in spite of herself.
After Mrs. Chester Ross went away, Marilla gave me a dreadful scolding.
Marilla had changed her mind about it being all right by the time she got back from Orchard Slope.
The rosebud tea set!
"My courage fails me at the thought of facing Diana's injured mother," sighed Anne.
I don't feel as if I wanted any after all those apples."
"Whatever has gone wrong now, Anne?" queried Marilla in doubt and dismay.
Monday afternoon Marilla sent her down to Mrs. Lynde's on an errand.
Oh, Marilla, can I use the rosebud spray tea set?"
"Marilla is a famous cook.
I was firmly convinced it was raspberry cordial.
Didn't you know the difference yourself?"
Her face hardened.
Why, Diana, what is the matter?"
"Let's go out to the orchard and get some of the Red Sweetings, Diana.
And indeed, she walked very dizzily.
But I forgot the flour and the cake was a dismal failure.
"I must go home," said Diana, and that was all she would say.
"I do hope you haven't gone and been saucy to Mrs. Lynde again."
She said we could have fruit cake and cherry preserves for tea.
"I must cry," said Anne.
Diana Is Invited to Tea with Tragic Results
"Let me get you a lunch anyhow," implored Anne.
Then she wept all the way back to Green Gables, where she sorrowfully put the remainder of the raspberry cordial back into the pantry and got tea ready for Matthew and Jerry, with all the zest gone out of the performance.
You're so much more dignified than I am.
Oh, Marilla, I'm just overcome with woe."
So she said, coldly and cruelly:
And--I don't really know if I'm doing right--it may make you more addlepated than ever--but you can ask Diana to come over and spend the afternoon with you and have tea here."
Where do you feel bad?"
This speech which would have softened good Mrs. Lynde's heart in a twinkling, had no effect on Mrs. Barry except to irritate her still more.
And then pressing her to take another piece of fruit cake and another helping of preserves.
"Well, I will," said Marilla, reflecting that it would probably be the wiser course.
"Mrs. Barry won't forgive me?"
But when she slipped into the east gable before going to bed and found that Anne had cried herself to sleep an unaccustomed softness crept into her face.
Well, this story will be a nice handle for those folks who are so down on me for making currant wine, although I haven't made any for three years ever since I found out that the minister didn't approve.
"Mind you don't drop leaves all over the stairs then.
She was terribly mortified about the pudding sauce last week.
"I never thought raspberry cordial would set people drunk, Marilla--not even if they drank three big tumblerfuls as Diana did.
I hope your father's crop is good too."
"How is your mother?" inquired Anne politely, just as if she had not seen Mrs. Barry picking apples that morning in excellent health and spirits.
Bedrooms were made to sleep in."
She even offered me some, but I couldn't swallow a mouthful.
I'm going to decorate my room with them."
"Set Diana drunk!" she said when she found her voice.
She was suspicious of Anne's big words and dramatic gestures and imagined that the child was making fun of her.
She just carried that sauce and pudding out and brought in some strawberry preserves.
The last time I made a cake I forgot to put the flour in.
"Oh, Diana, do you suppose that it's possible you're really taking the smallpox?
I suppose Mr. Cuthbert is hauling potatoes to the LILY SANDS this afternoon, is he?" said Diana, who had ridden down to Mr. Harmon Andrews's that morning in Matthew's cart.
"Poor little soul," she murmured, lifting a loose curl of hair from the child's tear-stained face.
"Oh, and dream in too, Marilla.
I suppose she thinks you've done it for a silly joke or something of that sort.
She is such a perfect housekeeper and fancy what she must have thought of us.
Marilla turned red as fire but she never said a word--then.
"I never tasted it," said Anne.
"Yes.
I thought of it next morning and ran to the pantry. Diana, fancy if you can my extreme horror at finding a mouse drowned in that pudding sauce!
The stars in their courses fight against me, Marilla.
"My last hope is gone," she told Marilla.
She will never believe but what I did it on purpose."
The story of Cupid and Psyche first appears in the works of Apuleius, a writer of the second century of our era.
Go, fetch me a sample of that precious wool gathered from every one of their fleeces."
CHAPTER XI
I will give her cause to repent of so unlawful a beauty."
You are so ill-favored and disagreeable that the only way you can merit your lover must be by dint of industry and diligence.
Her two elder sisters of moderate charms had now long been married to two royal princes; but Psyche, in her lonely apartment, deplored her solitude, sick of that beauty which, while it procured abundance of flattery, had failed to awaken love.
She often begged him to stay and let her behold him, but he would not consent.
Psyche obediently went to the riverside, prepared to do her best to execute the command.
The leader of the ant hill, followed by whole hosts of his six-legged subjects, approached the heap, and with the utmost diligence, taking grain by grain, they separated the pile, sorting each kind to its parcel; and when it was all done, they vanished out of sight in a moment.
But a voice from the tower said to her, "Why, poor unlucky girl, dost thou design to put an end to thy days in so dreadful a manner?
The fable of Cupid and Psyche is usually considered allegorical. The Greek name for a butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul.
Drawn by admiration and wonder, she approached the building and ventured to enter.
Milton alludes to the story of Cupid and Psyche in the conclusion of his "Comus":
It is this that Keats alludes to in his "Ode to Psyche":
He shed a few drops from the bitter fountain over her lips, though the sight of her almost moved him to pity; then touched her side with the point of his arrow.
In vain then did that royal shepherd, whose judgment was approved by Jove himself, give me the palm of beauty over my illustrious rivals, Pallas and Juno.
But now perform exactly the task imposed on you by my mother, and I will take care of the rest."
The fame of her beauty was so great that strangers from neighboring countries came in crowds to enjoy the sight, and looked on her with amazement, paying her that homage which is due only to Venus herself.
But go; return to your sisters, whose advice you seem to think preferable to mine.
The view of these celestial delights caused envy to enter their bosoms, at seeing their young sister possessed of such state and splendor, so much exceeding their own.
Then they proceeded to fill her bosom with dark suspicions.
But she shall not so quietly usurp my honors.
CUPID AND PSYCHE
By degrees her mind became composed, and she laid herself down on the grassy bank to sleep.
The sisters, not satisfied with this reply, soon made her confess that she had never seen him.
This unseemly confusion the pious Psyche put an end to, by separating and sorting everything to its proper place and kind, believing that she ought to neglect none of the gods, but endeavor by her piety to engage them all in her behalf.
In works of art Psyche is represented as a maiden with the wings of a butterfly, along with Cupid, in the different situations described in the allegory.
They embraced her and she returned their caresses.
So she prepared her lamp and a sharp knife, and hid them out of sight of her husband.
So, calling Zephyr, she acquainted him with her husband's commands, and he, promptly obedient, soon brought them across the mountain down to their sister's valley.
Venus at the approach of twilight returned from the banquet of the gods, breathing odors and crowned with roses.
"Most undutiful and faithless of servants," said she, "do you at last remember that you really have a mistress?
Provide yourself with a lamp and a sharp knife; put them in concealment that your husband may not discover them, and when he is sound asleep, slip out of bed, bring forth your lamp, and see for yourself whether what they say is true or not. If it is, hesitate not to cut off the monster's head, and thereby recover your liberty."
We whose voices you hear are your servants and shall obey all your commands with our utmost care and diligence. Retire, therefore, to your chamber and repose on your bed of down, and when you see fit repair to the bath.
Psyche replied that he was a beautiful youth, who generally spent the daytime in hunting upon the mountains.
While Psyche stood on the ridge of the mountain, panting with fear and with eyes full of tears, the gentle Zephyr raised her from the earth and bore her with an easy motion into a flowery dale.
I submit.
If you saw me, perhaps you would fear me, perhaps adore me, but all I ask of you is to love me.
She entered it, and in the midst discovered a fountain, sending forth clear and crystal waters, and fast by, a magnificent palace whose august front impressed the spectator that it was not the work of mortal hands, but the happy retreat of some god.
Psyche meanwhile wandered day and night, without food or repose, in search of her husband.
The charms of the two elder were more than common, but the beauty of the youngest was so wonderful that the poverty of language is unable to express its due praise.
Casting her eyes on a lofty mountain having on its brow a magnificent temple, she sighed and said to herself, "Perhaps my love, my lord, inhabits there," and directed her steps thither.
Next morning Venus ordered Psyche to be called and said to her, "Behold yonder grove which stretches along the margin of the water.
This reasoning somewhat quieted Psyche for a time, and while the novelty lasted she felt quite happy.
She repaired thither and told them the whole story of her misfortunes, at which, pretending to grieve, those spiteful creatures inwardly rejoiced.
On the contrary he charged her to make no attempt to see him, for it was his pleasure, for the best of reasons, to keep concealed.
Psyche, in vain endeavoring to follow him, fell from the window to the ground.
But Cupid, being now recovered from his wound, and not able longer to bear the absence of his beloved Psyche, slipping through the smallest crack of the window of his chamber which happened to be left open, flew to the spot where Psyche lay, and gathering up the sleep from her body closed it again in the box, and waked Psyche with a light touch of one of his arrows.
She had no sooner entered than she saw heaps of corn, some in loose ears and some in sheaves, with mingled ears of barley. Scattered about, lay sickles and rakes, and all the instruments of harvest, without order, as if thrown carelessly out of the weary reapers' hands in the sultry hours of the day.
Psyche resisted these persuasions as well as she could, but they did not fail to have their effect on her mind, and when her sisters were gone, their words and her own curiosity were too strong for her to resist.
"Again," said he, "hast thou almost perished by the same curiosity.
Go, then, and voluntarily surrender yourself to your lady and sovereign, and try by modesty and submission to win her forgiveness, and perhaps her favor will restore you the husband you have lost."
The holy Ceres, whose temple it was, finding her so religiously employed, thus spoke to her: "O Psyche, truly worthy of our pity, though I cannot shield you from the frowns of Venus, yet I can teach you how best to allay her displeasure.
Supper awaits you in the adjoining alcove when it pleases you to take your seat there."
She points out Psyche to him and says, "My dear son, punish that contumacious beauty; give thy mother a revenge as sweet as her injuries are great; infuse into the bosom of that haughty girl a passion for some low, mean, unworthy being, so that she may reap a mortification as great as her present exultation and triumph."
Cupid prepared to obey the commands of his mother.
She had not yet seen her destined husband.
There are two fountains in Venus's garden, one of sweet waters, the other of bitter.
Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness.
Proceeding onward, she perceived that besides the apartments of state there were others filled with all manner of treasures, and beautiful and precious productions of nature and art.
But I have another task for you.
Every object she met filled her with pleasure and amazement.
Cupid filled two amber vases, one from each fountain, and suspending them from the top of his quiver, hastened to the chamber of Psyche, whom he found asleep.
At the touch she awoke, and opened eyes upon Cupid (himself invisible), which so startled him that in his confusion he wounded himself with his own arrow.
A certain king and queen had three daughters.
In fact Venus found her altars deserted, while men turned their devotion to this young virgin.
Psyche, henceforth frowned upon by Venus, derived no benefit from all her charms.
Heedless of his wound, his whole thought now was to repair the mischief he had done, and he poured the balmy drops of joy over all her silken ringlets.
I am sorry you found out about it, because it has spoiled all our fun."
Miss Thompson had taken their names, but had not stated their punishment and it was certain that they would be made to feel the full weight of her displeasure.
Still there was no answer.
"And did you sign it?" asked Jessica.
Then she deliberately tore the offending paper into shreds and scattered them broadcast.
"I don't know about that," said Nora O'Malley.
"Hard to tell," said Nora.
"Perhaps we'll challenge you some day, Reddy," said Grace mischievously.
"They left before the game was over.
"Glad to know that," said Grace.
Very softly, you may be sure," continued Jessica, "but it was hissing, just the same.
She and her satellites are sitting away up on the back seat of the gallery."
Reddy says it's 'marvelously extraordinary and appallingly great.'"
"The juniors forever, hurrah, fans, hurrah! Our team is a winner, our captain's a star. And we'll drive the senior foe, from the basket every time. Shouting the war cry of the juniors."
"There are two girls on the sophomore and three on the freshman team whose basketball ardor will have to cool until after the mid-year exams."
"Anyone can twist 'Annabel Lee' to suit the occasion."
The juniors had all received copies of the words and had learned them by heart.
If, during this time, any one of them should be reported for a misdemeanor, they were to be suspended without delay.
"Small credit is due me," said Anne, smiling.
They must turn in two themes every week of not less than six hundred words on certain subjects to be assigned to them.
"There were so many different kinds of noises I couldn't distinguish it."
"By the way, Anne," said Grace, "as you are a poet, you must compose a basketball song to-day, and I'll see that the juniors all have copies. It's time we had one.
"Now, Anne, get busy at once.
"Then we'll see that she goes away in a gloomy frame of mind," said Nora, "for we're going to win, and don't you forget to remember it."
The spectators had not yet begun to arrive, as it was still early, so the girls indulged in a little warming-up practice, did a few stunts and skipped about, overflowing with animal spirits.
"It must have been something remarkable, or they wouldn't have subsided so suddenly."
"The very thing," she exclaimed.
The seniors did not intend to allow them to score again in a hurry.
Here we are at Stillman's."
"I can't understand how Eleanor could be so rude and disagreeable to her.
Julia Crosby and Grace took turns sprinting around the gymnasium three times in succession, while Miriam Nesbit timed them, Grace finishing just two seconds ahead of Julia.
When the four classes assembled Thursday morning, every girl, with the exception of Eleanor, was in her seat.
"'Rally Round the Flag,'" suggested Miriam Nesbit.
This ended the first half, with the score 5 to 2 in favor of the juniors.
"She can go to that, even though she is on bad terms with the school."
Up it went, the whistle sounded and the two captains sprang straight for it.
She talked for a moment to Edna and Eleanor.
She has disliked Miss Thompson from the first."
"I feel it in my bones."
"I wonder whether she apologized to Miss Thompson last night," mused Grace.
"That has a dandy swing to it."
"How absurd!" exclaimed Grace.
"Ruth Deane is a terror when she gets fairly started.
"I feel sure that she didn't, and I am just as sure that she won't get back until she does."
"They hissed Miss Thompson.
Grace hummed a few bars.
They tossed their heads, but they didn't hiss any more."
Grace Harlowe felt a load lifted from her mind when Miss Thompson publicly announced that she had not received any information from either Mabel Allison or the Phi Sigma Tau.
By a quarter of two the gallery was fairly well filled and by five minutes of two it was crowded.
"What did Ruth say to them?" asked Grace curiously.
It was a great game and a well-earned victory."
Hippy, David and Reddy have a new one, too.
"Oh, yes, girls, I intended telling you before this," replied Jessica. "Just before the last half started, Miss Thompson and Miss Kane came in and walked to the other end of the gallery.
"It was," giggled Jessica.
Besides, she would have had both High Schools on her side.
"It was an effectual threat at any rate," said Jessica.
The recess bell cut short the conversation and the girls returned to their desks with far better ideas of the coming game than of the afternoon's lessons.
There was a great clapping of hands from the admirers of the juniors at this effort, but the seniors promptly responded from the other end of the gallery to the tune of Dixie, with:
"She is always just," replied Grace.
"Oh, yes, I see her.
For a wonder, she didn't hear it, but every girl in the junior class did.
She looks as haughty as ever.
"Wasn't it nice of Miss Thompson to exonerate us publicly?" asked Anne.
CHAPTER XVI
Grace and Julia Crosby faced each other, beamed amiably and shook hands, then stood vigilant, eyes on the ball that the referee balanced in her hands.
Perhaps they were afraid of being waylaid."
This spurred the junior team on to greater effort, and Miriam made a brilliant throw to basket that brought forth an ovation from the gallery.
Reddy circled about the victors almost too delighted for words.
She felt a personal grudge against Eleanor for her accusation against Mabel, who had grown very dear to her and whom she mothered like a hen with one chicken.
"We ought to celebrate," said Miriam.
After conducting opening exercises, Miss Thompson pronounced sentence on the culprits.
You know what a temper Ruth Deane has and how ferocious she can look?
"I suppose she hopes we'll lose," said Marian Barber.
Hardly had the last notes died away, when the referee blew the whistle and the teams hustled to their positions.
Their penalty was far from light, but they had not been suspended, and so they resolved to endure it as best they might.
Let me see what would be a good tune?"
There was a general scramble for the ball, and for five minutes neither team scored; then Marian Barber dropped a neat field goal, and soon after Grace scored on a foul.
Grace captured it, however, and sent it flying toward Miriam, who was so carefully guarded that she dared not attempt to make the basket, and after a feint managed to throw it to Nora, who tried for the basket at long range and missed.
"I suppose they couldn't bear to see us win," said Grace.
"Thank goodness, none of us were concerned in that affair," she told the members of her basketball team at recess.
Even the boys like Miss Thompson."
They played such a close guarding game that, try as they might, the juniors made no headway.
"The seniors are the real thing. Hurrah!
"Let's hope that your bones are true prophets," laughed Marian Barber.
"O girls!" exclaimed Eva Allen from the open door, in which she had been standing looking up at the gallery.
Hurrah! Our gallant team now takes its stand, And all the baskets soon will land. We shout, we sing, the praises of the seniors."
"Come on.
"The boys' crack team couldn't have played a better game," he said solemnly, and the girls knew that he could pay them no higher compliment, for this team was considered invincible by the High School boys.
"Where?" asked Nora, going to the door.
They were to forfeit their recess, library and all other privileges until the end of the term.
There was a burst of laughter from the girls at this effusion, in which Nora herself joined.
From Norhala came a single cry--resonant, blaring like a wrathful, golden trumpet.
I felt a shock of repulsion.
It was the mark of--torture!
They burst into it--into yellow, glowing sunlight.
A hope--a PROMISE, that they would NOT conquer."
Norhala's flaming hair crackled and streamed; about her body of milk and pearl--about Ruth's creamy skin--a radiant nimbus began to glow.
I saw our Earth--I knew, Goodwin, indisputably, unmistakably that it was our earth.
And a fantastic notion came to me--fantasy it was, of course, yet built I know around a nucleus of strange truth.
The drums of Destiny!"
Came a shrill, keen wailing--louder than ever I had heard before.
"Just an itinerant demiurge of supergeometry riding along through space on its perfectly summed-up world; master of all celestial mechanics; its people independent of all that complex chemistry and labor for equilibrium by which we live; needing neither air nor water, heeding neither heat nor cold; fed with the magnetism of interstellar space and stopping now and then to banquet off the energy of some great sun."
Then slowly the Thing began to move; quietly it glided to the chasm it had blasted in the cliff wall.
It lurched forward--away from us.
"THE DRUMS OF DESTINY"
"Whence did--They--come?" His voice was clear and calm, the eyes beneath the red brand clear and quiet, too.
Beside a pile of the silken stuffs she halted.
"And it was well done--sister.
"Wait.
She caught the woman's hands, pressed close to her.
"The drums of destiny.
"The patterned symbols constantly changed form.
"They tortured him.
No use--now."
"But you and I, little sister, will dwell together--in the vastnesses--in the peace.
"Martin!
Nor except for the trembling cubes that made the platform on which we stood, did the shrunken Thing carrying us hold any unit of the Metal Monster except its spheres and tetrahedrons--at least within its visible bulk.
He pointed to the Thing that bore us.
The speeding shape halted, hesitated; it seemed about to return.
"Not yet can you go as I do--among the fires." She hesitated.
"Martin," I cried.
But this I do know--that last vision was of a cataclysm whose beginnings we face now--this very instant."
There was an earthquake trembling; a maelstrom swirling in which we spun; a swift sinking.
"But still--SOME truth in them.
Slowly we descended that mount of desolation; lingeringly, as though the brooding eyes of Norhala were not yet sated with destruction.
I heard a little wailing chorus without, fast dying into silence.
Silently we streamed through the chasm, through the canyon and the tunnel--speaking no word, Drake's eyes fixed with bitter hatred upon Norhala, Ventnor brooding upon her always with that enigmatic sympathy.
Shall it not be so?"
Whence did They come?
And at last it was twin sister of Norhala who looked upon her from the face of Ruth!
The drumming did not die; it grew louder, more vehement; defiant and deafening.
Into it streamed, over it clicked, score upon score of cubes, building it higher and higher.
We found it; then the precipices hid it.
And they promised him other agonies that would make him pray long for death.
It's drum fire.
A new child to whom shall be given dominion--nay, to whom has been given dominion? Or is it--taps--for Them?"
"I remember," he replied, "but not clearly.
CHAPTER XXVII.
From Norhala, of course, I looked for no perception of any of this.
There came to us as though from immeasurable distances, a faint, sustained thrumming--like the beating of countless muffled drums.
"Rest here until I return.
The Thing quieted; it began its steady, effortless striding through the crowding trees--but now with none of that speed with which it had come, spurred forward by Norhala's awakened hate.
"Sleep till I return," she murmured.
On the ordered plains were traced the hieroglyphs of the faceted world.
But where could batteries like those come from?"
But from Ruth--
"We can do nothing, Goodwin--nothing. Whatever is to be steps forth now from the womb of Destiny."
"They ARE drums.
Before my eyes they tortured my brother. Norhala--they were evil, all evil!
What do you mean?"
Beat down upon the blue globe like hollow metal worlds, beaten and shrieking.
They ranged themselves about Ruth. Norhala kissed her upon both brown eyes.
"I am afraid!" I heard her whisper.
As though his words had been a cue, the sounds again burst forth--no longer muffled nor faint.
Gently the two were plucked up; swiftly they were set beside us.
We were lifted; between us and the woman and girl a cleft appeared; it widened into a rift.
She swept from the chamber--with never a glance for us three.
Now it was a tremendous rhythmic cannonading. The Thing halted.
"No use, Drake," he said dreamily.
And on all Earth, Goodwin, there was no green life, no city, no trace of man. On this Earth that had been ours were only--These.
And suddenly I saw that mount as Earth--the city as Earth's cities--its gardens and groves as Earth's fields and forests--and the vanished people of Cherkis seemed to expand into all humanity.
"Don't think that I accept them in their entirety. Part truth, part illusion--the groping mind dazzled with light of unfamiliar truths and making pictures from half light and half shadow to help it understand.
Of human life, of green life, of life of any kind there was none.
"I saw vast caverns filled with the Things; working, growing, multiplying.
"Wait!" exclaimed Drake.
It was a shadow that seemed to be born of our own world--some threatening spirit of earth hovering over them.
Through the air came a louder drum roll--in it something ominous, something sinister.
"Martin," I cried once more, a dreadful doubt upon me.
The girl's eyes dwelt upon hers trustingly.
Now in the painful surges of awakening realization, of full human understanding of that inhuman annihilation, I turned to them for strength.
"Well!
Henry Tilney must know best.
A woman in love with one man cannot flirt with another."
"Does he?
He cannot think this--and you may be sure that he would not have you think it.
Why not?
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutor as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, under the decree which banished all emigrants on pain of Death.
Doctor Manette was next questioned.
Of the men, the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, many knitted.
"Lucie!
Under the President sat Doctor Manette, in his usual quiet dress.
"Take off his head!" cried the audience.
"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!"
It was nothing that the decree bore date since his return to France.
Was that criminal in the eyes of the Republic?
"An enemy to the Republic!"
Gub-Gub was a bit scared, walking on such a narrow bridge at that dizzy height above the river.
"The King's men are quite close now--Look at them!
And the Doctor felt very pleased.
"Golly!
They even got the Doctor some tobacco one day, when he had finished what he had brought with him and wanted to smoke.
How are we ever going to get across?"
Quick!--Make a bridge!
He called everybody a fool.
A bridge!"
A bridge!
"Oh, dear!" said Gub-Gub.
Walk over--all of you--hurry!"
But when he looked back at the cliff, there, hanging across the river, was a bridge all ready for him--made of living monkeys!
At night they slept in tents made of palm-leaves, on thick, soft beds of dried grass.
They used to make their lemonade out of the juice of wild oranges, sweetened with honey which they got from the bees' nests in hollow trees.
"It's all right!
So all this time, while the Doctor and his animals were going along towards the Land of the Monkeys, thinking themselves quite safe, they were still being followed by the King's men.
But when he cried they gave him milk out of the cocoanuts which he was very fond of.
I am afraid we are going to be taken back to prison again." And he began to weep.
And that same evening, sure enough, they saw Chee-Chee's cousin and a lot of other monkeys, who had not yet got sick, sitting in the trees by the edge of a swamp, looking and waiting for them.
"Boys--a bridge!
You are the first to see the famous 'Bridge of Apes.'"
Get lively!
But the King's men, who were still following, had heard the noise of the monkeys cheering; and they at last knew where the Doctor was, and hastened on to catch him.
And the big one shouted to the Doctor, "Walk over!
One day Chee-Chee climbed up a high rock and looked out over the tree-tops.
The ground was soft in places, quite muddy.
Longbill took two or three steps in rather a stately fashion.
But that doesn't happen often."
"That's where I'll go!" exclaimed Peter.
Off he started, lipperty-lipperty-lip, for the Smiling Pool.
You'll excuse me while I go on eating, I hope.
"If you had taken another step, Peter Rabbit, you would have stepped right on our eggs.
He scared me for a second."
Then Peter chuckled.
Peter scratched a long ear with a long hind foot, trying to think of some place to go.
"And was there a worm in every one?" asked Peter, his eyes very wide with interest.
There wasn't even a bug or a worm crawling on the ground.
Peter was puzzled.
Before Peter could say another word Teeter came running towards him, and it was plain to see that Teeter was very anxious about something.
The only time they are in danger is when somebody comes along, as you did, and is likely to step on them without seeing them.
"I don't suppose any one else can find hidden worms that way."
"Mrs. Woodcock made some of them."
"Not too scared to come back, anyway," said Longbill himself, dropping down just in front of Peter.
Then he pulled it out and Peter caught a glimpse of the tail end of a worm disappearing down Longbill's throat.
I'll just run over and pay my respects to Grandfather Frog, and to Redwing the Blackbird.
But the worms Welcome Robin got were always close to the surface, while these worms were so deep in the earth that Peter couldn't understand how it was possible for any one to know that they were there.
His eyes were very big and they were set so far back that Peter wondered if it wasn't easier for him to look behind him than in front of him.
Peter nodded.
Peter hastily backed away a few steps.
His back was a mixture of gray, brown, black and buff, while his breast and under parts were a beautiful reddish-buff.
Don't move!" he cried.
I think there is one right under my feet now; watch me get him." Longbill bored into the ground until his head was almost against it.
Peter doesn't mind getting his feet damp, so he hopped along carelessly.
"Don't move, Peter Rabbit!
I am glad it is no one but you, Peter, for I was having a splendid meal here, and I should have hated to leave it.
But his bill was long enough to make up.
Suddenly Longbill plunged his bill into the ground.
There was Mrs. Woodcock peeping at him from behind a tussock of grass.
"That's the way I get them," said he.
Then Peter saw right in a little hollow in the sand, with just a few bits of grass for a lining, four white eggs with big dark blotches on them.
It was his head that made him look queer.
"I didn't mean to scare him," apologized Peter.
You gave me a dreadful start."
When he pulled his bill out, sure enough, there was a worm.
He had just a glimpse of a brown form disappearing over the tops of some tall bushes.
I'm ever so glad to have seen you, and I'm coming over to call again the first chance I get."
"Peet-weet!
Peet-weet!" cried Teeter, turning towards Peter and bobbing and bowing as only Teeter can.
Peter turned quickly.
Longbill nodded.
Do you think he was really very much scared?"
"Now you speak of it, there is a strong family resemblance, although I hadn't thought of him as a relative of yours before.
Running along the very edge of the water was a slim, trim little bird with fairly long legs, a long slender bill, brownish-gray back with black spots and markings, and a white waistcoat neatly spotted with black.
When Peter thinks of something to do he wastes no time.
Just then Mrs. Teeter came hurrying up and squatted down in the sand right in front of Peter.
Peter greeted him joyously.
It startled Peter so that he stopped short with his eyes popping out of his head.
"You scared him.
He kept close to the edge of the Green Forest until he reached the place where the Laughing Brook comes out of the Green Forest on its way to the Smiling Pool in the Green Meadows.
But Peter couldn't see a thing that looked good to eat.
He plunged it in for the whole length.
So Peter said good-by and kept on down the Laughing Brook to the Smiling Pool.
Mrs. Teeter slipped back on the eggs and settled herself comfortably.
Right where the Laughing Brook entered the Smiling Pool there was a little pebbly beach.
I saw you coming, but Longbill didn't."
From right under his very nose something shot up into the air with a whistling sound.
Bushes and young trees grow along the banks of the Laughing Brook at this point.
"My cousin, Jack Snipe, can," replied Longbill promptly.
"It's wonderful," sighed Peter.
It suddenly struck Peter that if he hadn't seen her do it, he wouldn't have known she was there.
Redwing was one of the first birds to arrive, and I've neglected him shamefully."
We can talk between bites."
Every few steps he would stop to pick up something, then stand for a second bobbing up and down in the funniest way, as if his body was so nicely balanced on his legs that it teetered back and forth like a seesaw.
"I don't see any nest or eggs or anything," said he rather testily.
He showed it as he stared down at Mrs. Teeter just in front of him.
Mrs. Teeter chuckled softly.
"I really didn't mean to.
"Thank goodness!" exclaimed Teeter, still bobbing and bowing.
"Why not?" demanded Peter, for he could see no danger and could think of no reason why he shouldn't move.
See here!" Longbill suddenly thrust his bill straight out in front of him and to Peter's astonishment he lifted the end of the upper half without opening the rest of his bill at all.
That is why I have to fly away south as soon as the ground freezes at all."
Mrs. Teeter stood up and stepped aside.
It was Teeter the Spotted Sandpiper, an old friend of Peter's.
"I do," said he.
"I can feel them when I reach them, and then I just open the top of my bill and grab them.
"Of course," explained Longbill, "it is only in soft ground that I can do this.
"Where are your eyes, Peter?
Mrs. Pewee and I are very retiring.
Did you ever see a Flycatcher with a bill that looked as if it could cut wood?" She didn't wait for a reply, but rattled on.
"Does Cresty make the hole?" he asked.
Almost at once he began to call his name in a rather sad, plaintive tone, "Pee-wee! Pee-wee!
Jenny Wren's eyes twinkled, and she laughed softly.
Jenny paused and jerked her tail impatiently.
"Come as often as you like," replied Pewee.
Peter grinned and looked foolish.
Pewee chuckled happily.
Back in the Old Briar-patch Peter thought over all he had learned about the Flycatcher family, and as he recalled how they were forever catching all sorts of flying insects it suddenly struck him that they must be very useful little people in helping Old Mother Nature take care of her trees and other growing things which insects so dearly love to destroy.
Look!
Ugh!"
It is so quiet and restful that I love it.
One is all I can take care of."
But he wasn't sad, as Peter well knew.
"They certainly do, more's the pity!" snapped Jenny.
But the Woodpeckers seem to like new houses best, which, as I said before, is a very good thing for the rest of us."
Hope to God I judged the time right."
Their arrows had ceased to fly.
She looked at them, beckoned them.
A good five hundred yards away were Ruth and Drake, running straight to the green tunnel's mouth.
"To the fissure!" shouted Ventnor.
They fell back, hesitated.
A rifle-shot rang out above us; another and another.
There stood the host that had poured down the mountain road, horsemen, spearsmen, pikemen--a full thousand of them.
They clustered close, their shields held before them.
"A chance!" gasped Ventnor.
Again Ventnor's rifle cracked.
Just a minute," he called.
And then--it struck!
They swirled, eddied and formed a barricade between us and the armored men.
Drake can take care of Ruth."
I caught the glint of helmets and corselets.
Quick on the screen of my mind flashed two pictures, side by side--the little four-rayed print in the great dust of the crumbling ruin and its colossal twin on the breast of the poppied valley.
CHAPTER V. THE SMITING THING
"Very well," I gasped, irritated.
"You're right, Walter," he grinned.
While the way's open--"
They huddled, wavered, broke for cover.
We turned off the ruined way; raced over the sward.
Of what powers?
I heard the shouts of their captains; they rushed.
Close were we now to the mouth of the fissure.
Those in the van were mounted, galloping two abreast upon sure-footed mountain ponies.
Ruth sprang to the pony, lifted from its back a rifle.
"All right.
And to what myriads, it might be, of their kind?
Hurry!"
"Timed to a second!" cried Ventnor.
Fuses and dynamite.
"Quick, Mart!" I shouted up the shattered stairway.
I saw a spear thrown.
"Don't look back," grunted Ventnor.
I turned aside, crept through the shattered portal and looked over the haunted hollow.
We sprang up, sped on.
The twilight was stealing upon the close-clustered peaks.
Behind us was a wolflike yelping.
"They come!" he gasped.
Over us whined the bullets from the covering guns.
I heard a sigh from Ruth; wrested my gaze from the hollow; turned.
"Chiu-Ming's taking care of that," I gasped.
He's got lots of ammunition on the pony.
As we sped after him I looked back.
"The place is all right."
Scattered prone among these were men and horses; others staggered, screaming.
Their short swords, lifted high, flickered.
We'll follow.
Another hour, and their amethyst-and-purple mantles would drop upon them; snowfields and glaciers sparkle out in irised beauty; nightfall.
Within the black background of the fissure stood a shape, an apparition, a woman--beautiful, awesome, incredible!
"They come!"
Now Chiu-Ming was with them.
I stumbled up the side; joined them.
I pushed the two over the rim of the hollow.
"We can't make it.
I saw him stop, push her from him toward it.
I saw Drake stop, raise his rifle, empty it before him, and, holding Ruth by the hand, race back toward us.
The first pack had re-formed; had crossed the barricade the dynamite had made; was rushing upon us.
He reached out, touched me.
They were like rats scampering in panic over the bottom of a great green bowl.
The woman stepped from the crevice.
I looked back.
"It's all right," I shouted.
All too short was the check, but once more we held them--and again.
"Get Martin and Chiu-Ming quick!
"It's empty," I cried.
Now Ruth and Dick were a scant fifty yards from the crevice.
"Dick," I cried, "rush Ruth over to the tunnel mouth.
It swept through them like a scythe through ripe grain.
This way!"
"Right." My own breathing was growing labored, "WE'LL hold them.
Silently we looked at each other, and silently we passed out of the courtyard.
We threw ourselves down, facing them.
I dropped over the side, walked cautiously down the road up which but an hour or so before we had struggled so desperately; paced farther and farther with an increasing confidence and a growing wonder.
What is it they are heralding?
Faintly I wondered again at Ruth's scantiness of garb, her more than half nudity; dwelt curiously upon the red brand across Ventnor's forehead.
"And it is still summer!" Thorhild said.
"It must be giants that sail in it, frost giants," said another of the men.
Anywhere behind Eric!"
So they went on toward it.
Huge ships of ice sailed out from it and met him.
"It is a land of ice," they said.
Far off it looks flat, but when you walk upon it, there are great holes and cracks.
"Thorgest is off.
"I see afar off an iceberg larger than any one yet.
I am tired of the darkness and the smoke and the cattle.
Now we must have a name for our land.
His men laughed and said:
"I always liked the stars better than a smoky house fire," said one.
"Ah! Eric, it is good to hear your laugh again," they said.
One spring after they had been in that land for four years, Eric said:
Yes!
While they sat, a stranger came into the hall.
So I will steer straight west.
Some went because they were poor in Iceland and thought:
Some men went because they thought it would be a great frolic to go to a new country.
He bore hard on the rudder, but he could not turn the ship.
They took horses and cattle with them, and all kinds of tools and food.
"It sends out a cold breath," said one of the men.
Why, look!
We shall surely find something.
"By Thor, that Gunnbiorn was a foolish fellow.
But as they came nearer, Eric all at once laughed loudly and called out:
"We must not freeze here."
But they met heavy storms, and some ships were wrecked, and the men drowned.
After a while Eric said:
"Only the bravest and the luckiest men come here," Eric said.
And some went because they loved Eric and wanted to be his neighbors.
Come back with me and choose your land."
Sometimes the sun showed for an hour, sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes it did not show at all for a week.
Eric got into the pilot's seat and they sailed off.
Soon other houses were built along the fiords.
I have been driven about from place to place, like a seabird in a storm.
"There is no friend like mead.
"Ah, cheer up, good wife!" Eric laughed.
All this time they were making ready for the voyage, repairing the ship and filling it with stores.
"Here I will build my house," he said.
I will visit my friends in Iceland."
Then the men sat and talked over plans.
Then he laughed as he looked at his men.
Come to my house for a feast."
The next spring Eric said:
They sailed on south, all the time looking for a place to go ashore.
He jumped to his feet, and his face glowed.
It is no ship, and there is no one on it."
"He walks like Thor the Fearless."
"Eric killed the men in fair fight.
It is better than Iceland."
Who will go with me?"
"The land stretches far north.
I do not know, either, how long we must go."
"Yes!
She has shut Norway to me and now Iceland. Where will you go next, old comrade?" and he pulled out his sword and looked at it and smiled as the fire flashed on it.
"Yonder is a strange pilot," Eric laughed.
"I smell better luck ahead."
"We should best not talk to him."
Everybody seemed much excited.
"He is in a black temper," they said.
Always in a quarrel.
At last they found a place that Eric liked.
When the drinking-horns had been filled and emptied, Eric pulled himself up and smiled and shouted out so that the great room was full of his big voice:
"The white mast stands as high as a hill."
"Now I have a plan," Eric suddenly said.
"Hunted like a wolf from corner to corner of the world!" Eric cried angrily.
Soon they pulled the ship up on their own shore. Eric strolled into his house and called for supper.
"Perhaps we can find play for them in Iceland."
"But if I take my sport like a wolf, I must be hunted like one.
One day Eric said:
"It is a very white Greenland, but men will like the sound of it.
They all wrapped their cloaks about them.
A great shout went up that shook the rafters.
Eric sat down in his chair and laughed.
One day as Eric sat in the pilot's seat, he said:
"Is that not like Eric?
"And you thought of frost giants!"
Perhaps giants or dragons or strange men might come out of this inland ice and kill our people.
"His story would make a fine song," one said.
"Perhaps this river will carry us to a whirlpool and suck us under," the men said.
His foe Thorgest has many rich and powerful men to back him."
"We will go with you to this strange land."
We must stay together."
"Yes," shouted his men.
"Eric is a bloody man.
Men were walking about the plain and talking.
Eric led his wife Thorhild and his two young sons, Thorstein and Leif.
"We cannot tell what might come between us.
So they did and lived there that summer and pastured their cattle and cut hay for the winter and fished and hunted.
Word of what Eric meant to do got out, and men laughed and said:
"Well, I must off somewhere.
No trees grew there.
They ate the meat and wore the skins to keep them warm. The hardest thing was to get fuel for the fire.
I would call for her, and we would dine and go on to the theatre, often having supper as well; and by the end of the evening I had spent four or five louis, which came to two or three thousand francs a month, which reduced my year to three months and a half, and made it necessary for me either to go into debt or to leave Marguerite.
You will readily understand why.
For the rest, chance was on my side.
"Yes."
"Yonder," and Marguerite pointed to the house in question.
My expenses were very moderate; only I used up my year's income in eight months, and spent the four summer months with my father, which practically gave me twelve thousand francs a year, and, in addition, the reputation of a good son.
I had taken her cure in hand, and the poor girl, seeing my aim, obeyed me in order to prove her gratitude.
My doctor, whom I had made her meet, had told me that only rest and calm could preserve her health, so that in place of supper and sleepless nights, I succeeded in substituting a hygienic regime and regular sleep.
This, then, was my position when I made the acquaintance of Marguerite. You can well understand that, in spite of myself, my expenses soon increased.
For the rest, not a penny of debt.
We had now only to decide where we should go.
Free of Marguerite, I should have been free of gambling.
"Do you like it?"
The courtesan disappeared little by little.
As for me, I experienced that more than most.
I had succeeded without effort or trouble in almost isolating her from her former habits.
The house was empty, and to let for two thousand francs.
Duvernoy being needful on account of the old duke, Prudence was one of those women who seem made on purpose for days in the country.
I had by me a young and beautiful woman, whom I loved, and who loved me, and who was called Marguerite; the past had no more reality and the future no more clouds. The sun shone upon my mistress as it might have shone upon the purest bride.
She would come in tired, take a light supper, and go to bed after a little music or reading, which she had never been used to do.
We walked together in those charming spots which seemed to have been made on purpose to recall the verses of Lamartine or to sing the melodies of Scudo.
"Very much."
I came to Paris, studied law, was called to the bar, and, like many other young men, put my diploma in my pocket, and let myself drift, as one so easily does in Paris.
Forgive me if I give you all these details, but you will see that they were the cause of what was to follow.
"Ah, delicious!" replied Prudence.
"Yes, yes, an excellent idea," I stammered, not knowing what I was saying.
"Do you want to go to the real country?" she asked.
"Well, I will arrange that," said Marguerite, freeing my hand, and interpreting my words according to her own desire.
"Well, then, Marguerite, let me take it myself."
I looked at the house so long that I began by thinking of it as mine, so perfectly did it embody the dream that I was dreaming; I saw Marguerite and myself there, by day in the little wood that covered the hillside, in the evening seated on the grass, and I asked myself if earthly creatures had ever been so happy as we should be.
We left the house, and started on our return to Paris, talking over the new plan.
Nothing is so expensive as their caprices, flowers, boxes at the theatre, suppers, days in the country, which one can never refuse to one's mistress.
Thus my life, generally so calm, assumed all at once an appearance of noise and disorder.
"Am I sure of coming here?"
People have always associated the country with love, and they have done well; nothing affords so fine a frame for the woman whom one loves as the blue sky, the odours, the flowers, the breeze, the shining solitude of fields, or woods.
"That means," said Prudence, "that when I have two days free I will come and spend them with you."
Never believe, however disinterested the love of a kept woman may be, that it will cost one nothing.
In spite of herself, Marguerite got accustomed to this new existence, whose salutary effects she already realized.
"Let us go and see if it is to let."
"Would you be happy here?" she said to me.
"And for whom else should I bury myself here, if not for you?"
"Well, tell the duke to take it for you; he would do so, I am sure.
I began by borrowing five or six thousand francs on my little capital, and with this I took to gambling.
As Prudence had told us, it was the real country, and, I must add, it was a real lunch.
Since gambling houses were destroyed gambling goes on everywhere.
Thus, in the midst of all that, I preserved a considerable amount of self-possession; I lost only what I was able to pay, and gained only what I should have been able to lose.
Marguerite's nature was very capricious, and, like so many women, she never regarded as a serious expense those thousand and one distractions which made up her life.
Marguerite was dressed in white, she leaned on my arm, saying over to me again under the starry sky the words she had said to me the day before, and far off the world went on its way, without darkening with its shadow the radiant picture of our youth and love.
I wished above all not to leave myself time to think over the position I had accepted, for, in spite of myself, it was a great distress to me.
My dream vanished at the last words of Prudence, and brought me back to reality so brutally that I was still stunned with the fall.
Climbing flowers clung about the doorway of this uninhabited house, mounting as high as the first story.
Then, and by this I knew the violence of my love, I left the table without a moment's hesitation, whether I was winning or losing, pitying those whom I left behind because they would not, like me, find their real happiness in leaving it.
Duvernoy.
"Where?" asked Prudence.
I made no debts, and I spent three times as much money as when I did not gamble.
Beyond that, Paris in the mist!
However much one loves a woman, whatever confidence one may have in her, whatever certainty her past may offer us as to her future, one is always more or less jealous.
As I told you, I began by being allowed to stay only from midnight to six o'clock, then I was asked sometimes to a box in the theatre, then she sometimes came to dine with me.
What else could I have done?
So, wishing to spend as much time with me as possible, she would write to me in the morning that she would dine with me, not at home, but at some restaurant in Paris or in the country.
For the most of them, gambling was a necessity; for me, it was a remedy.
With her unchanging good-humour and her eternal appetite, she never left a dull moment to those whom she was with, and was perfectly happy in ordering eggs, cherries, milk, stewed rabbit, and all the rest of the traditional lunch in the country.
As I have told you, I had little money.
The habit or the need of seeing me which Marguerite had now contracted had this good result: that it forced me to leave the gaming-table just at the moment when an adroit gambler would have left it.
Chapter 16
It was impossible to resist an existence which gave me an easy means of satisfying the thousand caprices of Marguerite.
You know perfectly well that I have no right to accept it save from one man. Let me alone, big baby, and say nothing."
It is worth forty thousand francs a year, and during the ten years that he has had it, he has paid off the security and put aside a dowry for my sister.
What I tell you is a true and simple story, and I leave to it all the naivete of its details and all the simplicity of its developments.
I'll see about it if you like."
But, sooner than the moral metamorphosis, a physical metamorphosis came about in Marguerite.
Gambling is only likely to be carried on by young people very much in need of money and not possessing the fortune necessary for supporting the life they lead; they gamble, then, and with this result; or else they gain, and then those who lose serve to pay for their horses and mistresses, which is very disagreeable.
It is not only out of gratitude for the happiness I owe it, but Bougival, in spite of its horrible name, is one of the prettiest places that it is possible to imagine.
I would have consented to anything except the latter.
At the end of six weeks the count was entirely given up, and only the duke obliged me to conceal my liaison with Marguerite, and even he was sent away when I was there, under the pretext that she was asleep and had given orders that she was not to be awakened.
Formerly, when one went to Frascati, one had the chance of making a fortune; one played against money, and if one lost, there was always the consolation of saying that one might have gained; whereas now, except in the clubs, where there is still a certain rigour in regard to payments, one is almost certain, the moment one gains a considerable sum, not to receive it.
Jealousy would have kept me awake, and inflamed my blood and my thoughts; while gambling gave a new turn to the fever which would otherwise have preyed upon my heart, and fixed it upon a passion which laid hold on me in spite of myself, until the hour struck when I might go to my mistress.
Just then, one fine day in summer, Marguerite was awakened by the sunlight pouring into her room, and, jumping out of bed, asked me if I would take her into the country for the whole day.
That was the dream that the hot sun brought to me that day through the leaves of the trees, as, lying on the grass of the island on which we had landed, I let my thought wander, free from the human links that had bound it, gathering to itself every hope that came in its way.
As for her, she continued to love me as much, or even more than ever.
From that time, seeing that I could not change my mistress's life, I changed my own.
One morning I did not go till eight, and there came a day when I did not go till twelve.
Never did wife or sister surround husband or brother with such loving care as she had for me.
I told him that I was ill, and that I wanted rest.
At the same time, however, they spoke as if it were very doubtful whether Jason would succeed in getting the Golden Fleece.
So intensely hot it was, indeed, that it caught a dry tree under which Jason was now standing, and set it all in a light blaze.
It will be excellent sport, I assure you, when they catch a glimpse of your figure.
"My young friends," quietly replied Jason, "I do not wonder that you think the dragon very terrible.
What do you think of this, my brave Jason?"
"True," said the king, with a smile that did not look particularly good-natured.
"I must encounter the peril," answered Jason, composedly, "since it stands in the way of my purpose."
If you will trust to me, I can instruct you how to tame the fiery bulls, and sow the dragon's teeth, and get the Golden Fleece."
While the king talked with Jason, a beautiful young woman was standing behind the throne.
It would grieve us to the heart, if you and your nine and forty brave companions should be eaten up, at fifty mouthfuls, by this execrable dragon."
According to their account, the tree on which it hung was guarded by a terrible dragon, who never failed to devour, at one mouthful, every person who might venture within his reach.
She gave him a basket, in which were the dragon's teeth, just as they had been pulled out of the monster's jaws by Cadmus, long ago.
"We will none of us turn back!" cried his nine and forty brave comrades. "Let us get on board the galley this instant; and if the dragon is to make a breakfast of us, much good may it do him."
At all events, turn back who may, I will never see Greece again, unless I carry with me the Golden Fleece."
When the princes understood whither the Argonauts were going, they offered to turn back, and guide them to Colchis.
Medea then led Jason down the palace steps, and through the silent streets of the city, and into the royal pasture ground, where the two brazen-footed bulls were kept.
I am acquainted with some of your secrets, you perceive.
Now, who do you imagine these two voyagers turned out to be?
But there are other things as hard, or perhaps a little harder, to be done before you can even have the privilege of being devoured by the dragon.
You and your nine and forty Argonauts, my bold Jason, are hardly numerous or strong enough to fight with such a host as will spring up."
For my part, I enjoy it immensely.
"I have heard," rejoined the youth, "that a dragon lies beneath the tree on which the prize hangs, and that whoever approaches him runs the risk of being devoured at a mouthful."
They are an unruly set of reprobates, those sons of the dragon's teeth; and unless you treat them suitably, they will fall upon you sword in hand.
"Very true, young man.
It makes a holiday in Colchis whenever such a thing happens.
So she put a golden box into his hand, and directed him how to apply the perfumed unguent which it contained, and where to meet her at midnight.
"Pray, are you on a pleasure voyage?--Or do you meditate the discovery of unknown islands?--or what other cause has procured me the happiness of seeing you at my court?"
Are you an enchantress?"
At some distance before him he perceived four streams of fiery vapor, regularly appearing and again vanishing, after dimly lighting up the surrounding obscurity.
There is a furnace in each of their stomachs; and they breathe such hot fire out of their mouths and nostrils, that nobody has hitherto gone nigh them without being instantly burned to a small, black cinder.
She fixed her eyes earnestly upon the youthful stranger, and listened attentively to every word that was spoken; and when Jason withdrew from the king's presence, this young woman followed him out of the room.
Well, Prince Jason," he continued, aloud, and as complaisantly as he could, "make yourself comfortable for to-day, and to-morrow morning, since you insist upon it, you shall try your skill at the plow."
It is well for you that I am favorably inclined; for, otherwise, you would hardly escape being snapped up by the dragon."
After entering the pasture, the princess paused and looked around.
But, in my view of the matter, the dragon is merely a pretty large serpent, who is not half so likely to snap me up at one mouthful as I am to cut off his ugly head, and strip the skin from his body.
"Indeed, beautiful princess," answered Jason, "if you will do me this service, I promise to be grateful to you my whole life long."' Gazing at Medea, he beheld a wonderful intelligence in her face.
You cannot imagine in what a mere twinkling of an eye their hot breath shrivels a young man into a black cinder."
These, you will understand, were caused by the breath of the brazen bulls, which was quietly stealing out of their four nostrils, as they lay chewing their cuds.
"My master Chiron," replied Jason, "taught me, long ago, the story of Cadmus.
"Only be brave," added she, "and before daybreak the brazen bulls shall be tamed."
Why, if you will believe me, they were the sons of that very Phrixus, who, in his childhood, had been carried to Colchis on the back of the golden-fleeced ram.
"Yes, Prince Jason," answered Medea, with a smile, "you have hit upon the truth.
"Pardon, let me say all I have to say.
She waited for a long while without moving, and had forgotten about him.
"But perhaps the key may yet be found," thought Alexey Alexandrovitch.
If he hadn't heard there was such a thing as love, he would never have used the word.
"Anna, is this you?" said Alexey Alexandrovitch, quietly making an effort over himself, and restraining the motion of his fingers.
"It's late, it's late," she whispered with a smile.
But it would be better to get to sleep."
On seeing her husband, Anna raised her head and smiled, as though she had just waked up.
She looked at him so simply, so brightly, that anyone who did not know her as her husband knew her could not have noticed anything unnatural, either in the sound or the sense of her words.
She felt that some unseen force had come to her aid and was supporting her.
He talked and looked at her laughing eyes, which frightened him now with their impenetrable look, and, as he talked, he felt all the uselessness and idleness of his words.
Alexey Alexandrovitch was unconsciously saying something utterly unlike what he had prepared.
She came out from behind the door of the dressing room, and looked at him.
"Oh, please, don't do that, I do so dislike it," she said.
"But other people noticed it, and that's what upsets him."--"You're not well, Alexey Alexandrovitch," she added, and she got up, and would have gone towards the door; but he moved forward as though he would stop her.
He doesn't even know what love is."
"Perhaps I am mistaken, but believe me, what I say, I say as much for myself as for you.
"Why, what is it?
"I don't understand a word.
Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed, and, without saying more, went into the bedroom.
That union can only be severed by a crime, and a crime of that nature brings its own chastisement."
I am your husband, and I love you."
Alexey Alexandrovitch paused, and rubbed his forehead and his eyes.
She stopped, and bending her head back and on one side, began with her rapid hand taking out her hairpins.
Alexey Alexandrovitch shivered, and bent his hands to make the joints crack.
"Alexey Alexandrovitch, really I don't understand," she said.
His face was ugly and forbidding, as Anna had never seen him.
She thought of that other; she pictured him, and felt how her heart was flooded with emotion and guilty delight at the thought of him. Suddenly she heard an even, tranquil snore.
"Anna, I must warn you," he began.
"Well, let's talk, if it's so necessary.
Our life has been joined, not by man, but by God.
"It's late, Alexey Alexandrovitch," she said, when she had gone through the doorway.
His lips were sternly compressed, and his eyes looked away from her.
She thought: "Love?
This evening it was not I observed it, but judging by the impression made on the company, everyone observed that your conduct and deportment were not altogether what could be desired."
"Of what?"
Your too animated conversation this evening with Count Vronsky" (he enunciated the name firmly and with deliberate emphasis) "attracted attention."
"I have nothing to say.
"To enter into all the details of your feelings I have no right, and besides, I regard that as useless and even harmful," began Alexey Alexandrovitch.
"This is what I meant to say to you," he went on coldly and composedly, "and I beg you to listen to it.
What a wonder!" she said, letting fall her hood, and without stopping, she went on into the dressing room.
How simple and natural were her words, and how likely that she was simply sleepy!
She spoke, and marveled at the confident, calm, and natural tone in which she was speaking, and the choice of the words she used.
When she came into the bedroom, he was already in bed.
Reply by Top."
Herbert was still in a sleep.
"Judge coolly.
Neb! Go, go!"
Had he resisted, and been overcome in the struggle?
"What o'clock is it?" asked Gideon Spilett.
"Quick!"
"But the heart?" asked Harding.
The contusion, or rather the contused wound appeared,--an oval below the chest between the third and fourth ribs.
"Ten."
"Dead!" exclaimed Pencroft, with a groan.
"Quick!" said Harding.
You must aid me with your advice, your experience!"
"Herbert wounded.
The animal sprang at his master's call.
But for your boy's sake, calm yourself.
Now, what styptics, what antiphlogistics ought to be employed?
"The heart has not been touched; if it had been, Herbert would be dead!"
While the engineer thought, his eyes fell on Top, who, going backwards and forwards seemed to say,--
Nor could they see traces of any struggle, any devastation, either in the hut, or in the palisade.
Spilett, seeing there was nothing he could do at that moment, busied himself in preparing some nourishment, while attentively watching that part of the enclosure against the hill, at which an attack might be expected.
They have killed him!"
He understood, he knew what was expected of him.
"Yes, and he will come back, the faithful animal!"
"In a moment," said Harding.
Herbert was deadly pale, and his pulse so feeble that Spilett only felt it beat at long intervals, as if it was on the point of stopping.
Poor Mr. Herbert!"
"He will get there!" said the reporter.
"He lives," said he, "but he must be carried--"
We will watch for his return."
The engineer opened the gate, and seeing smoke a hundred feet off in the wood, he fired in that direction.
Herberts back was covered with blood from another contused wound, by which the ball had immediately escaped.
It was folded and fastened to Top's collar in a conspicuous position.
"Yes," answered the reporter, "but now we have the right to be merciless!"
"No, Pencroft," replied Cyrus Harding, "no!
We have need of all our self-possession."
"They have killed him!" he cried.
Top sprang forwards, then almost immediately disappeared.
His pulse still beats.
"I'll pay the villains off!" cried the sailor, shaking his fist in a menacing manner.
"Ah, if the telegraph still acted, he might be warned!
Top bounded at these words.
"Neb, Top!
But that is impossible now!
As to leaving Pencroft and Herbert here alone, we could not do it!
The ammunition only, with which Ayrton had been supplied, had disappeared with him.
He has even uttered a moan.
Gideon Spilett, at the moment he scaled the palisade, had clearly seen some one of the convicts running along the southern spur of Mount Franklin, towards whom Top had sprung.
"Yes, Top will go," said the reporter, who had understood the engineer.
Think only of this: Herbert must be saved!"
I will not stir.
Chapter 7
"No, Pencroft," replied the reporter.
I am in terrible perplexity.
Pencroft was silent, but a reaction set in, and great tears rolled down his cheeks.
Neither the engineer nor the reporter could calm him.
He will be sure to come!"
They could not speak.
"He must not be moved." said Gideon Spilett.
"Am not I here?"
He is not dead.
There he found a convict, who aiming at him, sent a ball through his hat.
"What! can't we carry him to Granite House?" asked Pencroft.
"Top, my dog," said the engineer, caressing the animal, "Neb, Top!
The road to the corral was familiar to him.
Almost immediately Top bounded into the corral, and the gate was quickly shut.
And he ran round the left corner of the palisade.
"Do not make us lose it, my friend."
"Why have they not done so?" said Herbert.
There was no fear of damp in the middle of that thick mass of granite. Many natural excavations situated in the upper passage were enlarged either by pick-axe or mine, and Granite House thus became a general warehouse, containing all the provisions, arms, tools, and spare utensils--in a word, all the stores of the colony.
"Poor Ayrton!
I have no right to speak."
Yes! all was explained, everything--except the presence of the torpedo in the waters of the channel!
Ayrton hesitated at first to reply, and Cyrus Harding regretted that Pencroft had so thoughtlessly put this question.
"Pencroft, think of Ayrton!" said Herbert, taking the sailor's hand.
We will not leave a corner of the island unexplored.
At any rate, for humanity's sake alone, it would be right to wait.
"Do you think that is useful?" asked the engineer.
Not one can land there now without our permission!"
"Captain Harding," replied Ayrton, "I can give you no better advice in this matter.
"Is that your opinion, Pencroft?" asked the engineer.
After all, the island was large and fertile. If any sentiment of honesty yet remained in the bottom of their hearts, these wretches might perhaps be reclaimed.
And now the pieces were as brilliant as if they had been on board a frigate of the United States Navy.
Thus their behavior towards the pirates was agreed upon, although Pencroft augured nothing good from it.
In the fabrication of these pieces, everything depends on employing a metal with the highest possible power of resistance, and steel is incontestably that metal of all others which resists the best.
It was under the action of this cylinder, charged with some explosive substance, nitro-glycerine, picrate, or some other material of the same nature, that the water of the channel had been raised like a dome, the bottom of the brig crushed in, and she had sunk instantly, the damage done to her hull being so considerable that it was impossible to refloat her.
"Everybody is against me!
He had never thought of his proposal being met with any objection.
Was it he who threw us that bottle, when the vessel made her first cruise?
If it was he, he possesses a power which renders him master of the elements."
Pencroft understood.
Louise Merrick was the eldest of Uncle John's nieces, having just passed her eighteenth birthday.
"Partly, miss.
"How do you get to Miss Thompson's place?"
Dan's already now.
CHAPTER VII.
As he appeared indisposed to say more on the subject she asked: "Did you sail with Captain Wegg?"
"I guessed it."
"Beth and Patsy have planned a tramp to the lake, and a row after water-lilies."
The other fellows were too clever for my young friend, Joseph Wegg, and knocked out his patent."
"Pah!" said the Major, scornfully.
"Well?"
"And have a cow and some pigs!" cried the girl.
"Yes, my dear.
"And it's true," asserted the other.
UNCLE JOHN'S FARM.
"I'm so sorry!" said Patsy, sympathetically.
"Somewhere at the north of the State, I believe."
"It's gone, John; and you've got the farm.
The farm's the thing.
"Perhaps so; at an expense that will add to your loss."
He wanted capital to patent the pump and put it on the market.
'These Jews are dangerous.
Every sheet of parchment must contain an equal number of lines, and the breadth of each column had to be thirty letters wide.
If, after your copy has itself been examined, three corrections have to be made, that copy must be destroyed.'
15.) But He saw that, even from a human standpoint, the nation could not be helped in this way, and that the Jews would only rebel against the Romans to their destruction.
The first wall fell, then the second and the third, until the Roman soldiers, now as mad as the Jews themselves, burst into the Holy City, hewing down the defenceless people at every step.
Just so was it with the Hebrew copies of God's Word.
The Roman soldiers hesitated, but the Jews promised most faithfully to keep their word.
'The law of Moses is like salt, but the Talmud is balmy spice,' they would say.
'The ink you write with must be of a pure black, made only from a mixture of soot, charcoal, and honey.
'Ah, my countrymen,' he cried, 'we did nothing without God in the past, but now you are fighting against Him.
At last the end came.
The letter 'A'--that is the Hebrew letter which stands for 'A'--occurs 42,377 times; the letter 'B' 35,218, and so on.
But a furious madness had possessed the people, and they refused to yield.
He was not a Christian, but he could see plainly enough that God was no longer with His people.
Josephus pleaded in vain.
They were looking for an earthly king, and the beautiful words spoken by the ancient prophets had no meaning to them.
These explanations, all collected together, are called 'The Talmud.' Now the learned Jews grew so fond of their Talmud, that they declared a man to be a blockhead if he knew only the Scriptures and not the Talmud explanation.
Locked up in a dead language, kept close, away from the world, they were like the jar of wheat which could not grow.
Though you know the whole Book of the Law by heart, you must not write a single word from memory, but raise your eyes to your copy, and pronounce the word aloud before trusting it to your pen.
Only the nervous system cannot so easily be adjusted to the new regime.
In the second place come games and sport, which may enter into their right if fatigue can be avoided.
The same effect which religion produces may thus be secured by any other deep interest: service for a great human cause, enthusiasm for a gigantic plan, even the prospect of a great personal success.
A go-as-you-please method characterizes our whole society from the kindergarten to the height of life.
Skill, tact, and experience are needed there.
The desire to hide them may often be itself a part of the disease.
To be sure, we must not forget that we have to deal here with a causal and not with a purposive point of view.
How psychotherapy is related to the church will interest us later.
To prescribe drugs is always quicker than to influence the mind; to cure a morphinist by hyoscine needs less effort than to cure him by suggestion.
There is no one for whom there is not a chance for work in our social fabric.
But if frequent pauses are made, and each short, the result is with many individuals the opposite.
Harmonious joyful company, as different as possible from the depressing company of the sanitariums, will add its pleasantness.
Yet mere flippant excitement and superficial entertainment is nothing but a cheap counterfeit of what is needed.
Voluntary effort is needed, and this is the field where the psychotherapist must put in his most intelligent effort.
But from such a causal point of view, we should not underestimate the manifold good which can come from the causal effect of religious and ethical ideas.
And yet no psychical treatment can start successfully so long as the patient is brooding on secret thoughts at the bottom of his mind.
Perceptions and associations, reactions and expressions ought to be examined with the same carefulness with which the conscientious physician examines the blood and the urine.
Too often he is entirely unconscious of the sources of trouble or else he has social reasons to deceive the world and himself, and ultimately the physician.
This fundamental law of the relativity of psychical impressions controls our whole life.
Again everything depends upon the experience and tact of the physician.
This relativity of the mental reaction on the demands of life must always be in the foreground of the psychotherapeutic regime.
The whole equipment of the modern laboratory ought to be put at its disposal.
Every element of a man's life history, impressions of early childhood, his love and his successes, his diseases and his distresses, his acquaintances and his reading, his talent, his character, his sincerity, his energy, his intelligence--everything--ought to determine the choice of the psychotherapeutic steps.
Moreover there the technique may be more complex and subtle.
But one rule is common to all of them: never use psychotherapeutic methods in a schematic way like a rigid pattern.
As soon as new faith in life is given, and given even where a sincere prognosis must be a sad one, a great and not seldom unexpected improvement is secured.
We eulogize the principle of following the paths of own true interest and mean by that too often paths of least resistance.
Strong drinks like cocktails are absolutely to be excluded.
The boy may pass as all right if we meet him at a ball; only his tutor knows the whole misery.
As it is entirely impossible to determine all those factors by any sufficient inquiry, most of the adjustment of method must be left to the instinct of the physician, in which wide experience, solid knowledge, tact, and sympathy ought to be blended. Even the way in which the patient reacts on the method will often guide the instinct of the well-trained psychotherapist.
Yet this general treatment may take and very often ought to take the opposite direction, not towards rest but towards work, not towards light distraction but towards serious effort, not towards reduction of engagements but towards energetic regulation.
The intellectual worker ought to decrease his work, the overbusy society woman ought to stay in bed one day in the week, the man in the midst of the rush of life ought to cut down his obligations, but probably each of them does better to go on than simply to swear off altogether.
Therapy is always only the last step.
While the advice of the physician ought thus to emphasize the positive elements which work, not towards rest, but toward a harmonious mental activity, we must not forget some essential negative prescriptions. Everything is to be avoided which interferes with the night's sleep. Furthermore, in the first place, alcohol must be avoided.
All is a matter of choice and adjustment to the particular needs in which all the personal factors of inherited constitution, acquired adjustments, social surroundings, temperament, and education, and the probable later development have to be most tactfully weighed.
Diagnosis and observation have to precede, and an inquiry into the causes of the disease is essential, and in every one of these steps psychology may play its role. The means of psychodiagnostic are not less manifold than those of psychotherapy.
This power is the act of attention. An attention which is trained and disciplined can hold its ideas against chance impulses.
As a matter of course, in the overwhelming mass of cases the frankness and the good will of the patient himself will support the physician and accordingly his examination is not obliged to trap the patient but simply to guide him to important points.
Ah! people might be sylphs.
Ah! it is true, I regret the grace of the ancient manners.
My friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a good contract, and then they had a good carouse.
Be grave in church, well and good.
Make way!
The doctor, on being consulted, declared that it might take place in February.
The wedding is not the housekeeping.
Neither any bad, nor any good odor.
Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is great.
at being petty.
With Cosette's garter, Homer would construct the Iliad.
She had reserved her decision on this point.
I regret the bride's garter.
He extricated Cosette from all difficulties.
"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with it.
One of the sides of that century was delicate, the other was magnificent; and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves. To-day, people are serious.
Be one of the gods.
The dreams of your bourgeois who set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet, ebony and calico.
Since the revolution, everything, including the ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave; your rigadoons are doctrinarian.
Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding a millionairess.
There's the epoch for you.
The grandfather was not the least happy of them all.
Happiness is only the necessary.
They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal.
He remained for a quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.
He would put in his poem, a loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor.
Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred thousand francs income.
I want the superfluous, the useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose.
"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God is caring for us."
It was then December.
--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"
why did Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances? Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter.
"It's an old plan of mine.
He who loves well lashes well.
A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at each other.
Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly spinster's indecision.
I belong to it.
Her heart and the Louvre.
The young man arrived, the old man was effaced; such is life.
Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.
"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed.
CHAPTER VI--THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY
For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg, and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."
But, in sooth! the stomach is an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which wants to have its wedding also.
Cosette became in the eyes of the law, Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent.
You smell nothing of life.
Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged everything, made everything easy.
People had no straps to their boots, they had no boots.
Presently Anne stepped out bareheaded into the chill autumn dusk; very determinedly and steadily she took her way down through the sere clover field over the log bridge and up through the spruce grove, lighted by a pale little moon hanging low over the western woods.
If you are I'll go and nurse you, you can depend on that.
I remembered everything and I just stood up in my place and shrieked out 'Marilla, you mustn't use that pudding sauce. There was a mouse drowned in it.
But it isn't good manners to tell your company what you are going to give them to eat, so I won't tell you what she said we could have to drink.
"I went up and saw Mrs. Barry myself and she treated me very insultingly.
Can I take her into the spare room to lay off her hat when she comes?
And you know one can dream so much better in a room where there are pretty things.
"I--I--must go right home."
"I wish you'd go, Marilla.
Our potato crop is very good this year.
You went and gave Diana currant wine instead of raspberry cordial.
I did not mean to--to--intoxicate Diana.
Diana had stood up very unsteadily; then she sat down again, putting her hands to her head.
Marilla whisked into the kitchen, grievously disturbed, leaving a very much distracted little soul in the porch behind her.
I know she doesn't but of course I'll ask her just as if I didn't know.
"Messy things," said Marilla, whose aesthetic sense was not noticeably developed.
"Don't cry any more, Anne.
I forgot to tell you before.' Oh, Diana, I shall never forget that awful moment if I live to be a hundred. Mrs. Chester Ross just LOOKED at me and I thought I would sink through the floor with mortification.
Diana and I are parted forever.
"I don't think you are a fit little girl for Diana to associate with. You'd better go home and behave yourself."
Likely she'd listen to you quicker than to me."
But there's a bottle half full of raspberry cordial that was left over from the church social the other night.
We had a plum pudding for dinner on Tuesday and there was half the pudding and a pitcherful of sauce left over.
Lie down on the sofa for a little while and you'll be better.
It will seem so nice and grown-uppish. No fear of my forgetting to put the tea to draw when I have company.
I tried to be as polite and dignified as I could be, for I wanted Mrs. Chester Ross to think I was a ladylike little girl even if I wasn't pretty.
Oh, Marilla, it's a wonderful sensation just to think of it.
How could I? Just imagine if you were a poor little orphan girl that kind people had adopted and you had just one bosom friend in all the world.
"Oh, Marilla, I know by your face that it's been no use," she said sorrowfully.
She had a fearful headache all day yesterday.
"Oh, ever so many," said Anne forgetting to be dignified and jumping up quickly.
"It is fairly good, thank you.
And then into the parlor to sit?"
"I should think she would better punish Diana for being so greedy as to drink three glassfuls of anything," said Marilla shortly.
And at the same time Marilla recollected that she had put the bottle of raspberry cordial down in the cellar instead of in the pantry as she had told Anne.
"No, indeed!
It doesn't taste a bit like hers."
"I thought it was the cordial.
"And asking Diana if she takes sugar!
Diana poured herself out a tumblerful, looked at its bright-red hue admiringly, and then sipped it daintily.
Mrs. Barry, coming to the door in answer to a timid knock, found a white-lipped eager-eyed suppliant on the doorstep.
"I'll get it right off--I'll go and put the tea down this very minute."
To do her justice, she really believed Anne had made Diana drunk out of sheer malice prepense, and she was honestly anxious to preserve her little daughter from the contamination of further intimacy with such a child.
As a result just after Marilla had driven off to Carmody, Diana came over, dressed in HER second-best dress and looking exactly as it is proper to look when asked out to tea.
Oh, it sounds so--so--like Mrs. Thomas's husband!
You ARE able to imagine things after all or else you'd never have understood how I've longed for that very thing.
Marilla stared in blank amazement.
He never scolded a bit. He put the tea down himself and said we could wait awhile as well as not.
"Let me give you a bit of fruit cake and some of the cherry preserves.
It was a beautiful fairy story, Marilla.
Sit right up this very minute and tell me what you are crying about."
"Oh, you mustn't dream of going home without your tea," cried Anne in distress.
But I do wish you'd stay till after tea.
"Don't be foolish, Anne.
Diana, that was a terrible moment.
"Oh, Mrs. Barry, please forgive me.
Anne's lips quivered.
Mrs. Barry was a woman of strong prejudices and dislikes, and her anger was of the cold, sullen sort which is always hardest to overcome.
"She is very well, thank you.
Oh, please don't say that you won't let Diana play with me any more.
The tumblerfuls were generous ones and the raspberry cordial was certainly very nice.
I meant to be so--so--hospitable.
Take as much as you want.
I'll never forsake you.
I love bright red drinks, don't you?
Don't they give you a thrill--several thrills?
Diana got awfully sick and had to go home. Mrs. Barry told Mrs. Lynde she was simply dead drunk.
I lifted the mouse out with a spoon and threw it out in the yard and then I washed the spoon in three waters.
Search revealed it away back on the top shelf.
I just told her plainly that currant wine wasn't meant to be drunk three tumblerfuls at a time and that if a child I had to do with was so greedy I'd sober her up with a right good spanking."
They taste twice as good as any other color."
I told her it was all a mistake and you weren't to blame, but she just simply didn't believe me.
In vain Anne pleaded.
Marilla was very cross and I don't wonder. I'm a great trial to her.
It will be all right."
"I'm--I'm awful sick," she said, a little thickly.
"What do you want?" she said stiffly.
What on earth did you give her?"
OCTOBER was a beautiful month at Green Gables, when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson and the wild cherry trees along the lane put on the loveliest shades of dark red and bronzy green, while the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths.
No answer from Anne save more tears and stormier sobs!
Oh, it was such a pathetic tale, Diana. The tears just rained down over my cheeks while I mixed the cake.
It was like heaping coals of fire on my head.
"Why, three of those big glasses would have made her sick even if it had only been cordial.
"How perfectly lovely!
Matthew was so good.
If the solitude these mountains promise deceives me not, it is so; ah!
"All this caution of mine, which he must have taken for coyness, had apparently the effect of increasing his wanton appetite--for that is the name I give to his passion for me; had it been what he declared it to be, you would not know of it now, because there would have been no occasion to tell you of it.
But proceed; by-and-by I may tell you something that will astonish you as much as it will excite your compassion."
CHAPTER XXVIII.
And so, senora, or senor, or whatever you prefer to be, dismiss the fears that our appearance has caused you and make us acquainted with your good or evil fortunes, for from all of us together, or from each one of us, you will receive sympathy in your trouble."
But to shorten the long recital of my woes, I will pass over in silence all the artifices employed by Don Fernando for declaring his passion for me.
This offer, and their sound advice strengthened my resolution, and I never gave Don Fernando a word in reply that could hold out to him any hope of success, however remote.
Dorothea, however, did not interrupt her story, but went on in these words:
At the dawn of the same day that Little John left the inn, he started from Nottingham, homeward for Blyth.
Come, busk thee, Little John!
I fear me, though, there is but poor chance of my seeing such a pleasant sight." So saying, he stretched himself at length upon the ground, that he might not only see the sport the better, but that he might enjoy the merry sight at his ease.
"Stay!" said Little John.
But Little John suffered the most, for he had become unused to such stiff labor, and his joints were not as supple as they had been before he went to dwell with the Sheriff.
Thus spoke Robin Hood to himself, all his anger passing away like a breath from the windowpane, at the thought that perhaps his trusty right-hand man was in some danger of his life.
For I make my vow thou art one of the stoutest men that ever mine eyes beheld."
At last Little John trod upon a stick, which snapped under his foot, whereupon, hearing the noise, the Tanner turned quickly and caught sight of the yeoman.
"Nay," quoth the Tanner boldly--for, though taken by surprise, he was not a man to be frightened by big words--"thou liest in thy teeth.
Right glad were they to welcome such a merry blade as Little John.
His way led, all in the dewy morn, past the verge of Sherwood Forest, where the birds were welcoming the lovely day with a great and merry jubilee.
Methinks the other is strange to my ears.
The day was warm and sultry, so that while most of the band were scattered through the forest upon this mission and upon that, these few stout fellows lay lazily beneath the shade of the tree, in the soft afternoon, passing jests among themselves and telling merry stories, with laughter and mirth.
Fresh cans of ale were brought, and with jest and song and merry tales the hours slipped away on fleeting wings.
Accordingly, quitting the path, he went peeping this way and that through the underbrush, spying now here and now there, with all the wiles of a master of woodcraft, and of one who had more than once donned a doublet of Lincoln green.
Then, raising his staff, stout Arthur dealt him another blow upon the ribs.
Who art thou that comest ranging Sherwood's paths?
"Let us first measure our cudgels.
As for my countenance, it is what it is; and, for the matter of that, thine own is none too pretty, thou saucy fellow."
Now Arthur had been to Nottingham Town the day before Little John set forth on his errand, there to sell a halfscore of tanned cowhides.
"Help!
I must see to this matter, and that quickly."
The folk there call him Jock o' Nottingham; we call him Will Scathelock.
"Nay, I pass not for length," answered the Tanner.
"Stop!" roared Little John.
First he looked up and then he looked down, and then, tilting his cap over one eye, he slowly scratched the back part of his head.
His name is Little John, and mine Robin Hood."
Little John and the Tanner of Blyth
So, without more ado, each gripped his staff in the middle, and, with fell and angry looks, they came slowly together.
Seeing that the Tanner had spied him out, Little John put a bold face upon the matter.
All this time Robin Hood lay beneath the bush, rejoicing at such a comely bout of quarterstaff.
At last Little John struck like a flash, and--"rap!"--the Tanner met the blow and turned it aside, and then smote back at Little John, who also turned the blow; and so this mighty battle began.
Thou didst break the crown of a friend of mine at the fair at Ely last October.
"Ay, marry, will I! Hey for a merry life!" cried he, leaping aloft and snapping his fingers, "and hey for the life I love!
"What may be thy name, good fellow?" said Robin, next, turning to the Tanner.
"Will I join thy band?" cried the Tanner joyfully.
I will follow thee to the ends of the earth, good master, and not a herd of dun deer in all the forest but shall know the sound of the twang of my bowstring."
So, being vexed to his heart by this, he set forth at dawn of day to seek Little John at the Blue Boar, or at least to meet the yeoman on the way, and ease his heart of what he thought of the matter.
Suddenly Robin Hood smote his knee.
I am no thief, but an honest craftsman.
Now it was an ill piece of luck for Little John that he left his duty for his pleasure, and he paid a great score for it, as we are all apt to do in the same case, as you shall see.
Bide thou here till I bring thee money to pay our good Hugh.
ONE FINE DAY, not long after Little John had left abiding with the Sheriff and had come back, with his worship's cook, to the merry greenwood, as has just been told, Robin Hood and a few chosen fellows of his band lay upon the soft sward beneath the greenwood tree where they dwelled.
Let me help thee to thy feet, good Master Little John, and let me brush the dust from off thy coat."
Four merry wags were at the Blue Boar Inn; a butcher, a beggar, and two barefoot friars.
So for a long time they both of them went hunting about, Little John after the Tanner, and the Tanner after the deer.
At this Robin laughed again, and, turning to the Tanner, he said, "Wilt thou join my band, good Arthur?
I warrant he hath no better customers in all Nottinghamshire than we." So saying, Robin left them and entered the forest.
"Heaven forbid that I should doubt thee, for I care for no taste of thy staff myself, Little John.
"Hold!" roared Little John.
In the good town of Blyth there lived a stout tanner, celebrated far and near for feats of strength and many tough bouts at wrestling and the quarterstaff.
"Marry come up with a murrain!" cried the Tanner, for he, too, had talked himself into a fume.
It must be looked to, and that in quick season.
"Big words ne'er killed so much as a mouse. Who art thou that talkest so freely of cracking the head of Arthur a Bland?
"Nay," quoth Robin Hood, laughing louder than all.
Now look to thyself, fellow!"
Not far from the trysting tree was a great rock in which a chamber had been hewn, the entrance being barred by a massive oaken door two palms'-breadth in thickness, studded about with spikes, and fastened with a great padlock.
"Surely," quoth he to himself, "that is Little John's voice, and he is talking in anger also.
"Now," quoth Arthur a Bland to himself, when he had come to that part of the road that cut through a corner of the forest, "no doubt at this time of year the dun deer are coming from the forest depths nigher to the open meadow lands.
"My staff is long enough to knock down a calf; so look to thyself, fellow, I say again."
None thought of time or tide till the night was so far gone that Little John put by the thought of setting forth upon his journey again that night, and so bided at the Blue Boar Inn until the morrow.
"And so thought I, also," cried Robin Hood, bursting out of the thicket and shouting with laughter till the tears ran down his cheeks.
I must needs own that there are those of my band can handle a seven-foot staff more deftly than I; yet no man in all Nottinghamshire can draw gray goose shaft with my fingers.
"Nay," quoth he again, after a time, "this matter must e'en be looked into." So, quitting the highroad, he also entered the thickets, and began spying around after stout Arthur a Bland.
"That cannot be; but all that I can say will be of little avail.
I arrived at Geneva.
"You are mistaken," said he.
It was eight o'clock when we landed; we walked for a short time on the shore, enjoying the transitory light, and then retired to the inn and contemplated the lovely scene of waters, woods, and mountains, obscured in darkness, yet still displaying their black outlines.
My father and Ernest yet lived, but the former sunk under the tidings that I bore.
After having landed, they proceeded to search the country, parties going in different directions among the woods and vines.
The wind, which had fallen in the south, now rose with great violence in the west.
The moon had reached her summit in the heavens and was beginning to descend; the clouds swept across it swifter than the flight of the vulture and dimmed her rays, while the lake reflected the scene of the busy heavens, rendered still busier by the restless waves that were beginning to rise.
The report of the pistol brought a crowd into the room.
Great God!
I know not; I lost sensation, and chains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me.
The magistrate appeared at first perfectly incredulous, but as I continued he became more attentive and interested; I saw him sometimes shudder with horror; at others a lively surprise, unmingled with disbelief, was painted on his countenance.
Cease; you know not what it is you say."
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.
A fiend had snatched from me every hope of future happiness; no creature had ever been so miserable as I was; so frightful an event is single in the history of man.
I was anxious and watchful, while my right hand grasped a pistol which was hidden in my bosom; every sound terrified me, but I resolved that I would sell my life dearly and not shrink from the conflict until my own life or that of my adversary was extinguished.
When I recovered I found myself surrounded by the people of the inn; their countenances expressed a breathless terror, but the horror of others appeared only as a mockery, a shadow of the feelings that oppressed me.
I now related my history briefly but with firmness and precision, marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation.
Everywhere I turn I see the same figure--her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier.
Chapter 23
The windows of the room had before been darkened, and I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber.
"I will exert myself, and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes.
Melancholy followed, but by degrees I gained a clear conception of my miseries and situation and was then released from my prison.
Alas!
He endeavoured to soothe me as a nurse does a child and reverted to my tale as the effects of delirium.
But why should I dwell upon the incidents that followed this last overwhelming event?
She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.
He, however, answered mildly, "I would willingly afford you every aid in your pursuit, but the creature of whom you speak appears to have powers which would put all my exertions to defiance.
As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins and tingling in the extremities of my limbs.
But I perceive your thoughts; you do not credit my narrative and do not intend to pursue my enemy with the punishment which is his desert." As I spoke, rage sparkled in my eyes; the magistrate was intimidated.
But I discovered no trace of him and was beginning to conjecture that some fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces when suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream.
Know that, one by one, my friends were snatched away; I was left desolate.
My own strength is exhausted, and I must tell, in a few words, what remains of my hideous narration.
If I looked up, I saw scenes which were familiar to me in my happier time and which I had contemplated but the day before in the company of her who was now but a shadow and a recollection.
The story is too connected to be mistaken for a dream, and I have no motive for falsehood." My manner as I thus addressed him was impressive but calm; I had formed in my own heart a resolution to pursue my destroyer to death, and this purpose quieted my agony and for an interval reconciled me to life.
It came from the room into which Elizabeth had retired.
Why did I not then expire!
For they had called me mad, and during many months, as I understood, a solitary cell had been my habitation.
I was bewildered, in a cloud of wonder and horror.
What then became of me?
However, it was hardly morning, and I might reasonably hope to arrive by night.
Tears streamed from my eyes.
"I do not doubt that he hovers near the spot which I inhabit, and if he has indeed taken refuge in the Alps, he may be hunted like the chamois and destroyed as a beast of prey.
I had been calm during the day, but so soon as night obscured the shapes of objects, a thousand fears arose in my mind.
What is it you fear?"
In this state I was carried back and placed on a bed, hardly conscious of what had happened; my eyes wandered round the room as if to seek something that I had lost.
For a moment only did I lose recollection; I fell senseless on the ground.
There were no horses to be procured, and I must return by the lake; but the wind was unfavourable, and the rain fell in torrents.
My rage is unspeakable when I reflect that the murderer, whom I have turned loose upon society, still exists.
But to a Genevan magistrate, whose mind was occupied by far other ideas than those of devotion and heroism, this elevation of mind had much the appearance of madness.
A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.
Life is obstinate and clings closest where it is most hated.
While I still hung over her in the agony of despair, I happened to look up.
Who can follow an animal which can traverse the sea of ice and inhabit caves and dens where no man would venture to intrude?
When I had concluded my narration I said, "This is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power.
The magistrate listened to me with attention and kindness.
The monster continued to utter wild and incoherent self-reproaches.
Did you not call this a glorious expedition?
Scoffing devil!
Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror, because at every new incident your fortitude was to be called forth and your courage exhibited, because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome.
A scene has just passed of such uncommon interest that, although it is highly probable that these papers may never reach you, yet I cannot forbear recording it.
His eloquence is forcible and touching; nor can I hear him, when he relates a pathetic incident or endeavours to move the passions of pity or love, without tears.
I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.
I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment.
I hoped to induce you to grant me a boat with which I could pursue my enemy.
Oh!
Farewell, Walton!
Was there no injustice in this?
Years will pass, and you will have visitings of despair and yet be tortured by hope.
How unlike it was to the blue seasons of the south!
Yet I fear such will be my fate; the men, unsupported by ideas of glory and honour, can never willingly continue to endure their present hardships.
Deprived of this respite, I should have sunk under my hardships.
I recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished.
I attempted to speak, but the words died away on my lips.
The rivers were covered with ice, and no fish could be procured; and thus I was cut off from my chief article of maintenance.
O blessed sleep!
When he heard the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror and sprung towards the window.
Yet I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery.
His voice became fainter as he spoke, and at length, exhausted by his effort, he sank into silence.
Do not return to your families with the stigma of disgrace marked on your brows.
I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing.
When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated.
I sat by his bed, watching him; his eyes were closed, and I thought he slept; but presently he called to me in a feeble voice, and bidding me come near, said, "Alas!
His recovery was slow, and he was left behind.
The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank.
Besides, his prospects were good.
Some, very few and seen there but seldom, led mysterious lives, had preserved an undefaced energy with the temper of buccaneers and the eyes of dreamers.
Nothing offered just then, and, while waiting, he associated naturally with the men of his calling in the port.
They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea.
Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss for ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smouldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity.
After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the regions so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages.
But now and again an uncontrollable rush of anguish would grip him bodily, make him gasp and writhe under the blankets, and then the unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such sensations filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost. Then fine weather returned, and he thought no more about It.
At the call of an idea they had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their fathers.
His lameness, however, persisted, and when the ship arrived at an Eastern port he had to go to the hospital.
Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire.
To Jim that gossiping crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more unsubstantial than so many shadows.
That truth is not so often made apparent as people might think.
He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference.
She held on straight for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy.
He walked slowly aboard, handsome and grave in his white gown and large turban.
They appeared to live in a crazy maze of plans, hopes, dangers, enterprises, ahead of civilisation, in the dark places of the sea; and their death was the only event of their fantastic existence that seemed to have a reasonable certitude of achievement.
The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought.
He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread--but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work.
The majority were men who, like himself, thrown there by some accident, had remained as officers of country ships.
Jim saw nothing but the disorder of his tossed cabin.
They loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white.
He lay there battened down in the midst of a small devastation, and felt secretly glad he had not to go on deck.
Directly he could walk without a stick, he descended into the town to look for some opportunity to get home.
The five whites on board lived amidships, isolated from the human cargo.
And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle--viscous, stagnant, dead.
The Patna, with a slight hiss, passed over that plain, luminous and smooth, unrolled a black ribbon of smoke across the sky, left behind her on the water a white ribbon of foam that vanished at once, like the phantom of a track drawn upon a lifeless sea by the phantom of a steamer.
There were perfumes in it, suggestions of infinite repose, the gift of endless dreams.
CHAPTER 2
Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
They came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous campongs, from villages by the sea.
The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.
This reward eluded him.
The nights descended on her like a benediction.
A string of servants followed, loaded with his luggage; the Patna cast off and backed away from the wharf.
These were of two kinds.
She was headed between two small islets, crossed obliquely the anchoring-ground of sailing-ships, swung through half a circle in the shadow of a hill, then ranged close to a ledge of foaming reefs.
In time, beside the original disdain there grew up slowly another sentiment; and suddenly, giving up the idea of going home, he took a berth as chief mate of the Patna.
She cleared the Strait, crossed the bay, continued on her way through the 'One-degree' passage.
The awnings covered the deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the ocean.
They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement, serving Chinamen, Arabs, half-castes--would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough.
He had come across that man before--in the street perhaps. He was positive he had never spoken to him.
And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly.
I followed up in time to see the captain rush at him and knock him down flat on his back. He did not strike him again: he stood bending over him and speaking angrily but quite low.
I fancy he was asking him why the devil he didn't go and stop the engines, instead of making a row about it on deck.
'The captain kept on moving here and there on the bridge; he seemed calm enough, only he stumbled several times; and once as I stood speaking to him he walked right into me as though he had been stone-blind.
They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
The face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors.
I thought the precaution reasonable.
'After you had concluded you had collided with something floating awash, say a water-logged wreck, you were ordered by your captain to go forward and ascertain if there was any damage done.
I might have been a little startled: all this happened in such a quiet way and so very suddenly.
I went back to tell the captain.
A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking of the ship: 'She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling over a stick.' The illustration was good: the questions were aiming at facts, and the official Inquiry was being held in the police court of an Eastern port.
He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for the better information of these men who wanted facts.
The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent listener.
I knew then there must be a big hole below the water-line.' He paused.
He exclaimed, "My God!
For days, for many days, he had spoken to no one, but had held silent, incoherent, and endless converse with himself, like a prisoner alone in his cell or like a wayfarer lost in a wilderness.
Jim's eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear.
Jim answered another question and was tempted to cry out, 'What's the good of this! what's the good!' He tapped with his foot slightly, bit his lip, and looked away over the heads.
He was anxious to make this clear.
The sound of his own truthful statements confirmed his deliberate opinion that speech was of no use to him any longer.
CHAPTER 4
The engineer slid down the starboard ladder and bolted round the skylight to the engine-room companion which was on the port side.
He mumbled to himself; all I heard of it were a few words that sounded like "confounded steam!" and "infernal steam!"--something about steam.
At present he was answering questions that did not matter though they had a purpose, but he doubted whether he would ever again speak out as long as he lived.
That man there seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty.
This had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of the utmost importance, and fortunately he remembered everything.
'I did not,' said Jim. 'I was told to call no one and to make no noise for fear of creating a panic.
'Yes,' said the big assessor, with a dreamy smile at the blotting-pad; his fingers played incessantly, touching the paper without noise.
I came upon the second engineer getting up at the foot of the bridge-ladder: he seemed dazed, and told me he thought his left arm was broken; he had slipped on the top step when getting down while I was forward.
The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of staring shadows.
Facts!
Did you think it likely from the force of the blow?' asked the assessor sitting to the left.
He was becoming irrelevant; a question to the point cut short his speech, like a pang of pain, and he felt extremely discouraged and weary.
I knew there was no other bulkhead in the ship but the collision bulkhead separating the forepeak from the forehold.
He made no definite answer to what I had to tell.
He answered truthfully by a curt 'Yes, I did'; and fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed within him.
This fellow--ran the thought--looks at me as though he could see somebody or something past my shoulder.
Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as after a final parting.
His left arm hung by his side.
I thought . . .'
He met the eyes of the white man. The glance directed at him was not the fascinated stare of the others. It was an act of intelligent volition.
They wanted facts.
He was made to answer another question so much to the point and so useless, then waited again.
I took one of the lamps that were hung under the awnings and went forward. After opening the forepeak hatch I heard splashing in there.
Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends.
Outside the court the sun blazed--within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed.
His mouth was tastelessly dry, as though he had been eating dust, then salt and bitter as after a drink of sea-water.
Jim between two questions forgot himself so far as to find leisure for a thought.
He was coming to that, he was coming to that--and now, checked brutally, he had to answer by yes or no.
But when they pay greatly, their high value is due to the impossibility of competition.
A man having two umbrellas keeps one at his office and the other at home; a student having two books of the same kind keeps one at his room and the other at the university; a farmer having two hoes keeps one at the barn and the other in a distant field, and by this distribution the agents are increased in efficiency.
II. EFFECTS OF SOCIAL CHANGES IN RAISING THE RENTS OF INDIRECT AGENTS
Social changes are constantly causing agents to shift from lower to higher uses.
Inventions and improvements thus gradually becoming common property, increase the free goods and free uses not bearing rent and open to every one.
3.
In this search for new devices the man who can see most quickly and clearly has a key to wealth.
A machine is an arrangement of material things through which force may be indirectly applied to move matter.
The cars, mules, dynamos, steam-engines, and other agents combined to furnish transportation, have a special earning power because other similar agents are forbidden to be used in that market.
Improved types of machinery more or less rapidly displace the older, less efficient types, which, therefore, more or less completely lose their rent-bearing power long before they are physically worn out.
Agents of the same kind may diminish in number, either absolutely or relatively.
In some cases, however, improvements such as the dredging of harbors or as the protecting of forests, are made by men collectively through the agency of governments.
If the quality or efficiency of looms is doubled, it is as if their number had grown in like proportion.
1.
A mineral spring, because of the supposed or proved healing properties of its waters, may be as good as a mine to the owner.
An urgent demand for special machinery raises quickly its rent and value.
Ten or fifteen years ago the number of horses in the United States was found to have decreased, and there was much comment on this evidence of a declining industry.
Some kinds of agents, as rare minerals or tools that can be produced only by highly skilled labor, cannot be increased rapidly in number and remain high in price for a long period; and favorably located building sites illustrate the same principle.
No fast line divides machinery as regards form, purpose, or cause of value, from the artificially improved natural agents that we have been discussing.
Other tracts less fertile, or for some reason less available, are ditched, tiled, and diked, and fertilizers are carried up steep hillsides to make a soil upon the very crags.
In some cases powerful or wealthy men can bring about social changes in entirely legitimate ways.
A rise in the value of any agent at once causes an attempt to duplicate it or to find a substitute for it; this attempt, if successful, puts a check or sets a limit to the rise.
Increase in machinery may be either in quality or quantity.
In an American watch-factory one man tends twelve or fifteen automatic machines.
3.
Fitness to produce nettles is not ordinarily a virtue in land, but the discovery that certain fields produce a superior quality of the nettle used for heckling cloth, causes them to take on a new value.
During the Boer War horses and mules rose in price in the United States on account of British purchases.
The first of these will be considered in this section.
This evidently is only a special illustration of the principle just stated, where it is not easy to find a substitute for certain agents.
In most cases, however, social changes are impersonally caused.
5.
It is said that lace machinery is sometimes thrown out of use for several years, until a sudden renewal of the demand for lace causes the rental to equal, in two years, more than the original cost.
1.
Such a lucky find has lifted the mortgage from a farm in eastern Pennsylvania, from which, in two or three years, has been taken feldspar exceeding in value the agricultural products of the same land in the last fifty years.
Just as a field is drained, plowed, and cultivated to fit it better to yield a crop, so is the iron ore shaped into a form called a machine, better fitted to cut, carve, and weave as man wills. Machines are merely adaptations of natural resources.
The aim of a progressive society is to enlarge the environment, and constantly to adapt it better to the service of wants.
Somewhere, however, the desire for these changes must arise in the minds of individuals.
When improvements in agriculture that are applicable to a considerable area of land take place, and the product thus is increased and cheapened, the poorer land is abandoned.
For, if consumers increase, a given supply of agents becomes relatively smaller than before.
Public franchises entitle the owners to special, sometimes exclusive, privileges, and protect them legally from competition.
Again, social changes are produced immorally, if not illegitimately, when wealthy men or influential politicians cause laws to be passed which inure to their advantage but which may ruin many other citizens.
It was not at once recognized that there was embodied in horse-flesh more horse-power than ever before, as a single Norman horse has the strength of several Mexican mustangs.
A small brass rod is fed automatically to the machine; a piece is cut off, is picked up by a human-like metal hand; is put into a lathe, and shifted or held firmly while it goes through fifteen or twenty processes; and then is dropped into a box where it is ready for the "assembling" of the watch.
5.
In its economic function the beast of burden may not illogically be classed with inanimate machines.
As the machinery improves, factories making allied products are grouped to make a system still more efficient.
Some of the groupings in the chemical and physical world that do not fit man's purposes may be made to do so.
It is often assumed to be a peculiar thing, sharply in contrast to other changes in value.
If some of the competing machines are destroyed, the rents of the machines that remain rise, while if new supplies are found, either in nature or by improved industrial processes, the rents of the older agents fall.
In commerce and transportation, new ways are opened by canals, railroads, and tunnels. An isthmian canal will raise the efficiency of ships plying between New York and San Francisco, enabling them to carry a greater amount of freight within a year.
The world in this way becomes more and more a great workshop, better and better adjusted to man's wants.
Peculiar fitness for the cultivation of celery may convert marsh land into a substantial source of income.
The log, once started through the mill, is carried automatically from one machine to another until it emerges as a roll of paper or as a box of tooth-picks, ready for use.
The increase of rents is due to two causes: changes in the agents by which they become more efficient technically, or more numerous; and changes taking place outside of the agents, affecting the utility of the products.
He can strive to increase the number and quality and to get control of such agents as he foresees will yield higher rents.
This end, therefore, must be in itself desirable, and social organization must be such as to present a motive to the men to make the needed effort.
Not all franchises are valuable; many street-railways are unfortunate ventures, the earnings being insufficient to pay expenses, to say nothing of interest on the investment.
The individual owner who profits by them is powerless to affect the result. He can only adapt his conduct in some measure so as to reap an advantage.
But the use of the house, or that of land for a school ground or campus, secures a certain gratification, an immaterial good.
The income is "funded" because it corresponds to an abiding fund of wealth.
There was a long-standing dispute in economic literature regarding the difference between productive and unproductive labor. Productive labor was said to be that which embodied itself in abiding material form.
A building used as a factory is called productive, but used by the owner as a dwelling it is called unproductive because the service it renders does not appear in material form.
INCOME AS A SERIES OF GRATIFICATIONS
Thus, any durable good may be looked upon as embodying a series of incomes ranging from present to future in varying degrees.
We may liken man's life to a journey in which the supplies of food are gotten at the stations.
Thus, more and more, the estimates placed by men on goods come to depend on knowledge and foresight, and not on immediate impressions and feelings.
No impression on the nerves or on the senses is lasting.
The value of the mass of wealth in possession and yielding income, rests in large part upon its power of contributing to income in some future period.
But many things existing which could be used to secure a gratification are not in fact treated as consumption goods.
The thickness of the walls was such that there were rooms within them.
It was like dropping water.
Impossible to make out his way.
Their staircases twisted, turned, ascended, and descended.
The floors of these hives reached from the cellars to the attics.
A confessional was grafted on to an alcove.
He was encompassed by a net of wonders.
CHAPTER II.
It realized the fables of enchanted castles.
Moreover, this was a labyrinth.
Not a sound.
Then a crossway, with rooms on every side.
He stood still and listened.
It was no one. It was only the reflection of himself in a mirror, dressed as a nobleman.
He was burning to be off, to get outside, to see Dea again.
In palaces after the Italian fashion, and Corleone Lodge was one, there were very few doors, but abundance of tapestry screens and curtained doorways.
Mirrors repeated the light of precious stones, and sparkles glittered in the darkest corners.
He examined the quaint arrangements of the rambling building, and their yet quainter fittings.
At each step he was stopped by some magnificent object which appeared to retard his exit, and to be unwilling to let him pass.
There were pleasant odours now and then, and he crossed currents of perfume, as though passing by invisible flowers.
A house for Mab or a jewel for Geo.
He felt himself bound and held back.
What a horrible palace! he thought.
He listened.
Restless, he wandered through the maze, asking himself what it all meant--whether he was in prison; chafing, thirsting for the fresh air.
The tops of the high windows were converted into small rooms and glass attics, forming pretty habitable lanterns.
Everywhere--on the ceilings, on the walls, and on the very floors--were representations, in velvet or in metal, of birds, of trees; of luxuriant vegetation, picked out in reliefs of lacework; tables covered with jet carvings, representing warriors, queens, and tritons armed with the scaly terminations of a hydra.
All was deserted, silent, splendid, sinister.
Cut crystals combining prismatic effects with those of reflection.
Everywhere was magnificence, at once refined and stupendous; if it was not the most diminutive of palaces, it was the most gigantic of jewel-cases.
If there was a giant, a hell-hound, a minotaur, to keep the gate of this enchanted palace, I would annihilate him.
They were gilded oubliettes, savouring both of the cloister and the harem.
One might have walked about there, unclothed.
They shall not keep me here by force.
Impossible!
He could not find one.
They were called "The Little Rooms."
The branches became a labyrinth.
Not a living creature was to be seen.
At times he thought that he must be returning towards his starting-point; then, that he saw some one approaching.
He strove to run; he was obliged to wander.
Woe to him who bars my exit!
Then he recognized himself, but not at once.
Pictures turning on false panels were exits and entrances.
"Oh!
If an army, I would exterminate it.
THE RESEMBLANCE OF A PALACE TO A WOOD.
There were attics, richly and brightly furnished; burnished recesses shining with Dutch tiles and Portuguese azulejos.
He thought that he had but one door to thrust open, while he had a skein of doors to unravel.
Perhaps the architects of "the little rooms," building for royalty and aristocracy, took as models the ramifications of coral beds, and the openings in a sponge.
What is that great tower yonder?
In every palace of that date there was a wonderful labyrinth of chambers and corridors, where luxury ran riot; gilding, marble, carved wainscoting, Eastern silks; nooks and corners, some secret and dark as night, others light and pleasant as the day.
The rooms never came to an end.
In those elegant caverns princes and lords stored their plunder.
It was within them that evil deeds were hatched.
He explored every passage that he came to.
Hidden pipes of hot air maintained a summer temperature in the building.
A zigzag of rooms, one running into another, led back to the starting-point.
Passages, niches, alcoves, and secret recesses.
Carpets everywhere.
It was as if some magician had caught up the month of June and imprisoned it in a labyrinth.
The view from each one was different.
He was in a dark narrow passage, closed, some few paces further on, by a curtain.
It was still so early that there were no signs of life without.
Here and there were closets, nominally wardrobes.
It was warm.
The deck was clear, and no stir was perceptible.
As we have already said, it often happens in life that some mighty help which we have held to have come from below has, in reality, come from above.
Homo and Gwynplaine shortly reached the brink.
He feels a vague obligation to become a guide.
A WATCH-DOG MAY BE A GUARDIAN ANGEL.
For a moment Gwynplaine was like a drunken man, so great is the shock of Hope's mighty return.
Gwynplaine was doing so.
He still wagged his tail--no longer joyfully, however, but with the sad and feeble wag of a dog troubled in his mind.
The paper boats made by children are of a somewhat similar shape.
Providence.
This slope shelved down to the Thames; and Gwynplaine, guided by Homo, descended it.
Gwynplaine, staggering under the weight of his emotion, looked around him, while the wolf went and lay down silently by his chain.
It was a long platform, floored and tarred, supported by a network of joists, and under which flowed the river.
Then the animal takes the direction of sense.
There was a lantern on the deck, close to the foremast, by the gleam of which was sketched in black, on the dim background of the night, what Gwynplaine recognized to be Ursus's old four-wheeled van.
These vessels had a mast on each deck.
Without noise or bark he pushed forward on his silent way.
Does it not seem that the law and the will of nature would have dictated Gwynplaine's headlong rush to throw himself upon life, happiness, love regained?
Who knows all the mysterious forms assumed by God?
But one step to descend, and Homo in a bound, and Gwynplaine in a stride, were on board.
Homo wagged his tail, and went on.
Having been so long out of service, it had become dreadfully rickety; it leant over feebly on one side; it had become quite paralytic from disuse; and, moreover, it was suffering from that incurable malady--old age.
But one was left to strike him--the thunderbolt of joy.
The gates of Paradise reopen; but before he enters he examines his ground.
Under the decks were the cabins, the doors of which opened into the hold and were lighted by glazed portholes.
Homo turned his head now and then, to make sure that Gwynplaine was behind him.
And it had just fallen upon him.
Meanwhile let those who have prevailed yield due honor to the defeated.
The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not shaken, was sorely tried.
Their habits of agriculture would have been developed, and their instincts of mutual slaughter repressed.
Unmolested by Indian enemies, and fed by a rich commerce, she would have put forth a vigorous growth.
The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable; but, from the stand-point of Liberty, that Providence is clear as the sun at noon.
Liberty may thank the Iroquois, that, by their insensate fury, the plans of her adversary were brought to nought, and a peril and a woe averted from her future.
The guns and tomahawks of the Iroquois were the ruin of their hopes.
Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete.
Here, then, closes this wild and bloody act of the great drama of New France; and now let the curtain fall, while we ponder its meaning.
In a measure, the occupation of the Jesuits was gone.
They ruined the trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror.
Could they have curbed or converted those ferocious bands, it is little less than certain that their dream would have become a reality.
But now new scenes succeed, and other actors enter on the stage, a hardy and valiant band, moulded to endure and dare,--the Discoverers of the Great West.
Indeed, in such vinous-caseous places cheese is on the house at all wine sales for prospective customers to snack upon and thus bring out the full flavor of the cellared vintages.
A country without a fit drink for cheese has no cheese fit for drink.
Switzerland also has another cheese favorite at home--Trauben (grape cheese), named from the Neuchatel wine in which it is aged.
Pommard and Port-Salut seem to be made for each other, as do Chateau Margaux and Camembert.
This is also true of our native Jersey Lightning and hard cider with their accompanying New York State cheese.
While a land flowing with milk and honey is the ideal of many, France, Italy, Spain or Portugal, flowing with wine and honey, suit a lot of gourmets better.
When something more fiery is needed we can twirl the flecks of pure gold in a chalice of Eau de Vie de Danzig and nibble on legitimate Danzig cheese unadulterated.
But professional wine tasters are forbidden any cheese between sips.
Red Cheshire with Light Tawny Port White Cheshire with Oloroso Sherry Blue Leicester with Old Vintage Port Green Roquefort with New Vintage Port
French la Jonchee is another potted thriller with not only coffee and rum mixed in during the making, but orange flower water, too.
This doctoring leads to fraudulent imitation, however, for either port or stout is put into counterfeit Cheshire cheese to make up for the richness it lacks.
"Fit for Drink"
Another perfect combination, if you can take it, is imported kuemmel with any caraway-seeded cheese, or cream cheese with a handy saucer of caraway seeds.
This is further fortified with brandy, white wine and pepper. One regional tipple with such brutally strong cheese is black coffee laced with gin.
The classical Greek cheese has always been Feta, and no doubt this was the kind that Circe combined most suitably with wine to make a farewell drink for her lovers.
In Italy white Gorgonzola is also put up in crocks with brandy.
She put further sweetness and body into the stirrup cup by stirring honey and barley meal into it. Today we might whip this up in an electric mixer to toast her memory.
The old man was dead.
Madmen know nothing.
To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts.
The ringing became more distinct:--It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness--until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.
And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it--oh so gently!
And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled.
But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone.
Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers--of my sagacity.
He was still sitting up in the bed listening;--just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
His fears had been ever since growing upon him.
I bade the gentlemen welcome.
I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed.
It grew louder, I say, louder every moment!--do you mark me well I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror.
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body.
It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
But the beating grew louder, louder!
Now this is the point.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door.
I loved the old man.
I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph.
I had been too wary for that.
Why would they not be gone?
louder!
I foamed--I raved--I swore!
Yes, he was stone, stone dead.
And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head.
THE TELL-TALE HEART.
The officers were satisfied.
They heard!--they suspected!--they knew!--they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think.
I removed the bed and examined the corpse.
I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased.
First of all I dismembered the corpse.
It was a low, dull, quick sound--much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.
I kept quite still and said nothing.
But even yet I refrained and kept still.
He had the eye of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it.
I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye--not even his--could have detected any thing wrong.
Object there was none.
I thought the heart must burst.
I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent, and noble blood.
A man might be respected with only one of these advantages, but without either he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few!
When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me.
The stranger learned about twenty words at the first lesson; most of them, indeed, were those which I had before understood, but I profited by the others.
Chapter 13
And what was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property.
She played a simple air, and her voice accompanied it in sweet accents, but unlike the wondrous strain of the stranger.
Agatha asked a question, to which the stranger only replied by pronouncing, in a sweet accent, the name of Felix.
Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?
"When she had finished, she gave the guitar to Agatha, who at first declined it.
On hearing this word, Felix came up hastily to the lady, who, when she saw him, threw up her veil, and I beheld a countenance of angelic beauty and expression.
He assisted her to dismount, and dismissing her guide, conducted her into the cottage.
She did not appear to understand him, but smiled.
Felix replied in a cheerful accent, and the old man was recommencing his music when someone tapped at the door.
I ardently desired to understand them, and bent every faculty towards that purpose, but found it utterly impossible.
When they separated Felix kissed the hand of the stranger and said, 'Good night sweet Safie.' He sat up much longer, conversing with his father, and by the frequent repetition of her name I conjectured that their lovely guest was the subject of their conversation.
"I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge.
It surprised me that what before was desert and gloomy should now bloom with the most beautiful flowers and verdure.
"The next morning Felix went out to his work, and after the usual occupations of Agatha were finished, the Arabian sat at the feet of the old man, and taking his guitar, played some airs so entrancingly beautiful that they at once drew tears of sorrow and delight from my eyes.
I perceived that the words they spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenances of the hearers.
"They were not entirely happy.
"A considerable period elapsed before I discovered one of the causes of the uneasiness of this amiable family: it was poverty, and they suffered that evil in a very distressing degree.
Yet why were these gentle beings unhappy?
When I returned, as often as it was necessary, I cleared their path from the snow and performed those offices that I had seen done by Felix.
"This reading had puzzled me extremely at first, but by degrees I discovered that he uttered many of the same sounds when he read as when he talked.
"I lay on my straw, but I could not sleep.
Happy, happy earth!
The young woman arranged the cottage and prepared the food, and the youth departed after the first meal.
Chapter 12
When I slept or was absent, the forms of the venerable blind father, the gentle Agatha, and the excellent Felix flitted before me.
Fit habitation for gods, which, so short a time before, was bleak, damp, and unwholesome.
Nothing could exceed the love and respect which the younger cottagers exhibited towards their venerable companion.
The young man and his companion often went apart and appeared to weep.
"This day was passed in the same routine as that which preceded it. The young man was constantly employed out of doors, and the girl in various laborious occupations within.
I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds.
This frequently took place, but a high wind quickly dried the earth, and the season became far more pleasant than it had been.
I conjectured, therefore, that he found on the paper signs for speech which he understood, and I ardently longed to comprehend these also; but how was that possible when I did not even understand the sounds for which they stood as signs?
It was not thus with Felix.
"This trait of kindness moved me sensibly.
I thought (foolish wretch!) that it might be in my power to restore happiness to these deserving people.
"My mode of life in my hovel was uniform.
She uttered some words in a loud voice, and the youth joined her, who also expressed surprise.
They often, I believe, suffered the pangs of hunger very poignantly, especially the two younger cottagers, for several times they placed food before the old man when they reserved none for themselves.
From this time Felix was more employed, and the heart-moving indications of impending famine disappeared.
If such lovely creatures were miserable, it was less strange that I, an imperfect and solitary being, should be wretched.
What did their tears imply?
He was always the saddest of the group, and even to my unpractised senses, he appeared to have suffered more deeply than his friends.
I saw no cause for their unhappiness, but I was deeply affected by it.
In the day, I believe, he worked sometimes for a neighbouring farmer, because he often went forth and did not return until dinner, yet brought no wood with him.
This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it. But I was baffled in every attempt I made for this purpose.
I thought of the occurrences of the day.
"By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment.
"I could mention innumerable instances which, although slight, marked the dispositions of these amiable cottagers.
I quickly collected some branches, but they were wet and would not burn.
This was a new sight to me, and I examined the structure with great curiosity.
No wood, however, was placed on the earth, which formed the floor, but it was dry; and although the wind entered it by innumerable chinks, I found it an agreeable asylum from the snow and rain.
A great fall of snow had taken place the night before, and the fields were of one uniform white; the appearance was disconsolate, and I found my feet chilled by the cold damp substance that covered the ground.
Darkness then came over me and troubled me, but hardly had I felt this when, by opening my eyes, as I now suppose, the light poured in upon me again.
This was the forest near Ingolstadt; and here I lay by the side of a brook resting from my fatigue, until I felt tormented by hunger and thirst.
[The moon] I gazed with a kind of wonder.
I gradually saw plainly the clear stream that supplied me with drink and the trees that shaded me with their foliage.
The vegetables in the gardens, the milk and cheese that I saw placed at the windows of some of the cottages, allured my appetite.
His appearance, different from any I had ever before seen, and his flight somewhat surprised me.
The meal was quickly dispatched.
She followed, and they disappeared.
In one corner, near a small fire, sat an old man, leaning his head on his hands in a disconsolate attitude.
I examined the materials of the fire, and to my joy found it to be composed of wood.
"The old man had, in the meantime, been pensive, but on the appearance of his companions he assumed a more cheerful air, and they sat down to eat.
The light became more and more oppressive to me, and the heat wearying me as I walked, I sought a place where I could receive shade.
The old man returned to the cottage, and the youth, with tools different from those he had used in the morning, directed his steps across the fields.
Chapter 11
I covered it carefully with dry wood and leaves and placed wet branches upon it; and then, spreading my cloak, I lay on the ground and sank into sleep.
One was old, with silver hairs and a countenance beaming with benevolence and love; the younger was slight and graceful in his figure, and his features were moulded with the finest symmetry, yet his eyes and attitude expressed the utmost sadness and despondency.
Sometimes I tried to imitate the pleasant songs of the birds but was unable. Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again.
Before I had quitted your apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes, but these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of night.
"It was dark when I awoke; I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it were, instinctively, finding myself so desolate.
I ate my breakfast with pleasure and was about to remove a plank to procure myself a little water when I heard a step, and looking through a small chink, I beheld a young creature, with a pail on her head, passing before my hovel.
"The moon had disappeared from the night, and again, with a lessened form, showed itself, while I still remained in the forest.
Finding the door open, I entered.
In my joy I thrust my hand into the live embers, but quickly drew it out again with a cry of pain.
"Sir, you are not mistaken.
So, after having passed a night in prison, he was brought before the magistrates of the district.
This place has a bad name,--a very bad name.
And Kwairyo immediately found himself among friends instead of judges,--friends anxious to prove their admiration by fraternal kindness.
At the mention of that name, a murmur of admiration filled the court-room; for there were many present who remembered it.
And the book further says that when the head comes back and finds that its body has been moved, it will strike itself upon the floor three times,--bounding like a ball,--and will pant as in great fear, and presently die.
He found his way to the lonely cottage in the mountains of Kai; but nobody was there, and he could not discover the body.
Beyond the shed was a vegetable garden, and a grove of cedars and bamboos; and beyond the trees appeared the glimmer of a cascade, pouring from some loftier height, and swaying in the moonshine like a long white robe.
So the head, still holding in its teeth the koromo that had been stripped from Kwairyo's shoulders, was put before the judges.
"Since my body has been moved, to rejoin it is not possible!
Perhaps you once belonged to the samurai-class?"
"Sirs, I did not fasten the head to my sleeve: it fastened itself there--much against my will.
They judged him to be a hardened criminal, and his story an insult to their intelligence.
It was dead.
Now, if these be Rokuro-Kubi, they mean me no good;--so I shall be justified in following the instructions of the book."...
This aged officer had made no remark during the trial; but, after having heard the opinion of his colleagues, he rose up, and said:--
Are you not afraid of Hairy Things?"
So he resigned himself to pass the night under the stars; and having found a suitable grassy spot, by the roadside, he lay down there, and prepared to sleep.
Eastward the sky was brightening; day was about to dawn; and Kwairyo knew that the power of the goblins was limited to the hours of darkness.
It is a goblin's head.
With the head still hanging to his sleeve he went back to the house, and there caught sight of the other four Rokuro-Kubi squatting together, with their bruised and bleeding heads reunited to their bodies.
I used to be in the service of a daimyo; and my rank in that service was not inconsiderable.
"What a nice priest you are!" exclaimed the robber.
He might then easily have obtained service under another daimyo; but as he had never sought distinction for his own sake alone, and as his heart remained true to his former lord, he preferred to give up the world.
Scarcely had he lain down when a man came along the road, carrying an axe and a great bundle of chopped wood.
In the way of food, I have nothing to offer you; but there is a roof at least, and you can sleep under it without risk."
But as it is now nearly morning, perhaps he has gone to sleep...
After a few minutes it came back, and cried out huskily, in a tone of great alarm:--
"Let us first examine the head carefully; for this, I think, has not yet been done.
But when they perceived him at the back-door all screamed, "The priest! the priest!"--and fled, through the other doorway, out into the woods.
See him!--the fat coward!"...
Kwairyo at once removed his koromo, and offered it to the robber, who then first perceived what was hanging to the sleeve.
Therefore he buried the head by itself, in the grove behind the cottage; and he had a tombstone set up over the grave; and he caused a Segaki-service to be performed on behalf of the spirit of the Rokuro-Kubi.
The woodcutter led him to a shed at the back of the house, whither water had been conducted, through bamboo-pipes, from some neighboring stream; and the two men washed their feet.
But I fear that I shall never find any way of so doing. Nevertheless, I try to overcome the karma of my errors by sincere repentance, and by helping as far as I can, those who are unfortunate."
To-night I shall recite the sutras for your sake, and pray that you may obtain the force to overcome the karma of any past errors."
In the book Nan-ho-i-butsu-shi it is written that certain red characters can always be found upon the nape of the neck of a real Rokuro-Kubi.
The woodcutter guided him along a narrow path, leading up from the main road through mountain-forest.
Now I often pray that I may be able to make some atonement for the evil which I did, and to reestablish the ancestral home.
Presently the head of the aruji stopped eating and said:--
The old man turned it round and round, carefully examined it, and discovered, on the nape of its neck, several strange red characters.
There are haunters about here,--many of them.
Retribution followed me; and I long remained a fugitive in the land.
The night was beautiful: there was no cloud in the sky: there was no wind; and the strong moonlight threw down sharp black shadows of foliage, and glittered on the dews of the garden.
Some one of you go to the house and see what the fellow is doing."
In the holy sutras it is written that those strongest in wrong-doing can become, by power of good resolve, the strongest in right-doing.
And I have not committed any crime.
There are the characters: you can see for yourselves that they have not been painted.
Perhaps you formerly belonged to one of the upper classes?"
For that age was an age of violence and disorder; and upon the highways there was no security for the solitary traveler, even if he happened to be a priest.
It was a rough and dangerous path,--sometimes skirting precipices,--sometimes offering nothing but a network of slippery roots for the foot to rest upon,--sometimes winding over or between masses of jagged rock.
Until a late hour he continued to read and pray: then he opened a little window in his little sleeping-room, to take a last look at the landscape before lying down.
Another head--the head of a young woman--immediately rose up and flitted to the house, lightly as a bat.
This is the head of a Rokuro-Kubi.
Smiling, the woodcutter answered:--
"I shall let you have the head and the robe if you insist; but I must tell you that this is not the head of a man.
For one instant he stood bewildered,--imagining a crime.
But when the house of Kikuji came to ruin, Isogai found himself without a master.
With these assurances, Kwairyo bade the aruji good-night; and his host showed him to a very small side-room, where a bed had been made ready. Then all went to sleep except the priest, who began to read the sutras by the light of a paper lantern.
Though brave, the highwayman was startled: he dropped the garment, and sprang back.
Gently unbarring the door, he made his way to the garden, and proceeded with all possible caution to the grove beyond it.
And now it only remains to tell what became of the head.
I was foolish to talk to him as I did;--it only set him to reciting the sutras on behalf of my soul!
What is the use of joking?"
Will you sell it?
While yet a boy he had surpassed his teachers in the art of swordsmanship, in archery, and in the use of the spear, and had displayed all the capacities of a daring and skillful soldier.
Here is my robe; and here is the money;--and let me have the head...
But its teeth still held the sleeve; and, for all his great strength, Kwairyo could not force open the jaws.
My story is the story of a ruined life--ruined by my own fault.
Kwairyo, however, as quickly gripped the head by its topknot, and repeatedly struck it.
She both feared his speaking and wished for it.
In that case, I beg you to forgive me. But if you are conscious yourself of even the smallest foundation for them, then I beg you to think a little, and if your heart prompts you, to speak out to me..."
"You're not in bed?
What about?" she asked, sitting down.
For the first instant Alexey Alexandrovitch seemed, as it were, appalled at his own snoring, and ceased; but after an interval of two breathings the snore sounded again, with a new tranquil rhythm.
"Well, I'm listening to what's to come," she said, calmly and ironically; "and indeed I listen with interest, for I should like to understand what's the matter."
I love you.
But I am not speaking of myself; the most important persons in this matter are our son and yourself.
"You're always like that," she answered, as though completely misapprehending him, and of all he had said only taking in the last phrase.
And besides," she said hurriedly, with difficulty repressing a smile, "it's really time to be in bed."
"I positively don't understand," said Anna, shrugging her shoulders--"He doesn't care," she thought.
"Anna, it's necessary for me to have a talk with you."
He saw that instead of doing as he had intended--that is to say, warning his wife against a mistake in the eyes of the world--he had unconsciously become agitated over what was the affair of her conscience, and was struggling against the barrier he fancied between them.
"Warn me?" she said.
But he was silent.
Come!
And how it would have rejoiced any great captain, who was bent on conquering the world, like Alexander or Napoleon, to raise a crop of armed soldiers as easily as Jason did!
But be of good courage.
Espying the two winged sons of the North Wind (who were disporting themselves in the moonlight, a few hundred feet aloft), Jason bade them tell the rest of the Argonauts to embark as speedily as possible.
A little way before him, he beheld the old woman whom he had helped over the stream, with her peacock beside her.
Upon my word, as the head came waving and undulating through the air, and reaching almost within arm's length of Prince Jason, it was a very hideous and uncomfortable sight.
Just as the brazen brutes fancied themselves sure of tossing him into the air, he caught one of them by the horn, and the other by his screwed-up tail, and held them in a gripe like that of an iron vice, one with his right hand, the other with his left.
Wherever a dragon's tooth had fallen, there stood a man armed for battle.
"It is only a sleeping potion," said the enchantress to Prince Jason. "One always finds a use for these mischievous creatures, sooner or later; so I did not wish to kill him outright.
"True, the Golden Fleece may not be so valuable as you have thought it; but then there is nothing better in the world; and one must needs have an object, you know.
The first look that they gave at the upper world was a glare of wrath and defiance.
Jason knew that it would be impossible to withstand this blood-thirsty battalion with his single arm, but determined, since there was nothing better to be done, to die as valiantly as if he himself had sprung from a dragon's tooth.
Had you acted fairly, you would have been, at this instant, a black cinder, or a handful of white ashes.
The dragon had probably heard the voices; for swift as lightning, his black head and forked tongue came hissing among the trees again, darting full forty feet at a stretch.
"It has surely been dipped in the richest gold of sunset.
Jason left the king's presence in great sorrow and anger.
Indeed, it had heretofore been a great inconvenience to these poor animals, that, whenever they wished to eat a mouthful of grass, the fire out of their nostrils had shriveled it up, before they could manage to crop it.
With one bound, he leaped aboard.
That fierce and feverish fight was the only enjoyment which they had tasted on this beautiful earth.
Let me hasten onward, and take it to my bosom."
At last, the front rank caught sight of Jason, who, beholding the flash of so many weapons in the moonlight, had thought it best to draw his sword.
An antelope, that probably mistook the yellow radiance for sunrise, came bounding fleetly through the grove.
"Have you forgotten what guards it?"
To say the truth, in the joy of beholding the object of his desires, the terrible dragon had quite slipped out of Jason's memory.
Could you help smiling, Prince Jason, to see the self-conceit of that last fellow, just as he tumbled down?"
Lead us to the charge!
Then they began to shout--"Show us the enemy!
You have won the Golden Fleece."
"That is already accomplished, may it please your majesty," replied Jason.
"You will think differently in the morning," said Medea.
"Throw it among them quickly!" cried she.
"Will he give you the Golden Fleece, without any further risk or trouble?"
Victory!
"Whether sooner or later, it will be sure to come," answered the princess.
"On the contrary," answered Jason, "he is very angry with me for taming the brazen bulls and sowing the dragon's teeth.
Jason went onward a few steps farther, and then stopped to gaze.
I hope you have been considering the matter a little more wisely, and have concluded not to get yourself scorched to a cinder, in attempting to tame my brazen-lunged bulls."
It is the Golden Fleece."
So Jason scattered them broadcast, and harrowed them into the soil with a brush-harrow, and took his stand on the edge of the field, anxious to see what would happen next.
"Well, Jason," whispered Medea (for she was ill natured, as all enchantresses are, and wanted to make the bold youth tremble), "what do you think now of your prospect of winning the Golden Fleece?"
Quick!
The gape of his enormous jaws was nearly as wide as the gateway of the king's palace.
Death or victory!" "Come on, brave comrades!
Entering the presence chamber, he stood at the foot of the throne, and made a low obeisance.
At any rate, our hero succeeded perfectly well in breaking up the greensward; and, by the time that the moon was a quarter of her journey up the sky, the plowed field lay before him, a large tract of black earth, ready to be sown with the dragon's teeth.
"Your eyes look heavy, Prince Jason," observed the king; "you appear to have spent a sleepless night.
"The world will always have simpletons enough, just like them, fighting and dying for they know not what, and fancying that posterity will take the trouble to put laurel wreaths on their rusty and battered helmets.
Wait for me here an hour before midnight."
Greatly encouraged at finding himself not yet turned into a cinder, the young man awaited the attack of the bulls.
Then there was a dazzling gleam from a vast number of polished brass helmets, beneath which, as they grew farther out of the soil, appeared the dark and bearded visages of warriors, struggling to free themselves from the imprisoning earth.
For your life, make haste!"
Jason caught the fleece from the tree, and hurried through the grove, the deep shadows of which were illuminated as he passed by the golden glory of the precious object that he bore along.
"Stay," said Medea, holding him back.
I forbid you, on pain of death, to make any more attempts to get the Golden Fleece.
Medea, however, bade him snatch up a stone from the ground.
And he forbids me to make any more attempts, and positively refuses to give up the Golden Fleece, whether I slay the dragon or no."
Immortal fame!" when he himself fell down, and lay quietly among his slain brethren.
"Do you see it?"
For a while, the warriors stood flourishing their weapons, clashing their swords against their shields, and boiling over with the red-hot thirst for battle.
The Golden Fleece you shall have, if it lies within the power of my enchantments to get it for you.
These bright objects sprouted higher, and proved to be the steel heads of spears.
Soon, however, something came to pass, that reminded him what perils were still to be encountered.
"A crop of armed men never fails to spring up, when the dragon's teeth have been sown."
While they were crossing the pasture ground, the brazen bulls came towards Jason, lowing, nodding their heads, and thrusting forth their snouts, which, as other cattle do, they loved to have rubbed and caressed by a friendly hand.
"Look yonder," she whispered.
As it approached, Medea tossed the contents of the gold box right down the monster's wide-open throat. Immediately, with an outrageous hiss and a tremendous wriggle--flinging his tail up to the tip-top of the tallest tree, and shattering all its branches as it crashed heavily down again--the dragon fell at full length upon the ground, and lay quite motionless.
"Yes, Jason," said the princess, "and I can tell you more.
But Lynceus, with his sharp eyes, had already caught a glimpse of him, bringing the Golden Fleece, although several stone walls, a hill, and the black shadows of the Grove of Mars, intervened between.
Jason answered only by drawing his sword, and making a step forward.
And, ever since that time, it has been the favorite method of brave men, when danger assails them, to do what they call "taking the bull by the horns"; and to gripe him by the tail is pretty much the same thing--that is, to throw aside fear, and overcome the peril by despising it.
"Make haste, Prince Jason!
She clapped her hands for joy, and beckoning him to make haste, disappeared among the duskiness of the trees.
"Oh, am I such an influential person?" said Mrs. Wilmington, with a shrug. "It's rather awful--isn't it, Annie?"
Do you mean with regard to Mr. Gerrish?"
"And besides, there was Mr. Wilmington, I know.
She checked the pony before the bar which the flagman at the railroad crossing had let down, while a long freight train clattered deafeningly by, and then drove bumping and jouncing across the tracks.
You know I might feel 'put upon.' I used to be one of the hands myself.
He sat down cornerwise on a chair, and listened, with a scornful thrust of his thick lips, to their talk.
"Social perdition at the least.
He was very opportune.
"Well, I must think about that, and I must ask Mr. Wilmington.
"Well, I confess," said Annie, "I don't see how, exactly.
He's one of the anti-Peck party in his church, and that is the reason I spoke to him.
"But I don't know that I wish to influence her in favour of the supper and dance; I don't know that I believe in them," said Annie, cowed and troubled by the affair.
"Yes, that's what any one would think--in the abstract," said Mrs. Munger.
And the question is, whether I ought to go back on my fellow-hands."
They drove along under the elms which here stood somewhat at random about the wide, grassless street, between the high, windowy bulks of the shoe shops and hat shops.
She opened her budget with all her robust authority, and once more put Annie to shame.
It's so fortunate they were frank about it.
"Put another plate, Norah," said Mrs. Wilmington carelessly.
You let your aunty speak for herself.
"Not at all!" Mrs. Munger answered for Annie.
As I said to Miss Kilburn on our way here, 'if Mrs. Wilmington is opposed to them, we'll drop them.'"
"Why, Annie," she said, "how glad I am to see you!
We all like to be consistent, as Annie says--even if we're inconsistent in the attempt," she added, with a laugh.
In the richly appointed dining-room--a glitter of china and glass and a mass of carven oak--the table was laid for two.
A black asphalt path curved from the steps by which you mounted from the street to the steps by which you mounted to the heavy portico before the massive black walnut doors.
But I want to see Mrs. Wilmington first."
But I meant the other gentlemen.
"Well," said Mrs. Munger, complying without regard to Annie, "all this diplomacy is certainly very exhausting."
"Will you join us, Jack?"
"Not till you've had lunch," said Mrs. Wilmington, rising with the ladies. "You must stay.
"Yes; that's just the point.
It throws a new light on it; and if that's the way nice people are going to look at it, why, we must give up the idea.
"Well, I didn't work very hard, and I didn't have to work long.
"No; I'm going to the office," said the nephew, bowing himself out of the room.
Annie said nothing, and she added, "Don't you think so?"
I'm quite prepared to do so.
It's none of the hands' business if you don't choose to ask them."
"That was a great success," said Mrs. Munger, as they drove away.
Annie, I shall not excuse you."
I don't know about not letting the hands stay to the dance and supper, Mrs. Munger.
And you too, Mrs. Munger.
The young fellow bowed silently, and Annie instantly took a dislike to him, his heavy jaw, long eyes, and low forehead almost hidden under a thick bang.
When she came to the question of the invited supper and dance, and having previously committed Mrs. Wilmington in favour of the general scheme, asked her what she thought of that part, Mr. Jack Wilmington answered for her--
"Yes," Mrs. Munger broke in; "but they were not your beginnings, Mrs. Wilmington; they were your incidents--your accidents."
"Well," said Mrs. Wilmington, with another laugh, "I'll think it over, Mrs. Munger."
"Mrs. Munger," said Annie uneasily, "I would rather not see Mrs. Wilmington with you on this subject; I should be of no use."
I will put the case to her."
"As Mrs. Wilmington's old friend, you will have the greatest influence with her."
I might have been a hand at this moment if Mr. Wilmington had not come along and invited me to be a head--the head of his house.
That's a great relief."
The dust gradually freed itself from the cinders about the tracks, and it hardened into a handsome, newly made road beyond the houses of the shop hands.
"It's very pretty of you to say so, Mrs. Munger," drawled Mrs. Wilmington. "But I guess I must oppose the little invited dance and supper, on principle.
You saw how they took it."
"He's an odious little creature, and I knew that he would go for the dance and supper because Mr. Peck was opposed to them.
They passed some open lots, and then, on a pleasant rise of ground, they came to a stately residence, lifted still higher on its underpinning of granite blocks.
Mr. Wilmington has built a very fine house on this side, and there are several pretty Queen Anne cottages going up."
As Mr. Putney says, he and I have our record, and we don't have to make any pretences.
She moved lazily about and got them into chairs, and was not resentful when Mrs. Munger broke out with "How hot you have it!" "Have we? We had the furnace lighted yesterday, and we've been in all the morning, and so we hadn't noticed.
"I think I heard, Lyra," said Annie; "but I had forgotten." The fact, in connection with what had been said, made her still more uncomfortable.
"Jack's learning to be superintendent," said Mrs. Wilmington, lifting her teasing voice to make him hear her in the hall, "and he's been spending the whole morning here."
"Yes.
"I saw that they both made fun of it," said Annie.
You were not brought up to it; it was just temporary; and besides--"
Jack," she called over her shoulder to the young man at the window, "do you think your uncle would approve of me as Juliet's Nurse?"
"And now we must really be going," she added, pulling out her watch by its leathern guard.
"Thank you," said Mrs. Munger.
"Oh no; I don't care anything about him," said Mrs. Munger, touching her pony with the tip of her whip-lash.
Yes, Annie, there was a time after you went away, and after father died, when I actually fell so low as to work for an honest living."
"I should think you had a right to do what you please about it.
It was built in a Boston suburban taste of twenty years ago, with a lofty mansard-roof, and it was painted the stone-grey colour which was once esteemed for being so quiet. The lawn before it sloped down to the road, where it ended smoothly at the brink of a neat stone wall.
But I was a hand, and there's no use trying to deny it.
"Oh yes," said Annie, with a smile.
"We've just been talking the matter over with Mr. Putney and Dr. Morrell, and they're both opposed. You're merely the straw that breaks the camel's back, Mrs. Wilmington."
They could not have been born or nurtured anywhere else on the face of the earth.
Here is where the photoplay can begin to give him a more delicate utterance.
He has invented the new printing.
CALIFORNIA AND AMERICA
Ironic feelings in this matter on the part of western men are based somewhat on envy and illegitimate cussedness, but are also grounded in the honest hope of a healthful rivalry.
The campaign for a beautiful nation could very well emanate from the west coast, where with the slightest care grow up models for all the world of plant arrangement and tree-luxury.
He can derive his Patriotic and Religious Splendors from something older and more magnificent than the aisles of the Romanesque, namely: the groves of the giant redwoods.
Patriotic art students have discussed with mingled irony and admiration the Boston domination of the only American culture of the nineteenth century, namely, literature.
It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our national text-book in Art as Boston appropriated to herself the guardianship of the national text-books of Literature.
He declares it is as though it were painted on a Brobdingnagian piece of gilt paper, and he who dampens his finger and thrusts it through finds an alkali valley on the other side, the lonely prickly pear, and a heap of ashes from a deserted camp-fire.
When, in the hands of masters, they become sources of strength, they will be a different set of virtues from those of New England.
But the Californian cannot shout "orange blossoms, orange blossoms; heliotrope, heliotrope!" He cannot boom forth "roseleaves, roseleaves" so that he does their beauties justice.
But just then--crack! crack!
"Forward!" cried the doctor.
And now, shipmates, this black spot?
"Oh," replied George, "you don't be under no kind of apprehension; WE'RE all square, we are.
Barbecue for cap'n!"
"Silver!" they cried.
"Where might you have got the paper?
J. F., and a score below, with a clove hitch to it; so he done ever."
Ah!
Kill that boy?
"Step up, lad," cried Silver.
Why, hillo!
But who done it?
"So that's the toon, is it?" cried the cook.
"Dick, was it?
Sea! Gentlemen o' fortune!
"You lost the ship; I found the treasure.
Ah, well, there's a deal to say to number three.
"Fair!
How?
Aldenham may know, but we his guests do not.
Say, "Come and look at the pond," and the worst sluggard will not refuse such gentle exercise.
At any rate we have every hope that he will empty the pond as speedily as possible so that we may watch it fill again.
I must say that he has been a little lucky in his choice of a year for inaugurating the pond.
For "the pond" is just a small artificial affair of cement, entirely unpretentious.
It must be nearly full.
A man or woman as lazy as this must not be rushed.
To the rest of us it is known simply as "the pond"--a designation which ignores the existence of several neighbouring ponds, the gifts of nature, and gives the whole credit to the handiwork of man.
Say to such a one, "Come and play," and the invitation will be declined.
And so the arrangements for the morning are made.
high.
The ribald call it the hippopotamus pond, tracing a resemblance between it and the bath of the hippopotamus at the Zoo, beneath the waters of which, if you particularly desire to point the hippopotamus out to somebody, he always lies hidden.
Or---?
Or golf?
This seems to me to give a much fairer indication of the rain that has fallen than do the official figures in the newspapers.
A man with such a broad and friendly outlook towards rain-gauges will be sure to arrange something striking when the great moment arrives.
We wander down to the pond together, and perhaps find Brown and Miss Smith there.
A most necessary thing in a country house is that there should be a recognized meeting-place, where the people who have been writing a few letters after breakfast may, when they have finished, meet those who have no intention of writing any, and arrange plans with them for the morning.
Or croquet?
For there is ever before our minds that great moment in the future when the pond is at last full.
By and by two or three others stroll up, and we all make measurements together.
But indoors it is so easy to drop into a sofa after breakfast, and, once there with all the papers, to be disinclined to leave it till lunch-time.
The Pond
And you know, it even reconciles us a little to these streaming days to reflect that it all goes to fill the pond.
It speaks much for my friend Aldenham's breadth of view that he understood this, and planned the pond accordingly.
Some think there will be merely a flood over the surrounding paths and the kitchen garden, but for myself I believe that we are promised something much bigger than that.
"A lot of rain in the night," says Brown.
Some sort of fete will help to celebrate it, I have no doubt; with an open-air play, tank drama, or what not.
But, anyhow, it is fairly fine now, and what about a little lawn tennis?
How tired we get of being indoors on these days, even with the best of books, the pleasantest of companions, the easiest of billiard tables. Yet if our hostess were to see us marching out with an umbrella, how odd she would think us.
Won't you come too?" And with any luck she comes.
All this for those delightful summer days when there are fine intervals; but consider the advantages of the pond when the rain streams down in torrents from morning till night.
And they can be made more readily out of doors; for--supposing it is fine--the fresh air calls you to be doing something, and the sight of the newly marked tennis lawn fills you with thoughts of revenge for your accidental defeat the evening before.
Let us pass on to another book.
The thought of your scorn at my previous ignorance of the world-famous Tillier, your amused contempt because I have only just succeeded in borrowing the classic upon which you were brought up, this is too much for me. Let us say no more about it.
For the last ten or twelve years I have been recommending it.
But it is a book which makes you feel that, though everybody in the house loves it, it is only you who really appreciate it at its true value, and that the others are scarcely worthy of it.
Well, of course, you will order the book at once.
Claude Tillier--who has not heard of Claude Tillier?
Well, the writer of my book is Kenneth Grahame.
Indeed, I feel sometimes that it was I who wrote The Wind in the Willows, and recommended it to Kenneth Grahame ... but perhaps I am wrong here, for I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance.
Once on a time I discovered Samuel Butler; not the other two, but the one who wrote The Way of All Flesh, the second-best novel in the English language.
The reason why I knew you had not read it is the reason why I call it "my" book.
Nor, as I have already lamented, am I financially interested in its sale, an explanation which suspicious strangers require from me sometimes.
By a Household Book I mean a book which everybody in the household loves and quotes continually ever afterwards; a book which is read aloud to every new guest, and is regarded as the touchstone of his worth.
But the book you have not read-- my book--is The Wind in the Willows.
Usually I speak about it at my first meeting with a stranger.
It knew all about Samuel Butler.
Am I not right?
"Is it as good as SO-AND-SO and SUCH-AND-SUCH?" you will ask, hardly believing that this could be possible.
For one cannot recommend a book to all the hundreds of people whom one has met in ten years without discovering whether it is well known or not.
The books you have read are The Golden Age. and Dream Days.
You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. ...
You have heard of him?
But, believe me, I shall be quite content with your gratitude.
Last week I discovered a Frenchman, Claude Tillier, who wrote in the early part of last century a book called Mon Oncle Benjamin, which may be freely translated My Uncle Benjamin. (I read it in the translation.) Eager as I am to be lyrical about it, I shall refrain.
It was I who introduced that novelist to it six months before.
You may be worthy; I do not know.
For instance, you may have noticed a couple of casual references to it, as if it were a classic known to all, in a famous novel published last year.
Ah, I was afraid so.
None of the watchfulness, which was so necessary to their situation, was neglected by the wary partisan. Patrols were seen on the distant hills, taking their protecting circuit around their comrades, who were enjoying, in the midst of danger, a security that can only spring from the watchfulness of discipline and the indifference of habit.
"This gentleman!" repeated the other, turning to Captain Wharton, and contemplating his figure for a moment until the anxiety of his countenance gave place to a lurking smile.
"I had a wish to break this Mr. Birch of his unsocial habits, and gave him a call this morning," he said.
Lawton regarded her with a mingled expression of pity and admiration; then shaking his head doubtingly, he continued,--
"Run--Massa Harry--run--if he love old Caesar, run--here come a rebel horse."
September, October, even November and December, compose the season for enjoyment in the open air; they have their storms, but they are distinct, and not of long continuance, leaving a clear atmosphere and a cloudless sky.
Henry bowed to this remark in distant silence, but Sarah ventured to urge something in behalf of her brother.
So soon as the information of this fact was communicated to the officer whose duty it was to guard the avenues of the American camp, he dispatched Captain Lawton in pursuit of the peddler.
A twelvemonth had not yet elapsed, since Birch had been seen lingering near the headquarters of the commander in chief, and at a time when important movements were expected hourly to occur.
He bowed again politely as he reentered the room, and walking up to Captain Wharton, said, with comic gravity,--
Leave him with us; there is no reward, no sum, which I will not cheerfully pay."
Captain Lawton never could forgive the deception; his antipathies to his enemies were not very moderate, but this was adding an insult to his penetration that rankled deeply.
"You have no cause for alarm, ladies," said the officer, pausing a moment, and contemplating the pale faces around him.
"I came out, as my father has mentioned, to see my friends, understanding your parties to be at Peekskill, and near the Highlands, or surely I would not have ventured."
He viewed the figure of Captain Wharton, as he stood proudly swelling with a pride that disdained further concealment, and exclaimed with great earnestness,--
"Quick, gentlemen, to your horses; there comes Dunwoodie," and, followed by his officers, he precipitately left the room.
"I prefer your ebony hair, from which you seem to have combed the powder with great industry.
In fact, no small part of the bitterness expressed by Captain Lawton against the peddler, arose from the unaccountable disappearance of the latter, when intrusted to the custody of two of his most faithful dragoons.
All the members of the Wharton family laid their heads on their pillows that night, with a foreboding of some interruption to their ordinary quiet.
His dark hair hung around his brow in profusion, though stained with powder which was worn at that day, and his face was nearly hid in the whiskers by which it was disfigured.
A short communication with the loquacious housekeeper followed the arrival of the main body of the troop, and the advance party remounting, the whole moved towards the Locusts with great speed.
Two or three of the dragoons now dismounted and disappeared; in a few minutes, however, they returned to the yard, followed by Katy, from whose violent gesticulations, it was evident that matters of no trifling concern were on the carpet.
On reaching the road which led through the bottom of the valley, they turned their horses' heads to the north.
The heavy tread of the trooper, as he followed the black to the door of the parlor, rang in the ears of the females as it approached nearer and nearer, and drove the blood from their faces to their hearts, with a chill that nearly annihilated feeling.
"I did not know it until I reached them, and it was then too late to retreat," said Wharton sullenly.
He approached the youth with an air of comic gravity, and with a low bow, continued, "I am sorry for the severe cold you have in your head, sir."
The dragoon looked at him for a minute with the drollery that characterized his manner, and then continued,--
Still, the expression of his eye, though piercing, was not bad, and his voice, though deep and powerful, was far from unpleasant.
The dragoon watched the movement with a continued smile, when, seeming to recollect himself, turning to the father, he proceeded,--
"Upon my word, you improve most rapidly in externals," added the trooper, preserving his muscles in inflexible gravity.
When treason reaches the grade of general officers, Captain Wharton, it behooves the friends of liberty to be vigilant."
As yet none of the family had sufficient presence of mind to devise any means of security for Captain Wharton; but the danger now became too pressing to admit of longer delay, and various means of secreting him were hastily proposed; but they were all haughtily rejected by the young man, as unworthy of his character.
"That is strange, too," said the trooper, looking at the disconcerted host intently, "considering he is your next neighbor; he must be quite domestic, sir; and to the ladies it must be somewhat inconvenient.
"But he is gone--how--when--and whither?"
"No, Mr. Caesar, running is not my trade." While speaking, he walked deliberately to the window, where the family were already collected in the greatest consternation.
"Dunwoodie!" exclaimed Frances, with a face in which the roses contended for the mastery with the paleness of apprehension.
On getting sufficiently near, however, to a body of horse of more than double his own number, to distinguish countenances, Lawton plunged his rowels into his charger, and in a moment he was by the side of his commander.
The two subalterns struggled to conceal their smiles; but the captain resumed his breakfast with an eagerness that created a doubt, whether he ever expected to enjoy another.
It was glittering with the opening brilliancy of one of those lovely, mild days, which occur about the time of the falling of the leaf; and which, by their frequency, class the American autumn with the most delightful seasons of other countries.
"I!" exclaimed the captain, in surprise; "I have no cold in my head."
In advance, with an officer, was a man attired in the dress of a countryman, who pointed in the direction of the cottage.
"I cannot, without violating the truth, say it is," returned the dragoon.
With the exception of the sentinels left to guard Captain Wharton, the dragoons mounted, and marched out to meet their comrades.
It was my mistake; you will please to pardon it."
Through Solway sands, through Taross moss, Blindfold, he knew the paths to cross: By wily turns, by desperate bounds, Had baffled Percy's best bloodhounds. In Eske, or Liddel, fords were none, But he would ride them, one by one; Alike to him was time or tide, December's snow or July's pride; Alike to him was tide or time, Moonless midnight or matin prime. --WALTER SCOTT.
"If I catch him," cried the dragoon, while buttering another cake, "he will dangle from the limbs of one of his namesakes."
"What is the offense of poor Birch?" asked Miss Peyton, handing the dragoon a fourth dish of coffee.
"Did you see banners in the clouds, and mistake Miss Peyton's Aeolian harp for rebellious music?"
"He would make no bad ornament, suspended from one of those locusts before his own door," added the lieutenant.
The leader of the horse dismounted, and, followed by a couple of his men, he approached the outer door of the building, which was slowly and reluctantly opened for his admission by Caesar.
CHAPTER V
"Mr. Harper," echoed the other, feeling a load removed from his heart, "yes, I had forgotten; but he is gone; and if there be anything wrong in his character, we are in entire ignorance of it; to me he was a total stranger."
"Had I found him within, I should have placed him where he would enjoy life in the midst of society, for a short time at least."
Miss Peyton was a close observer of these movements of her niece, and advancing with an air of feminine dignity, inquired,--
"We shall always be happy to see Major Dunwoodie."
Nothing remained now, but to meet the impending examination with as much indifference as the family could assume.
Her dread on behalf of her brother was certainly greatly diminished; yet her form shook, her breathing became short and irregular, and her whole frame gave tokens of extraordinary agitation. Her eyes rose from the floor to the dragoon, and were again fixed immovably on the carpet--she evidently wished to utter something but was unequal to the effort.
He is not a spy; nothing but a desire to see his friends prompted him to venture so far from the regular army in disguise.
It was too late to retreat to the woods in the rear of the cottage, for he would unavoidably be seen, and, followed by a troop of horse, as inevitably taken.
"My business will be confined to a few questions, which, if freely answered, will instantly remove us from your dwelling."
"And where might that be, sir?" asked Mr. Wharton, conceiving it necessary to say something.
"You have but little to apprehend from his character," answered the dragoon dryly.
In a few moments orders were given to some of the troops, and horsemen left the valley, at full speed, by its various roads.
The captain himself moved his hand involuntarily to his head, and discovered that the trepidation of his sisters had left some of his natural hair exposed.
At length Captain Lawton suspended for a moment his violent attacks on the buckwheat cakes, to inquire of the master of the house, if there was not a peddler of the name of Birch who lived in the valley at times.
"I fancied it then, from seeing you had covered such handsome black locks with that ugly old wig.
"Why," said the captain, laughing, "I do acknowledge a little inquietude myself--but how was it with you?" turning to his younger and evidently favorite sister, and tapping her cheek.
"You appear so close an observer of things, I should like your opinion of it, sir," said Henry, removing the silk, and exhibiting the cheek free from blemish.
"And congress a halter," continued the commanding officer commencing anew on a fresh supply of the cakes.
The trooper rose instantly from the table, exclaiming,--
As nothing could be seen likely to interrupt the enjoyments and harmony of such a day, the sisters descended to the parlor, with a returning confidence in their brother's security, and their own happiness.
Young Wharton very composedly did as was required and stood an extremely handsome, well-dressed young man.
"Captain Wharton, from my soul I pity you!"
"Sir, your anxiety for your friend excuses your language," said Lawton, haughtily; "but you forget I am a Virginian, and a gentleman." Turning to the young man, he continued, "Were you ignorant, Captain Wharton, that our pickets have been below you for several days?"
A man, whose colossal stature manifested the possession of vast strength, entered the room, and removing his cap, he saluted the family with a mildness his appearance did not indicate as belonging to his nature.
I doubt not that that muslin in the window seat cost twice as much as he would have asked them for it."
"Run!" repeated the British officer, gathering himself up in military pride.
The officers were invited to take their morning's repast at the family breakfast table, and having made their arrangements without, the invitation was frankly accepted.
We have no spring; vegetation seems to leap into existence, instead of creeping, as in the same latitudes of the Old World; but how gracefully it retires!
Frances ventured to throw a timid glance at his figure as he entered, and saw at once the man from whose scrutiny Harvey Birch had warned them there was so much to be apprehended.
Afterwards, neither woman nor peddler was to be found.
"Oh! doubtless; he is a general favorite, May I presume on it so far as to ask leave to dismount and refresh my men, who compose a part of his squadron?"
The necessity of a supply from the dominion of Dinah soon, however, afforded another respite, of which Lawton availed himself.
None of the watchfulness necessary in a war, in which similarity of language, appearance, and customs rendered prudence doubly necessary, was omitted by the cautious leader.
"This gentleman--here--favored us with his company during the rain, and has not yet departed."
"If he is poor, King George is a bad paymaster."
"Expresses are already on the road to announce to him our situation, and the intelligence will speedily bring him to this valley; unless, indeed, some private reasons may exist to make a visit particularly unpleasant."
The countenance of Lawton changed instantly, and his assumed quaintness vanished.
"Never mind," continued the captain; "I will have him yet before I'm a major."
The ladies left the table to their guests, who proceeded, without much superfluous diffidence, to do proper honors to the hospitality of Mr. Wharton.
Acquainted with all the passes of the hills, and indefatigable in the discharge of his duty, the trooper had, with much trouble and toil, succeeded in effecting his object.
At length his sisters, with trembling hands, replaced his original disguise, the instruments of which had been carefully kept at hand by Caesar, in expectation of some sudden emergency.
"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."
Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley both cried out against the injustice of her implied doubt, and were both protesting that they knew many women who answered this description, when Mr. Hurst called them to order, with bitter complaints of their inattention to what was going forward.
At five o'clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at half-past six Elizabeth was summoned to dinner.
The bakers have co-operated loyally.
The amounts of sugar and fat used are limited.
Margaret was about the same age as her husband, a nice-looking brown-skinned woman; worth $500.
He resolved to spare no pains, to give himself no rest until they were both free.
She, however, was not blessed with good health, though she was not favored any more on that account.
To select his own master was a privilege not allowed; privileges of all kinds were rare with him.
His master was known by the name of Major James H. Gales, and he was the owner of a farm with eighteen men, women and children, slaves to toil for him.
In order to economize time and space, with a view to giving an account of as many of the travelers as possible, it seems expedient, where a number of arrivals come in close proximity to each other, to report them briefly, under one head.
Luther Dorsey is about nineteen years of age, rather smart, black, well made and well calculated for a Canadian.
Uneducated as he was, he was too sensible to believe that Webster had any God-given right to his manhood.
He fled from Beaufort, North Carolina.
The separation was painful, as was everything belonging to the system of Slavery.
As he asserted, and as his appearance indicated, he had experienced a large share of "rugged" usage.
Being far in the South, and in the hands of a brutal "Captain of a small boat," chances of freedom or of moderate treatment, had rarely ever presented themselves in any aspect.
After recruiting, and all necessary arrangements had been made for his comfort and passage to Canada, he was duly forwarded.
"Don't swear, though might as well; he was so bad other ways."
In outward appearance Henry was uninteresting.
He had a wife and one child.
So he resolved to flee.
They were both owned by a farmer, who went by the name of David Stewart, and resided in Maryland.
William Henry was about 20 years of age, and belonged to Doctor B. Grain, of Baltimore, who hired him out to a farmer.
He left his mother, four sisters and two brothers.
Left his mother, three sisters and five brothers in slavery.
This Schriner was described as a "low chunky man, with grum look, big mouth, etc.," and was a member of the German Reformed Church.
Stephen's parents were dead; one brother was the only near relative he left in chains.
Staying to wear the yoke, he felt would rather make it worse instead of better for all concerned.
Chaskey is about twenty-four years of age, quite black, medium size, sound body and intelligent appearance, nevertheless he resembled a "farm hand" in every particular.
In escaping, he was obliged to leave them both.
The Major in disposition was very abusive and profane, though old and grey-headed. His wife was pretty much the same kind of a woman as he was a man; one who delighted in making the slaves tremble at her bidding.
Luther was a member of the Methodist church at Jones Hill.
Left two sisters in bondage.
Their attachment to each other was evidently true.
Being a young man of promise, Stephen was advised earnestly to apply his mind to seek an education, and to use every possible endeavor to raise himself in the scale of manhood, morally, religiously and intellectually; and he seemed to drink in the admonitions thus given with a relish.
Charles' affection for his wife, on seeing how hard she had to labor when not well, aroused him to seek their freedom by flight.
Not relishing the idea of having to work all his life in bondage, destitute of all privileges, he resolved to seek a refuge in Canada.
Before this watchful and resolute purpose the way opened, and he soon found it comparatively easy to find his way from Maryland to Pennsylvania, and likewise into the hands of the Vigilance Committee, to whom he made known fully the character of the place and people whence he had fled, the dangers he was exposed to from slave-hunters, and the strong hope he cherished of reaching free land soon.
His wife was also a very "close woman." They had four children growing up to occupy their places as oppressors. Stephen was not satisfied to serve either old or young masters any longer, and made up his mind to leave the first opportunity.
These were all gladly received by the Vigilance Committee, and the hand of friendship warmly extended to them; and the best of counsel and encouragement was offered; material aid, food and clothing were also furnished as they had need, and they were sent on their way rejoicing to Canada.
His master he describes thus--
SEVERAL ARRIVALS FROM DIFFERENT PLACES.
The order of the day was literally, as far as colored men were concerned: "No rights which white men were bound to respect."
Left his father in chains; his mother had wisely escaped to Canada years back, when he was but a boy.
James is twenty-four years of age, well made, quite black and pretty shrewd.
He was a member of "Albany Chapel," at Massey's Cross Roads, and a slave of Dr. B. Crain.
The gallant warrior starts from soft repose--from golden visions and voluptuous ease; where, in the dulcet "piping time of peace," he sought sweet solace after all his toils.
To manhood roused, he spurns the amorous flute, doffs from his brawny back the robe of peace, and clothes his pampered limbs in panoply of steel.
Governor Printz, finding he was not to be dislodged by these long shots, now determined upon coming to closer quarters.
To heighten his vexation, Governor Printz, who, as has been shown, was a huge trencherman, took the liberty of having the first rummage of every Dutch merchant-ship, and securing to himself and his guzzling garrison all the little round Dutch cheeses, all the Dutch herrings, the gingerbread, the sweetmeats, the curious stone jugs of gin, and all the other Dutch luxuries, on their way for the solace of Fort Casimir.
I forbear to dilate upon the war of words which was kept up for some time by these windy commanders; Van-Poffenburgh, however, had served under William the Testy, and was a veteran in this kind of warfare.
In the preceding chapter we have spoken of the founding of Fort Casimir, and of the merciless warfare waged by its commander upon cabbages, sunflowers, and pumpkins, for want of better occasion to flesh his sword. Now it came to pass that higher up the Delaware, at his stronghold of Tinnekonk, resided one Jan Printz, who styled himself Governor of New Sweden.
For some time this war of the cupboard was carried on to the great festivity and jollification of the Swedes, while the warriors of Fort Casimir found their hearts, or rather their stomachs, daily failing them.
It is possible he may have paid to the Dutch skippers the full value of their commodities, but what consolation was this to Jacobus Van Poffenburgh and his garrison, who thus found their favorite supplies cut off, and diverted into the larders of the hostile camps?
On all these points of windy warfare the antagonists were well matched; but so it happened that the Swedish fortress being lower down the river, all the Dutch vessels, bound to Fort Casimir with supplies, had to pass it.
To this General Van Poffenburgh replied that the land belonged to their High Mightinesses, having been regularly purchased of the natives as discoverers from the Manhattoes, as witness the breeches of their land measurer, Ten Broeck.
O'er his dark brow, where late the myrtle waved, where wanton roses breathed enervate love, he rears the beaming casque and nodding plume; grasps the bright shield, and shakes the ponderous lance; or mounts with eager pride his fiery steed, and burns for deeds of glorious chivalry.
CHAPTER I.
CONTAINING THE SECOND PART OF THE REIGN OF PETER THE HEADSTRONG, AND HIS GALLANT ACHIEVEMENTS ON THE DELAWARE.
Accordingly he descended the river in great force and fume, and erected a rival fortress just one Swedish mile below Fort Casimir, to which he gave the name of Helsenburg.
Governor Printz at once took advantage of this circumstance, and compelled them to lower their flags as they passed under the guns of his battery.
To this the governor rejoined that the land had previously been sold by the Indians to the Swedes, and consequently was under the petticoat government of her Swedish majesty, Christina; and woe be to any mortal that wore a breeches who should dare to meddle even with the hem of her sacred garment.
There was a contest who should run up the tallest flag-staff and display the broadest flag; all day long there was a furious rolling of drums and twanging of trumpets in either fortress, and, whichever had the wind in its favor, would keep up a continual firing of cannon, to taunt its antagonist with the smell of gunpowder.
No sooner did this robustious commander hear of the erection of Fort Casimir, than he sent a message to Van Poffenburgh, warning him off the land, as being within the bounds of his jurisdiction.
He had a garrison after his own heart at Tinnekonk, guzzling, deep-drinking swashbucklers, who made the wild woods ring with their carousals.
Methinks I at this moment behold him in my imagination; or rather, I behold his goodly portrait, which still hangs in the family mansion of the Stuyvesants, arrayed in all the terrors of a true Dutch general.
And now commenced a tremendous rivalry between these two doughty commanders, striving to outstrut and outswell each other, like a couple of belligerent turkey-cocks.
But soft, worthy reader!
On the other hand, if they say "pepper and salt," the quarrel is made doubly certain.
CHALLENGE.
The addition of the words "in a horn" justify a falsehood.
A boy who desires to tell an extravagant story without being guilty of a lie would point with his thumb over his left shoulder.
MYTHOLOGY.
PUNISHMENT.
Certain, true, Black and blue, Lay me down and cut me in two.
One of them drew a pail of fresh water and by chance brought up a small live fish.
Certain, true, Black and blue.
Children avert this catastrophe by exclaiming, "bread and butter," which is a counter charm.
Children collect two or three hundred names of persons, asking each to give a bow with the name.
At the age of six or seven years, a child, while going to a spring to draw water, saw a little creature with wings fly from one star to another, leaving behind an arc of light.
In making a false statement, it was proper to say "over the left." This was often uttered in such manner that the person addressed should not perceive the qualification.
The phrase is sometimes used, although the person giving the "stump" may not himself be able to accomplish the feat.
Stick your thumb through a knothole and say:--
First boy: "Honor bright?" Second boy: "Hope to die." First boy: "Cut your throat?" Second boy draws finger across throat.
FORTUNE.
Once in Ohio several lads were collected together about a spring.
Blue is the favorite color.
Boys believe that they can prevent the stitch in the side which is liable to be induced by running, by means of holding a pebble under the tongue.
A form fuller than the preceding:--
SPORT.
If two persons, while walking, divide so as to pass an obstruction one on one side and one on the other, they will quarrel.
FRIENDSHIP.
Thus in croquet no child (in a town near Boston) would take the red ball, because it was supposed to mean hate.
Put a mark upon a paper for every bow you get, and when you have one hundred bury the paper and wish.
To "stump" another boy to do a thing is considered as putting a certain obligation on him to perform the action indicated.
Believed by most schoolboys there at that time.
The ideas of children about the significance of color are mixed.
Red and yellow, catch a fellow.
The stars are holes made in the sky, so that the light of heaven shines through.
Children believe it is unlucky to step on the cracks in the flagstones, which are believed to contain poison.
Old Gran'f'ther Graybeard, without tooths or tongue, If you'll give me a little finger I'll give you a thumb. Thumb'll go away and little finger'll come.
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She felt his eyes were upon her, watching every motion, and grew more and more confused in her expression and behaviour.
She was too dizzy with happiness to have attended much to his details of his worldly prospects, but at the sound of his tender words of love her eager heart was ready to listen.
A basket of her father's unmended stockings was on the little round table beside her, and one was on her left hand, which she supposed herself to be mending; but from time to time she made long pauses, and looked in the fire; and yet there was but little motion of flame or light in it out of which to conjure visions.
Out of respect to him, Philip asked no more questions although there were many things that he fain would have known.
He came in, not seeing that any one was there at first; for they had never thought of lighting a candle.
And, perhaps, the elder man was not unprepared for the communication that followed.
Then a door was unbolted, and Sylvia said,
'Why, what's up?' said Philip, surprised at William's unusual manner, and, at the same time, rather gratified to find a reflection of his own feelings about Kinraid.
Things were much in this state when the frost broke, and milder weather succeeded.
Her life was quiet and monotonous, although hard-working; and while her hands mechanically found and did their accustomed labour, the thoughts that rose in her head always centred on Charley Kinraid, his ways, his words, his looks, whether they all meant what she would fain believe they did, and whether, meaning love at the time, such a feeling was likely to endure.
Coulson's face was pale with anger, but for a moment or two he seemed uncertain whether he would reply or not.
At any rate, it was not unwelcome.
He asked her about her mother; not sorry in his heart at Bell Robson's absence.
She was rather thinner and paler; but whatever change there was in her was always an improvement in Philip's eyes, so long as she spoke graciously to him.
Perhaps these bustling sounds prevented Sylvia from hearing approaching footsteps coming down the brow with swift advance; at any rate, she started and suddenly stood up as some one entered the open door.
'Bless thee, lad!
'Not he,' said Sylvia, with some contempt in her tone.
Neither could keep quiet and silent long.
She did not come forward to meet him; she went crimson to the very roots of her hair; but that, in the waning light, he could not see; and she shook so that she felt as if she could hardly stand; but the tremor was not visible to him.
But Sylvia's listening ears caught her father's voice, as he and Kester returned homewards from their day's work in the plough-field; and she started away, and fled upstairs in shy affright, leaving Charley to explain his presence in the solitary kitchen to her father.
She stooped to pick up the scattered stockings and ball of worsted, and so did he; and when they rose up, he had fast hold of her hand, and her face was turned away, half ready to cry.
He wound up with a chuckle, as the thought struck him that this great piece of business, of disposing of their only child, had been concluded while his wife was away.
But it thus happened that they did not give the prompt assistance they were accustomed to render at such times; and Coulson had been away on some of the new expeditions devolving on him and Philip as future partners.
Kinraid had turned his steps towards Haytersbank Farm as soon as ever he had completed his purchases.
By degrees both Hepburn and Coulson were introduced to distant manufacturers and wholesale dealers.
He had intended if necessary to acknowledge his wishes and desires with regard to Sylvia to her parents; but for various reasons he was not sorry that circumstances had given him the chance of seeing her alone, and obtaining her promise to marry him without being obliged to tell either her father or her mother at present.
The widow-woman was to come and stay in the house, to keep Sylvia company, during her mother's absence.
'Is he here again?' said Philip; 'I didn't see him.
'There'll be no need o' that,' murmured Sylvia.
Charley did not speak for a minute or so.
It was 'redd up' for the afternoon; covered with a black mass of coal, over which the equally black kettle hung on the crook.
Then he said--
Daniel laughed the more at this, especially when he caught Charley's look of disappointment.
Now he stood there, bright and handsome as ever, with just that much timidity in his face, that anxiety as to his welcome, which gave his accost an added charm, could she but have perceived it.
She liked him better, too, than she had done a year or two before, because he did not show her any of the eager attention which teased her then, although its meaning was not fully understood.
Dolly Reid came in, and went out softly, unheeded by them.
For a time there was no answer.
Her mother's story of crazy Nancy had taken hold of her; but not as a 'caution,' rather as a parallel case to her own.
It was the time of the great half-yearly traffic of the place; another impetus was given to business when the whalers returned in the autumn, and the men were flush of money, and full of delight at once more seeing their homes and their friends.
But, if he had done so, it would have been locking the stable-door after the steed was stolen.
He must have been pretty sure from some sign or other, or he would never have left it to her womanly pride to give way, and for her to make the next advance.
The shops in the town were equally busy; stores had to be purchased by the whaling-masters, warm clothing of all sorts to be provided.
But all she said was--
Sylvia sat in the house-place, her back to the long low window, in order to have all the light the afternoon hour afforded for her work.
But she was so afraid of herself, so unwilling to show what she felt, and how much she had been thinking of him in his absence, that her reception seemed cold and still.
He made for the door.
Kinraid stepped forward into the firelight; his purpose of concealing what he had said to Sylvia quite melted away by the cordial welcome her father gave him the instant that he recognized him.
'I may go back to where I came from,' he went on.
Their hearts were true and constant, whatever else might be their failings; and it is no new thing to 'damn the faults we have no mind to.' Philip wished that it was not so late, or that very evening he would have gone to keep guard over Sylvia in her mother's absence--nay, perhaps he might have seen reason to give her a warning of some kind.
One evening after the shop was closed, while they were examining the goods, and comparing the sales with the entries in the day-book, Coulson suddenly inquired--
I'm noan comin' down again to-night.'
These were the larger wholesale orders; but many a man, and woman, too, brought out their small hoards to purchase extra comforts, or precious keepsakes for some beloved one.
'I can't come down again.
When Philip saw Sylvia she was always quiet and gentle; perhaps more silent than she had been a year ago, and she did not attend so briskly to what was passing around her.
His voice was changed as he spoke next.
Dolly Reid had done her work and gone home.
'Well?'
'Philip knows,' said Hester, and then, somehow, her voice failed her and she stopped.
Alice was away, looking up Philip's things for his journey.
Those two words of hers, which two hours before would have been so far beneath his aspirations, had now power to re-light hope, to quench reproach or blame.
He turned away, and began to whistle, as if he did not wish for any further conversation with his interrogator.
Her father was right in saying that she might not have set out for Yesterbarrow.
She hastily got up and left the room.
The thought of poor dead Annie Coulson flashed into Philip's mind.
I shall be back, I reckon, in a month or so.'
The window was shut again as soon as the words were spoken.
There was no reply.
'Not to live there: only to stay for some time.
'I see,' said Philip: '"Robinson, Side, Newcastle, can give all requisite information."'
He took his cap and was gone, not heeding Alice's shrill inquiry as to his clothes and his ruffled shirt.
His heart beating, his busy mind rehearsing the probable coming scene, he turned into the field-path that led to Haytersbank.
He breathed hard for a minute, and then knocked at the door of Sylvia's room.
Although none but the Fosters knew the cause of their impatience for their letters, yet there was such tacit sympathy between them and those whom they employed, that Hepburn, Coulson, and Hester were all much relieved when the old woman at length appeared with her basket of letters.
'Liking has nought to do with it.'
Robson was fumbling among some dirty papers he had in an old leather case, which he had produced out of his pocket.
Probably, they would have been unwilling to incur the risk they had done on this manufacturer Dickinson's account, if it had not been that he belonged to the same denomination as themselves, and was publicly distinguished for his excellent and philanthropic character; but these letters were provocative of anxiety, especially since this morning's post had brought out the writer's full name, and various particulars showing his intimate knowledge of Dickinson's affairs.
Several times Jeremiah came out of the parlour in which his brother John was sitting in expectant silence, and, passing through the shop, looked up and down the market-place in search of the old lame woman, who was charitably employed to deliver letters, and who must have been lamer than ever this morning, to judge from the lateness of her coming.
'Luck!' said Alice, turning sharp round on him.
Hester said nothing.
After much perplexed consultation, John had hit upon the plan of sending Hepburn to London to make secret inquiries respecting the true character and commercial position of the man whose creditors, not a month ago, they had esteemed it an honour to be.
Philip, indeed, was quite idle when John Foster opened the parlour-door, and, half doubtfully, called him into the room.
But as soon as they had left the house, and she had covertly watched them up the brow in the field, she sate down to meditate and dream about her great happiness in being beloved by her hero, Charley Kinraid.
'You see, Sylvie, I've had a deal to think on; before long I intend telling yo' all about it; just now I'm not free to do it.
As it was, she scarcely took in the sense of his words.
"Hold your tongue," answered the Dervish.
You know----"
THE CONCLUSION.
It was, in fact, the princess laughing.
"Very well," said the prince; and, catching her up in his arms, he sprang with her from the rock.
The princess did not appear to understand him, for she retorted his question:--
But I don't care.
"Thank you.
"Is that what you call FALLING IN?"
"Come, then," said the prince.
"You took me out--put me in again."
"How am I to put you in?" "That is your business," she answered, quite snappishly.
"I wish I hadn't one either," rejoined the princess; "it is so stupid! I have a great mind," she continued, "to play them all a trick.
"You naughty, naughty, NAUGHTY, NAUGHTY man!" she cried.
"I'll tell papa."
"Put me up directly."
9.
I pity you."
"Here I am," said the prince.
I'm afloat!"
"Put me in."
"There, then," said she, holding out the wine to him.
She did not care who the man was; that was nothing to her.
"Well?" said she, without looking round.
They bore her across to the stone where they had already placed a little boat for her.
In a few minutes the prince appeared.
The princess gave a shriek, and sprang into the lake.
Put me in."
"Princess!" said he.
And the little boat bumped against the stone.
"Now you can go."
You must sit and look at me, else I shall not be able to keep up."
But the prince felt better.
When she saw it she shrieked, and covered her face with her hands.
"Huh!" interrupted Johnny Chuck.
You need not come tomorrow, Johnny Chuck, unless you want to," she added.
He was perfectly satisfied with things as they were.
Down a little way the tunnel grew smaller and then remained the same size all the rest of the way. Way down at the farther end was a nice little bedroom with some grass in it.
He has a number of whiskers and they are black.
Usually my new home isn't very far from my old one, because I am not fond of traveling. Sometimes, however, if we cannot find a place that just suits us, we go quite a distance."
Johnny Chuck certainly is right at home when it comes to digging."
You are better as a digger."
"Who ever heard of a Woodchuck climbing?"
Now sit up so that all can get a good look at you."
This is because I have used up the fat, waiting for the first green things to appear."
"I didn't know but Mrs. Chuck might make a nest on the ground the way Mrs. Peter and Mrs. Jumper do," replied Jumper meekly.
He grumbled and growled to himself.
"I sleep right through, thank goodness. Sometimes I wake up very early in the spring before the snow is all gone, earlier than I wish I did.
"Reddy Fox, Old Man Coyote, men and Dogs are the worst.
"Climb!" exclaimed Peter Rabbit.
"Six or eight," replied Johnny Chuck.
"Not many, but enough," growled Johnny Chuck.
"I can climb if I have to," retorted Johnny Chuck indignantly.
"Of course he looks like a Squirrel, because he is one," said Old Mother Nature.
"Our babies are born in that little underground bedroom, and they stay down in the ground until they are big enough to hunt for food for themselves."
Cold weather, snow and ice don't worry me a bit."
Do you ever wake up in the winter, Johnny Chuck?"
"If you please, Mother Nature," said he, "I think I'll come.
You will notice that Johnny has stout claws.
Peter was delighted to air his knowledge.
"I've climbed up bushes and low trees lots of times, and if I can get a good run first, I can climb up the straight trunk of a tree with rough bark to the first branches--if they are not too far above ground.
"That's quite true, Johnny," said Old Mother Nature.
I didn't know I had any close relatives, and I want to know about them."
"You remember," said Old Mother Nature, "how surprised you little folks were when I told you that Johnny Chuck is a member of the Squirrel family. Happy Jack, you go sit beside Johnny Chuck, and the rest of you look hard at Happy Jack and Johnny and see if you do not see a family resemblance."
He knew that Johnny Chuck would not dare disobey Old Mother Nature.
Of course I have a lot of food stored away down in my house, and once in a while I wake up and eat a little.
Perhaps you have noticed that early in the spring I am as thin as I was fat in the fall.
"Time is up," interrupted Old Mother Nature.
"Why!
"I dig a new hole each spring. Mrs. Chuck and I like a change of scene.
The Woodchucks, sometimes called Ground Hogs, though why any one should call them this is more than I can understand, belong to the Marmot branch of the Squirrel family, and wherever found they look much alike.
"No," replied Johnny.
Seeing Happy Jack and Johnny Chuck sitting up side by side, Peter Rabbit caught the resemblance at once.
Harry would be the town's rich man in the coming generation, and Major Wutherspoon would rise with him, and Vida was jubilant, though she was regretful at having to give up most of her Red Cross work.
And he's pretty cute, too.
Chucked him in the ribs and said, 'Say, boy, what do you want to go to Denver for?
She wondered if he had heard of Erik, and was taking advantage.
He was not Major Wutherspoon; he was Raymie.
The rooms over the store were silent.
In three months Kennicott made seven thousand dollars, which was rather more than four times as much as society paid him for healing the sick.
But whoever bought or sold or mortgaged, the townsmen invited themselves to the feast--millers, real-estate men, lawyers, merchants, and Dr. Will Kennicott.
Without understanding why Carol was troubled by this intensity.
Mr. Blausser reared up like an elephant with a camel's neck--red faced, red eyed, heavy fisted, slightly belching--a born leader, divinely intended to be a congressman but deflected to the more lucrative honors of real-estate.
He never came to the house without trying to paw her.
When Carol saw him with his uniform off, in a pepper-and salt suit and a new gray felt hat, she was disappointed.
Hear what he said to old Ezra?
He was not Raymie; he was Major Wutherspoon; and Kennicott and Carol were grateful when he divulged that Paris wasn't half as pretty as Minneapolis, that all of the American soldiers had been distinguished by their morality when on leave.
You take a genuwine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain't anything he's afraid to tackle.
Champ was broken.
He liked to be called Honest Jim.
She tried to have him appointed to the postmastership, which, since all the work was done by assistants, was the one sinecure in town, the one reward for political purity.
He could not do his work as buyer at the elevator.
How does the poor fish know?' says they.
Harry Haydock, as chairman, introduced Honest Jim Blausser.
Kennicott was respectful as he inquired whether the Germans had good aeroplanes, and what a salient was, and a cootie, and Going West.
In early summer began a "campaign of boosting." The Commercial Club decided that Gopher Prairie was not only a wheat-center but also the perfect site for factories, summer cottages, and state institutions.
The elevator company, Ezra Stowbody president, let him go.
Then, glory of glories, the town put in a White Way.
She learned, in brief, that this was the one Logical Location for factories and wholesale houses.
The wheat money did not remain in the pockets of the farmers; the towns existed to take care of all that.
He was attentive to all women.
In her funeral procession were the eleven people left out of the Grand Army and the Territorial Pioneers, old men and women, very old and weak, who a few decades ago had been boys and girls of the frontier, riding broncos through the rank windy grass of this prairie.
Well I'll tell you how I know!
James Blausser--Come On You Twin Cities--Our Hat Is In the Ring."
But it proved that Mr. Bert Tybee, the former bartender, desired the postmastership.
Americanism, and Pointing with Pride.
They were composed of ornamented posts with clusters of high-powered electric lights along two or three blocks on Main Street.
The town welcomed Mr. Blausser as fully as Carol snubbed him.
"And I am proud to say, my fellow citizens, that in his brief stay here Mr. Blausser has become my warm personal friend as well as my fellow booster, and I advise you all to very carefully attend to the hints of a man who knows how to achieve."
She could nurse Champ Perry, and warm to the neighborliness of Sam Clark, but she could not sit applauding Honest Jim Blausser.
At her solicitation Lyman Cass gave Champ a warm berth as night watchman.
It was rumored that he surprised Vida by coming unannounced, that Vida fainted when she saw him, and for a night and day would not share him with the town.
And Raymie--surely this was not Raymie, but a sterner brother of his, this man with the tight blouse, the shoulder emblems, the trim legs in boots. His face seemed different, his lips more tight.
Snap and speed are his middle name!
She hated the man, and she was afraid of him.
Ray still needed nursing, she explained.
The town was booming, as a result of the war price of wheat.
They say we can't make Gopher Prairie, God bless her! just as big as Minneapolis or St. Paul or Duluth.
Important inventions, such as the applications of steam, gas, and electricity, may find their places in history; but not so the alterations, great as they may be, which have taken place in the appearance of our dining and drawing-rooms.
It abounded in formal bows and courtesies, with measured paces, forwards, backwards and sideways, and many complicated gyrations.
This was the cradle of her genius.
In that simple church she brought them all into subjection to the piety which ruled her in life, and supported her in death.
True taste is not fastidious, nor rejects, Because they may not come within the rule Of composition pure and picturesque, Unnumbered simple scenes which fill the leaves Of Nature's sketch book.
Jane was only twelve years old at the time of the earliest of these representations, and not more than fifteen when the last took place.
These were the first objects which inspired her young heart with a sense of the beauties of nature.
Many years after her death, some circumstances induced her sister Cassandra to break through her habitual reticence, and to speak of it.
Vegetables were less plentiful and less various.
If all this is true, the future admiral of the British Fleet must have cut a conspicuous figure in the hunting-field.
CHAPTER II.
The minuet expired with the last century: but long after it had ceased to be danced publicly it was taught to boys and girls, in order to give them a graceful carriage.
One who knew and loved it well very happily expressed its quiet charms, when he wrote
I remember two such elegant little wheels in our own family.
The picture was drawn from the intuitive perceptions of genius, not from personal experience.
But mortal damsels have long ago discarded the clumsy implement.
I remember to have heard of only two little things different from modern customs.
Up to the beginning of the present century, poor women found profitable employment in spinning flax or wool.
The dinners too were more homely, though not less plentiful and savoury; and the bill of fare in one house would not be so like that in another as it is now, for family receipts were held in high estimation.
The family was unbroken by death, and seldom visited by sorrow.
It is certainly not a picturesque country; it presents no grand or extensive views; but the features are small rather than plain.
This dance presented a great show of enjoyment, but it was not without its peculiar troubles.
This little domestic tragedy caused great and lasting grief to the principal sufferer, and could not but cast a gloom over the whole party.
A young man who expected to have his things packed or unpacked for him by a servant, when he travelled, would have been thought exceptionally fine, or exceptionally lazy.
The outstretched arms, the advanced foot, the sway of the whole figure backwards and forwards, produced picturesque attitudes, and displayed whatever of grace or beauty the work-woman might possess.
It was appropriated to solid food, rather than to flowers, fruits, and decorations.
I have heard also of another curious proof of the respect in which this dance was held.
Ladies did not disdain to spin the thread of which the household linen was woven. Some ladies liked to wash with their own hands their choice china after breakfast or tea.
She said that, while staying at some seaside place, they became acquainted with a gentleman, whose charm of person, mind, and manners was such that Cassandra thought him worthy to possess and likely to win her sister's love.
She was, however, an early observer, and it may be reasonably supposed that some of the incidents and feelings which are so vividly painted in the Mansfield Park theatricals are due to her recollections of these entertainments.
It was not so much that they had not servants to do all these things for them, as that they took an interest in such occupations.
This defence against wet and dirt is now seldom seen.
But they never again met.
He accompanied this friend to the West Indies, as chaplain to his regiment, and there died of yellow fever, to the great concern of his friend and patron, who afterwards declared that, if he had known of the engagement, he would not have permitted him to go out to such a climate.
But the chief beauty of Steventon consisted in its hedgerows.
Heathen mythology celebrated it in the three Fates spinning and measuring out the thread of human life.
It was to be found only where there was a decided taste for music, not so common then as now, or in such great houses as would probably contain a billiard-table.
I believe that Cassandra and Jane sometimes visited them there, and that Jane thus acquired the intimate knowledge of the topography and customs of Bath, which enabled her to write 'Northanger Abbey' long before she resided there herself.
I am tempted to add a little about the difference of personal habits.
With regard to the mistresses, it is, I believe, generally understood, that at the time to which I refer, a hundred years ago, they took a personal part in the higher branches of cookery, as well as in the concoction of home-made wines, and distilling of herbs for domestic medicines, which are nearly allied to the same art.
To record such little matters would indeed be 'to chronicle small beer.' But, in a slight memoir like this, I may be allowed to note some of those changes in social habits which give a colour to history, but which the historian has the greatest difficulty in recovering.
The home at Steventon must have been, for many years, a pleasant and prosperous one.
Well-dressed young men of my acquaintance, who had their coat from a London tailor, would always brush their evening suit themselves, rather than entrust it to the carelessness of a rough servant, and to the risks of dirt and grease in the kitchen; for in those days servants' halls were not common in the houses of the clergy and the smaller country gentry.
Of Jane herself I know of no such definite tale of love to relate.
One house would pride itself on its ham, another on its game-pie, and a third on its superior furmity, or tansey-pudding.
The sympathy of Jane was probably, from her age, and her peculiar attachment to her sister, the deepest of all.
Edward Cooper did not live undistinguished.
Of course, they cannot be universally applicable.
This was of the more importance, because, previous to the introduction of clipping, about the year 1820, it was a difficult and tedious work to make a long-coated hunter dry and comfortable, and was often very imperfectly done.
The lanes wind along in a natural curve, continually fringed with irregular borders of native turf, and lead to pleasant nooks and corners.
It may be asserted as a general truth, that less was left to the charge and discretion of servants, and more was done, or superintended, by the masters and mistresses.
A pianoforte, or rather a spinnet or harpsichord, was by no means a necessary appendage.
First it dropped its iron ring and became a clog; afterwards it was fined down into the pliant galoshe--lighter to wear and more effectual to protect--a no less manifest instance of gradual improvement than Cowper indicates when he traces through eighty lines of poetry his 'accomplished sofa' back to the original three-legged stool.
A small writing-desk, with a smaller work-box, or netting-case, was all that each young lady contributed to occupy the table; for the large family work-basket, though often produced in the parlour, lived in the closet.
As the first twenty-five years, more than half of the brief life of Jane Austen, were spent in the parsonage of Steventon, some description of that place ought to be given.
The patten now supports each frugal dame, Which from the blue-eyed Patty takes the name.
Nor does life's stream for observation stay; It hurries all too fast to mark their way.
It was said of a nobleman, a personal friend of George III. and a model gentleman of his day, that he would have made the tour of Europe without ever touching the back of his travelling carriage. But perhaps we should be most struck with the total absence of those elegant little articles which now embellish and encumber our drawing-room tables.
Some time before they left Steventon, one great affliction came upon the family.
Still it has its beauties.
To gallop all the country over, The last night's partner to behold, And humbly hope she caught no cold.
Hornpipes, cotillons, and reels, were occasionally danced; but the chief occupation of the evening was the interminable country dance, in which all could join.
Many country towns had a monthly ball throughout the winter, in some of which the same apartment served for dancing and tea-room.
After the death of their own parents, the two young Coopers paid long visits at Steventon.
Gloves immaculately clean were considered requisite for its due performance, while gloves a little soiled were thought good enough for a country dance; and accordingly some prudent ladies provided themselves with two pairs for their several purposes.
Every hundred years, and especially a century like the last, marked by an extraordinary advance in wealth, luxury, and refinement of taste, as well as in the mechanical arts which embellish our houses, must produce a great change in their aspect.
Jane Cooper was married from her uncle's house at Steventon, to Captain, afterwards Sir Thomas Williams, under whom Charles Austen served in several ships.
The church itself--I speak of it as it then was, before the improvements made by the present rector--
She was a dear friend of her namesake, but was fated to become a cause of great sorrow to her, for a few years after the marriage she was suddenly killed by an accident to her carriage.
I have been told that Sir Francis Austen, when seven years old, bought on his own account, it must be supposed with his father's permission, a pony for a guinea and a half; and after riding him with great success for two seasons, sold him for a guinea more.
But a still greater difference would be found in the furniture of the rooms, which would appear to us lamentably scanty.
They shared with the principal tenant the command of an excellent manor, and enjoyed, in this reflected way, some of the consideration usually awarded to landed proprietors.
This was the daughter of Mr. Austen's only sister, Mrs. Hancock.
There would often be but one sofa in the house, and that a stiff, angular, uncomfortable article. There were no deep easy-chairs, nor other appliances for lounging; for to lie down, or even to lean back, was a luxury permitted only to old persons or invalids.
Orders had been given by Buonaparte's government to detain all English travellers, but at the post-houses Mrs. Henry Austen gave the necessary orders herself, and her French was so perfect that she passed everywhere for a native, and her husband escaped under this protection.
Men soon forget the small objects which they leave behind them as they drift down the stream of life.
It may be observed that this hand-spinning is the most primitive of female accomplishments, and can be traced back to the earliest times. Ballad poetry and fairy tales are full of allusions to it.
Any description that I might attempt of the family life at Steventon, which closed soon after I was born, could be little better than a fancy- piece.
When they parted, he expressed his intention of soon seeing them again; and Cassandra felt no doubt as to his motives.
As an illustration of the purposes which a patten was intended to serve, I add the following epigram, written by Jane Austen's uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, on reading in a newspaper the marriage of Captain Foote to Miss Patten:--
The carriage, once bought, entailed little further expense; and the horses probably, like Mr. Bennet's, were often employed on farm work. Moreover, it should be remembered that a pair of horses in those days were almost necessary, if ladies were to move about at all; for neither the condition of the roads nor the style of carriage-building admitted of any comfortable vehicle being drawn by a single horse.
We may rejoice that these causes of irritation no longer exist; and that if such feelings as jealousy, rivalry, and discontent ever touch celestial bosoms in the modern ball-room they must arise from different and more recondite sources.
The surface continually swells and sinks, but the hills are not bold, nor the valleys deep; and though it is sufficiently well clothed with woods and hedgerows, yet the poverty of the soil in most places prevents the timber from attaining a large size.
The same authority informs me that his first cloth suit was made from a scarlet habit, which, according to the fashion of the times, had been his mother's usual morning dress.
But the stately minuet still reigned supreme; and every regular ball commenced with it.
Whenever it is obeyed, we find that the corpse and the offerings disappear during our absence. Perhaps you have seen the cause."
It seemed to be in ruinous condition; but he hastened to it eagerly, and found that it was inhabited by an aged priest, from whom he begged the favor of a night's lodging.
We make the proper offerings and prayers;--then we go away, leaving the corpse alone.
All in turn saluted him; and when they had entered, and looked about the room, no one expressed any surprise at the disappearance of the dead body and the offerings.
By the rule of our village, none of us can stay here after midnight.
I am ashamed!--I am very much ashamed!--I am exceedingly ashamed!"
"Now, reverend Sir, much as we regret to leave you alone, we must bid you farewell.
Then it went away, as mysteriously as it had come.
He saw that Shape lift the corpse, as with hands, devour it, more quickly than a cat devours a rat,--beginning at the head, and eating everything: the hair and the bones and even the shroud.
Muso found his way to the hamlet, which consisted of less than a dozen farm-cottages; and he was kindly received at the dwelling of the headman.
"The priest who yesterday evening directed me to this village," answered Muso.
"What priest?" the young man asked.
No person seemed to be surprised by his narration; and the master of the house observed:--
We can find you good lodging in the other village.
"A long, long time ago, I was a priest in this desolate region.
For a long time he wandered about helplessly; and he was beginning to despair of finding shelter for the night, when he perceived, on the top of a hill lighted by the last rays of the sun, one of those little hermitages, called anjitsu, which are built for solitary priests.
All then left the house, except the priest, who went to the room where the dead body was lying.
The priest recited the service, and performed the funeral ceremonies,--after which he entered into meditation.
The young man appeared to be rejoiced by these assurances, and expressed his gratitude in fitting words.
We beg, kind Sir, that you will take every care of your honorable body, while we are unable to attend upon you.
Muso made answer:--
"Reverend Sir, there is no priest and there is no anjitsu on the hill. For the time of many generations there has not been any resident-priest in this neighborhood."
When he had done so, the hermit humbly bowed down before him, exclaiming:--"Ah!
Muso then inquired:--
But the law of our village, as I told you last evening, obliges us to quit our houses after a death has taken place, and to leave the corpse alone.
"I called at his anjitsu on the hill yonder.
And if you happen to hear or see anything strange during our absence, please tell us of the matter when we return in the morning."
But perhaps, as you are a priest, you have no fear of demons or evil spirits; and, if you are not afraid of being left alone with the body, you will be very welcome to the use of this poor house. However, I must tell you that nobody, except a priest, would dare to remain here tonight."
"You need not be ashamed for having refused me shelter," said Muso. "You directed me to the village yonder, where I was very kindly treated; and I thank you for that favor.
There was no other priest for many leagues around.
But, when the hush of the night was at its deepest, there noiselessly entered a Shape, vague and vast; and in the same moment Muso found himself without power to move or speak.
So, in that time, the bodies of the mountain-folk who died used to be brought here,--sometimes from great distances,--in order that I might repeat over them the holy service.
He refused me lodging, but told me the way here."
And the monstrous Thing, having thus consumed the body, turned to the offerings, and ate them also.
Then the other members of the family, and the folk assembled in the adjoining room, having been told of the priest's kind promises, came to thank him,--after which the master of the house said:--
This the old man harshly refused; but he directed Muso to a certain hamlet, in the valley adjoining where lodging and food could be obtained.
When the villagers returned next morning, they found the priest awaiting them at the door of the headman's dwelling.
"Does not the priest on the hill sometimes perform the funeral service for your dead?"
I do not know what you mean by your words about the danger of staying here alone; but I am not afraid of ghosts or demons: therefore please to feel no anxiety on my account."
Had you told me, I could have performed the service before your departure.
But I am sorry that you did not tell me of your father's death when I came;--for, though I was a little tired, I certainly was not so tired that I should have found difficulty in doing my duty as a priest.
The listeners looked at each other, as in astonishment; and, after a moment of silence, the master of the house said:--
The usual offerings had been set before the corpse; and a small Buddhist lamp--tomyo--was burning.
Presently the sliding-screens were gently pushed apart; and a young man, carrying a lighted lantern, entered the room, respectfully saluted him, and said:--
But I repeated the service and performed the rites only as a matter of business;--I thought only of the food and the clothes that my sacred profession enabled me to gain.
Whenever this law has been broken, heretofore, some great misfortune has followed.
No sooner had the hermit uttered this petition than he disappeared; and the hermitage also disappeared at the same instant.
But the master of the house said to Muso:--
Since then I have been obliged to feed upon the corpses of the people who die in this district: every one of them I must devour in the way that you saw last night...
But after having bidden them farewell, and obtained all necessary information as to his road, he determined to look again for the hermitage on the hill, and so to ascertain whether he had really been deceived.
Strange things always happen in the house where a corpse has thus been left: so we think that it will be better for you to come away with us.
Muso said nothing more on the subject; for it was evident that his kind hosts supposed him to have been deluded by some goblin.
I am ashamed only that you should have seen me in my real shape,--for it was I who devoured the corpse and the offerings last night before your eyes...
Forty or fifty persons were assembled in the principal apartment, at the moment of Muso's arrival; but he was shown into a small separate room, where he was promptly supplied with food and bedding.
As it is, I shall perform the service after you have gone away; and I shall stay by the body until morning.
Gladly we would have stayed with you, if it had been possible.
"What you have told us, reverend Sir, agrees with what has been said about this matter from ancient time."
But she had not the money necessary.
Take, therefore, this jar." So saying, she put the jar into his hands, and disappeared.
And as she could not bear the shame, she drowned herself, after having written a farewell letter containing these words:--
And the woman said: "I have come to answer your fervent prayer as it deserves to be answered.
"When I am dead, it will not be difficult to melt the mirror and to cast the bell.
After the bell had been rolled into the swamp, there was, of course, no more chance of ringing it in such wise as to break it.
With all their might and main they swung the ringing-beam; but the bell proved to be a good bell, and it bravely withstood their assaults. Nevertheless, the people were not easily discouraged.
For example:--you cannot afford to build a Buddhist temple; but you can easily lay a pebble before the image of the Buddha, with the same pious feeling that would prompt you to build a temple if you were rich enough to build one.
You cannot read the six thousand seven hundred and seventy-one volumes of the Buddhist texts; but you can make a revolving library, containing them, turn round, by pushing it like a windlass.
Among these folk was a dissolute farmer who lived near Mugenyama, on the bank of the Oigawa.
So the ringing became an affliction; and the priests could not endure it; and they got rid of the bell by rolling it down the hill into a swamp.
Into his house the happy man rushed, to tell his wife the good news.
Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.
LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!
They reckoned on it.
They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their cause.
This moment was brief.
The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered, the kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had been gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped, the fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned, the rubbish swept up, corpses removed.
I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion.
The lofty house which formed the back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof a rosy reflection.
The municipal guardsmen were attended to first.
"So be it.
Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses. Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people."
They waited for it with a smile.
The light of torches resembles the wisdom of cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles."
The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected."
No repast had been possible.
The redoubt had been cleverly made over, into a wall on the inside and a thicket on the outside.
He returned from his sombre eagle flight into outer darkness.
The cat is the erratum of the mouse.
In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth and Javert bound to his post.
Still, only three or four took advantage of it.
Birds flew about in it with cries of joy.
The sky was of that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue.
The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope.
"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly.
Caesar is stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys.
The manner in which they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn.
"The whole army of Paris is to strike.
"What is the cat?" he exclaimed.
One feels the God through the greater outrage."
About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength.
They had raised it two feet.
There were still thirty-seven of them.
Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and let us all remain in it.
The barricade had been not only repaired, but augmented.
The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it like the wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.
"It is a corrective.
All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of bees.
There is the National Guard in addition.
Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword.
The torch, which had been replaced in its cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished.
With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the day which was at hand into three distinct phases.
He interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.
It had the appearance of being afraid.
He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the better; the lesson is but the more exalted.
CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW
All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.
He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:
Why sacrifice forty?"
He had but one idea now, to die; and he did not wish to be turned aside from it, but he reflected, in his gloomy somnambulism, that while destroying himself, he was not prohibited from saving some one else.
They obeyed.
Combeferre took the word.
He did not cry. You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire, and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay.
Go."--"It is your duty rather," retorted the man, "you have two sisters whom you maintain."--And an unprecedented controversy broke forth.
There were ashes in his teeth.
"Long live death!
He would have turned pale, had it been possible for him to become any paler.
When one supports one's relatives by one's toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one's self.
My friends, there is a morrow; you will not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings!
The barricade is hemmed in."
'Whence come you?' 'Don't you belong to the barricade?' And they will look at your hands.
This guarantee satisfied every one.
"Do you designate who is to remain."
His breathing was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent.
Poor people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for themselves.
"Because not one will go away."
"Welcome, citizen."
Think of the street, think of the pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past which women go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire.
We know well what you are; we know well that you are all brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your souls the joy and the glory of giving your life for the great cause; we know well that you feel yourselves elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that each one of you clings to his share in the triumph.
See here.
"We did," said Mr. Furlong, "at a more or less nominal sum--four hundred thousand or whatever it might be.
Sometimes one saw a picture in the paper and wondered for a moment who the person was; but on looking more closely and noticing what was written under it, one said, "Oh, I see, an alderman," and turned to something else.
Dr. McTeague, blinking in the blue tobacco smoke, was there to stand for the church.
"It's a tyranny," he said.
"Abominable, is it not?" said Mr. Fyshe.
"Yes," assented Mr. Newberry, and then, leaning forwards in his chair and looking carefully about the corridors of the club, he spoke behind his hand and said, "And the mayor's the biggest grafter of the lot.
So when Mr. Newberry said "It's worse than Russia!" he meant it, every word.
Of course we knew what they wanted. They meant us to hand them over fifty dollars each to stuff into their rascally pockets."
"Our feeling was," went on Mr. Furlong, "that if the city wanted our land for the cemetery extension, it might have it at its own figure--four hundred thousand, half a million, in fact at absolutely any price, from four hundred thousand up, that they cared to put on it. We didn't regard it as a commercial transaction at all.
"As to the government of this city," said Mr. Newberry, leaning back in a leather armchair at the Mausoleum Club and lighting a second cigar, "it's rotten, that's all."
In a city with a hundred and fifty deaths a week, and sometimes even better, an undertaker sat on the council!
The word is a strong one.
In Philadelphia they called it the spirit of William Penn.
"We thought, too, that our ground, having the tanneries and the chemical factory along the farther side of it, was an ideal place for--" he paused, seeking a mode of expressing his thought.
Why don't you supply the city?' He shook his head, 'I wouldn't do it at three-fifty,' he said.
Nobody had ever really thought about them--that is to say, nobody on Plutoria Avenue.
And worse than that!
If we get a new council in they may name their own figure.' 'Good,' I said.
"Certainly not," said Mr. Fyshe, very quietly and decidedly, looking at Mr. Furlong in a searching way as he spoke.
'Take your own case,' I said to him, 'how is it that you, a coal man, are not helping the city in this matter?
"There ought to be a criminal law for that sort of thing."
Our reward lay merely in the fact of selling it to them."
He says that the city has been buying coal wholesale at the pit mouth at three fifty--utterly worthless stuff, he tells me.
"Isn't it fine," whispered Mr. Spillikins to Mr. Newberry, "to see a set of men like these all going into a thing like this, not thinking of their own interests a bit?"
"Refused it," gasped Mr. Spillikins, "I say!"
"I went down the next day to see the deputy assistant (about a thing connected with the same matter), told him what I wanted and passed a fifty dollar bill across the counter and the fellow fairly threw it back at me, in a perfect rage.
"Outrageous!" said Mr. Furlong.
We felt that for such a purpose, almost sacred as it were, one would want as little bargaining as possible."
There had come a moment--quite suddenly it seemed--when it occurred to everybody at the same time that the whole government of the city was rotten.
Mr. Rasselyer-Brown, Mr. Furlong senior and others were there, not from special interest in the light or traction questions, but, as they said themselves, from pure civic spirit.
"Heart and soul," answered Mr. Fyshe.
He refused it!"
Twenty names are hard to remember, and as a matter of fact, at the moment when this wave of feeling struck the city, nobody knew or cared who were aldermen, anyway.
"It's a fact," repeated Mr. Fyshe.
Giants! he said, that was what they were.
In a city that consumed a thousand tons of meat every week!
Everybody felt it at once.
Said it was too long!
You don't say!"
Let the boys know that just for a while the darker they keep the better."
"They take money.
Think of it!
Just think of it!"
"He did," said Mr. Fyshe.
"It's a splendid movement!" said Mr. Fyshe (he was a leading shareholder and director of the Citizens' Light), "what a splendid thing to think that we shan't have to deal for our new franchise with a set of corrupt rapscallions like these present aldermen.
"You had thought, had you not, of offering it to the city?" said Mr. Fyshe.
Not merely different in the matter of graft, but different, so Mr. Newberry said, in the calibre of the men.
As soon as people began to look into the condition of things in the city they were horrified at what they found.
"Well," said the heavy mayor, speaking slowly and cautiously and eyeing his henchman with quiet scrutiny, "you want to go pretty easy now, I tell you."
A hundred and fifty years (only a century and a half) too long for the franchise!
Thus it was that the light broke and spread and illuminated in all directions.
The thing was monstrous.
Imagine it!
"And the infernal insolence of them," Mr. Fyshe continued.
Mr. Boulder, who owned, among other things, a stone quarry and an asphalt company, felt that the paving of the streets was a disgrace.
And the fellow took it, took it like a shot."
But as for the present legislature--here Mr. Dick Overend sadly nodded assent in advance to what he knew was coming--as for the present legislature--well--Mr.
"A bum city solicitor," said Mr. Overend, "and an infernal grafter for treasurer."
Do you want to?"
"I believe it, Bibbs.
Then, Bibbs, I did what I'd been raised to know how to do.
"I do, though!" she sobbed.
"And you can't--you can't--"
He could not look at her, and he could not speak.
She looked at him, and slowly shook her head.
He followed her into the room where they always sat, and sank into a chair.
What is it that's happened?"
You didn't believe that I'd tried to make you fall in love with me--"
These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.
"For forms of government let fools contest--That which is best administered is best,"--yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.
A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
No senator, representative, or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States, can be of the numbers of the electors.
How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?
But as a majority of the votes might not always happen to centre in one man, and as it might be unsafe to permit less than a majority to be conclusive, it is provided that, in such a contingency, the House of Representatives shall select out of the candidates who shall have the five highest number of votes, the man who in their opinion may be best qualified for the office.
Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption.
Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says:
And to take the senator of any State from his seat as senator, to place him in that of President of the Senate, would be to exchange, in regard to the State from which he came, a constant for a contingent vote.
To the People of the State of New York:
They have not made the appointment of the President to depend on any preexisting bodies of men, who might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes; but they have referred it in the first instance to an immediate act of the people of America, to be exerted in the choice of persons for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment.
But two considerations seem to justify the ideas of the convention in this respect.
It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture.
The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
From The Independent Journal.
Nor would it be found easy suddenly to embark them, dispersed as they would be over thirteen States, in any combinations founded upon motives, which though they could not properly be denominated corrupt, might yet be of a nature to mislead them from their duty.
But the convention have guarded against all danger of this sort, with the most provident and judicious attention.
It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.
It has been alleged, that it would have been preferable to have authorized the Senate to elect out of their own body an officer answering that description.
THE mode of appointment of the Chief Magistrate of the United States is almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure, or which has received the slightest mark of approbation from its opponents.
And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office.
But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.
The appointment of an extraordinary person, as Vice-President, has been objected to as superfluous, if not mischievous.
The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.
Wednesday, March 12, 1788.
Their transient existence, and their detached situation, already taken notice of, afford a satisfactory prospect of their continuing so, to the conclusion of it.
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.
It is remarkable that in this, as in most other instances, the objection which is made would lie against the constitution of this State.
And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.
The Vice-President is to be chosen in the same manner with the President; with this difference, that the Senate is to do, in respect to the former, what is to be done by the House of Representatives, in respect to the latter.
This has relation to two objects: to the personal firmness of the executive magistrate, in the employment of his constitutional powers; and to the stability of the system of administration which may have been adopted under his auspices.
It is one thing to be subordinate to the laws, and another to be dependent on the legislative body.
Another answer, perhaps more obvious, though not more conclusive, will result from the consideration of the influence of the legislative body over the people; which might be employed to prevent the re-election of a man who, by an upright resistance to any sinister project of that body, should have made himself obnoxious to its resentment.
This remark is not less applicable to a political privilege, or honor, or trust, than to any article of ordinary property.
From the New York Packet.
In either case, feebleness and irresolution must be the characteristics of the station.
It is a just observation, that the people commonly INTEND the PUBLIC GOOD.
The first comports with, the last violates, the fundamental principles of good government; and, whatever may be the forms of the Constitution, unites all power in the same hands.
The representatives of the people, in a popular assembly, seem sometimes to fancy that they are the people themselves, and betray strong symptoms of impatience and disgust at the least sign of opposition from any other quarter; as if the exercise of its rights, by either the executive or judiciary, were a breach of their privilege and an outrage to their dignity.
To the People of the State of New York:
He might, then, hazard with safety, in proportion to the proofs he had given of his wisdom and integrity, and to the title he had acquired to the respect and attachment of his fellow-citizens.
In governments purely republican, this tendency is almost irresistible.
Unless the exclusion be perpetual, there will be no pretense to infer the first advantage.
There are few men who would not feel much less zeal in the discharge of a duty when they were conscious that the advantages of the station with which it was connected must be relinquished at a determinate period, than when they were permitted to entertain a hope of obtaining, by meriting, a continuance of them.
The actual conduct of foreign negotiations, the preparatory plans of finance, the application and disbursement of the public moneys in conformity to the general appropriations of the legislature, the arrangement of the army and navy, the directions of the operations of war--these, and other matters of a like nature, constitute what seems to be most properly understood by the administration of government.
And we need not be apprehensive that there will be too much stability, while there is even the option of changing; nor need we desire to prohibit the people from continuing their confidence where they think it may be safely placed, and where, by constancy on their part, they may obviate the fatal inconveniences of fluctuating councils and a variable policy.
As to the second supposed advantage, there is still greater reason to entertain doubts concerning it.
This exclusion, whether temporary or perpetual, would have nearly the same effects, and these effects would be for the most part rather pernicious than salutary.
The contrary is the usual course of things.
Wednesday, March 19, 1788.
A fifth ill effect of the exclusion would be, that it would operate as a constitutional interdiction of stability in the administration.
A fourth ill effect of the exclusion would be the banishing men from stations in which, in certain emergencies of the state, their presence might be of the greatest moment to the public interest or safety.
To the People of the State of New York:
Another ill effect of the exclusion would be the temptation to sordid views, to peculation, and, in some instances, to usurpation.
These are some of the disadvantages which would flow from the principle of exclusion.
Without supposing the personal essentiality of the man, it is evident that a change of the chief magistrate, at the breaking out of a war, or at any similar crisis, for another, even of equal merit, would at all times be detrimental to the community, inasmuch as it would substitute inexperience to experience, and would tend to unhinge and set afloat the already settled train of the administration.
Nothing appears more plausible at first sight, nor more ill-founded upon close inspection, than a scheme which in relation to the present point has had some respectable advocates--I mean that of continuing the chief magistrate in office for a certain time, and then excluding him from it, either for a limited period or forever after.
With a positive duration of considerable extent, I connect the circumstance of re-eligibility.
A man of many places--Norway, the north of Iceland, the west of Iceland, those little islands off the shore of Iceland.
"Can no bad fortune spoil your good nature?" laughed Eric.
Well, we have done it before."
Then laughter and talking began in the hall because Eric's good temper had come back.
"What will it be in winter?"
"It is pleasant to sail along the coast now," said Eric.
All the time the weather was growing colder. Eric's people kept themselves wrapped in their cloaks and put scarfs around their heads.
His men pounded on the tables and shouted:
It is carrying our ship away from this land.
I cannot make head against it. Out with the oars!"
The judges outlawed him because they were afraid.
So of those thirty-five ships only fifteen got to Greenland.
When they came home they had this to tell:
Let every man carry what he can."
"Is it so?" Eric cried, leaping up.
Some men liked the sound of it, and they came to Eric and said:
What will he not do?"
"It is a country of ice, shining white.
When the men looked above the cliffs they saw a long line of white cutting the sky.
Then he laughed.
He had never seen a king.
As they looked back at the shore, Leif said:
You are a welcome guest."
But ill luck came, and he grew poor.
Why did you not set out to look for him?
"They landed here this spring.
I mean to marry her, if her father will permit it."
"They are like food and drink," they cried.
The forests are without end.
Now the king was going to hold a feast at night, and Leif put on his most beautiful clothes to go to it.
Then Leif was angry.
Grapes do not grow in Greenland nor in Iceland nor even in Norway.
"Can I not tell grapes when I see them?" cried Tyrker.
Then they saw the grapes and tasted them.
"From Greenland!" said the king.
He was laughing and talking to himself.
There were no kings in Iceland or in Greenland.
"What is it?" cried the men.
The Greenlanders looked.
So he helped Leif fit out a boat and sent him off.
One spring Leif said to his father:
The sea is full of fish."
As they came near, the men said:
"I have never seen Norway, our mother land.
"For your sake I shall not forget Greenland."
"No man would ever need a cloak there.
Leif noticed two strangers, an old man who sat at Eric's side and a young woman on the cross-bench.
Now one day they had been wandering about and all came back to camp at night except Tyrker.
"Lumber! lumber!" they cried.
"I have found grapes growing wild," answered Tyrker, and he laughed, and his eyes shone.
But people could not forget his story.
Come up and speak with me."
The men were hungry and set about building a fire.
You shall take us to them early in the morning, Tyrker."
"It is right that you should go.
The ship we will load with logs from these great trees.
His face is not the face of a fool.
"There is no lack of fuel here," they said.
"Surely you must have plundered Asgard," they said, smacking their lips.
Then he turned and started out to hunt for him.
He passed Iceland and the Faroes and the Shetlands.
"It is wonderful," Leif said.
They turned and talked to Leif's ship-comrades who were scattered among them.
"Leif shall sit in the place of honor."
"Let this gift show my love, Leif Ericsson," he said.
"There is no stone here as in Norway, but only good black dirt," Leif said.
This hurt his pride.
Now half of you shall gather grapes for the next few days, and the other half shall cut timber."
They did not know where they were.
"I have not been so very far, but I have found something wonderful."
'I will not stay in Iceland and be a beggar,' he said to himself.
On his head he put a knitted cap of bright colors.
"Who are these strangers?" he asked.
So they did, and after a week sailed off.
So he steered for it.
"Why did you not keep together?
"I will call this country Wineland for the grapes that grow there."
He had shoes of scarlet with golden clasps.
"Then he got ready a great feast and invited all his friends.
Surely this is a better country than Greenland or than Iceland either."
"Surely luck has brought us also to a new country.
We must start back.
At the feast that night Eric said:
"I will go to the king," he said.
"He is surely worth knowing.
He carries his head like a lord of men."
When he started back in the spring, the king gave him two thralls as a parting gift.
He stopped at all of these places and feasted his mind on the new things.
His men followed, silent and ashamed.
He belted his jacket with a gold girdle.
"I am glad to have you for a guest," the king said.
"Why are you so late?" he asked.
Leif sailed for months.
He turned to his brother Thorstein who sat next to him.
For he said to himself, 'I will not leave in shame.
A German, named Tyrker, was with Leif.
"There is a great deal of truth in what you say, niece," returned Don Quixote, "and I could tell you somewhat about birth that would astonish you; but, not to mix up things human and divine, I refrain.
"I see," said Sancho; "I'll bet I ought to have said proportion, and not promotion; but it is no matter, as your worship has understood me."
But heaven forbid that, to gratify my own inclination, I should shake or shatter this pillar of letters and vessel of the sciences, and cut down this towering palm of the fair and liberal arts.
The curses which both housekeeper and niece poured out on the bachelor were past counting; they tore their hair, they clawed their faces, and in the style of the hired mourners that were once in fashion, they raised a lamentation over the departure of their master and uncle, as if it had been his death.
"Then might not your worship," said she, "be one of those that, without stirring a step, serve their king and lord in his court?"
It is by rugged paths like these they go That scale the heights of immortality, Unreached by those that falter here below."
CHAPTER VI.
"And so well understood," returned Don Quixote, "that I have seen into the depths of thy thoughts, and know the mark thou art shooting at with the countless shafts of thy proverbs.
"Well, if you can't understand me," said Sancho, "I don't know how to put it; I know no more, God help me."
See now who offers to become one; no less than the illustrious bachelor Samson Carrasco, the perpetual joy and delight of the courts of the Salamancan schools, sound in body, discreet, patient under heat or cold, hunger or thirst, with all the qualifications requisite to make a knight-errant's squire!
"There are," replied Don Quixote, "and plenty of them; and it is right there should be, to set off the dignity of the prince, and for the greater glory of the king's majesty."
OF WHAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS NIECE AND HOUSEKEEPER; ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CHAPTERS IN THE WHOLE HISTORY
"May be so," replied Don Quixote; "but to come to the point, what does Teresa say?"
OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS SQUIRE, TOGETHER WITH OTHER VERY NOTABLE INCIDENTS
The arch wag Samson came forward, and embracing him as he had done before, said with a loud voice, "O flower of knight-errantry!
Nevertheless, among many other representations made to him, the housekeeper said to him, "In truth, master, if you do not keep still and stay quiet at home, and give over roaming mountains and valleys like a troubled spirit, looking for what they say are called adventures, but what I call misfortunes, I shall have to make complaint to God and the king with loud supplication to send some remedy."
"And so say I," said Don Quixote; "continue, Sancho my friend; go on; you talk pearls to-day."
"That I can well believe," replied the bachelor, "for they are so good and so fat, and so well-bred, that they would not say one thing for another, though they were to burst for it.
"I would bet," said Sancho, "that from the very first you understood me, and knew what I meant, but you wanted to put me out that you might hear me make another couple of dozen blunders."
Whereupon the housekeeper said, "Tell us, senor, at his Majesty's court are there no knights?"
They strove by all the means in their power to divert him from such an unlucky scheme; but it was all preaching in the desert and hammering cold iron.
What has happened to you?
One would think you heart-broken."
CHAPTER VII.
"Nothing, Senor Samson," said she, "only that my master is breaking out, plainly breaking out."
In short then, mistress housekeeper, that is all, and there is nothing the matter, except what it is feared Don Quixote may do?"
He eats little and sleeps little, and all he eats is fruit, and when he sleeps, if he sleeps at all, it is in the field on the hard earth like a brute beast.
The cuts, thrusts, down strokes, back strokes and doubles, that Corchuelo delivered were past counting, and came thicker than hops or hail.
"If your worship had a good memory," replied Sancho, "you would remember the articles of our agreement before we started from home this last time; one of them was that I was to be let say all I liked, so long as it was not against my neighbour or your worship's authority; and so far, it seems to me, I have not broken the said article."
CHAPTER XX.
He has provided dancers too, not only sword but also bell-dancers, for in his own town there are those who ring the changes and jingle the bells to perfection; of shoe-dancers I say nothing, for of them he has engaged a host.
Talents and accomplishments that can't be turned into money, let Count Dirlos have them; but when such gifts fall to one that has hard cash, I wish my condition of life was as becoming as they are.
During the remainder of the journey the licentiate held forth to them on the excellences of the sword, with such conclusive arguments, and such figures and mathematical proofs, that all were convinced of the value of the science, and Corchuelo cured of his dogmatism.
He attacked like an angry lion, but he was met by a tap on the mouth from the button of the licentiate's sword that checked him in the midst of his furious onset, and made him kiss it as if it were a relic, though not as devoutly as relics are and ought to be kissed.
The spices of different kinds did not seem to have been bought by the pound but by the quarter, and all lay open to view in a great chest.
"Have done, thou glutton," said Don Quixote; "come, let us go and witness this bridal, and see what the rejected Basilio does."
I, sirs, for my sins have studied canon law at Salamanca, and I rather pique myself on expressing my meaning in clear, plain, and intelligible language."
Sometimes he gazes at the sky, at other times he fixes his eyes on the earth in such an abstracted way that he might be taken for a clothed statue, with its drapery stirred by the wind.
Sancho counted more than sixty wine skins of over six gallons each, and all filled, as it proved afterwards, with generous wines.
In short, he shows such signs of a heart crushed by suffering, that all we who know him believe that when to-morrow the fair Quiteria says 'yes,' it will be his sentence of death."
Interest retired, and Poetry came forward, and when she had gone through her figures like the others, fixing her eyes on the damsel of the castle, she said:
"Of course I have finished it," replied Sancho, "because I see your worship takes offence at it; but if it was not for that, there was work enough cut out for three days."
"At the rate we are going," said Sancho, "I'll be chewing clay before your worship dies; and then, maybe, I'll be so dumb that I'll not say a word until the end of the world, or, at least, till the day of judgment."
"Let him do what he likes," returned Sancho; "be he not poor, he would marry Quiteria.
"Well then," said the cook, "take spoon and all; for Camacho's wealth and happiness furnish everything."
But mightier than Love am I, Though Love it be that leads me on, Than mine no lineage is more high, Or older, underneath the sun. To use me rightly few know how, To act without me fewer still, For I am Interest, and I vow For evermore to do thy will.
Why!
All then mingled together, forming chains and breaking off again with graceful, unconstrained gaiety; and whenever Love passed in front of the castle he shot his arrows up at it, while Interest broke gilded pellets against it.
They won't give a pint of wine at the tavern for a good cast of the bar or a neat thrust of the sword.
"Say no more, Sancho," said Don Quixote at this; "don't try to better it, and risk a fall; for in truth what thou hast said about death in thy rustic phrase is what a good preacher might have said.
Sancho observed all, contemplated all, and everything won his heart.
Sancho did as his master bade him, and putting the saddle on Rocinante and the pack-saddle on Dapple, they both mounted and at a leisurely pace entered the arcade.
"In good faith, senor," replied Sancho, "there's no trusting that fleshless one, I mean Death, who devours the lamb as soon as the sheep, and, as I have heard our curate say, treads with equal foot upon the lofty towers of kings and the lowly huts of the poor.
"Look here, bachelor Corchuelo," returned the licentiate, "you have the most mistaken idea in the world about skill with the sword, if you think it useless."
Why, then, should not he do the same who has to make the whole journey of life down to the final halting-place of death, more especially when the companion has to be his companion in bed, at board, and everywhere, as the wife is to her husband?
"We shall soon see," replied Corchuelo, and getting off his ass briskly, he drew out furiously one of the swords the licentiate carried on his beast.
Interest then came forward and went through two more figures, and as soon as the tabors ceased, he said:
The companionship of one's wife is no article of merchandise, that, after it has been bought, may be returned, or bartered, or changed; for it is an inseparable accident that lasts as long as life lasts; it is a noose that, once you put it round your neck, turns into a Gordian knot, which, if the scythe of Death does not cut it, there is no untying.
The other two of the company, the peasants, without dismounting from their asses, served as spectators of the mortal tragedy.
"They have ruled, crushed, tyrannised.
Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp; his brain was tramping.
"We have plans.
Faces came out of the confusion to him as he stood there, eyes met his and passed and vanished.
"Hear the people calling to you!"
He stared stupidly for some moments at these things and then stood up abruptly; he grasped the arm of this shouting person.
The whole mass of people was chanting together.
"I have been awake three days--a prisoner three days.
A monstrous black banner jerked its way to the right.
Graham stood, his intelligence clinging helplessly to the thing he had just heard.
He is at the wind-vane offices directing.
A tall, sallow, dark-haired, shining-eyed youth, white clad from top to toe, clambered up towards the platform shouting loyally, and sprang down again and receded, looking backward.
They were no longer marking time, they were marching; tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.
The man who had called himself Lincoln came close to him.
But why these things should be so he could not understand.
Men gesticulated to him, shouted inaudible personal things.
In that host were bearded men, old men, youths, fluttering robed bare-armed women, girls.
He said a girl."
They were high and dark, and rather cold. In the first a few men were making ornaments of gold filigree, each man at a little bench by himself, and with a little shaded light.
The factories that were not working were sparsely lighted; to Graham they and their shrouded aisles of giant machines seemed plunged in gloom, and even where work was going on the illumination was far less brilliant than upon the public ways.
Presently they left the way and descended by a lift and traversed a passage that sloped downward, and so came to a descending lift again.
"She might have done better with herself than that," said Asano.
"A girl?
The Black Police.
Not--?"
He yelled an unspeakable horror that the Black Police had done in Paris, and so passed shrieking, "Ostrog the Knave!"
And then came a remote disorder.
To be brilliant physically or mentally, to be in any way attractive or exceptional, had been and was still a certain way of emancipation to the drudge, a line of escape to the Pleasure City and its splendours and delights, and at last to the Euthanasy and peace.
"The Master is betrayed!"
"You will lose time.
Graham regarded him doubtfully and followed him.
"I might have known.
To be steadfast against such inducements was scarcely to be expected of meanly nourished souls.
From the Business Quarter they presently passed by the running ways into a remote quarter of the city, where the bulk of the manufactures was done.
The answers to his questions were in the thick, vulgar speech.
Suddenly the situation shaped itself in his mind real and urgent.
Even the pretence of architectural ornament disappeared, the lights diminished in number and size, the architecture became more and more massive in proportion to the spaces as the factory quarters were reached.
"What did he say?" asked Graham.
"Stop that!" shouted one of the policemen, but the order was disobeyed, and first one and then all the white-stained men who were working there had taken up the beating refrain, singing it defiantly--the Song of the Revolt.
In the young cities of Graham's former life, the newly aggregated labouring mass had been a diverse multitude, still stirred by the tradition of personal honour and a high morality; now it was differentiating into an instinct class, with a moral and physical difference of its own--even with a dialect of its own.
"But how can they know?" asked Asano.
The hour has come."
And in the dusty biscuit-making place of the potters, among the felspar mills, in the furnace rooms of the metal workers, among the incandescent lakes of crude Eadhamite, the blue canvas clothing was on man, woman and child.
That walk left on Graham's mind a maze of memories, fluctuating pictures of swathed halls, and crowded vaults seen through clouds of dust, of intricate machines, the racing threads of looms, the heavy beat of stamping machinery, the roar and rattle of belt and armature, of ill-lit subterranean aisles of sleeping places, illimitable vistas of pin-point lights.
Looking over the parapet, Graham saw that beneath was a wharf under yet more tremendous archings than any he had seen.
They penetrated downward, ever downward, towards the working places. Presently they passed underneath one of the streets of the moving ways, and saw its platforms running on their rails far overhead, and chinks of white lights between the transverse slits.
But for the most part this remnant that worked, worked hopelessly.
"Why should I not appeal--?
Here was the smell of tanning, and here the reek of a brewery, and here unprecedented reeks.
"In your days people could stand such crudities, they were nearer the barbaric by two hundred years."
The vague shadows of these workers gesticulated about their feet, and rushed to and fro against a long stretch of white-washed wall.
"It has come," he said.
"To your wards, to your wards.
"It sounds true," said Asano.
"This is what I wanted to see," said Graham; "this is what I wanted to see," trying to avoid a start at a particularly striking disfigurement.
"What has happened now?" said Graham, puzzled, for he could not understand their thick speech.
Everywhere were pillars and cross archings of such a massiveness as Graham had never before seen, thick Titans of greasy, shining brickwork crushed beneath the vast weight of that complex city world, even as these anemic millions were crushed by its complexity.
One lank and very high carriage with longitudinal metallic rods hung with the dripping carcasses of many hundred sheep arrested his attention unduly.
The long vista of light patches, with the nimble fingers brightly lit and moving among the gleaming yellow coils, and the intent face like the face of a ghost, in each shadow, had the oddest effect.
Stop all work," and a swarthy hunchback, ridiculously gay in green and gold, came leaping down the platforms toward him, bawling again and again in good English, "This is Ostrog's doing, Ostrog the Knave!
The Master is betrayed." His voice was hoarse and a thin foam dropped from his ugly shouting mouth.
Here, too, the distinctive blue of the Labour Department was in abundance.
"But, Sire, we simply could not stand that stuff without the purple," said Asano.
He made no further effort to stop the singing.
Then a woman with a face of mute white terror, and another who gasped and shrieked as she ran.
The only people not in blue canvas were the overlookers of the work-places and the orange-clad Labour Police.
"What am I to do?"
"Stop all work.
"Go back to the Council House," said Asano.
He looked up at the great cliff of buildings on either side, vanishing into blue haze at last above the lights, and down to the roaring tiers of platforms, and the shouting, running people who were gesticulating past.
In spite of every precaution, the Labour policeman told them in a depressed tone, the Department was not infrequently robbed.
The feet upon the planks thundered now to the rhythm of the song, tramp, tramp, tramp.
Every now and then one would stop to cough.
He thought swiftly.
A string of black barges passed seaward, manned by blue-clad men.
In both cases his impression was swift and in both very vivid. The river was a broad wrinkled glitter of black sea water, overarched by buildings, and vanishing either way into a blackness starred with receding lights.
But they will mass about the Council House.
The Black Police are coming from South Africa....
Abruptly the edge of the archway cut and blotted out the picture.
CHAPTER XXI
Three barges, smothered in floury dust, were being unloaded of their cargoes of powdered felspar by a multitude of coughing men, each guiding a little truck; the dust filled the place with a choking mist, and turned the electric glare yellow.
"Let us have the facts," said Graham.
The latter-day labourer, male as well as female, was essentially a machine-minder and feeder, a servant and attendant, or an artist under direction.
Graham made some indignant comments.
The people are here."
Your strength is there--with them."
The Black Police."
They assumed this on coming to work, but at night they were stripped and examined before they left the premises of the Department.
The women, in comparison with those Graham remembered, were as a class distinctly plain and flat-chested.
The burly labourers of the old Victorian times had followed that dray horse and all such living force producers, to extinction; the place of his costly muscles was taken by some dexterous machine.
On their way the platforms crossed the Thames twice, and passed in a broad viaduct across one of the great roads that entered the city from the North.
As the silence became painful I concluded to hazard a little conversation on my own part, as I had guessed that he was making overtures of peace.
I found myself lying prone upon a bed of yellowish, mosslike vegetation which stretched around me in all directions for interminable miles.
Of course I might have been a babbling brook for all the intelligence my speech carried to him, but he understood the action with which I immediately followed my words.
Further, the heads of the adults are not so out of proportion to their bodies as in the case of the young.
These rifles were of a white metal stocked with wood, which I learned later was a very light and intensely hard growth much prized on Mars, and entirely unknown to us denizens of Earth.
They started toward us on a wild run, but were checked by a signal from him.
I did fairly well at this and in a few moments had reached the low, encircling wall of the enclosure.
On such a little thing my life hung that I often marvel that I escaped so easily.
He sat his mount as we sit a horse, grasping the animal's barrel with his lower limbs, while the hands of his two right arms held his immense spear low at the side of his mount; his two left arms were outstretched laterally to help preserve his balance, the thing he rode having neither bridle or reins of any description for guidance.
The roof of the enclosure was of solid glass about four or five inches in thickness, and beneath this were several hundred large eggs, perfectly round and snowy white.
Five or six had already hatched and the grotesque caricatures which sat blinking in the sunlight were enough to cause me to doubt my sanity. They seemed mostly head, with little scrawny bodies, long necks and six legs, or, as I afterward learned, two legs and two arms, with an intermediary pair of limbs which could be used at will either as arms or legs.
I knew that I was on Mars; not once did I question either my sanity or my wakefulness.
Instead of progressing in a sane and dignified manner, my attempts to walk resulted in a variety of hops which took me clear of the ground a couple of feet at each step and landed me sprawling upon my face or back at the end of each second or third hop.
Here and there were slight outcroppings of quartz-bearing rock which glistened in the sunlight; and a little to my left, perhaps a hundred yards, appeared a low, walled enclosure about four feet in height.
The throwing down of his weapons and the withdrawing of his troop before his advance toward me would have signified a peaceful mission anywhere on Earth, so why not, then, on Mars!
I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth.
Against the dark background of their olive skins their tusks stand out in a most striking manner, making these weapons present a singularly formidable appearance.
At the same time he motioned his followers to advance.
The highest type of man and one other animal, the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have well-formed nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in existence there.
Springing to my feet I received my first Martian surprise, for the effort, which on Earth would have brought me standing upright, carried me into the Martian air to the height of about three yards.
But how puny and harmless they now looked beside this huge and terrific incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of death.
CHAPTER III
Evidently he feared that were I to be really frightened again I might jump entirely out of the landscape.
Some were surveying me with expressions which I afterward discovered marked extreme astonishment, and the others were evidently satisfying themselves that I had not molested their young.
The eyeball itself is very white, as are the teeth.
My feat then was as marvelous upon Mars as it would have been upon Earth, and from desiring to annihilate me they suddenly looked upon me as a wonderful discovery to be captured and exhibited among their fellows.
How can earthly words describe it!
They were conversing together in low tones, and gesticulating and pointing toward me.
Placing my hand over my heart I bowed low to the Martian and explained to him that while I did not understand his language, his actions spoke for the peace and friendship that at the present moment were most dear to my heart.
Unarmed and naked as I was, the first law of nature manifested itself in the only possible solution of my immediate problem, and that was to get out of the vicinity of the point of the charging spear. Consequently I gave a very earthly and at the same time superhuman leap to reach the top of the Martian incubator, for such I had determined it must be.
The feet themselves were heavily padded and nailless, which fact had also contributed to the noiselessness of their approach, and, in common with a multiplicity of legs, is a characteristic feature of the fauna of Mars.
Coming, as they did, over the soft and soundless moss, which covers practically the entire surface of Mars with the exception of the frozen areas at the poles and the scattered cultivated districts, they might have captured me easily, but their intentions were far more sinister. It was the rattling of the accouterments of the foremost warrior which warned me.
The iris of the eyes is blood red, as in Albinos, while the pupil is dark.
He was the one whose spear had so nearly transfixed me, and was evidently the leader of the band, as I had noted that they seemed to have moved to their present position at his direction.
I found that I must learn to walk all over again, as the muscular exertion which carried me easily and safely upon Earth played strange antics with me upon Mars.
When they had covered perhaps two hundred yards they halted, and turning their mounts toward us sat watching the warrior by the enclosure.
Most of these details I noted later, for I was given but little time to speculate on the wonders of my new discovery.
In the adults, as I was to learn quite soon, this color deepens to an olive green and is darker in the male than in the female.
There was no hair on their bodies, which were of a very light yellowish-green color.
MY ADVENT ON MARS
Stretching my hand toward him, I advanced and took the armlet from his open palm, clasping it about my arm above the elbow; smiled at him and stood waiting.
Behind this first charging demon trailed nineteen others, similar in all respects, but, as I learned later, bearing individual characteristics peculiar to themselves; precisely as no two of us are identical although we are all cast in a similar mold.
Their discovery that I had not harmed the little Martians, and that I was unarmed, must have caused them to look upon me with less ferocity; but, as I was to learn later, the thing which weighed most in my favor was my exhibition of hurdling.
When his force had come to a halt he dismounted, threw down his spear and small arms, and came around the end of the incubator toward me, entirely unarmed and as naked as I, except for the ornaments strapped upon his head, limbs, and breast.
It was midday, the sun was shining full upon me and the heat of it was rather intense upon my naked body, yet no greater than would have been true under similar conditions on an Arizona desert.
You do not question the fact; neither did I.
Its belly was white, and its legs shaded from the slate of its shoulders and hips to a vivid yellow at the feet.
Their eyes were set at the extreme sides of their heads a trifle above the center and protruded in such a manner that they could be directed either forward or back and also independently of each other, thus permitting this queer animal to look in any direction, or in two directions at once, without the necessity of turning the head.
But the little sound caused me to turn, and there upon me, not ten feet from my breast, was the point of that huge spear, a spear forty feet long, tipped with gleaming metal, and held low at the side of a mounted replica of the little devils I had been watching.
This is quite far enough to imbue me with great respect for the Martian firearm, and some telepathic force must have warned me against an attempt to escape in broad daylight from under the muzzles of twenty of these death-dealing machines.
Now commenced a series of evolutions which even then seemed ludicrous in the extreme.
The theoretic effective radius of this rifle is three hundred miles, but the best they can do in actual service when equipped with their wireless finders and sighters is but a trifle over two hundred miles.
I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape.
And his mount!
BY EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
What times were those, Long ere the age of belles and beaux, And Brussels lace and silken hose, When, in the green Arcadian close, You married Psyche under the rose, With only the grass for bedding! Heart to heart, and hand to hand, You followed Nature's sweet command, Roaming lovingly through the land, Nor sighed for a Diamond Wedding.
So thousands of years have come and gone, And still the moon is shining on, Still Hymen's torch is lighted; And hitherto, in this land of the West, Most couples in love have thought it best To follow the ancient way of the rest, And quietly get united.
Love!
The little procession moved upstairs, Coonie, the house-boy, bringing up the rear with an armful of sticks and some fat splinters of lightwood, which were soon blazing with an oily sputter.
"You chillen is wusser dan night owls," said the old woman.
"I'm not sleepy," "Want to stay up," came in chorus from three pairs of lips.
"I wish mamma would come back," said Ned.
"Don't want to go to bed,"
BY ANNE VIRGINIA CULBERTSON
"And didn't he ever come back?" said Ned.
When the children got home from the nutting expedition and had eaten supper, they sat around discontentedly, wishing every few minutes that their mother had returned.
"But how could they think an owl was a man?" asked Janey.
Now, den, ef y'all raidy, I gwine begin.
Coonie scented a story, and his bullet pate was bent over the fire an unnecessarily long time, as he blew valiant puffs upon the flames which no longer needed his assistance, and arranged and rearranged his skilfully piled sticks.
The mind does not err in the mere act of imagining, but only in so far as it is regarded as being without the idea, which excludes the existence of such things as it imagines to be present to it.
Further, to retain the usual phraseology, the modifications of the human body, of which the ideas represent external bodies as present to us, we will call the images of things, though they do not recall the figure of things.
Note.--We now clearly see what Memory is.
The former directly answers to the essence of Peter's own body, and only implies existence so long as Peter exists; the latter indicates rather the disposition of Paul's body than the nature of Peter, and, therefore, while this disposition of Paul's body lasts, Paul's mind will regard Peter as present to itself, even though he no longer exists.
Thus every man will follow this or that train of thought, according as he has been in the habit of conjoining and associating the mental images of things in this or that manner.
Corollary II.--It follows, secondly, that the ideas, which we have of external bodies, indicate rather the constitution of our own body than the nature of external bodies.
Note.--We thus see how it comes about, as is often the case, that we regard as present many things which are not.
The human mind has no knowledge of the body, and does not know it to exist, save through the ideas of the modifications whereby the body is affected.
I will here draw attention to the fact, in order to indicate where error lies, that the imaginations of the mind, looked at in themselves, do not contain error.
Corollary.--The mind is able to regard as present external bodies, by which the human body has once been affected, even though they be no longer in existence or present.
I have amply illustrated this in the Appendix to Part I.
If the human body is affected in a manner which involves the nature of any external body, the human mind will regard the said external body as actually existing, or as present to itself, until the human body be affected in such a way, as to exclude the existence or the presence of the said external body.
The idea of every mode, in which the human body is affected by external bodies, must involve the nature of the human body, and also the nature of the external body.
Day at length dawned.
"Hallo, Colonel!
We were nearing the shore, for the purpose of looking for wood, the banks being invisible from the middle of the river.
I saw a light just ahead on the right--shall we hail?"
I had risen and went out with the Captain, to enjoy a view of the bluffs.
This wood seems rather better than that we took in at Yellow-Face's, but we're nearly out again, and must be looking out for more.
(Deal, sir, if you please; better luck next time.)"
"What's the price of wood?"
The game went on, and the paddles kept moving.
"How does that wood burn?" inquired the Captain of the mate, who was looking on at the game.
The wooding completed, we paddled on again.
"Hallo yourself!" answered a squeaking female voice, which came from a woman with a petticoat over her shoulders in place of a shawl.
The pilots here changed places.
Still, with all these disadvantages, they continued playing--they wanted to learn the game.
We jogged on quietly--and seemed to be going at a good rate.
It appears the two passengers, in their first lesson, had incidentally lost one hundred and twenty dollars.
A voyage from New Orleans to Vicksburg and back, including stoppages, generally entitled the officers and crew to a month's wages.
We had been out a little more than five days, and we were in hopes of seeing the bluffs of Natchez on the next day.
The Captain here told Thompson to take six cords, which would last till daylight--and again turned his attention to the game.
This pilot's beating us all to smash."
It was my fate to take passage in this boat.
At eleven o'clock it was reported to the Captain that we were nearing the woodyard, the light being distinctly seen by the pilot on duty.
It's your deal)--Thompson, I say, we'd better take three or four cords at the next woodyard--it can't be more than six miles from here--(Two aces and a bragger, with the age!
"Only about ten cords, sir," was the reply of the youthful salesman.
A respectable capacity for marshaling facts was fortified in him by a copiousness of impressive language that made juries as clay in his hands and sometimes disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules of evidence.
Is it the fact that there was an estrangement between you?"
But it was not to be yet.
"Because--" the coroner insisted gently.
This was not an impression of hardness.
He had changed towards me; he had become very reserved and seemed mistrustful. I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to be alone.
She had spoken to him.
"Did he say why?" the coroner asked.
"Yes," replied the lady, "he did explain why.
She was ashamed of herself; she thought she could go through with it, but she had not expected those last questions.
Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour for retiring on the Sunday night.
It shook me so to have to speak of that," she added simply, "and to keep from making an exhibition of myself took it out of me.
It's just poetry and books and rubbish.
If anybody tells you that it's only just to put you off.
Your affectionate friend,
She wants to be a fine lady."
Her letter to Mary, though affectionate, was very short.
"It has all been put off.
He wrote a scrawl to Dolly,--"I'll come," and, having sent it off by the messenger, tried to trust that there might yet be ground for hope.
I say there ain't nobody;--nobody.
She was not excellent herself at the writing of letters, and therefore she got Dolly to be the scribe.
If Mary must go to Cheltenham, why could she not go by herself, second class, like any other young woman?
He stood for awhile scratching his head as he thought of it.
Mary was free from her stepmother's zeal and her stepmother's persecution at any rate at night;--but the poor father was hardly allowed to sleep.
"That's why I speak open to you.
"But why has it been put off, Mrs. Masters?"
In all these disputes he never quite yielded.
She shan't go at all if I can help it."
Don't you be afraid of her.
"I'll make her a lady."
In all that misery the poor attorney had the worst of it.
That's the way to win her." Larry did go to the club and did think very much of it as he walked home.
"Lady Ushant is coming to Bragton.
She had no new argument to offer,--except this last interposition of Providence in her favour.
"My name is Morton."
"Oh, Mr. Reginald, is that you?" said old Mrs. Hopkins taking the card.
It was Mr. Gotobed who had just returned from a visit which he had made, the circumstances of which must be narrated in the next chapter.
"What do you mean by that, Mr. Morton?" she asked blushing up to her hair.
"It does not signify in the least.
But he felt that she had reproached him.
I can explain it all to her and she will understand me." She hardly meant to reproach him.
"Of course I shall answer her."
"Mr. Morton, sir, I think is out with the ladies, taking a drive."
"Why not go?"
"You don't think that, Mr. Morton."
"I did so long," he said, "to walk round the old place with you the other day before these people came there, and I was so disappointed when you would not come with me."
Reginald lifted his hat and assented.
"If I did think that,--that--"
If the old lady had altogether kept Mary it might have been very well; but she had not done so and Mrs. Masters had more than once said that that kind of thing must be all over;--meaning that Mary was to drop her intimacy with high-born people that were of no real use.
"But you went back with--that other man."
A FIT COMPANION,--FOR ME AND MY SISTERS.
After that he walked straight out to Bragton.
Lady Ushant is my dearest, dearest friend.
Good morning to you."
But on this Wednesday he received a letter, and,--as he told himself, merely in consequence of that letter,--he called at the attorney's house and asked for Miss Masters.
"I don't say that.
So he walked by the path across the bridge and when he came out on the gravel road near the front door he found a gentleman smoking a cigar and looking around him.
"I have brought you a letter from my aunt," he said.
"I am Mr. John Morton's cousin."
"I don't think it will be possible, Mr. Morton."
He had come there ardently wishing that she might be allowed to go to his aunt, and resolved that he would take her himself if it were possible.
Then he paused a moment.
"How should I not like to go?
Because Lady Ushant is kind to me I needn't expect other people to be so." Reginald Morton was of course the "other people."
Good afternoon to you, sir." Then Reginald having thus done his duty returned home.
What was I to do?
"I was coming."
"I didn't say so at all."
If she meant to marry Mr. Twentyman what good could she get by associating with his aunt or with him?
"They are all out,--except herself." As he certainly did not wish to see "herself," he greeted the old woman and left his card.
"She was writing to me and she put this under cover.
"I will leave a card then."
He was of course altogether unconscious what grand things his cousin John had intended to do by him, had not the Honourable old lady interfered; but he had made up his mind that duty required him to call at the house.
I am so glad."
Then it seemed as though there were nothing else for him but to go;--and yet he wanted to say some other word.
But now he almost thought that she had better not go.
"Perhaps you can let me know.
I know what it contains.
But as you were too grand for our friend of course you were too grand for us."
She wants you to go to her at Cheltenham for a month."
I only want Lady Ushant to understand that if I could possibly go to her I would rather do that than anything else in the world.
"Would you like to go?"
Ever since that walk her mind had been troubled by ideas as to what he would think about her, and now he was telling her what he thought.
That was the name I heard up there.
Kennicott and Main Street had drained her self-reliance; the presence of Hugh made her feel temporary.
Her glimpse of tasks involving millions of people and a score of nations reduced Main Street from bloated importance to its actual pettiness.
They welcomed Carol, asked about her husband, gave her advice regarding colic in babies, passed her the gingerbread and scalloped potatoes at church suppers, and in general made her very unhappy and lonely, so that she wondered if she might not enlist in the militant suffrage organization and be allowed to go to jail.
Washington gave her all the graciousness in which she had had faith: white columns seen across leafy parks, spacious avenues, twisty alleys. Daily she passed a dark square house with a hint of magnolias and a courtyard behind it, and a tall curtained second-story window through which a woman was always peering.
Yet they seemed to be as efficient as the Sam Clarks.
She could never again be quite so awed by the power with which she herself had endowed the Vidas and Blaussers and Bogarts.
She concluded that it was because they were of secure reputation, not hemmed in by the fire of provincial jealousies.
It was an endurance of monotonous details, yet she asserted that she had found "real work."
The teacher took her to headquarters.
Vida Sherwin had given her a letter to an earnest woman with eye-glasses, plaid silk waist, and a belief in Bible Classes, who introduced her to the Pastor and the Nicer Members of Tincomb.
That institution is reserved for men like Kennicott who, after devoting fifty years to "putting aside a stake," incontinently invest the stake in spurious oil-stocks.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Her first acquaintances were the members of the Tincomb Methodist Church, a vast red-brick tabernacle.
She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays.
A Western mining-settlement like a tumor.
She found the same faith not only in girls escaped from domesticity but also in demure old ladies who, tragically deprived of esteemed husbands and huge old houses, yet managed to make a very comfortable thing of it by living in small flats and having time to read.
She discovered that in the afternoon, office routine stretches to the grave.
Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
Though the armistice with Germany was signed a few weeks after her coming to Washington, the work of the bureau continued.
The chart which plots Carol's progress is not easy to read.
Kennicott had asserted that the villager's lack of courtesy is due to his poverty.
Carol recognized in Washington as she had in California a transplanted and guarded Main Street.
Not to have to apologize for her thoughts to the Jolly Seventeen, not to have to report to Kennicott at the end of the day all that she had done or might do, was a relief which made up for the office weariness.
The woman was mystery, romance, a story which told itself differently every day; now she was a murderess, now the neglected wife of an ambassador.
She perceived that she could do office work without losing any of the putative feminine virtue of domesticity; that cooking and cleaning, when divested of the fussing of an Aunt Bessie, take but a tenth of the time which, in a Gopher Prairie, it is but decent to devote to them.
With the congressman's secretary and the teacher Carol leased a small flat.
She felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.
Guy Pollock wrote to a cousin, a temporary army captain, a confiding and buoyant lad who took Carol to tea-dances, and laughed, as she had always wanted some one to laugh, about nothing in particular.
But she was casually adopted by this family of friendly women who, when they were not being mobbed or arrested, took dancing lessons or went picnicking up the Chesapeake Canal or talked about the politics of the American Federation of Labor.
Even her flight had been but the temporary courage of panic.
A rich farming-center in New Jersey, off the railroad, furiously pious, ruled by old men, unbelievably ignorant old men, sitting about the grocery talking of James G. Blaine.
There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. It was not at all the "artist's studio" of which, because of its persistence in fiction, she had dreamed.
The thing she gained in Washington was not information about office-systems and labor unions but renewed courage, that amiable contempt called poise.
But they played, very simply, and they saw no reason why anything which exists cannot also be acknowledged.
The captain introduced her to the secretary of a congressman, a cynical young widow with many acquaintances in the navy.
Some day--oh, she'd have to take him back to open fields and the right to climb about hay-lofts.
Nor could she upon inquiry learn that many of this reckless race died in the poorhouse.
She filed correspondence all day; then she dictated answers to letters of inquiry.
It did not appear that the Great World needed her inspiration, but she felt that her letters, her contact with the anxieties of men and women all over the country, were a part of vast affairs, not confined to Main Street and a kitchen but linked with Paris, Bangkok, Madrid.
Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them.
Most of the men who came to the flat, whether they were army officers or radicals who hated the army, had the easy gentleness, the acceptance of women without embarrassed banter, for which she had longed in Gopher Prairie.
But she also learned that by comparison Gopher Prairie was a model of daring color, clever planning, and frenzied intellectuality.
There was no sand around either of these, and they were quite hidden by the long grass hanging over them.
"Of course," replied Johnny Chuck.
Peter left him grumbling and growling, and chuckled to himself all the way back to the dear Old Briar-patch.
"I sleep most of the winter myself.
"He certainly is all right as a digger," exclaimed Peter Rabbit. "My, how he can make the sand fly!
"As you will notice, Johnny Chuck's coat is brownish-yellow, his feet are very dark brown, almost black.
Beneath he is reddish-orange, including his throat.
It made him feel quite uncomfortable.
"No," replied Johnny Chuck.
"How many do you usually have?" inquired Chatterer the Red Squirrel.
He didn't want to learn anything about his relatives.
He has a Squirrel face when you come to look at him closely.
Peter Rabbit delivered Mother Nature's message to Johnny Chuck. Johnny didn't seem at all pleased.
The entrance was quite large with a big heap of sand out in front of it.
"I understand," continued Old Mother Nature, "That you are not at all interested in learning about your relatives.
Johnny Chuck obediently sat up, and of course all the others stared at him.
He didn't want to go to school.
Those are to help him dig, for all the Marmot family are great diggers. What other use do you have for those claws, Johnny?"
That is where my fat comes in handy.
"Are your babies born down in that little bedroom in the ground?" asked Jumper the Hare.
"Do you have many enemies?" asked Peter Rabbit, who has so many himself that he is constantly thinking of them.
However, it wasn't for your benefit that I sent word for you to be here this morning.
"Mrs. Chuck and I believe in large families."
The more one knows the better fitted he is to take care of himself and do his part in the work of the Great World.
"Where else would they be born?"
"Johnny Chuck is very much bigger and so stout in the body that he has none of the gracefulness of the true Squirrels. But you will notice that the shape of his head is much the same as that of Happy Jack.
The truth is, Johnny Chuck was already beginning to get fat with good living and he is naturally lazy. As a rule he can find plenty to eat very near his home, so he seldom goes far from his own doorstep.
You ask Reddy Fox if I can't; he knows."
"Good morning, Johnny Chuck," said she.
It keeps me warm and keeps me alive until I can find the first green plants.
There were one or two other little rooms, and there were two branch tunnels leading up to the surface of the ground, making side or back doorways.
Then I go down to my bedroom, curl up and go to sleep.
It was for the benefit of your friends and neighbors.
"If I didn't I would starve," responded Johnny Chuck promptly. "When it gets near time for Jack Frost to arrive, I stuff and stuff and stuff on the last of the good green things until I'm so fat I can hardly waddle.
Johnny shook his head.
"Do you use the same house year after year?" piped up Striped Chipmunk.
His head is dark brown with light gray on his cheeks.
"No," replied Johnny Chuck.
Johnny bobbed his head and said, "Good morning."
"Johnny, here, is not fond of the Green Forest, but loves the Old orchard and the Green Meadows.
Johnny Chuck does look like a Squirrel," he exclaimed.
Good, I thought so.
But most of them were in your position--great admirers of the author and his two earlier famous books, but ignorant thereafter.
I shall not describe the book, for no description would help it. But I shall just say this; that it is what I call a Household Book.
Not unnaturally the world remained unmoved.
I think that I am probably safer with Tillier than with Butler, but I dare not risk it.
It is obvious, you persuade yourself, that the author was thinking of you when he wrote it.
When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, still less on the genius of Kenneth Grahame.
I LOVE his books!" and you will mention SO-AND-SO, and its equally famous sequel SUCH-AND-SUCH. But when I ask you if you have read MY book, you will profess surprise, and say that you have never heard of it.
No doubt they also spread the good news in their turn, and it is just possible that it reached you in this way, but it was to me, none the less, that your thanks were due.
For I am going to speak of another discovery; of a book which should be a classic, but is not; of a book of which nobody has heard unless through me.
Should I ever find myself in the dock, and one never knows, my answer to the question whether I had anything to say would be, "Well, my lord, if I might just recommend a book to the jury before leaving." Mr. Justice Darling would probably pretend that he had read it, but he wouldn't deceive me.
Am I not right again?
I had their promise before they left me, and waited confidently for their gratitude.
It was published some twelve years ago, the last-published book of a well-known writer.
If I don't get it in at the beginning, I squeeze it in at the end.
I say the second-best, so that, if you remind me of Tom Jones or The Mayor of Casterbridge or any other that you fancy, I can say that, of course, that one is the best. Well, I discovered him, just as Voltaire discovered Habakkuk, or your little boy discovered Shakespeare the other day, and I committed my discovery to the world in two glowing articles.
A Household Book
"Much better," I shall reply--and there, if these things were arranged properly, would be another ten per cent, in my pocket.
Thank you.
It is my opening remark, just as yours is something futile about the weather.
We grocers only put the currants out for show, and so that we may run our fingers through them luxuriously when business is slack.
When she had finished, she emptied the ends out of the window, wiped her hands, and settled down comfortably to her paper.
"Bulger, sir.
A grocer, in as far as it is possible to a man who sells both scented soap and pilchards, would become narrow.
At the Bookstall
But I am wondering now what the bookstall clerk will make of me. A man who keeps on buying Proverbs and Maxims.
It contained some thousands of the best thoughts in all languages, such as have guided men along the path of truth since the beginning of the world, from "What ho, she bumps!" to "Ich dien," and more.
Unfortunately enough I left it in the train before I had time to master it.
The thought occurred to me that an interesting article might be extracted from it, so I bought the book.
If he is wrong the first time, he never fails to recover with his second.
To be behind a bookstall is indeed to see life.
What paper? You'll never guess; I shall have to tell you--The Morning Post. Now doesn't that give you the woman?
Soon he would begin to know the different types; he would learn to distinguish between the patrons of The Dancing Times and of The Vote, The Era and The Athenaeum.
What a life!
Conceive the holy joy of the bookstall clerk as she and her bag of shrimps-- yes, he could have told at once they were shrimps--approached and asked for The Morning Post.
Yes, to be a grocer is to live well; but, after all, it is not to see life.
All customers are alike to the grocer, provided their money is good.
The answer came to me just as I got into my train-- Ask the man behind the bookstall.
Potted lobster does not define a man.
The shrimps alone, no; the paper alone, no; but the two to-gether.
Our bookstall clerk doesn't wait to be asked.
That will be all right; you shan't miss it.
That is rather for one's old age. While one is young, and interested in persons rather than in things, there is only one profession to follow--the profession of bookstall clerk.
This man will ask for Golfing--wrong, he wants Cage Birds; that one over there wants The Motor--ah, well, The Auto-Car, that's near enough.
For instance, I once occupied a carriage on an eastern line with, among others, a middle-aged woman.
I thought of these things last Monday, and definitely renounced the idea of becoming a grocer; and as I wandered round the bookstall, thinking, I came across a little book, sixpence in cloth, a shilling in leather, called Proverbs and Maxims.
I imagine him assigning in his mind the right paper to each customer.
As soon as this gentleman approaches, he whips out the book, dusts it, and places it before the raconteur.
Yes, and he would know who bought all his papers and books and pamphlets, and to know this is to know something about the people in the world.
As soon as we left Liverpool Street she produced a bag of shrimps, grasped each individual in turn firmly by the head and tail, and ate him.
But he has other things than papers to sell.
I have a good line in shortbreads, madam, if I can find the box, but no currants this evening, I beg you.
You cannot tell a man by the lobster he eats, but you can tell something about him by the literature he reads.
One of our greatest soldiers."
I shall be at the bookstall next Monday and I shall have to buy another copy.
Well, as I say, they see life.
The day can never be dull to the bookstall clerk.
He would know.
We do not come into contact with the outside world much, save through the medium of potted lobster, and to sell a man potted lobster is not to have our fingers on his pulse.
He recognizes also at a glance the sort of silly ass who is always losing his indiarubber umbrella ring.
I have often longed to be a grocer.
It was impossible?
Will the elements lay plots against me?
"To the raft!" he shouted.
One would have thought that this strange being was guessing at my uncle's intentions.
It seemed upset, contorted, and convulsed by a violent upheaval of the lower strata.
I will not stir a single foot backwards, and it will be seen whether man or nature is to have the upper hand!"
Fancy an enthusiastic bibliomaniac suddenly brought into the midst of the famous Alexandrian library burnt by Omar and restored by a miracle from its ashes! just such a crazed enthusiast was my uncle, Professor Liedenbrock.
I could get nothing out of a servant so feudalised, as it were, to his master.
There within three square miles were accumulated the materials for a complete history of the animal life of ages, a history scarcely outlined in the too recent strata of the inhabited world.
I was able to develop this series of unanswerable reasons for ten minutes without interruption; not that the Professor was paying any respectful attention to his nephew's arguments, but because he was deaf to all my eloquence.
"We shall not sail until to-morrow," he said.
I will not yield.
I was therefore going with as much resignation as I could find to resume my accustomed place on the raft, when my uncle laid his hand upon my shoulder.
We were therefore walking upon sedimentary soil, the deposits of the waters of former ages.
And leaving Hans to his work we started off together.
They undulated away to the limits of the horizon, and melted in the distance in a faint haze.
It took half an hour to bring us to the wall of rock.
Such was his only reply.
In fact we were not upon the north shore of the sea.
My only course was to proceed.
But in my opinion this liquid mass would be lost by degrees farther and farther within the interior of the earth, and it certainly had its origin in the waters of the ocean overhead, which had made their way hither through some fissure.
How shall I describe the strange series of passions which in succession shook the breast of Professor Liedenbrock?
I made a movement intended to express resignation.
Well, they shall know what a determined man can do.
I was therefore led to the conclusion that at one time the sea must have covered the ground on which we were treading.
Ah!
Erect upon the rock, angry and threatening, Otto Liedenbrock was a rather grotesque fierce parody upon the fierce Achilles defying the lightning.
Could I stand against the two?
Hans was finishing the repairs of the raft.
With a few more pieces of surturbrand he had refitted our vessel.
We trampled under our feet numberless shells of all the forms and sizes which existed in the earliest ages of the world.
"Just listen to me," I said firmly.
We had gone backwards instead of forwards!
"Aha! will fate play tricks upon me?
The Professor said a few words to the guide, and immediately he put everything on board and arranged every necessary for our departure. The air was clear--and the north-west wind blew steadily.
We moved with difficulty across these granite fissures and chasms mingled with silex, crystals of quartz, and alluvial deposits, when a field, nay, more than a field, a vast plain, of bleached bones lay spread before us.
I stood amazed.
"A human skull?" I cried, no less astonished.
First stupefaction, then incredulity, lastly a downright burst of rage. Never had I seen the man so put out of countenance and so disturbed. The fatigues of our passage across, the dangers met, had all to be begun over again.
To him this was important.
Axel! a human head!"
The Icelander seemed to have renounced all will of his own and made a vow to forget and deny himself.
If Hans had but taken my side!
A sail already hung from the new mast, and the wind was playing in its waving folds.
What could I do?
We had traversed the shores of the Liedenbrock sea for a mile when we observed a sudden change in the appearance of the soil.
Shall fire, air, and water make a combined attack against me?
Perhaps even this water, subjected to the fierce action of central heat, had partly been resolved into vapour.
This might up to a certain point explain the existence of an ocean forty leagues beneath the surface of the globe.
I also saw immense carapaces more than fifteen feet in diameter.
But no, it was not to be.
"Now let us start upon fresh discoveries," I said.
"Yes, nephew.
"Axel!
They had been the coverings of those gigantic glyptodons or armadilloes of the pleiocene period, of which the modern tortoise is but a miniature representative.
But I thought it my duty to interpose and attempt to lay some restraint upon this unmeasured fanaticism.
Huge mounds of bony fragments rose stage after stage in the distance.
But my uncle rapidly recovered himself.
It seemed like an immense cemetery, where the remains of twenty ages mingled their dust together.
My uncle had uplifted his long arms to the vault which was our sky; his mouth gaping wide, his eyes flashing behind his shining spectacles, his head balancing with an up-and-down motion, his whole attitude denoted unlimited astonishment.
The space between the water and the foot of the cliffs was considerable.
Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted to know the depth of it.
In many places depressions or elevations gave witness to some tremendous power effecting the dislocation of strata.
I have heard the tale of the kneepan of Ajax, the pretended body of Orestes claimed to have been found by the Spartans, and of the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, of which Pausanias speaks.
THE PROFESSOR IN HIS CHAIR AGAIN
It is true that these remains were not human bones, but objects bearing the traces of his handiwork, such as fossil leg-bones of animals, sculptured and carved evidently by the hand of man.
It was not to be done.
Then one very serious question arose presently which we scarcely dared to suggest. Had all those creatures slided through a great fissure in the crust of the earth, down to the shores of the Liedenbrock sea, when they were dead and turning to dust, or had they lived and grown and died here in this subterranean world under a false sky, just like inhabitants of the upper earth?
We knew all these details, but we were not aware that since our departure the question had advanced to farther stages.
It is the white race, our own.
Fresh discoveries of remains in the pleiocene formation had emboldened other geologists to refer back the human species to a higher antiquity still.
Next to these public things were the dreams of old women, or, I should say, the interpretation of old women upon other people's dreams; and these put abundance of people even out of their wits.
It is true a vast many people fled, as I have observed, yet they were chiefly from the west end of the town, and from that we call the heart of the city: that is to say, among the wealthiest of the people, and such people as were unencumbered with trades and business.
All the old soldiers set up trades here, and abundance of families settled here.
And no wonder, if they who were poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations and appearances, which had nothing in them but air, and vapour.
I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.
I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could see nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the sun upon the other part.
She described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion and the form, and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so much readiness; 'Yes, I see it all plainly,' says one; 'there's the sword as plain as can be.' Another saw the angel.
To this, as I said before, the astrologers added stories of the conjunctions of planets in a malignant manner and with a mischievous influence, one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen, in October, and the other in November; and they filled the people's heads with predictions on these signs of the heavens, intimating that those conjunctions foretold drought, famine, and pestilence.
He described the shape, the posture, and the movement of it so exactly that it was the greatest matter of amazement to him in the world that everybody did not see it as well as he.
One saw one thing, and one another.
These things serve to show how far the people were really overcome with delusions; and as they had a notion of the approach of a visitation, all their predictions ran upon a most dreadful plague, which should lay the whole city, and even the kingdom, waste, and should destroy almost all the nation, both man and beast.
So I left them; and this appearance passed for as real as the blazing star itself.
Here they told us they saw a flaming sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a point hanging directly over the city; there they saw hearses and coffins in the air carrying to be buried; and there again, heaps of dead bodies lying unburied, and the like, just as the imagination of the poor terrified people furnished them with matter to work upon.
One saw his very face, and cried out what a glorious creature he was!
I often thought that as Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans when the Jews were assembled together to celebrate the Passover--by which means an incredible number of people were surprised there who would otherwise have been in other countries--so the plague entered London when an incredible increase of people had happened occasionally, by the particular circumstances above-named.
In the first place, a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little before the fire.
One day, being at that part of the town on some special business, curiosity led me to observe things more than usually, and indeed I walked a great way where I had no business.
But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified by the force of their own imagination.
As this conflux of the people to a youthful and gay Court made a great trade in the city, especially in everything that belonged to fashion and finery, so it drew by consequence a great number of workmen, manufacturers, and the like, being mostly poor people who depended upon their labour.
Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books as terrified the people, and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of whom were taken up; but nothing was done in it, as I am informed, the Government being unwilling to exasperate the people, who were, as I may say, all out of their wits already.
The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she; and I found there was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and that I should be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them.
But the city itself began now to be visited too, I mean within the walls; but the number of people there were indeed extremely lessened by so great a multitude having been gone into the country; and even all this month of July they continued to flee, though not in such multitudes as formerly.
In the two first of them, however, they were entirely mistaken, for we had no droughty season, but in the beginning of the year a hard frost, which lasted from December almost to March, and after that moderate weather, rather warm than hot, with refreshing winds, and, in short, very seasonable weather, and also several very great rains.
I looked earnestly every way, and at the very moment that this man directed, but could not see the least appearance of anything; but so positive was this poor man, that he gave the people the vapours in abundance, and sent them away trembling and frighted, till at length few people that knew of it cared to go through that passage, and hardly anybody by night on any account whatever.
Some heard voices warning them to be gone, for that there would be such a plague in London, so that the living would not be able to bury the dead.
However, she turned from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that it was a time of God's anger, and dreadful judgements were approaching, and that despisers such as I should wander and perish.
So hypochondriac fancies represent Ships, armies, battles in the firmament; Till steady eyes the exhalations solve, And all to its first matter, cloud, resolve.
Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in going through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate Churchyard, by a row of alms-houses.
By this, however, the number of people in the whole may be judged of; and, indeed, I often wondered that, after the prodigious numbers of people that went away at first, there was yet so great a multitude left as it appeared there was.
So this poor naked creature cried, 'Oh, the great and the dreadful God!' and said no more, but repeated those words continually, with a voice and countenance full of horror, a swift pace; and nobody could ever find him to stop or rest, or take any sustenance, at least that ever I could hear of.
Another ran about naked, except a pair of drawers about his waist, crying day and night, like a man that Josephus mentions, who cried, 'Woe to Jerusalem!' a little before the destruction of that city.
I met this poor creature several times in the streets, and would have spoken to him, but he would not enter into speech with me or any one else, but held on his dismal cries continually.
By Daniel Defoe
The last was esteemed a pretty high bill; but after this we found the bills successively increasing as follows:--
It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.
The whole bill also was very low, for the week before the bill was but 347, and the week above mentioned but 343.
Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
This they did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions publicly that they died of the plague.
Parishes infected, 1.
This lay close to me, and my mind seemed more and more encouraged to stay than ever, and supported with a secret satisfaction that I should be kept.
The apprehensions of its being the infection went also quite away with my illness, and I went about my business as usual.
I desired him to let me consider of it but till the next day, and I would resolve: and as I had already prepared everything as well as I could as to MY business, and whom to entrust my affairs with, I had little to do but to resolve.
It was, however, upon inquiry found that this Frenchman who died in Bearbinder Lane was one who, having lived in Long Acre, near the infected houses, had removed for fear of the distemper, not knowing that he was already infected.
These thoughts quite turned my resolutions again, and when I came to discourse with my brother again I told him that I inclined to stay and take my lot in that station in which God had placed me, and that it seemed to be made more especially my duty, on the account of what I have said.
This was a very terrible and melancholy thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could not but look on from morning to night (for indeed there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of those that would be left in it.
It came very warmly into my mind one morning, as I was musing on this particular thing, that as nothing attended us without the direction or permission of Divine Power, so these disappointments must have something in them extraordinary; and I ought to consider whether it did not evidently point out, or intimate to me, that it was the will of Heaven I should not go.
Whereupon it was given in to the parish clerk, and he also returned them to the Hall; and it was printed in the weekly bill of mortality in the usual manner, thus--
So that now all our extenuations abated, and it was no more to be concealed; nay, it quickly appeared that the infection had spread itself beyond all hopes of abatement.
Once I resolved to travel on foot with one servant, and, as many did, lie at no inn, but carry a soldier's tent with us, and so lie in the fields, the weather being very warm, and no danger from taking cold.
Till this week the city continued free, there having never any died, except that one Frenchman whom I mentioned before, within the whole ninety-seven parishes.
I had set the evening wholly--apart to consider seriously about it, and was all alone; for already people had, as it were by a general consent, taken up the custom of not going out of doors after sunset; the reasons I shall have occasion to say more of by-and- by.
I went home that evening greatly oppressed in my mind, irresolute, and not knowing what to do.
This was the beginning of May, yet the weather was temperate, variable, and cool enough, and people had still some hopes.
The next bill was from the 23rd of May to the 30th, when the number of the plague was seventeen.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now.
being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665.
Besides this, it was observed with great uneasiness by the people that the weekly bills in general increased very much during these weeks, although it was at a time of the year when usually the bills are very moderate.
The first consideration was of great moment to me; my trade was a saddler, and as my dealings were chiefly not by a shop or chance trade, but among the merchants trading to the English colonies in America, so my effects lay very much in the hands of such.
Hence it was that this rumour died off again, and people began to forget it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of November or the beginning of December 1664 when two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane.
But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private.
For example:--
"I'll telephone headquarters to make the arrest at once."
The automatic in Jimmie Dale's hand edged forward the fraction of an inch.
Shall I tell you?
He ran quickly up the steps and rang the bell.
What ARE you?
Carling's tongue sought his lips, made a circuit of them--and he tried to speak, but his voice was an incoherent muttering.
It's quite useless for you to bring it up.
"THOMAS H. CARLING."
There was no label on it, but it needed none--the strong, penetrating odor of bitter almonds was telltale evidence enough.
But you were supposed to be a wealthy man in your own right; and so, in reality you were--once.
"About ten thousand dollars, I should say," said Jimmie Dale slowly.
You understand now why--don't you?" he said under his breath.
"Moyne, eh?" Carling was alert, quick now, jerking out his words.
Behind the other, across the hall, Jimmie Dale followed and close at Carling's heels entered the room, which was fitted up, quite evidently regardless of cost, as a combination library and study.
Then, with an effort, he jerked himself erect in his chair.
A little later perhaps in court--but not now.
"Well, he should have thought of all that before!
"That's it, is it!
I was rather curious to know whether it was locked or not."
But now the man made no answer.
You brought the parcel home, put it in that safe there--and notified the president of the bank by telephone from here of the robbery, suggesting that police headquarters be advised at once.
His hands went out again--again his tongue moistened his dry lips.
The other closed the front door.
And then, from first one pocket and then the other, Jimmie Dale took the two packages of banknotes, and, still with out a word, pushed them across the desk until they lay under the other's eyes.
"Well, what is it?" demanded a voice brusquely.
And then, even as Jimmie Dale sprang forward, the other pitched head long over the couch--and in a moment it was over.
He told you to go ahead and act as you saw best.
"In private!
"What is it?"
"You lie!" he cried.
"I guess it's all up.
"A story!
At the corner he stopped to light a cigarette--and the flame of the match spurting up disclosed a face that was worn and haggard.
I dare say it would take me half an hour to open it.
HUDSON-MERCANTILE NATIONAL BANK,
"Just a minute," interposed Jimmie Dale gravely.
He leaned back and surveyed Jimmie Dale critically with his little black eyes.
He moistened the adhesive side, and, still holding it by the tweezers, dropped it on his handkerchief and pressed the seal down on the face of the topmost package of banknotes.
"Sit down!" he gritted between his teeth.
"The way you'll fix it will be to write out a confession exonerating Moyne."
Double-crossing him, eh?
He held them an instant, staring at them, then methodically began to tear them into little pieces, a strange, tired smile hovering on his lips.
Moyne hadn't anything to do with it.
"Exactly," said Jimmie Dale.
Carling shrank back into his chair, his head huddling into his shoulders.
"Some other way--some other way!" Carling was babbling.
He began to drum nervously with his fingers on the desk, and shift uneasily in his chair.
"Oh, that's the game then, eh?
"Thank you," said Jimmie Dale courteously--and stepped into the hall.
For the past four years, and God knows how many before that, you've gone the pace.
Presently Jimmie Dale picked up the vial--and dropped it back on the floor again.
"District messenger--some way--in the morning," he murmured.
"Yes," said Carling.
Inside were nearly two dozen little packages of hundred-dollar bills.
Jimmie Dale moved over, and stood in front of Carling on the other side of the desk--and stared silently at the immaculate, fashionably groomed figure before him.
"This way, please."
He paused for an instant on the threshold for a single, quick, comprehensive glance around the room--then passed on out into the street.
The man was dead now--there would be disgrace enough for some one to bear, a mother perhaps--who knew!
It's safe enough."
A door opened almost instantly, sending a faint glow into the hall from the lighted room; a hurried step crossed the hall--and the outer door was thrown back.
And it was safer, much more circumspect on your part, not to order the flat searched at once, but only as a last resort, as it were, after you had led the police to trail him all evening and still remain without a clew--and besides, of course, not until you had planted the evidence that was to damn him and wreck his life and home!
"You found it--WHERE?"
"Yes!" Carling's voice was excited now, the colour back in his face. "But you--how--do you mean that you are returning the money to the bank?"
"I haven't counted it.
The man has had his chance already--a better chance than any one with his record ever had before. We took him into the bank knowing that he was an ex-convict, but believing that we could make an honest man of him--and this is the result."
"I didn't," said Jimmie Dale.
"Carling," said Jimmie Dale hoarsely, "I stood beside a little bed to-night and looked at a baby girl--a little baby girl with golden hair, who smiled as she slept."
"My name is--Smith."
His pal?
What has a story got to do with this?" snapped Carling.
Carling's fingers stopped their drumming, slid to the desk edge, tightened there, and a whiteness crept into his face.
Jimmie Dale smiled indulgently.
For a moment Carling hesitated; then, with a half-muttered oath, obeyed.
A white-gloved arm, a voice, and a silvery laugh!
There was yet a chance.
After all, he had known it in his heart of hearts all the time--it had always been the same--it was only one more occasion added to the innumerable ones that had gone before in which she had eluded him!
Mechanically his hand slipped into his pocket and closed over the automatic that nestled there.
Again he was tempted to return to the Sanctuary and make the attempt as Larry the Bat.
He beat it about fifteen minutes ago, him an' Dago Jim.
The letter--that was paramount now.
But now, too, he was Jimmie Dale again; and, apart from the slightly outthrust jaw, the tight-closed lips, impassive, debonair, composed.
That meant blackmail from them all his life, an intolerable existence, impossible, a hell on earth--the slave, at the beck and call of two of the worst criminals in New York!
"Glad to know youse, cull!" he exclaimed.
An hour, two hours, and New York would be metamorphosed into a seething caldron of humanity bubbling with the news.
Jimmie Dale whistled softly to himself.
A chance!
The first would not light.
And that was all he had ever seen of her, all that he had ever heard of her--except those letters, of course, each of which had outlined the details of some affair for the Gray Seal to execute.
At the worst, there was one mitigating factor in it all.
"I ain't much wise to New York," he explained.
The Wowzer! That was it!
It was useless--of course--every effort that he had ever made to find her had been useless.
If he could only get the chance to fight for it--against ANY odds!
He was running now, his hands clenched at his sides; his mind, working subconsciously, urging him onward in a blind, as yet unrealised, objectless way.
And now he found himself hesitating at the corner of a cross street.
He had no need to think of her. Whatever the ruin and disaster that faced him in the next few hours, she in any case was safe.
It was in his hand now, those slim, tapering, wonderfully sensitive fingers of Jimmie Dale, that were an "open sesame" to locks and safes, subconsciously telegraphing to his mind the fact that the texture of the paper--was hers.
The Mice will all be out sooner or later.
You might think that now and then he would have said to himself, "Oh, I won't bother to look for Peter Mink to-day.
"There's that squeak again!" he whispered.
While he was speaking, Solomon Owl started ever so slightly.
"This is a hard winter," said Simon Screecher.
"You're not going to get away from me till I've found out what I want to know," he declared.
"I don't feel like running.
I want you to tell me what I'll find to eat when I go to the orchard."
He had stored away a stock of food.
To tell the truth, Master Meadow Mouse always felt safer when one of the Muskrat family happened to be taking a swim at the same time.
The fourth time that Master Meadow Mouse found his cousin he took no chances.
He caught his cousin by his tail and held on firmly.
"You advised me to get more food," said Master Meadow Mouse.
And it wasn't long before Solomon Owl gave another start.
It was deep enough for a swim.
"If I'm not mistaken I heard a squeak.
"Do you want to scare the Mice?" Simon Screecher cut his whistle off right in the middle of it.
Several times Master Meadow Mouse took the wrong turn and had to retrace his steps. But at last he found his busy cousin again.
He said that he could dry his coat after he reached home; while if he stopped to dry it at the edge of the brook perhaps he'd never get home at all.
"Eat the bark!" his cousin answered.
"I've about made up my mind," said Simon Screecher, "that I'd move to some other neighborhood.
For the Muskrats all had a warning signal that told everybody when there was danger.
IN one way Peter Mink was like Master Meadow Mouse.
Owl Friends
"This is what comes of a hard winter."
Sometimes Peter dawdled on the banks of Swift River.
When I think of hills, I think of the upward strength I tread upon.
So you see I am not shut out from the region of the beautiful, though my hand cannot perceive the brilliant colours in the sunset or on the mountain, or reach into the blue depths of the sky.
The silent worker is imagination which decrees reality out of chaos.
When I touch what there is of the Winged Victory, it reminds me at first of a headless, limbless dream that flies towards me in an unrestful sleep.
But when the eye of my mind is opened to its beauty, the bare ground brightens beneath my feet, and the hedge-row bursts into leaf, and the rose-tree shakes its fragrance everywhere.
This small incident started me on a chat about hands, and if my chat is fortunate I have to thank my dog-star.
I
Its flowing curves and bendings are a real pleasure; only breath is wanting; but under the spell of the imagination the marble thrills and becomes the divine reality of the ideal. Imagination puts a sentiment into every line and curve, and the statue in my touch is indeed the goddess herself who breathes and moves and enchants.
Although, compared with the life-warm, mobile face of a friend, the marble is cold and pulseless and unresponsive, yet it is beautiful to my hand.
They appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling.
The pleasing changes of rough and smooth, pliant and rigid, curved and straight in the bark and branches of a tree give the truth to my hand.
Therefore a house with which I am not familiar has for me, at first, no general effect or harmony of detail.
It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women.
That is what it means.
Still, though I cannot warrant not to lose you, I promise that you shall not be led into fire or water, or fall into a deep pit.
My fingers are tickled to delight by the soft ripple of a baby's laugh, and find amusement in the lusty crow of the barnyard autocrat.
Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible.
In any case, it is pleasant to have something to talk about that no one else has monopolized; it is like making a new path in the trackless woods, blazing the trail where no foot has pressed before.
Once I had a pet rooster that used to perch on my knee and stretch his neck and crow.
What I call beauty I find in certain combinations of all these qualities, and is largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is over all things.
My garden would be a silent patch of earth strewn with sticks of a variety of shapes and smells.
It symbolizes duty.
I wanted to catch a picture of him in my fingers, and I touched him as lightly as I would cobwebs; but lo, his fat body revolved, stiffened and solidified into an upright position, and his tongue gave my hand a lick!
He loved it with his tail, with his paw, with his tongue.
When water is the object of my thought, I feel the cool shock of the plunge and the quick yielding of the waves that crisp and curl and ripple about my body.
It is not a complete conception, but a collection of object-impressions which, as they come to me, are disconnected and isolated.
With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.
I know how budding trees look, and I enter into the amorous joy of the mating birds, and this is the miracle of imagination.
In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different.
But my mind is full of associations, sensations, theories, and with them it constructs the house.
It feels, as I suppose it looks, straight--a dull thought drawn out endlessly.
All palpable things are mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or small, warm or cold, and these qualities are variously modified.
The garments of the Victory thrust stiffly out behind, and do not resemble garments that I have felt flying, fluttering, folding, spreading in the wind.
The coolness of a water-lily rounding into bloom is different from the coolness of an evening wind in summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body.
Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas.
The hardness of the rock is to the hardness of wood what a man's deep bass is to a woman's voice when it is low.
I find in a beautiful statue perfection of bodily form, the qualities of balance and completeness.
The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.
He was rolling on the grass, with pleasure in every muscle and limb.
Eloquence to the touch resides not in straight lines, but in unstraight lines, or in many curved and straight lines together.
But at the very outset we encounter a difficulty.
In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand.
A bird in my hand was then worth two in the--barnyard.
If he could speak, I believe he would say with me that paradise is attained by touch; for in touch is all love and intelligence.
They rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful.
I move around my house, touching object after object in order, before I can form an idea of the entire house.
Like Job, I feel as if a hand had made me, fashioned me together round about and moulded my very soul.
When I have something to do that must not be set aside, I feel as if I were going forward in a straight line, bound to arrive somewhere, or go on forever without swerving to the right or to the left.
You might as well say that a sight which makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have accumulated by means of touch.
In other people's houses I can touch only what is shown to me--the chief objects of interest, carvings on the wall, or a curious architectural feature, exhibited like the family album.
To escape this moralizing you should ask, "How does the straight line feel?"
All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot.
You are so accustomed to light, I fear you will stumble when I try to guide you through the land of darkness and silence.
My fingers cannot, of course, get the impression of a large whole at a glance; but I feel the parts, and my mind puts them together.
A tangible object passes complete into my brain with the warmth of life upon it, and occupies the same place that it does in space; for, without egotism, the mind is as large as the universe.
It is true, however, that some sculptures, even recognized masterpieces, do not please my hand.
So imagination crowns the experience of my hands.
THE SEEING HAND
The blind are not supposed to be the best of guides.
Without imagination what a poor thing my world would be!
If you will follow me patiently, you will find that "there's a sound so fine, nothing lives 'twixt it and silence," and that there is more meant in things than meets the eye.
The packet which she placed in my possession, contained, she said, the certificates of her marriage, and of the birth and baptism of her child.
The weather was intensely hot; her health was feeble and delicate; the dead and dying were around her in every stage of pain and horror; but she never shrank from the duty she had assumed.
On the 29th of June, the bombardment from the French camp was very heavy, shells and grenades falling in every part of the city.
Her heart and soul were in the cause for which those men had fought, and all was done that Woman could do to comfort them in their sufferings.
It was not to be expected, she said, that he could escape the dangers of another night, such as the last; and therefore it was her intention to remain with him, and share his fate.
Among these was to be seen every variety of age, sentiment, and condition,--striplings and blanched heads; wild, visionary enthusiasts; grave, heroic men, who, in the struggle for freedom, had ventured all, and lost all; nobles and beggars; bandits, felons and brigands.
On the 30th of April the first engagement took place between the French and Roman troops, and in a few days subsequently I visited several of my countrymen, at their request, to concert measures for their safety.
I am, Madame, very respectfully,
During this period I received several letters from her, all of which, though reluctant to part with them, I enclose to your address in compliance with your request.
Great excitement naturally existed; and, in the general apprehension which pervaded all classes, that acts of personal violence and outrage would soon be committed, the foreign residents, especially, found themselves placed in an alarming situation.
She received me with much kindness, and thus an acquaintance commenced.
In the month of April, 1849, Rome, as you are no doubt aware, was placed in a state of siege by the approach of the French army.
Here, in Rome, she is still spoken of in terms of regard and endearment, and the announcement of her death was received with a degree of sorrow not often bestowed upon a foreigner, especially one of a different faith.
I did so without delay, and found her lying on a sofa, pale and trembling, evidently much exhausted.
In compliance with your request, I have the honor to state, succinctly, the circumstances connected with my acquaintance with the late Madame Ossoli, your deceased sister, during her residence in Rome.
In the afternoon of the 30th, I received a brief note from Miss Fuller, requesting me to call at her residence.
Your obedient servant,
After a few words more, I took my departure, the hour she named having nearly arrived.
Happily, the cannonading was not renewed that night, and at dawn of day she returned to her apartments, with her husband by her side.
In the engagements which succeeded between the Roman and French troops, the wounded of the former were brought into the city, and disposed throughout the different hospitals, which were under the superintendence of several ladies of high rank, who had formed themselves into associations, the better to ensure care and attention to those unfortunate men.
And in a letter which I received not long since from this lady, who was gaining the bread of an exile by teaching languages in Constantinople, she alludes with much feeling to the support afforded by Miss Fuller to the republican party in Italy.
Only once again did this fell passion take possession of her spirit; and then only in the shape of a shadow soon to pass away.
Since we last saw him, the gay Pluto has become tamed down to a staid and sober Benedict--black though he be.
Such, in reality, was Sir Maurice Gerald--erst known as Maurice the mustanger!
The spirit of the aristocratic planter--steeped in sorrow, and humiliated by misfortune--had become purged of its false pride; though it needed not this to make him willingly acquiesce in an alliance, which, instead of a "nobody," gave him a nobleman for his son.
It was succeeded by a strong sympathy for the ill-fated Isidora; whose story she now better comprehended.
Beautiful, even in death, was Isidora.
Do not reproach the young Creole, because this passion was paramount in her soul.
During the course of the meal--but much more over the wine--you will hear talk of "Zeb Stump the hunter."
JOY.
You may not often see him.
The aim of the assassin had been true enough.
That voluptuous shape--the true form divine--may be admired in the cold statue.
In the physical world Time is accounted the destroyer; though in the moral, it is oft the restorer.
The "blue-eyed colleen" of Castle Ballagh must have been a myth--having existence only in the erratic fancy of Phelim.
The passion that controlled her may not be popular under a strictly Puritan standard.
Though saddened by the series of tragedies so quickly transpiring, she was but human; and, being woman, who can blame her for giving way to the subdued happiness that succeeded?
To the question, "Who has done this?" she was only able to answer, "Diaz--Diaz!"
There was a strange thought passing through their minds; a sadness independent of that caused by the spectacle of a murder.
You would find this old gentleman very proud upon many points: but more especially of his beautiful daughter--the mistress of the mansion--and the half-dozen pretty prattlers who cling to his skirts, and call him their "dear grandpa."
When again restored to consciousness, it was to discover that the fair vision of his dreams was no vision at all, but a lovely woman--the loveliest on the Leona, or in all Texas if you like--by name Louise Poindexter.
The stunning shock--with the mental and corporeal excitement--long sustained--did not fail to produce its effect; and the mind of Maurice Gerald once more returned to its delirious dreaming.
Do not blame her for feeling pleasure amidst moments that should otherwise have been devoted to sadness.
This was not Woodley Poindexter: for after Calhoun's death, it was discovered that the ex-captain had once been a Benedict; and there was a young scion of his stock--living in New Orleans--who had the legal right to say he was his son!
Not harmlessly, however: since it struck one of the spectators standing too close to the spot.
Once there, you would become the recipient of a hospitality, unequalled in European lands.
Nor, that her happiness was heightened, on learning from the astonished spectators, how her lover's life had been preserved--as it might seem miraculously.
Or it may have been the bud of a young love, blighted ere it reached blooming--by absence, oft fatal to such tender plants of passion?
After a visit to his native land--including the European tour--which was also that of his honeymoon--Sir Maurice, swayed by his inclinations, once more returned to Texas, and made Casa del Corvo his permanent home.
As they stood gazing upon the remains of the villain, and his victim-- the swarth ruffian dangling from the branch above, and the fair form lying underneath--the hearts of the Texans were touched--as perhaps they had never been before.
Such features as she possessed, owe not everything to the light of life.
Whether or no, Louise Poindexter--Lady Gerald she must now be called-- during her sojourn in the Emerald Isle saw nothing to excite her to jealousy.
You would have for your host one of the handsomest men in Texas; for your hostess one of its most beautiful women--both still this side of middle life.
Florinda--now the better half of his life--has effected the transformation.
Not I. Not you, if you speak truly.
Leaving him for a time, you would come in contact with two other individuals attached to the establishment.
While sojourning at Casa del Corvo, you may get hints of a strange story connected with the place--now almost reduced to a legend.
In Texas the title would have counted for little; nor did its owner care to carry it.
Men stood gazing upon her dead body--long gazing--loth to go away--at length going with thoughts not altogether sacred!
But, by a bit of good fortune--not always attendant on an Irish baronetcy--it carried along with it an endowment--ample enough to clear Casa del Corvo of the mortgage held by the late Cassius Calhoun, and claimed by his nearest of kin.
For all this, there are those who could conduct you to an ancient hacienda--still known as Casa del Corvo.
She even assisted her lord in the saddling of his red-bay steed, and encouraged him in the pursuit of the assassin.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED.
Splendid is the road and delightful the country coming east from Girard; even the red brick school-houses are embowered amid leafy groves; and so it continues with ever-varying, ever-pleasing beauty to Erie, after which the highway becomes hardly so good.
Stopping over night at LeBoy, in company with the president and captain of the LeBoy Club, I visit the State fish-hatchery at Mumford next morning, and ride on through the Genesee Valley, finding fair roads through the valley, though somewhat hilly and stony toward Canandaigua.
At Rome I enter the famous and beautiful Mohawk Valley, a place long looked forward to with much pleasurable anticipation, from having heard so often of its natural beauties and its interesting historical associations.
The western half is kept in rather poor repair these days; but from Fremont eastward it is splendid wheeling.
Twenty-four hours after entering Pennsylvania I make my exit across the boundary into the Empire State.
"Jumbo" goes all right when mounted, but, being unable to mount without aid, he seldom ventures abroad by himself for fear of having to foot it back.
From Napoleon my route leads up the Maumee River and canal, first trying the tow-path of the latter, and then relinquishing it for the very fair wagon-road.
Surely, this youngster's head ought to be level on agricultural affairs, when he grows up, if anybody's ought.
The latter stream traverses dreary plains, where almost nothing but sagebrush grows; the Maumee waters a smiling valley, where orchards, fields, and meadows alternate with sugar- maple groves, and in its fair bosom reflects beautiful landscape views, that are changed and rebeautified by the master-hand of the sun every hour of the day, and doubly embellished at night by the moon.
Leaving the bicycle at "Isham's "-who volunteers some slight repairs-I take a flying visit by rail to see Niagara Falls, returning the same evening to enjoy the proffered hospitality of a genial member of the Buffalo Bicycle Club.
Of the first assertion I have nothing to say, having passed through a dozen "garden spots of the world " on this tour across America; but there is no gainsaying the fact that the Mohawk Valley, as viewed from this vantage spot, is wonderfully beautiful.
Arriving at Camillus, I ask the name of the sparkling little stream that dances along this fairy glen like a child at play, absorbing the sun-rays and coquettishly reflecting them in the faces of the venerable oaks that bend over it like loving guardians protecting it from evil.
A remnant of some Indian tribe still lingers around here and gathers huckleberries for the market, two squaws being in the village purchasing supplies for their camp in the swamps.
Smiling villages nestling amid stately groves, rearing white church-spires from out their green, bowery surroundings, dot the low, broad, fertile shore-land to the left; the gleaming waters of Lake Erie here and there glisten like burnished steel through the distant interspaces, and away beyond stretches northward, like a vast mirror, to kiss the blue Canadian skies.
A small but frolicsome party of them on top of the Washington monument, "heaved a sigh " from their whistles, at a comrade passing along the street below, when a corpulent policeman, naturally mistaking it for a signal from a brother "cop," hastened to climb the five hundred feet or thereabouts of ascent up the monument.
When he arrived, puffing and perspiring, to the summit, and discovered his mistake, the wheelmen say he made such awful use of the Queen's English that the atmosphere had a blue, sulphurous tinge about it for some time after.
Sometimes the burden of this sulphurous profanity is aimed at me, sometimes at the inoffensive bicycle, or both of us collectively, but oftener is it directed at the unspeakable mule, who is really the only party to blame.
Inquiring the best road to Geneva I am advised of the superiority of the one leading past the poor-house.
From the top my road ahead is plainly visible for miles, leading through the broad and smiling Cattaraugus Valley that is spread out like a vast garden below, through which Cattaraugus Creek slowly winds its tortuous way.
Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so do I--I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms of women wreathing their arms around me.
Still, at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed back to his heart.
Do you know what the question is here?
After the expiration of a few minutes, five were unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.
If the duty of some is to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other."
Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments. Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan.
A sort of mud was found in his stomach.
There are other beings of whom you must think. You must not be egoists."
They replied:
Who is talking to you of yourselves?
"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."
At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms. Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently removed his coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.
Die, if you will, but don't make others die.
And those who have daughters!
CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE
Combeferre has said convincing things to you.
Young girls without bread--that is a terrible thing.
"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it will be too late."
You smell of powder. Shot."
Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."
"Come," said he, "you must have a little pity.
Vain-glory is waste.
He looked on at everything as from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details.
He is dead.
There were only four uniforms.
Then his glance dropped to the four uniforms.
These men did not astonish each other.
Despair, also, has its ecstasy.
Are there women or are there not?
They emerged thence a moment later.
He said nothing.
Statistics show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent. I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns young girls, it concerns little children.
what are you thinking of?
Are there children or are there not?
At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the other four.
Let such leave the ranks."
These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism. The improbable was simple there.
See, here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles, prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned?
That is deserting one's family.
And tomorrow?
You say: 'I have a gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.' So much the worse is easily said.
Combeferre followed, carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.
If you spoke to him, he did not answer.
But this moved him.
It is a question of women.
Here misery meets the ideal.
He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of prophetic breaths; places where death is have these effects of tripods. A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an inward look.
Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged in meditation.
We affirm it on this barrier.
We need all our cartridges just at present."
CHAPTER V--THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE
"Wait.
By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck, they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons a martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach, and meets the hands, after passing between the legs.
Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.
One of them wept as he took his leave.
There was no applause; but they whispered together for a long time.
The real governed by the true, that is the goal. Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and, later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the intelligence.
Why was he there?
"Then give me a drink," said Javert.
He entered the tap-room.
He raised his eyes, and recognized Jean Valjean. He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself to the remark: "It is perfectly simple."
Equality has an organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction.
To conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second. Reflect on what progress has already accomplished.
Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches in length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room, where they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.
Let the reader recall the state of his soul.
Javert replied: "When are you going to kill me?"
CHAPTER VI--MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC
His judgment was disturbed.
"You are not tender to have left me to pass the night here.
Yes, instruction! light!
Pray, stop and listen quietly.
"I am ready to talk with you; but I don't want any money.
Don't put yourself to any trouble on my account."
Sazen listened patiently to his story, and, after reflecting for a while, replied, "Well, sir, it's not a difficult matter to set right: and yet it will require some little management.
Sazen was not a little taken aback at this; however, he put on an innocent face, as though he had never heard of Chokichi before, and said, "I never heard of such a thing!
Now Sazen, who as a Ronin wore a long dirk in his girdle, kept looking out for a moment when Chokichi should be off his guard, in order to kill him; but Chokichi kept his eyes open, and did not give Sazen a chance.
"You amaze me!" replied the other.
Would you like something to eat?"
Then Tokiwa told Kiyomori that if he would spare her little ones she would share his couch; but that if he killed her children she would destroy herself rather than yield to his desire.
This put Sazen rather in a dilemma; however, he made up his mind not to show any hesitation, and said, "What are you talking about?
Pray, let me tell you all about it."
"Very well, then, the day after to-morrow I will go to your house."
"This is a curious meeting: pray, what have you been about since you left my service?
But Genzaburo, passing his hand gently over her head and back, and comforting her, said, "Come, sweetheart, there is no need to sob so.
I will promote you to the rank of Samurai."
On the appointed day Genzaburo made his preparations, and went in disguise, without any retainers, to call upon Sazen, who met him at the porch of his house, and said, "This is a great honour!
"Thank you, I have no appetite."
One day, as they were feasting and enjoying themselves in an upper storey in Sazen's house, Chokichi came to the house and said, "I beg pardon; but does one Master Sazen live here?"
The matter was immediately reported to the governor, and, Sazen having been summoned, an investigation was held.
But Genzaburo pressed it upon him by force, and at last he was obliged to accept the money.
When Chokichi heard this, he was thunderstruck, and exclaimed, "Can this really be true!
Just wait a little."
"Oh, say not so: misfortunes are the punishment due for our misdeeds in a former state of existence.
All was ready for the voyage, and now Jason went with his friends to view the ship before she was brought into the water.
Argus the master was on the ship, seeing to it that the last things were being done before Argo was launched.
When the ship was built and made ready for the voyage a name was given to it--the Argo it was called.
Both were still youthful and neither had yet achieved any notable deed.
Argus was his name. He told Jason that a dream had sent him to the city of Iolcus.
They went into the feasting hall and they saw one there who was tall as a pine tree, with unshorn tresses of hair upon his head.
The first was Arcas.
She had dedicated herself to Artemis, the guardian of the wild things, and she had vowed that she would remain unwedded.
Could it be that Heracles had come amongst them?
And there came two brothers, twins, who were a wonder to all who beheld them.
Very grave and wise looked Argus--Argus the builder of the ship.
From Sparta they came, and their mother was Leda, who, after the twin brothers, had another child born to her--Helen, for whose sake the sons of many of Jason's friends were to wage war against the great city of Troy.
He dreamt that she whom he had seen in the forest ways and afterward by the River Anaurus appeared to him.
But not with the timbers brought from Mount Pelion did Argus begin. Walking through the palace with Jason he noted a great beam in the roof.
He saw a figure standing by the mast; for a moment he looked on it, and then the figure became shadowy.
No two could be more different than these two were.
It was Chiron who had counseled Orpheus to go with Jason; Chiron the centaur had met him as he was wandering through the forests on the Mountain Pelion and had sent him down into Iolcus.
Great timbers were cut and brought down to Pagasae, the harbor of Iolcus.
Afterward Nestor went to the war against Troy, and then he was the oldest of the heroes in the camp of Agamemnon.
Around these figures were heads of snakes, heads with black jaws and glittering eyes, twelve heads such as might affright any man.
Another who came was Admetus; afterward he became a famous king.
He went to the city's gate and he met such a man.
The other hunter was a girl, Atalanta.
THE ASSEMBLING OF THE HEROES AND THE BUILDING OF THE SHIP
Before he had grown out of his boyhood Theseus had been able to raise the stone and draw forth his father's sword.
Wonderful to the heroes Argo looked with her long oars and her high sails, with her timbers painted red and gold and blue, and with a marvelous figure carved upon her prow.
There came a hero who was less youthful than Castor or Polydeuces; he was a man good in council named Nestor.
The folk were watching an eagle as he came into the city, an eagle that was winging its way far, far up in the sky. Arcas drew his bow, and with one arrow he brought the eagle down.
And wonderful to the heroes the ship looked now that Argus, for their viewing, had set up the mast with the sails and had even put the oars in their places.
The God Apollo once made himself a shepherd and he kept the flocks of King Admetus.
These two brothers had on their ankles wings that gleamed with golden scales; their black hair was thick upon their shoulders, and it was always being shaken by the wind.
And those who were building the ship often felt going through it tremors as of a living creature.
The awful figure of the Darkness of Death was shown there, too, with mournful eyes and the dust of battles upon her shoulders.
All the heroes welcomed Atalanta as a comrade, and the maiden did all the things that the young men did.
And then there came one who had both welcome and reverence from Jason; this one came without spear or bow, bearing in his hands a lyre only. He was Orpheus, and he knew all the ways of the gods and all the stories of the gods; when he sang to his lyre the trees would listen and the beasts would follow him.
Tiphys knew all about the sun and winds and stars, and all about the signs by which a ship might be steered, and Nauplius had the love of Poseidon, the god of the sea.
On the night of the day he had helped to bring them down Jason had a dream.
Then there came two men well skilled in the handling of ships--Tiphys and Nauplius.
All in wonder the heroes gazed on the great shield, telling each other that only one man in all the world could carry it--Heracles the son of Zeus.
They came riding on white horses, two noble-looking brothers.
On the day that the messengers had set out to bring through Greece the word of Jason's going forth in quest of the Golden Fleece the woodcutters made their way up into the forests of Mount Pelion; they began to fell trees for the timbers of the ship that was to make the voyage to far Colchis.
Jason welcomed him and lodged him in the king's palace, and that day the word went through the city that the building of the great ship would soon be begun.
And on other parts of the shield were shown the horses of Ares, the grim god of war.
Then all along the waterside came the noise of hammering; in the street where the metalworkers were came the noise of beating upon metals as the smiths fashioned out of bronze armor for the heroes and swords and spears.
Afterward there came, one after the other, two who were famous for their hunting.
Every day, under the eyes of Argus the master, the ship that had in it the beam from Zeus's grove was built higher and wider.
Heracles!
First there came the youths Castor and Polydeuces.
Under a great stone the king had hidden it before Theseus was born.
He was dressed in the skin of a bear; he had red hair and savage-looking eyes, and for arms he carried a mighty bow with bronze-tipped arrows.
Tall and brighthaired was Atalanta, swift and good with the bow.
The heroes went back to the palace of King Pelias to feast with the king's guests before they took their places on the ship, setting out on the voyage to far Colchis.
He turned to them a smiling face with smiling eyes.
Then mast and sails were taken down and the oars were left in the ship, and the Argo was launched into the water.
A sacred power was in the beam, and from it the prow of the ship should be fashioned.
Then began an existence which I shall have some difficulty in describing to you.
My heart beat violently while I waited for her reply.
"I don't in the least know."
It is folly no doubt, but I love him. What would you have me do?
"I shall take the whole house, and you can look after my place while I am away."
This courtesan who had cost more money in bouquets than would have kept a whole family in comfort, would sometimes sit on the grass for an hour, examining the simple flower whose name she bore.
I had no doubt, from the way in which Marguerite came to meet her, that another similar conversation was going to take place, and I was anxious to hear what it was about.
"As soon as possible."
"Yes; he agreed at once."
Chapter 17
Marguerite was no longer the same woman that I had known.
The duke is going to look after every single thing.
Since that day he had never been heard of.
Only think, my dear child, of the position that you are losing, and that Armand can never give you.
The duke, who had taken the house in order that Marguerite might rest there, no longer visited it, fearing to find himself in the midst of a large and merry company, by whom he did not wish to be seen.
"My life is yours, Marguerite; you need this man no longer.
Prudence had strictly sermonized Marguerite in regard to her new manner of life; but she had replied that she loved me, that she could not live without me, and that, happen what might, she would not sacrifice the pleasure of having me constantly with her, adding that those who were not satisfied with this arrangement were free to stay away.
The servants addressed me officially as their master.
I passed whole days at the feet of my mistress.
"It will be charming," she continued.
From that day forth the duke was never referred to.
A week later Marguerite was settled in her country house, and I was installed at Point du Jour.
We will be happy; we will live quietly, and I will say good-bye forever to the life for which I now blush.
And then, now that he has got accustomed to be always with me, he would suffer too cruelly if he had to leave me so much as an hour a day.
"What else is there?"
"The house is taken?" asked Prudence.
Tears choked my voice.
He said to her, somewhat cruelly, that he was tired of paying for the follies of a woman who could not even have him treated with respect under his own roof, and he went away in great indignation.
The duke wrote to her two or three times.
Sometimes the terms of these letters brought tears to my eyes.
"And you replied?"
So much I had heard one day when Prudence had said to Marguerite that she had something very important to tell her, and I had listened at the door of the room into which they had shut themselves.
He loves you with all his soul, but he has no fortune capable of supplying your needs, and he will be bound to leave you one day, when it will be too late and when the duke will refuse to do any more for you.
There were days when she ran in the garden, like a child of ten, after a butterfly or a dragon-fly.
Besides, I have not such a long time to live that I need make myself miserable in order to please an old man whose very sight makes me feel old.
No more barriers, my Marguerite; we love; what matters all the rest?"
"Well, I have seen the duke."
I was then once more in possession of some ten thousand francs, without reckoning my allowance.
For a whole month there was not a day when Marguerite had not eight or ten people to meals.
However, he has asked me how I, loving Paris as I do, could make up my mind to bury myself in the country.
Am I not here?
Does all that suit you?"
In vain Marguerite dismissed her guests, changed her way of life; the duke was not to be heard of.
For two months we had not even been to Paris.
He seemed to have some difficulty in believing me. The poor old man is always on the watch.
"Well?" said Marguerite.
Her delight in the smallest things was like that of a child.
In the course of the day I received this note:
Not long after, Prudence returned again.
Prudence was no doubt going to make some reply, but I entered suddenly and flung myself at Marguerite's feet, covering her hands with tears in my joy at being thus loved.
"In the same house?" asked Prudence, laughing.
"Yes," I answered, trying to quiet the scruples which this way of living awoke in me from time to time.
"We went all over the house, and we shall have everything perfect.
Let him keep his money; I will do without it."
I think, between ourselves, that he is enchanted with a caprice which will keep me out of Paris for a time, and so silence the objections of his family.
She had broken equally with her friends and with her ways, with her words and with her extravagances.
Marguerite could not be without me.
Not caring what the result might be, she publicly proclaimed our liaison, and I had come to live entirely at her house.
Shall I ever leave you, and can I ever repay you for the happiness that you give me?
"What did he say?"
Marguerite rose from table, and joined the duke in the next room, where she tried, as far as possible, to induce him to forget the incident, but the old man, wounded in his dignity, bore her a grudge for it, and could not forgive her.
Would you like me to speak to Armand?"
You know I had won some money at gambling; I therefore immediately handed over to Prudence what she asked for Marguerite, and fearing lest she should require more than I possessed, I borrowed at Paris a sum equal to that which I had already borrowed and paid back.
"I have been seeing about a place for Armand to stay."
"That I would report his decision to you, and I promised him that I would bring you into a more reasonable frame of mind.
'Let Marguerite leave the young man,' he said to me, 'and, as in the past, I will give her all that she requires; if not, let her ask nothing more from me.'"
She avoided everything that might recall to me the life which she had been leading when I first met her.
Marguerite seemed to be thinking, for she answered nothing.
The duke's money paid for all that, as you may imagine; but from time to time Prudence came to me, asking for a note for a thousand francs, professedly on behalf of Marguerite.
Prudence, on her side, brought down all the people she knew, and did the honours of the house as if the house belonged to her.
"Will you take your horses and carriage?"
"No," she answered, "I will not leave Armand, and I will not conceal the fact that I am living with him.
You won't ever reproach me for the past? Tell me!"
Was I right?" I flung my arms around her neck and kissed her.
Next day Marguerite sent me away very early, saying that the duke was coming at an early hour, and promising to write to me the moment he went, and to make an appointment for the evening.
Her nature was morbidly open to all impressions and accessible to all sentiments.
I did not know the duke, but I felt ashamed of deceiving him.
I took it.
"But what will you do?"
Alas, we made haste to be happy, as if we knew that we were not to be happy long.
"I am going to Bougival with the duke; be at Prudence's to-night at eight."
"Well," said she, turning to Prudence, and speaking in a broken voice, "you can report this scene to the duke, and you can add that we have no longer need of him."
"Well, it is all settled," she said, as she entered.
"But that is not all," continued Marguerite.
She recognised the writing and gave me the letters without reading them.
With a renewal of tenderness, however, they returned to her room on leaving the dining-parlour, and sat with her till summoned to coffee. She was still very poorly, and Elizabeth would not quit her at all, till late in the evening, when she had the comfort of seeing her sleep, and when it seemed to her rather right than pleasant that she should go downstairs herself.
Chapter 8
"Neglect!
She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else."
Her hair, so untidy, so blowsy!"
Such a countenance, such manners!
They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses.
She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet's height, or rather taller."
"Yes, all of them, I think.
And so extremely accomplished for her age!
"It ought to be good," he replied, "it has been the work of many generations."
Bingley was quite uncomfortable; his sisters declared that they were miserable.
"With all my heart; I will buy Pemberley itself if Darcy will sell it."
Her manners were pronounced to be very bad indeed, a mixture of pride and impertinence; she had no conversation, no style, no beauty.
Elizabeth was so much caught with what passed, as to leave her very little attention for her book; and soon laying it wholly aside, she drew near the card-table, and stationed herself between Mr. Bingley and his eldest sister, to observe the game.
Elizabeth thanked him from her heart, and then walked towards the table where a few books were lying.
"Certainly not."
Bingley urged Mr. Jones being sent for immediately; while his sisters, convinced that no country advice could be of any service, recommended an express to town for one of the most eminent physicians.
"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he; "that is rather singular."
Elizabeth joined them again only to say that her sister was worse, and that she could not leave her.
Her dirty petticoat quite escaped my notice."
"I wish it may."
"She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker.
"Your list of the common extent of accomplishments," said Darcy, "has too much truth.
On entering the drawing-room she found the whole party at loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting them to be playing high she declined it, and making her sister the excuse, said she would amuse herself for the short time she could stay below, with a book.
A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved."
"That is capital," added her sister, and they both laughed heartily.
But with such a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is no chance of it."
"I am talking of possibilities, Charles."
"Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it."
"Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office."
I could hardly keep my countenance.
"But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world," replied Darcy.
"It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing," said Bingley.
To this speech Bingley made no answer; but his sisters gave it their hearty assent, and indulged their mirth for some time at the expense of their dear friend's vulgar relations.
"Is Miss Darcy much grown since the spring?" said Miss Bingley; "will she be as tall as I am?"
"I am astonished," said Miss Bingley, "that my father should have left so small a collection of books.
"She did, indeed, Louisa.
But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art."
His anxiety for Jane was evident, and his attentions to herself most pleasing, and they prevented her feeling herself so much an intruder as she believed she was considered by the others.
"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."
"And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books."
Miss Bingley was engrossed by Mr. Darcy, her sister scarcely less so; and as for Mr. Hurst, by whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to eat, drink, and play at cards; who, when he found her to prefer a plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.
Her performance on the pianoforte is exquisite."
But that gentleman," looking at Darcy, "seemed to think the country was nothing at all."
Bingley met them with hopes that Mrs. Bennet had not found Miss Bennet worse than she expected.
I know we dine with four-and-twenty families."
She was very equal, therefore, to address Mr. Bingley on the subject of the ball, and abruptly reminded him of his promise; adding, that it would be the most shameful thing in the world if he did not keep it.
"Removed!" cried Bingley.
It is what everybody says.
It must be an amusing study."
I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!"
"That is exactly what I should have supposed of you," said Elizabeth.
She longed to speak, but could think of nothing to say; and after a short silence Mrs. Bennet began repeating her thanks to Mr. Bingley for his kindness to Jane, with an apology for troubling him also with Lizzy.
Mrs. Bennet was profuse in her acknowledgments.
The note was immediately dispatched, and its contents as quickly complied with.
She would not listen, therefore, to her daughter's proposal of being carried home; neither did the apothecary, who arrived about the same time, think it at all advisable.
"She is a great deal too ill to be moved.
"I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen through I am afraid is pitiful."
"You quite mistook Mr. Darcy.
He only meant that there was not such a variety of people to be met with in the country as in the town, which you must acknowledge to be true."
"Yes, she called yesterday with her father.
I shall tell Colonel Forster it will be quite a shame if he does not."
"It must not be thought of.
"Oh! yes--I understand you perfectly."
Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete victory over him, continued her triumph.
Everybody was surprised, and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment, turned silently away.
It does not follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours."
"When I am in the country," he replied, "I never wish to leave it; and when I am in town it is pretty much the same.
"And so ended his affection," said Elizabeth impatiently.
I do not know a place in the country that is equal to Netherfield.
"You begin to comprehend me, do you?" cried he, turning towards her.
"Oh! dear, yes; but you must own she is very plain.
"You may depend upon it, Madam," said Miss Bingley, with cold civility, "that Miss Bennet will receive every possible attention while she remains with us."
"But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever."
"I did not know before," continued Bingley immediately, "that you were a studier of character.
They have at least that advantage."
"Yes, indeed," cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood.
Lady Lucas herself has often said so, and envied me Jane's beauty.
Mrs. Bennet, accompanied by her two youngest girls, reached Netherfield soon after the family breakfast.
"Indeed I have, sir," was her answer.
She performed her part indeed without much graciousness, but Mrs. Bennet was satisfied, and soon afterwards ordered her carriage.
Nothing but concern for Elizabeth could enable Bingley to keep his countenance.
After sitting a little while with Jane, on Miss Bingley's appearance and invitation, the mother and three daughters all attended her into the breakfast parlour.
Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would have been very miserable; but being satisfied on seeing her that her illness was not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering immediately, as her restoration to health would probably remove her from Netherfield.
But, however, he did not.
When she was only fifteen, there was a man at my brother Gardiner's in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away.
Mr. Jones says we must not think of moving her.
"Did Charlotte dine with you?"
"Whatever I do is done in a hurry," replied he; "and therefore if I should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in five minutes.
"I am sure," she added, "if it was not for such good friends I do not know what would become of her, for she is very ill indeed, and suffers a vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the world, which is always the way with her, for she has, without exception, the sweetest temper I have ever met with.
I do not like to boast of my own child, but to be sure, Jane--one does not often see anybody better looking.
I fancy she was wanted about the mince-pies.
The country is a vast deal pleasanter, is it not, Mr. Bingley?"
His sister was less delicate, and directed her eyes towards Mr. Darcy with a very expressive smile.
I do not trust my own partiality.
Airships are not quite numerous enough for that, yet, though they may soon become so.
It doesn't seem as if anything could happen."
"About two miles now.
"Is it always as easy as this?"
"I told you it would come," declared the scientist, and there was a small hurricane below them that morning, but only the lower edge of it caught the Red Cloud, and when Tom sent her up still higher she found a comparatively quiet zone, where she slid along at good speed.
I."--his home station call--than he started and a look of surprise came over his face.
Mr. Jenks had no one to whom he wanted to send any word, but Mr. Parker wish to wire to a fellow scientist the result of some observations made in the upper air.
"Oh, I think there will be no danger," spoke Tom.
Mr. Jenks was gazing off toward the west--to where he hoped to discover the secret of Phantom Mountain.
"What for?"
Finally, after several hours of work, the wireless was in shape to send and receive messages.
Don't say that!" cried Mr. Damon.
As he worked away, he also made up his mind to send another message, in care of his father, for there was a receiving station in the Swift home. And to whom this message was addressed Tom did not say, but we fancy some of our readers can guess.
But I'll set the automatic steering gear now, Mr. Damon, and then you will be relieved."
"Bless my gizzard!
He--he's been trying to get us ever since we started, but I didn't have the wireless in shape to receive messages. Oh, I hope it's not too late!"
"It's hard to realize that we are really in an airship," observed the diamond man.
"Starting always is," was the answer, "though, as the Irishman said, coming down isn't sometimes quite so comfortable."
Mr. Damon, who knew how to operate the Red Cloud, was soon guiding her on the course, while Tom made his way to the rear compartments, through the motor room, where the stores of supplies and food were kept.
"I've never been in an airship before, and it's different than what I expected; but it's great!
"Well, I predict that we will have a bad storm," insisted Mr. Parker, and Tom could not help wishing that the scientist would keep his gloomy forebodings to himself.
"It's great," replied the diamond man.
On his way back through the motor room Tom looked to the machinery, and adjusted some of the auxiliary oil feeders.
"What are you doing now?" asked Mr. Jenks, who had been talking with Mr. Parker, and showing that scientist some of the manufactured diamonds.
"At first I thought I would be frightened, but I'm not a bit.
"Can we vol-plane to earth in the Red Cloud, Tom?"
That afternoon Tom busied himself about some wires and a number of complicated pieces of apparatus which were in one corner of the main cabin.
This craft is not like the ill-fated Whizzer.
But this is great!
He knew that either his father or Mr. Jackson, the engineer, could receive the wireless.
In the afternoon the speed of the ship was increased, and by night they had covered several hundred miles.
Bless my soul, too late for what?" gasped Mr. Damon, somewhat alarmed by Tom's manner.
Tom got up, occasionally, to look to the machinery, but it was all automatically controlled, and an alarm bell would sound in his stateroom when anything went wrong.
Tom and the others devoted several hours to arranging their staterooms and bunks, and getting their clothing stowed away, and when this was done Mr. Parker and Mr. Jenks sat gazing off into space.
CHAPTER IX--A WARNING BY WIRELESS
Looking down he tried to descry Mary Nestor, in her carriage, but the trees were in the way, their interlocking branches hiding the girl.
The various pieces of apparatus were working well, though the engine had not yet been speeded up to its limit.
Tom wanted it to "warm-up" first.
"They're calling us!" he exclaimed.
I just sent her up, as I thought I detected that storm Mr. Parker spoke of."
"Bless my napkin!" exclaimed Mr. Damon the next morning, as they sat down to a breakfast of fruit, ham and eggs and fragrant coffee, "this is living as well as in a hotel, and yet we are--how far are we above the earth, Tom?" he asked, turning to the young inventor.
"I guess Rad was just capering about without any special object," mused Tom, but it was not long after this that they learned to their dismay, that the colored man had had a method in his madness.
"It would be too bad to be wrecked before we got to Phantom Mountain."
"There is every indication of it;" and he seemed quite delighted at the prospect of his prediction coming true.
"A hurricane!" cried Mr. Damon.
"Has anybody any messages they wish sent?" For, with the courtesy of a true host he was ready to serve his guests before he forwarded his own wireless notes.
"Everything all right?" asked Mr. Damon, as Tom rejoined them in the pilot house, which was just forward of the living room in the main cabin.
Rapidly the airship ascended, and, when it was high over the town of Shopton, Tom headed the craft due west.
"If it comes on to blow we will ascend or descend out of the path of the storm.
"I'm glad to hear that," remarked Mr. Jenks.
"Something is likely to happen soon," said Mr. Parker, suddenly, as he gazed at some weather instruments on the cabin wall.
"How do you like it?" asked Tom.
"I should have done it before, but I had so much to do that I couldn't get at it. I'm going to send off some messages.
"A good start, Tom Swift," complimented Mr. Parker.
"Getting our wireless apparatus in shape," answered the lad.
However the storm had not developed up to noon, when Tom, with Mr. Damon's help, served a fine meal in the dining-room.
Now, Mr. Damon, if you will just take charge of the steering apparatus for a minute, I want to go aft."
Eradicate saw his face at a rear window, and tried to warn us!
Through the darkness the Red Cloud kept on, making good time.
The lad did not answer at once.
I hope we can find them."
"Who is?" asked Mr. Jenks.
"I think, from my observations, that we will soon have a hurricane," said the scientific man.
On his face there was a look of worriment.
However I hope we will not have to.
"The mysterious man is aboard the airship--hidden away!" cried Tom. "That's what Eradicate was trying to call to our attention as we started off.
Tom noted all the messages down, and then, when all was in readiness he began to call his home station.
Tom did see crowds of other persons, though, thronging the streets of Shopton, for, though the young inventor had made many flights, there was always a novelty about them, that brought out the curious.
"Yes, but not as easily as in the Butterfly.
He made a careful examination, looking from an after window, and even going out on a small, open platform, but could discover nothing wrong.
That's so," cried the eccentric Mr. Damon.
"Father has just sent me a message," he said.
"What is it?" asked Mr. Jenks, rising from his seat.
Tom pulled over the lever, and a crackling sound was heard, as the electricity leaped from the transmitters into space. Then he clamped the receiver on his ear.
"What is it?"
"Did Eradicate see the man?"
"You--you're not going to throw me over--with the airship two miles high; are you?" gasped the man.
Mr. Jenks' plan, of dropping him down in some place where he would have difficulty in sending on word to his confederates was considered a good one.
By that time we'll have the secret of the diamonds."
I'm ready as soon as you are, Tom," said the eccentric man. "Come ahead."
"I think that all he is waiting for is a favorable chance," declared the diamond seeker.
"Oh, I guess he didn't take much," declared the lad.
Heavily bound with ropes the man was locked in a small closet, to be kept there until a favorable spot was reached for letting him go.
"He would destroy the craft, and us too, if he could prevent us from discovering the secret of Phantom Mountain, I believe."
The cords were produced and the man, who had now ceased to struggle, was tightly bound.
"The man is hidden away on board now--probably among the stores and supplies."
"I wanted to prevent you from going to Phantom Mountain."
"Then you'll have to take what comes!"
Why?"
"Well, Farley Munson, so it's you, is it?" asked Mr. Jenks, as he surveyed the prisoner.
"I guess that will be far enough to let him fall," went on the diamond seeker.
But I hoped to accomplish it by other means.
"Where are the ropes, Tom?"
Tom thought considerable, but he did not answer the scientist just then.
Now to capture the stowaway!"
"I've got him!" cried Tom, making a dive for the shadow.
He listened intently.
It is Chokichi who has been throwing obstacles in the way.
Now it happened that the head of the house of Hojo heard that a descendant of Yoritomo was living as a peasant in the land, so he summoned him and said:--
When O Koyo heard this, she was so happy that she thought it must all be a dream, and doubted her own senses.
So now, my child, you may cheer up, and go to meet your lover as soon as you please."
But the princely line of Yoritomo came to an end in three generations, and the house of Hojo was all-powerful in the land.
But my lord Hojo was angry at this, and, thinking to punish the peasant for his insolence, said:--
And so he passed in, and Sazen called to his wife to prepare wine and condiments; and they began to feast.
"Certainly, sir: I am Sazen, at your service.
Why, I thought you must be one of us."
Poor thing! have you been unhappy?" And O Koyo, with the tears starting from her eyes for joy, hid her face; and her heart was so full that she could not speak.
At last they were found; but Tokiwa was so exceedingly beautiful that Kiyomori was inflamed with love for her, and desired her to become his own concubine.
But Kiyomori, desiring to destroy the family of Yoshitomo root and branch, ordered his retainers to divide themselves into bands, and seek out the children.
But as it is a long time since you have met the young lady, you must have a great deal to say to one another; so I will go downstairs, and, if you want anything, pray call me." And so he went downstairs and left them.
"Well, since you say that I defile your house, you had better get rid of O Koyo as well.
Of course I knew that the daughter of an Eta was no fitting match for a nobleman; so when Chokichi came and told me the errand upon which he had been sent, I had no alternative but to announce to my daughter that she must give up all thought of his lordship.
At last his lordship has secretly sent a man, called Kaji Sazen, a fortune-teller, to arrange an interview between you.
Begone as fast as possible."
"Yes," replied Genzaburo, "I too have suffered much;" and so they told one another their mutual griefs, and from that day forth they constantly met at Sazen's house.
And when I think that it was I who first introduced her to my lord, I am ashamed to look you in the face."
Chokichi consenting to this, the pair left the house together.
And Yoritomo became the chief of all the noble houses in Japan, and first established the government of the country.
Chokichi laughed disdainfully.
And as he pretended to leave the house, Sazen, at his wits' end, cried out, "Stop! stop!
"The story which Chokichi came and told us, that his lordship wished to break off the connection, was all an invention.
When Minamoto no Yoritomo was yet a child, his father, Minamoto no Yoshitomo, fought with Taira no Kiyomori, and was killed by treachery: so his family was ruined; and Yoshitomo's concubine, whose name was Tokiwa, took her children and fled from the house, to save her own and their lives.
Genzaburo gave a great start, and, turning to Sazen, said, "Well, you certainly are a first-rate hand at keeping up a hoax.
I don't know what your lordship wishes of me; but, at any rate, I cannot receive this money.
And now, as it is getting late, I will take my leave for to-night."
Shall you be at home the day after to-morrow?"
"Insolent knave!
Thus their race is polluted and accursed, and they are hated accordingly.
I suppose she must equally be a pollution to it."
At last Chokichi, as ill-luck would have it, stumbled against a stone and fell; and Sazen, profiting by the chance, drew his dirk and stabbed him in the side; and as Chokichi, taken by surprise, tried to get up, he cut him severely over the head, until at last he fell dead.
Pray tell me all about it as quickly as possible."
At last, Chokichi, after much persuasion, and greatly to his own distress, was obliged to accept the money; and when Kihachi had carried out all Sazen's instructions, he returned home, laughing in his sleeve.
How happy it makes me to see you again!
At this O Koyo, who had been crouching down like a drooping flower, gave a great start, and cried out, "Is that really true?
However, I cannot sufficiently praise the way in which you have carried out my instructions."
I want to speak to you.
"Pray," replied Genzaburo, "don't make any ceremony for me.
NOTE
To think of such a shameless villain coming and asking to be friends with me, forsooth!
In the meanwhile Sazen, who did not for a moment suspect what had happened, when the day which had been fixed upon by him and Genzaburo arrived, made O Koyo put on her best clothes, smartened up his house, and got ready a feast against Genzaburo's arrival.
"Indeed! what can it be?"
But when I tell her what you have just said, how glad and happy she will be!
At first Sazen pretended to be vexed at the question, and said, "Well, sir, I've done my best; but it's not a matter which can be settled in a hurry.
I bear you no ill-will.
"I think," said Sazen, "that the best way would be for O Koyo to live secretly in my lord Genzaburo's house; but as it will never do for all the world to know of it, it must be managed very quietly; and further, when I get home, I must think out some plan to lull the suspicions of that fellow Chokichi, and let you know my idea by letter.
They never marry out of their own fraternity, but remain apart, a despised and shunned race.
I will not take a fraction less than a hundred; and if I cannot get them I will report the whole matter at once."
Come! let us talk over matters a little.
We shall meet the day after to-morrow." And so the two parted, and went their several ways to rest.
"Good night, then.
The latter came punctually to his time, and, going in at once, said to the fortune-teller, "Well, have you succeeded in the commission with which I entrusted you?"
I am living in a poor and humble house; but if your lordship, at your leisure, would honour me with a visit--"
The following day, Chokichi's body was found by the police; and when they examined it, they found nothing upon it save a paper, which they read, and which proved to be the very letter which Sazen had sent to Kihachi, and which Chokichi had picked up.
"Well, it's a lucky chance that has brought us together, and I certainly will go and see you; besides, I want you to do something for me.
At last the night wore on; and as he was retiring along the corridor, he saw a man of about forty years of age, with long hair, coming towards him, who, when he saw Genzaburo, cried out, "Dear me! why this must be my young lord Genzaburo who has come out to enjoy himself."
I really must beg your lordship to take it back again."
When he heard this, Kiyomori, bewildered by the beauty of Tokiwa, spared the lives of her children, but banished them from the capital.
"Certainly, sir, I shall make a point of being at home."
One day Genzaburo, intent on ridding himself of the grief he felt at his separation from O Koyo, went to the Yoshiwara, and, going into a house of entertainment, ordered a feast to be prepared, but, in the midst of gaiety, his heart yearned all the while for his lost love, and his merriment was but mourning in disguise.
"No, indeed!
Genzaburo thought this rather strange; but, looking at the man attentively, recognized him as a retainer whom he had had in his employ the year before, and said--
Since that time she has been fretting and pining and starving for love.
"Well, sir, I have a little business to transact with you.
Sazen, cunning and bold murderer as he was, lost his self-possession when he saw what a fool he had been not to get back from Chokichi the letter which he had written, and, when he was put to a rigid examination under torture, confessed that he had hidden O Koyo at Genzaburo's instigation, and then killed Chokichi, who had found out the secret.
Pray where are you from?"
Kihachi in the meanwhile rejoined Sazen in the other room, and, after telling him of the joy with which his daughter had heard the news, put before him wine and other delicacies.
Talk to me a little, and let me hear your voice."
"Well, sir, since I parted from you I have been earning a living as a fortune-teller at Kanda, and have changed my name to Kaji Sazen.
There is no O Koyo here; and I never saw such a person in my life."
And when they also died, the care of the child fell to his mother's kinsmen, and he grew up to be a peasant.
"Well, at any rate, I have some news for you that will make you happy. A messenger has come from my lord Genzaburo, for whom your heart yearns."
Be not disinclined, however, to punish any such who give rise to disputes, or who overstep the boundaries of their own classes and are disobedient to existing laws."
He has all along been wishing to meet you, and constantly urged Chokichi to bring you a message from him.
No, indeed!
But Genzaburo, when he heard that he was not to meet O Koyo, lost heart entirely, and made up his mind to go home again.
"If girls amused themselves like that what fun you'd make of us!" said the practical Nora.
"No, but that's what you mean, and I'm surprised, Philip Blair, that a boy should be so awfully one-sided."
"Oh," said one girl, and "Ah," said another; and "How silly!" they all cried together.
"Oh, they hate to see these girls going about with books, and trying to get into Harvard."
"And Philip is one of the nicest young men I know," said Brenda, politely, turning to Edith.
"Do you suppose he sits up too late?" asked Brenda.
"If you went to College you'd see more use in them."
"Why, when he saw where he was, he didn't run away, or flunk out.
He really isn't very particular."
Though only about four years their senior, he seemed much older than Brenda and her friends.
"Oh, some do!"
"What was it?" asked Edith.
"Oh, he won't like that kind of a girl," hastily interposed Belle.
Don't let her do it, Edith."
Philip hurried off, bowing in a very grown-up way to the group of girls. For whatever criticisms any one might make about Philip's indolence and disinclination to study, no one could deny that he had very good manners.
"And then they led him up the steps into Mrs. Oxford's when she was giving an afternoon tea, and when they took the bandage off his eyes there he was in his shirt sleeves, without his hat, and his hair all tumbled, and everybody looking at him."
"Oh, yes, I've heard it too," interrupted Philip.
"Just see the way you treat Julia.
There was one good thing about the little disputes in which Brenda and Belle indulged.
If there was any one thing in the world he hated--so he said--it was girls' talk, this jabbering about nothing.
They very seldom lasted long.
"But don't tell him I said so," she added with a blush.
"I believe it's all perfectly true," said Nora.
"Well, I wish myself that our English instructor hadn't such a fondness for reading themes to us that the girls have written.
"I don't treat her," interrupted Brenda.
"Of course, really!"
"No, I haven't happened to," answered Philip.
"How can you?" cried Nora.
"Oh, it gives a fellow a chance to show what kind of stuff he's made of," explained Philip, "whether he has good manners, and whether he's clever--and all that."
"Who gets the best marks?"
"I know all about Philip, and he's good enough for me."
A SOPHOMORE
"I'm sure I can't say.
"Always stand up for your brother.
"Of course not; that's a part of the thing.
"It's a good thing Edith doesn't wish to go," said Nora; adding mischievously, "but Brenda Barlow's cousin Julia is going."
"We don't fight like you boys," answered Edith, good-humoredly.
"You never hear anything.
"Well, you'll see me sure," said Philip.
Nora nodded.
But I wouldn't let a sister of mine go to College," he concluded inconsequently.
"I've heard that some professors say that their Annex classes do better work than ours,--but anybody can tell that that's all rot."
Philip looked over his shoulder in the glass.
"Now, look here, Edith, I don't want you to talk that way," responded Philip with brotherly authority.
"It seemed to me he was just a little pale."
I guess I'd show him that New York isn't the whole world."
"Not girls we know."
She, too, had a brother in College.
There was nothing the matter with his own shapely nose, and I doubt that he would have run any such risk as Edith suggested.
"What?"
"Why, what do you mean?"
"It doesn't trouble me," answered the placid Edith.
"That's right," said Nora.
"Do you think that Philip looks very well, Edith," asked Belle when he had left the room.
"There isn't any danger of girls getting ahead of us."
"How funny you are, Edith," said Belle.
"We don't knock each other down and run the risk of breaking one another's noses."
"Oh, I say," said Philip, from his place in front of the mantelpiece, "how queer girls are; do you always fight like this when you're together?"
"I'm glad girls don't go to College."
Not he! He was a Harvard sophomore, and realized his own importance quite as much as the girls did.
"You don't mean to say you haven't seen her," cried Brenda in surprise.
"A matter of opinion," murmured Belle under her breath.
When Edith's brother Philip came in from College to spend Saturday and Sunday, Edith's house was apt to be a rendezvous for the other girls. Not that Philip was likely to waste much time with mere girls.
"Oh, say, did you hear about the time Will Hardon had with the Dicky, last week?" he asked.
He would have scorned to call it gossip.
"But see here, it's five o'clock now and I have an engagement down town."
"Oh, I don't know exactly, but I heard my brother talking the other day. He says there are two or three fellows just sponging off of Philip all the time, and Philip is too good-natured to say anything."
"How can you criticise Edith's brother?
But still there was always the chance that he would come into the room just for a minute, and tell them some of the latest Cambridge news.
"Oh, she is lovely," added Edith.
"And upon my word," he concluded, "I wasn't sorry, for the New York set is getting just unbearable.
"Yes, trying to break down the walls," said Nora, sarcastically.
Years before they had all been playmates together, but his two years in College had taken him away from them, and it was not often that he condescended to spend as long a time in their presence as had been the case this afternoon.
"I should say not," exclaimed Nora; but Belle, who had some New York cousins, was silent.
Brenda, however, noticing Belle's expression, and not feeling disposed to side completely with Nora, said,
"He is always pale," said Edith.
"I shouldn't think there'd be much fun in making anybody uncomfortable."
"Does Julia wear glasses, or look green?
"Friday, of course," replied Nora, "so we can sit up late without thinking about school the next day."
Why, there are fellows in Cambridge who would go through fire and water, or stand on their heads in front of a pulpit for the sake of getting into the Dicky.
"Wasn't he mad at the two fellows for taking him there?"
"She's about the nicest girl I know."
"I wonder how he'll like Julia," said Edith.
"Well, I declare," exclaimed Nora, "I'd like to know what difference it makes to them."
Perhaps this was the reason why Philip was not a fighter.
"We knew something about his manners."
"Boys never like a girl who studies; especially one who is going to College."
"She's invited to my cooking party next week," said Nora.
In the present instance the girls were ashamed of having shown temper before Philip.
"Are you afraid they'd get ahead of you?" asked Edith, gently.
"I didn't say so," replied Nora.
I tell you we make some of them suffer."
But I do think he might have better friends.
"Oh, yes, by the way," said Philip, "what evening is it?"
"You know that you've accepted too, so you'll see her."
"No, really?"
"Well, you'd better talk, Brenda Barlow," broke in Nora again.
"And now we understand each other."
"One evening a wolf emerged from a pine-wood hear which they were usually stationed, but the wolf had scarcely advanced ten yards ere he was dead.
This demanded new effort, but nothing compared to the first; at the end of a week he wrote as well with this pen as with the stylus.
At the end of the dinner he entered in person.
Carlini besought his chief to make an exception in Rita's favor, as her father was rich, and could pay a large ransom.
"Excellency," said he gravely, addressing Franz, "if you look upon me as a liar, it is useless for me to say anything; it was for your interest!"--
"I shared the same fate at Aquapendente."
When she recognized her lover, the poor girl extended her arms to him, and believed herself safe; but Carlini felt his heart sink, for he but too well knew the fate that awaited her.
"'I thought that my entreaties'--
At the end of three months he had learned to write.
The instant the letter was written, Carlini seized it, and hastened to the plain to find a messenger.
Then, when they had finished, they cast the earth over the corpse, until the grave was filled.
A cold perspiration burst from every pore, and his hair stood on end.
When the grave was formed, the father kissed her first, and then the lover; afterwards, one taking the head, the other the feet, they placed her in the grave.
He was to leave the city by the Porta del Popolo, skirt the outer wall, and re-enter by the Porta San Giovanni; thus they would behold the Colosseum without finding their impressions dulled by first looking on the Capitol, the Forum, the Arch of Septimus Severus, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and the Via Sacra.
He was standing, his arms folded, near Rita, who was still insensible.
The two children met, sat down near each other, let their flocks mingle together, played, laughed, and conversed together; in the evening they separated the Count of San-Felice's flock from those of Baron Cervetri, and the children returned to their respective farms, promising to meet the next morning.
Teresa was lively and gay, but coquettish to excess.
"You intend visiting Il Colosseo."
"Well, this route is impossible."
"No, for it would be useless.
"Excellency," said Pastrini, "I am delighted to have your approbation, but it was not for that I came."
"Do not give yourselves the trouble, excellency," returned Signor Pastrini, with the smile peculiar to the Italian speculator when he confesses defeat; "I will do all I can, and I hope you will be satisfied."
'I expected thee,' said the bandit to Rita's father.--'Wretch!' returned the old man, 'what hast thou done?' and he gazed with terror on Rita, pale and bloody, a knife buried in her bosom.
The host sat down, after having made each of them a respectful bow, which meant that he was ready to tell them all they wished to know concerning Luigi Vampa.
Then, extending his hand, the old man said; 'I thank you, my son; and now leave me alone.'--'Yet'--replied Carlini.--'Leave me, I command you.' Carlini obeyed, rejoined his comrades, folded himself in his cloak, and soon appeared to sleep as soundly as the rest.
"Yes, and at his age, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, who have all made some noise in the world, were quite behind him."
Vampa was twelve, and Teresa eleven.
With this, Luigi purchased books and pencils. He applied his imitative powers to everything, and, like Giotto, when young, he drew on his slate sheep, houses, and trees.
"Now go," returned Franz, "or I shall go myself and bargain with your affettatore, who is mine also; he is an old friend of mine, who has plundered me pretty well already, and, in the hope of making more out of me, he will take a less price than the one I offer you; you will lose the preference, and that will be your fault."
"Well, then, he is a bandit, compared to whom the Decesaris and the Gasparones were mere children."
Only their wish to see each other had become a necessity, and they would have preferred death to a day's separation.
"Very dangerous, to say the least."
The day was passed at Saint Peter's alone.
"Not out of my armory, for at Terracina I was plundered even of my hunting-knife."
These were the first tears the man of blood had ever wept.
The old man remained motionless; he felt that some great and unforeseen misfortune hung over his head.
'Here,' said he, to Cucumetto, 'here are three hundred piastres; give me back my child.
The bandit's laws are positive; a young girl belongs first to him who carries her off, then the rest draw lots for her, and she is abandoned to their brutality until death relieves her sufferings.
A large wound, extending from the temple to the mouth, was bleeding profusely. Diovalaccio, seeing himself thus favored by fortune, burst into a loud laugh.
Teresa was sixteen, and Vampa seventeen.
And yet their natural disposition revealed itself.
At the sight of Carlini, Cucumetto rose, a pistol in each hand.
When their parents are sufficiently rich to pay a ransom, a messenger is sent to negotiate; the prisoner is hostage for the security of the messenger; should the ransom be refused, the prisoner is irrevocably lost.
But nothing could be farther from his thoughts.
It was Rita's father, who brought his daughter's ransom in person.
But he was unable to complete this oath, for two days afterwards, in an encounter with the Roman carbineers, Carlini was killed.
The inn-keeper turned to Franz with an air that seemed to say, "Your friend is decidedly mad."
Rita lay between them.
Cucumetto fancied for a moment the young man was about to take her in his arms and fly; but this mattered little to him now Rita had been his; and as for the money, three hundred piastres distributed among the band was so small a sum that he cared little about it.
When quite a child, the little Vampa displayed a most extraordinary precocity.
"It so happened that night that Cucumetto had sent Carlini to a village, so that he had been unable to go to the place of meeting.
The old man obeyed.
Beside his taste for the fine arts, which Luigi had carried as far as he could in his solitude, he was given to alternating fits of sadness and enthusiasm, was often angry and capricious, and always sarcastic.
The names of all, including Carlini, were placed in a hat, and the youngest of the band drew forth a ticket; the ticket bore the name of Diovolaccio.
So that, thanks to her friend's generosity, Teresa was the most beautiful and the best-attired peasant near Rome.
"A young man?
"You could not apply to any one better able to inform you on all these points, for I knew him when he was a child, and one day that I fell into his hands, going from Ferentino to Alatri, he, fortunately for me, recollected me, and set me free, not only without ransom, but made me a present of a very splendid watch, and related his history to me."
What could you do against a dozen bandits who spring out of some pit, ruin, or aqueduct, and level their pieces at you?"
"It is much more convenient at Paris,--when anything cannot be done, you pay double, and it is done directly."
"'Now, then,' said Cucumetto, advancing towards the other bandits, 'are you coming?'--'I follow you.'
Cucumetto stopped at last, and pointed to two persons grouped at the foot of a tree.
"'What right have you, any more than the rest, to ask for an exception?'--'It is true.'--'But never mind,' continued Cucumetto, laughing, 'sooner or later your turn will come.' Carlini's teeth clinched convulsively.
It had been resolved the night before to change their encampment.
"Their demand was fair, and the chief inclined his head in sign of acquiescence.
He found a young shepherd watching his flock.
His disposition (always inclined to exact concessions rather than to make them) kept him aloof from all friendships.
At midnight the sentinel gave the alarm, and in an instant all were on the alert.
Proud of this exploit, Vampa took the dead animal on his shoulders, and carried him to the farm.
"To what class of society does he belong?"
But Carlini would not quit the forest, without knowing what had become of Rita's father.
"One day the young shepherd told the count's steward that he had seen a wolf come out of the Sabine mountains, and prowl around his flock.
"But, excellency"--said Pastrini, still striving to gain his point.
"That is what all the French say," returned Signor Pastrini, somewhat piqued; "for that reason, I do not understand why they travel."
The next day they kept their word, and thus they grew up together.
"Once upon a time"--
"But if your excellency doubt my veracity"--
"This," replied Signor Pastrini, "that you will go out by one, but I very much doubt your returning by the other."
The child accepted joyfully. Every day Luigi led his flock to graze on the road that leads from Palestrina to Borgo; every day, at nine o'clock in the morning, the priest and the boy sat down on a bank by the wayside, and the little shepherd took his lesson out of the priest's breviary.
"Go on, Signor Pastrini," continued Franz, smiling at his friend's susceptibility.
"Your excellencies permit it?" asked the host.
Cucumetto had been there, however, by accident, as he said, and had carried the maiden off.
They told ten other stories of this bandit chief, each more singular than the other.
"Signor Pastrini," returned Franz, "you are more susceptible than Cassandra, who was a prophetess, and yet no one believed her; while you, at least, are sure of the credence of half your audience.
These exploits had gained Luigi considerable reputation.
Then, when they had thus passed the day in building castles in the air, they separated their flocks, and descended from the elevation of their dreams to the reality of their humble position.
He took Cucumetto one side, while the young girl, seated at the foot of a huge pine that stood in the centre of the forest, made a veil of her picturesque head-dress to hide her face from the lascivious gaze of the bandits.
The young girl's lover was in Cucumetto's troop; his name was Carlini.
Half-way down the street the driver pulled up, and, turning to Lecoq, exclaimed: "Here we are.
"Really, I don't exactly know."
"Oh, it was very simple.
"In what direction?"
"Was she tall or short, stout or slender?"
That's the house the hussies went into."
You should have seen her shake the prim-looking girl, as if she had been a plum tree.
So many questions at a time confused the driver.
As soon as the vehicle was well under way, the young detective proceeded to ingratiate himself into the driver's good graces, being anxious to obtain all the information that this worthy was able to impart.
"Did you see her face?"
One of them dropped this handkerchief, which I picked up.
And then she began to sob: 'Indeed, madame, indeed I can't!' she said, and really she seemed quite unable to move: in fact, she appeared to be so ill that I said to myself: 'Here is a young woman who has drunk more than is good for her!'"
"Is that all, my good fellow?" he asked the driver, who during the last few minutes had been busy with his horses.
"Like most of the girls who go to dance at the Rainbow.
We have no ladies in this house who are in the habit of coming home alone after midnight."
He had been mistaken, however, in attributing the higher standing to the woman wearing the shoes with the high heels, the marks of which he had so particularly noticed in the snow, with all the attendant signs of precipitation, terror, and weakness.
"To which one?"
"Ah!
I must tell you that at about three o'clock in the morning, of the day before yesterday, I was quietly returning home, when two ladies, who were seemingly in a great hurry, overtook me and passed on.
"Now I think of it, I did notice something strange.
"Between the two."
"Which ran after you?"
"The girl who was neatly dressed, the one who--"
I opened it again as quickly as I could and looked out into the street.
"Go on!" said Lecoq, who could not restrain his impatience.
"The deuce!
"As you may suppose," continued the coachman, "I wasn't inclined to trust two such suspicious characters, alone at that hour and in that part of the city.
These facts confirmed even if they corrected Lecoq's first suppositions. As he had suspected, the social position of the two women was not the same.
Nor was it at all likely that these two fugitives, conscious as they were of their perilous situation, had gone straight to their real home in a vehicle hired on the public highway.
You will have time to faint when we get home; now come along.
"You scamp--!" she began.
I had been having a most unfortunate day--six hours on a stand on the Boulevards, with the rain pouring all the time. It was simply awful.
I did not pay any attention to them; for when a man is as old as I am, women--"
"I just caught a glimpse of it."
I had forgotten," exclaimed the old woman.
In so doing, he obeyed a maxim which he had framed in his early days of meditation--a maxim intended to assure his after-fame, and which ran as follows: "Always suspect that which seems probable; and begin by believing what appears incredible."
And not merely was she of a superior rank, but she had also shown superior energy.
I pulled the string that opens the door and listened, but not hearing any one close the door or come upstairs, I said to myself: 'Some mischievous fellow has been playing a trick on me.' I slipped on my dress and went out into the hall, where I saw two women hastening toward the door.
"Why, the dowdy one.
"Would you recognize her if you met her again?"
Contrary to Lecoq's original idea, it now seemed evident that she was the mistress, and her companion the servant.
"I had already passed them, when they began to call after me.
"I mean what kind of women did they seem to be; what did you take them for?"
"Ah! and how were they dressed?"
"Many thanks for your kindness," said she, "but you can keep it.
So, just as they were about to get into the cab, I called to them: 'Wait a bit, my little friends, you have promised papa some sous; where are they?' The one who had called after the cab at once handed me thirty francs, saying: 'Above all, make haste!'"
"What do you mean?"
One of the two women called the other 'Madame' as large as life, while the other said 'thee' and 'thou,' and spoke as if she were somebody."
"In my opinion she wasn't pretty, and I don't believe she was young, but she certainly was a blonde, and with plenty of hair too."
"As I had supposed, they do not live here," he remarked to the driver.
In reality, social preeminence belonged to the woman who had left the large, broad footprints behind her.
Before I could reach them they slammed the door in my face.
But they were hurrying away as fast as they could."
Hence, the driver's hope of finding them in the Rue de Bourgogne was purely chimerical.
How did these two women attract your attention?"
At midnight I had not made more than a franc and a half for myself, but I was so wet and miserable and the horse seemed so done up that I decided to go home.
In a moment the worthy dame imagined that this polite young man was making fun of her.
"Stop a minute!" he replied.
I pretended I did not hear them; but one of them ran after the cab, crying: 'A louis! a louis for yourself!' I hesitated for a moment, when the woman added: 'And ten francs for the fare!' I then drew up."
To draw off the silk handkerchief that served him as a muffler, to fold it and slip it into his pocket, to spring to the ground and enter the house indicated, was only the work of an instant for the young detective.
He first of all proceeded to the Prefecture of Police, going the longest way round as a matter of course, but, on reaching his destination, he could find no one who had seen the young detective.
Why did you behave in that manner?"
You simply desired to attract her attention, to influence her evidence."
"You are not telling the truth.
He instantly perceived his mistake and understood its consequences.
He understood everything.
He thought of the agreeable surprise he had in store for the magistrate, and fancied he could picture the sudden brightening of that functionary's gloomy face.
He must prevent any exchange of words between the two.
And yet, fate so willed it that the doorkeeper's message and his urgent appeal that Lecoq should not loiter on the way, produced the most unfortunate results.
"She wished to embrace you, and you repulsed her."
She left the room--or rather she rushed wildly from it as though only too eager to escape--and the magistrate and the detective exchanged glances of dismay and consternation.
Still, he preserved an obstinate silence; and the magistrate finding that this last thrust had failed to produce any effect, gave up the fight in despair.
"You kept her at a distance at all events.
The magistrate turned to his clerk: "Goguet," said he, "read the last remark you took down."
If you had a spark of affection in your nature, you would at least have looked at your child, which she held out to you.
Not understanding his connection with the affair, she asked herself if her testimony might not prove his death-warrant.
Down it jumped and Came fluttering up, much elated at being summoned by the captain of the sacred nine.
CHAPTER XIII
"I want you to take Sanch home, and tell your mother I'm going to walk, and may be won't be back till sundown.
"I Suppose it wouldn't do--" hinted Billy, with a look from Ben to the little girl, who stood winking hard to keep the tears back.
Bab with a face as red as a lobster and streaked with tears, shoes white with dust, playfrock torn at the gathers, something bundled up in her apron, and one shoe down at the heel as if it hurt her.
"You'll catch it when you get home, Ben; so you'd better have a good time while you can," advised Sam, thinking Bab great fun, since none of the blame of her pranks would fall on him.
"That was a cow mooing.
"I wouldn't give two cents for such a slow old place as this.
Some of the dead flowers, bits of moss, and green twigs fell near Ben, and one attracted his attention,--a spray of broad, smooth leaves, with a bunch of whitish berries on it.
"Hold on a minute, while I get one more drink.
"Yes, I could, as easy as not."
A supply of gingerbread was soon bought; and, climbing the green bank above, they lay on the grass under a wild cherry-tree, munching luxuriously, while they feasted their eyes at the same time on the splendors awaiting them; for the great tent, with all its flags flying, was visible from the hill.
"No, I won't; I don't like him.
It's only four miles, and we've got lots of time, so we can take it easy.
"How dared you come after us, miss?" demanded Sam, as she looked calmly about her, and took a seat before she was asked.
I don't care if it is my old hat," and Bab jerked it on to her head.
"What would you have done if you hadn't found us?" asked Billy, forgetting his impatience in his admiration for this plucky young lady.
Sanch will take care of me, if you won't," answered Bab, stoutly.
Bab still held the strap, intent on keeping her charge safe, though she lost herself; but her courage seemed to be giving out, as she looked anxiously up and down the road, seeing no sign of the three familiar figures she had been following as steadily as a little Indian on the war-trail.
Then you are too big to begin, though you might do for a fat boy if Smithers wanted one," said Ben, surveying the stout youth, with calm contempt.
"What do you suppose your mother will say to you?" asked Ben, feeling much reproached by her last words.
"They never do come to such little towns; you said so, and I think you are very cross, and I won't take care of Sanch, so, now!" cried Bab, getting into a passion, yet ready to cry, she was so disappointed.
Ben was a promising pupil, and made rapid progress; for eye, foot, and hand had been so well trained, that they did him good service now; and Brown was considered a first-rate "catcher".
Lock Sanch up for an hour, and tell your mother I'm all right," answered Ben, bound to assert his manly supremacy before his mates.
Tired teacher had dismissed them for eight whole weeks, and gone away to rest; the little school-house was shut up, lessons were over, spirits rising fast, and vacation had begun.
"You couldn't walk four miles," began Ben.
"Now you expect to go to the circus, I suppose."
"Now, you wash your face and spat down your hair, and put your hat on straight, and then we'll go," commanded Ben, giving Sanch a roll on the grass to clean him.
"Where are you going?
"Come on, Brown; you'll be a first-rate fellow to show us round, as you know all the dodges," said Billy, anxious to get his money's worth.
"Let's go in swimming, not loaf round here, if we can't play," proposed a red and shiny boy, panting for a game of leap-frog in Sandy pond.
"You haven't got any money."
"May as well; don't see much else to do," sighed Sam, rising like a young elephant.
Ben spoke very decidedly; and, taking Billy's arm, away they went, leaving poor Bab and Sanch to watch them out of sight, one sobbing, the other whining dismally.
"In a swampy place, coming along.
"Don't know what to do with Sancho.
Oh, Ben, do take me!" cried Bab, falling into a state of great excitement at the mere thought of such delight.
"You never would, it's only a picture!
Don't you be a donkey, Bill.
The girls immediately began to talk about picnics, and have them, too; for little hats sprung up in the fields like a new sort of mushroom,--every hillside bloomed with gay gowns, looking as if the flowers had gone out for a walk; and the woods were full of featherless birds chirping away as blithely as the thrushes, robins, and wrens.
I'll take the girls a lot of candy and make it all right."
"Circus!
"Don't you bother; we don't want any girls tagging after us," said Sam, walking off to escape the annoyance.
"Oh, I'd ask somebody to pay for me.
"You have; I saw you showing your dollar, and you could pay for me, and Ma would pay it back."
"Look here, read it!
Thorny likes queer leaves and berries, you know," answered Bab, "spatting," down her rough locks.
"Look out for the big show," read Sam.
"Sanch would come after Ben; I couldn't make him go home, so I had to hold on till he was safe here, else he'd be lost, and then Ben would feel bad."
"Will it break out on me 'fore I get to the circus?"
We can buy some dinner and get a ride home, as like as not," said the amiable Billy, with a slap on the shoulder, and a cordial grin which made it impossible for Ben to resist.
I 'm so little, it wouldn't be much."
I'd like to see her walking eight miles.
No use now.
Sanch saw something down there; and I went with him, 'cause I thought may be it was a musk-rat, and you'd like one if we could get him."
You just catch hold of this and run along home.
FRIED PERCH--III
PERCH SALAD
BROILED PERCH
PERCH A LA SICILY
Cook together four tablespoonfuls of butter and two of flour.
FRIED PERCH--II
PERCH A L'ALLEMANDE
BAKED PERCH
"Do it to-day," suggested the Major.
"Not yet," he said.
This speech frightened the woman.
If so, take first train to New York, where I will look after your outfit.
CHAPTER II
UNCLE JOHN MAKES PLANS
Now, here I am with three nieces on my hands--"
Answer immediately."
His telegram to Elizabeth was characteristic:
"Hold your tongue," said Uncle John.
He thought he could depend upon Beth.
"But the requirements of society--"
"I will."
"But you'll want a chaperone for them."
A chaperone, indeed!"
Mrs. Merrick held up her hands in horror.
Singular, isn't it?"
Good morning, Martha."
And now, I'm off.
So she said, meekly:
"I'll telegraph her, and find out," said Uncle John.
"You may say two, sir," interrupted the Major.
"Why, I never thought of it in that light."
His face fell.
"Doesn't the opera let out before midnight, the same as the theatres?" he asked.
"I believe so; but there is the supper, afterward, you know."
"Just what Patsy said.
"Why so?"
"Quite well, thank you."
"You!"
They fairly danced.
"Patsy can take care of herself."
Really, it's an ill wind that blows no good!
I will ask you to explain to us, sir, the brutal suggestion you have just advanced."
But to take Patsy to Europe would be like pulling the Major's eye teeth or amputating his good right arm.
The author is pleased to be able to present a sequel to "Aunt Jane's Nieces," the book which was received with so much favor last year.
And why?
"Oh, yes you will.
The Major's speech had a touch of the brogue when he became excited, but recovered when he calmed down.
Major Doyle sat opposite, stiffly erect, with his admiring eyes full upon Patsy.
Tell us of them, sir, and we'll prove the Major utterly wrong."
It's positive cruelty to her, sir, to suggest such a thing!"
"I'm going to Europe," he said.
She can't go a step, and you know it.
"I won't go, daddy."
In a thick cushioned morris-chair reclined the motionless form of Uncle John, a chubby little man in a gray suit, whose features were temporarily eclipsed by the newspaper that was spread carefully over them.
But then, Patsy could do anything, if she but tried.
When you crack it there's plenty of milk within--and in your case it's the milk of human kindness.
"Daddy!"
"You're dreaming again."
"I've only been thinking."
Patsy and her father stared at one another with grave intentness. Then the Major drew out his handkerchief and mopped his brow.
"That's right, daddy," she said.
It was not that he admired so much the "piece" the girl was playing as the girl who was playing the "piece." His pride in Patsy was unbounded.
"You've been asleep," she said.
"No, indeed; quite a mistake," replied the little man, seriously.
The Major gave an involuntary start, and then turned to look at him curiously.
"Your selfishness, my dear Major," said he, "is like the husk on a cocoanut.
The Major frowned.
Uncle John emerged again.
"That's Europe, right enough," he said.
His affection for the little man increased mightily, but his respectful attitude promptly changed, and a chance to reprove or discomfit his absurdly rich brother-in-law was one of his most satisfactory diversions.
"That's it!" said Uncle John.
CHAPTER I
"And I'm going to take Patsy along," he continued, with a mischievous grin.
The "we" is explained by stating that the Major held an important position in the great banking house--a position Mr. Merrick had secured for him some months previously.
But he resolved not to submit without a struggle.
Worse; far worse!
EDITH VAN DYNE.
Uncle John gave a snort of contempt.
"Sir," said he, sternly--he always called his brother-in-law "sir" when he was in a sarcastic or reproachful mood--"I've had an idea for some time that you were plotting mischief.
The Major smiled grimly.
"Yes, daddy; but I won't, of course."
"Let me in first.
I tried it.
Snap was threatening everybody with his cylinder.
Dr. Frank is trying ... don't stand there like an ass, man.
"Quiet, Gregg Haljan!
I heard him gasp, "Good God!"
"I'll bring him in here to you!
Dr. Frank and her brother are with her.
"Wait a minute.
We don't want him killed, not attacked, even.
"Why, by God, where is he?
"He's all right now."
Then go to the turret.
Anita hurt!
It opened cautiously.
The assailant opened it somehow, and assaulted Miss Prince--shot her in the chest with a heat ray.
Come back here!
The Captain rasped, "Get out, Haljan!
"There's been an accident!
Captain's orders."
I heard myself stammering, "Why--why we must get him!" I gathered my wits; a surge of hate swept me; a wild desire for vengeance.
No one there!
Why don't you go get him?
Arm yourselves and guard our weapons."
"Snap?"
His voice rang shrilly: "Stop!
He had dropped his hydrogen torch, and tried to grip me.
Get to the turret!
I could see only Carter, but I heard the murmuring voice of Dr. Frank through the interior connecting door to A20.
Is the door sealed?
I shouted, "Go back to your rooms!
Nor did Prince.
Where was Miko?
I was in the chart room with Captain Carter, Snap and Dr. Frank bending over me.
I searched for it, pried it loose softly.
The shock of my encounter, short-circuited his robe; he materialized in the starlight.
Miko!
"But--"
It caught me.
His spotlight clung to us.
The turmoil of the ship gradually quieted.
Dr. Frank and I followed.
"Stop that, you fools!"
I sat up, with Dr. Frank vigorously rubbing me.
"Gregg, keep the passengers quieted.
He had a large heat-ray projector in his hand.
Balch dashed up.
Verify our trajectory--no--wait...."
"Easy, Gregg!" Dr. Frank gripped me.
She repulsed him.
Snap and I shoved back three or four passengers.
I'll shoot!" His warning siren rang out to alert the ship.
A giant man.
Get back, Gregg!
A white actinic light shot from it--caught us, bathed us. Snap had been awake; had heard the commotion of our encounter.
He slammed the door upon me.
In the darkness, cylinder in hand, I crept softly from the bunk.
A brief, savage encounter.
I gazed around for her brother Miko, but did not see him.
"In there." I pounded on A22.
"Can you speak now, Gregg?"
Carter burst into the room.
Gregg, keep those passengers back!"
Dr. Frank was in advance of Snap and me now.
His electronized metallic robe burned my hands.
Where is Carter?"
Oh, is that you, Balch?
"Yes; but without fail."
"Good-morning, creditor," said he; "for I wager anything it is the creditor who visits me."
Philosophers may well say, and practical men will always support the opinion, that money mitigates many trials; and if you admit the efficacy of this sovereign balm, you ought to be very easily consoled--you, the king of finance, the focus of immeasurable power."
Danglars looked at him askance, as though to ascertain whether he spoke seriously.
Is he a deputy?"
"Yes," said Danglars, while the perspiration started from the roots of his hair.
"Yes, keep it--keep it."
"I registered their deed of gift yesterday."
How absurd--as if one crown were not as good as another.
"Yes."
"Certainly, I excuse you," said Monte Cristo graciously, "and pocket them." And he placed the bonds in his pocket-book.
"Oh, not much--from twelve to thirteen hundred thousand francs.
Where is her stepmother?
My funds are deposited there, and you can understand that if I draw out ten millions on the same day it will appear rather strange to the governor.
Why did you not tell me so before?
Why, this Count of Monte Cristo must be a nabob?"
"I have brought my receipt."
"Well," said he, extending his hand to Monte Cristo, "I suppose you have come to sympathize with me, for indeed misfortune has taken possession of my house.
"Come," said Boville, with a tone of entire incredulity, "five millions to that gentleman who just left, and who bowed to me as though he knew me?"
"Certainly," he said, "your receipt is money."
"No," said Danglars, "no, decidedly no; keep my signatures.
"Pardon me, count, pardon me."
"The truth, my dear count.
"They gave all their fortune to the hospitals."
"Oh, you may make sure of him; his charities alone amount to 20,000 francs a month."
"Well, I must confess, these are scruples."
"Because they would not spend money so guiltily acquired."
The banker saw the carriage of the count enter the court yard, and advanced to meet him with a sad, though affable smile.
But to return to our millions."
"No," said the banker; "I have appeared rather ridiculous since that affair of Benedetto, so I remain in the background."
"I must visit him," he said, "and obtain some pious grant from him."
"Yes," he answered, "if a fortune brings consolation, I ought to be consoled; I am rich."
"I will come myself."
"Are you then pressed for this money?"
"Do you think so?"
Monte Cristo replaced the notes in his pocket with that indescribable expression which seemed to say, "Come, reflect; if you repent there is still time."
But still, we have quite lost our dear Eugenie; for I doubt whether her pride will ever allow her to return to France."
"His banker?
"To the Governor of the Bank.
"And how much did they possess?"
"Then it will be to-morrow."
"Then I may keep this money?"
Oh, how happy you must be in not having either wife or children!"
He was punctual, dressed in black, with crape around his hat, and presented himself at his cousin's with a face made up for the occasion, and which he could alter as might be required.
"Indeed I do."
Do you know, count, that persons of our time of life--not that you belong to the class, you are still a young man,--but as I was saying, persons of our time of life have been very unfortunate this year.
"I think he is about to leave Paris; he was going to his banker."
"What," he stammered, "do you mean to keep that money?
At the door he found his carriage, and was immediately driven to the bank.
"No."
"But," said Danglars, "there is still a sum of one hundred thousand francs?"
"What new calamity?"
Why, it is as good as a century!
"How so?"
"Are they Spanish, Haitian, or Neapolitan bonds?" said Monte Cristo.
"Thank you, no, sir."
"Yes; for the examination of our cash takes place to-morrow."
"My daughter"--
"You do not doubt it?"
But whom are you seeking, Debray?"
"It is magnificent!
"What example?"
"Send at twelve," said Danglars, smiling.
Excuse me, excuse me, but I owe this money to the charity fund,--a deposit which I promised to pay this morning."
Please pay to my order, from the fund deposited by me, the sum of a million, and charge the same to my account.
"Poor things!"
Stay, count," he added, "you, who may be called the emperor, if I claim the title of king of finance, have you many pieces of paper of this size, each worth a million?"
Their grey hair and whiskers at once pronounced them to be above the ages set down in the trader's advertisement.
On board the Patriot, the firemen were using oil, lard, butter, and even bacon, with the wood, for the purpose of raising the steam to its highest pitch.
At this moment the engineer of the Patriot was seen to fasten down the safety-valve, so that no steam should escape.
After the steamer had left the wharf, and was fairly on the bosom of the Father of Waters, Walker called his servant Pompey to him, and instructed him as to "getting the Negroes ready for market." Amongst the forty Negroes were several whose appearance indicated that they had seen some years, and had gone through some services.
"Now go back to your bed, and be up in time to-morrow morning to brush my clothes and clean my boots, do you hear?"
DICK WALKER, the slave speculator, who had purchased Currer and Althesa, put them in prison until his gang was made up, and then, with his forty slaves, started for the New Orleans market.
Pompey had long been with the trader, and knew his business; and if he did not take delight in discharging his duty, he did it with a degree of alacrity, so that he might receive the approbation of his master.
CHAPTER II
"Here she is, and no mistake," replied the trader.
Few persons can arrive at anything like the age of a Negro, by mere observation, unless they are well acquainted with the race.
It seemed as if poor Althesa would have wept herself to death, for the first two days after her mother had been torn from her side by the hand of the ruthless trafficker in human flesh.
"Yes," responded Toby.
This plan was successful; for not even Clotel, who had been every day at the prison to see her mother and sister, knew of their departure.
The next morning, as the passengers were assembling in the breakfast saloons and upon the guards of the vessel, and the servants were seen running about waiting upon or looking for their masters, poor Jerry was entering his new master's stateroom with his boots.
The night was clear, the moon shining brightly, and the boats so near to each other that the passengers were calling out from one boat to the other.
At eight o'clock on the evening of the third day, the lights of another steamer were seen in the distance, and apparently coming up very fast.
"No, sir," replied the chattel.
"You have beat me," said Smith, as soon as he saw the cards. Jerry, who was standing on top of the table, with the bank notes and silver dollars round his feet, was now ordered to descend from the table.
It was on the second day of the steamer's voyage that Pompey selected five of the old slaves, took them in a room by themselves, and commenced preparing them for the market.
In a few moments a fine looking, bright-eyed mulatto boy, apparently about fifteen years of age, was standing by his master's side at the table.
The blaze, mingled with the black smoke, showed plainly that the other boat was burning more than wood.
Gambling and drinking were now the order of the day.
"Go call my boy, steward," said Mr. Smith, as he took his cards one by one from the table.
"Oh, Uncle Jim, is it?"
By the time the boats had reached Memphis, they were side by side, and each exerting itself to keep the ascendancy in point of speed.
"I will see you, and five hundred dollars better," said Smith, as his servant Jerry approached the table.
It was now twelve o'clock at night, and instead of the passengers being asleep the majority were ambling in the saloons.
Smith took from his pocket the bill of sale and handed it to Johnson; at the same time saying, "I claim the right of redeeming that boy, Mr. Johnson.
"Geemes," answered the man.
This was a signal for a general commotion on the Patriot, and everything indicated that a steamboat race was at hand.
At the starting of the boat cold water was forced into the boilers by the machinery, and, as might have been expected, one of the boilers immediately exploded.
Therefore the slave-trader very frequently carried out this deception with perfect impunity.
"Stand up, Currer, my gal; here's a gentleman who wishes to see if you will suit him."
One dense fog of steam filled every part of the vessel, while shrieks, groans, and cries were heard on every hand.
A man at one of the tables where they were gambling had been seen attempting to conceal a card in his sleeve, and one of the party seized his pistol and fired; but fortunately the barrel of the pistol was knocked up, just as it was about to be discharged, and the ball passed through the upper deck, instead of the man's head, as intended.
Pompey gave each to understand how old he was to be when asked by persons who wished to purchase, and then reported to his master that the "old boys" were all right.
As many of the slaves had been brought up in Richmond, and had relations residing there, the slave trader determined to leave the city early in the morning, so as not to witness any of those scenes so common where slaves are separated from their relatives and friends, when about departing for the Southern market.
"Our eyes are yet on Afric's shores, Her thousand wrongs we still deplore; We see the grim slave trader there; We hear his fettered victim's prayer; And hasten to the sufferer's aid, Forgetful of our own 'slave trade.'
"I want a good, trusty woman for house service," said the stranger, as they entered the cabin where Walker's slaves were kept.
"She is a rare cook, a good washer, and will suit you to a T, I am sure."
"I call you, then," said Johnson, at the same time spreading his cards out upon the table.
"Yes."
On the arrival of the boat at Baton Rouge, an additional number of passengers were taken on board; and, amongst them, several persons who had been attending the races.
"If I live to see next corn-planting time I will either be forty-five or fifty-five, I don't know which."
He goes to bed at night the property of the man with whom he has lived for years, and gets up in the morning the slave of some one whom he has never seen before!
How old is you?" addressing himself to a man who, from appearance, was not less than forty.
On the fourth day, while at Natchez, taking in freight and passengers, Walker, who had been on shore to see some of his old customers, returned, accompanied by a tall, thin-faced man, dressed in black, with a white neckcloth, which immediately proclaimed him to be a clergyman.
"Then you bet the whole of the boy, do you?"
"How old is you?" asked Pompey of a tall, strong-looking man.
"You will not forget that you belong to me," said Johnson, as the young slave was stepping from the table to a chair.
"Yes, sir," responded Jerry, as he wiped the tears from his eyes.
The Patriot stopped to take in passengers, and still no steam was permitted to escape.
"Most certainly, sir, the boy shall be yours, whenever you hand me over a cool thousand," replied Johnson.
A march of eight days through the interior of the state, and they arrived on the banks of the Ohio river, where they were all put on board a steamer, and then speedily sailed for the place of their destination.
"I was twenty-nine last potato-digging time," said the man.
This was, indeed, a dangerous resort.
The two boats soon locked, so that the hands of the boats were passing from vessel to vessel, and the wildest excitement prevailed throughout amongst both passengers and crew.
Nothing can exceed the excitement attendant upon a steamboat race on the Mississippi river.
GOING TO THE SOUTH
However, nothing serious had occurred.
"Yes."
The saloons and cabins soon had the appearance of a hospital.
My father gave him to me when I came of age, and I promised not to part with him."
Walker and the parson went into the saloon, talked over the matter, the bill of sale was made out, the money paid over, and the clergyman left, with the understanding that the woman should be delivered to him at his house.
'Credit them, ma'amselle! why all the world could not persuade me out of them.
I thought, when I saw them first, that all those fine silks and fine veils,--why, ma'amselle, their veils were worked with silver! and fine trimmings--boded no good--I guessed what they were!'
All this I saw through the key-hole.
But I will be trifled with no longer: let the recollection of your aunt's sufferings, in consequence of her folly and obstinacy, teach you a lesson.--Sign the papers.'
'Good God!' exclaimed Emily, 'what will become of me!'
'What, were they disputing, then?' said Emily.
'What had I but trouble to expect, when I condescended to reason with a baby!
'Locked you up!' said Emily, with displeasure, 'Why do you permit Ludovico to lock you up?'
'Would you, indeed, be glad?' said Emily, in a tone of mournful reproach.
'Sign the papers,' said Montoni, more impatiently than before.
This night--this very night'--
'Obey my order,' repeated Montoni.
'Quit my presence!' cried Montoni.
I have a punishment which you think not of; it is terrible!
'And for these fool's tricks--I will soon discover by whom they are practised.'
'Holy Saints!' exclaimed Annette, 'how can I help it!
Neither the estates in Languedoc, or Gascony, shall be yours; you have dared to question my right,--now dare to question my power.
"Oh, I don't know," returned Hurstwood.
"You don't say so," would be the reply.
"Great old boy, isn't he?
He was the picture of fastidious comfort.
I wouldn't bother about it myself, though.
"By George, that's so, I must go and call on her before I go away."
There he leaned over the splendid bar and swallowed a glass of plain whiskey and purchased a couple of cigars, one of which he lighted. This to him represented in part high life--a fair sample of what the whole must be.
"He's got the money, all right," and a little twinkle passed over his eyes.
"That's right," said Drouet, going out.
"Why, yes, didn't you know that?
It's half after eight already," and he drew out his watch.
A GLITTERING NIGHT FLOWER: THE USE OF A NAME
I have something I want to show you," said Hurstwood.
There were, in the last place, a few good followers, neither rich nor poor, famous, nor yet remarkably successful, with whom he was friendly on the score of good-fellowship.
"A little of the same for me," put in Hurstwood.
"You haven't anything on hand for the night, have you?" added Hurstwood.
"Well, you'd better be going.
Nevertheless, the fact that here men gather, here chatter, here love to pass and rub elbows, must be explained upon some grounds.
The barkeeper was setting out the glasses and bottle before them, and they now poured out the draught as they talked, Drouet filling his to within a third of full, as was considered proper, and Hurstwood taking the barest suggestion of whiskey and modifying it with seltzer.
"Glad of it," said Hurstwood, his black eyes lit with a warmth which half displaced the cold make-believe that usually dwelt in them.
We had quite a time there together."
When these things would fall upon Drouet's ears, he would straighten himself a little more stiffly and eat with solid comfort.
He was not a moneyed man.
"Oh, never mind her," Hurstwood remarked.
His preference for Fitzgerald and Moy's Adams Street place was another yard off the same cloth.
"Friday," said Drouet.
"That's Jules Wallace, the spiritualist."
Drouet followed him with his eyes, much interested.
"What are you going to take?" he added, as the barkeeper, in snowy jacket and tie, leaned toward them from behind the bar.
"Twelve o'clock," said Hurstwood.
By the way," he added, "are you going anywhere to-night?"
There was a class, however, too rich, too famous, or too successful, with whom he could not attempt any familiarity of address, and with these he was professionally tactful, assuming a grave and dignified attitude, paying them the deference which would win their good feeling without in the least compromising his own bearing and opinions.
The many friends he met here dropped in because they craved, without, perhaps, consciously analysing it, the company, the glow, the atmosphere which they found.
This was really a gorgeous saloon from a Chicago standpoint.
"Who is he?"
Nor could he, overruling her against her will, find in his choice of home-owning or personal-career investment the satisfaction he had expected.
That comes from understanding and cooperation.
Respect for the other member of the marriage association is a must-have.
Frankness must go clothed in tact.
Both get hurt, but the weak person does nothing but squeal about it, while the robust ignores it except for trying to take some constructive step to prevent future occasions for hurt.
Others cannot utter a poetic phrase, make a romantic gesture, or let their eyes show the quick intensity of their tender emotions if they must die for it.
Nor is it necessary, or at all wise, that they should be. John attracts Mary, and she appeals to him, because the personality of each one is what it is.
Roughly, both the helps and the hindrances to married happiness can be lumped under one word--personalities.
But there will come a first time when John is too tired to go out with Mary, or vice versa.
The changes a husband or wife makes in the partner's total personality are in the nature of altered emphasis in the expression of traits already present.
It may be a slight uncouthness at table, a peculiar back-country phrase or pronunciation, some gesture of timidity or swaggering.
The general level of emotion is what counts, not the spectacular scaling of peaks.
Then one begins to appraise.
These traits cannot be changed overnight.
That does not mean they are unadapted to each other.
To interpret the marriage association as little more than sex is to throw away all chance of success, even in the realm of sex.
Because of women's recent growth in socially recognized independence, any individual woman may waver between a craving for self-sacrifice and a repugnance to the very thought of it.
Friends, old and new, have a function in relieving the overclose concern of one marriage partner with the other.
A chief advantage of the married estate is its opportunity for frankness.
Before them is a clear road.
In the unhealthy marriage, sympathy will grow into pity, which drives out the indispensable attitude of respect.
It is an empty honor, for the one who bends but does not break will readily develop the fine art of influencing the headstrong one.
What is important is to learn whether one of you is set on being "head of the house." If your spouse craves that distinction, by all means hand it over without delay.
You cannot help your change of feeling.
Because reality rarely measures up to imagination, the first answer is almost bound to be, "No, this is not what I expected." And the first emotion tends to be disappointment.
Compromise, not submission, should be the rule.
These minor changes occur as by-products of active response to the personality of the mate in many small daily contacts, and not as a result of exhortation.
A young couple's engagement period is like any other time of excited anticipation, when one has received the promise of something greatly desired, but must wait awhile before its delivery.
Or perhaps he wants to invest money in professional or business advancement at the precise moment when she realizes she wants a child.
This is what they must guard against.
If John forges ahead on one count, Mary must find an acceptable outlet for herself on some other front.
Some husbands, some wives, are artists at achieving and momentarily living up to romantic settings, but quickly flop down to the lower levels of decent fairness between the high spots of their sentimental flare-ups.
Here are nine guideposts to help John and Mary along their road:
Knowing themselves accepted, they lounge--mentally, mannerly, and physically--when at home or elsewhere alone together.
After so long a time, husband and wife cease to feel that they must exert themselves for each other in little matters.
Each marriage partner must be proud of the other and let the other continue to be proud of him or her.
You remember other people you once thought you loved, and wonder, panic-stricken, how you can keep this love from dying as those other loves did.
More has a paralyzing effect on the recipient, producing a response in kind that takes away the ability to think of anything except retaliation.
What makes a successful marriage?
Other responsibilities, other interests, may serve a similar purpose, though more easily dislodged and seldom striking so deep.
If the expression of anger is to have its proper stimulative effect, it has to be administered but rarely, and then in small doses.
One who prides himself or herself on having to be handled with gloves has a great deal of growing up to do in order to be able to be an active partner in the marriage.
Therefore you have to respect yourself and act as if you did, even at home.
Trying to win over your partner with a single eye to getting what you want, regardless of its effect on the mate, is short-sighted in the extreme. Even if you could care only for personal pleasure, that cannot long outlast your spouse's displeasure.
But the first days of marriage bring out a different set of feelings--those that come when one has definitely obtained possession of anything that before was only promised.
As a continuing part of this life adjustment, sex adjustment can develop into a permanent factor of married happiness; but without the larger adjustment, the partial adjustment cannot be made in any fundamental and enduring form.
We are all immature at some points, but we can welcome opportunities for growth, painful though they may be.
All this must be taken into account in making decisions.
Knowing that a fleeting sense of disappointment is not peculiar to one's own marriage, but likely to occur in all, as in every other human undertaking, takes away its power to hurt.
As this is an impossibility, they are aware of increasing dissatisfaction.
Each means so much to the other, each needs so much from the other, that there can be no halfway satisfaction in being together.
Because it is part of the traditional feminine character to enjoy giving in to the man, this tendency must be scrutinized when it appears.
The goal is not easily won, but they can attain it without the aid of luck or rare gifts or miracles--simply by practicing the common everyday virtues that bring success in all human ventures.
The wife may be alone part of the day and profit by it.
How, then, can you hope to keep your affection from disappearing altogether if it has already begun to wane?
This difference is one of make-up and training, not of marriage capacity.
For the very young a person must register one hundred percent or be rejected.
But love is not a finished product that, once it comes, can forever after be trusted to keep its strength.
It is useless to discover who can win in any particular skirmish.
Now that you can see your mate more clearly, you should also be able to see more accurately his, or her, good points, which before were hidden from you in the mist of your enthusiasm.
The tale is never told.
Too great concentration is to be avoided.
The happiness of the waiting period is characterized by the absence of a critical spirit, and therefore is apt to be thought of as an experience of pure delight.
When John comes home at night, he has not had that privilege.
If one accepts the fact that discrepancy between imagination and reality is inevitable, he is better able to go on to a more thorough examination of the situation, from the fresh viewpoint of finding out just what he has received, regardless of hazy but optimistic expectations; and the object possessed will more than likely turn out to be better than, although different from, what the imagination pictured.
Love gives the push that keeps a marriage moving, but it does not give the direction.
In the healthy marriage, this sympathetic response will soon give way to anger, which in turn may have the effect of a dash of cold water in the face of the oversensitive one, helping him or her to buck up and behave like an adult.
Too many couples exploit the sense of let-down that marriage brings with it.
Love has grown up between the two as a result of this personality attraction.
There can be no narrowing of marriage to mere sex adjustment.
Another terrible moment that is due to come may seem even more frightening because it is you who are slipping.
Common friends are fine, but for this purpose there is special need of friends for either spouse who can call forth those sides of his or her nature that are not aroused by the mate.
The ease or difficulty with which husband or wife makes an adjustment in no way measures the worth of that adjustment for their partnership.
This changeableness can make her feel resentful after she has given in to her husband.
Decisions must be made on the basis of what is good for both, not the selfish or narrow wish of either.
There can be no holding on to the present nor seeking to bring back the past.
This is probably an almost universal experience, marking, not the beginning of the end of love, but the passage from an adolescent type of blind devotion to a more mature affection that persists in spite of being able to admit the flaws it sees.
Nor are they necessarily permanent. A chameleon changes color easily to match its environment or temper of the moment, but a human being's more lasting change is not so readily made.
This is why the unique value of children is their service as an entering wedge in the close-grown love of husband and wife, a wedge that widens and holds forever wider the unity of love it has penetrated.
That was the meaning of their song as they trooped to the front at his call:
Please, Papa-day, come back and play with your little Tad."
Some of the people gasped, as they had done when they saw Tad waving the Confederate flag at the window.
We will fight for him; yes, we will die for him."
"We are coming, Father Abraham; Three hundred thousand more."
But it hurt him deep in his heart to know that some of his beloved children misunderstood him so that they were willing to kill him!
"With malice toward none; with charity for all."
Then he went on outlining a policy of peace and friendship toward the South--showing a spirit far higher and more advanced than that of the listening crowd.
"Your papa's gone 'way off"--said his companion, his voice breaking with emotion--"gone to heaven."
The times were so out of joint and every word was so important that the President could not trust himself to speak off-hand.
There was a moment of silence.
"Tom Pen, Tom Pen, they have killed Papa-day!
Tad, of course, could not comprehend why any one could be so cruel and wicked as to wish to murder his darling Papa-day, who loved every one so!
Little Tad was with his father, as usual, and when the President had finished reading a page of his manuscript he let it flutter down, like a leaf, or a big white butterfly, for Tad to catch.
"Give us 'Dixie,' boys; play 'Dixie.' We have a right to that tune now."
As Mr. Lincoln came in through the door after speaking to the crowd, Mrs. Lincoln--who had been, with a group of friends, looking on from within--exclaimed to him:
Mr. Lincoln had written a short address for the occasion.
Going always with the President, he had heard his "Papa-day" say of several youths condemned to be shot for sleeping at their post or some like offense:
A call for national thanksgiving is being prepared and will be duly promulgated."
"If he don't know any better than that," said one man, "he should be taught better.
I'm tired--tired of playing alone.
"Give me 'nother paper, Papa-day."
"Give the boys a chance," was Abraham Lincoln's motto.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all," was the rule of his life in the backwoods as well as in the National Capital.
He wandered through the empty rooms, aching with loneliness, murmuring softly to himself:
THE END
LINCOLN'S LAST SPEECH AND HOW TAD HELPED
I want to play together.
CHAPTER XXI
It was his pet name for the dearest man on earth, and it was his only way of expressing the greatest pleasure his boyish heart was able to hold.
When the man spoke to comfort him, Tad would find out his terrible mistake, that his father was not with him.
But the heart of little Tad had been broken.
"Papa-day's happy.
"Papa-day, where's my Papa-day?"
LIEUTENANT TAD LINCOLN, PATRIOT
Lee was driven back from Maryland then, it is true, but he soon won the great battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and had made his way north into Pennsylvania.
As it was expected that the President would make a few offhand remarks, no one seems to have noticed its simple grandeur until it was printed in the newspapers.
This would have changed the grand result of the war.
"You're a sweet little rosebud yourself.
Glorious as this was, the greatest glory of Gettysburg lay in the experiences and utterances of one man, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America.
I had an awful time pulling you up out of there, and I couldn't stick you back again!"
I want to go--back to--my husband!"
"I will tell you how it was.
She gasped:
The President had put the finishing touches on it that morning.
"I feel--better--now.
It was a warm day and a Quaker woman near the platform fainted.
In point of numbers, bravery and genius, the battle of Gettysburg was the greatest that had ever been fought up to that time.
The night after the battle of Chancellorsville (fought May 2nd and 3d, 1863), was the darkest in the history of the Civil War.
There were fifteen thousand people waiting, some of whom had been standing in the sun for hours.
As this printed address covered two newspaper pages, Mr. Lincoln struck an attitude and quoted from a speech by Daniel Webster:
About noon on the 19th of November, the distinguished party arrived in a procession and took seats on the platform erected for the exercises.
There had been four disastrous defeats--twice at Bull Run, followed by Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
A youth who stood near the platform in front of the President says that, while Mr. Everett was orating, Mr. Lincoln took his "little speech," as he called it, out of his pocket, and conned it over like a schoolboy with a half-learned lesson.
He reached out, took her up and kissed her, saying:
CHAPTER XIX
Even the battle of Antietam, accounted victory enough for the President to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, proved to be a drawn battle, with terrific losses on both sides.
If Lee had been victorious there, he might have destroyed Philadelphia and New York.
When that modest woman "came to," she saw fifteen thousand pairs of eyes watching her while the President of the United States was fanning her tenderly.
During the forenoon of the 18th, Secretary John Hay was anxious lest the President be late for the special Presidential train, which was to leave at noon for Gettysburg.
This was too much for her.
That afternoon there was a patriotic service in one of the churches which the President decided to attend.
THE BATTLE
It came at a terrible time in the progress of the war, when everything seemed to be going against the Union.
Those who planned the dedication did not think the poor cobbler was of much account.
Not long after the conflict at Gettysburg a movement was on foot to devote a large part of that battle-ground to a national cemetery.
But Lincoln's spirits were bound to rise.
The fact that the President was speaking was sufficient, no matter what he said.
President Lincoln walked the floor the whole night long, crying out in his anguish, "O what will the country say!"
The President was asked, if he could, to come and make a few dedicatory remarks, but Mr. Everett was to be the chief speaker of the occasion.
He continued to follow the path to the glade; but, to his great surprise, Carlini arrived almost as soon as himself.
However, as he was a favorite with Cucumetto, as he had for three years faithfully served him, and as he had saved his life by shooting a dragoon who was about to cut him down, he hoped the chief would have pity on him.
"So," continued Franz, "the hero of this history is only two and twenty?"
And yet the two young people had never declared their affection; they had grown together like two trees whose roots are mingled, whose branches intertwined, and whose intermingled perfume rises to the heavens.
he is only two and twenty;--he will gain himself a reputation."
They sat down to dinner. Signor Pastrini had promised them a banquet; he gave them a tolerable repast.
"Excellency," cried the cicerone, seeing Franz approach the window, "shall I bring the carriage nearer to the palace?"
"On account of the famous Luigi Vampa."
An hour before daybreak, Cucumetto aroused his men, and gave the word to march.
Many young men of Palestrina, Frascati, and Pampinara had disappeared.
Then they knelt on each side of the grave, and said the prayers of the dead.
At length he advanced toward the group, the meaning of which he could not comprehend.
"Well, Signor Pastrini," said Franz, "now that my companion is quieted, and you have seen how peaceful my intentions are, tell me who is this Luigi Vampa.
"'Why should an exception be made in her favor?'
"Count," returned Signor Pastrini, hurt at Albert's repeated doubts of the truth of his assertions, "I do not say this to you, but to your companion, who knows Rome, and knows, too, that these things are not to be laughed at."
After some time Cucumetto became the object of universal attention; the most extraordinary traits of ferocious daring and brutality were related of him.
"It is the same thing.
"But," said Franz, in his turn interrupting his host's meditations, "you had some motive for coming here, may I beg to know what it was?"
At the end of three months he had learned to read.
"Because, after nightfall, you are not safe fifty yards from the gates."
In every country where independence has taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a weapon, which at once renders him capable of defence or attack, and, by rendering its owner terrible, often makes him feared.
'Now,' said the old man, 'aid me to bury my child.' Carlini fetched two pickaxes; and the father and the lover began to dig at the foot of a huge oak, beneath which the young girl was to repose.
"These are my words exactly."
Franz was the "excellency," the vehicle was the "carriage," and the Hotel de Londres was the "palace." The genius for laudation characteristic of the race was in that phrase.
'At nine o'clock to-morrow Rita's father will be here with the money.'--'It is well; in the meantime, we will have a merry night; this young girl is charming, and does credit to your taste.
"Is he tall or short?"
"Do you know, Signor Pastrini," said Albert, lighting a second cigar at the first, "that this practice is very convenient for bandits, and that it seems to be due to an arrangement of their own." Doubtless Signor Pastrini found this pleasantry compromising, for he only answered half the question, and then he spoke to Franz, as the only one likely to listen with attention.
He found the troop in the glade, supping off the provisions exacted as contributions from the peasants; but his eye vainly sought Rita and Cucumetto among them.
The brigands have never been really extirpated from the neighborhood of Rome.
Their disappearance at first caused much disquietude; but it was soon known that they had joined Cucumetto.
The steward gave him a gun; this was what Vampa longed for.
He inquired where they were, and was answered by a burst of laughter.
The two piastres that Luigi received every month from the Count of San-Felice's steward, and the price of all the little carvings in wood he sold at Rome, were expended in ear-rings, necklaces, and gold hairpins.
"I have not that honor."
There was some surprise, however, that, as he was with his face to the enemy, he should have received a ball between his shoulders. That astonishment ceased when one of the brigands remarked to his comrades that Cucumetto was stationed ten paces in Carlini's rear when he fell.
"In an hour."
"And pray," asked Franz, "where are these pistols, blunderbusses, and other deadly weapons with which you intend filling the carriage?"
The man of superior abilities always finds admirers, go where he will.
The curate related the incident to the Count of San-Felice, who sent for the little shepherd, made him read and write before him, ordered his attendant to let him eat with the domestics, and to give him two piastres a month.
No other of the bandits would, perhaps, have done the same; but they all understood what Carlini had done.
"Let us hear the history," said Franz, motioning Signor Pastrini to seat himself.
"Your excellency knows that it is not customary to defend yourself when attacked by bandits."
Teresa saw herself rich, superbly attired, and attended by a train of liveried domestics.
"Why?" asked Franz.
"Well, go on." Signor Pastrini turned toward Franz, who seemed to him the more reasonable of the two; we must do him justice,--he had had a great many Frenchmen in his house, but had never been able to comprehend them.
Teresa alone ruled by a look, a word, a gesture, this impetuous character, which yielded beneath the hand of a woman, and which beneath the hand of a man might have broken, but could never have been bended.
"Impossible!"
This was not enough--he must now learn to write.
The two brigands looked at each other for a moment--the one with a smile of lasciviousness on his lips, the other with the pallor of death on his brow.
He found the old man suspended from one of the branches of the oak which shaded his daughter's grave. He then took an oath of bitter vengeance over the dead body of the one and the tomb of the other.
"'Yes, captain,' returned Carlini.
Now, as I am not egotistical, we will return to our comrades and draw lots for her.'--'You have determined, then, to abandon her to the common law?' said Carlini.
As they entered the circle, the bandits could perceive, by the firelight, the unearthly pallor of the young girl and of Diavolaccio.
Come, sit down, and tell us all about this Signor Vampa."
The boy undertook the commission, promising to be in Frosinone in less than an hour.
"Albert does not say you are a liar, Signor Pastrini," said Franz, "but that he will not believe what you are going to tell us,--but I will believe all you say; so proceed."
He repeated his question.
Sometimes a chief is wanted, but when a chief presents himself he rarely has to wait long for a band of followers.
Suddenly the daylight began to fade away; Franz took out his watch--it was half-past four.
"'Well,' said Cucumetto, 'have you executed your commission?'
"I forewarn you, Signor Pastrini, that I shall not believe one word of what you are going to tell us; having told you this, begin."
"Where do your excellencies wish to go?" asked he.
They returned to the hotel; at the door Franz ordered the coachman to be ready at eight.
An hour after the vehicle was at the door; it was a hack conveyance which was elevated to the rank of a private carriage in honor of the occasion, but, in spite of its humble exterior, the young men would have thought themselves happy to have secured it for the last three days of the Carnival.
The curate, astonished at his quickness and intelligence, made him a present of pens, paper, and a penknife.
This, however, was nothing to a sculptor like Vampa; he examined the broken stock, calculated what change it would require to adapt the gun to his shoulder, and made a fresh stock, so beautifully carved that it would have fetched fifteen or twenty piastres, had he chosen to sell it.
Every one looked at Carlini; the sheath at his belt was empty.
The two children grew up together, passing all their time with each other, and giving themselves up to the wild ideas of their different characters. Thus, in all their dreams, their wishes, and their conversations, Vampa saw himself the captain of a vessel, general of an army, or governor of a province.
You have told your coachman to leave the city by the Porta del Popolo, to drive round the walls, and re-enter by the Porta San Giovanni?"
He went toward the place where he had left him.
This gun had an excellent barrel, made at Breschia, and carrying a ball with the precision of an English rifle; but one day the count broke the stock, and had then cast the gun aside.
The old man recognized his child, and Carlini recognized the old man.
"Cucumetto departed, without losing sight of Carlini, for, doubtless, he feared lest he should strike him unawares; but nothing betrayed a hostile design on Carlini's part.
A knife was plunged up to the hilt in Rita's left breast.
"I have."
Carlini returned, anxious to see his mistress, and announce the joyful intelligence.
The moon lighted the group.
"In an hour it will be at the door."
"Here it is," said he.
Twelve hours' delay was all that was granted--that is, until nine the next morning.
A terrible battle between the two men seemed imminent; but by degrees Carlini's features relaxed, his hand, which had grasped one of the pistols in his belt, fell to his side.
'Let us draw lots! let us draw lots!' cried all the brigands, when they saw the chief.
A ray of moonlight poured through the trees, and lighted up the face of the dead.--'Cucumetto had violated thy daughter,' said the bandit; 'I loved her, therefore I slew her; for she would have served as the sport of the whole band.' The old man spoke not, and grew pale as death.
"Scarcely so much."
"No; and your excellencies will do well not to think of that any longer; at Rome things can or cannot be done; when you are told anything cannot be done, there is an end of it."
Her head hung back, and her long hair swept the ground.
"Never."
"Dangerous!--and why?"
I want the ski to be a part of oneself, so that one always has full command of them.
It was easy to tie the end of the cover together like the mouth of the sack, and this kept the snow out of the bag during the day's march.
First the reindeer-skins had to be bought in a raw state, and this was done for me by Mr. Zappfe at Tromsoe, Karasjok, and Kaatokeino.
The others consisted of trousers and jacket with hood.
Besides the pemmican, we had biscuits, milk-powder, and chocolate.
Milk-powder is a comparatively new commodity with us, but it deserves to be better known.
These biscuits formed a great part of our daily diet, and undoubtedly contributed in no small degree to the successful result.
It came from the district of Jaederen.
They were specially baked for us, and were made of oatmeal with the addition of dried milk and a little sugar; they were extremely nourishing and pleasant to the taste.
We then went to work to make clothes after the pattern of the Netchelli Eskimo, and the sewing went on early and late -- thick anoraks and thin ones, heavy breeches and light, winter stockings and summer stockings.
This all came complete from a firm in Stockholm.
There was no question of this with our tents.
I have already spoken of the pemmican.
The whole supply was a very acceptable gift.
One man was sufficient to set up the tent in the stiffest breeze; I have come to the conclusion that the fewer poles a tent has, the easier it is to set up, which seems quite natural.
The sole was to be thick and stiff -- for we had to be prepared to use crampons -- but the uppers as soft as possible.
Our own medical outfit, which was bought in Christiania, and according to the vendor's statement unusually well packed, became in a short time so damaged that the whole of it is now entirely spoilt.
We also had quantities of loose straps.
The method is both simple and reliable.
Now, it is a fact that if one can wear soft foot-gear exclusively the risk of frost-bite is far less than if one is compelled to wear stiff boots; in soft foot-gear, of course, the foot can move far more easily and keep warm.
It is extraordinarily light and strong, and keeps the wind completely out.
There could be no better recommendation than this.
We also took dried milk from a firm in Wisconsin; this milk had an addition of malt and sugar, and was, in my opinion, excellent; it also kept good the whole time.
We attached great importance to having the bags made of the very best sort of skin, and took care that the thin skin of the belly was removed.
There is never any trouble with this apparatus; it has come as near perfection as possible.
There is not a speck of rust on needles, scissors, knives, or anything else, although they have been exposed to much damp.
"Every one cannot be as happy as a lord.
From without, a voice, the voice of Ursus, said,--
They were warm.
I am given up to the voracity of travellers.
"I was abandoned this evening on the sea-shore."
"What! did you pick her up?"
A betrothal perchance, perchance a catastrophe.
"You will have nothing!"
You are losing your time, old friend.
He had taken a few steps, and was hurrying away.
At intervals, that we should not become too discouraged, that we may have the stupidity to consent to bear our being, and not profit by the magnificent opportunities to hang ourselves which cords and nails afford, nature puts on an air of taking a little care of man--not to-night, though.
Having done so, he placed the phial on the stove, and exclaimed,--
"Gobble that up."
The little infant drank greedily.
You are going to answer my questions. Whence do you come?"
"And you?" said the child, trembling all over, and with tears in his eyes.
"Did you cross the bridge?"
So now I shall not have even the milk!"
Everything in the caravan was indistinct and misty.
We have fallen on times when nothing can equal the cynicism of spongers.
"You, boy, who have just eaten up my supper, are you already asleep?"
"Come up!" continued the man.
this crocodile falls upon me at the very moment. He installs himself clean between my food and myself.
A few minutes after, both children slept profoundly.
Ursus rolled the bear-skin over the two children, and tucked it under their feet.
"What o'clock is it?"
Ursus half opened the door, and said,--
I have enough to do to get through life.
The poor boy devoured rather than ate.
"Not so quick, you horrid glutton!
You're frozen through!
There was there a being alive and awake, though it might be a wild beast.
The boy obeyed, and stretched himself at full length by the side of the infant.
"You are hungry; eat!"
It charms, it terrifies; who knows which?
Horrid place!
"Will you be kind enough to eat it all up, you cub?
When lighted it still left the children in shadow.
He is so good for nothing that his relations desert him."
Perhaps he has the plague.
Swallow up my food, boa.
The child bowed his forehead, drew the sleeping infant closer in his arms, and collected his strength to resume his journey.
The man grumbled,--
In the meantime the boy had laid down his fork.
He turned the corner of a wall, and, behind in the vast sepulchral light made by the reflection of snow and sea, he saw a thing placed as if for shelter.
"Yes."
Whilst he was doing this he heard the other child eating, and looked at him sideways.
He approached.
My friends, get through the storm as best you can.
"Is any one there?"
The child having reached the threshold, perceived near the stove a man, tall, smooth, thin and old, dressed in gray, whose head, as he stood, reached the roof.
We have a destiny of which the devil has woven the stuff and God has sewn the hem. In the meantime, you have eaten my supper, you thief!"
The voice continued,--
I had but one potato, one crust of bread, a mouthful of bacon, and a drop of milk, and I put it to warm.
"Yes."
The man continued,--
There were a few good mouthfuls of milk left in it; he raised it to his lips.
Let me suckle you," and he put the neck of the bottle to its mouth.
There!
"It will be something to do if, henceforth, I have to feed that growing glutton.
The little boy and girl, lying naked side by side, were joined through the silent hours, in the seraphic promiscuousness of the shadows; such dreams as were possible to their age floated from one to the other; beneath their closed eyelids there shone, perhaps, a starlight; if the word marriage were not inappropriate to the situation, they were husband and wife after the fashion of the angels.
He swallowed some mouthfuls and made a grimace.
"You?
If you lie I will exterminate you."
No candle was burning in the caravan, probably from the economy of want. The hut was lighted only by a red tinge, arising from the opening at the top of the stove, in which sparkled a peat fire.
The infant in his arms, and at the same time on his lap, was sucking rapturously at the bottle, in the happy somnolency of cherubim before their Creator, and infants at their mothers' breast.
Thou art warm at the top and cold at bottom."
The temperature of the water which it contained had been unequally modified by the proximity of the stove.
"I do not know."
Warm yourself as quick as you can," and he shoved him by the shoulders in front of the fire.
"Here are clothes."
The gaping jaws appeared.
But no. I forbid you to answer.
Corporal, call out the guard! Another bang!
"Yes."
Behind the stove there was a jug with the spout off.
The boy, under this menace, began to eat again.
"Found?"
URSUS, PHILOSOPHER.
The porringer was more than empty; it was cleaned out.
"A fine gobbler this one, too!"
This smoke was red, and seemed to imply a good fire in the interior.
The snow was falling thickly and mournfully.
The sun is a chimney which sometimes smokes; so does my stove.
Comfort is wanting here.
"I am hungry."
"Come! take your supper, creature!
I respect wolves.
He took down from the things lying in disorder on the shelf a bandage of linen, a sponge and a phial, muttering savagely, "What an infernal place!"
Come! the little one must have a drink.
It is not appetite, it is ferocity.
Perhaps he does.
The wolf had almost run across the wharf; once on board, he slackened his pace into a discreet walk.
What an apparition!
Homo always followed his instinct and did his duty, but with the pensive reserve of an outlaw.
In any case, some one knows it for him.
Having reached the river, the wolf led down the narrow tongue of land which bordered the Thames.
But they were, doubtless, lying asleep in the cabins below, as the passage was to take place during the night.
In bad weather, both flaps of the gangway were lowered, on the right and left, on hinges, thus making a roof over the hold; so that the ship, in heavy seas, was hermetically closed.
The decks, fore and aft, were, as we have already said, without bulwarks.
About that time many events had occurred at sea, and amongst others, the defeat of the Baron de Pointi's eight ships off Cape Carnero, which had driven the whole French fleet into refuge at Gibraltar; so that the Channel was swept of every man-of-war, and merchant vessels were able to sail backwards and forwards between London and Rotterdam, without a convoy.
Gwynplaine, having reached the gangway, perceived a light in front of him.
He advanced a few steps, and then looked back to see if Gwynplaine was following him.
In stowing the cargo a passage was left between the packages of which it consisted.
On the deck of the vessel, near the prow, was a glimmer, like the last flicker of a night-light.
He was looking earnestly at Gwynplaine.
Then he began to lick his hands again.
Some fifty paces more, and he stopped.
The lining, the floor, and the axletrees seemed worn out with fatigue. Altogether, it presented an indescribable appearance of beggary and prostration.
Mouldy and out of shape, it tottered in decay.
The wolf appeared to him in a halo of light.
This poor wooden tenement, cart and hut combined, in which his childhood had rolled along, was fastened to the bottom of the mast by thick ropes, of which the knots were visible at the wheels.
A wooden platform appeared on the right.
CHAPTER I.
The shafts, stuck up, looked like two arms raised to heaven.
Still preceding Gwynplaine, he passed along the after-deck, and across the gangway.
His imperturbable scent is a confused power of vision in what is twilight to us.
Certainty, or at least the light which leads to it, regained; the sudden intervention of some mysterious clemency possessed, perhaps, by destiny; life saying, "Behold me!" in the darkest recess of the grave; the very moment in which all expectation has ceased bringing back health and deliverance; a place of safety discovered at the most critical instant in the midst of crumbling ruins--Homo was all this to Gwynplaine.
The passengers, if, as was likely, there were any, were already on board, the vessel being ready to sail, and the cargo stowed, as was apparent from the state of the hold, which was full of bales and cases.
Homo wagged his tail.
Hence the silence on the two decks connected by the gangway.
His eyes sparkled in the darkness.
The foremast was called Paul, the mainmast Peter--the ship being sailed by these two masts, as the Church was guided by her two apostles.
As for the crew, they were probably having their supper in the men's cabin, whilst awaiting the hour fixed for sailing, which was now rapidly approaching.
At the bottom of this platform, which was a kind of wharf on piles, a black mass could be made out, which was a tolerably large vessel.
There are cases in which the dog feels that he should follow his master; others, in which he should precede him.
A gangway was thrown, like a Chinese bridge, from one deck to the other, over the centre of the hold.
Probably not.
In such cases the passengers do not appear on deck till they awake the following morning.
It was the same that he had seen from the shore.
The wheels were warped.
What was this animal?
The whole thing was in a state of dislocation.
If the greatness of Christ is His being fatherless, then Adam is greater than Christ, for He had neither father nor mother.
Furthermore, in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, verses 12 and 13, it is said: "But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on His name:
Then surely the first man had neither father nor mother, for the existence of man is phenomenal.
Briefly, the Holy Manifestations have ever been, and ever will be, Luminous Realities; no change or variation takes place in Their essence. Before declaring Their manifestation, They are silent and quiet like a sleeper, and after Their manifestation, They speak and are illuminated, like one who is awake.
Is it better for a man to be created from a living substance or from earth?
These expressions are metaphors, allegories, mystic explanations in the world of signification.
But Christ was born and came into existence from the Holy Spirit.
As you admit that the first man came into existence without father or mother--whether it be gradually or at once--there can remain no doubt that a man without a human father is also possible and admissible; you cannot consider this impossible; otherwise, you are illogical.
Briefly, they say a man without a human father cannot be imagined.
Answer.--In regard to this question, theologians and materialists disagree. The theologians believe that Christ was born of the Holy Spirit, but the materialists think this is impossible and inadmissible, and that without doubt He had a human father.
For example, it is a Persian and Arabic expression to say that the earth was asleep, and the spring came, and it awoke; or the earth was dead, and the spring came, and it revived.
On the contrary, this is an intellectual state which is expressed in a sensible figure.
Certainly it is better if he be created from a living substance.
And they think that not only with man, but also with animals and plants, it is impossible.
This is an intellectual or spiritual state, to explain which you are obliged to have recourse to sensible figures.
The theologians say: "Then from your statement it has become evident and clear that mankind is phenomenal upon the globe, and not eternal.
Therefore, to explain the reality of the spirit--its condition, its station--one is obliged to give explanations under the forms of sensible things because in the external world all that exists is sensible.
Christ says, "The Father is in the Son, and the Son is in the Father." Was Christ within God, or God within Christ?
17: THE BIRTH OF CHRIST
From these verses it is obvious that the being of a disciple also is not created by physical power, but by the spiritual reality.
18: THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST IS DUE TO HIS PERFECTIONS
For example, in former times the telegraph, which causes the East and the West to communicate, was unknown but not impossible; photography and phonography were unknown but not impossible."
Hence it is evident that the holy reality, meaning the real existence of every great man, comes from God and owes its being to the breath of the Holy Spirit.
For example, the power of intellect is not sensible; none of the inner qualities of man is a sensible thing; on the contrary, they are intellectual realities.
That which causes honor and greatness is the splendor and bounty of the divine perfections.
If being without a father is a virtue, Adam is greater and more excellent than all the Prophets and Messengers, for He had neither father nor mother.
Thus in the Old Testament it is said that God appeared as a pillar of fire: this does not signify the material form; it is an intellectual reality which is expressed by a sensible image.
The honor and greatness of Christ is not due to the fact that He did not have a human father, but to His perfections, bounties and divine glory.
This exaltation and this progress are spiritual states and intellectual realities, but to explain them you are obliged to have recourse to sensible figures because in the exterior world there is nothing that is not sensible.
Moreover, the expression which John uses in regard to the disciples proves that they also are from the Heavenly Father.
The materialists believe that there must be marriage, and say that a living body cannot be created from a lifeless body, and without male and female there cannot be fecundation.
The materialists insist upon this belief, and the theologians reply: "Is this globe eternal or phenomenal?" The materialists answer that, according to science and important discoveries, it is established that it is phenomenal; in the beginning it was a flaming globe, and gradually it became temperate; a crust was formed around it, and upon this crust plants came into existence, then animals, and finally man.
Sleeping is the state of mystery; wakefulness is the state of manifestation.
Question.--How was Christ born of the Holy Spirit?
One is the knowledge of things perceptible to the senses--that is to say, things which the eye, or ear, or smell, or taste, or touch can perceive, which are called objective or sensible.
Sleeping and waking is passing from one state to another.
In explaining these intellectual realities, one is obliged to express them by sensible figures because in exterior existence there is nothing that is not material.
So the sun, because it can be seen, is said to be objective; and in the same way sounds are sensible because the ear hears them; perfumes are sensible because they can be inhaled and the sense of smell perceives them; foods are sensible because the palate perceives their sweetness, sourness or saltness; heat and cold are sensible because the feelings perceive them. These are said to be sensible realities.
These are only intellectual states, but when you desire to express them outwardly, you call knowledge light, and ignorance darkness.
So the symbol of knowledge is light, and of ignorance, darkness; but reflect, is knowledge sensible light, or ignorance sensible darkness?
Even ethereal matter, the forces of which are said in physics to be heat, light, electricity and magnetism, is an intellectual reality, and is not sensible.
We come to the explanation of the words of Baha'u'llah when He says: "O king!
In the same way, nature, also, in its essence is an intellectual reality and is not sensible; the human spirit is an intellectual, not sensible reality.
Sleeping is the state of silence; wakefulness is the state of speech.
So love is a mental reality and not sensible; for this reality the ear does not hear, the eye does not see, the smell does not perceive, the taste does not discern, the touch does not feel.
The substance of Adam's physical life was earth, but the substance of Abraham was pure sperm; it is certain that the pure and chaste sperm is superior to earth.
Sleeping is the condition of repose, and wakefulness is the condition of movement.
For this union of the male and female exists in all living beings and plants.
No, in the name of God!
No, they are merely symbols.
16: OUTWARD FORMS AND SYMBOLS MUST BE USED TO CONVEY INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTIONS
"The guarantee and the morality of labor."
"How could this claim, made valid by occupation, become stable and permanent property, which might continue to stand, and which might be reclaimed after the first occupant had relinquished possession?
"Agriculture alone was not sufficient to establish permanent property; positive laws were needed, and magistrates to execute them; in a word, the civil State was needed.
"Some philosophers pretend that man, in employing his forces upon a natural object,--say a field or a tree,--acquires a right only to the improvements which he makes, to the form which he gives to the object, not to the object itself.
The original cultivators of the land, who were also the original makers of the law, were not as learned as our legislators, I admit; and had they been, they could not have done worse: they did not foresee the consequences of the transformation of the right of private possession into the right of absolute property.
That was all that he had a right to expect; that was all that the advance of civilization demanded.
The consequences are plain enough, and this is not the time to criticise the whole Code.
This it is which Christianity has condemned, but which its ignorant ministers deify; who have as little desire to study Nature and man, as ability to read their Scriptures.
"Eternal principle,--"
Blind law; the law of the ignorant man; a law which is not a law; the voice of discord, deceit, and blood!
Why has the law sanctioned this abuse of power?
Would you believe it?
It was equality.
He begins in this way:--
But in what thing?
Possession alone produced all that.
Agriculture was the foundation of territorial possession, and the original cause of property.
Thus the soil came to be appropriated through need of the equality which is essential to public security and peaceable possession.
ALL HAVE AN EQUAL RIGHT OF OCCUPANCY.
who pretended to have it?
What was its standard?
Certainly, the preservation of property,--
By virtue of the social contract which assigns it to me as my share.
It was not right that the soldier, on returning from an expedition, should find himself dispossessed on account of the services which he had just rendered to his country; his estate ought to be restored to him.
"Agriculture was a natural consequence of the multiplication of the human race, and agriculture, in its turn, favors population, and necessitates the establishment of permanent property; for who would take the trouble to plough and sow, if he were not certain that he would reap?"
What sort of justice is it, then, which makes such laws as this:--
"The application of justice."
But, indeed, what guide did the law follow in creating the domain of property?
Of what consequence is it to us that the Indian race was divided into four classes; that, on the banks of the Nile and the Ganges, blood and position formerly determined the distribution of the land; that the Greeks and Romans placed property under the protection of the gods; that they accompanied with religious ceremonies the work of partitioning the land and appraising their goods?
In this we see what a wonderful change has been effected in property, and to what an extent Nature has been altered by the civil laws."
For that reason, every institution and every law based on property will perish.
"In fact, the cause of the cultivation of the habitable earth."
Evidently IN THE PRODUCT, not IN THE SOIL. So the Arabs have always understood it; and so, according to Caesar and Tacitus, the Germans formerly held.
Because justice was supposed to be its principle.
HE HAS PUT ALL THINGS UNDER MY FEET,--and I have not where to lay my head! MULTIPLY, he tells us through his interpreter, Pothier.
Then there was no property, not even private possession.
This payment is not rent, it is an indemnity.
Whoever without labor got possession, by force or by strategy, of another's means of subsistence, destroyed equality, and placed himself above or outside of the law.
"Therefore, the right of appropriation by labor shall never be admitted against individuals, but only against society."
"The original cause of man's prosperity upon earth."
What is justice without equality of fortunes?
"The human race having multiplied, men divided among themselves the earth and most of the things upon it; that which fell to each, from that time exclusively belonged to him.
The genesis and growth of possession gradually forcing people to labor for their support, they agreed either formally or tacitly,--it makes no difference which,--that the laborer should be sole proprietor of the fruit of his labor; that is, they simply declared the fact that thereafter none could live without working.
If the form cannot be separated from the object, nor property from possession, possession must be shared; in any case, society reserves the right to fix the conditions of property.
It necessarily followed that, to obtain equality of products, there must be equality of labor; and that, to obtain equality of labor, there must be equality of facilities for labor.
The law is intended to protect men's mutual rights,--that is, the rights of each against each, and each against all; and, as if a proportion could exist with less than four terms, the law-makers always disregard the latter.
Undoubtedly the division was never geographically equal; a multitude of rights, some founded in Nature, but wrongly interpreted and still more wrongly applied, inheritance, gift, and exchange; others, like the privileges of birth and position, the illegitimate creations of ignorance and brute force,--all operated to prevent absolute equality.
Man is mistaken as to the constitution of society, the nature of right, and the application of justice; just as he was mistaken regarding the cause of meteors and the movement of the heavenly bodies.
Whoever monopolized the means of production on the ground of greater industry, also destroyed equality.
This it is which, continually revived, reinstated, rejuvenated, restored, re-enforced--as the palladium of society--has troubled the consciences of the people, has obscured the minds of the masters, and has induced all the catastrophes which have befallen nations.
How could these men, who never had the faintest idea of statistics, valuation, or political economy, furnish us with principles of legislation?
"The multiplication of the human race had rendered agriculture necessary; the need of securing to the cultivator the fruit of his labor made permanent property necessary, and also laws for its protection.
Why, in according possession, has it also conceded property?
It would refuse its authority to all proceedings which would impose, on their savage independence, any improving restraint.
The king's interest lay in encouraging all partial attempts on the part of the serfs to emancipate themselves from their masters, and place themselves in immediate subordination to himself.
Even when the king was scarcely so powerful as many of his chief feudatories, the great advantage which he derived from being but one has been recognized by French historians.
3.
The mode in which such tribes are usually brought to submit to the primary conditions of civilized society is through the necessities of warfare, and the despotic authority indispensable to military command.
In any case in which the attempt to introduce representative government is at all likely to be made, indifference to it, and inability to understand its processes and requirements, rather than positive opposition, are the obstacles to be expected.
At his hands, refuge and protection were sought from every part of the country against first one, then another of the immediate oppressors.
The most obvious of these cases is the one already considered, in which the people have still to learn the first lesson of civilization, that of obedience.
These may exercise a temporary ascendancy, but as it is merely personal, it rarely effects any change in the general habits of the people, unless the prophet, like Mohammed, is also a military chief, and goes forth the armed apostle of a new religion; or unless the military chiefs ally themselves with his influence, and turn it into a prop for their own government.
His progress to ascendancy was slow; but it resulted from successively taking advantage of opportunities which offered themselves only to him.
A people are no less unfitted for representative government by the contrary fault to that last specified--by extreme passiveness, and ready submission to tyranny.
If, instead of struggling for the favors of the chief ruler, these selfish and sordid factions struggled for the chief place itself, they would certainly, as in Spanish America, keep the country in a state of chronic revolution and civil war.
These, however, are as fatal, and may be as hard to be got rid of as actual aversion; it being easier, in most cases, to change the direction of an active feeling than to create one in a state previously passive.
The willingness of the people to accept representative government only becomes a practical question when an enlightened ruler, or a foreign nation or nations who have gained power over the country, are disposed to offer it the boon.
That they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.
The contrary case is not indeed unexampled; there has sometimes been a religious repugnance to any limitation of the power of a particular line of rulers; but, in general, the doctrine of passive obedience meant only submission to the will of the powers that be, whether monarchical or popular.
Under his protection numerous communities were formed which knew no one above them but the king.
On the contrary, many a people has gradually emerged from this condition by the aid of a central authority, whose position has made it the rival, and has ended by making it the master, of the local despots, and which, above all, has been single.
The small class who, in this state of public feeling, gain the command of the representative body, for the most part use it solely as a means of seeking their fortune.
There are others in which it possibly might exist, but in which some other form of government would be preferable.
It was, therefore, sure; and, in proportion as it was accomplished, it abated, in the oppressed portion of the community, the habit of submitting to oppression.
That the people should be willing to receive it.
Unless, therefore, the authorities whose office it is to check the executive are backed by an effective opinion and feeling in the country, the executive has always the means of setting them aside or compelling them to subservience, and is sure to be well supported in doing so.
When nobody, or only some small fraction, feels the degree of interest in the general affairs of the state necessary to the formation of a public opinion, the electors will seldom make any use of the right of suffrage but to serve their private interest, or the interest of their locality, or of some one with whom they are connected as adherents or dependents.
When a people have no sufficient value for, and attachment to, a representative constitution, they have next to no chance of retaining it.
A despotism, not even legal, but of illegal violence, would be alternately exercised by a succession of political adventurers, and the name and forms of representation would have no effect but to prevent despotism from attaining the stability and security by which alone its evils can be mitigated or its few advantages realized.
When, however, the evil stops here, the price may be worth paying for the publicity and discussion which, though not an invariable, are a natural accompaniment of any, even nominal, representation.
This benefit, however, is entirely dependent on the coexistence with the popular body of an hereditary king.
These were, 1.
A military leader is the only superior to whom they will submit, except occasionally some prophet supposed to be inspired from above, or conjurer regarded as possessing miraculous power.
Obedience to a distant monarch is liberty itself compared with the dominion of the lord of the neighboring castle; and the monarch was long compelled by necessities of position to exert his authority as the ally rather than the master of the classes whom he had aided in affecting their liberation.
These are principally when the people, in order to advance in civilization, have some lesson to learn, some habit not yet acquired, to the acquisition of which representative government is likely to be an impediment.
In this manner a central power, despotic in principle, though generally much restricted in practice, was mainly instrumental in carrying the people through a necessary stage of improvement, which representative government, if real, would most likely have prevented them from entering upon.
Let us examine at what point in the descending series representative government ceases altogether to be admissible, either through its own unfitness or the superior fitness of some other regimen.
The third is when the people want either the will or the capacity to fulfill the part which belongs to them in a representative constitution.
After Mary had been taken East to school, her father had returned, and here he had spent the winters, going back to Sunnybank each summer to be with his little girl.
"Come on, Emanuel," Mary sang down to him.
The girls could see a distant blue haze that was the smoke from the Douglas copper smelters.
Mary sprang up, saying brightly, "I reckon it will have to." Then, stooping, she kissed her father as she whispered tenderly, "Rest well, darling.
Dora nodded.
She said no more about it just then, as they had reached the old ghost town of Gleeson.
The old man had shuffled into the dark well of his store.
"You've waited up for me, haven't you?" She dropped to her knees beside the invalid chair and pressed her flushed face to his gray, drawn cheek.
Now that you're working on the Newcomb ranch you ought to be there.
"Yes, Mr. Harvey.
Mary's nettlesome brown pony was hard to quiet until Jerry reached out a strong brown hand and patted its head.
"Then you came East to boarding-school and became like a sister to me," Dora said tenderly.
She didn't teach long though, for that very first vacation she married Jerry's cowboy father.
"That's impossible!"
"Why, of course.
Won't tomorrow do?"
An old man, shriveled, gray-bearded, unkempt, but with kind gray eyes, deep-sunken under shaggy brows, stood in the open door.
A bright, black-eyed Mexican boy of about ten ran out to the road as the girls approached.
The boys were sitting just where they had left them.
"Dick's working on the Newcomb ranch this summer," Mary said, as she started to ride on.
Goodbye, boys, we'll see you tomorrow."
His friendly, toothless smile was directed at the smaller girl.
Mary smiled faintly but it was evident that she was still thinking of the past, when she had been a little girl with golden curls that hung to her waist; a wonderfully pretty, wistful little girl.
"Thanks a lot," she called brightly up to the old man who was handing the packet down over the sagging wooden rail.
Then to change the subject, she started another.
The latter has to strengthen those powers by which the boy or girl by special natural fitness promises to be especially efficient and happy.
When we spoke of the treatment of the sick, we had always to emphasize that the suggestion cures symptoms but not diseases.
I myself have seen promising results.
Whether pedagogy and criminology are to make use of the services of psychotherapy is thus certainly an open question.
His achievement has therefore no moral value, and if he is really cured of his drunkenness or of his perverse habits, of his misuse of cocaine or of his criminal tendencies, he has lost the right to be counted a moral agent.
The nourishment of the child, the care for the child's sense organs, the recesses and the rest from fatigue, and especially the undisturbed sleep are essential conditions.
With young boys who through unfortunate influence have caught a tendency, for instance, to steal, and where the fault does not yield to sympathetic reasoning and to punishment, an early hypnotic treatment might certainly be tried.
Even where sound religion without superstition and without pseudophilosophy stands behind the therapeutic work, the community will not give up the question whether the church does not necessarily neglect by it the interests which are superior.
To counteract these slighter variations, these abnormalities which have not yet reached the degree of disease, will demand the same principles of treatment, only in a weaker form.
In the service of our ideals we may thus transform the world into a mechanism: out of our freedom we desire to conceive ourselves as necessary products.
But with this enrichment of feelings the disciplinary influence too has to go through the whole social life. Where art is sensational and the church hysterical,--in short, where the community stirs up overstrong feelings,--the wholesome balance is lost again.
More important, it would leave undeveloped that power which the youth especially needs to acquire by serious education, the power to master what does not appeal to the personal likings and interests.
The good resolution and the bad one can be suggested, the good example and the bad can be effective; both encouragement of the noble and imitation of the evil may work with the same mental technique.
If such cases should come early to suggestive treatment which really would close the channels of the antisocial autosuggestion, much harm might be averted.
From the multiplication table to the highest cultural studies in college, the youth is to be adjusted to the material of our civilization without any concession to the emasculating desire to adjust civilization simply to the particular youth.
All that society can do is, therefore, not to remodel the manifoldness of brains, but to shape the conditions of life in such a way that the weak and unstable brains also have a greater chance to live their lives without conflicts with the community.
Still more that is true of the healing of the sick. Whether or not such expansion of church activity in different directions saps the vital strength of religion itself is indeed a problem for the whole community.
The thought of crime now becomes a sort of obsession or rather an autosuggestion.
The possibilities of overlooking symptoms which ought to suggest an entirely different treatment, or of adjusting the treatment badly to the special physical conditions, or of ignoring the desirable physical supplement by drugs, or of creating unintentionally by suggestion injurious effects, are always open when medical amateurs undertake such work.
Above all, from early childhood the self-control has to be strengthened, the child has to learn from the beginning to know the limits to the gratification of his desires and to abstain from reckless over-indulgence.
To make a man fight where despair is inevitable, and where the enemy is necessarily stronger than his own powers, can certainly not be the moral demand.
It is claimed that suggestive power, especially in the form of hypnotization, may be secretly misused to make anyone without his knowledge and against his will a passive instrument of the hypnotist's intent.
The intellectual life of the community would have to suffer greatly if the way to be freed from bodily suffering had to be the belief in the metaphysical doctrines of Mrs. Eddy's "Science and Health." From a cultural viewpoint, too, suggestive therapeutics must stand the higher, the more sharply it is separated from special philosophical or religious doctrines.
The play of our children is too little adjusted to this task.
No one ought to take such arguments lightly.
Society has further to take care that those spheres of life which stand less under systematic principles, such as the home life of the child and the social life of the man, his family life and his public life, are steadily under the pressure of influences which urge in the same direction.
Yet while thoroughness demands concentration in one direction, society must with the same earnestness insist on well-rounded general education and continuity of general interests through life.
Here is the place where imagination in play and later in art come in.
Needless to say that any hypnotization for mere amusement and as a parlor trick ought to be considered as criminal.
The life at home and in public ought to be manifold and expansive but ought to avoid over-excitement and over-anxiety.
Yet again the liability of the brain to become antisocial would not have been removed, and thus not much would be secured unless such a person after the treatment could be kept under favorable conditions.
In short, there may be a large number of factors, sometimes even in combination, each one of which increases the chances that the individual may come in danger in the midst of developed society.
We recognized from the start that the abnormal mind never introduces any new elements but is characterized only by a change of proportions.
That is the glory of life that the suggestive power may belong to moral values instead of mere pleasures, but it is not the aim of life to remain untouched by suggestion.
In any case the saloon and its humiliating indecency must disappear and every temptation to intemperance should be removed.
He feels a simple impulse to go to the table and lift the book and, as no stronger natural desire and no moral objection stand in the way, he carries out that meaningless impulse and perhaps even invents a foolish motive to explain to himself why he wanted to look at that book.
To reduce these abnormalities means to secure a more stable equilibrium and thus to avoid social damages, and at the same time to prevent the growth of the abnormality to pathological dimensions.
But after a long experience, I have my doubts as to whether a man was ever cured in such a way by hypnotism of serious disturbances and of those anomalous actions which the critics want to see overcome by the patient's own moral efforts.
Destructive emotions like terror ought to be kept away and not needlessly brought near by uncanny stories and mystic superstitions.
Those who set forth this argument are entirely willing to acknowledge the profound effect which suggestive therapeutics may create.
All gambling from the child's play to the stock exchange is ruinous for the psychophysical equilibrium.
On the one side it demands a systematic discipline of the emotions, on the other a healthy stimulation of emotions.
No theory of the world and of God ought to gain authority over the mind from such an external motive as a belief in its curative effects.
The same is true of any overuse of coffee and tea and tobacco, and as a matter of course still more the habitual use of the drugs like the popular headache powders and sleeping medicines.
Sound sober lawmaking and fair judgment in court secure to the community a feeling of safety which gives stability to emotions and feelings.
But this censure too is entirely mistaken, not because it urges the purposive views against the causal but because it is in error as to the facts.
For instance, I have steadily refused requests of students and others to use hypnotism for the purpose of overcoming merely bad habits, such as the habit of biting the nails.
Such critics are fully under the influence of the startling results which are reached; they do not take the trouble to examine the long and difficult way which has had to be traversed with patience and energy.
Again in the field of will, we want the strong, spontaneous, independent will which is not frightened by discomfort and not discouraged by obstacles, and yet we want the will which is not stubborn and selfish but which subordinates itself to the larger will of the social group and to the eternal will of the norm.
The joy of removing some obstacles from the way of the patients is too much overshadowed by the deep pity and sympathy with their suffering and craving during the whole period of successive treatments.
In recent times this opposition has repeatedly found eloquent expression.
The fear suggests itself that the spiritual achievement may become hampered, that in the competition of the church with the other agencies of social life the particular church task may be pushed to the background, and that thus the church in imitating that which others can do just as well or better loses the power to do that which the church alone can do.
He had been for years a slave to his passion.
Literature and the libraries, the newspapers and the magazines play there a foremost role, and again the mental health of the community has to pay the penalty if its newspapers work against general culture.
For the cure the psychotherapist has to aim toward the cathartic result.
But in about four days I got used to the loss of so much morphine and stayed on this amount for a week, seeing the professor every other day for hypnotic treatment and then returning to my room where I spent twenty-two hours of the twenty-four on the bed, but did not sleep more than two or three hours a day.
And if the absurdity of such a proposal is recognized it seems to many justified to demand such an intrusion at least in the case of the born criminal, even if the occasional criminal cannot be reached.
Here again we have not a special class of brains which are criminal; but we have an endless variety of brains with a greater or smaller predisposition for antisocial outbreaks.
The worst time of all was a cut from four injections of a fourth of a grain each to four of one eighth of a grain each, which was about January 10th.
The easily suggestible person cannot be protected by any interdict; he may catch suggestions everywhere, any advertisement in the newspaper and any display in the shop-window may overrun his own intentions.
A good conscience, a congenial home, and a serious purpose are after all the safest conditions for a healthy mind, and the community works in preventive psychotherapy wherever it facilitates the securing of these three factors.
What he needs is training in firmness.
The fact that selfish and thus antisocial desires awake in the mind is not abnormal at all; only if they are not normally inhibited, the disturbance sets in.
In the field of the intellect, the community must take care that thoroughness of training and accuracy of information is rigidly demanded and not thrust out by an easy-going superficiality.
Wherever a reasonable amount of own will force and attention can be expected to overcome the antagonistic influence, there artificial hypnotic influence ought to be avoided.
Freest from such implications is certainly the hypnotic method of the physician who does not need the strong religious reenforcement of the suggestion because he reenforces instead the suggestibility of the patient by slight influences on his senses.
On the contrary, every suggestion has to rely on the efforts and struggles of the patient himself and all that the psychotherapists can give him is help in his own moral fight.
I cannot even acknowledge the right of psychologists to make hypnotic experiments merely for the psychological experiment's sake.
A child who finds some difficulty in sticking seriously to his tasks might learn now this and now that under the influence of hypnotic suggestions but he would remain entirely untrained for mastering the next lesson.
That holds true even for very slight abnormalities which seem still within the limits where the own energies can bring about the cure.
All hypnotizing therefore ought to be interdicted by the state.
What is gained if some nervous disorders are helped by belief, if the belief itself devastates our intellectual culture and brings the masses down again to a view of the world which has all the earmarks of barbarism?
The one without the other creates a lack of mental balance which is the most favorable condition for a pathological disturbance.
Nobody ought to be brought into a hypnotic or otherwise abnormal state of mind if it is not suggested by the interests of the subject himself.
Every society which allows successes to superficiality diminishes its chances for mental health.
Nothing seems more unfit to give a deeper meaning to life and a higher value.
Science has the right to make hypnotic experiments, or experiments with abnormal mental states, only under the one condition that a physician has hypnotized the subject in the interests of his health and that the patient has agreed beforehand to allow in the presence of witnesses certain psychological studies.
In truth it was the result of four months of the most noble and courageous suffering and struggling.
It must not be forgotten that the decomposition of the brain molecules can never be restituted by anything but rest, and ultimately by sleep.
Both educators and criminologists have indeed often raised such questions, and social reformers have not seldom seen there wide perspectives for social movements in future times.
All life becomes a psychophysical mechanism and from that point of view man's thinking and acting become the necessary outcome of the foregoing conditions.
The child needs sleep and fresh air and healthful food more than anything else, if his mind is active.
At the end of the week I was cut off by hypnotic suggestion half a grain and this put me to fighting the desire again.
There is too much or too little of a certain mental process and just for that reason there must be a steady and continuous transition from the normal to the entirely abnormal.
Grace laughed in spite of herself at Nora's remark, but regretted it the next moment, for Eleanor saw the glances directed toward her and heard Nora's giggle.
She turned white and half started toward Grace, then stopped, and, turning her back upon the Phi Sigma Tau, began talking to Edna Wright.
"What do you suppose she's up to now?"
Besides, Miss Pierson is too short.
"What you say about appearance is quite true, Miss Savell," replied Miss Tebbs frankly.
Mr. Southard is shaking hands with her."
"She looks like the 'Vendetta' or the 'Camorra' or some other Italian vengeance agency, doesn't she?" said Nora with a giggle.
"I thought so," laughed the doctor; "but if you take my advice, you will draw the bit slightly."
"I shall sit beside you and use the other oar," he answered nonchalantly, smiling down at her.
As she turned in at the gate, he held out his hand to Ruth.
"In the bow; I dislike to see dangers before we come to them."
"You are so slow," she said with a reckless little laugh; "I feel as if I could fly home."
He was glad to hear that the doctor had to leave on the early morning's train, though, of course, he did not say so.
She would have been glad enough to be able to turn from the short range of vision between them; but the stars and river afforded her good vantage-ground, and on them she fixed her gaze.
She could not yet meet his eyes again.
"And they are stanch, silent friends on such a night," remarked Kemp, softly.
Mr. Levice, sauntering down the garden-path, saw the trio approaching. For a moment he did not recognize the gentleman in his summer attire. When he did, surprise, then pleasure, then a spirit of inquietude, took possession of him.
He noticed that although Mrs. Levice kept up an almost incessant flow of talk, she ate a hearty meal, and that Ruth, who was unusually quiet, tasted scarcely anything.
"I do not care to be Absalomed; where were your eyes, Ruth?" she complained, as Kemp pushed out with a happy, apologetic laugh.
Slowly and more slowly sped the tiny boat; long gentle strokes touched the water; and presently the oars lay idle in their locks,--they were unconsciously drifting.
Ruth went straight to the little boat aground on the shore.
If she had promised to take care of Ruth, it would have been more to his mind; but since his wife was there, what harm could accrue that his presence would prevent?
"In what?" she asked, somewhat dazed.
Levice slept.
"Hadn't you better put something over your shoulders?" he asked deferentially as she appeared.
He gently lifted her resisting fingers one by one and raised the broad bone of contention to his shoulder.
"Your place?
With a half-pleased feeling of discomfiture Ruth seated herself in the stern, whereupon Kemp sat in the contested throne.
Now, when he decidedly objected to moving, it would have been heartless not to go.
But in the dark his lamb's eyes were mysteriously bright.
Against the black lace about her head her face shone like a cameo, her eyes were brown wells of starlight; she scarcely seemed to breathe, so still she sat, her slender hands loosely clasped in her lap.
The water dipped and lapped about the sides; the tender woman's voice across the water stole to them, singing of love; their eyes met--and Mrs. Levice slept.
"Then will you wrap something about you and come down to the river?"
She took his hand and stepped in; they were both standing, and as the little bark swayed he made a movement to catch hold of her.
"I was waiting for you to move from my place," she said in defiant mischief, standing motionless beside the boat.
She kept before them till they reached the gate, and stood inside of it as they drew near.
Dr. Kemp moved quietly back to his former position.
Ruth went indoors.
"This is a surprise, Doctor," he exclaimed cordially, opening the gate and extending his hand.
"I am a sort of surprise-party," he answered, swinging Ethel to the ground and watching her scamper off to the hotel; "and what is more," he continued, turning to him, "I have not brought a hamper, which makes one of me."
He protested at such a stupendous comparison, and insisted that she make clear that the dummy was not included.
Chapter XV
His flannel shirt, low at the throat, showed his strong white neck rising like a column from his broad shoulders, and his dark face with the steady gray eyes looked across at her with grave sweetness.
Then she straightened herself back in her seat.
"Others are enjoying themselves also," he remarked as their feet touched the pebbly beach.
"Mamma!"
Kemp grasped his hand heartily.
If Dr. Kemp wished to row, he should row; and since the Jewish Mrs. Grundy was not on hand, anything harmlessly enjoyable was permissible.
She leaned a little farther forward, looking past Kemp.
It was the first time he had dined with them; and he enjoyed a singular feeling over the situation.
"Indeed, no," she answered; "why should I?
"It looks like a cockle-shell," he said, as he put one foot in after shoving it off.
What was she to him anyway but a girl with whom he could flirt in his idle moments?
Probably the display amused him.
He helped her carefully to her place; she thanked him laughingly for his exceptionally strong arm, and he turned to Ruth.
She held them lightly in place on her shoulder.
"Wait for us, Ruth," called Mrs. Levice, and the slight white figure stood still till they came up.
Kemp, noting the sudden flush that had rushed to and from her cheek, turned halfway to look at Mrs. Levice.
"You had better sit down," he said, motioning to the rower's seat.
For old man as he was, he realized that Dr. Kemp's strong personality was such as would prove dangerously seductive to any woman whom he cared to honor with his favor; but with a "Get thee behind me, Satan" desire, he had put the question from him.
The short afternoon glided into evening, and Dr. Kemp went over to the hotel and dined at the Levices' table.
"How is she?" he asked, turning with him and catching a glimpse of Ruth's vanishing figure.
Her father also observed it, and resolved upon a course of strict surveillance.
Mrs. Levice was delighted to see him; she said it was like the sight of a cable-car in a desert.
Well (with a passionate fling of her arms), she would extinguish her uncontrollable little beater for the nonce; she would meet and answer every one of his long glances in kind.
Ah, yes; now," he said, holding out his hand to her, "will you step in?"
"Doctor," called a startled voice, "row out; I am right under the trees."
She felt a positive contempt for herself that his presence should affect her as it did; she dared not look at him lest her heart should flutter to her eyes.
As they approached the river, the faint susurra came to them, mingled with the sound of a guitar and some one singing in the distance.
They both started.
"There is nothing abroad here but the stars," she answered, flitting before them.
"Feeling quite well," replied Levice; "she is all impatience now for a delirious winter season."
She raised her shy eyes for one brief second to his glowing ones; and he passed, a tall, dark figure, down the shadowy road.
This was certainly something she had not bargained for.
"Don't consider me," said the doctor, observing his hesitancy.
"Will you sit in the stern or the bow, Mrs. Levice?"
With this new crown upon her!
Mrs. Levice was, without doubt, awake.
"As yet," corrected Kemp.
As they strolled about afterward, he managed to keep his daughter with him and allowed Kemp to appropriate his wife.
Ruth, in a white wool gown, sat opposite him.
In five minutes Kemp had grounded the boat and helped Mrs. Levice out. When he turned for Ruth, she had already sprung ashore and had started up the slope; for the first time the oars lay forgotten in the bottom of the boat.
"Allow me," he said, placing his hand upon the oars.
Dr. Kemp sat opposite her--and Mrs. Levice slept.
Sleep!
"And disgust the night with lack of appreciation?"
"I should like to show my prowess to you, Miss Levice."
"You will have to excuse my turning my back on you, Mrs. Levice," he said pleasantly.
It was a tiny boat; and seated thus, Kemp's knees were not half a foot from Ruth's white gown.
"It must be time to sight home now," said her mother; "I am quite chilly."
"After what she has said to you!
David promised to get me the tickets.
I think it's a shame, too.
"Eleanor?" exclaimed Nora.
The shepherd comforted her: "Lady sister, I pray you, do not weep, but do what I tell you.
The prince invoked God in addressing her: "God help you, old woman!"
It captured me, too, in this way, but now I have no means of escape." Then he proceeded: "Listen well to what I am going to say to you.
One day the eldest son went out hunting, and, when he got outside the town, up sprang a hare out of a bush, and he after it, and hither and thither, till the hare fled into a water-mill, and the prince after it.
The shepherd was cheerful, more cheerful than ever, but the emperor's daughter was sad and shed tears.
Whither do you go so far?
In the vault was a vast multitude of people.
But the emperor sent two grooms after him to go stealthily and see what he did, and they placed themselves on a high hill whence they could have a good view.
Then he left his home, and disguised himself; he put shepherd's boots to his feet, took a shepherd's staff in his hand, and went into the world.
Then the middle son went hunting, and as he issued from the town, a hare sprang out of a bush, and the prince after it, and hither and thither, till the hare fled into the water-mill and the prince after it; but it was not a hare, but a dragon, which waited for and devoured him.
He replied: "I do, illustrious crown!" Then the emperor engaged him, and began to inform and instruct him: "There is here a lake, and alongside of the lake very beautiful pasture, and when you call the sheep out, they go thither at once, and spread themselves round the lake; but whatever shepherd goes off there, that shepherd returns back no more.
Come out to single combat with me; let us measure ourselves once more, unless you're a woman!" The dragon replied: "I will, prince; now, now!" Erelong, there was the dragon! it was huge, it was terrible, it was disgusting! When it came out, they seized each other by the middle, and wrestled a summer's day till afternoon.
When he issued from the town, again up sprang a hare out of a bush, and the prince after it, and hither and thither, till the hare fled into the water-mill.
Then he swung the dragon, and tossed it high into the air, and when it fell to the ground it burst into pieces.
Then he went straight to the emperor.
When he arrived at the town, the whole town assembled as to see a wondrous sight because he had come, whereas previously no shepherd had been able to come from the lake.
But when the afternoon heat came on, the dragon said: "Let me go, prince, that I may moisten my parched head in the lake, and may toss you to the sky." The prince replied: "Come, dragon, don't talk nonsense; if I had the emperor's daughter to kiss me on the forehead, I would toss you still higher." Thereupon the dragon suddenly left hold of him, and went off into the lake.
The citizens told him that the emperor did.
But as it burst into pieces, out of it sprang a wild boar, and started to run away.
The next day the prince got ready again, and went with his sheep straight to the lake.
After he announced himself, the emperor admitted him into his presence, and asked him: "Do you wish to keep sheep?"
But the prince shouted to his shepherd dogs: "Hold it!
Then the prince asked her: "Where, old woman, is my hare?" She replied: "My son, that was not a hare, but a dragon.
The prince said to it: "Tell me now, where are my brothers?"
I assure you, in God's name, that he is able to overcome the dragon, only go to-morrow with him to see whether he will free us from this mischief which has destroyed so many people."
When, on the morrow, the day dawned and the sun came forth, up rose the shepherd, up rose the maiden too, to begin to prepare for going to the lake.
On going into the town he began to inquire who wanted a shepherd.
I know that you will be glad to liberate yourself from that pest." The old woman interrupted him: "How should I not?
But it was not a hare, but a dragon, and it waited for the prince and devoured him.
When several days had elapsed and the prince did not return home, people began to wonder why it was that he was not to be found.
"But," said he, "to-morrow you must go with the shepherd to the lake and kiss him on the forehead." When she heard this she burst into tears and began to entreat her father.
The dragon began to give an account in detail: "My strength is a long way off, and you cannot go thither.
He washed himself nicely, took the falcon on his shoulder, the hounds behind him, and the bagpipes under his arm, played as he went, drove the sheep, and proceeded to the emperor's palace, with the damsel at his side still in terror.
The prince ordered them to come out one by one, and go whither each would, and stood himself at the door.
When they were in the neighbourhood of the water-mill, the prince halted his attendants, went inside, cut up the three wands, and struck the root with them, and the iron door opened at once.
But the prince did not choose to follow it, but went to find other game, saying to himself: "When I return I shall find you." After thus he went for a long time up and down the hill, but found nothing, and then returned to the water-mill; but when he got there, there was only an old woman in the mill.
You will never tell me whither you go." The dragon replied: "Well, my dear old woman, I do go far." Then the old woman began to coax it: "And why do you go so far?
Ask it whither it goes and where its strength is; then kiss all that place where it tells you its strength is, as if from love, till you ascertain it, and afterward tell me when I come." Then the prince went off to the palace, and the old woman remained in the water-mill.
The old woman replied: "God help you, my son!"
After two hours the badger took its leave, with profuse expressions of thanks, and went out; and from that time forth it came every night to the hut.
Food and raiment I receive by the favour of the villagers, so I take no heed for those things.
As the badger would collect and bring with it dried branches and dead leaves from the hills for firewood, the priest at last became very friendly with it, and got used to its company; so that if ever, as the night wore on, the badger did not arrive, he used to miss it, and wonder why it did not come.
And yet even birds and beasts will show gratitude; so that a man who does not requite a favour is worse even than dumb brutes. Is not this a disgrace?
So you see, since you have expressed such kind feelings toward me, I have told you what is on my mind." When the priest had done speaking, the badger leant its head on one side with a puzzled and anxious look, so much so that the old man was sorry he had expressed a wish which seemed to give the beast trouble, and tried to retract what he had said.
"That's a very slight matter: make haste and come in and warm yourself."
It is a common saying among men that to forget favours received is the part of a bird or a beast: an ungrateful man will be ill spoken of by all the world.
Yet I would not get this money by violent or unlawful means; I only think of what might be if I had it.
When the priest heard what a helpless state the beast was reduced to, he was filled with pity and said:
If there is anything that you wish for, pray tell me."
What can I do to requite them?
Your favours are such that during all my life, and even after my death, I must remember them.
When this practice had gone on for ten years, one day the badger said to the priest, "Through your reverence's kindness for all these years, I have been able to pass the winter nights in comfort.
I pray you to let me enter and warm myself at the fire of your cottage, that I may live through this bitter night."
After three years had gone by, one night the old man heard a voice near his door calling out, "Your reverence! your reverence!"
He had not even a child to wait upon him, but prepared his food with his own hands.
The badger, delighted with so good a reception, went into the hut, and squatting down by the fire began to warm itself; and the priest, with renewed fervour, recited his prayers and struck his bell before the image of Buddha, looking straight before him.
Although the fame of his virtue did not reach far, yet his neighbours respected and revered him, and often brought him food and raiment; and when his roof or his walls fell out of repair, they would mend them for him; so for the things of this world he took no thought.
I, who am a priest, ought not to entertain such thoughts, or to want money; so pray pay no attention to what I have said;" and the badger, feigning assent to what the priest had impressed upon it, returned to the hills as usual.
"Indeed," replied the priest, "I cannot choose but tell this story.
While love is still the moving force of their lives, they must study the problems that are due to come.
At first the emotions seem to stand still--this is the long-coveted moment!
In the sex life in marriage, as in other parts of the association, each partner wins by considering the other before the self.
If you are tired or irritable, you can rest or exercise for restoration, as in the days before marriage.
A woman's feeling that she will be emotionally gratified by making a sacrifice does not prove that, aside from her momentary pleasure, there is any value in it.
Soon or late you find that some familiar mannerism of your spouse displeases you.
They two, and nobody else, can make the decision to fit their marriage.
If each one is hurt at the other's inability to join instantly in his, or her, plans, they will need to take pains not to get sidetracked into making a personal contest of the affair.
Like everything else that is alive, it must be kept growing through exercise, or it wastes away.
The factor that underlies all the perplexities, and most of the contentment, of marriage is its unique degree of concentrated intimacy. Here the supreme testing always comes.
Your love is now becoming less self-centered and more helpful to your partner.
At one end he perceived a small skiff, painted blue and shaped like a swan, lying under a clump of yellow broom.
But first I will divide with you all that my parents left me,' and going to her room, she opened a small chest, and took from it a bell, a knife, and a little stick.
I can only accept it with joy.'
'The swallow is less swift than the wind, the wind is less swift than the lightning.
'What is it?' asked Houarn, beginning to feel uncomfortable.
But though Houarn held his peace, he was not as happy as before. Something seemed to have gone wrong, and then he suddenly remembered Bellah.
Like them, I shall seek till I get what I want--that is, money to buy a cow and a pig to fatten.
There were so many of them that it took quite a long time.
Very soon she led her visitor into the great hall, where wine and fruit were always waiting, and on the table lay the magic knife, left there by Houarn.
'But what are you doing in this nest?'
With one of the leaves of the cabbage they made her a coat, and another served for a waistcoat; but it took two for the wide breeches which were then in fashion.
But the men did not know how this was to be done, and, shaking their heads over his obstinacy, left him to his fate.
Unseen by the Groac'h, Bellah hid it in a pocket of her green coat, and then followed her hostess into the garden, and to the pond which contained the fish, their sides shining with a thousand different colours.
But the bird had guessed his intentions, and plunged beneath the water, carrying Houarn with him to the palace of the Groac'h.
The island was large, and lying almost across it was a lake, with a narrow opening to the sea.
'Come lawyer, come miller, come tailor, come singer!' cried she, holding out a net of steel; and at each summons a fish appeared and jumped into the net.
So Houarn went down to the sea, and found a boatman who engaged to take him to the isle of Lok.
She thanked the little men gratefully, and after a few more instructions, jumped on the back of her great bird, and was borne away to the isle of Lok.
'Well, you can easily get that,' replied she; 'it is nothing to worry about.
Houarn sat down and took out the knife which Bellah had given him, but as soon as the blade touched the fish the enchantment ceased, and four men stood before him.
He stood quite still while Bellah scrambled up, then he started off, his pace growing quicker and quicker, till at length the girl could hardly see the trees and houses as they flashed past.
After that was finished, she begged Houarn to accompany her to a fish-pond at the bottom of the garden.
The hat was cut from the heart of the cabbage, and a pair of shoes from the thick stem.
But, rapid as the pace was, it was not rapid enough for Bellah, who stooped and said:
I will give you the knife to guard you against the enchantments of wizards, and the bell to tell me of your perils.
Instantly she threw the steel net over his head, and the eyes of a little green frog peeped through the meshes.
The girl saw it was useless to say more, so she answered sadly:
'By delivering Houarn, who is in the power of the Groac'h.'
'Poor little cock!' she said, 'and how am I to deliver you?'
'I have never come across one.' And the men answered that it was the name given to the fairy that dwelt in the lake, and that she was rich--oh! richer than all the kings in the world put together.
'Here I am!' he exclaimed.
It was at this very moment that Bellah, who was skimming the milk in the farm dairy, heard the fairy bell tinkle violently.
They were cousins, and as their mothers were great friends, and constantly in and out of each other's houses, they had often been laid in the same cradle, and had played and fought over their games.
At the sight of her Houarn stopped, dazzled by her beauty.
'A man would be mad indeed to refuse such an offer.
'This is our lord and master, who has saved us from the net of steel and the pot of gold!'
'There is no fortune to be made here,' he thought to himself; 'it is a place for spending, and not earning.
'Well, go then, since you must.
'Yes,' answered Bellah, with a deep sigh; 'but we live in such hard times, and at the last fair the price of pigs had risen again.'
Many had gone to the island to try and get possession of her treasures, but no one had ever come back.
The Groac'h seemed overjoyed to see her, and told her that never before had she beheld such a handsome young man.
Bellah only drew it the tighter, and, flinging the sorceress into a pit, she rolled a great stone across the mouth, and left her.
I see I must go further,' and he walked on to Pont-aven, a pretty little town built on the bank of a river.
In old times, when all kinds of wonderful things happened in Brittany, there lived in the village of Lanillis, a young man named Houarn Pogamm and a girl called Bellah Postik.
'Then the sooner it is done the better,' said the Groac'h, and gave orders to her servants.
The stick I shall keep for myself, so that I can fly to you if ever you have need of me.'
The knife frees all it touches from the spells that have been laid on them; while the stick will carry you wherever you want to go.
But just as she was going to touch the foremost fish, her eyes fell on a green frog on his knees beside her, his little paws crossed over his little heart.
As he listened Houarn's mind was made up.
'Ah! tell me how I can manage that, and if I have to walk round the whole of Brittany on my bended knees I will do it!'
Here she found a nest made of clay and lined with dried moss, and in the centre a tiny man, black and wrinkled, who gave a cry of surprise at the sight of Bellah.
On hearing this Bellah began to laugh.
Whenever they met they repeated their grievances, and at length Houarn's patience was exhausted, and one morning he came to Bellah and told her that he was going away to seek his fortune.
When you have found her you must contrive to get hold of the net of steel that hangs from her waist, and shut her up in it for ever.'
The girl was very unhappy as she listened to this, and felt sorry that she had not tried to make the best of things.
When it was full she went into a large kitchen and threw them all into a golden pot; but above the bubbling of the water Houarn seemed to hear the whispering of little voices.
It was all made of shells, blue and green and pink and lilac and white, shading into each other till you could not tell where one colour ended and the other began.
Now, unless you have been under the sea and beheld all the wonders that lie there, you can never have an idea what the Groac'h's palace was like.
'This bell,' she said, 'can be heard at any distance, however far, but it only rings to warn us that our friends are in great danger.
Bellah took the net which the Groac'h held out, and, turning rapidly, flung it over the witch's head.
'Come in,' said the Groac'h, rising to her feet.
'But where am I to find a young man's clothes?' asked she.
'The water is getting hot, and it makes the fish jump,' she replied; but soon the noise grew louder and like cries.
Do not be shy, but tell me how you found your way, and what you want.'
Without waiting for orders, they sat down in the nest and, crossing their legs comfortably, began to prepare the suit of clothes for Bellah.
He was sitting on a bench outside an inn, when he heard two men who were loading their mules talking about the Groac'h of the island of Lok.
'Is it possible I can have forgotten her so soon?
The staircases were of crystal, and every separate stair sang like a woodland bird as you put your foot on it. Round the palace were great gardens full of all the plants that grow in the sea, with diamonds for flowers.
Bibbs, it was true: I did try to make Jim want to marry me.
It was always you that gave and I that took.
"You can't, because you can't put it into words--they are too humiliating for me and you're too gentle to say them.
Never, never, never!"
I said I couldn't make it plain!" he cried, despairingly.
"Oh, a thousand times!" Her right hand went out in a faltering gesture, and just touched his own for an instant.
The wife stared curiously at Bibbs.
"Help me up, Bibbs." Then, when she was once more upon her feet, she wiped her eyes and smiled upon him ruefully and faintly, but reassuringly, as if to tell him, in that way, that she knew he had not meant to hurt her.
Mary drew a deep breath.
Somewhere in the still air of the room there was a whispered word; it did not seem to come from Mary's parted lips, but he was aware of it. "Why?"
As Bibbs came out of the New House, a Sunday trio was in course of passage upon the sidewalk: an ample young woman, placid of face; a black-clad, thin young man, whose expression was one of habitual anxiety, habitual wariness and habitual eagerness.
He propelled a perambulator containing the third--and all three were newly cleaned, Sundayfied, and made fit to dine with the wife's relatives.
"And you thought we were so--so desperate--you believed that I had--"
"I think I'm beginning to understand--a little." She bit her lip; there was anger in good truth in her eyes and in her voice.
We always talked of me, not of you.
We never had been, and we didn't know what to do.
It was all about my idiotic distresses and troubles.
I think I did mean to marry him.
We were poor, and we weren't fitted to be.
"I can't, I can't!
"You could forgive me, Mary?"
You seemed to lean down--out of a rosy cloud--to be kind to me.
"Wait!"
He came and stood beside her.
"Let me think.
I never dreamed you could need anything to be done for you by anybody.
"Let me tell you what you want to tell me," she said.
"You couldn't--"
That's all, Bibbs.
Always when he crossed that threshold he had come with his head up and his wistful gaze seeking hers.
"Yes."
The poverty came on slowly, Bibbs, but at last it was all there--and I didn't know how to be a stenographer.
"You gave me something to live for," he said.
"Couldn't you--Isn't there--Won't you--" he stammered.
"Were desperately poor," she said.
Look at me!"
Mary, happening to glance from a window, saw Bibbs coming, and she started, clasping her hands together in a sudden alarm.
"Those two!" she exclaimed, sharply; and then, with thoroughgoing contempt: "Lamhorn! That's like them!" She turned away, went to the bare little black mantel, and stood leaning upon it.
"Ah, poor boy!" she said, with a gesture of understanding and pity.
Oddly enough, Mary's pallor changed to an angry flush.
"Nothing."
"I didn't believe you'd done one kind thing for me--for that.
"I can't make it plain.
It's more to me than even if you'd come because you were happy." She did not speak again for a little while; then she said: "Bibbs--dear--could you tell me about it?
"You do not.
Bibbs was agonized.
I thought of you as a kind of wonderful being that had no mortal or human suffering except by sympathy.
"Listen," she said.
"Mary, I'm going with father.
I hadn't thought of myself as--well, not as particularly captivating!"
Something did stop me; it was your sister-in-law, Sibyl.
"What is the matter?
CHAPTER XXIX
Bibbs swallowed painfully and contrived to say, "I do--I do want you to--marry me, if--if--you could."
"Oh NO--you--you don't understand."
I had never cared for anybody, and I thought it might be there really WASN'T anything more than a kind of excited fondness.
"What made you say that?
"Bibbs, do you--" Her voice was as unsteady as his--little more than a whisper.
His tone and attitude did not change.
What had I shown you of myself that could make you--"
"I thought so!
"Can't what, Bibbs?"
"Do you think I'm--in love with you?"
Don't you SEE?"
"Bibbs, look at me!" Her voice was loud and clear.
"Bibbs!" she cried.
She met him at the door.
"Never!
We had just got the coffee boiling when the lovers came up, Elizabeth in the saddle, "learning to ride," and he walking beside her holding her hand.
If he is dead, may I stay on with one of you and perhaps get a school?
Altogether this is one of the most delightful places imaginable.
How happy they were!
The road was narrow against the hillside and he had to ride quite close, so I saw his handsome face plainly.
I could heartily agree; and Elizabeth went on, "The way I have been received and the way we all treated Mrs. Holt will be the greatest help to me in becoming what I hope to become, a real Westerner.
I have written him three times and have had no word.
And the stately pines kept whispering and murmuring; it almost seemed as if they were chiding the quaking aspens for being frivolous.
It was disappointing after she had been so careful to look nicely.
The mountains on one side were crested; great crags and piles of rock crowned them as far as we could see; timber grew only about halfway up.
He also issues licenses in case hunters have neglected to secure them before coming.
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy had refused to get a license when we did.
Such a way as we came over!
E. R. S.
Mr. Stewart said we might as well "noon" as soon as we came to a good place, and then he would ride across and see Mr. White.
The men are not very anxious to begin hunting.
The sky was clear blue, with a few fleecy clouds drifting lazily past.
Just as we rounded the hill a horseman came toward us.
Mr. Stewart is the queerest man: instead of letting me enjoy the tableau, he solemnly drove on, saying he would not want any one gawking at him if he were the happy man.
I felt that it wouldn't be right.
Anyway, he couldn't urge Chub fast enough to prevent my seeing and hearing what I've told you. Besides that, I saw that Elizabeth's hat was on awry, her hair in disorder, and her eyes red.
It is cool up here, but going back across the desert it will be warm for a while yet.
Trout scurry up stream whenever we go near.
Yesterday we had pie made of wild currants; there are a powerful lot of them here.
Such jolting and sliding!
Mr. Struble has already killed a fine "spike" elk for camp eating.
It had been decided to go as far as we could with the wagons and then set camp; from there the hunters would ride horseback as far up as they could and then climb.
Although I seldom heard from Wallace, his letters were well worth waiting for, and I knew he was doing well.
I don't know what that is, but if it is a fossil he won't get it, for the soil is too deep.
They went to work setting up tents and unloading wagons with a hearty good-will.
CONEY,--
He looks to be about forty years old, but whoops and laughs like he was about ten.
We have to gather all day to get as much as we can eat, but they are delicious.
"Eighteen months ago father died,--gently went to sleep.
"I just didn't have the courage to.
She and her Wallace made a fine couple as they rode away in the golden September afternoon.
If he is alive he is honorable."
They are using the largest caliber sporting guns,--murderous-looking things.
We had our little home and father had his pension, and I was able to get a small school near us.
I am so glad we met them."
Well, we felt powerfully reduced in numbers, but about three o'clock that afternoon we came upon Mr. Struble and Mr. Haynes waiting beside the road for us.
I kept shutting my eyes, trying not to see the terrifying places, and opening them again to see the beauty spread everywhere, until Mr. Stewart said, "It must make you nervous to ride over mountain roads.
Then too the whole country is filled with those tiny little strawberries.
I fired one that Mr. Stewart carries, and it almost kicked my shoulder off.
Happiness had taken a new clutch upon my heart.
We are camped just on the edge of the pines.
We are in the last camp, right on the hunting ground, in the "midst of the fray." We have said good-bye to dear Elizabeth, and I must tell you about her because she really comes first.
Just beyond the ford we could see the game-warden's cabin, with the stars and stripes fluttering gayly in the fresh morning breeze.
The rest of us were mighty near as foolish as they.
I waited six months and then wrote to Wallace, but received no reply.
We camped in a bunch, and we have camp stoves so that in case of rain or snow we can stay indoors.
They had come to pilot us into camp, for there would be no road soon.
Just now we have a huge camp fire around which we sit in the evening, telling stories, singing, and eating nuts of the pinon pine.
The students are jolly, likable fellows, but they can talk of nothing but strata and formation.
We were very comfortably situated, and in time became really happy.
Poor father couldn't speak, but his eyes told me how grateful he was to stay.
He is so reserved that I felt that he was kind of out of place among the rest until I caught his cordial smile.
Dear Elizabeth, she was glad to get away, I suspect!
"Wallace may have changed his mind about me, but he would not marry without telling me.
After we had eaten, Elizabeth selected a few things from her trunk, and Mr. Stewart and Mr. White drove the buckboard across the river to leave the trunk in its new home.
Staying on the wagon occupied all my attention for a while.
While they were gone we helped Elizabeth to dress.
I looked back, expecting to see Elizabeth all smiles, but if you will believe me the foolish girl was sobbing as if her heart was broken.
A splendid fellow he was, manly strength and grace showing in every line.
We call the valley Paradise Valley because it is the horses' paradise.
Still, when they see elk every day it is a great temptation to try a shot.
She said she was not going to hunt; she told us we could give her a small piece of "ilk" and that would do; so we were rather surprised when she purchased two licenses, one a special, which would entitle her to a bull elk.
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy drew her head down upon her shoulder and was trying to quiet her.
I find I can't write to you as often as I at first intended; but I've a chance to-day, so I will not let it pass unused.
That is, all except Mr. Harkrudder, the picture man.
I begged to get off and walk; but as the whole way was carpeted by strawberry vines and there were late berries to tempt me to loiter, I had to stay on the wagon.
He rode down to meet us, to inspect our license and to tell us about our privileges and our duties as good woodsmen.
"But, darlint," said Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, "supposin' it's married your man is?"
CAMP CLOUDCREST, September 12, 1914.
They were going to start immediately after dinner, on horseback, for the county seat, to be married.
After a while I got on to the wagon with Mr. Stewart and told him Elizabeth's story so that he could inquire about the man.
Years ago, before I was through school, I was to have been married; but I lost my mother just then and was left the care of my paralytic father.
I want to live here always."
I could take care of father and teach also.
He is just the kind, quiet good mon that he has always been since I have known him.
I don't think I shall be able to tell you of any great exploits I make with the gun.
I should never have told you what I have, only I think I owe it to you, and it was easier because of the Holts.
Soon we came to the crossing on Green River.
ELIZABETH'S ROMANCE
I could bear it no longer and have come to see what has become of him.
Mr. Struble drove for Mrs. O'Shaughnessy, and I could hear her imploring all the saints to preserve us from instant death.
He is so slight that I don't see how he will stand the hard climbing, not to mention carrying the heavy gun.
To begin with, the morning we left the Holts, Elizabeth suggested that we three women ride in the buckboard, so I seated myself on a roll of bedding in the back part.
Several miles were passed when we came in sight of a beautiful cabin, half hidden in a grove of pines beyond the river.
I heard one of them say he would be glad when some one killed a bear, as he had heard they were fine eating, having strata of fat alternating with strata of lean.
Mr. Struble is the big man of the party; he is tall and strong and we find him very pleasant company. Then there is Dr. Teschall; he is a quiet fellow with an unexpected smile.
I know she would not shoot one of those big guns for a dozen elk; besides that, she is very tender-hearted and will never harm anything herself, although she likes to join our hunts.
Mr. Haynes is a quiet fellow, just interested in hunting.
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy said, "Tut, tut, 'tis nothing at all we've done. 'Tis a comfort you've been, hasn't she, Mrs. Stewart?"
We have a beautiful place: it is well sheltered; there is plenty of wood, water, and feed; and, looking eastward down the valley, snow-covered, crag-topped mountains delight the eye.
I think you must be tired of this letter, so I am going to say good-night, my friend.
Back of us rises a big pine-clad mountain; our tents are set under some big trees, on a small plateau, and right below us is a valley in which grass grows knee high and little streams come from every way.
So I fired my Krag, but next I found myself picking myself up and wondering who had struck me and for what.
There was the Wowzer over there--sleek, dapper, squirming in and out of the throng with the agility and stealth of a cat.
Jimmie Dale nodded, grinned back, emptied his glass, and dug for a coin.
THE LETTER WAS GONE!
Jimmie Dale the millionaire!
What irony!
Know de place?"
It had fallen at his feet--a white envelope.
Yes; he knew Chang Foo's--too well.
She was there--but he could not recognise a face that he had never seen!
Time!
A merciless rage, cold, deadly, settled upon him.
Jimmie Dale shook his head.
And she must be one of those around him--one of those crowding either the row of seats in front or behind, or one of those just passing in the aisle.
And then gradually impulse gave way to calmer reason, and he slowed his pace to a quick, less noticeable walk.
The letter!
"Sure, youse can!" returned the barkeeper heartily.
Others, in the same row of seats as his own, were impatiently waiting to get by him.
It had come at last--the pitcher had gone once too often to the well!
It had fallen at his feet as he had stooped over for his hat--but from just exactly what direction he could not tell.
There was not time.
Or would they carry in screaming headlines the announcement that the Gray Seal was caged and caught at last, and in three-inch type tell the world that the Gray Seal was--Jimmie Dale!
The words had formed themselves into a sort of singsong refrain that, for the last few days, had been running through his head.
And then, suddenly, he realised that he was attracting attention.
Indeed, it seemed a great length of time now since he had heard from her even in that way, though it was not so many days ago, after all.
What if--Jimmie Dale smiled whimsically.
"T'anks!" said Jimmie Dale gratefully, as he turned away.
With an effort, he choked back the bitter, impotent laugh that rose to his lips.
The Gray Seal!
Knowing he was there, she would be on her guard; but in the lobby, among the crowd and unaware of his presence, there was the possibility that, if he could reach the entrance ahead of her, she, too, might be talking and laughing as she left the theatre. Just a single word, just a tone--that was all he asked.
He went on again--his brain incessantly at work.
The second broke, and, with an exclamation of annoyance, he flung it away.
Aftermath!
The next moment he was lost in a jam of people in the lobby.
Hers!
He strained to catch, to individualise the tone sounds that floated in a medley about him.
Underground Chinatown--where a man's life was worth the price of an opium pill--or less!
The row of seats at whose end he stood was empty now, and, instead of stepping into the thronged aisle, he made his way across to the opposite side of the theatre.
The crush in the theatre lobby--the pushing, the jostling, the close contact--the Wowzer, the slickest, cleverest pickpocket in the United States!
It seemed that he could hear the screams of the newsboys now shouting their extras; it seemed that he could see the people, roused to frenzy, swarming in excited crowds, snatching at the papers; he seemed to hear the mob's shouts swell in execration, in exultation--it seemed as though all around him had gone mad.
If he could find the Wowzer, reach the man BEFORE THE LETTER WAS OPENED--Jimmie Dale's lips grew tighter.
"I just blew in from Chicago.
Life!
His eyes, eagerly, hungrily, critically, swept face after face. Which one was hers?
"Gimme a mug of suds," said Jimmie Dale, reaching for a match.
The Wowzer had probably not worked alone, and he and his pal, or pals, would certainly not remain uptown either to examine or divide their spoils--they would wait until they were safe somewhere in one of their hell holes on the East Side.
The mystery of the Gray Seal was solved!
Once in--where he had to go--and the chances were even, just even, that was all, that he would ever get out.
"I wonder if it's just a fluke--or something else?
There could be no doubt of that. Well, there would be a reckoning at least before the end!
Larry the Bat was well enough known to enter Chang Foo's unquestioned, and--but again he shook his head and went on.
And then a cafe, just ahead, making a corner, gave him the opportunity that he sought. Away from the entrance, on the side street, the brilliant lights from the windows shone out on a comparatively deserted pavement.
Two blocks east was that dark, narrow alleyway, that side door that made the entrance to the Sanctuary.
And now--there was the letter!
"Nix!" said Jimmie Dale.
People still passed by him--too many.
She was too clever, far too clever for that--she, too, would know that he could and would recognise her voice where he could recognise nothing else.
It was Jimmie Dale, Jimmie Dale, Jimmie, Dale, the millionaire, the lion of society--and there was ignominy for an honoured name, and shame and disaster and convict stripes and sullen penitentiary walls--or death!
A burst of applause echoed through the house, the orchestra was playing, the lights were on, seats banged, there was the bustle of the rising audience, the play was at an end--and for the life of him he could not have remembered a single line of the last act!
Time passed.
"Something up!
No; what was apparently the greater risk at least held out the only hope.
It was useless, futile, profitless, for the moment, at least, to disturb himself over his failure--there was the letter!
As for himself--that was different.
As Larry the Bat he knew every den and lair below the dead line, and he knew, too, the Wowzer's favourite haunts. There was yet a chance, only one in a thousand, it was true, almost too pitiful to be depended upon--but yet a chance.
Chang Foo's!
What then?
Once they knew the contents of that letter--what then?
There was no clew to HER identity in the letter; and where he, for months on end, with even more to work upon, had failed at every turn to trace her, there was little fear that any one else would have any better success.
Exactly how he had got there he could not have told; he had only a vague realisation that, following an intuitive sense of direction, he had lost not a second of time in making his way downtown.
Almost feverishly now he was seeking an opportunity to open and read it unobserved; an eagerness upon him that mingled exhilaration at the lure of danger with a sense of premonition that, irritably, inevitably was with him at moments such as these.
Jimmie Dale gritted his teeth.
What sudden emergency was the Gray Seal called upon to face this time--what role, unrehearsed, without warning, must he play?
The other had paused at the corner and was staring down the street.
"I guess youse won't bump yer head none gettin' around inside."
They were talking, laughing around him.
What new venture did the night hold in store for him?
She was safe.
It was a voice now, her voice, that he was listening for; but, though it seemed that every faculty was strained and intent upon that one effort, his eyes, too, had in no degree relaxed their vigilance--and once, half grimly, half sardonically, he smiled to himself.
There would be an unexpected aftermath to this exodus of expensively gowned and bejewelled women with their prosperous, well-groomed escorts!
A block down, he turned from Broadway out of the theatre crowds that streamed in both directions past him.
The aisle at his elbow was already crowded with people on their way out. Jimmie Dale stooped down mechanically to reach for his hat beneath his seat--and the next instant he was standing up, staring wildly into the faces around him.
The second man was even better known than the first; there was not a crook in New York but would side-step Lannigan of headquarters, and do it with amazing celerity--if he could!
Used to know de Wowzer dere.
With a muttered apology, Jimmie Dale raised the seat of his chair, allowing these latter to pass him--and then, slipping the letter into his pocketbook, he snatched up his hat from the seat rack.
The sentence was never finished.
Jimmie Dale took a box of matches from his pocket.
The street seemed to rock about him--and he stared, like a man stricken, white to the lips, ahead of him.
"Forget it!" observed the barkeeper cordially.
It was perhaps fifteen minutes since he had discovered the loss of the letter, and he was walking now through the heart of the Bowery.
She, whom he would have given his life to know, for whom indeed he risked his life every hour of the twenty-four, was close to him now, within reach--and as far removed as though a thousand miles separated them.
His mind obsessed, Jimmie Dale's physical acts were almost wholly mechanical.
THAT was the chance!
For a moment he could have laughed aloud in a sort of ghastly, defiant mockery--he himself had predicted an unexpected aftermath, had he not!
A felon's death--the chair!
God, if he could get that letter before it was opened--before they KNEW!
Buy them off for a larger amount than the many thousands offered for the capture of the Gray Seal?
Hers!
"Possibly, Mr. Spilett," replied the sailor, "but that is how I imagine him!"
I have, therefore, reason to believe that our guns will bear without risk the expansion of the pyroxyle gas, and will give excellent results."
No matter!
"Believe me, Pencroft," replied the engineer, "it would be better not to have to make the experiment."
"That's not bad, what you say, Neb," observed Pencroft.
Pencroft looked at his companions one after the other.
"I am of Neb's opinion," said Gideon Spilett, "but that is no reason for not attempting the adventure.
How many hours he had spent, in rubbing, greasing, and polishing them, and in cleaning the mechanism!
Was it he who threw Top out of the lake, and killed the dugong?
At present, the colonists had reason on their side against Pencroft.
Such a shot, the honor of which belonged to his dear boy.
His rough nature could not allow that they ought to come to terms with the rascals who had landed on the island with Bob Harvey's accomplices, the murderers of the crew of the "Speedy," and he looked upon them as wild beasts which ought to be destroyed without delay and without remorse.
We have contracted a debt, and I hope that we shall one day pay it."
They were not to attack them, but were to be on their guard.
So, then, all was explained by the submarine explosion of this torpedo. Cyrus Harding could not be mistaken, as, during the war of the Union, he had had occasion to try these terrible engines of destruction.
Therefore it is, thanks to him, that I have become a man again.
"I have been one of those jaguars, Mr. Pencroft.
"Isn't what they have done already enough?" asked Pencroft, who did not understand these scruples.
Perhaps he is alone. Perhaps he is suffering.
Whatever you do will be best; when you wish me to join you in your researches, I am ready to follow you.
No, I will never forget him!"
"We will begin our researches as soon as possible.
"My opinion," said Pencroft, "is that, whoever he may be, he is a brave man, and he has my esteem!"
Was it not their interest in the situation in which they found themselves to begin a new life?
"Be it so," answered Harding, "but that is not an answer, Pencroft."
"You are right in speaking thus, my dear Cyrus," replied Gideon Spilett. "Yes, there is an almost all-powerful being, hidden in some part of the island, and whose influence has been singularly useful to our colony. I will add that the unknown appears to possess means of action which border on the supernatural, if in the events of practical life the supernatural were recognizable.
"But, Pencroft," answered Spilett, "you are describing a picture of the Creator."
I, too, as you said, have a debt of gratitude to pay him.
These pirates are regular jaguars, and it seems to me we ought not to hesitate to treat them as such!
"I thank you, Ayrton," answered Cyrus Harding, "but I should like a more direct answer to the question I put to you.
"I believe so.
The reporter's reasoning was just, and every one felt it to be so.
Without that how are we to know to what distance we can send one of those pretty shot with which we are provided?"
Before putting their project of exploring the yet unknown parts of the island into execution, they wished to get all possible work finished.
And with a slow step he walked away.
Would they be right in the future?
The second gun was pointed at the rocks at the end of Flotsam Point, and the shot striking a sharp rock nearly three miles from Granite House, made it fly into splinters.
The "Speedy" had not been able to withstand a torpedo that would have destroyed an ironclad as easily as a fishing-boat!
You wish to be generous to those villains!
"Try them, Pencroft," replied the engineer.
"Yes," rejoined Cyrus Harding, "if the intervention of a human being is not more questionable for us, I agree that he has at his disposal means of action beyond those possessed by humanity.
"And before hunting them mercilessly, you would not wait until they had committed some fresh act of hostility against us?"
From this height they commanded all Union Bay.
"Captain," said Pencroft one day, it was the 8th of November, "now that our fortifications are finished, it would be a good thing if we tried the range of our guns."
"And you, my boy, give us your opinion," said the engineer, turning to Herbert.
There is a mystery still, but if we discover the man, the mystery will be discovered also.
"And you, Ayrton?" asked the engineer.
It was also the time for collecting the various vegetables from the Tabor Island plants.
"Quite my opinion."
"Pencroft," said the engineer, "you have always shown much deference to my advice; will you, in this matter, yield to me?"
Pencroft only was prouder than he!
It is unnecessary to say that the four cannons were in perfect order. Since they had been taken from the water, the sailor had bestowed great care upon them.
"Well," said the sailor, "what ought to be done with regard to those six villains who are roaming about the island?
It was Herbert who had pointed this gun and fired it, and very proud he was of his first shot.
The shot, passing over the islet, fell into the sea at a distance which could not be calculated with exactitude.
Who this beneficent stranger is, whose intervention has, so fortunately for us, been manifested on many occasions, I cannot imagine. What his object can be in acting thus, in concealing himself after rendering us so many services, I cannot understand: But his services are not the less real, and are of such a nature that only a man possessed of prodigious power, could render them.
As to the guns obtained from the brig, they were pretty pieces of ordnance, which, at Pencroft's entreaty, were hoisted by means of tackle and pulleys, right up into Granite House; embrasures were made between the windows, and the shining muzzles of the guns could soon be seen through the granite cliff.
What do you think, Ayrton?" added Pencroft, turning to his companion.
Whether we find this mysterious being or not, we shall at least have fulfilled our duty towards him."
Besides, we are six also."
Speak, therefore."
All was stowed away, and happily there was no want of room in Granite House, in which they might have housed all the treasures of the island.
"We shall be a great deal more certain of that when we have tried them!" answered Pencroft.
"No doubt because it was not their interest to do it.
Hitherto they had only wild beasts to guard against, and now six convicts of the worst description, perhaps, were roaming over their island.
Are we to leave them to overrun our forests, our fields, our plantations?
Ayrton is indebted to him as much as we are, for, if it was the stranger who saved me from the waves after the fall from the balloon, evidently it was he who wrote the document, who placed the bottle in the channel, and who has made known to us the situation of our companion.
If they each lay hid in a corner, and each fired at one of us, they would soon be masters of the colony!"
"Very well, wait, and we will not attack them unless we are attacked first."
It was like a little Gibraltar, and any vessel anchored off the islet would inevitably be exposed to the fire of this aerial battery.
It was he, it could be only he who must have come to Tabor Island, who found there the wretch you knew, and who made known to you that there was an unfortunate man there to be saved.
Therefore, whoever he may be, whether shipwrecked, or exiled on our island, we shall be ungrateful, if we think ourselves freed from gratitude towards him.
What is your opinion on the matter?"
Perhaps he has a life to be renewed.
The third shot, aimed this time at the downs forming the upper side of Union Bay, struck the sand at a distance of four miles, then having ricocheted: was lost in the sea in a cloud of spray.
"I will do as you please, Captain Harding," answered the sailor, who was not at all convinced.
Very well; I hope we mayn't repent it!"
I would rather bite my tongue off than cause Ayrton any pain!
"Master," then said Neb, "my idea is, that we may search as long as we like for this gentleman whom you are talking about, but that we shall not discover him till he pleases."
He has as much right to speak here as any one!"
"They may adopt other sentiments!" said Harding, "and perhaps repent."
All the pirates in the Pacific have only to present themselves before Granite House!
We will search into its most secret recesses, and will hope that our unknown friend will pardon us in consideration of our intentions!"
But to return to the question.
"Well, well!" replied Pencroft, whom no reasoning could have convinced. "Let us leave these good people to do what they like, and don't think anything more about them!"
It seems to me that these ruffians have no right to any pity, and that we ought to rid the island of them as soon as possible."
For the fourth piece Cyrus Harding slightly increased the charge, so as to try its extreme range.
"He became an honest man again!"
Chapter 5
"Yes," said Gideon Spilett, "but his reserve does him honor, and it is right to respect the feeling which he has about his sad past."
The products of the colony were there, methodically arranged, and in a safe place, as may be believed, sheltered as much from animals as from man.
She never called her son by any name but John; 'love,' and 'dear,' and such like terms, were reserved for Fanny.
'They are very curious places,' said Mrs. Hale, 'but there is so much noise and dirt always.
Have you seen any of our factories?
'Nonsense, John.
'John always speaks as if I fancied I was ill, and I am sure I never do fancy any such thing.
Mr. Thornton looked annoyed.
'Oh, but I will send her home in a cab.
Make haste and put your things on.'
'She is not made of the same stuff as you are, John.
Mrs. Thornton went on after a moment's pause:
She will be able to suggest something, perhaps--won't you, Fan?'
Now as for Fanny there, a little hardship would do her good.'
She did not often make calls; and when she did, it was in heavy state that she went through her duties.
our magnificent warehouses?'
Their treatment in the present work is necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and is intended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer solutions.
VII.
Finally, the last chapter attempts to place the fact of the life of the Spirit in its relation to the social order, and to indicate some of the results which might follow upon its healthy corporate development.
It is superfluous to point out that each of these subjects needs, at least, a volume to itself: and to some of them I shall hope to return in the future.
PREFACE
No conditions being attached to this appointment, it seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as possible in the language of the moment, some of the implicits which I believe to underlie human effort and achievement in the domain of the spiritual life.
My aim here is the more general one, of indicating first the characteristic experiences--discoverable within all great religions--which justify or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and the way in which these experiences may be accommodated to the world-view of the modern man: and next, the nature of that spiritual life as it appears in human history.
For information on these matters they must go to larger and more technical works.
My numerous debts to previous writers are obvious, and for the most part are acknowledged in the footnotes; the greatest, to the works of Baron Von Hugely, will be clear to all students of his writings.
For the same reason, no attention has been given to those abnormal experiences and states of consciousness, which, too often regarded as specially "mystical," are now recognized by all competent students as representing the unfortunate accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirituality.
Readers of these pages will find nothing about trances, Ecstasies and other rare psychic phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and sometimes only disease.
The succeeding sections of the book treat in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems by mental analysis--a process which need not necessarily be conducted from the standpoint of a degraded materialism--and by recent work on the psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion.
Thanks are also due to my old friend William Scott Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave me much generous and valuable advice.
Since my subject is not the splendor of historic sanctity but the normal life of the Spirit, as it may be and is lived in the here-and-now, I have done my best to describe the character and meaning of this life in the ordinary terms of present day thought, and with little or no use of the technical language of mysticism.
Part of Chapter IV has already appeared in "The Fortnightly Review" under the title "Suggestion and Religious Experience." Chapter VIII incorporates several passages from an article on "Sources of Power in Human Life" originally contributed to the "Hubert Journal." These are reprinted by kind permission of the editors concerned.
This book owes its origin to the fact that in the autumn of 1921 the authorities of Manchester College, Oxford invited me to deliver the inaugural course of a lectureship in religion newly established under the will of the late Professor Upton.
When Margaret had been here before, she had brought down with her a great box of books, recommended by masters or governess, and had found the summer's day all too short to get through the reading she had to do before her return to town.
Thomson's Seasons, Hayley's Cowper, Middleton's Cicero, were by far the lightest, newest, and most amusing.
Margaret was once more in her morning dress, travelling quietly home with her father, who had come up to assist at the wedding.
Her out-of-doors life was perfect.
She was so happy out of doors, at her father's side, that she almost danced; and with the soft violence of the west wind behind her, as she crossed some heath, she seemed to be borne onwards, as lightly and easily as the fallen leaf that was wafted along by the autumnal breeze.
HEMANS.
ROSES AND THORNS
Her in-doors life had its drawbacks.
She was ready with a bright smile, in which there was not a trace of fatigue, to greet her father when he awakened.
Her keen enjoyment of every sensuous pleasure, was balanced finely, if not overbalanced, by her conscious pride in being able to do without them all, if need were.
I'm glad we don't visit them.
'It is undoubtedly one of the most out-of-the-way places in England,' said Mrs. Hale, in one of her plaintive moods.
The bones of his face were plainly to be seen--too plainly for beauty, if his features had been less finely cut; as it was, they had a grace if not a comeliness of their own.
Its people were her people.
'Very well.
And when the brilliant fourteen fine days of October came on, her cares were all blown away as lightly as thistledown, and she thought of nothing but the glories of the forest.
She took her mind away with a wrench from the recollection of the past to the bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future.
Her mind and body ached now with the recollection of all she had done and said within the last forty-eight hours.
In one of the letters she had received before leaving Harley Street, her father had told her that they had heard from Frederick; he was still at Rio, and very well in health, and sent his best love to her; which was dry bones, but not the living intelligence she longed for.
Margaret could not help believing that there had been some late intelligence of Frederick, unknown to her mother, which was making her father anxious and uneasy.
In the latter half of September, the autumnal rains and storms came on, and Margaret was obliged to remain more in the house than she had hitherto done.
Her eyes began to see, not visions of what had been, but the sight actually before her; her dear father leaning back asleep in the railway carriage.
The face was in repose; but it was rather rest after weariness, than the serene calm of the countenance of one who led a placid, contented life.
I wish I knew all about it.
His face returned into its lines of habitual anxiety.
The fern-harvest was over, and now that the rain was gone, many a deep glade was accessible, into which Margaret had only peeped in July and August weather.
I am so glad I am going home, to be at hand to comfort him and mamma.
It was the latter part of July when Margaret returned home.
Coach-building is a trade all the same, and I think a much more useless one than that of butchers or bakers.
'No!
I don't like shoppy people.
'Oh! if Frederick had but been a clergyman, instead of going into the navy, and being lost to us all!
But the cloud never comes in that quarter of the horizon from which we watch for it.
This marring of the peace of home, by long hours of discontent, was what Margaret was unprepared for.
She remained with her, and was devoted to her interests; always considering herself as the good and protecting fairy, whose duty it was to baffle the malignant giant, Mr. Hale.
'But the Gormans were neither butchers nor bakers, but very respectable coach-builders.'
He would be depressed for many days after witnessing a death-bed, or hearing of any crime.
His spirits were always tender and gentle, readily affected by any small piece of intelligence concerning the welfare of others.
His blue-black hair was grey now, and lay thinly over his brows.
'You must not be so fastidious, Margaret, dear!' said her mother, secretly thinking of a young and handsome Mr. Gorman whom she had once met at Mr. Hume's.
Helstone was at some distance from any neighbours of their own standard of cultivation.
I never understood it from Aunt Shaw; I only knew he could not come back to England because of that terrible affair. Poor dear papa! how sad he looks!
He had a trick of half-opening his mouth as if to speak, which constantly unsettled the form of the lips, and gave the face an undecided expression.
I'm sure you don't want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you, mamma?'
Accordingly, she was busy preparing her board one morning, when Sarah, the housemaid, threw wide open the drawing-room door and announced, 'Mr.
The book-shelves did not afford much resource. Margaret told her mother every particular of her London life, to all of which Mrs. Hale listened with interest, sometimes amused and questioning, at others a little inclined to compare her sister's circumstances of ease and comfort with the narrower means at Helstone vicarage.
He smiled back again, but faintly, as if it were an unusual exertion.
Oh! how tired I used to be of the drives every day in Aunt Shaw's carriage, and how I longed to walk!'
But the evenings were rather difficult to fill up agreeably.
Master Frederick had been her favorite and pride; and it was with a little softening of her dignified look and manner, that she went in weekly to arrange the chamber as carefully as if he might be coming home that very evening.
This did good for a time; but when the autumn drew on, and the weather became more changeable, her mother's idea of the unhealthiness of the place increased; and she repined even more frequently that her husband, who was more learned than Mr. Hume, a better parish priest than Mr. Houldsworth, should not have met with the preferment that these two former neighbours of theirs had done.
But now Margaret noticed an absence of mind, as if his thoughts were pre-occupied by some subject, the oppression of which could not be relieved by any daily action, such as comforting the survivors, or teaching at the school in hope of lessening the evils in the generation to come.
With the healthy shame of a child, she blamed herself for her keenness of sight, in perceiving that all was not as it should be there.
If Mrs. Shaw had guessed at the real reason why Mrs. Hale did not accompany her husband, she would have showered down gowns upon her; but it was nearly twenty years since Mrs. Shaw had been the poor, pretty Miss Beresford, and she had really forgotten all grievances except that of the unhappiness arising from disparity of age in married life, on which she could descant by the half-hour.
But he had the same large, soft eyes as his daughter,--eyes which moved slowly and almost grandly round in their orbits, and were well veiled by their transparent white eyelids. Margaret was more like him than like her mother.
Her mother--her mother always so kind and tender towards her--seemed now and then so much discontented with their situation; thought that the bishop strangely neglected his episcopal duties, in not giving Mr. Hale a better living; and almost reproached her husband because he could not bring himself to say that he wished to leave the parish, and undertake the charge of a larger.
She knew, and had rather revelled in the idea, that she should have to give up many luxuries, which had only been troubles and trammels to her freedom in Harley Street.
Now there were only the well-bound little-read English Classics, which were weeded out of her father's library to fill up the small book-shelves in the drawing-room.
Margaret was painfully struck by the worn, anxious expression; and she went back over the open and avowed circumstances of her father's life, to find the cause for the lines that spoke so plainly of habitual distress and depression.
CHAPTER II
I call mine a very comprehensive taste; I like all people whose occupations have to do with land; I like soldiers and sailors, and the three learned professions, as they call them.
If the look on her face was, in general, too dignified and reserved for one so young, now, talking to her father, it was bright as the morning,--full of dimples, and glances that spoke of childish gladness, and boundless hope in the future.
And walk Margaret did, in spite of the weather.
At one time they had tried backgammon as a resource; but as Mr. Hale grew to take an increasing interest in his school and his parishioners, he found that the interruptions which arose out of these duties were regarded as hardships by his wife, not to be accepted as the natural conditions of his profession, but to be regretted and struggled against by her as they severally arose.
He would sigh aloud as he answered, that if he could do what he ought in little Helstone, he should be thankful; but every day he was more overpowered; the world became more bewildering.
I think we are far better off, knowing only cottagers and labourers, and people without pretence.'
Mr. Hale was one of the most delightful preachers she had ever heard, and a perfect model of a parish priest.
So he withdrew, while the children were yet young, into his library, to spend his evenings (if he were at home), in reading the speculative and metaphysical books which were his delight.
What was she thinking of as she wound up the hill?
By the second Sunday in October this view of the case had become so clear to Adam that he was already on his way to Snowfield, on horseback this time, for his hours were precious now, and he had borrowed Jonathan Burge's good nag for the journey.
He came within three paces of her and then said, "Dinah!" She started without looking round, as if she connected the sound with no place.
Dinah could not be displeased with him for it.
If she had not felt this, she would surely have written to him to give him some comfort; but it appeared that she held it right to discourage him.
Tender and deep as his love for Hetty had been--so deep that the roots of it would never be torn away--his love for Dinah was better and more precious to him, for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow.
The scene looked less harsh in the soft October sunshine than it had in the eager time of early spring, and the one grand charm it possessed in common with all wide-stretching woodless regions--that it filled you with a new consciousness of the overarching sky--had a milder, more soothing influence than usual, on this almost cloudless day.
I'll wait patiently."
And I've no right to be impatient and interrupting her with my wishes.
And this moment, now you are with me, and I feel that our hearts are filled with the same love.
And they walked on so in silence, while the warm tears fell.
That was Adam's wise resolution, and it throve excellently for the first two or three weeks on the nourishment it got from the remembrance of Dinah's confession that Sunday afternoon.
Adam was no longer so confident as he had been.
"It's like as if it was a new strength to me," he said to himself, "to love her and know as she loves me.
The weeks were unusually long: Dinah must surely have had more than enough time to make up her mind.
My soul is so knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you.
The Meeting on the Hill
Other folks were not created for my sake, that I should think all square when things turn out well for me."
Adam was glad, for, with the fine instinct of a lover, he felt that it would be best for her to hear his voice before she saw him.
But that sort of glow dies out: memory gets sadly diluted with time, and is not strong enough to revive us.
"Yet," he thought, "she's not one to be overstartled; she's always so calm and quiet, as if she was prepared for anything."
His feeling towards Dinah, the hope of passing his life with her, had been the distant unseen point towards which that hard journey from Snowfield eighteen months ago had been leading him.
We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.
He began to fear that perhaps Dinah's old life would have too strong a grasp upon her for any new feeling to triumph.
She was so accustomed to think of impressions as purely spiritual monitions that she looked for no material visible accompaniment of the voice.
ADAM understood Dinah's haste to go away, and drew hope rather than discouragement from it.
He sat up late one night to write her a letter, but the next morning he burnt it, afraid of its effect.
He must ask Dinah not to leave him in painful doubt longer than was needful.
But towards the middle of October the resolution began to dwindle perceptibly, and showed dangerous symptoms of exhaustion.
There is a wonderful amount of sustenance in the first few words of love.
And if I were capable of that narrow-sighted joy in Adam's behalf, I should still know he was not the man to feel it for himself. He would have shaken his head at such a sentiment and said, "Evil's evil, and sorrow's sorrow, and you can't alter it's natur by wrapping it up in other words.
But what harm could he do by going to Snowfield?
She must surely expect that he would go before long.
You perceive how it was: Adam was hungering for the sight of Dinah, and when that sort of hunger reaches a certain stage, a lover is likely to still it though he may have to put his future in pawn.
The starfish is one of the most deadly enemies of these bivalves.
Simmer till the eels are tender, but do not break the fish.
Take it off the fire, strain it again, and add the remainder of the stock with the seasoning and mace.
Put in the fish, but do not let the soup boil, after it has been rubbed through the tammy.
Make the forcemeat balls with the remainder of the lobster, seasoned with mace, pepper, and salt, adding a little flour, and a few bread crumbs; moisten them with the egg, heat them in the soup, and serve.
PRAWN SOUP.
If not thick enough, put in a little butter and flour.
Simmer for 2 hours; skim the liquor carefully, and strain it. When a richer stock is wanted, fry the vegetables and fish before adding the water.
The Isle of Wight is famous for shrimps, where they are potted; but both the prawns and the shrimps vended in London, are too much salted for the excellence of their natural flavour to be preserved.
It is to be found on most of the sandy shores of Europe.
Put in the oysters, stir well, but do not let it boil, and serve very hot.
OYSTER SOUP.
FISH STOCK.
When it is well cooked, put in a few picked prawns; let them get thoroughly hot, and serve.
THE CRAYFISH.--This is one of those fishes that were highly esteemed by the ancients.
FISH SOUPS.
LOBSTER SOUP.
Take them out carefully, mix the flour smoothly to a batter with the cream, bring it to a boil, pour over the eels, and serve.
More water would kill them, because the large quantity of air they require necessitates the water in which they are kept, to be continually renewed.
Give one boil up, at the same time adding the tails cut in pieces.
The Greeks preferred it when brought from Alexandria, and the Romans ate it boiled with cumin, and seasoned with pepper and other condiments.
SEASON OF OYSTERS.--From April and May to the end of July, oysters are said to be sick; but by the end of August they become healthy, having recovered from the effects of spawning. When they are not in season, the males have a black, and the females a milky substance in the gill.
Take a pint of the stock, put in the beards and the liquor, which must be carefully strained, and simmer for 1/2 an hour.
If necessary, add seasoning.
From some lines of Oppian, it would appear that the ancients were ignorant that the oyster is generally found adhering to rocks.
In the distance I saw a sapphire spark; knew it for Norhala's home.
His voice deepened.
"That passed," he went on, unnoticing.
"Wait," said Ventnor, and caught him by the arm as wrathfully, blindedly, he strove against the force that held him.
My gaze fell again upon the red brand.
She tightened her grasp upon dreaming Ruth; motioned us to go within. We passed, silently; behind us she came, followed by three of the great globes, by a pair of her tetrahedrons.
"It had no mission; it wasn't at all out to do any reforming; it wasn't in the least concerned in rectifying any of the inaccuracies of the Other.
Spheres and pyramids twinkled at us, guarding the silken pile whereon Ruth lay asleep--like some enchanted princess.
"But Martin," I stammered, fighting against choking, intolerable terror, "there was something else.
I shall leave these to guard you and obey you."
The blue bubble was close; now it curved below us.
My reaction grew; the pity long withheld racing through me linked with a burning anger, a hatred for this woman who had been the directing soul of that catastrophe.
"I do not forget," he said.
The drums of Doom!
But its rolling hills were leveled, its mountains were ground and shaped into cold and polished symbols--geometric, fashioned.
Motionless stood Norhala; and as motionless Ruth.
She had crushed them within the rock--even as she had promised.
"But in those caverns, under countless orbs of many colored lights"--again the thrill of amaze shook me--"they grew.
But in the eyes of Ruth was none of this--sternly, coldly triumphant, indifferent to its piteousness as Norhala herself, she scanned the waste that less than an hour since had been a place of living beauty.
"I cannot remember; it eludes me.
And that picture passed."
The very Polar ice was chiseled.
Again the Thing trembled.
"I seemed to draw closer to it.
After all, those who had been destroyed so ruthlessly could not ALL have been wholly evil.
The tower that upheld Ruth and Norhala swayed, bent over the gap between us, touched the top on which we rode.
"Sister!" she whispered.
The serpent shape flashed toward us; it vanished beneath, merging into the waiting Thing.
Within the Thing under us a mighty pulse began to throb, accelerating rapidly to the rhythm of that clamorous roll.
A thrill of amazement passed through me; fantasy all this might be but--how, if so, had he gotten that last thought?
Yet mother and blossoming maid, youth and oldster, all the pageant of humanity within the great walls were now but lines within the stone.
Or if there be those in the world from which you came that you would have slain, then you and I shall go forth with our companies and stamp them out--even as I did these."
"Drums," whispered Ventnor.
Crashed down upon us an abrupt crescendo of the distant drumming; peremptory, commanding.
Steadily we gained upon the pyramid.
And then I saw that over every facet patterns were traced; gigantic symmetrical designs; mathematical hieroglyphs.
What are They?"
They were, in untold numbers--These!"
There WAS something--a shadow upon them, a menace.
Under me, the throbbing turned to an uneasy churning, a ferment.
I looked up at the bulk that had carried us.
Higher we rose; the three of us now upon the flat top of a tower upon whose counterpart fifty feet away and facing the homeward path, Ruth and Norhala stood with white arms interlaced.
And as he struggled the Thing we rode halted.
The drumming died as I listened--fearfully.
"Drums?" muttered Drake.
Norhala--you did well to slay them!"
I saw Norhala draw herself up, sharply; stand listening and alert.
In the patterns was an appalling harmony--as though all the laws from those which guide the atom to those which direct the cosmos were there resolved into completeness--totalled.
And when she spoke the golden voice held more than returning echoes of the far-away, faint chimings.
"Ruth!" cried Drake--and sprang toward them.
Yet it is because I remember but a little of it that I say those drums may not be--taps--for us."
Only now and then it took note of the deplorable differences between the worlds it saw and its own impeccably ordered and tidy temple with its equally tidy servitors.
The Thing split in two.
The Thing that carried us trembled--the sound died away.
I had been right--built it was only of globe and pyramid; an inconceivably grotesque shape, it hung over us.
It swelled to a crescendo; abruptly ceased.
The drums of Destiny!
Great gray eyes wide, filled with incredulous wonder, stunned disbelief, Norhala for an instant faltered.
"They tortured him," Ruth's voice was tense, bitter; she spoke in Persian--for Norhala's benefit I thought then, not guessing a deeper reason.
"There were three--visions, revelations--I know not what to call them. And though each seemed equally real, of two of them, only one, I think, can be true; and of the third--that may some time be true but surely is not yet."
Man and tree, woman and flower, babe and bud, palace, temple and home--Norhala had stamped flat.
"It is done," she said.
Or if it is your wish they shall go back to their world and I will guard them to its gates.
The sapphire marble became a sapphire ball, a great globe.
Louder the roaring grew.
"I suppose I ought to be grateful--although their intentions were not exactly--therapeutic--"
The sapphire spark had grown to a glimmering azure marble.
A geometric thought of the Great Cause, of God, if you will, made material.
It was"--his tone was half whimsical, half apologetic--"it was that this jeweled world was ridden by some mathematical god, driving it through space, noting occasionally with amused tolerance the very bad arithmetic of another Deity the reverse of mathematical--a more or less haphazard Deity, the god, in fact, of us and the things we call living.
Gently we were lifted down; were set before its portal.
What did they do to you?"
"Afraid--for you!"
Now you and I shall dwell together in peace--sister.
"At least not all do I forget of what I saw during that time when I seemed an atom outside space--as I told you, or think I told you, speaking with unthinkable effort through lips that seemed eternities away from me, the atom, who strove to open them.
"I am afraid, little sister," she whispered for the third time.
Norhala--I am tired.
"Martin--what do you mean?"
"And me--me"--she raised little clenched hands--"me they stripped like a slave.
A new birth of Earth and the passing of man?
And there're just as many chances for a fellow as ever, but they're a little gun shy, and you can't catch them by any such coarse method as putting salt on their tails.
That sporty way of answering, as if he was closing a bet, made me surer than ever that he was not cut out for a butcher.
That was just before the general adoption of typewriters, when they were still in the experimental stage.
That was so like Jim that I just laughed at first; besides, that sort of advertising was a pretty new thing then, and I was one of the old-timers who didn't take any stock in it.
It takes doctors, lawyers, engineers, poets, and I don't know what, to run the business, and I reckon that improvements which call for parsons will be creeping in next.
He kept me between a chill and a sweat all the time.
"Hello, Jim," I called; "do you still want that job?"
That was a good many years ago when the house was a much smaller affair. Jim's father had a lot of money till he started out to buck the universe and corner wheat.
I thought I'd find out if he really was so red-hot to work as he pretended to be; besides, I felt that perhaps I hadn't treated the boy just right, as I had delivered quite a jag of that wheat to his father myself.
Thirty years ago, you could take an old muzzle-loader and knock over plenty of ducks in the city limits, and Chicago wasn't Cook County then, either.
The fellow who hasn't had the training may be just as smart, but he's apt to paw the air when he's reaching for ideas.
It seemed there was nothing you could cook that didn't need a dash of it.
"Well, I tell you how it is, Jim," I said, looking up at him--he was one of those husky, lazy-moving six-footers--"I don't see any chance in the office, but I understand they can use another good, strong man in one of the loading gangs."
Used to call by about twice a week to find out if anything had turned up.
But habits of thought ain't the only thing a fellow picks up at college.
So I think you'll find it safe to go short a little on the frills of education; if you want them bad enough you'll find a way to pick them up later, after business hours.
There's nothing criminal about either, but I don't hire sporty clerks at all, and the only part of the premises on which cigarette smoking is allowed is the fertilizer factory.
Naturally, a young man who expects to hold his own when he is thrown in with a lot of men like these must be as clean and sharp as a hound's tooth, or some other fellow's simply going to eat him up.
It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it.
I noticed, too, when you were home Easter, that you were running to sporty clothes and cigarettes.
And he found them.
I thought that would settle Jim and let me out, for it's no joke lugging beef, or rolling barrels and tierces a hundred yards or so to the cars. But Jim came right back at me with, "Done.
I remember one picture he got out showing sixteen cows standing between something that looked like a letter-press, and telling how every pound or so of Graham's Extract contained the juice squeezed from a herd of steers.
The fact was that I didn't think a fellow with Jim's training would be much good, anyhow.
But I told him, and off he started hot-foot to find the foreman.
There's a chance for everything you have learned, from Latin to poetry, in the packing business, though we don't use much poetry here except in our street-car ads., and about the only time our products are given Latin names is when the State Board of Health condemns them.
That was where I caught the connection between a college education and business.
Seemed as if I couldn't get away from Graham's Extract, and whenever I saw it I gagged, for I knew it was costing me money that wasn't coming back; but every time I started to draw in my horns Jim talked to me, and showed me where there was a fortune waiting for me just around the corner.
But Jim hung on--said he'd taken a fancy to the house, and wanted to work for it.
Then it was all up with Mister Jim's job again.
It didn't take him long to decide that the Lord would attend to keeping up the visible supply of poetry, and that he had better turn his attention to the stocks of mess pork.
But old Durham found out what every one learns who gets his ambitions mixed up with number two red--that there's a heap of it lying around loose in the country.
The old man was mighty proud of Jim.
We didn't have to know fractions to figure out our profits.
Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow.
I have every confidence in your ultimate good sense, and I guess you'll see the point without my elaborating with a meat ax my reasons for thinking that you've had enough college for the present.
And the boy took all the fancy courses and trimmings at college.
There are sixteen ounces to the pound still, but two of them are wrapping paper in a good many stores.
Finally, after about a month of this, he wore me down so that I stopped him one day as he was passing me on the street.
You can get them still, but you've got to go to Kankakee and take a hammerless along.
Said we ought to go for the consumer by advertising, and make the trade come to us, instead of chasing it up.
I see you've been elected President of your class.
You're not going to be a poet or a professor, but a packer, and the place to take a post-graduate course for that calling is in the packing-house.
I suppose you're asking why, if I'm so hot for education, I'm against this post-graduate course.
I simply mention this in passing.
I forgot all about Jim until about three months later, when his name was handed up to me for a new place and a raise in pay.
What we used to throw away is our profit.
I told him I was sorry, but I couldn't do anything for him then; that we were letting men go, but I'd keep him in mind, and so on.
I didn't expect you to carry off all the education in sight--I knew you'd leave a little for the next fellow. But I wanted you to form good mental habits, just as I want you to have clean, straight physical ones.
The bears did quick work and kept the cash wheat coming in so lively that one settling day half a dozen of us had to get under the market to keep it from going to everlasting smash.
I'm glad the boys aren't down on you, but while the most popular man in his class isn't always a failure in business, being as popular as that takes up a heap of time.
Of course he claimed a raise again for effecting such a saving, and we just had to allow it.
The Lord let us in on the ground floor, gave us corner lots, and then started in to improve the adjacent property.
The first thing I knew he was sicking the agents for the new typewriting machine on to me, and he kept them pounding away until they had made me give them a trial.
He broke out in a new place every day, and every time he broke out it cost the house money.
But Jim just kept plugging away at me between trips, until finally I took him off the road and told him to go ahead and try it in a small way.
Graham's Extract started out by being something that you could make beef-tea out of--that was all.
Jim kept at this for three or four months, until his feet began to hurt him, I guess, and then he was out of a job again.
It was just as I thought.
It seems he had heard something of a new machine for registering the men, that did away with most of the timekeepers except the fellows who watched the machines, and he kept after the Superintendent until he got him to put them in.
Jim made two trips without selling enough to keep them working overtime at the factory, and then he came into my office with a long story about how we were doing it all wrong.
So I raised his salary, and made him an assistant timekeeper and checker.
The first are all theory; the second are all practice.
And I'm still sitting up and taking nourishment.
For right there the old lady got up with a mighty set expression around her lips and marched out, muttering that it was just as she had thought all along--Bud wasn't there.
But next day she came again and paid down four bits, and Clytie reckoned that that ought to fetch Bud sure.
First and last, a good many men have gone gunning for me, but they've always planned the obsequies before they caught the deceased.
So I threw in half a dozen cows to provide the refreshments.
Had he joined the church before he started?
Graham's Extract: It Makes the Weak Strong.
She was mighty grateful, you bet, and I didn't see her again for a fortnight.
I never sell goods without knowing where I can find them when I want them, and if these fellows try to put their forefeet in the trough, or start any shoving and crowding, they're going to find me forgetting my table manners, too.
I was too busy that morning to quarrel, so I sent word that I would fix it up; and when I was driving by there next day the painters were hard at work on it.
And while I'm too old to run, I'm young enough to stand and fight.
But the first essential of a quiet funeral is a willing corpse.
The first can't harm you and the second can't help you.
That fetched old Buck Williams' ghost on the jump, you bet, but he said he hadn't laid eyes on Bud yet. They hauled the Sweet By and By with a drag net, but they couldn't get a rap from him.
For when it comes to funny business I'm something of a humorist myself.
"No."
Take her by and large, she was a pretty cool, calm cucumber.
Then he'd have to look downstairs for him.
But we're going to get rid of you, and then go on before you can send any word to your confederates.
He, too, had been knocked down by the fleeing man.
"How you got aboard, and what your object was in coming."
We may get valuable information that way."
"Come on, Mr. Damon, help me throw him overboard!"
"That's so!" cried Tom.
"He was in with the diamond makers," said Mr. Jenks.
I'll have some ropes ready, and we'll tie him up, and--well, we'll decide later what to do with him."
"I don't think so," replied Tom.
How high up are we, Tom?"
"Bless my powder horn!" exploded Mr. Damon.
"How?" asked Tom.
Then, when he failed, the man must have sneaked into the shed, and hidden himself in the ship.
"Jump before he has a chance to use his gun.
They were glancing about with eager eyes.
"About two miles.
"I wonder if he's really here?" whispered Mr. Damon.
"We're going to get rid of you."
Tom's excited announcement startled Mr. Damon and the others as much as if the young inventor had informed them that the airship had exploded and was about to dash with them to the earth.
"What do you want to know?"
They went softly to the storeroom, and listened at the door.
"And what was your object?" demanded Mr. Jenks.
The men leaped to their feet, and stared at the lad.
"And if we refuse?" asked Tom.
"No, I knocked up his gun as he fired," explained Mr. Jenks.
CHAPTER X--DROPPING THE STOWAWAY
Finally I saw it, when that colored man went to feed his mule, and I slipped in, and hid in the airship.
What's to be done?" inquired Mr. Damon, looking around helplessly.
"There are enough of us to cope with one man, even if he is armed.
"All right.
"We caught him!" cried the scientist.
"But not from you!" exclaimed Mr. Jenks.
"We shall have to proceed cautiously then," spoke Mr. Jenks.
"Oh, don't worry," said Mr. Jenks, quickly, "we're not going to toss you overboard.
"Yes," was the hesitating answer, "but I don't want to use them if I can help it.
"If he is like any others in the gang he is a desperate man."
"We'll have to use a little strategy," decided Tom, and then they discussed several plans.
"Better sneak up on him then, if we can," proposed Mr. Parker.
Perhaps that will make him tell how he happened to get in our ship, and what are the plans of the gang of diamond makers.
"And while we're about it, give him a good scare when we do get him," suggested Mr. Jenks.
"I knew something would happen on this voyage," came from Mr. Parker.
"We must try to capture him.
The lad saw a dark figure moving, as if to get farther out of sight.
"Drop him overboard!" cried Mr. Parker, in horror.
"Father says," the lad told his companions "that Eradicate only had a glimpse of the man at the last moment.
We're not as desperate as your crowd.
"By destroying the airship if need be.
"I don't believe you can scare such fellows much," was Tom's opinion, but it was agreed to try.
"Do you know him?" asked Tom, in some surprise.
"Get him out and drop him overboard!"
"That man is one of my enemies.
"Are you sure that message is straight?" asked Mr. Jenks.
There was the report of a gun, some excited shouts, and when Tom could scramble to his feet, and rush out, he beheld Mr. Parker calmly sitting on a struggling man, while Mr. Jenks held a gun, that was still smoking.
But it will be the last time he ever goes there.
"Anybody hurt?" asked Tom, anxiously.
"How?"
Three days later, in crossing over a lonely region, near the Nebraska National Forest, Farley Munson, which was one of the names the spy went by, was dropped off the airship, when it was sent down to within a few feet of the earth.
But we must talk more quietly--we ought to have whispered--he may have heard us."
"How are you going to capture him?" asked Mr. Parker.
"I predicted it from the first!"
"Then I'll help you get it out!
Another communication was coming to him by wireless.
"But why do you think he has remained quiet all this while, Tom?" asked Mr. Damon.
"We'll soon find out," answered Tom.
Not only because of the danger, and a dislike of shedding blood, but because a stray bullet might pierce the gas bag and damage the ship."
"Let's go in."
"And do you really believe he would destroy the Red Cloud?" asked Mr. Parker.
"That's easy enough.
He uttered not a word, but he smiled grimly when Mr. Damon remarked:
They would discuss various dishes, and Mr. Damon was to express a preference for something in the food line, the box containing which, was well back in the room.
"He wasn't there long enough."
"Look out, Mr. Jenks!" cried Tom, to warn those on guard at the door of the storeroom.
This would give the two a chance to penetrate to the far end of the apartment, without arousing the suspicions of the hidden man, who, doubtless, would be listening to the conversation.
I had food and water, so I didn't touch any of yours," and he looked at Mr. Damon, who seemed much relieved.
"Bless my tomato sauce!" exploded Mr. Damon.
He and Tom moved cautiously back among the boxes and barrels.
"I have just flashed to dad a message, telling him that we will heed his warning.
"Then we must get ahead of him," decided Tom, quietly.
"That's so," agreed Mr. Jenks.
We must get rid of him, or he may wreck the Red Cloud!"
"He was one of those who took me to the secret cave.
I think we had better--" the lad paused, and again listened to the wireless message. "Father says Eradicate saw the man have a gun, so we must be careful," the young inventor translated the dots and dashes.
"Will you tell us what we want to know, if we don't?" asked Mr. Jenks.
"We must get him out at once!" declared Mr. Jenks.
He shook his fist at those in the airship, and shouted after them:
"We must get him out, that's all," decided Mr. Jenks; with vigor.
"Well, I guess if we go at it the right way we can capture him without any shooting.
"The storeroom is far enough off so that he couldn't hear us.
"I guess I'll go back in the storeroom, Tom, and see how much food he ate."
So, unless he heard the wireless working, and suspects something from that, he probably doesn't know that we are aware of his presence aboard."
"Threaten to drop him overboard.
We'll put you off in the most lonesome spot we can find, and I guess you'll be some time getting back to civilization.
He has been sent by the band of diamond makers hidden among the mountains, to spy on me, and, if possible, prevent me from seeking to discover their secret.
"If he has a gun it won't be any too easy to go in the storeroom, and drag him out."
"Catch him, Mr. Damon!" he cried.
And he would say nothing more, though by threats and promises Mr. Jenks tried to get from him something about the men in with him, and where the cave of the diamonds was located.
"It will take you some time to get to a telegraph office," said Mr. Jenks, as a package of food, and a flask of water was tossed down to the stowaway.
Was he not bringing with him the most potent of justifications?
"Ah, sir," said he, despondently, "to think that I didn't draw out of this woman everything she knew, when I might have done so easily.
Just for one second; and then she caught his withering glance and heard his words of menace. Terror-stricken, she staggered back, and then Lecoq seized her around the waist, and, lifting her with his strong arms, carried her out into the passage.
"No, sir, no. Since she has seen her husband, it is quite impossible to get her to speak.
"But for that supposition, your words would have been meaningless?"
Be guided by me; confess everything, while there is yet time; and abandon the present course which may lead you into serious danger.
Lecoq smiled as he went up the stairs.
"Yes."
Her eyes were fixed upon her unworthy husband, and the happiness she felt at seeing him again shone plainly in her anxious gaze.
He seemed confounded, and hung his head as if thoroughly abashed.
"Don't prevaricate any longer," he said.
He paused; the door opened again, this time to admit the magistrate's messenger, who timidly, and with a rather guilty air, handed his master a note, and then withdrew.
To the magistrate's proposal he carelessly nodded assent.
"You may retire, my good woman," said he kindly, after a moment's pause, "but remember that your strange silence injures your husband far more than anything you could say."
She swore that she had been misunderstood, that her words had been misconstrued; and vowed on her mother's memory, that she had never heard the name of Lacheneur before.
I don't understand you."
"I didn't repulse her."
What are you afraid of her telling us? Do you suppose the police are ignorant of your acquaintance with Lacheneur--of your conversation with him when he came in a cab to the corner of the waste ground near your mother's wine-shop; and of the hopes of fortune you based upon his promises?
She loves that rascal intensely, and he has a wonderful influence over her.
"I--I influence her evidence!
But the poor creature was quite overcome, and trembled like a leaf.
"It wasn't the time for sentiment."
I thought I was acting for the best--"
"What words?"
That's evident.
He rang the bell, and ordered the guard to conduct the witness back to prison, and to take every precaution to prevent him seeing his wife again.
As a rule, they are far less interested in the corpses laid out for public view on the marble slabs in the principal hall than in the people of every age and station in life who congregate here all day long; at times coming in search of some lost relative or friend, but far more frequently impelled by idle curiosity.
I entered it myself, and it is there I write this letter, in the mean time watching them out of the corner of my eye.
It would only have served me right if the liquor I bought with it had given me the gripes.
"Yes, there was one here."
A friendly "hush!" was the only response.
When a mysterious crime has been perpetrated, or a great catastrophe has happened, and the identity of the victims has not been established, "a great day" invariably follows at the Morgue.
And yet, ever since opening, we have had an immense crowd.
Suddenly I noticed that one of them turned as white as his shirt; and calling the attention of his companions to one of the unknown victims, he whispered: 'Gustave!'
If I were master here, on days like this, I would charge an admission fee of two sous a head, with half-price for children.
d'Escorval is, of course, in his office?"
A few, the more sensitive among them, may come no further than the door, but the others enter, and after a long stare return and recount their impressions to their less courageous companions.
The keeper's face brightened up.
There was no fear of their doing so, however, on the morrow of the tragedy at Poivriere, for the mysterious murderer whose identity Lecoq was trying to establish had furnished three victims for their delectation.
I will wait for you at the corner of the bridge.
Don't be uneasy about the score, and if you need a trap use mine for nothing, till you have caught the jades." As Lecoq's purse was low, he did not insist.
"Why not!
It would have been cruel to refuse such a request.
The man shook his head.
A. B. S."
Then, producing first his watch, and next his purse, he added: "We have been an hour and forty minutes, my good fellow, consequently I owe you--"
"Nothing at all," replied the driver, decidedly.
"No one.
The young detective was hastening away, when Papillon called him back. "When you leave the Morgue you will want to go somewhere else," he said, "you told me that you had another appointment, and that you were already late."
"His comrades put their hands over his mouth, and one of them exclaimed: 'What are you about, you fool, to mix yourself up with this affair!
I lodge at his place, because I have some small interest in the business, you see."
But the person who had first spoken was so overcome that he could scarcely drag himself along; and his companions were obliged to take him to a little restaurant close by.
"All right, then.
Through the small arched windows a gray light stole in on the exposed bodies, bringing each muscle into bold relief, revealing the ghastly tints of the lifeless flesh, and imparting a sinister aspect to the tattered clothing hung around the room to aid in the identification of the corpses.
It would bring in a round sum, more than enough to cover the expenses."
"But--"
"In that case," said he, "I have a letter for you, written by your comrade, who was obliged to go away. Here it is."
"Thereupon they went out, and I followed them.
"Excuse me," he interrupted, "didn't a detective come here this morning?"
What do you mean?"
I don't see him anywhere?"
If there was a crowd on the roadway outside, it was because the gloomy building itself was crammed full of people.
"Last night, as he was alighting from his carriage, at his own door, he had a most unfortunate fall, and broke his leg."
"You will, at least, take my name and address?" continued the driver.
The keeper glanced suspiciously at his eager questioner, but after a moment's hesitation, he ventured to inquire: "Are you one of them?"
"No matter.
The shop and work girls who reside in the neighborhood readily go out of their way to catch a glimpse of the corpses which crime, accident, and suicide bring to this horrible place.
Indeed, our hero accepted it as a token of unquestioning devotion which it would be his duty to repay with a master's kind protection toward his first disciple.
Do you want to get us into trouble?'
"Certainly.
This clothing, after a certain time, is sold--for nothing is wasted at the Morgue.
The attendants are so accustomed to the horrors of the place that the most sickly sight fails to impress them; and even under the most distressing circumstances, they hasten gaily to and fro, exchanging jests well calculated to make an ordinary mortal's flesh creep.
However, he had no time to waste in thought, and accordingly at once proceeded to peruse the note, which ran as follows:
However, Lecoq was too occupied with his own thoughts to remark the horrors of the scene.
This simple formula of politeness brought a faint smile to his lips.
As usual, he found among the mob a large number of girls and women; for, strange to say, the Parisian fair sex is rather partial to the disgusting sights and horrible emotions that repay a visit to the Morgue.
"When the result of the accident was communicated to you, you made inquiry yourself into its truth, its details, I believe?"
Convincing proofs; and Miss Carlyle lent her ear to them.
"Yes, sir."
Him put up for others at West Lynne!
Miss Corny paused.
Look well."
"You see him--my brother Archibald?"
Joyce was silent.
She died in the course of the same night.
"It was my duty to do so.
"Of a surety I did.
Certain it is, that the ominous sound of "Duck him," was breathed forth by a voice, and it was caught up and echoed around.
There was no one else to undertake it."
The laborers, their duty done, walked coolly away; the tagrag withdrew to a safe distance, waiting for what might come next; and Miss Carlyle moved away also.
What's up?
Out of the pea-soup before he was quite dead, quite senseless.
The earl stared with all his might; he thought it the strangest question that ever was asked him.
Out upon you for a bold, bad man!"
Miss Carlyle turned to the earl.
Sir Francis Levison?
But she returned to the charge, as if difficult to be convinced.
Here!
Mr. Drake and the lawyer--for the other was a lawyer--were utterly powerless to stop the catastrophe.
"And you see him, that pitiful outcast, who is too contemptible to live?
Look at the two, and contrast them.
Certainly she died."
"There was no difference," she murmured, and then she took courage and spoke more openly.
What on earth had put him into that state?
"I am accustomed to colored ones.
Had she interfered for his protection, she could not have been heard; and if she could have been, there's no knowing whether she would have done it.
He objected.
Quite a collection of gentlemen--Mr.
What's this?"
Duck him!
"I see him," faltered Lady Isabel.
Could it be?
"Duck him!
"Yes!" was the gaping answer.
"It wouldn't have done her harm had they ducked her too," was the angry response.
"Did you ascertain positively, beyond all doubt, that she did die?"
"My eyes are not strong."
Miss Carlyle followed her in.
But why wear colored glasses?
"Joyce," resumed Miss Carlyle, abruptly changing the subject, "who does the governess put you in mind of?"
What did she think of his beauty now?
"Cried?" echoed Miss Carlyle.
One pulled him, another pushed him, a third shook him by the collar, half a dozen buffeted him, and all abused him.
They dragged him through a gap in the hedge, a gap that no baby could have got through in a cool moment; but most of us know the difference between coolness and excitement.
I know what she thought of her past folly.
Mercy!" shrieked the victim, his knees bending and his teeth chattering--"a little mercy for the love of Heaven!"
Do you mean Madame Vine?"
It is an extraordinary likeness.
Peter cried."
Let's give him a taste of his deservings!
They set upon him, twenty pairs of hands at least, strong, rough, determined hands; not to speak of the tagrag's help, who went in with cuffs, and kicks, and pokes, and taunts, and cheers, and a demoniac dance.
"And I can tell you, Joyce, that I was confounded at the likeness.
You are sure that she is dead?"
Much he knows of Heaven!"
"I am as sure that she is dead as that we are living," decisively replied the earl: and he spoke but according to his belief.
"Here!
The pond be close at hand.
She put them on, there and then, Miss Carlyle's eyes searching her face inquisitively all the time.
Died?
Miss Carlyle never spoke a word.
"What did she go into hysterics for?" again snapped Miss Carlyle.
Did she come to repentance, think you?"
"It's very odd," thought Miss Corny.
"I didn't see her, and I was present."
A pause.
"Was it a positively ascertained fact that Lady Isabel died?"
"The governess?
The hedge was extensively damaged, but Justice Hare, to whom it belonged, would forgive that.
She arose; her face burning, her heart throbbing.
They were passing a spectacle shop, and Madame Vine had halted at the door, one foot on its step.
"I did to-day," returned Miss Carlyle.
"Mercy!
He'd have burst with it, if he hadn't, I expect; I never saw a chap so excited.
"Have you told me all?" he asked presently, lifting them.
He says he is innocent."
Rankin laughed.
"A theatrical entertainer.
Big, handsome fellow, isn't he?
I went to my cabin.
"A nasty one!" the Englishman exclaimed.
His pointed face, accentuated by the pointed beard, was pallid.
"The Venza, isn't that her name?
Who was it?
"I am happy to meet you, sir." His voice was soft and deep.
Then I sought out Carter.
"Johnson is all right, Gregg."
The ignorance--"
The Moon had dwindled to a pin point of light beside the crescent Earth.
We sat at the ends, with the passengers on each of the sides.
"This is Sir Arthur Coniston, an English gentleman, lecturer and sky-trotter--that is, he will be a sky-trotter; he tells us he plans a number of voyages."
She went past me, flashed me a smile.
And as a matter of fact--"
"I mean to say, I think I said too much.
"Mr.
And as pleasant as he is good-looking.
"I love an argument.
Snap introduced him as Rance Rankin.
We were well on our course to Mars.
They were brother and sister, these Martians.
An American--a quiet, blond fellow of thirty-five or forty.
It was located aft, on the stern deck, near the stern watch tower.
"We did, didn't we?
Rankin said calmly:
A smile plucked at his thin, gray lips.
I told him what Snap and I had learned: the rays from the Moon, proving that Grantline had concentrated a considerable ore body.
The Captain ignored my questions.
I was exhausted and drugged with lack of sleep.
Mr. Rankin, you are more diplomatic."
Of course, a chance to make a voyage with you--"
She leaned closer toward me.
What's going on, that's what I want to know?"
"Excitement?"
No!
Do you know, from Venus to Earth, and I have no doubt on all of Mars, no man will please me more."
It startled me.
Gregg, I'm getting like you--too fanciful.
"You?"
They wanted to know what kind of a ship this was.
At our table--a big, good-looking blond American.
Softer--"
By Satan, what a flow of words that devil driver can muster!
"Come back, Gregg!
"Wait!
Why?
And the purser acting innocent?
"Why do you say that?"
Venza caught my look.
The purser looked up, followed the sound with his gaze.
I'll talk with him.
Listen!
"That's what he told me.
Why we've hardly spoken!"
Venza, that prowler went through the smoking room!"
They came to the corner of the deck, but turned back.
A crooked game, of course.
"Contract.
Wild-eyed, chasing a phantom--"
Nice sort of fellow." She paused, then added, "If he's a professional entertainer, I'm a motor oiler."
By the stars, what else?
I gasped, "Venza!
"Why do you look so furtive?" she retorted.
Sober.
Good money, Gregg.
In the bottom were water and a stone, and from the bottom to the top was a ladder.
I hopped along as fast as I could, for I did not then know enough to be afraid.
There I had to live for most of the summer.
Yet when I drew back, I could see no wall there.
Well, I came right here, and you were all kind to me, but for a long time I could not sleep without dreaming that I was back in prison, and I would croak in my sleep at the thought of it."
I tried it again and again, and every time I hurt my head.
Even the Garter Snake, who had been there the longest, and the old Cricket, who had lived in the farm-yard, could tell no such exciting tales as the Tree Frog.
Perhaps I ought to say, 'like any other Tadpole,' for, of course, I began life as a Tadpole.
She didn't hurt me at all, but she would not let me go.
And, friends, the best way I can ever repay your kindness to me, is to tell you to never, never, never, never go near the farm-house."
I got close up to them both, and saw strange, big creatures going in and out of the red thing--the barn, as I afterward found it was called.
She picked me up and carried me inside.
"Wonderful!" exclaimed all the meadow people; "wonderful, indeed!"
Twice I was caught and put back.
"And at the top," continued the Tree Frog, "was something white over the doorway into my prison.
The queerest thing about it was, that the smaller creatures seemed to make the larger ones do whatever they wanted them to.
None of his friends had known him then, but he was an honest fellow, and they were sure that everything he told was true: besides, they must be true, for how could a body ever think out such remarkable tales from his own head?
I watched my chance, and three times I got out when the little door was not quite closed.
We were all in a hurry to be Frogs, and often talked of what we would do and how far we would travel when we were grown.
All the wonderful things of which he told had happened before he came to the meadow, and while he was still a young Frog.
There was a great red thing in the yard beside it, but I liked the white one better.
It seemed to me that just stretching my legs was enough to make me wild with joy.
And they all answered, "We never will."
One day when many of the meadow people were gathered around him, he told them his story.
"Matter enough," said the Tree Frog.
I tell you the truth, my friends, those walls were made of something which one could see through."
At first, when she put me down on a stone in some water, I did not know that I was in prison.
You may not believe me, but what I tell you is true.
"She put me in a very queer prison.
"As you may guess, I stayed there a long time, watching these strange creatures work.
I had enough to eat; but anybody who has been free cannot be happy shut in.
"I heard you," cried the Katydid, "and I wondered what was the matter."
My heart thumped as though it would burst, and I tried my best to get away from her.
Some of the other Frogs started with me, but they stopped along the way, and at last I was alone.
I tried to hop away, and--bump! went my head against something.
Oh, how frightened I was!
"I was a bold young fellow, and when I saw a great white thing among the trees up yonder, I made up my mind to see what it was.
"You don't say!" exclaimed a Grasshopper.
In all the meadow there was nobody who could tell such interesting stories as the old Tree Frog.
I was hatched in the pond beyond the farm-house, and ate my way from the egg to the water outside like any other Frog.
After they stopped hunting, the wind blew the door open, and I hopped out."
I saw two of the larger ones tied to a great load of dried grass and pulling it into the barn.
She stood with her head on her breast and looked at the water.
When they were all tired out and had stopped dancing, she said to him, "I am so tired!
Then she gave a pretty little start, and said, "Oh, are you here?
They had eaten nothing for several days, and were soon hunting for food, some on land, and some in the water, for they had stopped to feed and rest.
He was so excited that his knees shook, and he had to stand on both legs at once to keep from falling.
It was not long before another young Crane began to skip and hop and circle around, drooping his wings and whooping as he went.
They were fine looking, even when they slept, and some people never look well unless they are awake.
They would also have trumpeted, but more softly, to tell him that they were coming after.
They were brownish-gray, with no bright markings at all, and their long legs gave them a very genteel look.
Long afterward he asked her what she had forgotten and she said she couldn't remember--that she never could remember what she had forgotten.
Then they stood and fished for a long time without saying anything.
She did not turn her head towards him, although, having such a long and slender neck, she could have done so with very little trouble.
Stop for us in the fall!"
Let us go off into the woods and rest."
You may be very sure he was glad to go, and as he stalked off with her, he led the way to a charming nesting-place.
The Gulls, who had spent the winter by the pond, screamed to each other, "The Crane dance has begun!" Even the Frogs, who are afraid of Cranes, crept quietly near to look on.
He didn't know just how to tell what he wanted to, but he had seen another Crane bowing to her, and was afraid she might marry him if he was not quick.
And she strutted and leaped and whooped almost as loudly as he.
The flying Cranes trumpeted back, "We will!
When the flock arose to fly on again, eight Cranes stayed behind.
She changed, and stood on her other leg.
They were a fine company to look upon, orderly, strong, and dignified. Their long necks were stretched out straight ahead, their long legs straight behind, and they beat the air with slow, regular strokes of the strong wings.
When they were eating, the young fellow who had begun the dance, stalked up to the sister of one of his friends, as she stood in the edge of the pond, gracefully balanced on one leg.
They were flying high and quietly because the weather was bright. If it had been stormy, or if they had been flying by night, as they usually did, they would have stayed nearer the ground, and their leader would have trumpeted loudly to let his followers know which way he was going.
The tops of their heads were covered with warty red skin, from which grew short black feathers that looked more like hairs.
"I am sorry," he said.
He wondered what it was.
So he flew off to the fishing-place where he had seen her the day before, and he stalked along to where she was, and stood close to her while she fished.
"Of course I am not frightened now that I know who it is."
"Let me help you," he said.
"I saw you dancing this morning," she said.
He wanted a chance to tell her something, yet, whenever he tried to, it seemed to stick in his bill.
"Did you notice to whom I bowed?" he asked.
He could see it from the outside, a big bunch slowly moving downward.
"I bowed to her sister." He thought that was a very clever thing to say.
"I want to marry and have a home."
One morning, when the Cranes awakened, a fine young fellow began to strut up and down before the rest, bowing low, and leaping high into the air, and every now and then whooping as loudly as he could.
Then he would seem to fall asleep again.
If he had been an older Crane, and understood the ways of the world a little better, he would have known that she meant, "Aren't you coming to that fishing-place?
Now, behold the two Chieftains upon their Legs, commencing a new Trial of Skill! where they seem'd to get the better of each other alternately; for both were strong, and both were active.
Victory! in favour of the Champion in white.
A Merchant happening to pass by, he sold it to him for a Trifle, and took in Exchange nothing more than a Mantle, and a Cap.
The Queen was perfectly transported. The two Champions were reconducted to their separate Lodges, as the others had been before them, in Conformity to the Laws prescrib'd. Several Mutes were order'd to wait on the Champions, and carry them some proper Refreshment.
In one of his frantick Fits, he put on the green Armour, that had created him such a World of Disgrace.
Some conquer'd two of their Antagonists, and others were so far successful as to get the better of three.
He carried the Point so far at last, as to murmur at the unequal Dispensations of Divine Providence; and was tempted to believe, that all Occurrences were govern'd by a malignant Destiny, which never fail'd to oppress the Virtuous, and always crown'd the Actions of such Villains as the green Knight, with uncommon Success.
The other Champions play'd their Parts much better; and all came off with Credit.
His Armour was made of pure Gold, enamell'd with Green.
He grew quite out of Patience at last, and cut his Way thro' the insulting Mob, with his Rival's Sabre; but he did not know what Measures to pursue, or how to rectify so gross a Mistake.
The Esquires, who were the Attendants, ran to his Assistance, and with a Sneer remounted him.
The fourth Combatant catch'd hold of his Left Leg, and unhors'd him again.
Those of the former white as Snow.
Peter looked quite as surprised as he felt.
It was such a funny thing for Cresty to ask for that Peter's curiosity would allow him no peace, and the next morning he was up in the Old Orchard before jolly Mr. Sun had kicked his bedclothes off.
"By the way, where does Cresty build?" asked Peter.
"And Skimmer the Tree Swallow," added Jenny.
On his way he couldn't resist the temptation to run over to the Green Forest, which was just beyond the Old Orchard.
I've talked quite enough for one morning."
Then there are Killy the Sparrow Hawk and Spooky the Screech Owl."
Pewee nodded.
Again Jenny Wren nodded.
Pee-wee!" Peter chuckled happily.
"Did you find any old clothes of the Snake family?" she demanded.
I didn't expect to find him yet.
Pee-wee!"
That's good.
I like to see that.
"Have you got two homes?" asked Peter.
Jenny couldn't keep her tongue still if she wanted to.
Peter looked surprised.
Yellow Wing the flicker, who really is a Woodpecker, often uses an old house, but quite often makes a new one.
But most of all Peter thought about that queer request of Cresty's, and a dozen times that day he found himself peeping under old logs in the hope of finding a cast-off coat of Mr. Black Snake.
"What do you suppose I want of two homes?
"Why they want it, goodness knows!
He's building that nest to take up his time and keep out of mischief.
"Mr. Wren just has to be busy about something, bless his heart," said she.
CHAPTER VIII.
"He usually is one of the last of the Flycatcher family to arrive.
It was his way of expressing how happy he felt.
I wonder what has brought him up so early."
Hardly had he reached it when he heard a plaintive voice crying, "Pee-wee!
The upper half of his bill was black, but the lower half was light.
Perhaps they think it will scare robbers away.
He was a little bigger than his cousin, Chebec, but looked very much like him.
But they do, and an old house of Yellow Wing the Flicker suits either of them.
"If you please," Peter inquired politely, "why do folks call you Wood Pewee?"
It ended just where it had started, on a dead twig of a tree in a shady, rather lonely part of the Green Forest.
Finally curiosity got the best of him, and back he scampered, lipperty-lipperty-lip, to the foot of the tree in which Jenny Wren had her home.
He found Chebec very busy hunting for materials for that nest, because, as he explained to Peter, Mrs. Chebec is very particular indeed about what her nest is made of.
"Bless your heart, Peter, no," replied Scrapper with a chuckle.
This time Jenny popped her head out, and her little eyes fairly snapped.
While Peter sat staring up at him Scrapper suddenly darted out into the air, and his bill snapped in quite the same way Chebec's did when he caught a fly.
They do no work at all.
Jenny Wren looked as if she didn't know whether to feel flattered or provoked.
Peter didn't wait for Scrapper to return.
It was Cresty the Great Crested Flycatcher.
A few days after Chebec and his wife started building their nest in the Old Orchard Peter dropped around as usual for a very early call.
Peter hesitated, looking first towards the dear Old Briar-patch and then towards Jenny Wren's house.
"You don't understand," cried Peter hurriedly.
"Now don't forget, Peter.
I've got to go house hunting, but you'll find me there or hereabouts, if it happens that you find one of those cast-off Snake suits."
Snake skins!" shrieked Jenny Wren.
"What is it?" asked Peter, who is always glad to do any one a favor.
It was a bee.
Blacky saw him coming and was wise enough to suddenly appear to have no interest whatever in the Old Orchard, turning away toward the Green Meadows instead.
"Did you say your fighting cousin?" he asked in a hesitating way.
"Look up over your head," cried the voice, rather a harsh voice.
"Peter!
Before Peter could say another word Cresty had flown away.
You certainly did, and I'm sorry to disturb you," replied Peter meekly.
Oh, Peter Rabbit!" called the voice.
"Jenny Wren!
A pointed cap was all that was needed to make him quite distinguished looking.
"Didn't I tell you the other day, Peter Rabbit, that I'm not to be disturbed?
It is because of his fearlessness that he is called Kingbird.
"I--"
"What I want to know is, why should Cresty the Flycatcher ask me to please let him know if I found any cast-off suits of the Snake family?
Jenny Wren!" No one answered him. He could hear Mr. Wren singing in another tree, but he couldn't see him. "Jenny!
He knew that he couldn't have seen it had it been only one fourth that distance away.
But none, not even Bully the English Sparrow, was brave enough to join him in attacking big Redtail.
"Snake skins," replied Peter.
He took them quite modestly, assuring them that he had done nothing, nothing at all, but that he didn't intend to have any of the Hawk family around the Old Orchard while he lived there.
Of course, Peter couldn't be left out of anything like that, and he scampered for the scene of trouble as fast as his legs could take him.
For a minute Peter couldn't think what was the trouble with Redtail, and then he saw.
"I just want to ask one little favor of you."
He was a wee bit bigger than Scrapper the Kingbird, yet not quite so big as Welcome Robin, and more slender.
His throat and breast were gray, shading into bright yellow underneath.
But this seemed to make no difference to Scrapper, for that is who it was.
Ugh!
"Are you going to build in the Old Orchard this year?" asked Peter.
Peter stopped abruptly, sat up very straight, looked this way, looked that way and looked the other way, every way but the right way.
"There wouldn't be any honey if I did.
Peter couldn't help but admire Scrapper for his courage.
"He is Scrapper the Kingbird, as of course you know.
Didn't I? Didn't I?"
The rest of us always feel safe when he is about."
Just as he was leaving the far corner of the Old Orchard some one called him.
Slowly Peter reached over his back with his long left hind foot and thoughtfully scratched his long right ear.
Peter knew better than to waste any effort trying to see that fly.
But he had time to tell Peter a bit of news.
Didn't I, Peter Rabbit?
"A cast-off suit of clothes from any member of the Snake family," replied Cresty somewhat impatiently.
He flew away before I could ask him why he wants them, and so I came to you, because I know you know everything, especially everything concerning your neighbors."
"Jenny!" called Peter.
He didn't like to admit that he couldn't recall those two cousins of Chebec's.
When he had succeeded in driving Redtail far enough from the Old Orchard to suit him, Scrapper flew back and perched on a dead branch of one of the trees, where he received the congratulations of all his feathered neighbors.
He just couldn't understand about those cast-off suits of the Snake family, and he felt sure that Jenny Wren could tell him.
"My fighting cousin and my handsomest cousin arrived together yesterday, and now our family is very well represented in the Old Orchard," said Chebec proudly.
"Of course I am," declared Scrapper.
He certainly was the handsomest as well as the largest of the Flycatcher family.
He was just a little smaller than Welcome Robin, and in comparison with him Redtail was a perfect giant.
"Do you live on bees altogether?" asked Peter.
"Oh, that's all right, Mr. Beryl.
Jerry in answer to a look of Beryl's began to weep ostentatiously.
In a few years, when his passions worked their way through the mask, his face, now so smooth and innocent, would be wrinkled and sinful.
Miss Berengaria turned to Beryl.
"You should always hold your tongue," said Miss Berengaria, angrily. "You had no right to tell what Lord Conniston wished kept secret.
If Bernard were alive--as Julius began to suspect--he would come to one of these three people, and then Jerry would at once become aware of the fact.
I swear I do."
"I sincerely trust not."
I often visit her, not professionally, for she is as healthy as a trout in a pond."
Call me ma'am."
Well"--he laughed and looked at the small boy trotting beside him--"I am equal to both."
Beryl did not deny the charge.
"What were you doing there?"
"Yes.
Julius looked at him with satisfaction.
And remember that if I catch you plotting I will tell Mr. Durham."
Yes, ma'am, I'm going," and Jerry in answer to an imperative wave of his new mistress's hand disappeared.
"Good-bye, Jerry," said Beryl, kindly.
No one could have been meeker, and although Miss Randolph did not like or trust the woman, she had no fault to find with her in any way.
"I should have thought she would have felt it more," said Lucy, perplexed.
"I have an attack of nerves," she replied pettishly.
I give you back your ring--here it is!" She wrenched it from her finger.
She raised her head when she saw her visitors, and a look of annoyance crossed her face when she saw Mr. Beryl.
I never loved you, but I have always tried to see the best side of you.
"Would I be better off if I married you?"
As Lucy thought, he had shown his hand too clearly.
"By blackmailing Bernard," said Lucy, indignantly.
I have not much money now, but I will have some--a great deal some day."
"Not always.
"I don't believe that."
They think I'm a kind of Holy Bill, and I let them think so.
"Although you swore for an hour, I should never believe you.
"I don't know whether you intend to marry Bernard or Lord Conniston," he said, "but I wish, which ever it is, joy of a spitfire."
"Mr. Durham requires proof of the death," rejoined Lucy, sharply; "and until then, he is bound to administer the estate according to the will. As Bernard's body has not been found, there is always a chance that he may have escaped."
But at present he looked charmingly innocent, although he already knew much more about life than was good for him.
I don't want to see him hanged."
Lucy suffered severely from the shock of Sir Simon's tragic death, and from the supposed death of Sir Bernard.
"Are you ill, Lucy?" asked Beryl, with affection.
I will have nothing to do with you.
"He is a lad I wish you to help," said Beryl, blandly.
But you do not care for me."
"I am not hard-hearted," snapped Beryl.
He seems to be a most delightful fellow."
There it is, doctor.
"All I can get," rejoined Beryl, quietly.
"I shall write a note to her to-day," said Lucy.
Dr. Payne was doubtful.
You do not get it."
Every man worth calling a man should go to the front."
"And that makes him perfect in your eyes," said Beryl, looking savage. "See here, Lucy, Conniston has left the army--so you see he is not so brave as you think."
So far she had failed, but she did not intend to abandon her claim for one failure.
Jerry tossed his fair curls and looked roguish.
Was she very much attached to Mr. Gore?"
Mrs. Gilroy was a well-educated woman and very astute, therefore she hoped to gain her ends by craft if not by force.
"Alice has such a tender heart."
"I can't understand Durham's attitude," he said evasively.
Julius stared at the fire.
"His lordship got me a situation at a tobacconist's," said the child-like Moon, "and then he got me turned off."
"I have a right to a portion of the estate."
"Is she cheerful?" asked Lucy languidly.
"I like doing things," he explained frankly; "it's fun.
"Conniston is a scamp.
Lucy thought--but it matters little what she thought.
Lord Conniston is too kind a man to behave in that way.
She might be able to conceal her real feelings, but Alice being so young and impulsive might show her dislike too plainly and put Beryl on his guard.
Go to the kitchen and tell the servants to give you something to eat."
But his mind had not yet had time to work on his face, and the mask of his childhood--for he was only thirteen--concealed his evil nature successfully.
"You would never have the pluck," said Lucy, quickly.
"He left so as to seek after Bernard," said Lucy, quickly.
On leaving the office she judged it best to lower her crest for the moment and to wait patiently to see what would transpire.
He departed smiling, and they heard him gallop off.
There he paused to utter a final insulting speech.
I should have done so had she not goaded me into speech.
Julius, walking towards the Bower, was also angry with himself.
"I'm fly," said Master Moon, and began whistling.
"Well, you can stay here, boy.
She was angry with herself because she felt that in speaking of Conniston she had colored.
I am mistress here."
"How are you sure, my dear Lucy?" asked a third voice, and she looked up to see Julius standing in the doorway.
Jerry grinned, and ducked towards the door.
The boy was a handsome, innocent-looking little fellow, rather undersized.
In fact, the matter so preyed on her nerves that she became prostrate, and Dr. Payne had to be called in. He was a handsome and popular young doctor who had practiced in Hurseton.
"I always do good--"
"Quite well," said the doctor, who did not like Beryl, thinking him, in schoolboy phrase, "a sneak." "I am just going, Mr. Beryl."
"I fear not, doctor.
But she was expected back momentarily, and Miss Berengaria wished to get rid of Julius before the girl returned.
Bernard had a high temper, but he could not always control it, and was a kind-hearted boy.
But the fact of Conniston leaving the army and from Durham's attitude I shrewdly suspect he is, and in hiding.
But, apart from this, the fact that he suspected someone of passing himself off as Bernard startled her, and opened an abyss at her feet.
What's the use of his coming to life when he must suffer for his crime?"
"What a pretty lad!"
As it was, and with great diplomacy--so great that it deceived even the astute Beryl--she asked him to come into the house.
Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius perceived Cosette on an altar.
I do not make a pack of gyrations, I go straight to the mark, be happy.
I defy you to escape from that.
They looked about for M. Fauchelevent.
It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness in Marius, and with modesty in Cosette.
There is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life.
One possesses and one supposes.
I should like to go and listen to the bagpipes in the woods. Children who contrive to be beautiful and contented,--that intoxicates me.
On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling angel with his finger on his lips.
The philosophers talk stuff and nonsense.
Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.
Demand nothing more.
Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too much, charm each other too much?
Love is the only ecstasy.
Good, here I am uttering demagogical words!
A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.
Marius, triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase up which he had been borne in a dying condition.
They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty years old taken together.
Have a care, Nemorin, thou art too handsome!
They danced a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an amiable wedding.
It is impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything but this: to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like, to be dainty, to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze at one's image in one's little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to plume oneself; that is the aim of life.
Are we happy because we are good, or are we good because we are happy?
The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the celebration of love takes place.
At dessert, M. Gillenormand, rising to his feet, with a glass of champagne in his hand--only half full so that the palsy of his eighty years might not cause an overflow,--proposed the health of the married pair.
CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING
You have filched the winning number in the lottery; you have gained the great prize, guard it well, keep it under lock and key, do not squander it, adore each other and snap your fingers at all the rest.
The emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming of midnight is indescribable.
Philosophers say: 'Moderate your joys.' I say: 'Give rein to your joys.' Be as much smitten with each other as fiends.
Wisdom consists in jubilation.
What is the sun?
How good it is to have suffered!
One still has time before one to divine.
Her amazed and uneasy air added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty.
And then, an idea occurred to M. Gillenormand.--"Pardieu, this armchair is empty. Come hither, Marius.
That there should be any unhappy men is, in sooth, a disgrace to the azure of the sky.
The kingdom of Eve.
In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played quartettes by Haydn.
that's my catechism.
I am Madame Thou."
Here we pause.
Cosette and Marius were passing through one of those egotistical and blessed moments when no other faculty is left to a person than that of receiving happiness.
Evil has no right to exist.
My name is Marius.
Happiness desires that all the world should be happy.
And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic whisper: "So it is true.
She was in unison with Father Gillenormand; while he erected joy into aphorisms and maxims, she exhaled goodness like a perfume.
He who says love, says woman.
Henceforth, there must be no sadness anywhere.
And good sense cannot lie.
This armchair is for you.
No '89 for Eve.
The lover is the priest; the ravished virgin is terrified.
The night, yes; the shadows, no.
To realize one's dream.
It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair, converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs were but so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy.
There is no Robespierre who keeps his place but woman reigns.
There were flowers everywhere.
The other arm-chair remained empty.
I am no longer Royalist except towards that royalty.
My friends, long live women! I am old, they say; it's astonishing how much I feel in the mood to be young.
They thought they heard voices carolling in the infinite; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them like a ceiling of stars; above their heads they beheld the light of a rising sun.
Pardieu, I decree joy!
It was an exquisite candor expanding and becoming transfigured in the light.
Jean Valjean had seated himself on a chair in the drawing-room, behind the door, the leaf of which folded back upon him in such a manner as to nearly conceal him.
These two creatures were resplendent.
Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
She set her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius' foot.
The ocean is a rough Alcestis.
Evil does not come from man, who is good at bottom.
Wrath, tempest, claps of thunder, foam to the very ceiling.
I would like greatly to get married, if any one would have me.
Yes, love, woman, the kiss forms a circle from which I defy you to escape; and, for my own part, I should be only too happy to re-enter it.
Can there be too many perfumes, too many open rose-buds, too many nightingales singing, too many green leaves, too much aurora in life?
Jean Valjean began to laugh.
Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy.
As far as I am concerned, I have no longer any political opinions; let all me be rich, that is to say, mirthful, and I confine myself to that."
Cosette, let your fine weather be the smile of your husband; Marius, let your rain be your wife's tears.
And on that altar, and in that glory, the two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow. All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in intoxication.
They did not see each other, they did not contemplate each other.
Marius glanced at Cosette's charming bare arm, and at the rosy things which were vaguely visible through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, intercepting Marius' glance, blushed to her very hair.
Something of that joy ascends to God. Where true marriage is, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal enters in.
"Father, are you satisfied?"
The invention is old, my friends, but it is perfectly new.
What is Adam?
And we have been as foolish as you.
Alice Greggory turned as if stung.
Well, I'll come.
A quick step had sounded in the hall outside.
"These pieces have been in our family for generations," said Mrs. Greggory with an accent of pride.
Mrs. Greggory must have divined, in a way, the spirit that prompted it, for her eyes grew wet, and with a choking "Dear child!" she reached out and caught Billy's hand in both her own--even while she shook her head in denial.
And then--won't you keep it for me--here?
He picked up the teapot with careful rapture and examined it.
"But that girl was so--so queer!" she sighed, with a frown.
Not so her daughter.
William Henshaw cleared his throat.
That she was one day to be mistress of the Strata and all it contained was still anything but "common" to her.
But you must know that."
"Mother, what is it?
But when the shabby house on the narrow little street was reached, the man looked about him with a troubled frown.
What a beauty!"
Will you go?"
Billy, watching the little scene, with mingled emotions, saw the glance with which the girl swept the bare little room; and she knew that there was not a patch or darn or poverty spot in sight, or out of sight, which that glance did not encompass.
"Perfect!
Kate leaves this afternoon, you know, and it's been so snowy she hasn't thought best to try to get over to the house.
Her face had grown white again.
William Henshaw frowned angrily--that was the man; but his eyes--the collector's eyes--sought the teapot longingly.
And there's the tray--did you notice?" he exulted, turning back to the shelf.
You will let me do it, won't you?"
Yes, I'm so glad!--that is, of course I must be glad. I'll get it." Her voice broke as she pulled herself from her chair. There was only despairing sorrow on her face now.
"Awful!
"Well, by Jove!
"I have only one other in my collection as rare," he said.
The collector's eyes glowed.
My mother and my grandmother owned that teapot, sir." Again her voice broke.
"I can't do much at work that pays.
Billy lifted her chin the least bit.
"My name is Henshaw, Miss--Greggory, I presume," he said quietly.
He will give us--a hundred dollars."
"I'm afraid not," returned Billy, with a rueful laugh.
A curious expression, or rather, series of expressions crossed Mrs. Greggory's face.
And it's a Lowestoft, too, the real thing--the genuine, true soft paste!
"No, indeed--not if you want me."
There was no doubt on that point.
Alice Greggory flushed scarlet.
"They are, then--valuable?" Mrs. Greggory's voice shook.
With fingers that were almost reverent in their appreciation, the collector reached for the teapot.
She stopped, and drew back a little. Her startled eyes went from one face to another, then dropped to the Lowestoft teapot in the man's hands.
"Well, I do, my dear." Uncle William's voice was troubled.
"Thank you," she said with crisp coldness; "but, distasteful as darns and patches are to us, we prefer them, infinitely, to--charity!"
What time?"
Near it set a tray-like plate of the same ware and decoration.
Who are these people?" she asked sharply.
I tried to get Kate to go, too; but she wouldn't.
His face showed very clearly that he did not know what to do, or what to say; but it showed, too, as clearly, that he longed to do something, or say something.
"A hundred dollars?
Then he turned to the tray.
He, also, was not in the habit of being referred to as "these people."
I wouldn't trouble you, but he says they're peculiar--the daughter, especially--and may need some careful handling.
Billy, the next time I take you curio hunting, it won't be to this place," he fumed.
During the brief minute that he hesitated, however, Billy sprang forward.
"Alice, Alice, my love!" protested the sweet-faced cripple, agitatedly.
"I beg your pardon, of course," she said in a voice that was bitterly quiet.
"But, madam, if you do not wish to sell--" He stopped abruptly.
"A hundred dollars!" echoed the girl, faintly.
"Oh, good morning, Uncle William," she called, in answer to the masculine voice that replied to her "Hullo."
She's at the West End.
With a little outward fling of her two hands Alice Greggory stepped back.
"Oh, Alice, my dear," pleaded Mrs. Greggory again, feebly.
Billy was puzzled.
"Come, Billy!
How could I stand by and see life taken?
Your son's illness could not be cured without a liver taken from a live fox, so to repay your kindness I killed my cub and took out its liver; then its sire, disguising himself as a messenger, brought it to your house."
If we had not interfered just now, the fox's cub would have lost its life.
I thought you were intimate enough with me to know my heart; but to-day you have accused me of being eccentric, and I see how mistaken I have been in you.
The two friends were looking on all the while, and one of them, raising his voice, shouted out, "Hallo! you boys! what are you doing with that fox?"
Hence it was that, in spite of myself, I was moved to tears."
What on earth are you going to keep the fox for?"
"We must make a present to the messenger."
"The commission with which you entrusted me about the fox's liver turned out to be a matter of impossibility, so I came to-day to make my excuses; and now I really can't understand what you are so grateful to me for."
How shall we hand him over to you?"
He'll buy him, and then he'll boil him in a pot and eat him."
The affairs of the Buddhist or imported religion are under the care of the family of Kanjuji.
"How very unkind of you to speak of my tastes like that.
And as she spoke, the fox shed tears; and the master of the house, wishing to thank her, moved in bed, upon which his wife awoke and asked him what was the matter; but he too, to her great astonishment, was biting the pillow and weeping bitterly.
The desire to requite this kindness pierced me to the quick.
I thought that you might wish to use the cub as a sort of decoy to lead the old ones to you, that you might pray them to bring prosperity and virtue to your house.
"Well," replied the other, after considering the matter attentively, "I suppose it's all the same to you whom you sell him to.
In the night of the following day there came a messenger, who announced himself as coming from the person who had undertaken to procure the fox's liver; so the master of the house went out to see him.
We don't care what price we might have to pay for a fox's liver; pray, buy one for us at any expense." So they pressed him to exert himself on their behalf; and he, having promised faithfully to execute the commission, went his way.
He was married, and this union had brought him one son, who had reached his tenth year, but had been attacked by a strange disease which defied all the physicians' skill and drugs.
The saints who are alluded to above are the saints of the whole country, as distinct from those who for special deeds are locally worshipped.
Last night the fox's liver that you required fell into his hands; so he sent me to bring it to you." With these words the messenger produced a small jar, adding, "In a few days he will let you know the price."
"Look there!
"Well, at any rate, you must stop the night here."
At last he sat up in bed and said: "Last spring, when I was out on a pleasure excursion, I was the means of saving the life of a fox's cub, as I told you at the time.
"Oh, we'll sell him for that, sir.
Pray inquire carefully into the matter."
The eldest of the boys replied, "We're going to take him home and sell him to a young man in our village.
However, our friendship shall cease from this day forth."
"Wait a bit!" cried the guest, who did not know what to make of the joy of the two parents.
At last, when calamity attacked your house, I thought I might be of use to you.
The parents lost no time in sending to let the physician know that they had procured the fox's liver.
The next day the doctor came and compounded a medicine for the patient, which at once produced a good effect, and there was no little joy in the household.
And as he spoke, still bowing, the other replied: "Really! was that indeed your thought?
The man's friend, upon this, said to him: "Well, certainly you have got queer tastes.
However, they told the state of the case to a man who lived on the mountains.
"Indeed, sir, I've already been paid for my trouble."
"I really am perfectly unaware of having sent you a fox's liver: there must be some mistake here.
When he had delivered his message, the master of the house was greatly pleased and said, "Indeed, I am deeply grateful for this kindness, which will save my son's life."
Come, we will set it free!" And with these words they untied the string round the cub's neck, and turned its head toward the spot where the old foxes sat; and as the wounded foot was no longer painful, with one bound it dashed to its parents' side and licked them all over for joy, while they seemed to bow their thanks, looking toward the two friends.
At last a famous physician prescribed the liver taken from a live fox, which, as he said, would certainly effect a cure.
When I called you eccentric just now, I was but trying your heart, because I had some suspicions of you; and now I am truly ashamed of myself."
the old foxes have come back, out of fear for their cub's safety.
"Thank you, sir: I've a relation in the next village whom I have not seen for a long while, and I will pass the night with him;" and so he took his leave, and went away.
If that were not forthcoming, the most expensive medicine in the world would not restore the boy to health.
Last spring, when I was taking out my cub to play, it was carried off by some boys, and only saved by your goodness.
"Well, this is very strange.
How the foxes came to hear of this I don't know; but the foxes to whom I had shown kindness killed their own cub and took out the liver; and the old dog-fox, disguising himself as a messenger from the person to whom we had confided the commission, came here with it.
When the parents heard this, they were at their wits' end.
The other day I told Mr. So-and-so that, although my son were to die before my eyes, I would not be the means of killing a fox on purpose, but asked him, in case he heard of any hunter killing a fox, to buy it for me.
The doctor prepared the medicine, and now our boy can get up and walk about the room; and it's all owing to your goodness."
It kills and throttles many people." Hearing this, the prince was somewhat disturbed, and said to the old woman: "What shall we do now?
After the shepherd had thus obtained the dragon's head, twilight began to approach.
Tell me where your strength is.
Doubtless my two brothers also have perished here." The old woman answered: "They have indeed; but there's no help for it.
don't let it go!" and the dogs sprang up and after it, caught it, and soon tore it to pieces. But out of the boar flew a pigeon, and the prince loosed the falcon, and the falcon caught the pigeon and brought it into the prince's hands.
When the dragon came in, the old woman began to question it: "Where in God's name have you been?
Cut these three wands up from below, and strike with them upon their root; an iron door will immediately open into a large vault. In that vault are many people, old and young, rich and poor, small and great, wives and maidens, so that you could settle a populous empire; there, too, are your brothers." When the pigeon had told him all this, the prince immediately wrung its neck.
Go home, my son, lest you follow them." Then he said to her: "Dear old woman, do you know what?
The Old Oak had now only a few leaves left at the very top. "The end is near," he said gravely.
But before I die I should like to know the name you give to such conduct."
And one day the little shoots did at last burst forth from the earth.
And they were right.
"It is a pity I cannot stay and see how angry you will be," he growled, "but those confounded human beings have begun to press one so hard.
"Oak timber is better than Beech timber," they said.
"They are taking our strength out of us," they said, and shook as much as the Beeches around would let them.
The flowers came up in multitudes from the earth, and everything looked fresh and gay.
The winter came and tore all their leaves off them, the snow lay high over the whole land, and every Tree stood deep in his own thoughts and dreamt of the spring.
The Old Oak heard what he said very plainly, and the other Trees also; but they said nothing.
Bend them properly, as you see us do.
The Field Mouse sat outside his hole and ate acorns, and the Beaver built his artistic houses by the river banks.
It was in a land down towards the south--there I took a nap under the Beech Trees.
"Let us see what comes of it," said the Old Oak.
They all knew each other, for they belonged to a great family, and were proud of it.
"You shall be my foster--children, and be treated just as well as my own."
All the leaves burst forth from the swollen buds, and the Trees looked at one another and complimented one another on their beauty.
"I do not know these foreign words of yours," said the Oak.
But the Oaks talked the whole day long one to another about the funny Trees he had told them about.
"Keep your leaves to yourself," cried the Oak; "you overshadow me, and that is what I can't endure.
"This is the way it's done where we come from, and we are perhaps as good as you are."
But the Little Oak could not bear the strange Trees.
"Stuff and nonsense!" said the Beeches.
The light-green Beech leaves were peeping out everywhere, and the Oaks were sighing and bewailing their distress to one another.
But now you must behave yourselves, Little Beeches, or I will give you a clout on the head."
"You should try to grow a little broader, and stop this shooting up into the air.
By this time there were many more human beings in the land than there were before, and they made haste to hew down the Oaks while there were still some remaining.
Goodbye, you old, gnarled Oak Trees!"
So they put forth flowers and fruit, and when the fruit was ripe the Wind shook the boughs and scattered it round far and wide.
The Field Mouse was beside himself with joy over his new food, and thought that Beech nuts tasted much nicer than acorns.
But in this the Old Oak was wrong, for they did come.
At last they closed together over the Little Oak's head, and then he died.
"Nothing has come yet of the Bear's Beech Trees," he said jeeringly, at the same time glancing anxiously up at the Old Oak, who used to give him one on the head.
If you have a spark of honourable feeling alive in you, be good enough to move your leaves a little to one side.
"True," muttered the Bear.
But by his side stood an old gnarled Tree, who gave the Little Oak a clout on the head with one of his lowest boughs.
"I don't quite understand how that concerns us," answered the Beeches.
It will soon be all over with me, and not one of my acorns has sprouted under your shade.
And their tops are so dense that the sunbeams cannot creep through them.
What an old stupid I was!
"You are pretty things," he said, "if this is the way you reward me for my hospitality.
"Hold your tongue," he said, "and don't talk till you have something to talk about.
"What is it?" asked the Oak.
"That is just what is so sickening.
"Beech Trees?" said the Oak inquisitively.
It is competition which rules the world."
"That is not a polite way of speaking to an old Tree with moss on his boughs," said the Oak.
Not one of them had forgotten what the Bear had told them, and every morning when the sun came out they peeped down to look for the Beeches.
And when the spring came the grass stood green, and the birds began singing where they left off last.
"That is all the shade you can give against the sun."
"I call it mean ingratitude." And then he died.
I assure you the Wind gives one's head a good shaking. My old boughs have creaked many a time; and what do you think will become of the flimsy finery that you stick up in the air?"
"I like you for it, and am glad to do you a good turn." And the Fox rolled on the ground at the foot of the Beech Trees and got his fur full of the prickly fruits, and ran with them far out into the country.
Just see where your branches are soaring.
"It serves him right," he said.
And after this they composed themselves to rest.
"Many thanks," answered the Beeches.
"He is paid out for his boasting.
And in return for all this you stifle me."
There is scarcely a spot left where a self-respecting Bear can stay.
"It is, of course, a mere story; the Bear wishes to impose upon us," said the other.
"You begin to be rather pushing," the Old Tree said.
They are tall, slim Trees, not crooked old things like you.
But the Old Oak took his foster-children under his protection.
Years went by, and the Beeches went on growing, and they grew till they were tall young Trees, which reached up among the branches of the Old Oak.
"The kings of the wood do not come till the whole company is assembled."
"Thanks," said the Little Beeches, and they said no more.
"The land is ours no longer." One bough died after another, and the Storm broke them off and cast them on the ground.
How will you be able to hold out when a regular storm comes?
But at last they came.
He was very proud of it, and he thought that he had now the right to join in the conversation.
But I beg you to take notice that I am much older, and of good family besides."
The Beeches only laughed and went on growing.
When they knew this perfectly, they had finished their education.
The Bear, the Wolf, and the Fox went out hunting, while the Stag grazed by the edge of the fen.
"What are they?"
"You are quick people like me," said the Wind.
The Little Oak was shamefaced, and held his tongue; and the other big Trees spoke to one another in low whispers, for they had great respect for the old one.
"What on earth can those Trees be?" said one of them.
"It is the most dignified thing to come last!" they said to one another.
I have been for a little tour abroad, I may tell you, and am just a little bit spoilt.
But the Bear got up and rubbed his eyes.
We had slept longer than we thought, for the sun was westering fast, and though the rest had refreshed me, my leg had grown stiff, and hurt the more in dangling when we started again.
Then from the bottom of this shaft there spread out narrow passages or tunnels, mostly six feet high, but sometimes only three or four, and in these the marble is dug.
No time was wasted in words; Elzevir had the flask in his pocket, and the boy was biting the crown.
Although I knew little of these quarries, and certainly was in evil plight to take note of anything at that time, yet afterwards I learnt much about them.
Thus he came safe without stumble to the bottom of the pit.
'Scaring rooks for Farmer Topp,' was the answer.
Once get to the bottom safe, and we can laugh at Posse, and hue and cry, and at the King's Crown itself.
'Let us move on,' said Block; 'tis but a little distance now to go, and the heat is past already.
He whispered to me to lie still, so that it might not be perceived my leg was broken; and the boy replied:
Maybe you've seen a flask in walking through the furrows?'
'What! have you dropped your shot-flask too?' asked the boy.
The cliff-face was gleaming white, the sea tawny inshore, but purest blue outside, with the straight sunpath across it, spangled and gleaming like a mackerel's back.
When we got there all was dark, but he stepped off into a narrow opening on the right hand, and walked on as if he knew the way.
They will not be back for some time yet, and, when they come, will not think to search closely for us hereabouts; but that we cannot risk, and must get clear away.
Only twice did he set me down at a turning, while he took out his tinder-box and lit a match; but at length the darkness became less dark, and I saw that we were in a large cave or room, into which the light came through some opening at the far end.
A minute later he said: 'The boy is coming straight for the wall; we shall have to show ourselves'; and while he spoke there was a rattle of falling stones, where the boy was partly climbing and partly pulling down the dry wall, and so Elzevir stood up.
'No, I have seen no flask; but very like have not come the same way as you, being sent out here from Lowermoigne; and as for powder, I have little left, and must save that for the rooks, or shall get a beating for my pains.'
The boy's eyes twinkled, and so would mine at so valuable a piece, and he took out from his pocket a battered cowskin flask.
The boy looked frightened, and made as if he would run off, but Elzevir passed him the time of day in a civil voice, and he stopped and gave it back.
Behind one of these walls, broken down in places, but held together with straggling ivy, and buttressed here and there with a bramble-bush, Elzevir put me down at length and said, 'I am beat, and can carry thee no farther for this present, though there is not now much farther to go.
So we gained a sorry matchlock, slugs, and powder, and the boy walked off over the furrow, whistling with his hand in his pocket, and a guinea and a crown-piece in his hand.
'Come,' said Elzevir, 'give me a charge or two, and there is half a crown for thee.' And he took the coin out of his pocket and showed it.
Then I called out to Elzevir, and he, guessing what had come over me, cries to turn upon my side, and press my belly to the cliff.
But as I crept along, I relaxed care for a moment, and my eyes wandered from the cliff-side and looked down.
I shut my eyes firm again, and thus we moved along another spell, mounting still and feeling the wind still freshening.
For the Zigzag started off as a fair enough chalk path, but in a few paces narrowed down till it was but a whiter thread against the grey-white cliff-face, and afterwards turned sharply back, crossing a hundred feet direct above our heads.
Just at the end of this flat ledge, farthest from where the bridle-path leads down, but not a hundred yards from where we stand, there is a sheep-track leading up the cliff.
'John, I am going to stop; but open not thy eyes till I have set thee down and bid thee.'
Then he told me to stop, for that the way grew wider and he would pick me up again.
Is the bone broken?'
We have fifteen minutes yet to win or lose with, and if we gain the cliff-top in that time we shall have an hour's start, or more, for they will take all that to search the under-cliff.
But for how short a time!
And yet, if thou fear'st not, I will still try it.
And then the path grew steeper and steeper, and Elzevir went slower and slower, till at last he spoke:
But if we fall, why, we shall fall together, and outwit their cunning.
But have a care to keep thy outer hand near to the inner, and the balance of thy body to the cliff, for there is no room to dance hornpipes here.
He knelt, and rolled down the leg of my stocking; but though he only moved my foot ever so little, it caused me sharp pain, for feeling was coming back after the first numbness of the shot.
Pluck up thy courage, keep thy eyes to the cliff, and forward.'
At length he said that we were come to the last turn of the path, and he must set me down once more.
In a minute I knew from Elzevir's steps that he had left the turf and was upon the chalk.
'Tush!' he cried; 'it is thy heart that fails thee, and 'tis too late now to change counsel.
And Maskew, too, will keep them in check a little, while they try to bring the life back to so good a man.
We were safe.
And Elzevir, for all he was so strong, could not pull a helpless lump backwards up that path.
Five minutes later Elzevir stepped on to the cliff-top, with me upon his back.
Then Elzevir spoke.
Yet I could not, but answered: 'I cannot, I cannot; if I open my eyes, or move hand or foot, I shall fall on the rocks below.'
"There she is now!" he exclaimed.
Not you, Bill!
"That's not the one. She's all different, a pile different, Ronicky."
"Just for the reason I told you."
When he called out softly, the sound brought Gregg, with one long leap out of the chair where he was sleeping, to the window.
"Bill, look me in the eye and tell me, man to man, that you're a liar!" He added: "Can you ever be happy without her, man?"
"Shake!" said Ronicky Doone.
After you've done all that are you going to give up now?
You're going to buck up and go ahead full steam.
Bill, what that girl told you didn't come out of her own head.
"D'you know why she looked back over her shoulder?"
Not a sign of Caroline Smith appeared even during the second day.
Ain't that right?
It was vastly wearying work.
There could be no shadow of a doubt about it.
Ronicky sighed.
If, at the end of that time, Caroline Smith did not come out of the house across the street they could conclude that she did not stay there.
"That took the wind out of me.
"'Sent my picture to!' she says and looks as if the ground had opened under her feet.
The face was thin, almost fleshless, so that the bony jaw stood out like the jaw of a death's-head.
We've done our hunting pretty near as well as we could. If we don't land her this trip, I'm about ready to give up."
"Go on back to sleep. I'll call you again if anything happens."
Still he pleaded, and still she ordered him away.
"Grinning?" asked Bill Gregg, grinding his teeth and starting from his chair.
"No, Bill.
"Ain't there?
It come out of the head of the gent across the way.
If this were in her mind, however, it vanished instantly.
What a face it was!
From the back it looked down on the lights glimmering on the black East River and across to the flare of Brooklyn; to the left the whole arc of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was exposed.
Here they took up the vigil.
Every minute."
When you turned your back on her she looked like she'd run after you and try to explain.
"I'll smash every bone in his ugly head."
It's just about our last chance, Bill.
That's where you and me don't agree!
Why, Bill, look at the way things have gone!
'I don't remember any such name!'
Bill Gregg groaned.
'You're mad!' she says.
One week was decided on as a fair test.
I only had enough left to say: 'The gent that was writing those papers to the correspondence school to you from the West, the one you sent your picture to and--'
"Sure!
When Gregg opened the door Ronicky Doone blinked and drew in a deep breath at the sight of the poor fellow's face.
The nose was hooked like the nose of a bird of prey; the eyes were long and slanting like those of an Oriental.
And so swift was that descent that, when the girl, idling down the steps across the street, came onto the sidewalk, Bill Gregg rushed out from the other side and ran toward her.
"It's proof that she ain't yonder," said Bill Gregg.
Bill Gregg smiled sourly.
Ain't that something done?
He's the one who's kept her in that house.
"It's ended," said Bill Gregg faintly.
"Was the skunk laughing at me?"
She closed the door behind her and, walking to the top of the steps, paused there and looked up and down the street.
Let your men come on.
"Let me help you.
"But he left that room again and came down the hall."
A regular Apollo, my dear Ruth."
The only way he could get in was by stealth.
"The gun, partner."
Where did John Mark get his sudden strength?
I couldn't help hearing you, partner."
He was brought up with a shock by the sight of Ronicky's big Colt, held at the hip and covering him with absolute certainty.
"Go on," the leader was repeating.
"Tush," he broke in as smoothly as ever.
You smiled so much, in fact, that he followed you and found that you had come here.
He knew every line in that sharp profile.
"That dropped him into the coal bin.
"It was down in the cellar that we found the first tracks.
It was somebody you met somewhere--on the train, perhaps, and you couldn't help smiling at him, eh?
A pretty story, a true romance!
"You followed his trail?"
"Right to this room!"
"I have no doubt she is, but I got a good argument."
"John--" began Ruth Tolliver, her voice shaking.
I've been here for some time.
"And why?
Chapter Twelve
I had asked Harry to have sixteen of the best voices in the chapel school to be trained to eight or ten good Carols without knowing why.
and
I had invited Lycidas, because, besides being my best friend, he is the best fellow in the world, and so deserves the best Christmas eve can give him.
"Hail to the night, Hail to the day";
We went to the grandest places in Boston, and we went to the meanest.
And on this particular year the present was a Carol party,--which is about as good fun, all things consenting kindly, as a man can have.
Lycidas and I tumbled in on the back seat, each with a child in his lap to keep us warm; I was flanked by Sam Perry, and he by John Rich, both of the mercurial age, and therefore good to do errands.
Kisses flung from the window; kisses flung back from the street.
Many things must consent, as will appear.
But I told him, "No," as soon as I could hush their shouts of "Merry Christmas;" that we had a long journey before us, and must not alight by the way. And the children broke out with
But perhaps to-day, as they pin up the laurels and the palm in the chapel at Alexandria, they are humming the words, not thinking of Clement more than he thought of us.
"King of glory, king of peace!" "Hear the song, and see the Star!" "Welcome be thou, heavenly King!" "Was not Christ our Saviour?"
And so the children sung through Clement's old hymn.
CHRISTMAS WAITS IN BOSTON.
At nine we brought up at my house, D Street, three doors from the corner, and the children picked their very best for Polly and my six little girls to hear, and then for the first time we let them jump out and run in.
That will tone down the horses.
And then we came up Hanover Street and stopped under Mr. Gerry's chapel, where they were dressing the walls with their evergreens, and gave them
Everywhere they wished us a merry Christmas, and we them.
"Now is the time of Christmas come,"
As the children closed with
And when, after this, Harry would fain have driven on, because two carols at one house was the rule, how the little witches begged that they might sing just one song more there, because Mrs. Alexander had been so kind to them, when she showed them about the German stitches.
Haliburton came running out, and begged me to bring them in.
"Hail to the night, Hail to the day,"
Then the Italian image-man heard for the first time in his life
and
When I reached the main street I saw that my hope was futile, for another batch of cowboys were coming in full gallop towards me, very thoroughly heading me off in that direction.
Camp, Baldwin, and the judge had left their horses just outside the saloon, and there they were still patiently standing, with their bridles thrown over their heads, as only Western horses will stand.
I don't suppose I was on the ragged edge more than thirty seconds, but they were enough to prove to me that to keep one's back turned to an enemy as one runs away takes a deal more pluck than to stand up and face his gun.
What seemed at the moment an incomprehensible puzzle had, as we afterwards learned, a very simple explanation.
"You're just too late, gentlemen," I said, pointing out the side window of the saloon.
When the train had been held at that station for a few minutes, Camp went to the conductor, demanded the cause for the delay, and was shown my telegram.
And when I saw the judge finish off his signature with a flourish, I played a pretty desperate card.
They yelled at me to hold up, and I expected every moment to hear the crack of revolvers, for the poorest shot among them would have found no difficulty in dropping my horse at that distance if they had wanted to stop me.
"There come the cavalry."
But as I did so I realized that to destroy United States mail not merely entailed criminal liability, but was off color morally.
But the next step revealed the object, for the lawyer then asked for a search-warrant to look for stolen property.
I threw the papers towards Fred and Lord Ralles, shouting, "Hide them!" Fred was quick as a flash, and, grabbing them off the ground, sprang up the steps of my car and ran inside, just escaping a bullet from my pursuers.
It was denied, as was to have been expected; indeed, why they took the trouble to go through the forms was beyond me.
Seeing that I understood the moves too well to be bluffed, the judge, Mr. Camp, and the lawyer held a whispered consultation.
"I'll give you a stiff term, young man," he said.
I made no objection to the sheriff serving the paper, though it nearly broke my heart to see Madge's face.
Mr. Cullen and Albert tried to come too, but all outsiders were excluded by order of the "court." I was told to show cause why I should not forthwith produce the letters, and answered that I asked an adjournment of the case so that I might be heard by counsel.
Ash Forks, like all Western railroad towns, is one long line of buildings running parallel with the railway tracks.
This put me out of view of my pursuers for a moment, and in that instant I stood up in my stirrups, lifted the broad leather flap of the saddle, and tucked the letters underneath it, as far in as I could force them.
Seeing through the device, the party had at once gone to this ranch, where the owner, Baldwin, mounted them, and it was their dust-cloud we had seen as they rode up to Ash Forks.
The moment I saw that there was no escape, I put my hand in my breast-pocket and took out the letters, intending to tear them into a hundred pieces.
THE LETTERS CHANGE HANDS AGAIN
When I turned to do so I saw the lot struggling up from the floor, and, knowing that it wouldn't take them many seconds to find their way out through the window, I didn't waste much time in watching them.
Two hundred feet, therefore, brought me to the edge of the town, and I wheeled my pony and rode down behind the rear of the buildings. In turning, I looked back, and saw half a dozen mounted men already in pursuit, but I lost sight of them the next moment.
The moment I saw him, I rode towards him, pressing my pony for all he was worth.
"It will take just one day to have habeas corpus proceedings in a United States court, and one more to get the papers here," I rejoined pleasantly.
Before I had ridden a hundred feet I realized that I had a done-up horse under me, and, considering that he had covered over forty miles that afternoon in pretty quick time, it was not surprising that there wasn't very much go left in him.
It was a desperate place in which to hide them, but the game was a desperate one at best, and the very boldness of the idea might be its best chance of success.
I knew that Baldwin's cowboys could get new mounts in plenty without wasting many minutes, and that then they would overhaul me in very short order.
To escape them, I headed up the street away from the station, with the pack in close pursuit.
I made a dash for the door, and as I went through it I grabbed the key and locked them in.
It didn't take me long to have those bridles back in place, and as I tossed each over the peak of the Mexican saddle I gave two of the ponies slaps which started them off at a lope across the railroad tracks.
"It very appropriately means 'contempt of the court,' your honor."
Fortunately for me, my pursuers felt so sure of my capture that not one of them drew a bead on me.
I swung myself into the saddle of the third, and flicked him with the loose ends of the bridle in a way which made him understand that I meant business.
I turned across the railroad tracks, and cut in behind some freight-cars that were standing on a siding.
My hope was that I might get time to give Fred the tip as to where the letters were; but before I was within speaking distance Baldwin came running out from behind the station, and, seeing me, turned, called back and gesticulated, evidently to summon some cowboys to head me off.
The judge was equally obliging, and began to fill one out on the instant.
The three conspirators jumped to their feet and bolted for the window; even the sheriff turned to look.
I faltered, balancing the outwitting of Camp against State's prison, the doing my best for Madge against the wrong of it.
I was now heading for the station over the ties, and was surprised to see Fred Cullen with Lord Ralles on the tracks up by the special, for my mind had been so busy in the last hour that I had forgotten that Fred was due.
It isn't a very nice sensation to keep your ears pricked up in expectation of hearing the shooting begin, and to know that any moment may be your last.
As soon as I reached a street leading back to the railroad I turned again, and rode towards it, my one thought being to get back, if possible, to the station, and put the letters into the railroad agent's safe.
To cheer her I said, suggestively, "They've got me, but they haven't got the letters, Miss Cullen.
I couldn't make out this new move, and puzzled over it, while Judge Wilson ordered my commitment.
My surprise can be imagined when, at its conclusion, Mr. Camp said,--
CHAPTER XI
One of the G. S. directors, Mr. Baldwin, who had come in on Mr. Camp's car, was the owner of a great cattle-ranch near Rock Butte.
I think I'm as honest a fellow as the average, but I have to confess that I couldn't decide to do right till I thought that Madge wouldn't want me to be dishonest, even for her.
To make matters more serious, Baldwin had rounded up his cowboys and brought them along with him, in order to make any resistance impossible.
At first, when Deasey retired from the police force with a pension and an heiress with three hundred pounds, and time hung heavy on his hands, he would try to satisfy this craving through the medium of a host of small flirtations with everybody's maid.
What Deasey cared about was what he called "the secrets of the soul."
"Never met a man," he was wont to say, "with no backstairs to his mind! And the quieter, decenter, respectabler, innocenter a man looked--like enough!--the darker those backstairs!"
In this way he could inform himself exactly how many loaves were taken by the Sweeneys for a week's consumption, as compared with those which were devoured by all the Cassidys; for whom the bottles at the Presbytery went in by the back door; and what was the real cause of the quarrel between the twin Miss McInerneys.
They found it when they let the bucket down, but I wasn't his accomplice at all, 'twas only connivance with me!"
But these were but blackbird-scratchings, as it were, upon the deep soil of the human heart.
Indeed, it was curiously instructive how John Jamieson laid down a causeway of gleaming stepping-stones, so that Deasey might cross lightly over the turgid waters of his victims' souls.
But then, again, you could not well conceal a corpse in someone's waistcoat; and gold coins would melt or be mislaid amongst the loose bricks of a sooty chimney.
Or--
What subtle instinct was it that had prompted him to add to the first unvarying words: "But all that is now past and over, and safe beneath the mouldering clay!"
'Twould madden you!"
"Well, the way of it was, you see, he put it up the chimbley, but when the chimbley-sweepers come he transferred it in his weskit to my place, and I dropped it down the well.
But always, whatever the words, whatever the nature or sex, the shot would tell.
Or--
"'Twas never found out, from that hour to this, who done it!" muttered the Widow Geraghty, "but, may the Divvle skelp me if I touch one drop of chucken-tea again!"
Sometimes he would allude to a "certain document," or "incriminating facts," or "certain letters"--he would ring the changes on these three, according to the sex and temperament with which he had to deal.
It was the plan which made him ultimately describe himself as a humorist.
When he had spoken of the chimney and the well Deasey concluded at once it was a foully murdered corpse.
At her refusal Deasey was struck with the most respectful compassion; until that hour he had never known one single lacerated soul decline this consolation.
It was up these stairs he craved to go.
I only give the man a little push--that way!--and he fell over on the side, and busted all his veins!"
To ring at the front door of ordinary intercourse was not enough for him.
"Well--how would I get the time to clane the childer and to wash their heads, and I working all the day at curing stinkin' hides!
From those--they were nearly always the women--who swiftly asked if he hadn't destroyed the letters, he caught shame-faced gleams of the truth.
1922
He would wait until the bar was deserted by all but the one lingering victim whom his trained eye had picked out.
It was partly because Patrick delighted in long words, and partly to excuse himself for being full of the sour cream of an inhuman curiosity.
"Nature, I s'pose!" replied the white-haired widow.
At the words, accompanied by John Jamieson--"A certain dark page of your past history--help yourself, me boy!--has been inadvertently revealed to me, but is for ever sacred in me breast!"--it was strange to see how, from the underworld of the man's mind, there would trip out the company of misshapen hobgoblins and gnomes which had been locked away in darkness, maybe, this many a year.
Patrick Deasey described himself as a "philosopher, psychologist, and humorist."
"To look at you, ye'd think ma'am ye could never kill a fly!"
'Twas Herself should have got it, and Herself alone!"...
As a rule, from the type that demanded the letter back, he only caught sight of the tip of the secret's ears.
Deasey had craved for corpses, but nothing so grim as that had risen to his whisky-bait until he tried the same old game on Mrs. Geraghty.
First came the little start, the straightened figure, the pallor or flush, the shamed and suddenly-lit eyes, and then--
But there were some confessions, haltingly patchy and inadequate, but hauntingly suggestive, which Deasey could neither piece out on the spot, nor yet unravel in the small hours of the night.
This touch of the grey feet laid a spell on Deasey's hankering morbidity.
"Ah, now, that would be telling!" Deasey would make reply.
"Who told you, Mr. Deasey, sir?" Or "Where did you get the letter?"
And respectfully he passed the peppermints.
"It was so," said the widow.
Off, the length of Commonwealth Avenue, to where it crosses the Brookline branch of the Mill-Dam,--dashing along with the gayest of the sleighing-parties as we came back into town, up Chestnut Street, through Louisburg Square,--we ran the sleigh into a bank on the slope of Pinckney Street in front of Walter's house,--and, before they suspected there that any one had come, the children were singing
"Nor war nor battle sound,"
Ours are not the carollings of your poor shivering little East Angles or South Mercians, where they have to plod round afoot in countries where they do not know what a sleigh-ride is.
and all of them fell in so cheerily.
"Carol, carol, Christians, Carol joyfully."
Polly had some hot oysters for them, so that the frolic was crowned with a treat.
Under the full moon, on the snow still white, with sixteen children at the happiest, and with the blessed memories of the best the world has ever had, there can be nothing better than two or three such hours.
The instant the horses' bells stopped, their voices began.
Everywhere a little crowd gathered round us, and then we dashed away far enough to gather quite another crowd; and then back, perhaps, not sorry to double on our steps if need were, and leaving every crowd with a happy thought of
"The star, the manger, and the Child!"
In an instant more we saw Haliburton and Anna run to the window and pull up the shades, and, in a minute more, faces at all the windows.
Little did Clement think of bells and snow, as he taught it in his Sunday school there in Alexandria.
"Merry Christmas" again with a good-will, and then one of the girls began
Harry was in front somewhere flanked in likewise, and the twelve other children lay in miscellaneously between, like sardines when you have first opened the box.
There was a Christmas cake cut into sixteen pieces, which they took home to dream upon; and then hoods and muffs on again, and by ten o'clock, or a little after, we had all the girls and all the little ones at their homes.
I think the children had got inkling of what was coming, or perhaps Harry had hinted it to their mothers.
rather a favorite,--quicker and more to the childish taste perhaps than the other,--and with another "Merry Christmas" we were off again.
O dear me! it is a scrap of old Ephrem the Syrian, if they did but know it!
singing with all that unconscious pathos with which children do sing, and starting the tears in your eyes in the midst of your gladness.
"Carol, carol, Christians, Carol joyfully; Carol for the coming Of Christ's nativity."
First of all there must be good sleighing,--and second, a fine night for Christmas eve.
Stop on the left after you have passed Fairfield Street." So we dashed up to the front of Haliburton's palace, where he was keeping his first Christmas tide.
I always give myself a Christmas present.
So it was that when I came down with Lycidas to the chapel at seven o'clock, I found Harry had gathered there his eight pretty girls and his eight jolly boys, and had them practising for the last time,
And the children, whom Harry had hushed down for a square or two, broke forth with good full voice under his strong lead in
Not much matter indeed, for they were perfect enough in it before midnight.
And then up the hill and over to the North End, and as far as we could get the horses up into Moon Court, that they might sing to the Italian image-man who gave Lucy the boy and dog in plaster, when she was sick in the spring.
"The waiting world was still."
"First, driver, out on Commonwealth Avenue.
O, we went to twenty places that night, I suppose!
"Shepherd of tender sheep,"
and so down State Street and stopped at the Advertiser office, because, when the boys gave their "Literary Entertainment," Mr. Hale put in their advertisement for nothing, and up in the old attic there the compositors were relieved to hear
We did not care to disappoint them if a February thaw setting in on the 24th of December should break up the spree before it began.
"When Anna took the baby, And pressed his lips to hers"--
My first resolution was to quit Geneva forever; my country, which, when I was happy and beloved, was dear to me, now, in my adversity, became hateful.
I had no conception that vessels ever came so far north and was astounded at the sight.
Margaret, what comment can I make on the untimely extinction of this glorious spirit?
Neither yours nor any man's death is needed to consummate the series of my being and accomplish that which must be done, but it requires my own.
My work is nearly complete.
Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.
Oh!
I darted towards the spot from which the sound proceeded, but the devil eluded my grasp.
No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine.
These feelings are transitory; each day of expectation delayed fills them with fear, and I almost dread a mutiny caused by this despair.
Some weeks before this period I had procured a sledge and dogs and thus traversed the snows with inconceivable speed.
When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work, and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue.
"My reign is not yet over"--these words were legible in one of these inscriptions--"you live, and my power is complete.
The die is cast; I have consented to return if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes blasted by cowardice and indecision; I come back ignorant and disappointed.
I hesitated before I answered, when Frankenstein, who had at first been silent, and indeed appeared hardly to have force enough to attend, now roused himself; his eyes sparkled, and his cheeks flushed with momentary vigour.
About half an hour afterwards he attempted again to speak but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed forever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.
My present situation was one in which all voluntary thought was swallowed up and lost.
I am weak, but surely the spirits who assist my vengeance will endow me with sufficient strength." Saying this, he endeavoured to spring from the bed, but the exertion was too great for him; he fell back and fainted.
Everything was silent except the leaves of the trees, which were gently agitated by the wind; the night was nearly dark, and the scene would have been solemn and affecting even to an uninterested observer.
My courage and perseverance were invigorated by these scoffing words; I resolved not to fail in my purpose, and calling on heaven to support me, I continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean appeared at a distance and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon.
Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice.
With new courage, therefore, I pressed on, and in two days arrived at a wretched hamlet on the seashore.
What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me?
Covered with ice, it was only to be distinguished from land by its superior wildness and ruggedness.
Chapter 24
I am interrupted.
But you have a husband and lovely children; you may be happy.
September 5th
Again there is a sound as of a human voice, but hoarser; it comes from the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein still lie.
My beloved Sister,
I mentioned in my last letter the fears I entertained of a mutiny. This morning, as I sat watching the wan countenance of my friend--his eyes half closed and his limbs hanging listlessly--I was roused by half a dozen of the sailors, who demanded admission into the cabin.
But this was not the time for delay; I disencumbered the dogs of their dead companion, gave them a plentiful portion of food, and after an hour's rest, which was absolutely necessary, and yet which was bitterly irksome to me, I continued my route.
A sister or a brother can never, unless indeed such symptoms have been shown early, suspect the other of fraud or false dealing, when another friend, however strongly he may be attached, may, in spite of himself, be contemplated with suspicion.
My feelings are profound, but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements.
I hardly know whether I shall have the power to detail it; yet the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and wonderful catastrophe.
What his feelings were whom I pursued I cannot know.
I inquired of the inhabitants concerning the fiend and gained accurate information.
His sentence was pronounced, and I could only grieve and be patient.
Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.
Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.
Sometimes, seized with sudden agony, he could not continue his tale; at others, his voice broken, yet piercing, uttered with difficulty the words so replete with anguish.
Despair had indeed almost secured her prey, and I should soon have sunk beneath this misery.
At length I gathered resolution to address him in a pause of the tempest of his passion.
But I journey towards England, and I may there find consolation.
I followed, when I could, the courses of the rivers; but the daemon generally avoided these, as it was here that the population of the country chiefly collected.
And what, Margaret, will be the state of your mind?
I have lost my hopes of utility and glory; I have lost my friend.
"Oh, it is not thus--not thus," interrupted the being.
I must arise and examine. Good night, my sister.
I pressed on, but in vain.
"Or whither does your senseless curiosity lead you?
I quickly destroyed part of my sledge to construct oars, and by these means was enabled, with infinite fatigue, to move my ice raft in the direction of your ship.
"Yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions.
My life, as it passed thus, was indeed hateful to me, and it was during sleep alone that I could taste joy.
Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain.
At such moments vengeance, that burned within me, died in my heart, and I pursued my path towards the destruction of the daemon more as a task enjoined by heaven, as the mechanical impulse of some power of which I was unconscious, than as the ardent desire of my soul.
What agonizing fondness did I feel for them!
You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.
Your toils only begin; wrap yourself in furs and provide food, for we shall soon enter upon a journey where your sufferings will satisfy my everlasting hatred."
I am surrounded by mountains of ice which admit of no escape and threaten every moment to crush my vessel.
Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost, to which I am impassive.
Thus has a week passed away, while I have listened to the strangest tale that ever imagination formed.
Never will I give up my search until he or I perish; and then with what ecstasy shall I join my Elizabeth and my departed friends, who even now prepare for me the reward of my tedious toil and horrible pilgrimage!
The snows descended on my head, and I saw the print of his huge step on the white plain.
The Greeks wept for joy when they beheld the Mediterranean from the hills of Asia, and hailed with rapture the boundary of their toils.
He," he continued, pointing to the corpse, "he suffered not in the consummation of the deed.
The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion.
Walton, in continuation.
He seems to feel his own worth and the greatness of his fall.
I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion.
But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy?
If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction.
I shall die.
All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble.
"But it is true that I am a wretch.
Are you, then, so easily turned from your design?
September 2nd
Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
On every point of general literature he displays unbounded knowledge and a quick and piercing apprehension.
No sympathy may I ever find.
Sometimes the peasants, scared by this horrid apparition, informed me of his path; sometimes he himself, who feared that if I lost all trace of him I should despair and die, left some mark to guide me.
September 12th
Oh!
Who shall analyse those tears and say whether they were sweet or bitter?
"I tried--I tried my best, indeed I did, Rebecca," said Amelia deprecatingly, "but I couldn't forget--"; and she finished the sentence by looking up at the portrait.
She told him that she thought Major William was the best man in all the world--the gentlest and the kindest, the bravest and the humblest.
He was slow of movement, tied to his Doctor, and perhaps to some other leading-strings. At least Becky was not anxious to go to England.
She had been a daughter to him.
I will see that the buttons of the recruits are properly bright and that the sergeants make no mistakes in their accounts.
She talked to her perpetually about Major Dobbin sent about his business, and made no scruple of declaring her admiration for that excellent, high-minded gentleman, and of telling Emmy that she had behaved most cruelly regarding him.
What had that little Mrs. Crawley to say to him?
She treated Emmy like a child and patted her head.
It seemed to them of no consequence whether Becky had a quantity of very fine clothes in invisible trunks; but as her present supply was exceedingly shabby, Emmy supplied her out of her own stores, or took her to the best milliner in the town and there fitted her out.
It was the portrait of a gentleman in pencil, his face having the advantage of being painted up in pink.
The correspondence between George and his guardian had not ceased by any means: William had even written once or twice to her since his departure, but in a manner so unconstrainedly cold that the poor woman felt now in her turn that she had lost her power over him and that, as he had said, he was free.
"Why, when your papa was a little boy," she said, "he often told me that it was William who defended him against a tyrant at the school where they were; and their friendship never ceased from that day until the last, when your dear father fell."
We must have the bones in, or, dammy, I'll split.' What could the Major mean, Mamma?"
He is, ten to one, an impostor.
William had spent it all out.
At last the much-bragged-about boxes arrived from Leipzig; three of them not by any means large or splendid; nor did Becky appear to take out any sort of dresses or ornaments from the boxes when they did arrive.
He was riding on an elephant away from some cocoa-nut trees and a pagoda: it was an Eastern scene.
It's false!
She laid down the cup of tea.
She knew he would come.
He must go now.
CHAPTER LXVII
Neither spoke much, except now and then, when the boy said a few words to his timid companion, indicative of sympathy and protection.
The artless woman had made a confidant of the boy.
"Look there, you fool," Becky said, still with provoking good humour, and taking a little paper out of her belt, she opened it and flung it into Emmy's lap.
As for Jos, even in that little interview in the garret at the Elephant Inn, she had found means to win back a great deal of his good-will.
For wherever Mr. Joseph Sedley went, she travelled likewise, and that infatuated man seemed to be entirely her slave.
"You are not in debt, then?
Not he.
I am done.
Oh, she thought, she would be all her life saying them!
As for Becky, she came as a matter of course in the fourth place inside of the fine barouche Mr. Jos had bought, the two domestics being on the box in front.
"I want to talk to you.
Which Contains Births, Marriages, and Deaths
He never cared for you.
The memory of his almost countless services, and lofty and affectionate regard, now presented itself to her and rebuked her day and night.
Isn't the whole course of life made up of such?
She found herself suddenly and unexpectedly in snug comfortable quarters, surrounded by friends, kindness, and good-natured simple people such as she had not met with for many a long day; and, wanderer as she was by force and inclination, there were moments when rest was pleasant to her.
There's only two people on deck besides the steersman.
Why pine, or be ashamed of my defeat?"
It was no more torn collars now, I promise you, and faded silks trailing off at the shoulder.
That young scapegrace George had fled too, and as the gentleman in the old cloak lined with red stuff stepped on to the shore, there was scarcely any one present to see what took place, which was briefly this:
"Thank you," said Amelia.
The German ladies, never particularly squeamish as regards morals, especially in English people, were delighted with the cleverness and wit of Mrs. Osborne's charming friend, and though she did not ask to go to Court, yet the most august and Transparent Personages there heard of her fascinations and were quite curious to know her.
But if she did not indulge--the courier did: that rascal Kirsch could not be kept from the bottle, nor could he tell how much he took when he applied to it.
"There is nothing to forbid me now," she thought.
"I'm sure I can't tell what he meant." His presence and that of his friend inspired the little lady with intolerable terror and aversion.
"I bought it," said Becky in a voice trembling with emotion; "I went to see if I could be of any use to my kind friends.
Georgy had a dandy telescope and got the vessel under view in the most skilful manner.
They paid her tipsy compliments; they leered at her over the dinner-table.
When a traveller talks to you perpetually about the splendour of his luggage, which he does not happen to have with him, my son, beware of that traveller!
Indeed, she did not cry so much as Becky expected--the other soothed and kissed her--a rare mark of sympathy with Mrs. Becky.
So, pleased herself, she tried with all her might to please everybody; and we know that she was eminent and successful as a practitioner in the art of giving pleasure.
Georgy jumped at the idea of a move.
It was a fond mistake.
She grew pale and ill.
That incident of the picture had finished him.
And as she looked at her husband's portrait of nights, it no longer reproached her--perhaps she reproached it, now William was gone.
The ship came swiftly nearer and nearer.
When I'm in the Army, won't I hate the French?--that's all."
The Colonel's brow darkened at this.
"And now let us get pen and ink and write to him to come this minute," she said.
It was that signal, sure enough.
Jos clasped his hands and cried, "He would go back to India.
The French Minister was as much charmed with her as his English rival.
But though the steamer was under way, he might not be on board; he might not have got the letter; he might not choose to come.
George took the glass again and raked the vessel.
Rebecca," cried out Amelia, starting up.
"Then, why not come away with me?" said Dobbin in reply; but Jos had not the courage.
You must go away from here and from the impertinences of these men.
The more he thought of this long passage of his life, the more clearly he saw his deception.
He had left her, and she was wretched.
And suppose I had won her, should I not have been disenchanted the day after my victory?
He was sometimes surprised himself at the way in which Mr. Sedley's Cognac diminished.
Of course he would come; what could he do else but come?
Emmy did not care where she went much.
You must have a husband, you fool; and one of the best gentlemen I ever saw has offered you a hundred times, and you have rejected him, you silly, heartless, ungrateful little creature!"
She would have liked to kneel down and say her prayers of thanks there.
He asked little parties and invented festivities to do her honour.
A couple of ruffians were fighting for this innocent creature, gambling for her at her own table, and though she was not aware of the rascals' designs upon her, yet she felt a horror and uneasiness in their presence and longed to fly.
Becky took down her elephant and put it into the little box which she had had from Amelia ever so many years ago. Emmy also came off with her Lares--her two pictures--and the party, finally, were, lodged in an exceedingly dear and uncomfortable house at Ostend.
I have never parted with that picture--I never will."
"I may love him with all my heart now. Oh, I will, I will, if he will but let me and forgive me." I believe it was this feeling rushed over all the others which agitated that gentle little bosom.
"I'll go into harness again," he said, "and do my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Heaven to place me.
"Listen to me, Amelia," said Becky, marching up and down the room before the other and surveying her with a sort of contemptuous kindness.
She was very distraite, nervous, silent, and ill to please.
Having at first disliked Becky for being the means of dismissing him from the presence of her mistress, she was reconciled to Mrs. Crawley subsequently, because the latter became William's most ardent admirer and champion.
Her life is her answer to them.
The Transparent reigning family took too to the waters, or retired to their hunting lodges. Everybody went away having any pretensions to politeness, and of course, with them, Doctor von Glauber, the Court Doctor, and his Baroness.
I know everybody.
Emmy tried to look through the telescope over George's shoulder, but she could make nothing of it.
He found his brother-in-law in a condition of pitiable infirmity--and dreadfully afraid of Rebecca, though eager in his praises of her.
She might have some misgivings about the friends whom she should meet at Ostend, and who might be likely to tell ugly stories--but bah! she was strong enough to hold her own.
Some of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acquaintances, however, acknowledged her readily enough,--perhaps more readily than she would have desired. Among those were Major Loder (unattached), and Captain Rook (late of the Rifles), who might be seen any day on the Dike, smoking and staring at the women, and who speedily got an introduction to the hospitable board and select circle of Mr. Joseph Sedley.
He owned it to me.
She picketed her steed, hung up her weapons, and warmed herself comfortably by his fire.
Who are these Hales that he makes such a fuss about?'
'I wonder how you can exist without one.
Too crowded, that is the worst.
'If it has been Mrs. Thornton's home for some years, I can well understand her loving it,' said Margaret, in her clear bell-like voice.
'I never complained of it, I'm sure.'
A stranger, a careless observer might have considered that Mrs. Thornton's manner to her children betokened far more love to Fanny than to John.
'I dare say, papa would have taken me before now if I had cared.
'It will be a long way for her to walk back at night!' she remarked, at last.
She would have been thankful if it had not; for, as she said, 'she saw no use in making up friendships and intimacies with all the teachers and masters in Milton; why, he would be wanting her to call on Fanny's dancing-master's wife, the next thing!'
'What are you saying about me, Miss Hale?
My mother is not given to complaints,' said he, a little proudly. 'But so much the more I have to watch over you.
'Very probably,' said Mrs. Thornton, in a short displeased manner.
And presently, Margaret, racking her brain to talk to Fanny, heard her mother and Mrs. Thornton plunge into the interminable subject of servants.
Margaret had not the words ready for an answer to this question, which took her a little by surprise, so Miss Thornton replied:
But such a one would have been deeply mistaken.
'If you are going to-morrow, I shall order horses.'
As dinner-giving, and as criticising other people's dinners, she took satisfaction in it.
I only wanted you exactly to understand about it.'
She probably has forgotten her own personal experience.
'Mother!
'Not quite, yet.
She is very proud of Milton; dirty, smoky place, as I feel it to be.
The mother looks very ill, and seems a nice, quiet kind of person.'
Margaret was busy embroidering a small piece of cambric for some little article of dress for Edith's expected baby--'Flimsy, useless work,' as Mrs. Thornton observed to herself.
I wish you to go,' said he, authoritatively.
She liked Mrs. Hale's double knitting far better; that was sensible of its kind.
But I really do not find much pleasure in going over manufactories.'
But this going to make acquaintance with strangers was a very different thing.
One would think you were made of money.'
It must have been an heir-loom, and shows that she had ancestors.' So the owner of the ancestral lace became worthy of something more than the languid exertion to be agreeable to a visitor, by which Mrs. Hale's efforts at conversation would have been otherwise bounded.
Mrs. Hale was making rather more exertion in her answers, captivated by some real old lace which Mrs. Thornton wore; 'lace,' as she afterwards observed to Dixon, 'of that old English point which has not been made for this seventy years, and which cannot be bought.
'Oh! mamma, it's such a long way, and I am so tired.'
Couldn't you bring nurse here, mamma?
'I don't know--the weather, I think.
'Thank you,' said Mrs. Thornton.
But one is sure to hear the newest music there.
'Fanny dear I shall have horses to the carriage to-day, to go and call on these Hales.
'I think I should like to know all about them, if I were you,' replied Margaret quietly.
She made all these reflections as she was talking in her stately way to Mrs. Hale, and uttering all the stereotyped commonplaces that most people can find to say with their senses blindfolded.
'Fanny, don't speak so of your brother.
May I inquire?'
He went abruptly out of the room after saying this.
'You have good concerts here, I believe.'
CHAPTER XII
She had an unconscious contempt for a weak character; and Fanny was weak in the very points in which her mother and brother were strong.
'Fanny!' said her mother, as they drove away, 'we will be civil to these Hales: but don't form one of your hasty friendships with the daughter. She will do you no good, I see.
'Oh! you need not speak so hastily.
As Fanny had put it, it did seem as if they had been impertinently discussing Mrs. Thornton's feelings; but she also rose up against that lady's manner of showing that she was offended.
Mrs. Thornton did not speak; but she laid her work on the table, and seemed to think.
'It will do you good, instead of harm.
I am going to-morrow.
The carriage could fetch her, and she could spend the rest of the day here, which I know she would like.'
I remember once going in a lilac silk to see candles made, and my gown was utterly ruined.'
You have been in London, of course.'
'Yes; but somehow,' said Fanny, lowering her voice, 'mamma has never been to London herself, and can't understand my longing.
'Yes! ever since I read the Tales of the Alhambra.
It almost seems to me a necessary of life.'
It was only of late years that she had had leisure enough in her life to go into society; and as society she did not enjoy it.
The directors admit so indiscriminately.
'I suppose you are not musical,' said Fanny, 'as I see no piano.'
'I am fond of hearing good music; I cannot play well myself; and papa and mamma don't care much about it; so we sold our old piano when we came here.'
'London and the Alhambra!'
You could go on there while I am at Mrs. Hale's.'
'Do you like new music simply for its newness, then?'
'Do you know anything of Milton, Miss Hale?
Her son had given her a carriage; but she refused to let him keep horses for it; they were hired for the solemn occasions, when she paid morning or evening visits.
It's in the same direction, and she's always so glad to see you.
She was ill at ease, and looked more than usually stern and forbidding as she entered the Hales' little drawing-room.
Mrs. Thornton was shy.
'I merely thought, that as strangers newly come to reside in a town which has risen to eminence in the country, from the character and progress of its peculiar business, you might have cared to visit some of the places where it is carried on; places unique in the kingdom, I am informed.
Don't you know them?'
'Fifteen shillings a week, and three saved out of them!' thought Margaret to herself 'But she must have been very young.
But surely, it is a very easy journey to London.'
But she must know of those days.' Margaret's manner had an extra tinge of coldness in it when she next spoke.
I need hardly say, that if there is any little thing that could serve Mrs. Hale as an invalid, you will offer it, I'm sure.'
'If I can find it out, I will.
'I do not feel that my very natural liking for the place where I was born and brought up,--and which has since been my residence for some years, requires any accounting for.'
His mother's eyes were bent on her work, at which she was now stitching away busily.
She could not bear it.' Mrs. Thornton was silent after this; for her last words bore relation to a subject which mortified her.
Mr. Thornton had had some difficulty in working up his mother to the desired point of civility.
'Fanny!
He has good reasons of some kind or other, or he would not wish us to go.
'I don't think I do.
Margaret was vexed.
I never thought of her walking.' At this point, Mr. Thornton came in, just before going to the mill.
'Well! here is Fanny then, who is seldom without an ailment.
'I have not always an ailment,' said Fanny, pettishly; 'and I am not going with mamma.
MORNING CALLS
But I have never been ill myself, so I am not much up to invalids' fancies.'
I always have a large order to give to Johnson's, the day after a concert.'
'I thought I was doing my duty by talking to her, and trying to amuse her.'
'Yes,' said Margaret, 'I have lived there for several years.'
Yet Crampton was too far off for her to walk; and she had repeatedly questioned her son as to whether his wish that she should call on the Hales was strong enough to bear the expense of cab-hire.
But about the horses I'm determined.
'No!' said Margaret. 'I have not seen anything of that description as yet.' Then she felt that, by concealing her utter indifference to all such places, she was hardly speaking with truth; so she went on:
'With what?' asked Mrs. Thornton, her brow slightly contracting.
But her heart gave thanks for him day and night; and she walked proudly among women for his sake.
The investigations of 1838 had pointed out, as the causes or rather as the symptoms of the social malady, the neglect of the principles of religion and morality, the desire for wealth, the passion for enjoyment, and political disturbances.
PREFACE.
"In a Christian tongue you asked, gentlemen, what was the true system of society.
I am very glad that you have modified somewhat the rudeness of form which gave to a work of such gravity the manner and appearance of a pamphlet; for you quite frightened me, sir, and your talent was needed to reassure me in regard to your intentions.
"Perhaps you will regret, gentlemen, that, in giving all my attention to method and evidence, I have too much neglected form and style: in vain should I have tried to do better.
Do you think that one can be a robber without knowing it, without wishing it, without suspecting it?
You wish to abolish the most powerful motor of the human mind; you attack the paternal sentiment in its sweetest illusions; with one word you arrest the formation of capital, and we build henceforth upon the sand instead of on a rock.
If the present laws allow abuse, we can reconstruct them. Our civil code is not the Koran; it is not wrong to examine it.
Thenceforth I understood with how worthy and honorable a society I had to deal: my regard for its enlightenment, my recognition of its benefits, my enthusiasm for its glory, were unbounded.
We each possess the merit of sincerity; I desire also the merit of prudence.
I believe, then, that you have handled property as Rousseau, eighty years ago, handled letters, with a magnificent and poetical display of wit and knowledge.
"Since that time, metaphysics and moral science have been my only studies; my perception of the fact that these sciences, though badly defined as to their object and not confined to their sphere, are, like the natural sciences, susceptible of demonstration and certainty, has already rewarded my efforts.
I have aspired to your suffrages and sought the title of your pensioner, hating all which exists and full of projects for its destruction; I shall finish this investigation in a spirit of calm and philosophical resignation.
In a society like ours, to seek for literary glory seems to me an anachronism.
"I have severely blamed the learned Christian Church: it was my duty. This blame results from the facts which I call attention to: why has the Church decreed concerning things which it does not understand?
"Finally, gentlemen, this fundamental principle of equality you presented for competition in the following terms: THE ECONOMICAL AND MORAL CONSEQUENCES IN FRANCE UP TO THE PRESENT TIME, AND THOSE WHICH SEEM LIKELY TO APPEAR IN FUTURE, OF THE LAW CONCERNING THE EQUAL DIVISION OF HEREDITARY PROPERTY BETWEEN THE CHILDREN.
What is property?
In a word, can the principle of succession become a principle of equality?
On the following conditions, then, of subsequent evidence, depends the correctness of my preceding arguments:--
"But, gentlemen, of all the masters whom I have followed, to none do I owe so much as to you.
This argument did not meet with your approbation, since, without denying the relation pointed out by the competitor, you judged, and rightly gentlemen, that the principle of equality of conditions not being demonstrated, the ideas of the author were nothing more than hypotheses.
The most deserving among us is he who plays best this part.
"May you, gentlemen, desire equality as I myself desire it; may you, for the eternal happiness of our country, become its propagators and its heralds; may I be the last of your pensioners!
You have not written directly for them.
You admitted that yourselves, gentlemen when your committee reported that the competitors had enumerated with exactness the immediate and particular causes of suicide, as well as the means of preventing each of them; but that from this enumeration, chronicled with more or less skill, no positive information had been gained, either as to the primary cause of the evil, or as to its remedy.
"In 1838, the Academy of Besancon proposed the following question: TO WHAT CAUSES MUST WE ATTRIBUTE THE CONTINUALLY INCREASING NUMBER OF SUICIDES, AND WHAT ARE THE PROPER MEANS FOR ARRESTING THE EFFECTS OF THIS MORAL CONTAGION?
He is of the opinion that the society owes it to justice, to example, and to its own dignity, to publicly disavow all responsibility for the anti-social doctrines contained in this publication.
You have issued two magnificent manifestoes, the second more guarded than the first; issue a third more guarded than the second, and you will take high rank in science, whose first precept is calmness and impartiality.
The terms by which you characterize the fanatics of our day are strong enough to reassure the most suspicious imaginations as to your intentions; but you conclude in favor of the abolition of property!
Well, I no longer aspire to this sad success!
Of what use is it to invoke an ancient sibyl when a muse is on the eve of birth? Pitiable actors in a tragedy nearing its end, that which it behooves us to do is to precipitate the catastrophe.
But see to it, sir, that ere long they do not come, in spite of you, to seek for ammunition in this formidable arsenal, and that your vigorous metaphysics falls not into the hands of some sophist of the market-place, who might discuss the question in the presence of a starving audience: we should have pillage for conclusion and peroration.
"GENTLEMEN,--In the course of your debate of the 9th of May, 1833, in regard to the triennial pension established by Madame Suard, you expressed the following wish:--
"These three propositions, put to vote, are adopted."
It may be wrong for me to say it, but surely it is unfortunate for Christianity that it is true.
"Your pensioner,
"In 1839, your programme, always original and varied in its academical expression, became more exact.
"To sum up all these ideas in one inclusive question: What is the principle of heredity?
"My purpose in this work is the application of method to the problems of philosophy; every other intention is foreign to and even abusive of it.
Whoever, knowing them, pardons them, may read them.
You know that as well as any one.
Of all the wishes that I can frame, that, gentlemen, is the most worthy of you and the most honorable for me.
"I now propose, gentlemen, to discharge this duty.
The Church has erred in dogma and in morals; physics and mathematics testify against her.
"Farewell, sir!
That the pensioner be charged, in case he should publish a second edition of his book, to omit the dedication;
"P.
"Thereby it asked, in less general terms, what was the cause of the social evil, and what was its remedy?
"PARIS, May 1, 1841.
Change, then, the laws which govern the use of property, but be sparing of anathemas; for, logically, where is the honest man whose hands are entirely clean?
In pruning an old tree, we guard against destruction of the buds and fruit.
"I feel as deeply as you, sir, the abuses which you point out; but I have so great an affection for order,--not that common and strait-laced order with which the police are satisfied, but the majestic and imposing order of human societies,--that I sometimes find myself embarrassed in attacking certain abuses.
I will go farther: I will confess that, of all abuses, the most hateful to me are those of property; but once more, there is a remedy for this evil without violating it, all the more without destroying it.
Your co-operation, your programmes, your instructions, in agreement with my secret wishes and most cherished hopes, have at no time failed to enlighten me and to point out my road; this memoir on property is the child of your thought.
Honest people can at least understand one another.
The people, incapable as yet of sound judgment as to what is best for them, applaud indiscriminately the most opposite ideas, provided that in them they get a taste of flattery: to them the laws of thought are like the confines of the possible; to-day they can no more distinguish between a savant and a sophist, than formerly they could tell a physician from a sorcerer.
I try to serve and enlighten them, whereas some endeavor to mislead them.
But I do not reason from the abuse to the abolition,--an heroic remedy too much like death, which cures all evils.
"Can equality, by the right of succession, be preserved between citizens, as well as between cousins and brothers?
This proposition, now coming into notice--PROPERTY IS ROBBERY!--was of a nature to repel from your book even those serious minds who do not judge by appearances, had you persisted in maintaining it in its rude simplicity.
That I cannot agree to; and for that reason I have criticised your book, so full of beautiful pages, so brilliant with knowledge and fervor!
"I agree with you in one thing only; namely, that all kinds of property get too frequently abused in this world.
"I have been pitiless in my criticism of the economists: for them I confess that, in general, I have no liking.
"Instead of confining one to common places without breadth or significance, it seems to me that your question should be developed as follows:--
"It is for you now, gentlemen, whose mission and character are the proclamation of the truth, it is for you to instruct the people, and to tell them for what they ought to hope and what they ought to fear.
"I wish, sir, that my impaired health would permit me to examine with you, page by page, the memoir which you have done me the honor to address to me publicly and personally; I think I could offer some important criticisms.
The following letter served as a preface to the first edition of this memoir:--
To restore religion, gentlemen, it is necessary to condemn the Church.
Two months after the receipt of this letter, the Academy, in its debate of August 24th, replied to the address of its pensioner by a note, the text of which I give below:--
Such, at least, is my opinion.
But if you have softened the form, you are none the less faithful to the ground-work of your doctrines; and although you have done me the honor to give me a share in this perilous teaching, I cannot accept a partnership which, as far as talent goes, would surely be a credit to me, but which would compromise me in all other respects.
Literary hope and faith I have none. The nineteenth century is, in my eyes, a genesic era, in which new principles are elaborated, but in which nothing that is written shall endure.
Still further, it is necessary to show the method by which the new system will satisfy all the moral and political needs which induced the establishment of the first.
Is property, then, in your eyes a thing so simple and so abstract that you can re-knead and equalize it, if I may so speak, in your metaphysical mill?
So much controversy fatigues and wearies me.
For the moment, I must content myself with thanking you for the kind words in which you have seen fit to speak of me.
"I have spoken lightly of jurisprudence: I had the right; but I should be unjust did I not distinguish between this pretended science and the men who practise it.
"Such, gentlemen, is the object of the memoir that I offer you to day.
That is the reason, in my opinion, why, among so many men of talent, France to-day counts not one great writer.
To gain the victory for one's cause, it does not suffice simply to overthrow a principle generally recognized, which has the indisputable merit of systematically recapitulating our political theories; it is also necessary to establish the opposite principle, and to formulate the system which must proceed from it.
"The whole lot of it," said Ronicky, "though I wasn't playing my hand at eavesdropping.
Ronicky Doone, taken utterly by surprise, was at a great disadvantage.
I told you!" said the man of the sneer, with satisfaction.
Stand right where you are."
For a moment the leader hesitated, then his fingers closed over the extended hand of Ronicky Doone and clamped down on them like so many steel wires contracting.
"Tush, tush!
Do I gather the drift of the story fairly well? Finally you have him worked up to the right pitch.
"I--I--" stammered the girl, and she could say no more.
"What do you think about it?"
"I don't suppose you know, eh?" queried Logan ironically.
I told him; sure I did.
"Maybe not, but the point is I didn't see it.
"No; he lost a hoss.
"Nothin'.
Tell me what Bard has on him?"
"That's it."
"That's damn queer.
"Maybe you want to pay me?" he suggested fiercely.
"No, you won't put him up.
"Let me in on the joke, son."
THE FIRST DAY
"Maybe you think that interests me.
Come out short at poker lately?"
"I don't suppose the old man described him before you started, maybe?"
He stretched out on the blankets and was instantly asleep.
Logan considered the other with a sardonic smile.
But you're lookin' sort of sleepy, stranger?"
Who's he?"
It don't."
"He says: 'What a little beauty!
"The minute he seen that he stopped fightin' and started off at a gallop the way the tenderfoot wanted him to go, which was over there.
The boy paused to remember and then with twinkling eyes he mimicked: "'That's very good of you, sir, but I'll only stop to make a trade with you--this horse and some cash to boot for a durable mount out of your corral.
The boy flushed so red that by contrast his straw coloured hair seemed positively white.
"But a sure goer, eh?"
They look all right; they sound all right; but they don't mean nothin'.
"And he counts it out in pa's hand.
"Never heard the name before.
"Ma's sick, a little, and didn't get up to-day.
D'you mind if I turn in on that bunk over there?"
In fact, he was known for it all around these parts.
"Maybe you think we're squatters that run a hotel?"
"Maybe.
This with crackers, formed the meal. He watched Nash eat for a moment of solemn silence and then the foreman looked up to catch a meditative chuckle from the youngster.
"What's he sore about?
"When rocks turn into ham and eggs I'll trust you, Steve.
But I can cook you up some chow."
I could ride him; anybody could ride him.
He don't fool around with no pauses.
There is a south trail, only it takes about three days to get to Eldara."
"Listen; I'm all for old man Drew.
"It was the best horse pa ever had, too.
I'll tend to that."
Which maybe you sort of gather that he had to keep on performin', because the tenderfoot was still in the saddle.
I'll tell you what I done to Bard, anyway.
"All right son.
Mile after mile of the rough trail fell behind him, and still the pony shambled along at a loose trot or a swinging canter; the steep upgrades it took at a steady jog and where the slopes pitched sharply down, it wound among the rocks with a faultless sureness of foot.
"Never mind; I wake up automatic.
You know that.
Nash sipped his coffee and waited.
"He's what you call an eddicated bucker.
I'm on my way to the A Circle Y."
Did he rustle a couple of your sheep?"
"Speakin' man to man, son, I didn't think that, but I thought I'd sort of feel my way."
Certainly the choice of Nash was well made.
"Hello, young feller."
"'Lo, stranger."
"What time d'you want me to wake you up?"
What do you want to boot?'
"Never better.
"Where's the folks?" he asked.
Logan went on patiently: "I knew something was wrong when Drew was here yesterday but I didn't think it was as bad as this."
I got a dollar here that'll buy you a pretty good store knife."
It's the best hoss I've ever had.'
"'All right,' says the tenderfoot, 'here's the money.'
"Yep."
"Bard?
On the mountain desert one does not draw out a narrator with questions.
Having made sure that his mount was not "off his feed," Nash rolled a cigarette and strolled back to the house with the boy.
"Because I love you," he said, and his voice shook.
She did not shrink back, she did not look surprised.
"THE CONFESSION OF ODETTE RIDER."
He could only gaze in stupified silence.
"Odette!
"I hope I didn't hurt you?
"Won't you please tell me?"
"I could help you.
After all, he had no right or title to this curious purse.
On the bicycle?" she asked.
She looked up at him.
"I?
"Who was it?" he asked.
"Take it away with you."
She nodded.
She looked up at his words.
She shook her head.
Oh, I am afraid!"
Tarling picked up the wallet from the table and looked at it.
"No, it was not I."
"Not you?"
She shook her head.
She shook her head.
"Unlock and read to-night."
Milburgh had gone too far.
Tarling started.
I want to help you."
"Do you mean to say----" he said hoarsely.
"I didn't suspect----"
He walked to the door and unlocked it.
It was the girl's voice, surprisingly clear and steady.
THE CONFESSION OF ODETTE RIDER
"Ask me!"
"May I have that please?"
"Here!"
"My promise," he said, "what promise?"
And now he began to fear lest he should startle her too much.
Adam could never cease to mourn over that mystery of human sorrow which had been brought so close to him; he could never thank God for another's misery.
He chose this spot, almost at the top of the hill, because it was away from all eyes--no house, no cattle, not even a nibbling sheep near--no presence but the still lights and shadows and the great embracing sky.
She's told me what her mind is, and she's not a woman to say one thing and mean another.
It would be worse to have a discouraging answer by letter than from her own lips, for her presence reconciled him to her will.
It was Dinah who spoke first.
"I wish I'd asked her to write to me, though," he thought.
On the verge of a decision we all tremble: hope pauses with fluttering wings.
He waited an hour at least watching for her and thinking of her, while the afternoon shadows lengthened and the light grew softer.
Now she was beginning to wind along the path up the hill, but Adam would not move yet; he would not meet her too soon; he had set his heart on meeting her in this assured loneliness.
She was much longer coming than he expected.
She wants to be quite quiet in her old way for a while.
He knew quite well what was in her mind.
She had not forbidden him to go.
He treads the earth with a very elastic step as he walks away from her, and makes light of all difficulties.
Slowly, Adam thought, but Dinah was really walking at her usual pace, with a light quiet step.
At last he saw the little black figure coming from between the grey houses and gradually approaching the foot of the hill.
Chapter LIV
"I'll walk back a bit and turn again to meet her, farther off the village." He walked back till he got nearly to the top of the hill again, and seated himself on a loose stone, against the low wall, to watch till he should see the little black figure leaving the hamlet and winding up the hill.
What a look of yearning love it was that the mild grey eyes turned on the strong dark-eyed man!
As Adam's confidence waned, his patience waned with it, and he thought he must write himself.
"Perhaps that's the last hymn before they come away," Adam thought.
The ecclesiastical privileges, during barbarous times, had served as a check on the despotism of kings.
The supreme head of the church was a foreign potentate, guided by interests always different from those of the community, sometimes contrary to them.
HENRY VIII.
"The Englishman is hoping to reach that creek.
"Read it, sergeant," said the latter curtly.
"There is a creek in a direct line from the 'Chat Gris'?"
She felt, more than she heard, the men on the watch preparing for the fight.
Armand! why don't you fire?"
I know it well."
"Answer!" he again commanded, as the Jew with trembling lips seemed too frightened to speak.
Her heart was broken with cruel anguish.
CHAPTER XXX THE SCHOONER
They know it.
At any rate, there is a chance to get him yet.
"But I ordered you just now, when the woman screamed, to rush in and let no one escape."
Her senses told her that each, with sword in hand, was crouching, ready for the spring.
We waited."
"Into it, my men, and let no one escape from that hut alive!"
"Hush! what was that?"
"I, myself," concluded Chauvelin, "must now very reluctantly leave you. AU REVOIR, fair lady.
"Close by here, citoyen," said Desgas; "I gagged him and tied his legs together as you commanded."
He smiled.
He walked up to where Marguerite lay, and looked down into her face.
Here," he added, turning to the soldiers, "the buckle-end of your two belts to this confounded Jew."
Against a rock, on a hard bed of stone, lay the unconscious figure of Marguerite Blakeney, while some few paces further on, the unfortunate Jew was receiving on his broad back the blows of two stout leather belts, wielded by the stolid arms of two sturdy soldiers of the Republic.
Chauvelin had not given up all hope.
The cleverest woman in Europe, the elegant and fashionable Lady Blakeney, who had dazzled London society with her beauty, her wit and her extravagances, presented a very pathetic picture of tired-out, suffering womanhood, which would have appealed to any, but the hard, vengeful heart of her baffled enemy.
The door was partially open; one of the soldiers pushed it further, but within all was darkness, the charcoal fire only lighting with a dim, red light the furthest corner of the hut.
Quick, in every direction!"
"Bring the cowardly brute here," commanded Chauvelin.
"Bring the light in here!" he commanded eagerly, as he once more entered the hut.
But don't kill him," he added drily.
A low moan escaped from the Jew's trembling lips.
"That will do," commanded Chauvelin, as the Jew's moans became more feeble, and the poor wretch seemed to have fainted away, "we don't want to kill him."
Do not delay--and obey these instructions implicitly."
"You think?--You? . . ." said Chauvelin, almost choking with fury, "and you let them go . . ."
I'll follow."
"Percy, my husband, for God's sake fly!
Within a few minutes their running footsteps had died away in the distance.
He must have remained behind, and was even now hiding somewhere about the cliffs; the patrols were still about, he would still be sighted, no doubt.
Marguerite as she heard, felt that her very life was slipping away, as if when that voice drew nearer, when that singer became entrapped . . .
The men had sprung to their feet, there was no need for further silence on their part; the very cliffs echoed the poor, heart-broken woman's screams.
"Pick that up," said Chauvelin to the sergeant, pointing to this white scrap, "and bring it to me."
"Yes, your Honour," stammered the poor wretch.
But the latter had not waited an instant.
Marguerite's aching heart stood still.
"There is no 'but.' I said, do you remember?"
All three men listened attentively.
"Ah! by-the-bye! where is the Jew?"
"What was the bargain?"
His face in the silvery light of the moon looked positively ghastly with terror: his eyes were wide open and almost glassy, and his whole body was trembling, as if with ague, while a piteous wail escaped his bloodless lips.
"But," added Chauvelin, with slow emphasis, "if you deceived me in your promise, you were to have a sound beating, one that would teach you not to tell lies."
But I don't use poison, and I don't kill with mysterious X-rays.
"Yes," said the girl unevenly.
"I ask your pardon, my dear," said John Mark to Ruth.
"By the way, my name is John Mark."
Did he get coal dust on his shoes?"
"Well, you are going to persuade her to go to Bill Gregg?"
Had the clever devil guessed at the truth so easily?
Is that right?
I send for the girl; I request her to go down with you to the street and take a walk, because you wish to talk to her. Heavens, man, I can't persuade her to go with a stranger at night! Surely you see that!"
That brought a start from John Mark and a flash of eagerness, but he repressed the idea, after a single glance at the girl.
"That is--"
"And, if you couldn't get the girl--but see how absurd the whole thing is, Ronicky Doone!
"You just oblige me, partner," he replied in his own soft voice.
In that case--"
"We've shaken hands," he admitted slowly, as though just realizing the full extent of the meaning of that act.
I suppose Ruth has filled your head with a lot of rot about what a terrible fellow I am.
"I can show you the tracks."
"I should have guessed.
"Go ahead," said the leader.
"Western," he said at last, "decidedly Western.
Go back and tell them to hunt some more.
"Now," said the man of the sneer, "tell me the whole of it, Ruth."
We're safe to the doors of the house; the minute we step into the street, you're free to do anything you want to get either of us. Will you shake on that?"
If you have to talk to her, why not do the talking here?"
"I figure she'd think too much about you all the time."
Relief, wonder, and even a gleam of outright happiness shot into the eyes of John Mark.
"Yes.
"An amateur--a rank amateur!
Now what about Caroline?
Ruth Tolliver did not cry out, but every muscle in her face and body seemed to contract, as if she were preparing herself for the explosion.
"You send for Caroline Smith; I'm to do the persuading to get her out of the house.
"As much as that?
"The basilisk, eh?" asked John Mark.
You found him; he confessed why he was here; you took pity on him--and--" He brushed a hand across his forehead and was instantly himself, calm and cool.
"I'd kill you like a snake, stranger, which I mostly think you are.
Ronicky set his teeth.
"Let me hear the whole truth."
A moment of pause had come, a pause which, in the imagination of Ronicky, was filled with the approach of both the men toward the door of the closet.
"I'm Doone--some call me Ronicky Doone."
"Well," said Ronicky, "we've shaken hands, and now you can do what you please!
"Ah!" murmured the man of the sneer.
"And, when you're on the streets with the girl, do you suppose I'll rest idle and let you walk away with her?"
"Certainly," said the other, bowing.
She made a vague gesture of denial.
Now he pushed it open and stepped out.
"Maybe!"
"And what do you expect?"
Is that square?"
"You're wrong!
You came for that?" Suddenly he laughed heartily, but there was a tremor of emotion in that laughter.
The time had almost come for one desperate attempt to escape, and he was ready to shoot to kill.
"Only one: I'm acting as his agent."
The man of the sneer looked him over leisurely.
He turned back to Ronicky Doone.
Go up to the attic and search there.
"Right; and he didn't have sense enough to wipe it off."
"Yes, I have a curious stock of useless information."
"I'm glad to know you, Ronicky Doone.
"Are you staying long in the East, my friend?"
It seems I've made an ass of myself, but I'll try to make up for it.
"We already knew he'd gone there."
So he came in exactly that way, like a robber, but really only to keep a tryst with his lady love?
At the same time a flush of excitement and fierceness passed over the face of John Mark.
So step light, and step quick when I talk."
"Meaning that I'm liable to put an end to your stay?"
"But you can't expect me to assent to that?"
I imagine that name fits you. Now tell me the story of why you came to this house; of course it wasn't to see a girl!"
"Up the stairs to the kitchen and down the hall and up to Harry's room."
"Once we're outside of the house, Mark," said Ronicky Doone, "I don't ask no favors.
This Caroline Smith may be a person of great value to me."
I am, as you see, a very quiet and ordinary sort."
"And where did it lead?"
"You know the name, eh?"
Ronicky Doone smiled again.
"Ah?" In spite of himself the face of John Mark wrinkled with pain and suspicious rage.
It was."
The man of the sneer laughed unpleasantly.
What could they have to say of her?
Perhaps you did not know I had been there."
I have a great regard for him, I assure you: a gentleman-like, good sort of fellow as ever lived."
But what do you think we have been talking of?
She was very much vexed, and meant to make her apology as soon as possible."
Before they parted, however, it was agreed that the projected walk should be taken as soon as possible; and, setting aside the misery of his quitting their box, she was, upon the whole, left one of the happiest creatures in the world.
Stout, active--looks as young as his son.
There are few people much about town that I do not know.
You.
At length, however, he did look towards her, and he bowed--but such a bow!
If she felt such confidence in my good intentions, and could suppose it to be only a mistake, why should you be so ready to take offence?"
At the bottom of the street, however, she looked back again, and then, not at a window, but issuing from the door, she saw Miss Tilney herself.
Yes, by heavens!
"And what do you think I said?"--lowering his voice--"well done, general, said I; I am quite of your mind."
Who is to dance?"
"Oh, Edward!
Don't you!"
"Perhaps it is Emily King's ghost," whispered Felix.
"I shall tell it, too.
"There's the bell!"
Or else Uncle Roger is trying to fool us."
It's SOMETHING that WALKS."
All at once--something--leaped from the bough of a tree and alighted before us.
"Stay with us, old fellow."
But to be called "a sweet cat!" Oh, Sara, Sara!
"That's what I heard," cried Peter.
"Don't," cried Cecily hysterically.
"No, it isn't Peg Bowen.
I don't care if the joke is as much on myself as any one.
"Well, here's the key--go and see for yourself," said Peter.
As he did so, clear and sweet, rang out ten bell-like chimes.
Whatever had growled perceived his approach, and became furious.
You shark! how many teeth have you in your jaws?
I understand what is right and do what is wrong.
"A league from here."
The man could not have raised himself on tiptoe.
MISANTHROPY PLAYS ITS PRANKS.
"Well, will you eat?"
"I am weary," said the child.
"You are told to come in, you young rascal."
"Will you drink?"
Let the populace die, but not my wolf.
Seeing the infant drink had made him forget to eat.
This rough and sudden dressing made the infant angry.
Ah! vagabond with your vagabond child!
The one he had just heard growling, the other speaking.
The boy hesitated.
He drew away the sponge which she was sucking, allowed the cough to subside, and then replaced the phial to her lips, saying, "Suck, you little wretch!"
"It is a baby that I found."
The absence of ears, which is the concomitant of a hungry stomach, caused the child to take little heed of these violent epithets, tempered as they were by charity of action involving a contradiction resulting in his benefit.
Kings are the fathers of their people.
On the stove were smoking a porringer and a saucepan, containing to all appearance something to eat.
I can fancy the delight of those at sea.
Who are you? Answer!
Go away."
Ursus went on muttering angry words between his teeth.
"No," replied the child.
He made up his mind, and placed one foot on the lowest step.
He was impeded by the infant, so benumbed, rolled up and enveloped in the jacket that nothing could be distinguished of her, and she was but a little shapeless mass.
The man listened.
The savoury odour was perceptible.
Don't you see it is thirsty?
Ursus seized the pitcher again, and conveyed it to his mouth.
They drink, however.
The head began again,--
The child with difficulty climbed up the three steps.
By Jove!
"Dead!
Ursus muttered, "This building is badly joined.
The limbs having been rubbed, he next wiped the boy's feet.
The head replied,--
It stays the pulse.
Dress yourself!"
"It is not your sister?"
"Well! why do you not enter?"
However, at the same time that the window closed the door had opened; a step had been let down; the voice which had spoken to the child cried out angrily from the inside of the van,--
Behind, projecting hinges indicated a door, and in the centre of this door a square opening showed a light inside the caravan.
Mischievous pick-pocket, evil-minded abortion, so you walk the streets after curfew?
I shall have to burn an incredible amount of coals to dry up this lake--coals at twelve farthings the miners' standard!
The head was withdrawn and the window closed.
One cannot see clearly.
He went to the broken glass; he filled the hole with a rag; he heaped the stove with peat; he spread out as far as he could the bear-skin on the chest; took a large book which he had in a corner, placed it under the skin for a pillow, and laid the head of the sleeping infant on it.
"Come, you limb; you have nothing frost-bitten!
The hut was furnished with a chest, a stool, and an unlighted lantern which hung from the ceiling.
The child turned back.
"Who is it then?"
They try to give me nothing but farthings.
The child, in fact, was entering the house of Homo and Ursus.
From the roof arose a funnel, and out of the funnel smoke.
He had not much trouble in finishing what was left in the porringer.
"All the same, I'm hungry and thirsty," he observed.
Lucky for her!
"How wet you are!
"Where?
Besides, the laws are violated.
The child began to eat.
Every one is well down here. It's a cursed town, where every one is well!
Come, take off those rags, you villain!" and as with one hand, and with feverish haste, he dragged off the boy's rags which tore into shreds, with the other he took down from a nail a man's shirt, and one of those knitted jackets which are up to this day called kiss-me-quicks.
Come now, do I keep an inn, or do I not?
"You are going to choke!" growled Ursus.
If our good king only knew it, would he not have you thrown into the bottom of a ditch, just to teach you better?
Yes, I should have made my fortune; my part would have been a different one--I should not be the insignificant fellow I am.
Who is there?
This beggar here browses: browses, a word derived from brute.
To those to whom silence has become dreadful a howl is comforting.
"Who?"
"It is not my sister."
"So it is your bundle that wails!
In the meantime the boy had finished his supper.
For the moment he was absorbed by two exigencies and by two ecstasies--food and warmth.
I shall have for employment, office, and function, to fashion the miscarried fortunes of that colossal prostitute, Misery, to bring to perfection future gallows' birds, and to give young thieves the forms of philosophy.
On the boards and nails were rows of glasses, coppers, an alembic, a vessel rather like those used for graining wax, which are called granulators, and a confusion of strange objects of which the child understood nothing, and which were utensils for cooking and chemistry.
The clinking of a chain being undone was heard, and the sound of a man's footsteps, mingled with that of the pads of an animal, died off in the distance.
Just then a wail, touching and prolonged, arose in the hut.
I shall return.
Pack up your physic.
I was alone.
It was a cart, unless it was a hovel.
"Where?"
Fatten at my expense, parasite!
Now that you are warmed and stuffed, you beast, take care of yourself.
I have not pocketed a farthing; and now, to-night, beggars drop in.
Just as he was about to drink, his eye fell on the little girl.
But there was no outburst.
Of the questions and answers which now passed between him and the various members of the jury I need give no account.
But I did not turn away.
You have heard him call me son; with what words shall I overthrow his confidence in the truth and rectitude of his long-buried wife and make him know in his old age that he has wasted years of patience upon one who was not of his blood or lineage?
No woman of the mental or physical strength of Agatha Webb would plant a dagger in her own breast just to prevent another person from committing a crime, were he lover, husband, or son.
This feeling was shared by others, and a reaction set in in Frederick's favour, which even affected the officials who were conducting the inquiry.
I promised, and with perfect peace in her face, she pointed to the dagger in her breast.
Impossible!
"When I left my dead mother's side I was in such a state of mind that I passed with scarcely so much as a glance the room where my new-found father sat sleeping.
An awed silence greeted these words.
Finally, she gave me a key, and pointing out where the money lay hidden, bade me carry it away as her last gift, together with the package of letters I would find with it.
"The astounding fact which I have just communicated to you was made known by my mother, with the dagger still plunged in her breast.
Incredible!
The wonder, the incredulity you manifest are my best excuse for my long delay in revealing the secret entrusted to me by this dying woman."
Seeing this, and realising his opportunity, Frederick at once entered into the explanations for which each heart there panted.
"Oh, the fairy tale!"
"This will be overwhelming news to him who has cared for me since infancy.
"It is a sacred story to me, and if you must know it, let it be from her own words in the letters she left behind her.
I knelt before her in anguish.
It was almost worth the loss of her revenge to meet his look of hate, and dream of the possibility of turning it later into the old look of love.
She would not let me draw it out.
Yet how thrilling it had been to hear him plead his cause so well!
Frederick's voice broke as he proceeded in his self-imposed task.
For, however other people might feel, she did not for a moment believe his story.
To her all self-sacrifice was an anomaly.
She must let impulse have its way.
Happily, she took the right stand at first.
She had not a pure enough heart to do so.
Then I lifted her and laid her where you found her, on the sofa.
"This, as God lives, is the truth concerning the wound found in the breast of this never-to-be-forgotten woman."
Take them and let them pave your way to a better life.
No one had expected anything from him, and instinctively every eye turned towards Amabel to see how she was affected by his action.
Miss Page, who will, I am sure, pardon the introduction of her name into this narrative, has taken pains to declare to you that in the expedition she herself made into town that evening, she followed some person's steps down-hill.
Yet how could I hope to lure her down-stairs without noise?
Why, then, I should have thought of going to her in the great strait in which I found myself on that day, I cannot say.
Don't stain yours--don't--'
"Let me be put on my oath.
"This was a condition of things for which I was not prepared.
"Must have fallen when we did, for I never heard her voice after the first scream.
Her blood and Batsy's shriek from the adjoining room swam through my consciousness, and then she fell, as I supposed, dead upon the floor, and I, in scarcely better case, fell also.
As by one impulse men and women broke into a tumult.
There was a silence; no one ventured a dissent, no one so much as made a gesture of disapproval.
He had not meant to yield, but now that the moment had come, now that he must at once and forever choose between a course that led simply to personal unhappiness and one that involved not only himself, but those dearest to him, in disgrace and sorrow, he felt himself weaken to the point of clutching at whatever would save him from the consequences of confession.
Then and not till then did Frederick move forward.
Seated at a table set with abundance of untasted food, I saw the master of the house with his head sunk forward on his arms, asleep.
"I have made an assertion," said he, "before God and before this jury. To make it seem a credible one I shall have to tell my own story from the beginning.
Dr. Talbot, and you, gentlemen of the jury, in the face of God and man, I here declare that Mrs. Webb, in my presence and before my eyes, gave to herself the blow which has robbed us all of a most valuable life.
"'Give, then!
Am I allowed to do so, Mr. Coroner?"
But as these faces were those of Agnes Halliday and Amabel Page, he soon recognised that his own judgment was not at fault, and that notwithstanding outward appearances and the languid interest shown in the now lagging proceedings, the moment presaged an event full of unseen but vital consequence.
You could not bear it. Later, if you will wait for me in one of these rooms, I will repeat my tale in your ears, but go now.
Mr. Frederick Sutherland, will you take the stand?"
Better to yield than fall headlong into the pit one word of hers would open.
This is very likely true, and those steps were probably mine, for after leaving the house by the garden door, I came directly down the main road to the corner of the lane running past Mrs. Webb's cottage.
The eyes I had seen close, as I had supposed, forever, were now open, and she was looking at me with a smile that has never left my memory, and never will.
Moral strength and that tenacity of purpose which only comes from years of self-control were too lately awakened in his breast to sustain him now.
It is my last entreaty."
The coroner was astounded; everyone was astounded.
But no man can furnish what he does not possess, and the few final minutes before noon passed by without any addition being made to the facts which had already been presented for general consideration.
As the witness sat down the clock began to strike.
I could not bear it.
"I did not understand her.
"Go!" he whispered, but in so thrilling a tone it was heard to the remotest corner of the room.
Then Mr. Sutherland struggled to his feet, cast one last look around him, and disappeared through a door which had opened like magic before him.
But I shall speak of her again.
She was not murdered."
Having already seen from the hillside the light burning in her upper windows, I felt encouraged to proceed, and so hastened on till I came to the gate on High Street.
What did it mean?
"'No, no, Frederick!
It was more, infinitely more, than anyone there had expected.
An unexpected and pitiful sight awaited me.
It was the last day of the inquest, and to many it bade fair to be the least interesting.
It was a solemn assertion, but it failed to convince the crowd before him.
When I came to myself, and that must have been very soon, I found that the blow of which I had been such a horrified witness had not yet proved fatal.
If you want my money, take it; if you want my life, I will give it to you with my own hand.
"You are," was the firm response.
"I had expected to find a jovial group of friends in her little ground parlour, or at least to hear the sound of merry voices and laughter in the rooms above; but no sounds of any sort awaited me; indeed the house seemed strangely silent for one so fully lighted, and, astonished at this, I pushed the door ajar at my left and looked in.
The expected guests had failed to arrive, and he, tired out with waiting, had fallen into a doze at the board.
You don't know what you are doing.
She was too good!
Next moment the door opened, and Frederick and his father came in.
The old fear, which we understand, if Sweetwater did not, had again seized the victim of Amabel's ambition, and under her eye, which was blazing full upon him now with a fell and steady purpose, he found his right hand stealing toward the left in the significant action she expected.
As the slow, hesitating strokes rang out, Sweetwater saw Frederick yield to a sudden but most profound emotion.
"I have obtruded myself into this inquiry and now ask to be heard by this jury, because no man knows more than I do of the manner and cause of Agatha Webb's death.
Sweetwater, noting it, and the vivid contrast it offered to Frederick's air of depression, felt that his return had been well timed.
The moment was intense.
I want hundreds--thousands--now, now, to save myself! Disgrace, shame, prison await me if I don't have them.
Still, this would not seem to be reason enough for me to intrude upon her late at night with a plea for a large loan of money, had I not been in a desperate condition of mind, which made any attempt seem reasonable that promised relief from the unendurable burden of a pressing and disreputable debt.
It's all calumny!
Two days will be a different thing," said Danglars, smiling.
"And if that were the case it would be worth while to make some sacrifice."
"It is really wonderful," said the count; "above all, if, as I suppose, it is payable at sight."
"Who is he?"
"Here is his receipt.
"Certainly; it will only cost you a discount of 5,000 or 6,000 francs." The receiver started back.
"To-morrow?
"Listen--when one bears an irreproachable name, as I do, one is rather sensitive."
"For what reason?"
But hush, here comes our minister of justice; he will feel obliged to make some little speech to the cousin," and the three young men drew near to listen.
"One, two, three, four, five," said Monte Cristo; "five millions--why what a Croesus you are!"
"It is one of the best houses in Europe," said Danglars, carelessly throwing down the receipt on his desk.
There was a moment's silence, during which the noise of the banker's pen was alone heard, while Monte Cristo examined the gilt mouldings on the ceiling.
"The balance would come to about that sum; but keep it, and we shall be quits."
What a proposition!"
"Have you mentioned this death in your paper?"
"The other night she left."
"Still, he ought to have been here," said Debray; "I wonder what will be talked about to-night; this funeral is the news of the day.
"No," said Monte Cristo folding the five notes, "most decidedly not; the thing is so curious, I will make the experiment myself.
"Yes; well?"
I will take the five scraps of paper that I now hold as bonds, with your signature alone, and here is a receipt in full for the six millions between us.
"No!"
"At two o'clock."
"Got a pass?"
He shivered.
Amory smiled a bit.
Alec had a coarse taste in women.
"Well--" began the man dubiously.
I'm just resting."
Rosalind was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe.
He fancied a possible future comment of his own.
They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind.
"Stop worrying--"
That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back there.
Genius!"
Aren't people horrible!"
Answer.--That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.
I don't want to commit moral suicide.
A man approached through the heavy gloom.
He could live on it three months and sleep in the park.
To-morrow I'm going to leave New York for good.
Question.--Well--what's the situation?
Apartments along here expensive--probably hundred and fifty a month--maybe two hundred.
Where's the darned bell--
Wonder where Jill was--Jill Bayne, Fayne, Sayne--what the devil--neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat.
What a dirty river--want to go down there and see if it's dirty--French rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers.
I'm not sure.
He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want--not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had found in Burne.
Two and three look alike--no, not much.
One O Two instead of One Two Seven.
Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all-American. Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw.
It's the ugliest thing in the world.
"I hate them for being poor.
He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: "No.
Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people.
"This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club."
What?
Seat damp... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from clothes?...
And again--
It's a bad town unless you're on top of it.
The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to repeat her honeymoon.
Is this private?"
Youth is like having a big plate of candy.
No desire to sleep with Jill, what could Alec see in her?
"I'll go if you want me to."
They don't.
One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street--or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street....
Slackening pace at nightfall to cool my system gradually, I finally made my camp and slept as soundly as if on a bed of down.
Much of the conversation naturally centered on the question of our moving to a new home.
Our cows were gone--given for provender to save the lives of the oxen during the deep December snow.
On this occasion I was ill prepared for a cool night camp, having neither blanket nor coat.
The floor of the cabin--that is, the hotel--was a great deal harder than the sand spit where I had passed the night.
The wife, baby, bedding, ox yoke, and log chain were sent up the Cowlitz in a canoe.
Like all the earlier pioneers, he took a pride in helping others who came later.
With her shoes for a pillow, a shawl for covering, small wonder that she reported, "I did not sleep a wink last night."
If we had Buck and Dandy over there we could make twenty dollars a day putting in piles."
All help themselves to what they want.
I was well up the left bank of the Cowlitz River; how far I could not tell, for there were no milestones on the crooked, half-obstructed trail leading downstream.
Some take it there with them.
Socks I had none; neither had I suspenders, an improvised belt taking their place.
There I found out where the boat and the provisions had been left, and after an earnest parley succeeded in getting possession.
Men working in the timber camps get four dollars a day and their board.
Here a camp must be established again.
I do not look upon those years of camp and cabin life as years of hardship.
After all, the cabin could not be reached, as the trail could not be followed at night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mt. Rainier looked bigger and taller than ever.
We never thought of catching cold from lying on the ground or on cedar boughs, or from getting a good drenching.
The cabin could not be seen until the trail came quite near it.
I found that my wife had not fared any better than I had on the trail, and in fact not so well.
Buck and Dandy and I took the trail.
Everything looked cheerful; everything interested us, especially the crows, with their trick of breaking clams by rising in the air and dropping them on the boulders. There were so many new things to observe that for a time we almost forgot that we were nearly out of provisions and money and did not know what had happened to Oliver.
At best it would be a race with the sun, but the days were long, and the twilight was long, and I would camp that much nearer home if I made haste.
That question was a stumper.
Yet underlying all this there ran a vein of good cheer, of hopefulness.
That great-hearted pioneer, John R. Jackson, did not hesitate a moment, stranger though I was, to say, "Yes, you can have two if you need them."
The little wife never lost sight of that bargain made before we were married.
She never finished milking that cow, nor did she ever milk any cow when her husband was at home.
"CAN I get home tonight?" I asked myself.
Finding that the boat and provisions had been taken and seeing smoke in the bight, he surmised what had happened and came paddling across to the tent.
God bless those earlier pioneers!
But I could not make it, so again I lay out on the trail.
The money had all been expended on the canoe passage.
"Oh, almost everybody has to buy.
However, we had one consolation,--it would be worse in winter than at that time.
To be sure, our food was plain as well as our dress; our hours of labor were long and the labor itself was frequently severe; the pioneers appeared rough and uncouth.
I knew that smallpox was raging among the Indians, and that a camp where it was prevalent was less than a quarter of a mile away.
I was offered five cents a foot for piles.
"Where do they get the money?"
Oliver was to have had the cabin ready by the time I returned.
He would not listen to our proceeding any farther before the next day.
"Off the government land, of course.
I had expected to reach Hard Bread's Hotel, where the people in the canoe would stop overnight.
I had neither coat nor blanket. I wore a heavy woolen shirt, a slouch hat, and worn shoes; both hat and shoes gave ample ventilation.
"But what about the land for the claim?"
However, we decided to move, and began to prepare for the journey.
Jackson had settled there eight years before, ten miles out from the landing, and now had an abundance around him.
So when we took account of stock, we had the baby, Buck and Dandy, a tent, an ox yoke and chain, enough clothing and bedding to keep us comfortable, a very little food, and no money.
My consolation was that the night was short and I could see to travel by three o'clock.
They were all good to us, sometimes to the point of embarrassment, in their generous hospitality.
It was in this same year, 1853, that Congress cut off from Oregon the region that now comprises the state of Washington and all of Idaho north of the Snake River.
He insisted on entertaining us in his comfortable cabin, and sent us on our way in the morning, rejoicing in plenty.
I saw them selling at that.
The days were always too short, and interest in our work was always unabated.
I was dressed for the race and was eager for the trial.
With my canoe in tow I soon made my way back to where my little flock was, and speedily transferred all to the spot that was to be our island dwelling.
We set up our tent, and felt at home once more.
Now I found myself praising a country for the agricultural qualities of which I could not say much. But if we could sell produce higher, might we not well lower our standard of an ideal farm?
As a result of this work, he was able to exhibit a slug of California gold and other money that looked precious indeed in our eyes.
"Everybody seems to have money.
And such a road!
The butter you have there would bring you a dollar a pound as fast as you could weigh it out.
Could it be possible my folks had been taken sick and had been removed?
Not knowing what else to do, I paddled over to the town of Steilacoom.
I had plenty of pure, fresh air, while she, in a closed cabin and in the same room with many others, had neither fresh air nor freedom from creeping things that make life miserable.
Soon after I saw a man; he immediately responded to my renewed efforts to attract attention.
Not knowing but this was some cut-off, I went on until the Columbia River bluff was reached and the great river was in sight, half a mile distant and several hundred feet lower.
This brought disappointment; they had thought they were about through with the journey.
My younger brother also lay buried on the Plains, near Independence Rock.
When night came, I could not find it in my heart to camp.
Finally, while sitting there wondering what to do, I spied a blue smoke arising from a cabin on the other side.
Rejoicing and outbursts of grief followed.
A few hundred yards of travel brought uneasiness, as it was evident that we were not on the regular trail.
Strive against it as I might, my eyes would strain at the horizon to catch a glimpse of the expected train.
Rousing before sundown, refreshed, Bobby and I took the trail with new courage.
I lay down in the shade of a small tree near the spring to take an afternoon nap.
The trouble had been that the people were all asleep, while I was there in the early morning expending my breath for nothing.
The dust, in places, brought vivid memories of the trip across the Plains.
I traveled up and down the river bank for half a mile or so, in the hope of catching a favorable breeze to carry my voice to the fort, yet all to no avail.
"How long will it take?" they asked.
For a short time the little party halted to take breath and to look over the new country.
Procuring a fresh horse, I started out in a cheerful mood, determined to reach camp that night if I could possibly do so.
This rest, however, could not last long.
Many of them, it is true, were weakened by the long trip across the Plains; but better food was obtainable, and the goal was near at hand.
Every man literally "put his shoulder to the wheel." We were compelled often to take hold of the wheels to boost the wagons over the logs or to ease them down steep places.
I sat upon the bank hopelessly discouraged, not knowing what to do.
A serjeant at arms, in the king's name, demanded of the house the five members: and was sent back without any positive answer. Messengers were employed to search for them, and arrest them.
The opportunity was seized with joy and triumph.
For this reason they protested against all laws, votes, and resolutions, as null and invalid, which should pass during the time of their constrained absence.
When the king was looking around for the accused members, he asked the speaker, who stood below, whether any of these persons were in the house.
Well, since I see all the birds are flown, I do expect that you will send them to me as soon as they return.
Every measure pursued by the commons, and, still more, every attempt made by their partisans, were full of the most inveterate hatred against the hierarchy, and showed a determined resolution of subverting the whole ecclesiastical establishment.
By way of reproach, these gentlemen gave the rabble the appellation of Roundheads, on account of the short cropped hair which they wore: these called the others Cavaliers.
Multitudes flocked towards Westminster, and insulted the prelates and such of the lords as adhered to the crown.
That evening the accused members, to show the greater apprehension, removed into the city, which was their fortress.
Meanwhile the tumults still continued, and even increased about Westminster and Whitehall.
Yesterday I sent a serjeant at arms to demand some who, by my order, were accused of high treason.
The majority of the peers adhered to the king, and plainly foresaw the depression of nobility, as a necessary consequence of popular usurpations on the crown.
As soon as it was presented to the lords, that house desired a conference with the commons, whom they informed of this unexpected protestation.
They ordered halberts to be brought into the hall where they assembled, and thus armed themselves against those conspiracies with which, they pretended, they were hourly threatened.
Their trunks, chambers, and studies were sealed and locked.
This principle, which prevails so much among zealots, never displayed itself so openly as during the transactions of this whole period.
As stories of plots, however ridiculous, were willingly attended to, and were dispersed among the multitude, to whose capacity they were well adapted.
The king left them at the door, and he himself advanced alone through the hall, while all the members rose to receive him.
The punishment of leaders is ever the last triumph over a broken and routed party; but surely was never before attempted, in opposition to a faction, during the full tide of its power and success.
But I assure you, on the word of a king, I never did intend any force, but shall proceed against them in a fair and legal way; for I never meant any other.
But men had not leisure to wonder at the indiscretion of this measure: their astonishment was excited by new attempts, still more precipitate and imprudent.
The speaker, falling on his knee, prudently replied, "I have, sir, neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the house is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am.
The queen and the ladies of the court further stimulated his passion, and represented that, if he exerted the vigor and displayed the majesty of a monarch, the daring usurpations of his subjects would shrink before him.
This protestation, which, though just and legal, was certainly ill-timed, was signed by twelve bishops, and communicated to the king, who hastily approved of it.
Beale, a tailor, informed the commons that, walking in the fields, he had hearkened to the discourse of certain persons unknown to him, and had heard them talk of a most dangerous conspiracy.
When he considered all these increasing acts of insolence in the commons, he was apt to ascribe them in a great measure to his own indolence and facility.
These men, finding that their credit ran high with the nation, ventured to encourage those popular disorders, which, they vainly imagined, they possessed authority sufficient to regulate and control.
I must here declare to you, that though no king that ever was in England could be more careful of your privileges than I shall be, yet in cases of treason no person has privilege.
But the tide of popularity seized many, and carried them wide of the most established maxims of civil policy.
No man in either house ventured to speak a word in their vindication; so much displeased was every one at the egregious imprudence of which they had been guilty.
The whole world stood amazed at this important accusation, so suddenly entered upon without concert, deliberation, or reflection.
In order to obtain a majority in the upper house, the commons had recourse to the populace, who on other occasions had done them such important service.
Herbert, attorney-general, appeared in the house of peers and in his majesty's name entered an accusation of high treason against Lord Kimbolton and five commoners, Hollis, Sir Arthur Hazlerig, Hambden, Pym, and Strode.
Instead of obedience, I received a message.
These five members, at least Pym, Hambden and Hollis, are the very heads of the popular party; and if these be taken off, what fate must be expected by their followers, who are, many of them, accomplices in the same treason?
A hundred and eight ruffians, as he learned, had been appointed to murder a hundred and eight lords and commoners, and were promised rewards for these assassinations, ten pounds for each lord, forty shillings for each commoner.
He was accompanied by his ordinary retinue, to the number of above two hundred, armed as usual, some with halberts, some with walking swords.
But, notwithstanding these efforts of the commons, they could not expect the concurrence of the upper house either to this law, or to any other which they should introduce for the further limitation of royal authority.
When the commons employed in their remonstrance language so severe and indecent, they had not been actuated entirely by insolence and passion; their views were more solid and profound.
From the mixed character, indeed, of Charles, arose in part the misfortunes in which England was at this time involved.
"As to the militia, I thought so much of it before I gave that answer, and am so much assured that the answer is agreeable to what in justice or reason you can ask, or I in honor grant, that I shall not alter it in any point.
He shut the gates, and refused to receive the king, who desired leave to enter with twenty persons only.
Within ten days, vast quantities of plate were brought to their treasurers.
The commons sent up an impeachment against nine peers, for deserting their duty in parliament.
To the ordinance of the parliament concerning the militia, the king opposed his commissions of array.
Charles therefore entertained hopes that if he presented himself at Hull before the commencement of hostilities, Hotham, overawed by his presence, would admit him with his retinue; after which he might easily render himself master of the place.
In order to remove all jealousy, he had resolved that their usurpations and illegal pretensions should be apparent to the whole world; and thought that to recover the confidence of the people was a point much more material to his interest, than the collecting of any magazines, stores, or armies which might breed apprehensions of violent or illegal counsels.
Meanwhile the splendor of the nobility with which the king was environed much eclipsed the appearance at Westminster.
Charles had here a double advantage.
He now prepared himself for defence.
Lord Keeper Littleton, after sending the great seal before him, had fled to York.
Besides private adventurers without number, the king and parliament themselves carried on the controversy by messages, remonstrances, and declarations; where the nation was really the party to whom all arguments were addressed.
Hardly were there men enough to receive it, or room sufficient to stow it; and many with regret were obliged to carry back their offerings, and wait till the treasurers could find leisure to receive them; such zeal animated the pious partisans of the parliament, especially in the city.
Lay your hands on your hearts, and ask yourselves whether I may not likewise be disturbed with fears and jealousies, and if so, I assure you that this message has nothing lessened them.
The counties obeyed the one or the other, according as they stood affected.
Part of these, after escaping many perils, arrived safely to the king.
His preparations were not near so forward as those of the parliament.
Each party was now willing to throw on its antagonist the odium of commencing a civil war; but both of them prepared for an event which they deemed inevitable.
So obvious indeed was the king's present inability to invade the constitution, that the fears and jealousies which operated on the people, and pushed them so furiously to arms, were undoubtedly not of a civil, but of a religious nature.
The small interval of time which had passed since the fatal accusation of the members, had been sufficient to open the eyes of many, and to recover them from the astonishment with which at first they had been seized.
The queen, disposing of the crown jewels in Holland, had been enabled to purchase a cargo of arms and ammunition.
I do not ask what you have done for me.
All this considered, there is a judgment of Heaven upon this nation if these distractions continue.
You speak of jealousies and fears.
By him, assisted by the king himself, were the memorials of the royal party chiefly composed.
Though these writings were of consequence, and tended much to reconcile the nation to Charles, it was evident that they would not be decisive, and that keener weapons must determine the controversy.
The war of the pen preceded that of the sword, and daily sharpened the humors of the opposite parties.
The magazine of Hull contained the arms of all the forces levied against the Scots; and Sir John Hotham, the governor, though he had accepted of a commission from the parliament, was not thought to be much disaffected to the church and monarchy.
Their own members, also, who should return to them, they voted not to admit till satisfied concerning the reason of their absence.
Near the moiety, too, of the lower house absented themselves from counsels which they deemed so full of danger.
Lord Falkland had accepted the office of secretary; a man who adorned the purest virtue, with the richest gifts of nature, and the most valuable acquisitions of learning.
Charles accordingly resolved to support his authority by arms.
"What would you have?
To determine his choice in the approaching contests, every man hearkened with avidity to the reasons proposed on both sides.
You can have sleek, shining fur when theirs is dull.
He could dive more quickly, stay under water longer, and hunt by scent better than any other Mink round there.
"If you will help me out," said the Bachelor, "I will give you my luck."
"Never mind the fur," answered the Bachelor.
"Of course," answered the Bachelor.
"Then it is a kind of luck that cannot be lost.
"That is enough," answered the Bachelor.
He could hardly believe what he saw.
"No," said the Bachelor.
Then the fathers and mothers were very busy, for in each home there were four or five or six children, hungry and restless, and needing to be taught many things.
Once the Bachelor heard them wishing this, and he smiled and showed his beautiful teeth, and told them that it was not the tip of his tail but his whole body that made him lucky.
The Bachelor smiled again.
"You are a fine young Mink," said he.
"Yes, but how could that be?"
It is even more uncommon than for Minks to have white upper lips, and that happens only once in a great while.
A few days after this, the Bachelor was caught in a trap--a common, clumsy, wooden trap, put together with nails and twine.
It is said that one of their sons has a white-tipped tail, but that may not be so.
It was a beautiful hindfoot, thickly padded, and with short partly webbed toes, and no hair at all growing between them.
"Why, yes," said the young Mink, who had begun to fear he was not going to get anything.
Big Brother kept the secret, and worked until he had learned to be as lucky as the Bachelor.
"And what shall I do with the tail I have?" asked the young Mink, who thought that the Bachelor was to give him his white-tipped tail.
"I don't know," answered Big Brother.
"I don't see that I am to have your luck after all," said he.
You can beat in every fight.
It was the custom among his people to want to marry the best looking and strongest.
"I can't.
Then Big Brother became much excited.
In the winter, when food was not so plentiful and their youngest children were old enough to come with them, they visited there every day.
"Well, how will you put my tail in place of yours?" asked the Bachelor.
Then you will have good luck when theirs is poor.
He hurried up to where the trap was.
However it was he lived alone, and fished and hunted just for himself.
"Now," said the Bachelor, "we will talk about luck.
We will go to a place where nobody can hear what we say." They found such a place and lay down.
Minks are very brave and very fierce, and never know when to stop if they have begun to fight; so, after that, nobody dared tease Big Brother by saying anything more about the Bachelor.
The more the young Mink thought about it, the happier he became.
"What will you do with the tail you have?" said he.
The Bachelor rolled over three times and smoothed his fur; he was still so tired from being in the trap.
"I have good teeth," said he, "Tell me what to do."
It was not far from their home.
"I could do something with my teeth," answered the Bachelor, "if they were only where the tip of my tail is.
Perhaps it was because they had so little white fur that they thought so much of it.
"Don't you think?" said the Bachelor slowly, "don't you think that, if you could have my luck, you could get along pretty well with your own tail?"
"So you want my tail?" said he.
There was a family of young Minks who lived at the foot of the waterfall, where the water splashed and dashed in the way they liked best.
The fur was darker on their backs than on the under part of their bodies, and their tapering, bushy tails were almost black.
It is very hard for a young Mink to have the one he loves choose somebody else, just because the other fellow has the bushiest tail, or the longest fur, or the thickest pads on his feet.
Sometimes they did look at his tail and smile, but they never spoke, and he pretended not to know what they meant by it.
"I always tell people," said he, "that my luck is not in my tail, and they never believe it.
Then he looked at the young Mink very sharply.
The Bachelor smiled.
"You said you would give me your luck," answered Big Brother, "and everybody knows that your luck is in your tail."
There were four brothers and two sisters in this family, and the brothers were bigger than the sisters (as Mink Brothers always are), although they were all the same age.
Why are Minks always walking into traps?" He was trying hard not to be cross, but his eyes showed how he felt, and that was very cross indeed.
THE LUCKY MINK
The Bachelor ate more than Big Brother, for his mouth was not sore.
"Now try it," said he, after he had gnawed for quite a while.
This Mink was a bachelor, and nobody knew why. Some people said it was because he was waiting to find a wife with a white tip on her tail, yet that could not have been, for he was too wise to wait for something which might never happen.
It was not near the river, and none of his friends would have found him, if Big Brother had not happened along.
The claws were short, sharp, and curved.
If I carried mine in the tip of my tail, somebody might bite it off and leave me unlucky."
"Never mind now," answered the Bachelor, and he told the young Mink just where to gnaw.
When they hunted on land, they could tell by smelling just which way to go for their food.
The Bachelor was too brave to groan or make a fuss, when he knew there was anybody around to hear. Big Brother's mouth became very sore, and his stomach became very empty, but still he kept at work.
"I can smooth that down afterward.
They went to the river bank and had a good dinner.
When the Minks visited together, somebody was sure to speak of the Bachelor's luck.
His fur was sleeker and more shining than that of his friends, and it is no wonder that the sisters of his friends thought that he ought to marry.
You will have to gnaw a little on this side." And he raised one of his hind feet to show where he meant.
"Can't you do something with your lucky tail to make the trap open?" asked Big Brother.
"Now try it," said he.
It certainly has the opportunity that comes with the actors, producers, and equipment.
But even these things make for coincidence.
Then there is the lovely unforgotten Nora May French and the austere Edward Rowland Sill.
Indianapolis has had her day since then, Chicago is lifting her head.
Will this land furthest west be the first to capture the inner spirit of this newest and most curious of the arts?
It is thrillingly possible for the state and the art to acquire spiritual tradition and depth together.
And he can go on into stranger things and evolve all the Splendor Films into higher types, for the very name of California is splendor.
California is a gilded state.
This is the outgrowth of the fact that every type of the photoplay but the intimate is founded on some phase of the out-of-doors.
But for a description of California, ask any traveller or study the background of almost any photoplay.
Around Los Angeles the greatest and most characteristic moving picture colonies are being built.
They shout their statistics across the Rockies and the deserts to New York.
Let us hope that every region will develop the silent photographic pageant in a local form as outlined in the chapter on Progress and Endowment.
The present-day man-in-the-street, man-about-town Californian has an obvious magnificence about him that is allied to the eucalyptus tree, the pomegranate.
Our mechanical East is reproved, our tension is relaxed, our ugliness is challenged every time we look upon those garden paths and forests.
Already the California sort, in the commercial channels, has become the broadly accepted if mediocre national form. People who revere the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 have often wished those gentlemen had moored their bark in the region of Los Angeles rather than Plymouth Rock, that Boston had been founded there.
Being thus dependent, the plant can best be set up where there is no winter.
It has not the sordidness of gold, as has Wall Street, but it is the embodiment of the natural ore that the ragged prospector finds.
Edwin Markham, the dean of American singers, Clark Ashton Smith, the young star treader, George Sterling, that son of Ancient Merlin, have in their songs the seeds of better scenarios than California has sent us.
If the photoplay is the consistent utterance of its scenes, if the actors are incarnations of the land they walk upon, as they should be, California indeed stands a chance to achieve through the films an utterance of her own.
Yet there is a difference.
These poems are The Night Sentries and Tidal King of Nations.
These are the defects of the motion picture qualities also.
Besides this, the Los Angeles region has the sea, the mountains, the desert, and many kinds of grove and field. Landscape and architecture are sub-tropical.
Part of the thinness of California is not only its youth, but the result of the physical fact that the human race is there spread over so many acres of land.
It has the same passion for coast-line.
Nevertheless Boston still controls the text-book in English and dominates our high schools.
Then he tries gestures, and becomes flamboyant, rococo.
Both have a genius for gardens and dancing and carnival.
There is no more natural place for the scattering of confetti than this state, except the moving picture scene itself.
He says there is no substitute for time.
Whatever may be said of the patriarchs, from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Amos Bronson Alcott, they were true sons of the New England stone fences and meeting houses.
CHAPTER XVI
As an institution it advertises itself with the sweeping gesture.
The California photo-playwright can base his Crowd Picture upon the city-worshipping mobs of San Francisco.
He says the citizens of this state lack the richness of an aesthetic and religious tradition.
At last that landing is achieved.
The gold of California is the color of the orange, the glitter of dawn in the Yosemite, the hue of the golden gate that opens the sunset way to mystic and terrible Cathay and Hindustan.
The moving picture captains of industry, like the California gold finders of 1849, making colossal fortunes in two or three years, have the same glorious irresponsibility and occasional need of the sheriff.
His fellow-feeling is for the opposite coast-line.
Each photoplay magazine has its California letter, telling of the putting-up of new studios, and the transfer of actors, with much slap-you-on-the-back personal gossip.
The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes.
She tried to think how Jack Wilmington's having gone to Boston for the evening made it somehow less censurable for her to spend it with Lyra, even if she did not approve of her.
She wearied herself, as people do in such places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different numbers.
I've often heard my wife speak of your old days together at Hatboro'."
"Well, then, we'll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone. I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave it to me.
"Well, he's really at home now.
Lyra interrupted them.
But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration of some point he was explaining.
At moments it all seemed no harm; at others, the luxury in which this life was so contentedly sunk oppressed Annie like a thick, close air.
I'll go with you, with great pleasure.
But she had to own to herself that she did like her, and enjoyed hearing her soft drawl.
Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded: "Get right in.
They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand upon it.
"I'll show them through," he said to his uncle; and the old man assented with, "Well, perhaps you'd better, Jack," and went back to his room.
And I don't mean at the house, which isn't home to him, but the Works.
She was sure that she ought not to like Lyra if she did not approve of her, and that she ought not to have gone home to tea with her and spent the evening with her unless she fully respected her.
He seems to have been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back."
"I've just come from the Northwicks, and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton."
"You're too late, Lyra," said Annie.
"George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn."
I've just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at once to crush you with it.
She asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on to talk of her sister's part in them.
In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking.
"Oh--oh--decidedly!
When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her, saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that Jack was going to Boston.
We'll go down to the Works.
"Oh, it's at the rehearsals, you know, that the fun is, and then it don't matter what part you have."
You've never met my husband yet; have you, Annie?"
She said she studied music a little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.
She talked freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was. She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because she never went anywhere.
"No, I haven't, Lyra.
I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new phaeton," said Lyra, coming out.
You've never seen the Works either, have you?"
It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs. Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as ugly as the shoe shops.
I thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others.
At the outer office door they encountered Jack Wilmington.
"No, I haven't."
XII.
Isn't it a beauty?"
"I didn't know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie.
It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something.
"Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals?
"Don't you think, Annie, we'd better refer him to Mr. Peck?
"Well, I don't know; they're opposites.
The tireless machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to their stations again.
I mean the fact that the first years, to the fifth, sixth or eighth, have not left the same traces in our memory as have later experiences.
According to my unchanged conviction there is nothing to deny and nothing to make more palatable.
If the difference in age is greater, the new child may awaken certain sympathies as an interesting object, as a sort of living doll, and if the difference is eight years or more, motherly impulses, especially in the case of girls, may come into play.
You probably all know from your own experiences the peculiar amnesia, that is, loss of memory, concerning childhood.
Sachs).
The estranging impression that there is so much evil in man, begins to weaken.
And if they must, because of the dream censorship, disguise themselves through old forms of expression which are no longer comprehensible, what is the use of giving new life to old, long-outgrown psychic stimuli, wishes and character types, that is, why the material regression in addition to the formal?
Why should it be recalled by the dream at all!"
The time will soon come, however, when we shall clothe the unconscious character of the latent dream-thought with another name, which shall differentiate it from the unconscious out of the realm of the infantile.
In addition, children frequently react to the Oedipus-idea through stimulation by the parents, who in the placing of their affection are often led by sex-differences, so that the father prefers the daughter, the mother the son; or again, where the marital affection has cooled, and this love is substituted for the outworn love.
Still they are unconscious; how does one solve this contradiction?
Many things are taking place there that are not reasonable, and so it happens that we are ashamed of such dreams, and unreasonably.
Beautiful examples of this occur in literature, and I myself can present such an example.
This question is justified.
These evil wish-impulses have their origin in the past, often in a past which is not too far away.
The reason for this is that the deepest and most uniform motive for becoming unfriendly, especially between persons of the same sex, has already made its influence felt in earliest childhood.
He knows no unbridgable chasm between man and animal; the arrogance with which man distinguishes himself from the animal is a later acquisition.
This frightful evil is simply the original, primitive, infantile side of psychic life, which we may find in action in children, which we overlook partly because of the slightness of its dimensions, partly because it is lightly considered, since we demand no ethical heights of the child. Since the dream regresses to this stage, it seems to have made apparent the evil that lies in us.
We are not so evil as we might suspect from the interpretation of dreams.
The motives for this are everywhere known and disclose a tendency to separate those of the same sex, daughter from mother, father from son.
I trust this will be true, but this work has not, up to the present time, been undertaken.
It is not to be wondered at that in the case of a large number of people the dream discloses the wish for the removal of the parents, especially the parent of the same sex.
Because there is an unmistakable disposition to deny their significance in life, and to set forth the ideal demanded by society as a fulfilled thing much oftener than it really is fulfilled.
Our memory deals selectively with its later materials, with impressions which come to us in later life.
As often as someone has been in our way in life--and how often must this happen in the complicated relationships of life--the dream is ready to do away with him, be he father, mother, brother, sister, spouse, etc.
This is in accord with our expectation; we find it much more offensive for love between parents and children to be lacking than for love between brothers and sisters.
For the child loves itself first, and later learns to love others, to sacrifice something of its ego for another.
You know what antipathy society feels toward such intercourse, or at least pretends to feel, and what weight is laid on the prohibitions directed against it.
Expressions such as "I don't want him!
But I must remain within the bounds of our discussion and practice restraint. Prepare yourselves for the temporary abstention.
Subsequently every opportunity is made use of to disparage the new arrival, and even attempts to do him bodily harm, direct attacks, are not unheard of.
I concluded from the content that he was a physician.
One should accept the fact, recognized by the Greek myth itself, as inevitable destiny.
We can, at a pinch, understand hatred of brothers and sisters, and rivalry among them, but how may feelings of hatred force their way into the relationship between daughter and mother, parents and children?
After we have interpreted such a dream for the dreamer and he, in the most favorable circumstances does not attack the interpretation itself, he almost always asks the question whence such a wish comes, since it seems foreign to him and he feels conscious of just the opposite sensations. We need not hesitate to point out this origin.
The only satisfactory answer would be this, that only in this manner can a dream be built up, that dynamically the dream-stimulus can be satisfied only in this way.
Especially noteworthy among these forbidden wishes are those of incest, i.e., those directed towards sexual intercourse with parents and brothers and sisters.
Let the stork take him away again," are very usual.
THIRTEENTH LECTURE
On the other hand, it is interesting that this Oedipus-complex, cast out of life, was yielded up to poetry and given the freest play.
Less strained is the relationship between father and daughter, mother and son.
But it is preferable for psychology to speak the truth, rather than that this task should be left to the cynic.
Let us be satisfied with the circumstantial proof that this outlived wish can be shown to act as a dream stimulator and let us continue the investigation to see whether or not other evil wishes admit of the same derivation out of the past.
It not only translates our thoughts into a primitive form of expression, but it reawakens the peculiarities of our primitive psychic life, the ancient predominance of the ego, the earliest impulses of our sexual life, even our old intellectual property, if we may consider the symbolic relations as such.
The child may, then, be called "polymorphus perverse," and if he makes but slight use of all these impulses, it is, on the one hand, because of their lesser intensity as compared to later life, and on the other hand, because the bringing up of the child immediately and energetically suppresses all his sexual expressions.
For this reason I have called these childhood memories "disguise-memories," memories used to conceal; by means of careful analysis one is able to develop out of them everything that is forgotten.
I mean the love rivalry, with the especial emphasis of the sex character.
The little child is free from them.
THE DREAM
Let us sum up what our plunge into child psychology has given us toward the understanding of the dream.
Psychoanalytic research has incontrovertibly shown that the incestuous love choice is rather the first and most customary choice, and that not until later is there any resistance, the source of which probably is to be found in the individual psychology.
None of these limitations exist in the beginning, but are gradually built up in the course of development and education.
So we called the mode of expression of the dream-work the archaic or regressive.
The child is able to speak well at the age of two, it soon shows that it can become adjusted to the most complicated psychic situations, and makes remarks which years later are retold to it, but which it has itself entirely forgotten.
He was a one-eyed man, short in stature, stout, his head deeply sunk into his neck.
You will wish to conclude therefrom that such wishes and such dreams cannot occur if such changes in the relationship to a person have not taken place; if such relationship was always of the same character.
As a result of the whole investigation we grasp two facts, which, however, disclose only the beginnings of new riddles, new doubts.
This relationship is without doubt the more favorable, even when looked at from the viewpoint of the child.
Thus we are moved to study the development of sex-life in the child also, and we discover the following from a number of sources: In the first place, it is a mistake to deny that the child has a sexual life, and to take it for granted that sexuality commences with the ripening of the genitals at the time of puberty.
But it is only a deceptive appearance by which we have allowed ourselves to be frightened.
But the latent dream-thoughts, which we have solved by means of the dream-interpretation, are not of this realm.
Impatient waiting for the death of the father grows to heights approximating tragedy in the case of a successor to the throne.
Just think of the scandalized opinion of the fine old lady about her uninterpreted dream of "services of love." The problem is not yet solved, and it is still possible that upon further study of the evil in the dream we shall come to some other decision and arrive at another valuation of human nature.
First: the regression of dream-work is not only formal, it is also of greater import.
It is long outlived, to-day it can be present only in the unconscious and as an empty, emotionless memory, but not as a strong impulse.
You say: "Granted this death wish was present at some time or other, and is substantiated by memory, yet this is no explanation.
I believe it was Bernard Shaw who said: "If there is anyone who hates a young English lady more than does her mother, it is her elder sister." There is something about this saying, however, that arouses our antipathy.
This suppression continues in theory, so to say, since the grown-ups are careful to control part of the childish sex-expressions, and to disguise another part by misrepresenting its sexual nature until they can deny the whole business.
September 7th
It is past; I am returning to England.
In other places human beings were seldom seen, and I generally subsisted on the wild animals that crossed my path.
I shut my eyes involuntarily and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer.
"Since you have preserved my narration," said he, "I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity."
They entered, and their leader addressed me.
Our conversations are not always confined to his own history and misfortunes.
The only joy that he can now know will be when he composes his shattered spirit to peace and death.
"It is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made.
Peace, peace!
Heaven bless you and make you so!
You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret; and do you not feel your blood congeal with horror, like that which even now curdles mine?
Suddenly the broad disk of the moon arose and shone full upon his ghastly and distorted shape as he fled with more than mortal speed.
Great God! what a scene has just taken place!
As night approached I found myself at the entrance of the cemetery where William, Elizabeth, and my father reposed.
Hypocritical fiend!
"And do you dream?" said the daemon.
My beloved sister, the sickening failing of your heart-felt expectations is, in prospect, more terrible to me than my own death.
I did not weep, but I knelt down and with a full heart thanked my guiding spirit for conducting me in safety to the place where I hoped, notwithstanding my adversary's gibe, to meet and grapple with him.
Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature's formation, but on this point he was impenetrable.
I pursued him, and for many months this has been my task.
Be steady to your purposes and firm as a rock.
My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell."
Oh!
Sometimes, indeed, he left marks in writing on the barks of the trees or cut in stone that guided me and instigated my fury.
I trod heaven in my thoughts, now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects.
And do I dare to ask of you to undertake my pilgrimage, to endure the hardships that I have undergone? No; I am not so selfish.
I entered it and approached the tomb which marked their graves.
They insisted, therefore, that I should engage with a solemn promise that if the vessel should be freed I would instantly direct my course southwards.
In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being.
"That he should live to be an instrument of mischief disturbs me; in other respects, this hour, when I momentarily expect my release, is the only happy one which I have enjoyed for several years.
Often, when wearied by a toilsome march, I persuaded myself that I was dreaming until night should come and that I should then enjoy reality in the arms of my dearest friends.
A gigantic monster, they said, had arrived the night before, armed with a gun and many pistols, putting to flight the inhabitants of a solitary cottage through fear of his terrific appearance.
"Your repentance," I said, "is now superfluous.
What do these sounds portend?
His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiend-like malice.
Evil thenceforth became my good.
I had not despaired, nor had I yet conceived the idea of returning if set free.
"They shout," I said, "because they will soon return to England."
During the day I was sustained and inspirited by the hope of night, for in sleep I saw my friends, my wife, and my beloved country; again I saw the benevolent countenance of my father, heard the silver tones of my Elizabeth's voice, and beheld Clerval enjoying health and youth.
"When younger," said he, "I believed myself destined for some great enterprise.
"Do you think that I was then dead to agony and remorse?
It is midnight; the breeze blows fairly, and the watch on deck scarcely stir.
There is something terribly appalling in our situation, yet my courage and hopes do not desert me.
September 9th, the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance as the islands split and cracked in every direction.
I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror; I abhorred myself.
If I do, swear to me, Walton, that he shall not escape, that you will seek him and satisfy my vengeance in his death.
I spoke; I told them to retire and consider of what had been said, that I would not lead them farther north if they strenuously desired the contrary, but that I hoped that, with reflection, their courage would return.
As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy.
We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict.
For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires.
"Wretch!" I said.
My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery.
Oh!
They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned.
You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall.
My unfortunate guest regards me with the tenderest compassion.
"Farewell!
I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.
You took me on board when my vigour was exhausted, and I should soon have sunk under my multiplied hardships into a death which I still dread, for my task is unfulfilled.
"You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes.
Nay, then I was not miserable.
Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe--gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions.
I know not whether the fiend possessed the same advantages, but I found that, as before I had daily lost ground in the pursuit, I now gained on him, so much so that when I first saw the ocean he was but one day's journey in advance, and I hoped to intercept him before he should reach the beach.
Frankenstein has daily declined in health; a feverish fire still glimmers in his eyes, but he is exhausted, and when suddenly roused to any exertion, he speedily sinks again into apparent lifelessness.
I have longed for a friend; I have sought one who would sympathize with and love me.
What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow?
But the consideration of these points, and the well balancing of what you may esteem your duties, I leave to you; my judgment and ideas are already disturbed by the near approach of death.
To you first entering on life, to whom care is new and agony unknown, how can you understand what I have felt and still feel?
The deep grief which this scene had at first excited quickly gave way to rage and despair.
"Do you, then, really return?"
Even now I cannot recollect without passion my reveries while the work was incomplete.
He endeavours to fill me with hope and talks as if life were a possession which he valued.
This ice is not made of such stuff as your hearts may be; it is mutable and cannot withstand you if you say that it shall not.
In the meantime he told me that my friend had certainly not many hours to live.
Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen.
As I still pursued my journey to the northward, the snows thickened and the cold increased in a degree almost too severe to support.
For this purpose I will preserve my life; to execute this dear revenge will I again behold the sun and tread the green herbage of earth, which otherwise should vanish from my eyes forever.
Frankenstein, who was dozing, awoke and asked the cause of the tumult.
One inscription that he left was in these words: "Prepare!
Once, after the poor animals that conveyed me had with incredible toil gained the summit of a sloping ice mountain, and one, sinking under his fatigue, died, I viewed the expanse before me with anguish, when suddenly my eye caught a dark speck upon the dusky plain.
"After the murder of Clerval I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and overcome.
You have determined to live, and I am satisfied."
The only hotel-keeper in the town sold his kettles and pans, closed his house, and departed.
At the close of our visit, with a knowing look, she took us to see what Aunt Lucy had baked.
CHAPTER XXII
Men and half-grown boys hardly took time to collect a meagre outfit before they were off with shovel and pan and "something big to hold the gold." A few families packed their effects into emigrant wagons and deserted house and lands for the luring gold fields.
She searched us out, saying:
We were deeply impressed.
The day he died, the flag swung lower on the staff.
No one was allowed to suffer through lack of practical sympathy.
But we were not much afraid when it was light enough, so that imagination could not picture them creeping stealthily behind us.
Nights, she set her shoes handy, so that she could dress quickly when summoned to the sick; and dawn of day often marked her home-coming.
When late on the road, we saw coyotes sneaking out for their evening meal and heard the far-away cry of the panther.
Sometimes, we played on the way and made mistakes.
I was satisfied just to look at them and hear them speak.
He was as courteous to us as though we were grown ladies, shook hands, asked how we felt, begged us to be seated, and then stepped to a door and called, "Susan!
Grandpa brought the news home, "California is ours.
The coffin was covered with a flag, and upon it lay his chapeau, gauntlets, sash, and sword.
Yet the women felt that their battles and trials had just begun, since they had suddenly become the sole home-keepers, with limited ways and means to provide for the children and care for the stock and farms. Discouragement would have rendered the burdens of many too heavy to carry, had not "work together," and "help your neighbor," become the watchwords of the day.
A sweet voice answered, "Coming!"
Shopkeepers packed most of their supplies for immediate shipment, and raised the price of those left for home trade.
Thus more friends came among us.
After the lawyer went away, grandma told us that Jakie had willed us each fifty dollars in gold, and the rest of his property to grandpa and herself.
Georgia was to press down the nettle stems with a stick, while I cut them off and hoed up the roots.
At that auspicious time, she was but eighteen years of age, and second cook in the principal tavern of Neuchatel, Switzerland.
After months of treatment, the doctor shook his head saying: "I have done my best with the medicines at hand.
She told how poor, red-faced, bewildered Marie dropped her ladle and stared at the speaker, then rolled down her sleeves while the Frau Wirthin tied her own best white apron around her waist, at the same time instructing her in the manner in which she must hold her dress at the sides, between thumb and forefinger, and spread the skirt wide, in making a low, reverential bow.
The only thing that remains to be tried is a tea steeped from the nettle root. That may give relief."
Grandma put on deep mourning, but Georgia and I had only black sun-bonnets, which we wore with heartfelt grief.
Now, child, I tell the truth.
To impress us more fully with the importance of that event, grandma had Georgia and me stand up on our cellar floor and learn to make that deferential bow, she by turns, taking the parts of the Frau Wirthin, the Emperor, and the Empress.
It gave great satisfaction; and while the family and guests were admiring it, Senora Vallejo took me by the hand, saying in her own musical tongue, "Come, little daughter, and play while you wait."
And what a centrepiece it was!
One day as I was returning from it with my empty pail, a tidy, black-eyed woman came up to me and said,
She anticipated the coming event with interest and pleasure, because the prolonged and brilliant festivities would afford her an opportunity to display her fancy and talent in butter modelling.
She now finished her modelling with a dainty centrepiece for the bride's table, and let me go with her when she carried it to the Vallejo mansion.
This we did as speedily as possible, and succeeded none too soon; for as we reached the ground on the safe side, he stopped us, and angrily demanded the contents of our basket.
"I did not learn, it is a gift," she replied.
In exuberant delight we exclaimed, "Oh, grandma, how did you learn to make such wonderful things?"
No sooner would I commence operations than the branches, slipping from under the stick, would brush Georgia's face, and strike my hands and arms with stinging force, and by the time we had secured the required number of roots, we were covered with fiery welts.
I'm glad at seeing you, but am going away, wishing you wasn't so cut off from your own people."
As soon as we could get ready after the doctor uttered those words, Georgia and I, equipped with hoe, large knife, and basket were on our way to the Sonoma River.
She gave the quick call which brought the Frau Wirthin to the scene of confusion, where in mute agony, she looked from servant to servant, until, with hands clasped, and eyes full of tears, she implored, "Marie, take the higher place for the day, and with God's help, make no mistake."
The plants towered luxuriantly above our heads, making the task extremely painful.
We had a full two miles and a half to walk, but did not mind that, because we were going for something that might take Jakie's pains away.
But I could not play.
Even he said that he feared that Jakie had stayed away too long.
We obeyed with alacrity, for it was our first experience with a drunken Indian, and greatly alarmed us.
The bed was white, but the pillows were covered with pink silk and encased in slips of linen lawn, exquisite with rare needlework.
Five consecutive nights, she designed and modelled until the watchman's midnight cry drove her from work, and at three o'clock in the morning of the sixth day, she finished.
In fact, some of my sweetest memories of Sonoma are associated with these three Spanish homes.
She led me to a room that had pictures on the walls, and left me surrounded by toys.
Yet, after it was all over, she was informed that the Emperor and Empress had spoken kindly to her, and that she, herself, had made her bow and backed out of the room admirably for one in her position, and ought to feel that the great honor conferred upon her had covered with glory all the ills and embarrassments she had suffered.
We took the seats shaded by the fence and she continued with unmistakable pride: "I can read and write quite a little, and me and the men belong to the same tribe.
Then she told how she heard a heavy thud by the kitchen fire, which made her rush back, only to discover that the head cook had fallen to the floor in a faint!
We drove our band of cattle across the plains and over the Sierras, and have sold them for more than we expected to get.
"Ah, Marie! the butter-piece is so grand, it brings us into trouble. The great Emperor asks to see thee, and thou must come!"
But Marie was so upset that she realized only that her heart was beating like a trip-hammer, and her form shaking like an aspen leaf, while being led before those august personages.
My eyes wandered about until they became riveted on one corner of the room, where stood a child's crib which looked like gold.
Captain Frisbie spent much time in Sonoma after Company H was disbanded, and observing ones remarked that the attraction was Miss Fannie Vallejo.
Some declared him crazy, others called him a monster.
CHAPTER XVII
Like a flash, she tossed the bundle from her head, sprang into the water, snatched Frances as she rose to the surface, and restored her to us without a word.
Upon learning, he turned about, lifted a liver from a wooden peg and cut for each, a generous slice.
"Grandpa, please give us a little piece of meat."
He stated that he offered her food, which she refused.
In attempting to cross the distance from her camp to his, she had strayed and wandered about far into the night, and finally reached his cabin wet, shivering, and grief-stricken, yet determined to push onward.
Before we had recovered sufficiently to speak, she was gone.
Sometimes home was where night overtook us.
"There must be better ways of showing bravery," said the practical Edith.
If she'd been born in Boston----"
He makes out that they are better than ours, but I can't say that I see it myself."
Hasn't anyone told you how the other fellows made him run blindfolded in his shirt sleeves down Beacon Street?"
Philip said "we" with a rather important air, although he had belonged to the illustrious organization a very short time.
"Here we are, all of us," he said to himself, retiring discreetly behind his newspaper.
Tickets had been provided by the forethoughtful Harmon.
"Cast your eyes toward the Avenue and you'll see one."
"England?
"Where do you want to go?"
"I'll tell you," proffered the obliging and innocent Mr. Murphy.
"Wouldn't know them if I did.
"Spill it."
That's at the third corner of my little triangular piece of mountain and forest.
For a time Mr. Murphy regarded him disdainfully, then crossed over, held brief colloquy, and returned.
Mr. Harmon was then admitted through a crack scarcely adequate to his well-set, muscular frame, to the presence of Mr. Jacob Remsen, who wore an expensive dressing-gown and an expression of unutterable boredom.
Girl.
"Possibly.
"Simplest thing in the world if you'll be guided by me."
So Miss Greene wished her on Boulder Brook, and welcome."
Remsen meditated.
"But we've forgotten one point," said Remsen at the end of the discussion.
Not know a man with whom you toured for two months in Japan?" said Remsen reproachfully.
"Can it be done?"
Fishing and hunting on the premises."
"It certainly seems made to order.
You've never been to my place in the mountains, have you?"
Two fellows I know are getting married to-morrow.
You can go to Laconia, get yourself a car from the garage, and motor to the Bungalow.
"Who?"
Mrs. Bond, my housekeeper, is looking after her.
How would it be if the taxi I arrive in should catch fire at the psychological moment?"
"Make it the day after.
It's a dead secret.
It was done almost as well as that accomplished actor, Mr. Jacob Remsen, could have done it.
I'm to be in disguise.
"Leave that to me."
"Care to try?"
"What?
Neither couple knows where the other is going.
To-morrow?"
Not much to look at, is he?"
I'm not a manufacturer of chemicals for nothing."
He'll do it to you when you go out."
Friend Murphy on watch hauls out his little paper and on the chance of its being me, slaps the wrist of anybody who appears on those steps.
Cheery-o!" said his host Britishly.
Or which one of the numerous institutions you maintain in your private city?"
From its door emerged Mr. Thomas Harmon, who rolled upon the pavement apparently strangling. Mr. Murphy rushed to his aid.
"A worse-looking one comes on at ten and stays all night."
"Anywhere out of the world."
"Where do I go when I get out?"
"All right," called the face.
"Oh, it isn't as bad as that.
Excuse me with thanks."
Argument followed while the chauffeur burrowed into the mechanism of his car.
"No butt in about it.
He now busied himself in thought.
"Reads like a real-estate man's prospectus," observed Remsen.
And it's mighty good of you, old man.
I've loaned the place to both couples for a fortnight.
"Put on a suit of tights and dive out of the conservatory window disguised as Annette Kellerman, I suppose."
They get off at Meredith and go in on the truck.
"Laid up?" inquired Mr. Harmon, shaking hands.
Any other agreeable surprises about the resort?"
Don't know what it is or who she is, but she's up against it for a month's rest.
Or the Co-educational Club?
"That's your best make-up, is it, Remsen?"
I nearly forgot.
But they aren't onto that yet." Harmon's clear brown eyes twinkled.
When he was restored to his feet and his breath, and the taxi had ceased to imitate Fafnir the Dragon, a tall figure in an extremely English ulster (which had hastily emerged from the Remsen front door, rushed down ten steps, and leisurely climbed them again) was wrenching violently at the bell.
Good old Roddy! Certainly.
Butt in on a double bridal tour?
"Hard and fast."
"Bottled up," answered the young man gloomily.
"Boulder Brook on Lake Quam.
"Not yet."
"What is he making all the fuss about?" inquired that gentleman as the visitor again applied himself forcefully to the bell.
"What's that?"
FIVE times Mr. Thomas Harmon vainly rang the bell of the Remsen mansion. While engaged upon the sixth variation he became aware of a face in the window, scrutinizing him.
They're on oath."
"It's a blockade."
"Great!
"No, he wouldn't, coming in."
The Woods I'm sending to the Island.
"I see," said the visitor.
Plumb in the dead center of nowhere. Thirteen miles from a railroad.
They'll be a mile apart.
"Sounds like a party."
Tired out.
"Easily.
You'll go, won't you?"
"No. Oh, yes.
Did you ever kill a subpoena-server?"
"Oh, certainly!" assented the other with bitterness.
Shortly after, another couple, also glistening as to garb, entered and took possession of Drawing-Room "B," at the lower end of the car.
At the end of the ten seconds you will be seen going up the steps to the front door.
Presently you will be seen coming down again, unable to effect an entrance against the watchfulness of the faithful Connor.
These were suckerfish from the third family of the subbrachian Malacopterygia.
The Nautilus would do long, diagonal dives that took us to every level.
The memory of that imprisonment under the ice faded from our minds. We had thoughts only of the future.
Not a thing.
Right after catching them, our seamen dropped them in buckets of water.
CHAPTER 17
As for Ned Land, he didn't say a word, but his wide-open jaws would have scared off a shark.
The Nautilus traveled swiftly.
The Canadian and I sat him up; we massaged his contracted arms, and when he regained his five senses, that eternal classifier mumbled in a broken voice:
Geese and duck alighted by the dozens on the platform and soon took their places in the ship's pantry. As for fish, I specifically observed some bony fish belonging to the goby genus, especially some gudgeon two decimeters long, sprinkled with whitish and yellow spots.
Living in a conducting medium such as water, this bizarre animal can electrocute other fish from several meters away, so great is the power of its electric organ, an organ whose two chief surfaces measure at least twenty-seven square feet.
The Nautilus passed over these lush, luxuriant depths with tremendous speed.
"Especially once we've left him," Ned Land shot back.
"How?"
In these waterways our nets brought up fine samples of algae, in particular certain fucus plants whose roots were laden with the world's best mussels.
This forecast fair weather. And so it proved.
We, on the other hand, didn't have to practice such moderation: we could suck the atoms from the air by the lungful, and it was the breeze, the breeze itself, that poured into us this luxurious intoxication!
"A first-class barometer, my friend."
Soon we had cleared the Antarctic Circle plus the promontory of Cape Horn.
"Yes," Ned Land went on.
Next to me my two companions were getting tipsy on the fresh oxygen particles. Poor souls who have suffered from long starvation mustn't pounce heedlessly on the first food given them.
"You can repay your debt by coming with me when I leave this infernal Nautilus."
Here seals and otters could indulge in a sumptuous meal, mixing meat from fish with vegetables from the sea, like the English with their Irish stews.
We would soon settle this important point.
"Yes, my friend," I answered, "it was an electric ray that put you in this deplorable state."
The first words I pronounced were words of appreciation and gratitude to my two companions.
It was a question of simple arithmetic.
One of our nets had hauled up a type of very flat ray that weighed some twenty kilograms; with its tail cut off, it would have formed a perfect disk.
Later Sir Richard Hawkins called them the Maidenland, after the Blessed Virgin.
"Oh well," the Canadian said, "we'll give him the slip long before then."
Some zoophytes were dredged up by the chain of our trawl.
Near eleven o'clock in the morning, we cut the Tropic of Capricorn on the 37th meridian, passing well out from Cape Frio.
The sea was of moderate depth.
For once in his life, the poor lad didn't address me "in the third person."
Others looked like upside-down baskets from which wide leaves and long red twigs were gracefully trailing. They swam with quiverings of their four leaflike arms, letting the opulent tresses of their tentacles dangle in the drift. I wanted to preserve a few specimens of these delicate zoophytes, but they were merely clouds, shadows, illusions, melting and evaporating outside their native element.
Instantly there he was, thrown on his back, legs in the air, his body half paralyzed, and yelling:
Nobody could be better than a kind and generous man like yourself!"
Near evening it approached the Falkland Islands, whose rugged summits I recognized the next day.
In this way he would complete his underwater tour of the world, going back to those seas where the Nautilus enjoyed the greatest freedom.
No crewmen. Not even Captain Nemo.
The floor of this immense valley is made picturesque by mountains that furnish these underwater depths with scenic views. This description is based mostly on certain hand-drawn charts kept in the Nautilus's library, charts obviously rendered by Captain Nemo himself from his own personal observations.
"My friends," I replied, very moved, "we're bound to each other forever, and I'm deeply indebted to you--"
Keeping to its northerly heading, it followed the long windings of South America.
"All right, all right!" the Canadian repeated in embarrassment.
But if we returned to the Pacific, far from every populated shore, what would happen to Ned Land's plans?
By then, crowded with jellyfish, squid, and other devilfish, the oceans will have become huge centers of infection, because their waves will no longer possess "these huge stomachs that God has entrusted with scouring the surface of the sea."
From Cape Horn to the Amazon
"And do you know," I added, "what happened since man has almost completely wiped out these beneficial races? Rotting weeds have poisoned the air, and this poisoned air causes the yellow fever that devastates these wonderful countries. This toxic vegetation has increased beneath the seas of the Torrid Zone, so the disease spreads unchecked from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata to Florida!"
There's enough for everyone."
And what powerful inhalations! The Canadian "drew" like a furnace going full blast.
It would have been difficult to capture these valuable reptiles, because they wake up at the slightest sound, and their solid carapaces are harpoon-proof.
Will you help me!"
Besides, when I saw master fainting, it left me without the slightest desire to breathe. It took my breath away, in a manner of . . ."
These flat disks on their heads consist of crosswise plates of movable cartilage, between which the animals can create a vacuum, enabling them to stick to objects like suction cups.
The positions reported each day on the world map were put there by the chief officer, and they enabled me to determine the Nautilus's exact heading. Now then, that evening it became obvious, much to my satisfaction, that we were returning north by the Atlantic route.
I likewise marveled at the numerous medusas, including the most beautiful of their breed, the compass jellyfish, unique to the Falkland seas. Some of these jellyfish were shaped like very smooth, semispheric parasols with russet stripes and fringes of twelve neat festoons.
Your life is worth more than ours. So we had to save it."
But I could breathe, I could inhale the life-giving sea air.
By then all our past sufferings were forgotten.
"That's good news," the Canadian replied, "but where's the Nautilus going?"
Let master have no fears about breathing.
Not one of them had come up to enjoy the open air.
"After the South Pole, does our captain want to tackle the North Pole, then go back to the Pacific by the notorious Northwest Passage?"
But our suckerfish would effect their capture with extraordinary certainty and precision. In truth, this animal is a living fishhook, promising wealth and happiness to the greenest fisherman in the business.
Just then its peak appeared before us, standing out distinctly against the background of the skies.
Much to Ned Land's displeasure, Captain Nemo had no liking for the neighborhood of Brazil's populous shores, because he shot by with dizzying speed. Not even the swiftest fish or birds could keep up with us, and the natural curiosities in these seas completely eluded our observation.
By then we had fared 16,000 leagues since coming on board in the seas of Japan.
Which he did that same evening, but strictly as retaliation. Because, frankly, it tasted like leather.
In essence, it was an issue of stocking the larder with excellent red meat, even better than beef or veal. Their hunting was not a fascinating sport.
It was white underneath and reddish on top, with big round spots of deep blue encircled in black, its hide quite smooth and ending in a double-lobed fin.
"I'm unable to say, Ned."
"Sure," Ned Land went on, "but it remains to be seen whether we'll make for the Atlantic or the Pacific, in other words, whether we'll end up in well-traveled or deserted seas."
I had no reply to this, and I feared that Captain Nemo wouldn't take us homeward but rather into that huge ocean washing the shores of both Asia and America.
The same day an odd fishing practice further increased the Nautilus's stores, so full of game were these seas. Our trawl brought up in its meshes a number of fish whose heads were topped by little oval slabs with fleshy edges.
Its fishing finished, the Nautilus drew nearer to the coast. In this locality a number of sea turtles were sleeping on the surface of the waves.
We cut the Equator.
They could see that his face was red from his exertions, but filled with excitement as well; while his eyes were, as Bluff expressed it, "sticking out of his head!"
Teddy was showing decided signs of improvement.
He loved to watch the small woods folk when they did not suspect his presence, and learn more and more of their interesting habits.
"This way," explained the other.
"I hope he gets that prize the railroads are offering. So far as I can tell he has a dandy collection already, and we've got some time ahead of us still."
DID TEDDY KNOW?
But Frank rather liked being made the scapegoat; he certainly faced the angry old miser of Centerville without showing a sign of alarm.
"That's a measly shame, Frank!" objected Bluff impetuously.
There was a twinkle in his eye as he observed Frank Langdon.
"You know he said Uncle Felix, who loaned us his houseboat to make that trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans, was expecting some important mail to-day.
The hardware man nodded his head.
"I like the manly way you stand up and take hard knocks.
"That was as neat a compliment as you ever had paid you, Frank, do you know it?" he asked the other.
"You only ducked, Frank, when you saw it headed your way.
"Now you've gone and done it, you young rapscallions!" cried Isaac Chase, so excited that he could hardly control his trembling voice.
CHAPTER II
"Besides, we've had enough fun out of the business to stand a little expense like that.
Now what d'ye reckon can have happened?"
I'm sure that is all you could expect from us."
"What's Uncle Felix got to do with it?" demanded Jerry.
As the four chums went away, Jerry chuckled.
"Don't be impudent to me, boy!" snapped the old miser angrily.
"Look at him waving his hat over his head?
Bluff rubbed the side of his head at seeing this, as though wondering whether the missile that had struck him there had also been loaded in that way.
It isn't fair for you to pay the bill.
"That's so," Bluff declared sturdily, "and we've had lots of dandy vacations in the past, too.
"I got caught there, and it keeps on burning like a hot iron.
Let him go after Andy."
"We'll wait out here for you."
Between you and me, he never will be able to do it for days or weeks, he's that doubled up."
"I expect to have a good many orders like that, Frank, before the day is over," remarked the dealer, laughingly.
They talked it over as they sauntered in the direction of their homes. It happened that Will Milton's house was the first they came to.
"Oh, Uncle Felix, don't I love you!" muttered Bluff, as if a sudden brilliant idea had come into his mind.
"I saw the postman come out of our gate," Will commented.
"Here are lots of witnesses to prove it came from the other side."
They must have fixed up a lot of ammunition that way before they tackled us."
"As to that, Mr. Chase, I will tell my father all about it as soon as he comes home from the bank.
"Little he'll care about that," Bluff told him.
I happened to dodge a ball fired from the other side, and it went through the glass."
Will came hurrying up, and when he spoke his words gave them a thrill.
"What!
"We're sorry, Mr. Chase, that your window was broken," said Frank steadily; "it was an accident, I give you my word about that.
"We'll figure all that out in a day or so, never fear," Will observed.
Will left them shying a few snowballs at a tin can Bluff had set on a fence-post.
"But the trouble is, none of us threw it!" burst out Jerry, determined that the true facts should be known at any rate, even if they did have to foot the bill.
"Come, let's be moving along, fellows," Bluff finally remarked.
You here in this rowdy business, Frank Langdon!" exclaimed the other, as though more than surprised.
"No, I prefer settling the account myself, and not having any trouble about it," Frank told his objecting chums.
At that all of them laughed, as though they considered it a joke.
"A hard snowball can sting like fun when it catches you there."
"Oh, well, I noticed a lot of dodging being done," commented Frank; "and only for that all of us might have made more bull's-eyes."
A BROKEN WINDOW, AND GLORIOUS NEWS
"Same here," Bluff told him cheerfully; "I never feel happier than when I smell the woods and get on the trail of game.
"He must have seen us in the fight, and that settles it.
He knew the sort of reputation Frank had in Centerville, although the latter had not been a resident there much more than three years, having come from away off in Maine at the time his father took the local bank over.
Just the thought of it gives me a warm feeling around my heart."
With that he turned his back upon the group and hurried to reenter his house, as though fearful lest some of the spectators might endeavor to shame him out of accepting pay from an innocent party.
And do you see how he's grinning from ear to ear?
That glorious spell we had out on Mr. Mabie's ranch among the Rockies has haunted me ever since."
"Believe me, I'll let you boys off as lightly as I can, and not lose by it," was what he told them.
Frank and his three comrades stood talking with some of those who had gathered when the crash of broken glass, followed by angry words in the high-pitched voice of the miser, drew attention to the scene of action.
"I wonder if he brought Uncle Felix the letter he's been expecting for some days. You see, he's got a bad attack of rheumatism; yet he says he must try to get away Down East on some very important business.
What's bothering me is where we ought to go to spend this unexpected time that's been given to us through the fire at the college."
Frank, you talk with him.
The sooner that window pane is replaced the better I shall be pleased.
Some of the bystanders at this point tried to convince Mr. Chase that Frank was entirely innocent of the whole transaction; but the miser, acting on the principle that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," declined to let the generous offer Frank had made slip from his grasp.
My father was a boy himself once, not like some people who forget that they once used to play themselves."
I shall expect him to fulfill his offer, which you heard him make, Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Mole.
"Andy Lasher hid a stone in his last ball, and expected to do Frank damage, for he shied it straight at his head; but Frank dodged, and bang went the glass!"
I think I'd enjoy another turn up there in the woods."
"Seems to me Will's a long time coming out again," complained Jerry. "He's always so much taken up with that photography of his that any old time he's liable to remember something and go to work at it, forgetting all about his chums, who may be kicking their heels in the back yard waiting for him."
Upon Frank's shoulders was laid the burden of extricating them from numerous mishaps.
That's enough."
"Yes," added Jerry, as if it might be an afterthought, "and while you're about it, Will, just mention to Uncle Felix that there are four husky boys around, with considerable time to burn just now, and if he wants anybody to take that trip for him we might be coaxed into doing it, if he'd stand for expenses."
"Run in, if you feel like it, Will," Frank told him.
It galled him to think they had been made the scapegoats by Andy Lasher and his set, though he knew only too well that once Frank's mind was made up to pay for the broken window nothing could change him.
Frank smiled, but he did not look displeased.
"There he comes!" exclaimed Bluff.
"I'm glad Mr. Benchley has such a good opinion of the outdoor chums," he remarked, "for he meant every one of you, as well as me, when he said that.
"Yes, look at my right cheek, if you want to prove that," Bluff advised them.
The innocent often have to suffer for the guilty."
Perhaps he's held Will up to tell him about something. You know Uncle Felix thinks heaps of our chum; yes, and of all the rest of us in the bargain."
If I had a boy, I'd want him to be just your style, Frank."
"Oh, I don't think he's quite that forgetful!" laughed Frank.
Look who's coming out of the house on the rampage, will you!" cried Bluff Masters, as the front door was flung open and an excited man hurried down the steps toward the spot where the four chums stood breathing hard after their recent exertions.
But then Frank says we were in the crowd that was fighting, and it wasn't fair that Mr. Chase, who was an innocent party, should suffer from our fun.
So I reckon we'll have to put our hands in our pockets and pay your bill, Mr. Benchley."
"Yes," added Jerry, "leave it to Frank, and he'll arrange the details. Chances are we'll be dropping in to see how old Jesse Wilcox is getting on with his muskrat trapping.
"And, say, he seems to be in a terrible hurry," added Jerry, beginning to show a touch of excitement himself.
A ball went wide of the mark, did it, and picked out the window of Miser Chase's house to smash?"
Then what made you ask me?
"You kill me!" he said.
The room filled with strangeness in the long silence--the two were so strange to each other. At last she said:
You thought that I was fond of you; you knew I cared for you--but you didn't think I might be--in love with you. But you thought that I might marry you without being in love with you because you did believe I had tried to marry your brother, and--"
"No, no! And you must go now, Bibbs; I can't bear any more--please--"
Still he did not look up, but in a voice, shaken and husky he asked her a question so grotesque that at first she thought she had misunderstood his words.
Tell me, though, isn't it true?
Bibbs had forgotten himself long ago; his heart broke for her.
I told him just what I'd done; I asked his pardon, and I said I would not marry him.
Your sister-in-law told you, didn't she?"
"You 'heard her say' more than that. You 'heard her say' that we were bitterly poor, and on that account I tried first to marry your brother--and then--" But now she faltered, and it was only after a convulsive effort that she was able to go on.
"I want you to tell me."
She remembered that Sibyl had gone to the New House.
"He walks kind of slow and stooped over, like."
She meant no harm--but she was horrible, and she put what I was doing into such horrible words--and they were the truth--oh!
Isn't there some way you could use the money without--without--"
I did!" And she sank down into the chair, weeping bitterly again.
I posted the letter, but he never got it. That was the afternoon he was killed.
Still without looking at her, he inclined his head in affirmation.
"You mustn't come any more.
"Never, never, never!" she cried, in a passion of tears.
"Mary," he groaned, "I didn't know you COULD cry!"
I didn't know how to be anything except a well-to-do old maid or somebody's wife--and I couldn't be a well-to-do old maid.
"No, no, no!"
"I--I heard her say--"
She gave a choked little laugh.
But I couldn't!
"Not you--oh no!"
"To-day."
I never dreamed I could do anything for YOU!
"You needn't tell me," she said.
I SAW myself!
Now you know what I did--and you know--ME!" She pressed her clenched hands tightly against her eyes, leaning far forward, her head bowed before him.
"I can be glad of one thing, though it's selfish.
"Mary, Mary!" he cried, helplessly.
"And then--that I tried to marry--you!
"But there's nothing to forgive."
"You've given up--to your father," she said, slowly, "and then you came to ask me--" She broke off.
Never for an instant!"
"Listen till I get through--I want you to understand.
I did it openly, at least, and with a kind of decent honesty.
"Bibbs, do you want me to marry you?"
"No!" she cried.
And we couldn't DO anything. You might wonder why I didn't 'try to be a stenographer'--and I wonder myself why, when a family loses its money, people always say the daughters 'ought to go and be stenographers.' It's curious!--as if a wave of the hand made you into a stenographer.
"How'd you like for me to be THAT young fella, mamma?" the husband whispered.
I was the dependent--I did nothing but lean on you.
I can't see you, dear!
"What made you say that?"
"Yes," he said, just audibly.
"I've had nothing but dreams," Bibbs said, desolately, "but they weren't like that.
"He's one of the sons, and there ain't but two left now."
And that smile of hers, so lamentable, but so faithfully friendly, misted his own eyes, for his shamefacedness lowered them no more.
You've given up."
"Bibbs, do you know now why I stopped wearing my furs?"
It's something that happened since our walk this morning--yes, since you left me at noon.
I can be glad you came straight to me.
"What did you say, Bibbs?" she asked, quietly.
"What was it that made you?" she said.
"I do!"
Your father's won--you're going to do what he wants.
"No!" he said, quickly.
She meant it to express Sibyl's extremity, you see.
I left her, and I wrote to your brother--just a quick scrawl.
Something happened that--" She stopped abruptly, with a tremulous murmur of amazement and dawning comprehension.
I saw something was terribly wrong when I--You look--" She paused, and he came in, not lifting his eyes to hers.
But I hardly needed either of them to tell me.
"I think I know what happened, now." Mary's breath came fast and her voice shook, but she spoke rapidly.
"Wait," she said.
Both of her hands leaped to her cheeks--she grew red and then white. She rose slowly and moved backward from him, staring at him, at first incredulously, then with an intense perplexity more and more luminous in her wide eyes; it was like a spoken question.
All that involves the conviction that even the experimental psychologist as such is not prepared to enter into medical treatment; and a "Psychological Clinic," managed by a psychologist who is not a doctor of medicine, is certainly not better than a church clinic.
That is indeed one of the central dangers of all non-medical suggestive cures, that while any belief may cure through the mere emotional power of the act of believing, the content of the belief gains an undeserved appearance of truth.
And this is no longer confined to the physician but must be intrusted to all organs of the community. And here more than in the case of disease, the causal point of view of the physician ought to be brought into harmony with the purposive view of the social reformer, of the educator and of the moralist.
The ideal of such mental hygiene is the complete equilibrium of all mental energies together with their fullest possible development.
The whole social life must shape itself in such a way that everyone finds the best possible chances to perfect this harmonious growth.
Still more complex is the criminological problem.
But if we were to strike out all suggestive influences from social life, we should give up social life itself.
No one can insist too earnestly that life is worth living only if it serves moral duties and moral freedom and is not determined by pleasures and absence of pain only.
With such a training later on even the temptations of alcoholic beverages would lose their danger.
Social aid and charity work ought to be filled with religious spirit, but to perform it is not itself religion.
To work towards this end does not mean to aim towards the impossible and undesirable end of making all men alike, but to give to all, in spite of the differences which nature and society condition, the greatest possible inner completeness and outer usefulness.
The imagination of the hypnotized person is the only hypnotizing agency. Thus no one can be hypnotized without his knowledge or against his will. The story of telepathic mysteries which is often brought before the public is probably always the outcome of a diseased brain.
A similar unbalancing influence emanates from overstrong contrasts of poverty and comfort.
Everything ought to be left in that case to suggestions within normal limits, in the form of good example and persuasions, authority and discipline, love and sympathy.
It would be better if there were more suffering in the world than that the existence of the moral will should be undermined.
If that were immoral, we should have to make up our minds that all education and training were perverted with such immoral elements.
For that end society may take over directly from the workshop of the psychotherapist quite a number of almost technical methods.
To make clear this purposive side of the case as against the causal one which alone interested the physician, I may add a few features to the short report as a typical example.
Or there may be negative suggestibility, by which a moral admonition stirs up a vivid idea of the opposite.
This is also the most destructive effect of social and legal injustice; emotions are strangulated and then begin to work mischief.
Morality postulates that everyone find conditions in which he can be victorious if he puts his strongest efforts to the task.
At this time I had the worst two days of my life.
There is no doubt the arbitrary suppression of the sexual instinct must be acknowledged as the source of nervous injury while indulgence may lead to disease and misery.
The desire for the drug was something terrible.
We do not eliminate the moral will but we remove some unfair obstacles from its path.
No character is perfect.
To hypnotize or to perform any persistent psychotherapeutic treatment may thus be dangerous, if it is done by the unfit.
When I first went to see the professor in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, I was using between thirty-two and thirty-eight grains of morphine daily.
It is an objection from the standpoint of morality, belonging therefore entirely to the purposive view of the mind, but we have now reached a point where it is our duty to do justice to this purposive view too.
Harmonious development without one-sidedness, and yet with full justice to the individual talents and equipments, should be secured.
He has to learn learning and not only to play with knowledge, he has to learn to force his attention in adjustment to those factors of civilization which are foreign to his personal tendencies and perhaps unsympathetic.
And yet if there was one thought which controlled our discussion from the beginning, it was certainly the conviction that this causal view itself is only an instrument in the service of idealistic endeavors; the reality of man's life is the reality of will and freedom directed towards ideals.
The application of reenforced suggestion or even of hypnotism in the doctor's office is even for him no possible source of danger.
If there is moral criticism against suggestive therapy, it is the duty of the community to consider it.
That means from the start an effort to secure balance between general education and particular development.
For this reason it leaves too many unprepared for the world of art and for the emotional experiences of real life.
An equilibrium is secured only if at the same time full emphasis is given to the learning and training in all which is the common ground of our social existence.
We have discussed before the injuries which might result from the administration of such powerful psychotherapeutic effects through the best meaning minister, but we can extend this fear to anyone who has not systematically studied medicine and to a certain degree normal and abnormal psychology.
It is quite true that if I hypnotize a man and suggest to him to take up after awaking the book which lies on my table, he follows my suggestion without conflict and in a certain sense without freedom.
Few factors are more influential in all these directions than the administration of law.
Its intemperate use or its use by young people and by pathological persons is one of the gravest dangers. Whether intemperance ought to be fought by prohibition or rather by an education to temperance is a difficult question in which the enthusiastic women and ministers, backed by the well justified fears of psychiatrists, will hardly be on the same side as the sober judgment of scientists, unprejudiced physicians, and historians.
If again and again I hesitate to undertake new cases, it is just because I have to see during the treatment too much of this daily and hourly striving against overpowering impulses.
We recognized that mental disturbances were often the result of suppressed emotion and repressed wishes.
In the best case it brings a certain rest to some brain centers by engaging other brain parts.
No one can measure the injury done to the psychophysical balance of the weaker brains, for instance, by the sensational court gossip and reports of murder trials in the newspapers for the masses. But while the influence of suggestion is on the whole familiar to public opinion, the community is much less aware of another factor which we found important in the hands of the psychotherapist.
Furthermore the associative apparatus of the brain may work especially slowly; it may thus bring it about that the counteracting ideas do not arise in time.
In proportion as you deprive him of the power of self-control, you deprive him of that upon which his individual responsibility and moral status depend.
From whatever starting point we may come, we are led to the conviction that the physician alone is called to administer psychotherapeutic work, but that he needs a thorough psychological training besides his medical one.
This opposition argues as follows: Hypnotic influence brings the patient under the will control of the hypnotizer and thus destroys his own freedom.
The suppressed ideas had to be brought to consciousness again and then to be discharged through vivid expression. Society ought to learn from it that few factors are more disturbing for the mental balance than feelings and emotions which do not come to a normal expression.
It was a moral victory when he finally reached the point at which he went for several weeks without any desire for morphine and finally presented the remaining tablets to a hospital. And yet there would not have been the least chance for his winning this ethical victory without the outer help of the hypnotist.
Not less injurious than the strong drinks are the cards.
For the first few months, I found great relief after every injection of morphine, but soon I could not get the same easy feeling and could eat but very little and what sleep I got was in the daytime.
The mere learning is of course on both sides only a fraction of what the community has to develop in the youth.
He put me under his treatment October 6th and that day cut me down by hypnotic treatment to nine grains a day or three doses of three grains a day.
I tried whiskey, but it gave relief only for about half an hour and then the desire was worse than ever."
Fears in that direction have been uttered repeatedly, but from very different standpoints.
The artificial over-suggestions which are needed to overcome the pathological disturbances of mental equilibrium may be left for the cases of illness.
The efforts in that direction have to begin with the earliest infancy and are at no age to be considered as finished; the whole school work and to a high degree the professional work has to be subordinated to such endeavor.
A forcible book of recent days calls the suggestive power of the psychotherapist "The Great Psychological Crime." It says to the hypnotist: "By your own testimony, you stand convicted of applying a process which deprives your subjects of the inalienable right and power of individual self-control.
The expert ought to replace the amateur in every field.
As long as we discussed the problem entirely from the standpoint of the physician, no other view of mental life except the causal one could be in question.
But if the impulse has irresistible character in such a way that the good will is powerless, we are again in the field of disease and the point of view of the physician has to be substituted for that of the criminologist.
The situation is different as soon as the particular surroundings have brought it about that such a brain with reduced powers has entered a criminal career.
The variations which produce this criminal effect may lie in most different directions.
It must be acknowledged that a method which has such powerful influence over the mind that it can secure ideas and emotions and impulses which the own will of the patient cannot produce, ought to be allowed only to those who are prepared for its skillful use.
It is no chance that in countries of mixed Protestant and Catholic civilization, the number of suicides is larger in Protestant regions than in the Catholic ones where the confessional relieves the suppressed emotions of the masses.
Any absurd superstition can become accredited because its curative value may be equal to a truly valuable suggestion.
Yes, the artificial reenforcement of such special features would deprive education of that which is the most essential, namely, the development of the power to overcome difficulties by own energy.
On a higher level are objections which come from serious quarters and which are not without sympathy with true science.
Free election of life's work and unyielding mental discipline in the service of the common demands should thus steadily cooeperate.
The emotional stability and emotional enlargement of the mind is perhaps most neglected in our educational schemes.
It is in a way not psychical therapy but psychical hygiene.
The community becomes more and more strongly aware that too many factors of our modern society urge the church to undertake non-religious work.
The varieties which nature really produces are brains which are more liable than others to produce antisocial actions.
More important than mere physical hygiene is the demand that a sound character and a sound temperament are also to be built up, at the side of a sound interest.
We spoke of the danger which the mental cures carry with them when they are based on any particular creed, and especially when they are tied up with a semi-religious arbitrary metaphysics.
Whenever we aim to produce changes in the world, we must calculate the effects through the means of this causal construction, but we never have a right to forget that this calculation itself is therefore only a tool and that our reality, in which our duties and our real aims lie, is itself outside of this construction. The psychotherapist wants to produce effects inasmuch as he wants to cure disease.
We know that hypnotism is not based on any special power of the hypnotizer; there is no magnetic fluid in the sense of the old mesmerism.
The community should take care early that secret feelings are avoided, that the child is cured from all sullenness which stores up the emotion instead of discharging it.
Not less difficult and not less connected with the mental hygiene is the alcohol problem.
Much more justified than such ethical objections are the fears which move entirely in the causal sphere.
Physical exercise is certainly not such restitution.
Often this is coupled with telepathic fancies.
"Especially," I replied, "if it happens that we have only crossed it in its narrowest part.
"No; but we have got to the end of that endless sea.
"And now let us go to breakfast," said he.
I asked, was he not touched in the brain?
It seemed to me impossible that the terrible wreck of the raft should not have destroyed everything on board.
I asked.
I was unable to speak.
Hans prepared some food, which I could not touch; and each of us, exhausted with three sleepless nights, fell into a broken and painful sleep.
Not that we had suffered no losses.
"But then we shall have to refit the raft."
"Returning?
Then he returned to the rocks, against which the furious waves were beating, to save what he could.
Why, you are talking about the return before the arrival."
"But where is the compass?
"What is the matter?" I asked.
"You mean Axel Island.
I shook the box, examined it again, it was in perfect condition.
"To our journey's end?"
"That seems to me," I said, "rather difficult to make out."
"Here it is, upon this rock, in perfect condition, as well as the thermometers and the chronometer.
We have got there."
"Yes, it is difficult," he said, "to calculate exactly; perhaps even impossible, since during these three stormy days I have been unable to keep any account of the rate or direction of the raft; but still we may get an approximation."
For instance, our firearms; but we might do without them.
"Then, as to provisions, have we enough to last?"
CALM PHILOSOPHIC DISCUSSIONS
I stared at the Professor with a good deal of mistrust.
An exclamation of astonishment burst from me.
The sky and the sea had sunk into sudden repose.
When we have reached the centre of the globe, either we shall find some new way to get back, or we shall come back like decent folks the way we came.
In whatever position I placed the box the needle pertinaciously returned to this unexpected quarter.
"Yes; to be sure we have.
"But you, uncle, you seem in very good spirits this morning."
"I am only a little knocked up, but I shall soon be better."
What happened when the raft was dashed upon the rocks is more than I can tell.
The Professor moved towards the rock upon which Hans had laid down the instruments.
"How about returning?"
He was gay and full of spirits; he rubbed his hands, he studied his attitudes.
Would not any one have thought that we were still in our cheerful little house on the Koenigstrasse and that I was only just coming down to breakfast, and that I was to be married to Graeuben that day?
"Here is the aneroid, the most useful of all, and for which I would have given all the others.
Whilst breakfasting I took the opportunity to put to my uncle the question where we were now.
"Of course, Axel."
As for tools and appliances, there they all lay on the ground--ladders, ropes, picks, spades, etc.
The hunter is a splendid fellow."
"How so?" I cried.
As for the raft, I will recommend Hans to do his best to repair it, although I don't expect it will be of any further use to us."
Our course has been the same all along, and I believe this shore is south-east of Port Graeuben."
down!"
Don't decline the honour of having given your name to the first island ever discovered in the central parts of the globe."
The north pole of the needle was turned to what we supposed to be the south.
I don't think we shall come out by the way that we went in."
And yet there was method in his madness.
down!
"Well," cried the Professor, "as we have no guns we cannot hunt, that's all."
The next day the weather was splendid.
My uncle shook hands with him with a lively gratitude.
"Well, now," he repeated, "won't you tell me how you have slept?"
We left this grotto which lay open to every wind.
By means of it I can calculate the depth and know when we have reached the centre; without it we might very likely go beyond, and come out at the antipodes!"
You are only a little bit tired."
Our stock of powder had remained uninjured after having risked blowing up during the storm.
"Oh, very well," I said.
It pointed to the shore instead of to the open sea!
I followed him, curious to know if I was right in my estimate.
"But, my dear uncle, do let me ask you one question."
"Yes, but how about the instruments?"
Perhaps we have deviated."
But still let us go and make sure."
"Well, my boy," he cried, "have you slept well?"
Now we shall go by land, and really begin to go down!
Such high spirits as these were rather too strong.
I felt myself hurled into the waves; and if I escaped from death, and if my body was not torn over the sharp edges of the rocks, it was because the powerful arm of Hans came to my rescue.
In the mean time, Herod's affairs in Judea were in an ill state.
1.
3.
6.
5.
It is always in action and motion, still busy, still pretending to do all, to furnish all the powers and faculties with all that they have; but if an enemy dare rise up against it, it is the soonest endangered, the soonest defeated of any part.
He hovered about the pair, and constantly warned them against carelessness.
Frank was more than willing.
Bluff turned to Frank.
If anybody goes, it will have to be you two."
"You'll have to count me out of that deal," Frank told them.
"Oh, the meanest luck that ever was!" he lamented.
"I wasn't thinking so much of that as the chance of a blizzard coming down on you," Frank continued.
"It's a moose, all right, Will!" Frank told the proud photographer.
"If only you'll hold your horses until I can develop this film, you shall see for yourself whether I know a stag from a bull moose," he was told by the indignant photographer, as the latter broke away and vanished inside the cabin.
"Here's the place," Frank told them, a short time afterward.
Frank nodded his head.
"Who--what--where--how?" demanded Will, apparently confused, and not able to understand what all these strange hints portended.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if Teddy knew something about that fire business," he mentioned to Bluff, a short time later, when they walked together down to the spot where the mink tracks had been seen, as the latter had shown more or less interest in the habits of these little animals.
"Getting hung up in an old bear trap a blessing in disguise, was it?
"What trotted off?" shrilled Bluff.
"Whoever started the fire didn't care a hoot whether it hurt or not, I think," Bluff gave as his opinion.
Frank was always accommodating, especially when anything connected with his knowledge of nature was concerned.
And the boys soon learned that Teddy could manage splendidly.
Why, he might have been the death of some of them!"
"He may speak sooner or later," Frank told himself; "and if he does, it will not be the reward of a hundred dollars for information that will make him tell."
Bluff was not slow of comprehension.
To go back to that other drudgery would have been torture.
He had to be shown very little so as to suit their tastes; and none of them regretted in the least that they had extended a helping hand toward one in distress.
"That's what we did," asserted Will.
But I snapped him before he turned and trotted off!"
"I'll keep as mum as an oyster till you give me the tip that it's time to speak. Just as you say, Teddy couldn't have been the one to put the match to the camp over at Lumber Run.
"Of course, I'm only guessing all this, remember.
And Will is just wild over the bully pictures he's accumulating every day and night."
"The big coward!" muttered Bluff, clenching his fists and shaking his head, as though he would like nothing better than to get in a blow at the bully.
Another, and yet a third found the boys enjoying themselves to the limit.
"Speaking of angels, and you're most sure to hear their wings," chuckled Jerry; "for there's Will coming this way now."
He could get around fairly well by now, Jerry having cut him a walking-stick, with a crook at the end.
He saw what Frank's plan was, and while he may not have entirely agreed with such a course, there was no disposition to interfere.
"My opinion, as far as I have any, is about like this," Frank continued.
As soon as he was able to get around he insisted on taking charge of the cooking.
"Tried to burn down the camp at Lumber Run, did they?" burst out Jerry.
"Horns, Will?" Bluff fired at him; "cows have horns, deer carry antlers!"
Perhaps the boy had feared that Nackerson might come storming along, and insist on his returning to his duties as cook.
Frank did not tell all of his chums about what he had seen.
He was beginning to get over the nervousness that had shown itself for a whole day following his advent in the new camp.
A new life was opening up to Teddy.
"He looks excited, fellows.
"If we don't get another while we're up here in the Big Woods," said Jerry, suppressing the natural twinge of jealousy he felt, "we ought to be satisfied with our bag.
Still, he did not mention a word about what he might possibly know of the dastardly deed, when some one attempted to fire the logging camp. Frank often saw a worried expression come over the boy's face, and at such times he suspected that Teddy was puzzling his brain as to just what his duty might be.
I saw his head, though after a bit, when we had talked matters over, he went back to the fire again."
Evidently Teddy had heard enough.
"After Nackerson struck Teddy the boy happened to overhear him boasting about what he meant to do to the camp at Lumber Run."
"After all, I wouldn't put it past him, Frank."
"By the way, where is Will now?" asked Bluff,
We never know when we're well off, do we?
He had never before come in contact with such an agreeable lot of companions and every hour of the day he tried to prove himself grateful.
"He heard strangers talking outside when those two loggers came up," Frank continued, "and even dragged himself to the door to listen.
"He's the only party around that we know of who would be mean enough to try to set buildings on fire, just to get even with a man he disliked," he observed.
He feared the brutal sportsman more than ever, now that he had found such a fine harbor of refuge with the outdoor chums.
Frank had an idea they would be visited by a big snowfall before twenty-four hours had passed.
"Sure he would, because Old Joe, as he called the fur farmer, had pulled up stakes and gone to town for some weeks," Bluff admitted.
"Well, wouldn't that jar you?" remarked Bluff, as he heard what was contained in the brief communication from the lumberman.
Will was almost out of breath.
"Oh!
On the second day, about noon, some of the boys were busy near the cabin, laying in an extra supply of firewood.
At the same time it gave him food for much serious thought.
"It does seem as though he had met with nothing but success, so far," Frank admitted.
"We had a specimen of his nasty temper, you know," continued Bluff. "Yes, twice now we've heard him tear around like a bull in a china shop."
"And on the run, too!" added Frank.
"Huh! that's a queer thing to say," remonstrated Bluff.
"Of course that's only a hazard, fellows," he told Bluff and Jerry, who were helping him add to the handy heap close to the door of the cabin, "but there does seem to be a feeling of dampness in the air, for all it's so cold; and the sun, you notice, shines through a sort of hazy curtain."
"Oh! no, it isn't so bad as that," he was assured.
"That's what they were, sticking away up over his head that was like a mule's.
I'd like to know how you figure that out, Frank."
"We've got off pretty fortunately so far about storms," Bluff went on, as he threw another armful of fuel on the already huge pile.
He did not like to betray his kinsman, and yet felt that it was not right to refrain from taking someone into his confidence.
"Why, who else would try to turn on Mr. Darrel that way, and burn his shanties down just when winter is setting in?" asked Bluff.
"We can only give a guess at that," Frank told him.
"Oh! now I tumble to what you mean," cried Will, who did not often use any sort of slang, and must therefore have been unusually excited to fall into the habit.
That was a lucky shot you made yesterday, Bluff. The buckshot shell did the business, too, for after you fired both barrels the buck went down with a crash."
When Nackerson had gone away, perhaps with one of his pals who agreed to stand back of him, that's the time Teddy lit out."
"If he had missed connections with that trap Teddy would have reached the skunk farm only to meet with disappointment."
I think myself it would be a fine woods picture, and add to his collection."
"What's that?" demanded Frank, wondering what was coming now.
"See here, Frank, you don't think Teddy could have set that fire, I hope?" demanded Bluff, uneasily.
I wonder what he's run across now?"
"He struck it pretty hard at first, getting caught in that trap," Frank mused; "but when you come right down to facts I guess it was just as well that it happened to him."
So that day passed.
"Well, if you asked me my opinion, I'd have to admit that I didn't like the looks of a few of those lumberjacks."
"It's Bill--Bill Nackerson!"
Perhaps he had suspected that the others brought news of some startling character.
"You know best how to work it, Frank," he said simply.
"You've got it about straight, Bluff," Frank admitted.
"Oh! what a whopper!" he gasped, as he drew near the spot where they stood.
Frank noticed that the head had disappeared from alongside the open door.
"What for?
None of us Adders do.
"Reach your tail with your head?" asked the Water-Adder in her sweetest voice.
They said that he was cruel, and that he had a bad habit of using his stout sucking tube to sting with.
After that, I shall fly away on my wedding trip.
We would rather be stupid and polite."
The Mud Turtle was tired of having the children sprawl around him, and of Mrs. Mud Turtle telling about the trouble she had to get the right kind of food.
She could swim very fast, could creep, glide, catch hold of things with her tail, hang herself from the branch of a tree, lift her head far into the air, leap, dart, bound, and dive. All her family could do these things, but she could do them a little the best.
"Oh, nothing," replied the Water-Adder, swinging her head back and forth and looking at the scales on her body.
"Ouch!
The Snapping Turtle felt cross to-day, and had come to see if a talk with her would not make him feel better.
"What did you say?" asked the Adder who, like all her family, was a little deaf.
Why, mine hatch as soon as the eggs are laid, and go hunting at once.
Her slender forked tongue was darting in and out of her open mouth.
She was using her tongue in this way most of the time.
The Minnows said they could not bear the looks of the Adders--they had such ugly mouths and such quick motions.
Ouch!"
"Nothing is easier." And she wound herself around the willow branch in another graceful position, and took the tip of her tail daintily between her teeth.
They are no trouble at all."
"What a rude person she is!" they said.
They were good-natured enough, yet the Mud Turtles and Snapping Turtle were the only ones who ever called upon them and found them at home.
"Always trying to show how much more clever she is than other people.
The Water-Adder saw that he was provoked by what she had said, so she talked about something else.
Still, Belostoma did not care; he said, "A Giant Water-Bug does not always live in the water.
"Ouch!" exclaimed the Snapping Turtle.
"It isn't," said the Adder decidedly.
The Yellow Brown Frog wished that the Adders could be scared, badly scared, some time: so scared that a chilly feeling would run down their backs from their heads clear to the tips of their tails.
"They certainly are," agreed the Snapping Turtle, who was beginning to feel much better natured.
The Snapping Turtle was left to himself a great deal until the day when he and Belostoma drove away the boys.
One day she was hanging over the pond in a very graceful position, with her tail twisted carelessly around a willow branch.
And I shall flutter and sprawl around the light, and sting people who bother me, and have a happy time." That was Belostoma's way.
"I never close my eyes.
"I never worry about mine," said the Mud Turtle, "although their mother thinks it is not safe for them all to sleep at once, as they do on a log in the sunshine."
Belostoma did not have many friends among the smaller people, and only a few among the larger ones.
To fly with?
Nobody can ever say that we close our eyes to danger." They couldn't shut their eyes if they wanted to, because they had no eyelids, but she did not speak of that.
Mrs. Belostoma may go with me, if she feels like doing so after laying her eggs here.
"It must be dreadfully hot for the shore people," she said.
"What is the matter?" asked the Mud Turtle.
"How they must wish for shells!"
The Mud Turtle smiled. "I have heard," she went on, "that when young Ducks dive head first, they are quite sure to come up again, but that when they dive feet first, they never come up."
With the Water-Adders it was different.
One might think that the Sand-Hill Cranes, the Fish Hawks, and the other shore families would have been good friends for them, but when they called, the Adders were always away.
Let them come in swimming with their children, if they are warm and tired."
"I think the Ducks spoil their children," said she.
I shall go anyway.
"I wish," said he, "that the chilly feeling would be big enough to go way through to their bellies.
Their bellies are only the front side of their backs, anyway," he added, "because they are so thin." Of course this was a dreadful wish to make, but people said that one of the Adders had frightened the Yellow Brown Frog so that he never got over it, and this was the reason he felt so.
"Most of them," remarked the Turtles.
"I know what you mean," said the Snapping Turtle, "and you know what you mean, but I have to eat something, and if I am swimming under the water and a Duckling paddles along just above me and sticks his foot into my mouth, I am likely to swallow him before I think."
The Clever Water-Adder spoke first of the weather.
"How stupid people are," she said.
The Water-Adder laughed in her snaky way, and showed her sharp teeth.
And perhaps that was so.
The small people without shells were afraid of them, and the Clams and Pond Snails never called upon any one.
"They make such a fuss over them, and they are not nearly so bright as my children.
"All of them," she said, "except us Adders and the Turtles.
I even think that some of the Turtles are a little queer, don't you?"
After a while the Snapping Turtle said, "But then, you know, we are not stupid."
"It is useful in feeling of things," she said, "and then, I have always thought it quite becoming." She could see herself reflected in the still water below her, and she noticed how prettily the dark brown of her back shaded into the white of her belly.
After that his neighbors began to understand him better and he was less grumpy, so that those who wore shells were soon quite fond of him.
"I have heard," she said, "that when the Wild Ducks bring their children here to swim, they do not always take so many home as they brought."
THE CLEVER WATER-ADDER
The larger fishes kept away on account of their children, who were small and tender.
"We have thought so," said the Mud Turtle.
The Snapping Turtle and a Mud Turtle Father were in the shallow water below her.
Then they swam away, pushing themselves quickly through the water with swift strokes of their hairy oar-legs.
People said that the Adders were afraid of them.
When he first came to his home by the elm tree he was very thin, and looked as though he had been sick.
"When I was a little fellow," he said, "I was strong and well, and could leap farther than any other Frog of my size.
There I rested until sunset, and then began my evening song. While I was singing, one of the people from the house came out and found me.
They even made some of them help do their work.
"I did have when I was a Tadpole," said the Tree Frog.
Every time that I went up or down, those dreadful creatures would put their faces up close to my prison, and I could hear a roaring sound which meant they were talking and laughing.
"Oh, how happy we were then!
"I had a beautiful, wiggly little tail with which to swim through the waters of the pond; but as my legs grew larger and stronger, my tail grew littler and weaker, until there wasn't any tail left.
I remember the day when my hind legs began to grow, and how the other Tadpoles crowded around me in the water and swam close to me to feel the two little bunches that were to be legs.
"It makes my skin dry to think of it now.
In the pleasant weather, of course, I went to the top of the ladder, and when it was going to rain I would go down again.
The Katydids who stayed near said that he croaked in his sleep, and that, you know, is not what well and happy Frogs should do.
The largest creatures had four legs, and some of them had horns. The smaller creatures had only two legs on which to walk, and two other limbs of some sort with which they lifted and carried things.
In less than two years he was upset by a conspiracy which placed on the throne Artemius Anastasius, his own chief secretary.
They enlisted in their scheme Tiberius Apsimarus, who commanded the imperial fleet in the Aegean, and proclaimed him emperor when he joined them with his galleys.
After inducing the Saracens, more by craft than force, to raise the siege of Amorium, Leo disowned his allegiance to the incapable Theodosius and marched toward the Bosphorus.
The emperor learnt of the plot through his wife, and saved himself by the bold expedient of going at once to one of the two Khazar chiefs and asking for a secret interview.
He held the throne barely three years, amid constant revolts at home and defeats abroad.
Then he set to work to hunt out meaner victims: many prominent citizens of Constantinople were sown up in sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus.
"The affairs both of the realm and the city were neglected and decaying, civil education was disappearing, and military discipline dissolved." The Bulgarian and Saracen commenced once more to ravage the frontier provinces, and every year their ravages penetrated further inland.
The troops of Leontius betrayed the gates of the capital to the followers of the rebel admiral, and Apsimarus seized Constantinople.
Ere he had reached his twenty-first year Justinian had plunged into war with the Bulgarians.
Stephanus thrashed and stoned every one who fell into his hands; he is reported to have actually administered a whipping to the empress-dowager during the absence of her son, and Justinian did not punish him when he returned.
After this strange exhibition the two ex-emperors were beheaded.
Soldiers were picked out by the dozen and beheaded.
The two subsequent campaigns were equally unsuccessful, and the troops of the Caliph harried Cappadocia far and wide.
The chief men were caught and sent to the capital, where Justinian had them bound to spits and roasted.
The people and army were out of hand, the ephemeral emperor could count on no loyalty, and any shock was sufficient to upset his precarious throne.
While the emperor's financial expedients were making him hated by the moneyed classes, he was rendering himself no less unpopular in the army.
The unfortunate emperor, who had not coveted the throne he occupied, nor much desired to retain it, allowed his army to risk one engagement with the troops of Leo.
But they were soon to find out that they had erred in submitting to the exile, and should have resisted him at all hazards. Justinian came back in a relentless mood, bent on nothing but revenging his mutilated nose and his ten years of exile.
A mob joined him, he seized the Cathedral of St. Sophia, and then marched on the palace.
One of his companions cried to Justinian to make his peace with God, and pardon his enemies ere he died.
THE FIRST ANARCHY.
He attacked them suddenly, inflicted several defeats on their king, and took no less than thirty thousand prisoners, whom he sent over to Asia, and forced to enlist in the army of Armenia.
Justinian refused to receive them, and declared war.
Justinian's wars depleted his treasury; yet he persisted in plunging into expensive schemes of building at the same time, and was driven to collect money by the most reckless extortion.
As he parted from his friends he exclaimed that his days were numbered, and that he should be expecting the order for his execution to arrive at any moment.
After his ill-success in the Saracen war, he began to execute or imprison his officers, and to decimate his beaten troops: to be employed by him in high command was almost as dangerous as it was to be appointed a general-in-chief during the dictatorship of Robespierre.
To replace Justinian by Philippicus was only to substitute King Log for King Stork.
Their execution began a reign of terror, for Justinian had his oath to keep, and was set on wreaking vengeance on every one who had been concerned in his deposition.
Accordingly the nose of Leontius was slit, and he was placed in confinement in a monastery.
But the Emperor's stern soul was not bent by the tempest.
The boat weathered the storm, and Justinian survived to carry out his cruel oath.
The six years which followed were purely anarchical.
In a few years he had made himself so much detested that it might be said that he had been comparatively popular in the days of his first reign.
This gave him time to escape, and he fled in a fishing boat out into the Euxine with a few friends and servants who had followed him into exile. While they were out at sea a storm arose, and the boat began to fill.
It required a hero to restore the machinery of government and evolve order out of chaos.
Both were violent and cruel: Theodotus is said to have hung recalcitrant tax-payers up by ropes above smoky fires till they were nearly stifled.
More merciful than any of his ephemeral predecessors, Theodosius III. dismissed Anastasius unharmed, after compelling him to take holy orders.
The new emperor was a mere man of pleasure, and spent his time in personal enjoyment, letting affairs of state slide on as best they might.
With this prince the exile so ingratiated himself that he received in marriage his sister, who was baptized and christened Theodora.
His second venture in the field was disastrous: his unwilling recruits from Bulgaria deserted to the enemy, when he met the Saracens at Sebastopolis in Cilicia, and the Roman army was routed with great slaughter.
Constantine IV., known as Pogonatus, "the Bearded," reigned for seventeen years, of which more than half were spent in one long struggle with the Saracens.
Most of its population were massacred.
The Romans drove the enemy back to the very gates of their camp, but a last charge, headed by the fierce warrior Khaled, broke their firm array when a victory seemed almost assured.
"Theme" meant both the corps and the district which it defended, and the corps-commander was also the provincial governor.
He could do nothing; Emesa and Heliopolis were sacked before his eyes, and after an inglorious campaign he hurried to Jerusalem, took the "True Cross" from its sanctuary, where he had replaced it in triumph five years before, and retired to Constantinople.
The Persian replied with the threat that he would put the Prophet in chains when he had leisure.
Dangerous revolts broke out in Greece and Italy, and were not put down without much fighting.
The Empress Irene was clever, domineering, and popular.
The Iconoclastic controversy had prepared the way for it, while the fact that a woman sat on the imperial throne served as a good excuse for the Pope's action.
Constantine was neither precocious nor unfilial, but in his twenty-second year he rebelled against his mother's dictation, and took his place at the helm of the state.
We are told that he compelled many of their inmates to marry by force of threats; others were exiled to Cyprus by the hundred; not a few were flogged and imprisoned, and a certain number of prominent men were put to death.
At this time Pope Stephen, when attacked by the same enemy, sent for aid to Pipin the Frank, instead of calling on the Emperor, and for the future the papacy was for all practical purposes dependent on the Franks and not on the empire.
But it was not till 800 that the final breach took place.
XV.
Irene had actually striven to oppose him by armed force, but he pardoned her, and after secluding her for a short time, restored her to her former dignity.
Where Leo had chastised the adherents of superstition with whips Constantine chastised them with scorpions.
Then came the attempt to make myself heard across the wide river by the people of the fort.
One day we encountered a newly fallen tree, cocked up on its own upturned roots, four feet from the ground.
To make matters worse, his hobbles had become loosened, giving him free use of all his feet, and he was in no mood to take the trail again. Coaxing was of no avail, driving would do no good.
Dusk came on, and still no signs.
I must have been two hours hallooing at the top of my voice, until I was hoarse from the violent effort.
The cool of the evening invigorated the pony, and we pushed on.
No more immigrants were met until I reached the main-traveled route beyond the Columbia River.
When we came to consider how the party should proceed, I advised the over-mountain trip.
Father said some one must go and look after them.
As the sun rose, the heat became intolerable.
Taking an opportunity to seize his tail, I followed him around about over the plain and through the sage brush at a rapid gait; finally he slackened pace and I again became master.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
But I could not wait there for them.
Finding that the road could be followed, though but dimly seen, I kept on the trail until a late hour, when I unsaddled and hobbled the pony.
Tethering my pony for his much-needed dinner, I opened my sack of hard bread to count the contents; my store was half gone.
I have often thought that some one ought to write a just tribute to their valor and patience, a book of their heroic deeds.
"I want to; but what about my wife and the two babies, at the island?"
He came across the river and gave me glad tidings.
We made the trip across the divide in twenty-two days without serious mishap or loss.
As to this return trip, I can truly say for myself that it was not one of hardship.
"About three weeks."
The start for the high, arid table-lands bordering the Yakima valley cut me loose from all communication.
The man was Shirley Ensign, of Olympia, who had established a ferry across the Columbia River and had lingered to set over belated immigrants, if any should come along.
The row of sweet peas that my wife had planted near the cabin helped to put heart into those travel-weary pioneers; where flowers could be planted, a home could be made.
FINDING MY PEOPLE
So Oliver was sent ahead, while I was to take his place and help the immigrants through the Natchess Pass.
Their behavior was so in contrast to that of the Indians on the Sound that I could not help wondering what it meant.
The spirits of the tired party rose as they looked upon this scene, indicating a contentment and prosperity in which they might participate if they so desired.
"You came to stay with us, didn't you?"
Then an intolerable thirst seized upon me and compelled me to leave the road and descend into the valley for water.
Hundreds of cattle, sheep, and horses were quietly grazing, scattered over the landscape as far as one could see.
It required a great effort to creep out of the blanket, and an even greater effort to free the blanket from the accumulated sand.
By this time the wind had gone down and comparative calm prevailed.
I enjoyed overcoming the difficulties, and so did the greater number of the company.
I inquired for my mother the first thing.
Preparations must be made without delay for shelter from the coming storms of winter; the stock must be cared for, and other beginnings made for a new life of independence.
The next incident that I remember vividly was my attempt to cross the Columbia, just below the mouth of the Snake River.
I tethered my pony this time, and rolled myself up in the blanket, only to find myself fairly buried in the drifting sand in the morning.
ON leaving my newly found friends I faced a discouraging prospect.
Great was the feasting, with clam bakes, huckleberry pies and puddings, venison for meat, and fresh vegetables from our garden, at which the newcomers could not cease from marveling.
Go around it we could not; to cut it out with our dulled, flimsy saw seemed an endless task.
When the trail was found, there was the saddle to look for, and this was located with some difficulty.
But I cautioned them to expect some snow and much hard work.
"Let her alone, and see what she's up to," said Oliver, noticing that I was disturbed at such interference with my well-laid plans for bread-baking.
So our first night's camp was scarcely twelve miles from where we had started in the morning.
But a feeling of deep disappointment fell upon us when we could see in the foreground only bare, dismal mud flats, and beyond these a channel scarcely twice as wide as that of the great river we had left, bounded on either side by high, heavily timbered land.
An encampment of Indians being near, a party of them soon visited our camp and began making signs for trade.
Before retiring for the night, we repaid the visit.
After considerable dickering, with signs and gestures and words many times repeated, we were able to impart the information that we wanted a lesson in cookery.
We wished ourselves back at our cabin on the Columbia.
We floated lazily with the tide, sometimes taking a few strokes with the oars, and at other times whistling for the wind.
We felt so happy that we were almost glad the journey had been interrupted.
"What does she say, Oliver?"
The little town of Olympia to the south became dimmed by distance.
The harvest was ready twice a day, when the tide was out, and we need have no fear of a famine even if cast away in some unfrequented place.
"Let the tide decide; that will carry us out toward the ocean."
The idea that there lived a person who did not know how to cook clams!
We made it out of light lumber, then easily obtained at Tumwater.
We had pushed on past some good locations on the Chehalis, and farther south, without locating.
Upon these the clams were deposited.
We had been in Indian country for nearly a year, but with guns by our side, if not in our hands, during nearly half the time.
Without understanding her words, but knowing well what she meant, we fell to disposing of this, our first clam dinner.
The natives soon withdrew to their own camp.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We had not stopped to study the Indian character.
When I came to know the Indians better and saw their performances in these frail craft, my admiration for the canoes was even greater than my distrust had been.
My first camp on Puget Sound was not cheerful.
Should we turn around and go back?
But what was the use of stopping here?
But we were no sooner fairly out of sight of the little village than the question came up which way to go.
OUR enjoyment of this first home did not last long.
What channel should we take?
"I'm blessed if I know, but it looks as if she wanted to sell some clams."
Our expectations had been raised high by the glowing accounts of Puget Sound.
We took a lesson in Chinook, and by signs and words held conversation until a late hour.
Without saying by your leave or anything else, the motherly looking native woman began tearing down our camp fire.
A beautiful pebbly beach extended almost to the water's edge even at low tide.
It had three stores, a hotel, a livery stable, a saloon, and one weekly newspaper.
Thus began and ended our first lesson in the Chinook jargon, and our first experience with a clam bake.
Oliver said no, and my better judgment also said no, though I was sorely pressed with a feeling of homesickness.
We wanted a place to make a farm, and we could not do it on such forbidding land as this.
This brought some merriment in the camp.
"No, we are drifting into another bay; that cannot be where we want to go."
We had made the Indians a present first, it is true; but we did not expect any return, except perhaps goodwill.
We soon learned that the bivalves were to be found in almost unlimited quantity and were widely distributed.
This first clam bake gave us great encouragement.
Here on the Columbia we should be away off to one side, out of touch with the people who would shortly become a great separate commonwealth.
We could not stay at Olympia.
"The best thing we can do is to camp," said Oliver.
At dinner it was announced that the famous Tarantella would be danced in the lower hall of the hotel at nine o'clock, and the girls told Uncle John that they must not miss this famous sight, which is one of the most unique in Sorrento, or indeed in all Italy.
He was glad that he had not suspected the young man unjustly.
Then he remarked that the eruption of Vesuvius was waning and the trouble nearly over for this time.
May I express a hope that you are pleased with my beautiful country?"
"I--I did not know," he said, hesitatingly.
But I have resided much in New York, and may well claim to be an adopted son of your great city."
He joined his nieces, who were all busily engaged in writing letters home, and remarked, casually:
"He--he seems very nice and gentlemanly," said Louise with hesitation.
Here is our record of nobility.
"It has even been thoughtless enough to adopt me."
Uncle John hardly knew what to say further.
"That I cannot tell you, Signor Merrick."
Presently Louise turned with cheeks somewhat flushed and brought the gentleman to her party, introducing him to Uncle John and her cousins as Count Ferralti, whom she had once met in New York while he was on a visit to America.
"Are you sure, Uncle John?"
"Whom, sir?"
When an imposture is unmasked it is no longer dangerous.
The Tarantella originated in Ischia, but Sorrento and Capri have the best dancers.
The dancers entered at that moment and the Americans were forced to seat themselves hastily so as not to obstruct the view of others.
"Oh. Perhaps you know little about the nobility of your country."
I know little of the nobility!" answered Floriano, indignantly.
"Are you Italian?" asked Uncle John, regarding the young man critically.
"New York adopts a good many," said Uncle John, drily.
In their rooms that night Patsy told Beth that the young foreigner was "too highfalutin' to suit her," and Beth replied that his manners were so like those of their Cousin Louise that the two ought to get along nicely together.
"I'm told it's a proper place to buy silk stockings and inlaid wood-work.
"I wonder why he has tried to deceive us."
Either fortunately or unfortunately--I cannot say--you have no need of such a book in America."
Of course we won't encourage this young man in any way.
Uncle John took the card and read:
"Quite sure, my dear.
"It delights me to meet Mr. Merrick and the young ladies.
He put on his glasses and looked again.
He was a nice looking young fellow, Beth thought, and had a foreign and quite distinguished air.
Uncle John walked away.
"Oh, well, my dear," he said to her, "you must act as you see fit.
CHAPTER IX
A count, did you say?"
The Count twirled his small and slender moustaches in a way that Patsy thought affected, and said in excellent English:
The young man greeted him with a smile and a bow.
Uncle John whistled softly and walked away to the window.
"Allow me to offer you my card."
Afterward Uncle John and his nieces stood upon the terrace and watched the volcano rolling its dense clouds, mingled with sparks of red-hot scoria, toward the sky.
He turned the pages and ran his finger down the line of "Fs."
"You've been deceived in your Italian friend, Louise.
The girl paused, examining the point of her pen thoughtfully.
They come assorted, I suppose."
"And that is right, sir," was the prompt reply.
"Yes," replied Uncle John.
It was almost their first glimpse of foreign manners and customs.
The proprietor reached for a book that lay above his desk.
Floriano, the proprietor, who knows every aristocrat in Italy, has never before heard of him."
The other girls exchanged glances, but made no remark.
I do not imagine we shall see much of this young man, in any event, and now that you are well aware of the fact that he is sailing under false colors, you will know how to handle him better than I can advise you."
It will be better to avoid him."
"I thought you were Count Ferralti."
"Ferralti--Count Ferralti.
He is neither a count nor of noble family, although I suppose when you met him in New York he had an object in posing as a titled aristocrat."
"I!
That gave him an excuse to talk with the man, who spoke very good English and was exceedingly courteous to his guests--especially when they were American.
I've just been through the list of Italian counts, and his name is not there.
"Find me, if you can, a Count Ferralti in the list."
A goodly audience had already assembled in the room, and among them the girl seemed to recognize an acquaintance, for after a brief hesitation she advanced and placed her hand in that of a gentleman who had risen on her entrance and hastened toward her.
Let me see," he turned to his list of guests, who register by card and not in a book, and continued: "Ah, yes; he has given his name as Ferralti, but added no title.
As they entered the pretty, circular hall devoted to the dance Louise gave a start of surprise.
"The gentleman arrived last evening, and I had not yet learned his name.
Moreover, Louise being in love with that young Weldon her mother so strongly objected to, she would not be likely to care much for this Italian fellow, and Mrs. Merrick had enjoined him to keep her daughter's mind from dwelling on her "entanglement."
He felt he was in an awkward position, for Louise was the most experienced in worldly ways of his three nieces and he had no desire to pose as a stern guardian or to deprive his girls of any passing pleasure they might enjoy.
"I misunderstood your name last evening," he said.
"Surely, Mr. Merrick.
"Yet you say you don't know the Ferralti family."
He carefully placed the card in his pocket-book.
"Well then, girls, what do you say to a stroll around the village?" asked their uncle.
The dances were unique and graceful, being executed by a troup of laughing peasants dressed in native costume, who seemed very proud of their accomplishment and anxious to please the throng of tourists present.
"Oh, the world is full of impostors; but when you are on to their game they are quite harmless.
Beth and Patsy jumped up with alacrity, but Louise pleaded that she had several more letters to write; so the others left her and passed the rest of the forenoon in rummaging among the quaint shops of Sorrento, staring at the statue of Tasso, and enjoying the street scenes so vividly opposed to those of America.
Uncle John liked his nieces to make friends, and encouraged young men generally to meet them; but there was something in the appearance of this callow Italian nobleman that stamped his character as artificial and insincere.
It is the same as the 'Blue Book' or the 'Peerage' of England.
He resolved to find out something about his antecedents before he permitted the young fellow to establish friendly relations with his girls.
The name of Ferralti was no place in the record.
The Count clung to Louise's side, but also tried to make himself agreeable to her cousins.
Guilty and baffled antagonists
He poured bitter and biting ridicule on his discomfited opponents
His mood was one of pure exaltation
Fastidious correctness of form
Full of ardent affection and gratitude
High and undiscouraged hope
"So far as I am concerned I should like to break the engagement, Julius. We were never suited to one another."
Julius took it from him.
"Bernard is the owner of Gore Hall and of all the property, and of the title also.
This boy is a grandson of Lord Conniston's housekeeper, Mrs. Moon."
"In which case you would give him up to the police."
"From what I read in the papers it is just as well Mr. Gore did not live," said Payne, rising to take his leave.
"Perhaps you would like me to go," sneered Julius.
"Lord! what a bore stopping with her will be.
"Don't talk like that, child.
"What else could I do?
Luckily Alice was out of the way, having gone to pay a visit.
"Let us keep to the matter in hand.
All she knew was that her engagement to Julius, which had always weighed on her conscience, was at an end.
As this was the first time he had been called to the Hall, he was naturally very pleased, and was very attentive.
"But he talks too much."
"The lesser portion.
"I might help him to escape.
"No. Bernard and I are like brother and sister.
It was Sir Simon's wish that we should marry, and, owing to my circumstances, I had no choice in the matter.
It was only a freak on his part.
"They will find it difficult to prove that," sneered Beryl, with a white face.
No man could have lived in the cold and the fog.
"But Lucy--"
"A complete rest is what you need," he said to Miss Randolph.
"I lived with grandmother.
"Why did you accept me then?"
"Why do you think Bernard is innocent?" he asked.
"I don't want to see him.
But I am hoping against hope," said Lucy, rising.
"Jerry, you are a young scamp of the worst."
She will tell Durham and that interfering Conniston and put them on their guard.
If it hadn't been for Victoria--the girl I told you about--I should have left long before.
I'm going to marry her."
"I am very fond of her, and we get on very well together.
His lordship was so angry that he got me turned off, saying I was ungrateful."
She is most respectable."
"Yes.
"I have met him once.
But I have just come in.
"We don't know that Bernard is alive.
Julius looked at the ring which she had thrown at his feet, and laughed. "You take a high tone," he said sneeringly.
Beryl's vanity was hurt.
"Mr. Beryl--such a kind gentleman, ma'am--said you would help me."
"The kind gentleman got them for me, ma'am."
I heard he enlisted in the Lancers."
"That's Lord Conniston's place," said Miss Berengaria, more perplexed than ever.
"Lucy, if you talk to me like that--" began Beryl, and then restrained himself with an effort.
"Mr. Durham told me so."
"Is Alice--Miss Malleson also well?"
"Now leave the house, Mr. Beryl.
He was a messenger boy at a tobacconist called Taberley, and Lord Conniston got him turned out of the situation."
"I am not afraid of Durham.
He will tell you if you like to see him."
Miss Berengaria was as usual in the garden looking after the well-being of some white chrysanthemums.
"It is just as well he did die, though."
"Probably, but she bears up wonderfully.
I will put Mr. Durham on his guard, and"--here she blushed--"and Lord Conniston."
"Nor you either.
"Because, if he is guilty, his action gives the lie to his whole life, Julius," she replied, raising herself on her elbow.
"It is no use our quarrelling.
Dr. Payne, I hope I see you well."
"Yes, sweet lady."
"Don't forget me."
So far as he saw, Miss Malleson was remarkably cheerful under her sorrow.
"Why?
Let me show you that I am not so careless of others or so hard-hearted as I seem to be. Miss Plantagenet wants a page.
He has shown his hand too plainly.
During his life I was merely a puppet.
Shall I ask Miss Malleson to come over."
She saw that she had gone too far and had given Durham an inkling as to the possibility of Michael having masqueraded as Bernard. The housekeeper had thought her position unassailable, knowing that she had married Walter Gore; and although there was a flaw in the circumstances upon which she built her claim, yet she trusted to her own cleverness to conceal this from the too-clever lawyer.
"I lived with grandmother at Cove Castle."
"If he was guilty.
The boy told me himself.
Who is he, Mr. Beryl?"
"To seek after Bernard," said Julius, slowly, "and I believe Bernard may be alive after all."
"And you have refused to share my fortune with me."
The boy chuckled as though he had received a compliment.
Julius picked up the ring and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket calmly.
"I love fowls," said Jerry sweetly, and looking as innocent as a babe, "and dogs and things like that."
I never saw a more attached couple.
It pays."
Lucy had a high temper, which had been kept in subjection during the life of Sir Simon. But now that she tasted the sweets of power she was not disposed to allow Julius to treat her as he chose.
Jerry thrust his tongue in his cheek, but Julius answered, "I can vouch for his honesty," he said.
He left the army at my request."
"In very good health, and appears resigned to her loss."
He came forward.
Did you ever meet him?"
With his clear skin, his fair hair and wide blue eyes he looked like the conventional picture of a cherub.
"He is innocent."
But he is dead, so you need not cast stones at his memory."
"At your request?" said Julius, looking at her directly.
"On the contrary, I speak for his good.
I wish Bernard had lived, so that he could have married her."
It was his custom in the daytime to walk about, carrying a drawn cutlass, resting easily upon his arm, edge up, very much as a fine gentleman carries his high silk hat, and any one who should impertinently stare or endeavor to quell his high spirits in any other way, would probably have felt the edge of that cutlass descending rapidly through his physical organism.
Under the brutality, the cruelty, the dishonesty, and the recklessness of the sea-robbers of those days, there was nearly always meanness and cowardice.
When the pirate captain and his companions were brought before the Governor, he made no pretence of putting them to trial.
This story, however, I regard with a great deal of doubt; it has been told of Saladin and many other wicked and famous men, but I do not believe it is an easy thing to frighten a child into going to sleep.
There is nothing horrible that has ever been written or told about the buccaneer life, which could not have been told about Roc, the Brazilian.
Roc, as we have said in the beginning of this sketch, was a typical pirate; under certain circumstances he showed himself to have all those brave and savage qualities which Esquemeling esteemed and revered, and under other circumstances he showed those other qualities which Esquemeling despised, but which are necessary to make up the true character of a pirate.
The Story of Roc, the Brazilian
He was a typical pirate.
Buccaneers were outlawed by the Spanish, and were considered as wild beasts to be killed without mercy wherever caught.
But this downfall of a hero simply shows that Esquemeling, although he was a member of the piratical body, and was proud to consider himself a buccaneer, did not understand the true nature of a pirate.
I lunged against him--I was almost as surprised as he.
I stammered, "If ... if she dies ... will you flash us word?"
"Come on!" shouted Snap.
Send a flash for Balch!"
The scream was stilled, but now we heard a commotion inside--the rasp of opening cabin doors; questions from frightened passengers.
Then he cursed and dropped me; fled away.
I fell like a sack of carbide to the deck.
"I'm all right." I told them what had happened.
But I'll kill him, I tell you!"
Come in." He admitted the older officer and slammed the door upon me again. And immediately reopened it.
"Died!..." I leaped to my feet.
Dr. Frank went back into the room and banged the cabin door upon Snap and me.
"Was it from in there?
They're doing all they can." He told us what had happened.
Tell Blackstone what's happened."
The door was not sealed.
But she did not see who did it.
From within, Carter was shouting, "Keep them out!
Carter cut in on us from the chart room.
I entered cautiously, switched on the dimmer of the tube lights, and searched the room.
"Wasn't it sealed?"
Carter dashed up.
Tell them everything's all right. Miss Prince got frightened--that's all.
I fell helpless to the deck.
Alert.
It struck me blank.
Miko ran with me a few steps.
"In her stateroom, A22!"
It had only a bunk, my tiny desk, a chair and clothes robe.
Carter was grim and white.
"So it's you!"
But it had done its work--awakened me.
"Yes."
Not yet.
She might die ... murdered....
Weapon in hand, Snap forced the panic-stricken passengers back to their rooms.
I only want to talk."
Both were closed.
The Captain was almost incoherent.
I don't mean that! Tell Snap to watch his radio room.
"Burst it?
The empty deck chairs stood about.
We want order here--keep back!"
Carter came into the chart room.
Crouched at the door.
"But I don't know what's happened."
You look like a ghost."
Snap, help me keep the crowd away." He shoved me forcibly.
He shoved us aside.
Upon impulse I reached for the door, jerked it open.
Where are you, Frank?
Someone was tampering with my door!
The Captain said gently.
"I'll be there presently, Gregg."
I ordered my breakfast and let the argument go on.
She was dressed in Earth-fashion--white blouse and dark jacket, wide, knee-length trousers of gray, with a red sash her only touch of color.
I had slept heavily.
It was good news.
"Does he know anything about this Grantline affair?"
There were still three seats vacant at our table; I wondered who would occupy them.
"She's on the deck, having orange juice.
"By Jove!
Go to bed, Gregg, you need rest."
Explain it to them, Gregg.
I answered her greeting, and met George Prince's casual gaze.
I soon learned the answer--for one seat at least.
At the Captain's table I saw the objects of my search: George Prince and his sister, one on each side of the Captain.
THE STRANGER AT THE DOOR
Tell me, are you a--a relative?" This confused Joyce anew.
And I felt sure that he would see things differently when he was older.
The fact is," the stranger went on, "I was passing here and noticed this outer door open, which seemed a little queer.
"An unhappy family!" was his only comment, and he continued his tour around the room.
They could see that she was much moved, and had evidently been crying.
"That is--no, the house is empty, except just--just to-day!"
"Then you must have known young Mr. Fairfax very well," suggested Joyce. "That's he, on the right in the picture." The stranger eyed her curiously.
If I had--" Just at this point, they were all startled by a loud knock, coming from the direction of the front door.
"I wished to send him to a Southern college, but he begged me to send him to Harvard.
I have always possessed the most violent temper a mortal had to struggle with.
"Collingwoods!" he supplemented, with his twinkling smile.
"I think I did.
At last, however, she came to them, and sat down once more between them on the sofa.
A man--a complete stranger to her--stood outside.
"Did you often come here?" inquired Joyce.
CHAPTER XV
It seemed to be untenanted." At his mention of knowing the family, Joyce looked him over with considerably more interest.
"There is one of the family here to-day on--on business," she said, at last.
So I centered all my hopes on my son--on Fairfax.
"That's it, then.
I was a Southerner, but my husband came from the North, and brought me up North here to live.
Her eyes were wide and staring, her features almost gray in color.
Joyce was, for a moment, tongue-tied with perplexity.
Might I, perhaps, if it would not be intruding, come in just a moment to look once more at the old place?
She did not speak to them at once, but went and stood by the mantel, looking up long and earnestly at the portrait of the twins.
My little girl died before she was three; and I had scarcely become reconciled to this grief when my husband was also taken from me.
I always hated it--this Northern life--and, though I loved my husband dearly, I hated his devotion to it.
"Arthur-- Arthur Calthorpe!" he faltered.
"But perhaps you can inform me--is any one living in this house at present?"
"You must be very well acquainted with the house!"
Some one has seen it open, and has stopped to inquire if everything is all right." She hurried away to the front door, and, after an effort, succeeded in pulling it open.
Mrs. Collingwood remained a long time up-stairs,--so long, indeed, that the girls began to be rather uneasy, fearing that she had fainted, or perhaps was ill, or overcome--they knew not what.
In front of the old, square, open piano he paused again, and fingered the silk scarf that had, at some long ago date, been thrown carelessly upon it.
His iron-gray hair was crisply curly, and his dark eyes twinkled out from under bushy gray brows.
"Perhaps she needs help."
They drew toward each other unconsciously, as though moving in a dream.
He was tall, straight and robust, though rather verging on the elderly.
"Do you think we ought to go up?" asked Cynthia, anxiously.
"My babies!" they heard her murmur unconsciously, aloud.
At the first glance, however, he started back slightly, as with a shock of surprise.
The two girls, who had been watching this scene with amazement unutterable, saw the strange pair gaze, for one long moment, into each other's eyes.
Then came the crisis in the country's affairs, and the Confederacy was declared.
But we must not be inhospitable.
"If you will give me your name, I will ask if--that person would like to see you."
That is," he added hastily, seeing her hesitate, "only if it would be entirely convenient!
And in those earlier years, when I got into a rage, it blinded me to everything else, to every other earthly consideration.
That afternoon, shortly after he arrived, we had our interview.
I was almost like an inmate." He began to wander slowly about the room, examining the pictures.
I was married when I was a very young girl--only seventeen.
"I guess I'd better go," said Joyce.
At length they heard her coming slowly down, and presently she reentered the drawing-room.
They wondered nervously what she was going to say.
"These candles--everything--everything just the same as though it were yesterday!"
I planned that when they were both old enough, they should marry in the South and live there--and my husband and I with them.
"Oh! did you know the family, the--the--"
As his heart was so set on it, I couldn't deny him, thinking that even this would make little difference in the end.
Perhaps people are--are about to purchase it."
I came often.
"No, I think she just wants to be by herself.
He came several times, knocked at my door, and begged me to see him, but I would not. Heaven forgive me!-- I would not!
He accepted the invitation gratefully, and entered with her.
"If you care to look around the drawing-room, you will be most welcome," she announced politely.
The stranger gazed at her with a fixed look.
"I do not remember any one named Calthorpe, and I scarcely feel that I can see a stranger now.
"There never was a sweetheart like this mother fair of mine!--"
I really don't believe I'd have thought of it."
"Oh! er--I see!
"There are some things, however, that perhaps you do not know, and, after what you have done for me, you deserve to.
"But, in this life, things seldom turn out as we plan.
"Yes, I knew them--quite intimately.
I used to know the people who lived here--very well indeed--and I have been wondering whether the house was still in their possession.
She hated to refuse the simple wish of this pleasant stranger, yet how was she to comply with it, considering the presence of Mrs. Collingwood, and the almost unexplainable position of herself and Cynthia?
For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.
Such was Catherine Morland at ten.
by
From Pope, she learnt to censure those who
"Catherine grows quite a good-looking girl--she is almost pretty today," were words which caught her ears now and then; and how welcome were the sounds!
This is a LibriVox recording.
That
From Thompson, that--
THIS little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication.
This was strange indeed!
John Thorpe had first misled him.
Catherine took up her work directly, saying, in a dejected voice, that "her head did not run upon Bath--much."
I did not quite like, at breakfast, to hear you talk so much about the French bread at Northanger."
He was not ill-inclined to obey this request, for, though his heart was greatly relieved by such unlooked-for mildness, it was not just at that moment in his power to say anything to the purpose.
CHAPTER 30
"I am sure I do not care about the bread.
The detective turned his back while the fair man got in and pushed off into the loch.
It is humiliating to relate that he recoiled before it when it was placed in his hand, and nearly fled again into the road.
The young lady was still in sight, making her way up the steep pitch of the main street, and the detective followed her discreetly, loitering before shop windows, as if fascinated by the display of Scottish homespuns, or samples of Royal Stewart tartan, and taking an extraordinary interest in fishing-tackle and trout-flies.
He went first to the post office, where he registered and posted to Scotland Yard a packet he had brought with him.
As the few passengers who were waiting for her crossed the short gangway, a shower burst over the loch and in a few minutes had driven every one into the little cabin, except the two or three men who constituted the officers and crew of the steamer.
Gimblet conducted the men to the cottage, where Lady Ruth anxiously awaited them.
She ought to know better than to go to lunch alone with a young man, and I am just wondering if she has changed her mind and accepted him after all.
It was nearly three o'clock when they landed on the Inverashiel pier.
I really am feeling anxious about her."
A friend, he explained, had promised to meet him in that place; and though the shopwoman plainly doubted his veracity, and kept a sharp eye that he did not take to his heels with the cairngorm, she did not go so far as to suggest his removing himself from the zone of temptation.
Then, after asking his way of the sociable landlord of the hotel, he proceeded to the police station, a single-storied stone building standing at the end of a side street.
Waited for accordingly he was; and in a few minutes Gimblet, rather out of breath after his run, hurried on board, and with a word of apology and thanks to the obliging skipper turned, like the other passengers, towards the shelter of the cabin.
He was a tall, fair man, evidently a foreigner, but with nothing very striking about his appearance.
From this position--not without its embarrassments, since a couple of barefooted children came instantly to the door, where they stood and stared at him unblinkingly--he saw the Russian advancing at a rapid pace across the moor; and, look where he would, could perceive no means of keeping up with her unobserved upon the bare side of the hill.
The landlord was sorry, but the house was full.
CHAPTER XVI
I must tell him to write in good time next year if he wants a room."
"Dear me," said Gimblet, "just what my friend wants.
"By all means," said Lady Ruth.
For ten long minutes they stood talking, driving poor Gimblet to the desperate expedient of entering the shop and demanding a closer acquaintance with the cairngorm.
I expect you will find Miss Byrne up there.
Here he made himself known to the inspector, and imparted information which made that personage open his eyes considerably wider than was his custom.
"I suppose you get a lot of tourists passing through, though, Americans, for instance?"
"If you will bring one of your men, and come with me yourself," said Gimblet, at the conclusion of the interview, "I think I shall be able to convince you that a mistake has been made.
"If you don't mind their staying here," he suggested to her, "while I go up to the castle and consult Lord Ashiel about a magistrate, it will be most convenient, on account of the distance."
"I feel safer with them.
There was no great difficulty about it.
I'm sorry you can't take him in.
At last, when for the twentieth time he put his nose round the doorpost, he saw that the pair had separated, and were walking in opposite directions, the girl continuing on her way, while the man returned to the town.
Just as he decided that the distance separating them had increased to an extent which warranted his continuing the chase, he joyfully saw her slacken her pace, and at the same moment a man, who must have been sitting behind a boulder beside the road, rose to his feet out of the heather, and came forward to meet her.
However, he pulled himself together and held the proud proprietress, a gaunt, grey-haired woman with knitting-needles ever clicking in her dexterous hands, in conversation upon the theme of its unique beauties until the subject was exhausted to the point of collapse.
Girls are kittle cattle, but I've got quite fond of that one, and I hope she's not forgotten poor David so soon.
To him, now, Gimblet devoted his powers of shadowing.
"Indeed, I can well believe that," Gimblet assured him.
One of these was in the act of slackening the rope by which the boat had been warped alongside, when a running, gesticulating figure appeared in the distance, shouting to them to wait for him.
"And there's troots tac.
Gimblet had not been able to see his face before, but now he had a good look as he passed close beside him.
"I daresay she has only walked farther than she intended," said Gimblet, "or perhaps she came to a burn or some place she couldn't get over, and has had to go round a mile or two.
He kept, however, a strict eye on the door of the hotel, and after a quarter of an hour saw the object of his attentions emerge with fishing-rod and basket, and cross the road directly towards him.
But, though the girl looked back more than once, the little man in the ulster who was so intent on picking his way between the puddles did not apparently provide her with any food for suspicion; and she made no attempt to see who was so carefully sheltered beneath the umbrella he carried.
By the time he issued forth into the open air, his pockets full of packages, the stranger had passed the shop and was turning the corner of the next house.
She has not come in to lunch, and I think she probably met Mark and went to lunch at the castle.
"A present?"
Sir Arthur did not like it.
It is much better that they should learn to manage their own affairs; and Juliet is not such a ninny as you seem to think."
"I shall be perfectly all right by myself," Juliet protested.
"No; at least I suppose not; but there may be one inside."
I know the firm of Findlay & Ince quite well by name and reputation."
As a matter of fact she was a good deal excited now; for what the child said was true enough.
"Oh well, I don't know.
"Guess!"
Why not?"
"No, no; I see no reason to suppose such a thing.
Well, well."
I've got a lot of work on hand just now.
"I tell you, Sadness," he said impulsively, "dancing is the poetry of motion."
Her eyes prayed to his.
He broke into a laugh, a dry, murderous laugh, and his hands sought each other while the fingers twitched over one another like coiling serpents.
Oh, don't look at me like that."
She sprang up in bed, glaring angrily at him.
Skaggs smoked in silence and looked at Joe.
"Yes, he does, a drunken man tells the truth."
It made him think of Maudie.
They drank, and then, as if the whiskey had done him good, Joe sat up in his chair.
He stopped to help himself to a glass of brandy, as he had so often done before.
He always came in alone now, for Maudie had gone the way of all the half-world, and reached depths to which Mr. Skaggs's job prevented him from following her.
He was so ready to go down that it needed but a gentle push to start him, and once started, there was nothing within him to hold him back from the depths. For his will was as flabby as his conscience, and his pride, which stands to some men for conscience, had no definite aim or direction.
This was not Joe.
Her eyes blazed back at him, but she sang on insolently, tauntingly.
If he did n't steal it, who did?"
She shrank back from him, back to the wall.
His helplessness, instead of inspiring her with pity, inflamed her with an unfeeling anger that burst forth in a volume of taunts.
The gown had fallen away from her breast and showed the convulsive fluttering of her heart.
When he finally awoke, he started up as if some determination had come to him in his sleep.
He took another step towards her.
Hattie Sterling had given him both his greatest impulse for evil and for good.
He went forth at once to celebrate his victory.
"Been lushin' a bit, eh?"
You might have known it would have happened sooner or later. Better sooner than never."
For a while he stood still, brooding silently, his red eyes blinking at the light.
He sighed and turned away.
"Yes," replied Sadness, "and dancing in rag-time is the dialect poetry."
For the first time he looked up, and his eyes were full of tears--tears both of grief and intoxication.
Well, don't handle it carelessly; it might go off." And Sadness rose.
Drunk half the time and half drunk the rest.
Then, all of a sudden, he went down again, and went down badly.
It was only for a few months.
Finally he took a turn for the better that endured so long that Hattie Sterling again gave him her faith.
Five years had not changed the latter as to wealth or position or inclination, and he was still a frequent visitor at the Banner.
He held her.
But his were the fire of hell.
His step was steady and his tone was clear, menacingly clear.
He did not return to her for three days.
Then he became a hanger-on at the clubs, a genteel loafer.
It savoured of flippancy, and he was about entering upon a discussion to prove that Sadness had no soul, when Joe, with blood-shot eyes and dishevelled clothes, staggered in and reeled towards them.
Sadness and Skaggsy were together at the club that night.
There he lay for more than two hours.
He did not work, and yet he lived and ate and was proud of his degradation.
XIV
They held her.
He moved a step nearer her.
"Joe, Joe!" she said hoarsely, "what 's the matter?
It had taken barely five years to accomplish an entire metamorphosis of their characters.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "did you hear that?
Great story, ain't it? Come, come, wake up here.
He groaned and his head sunk lower.
He never stole that money.
She looked at him in silent contempt for a while as he sat nursing his aching head.
Well, you know what I told you the last time you got 'loaded'?
She started to rise, but he took a step towards her and she paused.
He had not uttered a word.
"Lucky dog!
For an instant she lost their steady glare and then she found her voice.
"Oh, you have?
There was an expression of a whipped dog on his face.
"Drunk again," said Sadness.
A part of the helplessness of his intoxication had gone, but his first act was to call for more whiskey.
"I would n't if I were you.
She tried to scream and she could not.
"Father?
"Yes, and I 'm going to do it again.
"You put me out to-night," he said.
In Joe's case even a shorter time was needed.
After some demur she received him upon his former footing.
Five years is but a short time in the life of a man, and yet many things may happen therein.
However, he mourned truly for his lost companion, and to-night he was in a particularly pensive mood.
His face was ashen and his eyes like fire and blood.
She kept her promise and threw him over.
She warmed to him.
Skaggsy looked at them regretfully as he sipped his liquor.
The unusual name of a freshman up at WESTMINSTER attracted my attention; I read what he had to say; and it was only by reciting rapidly with closed eyes the names of our own famous alumni, beginning confidently with Barrie and ending, now very doubtfully, with myself, that I was able to preserve my equanimity.
For we were so domestic, he so terrifyingly cosmopolitan.
What is Saki's manner, what his magic talisman?
There are dearly loved books of which we babble to a neighbour at dinner, insisting that she shall share our delight in them; and there are books, equally dear to us, of which we say nothing, fearing lest the praise of others should cheapen the glory of our discovery.
It may have been so; but, fortunately, our efforts to be funny in the Saki manner have not survived to prove it.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
Still more satisfying, in the story of the man who was tattooed "from collar-bone to waist-line with a glowing representation of the Fall of Icarus," is the word "privilege":
A strange exotic creature, this Saki, to us many others who were trying to do it too.
He has been my favourite author for years!"
In both of them Clovis exercises, needlessly, his titular right of entry, but he can be removed without damage, leaving Saki at his best and most characteristic, save that he shows here, in addition to his own shining qualities, a compactness and a finish which he did not always achieve.
The books of "Saki" were, for me at least, in the second class.
I do not think that he has that "mastery of the CONTE"--in this book at least--which some have claimed for him. Such mastery infers a passion for tidiness which was not in the boyish Saki's equipment.
While we were being funny, as planned, with collar-studs and hot-water bottles, he was being much funnier with werwolves and tigers.
Nor in his dialogue, delightful as it often is, funny as it nearly always is, is he the supreme master; too much does it become monologue judiciously fed, one character giving and the other taking.
Well, I discovered him, but only to the few, the favoured, did I speak of him.
But in comment, in reference, in description, in every development of his story, he has a choice of words, a "way of putting things" which is as inevitably his own vintage as, once tasted, it becomes the private vintage of the connoisseur.
In our envy we may have wondered sometimes if it were not much easier to be funny with tigers than with collar-studs; if Saki's careless cruelty, that strange boyish insensitiveness of his, did not give him an unfair start in the pursuit of laughter.
The secret of our favourite restaurant, to take a case, is guarded jealously from all but a few intimates; the secret, to take a contrary case, of our infallible remedy for seasickness is thrust upon every traveller we meet, even if he be no more than a casual acquaintance about to cross the Serpentine. So with our books.
It was in the WESTMINSTER GAZETTE that I discovered him (I like to remember now) almost as soon as he was discoverable.
It may have been my uncertainty (which still persists) whether he called himself Sayki, Sahki or Sakki which made me thus ungenerous of his name, or it may have been the feeling that the others were not worthy of him; but how refreshing it was when some intellectually blown-up stranger said "Do you ever read Saki?" to reply, with the same pronunciation and even greater condescension: "Saki!
JAMES', I was not too proud to take some slight but pitying interest in men of other colleges.
"Locate" is the pleasant word here.
Let us take a sample or two of "Saki, 1911."
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Like every artist worth consideration, he had no recipe.
Dear Grandpapa, for Heaven's sake, take me away from here, home to our village, I can't bear this any more...
I send greetings to Aliona, to one-eyed Tegor, and the coachman, and don't let any one have my mouth-organ.
Ah, short-tailed devil!"
And there was one hook which would catch a sheat-fish weighing a pound.
Before, however, deciding to make the first letter, he looked furtively at the door and at the window, glanced several times at the sombre ikon, on either side of which stretched shelves full of lasts, and heaved a heart-rending sigh.
I bow to the ground to you, and will pray to God for ever and ever, take me from here or I shall die..."
When little Vanka's mother, Pelagueya, was still alive, and was servant-woman in the house, Olga Ignatyevna used to stuff him with sugar-candy, and, having nothing to do, taught him to read, write, count up to one hundred, and even to dance the quadrille.
As for tea or sour-cabbage soup, the master and the mistress themselves guzzle that. They make me sleep in the vestibule, and when their brat cries, I don't sleep at all, but have to rock the cradle.
He thought a little, dipped the pen into the ink, and wrote the address:
His grandfather could not help shouting:
Nine-year-old Vanka Zhukov, who had been apprentice to the shoemaker Aliakhin for three months, did not go to bed the night before Christmas.
Vanka folded his sheet of paper in four, and put it into an envelope purchased the night before for a kopek.
The young lady, Olga Ignatyevna, Vanka's great friend, busied herself most about it.
"Dear Grandfather Konstantin Makarych," he wrote, "I am writing you a letter.
All day he slept in the servants' kitchen or trifled with the cooks.
"Won't we take some snuff?" he asks, holding out his snuff-box to the women.
VANKA
Food there is none; in the morning it's bread, at dinner gruel, and in the evening bread again.
"Off with it, it will freeze to your nose!"
The shopman at the poulterer's, from whom he had inquired the night before, had told him that letters were to be put into post-boxes, and from there they were conveyed over the whole earth in mail troikas by drunken post-boys and to the sound of bells.
He waited till the master and mistress and the assistants had gone out to an early church-service, to procure from his employer's cupboard a small phial of ink and a penholder with a rusty nib; then, spreading a crumpled sheet of paper in front of him, he began to write.
Vanka sighed convulsively, and again stared at the window.
The women take a pinch of snuff, and sneeze.
When Pelagueya died, they placed the orphan Vanka in the kitchen with his grandfather, and from the kitchen he was sent to Moscow to Aliakhin, the shoemaker.
The frost crackled, his grandfather crackled, and as they both did, Vanka did the same.
He remembered that his grandfather always went to the forest for the Christmas tree, and took his grandson with him.
An hour afterwards, lulled by hope, he was sleeping soundly.
Have pity on a poor orphan, for here they beat me, and I am frightfully hungry, and so sad that I can't tell you, I cry all the time.
I have no mamma or papa, you are all I have."
Vanka sighs, dips his pen in the ink, and continues to write:
More than once they had nearly broken his hind-legs, twice he had been hung up, every week he was nearly flogged to death, but he always recovered.
Beneath his deference and humbleness was hid the most inquisitorial maliciousness.
The young fir trees, wrapt in hoar-frost, stood motionless, waiting for which of them would die. Suddenly a hare springing from somewhere would dart over the snowdrift...
Dear Grandpapa, I can't bear this any more, it'll kill me...
When the tree was down, his grandfather dragged it to the master's house, and there they set about decorating it.
And in the meat-shops there are woodcocks, partridges, and hares, but who shot them or where they come from, the shopman won't say.
What happy times!
"Catch it, catch it, catch it!
Ask the young lady, Olga Ignatyevna, for it, say it's for Vanka."
Vanka ran to the first post-box and slipped his precious letter into the slit.
"Dear Grandpapa, and when the masters give a Christmas tree, take a golden walnut and hide it in my green box.
No one knew better than he how to sneak up and take a bite at a leg, or slip into the larder or steal a muzhik's chicken.
The assistants tease me, send me to the tavern for vodka, make me steal the master's cucumbers, and the master beats me with whatever is handy.
My life is a misfortune, worse than any dog's...
Kashtanka sneezes, twitches her nose, and walks away offended.
The old man goes into indescribable ecstasies, breaks into loud laughter, and cries:
The cords of the rackets are made of the guts of sheep or goats.
The globe terrestrial is the tennis-ball.
The suborners of men are the makers of matches, which are commonly friends.
And so, farewell!
After playing, when the game is done, they refresh themselves before a clear fire, and change their shirts; and very willingly they make all good cheer, but most merrily those that have gained.
It is the style of the prophet Merlin.
A prophetical Riddle.
No sooner was this enigmatical monument read over, but Gargantua, fetching a very deep sigh, said unto those that stood by, It is not now only, I perceive, that people called to the faith of the gospel, and convinced with the certainty of evangelical truths, are persecuted.
The monk then said, What do you think in your conscience is meant and signified by this riddle?
The waters are the heats that the players take till they sweat again.
"Why, I warrant you can see every hair on his head.
"That's going to be a prize picture, all right!"
"From the prints made by its big split hoofs, I'm pretty sure of that," Frank asserted; "I'm beginning to believe Will was not so far out of the way, after all, when he said it might be the giant of all Maine moose!"
Well, so-long, boys, and we all wish you success."
But you're away off in your guess.
"We take it all back," Jerry vowed.
The three soon reached the cabin.
Look for us when we come.
He started toward the cabin door as though anxious to develop his roll of film and discover what success his labor had resulted in.
Will was too busy working at his developing tank to sit down with the rest.
"After this, we'll own up that you know a bull moose from a mule or a buck deer every time."
"The sooner the better, so as to keep his lead cut down as much as we can," he was told by Bluff, after which they both turned toward Frank, for, after all, it would be from this quarter that the signal to start must eventually come.
"Give me five minutes more to get this film in fresh water and then I'll come."
It was a remarkable pose, if only the focus was right."
Those last words from Frank made Will very proud.
Frank, however, understood what a blizzard meant up there in Maine.
THE BIG MOOSE
"Well, chances are it was a bull moose," Frank admitted; "but we'll soon know."
"No need of rushing off as though you were crazy," Frank told them. "Will says the moose didn't act as though it was badly frightened by seeing him, so it isn't likely it will cover a great many miles before stopping again.
"Oh, I looked up to see what had made that queer sound, and there he was, just standing and looking straight at me!
"I'm done eating," announced Bluff.
"Did he run away then?" asked Frank.
You must stop long enough to eat a lot, because there's no telling when you may get another square meal."
Bluff glanced quickly at Frank.
"You remember that I sprained my ankle yesterday, and a long walk would lay me up.
We're not the 'Babes in the Woods,' you know.
And don't I hope that first picture turns out good!
"How did it happen, Will?" asked Frank.
I was nearly scared to death at first, for he looked nearly as big as a barn.
"Yes," said Jerry, "which would make it over there that the thing showed up.
Before half a minute had passed, Frank was pointing to certain marks plainly seen in the inch and more of snow that had fallen on the previous night, perhaps as a sort of forerunner of the coming storm.
"Why couldn't I have taken a notion to step out here with Will, to watch the way he took the pictures of that squirrel family?
If I do say it myself, we've had our eyeteeth cut for some time.
"Let's all take a look," he suggested.
"No need of that," came the reply, "because I'd be willing to start after that moose alone, and follow him for a week, if I thought I could get a fair crack at him in the end."
"I was sitting as still as anything," the other related, "after I'd got two dandy snaps at that funny squirrel family playing around the tree where they have their home, and was hoping for another whack at them to complete the set, when all at once I heard a whiffing sound."
As soon as the boys saw the splendid negative, in clear-cut lights and shadows, they burst into a chorus of cries.
Bluff even got down on hands and knees in order to see better.
We would feel pretty sorry if anything happened to mar our holiday up here."
Think how easy I could have dropped him, with such a short distance between.
Bluff and Jerry may have considered Frank a bit too old-womanish, making all that fuss over just going off on a little chase after a wandering moose.
"Plenty of time when I get through with this," he told them.
He also thrust several small boxes of safety matches into each of their coats, and made sure Bluff had his compass.
"I believe myself that I never got such splendid effects!" he exclaimed.
He had been in one or two himself, and would not care to repeat certain experiences that had come his way, unless well provided against hunger and bitter cold.
He did not feel that they could entirely depend on the evidence of Will, who may have been so startled by the sudden coming of some animal that his imagination worked overtime.
I've so longed to meet up with one when I had my camera with me that I've been picturing how he'd look.
If we don't show up by night, why, chances are we found ourselves so far away that we concluded to make camp."
"I hope it wasn't just a mule that strayed away from some lumber camp," he told the others, as they hurried off; but not before Bluff and Jerry had darted inside the cabin and reappeared, carrying their guns.
Lunch must be nearly ready.
Jerry clapped him on the shoulder.
They shook hands on the bargain, and so it was ratified.
"Yes, and here's where Will made himself a seat," added Bluff.
"Good luck, and I hope you get him!" said that individual, meaning every word, for he had already come to care a great deal for these jolly boys who had been the means of helping him over a very rough place in the road.
All stared hard at the monstrous tracks.
CHAPTER XVII
It won't weigh heavy; but if you do need it you'll thank me for it."
Bluff and Jerry were hurrying as fast as they could.
"I should hope so," grunted Jerry.
"And sure a whopper, just as you said!" added Bluff.
"That light snow falling last night was in our favor, for the tracks will show up well," suggested Jerry.
"He fixed it so he could sit comfortably, and not have to frighten the family of bushy-tails by moving.
Just look how I got him square in the middle of my plate!
"A bull moose, you say, Will?" echoed Bluff, his face lighting up with sudden energy.
"Well," said Will, stepping forward and holding up a dripping film, "take a peep at this, will you, and tell me if I know what I'm talking about or not!"
Then I knew it must be a bull moose; and the next thing I found myself taking his picture."
"We'd be pack horses if we tried to carry any more truck along."
There never was such a bully chance to get a big moose, and we want to do our level best.
"Wait just a minute or two, Will," he pleaded.
"Got everything now?" asked Bluff.
Bluff and Jerry shook hands gravely all around, even with Teddy.
I'll see to it that each of you has something to help make out a meal or so.
"I dare you!" he said.
It's better to be born lucky than rich, any day."
Bluff caught him by the arm.
"Tell us some more. Where did all this happen?"
Bluff got up again, shaking his head.
"I was just going to say the same myself," Jerry added, being evidently quite as much interested as Bluff.
It's cruel, that's what it is!"
"I know what you're thinking, Bluff, and that I wouldn't know a bull moose if I saw one.
"Frank, you can depend on us to be careful," Bluff told him earnestly. "But for goodness' sake don't worry about us.
"Turned and trotted off, as if he didn't care whether school kept or not," Will continued.
"I even had the nerve to shoot him again as he was going.
Frank had redeemed his promise to see that there was something put up in small shape that would help out for supper, in case they were delayed.
"Oh, we won't get lost!" he said loftily.
"It was a moose, all right, Frank!" said Jerry.
"Be sure to take along an extra supply of matches.
Let's take a look at the ground, and see if Will was dreaming or not."
"Couldn't cram another bite down, after seeing that picture!" Jerry proclaimed, as he darted over to the corner where his rifle stood, and began to buckle on the webbed belt filled with cartridges.
"There you are, fellows!" he announced.
And when they sought him for an explanation and for assistance, he had disappeared.
As the name of Florence Nightingale became world famous at the close of the Crimean War more than sixty years ago, the name of another English nurse who suffered martyrdom in the World War will go down into history with the lustre of glory and self-sacrifice surrounding it.
And soon spies began to come to the Governor with tales and fabrications of the crimes that she had been committing in their eyes. They bore witness that she had given an overcoat to a Frenchman who was cold and hungry--and the Frenchman later escaped over the Dutch frontier.
A blow was the only response when she tried to expostulate.
CHAPTER XXIX
But the main reason that the Germans hated her was because she was held in great affection by the people of Brussels.
She wrote a letter commenting on the German army when it swept through Belgium--and in it she voiced her pity for the tired, footsore German soldiers,--who were later to slay her.
He was not allowed to see the prisoner--and was not even allowed to look at the documents in the case until the trial began.
It was not fitting, they thought, that an enemy should be engaged in works of mercy, even though they themselves might benefit thereby.
Brussels became a part of the German Empire and a tyrannical governor came there to establish his headquarters, issuing proclamations threatening the Belgians with death for minor offenses, and filling Brussels with spies and intrigue.
He never informed them that the death sentence had been imposed.
Her regular duties were severe enough but she used a large part of her scanty leisure for such purposes as these.
She cared for the wounded German soldiers and nursed a number of German officers, as well as the Belgians who were in her care, but this made no difference to the authorities.
"My dear Baron:
When Mr. Whitlock learned that she had been tried and sentenced to death he did everything possible to secure her pardon, or at least a moderation of the punishment.
She was taken to prison and placed in solitary confinement.
He granted it, for the quiet English nurse made an impression upon him.
When her death became known, the entire civilized world was shocked and horrified.
It was only from a private source that Mr. de Leval learned that the trial was under way, and that the death sentence had been given.
Once she gave a glass of water to a Belgian soldier.
He never came to see them afterward.
He went at once to the German authorities, but they evaded his questions and waited ten days before giving him a reply.
All these promises were broken.
But they had planned to try her for her life, and Mr. Whitlock soon guessed this, in spite of the fact that the Germans kept their preparations from him so far as possible.
In England this murder did more to stimulate recruiting than anything else up to that time.
"BRAND WHITLOCK."
Death, she said, was well known to her, and she had seen it so often that it was not strange or fearful to her.
She studied at the London Hospital--a place, we are told, where the hardest and most difficult conditions prevailed, and where the nurses were worked to the limit of their strength.
But word of her plight did reach England through a traveler, and at once the British Government requested the American Ambassador, Dr. Page, to get what information he could from Brand Whitlock, the American Minister in Belgium.
Her father had died by this time, but her mother was close to her heart and she saw her as often as she could.
"I may be looked on as an old maid," she is reported as saying, "but with my work and my mother I am a very happy one, and desire nothing more as long as I have these two."
In 1906 Edith Cavell left the English hospitals, where she had made a reputation for herself, and went back to Brussels, where she took a position as matron in a Medical and Surgical Home.
All day long lines of men waited to sign the papers of enlistment, and in Miss Cavell's home town every eligible man was sworn into the army.
After the execution they refused to return the body.
She wore an English flag over her bosom. Only Germans were witnesses of the execution, but the German chaplain who attended said that she died like a heroine.
She told him that she was not in the least afraid of death and willingly gave her life for her country.
Her father was an English minister of the old school who was rector of a single parish in Norwich for more than half a century.
Edith and her sister were brought up in strict conformance with church ideas and were taught the value of leading useful lives and the glory of self-sacrifice.
She then returned to her home and remained there until, when twenty-one years old and resolved to give her life to some useful and benevolent occupation, she decided to become a trained nurse and went to London to study that calling.
She was dressed in her nurse's uniform and wore the badge of the Red Cross.
She was popular everywhere in the Belgian capital, and although Protestant, she gained the praise of the Roman Catholic priests for the generous and unselfish work that she performed.
If what they said were true, there was still no cause for killing the unfortunate woman in their power, for she was not accused at any time of having been a spy.
This was the German statement.
As was customary at the time when she was a young girl she received her education on the continent, attending school in the city of Brussels in Belgium.
An American lawyer, Mr. de Leval, was requested by Mr. Whitlock to take Miss Cavell's case and do whatever was possible in her behalf.
"I am too ill to present my request to you in person, but I appeal to your generosity of heart to support it and save this unfortunate woman from death.
All through the day the American Legation sent message after message to the German authorities asking for information.
We are told that the arrogant German formed a high opinion of her--so much so that he secretly determined to keep her under the strictest supervision!
Have pity on her.
Von Bissing to mitigate the sentence, and at eleven in the evening he was told that Von Bissing refused to do anything to save Miss Cavell's life.
She had given money to poor people, perhaps to soldiers.
From that time on spies dogged her tracks.
Her arrest was shrouded with the most careful secrecy, for the Germans did not want to have the representatives of neutral governments, such as the United States, know of the affair or of what they proposed to do.
They were determined to detect her in some crime and punish her.
Her words resembled those of Florence Nightingale that have been quoted elsewhere in this book.
I should try it if I were you.
She did not pick them up.
"It's impossible," he said, "it's no good.
"Speaking professionally, I think you are wrong.
He accepted it, with his arms round her and his lips against the face where the tears now ran warm and salt.
Ten minutes later, the stabbed man was reeling from the Onlooker's consulting room.
"Yes."
"Looks like as if he was going to a wedding," said his landlady.
Her eyes had blue marks under them, her chin had grown more pointed, her nose sharper.
There was a new line on her forehead, and her eyes had changed.
Yer hairt's as sound's a roach. T'other man must ha' been asleep when ye consulted him.
Why don't you try a complete change?"
What did he die of?" For the answer was "Heart," and in it the devil rose and showed the Onlooker the really only true and artistic way to develop the action in this situation, so dramatic in its possibilities.
"I--I don't remember," lied the Onlooker, with the eyes of his memory on the white face of the man he had stabbed.
He was coming down now.
He met her. And it was as though he had met the ghost of her whom he had loved.
That roused the Lover, as it was meant to do.
He turned away, and went back along the green path with hell in his heart.
On the other hand, Apollyon may be waiting for one round the corner of the next street.
Does she know I love her?
And that was just as long as he had loved her.
"It's a complicated nuisance," the father mused; "it isn't even as if I knew anything of the chap.
"I don't know.
For she loved him, had loved him these two years, had loved him since the day of their first meeting.
"He asked me to marry him three weeks ago.
To himself he was saying: "The situation is dramatically good; but I don't see how to develop the action.
I must set my teeth and bear it.
I tell you, man, you're sound's a bell, and a fine fathom of a young man ye are, too.
He caught at it as a drowning man catches at a white gleam in the black of the surging sea about him--it may be a painted spar, it may be empty foam.
Useless distinction!
"Without the ties of property it never would have been possible to subordinate men to the wholesome yoke of the law; and without permanent property the earth would have remained a vast forest.
"Property became the legitimate end of his ambition, the hope of his existence, the shelter of his family; in a word, the corner-stone of the domestic dwelling, of communities, and of the political State."
It has literally CREATED a right outside of its own province.
Are fathers unnatural, and children prodigal?
But what is there in common between these rude outlines of instinctive organization and the true social science?
His old opinions cannot be taken for articles of faith.
But I hear the exclamations of the partisans of another system: "Labor, labor! that is the basis of property!"
The German Ancillon replies thus:--
"All public order,--"
"It is a boon as precious as liberty."
Pothier seems to think that property, like royalty, exists by divine right.
But, nevertheless, the principle remained the same: equality had sanctioned possession; equality sanctioned property.
Vain pretext!
Property is eternal, like every negation,--
To sum up and conclude:--
"The right of property is the most important of human institutions."...
Under the regime of property, labor is not a condition, but a privilege.
This new basis of property is worse than the first, and I shall soon have to ask your pardon for having demonstrated things clearer, and refuted pretensions more unjust, than any which we have yet considered.
For the rich proprietor.
Now, property is no exception to this rule: then the universal recognition of the right of property does not legitimate the right of property.
What a profound disgust fills my soul while discussing such simple truths!
For the human race he has created the earth and all its creatures, and has given it a control over them subordinate only to his own.
But why need I go farther?
A famished stomach knows no morality,--
'This definition is not exact.
"Whereas, since labor so changes the form of a thing that the form and substance cannot be separated without destroying the thing itself, either society must be disinherited, or the laborer must lose the fruit of his labor; and
The field which I have cleared, which I cultivate, on which I have built my house, which supports myself, my family, and my livestock, I can possess: 1st.
Why, then, has society recognized a right injurious to itself, where there is no producing cause?
Let me call the attention of the writers on jurisprudence to their own maxims.
Not only does occupation lead to equality, it PREVENTS property.
What principle directed it?
Corner-stone of all which is, stumbling-block of all which ought to be,--such is property.
As long as man is opposed to man, property offsets property, and the two forces balance each other; as soon as man is isolated, that is, opposed to the society which he himself represents, jurisprudence is at fault: Themis has lost one scale of her balance.
This no code has ever expressed; this no constitution can admit!
Finally, that, inasmuch as possession, in right, can never remain fixed, it is impossible, in fact, that it can ever become property.
Every occupant is, then, necessarily a possessor or usufructuary,--a function which excludes proprietorship.
A balance with false weights.
If the cultivator ceased to be a tenant, would the land be worse cared for?
Men lived in a state of communism; whether positive or negative it matters little.
Now, this is the right of the usufructuary: he is responsible for the thing entrusted to him; he must use it in conformity with general utility, with a view to its preservation and development; he has no power to transform it, to diminish it, or to change its nature; he cannot so divide the usufruct that another shall perform the labor while he receives the product.
It has sanctioned selfishness; it has indorsed monstrous pretensions; it has received with favor impious vows, as if it were able to fill up a bottomless pit, and to satiate hell!
But none of these titles confer upon me the right of property.
The history of property among the ancient nations is, then, simply a matter of research and curiosity.
The individual passes away, society is deathless.
After this magnificent introduction, who would refuse to believe the human race to be an immense family living in brotherly union, and under the protection of a venerable father?
They did not foresee....
Comte, who has devoted half a volume to its definition, was in the beginning only the EXPRESSION OF A WANT, and the indication of the means of supplying it; and up to this time it has been nothing else.
To satisfy the husbandman, it was sufficient to guarantee him possession of his crop; admit even that he should have been protected in his right of occupation of land, as long as he remained its cultivator.
For, if I attempt to base it upon occupancy, society can reply, "I am the original occupant." If I appeal to my labor, it will say, "It is only on that condition that you possess." If I speak of agreements, it will respond, "These agreements establish only your right of use." Such, however, are the only titles which proprietors advance.
Yes, of our civil State, as you have made it; a State which, at first, was despotism, then monarchy, then aristocracy, today democracy, and always tyranny.
So we are indebted to property for the creation of the civil State."
If the form could be separated from the object, perhaps there would be room for question; but as this is almost always impossible, the application of man's strength to the different parts of the visible world is the foundation of the right of property, the primary origin of riches."
'Tis all one, though!
Why do you cry?"
He was answered by a loving growl.
"Perhaps you expect me to lay the cloth," said the man, and he placed the porringer on the child's lap.
Then letting down the steps, he called Homo.
The man went to the chest.
I was to-night, by hunger.
How am I going to manage to fit three into this caravan?
He took down from a shelf, and tied round his waist, a linen belt with a large pocket containing, no doubt, a case of instruments and bottles of restoratives.
He replaced the pot on the stove, took the phial, uncorked it, poured into it all the milk that remained, which was just sufficient to fill it, replaced the sponge and the linen rag over it, and tied it round the neck of the bottle.
But no--it is long.
Ice is night.
He picked up and ate pensively a few crumbs caught in the folds of the knitted jacket on his lap.
"No."
Innocence is higher than virtue.
"On the breast of a woman who was dead in the snow."
"She mews relentlessly," said he.
Who are you? whence do you come?"
He spread out, still with one arm, the bear-skin on the chest, working his elbow and managing his movements so as not to disturb the sleep into which the infant was just sinking.
It was enough to drive one back: he advanced.
She is well off there.
It was evident that it was not he who cried. He had his mouth full.
The arched brow of Ursus knitted and took that pointed shape which characterizes emotion on the brow of a philosopher.
Have you the plague, you thief?
It had a roof--it was a dwelling.
For my own part, I did wrong not to denounce you to the constable.
He unrolled the jacket.
Eat away, hell-born boy!
The steps were replaced, the door was reclosed.
I open them and find beggars inside. Is this fair?
"Yes."
The boy turned towards him.
The child placed his burden carefully on the top of the chest, for fear of awakening and terrifying it.
"Well, if she cries, give her the rest of the milk."
The cold comes in by the window pane." A pane had indeed been broken in front, either by a jolt of the caravan or by a stone thrown by some mischievous boy.
In my time I have seen dukes eat.
In which direction?"
Hunger overcame astonishment.
The jaws retreated, the growling ceased.
Vagabonds are punished, honest folks who have houses are guarded and protected.
Isn't he a greedy scoundrel?
"I am cold."
You would have been whipped in the public street had you chanced to have been met, and quite right, too.
He passed over the three steps; and having reached the threshold, stopped.
"You cry, sycophant!
I made a fire.
My stove is no better than the sun.
Then he turned to the boy.
That fierce growl reassured him; that threat was a promise.
He watched the infant's renewal of life; the completion of the resurrection begun by himself filled his eyes with an ineffable brilliancy.
You are cold.
CHAPTER V.
Go to sleep."
"She is drunk," said Ursus; and he continued, "After this, preach sermons on temperance!"
In the meantime the infant whom he was holding all the time in his arms very tenderly whilst he was vituperating, shut its eyes languidly; a sign of repletion.
There must be order in an established city.
The mouth was silent.
From time to time a ray of morning or a glass of gin, and that is what we call happiness!
The child answered,--
The man kicked the stool forward and made the little boy sit down, again shoving him by the shoulders; then he pointed with his finger to the porringer which was smoking upon the stove.
The cry continued.
I have worked far into the night.
He took it and handed it to the boy.
O the ruffian! to come here in such a state!
He arose, and sustaining the infant with his left arm, with his right he raised the lid of the chest and drew from beneath it a bear-skin--the one he called, as will be remembered, his real skin.
I said to myself, 'Good.' I think I am going to eat, and bang!
Ursus examined the phial, and grumbled,--
"You little scamp!
Ursus turned towards him.
The man took from the shelf a crust of hard bread and an iron fork, and handed them to the child.
The blast entered there.
Tear and crunch!
The moment before, while he ate, the expression in his face was satisfaction; now it was gratitude.
Besides, to the partition were attached some boards on brackets and some hooks, from which hung a variety of things.
The child put on the shirt, and the man slipped the knitted jacket over it.
Come, you pig, stuff yourself!"
What a hurricane!
The little boy now and then lifted towards Ursus his eyes moist with the unspeakable emotion which the poor little being felt, but was unable to express.
I have played the flute to the hurricane.
Now it is over; I enter the nursery; I am going to have in my house the weaning of the future beggardom of England.
Ursus opened the window at the back and examined the view.
what's your name?
What useful trouble Bishop Tillotson gives himself, thundering against excessive drinking.
Then he laid her down on the fur, on the side next the fire.
You are here to eat, drink, and sleep--eat, or I will kick you out, both of you."
An infant's head appeared, the mouth open and crying.
Well, to-day I've made nothing.
Guzzle, wolf-cub; no, I withdraw that word.
His Majesty touched nothing.
He heard a sharp sound, as of a chain violently pulled to its full length, and suddenly, under the door, between the hind wheels, two rows of sharp white teeth appeared.
It was a dark lantern.
Then said Sir Gawain, surnamed the Golden-Tongued, because he was the most courteous knight in Arthur's court: "It is not fitting that any should disturb an honorable knight from his thought unadvisedly; for either he is pondering some damage that he has sustained, or he is thinking of the lady whom best he loves.
The father and two elder brothers of Perceval had fallen in battle or tournaments, and hence, as the last hope of his family, his mother retired with him into a solitary region, where he was brought up in total ignorance of arms and chivalry.
When it was time the tables were set, and they went to meat.
When he came again to his mother, the countess had recovered from her swoon.
"What is this?" demanded Perceval, touching the saddle.
Just then, behold, Perceval entered the hall upon the bony, piebald horse, with his uncouth trappings.
So he turned his horse's head toward the meadow.
Then he asked about all the accoutrements which he saw upon the men and the horses, and about the arms, and what they were for, and how they were used.
Now Arthur and his household were in search of Perceval, and by chance they came that way.
He said to his mother, "Mother, what are those yonder?" "They are angels, my son," said she.
"Ha, ha, lad!" said Perceval, "my mother's servants were not used to play with me in this wise; so thus will I play with thee." And he threw at him one of his sharp-pointed sticks, and it struck him in the eye, and came out at the back of his head, so that he fell down lifeless.
"By my faith, I will go and become an angel with them." And Perceval went to the road and met them.
If thou see a fair woman, pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love."
I have also a message from Arthur unto thee, to pray thee to come and visit him.
Sir Owain unfastened the armor, and helped Perceval to put it on, and taught him how to put his foot in the stirrup, and use the spur; for Perceval had never used stirrup nor spur, but rode without saddle, and urged on his horse with a stick.
So they went together to Arthur, and saluted him.
And he came to a lake on the side of which was a fair castle, and on the border of the lake he saw a hoary-headed man sitting upon a velvet cushion, and his attendants were fishing in the lake.
And Perceval rode forward.
"Gladly will I do so," answered Perceval.
And Perceval went to the place where they kept the horses that carried firewood and provisions for the castle, and he took a bony, piebald horse, which seemed to him the strongest of them.
And when all the company saw this they began to weep and lament.
After this discourse Perceval mounted the horse and taking a number of sharp-pointed sticks in his hand he rode forth.
He was allowed no weapon but "a lyttel Scots spere," which was the only thing of all "her lordes faire gere" that his mother carried to the wood with her.
For when her page was serving the queen with a golden goblet, this knight struck the arm of the page and dashed the wine in the queen's face and over her stomacher. Then he said, "If any have boldness to avenge this insult to Guenever, let him follow me to the meadow." So the knight took his horse and rode to the meadow, carrying away the golden goblet.
And as he did not tell him the meaning of what he saw, he forebore to ask him concerning it.
At length, however, Perceval was roused to a desire of military renown by seeing in the forest five knights who were in complete armor.
And when the youth returned to the king, and told how rudely he had been treated, Sir Kay said, "I will go myself." And when he greeted Perceval, and got no answer, he spoke to him rudely and angrily.
Then Perceval returned to his mother, and said to her, "Mother, those were not angels, but honorable knights." Then his mother swooned away.
And he rode far in the woody wilderness without food or drink.
He wore a white dress with a yellow bonnet, and carried a bell or bawble in his hand.
A fool was the ornament held in next estimation to a dwarf.
And when he came there, the knight was riding up and down, proud of his strength and valor and noble mien.
CHAPTER XVIII
Now this damsel came up to Perceval and told him, smiling, that if he lived he would be one of the bravest and best of knights.
PERCEVAL
"Truly," said Kay, "thou art ill taught to remain a year at Arthur's court, with choice of society, and smile on no one, and now before the face of Arthur and all his knights to call such a man as this the flower of knighthood;" and he gave her a box on the ear, that she fell senseless to the ground.
For it seemed to them that no one would have ventured on so daring an outrage unless he possessed such powers, through magic or charms, that none could be able to punish him.
And Perceval thrust at him with his lance, and cast him down so that he broke his arm and his shoulder-blade.
Perceval journeyed on till he arrived at Arthur's court.
At last he came to an opening in the wood where he saw a tent, and as he thought it might be a church he said his pater-noster to it.
And he went towards it; and the door of the tent was open.
If thou see a fair jewel, win it, for thus shalt thou acquire fame; yet freely give it to another, for thus thou shalt obtain praise.
But Perceval was so intent upon his thought that he gave him no answer.
And hereupon there came the queen and her handmaidens, and Perceval saluted them.
In the use of this he became so skilful, that he could kill with it not only the animals of the chase for the table, but even birds on the wing.
They attacked me, and I was annoyed thereat"
But for all that, the man did not break off his discourse with Perceval.
And two men have been before on this errand." "That is true," said Perceval; "and uncourteously they came.
And the king's fool [Footnote: A fool was a common appendage of the courts of those days when this romance was written.
"My son," said she, "desirest thou to ride forth?" "Yes, with thy leave," said he.
Then they that were best horsed chased him, and shot at him, but the child went from them all.
Then Sir Gawain said, "Surely it is unworthy of a knight to travel in such sort;" but Sir Launcelot heeded him not.
One, more insolent than the rest, had the audacity to interrupt him during dinner, and even to risk a battle in support of his pleasantry.
--Old Song.
So when the queen had mayed, and all were bedecked with herbs, mosses, and flowers in the best manner and freshest, right then came out of a wood Sir Maleagans with eightscore men well harnessed, and bade the queen and her knights yield them prisoners.
Wilt thou shame thyself?
So upon the morn they took their horses with the queen, and rode a-maying in woods and meadows, as it pleased them, in great joy and delight.
Then within a while he came to a wood where was a narrow way; and there the archers were laid in ambush.
It seems that the story of the abominable cart, which haunted Launcelot at every step, had reached the ears of Sir Kay, who had told it to the queen, as a proof that her knight must have been dishonored.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CART
The carter consented, and Sir Launcelot placed himself in the cart and only lamented that with much jolting he made but little progress.
But Guenever had full leisure to repent the haste with which she had given credit to the tale.
They learned from some travellers whom they met, that there were two roads which led to the castle of Sir Maleagans.
At night he was received at another castle, with great apparent hospitality, but found himself in the morning in a dungeon, and loaded with chains.
And when Sir Maleagans saw him so flee, he understood that it was by the queen's commandment for to warn Sir Launcelot.
Three days elapsed, during which Launcelot wandered without knowing where he went, till at last he began to reflect that his mistress had doubtless been deceived by misrepresentation, and that it was his duty to set her right.
At supper Sir Launcelot came near being consigned to the kitchen and was only admitted to the lady's table at the earnest solicitation of Sir Gawain.
Launcelot, after an easy victory, only doomed him to be carted in his turn.
Now at this time carts were little used except for carrying offal and for conveying criminals to execution.
Then it happened Sir Gawain passed by and seeing an armed knight travelling in that unusual way he drew near to see who it might be.
The next day the fairy brought him on his road, and before parting gave him a ring, which she told him would by its changes of color disclose to him all enchantments, and enable him to subdue them.
He seized the first he found unoccupied and was left undisturbed.
"Alas! for shame," said Sir Launcelot, "that ever one knight should betray another! but it is an old saw, a good man is never in danger, but when he is in danger of a coward." Then Sir Launcelot went awhile and he was exceedingly cumbered by his armor, his shield, and his spear, and all that belonged to him.
Now this knight, Sir Maleagans, learned the queen's purpose, and that she had no men of arms with her but the ten noble knights all arrayed in green for maying; so he prepared him twenty men of arms, and a hundred archers, to take captive the queen and her knights.
"In the merry month of May, In a morn at break of day, With a troop of damsels playing, The Queen, forsooth, went forth a-maying."
And they shot at him and smote his horse so that he fell.
But to admit his companion, whom she supposed to be a criminal, or at least a prisoner, it pleased her not; however, to oblige Sir Gawain, she consented.
Neither would the damsels prepare a bed for him.
Sir Gawain thought it might be so, and became equally eager to depart.
Then they lashed together with swords till several were smitten to the earth.
And by the way Sir Maleagans laid in ambush the best archers that he had to wait for Sir Launcelot.
Then Sir Launcelot told him how the queen had been carried off, and how, in hastening to her rescue, his horse had been disabled and he had been compelled to avail himself of the cart rather than give up his enterprise.
As evening approached he was met by a young and sportive damsel, who gayly proposed to him a supper at her castle.
Sir Launcelot pursued his journey, without being much incommoded except by the taunts of travellers, who all seemed to have learned, by some means, his disgraceful drive in the cart.
Launcelot was enfeebled by his wounds, and fought not with his usual spirit, and the contest for a time was doubtful; till Guenever exclaimed, "Ah, Launcelot! my knight, truly have I been told that thou art no longer worthy of me!" These words instantly revived the drooping knight; he resumed at once his usual superiority, and soon laid at his feet his haughty adversary.
Then Sir Launcelot left his horse and went on foot, but there lay so many ditches and hedges betwixt the archers and him that he might not meddle with them.
The knight, who was hungry and weary, accepted the offer, though with no very good grace.
Then by chance there came by him a cart that came thither to fetch wood.
Consulting his ring, and finding that this was an enchantment, he burst his chains, seized his armor in spite of the visionary monsters who attempted to defend it, broke open the gates of the tower, and continued his journey.
The lady of the castle supplied Sir Launcelot with a horse and they traversed the plain at full speed.
"For thus it chanced one morn when all the court, Green-suited, but with plumes that mock'd the May, Had been, their wont, a-maying"
He followed the lady to her castle and ate voraciously of her supper, but was quite impenetrable to all her amorous advances.
He was on the point of sacrificing him to his resentment, when Guenever, moved by the entreaties of Brademagus, ordered him to withhold the blow, and he obeyed.
At nightfall they arrived at a castle and the lady thereof came out at the head of her damsels to welcome Sir Gawain.
CHAPTER IX
But Sir Launcelot took no thought of anything but the necessity of haste for the purpose of rescuing the queen; so he demanded of the carter that he should take him in and convey him as speedily as possible for a liberal reward.
At length his progress was checked by a wide and rapid torrent, which could only be passed on a narrow bridge, on which a false step would prove his destruction.
The columbine looked charming in an outstanding skirt that strangely resembled the large lamp-shade in the drawing-room.
You were going to steal the stones quietly; news came by an accomplice that you were already suspected, and a capable police officer was coming to rout you up that very night.
"I only ask you to give me the assistance that any gentleman might give."
Nothing but a lot of snivelling fairy plays.
What I say is, let's do something for the company tonight.
When they ask for bread, and you don't even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves."
"A real policeman," said Father Brown, and ran away into the dark.
"She has lately," cried out old Fischer, "opened her father's house to a cut-throat Socialist, who says openly he would steal anything from a richer man.
"I won't have you talking like that," cried the girl, who was in a curious glow.
"A harlequinade's the quickest thing we can do, for two reasons.
He always comes on Boxing Day."
The priest had only watched for a few more minutes the absurd but not inelegant dance of the amateur harlequin over his splendidly unconscious foe.
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.
Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Cafe Riche.
We can act it in this very hall, the audience sitting on those broad stairs opposite, one row above another.
"As I," supplemented Father Brown, with a broad grin, "was sitting just behind him--"
I know the woods look very free behind you, Flambeau; I know that in a flash you could melt into them like a monkey. But some day you will be an old grey monkey, Flambeau.
"Well, well," observed Crook, airily, "don't let's quarrel.
The boisterous Canadian, Mr. Blount, was lifting his loud voice in applause, and the astonished financier his (in some considerable deprecation), when a knock sounded at the double front doors.
The fellow acting the policeman--Florian.
Not blacking faces or sitting on hats, if you don't like those--but something of the sort.
Father Brown, though he knew every detail done behind the scenes, and had even evoked applause by his transformation of a pillow into a pantomime baby, went round to the front and sat among the audience with all the solemn expectation of a child at his first matinee.
But you will do meaner things than that before you die."
With real though rude art, the harlequin danced slowly backwards out of the door into the garden, which was full of moonlight and stillness.
On one side of the house stood the stable, on the other an alley or cloister of laurels led to the larger garden behind.
I can be harlequin, that only wants long legs and jumping about.
"Oh, I wish you'd do it to this company."
"That's true," admitted Crook, nodding eagerly and walking about. "But I'm afraid I can't have my policeman's uniform?
Here she gave an exclamation of wonder, real or ritual, and looking up at the high garden wall above her, beheld it fantastically bestridden by a somewhat fantastic figure.
John Crook, journalist, had heard of that eminent City magnate; and it was not his fault if the City magnate had not heard of him; for in certain articles in The Clarion or The New Age Sir Leopold had been dealt with austerely.
There was a startled stillness, and then the colonel said slowly, "Please say seriously what all this means."
Everything seemed undistinguished about the priest, even down to his name, which was Brown; yet the colonel had always found something companionable about him, and frequently asked him to such family gatherings.
"Oh, don't jump, Mr. Crook," she called out in some alarm; "it's much too high."
"He is very kind."
At abrupt intervals in the outrageous performance he would hurl himself in full costume at the piano and bang out some popular music equally absurd and appropriate.
The little priest bounded like a rabbit shot.
Here is the richer man--and none the richer."
Where is he exactly at this minute, I wonder."
Indeed, her uncle, James Blount, was getting almost out of hand in his excitement; he was like a schoolboy.
The scene thus framed was so coloured and quaint, like a back scene in a play, that they forgot a moment the insignificant figure standing in the door.
There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy they will last in that trade.
Lord Amber went into wild society in a sort of chivalry; now he's paying blackmail to the lowest vultures in London.
"Quite natural, I should say," growled the man in the red tie.
"I shouldn't blame 'em if they had taken 'em.
Seen from the outside it was perfectly incomprehensible, and it is from the outside that the stranger must study it.
First, one can gag to any degree; and, second, all the objects are household things--tables and towel-horses and washing baskets, and things like that."
In fact he would certainly have done so, had not Ruby unearthed some old pantomime paste jewels she had worn at a fancy dress party as the Queen of Diamonds.
"If you want the inside of my head you can have it," said Brown rather wearily.
What is it, pray?"
"You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name.
"Yes, we can!" he cried.
The silvery figure among the green leaves seems to linger as if hypnotised, though his escape is easy behind him; he is staring at the man below.
The curtain has gone up and down six times; he is still lying there."
In point of fact it's Florian, that famous French acrobat and comic actor; I knew him years ago out West (he was a French-Canadian by birth), and he seems to have business for me, though I hardly guess what."
As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group.
The colonel looked at him long, and then said, "Do you know, I should like to see the inside of your head more than the inside of your pockets.
"You see, we know these people, more or less.
With him also was the more insignificant figure of the priest from the neighbouring Roman Church; for the colonel's late wife had been a Catholic, and the children, as is common in such cases, had been trained to follow her.
And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn't come, entirely with soot--applied externally."
The clown at the piano played the constabulary chorus in the "Pirates of Penzance," but it was drowned in the deafening applause, for every gesture of the great comic actor was an admirable though restrained version of the carriage and manner of the police.
But this great French actor who played the policeman--this clever corpse the harlequin waltzed with and dandled and threw about--he was--" His voice again failed him, and he turned his back to run.
It seems almost a pity I repented the same evening."
The priest opened them, and they showed again the front garden of evergreens, monkey-tree and all, now gathering gloom against a gorgeous violet sunset.
"I think, my dear," he said, "you must get someone else for pantaloon."
"I'm all for making a policeman into sausages," said John Crook.
"Oh, it's glorious, godfather," cried Ruby, almost dancing.
The climax of this, as of all else, was the moment when the two front doors at the back of the scene flew open, showing the lovely moonlit garden, but showing more prominently the famous professional guest; the great Florian, dressed up as a policeman.
This, however, was frowned down. "Uncle is too absurd," cried Ruby to Crook, round whose shoulders she had seriously placed a string of sausages.
"I want you to give them back, Flambeau, and I want you to give up this life.
"Please forgive me, colonel, but when did your wife die?"
We ought to look at once to the one man we don't know.
Blue Beard's more in my line, and him I like best when he turned into the pantaloon."
Harry Burke started his free money movement sincerely enough; now he's sponging on a half-starved sister for endless brandies and sodas.
There were hollows and bowers at the extreme end of that leafy garden, in which the laurels and other immortal shrubs showed against sapphire sky and silver moon, even in that midwinter, warm colours as of the south.
"Does one want to own soot?" he asked.
"Well, my last crime was a Christmas crime, a cheery, cosy, English middle-class crime; a crime of Charles Dickens.
"I'm sick at being such a nuisance, colonel," he said, with the cheery colonial conventions; "but would it upset you if an old acquaintance called on me here tonight on business?
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam.
He pondered.
Were this ship and everyone on board doomed to perish in this tomb of ice? It was a dreadful state of affairs.
"Don't you understand," he went on, "that the congealing of this water could come to our rescue?
I couldn't answer him.
That day, the sixth of our imprisonment, Captain Nemo concluded that picks and mattocks were too slow to deal with the ice layer still separating us from open water--and he decided to crush this layer. The man had kept his energy and composure.
"But what can we do?"
Such sufferings are indescribable. The next day I was short-winded.
"Without ill effect.
We're shut up in a relatively confined area. If the Nautilus's pumps continually injected streams of boiling water into this space, wouldn't that raise its temperature and delay its freezing?"
That evening Captain Nemo was forced to open the spigots of his air tanks and shoot a few spouts of fresh oxygen through the Nautilus's interior. Without this precaution we wouldn't have awakened the following morning.
Get there first!
The Ice Bank's side walls and underbelly had visibly thickened.
"Professor Aronnax," he told me, "this calls for heroic measures, or we'll be sealed up in this solidified water as if it were cement."
It was futile to attack the ceiling since that surface was the Ice Bank itself, more than 400 meters high.
We could breathe! We could breathe!
Work began immediately and was carried on with tireless tenacity. Instead of digging all around the Nautilus, which would have entailed even greater difficulties, Captain Nemo had an immense trench outlined on the ice, eight meters from our port quarter. Then his men simultaneously staked it off at several points around its circumference.
By the next day, March 27, six meters of ice had been torn from the socket.
Captain Nemo set the example and was foremost in submitting to this strict discipline. When his time was up, he yielded his equipment to another and reentered the foul air on board, always calm, unflinching, and uncomplaining.
The captain understood and gave me a signal to follow him. We returned on board.
Besides, working meant leaving the Nautilus, which meant breathing the clean oxygen drawn from the air tanks and supplied by our equipment, which meant leaving the thin, foul air behind.
Long bores were driven into the side walls; but after fifteen meters, the instruments were still impeded by the thickness of those walls.
Another day?
I'm unable to estimate the hours that passed in this way. But I was aware that my death throes had begun.
"Five nights and four days!" I told my companions.
I squeezed it in an involuntary convulsion.
His shift over, each man surrendered to a gasping companion the air tank that would revive him.
What a night! I'm unable to depict it.
But this substance was missing on board and nothing else could replace it.
But we faced it head-on, each one of us determined to do his duty to the end.
So we can't rely on nature to rescue us, only our own efforts.
The admission of additional water was enough to shift its balance.
At his orders the craft was eased off, in other words, it was raised from its icy bed by a change in its specific gravity. When it was afloat, the crew towed it, leading it right above the immense trench outlined to match the ship's waterline. Next the ballast tanks filled with water, the boat sank, and was fitted into its socket.
"Can the panels in the lounge be left open?"
"Yes, captain, maybe so.
But this hardly mattered so long as the lower surface kept growing thinner.
Perhaps!
It was now the 26th. We had lived off the ship's stores for five days! And all remaining breathable air had to be saved for the workmen. Even today as I write these lines, my sensations are so intense that an involuntary terror sweeps over me, and my lungs still seem short of air!
But he seemed to brush it aside. He told himself no.
Not only are the side walls closing in, but there aren't ten feet of water ahead or astern of the Nautilus. All around us, this freeze is gaining fast."
I clutched his hand.
The Nautilus did not stir.
I broke out in a cold sweat.
"Well?" I asked, not catching the captain's meaning.
Before the Nautilus could return to the surface of the waves, couldn't we all die of asphyxiation?
But whatever resistance to crushing the Nautilus may have, it still couldn't stand such dreadful pressures, and it would be squashed as flat as a piece of sheet iron."
At last these words escaped his lips:
Had his companions died with him?
Had he perished?
Supervising our work, working himself, Captain Nemo passed near me just then.
"After tomorrow," he said, "the air tanks will be empty!"
In fact, I could feel it assuming an oblique position, lowering its stern and raising its spur.
"I might add," he went on, "that I'm as handy with a pick as a harpoon. If I can be helpful to the captain, he can use me any way he wants."
"Excellent, Ned," I said, extending my hand to the Canadian.
Half lying on a couch in the library, I was suffocating. My face was purple, my lips blue, my faculties in abeyance. I could no longer see or hear.
Separating us from the open air was a mere tract of ice.
The little air that remained had to be saved for the workmen.
We waited, we listened, we forgot our sufferings, we hoped once more. We had staked our salvation on this one last gamble.
"Gentlemen," he said in a calm voice, "there are two ways of dying under the conditions in which we're placed."
In any event the Nautilus was going to try.
Captain Nemo then bored into the lower surface. There we were separated from the sea by a ten-meter barrier. That's how thick the iceberg was.
When I returned on board, I felt half suffocated.
My movements were quite free, although they were executed under a pressure of thirty atmospheres.
I didn't tell my two companions about this new danger. There was no point in dampening the energy they were putting into our arduous rescue work.
All this water contained a considerable amount, and after it was decomposed by our powerful batteries, this life-giving elastic fluid could have been restored to us. I had thought it all out, but to no avail because the carbon dioxide produced by our breathing permeated every part of the ship. To absorb it, we would need to fill containers with potassium hydroxide and shake them continually.
"My friends," I said, "we're in a serious predicament, but I'm counting on your courage and energy."
The Nautilus's chief officer supervised us.
I informed the captain of Ned's proposition, which was promptly accepted.
Captain Nemo went out.
"How long," I asked, "will the oxygen in the air tanks enable us to breathe on board?"
I had lost all sense of time. My muscles had no power to contract.
The captain then broke into speech:
But the ship's air tanks were nearly empty.
I realized that I was about to die . . .
By then I should have been used to this type of talk!
The ice cracked with an odd ripping sound, like paper tearing, and the Nautilus began settling downward.
"Oh," he exclaimed, "if only my Nautilus were strong enough to stand that much pressure without being crushed!"
Near three o'clock in the afternoon, this agonizing sensation affected me to an intense degree. Yawns dislocated my jaws.
In it lived the Lopez family.
Mary smiled in appreciation of the old man's joke.
Mary, not wishing to appear foolishly timid, said, in as courageous a voice as she could muster, "Of course we're not afraid.
Mary lifted startled blue eyes.
"Not tonight, please.
"You may put up our horses and earn a dime."
When she spoke, she said, "It's only natural that Jerry should call me 'Little Sister.' Our mothers were like sisters when they were girl brides.
Hurrying up the steps, Mary skipped into a pleasant living-room, where, near a wide window that was letting in a flood of light from the setting sun, sat her fine-looking father, pale after his long illness, but growing stronger every day.
CHAPTER II THE GHOST TOWN
Today the chairs were empty.
Mary glanced affectionately at the old place with its flower-edged walk, its broad porch and adobe pillars.
"Jerry didn't have time to tell us about the Evil Eye Turquoise, did he?"
After that Mother and Mrs. Newcomb were good friends, naturally, being brides and neighbors."
Carmelita, the wife and mother, had long been cook for Mary Moore's father.
On their right was the corner general store and post office.
Dora defended the absent boy.
"When Jerry and I were little, we were playmates.
Then, glancing up at the nurse who had appeared from her father's bedroom, she asked eagerly, "May I tell Dad an adventure we've had?"
He's official fence-mender just at present."
Mary, not heeding the interruption, kept on.
Mrs. Farley, middle-aged, kind-faced, shook her head, smiling down at the girl.
Eight happy years they had spent together before her mother died.
Dora, seeing her friend's pale face, was sorry that she had wondered aloud.
Dick is Mrs. Farley's son." Mary took time, in a friendly way, to satisfy the old man's curiosity.
"Because he had to do the milking," Mary replied simply.
"Good!" Dora exclaimed as she rode close to the porch.
Jerry's sombrero and Dick's cap waved, then, feeling assured that the girls were all right, the boys went at a gallop down the road and across the desert valley to the Newcomb ranch which nestled at the base of the Chiricahua range.
"They're nice boys, aren't they?" Mary said.
The third adobe was neat and well kept.
Her husband was a doctor and they lived back in Boston before he died."
"I don't believe he will tell us about that.
Then to the cowboy she said in her practical matter-of-fact way, "Hurry along home to your milking, Jerry, and Dick, don't you bother to come with us.
Bustin' broncs?"
Now undoubtedly finite things, taken distributively, have contradictory attributes, but not as a class.
Thus an 'artificial ignorance,' as Locke calls it, was produced, which had the effect of sanctifying prejudice by recognizing so-called necessities of thought as the only bases of reasoning.
It was this, taken with his theory of the syllogism, which worked the great change.
It visibly takes the lead, it looks big and important, and it makes a great noise.
It was even asserted confidently, that nothing more was to be expected,--that an inductive logic was impossible.
As a systematic psychologist Mr. Mill has not done so much as either Professor Bain or Mr. Herbert Spencer.
It is through this door that ontological belief was supposed to enter. "Things in themselves" were to be believed in because we could not help it.
Those who think this a disparagement of his work must have very little conception of the mass of original thought that still remains to Mr. Mill's credit, the great critical power that could gather valuable truths from so many discordant sources, and the wonderful synthetic ability required to weld these and his own contributions into one organic whole.
His work on political economy not only put into thorough repair the structure raised by Adam Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo, but raised it at least one story higher.
Still it is his work in mental science which will, in our opinion, be in future looked upon as his great contribution to the progress of thought.
Not one iota is added to the proof by interpolating a general proposition." We not only may, according to Mr. Mill, reason from some particular instances to others, but we frequently do so.
As, however, the instances which are sufficient to prove one fresh instance must be sufficient to prove a general proposition, it is most convenient to at once infer that general proposition, which then becomes a formula according to which (but not from which) any number of particular inferences may be made.
Still less is there any one individual thing, "The Finite," in which these contradictory attributes inhere. But it was against a corresponding being, "The Infinite," that Mr. Mill was arguing.
He demonstrated that the general type of reasoning is neither from generals to particulars, nor from particulars to generals, but from particulars to particulars.
Here was a perfect paradise of question begging.
Modern Noumenalists agree that we can know nothing more of "things in themselves" than their existence, but this they continue to assert with a vehemence only equalled by its want of meaning.
After reviewing, in an opening chapter, the various views which have been held respecting the relativity of human knowledge, and stating his own doctrine, he proceeds to judge by this standard the philosophy of the absolute and Sir William Hamilton's relation to it.
The real inference was accomplished when the universal proposition was arrived at.
The ultimate major premise in every argument being assumed, it could of course be fashioned according to the particular conclusion it was called in to prove.
He acknowledged the force of Mr. Mill's argument, that "The Infinite" must include "a farrago of contradictions;" but so also, he said, does the Finite.
His inestimable "System of Logic" was a revolution.
The perfection of his method, its application, and the uprooting of prejudices which stood in its way,--this was the task to which Mr. Mill applied himself with an ability and success rarely matched and never surpassed.
The biggest lion in the path was the doctrine of so-called "necessary truth." This doctrine was especially obnoxious to him, as it set up a purely subjective standard of truth, and a standard--as he was easily able to show--varying according to the psychological history of the individual.
A line of rail lies separated from an adjacent one, the pointsman moves a handle, and the foaming giant, that would, it may be, have sped on to his destruction and that of the passive crew who follow in his rear, is shunted to another line running in a different direction and to a more desirable goal.
When Mr. Mill commenced his labors, the only logic recognized was the syllogistic.
Still that blustering machine, which puffs and snorts, and drags a vast multitude in its wake, is moving along a track determined by a man hidden away from the public gaze.
The work of deduction is the interpretation of these formulas, and therefore, strictly speaking, is not inferential at all.
I won't believe it.
Then he became aware of twigs hastily lopped off, of bushes bent and torn, of the uncovering, through these careless means, of an old path.
This necessary task on which Bobby had stumbled had made the thicket less congenial than the house.
But I want it quickly.
That moment in the hall when Graham had awakened him urged Bobby to reply with a genuine warmth:
"Where's Robinson?" Bobby asked.
The minister's arrived.
Entering the court, he scarcely glanced at the black wagon.
But, as always, thought brought no release.
There is a hack driver outside who is even more suspicious than you.
Paredes's arrival possessed one virtue: It diverted Bobby's thoughts temporarily from his own dilemma, from his inability to chart a course.
I asked Rawlins to drive me back, but he rushed from the courthouse, probably to telephone his rotund superior.
Clearly he had slept little.
"I was coming to hunt you up, Bobby.
"I don't know what to think of it," Bobby answered.
Go tell Robinson so."
Graham summoned Katherine.
With his direction a matter of indifference, chance led him into the thicket at the side of the house.
He will be here before noon.
He lay there still shivering, beneath the heavy blankets.
The car stopped at the entrance of the court.
Only one theory promised to fit at all.
Otherwise the nature of their industry and its surroundings had imposed upon them a silence, in itself beast-like and unnatural.
Bobby forced himself to walk up the staircase, facing the first phase of his ordeal.
"And why do you fill my mind with such thoughts?
He wants to be paid.
Bobby started to rise.
There was an ironical justice in the condition of the old cemetery.
Bobby walked from the room.
That fleeting, satanic impression of yesterday came back, sharper, more alarming.
Reluctantly Bobby's glance went to the centre of the floor where the casket rested on trestles.
The words came, nevertheless, with some difficulty:
Therefore, he would crush his justifiable anger.
Robinson stood opposite, but he didn't look at Silas Blackburn who could no longer accuse.
"Since the law won't hold me at your convenience in Smithtown I keep myself at your service here--if Bobby permits it.
He surveyed the remains of Bobby's breakfast.
I saw nothing."
"He learned nothing new last night?"
Robinson entered.
"If it's so far-fetched," Graham asked quietly, "why do you revolt from the idea?"
Her pictures are in most of the papers.
Bobby sprang upright.
Everything's about ready."
Bobby looked up.
The labour of the men was given an uncouth rhythm by their grunting expulsions of breath.
You will forgive us, Carlos?"
If it was hard to face sleep before, what do you think it is now?
"You've no objection to the gentleman visiting you for the present?"
Graham moved closer.
He had walked some distance.
So has Doctor Groom.
He fixed a pretty stiff bail, but the local lawyer was there with a bondsman, and I came back.
He settles himself in the Cedars again."
"Later, Mr. Graham.
"No.
"Time," Graham said, "lessens such facts--even for the police."
"It won't lessen the fact of his murder."
He appeared, moreover, to have slept pleasantly.
"We need not delay.
He paused, listening.
Bobby didn't care to meet the uncommunicative eyes whose depths he had never been able to explore.
He put down his coffee cup and lighted a cigarette.
Before either man could grope for a suitable greeting he faced Bobby.
It's a nasty thought, but I've heard of such things."
He suggests resources as hard to understand as anything that has happened in the old room.
"What are you driving at?"
I won't think of it."
But more important than the knowledge Graham desired, loomed the old question.
Now that another had expressed the idea Bobby fought it with all his might.
You should have tasted what I had this morning.
A strange man appeared, walking from the direction of the house.
And I tell you I did feel Howells's body move under my hand."
They walked slowly back to the house.
For Groom has brought the ghosts back with him.
"Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is?"
All at once, the clock struck.
She looked at Marius, she looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky: it seemed as though she feared that she should wake up from her dream.
Your aunt will permit it, although she has a right to you.
Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with the angels. That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling.
He was no longer there.
That empty arm-chair chilled the effusion of the wedding feast for a moment.
In fact, the women must always be loved.
Make merry, let us make merry.
Can one be too much alive, too happy? Moderate your joys.
There should be flashes of light athwart such houses.
"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."
That brute beast submits.
The evening was gay, lively and agreeable.
The delights of these two hearts overflowed upon the crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.
I, too, have had my dream, I, too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too, have had a moonlight soul.
She caressed him with her smile.
Cosette and Marius had been elected.
But, if M. Fauchelevent was absent, M. Gillenormand was present, and the grandfather beamed for two.
It is love.
"You shall not escape two sermons," he exclaimed.
Cosette, both at the mayor's office and at church, was dazzling and touching.
That he begged to be excused, that he would come to-morrow. He has just taken his departure."
The dining-room was full of gay things.
Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality.
Methusalem is a street arab beside Cupid.
Ask that demagogue of a Marius if he is not the slave of that little tyrant of a Cosette.
The grandfather's sovereign good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each person regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality.
There, let not that displease you which we used to think in our day, when we were young folks.
I should like to stuff their philosophy down their gullets again.
Listen to me; I will give you a bit of advice: Adore each other.
If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling of wings.
Marius was fighting six months ago; to-day he is married. That is well.
Moreover, what is an obscure corner in such a submersion of joy?
Down with the philosophers!
There was a tumult, then silence.
They do not consent to be black.
If there is no sun, one must be made.
M. Gillenormand took his seat.
The empty spaces between the candelabra were filled in with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a flower.
All the rest weeps.
Marius took Jean Valjean's place beside Cosette, and things fell out so that Cosette, who had, at first, been saddened by Jean Valjean's absence, ended by being satisfied with it.
Manage so that, when you are with each other, nothing shall be lacking to you, and that Cosette may be the sun for Marius, and that Marius may be the universe to Cosette.
The arm-chair being occupied, M. Fauchelevent was obliterated; and nothing was lacking.
This declaration sufficed.
Profit by it.
We are all made so.
Take care, Estelle, thou art too pretty!
Woman!
Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean.
The house was no less fragrant than the church; after the incense, roses.
Love has the right to a long white beard.
In all creation, only the turtle-doves are wise.
Well, what then?
Believe what I say to you.
One would have pronounced her a virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.
The oath of Henri IV. places sanctity somewhere between feasting and drunkenness.
Cosette did not recognize him.
It is good sense.
Try.
Let us obey the sun blindly.
Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning of a great joy.
The poor, who had trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them.
I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows.
Ah! you are the nineteenth century?
There is no joy outside of these joys.
"Well, then, laugh."
This birth of two souls into one, ought to be an emotion for the gloom.
Is the Sancy diamond called the Sancy because it belonged to Harley de Sancy, or because it weighs six hundred carats?
And let it never rain in your household.
Well, grumble as he will, when Venus appears he is forced to smile.
A woman enters on the scene, a planet rises; flat on your face!
Goodman Days of Yore might have been invited to it.
For sixty centuries men and women have got out of their scrape by loving.
To whom is this accorded?
It is impossible that this sacred and fatal festival should not give off a celestial radiance to the infinite.
In this way he does more good than the devil does him harm.
Which of you has seen the planet Venus, the coquette of the abyss, the Celimene of the ocean, rise in the infinite, calming all here below?
Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man and the woman takes place; the being one, the being triple, the being final, the human trinity proceeds from it.
Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are in the right.
"Monsieur Fauchelevent," said the grandfather to him, "this is a fine day.
From the moment when Marius took his place, and was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God himself.
A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served.
These friends are our angels.
My children, receive an old man's blessing."
Stay, that's your dinner hour; be walking up the street at three, three precisely; I will meet you."
"Nor they either.
And, oh, Archibald!
"And now, Cornelia, I really must beg you to leave me."
"A party!" echoed Miss Carlyle.
I have invited--"
I have invited a party for to-night."
Would it be advisable to acquaint her?"
Mr. Carlyle bent forward and spoke in a whisper.
"Four or five of the justices are coming in to smoke their pipes.
"What's up, Archibald?" interrupted Miss Carlyle.
"I think so."
"Is he at their house?"
He must not see me.
"At West Lynne!"
"Richard!" repeated Mr. Carlyle.
His confidential clerk and manager stood near him.
Can you devise any plan?
"It would be--it might be--death!"
"You are very clever, Archie, but you can't do me.
"What is it, Cornelia?"
"Why--what on earth!" began she, "have you been with Archibald for?"
"Can I see Mr. Carlyle?"
"They are gone now, and the coast's clear, Miss Barbara."
I am very busy, Cornelia, and Colonel Bethel is waiting; I will talk to you at dinner-time.
"Ah!
He is engaged just now.
You are so clever, you can do anything."
A clerk answered it.
"Well--contrive to be in the street at four this afternoon.
Soon after Mr. Carlyle was left alone another clerk entered.
A trifling matter, relating to a little money.
"Richard Hare!
Shall it be so?"
"If so, I must send to the bank.
"Sit down, Barbara," he said drawing her chair closer.
"Send in Miss Carlyle first," was the answer.
"What Thorn?" asked Mr. Carlyle, suppressing all signs of incredulity.
"It--it might excite suspicions; some one might see me, too, and mention it to papa.
Was this the purport of Richard's visit--to say this?"
"I thought business would have called me out, but I am not going now.
Richard Hare has returned."
"The doors are double doors; did you notice that they were?"
"Presently, Miss Barbara.
The justices are with him."
Is he mad?"
It would look so peculiar to see me here; but mamma was too unwell to come herself--or rather, she feared papa's questioning, if he found out that she came."
Neither ought you to send to our house."
Mr. Carlyle knew her and her resolute expression well, and he took his course, to tell her the truth.
Mr. Dill shut me into his room."
"Not until evening.
The whole five accepted the invitation eagerly.
If Mr. Hare and the other magistrates are there, ask them to step over to me."
It's nothing, indeed."
"I don't know; a friend of Afy's, he said.
"Go to the Buck's Head.
An ominous sound of talking; the justices were evidently coming forth.
Come at seven, not later, and you will find my father's old jar replenished with the best broadcut, and half a dozen churchwarden pipes.
Mr. Carlyle smiled.
And now," continued Barbara, "I want you to advise me; had I better inform mamma that Richard is here, or not?"
"Miss Carlyle is asking to see you, sir, and Colonel Bethel's come again."
It was Mr. Dill, a little, meek-looking man with a bald head.
She had died and left one child.
Can you manage to see Richard?"
Clean curtains are just put up throughout the house, and I'll have no horrid pipes to blacken them."
I ask you: to hear your opinion about the scrape the bench have got into, is yours.
And Archibald generally submitted, for the force of habit is strong.
"It is only natural.
"Up!
He had dropped his eyelids in thought.
MR.
How can I give my orders?"
Miss Carlyle did not believe a word.
"They shan't come!" screamed Miss Carlyle.
We will dine a little earlier, though, Cornelia, say a quarter before six.
Barbara sat down again, but her manner was hurried and nervous.
Mr. Dill rose from his seat and shook hands with her.
I should like to know what you and Barbara do with a secret between you."
"A farm laborer's, the best he could adopt about here, with large black whiskers.
"Do you think I'll be poisoned with tobacco smoke from a dozen pipes?"
He followed his summoner with increasing doubt, which was not dispelled by a solemn comicality in the scene of the study.
I know you not only forced the pantomime, but put it to a double use.
"You never did anything better, Flambeau.
I want a hot poker and a policeman made into sausages, and they give me princesses moralising by moonlight, Blue Birds, or something.
I like the jolly old pantomime where a man sits on his top hat."
There sat Colonel Adams, still unaffectedly dressed as a pantaloon, with the knobbed whalebone nodding above his brow, but with his poor old eyes sad enough to have sobered a Saturnalia.
No doubt he will prove an acquisition."
But the first thing I find in that disused pocket is this: that men who mean to steal diamonds don't talk Socialism.
"I'll put 'em back now, my dear," said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat.
"I don't often know myself," replied Mr. Crook; "but then I am on the right side of the wall now."
"Oh, that's my godfather, Sir Leopold Fischer.
How even such a banquet of bosh was got ready in the time remained a riddle.
We've got to go and look at that policeman!"
"Not on mine, please," said Sir Leopold Fischer, with dignity.
They rushed on to the now curtained stage, breaking rudely past the columbine and clown (who seemed whispering quite contentedly), and Father Brown bent over the prostrate comic policeman.
Haven't killed a policeman lately."
It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes.
"Why is he so wild?"
"Come on!
"But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own your own soot."
The green gaiety of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture; and among the top branches of the garden trees a strange figure is climbing, who looks not so much romantic as impossible.
I really think my imitation of Dickens's style was dexterous and literary.
The silver, sparkling figure above seems to lean forward in the laurels and, confident of escape, listens to the little figure below.
"You ought to have a statue," cried the Canadian, as he came back, radiant, from the telephone.
The individual riding the party wall like an aerial horse was a tall, angular young man, with dark hair sticking up like a hair brush, intelligent and even distinguished lineaments, but a sallow and almost alien complexion.
Oh, you will never do anything better.
"I think I was meant to be a burglar," he said placidly, "and I have no doubt I should have been if I hadn't happened to be born in that nice house next door.
You already had the clever notion of hiding the jewels in a blaze of false stage jewellery.
The worthy officer started from Putney police station to find you, and walked into the queerest trap ever set in this world.
It was quite possible."
Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep.
"There, we are all fitted.
Captain Barillon was the great gentleman-apache before your time; he died in a madhouse, screaming with fear of the "narks" and receivers that had betrayed him and hunted him down.
They are more likely," he added demurely, "to denounce it."
It was clever to come from Canada (with a Paris ticket, I suppose) just a week after Mrs. Adams died, when no one was in a mood to ask questions.
"And which is the right side of the wall?" asked the young lady, smiling.
But in the rest you eclipsed yourself."
I'll phone him to bring a police dress when he comes." And he went bounding away to the telephone.
"I'll be columbine and you shall be pantaloon."
I didn't know, Miss Adams, that your Santa Claus was so modern as this."
Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect.
All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them.
From this standpoint the drama may be said to have begun when the front doors of the house with the stable opened on the garden with the monkey tree, and a young girl came out with bread to feed the birds on the afternoon of Boxing Day.
Enough, you know the species.
Dislike of the red-tied youth, born of his predatory opinions and evident intimacy with the pretty godchild, led Fischer to say, in his most sarcastic, magisterial manner: "No doubt you have found something much lower than sitting on a top hat.
The athletic harlequin swung him about like a sack or twisted or tossed him like an Indian club; all the time to the most maddeningly ludicrous tunes from the piano.
The pantomime was utterly chaotic, yet not contemptible; there ran through it a rage of improvisation which came chiefly from Crook the clown.
The Flying Stars
"I am only the clown who makes the old jokes."
Long before this revelation was complete the two big doors of the porch had opened in the middle, and Colonel Adams (father of the furry young lady) had come out himself to invite his eminent guest inside.
My friend Florian 'phones he's bringing the police costume; he's changing on the way.
"Whichever side you are on," said the young man named Crook.
What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"
"He was?" called Fischer inquiringly.
"I've heard that gardeners use it.
The green branch on which the glittering figure swung, rustled as if in astonishment; but the voice went on:
"Oh, yes," says the man below, "I know all about it.
I did it in a good old middle-class house near Putney, a house with a crescent of carriage drive, a house with a stable by the side of it, a house with the name on the two outer gates, a house with a monkey tree.
I don't care; I'm not refined.
The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it.
And as you--"
"I never know what you will say or do next," she said.
With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them.
"Chloroform," he said as he rose; "I only guessed it just now."
Commonly he was a clever man, and he was inspired tonight with a wild omniscience, a folly wiser than the world, that which comes to a young man who has seen for an instant a particular expression on a particular face.
He was dusty-looking and in a frayed coat, evidently a common messenger.
They're the three great African diamonds called 'The Flying Stars,' because they've been stolen so often.
"It's a better definition of Socialism than some recently given.
An interlude ensued, during which the millionaire stared at the priest, and the priest at his breviary; then the pantaloon returned and said, with staccato gravity, "The policeman is still lying on the stage.
Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathedral town.
Father Brown dropped his book and stood staring with a look of blank mental ruin.
In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them.
He even essayed to put the paper donkey's tail to the coat-tails of Sir Leopold Fischer.
Why couldn't we have a proper old English pantomime--clown, columbine, and so on.
I came back to the old country only last year, and I find the thing's extinct.
"Well, Flambeau," says the voice, "you really look like a Flying Star; but that always means a Falling Star at last."
As they went together through the laurels towards the front garden a motor horn sounded thrice, coming nearer and nearer, and a car of splendid speed, great elegance, and a pale green colour swept up to the front doors like a bird and stood throbbing.
"Letting a top hat sit on you, for instance," said the Socialist.
I couldn't help saying to myself, "If this is victory, how about that other fellow?"
"They'll be handy to have in the house," says Miss Abigail, grimly.
What's the row about?"
The town authorities had prohibited ball-playing on the Square, and, there being no other available place, the boys fell back perforce on the school-yard.
"Learn to box, then, as you learn to play cricket and football.
He had, as we suspected, witnessed the closing scene of the fight from the school-room window, and the next morning, after prayers, I was not wholly unprepared when Master Conway and myself were called up to the desk for examination.
I disapprove of tale-bearing, I never encourage it in the slightest degree; but when one pupil systematically persecutes a schoolmate, it is the duty of some head-boy to inform me.
"Is your man ready?" asked Phil Adams, addressing Rodgers.
"Just like me when I was young--always in one kind of trouble or another.
"As for fighting, keep out of it, if you can, by all means.
For I could stand very little, and see not at all (having pommelled the school pump for the last twenty seconds), when Conway retired from the field.
The tears flew to my eyes, but they were not the tears of defeat; they were merely the involuntary tribute which nature paid to the departed tresses.
This drew out the story of Conway's harsh treatment of the smaller boys. As Binny related the wrongs of his playfellows, saying very little of his own grievances, I noticed that Mr. Grimshaw's hand, unknown to himself perhaps, rested lightly from time to time on Wallace's sunny hair.
As the reader is already familiar with the leading points in the case of Bailey versus Conway, I shall not report the trial further than to say that Adams, Marden, and several other pupils testified to the fact that Conway had imposed on me ever since my first day at the Temple School. Their evidence also went to show that Conway was a quarrelsome character generally.
Not one of you will be the worse, but very much the better, for learning to box well.
As I went along, my cap cocked on one side to keep the chilly air from my eye, I felt that I was not only following my nose, but following it so closely, that I was in some danger of treading on it.
"Then the thing must go on," said Adams, with dignity.
And don't give in when you can't! see!
Miss Abigail, opening the front door, started back at my hilarious appearance.
But don't say 'No' because you fear a licking and say or think it's because you fear God, for that's neither Christian nor honest.
Conway loses his recess for a month, and Bailey has a page added to his Latin lessons for the next four recitations.
Chapter Ten--I Fight Conway
I disapprove of boys' fighting; it is unnecessary and unchristian.
"Shouldn't wonder."
Conway had an accomplishment peculiarly his own--that of throwing his thumbs out of joint at will.
"Yes, it's a fight," I answered, "unless Conway will ask Wallace's pardon, promise never to hector me in future--and put back my hair!"
It was a custom with the larger pupils to return to the playground after school, and play baseball until sundown.
Behold us once more face to face, like David and the Philistine.
I am sure my apology was a very good one.
"Silence!" said Mr. Grimshaw, sharply.
"No was he, though?"
If one boy maltreats another, within school-bounds, or within school-hours, that is a matter for me to settle.
We clasped hands in the tamest manner imaginable, and Conway mumbled, "I'm sorry I fought with you."
Conway regarded these business-like preparations with evident misgiving, for he called Rodgers to his side, and had himself arrayed in a similar manner, though his hair was cropped so close that you couldn't have taken hold of it with a pair of tweezers.
I seemed to have nose enough for the whole party.
"If you please, sir," said Binny Wallace, holding up his hand for permission to speak, "Bailey didn't fight on his own account; he fought on my account, and, if you please, sir, I am the boy to be blamed, for I was the cause of the trouble."
I now request Bailey and Conway to shake hands in the presence of the school, and acknowledge their regret at what has occurred."
"Then he must have seen all the row."
I never had any more trouble with Conway.
Convinced of my error, I accepted his congratulations, with those of the other boys, blandly and blindly.
A good wash at the pump, and a cold key applied to my eye, refreshed me amazingly.
And if you do fight, fight it out; and don't give in while you can stand and see."
It was early candle-light when we reached the house.
Just at this crisis a dozen or so of the Templars entered the gate, and, seeing at a glance the belligerent status of Conway and myself, dropped bat and ball, and rushed to the spot where we stood.
Captain Nutter, as the recognized professional warrior of our family, could not consistently take me to task for fighting Conway; nor was he disposed to do so; for the Captain was well aware of the long-continued provocation I had endured.
Seth Rodgers, with both hands in his pockets, was leaning against the pump lazily enjoying the sport; but on seeing me sweep across the yard, whirling my strap of books in the air like a sling, he called out lustily, "Lay low, Conway!
He knew we were watching him, and made sundry mouths and scowled in the most threatening way over his sums.
Conway turned just in time to catch on his shoulder the blow intended for his head.
"--As the monkey said when he fell out of the cocoanut tree," added Charley Marden, trying to make me laugh.
If there is any fighting to be done, I am the person to be consulted.
Escorted by two or three of the schoolfellows, I walked home through the pleasant autumn twilight, battered but triumphant.
We fully expected an outbreak from him at recess; but the intermission passed off tranquilly, somewhat to our disappointment.
Of course, so great a breach of discipline was not to be passed over by Mr. Grimshaw.
I believe it runs in the family."
I am glad that I faced Conway, and asked no favors, and got rid of him forever.
He then loosened my gallowses (braces), and buckled them tightly above my hips.
I am glad that Phil Adams taught me to box, and I say to all youngsters: Learn to box, to ride, to pull an oar, and to swim.
There was one person, however, who cherished a strong suspicion that the Centipedes had had a hand in the business; and that person was Conway. His red hair seemed to change to a livelier red, and his sallow cheeks to a deeper sallow, as we glanced at him stealthily over the tops of our slates the next day in school.
At the close of the afternoon session it happened that Binny Wallace and myself, having got swamped in our Latin exercise, were detained in school for the purpose of refreshing our memories with a page of Mr. Andrews's perplexing irregular verbs.
I should have lacked the spirit of a hen if I had not resented it finally.
The occasion may come round, when a decent proficiency in one or the rest of these accomplishments will be of service to you.
That was bad for me.
"Is it a fight?" asked Phil Adams, who saw by our freshness that we had not yet got to work.
"No, I wasn't," interrupted Conway; "but I was going to because he knows who put Meeks's mortar over our door.
"Every boy in this school knows that it is against the rules to fight.
In a second my little jacket lay on the ground, and I stood on guard, resting lightly on my right leg and keeping my eye fixed steadily on Conway's--in all of which I was faithfully following the instructions of Phil Adams, whose father subscribed to a sporting journal.
I tried to smile upon her sweetly, but the smile, rippling over my swollen cheek, and dying away like a spent wave on my nose, produced an expression of which Miss Abigail declared she had never seen the like excepting on the face of a Chinese idol.
"Cool is the word," said Adams, as he bound a handkerchief round my head, and carefully tucked away the long straggling locks that offered a tempting advantage to the enemy.
When the time comes, if ever it should, that you have to say 'Yes' or 'No' to a challenge to fight, say 'No' if you can--only take care you make it plain to yourself why you say 'No.' It's a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives.
Seth Rodgers, on the part of his friend, proved that I had struck the first blow.
Miss Abigail's sanitary stores, including a bottle of opodeldoc, were never called into requisition.
Bailey, come here.
I remember that Binny Wallace wanted to give me his silver pencil-case.
You'll get no description of it from me, simply because I think it would prove very poor reading, and not because I consider my revolt against Conway's tyranny unjustifiable.
"You can go to your seats," said Mr. Grimshaw, turning his face aside to hide a smile.
The gentle soul had stood throughout the contest with his face turned to the fence, suffering untold agony.
Look at us as long as you may; for this is all you shall see of the combat. According to my thinking, the hospital teaches a better lesson than the battle-field.
Conway and I approached each other slowly and cautiously, as if we were bent upon another hostile collision.
Conway also threw himself into a defensive attitude, and there we were, glaring at each other motionless, neither of us disposed to risk an attack, but both on the alert to resist one.
I will tell you about my black eye, and my swollen lip, if you will; but not a word of the fight.
Should you never have to use it in earnest there's no exercise in the world so good for the temper, and for the muscles of the back and legs.
It is for her that we are mourning.
"I, too, have a gift for thee.
"You have served faithfully and well," said Father Time.
If he can persuade his neighbors to give them up, he should be able to piece together a pretty good reputation again.
The joy of the monarch knew no bounds, and Bobo, the one-time simpleton, became on the spot Lord Bobo of the Sapphire Hills, Marquis of the Mountains of the Moon, Prince of the Valley of Golden Apples, and Lord Seneschal of the proud City of Zizz--in a word, the greatest nobleman in all Fairyland.
And, sure enough, there was brave little Tilda standing alone in a great field waiting for the dragon to come and take her away. Lumbering heavily along like a monstrous turtle, and snorting blue smoke, the dragon was advancing toward her.
"A lost half-hour?" said the King.
On the second morning of his journey, he happened to see far ahead of him on the highway the unfortunate aged man who had lost his reputation. To him, therefore, Bobo repeated the counsel of Father Time, and sent him hurrying home to his neighbors' houses.
When the dawn broke, all sign of the ship had disappeared.
But Bobo had to answer "No," and the old man wandered on again.
He took such good care of the great black horses of the Hours of the Night, and the white horses of the Hours of the Day, that they were never more proud and strong, nor their coats smoother and more gleaming.
But never a sign of the lost half-hour did he find, although he asked thousands of people.
There was a perfectly terrific bang! as if a million balloons had blown up all at once.
"O sir," said the peasant woman, "evil days have fallen upon our unhappy kingdom.
"Here is your reward." And, with these words, he placed in Bobo's hands a small square casket made of ebony.
When she did get up, she found her court waiting for her in the castle gardens.
As for the missing daughter, she is the kitchen-maid in Princess Zenza's palace, who is known as Tilda."
The dragon roared again.
Then Tilda's father took her in his arms, and told her that she was a real princess. The Grand Cross of the Order of the Black Cat was conferred upon Bobo by Princess Zenza, who also asked his pardon for having treated him so shabbily.
To this Bobo willingly agreed.
Once upon a time there was an old widow woman who had three sons: the first two were clever enough, but the third, Bobo by name, was little better than a silly simpleton.
So Bobo left the proud city of Zizz, and once again rode over the hills and far away.
Drink this cup of water to the last drop." And the youth handed the simpleton a silver cup full to the brim of clear shining water.
Would you mind asking, as you go through the world, for news of my little daughter?" (Here the poor old King took out a great green handkerchief and wiped his eyes.) "She was stolen by the fairies on midsummer eve fifteen years ago.
Bobo arrived at twilight.
As for the man who lost his temper, tell him that it is to be found in the grass by the roadside close by the spot where you first met him.
Yes!" cried the courtiers.
When the year was up, Bobo again sought out Father Time.
"The Princess has lost a half-hour and I am going in search of it," said Bobo, proudly.
She was said to be the daughter of an old crane who had come to the castle one day, asking for help.
Farther on, the lad encountered Tilda's father, the unhappy King, and delivered his message.
Bobo, with great goodness of heart, took along this extraordinary object, in the hope of finding its angry possessor.
The monstrous dragon with Tilda in his claws was just a little smoky speck far down the southern sky.
In spite of his mad dash, Bobo, who had spurred on ahead, arrived exactly half an hour late.
We may save her yet."
Every day, one after the other, they ride for an hour round the whole wide world.
Yes, you shall have the lost half-hour, but you must look after my sons' horses for the space of a whole year."
At these words, Bobo, who was in attendance, pricked up his ears and said,--
For the dragon had blown up.
On the steps of one of the cottages sat an old woman, all alone and weeping with all her might.
Every now and then he would stop a passer-by and ask him if he had seen a lost half-hour.
Strange to say, not a living creature was to be seen, and though there were lights in the castle, there was not even a warder at the gate.
All would have been lost had not a brave little kitchen-maid named Tilda volunteered to go.
"Quick!
Alas!"
The lost half-hour may be there."
Now this water was the water of wisdom, and when Bobo had drunk it, he was no longer a simpleton.
"I've lost something much more serious, I've lost my reputation.
"Please, Your Highness, perhaps I can find it."
For two days Bobo walked inland toward the great mountain.
"What, off again?" said the little kitchen-maid.
THE LOST HALF-HOUR
Now it came to pass that one morning Princess Zenza, the ruler of the land, happened to pass by the cottage and heard Bobo being given a terrible tongue-lashing.
"I'll give him my old hat," said another.
Strange to say, black mourning banners hung from the trees, and every door in the first village which the travelers saw was likewise hung with black streamers.
"Tell the first," said Father Time, "that his reputation has been broken into a thousand pieces which have been picked up by his neighbors and carried home.
Find her, worthy Bobo, and an immense reward will be yours."
One pleasant mid-summer morning, when Bobo had been nearly a year at the castle, Princess Zenza overslept half an hour and did not come down to breakfast at the usual time.
"The half-hour lies inside.
I am Father Time himself, and these are my twelve sons, the Hours.
Above the shoes was a card, saying simply,--
I've lost my temper.
Tilda, the kitchen-maid, was as sweet and pretty as she was kind and good.
Suddenly Bobo noticed a strange little door in the bark of a great lonely tree, and, opening this door, he discovered a little cupboard in which were a pair of wooden shoes.
Answer me, you silly, have you seen a lost temper anywhere?
And thus for a year Bobo served Father Time and his sons.
Now he would be sent to find a white craw's feather or a spray of yellow bluebells; now he was ordered to look for a square wheel or a glass of dry water.
Yet who, I ask you, would be housekeeper for a dragon? Suppose he did n't like the puddings you made for him--why, he might eat you up!
And being no longer a simpleton, he remembered the man who had lost his reputation, the man who had lost his temper, and the king whose daughter had been stolen by the fairies.
Three days ago a terrible dragon alighted in the gardens of the palace and sent word to Princess Zenza that if within three days she did not provide him with someone brave enough to go home with him and cook his meals and keep his cavern tidy, he would burn our fields with his fiery breath.
As for the sun itself, turning round like a cartwheel and hissing like ten thousand rockets, it rolled back along the sky to the east.
Finally, I was led up a steep plank to what appeared to me an incalculable height.
The unknown voice then directed me to take ten steps forward and stop at the word halt.
Each boy who failed to report himself was fined one cent.
I did not feel so sure about that; but, having made up my mind to be a Centipede, a Centipede I was bound to be.
I scarcely need say that there were no vestiges to be seen of the fearful gulfs over which I had passed so cautiously.
In August we had two weeks' vacation.
"It is well!" said the husky voice.
Before being led to the Grotto of Enchantment--such was the modest title given to the loft over my friend's wood-house--my hands were securely pinioned, and my eyes covered with a thick silk handkerchief. At the head of the stairs I was told in an unrecognizable, husky voice, that it was not yet too late to retreat if I felt myself physically too weak to undergo the necessary tortures.
I have said that the society had no special object.
I was then conducted to the brink of several other precipices, and ordered to step over many dangerous chasms, where the result would have been instant death if I had committed the least mistake.
In the afternoon the widow was usually seen seated, smartly dressed, at her window upstairs, casting destructive glances across the street--the artificial roses in her cap and her whole languishing manner saying as plainly as a label on a prescription, "To be Taken Immediately!" But Mr. Meeks didn't take.
Each of the elect wore a copper cent (some occult association being established between a cent apiece and a centipedes suspended by a string round his neck).
As to her shyness, that was not so clear.
Bill Conway we hated for himself.
A prick from some two-pronged instrument, evidently a pitchfork, gently checked my retreat.
A second pistol-shot was heard, the something I stood on sunk with a crash beneath my feet and I fell two miles, as nearly as I could compute it. At the same instant the handkerchief was whisked from my eyes, and I found myself standing in an empty hogshead surrounded by twelve masked figures fantastically dressed.
As soon as I ascertained the existence of a boys' club, of course I was ready to die to join it.
One of our subsequent devices--a humble invention of my own--was to request the blindfolded candidate to put out his tongue, whereupon the First Centipede would say, in a low tone, as if not intended for the ear of the victim, "Diabolus, fetch me the red-hot iron!" The expedition with which that tongue would disappear was simply ridiculous.
People who went trustfully to sleep in Currant Square opened their eyes in Honeysuckle Terrace. Jones's Avenue at the north end had suddenly become Walnut Street, and Peanut Street was nowhere to be found.
After much noisy discussion, a plan of retaliation was agreed upon.
We were indebted for our arrest to Master Conway, who had slyly dropped a hint, within the hearing of Selectman Mudge, to the effect that "young Bailey and his five cronies could tell something about them signs." When he was called upon to make good his assertion, he was considerably more terrified than the Centipedes, though they were ready to sink into their shoes.
With a merry shout the boys threw off their masks, and I was declared a regularly installed member of the R. M. C.
There was a certain slim, mild apothecary in the town, by the name of Meeks.
In the course of ten days I recovered sufficiently from my injuries to attend school, where, for a little while, I was looked upon as a hero, on account of having been blown up.
At our next meeting it was unanimously resolved that Conway's animosity should not be quietly submitted to.
I took ten steps, and halted.
It was those wicked soldiers at the fort!
I naturally shrunk back at this friendly piece of information.
We disliked the widow not so much for her sentimentality as for being the mother of Bill Conway; we disliked Mr. Meeks, not because he was insipid, like his own syrups, but because the widow loved him.
I afterwards had a good deal of sport out of the club, for these initiations, as you may imagine, were sometimes very comical spectacles, especially when the aspirant for centipedal honors happened to be of a timid disposition.
The distraction which prevailed in the classes the week preceding the Fourth had subsided, and nothing remained to indicate the recent festivities, excepting a noticeable want of eyebrows on the part of Pepper Whitcomb and myself.
It spread like wildfire over the town, and, though the mortar and the placard were speedily removed, our triumph was complete.
It was also well known that the Widow Conway had not buried her heart with the late lamented.
The widow carried on a dress-making establishment at her residence on the corner opposite Meeks's drug-store, and kept a wary eye on all the young ladies from Miss Dorothy Gibbs's Female Institute who patronized the shop for soda-water, acid-drops, and slate-pencils.
Chapter Nine--I Become an R. M. C.
This was an honor to which I had long aspired, but, being a new boy, I was not admitted to the fraternity until my character had fully developed itself.
Late one dark Saturday night in September we carried our plan into effect.
Here I encountered five other pallid culprits, who had been fished out of divers coal-bins, garrets, and chicken-coops, to answer the demands of the outraged laws. (Charley Marden had hidden himself in a pile of gravel behind his father's house, and looked like a recently exhumed mummy.)
What don't we make a hero of?
I replied that I was not too weak, in a tone which I intended to be resolute, but which, in spite of me, seemed to come from the pit of my stomach.
The initiation ceremony took place in Fred Langdon's barn, where I was submitted to a series of trials not calculated to soothe the nerves of a timorous boy.
Wanted, a Sempstress!
"Stricken mortal," said a second husky voice, more husky, if possible, than the first, "if you had advanced another inch, you would have disappeared down an abyss three thousand feet deep!"
I have neglected to say that my movements were accompanied by dismal groans from different parts of the grotto.
Whenever a member had reasons for thinking that another member would be unable to attend, he called a meeting.
The trick, as was afterwards proved, had been played by a party of soldiers stationed at the fort in the harbor.
He had sought to inform against us in the stagecoach business; he had volunteered to carry Pettingil's "little bill" for twenty-four icecreams to Charley Marden's father; and now he had caused us to be arraigned before justice Clapham on a charge equally groundless and painful.
By these simple and ingenious measures we kept our treasury in a flourishing condition, sometimes having on hand as much as a dollar and a quarter.
Other boys had passed through the ordeal and lived, why should not I?
For instance, immediately on learning the death of Harry Blake's great-grandfather, I issued a call.
Having tearfully disclaimed to my grandfather all knowledge of the transaction, I disappeared from the family circle, and was not apprehended until late in the afternoon, when the Captain dragged me ignominiously from the haymow and conducted me, more dead than alive, to the office of justice Clapham.
It was a very select society, the object of which I never fathomed, though I was an active member of the body during the remainder of my residence at Rivermouth, and at one time held the onerous position of F. C., First Centipede.
Indeed, her attentions to Mr. Meeks, whose mother she might have been, were of a nature not to be misunderstood, and were not misunderstood by anyone but Mr. Meeks himself.
It is true, there was a tacit understanding among us that the Centipedes were to stand by one another on all occasions, though I don't remember that they did; but further than this we had no purpose, unless it was to accomplish as a body the same amount of mischief which we were sure to do as individuals.
It was about this time that I became a member of the Rivermouth Centipedes, a secret society composed of twelve of the Temple Grammar School boys.
The naughty cleverness of the joke (which I should be sorry to defend) was recognized at once.
It was generally given out that Mr. Meeks had a vague desire to get married, but, being a shy and timorous youth, lacked the moral courage to do so.
This concluded the ceremony.
The whole community was on the broad grin, and our participation in the affair seemingly unsuspected.
Any member had a right to call a meeting.
It's quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger.
"Well, it can't be helped now," I reflected.
I followed shortly after, and, on stepping into the playground, saw my little friend plastered, as it were, up against the fence, and Conway standing in front of him ready to deliver a blow on the upturned, unprotected face, whose gentleness would have stayed any arm but a coward's.
Here's young Bailey!"
Conway, with a piece of court-plaster in the shape of a Maltese cross on his right cheek, and I with the silk patch over my left eye, caused a general titter through the room.
"Tom," said Harry Blake, hesitating.
I might have shielded myself by appealing to Mr. Grimshaw; but no boy in the Temple Grammar School could do that without losing caste. Whether this was just or not doesn't matter a pin, since it was so--a traditionary law of the place.
"I am sure of it."
Bad for Conway.
This last condition was rather a staggerer.
No pupil has a right to take the law into his own hands.
My left cheek, also, was puffed out like a dumpling.
"Ready!"
He reached forward one of his long arms--he had arms like a windmill, that boy--and, grasping me by the hair, tore out quite a respectable handful.
Sometimes while absorbed in study, or on becoming nervous at recitation, he performed the feat unconsciously. Throughout this entire morning his thumbs were observed to be in a chronic state of dislocation, indicating great mental agitation on the part of the owner.
"O, by George!" I cried, reddening at the insult.
"I think you are," I replied, drily, "and I'm sorry I had to thrash you."
"Well?"
In the present instance, I consider every large boy in this school at fault, but as the offence is one of omission rather than commission, my punishment must rest only on the two boys convicted of misdemeanor.
"Rodgers, as I understand it, is your second, Conway?
"Ah, you rascal!" cried the old gentleman, after hearing my story.
"What, here?"
What do they mean to do next?"
He began to think that he was the victim of a nightmare.
The answer came pat to the question.
From the dark hull of the brig broke a flash and a report, and a musket ball cut the water beside them with a chirping noise.
It's liberty we require."
"Yes, and Balloon has had a good deal of public experience.
"Those checked off are all right."
It may not be strictly honest, indeed it is not unless he had some public documents mixed in with the clothes."
Nothing like a son-in-law here in Washington or a brother-in-law. . . .
Balloon is a whole-hearted fellow.
I expect to see the chairman of the committee to-day, Mr. Buckstone."
It seems that they had got hold of the dry-goods box packing story about Balloon, one day, and were talking it over when the Colonel came in.
"He is a handsome old gentleman, and he is gallant for an old man."
"Don't misunderstand me, I don't deny that it is for the interest of all of us that this bill should go through, and it will.
Now, Colonel, can you picture Jefferson, or Washington or John Adams franking their wardrobes through the mails and adding the facetious idea of making the government responsible for the cargo for the sum of one dollar and five cents? Statesmen were dull creatures in those days.
I knew you would only have to show him that it was just and pure, in order to secure his cordial support."
"I hope so; his name will give tone and strength to it.
"Those are my private marks.
"I think I convinced him.
I do not like to use it."
"Oh, no. I told him you were daft about the negro and the philanthropy part of it, as you are."
What we want abroad is good examples of the national character.
And yet when you come to look at it you cannot deny that we would have to go without the services of some of our ablest men, sir, if the country were opposed to--to--bribery.
"That's good, that's good," said the Senator; smiling, and rubbing his hands.
"You didn't mention me?"
Few lands are so blest."
Seemed to be in love . . . . .
They were always talking in the Row, everlastingly gossiping, bantering and sarcastically praising things, and going on in a style which was a curious commingling of earnest and persiflage.
"Yes, yes, but child, all Congressmen do that.
Don't you think so Colonel?"
I went over the whole thing.
The Senator laughed, but rather feebly, and said, "Balloon is always full of his jokes."
Sellers."
I have a much greater admiration for Senator Balloon."
"He seemed to be packing the day I was there.
"Daft is a little strong, Laura.
But he is right at heart.
There . . . .
I'm going to see that chairman."
"Yes, Balloon is a man of parts, there is no denying it"
I think there is more real talent among our public men of to-day than there was among those of old times--a far more fertile fancy, a much happier ingenuity.
You see it stands before three of the Hon.
His rooms were full of dry goods boxes, into which his servant was crowding all manner of old clothes and stuff: I suppose he will paint 'Pub.
"Gave them the outside slabs to fence in the reservation with.
Yes, I am perfectly sure he will vote right now."
But Balloon is not alone, we have many truly noble statesmen in our country's service like Balloon.
It was an ingenious thing and it had a genuine touch of humor about it, too.
He was ex-officio Indian agent, too.
He came.
"Certainly."
"So, you must, he ought to be seen without any delay.
"That is true, Colonel.
"Yes.
"He said that, did he?"
I meant nothing, Balloon talks a little freely sometimes, with men.
I meet them, Sir, every day, and the more I see of them the more I esteem them and the more grateful I am that our institutions give us the opportunity of securing their services.
Uncle Dilworthy . . . .
And he said he felt he couldn't vote for it.
"My daughter," said the Senator, with a grave look, "I trust there was nothing free in his manner?"
He puts on an air of levity sometimes, but there aint a man in the senate knows the scriptures as he does.
The Senate is full of them.
The Colonel wanted to know all about it, and Hicks told him.
"I wanted to see you.
I must find that chairman.
And everybody has 'em. . . .Let's see: . . . sixty-one. . . . with places . . . twenty-five . . . persuaded--it is getting on; . . . . we'll have two-thirds of Congress in time . . .
"Not exactly, he said--shall I tell you what he said?" asked Laura glancing furtively at him.
But you know that I wouldn't touch this bill if it were not for the public good, and for the good of the colored race; much as I am interested in the heirs of this property, and would like to have them succeed."
His term expires next year and I fear we shall lose him."
"Oh, I saw Senator Balloon"
Good-bye, uncle.
"Well Senator Balloon put fifteen cents worth of stamps on each of those seven huge boxes of old clothes, and shipped that ton of second-hand rubbish, old boots and pantaloons and what not through the mails as registered matter!
"Did you see Hopperson last night after the congressional prayer meeting?"
But I have one principle in my public life, which I should like you to keep in mind; it has always been my guide.
He said it was all right, he only wanted a word with you,", continued Laura.
I wonder what Dilworthy does think of me anyway?
"Free?" repeated Laura, with indignation in her face.
And if you pay fifteen cents for registering it, the government will have to take extra care of it and even pay you back its full value if it is lost.
Many a man would have taken the Indian appropriation and devoted the money to feeding and clothing the helpless savages, whose land had been taken from them by the white man in the interests of civilization; but Balloon knew their needs better.
Son-in-law . . . sinecure in the negro institution. . . .
I had to tell him some of the side arrangements, some of the--"
That 'C' stands for 'convinced,' with argument.
And then Hicks went on, with a serious air,
In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart?
Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue?--for brown were his father's eyes, and his father's father's.
"All we make," answered Sam.
Money!
Then the sheriff came and took my mule and corn and furniture--" "Furniture?
If you don't look up you can't get up,'" remarks Jackson, philosophically. And he's gotten up.
"I don't know,--what is it, Sam?"
"I says, 'Look up!
"Nicholas, I saw it... he was to blame, but why do you...
One matter connected with his management sometimes worried Nicholas, and that was his quick temper together with his old hussar habit of making free use of his fists.
She took his hand and kissed it.
Nicholas went out into the porch to question him, and immediately after the elder had given a few replies the sound of cries and blows were heard.
But what is the matter with you, Mary?" he suddenly asked.
She never cried from pain or vexation, but always from sorrow or pity, and when she wept her radiant eyes acquired an irresistible charm.
She could not find fault with Sonya in any way and tried to be fond of her, but often felt ill-will toward her which she could not overcome.
"Mary," he said softly, going up to her, "it will never happen again; I give you my word.
The buildings, begun under straitened circumstances, were more than simple.
It had bare deal floors and was furnished with very simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by their own serf carpenters out of their own birchwood.
The whole summer, from spring sowing to harvest, he was busy with the work on his farm.
The moment Nicholas took her hand she could no longer restrain herself and began to cry.
The country seat at Bald Hills had been rebuilt, though not on the same scale as under the old prince.
She is a sterile flower, you know--like some strawberry blossoms.
Nicholas said nothing.
"Such an insolent scoundrel!" he cried, growing hot again at the mere recollection of him.
The house was spacious and had rooms for the house serfs and apartments for visitors.
In winter, except for business excursions, he spent most of his time at home making himself one with his family and entering into all the details of his children's relations with their mother.
Among other things he spoke of the Bogucharovo elder.
The harmony between him and his wife grew closer and closer and he daily discovered fresh spiritual treasures in her.
She is one that hath not; why, I don't know.
Never," he repeated in a trembling voice like a boy asking for forgiveness.
He had asked Princess Mary to be gentle and kind to his cousin.
She waited on the old countess, petted and spoiled the children, was always ready to render the small services for which she had a gift, and all this was unconsciously accepted from her with insufficient gratitude.
He flushed crimson, left her side, and paced up and down the room.
Among the gentry of the province Nicholas was respected but not liked.
Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don't know, but from her is taken away, and everything has been taken away.
He did not concern himself with the interests of his own class, and consequently some thought him proud and others thought him stupid.
In winter he visited his other villages or spent his time reading.
In autumn he gave himself up to hunting with the same business-like seriousness--leaving home for a month, or even two, with his hunt.
"You should go, go away at once, if you don't feel strong enough to control yourself," she would reply sadly, trying to comfort her husband.
Like a cat, she had attached herself not to the people but to the home.
He would sit in his study with a grave air, reading--a task he first imposed upon himself as a duty, but which afterwards became a habit affording him a special kind of pleasure and a consciousness of being occupied with serious matters.
She thoroughly realized the wrong he had done Sonya, felt herself to blame toward her, and imagined that her wealth had influenced Nicholas' choice.
He understood what she was weeping about, but could not in his heart at once agree with her that what he had regarded from childhood as quite an everyday event was wrong.
"I give you my word of honor it shan't occur again, and let this always be a reminder to me," and he pointed to the broken ring.
Before that, Nicholas had told his wife all that had passed between himself and Sonya, blaming himself and commending her.
"What?" asked Countess Mary, surprised.
On returning to lunch Nicholas went up to his wife, who sat with her head bent low over her embroidery frame, and as usual began to tell her what he had been doing that morning.
But he did forget himself once or twice within a twelvemonth, and then he would go and confess to his wife, and would again promise that this should really be the very last time.
Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had a sort of presentiment that it would not come off.
From the time of his marriage Sonya had lived in his house.
"You know," said Natasha, "you have read the Gospels a great deal--there is a passage in them that just fits Sonya."
"If he had told me he was drunk and did not see...
It really seemed that Sonya did not feel her position trying, and had grown quite reconciled to her lot as a sterile flower.
She seemed to be fond not so much of individuals as of the family as a whole.
The immense house on the old stone foundations was of wood, plastered only inside.
Oh, Mary, don't remind me of it!" and again he flushed.
"Is it just sentimentality, old wives' tales, or is she right?" he asked himself.
Though Countess Mary told Natasha that those words in the Gospel must be understood differently, yet looking at Sonya she agreed with Natasha's explanation.
"I deserve it."
"Today--it was the same affair.
"Mary, you must despise me!" he would say.
"'To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away.' You remember?
The rest of the year life pursued its unbroken routine with its ordinary occupations, and its breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers, provided out of the produce of the estate.
"No, it's only the unexpectedness of it," thought Pierre.
"But no, it can't be!" he thought.
He tried to hide his agitation.
What a strange coincidence!"
Pierre spoke rapidly and with animation.
"I thought he had been killed.
It suffused him, seized him, and enveloped him completely.
The historian evidently decomposes Alexander's power into the components: Talleyrand, Chateaubriand, and the rest--but the sum of the components, that is, the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Stael, and the others, evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon of millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons.
To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the sum of the components must equal the resultant.
This curious contradiction is not accidental.
They see it in what is called culture--in mental activity.
This condition is never observed by the universal historians, and so to explain the resultant forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to the insufficient components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant action.
But Napoleon's power suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of the age.
And, on the other hand, no one can put in a better claim to be the historian than myself.
These thoughts traveled with the rapidity of light through my brain, as at one glance my eye took in the supremacy of beauty and power which seemed to have alighted from the clouds before me. Power, and the contemplation of power, in any absolute incarnation of grandeur or excess, necessarily have the instantaneous effect of quelling all perturbation.
In that respect, therefore, I had an advantage, being upon the spot through the whole course of the affair, for giving a faithful narrative; as I had still more eminently, from the sort of central station which I occupied, with respect to all the movements of the case.
His mode of defending himself, and his general deportment, were marked by the coolest, nay, the most sneering indifference.
Had these various contrivances failed merely in some human and intelligible way, as by bringing the aid too tardily-- still, in such cases, though the danger would no less have been evidently deepened, nobody would have felt any further mystery than what, from the very first, rested upon the persons and the motives of the murderers.
Before the arrival of Mr. Wyndham he had shown himself generous, indeed magnanimous. But never was there so painful an overthrow of a noble nature as manifested itself in him.
I did not witness the first meeting of this mysterious Maximilian and this magnificent Margaret, and do not know whether Margaret manifested that trepidation and embarrassment which distressed so many of her youthful co-rivals; but, if she did, it must have fled before the first glance of the young man's eye, which would interpret, past all misunderstanding, the homage of his soul and the surrender of his heart.
In every point our entertainment was superb; and I remarked that the music was the finest I had heard for years.
Many people stepped forward and checked his arm, uplifted for a repetition of this outrage.
There was an altar, in itself a splendid object, furnished with every article of the most costly material and workmanship, for the private celebration of mass.
"Blending the nature of the star With that of summer skies;"
He rushed forward, with eyes glaring like a tiger's, and leveled a blow at Maximilian.
The very midnight of mysterious awe fell upon all minds.
Mere panic seemed to have mastered her; and she was leaning, unconscious and weeping, upon the shoulder of some gentleman, who was endeavoring to soothe her.
In reality, his wealth and importance, his military honors, and the dignity of his character, as expressed in his manners and deportment, were too eminent to allow of his being treated with less than the highest attention in any society whatever.
Like some bird she seemed, with powers unexercised for soaring and flying, not understood even as yet, and that never until now had found an element of air capable of sustaining her wings, or tempting her to put forth her buoyant instincts.
Ferdinand himself drew his attention to THIS; for he said: "Reverend father! do not you, with the purpose of removing me from temptation, be yourself the instrument for tempting me into a rebellion against the church.
Yet this was left untouched, though suspended in a little oratory that had been magnificently adorned by the elder of the maiden sisters.
Try the effects of absence, though but for a month." The good father even made an overture toward imposing a penance upon him, that would have involved an absence of some duration.
The distance was not great; and within five minutes several persons returned hastily, and cried out to the crowd of ladies that all was true which the young girl had said.
And yet again it was turned against him; for a magistrate asked him how HE happened to know already that nothing had been touched.
These, it was hoped, might furnish a clew to the discovery of one at least among the murderous band.
In particular, there was a crucifix of gold, enriched with jewels so large and rare, that of itself it would have constituted a prize of great magnitude.
But observe the melancholy result: the more certain did these arrangements strike people as remedies for the evil, so much the more effectually did they aid the terror, but, above all, the awe, the sense of mystery, when ten cases of total extermination, applied to separate households, had occurred, in every one of which these precautionary aids had failed to yield the slightest assistance.
It followed, from the spirit in which these half-yearly dances originated, that, being given on the part of the city, every stranger of rank was marked out as a privileged guest, and the hospitality of the community would have been equally affronted by failing to offer or by failing to accept the invitation.
Many ladies fainted; among them Miss Liebenheim--and she would have fallen to the ground but for Maximilian, who sprang forward and caught her in his arms.
The music again began to pour its voluptuous tides through the bounding pulses of the youthful company; again the flying feet of the dancers began to respond to the measures; again the mounting spirit of delight began to fill the sails of the hurrying night with steady inspiration.
Do not you weave snares about my steps; snares there are already, and but too many." The old man sighed, and desisted.
So stood matters among us.
The accomplished guardsman outshone himself in brilliancy; even his melancholy relaxed.
I was at the time, and still am, a professor in that city and university which had the melancholy distinction of being its theater.
Then came--But enough!
She had clasped the golden pillars which supported the altar--had turned perhaps her dying looks upon the crucifix; for there, with one arm still wreathed about the altar foot, though in her agony she had turned round upon her face, did the elder sister lie when the magistrates first broke open the street door.
No tragedy, indeed, among all the sad ones by which the charities of the human heart or of the fireside have ever been outraged, can better merit a separate chapter in the private history of German manners or social life than this unparalleled case.
Unparalleled was the impression made upon our stagnant society; every tongue was busy in discussing the marvelous young Englishman from morning to night; every female fancy was busy in depicting the personal appearance of this gay apparition.
An examination went on that night before the magistrates, but all was dark; although suspicion attached to a negro named Aaron, who had occasionally been employed in menial services by the family, and had been in the house immediately before the murder.
Imagination exhausted itself in vain guesses at the causes which could by possibility have made the poor Weishaupts objects of such hatred to any man.
In the center stood a rustic girl, whose features had been familiar to her for some months.
Nothing, I can take upon myself to assert, was left undone of all that human foresight could suggest, or human ingenuity could accomplish.
Our host was in joyous spirits; proud to survey the splendid company he had gathered under his roof; happy to witness their happiness; elated in their elation.
But the profound melancholy which possessed him, from whatever cause it arose, necessarily chilled the native freedom of his demeanor, unless when it was revived by strength of friendship or of love.
Already had one dance finished; some were pacing up and down, leaning on the arms of their partners; some were reposing from their exertions; when--O heavens! what a shriek! what a gathering tumult!
The very police, instead of offering protection or encouragement, were seized with terror for themselves.
During the French anabasis to Moscow he entered our service, made himself a prodigious favorite with the whole imperial family, and even now is only in his twenty-second year.
Nor was any ridicule thus incurred; for the costliness of the entertainment was understood to be an expression of OFFICIAL pride, done in honor of the city, not as an effort of personal display.
In fact, how could it be otherwise?
On the part of Margaret, it seemed as if a new world had dawned upon her that she had not so much as suspected among the capacities of human experience.
It was poor, maniacal Von Harrelstein, who had been absent in the forest for a week.
The Russian secretary had latterly corresponded with me from a little German town, not more than ninety miles distant; and, as he had special couriers at his service, the negotiations advanced so rapidly that all was closed before the end of September.
"Why callest thou me murderer, and not rather the wrath of God burning after the steps of the oppressor, and cleansing the earth when it is wet with blood?"
I knew familiarly all the parties who were concerned in it, either as sufferers or as agents.
She was long of returning to herself; and, during the agony of his suspense, he stooped and kissed her pallid lips.
He, on the other hand, now first found the realization of his dreams, and for a mere possibility which he had long too deeply contemplated, fearing, however, that in his own case it might prove a chimera, or that he might never meet a woman answering the demands of his heart, he now found a corresponding reality that left nothing to seek.
"Lead us not into temptation!" said his confessor to him in my hearing (for, though Prussians, the Von Harrelsteins were Roman Catholics), "lead us not into temptation!--that is our daily prayer to God.
I believe that he had not himself suspected the strength of his passion; and the sole resource for him, as I said often, was to quit the city--to engage in active pursuits of enterprise, of ambition, or of science.
Nobody could now be unprepared; and yet the tragedies, henceforward, which passed before us, one by one, in sad, leisurely, or in terrific groups, seemed to argue a lethargy like that of apoplexy in the victims, one and all.
The circumstances were such as to leave every man in utter perplexity as to the presumption for and against him.
From her superior height she overlooked all the ladies at the point where she stood.
Margaret, on reviving, was confounded at finding herself so situated amid a great crowd; and yet the prudes complained that there was a look of love exchanged between herself and Maximilian, that ought not to have escaped her in such a situation.
All went happily.
The horror, the perfect frenzy of fear, which seized upon the town after that experience, baffles all attempt at description.
That is one of the luxuries attached to love; all men cede their places with pleasure; women make way.
We both bowed.
The masterpieces of Scotch historic fiction that have thrilled, entertained and uplifted millions of his fellow-men are a glorious monument on the field of a seeming failure.
"How will I let that poverty or wealth affect me?
For over three years he had studied tirelessly, with all energies concentrated on one aim,--to spread the gospel in China.
Hundreds of captains, sailing over the waters of the earth, noted the logs, in the Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean, in the South Seas-- for into all waters did these venturesome ones travel.
The art failure that cast him into the depths of poverty unified with marvellous intensity all the finer elements of his nature.
The loss of the Joggins raft was not a real failure, for it led to one of the great discoveries in modern marine geography and navigation.
But the discovery of America was a greater success than was any finding of a "back-door" to India.
But their failure to transmute the baser metals into gold resulted in the birth of chemistry.
These observations were then carefully collated, systematized and tabulated, and discoveries were made as to the course of ocean currents that otherwise would have been impossible.
His ingenious reasoning and experiment led him to believe that by sailing westward he would reach India.
The chief of the Hydrographic Department at Washington heard of the failure of the experiment, and at once sent word to shipmasters the world over, urging them to watch carefully for these logs which he described; and to note the precise location of each in latitude and longitude and the time the observation was made.
Life is a successive unfolding of success from failure.
Whether man has had wealth or poverty, failure or success, counts for little when it is past.
It ofttimes requires heroic courage to face fruitless effort, to take up the broken strands of a life-work, to look bravely toward the future, and proceed undaunted on our way.
It is experience leading man to higher things; it is the revelation of a way, a path hitherto unknown to us.
His brush strokes, put on in the early morning hours before going to his menial duties as a railway porter, in the dusk like that perpetuated on his canvas,--meant strength, food and medicine for the dying wife he adored.
When the novel craft neared New York and success seemed assured, a terrible storm arose.
As we trace each one, back, step by step, through the genealogy of circumstances, we will see how logical has been the course of our joy and success, from sorrow and failure, and that what gives us most happiness to-day is inextricably connected with what once caused us sorrow.
In the fury of the tempest, the iron bands snapped like icicles and the angry waters scattered the logs far and wide.
Many of our failures sweep us to greater heights of success, than we ever hoped for in our wildest dreams.
Failure is often the turning-point, the pivot of circumstance that swings us to higher levels.
This rare spiritual unity, this purging of all the dross of triviality as he passed through the furnace of poverty, trial, and sorrow gave eloquence to his brush and enabled him to paint as never before,--as no prosperity would have made possible.
High ideals, noble efforts will make seeming failures but trifles, they need not dishearten us; they should prove sources of new strength.
The failure spurred him to almost super-human effort.
Then word came from China that the "opium war" would make it folly to attempt to enter the country.
Some years ago, it was proposed to send logs from Canada to New York, by a new method.
There is but one question for him to answer, to face boldly and honestly as an individual alone with his conscience and his destiny:
Hundreds of reports were made, covering a period of weeks and months.
Birds cannot fly best with the wind but against it; ships do not progress in calm, when the sails flap idly against the unstrained masts.
Disappointment and failure did not long daunt him; he offered himself as missionary to Africa,--and he was accepted.
But what, to our eyes, may seem hopeless failure is often but the dawning of a greater success.
It may not be financial success, it may not be fame; it may be new draughts of spiritual, moral or mental inspiration that will change us for all the later years of our life. Life is not really what comes to us, but what we get from it.
His glorious failure to reach China opened a whole continent to light and truth.
The turning of the face of Time shows all things in a wondrously illuminated and satisfying perspective.
If that trial or deprivation has left me better, truer, nobler, then,--poverty has been riches, failure has been a success.
Our highest hopes, are often destroyed to prepare us for better things. The failure of the caterpillar is the birth of the butterfly; the passing of the bud is the becoming of the rose; the death or destruction of the seed is the prelude to its resurrection as wheat.
His study proved an ideal preparation for his labors as physician, explorer, teacher and evangel in the wilds of Africa.
Many a man is thankful to-day that some petty success for which he once struggled, melted into thin air as his hand sought to clutch it. Failure is often the rock-bottom foundation of real success.
May this not be one of Nature's gentle showings to man of the times when he grows best, of the darkness of failure that is evolving into the sunlight of success.
This was the success of failure, a wondrous process of Nature for the highest growth,--a mighty lesson of comfort, strength, and encouragement if man would only realize and accept it.
The best men in the world, those who have made the greatest real successes look back with serene happiness on their failures.
Let us fear only the failure of not living the right as we see it, leaving the results to the guardianship of the Infinite.
When David Livingstone had supplemented his theological education by a medical course, he was ready to enter the missionary field.
If we think of any supreme moment of our lives, any great success, any one who is dear to us, and then consider how we reached that moment, that success, that friend, we will be surprised and strengthened by the revelation.
Failure is one of God's educators.
The ingenious plan of Mr. Joggins was to bind great logs together by cables and iron girders and to tow the cargo as a raft.
The rocky way may prove safer than the slippery path of smoothness.
In discovering America Columbus failed absolutely.
Then begin to talk about it.
Good cheer attracts good luck. Cheer up.
I will increase it unto the Perfect Day." Grow in each day, and make each day grow.
Rebuild destroyed tissue. Keep the system free of waste.
It is fresh from the hand of God.
Think its time to droop.
That's the question. Otherwise Briggs will get next week, and he will have to wait until September--when the weather is often uncertain.
But to tell the truth, neither is thinking of the mechanical duties in hand.
Jerking them back to the present comes the puffy little shop-walker, with a paper in his hand.
Near him is an apprentice, apprenticed to the same high calling of draper's assistant, a ruddy, red-haired lad in a very short tailless black coat and a very high collar, who is deliberately unfolding and refolding some patterns of cretonne.
Proceeding up the left leg in a spiral manner, an unnatural hardness and redness would have been discovered on the upper aspect of the calf, and above the knee and on the inner side, an extraordinary expanse of bruised surface, a kind of closely stippled shading of contused points.
"Why, cycling, of course."
"Avoid running over dogs, Hoopdriver, whatever you do.
He is naturally of a sanguine disposition.
You mind those things, and nothing very much can't happen to you, Hoopdriver--you take my word."
The assistant is dreaming of the delicious time--only four hours off now--when he will resume the tale of his bruises and abrasions.
"Well, all I hope, Mr. Hoopdriver, is that you'll get fine weather," said Miss Howe.
The shop-walker brings up parallel to the counter.
It's fatal," a voice that came from round a fitful glow of light, was saying.
The right leg would be found to be bruised in a marvellous manner all about and under the knee, and particularly on the interior aspect of the knee.
"Good-night, old man."
Literature is revelation. Modern literature is indecorous revelation.
"They're going fairly well, sir.
"You're never going to ride that dreadful machine of yours, day after day?" said Miss Howe of the Costume Department.
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Thus even in a shop assistant does the warmth of manhood assert itself, and drive him against all the conditions of his calling, against the counsels of prudence and the restrictions of his means, to seek the wholesome delights of exertion and danger and pain.
But real literature, as distinguished from anecdote, does not concern itself with superficial appearances alone.
Then you descry dimly through the dusk the central figure of this story sitting by the roadside and rubbing his leg at some new place, and his friend, sympathetic (but by no means depressed), repairing the displacement of the handle-bar.
To which initial fact (among others) we shall come again in the end.
III
Even in literature one must know where to draw the line.
"You stow it," said Mr. Hoopdriver, looking hard and threateningly at the junior apprentice, and suddenly adding in a tone of bitter contempt,--"Jampot."
Blisters on the hands are eloquent of the nervous clutch of the wavering rider.
At supper that night, holiday talk held undisputed sway.
One large bruise on the shin is even more characteristic of the 'prentice cyclist, for upon every one of them waits the jest of the unexpected treadle.
Hoopdriver pulls at his skimpy moustache.
He would lapse into silence for a minute, save perhaps for a curse or so at his pipe, and then break out with an entirely different set of tips.
All drapers have to be, or else they could never have the faith they show in the beauty, washability, and unfading excellence of the goods they sell you.
You try at least to walk your machine in an easy manner, and whack!--you are rubbing your shin.
Hoopdriver rode off into Dreamland on his machine, and was scarcely there before he was pitched back into the world of sense again.--Something--what was it?
Under which happier circumstances you might--if of an observing turn of mind and not too much of a housewife to be inhuman--have given the central figure of this story less cursory attention.
It is the duty of the earnest author to tell you what you would not have seen--even at the cost of some blushes.
Now if you had noticed anything about him, it would have been chiefly to notice how little he was noticeable.
So, I say, he would have presented himself to your superficial observation.
The central figure of our story is now going along behind the counter, a draper indeed, with your purchases in his arms, to the warehouse, where the various articles you have selected will presently be packed by the senior porter and sent to you.
You mind just a few little things like that, Hoopdriver, and nothing much can't happen to you--you take my word."
"Any particular time when you want your holidays?" he asks.
At other times Hoopdriver might have further resented the satirical efforts of the apprentice, but his mind was too full of the projected Tour to admit any petty delicacies of dignity.
So out of innocence we ripen.
"And not come any nasty croppers."
"No--Don't want them too late, sir, of course."
He inclines rather to street fighting against revolutionaries--because then she could see him from the window.
"I'm getting fairly safe upon it now," he told Miss Howe.
But enough of these revelations.
You mind just a few little things like that--"
"Right you are!" said Hoopdriver.
"I'm going for a Cycling Tour.
Never lose control of the machine, and always sound the bell on every possible opportunity.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
Never let the machine buckle--there was a man killed only the other day through his wheel buckling--don't scorch, don't ride on the foot-path, keep your own side of the road, and if you see a tramline, go round the corner at once, and hurry off into the next county--and always light up before dark.
"I am," said Hoopdriver as calmly as possible, pulling at the insufficient moustache.
"Have the machine thoroughly well oiled," said Briggs, "carry one or two lemons with you, don't tear yourself to death the first day, and sit upright.
The decision comes at last. "That'll do me very well," said Mr. Hoopdriver, terminating the pause.
This is a LibriVox recording.
He had indeed been bumped and battered at an extraordinary number of points.
Along the South Coast."
And our first examination of the draper reveals beneath his draperies--the man!
The die is cast.
Let us approach the business with dispassionate explicitness.
So far we may proceed with our details. Fired by these discoveries, an investigator might perhaps have pursued his inquiries further--to bruises on the shoulders, elbows, and even the finger joints, of the central figure of our story.
Let us assume something of the scientific spirit, the hard, almost professorial tone of the conscientious realist.
The apprentice becomes extremely active.
And so to our revelation.
And the thing that you would not have seen about this young man, and the thing of the greatest moment to this story, the thing that must be told if the book is to be written, was--let us face it bravely--the Remarkable Condition of this Young Man's Legs.
One might fancy that he had been sitting with his nether extremities in some complicated machinery, a threshing-machine, say, or one of those hay-making furies.
His face is eloquent of conflicting considerations.
The revelation is made.
On the internal aspect of the right ankle of this young man you would have observed, ladies and gentlemen, a contusion and an abrasion; on the internal aspect of the left ankle a contusion also; on its external aspect a large yellowish bruise.
Two bruises on that place mark a certain want of aptitude in learning, such as one might expect in a person unused to muscular exercise.
Can he learn it in a week?
He was of a pallid complexion, hair of a kind of dirty fairness, greyish eyes, and a skimpy, immature moustache under his peaked indeterminate nose. His features were all small, but none ill-shaped.
Briggs had never been on a cycle in his life, but he felt Hoopdriver's inexperience and offered such advice as occurred to him.
"I?" said Hoopdriver when the question came to him.
Our strength returned promptly, and when I looked around, I saw that we were alone on the platform.
"I'll eat it."
"Yes," I replied, "because we're going in the direction of the sun, and here the sun is due north."
"Not too much, to be candid with master.
"Which I'll take advantage of," the Canadian shot back.
All at once, carried away by its frightful excess load, the Nautilus sank into the waters like a cannonball, in other words, dropping as if in a vacuum!
"Yes!" I said.
Instead of breathing it themselves, they had saved it for me, and while they were suffocating, they poured life into me drop by drop!
Had we risen to the surface of the waves? Had we cleared the Ice Bank?
The next day, March 26, I returned to my miner's trade, working to remove the fifth meter.
For an instant I was gripped by despair. My pick nearly slipped from my hands.
Suddenly I regained consciousness.
We were the Ice Bank's prisoners! The Canadian banged a table with his fearsome fist.
"And we have oxygen in the air tanks for only two days."
I tried to push the device away. They held my hands, and for a few moments I could breathe luxuriously.
We tilted.
Meanwhile, motionless and silent, Captain Nemo stood lost in thought. An idea visibly crossed his mind.
Aren't you aware that this force could be the instrument of our salvation rather than our destruction?"
We've got to get there first, that's all."
I would be dead first!
"Oh, if only I didn't have to breathe, to leave more air for master!"
"The first way," he went on, "is death by crushing.
Headaches and staggering fits of dizziness made me reel like a drunk.
Oh, if only we had the chemical methods that would enable us to drive out this noxious gas! There was no lack of oxygen.
An apt remark.
"It's worth trying!" I said resolutely.
Some moments later, we saw a dozen crewmen set foot on the shelf of ice, among them Ned Land, easily recognized by his tall figure. Captain Nemo was with them.
My eyes flew toward the clock.
He held my hand, he kept encouraging me, and I even heard him mutter:
Brought to full speed, the propeller made the sheet-iron hull tremble down to its rivets, and we sped northward.
"Borings will tell us that.
He could still think, plan, and act.
"Without taking into account," Ned answered, "that once we're out of this damned prison, we'll still be cooped up beneath the Ice Bank, without any possible contact with the open air!"
"He won't turn down your assistance.
"So let's try it, professor."
For several hours that day, I wielded my pick doggedly. The work kept me going.
After I monitored the operation's progress, double-checking it with many inspections, I told the captain, "It's working."
We must counteract this solidification. We must hold it in check.
"Boiling water!" he muttered.
And yet nobody prolonged his underwater work beyond the time allotted him.
"I think so," he answered me.
Shortage of Air
Meanwhile, after twelve hours had gone by, we had removed from the outlined surface area a slice of ice only one meter thick, hence about 600 cubic meters. Assuming the same work would be accomplished every twelve hours, it would still take five nights and four days to see the undertaking through to completion.
The pressure gauge soon indicated an ascending movement.
Our full electric power was then put on the pumps, which instantly began to expel water from the ballast tanks. After a few minutes we had checked our fall.
Obviously they would come together before the Nautilus could break free.
Before digging into the ice, the captain had to obtain borings, to insure working in the best direction.
"I know," he told me in that calm tone the most dreadful outlook couldn't change.
During the night, in line with my forecasts, a new one-meter slice was removed from this immense socket.
Just then the whole crew returned on board, and the double outside door was closed.
What was the point of this digging if I was to die smothered and crushed by this water turning to stone, a torture undreamed of by even the wildest savages! I felt like I was lying in the jaws of a fearsome monster, jaws irresistibly closing.
Where was Captain Nemo?
The water struck me as unusually cold, but I warmed up promptly while wielding my pick.
But when I returned on board, I mentioned this serious complication to Captain Nemo.
That was one degree gained. Two hours later the thermometer gave only -4 degrees.
"Sir," the Canadian replied, "this is no time to bore you with my complaints.
It brought tears to my eyes to hear him say these words.
This inexplicable individual acted like a mathematics professor working out a problem for his pupils.
"Boiling water?" I exclaimed.
The second is death by asphyxiation.
The Nautilus slowly settled and rested on the icy bottom at a depth of 350 meters, the depth at which the lower shelf of ice lay submerged.
Therefore, let's concentrate on our chances of being crushed or asphyxiated."
CHAPTER 16
Accordingly, that day it kept getting worse.
The Nautilus was traveling at the frightful speed of forty miles per hour.
It was writhing in the waters.
I'm ready to do anything I can for the common good."
For who could predict the minimum time we would need to free ourselves?
Some crewmen were at their last gasp.
My lungs were gasping in their quest for that enkindling elastic fluid required for breathing, now growing scarcer and scarcer.
"Which one?" I asked.
Could we break through it?
He had subdued physical pain with moral strength.
"As for asphyxiation, captain," I replied, "that isn't a cause for alarm, because the air tanks are full."
"We've escaped being crushed. Now we have only asphyxiation to fear."
Arms grew weary, hands were rubbed raw, but who cared about exhaustion, what difference were wounds? Life-sustaining air reached our lungs!
To impose on Christians they used Christian words for doctrines that were thoroughly unchristian.
And yet in her heart of hearts there was a deep conviction that no sad news of his life at Carthage could shake.
The custom was abolished not long after on account of the abuses which had arisen, but Monica observed it to the end.
The sum required was offered with such delicacy that it could not be declined.
On the threshold of that other world Monica bade farewell to her husband, and one more soul that she had won for Christ went out into a glorious eternity.
It was her love, her patience, that had done it all.
Then Monica would gently remind him that with God's help the hardest things were possible, and they would kneel and pray together, and Patricius would take heart again for the fight.
She had used to be violent and headstrong like himself, resentful and implacable in her dislikes, but now she was more like Monica than like him.
His own feet were not firm enough in the ways of Christ to enable him to stretch a steadying hand to another.
He supposed it was because she was so full of sympathy, and always made allowances.
Every day the germs of a noble nature that had lain so long dormant within him were gaining strength and life.
The old life, with all its stains, had passed from him in those cleansing waters; the new life was at hand.
Augustine was sure to bring glory on his native town, said Romanianus; it was an honour to be allowed to help in his education.
It was not schoolboy greed that prompted the theft, but the pure delight of doing evil, of tricking the owner of the garden.
He was scarcely likely to be astonished at the fact that his son's boyhood was rather like what his own had been.
The beautiful prayers of the Church had gone down with the departing soul to the threshold of the new life, and had followed it into eternity.
The want of principle and of honour in most of them disgusted him in his better moments; nevertheless he was content to enjoy himself in their company.
Her tears fell on his face, her loving arms supported him; her sweet voice, broken with weeping, spoke words of hope and comfort.
The bloody combats between men and beasts, the gladiatorial shows that delighted the Romans, were free to all who chose to frequent the amphitheatre of Carthage.
Was that indeed his mother, he asked himself, that gentle, patient old woman, so thoughtful for others, so ready to give up her own will?
She had passed away smiling, with their hands in hers, and the name of Jesus on her lips.
There were moments when he loathed it all, and longed for the old life, with its innocent pleasures; but it is hard to turn back on the downhill road.
She was like the sunshine, penetrating everywhere with its light and warmth.
Patricius was altogether unable to give Augustine the help that he needed.
He thanked her for all that she had been to him, all that she had shown him, all that she had done for him.
All his efforts had not succeeded in saving the sum required for his first year at Carthage.
He was careful to keep such escapades a secret from his mother, but Monica was uneasy, knowing what might be expected from the companions her son had chosen.
Once more he asked her to forgive him all the pain he had caused her, all that he had made her suffer.
Every day his soul was opening more and more to the understanding of spiritual things, while Monica watched the transformation with a heart that overflowed with gratitude and love.
Monica was devoting herself heart and soul to the old woman, who clung to her with tender affection, and was never happy in her absence.
He tells us how he went one night with a band of these wild companions to rob the fruit-tree of a poor neighbour.
A wonderful peace possessed him.
There was neither discipline nor order in the schools.
It was at this moment that Romanianus, a wealthy and honourable citizen of Tagaste, who knew the poverty of his friend, came forward generously and put his purse at Patricius's disposal.
Perhaps a certain dignity in the young man's bearing, or perhaps his brilliant gifts, won their respect, for he surpassed them all in intelligence, and speedily outstripped them in class.
He did not deceive himself. He spoke of his approaching death to Monica, and asked her to help him to make a worthy preparation for Baptism, which he desired to receive as soon as possible.
The ceremony over, he turned to his wife and smiled.
"My God," he cried in later years, "with what bitter gall didst Thou in Thy great mercy sprinkle those pleasures of mine!" He could not forget; and at Tagaste his mother was weeping and praying for her son.
If it was second only to Rome for its culture and its schools, it almost rivalled Rome in its corruption.
She had a wonderful gift for giving people courage; Patricius had noticed that before.
He was even ashamed, when they boasted of their misdoings, to seem more innocent than they, and would pretend to be worse than he really was, lest his prestige should suffer in their eyes.
His mother was failing fast; the end could not be far off.
There was the wild excitement, too, of the daring; the fear that they might be caught in the act.
They went by the name of "smashers" or "upsetters," from their habit of raiding the schools of professors whose teaching they did not approve, and breaking everything on which they could lay hands.
The old boyish laziness had given way to a real zeal for learning and thirst after knowledge. The idle life at home was certainly the worst thing for him.
His mother had already shown him the joys of a Christian deathbed.
She seemed close to them still in the light of that wonderful new Faith, and to be waiting for them in their everlasting home.
To go on trying was possible even for him, although he knew he could not always promise himself success.
And then she seemed to think--to be sure, even--that if one went on trying, failures did not matter, God did not mind them; and that was a very comforting reflection for poor weak people like himself.
Augustine was eager for knowledge and eager for enjoyment.
Self-conquest was the hardest task that he had ever undertaken, and sometimes he almost lost heart, and was inclined to give it up altogether.
The wealthier students gloried in their bad reputation.
They treated new-comers with coarse brutality, but Augustine seems in some manner to have escaped their enmity.
The Christian ideals of life and conduct were new to him as yet; the old pagan ways seemed only natural.
They were young men of fashion who were capable of anything, and who were careful to let others know it.
Patricius prayed with her; he understood at last.
Patricius watched them together, and marvelled at the effects of the grace of Baptism.
It was laden with pears, but they were not very good; they did not care to eat them, and threw them to the pigs.
No, she must not grieve, he told her; the parting would be but for a little while, the meeting for all eternity.
It was her only hope now, as with prayers and tears she besought of Him to watch over her son.
She had been his angel, he said; he owed all his joy to her.
But Monica's happiness was to be short-lived, for it seemed that Patricius would soon rejoin his mother.
The sorrows of the past were all forgotten in the joy of the present, that happy union at the feet of Christ.
There was but one cause for sadness--Patricius's health was failing.
But Monica did not know Carthage.
Hard work and the pursuit of wisdom might steady his wild nature and bring him back to God.
That was Monica's way, though; her sweetness and patience seemed to be catching.
He was standing, it is true, on the threshold of the Church, but her teaching was not yet clear to him.
Catechumen though he was, the old temper would often flash out still.
He had discovered that it would cost a good deal more than he had at first supposed, and it was difficult to see where the money was to come from.
With the simplicity and trustfulness of a child, he looked to her for guidance, and did all that she desired.
She had shown him the beauty of goodness and made him love it.
Such plays as the Romans delighted in, impossible to describe, were acted in the theatre.
Monica was almost glad to see her son depart.
But on the third night, hearing a noise, she wakened, and saw by the light of the moon the Princess Florina sitting at the window with a beautiful Blue Bird, who warbled in her ear and touched her gently with his beak.
"Oh, Florina, come to my help!" sighed he, "But she is dead, I know, and I will die also."
"My pretty maiden, what are you doing here all alone?"
Could he have really heard her, and been indifferent to her sorrow; or had he not heard her at all? She determined to buy another night in the Chamber of Echoes; but she had no more jewels to tempt Troutina; so she broke the third egg.
He persuaded King Charming that, overcome with fear and cruel treatment, Florina must have betrayed him.
The little woman listened attentively, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, became, instead of an old woman, a beautiful fairy.
Then he rose up, dressed himself hastily, and went in search of her.
"Why can I not return and govern it as before?"
As for King Charming and Queen Florina, delivered out of all their sorrows, and given to one another, their joy was quite inexpressible, and it lasted to the end of their lives.
"Good mother," replied the queen, "I have too many troubles to be pleasant company for anybody."
The third day, one of the palace valets, passing her by, said, "You stupid peasant-girl, it is well the king takes opium every night, or you would disturb him by that terrible sobbing of yours."
"Innocent, indeed!" cried the queen, and began to search the room.
When this news reached Troutina, she ran to the Chamber of Echoes, and there beheld her beautiful rival, whom she had so cruelly afflicted. But the moment she opened her mouth to speak, her wicked tongue was silenced for ever; for the magician turned her into a trout, which he flung out of the window into the stream that flowed through the castle garden.
"I have leisure enough: I may just as well spend some of it in adorning myself, instead of bemoaning my misfortune--innocent as I am."
In it she found all King Charming's presents--diamonds, rubies, emeralds, amethysts--in short, jewels without end.
Then the populace stormed the tower, rescued the sick and almost dying princess, and crowned her as their queen.
For more than a month she waited; but the serving-maid watched her night and day.
Out of it came a chariot of polished steel, inlaid with gold, drawn by six green mice, the coachman being a rose-coloured rat, and the postilion a grey one.
Despairing of ever climbing it, she sank down at the foot, prepared to die there, when she bethought herself of the eggs.
Meantime, from the window the Blue Bird, who had the eye of a lynx, sang aloud, "Beware, Florina!"
Under these circumstances the magician thought it best to agree with Soussio that King Charming should be restored to his kingdom and his natural shape for six months, on condition that Troutina should remain in his palace, and that he should try to like her and marry her.
"These are pretty trinkets," said Troutina; and going up to the king she asked him what he thought of them.
"Blue Bird, Blue Bird, Come to my side."
"As you will; your bargains are cheap enough," replied Troutina, laughing: and when she laughed she showed teeth like the tusks of a wild boar.
The riot became so dangerous that Troutina and her mother fled away to the fairy Soussio.
If not, he was to become again a Blue Bird.
"Incomparable Florina, the king you seek is no longer a bird; my sister Soussio has restored him to his proper shape, and he reigns in his own kingdom.
"Then if you will promise to-night to keep the opium cup out of his way, these pearls and diamonds," and she took a handful of them from her sack, "shall assuredly be yours."
The king her father died, and the people, who knew she was his heir, began to inquire, with one accord, where was the Princess Florina?
"Let me see," said she, "if the fairy has deceived me or not." So she broke one, and inside it were little hooks of gold, which she fitted on her feet and hands, and by means of which she climbed the mountain with ease.
Next night it happened the same, till they began to hope that the waiting-maid, who seemed to enjoy her sleep so much, would sleep every night to come.
Meantime Florina, overcome with grief, fell dangerously sick, and in her sickness she kept singing, day and night, her little song--
The two rushed upon her like furies.
She walked eight days and nights without stopping, and then came to a mountain made entirely of ivory, and nearly perpendicular.
When the princess learnt this she was in great grief.
"In captivity," repeated the queen.
"You!" cried the servants mocking.
Besides, he is going to-morrow to the temple with the Princess Troutina, whom he has at last agreed to marry."
She neither ate nor slept, but rose with the dawn, and pushed her way through the guards to the temple, where she saw two thrones, one for King Charming, and the other for Troutina.
The magician, who was King Charming's friend, went to the fairy Soussio, whom he knew, for they had quarrelled and made it up again, as fairies and magicians do, many times within the last five or six hundred years.
The king recognised the voice of his best friend: whereupon the magician took him out of the hollow tree, healed his wounds, and heard all his history.
They arrived shortly; he more charming and she more repulsive than ever.
"These bracelets are worth half my kingdom; I did not think there had been more than one pair in the world."
If she descends upon our mirror her first footstep will crack it into a thousand pieces."
The queen had caused sharp knives to be hung outside the hollow of the tree: he flew against them and cut his feet and wings, till he dropped down, covered with blood.
Who would obey a Blue Bird?"
When Troutina went to walk in the palace garden, Florina awaited her in a green alley, and made the mice gallop, and the ladies and gentlemen bow, till the princess was delighted, and ready to buy the curiosity at any price.
One day, stopping beside a fountain, she let her hair fall loose, and dipped her weary feet in the cool water, when an old woman, bent, and leaning on a stick, came by.
He could not make out whose voice it was, or whence it came, but it somehow reminded him of his dearest Florina, whom he had never ceased to love.
The obedient pigeons did so, flying day and night till they reached the city gates; when the queen dismissed them with a sweet kiss, which was worth more than her crown.
"Little peasant-girl, your eyes are not half good enough to see the king.
But no Blue Bird appeared.
Troutina, charmed with this marvellous novelty, bought it at the same price as the rest, adding generously a small piece of gold.
How her heart beat as she entered, and begged to see the king!
I shall at least be safe there for the five years that are to be endured."
"What have I done to thee, that thou shouldst forget me and marry Troutina?" sobbed she; and the king, who this time was wide awake, heard her.
The spy listened and heard all their conversation, very much astonished that a princess could be so fond of a mere bird.
Then she departed by night, and alone, to go over the world in search of her Blue Bird.
This family likeness may be traced in the fairy tales of all countries.
Then the poor deceived princess opened her little window, and sang her usual song--
But at this moment appeared the friendly enchanter, with a fairy still greater than Soussio, the one who had given Florina the four eggs. They declared that their united power was stronger than Soussio's, and that the lovers should be married without further delay.
They had need, for the charm of the mirror was that each saw herself therein, not as she was, but as she wished to be; and the grimaces they made were enough to cause a person to die of laughter.
"I found them," replied Florina, and refused to answer more.
"I fear," replied his friend, "that the thing is difficult.
"Now, my pretty pigeons," said she, "will you convey me to the palace of King Charming?"
She received him civilly, and asked him what he wanted. He tried to make a bargain with her but could effect nothing, unless King Charming would consent to marry Troutina.
Meanwhile the Queen Florina, in a peasant's dress, with a straw hat on her head, and a canvas sack on her shoulder, began her journey: sometimes on horseback, sometimes on foot, sometimes by sea, sometimes by land, wandering; evermore after her beloved King Charming.
Isabel's originality was that she gave one an impression of having intentions of her own.
"I shall always tell you," her aunt answered, "whenever I see you taking what seems to me too much liberty."
If her good-humour flagged at moments it was not because she thought herself ill-used, but because she suddenly felt sorry for Ralph.
"Ah, he has a good excuse for everything!" cried Lord Warburton, still with his sonorous mirth.
She was very critical herself--it was incidental to her age, her sex and her nationality; but she was very sentimental as well, and there was something in Mrs. Touchett's dryness that set her own moral fountains flowing.
Lord Warburton not only spent the night at Gardencourt, but he was persuaded to remain over the second day; and when the second day was ended he determined to postpone his departure till the morrow.
"You were very right to tell me then," said Isabel.
"Only I beg it shall not be before midnight."
Ralph had always taken for granted that his father would survive him--that his own name would be the first grimly called.
It devolved upon him of course to do the honours of the place.
It's very pleasant to be so well treated where one had least looked for it.
"Can't I stay with my own cousin?" Isabel enquired.
She would be as American as it pleased him to regard her, and if he chose to laugh at her she would give him plenty of occupation. She defended England against his mother, but when Ralph sang its praises on purpose, as she said, to work her up, she found herself able to differ from him on a variety of points.
Ralph meanwhile handed Isabel her candlestick.
If the manoeuvre should succeed there would be little hope of any great resistance.
He thought a great deal about her; she was constantly present to his mind. At a time when his thoughts had been a good deal of a burden to him her sudden arrival, which promised nothing and was an open-handed gift of fate, had refreshed and quickened them, given them wings and something to fly for.
"I don't know what you care for; I don't think you care for anything. You don't really care for England when you praise it; you don't care for America even when you pretend to abuse it."
"Pray do; but I don't say I shall always think your remonstrance just."
"I don't understand it, but I'm very glad to know it.
It was but half-hospitality to let her remain outside; to punish him for which Isabel administered innumerable taps with the ferule of her straight young wit.
CHAPTER VII
The two young persons, after spending an hour on the river, strolled back to the house and perceived Lord Warburton sitting under the trees and engaged in conversation, of which even at a distance the desultory character was appreciable, with Mrs. Touchett.
"Not in the least.
"I'll light your candle; do let me light your candle, Miss Archer!" Lord Warburton exclaimed.
Ralph will light my candle," Isabel gaily engaged.
"I'm not aware that Lord Warburton is your cousin."
During this period he addressed many of his remarks to Isabel, who accepted this evidence of his esteem with a very good grace.
She flattered herself that she was a very just woman, and had mastered the sovereign truth that nothing in this world is got for nothing.
Isabel enjoyed it largely and, handling the reins in a manner which approved itself to the groom as "knowing," was never weary of driving her uncle's capital horses through winding lanes and byways full of the rural incidents she had confidently expected to find; past cottages thatched and timbered, past ale-houses latticed and sanded, past patches of ancient common and glimpses of empty parks, between hedgerows made thick by midsummer.
I'll come up in half an hour."
But if he had expected anything of a flare he was disappointed, for the girl simply laughed a little, nodded good-night and withdrew accompanied by her aunt.
"I didn't make your country, my lord," Mrs. Touchett said majestically. "I must take it as I find it."
"I've been rowing a little," Isabel answered; "but how should you know it?"
He had been watching her; it had seemed to him her temper was involved--an accident that might be interesting.
Isabel always felt an impulse to pull out the pins; not that she imagined they inflicted any damage on the tough old parchment, but because it seemed to her her aunt might make better use of her sharpness.
Above-stairs the two ladies separated at Mrs. Touchett's door.
After he had known her for a week he quite made up his mind to this, and every day he felt a little more sure.
Mr. Touchett was confined to his chair, and his wife's position was that of rather a grim visitor; so that in the line of conduct that opened itself to Ralph duty and inclination were harmoniously mixed.
"Oh no; they're not all like him."
She had, however, a peculiar taste; she liked to receive cards.
Her cousin used, as the phrase is, to chaff her; he very soon established with her a reputation for treating everything as a joke, and he was not a man to neglect the privileges such a reputation conferred.
Gardencourt was not dull; the place itself was sovereign, her uncle was more and more a sort of golden grandfather, and Ralph was unlike any cousin she had ever encountered--her idea of cousins having tended to gloom.
You may say that doesn't make them very numerous!
He bethought himself of course that it had been a small kindness to his father to wish that, of the two, the active rather than the passive party should know the felt wound; he remembered that the old man had always treated his own forecast of an early end as a clever fallacy, which he should be delighted to discredit so far as he might by dying first.
"Very likely not.
These were nice questions, but Isabel's arrival put a stop to his puzzling over them.
My point of view, thank God, is personal!"
Little, however, for the present, had come of his offers, and it may be confided to the reader that if the young man delayed to carry them out it was because he found the labour of providing for his companion by no means so severe as to require extraneous help.
Isabel rose, blushing.
"I keep a band of music in my ante-room," he said once to her.
Mrs. Touchett gave a little look of despair and sat down again.
It's finer than the finest work of art--than a Greek bas-relief, than a great Titian, than a Gothic cathedral.
"Yes, I think I'm very fond of them.
She found herself liking him extremely; the first impression he had made on her had had weight, but at the end of an evening spent in his society she scarce fell short of seeing him--though quite without luridity--as a hero of romance.
The father and son had been close companions, and the idea of being left alone with the remnant of a tasteless life on his hands was not gratifying to the young man, who had always and tacitly counted upon his elder's help in making the best of a poor business. At the prospect of losing his great motive Ralph lost indeed his one inspiration.
"Yes, he's very nice.
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"But I needn't ask that," he said, "since you've been handling the oars."
"Perhaps I had better go to bed!" the visitor suggested.
Yours doesn't seem to be American--you thought everything over there so disagreeable. When I criticise I have mine; it's thoroughly American!"
"It is true.
Rollin spoke with enthusiasm.
"Yes.
One thing I have found out.
At last Rollin said: "I thank you.
Rollin trembled.
His agitation was greater than he could control. Rachel could not help seeing it.
Rollin was relieved when Rachel spoke.
The room itself in the Queen Anne style, with exquisite wood-carving, marble tiles, brass ornaments, and painted glass, is a gem.
But after seeing the admirable provision made for his workmen, we must enter the private office of Mr. Childs.
The Spanish Minister in 1778 offered eight hundred for it, that he might present it to his sovereign.
GEORGE W. CHILDS.
He gave ten thousand dollars for a Centennial Exposition.
Dom Pedro of Brazil sent, in 1876, a work on his empire, with his picture and his autograph.
Here he remained for four years, doing his work faithfully, and to the best of his ability.
He was ambitious, as who is not, that comes to prominence; and one day he made the resolution that he would sometime be the owner of this great paper and its building!
All this has not been accomplished without thought and labor.
At the end of these years he had saved a few hundred dollars, and opened a little store for himself in the Ledger Building, where the well-known newspaper, the "Public Ledger," was published.
This is indeed practical Christianity.
Mr. Childs has come to eminence by energy, integrity, and true faith in himself.
For ten years he has given the "Ledger Almanac" to every subscriber, costing five thousand dollars annually.
With all this elegance, befitting royalty, Mr. Childs has been a constant and generous giver.
He was nearly sixty-five years of age.
In three years, when he was twenty-one, he had become the head of a publishing house,--Childs & Peterson.
He has been one of General Grant's most generous helpers; yet while doing for the great, he does not forget the unknown.
He listens courteously to any requests, and then bids you make yourself at home in this elegant office, that certainly has no superior in the world, perhaps no rival.
Fortune, of course, had come, and fame.
The house is in Queen Anne style, surrounded by velvety lawns, a wealth of evergreen and exquisite plants, brought over from South America and Africa.
He bought the property, doubled the subscription rates, lowered the advertising, excluded everything questionable from the columns of his paper, made his editorials brief, yet comprehensive, until under his judicious management the journal reached the large circulation of ninety thousand daily.
"He refused to reduce the rate of payment of his compositors, notwithstanding that the Typographical Union had formerly sanctioned a reduction, and notwithstanding that the reduced scale was operative in every printing-office in Philadelphia except his own.
The album of Mrs. Childs contains the autographs of a great number of the leading men and women of the world.
He brought out Kane's "Arctic Expedition," from which the author, Dr. Kane, realized seventy thousand dollars.
Mr. Childs has about fifty rare clocks in his various homes, one of these costing six thousand dollars.
After a delightful hour spent in looking at these choice things, Mr. Childs bids us take our choice of some rare china cups and saucers.
At fourteen he came to Philadelphia, poor, but with courage and a quick mind, and found a place to work in a bookstore.
Childs is a wonderful man.
Alas! how unhomelike and barren are some of the newspaper offices, where gifted men toil from morning till night, with little time for sleep, and still less for recreation.
It was made for Joseph Potts, who paid six hundred and forty dollars for it.
Mr. Childs has had a most interesting history.
Every portion is interesting.
He has proved to all other American boys that worth and honest dealing will win success, in a greater or less degree.
Mr. Childs died at 3.01 A.M.
Two hundred thousand copies of Peterson's "Familiar Science" were sold.
The yearly profits, it is stated, have been four hundred thousand dollars.
That his employes, in a formal interview with him, expressed their willingness to accept the reduced rates, simply augments the generosity of his act." Strikes among laborers would be few and far between if employers were like George W. Childs.
We choose one dainty with red birds, and carry it away as a pleasant remembrance of a princely giver, in a princely apartment.
One could linger here for days, but we must see the lovely country-seat called "Wootton," some distance out from the city.
The wood-work is carved ebony with gold, the bookshelves six feet high on every side, and the ceiling built in sunken panels, blue and gold.
Like man in the classification of animals, he forms a genus in himself.
The farm adjoining is a delight to see.
The opportunity came in December, 1864.
He gives free excursions to poor children, a dinner annually to the newsboys, and aids hundreds who are in need of an education.
The beautiful grounds are open every Thursday to visitors.
Besides, he was never idle, he was economical, his habits were the best, and why should not such a boy succeed?
At the next session of Congress they concluded to try to stop it, and their ingenious scheme was to make Congress shot-proof, so to speak, against such missiles.
The mere presentation of an odious petition may seem in itself to be a simple task; but to find himself in a constant state of antagonism to a powerful, active, and vindictive majority in a debating body, constituted of such material as then made up the House of Representatives, wore hardly even upon the iron temper and inflexible disposition of Mr. Adams.
But in a moment Mr. Glascock, of Georgia, moved that the petition be not received.
Such was the beginning of the famous "gag" which became and long remained--afterward in a worse shape--a standing rule of the House.
On May 18 this committee reported in substance: 1.
The conservative, conscienceless respectability of wealth was, as is usually the case with it in the annals of the Anglo-Saxon race, quite in the wrong and predestined to well-merited defeat.
But it is time to resume the narrative and to let Mr. Adams's acts--of which after all it is possible to give only the briefest sketch, selecting a few of the more striking incidents--tell the tale of his Congressional life.
His position should be clearly understood; for in the vast labor which lay before the abolition party different tasks fell to different men.
The clerk, by direction of the Speaker, thereupon called his name.
There is no such man in the House."
The severe pressure against him begat only the more severe counter pressure upon his part.
On February 8, 1836, this novel scheme for shutting off petitions against slavery immediately upon their presentation was referred to a select committee of which Mr. Pinckney was chairman.
They had assumed an untenable position.
That Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in any State; 2.
Small was the suspicion in the Abbey Church of Olaston that morning, that the well-known successful man of business was weeping.
The groom took his horse in the street, and he came into the drawing-room.
At length the mare's hoofs echoed through all Sunday Glaston, and presently George rode up.
So we judged it better put off till Tuesday."
As the sermon drew to a close, and the mist of his emotion began to disperse, individual faces of his audience again dawned out on the preacher's ken.
As she repassed him to go to the drawing-room, she did indeed say a word of kindness; but it was in a forced tone, and was only about his dinner! His eyes over-flowed, but he shut his lips so tight that his mouth grew grim with determination, and no more tears came.
And the snake said: "Why, then, did he not speak like that to my Leopold?
Let a man have truth in the inward parts, and out of the abundance of his heart let his mouth speak. If then he should have ground to fear honest misunderstanding, let him preach again to enforce the truth for which he is jealous, and if it should seem to any that the two utterances need reconciling, let those who would have them consistent reconcile them for themselves.
So also was Leopold, but the hopes of the two were different.
Or, if he fancied he must speak of confession, why did he not speak of it in plain honest terms, instead of suggesting the idea of it so that the poor boy imagined it came from his own spirit, and must therefore be obeyed as the will of God?"
So said the snake, and by the time Helen had walked home with her aunt, the glow had sunk from her soul, and a gray wintry mist had settled down upon her spirit.
And he wanted a run after the hounds to-morrow.
Yet there was a human soul crying out after its birthright.
Imagine St. Paul having a prevision of how he would be misunderstood, AND HEEDING IT!--what would then have become of all those his most magnificent outbursts?
"I am quite able."
"Well, George?" she said, anxiously.
The reason of George Bascombe's absence from church that morning was, that, after an early breakfast, he had mounted Helen's mare, and set out to call on Mr. Hooker before he should have gone to church.
Would even her father require more of her than she had already done and endured?
Happily both for himself and others, the curate was not one of those who cripple the truth and blind their own souls by
To explain to him who loves not, is but to give him the more plentiful material for misinterpretation.
Who could once have imagined another reason for the laying of that round, good-humoured, contented face down on the book-board, than pure drowsiness from lack of work-day interest!
At times indeed he felt as if he were speaking to him immediately--and to him only; at others, although then he saw her no more than him, that he was comforting the sister individually, in holding out to her brother the mighty hope of a restored purity.
How far she mistook, or how far she knew or suspected that she spoke falsely, I will not pretend to know. But although she spoke as she did, there was something, either in the curate or in the sermon, that had quieted her a little, and she was less contemptuous in her condemnation of him than usual.
"I'll just run and show myself to Leopold: he must not suspect that I am of your party and playing him false.
The words jarred sorely on Helen's ear.
Leopold gave a sigh, and said no more.
True it was already fading away, but the eyes had wept, the glow yet hung about cheek and forehead, and the firm mouth had forgotten itself into a tremulous form, which the stillness of absorption had there for the moment fixed.
Had she not done enough?
and hence, in proportion as he roused the honest, he gave occasion to the dishonest to cavil and condemn.
Helen expected him back to dinner, and was anxiously looking for him.
AFTER THE SERMON.
"Oh, it's all right!--will be at least, I am sure.
Helen hastened to meet him.
"Oh!
His eyes followed her as she walked across to the dressing-room, and the tears rose and filled them, but he said nothing.
"Why not to-morrow?" said Leopold.
It made him feel very badly to have her leave him so.
After a while, he trumpeted softly, as though he were just trying his voice.
How you did frighten me!"
You ought to see what big mouthfuls I can take."
Now it was not at all queer that she should have seen him dancing, for all the eight Cranes had danced together, but he thought it very wonderful.
Don't forget us!"
They watched their friends fly away, and stood on the ground with their necks and bills uplifted and mouths open, while they trumpeted or called out, "Good-bye!
Every Crane danced, brothers, and sisters, and all, and as they did so, they looked lovingly at each other, and admired the fine steps and enjoyed the whooping.
A Crane would stand on one leg, with his head against his breast, so quietly that one might think him asleep: but as soon as anything eatable came near, he would bend his body, stretch out his neck, open his long, slender bill, and swallow it at one gulp.
That pleased him, of course, because Cranes think that big mouthfuls are the best kind, so he tipped his head to one side, and watched his neck as the mouthful slid down to his stomach.
They were those who thought of staying there for the summer.
She looked where he had pointed, "I?" she said.
Now he pointed with one wing to this nesting-place, and said, "How would you like to build a nest there?"
"No," said he.
One fine day in spring, a great flock of Sand-hill Cranes came from the south.
He wondered why he could not come too, although everybody knows that a Crane catches more if he fishes alone.
THE DANCE OF THE SAND-HILL CRANES
I am going now." Still, although he was such a young Crane and had never danced until this year, he began to think that she liked him and enjoyed having him near.
As they came near the pond, they flew lower and lower, until all swept down to the earth and alighted, tall and stately, by the edge of the water.
Those who hunted in the water, did so very quietly.
I can take bigger mouthfuls than that.
"To my sister?" she asked carelessly, as she drew one of her long tail-feathers through her beak.
When she flew away, she said, "That is a very pleasant fishing-place." He stood on the other leg for a while, and thought how sweet her voice sounded as she said it.
As she stalked off toward the pond, she passed him, and she said over her shoulder, "I should think you would be hungry.
They were very, very happy, and after a while--but that is another story.
I am almost starved." After she had gone, he wondered why she had said that.
"I did not want to frighten you." And he looked at her admiringly.
But she suddenly raised her head, and said, "There! I have forgotten something," and flew off, as she had done the day before.
That night they slept near together, as they had done when with the large flock, and one Crane kept awake to watch for danger while the others tucked their heads under their wings.
This went on until they were so tired they could hardly stand, and had to stop to eat and rest.
Then he thought that, if she liked the place so well, she might come there again the next day.
He began to fear that she didn't like him; and the next time the Cranes danced he didn't bow to her so much, but he strutted and leaped and whooped even more.
He often did this while he was eating.
He pitied short-necked people.
When they were hungry they ate some leaves, and never thought what they should eat the next time that they happened to be hungry.
"Ah," said the Five-Legged Walking-Stick, "what scrambling!
Three Walking-Sticks from the forest had come to live in the big maple tree near the middle of the meadow.
How very common!"
"What is it to be genteel?" asked a Grasshopper suddenly.
It is too much trouble to find a place."
On the day when the grass was cut, they had sat quietly in their trees and looked genteel.
One day the Tree Frog was under the tree when the large Brown Walking-Stick decided to lay some eggs.
They had nothing to do but to eat and sleep, and they did not often take the trouble to think.
If you had passed them in a hay-field, you would surely have thought each a stem of hay, unless you happened to see them move.
"A place?" said the Brown Walking-Stick, waving her long and slender feelers to and fro.
Then there was a great scrambling and the Crickets frolicked with them.
Now they were on the ground, hunting through the flat piles of cut grass for some fresh and juicy bits to eat.
Oh, no! I think they will hatch where they are.
They felt that they were a little better than those meadow people who rushed and scrambled and worked from morning until night, and they showed very plainly how they felt.
Their feelers were held quite close together, and they did not move their feet at all, only swayed their bodies gracefully from side to side.
"A place?
But then, if one is a Walking-Stick, you know, one does not care so very much about one's family.
They had never been taught to do anything useful, or to think much about other people.
He knew just what to expect, so when the Nuthatch set him down on the bark to look at him, he unhooked his feet from the bark and tumbled to the ground.
Nobody knew exactly why they had left the forest, where all their sisters and cousins and aunts lived. Perhaps they were not happy with their relatives.
To act as you see us act, and to----"
These Walking-Sticks had grown up the best way they could, with no father or mother to care for them.
"That may be," said the Brown Walking-Stick, "but they do not belong to our family." She spoke as if those who did not belong to her family might be good but could never be genteel.
She thought the meadow people very common.
The other Walking-Stick, their friend, was younger and green.
You would have thought her a blade of grass.
The young Grasshoppers were kicking up their feet, the Ants were scrambling around as busy as ever, and life went on quite as though neither men nor Horses had ever entered the meadow.
"Why," said the Five-Legged Walking-Stick, "it is just to be genteel.
That was because he crawled into a clump of ferns and kept very still.
It is true that the brother had the same kind of legs as his sister, but he did not have the same number.
When he was young and green he had six, then came a dreadful day when a hungry Nuthatch saw him, flew down, caught him, and carried him up a tree.
THE DIGNIFIED WALKING-STICKS.
The Tree Frog was also out, sitting in a cool, damp corner of the grass rows.
When they were tired they went to sleep, and when they had slept enough they awakened.
"Why can't they learn to move slowly and gracefully?
The Nuthatch tried to catch him and broke off one of his legs, but she never found him again, although she looked and looked and looked and looked.
The Five-Legged Walking-Stick looked much like his sister.
The Walking-Sticks looked very uncomfortable, and the brother and sister could not think of anything to say.
They said it was not genteel to hurry, no matter what happened.
She did not quite wish it, you understand, and would never have thought of it if she had turned brown.
It was the young green one who spoke at last.
Perhaps they can't help being fat, but they might at least act genteel."
"Some mothers do not think it too much trouble to be careful where they lay eggs."
"Yes, indeed!" said his sister.
His sister came and looked at him and said, "Now if you were only a Spider it would not be long before you would have six legs again."
He had the same long, slender body, the same long feelers, and the same sort of long, slender legs.
His relatives all waved their feelers, one at a time, and said, "Ah, he has the true Walking-Stick spirit!" Then they paid no more attention to him, and after a while he and his sister and their green little friend left the forest for the meadow.
Keep away from sad people, or you will be sad.
Think cheerfully.
A quarrel between two people to settle things, is a good deal like a dog fight in a flower bed, the only things that get settled are the flowers.
"A merry heart doeth good, like a medicine." To forget your sorrow begin to cultivate joy.
"Let thine heart cheer thee." Give it out-let.
Put irresistible confidence, "I SHALL ACHIEVE," into your ardent desires. You will then love work.
Grow something, create something, produce something and the law of youth will pervade your Being.
Check discord.
Adjust it until you do like it.
Develop it and it will develop you. Quicken your mental throb with new ideas.
Another widely-held theory is that hypnosis is a state of dissociation, meaning that it constitutes a group of unconscious memories and activities which may be dredged up to replace the stream of consciousness.
Probably the most widely held theory is that hypnosis is a transference phenomenon in which the prestige of the hypnotist and his relationship to the subject plays an important role.
This is a legitimate use of regression although it is not used so much these days to uncover past traumatic incidents.
There are many more theories I believe are partially correct, but the ones named will do for the purposes of this volume.
The former (Mesmer) thought further that metal became imbued by the solar qualities, and his system is also known as metalogy by which he meant the proper application of metals.
Others, primarily Europeans, have pointed out the analogy between the hypnotic state of animals and man.
Activity of the cerebrum, which controls the conscious and voluntary system, is rendered non-operational.
Others agree that it is a transference process, but that it is more of an extension of the subject's own psychic processes which is enlarged to include the voice of the hypnotist or his own thoughts or voice.
Milton V. Kline, professor of psychology at Long Island University, postulates that hypnosis is primarily retrogressive.
Mesmer, an 18th century physician, believed that hypnosis occurred as a result of "vital fluids" drawn from a magnet or lodestone and which drew their unique qualities from the sun, moon and stars.
In the opening chapter of the book, I explained that hypnosis was a state of heightened suggestion in which the subject adopted an uncritical attitude, allowing him to accept suggestions and to take appropriate action.
On the other hand, we know that a strong interpersonal relationship is necessary for hypnosis.
This theory is bolstered by the fact that all schools of psychotherapy yield approximately the same results even though the methods differ.
The Nature of Hypnosis
Some pioneers, notably Dr. William S. Kroger, a psychiatrically-oriented obstetrician and gynecologist who limits his practice to hypnotherapy, believe hypnosis is a conviction phenomenon which produces results that parallel the phenomena produced at Lourdes and other religious healing shrines.
A large number of hypnotists, including the author, has come to believe that hypnosis is a semantic problem in which words are the building blocks to success.
It is enough for them to know it has been harnessed for their use.
The most that can be done at this time is to explore various views which are held by leading authorities at present. It can be said, however, that a majority of authorities agree that hypnosis ensues as a result of natural laws which have been incorporated in the human organism since the beginning of man as he is today.
Actually, regression, by duplicating the exact earlier age, manner of speech and thought, etc., makes us once more as little children, a condition to be desired for certain forms of therapy.
This would logically indicate that the relationship between the therapist and the subject was the determining factor.
Chapter 12
Not just any words, but words which "ring a bell" or tap the experiential background of the subject.
We do not know the mechanics of this metamorphosis of an ordinary brain into an organ of concentrated power.
Hypnotists are much like those who use electricity every day of their lives, but have no idea of the nature of electricity.
This fits in perfectly, of course, with the author's already discussed visual-imagery technique which requires a high degree of imagination.
This is the crux of the hypnotic dilemma and the answer is far from solved.
Both names loom large in the history of hypnosis.
Along the last-named line, I believe that hypnotic suggestions have an autonomy of their own which supersede all else in the hypnotic situation.
Words, of course, would be of little use without the added effect of his conditioned reflexology.
Automaticism, of course, is inherently part of this view, and is presumed to negate volition.
Naturally, these theories have been largely abandoned today, although there are still a few who think that hypnosis is a form of hysteria.
This is excellent as far as it goes, but it does not explain how suggestion works.
His formula is that faith, hope, belief and expectation, all catalyzed by the imagination, lead inevitably to hypnosis.
In conclusion, the author would like to take issue with those who believe that it is the monotonous intonations of the therapist that cause the subject to lapse from the deeply relaxed state into true sleep.
Physiologically, Wolberg believes that hypnosis represents an inhibition of the higher cortical centers, and a limitation of sensory channels such as takes place in sleep.
If there is one thing virtually certain about hypnosis it is that some parts of the brain are inhibited and other parts expanded by the process.
Pin-point concentration is given as the reason for this selective procedure which narrows the horizon of the subject to what the hypnotist (or he, himself) is saying, screening out all other stimuli. But why is this high order of concentration so easy under hypnosis when Asians, notably the Chinese, have been trying for centuries to concentrate on one subject for as long as four or five seconds.
He also believes that the psychological process operates through transference.
It is implied that the process may be atavistic.
One of the newer theories--one held by Dr. Lewis R. Wolberg, a psychoanalyst--is that hypnosis is a psychosomatic process in that it is both physiological and psychological in character.
This is a logical conclusion and it disperses any ideas that hypnotic patients become dependent on their therapists.
This is why "sleep" continues to be in the lexicon of the hypnotist even though hypnosis is the antithesis of sleep.
He has written that the organism functions differently on various levels of behavior (regression), and that the behavior breaks down into component parts. The theory that regression can spotlight personality disorders found in more infantile states is also widely held.
Dr. Kroger, like a few others, has proved to his own satisfaction that all hypnotic phenomena can be produced at a non-hypnotic level.
"And," says he, "King O'Toole, you're a decent man, for I only came here to try you.
Well, sir, you must know, as you didn't hear it afore, that there was a king, called King O'Toole, who was a fine old king in the old ancient times, long ago; and it was he that owned the churches in the early days.
"I am," says Saint Kavin.
"True for you," says the king.
"Well, you know the difference now," says the saint.
After some more talk the king says, "What are you?"
King O'Toole and His Goose
"And what do you say to me," says Saint Kavin, "for making her the like?"
"As true as the sun," says the king.
You don't know me," says he, "because I'm disguised."
"But you'll keep your word true," says the saint.
The king was walkin' one mornin' by the edge of the lake, lamentin' his cruel fate, and thinking of drowning himself, that could get no diversion in life, when all of a sudden, turning round the corner, whom should he meet but a mighty decent young man coming up to him.
"I will," says King O'Toole, "and you're welcome to it," says he, "though it's the last acre I have to give."
"I am King O'Toole," says he, "prince and plennypennytinchery of these parts," says he; "but how came ye to know that?" says he.
"Oh, no matter; I was given to understand it," says Saint Kavin.
"I will," says the king.
"By Jabers, I thought I was only talking to a dacent boy," says the king.
When the king was as good as his word, Saint Kavin was pleased with him, and then it was that he made himself known to the king.
"Is it a tinker you are?" says the king.
My dear, at the word of making his goose as good as new, you'd think the poor old king's eyes were ready to jump out of his head.
"And that I'm beholden to you," says the king.
"Honour bright!" says King O'Toole, holding out his fist.
"You'll find them quite perfect, I think."
"I want you to go with me, if you can, to see a Mrs. Greggory.
"I know how much you think of that teapot that was grandmother's.
"I'll take the risk of that.
You see, she's just made up her mind to sell it, and asked him to find a customer.
"I don't like to--with these," she explained, tapping the crutches at her side.
She's got a teapot I want.
The next moment the door flew open and a young woman, who looked to be about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, burst into the room.
"Yes; and thank you, my dear.
Terror, joy, dismay, and relief seemed, one after the other to fight for supremacy.
She had tried not to seem to look about her; but there was not one detail of the bare little room, from its faded rug to the patched but spotless tablecloth, that was not stamped on her brain.
"I have been told so.
Billy turned away sharply.
Mrs. Greggory gave a low cry.
I know what it cost you to make up your mind to sell it at all.
"Eleven if you can, at Park Street.
"Alice!" gasped Mrs. Greggory in dismayed horror.
I haven't the hundred dollars with me, but I'll send it right away.
"Billy, look, what a beauty!
"Mother, only think, I've--"
She was conscious of a feeling which she could not name: Billy was not used to being called "these people" in precisely that tone of voice.
The girl was the most stubborn, unreasonable, vixenish little puss I ever saw.
So much as that?" she cried almost joyously.
"I declare, Billy, I'm not sure but we'd better turn back," he fretted. "I didn't mean to take you to such a place as this."
It was the man who said this, not the collector.
Billy's eyes were brimming with pity and dismay.
After a moment he spoke.
Of course you won't turn back.
Relief in the end conquered, though even yet there was a second hurriedly apprehensive glance toward the door before she spoke.
His eyes sparkled.
"Of course I will!
"Yes, dear, but that won't be necessary now.
"You didn't wait to let me tell you.
Once down the long four flights of stairs and out on the sidewalk, William Henshaw drew a long breath.
The man rose at once.
"Perhaps you will tell me what it would be worth to you," she concluded tremulously.
"Wasn't it awful!" choked Billy.
Mrs. Greggory was a cripple.
"This gentleman says he will be glad to buy it.
"Oh, but, please, I didn't mean--you didn't understand," faltered Billy.
"But I do--that is, I must.
"And so you see, I do very much wish to sell."
It was an impulsive speech, and a foolish one, of course, from the standpoint of sense and logic and reasonableness; but it was one that might be expected, perhaps, from Billy.
Never was there so victorious a conquest interchanged between two youthful hearts-- never before such a rapture of instantaneous sympathy.
But he was obliged to desist; for he saw that, without effecting any good, he would merely add spiritual disobedience to the other offenses of the young man.
How, therefore, or when could they have made an enemy?
He was not naturally of a reserved turn; far from it.
In that short interval other events had occurred no less terrific and mysterious.
The effect was awkward and embarrassing to all parties.
Thomas De Quincey
Early he had felt that in her hands lay his destiny; that she it was who must be his good or his evil genius.
That sight was more than could be borne by one who stood a little behind the group.
Their third meeting I DID see; and there all shadow of embarrassment had vanished, except, indeed, of that delicate embarrassment which clings to impassioned admiration.
At this moment she was exhausted with excitement, and the nature of the shock she had sustained.
From pity, from sympathy, from counsel, and from consolation, and from scorn--from each of these alike the poor stricken deer "recoiled into the wilderness;" he fled for days together into solitary parts of the forest; fled, as I still hoped and prayed, in good earnest and for a long farewell; but, alas!
And, when once that consummation was attained, I, that previously had breathed no syllable of what was stirring, now gave loose to the interesting tidings, and suffered them to spread through the whole compass of the town.
But now came a series of cases destined to fling this earliest murder into the shade.
Every eye was bent toward the doors--every eye strained forward to discover what was passing.
But in any case where the merit is transcendent of its kind, it is always useful to rack the expectation up to the highest point.
In this instance it certainly did no harm to the subject of expectation that I had been warned to look for so much.
near to him sat Margaret Liebenheim--hanging upon his words--more lustrous and bewitching than ever I had beheld her.
But, if this had been little anticipated by many, far less had I, for my part, anticipated the unhappy revolution which was wrought in the whole nature of Ferdinand von Harrelstein.
Even she herself knew, though not obliged to know, why she was seated in that neighborhood; and took her place, if with a rosy suffusion upon her cheeks, yet with fullness of happiness at her heart.
One or two had some influence with him, and led him away from the spot; while as to Maximilian, so absorbed was he that he had not so much as perceived the affront offered to himself.
In six weeks or less from the date of this terrific event, the negro was set at liberty by a majority of voices among the magistrates.
Nobody remembered to have seen them abroad for years.
In anything which partakes of the infinite, the most unlimited expectations will find ample room for gratification; while it is certain that ordinary observers, possessing little sensibility, unless where they have been warned to expect, will often fail to see what exists in the most conspicuous splendor.
Anxious that his son should go through a regular course of mathematical instruction, now becoming annually more important in all the artillery services throughout Europe, and that he should receive a tincture of other liberal studies which he had painfully missed in his own military career, the baron chose to keep his son for the last seven years at our college, until he was now entering upon his twenty-third year.
That argument certainly weighed much in his favor.
But the effect of these various advantages, enforced and recommended as they were by a personal beauty so rare, was somewhat too potent for the comfort and self-possession of ordinary people; and really exceeded in a painful degree the standard of pretensions under which such people could feel themselves at their ease.
But, as things were, no man could guess what it was that must make him obnoxious to the murderers.
At first, and perhaps to the last, I pitied him exceedingly.
My composure was restored in a moment. I looked steadily at him.
True, their charity was narrow and exclusive, but to those of their own religious body it expanded munificently; and, being rich beyond their wants, or any means of employing wealth which their gloomy asceticism allowed, they had the power of doing a great deal of good among the indigent papists of the suburbs.
Two months had now passed away since the arrival of Mr. Wyndham. He had been universally introduced to the superior society of the place; and, as I need hardly say, universally received with favor and distinction.
Then, my son, being led into temptation, do not you persist in courting, nay, almost tempting temptation.
I was personally acquainted with every family of the slightest account belonging to the resident population; whether among the old local gentry, or the new settlers whom the late wars had driven to take refuge within our walls.
There she had been placed by the host; and everybody knew why.
They were rather difficult to trace accurately; those parts of the traces which lay upon the black tessellae being less distinct in the outline than the others upon the white or colored.
A silence of horror seemed to possess the company, most of whom were still unacquainted with the cause of the alarming interruption.
Like a bird under the fascination of a rattlesnake, he would not summon up the energies of his nature to make an effort at flying away. "Begone, while it is time!" said others, as well as myself; for more than I saw enough to fear some fearful catastrophe.
The guardsman pressed forward to claim Miss Liebenheim's hand for the next dance; a movement which she was quick to favor, by retreating behind one or two parties from a person who seemed coming toward her.
As to the old gentleman and his wife, their infirmities confined them to the house.
And upon the beautiful parquet, or inlaid floor which ran round the room, were still impressed the footsteps of the murderer.
He is English by birth, nephew to the Earl of E., and heir presumptive to his immense estates.
We felt ourselves solitary, and thrown upon our own resources; all combination with other towns being unavailing from their great distance.
But there, every moment, less and less could be seen, for the gathering crowd more and more intercepted the view;--so much the more was the ear at leisure for the shrieks redoubled upon shrieks.
Still he turned a deaf ear to the only practical counsel that had a chance for reaching his ears.
Greek is what he wants from you;--never ask about terms.
The commonplace maxim is, that it is dangerous to raise expectations too high.
It will be easily imagined that such a story, already romantic enough in its first outline, would lose nothing in the telling.
True it was, and a fact which had puzzled no less than it had awed the magistrates, that, upon their examination of the premises, many rich articles of bijouterie, jewelry, and personal ornaments, had been found lying underanged, and apparently in their usual situations; articles so portable that in the very hastiest flight some might have been carried off.
He is himself one of the noblest looking of God's creatures.
Most unquestionably, so far as this went, it furnished a negative circumstance in favor of the negro, for the footsteps were very different in outline from his, and smaller, for Aaron was a man of colossal build.
Three weeks had passed since the murder at Mr. Weishaupt's--three weeks the most agitated that had been known in this sequestered city.
And such was the rivalship which prevailed, that often one quarter of the year's income was spent upon these galas.
Two or three other letters followed; and at length it was arranged that Mr. Maximilian Wyndham should take up his residence at my monastic abode for one year.
As to his accomplishments, they will speak for themselves; they are infinite, and applicable to every situation of life.
True, they were bigoted in a degree which indicated feebleness of intellect; but THAT wounded no man in particular, while to many it recommended them.
The first thing he did, on being acquainted with the suspicions against himself, was to laugh ferociously, and to all appearance most cordially and unaffectedly. He demanded whether a poor man like himself would have left so much wealth as lay scattered abroad in that house--gold repeaters, massy plate, gold snuff boxes--untouched?
January was drawing to its close; the weather was growing more and more winterly; high winds, piercingly cold, were raving through our narrow streets; and still the spirit of social festivity bade defiance to the storms which sang through our ancient forests.
Upon the evening at which I am now arrived, the twenty-second of January, 1816, the whole city, in its wealthier classes, was assembled beneath the roof of a tradesman who had the heart of a prince.
For the four last he had lived with me as the sole pupil whom I had, or meant to have, had not the brilliant proposals of the young Russian guardsman persuaded me to break my resolution.
She had recently come into the city, and had lived with her uncle, a tradesman, not ten doors from Margaret's own residence, partly on the terms of a kinswoman, partly as a servant on trial.
But my pity soon ceased to be mingled with respect.
Were there, then, no exceptions to this condition of awestruck admiration?
He stood there, stooping, eyes set, and vacant, fast asleep.
In doing this, he set his coat on fire, when he trampled it under foot.
They are fast.
Try.
He sarcastically asked him if he "didn't want the earth."
Then he stopped.
A slow movement was tried (the Valhalla motif).
It crackled like a mighty fire.
He was now almost naked.
Let us repeat that he was, perhaps, followed on this path of pain by eyes unsleeping in the distances of the shadows--the eyes of the mother and the eyes of God.
No voice was heard; no step moved; no candle was lighted.
He would soon be amidst living creatures.
There were the chimneys of which he had seen the smoke.
In the declivities into which it sloped the snow, driven by the wind into the dips of the ground, was so deep, in comparison with a child so small, that it almost engulfed him, and he had to struggle through it half buried.
It seemed to him that he had left all evil chances behind him. The infant was no longer a burden.
Or he had, perhaps, made a mistake, and it was possible that neither town nor village existed in the direction in which he was travelling.
He was obliged to do without this balance.
He felt the ineffable encouragement of hope.
He raised himself on tiptoe, and knocked with his pebble against the pane too softly to break the glass, but loud enough to be heard.
The reverse of a silhouette--a city painted in white on a black horizon, something like what we call nowadays a negative proof.
He almost ran.
He came to the outskirts of a town--an open street.
He travelled under this north wind, still towards the east, over wide surfaces of snow.
Even he who sleeps not feels a medium press upon him full of sinister life.
George III., having lost in his old age the intellect he had never possessed in his youth, was not responsible for the calamities of his reign.
This blind confidence set him onwards again.
Weymouth then was not the respectable and fine Weymouth of to-day.
It was Weymouth which he had just entered.
What was to become of him?
He whom all supports were failing felt that he was himself a basis of support.
He knew this because he felt her suck his cheek.
The waking man, wending his way amidst the sleep phantoms of others, unconsciously pushes back passing shadows, has, or imagines that he has, a vague fear of adverse contact with the invisible, and feels at every moment the obscure pressure of a hostile encounter which immediately dissolves.
All its lethargies mingle their nightmares, its slumbers are a crowd, and from its human bodies lying prone there arises a vapour of dreams.
The coldness of men is intentional.
One voice answered.
At intervals he knocked at the doors.
The bridge opened on a rather fine street called St. Thomas's Street.
That of Time.
The doors were all carefully double-locked, The windows were covered by their shutters, as the eyes by their lids.
All at once he heard a menace.
This resulted from the fact that George III. had not yet been born.
CHAPTER IV.
Sleep has gloomy associates beyond this life: the decomposed thoughts of the sleepers float above them in a mist which is both of death and of life, and combine with the possible, which has also, perhaps, the power of thought, as it floats in space.
There is something of the effect of a forest in the nocturnal diffusion of dreams.
What was he to do between those two silences--the mute plain and the deaf city?
However, the little infant leaned her head against his shoulder, and fell asleep again.
This passage led him to a water-brink, where there was a roughly built quay with a parapet, and to the right he made out a bridge.
Mysterious, diffused existences amalgamate themselves with life on that border of death, which sleep is. Those larvae and souls mingle in the air.
Three o'clock tolled slowly behind him from the old belfry of St. Nicholas.
He felt a tightening on his sinking heart which he had not known on the open plains.
The hour, the strokes of which he had just counted, had been another blow.
The deserted child, carrying the foundling, passed through the first street, then the second, then the third.
He was about to turn and wander long, perhaps, in the intersections of the Scrambridge lanes, where there were then more cultivated plots than dwellings, more thorn hedges than houses; but fortunately he struck into a passage which exists to this day near Trinity schools.
Bridges are strange vehicles of suction, which inhale the population, and sometimes swell one river-bank at the expense of its opposite neighbour.
It was the bridge which did the work.
He set to knocking at the doors again: he had no strength left to call or shout.
His blows, on which he was expending his last energies, were jerky and without aim; now ceasing altogether for a time, now renewed as if in irritation.
For the same reason they had not yet designed on the slope of the green hill towards the east, fashioned flat on the soil by cutting away the turf and leaving the bare chalk to the view, the white horse, an acre long, bearing the king upon his back, and always turning, in honour of George III., his tail to the city.
People would not even open their windows for fear of inhaling the poison.
Every precaution had been taken to avoid being roused by disagreeable surprises.
Which of the two refusals should he choose?
The uneasiness of nocturnal fear, increased by the spectral houses, increased the weight of the sad burden under which he was struggling.
Should he continue this journey?
His bare feet had a moment's comfort as they crossed them. Having passed over the bridge, he was in Melcombe Regis.
He perceived the sea to the right, and scarcely anything more of the town to his left.
She did not cry, believing him her mother.
These honours, however, were deserved.
Here was the country again.
ANOTHER FORM OF DESERT.
Now Melcombe Regis is a parish of Weymouth.
The traveller who entered the tavern, now replaced by the hotel, instead of paying royally his twenty-five francs for a fried sole and a bottle of wine, had to suffer the humiliation of eating a pennyworth of soup made of fish--which soup, by-the-bye, was very good.
It is probable that he did not understand them.
No one answered. Nothing makes the heart so like a stone as being warm between sheets. The noise and the shaking had at length awakened the infant.
The houses ended there.
The village has absorbed the city.
It is Eternity saying, "What does it matter to me?"
Wretched fare!
Nothing is so freezing in certain situations as the voice of the hour.
Irresistible summons of duty!
Should he advance and re-enter the solitudes? Should he return and re-enter the streets?
There is the anchor of mercy.
Hence arise entanglements.
This is what is called being afraid without reason.
This was the summit of misery.
Weymouth, a hamlet, was then the suburb of Melcombe Regis, a city and port.
The pitiless desert he had understood; the unrelenting town was too much to bear.
Ancient Weymouth did not present, like the present one, an irreproachable rectangular quay, with an inn and a statue in honour of George III.
It was a piece of waste land not built upon--probably the spot where Chesterfield Place now stands.
What a man feels a child feels still more.
Why not erect statues to him?
The boy went to the bridge, which at that period was a covered timber structure.
Here and there were high carved gables and shop-fronts.
The child felt the coldness of men more terribly than the coldness of night.
It is a declaration of indifference.
That no inhabitant should have opened a lattice may appear surprising. Nevertheless that silence is in a great measure to be explained.
He entered it.
To the east great inclined planes of snow marked out the wide slopes of Radipole.
The surrounding chimera, in which he suspects a reality, impedes him.
At Melcombe Regis, as at Weymouth, no one was stirring.
Dreams, those clouds, interpose their folds and their transparencies over that star, the mind.
The fugitive was the first man in the parlor car.
"Rather.
Fortified by my accent, it is most convincing.
Perhaps you can tell me what's amiss with this beastly house."
He did so.
If you see her, make a noise like a dry leaf and blow away.
"They won't thank you when they meet across the dinner-table."
The bell-ringer adjusted a monocle and ambled down the steps to shake hands.
The two conspirators elaborated their plan, built it up, revised it, tested it at every point, and pronounced it perfect.
Want to join?"
Yes, I'll just take you up on that."
"Right-o, old thing!
"Am I supposed to know him?"
The two gentlemen then moved away in the extinguished taxi.
"Then why not fool him by coming in?"
It ended by the Englishman bestowing two dollars upon Mr. Murphy to get a message to Mr. Remsen containing a protest and an address.
"Can I help?"
"Merely a matter of distracting Friend Murphy's attention for ten seconds.
Promptly at that hour, on the second morning thereafter, a taxicab swerved violently into the curbstone almost at the feet of the patient and vigilant Murphy, and stopped with an alarming scrunch of brakes. From its window emerged a heavy puff of smoke.
Unless they all happen to take the same train, one pair won't even know the other is around until they meet up on the lake or in the woods."
Refuges furnished to order.
I've got an amendment.
"I get you.
The Lees will be at the cottage.
"Well met, m'deah fellah!
"He didn't when I came in."
Among Mr. Harmon's many endearing virtues is this: he never asks questions about other people's troubles.
"What on earth are you doing over here?"
"One half won't know how the other half lives till they get there.
"There's a train at nine o'clock in the morning.
It's a double wedding.
I've got it.
"What does the thing look like?"
"As good as any.
Be here at eight-thirty.
"How the devil can I come in without going out?" demanded Mr. Remsen crossly, for confinement was beginning to tell upon his equable disposition.
"Then I'll just go back and jolly well camp there till somebody jolly well lets me in," decided the caller.
"Stupid of me," confessed Harmon, grinning.
"Now, about our jail-breaking scheme?
I've got some things to attend to."
Seclusion is her watchword.
"Haven't you any of your amateur theatrical duds here?" was the outcome of his cogitations.
"Just this.
"Wants to see Mr. Remsen.
Hardly had he settled when a young couple in suspiciously new apparel arrived, and were shown into Drawing-Room "A," at the upper end of the car.
"This year," pursued Harmon, "I'm keeping open house for a special reason.
"Doesn't it?
But the old bulldog of a butler won't let him put his nose inside the door.
"Hm!
"Hot chance he's got of breaking in," he observed to Mr. Harmon.
But how shall we get the process-server off guard?"
The "Four" were as excited as the others, although not so many of their own particular friends were in the Harvard team.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
"Well, you have the most ridiculous ideas, hasn't she, Brenda?"
There isn't a bit of sense in knowing people that we'll never see when we're in society," responded Belle, while Brenda echoed, "Yes, that's what I think, too."
XIII
"If it's anything like that," broke in Brenda, rather snappishly, "I will just tell Edith what I think."
"You can see yourself that this is different," she answered.
"I know that you can't guess."
"I should call it very impolite if there were no orange flags shown at the game."
I can hardly wait for Saturday."
Ruth was a pretty and amiable girl, about Julia's age, and therefore a little older than "The Four." She had been in the school for two years before the coming of Julia, but in all that time she had had only a speaking acquaintance with the other girls.
Why, Belle, I cannot imagine your doing anything else."
It was to be a game with Princeton, one of the great University matches, and for special reasons there was the deepest interest in the match.
Those girls who had brothers in college, or even cousins or friends, held themselves with more dignity than any of the others, and those who had relatives in the team "were too proud for anything," as Brenda said.
If you hadn't, I was going to tell Belle that it seems to me that Edith has a right to ask any one she wishes.
"Yes, I know, but still----"
Nora's temper was not easily ruffled.
The game was to be played in Holmes' Field, and tickets were not easy to get, because the seats were far less numerous than now on the great Soldiers' Field.
"Oh, it's clear that this is all Julia's doings; ever since Ruth went into her Latin class they have been awfully intimate.
"The least said, the soonest mended, and let us all go to the game with a crimson flag in each hand to wave for the winners."
Even Belle herself could not help smiling at this, which was very appropriate, following so closely, as it did, her own remarks about Julia.
But I don't see," turning rather snappishly towards Brenda, "why the rest of us have got to take up Ruth Roberts just because your Cousin Julia is so devoted to her."
What Nora or Brenda might have answered, I cannot say, for hardly had Belle disappeared within the house, when Edith herself appeared, with Julia and Ruth.
Nora smiled pleasantly, and her eyes looked brighter than ever under the rim of her brown felt hat, with its trimmings of lighter brown.
"Oh, well," said Nora laughing, "the whole thing is not worth quarreling about.
Edith at this time became unusually popular, because it was known that her mother had given her permission to arrange a large party to accompany her to the game, and every girl was hoping for an invitation--every girl, at least who had not been invited elsewhere to go in some other party.
"I'm not a child," responded Belle very crossly, walking away from Nora and Brenda, "I do not need to be told what to do."
"Nor I!" cried Brenda, "at a Harvard game!"
Oh dear!
For a week before Thanksgiving there was great excitement among the schoolgirls on account of the approaching football game.
"I never said that Harvard was my side," interrupted Belle, "didn't I tell you that I have a cousin on the Princeton team."
She is always very good to us all, and just think how many tickets her father has bought for this game!"
"Why, who is it?" cried Brenda, and "Who is it?" echoed Belle.
No one who saw the hearty way in which Nora and Brenda greeted Ruth, as she came up with Edith and Julia, could for a moment have imagined that she had been under discussion.
"Isn't it a Princeton game, too," asked Belle, "two or three of the boys I used to know in New York are in that team, one of them is a kind of cousin of mine."
Then they gossiped a moment in a very harmless fashion about the prospects of Harvard, and Edith quoted one or two things that Philip had said, and Nora told them that her father was perfectly sure that the crimson would win, and as they trooped into the dressing-room when the bell rang, Belle was surprised to see Brenda leaning on Ruth's arm.
I'm glad to hear you talk so sensibly, Brenda.
"Well, I don't care," rejoined Brenda, "it's hard enough to have Julia tagging about everywhere, but why in the world we should have Ruth Roberts, when we never see her anywhere except at school, I really cannot understand, and I don't see how you and Nora can like it either."
I should think that you would see that yourself."
"Oh, don't be silly, Nora, it wouldn't be worth while to guess about something you'll know all about so soon, except that you speak as if it were some one we might not care to have, and if that's the case, I declare it's too bad," said Belle.
"Oh," said Nora, "I didn't know that you thought that people had to be so very devoted to cousins."
"What for?
Then Belle added a final word.
"Crimson," cried Belle, "I am going to carry an orange scarf, and perhaps an orange flag."
She naturally was pleased at the prospect of going with the others, for like Julia, she had never seen a great football game.
"Oh," cried Belle, and "Ah," echoed Brenda.
why I never heard of such a thing!" exclaimed Nora.
Whistler won the case.
These pictures were very good, and when he was large enough to go to school the other children were apt to ask him to make animals and birds for them on the blackboard.
Two famous ones, of which we often see prints, are "Portrait of my Mother" and the Scotch writer, "Carlyle." James Whistler's mother lived to be an old woman, as one can guess from the picture, and her son loved her just as dearly as he did when he beat the prancing horses away from her, in Russia.
He worked quite steadily and people began to say: "I think young Whistler is going to do great things some day." But suddenly he packed up and went to London.
One of them said it was worth nineteen hundred dollars to have heard the talk that went on in the court-room.
That old, tiresome rheumatism kept bothering him, and by and by he had a long rheumatic fever.
Mr. Whistler married a woman who was herself an artist, and she was very proud of him.
One evening she had taken the boys in a carriage to see a big illumination.
At this academy he found he did not like to draw maps and forts nearly as well as he did human figures and faces.
However, he began to make money at last, and just as life seemed bright, an art critic, Mr. John Ruskin, declared that the Whistler pictures, which were being bought at big prices, were poor--very poor!
He was born in Lowell and was such a cunning baby that everybody wanted his picture.
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER
Well, he was just as patient and thorough when he was older.
These boys were named James McNeill, William, and Charles.
More than all his playthings he liked a pencil and paper.
The major made haste to start for Russia, because the honor was great, and the payment would be generous.
In among these was one white lock that dropped straight down over his forehead.
James was very careful of his mother, too.
The emperor was fond of the two boys and wanted them to stay on in Russia and be trained in the school for pages of the Court.
"What's his name?" asked Nicolas.
Bands were playing and rockets flying.
They visited many cities, wrote letters, and asked advice.
She did not have much money to spend but thought James should go to West Point to get the military training his father had had.
From the time he could scribble at all he drew pictures of everybody and everything in sight.
"He is named for a great officer," answered Nicolas, remembering our General Washington, and he dispatched a letter to the Lowell engineer.
The climate did not agree with James, and every time he caught cold he had touches of rheumatism, so that often he had to stay in the house and have his feet put in hot water.
But their mother said they must grow up in America and hurried back to her own land.
Still their parents did not let them forget they were little Americans.
"He is Major George Washington Whistler.
Some of his friends insisted on raising that sum for him.
He traveled a great deal, painting views in many countries and studying the pictures of other artists.
Major Whistler soon sent for his family to join him in Russia.
Then the colonel went back to the emperor and said: "The man you need to do this piece of work lives in the United States of America."
He was well scolded for this, I can tell you.
He left his boys and his wife behind, because he did not know just how comfortable he could make them in the far-off country, but he told the boys to be good and to mind their mother.
It was a long, hard voyage there, and poor little Charlie died on the way.
James Whistler was always kind to young artists and liked to have them sit by him while he worked.
It was fortunate that James could go a long time without food, for it took nearly all he could earn from his pictures to buy paint and canvas for others.
She used to say on Saturday afternoons: "Come, boys, empty your pockets and gather up your toys; we will put the knives and marbles away and get ready for Sunday." All day Sunday they were not allowed to read any book but the Bible.
Mr. Ruskin spoke, and what was worse, printed his opinion.
They went skating, dressed in handsome furs; they learned the folk and fancy dances, joined in the winter sports, and voted Russia a fine country.
He always was as polite to her as if she were the emperor's wife.
The French nation bought this portrait, and it hangs in the Luxembourg Museum, Paris.
One of his uncles, who loved him dearly, used to say: "It's enough to make Sir Joshua Reynolds (this was a great English painter, who had died years before) come out of his grave to paint Jimmie asleep!" Jimmie had delicate features and long, silky, brown curls that hung about his face.
He was a dear, patient boy, however, and afterwards declared he was almost glad he had it because some one who pitied the small invalid sent him a book of Hogarth's engravings.
He did not get his fame without much hard work.
He earned very little making maps and could not afford to buy the real, narrow-tailed coat which was proper.
He loved art so well that he made water-colors, pastels, etchings, and lithographs, as well as oil paintings.
"The Duet", one of his pictures, shows his wife and her sister at the piano.
Mr. Ruskin had to pay the costs of the trial, which had mounted up to nineteen hundred dollars.
You remember how many times he copied his own foot when he was a child.
The horses next their carriage were frightened, and reared and plunged as if they would hit the Whistler party.
The major worked too hard on the great railway and died before James was fifteen.
So he called an officer into his council chamber and said: "Now take plenty of time to look about in the different countries, have all the men you want to help you, but find me, somewhere, an engineer that will lay out a perfect railroad line." Men appointed by this colonel traveled some months.
This looked like a tiny feather.
I want you to be sure and remember about this gentleness and patience, because when he was older people often accused him of being cross and rude.
"I never expected," he wrote, "to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face!" Well, it did not look for a while as if there was any more good luck in the world for James Whistler.
James shoved his mother down on the seat behind him, and standing in front of her, beat the horses back from them.
When the judge awarded one farthing for damages (this is only a quarter of a cent in our money!), Whistler laughed and hung the English farthing on his watch-chain for a charm.
It is enough they were held impracticable the night before, and as there was no alternative in my uncle Toby's wardrobe, he sallied forth in the red plush.
My uncle Toby turn'd his head more than once behind him, to see how he was supported by the corporal; and the corporal as oft as he did it, gave a slight flourish with his stick--but not vapouringly; and with the sweetest accent of most respectful encouragement, bid his honour 'never fear.'
The mistake in my father, was in attacking my mother's motive, instead of the act itself; for certainly key-holes were made for other purposes; and considering the act, as an act which interfered with a true proposition, and denied a key-hole to be what it was--it became a violation of nature; and was so far, you see, criminal.
It is for this reason, an' please your Reverences, That key-holes are the occasions of more sin and wickedness, than all other holes in this world put together.
--It looks well at least; quoth my father to himself.
My uncle Toby look'd earnestly towards his cottage and his bowling-green.
A temperate current of blood ran orderly through her veins in all months of the year, and in all critical moments both of the day and night alike; nor did she superinduce the least heat into her humours from the manual effervescencies of devotional tracts, which having little or no meaning in them, nature is oft-times obliged to find one--And as for my father's example!
As for the thin scarlet breeches, they had been unripp'd by the taylor between the legs, and left at sixes and sevens--
quoth my uncle Toby, facing quite about to the corporal.
She cannot, quoth my uncle Toby, halting, when they had march'd up to within twenty paces of Mrs. Wadman's door--she cannot, corporal, take it amiss.--
Moreover, Miss Phipps was conscious that if the Countess was not a disreputable person, she, Miss Phipps, had no compensating superiority in virtue to set against the other lady's manifest superiority in personal charms.
He might be slightly recalcitrant now and then, as is the habit of long-eared pachyderms, under the thong of the fair Countess's tongue; but there seemed little probability that he would ever get his neck loose.
So she began to feel that she had miscalculated the advantages of a neighbourhood where people are well acquainted with each other's private affairs.
She had had seven years of sufficiently happy matrimony with Czerlaski, who had taken her to Paris and Germany, and introduced her there to many of his old friends with large titles and small fortunes.
As for Milly, the Countess really loved her as well as the preoccupied state of her affections would allow.
Mr. Bridmain's slow brain had adopted his sister's views, and it seemed to him that a woman so handsome and distinguished as the Countess must certainly make a match that might lift himself into the region of county celebrities, and give him at least a sort of cousinship to the quarter-sessions.
One of these conclusions was, that there were things more solid in life than fine whiskers and a title, and that, in accepting a second husband, she would regard these items as quite subordinate to a carriage and a settlement.
Under these circumstances, you will imagine how welcome was the perfect credence and admiration she met with from Mr. and Mrs. Barton.
Nice distinctions are troublesome.
All this, which was the simple truth, would have seemed extremely flat to the gossips of Milby, who had made up their minds to something much more exciting.
It is true, the Countess was a little vain, a little ambitious, a little selfish, a little shallow and frivolous, a little given to white lies.--But who considers such slight blemishes, such moral pimples as these, disqualifications for entering into the most respectable society!
Mr. Bridmain, in fact, quadragenarian bachelor as he was, felt extremely well pleased to receive his sister in her widowhood, and to shine in the reflected light of her beauty and title.
There was nothing here so very detestable.
Thus there was really not much affectation in her sweet speeches and attentions to Mr. and Mrs. Barton.
Still, a bachelor's heart is an outlying fortress that some fair enemy may any day take either by storm or stratagem; and there was always the possibility that Mr. Bridmain's first nuptials might occur before the Countess was quite sure of her second.
Let us do this one sly trick, says Ulysses to Neoptolemus, and we will be perfectly honest ever after--
It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs.
Still their friendship by no means adequately represented the object she had in view when she came to Milby, and it had been for some time clear to her that she must suggest a new change of residence to her brother.
Mr. Bridmain had put his neck under the yoke of his handsome sister, and though his soul was a very little one--of the smallest description indeed--he would not have ventured to call it his own.
The Countess did actually leave Camp Villa before many months were past, but under circumstances which had not at all entered into her contemplation.
Miss Phipps, for her part, didn't like dressing for effect--she had always avoided that style of appearance which was calculated to create a sensation.
--'Tis a full inch, continued my grandfather, pressing up the ridge of his nose with his finger and thumb; and repeating his assertion--'tis a full inch longer, madam, than my father's--You must mean your uncle's, replied my great-grandmother.
ex confesso, he will say--things were in a state of nature--The apple, is as much Frank's apple as John's.
--'Twas shaped, Sir, like an ace of clubs.
--Now, you must know, that my great-grandmother outlived my grandfather twelve years; so that my father had the jointure to pay, a hundred and fifty pounds half-yearly--(on Michaelmas and Lady-day,)--during all that time.
Whilst I am worth one, to pay a weeder--thy path from thy door to thy bowling-green shall never be grown up.--Whilst there is a rood and a half of land in the Shandy family, thy fortifications, my dear uncle Toby, shall never be demolish'd.
--My great-grandfather was convinced.--He untwisted the paper, and signed the article.
Now, my father, as I told you last year, detested all this--He pick'd up an opinion, Sir, as a man in a state of nature picks up an apple.--It becomes his own--and if he is a man of spirit, he would lose his life rather than give it up.
Chapter 2.XXVI.
or when he gathered it? or when he chew'd it? or when he roasted it? or when he peel'd, or when he brought it home? or when he digested?--or when he--?--For 'tis plain, Sir, if the first picking up of the apple, made it not his--that no subsequent act could.
Pray, Mr. Shandy, what patent has he to shew for it? and how did it begin to be his? was it, when he set his heart upon it?
He did his part however.--If education planted the mistake (in case it was one) my father watered it, and ripened it to perfection.
My father, replied my grandfather, had no more nose, my dear, saving the mark, than there is upon the back of my hand.
Defend me, gracious Heaven! from those persecuting spirits who make no allowances for these workings within us.--Never--O never may I lay down in their tents, who cannot relax the engine, and feel pity for the force of education, and the prevalence of opinions long derived from ancestors!
--Unless the breaking out of a fresh war--So wishing every thing, dear Toby, for best,
Silence, and whatever approaches it, weaves dreams of midnight secrecy into the brain: For this cause, if thou canst help it, never throw down the tongs and poker.
--They are all books which excite laughter; and thou knowest, dear Toby, that there is no passion so serious as lust.
I could like, said my mother, to look through the key-hole out of curiosity--Call it by its right name, my dear, quoth my father--
--Now, What do'st thou believe?
Yorick, for this reason, though he would often attack him--yet could never bear to do it with all his force.
By falling in love with a popish clergy-woman; said Trim.
Stick a pin in the bosom of thy shirt, before thou enterest her parlour.
As the turning of the thin scarlet breeches was laid aside (at least for the present), there was nothing which should put it off beyond the next morning; so accordingly it was resolv'd upon, for eleven o'clock.
Walter Shandy.
--She has gained her point.
--A just medium prevents all conclusions.
The hypothesis, like the rest of my father's, was plausible enough, and my uncle Toby had but a single word to object to it--in which Trim stood ready to second him--but my father had not drawn his conclusion--
My dear brother Toby,
I rest thy affectionate brother,
'Twas a Beguine, said my uncle Toby.
But I was imprisoned in the cage of Life--the Keeper would not let me go; her he had let loose.
Veronica refused to wear the bonnet and veil and the required bombazine.
The matter is often subservient to the manner.
It was the custom, and father took his hat off to thank his friends for their sympathy and attention.
I could have made it myself for half the price.
A discourse followed, which was calculated to harrow the feelings to the utmost.
Bed-time especially was their occasion. I was not allowed to undress alone.
The procession moved down the path again.
I wished it to drop and blot out the vague nothings under it.
I was tracing the shape of one of those green patches when I felt father's arm tremble.
Somebody must bury the dead.
Aunt Merce, when she saw me, put her hand on an empty chair, beside father, who sat by the coffin.
Mother hated it, too, for she had never worn out the garments made for Grand'ther Warren.
I looked upward, to discern the shadowy reflection behind the gray haze of cloud, where she might have paused a moment on her eternal journey to the eternal world of souls.
As the coffin was taken out to the hearse, my heart twisted and palpitated, as if a command had been laid upon it to follow, and not leave her.
All made way for me with a silent respect.
"You think I can go through with it, then?"
"Good; I can walk through it once more."
Those passages in the Bible which contain the beautifully poetic images relating to the going of man to his long home were read, and to my ear they seemed to fall on the coffin in dull strife with its inmate, who mutely contradicted them.
I shut my eyes, but could not close my ears to the sound of the spadeful of sand which fell on the coffin.
The kitchen was the focus of interest to him, for meals were prepared at all hours for comers and goers.
Somebody handed me gloves; my bonnet was tied, a handkerchief given to me, and the door opened.
Arthur began to cry so nervously, that some considerate friend took him out, and Aunt Merce wept so violently that she grew faint, and caught hold of me.
Perhaps mother was always right about me too; she was against me."
We sat in state, to be condoled with and waited upon.
Arthur's feelings were played upon also.
The duties of friendship and tradition had been fulfilled; the neighbors had gone home to their avocations.
I acquiesced in all her arrangements, for she derived a simple comfort from these external tokens.
"Yes, the idea."
When the hearse moved down the street, father, Arthur, and I were called, and assisted in our own chaise, as if we were helpless; the reins were put in father's hands, and the horse was led behind the hearse.
We must leave her to the creatures Veronica had seen.
Veronica knew nothing of this.
The graveyard was a mile outside the village--a sandy plain where a few stunted pines transplanted from the woods near it struggled to keep alive.
In the passage I heard a knocking from Veronica's room, and crossed to learn what she wanted.
He wept often, confiding to me his grief and his plans for the future.
But what a picture she had attempted to make!
She was wan and languid, but collected.
Her course was taken for granted; mine was imposed upon me. I remonstrated with Temperance, but she replied that it was all well meant, and always done.
"Because I have tried.
"Yes."
She presided there and wrangled with Fanny, who seemed to have lost her capacity for doing anything steadily, except, as Temperance said, where father was concerned.
She discussed the subject of the mourning with the Morgesons.
Every child in Surrey was allowed to come in, to look at the dead, with the idle curiosity of childhood.
At last the word was given, and the long procession began to move through the street, which was deserted.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
The landing-stair was full of people.
Temperance told me that the mild and indifferent mourners were fond of good victuals, and she thought their hearts were lighter than their stomachs when they went away.
"It's a pity she isn't his dog; she might keep at his feet then.
I gave her the flacon of salts, which revived her; but I felt as father looked--stern, and anxious to escape the unprofitable trial.
"No."
"Keep it; but don't work on it any more." And I put it away.
I am going to put on my bonnet.
It hung low over us.
We were still obliged to sit an intolerable while, till all present had passed before her for the last time.
"How could you have done this?"
Arthur's hand was in mine; he stamped his feet firmly on the sand, as if to break the oppressive silence which no one seemed disposed to disturb.
His lips moved, but no words were audible.
However, I was, in a measure, kept from myself during this interval.
"She's a bigger child than ever," Temperance remarked, "and must have her way."
Go.
A cat ran out of a house, and scampered across the way; Arthur laughed, and father jumped nervously at the sound of his laugh.
It was put under rigorous funeral law, and inspected from garret to cellar.
"Verry, you drive me wild.
I promised him to go, wondering whether I should meet an ancient beau, Joe Bacon.
Though the tall brass lamps glittered like gold, their circle of light was small; the corners of the room were obscure.
It occurred to her that she, also, had been no favorite of his.
I was within a month of sixteen, and Veronica was in her thirteenth year; but she looked as old as I did. She carefully prepared her toast with milk and butter, and ate it in silence.
The dishes were odd, some of china, some of delf, and were continually moved out of their places, for we helped ourselves, although Temperance stayed in the room, ostensibly as a waiter.
The plenty around me, the ease and independence, gave me a delightful sense of comfort.
Arthur played round the chair of mother, who looked happy and forgetful. After Temperance had rearranged the table for father's supper we were quiet.
"No more than the baby here did."
A smile crept into her blue eye, as she said: "My hearing him, or not, would make no difference, since God could hear and answer."
"I am afraid I make an idol of him, Cassy."
"Should I be glad?
There was one old Mink by the river who had a white tip on his tail, and that is something which many people have never seen.
"I don't know," answered the young Mink, "but you are so wise that I thought you might know some way." He began to feel discouraged, and to think that the Bachelor's offer didn't mean very much after all.
The Bachelor backed out as far as he could, but his body stuck in the hole. "You are rumpling your beautiful fur," cried the young Mink.
Big Brother stood it very patiently for a while; then he snarled at them, and showed his teeth without smiling, and said he would fight anybody who spoke another word about it.
The Bachelor backed carefully out through the opening and stood there, looking tired and hungry and very much rumpled.
Their under jaws were white, and they were very proud of them.
"That makes him lucky."
The best way to get out is not to get in--and I've gotten in."
He wished to be just like him in every way but one; he did not want to be a bachelor.
"Oh, no," answered Big Brother.
But Big Brother was very happy.
They said that, whatever he did, he was always lucky. "It is all because of a white tip on his tail," they said.
You know that is often the way--we think most of those things which are scarce or hard to get.
In some other families, where there were only nine or ten babies all the season, they had been brought up more strictly.
The oldest five will play 'Mud Turtles in winter,' the next five will play 'Frogs in winter,' and the youngest five will play 'Snakes in winter.' The way to play these games is to lie perfectly still in some dark place and not say a word."
In spring and summer, when they can find fresh grasses and young rushes, or a few parsnips, carrots, and turnips from the farmers' fields, other animals are quite safe.
"'Fore I'd make such a fuss!"
"Hard to tell: I know it always gives me a good appetite, though." Then all the Muskrats laughed.
What had been a lovely frolic became an unpleasant, disgraceful quarrel, and they said such things as these:
"Hard to tell," answered one Muskrat, who had lived in the marsh longer than the rest.
You're big enough, but you're just as homely as you can be.
In the winter they live mostly on roots.
Mud Hens cannot bear Minks.
Teasing is not so very bad, you know, although it is dreadfully silly, but when people begin by teasing they sometimes get to saying things in earnest--even really hateful, mean things.
"Yes, great pity," chuckled the old Muskrat.
"How glad you would be to see them!"
And that was what made the Muskrat father and mother stop it whenever they could.
The Turtles were sleeping all winter, too, in the banks of the pond.
The Wild Ducks who nested in the sedges, were quite willing that the young Muskrats should play with their children, and the Mud Hens were not afraid of them.
They were a jolly, good-natured company, and easy to get along with.
And many more things which were even worse.
If one did that, he could plainly see what they were; and if one happened to be a Muskrat, and could dive and go into them through their watery doorways, he would find under the queer roof of each, a warm, dry room in which to pass the cold days.
After she had let them think about this for a while, she said, "I shall punish you all for this." Then there was no quarrel among her children to see who should have the first turn--not at all.
"Won't you catch it though!"
Then they kept still and listened to their mother.
He smiled all around his little mouth and showed his gnawing teeth.
THE PLAYFUL MUSKRATS
"Suppose somebody had gotten hurt," she said.
They had short, downy fur, almost black on the back, soft gray underneath, and a reddish brown everywhere else.
Of all the birds who lived by the water, only the Gulls were there, and they were not popular.
"I dare you to!"
This made the young Muskrats look very sober, for they knew that the Muskrat who is hurt in winter never gets well.
We're the oldest." And five more said, "Well, it's our turn next anyway, 'cause we're next oldest." The others said, "You might give up to us, because we're the youngest."
So there!"
"Oh, yes.
There was very little fur on their tails or on their feet, and those parts were black.
"Fine day!" screamed the Gulls, as they swept through the air.
When they reached the old nest at the end, all of them tried to get in at once, and they pushed each other around with their broad little heads, scrambled and clutched and held on with their strong little feet.
Their mother was very proud of them, and loved to watch them running around on their short legs, and to hear them slap their long, scaly tails on the water when they dove.
These homes looked like heaps of dried rushes, unless one went close to them.
"I shall let you play all the rest of the day, but I shall choose the games.
All around them were their winter houses, built of mud and coarse grasses.
The young Muskrats looked at each other sorrowfully.
And the older one answered back, "Well, you're not so good-looking" (which was also true).
Now the whole fifteen crowded around the old summer home, and some of them went in one way, and some of them went in another, for every Muskrat's summer house has several burrows leading to it.
If they had all been exactly the same age, it would have been even pleasanter, for the oldest five would put on airs and call the others "the children"; and the next five would call the youngest five "babies"; although they were all well grown.
"You slapped your tail on my back!"
He knew that the Frogs were better off asleep in the mud at the bottom of the pond, than they would be sitting in the sunshine with a few hungry Gulls above them.
One warm day in winter, when some of the pussy-willows made a mistake and began to grow because they thought spring had come, a party of Muskrats were visiting in the marsh beside the pond.
Fifteen young Muskrats who really loved each other, talking like that because they couldn't decide whether the oldest or the youngest or the half-way-between brothers and sisters should go first into the old nest. And it didn't matter a bit who was oldest or who was youngest, and it never would have happened had it not been for their dreadful habit of teasing.
Think of it.
Like all young Muskrats, they were full of fun, and there were few pleasanter sights than to see them frolicking on a warm moonlight evening, when they looked like brown balls rolling and bounding around on the shore or plunging into the water.
It doesn't mean so much to Muskrats to be brothers and sisters as it does to some people, still they remembered that they were related, and they played more with each other than with those young Muskrats who were only their cousins or friends.
Fifteen young Muskrats, all brothers and sisters, and all born the summer before, started off to look at the old home where they were children together.
"I'm going to tell on you fellows!"
They did not dare say anything, for they knew that, although their mother was gentle, as Muskrats are most of the time, she could be very severe.
So they went away quietly to play what she had told them they must.
"Fine weather!" said every Muskrat to his neighbor.
There was no chance for the youngest five to call other Muskrats "babies," so when they were warm and well fed and good-natured they laughed and said, "Who cares?" When they were cold and hungry, they slapped their tails on the ground or on the water and said, "Don't you think you're smart!"
One young Muskrat said, "Aren't you going to let us play any more?"
They thought it sounded very much the same as being sent to bed for being naughty.
They pushed and scrambled some more, and one of the youngest children said to one of the oldest, "Well, I don't care.
"I am very glad I did think of her.
"The carriage!
How did you all behave?
You got Hannah that good place.
"Poor Miss Taylor!--I wish she were here again.
I wanted them to put off the wedding."
What a horrible idea!
Who cried most?"
CHAPTER I
"Dirty, sir!
I wish you may not catch cold."
'Tis a sad business."
"My dearest papa!
What are you proud of?
"But you must have found it very damp and dirty.
That was your doing, papa.
All looked up to them.
Not a speck on them."
He will be able to tell her how we all are."
He had been at the pains of consulting Mr. Perry, the apothecary, on the subject.
A complete change of life became desirable.
CHAPTER II
She would be very glad to stay."
He quitted the militia and engaged in trade, having brothers already established in a good way in London, which afforded him a favourable opening.
Mr. Woodhouse told me of it.
I do not think it could disagree with you."
Ours are all apple-tarts.
CHAPTER III
He had not much intercourse with any families beyond that circle; his horror of late hours, and large dinner-parties, made him unfit for any acquaintance but such as would visit him on his own terms.
Had it taken place only once a year, it would have been a grievance.
I do not advise the custard.
Wiser even than the lion, or the wisest of apes, his wisdom furthermore was benign where theirs was sinister. Consider his dignity, his poise and skill.
But we! we are experts.
Why don't we all die or give up when we're sick of the world?
VIII
All creatures wish to live, and to perpetuate their species, of course; but those two wishes alone evidently do not carry any race far.
He slogs through the world.
Adaptability is what we depend on. We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves first, to her ways.
If he once became a conscious user of tools he would of course go much further.
The pig is remarkably intelligent and brave,--but he's gross; and grossness delays one's achievement, it takes so much time.
Some, like horses and deer, were not bold enough; or were stupid, like buffaloes.
The creatures that want to live a life of their own, we call wild.
Isn't it strange?
But we still don't know which has the more value.
Because the love of life is reenforced, in most energized beings, by some longing that pushes them forward, in defeat and in darkness.
The elephant, being born to it, is easy-going, confident, tolerant.
When an elephant plucks off a branch and swishes his flanks, and thus keeps away insects, he is using a tool.
He had the best chance of all.
What was it then, that put them out of the race?
"We attain no power over nature till we learn natural laws, and our lordship depends on the adroitness with which we learn and conform."
There are many other beasts that one might once have thought had a chance.
He was plastic, too.
Such creatures sentence themselves to be captives, by their lack of ambition.
To use tools involves using reason, instead of sticking to instinct. Now, sticking to instinct has its disadvantages, but so has using reason.
It is not that we have planned this deliberately: but they know what we're like.
A tool, in the most primitive sense, is any object, lying around, that can obviously be used as an instrument for this or that purpose.
Some might be our friends.
And when they saw that they hadn't, and that the monkey-men were getting ahead, were they too great-minded and decent to exterminate their puny rivals?
Whichever faculty you use, the other atrophies, and partly deserts you.
They have more spirit.
If we had been as strong as the elephants, we might have been kinder. When great power comes naturally to people, it is used more urbanely. We use it as parvenus do, because that's what we are.
Some had over-trustful characters, like the seals; or exploitable characters, like cows, and chickens, and sheep.
Loving us, they let us stop their developing in tune with their natures; and they've patiently tried ever since to adopt ways of ours.
We don't wish it.
They have done it, too; but of course they can't get far: it's not their own road.
They've been true to us, yes, but they haven't been true to themselves.
We keep them all terrorized.
If super-snake-men had had banquets they would have been too vast to describe.
It may have been their tolerance and patience that betrayed them. They wait too long before they resent an imposition or insult. Just as ants are too energetic and cats too shrewd for their own highest good, so the elephants suffer from too much patience.
That is the kind of hold that curiosity has on the monkeys.
Each little snake family could have eaten a herd of cattle at Christmas.
Kings who won't lift their scepters must yield in the end; and, the worst of it is, to upstarts who snatch at their crowns.
In addition to these, a race, to be great, needs some hunger, some itch, to spur it up the hard path we lately have learned to call evolution.
The rhinoceros cares little for adaptability.
We are trying to use both.
All species must surrender unconditionally--those are our terms--and come and live in barns alongside us; or on us, as parasites.
Think of the long epochs that passed before it entered our heads.
Their exhibitions of it may seem superb,--such power and such restraint, combined, are noble,--but a quality carried to excess defeats itself.
With us is it curiosity?
Goats, then?
Adroitness however is merely an ability to win; back of it there must be some spur to make us use our adroitness.
Wolves, whales, crows?
endless interest in one's environment?
It is not necessarily stupid however, to fail to use tools.
Race by race they have been slaughtered.
VII
We have been considering which species was on the whole most finely equipped to be rulers, and thereafter achieve a high civilization; but that wasn't the problem.
The lesson to be learned was simple: the reward was the rule of a planet. Yet only one species, our own, has ever had that much brains.
And we have betrayed them by making under-simians of them.
By a master passion, I mean a passion that is really your master: some appetite which habitually, day in, day out, makes its subjects forget fatigue or danger, and sacrifice their ease to its gratification.
Captain George S. Williams, of New Milford, was a member of the class of 1852 at Yale for a time, and received a degree from Trinity in 1855.
Captain William H. Lewis, Jr., studied after the war at the Berkeley Divinity School, and has been for many years rector of St. John's Church in Bridgeport.
At the time of the regiment's formation he was conducting an academy in Goshen, and was enlisted as captain of a company which he had been active in recruiting.
Surgeon Henry Plumb, and Assistant-Surgeons Robert G. Hazzard and John W. Lawton were all graduates of the Yale Medical School, in the classes of 1861, 1862, and 1859.
Adjutant Theodore F. Vaill, the historian of the regiment, was a student before the war at Union College, but did not graduate.
It was made up of men of almost all conditions of life and of widely different ages, though naturally with young men in a large majority; of mechanics from the Housatonic and Naugatuck valleys, and farmers' boys from the hills; of men of education and men of none.
The university man of to-day, as the burden of the baccalaureate sermons so frequently testifies, is consigned to a special place of responsibility in life because of his training; these men surely earned one of special honor by reason of theirs, which was, too, not like the other, preparation alone, but also fulfilment.
Colonel Mackenzie graduated at West Point in 1862, but he was never a resident of the county, or of Connecticut, and his only connection with either was through his commission from Governor Buckingham.
Judge Augustus H. Fenn, Major and Brevet-Colonel, came back from the war, having lost an arm at Cedar Creek, to take a course in the Law School at Harvard, and Yale made him a Master of Arts in 1889.
Though the large addition to its numbers which the increase in size necessitated made it perhaps somewhat less homogeneous than at first, it did not greatly alter its essential characteristics.
As a whole, the regiment was a body thoroughly representative not only of the army of which it was a fraction, an army as has been often said unlike any other the world has known, but also of the population from which it was drawn.
Sergeant Romulus C. Loveridge, who had been entered in the class of 1865 at Yale, received a commission in a colored regiment.
At the time of his death in 1897, he was a lecturer in the Yale Law School, and member of the Supreme Court of Errors.
In the first place, they are well attended.
And this moral stamina has marked New England ever since, and marked her to her glory.
The original backless benches were replaced by box pews with narrow seats like shelves, hung on hinges around three sides, but part of the original pulpit remains and a few of the box pews.
The congregation either waits for the minister and his wife outside the door, or stands until he has entered the pulpit.
That they are interminable we know.
The belfry is precisely in the center of the four-sided pitched roof.
The house of Major-General Benjamin Lincoln, who received the sword of Cornwallis at Yorktown, is still occupied by his descendants, its neat fence, many windows, two chimneys, and its two stories and a half proclaiming it a dwelling of repute.
It was religious zeal which furnished this motive power.
After the morning service there is a noon intermission, in which the half-frozen congregation stirs around, eats cold luncheons brought in baskets, and then returns to the next session.
In fact, after the tolling of the last bell, the houses may all be searched--each ten families is under an inspector--if there is any question of delinquents hiding in them.
Near by, descendants of Samuel Lincoln, the ancestor of Abraham, occupy part of another roomy ancient homestead.
There is no idle talk or play.
This performance alone sometimes takes an hour, as there is no organ, nor notes, and only a few copies of the Bay Psalm Book, of which, by the way, a copy now would be worth many times its weight in gold.
In the spacious living-room are seventeen panels, on the walls and in the doors, painted with charming old-fashioned skill by John Hazlitt, the brother of the English essayist.
And why not, when the very house is still handsomely preserved, where the nameless nobleman, Francis Le Baron, was concealed between the floors, and, as we are told in Mrs. Austen's novel, very properly capped the climax by marrying his brave little protector, Molly Wilder? Why not, when the Lincoln family, ancestors of Abraham, has been identified with the town since its settlement?
Those whom it now tortures with its hot pincers of doubt and self-reproach are sacrificed to a cause long since won."
In 1681 the interior, like the exterior, is sternly bare.
Even your voice repeats the words which those old patriarchs, well versed in Biblical lore, chose for their neighborhood names.
Hingham changes.
The sermon is discussed and the children forbidden to romp or laugh.
Even motoring through, too quickly as motorists must, one cannot help being struck by the substantial dignity of the place, by the well-kept prosperity of the houses, large and small, which fringe the fine old highway.
A strange procession, indeed, for a road originally marked by the moccasined feet of Indians, and widened gradually by the toilsome journeyings of rough Colonial carts and coaches.
Every one is expected, nay, commanded, to come to church.
It was this high pitch, attained and sustained by our Puritan fathers, which produced a dramatic and sometimes terrible blend of personality.
Hingham, its Main Street--alas for the original name of "Bachelors Rowe"--arched by a double row of superb elms on either side, is incalculably rich in old houses, old traditions, old families.
But is the message cheering?
The people are very proud of their new building.
Yes, New England has changed amazingly in the revolutions of three centuries, and here, under the shadow of this square plain building--Hingham's Old Ship Church--while we pause to watch the Sunday pageant of 1920, we can most easily call back the Sabbath rites, and the ideals which created those rites, three centuries ago.
There is a Roman Catholic Church in the very heart of that one-time Puritan stronghold: the New North is Unitarian, and Episcopalians, Baptists, and Second Adventists have settled down comfortably where once they would have been run out of town.
These two small galleries, between the roof and the choir loft, held for thirty years, in diminishing numbers, negroes and Indians.
It is easy to emphasize its absurdities, to ridicule the almost fanatical fervor which goaded men to harshness and inconsistency.
One cannot speak of Hingham churches--indeed, one cannot speak of Hingham--without admiring mention of the New North Church.
And yet, forlorn and tedious as the bleak service appears to us, there is no doubt that these stern-faced men and women wrenched an almost mystical inspiration from it; that a weird fascination emanated from this morbid dwelling on sin and punishment, appealing to the emotions quite as vividly--although through a different channel--as the most elaborate ceremonial.
The small boys are separated from their families and kept in order by tithing-men who allow no wandering eyes or whispered words.
CHAPTER V
"Which way to Egypt?" Is this an echo from that time when the Bible was the corner-stone of Church and State, of home and school?
But for the sense of mysterious beauty, for snatches of pictures one will never forget, the little vistas which open on the upward or the downward trail, framed by hanging boughs or encircled by a half frame of stone and hillside--these are, perhaps, more lovely.
But modern Milton is something more than this, as old Milton was something more than this.
Foxgloves lean against the "pleached alley," and roses clamber on a wall that doubtless bore the weight of their first progenitors.
The Great Blue Hill, especially--the one which bears an observatory on its summit--swims above one's head.
But as the eye grows accustomed to the stretching distances, objects both near and far begin to appear.
So let us come down, for, after all, "Love is of the valley." Down again to the old town of Milton.
Nothing is left of this quaint structure but a small bronze bas-relief, set against a stone wall, near its original site.
And those mills stand upon the site of the first grist mill in New England to be run by water power.
One fancies the students' roving eyes may have occasionally strayed down the Indian trail directly opposite the old site--a trail which, although now attained to the proud rank of a lane, Churchill's Lane, still invites one down its tangled green way along the gray stone wall.
MILTON AND THE BLUE HILLS
Yes, wherever one goes in Milton, either on foot to-day or back through the chapters of three centuries ago, the Blue Hills dominate every event, and the Great Blue Hill floats above them all.
Those who are familiar with the State of Massachusetts--and New England--can stand here and pick out a hundred distinguishing landmarks, and those who have never been here before may find an unparalleled opportunity to see the whole region at one sweep of the eye.
This early church and early school was a log cabin with a thatched roof and latticed windows, if one may believe the relief, but men of brains and character were taught there lessons which stood them and the colony in good stead.
From the point of view of topography the summit of Great Blue Hill is the place to reach.
Milton--a town of dignity and distinction!
You may see, too, a solitary figure with a scientist's stoop, or a tutor with a group of boys, making a first-hand study of a region which is full of interest to the geologist.
All ground is historic ground in Milton.
That rollicking group of schoolboys yonder belongs to an academy, which, handsome and flourishing as it is to-day, was founded as long ago as 1787.
We have not half begun to wander over it: not half begun to hear the pleasant stories it has to tell. When one is as old as this--for Milton was discovered by a band from Plymouth who came up the Neponset River in 1621--one has many tales to tell.
The granite quarry man--far more interested in the value of the stone that underlay the wooded slopes than in Ruskin's theory of its purifying effect upon the inhabitants--had already obtained a footing here, when, under the able leadership of Charles Francis Adams, the whole region was taken over by the State in 1894.
This is the view that the Governor so admired, and tradition tells us that when he was forced to return to England he walked on foot down the hill, shaking hands with his neighbors, patriot and Tory alike, with tears in his eyes as he left behind him the garden and the trees he had planted, and the house where he had so happily lived.
Not only notable personages, but notable events have been engendered under the shadow of these hills.
The rounded summits of the Blue Hills, to which the eye is irresistibly attracted before entering the town which principally claims them, are the worn-down stumps of ancient mountains, and although so leveled by the process of the ages, they are still the highest land near the coast from Maine to Mexico.
This, then, is the Great Blue Hill of Milton.
As you pass through the Reservation--and if you are taking even the most cursory glimpse of Milton you must include some portion of this park--you will pass the open space where in the early days, when Milton country life was modeled upon English country life more closely than now, Malcolm Forbes raced upon his private track the horses he himself had bred.
That seems long ago, but there was a school in Milton before that: a school held in the first meeting-house.
Circling thus around the base of the Great Blue Hill and irresistibly drawn closer and closer to it as by a magnet, one is impelled to make the ascent to the top--an easy ascent with its destination clearly marked by the Rotch Meteorological Observatory erected in 1884 by the late A. Lawrence Rotch of Milton, who bequeathed funds for its maintenance.
The next group to the right is in Lyndeboro.
The avenue, however, was never completed, as Belcher was appointed governor of, and transferred to, New Jersey shortly after.
From them the Massachuset tribe about the Bay derived its name, signifying "Near the Great Hills," which name was changed by the English to Massachusetts, and applied to both bay and colony.
"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help," chants the psalmist.
How much of its success Milton attributes to its location--for one joins, indeed, a distinguished fellowship when one builds upon a hill, or on several hills, as Roman as well as Bostonian history testifies--can only be guessed by its tribute in the form of the Blue Hills Reservation.
Although its Indian name has been taken from this lovely range, the loveliness remains.
At the right of Lyndeboro, and nearly over the Readville railroad stations, is Joe English Hill, and to complete the round, nearly north-northwest are the summits of the Uncanoonuc Mountains, fifty-nine miles away.
Here is the old, old garden, and although the ephemeral blossoms of the present springtime shine brightly forth, the box, full twenty feet high, speaks of another epoch.
We are six hundred and thirty-five feet above the sea, on the highest coastland from Agamenticus, near York, Maine, to the Rio Grande, and the panorama thus unrolled is truly magnificent.
That peculiar odor of sweetness which drifts to us with a turn of the wind, comes from a chocolate mill whose trade-mark of a neat-handed maid with her little tray is known all over the civilized world.
This State recreation park and forest reserve of about four thousand acres--a labyrinth of idyllic footpaths and leafy trails, of twisting drives and walks that open out upon superb vistas, is now the property of the people of Massachusetts.
Facing nearly south, the long ridge of Manomet Hill in Plymouth, thirty-three miles away, stands clear against the sky, while twenty-six miles away, in Duxbury, one sees the Myles Standish Monument.
Two other men of note, who, since the days of our years are but threescore and ten, chose that their days without number should be spent in the town they loved, were Wendell Phillips and Rimmer the sculptor, who are both buried at Milton.
Chapter II
Pod said the scene was without a parallel; he was soaked to his equator; the half-christened, half-drowned Pythagorina Podina was picked up from the flood with a tablespoon, and the ceremony finished; then she was rolled on the barrel to get all the water out of her, and put to bed with hot flatirons at her feet to prevent croup and mumps.
Coonskin's opinion didn't benefit Pod much.
A little green-eyed Irish girl, five days old, was named Pythagorina Podina Mulgarry.
Fortunately for us the wind wasn't blowing strong, but we had to change our course some, and hustle faster, for the blazing trail chased us.
He said the babe was an unruly child, and kicked so frantically when the priest took her in his arms that two flatirons were tied to its feet to keep them down.
A silvertip would be a boon to you, Prof; its skin would fetch fifty dollars or more. Let's look for bear."
The shouting sounded nearer every second, and I soon distinguished Coonskin's voice.
The Professor snuffed.
But the guests didn't eat much.
That night he got up a fine supper, and invited some old friends. He bought a big porterhouse steak, thick and tender, and personally broiled it on his patent folding stove.
Pod said he would fry the fish, and went at it so enthusiastically that he forgot to put the bag of corn meal back in its place.
It has been estimated by various ornithologists, botanists and entomologists that the stump is millions of years old.
Somewhere about five o'clock Pod came into camp with a good mess of trout.
"What do you say?" Pod inquired, turning to Coonskin.
Coonskin learned a new lesson, and turned down the corner of the page so he'd recollect it.
Pod looked at me and I looked at Pod; I hadn't anything to say on the subject; it didn't interest me as much as it did Coonskin.
His hard-wood fire wasn't very satisfactory, but with some dry brush the men got the meal under way.
He lagged behind to do the blazing; and pretty soon I smelt smoke.
Coonskin said he was an experienced woodman, and would blaze the trees so we would get out again.
Ordinary wood burns up too fast."
I couldn't see any turkeys, but there was good pasturage around.
"Coonskin's in trouble, plain enough," said Pod aloud to himself, "I must run to his aid." So he started on a trot down stream to the bend, and then quickly turned, falling all over himself, and ran toward the cabins faster than I ever saw him run before or since.
"Just as soon as it's once going, it ought to burn smoothly enough--might pour coal oil on the chips. What do you say, Coonskin?"
"What would you do if you saw a bear?" Pod asked.
He said he had seen some trout in the stream; by supper time he had caught a nice mess.
"The only trouble will be in starting the fire," said Pod.
A board sign informed us it was simply Turkey Creek.
After Pod had explained the meaning of the word "blaze" in this case, the fellow was more put out than the fire.
Pod got up from the ground excitedly.
"Smells as if the woods were on fire somewhere," hinted Pod.
"Lots of petrified wood chips lying around," I remarked; "and they'll last.
Next morning we visited the noted petrified stump, measuring upwards of forty-five feet in circumference.
So when the priest was handed the tiny thing in swaddling clothes and held it over the barrel that served as the font, the poor girl was frightened and squirmed, and suddenly slipped out of the priest's arms into the barrel and sank out of sight.
And Coonskin went to work gathering petrified wood for the supper fire.
At length we struck a trail which led to a couple of cabins in the canyon.
"Well, now leave that to me," said Coonskin.
The ladies looked at the dog, and then at Pod, not knowing which to thank, then feeling sensitive about accepting the best part of the steak, insisted upon Pod's having one of their pieces and Coonskin the other; and both men being kind and gallant accepted the compliment, and all fell to eating.
Then the wake broke up.
We journeyed until ten at night, stopping at Florisant only a few minutes to buy a crate of peaches.
When Pod returned he told him he had seen huge bear tracks; he was going bear-hunting.
It was three o'clock when we donks were picketed and allowed to graze.
The happy father called personally on Pod and asked him to act as godfather at the baptismal service, Sunday afternoon.
Pod went fishing that afternoon with a gun, and took the whole arsenal along with him, including the axe.
That was my experience in the woods of Wisconsin.
Pod laughed at him.
At that time in Cripple Creek, several boys ranging from a day to six weeks old, whose destinies were thought to be promising, were afflicted with my master's ponderous name.
I think they were guessing at it, for I couldn't see the rings, and even if I had seen them with a telescope a fellow couldn't live long enough to count them.
You could see plainly from their appetites that they were telling the truth. After supper Don feasted on the tougher parts of the steak, and we donks were fed the scraps of potatoes and bread and tin tomato and peach cans.
Pod objected at first, because of the scarcity of fire-wood.
Several times I had a suspicion that we had been misdirected.
Then Coonskin went fishing.
When the banquet was over the guests went home.
Our tramp through the forest I cannot soon forget.
Pod didn't say anything, though, but just forked it on to the platter and scraped off some dry grass and a sliver and a bug, and carved it up and generously put it on the ladies' plates.
It was comical how those two men puzzled their brains about that missing commodity. When Coonskin detected some meal stamped in the ground, Pod pointed at me and said, "That's the thief, there."
They said they had just had dinner.
About six o'clock we went into camp on the margin of a famous petrified forest.
"I think best to go through the woods," said the valet.
Pod devoted Monday morning to business, and took in a good stock of supplies, and after lunch we set out on the trail to Florisant, about twenty miles away.
Next morning, Coonskin was the first to return from fishing, and looked much excited.
I don't believe the child understood a word that the priest said; Pod didn't.
That mixture might suit my stomach, I thought, but it doesn't delight my palate.
I was sorry, too.
I was successful, beyond my hopes and expectations, securing fine pictures of his study and parlor.
At dusk I had covered only three miles.
Canton did him honor.
I witnessed the leave-taking at his house, his ride to the train in the coach drawn by four greys under escort of a band, and heard him deliver his farewell address from the rear platform of his private car.
"Pretty cold, hain't it, Professor?"
I put my foot in it--the genuine red and yellow mixture of real Ohio clay.
With this I returned to my companions, somewhat warmer physically, but cooler in spirit.
Then a woman drove past and tossed me the comforting reminder: "Don't you find it awfully cold?" I did not reply to the last two.
That theatre put me way ahead financially.
I saw a meadow-lark on the first of March; this day I heard blue-birds and robins singing gaily.
A store loomed into view shortly; I was elated. According to the sign over the entrance, the younger generation was the ruling power.
It was so deep, and sticky, and liberally diluted with thawed frost that once I was compelled to crawl along the top of a rail fence two hundred feet and more, and drag my jackass.
I first ate the cake of chocolate, then some sugar, and drank two dippersful of hot water,--then shook myself.
"No," I said.
I was mad enough to unload my Winchester.
I shouted several times before the rig stopped.
These rural men eyed me with suspicion until I mentioned Mac A'Rony.
Chocolate is a favorite beverage of mine; besides, I wanted a hot drink.
The village treasurer wore a "boiled shirt" and brass collar-buttons, but no collar or coat.
The village dates back to pioneer days.
He said the town hadn't reached the hotel stage of development yet, but that he would gladly take me in, provided I'd sleep with his clerk in the garret.
While deliberating, one of the landlords approached, and taking my arm, led me to his comfortable hostelry, where he royally entertained me and my animals.
It looked as though spring had come to stay.
In front of two hotels, a block apart, stood their proprietors waving hats and arms, and calling to me to be their guest.
We two were engaged to appear at the Star Theatre Wednesday evening, and when I rode out on to the stage the house shook with laughter and cheers.
Thursday morning I called on the Mayor, Mark Hanna and Senator Garfield, and added the autographs of all three to my album.
From there we marched to Superior street, where cheers greeted us on every hand.
pure), a pint of corned oysters (light weight), some crackers, and leaf lard, to take the place of butter, and a cake of bitter chocolate.
To you I will say, 'Have you not, madame, put aside some of the surest, deadliest, most speedy poison?'"
It was terrible to behold the frightful pallor of that woman, the anguish of her look, the trembling of her whole frame.
"Yes," he murmured,--"yes, be satisfied."
"Sir! sir!"
"Madame, where do you keep the poison you generally use?" said the magistrate, without any introduction, placing himself between his wife and the door.
"For what you have just said."
"You do not answer, madame!" exclaimed the terrible interrogator.
The Judge.
"Yes, sir."
The magistrate had slept for a short time while the lamp sent forth its final struggles; its flickerings awoke him, and he found his fingers as damp and purple as though they had been dipped in blood.
He had been obliged to seclude himself more than ever, to evade the enormous number of applications presented to him for the purpose of obtaining tickets of admission to the court on the day of trial.
His head dropped upon his chest, and in this position he paced his study; then he threw himself, dressed as he was, upon a sofa, less to sleep than to rest his limbs, cramped with cold and study.
"Reflect that I am your wife!"
Have you been working all night?
"No!"
In the clover-fields beyond the chestnut-trees, a lark was mounting up to heaven, while pouring out her clear morning song.
He then entered the room.
Why did you not come down to breakfast?
Did you think the punishment would be withheld because you are the wife of him who pronounces it?--No, madame, no; the scaffold awaits the poisoner, whoever she may be, unless, as I just said, the poisoner has taken the precaution of keeping for herself a few drops of her deadliest potion." Madame de Villefort uttered a wild cry, and a hideous and uncontrollable terror spread over her distorted features.
"No, no!"
At the door he paused for a moment to wipe his damp, pale brow.
"No, no, no, I tell you; one day, if I allow you to live, you will perhaps kill him, as you have the others!"
"In the name of the love you once bore me!"
"You will thank me--for what?"
"I mean that the wife of the first magistrate in the capital shall not, by her infamy, soil an unblemished name; that she shall not, with one blow, dishonor her husband and her child."
"To the Palais."
If I find you alive on my return, you shall sleep to-night in the conciergerie." Madame de Villefort sighed; her nerves gave way, and she sunk on the carpet.
"What did I say?
Madame de Villefort was sitting on an ottoman and impatiently turning over the leaves of some newspapers and pamphlets which young Edward, by way of amusing himself, was tearing to pieces before his mother could finish reading them.
"Directly, sir." The valet re-appeared almost instantly, and, having shaved his master, assisted him to dress entirely in black.
"What are you bringing me?" said he.
"I understand," he said, "you confess; but a confession made to the judges, a confession made at the last moment, extorted when the crime cannot be denied, diminishes not the punishment inflicted on the guilty!"
His father went up to him, took him in his arms, and kissed his forehead.
"You have accomplished these different crimes with impudent address, but which could only deceive those whose affections for you blinded them.
By degrees every one awoke.
"Well, madame, it will be a laudable action on your part, and I will thank you for it!"
The valet then left the room.
"Go," he said: "go, my child." Edward ran out.
Twice you have pronounced that word!"
"My mistress wishes much to be present at the trial."
She said you would have to speak a great deal in the murder case, and that you should take something to keep up your strength;" and the valet placed the cup on the table nearest to the sofa, which was, like all the rest, covered with papers.
"No, I do not understand; what do you mean?" stammered the unhappy woman, completely overwhelmed.
"Monsieur," she said, "I--I do not understand you." And, in her first paroxysm of terror, she had raised herself from the sofa, in the next, stronger very likely than the other, she fell down again on the cushions.
"Then come to dress and shave me."
"Certainly.
"In the name of our child!
"Oh, pardon me, sir; let me live!"
"I did not ask for it.
Can you be a coward,--you who have had the courage to witness the death of two old men and a young girl murdered by you?"
"Oh, mercy, mercy, monsieur!"
"Do you understand me?" he said.
"In the name of heaven!"
"Tell your mistress," he at length answered, "that I wish to speak to her, and I beg she will wait for me in her own room."
"Oh, do not fear the scaffold, madame," said the magistrate; "I will not dishonor you, since that would be dishonor to myself; no, if you have heard me distinctly, you will understand that you are not to die on the scaffold."
The curtain was drawn, and yet the image of his father was so vivid to his mind that he addressed the closed window as though it had been open, and as if through the opening he had beheld the menacing old man.
When he had finished, he said,--
Oh, my brain whirls; I no longer understand anything. Oh, my God, my God!" And she rose, with her hair dishevelled, and her lips foaming.
She was dressed to go out, her bonnet was placed beside her on a chair, and her gloves were on her hands.
He approached her.
"Have you answered the question I put to you on entering the room?--where do you keep the poison you generally use, madame?" Madame de Villefort raised her arms to heaven, and convulsively struck one hand against the other.
"Oh, sir," she stammered, "I beseech you, do not believe appearances."
"What I require is, that justice be done.
It might have been thought that he hoped the beverage would be mortal, and that he sought for death to deliver him from a duty which he would rather die than fulfil.
"You are a poisoner."
Did you hope to escape it because you were four times guilty?
Have you, then, who have calculated everything with such nicety, have you forgotten to calculate one thing--I mean where the revelation of your crimes will lead you to? Oh, it is impossible--you must have saved some surer, more subtle and deadly poison than any other, that you might escape the punishment that you deserve.
"A cup of chocolate."
The next day, Monday, was the first sitting of the assizes.
She fainted.
Madame de Villefort fell at her husband's feet.
"No, no," she vociferated, "no, you cannot wish that!"
"It is not for you to interrogate, but to answer."
The king's attorney seemed to experience a sensation of pity; he looked upon her less severely, and, bowing to her, said slowly, "Farewell, madame, farewell!" That farewell struck Madame de Villefort like the executioner's knife.
"My mistress, sir.
Then he added, with a smile yet more terrible than his anger, "It is true, then; you do not deny it!" She moved forward.
"What to do?"
Who has paid me this attention?"
"Where to?"
"Oh, no.
"What is that?" asked Andrea.
Then he mentally added,--"Still my unknown protector!
"Let us horsewhip the fine gentleman!" said others.
"My father--I will know who my father is," said the obstinate youth; "I will perish if I must, but I will know it.
He bestowed the same attention upon the cambric front of a shirt, which had considerably changed in color since his entrance into the prison, and he polished his varnished boots with the corner of a handkerchief embroidered with initials surmounted by a coronet.
"Ah," cried Benedetto, his eyes sparkling with joy.
"I am no comrade of these people," said the young man, proudly, "you have no right to insult me thus."
"Well, I should say!
Much they'll mind me, truly, when they feel the gay wings on their backs, and can fly away out of my sight whenever they choose!"
"News, news, glorious news, friend Caterpillar!" sang the Lark; "but the worst of it is, you won't believe me!"
Oh, how dizzy I am!
But I have no time to look for another nurse now, so you will do your best, I hope.
"I believe everything I am told," observed the Caterpillar, hastily.
"No such thing, old lady!
"A pretty nurse she has chosen, indeed, poor lady!" exclaimed she, "and a pretty business I have in hand!
She made her back quite ache with walking all night round her young charges, for fear any harm should happen to them; and in the morning says she to herself--
"Let me hire you as a nurse for my poor children," said a Butterfly to a quiet Caterpillar, who was strolling along a cabbage-leaf in her odd lumbering way.
And the Caterpillar talked all the rest of her life to her relations of the time when she should be a Butterfly.
Why, her senses must have left her or she never would have asked a poor crawling creature like me to bring up her dainty little ones!
There was the shaggy Dog who sometimes came into the garden.
Dear! dear!
THE BUTTERFLY'S CHILDREN
"I shall be a Butterfly some day!"
"Well, then, first of all, I will tell you what these little creatures are to eat.
Go away!
By degrees his voice died away in the distance, till the green Caterpillar could not hear a sound. So she resumed her walk round the Butterfly's eggs, nibbling a bit of the cabbage-leaf now and then as she moved along.
Soon afterwards, however, he went singing upwards into the bright, blue sky.
Do you not hear how my song swells with rejoicing as I soar upwards to the mysterious wonder-world above?
Look at my long green body and these endless legs, and then talk to me about having wings and a painted feathery coat! Fool!--"
But her relations thought her head was wandering, and they said, "Poor thing!"
You have neither faith nor trust."
The Lark said, "Perhaps he should;" but he did not satisfy her curiosity any further.
By Mrs. Alfred Gatty
You are to feed them with cabbage-leaves."
"See these little eggs," continued the Butterfly; "I don't know how long it will be before they come to life, and I feel very sick and poorly, and if I should die, who will take care of my baby Butterflies when I am gone?
I will ask your advice no more."
"Then I'll tell you something else," cried the Lark; "for the best of my news remains behind.
"I would tell you if you would believe me," sang the Lark, descending once more.
"That is what you call--"
And with these words the Butterfly drooped her wings and died; and the green Caterpillar, who had not had the opportunity of even saying Yes or No to the request, was left standing alone by the side of the Butterfly's eggs.
And when she was a Butterfly, and was going to die again, she said--
"What a time the Lark has been gone!" she cried, at last.
"I thought the Lark had been wise and kind," observed the mild green Caterpillar, once more beginning to walk around the eggs, "but I find that he is foolish and saucy instead.
But she got no sleep that night, she was so very anxious.
"I can get at nothing quite easily but cabbage-leaves," murmured the Caterpillar, in distress.
"It was their dying mother's last request that I should do no such thing."
History records the fact that a large number of animals were brought from Spain for food, and that a considerable number of them succeeded in getting away from the expedition soon after the landing was effected.
The last time I saw "Jeff," in 1862, he was buried up to his ears in the cool sands of the Roanoke Island shore, with eyes upturned and looking like a very sad pig, but I fear none the wiser for his offenses against the rights of a well-regulated digestion.
He was fond of animal pets, and always welcomed the arrival of a new one.
They advance to the attack with the greatest impetuosity, and a feast upon snake is the usual reward of exceptional bravery.
The good old day, so dear to the hearts of Americans, was made more glorious by the exchange of camp hospitalities and an indulgence in such simple hilarity as the occasion seemed to require; but "Jeff" was not forgotten.
In the gradual development of "Jeff's" character, it was discovered that he had none of the usual well-known traits of the pig.
He was seen after he had run a few yards to make a great jump, and then remain in his tracks.
His pleasure upon those occasions was evinced by the emission of frequent good-natured grunts and looking up into the face of the friendly stroker.
He developed all the playful qualities of a puppy and reasoned out a number of problems in his own way.
In his right ear was a red ribbon, in his left a white one; around his neck another of blue.
The origin of this particular species of the porcine tribe is unknown, but there is a tradition to the effect that their progenitors were a part of the drove that came to the coast of Florida with De Soto when he started on the march which ended with the discovery of the Mississippi River.
It was decided to put him on a light diet of milk, which proved an immediate success, for, within forty-eight hours after his first meal, the patient became as lively as possible.
Under this treatment poor "Jeff" lost all his buoyancy of spirits and his habitual friskiness, and became sad and dejected, but bore his troubles with patience.
He was never so happy as when in the lap of one of the sailors, having his back stroked.
The doctor was consulted, and after a careful diagnosis, decided there was no organic disease: want of parental care, want of nourishment and exposure, were held responsible for "Jeff's" unfavorable condition.
He was more like a petted and pampered dog, was playful, good-natured, and expressed pleasure, pain, anger, and desire, with various squeals and grunts, delivered with a variety of intonations that were very easily interpreted.
Early in the morning he was bathed and scrubbed, more than to his heart's content, and then patriotically decorated.
His legs and body grew longer; and, with this lengthening of parts, there came a development of intellectual acuteness that was particularly surprising.
He had no favorites, but was hail-fellow-well-met with all.
The Fourth of July, 1862, was a gala day at Roanoke Island.
Colors were flying, bands playing, drums beating, patriotic steam was up to high pressure.
The pursuing party found him actively engaged in demolishing a moccasin, which he had crushed by jumping and landing with his feet upon its head and back.
His particular admirers declared that he learned the meaning of the different whistles of the boatswain: that he knew when the meal pennant was hoisted to the peak; could tell when the crew was beat to quarters for drill, and often proved the correctness of this knowledge by scampering off to take his place by one particular gun division, which seemed to have taken his fancy.
Hogs of this particular kind are famous snake-killers--a big rattler or a garter snake is all the same to them.
For the first he was put upon short rations; for the second, sand baths on shore were prescribed.
They were called "racers" because of their long legs, slender bodies, and great capacity for running; and "Razor Backs" on account of the prominence of the spinal column.
He had a most pertinacious way of poking his nose into all sorts of affairs, not at all after the manner of the usual pig, but more like a village gossip who wants to know about everything that is going on in the neighborhood.
He was an ill-conditioned little mite that had probably been abandoned by a heartless mother, possibly while escaping from the prospective mess-kettle of a Confederate picket.
"Jeff" was a confirmed lover of good eating, and in time paid the usual penalty for over-indulgence of his very piggish appetite. While the meal pennant was up, it was his habit to go from one fore-castle mess to another, and to insist upon having rather more than his share of the choice morsels from each.
He took to the sand baths at once, and gave forth many disgruntled grunts when lifted out of them.
In a short time he came to the repair shop very much the worse for wear, with an impaired digestion and a cuticle that showed unmistakable evidence of scurvy.
When "Jeff" was brought on board, his pitiful condition excited the active sympathy of all, from the commander down to the smallest powder monkey, and numerous were the suggestions made as to the course of treatment for the new patient.
Among them was a singular little character, known as "Jeff." He was a perfectly black pig of the "Racer Razor Back" order, which, at that time, were plentiful in the coast sections of the more southern of the slave-holding States.
It may be said of him, generally, that he was overflowing with spirits, and took an active interest in all the daily routine work of his ship.
He attached himself to each individual of the ship.
In those days Confederate pickets were not very particular as to the quality or kind of food, and I have a suspicion that even a "Razor Back" would have been a welcome addition to their meal.
During this triumphant march over the island an incident occurred which developed the slumbering instinct of the swamp "racer." In a second, as it were, and seemingly without cause, "Jeff" was seen to move off at a tremendous pace at right angles with the line of march.
He entered into all of their sports and sympathized with the discomforts of forecastle life.
In this act of courtesy he is always accompanied by the officer of the deck, and often by others that may happen to be at hand.
JEFF THE INQUISITIVE
As days and weeks went on, there appeared an improvement of appetite that was quite phenomenal, but no accumulation of flesh.
At the time of which I am writing, his ship carried quite a collection of tame birds and four-footed favorites.
Thus adorned he was brought on shore to pay me a visit, and as he came through my door he appeared to be filled with the pride of patriotism and a realization of the greatness of the occasion.
His treatment of his crew made him one of the most popular officers in the whole fleet.
Except in speech and appearance he was the counterpart of a happy, good-natured, and well-cared-for household dog--possibly, however, rather more intelligent than the average canine pet.
And, five minutes afterward, the whole table from one end to the other, was laughing with all the animation of forgetfulness.
The married pair disappeared.
However, he was present in the person of Father Gillenormand.
can people love each other too much? can people please each other too much?
That is legal and delightful. Fortunatus beside Fortunata."--Applause from the whole table.
Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.
Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness. The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.
This craft was discovered in the days of the terrestrial paradise.
Fine stupidity, in sooth!
And of his own free will, too, the coward!
Do not imagine that you have effected much change in the universe, because your trip-gallant is called the cholera-morbus, and because your pourree is called the cachuca.
Quite a number of old family friends of the Gillenormand family had been invited; they pressed about Cosette.
Let us be happy without quibbling and quirking.
Saperlotte! the best way to adore God is to love one's wife.
Because it is a gewgaw.
Why is it so solid?
"Sir," replied Basque, "I do, precisely.
He took the place of Jean Valjean, who, on account of his arm being still in a sling, could not give his hand to the bride.
A few moments before they sat down to table, Cosette came, as though inspired by a sudden whim, and made him a deep courtesy, spreading out her bridal toilet with both hands, and with a tenderly roguish glance, she asked him:
There must be elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to ourselves; the angels vote.
"Yes," said Jean Valjean, "I am content!"
The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm, entered the dining-room, and arranged themselves in the proper order around the table.
The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of the palace "twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades in the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures are accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo carriage, whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired landau, with its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups.
"To find out where it goes, and what it is.
One of the invited guests observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a jam of vehicles.--"Why?" asked M. Gillenormand--"Because of the maskers."--"Capital," said the grandfather, "let us go that way.
The gusts of rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.
The day had been adorable.
Far away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible.
"There's no bridegroom in that trap."
These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of maskers are very familiar to Parisians.
They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest way was to turn through the boulevard.
She loved Nero.
Here is their dialogue:
Nero was a titanic lighterman.
But what can be done about it?
"Yes."
"I'm hired."
Nearly at the same moment, the other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also.
The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of the boulevard.
There is government therein.
Sometimes it does!"
"I'm bought by the government for to-day."
Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday.
There the Carnival forms part of politics.
They cling to the seats, to the rumble, on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts.
"And the bridegroom?"
"Where does that wedding come from?"
CHAPTER I--THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833
And populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons.
This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the masquerade."
I run the risk of being nabbed.
Do you want to delay, Marius?"
"I can't."
"Say, now."
"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"
Twenty of them ride in a carriage intended for six.
At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's caress to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous verbal attacks of the populace.
Let us proceed.
"No."
In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full trot.
"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."
"Where is it going then?"
Here I'm concealed, no one knows that I'm here.
Maskers abounded on the boulevard. In spite of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew, Pantaloon and Clown persisted.
You must try.
Certain unhealthy festivals disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace.
"Where it went?"
Wedding-parties are at liberty."
Everything which exists being a scattered Carnival, there is no longer any Carnival.
It rained that day, but there is always in the sky a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.
There one lays one's finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and public women.
"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his paw I know, and that I'm positive."
She only demands of her masters--when she has masters--one thing: "Paint me the mud." Rome was of the same mind.
"We are the genuine article."
In truth, this laughter is suspicious.
"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."
"Or elsewhere."
"What old cove?"
Above its shadows heaven stood open.
"Listen."
The laughter of all is the accomplice of universal degradation.
"I like that! that would be queer.
"There's one thing you ought to do."
They went by way of the boulevard.
"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so much the better.
The first wedding coach held Cosette and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean.
Hurry up and jump down, trot, my girl, your legs are young."
At that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.
BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT
"As if he were the only father."
In the good humor of that winter of 1833, Paris had disguised itself as Venice.
"It's free.
"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."
The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with curious spectators.
"And what good does it do to know him?"
"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went to."
"Do the old fellows bother you?
These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows, set the philosopher to thinking.
A pin in a hay-mow!
A laughter that is too cynical to be frank.
As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community of property, the papers had been simple.
And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also, the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.
One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one is accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it puts a wedding nosegay in its buttonhole.
"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."
"Well, what of that?"
"Why not?"
In this gayety of Paris, England cracked her whip; Lord Seymour's post-chaise, harassed by a nickname from the populace, passed with great noise.
The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day.
If they were missing on a Shrove Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part, and people would say: "There's something behind that.
"Well?"
It is charged with proving the Carnival to the Parisians.
Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it.
"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.
"What for?"
"That's true."
"What concern is that of mine?"
You understand me, Azelma."
It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather, a fairy spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over the heads of the bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject of a painting to be placed over a door; but it had been sweet and smiling.
From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession of vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until the knot was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze the whole line.
"What, daddy?"
On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.
They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a knot, and their legs hanging.
It's Ash Wednesday.
Everything can be parodied, even parody.
These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public.
"I know."
"No one can tell.
But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers.
"Do you see that old cove?"
Paris,--let us confess it--willingly allows infamy to furnish it with comedy.
"That don't matter.
"Well, what?"
"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me will arrest me.
"So he is the father."
"What then?"
"I tell you that he's the father."
It's so easy to find out a wedding-party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week afterwards.
It was the wedding night of Marius and Cosette.
The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.
It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly to Saint-Paul.
"I can't go out otherwise than masked.
"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?"
The King has Roquelaure, the populace has the Merry-Andrew.
"What?"
"Not particularly."
We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office or to the church.
"That's not the point at all.
"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."
These young folks are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the serious part of life.
"He's in the first carriage."
The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most ancient days of the monarchy.
"Well?"
The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille, and skirting the right side of the Boulevard.
Here goes for the 16th!
"I can't quit the vehicle."
"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"
"Yes, I do."
They could not get ready before the 16th of February.
"Know him, if you want to."
"Unless it's the old fellow."
They even bestride the carriage lamps.
"What's that?"
But you are free."
"In the bride's trap."
"A sham wedding," retorted another.
Marius, still separated from his betrothed according to usage, did not come until the second.
The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed night.
This carriage which has become colossal through its freight, has an air of conquest.
"Yes."
The women sit on the men's laps.
We had gone to bed, but I couldn't remain there; so I sat on the wagon-seat with Jerrine beside me. Something struck the guy ropes of the tent, and I was so frightened I was too weak to cry out.
He did what Mr. Struble said was doling a doleful tune.
Dawn in the mountains--how I wish I could describe it to you!
It seemed to me that the storm lasted for hours; but at last it moved off up the valley, the flashes grew to be a mere glimmer, and the thunder mere rumbling.
THE HUNT
I was so dizzy I could scarcely move, but I got down to where the others were excitedly admiring the two dead elk that they said were the victims of Mrs. O'Shaughnessy's gun.
Supper was ready, but I went to bed at once.
We had been cautioned not to talk, but neither Mrs. O'Shaughnessy nor I wanted to.
As he got up from supper the first night he was with us, he said, "Mary Ellen, I have a real treat and surprise for you.
I thought old Goliar had hit me a biff with a blackthorn shilaley," she remarked.
Are you hurt?
In their places stood silvery patches against the red background of the cliffs.
I was scarcely through panting before we began to descend.
Mr. Haynes came running back.
I thought the big tree must have fallen. In the lulls of the storm I could hear the men's voices, high and excited.
Every one took it good-naturedly, but he kept doling the doleful until little by little the circle thinned.
At last we reached the top and sat down on some boulders to rest a few minutes before we started down to the hunting ground, which lay in a cuplike valley far below us.
For a while walking was easy and we made pretty good time; then we had a rocky hill to get over.
They had seen a big bunch of elk headed by a splendid bull, but got no shot, and the elk went out of the pass.
Come on up here and see my fine elk."
The men worked as fast as they could at the elk, and we helped as much as we could, but it was dark before we reached camp.
CAMP CLOUDCREST, October 6, 1914.
Then too, we had to keep up with the men, and we didn't find that easy to do.
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy and Mr. Struble came out of the woods just then.
We are camped so near the great pines that I will confess I was powerfully afraid. Had the lightning struck one of the big pines there would not have been one of us left.
We were obliged to pick our way carefully to avoid noise, and we were all together, not having come to a place where it seemed better to separate.
Now that it is snowing, we sit around the stoves, and we should have fine times if Professor Glenholdt could have a chance to talk; but we have to listen to "Run, Nigger, Run" and "The Old Gray Hoss Come A-tearin' Out The Wilderness." I'll sing them to you when I come to Denver.
We had about resolved to go to our horses when we heard a volley of shots.
I haven't one thing.
Our tent is as comfortable as can be.
It has been snowing for a long time, but Clyde says he will take me hunting when it stops.
Although I can't brag about Mr. Murry's appearance, I can about his taste, for he admires Mrs. O'Shaughnessy.
If you shoot haphazard you may cripple an elk and let it get away to die in misery.
The shadows are mellow, like the colors in an old picture--greenish amber light and a blue-gray sky. Far ahead of us we could see the red rim rock of a mountain above timber line.
Just wait a few minutes, an' I'll bet you'll be happy."
I heard the report of guns, and he tumbled in a confused heap.
So make sure when you fire."
I suppose the forest makes it so.
At the same instant one of the quaking asp groves began to move slowly.
He seated himself and took from the bundle--an accordion!
Instantly Mr. Haynes's gun flew to his shoulder and a deafening report jarred our ears.
In Oklahoma, at that hour of the day, the woods would be alive with song-birds, even at this season; but here there are no song-birds, and only the snapping of twigs, as our horses climbed the frosty trail, broke the silence.
Mrs. O'Shaughnessy has not seen him for years,--didn't know he lived up here.
His nose, however, seems to upset the original plan, for it is long and thin and bent slightly to one side.
We received instructions as to how we should move so as to keep out of range of each other's guns; then Mr. Haynes and myself started one way, and Mr. Struble and Mrs. O'Shaughnessy the other.
We were off before it was more than light enough for us to see the trail.
"Why, mamma," she said, "I had to look; he has swallowed something that won't go either up or down, and I'm 'fraid he'll choke."
VII
I sat on a log watching him dress his elk.
His neck is long and his Adam's apple seems uncertain as to where it belongs.
Next morning the horses could not be found; the storm had frightened them, and they had tried to go home.
That means that the elk will pass here in a short time and we may get a shot.
They had heard our shot, and came across to see what luck.
CONEY,--
Mr. Murry is an old-time acquaintance of Mrs. O'Shaughnessy's.
I have always loved a storm; the beat of hail and rain, and the roar of wind always appeal to me; but there was neither wind nor rain,--just flash and roar.
He tried to rise, but others coming leaped over him and knocked him down.
It didn't seem a minute before we heard the beat of their hoofs and a queer panting noise that I can't describe.
He had seen the game-warden from whom she had procured her license, and so hunted up our camp.
I shut them a moment, but when I looked the grove was moving faster.
He ran forward, but I stood still, fascinated by what I saw.
At supper Jerrine watched it as if fascinated until I sent her from the table and went out to speak to her about gazing.
While the men fed grain to the horses and saddled them, we prepared a hasty breakfast.
The men had to find them, and as it took most of the day, we had to put off our hunt.
On the night of September 30, there was the most awful thunderstorm I ever witnessed,--flash after flash of the most blinding lightning, followed by deafening peals of thunder; and as it echoed from mountain to mountain the uproar was terrifying.
We had to use care when we got into the timber; there were marshy places which tried us sorely, and windfall so thick that we could hardly get through.
I waved my hand weakly toward where the great mound of tangled trees and earth blocked the water.
Afterwards, when we compared notes, we found that we both had the same thought: we both felt ashamed to be out to deal death to one of the Maker's beautiful creatures, and we were planning how we might avoid it.
We were up and about next morning in the first faint gray light.
Some more shots, and those behind turned and went back the way they had come.
I was plumb out of breath, but men who are most gallant elsewhere are absolutely heartless on a hunt.
Before the echo died away among the hills another booming report would seem to shiver the atmosphere and set all our tinware jangling.
High overhead a triangle of wild geese harrowed the blue sky.
It slid swiftly, and I could plainly hear the rattle of stones falling against stones, until with a muffled roar the whole hillside fell into the stream.
We'll get our limit."
We had lunch, and the men covered the elk with pine boughs to keep the camp robbers from pecking it full of holes.
They had heard the noise, but had thought it thunder. Mr. Haynes told me that if I would "chirk up" he would give me his elk teeth.
"Why," he said, "that is only a landslide, not an earthquake.
We have found it best not to remove the skin, but the elk have to be quartered so as to load them on to a horse.
We were to meet where the valley terminated in a broad pass.
We had not followed them far when three cows and a "spike" came running out of the pines a little ahead of us.
We felt sure we could get a chance at what elk there might be in the valley.
Then came a long, hard climb.
At the report of the gun two huge blocks of stone almost as large as a house detached themselves and fell.
Though I don't admire them, they are considered valuable; however, his elk was a cow, and they don't have as nice teeth as do bulls.
They, too, were up.
I have been neglecting you shamefully, I think.
The elk will be here long before the men, since the men have no horses; so let's hurry and get placed along the only place they can get out.
We were all on one side, and Mr. Haynes said to me, "Rest your gun on that rock and aim at the first rib back of the shoulder.
So I will spend this snowy day in writing to you.
We were following fresh tracks, and a little of the hunter's enthusiasm seized me.
If I could only make you feel the keen, bracing air, the exhilarating climb; if I could only paint its beauties, what a picture you should have!
The sun was well up when we reached the little park where we picketed our horses.
The first rays of the sun turned the jagged peaks into golden points of a crown.
Here the colors are very different from those of the desert.
Next day the men would come with the horses and pack it in to camp.
To our right rose mile after mile of red cliffs. As the last of the quaking asp leaves have fallen, there were no golden groves.
Mr. Haynes told her.
We all felt refreshed; so we started on the trail of those that got away.
If Abner was at home, I should think he'd been swappin' again," said Miss Miranda.
THE BANQUET LAMP
Mr. Tubbs brought it over from North Riverboro and said somebody sent an order by mail for it."
We never thought of the expense of keeping up the lamp, Rebecca."
"Yes, but WHOSE horse was it that took us to North Riverboro?
Remember it's as dark at six as it is at midnight Would you like to take along some Baldwin apples?
"I have peppermints and maple sugar," said Emma Jane.
"Don't tell me it's broken," exclaimed Rebecca.
"Mr. Ladd, in North Riverboro."
"I asked you who sold the soap to Adam Ladd?" resumed Miss Jane.
"I didn't make a bad guess;" and she laughed softly to herself.
What child had wonderful eyes, except the same Rebecca? and finally, was there ever a child in the world who could make a man buy soap by the hundred cakes, save Rebecca?
"It was a heavenly party," she cried, taking off her hat and cape.
"No! oh, no! not that!
The Burnham sisters had gone and the two aunts were knitting.
"Well, there's one crop that never fails in Riverboro!"
"Is that his real name?" queried Rebecca in astonishment.
I have a handful of nuts and raisins and some apples."
"What's that?" asked Miss Lydia politely.
"There's hope for him still, though," said Miss Jane smilingly; "for I don't s'pose he's more than thirty."
Emma Jane and I sold the soap to Mr. Ladd."
Mrs. Ladd has it stacked up in the shed chamber."
"Rebecca, who was it that sold the three hundred cakes of soap to Mr. Ladd in North Riverboro?"
He needed the soap dreadfully as a present for his aunt."
"Something awful has happened," panted Emma Jane.
Well, you can go for an hour, and no more.
The brass glistened like gold, and the crimson paper shade glowed like a giant ruby.
"He could get a wife in Riverboro if he was a hundred and thirty," remarked Miss Miranda.
You never can let well enough alone, but want to be forever on the move."
What have you got in the pocket of that new dress that makes it sag down so?"
"Answer me, Rebecca."
"They had a real Thanksgiving dinner; the doctor gave them sweet potatoes and cranberries and turnips; father sent a spare-rib, and Mrs. Cobb a chicken and a jar of mince-meat."
"OUR selling the three hundred cakes," corrected Rebecca; "you did as much as I."
I just sat at the gate and held the horse."
"Why didn't you eat them?"
"I've got no patience with such foolish goin's-on."
At half past five one might have looked in at the Simpsons' windows, and seen the party at its height.
This time it was a full set of furs for Mrs. Ladd; and to think we can remember the time he was a barefoot boy without two shirts to his back!
"It was Mr. Aladdin," whispered Rebecca, as they ran down the path to the gate.
"And, oh!
"Adam Ladd! then he's A. Ladd, too; what fun!"
"Did you tease him, or make him buy it?"
"It's my nuts and raisins from dinner," replied Rebecca, who never succeeded in keeping the most innocent action a secret from her aunt Miranda; "they're just what you gave me on my plate."
"Why not?" bristled Patty.
"Young!--Wait till you see me with my hair done up."
"I hope it looked all right?"
"Oh, tell us, please.
"Better."
"And what did you wear at the wedding?"
"Where'd you get it?"
"Of course not.
"Oh, Patty!" a gasp went around the room.
"Where's some black silk, Patty?"
There's the study bell."
"Well?" they inquired in a breath.
"Looks like a man's," said Conny.
"J.
"Oh!" squealed Mae Mertelle.
So atrocious in his eyes was such a design, that he seems even unwilling to impute it to the commons; and though he was constrained to adjourn the parliament by reason of the plague, which at that time raged in London, he immediately reassembled them at Oxford, and made a new attempt to gain from them some supplies in such an urgent necessity.
As the duke knew that authority alone would not suffice, he employed much art and many subtleties to engage them to obedience; and a rumor which was spread, that peace had been concluded between the French king and the Hugonots, assisted him in his purpose.
His vehement temper prompted him to raise suddenly, to the highest elevation, his flatterers and dependants; and upon the least occasion of displeasure, he threw them down with equal impetuosity and violence.
They were acquainted with the difficulty of military enterprises directed against the whole house of Austria; against the king of Spain, possessed of the greatest riches and most extensive dominions of any prince in Europe; against the emperor Ferdinand, hitherto the most fortunate monarch of his age, who had subdued and astonished Germany by the rapidity of his victories.
To these reasons the commons remained inexorable.
So numerous an assembly, composed of persons of various dispositions, was not, it is probable, wholly influenced by the same motives; and few declared openly their true reason.
Strongly prejudiced in favor of the duke, whom he had heard so highly extolled in parliament, he could not conjecture the cause of so sudden an alteration in their opinions.
For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.
His influence over the modesty of Charles exceeded even that which he had acquired over the weakness of James; nor was any public measure conducted but by his counsel and direction.
In this view, likewise, the sinking of the value of subsidies must be considered as a loss to the king.
And as all human governments, particularly those of a mixed frame, are in continual fluctuation, it was as natural, in their opinion, and allowable, for popular assemblies to take advantage of favorable incidents, in order to secure the subject, as for monarchs, in order to extend their own authority.
They had learned by experience, that the public revenue could with difficulty maintain the dignity of the crown, even under the ordinary charges of government.
The end they esteemed beneficent and noble; the means, regular and constitutional.
But being told that this measure would appear unusual, he issued writs for summoning a new parliament on the seventh of May; and it was not without regret that the arrival of the princess Henrietta, whom he had espoused by proxy, obliged him to delay, by repeated prorogations, their meeting till the eighteenth of June, when they assembled at Westminster for the despatch of business.
To grant or refuse supplies was the undoubted privilege of the commons.
In this dilemma, men of such aspiring geniuses, and such independent fortunes, could not long deliberate: they boldly embraced the side of freedom, and resolved to grant no supplies to their necessitous prince, without extorting concessions in favor of civil liberty.
{1625.} No sooner had Charles taken into his hands the reins of government, than he showed an impatience to assemble the great council of the nation; and he would gladly, for the sake of despatch, have called together the same parliament which had sitten under his father, and which lay at that time under prorogation.
Great murmurs and discontents still prevailed in parliament.
They were not ignorant that Charles was loaded with a large debt, contracted by his father, who had borrowed money both from his own subjects and from foreign princes.
In order to fortify himself against the resentment of James, Buckingham had affected popularity, and entered into the cabals of the Puritans: but, being secure of the confidence of Charles, he had since abandoned this party; and on that account was the more exposed to their hatred and resentment.
The nation was very little accustomed at that time to the burden of taxes, and had never opened their purses in any degree for supporting their sovereign.
Though the religious schemes of many of the Puritans, when explained, appear pretty frivolous, we are not thence to imagine that they were pursued by none but persons of weak understandings.
It is not to be doubted, but spleen and ill will against the duke of Buckingham had an influence with many.
These the French court had pretended they would employ against the Genoese, who, being firm and useful allies to the Spanish monarchy, were naturally regarded with an evil eye, both by the king of France and of England.
All these were disgusted with the court, both by the prevalence of the principles of civil liberty essential to their party, and on account of the restraint under which they were held by the established hierarchy.
They knew that all the money granted by the last parliament had been expended on naval and military armaments; and that great anticipations were likewise made on the revenues of the crown.
Even Elizabeth, notwithstanding her vigor and frugality, and the necessary wars in which she was engaged, had reason to complain of the commons in this particular; nor could the authority of that princess, which was otherwise almost absolute, ever extort from them the requisite supplies.
The last parliament of James, amidst all their joy and festivity, had given him a supply very disproportioned to his demand, and to the occasion.
They were sensible, that the present war was very lately the result of their own importunate applications and entreaties, and that they had solemnly engaged to support their sovereign in the management of it.
Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who commanded one of the vessels, broke through and returned to England.
We shall, therefore, approach nearer to the truth, if we mention all the views which the present conjuncture could suggest to them.
1688
The parliament, swayed by custom, would not augment their number in the same proportion.
However the ill humor of the commons might have been increased by these considerations, we are not to suppose them the sole motives.
And when the war which they themselves had so earnestly solicited, was at last commenced, the immediate desertion of their sovereign could not but seem very unaccountable.
His discourse to the parliament was full of simplicity and cordiality.
Charles now found himself obliged to depart from that delicacy which he had formerly maintained.
Those lofty ideas of monarchical power which were very commonly adopted during that age, and to which the ambiguous nature of the English constitution gave so plausible an appearance, were firmly rivetted in Charles; and however moderate his temper, the natural and unavoidable prepossessions of self-love, joined to the late uniform precedents in favor of prerogative, had made him regard his political tenets as certain and uncontroverted.
This is a LibriVox recording.
The Puritanical party, though disguised, had a great authority over the kingdom; and many of the leaders among the commons had secretly embraced the rigid tenets of that sect.
And as every house of commons which was elected during forty years, succeeded to all the passions and principles of their predecessors, we ought rather to account for this obstinacy from the general situation of the kingdom during that whole period, than from any circumstances which attended this particular conjuncture.
A precarious liberty, the commons thought, which was to be preserved by unlimited complaisance, was no liberty at all.
Provoked at these repeated instances of vigor, which the court denominated contumacy, Charles ordered his attorney-general to enter an accusation of high treason against him.
This article, together with the new impositions laid on merchandise by James, constituted near half of the crown revenues; and by depriving the king of these resources, they would have reduced him to total subjection and dependence.
Though the ill success of his enterprises diminished his authority, and showed every day more plainly the imprudence of the Spanish war; though the increase of his necessities rendered him more dependent, and more exposed to the encroachments of the commons, he was resolved to try once more that regular and constitutional expedient for supply.
Besides a more stately style which Charles in general affected to this parliament than to the last, he went so far, in a message, as to threaten the commons that, if they did not furnish him with supplies, he should be obliged to try new "counsels." This language was sufficiently clear: yet lest any ambiguity should remain, Sir Dudley Carleton, vice-chamberlain, took care to explain it.
Sir Edward Cecil, lately created Viscount Wimbleton, was intrusted with the command.
Many trials he made to regain the good opinion of his master; but finding them all fruitless, and observing Charles to be entirely governed by Buckingham, his implacable enemy, he resolved no longer to keep any measures with the court.
What further authority should he retain in the nation, were he capable, in the beginning of his reign, to give, in so signal an instance, such matter of triumph to his enemies, and discouragement to his adherents?
The never-failing cry of Popery here served them in stead.
Perhaps, too, a little political art, which at that time he practised, was much trusted to.
To such deep perfidy, to such unbounded usurpations, it was necessary to oppose a proper firmness and resolution.
All the other complaints against him were mere pretences.
A new odium, likewise, by these representations, was attempted to be thrown upon Buckingham.
As long as James lived, Bristol, secure of the concealed favor of that monarch, had expressed all duty and obedience; in expectation that an opportunity would offer of reinstating himself in his former credit and authority.
He had promised to the last house of commons a redress of this religious grievance: but he was apt, in imitation of his father, to imagine that the parliament, when they failed of supplying his necessities, had, on their part, freed him from the obligation of a strict performance.
The earl of Suffolk, chancellor of the university of Cambridge, dying about this time, Buckingham, though lying under impeachment was yet, by means of court interest, chosen in his place.
The history of England had never hitherto afforded one instance where any great movement or revolution had proceeded from the lower house.
He sailed immediately for Cadiz, and found the bay full of Spanish ships of great value.
The ill humor of the commons, thus wantonly irritated by the court, and finding no gratification in the legal impeachment of Buckingham, sought other objects on which it might exert itself.
I fear to declare those that I conceive.
Charles alleged, as the reason of this measure, certain seditious expressions, which, he said, had, in their accusation of the duke, dropped from these members.
He either neglected to attack these ships or attempted it preposterously.
Under color of redressing grievances, which during this short reign could not be very numerous, they were to proceed in regulating and controlling every part of government which displeased them; and if the king either cut them short in this undertaking, or refused compliance with their demands, he must not expect any supply from the commons.
Further stay appearing fruitless, they were reembarked; and the fleet put to sea with an intention of intercepting the Spanish galleons.
It is remarkable that the commons, though so much at a loss to find articles of charge against Buckingham, never adopted Bristol's accusation, or impeached the duke for his conduct in the Spanish treaty, the most blamable circumstance in his whole life.
A little before, he was the idol of the people.
The supply was only voted by the commons.
His mother, who had great influence over him, was a professed Catholic; his wife was not free from suspicion: and the indulgence given to Catholics was of course supposed to proceed entirely from his credit and authority.
All encroachments on supreme power could only be resisted successfully on the first attempt.
It consisted of eighty vessels, great and small; and carried an board an army of ten thousand men.
"I pray you, consider," said he, "what these new counsels are, or may be.
From the whole, the great imprudence of the duke evidently appears, and the sway of his ungovernable passions; but it would be difficult to collect thence any action which, in the eye of the law, could be deemed a crime, much less could subject him to the penalty of treason.
To-day the commons pretend to wrest his minister from him: to-morrow they will attack some branch of his prerogative.
By their remonstrances, and promises, and protestations, they had engaged the crown in a war. As soon as they saw a retreat impossible, without waiting for new incidents, without covering themselves with new pretences, they immediately deserted him, and refused him all reasonable supply.
He submitted to the king's commands of remaining at his country seat, and of absenting himself from parliament.
And as their rank, both considered in a body and as individuals, was but the second in the kingdom, nothing less than fatal experience could engage the English princes to pay a due regard to the inclinations of that formidable assembly.
The army was landed, and a fort taken; but the undisciplined soldiers, finding store of wine, could not be restrained from the utmost excesses.
After the most diligent inquiry, prompted by the greatest malice, the smallest appearance of guilt could not be fixed upon him. What idea, he asked, must all mankind entertain of his honor, should he sacrifice his innocent friend to pecuniary considerations?
And it was necessary, while yet in their power, to secure the constitution by such invincible barriers, that no king or minister should ever, for the future, dare to speak such a language to any parliament, or even entertain such a project against them.
Even after Charles's accession he despaired not.
No new crime had since been discovered.
But his great success at Paris proved as fatal as his former failure at Madrid.
A fleet of a hundred sail, and an army of seven thousand men, were fitted out for the invasion of France, and both of them intrusted to the command of the duke, who was altogether unacquainted both with land and sea service.
Soubize, who, with his brother, the duke of Rohan, was the leader of the Hugonot faction, was at that time in London, and strongly solicited Charles to embrace the protection of these distressed religionists.
But a priest, past middle age, of a severe character, and occupied in the most extensive plans of ambition or vengeance, was but an unequal match, in that contest, for a young courtier, entirely disposed to gayety and gallantry.
The beauty of his person, the gracefulness of his air, the splendor of his equipage, his fine taste in dress, festivals, and carousals, corresponded to the prepossessions entertained in his favor: the affability of his behavior, the gayety of his manners, the magnificence of his expense, increased still further the general admiration which was paid him.
When the duke was making preparations for a new embassy to Paris, a message was sent him from Louis, that he must not think of such a journey.
At the time when Charles married by proxy the princess Henrietta, the duke of Buckingham had been sent to France, in order to grace the nuptials, and conduct the new queen into England.
Though Charles probably bore but small favor to the Hugonots, who so much resembled the Puritans in discipline and worship, in religion and politics, he yet allowed himself to be gained by these arguments, enforced by the solicitations of Buckingham.
Gavroche replied:
He lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway, then made a bound, disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his basket.
They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.
He had the air of being greatly diverted.
Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he assailed it with a burst of irony.
A man without a woman is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off. Well, Enjolras has no woman.
They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him.
"I'm filling my basket, citizen."
And with a single bound he plunged into the street.
He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood.
It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind it a trail of bodies.
take it by surprise.
The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the insurgents, mingled with bursts of grape-shot.
Thus it went on for some time.
"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me, you are wasting your row.
This was a second piece of ordnance.
What then?"
The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.
"Success."
"My name is Eight-Pounder."
Twenty cartouches for Gavroche meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.
"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras.
His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street.
They shed their blood lyrically for the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.
In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above all, intermittences of hope.
It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent.
Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather by an aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or thought itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting himself a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected it with his own head; and the first comer took it upon himself to save society.
"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.
This Lynch law was complicated with mistakes.
A moment more, and it was caught between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.
For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that which is ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.
Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against insurrections.
Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism [the barbarous name of the correct party].
Many posts were attacked.
He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.
Fierce Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest, for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as by the monarchy in Europe.
This momentary hesitation gave the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the corner of the street, its shelter.
CHAPTER XIII--PASSING GLEAMS
"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, "it seems to me that Paris is waking up."
Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed.
Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe, popular redoubts abound.
The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the bravery of the movement.
The troops broke in the doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time, manoeuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards.
He was put to the sword.
At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not extremely serious.
In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying: "There's another who will do us no more harm."
The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this grape-shot.
Are we really going to die like this, without anything to eat?"
"He did not answer my question."
An empty cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced.
This movement, executed with more good will than strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear.
A platoon of the National Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council of war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes.
This repression was not effected without some commotion, and without that tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the people.
Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons. Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend.
Before it had traversed two thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the barricade.
At the entrance to the Rue Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed a regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General Cavaignac de Barague.
This does happen sometimes.
A child fourteen years of age was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of cartridges.
In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins.
"We are hungry here.
Paris quivers supremely, the quid divinum is given forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back, and the army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet, France.
"Look here!"
"Mr. Kara's put down his steel latch," said Fisher with a smile, "which means that he is not to be disturbed until--" he looked at his watch, "until eleven o'clock at any rate."
"Yes, sir," said the servant.
His left arm hung limply by his side and Fisher privately gathered that the hand had got loose from the detaining pocket without its owner being aware of the fact.
"No more Patagonia!" he roared, "no more Tierra del Fuego!" he paused.
At that moment there came from Kara's room a faint "clang."
The beat of hoofs on the rocky roadway, the crash of the door falling in when the Turkish Gendarmes had battered a way to his rescue.
Kara breathed a sigh of relief and his face was wreathed in smiles.
"Don't you believe it, don't you believe it, my poor man," said the other, "you--"
The embarrassed Fisher grinned.
CHAPTER XII
"Is it grey!" challenged the visitor, with a roar.
The man thrust out his face.
"By the way, Fisher, after Mr. Gathercole has gone, you may go out for the night.
"Damn all Greeks," he said jovially, and Fisher could do no more than smile reproachfully, the smile being his very own, the reproach being on behalf of the master who paid him.
Fisher showed the way up the stairs.
"Send him up," he said, and then as Fisher was going out of the room he called him back.
He would get Fisher out of the way that night and make sure.
"Oh, you couldn't," sneered the visitor; "then lead on!"
Tell him to come up.
Bring me up some sandwiches and a large glass of milk.
Gathercole," and Kara came forward with a smile to meet his agent, who, with top hat still on the top of his head, and his overcoat dangling about his heels, must have made a remarkable picture.
"He's a funk!" snapped the other, "a beastly funk!"
The traveller touched the other on the chest with his right hand.
Such an instruction was remarkably pleasing to him.
"I suppose your cheque will be honoured all right?" asked the visitor sardonically, and then burst into a little chuckle of laughter as he carefully closed the door.
"Oh!" said the other glaring at the unoffending Fisher, "that's very good of him.
T. X. with a search warrant might be a source of panic especially if--he shrugged his shoulders.
Had T. X. returned!
"Is it real grey?" insisted the visitor.
"Do you see those grey hairs in my beard?"
He remembered with a savage joy the spectacle of his would-be assassins twitching and struggling on the gallows at Pezara and--he heard the faint tinkle of the front door bell.
Fisher closed the door behind them and returned to his duties in the hall below.
Kara laughed.
He replied to some question, "but not Patagonia," he paused again, and Fisher standing at the foot of the stairs wondered what had occurred to make the visitor so genial.
Fisher, his hands in his pockets, looked after the departing stranger, nodding his head in reprobation.
"Yes, sir," said Fisher.
It wanted five minutes to ten.
Grown grey in his service!
He slipped from the bed and went to the door, opened it slightly and listened.
Or better still, place them on a plate in the hall."
"Very good, sir," said the man and withdrew.
The startled Fisher drew back with an apologetic smile.
He pushed open the door and announced, "Mr.
There was much that he had to do and that night's freedom would assist him materially.
"Pull one out and see!"
Ask him if he minds seeing me in my room."
He stamped down the stairs as though testing the weight of every tread, opened the front door without assistance, slammed it behind him and disappeared into the night.
"Will you see Mr. Gathercole now!"
What started the train of thought he did not know, but at that moment his mind was very far away.
Who could it be!
"What's that?" asked the visitor a little startled.
Ten minutes later he heard the door opened and the booming voice of the stranger came down to him.
Very good of this person to see a scholar and a gentleman who has been about his dirty business for three years.
"I couldn't think of doing a thing like that, sir."
He had satisfied T. X. and allayed his suspicions.
"Yes, sir," said Fisher, "but I think you will always find that Mr. Kara is always most generous about money."
You've got somewhere to go, I suppose, and you needn't come back until the morning."
Do you understand that, my man!"
He came down the corridor talking to himself, and greeted Fisher.
"Mr. Kara will see you, sir," said Fisher.
"Never trust a Greek," he said, "always get your money in advance.
He remembered other things more pleasant.
He remembered the day well because it was Candlemas day, and this was the anniversary.
This time the traveller carried no books.
"Mr. Gathercole!"
"Yes, sir," said the valet hastily.
"Certainly!"
"Perhaps" Kara hesitated, "perhaps you had better wait until eleven o'clock.
The voice from the hall below was loud and gruff.
"You're a queer old devil," he said, and looked at his watch again.
The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.
Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps.
The passion rebuilds the world for the youth.
In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb.
They try and weigh their affection, and adding up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children.
Then first it ceases to be a stone.
It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims.
Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow.
By all the virtues they are united.
The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom.
Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself.
Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again.
And of poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable.
But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play.
The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other.
He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits.
We are by nature observers, and thereby learners.
"The person love does to us fit, Like manna, has the taste of all in it."
"I don't know; nothing I guess," replied Lucy, indignantly.
"Yes, my pet, I will; but I thought you said you had no present for me?"
"Oh! Enna, won't you give them back?" said Elsie, coaxingly; "you know Flora is a visitor, and we must be very polite to her."
So come, sit down and eat your lunch, and don't fret any more."
"I wish you were, my pet; I always love to have you with me; but you know it wouldn't do; you have your little guests to entertain.
"Do, papa," she urged, "it would give me pleasure to see you enjoying it."
She held up her face for a kiss, which he gave.
"Elsie," he said, as he caught sight of his little daughter, "go up to my dressing-room."
"Please don't ask me, Lucy," replied the little girl, blushing deeply. "Papa always has a good reason for what he does, and he is just the dearest, kindest, and best father that ever anybody had."
So, Elsie having first set the little ones to building block-houses, supplied Harry Carrington--an older brother of Lucy's--with a book, and two younger boys with dissected maps to arrange, the four girls sat down in a circle on the carpet and began their game.
"Is it half-past nine already, papa?" she asked.
"I won't break it, Elsie, indeed I won't," replied Flora, confidently; and Elsie sat down to her game again.
But at length tea being over, and all, both old and young, assembled as if by common consent in the drawing-room, it began to be whispered about that their curiosity was now on the point of being gratified.
There was lurking within his breast a vague consciousness that her father needed such a safeguard, but had it not.
And see, there's Miss Adelaide in her riding-dress and cap; how pretty she looks!
Elsie stood a moment looking much perplexed; then, with a brightening face, exclaimed in her cheerful, pleasant way, "Well, never mind, Flora, dear, I will get you my doll.
"Keep it in your pocket, and use it every day, won't you, papa?"
"From your papa," she said.
I am too big for that; they are very nice for little children."
"No, dearest," he said; "for though I, too, am fond of sweet things, I will not eat them while I refuse them to you."
"It is ten, my dear child, and high time you were in bed," he said, smiling at her look of astonishment.
Well, I like to see it; blushes are very becoming.
"I do believe he's just the crossest man alive!
"No, papa," she said, "I do not mind, when people say such things, because I know the Bible says, 'Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain;' and in another place, 'He that flattereth his neighbor spreadeth a net for his feet.' So I will try to keep away from that lady; shall I not, papa?"
She had an eager and growing thirst for knowledge, and was an apt scholar, whom any one with the least love for the profession might have delighted in teaching; and Mr. Dinsmore, a thorough scholar himself, and loving knowledge for its own sake--loving also his little pupil with all a father's fond, yearning affection--delighted in his task.
Elsie ran out of the room and was back again almost in a moment, with the doll in her arms.
"Here are blocks; will you build houses?"
They had a very pleasant time, and returned barely in season to be dressed for dinner.
Lucy, who was standing at the window, turned quickly round.
"No, I won't," returned Enna, flatly; "she's got enough now."
"Agreed!" said the others, "let's have a game."
"Strict!
"No, indeed, thank you; they are too much like lessons."
He put it in her hand, and ran away again.
Elsie looked up in her father's face inquiringly.
"Beautiful! beautiful!" cried the children, clapping their hands and dancing about with delight, while their elders, perhaps equally pleased, expressed their admiration after a more staid and sober fashion.
Elsie left her game to try to make peace.
It was only a gold pencil.
"Whatever you all prefer," said Elsie.
Flora turned to her as she entered.
Mr. Dinsmore"--to Elsie's papa, who just then came toward them--"you ought to be very proud of this child; she is the very image of yourself, and a perfect little beauty, too."
"Doesn't your papa let you eat anything good, Elsie?" asked Mary Leslie across the table.
They dined by themselves in the nursery, but were afterward taken down to the drawing-room.
"Here are some dissected maps, Mary," replied Elsie, opening a drawer; "would you not like them?"
I think your papa might have let you stay up a little longer; but he has promised that tonight--as we are to have the Christmas-tree, and ever so much will be going on--you shall stay up till half-past nine, if you like.
I consider it a very unladylike and slovenly trick."
The motion was carried without a dissenting voice, and in a few moments they all set out, a very merry party, full of fun and frolic.
I'm sure I am."
"Ah!
"He must be cross."
"Come, girls," she said, "let us run out and see them off; they're bringing up the horses.
Kind Mrs. Brown, who had just finished helping her young charge all round, followed her to the window, "Never mind, dear," she said in her pleasant, cheery tone, patting Elsie's cheek and smoothing her hair "I've got some excellent glue, and I think I can stick it on again and make it almost as good as ever.
"No," said he, "I think you have been a very good girl for quite a long time.
"Go and thank him: it is well worth it."
Good-by, darling.
"No, I haven't; I can't build a house with those," Flora said, with another sob.
"Will you play jack-stones? here are some smooth pebbles."
Aren't you glad?
"What are we going to do to-day, Elsie?" asked Caroline.
A large Christmas-tree had been set up at the further end of the room, and, with its myriad of lighted tapers, and its load of toys and bonbons, interspersed with many a richer and more costly gift, made quite a display.
When Elsie left her father she found that the Carringtons had just arrived.
"Ah!
CHAPTER ELEVENTH
Has she any faults, Dinsmore?"
And with a graceful good-night to the company, the little girl left the room.
I ought to be glad.
No office in the world would insure you."
And now he had reached the wallflowers high up, and was plucking them and throwing them down so that they fell in a wavering bright shower round her feet.
"I'm not likely to have forgotten you," said the Lover.
"Well--you know best, I suppose," he said to himself.
Her eyes were on him; and the empty place where her heart used to be seemed to swell till it almost choked her.
As, in fact, he had.
The two were alone in the grassy courtyard of the ruined castle.
Will she marry someone else before I've earned the right to try to make her love me? afforded a see-saw of reflection, agonising enough, for those small hours of wakefulness when we let our emotions play the primitive games with us.
It was for the last time--the last, last time.
Oh, thank God!
Its effect may be indicated briefly.
I didn't know--and--oh, what's the use of talking?"
Not even for you--not even for you.
And now the Onlooker dared not meet her--dared not call at the house as he had used to do.
A faulty, or at least a slow-working, charm, however, for the father did not lift a bag of gold from his safe and say: "Take her, take this also--be happy"--he only consented to a provisional engagement, took an earnest interest in the young man's affairs, and offered to make his daughter an annual allowance on her marriage.
There was no sound at all but the grating of his feet as he set them on the stones, and the movement, now and then, of a bird in the ivy.
But there was only one onlooker, a man of forty, or thereabouts, who paused for an instant under the great gate of the castle and took in the full charm and meaning of the scene.
He went back to London, hell burning briskly.
"But I may die at any moment."
It's all right--I was a fool. Pull yourself together--there's someone coming."
He had no right to bring me into the world to suffer like this. It's a crime.
"So may I! And you may live to be a hundred--I'll take my chance.
However, the letter lay in the prosperous pocket-book in the breast of the father's frock-coat, and the Lover was received as though that letter were a charm to ensure success.
"At my death she will have more," he said, "for, of course, I have insured my life.
He worked still, though there was now nothing to work for more; he worked as he had never worked in his life, because he knew that if he did not take to work he should take to drink or worse devils, and he set his teeth and swore that her Lover should not be degraded.
If you don't have a complete change you'll go all to pieces.
Certain?
Now the Lover and the Onlooker had each his own burden to bear.
The devil was waiting for the Onlooker in the answers to his careless questions--"Father alive?
"I fear my verdict was a great blow.
Doesn't she perhaps care at all?
Anyway, I can't stop it." Perhaps he swore a little.
The Onlooker asked the first needful questions automatically.
He took his stethoscope from the table, and he felt as though he had picked up a knife to stab the other man in the back.
Three days later he took up his new work.
He said, "Excuse me.
"They shine like gold," she said.
She was a very nice girl and not at all forward, and I cannot understand or excuse her conduct.
"Let them come, I don't care!
There was really a third at that interview.
"I don't care," she said, for the touch of his cheek, pressed against her hair, told her all that she wanted to know.
Yet the questions--Does she love me?
The other two were in Paradise.
The only definite thought that came to the Onlooker was this--"I must hold my tongue.
His days might be long, they might be brief; but be his life long or short, he must live it alone.
You look very worried, very ill. News like that is a great shock."
He walked down the street, certain words ringing in his ears--"Heart affected--probably hereditary weakness.
He had loved the Girl since her early teens, and it was only yesterday's post that had brought him the appointment that one might marry on.
"Do you want some?" he said, and on the instant his hand had found a strong jutting stone, his foot a firm ledge--and she saw his figure, grey flannel against grey stone, go up the wall towards the yellow flowers.
I mean, don't you think he may have lied to you to prevent your--marrying me?"
And though he had denied himself the joy of speaking in words, he had let his eyes speak more than he knew.
Short of owning to his own lie, he had done what he could to insure its being found out for the lie it was--or, at least, for a mistake.
"My child--Sir Henry--and Sir William and Mr.--"
The Onlooker got out at the next station.
And many of them well off, too.
He didn't.
The Onlooker had never done anything wronger than you have done, my good reader, and he never expected to meet a giant temptation, any more than you do.
"Oh, don't!" she cried.
That's all."
You will have to tell him you lied--and tell him why. You will never let him go to South Africa without telling him the truth--and you know it."
The rest of the picnic party had wandered away from them, or they from it. Out of the green-grown mound of fallen masonry by the corner of the chapel a great may-bush grew, silvered and pearled on every scented, still spray.
Then he had to wake up.
And then he bought a gardenia, and went home and dressed himself in his most beautiful frock-coat and his softest white silk tie, and put the gardenia in his button-hole--and went to see the Girl.
It seemed to him that there were so many more of the same pattern from whom she might have chosen.
And that very evening he ran up against the Lover at the Temple Station, and he got into the same carriage with him.
"I believe you're right," said the Lover thoughtfully; "I couldn't have believed that a man could be base like that, through and through.
Or I ought to have gone with her.
When he had told the Girl everything, and when she was able to do anything but laugh and cry and cling to him with thin hands, she said--
"Are you still going on with your usual work?"
You will have to eat your lie. Yes--though it will smash your life and ruin you socially and professionally.
So he took next day a much earlier train than was at all pleasant, and called on her father to explain his position and set forth his prospects.
Yet they talked for hours.
Then the Lover went and told the Girl.
He's very, very clever."
You'll forgive me--won't you?
"Not I--we'll just cut him.
He saw her slenderness turn to thinness, the pure, healthy pallor of her rounded cheek change to a sickly white, covering a clear-cut mask of set endurance.
My father ought never to have married.
"But why should he?"
Oh, thank God, thank God!
The Lover was short with the Onlooker; but he persisted.
The appointment had come through her father, for whom the Onlooker had fagged at Eton.
He had another caller that afternoon; he whom we know as the Onlooker came to thank him for the influence that had got him the appointment as doctor to the Influential Insurance Company.
"Because--if you must know, my chances of life have ceased to interest me."
Having prepared at Hampton Institute and elsewhere, she entered the Philadelphia Medical College for Women.
I have even known one to be killed by the continual demands upon him.
Or should we rather do intensive work among our people, looking especially toward their moral and social welfare?
A little later it suggested chiefly feathers and paint and "Buffalo Bill's Wild West." To-day the association is rather with the Carlisle school and its famous athletes; but to the thinking mind the name suggests deeper thoughts and higher possibilities.
Among Indian college and university graduates a failure is very rare; I am sure I have not met one, and really do not know of one.
His color is not counted against him.
Of course the obstacles to complete success that I have referred to still exist, and there are others as well.
CHAPTER VIII
From the fleet Deerfoot to this day we boast the noted names of Longboat, Sockalexis, Bemus Pierce, Frank Hudson, Tewanima, Metoxen, Myers, Bender, and Jim Thorpe.
If such a society were formed, it would necessarily take many problems of the race under consideration, and the officials at Washington and in the field are sensitive to criticism, nor are they accustomed to allowing the Indian a voice in his own affairs.
These boys always fight the battle on its own merits; they play a clean game, and lose very few games during the season, although they meet all our leading universities, each on its own home grounds.
Representative Carter of Oklahoma is also an Indian.
In this matter I speak from personal experience as well as long observation.
Or should we keep clear of these matters, avoid discussion of official methods and action, and simply aim at arousing racial pride and ambition along new lines, holding up a modern ideal for the support and encouragement of our youth?
Our people have not been trained to work together harmoniously.
From their point of view, a particularly able or well-equipped man of their race is a public blessing, and all but public property.
His much regretted death occurred a few months later.
Every complaint was brought to him, as a matter of course; and he was expected to expose and redress every wrong.
The whole country has come to realize his ability and influence.
THE INDIAN IN COLLEGE AND THE PROFESSIONS
What we need is not less education, but more; more trained leaders to uphold the standards of civilization before both races.
She has since taken up private practice and also had charge of a mission hospital.
Others think differently; and, as a matter of fact, a Washington office has been opened and much attention paid to governmental affairs.
I wish to contradict the popular misconception that an educated Indian will necessarily meet with strong prejudice among his own people, or will be educated out of sympathy with them.
He was brought to Chicago by the man who ransomed him, a reporter and photographer, and when his benefactor died, the boy became the protege of the Chicago Press Club.
When she had finished, she returned to her tribe, and was for some time in the Government service.
At least two are superintendents of schools.
Their own schools graduate them at a mature age and do not prepare them for college.
He has been a prominent physician there for a number of years, and was recently married to a lady of German descent.
We will prove that the Indian is a gentleman and a sportsman; he will not complain; he will do nothing unfair or underhand; he will play the game according to the rules, and will not swear--at least not in public!"
The very mention of the name "Indian" in earlier days would make the average white man's blood creep with thoughts of the war-whoop and the scalping-knife.
I stand for the latter plan.
He stands uncompromisingly for the total abolition of the reservation system and of the Indian Bureau, holding that the red man must be allowed to work out his own salvation.
We corresponded with leading Indians and arranged a meeting at Columbus for the following April.
"Major," I said, "that is exactly why I want you to do it.
F. A. McKenzie of the university arranged the course, and soon afterward he wrote me that he believed the time was now ripe to organize our society.
It is a fact that the intelligent and educated Indian has no social prejudice to contend with.
It was declared without qualification by the Universal Races Congress at London in 1911 that there is no inherently superior race, therefore no inferior race.
The Hon.
Stationed at Pine Ridge at the time of the Wounded Knee massacre, he opened his church to the wounded Indian prisoners as an emergency hospital.
Consequently its graduates must attend a higher preparatory school for several years before they can enter college.
As for those brilliant men, so many in number, who have the blood of both races in their veins, I will not pretend to claim for the Indian all the credit of their talents and energy.
Dr. Booker Washington is in the habit of saying jocosely that the negro blood is the strongest in the world, for one drop of it makes a "nigger" of a white man.
All this time, although receiving some aid from various sources, he largely supported himself.
It is a serious question what principles we should stand for and what line of work we ought to undertake.
His mother is a Kaw Indian.
Frank Wright, a Choctaw, is well known as an evangelistic preacher and singer.
Our first president is Rev.
I would argue that the Indian blood is even stronger, for a half-blood negro and Indian may pass for an Indian, and so be admitted to first-class hotels and even to high society.
The Five Civilized Nations of Oklahoma can show many other writers and journalists.
From every race some individuals have mastered the same curriculum and passed the same tests, and in some instances members of so-called "uncivilized" races have stood higher than the average "civilized" student; therefore they have the same inherent ability. Certain peoples have remained undeveloped because of their religion, philosophy, and form of government; in other words, because of the racial environment.
They must know that many distinguished army officers as well as traders and explorers left sons and daughters among the American tribes, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century.
SOME NOTED INDIANS OF TO-DAY
It is a large task.
Change the environment, and the race is transformed. Certainly the American Indian has clearly demonstrated the truth of this assertion.
The press is responsible for many popular errors.
But we have pretty well passed through that period, and the native graduates of our higher institutions have begun to show their strength and enlarge their views.
"Why," said he, "if I did that, half the press of the country would attack me for developing the original war instincts and savagery of the Indian! The public would be afraid to come to our games!"
After graduation Dr. Montezuma was sent by the Government as physician to an Indian agency in Montana, and later transferred to the Carlisle school.
Henry Roe Cloud, a Winnebago, graduated from Yale and Oberlin.
I have been asked why my race has not produced a Booker Washington. There are many difficulties in the way of efficient race leadership; one of them is the large number of different Indian tribes with their distinct languages, habits, and traditions, and with old tribal jealousies and antagonisms yet to be overcome.
It is the express policy of the Government to use the educated Indians, whenever possible, in promoting the advancement of their race; indeed some of the treaties include this stipulation.
The society has 500 active and about the same number of associate members; the latter are white friends of the race who are in sympathy with our objects.
Not long afterward the game was introduced at Carlisle, and I was asked by the General to visit Montana and the Dakotas to secure pupils for the school, and, incidentally, recruits for his football warriors.
In a few years he returned to Chicago and opened an office.
John Eastman, who passed but a short time in school, has not only been a successful preacher among the Sioux but for many years their trusted adviser and representative to look after their interests at the national capital.
The boy was called Berthold, from the place of his birth. He was afterward sent to Yankton College, but I do not know what became of him.
No doubt he often invited attacks upon himself by a rashness born of his ardent sympathy for his fellow-tribesmen.
In the ministry we have many able and devoted men--more than in any other profession.
Thorpe is a graduate of the Carlisle school, and at the Olympic Games in Sweden in 1912 he won the title of the greatest all-round athlete in the world.
He was the son of a Sioux woman and a military officer.
In literature several writers of Indian blood have appeared during the past few years, and have won a measure of recognition.
Sherman Coolidge, my brother, John Eastman, and myself.
A number of young women, Carlisle graduates, have taken up trained nursing as a profession, and are practising successfully both among whites and Indians.
They made him carry too heavy a burden, without much recompense save honor and respect.
It was the Chicago Museum which sent him to the Philippine Islands, where he was murdered by the natives a few years ago.
Charles Curtis, Senator from Kansas, was a successful lawyer in Topeka when he was elected to the House of Representatives, and later to the United States Senate.
The Presbyterian Church alone has thirty-eight and the Episcopal Church about twenty, with a less number in several other denominations, and two Roman Catholic priests.
William Jones, a Sac and Fox quarter blood, was a graduate of Hampton and of Harvard University.
Bishop Whipple developed many able preachers, of whom perhaps the most accomplished was the Rev. Charles Smith Cook, of the Yankton Sioux.
The Indians' victory was complete.
Francis La Flesche, an Omaha, has collaborated with Miss Alice C. Fetcher in ethnological work, and is also the author of a pleasing story of life in an Indian school called "The Middle Five." Zitkalasa, a Sioux (now Mrs. Bonney), attended a Western college, where she distinguished herself in an intercollegiate oratorical contest.
The contrary is true.
They have had to adjust themselves to a new way of thinking, as well as a new language, before they could master such abstract ideas and problems as are presented by mathematics and the sciences.
Senator Owen of Oklahoma is part Cherokee.
That was the old rule among us. Up to a very recent period an educated Indian could not succeed materially; he could not better himself, because the people required him to give unlimited free service, according to the old regime.
In the athletic world this little race has no peer, as is sufficiently proven by their remarkable record in football, baseball, and track athletics.
We all know that governors and other men of mark have proclaimed themselves descendants of Pocahontas; I have met several in the West and South.
One of the earliest practitioners of our race was Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte of the Omaha tribe.
Mr. Cook was graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, and later from Seabury Divinity School.
He is received cordially and upon equal terms in school, college, and society.
Very few Indians are sufficiently independent of the Bureau to speak and act with absolute freedom.
Some of us have entered upon every known professional career, such as medicine, law, the ministry, education and the sciences, politics and higher business management, art and literature.
A large portrait of him adorns the parlor of the club, showing him as the naked Indian captive of about four years old.
It is the impression of many people who are not well informed on the Indian situation that book education is of little value to the race, particularly what is known as the higher education.
OBJECTS OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN INDIANS
NO "INFERIOR RACE"
We organized as a committee, and issued a general call for a conference in October at the university, upon the cordial invitation of Dr. McKenzie and President Thompson.
Of alteratives and cordials no man doubts, be they simples or compounds.
It still maintains a pre-eminent position.
This gives them so distinct a character, of parliamentary falsehood, and that falsehood is so clearly dictated by their connection with executive power that they merit the title "Official."
I propose to examine the nature of that movement which I call "The Free Press," to analyse the disabilities under which it suffers, and to conclude with my conviction that it is, in spite of its disabilities, not only a growing force, but a salutary one, and, in a certain measure, a conquering one.
I am right.
Its remedy was an opposition to be headed by a lawyer.
On the contrary, it deliberately side-tracks any vital discussion that sincere conviction may have forced upon the public, and spoils the scent with false issues.
"The New Age" was, I think, the pioneer in the matter.
They do not really criticize.
With this I pass from the just denunciation of evil to the exposition of what is good.
They serve a clique whom they should expose, and denounce and betray the generality--that is the State--for whose sake the salaried public servants should be perpetually watched with suspicion and sharply kept in control.
It prevents the just criticism of public servants.
This transitional state of affairs (for I hope to show that it is only transitional) is a very great evil.
The current simulacrum of criticism apparently attacking some portion of the regime, never deals with matters vital to its prestige.
They know that their old power of observation over public servants has slipped from them. They suspect that the known gross corruption of Public life, and particularly of the House of Commons, is entrenched behind a conspiracy of silence on the part of those very few who have the power to inform them.
Under certain forms of arbitrary government in Continental Europe ministers once made use of picked and rare newspapers to express their views, and these newspapers came to be called "The Official Press." It was a crude method, and has been long abandoned even by the simpler despotic forms of government.
Their number will increase.
It warps and depletes public information.
Another clamours for the elimination of enemy financial power in the affairs of this country, and yet says not a word upon the auditing of the secret Party Funds!
Here I touch the core of my matter.
Is not everything which the regime desires to be suppressed, suppressed?
There are, among such gutter-snipes, thousands whose luck ends in the native gutter, half a dozen whose luck lands them into millions, one or two at most who, on the top of such a career go crazy with the ambition of the parvenu and propose to direct the State.
The regime under which we are now living is that of a Plutocracy which has gradually replaced the old Aristocratic tradition of England. This Plutocracy--a few wealthy interests--in part controls, in part is expressed by, is in part identical with the professional politicians, and it has in the existing Capitalist Press an ally similar to that "Official Press" which continental nations knew in the past.
The new governing Press is an oligarchy which still works "in with" the just-less-new parliamentary oligarchy.
Nothing of that kind exists now, of course, in the deeper corruption of modern Europe--least of all in England.
He would refuse advertisements of luxuries to a paper read by half the wealthier class if he had heard in the National Liberal Club, or some such place, that the paper was "in bad taste."
No policy is attempted until it is ascertained that the newspaper owner is in favour of it.
For another, there was no clear-cut distinction between the Capitalism that owned newspapers and the Capitalism that advertised.
How did such a catastrophe come about?
An individual newspaper owner might, for instance, have the greatest possible dislike for the trade in patent medicines.
Few are proffered without first consulting his wishes.
The type is the common modern type.
But he certainly could not print an article against them, nor even an article describing how they were made, without losing a great part of his income, directly; and, perhaps, indirectly, the whole of it, from the annoyance caused to other advertisers, who would note his independence and fear friction in their own case.
It was undreamt of but a few years ago.
Many are directly ordered by him.
He was compelled then to respect his advertisers as his paymasters.
In pure Economics exchange is exactly balanced by the respective advantages of the exchangers; just as in pure dynamics you have the parallelogram of forces.
He might himself have suffered acute physical pain through the imprudent absorption of one of those quack drugs.
The newspaper owner and the advertiser, then, were intermixed.
Parliament is full of it, and it runs newspapers only as one of its activities--all of which need the suggestion of advertisement.
In the first place, if advertisement had come to be the stand-by of a newspaper, the Capitalist owning the sheet would necessarily consider his revenue from advertisement before anything else.
It is already to-day the capital fact of our whole political system.
The same man who owned "The Daily Times" was a shareholder in Jones's Soap or Smith's Pills.
He would prefer to retain his income, persuade his readers to buy poison, and remain free (personally) from touching the stuff he recommended for pay.
As with patent medicines so with any other matter whatsoever that was advertised.
Let us halt at this phase in the development of the thing to consider certain other changes which were on the point of appearance, and why they were on the point of appearance.
Stupid (like all people given up to gain), he was muddle-headed about the distinction between a large circulation and a circulation small, but appealing to the rich.
A Prime Minister is made or deposed by the owner of a group of newspapers, not by popular vote or by any other form of open authority.
It is the advent of the great newspaper owner as the true governing power in the political machinery of the State, superior to the officials in the State, nominating ministers and dismissing them, imposing policies, and, in general, usurping sovereignty--all this secretly and without responsibility.
There is always this psychological, or, if you will, artistic element in exchange.
But on the balance the advertising interest being wider spread was the stronger, and what you got was a sort of imposition, often quite conscious and direct, of advertising power over the Press; and this was, as I have said, not only negative (that was long obvious) but, at last, positive.
He chose the former course.
He would not advertise in papers which he thought might by their publication of opinion ultimately hurt Capitalism as a whole; still less in those whose opinions might affect his own private fortune adversely.
But there is now a graver corruption at work even than this always negative and sometimes positive power of the advertiser.
Now from this fact arises a consideration of great importance to our subject.
From the Socialist point of view the leading fact about the insincerity of the great official papers is that this insincerity is Capitalist; just as from a Catholic point of view the leading fact about it was, and is, that it is anti-Catholic.
"Later," these founders of the Free Press seemed to say, "we may convert the mass to our views, but, for the moment, we are admittedly a clique: an exceptional body with the penalties attaching to such." They said this although the whole life of France is at least as Catholic as the life of Great Britain is Plutocratic, or the life of Switzerland Democratic.
Though, however, certain of the Socialist Free Papers thus boldly took up a standpoint of moral equality with the others, their attitude was exceptional.
C
It had disappeared by the 1900's.
They crept in as inferiors, or rather as open ex-centrics. For Victorian England and Third Empire France falsely proclaimed the "representative" quality of the Official Press.
The great Dailies were thought grey; not wicked--only general and vague.
The editor became (and now is) a mere mouthpiece of the proprietor. Editors succeed each other rapidly.
The Free Press in its beginnings did not attack as an enemy.
A
At last--like most rapid developments--it exceeded itself.
To distort, to lie?
It only timidly claimed to be heard.
It was humble.
You have the Single-tax papers.
But such a Free Press in defence of religion (the pioneer of all the Free Press) arose in Ireland and in France and elsewhere.
The first Propagandists, then, did not stand up to the Official Press as equals.
And there went with it a mass of ex-centric stuff.
It came quickly but thoroughly.
The "organs of opinion" professed a genteel ignorance of that idea which was most widespread, most intense, and most formative.
True, the editor, being revocable and poor, could not pretend to full political power.
Only a small number of people were acquainted with such particular truths.
But the magpie knew no more than the lesson he had learnt, so he soon fluttered away; while the prince hurried back to his castle to gather together a troop of horsemen, full of courage for whatever might befall.
The great green patch in the garden will prove you with a more lively company.'
He passed through the gardens which for him had lost their charm, and the sight of the princess's footprints on the golden sand of the pathway renewed his grief.
'Malicious Sprite,' she cried, 'why do you begrudge me my playmates --the greatest delight of my lonely hours?
'Loveliest of maidens,' he stammered, bowing low before her, 'let me gaze into your dear eyes, and read in them that you will no longer refuse my love, but will make me the happiest being the sun shines upon.'
Go! count the turnips in yonder meadow.
He searched every thicket and path, he looked behind every tree, and gazed into every pond, but without success; then he hastened into the palace and rushed from room to room, peering into every hole and corner and calling her by name; but only echo answered in the marble halls--there was neither voice nor footstep.
'You are trying to tease me,' she cried, as soon as she saw him.
This time she changed the turnip into a magpie.
In these magnificent garments she went to meet the gnome upon the great terrace.
All was lonely, empty, sorrowful; and the forsaken gnome resolved that he would have no more dealings with such false creatures as he had found men to be.
After that, by the power of the wonderful wand she summoned a cricket, and taught him this greeting:
When he understood this he flew down again in a great hurry into the thicket, and took the form of a handsome young man--that was the best way--and he fell in love with the girl then and there.
My heart answers to your tenderness, and yet I am fearful.
'Why tears, beloved one?' cried the gnome anxiously; 'every tear of yours falls upon my heart like a drop of molten gold.
Rubezahl
They shall provide me with bride-maidens too.
All his gloom and misery vanished in a moment, and he anxiously questioned the welcome messenger as to the fate of the princess.
'Dear queen of my heart,' answered he, 'I pray you to forgive my carelessness.
Greatly as I desire your love, I do not ask a sacrifice.'
At last, when they were quite weary, the princess cried out suddenly that nothing would content her but to bathe in the marble pool, which certainly did look very inviting; and they all went gaily to this new amusement.
Almost before the gnome had finished, the disappointed princess turned away, and marched off to her own apartments, without deigning to answer him.
To the right and left of the waterfall opened out a wonderful grotto, its walls and arches glittering with many-coloured rock-crystals, while in every niche were spread out strange fruits and sweetmeats, the very sight of which made the princess long to taste them.
'Your constancy has overcome me,' she said; 'I can no longer oppose your wishes.
She left off treating the gnome with coldness and indifference; indeed, there was a look in her eyes which encouraged him to hope that she might some day return his love, and the idea pleased him mightily.
And now all went cheerfully in the castle.
I promised more than I could perform.
Take this little many-coloured wand, and with a touch give to each root the form you desire to see.'
So the bee spread his shining wings and flew away to do as he was bidden; but before he was out of sight a greedy swallow made a snatch at him, and to the great grief of the princess her messenger was eaten up then and there.
He skipped along among the turnips as nimble as a grasshopper, and had soon counted them all; but, to be quite certain that he had made no mistake, he thought he would just run over them again.
A wife cannot always charm, and though YOU will never alter, the beauty of mortals is as a flower that fades.
'Then give me just one proof of your goodness.
Thus fostered they grew and flourished marvellously, and promised a goodly crop.
These two unlucky ventures did not prevent the princess from trying once more.
'Sweetest and fairest of damsels,' cried the gnome, 'do not be angry; everything that is in my power I will do--but do not ask the impossible. So long as the sap was fresh in the roots the magic staff could keep them in the forms you desired, but as the sap dried up they withered away.
He felt very well satisfied with himself as he crossed the mossy lawn to the place where he had left her; but, alas! she was no longer there.
On this particular morning the fancy took them to wander off again into the wood.
'Hop, little cricket, to Ratibor, and chirp in his ear that I love him only, but that I am held captive by the gnome in his palace under the mountains.'
With this he left her, and the princess, without an instant's delay, opened the basket, and touching a turnip, cried eagerly: 'Brunhilda, my dear Brunhilda! come to me quickly!' And sure enough there was Brunhilda, joyfully hugging and kissing her beloved princess, and chattering as gaily as in the old days.
Have patience for a little, and then without fail you shall have your puppets to play with.'
Thereupon he stamped three times upon the earth, and the magic palace, with all its treasures, vanished away into the nothingness out of which he had called it; and the gnome fled once more to the depths of his underground kingdom.
Day by day the princess pulled up some of them, and made experiments with them, conjuring up now this longed-for person, and now that, just for the pleasure of seeing them as they appeared; but she really had another purpose in view.
'Ask some proof, sweetheart,' said he.
She had a fine fresh turnip hidden close at hand, which she changed into a spirited horse, all saddled and bridled, and, springing upon its back, she galloped away over hill and dale till she reached the Thorny Valley, and flung herself into the arms of her beloved Prince Ratibor.
So saying the gnome took himself off.
Now Prince Ratibor was still spending his life in wandering about the woods, and not even the beauty of the spring could soothe his grief.
He imagined that she was too young and inexperienced to care for him; but that was a mistake, for the truth was that another image already filled her heart.
My wedding feast must not lack guests.
'Flutter from tree to tree, chattering bird,' said she, 'till you come to Ratibor, my love.
'Where have you hidden the basket?
So saying he would have drawn aside her veil; but the princess only held it more closely about her.
Thereupon he caught up a great stone, and would have hurled it at the magpie, if it had not at that moment uttered the name of the princess.
The next day, as soon as the sun rose, she made her appearance decked as a bride, in the wonderful robes and jewels which the fond gnome had prepared for her.
Furiously did the enraged gnome fling two great clouds together, and hurl a thunderbolt after the flying maiden, splintering the rocky barriers which had stood a thousand years.
One day she changed a tiny turnip into a bee, and sent him off to bring her some news of her lover.
Who is there I can find for her to talk to?'
They even sprang into the water and tried to dive after her, but in vain; they only floated like corks in the enchanted pool, and could not keep under water for a second.
This time, to his great annoyance, the number was different; so he reckoned them for the third time, but now the number was not the same as either of the previous ones!
While all this was happening, Prince Ratibor was hurrying away with his prize to a place of safety.
But the princess felt no such happiness; in spite of all the magic delights around her she was sad, though she tried to seem content for fear of displeasing the gnome.
Under his care all the crops flourished exceedingly, but the master proved to be wasteful and ungrateful, and Rubezahl soon left him, and went to be shepherd to his next neighbour.
Isabel presently found herself in the singular situation of defending the British constitution against her aunt; Mrs. Touchett having formed the habit of sticking pins into this venerable instrument.
Young girls here--in decent houses--don't sit alone with the gentlemen late at night."
Then her impressions were still so fresh and so quickly renewed that there was as yet hardly a hint of vacancy in the view.
Isabel had spoken to him very often about "specimens;" it was a word that played a considerable part in her vocabulary; she had given him to understand that she wished to see English society illustrated by eminent cases.
When they reached home they usually found tea had been served on the lawn and that Mrs. Touchett had not shrunk from the extremity of handing her husband his cup.
But I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
I had never been more blue, more bored, than for a week before she came; I had never expected less that anything pleasant would happen.
The old man had been gravely ill in the spring, and the doctors had whispered to Ralph that another attack would be less easy to deal with.
"When you criticise everything here you should have a point of view.
Mrs. Touchett fixed her bright little eyes upon him a moment and transferred them coldly to her niece.
"That's your privilege," Ralph answered, who had not been used to being so crudely addressed.
"It's very nice to know two such charming people as those," she said, meaning by "those" her cousin and her cousin's friend.
"If I could believe even that, I should be very glad."
"That will arrange it."
For what is usually called social intercourse she had very little relish; but nothing pleased her more than to find her hall-table whitened with oblong morsels of symbolic pasteboard.
It mattered little that he had assured her they were a very dismal place; she would have been glad to undertake to sweep them and set them in order.
"My dear Mrs. Touchett!" Lord Warburton murmured.
She had hoped she should see him again--hoped too that she should see a few others.
Isabel, seeing him for half an hour on the day of her arrival, had discovered in this brief space that she liked him; he had indeed rather sharply registered himself on her fine sense and she had thought of him several times.
Ralph wondered how their neighbour had found it out so soon; and then he said it was only another proof of his friend's high abilities, which he had always greatly admired.
"It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services.
"A specimen of an English gentleman."
It must be added moreover that an incident had occurred which might have seemed to put her good-humour to the test.
You're not--you're not at your blest Albany, my dear."
"Be touched in the right sense and you'll never look the worse for it," said Isabel, who, if it pleased her to hear it said that her accomplishments were numerous, was happily able to reflect that such complacency was not the indication of a feeble mind, inasmuch as there were several things in which she excelled.
She touches nothing that she doesn't adorn!"
He wondered whether he were harbouring "love" for this spontaneous young woman from Albany; but he judged that on the whole he was not.
Just now he appeared disburdened of pain, but Ralph could not rid himself of a suspicion that this was a subterfuge of the enemy, who was waiting to take him off his guard.
But of the two triumphs, that of refuting a sophistical son and that of holding on a while longer to a state of being which, with all abatements, he enjoyed, Ralph deemed it no sin to hope the latter might be vouchsafed to Mr. Touchett.
"I'm not vexed, but I'm surprised--and a good deal mystified.
"Oh, I say, mother!" Ralph broke out.
"Whenever she executes them," said Ralph, "may I be there to see!"
"I care for nothing but you, dear cousin," said Ralph.
It seemed to her he was talking as a blind and had little heart in what he said.
You're too fond of your own ways."
"A character like that," he said to himself--"a real little passionate force to see at play is the finest thing in nature.
The fortunate Lord Warburton exchanged a handshake with our heroine and hoped she was very well.
Isabel's chief dread in life at this period of her development was that she should appear narrow-minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should really be so.
Lord Warburton had been right about her; she was a really interesting little figure.
She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature; but what was she going to do with herself?
Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny.
"A specimen of what?" asked the girl.
"I don't know what's the matter with you," she observed to him once; "but I suspect you're a great humbug."
It must be said that her wit was exercised to a large extent in self-defence, for her cousin amused himself with calling her "Columbia" and accusing her of a patriotism so heated that it scorched.
Never in the world; that's shockingly narrow.
Isabel thought this a better answer than she admitted; it was a tolerable description of her own manner of judging, but it would not have sounded well for her to say so.
Wasn't it proper I should remain in the drawing-room?"
American?
Mr. Touchett went to bed at half-past nine o'clock, but his wife remained in the drawing-room with the other members of the party. She prolonged her vigil for something less than an hour, and then, rising, observed to Isabel that it was time they should bid the gentlemen good-night.
"Do you mean they're all like him?"
"Oh, I know he doesn't row; he's too lazy," said his lordship, indicating Ralph Touchett with a laugh.
Isabel had said nothing on her way up.
The key of a beautiful edifice is thrust into my hand, and I'm told to walk in and admire.
Isabel might have believed it and not have been far from the truth.
Isabel considered.
"It's impossible I should wait for you," Mrs. Touchett answered.
So, without further thought, she replied, very simply--
This question was irregular, for with most women one had no occasion to ask it.
For himself he was annoyed at his mother, though he thought she was right.
But it is by no means certain that she did not feel it to be wrong that so little notice was taken of them and that her failure (really very gratuitous) to make herself important in the neighbourhood had not much to do with the acrimony of her allusions to her husband's adopted country.
"My excuse for not rowing is that my cousin rows so well," said Ralph. "She does everything well.
But I'm glad to think of getting home.
Now I'll look back.
I wasn't a bit sick coming over in the boat.
I'm sure I'll guess right."
Orchard Slope's the name of his place.
Women were bad enough in all conscience, but little girls were worse.
"No, she didn't--really she didn't.
"It isn't heavy. I've got all my worldly goods in it, but it isn't heavy.
"It's a boy I've come for.
So I shut my eyes.
But I reckon Mrs. Spencer described it so's you could tell."
And what DOES make the roads red?"
"Well now, I'm afraid I can't," said Matthew, who was getting a little dizzy.
All she said might just as well have been about most of those other places.
"Well, whatever it was it must have been something nice because she was divinely beautiful.
Would you rather I didn't talk?
With this Matthew's companion stopped talking, partly because she was out of breath and partly because they had reached the buggy.
"I'm very glad to see you.
Maybe they were out of boys of the brand you wanted."
I never expected I would, though.
But am I talking too much?
And then I can imagine that I'm dressed gorgeously.
"Well now, I just can't recollect that I ever had."
Matthew Cuthbert is surprised
Because, you see, if the bridge DID crumple up I'd want to SEE it crumple.
I always like the rumble part of it.
"But there was a passenger dropped off for you--a little girl.
They were good, you know--the asylum people.
"That's Barry's pond," said Matthew.
She said I must have asked her a thousand already.
Oh, Mr. Cuthbert!!
I don't mind."
"Oh, I can carry it," the child responded cheerfully.
She said she never saw the beat of me for prowling about.
I never could find out.
"Fancy.
But you can't where you are.
Oh, Mr. Cuthbert!!!"
I asked her all about it.
I hadn't any real idea what it looked like.
Other people may call that place the Avenue, but I shall always call it the White Way of Delight. Have we really only another mile to go before we get home?
I can't feel exactly perfectly happy because--well, what color would you call this?"
"That's it, isn't it?" she said, pointing.
I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it's difficult."
Mrs. Spencer says--oh, Mr. Cuthbert!
We've got to drive a long piece, haven't we?
"Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime.
When we got on the train I felt as if everybody must be looking at me and pitying me.
It just makes me feel glad to be alive--it's such an interesting world.
And I've never had a pretty dress in my life that I can remember--but of course it's all the more to look forward to, isn't it?
Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?"
Do you think it can?
Something still pleasanter may come after, but you can never be sure.
In fact, he had looked at twenty very much as he looked at sixty, lacking a little of the grayness.
But why do other people call it Barry's pond?"
Have you ever imagined what it must feel like to be divinely beautiful?"
"Now you see why I can't be perfectly happy.
"Well now, I dunno," said Matthew.
But it isn't--it's firmly fastened at one end.
"I suppose you are Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables?" she said in a peculiarly clear, sweet voice.
Did you ever have an ache like that, Mr. Cuthbert?"
They had simply rounded a curve in the road and found themselves in the "Avenue."
Her face was small, white and thin, also much freckled; her mouth was large and so were her eyes, which looked green in some lights and moods and gray in others.
"Oh, I'm so glad.
Can you tell me?"
It's certain I'll never be angelically good.
He then descended from his throne, and causing only Ganem and the grand vizier, follow him, retired into his own apartment.
They were at the door waiting for that moment.
The caliph was not displeased with Fetnah for the freedom of these words; "But may I," said he, "rely on the assurance you give me of Ganem's virtue?" "Yes," replied Fetnah, "you may.
What melancholy return have you received for your care and respect?
Not questioning but that Fetnah was in waiting, with Abou Ayoub's widow and daughter, he caused them to be called in.
I take you to wife; and by that means shall punish Zobeide, who shall become the first cause of your good fortune, as she was of your past sufferings.
This said, she embraced the mother and the daughter, and went away.
It was afterwards laid up in his library, and many copies being transcribed, it became public.
This said, she went to the palace, and soon returned with a purse containing a thousand pieces of gold, which she delivered to the syndic, desiring him to buy apparel for the mother and daughter. The syndic, who was a man of a good taste, chose such as were very handsome, and had them made up with all expedition.
You are no longer his enemies.
Fetnah then said, "Let us bless Heaven for having brought us all together.
Alas! it is I that have made you wretched! why did you not let me perish miserably, rather than afford me your generous relief?
Ganem," added she, "it is not you that I address!
The caliph's favourite having dried up hers, said to Ganem's mother, "Be so kind as to tell us your misfortunes, and recount your story.
I went further yet: you know the tyranny of love: I felt some tender inclination rising in my breast.
I carried them both to my house, and delivered them to my wife, who was of the same opinion with me. She caused her slaves to provide them good beds, whilst she herself led them to our warm bath, and gave them clean linen.
You have dispelled his jealousy, and he has restored you to his favour."
Speak freely, you know the natural goodness of my disposition, and that I love to do justice."
The young man having recovered, looked all around, and not seeing what he sought, exclaimed, "What is become of you, charming Fetnah?
"Fetnah," said the caliph, without bidding her rise, "I think you charge me with violence and injustice.
He told them, that having taken refuge in a small village, he there fell sick; that some charitable peasants had taken care of him, but finding he did not recover, a camel-driver had undertaken to carry him to the hospital at Bagdad.
"Yes, my dear Ganem," answered Fetnah, "I have cleared myself before the commander of the true believers, who, to make amends for the wrong he has done you, bestows me on you for a wife." These last words occasioned such an excess of joy in Ganem, that he knew not for a while how to express himself, otherwise than by that passionate silence so well known to lovers.
They prostrated themselves before him: he made them rise; and was so charmed by Jalib al Koolloob's beauty, that, after viewing her very attentively, he said, "I am so sorry for having treated your charms so unworthily, that I owe them such a satisfaction as may surpass the injury I have done.
The son of Abou Ayoub, however indisposed, would know the voice of Fetnah." At the name of Fetnah, Ganem (for it was really he) opened his eyes, sprang up, and knowing the caliph's favourite; "Ah! madam," said he, "by what miracle"
The caliph was highly pleased with Ganem's reply, and assigned him a considerable pension.
Matters being so ordered, the syndic announced Fetnah's coming to the sick man, who was so transported to see her, that he was again near fainting away, "Well, Ganem," said she, drawing near to his bed, "you have again found your Fetnah, whom you thought you had lost for ever." "Ah! madam," exclaimed he, eagerly interrupting her, "what miracle has restored you to my sight?
Fetnah also told them all the uneasiness of her imprisonment, how the caliph, having heard her talk in the tower, had sent for her into his closet, and how she had cleared herself.
Ganem's face was bathed with them, as well as his mother's and sisters; and Fetnah let fall abundance.
He perceived it; but far from availing himself of my frailty, and notwithstanding the flame which consumed him, he still remained steady in his duty, and all that his passion could force from him were the words I have already repeated to your majesty, That which belongs to the master is forbidden to the slave.'"
Fetnah concluded, that he had not been able to survive the pain of losing her.
She spend the whole day and the thousand pieces of gold in giving alms at the mosques, and returned to the palace in the evening.
I thought you were in the caliph's palace; he has doubtless listened to you.
Thence, notwithstanding all they had endured, they proceeded to Bagdad.
Was there any need of staying a whole month after my return, before you sent me word where you were?" "Commander of the true believers," answered Fetnah, "Ganem went abroad so very seldom, that you need not wonder we were not the first that heard of your return.
He could say no more; such a sudden transport of joy seized him that he fainted away. Fetnah and the syndic did all they could to bring him to himself; but as soon as they perceived he began to revive, the syndic desired the lady to withdraw, lest the sight of her should heighten his disorder.
Fetnah would have proceeded, but the syndic of the jewellers coming in interrupted her: "Madam," said he to her, "I come from seeing a very moving object, it is a young man, whom a camel- driver had just carried to an hospital: he was bound with cords on a camel, because he had not strength enough to sit.
The mother and daughter were mounted on mules belonging to the palace, and whilst Fetnah on another mule led them by a bye-way to the prince's court, Jaaffier conducted Ganem, and brought him into the hall of audience.
Through all the rags that covered them, notwithstanding the impression the sun has made on their faces, I discovered a noble air, not to be commonly found in those people I relieve.
For nine successive mornings, Catherine wondered over the repetition of a disappointment, which each morning became more severe: but, on the tenth, when she entered the breakfast-room, her first object was a letter, held out by Henry's willing hand.
Let me soon hear from you, dear Catherine; you are my only friend; your love I do build upon.
You feel all this?"
"It is very true, however; you shall read James's letter yourself. Stay--There is one part--" recollecting with a blush the last line.
You feel, I suppose, that in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy.
"No, not very.
But now--in short, she made herself as miserable as possible for about half an hour, went down when the clock struck five, with a broken heart, and could scarcely give an intelligible answer to Eleanor's inquiry if she was well.
Frederick will not be the first man who has chosen a wife with less sense than his family expected.
"Our brother!
"It contained something worse than anybody could suppose!
Frederick too, who always wore his heart so proudly!
My letter was from my brother at Oxford."
But Isabella had promised and promised again; and when she promised a thing, she was so scrupulous in performing it!
I never was so deceived in anyone's character in my life before."
Now she has really got the man she likes, she may be constant."
"But," said Eleanor, after a short pause, "would it be to promote his happiness, to enable him to marry such a girl?
They live at Putney."
The general, between his cocoa and his newspaper, had luckily no leisure for noticing her; but to the other two her distress was equally visible.
The visions of romance were over.
I am very sorry for Mr. Morland--sorry that anyone you love should be unhappy; but my surprise would be greater at Frederick's marrying her than at any other part of the story."
Nothing further was said for a few minutes; and then speaking through her tears, she added, "I do not think I shall ever wish for a letter again!"
After half an hour's free indulgence of grief and reflection, Catherine felt equal to encountering her friends; but whether she should make her distress known to them was another consideration.
Miss Tilney, at Catherine's invitation, now read the letter likewise, and, having expressed also her concern and surprise, began to inquire into Miss Thorpe's connections and fortune.
I think you must be deceived so far.
Poor Thorpe is in town: I dread the sight of him; his honest heart would feel so much.
Thank God!
Frederick!"
Her folly, which now seemed even criminal, was all exposed to him, and he must despise her forever.
Catherine took her place at the table, and, after a short silence, Eleanor said, "No bad news from Fullerton, I hope?
"Though, God knows, with little inclination for writing, I think it my duty to tell you that everything is at an end between Miss Thorpe and me.
"How quick you are!" cried Catherine: "you have guessed it, I declare! And yet, when we talked about it in Bath, you little thought of its ending so.
"But perhaps," observed Catherine, "though she has behaved so ill by our family, she may behave better by yours.
Catherine had not read three lines before her sudden change of countenance, and short exclamations of sorrowing wonder, declared her to be receiving unpleasant news; and Henry, earnestly watching her through the whole letter, saw plainly that it ended no better than it began.
Your father is so very liberal! He told me the other day that he only valued money as it allowed him to promote the happiness of his children." The brother and sister looked at each other.
We parted at last by mutual consent--happy for me had we never met!
I cannot understand even now what she would be at, for there could be no need of my being played off to make her secure of Tilney.
"You think it is all for ambition, then?
"Are they a wealthy family?"
He gladly received the letter, and, having read it through, with close attention, returned it saying, "Well, if it is to be so, I can only say that I am sorry for it.
CHAPTER 25
Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities.
She drew back, trying to beg their pardon, but was, with gentle violence, forced to return; and the others withdrew, after Eleanor had affectionately expressed a wish of being of use or comfort to her.
"I hope, so far as concerns my brother, you are misinformed.
You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world.
"No, read it yourself," cried Catherine, whose second thoughts were clearer.
I will get the Bath paper, and look over the arrivals."
The liberty which her imagination had dared to take with the character of his father--could he ever forgive it?
The letter was one moment in her hand, then in her lap, and then in her pocket; and she looked as if she knew not what she did.
Perhaps, if particularly questioned, she might just give an idea--just distantly hint at it--but not more.
"No," said Catherine, after a few moments' reflection, "I do not--ought I? To say the truth, though I am hurt and grieved, that I cannot still love her, that I am never to hear from her, perhaps never to see her again, I do not feel so very, very much afflicted as one would have thought."
"What was her father?"
She must be an unprincipled one, or she could not have used your brother so.
She thanked him as heartily as if he had written it himself.
She has made me miserable forever!
She hated herself more than she could express.
He is a deceased man--defunct in understanding.
"Such a sister-in-law, Henry, I should delight in," said Eleanor with a smile.
I shall not enter into particulars--they would only pain you more.
And how strange an infatuation on Frederick's side!
Eleanor's work was suspended while she gazed with increasing astonishment; but Henry began to suspect the truth, and something, in which Miss Thorpe's name was included, passed his lips.
"To have so kind-hearted, so affectionate a sister," replied Henry warmly, "must be a comfort to him under any distress."
"I am sorry," said Henry, closing the book he had just opened; "if I had suspected the letter of containing anything unwelcome, I should have given it with very different feelings."
This made it so particularly strange!
I do not envy his situation, either as a lover or a son."
She opened it; it was from Oxford; and to this purpose:
They went to breakfast directly; but Catherine could hardly eat anything.
He was prevented, however, from even looking his surprise by his father's entrance.
He had--she thought he had, once or twice before this fatal morning, shown something like affection for her.
I wish your visit at Northanger may be over before Captain Tilney makes his engagement known, or you will be uncomfortably circumstanced.
To expose a friend, such a friend as Isabella had been to her--and then their own brother so closely concerned in it! She believed she must waive the subject altogether.
It was not only with herself that she was sunk--but with Henry.
"I have one favour to beg," said Catherine, shortly afterwards, in an agitated manner, "that, if your brother should be coming here, you will give me notice of it, that I may go away."
You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve, on whose regard you can place dependence, or whose counsel, in any difficulty, you could rely on.
"Dear Catherine,
Catherine was completely awakened. Henry's address, short as it had been, had more thoroughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies than all their several disappointments had done.
Most bitterly did she cry.
As soon as she dared leave the table she hurried away to her own room; but the housemaids were busy in it, and she was obliged to come down again. She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her.
I cannot forget that, when she first knew what my father would do for them, she seemed quite disappointed that it was not more.
I do not believe Isabella has any fortune at all: but that will not signify in your family.
Tears filled her eyes, and even ran down her cheeks as she sat.
"'Tis only from James, however," as she looked at the direction.
His marrying Miss Thorpe is not probable.
"That is the most unpromising circumstance, the strongest presumption against him.
"Your brother is certainly very much to be pitied at present; but we must not, in our concern for his sufferings, undervalue yours.
After my father's consent had been so kindly given--but no more of this.
Neither Oliver nor I had much experience in boating, and we had none in boat building.
Here and there might be a vessel loading piles and square timber for the San Francisco market, but not a steamer was then plying on the Sound; there was not even a sailing craft that essayed to carry passengers.
Its capital was to be on Puget Sound.
Olympia at the time contained about one hundred inhabitants.
As in the trip across the Plains, we must provide our own transportation.
"Yes, but I do not see any way out there."
"Why, we are drifting right back almost in the same direction from which we came, but into another bay!
In April of 1853, the word had begun to pass around that we were to have a new Territory to embrace the country north of the Columbia River.
However, when we had discarded the idea of taking a canoe, we set to work with a hearty good will to build us a skiff.
They were covered with fine twigs, and upon the twigs earth was placed.
If she would show us how to cook the clams, we would buy some.
Neither did I have much to say; but I fell to work, mechanically preparing the much-needed meal. We ate in silence and then went to sleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Again we set about searching for claims, and the more we searched the less we liked the look of things.
By this time we had drifted into the Narrows, and we soon found we had something more important to do than to tow a deer.
We did not know the exact location of the town.
They were a drunken, rascally rabble, spending their gains from the sale of fish and oil in a debauch that would last as long as their money held out.
When we had broken camp and were sailing along, we heard a dull sound like that often heard from the tide rips.
We had come to find a place to make a farm, and a farm we were going to have.
As the tide and wind favored us, we did not stop.
As a result things were booming.
It was our first introduction to a genuine tide rip.
We lingered at the mouth of the river in doubt as to what best to do.
A perpendicular bluff rose from the highwater mark, leaving no place for camp fire or bed.
Some were trolling for salmon, with a lone Indian in the bow of each canoe; others with poles were fishing for smelt; still others with nets seemed waiting for fisherman's luck.
The workers, it may be said, are less numerous among the men; the women are all industrious.
The Indians told us that there were two other like obstructions a few miles farther up the river, and that the current was very strong.
CRUISING ABOUT ON PUGET SOUND
Over these pack animals could pass, but wagon roads there were none; and whether a feasible route for one could be found, only time and labor could determine.
Turning the deer loose, we pulled our best for the shore, and found shelter in an eddy.
What prettier sight is there than a full-rigged vessel with all sails spread!
We hardly knew whether to camp in our boat or to start out on unknown waters in the dark.
We had crossed the two great states of Illinois and Iowa, over hundreds of miles of unoccupied prairie land as rich as anything that ever "lay out of doors," on our way from Indiana to Oregon in search of land on which to make a home.
Our Indian visitors made preparations to proceed on their journey, and assured us it was all right ahead.
My thoughts went back to wife and baby in the lonely cabin on the Columbia River, and again to that bargain we had made before marriage, that we were going to be farmers.
It was simply the camp of a company of United States soldiers, quartered in wooden shells of houses and log cabins.
The sight of those seven vessels lying in the offing made a profound impression upon our minds.
Sure enough, a short pull with a favorable current brought us to the Narrows and into Commencement Bay, in sight of numerous camp fires in the distance.
"It surely can't be," I responded, three quarters asleep.
We remembered the timber camps, the bustle and stir of the little new village, and the activity that we saw there, greater than anywhere else on the waters of the Sound.
Soon we came in sight of a fleet of seven vessels lying at anchor in a large bay, several miles in extent.
As we drew off from the mouth of the Puyallup River, numerous parties of Indians were in sight.
As the sun shone warm and the tide was taking us rapidly in the direction we wanted to go, why shouldn't I doze a little too, even if we did miss some of the sightseeing?
As we were not looking for a mill site or town site, we pushed on next day.
Here and there we saw a family industriously pursuing some object; but as a class they seemed to me the laziest set of people on earth.
They seemed to be a listless lot, with no thought for the future, or even for the immediate present.
Oliver did not sing as usual while preparing for camp.
The other two were gracefully beating their way out against the stiff breeze to the open waters beyond.
It was a discouraging outlook, even if there had been roads.
I remember that camp quite vividly; though I cannot locate it exactly, I know that it was on the water front within the present limits of the large and thriving city of Tacoma.
After a sober second thought, we realized that we had nothing to trade but labor; and we had not come as far as this to be laborers for hire.
How could we be farmers if we did not have land?
It took a tugging of two days to go six miles.
The shining, pebbly beach in front, the clear, level spot adjoining, with the beautiful open and comparatively level plateau in the background, and two or three vessels at anchor in the foreground, made a picture of a perfect city site.
Most of all, my thoughts would go on to the little cabin on the Columbia River.
When we fell asleep that night, it was without visions of new-found wealth.
Like the lost hunters, "we knew where we were, but we didn't know where any place else was." Not lost ourselves, the world was lost from us.
I have found just as industrious people, both men and women, among the Indians as among the whites.
Such timber!
I have said well-manned, but half the paddles, in fact, were wielded by women, and the post of honor, or that where most dexterity was required, was occupied by a woman.
Then launching our boat, we pulled for the head of Whidbey's Island, a few miles to the northwest.
A flat-bottomed boat like our little skiff, we thought, could not stay afloat there very long.
Upon the eastern slope of the shores of this bay lay the two towns, Port Steilacoom, and Steilacoom City, both established in 1851.
This camp did not prove so dreary as the last one, although it was more exposed to the swell of the big waters and the sweep of the wind.
Fortune favored us, for we found a good sandy beach upon which to land, though we got a thorough drenching while so doing.
We could feel the fish striking against the boat in such vast numbers that they fairly moved it.
There were some fine voices to be heard, and though there were but slight variations in the sounds or words, the Indians seemed never to tire in repeating, and I must confess we never tired of listening.
Now I have a fish story to tell.
Not a sailing craft of any kind was in sight of the little town, though the building activity was going on as before.
A mile and a half from the shore we found also Fort Steilacoom.
The memory of those ships, however, remained with us and determined our minds on the important question where the trade center was to be.
We responded, partly in English and partly in Chinook, that we were, and besides that it was impossible for us to proceed against the strong current.
It seemed an appalling undertaking to clear this land, the greater part of it being covered with a heavy growth of balm and alder trees and a thick tangle of underbrush besides.
Here, at what we might call the end of our rope, we had found the land, but with conditions that seemed almost too adverse to overcome.
Here we were compelled to remain two or three days in a dismal camp, until the weather became more favorable.
That opinion was materially modified later, as I became better acquainted with their habits.
We were sorely tempted to accept the flattering offer of four dollars a day for common labor in a timber camp, but concluded not to be swerved from the search for a new homesite.
Many shacks and camps, at first mistaken for the white men's houses, were found to be occupied by natives.
A far larger trade centered here than at any other point on Puget Sound, and we decided on a halt to make ourselves acquainted with the surroundings.
Intense rivalry ran between the two towns, upper and lower Steilacoom, at this time.
Very soon we caught up with the animal and succeeded in throwing a rope over its horns.
Three days sufficed to land us back in the bay we sought, but the ships were gone.
Just then some Indian canoes came along, moving with the tide.
They would often go out even to the open sea on their fishing excursions in canoes manned by thirty men or more.
As we afterwards ascertained, we could see the famous San Juan Island, later the bone of contention between our government and Great Britain, when the northern boundary of the United States was settled.
Other parties were passing, those in each canoe singing a plaintive chant in minor key, accompanied by heavy strokes of the paddle handles against the sides of the canoe, as if to keep time.
With misgivings and doubts, on the fourth day Oliver and I loaded our outfit into our skiff and floated out on the receding tide, whither, we did not know.
I have always been shy about telling it, lest some smart fellow should up and say I was drawing on my imagination: I am not.
We were wide awake now and gave chase.
"Carson and I climbed one of the nearest mountains; the forest land still extended ahead, and the valley appeared as far as ever.
"Axes and mauls were necessary today to make a road through the snow. Going ahead with Carson to reconnoitre the road, we reached in the afternoon the river which made the outlet of the lake.
He had lived on roots and acorns and was in the last stages of exhaustion.
We watched them anxiously, as now we dreaded a snow storm.
We took with us some of the best animals, and my intention was to proceed as rapidly as possible to the house of Mr. Sutter, and return to meet the party with a supply of provisions and fresh animals.
We repeated our shouts for Mr. Preuss; and this time we were gratified with an answer.
Among these, the prevailing tree was the evergreen oak (which, by way of distinction, we shall call the live oak); and with these, occurred frequently a new species of oak, bearing a long, slender acorn, from an inch to an inch and a half in length, which we now began to see formed the principal vegetable food of the inhabitants of this region.
The pack horse was found near the camp, but Derosier did not get in.
On the southern shore of what appeared to be the bay, could be traced the gleaming line where entered another large stream; and again the Buenaventura rose up in our mind.
For us, as connected with the idea of summer, it had a singular charm; and we watched its progress with excited feelings until nearly sunset, when the sky cleared off brightly, and we saw a shining line of water directing its course towards another, a broader and larger sheet.
"We began to be uneasy at Derosier's absence, fearing he might have been bewildered in the woods.
The day had been one of April; gusty, with a few occasional flakes of snow; which, in the afternoon enveloped the upper mountains in clouds.
Carson sprang over, clear across a place where the stream was compressed among rocks, but the parfleche sole of my moccasin glanced from the icy rock, and precipitated me into the river.
"We had hard and doubtful labor yet before us, as the snow appeared to be heavier where the timber began further down, with few open spots. Ascending a height, we traced out the best line we could discover for the next day's march, and had at least the consolation to see that the mountain descended rapidly.
He imagined he had been gone several days, and thought we were still at the camp where he had left us; and we were pained to see that his mind was deranged.
The ground round about was very rich, covered with an exuberant sward of grass; and we sat down for a while in the shade of the oaks to let the animals feed.
All along, the river was a roaring torrent, its fall very great; and, descending with a rapidity to which we had long been strangers, to our great pleasure oak trees appeared on the ridge, and soon became very frequent; on these I remarked unusually great quantities of mistletoe.
We had called up some straggling Indian--the first we had met, although for two days back we had seen tracks--who, mistaking us for his fellows, had been only undeceived by getting close up.
"Near night fall we descended into the steep ravine of a handsome creek thirty feet wide, and I was engaged in getting the horses up the opposite hill, when I heard a shout from Carson, who had gone ahead a few hundred yards.
In a short distance we crossed a little rivulet, where were two old huts and near by were heaps of acorn hulls.
They appeared so near, that we judged them to be among the timber of some of the neighboring ridges; but, having them constantly in view day after day, and night after night, we afterwards found them to be fires that had been kindled by the Indians among the tulares, on the shore of the bay, eighty miles distant.
In the course of the morning we struck a foot path, which we were generally able to keep; and the ground was soft to our animals feet, being sandy or covered with mould.
In the meantime Mr. Preuss continued on down the river, and unaware that we had encamped so early in the day, was lost.
Continuation of Fremont's Account of the Passage Through the Mountains.
Ignorant of the character of these people, we had now additional cause of uneasiness in regard to Mr. Preuss; he had no arms with him, and we began to think his chance doubtful.
Green grass began to make its appearance, and occasionally we passed a hill scatteringly covered with it.
They were forty to fifty feet high, and two in diameter, with a uniform tufted top; and the summer green of their beautiful foliage, with the singing birds, and the sweet summer wind which was whirling about the dry oak leaves, nearly intoxicated us with delight; and we hurried on, filled with excitement, to escape entirely from the horrid region of inhospitable snow, to the perpetual spring of the Sacramento.
The voice grew rapidly nearer, ascending from the river, but when we expected to see him emerge, it ceased entirely.
We tried to search a while for my gun, which had been lost in the fall, but the cold drove us out; and making a large fire on the bank, after we had partially dried ourselves we went back to meet the camp.
Shortly the advance party reached Sutter's Fort where they received the most hospitable treatment.
It was some few seconds before I could recover myself in the current, and Carson, thinking me hurt, jumped in after me, and we both had an icy bath.
He came in, and sitting down by the fire, began to tell us where he had been.
At the end of four days, Mr. Preuss surprised and delighted his friends by walking into camp.
It would have been pleasant to witness his astonishment; he would not have been more frightened had some of the old mountain spirits they are so much afraid of suddenly appeared in his path.
It appeared that he had been lost in the mountain, and hunger and fatigue, joined to weakness of body, and fear of perishing in the mountains had crazed him.
Charles Towns, who had not yet recovered his mind, went to swim in the river, as if it was summer, and the stream placid, when it was a cold mountain torrent foaming among the rocks. We were happy to see Derosier appear in the evening.
At one of these orchard grounds, we encamped about noon to make an effort for Mr. Preuss.
"The sky was clear and pure, with a sharp wind from the northeast, and the thermometer 20 below the freezing point.
One man took his way along a spur leading into the river, in hope to cross his trail, and another took our own back.
"The opposite mountain side was very steep and continuous--unbroken by ravines, and covered with pines and snow; while on the side we were travelling, innumerable rivulets poured down from the ridge.
"Carson had entered the valley along the southern side of the bay, but the country then was so entirely covered with water from snow and rain, that he had been able to form no correct impression of watercourses.
He meant to have it one of the best in the world.
I dare say that quite often when it was said: "James McNeill Whistler is growing rude and cross," the real truth of the matter was that James McNeill Whistler was hungry and worried.
They were very proud to be noticed by him, for long before he died he had received all kinds of honors and medals from foreign academies; and France, Germany, and Italy made him an Officer of the Legion of Honor, a Commander, and a Chevalier.
For a long time he made a practice of drawing a picture of himself every night before he went to bed.
But at this time I am sure no one could have been nicer.
Two portraits by this American artist hang in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but most of them are owned in England.
Instead of making a fuss about this, he used to call for pencil and paper and practise drawing feet until he could make very perfect ones.
He is a distinguished army officer and a fine engineer."
Once, when he had been sent to Washington to draw maps for the Coast Survey, he forgot what he was about and filled up the nice, white margins with pert little dancing folks.
There was a trial in London, and the court-room was crowded.
James was the oldest in the family.
Their mother was a fine woman, but sometimes they wished she would not be quite so strict.
He is one of the founders of the city in which he lives, Lowell, Massachusetts.
Some were there because they already owned Whistler pictures and wanted to find out if they had paid good money for bad pictures; others because they were warm friends of the artist or the critic; but even more men and women went to hear the sharp questions of the lawyers and the clever answers of Ruskin and Whistler.
The Scotch people wanted to own the portrait of Carlyle, and the city of Glasgow was glad to pay five thousand dollars for it.
Later, Mr. Whistler received much more than two hundred guineas for a single picture.
James was a tall, handsome young fellow at this time, and liked to go about to dancing-parties in the evening.
SLEEP.
"A minute ago," she answered.
"Not I! Mr. Wingfold is only just gone."
I shall never forget the first time I saw you--when I came to this country a lonely little foreigner,--and you, a great beautiful lady, for such you seemed to me, though you have told me since you were only a great gawky girl--I know that could never have been--you ran to meet me, and took me in your arms, and kissed me.
"What did he say to you?"
That man's soul is as grand and beautiful and patient as his body is insignificant and distorted and troubled.
"I can't see the good of taking more people into our confidence."
I was as if I had crossed the sea of death and found paradise in your bosom!
I am not likely to forget you for Mr. Wingfold, good and kind and strong as he is!
"Yes.
"You will be able to do without me now," she said sadly.
Leopold stared, looked half alarmed, and then said,
"No, you were asleep."
But when Leopold uttered himself thus, she felt that the current of events had seized her, and that she could only submit to be carried along.
Helen lifted a grateful look from eyes that swam in tears.
Helen," he said, "that IS a good fellow, SUCH a good fellow!"
She stepped quickly in, and round the screen to the side of the bed.
"Hate him!
They parted at the door from the garden, and she returned to the sick-room.
He was not aware that the tears stood in his eyes, but Helen saw them.
She turned the handle softly and peeped in: could it be that Wingfold's bearing had communicated to her mind a shadow of the awe with which he had left the place where perhaps a soul was being born again?
He hasn't got a secret like us, Helen," he added, sadly.
He is the wisest and best man I have ever known.
I know I took to you at first sight!
"I have let him out on the meadow since."
I think he knows where alone he can find rest.
Had the curate been a man she liked, she would not perhaps have minded it so much.
"I am so glad you don't hate him."
She did not answer.
Her love and her conscience were not yet at one with each other.
"Did he tell you he wants to bring a friend with him?"
"He's coming again to-morrow," added Leopold, almost gleefully, "and then perhaps he will tell me more, and help me on a bit!"
I do hope his mind will soon be more composed.
All was still as the grave.
"Oh!
The light of a new hope in his eye, as if the dawn had begun at last to break over the dark mountains, was already reflected from her heart.
You don't interfere with the doctor--why should you with him?
I wish you liked him better!--but you will in time.
"When did you come into the room?" he said.
The terror of his possible counsel for the moment vanished.
"I never could understand taking to people at first sight!"
Helen sighed, thinking how ill that had worked with Emmeline.
"That is true," returned Leopold; "but then he came to me with his door open, and let me walk in.
"Much what he said to you from the pulpit the other day, I should think."
"I must ask Leopold," returned Helen, who, the better the man was represented, felt the more jealous and fearful of the advice he might give.
"You don't think very badly of my poor brother, do you, Mr. Wingfold?" said Helen, meekly.
Who but a demon could hate him?"
"I did not hear you," he returned.
She paused, hesitating to enter.
She led the way down the stair, and walked with him through the garden. Wingfold did not speak.
"Some people are made so, I suppose, Helen.
There, to her glad surprise, he lay fast asleep, with the tears not yet dried upon his face.
Into the life I hope your brother will enter."
It doesn't take long to know a man then.
"Why should he not do what he thinks best, Helen?
I wish to be alone."
Leopold did not move. Terror laid hold of her heart.
"You know all!" she faltered.
"The dwarf!" exclaimed Helen, shuddering at the remembrance of what she had gone through at the cottage.
No wonder if with such a feeling in his breast Wingfold walked softly, and his face glistened!
For all his hardness and want of sympathy, the curate had yet had regard to her entreaties, and was not going to put any horrid notions about duty and self-sacrifice into the poor boy's head!
He could never tell him to give himself up!
"It is a terrible fate," he returned.
When a man is going to the bottom as fast as he can, and another comes diving after him--it isn't for me to say how he is to take hold of me.
"I do.
You see he's not one to pay young ladies compliments, as I have heard some parsons do; and he may be a little--no, not unpolished, not that--that's not what I mean--but unornamental in his manners!
"Did God make me sleep, Helen?"
Even SHE could not make me forget you, Helen.
No, Helen; when I trust, I trust out and out."
Then she remembered how pleased and consoled he had been when she said something about their dying together, and that reassured her a little: no, she was certain Leopold would never yield himself to public shame!
It flees to its kind for shelter from itself.
And was he to go and confess it, and be tried for it, and be--?
But instead of such words of gentle might, like those of the man of whom he was so fond of talking, he had only spoken drearily of duty, hinting at a horror that would plunge the whole ancient family into a hell of dishonour and contempt!
Strange it is and true that in publicity itself lies some relief from the gnawing of the worm--as if even a cursing humanity were a barrier of protection between the torn soul and its crime.
She did not know, perhaps never would understand the ghastly horror of conscious guilt, besides which there is no evil else.
Great God!--And here was the priest actually counselling what was worse than any suicide!
Poor Poldie was so easily led by any show of nobility--anything that looked grand or self-sacrificing!
Then indeed, if there be no God, or one that has not an infinite power of setting right that which has gone wrong with his work, then indeed welcome the faith, for faith it may then be called, of such as say there is no hereafter!
No; she would venture no farther. Sooner would she go to George Bascombe--from whom she not only could look for no spiritual comfort, but whose theories were so cruel against culprits of all sorts!
Her Poldie on the scaffold!
It was all his mother's fault--the fault of her race--and of the horrible drug her people had taught him to take!
Helen's only knowledge of guilt came from the pale image of it lifted above her horizon by the refraction of her sympathy.
It was impossible he should suspect the crime of which her brother had been guilty, and therefore could not know the frightful consequences of such a confession as he had counselled.
Hence, I imagine, in part, may the coolness of some criminals be accounted for.
"I think not," said the Lover--and he went out from the presence.
You lessen your chances of life!
I must hold my tongue." He held it.
Even then he tried to be strong.
They're not so particular just now.
I oughtn't to have allowed the child to make these long visits to her aunt.
And gradually, little by little, the whole worth of life seemed to lie in the faint, far chance of his being able to undo the one triumphantly impulsive and unreasoning action of his life.
One must not quote it--it is not proper to read other people's letters, especially letters to a trusted father, from a child, only and adored.
Then she stopped, because he was already some twelve feet from the ground, and she knew that one should not speak to a man who is climbing ruined walls.
"But are you perfectly certain?"
The illuminative flash of temptation was so sudden, so brilliant, that the Doctor-Onlooker closed his soul's eyes and yielded without even the least pretence of resistance.
They want men.
They parted.
Does she wonder why I don't speak? and the counter-questions--Will she think I don't care?
But it didn't.
Oh, how could you?"
He knew that she loved him, and there was a kind of fierce pain-pleasure--like that of scratching a sore--in the thought that she was as wretched as he was, that, divided in all else, they were yet united in their suffering.
"Because I won't; because it's wrong.
The sky was deep, clear, strong blue above, and against the blue, the wallflowers shone bravely from the cracks and crevices of ruined arch and wall and buttress.
But always the morning brought strength to keep to his resolution.
And so it was all over--the dreams, the hopes, the palpitating faith in a beautiful future.
Ye'll mak' a fine soldier, my lad."
Moral maxims and ethereal ideas notwithstanding, it was impossible for him to be glad that she was happy--like that.
Well, well," and he went back to his work with the plain unvarnished heartache of the anxious father--not romantic and pretty like the lover's pangs, but as uncomfortable as toothache, all the same.
That's all I'll trouble to do.
It showed the father that the Girl's happiness had had two long years in which to learn to grow round the thought of the young man, whom he now faced for the first time.
The father opened his heart to the Onlooker--and the Onlooker had to bear it.
If he did, the less precise and devotional may pardon him.
Odd, for to the father he seemed just like other young men.
Thank God!
And at last, out of hell, the Onlooker reached out his hands and caught at prayer.
"Well, if one isn't interested in one's life, one may be interested in one's death--or the manner of it.
And there was no work that could shut out that sight--no temptation of the world, the flesh, or the devil to give him even the relief of a fight.
Oh, how can people be so cruel!"
And that was bad.
"Dear--I do so hate to think badly of anyone.
"Perfectly.
He drove his passion on the curb, and mastered it.
The young man made a reverent note of the name, and the interview seemed played out.
He had no temptations; he had never had but the one.
And you--I hope it won't be as hard for you as it will for me."
Of course, a really honourable young man would have got out of the situation somehow.
This time he reeled like a man too drunk to care how drunk he looks.
I do hate to be suspicious--but--it is odd.
"I don't really know what business it is of yours, sir," he said; "but it's your business to know that they wouldn't pass a man with a heart like mine."
But he had never told his love.
He drove in cabs from Harley Street to Wimpole Street, and from Wimpole Street to Brooke Street--and he saw Sir William this and Sir Henry that, and Mr. The-other-thing, the great heart specialist.
His coming was heralded by a letter from her.
But do you really think that man was mistaken?
He saw how the light of life that his lying lips had blown out was not to be rekindled by his or any man's breath.
So she clasped her hands and waited, and her heart seemed to go out like a candle in the wind, and to leave only a dark, empty, sickening space where, a moment before, it had beat in anxious joy.
He saw her three times a year, when Christmas, Easter, and Midsummer brought her to stay with an aunt, brought him home to his people for holidays.
The picture was charming, too--a picture to wring the heart of the onlooker with envy, or sympathy, according to his nature.
The Onlooker prayed.
"I suppose it was you who saw him, by the way," said he, "a tall, well-set-up young fellow--dark--not bad looking."
You don't remember me?"
His smile struck her dumb.
He had a little fight with himself as he went down Wimpole Street; then he hailed a hansom, and went and told her father, who quite agreed with him that it was all over.
It was an hour full of poignant sentiments.
He was only about twenty-five feet from the ground.
And then his trying to get you to South Africa.
His soul was naked to the bitter wind of the actual; and the days went by, went by, and every day he knew more and more surely that he had lied and thrown away his soul, and that the wages of sin were death, and no other thing whatever.
"Don't!" he said tenderly, "don't worry.
Then came a rustle, a gritty clatter, loud falling stones: his foot had slipped, and he had fallen.
But I never could stand my sister Fanny.
Oh, how could you be so silly and horrid?
There are plenty who transgress the code, but they are in all the other stories.
And I'll not be a criminal.
You, of course, will insure yours."
At last--the father pressed him--he went.
And the very first man who came to him for medical examination was the man in whose arms he had seen the girl he loved.
He wanted you to get killed.
"Oh, any good office--the Influential, if you like.
She would never have believed anyone who had told her that only two minutes had been lived between the moment of his stumble and the other moment when his foot touched the grass and he came towards her among the fallen wallflowers.
She said it, of course, with her dear arms round his neck.
"Of course I will," the Lover echoed warmly; "does it matter what office?"
"I won't give you up just because you're ill," she said; "why, you want me more than ever!"
I'm a director, you know."
But there are some acts that there is no undoing.
"You ought to expose him."
In your place, I should enlist.
But the Onlooker was no dreamer, and he saw her about three times a week.
There is a code of honour, right or wrong, and it forbids a man with an income of a hundred and fifty a year to speak of love to a girl who is reckoned an heiress.
Two miles away he stopped and lit a pipe.
He was moving along now, slowly--hanging by his hands; now he grasped an ivy root--another--and pulled himself up till his knee was on the moulding of the arch.
The child replied,--
"In the direction of the sea."
A nice state to come into a house!
Ursus continued his imprecations, muttering to himself,--
He looked into the pot.
The nakedness of their bodies, embraced each in each, amalgamated with the virginity of their souls.
There is battle, struggle, competition between the fools in the street and myself.
He drew back.
Worthless vagabond! in the streets at this hour!
The hurricane is the passage of demons.
Nothing sold all day.
Who speaks of me? Wretched little barefooted clerk of Penniless Parish, I tell you, eat it all up!
The child drank, and then went on eating.
That being over there abuses my hospitality.
You should see a lord sup.
"Come in," resumed the voice.
"What has it got to do with me?
Ursus addressed him furiously.
They don't eat; that's noble.
The child, at once repulsed and invited, remained motionless.
He was half seated on the chest.
"How do you mean?
The rogue causes the wheat to spring up, ripens the grape, gives her song to the nightingale.
Innocence is holy ignorance. They slept.
Then he looked at the little infant.
The little creature whom he carried made his progress fearfully difficult. She was not only a burden, which his weariness and exhaustion made excessive, but was also an embarrassment.
He was not long before he reached the houses.
He knocked a third time.
He was overcome by fatigue, and the weight of the darkness would, as with the dead woman, have held him to the ground, and the ice glued him alive to the earth.
At length, then, he was near mankind.
Then he adopted in his gait a rocking movement, and the child was soothed and silenced.
The boy did not hesitate.
The hovel had but one door, which was like that of a dog-kennel; and a window, which was but a hole.
He felt the approach of another danger.
No movement was heard in the house.
The few rags which remained to him, hardened by the frost, were sharp as glass, and cut his skin.
A BURDEN MAKES A ROUGH ROAD ROUGHER.
This was one.
He raised the knocker with some difficulty, for his benumbed hands were stumps rather than hands.
In those two houses neither candle nor lamp was to be seen; nor in the whole street; nor in the whole town, so far as eye could reach.
The walls were of mud, the roof was of straw, and there was more thatch than wall.
There was no answer.
He approached the great mansion.
He had tripped upon the slopes of precipices, and had recovered himself; he had stumbled into holes, and had got out again.
Doubting, he yet persevered.
There glowed within him that sudden warmth--security; that out of which he was emerging was over; thenceforward there would no longer be night, nor winter, nor tempest.
He advanced, reeling at every step, as if on a spring board, and accomplishing, without spectators, miracles of equilibrium.
At the side an inhabited pig-sty told that the house was also inhabited.
That which he lost was not thrown away, but was gained by her. He found out that the poor infant enjoyed the comfort which was to her the renewal of life.
The storm had become shapeless from its violence.
He had arrived somewhere at last.
CHAPTER III.
It was little more than four hours since the hooker had sailed from the creek of Portland, leaving the boy on the shore.
The plain was unequal.
The paroxysm scourged the shore at the same time that it uptore the depths of ocean.
He could not afford to fall.
No smoke arose from them now.
No answer.
He must not slip.
Thenceforward the slightest fall would be death; a false step opened for him a tomb.
Then he found the surface a sheet of ice.
He hurried his steps.
He saw that they were all asleep, and did not care to get up.
Then he turned to the hovel.
Homesteads and cottages occupy the place of waste lands.
He continued to advance.
Sometimes less than a century separates a steppe from a city.
His eyes were fixed on the roofs.
Suddenly, a lull having occurred in the icy blast which was blinding him, he perceived, at a short distance in front of him, a cluster of gables and of chimneys shown in relief by the snow.
He knocked once.
The cowardly wind drove against him.
For a long time he had ceased to see the smoke.
An iron knocker was attached to it.
Two or three times the little infant cried.
He walked on, working away the snow with his knees.
The double folding-door of massive oak, studded with large nails, was of the kind that leads one to expect that behind it there is a stout armoury of bolts and locks.
He had not strength to rise even to his knees.
The street began by two houses.
Roofs--dwellings--shelter!
This was, perhaps, the moment when the distracted hooker was going to pieces in the battle of the breakers.
This little infant was the drop causing the cup of distress to overflow.
Such indications are soon effaced in the night; besides, it was past the hour when fires are put out.
It was also closed.
At that period bars to streets were falling into disuse.
He was, to all appearance, on the plains where Bincleaves Farm was afterwards established, between what are now called Spring Gardens and the Parsonage House.
He picked up a pebble from the snow, and knocked against the low door.
He struck again, and two knocks.
He became colder, but the infant was warmer.
At other times, his throat feeling as if it were on fire, he put a little snow in his mouth and sucked it; this for a moment assuaged his thirst, but changed it into fever--a relief which was an aggravation.
The little girl's lukewarm breath, playing on his face, warmed it for a moment, then lingered, and froze in his hair, stiffening it into icicles.
Deluges of snow are possible.
He staggered, slipped, recovered himself, took care of the infant, and, gathering the jacket about her, he covered up her head; staggered again, advanced, slipped, then drew himself up.
You will not forsake me?"
She spoils the look of the room."
"Check, old boy!"
"Why did you ask the Gogoffs?
"Very likely.
He was later connected with a church college in Missouri, where he died in 1898.
He was captain in a New York regiment in the early part of the war, and became afterward superintendent of the Buffalo State Hospital, and a recognized authority on insanity before his death in 1894.
In fact, to have passed the tests of so fierce a course of education gives them a title to a place thus apart.
Sergeant Garwood R. Merwin, who had been a member of the class of 1864 at Yale, died at Alexandria in 1863.
Any body of men--a college class, a legislature, a regiment--is in character what its component members make it; in this case there was the material, which, furnished with worthy leadership--and it unquestionably had that--made up the organization whose not uneventful existence has been described.
Enough has been told of what it did to furnish grounds for deducing what it was; but to deal with the regiment on the personal side is hardly possible within the limits of such a sketch as this, though it is a matter that cannot be entirely passed by.
Major James Q. Rice, who was killed at Winchester, was a member of the class of 1850 at Wesleyan, and received from that institution the degree of Master of Arts in 1855.
Corporal Edward C. Hopson, a graduate of Trinity in 1864, was killed at Cedar Creek.
The names of men of every sort and kind are found upon the rolls.
A large part of these men came back after their service ended to resume the peaceful life of citizenship, and every town among us has known some of them ever since among its leading figures, while some in quarters far distant have also attained to honors and responsibilities, as the records show.
He was pastor of the Congregational church at East Canaan when the regiment was organized, and was one of its recruiting officers.
Rev. James Deane, Captain and Brevet-Major, was a graduate of Williams in the class of 1857.
A number of the officers and men were college graduates when they enlisted, and others gained degrees after the war ended; the list which follows is, however, necessarily incomplete; in fact, an absolutely correct list is no doubt hopelessly impossible.
He was later made colonel of a colored regiment, and served with credit in that capacity.
Sergeant Theodore C. Glazier was a graduate of Trinity in the class of 1860, and was a tutor there when he enlisted.
Lieutenant-Colonel Nathaniel Smith of Woodbury entered the Yale Law School in the class of 1853, but did not graduate.
Corporal Francis J. Young entered the Yale Medical School before the war, and returned after its close to take his degree in 1866.
As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals.
Or who--unconsciously--still let it color their thinking.
But this would have run against their strongest instincts.
They couldn't or didn't live as equals.
Because this yeast is in us there may be great and undreamed of possibilities awaiting mankind; but because of our line of descent there are also queer limitations.
The ant is knowing and wise; but he doesn't know enough to take a vacation. The worshipper of energy is too physically energetic to see that he cannot explore certain higher fields until he is still.
"Yes," I said, "those for example are distinctively simian.
This quality may have something to do with their having groups wars. The egotism of their individual spirits is allowed scant expression, so the egotism of the groups is extremely ferocious and active.
Reason is seldom or never the ruler: it is the servant of instinct.
Ants are good citizens: they place group interests first.
And instead of merely struggling with Nature for it, they also fight other ants.
Certain groups sought the headship.
Darwin said the ant's brain was "one of the most marvelous atoms in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man"--yes, of present-day man, who for thousands and thousands of years has had so much more chance to develop his brain....
Their ways are more fixed than those of the old Egyptians, and their industry is painful to think of, it's hyper-Chinese.
There certainly seems to be a power at work in the world, by virtue of which every living thing grows and develops.
They could have made poison their weapon for the subjugation of rivals. And in these orderly insects there are obviously a capacity for labor, and co-operative labor at that, which could carry them far. We all know that they have a marked genius: great gifts of their own.
I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry.
Which group, we'd have wondered, would ever contrive to rule all the rest?
Such traits, we should have reminded ourselves, persist.
Ingenious.
Probably not.
And the ants commit atrocities in and after their battles that are--I wish I could truly say--inhuman.
What could you expect?
The scientists speak of their paved streets, vaulted halls, their hundreds of different domesticated animals, their pluck and intelligence, their individual initiative, their chaste and industrious lives.
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Still--those frowsy, unlovely hordes of apes and monkeys were so completely lacking in signs of kingship; they were so flighty, too, in their ways, and had so little purpose, and so much love for absurd and idle chatter, that they would have struck us, we thought, as unlikely material.
They are not easily left behind, even after long stages; and they form a terrible obstacle to all high advancement.
Ant reformers, if there were any, might lay this to their property sense, and talk of abolishing property as a cure for the evil.
They were not going anywhere,--they were just strolling up and down, staring at each other, and talking. There were thousands and thousands of them.
To our eyes they seem too orderly, for instance.
Familiar with the ways of evolution elsewhere in the universe, we naturally should have wondered what course it would take on this earth.
W. N. P. Barbellion.
The instincts of the species that you and I belong to are of an opposite kind; and that makes it hard for us to judge ants fairly.
But considering our simian descent, it has done very well.
"Even in this out-of-the-way corner of the Cosmos," we might have reflected, "and on this tiny star, it may be of interest to consider the trend of events." We should have tried to appraise the different species as they wandered around, each with its own set of good and bad characteristics.
"Toil has brought you up from the ruck of things." Reason would have plausibly said, "it's by virtue of feverish toil that you have become what you are.
But conversely, ants are absolutely unselfish within the community. They are skilful.
In a civilization of super-ants or bees, there would have been no problem of the hungry unemployed, no poverty, no unstable government, no riots, no strikes for short hours, no derision of eugenics, no thieves, perhaps no crime at all.
Being of simian stock, we had simian traits. Our development naturally bore the marks of our origin.
And it tends toward splendor.
Raids, ferocious combats, and loot are part of an ant's regular life.
Repressively so.
Even if such a race had somehow achieved self-consciousness and reason, would they have been able therewith to rule their instincts, or to stop work long enough to examine themselves, or the universe, or to dream of any noble development?
Many strange forgotten dynasties rose, met defiance, and fell. In the end it was our ancestors who won, and became simian kings, and bequeathed a whole planet to us--and have never been thanked for it.
When we think of these creatures as little men (which is all wrong of course) we see they have their faults.
In those distant invisible epochs before men existed, before even the proud missing link strutted around through the woods (little realizing how we his greatgrandsons would smile wryly at him much as our own descendants may shudder at us, ages hence) the various animals were desperately competing for power.
Why should you feel disappointment at something inevitable?" And I went on to argue that it wasn't as though we were descended from eagles for instance, instead of (broadly speaking) from ape-like or monkeyish beings.
This has gone on for ages among them, and continues today.
But they carry it so far, they have few or no political rights. An ant doesn't have the vote, apparently: he just has his duties.
Seeds become trees, and weak little nations grow great. But the push or the force that is doing this, the yeast as it were, has to work in and on certain definite kinds of material.
It was a mild afternoon and great crowds of people were out. Sunday afternoon crowds.
Their smallness of size was not necessarily too much of a handicap.
The custom of plunder seems to be a part of most of their wars.
But we must remember this is a simian comment.
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That evening I called at Dick's house, but was informed by his housekeeper that he had packed his bag and departed, stating that he would not return for at least a month, perhaps longer.
In surprise I glanced up from my work of romance-weaving on the following morning, and saw Dick, pale and agitated, standing at my elbow.
"You are at least sensible, Ethel," I said.
On this occasion, as on previous ones, I assisted Dick to receive his visitors, but unfortunately Ethel had been taken suddenly unwell, and could not attend.
Think of your actions on the day before you left me; how you took from that drawer a signed blank cheque, with which you drew six hundred pounds,--nearly all the money I possessed,--and then fled with your lover.
"It is gratifying to know that you recognise the impossibility of such an union."
The studio of my old friend, Dick Carruthers, the man who painted it, is on Campden Hill, Kensington, within a few hundred yards of where I reside, and in the centre of an aesthetic artistic colony.
Bah!
"Still thinking of her?" I observed reproachfully.
"Yes; always, always," he replied, shaking his head sorrowfully.
He knew absolutely nothing of her past, and was quite ignorant that she had been a popular actress.
"I will tell him."
Taking it up, I examined it minutely in the light.
I remembered the first time I saw Ethel Broughton, fully five years before.
The woman I referred to was yourself."
She wore a soiled pink wrapper, her satin slippers were trodden down at heel, and she had a bottle of champagne at her elbow.
I was glad of a chat after a hard day's work at my writing-table, but his companionship had one drawback.
The success of "The Masked Circe" in last year's Royal Academy was incontestable, not only for the intrinsic beauty of the picture, but from the fact that the personal charms of a handsome woman were perpetuated without compromising her features.
Whenever he paid flying visits to London, however, he always looked me up, but, strangely enough, never mentioned Ethel. Nevertheless, I ascertained that they frequently met.
Your women are inevitably false and fickle.
When I entered the studio, gloomy in the twilight, I was astonished to find that the "Circe" had been removed from the easel, and that it was standing in a corner with its face to the wall.
"Ethel."
"I--I cannot forget."
He drivelled over a girl he loved, and was forever suggesting that I might take her as a character and drag her into the novel upon which I was engaged.
It seemed as though a happiness--full, complete, perfectly satisfying--had taken possession of her, and lifted her out of herself-- out of the world even.
I knew her, though I did not tell him so.
By the time you receive this I shall be on my way to New York; nevertheless, you will be always remembered by yours unworthily-- Ethel." Bitter memories of the past overwhelmed me; but at last, growing impatient, and tossing the letters back into the drawer, I strove to forget.
When I had briefly acknowledged the compliment she paid me, she said--
Only an artist can appreciate her beauty."
A few days later, I dispatched it to the Academy, and waited patiently for the opening day, when I experienced the mingled surprise and satisfaction of seeing it hung "upon the line."
If he marries me, he shall never have cause for regret--never!"
"You must stay.
"It is true I once knew a woman who proved false and infamous," I replied, with some emphasis.
"You are too honourable for that.
"Ah, here's the Countess!" exclaimed the millionaire, stepping forward to introduce us.
The limit for sending in to the Academy was approaching; but Dick did not write, and I could only wonder vaguely where he was wandering.
Promise to keep my secret!"
It is needless to refer to the smooth and uninterrupted course of our love.
Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes.
Woman's vanity often outruns her natural diffidence, and the consciousness of her great beauty stifles the conscience of modesty.
One night, not long after I had expressed my sentiments to him regarding his infatuation, I entered his studio, and found his goddess seated by the fire, with her shapely feet upon the fender, sipping kummel from a tiny glass, and holding a lighted cigarette between her dainty fingers.
What would he think of you?"
"Dinner will be ready almost immediately," he said.
The days went by.
It hardly does her justice-- does it?"
A tender smile played about her lips.
Yet, as she turned her beautiful face towards me, I was struck by the complete effect of physical and moral frailty that she presented.
Perhaps, however, you write from personal experience of the failings of my sex," she laughed.
Looking up from my work, I saw Ethel.
I was sorry that he was so infatuated.
The colour was not dry, therefore I was enabled to remove the greater portion of it with a silk handkerchief, but I saw with regret that the tints of the forehead had been irretrievably ruined, rendering the picture valueless.
During the years that have gone I have many, many times wondered what had become of you, for in your writings I read plainly how soured and embittered you had become."
The idea of placing a half-mask upon the face suggested itself, and without delay I proceeded to carry it into effect.
Read that!"
She reeled backwards, and before we could save her, fell senseless to the floor.
The black hair of the daughter of Perseis falls in profusion about her bare shoulders, and strays over her breast, but her features are hidden by a half-mask of black silk.
"You will not!" she cried, clinging to me.
A few moments later the door opened, and there was the rustle of a silken train.
He contracted typhoid while we were playing in San Francisco, and it terminated fatally."
"But, after all, your apprehensions are groundless.
"You masked her, and it is only fair that you should have a word in the bargain.
That face!" the girl cried, when her eyes fell upon the canvas.
"Very well, Dick, old chap, forget my words," I said.
But it is all over," he added bitterly.
It was foolish for us to have loved, therefore forget me.
She pulled off her long gloves, and let her sealskin cape fall at her feet, while I put down my pen, and, rising, stood with my back to the fire.
"No," I said sternly.
"Ah, Harold!" she cried, jumping up as I entered the room.
You?" we both cried in amazement.
One day he drew a cabinet photograph carefully from his pocket, and placed it upon the blotting-pad before me.
"Ah," she said, striving to suppress a sob, "Forgive me!
Glancing sharply at her, I saw that her eyes did not waver.
"Not at all.
When I discovered that Dick Carruthers was wasting the very honest and ardent emotions of his heart at this feverish fairy's shrine, I resolved to take him aside, and, without admitting that I knew her, give him a verbal drubbing.
One hand holds aloft a golden wine-goblet, and the other a tapering wand, while upon the tesselated pavement before the dais purple grapes and yellow roses have been strewn.
I--I was mad then.
Unlocking a drawer in my writing-table, I took out a packet of letters that still emitted a stale odour of violets.
"I have earned it honestly, every penny," she replied.
"I approach your idol in the properly reverential spirit."
I--I have something to tell you."
"There are notes for six hundred pounds," she added, as I took it and felt the crisp paper inside.
"It is a strange fancy of mine," she explained, when I had greeted her. "I'm sure the dress is very becoming--isn't it?" And she waved the goblet she was holding above her head.
I saw that he was haggard-eyed and wild-looking. From his conversation, I knew that time had not healed the wound in his heart.
Taking it up, I eagerly read the following lines it contained:--
"Forgive me, Harold," she said, with intense earnestness.
The clock had struck two, and my reading-lamp was burning low and sputtering when I rose to retire for the night.
"Dick!" she gasped.
The fair model herself was charmed with it.
I did so, but he bit his moustache fiercely, and turned upon me.
She was a dark-haired, pink-and-white beauty that flitted through artistic Bohemia like a butterfly in a hothouse.
To think that sin should lie for years in the blood, just as arsenic does in a corpse!
While sitting in his studio musing one day, it suddenly occurred to me that if the flaw upon the forehead could be hidden, it might, after all, be sent for the inspection of the hanging committee.
It was a cold, formal note, merely a few lines of hurried scrawl, and read: "You are right.
But, alas! those halcyon days were all too brief.
I shall be able to assume that character well," she said, with a grim smile.
"You shall see her before long." His gaze grew bright, soft, and vague, as one who catches glimpses of the floating garments of supernatural mysteries.
Presently she reappeared, and we went to dine together at a restaurant in Piccadilly, afterwards visiting a theatre, and spending a very pleasant evening.
It was a great pity, I thought, that such a fine work should not be exhibited.
From morn till eve on "Show Sunday," Campden Hill is always blocked by the carriages of the curious, and studios are besieged by fashionable crowds, whose chatter and laughter mingles pleasantly with the clinking of tea-cups.
Ah, Poyser, how do you do?
I like these premises, do you know, beyond any on the estate."
"Hetty, run and tell your uncle to come in," said Mrs. Poyser, as they entered the house, and the old gentleman bowed low in answer to Hetty's curtsy; while Totty, conscious of a pinafore stained with gooseberry jam, stood hiding her face against the clock and peeping round furtively.
Now, the plan I'm thinking of is to effect a little exchange.
Meanwhile the bull-dog, the black-and-tan terrier, Alick's sheep-dog, and the gander hissing at a safe distance from the pony's heels carried out the idea of Mrs. Poyser's solo in an impressive quartet.
"I can't say, sir, I'm sure.
"That difficulty--about the fetching and carrying--you will not have, Mrs. Poyser," said the squire, who thought that this entrance into particulars indicated a distant inclination to compromise on Mrs. Poyser's part.
"Thank you; I will do so.
Unfortunately, my slight tendency to rheumatism makes me afraid of damp: I'll sit down in your comfortable kitchen.
On the other hand, Poyser, you might let Thurle have the Lower and Upper Ridges, which really, with our wet seasons, would be a good riddance for you. There is much less risk in dairy land than corn land."
"And you keep it so exquisitely clean, Mrs. Poyser.
"Say?
Thank you, that really is a pleasant sight.
I want to consult him about a little matter; but you are quite as much concerned in it, if not more.
"Is your husband at home, Mrs. Poyser?"
I don't expect that Mrs. Satchell's cream and butter will bear comparison with yours."
"I think I see the door open, there.
But I don't want to part with an old tenant like you."
I must have your opinion too."
However, she said, "Your servant, sir," and curtsied with an air of perfect deference as she advanced towards him: she was not the woman to misbehave towards her betters, and fly in the face of the catechism, without severe provocation.
Mr. Poyser had just entered in shirt-sleeves and open waistcoat, with a face a shade redder than usual, from the exertion of "pitching." As he stood, red, rotund, and radiant, before the small, wiry, cool old gentleman, he looked like a prize apple by the side of a withered crab.
"Not yet; I must see your dairy.
It's seldom I see other folks's butter, though there's some on it as one's no need to see--the smell's enough."
I think she has not a good method, as you have."
"Do you know, Mrs. Poyser--sit down, pray, both of you--I've been far from contented, for some time, with Mrs. Satchell's dairy management.
"And now, Poyser, as Satchell is laid up, I am intending to let the Chase Farm to a respectable tenant.
"Will you please to take this chair, sir?" he said, lifting his father's arm-chair forward a little: "you'll find it easy."
Mrs. Poyser "Has Her Say Out"
He was much too acute a man not to see through the whole business, and to foresee perfectly what would be his wife's view of the subject; but he disliked giving unpleasant answers.
The Eve of the Trial
"Is he come back?" said Adam at last.
"Adam, he WILL know--he WILL suffer, long and bitterly.
No amount of torture that you could inflict on him could benefit her."
"He is come; he is in Stoniton to-night.
As Mr. Irwine paused, Adam looked at him with eager, questioning eyes.
She is very much changed..."
His own mind is in a very perturbed state, and it is best he should not see you till you are calmer."
"Yes, Adam; I and the chaplain have both been with her this evening."
I have done everything now, however--everything that can be done to-night, at least. Let us all sit down."
It is ten o'clock on Thursday night, and the dark wall opposite the window shuts out the moonlight that might have struggled with the light of the one dip candle by which Bartle Massey is pretending to read, while he is really looking over his spectacles at Adam Bede, seated near the dark window.
Three or four days ago, before you were mentioned to her, when I asked her if there was any one of her family whom she would like to see--to whom she could open her mind--she said, with a violent shudder, 'Tell them not to come near me--I won't see any of them.'"
Adam took his chair again mechanically, and Bartle, for whom there was no chair remaining, sat on the bed in the background.
God bless you.
AN upper room in a dull Stoniton street, with two beds in it--one laid on the floor.
She didn't seem agitated when I mentioned your name; she only said 'No,' in the same cold, obstinate way as usual. And if the meeting had no good effect on her, it would be pure, useless suffering to you--severe suffering, I fear.
"Arthur Donnithorne is not come back--was not come back when I left.
"Yes, I did.
Adam started up from his chair and seized his hat, which lay on the table.
"No, he is not," said Mr. Irwine, quietly.
His face has got thinner this last week: he has the sunken eyes, the neglected beard of a man just risen from a sick-bed.
"I'm late, Adam," he said, sitting down on the chair which Bartle placed for him, "but I was later in setting off from Broxton than I intended to be, and I have been incessantly occupied since I arrived.
But think of this: if you were to obey your passion--for it IS passion, and you deceive yourself in calling it justice--it might be with you precisely as it has been with Arthur; nay, worse; your passion might lead you yourself into a horrible crime."
But he stood still then, and looked at Mr. Irwine, as if he had a question to ask which it was yet difficult to utter.
Adam was silent: the last words had called up a vivid image of the past, and Mr. Irwine left him to his thoughts, while he spoke to Bartle Massey about old Mr. Donnithorne's funeral and other matters of an indifferent kind.
I fear you have not been out again to-day."
"But you don't mind about it," said Adam indignantly.
"No.
Adam rose from his chair with instinctive respect, as Mr. Irwine approached him and took his hand.
I had a conversation with her--she pleased me a good deal. And now you mention it, I wish she would come, for it is possible that a gentle mild woman like her might move Hetty to open her heart.
Remember what you told me about your feelings after you had given that blow to Arthur in the Grove."
"You needn't be afraid of me. I only want justice.
His heavy black hair hangs over his forehead, and there is no active impulse in him which inclines him to push it off, that he may be more awake to what is around him.
Bartle Massey rose quietly, turned the key in the door, and put it in his pocket.
He is roused by a knock at the door.
"Oh yes, there are, heaps and heaps," contradicted Edward.
To-day why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite?
Harold, it further appeared, greatly coveting tadpoles, and top-heavy with the eagerness of possession, had fallen into the pond. This, in itself, was nothing; but on attempting to sneak in by the back-door, he had rendered up his duckweed-bedabbled person into the hands of an aunt, and had been promptly sent off to bed; and this, on a holiday, was very much.
Nature, who had accepted me for ally, cared little who had the world's biscuits, and assuredly was not going to let any friend of hers waste his time in playing policeman for Society.
"Why, there aren't any good lions," said Harold, hastily.
As a rule this sort of thing struck me as the most pitiful tomfoolery.
Further on, a hedgehog lay dead athwart the path--nay, more than dead; decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow in more bustling circumstances.
She panted up anon, and dropped on the turf beside me.
Like a black pirate flag on the blue ocean of air, a hawk hung ominous; then, plummet-wise, dropped to the hedgerow, whence there rose, thin and shrill, a piteous voice of squealing.
So we sheered off together, arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took the jigging, thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me.
"Take me for guide to-day," he seemed to plead.
"Come on and let's be surprised." But I could not help feeling that on this day of days even a grizzly felt misplaced and common.
Earth to earth!
"Where's Harold;" I asked presently.
Humanity would have rejected it with scorn, Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognised and accepted it without a flicker of dissent.
Bill's coveted booty, too, I could easily guess at that; it came from the Vicar's store of biscuits, kept (as I knew) in a cupboard along with his official trappings.
From forth the vestry window projected two small legs, gyrating, hungry for foothold, with larceny--not to say sacrilege--in their every wriggle: a godless sight for a supporter of the Establishment.
The Olympians are all past and gone.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Then brute force was pitilessly applied.
Looking back to those days of old, ere the gate shut behind me, I can see now that to children with a proper equipment of parents these things would have worn a different aspect.
For them the orchard (a place elf-haunted, wonderful!) simply produced so many apples and cherries: or it didn't, when the failures of Nature were not infrequently ascribed to us.
These elders, our betters by a trick of chance, commanded no respect, but only a certain blend of envy--of their good luck--and pity--for their inability to make use of it.
To be sure, there was an exception in the curate, who would receive unblenching the information that the meadow beyond the orchard was a prairie studded with herds of buffalo, which it was our delight, moccasined and tomahawked, to ride down with those whoops that announce the scenting of blood.
Perhaps, indeed, it was one of their best qualities that they spent the greater part of their time stuffily indoors.
But was the matter allowed to end there? I trow not.
A saddening doubt, a dull suspicion, creeps over me.
Mrs Jo refused to believe it, stoutly insisting that Emil would outlive any storm and yet turn up safe and gay.
There was great scrubbing and dusting among the matrons as they set their houses in order not only for Class Day, but to receive the bride and groom, who were to come to them for the honeymoon trip.
Teddy stood on his head literally, and tore about the neighbourhood on Octoo, like a second Paul Revere--only his tidings were good.
I must get over this first.
Emil's ship is lost, and as yet no news of him.'
Yet his success was far greater than Nat's, though only God and one good man saw it.
When he thought of it Dan felt as if he could not wait, but must burst that narrow cell and fly away, as the caddis-worms he used to watch by the brookside shed their stony coffins, to climb the ferns and soar into the sky.
'Please tell it at once.
Tidings had been sent to the shipowners at Hamburg by some of the survivors, and telegraphed at once by Franz to his uncle.
Sixth row:--Seamed, making 1 at the beginning.
Fifth row:--Make 1, knit 2, knit 2 together, knit 1, make 1, knit 5, make 1, knit 1, knit 2 together, knit 3.
Cast on 3 stitches; increase at the beginning of each row till you have 12.
Fourteenth row:--Seamed, make 1 at the beginning.
Seventh row:--Make 1, knit 3, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 7, make 1, knit 2 together, knit 4.
First pattern row:--Make 1, knit 2 together, knit 3, make 1, knit 1, make 1, knit 3, knit 2 together, knit 1, make 1.
This may either be done in Shetland or German wool, and is very pretty in black Shetland wool.
Ninth row:--Make 1, knit 5, make 1, knit 3, knit 2 together, knit 4, make 1, and knit the remainder.
Third row:--Make 1, knit 1, knit 2 together, knit 2, make 1, knit 3, make 1, knit 2, knit 2 together, knit 2.
Nineteenth row:--Make 1, knit 5, make 1, knit 3, knit 2 together, knit 4, make 1, knit 2 together, make 1, knit 3, knit 2 together, knit 4, make 1, knit the rest.
Second row:--Seamed, making a stitch at the beginning.
Sixteenth row:--Seamed, make 1 at the beginning.
Tenth row:--Seamed, making 1 at the beginning.
Eighteenth row:--Seamed, make 1 at the beginning.
Twenty-first row same as 11th.
Fifteenth row:--Make 1, knit 2, knit 2 together, knit 1, make 1, knit 5, make 1, knit 1, knit 2 together, * knit 2 together, knit 1, make 1, knit 5, make 1, knit 1, knit 2 together, and repeat from *, knit those left at the end.
It merely insisted that the case against him was proved.
I telephoned as soon as Rawlins got me to the Bastille.
Had his exclamation been drawn by an accuser?
Two burly fellows in overalls, carrying pick and spade across their shoulders, pushed through the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.
Do you know it's after ten o'clock?"
"I must consider every possibility.
The minister's telephoned Katherine.
He planned it with some local fellow.
He raised himself on his elbow and glanced from the window.
Bobby turned on him.
"When your grandfather's buried," Graham answered softly, "we'll all feel happier."
"He ignores what happened yesterday.
"You'll be at the grave--as chief mourner?"
I must decide what to do.
Its brevity pointed the previous dumbness of the speaker:
Your cousin is upstairs." He included the company in his circling turn of the head.
Let us call it a misunderstanding."
"Don't," Graham said.
His eyes still smiled, but his voice was harder:
He stepped aside, beckoning.
He glanced away while the angry colour left his face.
"Yes," Bobby said, "even if it does for me.
One of the black-clothed men opened the door of Silas Blackburn's room.
"Fact is, Bobby, I left New York too suddenly.
You were excited and imaginative when you went to the old room to take the evidence.
He broke off, looking at Graham.
"I've been asking myself since he came back," Graham answered, "if there's any queer power behind his quiet manner.
What was the man's game?
His purpose, whatever it was, compelled him to remain for the present in the mournful, tragic house.
Don't make any mistake about that.
I thought you were--"
His reserve and easy daring mastered them all; and always, as now, he laughed at the futility of their efforts to sound his purposes, to limit his freedom of action.
Doctor Groom stood at the foot of the stairs, talking with the clergyman, a stout and unctuous figure.
"Splendid coffee!
"Any one who cares to go--"
Bobby tried to account for Paredes's friendly manner.
You want the truth, don't you?"
"No, no," Bobby said hotly.
I'm glad you're out of it.
Yet that flash of temper had given him courage to face the ordeal.
"The manager took my advice, but Maria's still missing.
"Good morning.
His laugh was short and embarrassed.
Graham smiled.
Bobby glanced at him, flushing.
Dull clouds obscured the sun and furnished an illusion of crowding earthward.
He put on his coat and hat and left the house.
"I suppose not," Robinson sneered, "since everybody knows well enough what's in it."
It would, doubtless, be more difficult to endure than Howells's experiment over Silas Blackburn's body in the old room.
I've been weak, Hartley, but not that weak.
The underbrush had long interposed a veil between him and the Cedars above whose roofs smoke wreathed in the still air like fantastic figures weaving a shroud to lower over the time-stained, melancholy walls.
"How did you get away?"
"Why?" Bobby asked.
"This morning Carlos gave me the creeps."
The cold air invading the hall and the dining room told them he had opened the door. His sharp exclamation recalled Howells's report which, at their direction, he had failed to mail.
That's why I've come to wake you up.
Eventually his curiosity conquered.
I can't go on this way indefinitely."
From his thickly bearded face his reddish eyes gleamed forth with a fresh instability.
Jenkins passed through.
"Since you wish it," Bobby said.
For once he was grateful to the forest because it had forbidden him to glance perpetually back at that dismal and pensive picture.
"You mean Carlos may have made me go to the hall last night, perhaps sent me to the old room those other times?"
"Deep enough!"
"Maria did her share," Bobby said.
"We scarcely expected you back."
Graham frowned.
Graham interrupted with a flat demand for an explanation.
"Don't misunderstand me," Graham said gently.
"Isn't that an automobile coming through the woods?" he asked.
As far as possible you must."
He was glad to see Graham leave the court and hurry toward him.
They heard the remote tinkling of the front door bell.
He saw that the district attorney realized that, too, for he sprang from his chair, and, followed by Rawlins, started upward. The entire company crowded the stairs.
Will you come?"
I believe everything is functioning properly." He surveyed the panel of instruments hastily, assuring himself that every reading was correct. Then, with all three of the devices he called antennae in his hand, their leads plugged into the control panel, he led the way to the side of the pool.
It was a soft, musical beat, like the distant stroke of a mellow gong, but it had all the pleading quality of the word it seemed to bring to mind.
"Carson, will you operate the switch for us?
"Apparently forgetting that I existed, she leaped into the water, and as I approached a moment later I could see her breathing deeply and gratefully, a smile of relief upon her features, as she lay upon the bottom of the pool.
The patio was not large, but it was beautifully done.
Mercer literally jerked me away from the edge of the pool.
Sauntering dreamily, she moved away from the ancient derelict.
I didn't argue the matter.
"I would think--"
The coral structures grew smaller and poorer.
The other two receive.
She was very close now, within a few feet of us.
I threw off the smoking-jacket and pulled on a woolen golfing sweater, for the wind was brisk and sharpish.
I'm sure the three of us can handle her."
Rather gingerly I removed the thing from my head and laid it on the table.
I saw them capture and kill fish for food, saw them carve the thick, spongy hearts from certain giant growths and eat them.
Lifting up her head, I placed the glass to her lips.
"You won't be able to stay in the water with her," explained Mercer rapidly.
Her eyes were glowing.
Both sexes were slim, and there was a remarkable uniformity of size and appearance.
"Fire when ready, Gridley," I commented, and sank again to the bottom of the pool.
Here was no ocean bottom, but land, rich tropical jungle.
The foundation for one of the semi-circular houses was laid.
"You'll see, you'll see!
"I can imagine what happened. A momentary, psychic fusing of an ancient, long since broken link.
I was on the bottom of the ocean.
"Like most people in an emergency.
"Man came up from the sea," he said slowly, "and some men went back to it.
I felt Mercer's tense, sudden grip upon my arm, but I did not, could not, look at him.
I phoned, and here we are!"
Mercer, always an indefatigable experimenter, was never above using his friends in the benefit of science.
Perhaps, I thought quickly, this was, with her, a sign of greeting.
"I placed her on the bed in the guest room and poured her a stiff drink of Scotch--half a tumblerful, I believe.
I remembered only that a note had been sounded that awoke an echo of a long-forgotten instinct.
"You're light, light skin, light hair.
"The whole affair, you understand, is in laboratory form.
"Don't you see, Taylor?
"It's wizardry, Mercer!
Others, after a time, joined them in their search, which spread out to the floor of the ocean, away from the dwellings.
I nodded, and picked up one of the instruments.
I'll try to impress that on her.
The differences between these people and ourselves would not be noticeable to a casual observer.
You, together with all mankind, came up out of the sea.
'Some may have gone back?' I don't get it."
I sensed the fact that what I saw now was what the old man was telling, and that the majestic, swirling mist was the turning back of time.
I put on my bathing suit and dived into the pool.
Through the water the girl watched him, evident dislike in her eyes.
And you promised her, Taylor, whether you spoke your promise or not." His smile deepened a bit.
There was nothing sinister in the gaze, yet I felt my body shaking as though in the grip of a terrible fear.
Mercer shook his head, but made no other reply until we stood again on the edge of the pool.
The laboratory, brilliantly illuminated, was littered, as usual, with apparatus of every description.
Too much amazed to comment further, I followed my friend.
"And then what, Mercer?" I reminded him, as he paused, apparently lost in thought.
I'll lengthen these leads so that we can run them out into the pool, and then we'll be ready. Somehow we must induce her to wear one of these things, even if we have to use force.
We were standing at one side of the pool, near the center.
Mercer paused a moment, staring at me oddly.
It was ablaze with light.
Around many of them grew clusters of strange and colorful seaweeds that waved their banners gently, as though some imperceptible current dallied with them in passing.
She was staring up at me with her great, curious eyes, and I sensed, through the medium of the instrument I wore, that she was thinking of me.
"But, Mercer, it's a nightmare!" I protested.
I forgot, for the moment, who and what I was.
But I seemed to see again the floor of the ocean, with the vague light filtering down from above, and soft, monstrous growths waving their branches lazily in the flood.
As human as you or I. I'll tell you all I know, and then you can judge for yourself.
The great cloud of corn-colored hair floated down about it, falling below the knees.
Straight to the mother and father she came, gripping the shoulder of each with frantic joy.
Death is the signal for a feast.
Put the different antennae plug into these jacks.
What can I do?"
I should have called you to-morrow, for further test.
The mouth was utterly fascinating, and her teeth, revealed by her engaging smile, were as perfect as it would be possible to imagine.
Something she had drawn from her girdle shone palely in her hand.
The girl was thinking of her suffering, taken out of her native element.
The girl was standing where we had left her, and as she looked up into my face, she smiled again, and made a quick gesture with one hand.
On the end of the table nearest the door was still another panel, the smallest of the lot, bearing only a series of jacks along one side, and in the center a switch with four contact points.
Her great, weirdly blue eyes seemed to bore into my brain.
She seemed to be reviving, for she was struggling and gasping when I got here with her.
Would it be as clear to the girl?
I put him into a bathing suit, and we both endeavored to corner her.
"She managed to claw me, just once," Mercer resumed, wrapping the robe about him again.
Along one wall were the retorts, scales, racks, hoods and elaborate set-ups, like the articulated glass and rubber bones of some weird prehistoric monster, that demonstrated Mercer's taste for this branch of science.
Rum-runners, seeking out their hidden port with their cargo of contraband from Cuba.
"I was watching, old man," he said gently.
"It is the only thing we can do, Taylor," he said quietly.
Then I lowered her into the sea.
Somehow I seemed to recognize the child as the girl in the pool.
"Her?" I asked, startled.
The scene swirled and cleared again.
But there is no retracing the way."
Through the rent three deep, jagged scratches were clearly visible.
I looked down into the pool.
"It will, I know it will!--if we can get her to wear one of these," replied Mercer confidently.
Her eyes, startlingly large and dark in the strangely white face, were fixed on mine.
I seemed to see her crash, head on, into one of the massive timbers, and I cried out involuntarily, and glanced down at the girl in the water at my feet.
When the boy grew old enough he took care of his uncle's sheep and camels.
It is enclosed by arcades with pillars of marble and granite, and has nineteen gates, each with a minaret or pointed tower above it.
There is no god but God.
A splendid church was built for him in Medina.
In a cave on Mount Hira, near Mecca, he spent several weeks every year in prayer and religious meditation.
At this time he was only sixteen years of age; but the rich traders had so much confidence in him that they gave him important business to attend to, and trusted him with large sums of money.
After Mohammed died a person was appointed to be his successor as head of the Moslem church.
God is great."
He spent much of his time in thinking about religion.
He spoke in the market and other public places.
Mohammed is God's prophet."
About this time Mohammed's uncle and wife died, and he had then hardly any friends in Mecca.
They even threatened to put him to death as an enemy of the gods.
He always spoke the truth and never broke a promise.
Mohammed then told the story to other members of his family.
Mohammed waited to hear no more.
Within this enclosure is a famous building called the "Ka'a-ba," or cube.
He marched against Mecca with an army of ten thousand men, and the city surrendered with little resistance.
The emperor died; and the people chose Justin to succeed him.
When Belisarius reached Africa he left five men as a guard in each vessel, and with the body of his army he marched for some days along the coast.
The victories of these two generals largely helped to make the reign of Justinian remarkable in history.
Gelimer's brother was killed, and the king himself, who had followed with another army and joined the fight, was also defeated and fled from the field.
About ten miles from Carthage he met a large army led by the brother of Gelimer.
In a short time Gelimer gave himself up to Belisarius, who took him to Constantinople.
He erected great public buildings, which were not only useful but ornamental to the city.
Thus the power of Justinian was established throughout the whole country, and the city of Rome was again under the dominion of a Roman emperor.
But in a few months, Vit'i-ges, king of the Goths, appeared with an army before the gates and challenged Belisarius and Narses to come out and fight.
After some years Justinus was advised by his nobles to take the young man, who had adopted the name of Justinian, to help him in ruling the empire.
He made many excellent new laws and reformed many of the old laws, so that he became famous as one of the greatest of the world's legislators.
For a long time the Roman laws had been difficult to understand.
He took him into his own family, and gave him the best education that could be had in the city.
It still exists, and is the model according to which most of the countries of Europe have made their laws.
One day a great change came for both uncle and nephew.
But in the time of Belisarius there were no steamships, and nothing was known of the power of steam for moving machinery. The ships or galleys were sailing vessels; and when there was no wind they could make no progress except by rowing.
This was the end of the Vandal king in Africa.
It took this fleet three months to make the voyage from Constantinople to Africa.
And when the boy appeared at the great man's house and told who he was, his uncle received him with much kindness.
The collection which he made was called the CODE OF JUSTINIAN.
One of them was named Belisarius and the other Narses.
He often worked or studied all day and all night without eating or sleeping.
The Ostrogoth army was captured, and Vitiges was taken to Constantinople a prisoner.
There was a vast number of them, and different writers differed widely as to what the laws really were and what they meant. Justinian employed a great lawyer, named Trib-o'ni-an, to collect and simplify the principal laws.
Justinus agreed to this proposal, for he was now old and in feeble health, and not able himself to attend to the important affairs of government.
It was he who first brought silk-worms into Europe.
Some years before, this boy's uncle, who was named Justin, had gone to Constantinople and joined the Roman army.
But instead of having any thought of surrender, Belisarius was preparing his men for fight, and when they were ready he attacked Vitiges and defeated him.
A battle immediately took place, and the Vandals were utterly defeated.
He was a bright, clever boy who had spent his life hitherto in a village, but was now eager to go out into the world to seek his fortune.
Vitiges retired to Ravenna, and Belisarius quickly followed, and made such an assault on the city that it was compelled to surrender.
The great temple still exists in all its beauty and grandeur, but is now used as a Mohammedan mosque.
He was so brave and so good a soldier that he soon came to be commander of the imperial guard which attended the emperor.
To the last year of his life Justinian was strong and active and a hard worker.
Belisarius and Narses then went to Northern Italy, and, after a long war, conquered all the tribes there.
Belisarius then proceeded to Carthage and took possession of the city.
It is also told that the apostles Peter and Paul appeared to Attila in his camp and threatened him with death if he should attack Rome.
The Visigoths after the death of Alaric had settled in parts of Gaul, and their king had now agreed to join the Romans against the common enemy--the terrible Huns.
Attila agreed that there should be peace, but soon afterwards he found out that Theodosius had formed a plot to murder him.
He had taken command of the Visigoths when his father was killed, and now he led them on to fight.
One day, shortly after he became king, Attila went to the cave to get his fortune told.
Both sides fought with the greatest bravery.
He then strapped it to his side and said he would always wear it.
Very soon, however, he was again on the war path.
He was now near the city, and they had no army strong enough to send against him.
The fierce and warlike tribe, called the Huns, who had driven the Goths to seek new homes, came from Asia into Southeastern Europe and took possession of a large territory lying north of the River Danube.
They enclosed his body in three coffins--one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron--and they buried him at night, in a secret spot in the mountains.
The Roman Emperor Theodosius had to ask for terms of peace.
When Attila reached his camp he had all his baggage and wagons gathered in a great heap.
Not far from Attila's palace there was a great rocky cave in the mountains.
With a cry of horror Attila fled from the cave.
But although he was young, he was very brave and ambitious, and he wanted to be a great and powerful king.
At first the Huns seemed to be winning.
He was so enraged at this that he again began war.
Attila tried to take Orleans, but soon after he began to attack the walls he saw a great army at a distance coming towards the city.
He defeated the Romans in several great battles and captured many of their cities.
I see you going from country to country, defeating armies and destroying cities until men call you the 'Fear of the World.' You heap up vast riches, but just after you have married the woman you love grim death strikes you down."
The people had such dread of him that he was called the "Scourge of God" and the "Fear of the World."
Here they founded Venice.
But he was young and full of spirit, and very soon he remembered only what had been said to him about his becoming a great and famous conqueror and began to prepare for war.
Here the people bravely resisted the invaders. They shut their gates and defended themselves in every way they could.
He gathered together the best men from the various tribes of his people and trained them into a great army of good soldiers.
III
It was a fierce battle.
They drove back the Romans and Visigoths from the field, and in the fight Theodoric was killed.
Many persons believed that he was a fortune-teller, so people often went to him to inquire what was to happen to them.
This made peace, but the peace did not last long.
It was fine of you, Cynthia, to send her up alone!
We never agreed about those questions.
They regarded each other with mutual surprise.
"But I have been told a good deal about them."
But I little knew him!
What would he think of it all!
"Why, no!" replied Joyce, rather confusedly.
I do not know, of course, why the house is open.
The campaign was now getting hot.
"It is probably a mere coincidence.
She called attention to the fact that this campaign was important because it promised more beautiful and attractive houses for the farmers and townsmen alike.
He even attributed to them more than they deserved, for Uncle John's telling activities were so quietly conducted that he was personally lost sight of entirely by Mr. Hopkins.
"It was absurd to connect her with Lucy Rogers," observed Kenneth, "for there is nothing in her character to remind one of the unhappy girl."
This much Mr. Forbes has already done for you, and he will now tell you what else, if he is elected, he proposes to do."
"Then keep her, my dear," decided Kenneth.
There had been no loss of dignity by any one of the three, and their evident refinement, as well as their gentleness and good humor, had until now protected them from any reproach.
"These frizzle-headed females," continued the circular, "are trying to make your wives and daughters as rebellious and unreasonable as they are themselves; but no man of sense will permit a woman to influence his vote.
Yet the people tamely submitted to this imposition because they knew no way to avoid it.
The girls accepted the challenge at once.
The old butler was a general in his way, and in view of the fact that the staff of servants at Elmhurst was insufficient to cope with such a throng, he allowed Louise to impress several farmers' daughters into service, and was able to feed everyone without delay and in an abundant and satisfactory manner.
Kenneth then took the platform and was welcomed with a hearty cheer.
During this oration Beth happened to glance up at the house, and her sharp eyes detected the maid, Eliza, standing shielded behind the half-closed blind of an upper window and listening to, as well as watching, the proceedings below.
The most she can do is to report our movements to Mr. Hopkins, and there's no great harm in that."
The farmers can't eat beauty; they want money.
Therefore they are going to vote for the Honorable Erastus Hopkins for Representative." Then followed an estimate of the money paid the farmers of the district by the advertisers during the past five years, amounting to several thousands of dollars in the aggregate.
The next day Mr. Hopkins scattered flaring hand-bills over the district which were worded in a way designed to offset any advantage his opponent had gained from the lawn fete of the previous day.
Because of the activity of the opposing candidates every voter in the district had become more or less interested in the fight, and people were taking one side or the other with unusual earnestness.
But they laughed at him and at Mr. Hopkins, and declared they were not at all offended.
So the matter was left, for the time; and as if to verify Beth's suspicions Eliza was seen to leave the grounds after dusk and meet Mr. Hopkins in the lane.
Certain edibles, such as charlotte-russe, Spanish cream, wine jellies and mousses, to say nothing of the caviars and anchovies, were wholly unknown to them; but they ate the dainties with a wise disregard of their inexperience and enjoyed them immensely.
"I'm sorry," said Kenneth, "that you girls should be forced to endure this.
The circular ended in this way: "Hopkins challenges Forbes to deny these facts.
P. L.," and the words: "FORBES FOR REPRESENTATIVE."
Every woman who attended the fete is now linked with us as an ally, and every one of them will resent this foolish circular."
He was much incensed against the girls who were working for Kenneth Forbes, for he realized that they were proving an important factor in the campaign.
Her first impulse was to denounce the maid at once, and have her discharged; but the time was not opportune, so she waited until the festivities were ended.
That was what a Representative was for--to represent his people.
It had been a great day for the families of the neighboring farmers, and they drove homeward in the late afternoon full of enthusiasm over the royal manner in which they had been entertained and admiration for the girls who had provided the fun and feasting.
I'd like to study her a little."
"She's the living image of Mrs. Rogers."
They conversed together a few moments, and then the maid calmly returned and went to her room.
And Uncle John was right.
When Mr. Forbes began his campaign to restore the homesteads to their former beauty and dignity, a cry was raised against him.
They needed more school-houses for their children, and many other things which he hoped to provide as their Representative.
Indeed, there were more kindly thoughts expressed for the inhabitants of Elmhurst than had ever before been heard in a single day in the history of the county, and the great and the humble seemed more closely drawn together.
His tirade against the girls was neither convincing nor in good taste. He asked the voters if they were willing to submit to "petticoat government," and permit a "lot of boarding-school girls, with more boldness than modesty" to dictate the policies of the community.
Mr. Hopkins was not greatly pleased that his challenge had been accepted.
Forbes, who never earned a dollar in his life, but inherited his money, is trying to take the dollars out of the pockets of the farmers by depriving them of the income derived by selling spaces for advertising signs.
"Now that we know her secret," she said, "the girl cannot cause us more real harm, and there may be a way to circumvent this unscrupulous Hopkins and turn the incident to our own advantage.
But this was because the farmers did not understand how much this reform meant to them.
"If I'm not much mistaken, Mr. Hopkins has thrown a boomerang.
After luncheon began the speech-making, interspersed with music by the band.
Within two days every farmer had received a notice that Mr. Forbes would meet Mr. Hopkins at the Fairview Opera House on Saturday afternoon to debate the question as to whether advertising signs brought good or evil to the community.
"Except her looks," added Beth.
He had imagined that the Forbes party would ignore it and leave him the prestige of crowing over his opponent's timidity.
Hopkins is willing to meet Forbes before the public at any time and place he may select, to settle this argument in joint debate."
They have merely gone to work in a business-like manner and used their wits and common-sense in educating the voters.
"Good!" exclaimed shrewd Miss Patsy, when she read this circular.
Mr. Hopkins had therefore become so enraged that, against the advice of his friends, he issued a circular sneering at "Women in Politics." The newspapers having been subsidized by the opposition so early in the game, Mr. Hopkins had driven to employ the circular method of communicating with the voters.
Louise made the preliminary address, and, although her voice was not very strong, the silent attention of her hearers permitted her to be generally understood.
He modestly assured them that a Representative in the State Legislature could accomplish much good for his district if he honestly desired to do so.
CHAPTER XIII
It is a disgrace to this district that Mr. Forbes allows his girlish campaign to be run by a lot of misses who should be at home darning stockings; or, if they were not able to do that, practicing their music-lessons."
When the last guest had departed Beth got her cousins and Kenneth together and told them of her discovery of the spy.
Scarcely a day passed now that his corps of distributors did not leave some of his literature at every dwelling in the district.
So we gave them an object lesson.
The lawn fete was a tremendous success, and every farmer's wife was proud of her satin badge bearing the monogram: "W.
But he remembered how easily he had subdued Kenneth at the school-house meeting before the nominations, and had no doubt of his ability to repeat the operation.
We painted out all the signs in this section at our own expense, that you might see how much more beautiful your homes are without them.
It was folly to elect any man who would forget that duty and promote only his own interests through the position of power to which the people had appointed him.
They read: "Hopkins, the Man of the Times, is the Champion of the Signs of the Times.
I feared something like it when you insisted on taking a hand in the game."
We believe that none of you will ever care to allow advertising signs on your property again, and that the quiet refinement of this part of the country will induce many other places to follow our example, until advertisers are forced to confine themselves to newspapers, magazines and circulars, their only legitimate channels.
Let's think it over carefully before we act."
This was not, as it may seem, merely a theory tinged with sarcasm.
It would have proved that he believed she was firm--which was what she wished to seem to him.
He had been deeply affected--this she believed, and she was still capable of deriving pleasure from the belief; but it was absurd that a man both so intelligent and so honourably dealt with should cultivate a scar out of proportion to any wound.
Isabel candidly believed that his lordship would, in the usual phrase, get over his disappointment.
"They're the companions of freemen," Henrietta retorted.
Her suspense indeed was dissipated the second day.
"I don't know what you mean," Henrietta replied.
"But I don't believe that; he's not a man to do nothing.
I had come to see you with the hope that you would let me bring you over to my conviction; my reasons for entertaining this hope had been of the best.
"Faithless?
They share their work."
He is a man of high, bold action.
Henrietta looked disappointed, and her steady gaze betrayed it. "You don't ask that right--as if you thought it important.
"Suspected what?
The feeling pressed upon her; it made the air sultry, as if there were to be a change of weather; and the weather, socially speaking, had been so agreeable during Isabel's stay at Gardencourt that any change would be for the worse.
Isabel waited.
CASPAR GOODWOOD.
Is it because you've suspected?"
But his eyes asked it--and his handshake, when he bade me good-bye."
"No, he told me nothing; that's how I knew it," said Henrietta cleverly. "He said very little about you, but I spoke of you a good deal."
Looking up, however, as she mechanically folded it she saw Lord Warburton standing before her.
That's what I wish to be sure of."
It seemed to her at last that she would do well to take a book; formerly, when heavy-hearted, she had been able, with the help of some well-chosen volume, to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason.
"The companions of freemen--I like that, Miss Stackpole," said Ralph. "It's a beautiful description."
Isabel turned about again.
"I shall say it better to Mr. Goodwood himself."
"Should you like me better if I were your butler, dear?" her husband asked.
This time her companion was grave.
"I've not much control of my thoughts, but I'll do my best," said Isabel.
I did encourage him." And then she asked if her companion had learned from Mr. Goodwood what he intended to do.
At the mention of Mr. Goodwood's name she had turned a little pale.
"If you mean that I had any idea with regard to Mr. Goodwood--!" But she faltered before her friend's implacable glitter.
MY DEAR MISS ARCHER--I don't know whether you will have heard of my coming to England, but even if you have not it will scarcely be a surprise to you.
We shall never get on together therefore, and there's no use trying."
You've never asked me what it is.
"When a man's of that infallible mould what does it matter to him what one feels?"
Isabel offered no answer to this assertion, which her companion made with an air of great confidence.
She entertained herself for some moments with talking to the little terrier, as to whom the proposal of an ownership divided with her cousin had been applied as impartially as possible--as impartially as Bunchie's own somewhat fickle and inconstant sympathies would allow.
Of late, it was not to be denied, literature had seemed a fading light, and even after she had reminded herself that her uncle's library was provided with a complete set of those authors which no gentleman's collection should be without, she sat motionless and empty-handed, her eyes bent on the cool green turf of the lawn.
No, you are not, and you never will be, arbitrary or capricious.
"They're very bad in America, but I've five perfect ones in Florence."
I see his face now, and his earnest absorbed look while I talked.
What have you to tell me?"
Isabel failed even to smile back and in a moment she said: "Did he ask you to speak to me?"
"Yes, you're changed; you've got new ideas over here," her friend continued.
"Well, I don't care; you have changed.
I had a good deal of talk with him; he has come after you."
"Ah!" Isabel responded.
It was perhaps because her mind was oppressed with this image that she suffered some days to elapse before she took occasion to say to Isabel: "My dear friend, I wonder if you're growing faithless."
"Tell me what you mean, and I'll think of that."
Middling indeed!
"He'll find you changed," the latter pursued.
She pretended to herself, however, that she thought the event impossible, and, later, she communicated her disbelief to her friend.
"No, that would be a great pain; but it's not that."
She'd like Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house.
"What I mean is that Mr. Goodwood came out in the steamer with me."
He did not finish.
"Instanter," said Gavroche.
This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no more.
"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche.
The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble than they.
The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their eyes.
"They are killing my dead men for me."
Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the pavement, through the whole length of the street.
"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.
It was a charming and terrible sight.
There a fourth bullet missed him, again.
"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.
The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from the summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.
And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:
The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.
The National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him.
Gavroche was seen to stagger, then he sank to the earth.
At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.
The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls, and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even, without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on the preceding evening, and, who knows?
He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a nut.
Whoever has beheld a cloud which has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of lofty houses.
A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.
Enjolras shook his head and replied:
CHAPTER XV--GAVROCHE OUTSIDE
Gavroche, though shot at, was teasing the fusillade.
Gavroche raised his face:--
A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.
Those who were left standing continued to serve the pieces with severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.
In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene.
One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest, finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child.
He was not a child, he was not a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy.
Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"
The smoke in the street was like a fog.
It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice and as bold as fire."
By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade became transparent.
The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two thirds of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the cannons.
He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind, his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were firing, and sang:
This outlined the catastrophe.
The barricade trembled; he sang.
On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.
All were ready.
" 'Tis the fault of . . .
Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him, that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: "Patria."
A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--A third overturned his basket.
To each discharge he retorted with a couplet.
Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box.
Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his way out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the slope of the redoubt, into his basket.
A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him short.
"Don't you see the grape-shot?"
The combatants could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other, short as it was.
Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.
Gavroche sang:
He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death; every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the urchin administered to it a fillip.
It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale.
That's not thunder, it's a cough."
He might have been called the invulnerable dwarf of the fray.
The artillery-men rapidly performed their manoeuvres in force and placed this second piece in line with the first.
It was the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen.
He rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.
"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any cartridges left in the barricade."
It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.
"Yes, ma'am," answered Theo, and as she spoke, she felt a curious, startled glow flash over her.
Mr. Denis Oglethorpe would be a rich man some of these days, and then what a happy life must Priscilla's be--so young, so beautiful, so beloved.
He broke off here, sharply.
"Are you coming to see Priscilla?" he said.
Were you going to say--"
"We must have a fire in the best parlor, my dear," chirped Elizabeth, ecstatically, when Theo's hat and jacket were being carried out of the room.
"No!" he exclaimed.
"I was glad to see you.
Be good enough to say to Lady Throckmorton that I regret deeply that I could not see her before going; but--but the news has been sudden, and my time is fully occupied; but I will write to her from my first stopping-place."
"I want you to deliver a message to Lady Throckmorton for me," he said. "May I trouble you, Theodora?"
Theodora was reminded of Downport that day, in a hundred ways.
She had a pale, handsome, ungirlish face--a Minerva face--steady, grave, handsome eyes, and a fine head, unadorned, save with a classic knot of black brown hair.
The picture was not even younger-looking than Priscilla was now.
A polite fiction by the way, as my lady was looking her best.
Quince preserve, my dear, and white currant-jelly."
Her quickened heart might almost have been running a life-and-death race with her leaping pulse, but she answered him almost steadily.
"My dear," she said to Theodora, "that is the most beautiful face in London, to my old eyes.
He did not even open the carriage-door himself, but waited for the footman to do it.
It was very foolish, of course, but she felt as if something painful was going to happen, and nothing on earth could prevent it.
And now, perhaps, you had better tell the coachman to drive on.
"Don't forget to tell Jane, Priscilla, and--" fumbling in her large side-pocket, "here's the key of the preserve-closet.
What would you advise me to get, Miss Gower?"
She gave him her hand through the carriage-window, and, for a moment, he held it, to all appearance quite calm, as he looked down at the lovely face the flare of an adjacent gaslight revealed to him against a background of shadow.
"Thank you," he returned again.
But her manner was not changed in the least, and she welcomed her visitor with grave cordiality.
Consequently, under stress of Miss Elizabeth, the carriage was fain to depart, much to the abasement of the fat, gray coachman, who felt himself much dishonored in finding he was compelled, not only to pay majestic calls to Broome street, but to acknowledge the humiliating fact of friendly visits.
"I will not ask you."
This was the first time an actual approach to the subject had been made in her presence.
The day passed pleasantly enough, however, in a quiet way.
"Yes, madame," Theo faltered, very unsteadily, indeed.
"You are quite right.
He came to the window, and looked in at her.
Poor little snuff-colored Miss Elizabeth was delighted.
"My late lamented parents, at the respective ages of fifty and fifty-seven.
I will deliver your message to Lady Throckmorton; and as I shall not see you again, unless I am here in July--of course you will come back then--good-bye, Mr. Oglethorpe."
"I am so glad--" and then stopped, in a confusion and trepidation absolutely brilliant.
"Good-bye," he said, and then released it.
"Yes," she said to him.
"And now, there is something else, a subject upon which I wish to ask your unbiased opinion, my dear Theodora, before I say good-bye.
She was often both sarcastic and indifferent in her manner toward Sir Dugald.
It was a small picture, half life-size, and set in an oval frame of black walnut.
"Thank you," he replied, courteously, and then, after a short hesitation, began again, in the tone he used so often--the tone that might be jest or earnest.
This morning, when you spoke to me through the carriage window, you began to say something about being glad.
My sister, Anastasia; my only brother, my sister-in-law, his wife; and my dear Priscilla, at seventeen years."
"Oh, Mr. Oglethorpe!" she cried out.
The nice little company-dinner reminded her of it; the solitary little roast fowl and the preserves and puddings; but the company-dinners at Downport had always been detracted from by the sharp annoyance in Pam's face, and the general domestic bustle, and the total inadequacy of gravy and stuffing to the wants of the boys.
"Yes, my love!" Miss Elizabeth proceeded.
She was getting very fond of company in her old age, and had taken a great fancy to Theodora North.
She did not know what a struggle it cost him to face her thus carelessly all at once.
She attended to Miss Elizabeth's octagon-stitch, and left him to amuse Priscilla.
"Oh, dear!" said Theodora, secretly conscious of a guilty sympathy for the giddy young person who ran counter to brother Benjamin's wishes, in the matter of military balls and blue-satin slippers.
Don't you think so?"
He had better go away."
She bent her head with an unpleasantly-quickened heart-beat.
But when the carriage was announced, and she returned to the parlor, after an absence of a few minutes, drawing on her gloves, and buttoning her pretty jacket close up to her beautiful slender, dusky throat, Denis took his hat and accompanied her to the carriage.
He did not wait for the footman this time; but, after assisting her to get in, closed the door himself, and leaned against the open window for a moment.
It was an Afghan Miss Elizabeth was making now; and when at tea-time, Mr. Oglethorpe came, he found Theodora North sitting on the hearth, flushed with industrious anxiety, and thrown into reflected glow of brilliant Berlin wool, a beautiful young spider in a gorgeous Afghan web.
"Are you like your sister in that, Theodora?
The last time I visited the Spas, my health improved greatly."
"I do not think I have any message to send," she replied.
"He might have waited," Theo said to herself, with an unexpected, inconsistent feeling of wretchedness.
Perhaps this was the first time she really awoke to a full consciousness of where she had drifted.
CHAPTER V.
Lady Throckmorton missed him also, but she had the solace of her novels and her chocolate, which Theo had not.
The household seemed rather quiet after the change.
"That is a strange question," Miss Elizabeth interposed.
"I am not old enough to know yet."
Her intelligence is better than her character."
And in many ways interesting.
There were some moments of silence.
Miss Seyffert is a fairly crude mixture of frankness, insincerity and self-explanatory egotism, and I have been able to disregard a considerable amount of the conversation she has addressed to me.
That is the sort of thing that gratifies a silly woman extremely.
The matter was settled.
I would not care if you hired an omnibus, said Dr. Martineau.
"I see a lot more than that.
"I am really very sorry to find myself in this dilemma," said Sir Richmond with a note of genuine regret in his voice.
Theoretically she had a tremendously good time."
The war has turned an ugly face to her.
"Frankly," said the doctor, "this adventure is altogether uncongenial to me.
That is the core of this situation."
That I think is why history has become real to her.
Miss Grammont has a startled and matured mind, an original mind.
"And of course you told her I was."
Sir Richmond, upon the hearthrug, had a curious feeling that he was back in the head master's study at Caxton.
And you--if you will forgive me--are living in the patched up remains of a life that had already had its complications.
"No, I don't.
Because she looks back at you.
From the Psychologist of a New Age I find this amazing.
"The intelligence of all intelligent women is better than their characters.
But neither gentleman wished to break off with a harsh and bare decision.
I thought not.
Section 6
Dr. Martineau went on with a lucidity that Sir Richmond found rather trying, to give his impression of Miss Grammont and her position in life.
Those who seek find."
They would travel about together as they chose?"
It is a sort of moral laziness masquerading as affection....
Miss Grammont has an impulsive and adventurous character.
"It is not a dilemma," said Dr. Martineau, with a corresponding loss of asperity.
"It may help you to see this affair from a slightly different angle if I tell you that twice today Miss Seyffert has asked me if you were a married man."
"We might drop Belinda," he suggested turning to his friend and speaking in low, confidential tones.
"It's just that.
Perhaps she has seen people she knew killed.
And that somehow the war came to alter the look of that promise.
"I could have wished," said the doctor, "that these ladies had happened a little later...."
"It's just that," said Sir Richmond.
She is a very grown-up young woman.
This highway coupling--"
I have the privilege of the negligible--which is a cool head.
"She has told me as much."
And there is something more to be said.
Sir Richmond smiled again.
We are a party of four. There are conventions, there are considerations....
"I don't know.
She is very much at loose ends.
"I want to go on talking to Miss Grammont for a day or so," Sir Richmond admitted.
Quite. She could--for example--be left behind with the luggage and sent on by train.
"She knows nothing of Martin Leeds....
But we are not living in a new age yet; we are living in the patched-up ruins of a very old one.
After twenty-four eventful hours our two students of human motives found themselves together again by the fireplace in the Old George smoking-room.
"She is," he said, "manifestly a very expensively educated girl.
For a moment he had a wild hope that his companion would agree, and then he perceived that the doctor's silence meant only the preparation of an ultimatum.
A pause fell between the two gentlemen.
"I object to Miss Grammont and that side of the thing, more than I do to Miss Seyffert."
History, for her, has ceased to be a fabric of picturesque incidents; it is the study of a tragic struggle that still goes on.
Nothing more of a practical nature remained to be said.
"She is quite a manageable person.
You must remember that....
"I think this must be near the truth of her biography," said Sir Richmond.
There have been love experiences; experiences that were something more than the treats and attentions and proposals that made up her life when she was sheltered over there.
"I don't quite see what you are driving at."
But for this young woman I am convinced this expedition to Europe has meant experience, harsh educational experience and very profound mental disturbance.
"What would a rich girl find out there in America?
"You know that?"
I don't know.
"How?"
"When the New Age is here," said Sir Richmond, "then, surely, a friendship between a man and a woman will not be subjected to the--the inconveniences your present code would set about it?
Miss Grammont being a woman is a little more selective than that.
Sir Richmond looked at his toes for a moment or so as if he took counsel with them and then decided to take offence.
I don't think there has been any stepmother, either friendly or hostile? There hasn't been.
With an air of being neither married nor entangled.
"If you find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place like this.
"You don't mean--?"
No, no! say nothing at all, sir!
As he rode beside Kenneth he said:
Patsy laughed.
"Yes."
Bah!" she said.
Won't we, girls?"
"Oh, you don't need to, indeed!" cried Patsy, in great indignation. "Uncle John is my dear mother's brother, and he's to come and live with the Major and me, as long as he cares to.
"We're all three your nieces, and we'll take care of you between us.
"Of course.
Patsy ran up and put her arm around his neck.
Why, we'll be as snug and contented as pigs in clover.
Can you get ready to come with me today, Uncle John?"
Stay at Elmhurst, and you shall always be welcome."
"Never mind, dear," said she.
"It's so much easier than walking," she said to Uncle John, "that the common car is good enough," and the old man readily agreed with her.
"I've wandered all my life," he said.
Mr. Bradley having provided for that most fully.
Louise smiled rather scornfully, and Beth scowled.
"Why, you're worse off than any of us. What's going to become of you, I wonder?"
"But Patsy will be there, you know."
"I'd like that," declared the boy.
"Wasn't I the grand lady, though, with all the fortune I never had?" she cried merrily.
"No, my dear," answered the lawyer, gently.
"Yes," he said slowly.
The main subject of conversation was Aunt Jane's surprising act in annulling her last will and forcing Patricia to accept the inheritance when she did not want it.
At dinner the young folks chatted together in a friendly and eager manner concerning the events of the day.
"We're no worse off than before we came, are we?
"Father can hardly support his own family," said the other; "but I will talk to my mother about Uncle John when I get home, and see what she says."
"Thank you, my dear," said he; "but where's the money to come from?"
"Don't we get anything at all?" asked Beth, with quivering lip.
Uncle John seemed greatly affected, and wrung the boy's hand earnestly.
"I'm getting old, and my clients are few and unimportant, aside from the Elmhurst interests," he said.
It did not seem clear to them yet whether Miss Patricia or Lawyer Watson was to take charge of Elmhurst: but there were few tears shed for Jane Merrick, and the new regime could not fail to be an improvement over the last.
Blank looks followed Mr. Watson's statement.
They were really like cousins to him, by this time.
"We'll all go home," said Patsy, cheerfully.
"No," replied Uncle John, "the Merricks are out of Elmhurst now, and it returns to its rightful owners.
"It's all I'll ever get, it seems." And then the thought of the Professor and his debts overcame her and she burst, into tears.
Indeed, the arrangements of the household had been considerably changed by the death of its mistress, and without any real head to direct them the servants were patiently awaiting the advent of a new master or mistress.
But he shook his head.
You can stay here," said the boy, suddenly arousing from his apathy.
But, as she was so generous, he would accept enough of his Uncle Tom's money to educate him as an artist and provide for himself an humble home.
"But I like you," said Kenneth, "and you're old and homeless.
But we shall be glad to assist Uncle John as far as we are able."
"But I'm much obliged to Jane, nevertheless."
"I'm going home today," said Beth, angrily drying her eyes.
"Doesn't the Major earn a heap with his bookkeeping, and haven't I had a raise lately?
Patsy tried to comfort Beth.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Louise and Beth, having at last full knowledge of their cousin's desire to increase their bequests, were openly very grateful for her good will; although secretly they could not fail to resent Patsy's choice of the boy as the proper heir of his uncle's fortune.
"I used mine," said Beth, bitterly.
For this reason the will I read to you yesterday is of no effect, and Kenneth Forbes inherits from his uncle, through his mother, all of the estate."
She felt wonderfully relieved.
Louise smiled.
"Your aunt owned nothing to give you."
"Good-by to my five thousand," said Uncle John, with his chuckling laugh.
"That may be," answered the boy.
As far as she knew, she tried to be good to us."
The boy sat doubled within his chair, so overcome by the extraordinary fortune that had overtaken him that he could not speak, nor think even clearly as yet.
The lawyer hesitated.
"I'm wondering that myself," said the little man, meekly.
"I'll be ready, Patsy."
"For my part," remarked Uncle John, in a grave voice, "I have no home."
Uncle John and Mr. Watson did not appear at dinner, being closeted in the former's room.
Uncle John's eyes were moist.
"You ought to travel, and visit the art centers of Europe, and I shall try to find a competent tutor to go with you."
Come you shall, if I have to drag you; and if you act naughty I'll send for the Major to punish you!"
"I can wander yet."
"Perhaps I can manage to go abroad with you."
"Money?
Lawyer Watson and Uncle John were there, looking as grave as the important occasion demanded, and the former at once proceeded to relate the scene in James' room, his story of the death of Thomas Bradley, and the subsequent finding of the will.
"I shall take the afternoon train to the city.
You owe me nothing, my lad."
"See here," exclaimed Patsy.
Kenneth and Mr. Watson came to the station to see them off, and they parted with many mutual expressions of friendship and good will. Louise, especially, pressed an urgent invitation upon the new master of Elmhurst to visit her mother in New York, and he said he hoped to see all the girls again.
"Can't you go yourself?" asked the boy.
Come to my room at once.
"It's John Merrick" passed from mouth to mouth, and the uniformed official strutted from one window to another, saying:
"You're older than I am," suggested the Major, "and that makes it harder to break in.
It's always harder to economize at first."
Tell him John Merrick is here."
He opened a small door and disappeared.
"Don't I pay my share of them?"
"What did Mam'selle think of that?"
"Oh, a dress suit, and collars, and--and things."
I had to walk without lifting my feet.
"I told you to put it up," said Priscilla.
"What did she say?"
Where'd you get it?"
The gentleman is waiting."
"But you didn't leave it."
"Did you tell the Dowager?"
"Oh, Patty!
"What's in it?"
"You surely didn't speak to him?"
I felt as though I were flirting with my grandfather.
"Where on earth did you get it, Patty?"
"I'm afraid he did.
A maid appeared at the door.
"Are those his real eyebrows or were they blacked?"
Do you s'pose he opened it?" asked Conny.
"Oh!" Conny murmured disappointedly.
"Do your hair up--quick!"
"He wears blue silk suspenders."
I think you're beastly!"
What's the matter with it?'
"That was the best part of it!" Patty affirmed.
Did you bring us some wedding cake?"
"Jermyn Hilliard, Junior?" Priscilla asked breathlessly.
"There it is.
"Is it locked?"
"Adventures!" she called back excitedly.
"Then what happened?" Priscilla asked.
"Well--the glee club was last Thursday night."
"It is."
One would fancy not.
"I wish sometimes that I could bridle Minnie's," murmured Rebecca, as she went to set the table for supper.
"You must stay after school and try again, Rebecca," she said, but she said it smilingly.
"I know you do, Mirandy; but that don't MAKE you so," returned Jane with a smile.
Miss Dearborn gave her every sort of subject that she had ever been given herself: Cloud Pictures; Abraham Lincoln; Nature; Philanthropy; Slavery; Intemperance; Joy and Duty; Solitude; but with none of them did Rebecca seem to grapple satisfactorily.
R. R. R.
'One opens a favorite book;' 'One's thoughts are a great comfort in solitude,' and so on."
"That is better," Miss Dearborn answered, "though I cannot think 'going to smash' is a pretty expression for poetry."
"It's a pity she's so plain looking," remarked Mrs. Cobb, blowing out the candle.
"Because I was talking about 'household tasks' in the sentence before, and it IS one of my household tasks.
When her turn came to read she was obliged to confess she had written nothing.
THE RIVER!' just like that--the same as Eliza did in the play; then I leaped from puddle to puddle, and Living and Emma Jane pursued me like the bloodhounds.
SOLITUDE
Rebecca rose, overcome with secret laughter dread, and mortification; then in a low voice she read the couplet:--
"Stuff an' nonsense!" said Miranda "Speak for yourself.
"PLAIN LOOKING, mother?" exclaimed her husband in astonishment.
I knew Living would remember, too, so I took off my waterproof and wrapped it round my books for a baby; then I shouted, 'MY GOD!
A sudden light broke upon Rebecca's darkness.
It is the cat, the chips, and the milk pail that I don't like."
And Eliza wasn't swearing when she said 'My God! the river!' It was more like praying."
"Yes, I don't like a cow in a composition," said the difficult Miss Dearborn.
All one's little household tasks keep one from being lonely.
When Joy and Duty clash, 'T is Joy must go to smash."
"I don't see what makes you do it.
"I don't think she's like the rest of us," responded Jane thoughtfully and with some anxiety in her pleasant face; "but whether it's for the better or the worse I can't hardly tell till she grows up.
When did they chase you up the road, and what were you doing?"
"Land, no, mother; there ain't no home'path 'bout Miss Parks--she drives all over the country."
"And we sleep 'till eight o'clock, don't we, Patsy?" asked the Major.
Uncle John walked in, although the uniformed official at the door eyed him suspiciously.
Then, suddenly noting the time.
"They'd missed me at the office, and were glad to have me back.
"And now we'll have our cribbage and get to bed early.
"Your card, sir."
UNCLE JOHN ACTS QUEERLY.
Uncle John did not seem to be worrying over his idleness.
"More than enough, sir.
"You must be nearly bankrupt, by this time," said Patsy on Tuesday evening.
The Major has been terribly excited over you, and swore you should not be allowed to wander through the streets without someone to look after you.
"My dear Mr. Merrick!" he exclaimed, "I'm delighted and honored to see you here.
"Tomorrow is the day of rest," announced Patsy, "so we'll all go for a nice walk in the parks after breakfast."
You don't care for more than one, do you, Uncle John?"
A great surprise and pleasure, sir! Thomas, I'm engaged!"
"It's our Sunday morning extra--an egg apiece.
In a moment the great Broadway crowd had swallowed up John Merrick, and five minutes later he was thoughtfully gazing into a shop window again.
Talk about the Major's extravagance: it could not be compared to Uncle John's.
Uncle John had been advised by Patsy where to go for a good cheap luncheon; but he did not heed her admonition.
"Really?" said Uncle John, seeing it was expected of him.
"Fine," said the Major.
"Not arrived yet," said the official, who wore a big star upon his breast.
"I'll wait," announced Uncle John, and sat down upon a leather-covered bench.
"Have you had a good day?"
"Hasn't Mr. Marvin arrived yet?" he enquired, sharply.
To pass the time he turned into a small restaurant and had coffee and a plate of cakes, in spite of the fact that Patsy had so recently prepared coffee over the sheet-iron stove and brought some hot buns from a near-by bakery.
In a moment the door burst open to allow egress to a big, red-bearded man in his shirtsleeves, who glanced around briefly and then rushed at Uncle John and shook both his hands cordially.
"No, my dear."
Presently Uncle John jumped up and approached the official.
Drat these 'ere billionaires! Why don't they dress like decent people?"
We're dreadfully rich, Uncle John; so you needn't worry if you don't strike a job yourself all at once."
This last was directed at the head of the amazed porter, who, as the door slammed in his face, nodded solemnly and remarked:
Instead, he rode in a carriage beside the banker to a splendid club, where he was served with the finest dishes the chef could provide on short notice. Moreover, Mr. Marvin introduced him to several substantial gentlemen as "Mr.
"Your expenses are nothing at all," declared the Major, with a wave of his hand.
"Of course not," said Patsy, quickly.
"No, my dear."
Yet Uncle John seemed in no way elated by this reception.
But something in the angry glance of the shrewd eye made him fear he had made a mistake.
It's Patsy's doing, I've no doubt.
But I'm pretty tough, and mean to hold onto that twelve a week as long as possible."
"Well, he will see me, and right away.
She wheedled the firm into giving me a vacation, and now they're to pay me twelve a week instead of ten."
But he was happy and in good spirits and enjoyed his evening game of cribbage with the Major exceedingly.
"Mr. Marvin in?" he inquired, pleasantly.
But what could we do?"
"Is that enough?" asked Uncle John, doubtfully.
Except that it'll keep you busy, there's no need for you to work at all."
Come in at once.
By and bye he bethought himself of the time, and took a cab uptown.
But there's no hurry, as Patsy says."
But Uncle John waived it aside disdainfully.
The official hesitated, and glanced at the little man's seedy garb and countryfied air.
"What pay do you get, Patsy?" asked Uncle John.
"An hour ago," was the reply.
Do you know you're ten minutes late?"
"And so am I, Patsy."
He was not especially hungry; but in sipping the coffee and nibbling the cakes he passed the best part of an hour.
"I'm sorry," he said, humbly; "but it's a long way here from downtown."
The first whiff he took made Uncle John cough; but the Major smoked so gracefully and with such evident pleasure that his brother-in-law clung manfully to the cigar, and succeeded in consuming it to the end.
Another hour passed.
I want to see him."
"But my dinners at Danny Reeves' place must cost a lot," protested Uncle John.
"I haven't any.
Uncle John shook his head.
My name will do."
Don't hurry, Uncle John.
"Didn't you take a car?"
John Merrick, of Portland"; and each one bowed profoundly and declared he was "highly honored."
"I'm all right," declared Uncle John, cordially shaking hands with Patsy's father.
CHAPTER XXV
"Any luck today, sir," asked the Major, tucking a napkin under his chin and beginning on the soup.
And what do you think?
The Major is so fond of them."
He can't see you yet."
"Why, you foolish old Uncle!
"He's busy mornings.
Another hour was spent in looking in at the shop windows.
"It's an expensive city to live in," sighed Uncle John.
"I showed him in myself.
I've got a raise."
"Almost as much as Daddy.
"For a fact.
"Of course."
From the description of inanimate bodies and plants, I passed to animals, and particularly to man.
It was my design to comprise in it all that, before I set myself to write it, I thought I knew of the nature of material objects.
I was not, however, disposed, from these circumstances, to conclude that this world had been created in the manner I described; for it is much more likely that God made it at the first such as it was to be.
To this I likewise added much respecting the substance, the situation, the motions, and all the different qualities of these heavens and stars; so that I thought I had said enough respecting them to show that there is nothing observable in the heavens or stars of our system that must not, or at least may not appear precisely alike in those of the system which I described.
And what can physicians conjecture from feeling the pulse unless they know that according as the blood changes its nature it can be rarefied by the warmth of the heart, in a higher or lower degree, and more or less quickly than before?
Nor will this appear at all strange to those who are acquainted with the variety of movements performed by the different automata, or moving machines fabricated by human industry, and that with help of but few pieces compared with the great multitude of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and other parts that are found in the body of each animal.
She considered the lilies, and, while planting the plains with sage and the hills with cedar, she has covered at least one mountain with golden erythroniums and fritillarias as its crowning glory, as if willing to show what she could do in the lily line even here.
They have seen too much hard, repressive toil to admit of the development of lily beauty either in form or color.
In general they are thickset, with large feet and hands, and with sun-browned faces, often curiously freckled like the petals of Fritillaria atropurpurea.
Two liliaceous plants in particular, Erythronium grandiflorum and Fritillaria pudica, are marvelously beautiful and abundant.
It seems to be quite abundant on many of the eastern mountains of the basin, and forms a marked feature of their upper forests.
You may walk the deserts of the Great Basin in the bloom time of the year, all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the snowy Wahsatch, and your eyes will be filled with many a gay malva, and poppy, and abronia, and cactus, but you may not see a single true lily, and only a very few liliaceous plants of any kind.
Looking southward from the south end of Salt Lake, the two northmost peaks of the Oquirrh Range are seen swelling calmly into the cool sky without any marked character, excepting only their snow crowns, and a few weedy-looking patches of spruce and fir, the simplicity of their slopes preventing their real loftiness from being appreciated.
Not even in the cool, fresh glens of the mountains will you find these favorite flowers, though some of these desert ranges almost rival the Sierra in height. Nevertheless, in the building and planting of this grand Territory the lilies were not forgotten.
I hardly know how the little bells I have been describing would be regarded by seekers of this class, but every true flower-lover who comes to consider these Utah lilies will surely be well rewarded, however long the way.
After carefully scanning the jagged towers and battlements with which it is roughened, I determined to make it my way, though it presented but a feeble advertisement of its floral wealth. This apparent barrenness, however, made no great objection just then, for I was scarce hoping for flowers, old or new, or even for fine scenery.
I wanted in particular to learn what the Oquirrh rocks were made of, what trees composed the curious patches of forest; and, perhaps more than all, I was animated by a mountaineer's eagerness to get my feet into the snow once more, and my head into the clear sky, after lying dormant all winter at the level of the sea.
During the famine years between 1853 and 1858, great destitution prevailed, especially in the southern settlements, on account of drouth and grasshoppers, and throughout one hungry winter in particular, thousands of the people subsisted chiefly on the bulbs of the tulips, called "sego" by the Indians, who taught them its use.
Lilies are rare in Utah; so also are their companions the ferns and orchids, chiefly on account of the fiery saltness of the soil and climate.
If the neighboring mountains are as rich in lilies, then this may well be called the Lily Range.
Occasionally a specimen is met which has from two to five flowers hung in a loose panicle.
And the wide prairie of water glowing in the gold and purple of evening presented all the colors that tint the lips of shells and the petals of lilies--the most beautiful lake this side of the Rocky Mountains.
Here I feel uneasy about the name of this lily, for the compositors have a perverse trick of making me say all kinds of absurd things wholly unwarranted by plain copy, and I fear that the "Lily of San Pitch" will appear in print as the widow of Sam Patch.
I will bathe in the high sky, among cool wind-waves from the snow." From the more southerly of the two peaks a long ridge comes down, bent like a bow, one end in the hot plains, the other in the snow of the summit.
I reached the hotel on the lake about dusk with all my fresh riches, and my first mountain ramble in Utah was accomplished.
People oftentimes travel far to see curious plants like the carnivorous darlingtonia, the fly-catcher, the walking fern, etc.
After climbing about a thousand feet above the plain I came to a picturesque mass of rock, cropping up through the underbrush on one of the steepest slopes of the mountain.
One of these lilies, the calochortus, several species of which are well known in California as the "Mariposa tulips," has received great consideration at the hands of the Mormons, for to it hundreds of them owe their lives.
While standing at their feet, the other day, shortly after my memorable excursion among the salt waves of the lake, I said: "Now I shall have another baptism.
They are fruit rather than flower--good brown bread.
The shorelines, marked by a ribbon of white sand, were seen sweeping around many a bay and promontory in elegant curves, and picturesque islands rising to mountain heights, and some of them capped with pearly cumuli.
Descending the mountain, I followed the windings of the main central glen on the north, gathering specimens of the cones and sprays of the evergreens, and most of the other new plants I had met; but the lilies formed the crowning glory of my bouquet--the grandest I had carried in many a day.
They were growing in a small, nestlike opening between the rock and the bushes, and both the erythronium and the fritillaria were in full flower.
Pushing on up the rugged slopes, I found many delightful seclusions--moist nooks at the foot of cliffs, and lilies in every one of them, not growing close together like daisies, but well apart, with plenty of room for their bells to swing free and ring.
They extend horizontally in opposite directions, and form a beautiful glossy ground, over which the one large down-looking flower is swung from a simple stem, the petals being strongly recurved, like those of Lilium superbum.
In the planting of her wild gardens, Nature takes the feet and teeth of her flocks into account, and makes use of them to trim and cultivate, and keep them in order, as the bark and buds of the tree are tended by woodpeckers and linnets.
But down in the San Pitch Valley at Gunnison, I discovered a genuine lily, happily named Lily Young.
These were the first of the species I had seen, and I need not try to tell the joy they made.
At 4:30 p.m. a dark brownish cloud appeared close down on the plain towards the lake, extending from the northern extremity of the Oquirrh Range in a northeasterly direction as far as the eye could reach.
The snowy skirts of the Wahsatch Mountains appeared beneath the lifting fringes of the clouds, and the sun shone out through colored windows, producing one of the most glorious after-storm effects I ever witnessed.
With reference to the development of fertile storms bearing snow and rain, the greater portion of the calendar springtime of Utah has been winter.
Scarcely was it in plain sight ere it was upon us, racing across the Jordan, over the city, and up the slopes of the Wahsatch, eclipsing all the landscapes in its course--the bending trees, the dust streamers, and the wild onrush of everything movable giving it an appreciable visibility that rendered it grand and inspiring.
Surely nothing in heaven, nor any mansion of the Lord in all his worlds, could be more gloriously carpeted.
Earth and sky, round and round the entire landscape, was one ravishing revelation of color, infinitely varied and interblended.
Toward the evening of the 18th it began to wither.
Then came darkness, and the glorious day was done.
To me it seemed a cordial outpouring of Nature's love; but it is easy to differ with salt Latter-Days in everything--storms, wives, politics, and religion.
The mountains, the plains, the sky, all seemed new.
The mountains, in particular, with the forests on their flanks, their mazy lacelike canyons, the wombs of the ancient glaciers, and their marvelous profusion of ornate sculpture, were most impressively manifest.
Notwithstanding the vaunted refining influences of towns, purity of all kinds--pure hearts, pure streams, pure snow--must here be exposed to terrible trials.
I should like to see how Mr. Young, the Lake Prophet, would meet such messengers.
The disbanding clouds lingered lovingly about the mountains, filling the canyons like tinted wool, rising and drooping around the topmost peaks, fondling their rugged bases, or, sailing alongside, trailed their lustrous fringes through the pines as if taking a last view of their accomplished work.
I have seen many a glorious sunset beneath lifting storm clouds on the mountains, but nothing comparable with this.
They are covered with common sunshine.
I felt as if new-arrived in some other far-off world.
But to return to the storm.
Nevertheless, distant objects along the boundaries of the landscape were revealed with wonderful distinctness in this weird, subdued, cloud-sifted light.
Other experiences seemed but to have prepared me for this, as souls are prepared for heaven.
Of these partial storms there were soon ten or twelve, arranged in two rows, while the main Jordan Valley between them lay as yet in profound calm.
City Creek, coming from its high glacial fountains, enters the streets of this Mormon Zion pure as an angel, but how does it leave it?
Down here on the banks of the Jordan, larks and redwings are swinging on the rushes; the balmy air is instinct with immortal life; the wild flowers, the grass, and the farmers' grain are fresh as if, like the snow, they had come out of heaven, and the last of the angel clouds are fleeing from the mountains.
With a cry of joy Genseric sprang to his feet and exclaimed:
He said the count was a traitor, and that he was going to make war against Rome.
Eudoxia was the widow of Valentinian III.
III
When the Emperor Maximus heard that the Vandals were coming he prepared to flee from the city, and he advised the Senate to do the same.
But he first marched his men across the Alps, through Gaul, and down to the seaport of Carthagena in Spain, where his fleet was stationed.
One day a Roman ship came to Carthage with a messenger from the Empress Eudoxia to Genseric.
Genseric was greatly delighted to receive the invitation from Boniface. He had long wanted to attack Rome and take from her some of the rich countries she had conquered, and now a good opportunity offered. So he got ready a great army of his brave Vandals, and they sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar to Africa.
I shall set out for Rome immediately.
So he dyed his hair and disguised himself in other ways and went to Carthage, pretending that he was a messenger or ambassador from the Roman emperor, coming to talk about peace.
Three days later Genseric and his army were at the gates of Rome. There was no one to oppose them, and they marched in and took possession of the city.
She wishes you to protect them against Maximus.
But Genseric did not wait for the Roman fleet to come to attack him in his capital.
Every year their ships went round the coasts from Asia Minor to Spain, attacking and plundering cities on their way and carrying off prisoners.
Before sailing with his army for Carthage he wished very much to see with his own eyes what sort of people the Vandals were and whether they were so powerful at home as was generally believed.
"Great king, I bring you a message from the Empress Eudoxia.
But the cunning Vandal was not thinking of peace.
They spent fourteen days in the work of plunder.
Basilicus sailed with his ships to Africa and landed the army not far from Carthage. Genseric asked for a truce for five days to consider terms of peace, and the truce was granted.
Genseric captured this town after a siege of thirteen months.
But since then Rome had become again grand and wealthy, so there was plenty for Genseric and his Vandals to carry away.
I shall protect Eudoxia and her friends."
He now regretted having invited the Vandals to Africa and tried to induce them to return to Spain, but Genseric sternly refused.
He only wanted time to carry out a plan he had made to destroy the Roman fleet.
At last they had to flee for safety to two or three towns which the Vandals had not yet taken.
After ruling several years, Valentinian had just been murdered by a Roman noble named Maximus, who had at once made himself emperor.
She invites you to come with an army to Rome and take the city.
One of these towns was Hippo.
Of course peace was not made.
When he got word that it was in the Bay of Carthagena, he sailed there with a fleet of his own and in a single day burned or sank nearly all the Roman ships.
He built great fleets and sailed over the Mediterranean, capturing trading vessels.
These boats were set on fire and floated against the Roman vessels, which also were soon on fire.
The Roman emperor at the time of the plot was Valentinian III.
At the same time he wrote secretly to Count Boniface and told him that if he came to Rome the empress would put him to death.
One of the daughters was soon afterwards married to Genseric's eldest son, Hunneric.
There were more than a thousand ships in this fleet and they carried a hundred thousand men.
Genseric received him with respect and entertained him hospitably, not knowing that he was the Emperor Majorian.
So he got together a great army and built a fleet of three hundred ships to carry his troops to Carthage.
Boniface believed this story, and he refused to return to Rome. He also sent a letter to Genseric, inviting him to come to Africa with an army.
Aetius advised Placidia to dismiss Boniface and call him home from Africa.
"Tell the empress that I accept her invitation.
Genseric continued his work of conquest until he took the city of Carthage, which he made the capital of his new kingdom in Africa.
She and her friends will help you as much as they can."
He took this route because he expected to add to his forces as he went along.
"Then," cried Boniface, "I will drive you back."
They say that though you are so young you are a good caravan manager and can be trusted. Are you willing to take charge of my caravans and give your whole time and service to me?"
III
He still continued to attend to his wife's business; but he did not make so many journeys as before.
He could neither read nor write. But he was not ignorant.
"I have given my promise," he would say, "and I must keep it." He became so well known in Mecca for being truthful and trustworthy that people gave him the name of El Amin, which means "the truthful."
With a few faithful companions he made his escape to Medina.
He declared that, while praying in his cave, he often had visions of God and heaven.
He gained many victories.
When Mohammed returned home after the angel had first spoken to him, he told his wife of what he had seen and heard.
As he was now the husband of a rich woman he did not need to work very hard.
After a time the number of his followers began to increase.
It really is reddish-brown in color.
He lived there the remainder of his life.
Very few of them were Christians.
This he does by going on the platform, or balcony, of the minaret, or tower, of the mosque and chanting in a loud voice such words as these:
Mohammed had no school education.
I praise his perfection.
Mohammed was very earnest and serious.
"Come to prayer, come to prayer.
It is a large enclosure in the form of a quadrangle, or square, which can hold 35,000 persons.
Numbers of the people there believed his doctrines and wished him to come and live among them.
On his arrival in Medina the people received Mohammed with great rejoicing.
"There is but one God.
People came from distant parts of Arabia and from neighboring countries to hear him.
He knew well how to do the work intrusted to him, and was a first-rate man of business.
It means a place for prostration or prayer.
In modern times the sultans or rulers of Turkey have been commonly regarded as the caliphs.
Before the time of Mohammed the Ka'a-ba was a pagan temple; but when he took possession of Mecca he made the old temple the centre of worship for his own religion.
They would not believe what he preached, and they called him an impostor.
They died when Mohammed was a child, and his uncle, a kind-hearted man named A'bu-Ta-lib', took him home and brought him up.
She said:
It is nearly a cube in shape.
He was buried in the mosque in which he had held religious services for so many years; and Medina has ever since been honored, because it contains the tomb of the Prophet.
The people of the tribe to which he himself belonged were the most bitter against him.
Mohammed, however, paid no heed to the insults he received.
In Mecca there is a mosque called the Great Mosque.
Soon afterwards he began to preach to the people.
But the people of Mecca, Mohammed's own home, were nearly all opposed to him.
Then he would tell what he had seen in his vision.
He therefore resolved to leave that city and go to Medina.
Will you hear it?"
My dear Charlotte--impossible!"
"Engaged to Mr. Collins!
"That is right.
"Yes, there can; for mine is totally different.
"Yes, or I will never see her again."
"Speak to Lizzy about it yourself.
Nobody can tell what I suffer!
"Pray do, my dear Miss Lucas," she added in a melancholy tone, "for nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me.
In everything else she is as good-natured a girl as ever lived.
Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband, did Mrs. Bennet give up the point.
"Of what are you talking?"
Not that I have much pleasure, indeed, in talking to anybody.
We now come to the point.
"But, depend upon it, Mr. Collins," she added, "that Lizzy shall be brought to reason.
Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him."
She shall hear my opinion."
I told you in the library, you know, that I should never speak to you again, and you will find me as good as my word.
For him yesterday's incident was not so lightly to be passed over.
He turned.
He, too, was sombrely dressed, and, instead of the vivid necktie he had worn from the courthouse, a jet-black scarf was perfectly arranged beneath his collar.
I slept like a top last night.
It was necessary for the Panamanian to return to the Cedars.
The iron bed; the chest of drawers, scratched and with broken handles; the closed colonial desk; the miserly rag carpet--all seemed mutely asking, as Bobby did, why their owner had deserted them the other night and delivered himself to the ghostly mystery of the old bedroom.
Was there a special power there that could control the destinies of other people, that might make men walk unconsciously to accomplish the ends of an unscrupulous brain?
Nothing to forgive, Bobby.
After this something must be done about Paredes's detention.
But almost immediately even that prophylactic was denied him.
Bobby agreed indifferently.
He would make it practically impossible for Bobby to refuse his hospitality.
Graham made it plain that his mind was far from the sad business ahead.
You'll confess, Bobby, he's had a good deal of influence over you--an influence for evil?"
"That's better.
"I saw you arrive," he said.
He felt the touch of Graham's hand on his shoulder.
Graham, on the other hand, was ill at ease.
Graham, fully dressed, stood at the side of the bed.
"I won't blame Carlos for that," Bobby muttered.
"If it had been stolen earlier the coat pocket might have retained its bulging shape.
He lounged opposite the district attorney, his eyes studying the fire.
The district attorney appeared as much at sea as the others.
A lingering resentment at Graham's suggestion lessened the difficulty of his position.
"Those men?" Bobby asked wearily.
I must think it over."
Graham moved toward the door.
"Get up," Graham advised.
"How can I forget it?
Simple enough, Mr. Graham.
"The grave diggers," Graham answered.
His black clothing, relieved only by narrow edges of white cuffs between the sleeves and the heavy mourning gloves, fitted with solemn harmony into the landscape and Bobby's mood.
"You're trying to take away my one hope. But I was there, and you weren't.
Like everything about the Cedars, Silas Blackburn had delivered it to the swift, obliterating fingers of time.
"He shouldn't be in jail," Bobby persisted.
Fact is, this fellow wants five dollars--an outrageous rate.
Thanks."
I gather not."
My clothes are here.
"A funereal day."
If you think I'm guilty say so.
"I don't dare!" He echoed Graham's words. "There's nothing else any one can say.
It was a shock to have your candle go out. Your own hand, reaching out to Howells, might have moved spasmodically.
I've nearly frozen driving from Smithtown."
You don't mind, Bobby?"
"Gave me the creeps, too.
For some time Bobby stared through the window at the desolate, ragged landscape.
"I've been watching the preparations out there.
There were more dark-clothed men in the hall.
It was abnormally cold even for the late fall.
As he walked back he forecasted with a keen apprehension his approaching ordeal.
Your presence in the private staircase was the last straw.
The Panamanian had changed his clothing.
He could see where the men had had to tear bushes from among the graves in order to insert their tools.
Could he witness the definite imprisonment of his grandfather in a narrow box; could he watch the covering earth fall noisily in that bleak place of silence without displaying for Robinson the guilt that impressed him more and more?
"Doctor Groom?"
Could you ask more?"
He smoked with a vast contentment.
When Bobby had bathed and dressed he found, in spite of his mental turmoil, that his sleep had done him good.
"Bygones are bygones.
It was wet and besmirched with mud, and, in fact was lying half in and half out of a little puddle of water when it was found.
Lapierre gave up all his time to the search, and left the Royal Oak to the care of its landlady.
He had ridden from the door of the Peacock at about a quarter to eight.
But in this they were disappointed.
Every place, likely and unlikely, where a man's body might possibly lie concealed; every tract of bush and woodland; every barn and out building; every hollow and ditch; every field and fence corner, was explored with careful minuteness.
All to no purpose.
There was no longer any room for doubt.
ONE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD.
Here was a deepening of the mystery.
No, they hadn't.
Of this there was no doubt whatever.
Squire Harrington was especially active, and left no stone unturned to unravel the mystery.
Doctor Scott, the local coroner, held himself in readiness to summon a coroner's jury at the shortest notice.
May be found in a cash-book or the kangaroo gait.
Lower preferred.
Magua was content with his success, or too much occupied with his secret purposes to push his inquiries any further.
"His legs were good, though his arm is better for the hoe than the tomahawk," returned the other, pointing to the immovable form of Uncas.
They passed it unmolested.
She lay in a sort of paralysis, indifferent to the objects which crowded before her sight, and happily unconscious of suffering.
Uncas stood still, looking his enemy in the eye with features that seemed superior to emotion.
"My brother is a great medicine," said the cunning savage; "he will try?"
In order to render their games as like the reality as possible, one of the boldest of their number had conveyed a few brands into some piles of tree-tops that had hitherto escaped the burning.
He had not long occupied the seat wisely taken a little in the shade, when another of the elder warriors, who spoke the French language, addressed him:
Though the return of Duncan was likely to remind them of his character, and the suspicious circumstances of his visit, it produced no visible sensation.
The Huron was content with the assurance, and, resuming his pipe, he awaited the proper moment to move.
Their spirits are gone toward the setting sun, and are already crossing the great waters, to the happy hunting-grounds.
Slowly and reluctantly yielding to the necessity, he quitted the place, and mingled with the throng that hovered nigh.
"Thus spoke the sage: the kings without delay Dissolve the council, and their chief obey." --Pope's Iliad
The Indian paused, as if doubtful whether to proceed, and permitted his companion to approach his side.
One had never been known to follow the chase in vain; another had been indefatigable on the trail of their enemies.
Shall this be? Are their souls to enter the land of the just like hungry Iroquois or unmanly Delawares, or shall they meet their friends with arms in their hands and robes on their backs?
The women and children, who lingered around the entrance, took up the words in an echo, which was succeeded by another shrill and plaintive howl.
"My Canada father does not forget his children," said the chief; "I thank him.
The former was rather depressed, than remarkable for the bearing of the natives; and the latter was such as was commonly worn by the ordinary men of the nation.
He again recounted the events of the attack on the island at Glenn's, the death of his associates and the escape of their most formidable enemies.
It is enough."
This cunning savage beheld, and instantly profited by his advantage.
The latter cast an impatient look at his neighbor, and felt his flesh creep with uncontrollable horror when he found himself in actual contact with Magua.
Many of the Hurons understood the strange tongue in which the captive spoke, among which number was Magua.
Each dusky figure seemed a breathing statue, so motionless was the posture, so intense the attention of the individual.
The sudden return of this artful and dreaded chief caused a delay in the departure of the Huron.
You know they are not.
A glimmer of light had constantly been in their front, and they now arrived at the place whence it proceeded.
When the chief, who had solicited the aid of Duncan, finished his pipe, he made a final and successful movement toward departing.
He would greatly have preferred silence and meditation to speech, when a discovery of his real condition might prove so instantly fatal.
Unfortunately for this prudent resolution, his entertainers appeared otherwise disposed.
Then even Duncan knew it, by its restless and sidling attitudes, which kept the upper part of its form in constant motion, while the animal itself appeared seated, to be a bear.
This was brave, that generous.
At a little distance from a bald rock, and directly in its front, they entered a grassy opening, which they prepared to cross.
Marble could not be colder, calmer, or steadier than the countenance he put upon this sudden and vindictive attack.
A large black ball, which at first seemed stationary, now began to move in a manner that to the latter was inexplicable.
The bear growled frequently at his heels, and once or twice its enormous paws were laid on his person, as if disposed to prevent his further passage into the den.
But they departed without food, without guns or knives, without moccasins, naked and poor as they were born.
The quick and ready motion of the chief was not entirely too late.
The boys had resumed their sports in the clearing, and were enacting a mimic chase to the post among themselves.
However much his influence among his people had been impaired by his occasional and besetting weakness, as well as by his desertion of the tribe, his courage and his fame as an orator were undeniable.
It was only as the figure of Uncas stood in the opening of the door that his firm step hesitated.
The hated and yet respected name was repeated as by one voice, carrying the sound even beyond the limits of the lodge.
Gamut, who had stood prepared to pour forth his spirit in song when the visitors entered, after delaying a moment, drew a strain from his pipe, and commenced a hymn that might have worked a miracle, had faith in its efficacy been of much avail.
Profiting by so easy a method of retreat, Duncan stepped after him, and was gladly closing the slight cover to the opening, when he felt it drawn from his hand by the beast, whose shaggy form immediately darkened the passage.
"Let 'Reed-that-bends' go on the hunting path; he will meet them."
"Did my young men take his scalp?"
CHAPTER 24
Let this Delaware die."
"The Delawares have been like bears after the honey pots, prowling around my village.
Go! take him where there is silence; let us see if a Delaware can sleep at night, and in the morning die."
The latter approached her bedside, which was surrounded by females, in the center of whom Heyward was surprised to find his missing friend David.
A glance told him that the blow had failed, and terror changed to admiration.
"The Delawares of the Lakes!"
Duncan, who knew that the animal was often domesticated among the Indians, followed the example of his companion, believing that some favorite of the tribe had found its way into the thicket, in search of food.
A thicket of brush skirted its foot, and it became necessary to proceed through a crooked and narrow path.
But who has ever found a Huron asleep?"
Openings above admitted the light by day, and at night fires and torches supplied the place of the sun.
The darkness of the impending cloud which precedes a burst of thunder was not blacker than the brow of Magua as he exclaimed:
How long the nerves of Heyward would have sustained him in this extraordinary situation, it might be difficult to decide, for, happily, he soon found relief.
They will look on their children with a dark eye, and say, 'Go! a Chippewa has come hither with the name of a Huron.' Brothers, we must not forget the dead; a red-skin never ceases to remember.
Magua caught the expression, and raising his arm, he shook it at the captive, the light silver ornaments attached to his bracelet rattling with the trembling agitation of the limb, as, in a tone of vengeance, he exclaimed, in English:
A single look was sufficient to apprise the pretended leech that the invalid was far beyond his powers of healing.
Can the cunning stranger frighten him away?"
Near a minute these two bold and untamed spirits stood regarding one another steadily in the eye, neither quailing in the least before the fierce gaze he encountered.
A gesture of assent was the answer.
We will load the back of this Mohican until he staggers under our bounty, and dispatch him after my young men.
Just then fresh fuel was added to the fire, and a powerful light penetrated even to that distant spot.
"Spirits differ; some yield to the power of wisdom, while others are too strong."
Instead of manifesting any womanish curiosity to feast his eyes with the sight of a captive from a people he was known to have so much reason to hate, Magua continued to smoke, with the meditative air that he usually maintained, when there was no immediate call on his cunning or his eloquence.
A knot of warriors soon entered the place again, and reissuing, they bore the senseless remains into the adjacent woods.
Without seeming to hesitate, he walked into the lodge, and took his seat with a gravity that accorded admirably with the deportment of his hosts. A hasty but searching glance sufficed to tell him that, though Uncas still remained where he had left him, David had not reappeared.
Then, as if pitying a want of skill which had proved so fortunate to himself, he smiled, and muttered a few words of contempt in his own tongue.
No other restraint was imposed on the former than the watchful looks of a young Huron, who had placed himself at hand; though an armed warrior leaned against the post that formed one side of the narrow doorway.
"Good!" exclaimed two or three of his auditors at the same time.
"Let the Delawares count their prisoners; they will find one whose skin is neither red nor pale."
During the short and frugal repast that followed, the conversation was extremely circumspect, and related entirely to the events of the hunt, in which Magua had so lately been engaged.
She had sought the door of Paradise, and the door of hell had been opened to her!
But she must take care that foolish, extravagant curate should not come near him.
There was no knowing to what he might persuade him!
If the frightful idea which, she did not doubt, had already suggested itself to Leopold, should now be encouraged, there was nothing but black madness before her!
Their quietness is the relief brought by confession--even confession but to their fellows. Is it that the crime seems then lifted a little from their shoulders, and its weight shared by the ace?
"Perhaps not."
"Then give me some food--some hope, I mean, and try me again.
"If it be a thought of something past and gone, for which nothing can be done, I think activity in one's daily work must be the best aid to endurance."
"He wouldn't heed you."
"What would you do then?"
I fear for his brain.
Her voice had sunk almost to a groan.
I know that so long as we hang back from doing what conscience urges, there is no peace for us.
"Because then I could have said, you know where to go for comfort.--Might it not be well however to try if there is any to be had from him that said 'COME UNTO ME, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST?'"
"Alas! alas! that he will not hear of.
Yesterday, when I got alone in the park, I prayed aloud: I thought that perhaps, even if he might not be able to read what was in my heart, he might be able to hear my voice.
It was some moments before either of them spoke, and it did not help Wingfold that she sat clouded by a dark-coloured veil.
The curate paused, but, receiving no assistance, ventured on again.
"Tell me, then, what is the matter; I MAY be able to hint at some hope," said Wingfold, very gently.
Without that, I don't care about duty or life or anything."
In the strength of this much of conscious truth I venture to say--that no crime can be committed against a creature without being committed also against the creator of that creature; therefore surely the first step for anyone who has committed such a crime must be to humble himself before God, confess the sin, and ask forgiveness and cleansing.
"Then you think confession to God is all that is required?"
"Then to forgive and console me."
SUPPOSE, I say, that was what made me miserable!"
"Perhaps Jesus has begun to give you help, though you do not know it yet," he said, "His help may be on the way to you, or even with you, only you do not recognize it for what it is.
"I'm not sure about that."
"You must not fear to trust me because I doubt my ability to help you. I can at least assure you of my sympathy.
"Are you sure," he said at length, "that the person of whom you speak is not neglecting something he ought to do--something he knows perhaps?"
Still I have something more to say, and hesitate only because it may imply more confidence than I dare profess, and of all things I dread untruth.
Again the curate pondered.
ADVICE IN THE DARK.
"But if none were possible--what then?"
"Suppose it were a great wrong that had been done, and that was the unendurable thought?
He would rather be punished than consoled.
"Do you call yourself a Christian?"
If there is anything in religion at all it must rest upon an actual individual communication between God and the creature he has made; and if God heard the man's prayer and forgave him, then the man would certainly know it in his heart and be consoled--perhaps by the gift of humility."
"I speak from experience," the curate went on--"from what else could I speak?
Possibly there is something you ought to do and are not doing, and that is why you cannot rest.
"Then you must of course make all possible reparation," answered Wingfold at once.
Again the curate took time to reply.
"Such things sometimes arise merely from the state of the health, and there the doctor is the best help."
He had come back to the same with which he started.
"I can do nothing with that.
She tried hard, but could not prevent a sob.
I have known that kind of thing. Tell me some fact or some feeling I can lay hold of.
"At least," he said at length, "you could confess the wrong, and ask forgiveness."
"Will you not tell me something about it?" said the curate, yet more gently.
"Can you tell me," she said, from behind more veils than that of lace, "how to get rid of a haunting idea?"
I will not say our prayers are not heard, for Mr. Polwarth has taught me that the most precious answer prayer can have, lies in the growing strength of the impulse towards the dreaded duty, and in the ever sharper stings of the conscience.
She had gone much farther than she had intended; but the more doubtful help became, the more she was driven by the agony of a perishing hope to search the heart of Wingfold.
"Something or other--I don't know what exactly," returned Leopold.--"Oh Helen!" he broke out with a cry, stifled by the caution that had grown habitual to both of them, "is there no help of any kind anywhere?
I could trust the man that said such things as those you told me.
All at once Leopold sat straight up, his eyes fixed and flaming, his face white: he looked like a corpse possessed by a spirit of fear and horror.
A HAUNTED SOUL.
"Nonsense, dear Poldie! it was all fancy--nothing more," she returned, in a voice almost as hollow as his; and the lightness of the words uttered in such a tone jarred dismayfully on her own ear.
Her physical being was wrenched from her control, and she must simply sit and wait until the power or influence, whichever it might be, should pass away.
But in all she did for him, she felt like the executioner who gives restoratives to the wretch that has fainted on the rack or the wheel.
That there have been, alas, are many, who are aware of no ground of hope, nay even who feel no glimmer in them of anything they can call hope, I know; but I think in them all is an underlying unconscious hope.
Helen had not yet thought of asking herself whether her love to her brother was all clear love, and nowise mingled with selfishness--whether in the fresh horror that day poured into the cup that had seemed already running over, it was of her brother only she thought, or whether threatened shame to herself had not a part in her misery.
That I could!--Oh!
"Let her come then, Poldie!
Perhaps utter hopelessness is the outer darkness.
"What was that, Poldie?" asked Helen with a pang of fear.
"I saw her!" he said, in a voice that sounded as if it came from the grave, and she heard it in her heart.
"Helen, Helen!" he cried as she entered the room, "come here, close to me."
She turned away, and pretended to search for something she had dropped.
Helen felt herself grow white.
There is so much passes in us of which our consciousness takes no grasp,--or but with such a flitting touch as scarcely to hand it over to the memory--that I feel encouraged to doubt whether ever there was a man absolutely without hope.
What right had SHE, she thought, to multiply to him his moments of torture?
She started when she saw him: some change had passed on him since the morning!
"I don't think he would be of the slightest use to you," she said, still stooping.
"Fancy!" he repeated; "I know what fancy is as well as any man or woman born: THAT was no fancy.
"No, not if you told him everything," she answered, and felt like a judge condemning him to death.
Before God, Poldie, I would after all rather be you than she.
I think that not one in all the world has more than a shadowy notion of what hopelessness means.
What had he done but utter common-places and truisms about duty?
But that was a foolish fancy, and must be resisted!
"Not if I told him everything?" Leopold hissed from between his teeth in the struggle to keep down a shriek.
But Leopold seemed not to hear a word she said, and lay with his face to the wall.
So he lay and moaned, and she sat crushed and speechless with despairing misery.
Don't you think he might be able to do something?"
She shall know that a sister's love is stronger than the hate of a jilt--even if you did kill her.
Or was it only in her eyes--was she but reading in his face the agony she had herself gone through that day?
Surely, she thought afterwards, she must have been that moment in the presence of something unearthly!
The same moment she was free; the horror had departed from her own atmosphere too, and she made haste to restore him.
"But what am I to do?"
"Well, be it so, then.
"Well, I will mention you to him.
"Yes, so long as he pays me"--
"Yes," said the man, thrusting his hands into his pockets, and looking impudently at the youth; "I have taken the whim into my head; do you understand, Master Benedetto?"
I am very tired, and as I have not eaten so good a dinner as you, I can scarcely stand." The young man shuddered at this strange familiarity.
"Why do you wish to know?" asked Cavalcanti.
Is it as good now?"
"Not at all, my good friend."
"How does that annoy you?"
"He is not a prince; simply a count."
That is what I want."
You know I always did call you my child."
"Well?"
"But, tell me," said Andrea, "am I to remain bareheaded?"
"There now, again you degrade me."
"How did you come to be dining with that prince whose house you have just left?"
"Well, well, don't be angry, my boy; you know well enough what it is to be unfortunate; and misfortunes make us jealous.
A peer of France?"
He contemplated with unspeakable delight the large diamond which shone on the major's little finger; for the major, like a prudent man, in case of any accident happening to his bank-notes, had immediately converted them into an available asset.
"Well, what do you want?"
"I am not begging, my fine fellow," said the unknown to the servant, with so ironical an expression of the eye, and so frightful a smile, that he withdrew; "I only wish to say two or three words to your master, who gave me a commission to execute about a fortnight ago."
"Come, come, what then?"
"Don't think I want the glory of riding in your fine carriage," said he; "oh, no, it's only because I am tired, and also because I have a little business to talk over with you."
"With?"
I speak to you when I can catch you.
"So far I have appeared to answer his purpose."
"You'll honor and believe him--that's right.
You must have discovered a mine, or else become a stockbroker."
Andrea Cavalcanti found his tilbury waiting at the door; the groom, in every respect a caricature of the English fashion, was standing on tiptoe to hold a large iron-gray horse.
And now that you have all you want, and that we understand each other, jump down from the tilbury and disappear."
Chapter 64.
"Hush," said Andrea.
Not at all?"
"Come," said Andrea, "what do you want?"
"Oh, you knew that well enough before speaking to me," said Andrea, becoming more and more excited.
Then he had eaten some without saying a word more; Danglars, therefore, concluded that such luxuries were common at the table of the illustrious descendant of the Cavalcanti, who most likely in Lucca fed upon trout brought from Switzerland, and lobsters sent from England, by the same means used by the count to bring the lampreys from Lake Fusaro, and the sterlet from the Volga.
"Yes."
"By making me apply to the servants, when I want to transact business with you alone."
"Tell me," he said--"tell me what you want?"
"How?
"You do not speak affectionately to me, Benedetto, my old friend, that is not right--take care, or I may become troublesome." This menace smothered the young man's passion.
"It was very polite of you."
"Since you interest yourself in my affairs, I think it is now my turn to ask you some questions."
Certainly, as he had himself owned, the reputed son of Major Cavalcanti was a wilful fellow.
"Come, step in," said the young man.
I have no design upon your count, and you shall have him all to yourself.
"Yes, you."
They passed the barrier without accident.
"You?
"You wrong me, my boy; now I have found you, nothing prevents my being as well-dressed as any one, knowing, as I do, the goodness of your heart.
"Let me at least reach a shady spot," said Andrea.
To this Cavalcanti replied by saying that for some time past his son had lived independently of him, that he had his own horses and carriages, and that not having come together, it would not be difficult for them to leave separately.
"What? a real father?"
On his wife's request, M. de Villefort was the first to give the signal of departure.
We cannot say; but only relate the fact that he shuddered and stepped back suddenly.
"What do you want of me?" he asked.
"Yes; but you had better not have anything to say to him, for he is not a very good-tempered gentleman."
Did the young man recognize that face by the light of the lantern in his tilbury, or was he merely struck with the horrible appearance of his interrogator?
Margaret was the next sister.
"It's a far cry north to my home," said the Scotchwoman, thawing slightly.
At this point Lady Byrne came into the room, and the news had to be retold for her benefit; the letter was produced again, and she joined heartily in the excitement it had caused.
Juliet could get no enthusiasm out of her; and, look which way she might, she could not see any reflection on the faces of those around her of the emotions which stirred in her own breast.
You never did before since we've been here.
"Go?
Lady Byrne declared that it was impossible for her to do so: she had engagements, she said, for every day of the following week, which it was out of the question to break.
"Inside?
She was to lodge at a small hotel in Jermyn Street; and on that first evening even this seemed perfect to her.
"Then why do you say it's something I don't often get?" asked Juliet suspiciously; "I often get letters.
"But I hope they'll tell me.
One hot summer day, a few months after the marriage, Juliet, returning to the consulate after a morning spent in very active exercise upon a tennis court, was met on the doorstep by Dora, the youngest of the Clarency Butchers, who was awaiting her approach in a high state of excitement.
She dressed quickly, in the gayest humour, but with even more care than she usually bestowed upon her appearance; a subject to which she always gave the fullest attention.
She felt that the weather was playing up to the occasion, as became this important morning of her life. For that it was important she did not doubt.
'Something to your advantage!' Just what they put in the agony column when they leave you a fortune.
She departed with an injured air, and Juliet went to look for the consul.
You will hardly be ready to start to-morrow, will you?"
"DEAR MADAM,--We shall esteem it a favour if you can make it convenient to call upon us one day next week, upon a matter of business connected with a member of your family.
I often think that if she had lived she would have told you before now."
"They'll be local men, I have nae doubt.
"I could never find another father half as nice as the one I've got.
They displayed anxiety enough to reach land; but, as far as she could see, what land it was they reached was a matter of indifference to them.
So does Margaret.
On Monday morning she left Ostend, in the company of her maid.
She found her maid--who had been one of the most sea-sick of those aboard--and assisted her ashore, put her into a carriage and ministered to her wants with the help of a tea-basket containing the delicious novelty of English bread and butter.
She was prepared for anything, or so she said to herself, however astounding; and, that being so, she was excited in proportion.
They had it almost to themselves, for there were not many people left in that part of London; but more than one head was turned to gaze at the pretty girl in the garden-party dress, who stood transfixed before shop after shop.
It was a large envelope, addressed in a clerk's handwriting, and she came to the conclusion, as she tore it open, that it must be an advertisement from some shop.
"Not from you." Juliet put her arm through his.
She got up at once and looked out of the window.
"I don't believe I shall be able to get on without my eldest daughter," he replied, half-serious.
She was going to hear tremendous news that day; make wonderful discoveries about her birth; hear undreamt-of things.
What she would do without Juliet to help her in preparing for them, she did not know, but at least it was obvious that some one must be there to receive his guests.
"What should detain her," demanded his wife, "unless it is the discovery of her parents?
"That very one," Juliet assured her, undaunted; and was arrayed in it, in spite of obvious disapproval.
"I have been abroad during a considerable period," replied the person she addressed, a stern-looking Scotchwoman who did not appear anxious to enter into conversation.
Something you don't often get!"
"I could be ready, easily," said Juliet.
"What is it?" he asked, as she put the envelope into his hand.
"You must be glad to be going home," she ventured.
That is all I know.
"I would, like a shot," he replied, "but I can't possibly get away next week.
I'll be stopping in the south with some friends.
Juliet enjoyed every moment of the journey; and would have been sorry when the crossing was over if she had not been so eager to set foot upon her native soil.
"Supposing she is detained in London," he said.
It was a glorious August day.
After breakfast they went out, and, inquiring their way to Bond Street, flattened their noses against the shop windows to their mutual satisfaction.
"If you promised her not to ask, I won't ask either," said Juliet loyally.
You are the child of a friend of hers.
The journey north is awful' expensive."
He read it through carefully.
In any case, she can write, or cable to us when she has seen the solicitors, and it is no use providing for contingencies that will probably never arise."
The next twenty minutes were spent in cross-examining the hotel porter as to the time it would take to drive to her destination, and, having decided to start at ten minutes to twelve, in wondering whether the quarter of an hour which had still to elapse would ever come to an end.
In a few days.
"Hullo, what's this?"
No doubt, she thought, when the ship stopped and they felt better, they would be more disposed to a sentimentality like hers.
"No, but I was brought up in Corsica; you are old and obstinate, I am young and wilful.
"What an appetite you used to have!
The Beggar.
But instead of either of these, he saw nothing but a strange face, sunburnt, and encircled by a beard, with eyes brilliant as carbuncles, and a smile upon the mouth which displayed a perfect set of white teeth, pointed and sharp as the wolf's or jackal's.
But tell me all about it?"
"Pardon me, my friend, if I disturb you," said the man with the red handkerchief, "but I want to speak to you."
"What? do you again defy me?"
The two friends, as we see, were worthy of and understood one another.
"Major Cavalcanti is already one, perhaps; but then, hereditary rank is abolished."
If you have two coats you will give me one of them.
Thus it was with much politeness of manner that he heard Cavalcanti pronounce these words, "To-morrow, sir, I shall have the honor of waiting upon you on business."
"I?"
"What fine words he uses!"
What is his name?"
"And who found this father for you?"
"With a hundred and fifty francs I should be quite happy."
Oh, you are young while I am beginning to get old.
"It does not; on the contrary, I think it will answer my purpose."
"If I had been wearing a handkerchief like yours on my head, rags on my back, and worn-out shoes on my feet, you would not have known me."
"Come, if you will only put this scheme into execution, and be steady, nothing could be better."
"I think that with a hundred francs a month"--
"The Count of Monte Cristo."
Meanwhile, what are you going to do?"
"Come, come; I always said you were a fine fellow, and it is a blessing when good fortune happens to such as you.
"Patience--patience!"
"Oh, as for that, I'll take you to a splendid place," said the man with the handkerchief; and taking the horse's bit he led the tilbury where it was certainly impossible for any one to witness the honor that Andrea conferred upon him.
I thought you were earning a living in Tuscany or Piedmont by acting as facchino or cicerone, and I pitied you sincerely, as I would a child of my own.
Between people like us threats are out of place, everything should be amicably arranged.
Speak quickly, friend."
"So that, as you confess, you are jealous?"
"I hope I am not the cause."
"Upon a hundred francs!"
"Apply to the steward on the first day of every month, and you will receive the same sum."
At this name, no doubt, the young man reflected a little, for he went towards his groom, saying, "This man is right; I did indeed charge him with a commission, the result of which he must tell me; walk to the barrier, there take a cab, that you may not be too late." The surprised groom retired.
"I will do my best," said the inn-keeper of the Pont du Gard, shutting up his knife.
As for Andrea, he began, by way of showing off, to scold his groom, who, instead of bringing the tilbury to the steps of the house, had taken it to the outer door, thus giving him the trouble of walking thirty steps to reach it.
"Why, just think for a moment; with this red handkerchief on my head, with scarcely any shoes, no papers, and ten gold napoleons in my pocket, without reckoning what was there before--making in all about two hundred francs,--why, I should certainly be arrested at the barriers.
At that moment a hand touched his shoulder.
Your tilbury, your groom, your clothes, are not then hired?
The groom heard him with humility, took the bit of the impatient animal with his left hand, and with the right held out the reins to Andrea, who, taking them from him, rested his polished boot lightly on the step.
He drew up for a minute, threw a rapid glance around him, and then his hand fell instantly into his pocket, where it began playing with a pistol.
"All at once I see you pass through the barrier with a groom, a tilbury, and fine new clothes.
"True," said Andrea.
"Is he pleased with you?"
The latter, faithful to the principle of Horace, nil admirari, had contented himself with showing his knowledge by declaring in what lake the best lampreys were caught.
"I am patient, but go on."
"'How,' do you ask?
"No; the fact is, I have found my father."
Take it from me then, and so long at least as I receive my income, you shall be paid yours."
A red handkerchief encircled his gray head; torn and filthy garments covered his large bony limbs, which seemed as though, like those of a skeleton, they would rattle as he walked; and the hand with which he leaned upon the young man's shoulder, and which was the first thing Andrea saw, seemed of gigantic size.
"And I, sir," said Danglars, "shall be most happy to receive you." Upon which he offered to take Cavalcanti in his carriage to the Hotel des Princes, if it would not be depriving him of the company of his son.
You have a quick horse, a light tilbury, you are naturally as slippery as an eel; if I had missed you to-night, I might not have had another chance."
"How can I help that, my boy?
"Come, come; enough of this," said Cavalcanti.
"Major Cavalcanti."
"Come--you understand me; but that with"--
"You have no right to beg at night," said the groom, endeavoring to rid his master of the troublesome intruder.
No, no, my boy; I prefer remaining honorably in the capital." Andrea scowled.
I saw men begin to come upon the porch, but I didn't think anything about it.
It is a great pity that such women should be subjected to this treatment.
Demanded to see Superintendent Whittaker. Request refused.
A negro trusty was there.
The walls and floors were brick or stone cemented over.
This conservative, Southern judge said of the petition for the writ, "It is shocking and blood- curdling."
Mrs. John Winters Brannan was among the women who endured the "night of terror." Mrs. Brannan is the daughter of Charles A. Dana, founder of the New York Sun and that great American patriot of liberty who was a trusted associate -and counselor of Abraham Lincoln.
Went there and found our clothes.
Finally the tube was withdrawn.
their sentences in the District Jail, where they would join Miss Paul and her companions, all save one were immediately sent to Occoquan workhouse.
Massachusetts-Mrs.
Then I lost my balance and fell against the iron bed.
We began at once to serve the writ.
This week of brutality, which rivaled old Russia, if it did not outstrip it, was almost the blackest page in the Administration's cruel fight against women.
I am used to remembering a bad foot, which I have had for years, and I remember saying, "I'll come with you; don't drag me;
I didn't have my feet on the ground.
Again they were arrested.
Here are some of the scraps of Miss Burn's day-by-day log, smuggled out of the workhouse.
Charles W. Barnes, Indianapolis. Oklahoma-Mrs.
First Group
He urged her, however, to pay her fine, hinting that jail might be too severe on her and might bring on death.
Suddenly the door literally burst open and Whittaker burst in like a tornado; some men followed him.
"One of the few warning incidents during the gray days of our imprisonment was the unexpected sympathy and understanding of one of the government doctors," wrote Miss Betty Gram of Portland, Oregon.
The following is the statement of Mrs. Nolan, dictated upon her release, in the presence of Mr. Dudley Field Malone:
So thought the Administration! To their great surprise, however, in the face of that reckless and extreme sentence, the longest picket line of the entire campaign formed at the White House in the late afternoon of November 10th.
They stood guard several minutes before the police, taken unawares, could summon sufficient force to arrest them, and commandeer enough cars to carry them to police headquarters.
The effect of this upon our nerves can better be imagined than described . . . .
Face to face with an embarrassing number of prisoners the Administration used its wits and decided to reduce the number to a manageable size before imprisoning this group.
before.
I thought of the offense with which we had been charged,-merely that of obstructing traffic,-and felt that the treatment that we had received was out of all proportion to the offense with which we were charged, and that the superintendent, the matron and guards would not have dared to act towards us as they had acted unless they relied upon the support of higher authorities.
This was her second term of imprisonment. She wrote a comprehensive affidavit of her experience.
Failing to secure this, she went daily to Mr. Tumulty's office asking if he himself would not intercede for her.
I could not sleep, having a sense of constant danger . . . .
Asked for Whittaker, who came.
Operation leaves one very sick.
"You're posted," said I.
None could be reached by telephone.
There were exceptionally dramatic figures in this group.
Miss Burns is so gifted a writer that I feel apologetic for using these scraps in their raw form, but I know she will forgive me.
Second Group
Of the experience Mrs. Lewis wrote:-
"We cannot wait."
This morning Dr. Ladd appeared with his tube.
Counsel sought a deputy.
weakened condition and before the end of the week they hoped to increase their facilities for forcible feeding at the workhouse. They also wished to conceal the treatment of the women, the exposure of which would be inevitable in any court proceedings. And lastly, the Administration was anxious to avoid opening up the whole question of the legality of the very existence of the workhouse in Virginia.
Mrs. Cosu called out, "They have just thrown Mrs. Lewis in here, too."
Although the writ had been applied for in the greatest secrecy, a detective suddenly appeared to accompany Mr. O'Brien from Washington to Norfolk, during his stay in Norfolk, and back to Washington.
I am not yet prepared to try the case."
Fourth Group
Kate Stafford, Oklahoma City. Minnesota-Mrs.
She is a little girl.
Both refused.
But their minds were too full of the political aspect of our offense to conceal it. "The truth of the situation is that the court has not been given power to meet it," the judge lamented.
William Kent, Kentfield. Oregon-Miss Alice Gram, Miss Betty Gram, Portland. Utah-Mrs.
Left nostril, throat and muscles of neck very sore all night.
Mrs. Lewis stood up.
I saw Dorothy Day brought in.
out: "There was no disorder.
I was released on the sixth day and passed the dispensary as I came out.
She was fed after three days.
In order to show how widely representative of the nation this group of pickets was, I give its personnel complete:
The Administration tried in another way to stop picketing.
He brought news that unknown tortures were going on.
I said, "No."
Dr. Gannon told me then I must be fed.
When we were dressed, Dr. Gannon appeared, and said he wished to examine us.
"In a week?
Failing of that they tried still another way out.
During all of this time, . . . Superintendent Whittaker was . . . directing the whole attack. . . .
It was evident that the Administration was cognizant of every move in this procedure before it was executed.
I think I made him think.
He motioned to the guard.
It is impossible for me to describe the terror of that night. . .
A man sprang at me and caught me by the shoulder.
The next day they brought me some toast and a plate of food, the first I had been offered in over 36 hours.
Alice M. Cosu, New Orleans. Maryland-Miss Mary Bartlett Dixon, Easton; Miss Julia Emory, Baltimore. Florida-Mrs.
New York-Mrs.
Forty-one women picketed in protest against this wanton persecution of their leader, as well as against the delay in passing the amendment.
We could see a crowd of them on the porch.
All of us were seized by men guards and dragged to cells in men's part.
Mine was filthy.
We were so terrified we kept very still.
Previous to the feeding I had been forcibly examined by Dr. Gannon, I protesting that I wished a woman physician.
If you approach, I'll bark.
I swear to you that there is nothing in this house."
He halted, and said gently:--
She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath came from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.
As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--
Oh, yes, much!
"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I entreat you, you are a good fellow, don't enter."
"Bitch!"
There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom, where they appeared to melt away.
There are six of you, what matters that to me?
Eponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again, and said:--
She fastened her intent gaze upon Thenardier and said:--
"I won't go, so there now," pouted Eponine like a spoiled child; "you send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've hardly had time to kiss you."
Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians who were armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages of demons, and said in a firm, low voice:--
Two days in succession--this was too much.
I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall be cold this winter.
"Well, I don't mean that you shall."
"Burst!"
The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin. She went on:--
Thenardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever the rest pleased.
And he pointed out to Eponine, across the tops of the trees, a light which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion.
She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without breathing, a prey to her thoughts.
Eponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the road by which they had come.
I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you."
"I am here, little father, because I am here.
He had the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was known that he had plundered a police post simply out of bravado.
The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings.
You are men.
She rose and began to creep after them along the walls and the houses.
He retreated, growling between his teeth:--
"Not so close, my good man!" said she.
Let's quit."
You've embraced me.
There was a dim nook there, in which Eponine was entirely concealed.
The neighboring street lantern illuminated her profile and her attitude.
I don't hit a lady."
I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"
Two women, an old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains that ain't so bad at the windows.
"But good day, good evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"
It was Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen to dry.
"There are lone women," said Guelemer.
So you're out?"
Thenardier replied:--
So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact.
"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier.
Because you have finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed when you put on a big voice, forsooth!
In the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on this gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody, I'll have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."
But Eponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.
"She's well.
They went away.
"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a ventriloquist.
It is remarkable that Eponine did not talk slang.
"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"
It was only on the evening before that she had attempted to address him.
She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she swung her foot with an air of indifference.
It was precisely at the point where the railing touched the neighboring wall.
"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thenardier.
The old cove must be a Jew.
"I wouldn't.
"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"
"When we've turned the house upside down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below, we'll tell you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous or half-farthings."
Up to that time, she had contented herself with watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to encounter him.
Thenardier tried to disentangle himself from Eponine's arms, and grumbled:--
"Why, what's the matter with her?"
Thenardier resumed in his decided tone:--
"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.
"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud.
These men began to talk in a low voice.
Thenardier made a movement towards her.
That frightful tongue had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.
"So much the better," said the second who had spoken.
I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't care a straw for you.
I am the daughter of my father, perhaps.
Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows, "put up the job," had not as yet spoken.
She resumed:--
In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.
Eponine made a final effort.
Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"
She shook her head and added:--
"Friends!
At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--
"Ah, see here, what are you about there?
"So you mean to enter this house?"
Isn't a person allowed to sit on the stones nowadays?
Now, get away with you."
In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him eat."
She followed them thus as far as the boulevard.
It's a long time since I've seen you!
It's a shame to miss this, anyway.
Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened.
Well, I have made inquiries; you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see.
The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check by a girl, retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern, and held counsel with furious and humiliated shrugs.
He recoiled and stammered:--
"It won't screech under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."
I mean it too.
"Ha'ie 's throwed me down."
For instance, the whole way of a family's life may be changed.
He fell again.
He looked as she had never seen him look before.
The very inanity of the man disgusted her, and on a sudden impulse she sprang up and struck him full in the face with the flat of her hand.
"Oh, a hair of the dog.
She had at first given him his gentle push, but when she saw that his collapse would lose her a faithful and useful slave she had sought to check his course.
The reporter sat thinking for a time and then followed him, leaving Joe in a drunken sleep at the table.
She showed him that she was proud of him.
What about your father?"
His eyes fell to her throat.
They gave it the caress of death. She struggled.
She gazed at him fascinated.
"Who is it?" she cried in affright.
This was not the boy that she had turned and twisted about her little finger.
"You made me what I am, and then you sent me away. You let me come back, and now you put me out."
For almost four years this had happened intermittently.
Some one was playing rag-time on the piano, and the dancers were wheeling in time to the music.
Then he turned abruptly and left the club.
Her threat of the severance of their relations had held him up for a little time, and she began to believe that he was safe again.
"Here, here, tell us about your father and the money.
"You put me out--you--you, and you made me what I am." The realisation of what he was, of his foulness and degradation, seemed just to have come to him fully.
"Now, go, you drunken dog, and never put your foot inside this house again."
"I 'm goin' to kill her." He paused and looked at them drowsily.
He went back to the work he had neglected, drank moderately, and acted in most things as a sound, sensible being.
This was a terrible, terrible man or a monster.
Still he crept slowly towards her, his lips working and his hands moving convulsively.
His fingers had closed over her throat just where the gown had left it temptingly bare.
"Who did?
Here, Jack!"
This he gulped down, and followed with another and another.
He was too weak to resist the blow, and, tumbling from the chair, fell limply to the floor, where he lay at her feet, alternately weeping aloud and quivering with drunken, hiccoughing sobs.
"Well," sneered Sadness, "you see drunken men tell the truth, and you don't seem to get much guilt out of our young friend.
The scream was checked as it began.
Finally he flung her from him like a rag, and sank into a chair.
It may be true that the habits of years are hard to change, but this is not true of the first sixteen or seventeen years of a young person's life, else Kitty Hamilton and Joe could not so easily have become what they were.
Bet the chap stole it himself and 's letting the old man suffer for it.
Still his hands twitched and his eye held her.
Hullo there!" as the young man brought up against him; "take a seat." He put him in a chair at the table.
The reporter did not like this.
"In some cases," said Sadness.
"You ought to be put under a glass case and placed on exhibition."
She was a light sleeper, and his step awakened her.
It was very late when he reached Hattie's door, but he opened it with his latch-key, as he had been used to do.
What?"
Then he was battered, unkempt, and thick of speech.
The independence of respectability may harden into the insolence of defiance, and the sensitive cheek of modesty into the brazen face of shamelessness.
"You put me out to-night," he repeated, "like a dog."
Good natures may be made into bad ones and out of a soul of faith grow a spirit of unbelief.
FRANKENSTEIN
She fell back upon her pillow in silence.
Men also relate the tale of
I threw the reins on the mule's shoulders and gave myself up to regrets and melancholy thoughts, whilst she fared on with me to the eastward of Baghdad.
THE WOMAN WHOSE HANDS WERE CUT OFF FOR GIVING ALMS TO THE POOR.
When it was the Three Hundred and Fiftieth Night,
Answered he, 'O my lord, it is yet but the first third of the night and indeed we have hardly had time to rest.' I returned to my bed, but sleep was forbidden to me and I ceased not to awaken the boy, and he to put me off, till break of day, when he saddled me the mule, and I mounted and rode out, not knowing whither to go.
Succour Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi.' I awoke a second time, but knowing thee not I went to sleep again; and he came to me a third time and still I knew thee not and went to sleep again.
But, haply, this is a dream; for how could I hope that one of the Caliphate house should visit my humble home and carouse with me this night?' I conjured him to be seated; so he sat down and began to question me as to the cause of my visit in the most courteous terms.
Now this was the woman who had given two scones as an alms to the asker, and whose hands had been cut off therefor; and when the King married her, her fellow-wives envied her and wrote to the common husband that she was an unchaste, having just given birth to the boy; so he wrote to his mother, bidding her carry the woman into the desert and leave her there.
And Allah is the Giver, the Bestower!
A certain King once made proclamation to the people of his realm saying, "If any of you give alms of aught, I will verily and assuredly cut off his hand;" wherefore all the people abstained from alms-deed, and none could give anything to any one.
When it was Three Hundred and Forty-eighth Night
When it was the Three Hundred and Forty-ninth Night,
As she went along, she came to a river and knelt down to drink, being overcome with excess of thirst, for fatigue of walking and for grief; but, as she bent her head, the child which was at her neck fell into the water.
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Ibrahim son of Al-Mahdi continued: "Now when the housemaster heard my name he sprang to his feet and said, 'Indeed I wondered that such gifts should belong to any but the like of thee; and Fortune hath done me a good turn for which I cannot thank her too much.
So I said to him, 'Allah give thee health!
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the man took the trencher and jar to the bazar, but none would buy them of him.
The old Queen obeyed his commandment and abandoned the woman and her son in the desert; whereupon she fell to weeping for that which had befallen her and wailing with exceeding sore wail.
Things being on this wise there came to me one day certain of my servants and said to me, 'At the door is a pilgrim wight, who seeketh admission to thee.' Quoth I, 'Admit him.' So he came in and behold, he was a Khorasani.
Begin with the sister;' and he answered, 'With joy and goodwill.' So she came down and he showed me her hand and behold, she was the owner of the hand and wrist.
THE DEVOUT ISRAELITE.
And men relate a tale of
Quoth I, 'Allah make me thy ransom!
Never heard I of his like." And he bade Ibrahim bin al-Mahdi bring him to court, that he might see him.
And men recount this story of
"Call her when supper is ready," replied mother, who asked me to come into the bedroom where Arthur was sleeping.
I pondered over what father had said; he had perceived something in me which I was not aware of.
Verry turned her face to the wall and said no more; but she had started a less pleasant train of thought.
"By the way, you must take lessons in Milford; I wish you would learn to sing." I acquiesced, but I had no wish to learn to play.
"Grand'ther does not like me; I never pleased him."
Mr. Park, entering, retreated into one, and mother was obliged to forego the pleasure of undressing Arthur; so she sent him off with Temperance and Charles, whose duty it was to rock the cradle as long as his babyship required.
CHAPTER XI.
"But I never heard a word of grand'ther's prayers.
"Cassandra," she spoke with haste, "did you experience any shadow of a change during the revival at Barmouth?"
Say so to my own child?"
"Mother," she said, "eating toast does not make me better-tempered; I feel evil still.
Mother retired; Verry still played.
She then gave him a large slice of the cake.
As we began our meal, Veronica came in from the kitchen, with a plate of toasted crackers.
She had grown tall; her face was still long and narrow, but prettier, and her large, dark eyes had a slight cast, which gave her face an indescribable expression.
Is it best to cook more, Mrs. Morgeson, now that Cassandra has come?"
Can you forget you said such a thing?"
Her hand was pressed against her breast, as if she were repressing an inward voice which claimed her attention.
We left Veronica at the table, and mother resumed her conversation with me in a corner of the room.
"Is it salt?"
Soon after father came, and Hepsey brought in his hot supper; while he was eating it, Grandfather John Morgeson bustled in.
Hepsey was stationed by the bannock, knife in hand, to serve it.
I must, of course, be left to myself in many things; but he hoped that I would confide in him, if I did not ask his advice.
Temperance brought Arthur to the table half asleep, but he roused when she drummed on his plate with a spoon.
She comprehended him, and, giving her head a slight toss, told Verry to go and play on the piano.
Were you glad to see Cassy home again?"
"Excellent.
Leaning her head against her chair, she had quite pushed out her comb, her hair dropped on her shoulder, and looked like a brown, coiled serpent.
You know," turning to me, "that my temper is worse than ever; it is like a tiger's."
I took one of the brass lamps, proposing to go to bed.
Grandfather pursed up his mouth, and turned toward mother, as if he would like to say: "You understand bringing up children, don't you?"
"Oh, Verry," said mother, "not quite so bad; you are too hard upon yourself."
As she passed she gave me a dark look.
Distant, indifferent, and speculative as the eyes were, a ray of fire shot into them occasionally, which made her gaze powerful and concentrated.
She changed the subject.
Presently Temperance came in with Charles, bringing fresh plates.
I looked round the room; nothing had been added to it, except red damask curtains, which were out of keeping with the old chintz covers.
"Middling."
"Don't you wish to see Arthur?" inquired mother; "he is getting his double teeth."
She set the plate down, and gravely shook hands with me, saying she had concluded to live entirely on toast, but supposed I would eat all sorts of food, as usual.
A very strong relation of reserve generally existed between parent and child, instead of a confidential one, and the child was apt to discover that reserve on the part of the parent was not superiority, but cowardice, or indifference.
I heard the wonted sound of the banging of doors.
Though the fire had gone out, the lamps winked brightly, and father, moving his cigar to the other side of his mouth, changed his regards from one lamp to the other, and said he thought I was growing to be an attractive girl.
I could never perform mechanically what I heard now from Verry.
When I entered the house, and saw mother in her old place, her surroundings unaltered, I suffered a disappointment. I had not had the power of transferring the atmosphere of my year's misery to Surrey.
He threw away the stump of his cigar, and went to fasten the hall-door.
"Oh yes, and where's Veronica?"
"Let it not be so with us," was his conclusion.
"Temperance, is that pound cake, or sponge?"
He asked me if I would take pains to make myself an accomplished one also?
"Are you unhappy because you love him so well, mother, and feel that you must make expiation?"
"Charles can eat it," Verry said with a sigh.
Veronica, who had been silently observing her, rose from the sofa, picked up the comb, and fastened her hair, without speaking.
It was changed again by Temperance coming with lights.
I meditated how I could best amuse myself, where I should go, and what I should do, when Veronica, whom I had forgotten, interrupted my thoughts.
She looked astonished, then reflective.
Hepsey, rubbing her fingers against her thumb, remarked that she hoped learning had not taken away my appetite.
"Pound."
"How is the bannock?"
But he has not been here long; they are all so when they first come."
As soon as they began their supper, Veronica asked Temperance how the fish tasted.
When we rode over the brow of the hill within a mile of Surrey, and I saw the crescent-shaped village, and the tall chimneys of our house on its outer edge, instead of my heart leaping for joy, as I had expected, a sudden indifference filled it.
I wish Hepsey would not load our table as she does."
He encouraged mother not to be afraid, looking keenly at me.
"It is probably the chamber for visitors.
We parted with many a kiss and shake of the hand and last words.
As a mother, she could appreciate her anxiety and sadness in leaving me.
"Where?"
This was all the feast except sponge cake, which felt like muslin in the fingers; I could have squeezed the whole of it into my mouth.
She was a dignified, kind-looking woman, who asked me a few questions in such a pleasant, direct manner that I frankly told her I was eighteen years old, very ignorant, and averse from learning; but I did not speak loud enough for anybody beside herself to hear.
I struck out my hands through the palpable darkness, to find the bed without disturbing mother, whose soul was calmly threading the labyrinth of sleep.
Its fragrance was intoxicating.
"By to-morrow these little white bells will be dead."
She went to Boston that Friday afternoon, anxious to get safely home with Veronica.
"She never told her love," nor did she allow concealment to "feed on her damask cheek." In all her employments, in her ways about the house, and her accustomed quiet mirth, she was the same as ever.
In this she showed the peculiar strength which God had given her.
And, Fanny, don't tell Mark to put me into a lunatic asylum.
Miss Grantly will have a large fortune, I believe."
"Very well, say eleven.
She liked to rule, and she made people feel that she liked it.
"Well, Lucy, we must drive ourselves, that's all.
I do like Lord Lufton very much; and I do dislike Griselda Grantly almost as much.
At such period he was a pattern parson and a pattern husband, atoning to his own conscience for past shortcomings by present zeal.
"I beg Puck's pardon.
The parish duty was better attended to, and perhaps domestic duties also.
"I really think she is; not what I should call lovely, you know, but very beautiful.
It was now the month of April, and the fields were beginning to look green, and the wind had got itself out of the east and was soft and genial, and the early spring flowers were showing their bright colours in the parsonage garden, and all things were sweet and pleasant.
What would the men do? and what--oh! what would become of the women?
He ought to know that she is a mere automaton, cold, lifeless, spiritless, and even vapid.
The pony-carriage is wretched for three."
"Well, no; I think not.
But she did not betray herself.
He was going very nicely."
CHAPTER XXI.
He now felt that he might accept the stall without discredit to himself as a clergyman in doing so. Indeed, after what Mr. Sowerby had said, and after Lord Lufton's assent to it, it would have been madness, he considered, to decline it.
It's horridly improper to care about such a thing, I have no doubt."
"The house will not be furnished, will it, Mark?" said his wife.
"No, I could not.
"We'll take you to Barchester for that.
"You had better say earlier, as he is always out about the parish."
It is parish business about which I am going, so it need not irk his conscience to stay in for me."
"And are you a great scholar?" asked Lucy, drawing the child to her.
"Yes; I have heard of it," said Mr. Crawley, gravely.
"It is a mistake.
But what can I do?
"Of all my own acquaintance, Mrs. Crawley, I think, comes nearest to heroism."
I suppose you have heard of his good fortune?"
Would it not be a good work?
"Miss Robarts, I am afraid you must excuse me," said he, getting up and taking his hat and stick.
But, nevertheless, Grace was a pretty, simple-looking girl, and clung to her ally closely, and seemed to like being fondled.
"Greek Delectus and the irregular verbs!" And Lucy put up her hands with astonishment.
God has tried us with want, and for my children's sake I am glad of such relief."
"But some of them are mine," said the boy; "ain't they, Grace?"
Dear Mrs. Robarts, you must not be surprised at him.
Could we have looked into the innermost spirit of him and his life's partner, we should have seen that mixed with the pride of his poverty there was some feeling of disgrace that he was poor, but that with her, regarding this matter, there was neither pride nor shame. The realities of life had become so stern to her that the outward aspects of them were as nothing.
"It is all that I can give them," said Mr. Crawley, apologetically. "A little scholarship is the only fortune that has come in my way, and I endeavour to share that with my children."
"Oh, yes; there is nothing here but this young gentleman's library," said Lucy, moving a pile of ragged, coverless books on to the table. "I hope he'll forgive me for moving them."
"I know that it is.
"But he will have the house, will he not?"
"But you may get better preferment."
When they were again in the pony-carriage, behind the impatient Puck, and were well away from the door, Fanny was the first to speak.
Their faces are doubtful in color, neither sickly nor quite healthy-looking, and seamed with deep wrinkles like the bark of the spruces, but with no trace of anxiety.
It is regarded as being yet a far wild west--a dim, nebulous expanse of woods--by those who do not know that railroads and steamers have brought the country out of the wilderness and abolished the old distances.
Then they too grow rich and spend their money on red cloth and trinkets.
In a general way it resembles the well-known Nevada Fall in Yosemite, having the same twisted appearance at the top and the free plunge in numberless comet-shaped masses into a deep pool seventy-five or eighty yards in diameter.
The road leads through majestic woods with ferns ten feet high beneath some of the thickets, and across a gravelly plain deforested by fire many years ago.
XIX.
Many are killed every year, both for their flesh and skins.
But woe to the ranch should fire-water get there!
Orange lilies are plentiful, and handsome shining mats of the kinnikinic, sprinkled with bright scarlet berries.
It is now near to all the world and is in possession of a share of the best of all that civilization has to offer, while on some of the lines of advancement it is at the front.
Others again take the steamers for Victoria, Fraser River, or Vancouver, the new ambitious town at the terminus of the Canadian Railroad, thus getting views of the outer world in a near foreign country.
From a place called "Hunt's," at the end of the wagon road, a trail leads through lush, dripping woods (never dry) to Thuja and Mertens, Menzies, and Douglas spruces.
It is a fine thing to see people in hot earnest about anything; therefore, however extravagant and high the brag ascending from Puget Sound, in most cases it is likely to appear pardonable and more.
Their clothing is full of rosin and never wears out.
The main streets are crowded with bright, wide-awake lawyers, ministers, merchants, agents for everything under the sun; ox drivers and loggers in stiff, gummy overalls; back-slanting dudes, well-tailored and shiny; and fashions and bonnets of every feather and color bloom gayly in the noisy throng and advertise London and Paris.
The spirit of progress is in the air.
Still more striking are their queer camps on the edges of the fields or over on the river bank, with the firelight shining on their wild jolly faces.
The elk and perhaps also the moose still exist in the most remote and inaccessible solitudes of the forest, but their numbers have been greatly reduced of late, and even the most experienced hunters have difficulty in finding them.
It is the terminus of the Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern Railroad, now in process of construction, and calls itself the "Queen City of the Sound" and the "Metropolis of Washington." What the populations of these towns number I am not able to say with anything like exactness.
Many of their companions are already beneath the moss, and among those that we see at work some are now dead at the top (bald), leafless, so to speak, and tottering to their fall.
With their own scenery so glorious ever on show, one would at first thought suppose that these happy Puget Sound people would never go sightseeing from home like less favored mortals.
Their edges run back for miles into the woods among the trees and stumps and brush which hide a good many of the houses and the stakes which mark the lots; so that, without being as yet very large towns, they seem to fade away into the distance.
The large brown species likes higher and opener ground.
It is the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and calls itself the "City of Destiny." Seattle is also charmingly located about twenty miles down the Sound from Tacoma, on Elliott Bay.
The squirrel is everywhere, and the goat you can hardly fail to find if you climb any of the high mountains.
The people, however, are in no wise discouraged, and ere long the loss will be gain, inasmuch as a better class of buildings, chiefly of brick, are being erected in place of the inflammable wooden ones, which, with comparatively few exceptions, were built of pitchy spruce.
Lithe and sinewy, he walks erect, making his way with the skill of wild animals, all his senses in action, watchful and alert, looking keenly at everything in sight, his imagination well nourished in the wealth of the wilderness, coming into contact with free nature in a thousand forms, drinking at the fountains of things, responsive to wild influences, as trees to the winds.
Among the most interesting of all the summer rest and pleasure places is the famous "Hop Ranch" on the upper Snoqualmie River, thirty or forty miles eastward from Seattle.
Hungry at times and weary, he has corresponding enjoyment in eating and resting, and all the wilderness is home.
They are already towns "with all modern improvements, first-class in every particular," as is said of hotels. They have electric motors and lights, paved broadways and boulevards, substantial business blocks, schools, churches, factories, and foundries.
To many, especially in the Atlantic States, Washington is hardly known at all.
On the portions most easily cleared some three hundred acres of hop vines have been planted and are now in full bearing, yielding, it is said, at the rate of about a ton of hops to the acre.
Nor in your walks in the woods will you be likely to see many of the wild animals, however far you may go, with the exception of the Douglas squirrel and the mountain goat.
Seattle and Tacoma are at present far in the lead of all others in the race for supremacy, and these two are keen, active rivals, to all appearances well matched. Tacoma occupies near the head of the Sound a site of great natural beauty.
A little of everything in the woods is stuck fast to these loggers, and their trousers grow constantly thicker with age.
The pool is of considerable depth, as is shown by the radiating well-beaten foam and mist, which is of a beautiful rose color at times, of exquisite fineness of tone, and by the heavy waves that lash the rocks in front of it.
Still it is hard to realize how much good work is being done here of a kind that makes for civilization--the enthusiastic, exulting energy displayed in the building of new towns, railroads, and mills, in the opening of mines of coal and iron and the development of natural resources in general.
From the hotel at the ranch village the road to the fall leads down the right bank of the river through the magnificent maple woods I have mentioned elsewhere, and fine views of the fall may be had on that side, both from above and below.
Perhaps enough of hops might be raised in Washington for the wants of all the world, but it would be impossible to find pickers to handle the crop.
He is a dangerous animal, a near relative of the famous grizzly, and wise hunters are very fond of letting him alone.
Some of these rare, happy rovers die alone among the leaves.
Green River is a small rocky stream with picturesque banks, and derives its name from the beautiful pale-green hue of its waters.
A very different man, seen now and then at long intervals but usually invisible, is the free roamer of the wilderness--hunter, prospector, explorer, seeking he knows not what.
About a thousand Indians are required as pickers at the Snoqualmie ranch alone, and a lively and merry picture they make in the field, arrayed in bright, showy calicoes, lowering the rustling vine pillars with incessant song-singing and fun.
Many a tree have these old axemen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping, they too are beginning to lean over.
The towns of Puget Sound are of a very lively, progressive, and aspiring kind, fortunately with abundance of substance about them to warrant their ambition and make them grow.
Like young sapling sequoias, they are sending out their roots far and near for nourishment, counting confidently on longevity and grandeur of stature.
The ground is covered with the best moss-work of the moist lands of the north, made up mostly of the various species of hypnum, with some liverworts, marchantia, jungermannia, etc., in broad sheets and bosses, where never a dust particle floated, and where all the flowers, fresh with mist and spray, are wetter than water lilies.
Others will take the train to the Franklin and Newcastle or Carbon River coal mines for the sake of the thirty- or forty-mile rides through the woods, and a look into the black depths of the underworld.
The lusty, titanic clang of boiler making may be heard there, and plenty of the languid music of pianos mingling with the babel noises of commerce carried on in a hundred tongues.
In these Washington wilds, living alone, all sorts of men may perchance be found--poets, philosophers, and even full-blown transcendentalists, though you may go far to find them.
It is situated on the main river, where it plunges over a sheer precipice, about two hundred and forty feet high, in leaving the level meadows of the ancient lake basin.
I noticed the tracks of deer in many places among the lily gardens, and at the height of about seven thousand feet I came upon the fresh trail of a flock of wild sheep, showing that these fine mountaineers still flourish here above the range of Mormon rifles.
In winter only the bulbs are alive, sleeping deep beneath the ground, like field mice in their nests; then the snow-flowers fall above them, lilies over lilies, until the spring winds blow, and these winter lilies wither in turn; then the hiding erythroniums and fritillarias rise again, responsive to the first touches of the sun.
Our altitude that evening was 8,650 feet above the sea -- that is to say, at the foot of the glacier we had reached an altitude of 8,450 feet, or a drop from the Butcher's of 2,570 feet.
The wind aft, no doubt, helped the pace somewhat, but it alone could not account for the change.
The surface, which had become perfectly level, had the appearance at times of sinking; in any case, one would have thought so from the pace of the sledges.
The others, who were following, stopped when they came up to him.
We continued our course in the constant expectation of finding some surprise or other in our line of route.
It was Wisting who did this, thinking, presumably, that an extra mark would do no harm.
The air ahead of us was as black as pitch, as though it concealed something.
Our day's march was eighteen and a half miles.
Thanks to his presence of mind and a lightning-like movement -- some would call it luck -- he managed to save himself.
It was heavy going, though better than on the previous day.
They had to drive with great circumspection and patience to grapple with the kind of ground we had before us; a slight mistake might be enough to send both sledge and dogs with lightning rapidity into the next world.
We kept it going, however, by using the utmost caution.
For that matter, the site of the depot was so well marked by its position under the foot of the glacier that we agreed it would be impossible to miss it.
At any rate, our companions acknowledged the justness of the name with ringing acclamations when we told them of it.
We trampled down a place for the tent in the loose snow, and soon got it up.
It could not be a storm, or it would have been already upon us.
Meanwhile the sastrugi grew smaller and smaller, and finally they disappeared altogether, and the surface became quite flat.
So far the incline had not been so great as to cause uneasiness, but if it seriously began to go downhill, we should have to stop and camp.
During the evening the wind moderated a little, and went more to the east; we went to sleep with the best hopes for the following day.
The descent was easy and smooth, and we reached the plain without any adventure.
On the side nearest to the mountain these disturbances were such that a hasty glance was enough to show us the impossibility of advancing that way.
Poor beasts, they have toiled hard to get the sledges forward to-day." But the day did not turn out so badly after all, as we worked our way out of this uncertainty and found out what was behind the pitch-dark clouds.
Our companions were no less pleased with the news we brought of our prospects.
Our altitude came out at 9,475 feet above the sea, or a drop of 825 feet in the course of the day.
That question was unanswerable; possibly a week, or even a fortnight, and we had no time for that.
The surface remained about the same -- possibly rather more undulating.
I had already seen proofs on several occasions of the kind of men my comrades were, but their conduct that day was such that I shall never forget it, to whatever age I may live.
There was nothing to be done but to find the least disturbed spot, and set the tent there.
Well content with our morning's work, we turned in again and slept till 6 a.m., when we began our morning preparations.
Strictly speaking, I should now have been going in advance, but the uneven surface at the start and the rapid pace afterwards had made it impossible to walk as fast the dogs could pull.
As I went in, I could descry Wisting a little way off kneeling on the ground, and engaged in the manufacture of cutlets.
Luckily for us, the snowfall of the last few days had filled these up, so as to present a level surface.
November 27 did not bring us the desired weather; the night was filled with sharp gusts from the north; the morning came with a slack wind, but accompanied by mist and snowfall.
The distance according to our three sledge-meters was eighteen and a half miles; taking the bad going into consideration, we had reason to be well satisfied with it.
"Shall we try it?" No sooner was the proposal submitted than it was accepted unanimously and with acclamation.
Saturday, November 25, came; it was a grand day in many respects.
It appeared to be quite isolated, and to consist of four mountains; one of these -- Mount Helmer Hanssen -- lay separated from the rest.
This is the fifth day, and it's blowing worse than ever." We all agreed.
The two small black figures in the distance, on the right, are Hassel and I, who are reconnoitring ahead.
The gleam came; it did not last long, but long enough.
We therefore all slept with one eye open, and we knew well that nothing could happen without our noticing it.
We turned in and went to sleep.
It required some study to find a way out of the trap we had run ourselves into.
Close to the tracks can be seen an open piece of the crevasse; it is a pale blue at the top, but ends in the deepest black -- in a bottomless abyss.
The tent was not only drifted up, but covered with ice, and in taking it down we had to handle it with care. so as not to break it in pieces.
The sun showed as yet like a pat of butter, and had not succeeded in dispersing the thick mists; the wind had dropped somewhat, but was still fairly strong.
The fog came and went, and we had to take advantage of the clear intervals to get our bearings.
We stopped and looked at the imposing sight, but Nature did not expose her objects of interest for long.
Also fine falling snow, which makes the going impossible.
The fourteen dogs' carcasses that were left were piled up in a heap, and Hassel's sledge was set up against it as a mark.
Suddenly I saw Hanssen's dogs shoot ahead, and downhill they went at the wildest pace, Wisting after them.
If our progress was nevertheless slow and difficult, this was due to the wretched going, which was real torture to all of us.
All the qualities that I most admire in a man were clearly shown at that juncture: courage and dauntlessness, without boasting or big words.
The fog prevented our seeing far, but the immediate surroundings were enough to convince us that with caution we could beat up farther.
One more glance over the camping-ground to see that nothing we ought to have with us had been forgotten.
Some were sharp, but most were long and rounded.
The last thing to be done was planting a broken ski upright by the side of the depot.
In the course of the night the wind had gone back to the north, and increased to a gale.
She has never been able to get a scrap of proof as to who took them, or she'd make it hot for them.
But she did not.
There's a big plum tree growing on it close to the line fence.
"You seem to have won old Cropper over to your side entirely," Mr. Baxter told her that night.
It had been an especially hard day in school.
Bob and Alf Cropper were up among the boughs picking the plums.
This conviction was strengthened when he overtook her walking from school the next day and drove her home.
She could not believe that Mr. Cropper would carry his prejudices into a personal application.
Mr. Baxter nodded.
One day she resolved to go to Mr. Cropper himself and appeal to his sense of justice, if he had any.
They were handsome lads, with the same smooth way that characterized their father, and seemed bright and intelligent.
"You'll leave the proof with me, won't you?" said Mr. Cropper eagerly.
Some complaints were heard among the ratepayers and even Mr. Baxter looked dubious.
"You haven't any proof that it is really them, Mary," objected her husband, "and you shouldn't make reckless accusations before folks."
Alfred and Bob Cropper looked her squarely in the eyes and declared their innocence in their usual gentlemanly fashion, yet Esther felt sure that they were the guilty ones.
At first Esther had been inclined to like them.
"They are not behaving well in school."
And about that little matter we were discussing the other night, Miss Maxwell.
Isaac acted mean and scandalous clear through, and public opinion has been down on him ever since.
A man might, but they'd twist you around their fingers.
And he does hate Mrs. Charley.
"Well, Miss Maxwell, how did you get along today?" asked Mr. Baxter affably, when the new teacher came to the table.
There will be bushels of plums on it."
I just wish she could catch the Croppers once."
"Then you refuse to help me?" said Esther in a trembling voice.
"Indeed!" Mr. Cropper's voice expressed bland surprise.
That gentleman himself came in from the harvest field looking as courtly as usual, even in his rough working clothes.
As for the school, we will hope that matters will improve."
Just beyond her, with its laden boughs hanging over the line fence, was the famous plum tree. Esther looked at it for a moment.
On the ground beneath them stood their father with a basket of fruit in his hand.
From that time out the Cropper boys were models of good behaviour and the other turbulent spirits, having lost their leaders, were soon quelled.
When questioned every pupil denied having done or helped to do it.
"Very well for a beginning.
"I came past it today on my way 'cross lots home from the woods.
He asked interestedly about her school and her work, hoped she was getting on well, and said he had two young rascals of his own to send soon.
"No, thank you," said poor Esther.
And Mrs. Charley knows it too, although she can't prove it--more's the pity!
Not, of course, that he had any personal objection to you, but he is set against female teachers, and when a Cropper is set there is nothing on earth can change him.
But before long a subtle spirit of insubordination began to make itself felt in the school.
"Mrs. Charley Cropper's husband was Isaac's brother.
Thirteen and fourteen and big for their age.
She knew it had taken a powerful lever to change Mr. Cropper's opinion, but she kept her own counsel.
I'd give considerable to see the old sinner fairly caught, but he is too deep."
"I tell you, Miss Maxwell, the plums are mine.
Esther went across lots to Mrs. Charley Cropper's house, intending to make a call.
"I have come up to see you about Alfred and Robert, Mr. Cropper," she said.
"He said at the meeting today that you were the best teacher we had ever had and moved to raise your salary. I never knew Isaac Cropper to change his opinions so handsomely."
"That plum tree of Mrs. Charley's is loaded with fruit again this year," remarked Mr. Baxter at the tea table that evening.
"There are no bad children in the school except the Cropper boys--and they can be good enough if they like.
Complaint died away, and at the end of the term Esther was re-engaged.
"I have the negative still, you know."
Mr. Baxter approved of her; he "liked her style," as he would have said.
When the boat was nearing the island of Marken, the little yellow cheese had been presented with all due formality to one of the sailors who had been specially kind in the matter of securing good seats for Mr. King's party, Polly and Phronsie having held a whispered conference in a retired nook, to come out of it bright and smiling.
"Not so good as that," said Polly, sorrowfully.
"So she didn't do much harm, after all.
"Here, you boys, keep away; you've had enough; we're going to give this to the little girl," Jasper shouted to them as they threw coin after coin.
"Oh, Jasper, what pictures we'll take--and do see that woman's cap! and those pot-hooks of hair over her eyes, and that funny, long dangling curl!"
"It did, it did," crowed Phronsie, from her high perch.
"It's well that we've got so many pictures, for the people at home would never believe our stories without them."
"Polly, I wish we had a baby just like this," sighed Phronsie, giving motherly pats to the stout little legs dangling down from her lap.
"I think there is a round board under the cap," she confided to Jasper when once out of doors; "how else could they be pulled so tight?
"Yes, yes," said Polly, "I'd rather you did first; I truly had, Adela." She ran after her, for Adela had retreated down the bank, and made as if she were going to follow the party.
There you go," swinging her to his shoulder.
"Well, it's too, too splendid for anything.
"Dear me!
"Now that's too bad," mourned Polly, "for I'm afraid she'll keep away from me all the while we're on this island, and then I can't get a chance to give her my kodak at all."
"That's a good idea," said Jasper.
Jasper looked up.
"Hold up your apron," screamed Polly to the little girl.
"Well, I had then, but I've begun again," said Jasper, recklessly.
"May I carry her?" begged Phronsie, staggering to her feet--"she's mine"--and dragging the Marken baby up with her.
Then they all drew up stiff as sticks, and didn't even wink.
"They are her daughter's wedding clothes," said Mrs. Fisher, "I do believe." For, the old woman was working fearfully hard to make them understand, and pointing first to the white garments and then to the young woman.
See them standing by that old tumble-down house, Polly," he added excitedly.
California-Mrs.
In the hospital cottage I was met by Mrs. Herndon and taken to a little room with two white beds and a hospital table.
The day following their commitment to Occoquan Mr. O'Brien, of counsel, was directed to see the women, to ascertain their condition.
They were not in uniform.
mouth, or I will handcuff you, gag you and put you in a straitjacket. . .
It had been agreed that the demand to be treated as political prisoners, inaugurated by previous pickets, should be continued, and that failing to secure such rights they would unanimously refuse to eat food or do prison labor.
I was handcuffed all night and manacled to the bars part of the time for asking the others how they were, and was threatened with a straitjacket and a buckle gag.
"But I tell you, you must not proceed."
Told we were to go to Washington.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 16 . . . .
Miss Burns received six months.
Of this experience, Miss Burns wrote on tiny scraps of paper:
"’This is the most magnificent sacrifice I have ever seen made for a principle [he said I never believed that American women would care so much about freedom.
The superintendent shouted to me, "Oh, no, you won't; don't talk about protest; I won't have any of that nonsense."
Eva Decker, Colorado Springs, Mrs. Genevieve Williams, Manitou.
"It is very, very puzzling-I find you guilty of the offense charged, but will take the matter of sentence under advisement."
Chapter 11
We decided to take the only course open-to obtain a writ of habeas corpus.
Admission was denied to all of them.
They looked as much like tramps as anything.
We thought she was dead.
Slept hardly at all.
Mrs. Herndon, the matron, said we would have to wait up all night.
She is a frail girl.
The Administration was alarmed.
And so the forty-one women returned to the White House gates to resume' their picketing.
I hope that you will carry your point and force the hand of the government soon'."
Instantly Superintendent Whittaker rushed forward, shouting at me, "Stop that; not another word from your
Was stretched on bed, two doctors, matron, four colored prisoners present, Whittaker in hall.
We hear them outside now cracking eggs.
Tube drawn out covered with blood.
The following morning the women were ordered by Judge Mullowny to "come back on Friday.
I was told to "shut up," and was again threatened with a straitjacket and a buckle gag.
We quickened our pace.
Picketing must be stopped!
Persons convicted in the District for acts committed in violation of District law were transported to Virginia-alien territory-to serve their terms.
I was seized and laid on my back, where five people held me, a young colored woman leaping upon my knees, which seemed to break under the weight.
Whether this was done legally or illegally, logically or illogically, clumsily or dexterously, was of secondary importance.
"Get a doctor to examine her," he said.
Mr. O'Brien was denied admission and forced to come back to Washington without any report whatsoever.
They contended that sentence imposed upon a person for unlawful acts in the District should be executed in the District.
Third Group
George Scott, Montclair. Pennsylvania-Mrs.
Each one was called to the mat and interrogated.
"Will you work?"-"Will you put on prison clothes?"
"If you will only drop these proceedings, I can absolutely guarantee you that the prisoners will be removed from the workhouse to the jail in a week:"
I fell back again into the same stupor.
The answer was definite and final. Their resistance was superb.
health but militant in spirit, said she had come to take her place with the women struggling for liberty in the same spirit that her revolutionary ancestor, Eliza Zane, had carried bullets to the fighters in the war for independence.
The guards acted brutal in the extreme, incited to their brutal conduct towards us, . . , by the superintendent.
They were perfectly dark.
She had hardly begun to speak, saying we demanded to be treated as political prisoners, when Whittaker said:
I took off my coat and hat.
I guess that saved me.
Harvey Wiley. Louisiana-Mrs.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 14.
Why not instantly?"
New York-Miss Lucy Burns, New York City. District of Columbia-Mrs.
I turned and twisted my head all I could, but he managed to push it up.
Food dumped directly into stomach feels like a ball
I replied, "I am here."
It had to stop picketing.
Lawrence Lewis, Miss Elizabeth McShane, Miss Katherine Lincoln, Philadelphia.
the workhouse to the District, where he kept himself discreetly hidden for several days.
There were frequent references to the pluck of the silent sentinels."
All failed.
Her head struck the iron bed.
I burst into tears as they led me away.
I went first.
He refused to hear our demand for political rights. Seized by guards from behind, flung off my feet, and shot out of the room.
Telephone wires at our headquarters were tapped.
They brought that, and I noticed they did not lock the door.
J. H. Short, Minneapolis. Iowa-Mrs.
You girls are on your ninth day of hunger strike and your condition is critical.
"Will you eat?"-"Will you stop picketing?"-"Will you go without paying your fine and promise never to picket again?"
After this I was brought into the hospital in an ambulance.
Administration Terrorism
Fifth Group
It made me sick . . . .
I bade them both good- by.
Elizabeth Hamilton, Mrs. Ella O. Guilford, New York City; Miss Amy Juengling, Miss Hattie Kruger, Buffalo.
It seemed to me that everything had been done from the time we reached the workhouse to terrorize us, and my fear lest the extreme of outrage would be worked upon the young girls of our party became intense.
Any words of mine would be inadequate to tell the story of the prisoners' reception at the Occoquan workhouse.
"Why this mysterious week?" we asked.
Beethoven used it effectively. Chopin appropriated it as one of his most potent auxiliaries.
It has been said of him that he had a sad heart but a joyful mind.
In the same way he had listened to the human voice, and determined that the song of his own instrument should be heard.
He is described as kind, courteous, possessed of the most captivating grace and ease of manner, now inclined to languorous melancholy, now scintillating with a joyous vivacity that was contagious.
Reckless, out-of-time playing disfigures what is meant to express the fluctuation of thought, the soul's agitation, the rolling of the waves of time and eternity.
The elect few have come into touch with his vision of beauty, but it has been mercilessly misinterpreted by thousands of ruthless aspirants to musical honors, in the schoolroom, the students' recital and the concert hall.
Although his mode of expression was peculiarly his own, he had received a strong impulse from the popular music of Poland.
So in the most melancholy strains of his music one who heeds well may detect the presence of a lofty ideal that uplifts and strengthens the travailing soul.
A revering affection was cherished by him for Elsner, to whom he owed his sense of personal responsibility to his art, his habits of serious study and his intimate acquaintance with Bach.
In these few, bold strokes one who knew him by virtue of close art and race kinship, presents an incomparable outline sketch of the Polish tone-poet who explored the harmonic vastness of the pianoforte and made his own all its mystic secrets.
In melody and general conception his tone-poems sprang spontaneously from his glowing fancy, but they were subjected to the most severe tests before they were permitted to go out into the world.
In the sonatas and concertos he sees the princely Pole bravely carrying his banner amid classical currents.
Whoever approaches him with weak sentimentalism will miss altogether his dignity and strength.
Their guidance left him master of his own genius, at liberty to "soar like the lark into the ethereal blue of the skies." He respected them both.
Those of his contemporaries who have harkened with rapture to his playing have declared that he alone could adequately interpret his tone-creations, or make perfectly intelligible his method.
The highest type of artist and human being is thus represented.
His sensitive nature, like the most exquisitely constructed sounding-board, vibrated with the despairing sadness, the suppressed wrath, and the sublime fortitude of the brave, haughty, unhappy people he loved, and with his own homesickness when afar from his cherished native land.
To him bell tones were ever ringing, reminding him of home, summoning him to the heights.
Unquestionably the poetry of Chopin is of the most exquisite lyric character, his leadership is supreme.
Neither of these men attempted to hamper his free growth by rigid technical restraints.
His musical heroes were Bach and Mozart, for they represented to him nature, strong individuality and poetry in music.
And what an example he has left for teachers.
He never hesitated about placing it on a black key when convenient, and had it passed by muscle action alone in scales and broken chords whose zealous practice in different forms of touch, accent, rhythm and tone were demanded by him.
"From Zwyny and Elsner even the greatest dunce must learn something," he is quoted as saying.
They were his earliest models; on them were builded his first themes.
He evolved from its more intimate domain effects in sympathy with those of the orchestra, yet purely individual.
True art softens the harshest accents of suffering by placing superior to it some elevating idea.
Players without number have gone stumbling over the piano keys with a tottering, spasmodic gait, serenely fancying they are heeding the master's design.
The profound reserve of his nature made it peculiarly agreeable to him to gratify the haunting demands of his lyric muse through the medium of the one musical instrument that lends itself in privacy to the exploitation of all the mysteries of harmony.
To realize them, to divine the laws which regulate the undulating, tempest-tossed rubato, requires highly matured artistic taste and absolute musical control.
Those who give ear to the piano alone will never learn the secret of calling forth its supreme eloquence.
The national tonality became to him a vehicle to be freighted with his own individual conceptions.
"Tragic, romantic, lyric, heroic, dramatic, fantastic, soulful, sweet, dreamy, brilliant, grand, simple, all possible expressions are found in his compositions and all are sung by him on his instrument."
A vivid picture of his method of teaching is given in the lectures on "Frederic Chopin's Works and Their Proper Interpretation," by the Pole, Jean Kleczynski.
An accentuation like the ringing of distant bells is frequently heard in his music.
The recitative of the sixteenth century gave it prominence, and it passed into instrumental music.
Delicately strung as he was, he must often have endured tortures from the best of his pupils, but so thoroughly was he consecrated to his art that he never faltered in his efforts to lift those who confided in him to the aerial heights he had found.
Indications of it in Bach are too often neglected.
We can see and hear this "Raphael of Music" at the piano, so many and so eloquent have been the descriptions given of his playing.
In order to place it to advantage he caused it to be thrown lightly on the keyboard so that the five fingers rested on the notes E, F sharp, G sharp, A sharp and B, and without change of position required the practice of exercises calculated to insure independence.
It is easy to fancy him sweeping the ivory keys with his gossamer touch that enveloped with ethereal beauty the most unaccustomed of his complicated chromatic modulations.
He was exceedingly particular about arpeggio work, and insisted upon the repetition of every note and passage until all harshness and roughness of tone were eliminated.
Born and bred on Poland's soil, son of a French father and a Polish mother, Frederic Chopin (1809-1849) combined within himself two natures, each complementing the other, both uniting to form a personality not understood by every casual observer.
"Is that a dog barking?" he was known to exclaim to an unlucky pupil whose attack in the opening arpeggio of a Clementi study lacked the desired quality.
Patriot and tone-poet in every fibre of his being, his genius inevitably claimed as its own the soul's divinest language, pure music, unfettered by words.
He prepared each hand with infinite care before permitting any attempt at the reproduction of musical ideas.
In regard to the much discussed tempo rubato of Chopin many and fatal blunders have been made.
"I should like to be to my people what Uhland was to the Germans," he once said to a friend.
"The piano bard, the piano rhapsodist, the piano mind, the piano soul is Chopin," said Rubinstein.
The basis of this method consisted in refinement of touch, for the attainment of which a natural, easy position of the hand was considered by Chopin a prime requisite.
It is not too much to say for him that he ushered in a new era for his chosen instrument, spiritualizing its timbre, liberating it from traditional orchestral and choral effects, and elevating it to an independent power in the world of music.
He enriched it with new melodic, harmonic and rhythmic devices adapted to itself alone, and endowed it with a warmth of tone-coloring that spiritualized it for all time.
At one time he undertook to write a method or school of piano-playing, but never progressed beyond the opening sentences.
The rubato, from rubare, to rob, represents a pliable movement that is certainly as old as the Greek drama in declamation, and was employed in intoning the Gregorian chant.
A very independent use of the thumb was prescribed by him.
To interpret him requires simplicity, purity of style, refined technique, poetic imagination and genuine sentiment--not fitful, fictitious sentimentality.
"You see that tree," exclaimed Liszt; "its leaves tremble with every breath of the wind, but the tree remains unshaken--that is the rubato." There are storms to which even the tree yields.
To the piano he confided all the conflicts that raged within him, all the courage and living hope that sustained him.
Strong conviction in regard to his own calling and clear perception of the hidden powers and future mission of the piano early compelled him to consecrate to it his unfaltering devotion.
He addressed himself to the heart of this people and immortalized its joys, sorrows and caprices by the force of his splendid art.
Too sensitive to enjoy playing before miscellaneous audiences whose unsympathetic curiosity, he declared, paralyzed him, Chopin was at his best when interpreting music in private, for a choice circle of friends or pupils, or when absorbed in composition.
Liszt once said Chopin was the only pianist he ever knew that could play the violin on the piano.
In giving tonal form to the deep things of the soul, which are universal in their essence and application, he embodied universal rather than merely individual emotional experiences, and thus unbared what was most sacred to himself without jarring on the innate reticence which made purely personal confidences impossible.
By precept and example he advocated frequent playing of the preludes and fugues of Bach as a means of cultivating musical intelligence, muscular independence and touch and tone discrimination.
There is food for thought in the fact that this Prince Charming of the piano, whose magic touch awakened the Sleeping Beauty of the instrument of wood and wires, never had a lesson in his life from a mere piano specialist.
Spontaneous as was his creative power he was most painstaking in regard to the setting of his musical ideas and would often devote weeks to re-writing a single page that every detail might be perfect.
Advanced knowledge of acoustics and improved methods of construction have made it the magnificent instrument we know in concert hall and home, and to which we now apply the more intimate name, piano.
It was highly extolled by Mozart, and to it Clementi ascribed his knowledge and skill.
You have the force to overwhelm, control, compel the public."
When pupils were discouraged he reminded them how hard he had always been compelled to work, and assured them that equal industry would lead them to success.
The clavier gave promise of its destined career in the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare immortalized it, and William Byrd (1546-1623) became the first clavier master.
Forkel, his biographer, has finely said that Bach considered the voices of his fugues a select company of persons conversing together.
The man who, by his demands on the piano, induced improvements in its manufacture that materially increased its sonority and made it available for the modern idea, was Franz Liszt (1811-1886).
To this group belonged the virginal, or virginals, the clavicembalo, the harpsichord, or clavecin, and the spinet.
Carl Tausig said: "There is but one god in technique, Bach, and Clementi is his prophet."
To carry out his designs the third or sustaining pedal became necessary. His highest ambition, in his own words, was "to leave to piano players the foot-prints of attained advance." In 1839 he ventured on the first pure piano recital ever given in the concert hall.
He gained marvelous fulness of chord power, great dynamic variety, and numerous unexpected solutions of the tone problem.
The early hammer-clavier, or pianoforte, invented in 1711, by the Italian Cristofori, who derived the hammer idea from the dulcimer, did not attract him because of its extreme crudeness. Nevertheless, it was destined to develop into the musical instrument essential to the perfect interpretation of his clavier music.
Two or more strings of equal length are now divided and set in motion by flat metal wedges, attached to the key levers, and called tangents, because they touched the strings.
She was the ideal woman, artist and teacher who remained in active service until a short time before her death, in 1896.
The keyed monochord gained the name clavichord.
Like the wandering children of nature who had filled the dreams of his childhood, he became a wanderer and marched a conqueror, radiant with triumphs, through the musical world.
His son and pupil, Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788), proceeding on the principles established by his illustrious father, prepared the way for the modern pianist.
In France, by 1530, the dance, that promoter of pure instrumental music, was freely transcribed for the clavier.
Piano composers and virtuosos rapidly increase.
Amid his storm and stress, whispering and listening, his awakening of the soul, an original naturalism of piano-playing was recognized, side by side with the naturalism of his creative art.
From him Haydn gained much that he later transferred to the orchestra.
His "Cat's Fugue," and his one movement sonatas still appear on concert programmes.
His method is that of common sense, based on keen analytical faculties, and he never trains the hand apart from the musical sense.
Perhaps the most famous piano teacher of recent times is Theodore Leschetitzky, of Vienna.
Stops were added, as in the organ, that varied effects might be produced, and a second keyboard was often placed above the first.
With it he exchanged the most subtle confidences.
Its most eminent virtuoso was John Field (1782-1837) of Dublin.
It is a harsh term.
I believe that you and I together could run this government beautifully, uncle."
Queer. . . .
"You'll find some changes in that I guess," handing the Senator a printed list of names.
"With me!"
If we secure him we shall have a favorable report by the committee, and it will be a great thing to be able to state that fact quietly where it will do good."
He did not make any objections?"
That about gauges him. . . .
He was shy."
I have been with him a great deal on conference committees.
I must chance to meet him to-day."
He's a kind of--"
"Yes.
"That's encouraging.
Hopperson's influence ought to count twenty . . . the sanctimonious old curmudgeon.
The three committeemen . . . sons-in-law.
While Laura is on her errand to find Mr. Buckstone, it may not be out of the way to remark that she knew quite as much of Washington life as Senator Dilworthy gave her credit for, and more than she thought proper to tell him.
Governor Balloon was nothing less than a father to the poor Indians.
What is the 'C' before some of the names, and the 'B.
There.
Time to report progress from the committee of the whole," and the Senator beamed with his own congressional wit.
Laura looked a little incredulous, and the Senator proceeded.
He built a government saw-mill on the reservation with the money, and the lumber sold for enormous prices--a relative of his did all the work free of charge--that is to say he charged nothing more than the lumber would bring." "But the poor Injuns--not that I care much for Injuns--what did he do for them?"
She was acquainted by this time with a good many of the young fellows of Newspaper Row; and exchanged gossip with them to their mutual advantage.
Laura went down stairs, knocked at/the study door, and entered, scarcely waiting for the response.
"Ah, come in, sit down," and the Senator closed the book and laid it down.
"Indeed he was.
I never push a private interest if it is not Justified and ennobled by some larger public good.
I have no concealments from you.
He is spoken of for the post of Minister to China, or Austria, and I hope will be appointed.
"He said he had no doubt it was a good thing; if Senator Dilworthy was in it, it would pay to look into it."
To be sure you can buy now and then a Senator or a Representative but they do not know it is wrong, and so they are not ashamed of it.
Very strange . . . .
"Yes.
He was governor of one of the territories a while, and was very satisfactory."
That is what Dilworthy said.
"I think so.
"He will help us, I suppose?
"There, there, child.
We have made ever so much progress in a week.
The 'B.
The Senator beamed again.
He said he should like to help the negro, his heart went out to the negro, and all that--plenty of them say that but he was a little afraid of the Tennessee Land bill; if Senator Dilworthy wasn't in it, he should suspect there was a fraud on the government."
"It is only me."
Before she did that, however, she took out her note book and was soon deep in its contents; marking, dashing, erasing, figuring, and talking to herself.
"In the committee of the whole things are working very well.
He's a fine man, a very fine man. I don't know any man in congress I'd sooner go to for help in any Christian work.
The Senator spoke with feeling, and then added,
He promised to come here . . . and he hasn't. . . .
"Yes, and he seemed to have a new light on the measure: I think will vote for it."
"Free!
Dilworthy must surely know I understand him.
Uncle Balloon!--Tells very amusing stories . . . when ladies are not present . . .
Laura smiled, and said, forgetting her acquired correctness of speech,
Committee.
"I explained it to him.
Senator Dilworthy was alone--with an open Bible in his hand, upside down.
That's good economy, isn't it?"
I suppose it's so.".
Strange.
"I did.
What did he say?"
"Not shy, child, cautious.
Wouldn't Dilworthy open his eyes if he knew some of the things Balloon did say to me.
"John Jay and Benjamin Franklin were well enough in their day, but the nation has made progress since then.
I honor my country's public servants as much as any one can.
I was sure of it.
"Is there anything more?"
"I hope you showed Hopperson that our motives were pure?"
He's a very cautious man.
Docs' on them and frank them home.
I can't help loving that man, for all his drollery and waggishness.
He wants reasons, good ones. Didn't you show him he was in error about the bill?"
Balloon is a man we know and can depend on to be true to himself."
"Oh, he beat around a little.
"It's a funny world.
Isn't that so?"
Cards! cards!
This is not what you want.
"Don't approach!" she cried.
I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit me.
Eponine caught Montparnasse's hand.
All that's bad.
"What jade is this?"
Where is mother?
She began to laugh in a terrible way:--
"Have you the key to the gate, Thenardier?"
He redoubled his pace.
"As you like, but you shall not enter here.
She saw him displace the bar and slip into the garden.
"You bother me," said Eponine.
Go where you please, but don't come here, I forbid it!
She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the bar, as though she were guarding it.
Tell me about it!
So you intend to hinder us in our work, my daughter?
"Beginning with my father!"
He seemed thoughtful.
And he added:--
"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse.
"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."
Thenardier stepped nearer.
"Yes."
She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst out laughing:--
It was, in fact, Eponine, who had addressed Thenardier.
He bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.
He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light of the lantern.
I told Magnon so.
What! Scare?
There's nothing to be done here.
"This is the place," said one of them.
The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into the black niche, and was greatly alarmed.
Eponine turned to the five ruffians.
You don't frighten me.
They halted in amazement.
Nothing more resolute and more surprising could be seen.
"Pardine!
And my mother?
Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head in various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--
Yes, I'm out.
I'm not in.
"I don't know.
So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence and hummed:--
"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"
What do you want with us?
Go your way, you bore me!
Is she in love with the dog?
And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.
I'll use kicks; it's all the same to me, come on!"
"Do the job.
"Your daughter."
"That's good.
Are you crazy?" exclaimed Thenardier, as loudly as one can exclaim and still speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"
Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes upon the ruffians in turn:--
Marius, at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening, with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight of Eponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard.
"Under Pantin [Paris]."
"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang! There are six of you; I represent the whole world."
The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not see him.
Let us see, why should his father be indignant?
Is there a foreign war?
Why not?
Shall we brand every appeal to arms within a city's limits without taking the object into a consideration?
He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he was about to fall.
Well, the monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is a stranger; the right divine is a stranger.
Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of patriotism?
As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in every direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about to do, his glance strayed to the interior of the barricade.
One would have said that the man who was dead was surveying those who were about to die.
A sort of splendid rectification had just been effected in his mind.
the one is the defender, the other the liberator.
France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her wound.
War does not become a disgrace, the sword does not become a disgrace, except when it is used for assassinating the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth.
The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds. But is it true that the country does wail?
Had he not given her his word of honor that he would die?
Both of them are what history is in the habit of calling good kings; but principles are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true is rectilinear, the peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance; no concessions, then; all encroachments on man should be repressed.
Of whom are you speaking?
When the master falls in France, he falls everywhere.
Then war, whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime. Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does one form of man despise another?
All this was ten fathoms distant from him.
Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded, war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary. What have we to reproach that war with?
Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations with audacity, and shake up that sad humanity which is covered with gloom by the right divine, Caesarian glory, force, fanaticism, irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in the contemplation, in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs of the night.
Live without Cosette he could not.
He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in search of, and he walked on tiptoe.
Since she was gone, he must needs die.
And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of view, why do we speak of civil war?
Men must be stirred up, pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance, their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them in terrible handfuls.
This monstrous mass must be made to crumble.
slip away, all in a tremble, saying: "After all, I have had enough of it as it is.
Are there not cases where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty?
The vision of the action into which he felt that he was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more as lamentable, but as superb.
He left none of them unanswered.
Their mass bears witness to apathy. A crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience.
Hence the necessity of tocsins and wars.
War of the streets?
Should he be untrue at once to his love, to country, to his word?
Then I remembered him.
"Do you hear?
You said you would.
He was dead, but he was not defeated.
"Why, this is just like getting money from home."
When we gathered up the corners of his blanket and lifted him, he tried to sit upright, and cried out, "You're taking me to the front, aren't you?
The other pond people liked them much better than they did their neighbors, the Minks.
"Couldn't sleep all of such a day as this." They spoke in that way, you know, because they usually sleep in the daytime and are awake at night.
"Pity the Frogs don't come out to enjoy it!"
She told them that they should leave the place at once, and not one of them should even set foot in the old nest.
"We wish it would always be warm weather," said the young Muskrats. "What's the use of winter?"
"Quit poking me!"
It is true that they helped keep the pond sweet and clean, and picked up and carried away many things which made the shore untidy, still, they were rude, and talked too loudly, and wore their feathers in such a way that they looked like fine large birds, when really they were lean and skinny and small.
I'm just as big as you are" (which was so).
Their father sometimes slapped them with his tail.
The Eels were lying at the bottom, stupid and drowsy, and somewhere the Water-Adders were hidden away, dreaming of spring.
Five of them said, "It's our turn first.
These fifteen children had been fairly well brought up, but you can see that their mother had many cares; so it is not strange if they sometimes behaved badly.
While their mother was so weak, the Wise Old Crayfish amused the children, and taught them things which all Crayfishes should know.
"I have heard some queer things about the Eels myself," said the Stickleback, "but I have never felt much afraid of them.
He often did this when he was surprised.
"Eels swim!"
I suppose I am braver because I wear so many of my bones on the outside."
Mother Eel opened her big mouth very wide.
They have large mouths, and teeth in their mouths, and they are always sticking out their lower jaws."
They breathe through very small gill-openings in the backs of their heads.
"Eels run!"
They swim with their legs in the water, and with their wings in the air," said the biggest one.
"Eels swim.
It was not that they were so much missed, for the Eels, you know, do not swim around in the daytime.
Still, as the Mother Mud Turtle said, "They had known that they were there, and the mud seemed empty without them."
Just then a Wise Old Crayfish came along walking sidewise.
"That is the way in which children should learn," he said, "all around at once.
They don't run on land."
The Biggest Little Crayfish had beaten.
After he had told his pupils the best way to hold their food with their pinching-claws, and had explained to them how it was chewed by the teeth in their stomachs, one mischievous little fellow called out, "I want to know about the Eels.
"Eels, my children," said their teacher, "are long, slender, sharp-nosed, slippery people, with a fringe of fins along their backs, and another fringe along their bellies.
Each one had so many eyes that he could look at the teacher with a few, and at the other little Crayfishes with a few more, and still have a good many eyes left with which to watch the Tadpoles.
When he tried to walk, his eight legs stumbled over each other, and the weak way in which he waved his pinching-claw legs showed how tired he was.
"Anyhow, Eels run on land."
The larger people had been sorry to have them go, and some of them felt that without the Eels awake and stirring, the pond was hardly a safe place at night.
Then the two little Crayfishes, who had been talking louder and louder and becoming more and more angry, glared at each other, and jerked their feelers, and waved their pinching-claws in a very, very ugly way.
"There!" said she.
It seemed to help him think.
"Why didn't you ask them?" said a Stickleback.
The Wise Old Crayfish sometimes said that each of his pupils should sit in a circle of six teachers, so that he might be taught on all sides at once.
They were restless pupils, and their teacher could not keep them from looking behind them.
They had good ears, and there were also fine smelling-bristles growing from their heads.
It is only at night that they are really lively.
That was when he was teaching some young Crayfishes, his pupils.
The day after the Eels left, the pond people talked of nothing else.
This evening the Wise Old Crayfish was very sleepy.
They don't run," said the biggest one.
I used to live near them."
"And how do--" began the Biggest Little Crayfish.
"Well, they don't swim in air," said the saucy one.
"I know as much about it as you do!"
Their mother had brought up a large family, and was not strong.
It made no difference to them which way they came.
But I do the best I can, and I at least teach one side of each."
"I'd like to see them running on the land," said the saucy one.
"Guess I know!"
"Why?" replied the Minnow.
"Well, I've seen the Wild Ducks swim in it!
So there!"
When he had thought for a while, he waved his big pinching-claws and said, "It would be better for me not to tell what I think.
My mother would never let me go near them, and now they've moved away, and I won't ever see them, and I think it's just horrid."
They lie quietly in the mud and sleep or talk.
She had just cast the shell which she had worn for a year, and now she was weak and helpless until the new one should harden on her.
"I don't believe it," said the saucy one.
"I think it is a good deal safer," remarked a Minnow, who usually said what she thought.
This showed that the Wise Old Crayfish had been well brought up, and knew he should not say unpleasant things about people if he could help it.
"Well, I guess they do," replied the saucy one.
"That's all you know!
They did not notice a great green and yellow person swimming gently toward them, and they did not know that the Eels had come back to live in the old pond again.
The Crayfish stuck his tail into the mud.
"Eels swim on land," said the biggest one.
TWO LITTLE CRAYFISHES QUARREL
And not yet from my bosom was exhausted The ardour of sacrifice, before I knew This offering was accepted and auspicious;
As at the blowing of the winds a coal Quickens to flame, so I beheld that light Become resplendent at my blandishments.
Is situate the fortunate Calahorra, Under protection of the mighty shield In which the Lion subject is and sovereign.
And with me they have moved this company."
I've not so spoken that thou canst not see Clearly he was a king who asked for wisdom, That he might be sufficiently a king;
With all these families beheld so just And glorious her people, that the lily Never upon the spear was placed reversed,
Well was I ware it was of lofty laud, Because there came to me, "Arise and conquer!" As unto him who hears and comprehends not.
My ancestors and I our birthplace had Where first is found the last ward of the city By him who runneth in your annual game.
Then broke the silence of those saints concordant The light in which the admirable life Of God's own mendicant was told to me,
Let him the Wain imagine unto which Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day, So that in turning of its pole it fails not;
And hence at what I said above dost wonder, When I narrated that no second had The good which in the fifth light is enclosed.
That which can die, and that which dieth not, Are nothing but the splendour of the idea Which by his love our Lord brings into being;
O how much better 'twere to have as neighbours The folk of whom I speak, and at Galluzzo And at Trespiano have your boundary,
The first thing that was understood by me Was "Benedight be Thou, O Trine and One, Who hast unto my seed so courteous been!"
Well was I ware that I was more uplifted By the enkindled smiling of the star, That seemed to me more ruddy than its wont.
In such wise of those sempiternal roses The garlands twain encompassed us about, And thus the outer to the inner answered.
Ever the intermingling of the people Has been the source of malady in cities, As in the body food it surfeits on;
Whence Beatrice, who stood somewhat apart, Smiling, appeared like unto her who coughed At the first failing writ of Guenever.
Each one that bears the beautiful escutcheon Of the great baron whose renown and name The festival of Thomas keepeth fresh,
So from the lights that there to me appeared Upgathered through the cross a melody, Which rapt me, not distinguishing the hymn.
'Tis well that without end he should lament, Who for the love of thing that doth not last Eternally despoils him of that love!
Thou hast appeased, my son, within this light In which I speak to thee, by grace of her Who to this lofty flight with plumage clothed thee.
Dominic was he called; and him I speak of Even as of the husbandman whom Christ Elected to his garden to assist him.
And him of Nerli saw, and him of Vecchio, Contented with their simple suits of buff And with the spindle and the flax their dames.
O thou his father, Felix verily! O thou his mother, verily Joanna, If this, interpreted, means as is said!
So sudden and alert appeared to me Both one and the other choir to say Amen, That well they showed desire for their dead bodies;
A will benign, in which reveals itself Ever the love that righteously inspires, As in the iniquitous, cupidity,
Nor by division was vermilion made."
For in the Sun, which lighted you and burned With heat and radiance, they so equal are, That all similitudes are insufficient.
And if it do remain, say in what manner, After ye are again made visible, It can be that it injure not your sight."
Because it happens that full often bends Current opinion in the false direction, And then the feelings bind the intellect.
Already were Gualterotti and Importuni; And still more quiet would the Borgo be If with new neighbours it remained unfed.
Did Mary give me, with loud cries invoked, And in your ancient Baptistery at once Christian and Cacciaguida I became.
And as a lute and harp, accordant strung With many strings, a dulcet tinkling make To him by whom the notes are not distinguished,
'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta, From whence come such unto the written word That one avoids it, and the other narrows.
Nathan the seer, and metropolitan Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;
If Luni thou regard, and Urbisaglia, How they have passed away, and how are passing Chiusi and Sinigaglia after them,
From centre unto rim, from rim to centre, In a round vase the water moves itself, As from without 'tis struck or from within.
Tell me about the sheepfold of Saint John, How large it was, and who the people were Within it worthy of the highest seats."
Its brightness is proportioned to the ardour, The ardour to the vision; and the vision Equals what grace it has above its worth.
With this distinction take thou what I said, And thus it can consist with thy belief Of the first father and of our Delight.
Nor did it hide itself from me by choice, But by necessity; for its conception Above the mark of mortals set itself.
But among mortals will and argument, For reason that to you is manifest, Diversely feathered in their pinions are.
But he who takes his cross and follows Christ Again will pardon me what I omit, Seeing in that aurora lighten Christ.
Whence I, who mortal am, feel in myself This inequality; so give not thanks, Save in my heart, for this paternal welcome.
Silent and wakeful many a time was he Discovered by his nurse upon the ground, As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'
Not yet the daughter at her birth struck fear Into the father, for the time and dower Did not o'errun this side or that the measure.
He in short time became so great a teacher, That he began to go about the vineyard, Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;
He asked for, but against the errant world Permission to do battle for the seed, Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.
For in her eyes was burning such a smile That with mine own methought I touched the bottom Both of my grace and of my Paradise!
For I have seen all winter long the thorn First show itself intractable and fierce, And after bear the rose upon its top;
If then the fervent Love, the Vision clear, Of primal Virtue do dispose and seal, Perfection absolute is there acquired.
Knighthood and privilege from him received; Though with the populace unites himself To-day the man who binds it with a border.
And that he might be construed as he was, A spirit from this place went forth to name him With His possessive whose he wholly was.
Then with the doctrine and the will together, With office apostolical he moved, Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;
Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ, For the first love made manifest in him Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.
Together, at once, with one accord had stopped, (Even as the eyes, that, as volition moves them, Must needs together shut and lift themselves,)
So that thine own opinion I commend, That human nature never yet has been, Nor will be, what it was in those two persons.
And as the turning of the lunar heaven Covers and bares the shores without a pause, In the like manner fortune does with Florence.
How unto just entreaties shall be deaf Those substances, which, to give me desire Of praying them, with one accord grew silent?
Then said to me: "That one from whom is named Thy race, and who a hundred years and more Has circled round the mount on the first cornice,
No golden chain she had, nor coronal, Nor ladies shod with sandal shoon, nor girdle That caught the eye more than the person did.
Not to dispense or two or three for six, Not any fortune of first vacancy, 'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'
But, that may well appear what now appears not, Think who he was, and what occasion moved him To make request, when it was told him, 'Ask.'
And I have seen a ship direct and swift Run o'er the sea throughout its course entire, To perish at the harbour's mouth at last.
The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure, And unto us those holy lights gave need, Growing in happiness from care to care.
But that the sacred love, in which I watch With sight perpetual, and which makes me thirst With sweet desire, may better be fulfilled,
Out of the heart of one of the new lights There came a voice, that needle to the star Made me appear in turning thitherward.
All those who at that time were there between Mars and the Baptist, fit for bearing arms, Were a fifth part of those who now are living;
When, glorious and sanctified, our flesh Is reassumed, then shall our persons be More pleasing by their being all complete;
And as unto mine eyes it grew more fair, With voice more sweet and tender, but not in This modern dialect, it said to me:
When the Emperor who reigneth evermore Provided for the host that was in peril, Through grace alone and not that it was worthy;
There by that execrable race was I Released from bonds of the fallacious world, The love of which defileth many souls,
"Who speaks to me so gently?" asked she.
Then, lifting up her veil, she showed lovely blue eyes and dark eyelashes.
So they entered together into the fairy-palace, and she told her godmother privately how all had happened, and how she had won King Charming, begging the fairy to pacify him when he found out his mistake.
Next night Troutina, thickly veiled, quitted the palace by a secret door.
"Then I am sorry I cannot accept the honour," replied King Charming. "A monarch is surely at liberty to form his own engagements.
"Ah, would I had been sent here before I saw this amiable prince, who was so kind to me!
How great was his despair, when Soussio said to him in a commanding voice, "King Charming, behold the princess Troutina, to whom you have promised your faith: marry her immediately!"
Your troubles are not without remedy."
"If it were Florina, now," said the kings, or the kings' ambassadors, "we should be most happy to sign the contract."
"You cannot," said Soussio; and, touching him, he found himself fixed as if his feet were glued to the pavement.
The night was so dark that King Charming never found out the difference, but made to Troutina all the tender speeches that he meant for Florina, offering her his crown and his heart, and ending by placing his own ring on her finger, as a pledge of eternal fidelity.
"Then fly out of this window, in the shape of a Blue Bird."
"Florina!" cried he, enchanted.
A powerful and wealthy king, having lost his wife, was so inconsolable, that he shut himself up for eight entire days, in a little cabinet, where he spent his time in knocking his head against the wall, until the courtiers were afraid he would kill himself!
They accordingly placed stuffed mattresses over every wall, and allowed all his subjects, who desired, to pay him a visit, trusting that something would be said to alleviate his grief.
Flying from tree to tree, he sang melancholy songs about her and himself, and wished he were dead many a time.
She came to visit me with your diamonds on her neck, and your ring on her finger, wearing the golden crown and royal mantle which you had given her, while I was laden with iron chains."
"Be it so," said the queen; "and as my daughter is older, handsomer, and more amiable than yours, she shall have the first choice." The king disputed nothing; indeed, he never did--the queen ruled him in all things.
I will rather suppose that she is maligned by her stepmother and by Troutina, who is so ugly herself that no wonder she bears envy towards the fairest woman in the world."
The mother and daughter finished talking so late that it was midnight before they reached Florina's apartment.
But, though he looked only a blue bird, the king was his own natural self still, and remembered all his misfortunes, and did not cease to lament for his beautiful Florina.
He perched on the window-sill, and she sat at the window, and they were singing together a duet, which the queen heard outside.
"A king, who loves you, and will never love any other."
Meantime King Charming eagerly awaited her re-appearance, but he saw her no more; and by the queen's orders, every one about him spoke all the evil they could of poor Florina, but he refused to believe one word.
"I do not know; and if I did, I would not tell you," replied the queen, more angrily than ever; so that King Charming quitted her presence as soon as ever he could.
"And for what reason?" asked King Charming.
The king began to weep in company, and to talk to her of his dear wife--she did the same of her dear husband: in fact they talked so much, that they talked their sorrow quite away.
But neither grave nor lively discourse made any impression upon him; he scarcely heard what was spoken.
"I have been wickedly deceived!" cried the king; "come, my winged frogs, we will depart immediately."
When the princess recovered from her swoon, she began to weep, and wept all night long, sitting at the open window of her tower.
Florina, doubting no more her lover's loss, fell down in a swoon, and the queen immediately went to tell her father that she was mad for love, and must be watched closely lest she should in some way disgrace herself.
"You have spoken my name.
Nobody would have her.
"But, madam, is there not another princess called Florina?"
"Ah! do not deceive me.
"It was to me you gave this ring; to me you spoke at the window."
The king noticed her more and more--he spoke less and less of the departed queen; by and by he ceased to speak of her at all.
But soon she began stroking his beautiful plumage, and caressing him.
"I will respect you as much as a fairy deserves to be respected, if you will only give me back my princess."
"You may turn me into stone!" exclaimed he; "but I will love no one, except Florina."
It is to prevent my meeting him again, that the queen treats me so cruelly.
"Florina, your sister is come to see and bring you marriage presents, for she is now the wife of King Charming."
Troutina agreed with all her heart, but wished that the ceremony should be performed at her godmother's, the fairy Soussio.
"I choose," answered the king; "and I will not marry your goddaughter."
"Who are you, charming bird?"
They pointed to the corner where Florina was hidden, and she came out, blushing so much, that the young king was dazzled with her beauty, in spite of her shabby gown.
The fairy Soussio sent back Troutina to her mother, who was furious. "Florina shall repent having pleased King Charming!" cried she; and dressing her own daughter in rich garments, with a gold crown on her head, and King Charming's ring on her finger, she took her to the tower.
Some time after, news came that King Charming would shortly arrive, and that he was as charming as his name.
He also made her agree to fly with him next night, in a chariot drawn by winged frogs, of which a great magician, one of his friends, had made him a present.
At last there presented herself before him a lady, covered from head to foot in a long crape veil, who wept and sobbed so much that the king noticed her.
"My child," replied the godmother, "that is more easily said than done; he is too deeply in love with Florina."
"Am not I she?" said Troutina.
Each arrow was a diamond, a finger's length, and the chain was of pearls, each weighing a pound. When the young king received this very handsome present, he was much perplexed, until they told him it came from the princess whom he had lately seen, and who requested him to be her knight.
The end was, that he courted the inconsolable lady in the black veil, and married her.
Thus, for two years, Florina spent her time, and never once regretted her captivity.
When she paused in her lamentations, "Adorable princess," said he, "why do you mourn?
Next night, it was broad moonlight, and then he saw clearly the figure of a young girl, weeping sore, and knew that it was his beloved Florina.
Then he lifted her into the fairy chariot, and they sailed about in the air for some hours.
King Charming took no heed, but conversed with Florina for three hours without stopping.
But we will find her out and punish her."
She told him that she did not come, like the rest, to console him, but rather to encourage his grief.
Has this enemy to my peace carried away my dear Florina?"
This scheme succeeded so well, that Florina was persuaded to promise she would speak to him for a few moments next night, from a small window at the bottom of the tower. But the faithless lady-in-waiting betrayed her to the queen, who locked her up in her chamber, and determined to send her own daughter to the window instead.
Civil as this answer was, it irritated the queen and her daughter exceedingly; and when, since in all his audiences with their majesties he never saw Florina, he at last inquired where the younger princess was, the queen answered fiercely, that she was shut up in prison, and would remain there till Troutina was married.
Soussio employed persuasions, threats, promises, entreaties.
One day the king observed that both girls were now old enough to be married, and that he intended to choose for one of them the first prince who visited his court.
And though she saw nobody and he lived in the hollow of a tree, they always found plenty to say to one another.
He began to speak in a singing voice, and then uttering a doleful cry, fled away as far as possible from the fatal palace of Soussio.
"Yes," said Porthos; "I see a man."
Porthos embraced Madame Truchen, heaving an enormous sigh.
I ought to know that figure and peculiar style of walk." As he ran, the sound of his spurs and of his boots upon the hard ground of the street made a strange jingling noise; a fortunate circumstance in itself, which he was far from reckoning upon.
The cavalier kneels at the beginning, the young lady by and by gets tamed down, and then it is she who has to supplicate.
"Not yet."
"Oh, I don't deny that."
The two bearers of the corpse had unfastened the straps by which they carried the litter, and were letting their burden glide gently into the open grave.
"Let us go on," said D'Artagnan.
I had four windows here, but I bricked up two."
The latter, to show that she bore no ill-will, approached Porthos, upon whom she conferred the same favor.
"I should not like that," said Porthos.
Chapter VI.
Who is this lady?
"I am a great stickler for a good view myself," said Porthos.
"Yes, I will join you presently."
"That is exactly the reason," said Planchet, timidly, "why I feel it does me good to contemplate a few dead."
"But what is that I see out there,--crosses and stones?"
While this was going on, the three men, Porthos especially, ate and drank gloriously,--it was wonderful to see them.
D'Artagnan, whom nothing ever escaped, remarked how much redder Truchen's left cheek was than her right.
The table was laid for two persons.
Porthos's heart began to expand as he said, "I am hungry," and he sat himself beside Madame Truchen, whom he looked at in the most killing manner.
"The deuce," thought D'Artagnan, "can Porthos have any intentions in that quarter?"
Planchet turned to his housekeeper.
The ten full bottles were ten empty ones by the time Truchen returned with the cheese.
"You have before you," he said to her, "the two gentlemen who influenced the greatest, gayest, grandest portion of my life.
"Oh! they shall have as much as they like."
"Life, monsieur," said Planchet, laughing, "is capital which a man ought to invest as sensibly as he possibly can."
"You should not call her madame," said D'Artagnan.
Porthos began to curl the other side of his mustache.
"Some bran and water for my horse," said Porthos, "for it is very warm, I think."
A few oats and a good bed--nothing more."
"I am from Antwerp," said the lady.
"I was not bored; yet since you have been talking to me, I feel more animated."
"On the fifteenth and thirtieth of every month."
"I should do something rash."
"Oh!
"I?"
"Do you like the country?"
"That is as may be."
He was a clever fellow, although of a very odd complexion, which was the same color as your olives.
Tell me."
"Is it possible?"
"Well!"
"When?"
"Agreed, by all means."
"It is a very tempting one."
"Exactly; to Fontainebleau."
"I have no doubt of it; but what do you think of his mode of reasoning?"
"No; I prefer the gentlest of all; I never was a very good rider, as you know, and in my grocery business I have got more awkward than ever; besides--"
"Except to-day, and the day before yesterday."
"Quite so."
"Tell me how you console yourself."
"Good."
La Fontaine's hare thinks."
"Besides what?"
"You think so?--follow my example, then."
"Did we not fix to-morrow?"
"Where?"
"I don't pass my life in thinking."
"The best I have."
"Have you ever given it a thought, why I was absent?"
"Well?"
"That being understood then, proceed."
"What is it?"
You have noticed it, then?"
Come, explain, explain."
And the blue devils make people get thin.
"Very well, monsieur, I accept it; for I know that when you give your word of honor, it is sacred."
"It is miraculous."
"To-morrow."
Get angry if you like, or call me names, if you prefer it; but, the deuce is in it.
"Well, what does his hare do, then?"
"What have you got, then?" inquired Porthos, "and why do you call it a country-seat?"
what an honor!"
"What about?" inquired Porthos.
"At your chateau."
Chapter IV.
"What cheese?"
Porthos had all the taste and pride of a landed proprietor.
How many acres of park have you got?"
"Good lad, good lad!
"There is no doubt at all of it, monsieur."
I have rooms for a couple of friends, that's all."
"How so?"
"Which?"
As soon as they had finished eating they set off.
In the midst of his despair, he approached Porthos, who blocked up the whole of the passage leading from the back shop to the shop itself.
"Whereabouts, monsieur?"
"Because I don't know where it ends; and, also, because it is full of poachers."
"The Dutch cheese, inside which a rat had made his way, and we found only the rind left."
"In the first place, they can walk about the king's forest, which is very beautiful."
"Of park?"
But the grocer had a heart of gold, ever mindful of the good old times--a trait that carries youth into old age.
"Very well," said Porthos, "it does not trouble me in the least."
"Because they hunt my game, and I hunt them--which, in these peaceful times, is for me a sufficiently pleasing picture of war on a small scale."
The two others got under the counters, fearing Porthos might have a taste for human flesh.
Emmy did not hear her; she was looking at the letter.
"Couldn't forget HIM!" cried out Becky, "that selfish humbug, that low-bred cockney dandy, that padded booby, who had neither wit, nor manners, nor heart, and was no more to be compared to your friend with the bamboo cane than you are to Queen Elizabeth.
Jos's house never was so pleasant since he had a house of his own as Rebecca caused it to be.
Why, the man was weary of you, and would have jilted you, but that Dobbin forced him to keep his word.
As for Emmy, who found herself not in the least mistress of her own house, except when the bills were to be paid, Becky soon discovered the way to soothe and please her.
They have been absent from England fourteen years, having been embarked the year after Waterloo, in which glorious conflict they took an active part, and having subsequently distinguished themselves in the Burmese war.
The boat followed the smoke into sight.
The money was paid, and her character established, but Colonel Dobbin sent back his share of the legacy to the insurance office and rigidly declined to hold any communication with Rebecca.
In the course of a week, the civilian was her sworn slave and frantic admirer.
"How she does pitch!" he said.
And when I got home I found her in diamonds and sitting with that villain alone." He then went on to describe hurriedly the personal conflict with Lord Steyne.
I can't help you any more.
"Is there no way out of it, old boy?" the Captain continued in a grave tone.
"Serve him right," Macmurdo said.
And by the sermon-book was the Observer newspaper, damp and neatly folded, and for Sir Pitt's own private use.
In a postscript the Captain stated that he had in his possession a bank-note for a large amount, which Colonel Crawley had reason to suppose was the property of the Marquis of Steyne.
Poor Rawdon took up the paper and began to try and read it until his brother should arrive.
Captain Macmurdo, a veteran officer and Waterloo man, greatly liked by his regiment, in which want of money alone prevented him from attaining the highest ranks, was enjoying the forenoon calmly in bed.
didn't he?"
"I warned you a thousand times.
Look here, Pitt--you know that I was to have had Miss Crawley's money.
When Rawdon told the Captain he wanted a friend, the latter knew perfectly well on what duty of friendship he was called to act, and indeed had conducted scores of affairs for his acquaintances with the greatest prudence and skill.
Lady Jane, in her morning-gown, was up and above stairs in the nursery superintending the toilettes of her children and listening to the morning prayers which the little creatures performed at her knee. Every morning she and they performed this duty privately, and before the public ceremonial at which Sir Pitt presided and at which all the people of the household were expected to assemble.
To an affair of that nature, of course, he said, there was but one issue, and after his conference with his brother, he was going away to make the necessary arrangements for the meeting which must ensue.
Rawdon muttered some excuses about an engagement, squeezing hard the timid little hand which his sister-in-law reached out to him.
And--dash it--old chap, give him these gold sleeve-buttons: it's all I've got." He covered his face with his black hands, over which the tears rolled and made furrows of white. Mr. Macmurdo had also occasion to take off his silk night-cap and rub it across his eyes.
There was George Kitely, Lord Ragland's son, went through the Court last week, and was what they call whitewashed, I believe.
They said--they said you had gone off with the plate, Colonel"--the man added after a pause--"One of the servants is off already.
His adviser caught at some stray hints in it.
Rawdon answered it was Lord Steyne.
The servants was a drinkin' up in the drawingroom.
"What the deuce was the good of my telling you what any tom-fools talked about?"
Sunday After the Battle
By the time this note was composed, the Captain's servant returned from his mission to Colonel Crawley's house in Curzon Street, but without the carpet-bag and portmanteau, for which he had been sent, and with a very puzzled and odd face.
"That's over now." And the words were wrenched from him with a groan, which made his brother start.
"I hope to put a bullet into the man whom that belongs to." He had thought to himself, it would be a fine revenge to wrap a ball in the note and kill Steyne with it.
"I know I can trust your word."
The mansion of Sir Pitt Crawley, in Great Gaunt Street, was just beginning to dress itself for the day, as Rawdon, in his evening costume, which he had now worn two days, passed by the scared female who was scouring the steps and entered into his brother's study.
"The bailiffs were put upon me; I was taken as I was going out of his house; when I wrote to her for money, she said she was ill in bed and put me off to another day.
I gave up everything I had to her.
But Colonel Crawley only took out a card and enjoined him particularly to send it in to Lord Steyne, and to mark the address written on it, and say that Colonel Crawley would be all day after one o'clock at the Regent Club in St. James's Street--not at home.
Pitt closed the door and came up to the table, where he sat down in the other arm-chair--that one placed for the reception of the steward, agent, or confidential visitor who came to transact business with the Baronet--and trimmed his nails more vehemently than ever.
I didn't do my duty with the regiment so bad.
The Colonel told his senior briefly, and in broken accents, the circumstances of the case. "It was a regular plan between that scoundrel and her," he said.
Steyne has been a hundred times alone with her in the house before."
Nor did Sir Pitt vouchsafe her any explanation.
He started when he saw poor Rawdon in his study in tumbled clothes, with blood-shot eyes, and his hair over his face.
"If it wasn't for little Rawdon I'd have cut my throat this morning--and that damned villain's too."
And thus, and almost mutely, this bargain was struck between them.
This, as he was about to meet a lord, Captain Macmurdo performed with particular care.
"Don't be frightened, Pitt.
She held out her hand to Rawdon and said she was glad he was come to breakfast, though she could perceive, by his haggard unshorn face and the dark looks of her husband, that there was very little question of breakfast between them.
CHAPTER LIV
"He's a regular trump, that boy," the father went on, still musing about his son.
By Jove, sir, I've pawned my own watch in order to get her anything she fancied; and she she's been making a purse for herself all the time, and grudged me a hundred pound to get me out of quod." He then fiercely and incoherently, and with an agitation under which his counsellor had never before seen him labour, told Macmurdo the circumstances of the story.
I told him he was a liar and a coward, and knocked him down and thrashed him."
Little Rawdon was then sitting, one of fifty gown boys, in the Chapel of Whitefriars School, thinking, not about the sermon, but about going home next Saturday, when his father would certainly tip him and perhaps would take him to the play.
The other gave a whistle.
"Not that," Rawdon said.
The children came up to salute him, and he kissed them in his usual frigid manner. The mother took both of them close to herself, and held a hand of each of them as they knelt down to prayers, which Sir Pitt read to them, and to the servants in their Sunday suits or liveries, ranged upon chairs on the other side of the hissing tea-urn.
I don't mean to say that I won't assist you ultimately.
I'm a beggar because I would marry her.
How he sat the kicker to be sure!
"Is it only suspicion, you know, or--or what is it?
Her imploring eyes could read nothing but calamity in his face, but he went away without another word.
Every shilling of my money is tied up.
But the print fell blank upon his eyes, and he did not know in the least what he was reading.
"Thank you, brother," said he.
Shut the door; I want to speak to you."
"She may be innocent, after all," he said.
But as for paying your creditors in full, I might as well hope to pay the National Debt.
"You don't know how fond I was of that one," Rawdon said, half-inarticulately.
The fat red-faced man looked after him with astonishment as he strode away; so did the people in their Sunday clothes who were out so early; the charity-boys with shining faces, the greengrocer lolling at his door, and the publican shutting his shutters in the sunshine, against service commenced.
That dear good wife of yours has always been good to him; and he's fonder of her than he is of his . . .--Damn it.
The elder brother was much affected, and shook Rawdon's hand with a cordiality seldom exhibited by him.
"I will, upon my honour," the Baronet said.
"It's about--about my wife," Crawley answered, casting down his eyes and turning very red.
You must come to a compromise.
His gentleman alone took the opportunity of perusing the newspaper before he laid it by his master's desk.
"What is the matter, then?" said Pitt, somewhat relieved.
But for this I might have been quite a different man.
"Here's six hundred," he said--"you didn't know I was so rich.
Breakfast was so late that day, in consequence of the delays which had occurred, that the church-bells began to ring whilst they were sitting over their meal; and Lady Jane was too ill, she said, to go to church, though her thoughts had been entirely astray during the period of family devotion.
I'm not drunk.
"After the sacrifices I have made, and the manner in which I have stood by you, I think this sort of reproach is useless," Sir Pitt said. "Your marriage was your own doing, not mine."
"I'm done."
His room was hung round with boxing, sporting, and dancing pictures, presented to him by comrades as they retired from the regiment, and married and settled into quiet life.
Then Rawdon took out of his pocket the little pocket-book which he had discovered in Becky's desk, and from which he drew a bundle of the notes which it contained.
"Pitt, it's all over with me," the Colonel said after a pause.
The door of the dining-room happened to be left open, and the lady of course was issuing from it as the two brothers passed out of the study.
"That he did, old boy," said the good-natured Captain.
"I wish I was," Rawdon replied.
And he was anxious, on the Colonel's behalf, to give up the note to its owner.
Even the hundred pounds that Jane took you last night were promised to my lawyer to-morrow morning, and the want of it will put me to great inconvenience.
"The deuce! a Marquis! they said he--that is, they said you--"
The landlord's come in and took possession.
A book of family sermons, one of which Sir Pitt was in the habit of administering to his family on Sunday mornings, lay ready on the study table, and awaiting his judicious selection.
"Tell me your troubles, and I may be able to soften them."
The valet promised; and then Florina broke her fourth egg, out of which came a pie composed of birds, which, though they had been plucked, baked, and made ready for the table, sang as beautifully as birds that are alive.
"I see that you are in league with demons; but your father shall judge you;" and, very much frightened, the queen left her, and went to hold counsel with Troutina as to what was to be done.
When day came she related all to the queen and Troutina, who concluded that the bird could be no other than King Charming.
"I am a poor peasant-girl," said Florina.
"Blue Bird, Blue Bird, Come to my side."
Knitting her brows, Troutina exclaimed, "What creature is that who dares approach so near my golden throne?"
For what was the good of all their love when they were still in the power of the fairy Soussio?
"Why, then, do you dress yourself so fine, and adorn your chamber with flowers?"
Again Florina exacted permission to pass the night in the Chamber of Echoes; and again the king, undisturbed by her lamentation, slept without waking till dawn.
He had seen the queen and Troutina, and though he could not defend his princess, he refused to leave her.
"Then do as you will with me!" cried the king.
But no one regarded her.
They assailed the palace in crowds, demanding her for their sovereign.
"Some one has given them to you that you might join in treason against your father and the kingdom.
"Does he so?" said the queen, now comprehending all.
"You see, madam," said Florina, "even the spirits of the air take pity upon me."
"Am I likely to do this?
Her wonderful beauty and her splendid jewels startled them.
Not one of them had ever gained the top of the mountain; and when they saw Florina there, they all burst into angry outcries, "How has this woman got up the hill?
At last a sudden change took place in her fortunes.
I, a poor princess, kept in captivity for two years, with you as my gaoler?"
The Blue Bird flew to the window-sill, and they lavished on one another a hundred caresses, and talked together till dawn.
Now the king, when he was a Blue Bird, had informed Florina about this Chamber of Echoes, where every word spoken could be heard in his own chamber; she could not have chosen a better way of reproaching him for his infidelity.
Florina, greatly comforted, put the eggs in her sack, and turned her steps towards the country of King Charming.
"Ah, that is too true!" cried the king, sadly, "People only judge by the outside."
They sent the girl back, told her to express no curiosity, but to feign sleep, and to go to bed earlier than usual.
"Blue Bird, Blue Bird, Come to my side."
Inside the carriage sat little puppets, who behaved themselves just like live ladies and gentlemen.
Do not afflict yourself; happiness will yet be yours. Take these four eggs, and whenever you are in trouble, break them, and see what ensues." So saying, the fairy vanished.
But vain were her sobs and complainings; the king had taken opium to lull his grief; he slept soundly all night long.
At last, overcome with weariness, the girl fell asleep, and then Florina opened her little window, and sang in a low voice--
When all the palace were asleep, Florina for the last time, hoping King Charming would hear her, called upon him with all sorts of tender expressions, reminding him of their former vows, and their two years of happiness.
Arrived at the summit she found new difficulties; for the valley below was one large smooth mirror, in which sixty thousand women stood admiring themselves.
Next day, Florina was in great disquietude.
She dared not open the window, though she heard continually his wings fluttering round it.
At sight of the ornaments he turned pale, remembering those he had given to Florina.
The enchanter found this bride so ugly that he could not advise.
They agreed to put in Florina's chamber a waiting-maid, who should watch her from morning till night.
The exceeding care that was taken of her, and her longing to live in order to see again her Blue Bird, restored Florina's health, and gave her strength to call a council and arrange all the affairs of her kingdom.
But he would not.
What will he do? What shall I do?" And she melted into floods of tears.
Florina obeyed, and told her whole history, and how she was travelling over the world in search of the Blue Bird.
"No, Troutina."
She herself had lost the best of husbands, and here she began to weep so profusely, that it was a wonder her eyes were not melted out of her head.
Immediately the king's figure changed.
I know you have married Troutina.
He stood like a man in a dream: "What! am I betrayed?
Her Blue Bird visited her every night, and they loved one another dearly.
The malicious queen tried with all her might to get Troutina married, but in vain.
Indeed, she was altogether ugly and disagreeable; and when contrasted with Florina, the difference between the two made the mother so envious, that she and Troutina spared no pains to make the princess's life unhappy, and to speak ill of her to her father.
Rumours went about that the place was haunted, and no one would go near the spot.
At length, Soussio, quite worn out, said, "Choose seven years of penitence and punishment, or marry my goddaughter."
So saying he flew up to the window, and at first frightened the princess very much, for she could not understand such an extraordinary thing as a bird who talked in words like a man, yet kept still the piping voice of a nightingale.
I am King Charming, condemned to be a bird for seven years, because I will not renounce you."
Meantime the king was left waiting in a chamber with diamond walls, so thin and transparent, that through them he saw Troutina and Soussio conversing together.
"Do you think me a fool?" cried the king; "I have promised her nothing.
He rose, and made her a profound reverence, paying her besides so many elegant compliments, that the queen became very much displeased.
She is--"
What should I do if I saw his poor feathers scattered on the ground, and knew that he was no more?" So she grieved all day long.
Meantime the princess could not sleep for thinking of her Blue Bird. "Suppose sportsmen should shoot him, or eagles and kites attack him, and vultures devour him just as if he were a mere bird and not a great king?
The king said, her stepmother might do with her exactly what she pleased.
The beautiful Blue Bird, hid in a hollow tree, spent the hours in thinking of his princess.
They conversed till daybreak, and promised faithfully every night to meet again thus.
King Charming met her, received her in his arms, and vowed to love her for ever.
But as he was not likely to wish to sail about for ever, he at last proposed that they should descend to earth, and be married.
When he was alone, he sent for one of his attendants, whom he trusted very much, and begged him to gain information from some court lady about the princess Florina.
"How happy I am to have found her again, and found her so engaging and so sweet." And as he wished to pay her all the attentions that a lover delights in, he flew to his own kingdom, entered his palace by an open window, and sought for some diamond ear-rings, which he brought back in his beak, and, when night came, offered them to Florina.
Perhaps it was a symbol.
Both the others shifted sharply and the priest went on:
"Now, now, now," cried the Canadian farmer with his barbarian benevolence, "don't let's spoil a jolly evening.
I can't see any harm in it, anyhow."
A common thief would have been thankful for the warning and fled; but you are a poet.
Three flashing diamonds fell from the tree to the turf.
The winter afternoon was reddening towards evening, and already a ruby light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses.
"A saint," said Father Brown.
She had a pretty face, with brave brown eyes; but her figure was beyond conjecture, for she was so wrapped up in brown furs that it was hard to say which was hair and which was fur.
You are leaving suspicion on an honest boy with a good deal against him already; you are separating him from the woman he loves and who loves him.
Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.
Her brother James arrived just a week too late to see her."
"He'll black his face, if that's what you mean," cried Blount, laughing. "I don't doubt he'd black everyone else's eyes.
I must run after the criminal.
"Not a scrap," cried Blount, quite carried away.
"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist."
Then he sat down nervously, still fumbling, and then stood up again.
He sparkles from head to heel, as if clad in ten million moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch of him on fire.
That Socialist would no more steal a diamond than a Pyramid.
A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
"Nothing of the sort shall be suggested," said Colonel Adams, with a firm look at Fischer, which rather implied that some such thing had been suggested.
"The truth is, those diamonds we all saw this afternoon seem to have vanished from my friend's tail-coat pocket.
As always happens, the invention grew wilder and wilder through the very tameness of the bourgeois conventions from which it had to create.
You could have done it by sleight of hand in a hundred other ways besides that pretence of putting a paper donkey's tail to Fischer's coat.
But he swings, flashing and successful, from the short tree in this garden to the tall, rambling tree in the other, and only stops there because a shade has slid under the smaller tree and has unmistakably called up to him.
A large, neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they deposited Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him, like some very carefully protected parcel.
"Wife!" replied the staring soldier, "she died this year two months.
And now, by the way, you might give me back those diamonds."
The millionaire held himself stiff with a sort of heathen solemnity.
"Which is turning out his pockets," said Father Brown, and proceeded to do so, displaying seven and sixpence, a return ticket, a small silver crucifix, a small breviary, and a stick of chocolate.
Mr. Blount started, and stopped in his shout of assent.
Now, you saw that if the dress were a harlequin's the appearance of a policeman would be quite in keeping.
You know what I mean.
The clown and pantaloon made themselves white with flour from the cook, and red with rouge from some other domestic, who remained (like all true Christian benefactors) anonymous.
There are lower jokes than sitting on a top hat."
"What it's worth you can say afterwards.
Ripping up the envelope with evident astonishment he read it; his face clouded a little, and then cleared, and he turned to his brother-in-law and host.
It was almost impossible to believe that a living person could appear so limp.
In the large entrance hall of the house there was ample room even for Sir Leopold and the removal of his wraps.
But surely the get-up would be too big a business."
You will sit up in your free forest cold at heart and close to death, and the tree-tops will be very bare."
"How can you say such things!" she remonstrated.
He was a tall, sunburnt, and very silent man, who wore a red smoking-cap like a fez, making him look like one of the English Sirdars or Pashas in Egypt. With him was his brother-in-law, lately come from Canada, a big and rather boisterous young gentleman-farmer, with a yellow beard, by name James Blount.
But they went at it with that mixture of recklessness and industry that lives when youth is in a house; and youth was in that house that night, though not all may have isolated the two faces and hearts from which it flamed.
The pantaloon sprang erect and strode out of the room.
He put a paper donkey's head unexpectedly on Father Brown, who bore it patiently, and even found some private manner of moving his ears.
But for the attractive face she might have been a small toddling bear.
"This is a very painful matter, Father Brown," said Adams.
That road goes down and down.
This is the end of it.
"Come on!" he cried in quite unusual excitement.
The vamped dress of silver paper and paste, which had been too glaring in the footlights, looked more and more magical and silvery as it danced away under a brilliant moon.
That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter.
"Well," said the young man, "if you're born on the wrong side of the wall, I can't see that it's wrong to climb over it."
"I've got Florian's address here, and he knows every costumier in London.
But he said nothing and grimly watched the unloading of the motor-car, which was rather a long process.
Very slowly a light began to creep in his grey eyes, and then he made the scarcely obvious answer.
The harlequin, already clad in silver paper out of cigar boxes, was, with difficulty, prevented from smashing the old Victorian lustre chandeliers, that he might cover himself with resplendent crystals.
"Of course, of course," replied the colonel carelessly--"My dear chap, any friend of yours.
Then, after an innocent pause, which unconsciously betrayed some lack of enthusiasm, Ruby Adams added:
Porch and vestibule, indeed, were unduly large in proportion to the house, and formed, as it were, a big room with the front door at one end, and the bottom of the staircase at the other.
In front of the large hall fire, over which hung the colonel's sword, the process was completed and the company, including the saturnine Crook, presented to Sir Leopold Fischer.
Father Brown suddenly shouted with laughter, then stopped, and only struggled with it for instants during the rest of his speech. "Gentlemen," he gasped, "there's not much time to talk.
I saw one when I left England at twelve years old, and it's blazed in my brain like a bonfire ever since.
At about this limit of mental anarchy Father Brown's view was obscured altogether; for the City magnate in front of him rose to his full height and thrust his hands savagely into all his pockets.
Then it was that the strange actor gave that celebrated imitation of a dead man, of which the fame still lingers round Putney.
"He is harlequin to your columbine," said Crook.
"Your downward steps have begun.
"Oh, splendid," cried Ruby.
Flambeau would then proceed to tell the story from the inside; and even from the inside it was odd.
The small man stooped to pick them up, and when he looked up again the green cage of the tree was emptied of its silver bird.
Sir Leopold Fischer was leaning against the mantelpiece and heaving with all the importance of panic.
Mr. Crook shall be clown; he's a journalist and knows all the oldest jokes.
"I will be pantaloon, if you like," said Colonel Adams, taking his cigar out of his mouth, and speaking for the first and last time.
For an instant it seemed seriously likely that he would stride across the footlights; then he turned a glare at the clown playing the piano; and then he burst in silence out of the room.
Stealing the stones, I suppose, was nothing to you.
"Any of you gentlemen Mr. Blount?" he asked, and held forward a letter doubtfully.
Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime. Maurice Blum started out as an anarchist of principle, a father of the poor; he ended a greasy spy and tale-bearer that both sides used and despised.
You used to boast of doing nothing mean, but you are doing something mean tonight.
An aunt in his close neighbourhood was so great a comfort to him,--so ready and so natural an assistance to him in his difficulties!
"And I have promised you that I will not disobey you.
"Your aunt has told you, I suppose.
Yes; it is about Mr. Lopez.
One is bound to think of one's family.
"He has a business, and he lives with gentlemen.
Marriage, my dear, is a most serious thing."
Mrs. Roby was pleased with little intrigues, was addicted to the amusement of fostering love affairs, was fond of being thought to be useful in such matters, and was not averse to having presents given to her.
"I don't know that I ever did."
Those who knew her well, and had become attached to her, were apt to endow her with all virtues, and to give her credit for a loveliness which strangers did not find on her face.
But if so, the stain was as yet too impalpable to be visible to ordinary eyes.
"I should, my dear.
I should care very much.
As young men go, I think Mr. Lopez is as good as the best of them.
But I should have wished to accept him.
And why should not a foreigner be as good as an Englishman?
"Yes, papa, I know that."
"Lopez has been to your father," said Mrs. Roby, in a voice not specially encouraging for such an occasion.
But Emily Wharton was not in the least like her aunt, nor had Mrs. Wharton been at all like Mrs. Roby.
Of course I will."
"Or his mother,--or his family?
I cannot tell.
"I think I should have consulted you before I did that.
There was innate in her an appreciation of her own position as a woman, and with it a principle of self-denial as a human being, which it was beyond the power of any Mrs. Roby to destroy or even to defile by small stains.
But a feeling began to grow upon him already that his daughter had a mode of pleading with him which he would not ultimately be able to resist.
Lopez."
"Is he a bad man, papa?"
It is right that you should know the truth.
"But I think you ought to tell me why it must not be,--as I do love him."
I have never said so before to any one.
And he is clever.
But as we do not light up our houses with our brightest lamps for all comers, so neither did she emit from her eyes their brightest sparks till special occasion for such shining had arisen.
She had married a vulgar man; and, though she had not become like the man, she had become vulgar.
It might probably be the case that the whole condition of her future life would depend on the way in which she might now "have it out" with her father.
As soon as Mrs. Roby had gathered up her knitting, and declared, as she always did on such occasions, that she could go round the corner without having any one to look after her, Mr. Wharton began.
Emily Wharton had doubtless thought about these things, and she sincerely believed that she had found the good man in Ferdinand Lopez.
I suppose every girl would like to do that."
On his own behalf it must be acknowledged that he did love the girl, as well perhaps as he was capable of loving any one;--but he had found out many particulars as to Mr. Wharton's money before he had allowed himself to love her.
Suppose it should turn out afterwards that he was--disreputable!"
I have been very much astonished to-day by Mr. Lopez,--a man of whom I have seen very little and know less.
Of course I believe you."
"Did you tell him so?"
"Yes;--well; I don't know whether I said exactly that, but I told him that the whole thing must come to an end.
Her features were regular and handsome, and her form was perfect; but it was by her manner and her voice that she conquered, rather than by her beauty,--by those gifts and by a clearness of intellect joined with that feminine sweetness which has its most frequent foundation in self-denial.
I would not say so to you now, if he had not--spoken to you as he has done."
"And you ought to feel that, as I have had a long experience in the world, my judgment about a young man might be trusted."
"I wish he had never seen you."
He remained longer than usual with his bottle of port wine in the dining-room; and when he went upstairs, he sat himself down and fell asleep, almost without a sign.
If you tell me that I am never to see Mr. Lopez again, I will not see him."
"Emily, my dear, come here." Then she came and sat on a footstool at his feet, and looked up into his face.
He was as convinced as ever that unless there was much to conceal there would not be so much concealment.
"But should you have accepted him?"
You'll think about it, papa,--will you not, before you quite decide?" She leaned against him as she spoke, and he kissed her. "Good night, now, papa.
But what was there to think about? Nothing that she had said altered in the least his idea about the man.
"Because he is a stranger and a foreigner.
But to the girl the matrimony which is or is not to be her destiny contains within itself the only success or failure which she anticipates.
You ought to believe that it is the chief object of my life to do the best I can for my children."
Luckily it seems that nothing has been said on either side."
"Yes, papa." He was sitting on a sofa and shrank back a little from her as she made this free avowal.
"You claim a right to my obedience, and I acknowledge it.
Don't you think that is suspicious?"
If there has been intimacy between you, such information should have come naturally,--as a thing of course.
That is reason sufficient."
"But if I do that for you, papa, I think that you ought to be very sure, on my account, that I haven't to bear such unhappiness for nothing.
He had only to say resolutely and unchangeably that the thing shouldn't be, and it wouldn't be.
The man, certainly, was one strangely endowed with the power of creating a belief.
That was a statement which Miss Wharton was not prepared to admit. She had already professed herself willing to submit to her father's judgment, and did not now by any means contemplate rebellion against parental authority.
And he began the process of thinking about it immediately,--before the door was closed behind her.
"Why not, papa?
"I am sure it is."
How is one to know whether a man be bad or good when one knows nothing about him?" At this point the father got up and walked about the room.
"Yes, papa; I think I do.
You have made him no promise?"
"I will.
To those who were allowed to love her no woman was more lovable.
"He has no relatives, no family, no belongings.
"Why of course, papa?"
"I do not want to know him better."
It may be that some slightest soil had already marred the pure white of the girl's natural character.
He is well educated;--oh, so much better than most men that one meets.
I would not wish the reader to be prejudiced against Miss Wharton by the not unnatural feeling which may perhaps be felt in regard to the aunt.
But the girl can look forward to little else than the chance of having a good man for her husband;--a good man, or if her tastes lie in that direction, a rich man.
If this is to be as you say, it will make me very, very wretched.
"Emily, it must not be."
"My dear Emily," said Mr. Wharton, striving to wax into anger that he might be firm against her, "I don't think that it becomes you to ask your father such a question as that.
In this way Lopez had carried his point with Mr. Wharton. He had convinced Mrs. Roby that among all the girl's attractions the greatest attraction for him was the fact that she was Mrs. Roby's niece.
But she did feel that on a matter so vital to her she had a right to plead her cause before judgment should be given, and she was not slow to assure herself, even as this interview went on, that her love for the man was strong enough to entitle her to assure her father that her happiness depended on his reversal of the sentence already pronounced.
"No doubt your papa will have it out with you just now; so you had better make up your mind what you will say to him.
You were always a good girl."
"One is bound to be very careful.
"I do believe you.
It is about--Mr.
"Not in that way, certainly."
I don't know why you shouldn't have him.
Did you ever hear this man speak of his father?"
"I will ask him, papa, if you wish."
She swore splendidly; she boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist.
She worked; he created.
The man and the woman each had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with blows--this was the woman's; she went barefooted in winter--that was the man's doing.
Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an elephant.
As for his prowess at Waterloo, the reader is already acquainted with that.
This rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming from Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels, being comfortably astride of both frontiers.
He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner, but practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it. Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever.
He had something of the look of sailors, who are accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses. Thenardier was a statesman.
Her big face, dotted with red blotches, presented the appearance of a skimmer.
He did not disdain his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them.
At certain moments she beheld him like a lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.
Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier was approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.
He allowed it to be thought that he was an educated man.
But her maternity stopped short with her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys.
In this same year, 1823, Thenardier was burdened with about fifteen hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.
Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,--window panes, furniture, and people.
His cunning began here; he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing.
Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted for his skill in shooting.
She was not even the mistress.
He made pretensions to literature and to materialism. There were certain names which he often pronounced to support whatever things he might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly enough, Saint Augustine.
He smoked a big pipe.
She had a beard.
Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame Thenardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake.
No one had ever succeeded in rendering him drunk.
Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case, Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized peoples,--hospitality.
His coquetry consisted in drinking with the carters.
She did everything about the house,--made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything else.
He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh, which was particularly dangerous.
He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an old black coat.
What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God, find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the midst of men all naked!
This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters into it.
He declared that he had "a system." In addition, he was a great swindler.
The rest of him underneath was white.
The wing was bleeding a little.
Wings and tail were pure black and all the rest was a beautiful scarlet.
Then, doing his best to be careful and to hurt as little as possible, he worked the other part of the twig out from the under side.
This was quite true.
"I don't hear any strange voice," said she.
Then quite suddenly it came over Peter that something was wrong with Redcoat, and he hurried forward to see what the trouble might be.
"It's Farmer Brown's boy and I'm sure he won't hurt you. Perhaps he can help you." Then Peter scampered off for a short distance and sat up to watch what would happen.
Redcoat held up his right wing and sure enough there was a little stick projecting from both sides close up to the shoulder.
Redcoat hopped from branch to branch until he was halfway up the tree.
You don't have anything to fear from me," cried Peter.
"What is it, Redcoat?
Peter looked up to see a bird a little smaller than Welcome Robin.
If they did they would soon starve to death, for buds and blossoms don't last long.
"If you don't know Rosebreast the Grosbeak, Peter Rabbit, you certainly must have been blind and deaf ever since you were born.
"Oh, dear, whatever shall I do, Peter Rabbit?
Hide!" Mrs. Tanager flew off a short distance to one side and began to cry as if in the greatest distress.
"Does it pain you dreadfully?" asked Peter.
"No, I don't mean Welcome Robin's song," snapped Jenny.
He was puzzled.
"Of course they don't live on buds and blossoms.
Now run along, Peter Rabbit, and don't bother me any more."
The look of terror which had been in the eyes of Redcoat died out, and he stopped fluttering and simply lay panting.
She cocked her head on one side to listen, then looked down at Peter, and her sharp little eyes snapped.
"Do you mean to say that they live on buds and blossoms?" cried Peter. "I never heard of such a thing."
Altogether she looked more as if she might be a big member of the Sparrow family than the wife of handsome Rosebreast.
There was no beautiful rose color about Mrs. Grosbeak.
Redcoat heard the rustle of Peter's feet among the dry leaves and at once began to flap and flutter in an effort to fly away, but he could not get off the ground.
No one with any eyes at all could have helped seeing him, because of that wonderful scarlet coat.
It was Redcoat the Tanager.
I've had a terrible accident, and I don't know what I am to do.
None were, and after holding Redcoat a few minutes he carefully set him up in a tree and withdrew a short distance.
One song was a little louder and clearer than the others because it came from a tree very close at hand, the very tree from which those squeaky notes had come just a few minutes before. Peter suspected that that must be the song Jenny Wren meant.
"There!" cried Peter.
"Don't be afraid, Redcoat," he whispered.
That's a better song than Welcome Robin's.
You can ask more silly questions than anybody of my acquaintance," retorted Jenny Wren.
Farmer Brown's boy understood instantly that something was wrong with one wing, and running forward, he caught Redcoat.
During the month of July we eagerly watched the incoming steamers, and welcomed all new comers who landed in Chinik.
Our little sick girl being obliged now to keep her bed continually, with no more playing in the sand and sunshine, although her cough had left her, was still the same sweet, patient child she had been through all her illness, and my whole time was given to her.
Passing along easily beyond another high mountain, we were soon at the dock of Unalaska, beside other great ships in port.
Three evenings in the week these musicians, with the help of several singers on board, gave concerts in the dining salon, which, though impromptu, were very enjoyable.
All were loaded with passengers and freight for Nome.
The last named were going to start a restaurant in Nome.
We were not mistaken.
The English people were all workers, and I had known them for ten years or more.
Not many days had passed when we found that we had on board what few steamers can boast of, and that was an orchestra of professional musicians among the waiters.
Paul," belonging to the Alaska Commercial Company, and was advertised to sail on May twenty-fifth.
She wore a sailor suit of navy blue serge, trimmed with white braid, and was as coy and cunning as ever, not speaking often to strangers, but laughing and running away to her mother when addressed.
We tried at last to give them comfort by recommending out of former experiences ship's biscuit, dry toast and pop-corn as remedies, but only received black looks as our reward.
These evenings were sometimes varied by recitations from an elocutionist on board; and a practised clog dancer excited the risibles of the company to the extent that they usually shouted with laughter at his exhibition of flying heels.
There were several Swedish missionaries; one, a zealous young woman from San Francisco, going to the Swedish Mission at Golovin Bay.
Of passengers we had, all told, four hundred and eighty-seven.
Leaving Unalaska the sun shone clear and cold upon the mountains where in places the sides looked black from the late fires started in the deep tundra by miscreants.
But they were all tree physical as well as free moral agents and decided these things for themselves.
As we drew nearer and entered the harbor so well land-locked, the sun dipped low into yellow-red western waters, thereby casting long shadows aslant our pathway so delicately shaded in greens.
We then concluded that a diet of tea, coffee and soup was exactly such a one as the fishes would recommend could they speak, these favorite and much used liquids keeping up a continual "swishing" in one's interior regions, and causing one to truthfully speak of the same as "infernal" instead of internal.
"No one was ever so ill before," they said.
A sweet and trained singer was the English girl of our company, and she sang many times, accompanied by the stringed instruments of the musicians, much to the delight of the assembled passengers.
On Monday, June fourth, we saw from the deck a few drifting logs and a quantity of seaweed, and these, with the presence of gulls and goonies flying overhead, convinced us that we were nearing land.
As they were sociable, jolly, and good sailors for the most part, I enjoyed their society.
Paul." All were well cared for and satisfied, as well they might be, with the service of the ship's men.
I slept for hours each day and thoroughly enjoyed the trip.
Of these thirty-five were women.
This young person was pretty and pleasant, and I was glad to make her acquaintance as well as that of three other women speaking the same tongue and occupying the next stateroom to mine.
Their progress was never impeded.
Those who were continually seasick had diversion enough.
Scout boats had already been sent out to investigate and find, if possible, a passage through the ice fields, and the return of these scouts with good news was anxiously watched and waited for, as the most desired thing at that time was a speedy and safe landing on the supposedly golden beach sands of Nome.
Every stateroom was full; each seat at the tables occupied.
When she sang, one evening, in her clear sympathetic voice the selection, "Oh, Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight," there was not a dry eye in the room, and the mind of many a man went back to his old home and praying mother in some far distant state, making him resolve to write oftener to her that she might be comforted with a knowledge of his whereabouts and welfare.
The tops of the mountains were covered with snow. Down deep gorges dashed mountain waters of melting snow and ice, hurrying to leap off gullied and rocky cliffs into the sea.
Little did I then think that these people, placed by a seeming chance in an adjoining stateroom, were to be my fellow-workers and true friends, not only for the coming months in that Arctic land to which we were going, but, as the sequel will show, perhaps for years to come.
I was now much gratified to learn that there were many on board whom I had met before; that the steward, stewardess and several of the waiters had been on duty on the steamer "Bertha" during my trip out from Alaska the fall before, while I was upon speaking terms with a dozen or more of the passengers with whom I had traveled from the same place.
An English family consisting of the mother, one son and a daughter were to accompany me, and we had spent weeks in making our preparations.
They had all lived in San Francisco for years, and though not related to each other, were firm friends of long standing and were uniting their little fortunes in the hope of making greater ones.
I was not above doing any honest work, and felt confident that I could make my way if I could gain an entrance into that country.
At last we entered the Japan current and the weather was warmer and more enjoyable.
We had preachers on board, as well as doctors, lawyers, merchants and miners, and there were women going to Nome to start eating houses, hotels and mercantile shops.
Day after day passed.
CHAPTER VII.
It was useless for us to tell them a pathetic tale of some one, who, at some time, had been more ill than they, because they would not believe a word of it, and it was equally useless to recommend an antidote for mal de mer such as theirs.
No tree nor shrub obstructed the way with gnarled old trunks, twisted roots, or low hanging branches, for none grow in Unalaska, and the bold dignity and grandeur of the mountains is never diminished by these lesser objects.
My hope was to meet my father there, for he had written that he thought he should go to the new gold fields, where he could do beach mining.
Paul" to May twenty-sixth, and we left the dock on Saturday afternoon amid the cheers and hand-waving of thousands of people who had come to see the big boat off for Nome.
GOING TO NOME.
We were taking supplies of clothing, food, tents and bedding sufficient to last until some of our numerous plans of work after our arrival brought in returns.
They knew they should die and be buried at sea, and hoped they would if that would put an end to their sufferings.
These were men going, with all the others, to seek their fortunes in the new gold fields, working their passage as waiters on the ship to Nome, where they intended to leave it.
Not a foot of space above or below decks was left unused, but provision was made for all, and the ship was well manned.
As our ship sailed out into Behring Sea we were closely followed by the steamer "George W. Elder," whose master, an old friend of our captain, had decided to follow in our wake, he being less familiar than the latter with Alaskan waters, and having confidence in the ability of his friend to successfully pilot both ships to Cape Nome.
The little hamlet of Dutch Harbor nestled cosily at the foot of the mountains which bordered the bay, and here numbers of ships lay anchored at rest.
Both groups of craft were evidently waiting for the ice to clear from Behring Sea before proceeding on their way northward, and we counted sixteen ships of different kinds and sizes, the majority of them large steamers.
There was only one child on board, and that was the little black-eyed girl with her Eskimo mother and white father from Golovin Bay whom I had seen at St. Michael some months before, and who was now going back to her northern home.
And take heed also to thyself and thine own kingdom if thou permit this new fashion of driving forth kings to go unpunished.
Nor did such valor fail to receive due honor from the city.
So these three for a while stayed the first onset of the enemy; and the men of Rome meanwhile brake down the bridge.
There was a certain hill which men called Janiculum on the side of the river, and this hill King Porsenna took by a sudden attack.
Nevertheless they were steadfastly purposed to hold out.
Do ye therefore break it down with axe and fire as best ye can.
"Suffer not," they said, "that we, who are Tuscans by birth, should remain any more in poverty and exile.
But when men heard of his coming, so mighty a city was Clusium in those days, and so great the fame of King Porsenna, there was such fear as had never been before.
In the meanwhile I, so far as one man may do, will stay the enemy." And as he spake he ran forward to the farther end of the bridge and made ready to keep the way against the enemy.
The hair was combed daily after a bath.
To these natural advantages the people added by the usual artificial means.
An entry in Cormac's Glossary plainly indicates that the blush of the cheeks was sometimes heightened by a colouring matter obtained from the alder tree: and the sprigs and berries of the elder were applied to the same purpose.
The ancient Irish loved bright colours.
Shoes were often made of untanned hide stitched with thongs, with several layers for a sole.
Even the single outer cloak was often striped, spotted, or chequered in various colours.
But there was a more shapely shoe, made of fully tanned leather, having serviceable sole and heel, and often ornamented with patterns stamped in.
Married women usually had the head covered either with a hood or with a long web of linen wreathed round and round in several folds.
I do not find mentioned anywhere that the Irish dyed their hair, as was the custom among the Greeks and Romans.
When terminating below the ankles it was held down by a slender strap passing under the foot.
Like other Irish garments it was generally striped or speckled in various colours.
From what precedes it will be understood that combs were in general use with men as well as with women; and many specimens of combs are now found in the remains of ancient dwellings.
In every public hostel, in every monastery, and in every high-class house, there was a bath, with its accompaniments.
It was considered shameful for a man of position to have rough unkempt nails. Crimson-coloured finger-nails were greatly admired; and ladies sometimes dyed them this colour.
Thin circular gold plates were also worn fastened on the breast: and as for brooches, they were of all shapes and sizes, some plain, simple, and cheap, some of gold or other expensive material, of elaborate workmanship.
Soap was used both in bathing and washing.
Bathing was very usual, at least among the upper classes, and baths and the use of baths are constantly mentioned in the old tales and other writings.
They formed, too, an important item of everyday traffic, and they were also exported.
The fashion of wearing the beard varied.
A very common article of dress was a large cloak, generally without sleeves, varying in length, but commonly covering the whole person from the shoulders down.
Among the higher classes the finger-nails were kept carefully cut and rounded.
The veil was in constant use among the higher classes, and when not actually worn was usually carried, among other small articles, in a lady's ornamental hand-bag.
Nearly all have a mustache, in most cases curled up and pointed at the ends as we often see now.
The Irish were excessively fond of personal ornaments, which among the higher classes were made of expensive materials, such as gold, silver, gems, white bronze, etc.
In nearly all the figures of the Book of Kells, for example (seventh or eighth century), the hair is combed and dressed with the utmost care, so beautifully adjusted indeed that it could have been done only by skilled professional hairdressers, and must have occupied much time.
The furs of animals, such as seals, otters, badgers, foxes, etc., were much used for capes and jackets, and for the edgings of various garments, so that skins of all the various kinds were valuable.
A short cape was often worn on the shoulders, sometimes carrying a hood to cover the head.
The men were as particular about the beard as about the hair.
The over-garments were fastened by brooches, pins, buttons, girdles, strings, and loops, many of them beautifully made and ornamented.
King Domnall, in the seventh century, on one occasion sent a many-coloured tunic to his foster-son Prince Congal: like Joseph's coat of many colours.
An oval face, broad above and narrow below, golden hair, fair skin, white, delicate, and well-formed hands with slender tapering fingers: these were considered as marking the type of beauty and of high family descent; they were the Marks of Aristocracy.
The outer covering of the general run of the peasantry was just one loose sleeved coat or mantle, generally of frieze, which covered them down to the ankles; and which they wore winter and summer.
The heroes of the Fena of Erin, before sitting down to their dinner after a hard day's hunting, always took a bath and carefully combed their long hair.
Silk and satin, which were of course imported, were much worn among the higher classes.
Among Greek and Roman ladies the practice was very general of painting the cheeks, eyebrows, and other parts of the face.
PREFACE.
The publication comes at an appropriate time, when there is an awakening of interest in the Irish language, and in Irish lore of every kind, unparalleled in our history.
This book is the last of a series of three, of which the second is abridged from the first, and the third from both.
For all the statements it contains, full and satisfactory authorities will be found in the two larger works.
But there were, and are, Englishmen better informed about our country. More than three hundred years ago the great English poet, Edmund Spenser, lived for some time in Ireland, and made himself well acquainted with its history.
But it is better not to pursue these observations farther here, as it would be only anticipating what will be found in the body of the book.
This Third book--"The Story of Ancient Irish Civilisation"--gives in simple, plain language, an account of the condition of the country in the olden time; but as it is here to speak for itself, I need not describe it further.
But the book has a further mission.
This book, so far as it finds its way among the two classes above mentioned, will, I fancy, open their eyes.
But in the matter of our Social History he has no choice at all.
There are many English and many Anglo-Irish people who think, merely from ignorance, that Ireland was a barbarous and half-savage country before the English came among the people and civilised them.
The ordinary history of our country has been written by many, and the reader has a wide choice.
I have done my best to make all three readable and interesting, as well as instructive.
The beacons we had put up came to our aid, and for our final success we owe a deep debt of gratitude to our prudence and thoughtfulness in adopting this expedient.
Wisting came near to sounding the depth of one of these dangerous crevasses with sledge, dogs and all, as the bridge he was about to cross gave way.
It was not far away -- on the contrary, it seemed threateningly near and right over us.
The north-east wind whistled and howled, the air was thick with driving snow, and Wisting was not to be envied.
The dogs were not much inclined to start, and it took time to get them into their harness, but at last we were ready.
Behind this group the air had been heavy and black the whole time, showing that more land must be concealed there.
In a short time an immense erection of adamantine blocks of snow rose into the air, containing provisions for five men for six days and for eighteen dogs for five days.
We set to work at once to build the depot; the snow here was excellent for this purpose -- as hard as glass.
This was the photographer, who, in passing over this snow-bridge, struck his ski into it to try the strength of the support.
I shouted to Hanssen to stop, and he succeeded in doing so by twisting his sledge.
But right in our line of route -- straight on to the glacier -- it looked, as far as we could see, as though we could get along.
The descent on the south was too abrupt, but on the south-east it was better and more gradual, and ended in a wide, level tract.
The weather, which had somewhat improved during the night, had now broken loose again, and the north-easter was doing all it could.
This is, after all, the worst part of one's job -- turning out of one's good, warm sleeping-bag, and standing outside for some time in thin clothes, watching the weather.
Can anyone be surprised that we called it the Devil's Glacier?
What we could see of the glacier appeared to be pretty steep; but it was only between the south and south-east, under the new land, that the fog now and again lifted sufficiently to enable us to see anything.
We went on like this, slowly enough, but the main thing was that we made progress.
We had all taken a turn outside to look at the weather, and were sitting on our sleeping-bags discussing the poor prospect.
It was a fairy landscape in blue and white, red and black, a play of colours that defies description.
The weather improved in the course of the day, and when we camped in the afternoon it looked quite smiling.
To advance in that direction, then, was hopeless, but that was no great matter, since our way was to the south.
As we were advancing, still blindly, and fretting at the persistently thick weather, one of us suddenly called out: "Hullo, look there!" A wild, dark summit rose high out of the mass of fog to the east-south-east.
The language we used about the glacier as we went was not altogether complimentary; we had endless tacking and turning to get on.
What did it mean?
Amid joking and chaff, everything was packed, and then -- out into the blizzard.
Something extraordinary must await us farther on, but, what?
They had undergone a remarkable change since our arrival at the Butcher's Shop; they now wandered about, fat, sleek, and contented, and their former voracity had completely disappeared.
We saw well enough that this would be a difficult place to pass with sledges and dogs, but in default of anything better it would have to be done.
We were roped, and therefore safe enough.
The boiling-point test that evening showed that we were 10,300 feet above the sea, and that we had thus gone down 620 feet from the Butcher's.
The spare sets of dog-harness, some Alpine ropes, and all our crampons for ice-work, which we now thought would not be required, were left behind.
We examined the compass from time to time, and went forward cautiously.
There was thus no great sign of depression to be noticed when we came back into the tent after finishing our work, and had to while away the time.
A number of small articles were also left behind.
We knew by experience that a gleam like this, a clearing in the weather, might come suddenly, and then one had to be on the spot.
A sledge journey through the Sahara could not have offered a worse surface to move over.
It took, nevertheless, a remarkably short time to cover the distance we had explored on the previous evening; before we knew it, we were at Hell's Gate.
This surprised me greatly.
From the south round to the west the fog lay as thick as gruel.
From this mass, right across our course, ran a great, ancient glacier; the sun shone down upon it and showed us a surface full of huge irregularities.
It was blowing and snowing so that when we came out in the morning we could not see the sledges; they were half snowed under.
After putting ample brakes on the sledge-runners, we started off downhill in a south-easterly direction.
I see that my diary for November 28 does not begin very promisingly: "Fog, fog -- and again fog.
And then we were off: It was a hard pull to begin with, both for men and beasts, as the high sastrugi continued towards the south, and made it extremely difficult to advance.
We might risk falling into some chasm before we had time to pull up.
It would, no doubt, have been better if we could have halted, set up our tent, and waited for decently clear weather, so that we might survey the ground at our ease and choose the best way.
As regards ourselves, a day or two longer made no difference; our most important article of diet, the pemmican, was practically left untouched, as for the time being dog had completely taken its place.
It was to the south we had to go, and there it was possible to go forward a little way.
This formation -- like every -- thing else on the glacier-was obviously very old, and for the most part filled with snow.
Thank God we were not here while this was going on, I thought to myself, as I stood looking out over this battlefield; it must have been a spectacle like doomsday, and not on a small scale either.
As soon as this was done Hanssen and I set out to explore.
We were in the middle of a fairly steep descent; what there might be below was not easy to decide, nor would we try to find out in that weather.
It was not a long day's march that we had done -- eleven and three-quarter miles -- but we had put an end to our stay at the Butcher's Shop, and that was a great thing.
In this way we worked up about 200 feet, but then we came upon such a labyrinth of yawning chasms and open abysses that we could not move.
That it was a happy thought the future will show.
But, taking into account all the turns and circuits we had been compelled to make, it was not so short after all.
It was therefore important to have as little as possible on the sledges.
It was practically impossible to keep one's eyes open; the fine drift-snow penetrated everywhere, and at times one had a feeling of being blind.
It was our intention to lighten our sledges before tackling the glacier; from the little we could see of it, it was plain enough that we should have stiff work.
What a nice time Speckle did have, to be sure; for the grasshoppers were lively and fat, and aunt was in an unusually amiable mood.
'Fits, ma'am,' answered Doctor Drake, who just then waddled by.
'My child, my child!
No one knew what had become of her till some days later, when she was found dead in the meal, with her poor little claws sticking straight up as if imploring help.
Taste this mint-leaf!
Peck was a glutton, eating everything she could find, and often making herself ill by gobbling too fast, and forgetting to eat a little gravel to help digest her food.
Alas, alas, for poor Strut! he leaned so far forward in his frantic effort to get a big crow out, that he toppled over and fell bump on the hard barn-floor, killing himself instantly.
'You'll fall and get hurt,' said his sister Blot.
Having pecked his brothers and sisters, he tried to do the same to his playmates, the ducklings, goslings, and young turkeys, and was so disagreeable that all the fowls hated him.
Sam never saw her, but shut down the cover of the bin as he passed, and left poor Peep to die.
Before he had a feather to his bit of a tail, Chanty began to fight, and soon was known as the most quarrelsome chick in the farm-yard.
One day, a pair of bantams arrived,--pretty little white birds, with red crests and nice yellow feet.
Chanty thought he could beat Mr. Bantam easily, he was so small, and invited him to fight. Mr. B. declined.
don't flap and stagger so!
It was a dreadful blow to Mrs. Cluck; and Aunt Cockletop didn't show herself for a whole day after that story was known, for every fowl in the yard twitted her with the difference between her preaching and her practice.
'Where is Peep?' asked Mrs. Cluck.
Peck meanwhile got into mischief also; for, in her hunt for something good to eat, she strayed into the sheep-shed, and finding some salt, ate as much as she liked, not knowing that salt is bad for hens.
'Yes, ma'am,' chirped the chickens; and then as she went rustling into the hay-mow, they began to run about and enjoy themselves with all their might.
'Aunty told me not to run.
My mother will be glad to see you,' said the kit rubbing her soft white face against Blot's little black breast.
Speckle had hopped away from a toad with a startled chirp, which caused aunt to utter that remark.
Faster and faster fell the snow darker and darker grew the night, and colder and colder became poor Blot's little feet as she waded through the drifts.
The tragedy began with Chanty, who was the boldest little cockadoodle who ever tried to crow.
For some time after this, Mrs. Cluck kept her three remaining little ones close to her side, watching over them with maternal care, till they were heartily tired of her anxious cluckings.
They were very happy together till Thanksgiving drew near, when a dreadful pestilence seemed to sweep through the farm-yard; for turkeys, hens, ducks, and geese fell a prey to it, and were seen by their surviving relatives featherless, pale, and stiff, borne away to some unknown place whence no fowl returned.
I'm going to lay an egg, and can't look after you just now,' said their mother one day.
Come at once, for night is coming on, and the snow will soon be too deep for us,' said Blot.
'I live at the red farm-house over the hill, only I don't know which road to take.'
Peep found a little hole into the meal-room, and slipped in, full of joy at the sight of the bags, boxes, and bins.
The chicks stopped scratching and peeping, and sat in a row to hear Strut crow.
'Hold your tongue, you ugly little thing, and don't talk to me.
Have a drop of water!
In the morning few remained, and Blot felt that she was a forlorn orphan, a thought which caused her to sit with her head under her wing for several hours, brooding over her sad lot, and longing to join her family in some safe and happy land, where fowls live in peace.
He gave an angry cluck, flapped his wings, and tried again.
She'--there Peck stopped suddenly, rolled up her eyes, and began to stagger about as if she was tipsy.
That made Strut mad, and he resolved to crow, even if he killed himself doing it.
'Nothing, ma'am; it's fatal.' And the doctor waddled on to visit Dame Partlet's son, who was ill of the pip.
Be quiet, down there, and hear if I can't do it as well as daddy.'
Having taken all she wanted, she ran back to the barn, and was innocently catching gnats when her mamma came out of the hay-mow with a loud.
There never was a prouder mamma than Madam Cluck when she led forth her family of eight downy little chicks.
'Never run away from anything, but face danger and conquer it, like a brave chick,' said the old biddy, as she went clucking through the grass, with her gray turban wagging in the wind.
'Don't go out of the barn, children.
Old Aunt Cockletop told her that she didn't, and predicted that 'those poor dears would come to bad ends.'
What's the matter with the chick?' cried Mrs. Cluck, in great alarm.
Perching himself on the beam, he tried his best, but only a droll 'cock-a-doodle-doo' came of it, and all the chicks laughed.
Downy and Snowball soon followed; for the two sweet little things would swing on the burdock-leaves that grew over the brook.
'Now I'm safe; thank you very much.
Too stiff and weak to fly up, she crept as close as possible to the bright glow which shone across the door-step, and with a shiver put her little head under her wing, trying to forget hunger, weariness, and the bitter cold, and wait patiently for morning.
So he tried every day to fly and crow, and at last managed to get up; then how he did strut and rustle his feathers, while his playmates sat below and watched him.
The words had hardly left her beak, when a shadow above made her look up, give one loud croak of alarm, and then scuttle away, as fast as legs and wings could carry her.
All looked and acted so like cats that I wasn't at all surprised to hear one of them purr when the keeper scratched her head.
I hope he hasn't got out,' I said to myself, thinking of a story I read once of a person in a menagerie, who turned suddenly and saw a great boa gliding towards him.
One of the curiosities was a sea-cow, who lived in a tank of salt water, and came at the keeper's call to kiss him, and flounder on its flippers along the margin of the tank after a fish.
The first thing I saw was a great American bison; and I was so glad to meet with any one from home, that I'd have patted him with pleasure if he had shown any cordiality toward me.
The funny expression of his face was irresistible, and I enjoyed seeing him very much, and gave him a bun to comfort him when I went away.
The lions ate in dignified silence, all but my favourite, who carried his share to his sick mate, and by every gentle means in his power tried to make her eat.
As a contrast to the wild beasts, I went to see the monkeys, who lived in a fine large house all to themselves.
He looked very unhappy, and I thought it a pity that they didn't invent a big refrigerator for him.
This was their dinner, and as they were fed but once a day they were ravenous.
At first he'd sit and stare about him, as if much amazed to find himself there; then he'd scratch his little round head and begin to scold violently, which seemed to delight the other monkeys; and, finally, he'd examine his poor little tail, and appear to understand the misfortune which had befallen him.
I couldn't imagine what the trouble was, till, far down the line, I saw a man with a barrowful of lumps of raw meat.
He was a cross old party, and sat huddled up in the straw, scowling at every one, like an ill-tempered old bachelor.
Suddenly the lions began to roar, the tigers to snarl, and all to get very much excited about something, sniffing at the openings, thrusting their paws through the bars, and lashing their tails impatiently.
He would run up the bare boughs, and give a jump, expecting to catch and swing, but the lame tail wouldn't hold him, and down he'd go, bounce on to the straw.
Here was every variety, from the great ugly chimpanzee to the funny little fellows who played like boys, and cut up all sorts of capers.
One little leopard was better bred than the others, for he went up on a shelf in the cage, and ate his dinner in a quiet, proper manner, which was an example to the rest.
There were pretty spotted leopards, panthers, and smaller varieties of the same species.
As I took a last look at his fine old face, I named him Douglas, and walked away, humming to myself the lines of the ballad,--
He was not one of the largest kind, but I was quite satisfied, and left him to his dinner of rabbits, which I hadn't the heart to stay and see him devour alive.
I liked this lion very much, for, though the biggest, he was very gentle, and had a noble face.
I never knew before what handsome birds they were; not graceful, but with such snowy plumage, tinged with pale pink and faint yellow.
One poor little chap had lost the curly end of his tail,--I'm afraid the gray one bit it off,--and kept trying to swing like the others, forgetting that the strong, curly end was what he held on with.
The tigers were rushing about, as tigers usually are; some creeping noiselessly to and fro, some leaping up and down, and some washing their faces with their velvet paws.
So I threw him some fresh clover, and went on to the pelicans.
I did not blame him, for the poor fellow was homesick, doubtless, for his own wide prairies and the free life he had lost.
The great polar bear lived next door, and spent his time splashing in and out of a pool of water, or sitting on a block of ice, panting, as if the mild spring day was blazing midsummer.
It was very like a seal, only much larger, and had four fins instead of two.
I rather like snakes, since I had a tame green one, who lived under the door-step, and would come out and play with me on sunny days.
The tigers snarled and fought and tore and got so savage I was very grateful that they were safely shut up.
The snake-house came next, and I went in, on my way to visit the rhinoceros family.
Douglas, Douglas, Tender and true.
Such roars and howls and cries as arose while the man went slowly down the line, gave one a good idea of the sounds to be heard in Indian forests and jungles.
He wouldn't touch his dinner, but lay down near her, with the lump between his paws, as if guarding it for her; and there I left him patiently waiting, in spite of his hunger, till his mate could share it with him.
Its eyes were lovely, so dark and soft and liquid; but its mouth was not pretty, and I declined one of the damp kisses which it was ready to dispense at word of command.
These snakes I found very interesting, only they got under their blankets and wouldn't come out, and I wasn't allowed to poke them; so I missed seeing several of the most curious.
I was walking toward the camel's pagoda, when, all of a sudden, a long, dark, curling thing came over my shoulder, and I felt warm breath in my face.
I sat watching them a long time, longing to let some of the wild things out for a good run, they seemed so unhappy barred in those small dens.
He was kind enough to take a promenade and show me his size, which seemed immense, as he stretched himself, and then knotted his rough grayish body into a great loop, with the fiery-eyed head in the middle.
It was a very loud and large purr, but no fireside pussy could have done it better, and every one laughed at the sound.
He had politely tried to tell me to clear the way, which I certainly had done with all speed. Picking myself out of the hedge I walked beside him, examining his clumsy feet and peering up at his small, intelligent eye.
I'm very sure he winked at me, as if enjoying the joke, and kept poking his trunk into my pocket, hoping to find something eatable.
One lady had a fright, for the wind blew the end of her shawl within reach of a tiger's great claw, and he clutched it, trying to drag her nearer.
As I stood wondering if the big worm could be under the little flat blanket before me, the branch began to move all at once, and with a start, I saw a limb swing down to stare at me with the boa's glittering eyes.
One lioness was ill, and lay on her bed, looking very pensive, while her mate moved restlessly about her, evidently anxious to do something for her, and much afflicted by her suffering.
He was so exactly the colour of the bare bough, and lay so still, I had not seen him till he came to take a look at me.
Not far off from the beating of the waves, Behind which in his long career the sun Sometimes conceals himself from every man,
Of him were made thereafter divers runnels, Whereby the garden catholic is watered, So that more living its plantations stand.
I saw the Ughi, saw the Catellini, Filippi, Greci, Ormanni, and Alberichi, Even in their fall illustrious citizens;
Now let thy voice secure and frank and glad Proclaim the wishes, the desire proclaim, To which my answer is decreed already."
And when it was created was his mind Replete with such a living energy, That in his mother her it made prophetic.
So likewise did the ancestors of those Who evermore, when vacant is your church, Fatten by staying in consistory.
But it behoved the mutilated stone Which guards the bridge, that Florence should provide A victim in her latest hour of peace.
And if on 'rose' thou turnest thy clear eyes, Thou'lt see that it has reference alone To kings who're many, and the good are rare.
Florence, within the ancient boundary From which she taketh still her tierce and nones, Abode in quiet, temperate and chaste.
Let him the mouth imagine of the horn That in the point beginneth of the axis Round about which the primal wheel revolves,--
Perhaps my word appears somewhat too bold, Postponing the delight of those fair eyes, Into which gazing my desire has rest;
And soon aware they will be of the harvest Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares Complain the granary is taken from them.
So, at that orison devout and prompt, The holy circles a new joy displayed In their revolving and their wondrous song.
Because of the resemblance that was born Of his discourse and that of Beatrice, Whom, after him, it pleased thus to begin:
Within that region where the sweet west wind Rises to open the new leaves, wherewith Europe is seen to clothe herself afresh,
To celebrate so great a paladin Have moved me the impassioned courtesy And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,
Whence, if thou notest this and what I said, A regal prudence is that peerless seeing In which the shaft of my intention strikes.
And these contingencies I hold to be Things generated, which the heaven produces By its own motion, with seed and without.
With 'You,' which Rome was first to tolerate, (Wherein her family less perseveres,) Yet once again my words beginning made;
Therefore it happens, that the selfsame tree After its kind bears worse and better fruit, And ye are born with characters diverse.
After the dance, and other grand rejoicings, Both of the singing, and the flaming forth Effulgence with effulgence blithe and tender,
Song that as greatly doth transcend our Muses, Our Sirens, in those dulcet clarions, As primal splendour that which is reflected.
Can me excuse, if I myself accuse To excuse myself, and see that I speak truly: For here the holy joy is not disclosed,
Answer: "As long as the festivity Of Paradise shall be, so long our love Shall radiate round about us such a vesture.
I followed afterward the Emperor Conrad, And he begirt me of his chivalry, So much I pleased him with my noble deeds.
From horn to horn, and 'twixt the top and base, Lights were in motion, brightly scintillating As they together met and passed each other;
If in perfection tempered were the wax, And were the heaven in its supremest virtue, The brilliance of the seal would all appear;
Across the sunbeam move, wherewith is listed Sometimes the shade, which for their own defence People with cunning and with art contrive.
The insolent race, that like a dragon follows Whoever flees, and unto him that shows His teeth or purse is gentle as a lamb,
Some who turn Florentines, and trade and discount, Would have gone back again to Simifonte There where their grandsires went about as beggars.
For one may rise, and fall the other may."
Already had Caponsacco to the Market From Fesole descended, and already Giuda and Infangato were good burghers.
Therefore the vision must perforce increase, Increase the ardour which from that is kindled, Increase the radiance which from this proceeds.
And make the people here, through covenant God set with Noah, presageful of the world That shall no more be covered with a flood,
And it began: "The love that makes me fair Draws me to speak about the other leader, By whom so well is spoken here of mine.
Already rising was, but from low people; So that it pleased not Ubertin Donato That his wife's father should make him their kin.
Thus the effulgence that surrounds us now Shall be o'erpowered in aspect by the flesh, Which still to-day the earth doth cover up;
The One and Two and Three who ever liveth, And reigneth ever in Three and Two and One, Not circumscribed and all things circumscribing,
Because that living Light, which from its fount Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not From Him nor from the Love in them intrined,
And, in the lustre most divine of all The lesser ring, I heard a modest voice, Such as perhaps the Angel's was to Mary,
His family, that had straight forward moved With feet upon his footprints, are turned round So that they set the point upon the heel.
For will increase whate'er bestows on us Of light gratuitous the Good Supreme, Light which enables us to look on Him;
And as are spanned athwart a tender cloud Two rainbows parallel and like in colour, When Juno to her handmaid gives command,
With all my heart, and in that dialect Which is the same in all, such holocaust To God I made as the new grace beseemed;
But still the orbit, which the highest part Of its circumference made, is derelict, So that the mould is where was once the crust.
Thus constellated in the depths of Mars, Those rays described the venerable sign That quadrants joining in a circle make.
Therefore should not appear a marvellous thing What I shall say of the great Florentines Of whom the fame is hidden in the Past.
Then to uplift themselves mine eyes resumed The power, and I beheld myself translated To higher salvation with my Lady only.
Moronto was my brother, and Eliseo; From Val di Pado came to me my wife, And from that place thy surname was derived.
Truly thou art a cloak that quickly shortens, So that unless we piece thee day by day Time goeth round about thee with his shears!
Thus that effulgence; whence I gave it heed; Then round unto my Lady turned my sight, And on this side and that was stupefied;
And when the bow of burning sympathy Was so far slackened, that its speech descended Towards the mark of our intelligence,
Let not Dame Bertha nor Ser Martin think, Seeing one steal, another offering make, To see them in the arbitrament divine;
And lo! all round about of equal brightness Arose a lustre over what was there, Like an horizon that is clearing up.
Here are Illuminato and Agostino, Who of the first barefooted beggars were That with the cord the friends of God became.
And in among the shoots heretical His impetus with greater fury smote, Wherever the resistance was the greatest.
As soon as the espousals were complete Between him and the Faith at holy font, Where they with mutual safety dowered each other,
The soldiery of Christ, which it had cost So dear to arm again, behind the standard Moved slow and doubtful and in numbers few,
As through the pure and tranquil evening air There shoots from time to time a sudden fire, Moving the eyes that steadfast were before,
Mighty already was the Column Vair, Sacchetti, Giuochi, Fifant, and Barucci, And Galli, and they who for the bushel blush.
Nor yet shall people be too confident In judging, even as he is who doth count The corn in field or ever it be ripe.
But even as a coal that sends forth flame, And by its vivid whiteness overpowers it So that its own appearance it maintains,
And, as was said, he to his Bride brought succour With champions twain, at whose deed, at whose word The straggling people were together drawn.
And it continued: "Hunger long and grateful, Drawn from the reading of the mighty volume Wherein is never changed the white nor dark,
"This man has need (and does not tell you so, Nor with the voice, nor even in his thought) Of going to the root of one truth more.
And therefore who I am thou askest not, And why I seem more joyous unto thee Than any other of this gladsome crowd.
Because it is as much beyond our wont, As swifter than the motion of the Chiana Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.
Three several times was chanted by each one Among those spirits, with such melody That for all merit it were just reward;
'Tis right, where one is, to bring in the other, That, as they were united in their warfare, Together likewise may their glory shine.
But Beatrice so beautiful and smiling Appeared to me, that with the other sights That followed not my memory I must leave her.
Because ascending it becomes more pure.
Suffice it of my elders to hear this; But who they were, and whence they thither came, Silence is more considerate than speech.
Near to the gate that is at present laden With a new felony of so much weight That soon it shall be jetsam from the bark,
"I am called," said Andrea.
The court-yard of this quarter is enclosed by enormous walls, over which the sun glances obliquely, when it deigns to penetrate into this gulf of moral and physical deformity.
Come, I beseech you, lend me twenty francs, so that I may buy a dressing-gown; it is intolerable always to be in a coat and boots!
"At whose house you robbed and murdered, did you not?"
If you had me taken to a private room only to tell me this, you might have saved yourself the trouble.
You must have much to tell me, since you have come to seek me."
I will say"--
"Well, in the Champs Elysees there resides a very rich gentleman."
"What do you wish me to say?"
"Can I be deceived?" he murmured, as he stepped into the oblong and grated vehicle which they call "the salad basket." "Never mind, we shall see!
"You see some one pays me a visit.
I am not forgotten.
"Come," said Andrea, "you are a man void of compassion; I'll have you turned out." This made the keeper turn around, and he burst into a loud laugh.
"I will help you.
"Well?"
You have continued your course of villany; you have robbed--you have assassinated."
"No one."
Andrea felt his heart leap with joy.
"Now," said the steward, "what have you to tell me?"
Some of the inmates of the "Lions' Den" were watching the operations of the prisoner's toilet with considerable interest.
"Good!
In the court which we have attempted to describe, and from which a damp vapor was rising, a young man with his hands in his pockets, who had excited much curiosity among the inhabitants of the "Den," might be seen walking.
Let us talk of those, if you please.
But there are some with which, on the contrary, I am not acquainted.
Why should I risk an imprudent step?
The cut of his clothes would have made him pass for an elegant man, if those clothes had not been torn to shreds; still they did not show signs of wear, and the fine cloth, beneath the careful hands of the prisoner, soon recovered its gloss in the parts which were still perfect, for the wearer tried his best to make it assume the appearance of a new coat.
"Because the person who bears it is too highly favored by heaven to be the father of such a wretch as you."
"Of course--of course," said the prisoners;--"any one can see he's a gentleman!"
"Silence,--be silent!" said Andrea, who knew the delicate sense of hearing possessed by the walls; "for heaven's sake, do not speak so loud!"
"Do you not recognize me, unhappy child?"
The keeper relaxed his hold.
On this paved yard are to be seen,--pacing to and fro from morning till night, pale, careworn, and haggard, like so many shadows,--the men whom justice holds beneath the steel she is sharpening.
The prisoners, in their expressive language, have named it the "Lions' Den," probably because the captives possess teeth which frequently gnaw the bars, and sometimes the keepers also.
It is a prison within a prison; the walls are double the thickness of the rest.
"Well, then, lend him the twenty francs," said the keeper, leaning on the other shoulder; "surely you will not refuse a comrade!"
"Come, sir," he said, "lend me twenty francs; you will soon be paid; you run no risks with me.
"An order to conduct you to a room, and to leave you there to talk to me."
I know all these things.
"I believe I did."
The gratings are every day carefully examined by jailers, whose herculean proportions and cold pitiless expression prove them to have been chosen to reign over their subjects for their superior activity and intelligence.
"Everything," he said, "proves me to be under the protection of some powerful person,--this sudden fortune, the facility with which I have overcome all obstacles, an unexpected family and an illustrious name awarded to me, gold showered down upon me, and the most splendid alliances about to be entered into.
"Well, be it so.
And what a coat, sir, for a prince of the Cavalcanti!"
"Oh, these are fine words."
"You speak first."
"He looks like a big-bug," said another; "dresses in fine style.
What possessions, what reputation, what 'pull,' as Beauchamp says,--have I?
"How did you know I was in prison?"
The unfortunate youth was intrepid in the attack, and rude in the defence.
It might alienate my protector.
And yet, frightful though this spot may be, it is looked upon as a kind of paradise by the men whose days are numbered; it is so rare for them to leave the Lions' Den for any other place than the barrier Saint-Jacques or the galleys!
You great people always lose something by scandal, notwithstanding your millions.
"Menaces--I do not fear them.
Come, who is my father?"
The keeper turned his back, and shrugged his shoulders; he did not even laugh at what would have caused any one else to do so; he had heard so many utter the same things,--indeed, he heard nothing else.
"Benedetto!" exclaimed an inspector.
But Andrea, turning towards them, winked his eyes, rolled his tongue around his cheeks, and smacked his lips in a manner equivalent to a hundred words among the bandits when forced to be silent.
What does scandal signify to me?
Let us dispense with useless words.
"Oh, yes."
"And there will be fine doings, if you do not take care."
"Read?" he said.
The prisoners then approached and formed a circle.
"Bah," said Andrea, a little overcome, by the solemnity of Bertuccio's manner, "why not?"
Some voices were heard to say that the gentleman was right; that he intended to be civil, in his way, and that they would set the example of liberty of conscience,--and the mob retired.
Benedetto, you are fallen into terrible hands; they are ready to open for you--make use of them.
You were speaking of the Champs Elysees just now, worthy foster-father."
Who sends you?"
They wish for secrecy, since we are to converse in a private room.
He was immediately recognized as one of them; the handkerchief was thrown down, and the iron-heeled shoe replaced on the foot of the wretch to whom it belonged.
The hand which has retreated for a while will be again stretched forth to save me at the very moment when I shall think myself sinking into the abyss.
There, crouched against the side of the wall which attracts and retains the most heat, they may be seen sometimes talking to one another, but more frequently alone, watching the door, which sometimes opens to call forth one from the gloomy assemblage, or to throw in another outcast from society.
"Do you think you have to do with galley-slaves, or novices in the world?
"I came to tell you."
"Who, then, am I?"
Come, let us talk a little about my father."
Come, speak, my worthy Corsican, speak!"
It was at this moment of discomfort that the inspector's voice called him to the visiting-room.
Who sent you?"
"See, the prince is pluming himself," said one of the thieves.
"The Count of Monte Cristo?"
"To the visitors' room!" said the same voice.
"You--you?" said the young man, looking fearfully around him.
"And so closes our interview," said Andrea to the worthy steward; "I wish the troublesome fellow were at the devil!"
Suddenly a voice was heard at the wicket.
Oh, what larks!" Meanwhile the object of this hideous admiration approached the wicket, against which one of the keepers was leaning.
"Ah," said Andrea, deeply affected.
"And the eggs for breakfast?"
It's modest, sir; but wherever Patsy is the sun is sure to shine."
CHAPTER XXIV.
"Good gracious!" she cried, delightedly.
"It's cozy enough, my child; and I thank you for my welcome," said he. "But may I enquire where on earth you expect to stow me in this rather limited establishment?"
His face grew grave.
"By the bye," added the Major, "if you have any money about you, which is just possible, sir, of course, you'd better turn it over to Patsy to keep, and let her make you an allowance.
So they stopped the car and descended, lugging all the parcels into the little restaurant, where they were piled into a chair while the proprietor and the waiters all gathered around Patsy to welcome her home.
"Jane left five thousand to me, also, which I didn't get.
"There's Danny Reeves's restaurant.
"You'll find the air fine, and the neighborhood respectable," he said, to turn the subject.
On the wails were a few colored prints from the Sunday newspapers and one large and fine photograph of a grizzled old soldier that Uncle John at once decided must represent "the Colonel."
'Twas the time of my life."
Uncle John laughed and drew his chair up to the table.
"Where?
"And meantime--"
"Between the two of us and Patsy, we ought to have no trouble at all."
She fairly danced for joy, and ordered the dinner with reckless disregard of the bill.
"Wasn't I there.
"It didn't hurt you, did it?" asked the Major.
But I'm not sorry at all."
It'll do for car-fare and a bit of lunch now and then, and when you get broke you can come to me."
"He smokes," observed the Major, significantly.
I'll bet a penny you liked it as little as I did."
A model home, sir, and a happy one, as I hope you'll find it."
The place was so plain after the comparative luxury of Elmhurst, and especially of the rose chamber Patsy had occupied, that the old man could not fail to marvel at the girl's ecstatic joy to find herself in the old tenement again.
"Oh, Major!" cried Patsy, suddenly.
"Thank you," said Uncle John, his face grave but his eyes merry.
"That's as he may choose," said the Major, courteously.
HOME AGAIN.
Uncle John looked around curiously.
"Seven dollars and forty-two cents," she announced.
"I never said I was a pauper," returned Uncle John, complacently.
Have you no eyes, then?" she asked, in astonishment.
Uncle John shook his head, reproachfully, at the Major.
Did you ever?"
"Oh, Dad," she cried, "here's Uncle John, who has come to live with us; and if you don't love him as much as I do I'll make your life miserable!"
That's the way I do--it's very satisfactory."
When she died she left me all she had in the world."
"You couldn't, and be truthful, sir," declared the girl.
"Not at all, Daddy."
"I'll look around," answered the Major, briskly, as if such a "job" was the easiest thing in the world to procure.
Patsy?" asked Uncle John, reproachfully.
Where, indeed!"
And, after all, it's a wicked city to be carrying a fat pocketbook around in, as I've often observed."
The Major coughed and turned the lamp a little higher.
"But you've money, sir, for I marked you squandering it on the train," said Patsy, severely.
"A very bad habit, sir," he said.
Uncle John hesitated a moment, and then drew from an inner pocket of his coat a thin wallet.
He could hardly see Patsy at all, the Major wrapped her in such an ample embrace; but bye and bye she escaped to get her breath, and then her eyes fell upon the meek form holding her bundles.
Welcome, sir, now and always, to our little home.
And then, turning to her father, she exclaimed: "Oh, daddy!
And every Saturday night, sir, you shall have a cigar after dinner, with the Major.
But, after a merry meal and a good one, there was no bill at all when it was called for.
Patsy gets our breakfast on the stove yonder, and we buy our lunches down town, where we work, and then dine at Danny Reeves's place.
"Any more?"
He can't hang around all day and be happy, I suppose."
"Not a nickle, Dad. 'Twas the best joke you ever knew.
"You weren't vexed with disappointment, were you, Patsy?"
At once she dropped her bundles and flew to the Major's arms, leaving the little man in her wake to rescue her belongings and follow after.
In your case, it won't matter.
"True, but now you're here; and our love, Uncle, has nothing to do with Elmhurst.
My, how her eyes sparkled!
"My pocketbook is not exactly fat," remarked Uncle John.
"Of course; but don't spoil the lace curtains, dear," answered Patsy, mischievously.
And surely," he added, his voice falling tenderly, "my dear Violet's brother must be my own.
"Meantime," said Uncle John, smiling at them, "I'll look around myself."
"You know it won't matter, Uncle John, if you don't work.
But just to keep him out of mischief, and busy.
"Did you get nothing out of Jane Merrick's estate?"
There was a moment of thoughtful silence after this, and then Patsy said:
"On which account," said the Major, grasping the little man's hand most cordially, "I'll love Uncle John like my own brother.
"So I was rich for half a day, and then poor as ever."
Danny Reeves himself came instead, and made a nice little speech, saying that Patsy had always brought good luck to the place, and this dinner was his treat to welcome her home.
"Thank you, Patsy," said Uncle John, meekly, and gathered up his forty-two cents.
"And you're a dozen years younger, Major!" she cried, laughing, "and fit to dig into work like a pig in clover."
Let me see," pushing the coins about with her slender fingers, "you just keep the forty-two cents, Uncle John.
The girl caught sight of him outside the gates, his face red and beaming as a poppy in bloom and his snowy moustache bristling with eagerness.
"And Bull Durham is only five cents a bag, and a bag ought to last a week.
"To be sure," agreed the Major.
"I haven't many," said Uncle John, looking thoughtfully at his red bundle.
"Look at that, now!" said the Major, wonderingly.
"Why, this will last for ages, and I'll put it away safe and be liberal with your allowance.
Our house is yours, and there's plenty and to spare."
We can foresee that there is much grief in store for her, and some rocks ahead, too, in the political career of her husband.
Should he ultimately fail in regard to his seat he must--vanish out of the world.
"But when we read of Churches as is called State Churches,--Churches as have bishops you and I have to pay for, as never goes into them--"
I and my poor father became as it were outcasts.
Would there ever again come to him such cause for migration?
What I hope is that my friends will not suppose that I attack the Protestant Church because I am a Roman Catholic.
Between the two he was a good deal crushed and confounded, and Mrs. Low was very triumphant when she allowed him to escape from her hands at ten o'clock.
He does not attempt to persuade with promises of future care.
I complain of no injustice.
They tell me at the People's Banner office that the lords have had as much to do with this election as with any that ever went before it."
So he took up his residence once more at the house of a certain Mr. and Mrs. Bunce, in Great Marlborough Street, with whom he had lodged when he first became a member of Parliament.
He does--nothing.
You will have seen it all, and have enough of the feminine side of a man's character to be able to tell me how they are living. I am sure they are happy together, because Violet has more common sense than any woman I ever knew.
But after all there's been betwixt you and us it wouldn't be natural to pass it by without one word; would it, Mr. Finn?
In truth the burden of idleness has now fallen upon him so heavily that he cannot shake it off.
He knew that many votes had been given for Browborough which, if the truth were known of them, would be knocked off; and he did not know that the same could be said of any one of those by which he had been supported.
But neither did he nor did his wife for a moment abstain from attacking their guest in respect to his speeches at Tankerville.
He has never even told me that he loves me; but he is persistent in declaring that those whom God has joined together nothing human should separate.
"Pretty much the same, Mr. Finn.
LAURA KENNEDY.
Now he had been tempted back again to the old haunts. Would the Countesses' cards be showered upon him again?
He offers no comfort.
Of one club he had always remained a member, and he had already been re-elected a member of the Reform.
Our castle was built upon the sand.
Now Lord Chiltern was again his very intimate friend.
My father and my husband were both in the Cabinet, and you, young as you were, stood but one step below it.
That he didn't.
Do come if you can.
They were very glad to see him, explaining that, as nobody was supposed to be in town, nobody had been asked to meet him.
As to myself, what am I to say to you?
"Perhaps they don't know much about it at the People's Banner office. I thought Mr. Slide and the People's Banner had gone over to the other side, Bunce?"
But the ground for that was gone, and Mrs. Low was no longer painfully severe.
For myself I hate to think of the coming severance; but if it must come, why not by your hands as well as by any other?
I cannot conceive of you as living any other life than that of the House of Commons, Downing Street, and the clubs.
Violet does write, but tells me little or nothing of themselves. Her letters are very nice, full of anecdote, well written,--letters that are fit to be kept and printed; but they are never family letters.
Mr. Bunce was a privileged person, and Mrs. Bunce made up for his apparent rudeness by her own affectionate cordiality.
But, at that moment, nothing had as yet been heard in Baker Street of Mr. Daubeny's proposition to the electors of East Barsetshire!
"Yes; at the old game.
I do not know whether you would mind that.
Dresden, November 18, ----.
It seemed, indeed, to Phineas that as Mrs. Low was buckled up in such triple armour that she feared nothing, she might have been less loud in expressing her abhorrence of the enemies of the Church.
I have told Papa that I should ask you, and he would be delighted.
"Deary me, and isn't it a thing for sore eyes to have you back again!
But, as Barrington says, a horse won't get oats unless he works steady between the traces.
"Oh yes, we do; because, if they wasn't paid, the money would come to us to do as we pleased with it.
Now Mr. Low had sat for North Broughton before Phineas left London, and his wife spoke of the seat as a certainty.
MY DEAR MR.
Lord Chiltern for a few months had lived with him; and then there had arisen a quarrel, which he had for a time thought would dissolve his old life into ruin.
"The idea of a State Church," said Phineas, "is opposed to my theory of political progress.
Papa thought all evil of him. Violet had refused him over and over again.
He quarrelled with you, and all the world seemed against him.
He grounds his demand on no affection of his own, on no presumption that any affection can remain with me.
I suppose it's the same with you?" Now Mr. Bunce had been a very violent politician, and used to rejoice in calling himself a Democrat.
"You don't mean that I am guilty of throwing the first stone?" said Phineas.
Alas! alas! how soon might he now require that money-lender's services!
At home, as you know, not only did he take an active part in politics, but he was active also in the management of his own property. Now it seems to him to be almost too great a trouble to write a letter to his steward; and all this has come upon him because of me.
One card, or rather note, had reached him while he was yet at Tankerville, reminding him of old days.
Mrs. Low once raised her eyebrows in pretended surprise when Phineas explained that he had thrown up his place, and then they settled down on the question of the day.
He dreads that he may be called upon to do anything.
If I were a priest it would be my business to do so; but I am not a priest."
"But we don't pay the bishops, Mr. Bunce."
But Barrington seems to think that you managed as well as you did by getting outside the traces, as he calls it.
"You haven't thrown the first stone," said Mr. Low; "but you have taken up the throwing at the first moment in which stones may be dangerous."
He had entered upon a feverish state of existence in which it was impossible that he should live in Ireland.
It was from Mrs. Low, the wife of the barrister with whom he had worked when he had been a law student in London.
He is here because he cannot bear that I should live alone.
You're right enough, Mr. Finn, you are, as far as churches go, and you was right, too, when you cut and run off the Treasury Bench.
Phineas could not keep himself from feeling that Mrs. Low intended to triumph over him; but, nevertheless, he accepted the invitation.
I don't see that things are much better than they used to be.
He won his wife honestly;--did he not?
Would he be able to insert the point again between those two difficult shells?
And now he did think it probable that he should get the seat on a petition.
We have a large furnished house outside the town, with a pleasant view and a pretty garden.
I never expected this.
Since that I am constrained to leave his letters unanswered.
Since that he had been a married man, and those special drawing-rooms and those wonderful words had in no degree actuated him in his choice of a wife.
Not but what he's disgraced himself by what he's been and done now." Mr. Slide in former days had been the editor of the People's Banner, and circumstances had arisen in consequence of which there had been some acquaintance between him and our hero.
An ineffable misery fell upon me and upon my wretched husband.
That he did not attend during the last Session I do know, and we presume that he has now abandoned his seat.
We certainly did not think that you would come out strong against the Church.
Should he knock off eight votes and lose none himself, he would be member for Tankerville.
"You was all right, there, Mr. Finn.
My cousin Barrington writes me word that you will certainly get the seat.
And when I hear of you at Harrington Hall I know that you are on your way to the other things.
A scrutiny used to be a very expensive business, but under the existing law, made as the scrutiny would be in the borough itself, it would cost but little; and that little, should he be successful, would fall on the shoulders of Mr. Browborough.
"No stones can be dangerous," said Mrs. Low.
And then he recollected how he had left these rooms to go into others, grander and more appropriate to his life when he had filled high office under the State.
The Bear did the same, and grinned into the bargain at the Old Oak while he lay and rested in the shadow of the Beeches.
It was a real pleasure there to take a midday nap, I assure you."
"At last we get a little appreciation," said the old Oak, "but we have to pay for it with our lives."
There have been scarcely any buds on my lowest branches this year, you overshadow me so."
There were only a few human beings there in those days, and those that there were were nothing better than wild animals.
There was scarcely anything except Trees.
The Little Oak had grown ever so much.
Before that, we Oak Trees were lords in the land; and now every year I see my brothers around me perishing in the fight against you.
When I come back I will bring some Beech nuts with me, and I vow you will all turn yellow with jealousy when you see how pretty the new Trees are."
"Here you may see what I have for you."
But the Old Oak gazed sadly out over the wood.
"We can grow very nicely in the shade."
The Oak Trees alone stood with leafless boughs.
The Beeches went on growing, and at last quite overtopped the Little Oak.
All round new little Beech Trees shot up, which grew just as fast as their parents, and looked as green and as happy as if they did not know what an uneasy conscience was.
There were no towns then with houses and streets, and church steeples domineering over everything.
But Trees there were in plenty.
"But I don't want to chatter any more with you just now. I have had to trot a mile on account of a confounded hunter who struck me on one of my hind legs with an arrow.
"You are welcome among us," said the Old Oak, and graciously inclined his head to them.
But so far as ever I can see, there is nothing but Oak Trees."
The Beeches laughed with their little, tiny green leaves, but said nothing.
The day before yesterday they killed my wife and one of my brothers, and I must see about finding a place where I can live in peace.
"If you are not pleased with me, you can go," answered the Oak proudly.
"If they come, I will kill them," said the Little Oak Tree, but directly afterwards he got one on the head from the Old Oak.
"If they come, you shall treat them politely, you young dog," said he.
"Every one has quite enough to do to look after himself. If he is equal to his work, and has luck, it turns out well for him; if not, he must be prepared to go to the wall.
"Oh, how pretty they are!" said the Great Oak, and stooped his crooked boughs still more, so that they could get a good view of them.
One day the Bear came trudging along and lay down at full breadth under a great Oak Tree, "Are you there again, you robber?" said the Oak, and shook a lot of withered leaves down over him.
THE BEECH AND THE OAK
"But they will not come."
When the Bear had shambled off, the Trees looked at one another anxiously.
Then the Oak's lowest branch died, and he began to be seriously alarmed.
And the whole summer passed by, and another summer after that, and still more summers.
There were no schools, for there were not many boys, and those that there were learnt from their father to shoot with the bow and arrow, to hunt the stag in his covert, to kill the bear in order to make clothes out of his skin, and to rub two pieces of wood together till they caught fire.
Then he made off.
When you were little I let you grow at my feet, and sheltered you against the storm, I let the sun shine on you as much as ever he would, and I treated you as if you were my own children.
"You should not squander your leaves, my old friend," said the Bear, licking his paws.
Towards autumn the Bear came back and lay; down under the Old Oak. "My friends down there wish me to present their compliments," he said, and he picked some funny things out of his shaggy coat.
"It is dreadful the way you shoot up into the air," he said in vexation. "You are already half as tall as I am.
Then he said to the Beech Trees,--"What was I thinking of when I helped you on in your young days?
There were no railways either, and no cultivated fields, no ships on the sea, no books, for there was nobody who could read them.
"Shall I bend my branches a little aside so that the sun can shine better on you?" the Old Tree asked politely.
"I told you you would not believe me!" cried the Lark, nettled in his turn.
"Nonsense!" shouted the Caterpillar, "I know what's possible, and what's not possible, according to my experience and capacity, as well as you do.
I will consult some wise animal upon the matter, and get advice.
She nevertheless had learnt the Lark's lesson of faith, and when she was going into her chrysalis grave, she said--
"Wretched bird!" exclaimed the Caterpillar, "you jest with my inferiority--now you are cruel as well as foolish.
Guess!"
But still there was a difficulty--whom should the Caterpillar consult?
But none of them believed her.
At that moment she felt something at her side.
But he was so rough!--he would most likely whisk all the eggs off the cabbage-leaf with one brush of his tail.
Something simpler than that.
She looked round--eight or ten little green Caterpillars were moving about, and had already made a show of a hole in the cabbage-leaf.
"I believe everything I am told," reiterated the Caterpillar, with as grave a face as if it were a fact.
You must give them early dew, and honey from the flowers, and you must let them fly about only a little way at first; for, of course, one can't expect them to use their wings properly all at once.
At last the Lark's voice began to be heard again.
"I wonder where he is just now!
"Fool, to attempt to reason about what you cannot understand!
"Nay, but you do not," replied the Lark; "you won't believe me even about the food, and yet that is but a beginning of what I have to tell you.
What a place for young Butterflies to be born upon!
"Perhaps you will be able to inquire and hear something about it next time you go up high," observed the Caterpillar, timidly.
"Their dying mother knew nothing about the matter," persisted the lark; "but why do you ask me, and then disbelieve what I say?
The Caterpillar almost jumped for joy, and it was not long before she saw her friend descend with hushed note to the cabbage bed.
"And fool you!" cried the indignant Lark.
"Oh, I believe everything I am told," said the Caterpillar.
I would give all my legs to know!" And the green Caterpillar took another turn round the Butterfly's eggs.
What do you think it is to be?
There was the Tom Cat, to be sure, who would sometimes sit at the foot of the apple-tree, basking himself and warming his fur in the sunshine; but he was so selfish and indifferent!
"Butterflies, to be sure," said the Caterpillar.
"How am I to learn Faith?" asked the Caterpillar.
Why, Caterpillar, what do you think those little eggs will turn out to be?"
However, there lay the eggs on the cabbage-leaf; and the green Caterpillar had a kind heart, so she resolved to do her best.
Here, take this gold-dust from my wings as a reward.
But to tell me that Butterflies' eggs are Caterpillars, and that Caterpillars leave off crawling and get wings, and become Butterflies!--Lark! you are too wise to believe such nonsense yourself, for you know it is impossible."
I cannot think what made me come and lay my eggs on a cabbage-leaf!
Dear me! it is a sad pity you cannot fly yourself.
How should a poor crawling creature like me know what to do without asking my betters?"
Shame and amazement filled our green friend's heart, but joy soon followed; for, as the first wonder was possible, the second might be so too.
They had broken from the Butterfly's eggs!
Now in the neighbouring corn-field their lived a Lark, and the Caterpillar sent a message to him, to beg him to come and talk to her, and when he came she told him all her difficulties, and asked him what she was to do to feed and rear the little creatures so different from herself.
"Excellent! my good friend," cried the Lark, exultingly; "you have found it out.
"Two heads are better than one.
"What did you say about me?" Isabel asked.
Henrietta gazed at her, in silence, for a period which tried Isabel's patience, so that our heroine added at last: "Do you mean that you're going to be married?"
"I quite believe that." Henrietta might be wanting in delicacy, but it touched the girl, all the same, to hear this declaration.
"Not till I've seen Europe!" said Miss Stackpole.
If they were not the best in the world they were the worst, but there was nothing middling about an American hotel.
And this was the only reward that Ralph got for his compliment.
"Yes; but they shouldn't interfere with the old ones when the old ones have been the right ones."
"Ah, what it matters to me--that's not what we're discussing," said Isabel with a cold smile.
I don't like Miss Stackpole--everything about her displeases me; she talks so much too loud and looks at one as if one wanted to look at her--which one doesn't.
He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her confidence.
CHAPTER XI
As a rule I don't think I suspect," said Isabel.
"They're the companions of their servants--the Irish chambermaid and the negro waiter.
"My dear child, you certainly encouraged him."
"You say that right.
You told me that I'm not disagreeable to you, and I believe it; for I don't see why that should be.
If I like this country at present it is only because it holds you.
"I asked him, and he said he meant to do nothing," Miss Stackpole answered.
Isabel made for the moment as if to deny this charge; instead of which, however, she presently answered: "It's very true.
"I hope he'll hate me then," said Isabel.
"I like to be treated as an American lady."
I have been to England before, but have never enjoyed it much.
"Faithless to my country then?"
I never saw an ugly man look so handsome."
"Do you call the domestics in an American household 'slaves'?" Miss Stackpole enquired.
Faithless to you, Henrietta?"
For me, I find it almost too much of one!
"I believe you hope it about as much as I believe him capable of it."
"Did he tell you so?"
"I remember now that phrase in your letter, but I confess I had forgotten it.
"I'm very sorry you did that," she observed at last.
You're not the girl you were a few short weeks ago, and Mr. Goodwood will see it.
"Whatever he does will always be right," Isabel repeated.
"I said you were on the whole the finest creature I know."
I could have talked a long time to such a listener; he was so quiet, so intense; he drank it all in."
"If that's the way you desire to treat them, no wonder you don't like America."
I expect him here any day."
I protested against it. You in fact appeared to accept my protest and to admit that I had the right on my side.
You're changed--you're thinking of other things."
The letter bore the London postmark and was addressed in a hand she knew--that came into her vision, already so held by him, with the vividness of the writer's voice or his face.
"Will you really think of it?
"It's not a grand passion; I'm very sure it's not that."
"Ah, you do care for him!" her visitor rang out.
I'm affected by everything."
But she was notified for the first time, on this occasion, of the finite character of Bunchie's intellect; hitherto she had been mainly struck with its extent.
"I hope so," said Isabel; "one should get as many new ideas as possible."
This at present is the dearest wish of yours faithfully,
"Thank you for doing so." And Isabel turned away.
"It may not matter to him, but it matters to one's self."
"I don't think I should: you wouldn't at all have the tenue."
"Ah, that I hope will never be.
You admitted that you were unreasonable, and it was the only concession you would make; but it was a very cheap one, because that's not your character.
"Very likely.
This document proved short and may be given entire.
Her meditations were presently interrupted by the arrival of a servant who handed her a letter.
This contribution to the discussion, however, Miss Stackpole rejected with scorn.
He met it peacefully, a little perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!" This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as might be meant for herself.
She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen, but she wasn't the person he had "backed."
"I wasn't away, you know, long."
It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however, she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there was none other to be employed.
Hadn't he more or less paved the way for her by his prompt recognition of her rarity, by preceding her, in a friendly spirit--as he had the "ear" of society--with a sharp flashlight or two?
He met, poor Densher, these enquiries as he could, listening with interest, yet with discomfort; wincing in particular, dry journalist as he was, to find it seemingly supposed of him that he had put his pen--oh his "pen!"--at the service of private distinction.
Her little dry New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough of it.
What touched him most nearly was that the occasion took on somehow the air of a commemorative banquet, a feast to celebrate a brilliant if brief career.
"No, of course I didn't forget her.
She became aware of America, under his eyes, as a possible scene for social operations; the idea of a visit to the wonderful country had clearly but just occurred to her, yet she was talking of it, at the end of a minute, as her favourite dream.
High and fixed, this estimate ruled on each occasion at Lancaster Gate the social scene; so that he now recognised in it something like the artistic idea, the plastic substance, imposed by tradition, by genius, by criticism, in respect to a given character, on a distinguished actress.
This was what she now proposed to him to enjoy, and his secret discomfort was his sense that on the whole it was what would best suit him.
That was the story--that she was always, for her beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her.
That hand already, in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble nature of the social boom.
This was exactly, goodness knew, what he wanted to be; but he had never had it so largely and freely--SO supernaturally simply, for that matter--imputed to him as of easy achievement.
But she PASSED, the poor performer--he could see how she always passed; her wig, her paint, her jewels, every mark of her expression impeccable, and her entrance accordingly greeted with the proper round of applause.
He didn't believe in it, but he pretended to; this helped her as well as anything else to treat him as harmless and blameless.
"I certainly don't know enormously much--beyond her having been most kind to me, in New York, as a poor bewildered and newly landed alien, and my having tremendously appreciated it." To which he added, he scarce knew why, what had an immediate success.
"Ah there you are!" said Kate with much gay expression, though what it expressed he failed at the time to make out.
Densher saw himself for the moment as in his purchased stall at the play; the watchful manager was in the depths of a box and the poor actress in the glare of the footlights.
"You know nothing, sir--but not the least little bit--about my friend."
If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs. Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her.
It was Mrs. Stringham, obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully, smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her.
He asked nothing better.
"What do you offer, what do you offer?"--the place, however muffled in convenience and decorum, constantly hummed for him with that thick irony.
He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was civilisation--!
"Remember, Mrs. Stringham, that you weren't then present."
This apprehension, however, we hasten to add, enjoyed for him, in the immediate event, a certain merciful shrinkage; the immediate event being that, at Lancaster Gate, five minutes after his due arrival, prescribed him for eight-thirty, Mrs. Stringham came in alone.
She made it indeed effective for him by suddenly addressing him.
She would like--Milly had had it from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with her.
She was so engaged, with the further aid of a complete absence of allusions, when the highest effect was given her method by the beautiful entrance of Kate.
She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to admiration of type.
Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more determined by it.
It was made up, the character, of definite elements and touches--things all perfectly ponderable to criticism; and the way for her to meet criticism was evidently at the start to be sure her make-up had had the last touch and that she looked at least no worse than usual.
"Well, the impression was as deep as you like.
He met Mrs. Stringham's, which affected him: with her he could on occasion clear it up--a sense produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning, as the event was to show, of something extraordinary.
"Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.
She welcomed him genially back from the States, as to his view of which her few questions, though not coherent, were comprehensive, and he had the amusement of seeing in her, as through a clear glass, the outbreak of a plan and the sudden consciousness of a curiosity.
The drama, at all events, as Densher saw it, meanwhile went on--amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy.
"Oh it's precisely my point that Mr. Densher CAN'T have had vast opportunities." And then she smiled at him.
The ear of society?--they were talking, or almost, as if he had publicly paragraphed a modest young lady.
"You weren't present THEN, dearest," Mrs. Lowder richly concurred.
He would have liked as well to ask her how feasible she supposed it for a poor young man to resemble her at any point; but he had after all soon enough perceived that he was doing as she wished by letting his wonder show just a little as silly.
"Expecting American friends whom I'm so glad to find you know!" His knowledge of American friends was clearly an accident of which he was to taste the fruit to the last bitterness.
At opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the "figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the contractile effect of the perfect white waistcoat.
He HAD unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had developed her.
"She was off with you to these parts before I knew it.
He hadn't pretended he did, but there was a purity of reproach in Mrs. Stringham's face and tone, a purity charged apparently with solemn meanings; so that for a little, small as had been his claim, he couldn't but feel that she exaggerated.
Her companion, at the last moment, had been indisposed--positively not well enough, and so had packed her off, insistently, with excuses, with wild regrets.
There WERE plenty of people who were nothing over there and yet were awfully taken up in England; just as--to make the balance right, thank goodness--they sometimes sent out beauties and celebrities who left the Briton cold.
They dreamt dreams, in truth, he appeared to perceive, that fairly waked HIM up, and he settled himself in his place both to resist his embarrassment and to catch the full revelation.
To spare him therefore she also avoided discussion; she kept him down by refusing to quarrel with him.
It was at all events characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand.
"Is it possible you are here still, Joyce?" he said slowly.
In the peace of the old valley she had lived a life, narrow outwardly, wondrously deep and wide in thought and aspiration. Her native hills bounded the vision of her eyes, but the outlook of the soul was far and unhindered.
It needed but a glance, even in the dimness of the summer night, to see that the old house was deserted and falling to decay.
She had not changed; he realized that in the first amazed, incredulous glance.
He spent it wandering about the farm and the old haunts of wood and stream.
Cuthbert Marshall sat down on the old red sandstone step of the door and bowed his head in his hands.
Where might he find them again? Were they yet to be had for the seeking in the old valley?
Yet he could not find himself.
When he found himself in the old garden his heart grew sick and sore with disappointment and a bitter homesickness.
But I have discovered my loss."
"Stephen's Mary told me you had come.
The boys and girls, too, soon made friends with him.
He had no recollection of his father, who had died soon after his son's birth, but how well he remembered his mother, his little, brown-eyed, girlish-faced mother!
Last night I stood on those hills yonder and looked down, but I meant to go away because I thought there would be no one left to welcome me.
He must know why the homelight had failed him.
Beyond it, amid tall elms, was the old church with its square tower hung with ivy.
Oh, fool and blind that he had been!
With a smile she had made answer,
He would stay awhile on the hill, until the night came down over it, and then he would go back to his own place.
As he listened to the swish and murmur of the wind, the earth-old tune with the power to carry the soul back to the dawn of time, the years fell away from him and he forgot much, remembering more.
Stephen came to it, a stout grizzled farmer, with a chubby boy on his shoulder.
His was a name that stood for millions, but he was beggared of hope and purpose.
Can you forgive my mistake, my long blindness? Can you care for me again--a little?"
He had lost that intangible, all-real wealth of faith and idealism and zest; he had bartered it away for the hard, yellow gold of the marketplace, and he realized at last how much poorer he was than when he had left that home valley.
He would wait until he saw the kitchen light from the window of his old home.
Where were the ideals of his youth, the lofty aspirations that had upborne him then?
He felt anxious and dissatisfied, as if he could not go away until he had seen it.
It seemed to him that she held in her keeping all the good of his life, all the beauty of his past, all the possibilities of his future.
The man halted on the crest of the hill and looked sombrely down into the long valley below.
Then he would go.
It told of power and intellect, but the soul of the man was a hidden thing.
Perhaps so.
Cuthbert was obliged to tell who he was.
Now, again, he remembered as he looked down on the homeland fields.
Oh, bitterness!
Would it not be better to go away, having looked at it from the hill and having heard the saga of the firs, keeping his memory of it unblurred, than risk the probable disillusion of a return to the places that had forgotten him and friends whom the varying years must certainly have changed as he had changed himself? No, he would not go down.
Yet he realized clearly that only she could help him, only she could guide him back to the path he had missed.
A wind that blew across it from the misty blue sea beyond was making wild music in the rugged firs above his head as he stood in an angle of the weather-grey longer fence, knee-deep in bracken.
When he left home he had meant to go back to her some day.
"As the world calls success," he answered bitterly.
It would have left life too empty.
"I have never ceased to care," she said in a low tone.
The twilight is so kind it hides that, but it is true.
"Joyce, is it too late?
I have come back to the old valley seeking for what might satisfy, but I have little hope of finding it, unless--unless--"
He was made instantly and warmly welcome.
Eagle eyes, quick to discern and unfaltering to pursue; jaw square and intrepid; mouth formed to keep secrets and cajole men to his will--a face that hid much and revealed little.
The stars came out singly and crystal clear over the far purple curves of the hills.
Why was it lacking, that light he had so often hailed at dark, coming home from boyish rambles on the hills?
There had been many changes, of that he felt sure.
He remembered that when a boy he had thought there was nothing more beautiful than the evening sunshine falling athwart the dark green fir boughs on the hills.
It was evening, and although the hills around him were still in the light the valley was already filled with kindly, placid shadows.
The kitchen door swung open on rusty hinges; the windows were broken and lifeless; weeds grew thickly over the yard and crowded wantonly up to the very threshold through the chinks of the rotten platform.
No, he would not go down.
She had laughed and sighed and caught him to her heart.
I did not miss these things for a long while; I did not even know I had lost them.
And if not, would not the loss be most irreparable and bitter?
The gist of the lesson is that I left happiness behind me in the old valley, when I went away from it, happiness and peace and the joy of living.
If my love means so much to you it is yours, Cuthbert--it always has been yours."
Perhaps there were lines on her face, a thread or two of silver in the soft brown hair, but those splendid steady blue eyes were the same, and the soul of her looked out through them, true to itself, the staunch, brave, sweet soul of the maiden ripened to womanhood.
So he had come back to it, drawn by a longing not to be resisted.
He recalled the many times he had walked to it on the peaceful Sunday afternoons, sometimes with his mother, sometimes with Joyce.
I am tired of these things; they are the toys of grown-up children; they do not satisfy the man's soul.
But high up their tops were green and caught the saffron light of the west.
The new, fierce, burning interests that came into his life crowded the old ones out. Boyhood's love was scorched up in that hot flame of ambition and contest.
"Let us stay here awhile first, Joyce.
"What is over the hills?" he had asked of his mother.
"Some day I shall go over the hills and find them all, Mother," he had said stoutly.
Yet he felt himself the stranger and the alien, whom the long, swift-passing years had shut forever from his old place.
You have lived here in the old valley all these years?"
Down below him, on the crest of a little upland, he saw his old home, a weather-grey house, almost hidden among white birch and apple trees, with a thick fir grove to the north of it.
It had been by these firs he had halted twenty years ago, turning for one last glance at the valley below, the home valley which he had never seen since.
"I have place and wealth and power.
Suddenly, glancing over his shoulder, he saw through an arch of black fir boughs a young moon swung low in a lake of palely tinted saffron sky.
In the quiet places and the green ways she had found what he had failed to find--the secret of happiness and content.
He longed for conflict and accomplishment.
That name had all unconsciously been kept sacred to the long, green, seaward-looking glen where he had been born.
The stile he remembered was gone, replaced by a little rustic gate.
But at the last he felt afraid.
The old places had changed little, whatever he might fear of the people who lived in them.
Which so attracts you in her.
"But if you consider it scandalous--and really, Martineau, really!
For such people as you two anyhow.
And as I have been saying she was a spoilt child, with no discipline....
Yes.
In matters of property, economics and public conduct it will probably be just the reverse.
Her manners suggest a person of considerable self-control.
There was a pause.
Look at the thing frankly.
"On the second occasion."
This affair, if it goes on for a few days more, may involve very serious consequences indeed, with which I, for one, do not wish to be involved."
I haven't the material to guess with.
Perhaps the man has been killed.
Dr. Martineau rolled his face towards Sir Richmond.
Sir Richmond nodded.
My dear sir, don't we both know that ever since we left London you have been ready to fall in love with any pretty thing in petticoats that seemed to promise you three ha'porth of kindness.
I have not been favoured with very much of her attention, but that fact has enabled me to see her in profile.
You--on account of the illness of that rather forgotten lady, Miss Martin Leeds--" "Aren't you rather abusing the secrets of the confessional?"
Miss Grammont is not silly and all this homage and facile approval probably bored her more than she realized.
And something more than that.
"I grant you we discover we differ upon a question of taste and convenience.
Now I guess this Miss Grammont has had no mother since she was quite little."
I have been watching her.
"What do you think she found?"
"Your guesses, doctor, are apt to be pretty good," said Sir Richmond.
"I suppose her father adores and neglects her, and whenever she has wanted a companion or governess butchered, the thing has been done.... These business Americans, I am told, neglect their womenkind, give them money and power, let them loose on the world....
And at present the world is not prepared to tolerate friendship and companionship WITH that accompaniment.
And knowing less of me than you do, she probably regards me as almost as safe as--a maiden aunt say.
"Really!" he said, "this is preposterous.
They had resumed their overnight conversation, in a state of considerable tension.
Are men and women to go on for ever--separated by this possibility into two hardly communicating and yet interpenetrating worlds?
Still I suppose custom and tradition kept this girl in her place and she was petted, honoured, amused, talked about but not in a harmful way, and rather bored right up to the time when America came into the war.
She has been shocked out of the first confidence of youth.
You carry marriage and entanglements lightly.
I'm twice her age.
"But you don't really think that?" said Sir Richmond, with an ill-concealed eagerness.
"Thought is one matter.
Or she has met with cowardice or cruelty or treachery where she didn't expect it.
She has ceased to take the world for granted. It hasn't broken her but it has matured her.
They had smoothed over the extreme harshness of their separation and there was very little more to be said.
In these matters.
Sir Richmond said nothing.
Rash, inconsiderate action quite another.
You talk of falling in love as though it was impossible for a man and woman to be deeply interested in each other without that.
You don't know what an advantage it is to be as I am, rather cold and unresponsive to women and unattractive and negligible--negligible, that is the exact word--to them.
And the gulf in our ages--in our quality!
She is quite prepared to fall in love with you."
You see the interest of her."
"In America I suppose there is at least an equal variety, made up of rather different types.
"These miracles--grotesquely--happen," he said.
Can you deny it?
Is there never to be friendship and companionship between men and women without passion?"
"And then," he added, "if she and you fall in love, as the phrase goes, what is to follow?"
I want a world in order, a disciplined mankind going on to greater things.
"I shall be interested to learn what happens."
"We have a right to life--and happiness.
How do you put it?"
"I suppose it has," she said, meditatively, as though she had been thinking over some such question before.
Into this topic they peered as into some deep pool, side by side, and in it they saw each other reflected.
Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont had walked round the old circumvallation together, but Belinda Seyffert had strayed away from them, professing an interest in flowers.
But whether we get life and happiness or fail to get them we human beings who have imaginations want something more nowadays....
His round face betrayed little or no vestiges of his overnight irritation.
I've been suspecting for a long time that Civilization wasn't much good unless it got people like my father under some sort of control.
I've got a Committee full of that sort of thing.
Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards her.
"You really think," said Miss Grammont, "that it would be possible to take this confused old world and reshape it, set it marching towards that new world of yours--of two hundred and fifty million fully developed, beautiful and happy people?"
So much fact about Miss Grammont as we have given had floated up in fragments and pieced itself together in Sir Richmond's mind in the course of a day and a half.
We're kept out of things.
We have been made an exception of--and got our rations.
If it did it would be a secondary thing to companionship.
"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen," she had said. That didn't mean that she attached very much importance to her recently acquired vote.
Nobody is doing anything with the world except muddle about. Why not give it a direction?"
"And will?"
Of course we want bright lives, of course we want happiness.
"I've been talking of this sort of thing with my friend Dr. Martineau. And I've been thinking as well as talking.
"I believe that as Mankind grows up this is the business Man has to settle down to and will settle down to."
And even more contemptible than that is my making this remark now.
As he walked he began to stamp with his heels.
Of course I had better not go; of course, I must just snap my fingers at them.
I stole the brushes to clean them from the passage, being careful he should not detect it, for fear of his contempt.
But I will talk about that fellow, about that plague of mine, another time.
Please don't..."
At last my wretched little clock hissed out five.
This Zverkov had been all the time at school with me too.
I had not been treated like that even at school, though they all hated me.
Oh, how I prayed for the day to pass quickly!
My schoolfellows met me with spiteful and merciless jibes because I was not like any of them.
"It's not an official gathering."
I got the better of him on that occasion, but though Zverkov was stupid he was lively and impudent, and so laughed it off, and in such a way that my victory was not really complete; the laugh was on his side.
It was now well into the afternoon.
Well, the officer being a pretty good pilot, we decided to have that machine.
Opening them, the boys could hardly suppress their jubilation.
From the same envelope he extracted three smaller ones.
Whatever the morrow might bring, the night promised to be fairly quiet, while each side took account of stock and made necessary repairs, or altered their plans to meet the new situation.
At least that was the way it looked.
Four American planes sailed off and upward to meet the oncoming German air armada.
Then, in concerted action, the lines opened at alternate points, and pairs, dozens, scores of the huge armored tanks rolled through, their big guns already blazing shells into the ranks of the disconcerted enemy.
"Say," Jerry concluded, "they certainly did pebble us with machine-gun bullets!
As he tore it open and read the brief note within, a pleased smile spread over his face.
Nothing could halt them.
There their front-line ranks held firm, while the new formation was being effected behind them. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when this was complete.
"Who are you?"
"But some other German aviators saw the affair, apparently recognized our uniforms, and hardly gave us time to make a decent start.
Then, just as dawn was breaking, the infantry onslaught, participated in at some points by detachments of cavalry, began.
Still going at maximum speed, and now on a straight line toward the American side, without seeking a further height, the Taube several times wavered, and, a moment later, almost turned over.
The sun was setting, and soon, in great measure, at least, hostilities would be suspended for the night.
CHAPTER XV
He opened his left hand.
"It sounded like another call."
They were crossing a short gallery when Slim abruptly signaled a halt.
It was locked.
"S-M-O-T-H-E-R-I-N-G."
"Caught your message on deck.
Can you help?"
"Somebody shoved me--in that closet," he gasped, "and then--slammed and--locked--the door."
"Who are you--and where?"
Help!"
I talked with him over the pipe."
Can't make self heard.
I was groping my way along when I thought I heard steps just ahead of me.
"A trifle heavy!
"Right!" cried Jerry.
"And what does this fellow do aboard the ship?"
He was in his undershirt.
Then--
THE DEATH OF THE SPY
"Oh, yes, you will," counseled Joe.
CHAPTER VIII
He had disappeared when the sailor said to me, 'I think that was the fellow--the one that just went by.' Not wanting to arouse his suspicions, I ended the conversation with a casual remark, and then strolled away until I was out of the sailor's sight, and then hurried as fast as I could toward the engine room.
Isn't that so, Hoskins?"
"It's nothing," the youthful chauffeur replied.
CHAPTER XI
I think we might be fairly comfortable.'
I was here last summer with a couple of Harvard men, and we lodged at a farmhouse about a mile distant from the cathedral.
'I was frightened within an inch of my life.
I proceeded to save her, in the usual way, by holding her to my heart and kissing her lovely hair reassuringly as I murmured:
If you will step into the coffee-room for an hour, I'll walk up to Farmer Hendry's and see if they will take us in.
She is gathering statistics, but as the barmaids can never collect their thoughts while they are drawing ale, Aunt Celia proceeds slowly.
Jack! save me!'
I want to live here for ever and wave the American flag on Washington's birthday.
She has the fullest, whitest eyelids, and the loveliest lashes.
Now, Miss Van Tyck' (of course Aunt Celia appeared at this delightful moment), 'I have a plan to propose.
'I am frightened,' she said; 'I can't help being frightened.
She withdrew entirely now, all but her hand, and her eyes sought the ground.
At last we started to walk to the village, Mr. Copley so laden with our hand-luggage that he resembled a pack mule.
I watched them and they watched her.
How did Aunt Celia relax sufficiently to allow me to find her a lodging?
Never!' she replied.
Why did the inns chance to be full?
Mr. Copley looked about in every direction, but neither horse nor vehicle was to be had for love or money.
'Might I inquire,' I asked, 'if the dear little person at present reposing in my arms will stay there (with intervals for rest and refreshment) for the rest of her natural life?'
The barn was too far, the fence too high; I saw him coming, and there was nothing but you and the open country.
We chanced to be near a pair of low bars.
She was so beautiful on Sunday.
'I do indeed--decisive, undoubted, bare-faced encouragement.'
'Yes, darling, I thank you for saving my life, and I am willing to devote the remainder of it to your service as a pledge of my gratitude; but if you should take up life-saving as a profession, dear, don't throw yourself on a fellow with--'
Why did she fall in love with the lodging when found?
'I don't think I ought to be judged as if I were in my sober senses,' she replied.
Jack!' she cried, putting her hand over my lips, and getting it well kissed in consequence.
She arrives as soon as they can find room for her at the Three Tuns.
'Are you?' asked Mr. Copley, taking out his pencil.
Kitty gave a shriek.
Well, all this is but a useless prelude, for there are facts to be considered--delightful, warm, breathing facts!
The cathedral is very beautiful in itself, and its situation is beyond all words of mine to describe.
'Merely taking note of your statement, that's all.
At this juncture Aunt Celia disappeared for a moment to ask the barmaid if, in her opinion, the constant consumption of malt liquors prevents a more dangerous indulgence in brandy and whisky.
'Can Aunt Celia have Apollinaris and black coffee after her morning bath?' I asked.
What is he doing now?'
She has been wearing her favourite browns and primroses through the week, but on Sunday she blossomed into blue and white, topped by a wonderful hat, whose brim was laden with hyacinths.
O child of fortune, thy name is J. Q. Copley!
'To be sure,' I replied soothingly, 'any girl would have run after me, as you say.'
I greatly admired the pulpit, which is supported by five pillars sunk into the backs of squashed lions; but Mr. Copley, when I asked him the period, said, 'Pure Brummagem!'
She sat on the end of a seat in the nave, and there was a capped and gowned crowd of university students in the transept.
When she looks down I wish she might never look up, and when she looks up I am never ready for her to look down.
'You are safe, my darling; not a hair of your precious head shall be hurt.
Don't be frightened.'
I did not facilitate the preparations, and a moment of awkward silence ensued.
If it had been a secular occasion, and she had dropped her handkerchief, seven-eighths of the students would have started to pick it up--but I should have got there first!
If Mr. Copley can secure apartments for us, I shall be more than grateful.'
How did it happen to be election time?
'I hope, Katharine,' said Aunt Celia majestically--'I hope that I can accommodate myself to circumstances.
What are you doing?'
Of course, I took you.
'Edinburgh?
'Yes, I said so.
I looked everywhere about.
'I suppose I shall have to--that is, if you think--at least, I suppose you do think--at any rate, you look as if you were thinking--that this has been giving you encouragement.'
I hadn't been a college athlete for nothing.
I am so happy that I feel as if something were going to spoil it all. Twenty years old to-day!
He will chase us, I know.
I do not know.
But don't move; it may come again.'
She shivered like a leaf.
Where is he?
So here we are, all lodging together in an ideal English farmhouse. There is a thatched roof on one of the old buildings, and the dairy-house is covered with ivy, and Farmer Hendry's wife makes a real English curtsey, and there are herds of beautiful sleek Durham cattle, and the butter and cream and eggs and mutton are delicious, and I never, never want to go home any more.
'Yes, he is gone--she is gone, darling.
'Jack!
It was very natural, I'm sure; any girl would have done it.'
It was the first time she had called me 'Jack,' and I needed no second invitation.
We were coming home from evensong, Kitty and I. (I am anticipating, for she was still 'Miss Schuyler' then, but never mind.) We were walking through the fields, while Mrs. Benedict and Aunt Celia were driving.
I told you this morning that I was dreadfully afraid of bulls, especially mad ones, and I told you that my nurse frightened me, when I was a child, with awful stories about them, and that I never outgrew my childish terror.
The campfire burned steadily, and there was a certain oppressiveness in the atmosphere.
"It's going to be a heavy storm," Tom admitted to himself.
Gathered about the young inventor, the three men looked at the warning. The writing was poor, and it was evident that an attempt had been made to disguise it.
CHAPTER XV--THE LANDSLIDE
It took them the greater part of the day to make a circuit of the base of Phantom Mountain in order to get to a place where a sort of trail led upward.
At times it would be only dimly visible in the blackness, then, suddenly it would stand out in bold relief as a great flash of fire split the clouds.
It will be here in less than half an hour."
There's our friend in white!"
Perhaps it may not be as bad as Mr. Parker fears."
The others looked, and saw the same weird figure that had menaced them when they were encamped on the other side of the peak.
"I fancy they wanted it as conspicuous as possible."
But he knew he could accomplish nothing by worrying, and he tried to dismiss the matter from his mind.
"The ghost again!
"Is there anything we can do to avoid it?" asked Mr. Jenks.
"The lightning is attracted to it!"
"White ink is easy enough to make," stated Mr. Parker.
It was over in a few seconds.
"They must have followed us," said Mr. Jenks, in a low voice.
"It's possible," admitted Tom, "but now let's see if the person who pinned this warning on our tent took any of our things."
Instantly the earth trembled, as it had at Earthquake Island, but it was not the same.
"Rather odd," commented Mr. Jenks.
"Good idea," commented Mr. Jenks.
"Well, did you discover any volcanoes, that may erupt during the night, and scare us to death?"
"Then we'd better have supper," remarked Tom, practically, "and get ready for it.
Fitful flashes of lightning could be seen forking across the sky in jagged chains of purple light.
And so the twenty minutes' law passed into an infinity.
Bechamel stood with his eyes round and his knuckle on his hips.
But what light is there lighting a face like hers, to compare with the soft glamour of the midsummer moon?
"Has gone."
The ostler (being a fool) rushed violently down the road vociferating after them.
"Well?" said Bechamel, wondering suddenly if Jessie had kept some of her threats.
Bechamel's face suggested a different expectation.
Why?"
I've took a fancy to this place.
So it was that in the space of an hour they came abruptly down a little lane, full tilt upon the sea.
His feet stopped.
But he had it ready.
"Are you tired?" he asked.
I will help you with all my power."
He banged the arms of the chair with his fist, and swore again.
XXIII.
But as yet he seemed merely stunned.
"Quite a misunderstanding," said Hoopdriver, with splendid readiness. "My sister had gone to Bognor But I brought her back here.
"JESSIE," he repeated slowly.
"Chichester Harbour." He waved his arm seaward as though it was a goal.
That made ten minutes.
She came round obediently and took his machine, and for a moment they stood face to face.
Went into the yard, sir, got out the two bicycles, sir, and went off, sir--about twenty minutes ago."
That gave the fugitives five minutes.
He started up in a gusty frenzy with a vague idea of pursuit, and incontinently sat down again with a concussion that stirred the bar below to its depths.
"Another gentleman in brown, sir.
Now the road turned westward, and she was a dark grey outline against the shimmer of the moon; and now they faced northwards, and the soft cold light passed caressingly over her hair and touched her brow and cheek.
"Do you know," she said, "I am not afraid of you.
They scarcely heeded whither they rode at first, being only anxious to get away, turning once westward when the spire of Chichester cathedral rose suddenly near them out of the dewy night, pale and intricate and high.
He opened his mouth and shut it again, and, with a sudden wincing of his features, abruptly turned and bent down to open the lantern in front of her machine.
Bechamel looked up from a week-old newspaper as, without knocking, Stephen entered.
"Do you want to know--how things are with me?"
How their hearts beat together and their breath came fast, and how every shadow was anticipation and every noise pursuit!
"Good-night, Sis," he said, "and pleasant dreams.
"Mrs. Beaumont," said Stephen.
Well--Chris."
In which case the business might be hushed up yet, and the evil hour of explanation with his wife indefinitely postponed.
"What are we to do now?" her voice asked.
Mr. Hoopdriver felt flattered.
He looked sideways at her as she sat beside him with her ankles gracefully ruling the treadles.
"But WHERE?"
Then he returned panting to the Vicuna Hotel, and finding a group of men outside the entrance, who wanted to know what was UP, stopped to give them the cream of the adventure.
XXIV.
"I have lost an Illusion and found a Knight-errant." She spoke of Bechamel as the Illusion.
"Gone, sir.
THE MOONLIGHT RIDE
"Brown clothes?" he said.
She caught at her breath.
There is a magic quality in moonshine; it touches all that is sweet and beautiful, and the rest of the night is hidden.
And I wish him luck.
So gallantly did Mr. Hoopdriver comport himself up to the very edge of the Most Wonderful Day of all.
Stephen's sympathies changed at once.
"I am entirely at your service.
"I will do what has to be done."
It seemed to Hoopdriver that he heard her sob.
The road turned northward, going round through the outskirts of Bognor, in one place dark and heavy under a thick growth of trees, then amidst villas again, some warm and lamplit, some white and sleeping in the moonlight; then between hedges, over which they saw broad wan meadows shrouded in a low-lying mist.
"A little like yourself, sir--in the dark.
I could not describe her--"
This is nothing."
On her bicycle."
Interlude of conversational eyebrows.
"I will do anything," said Hoopdriver.
"My name, brother Chris," she said, "is Jessie."
He flung himself into the armchair.
"Poor chap!" said the barmaid.
And I do not even know your name!"
But he carried it off splendidly, as he felt himself bound to admit.
"Let 'em GO.
He bent down to his own, and struck a match on his shoe.
Stephen was too surprised to say anything but "Bourbon, sir?"
"And fairish?"
XXV.
And he--"
She was a monomaniac.
He was taken with a sudden shame of his homely patronymic.
Who cares?
The ostler, sir, Jim Duke--"
"But you are right in trusting me.
Falk pondered; after a while he resumed the conversation.
You understand me!"
You are going too far!
Is that so?"
A very good name!
"Take care!
I guarantee such and such a sum; I must pay it--that's clear!"
BILLS OF EXCHANGE
I have bills on all with the exception of one."
Is she easily hurt?
"Uniform?
"The devil!
"That's ugly," he said.
Of course you weren't, for there was no party.
"No, I don't!
"Did you...."
"No; not quite."
"Wouldn't she really?"
But, have you any meetings?
"Oh!
"Hold your tongue and do as I tell you!
Tell me?"
"Rehnhjelm?
What did you call it?"
"What rights do you mean?"
I should take jolly good care not to."
"Which bank do you prefer?
And besides--one thing more!
"What?
"You may depend upon it."
"Oh, no!"
"No more do I!"
"Hold your tongue when I'm speaking!
I think I've heard it before.
"We'll kick him out!"
No! Hold on! We'll postpone that!
"Hm--yes!
"At present only Mrs. Homan, the controller's wife, and Lady Rehnhjelm."
Do you think she meant it?"
"Hm!"
"Here," he said, handing it to Agnes; "go home and rid the world of a monster."
"I say, what a sweet thing!
That's true enough, isn't it?"
"I remember the book; I liked it very much.
I believe it is loaded."
"I see, I have to speak more plainly.
"Is she hurt?"
"Come along, let's be off," he said, spitting on the hearthstone.
"What are you talking about?
You had supper with the manager!"
"I hardly slept a wink."
It was impossible; he dressed and went to Falander's house.
Rehnhjelm overwhelmed him with questions, but Falander refused to reply before ten o'clock.
"I say it's a lie!
"Hadn't we better stop talking nonsense now and be off?
Where were you last night?"
"Lock it up," she said, "this is no toy, my friends."
Put on your hats and come."
"What's that?" laughed Agnes, opening the box and taking out a six-barrelled revolver.
"A spider on the morrow: grief and sorrow."
Did you sleep well?"
Shut the door!
Like the jed who had brought me, he was frightfully scarred, and also decorated with the breastplate of human skulls and dried dead hands which seemed to mark all the greater warriors among the Warhoons, as well as to indicate their awful ferocity, which greatly transcends even that of the Tharks.
Victor and vanquished rolled limp and lifeless upon the moss, a huge mass of torn and bloody flesh.
Just before dark we reached the main body of troops shortly after they had made camp for the night.
I was lying among a pile of sleeping silks and furs in the corner of a small room in which were several green warriors, and bending over me was an ancient and ugly female.
Without a sound he slipped to the floor, stone dead.
After a few more words with the female, during which she assured him that I was now fully fit to travel, the jed ordered that we mount and ride after the main column.
Three days later he walked without assistance to the body of Bar Comas which, by custom, had not been moved from where it fell, and placing his foot upon the neck of his erstwhile ruler he assumed the title of Jeddak of Warhoon.
"'Tis well," replied the one so addressed, rising and approaching my couch, "he should render rare sport for the great games."
"I have brought a strange creature wearing the metal of a Thark whom it is my pleasure to have battle with a wild thoat at the great games."
Presently they came in contact with a small chain at the end of which dangled a number of keys.
"He will live, O Jed."
Bar Comas eyed the defiant and insubordinate chieftain for an instant, his expression one of haughty, fearless contempt and hate, and then without drawing a weapon and without uttering a word he hurled himself at the throat of his defamer.
The dead jeddak's hands and head were removed to be added to the ornaments of his conqueror, and then his women cremated what remained, amid wild and terrible laughter.
Food was brought me at intervals but owing to the utter darkness of the place I do not know whether I lay there days, or weeks, or months.
Strapped on either breast were human skulls and depending from these a number of dried human hands.
Finally all the hatred and maniacal loathing for these awful creatures who had placed me in this horrible place was centered by my tottering reason upon this single emissary who represented to me the entire horde of Warhoons.
As I was groping to remove the chain from about my victim's neck I glanced up into the darkness to see six pairs of gleaming eyes fixed, unwinking, upon me.
Bar Comas had much the better of the battle as he was stronger, quicker and more intelligent.
"By the dead hands at my throat but he shall die, Bar Comas.
As I opened my eyes she turned to one of the warriors, saying,
The jeddak, Bar Comas, who was comparatively young, was the object of the fierce and jealous hatred of his old lieutenant, Dak Kova, the jed who had captured me, and I could not but note the almost studied efforts which the latter made to affront his superior.
His reference to the great games of which I had heard so much while among the Tharks convinced me that I had but jumped from purgatory into gehenna.
He was a huge fellow, terribly scarred about the face and chest, and with one broken tusk and a missing ear.
The injuries to Dak Kova had delayed the march so greatly that it was decided to give up the expedition, which was a raid upon a small Thark community in retaliation for the destruction of the incubator, until after the great games, and the entire body of warriors, ten thousand in number, turned back toward Warhoon.
"He will die as Bar Comas, your jeddak, sees fit, if at all," replied the young ruler, with emphasis and dignity.
Slowly they approached and slowly I shrank back from the awful horror of them.
They are a smaller horde than the Tharks but much more ferocious.
I was strapped securely to as wild and unmanageable a thoat as I had ever seen, and, with a mounted warrior on either side to prevent the beast from bolting, we rode forth at a furious pace in pursuit of the column.
"If at all?" roared Dak Kova.
No sound reached me from the world above and no word would my jailer vouchsafe when my food was brought to me, although I at first bombarded him with questions.
CHAPTER XVIII
Bar Comas was stone dead, and only the most herculean efforts on the part of Dak Kova's females saved him from the fate he deserved.
As he stooped to place my food upon the ground I swung the chain above my head and crashed the links with all my strength upon his skull.
My introduction to these cruel and bloodthirsty people was but an index to the scenes I witnessed almost daily while with them.
These two stopped at the foot of the throne, facing Than Kosis.
"Look!"
Thrusting Sab Than headlong from the platform, I drew Dejah Thoris to my side.
"The answer is easy, Dejah Thoris," I replied smiling.
I led them to the palace walls, which I negotiated easily without assistance.
Then came more dignitaries, and the officers of the palace and of the army, and finally two figures entirely muffled in scarlet silk, so that not a feature of either was discernible.
The object of the ceremony was clear to me; in another moment Dejah Thoris would be joined forever to the Prince of Zodanga.
Can it be that all Earth men are as you? Alone, a stranger, hunted, threatened, persecuted, you have done in a few short months what in all the past ages of Barsoom no man has ever done: joined together the wild hordes of the sea bottoms and brought them to fight as allies of a red Martian people."
Guided by the sound, we soon found him helpless in a dark recess.
The woman!
"Was there ever such a man!" she exclaimed.
Kill her!"
He was overjoyed at seeing me, and to know the meaning of the fight, faint echoes of which had reached his prison cell.
"It was not I who did it, it was love, love for Dejah Thoris, a power that would work greater miracles than this you have seen."
That you are a princess does not abash me, but that you are you is enough to make me doubt my sanity as I ask you, my princess, to be mine."
The jailers had all left to join the fighters in the throne room, so we searched the labyrinthine prison without opposition.
And thus in the midst of a city of wild conflict, filled with the alarms of war; with death and destruction reaping their terrible harvest around her, did Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, true daughter of Mars, the God of War, promise herself in marriage to John Carter, Gentleman of Virginia.
At the foot of the throne these two parties separated and halted, facing each other at opposite sides of the aisle.
As the great gate where I stood swung open my fifty Tharks, headed by Tars Tarkas himself, rode in upon their mighty thoats.
I then knelt down beside the fearsome-looking thing, and raising it to its feet motioned for it to follow me.
As I delivered the blow a low laugh rang out behind me, and, turning, I beheld Tars Tarkas, Sola, and three or four warriors standing in the doorway of the chamber.
CHAPTER VI
Presently I saw the great eyes of my beast bulging completely from their sockets and blood flowing from its nostrils. That he was weakening perceptibly was evident, but so also was the ape, whose struggles were growing momentarily less.
With a shriek of fear the ape which held me leaped through the open window, but its mate closed in a terrific death struggle with my preserver, which was nothing less than my faithful watch-thing; I cannot bring myself to call so hideous a creature a dog.
Leaping over his prostrate body, I seized the cudgel and finished the monster before he could regain his feet.
They seemed to be deep in argument, and finally one of them addressed me, but remembering my ignorance of his language turned back to Tars Tarkas, who, with a word and gesture, gave some command to the fellow and turned to follow us from the room.
It is true I held the cudgel, but what could I do with it against his four great arms?
She, on the contrary, was sober with apparent solicitude and, as soon as I had finished the monster, rushed to me and carefully examined my body for possible wounds or injuries.
The bullet striking the wooden casing of the window exploded, blowing a hole completely through the wood and masonry.
He lay gasping upon the floor of the chamber, his great eyes fastened upon me in what seemed a pitiful appeal for protection.
The warrior whose gun I had struck up looked enquiringly at Tars Tarkas, but the latter signed that I be left to my own devices, and so we returned to the plaza with my great beast following close at heel, and Sola grasping me tightly by the arm.
A FIGHT THAT WON FRIENDS
Evidently devoid of all the finer sentiments of friendship, love, or affection, these people fairly worship physical prowess and bravery, and nothing is too good for the object of their adoration as long as he maintains his position by repeated examples of his skill, strength, and courage.
Satisfying herself that I had come off unscathed she smiled quietly, and, taking my hand, started toward the door of the chamber.
'Tis but a short delay, and late or soon we all hasten towards one goal.
Only the pitiless revelers knew no remorse.
Orpheus stretched out his arms and tried to seize her, but he only clasped the empty air.
Orpheus wedded the fair nymph Eurydice, whom he loved dearly, and who returned his love.
Here he came in safety through the crowd of ghosts and phantoms, and stood at last before the throne of Pluto and Proserpina.
For three years he wandered among the mountains of Thrace, finding his only consolation in the music of his lyre, for he shunned all men and women and would have no bride after Eurydice.
A viper's sting has robbed her of the years that were her due.
But the shade of the dead singer went down to Hades, and found entrance at last.
Thus Orpheus and Eurydice were re-united, and won in death the bliss that was denied them in life.
Else the boon we grant you will be but vain."
In silence Orpheus led on, till the goal was close at hand and the welcoming light of the upper air began to penetrate the darkness.
Then a sudden fear struck his heart.
But if the Fates refuse a husband's prayers, I am resolved never to return hence.
I beseech you, by the realms of the dead, by mighty Chaos and the silence of your vast kingdom, revoke the untimely doom of Eurydice.
But he was not to die unwept.
Suddenly a great noise was heard of laughter and shouting and merry-making.
Indeed the happiness of Orpheus and Eurydice was to be but short-lived.
When they would not listen, he resolved to make one last effort to win her back.
To the sound of his lyre the Argo had floated down to the sea, and he played so sweetly when they passed the rocks of the Sirens that the dreadful monsters sang their most alluring strains in vain.
This is our last home, yours is the sole enduring rule over mankind.
He would go down to the Lower World and seek her among the dead, and try whether any prayer or persuasion could move Pluto to restore his beloved.
They seized the singer's head and threw it with his lyre into the river Hebrus.
One day he sat down to rest on a grassy hill in the sunshine, and played and sang to beguile his sorrow.
"Great lords of the world below the earth, to which all we mortals must one day come, grant me to tell a simple tale and declare unto you the truth.
Then, for the first time, tears moistened the cheeks of the Furies, and even the king and queen of the dead were moved to pity. They summoned Eurydice, and she came, yet halting from her recent wound.
Then he touched the chords of his lyre and chanted these words:
For this was one of the feasts of Bacchus, and the women were celebrating his rites, wandering over the mountains with dance and revel.
Never yet had such sweet strains been heard in the world of gloom.
I should have borne my loss, indeed I tried to bear it, but I was overcome by Love, a god well known in the world above, and I think not without honor in your kingdom, unless the story of Proserpina's theft be a lying tale.
Thus he prayed and touched his harp in tune with his words.
Seven days he sat on the further bank without food or drink, nourished by his tears and grief.
With these words they began to throw wands and stones at him, but even the lifeless objects were softened by the music, and fell harmlessly to the ground.
A steep path led upward from the realm of darkness, and the way was hard to find through the gloom.
Dimly he saw her, but for the last time, for a power she could not resist drew her back.
She too, when she shall have lived her allotted term of years, will surely come under your sway.
Orpheus fell lifeless to the ground.
Jason had persuaded Orpheus to accompany the Argonauts when they went to fetch back the golden fleece, for he knew that the perils of the way would be lightened by song.
As he played, the coolness of shady branches seemed all about him, and looking up he found himself in the midst of a wood.
But at their marriage the omens were not favorable. Hymen, the marriage god, came to it with a gloomy countenance and the wedding torches smoked and would not give forth a cheerful flame.
Come, let us kill him, and show that no man shall despise us unpunished."
Not to look upon the blackness of Tartarus have I come hither, nor yet to bind in chains the snaky heads on Cerberus.
He could not believe that he had lost her for ever, but prayed day and night without ceasing to the gods above to restore her to him.
Apollo himself had given him his golden harp, and on it he played music of such wondrous power and beauty that rocks, trees and beasts would follow to hear him.
This was the road by which Hercules descended when he went to carry off Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the threshold of Pluto. Undaunted by the terrors of the place, Orpheus passed through this gate and down a dark and dismal road to the kingdom of the dead.
It is my wife I seek.
There it floated down stream and, strange to tell, the chords gave forth a lament, and the lifeless tongue uttered words.
Till then, I implore you, let her be mine.
"Take her," says Pluto, "and lead her back to the light.
When they saw Orpheus they set up a shout of derision. "See," they cried, "the wretched singer who mocks at women and will have no bride but the dead.
All our lives are forfeit to you.
Hither all our footsteps tend.
But she must follow you at a distance, nor must you once turn round to look upon her till you have passed beyond these realms.
Now at last the shots took effect, and in their fury the women fell upon him, dealing blow on blow.
It was done as he desired.
You were told that there were high rocks looking over the sea near Loki's house.
While we have been occupied in catching him, his two sons, Ali and Nari, transformed into wolves by their evil passions, have fought with and destroyed each other.
First he thought he would dart out into the sea, and then that he would spring over the net back again into the river.
Tired at last of seeking what he could nowhere find, Loki built himself a house near a narrow, glittering river which, lower down flashed from a high rock into the sea below.
After the death of Baldur, Loki never again ventured to intrude himself into the presence of the gods.
But his punishment did not end here.
They themselves divided into two bands.
The eyes of the two met and fixed each other.
A rope was made of the dead wolves' sinews, and as soon as it touched Loki's body it turned into bands of iron and bound him immovably to the rock.
He rose without daring to look again, threw his net on a fire that burned on the floor, and, rushing to the side of the little river, he turned himself into a salmon, swam down to the deepest, stillest pool at the bottom, and hid himself between two stones.
The sight of them coming all together--beautiful, and noble, and free--pierced Loki with a pang that was worse than death.
In all the world there was only one who pitied him.
"Loki," he said, "has already forged for himself a chain stronger than any you can make.
He took care that his house should have four doors in it, that he might look out on every side and catch the first glimpse of the gods when they came, as he knew they would come, to take him away.
"The world is large, and I am very clever," said Loki to himself, as he turned his back upon Asgard, and wandered out into Manheim; "there is no end to the thick woods, and no measure for the deep waters; neither is there any possibility of counting the various forms under which I shall disguise myself.
Here his wife, Siguna, and his two sons, Ali and Nari, came to live with him.
With their sinews we must make a chain to bind their father, and from that he can never escape."
Siguna was a kind woman, far too good and kind for Loki.
Secured in this manner the gods left him.
The serpent could never move away afterwards; but every moment a burning drop from his tongue fell down on Loki's shuddering face.
He ordered his sons to make a new net, and to cast it into the water, and drag out whatever living thing they could find there.
This last seemed the easiest way of escape, and with the greatest speed he attempted it.
Thor waded down the river to the waterfall; the other gods stood in a group below.
Then he tried to escape the watchful eye by disguising himself under various shapes.
So will he lie bound till the Twilight of the Gods be here.
One of these, higher than the rest, had midway four projecting stones, and to these the gods resolved to bind Loki so that he should never again be able to torment the inhabitants of Manheim or Asgard by his evil-doings.
Loki swam backwards and forwards between them.
His kind wife ever afterwards stood beside him and held a cup over his head to catch the poison.
One by one they turned their faces from him; for, in looking at him, they seemed to see over again the death of Baldur the Beloved.
When the cup was full, she was obliged to turn away to empty it, and the deadly drops fell again on Loki's face.
A snake, whose fangs dropped poison, glided to the top of the rock and leaned his head over to peer at Loki.
He shuddered and shrank from them, and the whole earth trembled.
Thor proposed to return to Asgard, to bring a chain with which to bind the prisoner; but Odin assured him that he had no need to take such a journey.
And he bowed to him.
Then the sheriff, resuming that monotonous tone of voice which resembles nothing else, and which may be termed a judicial accent, turned towards the sufferer.
This man, who was the executioner's assistant, "groom of the gibbet," the old charters call him, went to the prisoner, took off the stones, one by one, from his chest, and lifted the plate of iron up, exposing the wretch's crushed sides.
"It was in this bottle," said the sheriff, "that the men about to perish placed the declaration which I have just read.
The sheriff increased the majesty of his tones, and continued,--
Awake, my lord!"
The sheriff, after a pause, resumed, a "note written in the same hand as the text and the first signature," and he read,--
The sheriff, who had allowed the prisoner to speak, resumed,--
"He laughed; that killed him."
"I come to awake you indeed," said a voice which had not yet been heard.
Such are the hidden channels by which truth, swallowed up in the gulf of human actions, floats to the surface."
"We, the undersigned, brought up and kept, for eight years, for professional purposes, the little lord bought by us of the king.
And looking at Gwynplaine,--
The sheriff took the gourd, and turned to the light one of its sides, which had, no doubt, been cleaned for the ends of justice.
The naked feet of an extended corpse seem, as it were, to bristle.
And he stood up, pale as death.
He let it be done, without seeking an explanation.
The other hand, being raised, fell back likewise.
The wapentake and the justice of the quorum approached Gwynplaine and took him by the arms.
He began to speak, like one who speaks unconsciously.
"Now, we have sworn secrecy to the king, but not to God.
The wapentake acquiesced by a nod.
The groom of the gibbet seized one foot and then the other, and the heels fell back on the ground.
Now silence is useless.
The prisoner, released alike from stones and chains, lay flat on the ground, his eyes closed, his arms and legs apart, like a crucified man taken down from a cross.
You believe yourself to be Gwynplaine; you are Clancharlie.
He saluted Gwynplaine with ease and respect--with the ease of a gentleman-in-waiting, and without the awkwardness of a judge.
He was rather old than young, and very precise.
He placed on the table something which the secretary had just taken out of the bag.
"In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
"He is dead."
He used to drink out of a flat bottle on which there was a name written in red."
I have kept it as long as I could.
They had, however, replaced in the flask a sort of bung made of tarred oakum, which had been used to cork it.
His eyelids closed.
"Has been wickedly deserted on the desert coast of Portland, with the intention of allowing him to perish of hunger, of cold, and of solitude, a child ten years old.
"I swore to keep the secret.
"Ah," said Gwynplaine, "awake me!"
For this reason I speak.
The serjeant on the right, the doctor, the justice of the quorum, the wapentake, the secretary, all the attendants except the executioner, repeated his salutation still more respectfully, and bowed to the ground before Gwynplaine.
It is time to awake.
"He was sold at the age of two, after the death of the peer, his father, and ten pounds sterling were given to the king as his purchase-money, as well as for divers concessions, tolerations, and immunities.
And may the Holy Virgin aid us, Amen.
"This fact is the result of his youth, and the slight powers of memory he could have had when he was bought and sold, being then barely two years old.
You have been dreaming.
The sheriff interrupted, saying,--"Here are the signatures.
He gave the secretary time to write, and then said,--
And the sheriff added,--
I was afraid of him.
There were women, Asuncion, and the other.
And we attach our signatures."
Then he freed his wrists and ankle-bones from the four chains that fastened him to the pillars.
Gaizdorra, Captain, that means chief.
You believe yourself to be one of the people; you belong to the peerage.
"A corpse to be carried away to-night."
CHAPTER I.
This second laugh, wilder yet than the first, might have been taken for a sob.
"That child is Lord Fermain Clancharlie, the only legitimate son of Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie and Hunkerville, Marquis of Corleone in Sicily, a peer of England, and of Ann Bradshaw, his wife, both deceased.
"After confession, life or death is a mere formality."
We did it between us--the king and I: the king, by his will; I, by my art!"
He raised his voice, turning to the motionless prisoner,--
All in different handwritings."
So be it!
Gwynplaine was as a man on whose head a tile falls from the palace of dreams.
That child is the inheritor of the estates and titles of his father.
"That child was brought up, and trained to be a mountebank at markets and fairs.
By a sign the justice of the quorum set in motion the man dressed in leather.
Gwynplaine did not understand.
The doctor rose up and said,--
THE DURABILITY OF FRAGILE THINGS.
This message addressed to justice has been faithfully delivered by the sea."
And he himself began to laugh.
Destiny sometimes proffers us a glass of madness to drink.
"Gernardus, yes, the doctor.
There was a ring of tar round its neck, showing that it had been hermetically sealed.
"This is the fourth day, and that which is legally set apart for the confrontation, and he who was deserted on the twenty-ninth of January, one thousand six hundred and ninety, having been brought into your presence, your devilish hope has vanished, you have broken silence, and recognized your victim."
Well--yes; 'tis he!
The prisoner opened his eyes, lifted his head, and, with a voice strangely resonant of agony, but which had still an indescribable calm mingled with its hoarseness, pronounced in excruciating accents, from under the mass of stones, words to pronounce each of which he had to lift that which was like the slab of a tomb placed upon him.
He felt himself placed in the chair which the sheriff had just vacated.
"The cemetery of the jail is opposite."
"On this flask, as you say, there is a name written in red."
He looked behind him to see who it was who had been addressed.
An old, sad-looking man.
"Now laugh for ever!"
The laughed ceased, and the man lay back.
The wapentake nodded again.
He is imprisoned in the dungeon of Chatham.
You believe yourself poor; you are wealthy. You believe yourself to be of no account; you are important.
Men of dark lives are faithful, and hell has its honour.
"'Tis of little consequence," said the sheriff.
The groom of the gibbet took up a hand and let it go; the hand fell back.
Then, the parchment being read to you which was contained, folded and enclosed within it, you would say no more; and in the hope, doubtless, that the lost child would never be recovered, and that you would escape punishment, you refuse to answer.
"In the same way that Harrow Hill produces excellent wheat, which is turned into fine flour for the royal table, so the sea renders every service in its power to England, and when a nobleman is lost finds and restores him."
"That child was sold at the age of two years, by order of his most gracious Majesty, King James the Second.
"Yes," he said; "I have come to awaken you.
It was a gourd, with handles like ears, covered with wicker. This bottle had evidently seen service, and had sojourned in the water. Shells and seaweed adhered to it.
"He is come," repeated Magua, bending his head with the dignity of an eastern prince.
In a few minutes they reappeared, escorting the individuals who had caused all these solemn preparations toward the seat of judgment.
The warriors were lounging in groups, musing more than they conversed and when a few words were uttered, speaking like men who deeply weighed their opinions.
"When was it ever otherwise?" returned Magua.
Their distant villages, their hunting-grounds and hundreds of their women and children, together with a material part of their physical force, were actually within the limits of the French territory.
Have not my brothers scented the feet of white men?"
Justice is the master of a red-skin.
"The Lenape are rulers of their own hills," returned the other a little haughtily.
CHAPTER 28
The chief consulted apart with his companions, and messengers despatched to collect certain others of the most distinguished men of the tribe.
They were all aged, even beyond that period to which the oldest present had reached; but one in the center, who leaned on his companions for support, had numbered an amount of years to which the human race is seldom permitted to attain.
Has not my brother scented spies in the woods?"
It might have been half an hour before each individual, including even the women and children, was in his place.
He was without arms, and his paint tended rather to soften than increase the natural sternness of his austere countenance.
"There have been strange moccasins about my camp.
"Is the face of my great Canada father turned again toward his Huron children?" demanded the orator of the Delawares.
He made, as he advanced, many courteous signs of greeting to the men he passed, neglecting to notice the women, however, like one who deemed their favor, in the present enterprise, of no importance.
The tribe, or rather half tribe, of Delawares, which has been so often mentioned, and whose present place of encampment was so nigh the temporary village of the Hurons, could assemble about an equal number of warriors with the latter people.
"He calls my people 'most beloved'."
Then Magua, as if recalled to such a recollection, by the allusion to the massacre, demanded:
The Delawares lost their gravity in a much more cordial expression; and the host, in particular, after contemplating his own liberal share of the spoil for some moments with peculiar gratification, repeated with strong emphasis, the words:
His head, on the whole of which the hair had been permitted to grow, the pursuits of war having so long been abandoned, was encircled by a sort of plated diadem, which, in its turn, bore lesser and more glittering ornaments, that sparkled amid the glossy hues of three drooping ostrich feathers, dyed a deep black, in touching contrast to the color of his snow-white locks.
Why should they brighten their tomahawks and sharpen their knives against each other? Are not the pale faces thicker than the swallows in the season of flowers?"
The delay had already continued long beyond the usual deliberative pause that always preceded a conference; but no sign of impatience or surprise escaped even the youngest boy.
This well-judged and politic stroke on the part of Magua was not without instantaneous results.
The politic captain of the Canadas had deemed it wiser to submit to entertain a passive friend, than by any acts of ill-judged severity to convert him into an open enemy.
Magua waited a little, to permit his words to soften the feelings of the Delawares, before he added:
His nation would not go on the warpath, because they did not think it well, but their friends have remembered where they lived."
When in full view of the Delawares he stopped, and made a gesture of amity, by throwing his arm upward toward heaven, and then letting it fall impressively on his breast.
"My brother is a wise chief.
"Where is the Yengee that the Delawares fear?" returned the other; "who has slain my young men?
His dark, wrinkled countenance was in singular and wild contrast with the long white locks which floated on his shoulders, in such thickness, as to announce that generations had probably passed away since they had last been shorn.
It would have been impossible for the most finished breeding to wear more of the appearance of considering the visit as a thing of course, than did his hosts, notwithstanding every individual present was perfectly aware that it must be connected with some secret object and that probably of importance to themselves.
He is welcome."
He, therefore, left the lodge and walked silently forth to the place, in front of the encampment, whither the warriors were already beginning to collect.
Its number somewhat exceeded a thousand souls.
In the division of the baubles the cunning Huron discovered no less art than in their selection.
Then they fled to the Delawares--for, say they, the Delawares are our friends; their minds are turned from their Canada father!"
The instruments of the chase were to be seen in abundance among the lodges; but none departed.
His reception was grave, silent, and wary.
"It is so; but they are now bright and dull; for the Yengeese are dead, and the Delawares are our neighbors."
They consisted principally of trinkets of little value, plundered from the slaughtered females of William Henry.
The news spread from mouth to mouth, until the whole encampment became powerfully agitated.
Who is the mortal enemy of my Great Father?"
The red-skins should be friends, and look with open eyes on the white men.
The dress of this patriarch--for such, considering his vast age, in conjunction with his affinity and influence with his people, he might very properly be termed--was rich and imposing, though strictly after the simple fashions of the tribe.
When the excitement had a little abated, the old men disposed themselves seriously to consider that which it became the honor and safety of their tribe to perform, under circumstances of so much delicacy and embarrassment.
The baffled Magua continued silent several minutes, apparently indifferent, however, to the repulse he had received in this his opening effort to regain possession of Cora.
"She is welcome."
The eyes of the old man were closed, as though the organs were wearied with having so long witnessed the selfish workings of the human passions.
"Does my prisoner give trouble to my brothers?"
They have been tracked into my lodges."
While he bestowed those of greater value on the two most distinguished warriors, one of whom was his host, he seasoned his offerings to their inferiors with such well-timed and apposite compliments, as left them no ground of complaint.
In short, the whole ceremony contained such a happy blending of the profitable with the flattering, that it was not difficult for the donor immediately to read the effect of a generosity so aptly mingled with praise, in the eyes of those he addressed.
The chief extended his arm and taking the other by the wrist, they once more exchanged friendly salutations.
"They will not find the Lenape asleep."
"A Huron never lies!" returned Magua, coldly, leaning his head against the side of the lodge, and drawing his slight robe across his tawny breast.
The women suspended their labors, to catch such syllables as unguardedly fell from the lips of the consulting warriors.
The Delaware gravely bowed his acquiescence to what he knew to be false, and continued:
A long and musing pause succeeded.
"It would not do.
they are colored by the same sun, and their just men will hunt in the same grounds after death.
When he had thus announced his liberal intention, the crafty chief arose, and gravely spread his presents before the dazzled eyes of his hosts.
As for the tribe itself, it had been content to announce to Montcalm, through his emissaries, with Indian brevity, that their hatchets were dull, and time was necessary to sharpen them.
Until such a one chose to make some movement, no deeds in arms, no natural gifts, nor any renown as an orator, would have justified the slightest interruption.
"Why should they not?
"She is welcome," returned the chief of the latter nation, still more emphatically.
Did not the Huron chief say he took women in the battle?"
Here and there a warrior was examining his arms, with an attention that is rarely bestowed on the implements, when no other enemy than the beasts of the forest is expected to be encountered.
Like their neighbors, they had followed Montcalm into the territories of the English crown, and were making heavy and serious inroads on the hunting-grounds of the Mohawks; though they had seen fit, with the mysterious reserve so common among the natives, to withhold their assistance at the moment when it was most required.
Accordingly, this alarming annunciation was received, as Magua intended, with manifest disapprobation, if not with alarm.
"The Hurons love their friends the Delawares," returned Magua.
The other acknowledged the pacific compliment by a gesture of the hand, and remained silent.
It is much used also by the whites.
After a suitable and decent pause, the principal chiefs arose, and, approaching the patriarch, they placed his hands reverently on their heads, seeming to entreat a blessing.
When he is told a bloody Yengee smokes at your fire?
But they love and venerate the great white chief."
The recent defection of the tribe had, as they well knew themselves, subjected the Delawares to much reproach among their French allies; and they were now made to feel that their future actions were to be regarded with jealousy and distrust.
Liszt, his hair floating wildly, was represented as darting through the air on wide-stretched pinions with keyboards attached--a play on Fluegel, the German for grand piano.
His "Gradus ad Parnassum" became the parent of Etude literature.
Two pupils of Liszt stand out prominently--Carl Tausig (1841-1871) and Eugene D'Albert (1864- ----).
The Clementi school was continued in that familiar writer of Etudes, Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858), and began to show respect for the damper pedal.
In response to the demand for increased range, as many as twenty keys were brought to act on a few strings, commanding often three octaves.
He taught the use of a loose wrist, absolute independence of the fingers and a new manipulation of the pedals.
A rival of Liszt in the concert field, especially before a Parisian public, was Sigismund Thalberg (1812-1871), who visited this country in 1855 and literally popularized the piano in America.
The case was either rectangular, or followed the outlines of the harp, a progenitor of this clavier type.
His piano works are a rich addition to the pianist's store, but whoever would unveil their beautiful proportions, all aglow as they are with sacred fire, must have taken a master's degree.
The great tidal wave set in motion by the piano has swept over the civilized world, carrying with it hosts of accomplished pianists.
He was the first to encourage professional clavier-playing among women. His daughter Marguerite was the first woman appointed official court clavier player.
Gaining a profound knowledge of its resources he raised it to an independent power.
In a collection of thirty sonatas he explained his purpose in these words: "Amateur, or professor, whoever thou art, seek not in these compositions for any profound feeling.
He possessed a well-trained, fascinating mechanism, with scales, chords, arpeggios and octaves that were marvels of neatness and accuracy, and a tone that was mellow and liquid, though lacking in warmth.
Losing the spirituality of a Mozart the Viennese school was destined to degenerate into empty bravura playing.
In his compositions he was an active agent in the crystallization of the sonata form.
The first was distinguished by his extraordinary sense for style, and was thought to surpass his master in absolute flawlessness of technique.
Tranquillity and poetic beauty being prime essentials of his playing, he preferred to the more brilliant harpsichord, or spinet, the clavichord, whose thrilling, tremulous tone, owing to its construction, was exceedingly sensitive to the player's touch.
The romantic temperament of Robert Schumann was nurtured on German romantic literature and music.
In it he directs scholars how to avoid a harsh tone, and how to form a legato style.
Chopin, who shrank from concert-playing, once said to him: "You are destined for it.
We may safely assume it was not slow in adopting the rude keyboard ascribed by tradition to Pan pipes, and applied to the portable organ of early Christian communities.
Also, it would bring you but little pleasure or renown if you should play badly; while to play well you would be obliged to devote ten or twelve years to practice, without being able to think of anything else.
In his playing, as in his compositions, every note was a pearl of great price.
But for him, my dear friend, Franz Liszt, you might not have had a note from me to-day."
Once, when about to play in public Beethoven's magnificent Kreutzer Sonata, with Remenyi, who was the first to recognize his genius, he discovered that the piano was half a tone below concert pitch, and rather than spoil the effect by having the violin tuned down, the boy of nineteen unhesitatingly transposed the piano part which he was playing from memory into a higher key.
Byrd was the more intimate, delicate, spiritual intellect; Bull the untamed genius, the brilliant executant, the less exquisitely refined artist.
What is generally recognized as the first period of clavier-virtuosity begins with the Neapolitan Domenico Scarlatti (1683-1757), and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), the German of Germans.
Thalberg, owing to his dignified repose, was caricatured as posing in a stiff, rigid manner before a box of keys.
Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) continued Couperin's work.
Quaint Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814) declares, in his "History of Music," that no performer of his day could play them without at least a month's practice.
His scheme of a dialogue, in the opening adagio of his "Invitation to the Dance," followed by an entrancing waltz and a grave concluding dialogue, betokens what he might have accomplished for the piano had he lived longer.
His playing is described as possessing an organ firmness of touch without organ ponderosity, and having an expression that moved deeply without intoxicating.
He gave the thumb its proper place on the keyboard, and materially improved fingering.
Schubert, closely allied in spirit to the master-builder, Beethoven, was unsurpassed in the refinement of his musical sentiment.
Her playing was distinguished by its musicianly intelligence and fine artistic feeling.
In his youth Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), the great apostle of modern intellectual music, made his debut before the musical world as a brilliant and versatile pianist.
Each string from the first had its due length and was tuned to its proper note.
The melody flooding his soul beautified his piano compositions, to which only a delicate touch may do justice.
A highly characteristic motive, or theme, as significant as the noblest "typical phrase," developing into equally characteristic progressions and cadences, is a striking feature of the Bach fugue.
Madame Schumann had acquired a splendid foundation for her career through the wise guidance of her father, whose pedagogic ideas every piano student might consider with profit.
His operatic transcriptions, in which a central melody is enfolded in arabesques, chords and running passages, have long since become antiquated, but his art of singing on the piano and many of his original studies still remain valuable to the pianist.
He advises parents to select teachers on whom implicit reliance may be placed, and teachers to keep the claviers of beginners under lock and key that there may be no practicing without supervision.
If she actually did justice to some of the airs with variations in the "Queen Elizabeth Virginal Book," she must indeed have been proficient on the instrument.
His series of performances in this line, covering the entire range of piano literature, in addition to his own compositions, given entirely without notes, led the public to expect playing by heart from all other artists.
By others he has been called the greatest contrapuntist after Bach, the greatest architectonist after Beethoven, the man of creative power who assimilated the older forms and invested them with a new life entirely his own.
When Liszt and Thalberg were in possession of the concert platform, they occupied the attention of cartoonists as fully as Paderewski at a later date.
All his early realistic and revolutionary ideas found vent in his pianistic achievements.
To her he dedicated his creative power.
Consider a moment whether this would become you.
Its box-like case was first placed on a table, later on its own stand, and increased in elegance.
Not until the eighteenth century was each key provided with a separate string.
As a piano virtuoso, a teacher, a conductor and an editor of musical works, he was a marked educational factor in music.
Living in genial surroundings, he was never forced to struggle, and although he climbed through flowery paths, he never reached the goal he longed for until his heart broke.
It is significant that these two types stand together on the threshold of clavier art." Bull had gained his degree at Oxford, the founding of whose chair of music is popularly attributed to Alfred the Great.
Little more than a century later, Jean Baptiste Lully (1633-1687) extensively employed the instrument in the orchestration of his operas, and wrote solo dances for it.
His "Suites" exalted forever the familiar dance tunes of the German people.
Many technical means of expression were invented by him, and a wholly new fingering was required for his purposes.
His "Well Tempered Clavichord" has been called the pianist's Sacred Book.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856) were the evangelists par excellence of the new romantic school.
Clementi, born in Rome, passed most of his life in London, where he attracted many pupils.
"Let all who aspire follow him in his flights toward regions sublime."
If your friends wish you to play in order to give them pleasure, tell them you do not desire to make yourself ridiculous in their eyes, and be content with your books and your domestic occupations."
In Germany, with grand old Father Bach, the keyboard instrument was found capable of mirroring a mighty soul.
His important theoretical work, "The True Art of Clavier Playing," was pronounced by Haydn the school of schools for all time.
As a teacher he was genial, kind, encouraging and in every respect a model.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), in his work for the piano, adapted to drawing-room use technical devices of his day, and in his "Songs without Words" gave a decisive short-story form to piano literature.
With the Virgin Queen it was a prime favorite, although not named expressly for her as the flattering fashion of the time led many to assume.
Delicate, sensitive, fastidious, Frederic Chopin (1809-1849) delivered his musical message with persuasive eloquence through the medium of the piano.
The bewitching tones of the gipsy violinist, Bihary, had fallen on his boyish ears "like drops of some fiery, volatile essence," stimulating him to effort.
It was often highly ornamented, and handsomely mounted.
He opened the way for the sonority of tone and imposing diction of the modern style.
Mozart brought into use its special features, showed its capacity for tone-shading and for the reflection of sentiment, and may well be said to have launched it on its career. Tradition declares that his hand was fashioned for clavier keys, and that its graceful movements afforded the eye no less pleasure than the ear.
The style of Scarlatti is peculiarly the product of Italian love of beautiful tone, and what he wrote, though without depth of motive, kept well in view the technical possibilities of the harpsichord.
Schumann, on making his acquaintance, proclaimed the advent of a genius who wrote music in which the spirit of the age found its consummation, and who, at the piano, unveiled wonders.
It was his chosen comrade.
The dreamy fervor and the glowing fire of an impassioned nature may be felt in his works, but also many times the lack of balance that belongs with the malady by which he was assailed.
Anton Rubinstein (1830-1894) was the impressionist, the subjective artist, who re-created every composition he played.
As a photograph may convey to the home an excellent conception of a master painting in some distant art gallery, so the piano, in addition to the musical creations it has inspired, may present to the domestic circle intelligent reproductions of mighty choral, operatic and instrumental works.
Earnest simplicity surrounded her public and her private life, and the element of personal display was wholly foreign to her.
His noble technique, based on his profound study of the Bachs, was spiritualized by his own glowing fancy.
Peter Iljitch Tschaikowsky (1840-1893), the distinguished representative of the modern Russian school, was an original, dramatic and fertile composer and wrote for the piano some of his highly colored and very characteristic music.
As early as the year 1400 claviers had appeared whose strings were plucked by quills attached to jacks at the end of the key levers.
Polish patriotism steeped in Parisian elegance shaped his genius, and his compositions portray the emotions of his people in exquisitely polished tonal language.
Rubinstein and Von Buelow offer two more contrasting personalities.
His suggestions deserve consideration to-day.
Taking upon himself the management of an English piano factory, he extended the keyboard, in 1793, to five and a half octaves. Seven octaves were not reached until 1851.
The same equilibrium is maintained in his piano and violin sonatas and his other concerted chamber music, amid all their persuasive and eloquent discourse.
Without great creative genius, he occupied himself chiefly with the technical problems of the pianoforte.
The secular music principle of the sixteenth century that called into active being the orchestra led also to a desire for richer musical expression in home and social life than the fashionable lute afforded, and the clavier advanced in favor.
Hans von Buelow (1830-1894) was the objective artist, whose scholarly attainments and musicianly discernment unraveled the most tangled web of phrasing and interpretation.
With his piano concertos he showed how clavier and orchestra may converse earnestly together without either having its individuality marred.
In the year 1529, Pietro Bembo, a grave theoretician, wrote to his daughter Helena, at her convent school: "As to your request to be allowed to learn the clavier, I answer that you cannot yet, owing to your youth, understand that playing is only suited for volatile, frivolous women; whereas I desire you to be the most lovable maiden in the world.
Every accent of his dramatic music was embodied in his piano compositions.
A servant came in for our bonnets and baskets. Cousin Alice begged us to take tea at once.
"Good-night."
The viands were as pretty as the dishes, the lamb chops were fragile; the bread was delicious, but cut in transparent slices, and the butter pat was nearly stamped through with its bouquet of flowers.
He then proposed our going to Miss Prior, the lady who had charge of the girls' department, and we followed him to her school-room.
In the morning, she said, we should see her three children. She never left them, she was so afraid of their being ill, also telling mother that she would do all in her power to make my stay in Rosville pleasant and profitable.
Locke Morgeson sounded familiarly, he said; a member of his mother's family named Somers had married a gentleman of that name.
"That is my house, on the right," he said.
Edward was delighted with their behavior, and for the first time I saw his father smile on him.
"Mrs. Morgeson," said Charles, "the horses will be ready to take you round Rosville.
But her countenance fell when she heard that Dr. Price had been a Unitarian minister, and that there was no Congregational church in Rosville.
"You would, would you?" he said, taking out the whip, as the horses recoiled from a man who lay by the roadside, leaping so high that the harness seemed rattling from their backs.
Dr. Price was behind them.
She sent out the two youngest, put little Edward in his chair, and breakfast began.
I looked up at him.
Rosville was larger and handsomer than Surrey.
As we passed through the town, Cousin Charles pointed to the Academy, which stood at the head of a green.
The oldest was eight years, the youngest three months.
We drove into the yard, and a woman came out on the piazza to receive us.
"And the glass is pinned up with nice yellow paper; and here is a damask napkin fastened to the wall behind the washstand.
It was sunset when we arrived in Rosville, and found Mr. Morgeson waiting for us with his carriage at the station.
Flower gardens, shrubbery, and trees were scattered everywhere.
"Here, in this room, and in you."
I have no wish that way.
Morning prayers were over, and the scholars, some sixty boys and girls, were coming downstairs from the hall, to go into the rooms, each side of a great door.
I finished Childe Harold early in the morning, though, and went down to breakfast, longing to be a wreck!
The walls were covered with dark red velvet paper, the furniture was dark, the mantel and table tops were black marble, and the vases and candelabra were bronze.
I looked back at him.
"Mother," I said afterward, "I am afraid I am an animal.
I replied we knew that grandfather had married a Rachel Somers.
From its open sides I looked out on a tranquil, agreeable landscape; there was nothing saline in the atmosphere.
"I hear Edward," said Alice.
"I think they would grumble, and admire.
"What would Temperance and Hepsey say to this?"
His face was serene, dark, and delicate, but to look at it made me shiver.
Cousin Alice gave unremitting attention to Edward, who ate as little as the rest.
I drew from her conversation the opinion that she had a tendency to the rearing of children.
Still hungry, I observed that Cousin Charles and Alice had finished; and though she shook her spoon in the cup, feigning to continue, and he snipped crumbs in his plate, I felt constrained to end my repast.
"How much worse is the mare, cousin Charles?"
"These are fine brutes," he said, not taking his eyes from them; "but they are not equal to my mare, Nell.
And everything stands on a mat.
Presently a girl, the same who had taken our bonnets, came in with a pitcher of warm water and a plate of soda biscuit.
They were beautifully dressed, and their mother was tending and watching them.
Mother came toward us, pleading fatigue as an excuse for retiring, and Cousin Charles called Cousin Alice, who went with us to our room.
I was glad when Cousin Charles came in, looking at his watch.
Alice is afraid of her; but I hope that you, Cassandra, will ride with me sometimes when I drive her."
Cousin Alice gave us descriptions of their tastes and habits, dwelling with emphasis on those of the baby.
We will call on Dr. Price, for you to see the kind of master Cassandra will have.
I have already spoken to him about receiving a new pupil."
Did you notice how little the Morgesons ate?"
"Yes," I said huskily, for the dry biscuit choked me.
"Send off the babies, Alice, and ring the bell for breakfast."
Now that I think of it, she was always making up some nice dish; tell her I remember it, will you?"
"What a contrast!" I said.
How miserable was my youth! It is too late for me to make any attempt at cultivation.
Mother tried in vain to look hard-hearted, and to persuade that it was good for me, but she lost her appetite, with the thought of losing me, which the mention of Dr. Price brought home.
It was Byron, and turning over the leaves till I came to Don Juan, I read it through, and began Childe Harold, but the candle expired.
I cried when I went up to my room, for I found a present there--a beautiful workbox, and in it was a small Bible with my name and hers written on the fly-leaf in large print-like, but tremulous letters.
Pretty houses stood round it, and streets branched from it in all directions.
"I noticed how elegant their table appointments were, and I shall buy new china in Boston to-morrow.
She directed us where to find the apparel she had nicely smoothed and folded; took off the handsome counterpane, and the pillows trimmed with lace, putting others of a plainer make in their places; shook down the window curtains; asked us if we would have anything more, and quietly disappeared.
CHAPTER XIV.
Look at this," showing her the tassels of the inner window curtains done up in little bags.
"Oh!" exclaimed mother, grasping my arm.
"Cassy, Mrs. Morgeson is an excellent housekeeper."
I ate every one, undressing meanwhile, and surveying the apartment.
I offered mother the warm water, and appropriated the biscuits.
I think also that the boiled eggs were smaller than any I had seen.
"You shall see."
"Now," said mother, when we came away, "think how much greater your advantages are than mine have ever been.
He stopped when he saw us, an introduction took place, and he inquired for Dr. Snell, as an old college friend.
"And between you and me?"
He directed mother's attention to the portraits of his children, explaining them, while I went to a table between the windows to examine the green and white sprays of some delicate flower I had never before seen.
The western breeze, which blew in our faces, had an earthy scent, with fluctuating streams of odors from trees and flowers.
"It will hardly bear touching," he said.
"It's no palace," said Patsy, entering to throw down the bundles as soon as the Major unlocked the door, "but there's a cricket in the hearth, and it's your home, Uncle John, as well as ours."
"But how about the money, Patsy dear?" he asked.
"Couldn't we get him a job?" asked Patsy, wistfully.
"And you can wash in my chamber," added the Major, with a grand air, "and hang your clothes on the spare hooks behind my door."
"All this wealth, and you pleading poverty?"
The others stood by to listen silently to the discussion, yielding first place to the victor in the race.
Uncle John leaped from the carriage, followed by Louise and Patsy.
"We don't want to ride," was the answer.
"Oh, don't bother me."
"All we want to-day is to see the town," he declared, "We're not going to ride, but walk."
From now on, past Prajano and into Amalfi, the day was brilliant and the temperature delightful.
Surely you will see that."
It was long-legs, sure enough, but shorn of his beautiful regalia.
"That's true enough," he returned.
Stop, I say!" he yelled at the man, angrily.
"Better," agreed Patsy.
There the uniformed vetturio stood beside the one modern carriage in the group.
It is good.
Uncle John could not well refuse.
They passed through the picturesque lanes of Sorrento, climbed the further slope, and brought the carriage to the other side of the peninsula, where the girls obtained their first view of the Gulf of Salerno, with the lovely Isles of the Sirens lying just beneath them.
"It is the proper thing to do, Uncle."
It was new; it was glossy; it had beautiful, carefully brushed cushions; it was drawn by a pair of splendid looking horses.
One of the young man's hands hung limp and helpless.
"Why, it's nothing at all," returned Beth, flushing; "we're trained to do such things in the gymnasium at Cloverton, and I'm much stronger than I appear to be."
Even Louise was pleased at the arrangement and as eager as the others to make the trip.
As it collided against the stone wall the vehicle tipped dangerously, hurling the driver from his seat to dive headforemost into the space beneath.
Is it not so?"
"It is wonderful!" murmured Ferralti.
But the fellow seemed suddenly deaf, and paid no heed.
And perhaps one suffers more in Italy than in America, owing to the general lack of means to keep warm on cold days.
The horses were frantic at the time and wrenched my wrist viciously as I tried to hold them.
"Is not bellissima, signore?" asked the man, proudly.
"Are you hurt, sir?" he asked.
Italy is beautiful; it is charming and delightful; but seldom is this true in winter or early spring.
"Well, I suppose we may as well take it," said the little man, in a resigned tone.
I am engage by you.
The cabman implored.
The road is dusty, very; I must not ruin a nice dress when I work," answered the man, smiling unabashed.
You will be much please when we return."
Circling around the cliff beyond Positano the sun greeted them, shining from out a blue sky, and they wondered what had become of the bad weather they had so lately experienced.
From that distance the boats drawn upon the sheltered beach seemed like mere toys.
Without warning the wind came whistling around them in a great gale, which speedily increased in fury until it drove the blinded horses reeling against the low parapet and pushed upon the carriage as if determined to dash it over the precipice.
The driver had by now repaired a broken strap and found his equippage otherwise uninjured.
The man promised, whereat his confreres lost all interest in the matter and the strangers were allowed to proceed without further interruption.
"You take my carrozza, signore?" begged the cabman.
THE ROAD TO AMALFI
I do not wish the signorini bella to tire and weep.
"But I'll get even with this rascal before I've done with him, never fear."
"Do you know where my rig is?" Uncle John asked the driver, at the same time peering up and down the road.
Uncle John had been observing the Count.
They had just sighted the ancient town of Positano and were circling a gigantic point of rock, when the great adventure of the day overtook them.
They had an early breakfast and were ready at nine o'clock; but when they came to the gate of the garden they found only a dilapidated carriage standing before it.
They found out all about the Amalfi drive that evening, and were glad indeed they had decided to go.
It may not be as pretty as the other, but I expect that one is only kept to make engagements with.
Instantly the crowd scampered back to the square, followed more leisurely by Uncle John and the girls.
"Hold fast," she called calmly to the driver, and began dragging him upward, inch by inch.
Others may look; it is only you who must ride.
When it comes to actual use, we don't get it."
So the girls and their uncle climbed into the vehicle again and the driver mounted the box and cracked his whip with his usual vigor.
They entered the crazy looking vehicle and found the seats ample and comfortable despite the appearance of dilapidation everywhere prevalent. The driver mounted the box, cracked his whip, and the lean nags ambled away at a fair pace.
He cracked his whip and rattled away through the streets without a glance behind him.
The Hotel Victoria faces the bay of Naples.
"Hop in, my dears."
"We may as well drive to Amalfi to-morrow," suggested Beth.
"A little, perhaps, Mr. Merrick; but it is unimportant.
At what hour, to-morrow, illustrissimo?"
Ferralti smiled, and his eyes rested upon Louise.
But ever the road returned in a brief space to the edge of the sea-cliff, and everywhere it was solid as the hills themselves, and seemingly as secure.
"Where's your uniform?" he asked.
I felt something snap; a small bone, perhaps.
Then Beth slipped from her seat to the flat top of the parapet, stepped boldly to where the reins were pulling upon the terrified horses, and seized them in her strong grasp.
From the arbored veranda of this charming retreat is obtained one of the finest views in Europe, and while the girls sat enjoying it Uncle John arranged with a pleasant faced woman (who had once lived in America) for their luncheon.
At this critical moment a mounted horseman, who unobserved had been following the party, dashed to their rescue.
Uncle John was obdurate.
Certainly they must make the Amalfi drive, or to Massa Lubrense or Saint' Agata or at least Il Deserto!
So I leave him home, for I am kind.
"Be ready to start at nine o'clock to-morrow morning."
"It was as I had feared: a small bone snapped.
"All right; we'll go, then."
Count Ferralti rode at the side of the carriage but did not attempt much conversation.
Mr. Merrick looked at the driver carefully.
I find me the carrozza is not easy; it is not perfect; it do not remain good for a long ride.
"We've been swindled, my dears," he said; "swindled most beautifully. But I suppose we may as well make the best of it."
"Only try, signore!
A flurry at the gates of the Chief of the nation at such a time would never do.
Meanwhile the President could proclaim through official channels his disinterestedness.
Of course it was embarrassing.
People could not be arrested for picketing.
The six women who were privileged to serve the first terms of imprisonment for suffrage in this country, were Miss Katherine Morey of Massachusetts, Mrs. Annie Arneil and Miss Mabel Vernon of Delaware, Miss Lavinia Dock of Pennsylvania, Miss Maud Jamison of Virginia, and Miss Virginia Arnold of
This occasion offered us the opportunity again to expose the Administration's weakness in claiming complete political democracy while women were still denied their political freedom.
Thinking they had been mistaken in believing the pickets were to be arrested, and having grown weary of their strenuous sport, the crowd moved on its way.
Champ Clark and his throng were not molested.
The First Arrests
This was too dreadful.
Inciting to riot?
Were not the District Commissioners who gave orders to prepare the cells the direct appointees of President Wilson?
Perhaps a raid!
with the visit of the Russian diplomats to the President.
Hurried conferences behind closed doors!
TO THE RUSSIAN ENVOYS
It would have been exceedingly droll if it had not been so tragic.
"Furnished without charge to all newspapers, post offices, government officials and agencies of a public character for the dissemination of official news of the United States Government."
We meant it to be.
Something must be done to stop this expose at once.
Because women were holding banners asking for the precious principle at home that men were supposed to be dying for abroad.
Others hurled cheap and childish epithets at them.
Was the fundamental weakness in our boast of pure and perfect democracy to be so wantonly displayed with impunity?
The responsibility for our protest is, therefore, with the Administration and not with the women of America, if the lack of democracy at home weakens the Administration in its fight for democracy three thousand miles away."
We are innocent."
This fact supplied us with a fresh angle of attack.
They resorted to force in an attempt to end picketing.
Our allies in the crusade for democracy must not know that we had a day-by-day unrest at home.
Champ Clark, late Democratic speaker of the House, is declaiming to a cheering crowd behind the White House, "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." In front of the White House thirteen silent sentinels with banners bearing the same words, are arrested.
The official bulletin concludes with:
North Carolina.
The Republicans had then attempted to
And so the Democratic Executive Committee began to spread abroad the news that its act was not really official, but merely reflected the "personal conviction" of the members present.
The truth must be told at all costs.
Impossible!
Even the South, the Administration's stronghold, sent fiery telegrams demanding action.
Simultaneously with these moves and counter-moves in political circles, the people in all sections of this vast country began to speak their minds.
This tiny flame would scarcely be visible.
Behind this matching of political wits by the two parties stood the faithful pickets compelling them both to act.
It decided to bring the offenders to trial.
The fact was that the pickets had moved the Democrats a step.
"Washington, July 3, 1917.
The manifestations of popular approval of suffrage, the constant stream of protests to the Administration against its delay nationally, and the shame of having women begging at its gates, could result in only one of two things.
"I warn you, you will be arrested if you attempt to picket again."
And so it went-like a great game of chess.
Women could not advance on drawn bayonets.
What a picture!
"Not a dollar of your fine will we pay," was the answer of the women.
The women had stood as silent sentinels holding the President's own eloquent words.
Whispered conversations were heard. The book on rules and regulations was hopefully thumbed.
News had spread through the city that the pickets were to be arrested.
To know that we were no longer wanted at the gates of the White House and that the police were no longer our "friends" was enough for the mob mind.
Closing the Woman's Party headquarters was discussed.
And all for what?
It developed that "orders" had been received at the jail immediately after the arrests and before the trial, "to make ready for the suffragettes." What did it matter that their case had not yet been heard?
Some members of the crowd made sport of the women.
"To pay a fine would be an admission of guilt.
All carried banners with the same words of the President.
In answering the criticism, Miss Paul publicly stated our position thus: "The intolerable conditions
Still uncertain as to the purposes of the Republicans, the Democrats were moved to further action.
Since, however, one cannot in the majority of cases distinguish between two-beat and four-beat measures, it will probably be best to leave the original classification intact and regard four-beat measure as a compound variety.
Perhaps the easiest way out of the difficulty is to admit that both may be true--but in different compositions.
100.
Rhythm is the regular recurrence of accent in a series of beats (or pulses), while measure is the grouping of these beats according to some specified system.
98.
MEASURE
99.
97.
In rapid tempi this is always taken as compound duple measure, a dotted quarter note having a beat.
There are two main classes of simple measures, two-beat measure, and three-beat measure.
The strongest accent falls normally on the first beat in the measure.
The principal compound measures are four-beat and six-beat, both being referred to as compound-duple measures.
4.
Five-beat, seven-beat, nine-beat, and twelve-beat measures are also classified as compound measures.
3.
Rhythm is thus seen to be a fundamental thing, inherent in the music itself, while measure is to a certain extent at least an arbitrary grouping which musicians have adopted for practical purposes.
The student will note the essential difference between rhythm and measure.
1.
CHAPTER X
(1) A group of even beats (or pulses), always felt, though not always actually sounded, one or more of these beats being stronger than the rest;
Two essential characteristics are involved in the ordinary musical measure:
The little girl's work was not ended.
To my good missionary friends I had already said good-bye, and the captain and Mollie were kindly regretful.
A tall, brown miner enters the living room, goes to the little bed by the window, speaks softly, and, bending over the tiny girl, kisses her.
They came from the east, west, north and south, all sorry to know of her illness, and bringing presents with them.
I was determined to go to St. Michael, up the Yukon to Dawson, and "outside," and laid my plans accordingly.
GOOD-BYE TO GOLOVIN BAY.
With tears in my eyes, but with real pain in my heart I bade Jennie good-bye, and stepped into the little boat which was to carry me to the "Dora."
With them came mails from the outside, with newspapers and tidings of friends in the States.
By the thirtieth of June schooners were coming into the bay with passengers and freight, and the coast steamers, "Elmore" and "Dora," had begun to make regular trips to and from Nome.
Many times I have seen evidence of the sweet and gentle influences going out from the life of little Yahkuk as she lies upon her cot of pain.
Farewell to the moss-covered hills and paths thickly bordered with blossoms.
Affairs connected with my gold claims were, with much anxiety and trouble, arranged as well as possible, and when I boarded the steamer, I would carry with me, at least, three deeds to as many claims, with a fair prospect of others; but I could not decide to remain another winter.
When August came I sailed away.
Nothing so delicious as their salads (for the French cooks had long ago gone, the hotel management being changed, and Mollie had a nice little kitchen of her own), and with fresh salmon trout, wild fowl, fresh meats and vegetables, we made up for many months of winter dieting.
Her love for her birthplace, with its hills, streams and ocean is a sincere one, and, young as she is, and having seen the great city by the Golden Gate, with many of its wonders, she is happiest in Chinik.
All this time I longed to get away.
The captain's vegetable garden in the sand was growing rapidly, and was watched with eager eyes by everyone.
I was going each day to the hill-top to watch for the steamers which would bring the letters for which I waited.
I wanted to take both with me, but, no, I could not.
A few remained for the summer.
CHAPTER XXVI.
On the morning of the twenty-sixth of June I awoke to find that the ice had drifted out to sea in the night, eight days after Mollie and I had taken our twelve miles trip across the bay and return.
When the man turns, his face wears a soft and tender expression as though he were looking at some beautiful sight far away, and, perhaps, he is.
The "Dora" had entered the bay in the morning and found my trunk packed and waiting; it was then only the work of a little time to make ready to leave.
Before one of the sunny south windows of the living room we placed her cot each morning, and here she received her numerous friends, both Eskimo and white, and their names were legion.
Here men built boats, and rowed away to Keechawik and Neukluk, carrying supplies for hunting or prospecting.
Born as she was in a rough mining camp at the foot of the barren hills, she was given the Eskimo name of Yahkuk, meaning a little hill, and she, like an oasis in a desert place, is left here to cheer, love, and help others.
Friends soon came in from the outside, bringing city dolls dressed in ribbons and laces; there were tiny dishes, chairs, tables,--a hundred things dear to a little girl's heart, and all pleased her immensely, but all were laid quickly aside for a basket of wild flowers or mosses, for a fish, bird, animal or baby, showing plainly her taste for the things of nature in preference to art.
Then her big, black eyes glance brightly into blue ones looking down from above, full red lips part in a cordial smile, while the one solitary dimple in the smooth, round cheek pricks its way still deeper, and small arms go up around his neck.
God grant that the sweet memory of that little child's kiss may be so lasting that all their lives, he and others, may be purer and better men.
Since the stone-throwing episode the Marshal had been doing duty as watchman, sleeping during the day and guarding the house nights, the heavy iron "bracelets" in his inner coat pocket weighing scarcely more than the loaded revolver in his belt.
Sometimes it was a little live bird or squirrel, a delicious salmon trout or wild fowl for her supper; sometimes it was candy, nuts, or fresh fruit from Nome, and with everything she was well pleased and joyous.
Then our fingers trembled at opening our letters until we found that all our dear ones were well, and we heartily thanked the Lord.
Letters from my father and brother in Dawson had been received.
Then John Silence began to understand.
His eyes no longer glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not excitement, but knowledge.
He marched along, picking his way delicately, but with a stately dignity that suggested his ancestry with the majesty of Egypt.
Next, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring announced the restoration of the cat to its normal state.
Far away it sounded.
And John Silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul was on the side of the Dark Powers.
Once, indeed, he sprang upwards and forwards, working furiously with teeth and paws, and with a noise like wolves fighting, but only to dash back the next minute against the wall behind him.
Smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to guide him.
Harmony was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to the room and all its occupants.
Smoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend's muzzle, purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection in his throat.
Clearly he was anxious to make amends for the mischief to which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and electric constitution.
Ice seemed to settle about his heart, and his mind trembled.
The doctor lit the candle and brought it over.
It was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew had become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another chamber, that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange distances, in a sort of vision.
It all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that--the events that took place in this little modern room at the top of Putney Hill between midnight and sunrise--that Dr. Silence was hardly able to follow and remember it all.
John Silence understood.
Then, after lying still for a bit, he rose to a crouching position as though to spring again, snarling horribly and making short half-circles with lowered head.
And power and confidence came with them.
Then it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person.
He saw the collie lying on its side against the wall; it was utterly exhausted, and foam still hung about its jaws.
He was no shadow-cat, but real and full of his usual and perfect self-possession.
Unholy thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil presented themselves seductively.
At first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short dangerous bark from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air, a foot or so from the ground.
He began to lose memory--memory of his identity, of where he was, of what he ought to do.
It came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror; the light was so uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult to follow on the dark carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken by surprise--that he found it almost impossible to observe accurately, or to recall afterwards precisely what it was he had seen or in what order the incidents had taken place.
He turned his head towards the corner where the collie still lay, thumping his tail feebly and pathetically.
Flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that "something" between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being restored to their master's confidence.
And all the while Smoke meowed piteously.
And with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power.
He stroked the dear body, feeling it over for bruises or broken bones, but finding none.
Something from the region of utter cold was upon him.
He felt lost, shelterless in the depths of his soul.
He seemed very pleased with himself, and smiled with an expression of supreme innocence.
Yet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the air, the perspiration poured down his face.
And, since his motive was pure and his soul fearless, they could not work him harm.
Smoke continued to rub against its cheek and nose and eyes, sometimes even standing on its body and kneading into the thick yellow hair.
But it was useless.
The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come out of them.
For ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil was branded everywhere upon its broken features.
Smoke was advancing across the carpet.
Nor could he make out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have altered, grown much larger, and why it extended away behind him where ordinarily the wall should have been.
At any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant, barking and leaping to the shoulder.
By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his own.
He was conscious, of course, of effort, and yet it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the character of his opponent's power, and he called upon the good within him to meet and overcome it.
Eyes, face and hair rose level with his own, and for a space of time he never could properly measure, or determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked straight into each other's visages and down into each other's hearts.
He bent down and stroked the creature's living fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of his hand down its back.
He was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and threatened utterly to overwhelm the dog through its terror.
And Smoke all the while meowed piteously by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon himself.
He was in a much larger space.
Its tail and eyes responded to the sound of its name, but it was evidently very weak and overcome.
Some force entered his being that shook him as the tempest shakes a leaf, and close against his eyes--clean level with his face--he found himself staring into the wreck of a vast dark Countenance, a countenance that was terrible even in its ruin.
Yet still he held out and resisted while the climax of the fight came nearer and nearer....
And directly afterwards the doctor's own distress became intolerably acute.
But Dr. Silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had happened, and his heart was wrung.
He heard the door shut.
For several minutes he continued to utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it.
The windows rattled.
It was like the reflections from a score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles.
The inner forces stirred and trembled in response to his call.
There came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and tearing its way down.
The collie had made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell to whining and then finally lay still.
Then, by slow degrees, the dark and dreadful countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul, the normal proportions returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted back into the fog, and the whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared whence they came.
He had stepped into the stream of forces awakened by Pender and he knew that he must withstand them to the end or come to a conclusion that it was not good for a man to come to.
He knew--provided he was not first robbed of self-control--how vicariously to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes.
The glacial atmosphere closed round him with the cold of death, and a great rushing sound swept by overhead as though the ceiling had lifted to a great height.
Dr. Silence heard the thumping of the collie's tail against the floor.
It was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the false began.
Still uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and rubbed vigorously against his legs.
Other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not.
The candle flickered and went out.
For just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes.
He had made a half movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls, animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own mind.
He made certain sigils, gestures and movements at the same time.
And then they advanced together towards the corner where the dog was.
His will seemed paralysed.
It was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began to restore him slowly to his own.
The dimensions of the place altered and shifted.
"Flame, old man! come!"
And even now he got up, though heavily and awkwardly, to his feet.
The very foundations of his strength were shaken.
They did not at first come readily as was their habit, for under the spell of glamour they had already been diabolically lulled into inactivity, but come they eventually did, rising out of the inner spiritual nature he had learned with so much time and pain to awaken to life.
And, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in his corner.
And then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there slowly rose up the Personality that had been all the time directing the battle.
Flame replied from time to time by little licks of the tongue, most of them curiously misdirected.
And the grunt and the thumping touched the depth of affection in the man's heart, and gave him some inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered.
In a deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser vibrations in its own swelling tone.
He started to run, wagging his tail more briskly.
"Where are we?"
"It's an ugly name," he said.
How could she ever have thought him common or absurd?
The glory of having her, even as a sister! and to call her Jessie like that!
She thought.
And the moonlight's simply dee-vine."
"SAFE."
He snapped his lamp and stood up.
MY Christian name.
But he had no adequate answer.
They dismounted abruptly.
She looked down at him, almost kneeling in front of her, with an unreasonable approbation in her eyes.
"But the Christian name?"
Their conversation hung comatose in the air, switched up by Bechamel. They listened together.
Stopped again.
After a pause Bechamel went back to the dining-room.
"Yes?"
"I might have thought!"
At the turnings of the road he made his decisions with an air of profound promptitude (and quite haphazard).
She took a minute to answer.
"But you must tell me your name--brother," she said,
Stunted oaks and thorns rose out of the haze of moonlight that was tangled in the hedge on either side.
The mute emotion of his face affected her strangely. She had to speak.
They rode, speaking little, just a rare word now and then, at a turning, at a footfall, at a roughness in the road.
There were also moral remarks and other irrelevant contributions.
It seemed at first as though everyone had gone to bed, but the Red Hotel still glowed yellow and warm.
You are tired, you know.
I was unhappy at home--never mind why.
He had seen her face in shadow, with the morning sunlight tangled in her hair, he had seen her sympathetic with that warm light in her face, he had seen her troubled and her eyes bright with tears.
"I'll chuck this infernal business!
"The Right," he would say. Or again "The Left," as one who knew.
She stood dimly there, holding her machine, and he, holding his, could go no nearer to her to see if she sobbed for weeping or for want of breath.
If so, he was in for an explanation.
For all that flight Mr. Hoopdriver was in the world of Romance.
And in silence under her benign influence, under the benediction of her light, rode our two wanderers side by side through the transfigured and transfiguring night.
How they rode!
Who would be Hoopdriver on a night like this?
Then, with infinite fervour, he said--But let us put in blank cartridge--he said, "------!"
"Damn her," said Bechamel, for all the world like a common man.
"Go on," said Bechamel.
Overhead, riding serenely through the spacious blue, is the mother of the silence, she who has spiritualised the world, alone save for two attendant steady shining stars.
Nowhere was the moon shining quite so brightly as in Mr. Hoopdriver's skull.
"Christian name?
She did not care to ask why.
The two black figures in the broken light were silent for a space.
Down the passage to the bedroom.
"WELL?"
"That was Chichester we were near?" she asked.
I wanted to come out into the world, to be a human being--not a thing in a hutch.
"We could stop there together--"
There were conflicting ideas of telling the police and pursuing the flying couple on a horse.
"Gone!" he said with a half laugh.
And we can't wander all night--after the day we've had."
He looked into her eyes, and his excitement seemed arrested.
he told himself.
A stepmother--Idle, unoccupied, hindered, cramped, that is enough, perhaps.
Had a policeman intervened because their lamps were not lit, Hoopdriver had cut him down and ridden on, after the fashion of a hero born.
"Do you think they will follow us?"
They heard a chair creak under him.
"Well, that's Mr. Beaumont," said the barmaid, "--anyhow."
"I suppose you won't take anything,--Jessie?"
It had begun early, you will remember, with a vigil in a little sweetstuff shop next door to the Angel at Midhurst.
"Beg pardon, sir," said Stephen, with a diplomatic cough.
And she by the side of him!
It has created the fairies, whom the sunlight kills, and fairyland rises again in our hearts at the sight of it, the voices of the filmy route, and their faint, soul-piercing melodies.
But compared with Bechamel!--"We take each other on trust," she said.
And his only ray of hope was that it seemed more probable, after all, that the girl had escaped through her stepmother.
"I'm going up," said Stephen, "to break the melancholy news to him."
"I know," said Hoopdriver.
"It wasn't that one at all, miss," said the ostler, "I'd SWEAR"
"We have turned and turned again."
"She went, sir, with Another Gentleman."
"Leave me alone with her," he would say; "I know how to calm her."
"We've had supper, thenks, and we're tired," said Mr. Hoopdriver.
"On her bicycle!
"That man," she went on, after the assent of his listening silence, "promised to help and protect me.
"You cannot imagine my stepmother.
Turned.
Oh! won't it be the greatest fun, Emma Jane?
Emma Jane practiced it on Rebecca, and Rebecca on Emma Jane.
"I'd rather be an apple-tree in blossom,--that one that blooms pink, by our pig-pen."
Emma Jane had enjoyed considerable experience of this kind, and Rebecca had succeeded in unstopping her ears, ungluing her eyes, and loosening her tongue, so that she could "play the game" after a fashion.
It was at this juncture that Clara Belle and Susan Simpson consulted Rebecca, who threw herself solidly and wholeheartedly into the enterprise, promising her help and that of Emma Jane Perkins.
"No," grumbled Emma Jane; "infant is worse even than babe.
Immerse the garments in a tub, lightly rubbing the more soiled portions with the soap; leave them submerged in water from sunset to sunrise, and then the youngest baby can wash them without the slightest effort."
A gorgeous leaf blew into the wagon.
These were lifted into the back of the wagon, and a happier couple never drove along the country road than Rebecca and her companion.
"I'm going to have a white satin with a pink sash, pink stockings, bronze slippers, and a spangled fan."
"Great, wide, beautiful, wonderful World, With the wonderful water round you curled, And the wonderful grass upon your breast, World, you are beautifully drest!"
Just before Thanksgiving the affairs of the Simpsons reached what might have been called a crisis, even in their family, which had been born and reared in a state of adventurous poverty and perilous uncertainty.
Rebecca, do you think we'd better do as the circular says, and let Elijah or Elisha try the soap before we begin selling?"
I could look at all the rest of the woods, see my scarlet dress in my beautiful looking-glass, and watch all the yellow and brown trees growing upside down in the water.
XIII
"I think it would be awful homely," said Emma Jane.
"Perhaps dizzy isn't just the right word, but it's nearest.
If you could be a tree, which one would you choose?"
They had sold enough to their immediate neighbors during the earlier autumn to secure a child's handcart, which, though very weak on its pins, could be trundled over the country roads.
"It takes so little to make you feel like a fool, Emma Jane," rebuked Rebecca, "that sometimes I think that you must BE one I don't get to feeling like a fool so awfully easy; now leave out that eating part if you don't like it, and go on."
Rebecca laughed.
SNOW-WHITE; ROSE-RED
There were still many leaves on the oaks and maples, making a goodly show of red and brown and gold. The air was like sparkling cider, and every field had its heaps of yellow and russet good things to eat, all ready for the barns, the mills, and the markets.
It is called the Snow-White and Rose-Red Soap, six cakes in an ornamental box, only twenty cents for the white, twenty-five cents for the red.
Rebecca and Emma Jane offered to go two or three miles in some one direction and see what they could do in the way of stirring up a popular demand for the Snow-White and Rose-Red brands, the former being devoted to laundry purposes and the latter being intended for the toilet.
"Oh, Rebecca, don't let's say that!" interposed Emma Jane hysterically. "It makes me feel like a fool."
"BABE, not baby," corrected Rebecca from the circular.
It was only of polished brass, continued the circular, though it was invariably mistaken for solid gold, and the shade that accompanied it (at least it accompanied it if the agent sold a hundred extra cakes) was of crinkled crepe paper printed in a dozen delicious hues, from which the joy-dazzled agent might take his choice.
His method, when once observed, could never be forgotten; nor his manner, nor his vocabulary.
It is made from the purest ingredients, and if desired could be eaten by an invalid with relish and profit."
"The Snow-White is probably the most remarkable laundry soap ever manufactured.
"No," answered Emma Jane after a long pause; "no, it don't; not a mite."
They had the soap company's circular from which to arrange a proper speech, and they had, what was still better, the remembrance of a certain patent-medicine vender's discourse at the Milltown Fair.
"Then I could see so much more than your pink apple-tree by the pig-pen.
"It's just the same thing," argued Emma Jane.
At some of the houses--where they can't possibly know me--I shan't be frightened, and I shall reel off the whole rigmarole, invalid, babe, and all.
Would you rather say infant?"
With large business sagacity and an executive capacity which must have been inherited from their father, they now proposed to extend their operations to a larger area and distribute soap to contiguous villages, if these villages could be induced to buy.
They were not exactly popular favorites, but they did receive certain undesirable morsels from the more charitable housewives.
It was a glorious Indian summer day, which suggested nothing of Thanksgiving, near at hand as it was.
Do they have green petticoats, I wonder?
Clara Belle was rather a successful agent, but Susan, who could only say "thoap," never made large returns, and the twins, who were somewhat young to be thoroughly trustworthy, could be given only a half dozen cakes at a time, and were obliged to carry with them on their business trips a brief document stating the price per cake, dozen, and box.
The premiums within their possible grasp were three: a bookcase, a plush reclining chair, and a banquet lamp.
"Does color make you sort of dizzy?" asked Rebecca.
Riverboro was doing its best to return the entire tribe of Simpsons to the land of its fathers, so to speak, thinking rightly that the town which had given them birth, rather than the town of their adoption, should feed them and keep a roof over their heads until the children were of an age for self-support.
It looked to be about eight feet tall in the catalogue, and Emma Jane advised Clara Belle to measure the height of the Simpson ceilings; but a note in the margin of the circular informed them that it stood two and a half feet high when set up in all its dignity and splendor on a proper table, three dollars extra.
"Of course it's just the same THING; but a baby has got to be called babe or infant in a circular, the same as it is in poetry!
It was a rustly day, a scarlet and buff, yellow and carmine, bronze and crimson day.
Life was rather dull and dreary, however, and in the chill and gloom of November weather, with the vision of other people's turkeys bursting with fat, and other people's golden pumpkins and squashes and corn being garnered into barns, the young Simpsons groped about for some inexpensive form of excitement, and settled upon the selling of soap for a premium.
"What if your aunt shouldn't like the kind of soap?" queried Rebecca nervously.
"Oh, Rebecca! how could you call him a nickname the very first time you ever saw him?"
Rebecca had heard the news of its arrival, but waited until nearly dark before asking permission to go to the Simpsons', so that she might see the gorgeous trophy lighted and sending a blaze of crimson glory through its red crepe paper shade.
It'll be five years before we're ladies."
It is called the"--
"If I can't, I'll save on something else," returned the jocose philanthropist.
Other stars in their courses governed Rebecca's doings.
The people whom she interviewed either remembered their present need of soap, or reminded themselves that they would need it in the future; the notable point in the case being that lucky Rebecca accomplished, with almost no effort, results that poor little Emma Jane failed to attain by hard and conscientious labor.
"I can see that they ought to have it if they want it, and especially if you want them to have it.
"I never thought to ask!" ejaculated Rebecca.
"Never mind," answered Rebecca; "we are the BEGINNINGS of ladies, even now."
"Rebecca Rowena Randall, sir."
"I'm just on a visit to my aunt, who has gone to Portland.
"It's your turn, Rebecca, and I'm glad, too," said Emma Jane, drawing up to a gateway and indicating a house that was set a considerable distance from the road.
"Oh! a babe, eh?
"So you consider your childhood a thing of the past, do you, young lady?"
Good-by Miss Rebecca Rowena!
"I'm keeping house to-day, but I don't live here," explained the delightful gentleman.
"What?" with an amused smile.
By dint of superhuman effort, and putting such a seal upon their lips as never mortals put before, the two girls succeeded in keeping their wonderful news to themselves; although it was obvious to all beholders that they were in an extraordinary and abnormal state of mind.
"Aladdin isn't a nickname exactly; anyway, he laughed and seemed to like it."
"Oh! isn't he perfectly elergant?
"If they sell two hundred more cakes this month and next, they can have the lamp by Christmas," Rebecca answered, "and they can get a shade by summer time; but I'm afraid I can't help very much after to-day, because my aunt Miranda may not like to have me."
"Yes, ma'am; we sometimes keeps tavern, ma'am," replied a large, greasy-looking, black-haired woman of some forty years, as, her hands folded within her up-turned apron, she courtesied to W----.
It was with no slight sense of relief that we paid our modest bill and at last broke away from such ghastly associations.
This cubby-hole of a room was also the wardrobe for the women of the household, the walls above the bed being hung nearly two feet deep with the oddest collection of calico and gingham gowns, bustles, hoopskirts, hats, bonnets, and winter underwear I think I had ever laid eyes on.
In the bottoms the trees are filled with flocks of birds,--crows, hawks, blackbirds, with stately blue herons and agile plovers foraging on the long gravel-spits which frequently jut far into the stream; ducks are frequently seen sailing near the shores; while divers silently dart and plunge ahead of the canoe, safely out of gunshot reach.
We assured him that with these muddy swamp roads, and in our wet condition, nothing but absolute necessity would induce us to take a mile's tramp.
An involuntary shudder overcame me, as we passed the head of the island at the foot of our host's orchard, which he had described as a catch-basin for human floaters.
Looking up, we saw for the first time a small tent on the opposite shore, a quarter of a mile away, in front of which was a man shouting to us and beckoning us over.
The cut-off was an ugly looking channel; but where our informant had gone through, with his unwieldy hulk, we considered it safe to venture with a canoe, so readily responsive to the slightest paddle-stroke.
The thunder-storm which had been threatening since early morning, soon burst upon us with a preliminary wind blast, followed by drenching rain.
While the storm raged without, the young man, who was a simple-hearted fellow, confided to us the details of his brief career.
There was huddled together an odd, slouchy combination of articles of shabby furniture and cheap decorations, peculiar, in the country, to all three classes of rooms, the evidences of poverty, shiftlessness, and untasteful pretentiousness upon every side.
A head wind this morning made rowing more difficult, by counteracting the influence of the current.
It was getting uncomfortably muddy under the trees, which had not long sufficed as an umbrella, and the rubber coats were not warranted to withstand a deluge, so we accepted the invitation with alacrity and paddled over through the pelting storm.
A huge, wheezy old cabinet organ was set diagonally in one corner, and upon this, as we entered, a young woman was pounding and paddling with much vigor, while giving us sidelong glances of curiosity.
Repressing our mirth, we assured our good hostess that we would have a due regard for our personal safety.
Prophetstown, five miles below, is prettily situated in an oak grove on the southern bank.
Making the canoe fast for the night, we strung our baggage-packs upon the paddle which we carried between us, and set out along a devious way, through a driving mist which blackened the twilight into dusk, to find this place of public entertainment.
The parley ended in our being directed to a small farm-house a quarter of a mile inland, where luckless travelers, belated on the dreary bottoms, were occasionally kept.
We were at Lyndon at eleven o'clock.
The muddy torrent, at a velocity of fully eight miles an hour, went eddying and whirling and darting and roaring among the gnarled and blackened stumps, the prostrate trees, the twisted roots, the huge bowlders which studded its course.
She was a neighbor, on an evening visit, decked out in a smart jockey-cap, with a green ostrich tip and bright blue ribbons, and gay in a new calico dress,--a yellow field thickly planted to purple pineapples.
It seemed that his wife was a ferryman's daughter, and her father had besought his son-in-law to follow the same steady calling.
W---- confessed her inability, chiefly from lack of practice in the art of incessantly working the pedals.
We went through the centre of the channel thus made, with a swoop that gave us an impetus which soon carried our vessel out of sight of Lyndon and its paper-mill and straw-stacks.
But after supper another shower and a stiff head wind came up, and we were well bedraggled by the time a ferry-landing near the little village of Erie was reached.
We had no sooner crossed the threshold of our little box than the creaky old cleat door was gently closed upon us and buttoned by our hostess upon the outside, as the only means of keeping it shut; and we were left free to grope about among these mysteries as best we might.
Running ashore on the lee bank, we wrapped the canvas awning around the baggage, and made for a thick clump of trees on the top of an island mudbank, where we stood buttoned to the neck in rubber coats.
Our host was a young fisherman, who helped us and our luggage up the slimy bank to his canvas quarters, which we found to be dry, although odorous of fish.
Seven feet square, with a broad, roped bedstead occupying the entire length, a bedside space of but two feet wide was left.
The latter made a pretty picture standing out on the bold bank, backed by a number of huge stacks of golden straw.
CHAPTER VII.
With eyes strained for obstructions, we turned and twisted through the labyrinth, jumping along at a breakneck speed; and, when we finally rejoined the main river below, were grateful enough, for the run had been filled with continuous possibilities of a disastrous smash-up, miles away from any human habitation.
Within an hour and a half the storm had apparently passed over, and we continued our journey.
There's a good many what kin learn the playin' part of it without no teacher; but there has to be lessons to learn the bellers.
W---- modestly confessed to never having possessed such an instrument.
Only the gables of a few houses can be seen from the river, whose banks of yellow clay and brown mud are here twenty-five feet high.
Much of this condition of affairs was not known, however, until next morning; for it was as dark as Egypt within, except for a few faint rays of light which came straggling through the cracks in the board partition separating us from the sitting-room candle.
There is a population of about two hundred, clustered around a red paper-mill.
Don't ye have no orgin, when ye're at home?" she asked sharply, as if to guage the social standing of the new guest.
There are rapids, almost continually, from a mile above Prophetstown to Erie, ten miles below.
The window, not at first discernible, proved to be a hole in the wall, some two feet square, which brought in little enough fresh air, at the best.
Much of this being filled with butter firkins, chains, a trunk, and a miscellaneous riff-raff of household lumber, the standing-room was restricted to two feet square, necessitating the use of the bed as a dressing-place, after the fashion of a sleeping-car bunk.
Our course still lay among large, densely wooded islands,--many of them wholly given up to maples and willows,--and deep cuts through sun-baked mudbanks, the color of adobe; but occasionally there are low, gloomy bottoms, heavily forested, and strewn with flood-wood, while beyond the land rises gradually into prairie stretches.
The ferryman, a good-natured young athlete, was landing a farm-wagon and team as we pulled in upon the muddy roadway.
It was a scene of howling desolation, rack and ruin upon every hand.
The phenomenal powers of observation displayed by this first-born youth were reported with much detail by the fond father, who sat crouched upon a boat-sail in one corner of the little tent, his head between his knees, and smoking vile tobacco in a blackened clay pipe.
Forcing our way through the hingeless gate, the violent removal of which threatened the immediate destruction of several lengths of rickety fence, we walked up to the open front door and applied for shelter.
In the course of our conversation I learned that the ferrymen, who are more numerous on the lower than on the upper Rock, pay an annual license fee of five dollars each, in consideration of which they are guarantied a monopoly of the business at their stands, no other line being allowed within one mile of an existing ferry.
Here, the high banks had receded, with several miles of heavily wooded, boggy bottoms intervening.
It is a little, one-story, dilapidated farm-house, standing a short distance from the country road, amid a clump of poplar trees.
We were somewhat jaded by the time Monday morning came, for Sunday brought not only no relief, but repetitions of many of the most horrible of these "tales of a wayside inn."
We met here the first rapids worthy of record; also an old, abandoned mill-dam, in the last stages of decay, stretching its whitened skeleton across the stream, a harbor for driftwood.
Floods had held high carnival, and the aspect of the country was wild and deserted.
STORM-BOUND AT ERIE.
It was at "the prophet's town," as White Cloud's village was known in pioneer days, that Black Hawk rested upon his ill-fated journey up the Rock, and from here, at the instigation of the wizard, he bade the United States soldiery defiance.
It's all in gettin' the bellers to work even like.
At Cleveland, a staid little village on an open plain, which we reached soon after the dinner-hour, there is an unused mill-dam going to decay.
The river is here from a half to three-quarters of a mile broad, but the shallows and snags are as numerous as ever and navigation is continually attended with some danger of being either grounded or capsized.
That cap'n hadn't no enterprise 'bout him.
I tol' the cap'n what I wanted, but he said as how I was more use a-takin' keer of the supplies.
CHAPTER VIII
The present landing was the last chance to strike a railway, except at Milan, twelve miles below.
With our host, a glib and rapid talker in a swaggering tone, one could not but be much amused, as he exhibited a degree of self-appreciation that was decidedly refreshing.
Fourteen miles above the mouth of the Rock, is the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy railroad bridge, with Carbon Cliff on the north and Coloma on the south, each one mile from the river.
She now broke out, in shrill, high notes,--
Taking a final spurt down to a ferry-landing a quarter of a mile beyond, on the south bank, we beached our canoe at 5.05 P.M., having voyaged two hundred and sixty-seven miles in somewhat less than seven days and a half.
This bill of fare, warranted to destroy the best of appetites, will be recognized by too many of my readers as that to be found at the average American farm-house, although we all doubtless know of some magnificent exceptions, which only prove the rule.
The husband, whom we had not met before, was a short, smooth-faced, voluble, overgrown-boy sort of man.
She had a vinegary, slangy tongue, and being somewhat deaf, would break in upon the conversation with remarks sharper than they were pat.
The river continues to widen as we approach the junction with the Mississippi,--thirty-nine miles below Erie,--and to assume the characteristics of the great river into which it pours its flood.
Leaving W---- to gossip with the ferryman's wife, who came down to the bank with an armful of smiling twins, to view a craft so strange to her vision, I went up into the country to engage a team to take our boat upon its last portage.
It was like going through Cleveland on the fast mail.
Stopping to question them, we found them both well-informed as to the railway time-tables of the vicinity and the topography of the lower river.
It is an ugly crevasse, but a careful examination showed the passage to be feasible, so we retreated an eighth of a mile up-stream, took our bearings, and went through with a speed that nearly took our breath away and appeared to greatly astonish a half-dozen fishermen idly angling from the dilapidated apron on either side.
"Were you wounded, sir?" asked W----, sympathetically.
"Ah! you were in the cavalry service, then?" I said to our landlord, by way of helping along the conversation.
It was quite evident that the breakfast we were eating was a special spread in honor of probably the only guests the quondam tavern had had these many months.
These savannas are apparently overflowed in times of exceptionally high water; and there are evidences that the stream has occasionally changed its course, through the sunbaked banks of ashy-gray mud, in years long past.
THE LAST DAY OUT.
Washing out the canoe and chaining in the oars and paddle, we lifted it into the wagon-box, piled our baggage on top, and set off over the hills and fields to Coloma, W---- and I trudging behind the dray, ankle deep in mud, for the late rains had well moistened the black prairie soil.
There was a momentary silence, broken by Simple Simon, who wiped his knife on his tongue, and made a wild attack on the butter dish.
It is a great pity that so many farmers' wives are the wretched cooks they are.
The scene becomes peculiarly desolate and mournful, often giving one the impression of being far removed from civilization, threading the course of some hitherto unexplored stream. Penetrate the deep fringe of forest and morass on foot, however, and smiling prairies are found beyond, stretching to the horizon and cut up into prosperous farms.
The mother was dumpy, coarse, and good-natured.
We began to deem it worth while to inquire about the condition of affairs at the mouth.
After having been gruffly refused by a churlish farmer, who doubtless recognized no difference between a canoeist and a tramp, I struck a bargain with a negro cultivating a cornfield with a span of coal-black mules, and in half an hour he was at the ferry-landing with a wagon.
"No, I wa'n't hurt at all,--that is, so to speak, wounded.
Now and then the banks become firmer, with charming vistas of high, wooded hills coming down to the water's edge; broad savannas intervene, decked out with variegated flora, prominent being the elsewhere rare atragene Americana, the spider-wort, the little blue lobelia, and the cup-weed.
Canoeists must not be too particular about the fare set before them; but on this occasion we were able to swallow but a few mouthfuls of the repast and our lunch-basket was drawn on as soon as we were once more afloat.
He had been a veteran in the War of the Rebellion, he proudly assured us, and pointed with his knife to his discharge-paper, which was hung up in an old looking-glass frame by the side of the clock.
The old grandmother, with a face like parchment and one gleaming eye, sat in a low rocking-chair by the stove, crooning over a corn-cob pipe and using the wood-box for a cuspadore.
In the centre, the main current has washed out a breadth of three or four rods, through which the pent-up stream rushes with a roar and a hundred whirlpools.
The islands increase in number and in size, some of them being over a mile in length by a quarter of a mile in breadth; the bottoms frequently resolve themselves into wide morasses, thickly studded with great elms, maples, and cotton-woods, among which the spring flood has wrought direful destruction.
The old woman had been listening eagerly to this narrative, evidently quite proud of her boy's achievements, but not hearing all that had been said.
It is no wonder that country boys drift to the cities, where they can obtain properly cooked food and live like rational beings.
It was a unique and picturesque procession.
The world, he believes, is entering upon a new phase in its history, the adolescence, so to speak, of mankind.
The idea of a New Age necessarily carries with it the idea of fresh rules of conduct and of different relationships between human beings.
And you are getting something going that will be a plan and a direction and a conscience and a control for them?
It is vast, I agree, but vast as it is it is the thing we have to think about.
While these fathers and brothers and husbands of ours play about with the fuel and power and life and hope of the world as though it was a game of poker. With all the empty unspeakable solemnity of the male.
Both these two people found themselves thinking in this fashion with an unwonted courage and freedom because the other one had been disposed to think in this fashion before.
There apparently she had really done responsible work.
They have no plans in particular....
Her eyes went back to the long, low, undulating skyline of the downs. She spoke as though she took up the thread of some controversy that had played a large part in her life.
"Well," said Dr. Martineau, extending his hand to Sir Richmond on the Salisbury station platform, "I leave you to it."
I am doing my best to help lay the foundation of a scientific world control of fuel production and distribution.
So that it was natural for Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond to ask: "What are we to do with such types as father?" and to fall into an idiom that assumed a joint enterprise.
The fragments came up as allusions or by way of illustration.
We don't get enough to do.
She either concealed or she had lost any great interest in her own personality.
She considered and turned on Sir Richmond gravely.
"He is a most intractable man."
And as they were both very frank and expressive people, they already knew a very great deal about each other.
"Tell me what you want to do to him.
Just as we want food, just as we want sleep.
She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern independent of Mr. Grammont, because he feared his own people wouldn't train her hard.
And it throws those who talk about it into the companionship of a common enterprise. To-morrow the New Age will be here no doubt, but today it is the hope and adventure of only a few human beings.
They talked at first chiefly about the history of the world and the extraordinary situation of aimlessness in a phase of ruin to which the Great War had brought all Europe, if not all mankind.
"Yes.
"I've been getting to believe something like this.
"Well!
It might happen, but it wasn't so necessary....
You've made it clear.
She herself, it was clear, was bound to become a very responsible citizen indeed.
"Why not?
"Obdurate clay with a sort of recalcitrant, unintelligent life of its own."
Generally it would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr. Lake had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his behaviour under bad treatment. There was some story, however, connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell.
"First," said Sir Richmond, "as much right as a pig has to food.
"After all," he would reflect as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's ideal, "there was Hetty Green."
The world excited them both in the same way; as a crisis in which they were called upon to do something--they did not yet clearly know what.
They were prepared to think of the makers of the Avebury dyke as their yesterday selves, of the stone age savages as a phase, in their late childhood, and of this great world order Sir Richmond foresaw as a day where dawn was already at hand.
"Rather shy in some respects.
Miss Grammont surveyed the landscape.
We're petted.
"What else could I do?" he asked aloud to nobody in particular.
They don't seem to know what they are doing.
About that story Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after his last talk with Dr. Martineau, still quite vaguely guessing.
She liked his turn of thought, she watched him with a faint smile on her lips as he spoke, and she spread her opinions before him carefully in that soft voice of hers like a shy child showing its treasures to some suddenly trusted and favoured visitor.
"Now Sir, please," said the guard respectfully but firmly, and Dr. Martineau got in.
We live like little modest pigs. And let the world go hang.
And treat us as though we ought to be satisfied if they bring home part of the winnings.
For an American Miss Grammont was by no means autobiographical.
Its delight was particularly manifest in the cream and salad it produced for lunch.
The visit to Avebury had been a great success.
"I haven't," she said.
She had no illusions about the power of the former class.
There is a flow of new ideas abroad, he thinks, widening realizations, unprecedented hopes and fears.
"I believe what you say is possible.
When they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark seemed to weave a fresh thread of common interest, then it wasn't so necessary.
It is giving history a new and more intimate meaning for us.
But upon the question of labour Mr. Grammont was fierce, even for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an improper familiarity with socialist ideas.
"I am tired of following little motives that are like flames that go out when you get to them.
We shall come out to Washington presently with proposals."
There is a consciousness of new powers and new responsibilities.
Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned from Salisbury station to the Old George after his farewell to Martineau.
So many of our big business men in America are.
He smiled at the idea of any facile passion in the composition of so sure and gallant a personality.
It is bringing us into directer relation with public affairs,--making them matter as formerly they didn't seem to matter. That idea of the bright little private life has to go by the board."
Her reflections travelled fast and broke out now far ahead of him.
He recalled too the soft firmness of her profile and the delicate line of her lifted chin.
"No.
It wasn't clear before."
Martineau was very fine-minded in many respects, but he was an old maid; and like all old maids he saw man and woman in every encounter.
That perhaps is why I'm so clear and positive."
The sustaining topic was this New Age Sir Richmond fore shadowed, this world under scientific control, the Utopia of fully developed people fully developing the resources of the earth.
But she was interested in and curious about the people she had met in life, and her talk of them reflected a considerable amount of light upon her own upbringing and experiences.
And her liking for Sir Richmond was pleasingly manifest.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
"All these people," she said, "are pushing things about, affecting millions of lives, hurting and disordering hundreds of thousands of people.
It was true that Dr. Martineau had not said many of the things Sir Richmond ascribed to him, but also it was true that they had not crystallized out in Sir Richmond's mind before his talks with Dr. Martineau.
But when we have eaten, when we have slept, when we have jolly things about us--it is nothing.
I should be glad to see you succeed. But I have heard many complaints regarding the order in school at present."
Forewarned is forearmed, you know.
The children seem bright and teachable and not hard to control."
"He has probably some private prejudice against him."
"They refuse to obey my orders," said Esther faintly.
After the preliminary remarks in which he indulged, she said, with seeming irrelevance, that Saturday had been a fine day.
Then an odd smile gleamed over her face and she lifted her kodak.
When she got home she shut herself up in her room and cried.
Mrs. Charley, for instance--she would like to see this proof, I think."
His eyes had lost their unconcerned glitter, but his voice was defiant.
"Oh, certainly," said Esther, smiling.
She thought that Mr. Baxter had exaggerated matters a little.
You need some refreshment after your long walk. Mrs. Cropper will bring you in something."
"There was an excellent light for snapshots," she went on coolly.
There was nothing for her to do but resign, she thought dismally.
You'll have your hands full, I'm afraid.
But I am tired of fighting over them and I had decided before this that I'd let her have them after this.
"Are the boys big?" queried Esther anxiously.
"Yes.
Monday evening Esther called on Mr. Cropper again.
I have been thinking it over, and I admit I was somewhat unreasonable.
Why Mr. Cropper Changed His Mind
The plum tree came out clearly.
"I had no trouble until your boys came," retorted Esther, losing her temper a little, "and I believe that if you were willing to co-operate with me that I could govern them."
But the house was locked up and evidently deserted, so she rambled past it to the back fields.
"Well, you see," said Mr. Cropper easily, "when I send my boys to school I naturally expect that the teacher will be capable of doing the work she has been hired to do."
It's only a trifle, anyhow.
"Don't show it to her," cried Mr. Cropper hastily.
During that time the Cropper boys had come to school.
"It's a burning shame, that's what it is!
I don't doubt that he is quite clear in his own mind that they are.
Mr. Cropper was opposed to our hiring you.
She rose and placed the proof on the table before Mr. Cropper.
"The plums are mine by right," he said.
"But what becomes of them?" asked Esther.
"Why, my dear young lady, what can I do?
It's the finest one in Maitland.
"You see, Miss Maxwell, it's this way," explained Mr. Baxter, turning to Esther.
Esther found herself powerless to cope with it.
Instead she set her mouth firmly, helped the children restore the room to order, and after school went up to Isaac Cropper's house.
Esther Maxwell was a stranger, but she was a capable girl, and had no doubt of her own ability to get and keep the school in good working order. She smiled brightly at Mr. Baxter.
But Mrs. Charley never gets a plum from it."
On the following Saturday Esther went for an afternoon walk, carrying her kodak with her.
He shook hands heartily, told her he was glad to see her, and began talking about the weather.
"That is strange.
Esther felt relieved.
Cropper is sly and slippery, and it is hard to corner him."
Reckon they weren't there today?"
The other pupils thought themselves at liberty to follow this example, and in a month's time poor Esther had completely lost control of her little kingdom.
They never got on well together, and when Charley died there was a tremendous fuss about the property.
The Croppers never openly defied her, but they did precisely as they pleased.
When she had been absent at the noon hour all the desks in the schoolroom had been piled in a pyramid on the floor, books and slates interchanged, and various other pranks played.
I don't say Isaac Cropper steals those plums with his own hands.
I'll talk to Alfred and Robert and see what I can do."
But he knows who does--and the plums go into Mehitable Cropper's preserving kettle; there's nothing surer."
"I don't think Mr. Cropper would steal," protested Esther.
She was a slight, dark girl, rather plain-looking, but with a smart, energetic way.
They know he'll back them up in secret, no matter what they do, just to prove his opinions.
The summer term had just opened in the Maitland district.
For a few days all went well, and Esther felt decidedly relieved.
Esther was not to be turned from her object thus, although she felt her courage ebbing away from her as it always did in the presence of the Cropper imperviousness.
"They disappear," said Mr. Baxter, with a significant nod.
But you are not going yet, Miss Maxwell?
"The matter of the plums isn't my business and I don't wish to be involved in your family feuds, especially as you say that you mean to allow Mrs. Charley to enjoy her own in future.
I thought you would be interested in it."
Not that I disapprove of you personally--far from it.
Mr. Baxter privately had no hope that they would, but Esther hoped for the best.
"I think Mr. Baxter is too hard on Mr. Cropper," said Esther to herself later on.
"Perhaps," said Esther calmly, "but there are some who do not think so.
She knew that unless she could regain her authority she would be requested to hand in her resignation, but she was baffled by the elusive system of defiance which the Cropper boys had organized.
But a month later she had changed her opinion.
"I don't suppose poor Mrs. Charley will get one of them any more than she ever has," said Mrs. Baxter indignantly.
But maybe they'll behave all right after all."
He says female teachers can't keep order.
At midnight she heard to her great horror some one coming along the passage, and in a minute her door was flung wide open and a troop of strange beings entered the room.
The poor beast was all torn and bleeding, and the kind little Princess was quite unhappy about it.
And there they lived for a hundred years, a hundred years of joy and happiness.
There is one habitable room in it, in which there is a golden bed; there you will have to live all by yourself, and don't forget that whatever you may see or hear in the night you must not scream out, for if you give as much as a single cry my sufferings will be doubled.'
Once upon a time there were three Princesses who were all three young and beautiful; but the youngest, although she was not fairer than the other two, was the most loveable of them all.
She nearly died with fright, but she never uttered a sound.
'I am not really a black crow, but an enchanted Prince, who has been doomed to spend his youth in misery.
The young Princess consented at once, and for a whole year she served as a maid; but in spite of her youth and beauty she was very badly treated, and suffered many things.
And so two years passed away, when one day the crow came to the Princess and said: 'In another year I shall be freed from the spell I am under at present, because then the seven years will be over.
So they went to the castle where they had both endured so much.
Come now to my castle with me, and let us live there happily together.'
'I am the Prince,' he said, 'who you in your goodness, when I was wandering about in the shape of a black crow, freed from the most awful torments.
Then she saw a handsome youth standing beside her; who knelt down at her feet and kissed the little weary white hands.
If you only liked, Princess, you could save me.
When the crow saw this it turned to her and said:
One day when she was pacing to and fro under the lime trees, a black crow hopped out of a rose-bush in front of her.
But before I can resume my natural form, and take possession of the belongings of my forefathers, you must go out into the world and take service as a maidservant.'
When night approached she lay down, but though she shut her eyes tight sleep would not come.
It thanked the Princess most heartily for her goodness, and said that its sufferings had already been greatly lessened.
But at midnight, when the odd folk appeared, the elder sister screamed with terror, and from this time on the youngest Princess insisted always on keeping watch alone.
When they had done this, they approached the bed on which the trembling girl lay, and, screaming and yelling all the time, they dragged her towards the cauldron.
But you would have to say good-bye to all your own people and come and be my constant companion in this ruined castle.
She implored her so urgently to let her spend the night with her in the golden bed, that at last the good-natured little Princess consented.
Then of a sudden the cock crew, and all the evil spirits vanished.
Now one of the Princess's elder sisters, who was very inquisitive, had found out about everything, and went to pay her youngest sister a visit in the ruined castle.
Kletke.
About half a mile from the palace in which they lived there stood a castle, which was uninhabited and almost a ruin, but the garden which surrounded it was a mass of blooming flowers, and in this garden the youngest Princess used often to walk.
But when they reached it, it was difficult to believe that it was the same, for it had all been rebuilt and done up again.
The good-natured Princess at once left her home and her family and hurried to the ruined castle, and took possession of the room with the golden bed.
So she lived in solitude all the daytime, and at night she would have been frightened, had she not been so brave; but every day the crow came and thanked her for her endurance, and assured her that his sufferings were far less than they had been.
One evening, when she was spinning flax, and had worked her little white hands weary, she heard a rustling beside her and a cry of joy.
They at once proceeded to light a fire in the huge fireplace; then they placed a great cauldron of boiling water on it.
Poor Ferko ate up the scrap of bread they had left him and wept bitterly, but no one heard him or came to his help.
Be of good cheer, and lead the King to the hill just outside the city walls.' And humming gaily she flew away again.
The day passed slowly, and with the evening came the little mouse and said, 'Now there is not a single stalk of corn left in any field; they are all collected in one big heap on the hill out there.'
At these words the Princess burst into tears, and when the King saw this he ordered her to be shut up in a high tower and carefully guarded till the dangerous magician should either have left the kingdom or been hung on the nearest tree.
The more the cruel King gazed on the wonder before him, the more angry he became, for he could not, in the face of his promise, put the stranger to death.
No matter how impossible it is, he must do it or die.'
Ferko fell fast asleep, but the other two remained awake, and the eldest said to the second brother, 'What do you say to doing our brother Ferko some harm?
Early on the following day the whole town was on its feet, and everyone wondered how and where the stranger would build the wonderful palace. The Princess alone was silent and sorrowful, and had cried all night till her pillow was wet, so much did she take the fate of the beautiful youth to heart.
Then return at once to me and get on my back, and I will help you to drive all the wolves together.'
To-morrow I must build a palace more beautiful than the King's, and it must be finished before evening.'
The moon was shining brightly, and lighted him to the lake where he could bathe his poor broken legs.
Ferko felt so sorry for the little beast that he spoke to it in the most friendly manner, and washed its small paws with the healing water.
In a moment the mouse was sound and whole, and after thanking the kind physician it scampered away over the ploughed furrows.
Just trust in me, and before the sun sets again you shall hear that your task is done.' And with these words the little creature scampered away into the fields.
He drove them all before him on to the hill, where the King and his whole Court and Ferko's two brothers were standing.
His two brothers were as jealous of him as they could be, for they thought that with his good looks he would be sure to be more fortunate than they would ever be.
He climbed to the top of a hill and lay down in the grass, and as he thought under the shadow of a big tree.
They did not think long, but replied, 'Let him build your Majesty in one day a more beautiful palace than this, and if he fails in the attempt let him be hung.'
The two brothers were delighted, for they thought they had now got rid of Ferko for ever.
Here, he thought to himself, he might as well go straight to the palace and offer his services to the King of the country, for he had heard that the King's daughter was as beautiful as the day.
'I should just think there was,' replied the other; 'many things that don't exist anywhere else in the world.
When this was done he stretched out his hand eagerly for the piece of bread, but his brothers gave him such a tiny scrap that the starving youth finished it in a moment and besought them for a second bit.
Then the cruel creatures laughed, and repeated what they had said the day before; but when Ferko continued to beg and beseech them, the eldest said at last, 'If you will let us put out one of your eyes and break one of your legs, then we will give you a bit of our bread.'
A splendid palace reared itself on the hill just outside the walls of the city, made of the most exquisite flowers that ever grew in mortal garden.
The King was pleased with this proposal, and commanded Ferko to set to work on the following day.
Ferko was no less willing to help her than he had been to help the wolf and the mouse, so he poured some healing drops over the wounded wing.
For in a heap higher than the King's palace lay all the grain of the country, and not a single stalk of corn had been left behind in any of the fields.
If we could only get him out of the way we might succeed better.'
And the wolves all went peacefully back to their own homes, and Ferko and his bride lived for many years in peace and happiness together, and were much beloved by great and small in the land.
The youngest of the three brothers, whose name was Ferko, was a beautiful youth, with a splendid figure, blue eyes, fair hair, and a complexion like milk and roses.
They went to the King and told him that Ferko was a wicked magician, who had come to the palace with the intention of carrying off the Princess.
Ferko again proceeded on his journey, but he hadn't gone far before a queen bee flew against him, trailing one wing behind her, which had been cruelly torn in two by a big bird.
The King in his terror called out, 'Stop a moment; I will give you half my kingdom if you will drive all the wolves away.' But Ferko pretended not to hear, and drove some more thousands before him, so that everyone quaked with horror and fear.
The sun sank to rest and night came on, when a little mouse started out of the grass at Ferko's feet, and said to him, 'I'm delighted to see you, my kind benefactor; but why are you looking so sad?
"Who's that?" Peter Rabbit pricked up his long ears and stared up at the tops of the trees of the Old Orchard.
"You poor little thing.
Carefully he examined the wing to see if any bones were broken.
She was dressed almost wholly in light olive-green and greenish-yellow.
Now you speak of it, Jenny, that song IS quite different from Welcome Robin's."
"That's Rosebreast.
"Isn't he lovely!"' cried Peter, and added in the next breath, "Who is that with him?"
"What are you laughing at?" demanded Jenny crossly.
"We'll have to get that out right away," continued Farmer Brown's boy, stroking Redcoat ever so gently.
"Don't you dare laugh at me!
At first Peter had eyes only for the wonderful beauty of Redcoat.
While Rosebreast sang, Mrs. Grosbeak was very busily picking buds and blossoms from the tree.
What shall I do, Peter?
"The way you are staring, Peter Rabbit, one would think that you had really heard something new and worth while."
I wouldn't have a pair of ears like yours for anything in the world, Peter Rabbit."
We've just got our nest half built, and I don't know what I shall do if anything happens to Redcoat.
"Do you mean Welcome Robin's song?" he asked rather sheepishly, for he had a feeling that he would be the victim of Jenny Wren's sharp tongue.
Poor Redcoat, with the old look of terror in his eyes, fluttered along, trying to find something under which to hide.
Whatever shall I do?" sobbed Redcoat.
He looked puzzled.
"For the same reason that you bite off sweet clover blossoms and leaves," replied Jenny Wren tartly.
"Broadwing the Hawk tried to catch me," sobbed Redcoat.
Instantly Jenny Wren popped her head out of her doorway.
Redcoat nodded.
Peter listened.
It is just Peter Rabbit.
I struck a sharp-pointed dead twig and drove it right through my right wing."
Then he sat there for some time as if fearful of trying that injured wing. Meanwhile Mrs. Tanager came and fussed about him and talked to him and coaxed him and made as much of him as if he were a baby.
I can't fly, and if I have to stay on the ground some enemy will be sure to get me.
"What is she doing that for?" inquired Peter.
She looked no more like beautiful Redcoat than did Mrs. Grosbeak like Rosebreast.
"What good are a pair of long ears if they can't tell one song from another?
It was about the size of Redwing the Blackbird.
"And what anybody wants to scold like that for when they can sing as Mr. Wren can, is too much for me," retorted Peter.
If there is any one thing I can't stand it is being laughed at."
"In dodging him among the trees I was heedless for a moment and did not see just where I was going.
You ask Farmer Brown's boy who helps him most in his potato patch, and he'll tell you it's the Grosbeaks. They certainly do love potato bugs.
At that very instant Mr. Wren began to scold as only he and Jenny can. Peter looked up at Jenny and winked slyly.
She was dressed chiefly in brown and grayish colors with a little buff here and there and with dark streaks on her breast.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
"What kind of an accident was it, Redcoat, and how did it happen?" he asked.
"Mrs. Grosbeak, of course.
Who else would it be?" sputtered Jenny rather crossly, for she was still a little put out because she had been laughed at.
Listen to that!
Of coarse Farmer Brown's boy saw Redcoat.
Over each eye was a whitish line.
So he scampered for the Green Forest, lipperty-lipperty-lip.
"That is Rosebreast singing up there, and there he is right in the top of that tree.
"It is the thought of what MAY happen to me."
"I knew Farmer Brown's boy would help him, and I'm so glad he found him," cried Peter happily and started for the dear Old Briar-patch.
"Isn't it dreadful, Peter Rabbit, to have such an accident?
"But I don't mind the pain," he hastened to say.
"I would never have guessed it," said Peter.
Welcome Robin's song is one of good cheer, but this one is of pure happiness.
But it was his breast that made Peter catch his breath with a little gasp of admiration, for that breast was a beautiful rose-red.
Somehow at that gentle touch Redcoat lost much of his fear, and a little hope sprang in his heart.
"Of course it is," retorted Jenny.
"She doesn't look the least bit like him."
Right away Peter was full of sympathy.
Fluttering on the ground was a bird than whom not even Glory the Cardinal was more beautiful.
"Can't you fly up just a little way so as to get off the ground?" she cried anxiously.
Peter heard the sound of heavy footsteps, and looking back, saw that Farmer Brown's boy was coming.
It was Rosebreast the Grosbeak.
His head, throat and back were black.
His wings were black with patches of white on them.
You poor, beautiful little creature," said Farmer Brown's boy softly as he saw the cruel twig sticking through Redcoats' shoulder.
Seeing Farmer Brown's boy coming through the Old Orchard Peter decided that it was high time for him to depart.
"Oh, Peter," he gasped, "you don't know how glad I am that it is only you.
He and Mrs. Rosebreast have been here for quite a little while.
"There!
Just then there were two or three rather sharp, squeaky notes from the top of one of the trees.
Have they spared me?
"At least keep him there till my daughter be married."
Villefort's conduct, therefore, upon reflection, appeared to the baroness as if shaped for their mutual advantage.
The Law.
"I was not thinking of that," replied Madame Danglars quickly.
"You are too late, madame; the orders are issued."
"A mischance?" repeated the baroness.
And now, what do you want?"
"No one; his parents are unknown."
"His dishonor reflects upon us."
Has the law ears to be melted by your sweet voice?
Have they loved me?
She had not long to wait; directly afterwards the door was opened wide enough to admit her, and when she had passed through, it was again shut.
You could not help thinking of it, and saying to yourself, 'you, who pursue crime so vindictively, answer now, why are there unpunished crimes in your dwelling?'" The baroness became pale.
"Well, I own it."
"Your daughter will be married to-morrow, if not to-day--in a week, if not to-morrow; and I do not think you can regret the intended husband of your daughter."
"The weakness of a murderer!"
She would invoke the past, recall old recollections; she would supplicate him by the remembrance of guilty, yet happy days.
What am I?--the law.
No, madame, they struck me, always struck me!
I have always found them; and more,--I repeat it with joy, with triumph,--I have always found some proof of human perversity or error.
Your name?"
We will leave the banker contemplating the enormous magnitude of his debt before the phantom of bankruptcy, and follow the baroness, who after being momentarily crushed under the weight of the blow which had struck her, had gone to seek her usual adviser, Lucien Debray.
"Oh, how extraordinary!
Has the law any eyes to witness your grief?
Come, forget him for a moment, and instead of pursuing him let him go."
You will tell me that I am a living being, and not a code--a man, and not a volume.
"Oh, this is too much!"
"Do you intend opening the door?" said the baroness.
"Who am I? You know me well enough."
The President's inauguration at Washington called forth a deafening demonstration.
I was puzzled to know which invitation to accept.
I returned to Massillon, and at 4:00 P. M., set out for Dalton over the muddiest, stickiest red-clay roads I ever encountered.
The citizens expected my arrival, and Market street teemed with excitement.
The human volcano was now ready to burst.
"He has killed a bull, chewed up a ram, made Thanks-giving mince-meat of several dogs, chased a pig up a tree, and only this morning ate two chickens and a duck and chased a farmer into his hay loft.
I have tramped nearly twenty miles without stopping to warm or eat; and I resolved to let the next fellow have the same dose I have been taking half-hourly all day.
The pageant that celebrated the departure of William McKinley to the seat of Government was a fair estimate of the regard in which his fellow-citizens held him.
I went and enjoyed myself.
Next day I reached the village of Bedford by 7:00 P. M., only making thirteen miles; and the following night I put up at a cozy inn at Cuyahoga Falls.
My route through the beautiful city lay along one of the finest residence streets in America--the famous Euclid avenue.
"'Course it's cold!" I answered, acridly.
"It's a cold day!" yelled the scamp.
My assorted supper went down all right until I tackled the chocolate.
I was almost frozen.
But he doesn't bite."
I found the store full of loungers, who patronized the chairs, soap and starch boxes, mackerel kits and counter, forming a silent circle round a towering stove in the center.
"Yes, pretty chilly," I returned, politely.
We three had covered eighteen miles that day; it seemed twice the distance.
Now, if you are satisfied that it is a cold day, I will bid you good night."
I expected that day to reach Dalton, only eight miles distant, but the mud prevented me.
"You bet," said Pod, icily.
It sounded like, "Won't you come in and warm, and have lunch," I hesitated a moment in the biting wind, then retraced my steps and called to the lad: "What's that you said?"
Then there was a rush to the door.
As it swung open, in leaped my great dog; at once the crowd surged back to the stove.
I made a short address and announced that I would sell photos of Mac A'Rony and his master at the door.
If not, don't let your curiosity get the better of you.
The yeast cake came to mind; then I knew the cause.
Something within was sizzling and brewing and steaming; gas and steam choked me.
I left a few things unmolested; such as soap, cornstarch, cloves, baking-powder and stove-polish.
From Willoughby we went to Cleveland.
As I ran, two or three dull whacks came to my ear.
It was, as we regarded it, one of those unfortunate occurrences which no care on our part could have well foreseen, and a casualty such as turkey-raisers are unavoidably heirs to, and we bore our loss with resignation.
"But a fox would bite you," I objected.
It was the "silver-gray."
They did, certainly; they savored as strongly of mice as Tom's question of bad grammar.
"And don't foxes catch mice?" demanded Tom, confidently.
Instantly two spry brown hands from out the nest clutched me with a most vengeful grip.
Selecting a nook in the edge of a clump of raspberry briars which grew about a great pine-stump, Tom lay down, and I covered him up completely with the contents of the big basket.
We proceeded to look for traces.
Considering the fact that a fox is a very active, sharp-biting animal, and that this was an unusually large male, I have always thought Tom got off very well.
With the dusk we stole out into the field where the stone-heaps were, and where we had oftenest heard foxes bark.
We owned a flock of thirty-one turkeys.
There were more fox-tracks, and a great many more feathers under the tree.
His squeaks were perfect successes--made by sucking the air sharply betwixt his teeth.
A DROLL FOX-TRAP
But Tom overcame me forthwith, choked me nearly black in the face, then, in dumb show, knocked my head with a stone.
This dilemma of ours developed Tom's genius.
What woke me was a noise--a sharp suppressed yelp.
"Got him, Tom?" I shouted, rushing up.
Tom thought it was "the Twombly boys," nefarious Sam in particular.
By C. A. Stephens
All went well till the last week in October, when, on taking the census one morning, a turkey was found to be missing; the thirty-one had become thirty since nightfall the previous evening. It was the first one we had lost.
"D'ye see, now!" he demanded.
Our suspicions were divided.
We sold the fox-skin in the village, and received thirteen dollars for it, whereas a common red fox-skin is worth no more than three dollars.
As a fox, I struggled tremendously.
An hour passed.
"I'll resk him when once I get these two bread-hooks on him.
"But how?" I asked.
This put a new and altogether ugly aspect on the matter.
These animals were the pests of the farm-yards, and made havoc with the geese, cats, turkeys, and chickens.
He then practiced squeaking and rustling several times to be sure that all was in good trim.
At the time of my story, my friend Tom Edwards (ten years of age) and myself were in the turkey business, equal partners.
It would take far too much space to relate in detail the plans we laid and put in execution to catch that fox during the next two weeks.
No algebra was needed to figure the outcome of the turkey business at this rate, together with our prospective profits, in the light of this new fact.
That night we set ourselves to put the stratagem in operation.
How, or by what wiles that fox got the turkeys out of the high butternut, is a secret--one that perished with him.
It was clear that something must be done, and at once, too, or ruin would swallow up the poultry firm.
Full of wonder and curiosity, I retired to the stump.
I recollect that we set three traps for him to no purpose, and that we borrowed a fox-hound to hunt him with, but merely succeeded in running him to the burrow in a neighboring rocky hill-side, whence we found it quite impossible to dislodge the wily fellow.
His left hand was bitten through the palm, and badly swollen.
Their sharp, cur-like barks used often to rouse us, and of a dark evening we would hear them out in the fields, "mousing" around the stone-heaps, making a queer, squeaking sound like a mouse, to call the real mice out of their grass nests inside the stone-heaps. This, indeed, is a favorite trick of Reynard.
He brought a two-bushel basket and went out into the fields.
Thus exhorted, I went into the barn and established myself at a crack on the back side, which looked out upon the field where Tom was ambushed.
I saw.
The next day, Tom told me that the fox had suddenly plunged into the grass, that he had caught hold of one of its hind legs, and that they had rolled over and over in the grass together.
A sound of scuffling and tumbling on the ground at some distance assisted my wandering wits, and I rushed out of the barn and ran toward the field.
He owned to me that when the fox bit him on the chin, he let go of the brute, and would have given up the fight, but that the fox had then actually attacked him.
"Some," said Tom; and that was all I could get from him that night.
We took the fox to the house and lighted a candle.
There were red foxes, "cross-grays," and "silver-grays;" even black foxes were reported.
I do not think that he ever cared to make a fox-trap of himself again, however.
These numerous bites, however, were followed by no serious ill effects.
I thought it might have been an owl.
I could see objects at a little distance through the crack, but could not see so far as the stump.
"Bite ye?" I exclaimed, after satisfying myself that the fox was dead.
"Let him bite," said Tom.
This theory received something of a check when our flock counted only twenty-nine the next morning.
"Now be off," said Tom, "and don't come poking around, nor get in sight, till you hear me holler."
Rightly or wrongly, we attributed the mischief to a certain "silver-gray" that had several times been seen in the neighborhood that autumn.
Tom must have grown pretty tired of squeaking.
The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society.
I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name.
The rude village boy teases the girls about the school-house door;--but to-day he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct.
It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart.
It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic.
But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words.
The union which is thus effected and which adds a new value to every atom in nature--for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element--is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay.
And therefore I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament of Love.
Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light.
For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman:--
With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy.
Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine.
Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me?
We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance.
The same remark holds of painting.
But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances.
If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee.
Nature grows conscious.
They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance.
In looking backward they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them.
Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all.
For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination.
And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth.
Love prays.
Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible.
Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other's personality.
It is not you, but your radiance.
But all is sour, if seen as experience.
By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them.
Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet,--than Romeo.
"I was as a gem concealed; Me my burning ray revealed." Koran.
For it is to be considered that this passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort.
We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points.
The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse.
From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage.
"Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought."
That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.
Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls.
For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.
Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding.
"Fountain-heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves, Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Are safely housed, save bats and owls, A midnight bell, a passing groan,-- These are the sounds we feed upon."
Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom.
Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object.
He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.
He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot.
The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes.
Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use.
This repairs the wounded affection.
Round it all the Muses sing.
He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims.
Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal.
Of this at first it gives no hint.
Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain.
But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul.
And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties?
Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day.
But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.
Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it.
The like force has the passion over all his nature.
"All other pleasures are not worth its pains:"
But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws.
But from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors.
The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary.
The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.
But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night.
The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.
It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know.
Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth.
It matters not therefore whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years.
Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues.
Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul.
If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton.
Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent.
There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons.
We cannot approach beauty.
In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:--
The soul may be trusted to the end.
But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers.
It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate.
His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood.
The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.
What books in the circulating libraries circulate?
In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself.
Her existence makes the world rich.
That is our permanent state.
Behold there in the wood the fine madman!
The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed.
It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances.
LOVE.
We may as well here inform the reader that the advice was immediately acted upon, and that Chaloner and Grenville recovered all their estates at about five years' purchase.
"The reason for rebuilding the mansion was good.
It is now seven years since you quitted the forest, and in your letters to Mr. Heatherstone you made no remark upon what had passed between you and Patience.
They took their leave of the prince, who thanked them for their long and meritorious services; and they then hastened to King Charles, who had left Spain and come to the Low Countries.
After the greetings were over, Edward said,
"Nothing.
Let her father but give me her, and Arnwood will be but a trifle in addition!"
"Now, Edward, who do you think was here to-day--the reigning belle, and the toast of all the gentlemen?"
"Your advice is good, my dear Alice, and I will be guided by it," replied Edward.
"What is your perplexity?"
I trust that the daughter will often grace our court."
He then married Clara Ratcliffe, who has not appeared lately on the scene, owing to her having been, about two years before the Restoration, claimed by an elderly relation, who lived in the country, and whose infirm state of health did not permit him to quit the house.
"Indeed!
On the following day a drawing-room was to be held, and Edward's sisters were to be presented.
About a year after the Restoration, there was a fete at Hampton Court, given in honor of three marriages taking place--Edward Beverley to Patience Heatherstone, Chaloner to Alice, and Grenville to Edith; and, as his majesty himself said, as he gave away the brides, "Could loyalty be better rewarded?"
"Yes," replied Grenville, "there can be no doubt of that; but will they, think you, recognize us?"
Now is their time: even a few days' delay may make a difference.
Do you recognize them?"
That they had not perceived him was evident; indeed her eyes were not raised once, from the natural timidity felt by a young woman in the presence of royalty. Edward half concealed himself behind one of his companions that he might gaze upon her without reserve.
Can you procure any of your countrymen?"
"Conde is my favorite, and he will soon be opposed to this truculent and dishonest court, who have kept me here as an instrument to accomplish their own wishes, but who have never intended to keep their promises, and place me on the English throne.
"Yes, I did; but let us not talk about it any more, my dear Edith.
After he had saluted her, the king said, loud enough for Edward to hear,
But Edward made a sign to Humphrey, and they beat a retreat.
Edward, on Mr. Heatherstone repeating to him his intentions relative to Arnwood, expressed his sense of that gentleman's conduct, simply adding--
His love of farming continued.
What must he think of my not having called upon him!"
Her father will resign the property to you as yours by right, but you have no property in his daughter, and I suspect that she will not be quite so easily handed over to you."
"A few days back.
That his two friends, who were, as the reader will recollect, old acquaintances of Alice and Edith, were warmly received, we hardly need say.
But eventually Conde was beaten back by the superior force of Turenne; and, not receiving the assistance he expected from the Spaniards, he fell back to the frontiers of Champagne.
Recollect also that Mr. Heatherstone, and his brother-in-law, Sir Ashley Cooper, have done the king much more service than you ever have or can do.
"At Arnwood.
He wrote a letter to the intendant, thanking him for his kind feelings and intentions toward him, and he trusted that he might one day have the pleasure of seeing him again.
They are wholly unshackled, further than that you are to repay by installments the money expended in the building of the house.
There was the same pensive, sweet expression in her face, which had altered little; but the beautiful rounded arms, the symmetrical fall of the shoulders, and the proportion of the whole figure was a surprise to him; and Edward, in his own mind, agreed that she might well be the reigning toast of the day.
I fear, however, Humphrey, that you are right and Edith wrong as regards his daughter."
I acknowledge his generosity, but I do not acknowledge his right of possession.
This is all that we have been able to collect relative to the several parties; and so now we must say farewell.
"He has, indeed," replied Edward.
Accepting the property from Mr. Heatherstone is receiving a favor were it given as a marriage portion with his daughter.
"You are here highly spoken of," said the prince, "for so young a man. So you were at the affair of Worcester?
Humphrey has charge of it until it is ascertained to whom it is to belong."
At all events, Edward, recollect you do not know what are the intentions of Mr. Heatherstone; wait and see what he proffers first."
He is not going to surrender my property and make me a present of the house."
A month after this interview, Conde, who had been joined by a great number of nobles, and had been re-enforced by troops from Spain, set up the standard of revolt.
"You have to choose between two generals, both great in the art of war--Conde and Turenne.
"Well," replied Edward, "since it is to be so, let us sit down and talk over the matter.
When he entered the room, he found himself in the arms of Humphrey, who had arrived with the messenger.
At the time of their joining the king, Richard, the son of Cromwell, who had been nominated Protector, had resigned, and every thing was ready for the Restoration.
Edward remained at court several days.
"No; I was about to call upon him, but I wanted to see you first."
After the peace and the pardon of Conde by the French king, the armies were disbanded, and the three adventurers were free.
They have been most important agents in his restoration, and the king's obligations to them are much greater than they are to you.
The Prince of Conde now had the command of the Spanish forces in the Netherlands; and Edward, with his friends, followed his fortunes, and gained his good-will: they were rapidly promoted.
Edward did not refer to the past for some time after they had renewed their acquaintance.
Humphrey must take the first place.
"Have you seen the intendant, Humphrey?"
And yet it must be.
Have we not been attached from our youth?"
I recollect that one morning on reaching my office (that of the treasurer of the American Missionary Association), my assistant told me that in the inner room were eighteen fugitives, men, women and children, who had arrived that morning from the South in one company.
On going into the room, I saw them lying about on the bales and boxes of clothing destined for our various missionary stations, fatigued, as they doubtless were, after their sleepless and protracted struggle for freedom.
On inquiry, I learned that they had come from a southern city. After most extraordinary efforts, it seemed that they had while in Slavery, secretly banded together, and put themselves under the guidance of an intrepid conductor, whom they had hired to conduct them without the limits of the city, in the evening, when the police force was changed.
"I was walking near the water," she said, "when a white sailor spoke to me, and after a few questions, offered to hide me on board his vessel and conduct me safely to New York, if I would come to him in the evening.
"Why," said he, "I must have one of them in my school." He took me to a class where I found one of the young men, to whom I gave the needful information.
The letter requested me to find them and give them warning.
To my inquiry, have you parents living, and also brothers and sisters, she replied: "There is no child but myself." "Were not your parents kind to you, and did you not love them?" "Yes I love them very much."
The "Vigilance Committee," for aiding and befriending fugitives, of which I was treasurer for many years, had no better or warmer friend than he.
I stated my errand to him, with a description of the young men.
These agents were entertained by abolitionists in the city, and many of us had two or three of them in each of our families for a couple of weeks.
I did so, and was hid and fed by him, and on landing at New York, he conducted me to Mrs. Smith's house, where I am now staying."
He was almost always at their meetings, which were known only to "the elect," for we dared not hold them too publicly, as we almost always had some of the travelers toward the "north star" present, whose masters or their agents were frequently in the city, in hot pursuit.
They were remarkably fine young men, and it seemed a special Providence that I should find them in such a large city, and direct them to escape from their pursuer, within one hour after I left my house in Brooklyn.
They came through Pennsylvania and New Jersey to my office.
I wrote notices to be read in the colored churches and colored Sabbath-schools, which I delivered in person.
The mob brought all his furniture out, and piling it up in the street, set it on fire. The family were absent at the time.
It was not surprising, for so fair was his complexion, that with the aid of a brown wig, after he had cut off his hair, he was completely disguised.
At first, we sent them to Canada, but after a while, sent them only to Syracuse, and the centre of the State.
T.'s) labors as was desirable.
Mr. Lane, Mr. Tappan's personal friend who labored with him in the Anti-Slavery Cause, and especially in the Vigilance Committee for many years, from serious affection of his eyes was not prepared to furnish as full a sketch of his (Mr.
When he and his brother Arthur, assembled the seventy anti-slavery agents, who were thereafter, like "firebrands," scattered all over the land, they held their meetings in this room.
Through Mr. Tappan's influence and extensive correspondence abroad, many remittances came for the help of the "Vigilance Committee," from England and Scotland, and at one time, an extensive invoice of useful and fancy articles, in several large boxes, was received from the Glasgow ladies, sufficient to furnish a large bazaar or fair, which was held in Brooklyn, for the benefit of the Committee.
He added, "I thought it right to say this." I then spoke to the crowd.
Abolitionists, white and colored, both in slave and free States, entered into extensive correspondence, set their wits at work to devise various expedients for the relief from bondage and transmission to the free States and to Canada, of many of the most enterprising bondmen and bondwomen.
However, feeling somewhat relieved to-day, from my paralysis, owing to the cheering sunshine and the favor of my Almighty Preserver, I will try to do what I can, in dictating a few anecdotes to my amanuensis, which may afford you and your readers some gratification.
One Sunday morning, I received a letter, informing me that an officer belonging to Savannah, Ga., had started for New York, in pursuit of two young men, of nineteen or twenty, who had been slaves of one of the principal physicians of the place, and who had escaped and were supposed to be in New York.
New York, Nov. 8, 1871.
These facts I must give without reference to date, as I will not tax my memory with perhaps a vain attempt to narrate them in order.
Although lately afflicted by disease, Mr. Tappan still lives in the enjoyment of all his faculties, and a good measure of health, and in his advanced years, sees now some of the great results of his life-long efforts for the restoration and maintenance of human rights.
As there was no time to be lost, I concluded to go over to New York, notwithstanding the doubtfulness of attempting to find them in so large a city.
Original American abolitionists, who met the scorn and odium, the imputed shame and obloquy, the frowns and cold-shoulders which they bore through all the dark days of Slavery, now see and feel their reward in some measure; to be completed only, when they shall hear the plaudit: "Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
In answer to my inquiries, this girl told me the name of the southern city, and the names of the persons who had held her as a slave, and the mode of her escape, etc.
We soon made our escape, and are now both in the city.
ANTHONY LANE.
I am a blacksmith, and have worked six months in one shop, in New York, with white journeymen, not one of whom believes, I suppose, that I am a colored man."
I then went to the colored school, superintended by Rev. C.B. Bay.
1.
The agent of the Underground Rail Road in New York, took charge of them, and forwarded them to Albany, and by different agencies to Canada.
He was very solicitous for their welfare, and that the colored people who were free should be enlightened and educated. He opened a Sunday-school for colored adults, which was numerously attended, in West Broadway, New York, and with a few others, devoted the most of the Sabbath to their teaching.
They went out all over the land, and were instrumental in diffusing more truth, perhaps, about the dreadful system of American Slavery, than was accomplished in any other way.
He soon notified his brother, who lived in another part of the city, and both put themselves out of harm's way.
Mr. Tappan was, therefore, requested to furnish a few reminiscences from his own store-house, which he kindly did as follows:
"My father," said I, "has long been one of your first doctors, and do you think it right for him to sell my mother and his children in this way?"
In 1834, I think, was the first rioting, the sacking of Mr. Tappan's house, in Rose Street.
You own you are not well; you are subject to headaches; and every physician will tell you that a tilting motion disorders the stomach and acts upon the brain.
It's all practice; Tommy Oriole says so.
"Well, neighbour, how unreasonable people are!
"Bless me, we shall all be ruined!" said Mrs. Bullfrog; "my poor husband--"
I never built one so in my life, and I never have headaches.
"I really don't understand you, ma'am," said poor Dr. Bullfrog.
I was talking with him about your case only yesterday, and says he, 'Mrs.
You must have made a mistake."
But you must know that there is a great difference between being busy and being industrious.
It's all on account of this way of swinging and swaying about in such an absurd manner."
But the tragedy for the poor old music-teacher grew even more melancholy in its termination; for one day, as he was sitting disconsolately under a currant-bush in the garden, practising his poor old notes in a quiet way, THUMP came a great blow of a hoe, which nearly broke his back.
I never could hit the high notes."
How can you tell what agrees with your constitution unless you try?
What I know, I know certainly.
"But, my dear," piped Mrs. Oriole timidly, "the Orioles always have built in this manner, and it suits our constitution."
"How do you know?
She bustled off down to Water-Dock Lane, where, as we said in a former narrative, lived the old music-teacher, Dr. Bullfrog. The poor old doctor was a simple-minded, good, amiable creature, who had played the double-bass and led the forest choir on all public occasions since nobody knows when.
"But I tell you, Mrs. Magpie, I don't want any interference between my husband and me, and I will not have it," says Mrs. Oriole, with her little round eyes flashing with indignation.
The result was, that poor old Dr. Bullfrog, instead of being considered as a respectable old bore, got himself universally laughed at for aping fashionable manners.
To say the truth, my wife was all well enough content till old Mother Magpie interfered.
"O Mrs. Magpie, pray don't speak to my husband; he will think I've been complaining."
"It's enough to make a bird swear," said Tommy Oriole.
Just try the scales.
Everybody now is a little touched with the operatic fever, and there's Tommy Oriole has been to New Orleans and brought back a touch of the artistic.
"But you must CUT her."
"I try to, all I can; but she won't BE cut."
It looks like President Wilson's move.
At four o'clock the threatened arrests took place.
All this suffrage shouting in Washington has as its single object the attainment of President Wilson's material support for equal suffrage . . . .
The law gives you no such power.
It is sometimes awkward indeed to quote the President's speeches after the speeches have "grown cold." Also a too vigorous use of the word "democracy" is distasteful to some government dignitaries, it seems.
Four o'clock is the hour the Government clerks begin to swarm homewards.
On the same afternoon a slender line of women-also "soldiers of freedom"-attempted to march in Washington.
Why not now?
I quote this from his speech in the Senate August 18, 1917:
The motion of condemnation was put.
A BILL
In some of the actions you must have been wrong.
"Six more women sentenced to-day to 30 days in Occoquan workhouse."
A few moments and Miss Lucy Branham of Maryland and Mrs. Pauline Adams of Virginia marched down the Avenue, their gay banners waving joyously in the autumn sun, to fill up the gap of the two comrades who had been arrested.
This, too, went to certain death.
But why not be among the first?
Still others advanced.
More banners ,went out,-purple, white and gold ones.
That would end the disturbance and it would make our shield of national justice somewhat brighter.
MR.
Unwilling to pass the amendment, it continued to send women to prison.
We originated, to put it in the vernacular, in a kick, and if it be unpatriotic to kick, why then the grown man is unlike the child.
There was hardly any one passing at the time; all traffic had been temporarily suspended, so there was none to obstruct.
Good!
But the Administration's policy must go on.
No.
MR.
The Avenue was roped off on account of the parade.
A fourth detachment was arrested in the middle of the Avenue on the trolley tracks.
As they attempted to take up their posts, two by two, in front of the Reviewing Stand, opposite the White House, they were gathered in and swept away by the police like common street criminals- their golden banners scarcely flung to the breeze.
But still they came.
Perhaps the inscriptions on the suffrage banners were not tactful.
I read:
President Wilson's word would carry the question into Congress . . .
Would there be any harm in letting Congress vote on a suffrage resolution?
Don't wait.
MR.
Had they no shame?
This was no time for manners.
The trial of this group was delayed to give the jail authorities time to "vacate and tidy up," as one prisoner confided to Miss Joy Young.
To jail they must go.
And was not the Chief of Police of the District of Columbia a direct appointee of these same commissioners?
Doors opened and closed mysteriously.
As the car carrying the envoys passed swiftly through the gates of the White House there stood on the picket line two silent sentinels, Miss Lucy Burns of New York and Mrs. Lawrence Lewis of Philadelphia, both members of the National Executive Committee, with a great lettered banner which read:
Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Maryland, Mississippi, as well as the West, Middle West, New England and the East-the stream was endless.
When. however. women continued to picket in the face of arrest, the Administration quickened its advance into the venture of suppression.
Chapter 3
The Administration had little choice.
Miss Burns and Miss Morey upon arriving at the police station, insisted, to the great surprise of all the officials, upon knowing the charge against them.
against which we protest can be changed in the twinkling of an eye.
Disorderly conduct?
And if they did . . .
It must yield to this pressure from the people or it must suppress the agitation which was causing such interest. It must pass the amendment or remove the troublesome pickets.
Every time a new piece of legislation was passed; the war tax bill, food conservation or what not,-women from unex- pected quarters sent to the Government their protest against the passage of measures so vital to women without women's consent, coupled with an appeal for the liberation of women. Club women, college women, federations of labor; various kinds of organizations sent protests to the Administration leaders.
GEORGE CREEL, Chairman.
I daresay political wisdom crept into the reasoning of others.
The Administration chose suppression.
They were promptly arrested for "obstructing the traffic." They, too, were dismissed and their cases never tried.
It decided to remove the pickets.
They told me I lied, and taking up a hatchet, they came to me, and said they would knock me down if I stirred out again, and so confined me to the wigwam.
My spirit was, upon this, I confess, very impatient, and almost outrageous.
Yet I can say, that in all my sorrows and afflictions, God did not leave me to have my impatience work towards Himself, as if His ways were unrighteous.
I could hardly bear to think of the many weary steps I had taken, to come to this place.
Thus the Lord dealt mercifully with me many times, and I fared better than many of them.
I would have tarried that night with her, but they that owned her would not suffer it.
I cannot express to man the sorrow that lay upon my spirit; the Lord knows it.
THE NINTH REMOVE
Whereupon I asked one of them, whether they intended to kill him; he answered me, they would not.
THE TENTH REMOVE
Connecticut, to meet with King Philip.
THE SEVENTEENTH REMOVE
Then I went along with him to his new master who told me he loved him, and he should not want.
This was about the time that their great captain, Naananto, was killed in the Narragansett country. My son being now about a mile from me, I asked liberty to go and see him; they bade me go, and away I went; but quickly lost myself, traveling over hills and through swamps, and could not find the way to him.
I took my load at my back, and quickly we came to wade over the river; and passed over tiresome and wearisome hills.
We bemoaned one another a while, as the Lord helped us, and then I returned again.
It seems to be a bait the devil lays to make men lose their precious time.
THE TWELFTH REMOVE
I cannot but think what a wolvish appetite persons have in a starving condition; for many times when they gave me that which was hot, I was so greedy, that I should burn my mouth, that it would trouble me hours after, and yet I should quickly do the same again.
He told me he saw him such a time in the Bay, and he was well, but very melancholy.
THE FOURTEENTH REMOVE
A comfortable remove it was to me, because of my hopes.
My mistress's papoose was sick, and it died that night, and there was one benefit in it--that there was more room.
He showed me the way to my son.
THE SIXTEENTH REMOVAL
And after I was thoroughly hungry, I was never again satisfied.
My son was ill, and I could not but think of his mournful looks, and no Christian friend was near him, to do any office of love for him, either for soul or body. And my poor girl, I knew not where she was, nor whether she was sick, or well, or alive, or dead.
When we were at this place, my master's maid came home; she had been gone three weeks into the Narragansett country to fetch corn, where they had stored up some in the ground.
We went in the morning to gather ground nuts, to the river, and went back again that night.
I offered the money to my master, but he bade me keep it; and with it I bought a piece of horse flesh.
But while she was pulling of it out I ran to the maid and gave her all my apron, and so that storm went over.
I went, and he gave me a pancake, about as big as two fingers.
We began this remove with wading over Banquang river: the water was up to the knees, and the stream very swift, and so cold that I thought it would have cut me in sunder.
I put it in my pocket to keep it safe.
Then he came running to tell me he had a new master, and that he had given him some ground nuts already.
Although I had met with so much affliction, and my heart was many times ready to break, yet could I not shed one tear in their sight; but rather had been all this while in a maze, and like one astonished.
I went to one wigwam, and they told me they had no room.
Then came an Indian to me with a pair of stockings that were too big for him, and he would have me ravel them out, and knit them fit for him.
I went to see how she did, and she was well, considering her captive condition.
One hill was so steep that I was fain to creep up upon my knees, and to hold by the twigs and bushes to keep myself from falling backward.
He told me he was as much grieved for his father as for himself.
For her satisfaction I went along with her, and brought her to him; but before I got home again it was noised about that I was running away and getting the English youth, along with me; that as soon as I came in they began to rant and domineer, asking me where I had been, and what I had been doing? and saying they would knock him on the head.
The next day in the morning they took their travel, intending a day's journey up the river.
Which he did, and it seems tarried a little too long; for his master was angry with him, and beat him, and then sold him.
This distressed condition held that day, and half the next.
On the morrow morning we must go over the river, i.e.
I went to a wigwam, and they bade me come in, and gave me a skin to lie upon, and a mess of venison and ground nuts, which was a choice dish among them.
He bade me come in and sit down, and asked me whether I would smoke it (a usual compliment nowadays amongst saints and sinners) but this no way suited me.
Many sorrowful days I had in this place, often getting alone. "Like a crane, or a swallow, so did I chatter; I did mourn as a dove, mine eyes ail with looking upward.
I could scarce discern one wigwam from another.
Another asked me to knit a pair of stockings, for which she gave me a quart of peas.
When I was returned, I found myself as unsatisfied as I was before.
And yet they were so nice in other things, that when I had fetched water, and had put the dish I dipped the water with into the kettle of water which I brought, they would say they would knock me down; for they said, it was a sluttish trick.
But instead of going either to Albany or homeward, we must go five miles up the river, and then go over it.
Two canoes full they had carried over; the next turn I myself was to go.
Then I went home to my mistress's wigwam; and they told me I disgraced my master with begging, and if I did so any more, they would knock me in the head.
But a sore time of trial, I concluded, I had to go through, my master being gone, who seemed to me the best friend that I had of an Indian, both in cold and hunger, and quickly so it proved.
When I was there, there came an Indian to look after me, who when he had found me, kicked me all along.
But as my foot was upon the canoe to step in there was a sudden outcry among them, and I must step back, and instead of going over the river, I must go four or five miles up the river farther northward.
If I keep in, I must die with hunger, and if I go out, I must be knocked in head.
THE EIGHTH REMOVE
I was utterly hopeless of getting home on foot, the way that I came.
Then I went to see King Philip.
I told her I had got him to a fire in such a place.
When I had done it, he would pay me nothing.
We had husband and father, and children, and sisters, and friends, and relations, and house, and home, and many comforts of this life: but now we may say, as Job, "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return: the Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord." I asked him whether he would read.
Then they packed up their things to be gone, and gave me my load.
When they came to the place where they intended to lodge, and had pitched their wigwams, being hungry, I went again back to the place we were before at, to get something to eat, being encouraged by the squaw's kindness, who bade me come again.
Thomas Read.
But I stepped out, and she struck the stick into the mat of the wigwam.
I have sometime seen bear baked very handsomely among the English, and some like it, but the thought that it was bear made me tremble.
Which stilled my spirit for the present.
But now that was savory to me that one would think was enough to turn the stomach of a brute creature.
For though I had formerly used tobacco, yet I had left it ever since I was first taken.
Then I went to another, and they said the same; at last an old Indian bade me to come to him, and his squaw gave me some ground nuts; she gave me also something to lay under my head, and a good fire we had; and through the good providence of God, I had a comfortable lodging that night.
THE THIRTEENTH REMOVE
We came to Banquang river again that day, near which we abode a few days.
I went home and found venison roasting that night, but they would not give me one bit of it.
It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear's grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.
Then I took it of the child, and eat it myself, and savory it was to my taste.
I told them the skin was off my back, but I had no other comforting answer from them than this: that it would be no matter if my head were off too.
THE FIFTEENTH REMOVE
Now may I say with David "I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.
We went on our travel.
They all gathered about the poor man, asking him many questions.
A squaw moved it down again, at which I looked up, and she threw a handful of ashes in mine eyes.
There was here one Mary Thurston of Medfield, who seeing how it was with me, lent me a hat to wear; but as soon as I was gone, the squaw (who owned that Mary Thurston) came running after me, and got it away again.
I told them, I could not tell where to go, they bade me go look; I told them, if I went to another wigwam they would be angry, and send me home again.
He answered me that he was not asleep, but at prayer; and lay so, that they might not observe what he was doing.
On the morrow they buried the papoose, and afterward, both morning and evening, there came a company to mourn and howl with her; though I confess I could not much condole with them.
He told me he was very sick of a flux, with eating so much blood.
So easy a thing it is with God to dry up the streams of Scripture comfort from us.
I showed myself willing, and bid him ask my mistress if I might go along with him a little way; she said yes, I might, but I was not a little refreshed with that news, that I had my liberty again.
And His goodness in bringing to my hand so many comfortable and suitable scriptures in my distress.
I hoped to be carried to Albany, as the Indians had discoursed before, but that failed also.
So like were these barbarous creatures to him who was a liar from the beginning.
I am undeceived in time! But it is a heavy blow!
Henry and Eleanor were by themselves in the breakfast-room; and each, as she entered it, looked at her anxiously.
James had protested against writing to her till his return to Oxford; and Mrs. Allen had given her no hopes of a letter till she had got back to Fullerton.
"Will you take the trouble of reading to us the passages which concern my brother?"
"A lawyer, I believe.
Open, candid, artless, guileless, with affections strong but simple, forming no pretensions, and knowing no disguise."
"You feel, as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature. Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves."
I left her and Bath yesterday, never to see either again.
When I think of his past declarations, I give him up. Moreover, I have too good an opinion of Miss Thorpe's prudence to suppose that she would part with one gentleman before the other was secured.
"I do not know what I was thinking of" (blushing again that she had blushed before); "James only means to give me good advice."
Take care my cries are not heard, for if they are it is more than probable I should be removed to another part of the prison, and we be separated forever.
"So that when you went on board the Pharaon, everybody could see that you held a letter in your hand?"
From this view of things, then, comes the axiom that if you visit to discover the author of any bad action, seek first to discover the person to whom the perpetration of that bad action could be in any way advantageous.
It was therefore near seven o'clock; but Edmond's anxiety had put all thoughts of time out of his head.
his father!"
"Then it was not till your return to the ship that you put the letter in the portfolio?"
"We have lost a year to no purpose!" cried Dantes.
Did you take anybody with you when you put into the port of Elba?"
"Did you fancy yourself dying?"
I am in a hurry to begin.
"You must teach me a small part of what you know," said Dantes, "if only to prevent your growing weary of me.
During these hours of profound meditation, which to him had seemed only minutes, he had formed a fearful resolution, and bound himself to its fulfilment by a solemn oath.
Had a thunderbolt fallen at the feet of Dantes, or hell opened its yawning gulf before him, he could not have been more completely transfixed with horror than he was at the sound of these unexpected words.
"But cannot one learn philosophy?"
"Old enough to be ambitions, but too young to be corrupt.
"Now let me behold the curious pens with which you have written your work."
"Never mind; let us go on."
Did you really think me capable of that?"
Dantes began to fear he had delayed too long ere he administered the remedy, and, thrusting his hands into his hair, continued gazing on the lifeless features of his friend.
The young man sprang to the entrance, darted through it, carefully drawing the stone over the opening, and hurried to his cell.
"Are you sure?"
"It might, for the cabin door was open--and--stay; now I recollect,--Danglars himself passed by just as Captain Leclere was giving me the packet for the grand marshal."
"Upon my word," said Dantes, "you make me shudder.
"And that?"
"Was there any person whose interest it was to prevent your marriage with Mercedes?"
"And was it not discovered that your sheets were unhemmed?"
"He did appear much disturbed when he read the letter that had brought me into this scrape.
"Danglars, as well as others."
"What?"
I can take you on my shoulders, and swim for both of us."
I want to learn."
what has happened?"
Stay!--stay!--How strange that it should not have occurred to me before!
As he entered the chamber of his friend, Dantes cast around one eager and searching glance in quest of the expected marvels, but nothing more than common met his view.
Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."
"Well, we will wait,--a week, a month, two months, if need be,--and meanwhile your strength will return.
"You think so?"
And you tell me this magistrate expressed great sympathy and commiseration for you?"
"You did?
"The last attack I had," said he, "lasted but half an hour, and after it I was hungry, and got up without help; now I can move neither my right arm nor leg, and my head seems uncomfortable, which shows that there has been a suffusion of blood on the brain.
"I separated the fat from the meat served to me, melted it, and so made oil--here is my lamp." So saying, the abbe exhibited a sort of torch very similar to those used in public illuminations.
"Then it is Danglars."
Dantes observed, however, that Faria, in spite of the relief his society afforded, daily grew sadder; one thought seemed incessantly to harass and distract his mind.
A double movement of the globe he inhabited, and of which he could feel nothing, appeared to him perfectly impossible.
"Night!--why, for heaven's sake, are your eyes like cats', that you can see to work in the dark?"
"Put it into my portfolio."
Dantes followed; his features were no longer contracted, and now wore their usual expression, but there was that in his whole appearance that bespoke one who had come to a fixed and desperate resolve.
"And yet the murder, if you choose to call it so, would be simply a measure of self-preservation."
"Come," said the abbe, closing his hiding-place, and pushing the bed back to its original situation, "let me hear your story."
The reputation of being out of his mind, though harmlessly and even amusingly so, had procured for the abbe unusual privileges.
"In the first place, then, who examined you,--the king's attorney, his deputy, or a magistrate?"
"Fernand."
"Let us talk of something else," said he.
They were in earnest conversation.
"About six or seven and twenty years of age, I should say."
Is the world filled with tigers and crocodiles?"
"I know nothing.
"I accept.
"Who supplied you with the materials for making this wonderful work?"
"No, I had no such idea; but, knowing that all was ready for flight, I thought you might have made your escape." The deep glow of indignation suffused the cheeks of Dantes.
"It has been long enough to inflict on me a great and undeserved misfortune.
Danglars was joking in a friendly way, but Fernand looked pale and agitated."
I was a very insignificant person."
The Abbe's Chamber.
I was generally liked on board, and had the sailors possessed the right of selecting a captain themselves, I feel convinced their choice would have fallen on me.
Well, by means of these lines, which are in accordance with the double motion of the earth, and the ellipse it describes round the sun, I am enabled to ascertain the precise hour with more minuteness than if I possessed a watch; for that might be broken or deranged in its movements, while the sun and earth never vary in their appointed paths."
"He did."
Pray tell me how."
"So," answered the abbe.
"What rank did he hold on board?"
"Now can you conceive of any interest that your heroic deputy could possibly have had in the destruction of that letter?"
Pray, was Danglars acquainted with Fernand?"
On the other hand, the symptoms may be much more violent, and cause me to fall into fearful convulsions, foam at the mouth, and cry out loudly.
As soon as you feel able to swim we will go."
"You have told me as yet but one of them--let me hear the other."
"Oh yes, I read it over three times, and the words sank deeply into my memory."
For the first half-mile several of the horses led Brigham, but on the second mile he began passing them one after the other, and on the third mile he was in advance of them all, and was showing them all the road at a lively rate.
Comstock and I dashed into a herd, followed by the referees.
The buffaloes were quite plenty, and it was agreed that we should go into the same herd at the same time and "make a run," as we called it, each one killing as many as possible.
Mr. Wilcox bought the horse at Wyandotte, from the gentleman who had won him at the raffle, and he intends to keep him as long as he lives.
So, leaving my saddle and bridle with the wagons, we rode to the windward of the buffaloes, as usual, and when within a few hundred yards of them we dashed into the herd.
There were ten chances at thirty dollars each, and they were all quickly taken.
The wager was five hundred dollars a side, and the man who should kill the greater number of buffaloes from on horseback was to be declared the winner.
The end of the track finally reached Sheridan, in the month of May, 1868, and as the road was not to be built any farther just then, my services as a hunter were not any longer required.
The next day I rode out with Mr. Wilcox and took a look at the gallant old horse.
We were fortunate in the first run in getting good ground.
Comstock began shooting at the rear of the herd, which he was chasing, and they kept straight on.
I soon had thirteen laid out on the ground, the last one of which I had driven down close to the wagons, where the ladies were.
I had "nursed" my buffaloes, as a billiard-player does the balls when he makes a big run.
At last the time came to begin the match.
The buffaloes separated; Comstock took the left bunch and I the right.
Everybody was surprised, as well as disgusted, that such a homely "critter" should be the winner.
We were to hunt one day of eight hours, beginning at eight o'clock in the morning, and closing at four o'clock in the afternoon.
He was comfortably cared for in Mr. Wilcox's stable, and looked the same clever pony that he always was.
Ike Bonham,--who took him to Wyandotte, Kansas, where he soon added new laurels to his already brilliant record.
Having no suitable place in which to leave my old and faithful buffalo-hunter Brigham, and not wishing to kill him by scouting, I determined to dispose of him.
A referee was to follow each of us on horseback when we entered the herd, and count the buffaloes killed by each man.
On this morning the buffaloes were very accommodating, and I soon had them running in a beautiful circle, when I dropped them thick and fast, until I had killed thirty-eight; which finished my run.
At this time there was a general Indian war raging all along the western borders.
I was very reluctant to part with him, but I consoled myself with the thought that he would not be likely to receive harder usage in other hands than he had in mine.
They killed, scalped and robbed Comstock; but Grover, although severely wounded, made his escape, owing to the fleetness of the excellent horse which he was riding.
Although I am getting ahead of my story, I must now follow Brigham for a while.
A grand tournament came off four miles from Wyandotte, and Brigham took part in it.
After surrounding the two men they suddenly attacked them.
The score now stood fifty-six to thirty-seven, in my favor.
The hunt took place about twenty miles east of Sheridan, and as it had been pretty well advertised and noised abroad, a large crowd witnessed the interesting and exciting scene.
Old Brigham was won by a gentleman--Mr.
"That's nothing at all," said I; "I have done it many a time, and old Brigham knows as well as I what I am doing, and sometimes a great deal better."
As has already been stated, his appearance was not very prepossessing, and nobody suspected him of being anything but the most ordinary kind of a plug.
After we had eaten a lunch which was spread for us, we resumed the hunt.
I am grateful that he is in such good hands, and whenever I again visit Memphis I shall surely go and see Brigham if he is still alive.
In this connection it will not be out of place to state that during the time I was hunting for the Kansas Pacific, I always brought into camp the best buffalo heads, and turned them over to the company, who found a very good use for them.
I finally lost track of Brigham, and for several years I did not know what had become of him.
An excursion party, mostly from St. Louis, consisting of about a hundred gentlemen and ladies, came out on a special train to view the sport, and among the number was my wife, with little baby Arta, who had come to remain with me for a while.
It was only a small drove, and we at once prepared to give the animals a lively reception.
CHAMPION BUFFALO KILLER.
Shortly after the adventures mentioned in the preceding chapter, I had my celebrated buffalo hunt with Billy Comstock, a noted scout, guide and interpreter, who was then chief of scouts at Fort Wallace, Kansas. Comstock had the reputation, for a long time, of being a most successful buffalo hunter, and the officers in particular, who had seen him kill buffaloes, were very desirous of backing him in a match against me.
While taking a short rest, we suddenly spied another herd of buffaloes coming toward us.
He succeeded, however, in killing twenty-three, but they were scattered over a distance of three miles, while mine lay close together.
The friends of the rider laughed at him for being mounted on such a dizzy-looking steed.
It frightened some of the tender creatures to see the buffalo coming at full speed directly toward them; but when he had got within fifty yards of one of the wagons, I shot him dead in his tracks.
They proved to be a herd of cows and calves--which, by the way, are quicker in their movements than the bulls. We charged in among them, and I concluded my run with a score of eighteen, while Comstock killed fourteen.
Everybody laughed at Mr. Bonham when it became known that he was to ride that poky-looking plug against the five thoroughbreds which were to take part in the race.
After the result of the first run had been duly announced, our St. Louis excursion friends--who had approached to the place where we had stopped--set out a lot of champagne, which they had brought with them, and which proved a good drink on a Kansas prairie, and a buffalo hunter was a good man to get away with it.
This made my sixty-ninth buffalo, and finished my third and last run, Comstock having killed forty-six.
This had raised the excitement to fever heat among the excursionists, and I remember one fair lady who endeavored to prevail upon me not to attempt it.
Comstock was mounted on one of his favorite horses, while I rode old Brigham.
Striking out for a distance of three miles, we came up close to another herd.
The arrangement was carried out, and Brigham was entered as one of the contestants for the purse.
On the fourth mile his rider let him out, and arrived at the hotel--the home-station--in Wyandotte a long way ahead of his fastest competitor.
As scouts and guides were in great demand, I concluded once more to take up my old avocation of scouting and guiding for the army.
When the exercises--which were of a very tame character, being more for style than speed--were over, and just as the crowd were about to return to the city, a purse of $250 was made up, to be given to the horse that could first reach Wyandotte, four miles distant.
It was accordingly arranged that I should shoot him a buffalo-killing match, and the preliminaries were easily and satisfactorily agreed upon.
This I did at once, and after providing them with a comfortable little home, I returned and reported for duty at Fort Larned.
CHAPTER XV.
I had several good offers to sell him; but at the suggestion of some gentlemen in Sheridan, all of whom were anxious to obtain possession of the horse, I put him up at a raffle, in order to give them all an equal chance of becoming the owner of the famous steed.
As I was so far ahead of my competitor in the number killed, I thought I could afford to give an extra exhibition of my skill. I had told the ladies that I would, on the next run, ride my horse without saddle or bridle.
When all the preliminaries had been arranged, the signal was given, and off went the horses for Wyandotte.
It seemed as if he almost remembered me, and I put my arms around his neck, as though he had been a long-lost child.
Brigham, of course, had already acquired a wide reputation, and his name and exploits had often appeared in the newspapers, and when it was learned that this "critter" was none other than the identical buffalo-hunting Brigham, nearly the whole crowd admitted that they had heard of him before, and had they known him in the first place they certainly would have ruled him out.
Again the excursion party approached, and once more the champagne was tapped.
This sad event occurred August 27, 1868.]
But to return to the thread of my narrative, from which I have wandered. Having received the appointment of guide and scout, and having been ordered to report at Fort Larned, then commanded by Captain Dangerfield Parker, I saw it was necessary to take my family--who had remained with me at Sheridan, after the buffalo-hunting match--to Leavenworth, and there leave them.
General Sheridan had taken up his headquarters at Fort Hayes, in order to be in the field to superintend the campaign in person.
Yet, although hitherto he had bowed his head before the authority of the Church, he had already raised it against the temporal power.
Savonarola from that time condemned himself to the most absolute seclusion, and disappeared in the depths of his convent, as if the slab of his tomb had already fallen over him.
"Have pity on Florence," said the monk.
They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than the curtain of the other was raised, and the monk, pale, immovable, solemn, appeared on the threshold.
Lorenzo shut his eyes, as though to reflect more at his ease; then, after a moment's silence, he replied:
With him logic always gave way before inspiration: he was not a theologian, but a prophet.
"It is not I who desire it; it is the Lord," replied Savonarola coldly.
Nevertheless, the reformation of Savonarola, more reverential than Luther's, which followed about five-and-twenty years later, respected the thing while attacking the man, and had as its aim the altering of teaching that was human, not faith that was of God.
There, kneeling on the flags, praying unceasingly before a wooden crucifix, fevered by vigils and penances, he soon passed out of contemplation into ecstasy, and began to feel in himself that inward prophetic impulse which summoned him to preach the reformation of the Church.
Indeed, Savonarola was one of those men of stone, coming, like the statue of the Commandante, to knock at the door of a Don Giovanni, and in the midst of feast and orgy to announce that it is even now the moment to begin to think of Heaven.
"Your sins and also your crimes, God will forgive them all," replied Savonarola.
"Everything," said Savonarola, "but on three conditions."
It was not, however, without an inward fear, against which the praises of his friends availed nothing, that the pleasure-seeker and usurper awaited that severe and gloomy preacher by whose words all Florence was stirred, and on whose pardon henceforth depended all his hope for another world.
"But, my father," cried Lorenzo, "Florence is free, Florence is happy."
never!" exclaimed Lorenzo, falling back on his bed and shaking his head,--"never!"
The man on the bed was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who at the beginning of the year had been attacked by a severe and deep-seated fever, to which was added the gout, a hereditary ailment in his family.
When he perceived him, Lorenzo dei Medici, reading in his marble brow the inflexibility of a statue, fell back on his bed, breathing a sigh so profound that one might have supposed it was his last.
Savonarola repeated the same words.
"My father," replied Lorenzo eagerly, "I feel this faith in the very depths of my heart."
If I tell you to shoot--shoot, and quickly.
It was dark, the long shed barely discernible, but the professor was particular about our position.
As the flames brightened I watched his restless figure.
"Do you see?"
"We go there again this evening," he said after lunch next day; "so a restful afternoon will suit us."
Perhaps his curious power was never more noticeable than in the case of the Withan murder.
"No, it runs beside the road for two or three hundred yards."
"From here we can do so.
"We may have to creep a little nearer presently," he whispered.
Someone was coming, and with no particular stealth.
That it was French I could not possibly affirm, but it might be, and so I fashioned a fragile link with the Normandy crime.
"We'll get away quickly," said Quarles.
Yet his history coincided with my theory.
For a few days the Withan murder seemed unique in atrocities, and then came a communication from the French police.
"How have you learnt all this?"
It seemed probable that the murderer had come upon his victim secretly, that the foul deed had been committed with horrible expedition, otherwise the victim, although not a strong man, would have made some struggle for his life, and apparently no struggle had taken place.
"Wigan, it would be interesting to know if a similar murder occurred anywhere in the intervening year at that date," said Quarles.
"A man who had walked a considerable distance in a ditch would be wet and muddy," said Zena, "and if he were met on the road carrying a bag he would arrest attention."
His calmness almost exasperated me, but he would answer no questions until we had returned to our hotel and had breakfast.
After walking along the road for about a mile Quarles scrambled through a hedge into a wood by the roadside.
"There may be worse than poachers' traps here."
"I think we are first, but great care is necessary," he whispered.
In this case also the head was missing, and nothing had been found upon the body to identify the victim.
"Couldn't keep him waiting all night, as we may have to do," said Quarles.
In the dark he had evidently got fuel, and had started a fire on the stone slab.
I went carefully through the case point by point, and he made no comment until I had finished.
"Full, or near it," I returned.
"Any traces that the head was carried to the wood?"
"One or two doubtful places I had dug up.
"We'll use what cover we can."
To this Quarles pointed.
"You need not wait for us, driver.
Footprints, nearly obliterated, were traceable to a wood on the opposite side of the road, but no one seemed to have left the wood in any direction.
In the darkness before the dawn the man moved about the shed again, and presently I heard him go.
By walking along this the murderer might have left the wood without leaving tracks behind him."
"Not clearly."
As an excuse I talked over cases with him, but he seldom volunteered an opinion, often was obviously uninterested.
I told you I was not certain of my theory.
The road winds a lot.
I had a great desire to rush from my hiding-place and seize him, and I waited, expecting some further revelation, listening for other footsteps.
It was getting dark when we set out, and again Quarles's unerring sense of locality astonished me.
From somewhere at the back of the shed he pushed forward a block of wood, and, standing on this, he fixed something to the short chain I had noted yesterday.
My theory seems absurd.
"We must get onto the veranda for a moment.
And keep your ears open to make sure no one is following us."
Now this year he was in England; illness had kept him to his house yonder, but he was well enough to get out at the fatal time, and the insane desire proved irresistible.
That is how it came about that I obtained credit which I did not deserve.
I cannot attempt to say how long we had waited in utter silence when Quarles touched my arm.
The ground in the wood was searched at the time, and I have been over it carefully since.
"Much water in the ditch?" asked Quarles.
"On the bench yesterday.
The shed, with its slanting roof, served to block a narrow, overgrown path between two precipitous chalk walls.
We took rooms at a hotel in Medworth, Quarles explaining that our investigations might take some days.
"I am not sure.
"I said I wasn't certain," he whispered when our path had led us into a damp hollow which looked as if it had not been visited by man for centuries.
The hollow was surrounded by perpendicular walls of sand and chalk; it was a pit, in fact, which Nature had filled with vegetation.
"We might come up against danger if my theory is correct.
"As I expected," said Quarles, with some excitement.
The coachman pocketed his money and drove away.
"Wait," he said when I began to question him.
"We can do that later.
For an hour--two, three, I don't know how long--that horrible bundle swung over the fire, and the man sat on his block of wood, staring straight before him.
I caught a glimpse of white hair, but he took no position in which I could see his face clearly.
"As I thought," he said.
"No; it was near the Withan end of it that the dead man was found."
He had evidently some definite goal, and I was conscious of excitement as I followed him.
Tied together, and secured in a network of string, were five or six human heads, blackened, shriveled faces, which seemed to grin horribly as they swung deeply from side to side, lit up by the flicker of the flames.
"Nothing."
I found such a man in Sir Henry Buckingham.
We plunged into the wood again, and were soon in the wilderness, forcing our way, sometimes with considerable difficulty, through the undergrowth.
The natural passage was winding, and about fifty yards long, and opened into another pit of some size.
They were round, and might have fallen over after having been put one upon another as one gathers coppers together when counting a number of them.
The cigarette-ends puzzled me.
Watching him closely, I was aware that he became more irritable as he proceeded.
The cigarette box he did not touch, but he took some cigarette-ends from his pocket and threw them on the floor.
Naturally I was not idle during the next few days, but at the end of them I had learnt nothing.
"Why should you think so?"
"Exactly," I answered.
"A very important point, and a reasonable conclusion, I fancy," said Quarles.
He just raised his arm and pointed the revolver toward the door, on a level at which the bullet would strike the head of a man of average height.
Apparently, having put it ready for use, he had forgotten to take it away.
Won't you sit down?"
Go to sleep!"
"Do you want money?" said Borg to the newcomer, laying his hand on his breast-pocket.
"One should be correct in matters of form," said Borg gravely.
"Hang it all, I'm cold!
"I'd rather not!
"That's no good; you are registered as assessor, and as such you still figure in the directory."
"Thanks."
But this is too hard."
I must have a fire."
"No!"
"That's Falk," said Sellen, opening the door.
"And the notes?"
"Those are easy terms," replied Falk.
"I'll give you an hour," said Borg.
"The rain's done it!"
What's the floor-packing?
"Confound you!
I know them!
"From the Wheelwrights' Bank.
Earth or rubbish?"
I can let you have it."
"Go on, Falk, sign!"
"How much do you want?
"Yes."
"But you can't do that sort of thing at Stockholm!"
Where's the servant?
"Oh!
"Did you look it up?"
"Don't do it, Falk," said Olle; "it'll end badly, there'll be trouble."
"Good Lord, how modest you are," remarked Borg, and turned to Levin.
"Oh, won't it!
"I want it, and a pair of fire-tongs."
How much?
Is he asleep?"
"A good subject!
"Oh!
Let's light a fire!"
"One takes up a fresh loan at the Tailors' Bank, for instance," replied Borg.
"Did he spend the night here?"
It's beastly cold."
"Poor devil!" muttered Sellen, covering him up with his rug.
"Oh! Bad!"
Levin had watched the scene, quiet, neutral, and polite.
Hm!
"All right, old chap!
"I don't care who's done it!
"Twelve crowns every sixth month, twenty-four crowns per annum, in two instalments," said Levin promptly and firmly.
Falk entered, looking a little hectic.
"Because I have no wood."
I'll make her trot."
"Come here, Falk!
"If you are not back with the money by then, I'll set the police on your track."
The figure!
The amount!"
"What a question to ask," said Falk, looking at him doubtfully.
"Eight hundred crowns?" he asked.
It shows too much!"
"Because it's rotten!" answered Borg.
But how is it to be paid back?"
"Miscreant!
"Send for some then!
"No, I'm a journalist," objected Falk.
Then all was explained.
"Very true, my dear sister; perhaps that is the reason that the New Forest has had such charms for me."
I thought that I had more control over myself; but I have seen her, and feel that my future happiness depends upon obtaining her as a wife.
He had written to Humphrey, and had dispatched a messenger with the letter; but the messenger had not yet returned.
You were at the wars; it was possible that you might, or might not return.
"Nature has done more, Edward.
"No less than one with whom you were formerly well acquainted, Edward--Patience Heatherstone."
"It may be so, Edith," replied Humphrey.
"Is it possible," thought Edward, "that these can be the two girls in russet gowns, that I left at the cottage?
"I will go with you.
We pass over the joy of this meeting after so many years' absence, and the pleasure which it gave to Edward to find his sisters grown such accomplished and elegant young women.
"We must go now, and I will not fail to communicate it to them this very night."
"It belongs to Mr. Heatherstone, does it not?" replied Edward.
He can not refuse it."
"With respect to the conditions upon which you are to possess Arnwood," said Humphrey, "I can inform you what they are.
Mr. Heatherstone may make his own terms; I must wave all pride rather than lose her.
"As for his daughter, Edward, you have yet to 'win her and wear her,' as the saying is.
"Alice and I have seen Patience, and I fear I must surrender at discretion.
Tell him that I have just made known to you his noble and disinterested conduct."
"You may think me impetuous, sir, but I trust you will believe me grateful."
Turenne bore down Conde, who had gained every campaign; and the court of Spain, wearied with reverses, made overtures of peace, which was gladly accepted by the French.
"That is to say, because all you wish for, your property and a woman you love, are offered you in one lot, you will not accept them; they must be divided, and handed over to you in two!" said Alice, smiling.
As they passed, Edward caught the eye of Edith, and smiled.
"You mistake, dearest; I am not so foolish; but I have a certain pride, which you can not blame.
"You are right--I will.
"Alice, that's Edward!" said Edith, so loud, as to be heard by the king, and all near him.
"After that speech, sir, the sooner you get back again the better!" retorted Edith.
Edward went to Chaloner and Grenville, who were delighted with the intelligence which he brought them.
"Which would your majesty recommend me to follow?" inquired Edward.
Edward was most kindly received by Mr. Heatherstone.
"Much you know about women," replied Edith.
"Any more?"
"Put not your trust in princes, brother," replied Alice.
That much of their property has been taken away and put into other hands, I know; and probably they expect it will be restored upon their application to the king.
But our young readers will not be content if they do not hear some particulars about the other personages who have appeared in our little history.
This I am empowered to state to you, and I think you will allow that Mr. Heatherstone has fully acted up to what he stated were his views when he first obtained a grant of the property."
Well, Chaloner, to all appearance, your good aunts have done justice to their charge."
Those who hold the property think so too, and so far it is fortunate.
The next day they were at the prince's levee, and introduced by Edward.
I acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Heatherstone, and feel that all he asserted to Humphrey is true: still I do not like that I should be indebted to him for a property which is mine, and that he has no right to give.
Edward was standing, with many others of the suit, behind the chair of the king, amusing himself with the presentations as they took place, and waiting for the arrival of his sisters--Chaloner and Grenville were not with him, they had obtained leave to go into the country, for the object we have before referred to--when his eyes caught, advancing toward the king, Mr. Heatherstone, who led his daughter, Patience.
"Yes, it was a youthful passion, I grant; but recollect nothing came of it, and years have passed away.
Edward gave him a large farm, rent free; and in a few years Humphrey saved up sufficient to purchase a property for himself.
You hold a place at court.
He left his property to Clara, about a year after her marriage to Humphrey.
"Indeed?
"Patience Heatherstone," cried Edward, "the toast of all London!"
"You know, Humphrey, how many offers Patience Heatherstone has had, and has every day, I may say.
Alice and Edith rose and waved their handkerchiefs, but they were soon obliged to cease, and put them to their eyes.
Patience colored up and trembled when Edward first saw her.
The court was now one continual scene of fetes and gayety.
"Look, Edward," said Chaloner, "at those lovely girls at yon window.
Nay, much as I admire, and I may say, fond as I am (for time has not effaced the feeling) of his daughter, it still appears to me that, although not said, it is expected that she is to be included in the transfer; and I will accept no wife on such conditions."
On his arrival at Paris, he was kindly received by King Charles, who promised to assist his views in joining the army.
Patience made no reply, but passed on; and, soon afterward, Edward lost sight of her in the crowd.
Edward, who but rarely heard from Humphrey, was now anxious to quit the army and go to the king, who was in Spain; but to leave his colors, while things were adverse, was impossible.
"Well, my view is different," replied Edith.
"But why should you say so, Humphrey?
On the 15th of May, 1660, the news arrived that Charles had been proclaimed king on the 8th, and a large body of gentlemen went to invite him over.
"I know but of two that I can recommend from personal knowledge; but these two officers I can venture to pledge myself for."
"We shall have some court beauties, Beverley," said the king, looking at him over his shoulder.
Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan.
All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures.
The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography and history.
They resign each other without complaint to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs.
For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames.
Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble.
The angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also.
It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs.
The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour.
It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization.
The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them.
In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said of love,--
The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed.
It makes all things alive and significant.
Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus.
How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature!
By and by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.
Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit.
This however yielded no result.
She pursed her lips thoughtfully.
He lifted it gingerly--there was a little knob for the purpose--and let it fall gently into the socket which had been made to receive it on the door itself.
"Is there anything you want, miss?" he asked as he stood at the door.
She heard the soft thud of the front door closing, and rising she crossed the room rapidly and looked down through the window to the street.
"My dear Mr. Meredith,
"Cut a man's flesh and it heals," he said.
"I am paying you 3 pounds a week, I think," he said.
"Mr. Kara expects you, sir.
"But I assure you, sir,--" stammered Fisher.
The girl was sealing up some letters as he entered and looked up.
"He never gave a chance, miss," said Fisher, with a little smile, "but if he comes again I'll show him straight up to you."
It was not the first visit she had made to the big underground room with its vaulted roof and its great ranges--which were seldom used nowadays, for Kara gave no dinners.
She played idly with the letter she held in her hand, balancing it on the edge of the desk, her eyes downcast.
"I shall certainly not discuss your business with any person," said the girl coldly.
Deftly he lifted his left hand from the pocket, crooked the elbow by some quick manipulation, and thrust the books, which the valet most reluctantly handed to him, back to the place from whence he had taken them.
She left him, a little astonished and not a little ruffled.
He was dressed in a well-worn overcoat of a somewhat pronounced check, he had a top-hat, glossy and obviously new, at the back of his head, and the lower part of his face was covered by a ragged beard.
"What is your favourite weapon, Mr. Kara?" she asked.
It was against a wooden surface beneath the sleeve that his knuckles struck, and this view of the stranger's infirmity was confirmed when the other reached round with his right hand, took hold of the gloved left hand and thrust it into the pocket of his overcoat.
That he should return to Kara's study and set the papers in order was natural and proper.
Again she watched from the window the disappearing figure.
As you know, and as I have given you proof, I have the greatest admiration in the world for one whose work for humanity has won such universal recognition.
"There was a gentleman coming to see Mr. Kara, whom Mr. Kara particularly wanted to see."
This beastly cold kills me," he shivered as he glanced into the bleak street.
"What dog am I that I should wait till six?"
He was a man who would have attracted attention, if only from the somewhat eccentric nature of his dress and his unkempt appearance.
In two seconds it was open and she was examining its contents.
"Get me my fur coat.
Fisher, who was an observer of some discernment, noticed under the overcoat a creased blue suit, large black boots and a pair of pearl studs.
He's had three years to be out!"
Tell Mr. Kara to expect me when he sees me!"
You will tell Mr. Kara that I called.
"I will go with pleasure, miss," he said.
He told me he would be in at six o'clock at the latest."
Accidentally the valet's hand pressed against the other's sleeve and he received a shock, for the forearm was clearly an artificial one.
Fear is a tyrant and a despot, more terrible than the rack, more potent than the stake.
George Gathercole, Junior Travellers' Club."
"Shall I ring up for a messenger?"
She gave her attention to the second drawer.
"It is amply justified to secure an end," he said blandly.
"Give me those books!" roared the other.
It was her last chance, her last hope.
She looked at him with interest in her eyes.
Mrs. Beale obeyed with alacrity and whilst she was assuming a hat--being desirous of maintaining her prestige as housekeeper in the eyes of Cadogan Square, the girl ascended to the upper floor.
Kara was given to making friends of his servants--up to a point.
It was a square case covered in red morocco leather.
"Do you know T. X. Meredith?" he asked suddenly.
You will probably meet him again, for he will find an opportunity of asking you a few questions about myself.
"I am afraid, Miss Holland, I've got myself into very serious trouble."
"Where is Kara?" growled the stranger.
T. X.," he went on somewhat oracularly, "is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect.
Fisher took the card from the salver and read, "Mr.
"Then I shan't wait.
"Mr. Gathercole," said the girl quickly.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Rum cove," said Fisher.
She was prepared for this contingency and a second key was as efficacious as the first.
If I can buy those who can use their influence to secure this thing for me, so much the better.
Kara had returned from the country earlier than had been anticipated, and, save for Fisher, the only other person in the house beside the girl, was the middle-aged domestic who was parlour-maid, serving-maid and housekeeper in one.
This time he made the bedroom the scene of his investigations.
Miss Holland laughed.
An examination of the first drawer did not produce all that she had expected.
"Yes, miss, I couldn't get him to stay though."
Fisher followed him to his car, wrapped the fur rug about his legs, closed the door carefully and returned to the house.
There were a number of small jewel-boxes almost filling the drawer.
You had better take it yourself."
CHAPTER IX
"If you would only wait, sir," pleaded the agonized Fisher.
Do whatever you can to prevent him going away until I return.
He will probably be interested if you take him into the library."
Kara shook his head.
"One thing always strikes me in reading your stories.
You must come too."
He never reads his new romance to his friends, nor do his well-wishers applaud in advance. Reviewers have first tilt at "advance copies," and very properly.
"I shall think no more of her."
"And where is Oranmore?"
I hope I don't disturb you."
Her head was bowed in humiliation.
"And you avenge yourself by reviling all of us.
He is a popular painter, and as handsome a man as ever had a picture "on the line."
I saw that words were of no avail.
Yet the wilful obliteration had utterly spoiled it.
Circe, seated on a throne, with her back to a great circular mirror, presents a half-draped figure of marvellous delicate colouring and beauty of outline.
"Well, I should suggest that of Circe--the woman who broke men's hearts," I replied, mischievously.
You may be friends, but he shall never marry you."
Woman's vanity always betrays itself over her picture.
Dick has asked me to become his wife," she said in a low tone.
"I shall never be able to thank you sufficiently, old chap, for touching up my daub.
That evening the Count received us in the library of his country mansion, and congratulated Dick warmly upon his masterpiece.
"Ethel!
The result of this interview was but natural.
Inquiries showed that the Count had met her while travelling in America, and had married her.
At the close of a blue summer's day, when the dreamy, golden haze wrapped the city in a mystic charm, I called at the studio, having heard that he had returned, and was settling down to work.
"Cannot you guess?
My object in coming this afternoon was to repay the money I--I borrowed." And she drew forth an envelope from her pocket and handed it to me.
"She is worthless and vain; why make yourself miserable?"
She expressed pleasure at meeting me, remarking that she had read my last novel, and had been keenly interested in it.
"To what do I owe the honour of this visit?"
"Suppose I told him?
"How cruel you are!" she said, with a touch of sadness.
An elderly man, evidently a foreigner, wearing the violet ribbon of the French Academy in his buttonhole, was standing with a young girl in the crowd around the easel.
I heard no more, for they turned and left.
A scrap of conversation I overheard in the course of the afternoon, however, caused me to ponder.
At first I hesitated, but at length acquiesced.
Poor Dick!
"The thing's impossible!" I cried warmly.
The "Masked Circe" was pronounced one of the pictures of the year. Thousands admired it.
Think no more of me.
He burst into my room unceremoniously one morning, still attired in his travelling ulster.
But I succeeded in turning the conversation into another channel.
Dick flung down his palette, and came forward to introduce me.
My anticipations proved correct.
"I was amusing myself until your return.
The girl he loved!
A scene occurred between us--and we parted.
"How did you obtain it?" I asked, hesitating to receive it.
"Ethel," I said gravely, taking her hand in mine, "you have fascinated Dick Carruthers, my friend; and you will treat him as you treated me."
"I warned you against your infatuation, old fellow," I said seriously.
Pray sit down," I said coldly, motioning her to an armchair.
In the months that followed, I visited the studio almost daily, and watched the growth of the picture.
A few words of excuse and explanation, and we left the Count, who, kneeling beside his wife and endeavouring to resuscitate her, was completely mystified at the strange recognition.
As I seated myself, and she poured me out a liqueur, I caught her glancing furtively at me under her long lashes.
"Welcome, old fellow!" Dick cried, turning to shake hands with me. "Behold my Circe!" and he waved his hand in the direction of his model. "Ethel will not sit for any other subject.
"For the present I will preserve silence," I answered, my heart softening towards her.
"Dead.
"At least I am honest.
Visitors to the Academy know the picture.
Please don't alter it," urged the artist; who, advancing to his easel again, continued the free, rapid outline.
"Your pose is perfect, dear.
The face was a lifelike portrait.
I loved you; but I did not apprehend the consequence."
He was such a large-hearted, honest fellow, that I felt quite pained when I anticipated the awakening that must inevitably come sooner or later.
"Refused?
I know the type--"
"Ah!
We have been chums for years, for on many occasions he has displayed his talent as a black and white artist in illustrating my articles and stories in various magazines.
I have been false to you.
"Well, what is it?" I asked, rather surprised.
A stray copy of an English newspaper containing a notice of his work, which Dick picked up in a hotel, however, caused him to return.
Dazzled by her beauty, I sympathised with her, endeavoured to cheer her, and concluded by falling violently in love with her.
A dry, grey day in March.
I shook my head sadly.
At that time I was writing numbers of dramatic criticisms, and I confess I used what weight my opinions possessed for the purpose of her advancement.
A glance was sufficient to recognise that the sprawly writing was Ethel's.
She nodded, but did not reply.
When I entered, Dick was standing before his easel, pipe in mouth and crayon in hand, busily sketching; while on the raised "throne" before him sat Ethel, radiant and beautiful.
I confess that my frame of mind surprised me, inasmuch as I actually found myself still loving her.
Of the thousands who have gazed upon it in admiration, none knows the somewhat remarkable story connected with it.
"But I cannot promise that I will never tell him."
"Circe" was voted an unqualified success.
"Look!
Why?"
Having acted as eavesdropper, I could hardly question them.
Spring came and went, but I saw very little of Dick.
The effect produced was startling, and none could have been more astonished at the result of my daubing than myself.
What nonsense to speak of it, when through your baseness I have been almost ruined.
"I will not allow it.
"Last night I told you that a woman had embittered my life.
Since that time they had apparently lived happily, and not a breath of scandal had besmirched her fair name.
"For reasons of my own," she replied in a harsh, strained voice.
I have always been thankful that the happy writer of books has no such ordeal to face.
Nevertheless, I was sorely puzzled.
It was evident that he meant to secure it at any cost, therefore the price was soon arranged; and before we had been there half an hour, my companion had a cheque for four figures in his pocket.
It is really too bad!" she said, pouting like a spoiled child.
Come away, Zelie; let us go."
Dick's popularity steadily increased; lucrative commissions poured in upon him, and he settled down to such hard, methodical work, that I began to think he had forgotten the woman who had enmeshed him.
I--I shall find her some day; then she will return to me."
"No, no. I love him," she said in a fierce half-whisper, adding, "Keep secret the fact that we loved one another, and I swear before Heaven I will be true to him.
Is that the way a woman shows her affection?"
"Forget her," I argued.
I approved her judgment.
"It is the privilege of my country, Mademoiselle," said I; "and, remember, I shall always claim it."
At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour.
Was it sagacity?--sense?
This, then, was my first glimpse of the garden; but I had not time to look long, the portress, after having answered in the affirmative my question as to whether her mistress was at home, opened the folding-doors of a room to the left, and having ushered me in, closed them behind me.
She laughed a little, quite good-naturedly, and with the sort of tranquillity obvious in all she did--a tranquillity which soothed and suited me singularly, at least I thought so that evening.
When I rose to go, I held out my hand, on purpose, though I knew it was contrary to the etiquette of foreign habits; she smiled, and said--
I remarked that I hoped she would find me worthy of her good opinion; that if I knew myself, I was incapable of betraying any confidence reposed in me.
I had been so taken up with the contemplation of the pretty little salon that I had not noticed the entrance of a person into the larger room.
I remember very well that before quitting my chamber, I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter.
I would rather have sat a little longer; what had I to return to but my small empty room?
It was a long, not very broad strip of cultured ground, with an alley bordered by enormous old fruit trees down the middle; there was a sort of lawn, a parterre of rose-trees, some flower-borders, and, on the far side, a thickly planted copse of lilacs, laburnums, and acacias.
Reuter, especially now, when the twilight softened her features a little, and, in the doubtful dusk, I could fancy her forehead as open as it was really elevated, her mouth touched with turns of sweetness as well as defined in lines of sense.
Yes, I thought so; but I could scarcely as yet be sure.
It looked pleasant, to me--very pleasant, so long a time had elapsed since I had seen a garden of any sort.
I discovered, however, that there was a certain serenity of eye, and freshness of complexion, most pleasing to behold.
For an instant he seemed terrified but he did not run.
Instead he stealthily shifted the pine dagger over to his right hand and the string to his left.
In the road across the creek was a chubby, tow-haired boy with a long switch in his right hand, and a pine dagger and a string in his left.
"That isn't your name," he said.
When he got to the bare crest of a little rise, he could see up the creek a spiral of blue rising swiftly from a stone chimney.
The fisherman turned his head and she started to run, but without a word he turned again to the fish he was playing. Moreover, he was too far out in the water to catch her, so she advanced slowly--even to the edge of the stream, watching the fish cut half circles about the man.
For a moment there was silence and a puzzled frown gathered on the mountaineer's face.
The fisherman laughed.
Geese and ducks were hunting crawfish in the little creek that ran from a milk-house of logs, half hidden by willows at the edge of the forest, and a turn in the path brought into view a log-cabin well chinked with stones and plaster, and with a well-built porch.
Attached to the string and tied by one hind leg was a frog.
That very point Hale was debating with himself as he unavailingly cast his minnow into the swift water and slowly wound it in again.
No, they had just come down to the creek and both they must know already.
"Don't, Dad!" shrieked a voice from the bushes.
The little girl gave a shrill answering cry, but she did not move.
She had never seen so queer a fishing-pole--so queer a fisherman.
Wonderful eyes, too, the little thing had--deep and dark--and how the flame did dart from them when she got angry!
"Who's that--your Mammy?"
"Twusn't no joke," he said shortly.
He was a "raider" sure, she thought now, and he was looking for a "moonshine" still, and the wild little thing in the bushes smiled cunningly--there was no still up that creek--and as he had left his horse below and his gun, she waited for him to come back, which he did, by and by, dripping and soaked to his knees.
"Yes 'tis," he said, shaking his head affirmatively.
"Thank you," said the fisherman stiffly, and the mountaineer turned silently away.
He was pulling the bass to and fro now through the water, tiring him out--drowning him--stepping backward at the same time, and, a moment later, the fish slid easily out of the edge of the water, gasping along the edge of a low sand-bank, and the fisherman reaching down with one hand caught him in the gills.
"Hit hain't!"
In a moment he had cast a minnow into the pool and waded out into the water up to his hips.
The laurel and rhododendron still reeked with dew in the deep, ever-shaded ravine. The ferns drenched his stirrups, as he brushed through them, and each dripping tree-top broke the sunlight and let it drop in tent-like beams through the shimmering undermist.
"JOHN Hale, except to my friends." He looked hard at the old man.
He had not moved hand or foot and he said nothing, but his mouth was set hard and his bewildered blue eyes had a glint in them that the mountaineer did not at the moment see.
When you git through fishin' come up to the house right up the creek thar an' I'll give ye a dram."
"Where?"
And her hair--it was exactly like the gold-bronze on the wing of a wild turkey that he had shot the day before.
"What--"
The fisherman looked around and was almost startled by the fierce gaze of his questioner.
"You make me nervous."
"Where is he?"
He loved old people, and two kinder faces he had never seen--two gentler voices he had never heard.
The mountaineer dropped the butt of his gun to the ground and laughed.
He pulled, missed the strike, and wound in.
The boy was using the switch as a goad and driving the frog as an ox, and he was as earnest as though both were real.
Did you think you could scare me?" The mountaineer stared in genuine surprise.
Then she saw him untie the queer "gun" on his saddle, pull it out of a case and--her eyes got big with wonder--take it to pieces and make it into a long limber rod.
And still she stared.
I reckon you don't know who I be?"
Her eyes fell at the ancient banter, but she lifted them straightway and stared again.
A giant mountaineer stood on the bank above him, with a Winchester in the hollow of his arm.
It was surely very queer, for the man didn't put his rod over his shoulder and walk ashore, as did the mountaineers, but stood still, winding something with one hand, and again the fish would flash into the air and then that humming would start again while the fisherman would stand quiet and waiting for a while--and then he would begin to wind again.
"That's a bright little girl of yours--What did she mean by telling you not to hurt me?"
The frog hopped several times.
The boy's breast heaved and his dirty fingers clenched tight around the whittled stick.
On one side he had left the earth yellow with the coming noon, but it was still morning as he went down on the other side.
She merely stared him straight in the eye and he smiled again.
How did that old man know his name?
The mountaineer's bushy brows came together across the bridge of his nose and his voice rumbled like distant thunder.
Down with the tyrant!
Then he shuddered.
These wars build up peace.
There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless than in the neighboring streets.
What was the good of living, and why should he live now?
They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at their own well-being; this dazzling awakens them.
Below, by the lights of the torch, which was thrust between the paving-stones, this head could be vaguely distinguished.
The war of the street was suddenly transfigured by some unfathomable inward working of his soul, before the eye of his thought.
It was the reflection of the torch which was burning in the Corinthe barricade.
She had gone knowing that; this meant that it pleased her that Marius should die.
The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but of a holy idea.
It was the interior of the barricade.
All at once he raised it.
And then he fell to weeping bitterly.
should he slip away after having come and peeped into the barricade?
An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down.
This was horrible.
There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,--and therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects and discuss theses.
And then, it was clear that she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus without warning, without a word, without a letter, although she knew his address!
No; no more than Louis XVI.
There is a divine right in Louis XVI., there is because a Bourbon in Louis Philippe; both represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right, and, in order to clear away universal insurrection, they must be combated; it must be done, France being always the one to begin.
There is a widening of the sphere of thought which is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to be near death.
This was the situation of Marius' mind.
The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.
He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted.
What was there that was degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about to begin?
But what was he to do?
Overhead, at the small window in the third story Marius descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to be singularly attentive.
All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery recurred to him in throngs, but without troubling him.
Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped his head.
Marius directed his steps towards that red light.
Marius had but a step more to take.
He entered it.
Multitudes have a tendency to accept the master.
For the passers-by now amounted to a crowd.
From that instant forth he encountered nothing more.
Marius thrust aside the bar which had so often allowed him to pass, emerged from the garden, and said: "I will go."
Marius left the horses behind him.
Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages", motionless and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came as stones in the midst of running water.
He approached, it took on a form.
The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.
BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW
Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect. The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their melancholy folds.
The necessity was the same for both.
It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should prove itself a revolution or a skirmish.
A situation so extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.
Some one passed close to him at a run.
Entering a street was like entering a cellar.
There the glance fell into an abyss.
He found himself most opportunely armed, as he had Javert's pistols with him.
Only the solitary and diminishing rows of lanterns could be seen vanishing into the street in the distance.
Although not one of them was walking, a dull trampling was audible in the mire.
A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.
He wished to die; the opportunity presented itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand in the darkness offered him the key.
There the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their half-open doors, people were walking about, the street lanterns were lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the windows were lighted as usual.
After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits of the troops; he found himself in something startling.
He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along the walls of the houses.
All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly drawing in and around the insurrection.
This multitude undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom.
No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable.
He took a few steps.
Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased. The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere, and maintained order, that is to say, night.
He set out at rapid pace.
Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more.
No more light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of guns, no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death. Where?
It had passed and vanished.
There circulation ceased.
At dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot.
The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but darkness.
The necessary tactics of insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains.
The Government understood this as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it.
No one could be seen to speak in this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull, deep murmur.
For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of flight.
A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him that he could make out something white in front of him.
he could not have told.
The only possible issue thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors.
Hence nothing was stirring.
This shot still betokened life.
Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid in his brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate after those two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love, overwhelmed at once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one desire remaining, to make a speedy end of all.
The light was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed.
In this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into contact.
There could be descried piles of guns, moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking.
CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS
There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses; and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror.
It was an overturned wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones scattered and piled up.
Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were equal.
As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what men were about to do.
Its whisperings had the hoarse accent of a vibration.
No curious observer passed that limit.
All was over.
In proportion as he left the Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows, the shops were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds, the street grew sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased in density.
He continued to advance.
How?
These melancholy openings which take place in the gloom before despair, are tempting.
There the rabble ended and the army began.
"Then Mr. Woods wasn't here all through dinner, Jackson?"
"Oh, his alibi is good of course, because he was around the club all that evening.
"I didn't know what we might find.
Grogan, the old bartender was there alone.
He had absolutely everything in his favor."
All the rest was apparently delirium.
"There's one thing I can't make out," I stated, "and that is the strange cry of my sister in her delirium.
If the man who fired those shots used this tree, I thought we might find an empty cartridge or two. There ought to be at least some broken twigs or something to show that he was up there, but I find nothing at all."
"Are you sure of that, George?"
Has Woods an aeroplane?"
"When was the first time you did see him, Jackson?"
"Only one or two of the gentlemen, sir.
There was Mr. Farnsworth and Mr. Brown and I think Mr. Woods."
Finally he broke into a wail.
It's going to hit us,' she called out, and I would be willing to swear it had something to do with the murder."
"Are you sure Mr. Woods was in here?"
The boy was trembling.
For a moment I saw red as I pictured Jim, helpless before approaching death.
"Still, the fact that the tree is where it is, makes the theory plausible."
The coroner thought a moment, then turned to me.
But her first weird cry had to do with the murder, I'm sure."
Those bullet holes in the back of the car were fired from above and behind the machine.
"There's our tree."
I remember Mr. Farnsworth and Mr. Brown. There were probably some others.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
We stopped the car and scrambled through the thorny bushes that lined the road.
He could have come down within fifty feet of the ground and followed that car, pumping bullets into it all the way.
"What time was he through dinner, do you know?"
"I don't know.
"What else did she say?"
The reason I think Mr. Woods was here was because he called my attention to the fact a few nights after the murder.
'Look out, Jim!
THE ANSWER
"Everything!
The coroner and I drove out to the bridge that afternoon and I must admit I was mighty poor company.
Mr. Woods said, in view of the fact that the murderer hadn't been found, almost any one might be accused.
"What did you expect to find here?" I asked.
It is one of the simplest tricks of a pilot's repertoire.
That she should risk her reputation to run after that man was inexplicable, but it was just like a woman.
It was done a hundred, yes, a thousand times in the war.
"The clever devil!
"Do you remember waiting on Mr. Frank Woods two weeks ago last Thursday night?" I asked.
I went into the house by the back way to avoid meeting people and asked for Jackson.
Well, if she could get along without me, I could get along without her. I'm the easiest going person in the world, but when it comes to allowing the girl you are practically engaged to, to make a fool of herself over another man, I won't stand for it.
"No.
What's that got to do with it?"
Who owns an aeroplane around here?"
An aeroplane has such speed that it was easy for Woods to fashion an ingenious alibi to account for every minute of his time on the night of the murder, but there must be some holes in it; there always is in a manufactured alibi.
These thoughts held my attention all the way out.
I'm sorry, for when I saw this tree, I thought we'd struck the right track."
High overhead we heard the droning of an aeroplane and we both stopped to gaze at it.
They slanted down but not sidewise.
There were a few gentlemen in here and they were talking of Mr. Felderson's death.
Mary's unreasonableness, her stupid obstinacy, when she knew she was wrong and I was right, her willingness to break our friendship at the first opportunity, gave me little room to think of anything else.
She begged forgiveness for some fancied wrong, and repeated that a certain man was not guilty of dishonesty.
We jumped into my car and drove rapidly to the club.
"Yes, but how are we going to prove it?" I asked.
"Well, no, sir, not exactly.
The darky scratched his head.
The bullets fired from above and behind. The number of bullets fired.
He shook his head.
"I've got it!"
"What do you mean, George?"
When we reached the tree, the coroner examined the ground around it carefully.
I shook hands with him and left.
"That's up to us now.
"What time was it when he came back?" I asked.
"He could get one easy enough."
Look over there!
"Nothing that seemed to refer to the accident.
As he saw it the coroner gave a grunt of satisfaction.
Suddenly the coroner clapped me on the shoulder.
"He was a military pilot in the French army and is the head of an aeroplane firm, but I don't think he has an aeroplane here."
It has been true from Pandora to Pankhurst.
And this was the last story he ever told:
They were the pilgrims who had come for the Passover feast.
"Then these people will be surprised, and say, 'Lord when did we ever do anything for you?'
The excitement spread through the city.
The city was crowded with travelers from all over Palestine, and from foreign countries too.
You will have to decide about that for yourselves.
Jesus got on the donkey, and started for Jerusalem.
The crowds saw the procession coming.
How can you escape the punishment which God is bringing upon you?"
The craftiest men in Jerusalem could not think what to do.
That was all they talked about.
You are like graves with rotting bodies in them, which people walk over without knowing what is underneath. Nobody knows how bad you are.
When they had almost reached the city, the disciples began to shout.
They were at their wits' end to know how to get rid of Jesus.
They untied it, and led it away.
"Who is this?" they asked.
They hated him, and they were afraid of him.
And Jesus still had not said anything that he could be punished for.
"What will you give me," Judas said, "if I turn Jesus over to you?"
They heard the shouting, and they understood the words.
Once they came and asked, "Should we pay taxes to the Romans?"
In the evening, Jesus and the disciples returned to Bethany to sleep.
The man I kiss will be the one you want."
You snakes!
"Watch out for the scribes and the Pharisees," he told the people, "and don't be like them.
They shouted the words of a psalm: "'Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.'"
These were his Father's people and his people.
Some of the crowds began to shout with the disciples.
"Send soldiers when I tell you," Judas said.
"What right have you to do these things?
"Look, the whole world has gone after him!"
They were afraid of the Romans too.
"Woe to you Pharisees!
I was sick, and in prison, and you came to visit me!'
But he said a great deal to make his enemies angry.
The priests and the rulers wanted to kill Jesus.
But now they could tell the whole world, for Jesus wanted everyone to know.
He left the Pharisees and went into the Temple, where people were making their gifts to God.
With many words and stories he taught the people who thronged around him on the days of that week.
"We shall have to do away with Jesus quietly," someone said.
I had nothing to wear, and you gave me clothes.
There was a man's picture stamped on one side of it.
They shouted, "Hosanna!"
There was a knock at the door.
A great cry of "Hosanna!" went ringing down the street.
Every day that week, Jesus came and taught in the Temple.
"Thirty pieces of silver you shall have," they cried, "if you give us Jesus!"
This was too much for the priests of the temple, and all the important men who ruled Jerusalem.
They were glad that they did not have to be quiet any longer.
His name?
Several times his enemies tried to trick him into saying something that would turn the people against him, but Jesus always had an answer which silenced them.
It was a royal welcome.
Then he drove the sheep and the cattle out after the men.
Jesus called his disciples to him, and said:
The next day Jesus returned to Jerusalem and again went to the Temple. This time he carried a whip.
It seemed to the people as if the Messiah might have come at last.
Others were selling doves for sacrifice.
For I was hungry, and thirsty, and naked, and sick, and in prison, and you did nothing at all for me.'
"Yes," the others agreed, "we can't wait till the day of the Passover. If we should do anything to him on that day, there would be a riot."
I was a stranger, and you took me into your homes.
The Assyrian war-lord, however, proved to be too powerful a rival.
One kingdom had its capital at Hamath and another at Carchemish on the Euphrates.
Ashur-natsir-pal's own account of the operations runs as follows:--
In 843 B.C.
The Assyrian war-lord afterwards forced several Nairi kings to acknowledge him as their overlord.
He waged war against Israel, and Baasha was compelled to abandon the building of the fortifications at Ramah.
It was promoted by the Nairi tribes, and even supported by some Assyrian officials.
Ahab was evidently an ally of Sidon as well as a vassal of Damascus, for he married the notorious princess Jezebel, the daughter of the king of that city State.
The time seemed ripe for Assyrian conquest.
Thereafter the Assyrian monarch turned towards the south-west and attacked the Hittite State of Hamath and the Aramaean State of Damascus.
For over half a century after this disaster Babylonia was a province of Assyria.
"Its pasture lands, known as the 'Jaif', are renowned", he wrote, "for their rich and luxuriant herbage.
Then Tela was attacked.
Flowers of every hue enamelled the meadows; not thinly scattered over the grass as in northern climes, but in such thick and gathering clusters that the whole plain seemed a patchwork of many colours.
Edom threw off the yoke of Judah and became independent.
He achieved so complete a victory that he captured the Babylonian general and 3000 of his followers.
Jehoshaphat did not again come into conflict with Damascus.
After a reign of two years Ahaziah was succeeded by Joram.
The Assyrian sculptures of this period lack the technical skill, the delicacy and imagination of Sumerian and Akkadian art, but they are full of energy, dignified and massive, and strong and lifelike.
The bleating of sheep and lowing of cattle, at first faint, became louder as the flocks returned from their pastures and wandered amongst the tents.
Layard excavated the emperor's palace and dispatched to London, among other treasures of antiquity, the sublime winged human-headed lions which guarded the entrance, and many bas reliefs.
Assyrian colonies were established in various districts for strategical purposes, and officials supplanted the petty kings in certain of the northern city States.
The Babylonian camp was captured, and the prisoners taken by the Assyrians included 5000 footmen, 200 horsemen, and 100 chariots
Over the pure cloudless sky was the glow of the last light.
There are traces of Phoenician influence in the art of this period.
The Israelites issued forth from Samaria and scattered the attacking force.
Accustomed for generations to desert warfare, they were fearless warriors.
Ere Jeroboam died, however, "Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead. In his days the land was quiet ten years.
After reigning about twenty-four years, Baasha of Israel died in 886 B.C. and was succeeded by his son Elah who came to the throne "in the twenty and sixth year of Asa".
Another revolt broke out in the Kirkhi district between the upper reaches of the Tigris and the southwestern shores of Lake Van.
I reared a column of the living and a column of heads.
For he took away the altars of the strange gods, and the high places, and brake down the images, and cut down the groves.
In the evening, after the labour of the day, I often sat at the door of my tent, giving myself up to the full enjoyment of that calm and repose which are imparted to the senses by such scenes as these....
The resisting power of the Syrian allies, however, was being greatly weakened by internal revolts, which may have been stirred up by Assyrian emissaries.
Judah and Israel thus became subject to Damascus, and had to recognize the king of that city as arbiter in all their disputes.
The former, the rightful heir, appealed for help to Shalmaneser, and that monarch at once hastened to assert his authority in the southern kingdom.
Artists and artisans were also provided by the vassals of Assyria.
His chosen heir, Shamshi-Adad VII, had to continue the struggle for the throne for two more years.
Then the shepherd hears a warning voice which comes and goes like the wind, saying: "If the horn is blown once again, the world will be upset altogether".
He was followed by his son Ahab, who ascended the throne "in the thirty and eighth year of Asa king of Judah....
In the north he had to drive back invading bands of the Muski.
Marduk-zakir-shum afterwards reigned over Babylonia as the vassal of Assyria, and Shalmaneser, his overlord, made offerings to the gods at Babylon, Borsippa, and Cuthah.
Apparently Israel and Judah desired to throw off the yoke of Damascus, which was being kept constantly on the defence by Assyria.
The watchman on the tower of Jezreel saw Jehu and his company approaching and informed Joram, who twice sent out a messenger to enquire, "Is it peace?" Neither messenger returned, and the watchman informed the wounded monarch of Israel, "He came even unto them, and cometh not again; and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously".
And Asa did that which was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God.
He found it more profitable, indeed, to extend his territories into Asia Minor.
The northern frontier of Assyria was continually menaced by groups of independent hill States which would have been irresistible had they operated together against a common enemy, but were liable to be extinguished when attacked in detail.
He also extended and redecorated the royal palace at Nineveh, and devoted much attention to the temples.
And commanded Judah to seek the Lord God of their fathers and to do the law and the commandment.
Tribute poured in from the subject States.
No fewer than thirty-two expeditions were recorded on his famous black obelisk.
Four years after Ahab began to reign, Asa died at Jerusalem and his son Jehoshaphat was proclaimed king of Judah.
Rehoboam was succeeded by his son Abijah, who shattered the power of Jeroboam, defeating that monarch in battle after he was surrounded as Rameses II had been by the Hittite army.
When the city of Kinabu was captured, no fewer than 3000 prisoners were burned alive, the unfaithful governor being flayed.
Assyrian art found expression in delineating the outward form rather than in striving to create a "thing of beauty" which is "a joy for ever".
"Here's a paper for you, Dick," he said; "you can look it over when you drop in at Delmonico's for your breakfast.
And actually, before the sun went down, two letters had been written and sent in two different directions--one speeding out of New York harbor on a mail steamer on its way to England, and the other on a train carrying letters and passengers bound for California.
The pictures he spoke of were on the front page, and Dick was staring at one of them with his eyes and mouth open, and his sharp face almost pale with excitement.
"SILAS HOBBS."
"Done it!" cried Dick, with disgust.
He had a shabby office near Dick's stand, and every morning Dick blacked his boots for him, and quite often they were not exactly water-tight, but he always had a friendly word or a joke for Dick.
"Mother of Claimant (Lady Fauntleroy)."
"Never mind," he said.
So no more at present
The story was too interesting to be passed over lightly, and it was talked of a great deal.
You ought to become familiar with the nobility and gentry, Dick.
"At Newport?
There were so many versions of it that it would have been an edifying thing to buy all the papers and compare them.
"And," said Mr. Hobbs, "say what your time's worth a' hour and look into this thing thorough, and I'LL pay the damage,--Silas Hobbs, corner of Blank street, Vegetables and Fancy Groceries."
But there really was nothing they could do but each write a letter to Cedric, containing assurances of their friendship and sympathy.
XIII
And in less than five minutes from that time he was tearing through the streets on his way to Mr. Hobbs and the corner store.
Blest if I didn't like that little feller fust-rate."
Dick actually forgot to grin.
"Yrs truly,
"What's to pay, Dick?" said the young man.
The very next morning, one of Dick's customers was rather surprised. He was a young lawyer just beginning practice--as poor as a very young lawyer can possibly be, but a bright, energetic young fellow, with sharp wit and a good temper.
OF course, as soon as the story of Lord Fauntleroy and the difficulties of the Earl of Dorincourt were discussed in the English newspapers, they were discussed in the American newspapers.
Mr. Hobbs was immensely impressed by this suggestion and Dick's business capacity.
Im going to look this thing up.
"I know her!
"Where did you meet her, Dick?" he said.
"Look at that woman in the picture!
Mr. Hobbs was almost overwhelmed by his sense of responsibility, and Dick was all alive and full of energy.
"Hello!" exclaimed Mr. Hobbs.
That particular morning, when he put his foot on the rest, he had an illustrated paper in his hand--an enterprising paper, with pictures in it of conspicuous people and things.
And leaving the store in the care of a substitute, he struggled into his coat and marched down-town with Dick, and the two presented themselves with their romantic story in Mr. Harrison's office, much to that young man's astonishment.
Fine young woman, too,--lots of hair,--though she seems to be raising rather a row.
He pointed to the picture, under which was written:
"That's so!" he replied.
It's BEN'S boy,--the little chap she hit when she let fly that plate at me."
The first persons to be written to are Dick's brother and the Earl of Dorincourt's family lawyer."
Professor Dick Tipton had always been a sharp boy, and earning his living in the streets of a big city had made him still sharper.
Dick really did look as if something tremendous had happened.
Mr. Hobbs could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses when he looked across the counter and saw Dick rush in with the paper in his hand.
"What has paralyzed you?"
"Well," said Mr. Harrison, "it will be a big thing if it turns out all right, and it will be almost as big a thing for me as for Lord Fauntleroy; and, at any rate, no harm can be done by investigating. It appears there has been some dubiousness about the child.
"This here calls for lawyers."
I believe its a put up job and them thats done it ought to be looked after sharp.
Hello!
He had just finished looking it over, and when the last boot was polished, he handed it over to the boy.
"DICK."
Let's ax him what we'd better do.
They wrote those letters as soon as they could after receiving the news; and after having written them, they handed them over to each other to be read.
Mr. Hobbs dropped into his seat.
"Her!" said Dick.
The boy was out of breath with running; so much out of breath, in fact, that he could scarcely speak as he threw the paper down on the counter.
And what I write to say is two things.
Mr. Hobbs read so much about it that he became quite bewildered.
They found out what an important personage an Earl of Dorincourt was, and what a magnificent income he possessed, and how many estates he owned, and how stately and beautiful was the Castle in which he lived; and the more they learned, the more excited they became.
That's what you look at!
And after the store was closed that evening, Mr. Hobbs and Dick sat in the back-room and talked together until midnight.
"Look at it!" panted Dick.
One said he was no relation to the Earl of Dorincourt at all, but was a small impostor who had sold newspapers and slept in the streets of New York before his mother imposed upon the family lawyer, who came to America to look for the Earl's heir.
He poured it all forth as if in one sentence.
He stood on the wharf and waved his cap.
I'm going to begin to take pictures right straight off." Then she stopped and looked at Adela.
Oh, here is a splendid group!
Polly took the time to study her headgear.
"It did, Jasper, go right straight down in the grass just like yours and Polly's."
"Oh, see, Jasper is calling us."
Whiz--spin--went the coins, to fall into the thick stubby grass on the bank.
"Well, it's enough to make any one step backward to see such funny clothes; and they are hay-making, Adela Gray, as sure as you live."
"Yes, so did I," said Polly.
And they look as hard as a drum."
But the boys racing along in advance soon discovered this successful trick, and completely swarmed around her, howling dreadfully, so she hastened off, happy in her prize, which she huddled up in her gown as she ran.
"Why, that's one of the things I specially wanted to see."
"Will he, Polly?" asked Phronsie, in a rapture; "and do you think he has got any little girls?"
Jasper followed the direction of Polly's finger.
"They want some stuivers," cried Jasper.
"So it did, Pet.
I must get a good picture of those girls raking hay." Polly ran off a few steps and sat down on a log to focus.
"Wedding clothes?" asked Mrs. Fisher, speaking very slowly.
"They don't know what you are saying, my boy," said old Mr. King, laughing heartily at the performance, "and they wouldn't mind you in the least if they did."
"And don't you ever do that again." And the hand was withdrawn, and the girl clattered off as fast as she could run in her wooden shoes.
And he looks hungry enough."
"She won't understand any better than the boys," said old Mr. King. "You forget, children, that these youngsters don't know our language."
The Marken girls happened to look up, and immediately whirled around and presented their backs to her.
"Oh, that was nothing," said Polly, "such a little bit of a while doesn't count."
"At any rate, for now."
"There, that's my last picture," he declared.
"I got them," said Polly, running back in triumph to Jasper.
They smiled and nodded, showing all their teeth, and the mother took the littlest baby, for there seemed to be a very generous number of the smaller members of the family, and sat down with it in her lap on the rickety step.
"I'll leave that to you, Polly."
Come, Phronsie--goodness me!" as he saw how she was occupied.
But some one of them always got the money.
"That's capital," said Jasper, in huge satisfaction, pouring the coins into the mother's lap, where they rolled underneath the fat baby.
"Come, children,"--Grandpapa emerged from the little old house,--"we must hurry on, else we sha'n't get through this island.
"Take care, Polly, you almost stepped off backward down the bank," warned Adela, pulling her back, as they got off the steamboat and stopped a bit to look around.
"Don't be sick, Grandpapa," she wailed, struggling with her tears.
He walked up to the group and held out his hand, then pointed to his kodak.
XIV
"To be sure," said Jasper.
Phronsie dropped the pudgy little hand, and threw herself into old Mr. King's arms.
"Didn't you suppose they would be?" answered Adela, composedly.
"I suppose not," said Jasper in chagrin.
"Now, Adela, be good and listen to reason."
So Jasper and Polly threw the bits next time in the other direction.
"Well, we must give her some, and that's a fact." The small girl kept on at a dog-trot along the bank, her eyes fixed on the wonderful people who tossed out such magic wealth, and holding out her arms and singing her shrill song.
"Well, maybe he has some; we'll think so, anyway," Polly answered.
I'm afraid he will be sick, Phronsie, if he is unhappy."
"Look out, Phronsie!" exclaimed Jasper.
But when the money was thrown, she was always a bit too late, and the other children, scrambling and scuffling, had pounced upon it, and had made off with it.
"Yes, and I took a picture of the saucy girl while she was trying to stop yours," said Jasper.
As quick as a flash Polly focussed again, and was just touching the button, when a hand came in front of her kodak, and she saw the grinning face of a Marken girl under its pot-hook of hair and with the long, dangling curl on one side, close to her own.
"Dear me, did I?" said Polly.
"I thought you had taken your last picture, Jasper," said Polly, bursting into a laugh.
they've eyes just like birds!" exclaimed Parson Henderson; "to think of finding anything in that thick grass."
"It made me happy in the first place because you thought of me, and then, just think, Pet, that poor sailor, how glad he will be to take it home."
"Why didn't we think of it before?"
"Let them alone for that," laughed old Mr. King; "their wits are sharpened by practice."
Jasper King, just look at Phronsie!"
"Oh, one more!
"Well, let us take pictures as fast as we can," suggested Jasper, "and then when we do come up with Adela, why you'll have yours done."
"Well, it can't be helped." So she was just going to get up from her log, when the girls, thinking from her attitude that she had given up the idea of taking a picture of them, turned back to their work.
"What a bother," exclaimed Jasper, "it is to have so many different languages, anyway!"
"Isn't this just richness?" exclaimed Polly, gazing all about her in an ecstasy.
"Your stuivers went into the water.
A variegated group of natives was near by, watching her intently.
"Oh, the mean little beggars!"
"She had it at the 'Model Farm,'" said Jasper, by way of comfort, for Polly's face fell.
There sat Phronsie on a grassy bank a little above them, with one of the fattest Marken babies in her lap.
"Well, it's funny anyway," she said, "that all the women and girls dress alike in those queer gowns in two parts, and those embroidered jackets over their waists, and those caps and horrible pot-hooks and long curls."
THE ISLAND OF MARKEN
Well, now, here is another."
"There's a little girl back there and she hasn't any," mourned Phronsie.
And at last the little girl understood by gestures what she could not possibly get into her head by words, so she picked up the skirt of her gown in her sturdy little fists, and one, two, three clinking coins fell safely into it.
"And these houses," continued Polly, squinting up at a crooked row, "all colours--green stripes and black stripes--and, O dear me!
"Put her down, Phronsie; she's ever so much too heavy for you, dear." He put forth a protesting hand, but the tears ran down Phronsie's cheeks and fell on the baby's stiff white cap.
Here, I'll hold you up, then you can throw it farther.
"I didn't investigate," he said, laughing.
As her face came close to my own, I became aware of the humming, crooning sound I had heard before, louder this time.
Look!" And he held out a thin, aristocratic brown hand before my eyes, a hand that shook with nervous excitement.
The long blade swept in an arc, ripped the pale belly of the monster just as he turned to dart away.
"Sorry, Mercer," I muttered.
For a moment she ran after me, rather awkwardly and heavily, but swiftly, nevertheless.
"Then I got out and called on Carson for help.
A milling mass of white forms shot through the water in every direction, searching.
Then, filling my lungs with air again, I pulled myself, by means of the ladder, to the bottom of the pool.
"I believe," replied Mercer, "that she can give us the history of her people, if we can only make her understand what we wish.
It helped jerk me back to the normal.
Then I saw again the beach, with the girl's figure in the pool.
Although I had not spoken to her, she had read and accepted the promise.
Crouching there, so that the water was just above the tawny glory of her hair, she gazed up at us.
What--I glanced at Mercer, and he laughed aloud with pleasure and excitement.
"Fine, Taylor!" he greeted me.
Apparently every bulb in the place was burning.
From somewhere out on the black, heaving Atlantic, the rapid, muffled popping of a speed-boat's exhaust drifted clearly through the night.
Still in our bathing suits we waded out into the ocean, until the waves splashed against our faces.
The pool--and its occupant.
I realized that I saw myself, in short, as she saw me.
She understood, I know she did.
You will, Mercer--you will return her to the sea?"
Then the band set to work.
"At last I thought of you.
Mercer's eyes were dancing.
Heading fearlessly through the darkness, fighting the high seas, still running after the storm of a day or so before, daring a thousand dangers for the sake of the straw-packed bottles they carried.
This was a Warren Mercer I did not know.
When the scene cleared again, it showed the bottom of the sea.
"It worked!" he cried.
Then she became a veritable fury.
But behind her darted a black and swifter shadow--a shark!
The leaves were glistening with condensed moisture; swift drops fell incessantly to the soaking ground below.
"You saw her mother and father, saw their suffering, and the joy her return would bring.
Then, gesturing toward my own head again, and pointing upward. I climbed the ladder.
The other three circular electrodes rested on his forehead and either side of his head.
"If she has," he went on, "it'll make our work very easy."
She did not seem to drink it, but sucked it out of the glass in a single amazing gulp--that's the only word for it.
A strange, dim whirl of pictures swept through my consciousness.
Please! Please!" over and over again.
With a gesture he flung open the door, and I stared, following his glance, down at the great tiled swimming pool.
And so, just as the dawn was breaking, we took her to the shore.
Then the scene cleared again.
Then I had a view of Mercer's face, so terribly distorted it was barely recognizable. Then a kaleidoscopic maze of inchoate scenes, shot through with flashes of vivid, agonizing colors.
Darting swiftly downward her feet spurned the yellow sand, and she shot at her enemy with amazing speed.
But listen, Taylor. I was amazed, and not a little rattled when she came for me.
Understand?"
It was his habit to speak slowly and thoughtfully, in his low, musical voice; even in the midst of our hottest arguments, and we had had many of them, his voice had never lost its calm, unhurried gentleness.
The houses were left behind. Before my consciousness now was only a vague and shadowy expanse of ocean floor, and in the sand dim imprints that marked where the strange people had trod, the vague footprints disappearing in the gloom in the direction from which the little weary band had come.
With him were a man and a woman, and a little girl.
In trying to save her, Mercer had almost killed her.
She would sit there, calm and placid, until one of us entered the water.
Like this."
To me, at least, it was quite clear that Mercer was asking whence they came.
Well, she came at me like a shark, quick as a flash, her teeth showing, her hands tearing like claws through the water.
"You saw why," interrupted Mercer grimly.
I did not reply.
She seemed to propel herself with a sudden mighty thrust of her feet against the bottom; she darted through the water with the speed of an arrow, yet stopped as gently as though she had merely floated there.
Here she is!"
I nodded, my head bowed on my streaming chest.
"I have only three of them; I had planned some three-cornered experiments with you, Carson, and myself.
"Late this afternoon I decided to go for a little walk along the beach," Mercer began.
These were a slimmer race, and whereas the first band had been exceedingly swarthy, these were very fair.
Fixing my eyes on the girl pleadingly, I settled myself by the edge of the pool to await the second and more momentous part of our experiment.
"In God's name, Mercer, what is it?
A great cloud of blood dyed the water.
There are only Carson and myself here, you know, and the job's too big for the two of us." He hurried me across the broad concrete porch and into the house.
Under eight feet of water!"
Carson and I are both very dark, almost swarthy.
Fascinated, I watched her.
I would need something to keep me under water, with my lungs full of air, and I could get out quickly if it were necessary.
All around were strange structures of jagged coral, roughly circular as to base, and rounded on top, resembling very much the igloos of the Eskimos.
The woman's features were torn with grief; the man's lips were set tight with suffering.
I can't describe it...."
"Tell me about it," I said, shaking my head dazedly.
Mercer?
He was wearing a bathrobe, hastily flung on over a damp bathing suit, his bare legs terminating in a pair of disreputable slippers.
Dimly, I could see there a low couch, piled high with soft marine growths.
"You've got your feet on the ground again, Taylor," he commented soothingly.
"You can judge for yourself whether the trip was worth while.
"Bring one of your gadgets over here, Mercer," I called across the pool. "I think I'm making progress."
"I'm going in," I said hoarsely.
He moved the switch from the position marked "Off" to the second contact point, watching me intently, his dark eyes gleaming.
As I had already noticed, her eyes were of unusual size, and I saw now that they were an intense shade of blue, with a pupil of extraordinary proportion. Her nose was well shaped, but the nostrils were slightly flattened, and the orifices were rather more elongated than I had ever seen before.
As she looked up, her eyes unmistakably sought mine, and her smile seemed warm and inviting.
Very nice old chap, Carson, impressive even in his bathing suit.
"There's more you'd like to learn?
One of the occupants of the room was a very old man; his face was wrinkled, and his hair was silvery.
When I climbed the ladder again, she looked after me, smiling confidently.
And in that white bathing suit--yes, I believe she's taken a fancy to you!"
"I ran up and lifted her from the water.
God!
I think I kissed her.
The man and the woman came up, and I looked closely into their faces.
This was not the same band I had seen at first.
So soon as one trouble was overcome another made itself manifest.
Although the Zeppelin is the main stake of the German people in matters pertaining to aerial conquest, other types of airships have not been ignored, as related in another chapter.
The lessons taught by one disaster were taken to heart, and arrangements to prevent the recurrence thereof incorporated in the succeeding craft. Unfortunately, however, as soon as one defect was remedied another asserted itself.
It is quite true that each astounding achievement has been attended by an equally stupendous accident, but that is accepted as a mere incidental detail by the faithful Teutonic nation.
One of the motors went wrong, and the longitudinal stability was found to be indifferent.
But as it approached the ground, Nature, as if infuriated at the conquest, rose up in rebellion.
The intimation that other Powers had approached the Count for the acquisition of his idea became known far and wide, together with the circumstance that he had unequivocally refused all offers.
Unshaken by this adverse criticism, Germany rests assured that by means of its Zeppelins it will achieve that universal supremacy which it is convinced is its Destiny.
It was a catastrophe that would have completely vanquished many an inventor, but the Count was saved the gall of defeat.
Germany was in advance of the world.
The trials with this vessel commenced on November 30th, 1905, but ill-luck had not been eluded.
Then a slight mishap demanded attention, but was speedily repaired, and was ignored officially as being too trivial to influence the main issue.
The crucial test was essayed on August 5th, 1908.
All the imperfections incidental to the previous craft had been eliminated, while the ship followed improved lines in its mechanical and structural details.
Another Zeppelin was built and it created a world's record.
The airship was 414 feet in length by 38 feet in diameter, was equipped with 17 gas balloons having an aggregate capacity of 367,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, was equipped with two 85 horse-power motors driving four propellers, and displaced 9 tons.
It was this persistent revelation of the unexpected which caused another period of indifference towards his invention. Probably nothing more would have been heard of the Zeppelin after this last accident had it not been for the intervention of the Prussian Government at the direct instigation of the Kaiser, who had now taken Count Zeppelin under his wing.
Although the Zeppelin was accepted as a perfect machine it has never been possible to disperse the atmosphere of disaster with which it has been enveloped from the first.
Many vivid prophecies of the forthcoming flights by Zeppelin have been uttered, and it is quite probable that more than one will be fulfilled, but success will be attributable rather to accident than design.
Certainly it has placed many notable flights to its credit.
But the Zeppelin must not be under-rated.
The vessel was brought down, and was to be anchored, but the Fates ruled otherwise.
Victory appeared within measurable distance: the arduous toil of many patient years was about to be rewarded.
But misfortune still pursued him.
This blind child-like faith has been responsible for the establishment and development of the Zeppelin factories.
The result was that the whole of the money collected by his hard work was expended before the ship could take to the air.
A strong wind caught the ungainly airship, she dipped her nose into the water, and as the motor was set going she was driven deeper into the lake, the vessel only being saved by hurried deflation.
The Count was hailed by his august master as "The greatest German of the twentieth century," and in this appreciation the populace wholeheartedly concurred.
With this capital a third ship was taken in hand, and in 1905 it was launched.
Another craft was built, larger than its predecessors, and equipped with two motors developing 170 horse-power.
The seeds so carefully planted by the "Most High of Prussia" now bore fruit. The German nation sympathised with the indomitable inventor, appreciated his genius, and promptly poured forth a stream of subscriptions to enable him to build another vessel.
He could forge ahead untrammelled by anxiety and worry.
They have been fostered upon a smaller but equally effective scale.
Here was a means of obtaining the mastery of the air: a formidable engine of invasion and aerial attack had been perfected.
A sudden squall struck the unwieldy monster.
The King of Wurtemberg took a personal interest in his subject's uphill struggle, and the Wurtemberg Government granted him the proceeds of a lottery.
The Parseval is pronounced by experts to be the finest expression of aeronautical engineering so far as Teuton effort is concerned.
Accidents were of almost daily occurrence.
A further crash and blasting of cherished hopes appeared imminent, but at this moment another Royal personage came to the inventor's aid.
The trials were fairly satisfactory, but inconclusive.
It stimulated financial support, and the second airship was taken in hand.
His flight, which was remarkable, inasmuch as he had covered 380 miles within 24 hours, including two unavoidable descents, struck the Teuton imagination.
A strong wind caught her during the night and she was speedily reduced to indistinguishable scrap.
The airship was within sight of home when it had to descend owing to the development of another motor fault.
Consequently the Grand Idea must be supported with unbounded enthusiasm.
It remained aloft for 38 hours, during which time it covered 690 miles, and, although it came to grief upon alighting, by colliding with a tree, the final incident passed unnoticed.
At Friedrichshafen the facilities are adequate to produce two of these vessels per month, while another factory of a similar capacity has been established at Berlin. Unfortunately such big craft demand large docks to accommodate them, and in turn a large structure of this character constitutes an easy mark for hostile attack, as the raiding airmen of the Allies have proved very convincingly.
He was striving for the Fatherland, and his unselfish patriotism appealed to one and all.
Despite catastrophe the inventor wrestled gamely with his project.
On June 20th, 1908, at 8:26 a.m. the craft ascended and remained aloft for 12 hours, during which time it made an encouraging circular tour.
He could show you a newspaper of almost every month--nay, almost every week, since newspapers were first published in America.
The war ended.
Not at all.
As soon as I arrived, I went forthwith to the stall where my son was kept; he could not return my embraces, but received them in such a manner, as fully satisfied me he was my son.
Though I knew not the calf was my son, yet I could not forbear being moved at the sight of him.
Her barrenness did not effect any change in my love; I still treated her with much kindness and affection.
I leave you to judge how much I was surprised.
I let the knife fall, and told my wife positively that I would have another calf to sacrifice, and not that.
I went immediately to my farmer, to speak to his daughter myself.
I then put the mallet into the farmer's hands, and desired him to take it and sacrifice her himself, for her tears and bellowing pierced my heart.
Her enmity did not stop at this abominable action, but she likewise changed the slave into a cow, and gave her also to my farmer.
rather,' replied she, the calf you bring back is our landlord's son; I laughed for joy to see him still alive, and wept at the remembrance of the sacrifice that was made the other day of his mother, who was changed into a cow.
She was only twelve years of age when I married her, so that I may justly say, she ought to regard me equally as her father, her kinsman, and her husband.
Sacrifice that cow; your farmer has not a finer, nor one fitter for the festival." Out of deference to my wife, I came again to the cow, and combating my compassion, which suspended the sacrifice, was going to give her the fatal blow, when the victim redoubling her tears, and bellowing, disarmed me a second time.
At my return, I enquired for the mother and child.
She applied herself to magic, and when she had learnt enough of that diabolical art to execute her horrible design, the wretch carried my son to a desolate place, where, by her enchantments, she changed him into a calf, and gave him to my farmer to fatten, pretending she had bought him.
I was more surprised and affected with this action, than with the tears of the cow.
Before I went, I recommended to my wife, of whom I had no mistrust, the slave and her son, and prayed her to take care of them during my absence, which was to be for a whole year.
I bound her, but as I was going to sacrifice her, she bellowed piteously, and I could perceive tears streaming from her eyes.
My wife, who was present, was enraged at my tenderness, and resisting an order which disappointed her malice, she cried out, "What are you doing, husband?
Take my advice, sacrifice no other calf but that." "Wife," I replied, "I will not sacrifice him, I will spare him, and pray do not you oppose me." The wicked woman had no regard to my wishes; she hated my son too much to consent that I should save him.
I doubt not but in acknowledgment you will make your deliverer your wife, as I have promised." He joyfully consented; but before they married, she changed my wife into a hind; and this is she whom you see here.
As soon as my wife heard me give this order, she exclaimed, "What are you about, husband?
"Your slave," said she, "is dead; and as for your son, I know not what is become of him, I have not seen him this two months." I was afflicted at the death of the slave, but as she informed me my son had only disappeared, I was in hopes he would shortly return. However, eight months passed, and I heard nothing of him.
Yesterday, as I carried back the calf which you would not sacrifice, I perceived she laughed when she saw him, and in a moment after fell a weeping.
My wife being jealous, cherished a hatred for both mother and child, but concealed her aversion so well, that I knew nothing of it till it was too late.
We lived together twenty years, without any children.
The Story of the First Old Man and the Hind.
I leave her to your disposal, only I must pray you not to take her life." "I am going then," answered she, "to treat her as she treated your son." "To this I consent," said I, "provided you first of all restore to me my son."
This seemed to me very extraordinary, and finding myself moved with compassion, I could not find in my heart to give her a blow, but ordered my farmer to get me another.
As to what relates to my wife, I also agree; a person who has been capable of committing such a criminal action, justly deserves to be punished.
"I come," said he, "to communicate to you a piece of intelligence, for which I hope you will return me thanks.
Allow me one word.
But I promise you, that this day twelve months I will return under these trees, to put myself into your hands." "Do you take heaven to be witness to this promise?" said the genie.
"I ask a year," said the merchant; "I cannot in less settle my affairs, and prepare myself to die without regret.
When I have done this, I will come back and submit to whatever you shall please to command." "But," said the genie, "if I grant you the time you ask, I doubt you will never return?"
Will you absolutely take away the life of a poor innocent?" "Yes," replied the genie, "I am resolved."
I would if I could, but I never shall."
It seemed to him as though he would be guilty of falsehood towards the earl if he did so.
"I don't want to be done good to, mamma.
"No, John; it would be a very bad thing.
I have not congratulated her, because I didn't know whether it was a secret.
He would have turned back had he not been aware that his promise to others required that he should persevere.
I like him as well as I can like any one.
"I wasn't very fond of him myself, Hopkins."
"Has she offended you?"
"Mr. John, may I make so bold!" and Hopkins held out a very dirty hand, which Eames of course took, unconscious of the cause of this new affection.
"No, Lily; not quite that."
During this time he considered much whether it would be better for him to ride or walk.
"Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Dale.
"You shall never do that."
But now the attempt had been made, and words had been forced from Lily's lips, the speaking of which would never be forgotten by herself.
"He has just been talking to me, too," said John, "as I came through the squire's garden."
Under such circumstances Eames was too honest a man not to do it, let the difficulties in his way be what they might.
Should he get up boldly and ask Lily to put on her bonnet and come out into the garden?
"Lily, I wonder whether you would come as far as that with me." As the request was made Mrs. Dale looked at her daughter almost beseechingly.
"My dear, there is John Eames," said Mrs. Dale, who had first seen him from the parlour window.
"There is only one thing," said he, still holding her by the hand, but with his face turned from her.
How should he manage to sneak back among them all at the Manor House, crestfallen and abject in his misery?
I hated him ollays; I did indeed, Mr. John, from the first moment when he used to be nigging away at them foutry balls, knocking them in among the rhododendrons, as though there weren't no flower blossoms for next year.
"Do, pray do," said he; "it is a beautiful day for walking."
"I wish it could be otherwise;--I wish it could be otherwise!
He had so proved himself to be a villain that his name might not be so much as mentioned!
"Well, it looks like it, does it not?
"Have a glass of wine before you go."
As every step brought him nearer to her whom he was seeking, he became more and more conscious of the hopelessness of his errand.
"No, no; oh, I would wish to be so kind to you!
You may not come again,--not in this way.
He made us almost cry; he was so pathetic."
"Nay; do not say so.
"Oh, yes; and then I should have to go again with you.
But Crofts was there last night, and if it is a secret he didn't seem to be very careful about keeping it."
"And, John;--I can understand her feeling now; and indeed, I thought all through that you were asking her too soon; but the time may yet come when she will think better of your wishes."
He wasn't a wholesome lover,--not like you are.
"Lily, I have come over here on purpose to speak to you.
Yes; he had failed: and he acknowledged to himself, with bitter reproaches, that he had failed, now and for ever.
"But he is gone.
Everybody knew the errand on which he had gone, and everybody must know of his failure.
When he reached Allington he did not go in through the village and up to the front of the Small House by the cross street, but turned by the church gate and passed over the squire's terrace, and by the end of the Great House through the garden.
"So you're staying at the Manor House," said Lily.
How can it be otherwise?
Of course nothing is settled."
"I am going to walk back to Guestwick," said he.
Crosbie had lost his love!
"Oh, yes; Mary told me.
We will think of each other, John, and pray for each other; and will always love one another.
And then he proposed to order saddle-horses.
He never looked at one as though one were a Christian; did he, Mr. John?"
That ride home along the high road and up to the Manor House stables would, under his present circumstances, have been almost impossible to him. As it was, he did not think it possible that he should return to his place in the earl's house.
Could it be possible that she should ever walk there again with another lover?
Why should he wish to rob me of my daughter?"
"And she is not like other girls," he thought to himself.
"I was always fond of walking," he said.
Of course she had done so, at that time; but, nevertheless, her manner of telling him had seemed to him to be cruel.
If she should give him any hope, he could ride back triumphant as a field-marshal.
When you marry I will tell your wife what an infinite blessing God has given her."
Dear John, I will do anything,--everything for you but that."
She had certainly shown defective judgment in desiring her mother not to leave them alone; and of this Mrs. Dale soon felt herself aware. The thing had to be done, and no little precautionary measure, such as this of Mrs. Dale's enforced presence, would prevent it.
"She has refused me, and it is all over."
"The earl wanted me to ride, but I prefer being on foot when I know the country, as I do here."
THE SECOND VISIT TO THE GUESTWICK BRIDGE.
He was conscious of his hobbledehoyhood,--of that backwardness on his part in assuming manhood which had rendered him incapable of making himself acceptable to Lily before she had fallen into the clutches of Crosbie.
"But it will not be so for ever, Lily."
The path is quite dry now."
A conquering hero, indeed!
It was not only of his late disappointment that he was thinking, but of his whole past life.
Eames was so intent on his own purpose, and so fully occupied with the difficulty of the task before him, that he could hardly receive Mrs. Dale's tidings with all the interest which they deserved. "Unpack them all again," he said.
But he hardly ventured to hope that he might be successful.
But Eames took his advice as being in itself good, and resolved to act upon it.
Is Lily with you, Mrs. Dale?"
"No, mamma, no; what good can it do?
"How do you do, Lily?" We all know the way in which such meetings are commenced.
You know well all that I have got to tell you.
He hardly began to think of what had passed till he had left the squire's house behind him.
And he also had been cruel.
"Yes, I will.
Eames had gone thither impelled by a foolish desire to declare to her his hopeless love, and she had answered him by telling him that she loved Mr. Crosbie better than all the world besides.
But the squire preferred walking, and in this way they were disposed of soon after breakfast.
"If you can be constant in your love you may win her yet.
He made his way out by the front door, and through the churchyard, and in this way on to the field through which he had asked Lily to walk with him.
Nobody dared to oppose Hopkins.
"Is it to be soon?" he asked.
"Yes, she is in the parlour.
That is, if I ever happen to see him.
Lord De Guest had opened his house to him, and had asked all the Dales there, and had offered himself up as a sacrifice at the cruel shrine of a serious dinner-party, to say nothing of that easier and lighter sacrifice which he had made in a pecuniary point of view, in order that this thing might be done.
"I cannot change myself because he is changed.
You are so true and honest!
It will be a joy to you in after years, and not a sorrow.
Tell me, Mr. John, did you give it him well when you got him?
"It would do you good," said Mrs. Dale.
"I'm sure we shall,--if he likes it.
Sir Richmond considered.
That's what she was,--a companion.
And in such long perspectives, the states, governments and institutions of to-day became very temporary-looking and replaceable structures indeed.
We aren't placed.
"The private life," she said, "has a way of coming aboard again."
Yes, I have."
You find out so many things for me that I seem to have been thinking about in a sort of almost invisible half-conscious way.
When Miss Grammont was keenly interested in a conversation, then Belinda had learnt from experience that it was wiser to go off with her devil out of the range of any temptation to interrupt.
Her views about America and about her own place in the world seemed equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.
Devoted to his work.
It is an idea that seizes the imagination.
"You have some sort of work cut out for you," she said abruptly.
The big thing confronts us still.
They were steered to their decisions by people employed, directed or stimulated by "father" and his friends and associates, the owners of America, the real "responsible citizens." Or they fell a prey to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries." But anyhow they were steered.
"But if you won't stay to see!"
If people dare."
Both Miss Grammont and Miss Seyffert displayed an intelligent interest in their food.
Sensible little piggywiggys.
"Incidentally," he smiled, "I want to get a lasso over the neck of that very forcible and barbaric person, your father.
Section 2
After lunch they had all gone out to the stones and the wall.
"He's a most interesting man," he said.
I am tired of seeing all the world doing the same.
I am tired of a world in which there is nothing great but great disasters.
We're spenders and wasters--not always from choice.
Their ways of thought harmonized.
"So we just live like pigs.
Dr. Martineau was forgotten.
She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building.
Don't you?"
She would some day, she laughed, be swimming in oil and such like property.
She gave no sketches of her idiosyncrasies, and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her contemporaries about herself.
At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was disposed to agree with father upon that.
"But before--?"
For a little while he thought confusedly of the collapse of his expedition into the secret places of his own heart with Dr. Martineau, and then his prepossession with Miss Grammont resumed possession of his mind.
And he's writing a book which has saturated him in these ideas. Only two nights ago we stood here and talked about it.
It's refreshing to meet you."
I want it as my culminating want.
"I don't mind if only he lashes out openly in the sight of all men."
"So that I go about," she added, "like someone who is looking for something.
But controlling father--as distinguished from managing him!" She reviewed some private and amusing memories.
He'll lash out at you."
"Now you tell me of it," she said with a smile, "I do."
I'd like to know if it's not jabbing too searching a question at you--what you have found."
Sir Richmond walked thoughtfully down the platform towards the exit.
But it was remarkable to find a young woman seeing it like that.
We want bright little lives of our own."
"Ought you to leave me to it?" smiled Sir Richmond.
But--... it frightens me.
I do not know why it should be so, but I am compelled by something in my nature to want to serve this idea of a new age for mankind.
She considered that.
"That can't go on," she said.
Here is something mankind can attempt, that we can attempt."
"I don't complain that you are clear and positive.
It didn't exist.
Section 3
You will find my father extremely difficult, but some of our younger men would love it.
COMPANIONSHIP
But passion was a thing men and women fell back upon when they had nothing else in common.
"And," she went on; "there are American women who'd love it too.
"Not quite that!"
This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico.
"That isn't going on," she said with an effect of conclusive decision.
Her interest in Sir Richmond's schemes for a scientific world management of fuel was therefore, she realized, a very direct one.
She had had plentiful opportunities for observation in their homes and her own.
Gunter Lake, the big banker, she knew particularly well, because, it seemed, she had been engaged or was engaged to marry him.
We have a Fuel Commission in London with rather wide powers of enquiry into the whole world problem of fuel.
This young woman had real firmness of character to back up her free and independent judgments.
He despised and distrusted women generally, and it was evident he had made it quite clear to her how grave an error it was on her part to persist in being a daughter and not a son.
For the better part of forty hours, Sir Richmond had either been talking to Miss Grammont, or carrying on imaginary conversations with her in her absence, or sleeping and dreaming dreams in which she never failed to play a part, even if at times it was an altogether amazing and incongruous part.
It was not so much that she felt they had to be left together that made her do this as her own consciousness of being possessed by a devil who interrupted conversations.
She evidently classified voters into the irresponsible who just had votes and the responsible who also had a considerable amount of property as well.
"I found it refreshing to meet Martineau." A twinge of conscience about Dr. Martineau turned Sir Richmond into a new channel.
He felt that this time at any rate he was not being deceived by the outward shows of a charming human being.
For a number of trivial reasons Sir Richmond found himself ascribing the project of this New Age almost wholly to Dr. Martineau, and presenting it as a much completer scheme than he was justified in doing.
They had agreed by a tacit consent to a common conception of the world they desired as a world scientifically ordered, an immense organization of mature commonsense, healthy and secure, gathering knowledge and power for creative adventures as yet beyond dreaming.
She was sitting at work near them, when Theo chanced to mention Arthur Brunwalde, and, to her surprise, Priscilla looked up from her desk immediately.
She was a woman of caprices, and her caprices always ruled the day, as this one did, to Theo's great astonishment.
"I have been thinking, Theo," she said, "that we might take a run over the Channel ourselves.
"Is your sister like you?" she asked.
It was a feeling scarcely defined enough to allow her to decide whether it was real pain or only discomfort.
To-night I shall answer him.
We are not alike at all."
He had no need to be so ready to go away." And then she found herself burning all over, as it were, in her shame at discovering how bold her thoughts had been.
Business had called him away, and Lady Throckmorton, of course, knew what such business was, and how imperative its demands were.
"I had a letter from Mr. Oglethorpe yesterday," Priscilla said, at last. "He is in Vienna now; he asked if you were well.
But she was even more silent than she had seemed at first, Theo thought, and she was sure her pale, handsome face was paler, though, of course, that was easily to be accounted for by her lover's absence.
"He loved me," she said.
The two spent hours together, sometimes, in the tiny parlor, stumbling over Berlin wool difficulties, and now and then wandering to and fro, conversationally, from Priscilla to the octagon-stitch, and from the octagon-stitch to Denis.
The truth was that the curious enchantment of the day had not been altogether sad, and at seventeen one does not comprehend that fate can be wholly bitter, or that some turn in fortune is not in store for the future, however hopeless the present may seem.
But Priscilla was looking straight at Theo's downcast eyes.
It seemed to her so strange a thing for Miss Priscilla Gower to say, that her pronoun was almost an interjection.
"I would have stayed anywhere to have seen him only for a minute.
"He was your sister's lover, was he not?" she said, with an abrupt interest in the subject.
"I should never love any one else."
"You are seventeen," said Priscilla.
She gave vent to no further exclamations. She would almost have been willing to give up the pleasure of the journey after that.
Priscilla got up from her chair, and, coming to the hearth, leaned against the low mantel, pen in hand.
Well, I think I have made up my mind about it.
The current had carried her along so far, and she had not been to blame, because she had not comprehended her danger; but now it was different.
The elder Miss Gower was always communicative, and always ready to talk about her favorites, and to Theo, in her half-puzzled, half-sad frame of mind, this was a curious consolation.
Novels had been delightful at Downport, when they were read in hourly fear of the tasks that always interfered to prevent any indulgence; but in those days, for some reason, they were not as satisfactory as they appeared once, and so being thrown on her own resources, she succumbed to the very natural girlish weakness of feeling a sort of fascination for Broome street.
She was beginning to feel more strangely concerning Mr. Denis Oglethorpe, and it was Priscilla Gower who had stirred her heart.
"Thank you, Miss Priscilla."
Theo answered in the affirmative again.
It was hard to resist Broome street, knowing that there must be news to be heard there, and so she gradually fell into the habit of paying visits, more to Miss Elizabeth Gower than to her niece.
She was far more sorry for Priscilla than she was for herself, though it was Priscilla who had won the lover, and herself who had lost him forever.
Theo dropped her ivory crochet-needle, and bent to pick it up, with a blurred vision and nervous fingers.
"But I think Theodora knows," she said, briefly.
"Mr. Oglethorpe told me so."
I remember hearing Mr. Oglethorpe say once you would be."
THE SEPARATION.
"I thought, perhaps," said Priscilla, quietly, "that a message from you would gratify him, if you had one to send."
She even wrote to Vienna, and told Denis that they were coming, herself and Theodora North, and he must wait and meet them if possible.
The first time Theo ever saw her display an interest in anybody, or in anything, was when she first heard Pamela's love-story mentioned.
She hoped he would have left Vienna before the letter reached him; she hoped he might go away in spite of it; she hoped it might never reach him at all.
Her tone was such a strange one that Theo lifted her face with a faint, startled look.
She thought over it for a long time, her handsome eyes brooding over the red coals, but after about half an hour she spoke out aloud to the silence of the room.
She was learning that it was best for her not to see Denis Oglethorpe again, and here it seemed that she must see him in spite of herself, even though she was conscientious enough to wish to do what was best, not so much because it was best for herself, as because it was just to Priscilla Gower.
It was a great trial to Theodora, this.
She found Lady Throckmorton waiting at home for her, to her surprise, in a new mood.
So when Theo broke into exclamations of pleasure and astonishment, she did not understand either her enthusiasm or her surprise.
"No," she replied, almost timidly.
"He loved me--me.
"I was not thinking of that," said Priscilla.
She talked to her oftener, and seemed to listen while she talked, even though she was busy at the time.
From that time she fancied that Priscilla Gower liked her better than she had done before; at any rate, she took more notice of her, though she was never effusive, of course.
Priscilla had taken up her muff, and was stroking the white fur, her eyes downcast upon her hand as it moved to and fro, the ring upon its forefinger shining in the gaslight.
He will not come back again until July, when he is to marry Miss Gower."
"If I knew that I loved any one.
Have you any message to send?"
She took her muff then, and went back to the parlor to kiss Miss Elizabeth, in a strange frame of mind.
"Yes," answered Theo; "but he died, you know."
When Theo went into the little back bedroom that evening to put on her hat, Priscilla Gower went with her, and, as she stood before the dressing-table buttoning her sacque, she was somewhat puzzled by the expression on her companion's face.
I think I was wondering most whether you would be as faithful as Pamela."
She had that evening received a letter from Denis herself, and it had suggested an idea to her.
Poor Priscilla!
"I knew at seventeen."
"I?" said Theo.
"And poor Pam could not forget him," she added, her usual tender reverence for poor Pam showing itself in her sorrowing voice.
Without the thumb-print, the robbery might have been committed by anybody; there is no clue whatever.
At this moment Polton made a silent appearance on the stairs leading from the laboratory, giving me quite a start; and I was about to retire into the room when my ear caught the tinkle of a hansom approaching from Paper Buildings.
"Not at all," rejoined Thorndyke; "the finger-print is a most valuable clue as long as its evidential value is not exaggerated.
They rather expected to see the thing in white again that night, but it did not appear, and morning came without anything having disturbed their heavy sleep, for they were tired from the day's tramp.
"We are standing on a mass of iron ore!
A great mass of fire, like some red-hot ingot from a foundry, was hurled through the air, straight at the face of the mountain, and at the spot where the figure in white had stood but a few minutes before.
In fact, it was a very business-like sort of warning.
But fate had not intended the adventurers for death by lightning.
"From the discharges of lightning among these mountain peaks, which contain so much iron ore.
We will have to be on our guard."
"We'll rest, and start the first thing in the morning."
"There will not be much danger from wind," was Mr. Parker's opinion.
"That is the landslide which I predicted!
He pointed upward, and whispered hoarsely:
"From what then?" asked Mr. Jenks.
Then, by contrast, it was blacker than ever.
Still there was no wind nor rain, and the campfire burned steadily.
"Well, we haven't had a great deal of success--so far," admitted Tom, as they sat about the fire, in the fast gathering dusk.
"That was a bad one," cried Mr. Damon, shouting so as to be heard above the echoes of the thunderclap.
That it was coming was evident, for now low mutterings of thunder could be heard off toward the west.
His voice was swallowed up in the terrific crash that followed, and, as there came another flash of the celestial fire, the figure in white could be seen hurrying back up the mountain trail.
It was now quite dark, save when the fitful lightning flashes came, and they illuminated the scene brilliantly for a few seconds.
Any minute may be our last!"
I only hope those fellows don't find our airship and destroy it.
Slowly the figure advanced, It waved the long white arms, as if in warning.
"No," replied Mr. Parker, calmly, "but there is every indication that we will soon have a terrific electrical storm.
"Black paper and white ink."
"There's a mass of iron ore there!" yelled Mr. Parker.
"I am going to make some observations," was the answer, and no one paid any more attention to him for some time.
"It will be bad enough," declared the gloomy scientist, and he seemed to find pleasure in his announcement.
"Do you think that fellow Munson, whom we left in the forest, could have gotten here and warned them?" asked Mr. Damon.
The thunder, meanwhile, had been growing louder and sharper, indicating the nearer approach of the storm.
"I think, perhaps, we'd better try on the other side of the mountain to-morrow.
Each lightning flash was followed in a second or two, by a terrific clap.
The storm came on rapidly, but there was a curious quietness in the air that was more alarming than if a wind had blown.
Supper was nearly ready when Mr. Parker returned.
"Yes," agreed Tom, "and this warning, together with the antics of the thing in white last night, shows that they are aware of our presence here, and perhaps know who we are.
"We'll do it, and move our camp.
"A landslide!" cried Mr. Parker.
The meal was soon over, and Tom busied himself in looking to the guy ropes of the tent, for he feared lest there might be wind with the storm.
"It's too late to do anything to-night," decided Tom, as they set up the tent.
Then, once more, came a terrific clap!
A great ball of fire, pear shaped, leaped for the same spot in the mountain.
He did not like to think that the unscrupulous men might damage the Red Cloud, that had been built only after hard labor.
This contingency caused Tom some uneasiness.
They stood still--awed--not knowing what to do.
Almost as he spoke there came another explosion, even louder than the one preceding.
His face wore a rather serious air, and Mr. Damon, noting it, asked laughingly:
Then, as the diamond seekers looked, they saw in the glare of a score of lightning flashes that followed the one great clap, the whole side of the mountain slip away, and go crashing into the valley below.
"We are in the midst of the storm!" cried Mr. Parker.
From a high peak I caught a glimpse of one working this way across the mountains."
Suddenly, as Tom was gazing up toward the peak of Phantom Mountain, he saw something that caused him to cry out in alarm.
"Then we'd better fasten the tent well down," called Tom.
"I hope lightning doesn't strike around here."
In another instant it looked as if the whole place about where the diamond seekers stood, was a mass of fire.
The fact that the scientist had not always made correct predictions was not now considered by his hearers, and Tom and the two men gazed at Mr. Parker in some alarm.
"Where are you going, Mr. Parker?" he asked, as he saw the scientist tramping a little way up the side of the mountain.
Evidently the electrical storm, with lightning bolts discharging so close, was too much for the "ghost."
If Pugwash had a watery mouth when he married, I guess it's pretty puckery by this time.
"Now, Marm Pugwash is like the minister's apples, very temptin' fruit to look at, but desperate sour.
We were then shown into the next room, where the fire was now blazing up, but Mr. Slick protested he could not proceed without the little boy, and lingered behind to ascertain his age, and concluded by asking the child if he had any aunts that looked like mama.
As the door closed Mr. Slick said, "It's a pity she don't go well in gear.
"How do you do? and how's Mr. Pugwash?" "He!" said she: "why, he's been abed this hour.
When we entered the house, the travelers' room was all in darkness, and on opening the opposite door into the sitting-room we found the female part of the family extinguishing the fire for the night.
"I am sure you have had no supper," said Mrs. Pugwash to me; "you must be hungry, and weary, too.
You don't expect to disturb him this time of night, I hope?" "Oh, no," said Mr. Slick, "certainly not, and I am sorry to have disturbed you, but we got detained longer than we expected; I am sorry that--"
He was teetotally defleshed, a mere walkin' skeleton. 'I am dreadful sorry,' says I, 'to see you, Banks, lookin' so peaked. Why, you look like a sick turkey-hen, all legs!
She reminds me of our old minister Joshua Hopewell's apple-trees.
That are outward row I grafted myself with the choicest kind I could find, and I succeeded.
However, if she goes to act ugly, I'll give her a dose of 'soft sawder' that will take the frown out of her frontispiece and make her dial-plate as smooth as a lick of copal varnish.
In our country," said he, turning to me, "the children are all as pale as chalk or as yaller as an orange.
It's a pity she's such a kickin' devil, too, for she has good points,--good eye, good foot, neat pastern, fine chest, a clean set of limbs, and carries a good--But here we are.
I wonder what on airth Pugwash was a-thinkin' on when he signed articles of partnership with that are woman; she's not a bad-lookin' piece of furniture, neither, and it's a proper pity sich a clever woman should carry sich a stiff upper lip.
"It's pretty well on in the evening, I guess," said he, "and Marm Pugwash is as onsartin in her temper as a mornin' in April; it's all sunshine or all clouds with her, and if she's in one of her tantrums she'll stretch out her neck and hiss like a goose with a flock of goslin's.
Well, the boys think the old minister's graftin' has all succeeded about as well as that row, and they sarch no further.
Well, I declare, if that are little feller ain't the finest child I ever seed.
"Well, when I last seed him he was all skin and bone, like a horse turned out to die.
What, not abed yet?
Come here, my little man, and shake hands along with me.
The strong flickering light of the fire, as it fell upon her tall, fine figure and beautiful face, revealed a creature worthy of the Clockmaker's comments.
I will get you a cup of tea." "I am sorry to give you so much trouble," said I. "Not the least trouble in the world," she replied; "on the contrary, a pleasure."
Mrs. Pugwash had a broom in her hand, and was in the act (the last act of female housewifery) of sweeping the hearth.
Pugwash, I guess, don't understand the natur' of the crittur; she'll never go kind in harness for him.
"I never knowed but one case of a broken heart, and that was in t'other sex, one Washington Banks.
"So am I," said she, "but if Mr. Pugwash will keep an inn when he has no occasion to, his family can't expect no rest."
That are row next the fence, I grafted it myself: I took great pains to get the right kind.
As we approached the inn at Amherst, the Clockmaker grew uneasy.
Stole them from mama, eh?
Here the Clockmaker, seeing the storm gathering, stooped down suddenly, and, staring intently, held out his hand and exclaimed: "Well, if that ain't a beautiful child!
"Black eyes,--let me see,--ah, mama's eyes, too, and black hair also; as I am alive, you are mama's own boy, the very image of mama." "Do be seated, gentlemen," said Mrs. Pugwash.
They snicker at my graftin', and I laugh in my sleeve, I guess, at their penetration.'
BY SAM SLICK
He was a sneezer.
"Good evening, marm," said Mr. Slick.
Did you ever see," said he, again addressing me, "such a likeness between one human and another, as between this beautiful little boy and his mother?"
Lord! that are little feller would be a show in our country.
Well, I wish my old mother could see that child, it is such a treat.
She knew every move of the game she was determining to play.
"Heavens, how late it is!" she exclaimed.
He felt every inch a man.
War was to most of the nation a great dramatic spectacle, presented to them at breakfast and in the afternoon editions.
Natalie was in her dressing-room.
Somehow here at home they always managed to make him feel like a small boy.
So she watched Graham and listened.
I must have been awful."
The vast number of war orders from abroad had brought prosperity into homes where it had long been absent.
"I'm accustomed to it," was her sole reply.
I promise," he said at last.
He sat down, still uneasily fingering the roll of bills.
She was doing all she could to make them happy.
Like Natalie Spencer's stupid party the night before.
It was marked by an almost feverish gayety, as though, having apparently determined to pursue a policy dictated purely by self interest, the people wished to forget their anomalous position.
"Was I pretty awful last night?" he asked.
"Mother," Marion explained, "is getting awfully touchy about the piano. Well, do you remember half the pretty things you told me last night?"
There were usually, by seven o'clock, whiskey-and-soda glasses and tea-cups on most of the furniture, and half-smoked cigarets on everything that would hold them, including the piano.
"But you're worrying yourself for nothing, mother."
We should--"
Three cars before the house showed that she already had callers, and indeed when the parlor-maid opened the door a burst of laughter greeted him.
"I don't think we've got spine enough to get into the mix-up, anyhow.
Marion Hayden, at twenty-five, knew already what her little world had not yet realized, that such beauty as she had had was the beauty of youth only, and that that was going.
She had gone through all sorts of humiliation to get him that money, and this was the gratitude she received.
Promise me you won't go."
The Hayden house was a general rendezvous.
"Five hundred."
"But I found it very interesting.
And I like big figures.
Then she sent the maid away and herself cautiously closed the door into Clayton's room.
He held himself very straight as he entered the house, and the boyish grin with which he customarily greeted the butler had given place to a dignified nod.
Which they proceeded to do, quite amiably.
Just how far Natalie's methods threatened to undermine his character was revealed when, at a sound in Clayton's room, he stuck the money hastily into his pocket.
Pay those bills before your father learns about them.
She brought them to him instead, her small grievances, her elaborate extravagances, her disappointments.
"You're a partner, aren't you?"
That's all."
Life went on much as before.
When he hesitated she resorted to her old methods with both Clayton and the boy.
And if we have--"
But although the war was in the nation's mind, it was not yet in its soul.
"You won't go.
But her resigned voice brought her, as it always had, the ready tribute of the boy's sympathy. "Sit down, Graham, I want to talk to you."
"Have you noticed a change in your father since he came back?"
On the east the Russians had made some gains.
Then, leaning rather heavily on him for support, she got to her feet.
He even developed an enthusiasm for it, to his own surprise.
You're an awful dear, you know."
And, too, she had the far vision of the calculating mind. She knew that if the country entered the war, every eligible man she knew would immediately volunteer.
"Don't worry about me," he said lightly.
"He needs me the hell of a lot," the boy muttered.
The great six-months battle of the Somme, with its million casualties, was resulting favorably.
"Good for us.
When Graham Spencer left the mill that Tuesday afternoon, it was to visit Marion Hayden.
Mills and factories took on new life. Labor was scarce and high.
Our peace was at a fearful cost.
It was a period of extravagance rather than pleasure.
"Yes," from a distance.
"Not that.
Audrey Valentine has telephoned that she has just got in, and finds she hasn't enough.
"Not yet.
"Fine!
She was holding out both hands to him, piteously.
You know, I like business.
"Great Scott!
Graham, your father thinks we may be forced into the war."
Poor people always do.
They met there, smoked her cigarets, made love in a corner, occasionally became engaged.
She was a really pathetic figure, crouched in her low chair, and shaken with terror.
Also he promised to be sole heir to a great business.
The work of Antung went on just the same.
The patriotism of the Japanese is blind and unswerving loyalty to what is practically an absolutism.
The colossal fact of our history is that we have made the religion of Jesus Christ our religion.
As yet, the Japanese business man has failed to understand this. When he has signed a time contract and when changing conditions cause him to lose by it, the Japanese merchant cannot understand why he should live up to his contract.
Only exists the honour of the State, which is his honour.
The late disturbance in the Far East marked the clashing of the dreams, for the Slav, too, is dreaming greatly.
He is not dead to new ideas, new methods, new systems.
We are in the midst of our own.
The Western world is warned, if not armed, against the possibility of it.
To us the country is more than land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain--it is the sacred abode of the gods, the spirit of our forefathers; to us the Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Reichsstaat, or even the Patron of a Kulturstaat; he is the bodily representative of heaven on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy."
The religion of Japan is practically a worship of the State itself. Patriotism is the expression of this worship.
He has a "sense of calm trust in fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, a stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, a disdain of life and friendliness with death." He relates himself to the State as, amongst bees, the worker is related to the hive; himself nothing, the State everything; his reasons for existence the exaltation and glorification of the State.
They were clad in blue. Pigtails hung down their backs.
It required no revolution of his nature to learn to calculate the range and fire a field gun or to march the goose-step.
The Chinese is no coward.
Liberty to him epitomizes itself in access to the means of toil.
The leopard cannot change its spots, nor can the Japanese, nor can we.
Work is the breath of his nostrils.
Nay, war itself bears fruits whereof he may pick.
"Upso," cursed word, which means "Have not got."
I was in China.
Nor is the Chinese the type of permanence which he has been so often designated.
This Western soul did not dream that the Eastern soul existed, it was so different, so totally different.
Tested thus, the Korean fails.
It is knowledge, and knowledge, like coin, is interchangeable.
Work is what he desires above all things, and he will work at anything for anybody.
War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as yet the final test of the worth-whileness of peoples.
"For God, my country, and the Czar!" cries the Russian patriot; but in the Japanese mind there is no differentiation between the three.
And here, in the thick of it all, a man was ploughing.
The Japanese mind does not split hairs as to whether the Emperor is Heaven incarnate or the State incarnate.
Love, money, or force could not procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe nail.
Things spiritual cannot be imitated; they must be felt and lived, woven into the very fabric of life, and here the Japanese fails.
A marvellous imitator truly, but imitating us only in things material.
We are thumbed by the ages into what we are, and by no conscious inward effort can we in a day rethumb ourselves.
Everybody worked.
"It seems to me that they have no soul," was her answer.
It was the land of Canaan.
The air above had been rent by screaming projectiles.
Under a capable management he will go far.
He is an indefatigable worker.
He does not look upon himself as a free agent, working out his own personal salvation.
It was a mere matter of training.
Everywhere a toiling population was in evidence.
There was no feel, no speech, no recognition.
This management, his government, is set, crystallized.
Under a capable management he can be made to do anything.
It has gained impetus. Affairs rush to conclusion.
It was the thick of war. But it did not matter.
Measured by what religion means to us, the Japanese is a race without religion.
It is not the nature of life to believe itself weak.
A servant returned with corn-beef in tins, a bottle of port, another of cognac, and beer, blessed beer, to wash out from my throat the dust of an army.
Comes now the Japanese.
In this travel, because of my wound, I was somewhat favored in my load; I carried only my knitting work and two quarts of parched meal.
One of the Indians carried my poor wounded babe upon a horse; it went moaning all along, "I shall die, I shall die." I went on foot after it, with sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length I took it off the horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed, and I fell down with it.
There was one who was chopped into the head with a hatchet, and stripped naked, and yet was crawling up and down.
He told me he himself was wounded in the leg at Captain Beer's fight; and was not able some time to go, but as they carried him, and as he took oaken leaves and laid to his wound, and through the blessing of God he was able to travel again.
With tears in his eyes, he asked me whether his sister Sarah was dead; and told me he had seen his sister Mary; and prayed me, that I would not be troubled in reference to himself.
One of my elder sisters' children, named William, had then his leg broken, which the Indians perceiving, they knocked him on [his] head.
The Indians were as thick as the trees: it seemed as if there had been a thousand hatchets going at once.
One of the Indians got up upon a horse, and they set me up behind him, with my poor sick babe in my lap.
Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures, with our bodies wounded and bleeding, and our hearts no less than our bodies.
The greatest number at this time with us were squaws, and they traveled with all they had, bag and baggage, and yet they got over this river aforesaid; and on Monday they set their wigwams on fire, and away they went.
Oh the doleful sight that now was to behold at this house!
Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred out.
It was nine days from the first wounding, in this miserable condition, without any refreshing of one nature or other, except a little cold water.
I had not seen him before, since the destruction of the town, and I knew not where he was, till I was informed by himself, that he was amongst a smaller parcel of Indians, whose place was about six miles off.
That day, a little after noon, we came to Squakeag, where the Indians quickly spread themselves over the deserted English fields, gleaning what they could find.
It was a cold morning, and before us there was a great brook with ice on it; some waded through it, up to the knees and higher, but others went till they came to a beaver dam, and I amongst them, where through the good providence of God, I did not wet my foot.
I do not desire to live to forget this Scripture, and what comfort it was to me.
What, through faintness and soreness of body, it was a grievous day of travel to me.
Here I parted from my daughter Mary (whom I never saw again till I saw her in Dorchester, returned from captivity), and from four little cousins and neighbors, some of which I never saw afterward: the Lord only knows the end of them.
They told me they did as they were able, and it was some comfort to me, that the Lord stirred up children to look to Him.
I had one child dead, another in the wilderness, I knew not where, the third they would not let me come near to: "Me (as he said) have ye bereaved of my Children, Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin also, all these things are against me." I could not sit still in this condition, but kept walking from one place to another.
Then they set me upon a horse with my wounded child in my lap, and there being no furniture upon the horse's back, as we were going down a steep hill we both fell over the horse's head, at which they, like inhumane creatures, laughed, and rejoiced to see it, though I thought we should there have ended our days, as overcome with so many difficulties.
There was hard by a vacant house (deserted by the English before, for fear of the Indians).
By the advantage of some brush which they had laid upon the raft to sit upon, I did not wet my foot (which many of themselves at the other end were mid-leg deep) which cannot but be acknowledged as a favor of God to my weakened body, it being a very cold time.
They quickly fell to cutting dry trees, to make rafts to carry them over the river: and soon my turn came to go over.
There came an Indian to them at that time with a basket of horse liver.
I asked him to give me a piece.
Being very faint I asked my mistress to give me one spoonful of the meal, but she would not give me a taste.
Heart-aching thoughts here I had about my poor children, who were scattered up and down among the wild beasts of the forest.
That was comfort to me, such as it was.
On Monday (as I said) they set their wigwams on fire and went away.
God having taken away this dear child, I went to see my daughter Mary, who was at this same Indian town, at a wigwam not very far off, though we had little liberty or opportunity to see one another.
But to return: the Indians laid hold of us, pulling me one way, and the children another, and said, "Come go along with us"; I told them they would kill me: they answered, if I were willing to go along with them, they would not hurt me.
I was not before acquainted with such kind of doings or dangers.
I asked them whether I might not lodge in the house that night, to which they answered, "What, will you love English men still?"
Before I got to the top of the hill, I thought my heart and legs, and all would have broken, and failed me.
I went to take up my dead child in my arms to carry it with me, but they bid me let it alone; there was no resisting, but go I must and leave it.
Upon a Friday, a little after noon, we came to this river.
Yet the Lord still showed mercy to me, and upheld me; and as He wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other.
More than twenty years after, I have heard her tell how sweet and comfortable that place was to her.
About two hours in the night, my sweet babe like a lamb departed this life on Feb. 18, 1675.
I was at this time knitting a pair of white cotton stockings for my mistress; and had not yet wrought upon a Sabbath day.
The next day was the Sabbath.
I told them it was the Sabbath day, and desired them to let me rest, and told them I would do as much more tomorrow; to which they answered me they would break my face.
There remained nothing to me but one poor wounded babe, and it seemed at present worse than death that it was in such a pitiful condition, bespeaking compassion, and I had no refreshing for it, nor suitable things to revive it.
They began their din about a mile before they came to us. By their noise and hooping they signified how many they had destroyed (which was at that time twenty-three).
A certain number of us got over the river that night, but it was the night after the Sabbath before all the company was got over.
It being about six years, and five months old.
The occasion (as I thought) of their moving at this time was the English army, it being near and following them.
Hearing, I say, that I was in this Indian town, he obtained leave to come and see me.
They being to go one way, and I another, I asked them whether they were earnest with God for deliverance.
See now that I, even I am he, and there is no god with me, I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal, neither is there any can deliver out of my hand.
And now I must part with that little company I had.
I had my Bible with me, I pulled it out, and asked her whether she would read.
On the Saturday they boiled an old horse's leg which they had got, and so we drank of the broth, as soon as they thought it was ready, and when it was almost all gone, they filled it up again.
I then remembered how careless I had been of God's holy time; how many Sabbaths I had lost and misspent, and how evilly I had walked in God's sight; which lay so close unto my spirit, that it was easy for me to see how righteous it was with God to cut off the thread of my life and cast me out of His presence forever.
I took this to be some gracious answer to my earnest and unfeigned desire.
The swamp by which we lay was, as it were, a deep dungeon, and an exceeding high and steep hill before it.
There were twelve killed, some shot, some stabbed with their spears, some knocked down with their hatchets.
I was glad of it, and asked him, whether he thought the Indians would let me read?
There were now besides myself nine English captives in this place (all of them children, except one woman).
At this place we continued about four days.
I hope she is reaping the fruit of her good labors, being faithful to the service of God in her place.
THE THIRD REMOVE
Oh, I may see the wonderful power of God, that my Spirit did not utterly sink under my affliction: still the Lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful spirit, and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning.
As we went along, I saw a place where English cattle had been.
I cannot but take notice of the wonderful mercy of God to me in those afflictions, in sending me a Bible.
When we are in prosperity, Oh the little that we think of such dreadful sights, and to see our dear friends, and relations lie bleeding out their heart-blood upon the ground.
Written by her own hand for her private use, and now made public at the earnest desire of some friends, and for the benefit of the afflicted.
THE SIXTH REMOVE
And as I was going along, my heart was even overwhelmed with the thoughts of my condition, and that I should have children, and a nation which I knew not, ruled over them.
Oh the experience that I have had of the goodness of God, to me and mine!
God did not give them courage or activity to go over after us.
Another, seeing many of the Indians about his barn, ventured and went out, but was quickly shot down.
We came that day to a great swamp, by the side of which we took up our lodging that night.
THE FOURTH REMOVE
No sooner were we out of the house, but my brother-in-law (being before wounded, in defending the house, in or near the throat) fell down dead, whereat the Indians scornfully shouted, and hallowed, and were presently upon him, stripping off his clothes, the bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and the same (as would seem) through the bowels and hand of my dear child in my arms.
There were five persons taken in one house; the father, and the mother and a sucking child, they knocked on the head; the other two they took and carried away alive.
In this time of the absence of his master, his dame brought him to see me.
When I came to the brow of the hill, that looked toward the swamp, I thought we had been come to a great Indian town (though there were none but our own company).
For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.
Hearing that my son was come to this place, I went to see him, and found him lying flat upon the ground.
In that time came a company of Indians to us, near thirty, all on horseback.
I thought of the English army, and hoped for their coming, and being taken by them, but that failed.
Now is my spirit revived again; though means be never so inconsiderable, yet if the Lord bestow His blessing upon them, they shall refresh both soul and body.
I could hardly tell what to say: Yet I answered, they would kill me.
In the morning they took the blood of the deer, and put it into the paunch, and so boiled it.
Afterwards he asked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner.
I ran out and catched it up, and put it into my pocket, and never let her see it afterward.
I thought of being sold to my husband, as my master spake, but instead of that, my master himself was gone, and I left behind, so that my spirit was now quite ready to sink.
Then was I fain to stoop to this rude fellow, and to go out in the night, I knew not whither.
Sometimes I met with favor, and sometimes with nothing but frowns.
When I came ashore, they gathered all about me, I sitting alone in the midst.
I complained it was too heavy, whereupon she gave me a slap in the face, and bade me go; I lifted up my heart to God, hoping the redemption was not far off; and the rather because their insolency grew worse and worse.
But I thank God, He has now given me power over it; surely there are many who may be better employed than to lie sucking a stinking tobacco-pipe.
If you don't you will offend me.
'I would go on an expedition any day,' said Lukashka. 'D'you hear the jackals howling?' he added, listening.
'By the middle one.
'Well, if you're not bragging about your home, if I were you I'd never have left it!
'How--don't want it?' Lukashka said, laughing.
And how can you help being afraid? Even we are afraid,' said Lukashka to set Olenin's self-esteem at rest, and he laughed too.
'Take it, take it!
They were still surrounded by the deep gloom of the forest.
Now you must come to see us.
Our company is going before the holidays, and your "hundred" too.'
Come into the hut.'
'I am a cadet, but have been recommended for a commission.'
Olenin could not refrain from replying that he had not only one, but several houses.
He told no one how he had got the horse.
But I have not got a horse yet.'
This is something unexpected, undreamt of.'
The Captain and the head of the village rode away, and Olenin, to please Lukashka as well as to avoid going back alone through the dark forest, asked the corporal to give Lukashka leave, and the corporal did so.
'Why should you make me a present?
The old woman only shook her head at her son's story, and decided in her own mind that he had stolen it.
'Do you think I am afraid?
'Why harness the horse?
Go back, and thank you.
Chapter XXII
Vanyusha!
After that you have nothing to fear.'
Do you find it pleasant living among us?'
How I want to!'
'Yes, very pleasant,' answered Olenin.
I bought it in Groznoe; it gallops splendidly!
We shall see what will come of this cadet.
Olenin looked out of the window to see what he would do.
'Then come in with me.
We'll get on by ourselves by God's help.'
'Aren't you in the regular service?'
'It's all right!
And there is something else I'll tell you if you like,' said Lukashka, bending his head.
Though we are not rich people still we can treat a kunak, and I will tell mother in case you need anything--clotted cream or grapes--and if you come to the cordon I'm your servant to go hunting or to go across the river, anywhere you like!
What those intentions were he could not decide, but neither could he admit the idea that a stranger would give him a horse worth forty rubles for nothing, just out of kindness; it seemed impossible.
They are trotters, you know....
'And what did you want to come here for?
He asked me to lie in ambush by the road where they come down from the mountains.
'Well, and did you come here of your own free will, or were you sent?' said Lukashka, laughing at him.
Lukashka sat down and took the wine-bowl.
They talked long, and it was late when Lukashka, not tipsy (he never was tipsy) but having drunk a good deal, left Olenin after shaking hands.
Lukashka seemed quite to have quieted down and to have understood Olenin's attitude towards him.
'Yes, we'll go; we'll go some day.'
'Oh dear no! I've only just joined, and have not got a horse yet, and don't know how to get one.
He's rich! ...'
'God willing I'll find a way to repay you,' he said, finishing his wine.
'Much bigger; ten times as big and three storeys high,' replied Olenin.
But why it had been given him he could not at all understand, and therefore he did not experience the least feeling of gratitude.
She therefore told the deaf girl to take it to the herd before daybreak.
Then, having led the horse out of the gate, he suddenly shook his head, threw the reins of the halter over its head, sprang onto its back like a cat, gave a wild shout, and galloped down the street.
We'll have a talk and a drink and in the morning you can go back.'
'Have you heard,' said one, 'that the cadet quartered on Elias Vasilich has thrown a fifty-ruble horse at Lukashka?
Olenin laughed.
'We were bargaining for one beyond the river the other day and they would not take sixty rubles for it, though it is a Nogay horse.'
But despite their fears his action aroused in them a great respect for his simplicity and wealth.
'What's there to be frightened about?
There now, only the other day, what a boar I killed, and I divided it among the Cossacks, but if I had only known, I'd have given it to you.' 'That's all right, thank you!
'I heard you singing last night, and also saw you.'
'Haven't I got the horse and we'll see later on.
Lukashka became confused.
It's a good horse.
To some he said he had bought it, to others he replied evasively.
Had he been drunk one might understand it!
'Couldn't I find a place to spend the night?' laughed Lukashka. 'But the corporal asked me to go back.'
'Those cadets are crafty, awfully crafty,' said a third.
Lukashka and Maryanka he involuntarily united in his mind, and he found pleasure in thinking about them.
Shall we go together?
'Perhaps we may be going together.
Lukashka took hold of the halter.
Yes, I'd never have gone away anywhere.
'Yes, I heard of it,' replied another profoundly, 'he must have done him some great service.
The wine was brought.
The wind howled through the tree-tops.
His calmness and the ease of his behaviour surprised Olenin, and he did not even quite like it.
'And what would a horse cost?'
'Why should you give me a present?' said Lukashka, 'I have not yet done anything for you.'
'Every one...' and Luke swayed his head.
We will be kunaks.
Olenin was as happy as a boy of twelve.
Olenin felt keenly, that night especially, that here in this village was his home, his family, all his happiness, and that he never had and never would live so happily anywhere as he did in this Cossack village.
But don't harness the horse, it has never been in harness.'
Lukashka went back alone to the cordon pondering over Olenin's action. Though he did not consider the horse a good one, yet it was worth at least forty rubles and Lukashka was very glad to have the present.
Lukashka rode home, jumped off the horse, and handed it over to his mother, telling her to let it out with the communal Cossack herd.
He was as delighted as a boy, and could not refrain from telling Vanyusha not only that he had given Lukashka the horse, but also why he had done it, as well as his new theory of happiness.
'Look! that's where you lost your way,' he added, 'you should have turned to the right.'
When the men jumped up from their chairs, he drove them out of the Temple.
This was his Father's house and his house.
"Show me a penny," Jesus replied.
When John the Baptist used to preach to you and baptize people, who gave him the right to do that?"
Turning to the Pharisees themselves, he went on:
In the Court of the Gentiles the money was clinking as it had done when Jesus was a boy.
Jesus strode down the room with the whip in his hand, and upset the tables where the money was.
And now it is too late!'"
"It is written in the Scriptures: God's house shall be a house of prayer.
"Then I will say to others: 'Go away.
The crowds would never let them.
"What is there we can do?" they said to one another.
"And I will say: 'Many poor people needed your help, and you did not help them.
Take the reward he has planned for you to have.
So for thirty pieces of silver Judas agreed to show them where Jesus was, at some time when there was no one around but the twelve disciples.
It was one of Jesus' twelve disciples, who had come to see the priests and rulers.
"I'll answer your question if you answer a question of mine.
"The other disciples will all be there, and the soldiers won't know which man to take.
"Very well," Jesus retorted, "neither am I going to tell you what right I have to do these things!"
I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink.
"All right," said Jesus, "do whatever your duty is to Caesar and his government.
"Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." Some cut branches from the trees, and waved them before the Messiah.
For whenever Jesus came to Jerusalem, great crowds gathered around him. None of the priests dared to lay a finger on him in the open.
Some of them put their clothes on the donkey's back, for a king must ride in comfort. Others spread their clothes out on the street, for a king should ride in state.
So all they said was, "We don't know--we can't tell."
But you have made it into a den of thieves and robbers!" he cried.
The disciples walked ahead.
Everyone seemed to be saying it.
They saw the donkey, and they remembered what the Scriptures said.
The king for whom the Jews had been waiting had come at last to reign.
But something had to be done, the priests and the rulers said.
But if he said they should not pay the taxes--well, they could count on the Roman governor to settle with Jesus then.
"I tell you, this poor widow has given more than all these rich people are giving.
The week was going by.
12.
When you failed them, you failed me.
That was a hard question.
"These people will also be surprised.
The next day some of the rulers came to Jesus and said:
But I will go up to Jesus and kiss him.
But they did not know how it was to be done.
The disciples went to the village, as Jesus told them, and there they found the donkey.
And also do your duty to God!"
Jesus said, "Whose picture is that?"
Who told you that you could act like this?"
"Why," they answered, "that is a picture of Caesar, the emperor of Rome."
"Yesterday?"
"Then telephone to the doctor.
Was she--"
"To New York," I finished.
I have not finished weighing my life against the good opinion of him I live for." Then faintly--"Mrs.
"Wait!
But this has been in my pocket for six years.
"With pleasure, madam."
It is too soon.
But the papers give no news, and all the attempts of the police end in nothing.
At another time she might have resented these words, especially the last; but I had roused her curiosity, her panting eager curiosity, and she let them pass altogether unchallenged.
That I might--"
Give my orders.
Her great eyes, haggard with suffering, rose to mine, then they fell on the bead which I had taken from my pocket.
You will go with me?"
"And did she?
"She has not sailed?"
The word must come from you.
I quarreled with the circumstances but felt forced to submit.
"No," I ventured to rejoin.
"HE WILL NEVER FORGIVE"
I waited respectfully.
And young Jack writes as well as his father, pretty nigh, Mr. Finn, which is a comfort,"--Mr.
FINN,
He says no word of happiness.
"So you're at the old game, Mr. Finn?" said his landlord.
Would drawing-rooms be opened to him, and sometimes opened to him and to no other?
"No, indeed."
It is my pride to think I never gave him up.
A few words were said as to his great loss.
He had opened the oyster for himself once, though it had closed again with so sharp a snap when the point of his knife had been withdrawn.
We proved all that when we pared them down a bit.
Phineas Finn returned from Tankerville to London in much better spirits than those which had accompanied him on his journey thither. He was not elected; but then, before the election, he had come to believe that it was quite out of the question that he should be elected.
And pray tell me about the affair at Tankerville.
"And so," said Mrs. Low, "you've begun to attack the Church?"
From time to time I am implored by him to return to my duty beneath his roof.
But the bitter part of my cup consists in this,--that as he has won what he has deserved, so have we.
But, unfortunately, the judge by whom all this would be decided might not reach Tankerville in his travels till after Christmas, perhaps not till after Easter; and in the meantime, what should he do with himself?
"I see you was hammering away at the Church down at Tankerville."
"I'm afraid you don't keep much, Mr. Bunce."
He had left all those things of his own free will, as though telling himself that there was a better life than they offered to him.
All our good things went from us at a blow.
And would he again be able to load the frame of the looking-glass over the fire with countless cards from Countesses and Ministers' wives?
Poor Mrs. Low!
Then he thought of certain special drawing-rooms in which wonderful things had been said to him.
In former days he had been very intimate in that house, having received from both of them much kindness, mingled, perhaps, with some touch of severity on the part of the lady.
Most sincerely yours,
He had certainly sighed for the gauds which he had left.
She had asked him to come and dine with them after the old fashion in Baker Street, naming a day as to which she presumed that he would by that time have finished his affairs at Tankerville, intimating also that Mr. Low would then have finished his at North Broughton.
He declares that Mr. Browborough is almost disposed not to fight the battle, though a man more disposed to fight never bribed an elector.
He makes his claim simply on Holy Writ, and on the feeling of duty which thence ought to weigh upon me.
What's an Ecclesiastical Commission?
We are very particular about the rooms, but my father bears the temperature wonderfully well, though he complains.
If he'd drink it, which he never does, I think I'd bear it better than give it to that nasty Union.
If she feared nothing, why should she scream so loudly?
I cannot but think of things as they were two or three years since.
Would the Countesses once more be kind to him?
It must be remembered that at this moment Mr. Daubeny had not as yet electrified the minds of East Barsetshire, and that, therefore, Mrs. Low was not disturbed.
For a while, till the inquiry be made at Tankerville, your time must be vacant.
He was very poor.
And he has ever been honest.
I can't say as I ever saw very much in your religion; but what a man keeps in the way of religion for his own use is never nothing to me;--as what I keeps is nothing to him."
There is no one whom I can ask to tell me of him.
I cannot explain to you what it would be to me to be able to talk again to one who knows all the errors and all the efforts of my past life as you do. Dresden is very cold in the winter.
While his young wife was living he had kept his sighs down, so that she should not hear them; but he had been forced to acknowledge that his new life had been vapid and flavourless.
Phineas was still in London, hanging about the clubs, doing nothing, discussing Mr. Daubeny's wonderful treachery with such men as came up to town, and waiting for the meeting of Parliament, when he received the following letter from Lady Laura Kennedy:--
"Mr. Slide is pretty wide-awake whatever side he's on.
As for going back to Dublin, that was now out of the question.
And now, my friend, could you not do for me a great kindness?
Or had some new tempest of calamity, let loose upon France, drowned the memory of their exile?
If at any time they shewed unto the savages the excessive price which they tooke, these villaines would answere them roughly and churlishly: If thou make so great account of thy marchandise, eat it, and we will eat our fish: then fell they out a laughing, and mocked us with open throat."
One of them fired at the advancing boats, and still there was no response.
The monarch was a priest too, and a magician, with power over the elements.
He sent to the fort mantles woven with feathers, quivers covered with choice furs, arrows tipped with gold, wedges of a green stone like beryl or emerald, and other trophies of his wanderings.
In brief but courteous terms, it required him to resign his command, and requested his return to France to clear his name from the imputations cast upon it.
He shook his head, however, when he saw the vessels in which they proposed to embark, and offered them all a free passage to France in his own ships.
The offer was accepted.
A mob of soldiers and artisans beset his chamber, threatening loudly to desert him, and take passage with Hawkins, unless the offer were accepted.
Ribaut was present, conspicuous by his long beard, an astonishment to the Indians; and here, too, were officers, old friends of Laudonniere.
They were clothed like the Indians,--in other words, were not clothed at all,--and their uncut hair streamed loose down their backs.
A great ship was standing towards the river's mouth.
The energy of reviving hope lent new life to their exhausted frames.
At no great distance from Lake George, a small affluent of the St. John's gave access by water to a point within six French leagues of Outina's principal town.
Who were the strangers?
Sagacious, bold, and restless, he pushed his way from town to town, and pretended to have reached the mysterious mountains of Appalache.
The peril was thickening hourly, and Ottigny resolved to regain the boats while there was yet time.
In a few days their preparations were made.
May-day came, the third anniversary of the day when Ribaut and his companions, full of delighted anticipation, had first explored the flowery borders of the St. John's.
Before them stretched a wide avenue, three or four hundred paces long, flanked by a natural growth of trees,--one of those curious monuments of native industry to which allusion has already been made.
Ottigny and Arlac, with a strong detachment of arquebusiers, went to receive the promised supplies, for which, from the first, full payment in merchandise had been offered.
"But, lo, how oftentimes misfortune doth search and pursue us, even then when we thinke to be at rest!" exclaims the unhappy Laudonniere.
And now, in ample measure, the French began to reap the harvest of their folly.
The Indians, too, were hostile.
Outina was nowhere to be seen.
The mystery was soon explained; for they expressed to the commandant their pleasure at finding that the charges made against him had proved false.
The generous slaver, whose reputed avarice nowhere appears in the transaction, desired him to set his own price; and, in place of money, took the cannon of the fort, with other articles now useless to their late owners.
Yet in these, their dark and subtle neighbors, was their only hope.
Corn came in slowly, but warriors mustered fast.
The result was a churlish message and a niggardly supply of corn, coupled with an invitation to aid him against an insurgent chief, one Astina, the plunder of whose villages would yield an ample supply.
Their stores were consumed, and the expected supplies had not come.
Hawkins came up the river in a pinnace, and landed at Fort Caroline, accompanied, says Laudonniere, "with gentlemen honorably apparelled, yet unarmed." Between the Huguenots and the English Puritans there was a double tie of sympathy.
On their arrival at the village, they filed into the great central lodge, within whose dusky precincts were gathered the magnates of the tribe. Council-chamber, forum, banquet-hall, and dancing-hall all in one, the spacious structure could hold half the population.
The name of the tribe is preserved in that of the river Caboosa.
With cries that imitated the yell of owls, the scream of cougars, and the howl of wolves, they ran up in successive bands, let fly their arrows, and instantly fell back, giving place to others.
He was right.
He begged to know more; on which Ribaut, taking him aside, told him that the returning ships had brought home letters filled with accusations of arrogance, tyranny, cruelty, and a purpose of establishing an independent command,--accusations which he now saw to be unfounded, but which had been the occasion of his unusual and startling precaution. He gave him, too, a letter from Admiral Coligny.
The kindness of his captors at Fort Caroline seemed to have won his heart.
Of the corn, two bags only had been brought off.
One thought now engrossed the colonists, that of return to France.
If they had had any skill in hunting and fishing, the river and the woods would have supplied their needs; but in this point, as in others, they were lamentably unfit for the work they had taken in hand.
Thus encouraged, I proceeded to set forth the theory of the crime as it had occurred to me on my way home in the fog, and I was gratified to observe the close attention with which Thorndyke listened, and his little nods of approval at each point that I made.
"That practically leaves the case to be investigated without reference to the finger-print, which thus becomes of no importance."
CHAPTER VIII
As to the other matter, I have asked Reuben, and he has no recollection of ever having made a thumb-mark in blood.
Then the near wheel struck my head, making a dirty little scalp wound, and pinned down my sleeve so that I couldn't pull away my arm, which is consequently barked all the way down.
"But the kind of syllogism that they do make is this--
"Dinner and a clothes-brush are what I chiefly need." Nevertheless, he looked very pale and shaken when he came into the light on the landing, and he sank into his easy-chair in the limp manner of a man either very weak or very fatigued.
But there is no such thing as a single fact that 'affords evidence requiring no corroboration.' As well might one expect to make a syllogism with a single premise." "I suppose they would hardly go so far as that," I said, laughing.
So there the matter rests."
But you have some special point in your mind, I think."
"I have entertained it from the first; and the new facts that you have gathered increase its probability.
You remember I said that four hypotheses were possible: that the robbery was committed either by Reuben, by Walter, by John Hornby, or by some other person.
A SUSPICIOUS ACCIDENT
"Well, that is a perfectly good syllogism, isn't it?" I asked.
"What became of the man?" I asked, wishing I could have had a brief interview with him.
"This theory of yours, Jervis, does great credit to your ingenuity.
"Perfectly," he replied.
"It might have a considerable bearing on the present case, might it not?"
"I do hope, sir, you're not much hurt?"
Then you consider my theory of John Hornby as the perpetrator of the robbery as quite a tenable one?" "Quite," replied Thorndyke.
The horses came stamping and sliding straight on to me, and, before I could wriggle out of the way, the hoof of one of them smashed in my hat--that was a new one that I came home in--and half-stunned me.
"Never mind that," said he.
You have really done a great thing, and I congratulate you; for you have emancipated yourself, at least to some extent, from the great finger-print obsession, which has possessed the legal mind ever since Galton published his epoch-making monograph.
"'The crime was committed by the person who made this finger-print.
"I should think not," Thorndyke agreed.
After my colleague retired, which he did quite early, I sat for a long time pondering upon this singular case in which I found myself involved. And the more I thought about it the more puzzled I became.
"But, you see, it begs the whole question, which is, 'Was the crime committed by the person who made this finger-print?' That is where the corroboration is required."
I was burning with impatience to impart my news to him, and this fact, together with the ghostly proceedings of Polton, worked me up to a state of nervous tension that rendered either rest or thought equally impossible.
"Those are the points--with some others--and they are likely to remain unsettled.
An alcoholic apple-woman picked me up and escorted me back to the hospital. It must have been a touching spectacle," he added, with a dry smile at the recollection.
He would not be liable at law."
"Undoubtedly," said Thorndyke.
Take our present case, for instance.
But it can hardly have been quite sudden and unforeseen."
The thumb-print, however, transfers the suspicion to Reuben; but yet, as your theory makes evident, it does not completely clear John Hornby.
"As to Walter Hornby, he may have had the means of obtaining Reuben's thumb-mark; but there is no evidence that he had access either to the diamonds or to Mr. Hornby's memorandum block.
"A sudden slump often proves disastrous to the regular Stock Exchange gambler who is paying differences on large quantities of unpaid-for stock.
It was a mighty near thing, Jervis; another inch or two and I should have been rolled out as flat as a starfish."
"I think we may dismiss that," answered Thorndyke.
"A queer affair, Jervis; a very odd affair indeed.
"No, of course not," he replied, but without much conviction, as it seemed to me; and I was about to pursue the matter when Polton reappeared, and my friend abruptly changed the subject.
Of course I went sprawling into the road right in front of the lorry.
"It is a highly improbable one," I began with some natural shyness at the idea of airing my wits before this master of inductive method; "in fact, it is almost fantastic."
"Yes.
Thorndyke looked round to make sure that his henchman had departed, and said--
"'Therefore the crime was committed by John Smith.'"
The Temple clock had announced in soft and confidential tones that it was a quarter to seven, in which statement it was stoutly supported by its colleague on our mantelpiece, and still there was no sign of Thorndyke.
"I am not really hurt at all," Thorndyke replied cheerily, "though very disreputable to look at.
I ran down the stairs and met Thorndyke coming up slowly with his right hand on Polton's shoulder.
In that work I remember he states that a finger-print affords evidence requiring no corroboration--a most dangerous and misleading statement which has been fastened upon eagerly by the police, who have naturally been delighted at obtaining a sort of magic touchstone by which they are saved the labour of investigation.
"A sound thinker gives equal consideration to the probable and the improbable."
Now, putting aside the 'some other person' for consideration only if the first three hypotheses fail, we have left, Reuben, Walter, and John.
"Yes, I see.
"You mean the man pushing you down in that way?"
As the case stands, the balance of probabilities may be stated thus: John Hornby undoubtedly had access to the diamonds, and therefore might have stolen them.
"It might bear on the case in more ways than one.
"On the supposition," I replied, "that Mr. Hornby was in actual pecuniary difficulties at the date of the robbery, it seems to me possible to construct a hypothesis as to the identity of the robber."
When I had finished, he remained silent for some time, looking thoughtfully into the fire and evidently considering how my theory and the new facts on which it was based would fit in with the rest of the data.
"Yes," replied Thorndyke.
"How did it happen?" I asked when Polton had crept away on tip-toe to make ready for dinner.
Reuben's rooms have been searched by the police, who failed to find any skeleton or duplicate keys; but this proves nothing, as he would probably have made away with them when he heard of the thumb-mark being found.
"'But John Smith is the person who made the finger-print.
"And I suppose they kept you there for a time to recover?"
The result was, on the whole, disappointing.
It would be interesting to know for certain."
"But John Hornby may have had access to the previously-made thumb-mark of Reuben, and may possibly have obtained it; in which case he is almost certainly the thief.
"And what about Mr. Hornby's liability for the diamonds?"
"Some of the fish were fresh, but others were rotten and without heads."
Also, as has been said before, a pond going up would be quite as interesting as frogs coming down.
"Among the number which I got, five were fresh and the rest stinking and headless."
A fall of fishes at Futtepoor, India, May 16, 1833:
Places with white frogs in them.
He says that Dr. Gray's explanation is no doubt right.
To start with I do not deny--positively--the conventional explanation of "up and down." I think that there may have been such occurrences.
Or to those who hold out for segregation in a whirlwind, or that objects, say, twice as heavy as others would be separated from the lighter, we point out that some of these fishes were twice as heavy as others.
According to Dr. Buist, some of these fishes weighed one and a half pounds each and others three pounds.
Something else apart from our three main interests is a phenomenon that looks like what one might call an alternating series of falls of fishes, whatever the significance may be:
In amiable accommodation to the crucifixion it'll get, I think--
But in the phenomenon of the Apennines, the mixture seems to me to be typical of the products of a whirlwind.
That the bottom of a super-geographical pond had dropped out.
"The fish were all dead, and indeed stiff and hard, when picked up, immediately after the occurrence."
They fell in a hailstorm.
I add, however, that I have notes upon two other falls of tiny toads, in 1883, one in France and one in Tahiti; also of fish in Scotland.
But so impressed are we with the datum that, though there have been many reports of small frogs that have fallen from the sky, not one report upon a fall of tadpoles is findable, that to these circumstances another adjustment must be made.
This time, the other mechanical thing "there in the first place" cannot rise in response to its stimulus: it is resisted in that these objects were coated with ice--month of May in a southern state.
I think, myself, that they were minnows and sticklebacks.
If a whirlwind at all, there must have been very limited selection: there is no record of the fall of other objects.
In this letter the fishes are said to have been about four inches long, but there is some question of species.
That, according to testimony taken before a magistrate, a fall occurred, Feb. 19, 1830, near Feridpoor, India, of many fishes, of various sizes--some whole and fresh and others "mutilated and putrefying." Our reflex to those who would say that, in the climate of India, it would not take long for fishes to putrefy, is--that high in the air, the climate of India is not torrid.
The sea is close to Hindon, but if you try to think of these fishes having described a trajectory in a whirlwind from the ocean, consider this remarkable datum:
"A small pond in the track of the cloud was sucked dry, the water being carried over the adjoining fields together with a large quantity of soft mud, which was scattered over the ground for half a mile around."
But a whirlwind is thought of as a condition of chaos--quasi-chaos: not final negativeness, of course--
A witness of this fall says:
After one of the greatest hurricanes in the history of Ireland, some fish were found "as far as 15 yards from the edge of a lake."
By way of contrast we offer our own acceptance:
Or if hosts of living frogs have come here--from somewhere else--every living thing upon this earth may, ancestrally, have come from--somewhere else.
Or Science and its continuity with Presbyterianism--data like this are damned at birth.
"A shower of frogs which darkened the air and covered the ground for a long distance is the reported result of a recent rainstorm at Kansas City, Mo."
And:
In this letter it is said that the largest fishes were five inches long, and that these did not survive the fall.
But something not to be overlooked is that if living things have landed alive upon this earth--in spite of all we think we know of the accelerative velocity of falling bodies--and have propagated--why the exotic becomes the indigenous, or from the strangest of places we'd expect the familiar.
That small frogs and toads, for instance, never have fallen from the sky, but were--"on the ground, in the first place"; or that there have been such falls--"up from one place in a whirlwind, and down in another."
Another peculiarity of this fall is that some of the fishes were much larger than others.
These seemed to thrive well." As to narrow distribution, we are told that the fishes fell "in and about the premises of Mr. Nixon." "It was not observed at the time that any fish fell in any other part of the neighborhood, save in the particular spot mentioned."
A correspondent writes, from the Dove Marine Laboratory, Cuttercoats, England, that, at Hindon, a suburb of Sunderland, Aug. 24, 1918, hundreds of small fishes, identified as sand eels, had fallen--
As to discussion--not a word.
The word "found" is agreeable to the repulsions of the conventionalists and their concept of an overflowing stream--but, according to Dr. Buist, some of these fishes were "found" on the tops of haystacks.
Upon several occasions we have had data of unknown things that have fallen from--somewhere.
That there is not one report findable of a fall of tadpoles from the sky.
The best-known fall of fishes from the sky is that which occurred at Mountain Ash, in the Valley of Abedare, Glamorganshire, Feb. 11, 1859.
A psycho-tropism that arises here--disregarding serial significance--or mechanical, unintelligent, repulsive reflex--is that the fishes of India did not fall from the sky; that they were found upon the ground after torrential rains, because streams had overflowed and had then receded.
There is nothing to conclude other than that hosts of data have been lost because orthodoxy does not look favorably upon such reports.
As to having been there "in the first place":
That ten minutes later another fall of fishes occurred upon this same narrow strip of land.
But also other areas, in which fishes--however they got there: a matter that we'll consider--remain and dry, or even putrefy, then sometimes falling by atmospheric dislodgment.
To start with, I'd like to emphasize something that I am permitted to see because I am still primitive or intelligent or in a state of maladjustment:
Those fishes--still alive--were exhibited at the Zoological Gardens, Regent's Park.
Apart from our three factors of indication, an extraordinary observation is the fall of living things without injury to them.
In a tornado, in Wisconsin, May 23, 1878, "a barn and a horse were carried completely away, and neither horse nor barn, nor any portion of either have since been found."
As to "there in the first place":
India is far away: about 1830 was long ago.
I omit many notes that I have upon indistinguishables.
And something that strikes my attention here is that these frogs are described as almost white.
Of all instances I have that attribute the fall of small frogs or toads to whirlwinds, only one definitely identifies or places the whirlwind.
I find that I have another note upon a specific hurricane:
Altogether I think we have not a sense of total perdition, when we're damned with the explanation that someone soused someone else with a pailful of water in which were thousands of fishes four or five inches long, some of which covered roofs of houses, and some of which remained ten minutes in the air.
Of all incredibilities that we have to choose from, I give first place to a notion of a whirlwind pouncing upon a region and scrupulously selecting a turtle and a piece of alabaster.
I don't know how much the horse and the barn will help us to emerge: but, if ever anything did go up from this earth's surface and stay up--those damned things may have:
I cannot think of a clearer indication of a direct fall from a stationary source.
"The effect is stated to have been almost instantaneous death." "Some were placed in fresh water.
Were there some especially froggy place near Europe, as there is an especially sandy place, the scientific explanation would of course be that all small frogs falling from the sky in Europe come from that center of frogeity.
Some persons, thinking them to be sea fishes, placed them in salt water, according to Mr. Roberts.
I could not have that one thing, and I was nearer to my heart's longings than you have ever been.
"Yes; I'm staying there.
How could he have been such a fool as to undertake such a task under the eyes of so many lookers-on?
"We are in terrible confusion, John, are we not?"
Then the horse would be delightful to him.
But, to tell you a secret,--only it must be a secret; you must not mention it at Guestwick Manor; even Bell does not know;--we have half made up our minds to unpack all our things and stay where we are."
I'll do anything for him I can if he ever comes up to London. Wouldn't it be a good thing, Mrs. Dale, if he settled himself in London?"
How could he escape at once out of the country,--back to London?
"I should be disgraced in my own eyes if I admitted the love of another man!" They were terrible words, but very easy to be understood.
It was well for him that she had come upon him in his sorrow.
"I don't know that I am fond of such secrets." But as she said this, she thought of Crosbie's engagement, which had been told to every one, and of its consequences.
"And so will I love you," said Lily, giving him her hand again.
Did she know of that encounter between him and Crosbie? and if she did know of it, in what light did she regard it?
No opportunity for such an interview offered itself, though he hung about the drawing-room all the morning.
But, John, really I don't wish to walk to-day." Whereupon John Eames again put down his hat.
"But they don't understand.
"Keep to it as to a great treasure.
I love him dearly.
She had not dropped his hand, and as she made her last speech was sitting in her old chair with her eyes fixed upon the ground.
Lily had asked her not to do so, and at the present period of their lives all Lily's requests were sacred.
"Good-by, John.
They had sat thus for an hour together, and Eames was not as yet an inch nearer to his object.
John had it in his mind to get Bell to himself for half an hour, and hold a conference with her; but it either happened that Lady Julia was too keen in her duties as a hostess, or else, as was more possible, Bell avoided the meeting.
Mrs. Dale had felt, from the first, that Eames was coming too soon, that the earl and the squire together were making an effort to cure the wound too quickly after its infliction; that time should have been given to her girl to recover.
He thought it could all be done this week.
So much having been, as it were, settled, he was able to speak of his visit as a matter of course at the breakfast-table, on the morning after the earl's dinner-party. "I must get you to come round with me, Dale, and see what I am doing to the land," the earl said.
I have spoken to you more openly about this than I have ever done to anybody, even to mamma, because I have wished to make you understand my feelings.
I always liked Dr. Crofts very much.
"Not stronger, but more certain.
"Good-by, Mrs. Dale," he said.
"Yes, I have.
"I knew that it would be so," said John.
It is still the same.
They continued for some time to talk of Crofts and his marriage; and when that subject was finished, they discussed their own probable,--or, as it seemed now, improbable,--removal to Guestwick.
"I don't know.
Besides, I should have to come back by myself."
He was wermin!
At any rate I have a right to tell her now."
I would have loved you dearly as my son; and I will love you now." Then she put up her lips and kissed his face.
Of this Mrs. Dale was well aware; and she felt, moreover, that John was entitled to an opportunity of pleading his own cause.
"No, John," she said; "not to-day, I think. I am almost tired, and I had rather not go out."
"Oh, I don't know; not much." John, however, remembered well, at this moment, all that the gardener had said to him.
I don't know anybody I should so much like for a brother.
But it can do no good. Let him come in here, and be very kind to him; but do not go away and leave us.
He had said that he would do this thing, and he would be as good as his word.
When he had thus stood upon the bridge for some quarter of an hour, he took out his knife, and, with deep, rough gashes in the wood, cut out Lily's name from the rail.
"How do you do, John?"
John, if you understand what it is to love, you will say nothing more of it.
"They should not have let him come," said Lily.
"She won't care for my boots being dirty." So at last he elected to walk.
But this he declined; and taking himself away hid himself about the place for the next hour and a half.
"I cannot tell you so.
Each longed to be tender and affectionate to the other,--each in a different way; but neither knew how to throw any tenderness into this first greeting.
When we do meet let us be glad to see each other.
He looked about as though he expected still to find her there; but there was no one to be seen in the garden, and no sound to be heard.
"Tell me that I may come again,--in a year," he pleaded.
He had gone some half mile upon his way before he ventured to stand still and tell himself that he had failed in the great object of his life.
But yet Mrs. Dale did not dare to get up and leave the room.
He had told her that he hated Crosbie,--calling him "that man," and assuring her that no earthly consideration should induce him to go into "that man's house." Then he had walked away moodily wishing him all manner of evil.
He had sat there for an hour, and Mrs. Dale still remained with her daughter.
"It's going too far, mamma," said Lily, "to say that you think we shall not go.
Dear Lily!" and he put out his hand to her.
"Well, mamma, it was very nearly that.
Do you mean to cut it out from your heart?"
Do you remember what I told you before, in the garden; that I loved him better than all the world besides?
"Don't go, mamma."
I'm so glad of it.
"Never.
It's my belief they'll give most to those who ask for most.
He crossed the road at the end of the squire's property, where the parish of Allington divides itself from that of Abbot's Guest in which the earl's house stands, and made his way back along the copse which skirted the field in which they had encountered the bull, into the high woods which were at the back of the park.
"I'll come back with you," said Johnny.
I cannot have that one thing; but I know that there are other things, and I will not allow myself to be broken-hearted."
"Lily," said he; and then he stopped.
If you are kind to me you will let that be enough."
Eames passed on over the little bridge, which seemed to be in a state of fast decay, unattended to by any friendly carpenter, now that the days of its use were so nearly at an end; and on into the garden, lingering on the spot where he had last said farewell to Lily.
He had hardly finished, and was still looking at the chips as they were being carried away by the stream, when a gentle step came close up to him, and turning round, he saw that Lady Julia was on the bridge.
There he stopped and stood a while with his broad hand spread over the letters which he had cut in those early days, so as to hide them from his sight.
The path proposed lay right across the field into which Lily had taken Crosbie when she made her offer to let him off from his engagement.
"Oh, Lady Julia!"
"And so you are really going to live in Guestwick?"
He had been ignominiously thrashed!
I understand what you mean; but yet I will."
"James, who took, at any rate, a year or two to make his proposal, wanted to be married the next day afterwards."
Indeed, I have come down from London only that I might see you."
Your uncle and Bell came yesterday afternoon."
"Well, yes; we think so.
It can do no good.
I am not blaming him, remember. These things are different with a man."
It was only last night that you suggested it. The truth is, John, that Hopkins came in and discoursed with the most wonderful eloquence.
It is to me almost as though I had married him.
"Oh, dear, no. I think I'll go back through the squire's fields, and out on the road at the white gate.
He had last seen her on the lawn behind the Small House, just at that time when her passion for Crosbie was at the strongest.
"But you are so unkind to me!"
"I don't know; perhaps it will be better that I should."
"Would you like to have a nice well-washed shirt for Sunday?
Gertrude mounted wearily to her room as if her last day was come.
Still she was haunted daily by a growing uneasiness, which was not diminished when she perceived that Veronica was gradually drawing away from her.
I said you'd better take your hands out of your pockets, and then your earnings would run in.
"It's always so with me," said Judith, "when I've lost anything, I can't see it."
She had planned it all out that Dietrich should marry Veronica soon after the confirmation, that they should set up a pretty little establishment, and be her beloved neighbors. She meant to be their intimate friend and helper, to go freely in and out of their house, and to stand god-mother now and then.
Do you think she will take him?" As Blasi spoke he came slowly nearer to Judith.
She sat down upon her bed, and when the morning light filled the room, still she sat there listening in trembling anxiety, as she had listened through all the long night; in vain.
Blasi looked on the ground, turned about, and searched behind and before.
"It wouldn't help you to take me, if you did not take your hands out too," said Judith, "but never mind, I have really something good for you," and Judith motioned to him to come nearer.
I don't understand anything about it.
Jost says that she knows all that Dietrich has been about, and she is hot with anger against him because he has not told her about it himself.
"There has been a row at the Rehbock.
Something has happened to Dietrich."
"I know what you mean," he went on, "but I am not so very stupid as you think.
At this moment, she heard through the stillness loud shouts and cries, first at a distance, then nearer and nearer, until they grew into a wild tumult.
I will do one up for you if you will tell me something."
His mother was dead, and his father had enough else to spend for, without the washing for a grown-up son.
"I gave it to you this very minute.
No one ever knows how to take you," grumbled Blasi.
His should be the pleasure and the profit of all.
The moon peeped out from between the flying clouds, and shone peacefully down upon the trees and the neat flower-beds.
She had taken the children by the hand and, stupefied with pain, was about to put them to bed, but Dieterli objected, saying,
There was no answer; Jost did not or would not, hear.
She had done this as she did everything, carefully and with great painstaking, and it was all for her son's sake.
"Is Dietrich killed?
"Now that is a good idea," said Judith.
"What is it?
Blasi, the lounger, stood in his doorway in the clear sunshine of this lovely summer morning, both hands plunged deep into his pockets as was his wont, and looked about him as if to see whether everything in the outer world was the same as yesterday.
Speak out!" broke in Gertrude, trembling.
"He isn't coming yet awhile.
But that's nothing to what it costs him afterwards.
The question seemed to interest Judith, for she stood stock still.
Now you have told me enough.
"I mean Veronica and Jost.
Jost says that if he only mentions Dietrich's name before her she looks like a wild-cat in a moment, and he says too that he has noticed for some time, that she has no objection to letting Dietrich see that she can get along very well without his help, and you know that she is capable of anything when she's angry."
He assured her that this affair was certain to turn out all right, and that she herself would be surprised and satisfied at the result.
Dietrich was walking in steep and dangerous paths; that she was sure of, but he knew the straight road and would not his steps turn back to it again?
Show it to me," said Blasi, with more animation.
"He has been saying some things lately, that made me think so."
He ran faster than before, and the second fellow ran too.
He knew from some one who understood it, that it could not fail. He had to draw large sums several times for himself and also for Jost, but he was sanguine that in a short time it would all be paid back, with interest.
Gertrude seated herself upon a small bench under the apple tree, and gazed about the garden, all illuminated by the moonbeams.
"No, mother, no; it is not good to go to bed before you say your prayers."
Bring me your shirt on Saturday, and I'll wash it for you."
Do you think she will have him?"
what do you mean?"
She would leave her property to the little ones.
She even avoided her old and well-tried friend Judith, and if the latter showed a disposition to talk about her household matters or her children's future, Gertrude would give her to understand that she had no time to stop to talk.
Whenever I want to put something in, and ask Dietrich to lend me a little to try with, Jost acts as if he were the lord and master of the whole concern, and 'donkey' is the mildest name he calls me.
At first they do just as other people do, they drink a little and then a little more, and Dietrich pays.
"Yes, and keeps on happening; all sorts of things, too.
I am just waiting though, till I can trip him up, and I'll do it with a vengeance too, so that he won't forget it all his life long."
Two men were killed.
Now listen; Can you tell me what is going wrong with Dietrich?
Some one stole the cattle dealer's money bag--"
They do something with paper, he and Jost. Sometimes it is a lottery and then again something that they call speculating.
The last one paused a little; it was Blasi.
She recalled the evening of the day when her husband was borne from the house to his burial.
CHAPTER VII.
This last remark referred to Gertrude, who had greatly altered during the last few months.
She had often said to herself, "Ah! how much longer will this go on?" but she tried hard to believe that it would soon come to an end, and her son would resume his former orderly and happy mode of life.
"Oh do tell me what has happened," said Gertrude, white with terror. "Don't leave me so, but tell me, Blasi, why Dietrich hasn't come home with the rest of you?"
That was an offer worth listening to.
"Look out, Blasi, you are losing something," she cried.
Judith lifted her water-jug and was turning away, but Blasi detained her.
"That's all the thanks I get for telling you that you are losing something, and I was just going to make you a present that is worth more than five francs to a fellow like you."
That's good advice and worth more than five francs.
He had no one to wash for him.
Somebody comes over from Fohrensee and explains it to them.
Isn't that so?"
Blasi's money went for other things than washing, and he was not fond of doing it for himself.
You can go to bed;" and was making off.
Jost has nothing to put in but promises.
A vague fear seized Gertrude.
The red-haired man says yes to it all.
"No; he struck about him bravely, till one of the fellows got enough of it, and lay dead on the ground; and then he made off."
Judith came out to the well, carrying her water-jug on her head.
Gertrude knew where Dietrich spent his evenings.
Why could he not be happy in it now?
Why was she so worried about him?
Poor Gertrude!
A THUNDER CLAP.
He tells Dietrich all the time that presently the winnings will begin to flow in, and says that at first a fellow must expect to lose, so as to win all the more in the end, and that bye-and-bye it will all come back; with interest, of course.
Blasi had too much respect for Dietrich's mother to run away from her when she put a direct question to him, although he would fain have escaped.
"Well, suppose it is," said Blasi, angrily.
It had become a regular thing now.
"I'm going to ask Fraeulein Scherin about her," Priscilla declared. "She's made me so much trouble that I'm curious to see what she looks like."
"Do you know," said Georgie, "I begin to think it's all a hallucination, and that there really isn't any Kate Ferris.
"I have so many freshmen," she apologized, "I cannot all of them with their queer names remember."
"Not just now--I shouldn't dare.
What did she look like, Pris?"
"Hallucinations don't send flowers," said Priscilla, hotly; and she stalked out of the room, leaving Patty and Georgie to review the campaign.
"I shall go to the registrar and tell her that this Kate Ferris is neither down in the catalogue nor the college directory, and find out where she lives."
The next morning's mail brought a bunch of violets and an apology from Kate Ferris.
"You read the name yourself.
Priscilla exhibited the note to the president as a tangible proof that Kate Ferris still existed, and reinscribed the name in the roll-book.
Patty sighed sympathetically and remarked to the room in general: "It's sort of pathetic to have your whole college life summed up in a hole in the German Club archives.
"No, thank you; I pay club dues enough already."
"He was supercargo."
"Here are two flints and a piece of burnt linen."
So sudden and violent was the fit that the unfortunate prisoner was unable to complete the sentence; a violent convulsion shook his whole frame, his eyes started from their sockets, his mouth was drawn on one side, his cheeks became purple, he struggled, foamed, dashed himself about, and uttered the most dreadful cries, which, however, Dantes prevented from being heard by covering his head with the blanket.
None can fly from a dungeon who cannot walk."
Who knows what may happen, or how long the attack may last?"
"Thanks," said the poor abbe, shivering as though his veins were filled with ice.
"The ways of justice are frequently too dark and mysterious to be easily penetrated.
When he regained his dungeon, he threw himself on his bed, where the turnkey found him in the evening visit, sitting with fixed gaze and contracted features, dumb and motionless as a statue.
"I once thought," continued Faria, "of removing these iron bars, and letting myself down from the window, which, as you see, is somewhat wider than yours, although I should have enlarged it still more preparatory to my flight; however, I discovered that I should merely have dropped into a sort of inner court, and I therefore renounced the project altogether as too full of risk and danger.
"Nobody."
I had quarelled with him some time previously, and had even challenged him to fight me; but he refused."
"At least a year."
"You have not seen all yet," continued Faria, "for I did not think it wise to trust all my treasures in the same hiding-place.
"No," replied Dantes.
I made it, as well as this larger knife, out of an old iron candlestick." The penknife was sharp and keen as a razor; as for the other knife, it would serve a double purpose, and with it one could cut and thrust.
But let us first settle the question as to its being the interest of any one to hinder you from being captain of the Pharaon.
Starting up, he clasped his hands around his head as though to prevent his very brain from bursting, and exclaimed, "His father!
The fit lasted two hours; then, more helpless than an infant, and colder and paler than marble, more crushed and broken than a reed trampled under foot, he fell back, doubled up in one last convulsion, and became as rigid as a corpse.
"Yes."
"I was reflecting, in the first place," replied Dantes, "upon the enormous degree of intelligence and ability you must have employed to reach the high perfection to which you have attained.
Every one, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his place on the social ladder, and is beset by stormy passions and conflicting interests, as in Descartes' theory of pressure and impulsion.
"The deputy."
"That is in strict accordance with the Spanish character; an assassination they will unhesitatingly commit, but an act of cowardice, never."
Now, to apply it in your case,--to whom could your disappearance have been serviceable?"
"With more of mildness than severity."
"I tore up several of my shirts, and ripped out the seams in the sheets of my bed, during my three years' imprisonment at Fenestrelle; and when I was removed to the Chateau d'If, I managed to bring the ravellings with me, so that I have been able to finish my work here."
Do you recollect the words in which the information against you was formulated?"
"Yes; and remember that two-legged tigers and crocodiles are more dangerous than the others."
And what was this man's name?"
"I do."
"No; the letter."
He had scarcely done so before the door opened, and the jailer saw the prisoner seated as usual on the side of his bed.
Dantes was at length roused from his revery by the voice of Faria, who, having also been visited by his jailer, had come to invite his fellow-sufferer to share his supper.
"Alas, my boy," said he, "human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself.
"And what did you do with that letter?"
The young man, in reply, took up the chisel, bent it into the form of a horseshoe, and then as readily straightened it.
I could never agree to it."
Dantes examined it with intense admiration, then looked around to see the instrument with which it had been shaped so correctly into form.
We shall save you another time, as we have done this, only with a better chance of success, because we shall be able to command every requisite assistance."
"No; we were quite alone."
"I feel quite sure of it now."
Almost before the key had turned in the lock, and before the departing steps of the jailer had died away in the long corridor he had to traverse, Dantes, whose restless anxiety concerning his friend left him no desire to touch the food brought him, hurried back to the abbe's chamber, and raising the stone by pressing his head against it, was soon beside the sick man's couch.
"Alas," faltered out the abbe, "all is over with me.
The abbe burst into a fit of laughter, while Dantes gazed on him in utter astonishment.
"Oh, yes, yes!"
"I see," answered Dantes.
"I shall never swim again," replied Faria.
"Could your conversation have been overheard by any one?"
Dantes examined the various articles shown to him with the same attention that he had bestowed on the curiosities and strange tools exhibited in the shops at Marseilles as the works of the savages in the South Seas from whence they had been brought by the different trading vessels.
Everything is in readiness for our flight, and we can select any time we choose.
I can well believe that so learned a person as yourself would prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself.
Faria had now fully regained his consciousness, but he still lay helpless and exhausted.
What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?"
"Oh, your great work on the monarchy of Italy!"
quick!" returned the abbe, "listen to what I have to say." Dantes looked in fear and wonder at the livid countenance of Faria, whose eyes, already dull and sunken, were surrounded by purple circles, while his lips were white as those of a corpse, and his very hair seemed to stand on end.
Edmond waited till life seemed extinct in the body of his friend, then, taking up the knife, he with difficulty forced open the closely fixed jaws, carefully administered the appointed number of drops, and anxiously awaited the result.
"Now, listen to me, and try to recall every circumstance attending your arrest.
The abbe smiled, and, proceeding to the disused fireplace, raised, by the help of his chisel, a long stone, which had doubtless been the hearth, beneath which was a cavity of considerable depth, serving as a safe depository of the articles mentioned to Dantes.
And how did he treat you?"
They had learned to distinguish the almost imperceptible sound of his footsteps as he descended towards their dungeons, and happily, never failed of being prepared for his coming.
Chapter 17.
Should I ever get out of prison and find in all Italy a printer courageous enough to publish what I have composed, my literary reputation is forever secured."
"The thing is clear as day," said he; "and you must have had a very confiding nature, as well as a good heart, not to have suspected the origin of the whole affair."
"Yes."
Now let us return to your particular world.
"Repeat it to me."
Come, let me show you my plan." The abbe then showed Dantes the sketch he had made for their escape.
Dantes listened, and plainly distinguished the approaching steps of the jailer.
"Do you really think so?
"I cannot believe such was the case.
I wrote the word finis at the end of the sixty-eighth strip about a week ago.
"I saw it done."
"Still, you have thought of it?"
Go into my cell as quickly as you can; draw out one of the feet that support the bed; you will find it has been hollowed out for the purpose of containing a small phial you will see there half-filled with a red-looking fluid.
"As for the ink," said Faria, "I told you how I managed to obtain that--and I only just make it from time to time, as I require it."
"I promise on my honor."
"And as for your poor arm, what difference will that make?
Lift it, and judge if I am mistaken." The young man raised the arm, which fell back by its own weight, perfectly inanimate and helpless.
"Now, could any one have had any interest in preventing the accomplishment of these two things?
Dantes was occupied in arranging this piece of wood when he heard Faria, who had remained in Edmond's cell for the purpose of cutting a peg to secure their rope-ladder, call to him in a tone indicative of great suffering.
I am seized with a terrible, perhaps mortal illness; I can feel that the paroxysm is fast approaching.
"I did!"
"With what?"
"Tell me, I beseech you, what ails you?" cried Dantes, letting his chisel fall to the floor.
He already knew Italian, and had also picked up a little of the Romaic dialect during voyages to the East; and by the aid of these two languages he easily comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English, and German.
"What? the accusation?"
As to Mr. Fletcher, you don't care a bit about him."
I will not have my daughter encourage an adventurer,--a man of whom nobody knows anything.
And Mr. Wharton had felt himself bound to abstain from allusion to such matters from an assured feeling that he could not in that direction plant an enduring objection.
"If you tell me that I am not to see him, I shall not see him.
"But, papa--; is there to be no reason?"
"You are a good girl.
She was not an eligible companion for Mr. Wharton's daughter,--a matter as to which the father had not given himself proper opportunities of learning the facts.
You will think about it?"
"Haven't I given reasons?
I will do as you bid me." Then he put out his hand and caressed her, stroking down her hair.
He is Everett's friend.
He may be ever so bad.
"I don't know why they should say anything, but if they did I shouldn't much care."
If you say it shall not be so, it shall not.
"Do you know what I am going to speak to you about, my darling?"
Like other girls she had been taught to presume that it was her destiny to be married, and like other girls she had thought much about her destiny.
Emily Wharton was a tall, fair girl, with grey eyes, rather exceeding the average proportions as well as height of women.
What would they say in Herefordshire?"
He is what we call an adventurer.
"You know, papa, that I trust you," she said.
"But when a man has connexions, a father and mother, or uncles and aunts, people that everybody knows about, then there is some guarantee of security.
"But is he?
Would you have wished me to tell him that he might come?"
"Nor spoken to him--of your regard for him?"
A young man generally regards it as his destiny either to succeed or to fail in the world, and he thinks about that. To him marriage, when it comes, is an accident to which he has hardly as yet given a thought.
Of course you'll have money, but then I suppose he makes a large income himself.
And it must.
If he did not mean you to choose for yourself, why didn't he keep a closer look-out?"
There is Arthur Fletcher."
I am sure you believe me when I promise not to see him without your permission."
"But I think that you ought to hear me." Then he stood still with his hands in his trowsers pockets looking at her.
He had the power, he knew, of putting an end to the thing altogether.
"Who knows?
How can I give you to a man I know nothing about,--an adventurer?
But I shall be very unhappy.
He did not want to hear a word, but he felt that he would be a tyrant if he refused.
"In that case I could have judged for myself.
If you really like the man, I don't see why you shouldn't say so, and stick to it.
"It isn't only that; no one knows anything about him, or where to inquire even."
"Well;--to speak fairly, I thought you had; and I have nothing to say against your choice.
The young man may become Lord Chancellor, or at any rate earn his bread comfortably as a county court judge.
No doubt the contact was dangerous.
Nor he to me,--except in such words as one understands even though they say nothing."
"That is nonsense, Emily.
"You may say that of any man, papa."
When going to Mr. Wharton at his chambers he had not intended to cheat the lawyer into any erroneous idea about his family, but he had resolved that he would so discuss the questions of his own condition, which would probably be raised, as to leave upon the old man's mind an unfounded conviction that in regard to money and income he had no reason to fear question.
"He is a foreigner."
"Oh no, papa."
"I think you should inquire, papa, and be quite certain before you pronounce such a sentence against me.
"Is not that prejudice, papa?"
Injury had perhaps already been done.
It will be a crushing blow." He looked at her, and saw that there was a fixed purpose in her countenance of which he had never before seen similar signs.
Then she paused a moment; but her niece said nothing, and she continued, "Yes,--and your father has been blaming me,--as if I had done anything!
There had, however, been a few words spoken on the subject between Mrs. Roby and her niece which had served to prepare Emily for what was coming.
He had made Emily herself believe that the one strong passion of his life was his love for her, and this he had done without ever having asked for her love.
I would not wish that there should be opportunity for such asking.
He came to me to-day and asked for my permission--to address you." She sat perfectly quiet, still looking at him, but she did not say a word.
"Never;--not a word.
"That is promotion, and I am glad!
Or, if he does lie in doing so, he does not know that he lies.
Then she had made her request, had been refused, and was now moody.
He comes backwards and forwards every week,--doesn't he?"
I wonder whether she'll like going.
Mr. Rattler had gone back to his old office at the Treasury and Mr. Roby had been forced to content himself with the Secretaryship at the Admiralty.
"Go to Ireland!--How do you mean?"
Of course men were always anxious for office as they are now."
It was probably this encouragement which had enabled the new Premier to go on with an undertaking which was personally distasteful to him, and for which from day to day he believed himself to be less and less fit.
By the time that the Easter holidays were over,--holidays which had been used so conveniently for the making of a new government,--the work of getting a team together had been accomplished by the united energy of the two dukes and other friends.
Mr. Macpherson and Mr. Roby, with a host of others who had belonged to Mr. Daubeny, were prepared, as they declared from the first, to lend their assistance to the Duke. They had consulted Mr. Daubeny on the subject, and Mr. Daubeny told them that their duty lay in that direction.
I quite sympathise with him.
"That's just the reason why they should.
Lord Thrift made way for Sir Orlando Drought at the Admiralty, because it was felt on all sides that Sir Orlando could not join the new composite party without high place.
"They're both good, men in their way, you know."
One must be Patronage Secretary, no doubt."
And so Phineas is to be Secretary for Ireland!
She may be an antiquated Eve for me."
She said nothing of any extraordinary expenditure of money.
There was no doubt, in the minds of all these editors and contributors, the teaching of a tradition that coalitions of this kind have been generally feeble, sometimes disastrous, and on occasions even disgraceful.
The chances are that when I see her Grace I shall tell her what I think about her."
If she began her career in the time of George the Fourth, what is it to you?"
At the first blush of the matter the arrangement took the form of a gracious tender from themselves to a statesman called upon to act in very difficult circumstances,--and they were thanked accordingly by the Duke, with something of real cordial gratitude.
When it was first known that the Duke of Omnium had consented to make the attempt, they had both on one side and the other been loud in his praise, going so far as to say that he was the only man in England who could do the work.
"But what am I to do?
When a man, perhaps through a long political life, has bound himself to a certain code of opinions, how can he change that code at a moment?
"To be told within the same half-hour by two men that I had made promises to each of them inconsistent with each other!"
You do not know how constantly I carry you about with me."
"It's a pity she should not remember hers in the way she dresses," said the Duchess.
"So I am told.
Finn is to go to Ireland."
"Not quite that, I believe."
We've heard of that before to-day, I think."
In this way the domestic peace of the Prime Minister was readjusted, and that sympathy and co-operation for which he had first asked was accorded to him.
But she set herself to work after her own fashion, making to him suggestions as to dinners and evening receptions, to which he objected only on the score of time.
They'll be able to spend money, which they always like, over there.
"Poor Barrington!
Individuals might be content, but the party would be dissatisfied.
I'm sure she's nearer sixty than fifty."
"I do like her.
"I have asked him to undertake the office," said the Duke solemnly, "because I am told that he is fit for it.
"He's an Irishman himself."
"There ought to be something like a fair division.
It seems that Mr. Erle is after all the one man in Parliament modest enough not to consider himself to be fit for any place that can be offered to him."
But at last even the Rattlers and Robys were fixed, if not satisfied, and a complete list of the ministry appeared in all the newspapers. Though the thing had been long a-doing, still it had come suddenly,--so that at the first proposition to form a coalition ministry, the newspapers had hardly known whether to assist or to oppose the scheme.
The town horse, used to gaudy trappings, no doubt despises the work of his country brother; but yet, now and again, there comes upon him a sudden desire to plough.
I know you don't like her."
But he said just the same!--that he considered I was bound to join him.
When she was unhappy he was miserable, though he would hardly know the cause of his misery.
The matter affected our Duke,--only in so far that he could not get out of his mind that strange application from his own wife.
"I can certainly.
"You must eat your dinner somewhere," she said, "and you need only come in just before we sit down, and go into your own room if you please without coming upstairs at all.
He perceived, however, in spite of the multiplicity of his official work, that his refusal sat heavily on his wife's breast, and that, though she spoke no further word, she brooded over her injury.
He had gone to her, up to her own room, before he dressed for dinner, having devoted much more time than as Prime Minister he ought to have done to a resolution that he would make things straight with her, and to the best way of doing it.
For myself, I'd have sooner stayed out as an independent member, but Daubeny said that he thought I was bound to make myself useful."
She did not at first dare to expound to him those grand ideas which she had conceived in regard to magnificence and hospitality.
But Mr. Erle declined.
But, as the old Duke had said, they were close friends, and prepared to fight together any battle which might keep them in their present position.
"Who were the two men?"
And when at the same moment, together with the change, he secures power, patronage, and pay, how shall the public voice absolve him?
"It is looked upon as being very great promotion.
"That's not so very long ago, Cora."
And his heart was sad within him when he thought that he had vexed her,--loving her as he did with all his heart, but with a heart that was never demonstrative.
"You carry a very unnecessary burden then," she said.
"It will never do," said Mr. Rattler to Mr. Roby.
This was marvellous to him,--that his wife, who as Lady Glencora Palliser had been so conspicuous for a wild disregard of social rules as to be looked upon by many as an enemy of her own class, should be so depressed by not being allowed to be the Queen's head servant as to descend to personal invective!
"I hope, Cora, you are not still disappointed because I did not agree with you when you spoke about the place for yourself."
And Sir Gregory Grogram said not a word, whatever he may have thought, when he was told that Mr. Daubeny's Lord Chancellor, Lord Ramsden, was to keep the seals.
The old statesman laughed.
He had expressly asked her for her sympathy in the business he had on hand,--thereby going much beyond his usual coldness of manner.
Her ridicule and raillery he could bear, though they stung him; but her sorrow, if ever she were sorrowful, or her sullenness, if ever she were sullen, upset him altogether.
He certainly couldn't go as Lord Lieutenant."
But he could tell at once from the altered tone of her voice, and from the light of her eye as he glanced into her face, that her anger about "The Robes" was appeased.
"No;--not in the Cabinet.
"You are what you have made yourself, and I have always rejoiced that you are as you are, fresh, untrammelled, without many prejudices which afflict other ladies, and free from bonds by which they are cramped and confined.
And the same grace was shown in regard to Lord Drummond, who remained at the Colonies, keeping the office to which he had been lately transferred under Mr. Daubeny.
The real struggle, however, lay in the appropriate distribution of the Rattlers and the Robys, the Fitzgibbons and the Macphersons among the subordinate offices of State.
Not in the Cabinet?"
I doubt, however, whether it is more dishonest, and whether struggles were not made quite as disgraceful to the strugglers as anything that is done now.
They were habitually indifferent to self-exaltation, and allowed themselves to be thrust into this or that unfitting role, professing that the Queen's Government and the good of the country were their only considerations.
But then again men, who have by the work of their lives grown into a certain position in the country, and have unconsciously but not therefore less actually made themselves indispensable either to this side in politics or to that, cannot free themselves altogether from the responsibility of managing them when a period comes such as that now reached.
I asked Gresham, and when Gresham said so too, of course I had no help for it."
"Silverbridge is older now than I was then, and I think that makes it a very long time ago." Lord Silverbridge was the Duke's eldest son.
"Well; yes.
Who should lead the House?
"Nothing on earth,--only that she did in truth begin her career in the time of George the Third.
The House doesn't care about Monk."
"There is no doubt about the dangers.
"Yes, I do.
But after a day or two,--on one of which Mr. Daubeny had been seen sitting just below the gangway,--that gentleman returned to the place usually held by the Prime Minister's rival, saying with a smile that it might be for the convenience of the House that the seat should be utilised.
But I did have some pleasure in proposing it to him because I thought that it would please you."
Monk wouldn't have done.
"But I don't think any man ever ventured to ask Mr. Mildmay."
He was astounded not so much by the pretensions as by the unblushing assertion of these pretensions in reference to places which he had been innocent enough to think were always bestowed at any rate without direct application.
He must put up with that of course.
The work in Parliament began under the new auspices with great tranquillity.
It may be a question whether on the whole the Duchess did not work harder than he did.
"Well; yes.
"The fact is," said Roby, "that we've trusted to two men so long that we don't know how to suppose any one else big enough to fill their places.
"But they said that Barrington Erle was going to Ireland."
It used not to be so.
"I have done as you asked about a friend of yours," he said.
I don't know why I'm always to be looked upon as different from other women,--as though I were half a savage."
Sir Gregory did, no doubt, think very much about it; for legal offices have a signification differing much from that which attaches itself to places simply political.
They do murder people, you know, sometimes."
But when the actual adjustment of things was in hand, the Duke, having but little power of assuming a soft countenance and using soft words while his heart was bitter, felt on more than one occasion inclined to withdraw his thanks.
He had an idea that it should be one of your men."
"Mr.
"I always thought it should be Wilson, and so I told the Duke.
Indeed I am told that he is considered to be the luckiest man in all the scramble."
Of course, I would support him, but I had been too thoroughly a party man for a new movement of this kind.
"I'm afraid," said he, attempting to smile, "that it won't come within the compass of my office to effect or even to propose any radical change in her Grace's apparel. But don't you think that you and I can afford to ignore all that?"
"But what does it matter?
"I am assured that they are inseparable since the work was begun. They always had a leaning to each other, and now I hear they pass their time between the steps of the Carlton and Reform Clubs."
But do not let us quarrel about an old woman."
Many of the cares of office the Prime Minister did succeed in shuffling off altogether on to the shoulders of his elder friend. He would not concern himself with the appointment of ladies, about whom he said he knew nothing, and as to whose fitness and claims he professed himself to be as ignorant as the office messenger.
"Mr. Rattler and Mr. Roby."
"I don't mean to say anything against Drought, who has always been a very useful man to your party;--but he lacks something of the position."
She, with an eagerness which might have been expected from her, had promised that she would slave for him, if slavery were necessary.
"What friend?"
Mr. Gresham at this time had, with declared purpose, asked and obtained the Speaker's leave of absence and was abroad.
I hope they won't murder him, or anything of that kind.
Neither of these excellent public servants had told a lie in this. Some such conversations as those reported had passed;--but a man doesn't lie when he exaggerates an emphasis, or even when he gives by a tone a meaning to a man's words exactly opposite to that which another tone would convey.
"Time had done much for him in consolidating his authority, and perhaps the present world is less reticent in its eagerness than it was in his younger days.
"I think he's right there," said Roby.
He does not like the idea of crossing the Channel so often.
"You don't mean as Chief Secretary?"
But when the newspapers told him that he was the only man for the occasion, how could he be justified in crediting himself in preference to them?
"Not because you did not agree with me,--but because you did not think me fit to be trusted with any judgment of my own.
Of course such a turn of character is subject to certain dangers of its own."
But for the moment, for the month even, perhaps for the Session, there was to be peace, with full latitude for the performance of routine duties. There was so to say no opposition, and at first it seemed that one special bench in the House of Commons would remain unoccupied.
That there would soon come causes of hot blood,--the English Church, the county suffrage, the income tax, and further education questions,--all men knew who knew anything.
You can quite understand how necessary she is to me. But she is in truth the only woman in London to whom I can say what I think.
"I told the Duke from the beginning," said Rattler, "that I didn't think that I could be of any service to him.
She was proud of being fat.
Nothing!--that is all that is asked of the sovereign of England.
She liked surprises, which is extremely woman-like. Anne was a pattern--just sketched roughly--of the universal Eve.
As a wife she was faithless and faithful, having favourites to whom she gave up her heart, and a husband for whom she kept her bed.
It was the interval between Hochstadt and Ramillies, and the first of these victories was foretelling the second.
But there is nothing delicate in the reigns of these women. The lines are heavy.
A detail to be noted.
The equestrian statue, reserved for kings alone, is an excellent figure of royalty: the horse is the people.
III.
Elizabeth was a virgin tempered by Essex; Anne, a wife complicated by Bolingbroke.
As they will. Be it so.
Still the whole was effeminate, and Anne's Pere Tellier was called Sarah Jennings.
Her father, James II., was candid and cruel; she was brutal.
They fight.
To that sketch had fallen that chance, the throne.
She had fits of rage.
That favourable regard of the chains which bind their neighbours sometimes attains to enthusiasm for the despot next door.
There is a reason at once.
As to their immaculate virtue, England is tenacious of it, and we are not going to oppose the idea.
No quality of hers attained to virtue, none to vice.
What was she doing to be so?
Perhaps there is no other.
Words escaped from her which had to be guessed at.
The English under that royalty born of a revolution possessed as much liberty as they could lay hands on between the Tower of London, into which they put orators, and the pillory, into which they put writers. Anne spoke a little Danish in her private chats with her husband, and a little French in her private chats with Bolingbroke.
France excludes them.
Good-natured, her ideal was to allow none to despair, and to worry all.
But she would have left him a god.
The assembly of twelve persons, were it only to eat oysters and drink porter, was a felony.
She was stubborn and weak.
Why?
She was gay, kindly, august--to a certain extent.
Queen Anne bore a little grudge to the Duchess Josiana, for two reasons. Firstly, because she thought the Duchess Josiana handsome.
Beyond a burst of merriment now and then, almost as ponderous as her anger, she lived in a sort of taciturn grumble and a grumbling silence.
Six farthings were struck during her reign.
Her skin was white and fine; she displayed a great deal of it.
In Anne's time no meeting was allowed without the permission of two justices of the peace.
It was a miniature copy of all the great men of Versailles, not giants themselves.
She rather liked fun, teasing, and practical jokes.
A contradiction which only appears such.
The king's.
Under her reign, otherwise relatively mild, pressing for the fleet was carried on with extreme violence--a gloomy evidence that the Englishman is a subject rather than a citizen.
The whole is solemn and pompous, and the Windsor of the time has a faded resemblance to Marly.
It was felt that he was about to give up his hold over Acadia, St. Christopher, and Newfoundland, and that he would be but too happy if England would only tolerate the King of France fishing for cod at Cape Breton.
Only that the horse becomes transfigured by degrees.
She had often a rough word in her mouth; a little more, and she would have sworn like Elizabeth.
More of a Puritan than anything else, she would, nevertheless, have liked to devote herself to stage plays.
They pay.
One idiotic habit of the people is to attribute to the king what they do themselves.
Whose the glory?
How great is this myrmidon! he is on my back. A dwarf has an excellent way of being taller than a giant: it is to perch himself on his shoulders.
She considered it against good morals. As for herself, she was ugly.
Simplicity of mankind!
It had resumed the pack-saddle, idolatry of the crown.
Certain relationships are detrimental.
Although the England of the period quarrels and fights France, she imitates her and draws enlightenment from her; and the light on the facade of England is French light.
The king's.
How was it possible to refuse Anne admiration for taking the trouble of living at the period?
She was greedily fond of the flat Zealand gingerbread cakes.
What great things accomplished!
Her stoutness was bloated, her fun heavy, her good-nature stupid.
What good was a Josiana?
One is sufficient for a queen.
From time to time she would take from a man's pocket, which she wore in her skirt, a little round box, of chased silver, on which was her portrait, in profile, between the two letters Q.A.; she would open this box, and take from it, on her finger, a little pomade, with which she reddened her lips, and, having coloured her mouth, would laugh.
England was sending a squadron to the East Indies, and a squadron to the West of Spain under Admiral Leake, without mentioning the reserve of four hundred sail, under Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel.
She had one beauty--the well-developed neck of a Niobe.
QUEEN ANNE.
Her whole policy was cracked.
When a whim of authority took hold of her, she called it giving a stir with the poker.
Meanwhile, she had taken Gibraltar, and was taking Barcelona.
She was violent, a brawler. Nobody more awkward than Anne in directing affairs of state.
At the same time she was mild at bottom.
Not from choice, however.
An ordinary woman was Queen Anne.
She had an absurd academy of music, copied after that of France.
Like Louis XIV., she liked to be driven at a gallop.
Her short sight extended to her mind.
Let us add that she bore her a grudge for being her sister.
To be godchild of the Pope was no longer possible in England. A mere primate is but a poor sort of godfather.
Why was she a Protestant?
But that the giant should allow it, there is the wonder; and that he should admire the height of the dwarf, there is the folly.
Like him, she plays at a great reign; she has her monuments, her arts, her victories, her captains, her men of letters, her privy purse to pension celebrities, her gallery of chefs-d'oeuvre, side by side with those of his Majesty.
CHAPTER V.
Above this couple there was Anne, Queen of England.
Her court, too, was a cortege, with the features of a triumph, an order and a march.
Wretched gibberish; but the height of English fashion, especially at court, was to talk French.
Anne did not like women to be pretty.
England liked feminine rulers.
A part of her religion she derived from that ugliness.
She was a clumsy coquette and a chaste one.
Then a silence fell . . . a very creepy, uncomfortable silence.
"Well, Anne, I guess you've won over Anthony Pye, that's what.
Can I take those books for you, teacher?"
It was a full hour before quiet was restored . . . but it was a quiet that might be felt.
"It doesn't seem right.
So all her boasts had come to this . . . she had actually whipped one of her pupils.
"Why is this?"
She looked at Anthony Pye, and Anthony Pye looked back unabashed and unashamed.
Then he dodged back just in time.
I can't forget the expression in Paul Irving's eyes . . . he looked so surprised and disappointed.
She felt as guilty as if their positions were reversed; but to her unspeakable astonishment Anthony not only lifted his cap . . . which he had never done before . . . but said easily,
"I can't help it.
As for Anthony Pye, why need you care if he does dislike you?
And how Mr. Harrison would chuckle!
But she decided not to.
"Well, never mind.
Anthony smiled . . . no, if the truth must be told, Anthony GRINNED back.
How Jane would triumph!
"Throw it into the fire," said Anne.
We all make mistakes . . . but people forget them.
"Joseph, are you going to obey me or are you NOT?" said Anne.
"Anthony, was it you?"
A Jonah Day
Oh, Marilla, I HAVE tried so hard to be patient and to win Anthony's liking . . . and now it has all gone for nothing."
You're not going yet, Anne?"
"What color are you going to have it?"
"There must be some mistake . . . there must.
"Willie White's began,
"'Then there is the Golden Lady of the cave.
I owe this all to you, my sweetest teacher.
"'I have kept the best for the last.
Think of that, teacher, I've been in the sunset.
Your hair is like rippling gold.
""Respected Miss,
The youngest Twin Sailor is very good-tempered but the oldest Twin Sailor can look dreadfully fierce at times.
That evening I fell downstairs and sprained my ankle and had to stay in bed for a week.
We sailed into a great harbor, all the color of gold, and I stepped right out of the boat on a big meadow all covered with buttercups as big as roses.
"'You told us to describe something strange we have seen.
"'My dear teacher,
I put "teacher" where he put "lady" and I put in something of my own when I could think of it and I changed some words.
May God watch over you and protect you from all harm.
I think the most interesting people I know are my rock people and I mean to tell you about them.
Facts and Fancies
Annetta Bell's worst crime was 'eating some blueberries that grew in the graveyard.' Willie White had 'slid down the sheephouse roof a lot of times with his Sunday trousers on.' 'But I was punished for it 'cause I had to wear patched pants to Sunday School all summer, and when you're punished for a thing you don't have to repent of it,' declared Willie.
That is what makes it strange.
Rose Bell says he was . . . also that William Tyndale WROTE the New Testament. Claude White says a 'glacier' is a man who puts in window frames!
I stayed there for ever so long.
""Your afecksionate pupil,
I am thinking of you all the time. . . in the morning and at the noontide and at the twilight.
edward blake ClaY.'"
It is just that he has not a great deal of tact or imagination."
Those compositions would atone for much.
"'I always met the Twin Sailors at the Striped Rocks.
I couldn't get the older ones to do so, but the third class answered quite freely.
It is built on the lower Carmody road.
I have my suspicions about that oldest Twin. I believe he'd be a pirate if he dared.
"'Yours respectfully,
"'Your loving pupil Paul Irving.'
"'Dear teacher,
The first night I was there we were at tea. I knocked over a jug and broke it.
I do love you with all my heart.'
You must be awful clever, teacher.'
"'Dearest teacher, good night.
When I got better it was time to go home.
Now I can't go till spring, but they will be there, for people like that never change . . . that is the splendid thing about them.
Green gabels.
This afternoon little Jimmy Andrews was trying to spell 'speckled' and couldn't manage it.
I have never told anybody about them except grandma and father but I would like to have you know about them because you understand things.
'Well,' he said finally, 'I can't spell it but I know what it means.'
"'Dearest teacher,
They were to write the letters on real note paper, seal them in an envelope, and address them to me, all without any assistance from other people.
It is painted blue.
"Why, this is a victory!" cried the king, all radiant, "a complete victory!"
"What?"
You accuse him, then?
"Bad, monsieur, bad!" replied the king; "I am bored."
Poor cardinal!
"How!
Come in, Treville."
Go, Monsieur Duke, and return often.
"No, bring me all four together.
"Good Lord!
Let us see, for you know, my dear Captain, a judge must hear both sides."
"Yes, sire."
On guard!"
It was already too late.
"Truly!"
"I?
"Yes, sire, as they always do."
"Tomorrow, then, sire?"
Speak, I am ready to obey."
Justice before everything."
"Awaken me!
"What, then!
"Perfectly."
"Does he talk?"
They soon tired of the sport.
"Certainly."
"Quite contrite and repentant!
"Ah!
In particular, there is one yonder of a Gascon look.
"Undoubtedly."
"And how did the thing happen?
Louis XIII appeared, walking fast.
"With difficulty, but he can speak."
The Guards of Monsieur the Cardinal are forever seeking quarrels with them, and for the honor of the corps even, the poor young men are obliged to defend themselves."
"Far from here?"
"But of what sort?"
"Ah, that's quite another thing; but promise me, if you should not be killed tonight, that you will go tomorrow."
"She gave it to me herself."
"I?
You are acquainted with the Scriptures?"
"Above all things be always on your guard.
"But why this question?"
You must look out for yourself."
"I was sure of it--the cursed letter!"
What the devil!
Is it not some bad affair?"
Not the least in the world."
"Well, then, I count on you."
Stop!"
"And you found it?"
"Bah!"
"There again!
"And where is that letter?"
That, I think, is as much as I shall want."
"What?"
"The devil!
"Yes, go."
"Indeed!"
"You will take your musketoon and your pistols."
"Where?"
"Yes, but I thought perhaps you had worn out all your courage the first time."
"What!
When I am happy, I wish all the world to be so; but it appears that is not possible."
Imprudent, thrice imprudent!"
The young man departed, laughing at the joke, which he thought he alone could comprehend.
"I promise it."
"Do you need money?"
"Not yet; wait a little!
"There, now!
"How?"
He led me to the door of his daughter's room; and stood close by, when I knocked softly, and begged that she would come out.
You will ask me who the person is.
But, I was naturally desirous of discovering next what Lady Rachel had said; and I asked to speak with Cristel.
He went on with his story without wanting questions to help him.
Has she not told you what it is?"
He rubbed his fleshless hands, and whispered: "You'll get it out of Cristy to-morrow, and I'll help you."
I must positively make a sketch of the cottage by the mill--I mean, of course, the picturesque side of it.
When we had left each other, I thought of the absent Captain in the Navy who was Lady Rachel's husband.
I beckoned to Gloody, waiting modestly at the door, to come in, and tell me what he had discovered.
"Is the cause there?" I asked.
A purple feather."
Lovely interfusions of sobered color rested, faded, returned again, on the upper leaves of the foliage as they lightly moved.
I looked at her in silence.
Old Toller highly approved of my conduct.
I was on the point of putting the question, when she held up her hand, and said, "Hush!"
Before I recovered myself, Cristel entered the kitchen.
I started, trembled, returned reluctantly to my present self.
"Not she!
I've had another row with that deaf-devil--my new name for him, and I think it's rather clever.
Her father whispered, "Look at her!"
"Yes!
Shall we go to tea?"
Of the excitement which had disturbed--I had almost said, profaned--her beautiful face, not a vestige remained.
What is it?"
He has given Cristy no reason to complain of him.
"Are you determined to keep your engagement?"
That old Toller--the most exasperating of men, judged by a quick temper--had irritated my friend into speaking rashly was plain enough. Nevertheless, I felt some anxiety (jealous anxiety, I am afraid) about Cristel.
You mark my words: I'll be even with him."
Which do you admire--that gypsy complexion, or Lena's lovely skin?
I have not seen him; I have not heard from him.
I was left to decide for myself.
I said I would return on the next day; and left the room with a sore heart.
Useless to speculate on it!
After looking round the kitchen again, I asked where she was.
The longing in me to see Cristel again, was more than I could resist.
I'll be even with him.
Explain it who can--I knew that I was going to drink tea with him, and yet I was unwilling to advance a few steps, and meet him on the road!
Cristel counted the strokes.
"Remember what I told you at the spring," she answered.
"Gloody has seen the person," he announced; "and (what do you think, sir?) it's a woman!"
Useless!
I am not suspicious by nature, as I hope and believe.
Her parasol?
"How can I help it, sir?"
Having set him at ease, in that particular, I said: "You seem to be interested in Miss Cristel."
Threatens, if any man attempts to take her away, he'll shoot her, and shoot the man, and shoot himself.
"Seven," she said.
I went in.
While my eyes followed the successive transformations of the view, as the hour advanced, tender and solemn influences breathed their balm over my mind. Days, happy days that were past, revived.
She took it!
"Have you seen Gloody to-day?"
Was this the dear Cristel so well known to me?
Pale, composed, resolute, she said, "I am ready," and led the way out.
I failed to see it myself in that light.
I went back to the garden.
The meanest of all human infirmities is also the most universal; and the name of it is Self-esteem.
"Because a tea-party is not complete without a woman."
"I dare say I am excited, Mr. Gerard, by the honor that has been done me. You are going to keep your engagement, of course?
"Not that I know of.
I felt vaguely uneasy; irritated by my own depression of spirits.
What have you done, Mr. Gerard, to make him like you so well, in that short time?"
When I woke, and got home again just now, that was how I found her.
My mother whispered to me--I thanked the little mill-girl, and gave her a kiss.
Leaves me to guess.
I invited myself--the deaf gentleman submitted."
I offered a suggestion.
"But, Mr. Toller," I objected, "something must have happened to distress her.
My next day's engagement being for seven o'clock in the evening, I put Mrs. Roylake's self-control to a new test.
"Why did you invite yourself?"
As I turned suddenly, a living breath played on my face.
I don't mean to be rude, sir--pray be kinder to me than ever! pray let me be!"
She was yawning over it fearfully, when she discovered that I was looking at her.
"Miss Cristel." His face brightened with an expression of interest when he mentioned the miller's daughter.
Even Lord Uppercliff (perhaps not yet taken into their confidence) noticed the proceedings of the two ladies, and seemed to be at a loss to understand them.
Did I feel the child's breath, in my day-dream, still fluttering on my cheek?
I had accepted his invitation; and I had no other engagement to claim me: it would have been an act of meanness amounting to a confession of fear, if I had sent an excuse.
He waved his hand gaily, and approached us along the road.
Old Toller was in the kitchen, smoking his pipe without appearing to enjoy it.
No! that's not quite true.
I left the house, followed by my stepmother's best wishes for a pleasant evening.
"Any ornament in it?"
I was stupefied.
Some large birds circled screeching round their nests in those trees.
He appeared to himself to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all the while he really needed nothing for himself.
He even felt that without this mosquito-filled atmosphere around him, and that mosquito-paste mingled with perspiration which his hand smeared over his face, and that unceasing irritation all over his body, the forest would lose for him some of its character and charm.
Everything seemed changed--the weather and the character of the forest; the sky was wrapped in clouds, the wind was rustling in the tree-tops, and all around nothing was visible but reeds and dying broken-down trees.
Putting his hand behind him he felt his pheasants, and found one missing.
His dog had turned from black to grey, its back being covered with mosquitoes, and so had Olenin's coat through which the insects thrust their stings.
The next day Olenin went alone to the spot where he and the old man startled the stag.
Love, self-sacrifice.' He was so glad and excited when he had discovered this, as it seemed to him, new truth, that he jumped up and began impatiently seeking some one to sacrifice himself for, to do good to and to love.
He called off his dog, uncocked his gun, put in a bullet above the small shot, and brushing away the mosquitoes with the wide sleeve of his Circassian coat he went slowly to the spot where they had been the day before.
'Since one wants nothing for oneself,' he kept thinking, 'why not live for others?' He took up his gun with the intention of returning home quickly to think this out and to find an opportunity of doing good.
'Just as they, just as Daddy Eroshka, I shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly:
He grew frightened.
He remembered the abreks and the murders he had been told about, and he expected every moment that an abrek would spring from behind every bush and he would have to defend his life and die, or be a coward.
Altogether his spirits became gloomy.
'Still I must live and be happy, because happiness is all I desire.
Of his shooting he had no further thought; but he felt tired to death and peered round at every bush and tree with particular attention and almost with terror, expecting every moment to be called to account for his life.
But what desires can always be satisfied despite external circumstances?
'And is it worth while living for oneself,' thought he, 'when at any moment you may die, and die without having done any good, and so that no one will know of it?' He went in the direction where he fancied the village lay.
The vegetation grew poorer and he came oftener and oftener upon rustling reeds and bare sandy spaces covered with animal footprints.
He made his way out of the thicket.
It had broken off and was lost, and only the bleeding head and beak remained sticking in his belt.
He too had a drink, and then followed the dog in the direction it wished to go, thinking it would lead him to the village.
When he had come out into the glade he looked around him; the sun was no longer visible above the tree-tops.
The day was perfectly clear, calm, and hot.
And he looked round at the foliage with the light shining through it, at the setting sun and the clear sky, and he felt just as happy as before.
Never mind what I am--an animal like all the rest, above whom the grass will grow and nothing more; or a frame in which a bit of the one God has been set,--still I must live in the very best way.
He felt cool and comfortable and did not think of or wish for anything.
Olenin was ready to run away from them and it seemed to him that it was impossible to live in this country in the summer.
Having found the traces of yesterday's stag he crept under a bush into the thicket just where the stag had lain, and lay down in its lair.
The sun stood right above the forest and poured its perpendicular rays down on his back and head whenever he came out into a glade or onto the road.
The desire for happiness is innate in every man; therefore it is legitimate.
After going round the place where yesterday they had found the animal and not finding anything, he felt inclined to rest.
He examined the dark foliage around him, the place marked by the stag's perspiration and yesterday's dung, the imprint of the stag's knees, the bit of black earth it had kicked up, and his own footprints of the day before.
Here's some one we can eat!' They buzzed and stuck to him.
'But what though the grass does grow?' he continued thinking.
It had grown cooler and the place seemed to him quite strange and not like the country round the village.
He thought of God and of the future life as for long he had not thought about them.
These myriads of insects were so well suited to that monstrously lavish wild vegetation, these multitudes of birds and beasts which filled the forest, this dark foliage, this hot scented air, these runlets filled with turbid water which everywhere soaked through from the Terek and gurgled here and there under the overhanging leaves, that the very thing which had at first seemed to him dreadful and intolerable now seemed pleasant.
'Why am I happy, and what used I to live for?' thought he.
The forest grew darker and the wind grew stronger and stronger in the tops of the broken old trees.
That is evident.
'Happiness is this!' he said to himself.
How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?' And he began to recall his former life and he felt disgusted with himself.
He called to his dog who had run away to follow some animal, and his voice came back as in a desert.
But despite the dog's company everything around him seemed still more dreary.
He felt more frightened than he had ever done before.
'How much I exacted for myself; how I schemed and did not manage to gain anything but shame and sorrow!
Chapter XX
After having wandered about for a considerable time he came upon a ditch down which was flowing cold sandy water from the Terek, and, not to go astray any longer, he decided to follow it. He went on without knowing where the ditch would lead him.
He was about to go home, but remembering that other people managed to endure such pain he resolved to bear it and gave himself up to be devoured.
The morning moisture had dried up even in the forest, and myriads of mosquitoes literally covered his face, his back, and his arms.
He shuddered and seized his gun, and then felt ashamed of himself: the over-excited dog, panting hard, had thrown itself into the cold water of the ditch and was lapping it!
Here I sit, and around me stand old and young trees, one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and pheasants are fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps scenting their murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined them, and wiped the warm blood off his hand onto his coat.
and, there now, I require nothing to be happy;' and suddenly a new light seemed to reveal itself to him.
When trying to satisfy it selfishly--that is, by seeking for oneself riches, fame, comforts, or love--it may happen that circumstances arise which make it impossible to satisfy these desires. It follows that it is these desires that are illegitimate, but not the need for happiness.
He had hardly stepped among the briers when the pheasants began to rise at every step (the old man had not shown him that place the day before as he meant to keep it for shooting from behind the screen).
And strange to say, by noontime the feeling became actually pleasant.
What are they?
Suddenly the reeds behind him crackled.
He remembered Maryanka and the kiss he had heard by the gate, and he was sorry for Lukashka and his want of culture.
The corporal replied that all was well at the outposts.
Can you read?'
'But what a fine fellow to look at!' said the captain, again playing the commander.
He saw it all.
It's getting dark.
'Well, you had better not meet him again now, mate!' said one of the Cossacks who had seen the skiff off, addressing Lukashka. 'Did you hear him asking about you?'
The dead man's brother sat motionless, gazing at the opposite bank.
The scout was as ragged as the other, but instead of being red-haired he was black-haired, restless, with extremely white gleaming teeth and sparkling black eyes.
'Which of you is Luke Gavrilov?' asked the captain.
Some, and among them Lukashka, rose and stood erect.
He seemed to have understood all that Olenin wished to say to him, but to be above such considerations.
The scout willingly entered into conversation and asked for a cigarette.
That look expressed not hatred but cold contempt.
The dead man's brother, tall and well shaped with a short cropped beard which was dyed red, despite his very tattered coat and cap was calm and majestic as a king.
'My godson?' said Lukashka, meaning by that word the dead Chechen.
He began to speak to him, asking from what village he came, but the Chechen, scarcely giving him a glance, spat contemptuously and turned away.
The scout, standing up at one end of the skiff and dipping his paddle now on one side now on the other, steered skilfully while talking incessantly.
'Put on your cap.
Olenin felt that he was again, without any apparent cause, perfectly happy.
All this seemed ridiculous: it was as if these Cossacks were playing at being soldiers.
'Why do you smoke?' he said with assumed curiosity.
The Cossacks involuntarily stepped aside to let him pass.
'Is it good?'
Lukashka raised his head.
His face was very like that of the dead abrek.
Well, lend a hand, help them,' he said, turning to the Cossacks.
How will you get back alone?
He heard Russian being spoken, and also heard the rapid smooth flow of the Terek, and a few steps farther in front of him saw the brown moving surface of the river, with the dim-coloured wet sand of its banks and shallows, the distant steppe, the cordon watch-tower outlined above the water, a saddled and hobbled horse among the brambles, and then the mountains opening out before him.
'Your godson won't rise, but the red one is the godson's brother!'
Then they approached the body.
On entering the mud hut he lit a cigarette.
He was evidently a brave who had met Russians more than once before in quite other circumstances, and nothing about them could astonish or even interest him.
'I can't.'
The captain--one of the new type of Cossack officers--wished the Cossacks 'Good health,' but no one shouted in reply, 'Hail!
The skiff became smaller and smaller as it moved obliquely across the stream, the voices became scarcely audible, and at last, still within sight, they landed on the opposite bank where their horses stood waiting.
'He's a trump!' and Lukashka, evidently much interested, began talking to the scout in Tartar.
'From there in the hills,' replied the scout, pointing to the misty bluish gorge beyond the Terek. 'Do you know Suuk-su?
There they lifted out the corpse and (though the horse shied) laid it across one of the saddles, mounted, and rode at a foot-pace along the road past a Tartar village from which a crowd came out to look at them.
Which of the Gavrilovs does he come of? ... the Broad, eh?'
When the body had been carried to the skiff the brother Chechen descended to the bank.
'I have reported your exploit to the Commander.
Olenin was so surprised at the Chechen not being interested in him that he could only put it down to the man's stupidity or ignorance of Russian; so he turned to the scout, who also acted as interpreter.
Can it be that nothing tells him that it is not a reason for any rejoicing, and that happiness lies not in killing, but in sacrificing oneself?'
'Well, that happens too!
'He is my neighbour,' answered the scout.
The red sun appeared for an instant from under a cloud and its last rays glittered brightly along the river over the reeds, on the watch-tower, and on a group of Cossacks, among whom Lukashka's vigorous figure attracted Olenin's involuntary attention.
The Cossack looked at Olenin with laughing eyes.
It is about eight miles beyond that.'
The Chechen looked at him and, turning slowly away, gazed at the opposite bank.
The Cossacks on the Russian side of the river were highly satisfied and jovial.
I don't know what will come of it.
'A man kills another and is happy and satisfied with himself as if he had done something excellent.
He jumped into the boat and pushed off from the bank with his powerful leg, and now, as Olenin noticed, for the first time threw a rapid glance at all the Cossacks and then abruptly asked his companion a question.
He accosted the Cossacks, but not finding as yet any excuse for doing anyone a kindness, he entered the hut; nor in the hut did he find any such opportunity.
Laughter and jokes were heard on all sides.
The latter answered something and pointed to Lukashka.
I'll take you, if you like.
Some hostile Chechens, relatives of the abrek who had been killed, had come from the hills with a scout to ransom the body; and the Cossacks were waiting for their Commanding Officer's arrival from the village.
He moved away from the corporal, and having put on his cap sat down beside Olenin.
'His nephew,' replied the corporal.
Look there now, the mountains are not far off,' continued Lukashka, 'yet you can't get there!
He evidently spoke because he noticed Olenin felt ill at ease and isolated among the Cossacks.
Olenin was about to approach the dead body and had begun to look at it when the brother, looking up at him from under his brows with calm contempt, said something sharply and angrily.
'There were five brothers,' began the scout in his broken Russian. 'This is the third brother the Russians have killed, only two are left. He is a brave, a great brave!' he said, pointing to the Chechen. 'When they killed Ahmet Khan (the dead brave) this one was sitting on the opposite bank among the reeds.
He again made some remark.
Don't our fellows get killed sometimes?'
He sat there till the night and wished to kill the old man, but the others would not let him.'
The scout hastened to cover the dead man's face with his coat.
The captain and the head of the village entered the mud hut to regale themselves.
'It's just a habit,' answered Olenin. 'Why?'
The Cossacks paid little attention to him, first because he was smoking a cigarette, and secondly because they had something else to divert them that evening.
Good health to your honour,' as is customary in the Russian Army, and only a few replied with a bow.
Saw him laid in the skiff and brought to the bank.
You ask the corporal to give me leave.'
It's always the same,' replied the scout, evidently inventing, and he smiled, showing his white teeth, as he jumped into the skiff.
'What are you glad about?' asked Olenin. 'Supposing your brother had been killed; would you be glad?'
Lukashka went up to the speaker, and sat down.
He was so full of hatred and contempt that there was nothing on this side of the river that moved his curiosity.
Presently a Cossack captain, with the head of the village, arrived on horseback with a suite of two Cossacks.
'He is my kunak.'
But these formalities soon gave place to ordinary ways of behaviour, and the captain, who was a smart Cossack just like the others, began speaking fluently in Tartar to the interpreter.
Lukashka, vainly striving to impart a sedate expression to his merry face, sat down with his elbows on his knees beside Olenin and whittled away at a stick.
The Cossacks received him coldly.
'What confusion it is,' he thought.
It had grown quite dark before, talking in this way, they approached the village.
That's why the marriage does not come off.'
'How are you called?'
In your place I'd do nothing but make merry!
He was so fond of everybody and especially of Lukashka that night.
Olenin thought that Lukashka wanted to see Maryanka and he was also glad of the companionship of such a pleasant-looking and sociable Cossack.
'Will you come and be my drabant?' (A drabant was a kind of orderly attached to an officer when campaigning.) 'I'll get it arranged and will give you a horse,' said Olenin suddenly.
'He loves Maryanka,' thought Olenin, 'and I could love her,' and a new and powerful emotion of tenderness overcame him as they walked homewards together through the dark forest.
Bigger than ours?' asked Lukashka good-naturedly.
Take the grey horse to his house.'
However, the truth soon got about in the village, and Lukashka's mother and Maryanka, as well as Elias Vasilich and other Cossacks, when they heard of Olenin's unnecessary gift, were perplexed, and began to be on their guard against the cadet.
On reaching home, to Lukashka's great surprise, Olenin with his own hands led out of the shed a horse he had bought in Groznoe--it was not the one he usually rode but another--not a bad horse though no longer young, and gave it to Lukashka.
'I have a kunak, Girey Khan.
'Really now, I have two and I don't want both.'
Vanyusha, bring us some chikhir.
'No, really!
'I have a hundred horses, worth three or four hundred rubles each, but they are not like yours.
But I should like to join an expedition,' Lukashka repeated.
He might have wished to show off. But the cadet had been sober, and therefore must have wished to bribe him to do something wrong.
Lukashka was the first to break the silence.
Lukashka too felt happy; something akin to love made itself felt between these two very different young men.
The jackals suddenly seemed to be crying close beside them, howling, chuckling, and sobbing; but ahead of them in the village the sounds of women's voices and the barking of dogs could already be heard; the outlines of the huts were clearly to be seen; lights gleamed and the air was filled with the peculiar smell of kisyak smoke.
Or don't you want to be a drabant?' said Olenin, glad that it had entered his head to give a horse to Lukashka, though, without knowing why, he felt uncomfortable and confused and did not know what to say when he tried to speak.
On the contrary, vague suspicions that the cadet had some evil intentions filled his mind.
'Really it is nothing,' answered Olenin. 'Take it, and you will give me a present, and we'll go on an expedition against the enemy together.'
But still, I like the horses here best.'
'How I want to!
'Eh, humbug!' thought Lukashka.
'By which gate do you enter?' asked Olenin.
'Tie it up here.
'A good house?
His method was systematic.
There was a curious eagerness in his face as he bent down and opened his bag, taking a thin chisel from it, and from his hip pocket he took a revolver.
The next night we were on the watch again, concealed as before.
They were of a cheap American brand, had not been taken from Sir Joseph's box, which contained only Turkish ones, and, although they had apparently been thrown down carelessly, there was no ash upon the carpet nor anywhere else.
He said he had not, was inclined to laugh at my question, and proceeded to inform me that he had no family skeleton, had no part in any Government secret, had never been in touch with any mysterious society, and had no papers giving any valuable details of scientific experiments upon which he was engaged.
Round counters--doctors.
You still think that?
"Presumably something a doctor is likely to have," I said.
Sir Joseph picked them up and put them on the writing-table while he was talking to me."
"The amateur constantly overlooks the obvious," I answered.
Nothing has happened to make you change that opinion?"
Dr. Tresman was a man in the prime of life, and evidently believed himself capable of dealing with any thieves who visited him.
"No, that would have scattered them more.
"What is the opinion you have formed about it, Wigan?" he said.
I remembered the counters in Sir Joseph's room, and wished we had thought to place some in here to see what he would have done with them.
When I questioned Sir Joseph about his papers his manner seemed curious, as I have said.
These preliminaries seemed stereotyped ones, and he appeared glad to be done with them.
Only one had been drunk out of, and probably a little of the liquid had been emptied out of this into the other two.
"You know that as well as I do.
That was my first question, as I told you.
"To this question," I replied.
The guests left early, and soon after midnight the household had retired.
The thief has tried again--twice.
"Nor counters, I suppose," I interrupted.
That he was interested was shown by our adjournment to the empty room, and he did not ask a question until I had finished my story.
All this silver was upon the floor, also the bag of money intact.
"You assume a little too much.
It could not be chance that the burglar had visited these men in exact order, so I argued that he would next go to Dr. Tresman.
Neither Sir Joseph nor Lady Maynard nor any of the servants were disturbed during the night, but next morning it was found that burglars had entered.
The floor was covered with things, and I fancy they happened to be in his way, that was all."
For just a fraction of time I realized that the burglar meant to shoot the intruder without a word of warning, and for a moment I seemed unable to utter a sound.
"That may be true, but we have also got to consider the man's character.
There was the link.
"Why do you expect this particular doctor will be visited?" I asked.
Then I shouted:
In fact, although nothing had been taken, the damage was considerable.
So far as Sir Joseph could tell, not a thing had been taken.
Whatever it is the thief is seeking for, he is desperately anxious to obtain it--witness his two attempts on consecutive nights."
It was discovery from without that he was afraid of.
Had the thief found what he was looking for?
"If you are right, it narrows the sphere of inquiry--narrows it very much, taken with the other facts of the case."
Half a dozen cigarette-ends had been thrown down upon the carpet, and a small box containing some round counters lay broken by the writing-table.
Some of the contents he hardly looked at.
"I think there was only one burglar, but for some reason he thought it important that it should be believed there were more."
Nothing happened.
We must wait; for the moment there is nothing to be done."
Then there is only his own statement that nothing has been taken.
The burglars appeared to have given all their attention to Sir Joseph's room, which was in a state of confusion.
"Forget?
Had he any document which, for private or public reasons, someone might be anxious to obtain?
It was like Christopher Quarles to raise my curiosity, and then to leave it unsatisfied.
"Sudden temptation or necessity may subvert the highest character," I answered.
"Come, now, if it means a rough-and-tumble, I should back myself against you," laughed Tresman, drawing himself up to his full inches.
I questioned Sir Joseph about his papers.
"And you are right," he snapped.
It was his way of showing that he was my superior--at least, it always impressed me like this.
It seemed, however, that the burglar must have heard her moving about and had been prepared to defend himself, for a revolver, loaded in every chamber, was found on one of the cabinets.
He had worked round half the room when he suddenly stopped, and, with a quick movement, took up the revolver.
This was the obvious explanation, but it did not satisfy me.
I grant the safe was not a difficult one to break open, but it had not been done in a very expert manner.
No one had moved about the house during the night, so apparently there had been nothing to disturb them.
His almost superhuman power of recognizing this key-clew was the foundation of Christopher Quarles's success, and his solution of the mysterious burglaries which caused such speculation for a time was not the least of his achievements.
"The unexpected has happened," I said.
And that is where the counters help me--or I think they do."
"Quickly, Wigan!" Quarles cried.
For some time I could not make out what kind of article it was to which he gave special attention, but presently noticed that anything in ivory or bone interested him, especially if it were circular.
I had not heard a sound in the house, but he had.
The professor shook his head.
On the night of the burglary Dr. Wood was away from home, only servants being in the house.
"I cannot say it did.
"For all that, you may be glad of my muscle when it comes to the point," was the answer.
Nonsense!" said the professor sharply.
On consecutive nights two doctors' houses were burgled.
Sir Joseph Maynard, the eminent physician of Harley Street, had given a small dinner party one evening.
Moreover, the cigarette-ends and the dirty glasses suggested a certain leisurely method of going to work, and men of this kind would not be easily frightened.
"The counters were in a heap," I said.
He did not make any movement to switch off the light, he did not attempt to conceal himself.
The first was in Kensington.
Now, what is he looking for?"
"Thank heaven that fool Tresman didn't come sooner!
He laid the revolver ready to his hand upon the piece of furniture he was examining.
The sheriff turned the parchment, and raised it in his right hand, to expose it to the light.
They did not close again; the glassy eyeballs remained fixed.
Now it was unsealed and open.
"Behold it," said the sheriff.
Between the interstices of wicker was a narrow line of red reed, blackened here and there by the action of water and of time.
A man came out from behind the pillars.
For twenty-five years you have slept.
The sheriff, holding in his left hand the nosegay and in his right the white wand, placed himself opposite Gwynplaine, who was still seated, and made him a low bow; then assuming another solemn attitude, he turned his head over his shoulder, and looking Gwynplaine in the face, said,--
And he added,--
A hand is thrust out of the mist, and suddenly hands us the mysterious cup in which is contained the latent intoxication.
You believe yourself a player; you are a senator.
The fingers remained inert, and the toes motionless.
He spoke,--
When Gwynplaine was seated, the justice of the quorum and the wapentake retired a few steps, and stood upright and motionless, behind the seat.
His name was Capgaroupe.
The sheriff placed the parchment on the table, laid down his spectacles, took up the nosegay, and said,--
He was a monster by the grace of God.
She was self-isolated.
If the heir be found, let the coronet be given back to him.
The Lord Chancellor proved the fact that the heir to a peerage had been carried off, mutilated, and then restored.
In cases of doubtful descent, and of peerages in abeyance claimed by collaterals, the House of Lords must be consulted.
As to Lord David, they sent him to sea, off the coast of Flanders.
Barkilphedro found that all his dreams had been nonsense; reality were better.
THE WAIF KNOWS ITS OWN COURSE.
That amphora had been floating fifteen hundred years.
Advancing by such favour, and assuming grave and modest airs, Barkilphedro might become a somebody.
The facts were found to be correct.
The same day a post-chaise belonging to the royal household was suddenly sent by her Majesty to fetch Lady Josiana from London to Windsor, where the queen was at the time residing.
In what manner Gwynplaine was deformed, and by what kind of ugliness, Barkilphedro had not communicated to the queen, and Anne had not deigned to inquire.
He who whispers to the emperor.
The waves transmitted from one to another the floating bottle.
Barkilphedro, having uncorked and emptied the bottle, carried it to the queen.
Whatever appearance of indifference Barkilphedro tried to exhibit, his wonder had equalled his joy.
Meanwhile he was happy.
It was for this that there had been a cordial co-operation between the winds, the tides, and the tempests--a vast agitation of all prodigies for the pleasure of a scoundrel; the infinite co-operating with an earthworm!
In all facts there are wheels within wheels.
The queen was then at Windsor--a circumstance which placed a certain distance between the intrigues of the court and the public.
Barkilphedro was perhaps just on the point of renouncing not his desire to do evil to Josiana, but his hope of doing it; not the rage, but the effort.
Hence an access of savage animosity lurked in his mind. He had reached the paroxysm which is called discouragement.
"If a drowned man is cast up by the water, and is not dead, it is an act of God readjusting one of the king.
We will relate the facts.
He had not lain in ambush in vain.
Besides, she argued to herself that she was repairing an abuse of power committed by her august father. She was reinstating a member of the peerage.
Why should James II., whose credit required the concealment of such acts, have allowed that to be written which endangered their success?
Who could have hoped for this?
Every deed done is a draft drawn on the great invisible paymaster.
Lord William Cowper is celebrated for having, with reference to the affair of Talbot Yelverton, Viscount Longueville, propounded this opinion: That in the English constitution the restoration of a peer is more important than the restoration of a king.
The affair, thanks to him, was kept so close, the secret was so hermetically sealed, that neither Josiana nor Lord David caught sight of the fearful abyss which was being dug under them.
Oh, what a great success! and what a deal of useful work had chance accomplished for him!
This is what he did not see.
The Lord Chancellor was William Cowper.
Barkilphedro was struck by a flash of Titanic pride.
Protector of whom?
Insects exist which are so savagely disinterested that they sting, knowing that to sting is to die. Barkilphedro was like such vermin.
Now to stifle is worse than to mutilate.
Hence the king may order the suppression of a limb like the suppression of a state, etc.
He had read the sign nailed up against the Tadcaster Inn as one reads a play-bill that attracts a crowd.
Thus, under another form, Providence," etc.
Neither was Hardquanonne dead.
He was clever in the art of suggestion, which consists in making in the minds of others a little incision into which you put an idea of your own.
It is legal.
What had she now before her?
Search was made.
Often when it would be to a man's greatest advantage to escape from the hands of the police or the records of history, he would seem to regret the escape so great is the love of notoriety.
Josiana was about to be dashed against Barkilphedro, to his intense villainous ecstasy.
Here was the destruction of the edifice which made the existence of Josiana.
All this was done with the most rigid secrecy, with what is called royal promptitude, and with that mole-like silence recommended and practised by Bacon, and later on made law by Blackstone, for affairs connected with the Chancellorship and the state, and in matters termed parliamentary.
To save the victim of James II. was to give a prey to Barkilphedro.
This flask, covered with mould, was corked by a tarred bung.
Certain princes, too near to the throne, have been conveniently stifled between mattresses, the cause of death being given out as apoplexy.
But one law does not destroy another.
Any one who could have lifted the mask with which he covered his inmost heart even before God would have discovered this: that at the very time Barkilphedro had begun to feel finally convinced that it would be impossible--even to him, the intimate and most infinitesimal enemy of Josiana--to find a vulnerable point in her lofty life.
He had noted it.
The change he was about to work would not have seemed less desirable had it been detrimental to him.
Knowing how to wait, he had fairly won his reward.
The secret had not oozed out, silence being an element of law.
Ocean had made itself father and mother to an orphan, had sent the hurricane against his executioners, had wrecked the vessel which had repulsed the child, had swallowed up the clasped hands of the storm-beaten sailors, refusing their supplications and accepting only their repentance; the tempest received a deposit from the hands of death.
Let us clear the character of chance.
What trouble the abyss must have taken! Thus that which Gernardus had flung into darkness, darkness had handed back to Barkilphedro.
When reality likes, it works masterpieces.
Mysterious efforts!
It was easy to deceive Josiana, entrenched as she was behind a rampart of pride.
She was obliged to set out at once, and to leave her residence in London, Hunkerville House, for her residence at Windsor, Corleone Lodge.
A villain gnawing at his own powerlessness!
Besides, what could it matter?
Barkilphedro managed everything.
Thus was it done for Lord Alla, King of Northumberland, who was also a mountebank.
What words could express his devilish delight!
He even went so far as to justify him.
Oh! you believe that effrontery is confined to abandoned women?
Of a peer of England.
He had nothing to do but to pick them up and fit them together--a repair which it was an amusement to execute.
To commit a crime and emblazon it, there is the sum total of history.
He was all the more furious, because despairing.
All at once to a certain goal--Chance, immense and universal, loves to bring such coincidences about--the flask of Hardquanonne came, driven from wave to wave, into Barkilphedro's hands.
He felt that he was the object and the instrument.
We have seen the result.
"No butcher's meat to-morrow for us, widow," said the man.
"And for small cops, too!
"I think the world is turned upside downwards in these parts.
I've heard they keep their whole establishment on factory fines."
Weal, indeed!
"You sent up for snicks!
"That's a bad job," said Mrs Carey; "for those Traffords are kind to their people.
All the children keep house in these days.
"I take it kindly," said Mrs Carey; "and so you keep house together!
"And why not, neighbour?
And those Traffords had so many schools."
"Well, that's delight," said Caroline.
The bright and lively shops were crowded; and groups of purchasers were gathered round the stalls, that by the aid of glaring lamps and flaunting lanthorns, displayed their wares.
"And what are you going to do now, Caroline?" said Mick.
"And we shall be happy to see you, Mick; and Julia, if you are not engaged;" continued the girl; and she looked at her friend, a pretty demure girl, who immediately said, but in a somewhat faultering tone, "Oh! that we shall."
I proposed to go with her--but two girls alone,--you understand me.
"Well, I have left Mr Trafford's mill," said the girl.
Times is changed indeed!"
Crossing this open ground they gained a suburb, but one of a very different description to that in which was situate the convent where they had parted with Sybil.
"Why, Madam Carey, what has Dandy Mick done to thee?" said a good-humoured voice, it came from one of two factory girls who were passing her stall and stopped.
"Very true," said Mick; "and now we'll be off.
"Well, you need not be so fierce, Mother Carey," said the youth with an affected air of deprecation.
The Temple!" murmured Mrs Carey to herself.
"Well, let it pass," said Mrs Carey.
If you will take a dish of tea with us to-morrow, we expect some friends."
Your father takes a leading part; he is a great orator, and is in his element in this clamorous and fiery life.
At first he talked of writing to see your father, and I offered that Gerard should call upon him.
When I heard my father speak the other night, my heart glowed with emotion; my eyes were suffused with tears; I was proud to be his daughter; and I gloried in a race of forefathers who belonged to the oppressed and not to the oppressors."
It does not much suit me; I am a man of the closet.
He can walk into the government offices like themselves and tell his tale, for though one of the pseudo-opposition, the moment the people move, the factions become united."
"And this Egremont," said Morley rather hurriedly and abruptly, and looking on the ground, "how came he here?
"I am sure that I should complain of no toil that would benefit you," said Hatton; and then addressing himself again to Gerard, he led him to a distant part of the room where they were soon engaged in earnest converse.
The spirit that would cure our ills must be of a deeper and finer mood."
The fact is, in active life one cannot afford to refine.
And for the rest, he has not been injured from learning something of the feelings of the people by living among them."
This Convention, as you well know, was never much to my taste.
And is it possible, that among the delegates of the People there can be other than one and the same object?"
At this moment Gerard and Hatton who were sitting in the remote part of the room rose together and advanced forward; and this movement interrupted the conversation of Sybil and Morley.
"Perhaps I should rather say of your poor dear father," said Hatton, scanning Gerard with his clear blue eye, and then he added, "He was of great service to me in my youth, and one is not apt to forget such things."
Morley at the same moment approached Sybil, and spoke to her in a subdued tone.
And why should anything happen that should make us apprehensive?"
If I had refused to be a leader, I should not have prevented the movement; I should only have secured my own insignificance."
"There is no wisdom like frankness.
"But your father, Sybil, stands alone," at length Morley replied; "surrounded by votaries who have nothing but enthusiasm to recommend them; and by emulous and intriguing rivals, who watch every word and action, in order that they may discredit his conduct, and ultimately secure his downfall."
Had he not accompanied me to this door and met my father, which precipitated an explanation on his part which he found had not been given by others, I might have remained in an ignorance which hereafter might have produced inconvenience."
"I knew we had fearful odds to combat against.
Their eyes had met: hers were kind and calm.
You would think me foolish; but I am alone in the world, and seeing you again, and talking of old times--I really am scarcely fit for business.
I thought, whatever might be the result, it must be a satisfaction to Gerard at last to see this man of whom he has talked and thought so much--and so we are here."
Do not they know everything?
"This world has gone well with you, I am glad to hear and see."
Sybil turned and looked at him, and then said, "And what could happen to-morrow, that we should care for the government being acquainted with it or us?
"But my father has not these fears; he is full of hope and exultation," said Sybil.
"One ought not," said Gerard: "but it is a sort of memory, as I have understood, that is rather rare.
Do not you meet in their very sight?
When we discovered him yesterday your father and myself agreed that we should not mention to you the--the mystification of which we had been dupes."
"All is very well at this moment," said Morley, "and all may continue well; but popular assemblies breed turbulent spirits, Sybil.
I was about to withdraw, when he asked me carelessly a question about your father; what he was doing, and whether he were married and had children.
Go, however, I must; I have an appointment at the House of Lords.
Before however her father and his new friend could reach them, Hatton as if some point on which he had not been sufficiently explicit, had occurred to him, stopped and placing his hand on Gerard's arm, withdrew him again, saying in a voice which could only be heard by the individual whom he addressed.
If money were the only difficulty, trust me, it should not be wanting; I owe much to the memory of your father, my good Gerard; I would fain serve you--and your daughter.
"We have all of us opened ourselves too unreservedly before this aristocrat."
"He chose to wear a disguise, and can hardly quarrel with the frankness with which we spoke of his order or his family.
"You terrify me," said Sybil.
"Qui laborat, orat," said Hatton in a silvery voice, "is the gracious maxim of our Holy Church; and I venture to believe my prayers and vigils have been accepted, for I have laboured in my time," and as he was speaking these words, he turned and addressed them to Sybil.
"I should hope that none of us have said to him a word that we wish to be forgotten," said Sybil.
"Qui laborat, orat," said Sybil with a smile, "is the privilege of the people."
She rose and returned his salute with some ceremony; then hesitating while a soft expression came over her countenance, she held forth her hand, which he retained for a moment, and withdrew.
"Is he not one of themselves!
This led to a very long conversation in which he suddenly seemed to take great interest.
"My father's downfall!" said Sybil.
There was the school he had attended, a small, low-eaved, white-washed building set back from the main road among green spruces.
One learns there--in time--but sometimes the lesson is learned too late.
This was what he had come back to--this ghost and wreck of his past!
If I had known you were here!
Would it still be home?
She had kept her freshness of soul and her ideals untarnished.
When it was quite dark he descended the hill resolutely.
He had had many habitations, but he realized now that he had never thought of any of these places as home.
"All these years," she said gently, "I suppose you think it must have been a very meagre life?"
As he passed through it he lifted his eyes and there before him he saw her, standing tall and gracious among the grey trees, with the light from the west falling over her face.
Wonderful things, beautiful things, heart-breaking things."
"Many things, laddie.
Not in the arena where he had fought and triumphed, giving fierce blow for blow, was it to be shown; but here, looking down on the homeland, with the strength of the hills about him, it rose dominantly and claimed its own.
With the thought came a great yearning for home.
Father and Mother will be glad to see you."
They had parted without pledge or kiss, yet he knew she loved him and that he loved her.
Down in the valley the lights began to twinkle out here and there like earth-stars.
"Joyce!" he said, stupidly, unbelievingly.
He could not ask him what had become of Joyce Cameron. The question was on his lips a dozen times, but he shrank from uttering it.
Hers was the master word, but how should he dare ask her to utter it?
He and Stephen talked late that night, and in the morning he yielded to their entreaties to stay another day with them.
Where was the eagerness and zest of new dawns, the earnestness of well-filled, purposeful hours of labour, the satisfaction of a good day worthily lived, at eventide the unbroken rest of long, starry nights?
He had tilled the broad fields and gone in and out among the people, and their life had been his life.
At first they corresponded, then the letters began to grow fewer.
"No.
While he had sought and toiled afar, the best that God had meant for him had been here in the home of youth.
When darkness came down through the firs he told her all this, haltingly, blunderingly, yearningly.
She smiled and put out her hand.
"After a little," he said imploringly.
He had come back to it, heartsick of his idols of the marketplace.
She coloured slightly and pulled away her hands, laughing.
He had called that longing by other names, but he knew it now for what it was when, hearing, he was satisfied.
He wanted to go beyond the hills and seek what he knew must be there.
Should he go down to it?
For years they had satisfied him, the buying and selling and getting gain, the pitting of strength and craft against strength and craft, the tireless struggle, the exultation of victory.
She had offered him only one hand but he took both and held her so, looking hungrily down at her as a man looks at something he knows must be his salvation if salvation exists for him.
He had lived on the homestead until he was twenty.
But that is not success, Joyce.
Stephen had been a good sort of a fellow, a bit slow and plodding, perhaps, bovinely content to dwell within the hills, never hearkening or responding to the lure of the beyond.
He understood that he could not bring back to the old valley what he had taken from it.
This valley had his past in its keeping, but it could not give it back to him; he had lost the master word that might have compelled it.
He was silent, remembering that he had forfeited all right to her help in the quest.
There was no one left there, unchanged and unchanging, to welcome him.
And I thought you would be over to see us this evening."
He had been born in that old house; his earliest memory was of standing on its threshold and looking afar up to the long green hills.
He smiled a little, remembering that in boyhood it had been held a good omen to see the new moon over the right shoulder.
He walked slowly and dreamily, with his eyes on the far hills scarfed in the splendour of sunset.
He could not enter again into the heritage of boyhood and the heart of youth.
He had not heard from or of Joyce for many years.
How true and strong and womanly and gentle she had always been!
But his heart was not in his work.
They walked among the firs until the stars came out, and they talked of many things.
He asked Stephen fully about all his old friends and neighbours with one exception.
"Yet you have been a very successful man," she said wonderingly.
So he had walked in the old days, but he had no dreams now of what lay beyond the hills, and Joyce would not be waiting among the firs.
She turned her face upward to the sky between the swaying fir tops and he saw the reflection of a star in her eyes.
The valley was too narrow, too placid.
It had been a foolish whim to come at all--foolish, because the object of his quest was not to be found there or elsewhere.
Yet it might be he had chosen the better part, to dwell thus on the land of his fathers, with a wife won in youth, and children to grow up around him.
The old bond held.
He would be a stranger there, even among his kin.
This was the question he asked himself.
He felt glad to see it; he had expected to see a new church, offensively spick-and-span and modern, for this church had been old when he was a boy.
"I am glad to see you, Cuthbert," she said simply.
He wondered where Joyce was now and whom she had married, for of course she had married.
You'll have to, Ruggles.
"That is, I'll compose it. But you'll have to copy it.
Anyhow, there they both were, going on at the silliest rate about how much they loved each other and how the Old Fellow thought she loved Micky and all that sort of thing.
"Yes," said Sylvia, not much above a whisper.
Well, Ruggles wrote the letter.
He looked sideways at Sylvia for a moment and then he said kind of drily, "Ah, did you?"
Just across the square Sylvia met the Old Fellow and bowed.
He was so handsome, we didn't see how she could help it.
"She's the sort of girl who can take a joke.
Both Ruggles and I see that now, since we have had time to cool off, but at the moment we were in a fearful wax at the Old Fellow and were bound to hatch up something to get even with him.
The girls are always a little provoked at him because he is so shy and absent-minded, but when it comes to the point, they like him too.
I know he writes to Em White in vacations.
Anyhow, that letter just filled the bill.
Tumbled to the trick in a jiff; never let on but what he wrote the letter, never will let on, I bet.
"Sylvia, do you mean that you--you actually care a little for me, dearest?
As the saddler mounted the steps of his shop, he felt the blood so rush along his limbs, and tingle in his fingers, that he could not forbear standing without the door for a moment, as if to enjoy the triumph of the warmth within him over the cold morning air.
So he went back to his shop, and sat looking upon the church, and watching, almost with dread, the doves that lighted upon its roof, and fluttered about, and beat their wings against its windows.
While Nathan stood musing, with his eyes fixed upon the church, he became suddenly conscious that another figure had entered the square upon the opposite side, and was walking hastily along.
As he was driving rapidly along, his ear caught what seemed the peal of an organ.
And he was so rapt with the sights and the sounds within, that it needed all Nathan's endeavors to uphold him.
Filled with astonishment, he put his horse upon its fastest trot, and drove round into the square, to the shop of Nathan Stoddard.
It was closed, as usual on Christmas day, and a recent snow had heaped the steps and roof, and loaded the windows.
But there was a great green cross over the pulpit, and words along the walls, and festoons upon the galleries, and great wreaths, like vast green serpents, coiled about the cold pillars.
The whole party appeared full of life and cheerfulness, while the old man whom Nathan had seen enter stood near the door, looking quietly on, with a little girl holding his hand.
But he was not easily to be daunted.
They were mounted upon benches and ladders, and boards laid along the tops of the pews, and were apparently just completing the decoration of the church, which was already dressed with green, with little trees in the corners, and with green letters upon the walls, and great wreaths about the pillars.
But as his vision grew more clear, he beheld a sight which could not amaze him less than the apparition that startled Tam o' Shanter as he glared through the darkness into the old Kirk of Alloway.
By this time the sound of a gathering crowd below, which he had not heeded at first, was forced more and more upon his notice; and the anxious voice of his oldest deacon calling, "Mr.
Mr. Dudley looked, and had not Nathan's arm been about his body he would have lost his hold, in sheer amazement.
The congregation, indeed, were gone, and the preacher, and the choir; and the room was cold.
The minister of Nathan's parish was a young man by the name of Dudley; and it so happened that he had driven out, before light, on the morning we have spoken of, to visit a sick man at some distance.
When Nathan Stoddard climbed upon the old shed and pressed his face against the glass of the little church-window, he had at first only a confused impression of many lamps and many figures in all parts of the church.
In returning home, he had to pass along the rather unfrequented street which runs in the rear of his church, and close to it.
All gazed about in wonder.
Mr. Dudley listened intently, and could catch what seemed the words of some old Christmas carol:
Nathan sprang upon the shed at the side of the church, and scrambled up to the little window.
But it was like some deep and holy experience that would lose its charm if it were spoken of to another.
"There is music to-day in our church, Nathan!" he cried to the young saddler.
There was a strange beauty, too, about the old man's face.
It was said to be a portrait of a minister in the town, who lived in the last century, and is still remembered for his virtues.
It was not until Nathan Stoddard had looked for some little time upon this spectacle that he began to feel that he was witness of any thing more than natural.
Mr. Dudley hastened round to prevent their causing any disturbance to the congregation within; but he came only in time to see the door burst open, and to be borne in with the crowd.
It was not without a creeping feeling of awe, mingled with his astonishment, that Nathan gazed upon the door through which this silent figure had vanished.
He turned his eyes upon it, and was greatly surprised by its appearance.
Dudley!
The singers' gallery was filled by a choir of girls and boys, while his own place in the pulpit was occupied by a white-haired figure, whom he recognized as the original of a portrait which he had purchased and hung in his parlor at home for its singular beauty.
The girl who received it reported the old man as saying, in a tremulous, but very kind voice, "Give your master the Christmas blessing of an old Puritan minister." How the meaning of this message would have been known to Mr. Dudley, had not the events we have told disclosed it, who can say?
Nathan thought that it looked uncommonly beautiful in the softening twilight of the morning.
He caught the horse by the head, and fastened him to a post before the door.
The little stone church which Nathan attends stands in the same square with his shop, and nearly opposite.
He did not care to follow the steps of the stranger into the church; but he remembered a shed so placed against the building, near the farther end, that he had often, when a child, at some peril indeed, climbed upon its top, and looked into the church through a little window at one side of the pulpit.
Again and again he drew his hand across his brows, until he felt that he was near swooning, and like to fall; and he clung desperately to his hold. When the fit was over, he dared venture no more, but hastened to the ground.
Then stepping to the side of the sleigh, he said to Mr. Dudley, "Come with me, Sir." Mr. Dudley looked upon the pale face and trembling lips of his parishioner, and followed in silence.
For this he started; but he did not fail to run across the square and leap over the church-gate at the top of his speed, in order to gather warmth and courage for the attempt.
It was six o'clock in the morning of last Thursday (Christmas morning), when Nathan Stoddard, a young saddler, strode through the vacant streets of one of our New England towns, hastening to begin his work.
When Mr. Dudley reached his home, after the wonder had in part spent itself, he found that an enormous Christmas pie had been left at his door by a white-haired old man dressed in black, about six in the morning, just after he had gone to visit his sick parishioner.
The town is an old-fashioned one, and although the observance of the ancient church festival is no longer frowned upon, as in years past, yet it has been little regarded, especially in the church of which Nathan is a member.
CHRISTMAS REVIVED.
"Look in, Sir," said Nathan, not venturing a glance himself.
He was leaning over the great Bible, with his hands folded upon it, and his eyes seemingly filled with tears of pleasure and gratitude, and bent upon the choir.
The whole party had so home-like an air, and appeared so engaged with their pleasant occupation, that, notwithstanding their quaint dress, Nathan only thought how much he should like to share their company.
He had hardly begun to speculate as to who the stranger could be, when he beheld him turn in between the posts by the path that leads to the church, tread lightly over the snow, and up the steps, and knock hastily and vigorously at the church-door.
Mr. Young was then put to bed, and he slept all the way back to Wrangell.
The woods here are without a trace of those deep accumulations of mosses, leaves, and decaying trunks which make so damp and unclearable mass in the coast forests.
He ran down to our help, and while I steadied my trembling companion from behind, the captain kindly led him up the plank into the saloon, and made him drink a large glass of brandy.
I saw fine specimens a hundred and twenty-five feet high on deep bottom land a few miles below Glenora.
After narrowly scanning the cliff and making footholds, I managed to roll and lift him a few yards to a place where the slope was less steep, and there I attempted to set his arms.
Although it was now twenty minutes past three and the days were getting short, I thought that by rapid climbing I could reach the summit before sunset, in time to get a general view and a few pencil sketches, and make my way back to the steamer in the night.
We arrived before noon at the old trading-post called "Buck's" in front of the Stickeen Glacier, and remained long enough to allow the few passengers who wished a nearer view to cross the river to the terminal moraine.
We left Wrangell in the afternoon and anchored for the night above the river delta, and started up the river early next morning when the heights above the "Big Stickeen" Glacier and the smooth domes and copings and arches of solid snow along the tops of the canyon walls were glowing in the early beams.
But strange to say, instead of coming down to help, they made haste to reproach him for having gone on a "wild-goose chase" with Muir.
The birch is common on the lower slopes and is very effective, its round, leafy, pale-green head contrasting with the dark, narrow spires of the conifers and giving a striking character to the forest.
The Indians have a tradition that the river used to run through a tunnel under the united fronts of the two large tributary glaciers mentioned above, which entered the main canyon from either side; and that on one occasion an Indian, anxious to get rid of his wife, had her sent adrift in a canoe down through the ice tunnel, expecting that she would trouble him no more.
After the main trunk canyon was melted out, its side branches, drawing their sources from a height of three or four to five or six thousand feet, were cut off, and of course became separate glaciers, occupying cirques and branch canyons along the tops and sides of the walls.
After scrambling to an outstanding point that commands a view of it from top to bottom, to make sure that it was not interrupted by sheer precipices, I concluded that with great care and the digging of slight footholds he could be slid down to the glacier, where I could lay him on his back and perhaps be able to set his arms.
The sunbeams streaming through the ice pinnacles along its terminal wall produced a wonderful glory of color, and the broad, sparkling crystal prairie and the distant snowy fountains were wonderfully attractive and made me pray for opportunity to explore them.
I found, however, that this was impossible in such a place. I therefore tied his arms to his sides with my suspenders and necktie, to prevent as much as possible inflammation from movement.
The river-bank cottonwoods are also smaller, and the birch and contorta pines mingle freely with the coast hemlock and spruce.
I now told him I would run down the mountain, hasten back with help from the boat, and carry him down in comfort.
I therefore concluded to try to get him to the ship by short walks from one fire and resting-place to another.
There is another handsome spruce hereabouts, Picea alba, very slender and graceful in habit, drooping at the top like a mountain hemlock.
About half an hour before sunset, when we were near a cluster of crumbling pinnacles that formed the summit, I had ceased to feel anxiety about the mountaineering strength and skill of my companion, and pushed rapidly on.
The rich hazy sunshine streaming over the cliffs calls forth the last of the gentians and goldenrods; the groves and thickets and meadows bloom again as their leaves change to red and yellow petals; the rocks also, and the glaciers, seem to bloom like the plants in the mellow golden light.
The tops of some of them were almost covered with dense clusters of yellow and brown cones.
It draws its sources from snowy mountains within fifteen or twenty miles of the coast, pours through a comparatively narrow canyon about two miles in width in a magnificent cascade, and expands in a broad fan five or six miles in width, separated from the Stickeen River by its broad terminal moraine, fringed with spruces and willows.
You can't slip past me and I will soon get you out of this."
The most interesting of the short excursions we made from Fort Wrangell was the one up the Stickeen River to the head of steam navigation.
Mr. Young was perhaps a dozen or two yards behind me, but out of sight.
Accordingly, I cheered him up, telling him I had found a way, but that it would require lots of time and patience.
The majestic cliffs and mountains forming the canyon walls display endless variety of form and sculpture, and are wonderfully adorned and enlivened with glaciers and waterfalls, while throughout almost its whole extent the floor is a flowery landscape garden, like Yosemite.
But to his surprise she floated through under the ice in safety.
Don't leave me."
"No, no," he said, "I can walk down.
On account of destructive fires the woods are younger and are composed of smaller trees about a foot to eighteen inches in diameter and seventy-five feet high, mostly two-leaved pines which hold their seeds for several years after they are ripe.
It is about three hundred and fifty miles long, and is navigable for small steamers a hundred and fifty miles to Glenora, and sometimes to Telegraph Creek, fifteen miles farther.
Then, with a man holding down his shoulders, we succeeded in getting the bone into its socket, notwithstanding the inflammation and contraction of the muscles and ligaments.
I managed to get below him, touched one of his feet, and tried to encourage him by saying, "I am below you.
He proved to be a stout walker, and we made rapid progress across a brushy timbered flat and up the mountain slopes, open in some places, and in others thatched with dwarf firs, resting a minute here and there to refresh ourselves with huckleberries, which grew in abundance in open spots.
"These foolish adventures are well enough for Mr. Muir," they said, "but you, Mr. Young, have a work to do; you have a family; you have a church, and you have no right to risk your life on treacherous peaks and precipices."
While he was resting I went ahead, looking for the best way through the brush and rocks, then returning, got him on his feet and made him lean on my shoulder while I steadied him to prevent his falling.
It first pursues a westerly course through grassy plains darkened here and there with groves of spruce and pine; then, curving southward and receiving numerous tributaries from the north, it enters the Coast Range, and sweeps across it through a magnificent canyon three thousand to five thousand feet deep, and more than a hundred miles long.
"Yes," he bravely replied.
I therefore bound it closely to his side, and asked him if in his exhausted and trembling condition he was still able to walk.
Here, too, occurs a marked change in climate and consequently in forests and general appearance of the face of the country.
This is no time for preaching!
Thirty-five miles above the Big Stickeen Glacier is the "Dirt Glacier," the second in size.
In passing around the shoulder of the highest pinnacle, where the rock was rapidly disintegrating and the danger of slipping was great, I shouted in a warning voice, "Be very careful here, this is dangerous."
The captain, Nat Lane, son of Senator Joseph Lane, had been swearing in angry impatience for being compelled to make so late a start and thus encounter a dangerous wind in a narrow gorge, and was threatening to put the missionaries ashore to seek their lost companion, while he went on down the river about his business.
Of course all the boys went to school; and most of them got into Class III, but Slightly was put first into Class IV and then into Class V. Class I is the top class.
You see that judge in a wig coming out at the iron door?
I suppose it was because Wendy knew this that her last words to him were these rather plaintive ones:
Wendy rushed to the window.
"I don't want to be a man.
"O Peter, you know it matters."
Peter rose and bowed to her, and she bowed to him from the bed.
"About me, Peter?"
"I don't think he is a cypher," Tootles cried instantly.
Once a week Jane's nurse had her evening off; and then it was Wendy's part to put Jane to bed.
"Yes."
"And then to an office?"
"Sneaky tell-tale!" Tink called out from somewhere round the corner.
"With Tink in the house we built for Wendy.
She was as grown up as that.
"I expect she is no more."
"You promised not to!"
In time they could not even fly after their hats.
"My name is Peter Pan," he told her.
"There are such a lot of them," he said.
"Yes."
"I don't think I see anything to-night," says Wendy, with a feeling that if Nana were here she would object to further conversation.
"He does so need a mother," Jane said.
"No, no," she cried.
Something inside her was crying "Woman, Woman, let go of me."
Of course Peter promised; and then he flew away.
Because, if so, we can go away."
"Would you send me to school?" he inquired craftily.
"Girl."
That was the time for stories.
"Oh dear, are you going away?"
Now surely he would understand; but not a bit of it.
I expect he was right, for fairies don't live long, but they are so little that a short time seems a good while to them.
"What is gay and innocent and heartless?
"Certainly not.
I grew up long ago."
"I do believe it is," says Jane.
"Then follow the leader," he cried gaily.
"Why do they forget the way?"
"I think I liked the home under the ground best of all."
"No, she's not."
She was one of the kind that likes to grow up.
Wendy was married in white with a pink sash.
"It doesn't matter," Peter said.
"Why can't you fly now, mother?"
"My darling, how can you know?"
He was exactly the same as ever, and Wendy saw at once that he still had all his first teeth.
Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him; so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first year.
"What is it?" he cried again.
That used to be Tootles.
But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.
"Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man."
"Yes! which did you like best of all?"
"I thought all the fairies were dead," Mrs. Darling said.
But she seemed satisfied.
You may see the twins and Nibs and Curly any day going to an office, each carrying a little bag and an umbrella.
Michael came close to her and whispered, with a shiver, "Perhaps there is no such person, Wendy!" and then Wendy would have cried if Michael had not been crying.
But he was exactly as fascinating as ever, and they had a lovely spring cleaning in the little house on the tree tops.
"Yes."
"Yes."
There were only two beds in the nursery now, Jane's and her nurse's; and there was no kennel, for Nana also had passed away.
Then he burst into tears, and the truth came out.
"The foolish fellow," says Wendy, "tried to stick it on with soap, and when he could not he cried, and that woke me, and I sewed it on for him."
"You have missed a bit," interrupts Jane, who now knows the story better than her mother.
She died of old age, and at the end she had been rather difficult to get on with; being very firmly convinced that no one knew how to look after children except herself.
"The last thing he ever said to me was, 'Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing.'"
Peter continued to cry, and soon his sobs woke Jane.
The sheet of the paper which he held up was a lake of print around an islet of illustration.
"You are very wise.
The mighty neck came down square from the ears and curved outwards into shoulders, which had lost nothing at the hands of the local artist.
I have never claimed one.
They contend for a sum of money.
"Hang it, I'm only twenty-three!" said Montgomery to himself, and read on more cheerfully.
Have your way."
If he lost, it would only mean a thrashing.
"Broke his leg, has he?"
"No, sir."
There were a few points in his favour, and he must make the most of them. There was age--twenty-three against forty.
A hard veteran full of cool valour and ring-craft, could give ten or fifteen years and a beating to most striplings.
Ambitious of a more than local fame, he secured a patron, and fought his first fight against Jack Barton, of Birmingham, in May 1880, at the old Loiterers' Club.
"It is very inconvenient upon so busy a day."
Why do you eat toast with every meal?"
"No, sir; I have had some business to detain me."
Undismayed by his reverses, the Master adapted the style of his fighting to his physical disabilities and resumed his career of victory--defeating Norton (the black), Hobby Wilson, and Levi Cohen, the latter a heavy-weight.
I should recommend a visit to the ruins of St. Bridget's Church, a very interesting relic of the early Norman era. By the way, there is one objection which I see to your going to Croxley on Saturday.
On the Friday night, which was the last night before the fight, Montgomery's three backers assembled in the gymnasium and inspected their man as he went through some light exercises to keep his muscles supple.
If he could not get leave he would go without it.
Happen thou'lt pull through yet." He chuckled with joy when Montgomery knocked him into a corner.
The kick of a horse broke his thigh, and for a year he was compelled to rest himself.
"I am going over Croxley way."
There was an old ring proverb that "Youth will be served," but the annals of the ring offer a great number of exceptions.
If he hadn't broke his leg he'd have been champion of England."
"Ten stone eleven," the assistant answered.
I observe, also, that you have turned against potatoes."
A local ruffian, a patient of ours, by the way, matched against a pugilist over at Croxley. I cannot understand why the law does not step in and stop so degrading an exhibition.
"What weight to-day?"
"And you no longer drink your beer?"
It is always so particularly easy to "compound for sins we're most inclined to by damning those we have no mind to." In any case, Montgomery felt that of all the men concerned in such a fight--promoters, backers, spectators--it is the actual fighter who holds the strongest and most honourable position.
It was not a cheering record which he read there.
"Well, there is no prettier country when once you are past the iron-works.
There was a little tobacco-shop at the corner of the street, where Montgomery got his bird's-eye and also his local information, for the shopman was a garrulous soul, who knew everything about the affairs of the district.
"You will remember, Dr. Oldacre, that when I came to you it was understood that I should have a clear day every month.
There are various rumours afloat as to who their representative is to be, the name of Ted Barton being freely mentioned; but the betting, which is seven to one on the Master against any untried man, is a fair reflection of the feeling of the community.
Having in his youth shown a surprising aptitude for the game, he fought his way up among his comrades, until he became the recognised champion of the district and won the proud title which he still holds.
At this period it looked as if the very highest honours of the ring were within the reach of the young Yorkshireman, but he was laid upon the shelf by a most unfortunate accident.
They were sitting alone at lunch, and the assistant thought that it would be a good opportunity of asking leave for the day of the fight.
It seems dreadful and almost incredible--does it not?--to think that such scenes can be enacted within a few miles of our peaceful home.
Dr. Oldacre gave in with a very bad grace.
"Yes, and it set badly.
I should hope to be back in the evening."
Such fads are not to be encouraged in one's youth.
There was his whole record, and was it enough to encourage him to stand up to the Master of Croxley?
"Heard of him!
"Yes, sir."
"Runs a bit light at the loins, to my way of thinking'."
His muscular development was finely hard, but his power came rather from that higher nerve-energy which counts for nothing upon a measuring tape.
Endurance and courage are virtues, not vices, and brutality is, at least, better than effeminacy.
"He's simply ripping!" said the undergraduate.
The only part of Montgomery's training which came within the doctor's observation was his diet, and that puzzled him considerably.
The coolness, the power of hitting, above all the capability of taking punishment, count for so much.
You will find a quiet day among the wild flowers a very valuable restorative.
His conscience gave him no concern upon the subject.
"Yes, sir; I think that I am better without them."
"Happen he's a trifle on the fine side," said the publican.
"I am afraid I cannot spare you, Mr. Montgomery."
"I hear that the Master will scale a hundred and sixty odd at the ring-side."
It was true that his teacher was long past his prime, slow upon his feet, and stiff in his joints, but even so he was still a tough antagonist; but Montgomery had found at last that he could more than hold his own with him.
There was something in the cool insistence of the young man, a quiet resolution in his voice as he claimed his Saturday, which aroused his curiosity.
He must prepare himself carefully, throw away no chance, and do the very best that he could.
Even if he had been prompted to advance those class fees, for which his assistant had appealed, it would have been against his interests to do so, for he did not wish him to qualify, and he desired him to remain in his subordinate position, in which he worked so hard for so small a wage.
Hard hitting was the feature of his own style, and he exacted it from others.
"Yes, sir."
He could not rely too much upon his advantage in age. But then there was the lameness; that must surely count for a great deal.
The three walked round him and exulted.
"I believe that to be the correct term.
He had been exhorted to go in for the Amateur Championships, but he had no particular ambition in that direction.
Do you still insist?"
But you will realise, Mr. Montgomery, that while there are such influences for us to counteract, it is very necessary that we should live up to our highest."
And, lastly, there was the chance that the Master might underrate his opponent, that he might be remiss in his training, and refuse to abandon his usual way of life, if he thought that he had an easy task before him.
The medical assistant sat for a time in the surgery turning it over a little in his mind.
Above was written "Silas Craggs," and beneath, "The Master of Croxley."
But he knew enough to appreciate the difference which exists in boxing, as in every sport, between the amateur and the professional.
Born in 1857 (said the provincial biographer), Silas Craggs, better known in sporting circles as the Master of Croxley, is now in his fortieth year.
"I will take my chance of that, sir," said the assistant.
The whole history of the Croxley Master was given in full, his many victories, his few defeats.
"These causeless whims and fancies are very much to be deprecated, Mr. Montgomery.
The assistant strolled down there after tea and asked, in a casual way, whether the tobacconist had ever heard of the Master of Croxley.
"I should be glad if you could let me have leave for Saturday, Dr. Oldacre."
"In the country?"
"It is very near to my heart that my household should set a good example.
Montgomery read it over twice, and it left him with a very serious face. No light matter this which he had undertaken; no battle with a rough-and-tumble fighter who presumed upon a local reputation. The man's record showed that he was first-class--or nearly so.
He had the well-curved nose and the widely opened eye which never yet were seen upon the face of a craven, and behind everything he had the driving force, which came from the knowledge that his whole career was at stake upon the contest.
Meanwhile, if his opponent were the best man who ever jumped the ropes into a ring, his own duty was clear.
The medical assistant had a good basis to start from.
Such things are not to be acquired in a week, but all that could be done in a week should be done.
This was a facer.
"I find that it suits me better than bread, sir."
"No, sir.
One of my patients tells me that it is the talk of the district.
Perhaps some day the government will crown a Colyumist Laureate, some majestic sage with ancient patient blue eyes and a snowy beard nobly stained with nicotine, whose utterances will be heeded with shuddering respect.
I find a memorandum of it in my scrap-book:
There he stood (a sort of unsuccessful Cyrus Curtis), very diminutive, his gray hair rather long abaft his neck, his yellowish straw hat (with curly brim) tilted backward as though in perplexity, his timid and absorbed blue eyes poring over his memorandum-book which was full of pencilled notes.
When a big jewellery firm in the city puts out a large ad--
He has to deal with the most elusive and grotesque material he knows--his own mind; and the unhappy creature, everlastingly probing himself in the hope of discovering what is so rare in minds (a thought), is likely to end in a ferment of bitterness.
I can not imagine any pleasant job so full of pangs, or any painful job so full of pleasures, as the task of conducting a newspaper column.
Bailey, Banks & Biddle Company Watches for Women Of Superior Design and Perfection of Movement
If you are to make steady column-topers out of your readers, your daily dose must, as far as possible, average up to that same prescription.
There is nothing so amazing to him as to find that any one really enjoys his "stuff." Poor soul, he remembers how he groaned over it at his desk.
When people see a man toiling, they have an irresistible impulse to crowd round and stop him.
It is hard to get the colyumist to admit this, for he fears spoofing worse than the devil; but it is eminently true.
The original of all paragraphers--Ecclesiastes--came very near ending as a complete cynic; though in what F. P. A. would call his "lastline," he managed to wriggle into a more hopeful mood.
He had a slightly unkempt, brief beard and whiskers, his cheek-bones pinkish, his linen a little frayed.
He remembers the hours he sat with lack-lustre eye and addled brain, brooding at the sluttish typewriter. He remembers the flush of shame that tingled him as he walked sadly homeward, thinking of some atrocious inanity he had sent upstairs to the composing-room.
SO DO WE ALL
Yet who will say that all his labour is wholly vain?
He then learns, in secret, to take it rather seriously.
The more a colyumist is out on the streets, making himself the reporter of the moods and oddities of men, the better his stuff will be.
His umbrella leaned against a shop-window, on the sill of which he had laid a carefully rolled-up newspaper.
And in the long run such a habit of inquiry must bear fruit in understanding and sympathy.
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
The other afternoon I was very much struck by the unconscious pathos of a little, gentle-eyed old man who was standing on Chestnut Street studying a pocket notebook.
This is all a part of the great and salutary human instinct against work.
He becomes filled with an extraordinary curiosity about the motives and purposes of the people he sees.
There was something strangely pathetic about him, and I would have given much to have been able to speak to him.
Of course there are good days, too.
And in that day
Then the battered jester turns again to his machine and ticks off something like this:
By his feet was a neat leather brief-case, plumply filled with contents not discernible.
I halted at a window farther down the street and studied him; then returned to pass him again, and watched him patiently.
If you employ the purge all the time, or the sedative, or the acid, your clients will soon ask for something with another label.
They seem to imagine that he has been put there on purpose to help them solve their problems, to find a job for their friend from Harrisburg, or to tell them how to find a publisher for their poems.
If you have to be endlessly speculating, watching, and making mental notes, your brain-gears soon get a hot box.
I had always wanted to have a try at writing a column.
When Governor Hobby of Texas issues a call for the state cavalry.
That is just one of the thousands of vivid little pictures one sees on the city streets day by day.
The meanest paragraph that blows will give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for sneers.
Joseph Conrad (who seems, by the way, to be more read by newspaper men than any other writer) put very nobly the pinnacle of all scribblers' dreams when he said that human affairs deserve the tribute of "a sigh which is not a sob, a smile which is not a grin."
all that one needs to do to that is to write over it the caption
One never buys a package of tobacco, crosses a city square, enters a trolley car or studies a shop-window without trying, in a baffled, hopeless way, to peer through the frontage of the experience, to find some glimmer of the thoughts, emotions, and meanings behind.
He soon outgrows this, and is disheartened because too many people notice it, and he imagines that all see the paltriness of it as plainly as he does.
Poor soul, he is like one condemned to harangue the vast, idiotic world through a keyhole, whence his anguish issues thin and faint.
So besotted was I, I would have paid to have this printed if I had not been counselled by an older and wiser head.
If I were the owner of a newspaper, I think I would have painted up on the wall of the local room the following words from Isaiah, the best of all watchwords for all who write:
This lasts about a week.
It is a job that engenders a healthy humility.
Heaven help me, I think I had an idea that I was born for the job.
Said Humorist can also supply excellent veins of philosophy, poetry, satire, uplift, glad material and indiscriminate musings. Remarkable opportunity for any newspaper desiring a really unusual editorial feature.
But it is fun.
It is heart-racking to struggle day by day, amid incessant interruption and melee, to snatch out of the hurly-burly some shreds of humour or pathos or (dare one say?) beauty, and phrase them intelligibly.
Yet now and then he gets a glimpse into a human vexation so sincere, so honest, and so moving that he turns away from the typewriter with a sigh.
There was a time when I seriously thought of inserting the following ad in a Philadelphia newspaper.
I may as well be candid.
He stood quite absorbed, and was still there when I went on.
Unhappily, their victim being merely human, is likely to grow a bit snappish under infliction.
It seems to me that his job ought to be good training for a novelist, as it teaches him a habit of human sensitiveness.
The first valuable discovery that the colyumist is likely to make is that all minds are very much the same.
A guaranteed circulation-getter.
So much, with apology, for the ideals of the colyumist, if he be permitted to speak truth without fear of mockery.
Address HUMORIST, etc.
He wonders how one dare approach the chronicling of this muddled panorama with anything but humility and despair.
HUMORIST: Young and untamed, lineal descendent of Eugene Field, Frank Stockton, and Francois Rabelais, desires to run a column in a Philadelphia newspaper.
The doctors tell us that all patent medicines are built on a stock formula--a sedative, a purge, and a bitter.
He may yearn desperately to compose a really thrilling poem that will speak his passionate soul; to churn up from the typewriter some lyric that will rock with blue seas and frantic hearts; he finds himself allaying the frenzy with some jovial sneer at Henry Ford or a yell about the High Cost of Living.
It is a task not a whit less worthy, less painful, or less baffling than that of the most conscientious novelist.
Frank Harris once said of Oscar Wilde: "If England insists on treating her criminals like this, she doesn't deserve to have any." Similarly, if the public insists on bringing its woes to its colyumists, it doesn't deserve to have any colyumists.
He had answered that he must keep on there for awhile, till a certain undertaking which he had started with Jost was fairly under way.
"Come a little nearer to the well; no one knows who may be behind those trees.
She went down into the garden.
"First I will tell you something, and then you shall have it," replied Judith.
But Jost can tell you more than I can.
"I don't see anything," he said, and stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets.
Dietrich puts in more money every time.
He has business in Fohrensee once a week, and lives the rest of the time down in the city; and he arranges everything down there, and then brings the account of gains and losses up to them; but it's a good deal more loss than gain.
He was her prime, favorite and she meant to do well by him.
She had expostulated with him about it more than once.
He does not belong there; but I guess you have seen him; he has fiery red hair, and red beard and red face.
"And no one can get a word out of her, either; it is exactly as if all the oil had been burned out."
With this Blasi ran on.
He said hastily:
"Yes, she is! she is! she is capable of anything when she is angry!"
Judith walked along, talking aloud to herself,
It certainly means something, when she is so changed.
She had planted it all and cared for it with her own hands.
She had grown very quiet and silent.
They sit together in the Rehbock half the night and more, too; long after everybody else has gone, there they sit in the little back room.
But this evening she was so anxious that she could not stay in her bedroom.
"Oh, Dieterli, my son, you are wandering away, but you know the way home," she said to herself, and she folded her hands in prayer, for her habit was to lay all her troubles before God, her Supporter and Comforter.
Did her boy ever pray now?
"Now give me what you promised me."
Judith bounced violently into the kitchen and set her jug down with such a bang that the water spurted up into the air.
She had no longer the cheerful expression that she had always been noted for.
She liked Veronica because she was such a steady girl at her needle, and because she would have nothing to say to any one but Dietrich.
Now all this fine air-castle was overthrown and all her plans spoiled.
Three fellows shouting and calling, passed on the other side of the hedge; she recognized one of the voices.
"What stuff!
One night after she had gone to her room she heard her son leave the house with hasty steps.
This very reserve however, was rather distasteful to Judith as regarded herself, but she liked it towards others.
With an effort I glanced at Mercer.
"You bet!" I said quickly, feeling rather a fool for ragging him when he was in such deadly earnest.
I looked down at the girl.
That, no doubt, was why she hated him.
She came closer, walking with the airy grace I had noted before, and my heart pounded against my ribs as she raised one long, slim arm towards me.
Then she saw the pool.
If we only could!"
And I want you to help, and not admire.
I smiled back at her and shook my head. She seemed to understand, for the sound ceased, and she studied me with a little thoughtful frown, as though trying to figure out some other method of communication.
Then again the vision was swallowed up by the swirling mists of time.
But it was his present excited speech that amazed me most.
They returned the caress, the crowd gathered around them, listening to her story as they moved slowly, happily, towards the distant city.
She was smiling, and looking up into my eyes.
From the left came a band of men and women, looking around as though in search of some particular spot.
A heavy, snaky cable led from this panel to the maze of apparatus further on.
I think so.
Then they made what I understood was a fire, although the girl was able to visualize it only as a bright red spot that flickered.
Blinded, she did not see that the jutting ribs of the ancient ship were in her path.
The thing had an indescribably eery effect.
"For Carson," he explained.
We'll leave Carson out of to-night's experiment, however, for we'll need him to operate this switch.
Mercer was mighty lucky to have a man like Carson....
He laughed, an excited, high-pitched laugh that irritated me in some subtle way.
"Webbed," nodded Mercer solemnly.
"The salt water would short the antennae, you see.
I saw that same shore line, but the people had vanished.
I headed directly towards the heavy bronze ladder that led to the bottom of the pool.
They searched ceaselessly for something, and I guessed that something was food.
Her eyes met mine and I knew that I had not misunderstood.
Mercer picked the place up for me at a song.
Just a few yards beyond the surf boomed hollowly on the smooth, shady shore, littered now, I knew, by the pitiful spoils of the storm.
There were persons there, seated on stone or coral chairs, padded with marine growths.
I tried to look away, and found myself unable to move.
Here and there figures moved, slim white figures that strolled along the narrow street, or at times shot overhead like veritable torpedoes.
The set-up consisted of a whole bank of tubes, each one in its own shielding copper box.
I carried her, unresisting, trustful, in my arms, while Mercer bore a huge basin of water, in which her head was submerged, so that she might not suffer.
The girl was watching me, and there was no smile on her face now.
"I fell asleep working on it at three o'clock, or thereabouts, this morning, and some tests with Carson seem to indicate that it is a success.
"I think I have what you call my thought-telegraph perfected, experimentally," he explained rapidly.
Shall we carry on?"
The other end of the room was nearly all glass, and opened onto the patio and the swimming pool.
The receiver snapped and crackled; Mercer had hung up the instant he had my assurance that I would come.
"You're not in love, by any chance, and bringing me down here like this merely to back up your own opinion of them eyes and them lips, Mercer?"
"I don't blame you," I said quickly.
Then he lifted his dark eyes to mine, and smiled, rather wearily.
She was such a slim, graceful, almost delicate little thing; the thought that three strong men might not be able to control her seemed almost amusing.
I don't blame you.
So I picked her up in my arms and brought her to the house as quickly as I could.
This time she did not grasp me, but watched me intently, as though understanding what I did, and the reasons for it.
"Have--"
She was walking slowly away from the cluster of coral structures. Once or twice she paused, and seemed to hold conversation with others of the strange people, but each time she moved on.
She made again that strange little gesture of invitation.
"Now," he directed, "you put on this one"--he adjusted a second contrivance upon my head, smiling as I shrank from the contact of the cold metal on my skin--"and think!"
She gripped both our shoulders with a gentle pressure, smiling at us.
It was a knife of whetted stone or bone.
Brushing the cigarette ashes from my smoking-jacket, I crossed the room and snatched up the receiver.
Something seemed to tick suddenly, somewhere deep in my consciousness.
"Now you'll see why I called you here," he said tensely.
"We'll need his help.
It seemed to me that she invited me to join her.
He picked up a weird, hastily built contrivance composed of two semi-circular pieces of spring brass, crossed at right angles.
The picture grew hazy; I realized Mercer was trying to picture the bottom of the sea.
They were forced back to the teeming source from whence they came, for lack of food.
I glanced down at her.
I was conscious of the little click that told me the switch had been moved.
"And what's more, I hope you don't."
He laughed wildly.
Her body was cold, and deathly white, although her lips were faintly pink, and her heart was beating, faintly but steadily.
But come in, come in!
Before I could leap from the car, the broad front door, with its rounded top and circular, grilled window, was flung wide, and Mercer came running to meet me.
I was aware of the soft little tick in the center of my brain that announced that the switch had been moved to another contact point.
The strange creature thrust her face close to mine as my feet touched bottom, and for the first time I saw her features distinctly.
"Webbed?" I asked, startled.
"I suppose you're wondering what it's all about.
"Taylor?"
"I believe she likes you, Taylor," said Mercer thoughtfully.
Mercer was ready to get his message to her.
It was after eleven by the ship's clock on the mantel, and if--
It is difficult for me to describe the scene.
You saw that, Taylor--saw her forebears become amphibians, like the now extinct Dipneusta and Ganoideii, or the still existing Neoceratodus, Polypterus and Amia.
He was picturing himself walking long the shore, with the stormy ocean in the background.
I was weak and shaking when I finished, but my head was clear.
"Get in your car and come down here as fast as possible.
The human race as we know it.
I saw him run up to the pool and lift the slim, pale figure in his arms.
My heart was pounding.
At last they came to the edge of the sea.
Mercer, during all the years I had known him, had never been moved before to such tempestuous outbursts of enthusiasm.
I watched him in silence as he spliced and securely taped the last connection.
I forgot time and space.
"The human race," he said gravely, "came up out of sea.
"Burglars?" I had never heard Mercer speak in that high-pitched, excited voice before; his usual speech was slow and thoughtful, almost didactic.
"I don't know.
"This is the control panel," explained Mercer.
"I received your thought regarding Carson, and then turned the switch so that you received my thought.
Such great things made him a mark for public admiration.
Such were, towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pastimes of the rich idlers of London.
This club was dedicated to deformity.
This club was still in existence in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Mirabeau was elected an honorary member.
One was "a dancing master;" that is to say he made the rustics frisk about by pricking the calves of their legs with the point of his sword.
When the man, closed round by the circle of swords and covered with blood, had turned and danced about enough, they ordered their servants to beat him with sticks, to change the course of his ideas.
This looked serious.
In this he excelled.
This maternal solicitude continually brought some new perfection into the pupil's education.
With a pair of scissors he cut off all the feathers from the tail and from the head to the shoulders, and all those on the neck.
The poor devils in the cottage were saved in their night clothes.
So much for the enemy's eyes, he would say.
It was fun to cut a square hole in the Holbein at Hampton Court.
He played the blackguard in a masterly style: when necessary, he used his fists.
Lord David Dirry-Moir brought into all these institutions his magnificent and liberal spirit.
The reaction against the wig was beginning.
He held his ground.
Lord David flung himself into the abyss of no longer wearing a wig.
He taught him the blow with the fist which breaks the teeth, and the twist of the thumb which gouges out the eye.
They found some street porter with a wide chest and a stupid countenance.
No one could train like him.
Though handsome, he belonged to the Ugly Club.
They offered him, and compelled him, if necessary, to accept a pot of porter, in return for which he was to allow them to butt him with their heads four times in the chest, and on this they betted.
Having once adopted the Cyclops, he never left him.
The Mohawk surpassed the Fun.
The gentleman behind him chastised him for this by a prick of his sword, which made him spring round; another prick in the back warned the fellow that one of noble blood was behind him, and so on, each one wounding him in his turn.
Under James II. a young millionaire lord who had during the night set fire to a thatched cottage--a feat which made all London burst with laughter--was proclaimed the King of Fun.
If it were poor people who did these things, they would be sent to jail; but they are done by pleasant young gentlemen.
The Mohawk Club had one great object--to injure.
To the republican clubs had succeeded monarchical clubs.
Lord David Dirry-Moir was passionately fond of open-air exhibitions, of shows, of circuses with wild beasts, of the caravans of mountebanks, of clowns, tumblers, merrymen, open-air farces, and the wonders of a fair. The true noble is he who smacks of the people.
It was he who invented the athlete's admirable rules, afterwards reproduced by Morley.
The members agreed to fight, not about a beautiful woman, but about an ugly man.
All this science, however, did not render him a pedant, nor destroy his ease of manner in society.
The most fashionable of the clubs was presided over by an emperor, who wore a crescent on his forehead, and was called the Grand Mohawk.
They called him Tom-Jim-Jack.
Lord David, therefore, made his cock as bald as possible.
Lord David attended prize-fights, and was their living law.
So much less for the enemy's beak, he used to say.
It was marvellous to see Lord David dress a cock for the pit.
All, moreover, had their coats turned the wrong way, for luck.
To fulfil this duty all means were held good.
What could be more touching?
It was a joust of sacrilege.
The idlers of Paris had theirs.
For this reason no complaint was possible.
Those manners have not altogether disappeared.
There was the Hell-fire Club, where they played at being impious.
One was unmarried--he gave her a portion; the other was married--he had her husband appointed chaplain.
There was the Butting Club, so called from its members butting folks with their heads.
Lord David was one of the few referees whom they dared not thrash.
He watched over his virtue.
In becoming a Mohawk the members took an oath to be hurtful.
Fun would have been proud to have broken the arm of the Venus of Milo.
It was the rich who acted thus towards the poor.
The pugilist whose trainer he consented to become was sure to win.
Just like any one else, he would gaily set fire to a cot of woodwork and thatch, and just scorch those within; but he would rebuild their houses in stone.
Lord David, then, did not wear a wig, and did wear cowhide boots.
Thus he was preparing himself for public life to which he was to be called later on.
On occasions of great performances it was he who had the stakes driven in and ropes stretched, and who fixed the number of feet for the ring.
Under this name he was famous and very popular amongst the dregs of the people.
Every member of the Mohawk Club was bound to possess an accomplishment.
He insulted two ladies.
Lord David would choose a Hercules--massive as a rock, tall as a tower--and make him his child.
Fun is to farce what pepper is to salt.
In many places in England and in English possessions--at Guernsey, for instance--your house is now and then somewhat damaged during the night, or a fence is broken, or the knocker twisted off your door.
One day a man, a great brute of a Welshman named Gogangerdd, expired at the third butt.
Lord David was a member of the Beefsteak Club, the Surly Club, and of the Splitfarthing Club, of the Cross Club, the Scratchpenny Club, of the Sealed Knot, a Royalist Club, and of the Martinus Scribblerus, founded by Swift, to take the place of the Rota, founded by Milton.
Cockfighting owed him some praiseworthy improvements.
Cocks lay hold of each other by the feathers, as men by the hair.
Since the restoration of Charles II. revolutionary clubs had been abolished.
Do evil for evil's sake was the programme.
The first, intoxicated by the novelty, may ignore the danger; the second sees the abyss, and rushes into it.
There was the Fun Club.
In the street he never allowed him to leave his sight, keeping him out of every danger--runaway horses, the wheels of carriages, drunken soldiers, pretty girls.
As a Christian she was a heretic and a bigot.
She was bringing into her ports in triumph ten Spanish line-of-battle ships, and many a galleon laden with gold.
The king receives a crown from the poor, and returns them a farthing.
To an ugly queen, a pretty duchess is not an agreeable sister.
She drank.
She had a narrow forehead, sensual lips, fleshy cheeks, large eyes, short sight.
Parliament having voted a patriotic loan of thirty-four million francs of annuities, there had been a crush at the Exchequer to subscribe it.
She allowed events to fall about as they might chance.
Queen Anne, as we have just observed, was popular.
Not a personage is missing.
Secondly, because she thought the Duchess Josiana's betrothed handsome.
From a certain point of view, the reign of Anne appears a reflection of the reign of Louis XIV.
The laws against Ireland, emanating from Queen Anne, were atrocious. Anne was born in 1664, two years before the great fire of London, on which the astrologers (there were some left, and Louis XIV. was born with the assistance of an astrologer, and swaddled in a horoscope) predicted that, being the elder sister of fire, she would be queen.
Her husband was a Dane, thoroughbred.
It broke my heart, knowing myself to be innocent, and suffering also under the almost equally painful feeling that the other three--no doubt wicked boys--were the curled darlings of the school, who would never have selected me to share their wickedness with them.
CHAPTER I.
My tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the charity.
And now, when it came to the turn of any servant, he received sixty-nine shillings instead of seventy, and the cause of the defalcation was explained to him.
And it is one also for success in which a sufficient capital is indispensable.
But he was never idle unless when suffering.
No doubt my appearance was against me.
Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, which, with some slight superveillance, were at the command of other scholars, were closed luxuries to me.
Then another and a different horror fell to my fate. My college bills had not been paid, and the school tradesmen who administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their credit to me.
I cannot bethink me of aught that he ever did for my gratification; but for my welfare,--for the welfare of us all,--he was willing to make any sacrifice.
After a while my brother left Winchester and accompanied my father to America.
There were ever so many other punishments accumulated on our heads.
In those days he never punished me, though I think I grieved him much by my idleness; but in passion he knew not what he did, and he has knocked me down with the great folio Bible which he always used.
Our table was poorer, I think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered fortunes.
Dr. Butler only became Dean of Peterborough, but his successor lived to be Archbishop of Canterbury.
Once I made a futile attempt for a scholarship at Trinity, Oxford,--but failed again.
He purchased various dark gloomy chambers in and about Chancery Lane, and his purchases always went wrong.
My mother went first, with my sisters and second brother.
This position I achieved by gravitation upwards.
I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never premeditated.
And a worse thing came than the stoppage of the supplies from the shopkeepers. Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money, which we called battels, and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the second master.
This was, I think, in 1827.
And I was taken there with him.
I had not only no friends, but was despised by all my companions.
Into the hay-field on holidays I was often compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much profit. My father's health was very bad.
Of amusement, as far as I can remember, he never recognised the need.
There were exhibitions from Harrow--which I never got.
But I could not look my feelings.
The result was that, as a part of his daily exercise, he thrashed me with a big stick.
But in those school-days he was, of all my foes, the worst.
At last I was driven to rebellion, and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent had to be taken home for a while.
When he died, three numbers out of eight had been published by subscription; and are now, I fear, unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts.
My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative, though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford. My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except what came from the farm.
Mine was only done a day or two before the holidays.
I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler when I was a little boy.
The furniture was mean and scanty.
I do not doubt that I was dirty;--but I think that he was cruel.
My father's clients deserted him.
When I left Harrow I was all but nineteen, and I had at first gone there at seven.
I have seen it since in the town of Cincinnati,--a sorry building!
Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference, with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful task with unflagging industry.
That I, or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible. Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing?
It is the nature of boys to be cruel.
There have been hot words between us, for perfect friendship bears and allows hot words.
He had no knowledge, and, when he took this second farm, no capital.
Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty.
On one awful day the second master announced to me that my battels would be stopped.
MY EDUCATION. 1815-1834.
Every day, until his last illness, my father continued his work.
He was much interested in, and was very much distressed by, the unhappy condition of the country.
It may be well that I should put a short preface to this book.
He would not otherwise have been happy.
This journey did him much good, for he found that the softer atmosphere relieved his asthma, from which he had been suffering for nearly eighteen months. In August following he made another trip to Ireland, but from this journey he derived less benefit.
In the summer of 1880 my father left London, and went to live at Harting, a village in Sussex, but on the confines of Hampshire.
But I would not wish that anything should be added to the memoir.
He did not speak about it at length, but said that he had written me a letter, not to be opened until after his death, containing instructions for publication.
He had at last resolved to give up his favourite amusement, and that as far as he was concerned there should be an end of it.
He could not rid his mind of the fact that he had a story already in the course of publication, but which he had not yet completed.
And I have made no alterations.
He continued to ride to the end of his life: he liked the exercise, and I think it would have distressed him not to have had a horse in his stable.
He went there in May of that year, and was then absent nearly a month.
Additions of any other sort there have been none; the few footnotes are my father's own additions or corrections.
But he never spoke willingly on hunting matters.
Blackwood & Sons in 1884.
So much I would say by way of preface.
If you wish to say any word as from yourself, let it be done in the shape of a preface or introductory chapter." At the end there is a postscript: "The publication, if made at all, should be effected as soon as possible after my death." My father died on the 6th of December, 1882.
It will be seen, therefore, that my duty has been merely to pass the book through the press conformably to the above instructions.
Ahaziah endeavoured to conceal himself in Samaria, but was slain also.
The city of Damdamusa was set on fire.
The former had raided North Syria and apparently penetrated as far as the Mediterranean coast.
In 854 B.C.
Their booty and possessions, cattle, sheep, I carried away; many captives I burned with fire.
His sphere of influence was therefore confined to North Syria.
The kingdom of Urartu was growing more and more powerful.
These he disposed of with characteristic barbarity. Some were skinned alive and some impaled on stakes, while others were enclosed in a pillar which the king had erected to remind the Aramaeans of his determination to brook no opposition.
When Jehu of Israel died, he was succeeded by Jehoahaz.
Terrible reprisals were meted out to the rebels.
After Solomon died, the kingdom of his son Rehoboam was restricted to Judah, Benjamin, Moab, and Edom.
Akhiababa the pretender was sent to Nineveh with a few supporters; and when they had been flayed their skins were nailed upon the city walls.
As the sun went down behind the low hills which separate the river from the desert--even their rocky sides had struggled to emulate the verdant clothing of the plain--its receding rays were gradually withdrawn, like a transparent veil of light from the landscape.
King Joram went out himself to meet the famous charioteer, but turned to flee when he discovered that he came as an enemy.
In times of quiet, the studs of the Pasha and of the Turkish authorities, with the horses of the cavalry and of the inhabitants of Mosul, are sent here to graze....
Then Athaliah rent her clothes, and said, Treason, Treason.
"And Israel pursued them: and Ben-hadad the king of Syria escaped on a horse with the horseman.
In the distance and beyond the Zab, Keshaf, another venerable ruin, rose indistinctly into the evening mist.
Ashur-natsir-pal's great palace at Kalkhi was excavated by Layard, who has given a vivid description of the verdant plain on which the ancient city was situated, as it appeared in spring.
Then Jehu drew his bow and shot Joram through the heart.
"And Jehoiada made a covenant between him, and between all the people, and between the king, that they should be the Lord's people.
Their armies had great mobility, being composed mostly of mounted infantry, and were not easily overpowered by the Assyrian forces of footmen and charioteers. Indeed, it was not until cavalry was included in the standing army of Assyria that operations against the Aramaeans were attended with permanent success.
Jehoram, who had married Athaliah, a royal princess of Israel, was dead.
The Kurdish mountains, whose snowy summits cherished the dying sunbeams, yet struggled with the twilight.
In the following year Ben-hadad fought against the Israelites at Aphek, but was again defeated.
In 829 B.C. the great empire was suddenly shaken to its foundations by the outbreak of civil war.
In 851 B.C.
For several years the great conqueror engaged himself in thus subduing rebellious tribes and extending his territory.
The tribes round the shores of Lake Van had asserted themselves and extended their sphere of influence.
And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord, at the hand of Jezebel....
Like his father, Ashur-natsir-pal fought against the Muski, whose power was declining.
He had come from the neighbouring Aramaean State of Bit-Adini, and was preparing, it would appear, to form a powerful confederacy against the Assyrians.
And Abijah pursued after Jeroboam, and took cities from him, Bethel with the towns thereof, and Jeshanah with the towns thereof, and Ephraim with the towns thereof.
In time Jehoiada stirred up a revolt against the Baal-worshipping queen of Judah.
His first objective was Aleppo, where he was welcomed.
He was condemned for his idolatry by the prophet Ahijah, who declared, "The Lord shall smite Israel, as a reed is shaken in the water; and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river, because they have made their groves, provoking the Lord to anger.
He devoted himself to the development of his kingdom, and attempted to revive the sea trade on the Persian gulf which had flourished under Solomon.
But the western allies soon gathered strength again, and in 846 B.C. he found it necessary to return with a great army, but was not successful in achieving any permanent success, although he put his enemies to flight.
Still more distant, and still more indistinct, was a solitary hill overlooking the ancient city of Arbela.
Jeroboam established the religion of the Canaanites and made "gods and molten images".
"The children of Israel fled before Judah: and God delivered them into their hand.
Girls hurried over the greensward to seek their fathers' cattle, or crouched down to milk those which had returned alone to their well-remembered folds.
Thus the children of Israel were brought under at that time, and the children of Judah prevailed, because they relied upon the Lord God of their fathers.
The Aramaeans of Mesopotamia gave much trouble to Ashur-natsir-pal. Although he had laid a heavy hand on Suru, the southern tribes, the Sukhi, stirred up revolts in Mesopotamia as the allies of the Babylonians.
Also he took away out of all the cities of Judah the high places and the images: and the kingdom was quiet before him.
Judah was nominally subject to Egypt, which, however, was weakened by internal troubles, and therefore unable either to assert its authority in Judah or help its king to resist the advance of the Israelites.
When Ashur-natsir-pal approached Suru, a part of its population welcomed him.
The sleepers open their eyes and raise themselves on their elbows.
Shalmaneser's soldiers meanwhile wasted and burned cities without number, and carried away great booty.
The mountain and valley tribes in the north furnished in abundance wine and corn, sheep and cattle and horses, and from the Aramaeans of Mesopotamia and the Syro-Cappadocian Hittites came much silver and gold, copper and lead, jewels and ivory, as well as richly decorated furniture, armour and weapons.
He reigned only "seven days in Tirzah". The army was "encamped against Gibbethon, which belonged to the Philistines.
In consequence he came into conflict with Babylonia, but he ultimately formed an alliance with that kingdom.
As Shalmaneser was the first Assyrian king who came into direct touch with the Hebrews, it will be of interest here to review the history of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as recorded in the Bible, because of the light it throws on international politics and the situation which confronted Shalmaneser in Mesopotamia and Syria in the early part of his reign.
For the priest said, Slay her not in the house of the Lord.
After four years of civil war Shalmaneser died.
In the following year Shalmaneser had to lead an expedition into northern Mesopotamia and suppress a fresh revolt in that troubled region.
In 1891 a decision was given against him upon a foul when fighting a winning fight against Jim Taylor, the Australian middle weight, and so mortified was he by the decision, that he withdrew from the ring.
Conceding two stone, he fought a draw with the famous Billy McQuire, and afterwards, for a purse of fifty pounds, he defeated Sam Hare at the Pelican Club, London.
Barton was full of admiration for his cleverness and quickness, but doubtful about his strength.
Montgomery's chief difficulty was to find time for his training without any interference from the doctor.
"You don't go to service, I observe, Mr. Montgomery" said he, coldly.
"I'll take this with me," said Montgomery; and putting the paper into his pocket he returned home.
It was a sinister but powerful face, the face of a debauched hero, clean-shaven, strongly eye-browed, keen-eyed, with huge, aggressive jaw, and an animal dewlap beneath it.
His work took him a large part of the day, but as the visiting was done on foot, and considerable distances had to be traversed, it was a training in itself.
"It entails unnecessary work upon the cook.
"I should do a double day's work on Friday so as to leave everything in order.
You may find yourself molested by the blackguards whom it will attract."
It is really a prize fight."
The three backers rubbed their hands when they saw him at work punching the ball in the gymnasium next morning; and Fawcett, the horse-breaker, who had written to Leeds to hedge his bets, sent a wire to cancel the letter, and to lay another fifty at the market price of seven to one.
The latest of these ambitious souls comes from the Wilson coal-pits, which have undertaken to put up a stake of 100 pounds and back their local champion.
Those specially developed, gutta-percha-like abdominal muscles of the hardened pugilist will take without flinching a blow which would leave another man writhing on the ground.
After all, what did it matter?
Do it again, lad, do it again!"
If he won, there was the money, which meant so much to him.
The doctor's sermon would have had more effect if the assistant had not once or twice had occasion to test his highest, and come upon it at unexpectedly humble elevations.
The doctor was boiling over with anger, but Montgomery was a valuable assistant--steady, capable, and hardworking--and he could not afford to lose him.
The latter was a coarse wood-cut of a pugilist's head and neck set in a cross-barred jersey.
But his arms--well, if they was both stropped to a bench, as the sayin' is, I wonder where the champion of England would be then."
The long, obstinate cheeks ran flush up to the narrow, sinister eyes.
"Very good.
"No doubt, sir, but at present I prefer to do without them."
"It is very important to me, sir."
His appearance and words were always vaguely benevolent.
Montgomery looked up, for the voice was a loud and rasping one.
"You'll save trouble if you'll go quietly.
"I thought him too light built, and I think so now," said the horse-breaker, still tapping his prominent teeth with the metal head of his riding-whip.
He looked upon you as a stranger this morning, but he says he knows you now.
"A hundred and seventy-five."
The assistant, looking after him, saw him rolling, with an uncertain step, down the street, until a friend met him, and they walked on arm in arm.
But no answer came.
The publican had seized his right hand, the horse-dealer his left, and the Cantab slapped him on the back.
"Well, the Master doesn't scale much more than that."
Consider, sir, how many thousands of medical students there are in this country.
The two combined were irresistible.
"The fees, Dr. Oldacre, would amount to about sixty pounds."
If you can lick Ted Barton you may lick the Master of Croxley, but if you don't we're done, for there's no one else who is in the same street with him in this district.
Montgomery smiled.
"Stand oop, lad; let's see thee standin'." It was the publican who spoke.
It's off!" cried the horse-breaker.
The three sprang from their seats.
It was the first direct question which had been asked him.
"You can drop out if you like, Fawcett, but I'll see this thing through, if I have to do it alone.
Publican, exquisite, and horse-breaker were all three equally silent, equally earnest, and equally critical.
Ogilvy has been acting for Barton, but we don't think that he is class enough.
"Barton.
Montgomery looked at them in bewilderment.
The second was Purvis, the publican, owner of the chief beer-shop, and well known as the local bookmaker.
But the ways of Fate are strange, and his customer was at hand.
But, such as it was, it brought him his board and One pound a week--enough to help him during the summer months and let him save a few pounds towards his winter keep.
With tense nerves and a rigid face he went to meet his visitors.
If you don't you'll be hurt.
He would learn all about it, no doubt, if he were patient.
Well, then, we will make up the hundred for the stake among us, and the fight stands--always supposin' the young man is willin'."
Barton bears you no grudge. He's a good-hearted fellow, though cross-grained with strangers.
So did the third visitor, Fawcett, the horse-breaker, who leaned back, his long, thin legs, with their boxcloth riding-gaiters, thrust out in front of him, tapping his protruding teeth with his riding-whip, with anxious thought in every line of his rugged, bony face.
Ah, you would?
"And well I knew you would," said Purvis, "for it would be somethin' new to find Isaac Fawcett as a spoil-sport.
Luck was with the assistant.
"Good lad! good lad!" croaked the publican.
"I said that he was a welter weight."
He was the champion of the Wilson coal-pits, and the other was the Master of the iron-folk down at the Croxley smelters.
The provocation was so gross, the insult so unprovoked, that he could have none of those qualms which take the edge off a man's mettle.
A young man stood at the entrance-- a stocky, bull-necked young miner, in tweed Sunday clothes and an aggressive neck-tie.
"A hundred and thirty."
"Exactly.
In the first place, you remember the man whom you knocked out this morning?
The doctor's lips had thinned into a narrow line.
Of course, you might not like to take the hundred pounds; but I have no doubt that, in the case of your winning, we could arrange that it should take the form of a watch or piece of plate, or any other shape which might suggest itself to you.
At first it had enraged him, but after a time he had grown callous to it, and accepted it as it was meant.
He had prospered exceedingly by the support of the local Church interest, and the rule of his life was never by word or action to run a risk of offending the sentiment which had made him. His standard of respectability and of dignity was exceedingly high, and he expected the same from his assistants.
He had stood in the midst of them like a horse at a fair, and he was just beginning to wonder whether he was more angry or amused.
You know the out-house in my garden?"
His eyes were raised again, and sparkled indignantly.
Work the grease out of him and I lay there's no great difference between them.
"Naturally."
Outside, through the grimy surgery window over a foreground of blackened brick and slate, a line of enormous chimneys like Cyclopean pillars upheld the lowering, dun-coloured cloud-bank.
He'll do yet!" cried Purvis.
It was insolence--brutal, overbearing insolence, with physical menace behind it.
"But suppose you was trained?" said the publican.
"Because Ted Barton was to have fought him next Saturday.
"But why?"
But then there came a sudden revulsion.
"Gentlemen," said Montgomery, "I think that you will acknowledge that I have boon very patient with you.
There was no reason why the doctor should know anything about it.
That single whizzing uppercut, and the way in which it was delivered, warned him that he had a formidable man to deal with.
It was absolute ruin.
And then the danger of his position came upon Montgomery, and he turned as white as his antagonist. A Sunday, the immaculate Dr. Oldacre with his pious connection, a savage brawl with a patient; he would irretrievably lose his situation if the facts came out.
"He's ten good pund on the light side," growled the horse-breaker.
I don't hedge a penny.
The countess exchanged a look with Sonya.
"Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet," said the countess, softly touching Natasha's shoulders.
For a long time Natasha listened attentively to the sounds that reached her from inside and outside the room and did not move.
"Come, lie down."
Her long, thin, practiced fingers rapidly unplaited, replaited, and tied up her plait.
"Look, Natasha, how dreadfully it is burning!" said she.
The cold she felt refreshed her.
"Natasha, you'd better lie in the middle," said Sonya.
Yes, he was altogether like that.
She put her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window frame.
Natasha, do look!
"You are cold.
She was planning something and either deciding or had already decided something in her mind.
Her head moved from side to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before her.
The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in the room.
"I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there's an awful glow!
The valet sat up and whispered something.
The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sonya undressed hastily and lay down.
After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one replied.
Both the countess and Sonya understood that, naturally, neither Moscow nor the burning of Moscow nor anything else could seem of importance to Natasha.
A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only.
She knew Prince Andrew was in the same yard as themselves and in a part of the hut across the passage; but this dreadful incessant moaning made her sob.
You'd better lie down," said the countess.
"But you didn't see it!"
All the way she had sat motionless in a corner of the coach with wide open eyes, and the expression in them which the countess knew so well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same way on the bench where she had seated herself on arriving.
"Yes, really I did," Natasha replied in a voice that pleaded to be left in peace.
But after she had been told that she could not see him, that he was seriously wounded but that his life was not in danger, she ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, evidently disbelieving what they told her, and convinced that say what she might she would still be told the same.
It was dark in there.
"Oh, how terrible," said Sonya returning from the yard chilled and frightened.
As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a crack in the wall.
"Natasha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed."
"Do lie down," she added crossly, and buried her face in the pillow.
And as if in order not to offend Sonya and to get rid of her, she turned her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was evident that she could not see anything, and again settled down in her former attitude.
"Lie down?
When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, she sat down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made up on the floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front, and began replaiting it.
Madame Schoss and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.
The valet, returning to the cottage, informed the count that Moscow was burning.
The boards of the floor creaked.
The count returned and lay down behind the partition.
"No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor," Natasha replied irritably and she went to the window and opened it.
"What's this?" said the doctor, rising from his bed.
That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man.
Prince Andrew wished to return to that former world of pure thought, but he could not, and delirium drew him back into its domain.
All the powers of his mind were more active and clearer than ever, but they acted apart from his will.
"Mine, sir?
When he had been placed on his camp bed he lay for a long time motionless with closed eyes.
To love one's neighbors, to love one's enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations.
No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it.
Prince Andrew collected all his strength in an effort to recover his senses, he moved a little, and suddenly there was a ringing in his ears, a dimness in his eyes, and like a man plunged into water he lost consciousness.
Each time the fly touched his face it gave him a burning sensation and yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though it knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising.
He felt that he had to balance carefully (though it was difficult) so that this airy structure should not collapse; but nevertheless it kept collapsing and again slowly rising to the sound of whispered rhythmic music--"it stretches, stretches, spreading out and stretching," said Prince Andrew to himself.
He remembered that he had now a new source of happiness and that this happiness had something to do with the Gospels.
"Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is," thought Prince Andrew, trying to drive that face from his imagination.
"Yes--love," he thought again quite clearly.
He felt Prince Andrew's pulse, and to his surprise and dissatisfaction found it had improved.
But besides this there was something else of importance.
"You?" he said.
Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly, compassionately, and with joyous love.
Timokhin, who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had long been watching all that was going on, carefully covering his bare body with the sheet as he huddled up on his bench.
That's enough, please leave off!" Prince Andrew painfully entreated someone.
When he came to himself, Natasha, that same living Natasha whom of all people he most longed to love with this new pure divine love that had been revealed to him, was kneeling before him.
Now again I feel that bliss.
"Forgive me!"
Every man can understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was possible only for God.
A healthy man can tear himself away from the deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can then return again to his own thoughts.
At times his brain suddenly began to work with a vigor, clearness, and depth it had never reached when he was in health, but suddenly in the midst of its work it would turn to some unexpected idea and he had not the strength to turn it back again.
A cricket chirped from across the passage; someone was shouting and singing in the street; cockroaches rustled on the table, on the icons, and on the walls, and a big fly flopped at the head of the bed and around the candle beside him, the wick of which was charred and had shaped itself like a mushroom.
Only in the lower part of it something quivered.
"But not love which loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love which I--while dying--first experienced when I saw my enemy and yet loved him.
Yet how many people have I hated in my life?
They gave Prince Andrew some tea.
Her face was pale and rigid.
"Please go away, madam!"
"Couldn't one get a book?" he asked.
It was something white by the door--the statue of a sphinx, which also oppressed him.
And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did her." And he vividly pictured to himself Natasha, not as he had done in the past with nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for the first time picturing to himself her soul.
But on the seventh day he ate with pleasure a piece of bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that his temperature was lower.
He realized that it was the real living Natasha, and he was not surprised but quietly happy.
While listening to this whispering and feeling the sensation of this drawing out and the construction of this edifice of needles, he also saw by glimpses a red halo round the candle, and heard the rustle of the cockroaches and the buzzing of the fly that flopped against his pillow and his face.
At the same time he felt that above his face, above the very middle of it, some strange airy structure was being erected out of slender needles or splinters, to the sound of this whispered music.
Natasha's thin pale face, with its swollen lips, was more than plain--it was dreadful.
The first night after they left Moscow had been fairly warm and he had remained in the caleche, but at Mytishchi the wounded man himself asked to be taken out and given some tea.
And those thoughts, though now vague and indefinite, again possessed his soul.
At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her daughter's absence, knocked at the door.
Washington, convinced that the nation would ultimately be involved, kept its secret well and continued to preach a neutrality it could not enforce.
He was only grateful for her confidence, and a trifle bewildered by it.
"Not exactly.
"You boasted, my dear young friend."
But she was of the game, no longer in it.
"Oh, business!"
"I kept the library as long as I could.
"Why, good heavens, mother," he began, "we should have been in it last May.
And, Graham, tell Buckham to do up a dozen dinner-napkins in paper.
What did I say?"
All I have left to live for. You wouldn't need to go.
And on the edge of this volcano America played.
Her house was still a rendezvous, but it was for couples like the ones who had preempted the drawing-room, the library and the music room that afternoon.
"Never mind about taking it.
"I hate to take it, mother."
But he went over and, stooping down, kissed her trembling face.
People played that they might not think.
And--I imagine--rather indiscreet."
"You wouldn't go, would you?"
An abiding faith in the Allies was the foundation stone of its complacency.
It's time, that's sure."
It furnished unlimited conversation at dinner-parties, led to endless wrangles, gave zest and point to the peace that made those dinner parties possible, furnished an excuse for retrenchment here and there, and brought into vogue great bazaars and balls for the Red Cross and kindred activities.
But I meant them."
She was enormously popular at dances.
But I can, easily."
They brought or sent her tribute, flowers, candy, and cigarets.
He was divided between gratitude and indignation.
"I've got the money for you, darling," she said.
"He's not sick, is he?"
He looked up at her admiringly.
"You wouldn't, Graham.
Encouraged by her interest, he elaborated on the new work.
"All right.
She was quite content then, cheered at once, consulted the jewelled watch on her dressing table and rang for the maid.
"I might have to go," he evaded.
It did not occur to him that she transferred to his young shoulders many of her own burdens.
And she had helped him out of a hole just now.
But--he's different.
"No, Toots dear.
But of course I shall be."
His new-found maturity seemed to be slipping from him.
"Tommy!" Marion called, when she had settled herself.
"About the new war contracts."
"Very well.
If the war only lasted long enough--
There were wagers that the Germans would be done in the Spring.
He flushed slightly.
"I'll be awfully glad to."
One does not like to be seen in these places, as if one kept no company."
Small cops be hanged!
"Well, I never," said Mrs Carey.
The streets were nearly empty; and with the exception of some occasional burst of brawl or merriment from a beer-shop, all was still.
"What, not when you cut up the jackass and sold it for veal cutlets, mother."
His long, loose, white trousers gave him height; he had no waistcoat, but a pink silk handkerchief was twisted carelessly round his neck, and fastened with a very large pin, which, whatever were its materials, had unquestionably a very gorgeous appearance.
Good night, widow."
But young persons--"
"And where have you been this long time, my child; and who's your friend?" she added in a lower tone.
"To-morrow evening!
You can't come, and you can't go, but there's a fine; you're never paid wages, but there's a bate ticket.
Those villains, Shuffle and Screw, have sarved me with another bate ticket: and a pretty figure too."
I can't stand a country life, Mrs Carey.
"Come, come, it's a prime piece," said a jolly looking woman, who was presiding at a stall which, though considerably thinned by previous purchasers, still offered many temptations to many who could not purchase.
"Dying; she's only drunk," said the youth.
This one was populous, noisy, and lighted.
"Hold your tongue, Mr Imperence," said the widow.
"And what's that?" asked Mrs Carey with a sneer.
"No; I never heard a thing like that!"
I must have company."
They were gaily dressed, a light handkerchief tied under the chin, their hair scrupulously arranged; they wore coral neck-laces and earrings of gold.
The moment I came out I bathed in the river, and then went home and dressed," he added in a satisfied tone; "and now I am going to the Temple.
On the spot the queen bee was cured, and turning to Ferko she said, 'I am most grateful for your kindness, and shall reward you some day.' And with these words she flew away humming, gaily.
Then Ferko went straight to the palace and told the King that he was ready to perform the third task if he would come to the hill and see it done.
The whole court went out to see the wonder, and their astonishment was great at the sight which met their eyes.
There is a lake down there below us, and anyone who bathes in it, though he were at death's door, becomes sound and well on the spot, and those who wash their eyes with the dew on this hill become as sharp-sighted as the eagle, even if they have been blind from their youth.'
No sooner had Ferko entered the palace than all eyes were turned on the handsome youth, and the King's daughter herself was lost in admiration, for she had never seen anyone so handsome in her life before.
But it was no tree he leant against, but a gallows on which two ravens were seated.
Before to-morrow night all the grain in the kingdom has to be gathered into one big heap, and if as much as a stalk of corn is wanting I must pay for it with my life.'
But the two brothers had grown quite green with envy, and only declared the more that Ferko was nothing but a wicked magician.
'Well,' answered the first raven, 'my eyes are in no want of this healing bath, for, Heaven be praised, they are as good as ever they were; but my wing has been very feeble and weak ever since it was shot by an arrow many years ago, so let us fly at once to the lake that I may be restored to health and strength again.' And so they flew away.
His brothers noticed this, and envy and jealousy were added to their fear, so much so that they determined once more to destroy him.
This splendid palace had been built by the grateful queen bee, who had summoned all the other bees in the kingdom to help her.
Only the beautiful Princess rejoiced over Ferko's success, and looked on him with friendly glances, which the youth returned.
Can I be of any help to you, and thus repay your great kindness to me?'
Then Ferko crawled to the edge of the lake and dipped his limbs in the water.
But he could think of no way of escape.
Then Ferko went straight to the palace and set the Princess free, and on the same day he married her and was crowned King of the country.
Ferko continued his way till he came to a ploughed field.
So he went to the royal palace, and as he entered the door the first people he saw were his two brothers who had so shamefully ill-treated him.
Suddenly a big wolf ran up to him, and standing still said, 'I'm very glad to see you again, my kind benefactor.
Quick as lightning the wolf flew round the wood, and in a minute many hundred wolves rose up before him, increasing in number every moment, till they could be counted by thousands.
'I quite agree with you,' answered the second brother, 'and my advice is to eat up his loaf of bread, and then to refuse to give him a bit of ours until he has promised to let us put out his eyes or break his legs.'
But the wolf kept on encouraging Ferko, and said, 'Go on! go on!' So he led the wolves on, till at last they fell on the King and on the wicked brothers, and ate them and the whole Court up in a moment.
Night came on, and the poor blind youth had no eyes to close, and could only crawl along the ground, not knowing in the least where he was going.
Only the lovely Princess was not present, for she was shut up in her tower weeping bitterly.
The grateful creature thanked his benefactor warmly, and promised Ferko to do him a good turn if he should ever need it.
The wicked brothers stamped and foamed with rage when they saw the failure of their wicked designs.
Ferko recognised the queen bee, and said, 'Alas! how could you help me? for I have been set to do a task which no one in the whole world could do, let him be ever such a genius!
He filled a bottle with the healing water, and then continued his journey in the best of spirits.
At last it began to grow dusk, and the sun sank behind the mountains; gradually it became cooler on the hill, and the grass grew wet with dew. Then Ferko buried his face in the ground till his eyes were damp with dewdrops, and in a moment he saw clearer than he had ever done in his life before.
At these words poor Ferko wept more bitterly than before, and bore the torments of hunger till the sun was high in the heavens; then he could stand it no longer, and he consented to allow his left eye to be put out and his left leg to be broken.
But when the sun was once more high in the heavens, Ferko felt the blazing heat scorch him, and sought for some cool shady place to rest his aching limbs.
'If that's all you want done,' answered the wolf, 'you needn't worry yourself.
And turning to the two wicked brothers he said, 'Suggest something for him to do; no matter how difficult, he must succeed in it or die.'
Go quickly to the King, and tell him to go to the hill that he may see the wonder you have done with his own eyes.
Ferko spent the whole day in the meadows waiting the return of the bee. And when evening was come the queen bee flew by, and perching on his shoulder she said, 'The wonderful palace is ready.
Ferko wandered out into the fields again, and sat down on the stump of a tree wondering what he should do next.
But the more Ferko wept and told his brothers that he was dying of hunger, the more they laughed and scolded him for his greed.
I'll undertake the task, and you'll hear from me again before sunset to-morrow.
'Is that all?' answered the mouse; 'that needn't distress you much.
'My good friend,' said the youth, 'be of good cheer, for I can soon heal your leg,' and with these words he poured some of the precious water over the wolf's paw, and in a minute the animal was springing about sound and well on all fours.
All the next day he spent wandering about the fields, and toward evening the wolf came running to him in a great hurry and said, 'I have collected together all the wolves in the kingdom, and they are waiting for you in the wood.
Can I be of any help to you? I am the bee whose wing you healed, and would like to show my gratitude in some way.'
He lay down once more on the grass and soon fell fast asleep.
Ferko went at once to the King and told him the palace was finished.
'Is that all?' answered the bee, 'then you may comfort yourself; for before the sun goes down to-morrow night a palace shall be built unlike any that King has dwelt in before.
The eldest answered quickly, 'Let him drive all the wolves of the kingdom on to this hill before to-morrow night.
If I can help you in any way only say the word, for I would like to give you a proof of my gratitude.'
So he endured the pangs of starvation all that day, but when night came his endurance gave way, and he let his right eye be put out and his right leg broken for a second piece of bread.
Here he noticed a little mouse creeping wearily along on its hind paws, for its front paws had both been broken in a trap.
His eldest brother was delighted with this proposal, and the two wicked wretches seized Ferko's loaf and ate it all up, while the poor boy was still asleep.
When he did awake he felt very hungry and turned to eat his bread, but his brothers cried out, 'You ate your loaf in your sleep, you glutton, and you may starve as long as you like, but you won't get a scrap of ours.'
The little mouse had summoned every other mouse in the land to its help, and together they had collected all the grain in the kingdom.
If he does this he may go free; if not he shall be hung as you have said.'
Ferko was at a loss to understand how he could have eaten in his sleep, but he said nothing, and fasted all that day and the next night.
Keep your spirits up.' And with these words he trotted quickly away.
As he was wandering disconsolately about the meadows round the palace, wondering how he could escape being put to death, a little bee flew past, and settling on his shoulder whispered in his ear, 'What is troubling you, my kind benefactor?
Ferko himself returned to the fields, and mounting on the wolf's back he rode to the wood close by.
Ferko, who never doubted that the mouse would be as good as its word, lay down comforted on the soft grass and slept soundly till next morning.
But the wolf on whose back Ferko sat, said to its rider, 'Go on!
What are you thinking about all alone by yourself?
Then the eldest brother replied, 'The corn has all been cut, but it has not yet been put into barns; let the knave collect all the grain in the kingdom into one big heap before to-morrow night, and if as much as a stalk of corn is left let him be put to death.
The poor youth himself was heart-broken, and cursed the hour he had crossed the boundary of the King's domain.
But the King was overcome by a sudden terror when he saw the enormous pack of wolves approaching nearer and nearer, and calling out to Ferko he said, 'Enough, enough, we don't want any more.'
He had not gone far before he met a wolf, who was limping disconsolately along on three legs, and who on perceiving Ferko began to howl dismally.
The one was saying to the other as the weary youth lay down, 'Is there anything the least wonderful or remarkable about this neighbourhood?'
go on!' and at the same moment many more wolves ran up the hill, howling horribly and showing their white teeth.
"I can still remember it," answered Rebecca gravely, "though it seems a long time ago."
"No acid in it?"
"You should never seem surprised when you have taken a large order," said he; "you ought to have replied 'Can't you make it three hundred and fifty?' instead of capsizing in that unbusinesslike way."
"Oh!" exclaimed Rebecca sympathetically,--"mine was no shoes and too many babies and not enough books.
Rebecca was a trifle shy at this unexpected encounter, but there was nothing to be done but explain her presence, so she asked, "Is the lady of the house at home?"
You wouldn't believe it, but I was a dreadful homely baby, and homely right along till just a year or two ago, when my red hair began to grow dark.
Rebecca could not make up her mind. At all events he had an air of the city about him,--well-shaven face, well-trimmed mustache, well-fitting clothes.
Emma Jane had disposed of three single cakes, Rebecca of three small boxes; for a difference in their ability to persuade the public was clearly defined at the start, though neither of them ascribed either success or defeat to anything but the imperious force of circumstances.
But I called him Mr. Aladdin because he gave us a lamp.
"He raised his hat to us, and we not thirteen!
And wasn't it lovely of him to buy us out?
"I haven't got over trembling from the last place yet." (A lady had put her head out of an upstairs window and called, "Go away, little girl; whatever you have in your box we don't want any.") "I don't know who lives here, and the blinds are all shut in front.
"Or with me," laughed Rebecca.
MR.
"What can I do for you?"
"Lack of food and clothes principally."
"I was a sort of commercial traveler myself once,--years ago,--and I like to see the thing well done.
"What was your worst trouble?"
"Oh, I could never say anything like that!" exclaimed Rebecca, who was blushing crimson at her awkward fall.
Housewives looked at Emma Jane and desired no soap; listened to her description of its merits, and still desired none.
ALADDIN
Rebecca dimpled.
"What are you going to do with the magnificent profits you get from this business?"
"BOTH?
"Everybody says you're awful bright and smart, and mother thinks you'll be better looking all the time as you grow older.
And just think of having both the lamp and the shade for one day's work!
Mr. Aladdin followed smilingly to corroborate this astonishing, unbelievable statement; lifted all their boxes from the back of the wagon, and taking the circular, promised to write to the Excelsior Company that night concerning the premium.
If there's nobody at home you mustn't count it, but take the next house as yours."
I'll take three hundred cakes, and that will give them shade and all."
"Mine doesn't!" exclaimed Rebecca
This was great good fortune, to find a customer who knew all the virtues of the article in advance.
Rebecca had been seated on a stool very near to the edge of the porch, and at this remark she made a sudden movement, tipped over, and disappeared into a clump of lilac bushes.
She must be so tired waiting, and she will be so glad!"
Your mother was generous."
"Not a trace."
Emma Jane! we are sold out!"
Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath?
"Do I look as if I did?" he responded unexpectedly.
Presently she forgot all about her silent partner at the gate and was talking as if she had known this grand personage all her life.
"Oh, don't mention it!" laughed Mr. Aladdin, lifting his hat.
"Good-by, Mr. Aladdin!
"I see.
"Oh!
"He tucked the lap robe round us, too," continued Emma Jane, in an ecstasy of reminiscence.
"Oh, I don't know about that; soap keeps, doesn't it?"
"I didn't mean THAT; I have some soap to sell; I mean I would like to introduce to you a very remarkable soap, the best now on the market.
"I am the lady of the house at present," said the stranger, with a whimsical smile.
We are trying to get a premium for some friends of ours."
"You needn't argue that point," laughed the man, as he stood up to get a glimpse of the "rich blacksmith's daughter" at the gate.
"I'm doing pretty well, thank you," said the man, with a delightful smile.
Now give me the circular, and let's do some figuring.
That child grows younger every year, instead of older--wise child!"
"A babe," corrected Rebecca
Are you sure you can afford it?"
Rebecca walked up the lane and went to the side door.
They did not accompany each other to the doors of their chosen victims, feeling sure that together they could not approach the subject seriously; but they parted at the gate of each house, the one holding the horse while the other took the soap samples and interviewed any one who seemed of a coming-on disposition.
"Have you ever heard of the--would you like, or I mean--do you need any soap?" queried Rebecca.
"Made out of pure vegetable fats, isn't it?"
"I think I know already," answered Rebecca, with a bright glance.
"And yet a child could do the Monday washing with it and use no force."
I've known what it was myself to do without a banquet lamp.
You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab and brown!"
I must know that soap," said the gentleman genially.
Rebecca dimpled more and more, and at her new friend's invitation sat down on a stool at his side near the edge of the porch.
"If you could contrive to keep a secret,--you two little girls,--it would be rather a nice surprise to have the lamp arrive at the Simpsons' on Thanksgiving Day, wouldn't it?" he asked, as he tucked the old lap robe cosily over their feet.
"Then there's something wrong with your aunt!"
There was a porch there, and seated in a rocking-chair, husking corn, was a good-looking young man, or was he middle aged?
"The very purest," corroborated Rebecca.
Well, that's all right.
It was a very short distance, fortunately, and the amused capitalist picked her up, set her on her feet, and brushed her off.
"I'm not certain," said Rebecca conscientiously, "but I'll look in the circular--it's sure to tell;" and she drew the document from her pocket.
"We are not selling for our own benefit," said Rebecca confidentially. "My friend who is holding the horse at the gate is the daughter of a very rich blacksmith, and doesn't need any money.
"Tell me why I ought to break my engagement," I said.
"You have surprised me," I answered.
The man she was speaking of turned the corner of the new cottage.
She walked in, sir, as if the place belonged to her."
The tone of the poor girl's voice--answering, "Forgive me, sir; I can't do it"--convicted the she-socialist (as I thought) of merciless conduct of some sort.
WARNED FOR THE LAST TIME!
"Did you notice the lady's dress?" I asked.
are you angry?
I was secretly annoyed, feeling that my stepmother's singular indifference to domestic interests of paramount importance, at other times, must have some object in view, entirely beyond the reach of my penetration.
Which way did I turn my steps?
Without any cause that I knew of to account for it, I was so restless that nothing I could do attracted me or quieted me.
Hoping to speak with Cristel alone, I had arranged to reach the cottage before seven o'clock.
"No! no indeed!
"But you mean to try?"
Men will wonder what possessed me--women will think it a proceeding that did me credit--I took the familiar road which led to the gloomy wood and the guilty river.
"I am afraid you are ill, Cristel?" was all I could find to say, under the double disadvantage of speaking through a door, and having a father listening at my side.
"When we are in want of help," I said, "we sometimes find it, nearer than we had ventured to expect--at our own doors."
If I had dared to commit such an act of rudeness, I should have jumped out of the carriage, and have told Mrs. Roylake that I meant to walk home.
"I can guess."
Both, I have no doubt, at your age. Good-bye."
"The most precious sermons, Gerard, that have been written in our time." I looked at the book; I opened the book; I recovered my presence of mind, and handed it back.
"Any particular color?" I went on.
"I've got burdens on my mind," he explained, "or I should have thought of it too." Having done justice to his own abilities, he bustled out.
Not because I was in love with her; only because I had left her in distress.
Her manner had become quieter; her face was more composed; her expression almost recovered its natural charm while she spoke of Lady Rachel.
No, sir; our deaf-devil is not to blame for this.
The ancient miller rose at that hint like a fish at a fly.
Perhaps he was fatigued, or perhaps he had something else to think of.
In the present direction of the wind, we could hear the striking of the church clock.
We were tracing our way along our favorite woodland path; and we found a companion of tender years, hiding from us.
A dark flush discolored her face.
Mrs. Roylake talked as fluently as ever; exhausting one common-place subject after another, without the slightest allusion to my lord's daughter, to my matrimonial prospects, or to my visits at the mill.
I was silent; I was awed.
A visible hand touched my arm.
I tried to discover it now.
are you trying to startle me by acting a part?" I urged those questions on her, one after another; and I was loudly and confidently answered.
My own moths failed to interest me.
"Nothing."
The man whom she hated offered his arm.
In less than a minute, he was back again in a state of breathless triumph.
Returning to the house, I tried to occupy myself with my collection of insects, sadly neglected of late.
Well, your friend, your favorite friend, has invited me to meet you.
In his case I had failed to trace the motive.
It is perhaps only right to add that my patience had been tried by the progress of domestic events, which affected Lady Lena and myself--viewed as victims.
It's too late now."
Dark green, I think."
Obstinate about it.
Was I conscious of her touch?
Or was it a mockery of her that had taken her place?
More wonderful still, at every fair opportunity that offered, she kept out of my way.
"How is it you are not sure of that?" I said.
That fine girl of Toller's was standing at the door.
"Is this Lady Rachel's doing?" I said.
She says so herself--and she never told a lie yet."
She held out both hands to me.
"Yes; I mean to try."
"Try, sir, to forget it and forgive it," she resumed gently, "if I have misbehaved myself.
I had expected to see her blush.
Will you tell me what you wrote when you answered him?"
His fleshless face would have looked like the face of a mummy, but for the restless brightness of his little watchful black eyes.
He proceeded to reckon up the repairs, counting with his fleshless thumb on his skinny fingers, when he was interrupted by a curious succession of sounds which began with whining, and ended with scratching at the cottage door.
"Then I now ask you, Mr. Roylake: Which are we--enemies or friends?"
Absurd! contemptible!
"I tell you again, sir, this is no laughing matter.
"Like a scene in a play, isn't it?"
Yes, yes, Cristy, I'm noticing him; he's done with his writings.
"At any rate," she resumed, "you have heard of their father, Lord Uppercliff?"
"Neither enemies nor friends.
"Will you follow me to my side of the cottage?" I shook my head.
She is married to the Honorable Captain Millbay, of the Navy, now away in his ship.
She took no notice of him.
I replied by a sign in the affirmative.
"Write," he repeated.
He waited a little, in the vain hope that she would relent: she turned away from him.
When we said good-bye--I have been told that I did wrong; I meant no harm--I kissed her.
"It won't do, Mr. Toller!"
It would have been an act of downright cruelty to persist in opposing her.
The portfolio was a trust confided to me; the sooner I returned it to the writer of the confession--the sooner I told him plainly the conclusion at which I had arrived--the more at ease my mind would be.
He was a perfect stranger to me."
Having made up my mind, so far, the next thing to do (with the clock on the mantel-piece striking midnight) was to go to bed.
Well?
In a minute after, the door was opened from without.
I repeated what I had written, word for word.
In this state of embarrassment I took a young man's way out of the difficulty, and spoke lightly of a serious thing.
He bowed, smiled, possessed himself abruptly of her hand, and kissed it. She tried to withdraw it from his grasp, and met with an obstinate resistance.
Mr. Toller went on with his questions immediately.
"I became acquainted with your deaf Lodger, Cristel, under ridiculous circumstances.
He tore from his pocket his little book, filled with blank leaves, and threw it at Toller's head.
At another time, the picture of himself in his later years, and the defiant manner in which he presented it, almost made me regret that he had not died of the illness which had struck him deaf.
Unlike the river and the cottage, she gained by being revealed in the brilliant sunlight.
To my surprise she turned pale, and vehemently remonstrated.
"My dear child," I said grandly, "do you really suppose I am afraid of that poor wretch?
As strangers I was determined we should remain.
"For some part of the time," I answered, "I was catching moths in Fordwitch Wood."
As strangers he and I had first met.
"No.
Shall I make another acknowledgment of weakness?
"You won't think I am presuming on your kindness?"
The dog laid his head on her lap, asking to be caressed.
His daughter interfered, and stopped him at the critical moment when he was actually offering his arm to conduct me in state across the kitchen. Cristel had just put her pretty brown hand over his mouth, and said, "Oh, father, do pray be quiet!" when we were all three disturbed by another interruption.
"Come, my angel; let me kiss you."
I've never seen his portfolio before.
But the dog has never changed; he feels and knows there is something dreadful in that man.
"I want my answer," he said, handing me the book and the pencil.
Cristel dropped his book on the table, and hurried to me in breathless surprise.
Cristel followed (from the kitchen garden), with a basket of vegetables on her arm.
The old fellow received his dismissal with a low bow, and left the kitchen with a look at the Lodger which revealed (unless I was entirely mistaken) a sly sense of triumph.
She was evidently in earnest.
I knocked at the door on the ancient side of the building.
Get out of the way."
Cristel was leaving the kitchen; I saw her at the door which communicated with the Lodger's side of the cottage.
"What does it mean?"
Oh, what made you do that!"
I beg your pardon again.
"I have something to say to Mr. Roylake," he announced, with a haughty look at his landlord.
She opened the door, passed through it, and closed it behind her.
"Was it a pleasant dinner-party last night?" I asked--as if the subject really interested me.
I am too stupid, or too impatient, or too wicked to be able to do that.
I beg your pardon, sir, did you speak?
"You find me here, because I don't wish to return to your side of the house."
I was shocked; I was grieved; I was more than ever secretly resolved to go back to her.
I tried to stop him by promising to speak to the bailiff myself.
"I wouldn't distress you, Cristel, for the whole world," I said--and left her to conclude that I had felt the influence of her entreaties in the right way.
I might have felt the same objection to the pale delicacy of his complexion, to the soft profusion of his reddish-brown hair, to his finely shaped sensitive lips, but for two marked peculiarities in him which would have shown me to be wrong--that is to say: the expression of power about his head, and the signs of masculine resolution presented by his mouth and chin.
"You asked me to bear with that man," she said, "because he paid you a good rent.
On this ground, I declined to answer any more questions.
In the instant before the person behind it appeared, the dog looked that way--started up, frightened--and took refuge under the table.
His gallantry addressed her in sweet words; and his voice destroyed their charm by the dreary monotony of the tone in which he spoke.
"I agree with this old friend, Mr. Gerard.
That fiercest anger which turns the face pale, was the anger that had possession of Cristel as she took refuge with her father.
We are falling to pieces, as it were, on this old side of the house.
We will drive out after luncheon, and pay a round of visits." When this prospect was placed before me, I remembered having read in books of sensitive persons receiving impressions which made their blood run cold; I now found myself one of those persons, for the first time in my life.
"You see, sir, it's no use speaking to the bailiff.
There was no other alternative.
At the next moment, the deaf Lodger walked into the room.
Cristel picked up the book.
They say smoking leads to meditation; I leave you to meditate on Lady Lena.
I have got to hate him, since that time--perhaps to despise him.
I live in my fool's paradise; I don't hear you." He tried to draw her nearer to him.
That will do.
He looked where she was looking--and discovered, for the first time, that I was in the room.
"Yes."
"Mind!
CHAPTER VI
Cristel joined us, amazed at his pertinacity.
It was he beyond all doubt who had frightened the dog, forewarned by instinct of his appearance.
He opened the door that led to his side of the cottage--paused--and looked back at Cristel.
"I'll write it myself."
He saw us talking last night, and did me the honor to be jealous of me."
He held out his hand; it was not taken.
I shook my head.
No?
I think I see it in your face.
He hobbled up to his lodger, and shook his infirm fists, and screamed at the highest pitch of his old cracked voice: "Let her be, or I won't have you here no longer!
Leave us, Mr. Gerard--pray, pray leave us, and don't come near this place again till father has got rid of him."
I replied that I had met with the "bold girl" purely by accident, on her side as well as on mine; and then I started a new topic.
Placed between Cristel and his money, he really acted as if he preferred Cristel.
"Very well," he resumed; "we will have it out, here.
His personal attractions triumphed in the clear searching light.
Time has passed since I first read it, and changes have occurred in the interval, which leave me free to exercise my own discretion, and to let the autobiography speak for itself.
"Of course!"
Well, I won't be in your way.
Taking one of my visiting cards, I wrote on it: "I came back for my stick, and saw you go to him." After I had pinned this spiteful little message to the door, so that she might see it when she returned, I suffered a disappointment.
"He did."
Who would have thought that the youth of our generation should have no more consideration for established merit?
"Madam," said Dr. Bullfrog, with all that energy of tone for which he was remarkable, "I don't believe it,--I CAN'T believe it.
"The fact is," quoth Tommy, "I am a society bird, and Nature has marked out for me a course beyond the range of the commonplace, and my wife must learn to accommodate.
Magpie, I perfectly agree with you.'"
What a fright for a poor, quiet, old Bullfrog, as little wiry, wicked Wasp came at him, barking and yelping.
"My dear, I don't gossip.
"No, no, he won't.
"There you go, Paddy-go-donk, Paddy-go-donk- -umph--chunk," some rascal of a boy would shout, while poor old Bullfrog's yellow spectacles would be bedewed with tears of honest indignation.
So, after this, Tommy Oriole went to rather more concerts, and spent less time at home than ever he did before, which was all that Mother Magpie effected in that quarter.
She was always full of everybody's business but her own--up and down, here and there, everywhere but in her own nest, knowing everyone's affairs, telling what everybody had been doing or ought to do, and ready to cast her advice gratis at every bird and beast of the woods.
Latterly some youngsters had arisen who sneered at his performances as behind the age.
"But my husband prefers this style of building."
And so poor Mr. Bullfrog was persuaded to forego his pleasant little cottage under the cat-tails, where his green spectacles and honest round back had excited, even in the minds of the boys, sentiments of respect and compassion.
My husband always sits regularly half the time, that I may have time to go about and exercise."
"That's only because he isn't properly instructed.
You'd better take my advice, for I understand just what to do,"--and away sails Mother Magpie; and presently young Oriole comes home all in a flutter.
"Here, here, Wasp, my boy."
It is quite my duty to take strong ground, and show that I cannot be dictated to."
As to your voice, your manner of living has a great deal to do with it.
Ask old Dr. Kite.
I always did tell you that your passion for water injured your singing.
Let me alone.
They pulled the young checkerberry before it even had time to blossom, rooted up the sassafras shrubs and gnawed their roots, fired off guns at the birds, and on several occasions, when old Dr. Bullfrog was leading a concert, had dashed in and broken up the choir by throwing stones.
"No, I have no time to attend lectures.
If she has a brilliant husband, whose success gratifies her ambition and places her in a distinguished public position, she must pay something for it.
"A fiddle on your constitution!
You must alter your style a little,--adapt it to modern times.
No, no, my good friend; I never make mistakes.
Old Mother Magpie was about the busiest character in the forest.
"Depend upon it, my dear," Mother Magpie would say, "that this way of building your nest, swinging like an old empty stocking from a bough, isn't at all the thing.
Now you complain always that your head aches whenever I call upon you.
I shall speak to him about it.
This was not the worst of it.
He came up into the garden, and established himself under a burdock, and began to practise Italian scales.
"I say, my dear, if you will persist in gossiping over our private family matters with that old Mother Magpie--"
He jumped with all his force sheer over a patch of bushes into the river, and swam back to his old home among the cat-tails.
"I mistake!
She comes and bores me to death with talking, and then goes off and mistakes what she has been saying for what I said."
Tommy Oriole, to say the truth, had as good a heart as ever beat under bird's feathers; but then he had a weakness for concerts and general society, because he was held to be, by all odds, the handsomest bird in the woods, and sung like an angel; and so the truth was he didn't confine himself so much to the domestic nest as Tom Titmouse or Billy Wren.
"Dear madam, consider my voice.
"Oh, as to that, if you take things in time, and listen to my advice," said Mother Magpie, "we may yet pull you through.
I understand just how to say the thing.
Pray, did you ever attend Dr. Kite's lectures on the nervous system?"
MOTHER MAGPIE'S MISCHIEF
Come up on the bank and learn to perch, as we birds do.
I confess this was very bad in Tommy; but then birds are no better than men in domestic matters, and sometimes will take the most unreasonable courses, if a meddlesome Magpie gets her claw into their nest.
"What! you haven't heard of a committee that is going to call on you, to ask you to resign the care of the parish music?"
"Don't put yourself in a passion, my dear; the more you talk, the more sure I am that your nervous system is running down, or you wouldn't forget good manners in this way.
She could see their strong little pointed tails too, and their webbed feet with a stout claw on each toe.
The Slow Little Turtle felt the ten brothers and sisters on his right side looking at him out of their left eyes, and the nine brothers and sisters on his left side looking at him out of their right eyes.
He sprawled off the end of his log and slid into the water, and all his brothers and sisters followed him except the Slow Little Turtle.
"Come on," said the Biggest Little Turtle.
His mother came and leaned her shell lovingly against his.
She looked so stern that the Slow Little Turtle didn't dare finish what he had begun to say, yet down in his little Turtle heart he thought, "Now they are going to catch it!"
The pond people looked at each other and laughed.
You know the Tree Frog had been carried away when he was young, before he came to live with the meadow people, so he knew how to be sorry for the Slow Little Turtle.
The boys carried him to the edge of the meadow and put him down on the grass.
"Never mind me," said the Tree Frog.
I was telling your father only yesterday that it was about time for you to hatch.
"You just wait and see," said the Slow Little Turtle.
And you," she added, turning to his brothers and sisters, "must be patient with him.
This did not really give him pain, yet, as he said afterward, "It hurts almost as much to think you are going to be hurt, as it does to be hurt."
The Mother Turtle stretched her head this way and that until there was hardly a wrinkle left in her neck-skin, she was so eager to see them all.
One slow little fellow stopped to look at the broken shells, stubbed one of his front toes on a large piece and then sat down until it should stop aching. "Wait for me!" he called out to his brothers and sisters.
At the edge of the pond the Slow Little Turtle found his nineteen brothers and sisters sound asleep.
Just then the Mother Turtle came up.
"I don't want to get up." And again he fell fast asleep.
She looked often at her children, and thought how handsome their rounded-up back shells were in the sunshine with the little red and yellow markings showing on the black.
"Yes," said a fine old fellow who was floating near her, "a row of their mothers!" He was a Turtle whom she had never liked very well, but now she began to think that he was rather agreeable after all.
Never!"
It was determined that two Englishmen, Ayloffe and Rumbold, should accompany Argyle to Scotland, and that Fletcher should go with Monmouth to England.
Locke had, at Oxford, abstained from expressing any opinion on the politics of the day.
It was speedily known at Edinburgh that the rebel squadron had touched at the Orkneys.
Some suspected persons were arrested.
When it was found that treachery could do nothing, arbitrary power was used.
The voyage was prosperous.
After vainly trying to inveigle Locke into a fault, the government resolved to punish him without one.
In one point, however, he was vulnerable.
John Murray, Marquess of Athol, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Argyleshire, and, at the head of a great body of his followers, occupied the castle of Inverary.
Skelton now addressed himself to the States General.
This delay was full of danger.
Six thousand pounds had been expected thence.
Then, instead of applying, as he should have done, to the States General, who sate close to his own door, he sent a messenger to the magistrates of Amsterdam, with a request that the suspected ships might be detained.
One of those boards sate at Amsterdam, was partly nominated by the authorities of that city, and seems to have been entirely animated by their spirit.
The Admiralty of Amsterdam made this error a plea for doing nothing; and, before the error could be rectified, the three ships had sailed.
The herdsmen and fishermen were indeed ready to rally round Mac Callum More; but, of the heads of the clan, some were in confinement, and others had fled.
It seemed probable that he would consent to form a close alliance with the United Provinces and the House of Austria.
The personal interest of William was also on this occasion identical with the interest of his father in law.
But the case was one which required rapid and vigorous action; and the nature of the Batavian institutions made such action almost impossible. The Union of Utrecht, rudely formed, amidst the agonies of a revolution, for the purpose of meeting immediate exigencies, had never been deliberately revised and perfected in a time of tranquillity.
Others were compelled to give hostages.
On the sixth the Orkneys were in sight. Argyle very unwisely anchored off Kirkwall, and allowed two of his followers to go on shore there.
Ambitious hopes, which had seemed to be extinguished, revived in his bosom.
The King said that he had received from unquestionable sources intelligence of designs which were forming against the throne by his banished subjects in Holland.
Spies had been set about him.
It is remarkable that the most illustrious and the most grossly injured man among the British exiles stood far aloof from these rash counsels. John Locke hated tyranny and persecution as a philosopher; but his intellect and his temper preserved him from the violence of a partisan. He had lived on confidential terms with Shaftesbury, and had thus incurred the displeasure of the court.
A chief object of the expedition was declared to be the entire suppression, not only of Popery, but of Prelacy, which was termed the most bitter root and offspring of Popery; and all good Scotchmen were exhorted to do valiantly for the cause of their country and of their God.
But no effectual step was taken for the purpose of detaining him; and on the afternoon of the second of May he stood out to sea before a favourable breeze.
When Grey repeated with approbation what Wildman had said about Richmond and Richard, the well read and thoughtful Scot justly remarked that there was a great difference between the fifteenth century and the seventeenth.
The Bishop ordered them to be arrested. The refugees proceeded to hold a long and animated debate on this misadventure: for, from the beginning to the end of their expedition, however languid and irresolute their conduct might be, they never in debate wanted spirit or perseverance.
It was hinted that the late King had died by poison.
Monmouth was to command in England.
He was a student of Christ Church in the University of Oxford.
Some of the exiles were cutthroats, whom nothing but the special providence of God had prevented from committing a foul murder; and among them was the owner of the spot which had been fixed for the butchery.
Excellent judges of character pronounced him to be the most shallow, fickle, passionate, presumptuous, and garrulous of men.
Some were for an attack on Kirkwall.
A proclamation was accordingly issued directing that Scotland should be put into a state of defence.
At length all differences were compromised.
It was determined that an attempt should be forthwith made on the western coast of Scotland, and that it should be promptly followed by a descent on England.
At Dunstaffnage he sent his second son Charles on Shore to call the Campbells to arms.
Let all we have be subject to thy law,
That is, the synagogue or place where they met for prayer.
All these prepared themselves together to fight against the children of Israel, and they came by the hillside to the top, which looketh toward Dothain, from the place which is called Belma, unto Chelmon, which is over against Esdrelon.
And she was exceedingly beautiful, and her husband left her great riches, and very many servants, and large possessions of herds of oxen, and flocks of sheep.
Nevertheless there were springs not far from the walls, out of which they were seen secretly to draw water, to refresh themselves a little rather than to drink their fill.
The distress of the besieged.
For which crime they were given up to their enemies, to the sword, and to pillage, and to confusion: but we know no other God but him.
Judith Chapter 6
But on the square of them, each side was extended the space of twenty feet.
And when the Egyptians had cast them out from them, and the plague had ceased from them, and they had a mind to take them again, and bring them back to their service,
And they cried to the Lord the God of Israel with one accord, that their children might not be made a prey, and their wives carried off, and their cities destroyed, and their holy things profaned, and that they might not be made a reproach to the Gentiles.
And that thou mayst know that thou shalt experience these things together with them, behold from this hour thou shalt be associated to their people, that when they shall receive the punishment they deserve from my sword, thou mayst fall under the same vengeance.
But the children of Israel, when they saw the multitude of them, prostrated themselves upon the ground, putting ashes upon their heads, praying with one accord, that the God of Israel would shew his mercy upon his people.
Judith Chapter 4
Judith Chapter 3
The character of Judith: her discourse to the ancients.
And he went forth he and all the army, with the chariots, and horsemen, and archers, who covered the face of the earth, like locusts.
And all the people cried to the Lord with great earnestness, and they humbled their souls in fastings, and prayers, both they and their wives.
Judith Chapter 8
This is not a word that may draw down mercy, but rather that may stir up wrath, and enkindle indignation.
And he took by assault the renowned city of Melothus, and pillaged all the children of Tharsis, and the children of Ismahel, who were over against the face of the desert, and on the south of the land of Cellon.
We have sinned with our fathers, we have done unjustly, we have committed iniquity:
The church...
And he called all the ancients, and all the governors, and his officers of war, and communicated to them the secret of his counsel:
But esteeming these very punishments to be less than our sins deserve, let us believe that these scourges of the Lord, with which like servants we are chastised, have happened for our amendment, and not for our destruction.
And taking their arms of war, they posted themselves at the places, which by a narrow pathway lead directly between the mountains, and they guarded them all day and night.
Then the kings and the princes of all the cities and provinces, of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Syria Sobal, and Libya, and Cilicia sent their ambassadors, who coming to Holofernes, said:
So that which I intend to do prove ye if it be of God, and pray that God may strengthen my design.
And why they above all that dwell in the east, have despised us, and have not come out to meet us, that they might receive us with peace?
But if after five days be past there come no aid, we will do the things which you have spoken.
Saying: The God of our fathers, whose power thou hast set forth, will make this return to thee, that thou rather shalt see their destruction.
Remember Moses the servant of the Lord overcame Amalec that trusted in his own strength, and in his power, and in his army, and in his shields, and in his chariots, and in his horsemen, not by fighting with the sword, but by holy prayers:
But if there be no offence of this people in the sight of their God, we cannot resist them because their God will defend them: and we shall be a reproach to the whole earth.
And though they did these things, they could not for all that mitigate the fierceness of his heart:
For perhaps he will put a stop to his indignation, and will give glory to his own name.
So they being moved by this exhortation of his, prayed to the Lord, and continued in the sight of the Lord.
And he made all his warlike preparations to go before with a multitude of innumerable camels, with all provisions sufficient for the armies in abundance, and herds of oxen, and flocks of sheep, without number.
Judith Chapter 7
And when the Lord our God shall give this liberty to his servants, let God be with thee also in the midst of us: that as it shall please thee, so thou with all thine mayst converse with us.
That they may not say among the Gentiles: Where is their God?
Now there were in his troops a hundred and twenty thousand footmen, and two and twenty thousand horsemen, besides the preparations of those men who had been taken, and who had been brought away out of the provinces and cities of all the youth.
Then Holofernes called the captains, and officers of the power of the Assyrians: and he mustered men for the expedition, and the king commanded him, a hundred and twenty thousand fighting men on foot, and twelve thousand archers, horsemen.
So Isaac, so Jacob, so Moses, and all that have pleased God, passed through many tribulations, remaining faithful.
And now, brethren, as you are the ancients among the people of God, and their very soul resteth upon you: comfort their hearts by your speech, that they may be mindful how our fathers were tempted that they might be proved, whether they worshipped their God truly.
It's heavy, lads--solid books."
What decision?
"The Elder?
"You know it has cost money!
"It's wrong, lads!"
Let it all be done properly, according to rule.
"Well, is she pretty?
The two tall peasants had their say.
"Arguing?
"That's it--not against it!
"Don't catch up against it!
"Was it not fate that brought him to Bogucharovo, and at that very moment?" thought Princess Mary.
Dron was of this opinion, but as soon as he expressed it Karp and others attacked their ex-Elder.
"Decision?
"Where's the Elder?" he cried furiously.
Old dotard!..." cried he.
Good-bye, Princess.
Traitors!" cried Rostov unmeaningly in a voice not his own, gripping Karp by the collar.
We did it just out of foolishness.
"Why, we've not done any harm!
"We don't riot, we're following the orders," declared Karp, and at that moment several voices began speaking together.
For himself personally Nicholas could not wish for a better wife: by marrying her he would make the countess his mother happy, would be able to put his father's affairs in order, and would even--he felt it--ensure Princess Mary's happiness.
"It's as the old men have decided--there's too many of you giving orders."
"What decision have you been pleased to come to?" said he.
Mutiny!...
It's all nonsense...
But on glancing at Rostov's face Ilyin stopped short.
Look here, put it under the bast matting and cover it with hay--that's the way!"
And his plighted word?
I don't like that way of doing things.
"The Elder....
"There!
But Sonya?
What do you want with him?..." asked Karp.
"We've been told to keep order, and that no one is to leave their homes or take away a single grain, and that's all about it!" cried another.
Didn't he write in those idiotic broadsheets that anyone, 'whoever it might be, should be dragged to the lockup by his hair'? (How silly!) 'And honor and glory to whoever captures him,' he says.
How is it that we are staying on?"
The Emperor had written to Count Rostopchin as follows:
"What is it?
See!
"What's to be done?
"He's cook to some prince."
With what?
The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be appreciated.
"Well then, sell it," said he.
Who is it?
Under this treaty we are in honor bound to arbitrate the question of canal tolls for coastwise traffic between the Western and Eastern coasts of the United States.
China has neither a fleet nor an efficient army.
I deemed it probable that she would no more be able successfully to defend Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria than she had been able to defend Southern Manchuria and Korea.
There were various mob outbreaks, especially in the Japanese cities; the police were roughly handled, and several Christian churches were burned, as reported to me by the American Minister.
I received another gift which I deeply appreciated, an original copy of Sully's "Memoires" of "Henry le Grand," sent me with the following inscription (I translate it roughly):
China now sees Japan, Russia, Germany, England and France in possession of fragments of her empire, and has twice within the lifetime of the present generation seen her capital in the hands of allied invaders, because she in very fact realizes the ideals of the persons who wish the United States to disarm, and then trust that our helplessness will secure us a contemptuous immunity from attack by outside nations.
The men who have stood highest in our history, as in the history of all countries, are those who scorned injustice, who were incapable of oppressing the weak, or of permitting their country, with their consent, to oppress the weak, but who did not hesitate to draw the sword when to leave it undrawn meant inability to arrest triumphant wrong.
I remember one representative of their number, who used to write little sonnets on behalf of the Mahdi and the Sudanese, these sonnets setting forth the need that the Sudan should be both independent and peaceful.
If this country had not fought the Spanish War; if we had failed to take the action we did about Panama; all mankind would have been the loser.
But at least their position is understandable.
It had been established by joint international agreement, but no Power had been willing to resort to it.
But as yet there has been only a rudimentary beginning of the development of international tribunals of justice, and there has been no development at all of any international police power.
One class of our citizens clamors for treaties impossible of fulfilment, and improper to fulfil; another class has no objection to the passage of these treaties so long as there is no concrete case to which they apply, but instantly oppose a veto on their application when any concrete case does actually arise.
Mr. Meyer, who was, with the exception of Mr. White, the most useful diplomat in the American service, rendered literally invaluable aid by insisting upon himself seeing the Czar at critical periods of the transaction, when it was no longer possible for me to act successfully through the representatives of the Czar, who were often at cross purposes with one another.
It was only the growth of the European powers in military efficiency that freed eastern Europe from the dreadful scourge of the Tartar and partially freed it from the dreadful scourge of the Turk.
In such event it can afford to pass its spare time in one continuous round of universal peace celebrations, and of smug self-satisfaction in having earned the derision of all the virile peoples of mankind.
As a result of the Portsmouth peace, I was given the Nobel Peace Prize. This consisted of a medal, which I kept, and a sum of $40,000, which I turned over as a foundation of industrial peace to a board of trustees which included Oscar Straus, Seth Low and John Mitchell.
During the last century at least half of the wars that have been fought have been civil and not foreign wars.
As Americans their folly is peculiarly scandalous, because if the principles they now uphold are right, it means that it would have been better that Americans should never have achieved their independence, and better that, in 1861, they should have peacefully submitted to seeing their country split into half a dozen jangling confederacies and slavery made perpetual.
The treaty of peace was finally signed.
"The undersigned members of the French Parliamentary Group of International Arbitration and Conciliation have decided to tender President Roosevelt a token of their high esteem and their sympathetic recognition of the persistent and decisive initiative he has taken towards gradually substituting friendly and judicial for violent methods in case of conflict between Nations.
Throughout the seven and a half years that I was President, I pursued without faltering one consistent foreign policy, a policy of genuine international good will and of consideration for the rights of others, and at the same time of steady preparedness.
But I know my countrymen.
I felt that it would be better for Russia to pay some indemnity than to go on with the war, for there was little chance, in my judgment, of the war turning out favorably for Russia, and the revolutionary movement already under way bade fair to overthrow the negotiations entirely.
The chief trouble comes from the entire inability of these worthy people to understand that they are demanding things that are mutually incompatible when they demand peace at any price, and also justice and righteousness.
On the recommendation of John Hay, I succeeded in getting an agreement with Mexico to lay a matter in dispute between the two republics before the Hague Court.
It was followed by numerous others; and it definitely established that court as the great international peace tribunal.
Such being the case, they will do well to remember that the surest of all ways to invite disaster is to be opulent, aggressive and unarmed.
It is the foolish, peace-at-any-price persons who try to persuade our people to make unwise and improper treaties, or to stop building up the navy.
In a very interesting French book the other day I was reading how the Mediterranean was freed from pirates only by the "pax Britannica," established by England's naval force.
Japan might have met defeat, and defeat to her would have spelt overwhelming disaster; and even if she had continued to win, what she thus won would have been of no value to her, and the cost in blood and money would have left her drained white.
It is a huge civilized empire, one of the most populous on the globe; and it has been the helpless prey of outsiders because it does not possess the power to fight.
The hopeless and hideous bloodshed and wickedness of Algiers and Turkestan was stopped, and could only be stopped, when civilized nations in the shape of Russia and France took possession of them.
I believed, therefore, that the time had come when it was greatly to the interest of both combatants to have peace, and when therefore it was possible to get both to agree to peace.
I did, however, receive aid from the Emperor of Germany.
But if trouble comes and the treaties are repudiated, or there is a demand for armed intervention, it is not these people who will pay anything; they will stay at home in safety, and leave brave men to pay in blood, and honest men to pay in shame, for their folly.
From all the sources of information at hand, I grew most strongly to believe that a further continuation of the struggle would be a very bad thing for Japan, and an even worse thing for Russia.
I no less emphatically insist that it is our duty to keep the limited and sensible arbitration treaties which we have already made.
There was difficulty in getting them to agree on a common meeting place; but each finally abandoned its original contention in the matter, and the representatives of the two nations finally met at Portsmouth, in New Hampshire.
The chief difficulty came because of Japan's demand for a money indemnity.
At any rate nothing useful can be done unless with the clear recognition that we object to putting peace second to righteousness.
Russia, in spite of her gigantic strength, was, in my judgment, apt to lose even more than she had already lost if the struggle continued.
Many of them are, in the ordinary relations of life, good citizens.
During our generation this seems to have been peculiarly the case among the men who have become obsessed with the idea of obtaining universal peace by some cheap patent panacea.
Down at bottom their temper is such that they will not permanently tolerate injustice done to them.
Almost every great nation has inherited certain questions, either with other nations or with sections of its own people, which it is quite impossible, in the present state of civilization, to decide as matters between private individuals can be decided.
There can be no nobler cause for which to work than the peace of righteousness; and high honor is due those serene and lofty souls who with wisdom and courage, with high idealism tempered by sane facing of the actual facts of life, have striven to bring nearer the day when armed strife between nation and nation, between class and class, between man and man shall end throughout the world.
Peace came, well-being came, freedom from rape and murder and torture and highway robbery, and every brutal gratification of lust and greed came, only when the Sudan lost its independence and passed under English rule.
They rarely try to prevent their fellow countrymen from insulting or wronging the people of other nations; but they always ardently advocate that we, in our turn, shall tamely submit to wrong and insult from other nations.
There are big and powerful nations which habitually commit, either upon other nations or upon sections of their own people, wrongs so outrageous as to justify even the most peaceful persons in going to war.
If the war went on, I thought it, on the whole, likely that Russia would be driven west of Lake Baikal.
But in their particular case they are able to do harm because they affect our relations with foreign powers, so that other men pay the debt which they themselves have really incurred.
In international affairs we are a short-sighted people.
But it was very far from certain.
Japan stands on a footing of equality with European and American nations because it does possess this power.
The Japanese Government had been wise throughout, except in the matter of announcing that it would insist on a money indemnity.
Until people get it firmly fixed in their minds that peace is valuable chiefly as a means to righteousness, and that it can only be considered as an end when it also coincides with righteousness, we can do only a limited amount to advance its coming on this earth.
It was under my administration that the Hague Court was saved from becoming an empty farce.
Looking back from the vantage point of a score of years, probably every one will agree that he was an absurd person.
Each assented to my proposal in principle.
The weakest nations knew that they, no less than the strongest, were safe from insult and injury at our hands; and the strong and the weak alike also knew that we possessed both the will and the ability to guard ourselves from wrong or insult at the hands of any one.
They will speak ill soon enough.
To have the best nations, the free and civilized nations, disarm and leave the despotisms and barbarisms with great military force, would be a calamity compared to which the calamities caused by all the wars of the nineteenth century would be trivial.
Yet this well-meaning little sonneteer sincerely felt that his verses were issued in the cause of humanity.
Those who advocate such a policy do not occupy a lofty position.
I first satisfied myself that each side wished me to act, but that, naturally and properly, each side was exceedingly anxious that the other should not believe that the action was taken on its initiative.
I got no aid from either.
One class of our citizens indulges in gushing promises to do everything for foreigners, another class offensively and improperly reviles them; and it is hard to say which class more thoroughly misrepresents the sober, self-respecting judgment of the American people as a whole.
I cordially sympathized with these views.
Hitherto peace has often come only because some strong and on the whole just power has by armed force, or the threat of armed force, put a stop to disorder.
But he was not one whit more absurd than most of the more prominent persons who advocate disarmament by the United States, the cessation of up-building the navy, and the promise to agree to arbitrate all matters, including those affecting our national interests and honor, with all foreign nations.
It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession and are not open to reason.
As yet in neither case is there any efficient method of getting international action; and if joint action by several powers is secured, the result is usually considerably worse than if only one Power interfered.
Of course what I had done in connection with the Portsmouth peace was misunderstood by some good and sincere people.
They are exactly like the other good citizens who believe that enforced universal vegetarianism or anti-vaccination is the panacea for all ills.
Neither in national nor in private affairs is it ordinarily advisable to make a bluff which cannot be put through--personally, I never believe in doing it under any circumstances.
This was the first case ever brought before the Hague Court.
There are also weak nations so utterly incompetent either to protect the rights of foreigners against their own citizens, or to protect their own citizens against foreigners, that it becomes a matter of sheer duty for some outside power to interfere in connection with them.
The only safe rule is to promise little, and faithfully to keep every promise; to "speak softly and carry a big stick."
The losses of life and of treasure were frightful.
The trouble is that our policy is apt to go in zigzags, because different sections of our people exercise at different times unequal pressure on our government.
We were of substantial service in bringing to a satisfactory conclusion the negotiations at Algeciras concerning Morocco.
There is no certainty in such a war.
The Germans held Paris and half of France, and gave up much territory in lieu of the indemnity, whereas the Japanese were still many thousand miles from Moscow, and had no territory whatever which they wished to give up.
I previously received the two delegations at Oyster Bay on the U. S. S. Mayflower, which, together with another naval vessel, I put at their disposal, on behalf of the United States Government, to take them from Oyster Bay to Portsmouth.
PARIS, January, 1906.
Then he told her that a good cure for toothache was to bite on a white stone and she believed him and the next morning got a piece of white quartz and began to bite on it; but this only broke her teeth and made her mouth bleed so that the pain was worse than before: then the boy jeered at her and said.
The boy was rather frightened and sang
The old woman was called Hutibudi; and she and the boy sat up late talking together and then they lay down to sleep; but in the middle of the night he heard the old woman crunching away trying to bite his bow to pieces.
and they drank and went away.
Then various kinds of birds came and after them a great herd of rhinceroses and among them was one which had the dried up body of the boy's father stuck on its horn.
"He is alive" said she "but a long time ago a rhinoceros carried him off on its horn." Then the boy vowed that he would go in search of his father and made his mother put him up provisions for the journey; and he started off taking with him an iron bow and a big bundle of arrows.
"Did you think, Grannie, that you could bite my iron bow and arrows?"
He asked her what she was eating: "Some pulse I got from the village headman," "Give me a little to try" he begged.
He journeyed on all day and at nightfall he came to a village; there he went up to the house of an old woman to ask for a bed.
First of all, then, it is a mistake to say, with the objectors whom I began by citing, that anger, love and fear are affections purely of the mind.
Classifications depend on our temporary purposes.
If 'physical' and 'mental' meant two different kinds of intrinsic nature, immediately, intuitively, and infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in whatever bit of experience it qualified, one does not see how there could ever have arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity.
Thoughts, we all naturally think, are made of one kind of substance, and things of another.
In the extraordinary case of amnesia of the Rev.
So far, then, as the physical world means the collection of contents that determine in each other certain regular changes, the whole collection of our appreciative attributes has to be treated as falling outside of it.
Common sense and popular philosophy are as dualistic as it is possible to be.
I now return to the subject, because I believe that, so far from invalidating my general thesis, these phenomena, when properly analyzed, afford it powerful support.
It is the very light of the arc-lamp which displaces the darkness of the midnight street, etc.
Sometimes I treat my body purely as a part of outer nature.
But if, on the contrary, these words are words of sorting, ambiguity is natural.
The common-sense stage of thought is a perfectly definite practical halting-place, the place where we ourselves can proceed to act unhesitatingly.
For then, as soon as the relations of a thing are sufficiently various it can be sorted variously.
When active, it would figure in the physical, and when inactive, in the mental group.
Our body itself is the palmary instance of the ambiguous.
Chemical 'affinities' are a purely verbal metaphor; and, as I just said, even such things as forces, tensions, and activities can at a pinch be regarded as anthropomorphic projections.
That, however, is enough to save them from being classed as absolutely non-objective.
In Section VII. of [the first essay], I treated of this class of experiences very inadequately, because I had to be so brief.
By engendering and translocating just these qualities, actively efficacious as they seem to be, we ourselves succeed in altering nature so as to suit us; and until more purely intellectual, as distinguished from practical, needs had arisen, no one ever thought of calling these qualities subjective.
It is their way of behaving towards each other, their system of relations, their function; and all these things vary with the context in which we find it opportune to consider them.
It is only towards certain specific groups of associates that the physical energies, as we call them, of a content are put forth. In another group it may be quite inert.
When clouds float by the moon, it is as if both clouds and moon and we ourselves shared in the motion.
We even go so far as to talk of a weary road, a giddy height, a jocund morning or a sullen sky; and the term 'indefinite' while usually applied only to our apprehensions, functions as a fundamental physical qualification of things in Spencer's 'law of evolution,' and doubtless passes with most readers for all right.
Let the reader arrest himself in the act of reading this article now.
The man is really hateful; the action really mean; the situation really tragic--all in themselves and quite apart from our opinion.
We can say that we are aware of a painful place, filling a certain bigness in our organism, or we can say that we are inwardly in a 'state' of pain.
The beauty of a thing or its value is no force that can be plotted in a polygon of compositions, nor does its 'use' or 'significance' affect in the minutest degree its vicissitudes or destiny at the hands of physical nature.
The reason would seem to be that, although they are inert as regards the rest of physical nature, they are not inert as regards that part of physical nature which our own skin covers.
The 'interesting' aspects of things are thus not wholly inert physically, though they be active only in these small corners of physical nature which our bodies occupy.
At the moment, it is there for neither; later we shall probably judge it to have been there for both.
If we mean by physical nature whatever lies beyond the surface of our bodies, these attributes are inert throughout the whole extent of physical nature.
Sometimes, again, I think of it as 'mine,' I sort it with the 'me,' and then certain local changes and determinations in it pass for spiritual happenings.
Shall we say an 'agreeable degree of heat,' or an 'agreeable feeling' occasioned by the degree of heat?
A piece of experience of a determinate sort is there, but there at first as a 'pure' fact.
The sun caresses it, and the zephyr wooes it as if it were a bed of roses.
It is by the interest and importance that experiences have for us, by the emotions they excite, and the purposes they subserve, by their affective values, in short, that their consecution in our several conscious streams, as 'thoughts' of ours, is mainly ruled.
Either will do; and language would lose most of its esthetic and rhetorical value were we forbidden to project words primarily connoting our affections upon the objects by which the affections are aroused.
In the two cases their contexts are apt to be different.
It is possible to imagine a universe of experiences in which the only alternative between neighbors would be either physical interaction or complete inertness.
They are undeniable parts of pure experience; yet, while common sense and what I call radical empiricism stand for their being objective, both rationalism and the usual empiricism claim that they are exclusively the 'work of the mind'--the finite mind or the absolute mind, as the case may be.
It surely can be nothing intrinsic in the individual experience.
Something like this is true of every experience, however complex, at the moment of its actual presence.
Hardness and softness are effects on us of atomic interactions, and the atoms themselves are neither hard nor soft, nor solid nor liquid.
(1) That the popular notion that these experiences are intuitively given as purely inner facts is hasty and erroneous; and
Even the primary qualities are undergoing the same fate.
Psychologists, studying our perceptions of movement, have unearthed experiences in which movement is felt in general but not ascribed correctly to the body that really moves.
So they remain equivocal; and, as the world goes, their equivocality is one of their great conveniences.
In the paragraphs that follow I shall try to show:
Thus would these experiences, so far from being an obstacle to the pure experience philosophy, serve as an excellent corroboration of its truth.
It is thus both energetic and inert; and the same is true (if you vary the associates properly) of every other piece of experience.
With the affectional experiences which we are considering, the relatively 'pure' condition lasts.
It is those very appreciative attributes of things, their dangerousness, beauty, rarity, utility, etc., that primarily appeal to our attention.
In practical life no urgent need has yet arisen for deciding whether to treat them as rigorously mental or as rigorously physical facts.
On this stage of thought things act on each other as well as on us by means of their secondary qualities.
Why then do men leave them as ambiguous as they do, and not class them decisively as purely spiritual?
Turn now to those affective phenomena which more directly concern us.
But the universe we live in is more chaotic than this, and there is room in it for the hybrid or ambiguous group of our affectional experiences, of our emotions and appreciative perceptions.
We discover beauty just as we discover the physical properties of things.
Desire introduces them; interest holds them; fitness fixes their order and connection.
Consciousness, flowing inside of us in the forms of conception or judgment, or concentrating itself in the shape of passion or emotion, can be directly felt as the spiritual activity which it is, and known in contrast with the space-filling objective 'content' which it envelopes and accompanies.
The central point of the pure-experience theory is that 'outer' and 'inner' are names for two groups into which we sort experiences according to the way in which they act upon their neighbors.
Here whatever is hard interferes with the space its neighbors occupy.
It dents them; is impenetrable by them; and we call the hardness then a physical hardness.
There is no original spirituality or materiality of being, intuitively discerned, then; but only a translocation of experiences from one world to another; a grouping of them with one set or another of associates for definitely practical or intellectual ends.
Training is needed to make us expert in either line.
To her offspring a tigress is tender, but cruel to every other living thing--both cruel and tender, therefore, at once.
Then the Slow Little Turtle came hurrying over the sand with a rather cross look in his eyes and putting his feet down a little harder than he needed to--quite as though he were out of patience about something.
"If you will only learn to keep up with your brothers and sisters," she said "I shall not be sorry that the boys carried you off."
She drew a long Mud Turtle breath and answered her own question.
Then one of these great animals stooped over and picked him up, and held him bottom side uppermost and rapped on that side, which was flat; and on the other side, which was rounded; and stared at him with two great eyes.
Something always happens to pond people who are too slow.
He wanted to see what they would do, so he looked out of his right eye at the ten brothers and sisters on that side, and out of his left eye at the nine brothers and sisters on that side.
"What do you mean?" asked the Slow Little Turtle, peeping out from between his shells.
"You do not want to," said his mother, "but you will not be with us long unless you learn to keep up with the rest.
"That is queer!" they said.
There are my children!
"I did hope," said the Mother Turtle, "that I might have one family without such a child in it.
This was the first time he had ever seen the moon, for, except when they are laying eggs, Turtles usually sleep at night.
"I wish I might help you some time."
Nothing happened to him, and so he grew careless and made people wait for him just because he was not quite ready to go with them, or because he wanted to do this or look at that or talk to some other person.
"Does my shell look very bad?" he cried. "I wish I could see it.
Next the other great animal took him and turned him over and rapped on his shells and stared at him.
"I'm coming in a minute."
Did you ever see a finer family?
The sun has been so hot lately that I was sure you would do well."
The Biggest Little Turtle saw these great animals coming toward him.
I remember so well my first slow child--and how he--" She began to cry, and since she could not easily get her forefeet to her eyes, she sprawled to the pond and swam off with only her head and a little of her upper shell showing above the water.
The other little Turtles waited, but when his toe was comfortable again and he started toward them, he met a very interesting Snail and talked a while with him.
He would have liked to draw them in too, but of course he couldn't do that.
"After this we will call him 'The Quick Little Turtle.'"
After that he was always the first to slip from the log to the water if anything scared them; and when, one day, a strange Turtle from another pond came to visit, he said to the Turtles who had always lived there, "Why do you call that young fellow with the marked shell 'The Slow Little Turtle?' He is the quickest one in his family."
"Yes," she said, "you certainly are, for I saw you scrambling out of the sand a little while ago, and you came from the very place where I laid my eggs and covered them during the first really warm nights this year.
That makes him miss his share of good things, and then he is quite certain to be cross and think it is somebody else's fault."
When he did open his eyes, his relatives were sitting around looking at him, and he remembered all that had happened before he slept.
The Slow Little Turtle was really frightened by what his mother had said, and for a few days he tried to keep up with the others.
So they sprawled along until they came to a place where they could sit in a row on an old log, and they climbed onto it and sat just close enough together and not at all too close.
Oh, I am so glad to get back!
When the twenty little Mud Turtles broke their egg-shells one hot summer day, and poked their way up through the warm sand in which they had been buried, they looked almost as much alike as so many raindrops.
And he was as good as his word.
But there is always one Slow Little Turtle who lags behind and wants the others to wait for him.
Most of the young Mud Turtles crawled quickly out of the sand and broken shells, and began drying themselves in the sunshine.
The Mother Turtle who was sunning herself on the bank near by, said to her friends, "Why!
"I tell you I'm not hungry," he murmured.
He could do this very easily, because his eyes were not on the front of his head like those of some people, but one on each side.
"I'm not going away."
"Why didn't you Turtles wait for me?" he grumbled.
One beautiful sunshiny afternoon, when most of the twenty little Turtles were sitting on a floating log by the edge of the pond, their mother was with some of her friends on another log near by.
That is because they forget that the Tortoises live on land, have higher back shells, and move very, very slowly. Turtles live more in the water and can move quickly if they will.
This is why other Turtles sometimes make fun of a slow brother by calling him a Land Tortoise.
It is all right, you know, to be a Land Tortoise when your father and mother are Land Tortoises, and these cousins of the Turtles look so much like them that some people cannot tell them apart.
"They didn't wait for me," he said.
This was not because they were rude or bashful, but because they did not know what to say.
"I'm here!" he cried joyfully, poking first one and then another of them with his head.
She was just noticing how beautifully the skin wrinkled on his neck, when she heard a splash and saw two terrible great two-legged animals wading into the pond from the shore.
"Good night!" said the Turtle.
It was not until the sun went down that the boys let the Slow Little Turtle go.
She was so proud that she could not help talking about them.
I believe I will go over and speak to them."
He drew in his head and his tail and his legs, until all they could see was his rounded upper shell, his shell side-walls, and the yellow edge of his flat lower shell.
THE SLOW LITTLE MUD TURTLE
It is too bad."
Then they laughed and picked him up again, and one of them took something sharp and shiny and cut marks into his upper shell.
"The first year I had only a few children, the next year I had more, and so it has gone--every year a few more children than the year before--until now I never know quite how many I do have.
I cannot help loving even a slow child who is cross, if he is hatched from one of my eggs, yet it makes me sad--very, very sad."
He lay perfectly still for a long, long time, and when he thought they had forgotten about him he tried to run away.
The Tree Frog hopped along ahead to show the way, and the Turtle followed until they reached a place from which they could see the pond. "Good night!" said the Tree Frog.
He was thinking over and over, "Something has happened!
The Biggest Little Turtle moved without awakening.
"Why are you not up here with your brothers and sisters?" she asked suddenly of the Slow Little Turtle, who was trying to make a place for himself on the log.
He was sure his mother was going to scold the other Turtle children for leaving him.
"I thought you were when I heard you trying to make the others wait.
"Boys!" she cried, "Boys!" And she sprawled off the end of her log and slid into the water, all her friends following her.
He can catch up."
The little Mud Turtles looked at each other and didn't say a word.
We shall not have him with us long."
Then he was very, very tired, but he wanted so much to get back to his home in the pond that he started at once by moonlight.
"I was coming right along but they wouldn't wait.
For me and for this book, however, for my love of it and for its inner development, there is no better adaptation of means to ends than this, namely, that right at the start I begin by abolishing what we call orderly arrangement, keep myself entirely aloof from it, frankly claiming and asserting the right to a charming confusion.
And so, alas, it is; and I should indeed feel very disconsolate about it if I could not cherish the hope that at least a part of it may soon be realized.
The selection is not difficult.
This is all the more necessary, inasmuch as the material which our life and love offers to my spirit and to my pen is so incessantly progressive and so inflexibly systematic.
The great Cervantes too, an old man in agony, but still genial and full of delicate wit, drapes the motley spectacle of his lifelike writings with the costly tapestry of a preface, which in itself is a beautiful and romantic painting.
Nothing concerns him except to keep clean the sheen of his white pinions.
A fresh, warm breath of life and love fanned me, rustling and stirring in all the branches of the verdant grove.
I not only enjoyed, but I felt and enjoyed the enjoyment.
I breathed the spring and I saw clearly all about me everlasting youth.
The clever Boccaccio talks with flattering courtesy to all women, both at the beginning and at the end of his opulent book.
And yet with calm presence of mind I watched for the slightest sign of joy in you, so that not one should escape me to impair the harmony.
And in my mind's eye I saw, too, in many forms, my one and only Beloved, now as a little girl, now as a young lady in the full bloom and energy of love and womanhood, and now as a dignified mother with her demure babe in her arms.
CONFESSIONS OF AN AWKWARD MAN
Well, I was standing by the window and looking out into the open; the morning certainly deserves to be called beautiful, the air is still and quite warm, and the verdure here before me is fresh.
I was going to expound to you, step by step, in accordance with natural laws, the misunderstandings that attack the hidden centre of the loveliest existence, and to confess to you the manifold effects of my awkwardness.
PROLOGUE
I was just on the point of unfolding to you in clear and precise periods the exact and straightforward history of our frivolities and of my dulness.
And even as the wide land undulates in hills and dales, so the calm, broad, silvery river winds along in great bends and sweeps, until it and the lover's fantasy, cradled upon it like the swan, pass away into the distance and lose themselves in the immeasurable.
Just one word, a parting trope: It is not alone the royal eagle who may despise the croaking of the raven; the swan, too, is proud and takes no note of it.
But what shall my spirit bestow upon its offspring, which, like its parent, is as poor in poesy as it is rich in love?
I gazed and enjoyed it all, the rich green, the white blossoms and the golden fruit.
JULIUS TO LUCINDA
All the rest is readily explained by psychology.
And then I now know that death can also be felt as beautiful and sweet.
Since the last letter from your sister--it is three days now--I have undergone the sufferings of an entire life, from the bright sunlight of glowing youth to the pale moonlight of sagacious old age.
I felt so alone and so strangely.
Finally I became conscious that it was now nearly over.
And for that reason I suspect--if I am not mistaken, I have already imparted my suspicion to you--that the next life will be larger, and in the good as well as in the bad, stronger, wilder, bolder and more tremendous.
Then of a sudden the different memories all became confused; with unbelievable rapidity the outlines changed, reassumed their first form, and transformed themselves again and again, until the wild vision vanished.
It seemed to me that all was right so, and that your unavoidable death was nothing more than a gentle awakening after a light sleep.
I should have despaired, had I not perceived and idolized both in you, gracious Madonna, and you and your gentle godliness in myself.
And as a delicate spirit often grows melancholy in the very lap of happiness over its own joy, and at the very acme of its existence becomes conscious of the futility of it all, so did I regard my suffering with mysterious pleasure.
Every little detail she wrote about your sickness, taken with what I had already gleaned from the doctor and had observed myself, confirmed my suspicion that it was far more dangerous than you thought; indeed no longer dangerous, but decided, past hope.
For a long time you had been wrapt in the bosom of the cold earth; flowers had started to grow on the beloved grave, and my tears had already begun to flow more gently. Mute and alone I stood, and saw nothing but the features I had loved and the sweet glances of the expressive eyes.
Then I became conscious that I had been dreaming; I shuddered at all the significant suggestions and similarities, and stood anxiously by the boundless deep of this inward truth.
Everything was already past.
My career was ended, but not completed.
I hated everything earthly and was glad to see it all punished and destroyed.
Serious and yet charming, quite you and yet no longer you, the divine form irradiated by a wonderful light!
For your spirit, too, stands distinct and perfect before me, not as an apparition which appears and fades away again, but as one of the forms that endure forever.
I remember everything, even the griefs, and all my thoughts that have been and are to be bestir themselves and arise before me.
One thing crowds out another, and that which just now was near and present soon sinks back into obscurity.
One among all is at once the wittiest and the loveliest: when we exchange roles and with childish delight try to see who can best imitate the other; whether you succeed best with the tender vehemence of a man, or I with the yielding devotion of a woman.
How could separation separate us, when presence itself is to us, as it were, too present?
Suppose words or a human being to create a misunderstanding between us!
The time is coming when we two shall behold in one spirit that we are blossoms of one plant, or petals of one flower.
A great future beckons me on into the immeasurable; each idea develops a countless progeny.
For you all feeling is infinite and eternal; you recognize no separations, your being is an indivisible unity.
Nothing can part us; and certainly any separation would only draw me more powerfully to you.
The poignant grief would be transient and quickly resolve itself into complete harmony.
I wanted first to demonstrate to you that there exists in the original and essential nature of man a certain awkward enthusiasm which likes to utter boldly that which is delicate and holy, and sometimes falls headlong over its own honest zeal and speaks a word that is divine to the point of coarseness.
In you alone I first saw true pride and true feminine humility.
The most extreme suffering, if it is only surrounded, without separating us, would seem to me nothing but a charming antithesis to the sublime frivolity of our marriage.
The words are weak and vague.
It looks at me joyously out of its deep eyes and opens its arms to embrace my spirit.
I am all yours; we are closest to each other and we understand each other.
Oh, I should have thought it all a fairy-tale that there could be such joy, such love as I now feel, and such a woman, who could be my most tender Beloved, my best companion, and at the same time a perfect friend.
The holiest and most evanescent of those delicate traits and utterances of the soul, which to one who does not know the highest seem like bliss itself, are merely the common atmosphere of our spiritual breath and life.
The extremes of unbridled gayety and of quiet presentiment live together within me.
For it was in friendship especially that I sought for what I wanted, and for what I never hoped to find in any woman.
But then my longing grew again irresistible, until on its wings I sank back into your arms.
Only here I see myself in harmonious completeness.
I bethink me how at our last embrace, you vehemently resisting, I burst into simultaneous tears and laughter.
That is why you are so serious and so joyous, why you regard everything in such a large and indifferent way; that is why you love me, all of me, and will surrender no part of me to the state, to posterity, or to manly pleasures.
And for him there come, too, moments of the profoundest and fullest consciousness, when all lives fall together and mingle and separate in a different way.
We have to cool and mitigate the consuming fire with jests, and thus for us the most witty of the forms and situations of joy is also the most beautiful.
And then again come moments of sudden and universal clarity, when several such spirits of the inner world completely fuse together into a wonderful wedlock, and many a forgotten bit of our ego shines forth in a new light and even illuminates the darkness of the future with its bright lustre.
Meantime I will by no means make common cause with them, but will rather excuse and defend my liberty and audacity by means of the example of the little innocent Wilhelmina, since she too is a lady whom I love most tenderly.
Gladly and lovingly would you descend into the burning abyss, even as the women of India do, impelled by a mad law, the cruel, constraining purpose of which desecrates and destroys the most delicate sanctities of the will.
You accompany me through all the stages of manhood, from the utmost wantonness to the most refined spirituality.
On the other side, perhaps, longing will be more completely realized. I often wonder over it; every thought, and whatever else is fashioned within us, seems to be complete in itself, as single and indivisible as a person.
How faithfully and how simply you have sketched it, the old and daring idea of my dearest and most intimate purpose!
That was my dithyrambic fantasy on the loveliest situation in the loveliest of worlds.
The alarm spread.
The sentries on the bluff challenged, and received no answer.
The Indians had killed two of the carpenters; hence long delay in the finishing of the new ship.
Three hundred Thirnagoas and thirty Frenchmen took up their march through the pine barrens.
Stores were landed, tents were pitched, women and children were sent on shore, feathered Indians mingled in the throng, and the borders of the River of May swarmed with busy life.
Worn in body and mind, mortified and wounded, he soon fell ill again.
The spring wore away, and no relief appeared.
On the following morning, they saw seven barges rowing up the river, bristling with weapons, and crowded with men in armor.
Excited warriors, bedaubed with red, came thronging from all his villages.
FAMINE.
The two barges, crowded with soldiers, and bearing also the captive Outina, rowed up this little stream.
At length they learned that he was in one of the small huts adjacent.
A gentleman named Grotaut took up the quest, and penetrated to the dominions of Hostaqua, who, it was pretended, could muster three or four thousand warriors, and who promised, with the aid of a hundred arquebusiers, to conquer all the kings of the adjacent mountains, and subject them and their gold mines to the rule of the French.
Having reached Outina's landing, they marched inland, entered his village, surrounded his mud-plastered palace, seized him amid the yells and howlings of his subjects, and led him prisoner to their boats.
The commandant was forced to comply.
It was long in coming, and meanwhile their troubled fortunes assumed a new phase.
Each year he withdrew from the public gaze to hold converse in secret with supernal or infernal powers; and each year he sacrificed to his gods one of the Spaniards whom the fortune of the sea had cast upon his shores.
They were the pioneers of that detested traffic destined to inoculate with its infection nations yet unborn, the parent of discord and death, filling half a continent with the tramp of armies and the clash of fratricidal swords.
As they were deaf to all other terms, Laudonniere yielded, released his prisoner, and received in his place two hostages, who were fast bound in the boats.
Here Ottigny halted and formed his line of march.
The Indians gradually drew off, and the forest was silent again.
While the mutiny was brewing, one La Roche Ferriere had been sent out as an agent or emissary among the more distant tribes.
No longer in dread of the Spaniards, the colonists saluted the new-comers with the cannon by which a moment before they had hoped to blow them out of the water.
He had been to the coast of Guinea, where he bought and kidnapped a cargo of slaves.
On the twenty-seventh of July, at nine in the morning, he set his men in order.
His old enemy, Satouriona, keen as a hound on the scent of prey, tried, by great offers, to bribe Laudonniere to give Outina into his hands; but the French captain refused, treated his prisoner kindly, and assured him of immediate freedom on payment of the ransom.
There was no panic among the French.
They waited only for a fair wind.
They told of the King of Cabs, on whose domains they had been wrecked, a chief mighty in stature and in power. In one of his villages was a pit, six feet deep and as wide as a hogshead, filled with treasure gathered from Spanish wrecks on adjacent reefs and keys.
As Arlac's party reached the spot, the whole pack gave tongue at once.
The colonists applied to Outina, who owed them two victories.
The foremost ship was a stately one, of seven hundred tons, a great burden at that day.
In vain the watchman on the hill surveyed the solitude of waters.
Meanwhile his captivity was bringing grievous affliction on his tribesmen; for, despairing of his return, they mustered for the election of a new chief.
Outina chafed in his prison on learning these dissentions; and, eager to convince his over-hasty subjects that their chief still lived, he was so profuse of promises that he was again embarked and carried up the river.
Party strife ran high.
Laudonniere hesitated, and hereupon arose a great clamor.
They were neither.
But no persuasion could induce Outina to follow up his victory.
Among the rugged heroes of the British marine, Sir John stood in the front rank, and along with Drake, his relative, is extolled as "a man borne for the honour of the English name....
Yet Hawkins secretly rejoiced when he learned their purpose to abandon Florida; for although, not to tempt his cupidity, they hid from him the secret of their Appalachian gold mine, he coveted for his royal mistress the possession of this rich domain.
Why, then, had they approached in the attitude of enemies?
Ribaut had been commissioned to sail with seven ships for Florida.
WAR. SUCCOR.
The Indians had left the neighborhood, but from time to time brought in meagre supplies of fish, which they sold to the famished soldiers at exorbitant prices.
Outina's conjurer was of the number, and had wellnigh ruined the enterprise.
He went home to dance round his trophies, and the French returned disgusted to Fort Caroline.
Conquest, gold, and military occupation had alone been their aims.
During the winter, Indians from the neighborhood of Cape Canaveral brought to the fort two Spaniards, wrecked fifteen years before on the southwestern extremity of the peninsula.
Here, anchored in mid-stream, they demanded a supply of corn and beans as the price of his ransom.
Some were for a boy, his son, and some for an ambitious kinsman.
Put them out, and they will bring the corn faster."
The French officers grew anxious, and urged the chiefs to greater alacrity in collecting the promised ransom. The answer boded no good: "Our women are afraid when they see the matches of your guns burning.
Then another came in sight, and another, and another. He despatched a messenger with the tidings to the fort below.
Had Coligny left them to perish?
The village without was full of them.
Their chief was Sir John Hawkins, father of the English slave-trade.
Here the French made their abode.
He had given his heavier cannon to Hawkins, and only two field-pieces were left.
Were they the friends so long hoped for in vain? or were they Spaniards, their dreaded enemies?
Before the English top-sails had sunk beneath the horizon, the colonists bestirred themselves to depart.
But these vessels were insufficient, and they prepared to build a new one.
Friends or foes, French or Spaniards, succor or death,--betwixt these were their hopes and fears divided.
A deep dejection fell upon them,--a dejection that would have sunk to despair could their eyes have pierced the future.
Thus, beset with swarming savages, the handful of Frenchmen pushed slowly onward, fighting as they went.
The commandant accordingly resolved to buy the vessel.
A doubt soon mingled with their joy.
Arlac, with eight matchlock men, was sent in advance, and flanking parties were thrown into the woods on either side.
Both hated priests, and both hated Spaniards. Wakening from their apathetic misery, the starveling garrison hailed him as a deliverer.
They were levelled at the foremost boats, and the word to fire was about to be given, when a voice from among the strangers called out that they were French, commanded by Jean Ribaut.
Not a rod of ground had been stirred with the spade.
Again they moved forward, and soon encountered Potanou with all his host.
Famine and desperation now reigned at Fort Caroline.
They moved on for a quarter of a mile through a country, as it seems, comparatively open, when again the war-cry pealed in front, and three hundred savages bounded to the assault.
They stood firm, and sent back their shot so steadily that several of the assailants were laid dead, and the rest, two or three hundred in number, gave way as Ottigny came up with his men.
These he had sold to the jealous Spaniards of Hispaniola, forcing them, with sword, matchlock, and culverin, to grant him free trade, and then to sign testimonials that he had borne himself as became a peaceful merchant.
Ottigny set forth on this fool's errand with thrice the force demanded.
Their whoops were echoed from the rear.
Again the fort was wild with excitement.
As they fell, the soldiers picked them up and broke them.
Yet no ransom was offered, since, reasoning from their own instincts, they never doubted that, after the price was paid, the captive would be put to death.
Each shouldering a sack of corn, they marched through the rows of huts that surrounded the great lodge, and out betwixt the overlapping extremities of the palisade that encircled the town.
In a rude chamber of Fort Caroline the sentinel stood his guard, pike in hand, while before him crouched the captive chief, mute, impassive, and brooding on his woes.
Several of the officers went to him, complaining of the slow payment of his ransom.
In close league with him was the mighty Oathcaqua, dwelling near Cape Canaveral, who gave his daughter, a maiden of wondrous beauty, in marriage to his great ally.
But, as his sway verged towards despotism, his subjects took offence, and split his head with a hatchet.
It was the party whom Arlac had just repulsed, and who, leaping and showering their arrows, were rushing on again with a ferocity restrained only by their lack of courage.
Laudonniere was almost defenceless.
The Far East is the point of contact of the adventuring Western people as well as of the Asiatic.
So far as the Japanese are concerned, the Emperor lives, is himself deity.
The governing class, entrenched by the precedent and power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon his mind, will never free him.
This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul.
He takes the turning which we cannot perceive, twists around the obstacle, and, presto! is out of sight in the ramifications of the Chinese mind where we cannot follow.
I bought condensed milk, bitter, canned vegetables, bread, and cake.
They had tramped probably forty miles that day, down from their hiding-places, just for a "look see," and forty miles back they would cheerfully tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen.
The world is whirling faster to-day than ever before.
The Korean is the perfect type of inefficiency--of utter worthlessness. The Chinese is the perfect type of industry.
Green things were growing--young onions--and the man who was weeding them paused from his labour long enough to sell me a handful.
He thinks with the same thought-symbols as does the Chinese, and he thinks in the same peculiar grooves.
To go far and to endure, it must have behind it an ethical impulse, a sincerely conceived righteousness.
From the West he has borrowed all our material achievement and passed our ethical achievement by.
Our material achievement is the product of our intellect.
So far as the business man is concerned he has grasped far more clearly the Western code of business, the Western ethics of business, than has the Japanese.
He has developed national consciousness instead of moral consciousness.
Though we have strayed often and far from righteousness, the voices of the seers have always been raised, and we have harked back to the bidding of conscience.
I bought knives, forks, and spoons, granite-ware dishes and mugs.
The Emperor is the object to live for and to die for. The Japanese is not an individualist.
What if there be twenty other soldiers jostling about him?
He goes on where we are balked by the obstacles of incomprehension.
But it must be taken into consideration that the above postulate is itself a product of Western race-egotism, urged by our belief in our own righteousness and fostered by a faith in ourselves which may be as erroneous as are most fond race fancies.
It is not wrapped up in the heredity of the new-born child, but is something to be acquired afterward.
For sheer work no worker in the world can compare with him.
Everything worked.
Granting that the Japanese can hurl back the Slav and that the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race do not despoil him of his spoils, the Japanese dream takes on substantiality.
No matter how dark in error and deed, ours has been a history of spiritual struggle and endeavour.
The Emperor can do no wrong, nor can the five ambitious great men who have his ear and control the destiny of Japan.
The fields lay untouched.
We shall not have to wait for our children's time nor our children's children.
The shops were wide open; the streets were lined with pedlars.
I repeat it, cake--good cake.
"Our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as the national consciousness of the individual. . . .
I was in China.
Truly would he of himself constitute the much-heralded Yellow Peril were it not for his present management.
Twilight fell and deepened, and still the ploughs went up and down the fields, the sowers following after.
He proceeds at once to offer them for sale.
It is what binds him down to building as his fathers built.
There is such a thing as race egotism as well as creature egotism, and a very good thing it is.
No great race adventure can go far nor endure long which has no deeper foundation than material success, no higher prompting than conquest for conquest's sake and mere race glorification.
So be it.
The previous day the Russians had been there, a bloody battle had been fought, and to-day the Japanese were there--but what was that to talk about?
He is only forty-five millions, and so fast does the economic exploitation of the planet hurry on the planet's partition amongst the Western peoples that, before he could attain the stature requisite to menace, he would see the Western giants in possession of the very stuff of his dream.
Everybody was busy.
The Slav is just girding himself up to begin.
One could buy anything; get anything made.
In the first place, the Western world will not permit the rise of the yellow peril.
Little or nothing was to be purchased.
Our soul stuff is not a coin to be pocketed by the first chance comer.
The most admired quality to-day of the Japanese is his patriotism.
In many a lonely village not an ounce nor a grain of anything could be bought, and yet there might be standing around scores of white-garmented, stalwart Koreans, smoking yard-long pipes and chattering, chattering--ceaselessly chattering.
The Chinese has been called the type of permanence, and well he has merited it, dozing as he has through the ages.
As one Japanese has written:
He felt the featureless misery of one who wakes towards the hour of dawn.
An awakening came.
He caught at the table to save himself, knocking one of the glasses to the floor--it rang but did not break--and sat down in one of the armchairs.
He put out a languid hand to reach his watch from the chair whereon it was his habit to place it, and touched some smooth hard surface like glass.
But where?
The apartment lost none of its size and magnificence now that the greenish transparency that had intervened was removed.
He remembered now that he had wanted to sleep.
Did it matter, seeing he was so wretched?
He had an uncertain sense of whispers and footsteps hastily receding.
The effort was unexpectedly difficult, and it left him giddy and weak--and amazed.
What was that sound of pattering feet?
Graham became aware that his eyes were open and regarding some unfamiliar thing.
The passage ran down a cool vista of blue and purple and ended remotely in a railed space like a balcony brightly lit and projecting into a space of haze, a space like the interior of some gigantic building.
Suddenly Graham's knees bent beneath him, his arm against the pillar collapsed limply, he staggered forward and fell upon his face.
CHAPTER III
The archway he saw led to a flight of steps, going downward without the intermediation of a door, to a spacious transverse passage.
The tumult of voices rose now loud and clear, and on the balcony and with their backs to him, gesticulating and apparently in animated conversation, were three figures, richly dressed in loose and easy garments of bright soft colourings.
For a moment it resisted his hand, bending outward like a distended bladder, then it broke with a slight report and vanished--a pricked bubble.
The movement of his head involved a perception of extreme physical weakness.
The colour of his thoughts was a dark depression.
The pilgrimage towards a personal being seemed to traverse vast gulfs, to occupy epochs.
Then came a panorama of dazzling unstable confluent scenes....
He heard some indistinct shrill cry, and abruptly these three men began laughing.
The slightly greenish tint of the glass-like substance which surrounded him on every hand obscured what lay behind, but he perceived it was a vast apartment of splendid appearance, and with a very large and simple white archway facing him.
It went up beyond the top of his eyes.
A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, recumbent, faint, but alive.
He recalled the cliff and Waterfall again, and then recollected something about talking to a passer-by....
Beyond and remote were vast and vague architectural forms.
He must have slept.
What was this place?--this place that to his senses seemed subtly quivering like a thing alive?
He put down the vessel and looked about him.
He had miscalculated his strength, however, and staggered and put his hand against the glass like pane before him to steady himself.
This passage ran between polished pillars of some white-veined substance of deep ultramarine, and along it came the sound of human movements, and voices and a deep undeviating droning note.
Gigantic dreams that were terrible realities at the time, left vague perplexing memories, strange creatures, strange scenery, as if from another planet.
The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear--evidently his sleep had benefited him.
He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass.
This he wrapped about him and sat down again, trembling.
this simple seeming unity--the self! Who can trace its reintegration as morning after morning we awaken, the flux and confluence of its countless factors interweaving, rebuilding, the dim first stirrings of the soul, the growth and synthesis of the unconscious to the subconscious, the subconscious to dawning consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again.
Close to the walls of the cage were articles of furniture, a table covered with a silvery cloth, silvery like the side of a fish, a couple of graceful chairs, and on the table a number of dishes with substances piled on them, a bottle and two glasses.
He realised that he was intensely hungry.
Their faces assumed an expression of consternation, an expression that deepened into awe.
He supposed he was in bed in the hotel at the place in the valley--but he could not recall that white edge.
He rubbed his eyes.
In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum and minimum thermometer was recognisable.
He moved his head slightly, following the contour of this shape.
Quite suddenly he rolled over, stared for a moment, and struggled into a sitting position.
He looked about him at the clean and beautiful form of the apartment, unstained by ornament, and saw that the roof was broken in one place by a circular shaft full of light, and, as he looked, a steady, sweeping shadow blotted it out and passed, and came again and passed.
He tried to think where he might be.
And this bed was placed in a case of greenish coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention.
THE AWAKENING
"Beat, beat," that sweeping shadow had a note of its own in the subdued tumult that filled the air.
His mind was still a surging perplexity.
The shouts sounded like English, there was a reiteration of "Wake!"
There was a distinct impression, too, of a momentous conversation, of a name--he could not tell what name--that was subsequently to recur, of some queer long-forgotten sensation of vein and muscle, of a feeling of vast hopeless effort, the effort of a man near drowning in darkness.
This was so unexpected that it startled him extremely.
And who were those people, the distant crowd beyond the deep blue pillars?
Clearly he had slept, and had been removed in his sleep.
The other two turned swiftly at his exclamation and stood motionless.
About his arm--and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow--was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below.
He could see no one, and after a period of hesitation scrambled off the translucent mattress and tried to stand on the clean white floor of his little apartment.
Then with a shock he remembered that he was naked, and casting about him for covering, saw a long black robe thrown on one of the chairs beside him.
He sat, now fully awake, listening alertly, forgetting the viands in his attention.
He would have called out, but only a little sound came into his throat. Then he stood up, and, with the uncertain steps of a drunkard, made his way towards the archway.
The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly.
He turned his eyes full of merriment along the passage.
He staggered down the steps, tripped on the corner of the black cloak he had wrapped about himself, and saved himself by catching at one of the blue pillars.
He poured out and partially drank another glass of the colourless fluid.
He reeled out into the general space of the hall, greatly astonished.
It was something white, the edge of something, a frame of wood.
Boscastle?
And as it happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with Graham at the end of his vast slumber.
How long had he slept?
And that rise and fall, like the murmur of breakers on pebbles?
The noise of a great multitude of people poured up over the balcony, and once it seemed the top of a banner passed, and once some brightly coloured object, a pale blue cap or garment thrown up into the air perhaps, flashed athwart the space and fell.
When he had a little recovered he filled the remaining glass from the bottle and drank--a colourless liquid it was, but not water, with a pleasing faint aroma and taste and a quality of immediate support and stimulus.
What a wonderfully complex thing!
"I know!" he panted.
"What's that, Bre'r Rabbit?
The study has been so full of freshmen all the time that I told her to hang it on the door and let them join outside; it works beautifully." Patty turned the leaves and ran her eyes down the list of sprawling signatures.
"It's strange that she should send an acceptance for a tea," she remarked as she read it, "but I'm glad to get it, anyway.
Her name was posted on the bulletin-board for having library books that were overdue.
"I'm afraid I'm not exactly eligible myself, as I don't know any German. It's such a beautifully sharp pencil, though, that I hate not to write with it." Patty poised the pencil a moment, and abstractedly traced the name "Kate Ferris."
The Elusive Kate Ferris
She has caused me more trouble than all the rest of the members put together."
She believes in corporal punishment."
The invitation was despatched, and on the next day Priscilla received a formal acceptance.
"She isn't a sophomore," the president announced.
The mysterious Kate Ferris, who kept Priscilla on the verge of nervous prostration for a whole semester, entered upon her college career in an entirely unpremeditated and impromptu manner.
On the evening of the tea, after the guests had gone and the furniture had been moved back, the weary hostesses, in somewhat rumpled evening dresses (a considerable crush results when fifty are entertained in a room whose utmost capacity is fifteen), were reentertaining one or two friends on the lettuce sandwiches and cakes the obliging guests had failed to consume.
"She insists that there isn't any such person in college, and that I must have made a mistake in the name!
Georgie Merriles and Patty had just strolled home from the athletic field, where they had been witnessing the start of a paper-chase cross country, in which Priscilla was impersonating a fox. As they entered the study, Georgie stopped to examine some loose sheets of paper which were impaled upon the door.
"I never knew them to make such a mistake before," said the president, dubiously.
The next morning a third note appeared on the block:
It was as plain as printing."
"If there should happen to be a Kate Ferris in college, she would be surprised to find herself a member of the German Club," and the incident was forgotten.
I know Priscilla would be gratified."
"Oh, that's the registration-list for the German Club.
I'm growing positively morbid over the girl; I begin to think she's invisible."
Priscilla's secretary, you know, and every one who wants to join comes here.
The next morning, as Priscilla came in from a class, she found a note on her door-block, written in the perpendicular characters of Kate Ferris. It ran:
"Take what the gods send and be grateful."
"Perhaps it is Harris instead of Ferris."
"I'm afraid so," sighed Patty.
"A girl named Kate Ferris has registered for the German Club, and we've gone through all the classes, and there simply isn't any such girl in college."
"She's left college," Priscilla snapped, "and don't you ever mention her name to me again."
"No; she isn't here."
KATE FERRIS.
She's the most abnormally inconspicuous person I ever heard of.
A month or two after Kate Ferris's advent, Priscilla had friends visiting her from New York, for whom she gave a tea in the study.
Priscilla tossed the note to Patty with a groan, and getting out the roll-book, she turned to the F's and reenrolled Kate Ferris.
"You've mistaken the name," she remarked, handing the book back with a shrug.
She hasn't paid her dues, and, as far as I can make out, she hasn't attended a single meeting.
"I didn't see her, either.
"It's positively uncanny!" Priscilla declared.
"We're all liable to make mistakes," Patty murmured soothingly.
"That seems to me the only reasonable explanation," Patty agreed amicably.
Georgie and Patty exchanged glances and inquired the trouble.
Priscilla kept hearing about the girl on all sides, but could never catch a glimpse of her.
Why didn't we think of that?" And Priscilla turned to the list of special students.
I thank you very sincerely for your kindness to me this year, and shall always look back upon our friendship as one of the happiest memories of my college life.
Georgie laughed.
"Would you like to join?
Priscilla knit her brows.
KATE FERRIS.
"Of course!
"Shall we tell her?"
But Priscilla was as good as her word, and she returned from the registrar's office flushed and defiant.
"The book is getting so thin in that spot," she laughed, "that Kate Ferris is actually coming through on the other side.
I don't believe she's in college any more."
A few days later Priscilla received another note directed in the hand she had come to dread.
Patty shook her head.
"I begin to think so myself," said Patty.
Patty sympathetically watched the process over her shoulder.
I left my letter of resignation on the bookcase.
"I don't believe we'd better put her in the roll-book till we find out who she is."
"It's a popular organization, isn't it?
"That's so!" Patty exclaimed.
A few days later the two came in from class, to find Priscilla and the president of the German Club sitting on the divan with their heads together, frantically turning the leaves of the catalogue.
Look again."
"Freshmen are terribly sensitive about being slighted."
"I am going to invite Kate Ferris," she announced.
Patty picked up the pencil.
"What's this, Patty?"
A few weeks later she found a second note on her door-block:
Priscilla produced the registration-list, and triumphantly exhibited an unmistakable Kate Ferris.
KATE FERRIS.
If she changes her mind many more times there won't be anything left."
"Oh, very well; it doesn't matter." And Kate Ferris was accordingly enrolled in the club records.
So I shall be much obliged if you will not present my letter at the meeting after all, as I have decided to follow her advice.
"Then you'll hurt her feelings," said Georgie.
"Don't do anything reckless," Georgie pleaded.
"It's been very entertaining, but she is really getting sensitive on the subject, and I don't dare mention Kate Ferris's name when we're alone."
"I'm afraid it's gone far enough," said Georgie.
As Priscilla scratched the name out of the roll-book again she remarked to Patty: "I am glad this Kate Ferris has left the club at last.
Priscilla faced her ominously.
"I should like to find out myself."
She even wrote a paper for one of the German Club meetings (Georgie was not a facile German scholar, and it had required a whole Saturday); but owing to the fact that she was suddenly called out of town, she did not read it in person.
She threw it into the waste-basket unopened; but, curiosity prevailing, she drew it out again and read it:
"She couldn't have come.
I kept watching for her all the evening.
DEAR MISS POND: As I have been obliged to leave college on account of my health, I inclose my resignation to the German Club.
The company and the clothes having passed in review, the conversation flagged a little, and Georgie suddenly asked: "Was Kate Ferris here?
Several weeks later Priscilla was engaged in laboriously turning the minutes of the last meeting into grammatical German, and as she closed the dictionary and grammar with a sigh of relief, she remarked to Patty: "Do you know, it's very queer about that Kate Ferris.
Patty never made the mistake of over-acting.
"They're trying to show Fraeulein Scherin how much interest they take in the subject," Georgie laughed.
The freshmen are simply scrambling to get in."
"Changed her mind again?" Patty asked pleasantly.
When Patty came in she found Priscilla silently and grimly scratching a hole into the roll-book where Kate Ferris's name had been.
Did you ever hear anything so absurd?"
"They forgot to put her in the catalogue."
"Let me look"; and Patty ran her eyes down the column.
"Possibly a special," Patty suggested.
"I've gone over this list three times, and there isn't a single Ferris down."
Am sorry to have missed so many meetings, but have not been able to attend classes lately.
It's strange, of course, but not any stranger than some of those cases you read about in psychology."
"You might as well," said Patty, and she listlessly watched Priscilla as she scratched out the name with a penknife.
DEAR MISS POND: As I am very busy with my class work, I find that I have not time to attend the German Club meetings, and so have decided to resign.
He is splendid: big six-footer with magnificent muscles, red cheeks, and curly yellow hair.
At this point Ruggles and I differ as to what came next.
There was a rumour running at large in the Academy that the Old Fellow wrote poetry, but he ran the mathematics and didn't make such a foozle of it as you might suppose, either.
Most of the Cads like the Old Fellow.
I tell you, they made a dandy-looking couple when they were together.
Her hair was shining under it, all purply-black, and she looked sweet enough to eat.
Of course I went.
"You see--I don't want you to help caring."
Sylvia looked stunning.
He lifted his hat and passed on, but after a few steps he turned and looked back; he caught Sylvia doing the same thing, so he wheeled and came on, looking mighty foolish.
She was all in white, with a string of pearls about her pretty round throat and a couple of little pink roses in her black hair.
"I've always cared--ever since I was a little girl coming here to school and breaking my heart over mathematics, although I hated them, just to be in your class. Why--why--I've treasured up old geometry exercises you wrote out for me just because you wrote them.
"It--it surprised me very much.
I told him so, and made him own up.
"She's thinking of the letter," he said.
Then all at once Sylvia said softly, with her eyes cast down, "I received your letter, Mr. Osborne."
Ruggles, hanging halfway out of the window as usual, saw her, and called me to go and look.
"I can't.
He is quite old--thirty-six if he's a day, and whatever possessed Sylvia Grant--but there, I'm getting ahead of my story.
She'll give him a fearful snubbing, and we'll be revenged."
The Old Fellow's Letter
"Sylvia," said the Old Fellow, "I've loved you for years.
It was beautifully expressed.
It was pure accident.
I thought it kind of mean of Sylvia to torment him so, when she knew he hated to have to talk to girls, but when I saw Micky scowling at the corner, I knew she was doing it to make him jealous.
I was the happiest girl in the world when your letter came today."
She was over twenty and had graduated from it two years ago, but she was in all the social things that went on in the Academy; and all the unmarried professors, except the Old Fellow, were in love with her.
He bent forward and took her hand.
"But, I say, isn't that Old Fellow game?
"But look here," I said, an uncomfortable idea striking me, "what about Sylvia?
"She did," said Ruggles gloomily.
Any other man in the world would have jumped, or said, "My letter!!!" or shown surprise in some way.
I copied the letter out on heliotrope paper in my best imitation of the Old Fellow's handwriting and signed it, "Yours devotedly and imploringly, George Osborne." Then we mailed it that very evening.
It was a girl's exclamation, but nothing else would have expressed his feelings.
Where does the joke come in, Polly, my boy?"
They were brownish, kind of, and she'd a spanking hat on with feathers and things in it.
Will you--can you be my wife, darling?"
She'll just laugh.
He asserts that Sylvia turned square around and kissed the Old Fellow.
Ruggles turned red.
I never thought the Old Fellow or Sylvia either could be so spooney.
I thought it quite useless to tell you of my love--before.
I never supposed that you--you cared for me in that way."
I never saw her so smiling and bright; but she seemed quieter than usual, and avoided poor Micky so skilfully that it was really a pleasure to watch her.
You've had more practice."
Ruggles and I would have given anything on earth to be out of that.
The room was quite empty, or they thought it was, and they sat down just on the other side of the flags.
I heard Emma White say once that he was "so handsome"; I nearly whooped.
She's always so cool and stiff when he's about, not a bit like she is with the other professors."
Sylvia Grant did go down the street, however.
Sylvia was the Latin professor's daughter; she wasn't a Cad girl, of course.
He is principal of the Frampton Academy--the Old Fellow, not Ruggles--and his name is George Osborne.
You can imitate the Old Fellow's handwriting so well."
It was awful.
We haven't anything against her, you know."
His eyes just blazed, but his face went white.
Well, as I said before, I toddled to the window to have a look at the fair Sylvia.
Sylvia Grant was always worth looking at.
Did she--did she really promise to marry him, Ruggles?"
Micky had it the worst, and we had all made up our minds that Sylvia would marry Micky.
My private opinion is that Sylvia hadn't any, or she would never have preferred--but there, I'm getting on too fast again.
But I thought I could never make you care for me.
"Well, did you ever?" said Ruggles.
As for brains, that is another thing altogether.
For of course he'll tell her.
"I'll do my best," he said, quite meekly.
Ruggles was mad because he's gone on Em.
Then she saw Ruggles and me and she waved her hand and laughed, and her big blackish-blue eyes sparkled; but she hadn't been laughing before, or sparkling either.
"Oh, Sylvia won't care," said Ruggles serenely.
It passes comprehension.
Even Ruggles and I like him on the average.
"No, I never," I said.
Ruggles and I never meant to listen, upon my word we didn't.
"Of course I do," said Sylvia right out.
Of course, the Old Fellow had another name, just as Ruggles has another name.
As for the Old Fellow, he looked, as Em White would say, as Sphinx-like as ever. I'd defy any man alive to tell from the Old Fellow's expression what he was thinking about or what he felt like at any time.
"Well, you know the Old Fellow isn't a bad sort after all," said Ruggles, "and he's really awfully gone on her.
They couldn't see us, but we could see them quite plainly.
Besides, she doesn't like the Old Fellow a bit.
"It's on us," I said, "but nobody will know of it if we hold our tongues.
His voice actually trembled.
He found the other's track, not turning back as he had half feared, cleanly printed on level spots of wet earth--eastward now. What was the purpose of the other's expedition?
He lay on a wide branch trying to control the heavy panting which supplied his laboring lungs.
And in the meantime he would let the other past him, follow along behind until he was far enough from the camp so that his friends could not interfere--then, they would have a meeting!
He pushed back into the bushes while the sparks still flitted, but they no longer gathered in strength enough to light his presence.
Rynch froze, so startled that he could not think clearly for a second.
Dark pits for eyes showed no pupil, iris, or cornea.
He huddled against the bole of a tree when he made out the curve of a round bulk holding tight to the tree trunk aloft.
Now he tried to reason why he had run.
As Rynch sighted him, he stooped to recover the needler he had dropped, lurched away from the rock towards the water, and so blundered straight into another Jumalan trap.
There was a spitting of sparks and the stranger worked frantically at the buckle of the webbing harness to loosen it and toss the whole thing from him.
Rynch's fingers balled into fists.
Then he noted that the outline of the other's body was visible, growing brighter by the moment.
Was the other out to spy on them?
That idea made sense.
To go back to the ship clearing was to risk capture--but he had to know. Rynch looked with more attention at his present surroundings.
He was also to discover that close to the site of the L-B crash others waited.
And was waiting--for what?
But that tall man--the one who had led the party into the irregular clearing about the life boat--
And he could still hear the echoes of the startled cries which had come from the men who had threaded through the woods to the up-pointed tail fins of the L-B.
Rynch shivered, dug his nails into the wood on which he lay.
The trapped prisoner had shied halfway around, stretching out his arms to find a firmer grip on some rock large and heavy enough to anchor him.
Alert as he was, he lost sight of the stranger who melted into the dusky cover of the shadows.
Or were those traces left to guide another party from the camp?
That other would know, and would tell him the truth!
Not a beast's cry--or was it?
Deep mold under the trees here would hold tracks.
But Rynch had prudently withdrawn under a bush, and the scent of its aromatic leaves must have discouraged the sparks, for no such crown came to his sentry post.
Rynch jumped to his feet, a cry of warning shaping, but not to be uttered.
Still facing that featureless blob in the tree, the man retreated, alert for the first sign of advance on the part of the creature above. None came, and he dared to slip around the bole of the tree under which he stood, listening intently for any corresponding movement overhead.
That man would come, Rynch was sure of that, but he was too spent to struggle on.
Now he could see they drifted about the vegetation, about the log where the man sat, about rocks and reeds.
Waiting for him?
He continued to keep them whirling by means of waving hand and arm, but there was enough light to show Rynch the fingers of his other hand, busy on the front panel of the box he wore.
To open his eyes to this blue-green pocket instead of to four dirty walls, was wrong.
One of the men trailed him, but as they reached a post planted a little beyond the bubble tents he stopped, allowed the explorer to advance alone into the dark.
By their gestures the others were arguing with him, but he shook his head, came on, to be a shadow stalking among other shadows.
However the other was as wary of that dark as if he suspected what might lie in wait there.
A fire burned in their midst and men were moving about it.
Clumps of small trees and high growing bushes dotted that expanse, an ideal cover.
The box on his chest caught on a stone he had dragged to him in a desperate try for support.
Thankfully Rynch found his own lurking place from which he could keep the other in sight.
But not far from the small ship he had discovered something more--a campsite with a shelter fashioned out of spalls and vines, containing possessions a castaway might have accumulated.
Rynch ran a zigzag course from one clump of bush to the next.
Rynch watched him check the webbing, count the equipment at his belt, settle the needler in the crook of his arm. Then the stranger left the stream, headed towards the woods.
Moisture from the night's rain hung on the tree leaves, clung in globules to Rynch's sweating body.
Rynch got to his feet, walked with slow deliberation down to the river's brink.
Was the other sending a message by that means?
Only a timely rustle told him that the other had sat down on a drift log.
Did he guess that Rynch lurked behind, was now leading him on for some purpose of his own?
Now he was facing that survivor's camp.
As his heart quieted he began to think more coherently.
In spite of his caution Rynch was close to betrayal as he edged around a clump of vegetation growing half in, half out of the stream.
No, the answer to every part of the puzzle lay with that man.
That fingering stopped, then Rynch's head came up as he heard a very faint sound.
Had they somehow learned of his own presence nearby, were they out to find him?
That sound of snarling, spitting hate ended in mid-cry as Rynch crawled to the river bank.
To advance openly up the stream bed was to invite discovery.
His unsteady foot advancing for another step came down on a slippery surface, and he fell forward as his legs were engulfed in the trap burrow of a strong-jaws.
Rynch went to cover under a bush.
Only this one did not have the self-color of the foliage to disguise it.
Another object crouched in the dark of the lean-to shelter, just as its fellow was on sentry duty in the tree!
Grotesque, alien and terrifying, it made no hostile move.
Remembering, he started up and slunk down the slope, angry at his failure.
Again those fingers moved on the panel.
Rynch surveyed the nearer bank.
The nose was a black, perfectly rounded tube jutting an inch or so beyond the cheek surface.
Then the marks on the ground at the point from which he had fallen and the L-B were here, just as he remembered.
The box struck one of the dead water-cats, flashed as fur and flesh were singed.
His journey through those heights was awkward and he sweated and cringed when he disturbed vocal treetop dwellers.
The light points gathered, hung in a small luminous cloud over the rocks.
As time passed the beasts closed about the clearing of the camp. Afternoon was fading into evening when he reached a point several miles downstream near the river.
The dark shadow of an arm flapped, the radiance swirled, broke again into pinpoint sparks.
He eyed the spread of limbs on a neighbor tree.
Truly an excellent young man.
Merriwig looked round him to see that there were no eavesdroppers.
Merriwig unwrapped the paper, and disclosed a couple of ginger whiskers, neatly tied up with blue ribbon.
Life would be lonely in Euralia then, unless---- Should he risk it?
An excellent arrangement, my dear."
"That," said Coronel simply, "is much more surprising."
"When a man has just come back from a successful campaign, he doesn't want to find a surprise like this waiting for him.
"Now, Father," said Hyacinth later on, when Merriwig had changed his clothes and refreshed himself, "you've got to tell me all about it.
He produced from his pocket a small packet in tissue paper.
"I don't want a suitor," said Hyacinth softly.
"Of course," he said, "you'll have to win her."
So that's the secret.
Why didn't I think of him?
"It's just the sort of story that Coronel would love.
How good to see Hyacinth again!
Home again!
"Before I explain myself, your Majesty," he said, "may I congratulate your Majesty on your wonderful victory over the Barodians?
"Well, we'll arrange something," said Merriwig, looking pleased. "Perhaps your Prince Udo would care to be a competitor too."
So far as is known, this was her only work, but she built up some reputation on it, and Belvane, who was a good judge, had a high opinion of her genius.
We might----"
The King laughed good-humouredly.
He waited nervously, wondering if Hyacinth would realise that "all" was meant to include more particularly Belvane.
"There, you can see the place where Henry Smallnose's arrow bent it. By the way," he added, "Henry is marrying and settling down in Barodia.
"Oh, how exciting!
I know his father had hopes in that direction."
Or shall I stay here, in the Countess's garden, and amuse myself with Udo?
"I haven't sent him away at all yet," she said; "he's only just come. He's been very kind to me, and I'm sure you'll love him."
Merriwig leant forward with eagerness.
"My dear, this is indeed news.
Hyacinth and Merriwig went into the Palace.
Had she lived in modern times she would have expected the question, "What is his income?" A man must prove his worth in some way.
"So you like it," said Merriwig, trying to look modest.
I suppose you haven't heard anything of them?"
"It isn't Udo, I'm afraid, Father.
"There, there!
Now I wonder if I can guess who she is. What do you say to the Princess Elvira of Tregong?
And she, I understand, wishes to marry you."
CHAPTER XX
Perhaps that bull I was speaking of---- By the way, who is he?"
"I have one."
Tell me all about it.
"I don't think it hurt him very much, my dear.
"Oh, I have my ideas," said Coronel.
In a little while Hyacinth and Coronel were seated eagerly at his feet, and he was telling once more the great story of his adventures.
"My dear Udo, what a speech for a lover!
You see he doesn't know yet about our little present to the Countess."
"Now, understand clearly, Coronel, I'm not in the least frightened by the Countess."
"There's no holding Udo once he begins," volunteered Coronel.
Whatever his feelings for the Countess, he was not going to be rushed into a marriage.
"It wasn't in the least compromising," protested Udo indignantly.
We can do what we like, and it doesn't matter if it doesn't come off.
Coronel put his arm in Udo's and walked him up and down the flagged path.
Let me see, that must have been just the day before he arrived in Euralia.
"Will he?
"How very unkind of her.
It will annoy your father, but one can't please everybody.
But he had stayed on, and--well, decidedly she was beautiful--perhaps he had paid rather too much attention to that.
Lovely flowers, aren't they?
Poor innocent girl.
What's the name of this one?"
After all, what you bore with such patience and dignity once, you can bear again."
"I'm almost afraid to leave the forest," said Hyacinth, "in case something happens."
"Be very close, Coronel," she whispered, and then they walked out together.
No, don't take my arm--we can talk quite well like this."
She was looking over his shoulder at something behind him.
Coronel exchanged a glance with Hyacinth.
Belvane made up her mind.
Meanwhile Udo, of course, blundered along gaily.
"Your precious Countess, whom you expect me to marry."
"I am sorry, Udo," said Coronel meekly; "we seem to have made a mistake.
"Say something, Udo," prompted Coronel.
I think one of the things which made Belvane so remarkable was that she was never afraid of remaining silent when she was not quite sure what to say.
If he stayed in Euralia as adviser--more than adviser she guessed--to Hyacinth, her own position would not be in much doubt. And as for the King, it might be months before he came back, and when he did come would he remember her?
But it is quite time we got back to Belvane; we have left her alone too long.
Well, let's forget about it. And now tell me, how do you like Euralia?"
I haven't the slightest intention of marrying her."
"I congratulate your Royal Highness.
Personally, I can't make out what she sees in you.
Just now he was with her in her garden, telling her for the fifth time an extraordinarily dull story about an encounter of his with a dragon, apparently in its dotage, to which Belvane was listening with an interest which surprised even the narrator.
"What should happen?"
"I am returning to Araby this afternoon," said Udo stiffly.
After all, again, why not marry the Countess?
Of course he ought to have left Euralia long ago.
"And now," said Coronel, "we'd better decide what to do."
"She couldn't do anything.
She's clever, you know; and I should never feel quite safe if she were my enemy. . . .
"Your approaching marriage," he said, "is the talk of Araby. Naturally I had to come here to see for myself what she was like.
We will be her most humble obedient servants.
She took unflinching what must have been the biggest shock in her life.
He tried to show that he was not in the least frightened.
"What do you mean?"
"We find that we have really known each other a very long time," explained Hyacinth.
Coronel, this is Countess Belvane, a very dear and faithful friend of mine. Prince Udo, of course, you know.
"I did."
Ah, that would indeed be infamous."
"Danglars, as well as the rest?"
"De Villefort!"
The sick man was not yet able to speak, but he pointed with evident anxiety towards the door.
"And matches?"
"Simply because that accusation had been written with the left hand; and I have noticed that"--
"Pray ask me whatever questions you please; for, in good truth, you see more clearly into my life than I do myself."
"Not if the choice had remained with me, for I had frequently observed inaccuracies in his accounts."
I am fearfully exhausted and debilitated by this attack."
"Yes; the grand marshal did."
"With all my heart!
The physician who prepared for me the remedy I have twice successfully taken, was no other than the celebrated Cabanis, and he predicted a similar end for me."
I have torn up two of my shirts, and as many handkerchiefs as I was master of, to complete the precious pages.
Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess."
"Look at this ray of light which enters by my window," said the abbe, "and then observe the lines traced on the wall.
"And how long shall we be in accomplishing the necessary work?"
In spite of the magnitude of the misfortune which thus suddenly frustrated his hopes, Dantes did not lose his presence of mind, but descended into the passage, dragging his unfortunate companion with him; then, half-carrying, half-supporting him, he managed to reach the abbe's chamber, when he immediately laid the sufferer on his bed.
"That alters the case.
I had a similar attack the year previous to my imprisonment.
Since the first attack I experienced of this malady, I have continually reflected on it.
"Be of good cheer," replied Dantes; "your strength will return." And as he spoke he seated himself near the bed beside Faria, and took his hands.
"And why not?" asked the young man.
"Now as regards the second question."
He seemed quite overcome by my misfortune."
"I worked at night also," replied Faria.
Days, even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive course.
Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced--from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination."
"Your life, my young friend, has not been of sufficient length to admit of your having passed through any very important events."
"You had your portfolio with you, then?
What was your deputy called?"
"Forgive me!" cried Edmond, blushing deeply.
"Yes."
"Gracious heavens!" exclaimed Dantes, "what is the matter?
Indeed, I expected it, for it is a family inheritance; both my father and grandfather died of it in a third attack.
"Stop a bit," said the abbe, taking up what he called his pen, and, after dipping it into the ink, he wrote on a piece of prepared linen, with his left hand, the first two or three words of the accusation. Dantes drew back, and gazed on the abbe with a sensation almost amounting to terror.
Well, these twelve thousand livres are his civil list, and are as essential to him as the twelve millions of a king.
To whom was this letter addressed?"
"Well, then," said Dantes, "What shall you teach me first?
"Good again!
"Well," said he, "but you had another subject for your thoughts; did you not say so just now?"
Behind the head of the bed, and concealed by a stone fitting in so closely as to defy all suspicion, was a hollow space, and in this space a ladder of cords between twenty-five and thirty feet in length. Dantes closely and eagerly examined it; he found it firm, solid, and compact enough to bear any weight.
"Disguised."
These rolls consisted of slips of cloth about four inches wide and eighteen long; they were all carefully numbered and closely covered with writing, so legible that Dantes could easily read it, as well as make out the sense--it being in Italian, a language he, as a Provencal, perfectly understood.
"You are right; it was left on board."
"Wait a little.
"Without you?
"But light?"
Now, how could a sailor find room in his pocket for a portfolio large enough to contain an official letter?"
"Yes."
Faria bent on him his penetrating eye: "I regret now," said he, "having helped you in your late inquiries, or having given you the information I did."
This malady admits but of one remedy; I will tell you what that is.
"By your misfortune?"
"Then you feel quite sure that it was your misfortune he deplored?"
"And will you engage not to do any harm to the sentry, except as a last resort?"
Dantes hastened to his dungeon, where he found him standing in the middle of the room, pale as death, his forehead streaming with perspiration, and his hands clinched tightly together.
And your third attack (if, indeed, you should have another) will find you at liberty.
"At least," said the abbe, "I now see how wrong such an opinion would have been.
"The physician may be mistaken!" exclaimed Dantes.
"This action is somewhat too sublime to be natural."
That's my masterpiece.
"He gave me one great proof of his sympathy, at any rate."
"Perhaps!" exclaimed Dantes in grief-stricken tones.
Now I remember quite well, that on the table round which they were sitting were pens, ink, and paper. Oh, the heartless, treacherous scoundrels!" exclaimed Dantes, pressing his hand to his throbbing brows.
"It was this,--that while you had related to me all the particulars of your past life, you were perfectly unacquainted with mine."
"One thing still puzzles me," observed Dantes, "and that is how you managed to do all this by daylight?"
"That while the writing of different persons done with the right hand varies, that performed with the left hand is invariably uniform."
At length a slight color tinged the livid cheeks, consciousness returned to the dull, open eyeballs, a faint sigh issued from the lips, and the sufferer made a feeble effort to move.
But these forces increase as we go higher, so that we have a spiral which in defiance of reason rests upon the apex and not on the base.
Each word that fell from his companion's lips seemed fraught with the mysteries of science, as worthy of digging out as the gold and diamonds in the mines of Guzerat and Golconda, which he could just recollect having visited during a voyage made in his earliest youth.
In strict accordance with the promise made to the abbe, Dantes spoke no more of escape.
"Two years!" exclaimed Dantes; "do you really believe I can acquire all these things in so short a time?"
"And you have discovered a means of regaining our freedom, have you not?" asked Dantes eagerly.
"Quick!
"It was very boldly written, if disguised."
"Indeed they are not; but God has supplied man with the intelligence that enables him to overcome the limitations of natural conditions.
You say you were on the point of being made captain of the Pharaon?"
"Ah, yes," said Faria; "the penknife.
Dantes took the hand of the abbe in his, and affectionately pressed it.
Some of your words are to me quite empty of meaning.
At the end of fifteen months the level was finished, and the excavation completed beneath the gallery, and the two workmen could distinctly hear the measured tread of the sentinel as he paced to and fro over their heads.
This last explanation was wholly lost upon Dantes, who had always imagined, from seeing the sun rise from behind the mountains and set in the Mediterranean, that it moved, and not the earth.
Perhaps the delight his studies afforded him left no room for such thoughts; perhaps the recollection that he had pledged his word (on which his sense of honor was keen) kept him from referring in any way to the possibilities of flight.
This proof of his guilt may be procured by his immediate arrest, as the letter will be found either about his person, at his father's residence, or in his cabin on board the Pharaon.'" The abbe shrugged his shoulders.
"What?"
Faria then drew forth from his hiding-place three or four rolls of linen, laid one over the other, like folds of papyrus.
"My father, my father," said the dying man, "do not leave me thus: have pity on me!"
Lorenzo sat up on his bed, shaken by a convulsive movement, and questioned with his eyes the eyes of the Dominican, as though he would find out if he had deceived himself and not heard aright.
But Lorenzo on his deathbed sent for him, and that was another matter.
"My father, shall I have time?" asked the dying man.
To him religion and liberty appeared as two virgins equally sacred; so that, in his view, Lorenzo in subjugating the one was as culpable as Pope Innocent VIII in dishonouring the other.
"What are they?" asked the dying man.
On the 8th of April, 1492, in a bedroom of the Carneggi Palace, about three miles from Florence, were three men grouped about a bed whereon a fourth lay dying.
He did not work, like the German monk, by reasoning, but by enthusiasm.
"Never!
"Yes, my father, I will do it."
The monk glanced round the room as though to assure himself that he was really alone with the dying man; then he advanced with a slow and solemn step towards the bed.
Then at last, when he had finished, Lorenzo asked in a doubtful tone:
The monk, without replying a single word, made a step to withdraw.
The result of this was that, so long as Lorenzo lived in riches, happiness, and magnificence, Savonarola had never been willing, whatever entreaties were made, to sanction by his presence a power which he considered illegitimate.
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"God will give it to you," replied the monk.
Lorenzo watched his approach with terror; then, when he was close beside him, he cried:
"O my father, I have been a very great sinner!"
"The third," resumed Savonarola, "is that you restore to the republic her ancient independence and her former liberty."
"The first," said Savonarola, "is that you feel a complete faith in the power and the mercy of God."
"Impossible, impossible!" murmured Lorenzo.
Lorenzo, as we have said, was awaiting the arrival of Savonarola with an impatience mixed with uneasiness; so that, when he heard the sound of his steps, his pale face took a yet more deathlike tinge, while at the same time he raised himself on his elbow and ordered his three friends to go away.
"The second," said Savonarola, "is that you give back the property of others which you have unjustly confiscated and kept."
The austere preacher set forth at once, bareheaded and barefoot, hoping to save not only the soul of the dying man but also the liberty of the republic.
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"God will forgive your vanities, your adulterous pleasures, your obscene festivals; so much for your sins.
There, where he was appointed by his superiors to give lessons in philosophy, the young novice had from the first to battle against the defects of a voice that was both harsh and weak, a defective pronunciation, and above all, the depression of his physical powers, exhausted as they were by too severe abstinence.
The drama was played smoothly, and created a great deal of enthusiasm.
I also accompanied General Sheridan--who meantime had returned to the city--to a ball at Riverside--an aristocratic suburb.
I had been in New York about twenty days when General Sheridan arrived in the city.
They were all very anxious to have us remain several days, but as I had some business to attend to in New York, I was obliged to return that day.
The drama was called "Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men." While I was in New York it was produced at the Bowery Theater; J.B.
I received numerous dinner invitations, as well as invitations to visit different places of amusement and interest; but as they came in so thick and fast, I soon became badly demoralized and confused.
The play of "Buffalo Bill" had a very successful run of six or eight weeks, and was afterwards produced in all the principal cities of the country, everywhere being received with genuine enthusiasm.
Acting upon the suggestion of Mr. Bennett, I had dressed myself in my buckskin suit, and I naturally attracted considerable attention; especially when I took part in the dancing and exhibited some of my backwoods steps, which, although not as graceful as some, were a great deal more emphatic.
Having determined to visit New York, I acted upon General Sheridan's suggestion and wrote to General Stager, from whom in a few days I received my railroad passes.
Assuring them, however, that I would visit them again soon, I bade them adieu, and with Buntline took the train for New York.
I confess that I felt very much embarrassed--never more so in my life--and I knew not what to say.
Mr. Bennett, who was among the guests, having forgiven my carelessness, invited me to accompany him to the Liederkranz masked ball, which was to take place in a few evenings, and would be a grand spectacle.
He would listen to no excuses, and on introducing me to Messrs.
I met him soon after he got into town.
Inviting us into the parlor, my uncle brought in the members of his family, among them an elderly lady, who was my grandmother, as he informed me.
I was curious to see how I would look when represented by some one else, and of course I was present on the opening night, a private box having been reserved for me.
He was delighted to see me, and insisted on my becoming his guest.
I never felt more relieved in my life than when I got out of the view of that immense crowd.
James Gordon Bennett had prepared a dinner for me, at which quite a large number of his friends were to be present, but owing to my confusion, arising from the many other invitations I had received, I forgot all about it, and dined elsewhere.
General Ord, commanding the Department of the Platte at the time, and who had been out on the Alexis hunt, had some business to attend to at Fort McPherson, and I accepted his invitation to ride over to the post with him in an ambulance.
I looked up, then down, then on each side, and everywhere I saw a sea of human faces, and thousands of eyes all staring at me.
August Belmont, the banker, being near said:
I was introduced to quite a number of the best people of the city, and was invited to several "swell" dinners.
I'll be there, sure."
According to the route laid out for me by General Stager, I was to stop at Niagara Falls, Buffalo and Rochester on my way to New York, and he provided me with all the necessary railroad passes.
Obtaining thirty days' leave of absence from the department, I struck out for the East.
But when I undertook to do artistic dancing, I found I was decidedly out of place in that crowd, and I accordingly withdrew from the floor.
I thanked General Ord for his kindness, and said that although an officer's commission in the regular army was a tempting prize, yet I preferred to remain in the position I was then holding.
I had an elegant dinner at the club rooms, with the gentlemen who had been out on the September hunt, and other members of the club.
I finally compromised the matter by agreeing to divide my time between the Union Club, the Brevoort House, and Ned Buntline's quarters.
On the way thither he asked me how I would like to have an officer's commission in the regular army.
I found I had accepted invitations to dine at half a dozen or more houses on the same day and at the same hour.
He told me that my Aunt Eliza, his first wife, was dead, and that he had married a second time; Lizzie Guss, my cousin, I thought was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
And besides this, the hundreds of questions which I was called upon to answer further embarrassed and perplexed me.
That evening Mr. Freleigh offered to give me five hundred dollars a week to play the part of "Buffalo Bill" myself.
CHAPTER XXVI.
I occasionally passed an evening at Niblo's Garden, viewing the many beauties of "The Black Crook," which was then having its long run, under the management of Jarrett & Palmer, whose acquaintance I had made, and who extended to me the freedom of the theater.
Sheridan, who said that his brother, the General, had not yet returned, but had sent word that I was to be his and the Colonel's guest, at their house, while I remained in Chicago.
I apologized as well as I could, by saying that I had been out on a scout and had got lost, and had forgotten all about the dinner; and expressed my regret for the disappointment I had created by my forgetfulness.
He was on his way to Rochester, and kindly volunteered to act as my guide until we reached that point.
"Thank you, sir," said I; "I see you are determined that I shall not run short of rations while I am in the city.
I thanked him for the generous offer, which I had to decline owing to a lack of confidence in myself; or as some people might express it, I didn't have the requisite cheek to undertake a thing of that sort.
The next few days I spent in viewing the sights of New York, everything being new and startling, convincing me that as yet I had seen but a small portion of the world.
"Never mind, gentlemen, I'll give Cody a dinner at my house."
The dancers kept on their masks until midnight, and the merry and motley throng presented a brilliant scene, moving gracefully beneath the bright gas-light to the inspiriting music.
They said that Bennett had taken great pains to give me a splendid reception, that the party had waited till nine o'clock for me, and that my non-arrival caused considerable disappointment.
On arriving in Chicago, in February, 1872, I was met at the depot by Colonel M.V.
This he willingly did, and then informed me that my services would soon be required at Fort McPherson, as there was to be an expedition sent out from that point.
Just as I was about to leave Chicago I met Professor Henry A. Ward, of Rochester, for whom during the previous year or two I had collected a large number of specimens of wild animals.
I finally consented, and the next moment I found myself standing behind the footlights and in front of an audience for the first time in my life.
This was "a bad break," but I did not learn of my mistake until next day, when at the Union Club House several gentlemen, among them Lawrence Jerome, inquired "where in the world I had been," and why I had not put in an appearance at Bennett's dinner.
He said that General Sheridan and himself had had some conversation about the matter, and if I wanted a commission, one could easily be procured for me.
This was my first trip to the East, and I had not yet become accustomed to being stared at.
Hecksher, who had been appointed as "a committee of one" to escort me to the Union Club, where James Gordon Bennett, Leonard W. Jerome and others were to give me an informal reception, and where I was to make my headquarters during my visit in the great metropolis.
I made a note of the date, and at the appointed time I was promptly at Mr. Belmont's mansion, where I spent a very enjoyable evening.
Both Mr. Jerome and Mr. Hecksher told me that I must not disappoint Mr. Belmont, for his dinners were splendid affairs.
Mr. Freleigh, the manager, insisted that I should comply with the request, and that I should be introduced to Mr. Studley.
The audience, upon learning that the real "Buffalo Bill" was present, gave several cheers between the acts, and I was called on to come out on the stage and make a speech.
Overton & Blair, proprietors of the Brevoort, they also gave me a pressing invitation to make my home at their house.
My utterances were inaudible even to the leader of the orchestra, Mr. Dean, who was sitting only a few feet in front of me. Bowing to the audience, I beat a hasty retreat into one of the canons of the stage.
Together we attended the ball, and during the evening I was well entertained.
There was a gray haze of mist everywhere.
"What do you mean.
"We should be able to," I smiled.
The trees were oddly like undersea growths, which puzzled me for an instant.
Both of them bore corroded bronze plates, "The Billows," the name given The Monstrosity by the original owner, a newly-rich munitions manufacturer.
I could sense Mercer's thoughts now.
Mercer stared at me silently, grimly, as I told him what I wished. Whatever eloquence I may have, I used on him, and I saw his cold, scientific mind waver before the warmth of my appeal.
I tore myself away from the staring, curious eyes of the figure.
"Throw the cap anywhere and come on!"
Then, strangling, I tore myself from her embrace and shot to the surface.
"Why, try it on her!" exclaimed Mercer with mounting enthusiasm.
The sound was not at all like the English word.
Strange exotic trees and dense growths of rank undergrowth choked the earth.
I smiled back at her, and shook my head.
The vision was vague, for Mercer was picturing his thoughts with difficulty.
It seemed that they were about to give up the search when suddenly, from out of the watery gloom, there shot a slim white figure--the girl!
The great mane of hair which enveloped her was, as I have said, tawny in hue, and almost translucent, like the stems of some seaweeds I have seen.
The white figure of the girl shot onward through the scarlet flood.
Suddenly a dim shadow swept across the sand at her feet, and she arrowed from the spot like a white, slim meteor.
Mercer hurried back to the other side of the pool, and I adjusted my head-set again, smiling down at the girl.
But first slip on a bathing suit."
Mercer reached around the door into the laboratory and pressed a button.
Porcelain?" I asked hoarsely.
I turned, but not quickly enough to entirely escape.
There was something devilishly fascinating about the girl's great, dark, searching eyes.
You see, as it is now wired only one person transmits thoughts at a time.
He laughed excitedly.
Two slim white hands reached towards us, and with one accord, Mercer and I bent towards her.
The next instant she was off the bed, her face a perfect mask of hate and agony.
"We can try, old-timer," I said, a bit shakenly.
I had two reasons in mind.
Into the scene roamed a pitiful band of people.
Like a flash she turned and faced the monster.
With both hands I grasped her shoulders, and, smiling, I nodded my head vigorously.
She came still closer, until she was at my very feet as I stood on the raised ledge that ran around the edge of the pool, her head thrown back, staring straight up at me through the water.
He had not exaggerated.
The impressions grew wilder, swirled, grew gray and indistinct.
"As are her feet.
"Porcelain?
In a few seconds they rose and ran into the water, plunged into it as though they welcomed its embrace, and disappeared.
I threw off the instrument on my head, and dropped down beside her.
She was frowning, and her eyes were very wide.
I looked down.
"What do you think of her, Taylor?" he asked, his dark eyes dancing with excitement.
With a quick, nervous gesture, Mercer fitted the thing to his head, so that the elongated electrode pressed against the back of his neck, extending a few inches down his spine.
On all four ends were bright silvery electrodes, three of them circular in shape, one of them elongated and slightly curved.
It was maddening.
"And what do you plan to do now?" I asked eagerly, glancing down at the beautiful pale face that glimmered up at me through the clear water of the pool.
"We have no right to keep her from her people," I concluded.
Then he pictured again the girl lying in the pool, and once again the sea.
Then their lungs became, in effect, gills, and they lost their power of breathing atmospheric air, and could use only air dissolved in water.
One party came to the gaunt skeleton of the ancient wreck, and found the scattered, fresh-picked bones of the shark the girl had killed.
"Yes, that's very true: Carson is a most decent sort of chap." The words were not spoken.
I read it in her face.
"Hello!" I snapped ungraciously into the mouthpiece.
Directly opposite us, seated on the bottom of the pool, was a human figure, nude save for a great mass of tawny hair that fell about her like a silken mantle.
"What's the matter?" I managed to interrupt him.
Sea-bronzed men, with hard, flat muscles and fearless eyes; ready guns slapping their thighs as they--
With a last swift, smiling glance up into my face, she turned.
The structure itself loomed up before me in a few seconds, a rambling affair with square-shouldered balconies and a great deal of wrought-iron work, after the most flamboyant Spanish pattern.
"What work?" I asked suspiciously.
"The harder we tried, the more determined I became.
The scene faded.
She was gone....
At first they ate the food raw, tearing the flesh from the shells.
Breathing, Taylor, on the bottom of the pool!
Coral growth were dragged to the spot.
"Something got into me.
And you did!"
In the meantime, we'll look over the set-up.
And some of his experiments in the past had been rather trying, not to say exciting.
His eyes, dark and large, smiled easily, and shone with interest, but his almost beautiful mouth, beneath the long slim mustache, always closely cropped, seldom smiled with his eyes.
"A whole people there beneath the waves that land-man never dreamed of--except, perhaps, the sailors of olden days, with their tales of mermaids, which we are accustomed to laugh at in our wisdom!"
Quickly as I shot to the ladder she was there before me, a dim, wavering white shape, waiting.
They were barely noticeable, for they were as transparent as the fins of a fish, but they were there, extending nearly to the last joint of each finger.
Mercer was bending over me; speaking softly.
The band approached, seemed to talk with those there, and moved on.
If it weren't urgent, I wouldn't be calling you, you know.
Instead of a picture, I was conscious then of a sound, like a single pleading word repeated softly, as though someone said "Please!
I saw only that pale, smiling face and those great dark eyes.
And so on.
The house was completed.
"She was laying face down in the water, motionless, her head towards the sea, one arm stretched out before her, and her long hair wrapped around her like a half-transparent cloak.
We'll add a page to scientific history--a whole big chapter!--that will make us famous. Man this is so big it's swept me off my feet!
I pointed upward, for I was feeling the need for fresh air again, and slowly mounted the ladder.
Then, gradually, it cleared somewhat.
The apparatus is strewn all over the place."
Let's get busy.
Usually his clean-cut, olive-tinted face was a polite mask that seldom showed even the slightest trace of emotion.
Try to get her to wear one, and then you get your head out of water, and don yours. And remember, she won't be able to communicate with us by words--we'll have to get her to convey her thoughts by means of mental pictures.
"All set," he nodded.
If it will work on her, and we can direct her thoughts, we can find out her history, the history of her people!
That you think she can give us?" I asked hesitantly.
The figure was moving.
"No, Taylor, we have been party to what was close to a miracle.
Handkerchiefs fluttered to them from the walls; trumpets were blown; hounds bayed.
Hyacinth put out her hand, and Coronel pressed it encouragingly.
"I knew he'd love it," put in Hyacinth.
You invited him here?
He took a step forward and addressed his troops.
"He's--he's--well, he's---- Here he is, Father." She ran up to him impulsively as he came in at the door.
"Aha!
Whatever can it be?"
"My dear child," said Merriwig as he patted her soothingly.
"What?
But of course I am longing to hear the full story from your Majesty's own lips.
"What am I going to do with them, Father?
"Well, then, listen."
I have no wish to----"
"There, there, my child.
"Yes, please, Father."
"We must offer the good news to him gradually," he said.
Hyacinth looked round at Coronel as if appealing for his support.
There, there!" He patted her again, as though it were she and not himself who was in danger of breaking down.
Let me see, there's that seven-headed bull; he's getting a little old now, but he was good enough for the last one.
It's your old father come back again.
She was waiting for him at the gates of the castle.
It's as well," he added with a disarming smile, "that you cannot ask for the whiskers of the King of Barodia.
"No, Father," said Hyacinth, with a little smile.
"These are matters for men to discuss." But Hyacinth would know quite well why she had been sent out, and would certainly tell Coronel the truth of the matter afterwards.
From the little I have gathered outside, it is the most remarkable victory that has ever occurred.
The cavalcade drew up in front of the castle.
Merriwig was in an awkward position.
Just think--we don't even know why the war is over--he must be longing to tell you that.
"Why?"
"Isn't that a little unkind now that the poor man's dead?"
Nothing much, I suppose?' then you can say----"
"Anything your Majesty sets me to do.
Let me see, there were six or seven Princes who came about it only the other day. I sent them off on adventures of some kind, but--dear me, yes, they ought to have been back by now.
He gazed at each remembered landmark of his own beloved country, his heart overflowing with thankfulness.
"And who might Coronel be?" said the King, rather sternly.
"Well, no, it doesn't.
"Does that surprise your Majesty?"
We'll arrange a little competition, and let them know in the neighbouring countries; there'll be no lack of candidates.
"His Royal Highness," put in Coronel, "has given his affections to another."
He liked the look of Coronel, he liked his manner, and he saw at once that he knew a good story--when he heard one.
He wondered for a moment whether to order his daughter out of the room.
To Hyacinth he seemed the dearest of fathers and the most wonderful of kings.
I bid you all now return to your homes, and I hope that you will find as warm a welcome there as I have found in mine." Here he turned and embraced his daughter again; and if his eye travelled over her shoulder in the direction of Belvane's garden, it is a small matter, and one for which the architect of the castle, no doubt, was principally to blame.
"I thought we might run them up the flagstaff, as we did in Barodia."
Down the steps came Hyacinth, all blue and gold, and flung herself into her father's arms.
My own little girl!"
To be exact, there were only four hundred and ninety-nine men.
See, I have brought these home for you."
"Oh, Coronel, you're just in time; do tell Father who you are."
And by and by the moment came of which Coronel had spoken.
"Then I shall say, 'Nothing much; only Coronel.' And such a clever!"
He came to stay with you and he never----"
He took a step towards her.
It happened like this." Once more he told the story of his midnight visit, and of the King's letter to him.
Merriwig, however, was not so sure of that.
As the towers of the castle came in sight, Merriwig drew a deep breath of happiness.
"Those are just a few of the little adventures that happen in war time." He turned to Coronel.
Hyacinth had felt this coming.
"It's rather serious, but it's rather nice.
"I love it."
"Father!"
Coronel bowed profoundly to the King.
"Do tell me, did the King of Barodia apologise?"
"Can you keep a secret?" he asked mysteriously.
"Leave us, my child," he would say.
Hyacinth drew a stool up to her father's chair and sat down very close to him.
Is it a fact that your Majesty made his way at dead of night to the King of Barodia's own tent and challenged him to mortal combat and slew him?" There was an eagerness, very winning, in his eyes as he asked it; he seemed to be envying the King such an adventure--an adventure after his own heart.
No matter, dear, we can easily find you plenty more suitors.
"Of course," said Hyacinth, deciding at once that it would not matter if she only told Coronel.
"There are certain state reasons," he said with dignity, "why that story has been allowed to get about."
It's Coronel."
"But as you know so much, you may as well know all.
It's all over," said Merriwig heartily.
Henry, having caught a glimpse of the Chief Armourer's daughter, had accepted without any false pride, and had frequently dropped in to supper thereafter.
Should he risk it?
Now that the war was over, he found that he could not tear himself away. With King Merriwig's permission he was settling in Barodia, and with the Chief Armourer's permission he was starting on his new life as a married man.
She had wanted Coronel to wait with her, but he had refused.
Henry Smallnose, a bowman of considerable promise, had been left behind in the enemy's country, the one casualty of war.
"No, it's not the Princess Elvira," said Hyacinth, a little nervously.
Anyhow, I'll give you an hour alone together first."
I can hardly believe it's really over."
"Well, well," said the King at the end of it, when he had received their tribute of admiration.
Indeed, the subject has been very near my thoughts lately.
While spying out the land in the early days of the invasion, he had been discovered by the Chief Armourer of Barodia at full length on the wet grass searching for tracks.
"Well, I'll be out of the way somewhere.
I think I'll go for a walk in the forest.
Nothing much, I suppose?"
"Udo, of course.
Poor little Hyacinth left all alone; but there! she had had the Countess Belvane, a woman of great experience, to help her.
I can't plant them in the garden."
Upon what quest did you send him?"
"Wait till he has seen them, my dear," said Merriwig with a chuckle.
In vain our Protector and his partizans sought to conceal this truth; in vain, day after day, he appointed a period for the discussion of the new laws concerning hereditary rank and privilege; in vain he endeavoured to represent the evil as partial and temporary.
His measures were thwarted, and his schemes interrupted by this new state of things. Many of the foreigners were utterly destitute; and their increasing numbers at length forbade a recourse to the usual modes of relief.
It was called an epidemic. But the grand question was still unsettled of how this epidemic was generated and increased.
Every day added to his difficulties; the arrival of fresh vessels with emigrants, the total cessation of commerce, the starving multitude that thronged around the palace of the Protectorate, were circumstances not to be tampered with.
It drinks the dark blood of the inhabitant of the south, but it never feasts on the pale-faced Celt.
England was still secure.
The tent of the Arab is fallen in the sands, and his horse spurns the ground unbridled and unsaddled.
At first an unusual quantity of specie made its appearance with the emigrants; but these people had no means of receiving back into their hands what they spent among us.
Such things, when they happen singly, affect only the immediate parties; but the prosperity of the nation was now shaken by frequent and extensive losses.
Nations, bordering on the already infected countries, began to enter upon serious plans for the better keeping out of the enemy.
They insinuated themselves into the substances about them, and the impediments to their progress yielded at their touch.
These reflections made our legislators pause, before they could decide on the laws to be put in force.
But that country had so many resources in the way of agriculture, that the rush of population from one part of it to another, and its increase through foreign emigration, was less felt than with us.
He had sought this office with eagerness, under the idea of turning his whole forces to the suppression of the privileged orders of our community.
As at the conclusion of the eighteenth century, the English unlocked their hospitable store, for the relief of those driven from their homes by political revolution; so now they were not backward in affording aid to the victims of a more wide-spreading calamity.
On the contrary, the disease gained virulence, while starvation did its accustomed work.
We had many foreign friends whom we eagerly sought out, and relieved from dreadful penury.
He came to Windsor to consult with us.
Our vessels truly were the sport of winds and waves, even as Gulliver was the toy of the Brobdignagians; but we on our stable abode could not be hurt in life or limb by these eruptions of nature.
Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.
Thus we began to feel, with regard to many-visaged death let loose on the chosen districts of our fair habitation, and above all, with regard to the plague.
SOME disorder had surely crept into the course of the elements, destroying their benignant influence.
Trade was stopped by the failure of the interchange of cargoes usual between us, and America, India, Egypt and Greece.
At the commencement of summer, we began to feel, that the mischief which had taken place in distant countries was greater than we had at first suspected.
No voice was heard telling us to hold!
The revenue of its possessor, which had always found a mode of expenditure congenial to his generous nature, was now attended to more parsimoniously, that it might embrace a wider portion of utility.
The English spirit awoke to its full activity, and, as it had ever done, set itself to resist the evil, and to stand in the breach which diseased nature had suffered chaos and death to make in the bounds and banks which had hitherto kept them out.
When foreign distresses came to be felt by us through the channels of commerce, we set ourselves to apply remedies.
It was August; so there could be small hope of relief during the heats.
These disasters came home to so many bosoms, and, through the various channels of commerce, were carried so entirely into every class and division of the community, that of necessity they became the first question in the state, the chief subjects to which we must turn our attention.
Its obscurity of situation rendered it the more conspicuous: the diminutive letters grew gigantic to the bewildered eye of fear: they seemed graven with a pen of iron, impressed by fire, woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of the universe.
It seems as if the giant waves of ocean, and vast arms of the sea, were about to wrench the deep-rooted island from its centre; and cast it, a ruin and a wreck, upon the fields of the Atlantic.
He must aim no more at the dear object of his ambition; throwing his arms aside, he must for present ends give up the ultimate object of his endeavours.
As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so?
Could we domesticate a cub of this wild beast, and not fear its growth and maturity?
CHAPTER V.
Mexico laid waste by the united effects of storm, pestilence and famine.
Calm was now restored to the metropolis, and to the populous cities, before driven to desperation; and we returned to the consideration of distant calamities, wondering if the future would bring any alleviation to their excess.
Many of our visitors left us: those whose homes were far in the south, fled delightedly from our northern winter, and sought their native land, secure of plenty even after their fearful visitation.
The infection had now spread in the southern provinces of France.
France, Germany, Italy and Spain, were interposed, walls yet without a breach, between us and the plague.
These speculations were rife among us; yet not the less we proceeded in our daily occupations, and our plans, whose accomplishment demanded the lapse of many years.
Our own distresses, though they were occasioned by the fictitious reciprocity of commerce, encreased in due proportion.
A little population occupied its halls.
If infection depended upon the air, the air was subject to infection.
He whom a scratch has disorganized, he who disappears from apparent life under the influence of the hostile agency at work around us, had the same powers as I--I also am subject to the same laws.
Nature, our mother, and our friend, had turned on us a brow of menace.
Subscriptions were made for the emigrants, and merchants bankrupt by the failure of trade.
The blow was struck; the aristocracy obtained all they wished, and they subscribed to a twelvemonths' bill, which levied twenty per cent on all the rent-rolls of the country.
The God sends down his angry plagues from high, Famine and pestilence in heaps they die. Again in vengeance of his wrath he falls On their great hosts, and breaks their tottering walls; Arrests their navies on the ocean's plain, And whelms their strength with mountains of the main.
To give up their pleasure-grounds to the agriculturist, to diminish sensibly the number of horses kept for the purposes of luxury throughout the country, were means obvious, but unpleasing.
The clouds become thin; an arch is formed for ever rising upwards, till, the universal cope being unveiled, the sun pours forth its rays, re-animated and fed by the breeze.
Alas, what will become of us?
Our little island was filled even to bursting.
The wind, prince of air, raged through his kingdom, lashing the sea into fury, and subduing the rebel earth into some sort of obedience.
The air is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death, even while in youth and health, their hopes are in the flower.
These were questions of prudence; there was no immediate necessity for an earnest caution.
Persia, with its cloth of gold, marble halls, and infinite wealth, is now a tomb.
What the coming summer would bring, we knew not; but the present months were our own, and our hopes of a cessation of pestilence were high.
Their deadly power shook the flourishing countries of the south, and during winter, even, we, in our northern retreat, began to quake under their ill effects.
The evil was so wide-spreading, so violent and immedicable, that no care, no prevention could be judged superfluous, which even added a chance to our escape.
We feared the coming summer.
The most luxurious were often the first to part with their indulgencies.
Experience demonstrated that in a year or two pestilence would cease; it were well that in the mean time we should not have destroyed our fine breeds of horses, or have utterly changed the face of the ornamented portion of the country.
He addressed himself to the wealthy of the land; he made proposals in parliament little adapted to please the rich; but his earnest pleadings and benevolent eloquence were irresistible.
O, yes, it would--Countrymen, fear not!
Thousands died unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpse the mourner was stretched, made mute by death.
Bankers, merchants, and manufacturers, whose trade depended on exports and interchange of wealth, became bankrupt.
That the plague was not what is commonly called contagious, like the scarlet fever, or extinct small-pox, was proved.
Chairs, as in olden time, and Indian palanquins were introduced for the infirm; but else it was nothing singular to see females of rank going on foot to places of fashionable resort.
Yet a feeling of awe, a breathless sentiment of wonder, a painful sense of the degradation of humanity, was introduced into every heart.
Could we take integral parts of this power, and not be subject to its operation?
These tidings were at first whispered about town; but no one dared express aloud the soul-quailing intelligence.
Day by day we are forced to believe this.
The English, whether travellers or residents, came pouring in one great revulsive stream, back on their own country; and with them crowds of Italians and Spaniards.
But how are we to judge of airs, and pronounce--in such a city plague will die unproductive; in such another, nature has provided for it a plentiful harvest?
As for instance, a typhus fever has been brought by ships to one sea-port town; yet the very people who brought it there, were incapable of communicating it in a town more fortunately situated.
It was impossible to see these crowds of wretched, perishing creatures, late nurslings of luxury, and not stretch out a hand to save them.
We called to mind the plague of 1348, when it was calculated that a third of mankind had been destroyed.
Where late the busy multitudes assembled for pleasure or profit, now only the sound of wailing and misery is heard.
That fable is unjust, which gives the superiority to the sun over the wind. Who has not seen the lightsome earth, the balmy atmosphere, and basking nature become dark, cold and ungenial, when the sleeping wind has awoke in the east?
Many of these, of high rank in their own countries, now, with hoe in hand, turned up the soil.
What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space?
But in this mortal life extremes are always matched; the thorn grows with the rose, the poison tree and the cinnamon mingle their boughs.
But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star.
He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to investment.
And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of his Sunday sermon at two days' notice for fear of offending public sentiment.
And when she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn't have told it from the original.
For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself. Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was no certainty.
Inside, there are two shaving chairs of the heavier, or electrocution pattern, with mirrors in front of them and pigeon holes with individual shaving mugs.
All day in the street you could hear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and faults,--the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination day.
I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our poor little earnings.
You could see, as I saw, the night express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller or Carnegie or anyone might be on it!
Painted on the panes of the window is the remains of a legend that once spelt BARBER SHOP, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in the golden age of sign painting in Mariposa.
In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: "I see where it says that this 'Flying Squirl' run a dead heat for the King's Plate."
Just send the money whether by express order or by bank draft or cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cuban gentlemen.
To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple.
Why, to those as don't want it, every time.
In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, down to nine cents, and Jefferson still held on.
But still,--what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do?
It just shows the difference between people.
They didn't care! They took a chance.
And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off again like autumn leaves.
It is strange how quiet these things look, the other way round.
Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife's money into Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, and put every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred.
And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange--they were glad enough to get her, and she says now that if there's one thing she hates, it's the stage, and she can't see how the actresses put up with it.
To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relations of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.
The house,--I think I said it,--stood out behind the barber shop.
"Level-headed" I think was the term; indeed in the speech of Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set on horizontally as with a theodolite.
A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure and lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of an hour.
If a man's got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away.
The moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough. Brains, you know, are recognized right away.
The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore's studio (upstairs over Netley's).
So no wonder the town went wild!
Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store and jammed it into Twin Tamagami.
I liked it about Jeff that he didn't stop shaving.
It was not until the mining boom, at the time when everybody went simply crazy over the Cobalt and Porcupine mines of the new silver country near the Hudson Bay, that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call public importance in Mariposa.
As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown American boots, there was style written all over her,--the kind of thing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to.
It was probably in him from the start.
He kept them out at the back of his house,--which itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop,--and in the old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice, that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer visitors.
I never knew the meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines.
And who do they give it to?
Utter lack of engineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making a fortune for its holders.
"I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for one of them observatories," he would say.
Everybody knew him and everybody got shaved there.
Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them.
It makes one drowsy just to think of it!
It is the current supposition of each of Jeff's customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug. One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign: HOT AND COLD BATHS, 50 CENTS.
So they shoved and pushed and clawed her down--that unseen nefarious crowd in the city--and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted at his grip, and then--
And why was it that Mr. Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wages when he wanted to put it into Cuba?
What with Jeff's white coat and Mr. Smith's flowered waistcoat and the red geranium in the window and the Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth, the little shop seemed multi-coloured and luxurious enough for the annex of a Sultan's harem.
Not a cent and never will."
In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his perpetual interest in the great capitalists.
"This Cubey, it appears is an island," Jeff would explain.
So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading actress.
"She's at six," said Jeff, "but I've got her.
"She ain't been developed," Jeff would say.
You see, Jefferson's forte, or specialty, was information.
As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring up above and a bell that almost rings.
He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers under the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink the last drop of whiskey within fifty miles.
In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only little bits and scraps of them.
"They're working her down," he admitted, "but I'm holding her."
One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn't give up shaving was because it allowed him to talk about Cuba.
They wrote most handsomely.
You don't know Mariposa.
Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another.
I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower, wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, you know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don't see in business men in America, and that touches you.
Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers and renovators, regardless of expense.
No, sir."
They heard of him, somehow,--it wasn't for a modest man like Jefferson to say how.
Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he'd forgotten that he'd never been in the country.
And right from the start he was confident of winning.
Perhaps not.
You could see it all there in the pictures--tobacco plants and the insurrectos--everything.
I don't say," he used to continue, with the scissors open and ready to cut, "that some of the greenhorns won't get bit.
So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was "in Cuban lands" and would probably clean up half a million by New Year's. You couldn't have failed to know it.
Why, no wonder; it seemed like the finger of Providence.
Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till he made money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all.
Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote to Jeff.
I thought that perhaps getting so much money,--well, you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities.
Jeff has to work pretty late, but that's nothing--nothing at all, if you've worked hard all your lifetime.
The end of it was bound to come.
Then the man moved the wooden block to the side of the fire and sat down facing us, the flickering flames throwing a red glow over him.
"With the head in it," she answered.
"That is our way," he said.
And where would that ditch lead him?"
"Eventually to the high road, which runs almost at right angles to the Withan road."
I think the murderer must have taken the head with him."
He was going forward again.
"We're trespassers, but we must take our chance.
He had become keen, like a dog on the trail, and, old as he was, seemed incapable of fatigue.
"The foreign cut of the clothes may be of importance," he said.
My association with Christopher Quarles has, however, led to the solution of some strange mysteries, and, since my own achievements are sufficiently well known, I may confine myself to those cases which, single-handed, I should have failed to solve.
I know that in many of them I was credited with having unraveled the mystery, but this was only because Professor Quarles persisted in remaining in the background.
He was often as astonished at my acumen in following a clew as I was at his marvelous theories, which seemed so absurd to begin with yet proved correct in the end.
Your life is likely to depend upon it.
"I do sometimes," he said, tapping his pocket.
To our left, toward what was evidently the extremity of the park, was hilly ground, which had been allowed to run wild.
I think we are alone here, but keep your ears open."
My friend and I are going to walk back."
If I did the spade work, the deductions were his.
It was not found, however, and the countryside was in a state bordering on panic.
The fire flickered lower and went out.
"But the head?"
"We'll go carefully," said Quarles.
He was well dressed, and a man who would be likely to carry papers with him, but nothing was found, and the murder had remained a mystery.
"I think the shed is climbable," said Quarles.
He was cunning too.
In a corner of the wall, or, to be more precise, filling up a rent in it, was a shed, roughly built, but with a door secured by a very business-like lock.
It was not much help he wanted.
These were the points known and conjectured when the case came into my hands, and my investigations added little to them.
"Yes."
I heard him moving about for some time.
"You have a theory, professor?"
"I am not sure yet.
Truth to tell, I was not there for his opinion, but to see his granddaughter.
In a few moments we were on the roof.
Another point, both these murders happened at the time of the full moon.
It was not until some days later that the case came into my hands, and in the interval the local authorities had not been idle.
The cave part had a rough, sandy floor, and here was a long shed of peculiar construction. It was raised on piles, about eight feet high; the front part formed a kind of open veranda, the back part being closed in.
We were trespassers in a private park.
I'm tired, Wigan; but it was safer not to keep the carriage."
"You think----"
"Half a foot when I went there.
"January the seventeenth."
"His mother was eccentric.
Quarles looked at me inquiringly.
They were poor, worn almost threadbare, but they had once been fairly good, and the cut was not English.
Why should a head be required?
The next afternoon he arranged a drive.
"Why carrying a bag?" asked Quarles.
Once or twice the professor gave me a warning gesture, but he did not speak.
It's a deal nearer as the crow flies."
Moonlight was presently above us, throwing the cave part of the pit into greater shadow than ever.
That would account for the foreign cut of his clothes.
"Of course, the head may be buried in the wood," said Zena.
By evening the clouds had gone, the moon sailed in a clear sky, and, looking round to find the cause of his horse's unusual behavior, the farmer saw a man lying on a heap of snow under the opposite hedge.
To our right was a large house, only partially seen through its screen of trees, but it was evidently mellow with age.
He realized that he was a stranger, and attacked him."
I never mention my theories until I have some facts to support them.
"That night.
A few days later Quarles telegraphed me to meet him at Kings Cross, and we traveled North together.
We are going to find out if it is."
Through one part of the wood there runs a ditch, which is continued as a division between two fields which form part of the farm land behind the wood.
"Five or six miles.
They were all cases with peculiar features in them, and it was never as a detective that Quarles approached them.
We crept forward and concealed ourselves among the scrub vegetation which grew in that part of the pit which was open to the sky.
The likeness between the two crimes can hardly be a coincidence."
"Wigan, do you see?" whispered Quarles.
There were many fantastic answers to the question.
Carefully."
He was always as secret as the grave until he had proved his theory, and then he seemed anxious to forget the whole affair, and shrank from publicity.
The man's face was familiar, but just then I could not remember who he was.
"There was a moon that night, wasn't there?"
"To bury somewhere else?" asked Quarles.
One point, however, impressed me.
From our new point of view I looked again.
On this occasion I went to Quarles with the object of interesting him in the Withan case, and he forestalled me by beginning to talk about it the moment I entered the room.
A pit I call it, but it was as much a cave as a pit, part of it running deeply into the earth, and only about a third of it being open to the sky.
"That's another good point, Wigan," chuckled Quarles.
I felt convinced that the man's clothes, which were shown to me, had not been made in England.
"I think there would have been other heads missing if he had been," Quarles answered.
Without help from me he dropped from the roof, and I followed him.
As she sank she fell upon her side, and forced a very large lobster-tree out of its place.
Add to this, my situation was in other respects very unpleasant; I met many large fish, who were, if I could judge by their open mouths, not only able, but really wished to devour us; now, as my Rosinante was blind, I had these hungry gentlemen's attempts to guard against, in addition to my other difficulties.
The lobster-trees appeared the richest, but the crab and oysters were the tallest.
It was in the spring, when the lobsters were very young, and many of them being separated by the violence of the shock, they fell upon a crab-tree which was growing below them; they have, like the farina of plants, united, and produced a fish resembling both.
The periwinkle is a kind of shrub; it grows at the foot of the oyster-tree, and twines round it as the ivy does the oak.
"As we drew near the Dutch shore, and the body of water over our heads did not exceed twenty fathoms, I thought I saw a human figure in a female dress then lying on the sand before me with some signs of life; when I came close I perceived her hand move: I took it into mine, and brought her on shore as a corpse.
CHAPTER XV
A tail!
"I was afraid so," he said.
However, we'll soon get him all right."
"I couldn't have stayed with him a moment longer," he thought.
"Obviously."
Let us describe it calmly.
You mark my words, Coronel; she did it."
"But you mustn't be surprised if I don't look very well.
"Coronel!" said a small voice behind him.
Isolated--cut off--suffering in regal silence." He waved an explanatory paw.
What devotion it showed if he came to her even now--in his present state of bad health! She was in trouble: enchanters, wizards, what-nots.
"I don't know.
Coronel stopped.
So they held a council of war.
That evening he reached the place where the cottage had stood, but it was gone.
I just went to sleep, and woke up feeling rather funny, and----"
Coronel had thought him--funny; but women had not much sense of humour as a rule.
"What's the matter?
"That's the cruel part about it.
Perhaps because I'm too unimportant."
I was very polite to her.
"I should have burst.
Coronel, what shall we do?
One does not laugh at a yak, Coronel, and where one does not laugh one may come to love. . . .
"I don't know, Coronel.
Coronel decided that it was an occasion for tact.
"Really, I don't know.
"And if I don't?"
The second was that Coronel should go back that afternoon and kill the old woman.
He trotted off.
Next morning he rode back to the wood.
"Yes, I am coming out, Coronel," said the voice.
"I command you!"
"Have you ever seen a yak, Coronel?" he asked.
What are you hiding in the bushes for? Whatever's the matter, Udo?"
"Yes, yes, you may leave me."
Udo was gone too. He returned to the Palace, and began to think it out.
"It was that old woman did it.
Poor Prince Udo!
"We aren't starting," said the voice.
Don't you remember my saying to you, 'Be polite to her, because she's probably a fairy!' You see, I saw through her disguise at once.
Had I been a lion there would have been a certain pathetic splendour about my position.
"Ah, here you are," he said cheerfully.
"Never."
The Princess Hyacinth had called for him.
Coronel pointed out that as she had turned Prince Udo into--into a--a--("Quite so," said Udo)--it was likely that she alone could turn him back again, and that in that case he had better only threaten her.
"It looks--striking."
Probably as a child Hyacinth had kept rabbits . . . or lambs.
Roger Scurvilegs frankly breaks down over it.
I'm--I'm--Coronel, here I am," said Udo pathetically and he stepped out.
Well, think of that!"
He was wondering if Princess Hyacinth had an attendant of surpassing beauty, or a dragon of surpassing malevolence--if, in fact, there were any adventures in Euralia for a humble fellow like himself.
"Isn't it time we were starting?"
"Yes, that must be it." He began to feel a little brighter. "Obviously, that's it." He caressed a whisker with one of his paws. "They were afraid of me."
Coronel considered for a moment.
Let's hold a council of war and think it over."
"Really frankly?" he asked.
How awkward for everybody!
"My poor Udo, what's happened?"
Women like to feel that there is something fierce, untamable in the man they love; well, there it was.
"Then, frankly, your Royal Highness looks--funny."
To Euralia then with all dispatch.
"Even in the most hideous of beasts there might be a dignity." He meditated for a moment.
"This is not a time for tact," he said.
"I'm not very well."
Already, then, he had suffered in her service--so at least he would say, and so possibly it might be.
Spasm after spasm shook him.
This he rejected at once.
"Good-bye, your Royal Highness."
"Good-bye, good-bye."
"Don't be a fool, Coronel," said Udo, almost crying.
He began to look so much happier that Coronel thought it was a favourable moment in which to withdraw.
"And shall I find you here when I come back?"
"Then return to the Palace."
There were three courses open to him.
"Coronel," said an unhappy voice at last, "I think I'm coming out."
Left to himself Udo very soon made up his mind.
"How did it happen?"
What does my head look like?"
"I haven't seen it, you see."
It was not as if he had Coronel with him.
Prince Udo put forward two suggestions.
Coronel didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
"Tell me what I look like."
"After us!" yelled the ruffians.
"What is it?" asked her husband.
Nearly half an hour passed in this manner.
She paused, choking, then went on:--
He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thenardier woman did in fact rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes, and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--
Mullins and Bagshaw and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends of mine.
Even now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.
My own experience is exactly the other way.
I have noted that of my pupils, those who seemed the laziest and the least enamoured of books are now rising to eminence at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really promising boys who took all the prizes are now able with difficulty to earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck hand on a canal boat.
But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between.
When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance.
I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is.
In Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section of the Transcontinental Railway.
Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called "Literary Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels." Each of these is published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence.
The inspiration of the book,--a land of hope and sunshine where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest,--is large enough.
I was soon appointed to a Fellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporary employment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1903.
I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869.
This was during the hard times of Canadian farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired men and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year's crop without buying any.
To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such individual attributes as he might find for himself.
Mariposa is not a real town.
Preface
Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many years it was found impossible to print them.
I thus have what the business man can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.
I have had some small connection with politics and public life.
I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England.
I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst paid profession in the world.
From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated in 1891.
My father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario.
Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.
In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a business man knows in his whole life.
The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine--or rather, of the kind of men who operate it--made it possible to print these books.
As for Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice, his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address and the goodness of his heart,--all of this is known by everybody to be a necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business.
Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller.
I am not aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the time, but should think it extremely likely.
By this process my brothers and I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm labourers.
But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually, I should have much ado to know them.
The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough.
There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island.
These things, surely, are a proof of respectability.
You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope.
The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life, and is pronounced completely full.
By this means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to the extenuating circumstances of his life.
This, however, is a form of national ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.
At the University I spent my entire time in the acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing of the outside world.
In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people.
I have written a number of things in connection with my college life--a book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so on.
My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them.
I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head boy in 1887.
After this, no new ideas can be imparted to him.
In other words I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to school teaching as the only trade I could find that need neither experience nor intellect.
In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of each day.
From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at this period, I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as lecturer in Political Science, and later as head of the department of Economics and Political Science.
Preface
Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages, and found myself intellectually bankrupt.
Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven shillings.
Well, that's how he walked.
All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff's would be treated.
The thing was so evidently a conspiracy.
If you're in it, you're in it, that's all!
They all went in.
But if a feller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can't lose."
And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of the Mariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handles and it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the whole thing.
She's full of it.
They all went in--or all except Mr. Smith.
Not quite.
It was all over the town in a minutes.
If they'd just go right into her good, they'd get it again.
But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public recognition that it meant.
The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place.
Anyway, what's two hundred miles!
I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake.
The fever just caught the town and ran through it!
Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, took his morning shave from Jeff as a form of resuscitation, with enough wet towels laid on his face to stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razor in hand, as grave as an operating surgeon.
You should have heard her recite "The Raven," at the Methodist Social!
And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirror of the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that was worth forty thousand dollars!
But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe never occupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa.
You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn't the hurried, perfunctory thing that it is in the city.
They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves.
Perhaps you've felt it about people that you know.
"The only trouble with that mine," said Jeff, "is they won't go deep enough.
No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer.
And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings when the shop got empty.
These hideous and delicate products of wonderful art are to jewellers' work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry. There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons in language.
"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient.
"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice, and at the same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut.
She handed it to her husband.
That's the way I should have managed matters! People are perfectly right when they say that men are a deal stupider than women!
He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--
"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."
As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself, he had not cut the bonds of his left leg.
The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.
You are too good, you see!
You see that our intentions are not evil."
"Through the window," replied Thenardier.
Discharge the pistol?
All at once a shudder ran through him.
In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase was heard to open and shut again.
This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks for action on board ship.
At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition, but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy conducted in a low tone:--
I spoke to both the porter and the portress, a fine, stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"
My wife will go and hunt her up with your letter.
"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.
"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"
"There is only one thing left to do."
As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thenardier cried:
One of those monsters was to bear her off into the darkness?
She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her, was safe.
If you have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark, that's all."
It was Javert.
And after all that racing and fee to the coachman and all!
Up to that moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of possibility had presented itself.
The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor peculiar to chambers of torture filled the hovel.
Thenardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.
If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast in four quarters to begin with!
The devil!"
I tied that paw for him."
It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.
"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go down first."
It's nothing but a big carriage gate!
The prisoner was only attached to the bed now by one leg.
The prisoner resumed:--
"See here."
Whither?
This was what Marius perceived most clearly of all.
With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth, and make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery force the captain to show himself.
All at once, Thenardier addressed the prisoner:
Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all the most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.
He waited, in the hope of some incident, no matter of what nature, since he could not collect his thoughts and did not know upon what course to decide.
It was high time.
In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--
There he stood, almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though annihilated by the abominable things viewed at such close quarters.
For the last hour he had had two voices in his conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father's testament, the other crying to him to rescue the prisoner.
The prisoner had not seemed to be affected by that word, "the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner in the world: "I do not know what you mean." On the other hand, the two letters U. F. were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre; and Ursule was no longer named Ursule.
Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap and decamp!"
"Something is falling!" cried the Thenardier woman.
For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot, which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.
It was clear that it was she.
Marius felt his heart stop beating.
"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from? Through the window, of course."
Thrown into a hat!--"
"We haven't the time."
The prisoner uttered not a syllable.
At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.
Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer, and took out the knife.
That old fellow has duped you!
"Quick!
And what if it were she!
The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.
And he rushed headlong to the window.
Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource of despair.
An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient of which he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.
The ladder!
The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster.
What did you expect to gain by that?"
This can be screwed together and unscrewed at will; it is a box.
The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the den.
Terrible images passed through Marius' mind.
"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble of defending it. When you think that you can make me speak, that you can make me write what I do not choose to write, that you can make me say what I do not choose to say--"
"False address!"
In this box he hides a watch-spring, and this watch-spring, properly handled, cuts good-sized chains and bars of iron.
"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"
Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his own love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt himself restrained.
What a pack of boobies!
What!
He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the sheet of paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall, wrapped the paper round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice into the middle of the den.
"That's it."
At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full moon illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper.
While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thenardier had seated himself on the table.
After a pause, Thenardier continued:--
The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key on the floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched his fists, three times rapidly without uttering a word.
"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thenardier woman.
Thenardier had conquered his last fears or his last scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.
He would have been obliged to speak, and say where the girl is, and where he keeps his shiners!
Draw lots, do you?
Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle. The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.
"Do what you please with me." He was disarmed.
"Cut his throat."
I think that the Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural that you should keep her.
After his first startled cry he had made no sound, but now, as he sighted Rynch, his eyes widened and his lips parted.
And, since it had not turned its head, he could not be sure it had even sighted him.
The man eyed him steadily, and his expression did not alter even when Rynch swung the off-world weapon to center its sights on the late owner.
He hoped they did not willingly venture out of the trees where the leaves were their protection.
Though it was balled in upon itself he was sure the creature was fully as large as he, and the menacing claws suggested it was a formidable opponent.
Three red bodies were flat and still on the gravel as the off-worlder leaned back against a rock breathing heavily.
"Suppose," Rynch's voice was rusty sounding in his own ears, "we talk now."
There might just be another way to move.
The man he sought stood by the fire, shrugging his arms into a webbing harness which brought a box against his chest.
And the feline was attacking an enemy, enraged to the pitch of vocal frenzy.
"As you wish, Brodie."
There was plenty of time to stop the man before he reached the danger which might lurk under the trees.
The watchers!
Rynch went flat on the stream bank, made a worm's progress up the slope to crouch behind a bush and survey the land immediately ahead. There stood an off-world spacer, fins down, nose skyward, and grouped not too far from its landing ramp, a collection of bubble tents.
He withdrew farther into the wood, intent upon finding a detour which would bring him out into the open lands.
The man from the spacer camp had been the focus of a three-prong attack from a female and her cubs.
At the sight of that man, dream and reality had crashed together, sending him into panic-stricken flight.
Now that he was free from the wood and its watchers and had come so near to his goal, Rynch was curiously reluctant to do the sensible thing, to rise out of concealment and walk up to that fire, to claim rescue by his own kind.
Now he wanted to join forces with his own kind, whether those men were potential enemies or not.
But he had not lost his head and was jerking from side to side in an effort to pull free.
When it made no move to follow him Rynch began to hope it had only been defending its own hiding place, for its present attitude suggested concealment.
The man from the spacer had made no effort to conceal his trail, in fact it would almost seem that he had deliberately gone out of his way to leave boot prints on favorable stretches of ground.
With a startled cry the man dropped the needler again, clawed at the ground about him.
The man from the spacer camp was using the stream as his road.
Having made that fast he picked up a needler by its sling.
That was the man from the room--the man with the cup!
They were his own kind, they would take him out of the loneliness of a world heretofore empty of his species.
He padded after the other.
The man nodded.
"And now, my dear companions," said Michel Ardan, "let us make ourselves at home; I am a domesticated man and strong in housekeeping.
"It is a prison," said he, "but a traveling prison; and, with the right of putting my nose to the window, I could well stand a lease of a hundred years.
So saying, the thoughtless fellow lit a match by striking it on the sole of his boot; and approached the burner fixed to the receptacle, in which the carbonized hydrogen, stored at high pressure, sufficed for the lighting and warming of the projectile for a hundred and forty-four hours, or six days and six nights.
They were like two methodical travelers in a car, seeking to place themselves as comfortably as possible.
You smile, Barbicane.
"A hundred dollars we shall find none!" said Nicholl.
Nicholl's chronometer marked twenty minutes past ten P.M. when the three travelers were finally enclosed in their projectile. This chronometer was set within the tenth of a second by that of Murchison the engineer.
"Come, Nicholl.
The gas caught fire, and thus lighted the projectile looked like a comfortable room with thickly padded walls, furnished with a circular divan, and a roof rounded in the shape of a dome.
"Enough, Michel, enough!" said Barbicane, in a serious voice; "let us prepare.
"Well, twenty-four, if you like, my noble captain," said Ardan; "twenty-four minutes in which to investigate----"
And friend Murchison, with his chronometer in hand, his eye fixed on the needle, his finger on the electric apparatus, is counting the seconds preparatory to launching us into interplanetary space."
"Done, my captain!" replied Ardan, clasping Nicholl's hand. "But, by the bye, you have already lost three bets with our president, as the necessary funds for the enterprise have been found, as the operation of casting has been successful, and lastly, as the Columbiad has been loaded without accident, six thousand dollars."
At forty- seven minutes past ten Murchison will launch the electric spark on the wire which communicates with the charge of the Columbiad. At that precise moment we shall leave our spheroid.
"Yes, five little minutes!" replied Michel Ardan; "and we are enclosed in a projectile, at the bottom of a gun 900 feet long! And under this projectile are rammed 400,000 pounds of gun-cotton, which is equal to 1,600,000 pounds of ordinary powder!
"Twenty seconds more!" Barbicane quickly put out the gas and lay down by his companions, and the profound silence was only broken by the ticking of the chronometer marking the seconds.
And first let us try and see a little.
Other plates, closely fitted, covered the lenticular glasses, and the travelers, hermetically enclosed in their metal prison, were plunged in profound darkness.
"Well!" exclaimed Michel Ardan, in a good-humored tone, "much may be done in twenty-six minutes.
The gravest questions of morals and politics may be discussed, and even solved. Twenty-six minutes well employed are worth more than twenty-six years in which nothing is done.
"And how?" asked Barbicane.
That will do honor to the canine race!
TWENTY MINUTES PAST TEN TO FORTY-SEVEN MINUTES PAST TEN P. M.
Suddenly a dreadful shock was felt, and the projectile, under the force of six billions of litres of gas, developed by the combustion of pyroxyle, mounted into space.
I beg to be allowed to get out!"
"Yes," replied Nicholl.
"We have now to decide how we can best place ourselves to resist the shock. Position cannot be an indifferent matter; and we must, as much as possible, prevent the rush of blood to the head."
"I only ask to be allowed to pay."
Well, before another quarter of an hour you will have to count nine thousand dollars to the president; four thousand because the Columbiad will not burst, and five thousand because the projectile will rise more than six miles in the air."
"Forty-seven minutes past ten!" murmured the captain.
"There are," said Michel Ardan, "just as there are horses, cows, donkeys, and chickens.
But his companions were not listening; they were taking up their last positions with the most perfect coolness.
I bet that we shall find chickens."
"Twenty," said Nicholl.
"My stake is deposited at the bank in Baltimore," replied Barbicane simply; "and if Nicholl is not there, it will go to his heirs."
"Entirely," replied the captain.
"Do you approve of my idea, Nicholl?" asked Barbicane.
Three thick and solidly-made couches had been placed in the projectile.
Ah, Satellite!" he exclaimed, teasing them; "so you are going to show the moon-dogs the good habits of the dogs of the earth!
During this time, Ardan, not being able to keep still, turned in his narrow prison like a wild beast in a cage, chatting with his friends, speaking to the dogs Diana and Satellite, to whom, as may be seen, he had given significant names.
The tackle belonging to the crane being hauled from outside, the mouth of the Columbiad was instantly disencumbered of its last supports.
"No," said Barbicane, "let us stretch ourselves on our sides; we shall resist the shock better that way.
Remember that, when the projectile starts, it matters little whether we are in it or before it; it amounts to much the same thing."
"And why?" asked Nicholl.
"Just so," said Nicholl.
'Come away, Madame! you are trying to frighten me,' I said, in the childish anger which accompanies fear.
So I despise.
And Madame rolled her eyes awfully, as if she expected to see something unearthly, and, indeed, looked very like it herself.
'Poor mamma is buried there.'
We shall have so pleasant walk.'
But no, you are not afraid.
The brandy was purely medicinal.
But it would not do: she saw that I had detected her, and she laughed aloud.
With which words she seized that joint, and laughing spitefully, she twisted it suddenly back.
You don't know, Madame, how you hurt me. Let us speak of something else.'
Upon this, Mrs. Rusk impounded the flask; and, with Anne beside her, rather precipitately appeared before 'the Master.' He heard and summoned Madame.
'You've hurt me very much--you have broken my finger,' I sobbed.
'But, Madame, I really know nothing of it.
'Will you tell?'
I am not afraid of the dead people, nor of the ghosts.
I assented.
'Come away, Madame,' I said, growing frightened, and feeling that if I were once, by any accident, to give way to the panic that was gathering round me, I should instantaneously lose all control of myself.
At that moment the door of my father's study opened, and Mrs. Rusk, with her dark energetic face very much flushed, stepped out in high excitement.
She was devouring all that was passing there. I drew back into the shadow with a kind of disgust and horror.
Madame had made a sort of pet of Anne Wixted, an underchambermaid, and attached her to her interest economically by persuading me to make her presents of some old dresses and other things.
Madame laughed an ugly laugh, and said--
And off whisked Mrs. Rusk for the back staircase.
'And what then is his disease?'
'Yes, yes! let me go,' I shrieked.
Oh, yes--he is old man, and so uncertain life is.
I can't say whether there is a will or not.
There was a grass-grown road, which we easily reached, leading to the sombre building, and we soon arrived before it.
How high and thick are the trees all round! and nobody comes near.'
This did not last very long, however, and she soon resumed her wonted ways. And she returned to the question of the will, but not so directly, and with more art.
Madame was in high spirits.
'Very--the kindest darling.
And so I yielded, though still reluctant.
'Why?' said I, flushing and growing pale again.
We regard them first for the oracle of the dead, and find them after only the folly of the living.
Let us come--even a little part of the way.'
'There is no need of haste, Madame; it is quite time enough when his health begins to fail.'
I felt that I could have thrown something at her; but a kind of fear made me recede again toward my room. Indignation, however, quickly returned, and I came back, treading briskly as I did so.
'No, on the contrary, sit here by me.
'I am fatigue--maybe you will read it aloud to me slowly and solemnly, my dearest Maud?'
'Better your own brandy, if drink you must!' exclaimed Mrs. Rusk.
How could it concern her?
She would not answer my questions, and affected to be very lofty and offended.
'But that doctor is a doctor in theology, I fancy.
She sat down on the little bank opposite, in her most languid pose--her head leaned upon the tips of her fingers.
'You may come to the store-room now, or the butler can take it.'
I treated her as if she had human sympathies, in the hope that they might be generated somehow.
Perhaps in their relations to men they are generally more trustworthy--perhaps woman's is the juster, and the other an appointed illusion.
This confidential talking with Madame, strange to say, implied no confidence; it resulted from fear--it was deprecatory.
Do, pray.'
I screamed while she continued to laugh.
I had made a resolution to speak as little as possible to Madame, I was so incensed at the treachery I had witnessed; but such resolutions do not last long with very young people, and by the time we had reached the skirts of the wood we were talking pretty much as usual.
Madame courtesied with a great smirk, that was full of intangible hate and insult.
'Yes, a Doctor Bryerly, who remained a few days.
What is in his will, and when he wrote?'
Madame was cool, frank, and fluent.
She produced a document in the form of a note.
Her eyes were turned in the direction of the stairs, from which only she apprehended surprise.
Madame, I suppose, had heard me, for she was half-way down the stairs.
What cross girl!
'And for what?'
Let us talk of something else.'
How dark is this place!
The air was sweet--the landscape charming--I, so good--everything so beautiful! Where should we go?
'My faith, curious reason; you say because poor mamma is buried there you will not approach!
She was transformed into a great gaping reptile.
Two little pieces of by-play in which I detected her confirmed my unpleasant suspicion.
What do you cry for, little fool?'
'I know nothing of papa's will.
Come, tell me all about--it is for your advantage, you know.
She did not release it immediately however, but continued her torture and discordant laughter.
There had been no common skirmish on this occasion, but a pitched battle.
I felt quite afraid of Madame, and confounded at the suddenness of all this.
'No--I think not.'
No, no; you know everything.
Doctor Somebody presented his compliments to Madame de la Rougierre, and ordered her a table-spoonful of brandy and some drops of laudanum whenever the pain of stomach returned.
The way was in deep shadow, for the sun was near the horizon; but suddenly we turned to the left, and there we stood in rich sunlight, among the many objects he had described.
We can only reach it through the gate of death, to which we are all tending, young and old, with sure steps.'
He leaned his elbow on his knee, and his forehead on his hand, which shaded his downcast eyes.
Come, dear; let us be going.'
So I can tell you now as I did then; and as we are both, I hope, walking on to the same place just as we did to the trees and cottage.
I think it was about a fortnight after that conversation in which my father had expressed his opinion, and given me the mysterious charge about the old oak cabinet in his library, as already detailed, that I was one night sitting at the great drawing-room window, lost in the melancholy reveries of night, and in admiration of the moonlighted scene.
In that attitude he described to me a beautiful landscape, radiant with a wondrous light, in which, rejoicing, my mother moved along an airy path, ascending among mountains of fantastic height, and peaks, melting in celestial colouring into the air, and peopled with human beings translated into the same image, beauty, and splendour.
'Now, what do you see there?' he asked, pointing horizontally with his stick towards the centre of the opposite structure.
It is enough for me to know that their founder either saw or fancied he saw amazing visions, which, so far from superseding, confirmed and interpreted the language of the Bible; and as dear papa accepted their ideas, I am happy in thinking that they did not conflict with the supreme authority of holy writ.
He played and he played, and, after a while, one after another of those who listened to him began to get drowsy.
And in he went, as he said, with the servant at his heels trembling like a leaf at what he had heard.
The garden and the torrent and all were gone, and nothing was left but a naked plain covered over with the bones of those who had come that way before, seeking the fruit which the travelling servant had sought.
He was clad in a weather-stained coat, and he wore dusty boots, and the servant bade him good-morning.
And in the middle of it grew a golden tree, and on it golden fruit.
He knocked at the door, and the wise man who had been his master opened to him.
"No offence," said the Blacksmith; "I meant not to speak ill of your story.
There, lo and behold! Instead of being dark and silent, as it was before, all was ablaze with light and noisy with the sound of rejoicing and merriment.
So all the rest of that day they journeyed onward together, until, towards evening, they came to a town with high towers and steep roofs and tall spires.
Rap! tap! tap!
Then the flaming fire flew away to heaven again, carrying him along with it.
He gave it to the captain of the band, and after he had gone the robbers fought for it with one another until they were all killed.
In this cottage lived a widow and her only son, and they also made the travellers welcome, and set before them a good supper and showed them to a clean bed.
Up he scrambled, and away he went as fast as his legs could carry him.
"Yes," said the travelling companion, "I would, for that is why I came hither."
For he is not the only one in the world who has come in sight of the fruit of happiness, and then jogged all the way back home again to cook cabbage and onions and pot-herbs, and to make broth for wiser men than himself to sup.
Do you agree to that?"
On and on he travelled, until he came to the cross-roads and the stone cross of which the raven spoke, and there, sure enough, sat the traveller.
"Stop a bit," said Fortunatus; "what is this story mostly about?"
Once upon a time there was a servant who served a wise man, and cooked for him his cabbage and his onions and his pot-herbs and his broth, day after day, time in and time out, for seven years.
This time the travelling comrade did neither good nor ill to those of the house, but in the morning he told the widow whither they were going, and asked if she and her son knew the way to the garden where grew the fruit of happiness.
tap!
That is the end of this story.
"What use?
Come, friend, let us have it."
"That is good," said the servant's comrade, "and if he will do so I will pay him well for his trouble."
So the two did without second bidding, and such food and drink the serving-man had never tasted in his life before.
The servant stood and stared like one bereft of wits.
Well, he played and played until, by-and-by, the door opened, and out came a serving-man.
In the house lived a poor man and his wife; and, though the two were as honest as the palm of your hand, and as good and kind as rain in spring-time, they could hardly scrape enough of a living to keep body and soul together.
tap!
Up stepped the servant's comrade and knocked upon the door--rap!
Not a Pin to Choose.
And all the while the serving-man stood gaping like a fish to see what his comrade was about.
"It is," said Ali Baba, "about two men betwixt whom there was--"
"Can you play good music, piper?" said he.
"There!" cried the comrade, "that is your reward for your service!"
Then--
If he would ask it of him, that man would lead him to the garden where the fruit of happiness grows."
Come, come, sir, will you not take a pot of ale with me?"
But before I blow my pipe I and my friend here must have something to eat and drink, for one cannot play well with an empty stomach."
"I like your story, holy sir," said the Blacksmith who made Death sit in a pear-tree.
There they began talking to one another, and the servant popped the pebble into his mouth to hear what they might say.
"So be it," said the young man; "sit down with me and eat and drink."
By-and-by in came the gang of thieves with a great noise and uproar, and down they sat to their supper.
There happened to be one of the household standing at the door, and he knew the servant as the companion of that one who had stolen the ruby ring. Up he came and laid hold of the servant by the collar, calling to his companions that he had caught one of the thieves.
After that the sky cleared once more, and, lo and behold!
So the young man put on his hat, and took up his stick, and off went the three, up hill and down dale, until by-and-by they came over the top of the last hill, and there below them lay the garden.
But the next morning, before the dawning of the day, the travelling companion was stirring again.
The other day there came an angel hither, and with him he brought the ring of discord that breeds spite and rage and quarrelling.
But suddenly everything went wrong; his wife and he fell out and quarrelled until there was no living together, and she had to go back to her old home.
But the next day they jogged on together again until by-and-by they came to a great forest.
In those years the servant was well enough contented, but no one likes to abide in the same place forever, and so one day he took it into his head that he would like to go out into the world to see what kind of a fortune a man might make there for himself.
As he spoke he drew from his pocket the ruby ring which he had stolen from the sorrowful young man's finger, and dropped it into the cup from which the robber captain drank.
"Yonder is a traveller in the world," said the first raven.
The robbers are all dead and gone now, and I use the treasure that they left behind to entertain poor travellers like yourself.
And strange work it was!
"Why, thus," said the second.
Thereupon, as he ended speaking, he struck his staff upon the ground. Instantly the earth trembled, and the sky darkened overhead until it grew as black as night.
"Whither away, comrade," asked the traveller.
"I want to take service with you again," said the travelling servant.
"So it was, and that is how I came to be rich now," said the one-time poor man.
First they winked, then they shut their eyes, and then they nodded until all were as dumb as logs, and as sound asleep as though they would never waken again.
Then the poor travelling servant began to thump his head.
There he beheld masons and carpenters hard at work hacking and hewing, and building a fine new house.
By-and-by it was opened a crack, and there stood an ugly old woman, blear-eyed and crooked and gnarled as a winter twig. But the heart within her was good for all that.
The servant, who had travelled so long and so far, could see it plainly from where he stood, and he did not need to be told that it was the fruit of happiness.
"Yes," said the Fiddler, "I have.
there he was, under the oak-tree whence he had started in the first place.
"All this is mine," said the old man, "and after I am gone it shall be yours.
"Yes," says Ill-Luck, "it is."
Since I have come so far, I may as well see the end of it." So he entered the passageway, and closed the door behind him.
At first the old man put him off with short answers, but the Fiddler was a master-hand at finding out anything he wanted to know.
Oh no!
I see how it is now.
The queen looked up and screamed, and the Fiddler climbed down.
He entered the door, and nobody said no to him.
And that is the way we all of us talk.
You fell from heaven, for I saw it with my eyes and heard it with my ears.
But since the old man had given him leave, he would just help himself to a few of the fine things.
Yes, that was a very fine thing to say; but before an hour had gone by the Fiddler's head began to hum and buzz like a beehive.
Even that day there were three princes at the castle, each one wanting the queen to marry him; and the wrangling and bickering and squabbling that was going on was enough to deafen a body.
You were sent hither from heaven to be my husband, and my husband you shall be. You shall be king of this country, half-and-half with me as queen, and shall sit on a throne beside me."
"So!" says St. Nicholas, "that's a piece of work well done." Then he tossed the hazel-nut under the roots of an oak-tree near by, and went his way.
First he wondered; then he began to grow curious; then he began to itch and tingle and burn as though fifty thousand I-want-to-know nettles were sticking into him from top to toe.
At last he could stand it no longer.
Well, the Fiddler smoothed down his hair and brushed his clothes a bit, and off he went to see what was to be seen at the grand house at the end of the garden.
And this morning I said to myself that the first body that came to my house I would take for a son--or a daughter, as the case might be.
The Fiddler looked up and down, but he could see nobody.
Sure enough, there he stood on the sea-shore, with the waves beating and dashing on the rocks.
The old man fitted the key to the lock and turned it.
There lay his fiddle, just as he had left it.
Dick winked his eyes also, and yet they looked rather moist about the lashes.
"Yes--yes," she answered, in a low, sweet voice.
Mr. Hobbs blew his nose very loudly again.
Perhaps he'll write and ask you, when I tell him about you.
When this you see, remember me.' I don't want you to forget me."
I didn't think I was going to like it myself, but I like it better now I'm used to it.
Some one was hurriedly forcing his way through this group and coming toward him.
He's very kind, if he IS an earl; and he sent me a lot of money by Mr. Havisham, and I've brought some to you to buy Jake out."
The interview with Dick was quite exciting.
III
Trade's been prime!
There was a great straining and creaking and confusion.
"We liked this little house, Dearest, didn't we?" he said.
It seemed almost impossible for him to realize that there was scarcely anything he might wish to do which he could not do easily; in fact, I think it may be said that he did not fully realize it at all.
You know you always remember people who are kind to you."
He laid the case on his stout knee, and blew his nose violently several times.
I hope you'll come to see me sometime.
And I wish you'd write to me, because we were always good friends.
Cedric held the handkerchief in his hand.
Then he winked his eyes again.
He could not believe in his good luck any more easily than the apple-woman of ancient lineage could believe in hers; he walked about like a boot-black in a dream; he stared at his young benefactor and felt as if he might wake up at any moment.
When he picked it up, he uttered a rather singular exclamation.
Write when you get to Liverpool.
"Thank you!
The statement that his old friend had become a lord, and was in danger of being an earl if he lived long enough, caused Dick to so open his eyes and mouth, and start, that his cap fell off.
When his young friend brought to him in triumph the parting gift of a gold watch and chain, Mr. Hobbs found it difficult to acknowledge it properly.
Little Lord Fauntleroy leaned forward and waved the red handkerchief.
'From his oldest friend, Lord Fauntleroy, to Mr. Hobbs.
The people on the wharf began to shout to their friends, and the people on the steamer shouted back:
But at least he understood, after a few conversations with Mr. Havisham, that he could gratify all his nearest wishes, and he proceeded to gratify them with a simplicity and delight which caused Mr. Havisham much diversion.
They didn't want to let me up. It's a hankercher."
"I shouldn't forget you, whoever I was among," answered his lordship. "I've spent my happiest hours with you; at least, some of my happiest hours.
"Good-bye, Dick!" he shouted, lustily.
Dick had just been having a great deal of trouble with Jake, and was in low spirits when they saw him.
"For I have to go to England and be a lord," explained Cedric, sweet-temperedly.
It was Dick.
Good-bye! Good-bye!"
He knew something made them both sorry, though he scarcely knew what it was; but one tender little thought rose to his lips.
"Good-bye!
"Good-bye!" he panted.
Good-bye, old fellow!" Every one seemed to be saying, "Don't forget us.
"Once, when I fell down and cut my knee, she gave me an apple for nothing.
And if you write to me, here's where you must send your letter." And he gave him a slip of paper.
Good-bye!
The one who is the Earl now, he's my grandpapa; and he wants me to do anything I like.
In the week before they sailed for England he did many curious things.
Good-bye, Dick!"
I'm sorry I'm going away to leave you, but perhaps I shall come back again when I'm an earl.
A bell rang, and he made a leap away before Cedric had time to speak.
"I've run all the way," he said.
He was not an educated boot-black, and he would have found it difficult to tell what he felt just then if he had tried; perhaps that was why he didn't try, and only winked his eyes and swallowed a lump in his throat.
His mamma had been shut up in her room for some time; when she came down the stairs, her eyes looked large and wet, and her sweet mouth was trembling.
At last all the preparations were complete; the day came when the trunks were taken to the steamer, and the hour arrived when the carriage stood at the door.
"There's something written on it," said Cedric,--"inside the case. I told the man myself what to say.
And then they went into the carriage and Cedric sat very close to her, and as she looked back out of the window, he looked at her and stroked her hand and held it close.
Gloom had settled upon Mr. Hobbs; he was much depressed in spirits.
I bought this for ye out o' what I made yesterday.
I'm sure my grandpapa would be very much pleased.
I lost the paper when I was tryin' to get through them fellers downstairs.
This plainly embarrassed his lordship a little, but he bore himself bravely.
He came up to Cedric quite breathless.
Now's my chance to hunt lions and tigers!" But if you're invited to hunt sharks in their native element, you might want to think it over before accepting.
A New Proposition from Captain Nemo
"On the fishing itself?" I asked.
"Before we tackle the terrain, it helps to be familiar with it."
"Yes, my boy.
No doubt we'll be arriving a little early.
CHAPTER 2
"Ha!" Ned Land exclaimed.
"Me?" the Canadian replied.
"Only one penny to those poor people who make their employers rich! That's atrocious!"
"Your Captain Nemo--the devil take him--has just made us a very pleasant proposition!"
"As little as zero!
"Oh!" I said "You know about--"
"Maybe that's why Kate Tender married somebody else," replied Mr. Land philosophically.
"On that note, professor," Captain Nemo told me, "you and your companions will visit the Mannar oysterbank, and if by chance some eager fisherman arrives early, well, we can watch him at work."
I went back to reading Sirr's book, but I leafed through it mechanically. Between the lines I kept seeing fearsome, wide-open jaws.
"Here, no," Ned Land said.
"Sharks?" I exclaimed.
"Well?" Captain Nemo went on.
Ned and Conseil took seats on a couch, and right off the Canadian said to me:
"Yes, since those poor fishermen can't stay long underwater. On his voyage to Ceylon, the Englishman Percival made much of a Kaffir who stayed under five minutes without coming up to the surface, but I find that hard to believe.
"I'm a professional harpooner! It's my job to make a mockery of them!"
"Not a one, Mr. Naturalist.
I went looking in the library for a book about this island, one of the most fertile in the world.
"We're used to them, the rest of us," Captain Nemo answered. "And in time you will be too.
Pearls result simply from mother-of-pearl solidifying into a globular shape. Either they stick to the oyster's shell, or they become embedded in the creature's folds.
The captain said a few words to his chief officer who went out immediately.
"On the fishing," the Canadian replied.
For my part, I stared at them with anxious eyes, as if they were already missing a limb or two. Should I alert them?
With the chart under my eyes, I looked for the Gulf of Mannar.
"Yes," I said, "2,000,000 francs, and no doubt all it cost our captain was the effort to pick it up."
"You mean," I said, "that such primitive methods are still all that they use?"
"I'm afraid I must be frank with master."
Reentering the lounge, I first noted the bearings of Ceylon, on which antiquity lavished so many different names.
"Certainly, captain."
"Good!" the Canadian replied.
"By the way, Professor Aronnax, you aren't afraid of sharks, are you?"
Finally, classed in the lowest order, the smallest pearls are known by the name seed pearls; they're priced by the measuring cup and are used mainly in the creation of embroidery for church vestments."
"According to Sirr's book," I replied, "these Ceylon fisheries are farmed annually for a total profit of 3,000,000 man-eaters."
What are your feelings about these man-eaters?"
You see, sir, these sharks are badly designed.
"Yes, my boy.
"Nothing, sir," the Canadian replied.
"It must have tasted pretty bad," Ned Land added.
"He didn't tell you anything else?"
They have to roll their bellies over to snap you up, and in the meantime . . ."
"But I don't think these fisheries bring in the returns they once did. Similarly, the Central American fisheries used to make an annual profit of 4,000,000 francs during the reign of King Charles V, but now they bring in only two-thirds of that amount.
It comes from the scales of a European carp, it's nothing more than a silver substance that collects in the water and is preserved in ammonia.
"Francs!" Conseil rebuked.
Just then Captain Nemo and his chief officer appeared.
And if we ever brought back to Europe or America a pearl worth millions, it would make the story of our adventures more authentic--and much more rewarding."
"Indeed," I said.
On the valves a pearl sticks fast; on the flesh it lies loose.
Thus they die in the open air, and by the end of ten days they've rotted sufficiently.
Next they're immersed in huge tanks of salt water, then they're opened up and washed. At this point the sorters begin their twofold task.
It's easily done.
"But," I went on, "for secreting pearls, the ideal mollusk is the pearl oyster Meleagrina margaritifera, that valuable shellfish.
At length, after the temperature was somewhat mitigated on this memorable first of May, we arose and began to struggle homeward.
The snow was as dry as meal, and the finer particles drifted freely, rising high in the air, while the larger portions of the crystals rolled like sand.
At first the cliffs were beaten with hail, every stone of which, as far as I could see, was regular in form, six-sided pyramids with rounded base, rich and sumptuous-looking, and fashioned with loving care, yet seemingly thrown away on those desolate crags down which they went rolling, falling, sliding in a network of curious streams.
Several times, when the storm ceased for a few minutes, a Douglas squirrel came frisking from the foot of a clump of dwarf pines, moving in sudden interrupted spurts over the bossy snow; then, without any apparent guidance, he would dig rapidly into the drift where were buried some grains of barley that the horses had left.
Violets appeared along the edges of the trail, and the chaparral was coming into bloom, with young lilies and larkspurs about the open places in rich profusion.
The first rains had fallen on the lowlands, and the first snows on the mountains, and everything was fresh and bracing, while an abundance of balmy sunshine filled all the noonday hours.
On the 30th, accompanied by Jerome Fay, I made another ascent to make some barometrical observations, the day intervening between the two ascents being devoted to establishing a camp on the extreme edge of the timberline.
To lie out alone in the mountains of a still night and be touched by the first of these small silent messengers from the sky is a memorable experience, and the fineness of that touch none will forget. But the storm-blast laden with crisp, sharp snow seems to crush and bruise and stupefy with its multitude of stings, and compels the bravest to turn and flee.
I frequently sank to my armpits between buried blocks of loose lava, but generally only to my knees.
We had been so long without food that we cared but little about eating, but we eagerly drank the coffee he prepared for us.
No inexperienced person was depending on me, and I told Jerome that we two mountaineers should be able to make our way down through any storm likely to fall.
Jerome peered at short intervals over the ridge, contemplating the rising clouds with anxious gestures in the rough wind, and at length declared that if we did not make a speedy escape we should be compelled to pass the rest of the day and night on the summit.
All I wanted was to have blankets and provisions deposited as far up in the timber as the snow would permit a pack animal to go.
To go farther was out of the question, so we were compelled to camp as best we could.
At the salmon-hatching establishment on the McCloud River I halted a week to examine the limestone belt, grandly developed there, to learn what I could of the inhabitants of the river and its banks, and to give time for the fresh snow that I knew had fallen on the mountain to settle somewhat, with a view to making the ascent.
Again they would look familiar and remind us of stargazing at home.
But there was not a trace of that warm, flushing sunrise splendor we so long had hoped for.
Day after day the storm continued, piling snow on snow in weariless abundance.
Next morning, having slept little the night before the ascent and being weary with climbing after the excitement was over, I slept late.
Toward the end of summer, after a light, open winter, one may reach the summit of Mount Shasta without passing over much snow, by keeping on the crest of a long narrow ridge, mostly bare, that extends from near the camp-ground at the timberline.
The storm side of my blankets was fastened down with stakes to reduce as much as possible the sifting-in of drift and the danger of being blown away.
One huge mountain-cone of cloud, corresponding to Mount Shasta in these newborn cloud ranges, rose close alongside with a visible motion, its firm, polished bosses seeming so near and substantial that we almost fancied that we might leap down upon them from where we stood and make our way to the lowlands.
Here he opened a council in which, under circumstances sufficiently exciting but without evincing any bewilderment, he maintained, in opposition to my views, that it was impossible to proceed.
We shall have to wait for sunshine, and when will it come?"
I held my commanding foothold in the sky for two hours, gazing on the glorious landscapes spread maplike around the immense horizon, and tracing the outlines of the ancient lava-streams extending far into the surrounding plains, and the pathways of vanished glaciers of which Shasta had been the center.
In the afternoon we reached Strawberry Valley and fell asleep.
Presently thin, fibrous films of cloud began to blow directly over the summit from north to south, drawn out in long fairy webs like carded wool, forming and dissolving as if by magic.
But my fire glowed bravely as if in glad defiance of the drift to quench it, and, notwithstanding but little trace of my nest could be seen after the snow had leveled and buried it, I was snug and warm, and the passionate uproar produced a glad excitement.
Melted snow answered for coffee, and we had plenty of venison to roast.
At 9 a.m. the dry thermometer stood at 34 degrees in the shade and rose steadily until at 1 p.m. it stood at 50 degrees, probably influenced somewhat by radiation from the sun-warmed cliffs.
And how lavishly the snow fell only mountaineers may know.
During the storm we lay on our backs so as to present as little surface as possible to the wind, and to let the drift pass over us.
Toward the end of my stay a succession of small clouds struck against the summit rocks like drifting icebergs, darkening the air as they passed, and producing a chill as definite and sudden as if ice-water had been dashed in my face.
After we had forced our way down the ridge and past the group of hissing fumaroles, the storm became inconceivably violent.
Here, on our red trachyte bed, we obtained two hours of shallow sleep broken for occasional glimpses of the keen, starry night.
These higher and finer cloud fabrics were evidently produced by the chilling of the air from its own expansion caused by the upward deflection of the wind against the slopes of the mountain.
After waiting and watching in vain for some flaw in the storm that might be urged as a new argument in favor of attempting the descent, I was compelled to follow.
For the duller and fainter we became the clearer was our vision, though only in momentary glimpses.
A pedestrian on these mountain roads, especially so late in the year, is sure to excite curiosity, and many were the interrogations concerning my ramble.
On the contrary they impressed one as being lasting additions to the landscape.
But anxiety to complete my observations stifled my own instinctive promptings to retreat, and held me to my work.
The wind twisted them into ringlets and whirled them in a succession of graceful convolutions like the outside sprays of Yosemite Falls in flood time; then, sailing out into the thin azure over the precipitous brink of the ridge they were drifted together like wreaths of foam on a river.
After breaking a trail through the snow as far as possible he had tied his animals and walked up.
We were glad at first to see the snow packing about us, hoping it would deaden the force of the wind, but it soon froze into a stiff, crusty heap as the temperature fell, rather augmenting our novel misery.
Mountaineers, however, always find in themselves a reserve of power after great exhaustion.
When the heat became unendurable, on some spot where steam was escaping through the sludge, we tried to stop it with snow and mud, or shifted a little at a time by shoving with our heels; for to stand in blank exposure to the fearful wind in our frozen-and-broiled condition seemed certain death.
Oftentimes imagination coming into play would present charming pictures of the warm zone below, mingled with others near and far.
On the fifth day I returned to Sisson's, and from that comfortable base made excursions, as the weather permitted, to the Black Butte, to the foot of the Whitney Glacier, around the base of the mountain, to Rhett and Klamath Lakes, to the Modoc region and elsewhere, developing many interesting scenes and experiences.
The wind increased in violence, raising the snow in magnificent drifts that were drawn out in the form of wavering banners blowing in the sun.
I seemed to be walking and wallowing in a cloud; but, holding steadily onward, by half-past ten o'clock I had gained the highest summit.
When tired with walking I still wallowed slowly upward on all fours.
I reached camp about an hour before dusk, hollowed a strip of loose ground in the lee of a large block of red lava, where firewood was abundant, rolled myself in my blankets, and went to sleep.
But the bracing air and the sublime beauty of the snowy expanse thrilled every nerve and made absolute exhaustion impossible.
Accordingly, when during the long, dreary watches of the night we roused from a state of half-consciousness, we called each other by name in a frightened, startled way, each fearing the other might be benumbed or dead.
Apprehensive of this coming darkness, I had taken the precaution, when the storm began, to make the most dangerous points clear to my mind, and to mark their relations with reference to the direction of the wind.
The tempered area to which we had committed ourselves extended over about one fourth of an acre; but it was only about an eighth of an inch in thickness, for the scalding gas jets were shorn off close to the ground by the oversweeping flood of frosty wind.
Then the bitter wind and the drift would break the blissful vision and dreary pains cover us like clouds.
"Are you suffering much?" Jerome would inquire with pitiful faintness.
Frozen, blistered, famished, benumbed, our bodies seemed lost to us at times--all dead but the eyes.
Here they were in danger of being lost, but after we had removed packs and saddles and assisted their efforts with ropes, they all escaped to the side of a ridge about a thousand feet below the timberline.
No hint was given, by anything in their appearance, of the fleeting character of these most sublime and beautiful cloud mountains.
When I hinted that new snow was beautiful and storms not so bad as they were called, my advisers shook their heads in token of superior knowledge and declared the ascent of "Shasta Butte" through loose snow impossible.
Nevertheless, before noon of the second of November I was in the frosty azure of the utmost summit.
The mealy snow sifted into the folds of our clothing and in many places reached the skin.
The mountain sheep also, quite a large flock of them, came to my camp and took shelter beside a clump of matted dwarf pines a little above my nest.
All my friends among the birds and plants seemed like OLD friends, and we felt like speaking to every one of them as we passed, as if we had been a long time away in some far, strange country.
But the next spring, on the other side of this eventful winter, I saw and felt still more of the Shasta snow.
The animals began to get discouraged, and after night and darkness came on they became entangled in a bed of rough lava, where, breaking through four or five feet of mealy snow, their feet were caught between angular boulders.
The sky speedily darkened, and just as I had completed my last observation and boxed my instruments ready for the descent, the storm began in serious earnest.
Our discussions ended, Jerome made a dash from the shelter of the lava-block and began forcing his way back against the wind to the "Hot Springs," wavering and struggling to resist being carried away, as if he were fording a rapid stream.
Grey The evening, like an opal; low, A grey moon shrouded in sea fog: Air pregnant with spring; rasp of my steps Beside the lapping water; within The dark.
And that other night, When the river rippled with faint spears Of street lights vaguely reflected.
Monotonously the solemn reeds Waved to our passing; Ahead the canal shimmered, blotched green by the water-weeds. With a grinding swing And see-saw of sound, The steamer slunk down the canal.
NIGHT PIECE
Dark, with crumbling railing and planks, The bridge leads into the sunset. Across it many lonely figures, Their eyes a-flare with the sunset, Their faces glowing with its colors, Tramp past me through the evening.
A silver web has the moon spun, A silver web upon all the sky, Where the frail stars quiver, every one Like tangled gnats that hum and die.
The crowd thins, the players are alone; In their faith's raucous monotone, Loud with gaudy angels, tinsel cherubim, A drum pounds out the hymn.
That night from a dingy hotel room, I saw the moon, like a golden gong, Redly loom Across the lake; like a golden gong In a temple, which a priest ere long Will strike into throbbing song, To wake some silent twinkling city to prayer. The lake waves were flakes of red gold, Burnished to copper, Gold, red as the tangled gleam Of sunlight in your hair.
INCARNATION
CHAPTER VIII
HELEN AND THE CURATE.
TO THE PUBLIC.
"A simple trip to an oysterbank?"
3,000,000 francs!" I went on.
"Me?
"Yet it strikes me that diving suits like yours could perform yeoman service in such work."
"Yes, francs!
"No, my friend.
"Or on the occupational hazards that--"
Right off, I observed a cluster of mountains about 2,000 feet high, whose shapes were very whimsically sculpted. After our position fix, I reentered the lounge, and when our bearings were reported on the chart, I saw that we were off the island of Ceylon, that pearl dangling from the lower lobe of the Indian peninsula.
"In fact," I said, "Mr.
Why yes, certainly, of course!
"What good would a pearl worth millions do us here on the Nautilus?"
"So it's an issue of . . . ?"
"Yes!
The finest pearls are called virgin pearls, or paragons; they form in isolation within the mollusk's tissue. They're white, often opaque but sometimes of opalescent transparency, and usually spherical or pear-shaped.
"But when a little glass of vinegar is worth 1,500,000 francs, its taste is a small price to pay."
To reach it we had to go all the way up Ceylon's west coast.
"Are mussels included too?" the Canadian asked.
But its nucleus is always some small, hard object, say a sterile egg or a grain of sand, around which the mother-of-pearl is deposited in thin, concentric layers over several years in succession."
The spherical ones are made into bracelets; the pear-shaped ones into earrings, and since they're the most valuable, they're priced individually. The other pearls that stick to the oyster's shell are more erratically shaped and are priced by weight.
"Yes," I said, "it's a sad occupation, and one that exists only to gratify the whims of fashion.
"Exactly.
"That Essence of Orient must sell for quite a large sum."
"Cleopatra," Conseil shot back.
"Hardly, professor.
I found it by the 9th parallel off the northwestern shores of Ceylon.
"That's how I see it," the Canadian said.
Assuredly, Captain Nemo hadn't seen fit to plant the idea of sharks in the minds of my companions.
"Did I say sharks?" I exclaimed hastily.
That task is performed with eleven strainers, or sieves, that are pierced with different numbers of holes. Those pearls staying in the strainers with twenty to eighty holes are in the first order.
"But," I said, "getting back to pearls of great value, I don't think any sovereign ever possessed one superior to the pearl owned by Captain Nemo."
It's worthless."
But tell me, captain, how many oysters can a boat fish up in a workday?"
As for Ned Land, I admit I felt less confident of his wisdom. Danger, however great, held a perennial attraction for his aggressive nature.
"Dangerous?" Ned Land replied.
"What risks would you run in a job like that?" Ned Land said. "Swallowing a few gulps of salt water?"
"I admit, captain, I'm not yet on very familiar terms with that genus of fish."
He did so in the most cordial terms and conducted himself like a true gentleman."
It's even said that in 1814, when the English government went fishing on its own behalf, its divers worked just twenty days and brought up 76,000,000 oysters."
"All right, sit down, my friends, and I'll teach you everything I myself have just been taught by the Englishman H. C. Sirr!"
"In the water?"
And could master tell us the profits brought in by harvesting these banks of pearl oysters?"
If you're invited to hunt bears in the Swiss mountains, you might say: "Oh good, I get to go bear hunting tomorrow!" If you're invited to hunt lions on the Atlas plains or tigers in the jungles of India, you might say: "Ha!
"Oh! Elsewhere!" Conseil put in, shaking his head.
You will be going with us, right?"
"He said you'd already discussed this little stroll."
"And why not?"
"Do the prices of these pearls differ depending on their size?" Conseil asked.
"Sir, just what is a pearl exactly?"
"No," I replied quickly, "especially if one takes certain precautions."
Yes, surely, but I hardly knew how to go about it.
"Whatever you say, Ned." Then, trying to imitate Captain Nemo's carefree tone, I asked, "By the way, gallant Ned, are you afraid of sharks?"
Land is right.
The mussels of certain streams in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Saxony, Bohemia, and France."
"Fine.
I can see that you like the idea, Mr. Land."
"Yes!
"My gallant Ned," I replied, laughing, "those were artificial pearls, ordinary glass beads whose insides were coated with Essence of Orient."
At Vienna there was "a counsellor of the ear"--an aulic dignitary.
The truth was that the joy of Barkilphedro had become enthusiastic.
He had quietly prepared everything beforehand.
It is very sweet to do a just action which is disagreeable to those whom we do not like.
The lost child was found. There was a Lord Clancharlie; David Dirry-Moir was nobody.
How bitter the humiliation!
But he was wrong.
Peerage, riches, power, rank--all these things left Lord David and entered Gwynplaine.
The Lord Chancellor, its oracle, had approved.
She was acting like a great queen; she was protecting innocence according to the will of God that Providence in its holy and impenetrable ways, etc., etc.
The most hateful combinations are surpassed by the infernal munificence of the unforeseen.
In the mind of the Lord Chancellor, however, the recognition of Gwynplaine by Hardquanonne was indubitable.
He was going to lose his peerage, and had no suspicion of it. One circumstance is noteworthy.
Gwynplaine, by the inscription over his door, was soon found.
James II. was an easy-minded tiger; like Philip II., his crimes lay light upon his conscience.
There is the tyrant who conceals himself, like Tiberius; and the tyrant who displays himself, like Philip II.
All preliminaries being complete, he had watched till all the necessary legal formalities had been accomplished.
Hardquanonne was still in prison at Chatham.
Holding himself aloof, and without appearing to mix himself up in the matter, it was he who arranged that Josiana should go to the Green Box and see Gwynplaine.
Illustrious and haughty, a player; beautiful, a monster.
The work on which he was engaged could only be expressed in these strange words--the construction of a thunderbolt.
The Earl of Pembroke, President of the Council, proposed that this Captain Halyburton should be made vice-admiral.
A sudden earthquake.
The answer is, cynicism--haughty indifference.
To gnaw one's chain--how tragic and appropriate the expression!
Besides, was it not all due to him, who had waited so long on duty at the gate of chance?
Destiny is subject to such grim caprices.
But how degrading to be thus baffled!
What he most desired was something unspeakably abrupt.
The eyes of dukes of the blood royal have been plucked out for the good of the kingdom.
Fifteen years is nothing.
First, there are ancient monarchical maxims.
The appearance of the mountebank, in his low estate, would be a good ingredient in the combination; later on it would season it.
Gwynplaine!
Only such persons as were absolutely necessary to the plan were in the secret of what was taking place.
If there be one thing in the world which can be more hideous than another, 'tis joy.
James II. was of this latter variety.
Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, a Catholic peer, who is hereditary Earl Marshal of England, had sent word by his deputy Earl Marshal, Henry Howard, Earl Bindon, that he would agree with the Lord Chancellor.
Royalty on this occasion had shown itself a good and scrupulous guardian of the privileges of the peerage.
They had only to put their hands on him.
It happened that at six leagues from the anchorage of the naval station commanded by Lord David, a captain called Halyburton broke through the French fleet.
His vengeance--for he called it his vengeance--had been softly brought to him by the waves.
His ugliness would please the queen in the same proportion as it displeased Josiana.
A man commits a bad action, and places his mark upon it.
Here was a case of the restoration of a peer.
He had always been destined for the church.
There was no point to submit to the House, and the Queen, assisted by the Lord Chancellor, had power to recognize and admit the new peer.
Christina seized Monaldeschi, had him confessed and assassinated, and said,--
Like every one else, he had been to see the Laughing Man.
Whatever might be the face of the new lord, a face cannot be urged in objection to a right.
One day one of the four gunners composing the garrison of Castle Calshor picked up on the sand at low water a flask covered with wicker, which had been cast up by the tide.
He said to himself that it had all been done to fulfil his intentions.
They obtained from the local archives at Vevey, at Lausanne, the certificate of Lord Linnaeus's marriage in exile, the certificate of his child's birth, the certificate of the decease of the father and mother; and they had duplicates, duly authenticated, made to answer all necessary requirements.
Queen Anne, in one particular unfeminine, seeing that she could keep a secret, demanded a confidential report of so grave a matter from the Lord Chancellor--one of the kind specified as "report to the royal ear." Reports of this kind have been common in all monarchies.
Philip was sullen, James jovial.
To fill up the measure of crime by effrontery, to denounce himself, to cling to his misdeeds, is the insolent bravado of the criminal.
He fancied that it had been effected for Barkilphedro, and that he was well worth the trouble. Thus it is ever with Satan.
As to Barkilphedro, he was joyful--a circumstance which gave a lugubrious expression to his face.
Therefore he had nothing to dissimulate nor to extenuate, and his assassinations were by divine right.
That co-operation had continued for fifteen years.
The confrontation of Hardquanonne with Gwynplaine had taken place. Barkilphedro had been present.
He was transferred from Chatham to London.
The House of Lords could not but be grateful.
Mischief and kindness combined.
The reinstatement of Lord Fermain Clancharlie was, moreover, a very simple affair, the heir being legitimate, and in the direct line.
He seemed but little surprised, for astonishment is the attribute of a little mind.
At heart we may admit that he was very much astonished.
He did not blame James II., who was, after all, the queen's father.
All this had occurred owing to the circumstance of a soldier having found a bottle on the beach.
He was the artificer.
He, too, would not have minded leaving behind him those archives of Simancas, with all his misdeeds dated, classified, labelled, and put in order, each in its compartment, like poisons in the cabinet of a chemist.
To reinstate Gwynplaine was to crush Josiana. Barkilphedro had succeeded, and it was for this that for so many years the waves, the surge, the squalls had buffeted, shaken, thrown, pushed, tormented, and respected this bubble of glass, which bore within it so many commingled fates.
The message sent to God had reached the devil. Space had committed an abuse of confidence, and a lurking sarcasm which mingles with events had so arranged that it had complicated the loyal triumph of the lost child's becoming Lord Clancharlie with a venomous victory: in doing a good action, it had mischievously placed justice at the service of iniquity.
The King of Tunis tore out the eyes of his father, Muley Assem, and his ambassadors have not been the less favourably received by the emperor.
William, Baron Cowper, Chancellor of England, whom the queen believed in because he was short-sighted like herself, or even more so, had committed to writing a memorandum commencing thus: "Two birds were subject to Solomon--a lapwing, the hudbud, who could speak all languages; and an eagle, the simourganka, who covered with the shadow of his wings a caravan of twenty thousand men.
Secondly, there is a royal right of mutilation.
He did not believe that it had all been done for Gwynplaine.
A hideous husband for her sister, and a fine step for Lord David.
All the castles, parks, forests, town houses, palaces, domains, Josiana included, belonged to Gwynplaine.
The flask found at Calshor had awakened his interest in the highest degree.
He had a vague longing to be a bishop.
She was proudly and royally disdainful.
The fragments of the event which was to satisfy his hate were spread out within his reach.
To keep hate thenceforth in a case, like a dagger in a museum!
The soldier carried the waif to the colonel of the castle, and the colonel sent it to the High Admiral of England.
Observe the design!
To know that the future husband of her sister was deformed, sufficed the queen.
"I am the Queen of Sweden, in the palace of the King of France."
And what a climax for Josiana!
Josiana entered her house feeling very spiteful, supped in a bad humour, had the spleen, dismissed every one except her page, then dismissed him, and went to bed while it was yet daylight.
The queen immediately took the matter into consideration.
One has the attributes of the scorpion, the other those rather of the leopard.
Both were equally ferocious.
To set the sign-manual to crimes is right royal.
And on this point the chancellor, as constitutional keeper of the royal conscience, based the royal decision.
He had, we know, a gay and open countenance, differing so far from Philip.
Her Majesty was going to enjoy a comedy.
Why object to such manners?
In making the forbidden the permitted fruit, Eve fell; in making the permitted the forbidden fruit, she triumphs.
Hence the deep respect of the Episcopalian Church for that queen--respect resented by the Church of Rome, which counterbalanced it with a dash of excommunication.
Gallantry found its convenience in a certain medley of ranks.
Nowadays England, whose Loyola is named Wesley, casts down her eyes a little at the remembrance of that past age.
Beyond all, keep the human species at a distance.
It was the dawn of the eighteenth century.
At court all admired the good taste of this delay.
One day she said to Swift, "You people fancy that you know what scorn is." "You people" meant the human race.
Besides, Josiana, while she knew herself to be a bastard, felt herself a princess, and carried her authority over him with a high tone in all their arrangements.
To be too much on the defensive points to a secret desire for attack; the shy woman is not strait-laced.
These fine ladies, moreover, knew Latin.
At times her sleepy and voluptuous way of dragging out the end of her phrases was like the creeping of a tiger's paws in the jungle.
He addressed sonnets to her, which Josiana sometimes read.
Lord David was handsome, but that was over and above the bargain.
Mary Stuart, less concerned with the church and more with the woman part of the question, had little respect for her sister Elizabeth, and wrote to her as queen to queen and coquette to prude: "Your disinclination to marriage arises from your not wishing to lose the liberty of being made love to." Mary Stuart played with the fan, Elizabeth with the axe.
Such were the models of the day.
She is vexed at the memory, yet proud of it.
To err is a diversion.
She must eventually marry Lord David, since such was the royal pleasure.
She appeared to have emerged from the foam.
Forty; 'tis a marked period.
Did they hate each other?
The Duchess Josiana Latinized. Then (another fine thing) she was secretly a Catholic; after the manner of her uncle, Charles II., rather than her father, James II.
England was a sketch of what France was during the regency.
She had the self-possession of a goddess.
To have made her nudity a torment, ever eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an amusement to her.
Princely unconstraint has the privilege of experiment, and what is frailty in a plebeian is only frolic in a duchess.
Lord David was handsome, so much the better. The danger in being handsome is being insipid; and that he was not.
Lady Jane Grey had carried fashion to the point of knowing Hebrew.
The young and pretty Duchess of Buckingham, Countess of Coventry, made a fool of herself for love of the handsome Thomas Bellasys, Viscount Falconberg, who was sixty-seven.
It is a protection.
They were rivals, besides, in literature.
The ancient comparison of flesh to marble is absolutely false.
She washed her face, arms, shoulders, and neck, in sugar-candy, diluted in white of egg, after the fashion of Castile.
It is true (for manners re-echo each other) that in the sixteenth century Smeton's nightcap had been found under Anne Boleyn's pillow.
An uneven match.
Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young.
The maiden a sovereign, the wife a subject, such was the old English notion.
On the other hand, Josiana had dreams.
Adam is left outside.
The novels of those days carried lovers and engaged couples to that kind of stage which was the most becoming.
In these sonnets he declared that to possess Josiana would be to rise to the stars, which did not prevent his always putting the ascent off to the following year. He waited in the antechamber outside Josiana's heart; and this suited the convenience of both.
He who might have looked upon Josiana nude would have perceived her outlines only through a surrounding glory.
It was the fashion.
It is unbecoming to be married--fades one's ribbons and makes one look old.
Josiana was deferring the hour of this subjection as long as she could.
Every prude puts on an air of repugnance.
She shut herself up in the arrogance of the exceptional circumstances of her rank, meditating, perhaps, all the while, some sudden lapse from it.
Not that she was unfeeling.
Mary Stuart composed French verses; Elizabeth translated Horace.
Josiana felt herself majestic and material.
This is the pleasant view to take of religion.
The Duchess Josiana had a peculiarity, less rare than it is supposed. One of her eyes was blue and the other black.
Sometimes she wore an embroidered cloth jacket like a bachelor.
Never had a passion approached her, yet she had sounded them all.
To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times.
Lord David, on his side, bowed down before the fascinations of the Duchess Josiana--a maiden without spot or scruple, haughty, inaccessible, and audacious.
In the mouth of Sixtus V., when anathematizing Elizabeth, malediction turned to madrigal.
Night and day were mingled in her look.
The beauty of flesh consists in not being marble: its beauty is to palpitate, to tremble, to blush, to bleed, to have firmness without hardness, to be white without being cold, to have its sensations and its infirmities; its beauty is to be life, and marble is death.
Hers was a noble neck, a splendid bosom, heaving harmoniously over a royal heart, a glance full of life and light, a countenance pure and haughty, and who knows?
That is the climax.
She was extravagant in gold lace.
The recoils of pride in the direction opposed to our vices lead us to those of a contrary nature.
She was a skin-deep Papist.
In default of thunderclaps there is impertinence.
Her hair was of that tinge which might be called red gold.
The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary.
The temple shrivels into the boudoir.
She discoursed on Locke; she was polite; she was suspected of knowing Arabic.
She had a fancy for Lord David.
At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the Gerrards of Bromley, filled London with his successes.
She was a little too heavy for her cloud.
She thought little of her reputation, but much of her glory.
Biblical precedent goes so far as to speak of a child who was called Ebnehaquem or Melilechet--that is to say, the Wise Man's son.
The advantage of prudes is that they disorganize the human race.
A pretension to divinity not admitted creates affectation.
Never, covering her frailty by her charms, and her weakness by her omnipotence, has she claimed absolution more imperiously.
She was very tall--too tall.
Their kinship is visible in the fop.
She usurped rather than charmed.
To be fashionable is everything.
Josiana appreciated Lord David, and showed him off.
To make Love prosaically decent, how gross! to deprive it of all impropriety, how dull!
He did not perceive this, and in truth he looked no more than thirty.
To be "the flesh" and to be woman are two different things.
Nevertheless, she might find it amusing to plan a fall for herself.
Her origin had been bastardy and the ocean.
It was the excessive effort to be chaste which made her a prude.
He took Mrs. Darling's kiss with him.
"Boy or girl?"
Then she turned up the light, and Peter saw.
"I suppose so."
Of course he did not strike.
"But, alas, he forgot all about me," Wendy said it with a smile.
"Peter," said Wendy the comforter, "I should love you in a beard;" and Mrs. Darling stretched out her arms to him, but he repulsed her.
Funny.
"What is it?" he cried, shrinking.
She huddled by the fire not daring to move, helpless and guilty, a big woman.
She loved to hear of Peter, and Wendy told her all she could remember in the very nursery from which the famous flight had taken place.
"Well, then, come with me to the little house."
I am ever so much more than twenty.
"Yes, I know," Jane said, "I have been waiting for you."
"Yes, that was it," says Jane, with a big breath.
He gave a cry of pain; and when the tall beautiful creature stooped to lift him in her arms he drew back sharply.
"Yes, I know."
For a little longer she tried for his sake not to have growing pains; and she felt she was untrue to him when she got a prize for general knowledge.
Years rolled on again, and Wendy had a daughter.
Wendy was grown up.
"I forget them after I kill them," he replied carelessly.
"No, I don't.
In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.
Jane is now a common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories about himself, to which he listens eagerly.
When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to see her he said, "Who is Tinker Bell?"
"But where are you going to live?"
Wendy was sitting on the floor, very close to the fire, so as to see to darn, for there was no other light in the nursery; and while she sat darning she heard a crow.
"I couldn't help it.
"The dear old days when I could fly!"
"But he does so need a mother."
"That is not Michael," she said quickly, lest a judgment should fall on her.
"No."
"That is a long time ago, sweetheart," says Wendy.
When Wendy returned diffidently she found Peter sitting on the bed-post crowing gloriously, while Jane in her nighty was flying round the room in solemn ecstasy.
"O Peter," she said, shocked; but even when she explained he could not remember.
This ought not to be written in ink but in a golden splash.
"Rather not.
"No, you're not."
The kiss that had been for no one else, Peter took quite easily.
Wendy would have preferred a more permanent arrangement; and it seemed to her that spring would be long in coming; but this promise sent Peter away quite gay again.
"Yes, and the little girl in the bed is my baby."
Or perhaps Wendy admits she does see something.
"I sat up in bed and I said, 'Boy, why are you crying?'"
When she was old enough to ask them they were mostly about Peter Pan.
She sat up in bed, and was interested at once.
"No."
Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.
"Of course; that is why I have come." He added a little sternly, "Have you forgotten that this is spring cleaning time?"
"You won't forget me, Peter, will you, before spring cleaning time comes?"
"Yes, so do I. What was the last thing Peter ever said to you?"
"What did his crow sound like?" Jane asked one evening.
"I always cut their hair myself," said Wendy.
"I shall have Tink."
"Perhaps he is ill," Michael said.
All the boys were grown up and done for by this time; so it is scarcely worth while saying anything more about them.
You need not be sorry for her.
The bearded man who doesn't know any story to tell his children was once John.
"It is just for spring cleaning time," Jane said, "he wants me always to do his spring cleaning."
He was a little boy, and she was grown up.
"Tink can't go a twentieth part of the way round," she reminded him a little tartly.
"Yes, you did."
They went up by the stair, because they thought this would make a better impression.
It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly."
When people grow up they forget the way."
Wendy was a little startled.
Mrs. Darling came to the window, for at present she was keeping a sharp eye on Wendy.
And then one night came the tragedy.
The Douglas squirrel does not strictly belong to these upper woods, and I was surprised to see him out in such weather.
Jerome accompanied me a little distance above camp and indicated the way as well as he could in the darkness.
The grand color glow--the autumnal jubilee of ripe leaves--was past prime, but, freshened by the rain, was still making a fine show along the banks of the river and in the ravines and the dells of the smaller streams.
The precious bread sack was placed safely as a pillow, and when at length the first flakes fell I was exultingly ready to welcome them.
Sisson, who is a mountaineer, speedily fitted me out for storm or calm as only a mountaineer could, with warm blankets and a week's provisions so generous in quantity and kind that they easily might have been made to last a month in case of my being closely snowbound.
Our feet were wrapped in sacking, and we were soon mounted and on our way down into the thick sunshine--"God's Country," as Sisson calls the Chaparral Zone.
The hail gave place to snow, and darkness came on like night.
Some crystals landed with their rays almost perfect, but most of them were worn and broken by striking against one another, or by rolling on the ground.
The weary hours wore away like dim half-forgotten years, so long and eventful they seemed, though we did nothing but suffer.
The thermometer fell 22 degrees in a few minutes, and soon dropped below zero.
My bedroom was flooded with sunshine, and from the window I saw the great white Shasta cone clad in forests and clouds and bearing them loftily in the sky. Everything seemed full and radiant with the freshness and beauty and enthusiasm of youth.
The frost was intense, and drifting snow dust made breathing at times rather difficult.
In about thirteen hours--every hour like a year--day began to dawn, but it was long ere the summit's rocks were touched by the sun. No clouds were visible from where we lay, yet the morning was dull and blue, and bitterly frosty; and hour after hour passed by while we eagerly watched the pale light stealing down the ridge to the hollow where we lay.
In the mean time clouds were growing down in Shasta Valley--massive swelling cumuli, displaying delicious tones of purple and gray in the hollows of their sun-beaten bosses.
The ordinary sensations of cold give but a faint conception of that which comes on after hard climbing with want of food and sleep in such exposure as this.
I gazed enchanted, but cold gray masses, drifting like dust on a wind-swept plain, began to shut out the light, forerunners of the coming storm I had been so anxiously watching.
Snowstorms of the same gentle kind abound among the high peaks, but in spring they not unfrequently attain larger proportions, assuming a violence and energy of expression scarcely surpassed by those bred in the depths of winter.
The wind swept past in hissing floods, grinding the snow into meal and sweeping down into the hollows in enormous drifts all the heavier particles, while the finer dust was sifted through the sky, increasing the icy gloom.
As it was, we had first to make our way along a dangerous ridge nearly a mile and a half long, flanked in many places by steep ice-slopes at the head of the Whitney Glacier on one side and by shattered precipices on the other.
Such was the storm now gathering about us.
The wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged amid the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old volcano were breaking forth again.
There was a deliberate growth of clouds, a weaving of translucent tissue above, then the roar of the wind and the thunder, and the darkening flight of snow. Its subsidence was not less sudden.
Most of my firewood was more than half rosin and would blaze in the face of the fiercest drifting; the winds could not demolish my bed, and my bread could be made to last indefinitely; while in case of need I had the means of making snowshoes and could retreat or hold my ground as I pleased.
Extending gradually southward around on both sides of Shasta, these at length united with the older field towards Lassen's Butte, thus encircling Mount Shasta in one continuous cloud zone.
When I said that I was simply taking a walk, and that icy Shasta was my mark, I was invariably admonished that I had come on a dangerous quest.
Rhett and Klamath Lakes were eclipsed beneath clouds scarcely less brilliant than their own silvery disks.
The touch of these snow-flowers in calm weather is infinitely gentle--glinting, swaying, settling silently in the dry mountain air, or massed in flakes soft and downy.
The weather of the springtime and summer, throughout the Sierra in general, is usually varied by slight local rains and dustings of snow, most of which are obviously far too joyous and life-giving to be regarded as storms--single clouds growing in the sunny sky, ripening in an hour, showering the heated landscape, and passing away like a thought, leaving no visible bodily remains to stain the sky.
After passing the "Hot Springs" I halted in the lee of a lava-block to let Jerome, who had fallen a little behind, come up.
Up to the time the storm first broke on the summit its development was remarkably gentle.
This is the kind of cloud in which snow-flowers grow, and I turned and fled.
They were then on their way south to their winter homes, leading their young full-fledged and about as large and strong as the parents.
My barometer and the sighing winds and filmy half-transparent clouds that dimmed the sunshine gave notice of the approach of another storm, and I was in haste to be off and get myself established somewhere in the midst of it, whether the summit was to be attained or not.
Our feet were frozen, and thawing them was painful, and had to be done very slowly by keeping them buried in soft snow for several hours, which avoided permanent damage. Five thousand feet below the summit we found only three inches of new snow, and at the base of the mountain only a slight shower of rain had fallen, showing how local our storm had been, notwithstanding its terrific fury.
The time was far too late, the snow was too loose and deep to climb, and I should be lost in drifts and slides.
He seemed loath to leave me, but, being reassured that I was at home and required no care, he bade me good-bye and returned to camp, ready to lead his animals down the mountain at daybreak.
The creative sun shone glorious on the vast expanse of cloudland; hill and dale, mountain and valley springing into existence responsive to his rays and steadily developing in beauty and individuality.
When day dawned the clouds were crawling slowly and becoming more massive, but gave no intimation of immediate danger, and I pushed on faithfully, though holding myself well in hand, ready to return to the timber; for it was easy to see that the storm was not far off.
But, as I had left my coat in camp for the sake of having my limbs free in climbing, I soon was cold.
At 10 a.m. we reached the timber and were safe.
The crisp crystal flowers seemed to touch one another and fairly to thicken the tremendous blast that carried them.
Could we at once have begun to descend the snow slopes leading to the timber, we might have made good our escape, however dark and wild the storm.
The mountain rises ten thousand feet above the general level of the country, in blank exposure to the deep upper currents of the sky, and no labyrinth of peaks and canyons I had ever been in seemed to me so dangerous as these immense slopes, bare against the sky.
The clouds broke and vanished, not a crystal was left in the sky, and the stars shone out with pure and tranquil radiance.
Squirrels, dry and elastic after the storms, were busy about their stores of pine nuts, and the latest goldenrods were still in bloom, though it was now past the middle of October.
A pitch pine fire speedily changed the temperature and shed a blaze of light on the wild lava-slope and the straggling storm-bent pines around us.
A common bumblebee, not at all benumbed, zigzagged vigorously about our heads for a few moments, as if unconscious of the fact that the nearest honey flower was a mile beneath him.
Still the pain was not always of that bitter, intense kind that precludes thought and takes away all capacity for enjoyment.
But on my first excursion to the summit the whole mountain, down to its low swelling base, was smoothly laden with loose fresh snow, presenting a most glorious mass of winter mountain scenery, in the midst of which I scrambled and reveled or lay snugly snowbound, enjoying the fertile clouds and the snow-bloom in all their growing, drifting grandeur.
Our frozen trousers could scarcely be made to bend at the knee, and we waded the snow with difficulty.
Toward midnight I rolled myself in my blankets, slept an hour and a half, arose and ate more venison, tied two days' provisions to my belt, and set out for the summit, hoping to reach it ere the coming storm should fall.
On the 28th of April [1875] I led a party up the mountain for the purpose of making a survey of the summit with reference to the location of the Geodetic monument.
The slight weariness of the ascent was soon rested away, and our glorious morning in the sky promised nothing but enjoyment.
It is a kind of second life, available only in emergencies like this; and, having proved its existence, I had no great fear that either of us would fail, though one of my arms was already benumbed and hung powerless.
This was the bloom-time, the summer of the cloud, and never before have I seen even a mountain cloud flowering so profusely.
Life is then seen to be a fire, that now smoulders, now brightens, and may be easily quenched.
Well I knew the weariness of snow-climbing, and the frosts, and the dangers of mountaineering so late in the year; therefore I could not ask a guide to go with me, even had one been willing.
Then, awaking suddenly, my eyes opened on one of the most beautiful and sublime scenes I ever enjoyed.
Next morning we seemed to have risen from the dead.
The acrid incrustations sublimed from the escaping gases frequently gave way, opening new vents to scald us; and, fearing that if at any time the wind should fall, carbonic acid, which often formed a considerable portion of the gaseous exhalations of volcanoes, might collect in sufficient quantities to cause sleep and death, I warned Jerome against forgetting himself for a single moment, even should his sufferings admit of such a thing.
When I arrived at Sisson's everything was quiet.
Then, after the sky cleared, we gazed at the stars, blessed immortals of light, shining with marvelous brightness with long lance rays, near-looking and new-looking, as if never seen before.
The steepness of the slope--thirty-five degrees in some places--made any kind of progress fatiguing, while small avalanches were being constantly set in motion in the steepest places.
Sisson's children came in with flowers and covered my bed, and the storm on the mountaintop banished like a dream.
The summit ridge was fortunately wind-swept and nearly bare, so we were not compelled to lift our feet high, and on reaching the long home slopes laden with loose snow we made rapid progress, sliding and shuffling and pitching headlong, our feebleness accelerating rather than diminishing our speed.
During these calm intervals I replenished my fire--sometimes without leaving the nest, for fire and woodpile were so near this could easily be done--or busied myself with my notebook, watching the gestures of the trees in taking the snow, examining separate crystals under a lens, and learning the methods of their deposition as an enduring fountain for the streams.
The storm lasted about a week, but before it was ended Sisson became alarmed and sent up the guide with animals to see what had become of me and recover the camp outfit.
A Perilous Night on Shasta's Summit
When, therefore, the darkness came on, and the bewildering drift, I felt confident that we could force our way through it with no other guidance.
But the bloom of this fertile snow cloud grew and matured and fell to a depth of two feet in a few hours.
I had walked from Redding, sauntering leisurely from station to station along the old Oregon stage road, the better to see the rocks and plants, birds and people, by the way, tracing the rushing Sacramento to its fountains around icy Shasta.
"I am, dear Mr. Meredith,
From thence onward his behaviour was somewhat extraordinary for a well-bred servant.
He paid a visit to the library, where the secretary was engaged in making copies of Kara's correspondence, answering letters appealing for charitable donations, and in the hack words which fall to the secretaries of the great.
"Mr. Kara keeps some of his private papers in there," said the girl quietly, "he has told me so himself."
Good morning to you."
To refuse the favours of Remington Kara was, by him, regarded as something of an affront.
"I want you to go out now," she said, "I have no stamps."
By the side of the bed on a small table was a telephone, the sight of which apparently afforded the servant a little amusement.
"I think I will go as I am," he said.
Fisher nodded.
He lifted his shoulders with a deprecating smile.
"Blackmail suggests to me a vulgar attempt to obtain money."
In his more generous moments he would address his bodyguard as "Fred," and on more occasions than one, and for no apparent reason, had tipped his servant over and above his salary.
"Very good, sir," said the urbane Fisher, "will you change before you go out?"
If I can buy it, well and good.
"It's a sight for sore eyes to see you in my kitchen, miss," she smiled.
Fisher went back to the library.
"Keep my fire going, put all my private letters in my bedroom, and see that Miss Holland has her lunch."
Her hand shook a little as she pulled it open.
He rang the bell, this time for his valet.
"Thank you," said the girl quietly, "but I am already being paid quite sufficient."
"REMINGTON KARA."
She took them out one by one and at the bottom she found what she had been searching for and that which had filled her thoughts for the past three months.
"There's a gentleman who wants to see Mr. Kara," she said, "here is his card."
Kara rose from his desk and began to pace the room.
I feel that anything less will neither rehabilitate me in your esteem, nor secure for me the remnants of my shattered self-respect.
He replenished the fire, asked deferentially for any instructions and returned again to his quest.
"What would justify the use of such an awful weapon?" she asked.
"He will be back very shortly, sir," said the urbane Fisher.
Mr. Fred Fisher found little to reward him for his search until he came upon Kara's cheque book which told him that on the previous day the Greek had drawn 6,000 pounds in cash from the bank.
I know he goes in sometimes because I tried a dodge that my brother--who's a policeman--taught me.
He rang a bell on his table and the girl who had so filled T. X. with a sense of awe came from an adjoining room.
He was less than half-way down when the one maid of Kara's household came up to meet him.
"It is a matter of plane," he said airily.
"Take these!" he ordered peremptorily, pointing to the books under his arm.
She pointed to the far end of the kitchen to a soiled looking door of unpainted wood.
"Rum cove," he said again, and lifting the latch to the hook which held it up, left the room, closing the door softly behind him.
"What is that, Fisher!" asked the girl.
Kara folded the letter and inserted it in its envelope.
The maid--who was also cook--arose up as the girl entered.
"That is a word I never use, nor do I like to hear it employed," he said.
If I can obtain it by any merit I possess, I utilize that merit, providing always, that I can secure my object in the time, otherwise--"
It's that door that gives me the hump."
"I'll see this gentleman," he said, with a sudden brisk interest.
"You will see that this is delivered, Miss Holland."
It was a large safe of the usual type.
"I suppose that is how blackmailers feel."
The top pair were locked.
From her bag she produced a small purse and opened it.
"For example--I want something--I cannot obtain that something through the ordinary channel or by the employment of ordinary means.
"I'm afraid you're rather lonely, Mrs. Beale," said the girl sympathetically.
The newcomer glared round at the valet.
"Viewed from my standpoint, they are sordid criminals--the sort of person that T. X. meets, I presume, in the course of his daily work.
Give me those books."
In that case was a new steel key.
"What time did Mr. Kara say he would be back?"
A pair of pince-nez sat crookedly on his nose and two fat volumes under his arm completed the picture.
Half his quarrel with T. X. was that gentleman's curious indifference to the benevolent attitude which Kara had persistently adopted in his dealings with the detective.
His cook, and the other domestics, necessary for conducting an establishment of that size, were engaged by the day.
He walked down the corridor, with a meditative frown, and began to descend the stairs to the hall.
"I've waited three years, I tell you.
She returned the papers to the drawer, pushed it to and locked it.
I need hardly tell you--"
"Part of it, Miss Holland," he smiled.
Probably he required no such encouragement, for in the presence of his social inferiors he was somewhat monopolizing.
"Out, is he?" boomed the visitor.
This he was plucking with nervous jerks, talking to himself the while, and casting a disparaging eye upon the portrait of Remington Kara which hung above the marble fireplace.
If you will allow Gathercole, who will be unconscious of the part he is playing, to act as peacemaker between yourself and myself, I shall feel that his trip, which has cost me a large sum of money, will not have been wasted.
"I hope that we shall both forget this unhappy morning and that you will give me an opportunity of rendering to you in person, the apologies which are due to you.
"Mr. Kara will be very cross, but I don't see how you can help it.
"I am hoping you will dine with me next week and meet a most interesting man, George Gathercole, who has just returned from Patagonia,--I only received his letter this morning-- having made most remarkable discoveries concerning that country.
"Is that your creed?" she asked quietly.
"I intend increasing that to 5 pounds because you suit me most admirably."
She nodded.
I wish you had called me."
This interested him mightily and he replaced the cheque book with the tightened lips and the fixed gaze of a man who was thinking rapidly.
He gave a savage little tug at his beard.
"Six o'clock, eh?
"Fisher," he said, "I am expecting a visit from a gentleman named Gathercole--a one-armed gentleman whom you must look after if he comes. Detain him on some pretext or other because he is rather difficult to get hold of and I want to see him.
"Which is generally very badly wanted by the people who use it," said the girl, with a little smile, "and, according to your argument, they are also justified."
"At six o'clock, miss," the man replied.
"I feel sure that you are large enough minded and too much a man of the world to allow my foolish fit of temper to disturb a relationship which I have always hoped would be mutually pleasant.
What the devil does he mean by being out?
He paused for a moment before the closed door of the room and smilingly surveyed the great steel latch which spanned the door and fitted into an iron socket securely screwed to the framework.
There were four steel drawers fitted at the back and at the bottom of the strong box.
"I see," she said, nodding her head quickly.
He put it carefully in his pocket and went from the room to change. Large as the house was Kara did not employ a regular staff of servants. A maid and a valet comprised the whole of the indoor staff.
"I have heard of him," said the girl.
She passed swiftly down the corridor to Kara's room and made straight for the safe.
"A man with a singular mind," said Kara; "a man against whom my favourite weapon would fail."
"No, I don't think that would be advisable.
He owed her something for that--why did she try to protect him?
The little fellow wheeled suddenly, and his feet spurned the sand around the bushes for home--the astonished frog dragged bumping after him.
He little guessed that while he halted to let his horse drink, the girl lay on a rock above him, looking down. She was nearer home now and was less afraid; so she had slipped from the trail and climbed above it there to watch him pass.
You can see I'm fishing, but why does everybody in these mountains want to know my name?"
That was a queer name for the mountains, and the fisherman wondered if he had heard aright--June.
Now and then he could see the same slender foot-prints in the rich loam and he saw them in the sand where the first tiny brook tinkled across the path from a gloomy ravine. There the little creature had taken a flying leap across it and, beyond, he could see the prints no more.
She looked at the fisherman and his tackle with the naive wonder of a child, and then she said in a commanding undertone.
At the edge of the bushes, he looked back; the stranger was still fishing, and the old man went on with a shake of his head.
As he went on, she slid from her perch and with cat-footed quiet followed him.
"Cat got your tongue?"
He smiled, remembering--he liked that.
"Stop that, please," he said, with a humourous smile.
The fisherman never moved and there was the click of a shell thrown into place in the Winchester and a guttural oath from the mountaineer's beard.
"Have you got a father?" Like a flash, her whole face changed.
"Suppose I don't tell you," he said gravely.
"How are you?" The giant's heavy eyes lifted quickly, but he spoke to the girl.
There was a bass down there in the clear water--a big one--and the man whistled cheerily and dismounted, tying his horse to a sassafras bush and unbuckling a tin bucket and a curious looking net from his saddle.
The fisherman threw back his head, and his peal of laughter did what his sternness failed to do.
"You heerd me!"
He was just becoming accustomed to the mountain etiquette that commands a stranger to divulge himself first.
"I should say not," he said teasingly.
Still there was no sound of ox or wagon and the voice sounded like a child's.
Down the rise and through a thicket he went, and as he approached the creek that came down past the cabin there was a shrill cry ahead of him.
The girl shrank to the bushes, but she cried sharply back:
When he reached the river she saw him pull in his horse and eagerly bend forward, looking into a pool just below the crossing.
"Go on, Billy."
How could he get a fish out with that little switch, she thought contemptuously?
"Oh, well, of course, you can't talk, if the cat's got your tongue."
"Good Lord!" said the fisherman, startled, and then he stopped--the words were as innocent on her lips as a benediction.
The minnow was all right, so he tossed it back again.
"No use gittin' mad, young feller," he said coolly.
"Yes." The fisherman turned again and saw the giant's rugged face stern and pale with open anger now, and he, too, grew suddenly serious.
The steady eyes leaped angrily, but there was still no answer, and he bent to take the fish off his hook, put on a fresh minnow, turned his back and tossed it into the pool.
He was leaning with one arm on the muzzle of his Winchester, his face had suddenly become suave and shrewd and now he laughed again:
The little girl was a wonder: evidently she had muffled his last name on purpose--not knowing it herself--and it was a quick and cunning ruse.
In her wonder, she rose unconsciously to her feet and a stone rolled down to the ledge below her.
"No--not in THESE mountains--why?"
He looked up again.
"Here, boy," said the fisherman with affected sternness: "What are you doing with that dagger?"
By and by something hummed queerly, the man gave a slight jerk and a shining fish flopped two feet into the air.
"Shet up!"
His face was smooth and looked different, as did his throat and his hands.
Along this spur it travelled straight for a while and, as her eyes eagerly followed it to where it sank sharply into a covert of maples, the little creature dropped of a sudden to the ground and, like something wild, lay flat.
Where was the shrieking monster that ran without horses like the wind and tossed back rolling black plumes all streaked with fire?
She had seen that it was a man, but she had dropped so quickly that she did not see the big, black horse that, unled, was following him.
With the thought, she rose slowly to her feet, moved slowly to the cliff that dropped sheer ten feet aside from the trail, and stood there like a great scarlet flower in still air.
So, she lay back and rested--her little mouth tightening fiercely.
She sat at the base of the big tree--her little sunbonnet pushed back, her arms locked about her knees, her bare feet gathered under her crimson gown and her deep eyes fixed on the smoke in the valley below. Her breath was still coming fast between her parted lips.
Still, seen or not seen, flight was easy for her, so she could not forbear to look again.
Beyond those white mists trailing up the hills, beyond the blue smoke drifting in the valley, those limitless blue waves must run under the sun on and on to the end of the world!
BY
Where was the great glare of yellow light that the "circuit rider" had told about--and the leaping tongues of fire?
Now both man and horse had stopped.
She had never been up there before.
Starting to mount, the man stopped with one foot in the stirrup and raised his eyes towards her so suddenly that she shrank back again with a quicker throbbing at her heart and pressed closer to the earth.
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The mountains ran in limitless blue waves towards the mounting sun--but at birth her eyes had opened on them as on the white mists trailing up the steeps below her.
Something blue was tied loosely about his throat.
Beyond them was a gap in the next mountain chain and down in the little valley, just visible through it, were trailing blue mists as well, and she knew that they were smoke.
Her dead sister had gone into that far silence and had brought back wonderful stories of that outer world: and she began to wonder more than ever before whether she would ever go into it and see for herself what was there.
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The stranger had taken off his gray slouched hat and he was wiping his face with something white.
She had no business there now, and, if she were found out when she got back, she would get a scolding and maybe something worse from her step-mother--and all that trouble and risk for nothing but smoke.
Down it went, writhing this way and that to a spur that had been swept bare by forest fires.
His breeches were tight and on his feet were strange boots that were the colour of his saddle, which was deep in seat, high both in front and behind and had strange long-hooded stirrups.
For many days now she had heard stories of the "furriners" who had come into those hills and were doing strange things down there, and so at last she had climbed up through the dewy morning from the cove on the other side to see the wonders for herself.
She drew a long breath and stirred uneasily--she'd better go home now--but the path had a snake-like charm for her and still she stood, following it as far down as she could with her eyes.
Apparently, he had seen nothing--only that the next turn of the trail was too steep to ride, and so he started walking again, and his walk, as he strode along the path, was new to her, as was the erect way with which he held his head and his shoulders.
"Here I am," says Ill-Luck--"here in this hazel-nut, under the roots of the oak-tree."
"Well," says he, "this is the most curious thing I have seen for a long time.
"Oh, Ill-Luck brought me," said the Fiddler.
The queen was very fond of him, and was glad enough to show him all the fine things that were to be seen; so hand in hand they went everywhere, from garret to cellar.
But by-and-by he began to wonder where all the good things came from. Then, before long, he fell to pestering the old man with questions about the matter.
Well; on and on they flew, over hill and valley, over moor and mountain, until they came to another garden, and there Ill-Luck let the Fiddler drop.
He picked it up and ran his fingers over the strings--trum, twang! Then he got to his feet and brushed the dirt and grass from his knees. He tucked his fiddle under his arm, and off he stepped upon the way he had been going at first.
It took him maybe an hour to count all the money and jewels he had brought up with him.
And that is how this story begins.
Well, since I have come so far, it would be a pity to turn back without seeing more." So he opened the door and peeped in.
By-and-by he heard a little shrill voice piping and crying, "Let me out! let me out! let me out!"
As the Fiddler came in the little old man nodded and smiled.
"I'll just go down yonder," says he, "and peep through the key-hole; perhaps I can see what is there without opening the door."
It was not long before the Fiddler found the little wooden plug, and then nothing would do but he must take a peep inside the nut to see if Ill-Luck was really there.
So down he took the key, and off he marched to the garden.
Down below it was as light as day, for in the centre of the room hung a great lamp that shone with a bright light and lit up all the place as bright as day.
"Welcome!" he cried; "and have you come at last?"
Now, St. Nicholas had a pocketful of hazel-nuts, which he kept cracking and eating as he trudged along the road, and just then he came upon one with a worm-hole in it.
You are the first, and so you shall live with me as long as I live, and after I am gone everything that I have shall be yours."
"Let you out?" says the Fiddler.
"Yes," says Ill-Luck, "I could indeed."
So at last the old man said that he would show him the treasure-house where all his wealth came from, and at that the Fiddler was tickled beyond measure.
It was left to me as I will leave it to you, and in the meantime you may come and go as you choose and fill your pockets whenever you wish to.
Then away he flew to attend to other matters of greater need.
Plague take the Fiddler! say I.
Down fell the Fiddler into the apple-tree and down fell a dozen apples, popping and tumbling about the queen's ears.
So he stuffed his pockets full, and then he followed the old man up the steps and out into the sunlight again.
Well, three or four days passed, and all was as sweet and happy as a spring day.
By-and-by he came to a garden, and there he let the Fiddler drop on the soft grass below.
"Good-morning, Ill-Luck," says he.
"Who are you?" says he.
Once upon a time St. Nicholas came down into the world to take a peep at the old place and see how things looked in the spring-time.
Then he passed through one room after another, and each was finer than the one he left behind. Many servants stood around; but they only bowed, and never asked whence he came.
"Good-morning, St. Nicholas," says Ill-Luck.
After he had done that, he began to wonder what was inside of the little door at the back of the room.
As for the gold and silver and jewels--why, they were as plentiful in that house as dust in a mill!
Should you open that door Ill-Luck will be sure to overtake you."
So the princes were sent packing, and the Fiddler was married to the queen, and reigned in that country.
"It hath no name," said Dr. Faustus.
"Nay," said Dr. Faustus, "the story is not altogether of the man himself, but rather of a pupil who came to learn wisdom of him."
"What is behind that door?" said he.
"Nay," said the queen, "do not say so.
But she was a prize, for not only was the kingdom hers, but she was as young as a spring apple and as pretty as a picture; so that there was no end of those who would have liked to have had her, each man for his own.
"You look as hale and strong as ever," says St. Nicholas.
Swash!
You can guess whether or not that was music to the Fiddler's ears.
"I am glad to hear it," says the Fiddler.
The Fiddler had his own mind about that; but, all the same, down he sat at the table, and fell to with knife and fork at the good things, as though he had not had a bite to eat for a week of Sundays.
Let me out! let me out!"
"Ah! that," said the queen, "you must not ask or wish to know.
By-and-by he managed to screw his head around and look up, and there it was Ill-Luck that had him.
He stood looking and wondering to find himself in such a place, when all of a sudden something came with a whiz and a rush and caught him by the belt, and away he flew like a bullet.
The day was warm, and he was tired; so down he sat under the shade of the oak-tree to rest his legs.
The king of that country had died, and no one was left behind him but the queen.
He opened the trap-door, and went down the steep steps to the room below.
Then he began twisting and turning it in his fingers, looking first on one side and then on the other, and all the while Ill-Luck kept crying, "Let me out! let me out!"
Swash!
The table was spread with a feast that smelled so good that it brought tears to the Fiddler's eyes and water to his mouth, and all the plates were of pure gold.
But at the end of that time the Fiddler began to wonder what was to be seen in the castle.
"They tell me," says St. Nicholas, "that you can go wherever you choose, even if it be through a key-hole; now, is that so?"
Everything the Fiddler wanted came to his hand. He lived high, and slept soft and warm, and never knew what it was to want either more or less, or great or small.
"Listen," says Ill-Luck.
"I thought so," said the Fiddler; and then he gave over kicking.
Should you do so, Ill-Luck will be sure to overtake you."
The Fiddler would never think of doing such a thing as opening the door.
He lifted the door, and then went down a steep flight of stone steps, and the Fiddler followed close at his heels.
"I am Ill-Luck!
He listened, and after a while he heard a sound like the waves beating on the shore.
By-and-by he came to a cross-road, and who should he see sitting there but Ill-Luck himself.
Then what do you think St. Nicholas did?
The little old man sat alone, but another place was spread, as though he were expecting some one.
Suddenly Ill-Luck let him drop, and down he fell--thump! bump!--on the hard ground.
Before him was a great long passageway, and at the far end of it he could see a spark of light as though the sun were shining there.
"Ah, yes," says Ill-Luck, "I find plenty to do in this world of woe."
"Where did you come from?" said she.
There was the door at the end of the room, but when he came to look there was no key-hole to it.
But before he had gone six steps he stopped.
On he stepped along the road to the town where he used to live, for he had a notion to find out whether things were going on nowadays as they one time did.
He dinned and drummed and worried until flesh and blood could stand it no longer.
He went on and on, and the spark of light kept growing larger and larger, and by-and-by--pop! out he came at the other end of the passage.
It was the garden of a royal castle, and all had been weeping and woe (though they were beginning now to pick up their smiles again), and this was the reason why:
"I should like to see you," says St. Nicholas; "for then I should be of a mind to believe what people say of you."
Sit down to the table and eat; and when I have told you all, you will say it was not Ill-Luck, but Good-Luck, that brought you."
When he saw Ill-Luck it came into his head to do a good turn to poor sorrowful man.
"Just to think!" said he, "I would either have been the richest man in the world, or else I would have been a king, if it had not been for Ill-Luck."
Away flew the Fiddler like a bullet, and there was Ill-Luck carrying him by the belt again.
In the floor were set three great basins of marble: one was nearly full of silver, one of gold, and one of gems of all sorts.
"Not I; if you are bottled up here it is the better for all of us;" and, so saying, he tucked his fiddle under his arm and off he marched.
"It hath no name," said Dr. Faustus.
It was Ill-Luck that brought me."
But there is one thing you must not do: you must never open that door yonder at the back of the room.
"Pooh!" said the Fiddler, "There's nothing there, after all," and he opened the door wide.
I turned it into a gymnasium for Ted Barton.
"Thou hit me hard!
"I am always in training."
"And you, Purvis?"
Take it, then!"
"It's off!
The adventure and the profit would either of them have attracted Montgomery.
He only excelled in his strength, and where was he to find a customer for that?
For six days in the week they spouted smoke, but to-day the furnace fires were banked, for it was Sunday.
"I am just eleven stone," said he.
I am surprised that you should have made it.
"Lumpiness isn't always strength.
It is very unexpected.
"Had enough?" asked the assistant, breathing fiercely through his nose.
But this was something different.
They were a very singular trio.
Without money for his classes, and without a situation--what was to become of him?
"Gentlemen," said he, "I'll do it!"
"Yes, Mr. Montgomery?"
"Won't you stay awhile and rest?"
"Your request is unreasonable, Mr. Montgomery.
Yet all day he was aware of a sense of vague uneasiness, which sharpened into dismay when, late in the afternoon, he was informed that three gentlemen had called and were waiting for him in the surgery. A coroner's inquest, a descent of detectives, an invasion of angry relatives--all sorts of possibilities rose to scare him.
Am I to provide for them all? Or why should I make an exception in your favour?
"Look at Barton's shoulders, Mr. Wilson."
"We've begun at the wrong end, I know, but we'll soon straighten it out, and I hope that you will see your way to falling in with our views.
His brains were fairly good, but brains of that quality were a drug in the market.
But a chill of doubt came over him.
The miner's head had come with a crash against the corner of the surgery shelves, and he had dropped heavily on to the ground.
I like the cut of him a great deal better than I liked Ted Barton."
"So you have told me."
The publican and horse-breaker felt it with an air of reverence.
"That's easy done, Mr. Montgomery," said the fat-voiced publican. "But before sayin' anything we had to wait and see whether, in a way of speakin', there was any need for us to say anything at all.
Wait outside in the waiting-room if you wish to wait at all."
"Why, it took Morris, the ten-stone-six champion, a deal more trouble than that before he put Barton to sleep.
He finished sealing the bottle upon which he was occupied, and he addressed it and placed it carefully in the rack. "Look here!" said he, turning round to the miner, "your medicine will be made up in its turn and sent down to you.
"I'm sure, sir, you may well be proud to have outed him in one round," said the publican.
"Well, gentlemen?" he observed, but no answer came.
I have listened to all that you have to say about my personal appearance, and now I must really beg that you will have the goodness to tell me what is the matter."
"No.
"Next the road?"
His trouble was deeper and more personal.
I could stan' such fly-flappin' all day.
He wiped the blood from the floor, put the surgery in order, and went on with his interrupted task, hoping that he had come scathless out of a very dangerous business.
A pleasant sense of relief thrilled softly through him.
"I am afraid that my duties call me elsewhere, Mr. Montgomery."
"I shouldn't advise you to fasten a quarrel upon me." Montgomery was speaking in the hard, staccato voice of a man who is holding himself in with difficulty.
It's off.
Montgomery gladly made it up and handed it to the miner.
A sudden impulse came over the despondent student.
Mr. Wilson thinks there is.
Have you been weighed lately, Mr. Montgomery?"
"Well, I'll stan' to my share of the purse."
There was nothing in the surroundings to cheer a desponding soul, but it was more than his dismal environment which weighed upon the medical assistant.
Montgomery seated in the midst of them, looked from one to the other.
Give me nerve and fire and breed. That's what wins."
"I never heard of Ted Barton, beyond seeing the name on a medicine label," said the assistant.
The young Cantab put his fingers on the assistant's upper arm, then with his other hand on his wrist, he bent the forearm sharply, and felt the biceps, as round and hard as a cricket-ball, spring up under his fingers.
"It would be a very sporting thing of you, Mr. Montgomery, if you would come to our help when we are in such a hole.
"One moment, sir!
"For goodness' sake, gentlemen, tell me what it is you want me to do!" he cried.
He had shrewd, light-blue eyes with foxy lashes, and he also leaned forward in silence from his chair, a fat, red hand upon either knee, and stared critically at the young assistant.
He is Barton--the famous Ted Barton."
"Good lad!
The doctor's appearance was not encouraging.
"By George, sir, if you pull it off, you've got the constituency in your pocket, if you care to stand.
He would test the reality of this philanthropy.
"I ain't one to go back, Fawcett."
"No," said the horse-breaker, at last.
He sat up at last with a gasp and a scowl.
I am grieved and disappointed, Mr. Montgomery, that you should have put me into the painful position of having to refuse you." He turned upon his heel, and walked with offended dignity out of the surgery.
"Which I do."
He stood up and turned slowly round, as if in front of his tailor.
"It is the most sporting thing I ever heard of in my life," said young Wilson.
You see, you are responsible for our having lost our champion, so we really feel that we have a claim upon you."
"That was when he was hog-fat and living high.
"Eh, lad, but thou art!" cried old Purvis.
I am afraid the doctor would never consent to my going--in fact, I am sure that he would not."
Or, if you like, I will work it off after I am qualified."
You'll find all you want there: clubs, punching ball, bars, dumb-bells, everything. Then you'll want a sparring partner.
It was poor and unworthy work--work which any weakling might have done as well, and this was a man of exceptional nerve and sinew.
"How can I fight for the coal-pits?" said he.
The winter session was approaching.
What blessed safety-valve was this through which his jangled nerves might find some outlet.
Montgomery obeyed.
"But he need never know--not before the fight, at any rate.
"Feel that!" said he.
The student smiled bitterly, and turned to his work of making up the morning prescriptions.
He was a coarse, clean-shaven man, whose fiery face made a singular contrast with his ivory-white bald head.
Dr. Oldacre would not advance them.
But perhaps he could escape exposure after all.
I don't allow folk in the surgery.
"Yes, that's right enough," said the Cantab.
There he lay with his bandy legs drawn up and his hands thrown abroad, the blood trickling over the surgery tiles.
"Why, whoever is this?" she said, getting to her feet.
"But I don't mind what we do now," said Hyacinth happily.
There'll be much to see about."
"You know, of course, that his Majesty comes back to-morrow with all his army."
"I should have thought it was quite obvious," said Udo with dignity. "Well, Coronel, I think perhaps you are right and that it's my duty to marry her."
"But I didn't know that you----"
"My father will be so excited when he hears," said Hyacinth.
You never told me."
"And now," said the Prince, "tell me what you are doing here."
Udo dropped undecidedly into a seat.
"My dear Udo, I'm so delighted to see you again.
The Countess--what was wrong with her, after all?
"Then why have you told everybody that you are going to?"
They got up and wandered back along Wiggs's path, hand in hand.
"You'll be a very lucky man," put in Coronel.
But I get no assistance from Roger at this point; he pretends that he has a mind far above the gossip of the lower orders.
She did not plead the vapours or the megrims.
"Well," she announced, "I must be going in, too.
"That's what makes it so jolly.
"I rode," said Coronel.
"Then perhaps I had better see that everything is ready in the Palace," she said, "if your Royal Highness will excuse me." And with a curtsey she was gone.
The poor woman had misunderstood him, and she should not be disappointed.
She shall have everything she wants."
By the by, how did that happen?
Don't say I have deceived you."
"Including Prince Udo," smiled Hyacinth.
"Ah, Countess, I thought we should find you together," said Hyacinth archly.
I must ask you not to refer to it.
"I don't know; but all our life together has been in the forest, and I'm just a little afraid of the world."
"Don't be a fool, Coronel.
"And hearing that there was to be a wedding," added Coronel----
"That subject is distasteful to me.
If any of the servants at the Palace were surprised to see Coronel, they did not show it.
"Prince Coronel will be staying here," said the Princess.
But to be Queen of Araby was no mean thing.
"I feel I don't want to hurt anybody to-day."
No; certainly not.
I hope that nothing will happen to you on the way."
"We aren't exactly, Princess--I mean----What are you doing here, Coronel?--I didn't know, Princess, that you---- The Countess and I were just having a little--I was just telling her what you said about--How did you get here, Coronel?"
"I will be very close to you always, Hyacinth."
Coronel was left alone with the most desperate lover in Araby.
Udo is one of my oldest friends"--he turned and clapped that bewildered Highness on the back--"aren't you, Udo? and I can think of no one more suitable in every way." He bowed again, and turned back to the Prince.
Coronel shook him solemnly by the hand.
"My dear, I am a king among men to-day, and you are my queen, but that's in our own special country of two."
"I haven't the slightest intention--what do you keep clinging to my arm like this for?
My dear Udo, she's charming; I congratulate you."
"I say," said Coronel, as they went up the grand staircase, "I am not a Prince, you know.
It was more than Udo did.
Oh, I can see myself enjoying this."
Pity him, you lovers.
"Yes, but of course the chance might come again.
"He's the most desperate lover in Araby.
She did not swoon or utter a cry.
After all, that was their business.
"It's a secret," he added.
Wiggs and I have often talked about it together."
"You ought to make the Palace garden look beautiful between you."
"Once more, I am not going to marry her."
And he had certainly neglected the Princess a little.
A different thing, Countess, from when I last saw him.
"Shall we tell him?" said Coronel, with a smile at Hyacinth.
"Oh, I'm so glad," said Hyacinth.
"I'm enjoying this," he seemed to say.
Before Udo had completely cleared his mind of his dragon, the Princess and Coronel were upon them.
"Let me present to you my friend, the Duke Coronel.
I will announce your decision to the Princess.
Of course you're not.
"All right, we won't hurt her, we'll humour her.
("What has happened to the child?" thought Belvane.
"She may have the throne and Father and Udo, and--and anything else she can get, and I shan't mind a bit.
"Well, you must please yourself, but you have compromised her severely with that story.
He stopped suddenly at the expression on Belvane's face.
"I happen to know that the King of Euralia--however, she's chosen you, it seems.
If I marry the Countess----"
"That's a splendid idea.
"As a matter of fact I was just telling her about that dragon I killed in Araby last year."
Of course that was not surprising; the question was, was it fair to disappoint one who had, perhaps, some little grounds for----? After all, he had been no more gallant than was customary from a Prince and a gentleman to a beautiful woman.
UDO BEHAVES LIKE A GENTLEMAN
Hyacinth nodded.
This wanted thinking out.
Coronel made a deep bow to the astonished Belvane.
"If you are so particular," said Hyacinth, with a smile, "Father will make you a proper Prince directly he comes back."
Udo, who was about to enter the Palace, turned round with a startled look.
"Your humble servant," he said.
Udo evidently hadn't thought of this.
It was absurd to suppose there was anything in Coronel's nonsense, but one never knew.
So just for fun let's think of something to pay her out."
That's what I'm wondering.
What is it?"
"She seems fond of flowers," said Coronel.
But you must admit we found you in a very compromising position."
"Well, something happened on the way here.
And she evidently adored him.
Worse than that was the Silent Pine,--a clear case of stupid incompetence!
It stands to reason.
You could see the light of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you came along.
The barber shop, you will remember, stands across the street from Smith's Hotel, and stares at it face to face.
And right at our very doors!
Of course, he must have felt proud when, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from New York, accepting the money straight off without a single question, and without knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend of Jeff's.
I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens. That was years ago.
But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoes to send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars a bag.
Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet.
It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was another side to Jefferson's speculation that no one in Mariposa ever knew, or will ever know now.
Mind you, I don't mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless.
"They make their money and what do they do with it?
Then he'd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust.
"They've got her down to three cents," said Jeff, "but I'm with her. Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, but they can't do it.
It is one of those wooden structures--I don't know whether you know them--with a false front that sticks up above its real height and gives it an air at once rectangular and imposing.
They know just as much as Jeff did about the countries where they make it.
There they read the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, in the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a college president to the blush.
Of course, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to making money,--"and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can't stop it." And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and the resurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonder how he could know it.
So this night,--I don't know just what it was in the paper that caused it,--Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk about Carnegie.
I believe it's something the same in other places too.
He went on just the same.
Pete Glover at the hardware store bought Nippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeen and bought it back in less than a week at nineteen.
I've boughten in Johnson's shares, and the whole of Netley's, and I'll stay with her till she breaks."
She's down there all right."
It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that would easily account for forty thousand dollars.
Mr. Smith, I say, hung back.
She was a girl with any amount of talent.
But in Mariposa it's different.
I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa if you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean sold up, put up for auction, as it were.
You couldn't, for example, have compared him with a man like Golgotha Gingham, who, as undertaker, stood in a direct relation to life and death, or to Trelawney, the postmaster, who drew money from the Federal Government of Canada, and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion Cabinet.
"I tell you, boys," continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but in Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginary audience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million out of this Cubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide it up into a hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people that hadn't nothing."
He had a kind of divination about it. There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as he stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper: "I see where Saint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago,"--and so hold him fascinated to the end.
Even in Mariposa some of the people must have thought so.
Still, it lends distinction somehow, just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against the mirror with the legends: TURKISH SHAMPOO, 75 CENTS, and ROMAN MASSAGE, $1.00.
It was the only way to test him.
But it's hard to see how he could.
That always seemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminal law.
They made no rash promises, just admitted straight out that the enterprise might realise 400 per cent. or might conceivably make less.
After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw away chicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half. But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away already on the possibilities of what he called "displacement" mining on the Yukon.
Pathetic?
There was no hint of more.
He did it too.
Did I mention Myra, Jeff's daughter?
Through the window you can see the geraniums in the window shelf and behind them Jeff Thorpe with his little black scull cap on and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as he bends forward in the absorption of shaving.
There must be ever so many of them, fifteen or sixteen.
Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved him for five cents, in the same old way.
There is a red, white and blue post in front of the shop and the shop itself has a large square window out of proportion to its little flat face.
Not at all.
But no doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.
Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, and yellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing.
Within a fortnight they put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and opened the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main Street started buying scrip.
The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe
But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom right from the start.
He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before the interim prospectus was out.
Take the case of Corona Jewel.
Excitement!
They give it away.
And they were quite frank about their enterprise--bananas and tobacco in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos.
This morning they've got her down to sixteen, but I don't mean to let go.
Where he got it all, I don't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the newspapers.
Any friends of Jeff's were friends of Cuba.
Then at night there was a big oyster supper in Smith's caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa band outside.
Of course everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood just across the street from Smith's Hotel.
Simply genius!
That was why, of course, within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba, and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and Heaven knows what.
And since that, though it's quite a little while ago, the shop's open till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and--
They can't squeeze me."
Anyway, things are not so bad.
I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night.
A shave cost five cents, and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), and at that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both chairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other.
So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown for.
"And now look at 'em," Jeff went on.
Nobody knows or cares about it now.
Still, it was realized that a man with money has got to know these things.
That was Jeff's money--part of it.
They have to.
"I bought her," said Jeff, "at thirty-two, and she stayed right there tight, like she was stuck.
Just as well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till he forces his way into it.
A few instants alone separate us from an eventful moment.
Thus we still have twenty-seven minutes to remain on the earth."
"Forty-two minutes past ten!" said Nicholl.
"Thirty-seven minutes six seconds past ten."
"We've still thirteen minutes and a half."
I see that you are a man of method, which I could never be; but indeed you have made a series of bets of very little advantage to yourself, allow me to tell you."
"Because, if you gain the first, the Columbiad will have burst, and the projectile with it; and Barbicane will no longer be there to reimburse your dollars."
There the three travelers were to stretch themselves some moments before their departure.
We are bound to make the best of our new lodgings, and make ourselves comfortable.
For some moments the three travelers looked at each other. Then they began to examine the objects imprisoned with them.
Nicholl and Barbicane placed them in the center of the disc forming the floor.
"Have we not the water-cushions placed between the partition- breaks, whose elasticity will sufficiently protect us?"
"He hopes!--He is not sure!-- and he waits for the moment when we are encased to make this deplorable admission!
We might well ask ourselves of what materials are the hearts of these Americans made, to whom the approach of the most frightful danger added no pulsation.
"Doubtless; but there are still some precautions to be taken, to deaden as much as possible the first shock."
"I hope so, Michel," replied Barbicane gently, "but I am not sure."
"Ah, Diana!
"It is understood, captain.
While Michel Ardan was speaking, Barbicane and Nicholl were making their last preparations.
Nicholl, once introduced with his companions inside the projectile, began to close the opening by means of a strong plate, held in position by powerful screws.
"And you conclude, then, you everlasting talker?" asked Barbicane.
"Twenty-four only," said Nicholl.
"Michel," said Barbicane, "during the passage we shall have plenty of time to investigate the most difficult questions. For the present we must occupy ourselves with our departure."
There, an opening made for the purpose gave them access to the aluminum car.
"That Nicholl is not a man," exclaimed Michel; "he is a chronometer with seconds, an escape, and eight holes."
Barbicane consulted it.
The name of their Redeemer, phonetically rendered, is Kerm-Cher.
There being no competition, no time or space is required for sensational trash.
This is principally due to their lack of time.
The power of steam has never been utilized.
Furrows of care and trouble begin to deepen on the faces of these Briefites as they approach an age of what we would call three years, and if by lease of strength they pass on toward an age of four years, it is but an evidence of their exceptional vitality.
Strange as it may seem, this sphere, which for convenience we will call Brief, revolves very slowly on its axis, so that our world makes fifteen times as many revolutions as this planet.
I have no words of praise for this system, although the Briefites can cover considerable territory in an hour.
They are nearly as large as we and relatively much lighter in weight.
There are indeed some advantages in the government being in constant touch with each home under its care. The advertising department pays nearly all expenses of this whole system of journalism.
Their Redeemer is worshiped quite separately from God, and with distinctive adorations.
If you were permitted to look upon the public and private life of this incredible world, your first sensation would be dizziness, not to mention the weirdness of all sights that would confront you at every turn.
Children walk four or five weeks after birth, and are capable of receiving regular instruction at the age of five months.
CHAPTER XX.
Nothing like a traveling locomotive has ever been made, although I learned that a bright wizard was experimenting and that he prophesied great changes when his gas-propelled vehicle was perfected.
Similar to Christ, he confirmed his identity by unanswerable miracles.
Many, however, disbelieved in Kerm-Cher, and held to the old axiomatic truths.
All the periods of physical growth are correspondingly decreased.
The females never graduated to the corset degree, and while they do not cut a scientific figure, yet they surely develop a more ruddy waist after the model intended by the Designor of the body.
Thus creeds were prevalent and they remain until now, only there is much less variety than is found amongst us.
THEIR RAIMENT.
Their raiment is altogether after new models.
The most faithful translation of this word into our language would be God-affluence.
Early in the morning certain crops are planted and are harvested at night.
They are much purer in morals, more refined in manner, more harmonious in government, and unusually bright in mathematics.
THEIR FOOTWEAR.
It costs more to advertise at certain periods than at other times, all regulated by the customs of the people.
The government verifies, as much as possible, all reports before they are transmitted.
They look upon this gravity system as a wonderful achievement, for it has not been in operation for more than three hundred years.
If one of the Briefites were to step upon the shores of our rugged Earth and see the cotton or wool and leather that lies around our feet, it would appear to him as the most ridiculous thing imaginable, and no doubt his shapely feet of ivory cast would be of more than passing interest to us.
But compared to our customs, the news is very scarce.
Spare me a detailed description of this peculiar traveling system.
RELIGIOUS LIFE.
Of course, people take their choice as to reading advertisements.
The religious life of the people of Brief is, on an average, of a higher type than is found in our world.
On this world, of Brief all vegetables mature in periods so short that one marvels when he hears it.
Announcements for private gain are paid at a regular rate.
In a city of Brief, overhead tracks after such an order run along all business streets and certain residence streets.
Thus, if nothing of importance occurs, nothing need be transmitted.
It appears that on all worlds everything is regulated in accordance with the length of human life.
Their garments partake of the loose flowing order.
Things happen in such quick succession that the news is hustled out at all hours of the day and night; not on sheets of paper, but through automatic news-receivers, machines somewhat akin to our telegraph instruments.
They never think of covering the feet under any change of climate.
But they have discovered what we would call gaseous oil, and have learned to put it to work, so that it is the main force employed in hoisting and all other purposes where power is required.
For instance, a strong fabric of chosen shade is fastened at the neck, hip, knee and ankle, and lies carelessly over the parts between.
JOURNALISM.
Suffice it to say that a person, in lightning rapidity of motion, rushes from a store, springs upon a passing seat and is hurled away by the power of an overhead cable system.
Think of cereals reaching maturity in seven or eight of our days, or during one day of Brief.
Quadrupeds that take the place of our horses are used for drayage, although nothing except the two-wheeled class of vehicles was ever used until some eighty-seven years ago.
England was about to impose upon him the shame of demolishing himself the fortifications of Dunkirk.
Nothing.
That the lion should relapse into the donkey is astonishing; but it is so.
Why this Josiana?
It begins in an ass; it ends in a lion.
Heat sugar and it will boil.
She excelled in bringing about great catastrophes from little causes.
What had put it into her head to be born?
A Tory, she governed by the Whigs--like a woman, like a mad woman.
In it there is enough to deceive the eye; add God save the Queen, which might have been taken from Lulli, and the ensemble becomes an illusion.
The rest of her person was indifferently formed.
It was an unpleasant resemblance. Josiana had a right to say to Anne, "My mother was at least as good as yours." At court no one said so, but they evidently thought it.
"He is the kind of king they want in France," said the English.
Could she have made Apollo a hunchback, it would have delighted her.
There was something of the Sphinx in this goose.
Then it throws its rider, and you have 1642 in England and 1789 in France; and sometimes it devours him, and you have in England 1649, and in France 1793.
For centuries England suffered under that process of tyranny which gave the lie to all the old charters of freedom, and out of which France especially gathered a cause of triumph and indignation.
It is gross grandeur and gross good-nature.
Then the people love him for being so rich.
This Forteroche passed into England, and proposed to Queen Anne, who was immediately charmed by the idea, to build in London a theatre with machinery, with a fourth under-stage finer than that of the King of France.
She had the humiliation of having only Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, for godfather.
There was another grievance, Josiana's "improper" birth.
All Josiana's instincts impelled her to yield herself gallantly rather than to give herself legally.
Morally, Josiana brought to one's mind the line--
An espousal is a dreary absorption of brilliancy.
Towards 1705, although Lady Josiana was twenty-three and Lord David forty-four, the wedding had not yet taken place, and that for the best reasons in the world.
He had mistresses.
It is a line of circumvallation with a ditch.
Her pupils were made for love and hate, for happiness and misery.
Men! oh, fie! a god only would be worthy of her, or a monster.
To surrender on the score of gallantry implies learning, recalls Menalcas and Amaryllis, and is almost a literary act.
In admiring her you felt yourself becoming a pagan and a lackey.
And then woman feels her weak point guarded by all that casuistry of gallantry which takes the place of scruples in prudes.
Lady Josiana said, "It is a bore that I should be obliged to marry Lord David; I, who would desire nothing better than to be in love with him!"
They deprive it of the honour of their adherence.
She felt such a leaning towards immodesty that she was a prude.
She had neither lovers nor chastity.
Degradation of rank, an aristocratic prelude, began what the revolution was to complete.
Her ambition was this--to show herself capable of impossibilities.
There was between them a tacit agreement neither to conclude nor to break off the engagement. They eluded each other.
Walpole and Dubois are not unlike. Marlborough was fighting against his former king, James II., to whom it was said he had sold his sister, Miss Churchill.
Why hasten the conclusion?
The subtile is derived from the sensual.
Lord David was ripening.
He betted, boxed, ran into debt.
She walled herself round with pride.
Elizabeth was more than English--she was Anglican.
Thus it was that while a Catholic amongst her intimate friends and the refined of both sexes, she was outwardly a Protestant for the benefit of the riffraff.
They did not love, they pleased, each other.
Josiana thought great things of his horses, his dogs, his losses at play, his mistresses.
Bolingbroke was in his meridian, and Richelieu in his dawn.
Men were equalized by the same vices as they were later on, perhaps, by the same ideas.
Where a woman is vulnerable, on the side of pity, for instance, which so readily turns to love, Josiana was not.
Caliban, fashionable and magnificent, would distance Ariel, poor.
She had eyes which were too intelligible.
She disdained intrigues; but she would not have been displeased had she been supposed to have engaged in some, provided that the objects were uncommon, and proportioned to the merits of one so highly placed.
Josiana was in everything--in birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliancy--almost a queen.
Gluttony affects delicacy, a grimace of disgust conceals cupidity.
She will consent, but she disdains--for the present.
It was a necessity, doubtless; but what a pity!
Flesh, when it attains a certain degree of beauty, has almost a claim to the right of nudity; it conceals itself in its own dazzling charms as in a veil.
She regretted that Hercules was dead. She lived in some undefined expectation of a voluptuous and supreme ideal.
Josiana was "the flesh." Nothing could be more resplendent.
She rode on a man's saddle, notwithstanding the invention of side-saddles, introduced into England in the fourteenth century by Anne, wife of Richard II.
Not having the power to be a goddess, she is an idol.
She trod upon hearts. She was earthly.
She was plump, fresh, strong, and rosy, with immense boldness and wit.
From the stream had risen the first jet of her destiny; but the spring was royal.
They grew gray as young fops.
A woman handed over to you by a notary, how commonplace!
III.
She was, in the insolence of high birth, tempting and inaccessible.
In the eighteenth century the wife bolts out her husband.
He possessed others.
Hers was a cumbrous beauty.
Far from it; but what cannot escape from you inspires you with no haste to obtain it.
With all that she was a prude.
This is a point of the greatest importance.
She shuts herself up in Eden with Satan.
That which is biblical may well be Anglican.
She dwelt in a halo of glory, half wishing to descend from it, and perhaps feeling curious to know what a fall was like.
She would have been a Puseyite in the present day.
Although plump and healthy, Josiana was, we repeat, a perfect prude.
You enjoy all the good things belonging to the official Episcopalian church, and later on you die, like Grotius, in the odour of Catholicity, having the glory of a mass being said for you by le Pere Petau.
Josiana and David carried on a flirtation of a particular shade.
below the surface was there not, in a semi-transparent and misty depth, an undulating, supernatural prolongation, perchance deformed and dragon-like--a proud virtue ending in vice in the depth of dreams.
She was well read and accomplished.
CHAPTER III.
It was not very far off the time when Jelyotte was seen publicly sitting, in broad daylight, on the bed of the Marquise d'Epinay.
It seems to me that anybody who had lost a pond would be heard from.
That, according to witnesses, the fall upon this small area occupied ten minutes.
If these fishes were not upon the ground in the first place, we base our objections to the whirlwind explanation upon two data:
These three factors indicate, somewhere not far aloft, a region of inertness to this earth's gravitation, of course, however, a region that, by the flux and variation of all things, must at times be susceptible--but, afterward, our heresy will bifurcate--
I'm afraid there is no escape for us: we shall have to give to civilization upon this earth--some new worlds.
It sounds positive, but if there be such reports they are somewhere out of my range of reading.
Riley, it was not polymorphism, "but two distinct species"--which, because of our data, we doubt.
From this cloud, fell a torrential rain, in which were hundreds of mussels.
Orthodoxy accepts the correlation and equivalence of forces:
However, our expression will be:
That, upon the last of January, 1890, there fell, in a great tempest, in Switzerland, incalculable numbers of larvae: some black and some yellow; numbers so great that hosts of birds were attracted.
There is no opposition here, if our data of falls are clear.
The usual whirlwind-explanation is given--"but in what locality snakes exist in such abundance is yet a mystery."
If we try to accept that these snakes had been raised from some other part of this earth's surface in a whirlwind:
But the omnipresence of Heterogeneity--or living fishes, also--ponds of fresh water: oceans of salt water.
Gray snake, about a foot long.
Not one instance have we of tadpoles that have fallen to this earth.
Here are the data.
As to differences in specific gravity--the yellow larvae that fell in Switzerland January, 1890, were three times the size of the black larvae that fell with them.
They were crawling on sidewalks, in yards, and in streets, and in masses--but "none were found on roofs or any other elevation above ground" and "none were seen to fall."
In accounts of this occurrence, there is no denial of the fall.
If you prefer to believe that the snakes had always been there, or had been upon the ground in the first place, and that it was only that something occurred to call special attention to them, in the streets of Memphis, Jan. 15, 1877--why, that's sensible: that's the common sense that has been against us from the first.
As to falls or flutterings of winged insects from the sky, prevailing notions of swarming would seem explanatory enough: nevertheless, in instances of ants, there are some peculiar circumstances.
Then, near the place of origin, there would have been a fall of heavier objects that had been snatched up with the snakes--stones, fence rails, limbs of trees.
He met one person who said that he had seen the snails fall.
Always frogs a few months old.
Larvae thought to have been of beetles, but described as "caterpillars," not seen to fall, but found crawling on the snow, after a snowstorm, at Warsaw, Jan. 20, 1850.
Or still simpler:
Theoretically the attraction of a magnet should decrease with the square of the distance, but the falling-off is found to be almost abrupt at a short distance.
The crust of the snow has been covered two or three times with worms resembling the ordinary cut worms.
Say that the snakes occupied the next gradation, and would be the next to fall.
If we accept that these snakes did fall, even though not seen to fall by all the persons who were out sight-seeing in a violent storm, and had not been in the streets crawling loose or in thick tangled masses, in the first place:
Before we take up an especial expression upon the fall of immature and larval forms of life to this earth, and the necessity then of conceiving of some factor besides mere stationariness or suspension or stagnation, there are other data that are similar to data of falls of fishes.
If he thinks of a long translation--all the way from the south of France to Upper Savoy, he may think then of a very fine sorting over by differences of specific gravity--but in such a fine selection, larvae would be separated from developed insects.
He found that the snails had appeared after the rain: that "astonished rustics had jumped to the conclusion that they had fallen."
All other forces have phenomena of repulsion and of inertness irrespective of distance, as well as of attraction.
If an exclusionist says that, in January, larvae were precisely and painstakingly picked out of frozen ground, in incalculable numbers, he thinks of a tremendous force--disregarding its refinements: then if origin and precipitation be not far apart, what becomes of an infinitude of other debris, conceiving of no time for segregation?
That never has a fall of full-grown frogs been reported--
Again two species, or polymorphism.
That wingless, larval forms of life, in numbers so enormous that migration from some place external to this earth is suggested, have fallen from the sky.
But tadpoles would be more likely to fall from the sky than would frogs, little or big, if such falls be attributed to whirlwinds; and more likely to fall from the Super-Sargasso Sea if, though very tentatively and provisionally, we accept the Super-Sargasso Sea.
Fall of fishes, June 13, 1889, in Holland; ants, Aug. 1, 1889, Strasbourg; little toads, Aug. 2, 1889, Savoy.
Genesistrine.
We'll be persecuted for it.
Take it or leave it--
Our quasi-reasoning upon this subject applies to all segregations so far considered.
Other indications of long duration.
"As I suspected," says this correspondent, "I found that the snails were of a familiar land-species"--that they had been upon the ground "in the first place."
As to the Law of Gravitation, I prefer to take one simple stand:
It is not said whether the snakes were of a known species or not, but that "when first seen, they were of a dark brown, almost black." Blacksnakes, I suppose.
Whether it's the planet Genesistrine, or the moon, or a vast amorphous region super-jacent to this earth, or an island in the Super-Sargasso Sea, should perhaps be left to the researches of other super--or extra--geographers.
Gravitation is one of these forces.
Another correspondent writes that he had heard of the supposed fall of snails: that he had supposed that all such stories had gone the way of witch stories; that, to his astonishment, he had read an account of this absurd story in a local newspaper of "great and deserved repute."
Almost positively were there no other forms of insect-life upon these glaciers, and there was no vegetation to support insect-life, except microscopic organisms. Nevertheless the description of this probably polymorphic species fits a description of larvae said to have fallen in Switzerland, and less definitely fits another description.
The writer thinks that the worms had been brought to the surface of the ground by rain, which had fallen previously.
Then I think of a hurricane that occurred in the state of Mississippi weeks or months before May 11, 1894.
That, in Memphis, Tenn., Jan. 15, 1877, rather strictly localized, or "in a space of two blocks," and after a violent storm in which the rain "fell in torrents," snakes were found.
That small snails, of a land species, had fallen near Redruth, Cornwall, July 8, 1886, "during a heavy thunderstorm": roads and fields strewn with them, so that they were gathered up by the hatful: none seen to fall by the writer of this account: snails said to be "quite different to any previously known in this district."
The occurrence is considered a great mystery, because the worms could not have come up from the ground, inasmuch as the ground was frozen at the time, and because they were reported from other places, also, in Norway.
That never has a fall of tadpoles been reported;
One kind was larger than the other: color-differences not distinctly stated.
It then came to life.
No--I don't look for it--and inevitably find it.
There's no escape from it.
This matter of enormousness of numbers suggests to me something of a migratory nature--but that snakes in the United States do not migrate in the month of January, if ever.
I was obliged to acknowledge my ignorance.
"I shall trouble you no more for to-day.
What's he going to do next?"
Perhaps you can say what the value of them may be?"
On entering the room, the first person, and the only person, who attracted his attention was Cristel.
Give me a little comfort to take back with me to my solitude.
I now saw, in their full beauty, the luster of her brown eyes, the warm rosiness of her dark complexion, the delightful vivacity of expression which was the crowning charm of her face.
She smiled, and kissed her hand, and fluttered out of the room.
As he moved again to the door and left us, the hysterical passion in him forced its way outward--he burst into tears.
She tried to thank me; the tears rose in her eyes--she signed to me to leave her, poor soul, as if she felt ashamed of herself.
What could her dear Gerard have been doing, out in the dark by himself, for all that time?
"I can't congratulate you on the first visit you have paid in our neighborhood," she said.
I communicated this view of the matter to Cristel.
The dog sprang up from his refuge under the table, and shook himself joyfully.
Finding that he had attracted my notice, he showed no signs of embarrassment--he seized the opportunity of asking for information.
"Your absence was the only drawback," she answered.
I betray no confidence in presenting this copy of his confession.
"There's the whole story," I concluded.
Write it for me, dear, and make me happy for the day."
When I trusted you with my confession last night, I left you to decide (after reading it) whether you would make an enemy of me or not. You remember that?" I nodded my head.
Mrs. Roylake was shocked.
Ah, yes, yes; I thought so.
My affliction is my happiness, when you say cruel things to me.
A second door communicating, as I concluded from its position, with the new cottage, was suddenly opened.
You can see in his face he finds the tale of them correct. He's coming this way.
He inquired next if I had brought his portfolio with me.
He seemed to have caught the infection of his daughter's anger.
"The only happy moments I have are my moments passed in your presence," he said.
Absurd, Cristel--absurd!"
Angry thoughts these--and surely thoughts unworthy of me?
Her father seemed to have reasons of his own for following my example and declining to answer questions.
"Don't laugh, sir!
Old Toller astonished me.
Mrs. Roylake's fascinating smile disappeared when I mentioned the mill. She suddenly became a cold lady--I might even say a stiff lady.
She paused confusedly in the doorway, and tried to resist me when I insisted on relieving her of the basket.
"Did he want you to read it?"
He tried again--I declare it positively, he tried again.
I described his successful appeal to my compassion--not very willingly, for it made me look (as I thought) like a weak person.
Having traversed the short distance between the cottage and the wood, I remembered that I had left my walking-stick behind me, and returned to get it.
"Spare your breath, Mr. Toller.
But I was still in such a vile temper that I determined to let Cristel know she had been discovered.
"On this lovely day, Cristel, Nature pleads for me.
His little restless black eyes followed the movements of his lodger's fingers, as they turned over leaf after leaf of the manuscript, with such eager curiosity and interest that I looked at him in surprise.
"He speaks as if he knew you!" she cried.
It failed to satisfy her.
The deaf man addressed me with a cold and distant manner.
He says, 'All right,' and he does nothing.
Society--provided it was not society at the mill--was always attractive as a topic of conversation.
"You ought to know me better than that, Cristel!"
You deaf adder, let her be!"
Go out on the terrace; your poor father always took his cigar on the terrace.
You had better have roused the fury of a wild beast.
There's first drains----"
"Are you the young master, sir?
I put it at once into his hand.
I lit my cigar, but not on the terrace.
I slept badly.
"If you murder me with your screeching again, look out for your skinny throat--I'll throttle you."
At the breakfast table, my stepmother and I met again.
A brown dog, of the companionable retriever breed, ran in and fawned upon old Toller.
You being our landlord, we look to you to help us.
Charming; perfectly charming.
More polite, however, than I had been, he left his resolution to be inferred.
THE RETURN OF THE PORTFOLIO
Either I had forgotten Lord Uppercliff, during my long absence abroad, or I had never heard of him.
"Do you notice, sir, that he seems to set a deal of store by his writings?
He picked up his book from the table, and took his pencil out of Cristel's hand, while we were speaking.
"If you want to speak to me, write it!" he said, with rage and suffering in every line of his face.
Her back was turned towards me; astonishment held me silent.
There are some deaf people who can tell what is said by looking at the speaker's lips.
"Oh, sir, don't distress me by talking in that way!
"Is that the impression," he asked, "produced by what I allowed you to read?"
Not one impression, but many impressions, troubled and confused my mind. Certain passages in the confession inclined me to believe that the writer was mad.
My dear Gerard! you look surprised.
Pray don't think me bold; I don't know how to express myself.
May I hope that you forgive me?"
I took the pencil, and wrote my reply:
Cristel was not attending to him, she was speaking to me.
Did she think I was to be so easily frightened as that?
Once more, it won't do!"
"Did you know him before that?"
On hearing this good news, Mr. Toller's gratitude became ungovernable: he was more eager than ever, and more eloquent than ever, in returning to the repairs.
In some way unknown to me, I had apparently roused his suspicions.
I daresay you know, Wigan, there is an annual published giving particulars of all the hospitals, with the names of the medical staff, consulting surgeons and physicians, and so forth.
The doctor was furious at the wanton destruction of his specimens, and, being irascible and suspicious, fancied the revolver was merely a blind and that the culprit was some jealous medical man.
Assuming this to be the work of an amateur, to what definite point does it lead you?"
One small cabinet, which might possess a secret hiding-place, he broke with the chisel, and I noticed that whenever a drawer was locked his scrutiny of the contents was more careful.
"I admit I might not have got upon the right track had you not made that discovery.
A safe which stood in a corner had been broken open.
If my idea were correct, it would mean that they had been put there on purpose to mislead.
"I've read every report, but tell me yourself--every detail."
Dr. Wheatley had taken some part in local politics which had made him unpopular with certain people, and he was inclined to consider the burglary one of revenge rather than intended robbery.
He showed no disappointment, nor any sign that his theory had received a shock.
"How?"
I found him ready and waiting for me next morning, as eager to be on the trail as a dog in leash.
We had decided that the most likely means of entry was by a window at the end of the hall, and we expected our prey to enter the room by the door.
The counters, Wigan, they were the clew.
But I did not understand their significance at first."
Then the unexpected happened.
"The same brand of cigarettes?" he asked.
He evidently expected that the man he was robbing would value the thing he was looking for, and would be likely to hide it securely.
They had got in by a passage window at the back--not a very difficult matter--and had evidently gone to the dining room and helped themselves to spirits from a tantalus which was on the sideboard.
"His manner was curious.
"Call for me to-morrow morning; we are going to pay a visit together. We may be too late, but I hope not.
"No, but all cheap American ones."
We might have missed much that was interesting.
I told him that the man we expected was no ordinary thief.
The next five seconds were full of happenings.
The cigarette-ends, the dirty glasses, and the biscuit crumbs seem to me rather gratuitous deceptions, and----"
He did, and visited two other doctors.
Of course the thieves might have been disturbed, but there were certain points against this idea.
"No, I hold to the one man theory."
It means that opportunity has been lacking.
Then he broke off a piece of biscuit, crumbled it in his hands, and scattered the crumbs beside the glasses.
He was looking for something of which a doctor at this hospital had robbed him, as he imagined, and, not knowing which doctor, looked at this annual and began at the first name.
Yet I owe him much, and there is no gainsaying his marvelous deductions.
"It did not seem to help you to a theory," I answered.
The handle was turned, and the door began to open.
"There is a suggestion to my mind of amateurishness in the affair.
If the thief had not found what he wanted, he would continue his search, I argued.
So slowly did time go that half the night seemed to have passed when I heard a neighboring church clock strike one, and almost directly afterward the door of the room was opened stealthily and was shut again.
His often-repeated statement that she helped him by her questions had never impressed me very greatly.
"Back for your life!"
If a drawer were locked, he pried it open.
You noted how keen he was with every piece of bone he could find, how irritable he was growing.
"Something in bone or ivory."
The ray from his lantern swung about the room for a moment, then he switched on the electric light.
"I do not understand the case now," I confessed, "except that we have caught a mad burglar."
Much depended upon the answer.
By arrangement, the house retired to rest early.
"Did Sir Joseph Maynard burgle his own house?"
"You forget that days have elapsed since Sir Joseph's was broken into."
We don't want to have to commit burglary ourselves in order to catch the thief."
Three glasses, with a little of the liquor left in them, were on the table, and near them were some biscuit crumbs. There were several silver articles on the sideboard, but these had not been touched.
It might implicate Sir Joseph, it might not.
Until that moment I had not heard a sound in the house, and I was not certain that anyone had entered the room even now, until I saw a tiny disk, the end of a ray of light, on the wall.
Imagination carries one to the hills, and shows something of that truth which lies behind what we call truth."
This was the story I told to Professor Quarles and his granddaughter. I went to him at once, feeling that the case was just one of those in which his theoretical method was likely to be useful.
There was no sign of doubt in his attitude, which was of a most uncompromising character.
"Did that strike you as significant?" asked Quarles.
He had several cabinets in his room containing specimens, and everything had been turned on to the floor and damaged more or less.
They would have deceived nine men out of ten--you happen to be the tenth man.
"No, no; the expected," he said impatiently, and he pointed to a heap of newspapers.
I did so.
Nothing had been stolen, but everything in his room was in disorder, and a small and unique inlaid cabinet with a secret spring lock had been smashed to pieces.
I had dashed aside the curtain, and I threw myself upon the burglar just in time to prevent his picking up his weapon with his left hand. He struggled fiercely, and I was glad of Tresman's help in securing him, although the doctor had come perilously near to losing his life by his unexpected intrusion.
I had become so accustomed to Quarles jumping to some sudden conclusion that I was disappointed.
"Wait," said Quarles.
Two cupboards and every drawer had been turned out and the contents thrown about in all directions.
However obscure a mystery may be, there is always some point or circumstance which, if rightly interpreted, will lead to its solution. Even in those crimes which have never been elucidated this point exists, only it has never been duly appreciated.
"You had better leave it to us, doctor," said Quarles, who, for the purpose of this interview, posed as my assistant.
"True.
The silver on the floor was scattered, not gathered together ready to take away as I should have expected to find it, and it looked as if it had been thrown aside carelessly, as though it were not what the thieves were in search of; and surely, had they left in a hurry, the bag of money would have been taken.
Of course you may keep watch, and I shall be within call should you want help."
That is why I said we must wait.
But now and then his attention was closer, and at intervals he seemed puzzled, standing quite still, his hands raised, a finger touching his head, almost as a low comedian does when he wishes the audience to realize that he is in deep thought.
"It creeps into my brain."
When a mystery was cleared up, it was easy to say that Zena had put him on the right road, and I considered it a whim of his more than anything else.
"Yes."
"That gives the explanation, I think," said Quarles.
We were anxious to reproduce the circumstances of the burglary at Sir Joseph Maynard's as nearly as possible, for Quarles declared it was impossible to say what significance there might be in the man's every action.
The next moment he almost trod upon me.
Indeed, most of the contents did not interest him.
"I think that would entirely depend on the man's temperament, professor."
Did you see how he touched his head several times to-night?"
I see ever so much.
'She is taken away!' I cried, starting up, and with streaming eyes, gazing on the building which, though I stamped my feet in my distraction, I was afraid to approach.
He led me into the garden--the Dutch garden, we used to call it--with a balustrade, and statues at the farther front, laid out in a carpet-pattern of brilliantly-coloured flowers.
Where is she?
All outside was and is darkness.
He smiled sadly and said--
Of these Swedenborgians, indeed, I know no more than I might learn from good Mrs. Rusk's very inaccurate talk.
I remember feeling a sort of awe of this little dark man; but I was not afraid of him, for he was gentle, though sad--and seemed kind.
'Come, dear, let us go.'
'Yes, a stone wall with pillars, too high for either you or me to see over. But----'
Thus entertained, though a little awfully, I accompanied the dark mysterious little 'whipper-snapper' through the woodland glades.
'Home, I mean, dear.
'Sit down beside me, my child,' said the grave man with the black eyes, very kindly and gently.
He was shut up a good deal with my dear father, who was in deep affliction; and Mrs. Rusk used to say, 'It is rather odd to see him praying with that little scarecrow from London, and good Mr. Clay ready at call, in the village; much good that little black whipper-snapper will do him!'
Where have they brought her to?'
CHAPTER III
Fancies and regrets float mistily in the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance.
The air was still.
When my dear mamma died I was not nine years old; and I remember, two days before the funeral, there came to Knowl, where she died, a thin little man, with large black eyes, and a very grave, dark face.
There was a stone bench some ten steps away from the tomb.
At the sight the fountains of my grief reopened, and I cried bitterly, repeating, 'Oh! mamma, mamma, little mamma!' and so went on weeping and calling wildly on the deaf and the silent.
'And where is the gate of death?' I asked in a sort of whisper, as we walked together, holding his hand, and looking stealthily.
We cannot walk to the place I have described.
The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon, and the frosty stars blinked brightly.
Two or three of them crossed in the course of my early life, like magic-lantern figures, the disk of my very circumscribed observation.
As my eyes rested on those, to me, funereal but glorious woods, which formed the background of the picture, my thoughts recurred to my father's mysterious intimations and the image of the approaching visitor; and the thought of the unknown journey saddened me.
He says your mamma is not there.'
Poor thing!
'Very well, dear.'
'In her room, but not in bed.'
You must not.
She stuffed a book hastily between her dress and the chair, and received me in a state of langour which, had it not been for Mrs. Rusk's comfortable assurances, would have frightened me.
'I--I really don't know; I rather think not.
'I should so like to see her, my dear.
'But she is ill,' I answered, and all this time I was ready to cry for vexation, thinking of my dress, which must be very absurd to elicit so much unaffected laughter from my experienced relative, and I was only longing to get away and hide myself before that handsome Captain returned.
Do you remember little Kitty Weadon that I wanted you to marry eight-and-twenty years ago, or more, with a hundred and twenty thousand pounds?
And Madame shed some tears, which always came at call, and with her hand pressed to her ear, said very faintly,
But it was impossible long to be vexed with Cousin Monica.
As I went along the passage, I was thinking whether my dress could be so very ridiculous as my old cousin thought it, and trying in vain to recollect any evidence of a similar contemptuous estimate on the part of that beautiful and garrulous dandy.
I there-fore said with a kind of courage which sometimes helped me suddenly--
'And your cold, is it better?'
'Very thoughtful of you, Monica!' said my father.
Did not she engage to make your dresses?'
I should so like to talk to her a little.'
She is my governess--a finishing governess, Mrs. Rusk says.'
It was a long way to Madame's room.
'You know, my dear, your father is an oddity,' she said.
Madame was sitting, or rather reclining, in a low arm-chair, when I entered the room, close to the fire, as was her wont, her feet extended near to the bars, and a little coffee equipage beside her.
'A cold--feverish and rheumatic, she says.'
CHAPTER X
I suppose they did not wish a revolution and all its consequences at Knowl, and thought it no harm to excite my vigilance.
'I hope you are better, Madame,' I said, approaching.
And she winced and moaned, with her eyes closed and her hand pressed to the organ affected.
In fact, curiosity has nothing on earth to do with it.
Nothing I dreaded more than a step-mother.
And she tapped the corner of her forehead, with a look so sly and comical, that I think I should have laughed, if the sentiment had not been so awfully irreverent.
We have come to relieve your ear. Pray let me see it.
'Ill! is she?
She was over-acting; her transitions were too violent, and beside she forgot that I knew how well she could speak English, and must perceive that she was heightening the interest of her helplessness by that pretty tessellation of foreign idiom.
Lady Knollys tapped at the door, saying--'we'll come in, please, and see you.
I could not--quite the reverse, indeed. Still I was uncomfortable and feverish--girls of my then age will easily conceive how miserable, under similar circumstances, such a misgiving would make them.
She shook her head languidly, her elbow resting on the chair, and three finger-tips supporting her forehead, and then she made a little sigh, looking down from the corners of her eyes, in an interesting dejection.
Cousin Monica set down her two little vials on the table, and, stooping again over the bed, began very gently with her fingers to lift the coverlet that covered her face.
what's the matter?'
Well, dear, I think I can cure that in five minutes.
She has not a human relation, and she is in the best set.'
'Yes, you may, but not for myself, Austin--I'm not worthy.
There was no answer; so she opened the door, and we both entered.
So my father, with a kind look at her, and a very tender one on me, went silently to the library, as he often did about that hour.
Madame uttered a slumbering moan, and turned more upon her face, clasping the coverlet faster about her.
She eat enough for two to-day.
'But it won't do.
Good Mrs. Rusk and Mary Quince, in their several ways, used to enhance, by occasional anecdotes and frequent reflections, the terrors of such an intrusion.
Cracky, my dear, cracky--decidedly cracky!'
I met Mrs. Rusk bustling along the passage with a housemaid.
'You were always a match-maker, Monica,' said my father, stopping, and putting his hand kindly on hers.
Her last husband, the Russian merchant, left her everything.
'Quite well, I believe,' answered the housekeeper, drily.
So she lighted her candle in the lobby, and with a light and agile step she scaled the stairs, I following; and having found the remedies, we approached Madame's room together.
'Yes, and really, Austin, it is quite clear you ought to marry; you want some one to take this girl out, and look after her, and who's to do it? She's a dowdy--don't you see?
'I'm glad I was not the first,' said my father.
I think, while we were still at the end of the gallery, Madame heard and divined our approach, for her door suddenly shut, and there was a fumbling at the handle.
That, then, accounted for the rumble and smack of balls which I had heard as I passed the door.
But the bolt was out of order.
Ha!
His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam when the brown spring freshets flow; Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow; They knew him far for the fitful man who spat forth blood on the snow.
"The Moose-hides called it the devil-fox, and swore that no man could kill; That he who hunted it, soon or late, must surely suffer some ill; But I laughed at them and their old squaw-tales. Ha!
"I tracked it up where the mountains hunch like the vertebrae of the world; I tracked it down to the death-still pits where the avalanche is hurled; From the glooms to the sacerdotal snows, where the carded clouds are curled.
The black fox skin a shadow cast from the roof nigh to the floor; And sleek it seemed and soft it gleamed, and the woman stroked it o'er; And the man stood by with a brooding eye, and gnashed his teeth and swore.
"So that was the end of the great black fox, and here is the prize I've won; And now for a drink to cheer me up--I've mushed since the early sun; We'll drink a toast to the sorry ghost of the fox whose race is run."
Grim shadows diapered the snow; the air was strangely mild; The valley's girth was dumb with mirth, the laughter of the wild; The still, sardonic laughter of an ogre o'er a child.
When thieves and thugs fall out and fight there's fell arrears to pay; And soon or late sin meets its fate, and so it fell one day That Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike fanged up like dogs at bay.
Wherefore it was beyond all laws that lusts of man restrain, A man drank deep and sank to sleep never to wake again; And the Yukon swallowed through a hole the cold corpse of the slain.
A bird sang for the joy of spring, so piercing sweet and frail; And blinding bright the land was dight in gay and glittering mail; And with a wondrous black fox skin a man slid down the trail.
I was weary and sick and cold.
Mad!
"Farewell!" we cried to our dearests; little we cared for their tears. "Farewell!" we cried to the humdrum and the yoke of the hireling years; Just like a pack of school-boys, and the big crowd cheered us good-bye. Never were hearts so uplifted, never were hopes so high.
Gold!
Never was seen such an army, pitiful, futile, unfit; Never was seen such a spirit, manifold courage and grit. Never has been such a cohort under one banner unrolled As surged to the ragged-edged Arctic, urged by the arch-tempter--Gold.
We roused Lake Marsh with a chorus, we drifted many a mile; There was the canyon before us--cave-like its dark defile; The shores swept faster and faster; the river narrowed to wrath; Waters that hissed disaster reared upright in our path.
But what of the others that followed, losing their boats by the score? Well could we see them and hear them, strung down that desolate shore. What of the poor souls that perished?
Gold!
Thus toiled we, the army of fortune, in hunger and hope and despair, Till glacier, mountain and forest vanished, and, radiantly fair, There at our feet lay Lake Bennett, and down to its welcome we ran: The trail of the land was over, the trail of the water began.
Each man worked like a demon, as prow to rudder we raced; The winds of the Wild cried "Hurry!" the voice of the waters, "Haste!" We hated those driving before us; we dreaded those pressing behind; We cursed the slow current that bore us; we prayed to the God of the wind.
"Klondike or bust!" rang the slogan; every man for his own. Oh, how we flogged the horses, staggering skin and bone! Oh, how we cursed their weakness, anguish they could not tell, Breaking their hearts in our passion, lashing them on till they fell!
Gone was the joy of our faces, grim and haggard and pale; The heedless mirth of the shipboard was changed to the care of the trail. We flung ourselves in the struggle, packing our grub in relays, Step by step to the summit in the bale of the winter days.
We built our boats and we launched them.
Spring! and the hillsides flourished, vivid in jewelled green; Spring! and our hearts' blood nourished envy and hatred and spleen. Little cared we for the Spring-birth; much cared we to get on-- Stake in the Great White Channel, stake ere the best be gone.
We joined the weltering mass, Clamoring over their outfits, waiting to climb the Pass. We tightened our girths and our pack-straps; we linked on the Human Chain, Struggling up to the summit, where every step was a pain.
For grub meant gold to our thinking, and all that could walk must pack; The sheep for the shambles stumbled, each with a load on its back; And even the swine were burdened, and grunted and squealed and rolled, And men went mad in the moment, huskily clamoring "Gold!"
We landed in wind-swept Skagway.
Beneath us the green tumult churning, above us the cavernous gloom; Around us, swift twisting and turning, the black, sullen walls of a tomb. We spun like a chip in a mill-race; our hearts hammered under the test; Then--oh, the relief on each chill face!--we soared into sunlight and rest.
Besides, how can I tell in what manner this letter may have been written?
But I can afford to be contented, Clement, so long as I have you with me."
Henry Dunbar was not the murderer of my father.
"I should like to help you in this business," Clement Austin said, "for I have a vital interest in the issue of the case."
"You're rather more likely to hinder than help, sir," Mr. Carter answered, with a smile; "but you're welcome to have a finger in the pie if you like, as long as you'll engage to hold your tongue when I tell you."
"Then I'll go with you," Clement said, promptly.
"So be it, Mr. Austin.
"MARGARET WILMOT."
Mr. Dunbar himself offered a reward for the apprehension of the guilty party, didn't he?"
"I'll look up a file of newspapers, and run my eye over the details of the case," said the detective.
On the very day after this resolution took a definite form, Clement received a letter from Margaret Wilmot.
His life seemed to have altogether slipped away from him, and he felt like an old man who has lost all the bright chances of existence; the hope of domestic happiness and a pleasant home; the opportunity of a useful career and an honoured name; and who has nothing more to do but to wait patiently till the slow current of his empty life drops into the sea of death.
"There will be no peace for us until the secret of the deed done in the grove near Winchester has been brought to light."
Let this knowledge content you, and allow the secret of the murder to remain for ever a mystery upon earth, God knows the truth, and has doubtless punished the wretched sinner who was guilty of that crime, as He punishes every other sinner, sooner or later, in the course of His ineffable wisdom.
He was a man whose appearance was something between the aspect of a shabby-genteel half-pay captain and an unlucky stockbroker: but Clement liked the steady light of his small grey eyes, and the decided expression of his thin lips and prominent chin.
"I feel so old, mother," he said, sometimes; "I feel so old."
Again and again he went over the same ground, trying to find some lurking circumstance, no matter how unlikely in its nature, which should explain and justify Margaret's conduct.
Start with a conviction of the man's guilt, and you'll go hunting up evidence to bolster that conviction.
At last, by dint of going over the ground again and again, always pleading Margaret's cause against the stern witness of cruel facts, Clement came to look upon the girl's innocence as a settled thing.
It may have been written at Henry Dunbar's dictation, and under coercion.
My plan is to begin at the beginning; learn the alphabet of the case, and work up into the syntax and prosody."
Clement Austin felt this, and yet he had no heart to begin life again, though tempting offers came to him from great commercial houses, whose chiefs were eager to secure the well-known cashier of Messrs.
Be it as it may, the mystery of the Winchester murder shall be set at rest, if patience or intelligence can solve the enigma. No mystery shall separate me from the woman I love."
The detective called upon him two days after the interview at Scotland Yard.
He told his mother that he and his betrothed had parted; but he would tell no more.
The detective business happened to be rather dull just now.
As Heaven is my witness, this is the truth, and I know it to be the truth.
"I've read-up the Wilmot case, sir," Mr. Carter said; "and I think the next best thing I can do is to see the scene of the murder.
MARGARET'S LETTER.
The longer Clement thought of the subject, the more certainly he arrived at the conclusion that Margaret Wilmot had been, either bribed or frightened into silence by Henry Dunbar.
It might be that the banker had terrified this unhappy girl by some awful threat that had preyed upon her mind, and driven her from the man who loved her, whom she loved perhaps, in spite of those heartless words which she had spoken in the bitter hour of their parting.
This girl, who seemed the very incarnation of purity and candour, had her price, perhaps, as well as other people, and Henry Dunbar had bought the silence of his victim's daughter.
Before he went back to the quiet routine of life, he set himself a task to accomplish, and that task was the solution of the Winchester mystery.
You must always look at these sort of things from every point of view.
poverty must indeed be a bitter school if it has prepared you for such degradation as this!"
"I have been cruelly disappointed, mother, and the subject is very bitter to me," he said; and Mrs. Austin had not the courage to ask any further questions.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
"It was the knowledge of this business that made her shrink away from me that night when she told me that she was a contaminated creature, unfit to be the associate of an honest man Oh, Margaret, Margaret!
Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby's establishment.
This thought, working night and day in Clement Austin's brain, gave rise to a fixed resolve.
There was a mystery, and Henry Dunbar was at the bottom of it.
"No, Margaret," he thought; "even your pleading shall not turn me from my purpose.
Clement went back to London.
Poor Clement could not go into the world yet.
The sight of the well-known writing gave him a shock of mingled surprise and hope, and his fingers were faintly tremulous as they tore open the envelope.
"I was away in Glasgow, hunting up the particulars of the great Scotch-plaid robberies, all last summer, and I can't say I remember much of what was done in the Wilmot business.
"Yes; but that might be a blind."
He wasted hour after hour, and day after day, in gloomy thoughts about the past.
The letter was carefully worded, and very brief.
Further,--a young man of good breeding should promptly offer his hand to ladies, even if they are not acquaintances, when they pass such a place.
Any person, particularly a lady, who walks in this improper manner, whatever her education may be in other respects, will always appear awkward and clumsy.
When we meet, in the street, a person of our acquaintance, we salute them by bowing and uncovering ourselves, if there is occasion.
If you are a man, and a lady or distinguished person asks this favor of you, you should take off your hat while answering them.
PART II.
During this interview, which should be very short, the speaker of least importance ought to take the lower part of the side-walk, in order to keep the person with whom he is conversing, from the neighborhood of the carriages.
With the right hand she should hold together the folds of her gown, and draw them towards the right side.
They also, as they pass, ought to bow politely to you.
OF PROPRIETY OF DEPORTMENT IN REGARD TO OUR SOCIAL RELATIONS.
This ungraceful practice can be tolerated only for a moment, when the mud is very deep.
This opinion, which obtains among some persons, is an error.
This civility becomes a rigorous duty if they are accompanied by a lady.
To raise the dress on both sides, and with both hands, is vulgar.
The direction being given us, we should thank them, at the same time bowing.
The bugles sounded the retreat, and reluctantly they gave up the ground which they had won with so much courage and daring.
Nor did Grant and Buell wish to pursue.
"We knew that it was going to be a big war," said Dick, "but it's going to be far bigger than we thought."
He and Grant had reckoned that the decimated brigades of the South could not stand at all before him, but just as on the first day they came on with the fierce rebel yell, hurling themselves upon superior numbers, taking the cannon of their enemy, losing them, and retaking them and losing them again, but never yielding.
Nearly a third of her army had been killed or wounded in the battle, and yet they retired in good order, showing the desperate valor of these sons of hers.
It was charged at once by the men in gray so fiercely that the gunners were glad to escape with their guns, and once more the wild rebel yell of triumph swelled through the southern forest.
"And we won't make that easy parade down to the Gulf," said Warner.
Look, there's General Grant himself."
When the last of the Southern regiments disappeared in the deep woods, Dick and many of those around him sank exhausted upon the ground.
"Not that I can perceive," replied the colonel, "and yet with the rush of forty thousand fresh troops of ours upon the field I deemed victory quick and easy.
Sherman, McClernand and other generals now passed among their troops, cheering them, telling them that the time had come to win back what they had lost the day before, and that victory was sure.
Whole brigades and regiments were cut to pieces or thrown in confusion.
Grant reformed his line, which had been shattered by the last fiery and successful attack of the South.
He had not been able to avert defeat, but he had prevented utter ruin.
He, too, must have felt a singular thrill at that moment.
Buell, a man of iron courage, saw that his soldiers must fight to the uttermost, not for victory only, but even to ward off defeat.
A long and furious combat ensued.
But as they moved forward to attack the Union troops came out to meet them. Nelson had occupied the high ground between Lick and Owl Creeks, and his and the Southern troops met in a fierce clash shortly after dawn.
The exultant cheer swept through the ranks again, and back came the defiant rebel yell.
The great conflict increased in violence.
He could see from where he stood the flash of rifle fire and the blaze of cannon, and both eye and ear told him that the battle was not moving back upon the South.
It was the middle of the afternoon when the last shot was fired, and the Southern army at its leisure resumed its march toward Corinth, protected on the flanks by its cavalry, and carrying with it the assurance that although not victorious over two armies it had been victorious over one, and had struck the most stunning blow yet known in American history.
Another battery dashed up to the relief of the men in blue.
Sherman's whole division now raised itself up and rushed at the enemy, Dick and his comrades in the front of their own regiment.
He understood on the instant a fact that his soldiers did not comprehend until later.
"But we'll win!" said Dick.
Their armies had been too terribly shaken to make another attack.
The promises of their generals were coming true, and there is nothing sweeter than victory after defeat. Fortune, after frowning upon her so long, was now smiling upon the North.
He walked up and down in front of his lines, saying little but seeing everything.
Despite the prodigies of valor performed by their men, the Southern generals saw that they could not longer hold the field.
Even had they been ordered to follow they would have been incapable of it. Complete nervous collapse followed such days and nights as those through which they had passed.
Their decimated ranks could not withstand the charge of two armies.
But he neither boasted nor predicted, continuing to watch intently the swelling battle.
His division alone had held together in the face of the Southern attack until night came.
He knew the remains of Grant's army were about to march upon the enemy, helping the Army of the Ohio to achieve the task that had proved so great.
There was only one road by which Beauregard could retreat to Corinth.
The shock was terrific.
They retreated rather as victors than defeated men, presenting a bristling front to the enemy until their regiments were lost in the forest, and beating off every attempt of skirmishers or cavalry to molest them.
Dick, standing with his comrades on one of the ridges that they had defended so well, listened to the roar of conflict on the wing, ever increasing in volume, and watched the vast clouds of smoke gathering over the forest.
The generals discussed in subdued tones their narrow escape, and the soldiers, who now understood very well what had happened, talked of it in the same way.
The Southerners cut a wide gap in the Northern army, through which they rushed in triumph, holding the Corinth road against every attack and making their rear secure.
Sherman's division, after its momentary repulse, gathered itself anew, and, although knowing now that the Southern army could not be entrapped, drove again with all its might upon the positions around the church. They passed over the dead of the day before, and gathered increasing vigor, as they saw that the enemy was slowly drawing back.
Buell led splendid troops that he had trained long and rigidly, and they had not been in the conflict the day before.
Yet Beauregard and his generals were still sanguine of completing the victory.
Dick now knew that the North would recover the field, and that the South, cut down fearfully, though having performed prodigies of valor, must fight to save herself.
"I'm thinking that a lot of lions are in the path."
McClernand, too, reeled back, others were driven in also.
How the South fights!"
Grant was passing along his whole line.
Then after dreaming a little with his eyes open he fell asleep, gathering new strength for mighty campaigns yet to come.
He knew that the whole army of Buell was now before him.
Their scouts and skirmishers had failed to discover that the entire army of Buell also was now in front of them.
Nevertheless he awoke before midnight, and it was a very slight thing that caused him to come out of sleep.
The third man, who had been sitting with his shoulder toward Dick, turned his face presently, and the boy with difficulty repressed an exclamation.
She had placed the pine table in the middle of the room, and Dick noticed that it was large enough for five or six persons.
The stable was a good one, better than usual in that country.
"It's a good night to be indoors," she said.
"I know places where sojers wouldn't find that hoss in a thousand years.
He's got messages, dispatches of some kind that are worth a heap to somebody.
Dick rode close to the door, and, without hesitation, asked for a night's shelter and food.
The woman was pleading with them to let him go.
"But not younger than many who have gone to the war," replied Dick.
It was an icy night, but Dick did not stop to notice it.
Dick sat down gladly, and they fell to.
Dick sprang down gladly, but staggered a little at first from the stiffness of his legs.
"Hello!
The fire had died down except a few coals which cast but a faint light.
Me an' my pardners have been hangin' 'roun' in the woods, seein' what would happen.
A fourth and conclusive signal of alarm was registered upon his brain.
As he approached two yellow curs rushed forth and began to bark furiously, snapping at the horse's heels, the usual mountain welcome. But when a kick from the horse grazed the ear of one of them they kept at a respectful distance.
"The regiment!" they cried joyfully.
And as she talked to her husband Anna Pavlovna looked thinner, older, plainer.
"Why?
"You are not going?" asked the ladies in surprise.
She felt miserable, insulted, and choking with hate as she listened to her husband's heavy footsteps.
"I don't want you, but I wish you to be at home.
Seeing her husband standing before her, Anna Pavlovna started as though recalling the fact that she had a husband; then she flushed all over: she felt ashamed that she had such a sickly-looking, ill-humoured, ordinary husband.
"Of course not!
And Anna Pavlovna could scarcely walk....
We're clumsy seals, unpolished provincial bears, and she's the queen of the ball!
Where do we poor country bumpkins come in!" sneered the tax-collector.
"It makes me sick to look at her!" he muttered.
"I beg you to come home!" said the tax-collector deliberately, with a spiteful expression.
During the mazurka the tax-collector's face twitched with spite.
Among the husbands was Shalikov, the tax-collector--a narrow, spiteful soul, given to drink, with a big, closely cropped head, and thick, protruding lips.
The tax-collector watched, scowling with spite....
"Anyuta, let us go home," croaked the tax-collector.
I wish it; that's enough, and without further talk, please."
She began assuring him she would not stay long, only another ten minutes, only five minutes; but the tax-collector stuck obstinately to his point.
And meanwhile the band was playing and the darkness was full of the most rousing, intoxicating dance-tunes.
I wish it, that's all."
"We are at a discount now....
Their wishes were carried out.
He was ill-humoured--first, because the room was taken up with dancing and there was nowhere he could play a game of cards; secondly, because he could not endure the sound of wind instruments; and, thirdly, because he fancied the officers treated the civilians somewhat too casually and disdainfully.
"You wait; I'll teach you to smile so blissfully," he muttered.
"Her head aches," said the tax-collector for his wife.
Waiting for the end of the mazurka, he went into the hall and walked up to his wife.
Having talked to their hearts' content, they sent for the Military Commandant and the committee of the club, and instructed them at all costs to make arrangements for a dance.
"All right; then I shall make a scene."
Oh, how awful it is!
"Why?
"Why do you want me at once?" asked his wife.
The tax-collector walked behind his wife, and watching her downcast, sorrowful, humiliated little figure, he recalled the look of beatitude which had so irritated him at the club, and the consciousness that the beatitude was gone filled his soul with triumph.
An old fright ought to realise she is a fright!"
They knew everything.
The tax-collector could endure it no longer; he felt a desire to jeer at that beatitude, to make Anna Pavlovna feel that she had forgotten herself, that life was by no means so delightful as she fancied now in her excitement....
She was still under the influence of the dancing, the music, the talk, the lights, and the noise; she asked herself as she walked along why God had thus afflicted her.
"I wish it, and that's enough.
Come along, and that's all about it."
"Stay if you like," he said, "but I'll make a scene if you do."
But I shall be content if she will take my present one of Steele.
"Mr. Steele, I do not mean you to disturb my house or to rob me of my wife.
"Good!
Good!" rang thrilling through the room, as the old man reeled back from the wall against which he had been cast.
"I shall not give you even that satisfaction.
A man of twenty-five is old enough to have made a record, Mr. Steele--" The mayor's tone hardened, so did his manner; and I saw why he had been such a power in the courts before he took up politics and an office.
"Insults!" broke from those set lips and nothing more.
I am thirty-two now."
It was but child's play for so strong a man as Mr. Steele to shake off so futile a grasp, and he did so with a rasping laugh.
"My real name is Brainard; therefore, it is also hers.
Had the random shot told?
"I couldn't help it, your Honor.
"Do you mean to say, you, that your work is a traitor's work?
And it was characteristic of the forceful men, as well as the extreme nature of the conflict, that both were quiet in manner and speech--perhaps the mayor the more so, as he began the struggle by saying:
"Which name?
"Then," he cried, "I take back the word by which I qualified you a moment ago.
I am an adept at the glorification of the party, of the man that it suits my present exigencies to promote, but it is a faculty which should have made you pause before you trusted me with the furtherance and final success of a campaign which may outlast those exigencies.
I looked to see the mayor spring and grasp him by the throat, but that was left for another hand.
"No, not the devil, but yourself.
But what does that truth involve for me?
No answer from the sternly set lips.
The secretary's eye did not falter, nor his figure lose an inch of its height, yet the impression made by his look and attitude were not the same; the fire had gone out of them; a blight had struck his soul--the flush of his triumph was gone.
What was your life before you met Olympia Brewster?"
"I shall never answer; the devil has whispered his own suggestions in your ear; the devil and nothing else."
Mayor Packard was merciless.
Not two weeks, but seven years of torture, five of them devoted to grief for her, loss, and two to rage and bitter revulsion against her whole sex when I found her alive, and myself the despised victim of her deception."
But the next moment he was tottering, blanched and helpless, and while struggling to right himself and escape, yielded more and more to a sudden weakness sapping his life-vigor, till he fell prone and apparently lifeless on the lounge toward which, with a final effort, he had thrown himself.
This woman who has gone through the ceremony of marriage with both of us shall never know to which of us she is the legal wife.
That the glorification you speak of is false?
Seven years ago I was twenty-five.
"Never!"
He is dead this time, and it's a mercy!
Mr. Steele, you are both a villain and a bastard, and have no right in law to this woman.
Without a droop of his eye, or a tremor in his voice, the answer came short, sharp and emphatic:
THE FINGER ON THE WALL.
"Mr. Steele, I practised law in that state for a period of three years. All the records of the office and of the prison register are open to me. Over which of them should I waste my time?"
Perhaps it is as good a revenge as the other.
Steele or Brainard?
"You will bring such a charge?"
"I?
Contradict me if you dare."
That you may talk in my favor, but that when you come to the issue, you will vote according to your heart; that is, for Stanton?"
Then slowly and with a short look at her: "The woman who has queened it so long in C---- society can not wish to undergo the charge of bigamy?"
"So I have heard you say.
You are not a villain, you are a dastard."
I have not always been of your party; I am not so now at heart."
The mayor flushed; indignation gave him vehemence.
Thank God, Miss Olympia! thank God as I do now on my knees!" But here catching the mayor's eye, he faltered to his feet again, saying humbly as he crept away:
"You have known for two years that this woman whom you called yours was within your reach, if not under your very eye, and you forbore to claim her. Has this delay had anything to do with the record of those years to which I have just alluded?"
At this alternative, uttered with icy deliberation, Mrs. Packard recoiled with a sharp cry; but the mayor thrust a sudden sarcastic query at his opponent:
"My political principles!" Oh, the irony of his voice, the triumph in his laugh!
"God has finished what these old arms had only strength enough to begin.
"True! yes, it is true.
In short, all through December Mollie was weighed down under an avalanche of responsibility.
They've been a month at it, and I'm always kind of relieved when Christmas is over and there are no more mysterious doings.
"The children will go wild with delight," said his wife happily.
The month before Christmas was always the most exciting and mysterious time in the Joseph household.
"Dead" secrecy was the keystone of all plans and confidences.
When Mrs. Joseph went back to the kitchen her eyes fell on the heaped-up table in the corner.
Mr. Joseph nodded.
During this particular December the planning and contriving had been more difficult and the results less satisfactory than usual.
Things will be better next Christmas, we'll hope. The children will not mind, bless their hearts.
It fell out as Mrs. Ralston had planned.
It was Mollie who put the finishing touches to most of the little gifts.
But there!
Then the two of them, moving as stealthily as if engaged in a burglary, transferred the contents to the table.
"Late hour for callers, isn't it?" said Mr. Ralston.
Mrs. Ralston went over to the Christmas table and looked at the little gifts half tenderly and half pityingly.
"Please, how long shall I stay?" asked Jimmy Scarecrow.
"This is the doll-baby I gave Betsey, and it is not at all delicate.
"Santa Claus, please give me a little present.
She carried her new doll-baby smuggled up under her shawl.
Sometimes he almost vanished in the thick white storm.
Then Jimmy Scarecrow stood in the corn-stubble and shook with sobs until his joints creaked.
"First, I want to make a present to Aunt Hannah and Betsey, next Christmas."
Why, if they found the Pole, there wouldn't be a piece an inch long left in a week's time, and the earth would cave in like an apple without a core!
"No," answered Santa Claus, "but I don't want you to scare away crows. I want you to scare away Arctic Explorers.
"Why, it's my old crazy quilt, but it isn't crazy now!" cried Aunt Hannah, and her very spectacles seemed to glisten with amazement.
"Just wait a minute."
"Aunt Hannah wants to give it away if anybody wants it," she explained. "She's got so many crazy quilts in the house now she doesn't know what to do with them.
Come along; I am in a hurry."
Jimmy's greatest grief was his lack of occupation.
"Let me see it!" And with that he pulled the doll-baby out from under the Scarecrow's coat, and patted its back, and shook it a little, and it began to cry, and then to crow.
"Get in, Jimmy Scarecrow, and come with me to the North Pole!" he cried.
"Keep her under your overcoat, so the snow won't wet her, and she won't catch cold, she's delicate."
It went through the measles, and the chicken-pox, and the mumps, and the whooping-cough, before it left the North Pole.
NOTICE TO CROWS
He liked to be useful, and in winter he was absolutely of no use at all.
Santa took his stylographic pen out of his pocket, went with his lantern close to one of the fence-posts, and wrote these words upon it:
Betsey looked pitifully at the old hat fringed with icicles, like frozen tears, and the old snow-laden coat.
They would whittle it all to pieces, and carry it away in their pockets for souvenirs.
"You're welcome," said she.
"Aunt Hannah?" said she.
I can keep you in work for a thousand years, and scaring away Arctic Explorers from the North Pole is much more important than scaring away crows from corn.
"No, of course he didn't."
He was on his way to the farmhouse where Betsey lived with her Aunt Hannah.
"Don't you feel cold in that old summer coat?" asked Betsey.
"Well?" said she.
"Santa Claus! dear Santa Claus!" cried Jimmy Scarecrow with a great sob, and that time Santa Claus heard him and drew rein.
"Wish you Merry Christmas!" she said to Jimmy Scarecrow.
"I hope this quilt is harmless if it IS crazy," he said.
"Are there any crows to scare away at the North Pole?
But the quilt was warm, and he dismissed his fears. Soon the doll-baby whimpered, but he creaked his joints a little, and that amused it, and he heard it cooing inside his coat.
"Nonsense!" cried Santa Claus.
He was afraid to trust it in the pack, lest it get broken.
Santa Claus had a large wax doll-baby for her on his arm, tucked up against the fur collar of his coat.
Betsey had told Aunt Hannah she had given away the crazy quilt and the doll-baby, but had been scolded very little.
"The corn will be safe now," said Santa Claus, "get in." Jimmy got into the sledge and they flew away over the fields, out of sight, with merry halloos and a great clamour of bells.
"Here," said she, "here is something to keep you warm," and she folded the crazy quilt around the Scarecrow and pinned it.
"You shall make them any present you choose.
Aunt Hannah was making a crazy patchwork quilt, and she frowned hard at a triangular piece of red silk and circular piece of pink, wondering how to fit them together.
Then she and Betsey had each a strange present.
"What's that over your shoulders?" Santa Claus continued, holding up his lantern.
Every morning, when the wintry sun peered like a hard yellow eye across the dry corn-stubble, Jimmy felt sad, but at Christmas time his heart nearly broke.
But he was mistaken.
John, the servant-man, searched everywhere, but not a trace of them could he find.
"I've been looking for a person like you for a long time."
"Wish you the same," said Jimmy, but his voice was choked with sobs, and was also muffled, for his old hat had slipped down to his chin.
Jimmy Scarecrow stood in the corn-stubble, with the doll-baby under his coat and waited, and soon Betsey was back again with Aunt Hannah's crazy quilt trailing in the snow behind her.
Jimmy Scarecrow led a sad life in the winter.
Then she got up and spread it out over the sofa with an air of pride.
"Thank you," said Jimmy Scarecrow faintly.
"Yes, I will," said Jimmy Scarecrow, and he tried hard to bring one of his stiff, outstretched arms around to clasp the doll-baby.
"It's all right," said Santa Claus.
"Jimmy Scarecrow!"
"Why, you are going to live with me," replied Santa Claus.
What else?"
But after that the snow began to turn to rain, and the crazy quilt was soaked through and through: and not only that, but his coat and the poor doll-baby.
"Because he's a Scarecrow.
"Have you been standing here ever since corn was ripe?" he asked pityingly, and Jimmy replied that he had.
"You wait a minute," said Betsey, and was off across the field.
Here I am!" he cried out, but Santa Claus did not hear him.
But the next summer there was no need of a scarecrow, for not a crow came past the fence-post on which Santa Claus had written his notice to crows.
"I will go on two conditions," said Jimmy.
Per order of Santa Claus.
I've got one for every bed in the house, and I've given four away.
Don't ask silly questions."
He was a young Scarecrow, and this was his first one.
The bright flash of colours under Jimmy's hat-brim dazzled his eyes, and he felt a little alarmed.
Whichever crow shall hereafter hop, fly, or flop into this field during the absence of Jimmy Scarecrow, and therefrom purloin, steal, or abstract corn, shall be instantly, in a twinkling and a trice, turned snow-white, and be ever after a disgrace, a byword and a reproach to his whole race.
"It's my doll-baby!" she cried, and snatched her up and kissed her.
On Christmas Eve Santa Claus came in his sledge heaped high with presents, urging his team of reindeer across the field.
It was after midnight, Christmas was over, and Santa was hastening home to the North Pole.
That was all Aunt Hannah had said.
He wondered how many such miserable winters he would have to endure.
"Who's me?" shouted Santa Claus.
Make a stuffing of bread, butter, salt, pepper and parsley; fill a large shad with this, and bake it in a stove or oven.
Plain Oyster Pie.
Another Way.
A Dish of Poached Eggs.
Scolloped Oysters.
To Stew Terrapins.
To Bake a Fresh Shad.
Wash and drain the oysters, and put them in salt and water, that will bear an egg; let them scald till plump, and put them in a glass jar, with some cloves and whole peppers, and when cold cover them with vinegar.
To Bake a Rock Fish.
A Rich Oyster Pie.
To Boil Salt Salmon.
A fat shad is very nice boiled, although rock and bass are preferred generally; when done, take it up on a fish dish, and cover it with egg sauce or drawn butter and parsley.
Omelet.
To Stew Clams.
"Not dead!
"Saying your prayers!
"Worth no more than that," repeated Mr. Cruncher.
"You weren't.
Keep still!"
The leg is also good, cut into slices and broiled.
Warm up the brains with a little water, butter, salt, and pepper.
When stewed tender, take up the meat, thicken the gravy with flour and water, mixed smoothly together, squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, then turn it over the collops.
If the beef is not very tender, it should be laid on a board and pounded, before broiling or frying it.
To every gallon of cold water, put a quart of rock salt, an ounce of salt-petre, quarter of a pound of brown sugar--(some people use molasses, but it is not as good)--no boiling is necessary.
When the veal is fried brown, dip it into the batter, then put it back into the fat, and fry it until brown again.
Then take it, cut it into small strips together with the pork, put it in a stew pan, with a little water, butter, and pepper.
A little curry powder in this, converts it into a curry dish.
If broiled slow, it will not be good.
7.
Add wine and spices if you like.
Mutton for roasting, should have a little butter rubbed on it, and a little salt and pepper sprinkled on it--some people like cloves and allspice.
When the meat is sufficiently fried, take it up, remove the frying pan from the fire to cool; when so, turn in a little cold water for the gravy, put it on the fire--when it boils, stir in a little mixed flour and water, let it boil, then turn it over the meat.
8.
The tender loin and first and second cuts off the rack are the best roasting pieces--the third and fourth cuts are good.
Some people prefer part of the liver and feet for dressing--they are prepared like the brains.
The dish should be very hot on which broiled meat is put, and it should not be seasoned till taken up.
Garnish them with a lemon cut in thin slices.
Bake it in a quick oven, and garnish it with slices of lemon, or force meat balls.
Fry a few slices of salt pork, brown, then take them up and put in the beef.
Calf's head is also good, baked.
Cut part of a leg of veal into pieces, three or four inches broad--sprinkle flour on them, fry them in butter until brown, then turn in water enough to cover the veal.
The breast also is good made into a pot pie, and the rack cut into small pieces and broiled.
When a piece of beef is put in the brine, rub a little salt over it.
If you wish to fry meat, cut a small piece of pork into slices, and fry them a light brown, then take them up and put in your meat, which should be perfectly dry.
For seven or eight pounds of beef, cut up about a quarter of a pound of butter.
Are good, broiled or fried.
Cut off the shank of a leg of veal, and cut gashes in the remainder. Make a dressing of bread, soaked soft in cold water, and mashed; season it with salt, pepper, and sweet herbs; chop a little raw pork fine, put it in the dressing, and if you have not pork, use a little butter instead.
The leg is good cut in gashes, and filled with a dressing, and baked.
6.
Serve it up as a dressing for the head.
5.
It should not be put with pork, as fresh meat is apt to injure it.
11.
Boil the head two hours, together with the lights and feet.
A little rice boiled with it, improves the looks of it.
On this account it is good to corn it in the pot when boiled.
The leg is also good, cooked in the same manner; but it is better boiled with a pound of salt pork.
When done, take it up, and thicken the gravy with a little flour and water, and put in a small piece of butter.
These pieces are good stuffed like a fillet of veal, and roasted.
It takes from fifteen to twenty minutes to broil a steak.
The liquor that the calf's head is boiled in, makes a good soup, seasoned in a plain way like any other veal soup, or seasoned turtle fashion.
13.
For boiling or roasting mutton, allow a quarter of an hour to each pound of meat.
It takes about an hour to cook this dish.
The fore quarter, with the ribs divided, is good broiled.
17.
The saddle is the best part to roast--the shoulder and leg are good roasted; but the best mode to cook the latter, is to boil it with a piece of salt pork.
Lamb is very apt to spoil in warm weather.
The liquor should stand until the next day after the head is boiled, in order to have the fat rise, and skimmed off.
Take it up, cut it into strips three or four inches long, put it back into the pot, with the liquor it was boiled in, with a tea cup of rice to three pounds of veal.
Beef steak to be good, should be eaten as soon as cooked.
4.
The breast of mutton is nice baked.
If you wish to keep a leg several days, put it in brine.
The tender loin is the best piece for broiling--a steak from the round or shoulder clod is good and comes cheaper.
There should always be a trough to catch the juices of the meat when broiled.
"Monsieur Colbert!"
You speak just as the confessor did."
"Ah," replied Colbert, "that is because your eminence, absorbed as you are by your disease, entirely loses sight of the character of Louis XIV."
"To inherit, yes, Colbert, yes; he is anxious for my death, in order to inherit.
What for?
I would prevent him!"
"Saying certain things to him at the same time, I guarantee he will refuse them."
Chapter XLVI.
Did I not hear him say--'Distinguish that which the king has given you from that which you have given yourself.' Recollect, my lord, if he did not say something a little like that to you?--that is quite a theatrical speech."
"Pride!
The cardinal was indeed very ill; large drops of sweat flowed down upon his bed of agony, and the frightful pallor of a face streaming with water was a spectacle which the most hardened practitioner could not have beheld without much compassion.
Can all this money be badly acquired?"
"Well; but how?"
"But for what?" said Mazarin, quite bewildered.
"And you will guarantee, that if I give my forty millions to the king--"
"You said so, clearly, it seems to me, when you advised me to give it to him."
The particulars of my property will be found--they are drawn up--at the first requisition of his majesty, or at the last sigh of his most devoted servant,
But my pains are returning, I shall faint.
People generally find they have been so,--when they die."
"Your eminence has misunderstood me.
"That admits of no contradiction, my lord."
"About to appear before God, the Master of mankind, I beg the king, who was my master on earth, to resume the wealth which his bounty has bestowed upon me, and which my family would be happy to see pass into such illustrious hands.
"I felt assured that in consulting you, Colbert, I should have good advice," replied Mazarin, greatly delighted.
Colbert started.
Next?"
The Donation.
"Because the king will not accept of the whole."
Against the king?"
"To make restitution!" cried Mazarin, with great warmth.
"What, of all!
All that does not proceed from himself, I predict, he will disdain."
"Pride,--yes, you are right.
"Alas! yes, my lord."
"In the first place, they commit the wrong of dying, Colbert."
"To make restitution of a part,--that is to say, his majesty's part; and that, monseigneur, may have its dangers.
"Just so."
"I thought your eminence did me the honor to ask my advice?"
"Exactly: if the donation were made in a certain form he would refuse it."
"Oh! no; a snare?
"But, if he should accept it; if he should even think of accepting it!"
"Well, but, after all, what advantage will that be to me?"
Pardon me, my lord, haughtiness, nobleness; kings have no pride, that is a human passion."
You appear to be much afraid that the king will accept; you have a deal more reason to fear that he will not accept."
"I will write them, if my lord will have the goodness to dictate them."
"But those things--what are they?"
"The legacy of a part would dishonor you and offend the king.
"And I might fairly keep for my own family, which is so needy, a good fortune,--the whole, even, of which I have earned?"
"Then there would remain thirteen millions for your family, and that is a good round sum."
"Does it?
Triple fool that I am!
"Can he be right?
Colbert resumed his place at Mazarin's pillow at the first interval of pain, and persuaded him to dictate a donation thus conceived.
"That is possible."
"That is true, my lord.
"Surely the king would reproach me with nothing, but he would laugh at me, while squandering my millions, and with good reason."
"Well, my lord, if I have divined rightly, your eminence has but to give all your money to the king, and that immediately."
Colbert was, without doubt, very much affected, for he quitted the chamber, calling Bernouin to attend to the dying man, and went into the corridor.
Your eminence is too skillful a politician not to know that, at this moment, the king does not possess a hundred and fifty thousand livres clear in his coffers."
"Yes, but you are ignorant of the principal details of the question."
The cardinal sighed heavily as he signed this; Colbert sealed the packet, and carried it immediately to the Louvre, whither the king had returned.
"Go on--that is?"
"I see no impediment to that, monseigneur."
"How so?"
"That is plain enough.
Colbert reappeared beneath the curtains.
"My lord!"
"That is beyond doubt."
Whilst burning-hot napkins, physic, revulsives, and Guenaud, who was recalled, were performing their functions with increased activity, Colbert, holding his great head in both his hands, to compress within it the fever of the projects engendered by the brain, was meditating the tenor of the donation he would make Mazarin write, at the first hour of respite his disease should afford him.
Leaving a part to his majesty, is to avow that that part has inspired you with doubts as to the lawfulness of the means of acquisition."
"Yes."
"That the present is worth the trouble?
"But forty millions!" said Anne of Austria, in the same tone as that in which, at a later period, poor Marie Antoinette replied, "You will tell me as much!"
These horsemen were a fraction of the watch: the groups were busy portions of the people, to whom a king is always a curious thing, the same as a rhinoceros, a crocodile, or a serpent.
It is the act of a faithful subject and a good Christian." And having once more cast her eyes over the act, she restored it to Louis XIV., whom the announcement of the sum greatly agitated.
"Yes," said the king, replying pointedly to the superintendent of finances, "yes, at the point of death, monsieur le cardinal makes me a donation of all his wealth."
Then, passing his hand over his brow, and feeling the want of air, he approached a window, and looking down, saw below some horsemen talking together, and groups of timid observers.
"Thank you, Monsieur Fouquet," said the king politely, "and I am gratified by your intention, for I love good horses; but you know I am not very rich; you, who are my superintendent of finances, know it better than any one else.
The young king then was, as we have seen, a prey to a double excitement; and he said to himself as he looked in a glass, "O king!--king by name, and not in fact;--phantom, vain phantom art thou!--inert statue, which has no other power than that of provoking salutations from courtiers, when wilt thou be able to raise thy velvet arm, or clench thy silken hand?
"I shall consider of it," replied he, looking at Fouquet.
"Thank him, sire--"
"Who!
"Thank you, mother," replied Louis, bowing respectfully to the queen. "Thank you Monsieur, Fouquet," said he, dismissing the superintendent civilly.
But the king is silent, and consequently I am condemned."
I am not able, then, however willing I may be, to purchase such a valuable set of horses."
"He is not precisely a king, as you fancy," said Anne of Austria to her son; "he is only a man who is much too rich--that is all."
"The king shall have them whenever he wishes," said the superintendent of finances, bowing.
During this speech, Louis was, unconsciously, folding and unfolding Mazarin's paper, upon which he had not cast his eyes.
People of France! what a heap of creatures!
I therefore protested against his putting in for me, and urged every reason to dissuade him from it that I could, without wounding his feelings.
"Yes," said Billy, "dang old Roper if we don't go our death for you, no matter who offers.
"Well," returned I, "you've seen it now, and I'm the boy that can do it."
"With all my heart," returned I; "but you must be as clever as I've been, and give me your name."
"Now I know you're the very chap, for I heard daddy tell that very thing about the half bullet.
Take her, and show the boys how you used to do when you was a baby."
We stopped at the 'squire's door.
"Oh, Lord!" exclaimed two or three: "now we have it.
Here goes!"
"Where are you going, Bob?"
There was nothing remarkable in his person or manner.
The distinction is perfectly natural and equitable.
Three or four followed him without bettering his shot; all of whom, however, with one exception, "eat the paper."
Another sort for getting bets upon, to the drop-sight, with a single wabble!
Consequently, they were all transfixed with astonishment when the judges presented the target to them, and gravely observed, "It's only second best, after all the fuss."
These were, that they should be fired off-hand, while the shot-guns were allowed a rest, the distance being equal; or that the distance should be one hundred yards for a rifle, to sixty for the shot-gun, the mode of firing being equal.
I had just strength enough to master Soap-stick's obstinate proclivity, and, consequently, my nerves began to exhibit palpable signs of distress with her first imperceptible movement upward.
It now came to Spivey's turn.
It was soon ascertained that not more than twenty persons would take chances; but these twenty agreed to take the number of shots, at twenty-five cents each.
Billy wiped out his rifle carefully, loaded her to the top of his skill, and handed her to me.
"I find you're not the fool I took you to be; so here's to a better acquaintance with you."
"Now," said he, "Lyman, draw a fine bead, but not too fine; for Soap-stick bears up her ball well.
"Well, clear the way! the Soap-stick's coming, and she'll be along in there among 'em presently."
An auger-hole in the breech served for a grease-box; a cotton string assisted a single screw in holding on the lock; and the thimbles were made, one of brass, one of iron, and one of tin.
Take care and don't touch the trigger until you've got your bead; for she's spring-trigger'd and goes mighty easy: but you hold her to the place you want her, and if she don't go there, dang old Roper."
The beef was not present, nor is it ever upon such occasions; but several of the company had seen it, who all concurred in the opinion that it was a good beef, and well worth the price that was set upon it--eleven dollars.
Archibald had been a justice of the peace in his day (and where is the man of his age in Georgia who has not?); consequently, he was called 'Squire Sims.
They are still common throughout the Southern States, though they are not as common as they were twenty-five or thirty years ago. Chance led me to one about a year ago.
"Kiss my foot!" said Mealy.
I was rejoiced when one of the company inquired, "Where is it?" for I could hardly believe they were founding these remarks upon the evidence of their senses.
"To be sure I will, my old coon; take it, take it, and welcome.
"No great harm done yet," said Spivey, manifestly relieved from anxiety by an event which seemed to me better calculated to produce despair. Firmby's ball had cut out the lower angle of the diamond, directly on a right line with the cross.
"About three-quarters of an inch from the cross," was the reply.
"A pretty good shot, Mealy!" said one.
"How goes it, stranger?" said he, with a tone of independence and self-confidence that awakened my curiosity to know a little of his character.
I was thunder-struck, not at his proposition to pay for my shot, because I knew that Billy meant it as a token of friendship, and he would have been hurt if I had refused to let him do me this favor; but at the unexpected announcement of my name as a competitor for beef, at least one hundred miles from the place of my residence.
And the Soap-stick's the very yarn for it."
I reckon you hardly ever was at a shooting-match, stranger, from the cut of your coat?"
"I swear poin' blank," said one, "that man can't shoot."
Moses kept us not long in suspense.
"Why, stop, stranger, let me look at you good!
"What's that!
"Put it down!" said Billy, with the authority of an emperor, and with a look that spoke volumes intelligible to every by-stander.
As soon as I found that Soap-stick was high enough (for I made no farther use of the sights than to ascertain this fact), I pulled trigger, and off she went.
"The way I'll creep into that bull's-eye's a fact."
It is the custom in this state, when a man has once acquired a title, civil or military, to force it upon him as long as he lives; hence the countless number of titled personages who are introduced in these sketches.
"Going driving?" inquired I.
Anything else about me you'd like to have?"
Mealy stepped out, rifle in hand, and toed the mark.
Don't say nothing about it."
It seems to me I ought to know you."
Put down four shots to me, and one to Lyman Hall, paid for by William Curlew."
"Why, Billy," said I, "you little mortal, you! what do you use such a gun as this for?"
"Buck-killer made a clear racket. Where am I, gentlemen?"
"Tell her," said I, "that I send her a quarter of beef which I won, as I did the handkerchief, by nothing in the world but mere good luck."
"Where am I?" said Billy, as the smoke rose from before his eye.
Here, Billy, my son, take the old Soap-stick; she's a good piece, but I'm getting too old and dim-sighted to shoot a rifle, especially with the drop-sight and double wabbles."
"I've eat paper," said he, at the crack of the gun, without looking, or seeming to look, toward the target.
Several received this palaver with a contemptuous but very appropriate curl of the nose; and Mealy Whitecotton offered to bet a half pint "that I couldn't do the like again with no sort o' wabbles, he didn't care what." But I had already fortified myself on this quarter of my morality.
I took hold of Soap-stick, and lapsed immediately into the most hopeless despair.
"How goes it, Uncle Archy?" said I, taking his hand warmly (for I am always free and easy with those who are so with me; and in this course I rarely fail to please).
"The stranger's got the peedoddles," said a fourth, with humorous gravity.
"Oh, yes," returned I, "many a time.
He was born a shooting, and killed squirrels before he was weaned."
"Pretty digging!" said he.
Billy discharged his last shot, which left the rights of parties thus: Billy Curlew first and fourth choice, Spivey second, Firmby third and Whitecotton fifth.
The third and fourth rounds were shot.
"Go 'long, you old coon!" said Billy; "I see what you're at;" intimating that all this was merely to make the coming shot the more remarkable. "Daddy's little boy don't shoot anything but the old Soap-stick here to-day, I know."
The next was Moses Firmby.
"Well," said I, "if the shooting-match is not too far out of my way, I'll go to it with pleasure."
"Five," was the reply.
"Well, that's not my fault."
Had I judged Billy's chance of success from the looks of his gun, I should have said it was hopeless.
"Second best!" reiterated I, with an air of despondency, as the company turned from the target to me.
We soon reached the place appointed for the shooting-match.
"Oh, yes there is, stranger!
I was too young to recollect you myself; but I've heard daddy talk about you many a time.
He took his place, lowered his rifle slowly from a perpendicular until it came on a line with the mark, held it there like a vice for a moment and fired.
This round was a manifest improvement upon the first.
LONGSTREET
"Reckon I don't know what I'm about?" Then wheeling off, and muttering in an under, self-confident tone, "Dang old Roper," continued he, "if he don't knock that cross to the north corner of creation and back again before a cat can lick her foot."
A general inquiry ran around, in order to form some opinion as to the number of shots that would be taken; for, of course, the price of a shot is cheapened in proportion to the increase of that number.
"Second best, only?
"He used to shoot well," said another; "but can't now, nor never could."
"How many shots left?" inquired Billy.
But I could not accept his hospitality without retracing five or six miles of the road which I had already passed, and therefore I declined it.
Come along, Lyman, and I'll go my death upon you at the shooting-match, with the old Soap-stick at your shoulder."
Their report, however, was true; so much keener is the vision of a practiced than an unpracticed eye.
I looked with all the power of my eyes, but was unable to discover the least change in the surface of the paper.
"I said I'd eat paper, and I've done it; haven't I, gentlemen?"
"Well, Mr. Swinge-cat," said the 'squire, "here's to a better acquaintance with you," offering me his hand.
"It may be fun," said the other, "but it looks mightily like yearnest to a man up a tree."
Bet 'em two to one that I've knocked out the cross."
Simon Stow was now called on.
"Unless your way lies through the woods from here," said Billy, "it'll not be much out of your way; for it's only a mile ahead of us, and there is no other road for you to take till you get there; and as that thing you're riding in ain't well suited to fast traveling among brushy knobs, I reckon you won't lose much by going by.
"Where's Lark Spivey's bullet?" called out Billy to the judges, as he finished rolling up his sleeves.
So you see how ridiculous this young girl, by the betrayal of such ignorance, made herself in conversation with a cultured young gentleman whose good opinion she was most anxious to win.
Directions and suggestions for aiding young people to become agreeable and pleasant conversers must necessarily be mainly negative.
It is one of the marks of an advancing state of intelligence and culture, when an assemblage of gentlemen and ladies can pass delightful hours in the mere interchange of thought in conversation.
Especially should she avoid seeking to make an impression by frequent mention of advantageous friends or circumstances.
'No one ever knew a sarcastic woman who could keep friends.
"'If you want to read him,' said Corey, with a laugh of sympathy for an imaginable joke.
I am to infer that you keep good company by your good manners and better information; and to infer your reading from the wealth, and accuracy of your conversation."
Happily, this is not a necessary alternative.
"'We had a good deal about him in school.
Nevertheless, one must have a good groundwork of knowledge of books in order to avoid mistakes such as poor Irene made in talking with young Corey.
"'And Shakespere,' she added.
Be especially careful to avoid interrupting one who is speaking.
I believe we had one of his books.
She was telling a young gentleman where the book-shelves were to be in the splendid new house being built by her father, and suggesting that the shelves would look nice if the books had nice bindings.
It is not very long since another popular modern novelist held up to scorn and ridicule the young woman whose particular ambition seemed to be to let society know what an immense number of books she had been reading.
Weren't you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays there were of his?
be especially kind to the shrinking and timid, to the poor and unfortunate.
More than three-fourths of the matter printed in the "great city dailies" is not only of no use to anyone, but it is a positive damage to habits of mental application to read it.
And while games and other amusements may serve for a temporary variety (always excepting games known as "kissing-games," which should be promptly tabooed and denounced, and ever will be in truly refined society), yet animated and intelligent conversation must always hold the first place in the list of the pleasures of any refined society circle.
I think we ought to have all the American poets.'
But talking in too loud a tone is scarcely less unpleasant to the listeners than the use of too low a tone, which is generally an affectation.
1.
"'They're historians, too.'
Have a special thought and regard for those who may labor under disadvantages?
The talent for being sarcastic is a most dangerous one.
In this way you will avoid that bane of social conversation--gossip.
A young girl may not be called upon to reprove it, but she certainly can shun the company of those who are given to such vulgarity (for no other term will rightly describe it), and she can certainly refrain from joining in any conversation of this description.
'I used to get them mixed up with each other, and I couldn't tell them from the poets. Should you want to have poetry?'
'But of course there was a time when Tennyson was a great deal more to me than he is now.'
The temptation to be bright and interesting and to attract attention by the use of sarcasm is very strong, for nearly all will be interested in it and enjoy it for a little.
3.
What kind of writers are they?'
Mine's lost, but Pen will remember.'
The most that any earnest person should attempt to do with a daily paper is to glance over the headlines which give the gist of the news, and then to read such editorial comments as enable the reader to understand the more important events and affairs that are transpiring in the world so that reference to them in conversation would be intelligent and intelligible.
I have heard a young boarding-school graduate embarrass a whole room-full of excellent and educated people by asking a young gentleman if he did not think Longfellow very inferior to Lowell in his love poems.
American girls and women are accused by cultivated foreigners of having loud, harsh, strident voices; and there is too much truth in the accusation.
It is a waste of time even to undertake to sift the important from the unimportant.
In one of his essays he says: "You shall not enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me by their titles what books you have read.
We had ever so much about Shakespere.
So many people want to talk about themselves, or their affairs, that it is in many circles almost an impossibility to maintain a high and elevating conversation.
Much harm, much blunting of fine sensibilities, much destruction of that delicate modesty which is the priceless dower of young girlhood, comes of such jesting and joking where it is permitted without restraint or reproof.
The field of literature is now so vast that no one can hope to be well acquainted with more than a small portion of it.
Do you like it?'
Yet every well-informed young person should know the general character of the principal writers since the time of Shakespere, even though one should never read their works.
But were I obliged to choose between sarcasm and dullness in a young girl, I should prefer dullness.
She must avoid frequent attempts at wit; avoid punning, which is the cheapest possible form of wit; and avoid sarcasm.
"'We don't any of us like poetry.
And yet, to talk too much about books is not well; it often marks the pedantic and egotistic character.
Until years and experience, as well as wide reading and information, have given you the right to express freely your opinions in society, it will be well to listen a great deal more than you speak, especially when in the company of your elders.
The culture of the voice is one of the most important elements in making a pleasant converser.
That's what Gibbon was.
To laugh aloud is a dangerous thing, unless all noise and harshness have been cultivated out of the voice, as ought to be done in every good school.
But if one should never see a daily paper, yet should every week carefully read a digest of news prepared for a good weekly paper, one would be thoroughly furnished with all necessary knowledge of contemporaneous events, and the time thus saved from daily papers could be profitably employed in other reading.
"'Well, not all.
In all social relations strive to throw your influence for that which is faithful, sincere, kind, generous, and just.
The cause of harshness and loudness is often mere carelessness on the part of young people.
The greatest observer and commentator upon manners that ever wrote was Mr. Emerson.
I remember, at the time, it felt as though something had passed over my face."
It was to that class of trade that Mrs. Darcy catered.
"You didn't call Mrs. Darcy?"
It was left here by--"
"That's what did it!" exclaimed the county physician.
He has done business with me for some years."
"I can't say for sure," answered the young man--he was this side of thirty.
"Like a hand?" suggested Carroll.
The butt of his gun projected behind him, and as Dr. Warren moved the statue into the light of the jewelry store chandeliers, they all saw, clinging to the stock of the gun, some straggling, white hairs.
"Better come down and meet him, Mr. Darcy.
"Wheresh my paper cutter, Darcy?" went on King, smiling in a fashion meant to be merry, but which was fixed and glassy as to his eyes. "Wheresh my li'l preshent for wifely?
Killed, I'm afraid!
"Um, yes!
Oh, Miss Brill, come in!" and he held out his hand to the one young woman clerk, who drew back in horrified fright as she saw the silent figure on the floor.
"This is getting interesting!"
"The county physician," explained Carroll.
Wheresh my gold-mounted paper cutter, Darcy?"
"The house I hope to live in with my wife--Miss Amy Mason," answered Darcy, and he spoke in calm contrast to his former excitement, "We are going to be married in the fall," he went on.
"Where is your room?"
There came another knock on the side door downstairs.
"No.
I lay still a little while, and then I went to sleep again. I was only awake maybe two or three minutes."
Got a place where I can wash my hands?" he asked.
"Dr. Warren," reported the policeman, calling upstairs to Carroll and Thong.
"Did you come directly down to the store from your room?" asked Thong.
She's deaf."
"Then you came downstairs and found Mrs. Darcy lying here--dead?"
But if it was a burglar it's funny you didn't hear any noise--like a fall, or something.
Bad place, too.
Then we'll have another go at you.
"No.
"The watch that is still ticking?"
I wasn't very wide awake, and I didn't really attach any importance to it until after I saw her--dead."
"Yes, but the funny part of it is that the watch wasn't going last night, when I planned to start work on it.
Anyhow I didn't do anything to the Indian's watch more than look at it, and I made up my mind to rise early and hurry it through.
Sallie Page sleeps on the top floor where the janitor's family lives, and he, of course, sleeps up there also."
"A little after.
"What's up?" asked Thong quickly.
Darcy indicated a little closet near his work bench.
Yes," murmured Carroll.
"Doc Warren, eh," mused Thong to his partner, as Darcy preceded them downstairs.
You see, I was all excited like--"
"Singa Phut!" ejaculated Carroll.
"Say, do you know something about this killing that you're keeping back from us?"
"What kind of talk is that?" demanded Thong roughly.
"Yes.
That is to say, those, aside from a casual trade with people who dropped in as they might have done to a grocery, to get what they really needed in the way of jewelry, came in gasolene or electric cars where their ancestors had come with horses and carriage.
Did you hear anything?"
"Oh," said Carroll and Thong in unison.
He left the watch with my cousin, who told me to repair it.
She seldom came down ahead of me, especially of late years.
"Dead!
Then come those of her maid, Jane Metson.
And so the Darcy trade had grown and prospered.
Young ladies counted it a point in the favor of their lovers if the engagement circlet came from Van Doren's. And Mortimer Darcy, knowing the value of that class of trade, had, when he purchased Mr. Van Doren's business fostered that spirit.
Place on fire?
"No."
"Yes," assented Thong.
"Wasn't it bolted?" came sharply from Thong.
"Wheresh tha' paper cutter I left for you t' 'grave Pearl's name on?
"My wife--she likes them things.
I went out the side one.
"Is anything gone?"
"Well, then you went to sleep again. What did you do next?"
"But what did you do?"
More reporters came, and Daley fraternized with them, the newspaper men aside from the police and Jim Holiday, a detective from Prosecutor Bardon's office, being the only people admitted to the shop, when the clerks had been sent home.
Dr. Warren soon resumed his coat, accepted a cigarette from Daley, slipped into his still damp rain-garment and was soon throbbing down the street in his automobile, having announced that he was going to breakfast and would perform the autopsy immediately afterward.
"Um!
I'll put a notice in the door now," and Darcy wrote out one which a clerk affixed to the front door for him.
And then, in the gleam from the electric lights there was revealed underneath and in the left side of the dead woman a clean slit through her light dress--a slit the edges of which were stained with blood.
But I remember it.
Thatsh me--sure thash mine!" and carefully trying to balance himself, he reached forward as though to take the stained dagger from the hand of the detective.
As soon as I awakened."
She understood it, and it understood her.
"Why not?"
Take her home nice preshent.
"Was it the striking of the clock that awakened you?"
Got take it home now.
I'll get at it right away. I guess you remember that Murray case," he went on, to no one in particular.
All I know is I slept quite soundly--sounder than usual in fact, and, all at once, I heard a clock strike."
"We will have Mr. Darcy design something different for you."
"That's what I want," the customer would say--"something different--something you don't see everywhere."
That was enough.
"Well, put it down as three," suggested Thong.
What happened during the night?
He was an expert jewelry designer and a setter of precious stones; and often, when some fastidious customer did not seem to care for what was shown from the glittering trays in the showcases, Mrs. Darcy or one of her clerks would say:
It may have been a quarter to eleven."
"Yes.
After a conference with Pepperrell he hurried off to begin the blockade of Louisbourg.
But they came in by driblets, and most of them were drunk.
Rome would not rest till she had ruined Carthage.
The burning of Canso and the attack on Annapolis stirred up the wrath of New England.
Its signal cannon fired.
THE SEA LINK LOST 1745
Discipline, never good, had been growing worse. Punishments were unknown.
They amounted to about three hundred.
All the merchants were eager for attack.
The walls were continually being smashed from without and patched up from within. The streets were ploughed from end to end.
A second vessel was forced aground.
The Provincials eyed the fortress eagerly.
The bibulous du Quesnel had died in October.
Shirley was dejected and in doubt what to do next.
The arming of this battery was a stupendous piece of work.
Nor could they be blamed.
No reinforcements arrived after the first appearance of the British fleet.
The first men up the rungs were shot, stabbed, or cut down.
But it looked hard enough, for all that.
But when the drums began beating, it was to a parley, not to arms.
Their Royal Battery wrecked the whole inner water-front of Louisbourg.
The Provincials reported their own killed, quite correctly, at a hundred.
But the rumour ran quickly through the whole camp, probably not without Pepperrell's own encouragement, and at once produced, not a panic, but the most excellent effect.
Her captain fought her to the last; but Warren's boat crews took her. Some men who escaped from her brought du Chambon the news that a third French ship, the Vigilant, was coming to the relief of Louisbourg with ammunition and other stores. This ship had five hundred and sixty men aboard, that is, as many as all the regulars in Louisbourg.
'Good Lord!' he said, 'we have so much to thank Thee for, that Time will be too short.
Warren, who was just over forty, replied with some heat.
On May 5 Warren sailed into Canso.
The commandant of the battery felt far from easy.
Very few had even a single change of clothing.
Everything went off without a hitch.
The French officer and he saluted.
The men volunteered eagerly.
He was much disliked in Louisbourg.
CHAPTER II
Most men's kits were of the very scantiest.
The news from Boston was not heeded.
Warren was cursed, Pepperrell blamed; and a mutinous spirit arose.
But Vaughan was not to lead.
The rest sheered off.
Races, wrestling, and quoits were better; while fishing was highly commendable, both in the way of diet as well as in the way of sport.
The French did not.
A wild enthusiast, William Vaughan, urged Governor Shirley of Massachusetts to make an immediate counter-attack.
But a ship-builder colonel, Meserve of New Hampshire, came to the rescue by designing a gun-sleigh, sixteen feet in length and five in the beam.
Vaughan then retired for the night.
They had seized this position some time before and called it Gorham's Post, after the colonel whose regiment held it. Fourteen years later there was another and more famous Gorham's Post, on the south shore of the St Lawrence near Quebec, opposite Wolfe's Cove.
Then a puff of wind came and blew Curdken's hat far away, so that he had to run after it; and when he returned she had long finished putting up her golden locks, and he couldn't get any hair; so they watched the geese till it was dark.
Then she spoke:
But Falada observed everything, and laid it all to heart.
"'Oh!
Suddenly a shower of mortar came rattling down the chimney.
By and by footsteps sounded outside the door.
Hans held up a necklace of blue and white beads that glistened like jewels in the sun, and from them hung a gorgeous filigree cross.
"And what good would that do?" said Fritz, the swineherd.
Presently, with a click, a little square wicket that pierced the door was opened, and a woman's face peered out through the iron bars.
"I will have nothing to do with it!" said Fritz, and he got up from the wooden block whereon he was sitting and stumped out of the house.
Rap-tap-tap!
Thou hussy!
The one-eyed Hans whipped off his leathern cap.
"It's thine," said he, "and now wilt thou not help me to a trade?"
Bang! the door was clapped to and away they scurried like a flock of frightened rabbits.
He settled the cap more firmly upon his head, spat upon his hands, and once more stooping in the fireplace, gave a leap, and up the chimney he went with a rattle of loose mortar and a black trickle of soot.
"How shall I find the Baron Conrad to bear a message to him, when our Baron has been looking for him in vain for two days past?"
"The necklace," said the girl, in a frightened whisper.
But, then, Katherine had heard him talk in that way before, and knew, in spite of his saying "no," that, sooner or later, he would do as she wished.
No! no!
"Egad! that is true!" said Lucian, kissing her.
Suddenly Link had laid his clasp on Lucian's wrist to command silence, and the next moment they heard the swish-swish of a woman's dress coming along the passage.
"I don't believe he is Mr. Vrain," retorted the detective bluntly.
"I hope it won't prove to be Vrain," said Lucian restlessly, for he thought how grieved Diana would be.
"But won't the two be seen climbing over that fence in the daytime?" asked the barrister doubtfully.
Vrain!"
"Absolutely.
"I am only doing my duty," she said.
Lydia wrote to her father in Paris, but received no reply, and therefore was without a friend in the world save Diana.
"Look again," said Link, passing his hand rapidly over the face and head of the prostrate man.
"If it had not been for Lydia, your father would not have left his home for a lunatic asylum, nor would Clear have been murdered."
"And if you don't give it to me this very night I'll go straight and tell the police all about my husband."
"And if I refuse?"
The place was new to her.
"Never!
How far was she from Sidham?
I--I cannot bear it, I have gone through so much already!"
"If you go back, do you know what they will do?
"Perhaps, but I am not afraid--now.
As they came up, Margaret's strength gave out, and suddenly she sank down on her knees.
I've loved you for a long time--I told you so before." He took hold of her arm.
"Will you consent to marry me?"
"You are fooling me."
"You are going to hand me over to the--the authorities."
Then she gave a low call, and the old woman appeared in the doorway.
He spoke a few low words to the old woman, and the latter walked away.
Again she shrank back.
"You know the murderer," she repeated.
"A fine forgery, if I do say so myself," he mused.
"Go back to the house," he said to the old woman.
"I'll not take you there, don't fear."
He glared at her steadily.
"Who could have been so wicked as to take your life?"
"How?"
"Well, I suppose it cannot be helped.
My mind is made up.
He raised up the almost lifeless girl, and forced open her lips.
Then he hurried outside:
Outside of the broken window a wild bird was singing gayly.
Then he took the glass, and poured half the contents down her throat.
She put up her hands, and waved him away.
"Mr. Styles--" she began, but he put his hand over her mouth.
"To a place where you will be safe."
"Tell me first."
Everybody will think you guilty, and Raymond Case will never come near you again."
It shall be yours for the taking--if you will marry me.
He paused again and took from his pocket several sheets of paper, closely and carelessly written upon in pencil.
And the woman slunk away as if struck, like a dog.
A GLASS OF POISON
"Don't speak so, please don't!
I love you, and I'll do all I can to help you.
"I am giving you everything I have, my wealth, my honor, everything!
"Never mind how it can be done.
I loathe and despise you!"
"No, I was not near the place, I can prove it.
"I swear I am not, Margaret.
She had been put to bed, and sat there, trying to think for several minutes.
Don't you understand the matter?
An hour went by, and she prepared to leave the cottage, when a shadow fell across the window, and Matlock Styles appeared.
"No, afterwards."
Then he looked around to see that there was no other water around the building.
Then they struck a trail leading up a hillside.
"That isn't answering the question."
There was a moment of silence, and his dark face turned a sickly white and then red.
She wrung her hands and his dark eyes seemed to pierce her very soul. She felt faint and sank on a bench.
Of course not!
"You're safe enough, never fear."
She gave a start and looked at him wildly, pleadingly.
You are in my power--in my power absolutely.
The first sheet was headed:
Come on." And he pulled her forward by the hand.
"Poor, dear father," she murmured.
"If you'll do what I wish, I'll see to it that you escape--that you are never bothered any more."
As she sat there she reviewed what had passed, her mind becoming clearer as she thought.
Cannot you trust me, girl?
Do not say that!"
"Thank you, but I do not see what you can do.
"If I tried to escape, they would soon be on my track--"
She looked around. The old woman was not in sight.
There is somebody else, who was around the house when the affair happened--somebody you know well, a person who would know all about the drug with which your father and Mrs. Langmore were killed."
Then, in a burst of rage, he caught her by the throat and threw her backward to the floor.
I won't hurt you."
He led the way through the woods, across a small stream and past a spot where some wild berries grew.
He waited, and as she did not return to consciousness, he picked her up, and placed her on the bed.
"I want to know where you are taking me," she said presently, and came to a halt.
"Oh, that's all right, Miss Margaret.
Come.
She knew she must have come a long distance, but could not tell if it was five miles or fifty.
"Where to?"
"How can you do that?"
"Don't be in a hurry to go.
Listen, do you know that I am immensely wealthy?
They will surely hang you?"
"Refuse, sire," said Fouquet.
"Your intention," continued the king, "was not, however, to cast blame upon the rich men of this age, was it?"
"What were you doing, then?"
I was at my country-house of Vaux when the news reached me; and the affair seemed so pressing that I left at once."
"Does your majesty wish to know my opinion?"
"And were they not oppressed, madame," replied Fouquet, "when they were made to sweat the forty millions given by this deed?
But at the moment he was about to open it, there was a great noise in the gallery, the ante-chamber, and the court.
"It ill becomes you, monsieur, to give your king a lesson," said Anne of Austria; "better procure for him forty millions to replace those you make him lose."
"What is the matter, my son?" asked the queen, anxiously, and going towards the king.
Why, my good God! have not I, the king, the right to ask of you all that?"
Is not that your opinion as well as mine, my son?" said the queen.
Louis started.
"But how, madame?"
"From the cardinal," replied the king, continuing to read; "yes, yes, it is really from him."
"I thought I was under the ferule of my professor, and developing a subject of amplification."
"Give it to me," said the king; and he took the paper.
They really brought me from Vaux to the Louvre in an hour and a half, so your majesty sees I have not been cheated." The queen-mother smiled with something like secret envy.
Not at all," said Louis XIV.; "no, in truth, you err, madame."
"Why, it is but an hour since I left his eminence," said the king.
The king looked at him, and held the paper out to him, in turn.
They were placed at distances of four leagues apart, and I tried them this evening.
He struck his brow with his open hand, crying,--"King of France! what a title!
"Besides," continued Anne of Austria, "the Lord never gives the goods of this world but for a season; the Lord--as correctives to honor and riches--the Lord has placed sufferings, sickness, and death; and no one," added she, with a melancholy smile, which proved she made the application of the funeral precept to herself, "no man can take his wealth or greatness with him to the grave.
"Truly not, madame; therefore the horses only await the orders of his majesty to enter the royal stables; and if I allowed myself to try them, it was only for fear of offering to the king anything that was not positively wonderful."
The face of Anne of Austria appeared a little changed, but that was from sufferings of quite a personal character. Perhaps the alteration was caused by the cancer which had begun to consume her breast.
"Forty millions," cried the queen.
"Thus, madame," he promptly said, "such horses are made for kings, not for subjects; for kings ought never to yield to any one in anything."
"Ah!" said the queen.
"Yes, by oppressing the people," said the queen.
Louis had opened the paper, and yet he did not read it.
"You know, Monsieur Fouquet," said the queen, "that at the court of France it is not the custom for a subject to offer anything to his king."
"What have you there?" asked the king.
"As long as a king lives, he has no other measure but his conscience,--no other judge than his own desires; but when dead, he has posterity, which applauds or accuses."
In addition to all this, a loud murmur was heard along his passage, which did not die away till some time after he had passed. It was this murmur which Louis XIV. regretted so deeply not hearing as he passed, and dying away behind him.
The king remained silent between these two contrary opinions.
It results, therefore, that the young gather the abundant harvest prepared for them by the old."
no; there were not twenty anxious to see the king of France.
I?
I was mistaken, there are two."
A day will come, and perhaps quickly, wherein you will have occasion to remember that axiom:--'Gold is universal power; and they alone are kings who are all-powerful.'"
At length he glanced upon it, and uttered a faint cry at reading the first line.
Furthermore, his majesty has asked my opinion, I have given it; if his majesty ask my concurrence, it will be the same."
"Accept, then, and thank him," insisted Anne of Austria.
Fouquet darted a haughty glance at the queen-mother, who appeared to triumph at the false position in which the minister had placed himself, and replied:--
"You left Vaux this evening, monsieur?"
"You must reply to it, my son," said Anne of Austria; "you must reply to it, and immediately."
I have just returned to my Louvre; my horses, just unharnessed, are still smoking, and I have created interest enough to induce scarcely twenty persons to look at me as I passed.
"But do not accept," continued Fouquet.
Your majesty doubts my word, and you have reason to do so; but I have really come in that time, though it is wonderful!
Chapter XLVII.
"Madame," said he, looking earnestly at his mother, "one would almost say in truth that you had something else to announce to me."
"Do you accept?" asked Anne of Austria, once more.
But the minister had had, as we have said, an alarming attack of gout, and the tide of flattery was mounting towards the throne.
"How could I say there was but one king in France!
"It is precisely, madame, because these forty millions would be a fortune that I will say to the king, 'Sire, if it be not decent for a king to accept from a subject six horses, worth twenty thousand livres, it would be disgraceful for him to owe a fortune to another subject, more or less scrupulous in the choice of the materials which contributed to the building up of that fortune.'"
"You are above reports and interpretations."
But Fouquet caught her thought.
The voice which had pronounced these words was that of Anne of Austria.
"Nonsense! accept, my son, accept," said Anne of Austria.
That is what I mean to say by the words for which you reproach me."
Under the mild heat of this luxury of kings springs the luxury of individuals, a source of riches for the people.
this is very noble on the part of his eminence, and will silence all malicious rumors; forty millions scraped together slowly, coming back all in one heap to the treasury!
"An hour and a half!" said the king, still able to restrain his anger, but not to conceal his astonishment.
Courtiers have a marvelous instinct in scenting the turn of events; courtiers possess a supreme kind of science; they are diplomatists in throwing light upon the unraveling of complicated intrigues, captains in divining the issue of battles, and physicians in curing the sick.
"Yes, madame; yes, certainly, it would be a great loss for the kingdom," said Louis, coloring; "but the peril does not seem to me to be so great; besides, the cardinal is still young." The king had scarcely ceased speaking when an usher lifted the tapestry, and stood with a paper in his hand, waiting for the king to speak to him.
"By a visit to the cardinal."
"And why not?" asked the queen.
"A gift?" repeated Fouquet.
I received from England three pairs of very fast horses, as I had been assured.
"An hour and a half ago, yes, your majesty," said Fouquet, consulting a watch, richly ornamented with diamonds.
"Is he worse, then?"
Twenty! what do I say?
Louis looked at his mother, expecting some emotion in her voice, some sorrow in her countenance.
when wilt thou be able to open, for any purpose but to sigh, or smile, lips condemned to the motionless stupidity of the marbles in thy gallery?"
Louis listened with increased attention to the words which Anne of Austria, no doubt, pronounced with a view to console him.
"Write!" said the young king, with evident repugnance.
It was not so much a present that I permitted myself to offer, as the tribute I paid."
The king became quite red.
"Write, then, sire."
He nodded, therefore, familiarly to Fouquet, whilst he continued to unfold the paper given to him by the usher.
"I only paid attention to one thing, my son, and that was, that you were complaining."
"I have absolutely nothing, my son; only you cannot have failed to remark that his eminence the cardinal is very ill."
"My son," replied Anne of Austria, shaking her head, "you are wrong not to trust my word; you are wrong not to grant me your confidence.
"Because," said a voice, replying to his, and which sounded from the other side of the door of the cabinet, "because at the Palais Royal lies all the gold,--that is to say, all the power of him who desires to reign."
The king started, and advanced towards her. "I hope," said he, "your majesty has paid no attention to the vain declamations which the solitude and disgust familiar to kings suggest to the happiest dispositions?"
"Oh! a regularly drawn up deed of gift," said she.
Louis XIV., to whom his mother had taught this axiom, together with many others, understood at once that the cardinal must be very ill.
As he spoke or thought thus, the door opened, and the superintendent of finances, Fouquet, appeared before his nominal master.
The king looked up.
It is about the size of the Des Moines river in northern Iowa, not nearly so large as this river in the southern part of the state.
At the fords of the Jordan I waded out into the stream but the current was so swift that I did not attempt to go entirely across.
These sudden storms often imperil any small boats which may be out on the sea as was the case in Bible times when the Master was sleeping and his disciples awakened him, saying: "Lord, save us; we perish."
This lake is just on a level with the Mediterranean Sea which is only about thirty miles to the west.
The record also states that this crossing was at the time when the river was out of its banks and this whole bottom, nearly a mile wide, was a rushing torrent. Perhaps this accounts for the fact that the enemies who had taken possession of the Promised Land were totally unprepared for their coming, feeling secure while the river was so high and dangerous.
That spring is but a few hundred feet above sea level.
It must have been an exciting day for the entire camp when they last saw their great leader become a mere speck on the mountain side and finally disappear altogether.
This Jordan valley is from four to fourteen miles wide and the mountains on each side rise to the height of from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet.
This, with the fact that this body of water has no outlet whatever, makes a problem to which geologists and scientific men have failed to give a satisfactory solution.
Of course, the water evaporates very rapidly, but in the spring when the Jordan overflows and pours a much greater volume of water into it, how does it come that it evaporates so much faster than at any other time in the year?
His name was Lynch and he was a lieutenant in the American Navy.
CHAPTER XVII
The young man was greatly troubled about this for it was a borrowed one.
One day among others who came was a fine looking young man who asked for baptism.
The first ten and one-half miles the water falls six hundred and eighty feet to where it enters the Sea of Galilee.
Everything about it is dead.
After thirty days mourning for Moses, the great company marched down to the river; it was opened for them and they crossed on dry ground.
While the Jordan as well as other smaller streams flow continually into the Dead Sea, it is said that it never raises an inch.
I have never learned to swim; in deep water simply cannot keep my feet up, but in the Dead Sea they could not be kept down, and of course I could swim like a duck.
The water from this spring is joined by that of several other springs and small rivulets caused by the melting snows on the mountain, flows to the south a distance of a few miles, and forms a small lake which is about three miles wide and four miles long.
When carried by the swift current into this salty water they soon die.
This pear-shaped body of water is a little more than a dozen miles long and half that wide and is surrounded by mountains.
Nothing grows near this body of water.
John the Baptist must have been the Billy Sunday of his day for the crowds that came to hear him were immense.
In one case the ax flew off the handle and went into the water.
Unlike all other rivers which rise in some elevated place and flow toward the sea level, nearly every mile of this river is below the surface of the ocean.
They not only never saw him again but they never were able to find a trace of his body.
It is the River Jordan, and a glimpse of it brings forth some of the most wonderful characteristics possessed by any river, as well as many historical events that make their memories dear to the hearts of men and women wherever civilization has found its way.
The River Jordan runs very swiftly.
There must have been much speculation among these people as to what became of Moses until in some miraculous way Joshua was informed that the great leader was dead and that he must now take charge and lead the people across the Jordan into the Promised Land.
But perhaps the greatest of all events that occurred at this place was the baptism of Christ.
This is spoken of in the Bible as "the waters of Merom." From the southern end of this lake the Jordan begins.
Like some people, it is always receiving but never giving.
This might be called the river bottom and the river winds like a snake in this smaller valley.
Here at this ford occurred some of the greatest events of Bible history. On the plain just east of the river the Children of Israel were encamped when Moses went up on Mount Nebo, looked over the Promised Land, folded his arms and peacefully passed into the great beyond.
The river enters through a small canyon at the northwest and passes out through another canyon at the south end. Sometimes the wind will rush down the canyon at the northwest and in a few moments the waters of the lake are like a great whirlpool.
Failing to find the body, together with the fact that they had witnessed the parting of the waters when the two men went over and the same when Elisha came back alone, was sufficient evidence to them that the young prophet had told the truth.
At the mouth of the Jordan one can see dead fish floating on the water.
At the close of the Mexican War, our Government permitted Lieutenant Lynch to take ten seamen and two small boats and make this exploration.
During this sixty-five miles (airline) to the Dead Sea, it falls more than six hundred feet more, so that the Dead Sea itself is about thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean Sea which is only forty miles west.
Every student borrowed an ax and went to work felling trees along the river bank.
Within this Jordan valley is what might be called an inner valley which is from a quarter of a mile to a mile wide, and from fifty to something like seventy-five feet deep.
Evidently this event created a great impression all over the country and young men came to the school for the prophets which was located near, that the buildings had to be enlarged.
But the preacher knew him and refused, saying that he was unworthy to do this, but the young man, who was no other than the Master himself, explained the situation and the preacher hesitated no longer.
In connection with the River Jordan and the bodies of water at each end, it is interesting to note that the first man to take the level and give to the world the remarkable facts about the physical characteristics of this wonderful and world-famous river, was an American.
From this body of water to the point where the Jordan empties into the Dead Sea is only sixty-five miles by airline, but the way the river winds like a gigantic serpent, one would travel twice that distance were he to go in a boat.
A WORLD-FAMOUS RIVER--THE JORDAN
Mount Calvary is only a small hill.
The history of the world is largely the story of the rise and fall of great cities.
It is called the "Church of the Holy Sepulchre." For sixteen hundred years there was no question but what this tomb was the identical one in which the body of Christ was laid.
AFTER AN EARTHQUAKE
Think the problem through, decide what's the safest and best thing to do, and then do it slowly and carefully.
--Travel by daylight and use major highways if you can.
Keep the car radio turned on for weather information and advice.
Use your radio, television and newspapers to keep informed of current weather conditions and forecasts in your area.
It also is good to have with you heavy gloves or mittens, overshoes, extra woolen socks, and winter headgear to cover your head and face.
Remain in the car until the disturbance subsides.
If necessary, conserve fuel by keeping the house cooler than usual, or by "closing off" some rooms temporarily.
Also, be certain that all family members know how to take precautions that would prevent fire at such a time, when the help of the fire department may not be available.
If your home has no basement, take cover under heavy furniture on the ground floor in the center part of the house, or in a small room on the ground floor that is away from outside walls and windows.
--REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.
If you add to this physical exercise, especially exercise that you are not accustomed to--such as shovelling snow, pushing an automobile, or even walking fast or far--you are risking a heart attack, a stroke, or other damage to your body.
Also, keep watching the sky, especially to the south and southwest.
--Make sure someone knows where you are going, your approximate schedule, and your estimated time of arrival at your destination.
If you are outdoors, stay outdoors; if indoors, stay indoors.
Don't try to save time by travelling faster than road and weather conditions permit.
--Stock an emergency supply of food and water, as well as emergency cooking equipment such as a camp stove.
If you live in a rural area, make sure you could survive at home for a week or two in case a storm isolated you and made it impossible for you to leave.
--If you are indoors, sit or stand against an inside wall (preferably in the basement), or in an inside doorway; or else take cover under a desk, table or bench (in case the wall or ceiling should fall).
--Make sure you have a battery-powered radio and extra batteries on hand, so that if your electric power is cut off you could still hear weather forecasts, information and advice broadcast by local authorities.
Be sure to keep on hand the simple tools and equipment needed to fight a fire.
In a factory, go to a shelter area, or to the basement if there is one.
Do not remain in a trailer or mobile home if a tornado is approaching; take cover elsewhere.
If you take the proper precautions, the chances are you will not be hurt.
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
When you drive on, watch for hazards created by the earthquake, such as fallen or falling objects, downed electric wires, and broken or undermined roadways.
Here is advice that will help you protect yourself and your family against the hazards of winter storms--blizzards, heavy snows, ice storms, freezing rain, or sleet.
It is rather strange that in this country with lovely and productive valleys whose irrigated orchards and gardens make a regular paradise, that the farming classes should be poor and ignorant, without ambition or education and be satisfied to live in comfortless, tumble-down huts without furniture or any of the improvements that make life worth living.
The heat is intense all around this lake.
Coffee is also a staple crop.
At the piers will be noticed bags of coffee and cocoa beans, great quantities of rubber and piles of hides.
At the mouth of the Orinoco river is the Island of Trinidad upon which is the famous pitch lake.
Is it not about time we were getting acquainted and shaking hands with each other?
The sea is nearly always rough and the weather always hot.
The tracks cling to the mountain sides almost like vines cling to brick walls, and the curves are so short that one riding in the end coach can nearly reach the engineer.
After noting some movements of the body that seemed familiar he said: "Jack, where did you come from?" The two men sat down and talked of boyhood days and found that they were born in the same community and had played together when they were small boys.
Years ago two miners worked together for months and finally came to know each other as Tom and Jack.
Business firms of other lands found this out and did not care to do business with such a country or help develop its resources in any way.
Venezuela is our nearest neighbor to the south.
During the past seventy or eighty years Venezuela has had more than a half hundred revolutions but generally they were gotten up to give an excuse for pillage and robbery rather than to make a better country or government.
Nobody knows how deep the asphalt bed is for borings have been made a hundred feet or more deep and there was no bottom.
We are not ashamed of our revolution in 1776 for its purpose was to gain our independence.
It is only about twenty-five miles by rail and this railroad was about as difficult to build as any of our mountain railroads.
A COUNTRY WITH A THOUSAND RIVERS--VENEZUELA
Here lived Las Casas, a priest who was the Indian's greatest champion in the early days and who is said to be the father of African Slavery in the new world.
In his miserable home he has no lamp or candle, no books or papers of any sort.
In this same room is a portrait of Washington upon which is the inscription: "This picture of the liberator of North America is sent by his adopted son to him who acquired equal glory in South America."
It is also used extensively for calking vessels, making waterproof roofs, lining cold storage plants, making varnishes as well as shoe blacking as well as in a hundred other ways.
This great river system drains a territory of three hundred and sixty thousand square miles.
This port city contains about fifteen thousand people and has but a single street.
It was from this inland lake of asphalt that the material was procured to protect the New York subway tunnels from moisture, so it is said.
Two hundred thousand tons per year have been taken from the lake and yet there is no hole to be seen.
This is the most noted deposit of asphalt known.
This country is nearer to Florida than New Orleans is to New York and yet we have lived side by side for four hundred years and hardly knew we were neighbors.
In one of the large museums is a room in which are kept the great liberator's clothing, saddle, boots and spears and these things are as sacred to them as the Ark of the Covenant was to the Jews.
CHAPTER XIX
Here they had worked together for months without knowing that they were neighbors; they actually got up and shook hands with each other.
It was he who suggested that negroes be imported to labor in the fields and mines that the Indians might have an easier time. Brought from Africa to work that the Indians might rest, these black people became the slaves of all.
Venezuela got its name from Venice, Italy, in the following way.
How people can endure such extreme heat all the time is a mystery.
More than two million head of cattle feed, upon these llanos, but they are capable of feeding many times that number.
It is a country that has a thousand rivers.
The chief industry here is cattle raising.
This makes the smoothest street paving of any material known.
Even the coins of the old days were stamped with Bolivar's name and everywhere he is revered as the George Washington of that country.
The asphalt is dug from the edges of the lake, loaded on carts, hauled to the port and from there shipped to nearly every country on the globe.
This is the great need of many of the countries of South America today.
He imprisoned those who refused to assist him and ran things in a high-handed way.
In some parts of it you can travel for days in regions where as yet no white man has ever set his foot.
Things are better now, however, and a new day is dawning for these unhappy people.
Through this country runs one of the world's greatest rivers, the Orinoco, which with its tributaries furnishes more than four thousand miles of navigable rivers.
As we are nearer to them than other foreign countries we now use much of their products.
The government of Trinidad has leased the asphalt lake to an American company and the income amounts to nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year.
The high mountains are so near the sea that there is only a narrow strip of land at the foot and on this narrow strip the city is built.
This material is of a dark green color and at the border is hard and strong enough to bear quite a heavy weight, but near the center it is almost like a boiling mass.
The main port or entrance to this country is La Guaira and sailors say it is about the worst port to enter in the world.
It is therefore with pride that one can say that considering all the complex problems with which the American farmer has to grapple, he is a hundred times better off than his brother farmers in any country in the world.
One can look hundreds of feet into caverns and gorges that seem almost like the bottomless pit.
From the beans of this tree are made cocoa and chocolate.
Its treasury has been looted again and again.
No people can be prosperous and happy without a stable government, schools and colleges and the influences that are uplifting.
Here where there are millions of coffee trees, fields of sugar cane and orchards of oranges, lemons and all kinds of tropical fruit, where the farmer could be happiest, he is about the most miserable creature that could be found.
It is surprising to know that Venezuela is as large as Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, the two Virginias, North and South Carolina and Georgia combined.
Some believe that the two deposits are connected by a subterranean passage and supplied from the same source.
All along this coast strip of Venezuela are plantations generally covered with cocoa trees.
This lake is a mile and a half across and looks, from a distance, like a pond surrounded with trees.
One day Tom was not well and could not do much but watch Jack dig.
One reason why the people of this country have no ambition to lay up for the future or even get large herds of cattle has been because of the numerous revolutions of the past.
Just here it is well for the farmers of this country to congratulate themselves.
This is asphalt, or mineral pitch as it is sometimes called.
He robbed merchants of other countries who tried to do business with his government.
One writer says that of all the countries in the world Venezuela is the one for which God has done the most and man has done the least.
This city, Caracas, is about as large as Sioux City, Iowa, but to get to it is some job.
Even the president of Venezuela was for years a criminal.
Every time they have succeeded in getting large herds of cattle or stores of grain a revolution would come and their property be seized and often destroyed.
The population of this great country is only a little more than that of the state of Iowa.
We might have been friends and greatly assisted each other all these years.
"Do you, indeed, think so?" inquired the marquise.
What is there I would not do to evince my earnest gratitude!"
"And one which will go far to efface the recollection of his father's conduct," added the incorrigible marquise.
Besides, one requires the excitement of being hateful in the eyes of the accused, in order to lash one's self into a state of sufficient vehemence and power. I would not choose to see the man against whom I pleaded smile, as though in mockery of my words.
"Nay, madame, the law is frequently powerless to effect this; all it can do is to avenge the wrong done."
"To Saint Helena."
The prisoner whom you there see pale, agitated, and alarmed, instead of--as is the case when a curtain falls on a tragedy--going home to sup peacefully with his family, and then retiring to rest, that he may recommence his mimic woes on the morrow,--is removed from your sight merely to be reconducted to his prison and delivered up to the executioner.
"That is right," cried the marquise.
"Why, that is the very worst offence they could possibly commit; for, don't you see, Renee, the king is the father of his people, and he who shall plot or contrive aught against the life and safety of the parent of thirty-two millions of souls, is a parricide upon a fearfully great scale?"
"How dreadful!" exclaimed Renee, turning pale.
Of this, however, be assured, that should any favorable opportunity present itself, I will not fail to offer you the choice of being present."
"Come, come, my friend," interrupted the marquise, "do not neglect your duty to linger with us.
"Dear mother," interposed Renee, "you know very well it was agreed that all these disagreeable reminiscences should forever be laid aside."
You know we cannot yet pronounce him guilty."
Upon my word, you killed him ere the executioner had laid his hand upon him."
"I beg your pardon, madame.
"O mother!" murmured Renee.
The only difference consists in the opposite character of the equality advocated by these two men; one is the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades; one brings a king within reach of the guillotine, the other elevates the people to a level with the throne.
"To give you pleasure, my sweet Renee, I promise to show all the lenity in my power; but if the charges brought against this Bonapartist hero prove correct, why, then, you really must give me leave to order his head to be cut off." Renee shuddered.
I really must pray you to excuse me, but--in truth--I was not attending to the conversation."
"Amusing, certainly," replied the young man, "inasmuch as, instead of shedding tears as at the fictitious tale of woe produced at a theatre, you behold in a law-court a case of real and genuine distress--a drama of life.
What avails recrimination over matters wholly past recall?
The young man passed round to the side of the table where the fair pleader sat, and leaning over her chair said tenderly,--
"So much the better.
No; my pride is to see the accused pale, agitated, and as though beaten out of all composure by the fire of my eloquence." Renee uttered a smothered exclamation.
It was not over the downfall of the man, but over the defeat of the Napoleonic idea, that they rejoiced, and in this they foresaw for themselves the bright and cheering prospect of a revivified political existence.
The magistrates freely discussed their political views; the military part of the company talked unreservedly of Moscow and Leipsic, while the women commented on the divorce of Josephine.
I leave you to judge how far your nerves are calculated to bear you through such a scene.
"For heaven's sake, where is that?" asked the marquise.
'Tis like a duel.
"That is true," answered the marquis.
"Why, if my information prove correct, a sort of Bonaparte conspiracy has just been discovered."
But we have not done with the thing yet."
"Just the person we require at a time like the present," said a second.
Napoleon, in the Island of Elba, is too near France, and his proximity keeps up the hopes of his partisans. Marseilles is filled with half-pay officers, who are daily, under one frivolous pretext or other, getting up quarrels with the royalists; from hence arise continual and fatal duels among the higher classes of persons, and assassinations in the lower."
"These are mournful auspices to accompany a betrothal," sighed poor Renee.
I should be glad to know what connection there can possibly be between your sickly sentimentality and the affairs of the state!"
"Is it possible?" burst simultaneously from all who were near enough to the magistrate to hear his words.
Now, then, were a conspirator to fall into your hands, he would be most welcome."
If you wish to see me the king's attorney, you must desire for me some of those violent and dangerous diseases from the cure of which so much honor redounds to the physician."
"Never mind, Renee," replied the marquise, with a look of tenderness that seemed out of keeping with her harsh dry features; but, however all other feelings may be withered in a woman's nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in the desert of her heart, and that is the shrine of maternal love.
In a word, an almost poetical fervor prevailed.
I should myself have recommended the match, had not the noble marquis anticipated my wishes by requesting my consent to it.'"
Do you know I always felt a shudder at the idea of even a destroying angel?"
Come, now, I have hopes of obtaining what I have been for years endeavoring to persuade the marquise to promise; namely, a perfect amnesty and forgetfulness of the past."
I have already recorded sentence of death, five or six times, against the movers of political conspiracies, and who can say how many daggers may be ready sharpened, and only waiting a favorable opportunity to be buried in my heart?"
"Bravo!" cried one of the guests; "that is what I call talking to some purpose."
"What would you have?
"I love to see you thus.
"With all my heart," replied the marquise; "let the past be forever forgotten.
"An island situated on the other side of the equator, at least two thousand leagues from here," replied the count.
"Upon my word, child!" exclaimed the angry marquise, "your folly exceeds all bounds.
"Marquise, marquise!" interposed the old nobleman who had proposed the toast, "let the young people alone; let me tell you, on one's wedding day there are more agreeable subjects of conversation than dry politics."
I promise you it affords me as little pleasure to revive it as it does you.
"'Tis true, madame," answered he, "that my father was a Girondin, but he was not among the number of those who voted for the king's death; he was an equal sufferer with yourself during the Reign of Terror, and had well-nigh lost his head on the same scaffold on which your father perished."
Well, I at least resemble the disciples of Esculapius in one thing--that of not being able to call a day my own, not even that of my betrothal."
You are the king's servant, and must go wherever that service calls you."
"He!" cried the marquise: "Napoleon the type of equality!
I have already successfully conducted several public prosecutions, and brought the offenders to merited punishment.
Renee regarded him with fond affection; and certainly his handsome features, lit up as they then were with more than usual fire and animation, seemed formed to excite the innocent admiration with which she gazed on her graceful and intelligent lover.
"Then the guilty person is absolutely in custody?" said the marquise.
"I forgive you.
Come, come, do not strip the latter of his just rights to bestow them on the Corsican, who, to my mind, has usurped quite enough."
"They had, however, what supplied the place of those fine qualities," replied the young man, "and that was fanaticism.
"And where is the unfortunate being?" asked Renee.
"How much do I owe this gracious prince!
"But," said Renee, "this letter, which, after all, is but an anonymous scrawl, is not even addressed to you, but to the king's attorney."
Chapter 6.
"Can I believe my ears?" cried the marquise.
This toast, recalling at once the patient exile of Hartwell and the peace-loving King of France, excited universal enthusiasm; glasses were elevated in the air a l'Anglais, and the ladies, snatching their bouquets from their fair bosoms, strewed the table with their floral treasures.
"True; but that gentleman being absent, his secretary, by his orders, opened his letters; thinking this one of importance, he sent for me, but not finding me, took upon himself to give the necessary orders for arresting the accused party."
"Then all he has got to do is to endeavor to repair it."
"For a very serious matter, which bids fair to make work for the executioner."
Ample corroboration of this statement may be obtained by arresting the above-mentioned Edmond Dantes, who either carries the letter for Paris about with him, or has it at his father's abode.
Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by his commonplace but ambitions followers, not only as a leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of equality."
"Well, they fastened a thirty-six pound ball to his feet, and threw him into the sea."
"To tell you the truth, I consider it lost."
"Oh, yes; and they may have the fact attested whenever they please."
"So that the governor got rid of the dangerous and the crazy prisoner at the same time?"
A heavy man as well as a big one, he was not so amusing and so fluent a talker out of school as his predecessor, nor, as we were delighted to discover, so exacting and tyrannical in school.
But there were also Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodist ministers, all with churches of their own in the town, and he may have flirted a little with all of them.
He would forget all about school hours, roam about the gardens and plantations, get into long conversations with the workmen, and eventually, when he found that he was somewhat too casual to please his employer, he enjoined us to "look him up" and let him know when it was school-time.
Then he came for his year of waiting to us, during which he amused himself by teaching the little ones, smoothing the way for my mathematical brother, and fishing.
He would exhibit him as the meanest, most contemptible insect that ever crawled on the surface of the earth.
Looking him up usually took a good deal of time.
He had waited patiently for months, and had been put off with idle promises or thrust aside, while every greedy pushing priest that arrived from Spain and Italy was received with open arms and a place provided for him.
He was also glad of any excuse to let us off for half-a-day.
When lessons were not learned he would sympathize with and comfort us by saying we had done our best and more could not be expected.
We found out that he was exceedingly fond of fishing--that with a rod and line in his hand he would spend hours of perfect happiness, even without a bite to cheer him, and on any fine day that called us to the plain we would tell him that it was a perfect day for fishing, and ask him to let us off for the afternoon.
We all agreed joyfully, and as the title had taken our fancy we started hunting for a blue pitcher all over the house, but couldn't find such a thing, and finally had to put up with a tin box with a wooden lid and a lock and key.
He did not go so far as to accept that offer: he was wise in his generation, and eventually got his reward.
All went well for a few days.
He was, perhaps, of a better class, as his features were all good.
This letter met with a warm response, and there was much correspondence and meetings with other clerics-Anglican or Episcopalian, I forget which.
I had no inclination to do anything with books myself: books were lessons, therefore repellent, and that any one should read a book for pleasure was inconceivable.
I was to say something about birds: there was never a week went by in which I didn't tell them a wonderful story of a strange bird I had seen for the first time: well, I could write about that strange bird and make it just as wonderful as I liked.
He had come, he told them, a Roman Catholic priest to a Roman Catholic country, and had found himself a stranger in a strange land.
But he didn't know, and in any case he would like to correspond on these important matters with one on the other side.
However, one day he announced that he had a grand scheme to put before us.
The person--owner or tenant, I forget which--who lived in the house was an old woman named Dona Pascuala, whom I never saw without a cigar in her mouth.
One more is wanted to make the full dozen.
And this was soon settled.
I disliked the whole tribe, except a little girl of about eight, a child, it was said, of one of the unmarried sisters. I never discovered which of her aunts, as she called all these tall, white-faced heavy-browed women, was her mother.
It is not the proper number in this case.
A stranger at the meeting quickly responded to the call.
The stanza ended, Marcos resumed his comments.
And so there was no fight after all!
I thought him a coward.
I, too, suffered as you have suffered--"
I refuse to play to you!
The words mattered more than the air. For here we had before us not a small sweet singer, a goldfinch in a cage, but a cock--a fighting cock with well-trimmed comb and tail and a pair of sharp spurs to its feet.
But nothing of the kind happened, although on two occasions I thought the wished moment had come.
It is commonly said among the gauchos that when a man has proved his prowess by killing a few of his opponents, he is thereafter permitted to live in peace.
Oh, the subject!
Yes, he could play to any man's singing--any tune he liked to call.
I'm sorry, but it wouldn't do--here," and the doctor motioned to the glittering array of cut glass and plate.
Depressed fracture.
"On a watch."
"'Lo, Darcy!" went on a young man, who walked unsteadily into the jewelry store.
"I see," murmured Carroll.
"Oh, sure," assented the jewelry worker.
"I think not.
Didn't have no name on it--brought it here for my ole fren', Darcy, t' engrave.
Who belongs to it?"
There wasn't any use in that.
"Well, let that go for the time.
quite an old lady," he mused as he took off his coat, which Carroll held for him.
He'll want to ask you some questions.
"Well, like a cloth brushing my face more than like a hand--or it may have been a hand with a glove on it.
"Well, I couldn't be sure.
The front door was locked, just as it is now.
"Is he all right--safe--not one of them gars--you know, the fellows that use a silk cord to strangle you with?" asked Thong, who had some imagination regarding garroters.
"There's a bolt on the door!" Carroll snapped.
Miss Mason admired it, and I planned to buy it.
I forget just why I didn't do it," and Darcy seemed a bit confused, a point not lost sight of by Carroll.
"Maybe not," assented the doctor.
He had been strolling about the shop, and had come to a stop near Darcy's work table--a sort of bench against the wall, and behind one of the showcases.
It was either three or four, I can't be sure which," Darcy replied.
This was the easier for her, since she owned the building in which her display was kept, and lived in a quiet and tastefully furnished apartment over the store.
But of course she might have heard a noise if you didn't, and she might have come down to find out what it was about.
She had gone to her apartment, but I don't have to pass near that to get to my room.
"I don't!
His long, artistic fingers were trembling, and he felt weak and faint.
The bench was fitted with a lathe, and on it were parts of watches, like the dead specimens preserved in alcohol in a doctor's office.
Any of the doors or windows forced?" and the detective fairly shot these questions at Darcy,
"Wonder what did it?"
This man--Harrison Van Doren by name--had what was termed the best jewelry trade in Colchester.
It may have been I dreamed it."
Many good wishes, and not a little trade, had gone to him from his former employers, and some of their customers bought of him when he went into business for himself in the thriving city of Colchester.
This name, on little white plush-lined boxes, containing pins or sparkling rings, came to mean almost as much as some of the more expensive names in New York.
We?
One of the clerks switched on more electric lights, and they glinted and sparkled on the silver and cut glass.
"Yes; three anyhow--maybe four.
Might have been from a black-jack?" and he glanced questioningly at the detectives.
"You know when you awaken in the night, and hear the strokes, you can't be sure you haven't missed some of the first ones.
CHAPTER II
More knockings had sounded on the front door, and the faces of two young men peered in through the misty glass, the crowd having made a lane for them on learning that they worked in the place of death.
"She?
"Don't!" muttered Darcy in a strained voice.
"And you didn't hear anything all night?" Carroll shot this question at Darcy suddenly.
"He has a curio store down on Water Street.
We had the place all picked out where it would stand. But--now--"
Let me in.
He took a step nearer Darcy--a threatening step it would seem, from the fact that the jewelry worker drew back as if in alarm.
I went to bed about half past ten, after working at my table down here awhile."
Rather more than a repair man and clerk was James Darcy.
It was that of a hunter, standing as though he had just delivered a shot, and was peering to see the effect.
But gotta square wife somehow.
"You won't keep the store open?" he inquired.
That's why I'm saying nothing until I've made an examination.
"Only the watch ticking in her hand.
"I awakened with a sudden start just before six o'clock.
"But are you sure it did, Doc?"
I can't understand what makes it go, unless some one got in and wound it--and they wouldn't do that."
I generally opened the store.
Mrs. Darcy, who was sixty-five years of age, had carried on the jewelry business of her husband, Mortimer Darcy, after his death, which preceded her more tragic one by about seven years.
The words were as crisp as the steel of the stained blade.
I like my sleep!"
She was down first, though why, I can't say.
"What's the matter?
"Nor the servant--what's her name?
"Head's badly cut--let's see what we have here.
"Well, whatever it is, who owns it?"
"Shouldn't wonder but it was done with this!" and Thong held out, on the palm of his large hand, a slender dagger, on the otherwise bright blade of which were some dark stains.
"Have you--have you got to take her away?" faltered Darcy.
"No, not exactly.
"It's a cut--a deep one, too," murmured Carroll, as he drew nearer to look.
I heard three, anyhow, I'm sure of that."
"Yes, but Mrs. Darcy may have slipped it back herself.
"Use the statue that way."
"Yes, a clock struck.
He was smiling and cheerful, was Dr. Warren.
"Pretty sure, yes.
KING'S DAGGER
The county physician, who was also the coroner, had not yet arrived.
Mortimer Darcy had been a diamond salesman for a large New York house in his younger days, and had come to be an expert in precious stones.
"That I couldn't say."
Then I tried to arouse myself, but I heard the wind blowing and a sprinkle of rain, and, as my window was open, I thought the curtain might have blown across my face.
"But if there has been a robbery they didn't get much.
"Well, if you call a clock striking a noise, then it was one."
The doctor rolled up his shirt sleeves and stooped down.
"Second time this week you've got me out of bed before my time.
What's the matter, if they've got to have a murder, with doing it in the afternoon?
However, since he has joined to the image of the thing other images, which exclude its existence, this determination to pain is forthwith checked, and the man rejoices afresh as often as the repetition takes place.
Love or hatred towards, for instance, Peter is destroyed, if the pleasure involved in the former, or the pain involved in the latter emotion, be associated with the idea of another cause: and will be diminished in proportion as we conceive Peter not to have been the sole cause of either emotion.
If a man has been affected pleasurably or painfully by anyone, of a class or nation different from his own, and if the pleasure or pain has been accompanied by the idea of the said stranger as cause, under the general category of the class or nation: the man will feel love or hatred, not only to the individual stranger, but also to the whole class or nation whereto he belongs.
However, I do not think it worth while to point out here the vacillations springing from hope and fear; it follows from the definition of these emotions, that there can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope, as I will duly explain in the proper place.
For, as we have said, when the image of the thing in question, is aroused, inasmuch as it involves the thing's existence, it determines the man to regard the thing with the same pain as he was wont to do, when it actually did exist.
Joy arising from the fact, that anything we hate is destroyed, or suffers other injury, is never unaccompanied by a certain pain in us.
For pleasure is called love towards Peter, and pain is called hatred towards Peter, simply in so far as Peter is regarded as the cause of one emotion or the other.
Part I.) conceive it not as the sole cause, but as one of the causes of the emotion, and therefore our love or hatred towards it will be less.
For in so far as we conceive a thing similar to ourselves to be affected with pain, we ourselves feel pain.
Note.--Things which are accidentally the causes of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
note).
This is the cause of men's pleasure in recalling past evils, and delight in narrating dangers from which they have escaped.
When this condition of causality is either wholly or partly removed, the emotion towards Peter also wholly or in part vanishes.
note) love it or hate it, and shall do so with the utmost love or hatred that can arise from the given emotion.
For when men conceive a danger, they conceive it as still future, and are determined to fear it; this determination is checked afresh by the idea of freedom, which became associated with the idea of the danger when they escaped therefrom: this renders them secure afresh: therefore they rejoice afresh.
Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other conditions being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.
7.
This medium may be air, water, a bar of iron or steel, the earth, etc.
3.
The highest tone that can ordinarily be heard is the E[flat] four octaves higher than the highest E[flat] of the piano.
13.
The duration of the reverberation depends upon the size and height of the room, material of floor and walls, furniture, size of audience, etc.
9 above.)
A similar series might be worked out from any other fundamental.
There would be many other disadvantages in such a system, notably the inability to modulate freely to other keys, and since modulation is one of the predominant and most striking characteristics of modern music, this would constitute a serious barrier to advances in composition.
Pitch.
11.
The intensity of tones varies with the medium conveying them, being usually louder at night because the air is then more elastic.
APPENDIX C
Quality (timbre).
The characteristic tone of the oboe on the other hand has many overtones and is therefore highly individualistic: this enables us to recognize the tone of the instrument even though we cannot see the player.
It depends upon rate of vibration.
He called the collection "The Well-tempered Clavichord."
ACOUSTICS
If there is such a surface in an auditorium (as often occurs) there will be a certain point where everything can be heard very easily, but in the rest of the room it may be very difficult to understand what is being said or sung.
6.
The first of these overtones is the octave above the fundamental; the second is the fifth above this octave; the third, two octaves above the fundamental, and so on through the series as shown in the figure below.
In 1891 a convention of piano manufacturers at Philadelphia adopted this same pitch for the United States, and it has been in practically universal use ever since.
If two strings of the same length are stretched side by side and one set in vibration so as to produce tone the other will soon begin to vibrate also and the combined tone will be louder than if only one string produced it.
This phenomenon of sound-transmission may perhaps be made more clear by the old illustration of a series of eight billiard balls in a row on a table: if the first ball is tapped lightly, striking gently against ball number 2, the latter (as well as numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) will not apparently move at all, but ball number 8 at the other end will roll away.
12.
1.
1.
5.
9.
A series of simple vibrations will cause a simple (or colorless) tone, while complex vibrations (giving rise to overtones of various kinds and in a variety of proportions) cause more individualistic peculiarities of quality.
Practically every musical tone really consists of a combination of several tones sounding simultaneously, the combined effect upon the ear giving the impression of a single tone.
If a body vibrates only 8 or 10 times per second no tone is heard at all: but if it vibrates regularly at the rate of 16 or 18 per second a tone of very low pitch is heard.
These particles lie so close together that no movement at all can be detected, and it is only when the disturbance finally reaches the air-particles that are in contact with the ear-drum that any effect is evident.
"A dread vision has even now appeared to me, which I would have you hear and keep secret, till I know what God will please to do with me.
Hereupon the bishop sent him to Rome, furnishing him with a guide and supplying plenty of all things requisite for his journey, earnestly requesting that he would come that way, when he returned into his own country.
He likewise carefully provided holy vessels, lamps, and other such things as appertain to the adorning of the house of God.
This being heard, the Pope and all the rest said, that a man of so great authority, who had held the office of a bishop for nearly forty years, ought by no means to be condemned, but being altogether cleared of the faults laid to his charge, should return home with honour.
For he gave all diligence, as he does to this day, to procure relics of the blessed Apostles and martyrs of Christ from all parts, and to raise altars in their honour in separate side-chapels built for the purpose within the walls of the same church.
But Wilfrid thanked him for the loving-kindness which he was pleased to show to a stranger, and answered, that he had resolved upon another course of life, and for that reason had left his country and set out for Rome.
When he told the brethren, they commended his design, and advised him to carry out that which he purposed.
This man, straightway being called, came in, and seeing him somewhat recovered and able to speak, knelt down, and gave thanks to God, with all the brethren there present.
He enriched the structure of his church, which is dedicated in honour of the blessed Apostle Andrew with manifold adornments and marvellous workmanship.
Grant, O Jesus, that the flock may follow in the path of the shepherd."
And he also brought the holy season of Easter, returning in its course, to accord with the true teaching of the catholic rule which the Fathers fixed, and, banishing all doubt and error, gave his nation sure guidance in their worship.
The king gave him Wilfrid for a companion, and bade Wilfrid conduct him to Rome.
Besides which, he industriously gathered the histories of their martyrdom, together with other ecclesiastical writings, and erected there a large and noble library.
This being read, the hearers were amazed, and the reader ceasing, they began to ask of one another, who that Bishop Wilfrid was.
And long time sore vexed by many a peril at home and abroad, when he had held the office of a bishop forty-five years, he passed away and with joy departed to the heavenly kingdom.
Eleven other bishops met at the consecration of the new bishop, and that function was most honourably performed.
From a tender regard to the expiring prejudices of Rome, the Barbarian declined the name, the purple, and the diadem, of the emperors; but he assumed, under the hereditary title of king, the whole substance and plenitude of Imperial prerogative.
And the subordinate care of justice and the revenue was delegated to seven consulars, three correctors, and five presidents, who governed the fifteen regions of Italy according to the principles, and even the forms, of Roman jurisprudence.
He maintained, with a powerful hand, the balance of the West, till it was at length overthrown by the ambition of Clovis; and although unable to assist his rash and unfortunate kinsman, the king of the Visigoths, he saved the remains of his family and people, and checked the Franks in the midst of their victorious career.
Theodoric loved the virtues which he possessed, and the talents of which he was destitute.
His prudence could not safely intrust the bulwark of Italy to such feeble and turbulent neighbors; and his justice might claim the lands which they oppressed, either as a part of his kingdom, or as the inheritance of his father.
1876--To frustrate repetition of body-snatchers' attempt, reinterred deeper.
1840--Partner in law with S. T. Logan.
1858--Lost in the legislature the senatorship to Douglas.
Of the four sons, Edward died in infancy; William ("Willie") at twelve at Washington; Thomas ("Tad") at Springfield, aged twenty; Robert M. T., minister to Great Britain, presidential candidate, secretary of war to President Garfield.
1844--Proposed for Congress.
1832--First political speech.
1874--In catacomb, in sarcophagus.
1846--Elected to Congress, the single Whig Illinois member; voted antislavery; sought abolition in the D. C.; voted Wilmot Proviso. Declined reelection.
Law partner with John L. Stuart till 1840.)
1849--Defeated by Shields for United States senator.
1871--Temporarily deposited in catacomb.
1845--Law partner with W. H. Herndon, for life.
1834--Elected to State legislature as Whig. (Resides in Springfield till 1861.
1838 to 1840--Reelected to State legislature.
1854--Won the State over to the Republicans, but by arrangement transferred his claim to the senatorship to Trumbull.
Studies for the law.
1831--Works for himself: boatbuilding and sailing, carpentering, hog-sticking, sawmilling, blacksmithing, river-pilot, logger, etc., in Menard County, Indiana.
1900--A fifth removal; the whole structure solidly rebuilt, containing the martyred President, his wife, and their three children, as well as the grandson bearing Abraham's name.
1860--May 9, nominated for President, "shutting out" Seward, Chase, Cameron, Dayton, Wade, Bates, and McLean.
1842--Married Miss Mary Todd, of Kentucky.
His only grandson, Abraham, died in London, March, 1890.
1859--Placed for the presidential candidacy.
1863--January 1, emancipation proclaimed.
1831--Election clerk at New Salem.
1852--Electioneered for General Scott.
Store clerk and merchant, New Salem.
Defeated through strong local vote.
1848--Electioneered for General Taylor.
Deputy surveyor, at three dollars a day, Sangamon County.
1856--Organized the Republican Party and became its chief; nominated vice-president, but was not chosen by its first convention; worked for the Fremont-Dayton presidential ticket.
1865--March 4, inaugurated for the second term.
Reelected November 8.
April 14, assassinated in Ford's Theater, Washington, by a mad actor, Wilkes Booth.
When the queen saw the huge basin full of silver treasure, her cheeks and her forehead flushed as red as fire.
He removed the cloths from the young man's back, and rubbed the places that smarted with a cooling unguent.
And to think that if I had listened to the Talisman of Solomon I would have had none of it."
Thereupon he vanished like a flash, leaving the young man standing like one in a dream.
The Demon laughed.
Following the Demon, the young man ascended a flight of steps, and so entered the vestibule of the palace.
Thereupon he tore his cap from his head and flung it upon the ground, and began beating himself violently upon the head with great outcrying.
"I think everybody in this place has gone mad," said he.
He led him from this room to another--like it vaulted, and like it lit by a carbuncle set in the dome of the roof above.
"But," said Fortunatus, "you have not told us what the story is to be about."
"What you tell me," said the young man, "passes wonder.
The queen looked about her.
The young man smote his hand upon his head.
"I obey," said Zadok.
"And do you really love me as you say?"
In an instant the walls of the prison split asunder, and the sky was above them.
Zadok led the way down the steps and the young man followed.
Only do not call upon Zadok, the King of the Demons, in this thy trouble."
All the city was shrouded in gloom, and everywhere was weeping and crying.
So for seven months he lived a life of joy and delight; then one morning he awakened and found everything changed to grief and mourning.
"No!" cried she.
The young man struck his head with his clinched fist.
Then he called aloud, Zadok!
"Are you content?" asked the young man.
Beyond this door is that alone which shall satisfy all thy desires."
The floor swayed and rocked beneath the young man's feet.
Do not push the door open, for it is not locked!"
"Who are you?" it said.
He saw before him a garden of such splendor and magnificence as he had never dreamed of even in his wildest fancy.
"Thou mayst go now, Zadok," said the young man, trembling with eagerness.
"Six times, vile thing, you would have betrayed me.
Within here shalt thou find death!"
Is there not some one here to tell us a fair story about a saint?"
He grew suddenly dizzy; the world swam before his eyes.
At the bottom of the steps there was a door of adamant.
The young man heard the Demon Zadok give a yell of laughter.
Zadok laughed and vanished.
They ascended the steps, and so reached the garden above.
I have shown thee how to enter, and thou mayst go in whenever it pleases thee to do so."
Then, tell me, can you take me from here to the city of the queen of the Black Isles, whence you brought him?"
"And where is this treasure-house, O Zadok?" said the young man.
"Tell me," said the young man, "what means all this sorrow and lamentation?"
Zadok!
"Thou art where thou commandest to be," said the Demon.
He seized the young man by the girdle, and in an instant flew away with him to a hanging-garden that lay before the queen's palace.
He had to lean against the wall behind him, for the sight made him dizzy.
"I will tell thee," said Zadok.
That she were flesh and blood, instead of cold stone!
It was I that brought him thence to this place with one vessel of gold money and one vessel of silver money."
"What means all this sorrow?" said he to one of the slaves.
He saw it become warm, and the cheeks and lips grow red with life.
Here have I been coming to this place seven months, and have never yet thought to try whether yonder door was locked or not!"
He took the young man by the hand and led him into a third room--vaulted as the other two had been, lit as they had been by a carbuncle in the roof above.
Upon the couch in the centre of the apartment reclined a queen with a crown of gold upon her head.
"He has asked the question!" howled the slaves--"he has asked the question!"
It was here that I saw thy father seal it so that no one but the master of Zadok may enter.
To the master who has come again!
"And to think," said he, "if I had listened to that accursed Talisman of Solomon, called The Wise,' all this happiness, this ecstasy that is now mine, would have been lost to me."
"How can I open the door, seeing that there is no lock nor key to it?"
"Zadok!" he cried--"Zadok!
The young man stood for a while looking down at the beautiful figure of alabaster.
"Oh, wretched one!" cried the Talisman, "oh, wretched one!
He sighed; he melted; the tears burst from his eyes and ran down his cheeks.
"I cannot open the door," said he.
There were seven fountains as clear as crystal that shot high into the air and fell back into basins of alabaster.
Not a sound was to be heard, not a thing moved, but silence hung like a veil between the earth and the sky.
It was done as the king said, and by-and-by Aben Hassen the Fool lay in the prison, smarting and sore with the whipping he had had.
"What," he cried, "art thou not contented with all thou hast and with all that we do for thee without asking the forbidden question?"
"We are now," said Zadok, "above the treasure-house of which I spoke.
In an instant there came a marvellous change. He saw the stone melt, and begin to grow flexible and soft.
"Listen, O master.
Around the wall, and facing the basin from all sides, stood six golden statues.
Where the day before had been laughter, to-day was crying.
The young man pushed the door with his hand. It opened swiftly and silently, and they entered.
"Tell me, Zadok," said the young man, after he had filled his soul with all the other wonders that surrounded him--"tell me what is there that lies beyond that door?"
"I wish that I knew what was there," said the young man.
Strike, O slave!"
Zadok laughed.
The young man opened the door of adamant and entered the first of the vaulted rooms.
Zadok! Zadok!"
The door was tightly shut, and there was neither lock nor key to it.
"Open the door!" cried the queen.
The Demon leaped from the earth, carrying the young man by the girdle, and flew through the air so swiftly that the stars appeared to slide away behind them.
But each sat silent and motionless--each was a stone as white as alabaster.
"And tell me," said the young man, "can she never become alive again?"
The young man stood as though turned to stone, for there stood a gigantic Black Demon with a napkin wrapped around his loins and a scimitar in his right hand, the blade of which gleamed like lightning in the flame of the lamp.
Now," said he to the queen, "I will show you our treasure." He called aloud, "Zadok, Zadok, Zadok!"
"Yes," said Zadok, "with ease."
Behind the slaves stood a double row of armed men, and behind them a great crowd of other slaves and attendants, dressed each as magnificently as a prince, blazing and flaming with innumerable jewels and ornaments of gold.
He led the way, and the young man followed, filled with wonder and astonishment.
"Must have been asleep, sir.
Was there any driver?
A LONELY RIDE
Perhaps I was out of spirits.
Bully place for a nice quiet snooze--empty stage, sir!"
Please try this chair."
His elbow brushed her shoulder.
"I didn't know your office was up here."
"Carol!
"(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it's the town."
I'm broken.
CHAPTER XIII
Tell me your side.
"A bore!"
"Twenty-six, Guy."
He had a golf jacket of jersey, worn through at the creases in the sleeves.
"I'd like to.
There were only two things which suggested Guy Pollock.
"Guy!
There's one thing that's the matter with Gopher Prairie, at least with the ruling-class (there is a ruling-class, despite all our professions of democracy). And the penalty we tribal rulers pay is that our subjects watch us every minute.
To the person who opened she murmured, "Do you happen to know where the Perrys are?" She realized that it was Guy Pollock.
What is Gopher Prairie to you?"
Evangelize it to what?"
He flitted over to the desk-chair, his thin back stooped.
I'm afraid of what people might say."
It's like blood on the wing of a humming-bird."
He quartered the office, a grayhound on the scent; a grayhound with glasses tilted forward on his thin nose, and a silky indecisive brown mustache.
I walked in Gramercy Park.
"Would you have a fireplace for me?"
"Oh, maybe once or twice, when Will has positively known of a case where Doctor--where one of the others has continued to call on patients longer than necessary, he has laughed about it, but----"
I'm a perfect example.
She noted that he did not apologize for it, as Kennicott would have done.
"I'm not a humming-bird.
"Yes, I'm sure she's very bland.
But her mother, Mrs. Westlake--nobody could be sweeter."
They don't know much of anybody----"
From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School.
Won't you come in and wait for them?"
"To anything that's definite.
He stopped himself with a sharp, "Good Lord, Carol, you're not a jury.
He picked up the cloisonne vase. Across it he peered at her with such loneliness that she was startled. But his eyes faded into impersonality as he talked of the jealousies of Gopher Prairie.
He slipped out, came back with Dr. and Mrs. Dillon.
"Of course.
Really?"
"I don't know.
Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli--or of factory-smoke--are just as suspicious and righteous.
"How could you?"
And I read, oh, everything.
She glanced about the rusty office--gaunt stove, shelves of tan law-books, desk-chair filled with newspapers so long sat upon that they were in holes and smudged to grayness.
Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?"
And I've never thought to call.
"I won't be cajoled!
At least, I am making you talk!
She asked impulsively, "You, why do you stay here?"
Julius got well.
I came here.
She knocked.
The widows themselves demand it!
She saw a light under an office door.
He's a dentist, just come to town.
How old are you, Carol?"
"It is.
I went to symphonies twice a week.
"Please stay and have some coffee with me."
They are a cot and a wash-stand and my other suit and the blue crepe tie you said you liked."
I thought I was 'keeping up.' But I guess the Village Virus had me already.
"No, REALLY!
"Yes.
Suppose I did dare to make love to--some exquisite married woman. I wouldn't admit it to myself.
Seriousness or frivolousness or both.
The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow. "If only you'd spoken before! It's excessively awkward to mention it now, With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!
There was silence supreme!
("That's exactly the method," the Bellman bold In a hasty parenthesis cried, "That's exactly the way I have always been told That the capture of Snarks should be tried!")
"'Tis a pitiful tale," said the Bellman, whose face Had grown longer at every word: "But, now that you've stated the whole of your case, More debate would be simply absurd.
But the Butcher turned nervous, and dressed himself fine, With yellow kid gloves and a ruff-- Said he felt it exactly like going to dine, Which the Bellman declared was all "stuff."
Fit the fourth
THE BAKER'S TALE
"We have had that before!" The Bellman indignantly said. And the Baker replied "Let me say it once more. It is this, it is this that I dread!
"For England expects--I forbear to proceed: 'Tis a maxim tremendous, but trite: And you'd best be unpacking the things that you need To rig yourselves out for the fight."
"It is this, it is this--"
"It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul, When I think of my uncle's last words: And my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl Brimming over with quivering curds!
They roused him with muffins--they roused him with ice-- They roused him with mustard and cress-- They roused him with jam and judicious advice-- They set him conundrums to guess.
"It's excessively awkward to mention it now-- As I think I've already remarked." And the man they called "Hi!" replied, with a sigh, "I informed you the day we embarked.
When at length he sat up and was able to speak, His sad story he offered to tell; And the Bellman cried "Silence!
Not a shriek, not a scream, Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe In an antediluvian tone.
"To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care; To pursue it with forks and hope; To threaten its life with a railway-share; To charm it with smiles and soap!
"I skip forty years," said the Baker, in tears, "And proceed without further remark To the day when you took me aboard of your ship To help you in hunting the Snark.
The maker of Bonnets ferociously planned A novel arrangement of bows: While the Billiard-marker with quivering hand Was chalking the tip of his nose.
"But if ever I meet with a Boojum, that day, In a moment (of this I am sure), I shall softly and suddenly vanish away-- And the notion I cannot endure!"
Not even a shriek!" And excitedly tingled his bell.
The Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade-- Each working the grindstone in turn: But the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed No interest in the concern:
Then the Banker endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed), And changed his loose silver for notes. The Baker with care combed his whiskers and hair, And shook the dust out of his coats.
"You may charge me with murder--or want of sense-- (We are all of us weak at times): But the slightest approach to a false pretence Was never among my crimes!
"'But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, If your Snark be a Boojum!
"My father and mother were honest, though poor--" "Skip all that!" cried the Bellman in haste. "If it once becomes dark, there's no chance of a Snark-- We have hardly a minute to waste!"
"A dear uncle of mine (after whom I was named) Remarked, when I bade him farewell--" "Oh, skip your dear uncle!" the Bellman exclaimed, As he angrily tingled his bell.
"For the Snark's a peculiar creature, that won't Be caught in a commonplace way. Do all that you know, and try all that you don't: Not a chance must be wasted to-day!
"I said it in Hebrew--I said it in Dutch-- I said it in German and Greek: But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) That English is what you speak!"
"He remarked to me then," said that mildest of men, "'If your Snark be a Snark, that is right: Fetch it home by all means--you may serve it with greens, And it's handy for striking a light.
Fit the Third
"'You may seek it with thimbles--and seek it with care; You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway-share; You may charm it with smiles and soap--'"
When the verdict was called for, the Jury declined, As the word was so puzzling to spell; But they ventured to hope that the Snark wouldn't mind Undertaking that duty as well.
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share; They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Then a scream, shrill and high, rent the shuddering sky, And they knew that some danger was near: The Beaver turned pale to the tip of its tail, And even the Butcher felt queer.
He thought of his childhood, left far far behind-- That blissful and innocent state-- The sound so exactly recalled to his mind A pencil that squeaks on a slate!
But the very same plan to the Beaver occurred: It had chosen the very same place: Yet neither betrayed, by a sign or a word, The disgust that appeared in his face.
"You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue: You condense it with locusts and tape: Still keeping one principal object in view-- To preserve its symmetrical shape."
The Jury had each formed a different view (Long before the indictment was read), And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew One word that the others had said.
The Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted: But the Snark, though a little aghast, As the lawyer to whom the defense was entrusted, Went bellowing on to the last.
The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens, And ink in unfailing supplies: While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens, And watched them with wondering eyes.
"As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird, Since it lives in perpetual passion: Its taste in costume is entirely absurd-- It is ages ahead of the fashion:
Then the Butcher contrived an ingenious plan For making a separate sally; And had fixed on a spot unfrequented by man, A dismal and desolate valley.
"In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been Enveloped in absolute mystery, And without extra charge I will give you at large A Lesson in Natural History."
But the Barrister, weary of proving in vain That the Beaver's lace-making was wrong, Fell asleep, and in dreams saw the creature quite plain That his fancy had dwelt on so long.
The proof is complete, If only I've stated it thrice."
"But it knows any friend it has met once before: It never will look at a bribe: And in charity-meetings it stands at the door, And collects--though it does not subscribe.
THE BARRISTER'S DREAM
While the Beaver confessed, with affectionate looks More eloquent even than tears, It had learned in ten minutes far more than all books Would have taught it in seventy years.
He dreamed that he stood in a shadowy Court, Where the Snark, with a glass in its eye, Dressed in gown, bands, and wig, was defending a pig On the charge of deserting its sty.
The Beaver had counted with scrupulous care, Attending to every word: But it fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair, When the third repetition occurred.
So the Snark found the verdict, although, as it owned, It was spent with the toils of the day: When it said the word "GUILTY!" the Jury all groaned, And some of them fainted away.
"The method employed I would gladly explain, While I have it so clear in my head, If I had but the time and you had but the brain-- But much yet remains to be said.
In his genial way he proceeded to say (Forgetting all laws of propriety, And that giving instruction, without introduction, Would have caused quite a thrill in Society),
"You must know--" said the Judge: but the Snark exclaimed "Fudge!" That statute is obsolete quite! Let me tell you, my friends, the whole question depends On an ancient manorial right.
Each thought he was thinking of nothing but "Snark" And the glorious work of the day; And each tried to pretend that he did not remark That the other was going that way.
Fit the Fifth
The indictment had never been clearly expressed, And it seemed that the Snark had begun, And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed What the pig was supposed to have done.
"'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!" he suddenly cried. (This man, that they used to call "Dunce.") "As the Bellman would tell you," he added with pride, "I have uttered that sentiment once.
But the valley grew narrow and narrower still, And the evening got darker and colder, Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill) They marched along shoulder to shoulder.
Then the Snark pronounced sentence, the Judge being quite Too nervous to utter a word: When it rose to its feet, there was silence like night, And the fall of a pin might be heard.
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; They pursued it with forks and hope; They threatened its life with a railway-share; They charmed it with smiles and soap.
It felt that, in spite of all possible pains, It had somehow contrived to lose count, And the only thing now was to rack its poor brains By reckoning up the amount.
THE BEAVER'S LESSON
The Butcher would gladly have talked till next day, But he felt that the lesson must end, And he wept with delight in attempting to say He considered the Beaver his friend.
While the war was going on thousands of sick and wounded British soldiers were pouring into the base hospitals at Scutari, where no provision for their care had been made.
Then the newspapers began calling for English women to go to the Crimea and care for the sick, and Florence Nightingale heard the call.
They were laid groaning in hallways and on the bare ground until such time as the doctors could look after them.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
They visited the quartermasters and obtained the supplies that had been tied up through faulty administration and through army red tape, and in a short time they had established a diet kitchen where several hundred sick and wounded men could have the food they required, food that would save their lives.
After most of the men had left and only a few remained she still worked faithfully to serve them, establishing "reading huts" and places of recreation such as the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. established in France and Belgium in the course of the World War some sixty years later.
She did not die, however, but recovered to take up again her duties as chief nurse and organizer.
The doctors who had been her opponents soon looked up to her and became her devoted friends, and the men who had been through such terrible sufferings thought she was indeed an angel from heaven, and, as she passed down the long wards would furtively kiss her shadow as it fell across their blankets.
When the war was ended Miss Nightingale remained at the Crimea until the last soldiers were sent home, and then, and not till then, she followed them.
One of her biographers tells us that when she entered the trenches she was warned by a sentinel to go no further, because the enemy had the place under close watch and would certainly open fire when they beheld a group of people at that particular point.
It may well be thought that her heart sank when she saw the enormity of the task that lay before her, for she had been sent to bring order from chaos, plenty from want, comfort from torture and cleanliness from wholesale filth.
Right then a curious thing happened.
Offer and request crossed each other in the mails.
Before the walls of Sebastopol there took place severe fighting, which continued until bitter winter rendered further campaigning impossible.
The Nightingale family did not remain long in Italy, and soon after the birth of his youngest child William Nightingale, with his wife and two little daughters, returned to England where the two girls spent their childhood in a rambling old house in Derbyshire with many traditions and stories attached to it.
All the food, we are told, consisted of beef and vegetables boiled together in one huge caldron, into which new supplies were thrown indiscriminately as fast as they were delivered.
And the wonders she performed were heard of back in England, where her name became national.
CHAPTER XXV
From the ships and warehouses there commenced to appear the comforts that sick men demanded--sheets and nightgowns, socks and pillows; in the place of the nauseous beef stew, the wounded began to get broths and jellies.
They were brought in with their uniforms covered with filth and blood, and were laid in long rows on the floors of the hospital where few cots were to be found.
The War Department had already decided that Miss Nightingale was the one person who could take charge of the reorganization of the hospitals in the Crimea, and had written a letter requesting her services.
Vermin crawled over the floors, over the walls and over the bodies of the helpless men.
Great Britain and France supported the Turks and active fighting commenced.
She was born in 1822 in the city of Florence in Italy, and was named after the place where she first drew breath.
Then she fell ill with Crimean fever, and through the army the news was received with more consternation than a severe defeat.
On one occasion, we are told, a consignment of shoes for the soldiers turned out to be in women's sizes.
In May, 1855, she visited other hospitals that were nearer the seat of war and went into the trenches themselves before Sebastopol.
This home, like many another benevolent institution in those times, was badly administered.
In the following years she was frequently consulted on hospital organization in the armies not only of Great Britain but of Continental nations as well.
She returned to England quietly as she had left, although a British Government placed a battleship at her service--and she lived in England engaged in useful and philanthropic work for a great many years.
Miss Nightingale had personally visited the former subscribers, and secured once more their help and patronage.
Improper inspections resulted in high profits, for the army contractors made uniforms out of shoddy and leather accouterments from paper, filled the cores of hay bales with kale stocks and cheated the Government right and left without forbearance or conscience.
A large number of patriotic women volunteered to aid her, but only a very few possessed the necessary qualifications for such a task.
Then war broke out between England, France and Turkey on the one side and Russia on the other,--a war that was brought about among other reasons by the desire of the Russian Czar to seize and hold the port of Constantinople.
As Florence grew older she thought a great deal about these things, and finally decided that she would do something which at that time was regarded almost as strange as if she had declared her intention of visiting the North Pole--she said she was going to become a professional trained nurse, and went abroad to study nursing on the Continent which was far ahead of England in such matters.
On the following day her appointment was officially announced, and she was overwhelmed with proffers of assistance from all sides.
Without farewells, quietly and at night, seen off only by a few intimate relatives, the little group of nurses started on their mission--the first one where women were to care for the soldiers who had fallen in war.
This was the state of affairs when Florence Nightingale became the Superintendent of the Home.
Sick people were expected to be cared for by their relatives; hospitals were inefficient and badly run, and the comforts of the modern sickroom were unknown.
She wrote a letter to Sydney Herbert who was Minister of War, volunteering to organize a body of nurses and go out to the Crimea to care for the wounded.
Men broke down and cried like children when they heard that Miss Nightingale lay at the point of death, and the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan, rode through sleet and mud for hours to visit her personally.
She had to contend not only with these awful conditions, but with the dislike and distrust of the medical officers with whom she was to work, who resented the fact that a woman had been sent out to reorganize what they considered a part of their department, and who doubted, because she was a woman, that she would be capable of doing so efficiently.
Here Florence conceived a love for nursing and used to tend sick animals in the neighborhood and when she grew older, to sit up with and cheer the sick among the cottagers.
Then Florence Nightingale, hardly taking breath, plunged into the task that awaited her and sent her nurses to the quarters where they were most needed.
Poor men used to come hat in hand to the old house requesting that Miss Florence spend a few hours with a sick wife or a young mother, and the Nightingales were kind enough and sensible enough to allow their daughter to do the work for which she had so evident an inclination.
Many a time she took charge of cases that had been given up by the doctors, who turned their attention always to those whom they believed had a fighting chance for life, and she nursed them back to life with a patience and a tenderness that the doctors could not spare.
The ladies who were compelled to remain there did not receive the care that they should have had, and were unhappy and dispirited.
And when she arrived there was no time to spend in preliminary planning, for active fighting had been going on at the front and the wounded from recent battles were pouring in, adding to the confusion that already existed.
As it constantly showed a deficit, its friends had become discouraged in supporting it, and the subscriptions on which it lived had been falling off.
With the constant flood of wounded men, and men who were dying of dysentery and cholera, with no medical supplies and little food, with no nurses and only a few doctors, the condition of the British wounded soon became terrible beyond description.
She had gone to Scutari in 1854.
The bread was moldy and the beef too tough even for well men to eat.
With a fund of about $250,000 she founded the Nightingale Home for the proper training of nurses, a fund that she could have doubled or trebled had she so desired, or if the needs of the home had required it.
Of all that offered to go Miss Nightingale was only able to accept thirty that she considered would be capable of performing the severe tasks that lay ahead, for she knew only too well the grim welcome she would receive at the Crimea.
The theater of war soon shifted to the Crimean Peninsula where the British and French laid siege to the town of Sebastopol which was Russia's most important fortress and chief base of supplies.
As a matter of fact the work performed by Miss Nightingale was indirectly responsible for the birth of the Red Cross which was organized in Switzerland some four years after she had finished her work at the Crimea, and certainly no name in the Red Cross, in spite of the host of noble men and women who have served there, has ever equaled the glory of her own.
From there they made their way to the seat of the war, and Miss Nightingale looked for the first time on the hospital where she was so soon to acquire immortal fame.
Were they some of the two hundred thousand species of vegetables known hitherto, and did they claim a place of their own in the lacustrine flora?
The currents of wind seemed to have had no effect upon their shape, and in the midst of the windy blasts they stood unmoved and firm, just like a clump of petrified cedars.
The word cavern does not convey any idea of this immense space; words of human tongue are inadequate to describe the discoveries of him who ventures into the deep abysses of earth.
"It is a conservatory, Axel; but is it not also a menagerie?"
At a distance of five hundred paces, at the turn of a high promontory, appeared a high, tufted, dense forest.
It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmical phenomenon, filling a cavern of sufficient extent to contain an ocean.
At first I could hardly see anything.
But at that moment my attention was drawn to an unexpected sight.
"That may be," I replied; "but if there have been creatures now extinct in these underground regions, why may not some of those monsters be now roaming through these gloomy forests, or hidden behind the steep crags?"
Who would ever have imagined, under this terrestrial crust, an ocean with ebbing and flowing tides, with winds and storms?"
CHAPTER XXXI.
It is called surturbrand, a variety of brown coal or lignite, found chiefly in Iceland."
"Yes," answered the Professor laughing.
What are the finest arches of bridges and the arcades of cathedrals, compared with this far reaching vault, with a radius of three leagues, beneath which a wide and tempest-tossed ocean may flow at its ease?"
"It is fir, pine, or birch, and other northern coniferae, mineralised by the action of the sea.
"To be sure," said I; "and why should not these waters yield to us fishes of unknown species?"
"What! the tide!" I cried.
Hans was a good caterer for our little household; he had water and fire at his disposal, so that he was able to vary our bill of fare now and then. For dessert he gave us a few cups of coffee, and never was coffee so delicious.
Therefore that mysterious centre of attraction is at no great depth."
But I should like to see my boat first."
"Uncle, what wood is this?" I cried.
"I am quite convinced, although it is incredible!"
"Are you convinced?" said my uncle.
"Oh, I am not afraid that it will fall down upon my head.
"What depth have we now reached?"
"Can the influence of the sun and moon be felt down here?"
"Well," replied my uncle, "is there any scientific reason against it?"
But if all oceans are properly speaking but lakes, since they are encompassed by land, of course this internal sea will be surrounded by a coast of granite, and on the opposite shores we shall find fresh passages opening."
"Would you then conclude," I said, "that the magnetic pole is somewhere between the surface of the globe and the point where we are?"
"Thirty or forty leagues; so that we have no time to lose, and we shall set sail to-morrow."
Just look," added my uncle, throwing into the sea one of those precious waifs.
"It will not be a boat at all, but a good, well-made raft."
"Oh, I am not going to dive head foremost.
Don't you hear the hammer at work?
"We will try, Axel, for we must penetrate all secrets of these newly discovered regions."
"Why not?
Come, and you will see for yourself."
"At any rate," he replied, "we have not seen any yet."
In a few more steps I was at his side.
"We are thirty-five leagues below the surface."
"And does the compass still show south-east?"
"Now," said my uncle, "now is the time for high tide, and we must not lose the opportunity to study this phenomenon."
"Here is the tide rising," I cried.
The bit of wood, after disappearing, returned to the surface and oscillated to and fro with the waves.
"How long do you suppose this sea to be?"
"Why," I said, "a raft would be just as hard to make as a boat, and I don't see--"
"Set sail, shall we?
"So much as that?"
"Exactly so; and it is likely enough that if we were to reach the spot beneath the polar regions, about that seventy-first degree where Sir James Ross has discovered the magnetic pole to be situated, we should see the needle point straight up.
"I am sure of not being a mile out of my reckoning."
I remarked: "It is so; and here is a fact which science has scarcely suspected."
I came back to breakfast with a good appetite.
To my great surprise a half-finished raft was already lying on the sand, made of a peculiar kind of wood, and a great number of planks, straight and bent, and of frames, were covering the ground, enough almost for a little fleet.
"Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth."
"Horizontally, three hundred and fifty leagues from Iceland."
This mass of water cannot escape the general law.
And in spite of the heavy atmospheric pressure on the surface, you will see it rise like the Atlantic itself."
"I know you don't see; but you might hear if you would listen.
The next morning I awoke feeling perfectly well.
But now what are your plans?
"This is wonderful," I said.
"But where are we, uncle? for I have not yet asked you that question, and your instruments must be able to furnish the answer."
Are you not thinking of returning to the surface now?"
By next evening, thanks to the industry and skill of our guide, the raft was made.
"But how are we to get down below this liquid surface?"
After half an hour's walking, on the other side of the promontory which formed the little natural harbour, I perceived Hans at work.
The great Architect has built it of the best materials; and never could man have given it so wide a stretch.
In the uppermost regions of the air immense birds, more powerful than the cassowary, and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast breadth of wings and strike with their heads the granite vault that bounds the sky.
Evening came, and, as on the previous day, I perceived no change in the luminous condition of the air.
A horrible fear turned me cold.
A long narrow passage stretched in front of me, with doors upon either side.
She had leaned her arms upon the sill and her head upon her arms.
Then I carried the woman to the window and placed her in the chair, and supported her so that she might not fall.
A thick soft scarf--silk it seemed to the touch--was knotted tightly round it, and the end of the scarf ran up to the cross-beam above the bed-posts.
Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing.
She moved her hands upon her lap, and finally lifted one and held her throat with it.
She did not answer me.
I crept forward, and at last at the far end of the house and on the left hand of the passage I came to that for which I searched, and which I barely hoped to find--an open door.
I wondered what it was on which she stood.
I pondered for a moment what I should do!
I had only my stockings upon my feet and I crept forward so carefully that I could not hear my own footfalls.
For the sound was neither a screech like that which rose from the hollow, nor a groan, nor any ghostly noise.
I saw that she was young, little more than a girl indeed, with hair and eyes of an extreme blackness.
It was a large bedroom, and the bed had not been slept in.
Remembering what Dick Parmiter had told me, I mean that every sound reverberated through the house, I crept down the landing on tiptoe.
I held my breath and listened in the doorway, but there was no sound of any one breathing, so I stepped into the room.
I spoke to her.
Such light as there was, glimmered upon the woman's face.
The strangeness of my position, besides, kept me in some excitement.
I thought that my heart would stop or my brain burst.
"Very likely there will be some water in the room," said I. "If you are safe, if you will not fall, I will look for it."
The white thing was a live thing of flesh and blood.
It was a slip knot, and now that no weight kept it taut, it loosened easily.
I found it at last and a glass beside it.
I had taken some twenty paces when the passage opened out to my right. I put out my hand and touched a balustrade.
Again the queer gasping coughing noise broke from her lips, and at last I understood it.
I noticed a streak of white which ran straight up towards the ceiling from behind her head, and I wondered what that was.
Ghosts and bogies might do very well for the island of Tresco, but Mr. Berkeley was not to be terrified with any such old-wives' stories, and so Mr. Berkeley fell asleep.
She was standing on nothing whatever!
I poured out the water from the jug into the tumbler.
I cannot describe my astonishment; she was in a deep sleep.
But at some time during that night I woke up quite suddenly with a clear sense that I had been waked up.
The girl was still seated on the chair, but she had changed her attitude.
Yet there was no doubt possible.
There was no hint of any trouble in her expression, no trace of any passionate despair.
These I carried back to the window.
The room was so dark that I could not have read my watch, even if I had looked at it, which I did not think to do.
I slipped the noose back over her head and left it dangling.
It was taller than any human being that I had seen.
It had two big windows looking out towards the sea, and as I stood in the dim grey light, I wondered whether it was from one of those windows that Adam Mayle had looked years before, and seen the brigantine breaking up upon the Golden Ball Reef.
With the other arm I felt about her neck.
Her face was pale, but that I took to be its natural complexion.
The fog was still thick about the house, so that hardly a glimmer of light came from the window.
I could not for a moment entertain Dick's supposition of a spirit.
I raised her in my arms, and still she did not wake.
I fumbled at the knot with my fingers.
I could feel her breath upon my cheek and it came steadily and regular.
I could see the whites of them; our heads were so near they almost touched.
Her eyes were open and they stared into mine.
TELLS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY INCIDENT IN CULLEN MAYLE'S BEDROOM
Finally, there was the adventure of that night.
I groped for the chair and set it to face the open night.
I propped her securely in the chair, then crossed the room, opened the door and listened.
I carried her down the passage, through the open door and laid her on the bed.
Should I wake the household? Should I explain what had happened and my presence in the house?
But the light was broadening with the passage of every minute.
I held her thus with the cold salt air blowing upon her face, and in a little, she began to recover.
Helen Mayle was still asleep, and she had not moved from her posture.
Her long black eyelashes rested upon her cheeks.
I took my arm from her waist and groped about the room for the water-jug.
I could not doubt who it was, for one thing the white dress she wore was of some fine soft fabric, and even in that light it was easy to see that she was beautiful.
The house was very still; so far no one had been disturbed.
Five miles from Warwick (ten, if you believe the cab-drivers) are the ruins of Kenilworth Castle.
All about are quaint old houses and shops, with red-tiled roofs, and little windows, with diamond panes, hung on hinges, where maidens fair have looked down on brave men in coats of mail.
But we should think of her gratefully, for no doubt it was she who started the lad off for London.
Yet his fancies serve us better than the facts.
I sent a shrill whistle and a stick that way, and out ran four fine deer that loped gracefully across the turf.
The sight brought my poacher instincts to the surface, but I bottled them, and trudged on until I came to the little church that stands at the entrance to the park.
Whether her ticket was by way of Leamington I do not know.
No doubt Kenilworth was stupendous in its magnificence, and it will pay you to take down from its shelf Sir Walter's novel and read about it.
So each estate hired its priests by the year, just as men with a taste for litigation hold attorneys in constant retainer.
In Fifteen Hundred Seventy-five, when Shakespeare was eleven years of age, Queen Elizabeth came to Kenilworth.
But practically it is the same.
So I asked, and Rusticus informed me that Hampton Lucy was only a mile beyond and that Shakespeare never stole deer at all; so I hope we shall hear no more of that libelous accusation.
Soon after leaving the church a rustic swain hailed me and asked for a match. The pipe and the Virginia weed--they mean amity the world over.
Had his view been from the inside he would not have made his kings noble nor his princes generous; for the stress of strife would have stilled his laughter, and from his brain the dazzling pictures would have fled.
Some hasty individual has put forth a statement to the effect that poets can only be bred in a mountainous country, where they could lift up their eyes to the hills.
All mansions, castles and prisons in England have chapels or churches attached.
Rock and ravine, beetling crag, singing cascade, and the heights where the lightning plays and the mists hover are certainly good timber for poetry--after you have caught your poet--but Nature eludes all formula.
And come to think of it Rusticus is right.
Perhaps this is by some Act of Parliament--I really do not know; anyway, I have ceased to kick against the pricks and now meekly accept my fate.
I have walked both routes and consider the latter the shorter.
The winding Avon, full to its banks, strays lazily through rich fields and across green meadows, past the bright red-brick pile of Charlcote Mansion.
No record is found of the marriage.
And to whom do we owe it that he did leave--Justice Shallow or Ann Hathaway, or both?
But she remained from July Ninth to July Twenty-seventh, and there were great doings 'most every day, to which the yeomanry were oft invited.
When the Charlcote Mansion was built, there was a housewarming, and Good Queen Bess (who was not so awful good) came in great state; so we see that she had various calling acquaintances in these parts.
It costs a shilling to visit the castle.
It is a good place to rest: for nothing is so soothing as a cool church where the dim light streams through colored windows, and out of sight somewhere an organ softly plays.
"But did Shakespeare run away?" I demanded.
Just beyond the bridge, settled snugly in a forest of waving branches, we see storied old Warwick Castle, with Caesar's Tower lifting itself from the mass of green.
There are the cedars of Lebanon, brought by Crusaders from the East, and the screaming peacocks in the paved courtway: and in the Great Hall are to be seen the sword and accouterments of the fabled Guy, the mace of the "Kingmaker," the helmet of Cromwell, and the armor of Lord Brooke, killed at Litchfield.
Leamington seems largely under subjection to that triumvirate of despots--the Butler, the Coachman and the Gardener.
"Farewell, proud, vain, false, treacherous world, We have seen enough of thee: We value not what thou canst say of we."
But just suppose that Shakespeare had not run away!
A fine old soldier in spotless uniform, with waxed white moustache and dangling sword, conducts the visitors.
"This castle hath a pleasant seat: the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle senses. This guest of Summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven's breath Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze, Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed, and procreant cradle; Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed, The air is delicate."
At the foot of Mill Street are the ruins of the old Gothic bridge that leads off to Banbury.
And this is well, for in the good old days it seemed wise to keep in close communication with the other world.
In Charlcote Church is a memorial to Sir Thomas Lucy; and there is a glowing epitaph that quite upsets any of those taunting and defaming allusions in "The Merry Wives." At the foot of the monument is a line to the effect that the inscription thereon was written by the only one in possession of the facts, Sir Thomas himself.
If I had questions to ask, now was the time!
It is eight miles from Warwick to Stratford by the direct road, but ten by the river.
It is the only castle in England where the portcullis is lowered at ten o'clock every night and raised in the morning (if the coast happens to be clear) to tap of drum.
John Shakespeare was a worthy citizen of Warwickshire, and it is very probable that he received an invitation, and that he drove over with Mary Arden, his wife, sitting on the front seat holding the baby, and all the other seven children sitting on the straw behind.
I should say to Ann first and His Honor second.
And that Shakespeare saw these things there is no doubt.
In fact, in "Midsummer Night's Dream" he has called on his memory for certain features of the show.
But today it is all a crumbling heap; ivy, rooks and daws hold the place in fee, each pushing hard for sole possession.
The long line of battlements, the massive buttresses, the angular entrance cut through solid rock, crooked, abrupt, with places where fighting men can lie in ambush, all is as Shakespeare knew it.
Warwick is worth our while.
Indeed, it seems necessary that a man should have "run away" at least once, in order afterward to attain eminence.
It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
Moses, Lot, Tarquin, Pericles, Demosthenes, Saint Paul, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Voltaire, Goldsmith, Hugo--but the list is too long to give.
And again they came back when Will Shakespeare, a youth from Stratford, eight miles away, came here and waved his magic wand.
We know this, because he has covered all with the glamour of his rich, boyish imagination that failed to perceive the cruel mockery of such selfish pageantry.
You hear the jingle of keys, the flick of the whip and the rattle of the lawnmower; and a cold, secret fear takes possession of you--a sort of half-frenzied impulse to flee, before smug modernity takes you captive and whisks you off to play tiddledywinks or to dance the racquet.
The river-bank is lined with rushes, and in one place I saw the prongs of antlers shaking the elders.
Two miles down the river is Barford, and a mile farther is Wasperton, with its quaint old stone church.
But he saw them as a countryman who came on certain fete-days, and stared with open mouth.
And we may be sure that the eldest boy in that brood never forgot the day.
I have on several occasions been to the Shakespeare country, approaching it from different directions, but each time I am set down at Leamington.
For here we see scenes such as Shakespeare saw, and our delight is in the things that his eyes beheld.
In England poets are relegated to a "Corner." The earth and the fulness thereof belongs to the men who can kill; on this rock have the English State and Church been built.
And one grows to the belief that, while woman's glory is her hair, man's glory is to defeat some one.
And if he can "defeat with great slaughter" his monument is twice as high as if he had only visited on his brother man a plain undoing.
The mines and quarries of earth have been called on for their richest contributions; and talent and skill have given their all to produce this enduring work of beauty, that tells posterity of the mighty acts of this mighty man.
One of these monuments is to commemorate a calamity--the conflagration of Sixteen Hundred Sixty-six--and the others are in honor of deeds of war.
In a minute or so everybody was laughing, and no one but Johnny Chuck knew what the joke was.
This way and that way he went in great leaps.
Nimbleheels hopped up beside Whitefoot the Wood Mouse, and as the two little cousins sat side by side they were not unlike in general appearance, though of the two Whitefoot was the prettier.
Johnny Chuck backed up against the trunk of a tree and made ready to fight.
Striped Chipmunk vanished in a hole under an old stump.
Peter Rabbit bolted for a hollow log.
I have little storerooms down there too, in which I put seeds, berries and nuts. Then when I do wake up I have plenty to eat."
To migrate is to move from one part of the country to another.
However, they belong to the Mouse family.
Of course, they eat everything eatable in their path."
It covers the ground just as grass does here.
Hardly were the words out of Old Mother Nature's mouth when something landed in the leaves almost at her feet and right in the middle of school.
I don't envy those cousins up there in the Far North a bit.
They form a great army and push ahead, regardless of everything.
Whitefoot possessed a long tail, but the tail of Nimbleheels was much longer, slim and tapering.
But I like best to be among the weeds because they are tall and keep me well hidden, and also because they furnish me plenty to eat.
When I say this, I mean the greatest ground jumper.
"Do you make your home under the ground?" asked Striped Chipmunk.
He thought that if it was a good thing for Danny it would be a good thing for him, so he had come.
I ought to have sent word to him to be here this morning."
His ears were much smaller than those of Whitefoot.
"I told you yesterday that I would tell you about some of Danny's cousins," began Old Mother Nature just as Chatterer the Red Squirrel, who was late, came hurrying up quite out of breath.
Before he could reply Johnny Chuck began to chuckle.
Her eyes twinkled.
When they were through laughing Nimbleheels answered Old Mother Nature's questions.
By the way, both Nimbleheels and Whitefoot have small pockets in their cheeks. Tell us where you live, Nimbleheels."
But the greatest differences between the two were in their hind legs and tails.
Only Happy Jack the Gray Squirrel and Chatterer the Red Squirrel and Prickly Porky the Porcupine, who were sitting in trees, kept their places. You see they felt quite safe.
Like Johnny Chuck he gets very fat before going to sleep.
"Hop up on that log side of your Cousin Whitefoot, where all can see you."
At last Peter Rabbit stopped laughing long enough to ask Johnny what he was laughing at.
Like Whitefoot he was white underneath.
So Whitefoot found a hole in a stump near by and decided to camp out there for a few days.
Yet, strange to say, they are not called Mice at all, but Lemmings.
"He went right over my head, and I was sitting up at that!"
His jumping is done only in times of danger.
So the next morning both were on hand when school opened.
Now, as you know, laughter is catching.
"Yes, she is very proud."
"Threw a kiss--from a minstrel's gallery, to a most unworthy individual, Aunt Priscilla?"
But before her eyes were visions of her dismantled home, in her ears was the roar of voices clamouring for her cherished possessions,--a sickening roar, broken, now and then, by the hollow tap of the auctioneer's cruel hammer.
When she heard my little stick come tapping along she tried to hide them,--I mean her tears, of course, Mr. Bellew, and when I drew her dear, beautiful head down into my arms, she--tried to smile.
You will find the Sergeant just sitting down in the chair on the left hand side of the fire-place,--in the corner,--at the 'King's Head,' you know.
You will find the Sergeant at the 'King's Head,'--until half past seven."
Very slowly, for her, Anthea climbed down from the high dog-cart, aiding Small Porges to earth, and with his hand clasped tight in hers, and with lips set firm, she turned and entered the hall.
"Then I will go to the 'King's Head,'" said Bellew.
So I got up,--ridiculously early,--but, bless you, she was before me!"
"I rose this morning--very early, Mr. Bellew,--Oh! very early!" said Miss Priscilla, following Adam's laden figure with watchful eyes, "couldn't possibly sleep, you see.
"And I think," said Bellew, "Yes, I think I'll take a walk.
But Small Porges had seen, and stood aghast, and Miss Priscilla had seen, and now hurried forward with a quick tap, tap of her stick.
Then, while her face was yet hidden there, she whispered:
"The Sergeant!" said Miss Priscilla, "let me see,--it is now a quarter to six, it should take you about fifteen minutes to the village, that will make it exactly six o'clock.
"Oh dear yes!--had been up--hours!
And, each time the clamouring voices rose, she shivered, and every blow of the cruel hammer seemed to fall upon her quivering heart.
Seldom indeed had the old hall despite its many years, seen such a running to and fro, heard such a patter of flying feet, such merry voices, such gay, and heart-felt laughter.
"But!" nodded Bellew, "yes, I understand."
"Ah!" nodded Bellew thoughtfully, "I wonder!"
Thus, she was unwontedly deaf and unresponsive to Small Porges, who presently fell into a profound gloom, in consequence; and thus, she held in the eager mare who therefore, shied, and fidgeted, and tossed her head indignantly.
"Threw you a kiss, Mr. Bellew,--I had to,--the side-board you know,--on her knees--you understand?"
such great, big tears,--and so very quiet!
"Lord!" exclaimed Adam again, balanced now upon a ladder, and pausing to wipe his brow with one hand and with a picture swinging in the other, "Lord! what ever will Miss Anthea say, Mr. Belloo sir!"
The awakener of England could have captivated hearts by glowing pictures of a great and glorious future.
This was the first time they had come together since the afternoon of revelation, and there was a moment of constraint during which Silas tugged at his streaked beard and looked with mournful wistfulness at his son.
I didn't tell you.
He saw her proud lips curl.
Each had made his way from the slum, each had been guided by an inner light--was Silas Finn's fantastic belief less of an ignis fatuus than his own?--each had sought to get away from a past, each was a child of Ishmael, each, in his own way, had lived romantically.
It's the party and the country.
Wilson opened his eyes.
"It's all that's damnable.
Then the candidate braced himself and said: "The bare facts are true. But I have lived stainlessly in the fear of God and in the service of humanity for thirty years.
"I quite agree with you," said the Colonel.
And to crown all, came the intolerable conviction, in the formation of which Wilson's triumphant words had not been necessary, that if he won the election it would be due to this public dishonouring of his own father.
"Very well."
"Besides," said Miss Winwood, "let us hope it won't affect votes.
It was Paul's turn to start forward.
The servant who woke him brought a newspaper to the bedside.
"Something to interest you, sir."
Is that all you have against me?"
Once on coming out of his headquarters he met Silas, who was walking up the street with two or three of his committee-men.
"That's all," said the man.
It's loathsome." He shuddered.
"It was the merest of suggestions, Mr. Savelli.
A little while later they drove off with him to his committee room in the motor car gay with his colours.
Towards the end of Silas Finn's speech, at his last great meeting, a man, sitting in the body of the hall near the platform, got up and interrupted him.
But he could not eat.
"That's it.
The shame of the prison struck him as it had struck the old man.
It's a foul thing to bring such an accusation up against a man who has lived a spotless life for thirty years.
"Tell him from me not to do it.
It's all damned hypocrisy.
"I don't blame you, my boy," said Colonel Winwood.
The chairman then put a vote of confidence in the candidate, which was carried by acclamation, and the meeting broke up.
How is my father?"
They shook hands again, and Paul drove off in the motor car that had been placed at his disposal during the election, and Silas continued his sober walk with his committee-men up the muddy street.
"I would give anything for it not to have happened," he said.
He saw him bowed down under the blow, and he clenched his hands in a torture of anger and indignation.
You must forgive me."
He came into the room radiant.
"My dear Wilson," said he, "if you or anybody else thinks I'm a man to talk through his hat, I'll retire at once.
"I'll have no capital made out of it whatsoever.
'The spoiled minion of the Almighty's ante-chamber.' It'll become historical."
As a matter of fact he's rather crazy on the subject.
He was very near him.
That's a devilish good catch-phrase," he added, starting forward in the joy of his newborn epigram: "Devilish good.
He tore the photograph from its frame and threw it into the fire and watched it burn.
I don't care a damn about myself.
In the midst of these fine thoughts it occurred to him that he had hidden the prison episode in his father's career from the Winwoods as well as from the Princess.
Their faces were grave.
A lingering memory of grammar school days flashed on him when he told his wife later of the conversation, and he likened Paul to a wrathful Apollo.
They nearly raised the roof off last night.
For myself, personally, the whole thing can go to blazes.
Not a tuppenny damn.
It was he who, in a way, had cast her off.
They understood.
So, all through the wintry days of the campaign, Silas Finn carried his fiery cross through the constituency, winning frenzied adherents, while Paul found it hard to rally the faithful round the drooping standard of St. George.
The agent watched the workings of his candidate's dark clear-cut face. He was very proud of his candidate, and found it difficult to realize that there were presumably sane people who would not vote for him on sight.
"There's nothing to be done, except to find out who put up the man to make the announcement."
But--you'll pardon my mentioning it--you began this discussion by asking me whether the Almighty had common sense."
"Yes.
"It's Paul speaking," he replied.
But hope reigned among his official supporters, whereas depression began to descend over Paul's brilliant host.
Heaven knows we don't want to descend to personalities, and your retirement would be an unqualifiable disaster.
"It wasn't with Mr. Finn's cognizance.
He had far sterner things to do than shriek his heart out over a woman in an alien star.
Paul turned on him angrily.
"I?
"I do my best," said Paul coldly, but the reproach cut deep.
"If it does," said Paul, "it will be associated with the immediate retirement of the Conservative candidate."
You had no right to tell us."
By George! you can get him in the neck if you like."
"He's greatly upset," came the voice.
Does either of you think that I--?"
"No. Don't you?"
He walked about the room in despair, and at last halted before the mantelpiece on which still stood the photograph of the Princess in its silver frame.
"Hickney Heath Election.
You can score tremendously.
You can't understand.
He had been chosen for his youth, his joyousness, his magnetism, his radiant promise of great things to come.
He spoke so simply and with such sorrowful dignity.
I don't think it would be a bad move to make a special reference to it.
He was both stricken with shame and moved to the depths by immense pity.
On the other hand, Silas Finn, with his enthusiasms, and his aspect of an inspired prophet, made alarming progress.
"That is true, my son," said Silas.
In five minutes he reached Savareen's front gate.
Good night!" And so saying, Savareen continued his course homeward at a brisk trot.
Savareen had called in at Stollivers.
Of course it was all nonsense about the landlord having passed him on the road without seeing or hearing anything of him.
The old man expressed his entire concurrence in Savareen's estimate of Shuttleworth's conduct.
I had some words with that conceited puppy, Shuttleworth, at the bank. He's altogether too big for his place, and I can tell you he'll have the handling of no more money of mine." And then, for about the twentieth time within the last few hours, he recounted the particulars of his interview with the bank clerk.
It was Lapierre's business to find him and take him home. Accordingly the landlord of the Royal Oak turned his horse's head and cantered back up the road till he reached the front of Stolliver's place.
No more I shouldn't like to carry such a pot o' money home in the night time, even if nobody knew as I had it on me.
Lapierre, as he drew rein, saw the three figures on the fence, but could not in the darkness, distinguish one from, another.
Strange, though, that he had said nothing to old Jonathan about his intention to call there.
In another moment the horseman drew up before him, but only to exchange a word of greeting, as the gate was thrown wide open, and there was nothing to bar his progress.
There's never any housebreaking hereabouts."
He had ridden off as though intent upon getting home without delay, and hiding his money away in a safe place for the night.
Been a warm day."
The two had not encountered each other.
No, of course he had not got home.
But this time he was out in his conjecture.
Lapierre cross examined her, and found that her report of the interview exactly corresponded with what he had already heard from old Jonathan.
"Yes.
You've had a long day of it in town.
"Here?
Lapierre was astounded.
She had neither seen nor heard anything of him, and was by this time very uneasy.
"Mister who?"
And so it will.
A short trot brought him again to the toll-house.
Yes, one other thing might be done.
But what other explanation did the circumstances admit of?
"Well," he remarked, with exasperating coolness, "I guess you must 'a' passed him on the road.
At any rate, there was nothing for Lapierre to do but ride back to Savareen's house and see if he had arrived there.
The only outlet from the road within four times that distance was the gateway leading into Stolliver's house.
Therefore, one of them had deviated from the road.
Had he sunk into the bowels of the earth, or gone up, black mare and all, in a balloon?
It was Savareen on his black mare.
Scarcely had he done so ere he heard the clatter of horse's hoofs moving rapidly towards the gate from the northward.
The gatekeeper was still sitting smoking at the door.
The old man watched him as he sped away up the road, but could not keep him in view more than half a minute or so, as by this time the light of day had wholly departed.
"Yes, Mr. Savareen--a lovely night.
Did you find the money all right, as you expected?"
"Saw him!
Where, then, was Savareen?
Hain't seen him."
"O, the money was there, right enough, and I've got it in my pocket.
"But all the same," he continued, "I shouldn't like to keep such a sum as four hundred pound about me, even for a single night.
He had never had any business or social relations of any kind with Stolliver, and in fact the two had merely a nodding acquaintance.
I am Mister Lapierre."
My eyesight's getting dimmer every day, I think.
However, there was no use raising difficult problems, which could doubt less be solved by a moment's explanation. It was absolutely certain that Savareen was at Stolliver's because he could not possibly have avoided meeting Lapierre if he had not called there.
"How long!
"Savareen."
But the space of time which had elapsed was too brief to admit of the latter's having ridden more than a hundred yards or thereabouts.
He explained the state of affairs to his interlocuter, who received the communication with his wonted stolidity, and proceeded to light his pipe, as much as to say that the affair was none of his funeral.
What's the matter now, I wonder?"
Mrs. Savareen was waiting there, on the look-out for her husband.
So Count Frontenac's head was once more turned southward.
"O, good evening, Mr. Lapierre; I didn't know you till you spoke.
Bound for town?"
When?"
We hain't been out here more'n a minute or two. Nobody hain't passed since then."
"Why, not two minutes ago.
"Why," said he to himself, "this must be Savareen coming back again.
The facts, however, seemed to be wholly against him, as he bade the old couple a despondent good-night and put Count Frontenac to his mettle.
Mrs. Perry's answer was decisive, and at the same time conclusive as to the facts.
"I have to pay the gate-money into the bank on the first of every month," he remarked, "and that young feller always acts as if he felt too uppish to touch it.
I reckon his wife'll be apt to give him fits for being so late."
"Well, Jonathan, a nice evening," remarked the young farmer.
The explanation, consequently, was simple enough.
We can imagine that during this period the water that flowed off through the great Mississippi must have been of enormous volume as compared to the present time.
When this great body of water was released it was to the northward.
It is supposed, however, that this lake is entirely the product of glacial action, as there is no evidence of an old river bed in its bottom; besides, it is much shallower than the other lakes.
There is abundant proof of this in the successive moraines and also in the formation of successive terraces. Some of these terraces could have been formed from other causes.
The fact that in some places successive terraces are found does not disprove the theory, because it is more than likely that when the ice receded it did so in successive stages, remaining at different positions for a considerable length of time.
These lakes, however, are comparatively insignificant as compared with the great inland seas like Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, that undoubtedly owe their origin largely to the ice age.
Another glacier plowed down through Lake Michigan, widening it out to its present dimensions, while the glacial drift was deposited at what is now the head of the lake, filling up the old outlet and thus making a great dam.
When these ice mountains melted away depressions were left which in some cases have resulted in lakes, and in others simply dry kettle holes.
There may have existed something of a lake in preglacial times, through which the river ran, but it undoubtedly owes its present width to the grinding action of the irresistible icebergs and the piling up of debris on the shores.
The same action that formed Lake Erie filled up the old river bed running through the province of Ontario, so that when the ice receded Lake Erie became the new channel for the old river.
Dr. Wright--as we have before stated--has estimated that there are a million square miles of country that has been covered to an average depth of fifty feet with glacial drift.
These smaller inland lakes, so many of which are seen in northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and Minnesota, are due almost entirely to the great deposits of glacial drift that have been transported with the ice.
This process has been hinted at in a former chapter, but we give it here as one of the kinds of lakes formed during the glacial period.
The question naturally arises, Where did all the dirt come from to fill up these great river beds and change the whole topography of the northern half of the continent?
Of course such a lake could not be permanent, because, when the ice melted away, it again opened the channel and allowed the water to flow off.
All of the region about Winnipeg, in the Red River country, covering great areas of hundreds of miles in extent, is a level plain only lacking the coloring to give to one passing through it the effect of a great unruffled sea.
The same process filled up the Valley of the Mohawk to more than 100 feet in depth and also raised the Valley of the Hudson.
The river at that point passed between two of these hills.
Those found in the "kettle holes" of the terminal or medial moraines, and those that are formed by the deposition of the glacial drift, as, for instance, Devil's Lake, and those that are caused by ice forming dams across the valley of a river that lasted only during the ice age.
In order, however, that we may understand more fully the formation of these greater lakes it will be necessary for us to go back and examine the conditions that seem to have existed before the glacial period.
GLACIAL AND PREGLACIAL LAKES AND RIVERS.
Wherever these "kettle holes" are found large bodies of ice have become anchored, while the ice behind it has carried the drift until it is covered over and piled up at the sides.
Even the imagination, that wonderful architect, with all its tendencies to exaggeration, palls in its attempt to give expression in measured quantities to the mighty power exerted by the great glacier or combination of glaciers that existed in comparatively recent times.
Terraces were formed running up the Ohio and its tributaries corresponding to the level that the water must have risen to if the valley were filled up with ice.
Glacial lakes may be divided into three classes.
At the same time it built great dams across the outlets which raised the surface of the water to a much higher level and caused them to form new outlets, thus changing the whole face of the country over which the ice drifted.
When the ice flowed down it surrounded these hills, yet did not sweep over their tops, but left great piles of glacial drift, both at the points where the river channel entered the hills and where it emerges from them.
All of the lake bottoms of this great chain, with the exception of Lake Erie, are now below sea-level.
Before the glacial period the Wisconsin River made a detour some miles west of its present channel through the high hills in the region of Baraboo.
In preglacial times the watershed of the Mississippi and of the great rivers east of the Alleghany Mountains, the Susquehanna and Hudson, extended probably farther north than it does to-day.
Dr. Wright estimates that there is not less than 1,000,000 square miles of territory in North America covered with glacial debris to an average depth of 50 feet.
It is a fact well known that continents have periods of elevation and depression.
There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of lakes that have been formed in one way or another through the power of glacial action.
Therefore a deep basin was left, which is kept filled by the watershed furnished by the surrounding hills.
Of the carrying power of these great glaciers we will speak more fully in a future chapter.
In a similar way Lake Erie was formed.
They are found everywhere that glacial action has prevailed.
CHAPTER XXVII.
The ice did not stand with an even thickness over the surface of the glaciated area, but at some points it moved down in great lobes, which marked the lines of greatest pressure as well as the greatest accumulation.
The great lakes, that were enlarged during the glacial period and in some cases wholly created--by the scooping out and damming up of the waterways and by piling glacial drift around their shores--have had some of their outlets raised to a higher level, and others have been created anew.
There is evidence that the whole bed of the river was from 100 to 150 feet deeper than it is at present.
This fact need not occasion any uneasiness on the part of those who are living to-day or for millions of years to come.
They match as perfectly as the grain of a block of wood when sawn asunder--showing that these coal beds were formed at an age long before the water cut this sinuous groove.
For many years the writer lived upon one of the rivers tributary to the Ohio and often made trips by steamboat up and down the Ohio River. Traveling along this river a close observer will be struck by the exactness of the stratifications in the rock and in the coal beds to be seen on each side of the river.
There is no such thing as rest in nature.
These lands are exceedingly productive, owing to the great depth and richness of the soil.
The valley of the Ohio River will probably average a mile in width at its upper level and, deep as it is to-day, it was much deeper in preglacial times.
All the rivers that are tributary to the Ohio, such as the Monongahela, the Alleghany, the Muskingum, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Kentucky, the Wabash, the Miami, the Licking, the Scioto, the Big Sandy, the Kanawha, the Hocking, and the Great Beaver, besides numerous smaller streams, have their own valleys that have been worn away by the same process, and to a greater depth than they now appear to be.
There is abundant evidence that the earth sinks in some places and rises in others.
It seems to be a fundamental law of all life and growth, as well as of all decay, that there shall be a constant change.
The problem of building a world and then tearing it to pieces is a very complicated one.
Does this law apply to mind and soul?
Do we die?
Then there are big horses that draw the big wagons, and on the corner there is a big taproom where the thirsty are served with big glasses.
Each day the same bright British damsel conducted me through, and told her tale, but it was always with animation, and a certain sweet satisfaction in her mission and starched apron that was very charming.
Yes, yes, I must be truthful--it is a big brewery, and there are four big bulldogs in the courtway; and there are big vats, and big workmen in big aprons.
But England's Budget has never been ballasted with a single pound to help preserve inviolate the memory of her one son to whom the world uncovers.
Then why a monument to Shakespeare?
But there is no park, and no monument, and no white-haired old poet to give you welcome--only a brewery.
The inscription over Shakespeare's grave is an offer of reward if you do, and a threat of punishment if you don't, all in choice doggerel.
At least, this is what I thought he said.
He was born in England; he never was out of England; his ashes rest in England.
We have seen that, although Napoleon, the defeated, has a more gorgeous tomb than Wellington, who defeated him, yet there is consolation in the thought that although England has no monument to Shakespeare he now has the freedom of Elysium; while the present address of the British worthies who have battened and fattened on poor humanity's thirst for strong drink, since Samuel Johnson was executor of Thrale's estate, is unknown.
The rare richness and lavish beauty of the Wellington mausoleum are only surpassed by a certain tomb in France.
His name is honored in every school or college of earth where books are prized.
In fact, a "cabby" just outside of New Place offered to take me to the Whirlpool and the Canada side for a dollar.
Why a monument to Shakespeare?
What is as indestructible as these: "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," "Julius Caesar," "Coriolanus"?
What architect has the skill to build a tower so high as the name of Shakespeare?
But I rather guess I know why his grave was not marked with his name.
Drayton before Shakespeare's time called Warwick "the heart of England," and the heart of England it is today--rich, luxuriant, slow.
Philanthropists have won all by giving money, but who save Quiney has reaped immortality by asking for it!
There is a Macbeth livery-stable, a Falstaff bakery, and all the shops and stores keep Othello this and Hamlet that.
The young ladies who perform this office are clever women with pleasant voices and big, starched, white aprons.
He was a play-actor, and the church people would have been outraged at the thought of burying a "strolling player" in that sacred chancel.
What edifice can equal thought?
There is no scholar in any clime who is not his debtor.
Add anything if you can to mind!
As an exploiter, the Corsican overdid the thing a bit--so the world arose and put him down; but safely dead, his shade can boast a grave so sumptuous that Englishmen in Paris refuse to look upon it.
The first glimpse we get of Stratford is the spire of Holy Trinity; then comes the tower of the new Memorial Theater, which, by the way, is exactly like the city hall at Dead Horse, Colorado.
They lift themselves out of the fog and smoke and soot, and seem to struggle toward the blue.
What framework of cedar or oak will last as long as "Othello"?
I was at Stratford four days and went just four times to the old curiosity-shop.
The finest memorial in Saint Paul's is to a certain eminent Irishman, Arthur Wellesley.
But still, should not England have a fitting monument to Shakespeare?
But it is worthy of note that, although considerable doubt as to authenticity has smooched the other Shakespearian relics, yet the fact of the poet having been "struck" for a loan by Richard Quiney stands out in a solemn way as the one undisputed thing in the master's career.
What capital, were it even in London, could rumble around it as tumultuously as Macbeth's perturbed soul?
Stratford is just another village of Niagara Falls.
Victor Hugo has said something on this subject which runs about like this:
A threat from a ghost!
Down toward Stratford there are flat islands covered with sedge, long rows of weeping-willows, low hazel, hawthorn, and places where "Green Grow the Rushes, O." Then, if the farmer leaves a spot untilled, the dogrose pre-empts the place and showers its petals on the vagrant winds.
As the tourist approaches the city of London for the first time, there are four monuments that probably will attract his attention.
Her land is spiked with glistening monuments to greatness gone.
And each of these workmen is allowed to drink six quarts of beer each day, without charge, which proves that kindliness is not dead.
We have this on the authority of a solid Englishman, who says: "The virtues essential and peculiar to the exalted station of British Worthy debar the unfortunate possessor from entering Paradise.
What bronze can equal the bronze of "Hamlet"?
Shakespeare has no need of a pyramid; he has his work.
I answer, not for the glory of Shakespeare, but for the honor of England!
Whether he was accommodated we can not say; and if he was, did he pay it back, is a question that has caused much hot debate.
The founder of this brewery became rich; and if my statistical friend is right, the owners of these mighty vats have defeated mankind with "great slaughter."
Malachite and alabaster are of no avail; jasper, serpentine, basalt, porphyry, granite: stones from Paros and marble from Carrara--they are all a waste of pains: genius can do without them.
Of course, it is barely possible that I was daydreaming, but I think the facts are that it was he who dozed, and waking suddenly as I passed gave me the wrong cue.
Judith married Thomas Quiney.
On the carved marble to Lord Cornwallis I read that, "He defeated the Americans with great slaughter." And so, wherever in England I see a beautiful monument, I know that probably the inscription will tell how "he defeated" somebody.
When I visited the site of the Globe Theater and found thereon a brewery, whose shares are warranted to make the owner rich beyond the dream of avarice, I was depressed.
"Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here, Blest be the man who spares these stones, And cursed be he who moves my bones."
Further than that, in every library there are Washington Irving, Hawthorne, and William Winter's three lacrimose but charming volumes.
What monument sublimer than "Lear," sterner than "The Merchant of Venice," more dazzling than "Romeo and Juliet," more amazing than "Richard III"?
Then they hastily replaced the stones, and over the grave they placed the slab that they had brought:
And on these monuments one often gets the epitomized life of the man whose dust lies below.
What moon could shed about the pile a light more mystic than that of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"?
I saw briarwood pipes with Shakespeare's face carved on the bowl, all for one-and-six; feather fans with advice to the players printed across the folds; the "Seven Ages" on handkerchiefs; and souvenir-spoons galore, all warranted Gorham's best.
So, for the present, I will allow him to go on his own recognizance, believing that he will adduce his documents at the proper time.
The writer quoted is an honorable man, and I am sure he would not make this assertion if he did not have proof of the fact.
Under certain circumstances, if occasion demands, I might muster a sublime conceit; but considering the fact that ten thousand Americans visit Stratford every year, and all write descriptions of the place, I dare not in the face of Baedeker do it.
The only letter addressed to Shakespeare that can be found is one from the happy father of Thomas, Mr. Richard Quiney, wherein he asks for a loan of thirty pounds.
Little did Mr. Quiney think, when he wrote that letter, that he was writing for the ages.
This is the only dignity beyond their reach."
The principal sat crouched over her desk as if overawed by her visitor, who stopped his nervous pacing up and down the room as the girl appeared.
She even joined a group in a game of tennis after luncheon and it was while she was playing that little Miss Dandler came with, a message that Mary Louise was wanted in Miss Stearne's room at once.
And remember, Mary Louise, that you are to come to me for any advice and assistance you need, for I promised your grandfather that I would fill your mother's place as far as I am able to do so."
There was unbelief in the woman's eyes--unbelief and a horror of the whole disgraceful affair that somehow included Mary Louise in its scope.
Since the move was inevitable, she would be glad to go to Miss Stearne as soon as possible.
She helped Aunt Polly pack her trunk and suit case, afterwards gathering into a bundle the things she had forgotten or overlooked, all of which personal belongings Uncle Eben wheeled over to the school.
"He didn't say where he was going?"
The Federal Government's not to be trifled with.
"You don't, eh?
The girl read this look and it confused her.
He gave a bark of anger that made her smile, but as she turned away he sprang forward and seized her arm, swinging her around so that she again faced him.
Foxy old guy.
In that case I--or someone appointed by the Department--will get a chance to nab him.
He regarded her keenly, still frowning, but when he spoke again he had moderated both his tone and words.
I was at the station myself--two miles from this forsaken place--to make sure that Hathaway didn't skip while I was waiting for orders.
Tell me where to find your grandfather."
I see.
"I am the granddaughter of Colonel James Weatherby, sir."
When she entered Miss Stearne's room she was surprised to find herself confronted by the same man whom she and her grandfather had encountered in front of Cooper's Hotel the previous afternoon--the man whom she secretly held responsible for this abrupt change in her life.
"I cannot answer that question, Miss Stearne," she admitted, candidly, "but Gran'pa Jim must have had some good reason."
I suppose your family left Beverly this morning, by the early train?"
Where is Hathaway--or Weatherby--or whatever he calls himself?"
"Don't annoy me with your airs, for I'm in a hurry.
"Miss Stearne," Mary Louise said, turning to the principal, "unless you request your guest to be more respectful I shall leave the room."
She was a very clever teacher and a very incompetent business woman, so that her small school, of excellent standing and repute, proved difficult to finance.
"I do not intend to be insolent, Miss Burrows, but I have been greatly aggravated by your grandfather's unfortunate escape and in this emergency every moment is precious if I am to capture him before he gets out of America, as he has done once or twice before.
But no one could ever take the place of Gran'pa Jim.
He began to pace the room again, casting at her shrewd and uncertain glances.
If a law exists that permits you to insult a girl, there must also be a law to punish you.
That's all.
Then she bade the faithful servitors good-bye, promising to call upon them at their humble home, and walked slowly over the well-known path to Miss Stearne's establishment, where she presented herself to the principal.
"Huh!
He's the best man that ever lived, and the whole trouble is that this foolish officer has mistaken him for someone else. I heard him, with my own ears, tell the man he was mistaken."
She was kindly natured, fond of young girls and cared for her pupils with motherly instincts seldom possessed by those in similar positions.
Therefore, he is either hidden somewhere in Beverly or he has sneaked away to an adjoining town.
"If you have finished your insolent remarks," she answered with spirit, "I will go away.
It being Saturday, Miss Stearne was seated at a desk in her own private room, where she received Mary Louise and bade her sit down.
"When did he say he'd send it?"
"Sit down, Mary Louise," she said to the girl.
"It--it's--dreadful!" stammered the teacher, shrinking back with a moan.
Don't you realize what you're up against?" he demanded.
"I do not know."
Therefore, whether you dislike to or not, you must tell me where to find your grandfather."
"And you say they are gone?" cried Mary Louise in surprise, as she came down to breakfast the next morning and found the table laid for one and old Eben waiting to serve her.
"No."
"I am sure I shall be quite contented here.
I've been searching for James J. Hathaway for nine years, and so has every man in the service. Last night I stumbled upon him by accident, and on inquiring found he has been living quietly in this little jumping-off place.
"I seem to be in the power of a brute.
"They have gone," replied Mary Louise, non-committally.
Knew I would question you and wouldn't take chances.
I shall see a lawyer and try to have you properly punished for this absolute insolence."
"That he was going away and would arrange with Miss Stearne for me to board at the school."
"Yes; and your trunk has already been placed in it.
She reflected upon this seemingly unnecessary secrecy as she ate her breakfast.
Where is he?"
She mumbled an excuse and fled to her room to indulge in a good cry.
Keep the secret.
Therefore her girls usually found as much fault as other boarding school girls are prone to do, and with somewhat more reason.
"It's all the same; Hathaway or Weatherby, the scoundrel can't disguise his personality.
She did not reply.
Seemed to think of everything.
On the other hand, no one could question the principal's erudition or her skill in imparting her knowledge to others.
I wired the Department for instructions and an hour ago received orders to arrest him, but found my bird had flown.
"I'm a federal officer," he asserted with egotistic pride, "a member of the Government's Secret Service Department.
In character Miss Stearne was temperamental enough to have been a genius.
"Great Caesar, girl!
No nonsense, girl!
"I understand, Uncle Eben."
They asked numerous questions as they helped her to unpack and settle her room, but accepted her conservative answers without comment.
Miss Stearne was a woman fifty years of age, tall and lean, with a deeply lined face and a tendency to nervousness that was increasing with her years.
It is your duty, as a loyal subject of the United States, to assist an officer of the law by every means in your power, especially when he is engaged in running down a criminal.
"This is an astonishing change in your life, is it not?
"I don't believe you.
If nothing gets out, Hathaway may think the coast is clear and it's safe for him to come back.
"The stag!
"Don't you touch that deer," said I--my voice was so husky I could hardly speak--"don't you see it's surrendered?
In a second I clapped spurs into my tricycle and was off.
He turned sharp to the right, dashed up the hill, cleared a hedge and was gone.
"Confound my mother!" yelled the man.
It was trembling all over and fairly tired to death.
The man's eyes looked as if they would burst out of his head.
Your mother--"
And for fear he would make for the hedge and jump over it, not minding me, I jerked out my handkerchief and shook it at him.
In an instant I was free.
The stag!" I cried.
He had been to Chedcombe, and was coming back.
"Let go of me," I cried, "we shall lose the stag.
Not that she wanted to be a teacher!
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions, of Panama, had gone to New York.
He had never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.
Part I
They liked New York.
"She suggested it, but we are going up independent."
While she trudged home--a pleasant, inconspicuous, fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field daisy--a cataract of protest poured through her.
Una was facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word "feminist" meant.
"But can we afford to?...
She pounced on it.
"Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to go and scold you," Una agonized.
Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect.
Her mouth was as kind as her spirited eyes, but it drooped.
Of course she would teach!
"Mumsie!" she cried, "we're going to New York!
He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.
There was no place to which she could flee.
Is it the letter from Emma Sessions?
This she knew scientifically.
He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania.
"Very well, Plato.
But you mustn't say a word about it, Plato, or you won't get the dollar, and I'll not ask the teacher to let you go home with her again."
You shall have a dollar, and I'll ask her to let you go home with her the next day.
She might feign sickness,--indeed, it would scarcely be feigning, for she felt far from well; she had never, since her illness, quite recovered her former vigor--but the inconvenience to others would be the same, and her self-sacrifice would have had, at its very first trial, a lame and impotent conclusion.
She had as yet no fear of personal violence from Wain; but, under the circumstances, his attentions were an insult.
Your teacher, I imagine, merely wants some one to see her safely home. Don't you think, if you should go part of the way, that I might take your place for the rest, while you did my errand?"
If he could have understood how she loathed the sight of his narrow eyes, with their puffy lids, his thick, tobacco-stained lips, his doubtful teeth, and his unwieldy person, Wain, a monument of conceit that he was, might have shrunk, even in his own estimation, to something like his real proportions.
She must not meet him--at any cost she must avoid him.
The knowledge of Tryon's presence in the vicinity had been almost as much as Rena could bear.
Wherein lay the great superiority of his position, if he was denied the right to speak to the one person in the world whom he most cared to address?
He felt some dim realization of the tyranny of caste, when he found it not merely pressing upon an inferior people who had no right to expect anything better, but barring his own way to something that he desired.
"You may go with me to-morrow, Plato," answered the teacher.
In a week her school would be over, and then she would get Elder Johnson, or some one else than Wain, to take her back to Patesville.
He meant her no harm--but he must see her.
True, she might abandon her school and go at once; but her work would be incomplete, she would have violated her contract, she would lose her salary for the month, explanations would be necessary, and would not be forthcoming.
Relying upon his own powers, and upon a woman's weakness and aversion to scandal, from which not even the purest may always escape unscathed, and convinced by her former silence that he had nothing serious to fear, Wain made it a point to be present at every public place where she might be.
To it must be added the consciousness that he, too, was pursuing her, to what end she could not tell.
He assumed, in conversation with her which she could not avoid, and stated to others, that she had left his house because of a previous promise to divide the time of her stay between Elder Johnson's house and his own. He volunteered to teach a class in the Sunday-school which Rena conducted at the colored Methodist church, and when she remained to service, occupied a seat conspicuously near her own.
The rest he would leave to Fate, which seemed reluctant to disentangle threads which it had woven so closely.
He could not marry the other girl, of course, but they must meet again.
Plato scratched his head disconsolately, but suddenly a bright thought struck him.
He was conscious of a certain relief at the thought that he had not asked Blanche Leary to be his wife.
On the one hand, Jeff Wain's infatuation had rapidly increased, in view of her speedy departure.
As soon as you are gone, I'll come out and tell the teacher that I've sent you away on an errand, and will myself take your place.
I shouldn't say anything to the teacher about it at all; but when you and she get here, drop behind and run along this path until you meet me,--I'll be waiting a few yards down the road,--and then run to town as fast as your legs will carry you.
This path leads to the main road, and will take you to town very quickly.
Fortunate teacher!
From Mrs. Tryon's remark about Wain's wife Amanda, and from things Rena had since learned, she had every reason to believe that this wife was living, and that Wain must be aware of the fact.
I think we can arrange it so that you can kill the two rabbits at one shot.
The honor might be postponed or, if necessary, foregone; the opportunity to earn a dollar was the chance of a lifetime and must not be allowed to slip.
If he had loved her truly, he would never have forgotten her in three short months,--three long months they had heretofore seemed to her, for in them she had lived a lifetime of experience.
In the light of this knowledge, Wain's former conduct took on a blacker significance than, upon reflection, she had charitably clothed it with after the first flush of indignation.
"Now, Plato," said Tryon, pausing here, "this would be a good spot for you to leave the teacher and for me to take your place.
Rena believed that, to defend herself from persecution at his hands, it was only necessary that she never let him find her alone. This, however, required constant watchfulness.
Rena's letter had re-inflamed his smouldering passion; only opposition was needed to fan it to a white heat.
Plato led the way by the road through the woods to a point where, amid somewhat thick underbrush, another path intersected the road they were following.
I wanted you to go to town to-morrow to take an important message for me.
He was evidently bent upon conquest, and vain enough to think he might achieve it by virtue of his personal attractions.
Happy Plato!
"A copy of verses," corrected Carolyn, with a modest catch in her breath.
"You don't like my poor girls," she said.
Mrs. Phillips accompanied him, on his way out, as far as the hall.
But--
"Possibly," Cope said, turning his back on the keyboard.
"Of course," said Cope to himself.
Cope, on his way eastward, in the early evening, passed near the trolley tracks, the Greek lunch-counter, without a thought; he was continuing his letter to "Dear Arthur":
"If you have a slight past, that only makes you the more atmospheric.
The others--either engaged elsewhere or consciously unworthy--went away after a moment or two on the front steps.
Yes, you're yourself," she went on, adding to her previous pleasure the further pleasure of recognition.
"Meanwhile, how about a drop of tea?" asked Mrs. Phillips suddenly. "Roddy"--to the sophomore--"if you will help clear that table...."
Perhaps they did not feel "encouraged." And in fact Mrs. Phillips looked back toward Cope with the effect of communicating the idea that she had enough men for to-day.
Cope gained another stage on the way to self-consciousness and self-control. Entertainment was doubtless the basic curse of this household.
Be sure you come again soon, and put in a little more work on the foreground."
That changes the forehead.
She was a quiet, sedate girl, with brown eyes and hair.
No; I'll pour, myself."
"Now, Amy, before you really stop, do play that last little thing.
A third wrote a poem and read it to us.
The youth hastened to get into action.
"Hortense did it."
The poem was over, the patroness duly celebrated.
"That's unfair," Cope protested.
The dear child," she said to Cope in a lower tone, "composed it herself and dedicated it to me."
He transferred an obligatory glance from the canvas to the expectant artist.
He was lingering in a smiling abstractedness on his fancy, when--
And further on Mrs. Phillips said:
But--
He looked back again from the painter (who also had black hair and eyes) to her work.
"You don't find them clever; you don't find them interesting."
"Bertram Cope!" a voice suddenly said, "do you do nothing--nothing?"
She slid into her place at table and got things to going.
"I think," he wrote, with his mind's finger, "that you might as well come down.
"It's a poem,--of course it's a poem.
'Come, Holy Spirit,' and all that?"
Lassen, Grieg, Rubinstein--all these were carried through rather cautiously, perhaps a little mechanically; and there was a silence.
She even conveyed to him the notion that he had made the others superfluous.
And none of the three girls made any further comment on his own performance.
Can you play your own accompaniments?"
Mrs. Phillips stepped to the front door to meet the half dozen young people who were cheerily coming up the walk.
Cope, looking at the fallen cushions with an unseeing eye, remained within the drawing-room door to compose a further paragraph for the behoof of his correspondent in Wisconsin:
"Oh, you're so sweet, so old-fashioned!" protested Mrs. Phillips, slightly rolling her eyes.
"No, you don't care for them one bit," she insisted.
"Then, sing--do.
"You're looking at my portrait!" declared Mrs. Phillips, as the poetess sank deeper into the big chair.
"It's you who don't care for me," he returned.
This brought into play a row of electric bulbs near the top edge of the frame and into full prominence the dark plumpness of the subject.
"Well, listen, anyway," said Medora.
"Meaning, then, that I am not to raise the roof nor jar the china.
"Isn't he the dear, comical chap!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, with unction, glancing upward and backward at the girls.
He met Hortense and Carolyn--with due stress laid on their respective patronymics--and he made an early acquaintance with Amy's violin.
Another set up her easel and painted a picture for us.
Hortense broke it.
"Some of the simpler ones!
"Of course she did," said Cope under his breath.
"Parnassus, yes.
I'm two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about.
A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon-shed struck up a harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began:
With dismal monotony and startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way.
Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this.
Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid's fences needed repairing, and that the adjutant-general's sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.
The Kid looked at her fondly.
When confronted by their indignant men folk with proof of the /caballero's/ deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.
The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six.
Thus he might bring down the kite and the humming-bird with one stone.
The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by.
"I knew you were braver than that small slayer of men who never smiles. How could I ever have thought I cared for him?"
"And then," said the girl, "you must bring your men here and kill him. If not, he will kill you."
It had been one of the Kid's pastimes to shoot Mexicans "to see them kick": if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him!
"But if you'll run in, /chica/, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the /caballo/, I'll be a good deal obliged."
This /hombre/ they call the Kid--Goodall is his name, ain't it?--he's been in my store once or twice.
It warps itself a thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to lure the rider into blind and impassable spine-defended "bottoms of the bag," leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass whirling in his head.
When he is that near he always comes.
The rangers protested against his going alone.
Somebody might get hurt that oughtn't to."
Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful /couleur de rose/ through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.
Last of all he said I must prove to him I am true.
As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy.
He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla.
Soon he said he must leave before daylight when it is dark and stillest.
To escape he says he will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away.
"I will send you the message by the boy Gregorio," said the girl.
Sandridge quickly explained to his men the official part of the missive.
Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar.
"It's funny," said the Kid, "how I feel.
And then he seemed to suspect that I be not true to him.
And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.
I'll be back in a quarter of an hour."
The demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the parched traveller with its lush grey greenness.
The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass- thatched hut.
No sound or movement disturbed the serenity of the dense pear thicket ten yards away.
He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her.
That sounded business-like.
As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand.
He was not a /caballero/ by instinct, and he could not understand the niceties of revenge.
The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitred between the leaves of a clump of cactus.
Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket.
He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty devotion.
And don't even think he'll get the drop on me."
A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.
The Kid turned the speckled roan's head up the ten-mile pear flat that stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio.
He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under the brush shelter, and tell him how the /chivo/ was thriving on the bottle.
His thick, black hair clung to his head like a wrinkled mat.
Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding- place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties.
A /vaquero/ at the /tienda/ said to-day he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago.
"Who wrote it?"
Soon he will be here.
Sandridge saddled his horse and rode to the Lone Wolf Crossing.
When he first talked he said he would stay three days or more.
Then he dismounted, dropped the roan's reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian.
"Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me," said he.
Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid's last visit; it was as all his other home-comings had been.
"My eyes are dim with always gazing into that devil's pincushion through which you come.
He stopped and waited in the silent depths of the pear until half an hour had passed.
"When he comes," said Tonia, "he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the /lavendera/, has a swift pony.
"How's my girl?" he asked, holding her close.
"All right," said the stranger.
He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it.
The wagon-shed was an excellent place for ambush; and the ranger got inside it safely.
One shouldn't believe everything one heard, they said.
"The girl's got him trapped.
He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the stories circulated about Mr. Kid.
The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.
The Cap wrote one or two things to me that make me want to do the trick without any help.
The roan whickered; for he had a sense of locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse; and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the end of a forty-foot stake-rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe's straw-roofed hut.
It is a terrible thing.
These were its words:
"Do you love me just the same, old girl?" asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers.
Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his humming-bird, of whom not a feather fluttered.
The old ancestor, asleep on his blanket, was awakened by the shots. Listening further, he heard a great cry from some man in mortal distress or anguish, and rose up grumbling at the disturbing ways of moderns.
"Remain with your Tonia; no one will find you here."
"What a splendid coat!" they will exclaim when they see me.
Just as the body was being placed in the ground the other woman's husband came running up, dressed, as far as anyone could see, in no clothes at all.
'You will do no such thing,' replied his wife.
'Of course, if I had had any idea how ill I really was, I should have spoken at once.'
Meanwhile the other wife was not idle.
'That is because it is so fine,' answered she; 'you do not want it to be as thick as the rough clothes you wear every day.'
Is there anything the matter?' asked he.
'And if not, why did you let yourself be buried?'
Once he even took my best bonnet, when I had gone away to my sick mother, and when I came back I found he had given it to the hen to lay her eggs in.
Indeed, I think I shall go out to work.'
'Dear me!' he replied, 'what a clever wife I have got!
The man was rather surprised at first, as he felt particularly well that evening; but the moment his wife spoke he became quite certain that he had something dreadful the matter with him, and grew quite pale.
The man was very frightened at her words, and lay absolutely still while the undertaker came and measured him for his coffin; and his wife gave orders to the gravedigger about his grave.
'That is bad enough, of course,' answered the other; 'but it is really NOTHING to what I have to endure every day from MY husband.
All that day the man lay in bed, and whenever his wife entered the room and asked him, with a shake of the head, how he felt, he always replied that he was getting worse.
'I will get some dried herbs and make you a drink, but I am very much afraid that it is too late.
The men, who worked under the same master, were quite good friends, but the wives were always quarrelling, and the subject they quarrelled most about was--which of the two had the stupidest husband.
I must go to-morrow and order your coffin.'
snap! as far as the garden.
At last she got up, and said to her husband: 'I am too tired to finish it to-night, so I shall go to bed, and to-morrow I shall only have the cutting and stitching to do.'
So, about the time that she expected her husband home from work, she got out her spinning-wheel, and sat busily turning it, taking care not even to look up from her work when the man came in.
Why did you not tell me before?'
Lie still, and keep yourself warm.'
In a little village that stood on a wide plain, where you could see the sun from the moment he rose to the moment he set, there lived two couples side by side.
Unlike most women--who think that anything that belongs to them must be better than what belongs to anyone else--each thought her husband the more foolish of the two.
After the cutting came the sewing.
'He puts on the baby's frock upside down, and, one day, I found him trying to feed her with boiling soup, and her mouth was scalded for days after. Then he picks up stones in the road and sows them instead of potatoes, and one day he wanted to go into the garden from the top window, because he declared it was a shorter way than through the door.'
That evening the coffin was sent home, and in the morning at nine o'clock the woman put him on a long flannel garment, and called to the undertaker's men to fasten down the lid and carry him to the grave, where all their friends were waiting them.
'Oh, my poor, poor husband, are you really dead?
'Just keep quite quiet, for before the sun rises you will be a dead man.'
'I thought perhaps the pain would go off in a day or two; and, besides, I did not want to make you unhappy,' answered the man, who was by this time quite sure he had been suffering tortures, and had borne them like a hero.
'Well, well, I will see what can be done,' said the wife, 'but talking is not good for you.
For some minutes he stood with his mouth open watching her, and as she still remained silent, he said at last:
Her husband could not see anything to snip at; but then he was so stupid that was not surprising!
'Oh, bad; very bad indeed,' answered he; 'I have not slept for a moment. Can you think of nothing to make me better?'
'Oh! go to bed at once,' she cried; 'you must be very ill indeed to look like that!'
At this the wives both confessed that they had each wished to prove that her husband was stupider than the other.
At last, in the evening, she burst into tears, and when he inquired what was the matter, she sobbed out:
'YOU may think that there is nothing on it,' answered she, 'but I can assure you that there is a large skein of wool, so fine that nobody can see it, which will be woven into a coat for you.'
'Why do you stare at me so?
He DID, but was ashamed to say so, and only answered: 'Well, I am sure it must be beautiful since you say so, and I shall be smarter than anyone in the whole village.
If, when I am busy, I ask him to go and feed the poultry, he is certain to give them some poisonous stuff instead of their proper food, and when I visit the yard next I find them all dead.
Then they rushed with one accord to the coffin, and lifted the lid so that the man could step out amongst them.
So the next morning she got up early, and after she had cleaned her house, and fed her chickens, and put everything in its place again, she bent over the kitchen table, and the sound of her big scissors might be heard snip!
She took care not to be noticed as she reached the ship, and directly she got on board she once more changed to her former lovely appearance and told the prince that her luggage was now all on board, and that they need wait for nothing more.
'Once I am married to the king's son I shall be better off than now. I shall take care to have all that pack of courtiers put to death, and then I shall send for all my relations to come and live here instead. I fancy the giants will enjoy themselves very much with me and my husband.'
Asmund, on his side, asked for the hand of Prince Ring's sister, which was gladly granted him, and the double wedding was celebrated with great rejoicings.
Prince Asmund dearly loved all outdoor sports and an open-air life, and from his earliest childhood he had longed to live entirely in the forest close by.
The prince was quite astonished at them and at all their contents, but still more so at the extreme beauty of Signy.
During his absence the queen fell ill, and after lingering for some time she died, to the great grief of her children.
The next time Prince Ring came to see her she gave them to him, and he paid her many compliments on her skilful work, after which he took leave of her in the most friendly manner.
If they didn't have the universities and the trained people we need I would never use them."
Dis was on its own.
He was a good man, but I think he went at this problem the wrong way.
"Apparently there were large-scale mining operations carried on there once; the world is rich enough in minerals and mining them is very simple.
"Going to do what!" Lea gasped.
"Perhaps from the abstract scientific point of view.
I'm an exobiologist, with a supplementary degree in anthropology.
Nonviolence is essential to these people--they have vitality without needing destruction.
They want to light the fuse and drop these bombs on Nyjord, the next planet.
"My faith in our recruiters is restored," he said.
The Nyjorders are all that counts here.
While essentially a peaceful and happy people, the Nyjorders were justifiably annoyed at this and convinced the tramp's captain to give them some more information. It's all here.
Not guiding so much as protecting them from any blows that might destroy this growing idea.
It's delicious.
"Better eat something.
The Disans are out to commit racial suicide.
Don't call me; I'll call you when I want breakfast."
Build up the strength.
Earth is a reservoir of tired genes.
"Save them--they'd all be radiated and dead!" Brion's voice rose in anger.
Like Newton and the falling apple, Levy and the hysteresis in the warp field.
That is what we must stop."
"No more bickering.
Don't bulge your eyes and look moronic. As a last resort I'll drop the bombs myself rather than let the Nyjorders do it.
Everything has a beginning.
"He almost did--just after the picture was taken.
From a plaited belt were suspended a number of odd devices made of hand-beaten metal, drilled stone and looped leather.
"Dis has some spacers as well as the cobalt bombs--though these aren't the real threat.
Particularly since I plan to drop some H-bombs on Dis myself--if we can't turn off the war."
"I don't believe it!"
That might save them."
We must either find out what makes these people tick--or we are going to have to stand by and watch the whole lot blown up!"
"They are paying our Cultural Relationships Foundation a good sum to try and prevent this war.
They have tried every kind of compromise but none of them works.
If you can keep notes perhaps you might write a book about it some time.
I don't see how his kind can be any real threat to another planet."
"Don't be smug.
"Not the Disans.
Wipe out this fascinating genetic pool?
The population was small, educated, intelligent.
But water came only from expensive extraction processes and I imagine most of the food came from offworld.
I want to save the Nyjorders.
Not that I intend to stop looking for the bombs or the jump-space generator either. We are going to try anything that will avert this planetary murder."
Nothing said or done can convince them differently.
"The top of her head is below my chin."
Now get below and study your Disan and read the reports.
They couldn't do it mechanically, but by the time the last machine collapsed, enough people were adjusted to the environment to keep the race going.
Why?
I don't know the exact details, but the reports are very enthusiastic about symbiotic relationships.
"He looks as if he wanted to kill the photographer," she said.
You can survive there just by pulling fruit off a tree.
What looked like a piece of green vine was hooked over one shoulder.
"Wonderful!" Lea exclaimed.
But we've fallen down on the job.
If we can find out why these people are so hell-bent on suicide we might be able to change the reasons.
What happened to the people there is a tribute to the adaptation possibilities of homo sapiens. Individuals died, usually in enormous pain, but the race lived. Changed a good deal, but still human.
But they will drop the bombs in order to assure their own survival."
Not without good reason, though.
But I'm not interested.
Bare, horny feet.
They demand unconditional surrender, or else.
But if they are forced to blow up Dis for their own survival--against every one of their basic tenets--their philosophy won't endure.
"When is that deadline?" Lea asked.
"Destroy them?
So are the people.
"That's the norm.
But I doubt if she will like the way we operate.
"Why did you lie to her about the Foundation?"
"Their descendants are still there, completely adapted to the environment.
"You heard me correctly.
A bulky, ragged length of cloth around the waist was the only garment.
I think it is a cultural one, not a physical one."
They have a planet blessed by the laws of chance.
"Run it through again with the power turned up," Lea said, frowning. "All I hear is static."
If she joins up, there'll be time enough to tell her.
"What am I supposed to do?" Lea asked, flipping the pages of the report.
"You can count on me for complete cooperation.
Our foundation has had six people killed--including my late predecessor in charge of the project.
Physically they'll live on, as just one more dog-eat-dog planet with an A-bomb for any of the competition who drop behind."
Weak backs, vermiform appendixes, bad eyes.
"In ten more days.
He pulled his gun out, and as he did he wondered what Ulv's answer might be.
And beyond that to life of all kinds.
Even if all life on the surface of the planet was dead, this would have no effect on the magter. They would go ahead as planned, without emotion or imagination enough to alter their set course.
A life form that cooperates and aids other life forms.
"Exactly so," Professor Krafft said.
"Not only you, but the magter in this cave.
We came in quietly and took them by surprise. Made a clean sweep--killed the ones we couldn't capture."
"You've seen the armies, then?" he said.
Corn cakes, vegetables, and two kinds of meat were cooking over the coals and a great pot of coffee boiled and bubbled.
Meanwhile Dick had dressed with more rapidity than ever before in his life, fully alive to the great dangers that threatened.
Dick surmised that this bed would be assigned to him.
It was fought near a little place called Mill Spring, and resulted in a complete victory for the Northern forces under General Thomas."
A man, elderly, but dark and strong, with the high cheek bones of an Indian stood in the door, the light of a fire blazing in the fireplace on the opposite side of the wall throwing him in relief.
Besides, he's a nice boy an' he spoke nice all the time to pap an' me."
"That was what I heard.
You've got a right to be hungry, an' you mustn't forget Ma's cookin' either.
What do you say to that, Kerins?"
Lots of us in the mountain feel that way.
For a time the two masculine human beings ate and drank with so much vigor that there was no time for talk. Leffingwell was the first to break silence.
For a few moments he did not know what to do.
While they were still talking he put his saddle bags over his arm, opened the shutter its full width, and dropped quietly to the ground outside, remembering to take the precaution of closing the shutter behind him, lest the sudden inrush of cold startle the Leffingwells and their friends.
The Yanks whipped the Johnnies in a big battle at Mill Spring.
But her words did not seem to make any impression upon the others, except her husband, who protested again that it would be enough to take the horse.
"I'm grateful," said Dick falling into the spirit of it, "but what pains me, Mrs. Leffingwell, is the fact that Mr. Leffingwell will only nibble at your food.
He had spoken hastily and incautiously and he realized it at once.
Dick, although he had been unwilling to say so, was in fact very sleepy. The heavy supper and the heat of the room pulled so hard on his eyelids that he could scarcely keep them up.
Despite the languor produced by food and heat a certain nervous apprehension had been at work in the boy's mind, and it followed him into the unknown regions of sleep.
Now he understood about those empty stalls.
"A hoss like that would be knowed," protested the woman.
In a great fireplace ten feet wide big logs roared and crackled.
He had seldom beheld a more cheerful scene.
The smoke came from a strong double cabin, standing about four hundred yards from the road, and the sight of the heavy log walls made Dick all the more anxious to get inside them.
He might take his pistols and fight, but he could not fight them all with success.
The mountaineers liked hot rooms all the time, but he did not.
The flames gave sufficient illumination.
All we ask of people is to let us be.
A third signal of alarm was promptly registered on his brain.
Then that pleasant flood of cold air gave him the key.
His body was dead for a time and his mind too, but this nervous power worked on, almost independently of him.
Leffingwell's wife, a powerful woman, as large as her husband, and with a pleasant face, gave Dick a large hand and a friendly grasp.
We're just plain mountain people, but you're welcome to the best we have.
The man's keen gaze was turned upon him again.
He murmured his excuses and said he believed he would like to retire.
Dick saw stalls for four horses, but no horses.
"Supper's ready, Seth.
"It'll make the fire an' supper all the better.
His hair was coal black, long and coarse, increasing his resemblance to an Indian.
No candles had been lighted, but they were not needed.
"Shut up, Seth," said Mrs. Leffingwell, genially, "you'll make the young stranger think you're plum' foolish, which won't be wide of the mark either."
"I'd like to have that hoss of his," said the elder Leffingwell.
He sat up in his bed and became conscious of a hot and aching head.
The man sharply bade the dogs be silent and they retreated behind the house, their tails drooping.
"'Light, stranger, an' we'll put up your horse.
An old-fashioned squirrel rifle lay on hooks projecting from the wall, but there was no other sign of a weapon.
It will be good news to some, an' bad news to others.
As Dick stared his eyes grew more used to the half dusk and he saw clearly.
He rode on briskly for a full hour, anxiously watching both sides of the road for a cabin or cabin smoke.
The room in which they sat was large, apparently used for all purposes, kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, and bedroom.
I don't understand it, as he looks like a healthy man."
Dick, used to primitive customs, said good-night and retired within his alcove, taking his saddle bags.
This window contained no glass, but was closed with a broad shutter.
Mandy will have supper ready by the time we finish the job."
"Don't you be bashful about sayin' so," exclaimed Leffingwell heartily, "'cause I don't think I could keep up more'n a half hour longer."
He was only a harmless lad, and while these were dark days, a crime committed now might yet be punished.
I noticed him at once, when Mason come ridin' up.
They were sitting fully clothed before the fireplace, and three other persons were with them.
He heard the hum of voices and sat up again.
Stealin' hosses is bad enough, but if that boy has got the big dispatches you say he has, an' he's missin', don't you think that sojers will come after him?
As for the dispatches it wasn't wise for them to fool with such things.
"You've rid far, stranger," said the man, who Dick knew at once had a keen eye and a keen brain, "an' you're young, too."
By that time night had come fully, though fortunately it was clear but very cold.
But his fear was greatest lest he might lose the precious dispatches that he bore.
It had noted the sound of voices nearby, and awakened him, as if he had been shaken by a rough hand.
"I never heard of one that did."
The boy undressed and got into bed, placing his saddle bags on the foot of it, and the pistol that he carried in his belt under his head.
Hello!" called Dick loudly.
With all the armies gatherin' in the south an' west of the state it stands to reason that them dispatches mean a lot.
"Mebbe you're a sojer yourself?"
"All right," answered Wilson.
"You...."
Joe handed them candles and they followed him upstairs.
I'm done up totin' this gun."
"Down the Ringgold road about five miles."
They found nothing of importance.
"We're arrested for burning bridges.
In the dim light which came from the room in which they had been sitting downstairs he could see a wagon drawn up beside the house; there was a stack of farm tools against the wagon, and the ground was strewn with objects he could not make out. Just a mixture of things which had been thrown there for want of a better place, he thought.
"You and Shadrack take it," said Tom to Wilson.
Look at my hands." He spread his hands out upon the table, palms up.
The procession started again.
"You're a Yank yourself," answered Tom hotly.
"Stole a train!"
"What do you want us to do?
"I can tell a Yank one mile off," boasted Alf.
As they went down the main street, men and boys tagged along beside them, plying the guards with questions.
"That man acts a little crazy," said Tom.
What was it we burned, Tom?"
And tell Alf that I don't want to be disturbed."
Instantly there was commotion.
Picked 'em up a piece down the road."
"That so?" asked Wilson.
They can do whatever they think best."
The guards waved them aside, and answered, "Don't know if it's them or not.
The folks at home'll laugh when they hear that we were held up just as soon as we got in the South."
"Then what do you want?"
"Now, Alf, keep quiet," said the Judge.
But such hopes were shattered a few minutes later when two horsemen pulled up before them.
They yelled when they saw the three prisoners.
"Two of you can sleep there."
Tomorrow you can go to Chattanooga and enlist."
"Hey?
What bridges?"
Were they to be set free again, or would they be taken to Chattanooga?
It was easy.
But perhaps Joe might leave for a moment.
"Now, boys," said the Judge as they pushed back from the table, "I want you to stay here in this hotel for the night.
"I'd take 'em over tonight," answered Alf.
The men are upstairs going to bed, and Joe is in the hall on guard.
"Good work, Alf!" said one of the men.
"The Yanks have taken a bite out of the railroad between there and Corinth."
"Is that what this man Alf was so excited about!"
A murmur arose from the men.
This fellow held us up and arrested us in the name of the law for something-or-other.
"Why not wait until we get back to Judson?
"I know there aren't," answered Tom.
Then he put his ear down and listened.
They nodded and said good-night.
Hello there, Yanks."
"He gets one idea and he can't think of anything else.
They had been torn and bruised by the logs he had yanked from the tender.
"Now, Alf," said the Judge, "you go on out to the kitchen and get something to eat.
"No use talkin' like that, Alf," said the man addressed as Judge.
What did he think?
He could hear the boots pounding up the stairs.
Now let's search these men, and see what we can find."
"What's that?"
Go on, now." He pushed Alf gently toward the door.
"Judge, we're famished," said Wilson.
Whose bridges?
Leaning far out, he reached around and pushed up the window of the next room, climbed in and closed his own window.
It was a good yarn, and they enlarged upon it.
"That's what they did!" He gave them a wild and inaccurate account of what Andrews' raiders had done.
Tom, Shadrack, and Wilson held their arms up, while the men dumped the contents of their pockets on a table.
"Now, Alf," said the Judge, "I'm taking care of this.
What's the matter with you?"
Tom left the hole, and continued his investigations.
"I'm after you."
"All right," replied Alf.
Everyone commenced talking.
The Judge shook his head, laughing.
"If you're after our money you won't get much," Tom replied.
"Don't believe 'em," said Alf.
They shook hands.
"What!" yelled the Judge.
Three revolvers, handkerchiefs, Confederate money....
"Search 'em," demanded Alf.
"Well, this way we won't take the wrong road again," said Tom.
To jump on that mess of farm tools below him would probably mean a broken leg.
"From Fleming County, Kentucky," replied Wilson.
Then he put his ear against the thin wall and listened.
"Good-night."
"Where did you come across the river?" demanded the Judge.
Wilson broke in: "We tried to tell this wild man with his rifle that we were going to enlist in the army.
"Some Yanks stole a train on the Georgia State Railroad yesterday and burned a bridge."
The conversation, carried along upon those lines, lasted for half an hour, with the Judge dominating.
He leaned over and peered in, but he could see nothing.
That's what I want."
They stopped at a two-story frame building labeled "Hotel." One of the guards went in, then motioned to the others to bring the prisoners. Presently they found themselves in a big room, lighted by two lamps which hung from the ceiling.
"I'll call for you at nine o'clock sharp, and we'll go across to the house at once.
Get back to the window!"
"Have you heard anything of that girl Rhoda?" he asked.
Denzil did look, and uttered a second cry more startling than the first.
"He has reason to know it," replied Lucian bitterly.
So Diana played the part of a Good Samaritan towards her stepmother, and helped her to bear the evil of being thrust into prison.
"No.
She'll come in by the back, down the cellarway, as Wrent expects her to come.
They saw her pass and repass the square of glass, when, unexpectedly, she paused, rigid and silent.
Lucian could not forbear pointing out the discrepancy between Diana's past sentiments and her present actions; but Miss Vrain was quite ready with an excuse.
Then, maybe, you won't require an answer."
"Jabez Clyne!--Jabez Clyne!" he exclaimed in astonishment.
"So do I, and I hope to make him confess as much to-night.
"In that case, he'll have to pay for his whistle, sir."
"It's an awful situation," and she moved stealthily across the floor to the window.
Link had a dark-lantern, which he used carefully, so that no light could be seen from the window looking on to the square; and with his three companions he went into the back room which had formerly been used by Clear as a sleeping apartment.
"I am glad you have come."
For such reason, Mr. Denzil, I wish to overhear what he says to Mrs. Clear.
"Mrs. Clear, also?" questioned Lucian, wishing to be enlightened on all points.
"He will, if he knows I've betrayed him."
I wish to secure this fellow as quietly as possible.
"Yes," replied Link in the same tone.
"You and I and a couple of policemen will go down to that house in Geneva Square--by the front, sir, by the front."
According to instructions, a policeman had waited behind the closed door, and at the one sharp knock of his superior opened it at once so that the two slipped in as speedily as possible.
"Because you won't pay me the money," said Mrs. Clear boldly.
In the first place, he did not wish to see Lydia, for whom he had no great love; and in the second, he was afraid to speak to Diana as to the possibility of her father being Wrent.
"It is very probable I won't," replied Lucian drily.
Wig and beard and venerable looks were all gone, and he recognised at once who Wrent was.
The fact of Vrain's being often away from Mrs. Clear's house in Bayswater, and Wrent absent in the same way from Mrs. Bensusan's house in Jersey Street, appeared strange, and argued a connection between the two.
In a whisper he conversed with Link.
"I hope I'll get through with this all right," said Mrs. Clear nervously.
"In herself I like Lydia as little as ever I did, but I think we have suspected her wrongly in being connected with this conspiracy, so I wish to help her if possible.
Peacock gave it to me this morning.
"We've got him this time, Mr. Denzil," he said, with enthusiasm.
The position of this she knew well, because it was opposite the window.
Good-day, Mr. Denzil.
Diana had never liked Lydia; when the American girl became her stepmother she hated her, and not only said as much but showed in her every action that she believed what she said.
"Lost! lost!" he muttered.
"All the better," said Link, casting a look round the deserted square; "all the better for our little game.
"She went back to her gypsy kinsfolk, you know.
Here the two policemen stationed themselves in one corner; and Link, with Lucian, waited near the door leading into the sitting-room, so as to be ready for Mrs. Clear.
"Can you trust Mrs. Clear?"
"That will be all right," said Link in a low, impatient voice.
His having been in the asylum of Jorce is a strong card for him to play.
Diana, as a good daughter should, held firmly to the idea that her father could not behave in such a way; and as a sensible woman, she did not think that a man with so few of his senses about him could have acted the dual part with which he was credited without, in some measure, betraying himself.
"I am glad, also," said the voice harshly, "as I wish to know why you propose to betray me."
"Yes.
Lucian put on his hat at once, and the two walked out into the dark night, for dark it was, with no moon, few stars, and a great many clouds.
And after all," added Diana, "she is my father's wife," as if that fact extenuated all.
"You mean in connection with the conspiracy?"
"Well, he won't show much fight if he is Mr. Vrain."
It is as well to give him enough rope to hang himself with."
"We have traced her to Berkshire," whispered Link.
However, he could do little against his four adversaries, and, worn out with the struggle, collapsed suddenly on to the dusty floor with a motion of despair.
"Well, sir," said Link, putting his head on one side, and looking at Lucian with an odd expression, "you had better wait till the man's caught before I answer that question.
Punctual to the minute, Link, in a state of subdued excitement, came to Lucian's rooms.
Supposing, after all, this mysterious Wrent proves to be this unhappy man?"
"Are you there?" whispered Mrs. Clear nervously.
We'll keep back in the darkness.
"I am doubtful of that, also," admitted Lucian, "but you know Vrain is now out of the asylum, and, for the time being, has been left to his own devices.
I have the key in my pocket now.
Out of the darkness started a pale face with white hair and long white beard.
But only Link knew where the woman was to be found, and kept that information to himself--especially from Denzil.
She entered the sitting-room cautiously, moving slowly in the darkness, and stole up to the door behind which Lucian and the detective were hiding.
Here's the door open--in with you, Mr. Denzil!"
"I hope nothing is wrong with poppa," wept Lydia.
Later on she was admitted to bail, and Diana took her to the hotel in Kensington, there to wait for the arrival of Mr. Clyne.
However, if the old man does get into trouble he can plead insanity.
"I hope not," answered Link curtly, "but there's no knowing.
However closely one may study the fair sex, there is no understanding them in the least.
All was still and silent as the grave when they began their dreary watch.
Lucian was somewhat of this opinion himself, yet he had an uneasy feeling that Vrain might prove to be the culprit.
Miss Vrain declared that her stepmother was innocent, visited her in prison, and engaged a lawyer to defend her.
Hush!"
Again, the resemblance between them was most extraordinary and unaccountable.
Lucian uttered a cry.
The punishment would be no more than she deserved.
"I'll kill you first!" cried the man with a snarl, and made a dash at the woman.
The next moment the four watchers were in the room wrestling with Wrent.
They paused at the door, and then moved towards the window where Mrs. Clear was standing.
"All lost!"
The minutes passed slowly in the darkness, and there was an unbroken silence save for the breathing of the watchers and the restless movements of Mrs. Clear near the window.
"Who said anything about the daytime, Mr. Denzil?
While she was thus waiting for her father, and Link in every way was seeking evidence against her, Mrs. Clear received an answer to her message.
"Yes, and perhaps with the murder of Clear; but we don't know if the so-called Wrent committed the crime.
"Myself, Mr. Denzil, and two policemen.
There was a faint gaslight outside, and the watchers could see her figure and profile black against the slight illumination.
"He won't, Mrs. Clear.
I did not, and Wrent knows too much to risk himself at a time that he can be seen from the windows of the adjacent houses.
We'll give him rope enough to hang himself, sir, and then pounce out and nab him."
She knows on which side her bread is buttered.
He'll see you!"
Already he had sent his two policemen over to the house, into which he had instructed them to enter in the quietest and most unostentatious manner, and now came to escort the barrister across.
CHAP.
So Frithiof became an exile, and a wanderer on the face of the earth. For many years he lived the life of a pirate or viking, exacting tribute from other ships or sacking them if they would not pay tribute; for this occupation in the days of Frithiof was considered wholly respectable.
He comforted his crew, and then climbed the mast to keep a sharp lookout for danger.
Viking had sailed the sea in a dragon ship, meeting with many adventures, and Thorsten, Frithiof's father, had likewise sailed abroad, capturing many priceless treasures and making a great name for himself.
It was followed again and again by the brave men of the North.
But Frithiof was too fine and loyal to listen to such suggestions.
But the kings had heard of how Frithiof had spoken to Ingeborg in the temple, and although they feared Sigurd they would not grant the request.
Speaking to his good ship, which could both hear and obey, he bade it run down the whale and the witches.
One spring day Sigurd and Frithiof had ridden away on a hunting expedition, and the old king being tired from the chase lay down on the ground to rest, feigning sleep.
"Who are you who comes to us thus?" asked Sigurd Ring.
Frithiof had no weapons, but with a turn of his wrist he threw his opponent.
At this Sigurd Ring invited the old man to remove his mantle and take a seat near him.
But many of the crew were worn out by the battle with the elements and had to be carried ashore by Frithiof and Bjoern when they reached the Orkney Islands.
"You are Frithiof the Bold," he said, "and from the first I knew you. Be patient now a little longer and you shall have Ingeborg, for my end is near."
Frithiof was now one of the wealthiest and most envied of land-owners. His treasures were richer by far than those of any king.
The hero, still angry, refused; but he hastened at once to Ingeborg.
His request was not granted and Helge dismissed him contemptuously.
Horror-stricken, Frithiof tried to stop the blaze, and when he could not, hurried away to his ship.
Soon after this the king died, leaving his kingdom to his two sons and giving instructions that his funeral mound should be erected in sight of that of his dear friend Thorsten, so that their spirits might not be separated even in death.
Then the two brothers were glad to send a messenger after Frithiof, asking his aid.
The people, admiring his bravery, wanted to make Frithiof king, but he would not listen to their pleadings.
But Frithiof was often homesick, and longed to enter a harbor, and lead again a life of peace.
Great was his grief when the time came for her to sail away.
Soon after his departure another suitor, the aged King Ring of Norway sought the hand of Ingeborg in marriage, and being refused, collected an army and prepared to make war on Helge and Halfdan.
Soon after this Sigurd died, commending his wife to the young hero's loving care.
Landing, he wrapped himself in an old cloak and approached the court.
Instead he lifted the little son of Sigurd upon his shield.
At last he decided to visit the court of Sigurd Ring and find out whether Ingeborg was really happy.
From there he spied a huge whale, upon which the two witches were seated, delighted at the tempest they had stirred up.
"Behold your king," he cried, "and until he is grown to manhood I will stand beside him."
The warning, however, came too late, for Frithiof already loved the fair maiden, and vowed that he would have her for his bride at any cost.
He found her in tears at the shrine of Balder, and although it was considered a sin for a man and woman to exchange words in the sacred temple, he spoke to her, again making known his love.
Frithiof was a Norwegian hero, grandson of Viking, who was the largest and strongest man of his time.
His ship was prepared and soon he touched the shore near the temple of the god Balder.
"But I do.
She walked slowly through the churchyard, feeling much pleased to see that the curate had just left the vestry door, and that in a few moments their paths must converge.
I led her through more terrible future possibilities in the second lesson than would be required for a three-volume novel.
Personally I should have preferred to linger in Mrs. O'Reilly's pleasant drawing-room, for, as I said before, my victim interested me, and I wanted to observe him more closely and hear what he talked about.
I promptly seized my opportunity, and in a moment her whole mind was full of me.
"Yes, every one thinks they are either engaged or on the brink of it.
The curate looked startled.
And they walked home together.
Had she not caused me to grow stronger and larger by every word she uttered? And had not the conversation revealed to me Mr. Blackthorn's one vulnerable part?
"I suppose we can do nothing.
I want just to speak to him about the choir treat."
"Why, she has found out that he is really a Nihilist--just think of a Nihilist going about loose like this, and playing tennis at the rectory and all the good houses!
As we passed down the High Street the bells rang out loud and clear, and they made me feel the same slight sense of discomfort that I had felt when I looked at Zaluski; however, I went on, and soon entered the church.
The way in which mortals practise pious frauds on themselves is really delightful!
It seems officious rather, and meddlesome."
Mr. Blackthorne had only been ordained three or four years, and was a little younger, and much less experienced in the ways of the world, than Sigismund Zaluski.
"You won't tell any one that I told you?"
Out of it flew the prettiest little female canary that ever was seen.
So he presented the gypsy to the lords and ladies of the Court, explaining to them the terrible misfortune which had befallen his beautiful bride.
And this is why to-day the country boys always throw stones at a titmouse.
'What!' he cried.
Give her this brush.
'Your Excellency, it is the bird,' replied the Scullion, and he placed it in his hand.
Then he remembered that the night before he had disobeyed the orders of the old man.
On the evening of the wedding-day all the larders, cellars, cupboards and tables of the people, whether rich or poor, were loaded as if by enchantment with bread, wine, beer, cakes and tarts, roast larks, and even geese, so that Tubby could not complain any more that his son had married Famine.
The servants mounted their horses and rode after the Prince; but as they did not know which road he had taken, they went all ways except the right one, and instead of bringing him back they returned themselves when it grew dark, with their horses worn out and covered with dust.
'No,' replied the gate; 'it is a hundred years since you left me to rust, and he has oiled me.
'To my father's castle,' he said.
So they used to call her Titty.
Out of it flew another canary, and she too began to cry:
'Poor girl,' he thought to himself.
The bird appeared a third time, and said: 'Good-morning, my fine Cook.'
While it was browning at the fire, Tubby inquired for his goose a second time.
But all the same, as he adored his son, he gave the gypsy his hand and led her to the great hall, where the bridal feast was spread.
So saying, she broke her pitcher and went home.
'I met a wolf,' she told the bricklayer, 'and I broke the bucket across his nose.'
And the Scullion fell fast asleep, and when the Master Cook came back he found the goose as black as the chimney.
'It is not her fault, after all, that she has grown so ugly, it is mine.
'My dear Zizi,' said Tubby's son, 'we cannot present ourselves before my father like two common people who have come back from a walk.
THE ENCHANTED CANARY
Come, some of you, and hide yourselves, and if it comes again, catch it and wring its neck.'
Since that time there has always been plenty to eat in that country, and since that time, too, you see in the midst of the fair-haired blue-eyed women of Flanders a few beautiful girls, whose eyes are black and whose skins are the colour of gold.
VIII
Alas! out of it flew a little canary, just like the others, who cried:
Wait for me here, and in an hour I will return with carriages and horses fit for a princess.'
I am certainly much too pretty to be their water carrier!'
Titty was often sent by the bricklayer to fetch water from the fountain, and as she was very proud and lazy the gypsy disliked this very much.
But if you only have the courage to marry me I shall get back my beauty.' And she began to cry bitterly.
'I am dying of thirst; give me something to drink.'
It was night, the sky was sparkling with stars, and the earth was covered with a heavy dew.
'Good-morning, lovely Golden Bird,' replied the Cook, as if nothing had happened, and at the moment that the Canary was beginning, 'I pray Heaven that it may send,' a scullion who was hidden outside rushed out and shut the shutters.
In less than an hour he arrived at the wall, which was very high indeed.
She answered that she was called the Princess Zizi; she was about sixteen years old, and for ten years of that time the witch had kept her shut up in an orange, in the shape of a canary.
'I pray Heaven,' went on the Canary, 'that it will send you to sleep, and that the goose may burn, so that there may be none left for Titty.'
An old man with a white beard was sitting on the doorstep enjoying the fresh air.
He ate four meals a day, slept twelve hours out of the twenty-four, and the only thing he ever did was to shoot at small birds with his bow and arrow.
The bricklayer asked her no more questions, but took down a broom and gave her such a beating that her pride was humbled a little.
Perhaps his terrible thirst was a trick of the cunning witch, and suppose, even though he opened the orange on the banks of the stream, that he did not find in it the princess that he sought?
He carried her home to his wife, and the good woman was sorry for her, and brought her up with her own sons.
Meanwhile the Prince was coming as fast as his horse could carry him. He was so impatient that he was always full fifty yards in front of the lords and ladies sent by Tubby to bring back Zizi.
'What are you doing there, you lovely creature?' she said to Zizi.
The only thing you want, in order to become as fat as a pig, is a wife that can bring you broad, rich lands.
Follow the wall till you come to a heavy iron gate.
When he came to himself, he had a pleasant feeling of freshness all about him.
Then he went on to the well, drew up the cord, which was half rotten, and stretched it out in the sun.
And he took her in his arms, crying: 'My darling Zizi, how happy I am to see you once more!'
'That was neatly done,' said the gypsy.
'Give me something to drink, I am dying of thirst,' said the golden bird.
'Baker, baker, take him by his feet, and throw him into the oven!'
It would not go down into the well, and the gypsy had to try again and again.
Then gather three oranges, and get back to the gate as fast as you can.
When they were about four stone-throws from the gates they dismounted in the forest, by the edge of a fountain.
That is the wife I want, and I am going to look for her.'
In the middle of the park is a castle, where dwells a horrible witch who allows no living being to enter the doors.
May I ask where you are going?'
'I am waiting for my lover,' Zizi replied; and then, with a simplicity quite natural in a girl who so lately had been a canary, she told all her story.
The gypsy returned to the fountain, and addressing once more the image of Zizi, she said:
In a fury he woke the Scullion, who in order to save himself from blame told the whole story.
He hardly had courage to open his last orange.
'Don't be long,' replied Zizi, and she watched him go with wistful eyes.
But the gourd was empty; in the excitement of his joy he had forgotten to fill it.
He has given me as much as I want.
He jumped lightly on his horse, and was a mile from home before Tubby had ceased laughing.
Still he was silent, and Zizi drew herself up proudly.
Behind the castle is the orange grove.
Bells were pealing, chimes ringing, and the people filling the streets and standing at their doors to watch the procession go by, and they could hardly believe their eyes as they saw what a strange bride their Prince had chosen.
'Ah me!' said Titty, 'so you don't know your poor Zizi?
He travelled in this way for many weeks, passing by villages, towns, mountains, valleys, and plains, but always pushing south, where every day the sun seemed hotter and more brilliant.
Titty turned round and perceived the mistake she had made; and she felt so angry that she made up her mind to be revenged at once.
'No,' replied the rope; 'you have left me for many years past to fall to pieces with the damp.
'Well, then, my charming Zizi,' said the young Prince, who was longing to marry her, 'let us ride away quickly so as to escape from the wicked witch.'
Now, the only trouble that Lord Tubby had was about his son, whom he loved very much, although they were not in the least alike, for the young Prince was as thin as a cuckoo.
'Madness in youth is true wisdom.
'No, father, nothing of the sort.
Already he felt that death was near him, when his eyes fell on the bag where the oranges peeped out.
I dreamed that in the land of the sun there was a wood full of orange trees, and that in one of the oranges I should find a beautiful princess who is to be my wife.
'Good-morning, lovely Golden Bird,' replied the Scullion, whom the Master Cook had forgotten in his excitement to warn.
We must enter the castle with more ceremony.
'No,' replied the dog; 'though I have served you long, you never gave me any bread.
When the narrative was ended, Pir-napishtim spoke sympathetically and said: "Who among the gods will restore thee to health, O Gilgamesh?
Ishtar's heart was filled with wrath when she heard the words which Gilgamesh had spoken, and she prevailed upon her father Anu to create a fierce bull which she sent against the lord of Erech.
My wings were burnt, but those of my brother were not....
So ends the story of Gilgamesh in the form which survives to us.
The following quotations are from two separate versions:--
Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart....
The spirits are usually wild beasts or birds--the "fates" of immemorial folk belief--and they may either carry the hero on their backs, instruct him from time to time, or come to his aid when called upon.
He was named Ea-bani, which signifies "Ea is my creator".
We despaired of returning with our lives....
Ultimately the people prayed to the goddess Aruru to create a liberator.
Gift thy strength unto me.
And she gave us food and drink of various kinds.
Passing many other wonderful trees, he came to a shoreland, and he knew that he was drawing nigh to the Sea of Death.
Other heroes kill treasure-protecting dragons of various kinds.
Stricken with terror, Gilgamesh uttered a curse.
The tunnel may run from a castle to the seashore, from a cave on one side of a hill to a cave on the other, or from a seashore cave to a distant island.
Among the myths attached to his memory in the Ethiopic "history" is one which explains how "he knew and comprehended the length and breadth of the earth", and how he obtained knowledge regarding the seas and mountains he would have to cross.
Prepare thou for him the magic food, and place it near his head."
When Bhima reaches the lotus lake he fights with demons.
On this or another occasion Etana desired to ascend to highest heaven. He asked the Eagle to assist him, and the bird assented, saying: "Be glad, my friend.
When Gilgamesh beheld them he swooned with terror.
Gilgamesh, however, resolved to encounter any peril, for he was no longer afraid, and he was allowed to go forward.
Sleep envelops him like to a black storm cloud."
The sun was enlivening me pretty well though I was dead." Afterwards the eagle bathed in a healing well, and as it splashed in the water, drops fell on the hero and he came to life.
This is the philosophy of the Egyptian "Lay of the Harper".
Nor could any man tell when his hour would come.
Certain folk tales, and the folk beliefs on which they were based, seem to have been of hoary antiquity before the close of the Late Stone Age.
Ishtar cursed Gilgamesh.
They wasted o'er a scorching flame The marrow of his bones, But the miller used him worst of all, For he crushed him between two stones.
The hero proceeds: "Sleep came upon herself (the eagle) and she slept.
"In the Country of Darkness" Alexander fed and tamed great birds which were larger than eagles.
The goddess Ishtar appeared as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" before Gilgamesh and addressed him tenderly, saying: "Come, O Gilgamesh, and be my consort.
Nimrod then built a tower so as to ascend to heaven "to see Abraham's god", and make war against Him, but the tower was overthrown.
His wife was about to become a mother, and was accordingly in need of magical aid.
Then Pir-napishtim addressed his wife, saying: "His sufferings make me sad.
This fortunate man kept his secret.
Apparently he assumed the colour of supernatural beings.
It is also called "the steed-necked incarnation of Vishnu", the "Preserver" of the Hindu trinity who rode on its back.
Gilgamesh sat in the ship, and sleep enveloped him like to a black storm cloud.
Then the temptress pleaded with him to go with her to Erech, where Anu and Ishtar had their temples, and the mighty Gilgamesh lived in his palace.
The way is full of peril.
What hast thou done unto thy servant?"
Gilgamesh spake unto Pir-napishtim and said: "I was suddenly overcome by sleep....
Nin-Girsu, the god of Lagash, who was identified with Tammuz, was depicted as a lion-headed eagle.
When Gilgamesh revived, he realized that the monsters regarded him with eyes of sympathy.
Gilgamesh dedicated the horns of the bull to Shamash and returned with his friend to Erech, where they were received with great rejoicings.
On the seashore Moses fell asleep, and the fish, which had been roasted, leapt out of the basket into the sea.
The hero died, but, curiously enough, remained conscious of what was happening.
Pir-napishtim had perceived the vessel crossing the Sea of Death and marvelled greatly.
They filled up a darksome pit With water to the brim, They heaved in John Barleycorn-- There let him sink or swim.
The Well of Life is found in Fingalian legends.
Jastrow contrasts the Babylonian poem with the following quotation from Ecclesiastes:--
Gilgamesh then asked Pir-napishtim how it chanced that he was still alive.
He was apparently of great antiquity, so that it is impossible to identify him with any forerunner of Sargon of Akkad, or Alexander the Great.
He, however, persisted in his design.
This great bird, which resembles the Etana eagle, expressed the opinion that Sita was in Lanka (Ceylon), whither she must have been carried by Ravana.
The sound of the pipes is heard for a time; then the music ceases suddenly, and shortly afterwards the dog returns without a hair upon its body.
The quest of the plant, flower, or fruit of life is referred to in many folk tales.
The god of destiny measured out the span of life: he fixed the day of death, but never revealed his secrets.
He asked her how he could reach Pir-napishtim, his ancestor, saying he was prepared to cross the Sea of Death: if he could not cross it he would die of grief.
Then some disaster happens, for further onwards the broken tablet narrates that the Eagle is falling.
Give me a draught from thy palms, O Finn, Son of my king for my succour, For my life and my dwelling.
Ea-bani then defied her and threatened to deal with her as he had dealt with the bull, with the result that he was cursed by the goddess also.
The blemished skin fell from him, and he was made whole.
Erech was thus freed from the oppression of its fierce enemy.
In one fragmentary legend which was preserved in the tablet-library of Ashur-banipal, the Assyrian monarch, Etana obtained the assistance of the Eagle to go in quest of the Plant of Birth.
In Indian mythology Garuda, the eagle giant, which destroyed serpents like the Babylonian Etana eagle, issued from its egg like a flame of fire; its eyes flashed the lightning and its voice was the thunder.
Thereafter Gilgamesh prepared to return to his own land.
Birds were not only fates, from whose movements in flight omens were drawn, but also spirits of fertility.
Mimic Adonis gardens were cultivated by women.
Then he cried upon the moon god, who took pity upon him, and under divine protection the hero pressed onward.
Give him power to pass through the mighty door by which he entered."
In another part of the narrative Alexander and his army arrive at a place of darkness "where the blackness is not like the darkness of night, but is like unto the mists and clouds which descend at the break of day".
The hymn referred to lauds Garuda as "the bird of life, the presiding spirit of the animate and inanimate universe ... destroyer of all, creator of all".
I saw their starved lips in the gloam, With horrid warning gaped wide; And I awoke and found me here On the cold hill's side.
The floating legends with which they were associated were utilized and developed by the priests, when engaged in the process of systematizing and symbolizing religious beliefs, with purpose to unfold the secrets of creation and the Otherworld.
So Gilgamesh and Arad Ea went on their way together, nor paused until they came to a well of pure water.
He travelled to distant places, and was informed regarding the flood and the primitive race which the gods destroyed; he also obtained the plant of life, which his enemy, the earth-lion, in the form of a serpent or well demon, afterwards carried away.
When it was fixed on, the boat was launched and the voyage began.
But in the hour of triumph a shadow falls.
As Vishnu, the Indian god, rides on the back of Garuda, so does Etana ride on the back of the Babylonian Eagle.
He may set forth in search of a fair lady who has been taken captive, or to obtain a magic herb or stone to relieve a sufferer, to cure diseases, and to prolong life.
Here the text becomes fragmentary.
Said Gilgamesh: "Let me sit down and weep, but tell me regarding the land of spirits."
Open the door.
"Yes," said her mother, "Santa Claus won't forget you, I am sure, although he has been kept pretty busy looking after the soldiers this winter."
Kitty, who loved to play quite as much as any frolicsome Kitty of to-day, had spent all her spare time in knitting a pair of thick woollen stockings, which seems a wonderful feat for a little girl only eight years old to perform!
From many homes the fathers were absent, fighting bravely for the liberty which we now enjoy, while the mothers no less valiantly struggled against hardships and discomforts in order to keep a home for their children, whom you only know as your great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, dignified gentlemen and beautiful ladies, whose painted portraits hang upon the walls in some of your homes.
"Oh, he'll come!
"What's that?" cried Harry.
"What would become of our country if we should all do that, my little man?
"Oh, I forgot.
Some of these little people never forgot the wonderful events of which they heard, and afterward related them to their children and grandchildren, which accounts for some of the interesting stories which you may still hear, if you are good children.
The gentleman--for he was a real gentleman--gasped out, 'Take care of my poor Fido; good-night,' and was gone.
Instead she sees something very like tears in her mother's eyes.
"The right side, of course," said Mrs. Tracy, which was the most sensible answer she could possibly have given.
"Which side is he on?" asked Harry.
It was a joyful hour to the good town people when the red-jackets turned their backs on them, thinking every moment that the patriot army would be after them.
There was great excitement in the town; men and women gathered together in little groups in the streets to wonder what it was all about, and neighbours came dropping into Mrs. Tracy's parlour, all day long, one after the other, to say what they thought of the firing.
What a good time we'll have!
Santa Claus, in the form of Mrs. Tracy's farmer brother, brought her a splendid turkey; but because the Hessians were uncommonly fond of turkey, it came hidden under a load of wood.
Toward morning the good people in Bordentown were suddenly aroused by firing in the distance, which became more and more distinct as the day wore on.
Here, Fido, Fido!"
Papa never stays away on Christmas," says Kitty, looking up into her mother's face for an echo to her words.
Children, have any of you ever thought of what little people like you were doing in this country more than a hundred years ago, when the cruel tide of war swept over its bosom?
Mrs. Tracy looked anxiously each day for news of the husband and father only a few miles away, yet so separated by the river and the enemy's troops that they seemed like a hundred.
Thus you see that the British, in force, were between Washington's army and Bordentown, besides which there were some British and Hessian troops in the very town.
Merry, romping children they were in those far-off times, yet their bright faces must have looked grave sometimes, when they heard the grown people talk of the great things that were happening around them.
"The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there."
Cold and tired Captain Tracy was, after a night's march in the streets and a day's fighting; but he was not too weary to smile at the dear faces around him, or to pat Kitty's head when she brought his warm stockings and would put them on the tired feet, herself.
"From the battle of Trenton," said her father.
"His poor master was shot.
The days of that cold winter of 1776 wore on; so cold it was that the sufferings of the soldiers were great, their bleeding feet often leaving marks on the pure white snow over which they marched.
Two little rosy faces lay fast asleep upon the pillow when the good old soul came dashing over the roof about one o'clock, and after filling each stocking with red apples, and leaving a cornucopia of sugar-plums for each child, he turned for a moment to look at the sleeping faces, for St. Nicholas has a tender spot in his great big heart for a soldier's children.
It was a good day's work that we did this Christmas, getting the army all across the river so quickly and quietly that we surprised the enemy, and gained a victory, with the loss of few men."
ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON
Then, remembering many other small folks waiting for him all over the land, he sprang up the chimney and was away in a trice.
Suddenly there was a sharp, quick bark outside the door.
Kitty prayed that her "dear papa might not be out in the storm, and that he might come home and wear his beautiful blue stockings"; "And eat his turkey," said Harry's sleepy voice; after which they were soon in the land of dreams.
Indeed, it seemed as if wonders would never cease that day, for while rejoicings were still loud, over the departure of the enemy, there came a knock at Mrs. Tracy's door, and while she was wondering whether she dared open it, it was pushed ajar, and a tall soldier entered.
In the evening there came a body of Hessians flying into the town, to say that General Washington had surprised the British at Trenton, early that morning, and completely routed them, which so frightened the Hessians in Bordentown that they left without the slightest ceremony.
"Pretty little Fido," said Kitty, taking the soft, curly creature in her arms; "I think it's the best present in the world, and to-morrow is to be real Christmas, because you are home, papa."
"Oh, mamma, don't you think he'll come?"
The day passed and night came, cold with a steady fall of rain and sleet.
Into the room there sprang a beautiful little King Charles spaniel, white, with tan spots, and ears of the longest, softest, and silkiest.
Christmas Eve came, but brought with it few rejoicings.
"On Christmas day in Seventy-six, Our gallant troops with bayonets fixed, To Trenton marched away."
"We'll let him come just the same, and if he brings anything for papa we can put it away for him."
Can you not see her sitting by the great chimney-place, filled with its roaring, crackling logs, in her quaint, short-waisted dress, knitting away steadily, and puckering up her rosy, dimpled face over the strange twists and turns of that old stocking?
Or, how can seven sticks of candy be divided among eight people so that each shall have one?
It was Mollie who for troubled small brothers and sisters did such sums in division as this: How can I get a ten-cent present for Emmy and a fifteen-cent one for Jimmy out of eighteen cents?
"The fact is, our horse has about given out, and the storm is so bad that we can't proceed.
Such a Christmas had never been known in the Joseph household before.
Sister Mollie was the grand repository of these; all the little Josephs came to her for advice and assistance.
"Our Santa Claus is somewhat out of pocket this year," said Mr. Joseph frankly.
They've never had anything really nice for Christmas.
Mrs. Joseph's taffy was eaten too.
The air was simply charged with secrets.
Good-bye and a merry Christmas to you all."
The dawn broke fine and clear over a vast white world.
We're in such cramped quarters here that you can't move without stepping on somebody's secret."
It speaks volumes for her sagacity and skill that she never got things mixed up or made any such terrible mistake as letting one little Joseph find out what another was going to give him.
Two snowed-up figures were standing on the porch.
How meagre and small they did look, to be sure, beside that bulgy basket with its cover suggestively tied down.
"Thought I'd better bring our Christmas flummery in," he said.
That Christmas was one to date from in that family.
"I'm glad I'm not driving over the prairie tonight," said Mr. Joseph. "It's quite a storm.
Mrs. Ralston packed this basket, and goodness knows what she put in it, but she half cleaned out my store. The eyes of the Lindsay youngsters will dance tomorrow--that is, if we ever get there."
Can you take us in for the night, Mr. Joseph?"
This way, if you please."
Mrs. Ralston untied the cover of the big basket.
Mr. Ralston put the big basket he was carrying down on a bench in the corner.
There really seemed to be everything on that table that the hearts of children could desire--three pairs of skates, a fur cap and collar, a dainty workbasket, half a dozen gleaming new books, a writing desk, a roll of stuff that looked like a new dress, a pair of fur-topped kid gloves just Mollie's size, and a china cup and saucer.
A shakedown was spread in the kitchen for the unexpected guests, and presently the Ralstons found themselves alone.
When you and Mrs. Joseph come to town we shall hope to have a chance to return it.
It's all the 'Christmassy' I could give them.
"Just what I was thinking," returned her husband, "and I was thinking of something else, too.
And as for the big box of good things, why, everybody appreciated that.
Mr. Joseph came too, and looked and whistled.
I did feel that I'd ask nothing better than to go in and buy all the lovely things I wanted, just for once, and give them to the children tomorrow morning.
Mrs. Joseph sighed over Jimmy's worn jacket which she was mending. Then she smiled.
My, Mrs. Ralston," as his wife helped her off with her things, "but you are snowed up! I'll see to putting your horse away, Mr. Ralston.
Much obliged for your kindness, Mr. Joseph.
"That's so.
"Let's just leave them here, Edward.
"Never mind, John.
The Josephs' Christmas
The Josephs were poor at any time, but this winter they were poorer than ever.
One look she gave, and then this funny little mother began to cry; but they were happy tears.
No questions were asked no matter what queer things were done.
I hope it will be fine tomorrow, for the children's sake.
"Certainly, and welcome!" exclaimed Mr. Joseph heartily, "if you don't mind a shakedown by the kitchen fire for the night.
"I expect the trail will be heavy," he said, "but I guess we'd get to Lindsay in time for dinner, anyway.
Not a scrap of it was left.
Look at all the little knick-knacks they've made for each other.
I'm glad to be able to say, too, that even in the heyday of their delight and surprise over their wonderful presents, the little Josephs did not forget to appreciate the gifts they had prepared for each other.
She took her son in her arms, and told them all his history and her misfortunes, and how she had watched over him year after year and gathered the birds to save him.
Now, if the bird-boy was the prettiest little boy in all the world, Rosabella was the prettiest little girl. Moreover, she had a sweet disposition, which is a gift even more precious than the gift of beauty.
The doom which Malefico had intended for another had overtaken him.
The King and the Queen, Rosabella and the bird-boy, rushed down the stairs and out into the sunlight.
And every year, on the boy's birthday, a great gray bird came flying over the forest from the distant ocean, circled thrice the charcoal-burners' hut, and disappeared again, crying mournfully.
So the bird-boy became the best beloved playmate of the Queen's only child, her darling Rosabella.
"If it were known that the winged child is alive," he thought, "the people would thrust me from my place, and restore him to his father's throne.
The clock marked a quarter to twelve.
Then, before anyone could prevent her, the poor Queen beat open the rotted fastening of an old casement window, sprang upon the ledge, and giving one last look of love and tenderness to her unhappy child, leaped down into the sea surging and pounding over the rocks hundreds of feet below.
When the clock stood at five minutes to twelve, there was a confused noise below, and Malefico and the judges who shared with him the guilt of the unrighteous punishment took their places on a kind of platform which overlooked the place of execution.
It was a lovely picture to see the children building toy castles on the floor of the nursery in the castle tower, the sun streaming on the black-brown hair and silver white wings of the little boy, and on the golden curls of Rosabella.
So the Queen and her baby were taken to an old and gloomy tower on a great rock overlooking the northern sea; and after they had been there a day or two, the chief jailer came to the Queen's room to take the child and kill him.
When Malefico saw the bird-boy, a look of surprise appeared on his face, for he had believed that the wonderful child was dead.
Suddenly, far, far up in the sky, she heard the weird cry of birds flying southward, and lifting her eyes, the Queen beheld bird after bird fly across the golden shield of the moon.
Besides, he will be a playmate for Rosabella."
THE BIRD BOY
A month passed, an unhappy month in which there were no tidings from the King.
Twelve years passed.
So, instead of killing the bird-boy, he carried him many leagues back into the dark forest which bordered the sea, and gave him to a family of charcoal-burners.
And sure enough, they heard the jangle of the jailer's keys at the foot of the stair.
His enemy was no other than the wicked chamberlain Malefico, who had succeeded to the kingdom of the bird-boy's father, when that Prince had died some years before. So the good King, who had been a real father to the bird-boy, put on his shining armor, kissed his dear wife and child good-bye, and rode off to the battlefield.
Crying mournfully, the bird circled the old tower thrice, and disappeared over the white-capped waters.
Thus it came to pass that, when the troops of Malefico saw their former Queen and heard her story, they acclaimed the bird-boy as their rightful king, and carried him back in triumph into his own country.
She certainly would have been dashed to pieces, had not a good spirit of the ocean taken pity on her, and changed her into a great gray bird.
Now it came to pass that before the harvest moon rose again over the land, the Queen became the mother of a little boy who was born with wings on his shoulders.
And now dawned the unhappy day.
Now that the bird-boy is in my hands, I will destroy him, and be sure of my power."
There was a pretty spring near the door of the hut, and the party came to a halt at its edge.
The morning was fresh and fair; a pleasant southwest wind was blowing.
But although she fought for her baby with all her might, the rude strength of the jailers prevailed, and the child was torn from its mother's arms.
And even if it were to come, what could it do to save us from these cruel people?"
"They will soon be coming to get us," said the King to the bird-boy.
When it was over, he sent a soldier to tell the King and the bird-boy that they were to be punished the following day.
Every year, on the bird-boy's birthday, a great gray bird would fly in from over the sea, circle the castle thrice, and disappear, crying mournfully.
Really, dear, I must have him for my page.
And a wonderful sight it was, indeed, to see the horses tossing their jeweled bridles, the hooded falcons riding on the saddlebow, clutching the leather with their curving claws, the merry young pages in their dark suits, and all the gay company in rich attire.
One midsummer day, with a great deal of merry hallooing and blowing of sweet-voiced horns, the King of the country, accompanied by his young wife, came hunting through the wood.
A great battle had been fought, the army of Rosabella's father had been completely defeated, and the troops of the wicked Malefico were hurrying toward the castle as fast as they could come.
Both the cat and the dog were awarded countless honorary decorations.
"Well, dear pupils, if you must go, you must go.
Thanks to the advice of a friendly chimney swift, it did not take him long to find one.
First, Zidoc locked the only door with a great key and then he said to Serponel,--
The dwelling was the property of the Fairy Jocapa.
"I will try to-morrow," said the cat.
I owe the Fairy Jocapa twelve months rent for this house.
So the poor old gentleman packed up his magic books, put his enchanter's wand into its silver case, and went to the country one pleasant day in search of a house.
So the white dog, who was the stronger of the two, took the purse with the twelve golden coins, and put it in a large wallet which he wore at his side, and then both the wonderful animals said good-bye.
Now, if you remember the first part of this story, you will recall that Zidoc quarreled with the old enchanter over the right spell for destroying castles.
I have forgotten exactly what the quarrel was about, but I think that it had to do with the best spell for causing castles to fall to pieces in an instant.
At any rate, Zidoc, who considered himself quite the most wonderful enchanter in Fairyland, was furious at being opposed, and told the old enchanter, very angrily, that he was not to have his classes any more and must leave the college at once.
"Very," whispered back the dog in his deeper tone.
The driver of the chariot was a tall, elderly man, wearing a wizard's cap; his face was red as with anger, an evil light gleamed in his small malicious eyes.
But hearken to my story.
Thus did the white puppy and black kitten change hands.
"There, I told him so!" said the old enchanter.
And he brought his possessions to the house.
The cat, who could see quite well in the dark, did not mind this, but the dog was not particularly pleased.
Now, one autumnal morning, when a blue haze hung over the lonely fields from which the reapers had departed, and the golden leaves were wet underfoot, the old enchanter went for a walk down the lane, and finding the day agreeable, kept on until he found himself in the woods.
Now Zidoc knew very well where the dog had concealed himself.
You know the rest.
With great respect, these attendants conducted the cat and the dog into a little ante-room, and then retired, leaving them alone.
The animals turned to look, and saw their master, the old enchanter.
A few minutes later, a very old woman, who, the animals noticed, was stone-blind, came to take them before the king.
When the darkness cleared, the hearts of the true animals fell for fear lest the sorcerer's ruse be successful; but they met the challenge readily, and instead of fleeing, stood their ground; the true dog battling with the false dog, the real cat with the false cat.
"Very little," replied the cat.
He had been worried by their long absence and had gone forth to look for them.
"Give them to me," said the old enchanter, "I will bring them up." The countryman nodded his head.
Listen, then, to my story and help me if you can.
He came to the castle gate to meet them, for Zidoc's overthrow had broken the spell which had so oddly disfigured him.
Beside the fireplace, in which a wood-fire was cheerily burning, sat a gray-haired lady, who was no other than the Fairy Jocapa, and in the centre of the room, reading a great book by the light of many candles, sat a young man, the King.
Arriving in the twilight, they were somewhat surprised to find a number of torchbearers waiting for them in the castle courtyard.
The dog's plan was to pretend to be but an everyday stray dog, and to this end, he rolled several times in a mud-puddle; the cat, too, was to appear as a stray cat, and neglected his fine black coat in order to look the part.
Calling them before him, he said to them:--
It was she who caused this enchanted chamber to appear in the heart of the foundations of my castle; and in this chamber I have hidden since that terrible hour when the spell was put upon me.
"Nothing whatever," replied the dog.
It was very quiet.
The old enchanter liked this life of quiet and study, and doubtless would have been teaching in Fairyland to this very day, had he not been so unfortunate as to quarrel with the terrible sorcerer Zidoc, who was then Lord High Chancellor of the Fairies' College.
The Lord Chancellor rules the kingdom in my stead.
Hardly had he reached a point above the dog's jaws when a voice said:--
Arriving at the crest of a little hill in the woodland, he saw below him, almost at the foot of the slope, a countryman with a white puppy and a black kitten following at his heels.
When twilight came, the dog ran out and met the cat in the castle garden.
So the old enchanter gave his arm to the Fairy Jocapa, the Prince gave his to the white dog, and the cat followed all by himself.
Only the far away klingle-klangle of a cow-bell could be heard.
So he taught the cat and the dog all the known languages, then history, arithmetic, dancing, social deportment, and a variety of the best magic and spells. The cat, as was to be expected, was particularly good on anything that had 'cat' in it; he once catalogued all the principal catastrophes; while the dog, although a good student, had a fancy for writing doggerel.
At the same moment he caused the locked door to fly open.
Stop your quarreling this instant!"
For a long time the enchanter, who loved his charges very much indeed, resisted their request; but as they continued to press him, he came at length to yield.
"And something tells me that it is time to let him feel your staff."
The room was now in dusk, save for the bulbs which made the portrait shine forth like a wayside shrine.
And it inspired Carolyn too.
There was an interval which Cope might have employed in praising the artistic aptitudes of this variously gifted household, but he found no appropriate word to say,--or at least uttered none.
"On the contrary," he rejoined, "I have spent a delightful hour." Must he go on and confess that he had developed no particular dexterity in dealing with the younger members of the opposite sex?
Her eyes were shy, and her hair was plainly dressed.
"Some of the simpler ones."
I miss you--even more than I thought I should.
"Will you sing before your tea, or after it?"
"Of course," she said.
They came on as thick as spatter. One played a few things on the violin.
But I never saw you before without your mortar-board.
And finally comes Apollo." She reached over and murmured to Mrs. Phillips: "None too skillful on the lyre, and none too strong in the lungs...."
I'll try not to."
We can easily arrange some suitable quarters..."
Yet one of them--Hortense--formed her black brows into a frown, and might have spoken resentfully, save for a look from their general patroness.
The last little thing was a kind of "meditation," written very simply and performed quite seriously and unaffectedly.
She looked up at him questioningly.
Perhaps he had really deserved his hostess' rebuke.
She tried to look rebuking, reproachful; yet some shade of expression conveyed to him a hint that her protest was by no means sincere: if he really didn't, it was no loss--it was even a possible gain.
Possibly Cope gave too great heed to his hostess' caution; but it seemed as if a voice essentially promising had slipped through some teacher's none too competent hands, or--what was quite as serious--as if some temperamental brake were operating to prevent the complete expression of the singer's nature.
Its title was read, formally, by the writer; and, quite as formally, the dedication which intervened between title and first stanza,--a dedication to "Medora Townsend Phillips."
There's the open piano.
The bishop can spare you.
"Do you know, I think I've heard you sing before."
Phaon, a poor lad of nineteen, swept some pamphlets and paper-cutters off the center-table, and we all plunged into the ocean of Oolong--the best thing we do on this island...."
"It was an afternoon in Lesbos--with Sappho and her band of appreciative maidens.
Cope spatted a little too, but kept his eye on one of the walls.
Roddy, the possible sophomore, helped a maid find places for the cups and saucers; and the three girls, still formed in a careful group about the sofa, silently waited.
She wrote a poem after hearing it."
And it gave, of course, a good chance for the arms.
He is quite prepared to wipe us all out.
He suddenly came to.
I leave it to Mr. Cope, if it isn't!"
"Nonsense," she rejoined.
The term is young, and you can enter for Spanish, or Psychology, or something. There's nothing for you up there.
He knew what he expected to find.
"Meaning....?"
"I'm ready to sing this instant,--during it, or before it."
"I sing," he said, with naif suddenness and simplicity.
And a few sophomores hung about in the background.
"It's getting almost too dark to see it," said his hostess, and suddenly pressed a button.
Medora spoke up loudly and promptly.
"I mean," proceeded Mrs. Phillips, "can you do nothing whatever to entertain?"
"Very well."
Cope went on with his letter to "Arthur":
Shall we let him?"
And we await a reply from "Dear Arthur"--the fifth and last of our little group.
"You've earned your tea," she added. "Hortense," she said over her shoulder to the dark girl behind the sofa, "will you--?
He reached the house behind the cedars, went round to the back door, and handed the envelope to Mis' Molly, who was seated on the rear piazza, propped up by pillows in a comfortable rocking-chair.
The boy took the gratuity, thanked her, and turned to go.
My young client, Green's relation, is her lover--is engaged to marry her--is in town, and is likely to meet her!"
Age had dimmed his perceptions somewhat, and it was not until he had finished the letter, and read it over again, and noted the signature at the bottom a second time, that he perceived that the writing was in a woman's hand, that the ink was comparatively fresh, and that the letter was dated only a couple of days before.
I wonder," he mused, "if he will find her out?"
I'll have Aunt Zilphy fetch you a piece of 'tater pone, if you'll hol' on a minute."
The boy kept the note in his hand, winked at his companions, who had gathered as near as their awe of the judge would permit, and started down the street.
When you come back and tell me what she says, I'll give you ten cents.
She has come to visit her sick mother.
When the party turned the corner of Front Street and were safely out of sight of Judge Straight's office, the capitalist entered the grocery store and invested his unearned increment in gingerbread.
Ten years later, the ghost of my good deed returns to haunt me, and makes me doubt whether I have wrought more evil than good.
He had nearly reached his objective point when he met upon the street a young white lady, whom he did not know, and for whom, the path being narrow at that point, he stepped out into the gutter.
Never mind."
While he still held the sheet in his hand, it dawned upon him slowly that he held also one of the links in a chain of possible tragedy which he himself, he became uncomfortably aware, had had a hand in forging.
Such people were, for the most part, merely on the ragged edge of the white world, seldom rising above the level of overseers, or slave-catchers, or sheriff's officers, who could usually be relied upon to resent the drop of black blood that tainted them, and with the zeal of the proselyte to visit their hatred of it upon the unfortunate blacks that fell into their hands.
There is certainly as much reason in my helping the girl as the boy, for being a woman, she is less able to help herself."
The general belief was that they were just as inferior as before, and had, moreover, been spoiled by a disgusting assumption of equality, driven into their thick skulls by Yankee malignity bent upon humiliating a proud though vanquished foe.
Oh, boy!"
Very few mortals can spare the spring of hope, the motive force of expectation.
Mis' Molly was still scanning the superscription of the letter.
The judge was unable to connect this letter with the transaction which formed the subject of his examination.
One curse of negro slavery was, and one part of its baleful heritage is, that it poisoned the fountains of human sympathy.
But the old man's attitude toward society was chiefly that of an observer, and the narrow stream of sentiment left in his heart chose to flow toward the weaker party in this unequal conflict,--a young woman fighting for love and opportunity against the ranked forces of society, against immemorial tradition, against pride of family and of race.
Under a system where men might sell their own children without social reprobation or loss of prestige, it was not surprising that some of them should hate their distant cousins.
The judge sighed as he contemplated another possibility.
"If he made the discovery here, the facts would probably leak out in the town.
Yes, conditions were changed, so far as the girl was concerned; there was a possible future for her under the new order of things; but white people had not changed their opinion of the negroes, except for the worse.
MY DEAREST GEORGE,--I am going away for about a week, to visit the bedside of an old friend, who is very ill, and may not live.
As soon as the judge had disappeared, Billy beckoned to his friends, who speedily overtook him.
"It may be the unwisest thing I ever did," he said to himself, turning to his desk and taking up a quill pen, "and may result in more harm than good; but I was always from childhood in sympathy with the under dog.
When Judge Straight's visitors had departed, he took up the papers which had been laid loosely on the table as they were taken out of Tryon's breast-pocket, and commenced their perusal.
She called to Aunt Zilphy, who soon came hobbling out of the kitchen with a large square of the delicacy,--a flat cake made of mashed sweet potatoes, mixed with beaten eggs, sweetened and flavored to suit the taste, and baked in a Dutch oven upon the open hearth.
She laid the letter carefully on the chimney-piece of the kitchen.
MADAM,--If you value your daughter's happiness, keep her at home for the next day or two.
On second thoughts, I shall be gone to lunch, so here's your money," he added, handing the lad the bit of soiled paper by which the United States government acknowledged its indebtedness to the bearer in the sum of ten cents.
He dipped his pen into the ink and wrote the following lines:--
This note he dried by sprinkling it with sand from a box near at hand, signed with his own name, and, with a fine courtesy, addressed to "Mrs. Molly Walden." Having first carefully sealed it in an envelope, he stepped to the open door, and spied, playing marbles on the street near by, a group of negro boys, one of whom the judge called by name.
"If he found her out, would he by any possibility marry her?"
"Who's it fur?" she asked.
"It is not likely," he answered himself.
There was a note for five hundred dollars, many years overdue, but not yet outlawed by lapse of time; a contract covering the transaction out of which the note had grown; and several letters and copies of letters modifying the terms of the contract.
Conditions were changed, but human nature was the same.
"I wonder," she murmured, "what old Judge Straight can be writin' to me about.
AN INJUDICIOUS PAYMENT
It is something that a man might do in secret, but only a hero or a fool would do openly."
Do you know where she lives--down on Front Street, in the house behind the cedars?"
Do not be alarmed about me, for I shall very likely be back by the time you are.
The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real.
Education as National and as Social.
Otherwise a democratic criterion of education can only be inconsistently applied.
What was called social life, existing institutions, were too false and corrupt to be intrusted with this work.
Hence, once more, the need of a measure for the worth of any given mode of social life.
Instead of operating on their own account they are reduced to mere servants of attaining pleasure and avoiding pain.
Travel, economic and commercial tendencies, have at present gone far to break down external barriers; to bring peoples and classes into closer and more perceptible connection with one another.
Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites, they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition. They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its internal guardians in peace.
It springs from the fact that they have identified their experience with rigid adherence to their past customs. On such a basis it is wholly logical to fear intercourse with others, for such contact might dissolve custom.
But there is a deeper explanation.
It would certainly occasion reconstruction.
Such limitation was both distorting and corrupting.
In reality its chief interest was in progress and in social progress.
Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission.
Much which has been said so far is borrowed from what Plato first consciously taught the world.
Chapter Seven: The Democratic Conception in Education
Three typical historic philosophies of education were considered from this point of view. The Platonic was found to have an ideal formally quite similar to that stated, but which was compromised in its working out by making a class rather than an individual the social unit.
But their limit is fixed by their lack of reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal.
The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy.
Gangs are marked by fraternal feeling, and narrow cliques by intense loyalty to their own codes.
Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane.
But, as we have just seen, the ideal cannot simply repeat the traits which are actually found.
The devotion of democracy to education is a familiar fact.
In seeking this measure, we have to avoid two extremes.
The Platonic Educational Philosophy.
3.
To make the general ideas set forth applicable to our own educational practice, it is, therefore, necessary to come to closer quarters with the nature of present social life.
Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them.
Intelligence is narrowed to the factors concerned with technical production and marketing of goods.
In social philosophy, the former connotation is almost always uppermost.
Two results should stand out from this brief historical survey.
5.
The qualities which accompany this unity, praiseworthy community of purpose and welfare, loyalty to public ends, mutuality of sympathy, are emphasized.
The first one to be considered is that of Plato.
The final end of life is fixed; given a state framed with this end in view, not even minor details are to be altered.
The seeming antisocial philosophy was a somewhat transparent mask for an impetus toward a wider and freer society--toward cosmopolitanism.
Each doing his own part, and never transgressing, the order and unity of the whole would be maintained.
The Democratic Ideal.
In evoking dread and hope of specific tangible reward--say comfort and ease--many other capacities are left untouched.
The real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated.
Private individuals here and there could proclaim the gospel; they could not execute the work.
Summary.
If we do not know its end, we shall be at the mercy of accident and caprice.
1.
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.
And these two traits are precisely what characterize the democratically constituted society.
We seem to be caught in a hopeless circle. However, Plato suggested a way out.
"And you, too, Warner and Pennington?"
He awoke once before dawn and remembered, but vaguely, all that had happened.
But the deep woods were silent and empty.
"Then keep close beside me.
"Boys," he said, "I apologize."
He could appreciate the feelings of the squirrel, which probably had been imprisoned in a hollow of the tree all day long, listening to this tremendous battle, and squirrels were not used to such battles.
Coils and streamers of smoke floated about among the trees, and suddenly a gray squirrel hopped out on a bough and began to chatter wildly.
"Dick," he said, "we're some distance from where we started this morning.
The boy felt stiff and sore in every bone and muscle, and, although the cannon and rifles were silent, there was still a hollow roaring in his ears.
"There have been times today when I felt brave as a lion, and lots of other times I was scared most to death. It would have helped me a lot then, if I could have opened my mouth and yelled at the top of my voice."
Regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade crossed.
Colonel Winchester walked away to a council that had been called, and Dick turned to Pennington and Warner, who were not hurt, save for slight wounds.
Colonel Winchester beckoned to him.
The deep river, although it was on their flank, seemed to flow as a barrier against the foe, and it was, in fact, a barrier more and more, as without its command the second Union army could never have come to the relief of the first.
Grant, his face an expressionless mask, presided, and said but little.
Beauregard, at dawn, would have to face twice his numbers, at least half of whom were fresh troops.
Grant, after a day in which any one of a dozen chances would have wrecked him, must have concluded that in very deed and truth he was the favorite child of Fortune.
It was a trifle that made him laugh, but everything was out of proportion now.
It was the surprise that did it.
"What is it, Dick?" asked Warner.
Dick saw Colonel Winchester going among his men, and pulling himself together he saluted his chief.
Those blinding flashes of flame no longer came from the forest before him, the shot and shell quit their horrible screaming, and the air was free from the unpleasant hiss of countless bullets.
But they fought magnificently, Dick!
Yet he was conscious that there was much movement in the forest.
"Me, too," said Pennington.
Continual reinforcements came to the North throughout the night, not a soldier came to the South.
They are saying to the Southern army: 'Look out!
There's nothing like being shoved along when you don't want to go.
"Yes, Dick, we have been beaten, and beaten badly.
He was awakened by the call of a trumpet, and, as he rose, he saw the whole regiment or rather, what was left of it, rising with him.
The last rosy glow of the sun faded, and thick darkness enveloped the vast forest, in which twenty thousand men had fallen, and in which most of them yet lay, the wounded with the dead.
Dick!
The nerves, drawn so tightly by the day's work, were not yet relaxed wholly.
The ordinary occupations were gone, and people spent most of their time trying to kill one another.
The Confederates broke up our breakfast.
He stretched himself a little and stood up.
Look out!
"All right this morning, Dick?" he said.
CHAPTER XVI.
But in a few seconds he recovered himself and looked rather ashamed.
The three men upon whom most rested were very taciturn that night, but it is likely that extraordinary thoughts were passing in the minds of every one of the three.
Dick, despite himself, laughed, but the laugh was hysterical.
It is only here that we have withstood the rush of the Southern army, and it is probable that we, too, would have gone had not night come to our help."
Dick, my boy, we'll have forty thousand new troops on the field at the next dawn, and before God we'll wipe out the disgrace of today!
Many thousands had fallen, and no new troops were coming to take their place.
The last words were high-pitched and excited.
Listen to the big guns from the boats as they speak at intervals! Why, I can understand the very words they speak!
Dick, not having slept any the night before, and having passed through a day of fierce battle, was overcome after midnight, and sank into a sleep that was mere lethargy.
They were talking of their losses.
I've been scared for myself, an' I've been scared for the regiment, an' I've been scared for the whole army, an' I've been scared on general principles, but here we are, alive an' kickin', an' we ought to feel powerful thankful for that."
"How large do you suppose the Southern army was?" asked Pennington.
The others, however, summoned their courage anew, and passed the whole night arranging their forces, cheering the men, and preparing for the morn. Their scouts and skirmishers kept watch on the Northern camp, and the Southerners believed that while they had whipped only one army the day before, they could whip two on the morrow.
We never had time to think of dinner, and now its nothing to eat."
They also talked much of the battle.
"If you were to hit me in the stomach I'd give back a hollow sound like a drum.
Dick, after a while, saw Colonel Winchester, and other officers near him.
They had to, or be crushed!
He rubbed his hands across his eyes and cleared them of the smoke.
Their pulses became stronger, and the blood flowed in a quickened torrent through their veins.
Why don't somebody ring the supper bell?"
Nine o'clock came.
Sherman must have recalled, too, how his statement that the North would need 200,000 troops in the west alone had been sneered at, and he had been called mad.
The junction of Grant and Buell, after all, had proved too much for them.
This swarthy general, volatile and dramatic, nevertheless had great penetration.
"We'll win yet," said Dick hopefully, "but I don't think we can achieve any big victory.
The South had lost almost as many.
He must have known that his star was rising.
How the battle grows!
The double army which had saved itself, but which had yet been unable to destroy its enemy, slept that night in the recovered camp.
Beauregard, drawn by the firing at that point, and noticing the courage and tenacity with which the Northern troops held their ground, sending in volley after volley, divined at once that these were not the beaten troops of the day before, but new men.
Edmond Dantes.
"Edmond Dantes.
"Really!" exclaimed the Englishman.
Then he saw through the whole thing.
"No doubt; but unfortunately for the prisoners, the Abbe Faria had an attack of catalepsy, and died."
"But at a tremendous discount, of course?"
"Well, then, I will buy it of you!"
"Yes, yes, the mortuary deposition.
I have come, therefore, express from Rome, to ask you for information."
"As I have already told you, sir, he was a very dangerous man; and, fortunately, by his own act disembarrassed the government of the fears it had on his account."
"Oh, he was, decidedly."
"The Chateau d'If has no cemetery, and they simply throw the dead into the sea, after fastening a thirty-six pound cannon-ball to their feet."
"This dangerous man's name was"--
"I recollect this, because the poor devil's death was accompanied by a singular incident."
"You?"
"How?
"Very possibly; but what sort of madness was it?"
"Indeed!" said the Englishman.
Beneath these lines was written in another hand: "See note above--nothing can be done." He compared the writing in the bracket with the writing of the certificate placed beneath Morrel's petition, and discovered that the note in the bracket was the same writing as the certificate--that is to say, was in Villefort's handwriting.
"And so," continued the Englishman who first gained his composure, "he was drowned?"
The Englishman appeared to reflect a moment, and then said,--"From which it would appear, sir, that this credit inspires you with considerable apprehension?"
An inveterate Bonapartist; took an active part in the return from the Island of Elba.
"Precisely."
"Well," observed the Englishman as if he were slow of comprehension.
That man made a deep impression on me; I shall never forget his countenance!"
"No."
"Name it, sir, I beg."
"I have been so these fourteen years."
I should like to have seen his face at that moment."
The Englishman smiled imperceptibly.
"Poor devil!--and he is dead?"
"This tunnel was dug, no doubt, with an intention of escape?"
"Sir," said he, "I am chief clerk of the house of Thomson & French, of Rome.
"That would have been difficult."
"Excuse you for what?
"Yes, I!"
To be kept in strict solitary confinement, and to be closely watched and guarded.
We have a hundred thousand francs or thereabouts loaned on their securities, and we are a little uneasy at reports that have reached us that the firm is on the brink of ruin.
Excuse me."
"True, this story has diverted our attention from them.
"And you say, sir," he interposed, "that the two dungeons"--
"But," said the Englishman, "this looks very much like a suspension of payment."
"No, for two hundred thousand francs.
He was no longer astonished when he searched on to find in the register this note, placed in a bracket against his name:--
"You keep the registers of entries and departures?"
"That must have cut short the projects of escape."
"You have a good memory, sir, to recollect dates so well."
The Prison Register.
"But some official document was drawn up as to this affair, I suppose?" inquired the Englishman.
"And you will pay"--
"That's no affair of mine," replied the Englishman, "that is the affair of the house of Thomson & French, in whose name I act.
For the story?
He has lost four or five vessels, and suffered by three or four bankruptcies; but it is not for me, although I am a creditor myself to the amount of ten thousand francs, to give any information as to the state of his finances.
"There are special reports on every prisoner."
"Yes, sir," continued the inspector of prisons.
Chapter 28.
"Yes, sir, five or six months ago--last February."
"Sir," replied the Englishman, laughing, "I am like my house, and do not do such things--no, the commission I ask is quite different."
Do you not comprehend?"
Whatever you say."
"Unquestionably."
"The Abbe Faria."
Our house," added the Englishman with a laugh, "does not do things in that way."
It appears, sir, that this Edmond Dantes had procured tools, or made them, for they found a tunnel through which the prisoners held communication with one another."
"Thanks," said the latter, closing the register with a slam, "I have all I want; now it is for me to perform my promise.
You understand, Dantes' relations, if he had any, might have some interest in knowing if he were dead or alive."
"I do."
"You are the inspector of prisons?"
As we have said, the inspector, from discretion, and that he might not disturb the Abbe Faria's pupil in his researches, had seated himself in a corner, and was reading Le Drapeau Blanc.
"So can I," said the Englishman, and he laughed too; but he laughed as the English do, "at the end of his teeth."
"But to return to these registers."
"How was that?"
The day after that in which the scene we have just described had taken place on the road between Bellegarde and Beaucaire, a man of about thirty or two and thirty, dressed in a bright blue frock coat, nankeen trousers, and a white waistcoat, having the appearance and accent of an Englishman, presented himself before the mayor of Marseilles.
I only ask a brokerage."
"He pretended to know of an immense treasure, and offered vast sums to the government if they would liberate him."
They have, perhaps, some motive to serve in hastening the ruin of a rival firm. But all I know, sir, is, that I am ready to hand you over this sum in exchange for your assignment of the debt.
"What was his name?"
"Well, sir, I was educated at home by a poor devil of an abbe, who disappeared suddenly.
"Sir," replied the mayor.
In an instant more it was done, and, a good length in advance of the Foger craft, Tom shot over the finish line a winner, richer by ten thousand dollars, and, not only that, but he had picked up a mile that had been lost, and had snatched victory from almost certain defeat.
They saw the plight of the Humming-Bird and determined to beat her.
They could be no worse off than they were.
"We're done for, I guess."
"Andy seems to be doing well," said Mr. Damon.
Tom cast a despairing look up at the motor.
He was right.
There is little hope," translated Tom.
But Tom and Mr. Damon could not hear them.
His heart was like lead.
Mr. Damon saw him turn pale.
They looked back and saw him coming.
"I'll pass 'em all!"
There was but a single chance.
Tom suddenly changed his plans.
There was twenty miles yet to go.
He shut off the power.
But dad is game.
Mr. Damon gazed blankly forward.
"Now to win!" cried Tom, grimly.
He would begin his final spurt, and if possible finish the hundred miles at his utmost speed, win the race and then hasten to his father's side.
Tom opened up a big gap between his machine and the one nearest him, which, at that moment, was the Antoinette, with the Spaniard driving her.
They tried to put on more speed, but it was impossible.
"A mile behind!" gasped Tom.
On came the other machines, Andy in the lead, then the Santos-Dumont, then the Farman, and lastly the Wright.
"Of course you will!" cried Mr. Damon.
"Where's the Slugger?" called Tom to his friend.
"Yes, he has a good machine," conceded Tom.
Tom flashed through the air so quickly that his speed was almost incredible.
They were beaten. It did not seem possible.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Faster and faster flew the Humming-Bird.
"A good start!" shouted Mr. Damon in his ear.
"Mr.
If Tom shut off all power, coasted for a moment, and then, ere the propeller had ceased revolving, if he could start the motor on the spark, the silent cylinders might pick up, with the others, and begin again.
He looked at the speed gage.
"Dr. Gladby says dad has a turn for the worse.
For a moment Tom's heart misgave him.
Then she crept up on Andy's Slugger.
"I don't believe he's going to make it," thought Tom.
"Dad isn't quite so well," answered the lad.
The motor of the Humming-Bird suddenly slackened its speed, it missed explosions, and the trim little craft began to drop behind.
He could not reach it in mid-air.
Slowly he crept on them.
"My father has become unconscious, so Mr. Jackson says, but his last words were to me: 'Tell Tom to win the race!' And I'm going to do it!"
"He's going to try to catch me!" exulted Tom.
Tom shook his head.
"What's the matter?" cried Mr. Damon.
Then another five.
He looked down at the signals.
Eagerly Tom waited for the right signal.
She shot ahead like an eagle darting after his prey.
"I'll get him!" muttered Tom.
"We did it!" yelled Tom.
He was half a lap ahead of them all now. But he saw Andy Foger's machine pulling away from the bunch.
He would try it.
However, he must think of himself and his own craft now.
"Will you--are you going to quit?" asked Mr. Damon.
He sends me word to go on and win, and I'll do it, too, only--"
They only heard the powerful song of the motor.
And such a roar as it was!
"Well?" asked Mr. Damon, as Tom took off the receiver.
Tom glanced at the barograph.
And he did.
Tom paused, and choked back a sob.
"I'll catch him!" muttered Tom, and he opened the throttle a trifle wider, and went after Andy, passing him with ease.
Quickly the young inventor clamped the receiver to his ear.
Tom looked down, and saw the signal put up which meant that there were but three miles more to go. He felt that he could do it.
Then the Antoinette flashed by.
Yet he would wait until five miles from the end, and then he felt that he could gain and maintain a lead.
"It's a long chance, but I'll take it."
In the days of the American Revolution a young woman lived as a servant in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with the family of General Irving, a retired British officer, who had fought in the French and Indian War and had seen a great deal of service.
When she was still a very young woman the American Revolution for freedom from Great Britain broke out.
The sun had proved too much for him.
The situation was saved by General Greene, who saw what had happened, changed his own plans and diverted the attack of the British to his own position from which he poured in a heavy artillery fire that caused them terrible losses.
This young woman was named Molly Ludwig Hays, and was the wife of a barber who had been well known in the village.
At last her husband came to her, somewhat sheepishly, for he disliked to tell her the intention he had in his heart; but at length he made her understand that just because he was married was no reason why he should remain at home with the women; and he, too, intended to enlist that very day.
It was hard to get the newspapers in those times and news of the armies and their doings was often weeks behind the actual events.
The brave girl dropped the pail of water that she had been carrying, picked up the fuse and applied it to the touch hole.
The English had been retreating from Philadelphia, across New Jersey, followed by Washington, and the American general had decided to launch an attack on the left wing of the retreating forces and General Lee was ordered by Washington to attack the English on the flank and hold them in battle until he himself could come up with the bulk of the American Army.
Molly had left and had taken with her a wounded American soldier whom she carried on her shoulder.
And not only the Americans did her honor, but the French as well, for the Marquis de Lafayette with his own hand presented her with a purse of golden crowns.
General Lee, however, proved to be a poor man for this task and his indecision and semi-cowardice left Washington exposed to the brunt of the enemy's attack before he was prepared to meet it and against the intentions of the American commander.
As it was they thought she was only some country girl who had perhaps lost some relative in the recent battle and was carrying his dead body back to her home.
John Hays was one of the cannoneers of Greene's artillery and he worked all day loading and firing his piece.
The tide of the struggle wavered and battles with the red coats were fought and won.
The letter ended by telling her to come to Trenton and live with her parents, for he would be able without doubt to get leave from his command and see her often.
He had a letter from John Hays for Molly, and it not only told her that he was alive and well, but was in camp not far off from her former home in Trenton, New Jersey, where her aged parents were still living.
CHAPTER XX
For many weary hours she toiled at the gun, until the British were driven back and the battle was claimed as an American victory.
On a hot day of July in the following summer it chanced that Washington's forces were again not far away from Molly's home, and she took a difficult journey on the chance of seeing her husband.
Soon the war itself was being fought in the neighborhood of her home. The Americans attacked the British near Princeton killing and capturing a large number.
And so they paid no attention to her.
Throughout her life Molly Hays had admired soldiers, and more than once she expressed herself in no undecided terms to the effect that she wished she were a man so that she could bear arms and wear a uniform, and be a soldier herself.
A far greater adventure lay before her, for she fell in with the American soldiers just as they commenced the severe battle of Monmouth.
When her husband had departed Molly returned to the Irving household where she worked as well as she had before her marriage, trying to find relief in the heavy labor from the pain of having lost her husband and the aching desire to go and do her part beside him even though she were a woman.
This battle had considerable importance, as a comparatively large number of troops were engaged in it.
Washington praised her highly and before a large number of his officers and men, and more cheering reechoed through the ranks when he gave her the brevet rank of Captain in the American Army.
I am a gunner's wife and know how to load and fire a cannon.
And now Molly found that there was something that she could do--namely, go and care for the wounded who were still lying where they had fallen on the field of battle.
Molly consented with the utmost enthusiasm.
I can fire it.
Molly hoped and waited, but for weeks at a time she went without word from her husband and did not know whether he were alive or dead.
She washed and scrubbed and scoured and baked from morning till night, and seemed to revel in the hard work that gave the needed exercise to her strong muscles.
She studied the cannon carefully and it seemed to be aimed right at a group of the enemy that was approaching.
I'll take the place that my brave husband has left!" And running to the gun Molly commenced to load and fire so determinedly and skilfully that a gasp of amazement ran through the men that saw her.
This was not all the triumph she received, however, for word was soon brought to her that General Washington himself wished to see her.
Her first step in soldiering had been taken when she fired the cannon at the British in the preceding year.
All the country was aflame, and rang with the stories of what happened at Lexington and Bunker Hill. Man after man from the village took his powder horn and musket and went off to enlist for the war, and Molly grew more and more restless as she saw them go.
All this time Molly Hays had been caring for the wounded and carrying water to the thirsty gunners, using for the purpose the bucket that was attached to her husband's cannon for cleaning purposes.
"Leave the gun where it is.
Molly stopped carrying water to care for her husband.
Before she left her cannon General Greene himself came over to where she stood and grasping her hand thanked her in the name of the American Army.
Fate, thought Molly, had made a sad mistake, in making her a woman, for she knew that in spite of her petticoats she could soldier as well as the men,--and if she had only been a man she believed she could have risen to an important position in the army.
MOLLY PITCHER
It was a terribly hot day and many men in both the British and the American armies fell exhausted and even died from the heat of the sun.
At this Molly sprang forward crying out:
As the day wore on the men would greet her coming with: "Here comes Molly with her pitcher!" And gradually this was changed to "Here comes Molly Pitcher." And this was the name that history has adopted in regard to the brave woman for whom it was so used.
She bathed his head and moved him into the shade, returning to her duties just in time to hear General Knox give orders that the cannon be removed, because he had no other gunner cool enough and skilful enough to work it in its present exposed position.
She was not only handsome, but as strong as a man, able to carry a heavy meal-sack on her shoulder; and one of the hardest workers that the town knew.
Tirelessly she continued her efforts to care for the wounded and comfort the fighting soldiers, heedless of the bullets that came her way or of the general turmoil of battle.
There were no conveniences of any kind and many men died of exhaustion because no food adequate for the sick could be prepared.
But owing to the inefficiency and red tape of the War Department, the supplies were not delivered, but lay rotting in warehouses and in the holds of vessels while men died for the want of them.
Her father was William Nightingale, an English gentleman, and her elder sister, Parthenope, also took her name from the place where she was born, for Parthenope is the ancient term for Naples.
As there were no field dressing stations they had to be carried for days with their wounds undressed before they reached the hospital, and when they arrived it was often some time before the harassed doctors could care for them.
In a very short time the Home was completely changed.
Rats gnawed the fingers of the wounded who were too weak to drive them away.
On my passage, I paid particular attention to the direction which the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia.
The hearth is desolate.
But it was not to them that I was attached.
CHAPTER VIII
I sailed from Baltimore for St. Michael's in the sloop Amanda, Captain Edward Dodson.
I took passage with Captain Rowe, in the schooner Wild Cat, and, after a sail of about twenty-four hours, I found myself near the place of my birth.
I was immediately sent for, to be valued with the other property.
Prior to this, I had become, if not insensible to my lot, at least partly so.
He died while on a visit to see his daughter at Hillsborough.
Not a slave was left free. All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest.
Cut off thus unexpectedly, he left no will as to the disposal of his property.
The principal products raised upon it were tobacco, corn, and wheat.
My master's family consisted of two sons, Andrew and Richard; one daughter, Lucretia, and her husband, Captain Thomas Auld.
He was a very different man.
His career was short.
Their names were Peter, Isaac, Rich, and Jake.
Especially would they do this, when leaving home.
All the mechanical operations for all the farms were performed here.
He was called the smartest and most trusty fellow, who had this honor conferred upon him the most frequently.
I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it.
I have had two masters.
She was the daughter of Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark.
I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood.
Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to conjecture.
CHAPTER I
He was generally called Captain Anthony--a title which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the Chesapeake Bay. He was not considered a rich slaveholder.
Aunt Hester went out one night,--where or for what I do not know,--and happened to be absent when my master desired her presence.
I was quite a child, but I well remember it.
The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me.
I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.
Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes.
It struck me with awful force.
She was gone long before I knew any thing about it.
I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.
She now stood fair for his infernal purpose.
This occurrence took place very soon after I went to live with my old master, and under the following circumstances.
It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him.
I expected it would be my turn next.
He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave.
She was with me in the night.
It was a most terrible spectacle.
It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it before.
She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve miles from my home.
They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time.
He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.
And with this the father had to rest content.
What's the use of being ruler of a great empire if I may not treat my dog as I will?"
"Willingly," responded the Fairy, "I will make your son the most handsome prince in the world, or the richest, or the most powerful; choose which you will for him."
One day he carried his little piece of bread into the garden to eat it there, but wandering with it in his mouth, still further on, he saw a young girl pale and thin, and almost fainting for want of food.
I condemn you to take the resemblance of the beasts you are like in disposition--A lion, because of your fury--a wolf, on account of your greediness--a serpent, for destroying him who has been your second father--a bull, by reason of your brutality."
That night when he was alone in his room, there appeared a lovely lady.
One day while he was out hunting, a little rabbit that his dogs were about to kill, threw itself into his arms.
The worthy Governor was delighted to behold his dear master, and gladly resigned the throne to him.
There was once a king who was such an honourable man that his subjects called him "The Good King."
All that I can promise is that I will give him good advice, and punish him for his faults, if he will not himself correct them."
Fluttering down he alighted upon her shoulder.
"What is this?" he exclaimed: "the Fairy must be mocking me, surely I've done no great harm in kicking an animal that annoyed me.
Just then he heard loud cries, and saw that it was the beautiful Zelie struggling to free herself from four men who were carrying her into a house near by.
One day when he was out walking he saw a girl named Zelie, who was so beautiful that he resolved to marry her.
Presently from a window was thrown a plateful of tempting-looking food.
He was captured and led into the capital of his Kingdom.
At that moment the ring pricked like a pin running into his finger.
For several days he flew around hoping to catch sight of Zelie, and at last, seated by a hermit, outside a cave, he found her.
Great was his surprise, on entering the apartment, to find the captive had disappeared, for he carried the key of the door in his pocket.
She wore a robe as white as snow, and a wreath of white roses on her head.
If, in spite of the pricks, you continue your bad actions, you will lose my friendship and I shall become your enemy."
You have despised my counsels and your crimes have converted you into a monster, the horror of heaven and earth.
At the same moment he found himself in a forest, and there, after roaming about miserably for some time, he fell into a pit dug by hunters.
But Zelie was as good as she was beautiful, and said to him:
The King caressed the little creature, and said:
"I promised your father to be your friend," she told him; "here is a little gold ring, take care of it, for it is worth more than diamonds. Every time that you are about to do any wrong action it will prick you.
Now it is time to fulfill my promise of punishment.
He had a lion's head, a bull's horns, the feet of a wolf, and the tail of a viper.
"I promised your father," said she in a stern voice, "to give you good advice, and to punish you if you refused to follow it.
"I am the Fairy Candide; I wished to see if you were as good as everybody declares you are, and for this reason I changed myself into the little rabbit, and ran to you in my distress, for I know that those who have pity for dumb creatures have still more pity for mankind.
He gave readings, not only in England, but also in Scotland and Ireland, and everywhere he met with enormous success.
True artist as he was, Dickens seldom wrote without having in his mind the thought of showing some defect in the law, or some wrong condition of affairs which might be righted.
He attempted one more series of readings, and with their close bade farewell for ever to his English audience.
This was his first long story.
With such a tender heart for all the world, he was more than an affectionate father to his own children, and gave much thought to their happiness and education.
They begged him to lie down.
Better days, however, came at last.
The years that followed this separation were years of constant labor for Dickens.
This was by no means an easy task.
"Yes, on the ground," he said--these were the last words he ever uttered--and as he spoke he slipped down upon the floor.
Everyone, he thought, had some good in him, and in all he met he was on the lookout to find it.
It is good to learn that, as a result of this novel, an end was made of many such boys' schools.
He landed at Boston accompanied by his wife, in 1842, and visited many of the greater cities of the Eastern states.
It was a hard parting at the last.
But he was too ill.
This book brought Dickens to the height of his career.
He was never content merely to tell an interesting story.
People have often wondered how Dickens found time to accomplish so many different things.
He liked best to wander along the cliffs or across the downs by the sea.
One of these was performed before Queen Victoria.
The first series was hardly over, when he was at work on a new story, and this was scarcely completed when he was planning more readings.
As he sat down to dinner all present noticed that he looked very ill.
But Dickens had great strength of will and a determination to do well whatever he did at all, and he succeeded, just as David Copperfield did in the story.
He used to say that being without them was "like losing his arms and legs."
In the meantime he had met with both joy and sorrow.
This summer of 1869--the last summer of his life--was a contented and even a happy one.
Throughout his life he loved to act in plays got up and often written, too, by himself and his friends.
A great banquet of farewell was given to him in New York and he returned to England bearing the admiration and love of the whole American people.
Round about are chalk hills, green lanes, forests and marshes, and amid such scenes the little Charles's genius first began to show itself.
His restlessness, perhaps also his lack of happiness, drove him to work without rest.
He rose early and almost every day might have been seen tramping for miles along the country roads, or riding horseback with his dogs racing after him.
And so, indeed, it had proved.
These happy years were not to last long.
Dickens was a very active man, and his life was simple and full of work and exercise.
Certainly its honest fun, its merriment, its quaintness, good humor and charity appealed to every reader.
It became, almost at once, the most popular book of its day, perhaps, indeed, the most popular book ever published in England.
Unfortunately, however, Dickens had taken a dislike to American ways, and this dislike appeared in many things he wrote after his return to England.
His aim was to make it cheerful, useful and at the same time cheap, so that the poor could afford to buy it as well as the rich.
But, however this may be, Dickens and his wife had not lived happily together, and now decided to part, and from that time, though they wrote to each other, he never saw her again.
A serious illness followed, and afterward he was troubled with an increasing lameness--the first real warning of the end.
If he did, his success as a reporter soon determined him otherwise.
He did not marry on this occasion, as did David, but how much he was in love one may see by the story of David's Dora.
Up to this time he had never seen the United States; he decided now to visit this country and meet his American readers face to face.
Soon after the appearance of its first chapters, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the editor of one of the London newspapers, who had helped him in his career.
As a consequence of this habit of regularity, he never wasted time.
And like the latter, too, about this time Dickens fell in love.
With his increasing wealth, Dickens had, of course, changed his manner of life.
He could not work in a room unless everything in it was in its proper place.
It is easy to see that the young Charles Dickens noted carefully and remembered everything he saw, and this habit was of great use to him all his life.
As the years went by, his letters to his oldest son told of his own work and plans. When his youngest son sailed away to live in Australia, he wrote: "Poor Plorn is gone.
One day as he entered the house at Gad's Hill, he seemed tired and silent.
When he was a little boy his father had pointed out this fine house to him, and told him he might even come to live there some day, if he were very persevering and worked hard.
Often at the close of an evening he would become so faint that he would have to lie down.
He followed this with others as successful, signed "Boz"--the child nickname of one of his younger brothers.
He never fully recovered consciousness, and next day, June 9, 1870, Charles Dickens breathed his last.
Dickens loved to encourage young writers, and would just as quickly accept a good story or poem from an unknown author as from the most famous.
He was now both famous and rich.
He liked best, however, a little English watering place called Broadstairs--a tiny fishing village, built on a cliff, with the sea rolling and dashing beneath it. In such a place he felt that he could write best, but he greatly missed his London friends.
When he was twenty-one he saw his first printed sketch in a monthly magazine.
These sorrows made him throw himself into his work with greater earnestness.
This did not content him and he made up his mind to learn to write shorthand so as to become a reporter, in the Houses of Parliament, for a newspaper.
Everything he did "went like clockwork," and he prided himself on his punctuality.
The theater had always a great attraction for Dickens.
They loved to watch the stars together, and there was one particular star which they used to pretend was their own.
'This is our would-be soldier,' said Colonel Graham--'the "button-boy," as I hear he is called.
'No; their grub is something shocking, and they live like cattle!'
You never do anything wrong!'
'Why not?' asked Mrs. Graham.
'But, Major Tracy, you are giving us a shocking idea of the morals in the Service,' said one lady.
In another minute he rose to his feet, and with a face perfectly radiant he turned to, the colonel, 'It's lovely, sir, it's lovely!'
'But it's at the bottom of the river, isn't it?'
Oh, sir!'
Teddy held his head erect as he followed the colonel into a bright, cheery room, where a group of ladies and gentlemen were round the fire enjoying their cup of five o'clock tea.
Some of you remember his story told in our schoolroom to the regiment passing through in the summer, and we weren't surprised to hear of his narrow escape from death from trying to regain his button.
'Now, my boy, come here.'
He shrugged his shoulders.
He was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, and putting his hand into his pocket he drew out a small box and placed it in the child's hand.
He lay there so still for a moment that Mrs. Graham bent forward to touch him, fearing that the excitement might be too much for him, but he was only trying to hide his emotion from those looking on.
'No wonder no one couldn't find it!' he said, fingering his adornment proudly.
There are exceptions, I know, but precious few, as far as my experience goes.'
Wouldn't you like to be one?'
I shall never forget a pretty boy we had once; he was called the "cherub," and had been a chorister--sang divinely.
'I shall never be a footman,' he was asserting; 'I couldn't keep my legs so stiff.
And then Teddy was dismissed.
I knew You would answer me, for You knew how dreadful it was to live without my button, and You knew how unhappy my heart was about it, though I tried to be brave, and not talk about it.
'Not he.
The other day I brought home a few fish, and in preparing one of these for table our cook discovered your button inside it--I wonder the fish had not come to an untimely end before from such an indigestible meal!
'Yes; and I suppose when I get bigger and stronger it will be much easier, won't it?
Teddy stepped in upon the soft rugs almost on tiptoe, and the colonel himself came out into the hall to meet him.
'I don't know where it is, but God does, and I ask Him every day to send it back to me.
'Yes, indeed I have, my boy.'
'Don't bother your head about your size,' he said; 'you'll grow, and there's plenty of time before you.'
She was quite as delighted as he was, but said, a few minutes after, 'Button-boy, do you remember telling me you couldn't live without your-button?
I'd rather have it back than anything else in the world!
He was only four years in the regiment, and his case was brought to me before he was discharged.
A button isn't worth much sorrow after the first pang of its loss is over.'
'Now, my boy, I don't think you will ever guess how it came into our possession.
He does trouble me a lot now'
Mrs. Graham came forward and gave him a kindly greeting.
Mother, do you have any fighting?
Found
There was silence on the little company for a minute, then Major Tracy said with a laugh, 'What an original little oddity it is!--quite a character!'
'"Fact is stranger than fiction," certainly,' said the colonel.
Don't you never kick your legs out in the kitchen, or have you got stiff knees?'
'I meant it to be buried with me,' said Teddy, considering, 'but I don't mind altering my mind about it, and if you promise not to give it to any one else, I will let you have it.'
'Don't you think it's nicer to be a soldier?
'The master wants you to let the youngster come up with me now and speak to him.'
'It's like the fish that brought Peter some money once.'
Daily he prayed for it to be found, and his hope and faith in God never failed him.
The next morning before breakfast, Teddy ran off to tell Nancy, and to show her the long-lost treasure.
'Do you think I'm too small to be a soldier?' he asked.
His mother knew already, so was prepared for his news, but she was not prepared for the handsome adornment now on her boy's coat, and his grandmother and uncle were equally pleased and gratified at the colonel's kindness.
'Yes, I thought I should; but as soon as I began to pray about it I knew it was coming back, and so I got better.'
'Come in, my little man, and don't be frightened.'
Teddy listened eagerly.
She told us of it, not recognising what a valuable treasure she had brought to light, and directly we saw it, we knew it was the redoubtable button that has been the means of causing such interest in our neighbourhood.'
I give them a month generally, and then away flies their bloom and all their home training.'
'Oh, my button, my own button!
I'm quite sure He will, and I think it will be this Christmas.'
You see, I belong to God's army.
When I see a fresh drummer brought in, I wonder how long he will keep his innocence, and sometimes wish his friends could see the life he is subjected to.
Teddy did not understand this conversation, but he gathered from the major's tone that he did not approve of him.
When they get older, and have sense and strength enough to stick to their principles, then let them enlist.'
'But,' said Teddy, 'I mean to do both; and now, mother, just before I go to sleep, give me father's button to kiss!'
The rougher, harder natures get on best.
Snow was falling, but he heeded it not, and burst into the kitchen a little later in a breathless state of excitement.
'A capital decision--stick to it, little chap, and you have my hearty approval.'
I would only ask you to watch a boy, as I have, from the start, and see what kind of a man he grows into after having spent most of his early youth in the Service.
You're always like the soldiers when they stand at Attention.
'I say, just tell me, is the colonel angry?' asked Teddy, as looking into the large, brightly lighted hall, he suddenly felt his diminutive size.
Have you got an enemy like me?'
'Because it's the ruination of them.
I would take great care of it.'
Perhaps I shall find it in my stocking on Christmas morning,' he used to say to his mother; and she told him to pray on.
'That may be.
'You have your father's blood in your veins,' said the colonel, laughing; 'meanwhile, I suppose you try your hand on the village boys, to content your fighting propensities.'
'Yes,' nodded Nancy; 'sailors and soldiers are quite even, and my father is just as good as your father was!'
It was winter time, and Teddy was back at school, full of health and spirits, yet, through all his boyish mirth, the loss of his button was never forgotten.
The major laughed.
'No,' said Teddy, a grave look coming into his sunny blue eyes.
'But I have always heard,' said Mrs. Graham, 'that the drummer boys are well looked after now.
'Now, major, what do you think of this youngster?
'He won't keep him long.' Then, as excited Teddy began pulling on his great-coat, he whispered something into his mother's ear, which had the effect of completely reassuring her, and bringing a pleased smile about her lips.
Would you like to take him as a drummer boy into your regiment?'
'But you're never beaten, are you?
'And we'll always remember that soldiers and sailors are just as good as each other--they're quite even!'
'I don't want to be a drummer,' said Teddy earnestly; 'I'd rather wait and be a proper soldier--a soldier that fights.'
'He's my own enemy; Mr. Upton told me about him.
'Soldiers must never get tired of fighting, sonny, and you have your Captain to help you.'
'And when you die, and I get the button, I shall wear it as a brooch!'
He flew down the avenue home as fast as he could go.
'There is a verse in the Bible that says, "He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city." Mother would rather have her little son fight God's battles than be the bravest soldier in the Queen's army.'
'Open it, and tell me if you recognise the contents.'
The major scanned the boy from head to foot, then answered emphatically, 'I wouldn't take a boy with a face like that for a good deal!'
Teddy pondered over this.
And here the tears welled up in the blue eyes, and, utterly regardless of the place he was in, he flung himself down on the hearthrug and buried his head, face foremost, in his arms.
'What about?' questioned Mrs. John, rather alarmed at this summons, and wondering if Teddy had been up to mischief.
'I grant you, on the whole, they are better than they were, but the Service is no place for highly strung boys like this one.
Is that wicked?
Wipe your feet, and take your cap off.'
'No, darling; there will be no fighting with sin there.'
Teddy smiled.
'O God, I do thank You.
No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by.
Of course the children anthropomorphized--if that is the proper term--their friends of the animal world.
there's poor Kraft's horse, all soppin' wet!"
"He bites legs sometimes, but he never bites faces," said the little boy.
"It didn't do any such thing.
However, the culprit was much impressed with a sense of shortcoming as to the obligations he had undertaken; so the result was as satisfactory as if the quotation had been from the right service.
She held together well for a season or two after having been cleared of everything down to the timbers, and this gave us the chance to make camping-out trips in which the girls could also be included, for we put them to sleep in the wreck, while the boys slept on the shore; squaw picnics, the children called them.
Little boy (without heeding, and hurrying toward the climax).
He would never let the other dogs fight, and he himself never fought unless circumstances imperatively demanded it; but he was a murderous animal when he did fight.
They evidently associated the color with the term.
He was not only exceedingly fond of the water, as was to be expected, but passionately devoted to gunpowder in every form, for he loved firearms and fairly reveled in the Fourth of July celebrations--the latter being rather hazardous occasions, as the children strongly objected to any "safe and sane" element being injected into them, and had the normal number of close shaves with rockets, Roman candles, and firecrackers.
"And then they steamed bang into the monitor."
Little girl.
Then there were flying squirrels, and kangaroo rats, gentle and trustful, and a badger whose temper was short but whose nature was fundamentally friendly.
When the eldest small boy was getting well, and had recovered his spirits, I slept on a sofa beside his bed--the sofa being so short that my feet projected over anyhow.
Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.
But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.
Little girl.
Of course the children took much interest in the trophies I occasionally brought back from my hunts.
It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful business man, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or doctor; or a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions.
The children did not wish me to read the books they desired their mother to read, and I usually took some such book as "Hereward the Wake," or "Guy Mannering," or "The Last of the Mohicans" or else some story about a man-eating tiger, or a man-eating lion, from one of the hunting books in my library.
Another famous place for handicap races was Cooper's Bluff, a gigantic sand-bank rising from the edge of the bay, a mile from the house.
They have known and they will know joy and sorrow, triumph and temporary defeat.
Little girl.
Well, we used to play stage-coach on the float while in swimming, and instead of tamely getting up and turning round, the child whose turn it was had to plunge overboard.
"My monitor is not to sink!"
We had a sleigh for winter; but if, when there was much snow, the whole family desired to go somewhere, we would put the body of the farm wagon on runners and all bundle in together.
My pasteboard rams and monitors were fascinating--if a naval architect may be allowed to praise his own work--and as property they were equally divided between the little girl and the small boy.
If the tide was high there was an added thrill, for some of the contestants were sure to run into the water.
Besides profiting by the more canonical books on education, we profited by certain essays and articles of a less orthodox type.
There was also much training that came as a by-product and was perhaps almost as valuable--not as a substitute but as an addition.
They rushed inside, clambered over or burrowed through the hay, as suited them best, dropped out of a place where a loose board had come off, got over, through, or under the three fences, and raced back to the starting-point.
They have had their share of accidents and escapes; as I write, word comes from a far-off land that one of them, whom Seth Bullock used to call "Kim" because he was the friend of all mankind, while bossing a dangerous but necessary steel structural job has had two ribs and two back teeth broken, and is back at work.
There are many forms of success, many forms of triumph.
One of these wagons, by the way, a gorgeous red one, had "Express" painted on it in gilt letters, and was known to the younger children as the "'spress" wagon.
When we were in Washington, the children usually went with their mother to the Episcopal church, while I went to the Dutch Reformed.
"And the torpedo went at the monitor!"
Next morning Dr. Lambert rather enviously congratulated the boy on the fact that stones and roots evidently did not interfere with the soundness of his sleep; to which the boy responded, "Well, Doctor, you see it isn't very long since I used to take fourteen china animals to bed with me every night!"
But I believe they are all the better off because of their happy and healthy childhood.
On one occasion, when the child's conduct fell just short of warranting such extreme measures, his mother, as they were on the point of entering church, concluded a homily by a quotation which showed a certain haziness of memory concerning the marriage and baptismal services: "No, little boy, if this conduct continues, I shall think that you neither love, honor, nor obey me!"
The children are no longer children now.
They were never allowed to be disobedient or to shirk lessons or work; and they were encouraged to have all the fun possible.
There are many kinds of success in life worth having.
A favorite amusement used to be an obstacle race when the barn was full of hay.
As the children grew up, Sagamore Hill remained delightful for them. There were picnics and riding parties, there were dances in the north room--sometimes fancy dress dances--and open-air plays on the green tennis court of one of the cousin's houses.
When we reached the store, we found to our dismay that the wagon which we had seen had been sold.
Among these friends at one period was the baker's horse, and on a very rainy day I heard the little girl, who was looking out of the window, say, with a melancholy shake of her head, "Oh!
For nearly thirty years we have given the Christmas tree to the school.
On one occasion I was holding a conversation with one of the leaders in Congress, Uncle Pete Hepburn, about the Railroad Rate Bill.
They always liked to swim in company with a grown-up of buoyant temperament and inventive mind, and the float offered limitless opportunities for enjoyment while bathing.
My monitor always goes to bed at seven, and it's now quarter past.
My monitor was in bed and couldn't sink!"
They loved pony Grant.
"That'll crack a skull, but it won't draw blood--not if it's used right," and he brought from his hip pocket one of the weapons in question--a short, stout flexible reed, covered with leather, the end forming a pocket in which was a chunk of lead.
Got to ask a lot of questions in a case like this," he half apologized.
I got something here.
Nothing seems to be gone from the cases, though I'd have to make a better search, and go over the inventory, to make certain."
"Where'd you get it?" demanded Carroll.
"Three or four," murmured Thong.
"Another wound!" exclaimed Daley, his newspaper instincts quickly aroused by this addition of evidence of mystery.
They flashed on the white, still face, and the gleams seemed to be swallowed up in that red blotch in the snowy hair.
I couldn't bear to look at it--nor could she!"
What do you mean?" asked Carroll quickly.
"Let's look a bit further."
Darcy did so, Mulligan helping him keep back the crowd of curious ones.
How about that, Mr. Darcy?"
We have bought some odd things from him for our customers, queer bead necklaces and the like.
"Yes, at first I thought some one had been in my room, and then, after I thought about it, I wasn't quite sure.
"And you didn't call the janitor?"
"Is that your dagger?" snapped Carroll at the jewelry worker.
That was locked with the spring catch from the inside."
"Over on the watch repair table."
"I had asked Mrs. Darcy to set that statue aside for me.
"You got Pearl's name 'graved on it, Darcy, ole man?" asked King, thickly, licking his hot and feverish lips.
First I thought it was her heart beating."
Darcy gasped.
Mrs. Darcy has her rooms in front.
I came straight up and went to bed."
"Sure thash mine!
"No.
"Don't what?" asked the physician sharply.
"Well, that's all I can do now," Dr. Warren said, after his very perfunctory examination.
So Darcy's jewelry store was known, and though a bit old-fashioned in a way, was favorably known, not only to the older members of the rich families of the place, but to the younger set as well.
Come on!"
"He has not lived here very long, but I knew him in New York.
Better 'phone the morgue keeper," he went on, "and have them come for the body."
"Nothing.
"What sort of a repair job?" asked Carroll.
"No," answered the jewelry worker, hollowly.
But when Miss Brill had been carried to a rear room and quieted, and when the shades had been drawn to keep the curious ones from peering in, the questioning of Darcy was resumed.
The safe hasn't been opened, and the best of the goods--all the diamonds and other stones--are in that.
The detective held it out, and the red spots on it seemed to show brighter in the gleam of the electric lights.
"Oh, a clock struck!" and Thong settled back in his chair more at his ease.
The pretty girls and their well-groomed companions of the "Assembly Ball" set liked to stop in there for their rings, brooches, scarf pins or cuff links, and very frequent were the rather languid orders:
I was anxious to finish the repair job for a man who was to leave on an early train this morning.
The men from the morgue had the body raised in the air.
"Is that your knife, Harry King?" demanded Thong.
"Well, let's hear what you have to say," said Carroll, after James Darcy had given what the detectives considered was, for the time, a sufficient history of himself and his relative, and had hastily gone over such of the stock as was kept outside the safe.
"At ten o'clock, you say?"
"The rest will have to be at the morgue.
No telling what that may develop.
"Crimps, what a name!
His manner seemed to indicate that he was on the track of something.
"It isn't a dagger--it's a paper-cutter--a magazine knife."
"Harry King, and stewed to the gills again!" murmured Pete Daley. "Wow! he has some bun on!"
Now which was it?"
On the death of her husband, she had sent for his second cousin, who at that time was in the employ of a well-known New York jewelry house, and he agreed to come to her.
So I didn't even wind it.
That would account for it I reasoned, so--"
I never make a statement, though, until after the autopsy.
"Where's the watch now?" and the detective flicked the ashes from a cigar the reporter had given him.
Take wifely home li'l preshent--you know how 'tish.
How'd you find things when you came downstairs?
"The watch," murmured Darcy.
Sallie?"
They were questioning Darcy in the living-room of Mrs. Darcy's suite, the clerks being detained downstairs by Mulligan.
"That wasn't your case, Doc," observed Carroll.
The "old" families--not that any of them could trace their ancestry back very far--liked to say that "we get all our stuff at Van Doren's."
"You may send it, charge."
"I couldn't say.
'Svaluable, too!
"Whose watch is it?" asked Thong.
"Look!" exclaimed Carroll, pointing.
I had not set an alarm, though I wanted to get up early to do a little repair job I had promised for early this morning.
Something awakened me suddenly; but what, I can't say.
"No question about that.
He may be in any time now, and I haven't it ready for him."
Let's have a light, it's too dark to see."
"No, it was before my time.
"In the rear, on the second floor--the one next above.
The burglar--or whoever it was--swung this statue as a club. It would make a deadly one, using the foot end for a handle," and Dr. Warren waved the ornament in the air over the dead woman's head to illustrate what he meant.
The store won't open to-day, but the police want to see every one.
There was less of a crowd about now, and Mulligan did not have to keep back a rush as he opened the portal.
"What's up, Bill?"
Murders and autopsies were all in the day's work with him.
Darcy stared at the keen knife, and then at the dead woman.
It needed a new case-spring and some of the screws were loose."
But now-- Oh, I never want to see it in the house!
"It--it's in her hand," and he nodded in the direction of the silent figure downstairs.
The latter had not been forced open--it did not take long to ascertain that.
His countenance denoted the struggle between two opposite principles--a wicked nature, subdued by determination, perhaps by repentance.
"Yes," continued the curate, apparently accustomed to this tone, "yes, we wish to know your opinion of the events of to-day and what you have heard said by people going in and out of the church."
"Certainly."
D'Artagnan and Porthos obeyed.
Two hours later, thirty officiating ministers from the most populous, and consequently the most disturbed parishes of Paris had assembled there.
"The war will not only be approved of, but directed by the church.
"Yes, madame," replied the coadjutor; "I have to beg you to reflect twice ere you cause a civil war in the kingdom."
"In that case, my lord, the time for words has passed and the hour for action is at hand; my lord, in three days, if you wish it, my father will be out of prison and in six months you may be cardinal."
Him I can place at your disposal; it is Count de Rochefort."
As for me, I hate the court and have but one desire at this moment--vengeance.
The coadjutor started.
"And wherefore has he not been to see me?"
"The rascal is rich, then?"
Speak, D'Artagnan, speak."
During this storm, Gondy, who had it in his power to make it most unpleasant for the jesters, remained calm and stern.
Porthos bowed.
D'Artagnan would have preferred money in hand to all that fine talk, for he knew well that to Mazarin it was easy to promise and hard to perform. But, though he held the cardinal's promises as of little worth, he affected to be completely satisfied, for he was unwilling to discourage Porthos.
"You have been preparing long enough, my lord, for it to be welcome to you now."
For the rest, if any one of you have further or better counsel to expound, I will listen to him with the greatest pleasure."
"My friend," said Gondy, "you seem to be a clever and a thoughtful man; are you disposed to take a part in a little civil war, should we have one, and put at the command of the leader, should we find one, your personal influence and the influence you have acquired over your comrades?"
There was an ironical tone in his voice which he could not quite disguise and which astonished the coadjutor.
At this moment the coadjutor was announced; a cry of surprise ran through the royal assemblage.
"Let us hear.
"If occasion requires, monsieur, you will remember that man who has just gone out, will you not?"
The curates asked him what was to be done.
"These names are too numerous for me to remember them all, and I will content myself with the first," said the queen, graciously.
The mendicant shook his head.
"Then," said the coadjutor, "this evening, at ten o'clock, and if I am pleased with you another bag of five hundred pistoles will be at your disposal."
"Very well, sir, find this man, and when you have found him bring him to me."
Broussel's son was there, still furious, and still bearing bloody marks of his struggle with the king's officers.
"Certainly, speak."
"I think they have some esteem for me," said the mendicant with pride, "and that not only will they obey me, but wherever I go they will follow me."
Well, undermine in them the miserable prejudice of respect and fear of kings; teach your flocks that the queen is a tyrant; and repeat often and loudly, so that all may know it, that the misfortunes of France are caused by Mazarin, her lover and her destroyer; begin this work to-day, this instant even, and in three days I shall expect the result.
"Well, the man whom I offer you is a general syndic."
"Good! at midnight, my lord."
That glance was so sharp that it penetrated the heart of Mazarin, who, reading in it a declaration of war, seized D'Artagnan by the arm and said:
"Who and what is this man?"
"And think you that we should find him at this hour at his post?"
The court of Anne of Austria was full of gayety and animation; for, after having gained a victory over the Spaniard, it had just gained another over the people.
Although almost engaged to the leaders of the Fronde he had not gone so far but that retreat was possible should the court offer him the advantages for which he was ambitious and to which the coadjutorship was but a stepping-stone.
"I mean that all these cries, all these complaints, these curses, produce nothing but storms and flashes and that is all; but the lightning will not strike until there is a hand to guide it."
"Yes, sir, provided this war were approved of by the church and would advance the end I wish to attain--I mean, the remission of my sins."
"Some of those men sometimes die worth twenty thousand and twenty-five and thirty thousand francs and sometimes more."
The queen at last asked him if he had anything to add to the fine discourse he had just made to her.
"My lord, I have in my parish a man who might be of the greatest use to you."
"We will be with you at six o'clock, my lord."
"Never mind," said the coadjutor; "you must be well aware that this requires reflection."
"You are the directors of all consciences.
The Count de Villeroy said that "he did not know how any fear could be entertained for a moment, when the court had, to defend itself against the parliament and the citizens of Paris, his holiness the coadjutor, who by a signal could raise an army of curates, church porters and vergers."
As for the remission of your sins, we have the archbishop of Paris, who has the very greatest power at the court of Rome, and even the coadjutor, who possesses some plenary indulgences; we will recommend you to him."
He concluded by saying that he placed his feeble influence at her majesty's command.
"Oh! let us speak frankly," continued Louvieres, "and act in a straightforward manner.
As to what is said, everybody is discontented, everybody complains, but 'everybody' means 'nobody.'"
"Stop!" he said, "there he is at his post."
The people were in an excited mood, but, like a swarm of frightened bees, seemed not to know at what point to concentrate; and it was very evident that if leaders of the people were not provided all this agitation would pass off in idle buzzing.
The young man gazed at him as if he would have read the secret of his heart.
"Nothing, my lord, except that he is tormented with remorse."
Gondy bit his lips.
The coadjutor bowed and left the palace, casting upon the cardinal such a glance as is best understood by mortal foes.
"If I should not be in, wait for me."
"That your lordship was about to treat with the court."
"Better, my lord."
Without him I should probably at this moment be a dead fish in the nets at Saint Cloud, for it was a question of nothing less than throwing me into the river.
"I will undertake to throw up fifty, and when the day comes, to defend them."
"Yes, my lord," he replied.
"Go, my dear curate, and may God assist you!"
"With me!" said the mendicant; "it is a great honor for a poor distributor of holy water."
"You think, then, that you can help me more efficaciously than your brothers?" said Gondy.
"He was told--my lord will pardon me----"
"What makes you think so?"
Gondy dressed himself as an officer, put on a felt cap with a red feather, hung on a long sword, buckled spurs to his boots, wrapped himself in an ample cloak and followed the curate.
"Yes, I have heard it said," replied the coadjutor.
"Those costumes," he said, "are of more worth than most of those which you will see on the backs of the queen's courtiers; they are costumes of battle."
"And what do you know of him?"
He hastened to his cabinet.
"From the depth of my heart," said Gondy.
45.
"It must be on some elevated place, whence a given signal may be seen in every part of Paris."
At their approach the mountain had opened a little, and the bagpiper had gone in with them, after which it had closed again. Only the three little ones who told the adventure had remained outside, as if by a miracle.
Then through the east door of the town came three little boys, who cried and wept, and this is what they told:
'Leave it to the Town Counsellor,' said the town council with a malicious air.
'Our children! where are our poor children?' was the cry that was soon heard in all the streets.
There they found the ratcatcher playing his bagpipes at the same spot as the evening before.
When the people of Hamel heard of the bargain, they too exclaimed: 'A gros a head! but this will cost us a deal of money!'
Arrived there he turned round; the rats were following.
The Town Counsellor, who was considered clever, reassured them.
'Leave it to the Town Counsellor,' said the citizens one to another.
'The heads!' cried he, 'if you care about them, go and find them in the river.'
hop! without hesitating, the rats took the leap, swam straight to the funnel, plunged in head foremost and disappeared.
Reckon!'
'Are they all there, friend Blanchet?' asked the bagpiper.
'Well reckoned.'
'Keep your recompense for yourself,' replied the ratcatcher proudly.
And the good people of Hamel repeated with their counsellors, 'Leave it to the Town Counsellor.'
'Well reckoned?'
The ratcatcher did not expect this treacherous stroke.
The more they killed the more came.
These people also declared that they came from Germany, but they did not know how they chanced to be in this strange country.
'If you do not pay me I will be paid by your heirs.'
'All your rats took a jump into the river yesterday,' said he to the counsellors, 'and I guarantee that not one of them comes back.
And it was done as he commanded.
'I am going to the King for what he owes me.'
'One step further....
The King is dining, and will not be disturbed.'
He thought this time it was all up with him.
'Oh! take me with thee!'
what does he want?'
'I am going to the King, you know, for what he owes me.'
Drakestail said to himself: 'We can't be too many friends.'... 'I will,' says he, 'but you who sleep while you walk will soon be tired.
I wish to speak to the King.'
'Ladder, Ladder, come out of thy hold, Or Drakestail's days will soon be told.'
There, there you are.'
quack! he tears them to pieces; so much so that at the end of five minutes there was not one left alive.
'Tell him that it is I, and I have come he well knows why.'
Behold Drakestail much astonished, all alone in the big saloon and master of the field.
'Speak to the King!...
'Who is there?' asks the porter, putting his head out of the wicket.
Nevertheless, he remembered shortly what he had come for to the palace, and improving the occasion, he set to work to hunt for his dear money. But in vain he rummaged in all the drawers; he found nothing; all had been spent.
'I am going to the King for what he owes me.'
The porter descends.
'I am lost!' said Drakestail to himself, when by good luck he remembers his comrade friend Fox, and he cries:
The furnace was soon hot, but this time Drakestail was not so afraid; he counted on his sweetheart, my friend River.
Make him come in, and put him with the turkeys and chickens.'
'This way, this way,' says the porter.
He strikes with the knocker: 'Toc! toc!'
'Good!' says Drakestail to himself, 'I shall now see how they eat at court.'
She takes bag and baggage, and glou, glou, glou, she takes her place between friend Fox and my friend Ladder.
Make yourself quite small, go into my throat--get into my gizzard and I will carry you.'
Fancy how vexed Drakestail was!
'How? what?
'Bring him here, and I'll cut his throat! bring him here quick!' cried he.
''Tis I, Drakestail.
'Happy thought!' says friend Fox.
'Have the goodness to enter.'
And left file! he takes the same road to join the others with all his party.
'The brave Wasp's-nest rushes out with all his wasps.
He could not get over it.
'Reynard, Reynard, come out of your earth, Or Drakestail's life is of little worth.'
Then friend Fox, who was only waiting for these words, hastens out, throws himself on the wicked fowls, and quick!
'Oh! take me with thee!'
Drakestail said to himself, 'One can't have too many friends.'... 'I will,' says he, 'but with your battalion to drag along, you will soon be tired.
'What is it?
in the poultry yard?'
'River, River, outward flow, Or to death Drakestail must go.'
Thus he became King.
Drakestail said to himself: 'One can't have too many friends.' ... 'I will,' says he, 'but with your wooden legs you will soon be tired.
Drakestail, who was no longer surprised at anything, received the acclamations of the people as if he had never done anything else all his life.
'I am going to the King for what he owes me.'
'Oh! take me with thee!'
'And now,' said he after the ceremony, 'ladies and gentlemen, let's go to supper.
Make yourself quite small, get into my throat--go into my gizzard and I will carry you.'
'Wait!
There was not much more room, but by closing up a bit they managed....
'The King is dead, long live the King! Heaven has sent us down this thing.'
She wondered what her mother would say if she knew of her promise to Mrs. Carleton to take a message to Fort Sumter if Mrs. Carleton should ask her to do so.
"Mrs. Carleton and I will always remember your courage," he said, as he handed her the letter.
Then I will tell her, and you too."
"We will start early to-morrow morning.
He said that Ralph was in the Confederate army.
"Do you, Missy?
The sentries at the fort had watched the little craft with anxious eyes, wondering if it could be bringing any message.
Uncle Peter was not to be seen.
"Come 'long down in de garden," said Estralla, now as interested as Sylvia herself, "an' tells me more whar' nobody'll be hearin'," and the two little girls hurried off to a far corner of the pleasant garden.
"I'd be a soldier if I was only a little older," he declared; and Sylvia did not even ask him about Dinkie, or the ponies. She wished that she could tell him that very soon she was going to Boston, but she knew that she must not; so she said good-bye, and Philip walked down the path, and waved his cap to her as he reached the gate.
Sylvia was for a moment tempted to tell her friend that she would carry the message, but she kept silent, thinking to herself that here was another reason for her to carry out her plan.
The warm days of early March made the southern city full of fragrance and beauty.
But Mrs. Fulton shook her head.
You could rub soot from the chimney all over my face and hands.
Within the hour of their arrival Sylvia and Estralla were on their way home.
"I'll go and thank her myself," said Sylvia, taking the plate, and offering one of the cookies to Estralla.
Philip had not come into the house.
But she was finally convinced that Missy Sylvia could carry out the plan, and agreed to have a large quantity of soot ready at her mother's cabin the next morning.
And she thought, too, of the pleasure it would be to once more sail the Butterfly to Fort Sumter.
Sylvia knew that Mrs. Carleton was worried and unhappy.
It would give them all courage," said Mrs. Carleton.
And he was eager to hear all that she could tell him.
She sat down on the porch steps, and a moment later Estralla appeared bringing a plate of freshly baked sugar cookies from Aunt Connie.
Well, I reckons you can.
She is white."
"If you could send a message to Captain Carleton what would you say?" questioned Sylvia, and Mrs. Carleton smiled at Sylvia's serious voice.
Once or twice a guard-boat passed them closely enough to make sure that there were only two colored children in the boat, and they came up under the walls of Fort Sumter without a hindrance.
"That is great news," said the Captain; "if it is only true we may keep the fort for the Union."
Two or three men in uniform watched the little "darkies," as they supposed both the girls to be, with amusement.
If the men are hungry we could carry them something to eat.
Sylvia realized that this kind friend was troubled, and wished with all her heart that she could say: "To-morrow I will tell you all about Captain Carleton." But she knew that she must keep silent until she had carried out her plan.
He said that unless Major Anderson and his soldiers left Fort Sumter at once that all the forts, and the new batteries built by the Confederates, would open fire upon Sumter and destroy it.
"Perhaps she won't ask me.
But it happened that Uncle Peter had been sent on an errand to a distant part of the town, and before he returned the Butterfly was well down the harbor.
Now and then he appeared at Aunt Connie's kitchen, and one warm day toward the last of March, when Sylvia was wandering about the garden, she saw Uncle Peter going up the walk to the rear of the house.
It was still early in the forenoon when two little negro girls, one carrying a large package wrapped in a newspaper, appeared at the wharf where the Butterfly was moored.
Many flowers were in bloom, the hedges were green, and the air soft and warm.
It had been many weeks since the Butterfly had sailed about Charleston harbor.
"TWO LITTLE DARKY GIRLS"
Sylvia sprang to her feet so quickly that she nearly upset the plate of cookies.
Negro children were always playing about, and no attention was paid to them.
It was known in Charleston that Fort Sumter was near the end of its food supplies, and that unless the Government at Washington sent reinforcements and provisions very soon by ships that the little garrison would be at the mercy of the Confederates, who were daily growing in strength.
"But, Estralla, listen.
"Could we?
Some cookies and a cake," she said.
CHAPTER XX
But I reckon Uncle Pete won' let us.
I want to give it away, and I don't want to tell even my mother until--well," and Sylvia hesitated a moment, and then continued, "until next week.
"When will Mr. Lincoln be President?" Sylvia asked a few mornings after her father's announcement of his intention to return to Boston.
"I am so glad I thought about it; but it was really Estralla.
And, Estralla, we will have to tell Uncle Peter, or he won't let us have the boat."
"I am not going to land at the big wharves," said Sylvia.
"Captain Carleton must stay and perhaps fight to defend the flag," she replied.
"Why, if I could only let him know that I was safe and well and going to Boston with you, in case Sumter really is attacked; I know that is what he wants to hear."
"Dat's right, Missy.
"Missy wants a big pitcher of hot water," replied Estralla, dancing about just beyond Aunt Connie's reach.
"I wish we could leave at once, but we must stay as long as we can."
"Then can't Captain Carleton go north with us?" asked Sylvia, who had convinced herself that when Mr. Lincoln was in charge of the Government that all the troubles over Charleston's forts would end.
Sylvia and Grace often spoke of Flora, and wished that they could again visit the plantation.
The Captain had praised and thanked Sylvia for the loyal friendship that had prompted her visit.
She is so unhappy to go away without a word."
"You can write a letter to Mrs. Carleton and we will take it," suggested Sylvia, and then she told him Uncle Peter's news: that the President was sending ships to the aid of the fort.
Then the boat swung clear and headed toward Charleston.
"I'll come to your cabin and dress up there, and I will ask your mammy to give me some food for a poor man.
And I could pin my hair close on top of my head and twist one of your mammy's handkerchiefs tight over it.
"I wish I could have a sail in the Butterfly again," said Sylvia, a little wistfully.
Sylvia was the first one at the breakfast table the next morning, and was delighted when her mother said that she and Mrs. Carleton were invited to luncheon at the house of a friend.
She said if I was black we could come," Sylvia had replied.
Wait!" she called and ran to ask him about the boat.
"He was inaugurated yesterday," replied her mother.
In a moment Sylvia had unfastened the rope, pushed the boat clear of the landing, and rudder in hand was steering the boat out toward the channel.
But if I could go and see Captain Carleton, and tell him that she was going to Boston with us, and then bring her back a message, I know she'd be happier," thought the little girl.
Sylvia listened soberly.
"It's a secret, Aunt Connie!
Sylvia was glad that she had eaten only one of the cookies.
Then nobody would know me." Sylvia had quite forgotten the fine cookies.
Estralla held the cake and cookies, which she had carefully wrapped in a newspaper, and the Captain seemed as much pleased with the paper as with the cake.
She was holding Estralla by the arm, and talking very rapidly. Estralla was almost frightened at Sylvia's eagerness.
But the little boat was in the charge of an old negro who took good care of it.
She carried the remainder to her room and then went to the kitchen.
But most of all I want to see Captain Carleton, and get some message for his wife.
Philip had brought Sylvia a letter from Flora, thanking her for the locket, and hoping that they would see each other again.
But she made no reply, and soon hurried to the cabin where Estralla was waiting for her.
"I hears a good deal, Missy, 'deed I does," he declared, "but I doan' let on as I hears.
And then we'll tell Uncle Peter where the Butterfly is."
I could be black.
Affairs were about to be brought to a crisis, and as Link was the moving spirit in the matter, his vanity was sufficiently gratified as to make him quite amiable.
"Mr. Vrain!" he said, shrinking back, "Mr.
If he shows a light, we'll rush him before he can use a weapon or clear out.
"It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good."
A most satisfactory night for their purpose.
Yet when these things came to pass; when, by the discovery that Vrain yet lived, Lydia lost her liberty; and when, as connected with the conspiracy, she was arrested on a criminal warrant and put into prison, Diana was the only friend she had.
"Good-day," replied Lucian, and the pair parted for the time being.
At the same time such a lamp must require a relatively small amount of current, in order that comparatively small conductors could be used, and its burner must be capable of withstanding the necessarily high temperatures without disintegration.
For a short while the world outside of Menlo Park held Edison's claims in derision. His lamp was pronounced a fake, a myth, possibly a momentary success magnified to the dignity of a permanent device by an overenthusiastic inventor.
And although the Edison interests had spent from first to last nearly $2,000,000, and had only about three years left in the life of the fundamental patent, Edison was thoroughly sustained as to priority by the decisions in the various suits.
If the same wire be coiled in such a manner that but one-quarter of its surface radiates, its temperature will be increased four times with the same battery, or, one-quarter of this battery will bring it to the temperature of straight wire.
"Hence, in the case of incandescent conductors, if the radiating surface be twelve inches and the temperature on each inch be 100, or 1200 for all, if it is so coiled or arranged that there is but one-quarter, or three inches, of radiating surface, then the temperature on each inch will be 400.
The work of Edison on incandescent lamps did not stop at this fundamental invention, but extended through more than eighteen years of a most intense portion of his busy life.
ALTHOUGH Edison's contributions to human comfort and progress are extensive in number and extraordinarily vast and comprehensive in scope and variety, the universal verdict of the world points to his incandescent lamp and system of distribution of electrical current as the central and crowning achievements of his life up to this time.
If one square inch of platina be heated to 100 degrees it will fall to, say, zero in one second, whereas, if it was at 200 degrees it would require two seconds.
This view would seem entirely justifiable when we consider the wonderful changes in the conditions of modern life that have been brought about by the wide-spread employment of these inventions, and the gigantic industries that have grown up and been nourished by their world-wide application.
All of the technical, expert, and professional skill and knowledge that money could procure or experience devise were availed of in the bitter fights that raged in the courts for many years.
He KNEW that he had reached the goal.
"This was actually determined by trial.
Of course, when Light is radiated in great quantities not quite these temperatures would be reached.
Their efforts had been confined to low-resistance burners of large radiating surface for their lamps, but he realized the utter futility of such devices.
Although very many of these inventions were of the utmost importance and value, we cannot attempt to offer a detailed exposition of them in this necessarily brief article, but must refer the reader, if interested, to the patents themselves, a full list being given at the end of this Appendix.
He was the first to make a carbon of materials, and by a process which was especially designed to impart high specific resistance to it; the first to make a carbon in the special form for the special purpose of imparting to it high total resistance; and the first to combine such a burner with the necessary adjuncts of lamp construction to prevent its disintegration and give it sufficiently long life.
"A given straight wire having 1 ohm resistance and certain length is brought to a given degree of temperature by given battery.
We shall offer a few brief extracts from some of these decisions.
It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the invention of the slender thread of carbon as a substitute for the burners previously employed opened the path to the practical subdivision of the electric light."
The outline sketch will indicate the principal patents covering the basic features of the lamp.
"The amount of heat lost by a body is in proportion to the radiating surface of that body.
An appeal was taken in the above suit to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, and on October 4, 1892, the decree of the lower court was affirmed.
He was convinced from the first that the true solution of the problem lay in a lamp which should have as its illuminating body a strip of material which would offer such a resistance to the flow of electric current that it could be raised to a high temperature--incandescence--and be of such small cross-section that it would radiate but little heat.
THE INCANDESCENT LAMP
It is interesting to note that these conceptions were in Edison's mind at an early period of his investigations, when the best expert opinion was that the subdivision of the electric current was an ignis fatuus. Hence we quote the following notes he made, November 15, 1878, in one of the laboratory note-books:
Proceeding logically upon these lines of thought and following them out through many ramifications, we have seen how he at length made a filament of carbon of high resistance and small radiating surface, and through a concurrent investigation of the phenomena of high vacua and occluded gases was able to produce a true incandescent lamp.
To carry out this law to the best advantage in regard to platina, etc., then with a given length of wire to quadruple the heat we must lessen the radiating surface to one-quarter, and to do this in a spiral, three-quarters must be within the spiral and one-quarter outside for radiating; hence, a square wire or other means, such as a spiral within a spiral, must be used.
Impossibility of "sulphation." 8.
It should be noted that the layers of flake nickel extend practically unbroken across the tube and make contact with the metal wall at both sides.
"The principle on which the action of this new battery is based is the oxidation and reduction of metals in an electrolyte which does not combine with, and will not dissolve, either the metals or their oxides; and an electrolyte, furthermore, which, although decomposed by the action of the battery, is immediately re-formed in equal quantity; and therefore in effect is a CONSTANT element, not changing in density or in conductivity.
Experience has proven that this not only secures durability and greater output per unit-weight of battery, but in addition there is eliminated a long list of troubles and diseases inherent in the lead-acid combination....
6.
In conclusion, the article enumerates the chief characteristics of the Edison storage battery which fit it preeminently for transportation service, as follows: 1.
Thus, the positive plate becomes oxidized, and the negative plate reduced.
"The Edison invention involves the use of an entirely new voltaic combination in an alkaline electrolyte, in place of the lead-lead-peroxide combination and acid electrolyte, characteristic of all other commercial storage batteries.
"It will be seen at once that the construction of the two kinds of plate is radically different.
XVIII.
Simplicity of care required.
"The 'A' type Edison cell is the outcome of nine years of costly experimentation and persistent toil on the part of its inventor and his associates....
Again, the active materials of the electrodes being insoluble in, and absolutely unaffected by, the electrolyte, are not liable to any sort of chemical deterioration by action of the electrolyte--no matter how long continued....
This view, however, is not in accordance with facts.
The soundness of his reasoning is amply justified by the perfection of results obtained in the new type of storage battery bearing his name, and now to be described.
It is exactly like the primary battery in the fundamental circumstance that its ability for generating electric current depends upon chemical action.
On closing the circuit of a primary battery an electric current is generated by reason of the chemical action which is set up between the electrolyte and the elements. This involves a gradual consumption of one of the elements and a corresponding exhaustion of the active properties of the electrolyte.
Impossibility of "buckling" and harmlessness of a dead short-circuit.
No jar breakage.
Early in the eighties, at Menlo Park, he had given much thought to the lead type of storage battery, and during the course of three years had made a prodigious number of experiments in the direction of improving it, probably performing more experiments in that time than the aggregate of those of all other investigators.
"The electrolyte of the Edison battery is a 21 per cent. solution of potassium hydrate having, in addition, a small amount of lithium hydrate.
After the charging operation is concluded the battery is ready for use, and upon its circuit being closed through a translating device, such as a lamp or motor, a reversion ("discharge") takes place, the positive plate giving up its oxygen, and the negative plate being oxidized.
Each negative contains twenty-four pockets--a pocket being 1/2 inch wide by 3 inches long, and having a maximum thickness of a little more than 1/8 inch.
They are put together with a double-lapped spiral seam to give expansion-resisting qualities, and as an additional precaution small metal rings are slipped on the outside.
The essential technical details of this battery are fully described in an article written by one of Edison's laboratory staff, Walter E. Holland, who for many years has been closely identified with the inventor's work on this cell The article was published in the Electrical World, New York, April 28, 1910; and the following extracts therefrom will afford an intelligent comprehension of this invention:
He said that the intimate and continued companionship of an acid and a metal was unnatural, and incompatible with the idea of durability and simplicity.
In strict terminology it is a "reversible" battery, as will be quite obvious if we glance briefly at its philosophy.
Durability of materials and construction. 7.
I knew that he was ploughing up the steep hill and the horse was moving with effort, and from time to time the peasant's call "come up!" floated upwards to me.
And in fact I soon forgot Marey.
Nut sticks make such fine whips, but they do not last; while birch twigs are just the opposite.
I brooded over them for another minute.
The corners of my mouth were twitching, and I think that struck him particularly.
He stopped his horse on hearing my cry, and when, breathless, I caught with one hand at his plough and with the other at his sleeve, he saw how frightened I was.
But I was trembling all over, and still kept tight hold of his smock frock, and I must have been quite pale.
A political prisoner called M. met me; he looked at me gloomily, his eyes flashed and his lips quivered.
I was interested, too, in beetles and other insects; I used to collect them, some were very ornamental.
I suddenly roused myself and sat up on the platform-bed, and, I remember, found myself still smiling quietly at my memories.
I sauntered behind the prison barracks.
He looked at me with an uneasy smile, evidently anxious and troubled over me.
Was he, perhaps, very fond of little children?
"Nonsense, nonsense!
This was the second day of the "holidays" in the prison; the convicts were not taken out to work, there were numbers of men drunk, loud abuse and quarrelling was springing up continually in every corner.
And what made him like that?
These memories rose up of themselves, it was not often that of my own will I summoned them.
Of course any one would have reassured a child, but something quite different seemed to have happened in that solitary meeting; and if I had been his own son, he could not have looked at me with eyes shining with greater love.
There; come, come!"
For these two days of holiday all this had been torturing me till it made me ill.
There were not many mushrooms there.
"There is a wolf!" I cried, panting.
"Come, come, there; Christ be with you!
And indeed I could never endure without repulsion the noise and disorder of drunken people, and especially in this place.
But I did not cross myself.
He flung up his head, and could not help looking round for an instant, almost believing me.
He stretched out his hand, and all at once stroked my cheek.
"Where is the wolf?"
I was busy, too; I was breaking off switches from the nut trees to whip the frogs with.
A wolf?
I met M. again that evening.
You must see him walk!"
"And I," said Brian the Brave.
"And I," exclaimed Kenneth the Kind.
The king, our wise ruler, has sent us here to see your good child; for a good child is more precious than a kingdom.
The king's words were true; for when the king was an old, old man, Gauvain rode to his court and was knighted.
Even the creatures of the wood knew and loved him, for he never hurt anything that God had made.
The first knight was called Sir Brian the Brave.
So the knights followed him; and when they had reached the castle, Florimond ran to meet them.
"Oh! there is nothing he cannot do," cried the fat little man whose name was Puff.
"Greeting to you, fair sir," said the boy, looking up with eager eyes at the knight on his splendid horse, that stood so still when the knight bade it.
MOTTO FOR THE MOTHER
"And can you prove a trusty guide, little Gauvain, and lead me to a pleasant place where I may rest to-night?" asked the knight.
North, south, east, and west, they searched; and at last, one afternoon, they halted under an oak tree, to talk, and they decided to part company.
"Is that my sunbeam coming home to roost?" which made Gauvain and the knight both laugh.
The king's love is precious; but I love my child more than the whole world, and he is dearer to me than a thousand kingdoms."
"My trusty knights, I am growing old, and I long to see in my kingdom many knights like you to take care of my people; and so I will send you through all my kingdom to choose for me a little boy who may live at my court and learn from you those things which a knight must know.
He was a merry little fellow, with long fair curls and rosy cheeks; and when he saw the fine horses he clapped his hands with delight.
Now the knights were well pleased with the words of the king, and at the first peep of day they were ready for their journey, and rode down the king's highway with waving plumes and shining shields.
"Come, and I will carry you to the child!" And when the knights followed him, he led them to the home where little Gauvain was working with his mother, as happy as a lark and as gentle as a dove.
"You must hear him talk!
The parents' messages were so full of praises of their children that the knights scarcely knew where to go.
He thought beautiful thoughts, said beautiful words, and did beautiful deeds, for he kept his whole life as lovely as a garden full of flowers without a single weed.
"What is your name?" asked the knight.
On the second day, however, as they rode along, they met a company of men in very fine clothes, who bowed down before them; and while the knights drew rein in astonishment, a little man stepped in front of the others to speak to them.
The baron and baroness, too, were well pleased with their visitors, and made a feast in their honor; but early the next morning, the knights were startled by a most awful sound which seemed to come from the hall below.
"I do not know the child's name," continued Gerald the Glad; "but as I was riding in the forest I heard some one singing the merriest song!
The second knight was Gerald the Glad, who was so happy himself that he made everybody around him happy too; for his sweet smile and cheery words were so comforting that none could be sad or cross or angry when he was near.
Then the knights saw that they were not wanted, and they hurried upstairs to prepare for their journey.
Sir Kenneth the Kind was the third knight, and he won his name by his tender heart.
I tarried all night at her cottage, and she told me of his kindness."
And the king offers him his love and favor if you will let him ride with us to live at the king's court and learn to be a knight."
"I cannot spare my good child from my home.
"Greeting to you, little boy," said he.
Some of the parents said that their sons were beautiful; some said theirs were smart; but as the knights cared nothing for a child who was not good, they did not hurry to see these children.
A good child is worth more than a kingdom.
He had killed the great lion that came out of the forest to frighten the women and children, had slain a dragon, and had saved a princess from a burning castle; for he was afraid of nothing under the sun.
"And I," said Percival the Pure; and they looked at each other in astonishment.
Gauvain had a beautiful name of his own then, for he was called "Gauvain the Good"; and he was brave, happy, kind, pure, and true.
His mamma and papa were begging him to be quiet.
It sounded something like the howling of a dog; but as they listened, it grew louder and louder, until it sounded like the roaring of a lion.
"I saw a lad at the spring near by," said Percival the Pure.
Sir Tristram was so glad of this that he could scarcely wait for the time to come when he should meet his comrades under the oak tree.
When they came there the little dog ran out to meet them, and the cat rubbed up against Gauvain, and the mother called from the kitchen:--
"I rode by the highway," said Sir Brian the Brave, "and I came suddenly upon a crowd of great, rough fellows who were trying to torment a small black dog; and just as I saw them, a little boy ran up, as brave as a knight, and took the dog in his arms, and covered it with his coat.
Little Gauvain and his mother were greatly astonished.
The baron and baroness and fat little Puff all begged them to stay, and Florimond cried again when they left him; but the knights did not care to stay with a child who was not good.
All day and all night they rode, and it was the peep of day when they came to the king's highway.
Tristram the True was the last knight, and he was leader of them all.
Now little Gauvain wanted to help the good knight so much that he was sorry to say this; but Sir Tristram told him to run, and promised to wait patiently until his return; and before many moments Gauvain was back, bounding like a fawn through the wood, to lead the way to his own home.
"Greeting to you!
Only a good child can be chosen.
The rest ran away when I rode up; but the child stayed, and told me his name--Gauvain."
Then they rode slowly, for they were sad because of their news; but the king rejoiced when he heard it, for he said: "Such a child, with such a mother, will grow into a knight at home."
The fourth knight had a face as beautiful as his name, and he was called Percival the Pure.
I should like to find his home and see him there."
And when you have found him, bring him, if he will come willingly, to me, and I shall be happy in my old age."
He was a fat little man, with a fat little voice; and he told the knights that he had come to invite them to the castle of the Baron Borribald, whose son Florimond was the most wonderful child in the world.
"I have found a child whom you must see," he said, as soon as they came together.
The king of the country trusted these five knights; and one morning in the early spring-time he called them to him and said:--
But that they have not, for Heaven will not suffer so great a wrong to Earth, as it would be to pluck unripe the grapes of the fairest vineyard on its surface.
I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, whose calling it is to give aid to the needy of all sorts; and that being so, it is not necessary for you, senora, to make any appeal to benevolence, or deal in preambles, only to tell your woes plainly and straightforwardly: for you have hearers that will know how, if not to remedy them, to sympathise with them."
God bless me, how he hated them, that same apothecary! And so what I'm thinking is, if all duennas, of whatever sort or condition they may be, are plagues and busybodies, what must they be that are distressed, like this Countess Three-skirts or Three-tails!--for in my country skirts or tails, tails or skirts, it's all one."
"Hush, friend Sancho," said Don Quixote; "since this lady duenna comes in quest of me from such a distant land she cannot be one of those the apothecary meant; moreover this is a countess, and when countesses serve as duennas it is in the service of queens and empresses, for in their own houses they are mistresses paramount and have other duennas to wait on them."
Another time he sang:
"She died, no doubt," said Sancho.
On seeing this the duke, the duchess, and Don Quixote went some twelve paces forward to meet her.
"Sancho is right," said the duke; "we'll see what the countess is like, and by that measure the courtesy that is due to her."
Come Death, so subtly veiled that I Thy coming know not, how or when, Lest it should give me life again To find how sweet it is to die.
The duchess asked the duke if it would be proper to go out to receive her, as she was a countess and a person of rank.
Don Quixote and Sancho were overwhelmed with amazement, and the bystanders lost in astonishment, while the Trifaldi went on to say: "Thus did that malevolent villain Malambruno punish us, covering the tenderness and softness of our faces with these rough bristles!
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Then, it must not be supposed her intelligence was childish; she was as intelligent as she was fair, and she was fairer than all the world; and is so still, unless the envious fates and hard-hearted sisters three have cut for her the thread of life.
By my faith, if it were permitted me and time allowed, I could prove, not only to those here present, but to all the world, that there is no virtue that is not to be found in a duenna."
"In respect of her being a countess," said Sancho, before the duke could reply, "I am for your highnesses going out to receive her; but in respect of her being a duenna, it is my opinion you should not stir a step."
WHEREIN IS CONTINUED THE NOTABLE ADVENTURE OF THE DISTRESSED DUENNA
"I will," replied the countess.
They would have carried on this duenna dispute further had they not heard the notes of the fife and drums once more, from which they concluded that the Distressed Duenna was making her entrance.
To which Sancho replied, "Ever since I have sniffed the governorship I have got rid of the humours of a squire, and I don't care a wild fig for all the duennas in the world."
What father or mother will feel pity for her?
"For all that," said Sancho, "there's so much to be clipped about duennas, so my barber said, that 'it will be better not to stir the rice even though it sticks.'"
WHEREIN IS TOLD THE DISTRESSED DUENNA'S TALE OF HER MISFORTUNES
"Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for with a knight-errant, if he has but two fingers' breadth of good fortune, it is on the cards to become the mightiest lord on earth.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
But let senora the Distressed One proceed; for I suspect she has got yet to tell us the bitter part of this so far sweet story."
By every word that Sancho uttered, the duchess was as much delighted as Don Quixote was driven to desperation.
No, no, not that; marriage must come first in any business of this sort that I take in hand.
Governors, police officials, tax collectors often have compassion on the people and try to find pretexts for not collecting the tax from them.
The best men of our day are all striving for such places of honor. Consequently the class from which the wealthy and the government officials are drawn grows less in number and lower in intelligence and education, and still more in moral qualities.
For it may come any time, in such an hour as ye think not.
It might do you good"; and turning round he continued his discourse.
The most delicate and moral people (they are generally also the most cultivated) avoid such positions and prefer more humble callings that are not dependent on the use of force.
All those things are the work of men.
It is just so with the present order of society, based on force.
And to him came two tailors, who promised to make him some extraordinary clothes.
The external aspect is unchanged.
It is just the same with the army.
The same priests and archbishops and churches and synods, but it becomes more and more evident that they have long ago ceased to believe in what they preach, and therefore they can convince no one of the necessity of believing what they don't believe themselves.
And what is the use of tax collectors who collect the taxes unwillingly, when it is easy to raise all that is wanted without them?
Jailers and overseers of galleys generally become the champions of those whom they ought to torture.
The learned jurists whose business it is to justify the violence of authority, are more and more disposed to deny the right of punishment and to replace it by theories of irresponsibility and even of moral insanity, proposing to deal with those they call criminals by medical treatment only.
The prosecutors themselves often refuse to proceed, and even when they do proceed, often in spite of the law, really defend those they ought to be accusing.
The position of Christian humanity with its prisons, galleys, gibbets, its factories and accumulation of capital, its taxes, churches, gin-palaces, licensed brothels, its ever-increasing armament and its millions of brutalized men, ready, like chained dogs, to attack anyone against whom their master incites them, would be terrible indeed if it were the product of violence, but it is pre-eminently the product of public opinion.
And what good to us are these armies with their generals and bands and horses and drums?
But even before those who support these institutions decide to abolish them, the men who occupy these positions will be reduced to the necessity of throwing them up.
The same rich men, but it becomes more and more evident that they can only be of use by ceasing to administer their property in person and giving up to society the whole or at least a part of their wealth.
All we can know is what we who make up mankind ought to do, and not to do, to bring about the coming of the kingdom of God.
The day of the procession comes in which the emperor is to go out in his new clothes.
And because the people they hinder turn to them and request them not to interfere, they fancy they are very useful indeed.
That is just what should be done in all cases of violence.
Mrs. Fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why Mrs. Heeny had found her lacking in conversation.
She took particular pains to give Undine her due part in the performance; but the girl's expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust, and to-night the latter prevailed.
With all the hints in the Sunday papers, she thought it dull of Mrs. Fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn't a real "dinner party," and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone.
He was going to "escort" her home, of course!
"He's doing everybody this year, you know--"
"--to see me some afternoon," Mrs. Van Degen ended, going down the steps to her motor, at the door of which a much-furred footman waited with more furs on his arm.
But it was no use to wish.
How they wished that they had never teased her, never said sharp words about her to each other!
Katy studied his face anxiously.
Poor Debby!
And Mrs. Jackson's boy came for him before we were through."
And if to hurt the back make you study, it would be well that some other of my young ladies shall do the same."
Where all the things to eat are gone to, I can't imagine!"
I've been thinking about it all day.
The three girls didn't know much about sickness, but Papa's grave face, and the hushed house, weighed upon their spirits, and they missed the children very much.
"Why, how did you suppose we were going to arrange it?
So the arrangement was made.
Dorry declared he wished there could be a Valentine's-Day every week.
"Oh, Papa!" cried Katy, in dismay, "must we have anybody?"
Katy felt the heat very much.
"Oh dear!" sighed Elsie.
And after school, Elsie and John brought in their patchwork, and we had a 'Bee.' That's all."
Miss Carr never gave me no shell-outs at all at all!"
Clover reported that he looked very tired and scarcely said a word.
Her worrying ways were all forgotten now.
"No, Miss Katy, I never heard tell of it before.
Katy was too much in earnest not to improve.
"I studied my French lesson this morning.
I have told her that she had better lie still, and not try to get up this evening.
She would stand by the door with her pleasant red face drawn up into a pucker, while Katy read aloud some impossible-sounding rule.
"We all want her," said Dr. Carr, who looked disturbed and anxious.
But as months go on, and everything grows an old story, and one day follows another day, all just alike and all tiresome, courage is apt to flag and spirits to grow dull.
After a while Katy grew wiser.
Month by month she learned how to manage a little better, and a little better still.
For the first time, the three girls, sobbing in each other's arms, realized what a good friend Aunt Izzie had been to them.
She also fidgeted the children about wearing india-rubbers, and keeping on their coats, and behaved altogether as if the cares of the world were on her shoulders.
It seemed to her that it had grown older of late, and there was a sad look upon it, which made her heart ache.
Dorry, who was a sort of Dr. Livingstone where strange articles of food were concerned, usually made the first experiment, and if he said that it was good, the rest followed suit.
She has some fever and a bad pain in her head.
And I shall pick up the croquet-balls and put them in the box every night."
It wasn't much, to be sure, but I think Papa liked it.
And beside, she is at school all day."
But so many idle weeks made it seem harder work than ever.
For several days she saw almost nothing of her father.
"We'll be real good to her when she does, won't we?" said Clover.
Oh, and ask Debby to make some cream-toast for tea!
"Oh, nothing, much," said Katy.
"Please, Miss Katy, what's them?"
Do let me try!
At the end of a month Katy was eager to go on. So he said,
Dinner-time became quite exciting, when nobody could tell exactly what any dish on the table was made of.
It must be something quite common, for it's in almost all the recipes."
But she bore her trials meekly, except for an occasional grumble when alone with Bridget.
As soon as breakfast was over, and the dishes were washed and put away, Debby would tie on a clean apron, and come up stairs for orders.
"Did Papa eat any dinner?" asked Katy, one afternoon.
No, I'll tell you my plan.
It is often so with sick people.
"My dear, you are overdoing it sadly," he said, as Katy opened her book and prepared to explain her views; "I am glad to have the children eat simple food--but really, boiled rice five times in a week is too much."
Perhaps if you look in her room you'll find it."
Blessings brighten as they take their flight.
Dr. Carr had to eat a great many queer things in those days.
But Katy's long year of schooling had taught her self-control, and, as a general thing, her discomforts were borne patiently.
Little people are apt to feel as if grown folks are so strong and so big, that nothing can possibly happen to them.
Katy laughed.
Her cares ceased to fret her.
She could not help growing pale and thin however, and Papa saw with concern that, as the summer went on, she became too languid to read, or study, or sew, and just sat hour after hour, with folded hands, gazing wistfully out of the window.
Katy had plenty of quiet thinking-time for one thing.
After a while she collected her books again, and tried to study as Cousin Helen had advised.
"Ah! my dear Lovell, is that you?
"Because there's some one here who very much wishes to see you; quite an old friend of yours, he says.
He spread the chamois leather out upon the table, and cut the skins into two long strips, about a foot broad.
"I shan't be able to see Lord Herriston to-night," Mr. Dunbar said, hurriedly; "I must go by this train, or I shall lose a day.
I can't see any one, Lovell.
The train was moving.
"Here, in the station--in the waiting-room.
"I don't know, I can't guess--I've so many old friends.
"I could do that," answered the banker; "it's only three o'clock.
"I didn't succeed in getting a glimpse of my old friend Henry Dunbar."
"Yes, sir."
Then he put the chamois-leather belt under his pillow, and went to bed.
But not towards the church.
He had fires in his bedroom and dressing-room every night.
Good-bye, Lovell.
"Yes, I shall be very glad; I----"
Round his waist he wore the chamois-leather belt which he had made with his own hands at the Clarendon Hotel.
Nothing could have better pleased the new inhabitant of Woodbine Cottage, who was speedily on excellent terms with his housekeeper.
Henry Dunbar looked at his watch, and seemed to reflect upon this question some moments before he answered.
Make my best compliments to Herriston; tell him I have been very ill.
"No, my Lord.
I was so anxious to see you."
A thrill of rapture ran through the banker's veins as he plunged his fingers in amongst the glittering stones.
You'll see him, wont you?"
"You're a clever fellow, dear friend," he muttered, as he lighted his cigar; "you're a stupendous fellow, dear boy; but your friend can see through less transparent blinds than this diamond business.
Every one of these canvas-bags was full of loose diamonds.
The Major looked at him sharply.
Dunbar!"
You'll have time to speak to him."
"I shall start for Paris to-night, Jeffreys," he said to this man.
"It's comfortable!" he exclaimed; "to say the least of it, it's very comfortable, dear boy!"
This work took him so long, that it was four o'clock in the morning when he had quilted the last diamond into the belt.
"Good morning."
He did not go straight back to the Clarendon, but pierced his way across Smithfield, and into a busy smoky street, where he stopped by-and-by at a dingy-looking currier's shop.
Major Vernon was not going to church on this bright winter's morning.
At the moment of his doing so, an elderly gentleman came out of the waiting-room.
This little conversation between the new tenant of Woodbine Cottage and his housekeeper occurred on the very evening on which Major Vernon took possession of his new abode.
Henry Dunbar walked slowly up and down the platform.
You'll come and see him?"
Almost immediately after Major Vernon's departure, Henry Dunbar rang the bell for the servant who acted as his valet whenever he required the services of one, which was not often.
You quite startled me."
"Why so?"
He ran along the platform, looking into the carriages.
"Is this my train, Lovell?" he asked.
To-night he retired very early, dismissed the servant who attended upon him, and locked the door of the outer room, the only door communicating with the corridor of the hotel.
Henry Dunbar smiled to himself as his friend said this.
The deed which transferred to him the possession of Woodbine Cottage was speedily executed, and he took up his abode there.
Good-bye."
But when the jeweller's agent came, two or three days afterwards, Mr. Dunbar could find no design that suited him; and the man returned to London without having received an order, and without having even seen the brilliants which the banker had bought.
But he was not going to write; he pushed aside the writing-materials, and took his purchases of the afternoon from his pocket.
Henry Dunbar was not alone.
If not, I shall take the diamonds to Paris, and get them made up there."
What's a thousand or so, more or less, to the senior partner in the house of D., D., and B.?
"Lord Herriston, the great Anglo-Indian statesman.
He did not leave Maudesley Abbey until he had succeeded in the object of his visit, and he carried away in his pocket-book cheques to the amount of two thousand five hundred pounds.
He means a bolt; and the money I've had to-day is the last I shall ever receive from that quarter."
"You may bring up some fresh coffee, John; for I haven't made much of a breakfast myself; and if you'll tell the cook to devil the thigh of a turkey, with plenty of cayenne-pepper and a squeeze of lemon, I shall be obliged.
"Yes!
There were lamps here and there, but they only made separate splotches of light in the dusky atmosphere.
I am leasehold proprietor of Woodbine Cottage, near Lisford and Shorncliffe."
He talked a great deal about you, when my father told him that you'd settled at Maudesley, and would have driven over to see you if he could have managed to spare the time, without losing his train.
Henry Dunbar got into the carriage.
The train came into the station at this moment.
When he had completed the two sides and the end that was closed, he took four or five little canvas-bags from his pocket.
"Your sentiments are liberality itself, my dear friend.
He went in by the low iron gate, for there was a bridle-path by this part of the park--that very bridle-path by which Philip Jocelyn had ridden to Lisford so often in the autumn weather.
He went in and selected a couple of chamois skins, very thick and strong.
Major Vernon had returned to the Rose and Crown at Lisford.
"My eyes are not what they used to be," he said, with a good-tempered laugh, when he went back to Arthur Lovell.
He measured these round his waist, and then began to stitch them together, slowly and laboriously.
He went the other way, tramping through the snow, towards the eastern gate of Maudesley Park.
He is a friend of my father's, and he has been very kind to me--indeed, he offered me an appointment, which I found it wisest to decline.
He gave a long sigh of relief as he threw the waste scraps of leather upon the top of the low fire, and watched them slowly smoulder away into black ashes.
But the old man's sight was not as good as his legs were; he looked eagerly into the carriage-windows, but he only saw a confusion of flickering lamplight, and strange faces, and newspapers unfurled in the hands of wakeful travellers, and the heads of sleepy passengers rolling and jolting against the padded sides of the carriage.
The next day was Sunday--a cold wintry Sunday; for the snow had been falling all through the last three days and nights, and lay deep on the ground, hiding the low thatched roofs, and making feathery festoons about the leafless branches, until Lisford looked like a village upon the top of a twelfth-cake.
Mr. Dunbar is here; he goes by this train.
He wore the chamois-leather belt buckled tightly round his waist next to his inner shirt, and was able to defy the swell-mob, had those gentry been aware of the treasures which he carried about with him.
Who do you think it is?"
"Where is he?"
Cold meats, raised pies, and other comestibles were laid out upon the carved-oak sideboard.
From his new abode Mr. Vernon was able to keep a tolerably sharp look-out upon the two great houses in his neighbourhood--Maudesley Abbey and Jocelyn's Rock.
GOING AWAY.
"Mr. Dunbar," he said; "Mr.
You need'nt trouble yourself; I know my way."
But I must respectfully remind you that the expenses attendant upon taking possession of my humble abode have been very heavy.
Who is it that wants to see me?"
"Tell your employer that I will retain two or three of these designs," Mr. Dunbar said, selecting the drawings as he spoke; "and if, upon consideration, I find that one of them will suit me, I will communicate with your establishment.
"You're welcome to do so," he said, "as far as I am concerned."
Make it two five, Prince of Maudesley!"
He filled his hands with the bright gems, and let them run from one hand to the other, like streams of liquid light.
Then, very slowly and carefully, he began to drop the diamonds into the open end of the chamois-leather belt.
The banker turned sharply round, and recognized Arthur Lovell.
Although it was not yet five o'clock, the wintry light was fading in the grey sky, and in the railway station it was already dark.
At one o'clock on the appointed Thursday morning, Mr. Dunbar presented himself in the diamond-merchant's office.
Henry Dunbar stopped suddenly, with his hand upon his side.
When he had dropped a few into the belt, he stitched the leather across and across, quilting-in the stones.
The dear boy did not look particularly pleased as he lifted his eyes to his visitor's face.
Ghosts.
He went to him.
The splendor was within.
You will find him quite enthusiastic."
"That tells me their name, and nothing else."
Who?"
"I mean, because he wants petting.
At precisely six o'clock the clatter of horses' hoofs was heard at the entrance door; it was our captain of Spahis, who had arrived on Medeah.
It is the work of another age, constructed by the genii of earth and water."
Certainly not," replied the count.
"That can only be to hold gloves," he said.
The count understood him.
"Have they any fortune?"
"He laid a wager he would tame Medeah in the space of six months.
You are in a shocking hurry to be off--you forget one of my guests.
The carriage drove round, and stopped at the steps, followed by the horsemen.
"Try to spend it all.
"Yes; it was proposed for the Museum."
"You see my position, madame," said Morrel, bestowing a grateful smile on Monte Cristo.
Before this room, to which you could ascend by the grand, and go out by the back staircase, the servants passed with curiosity, and Bertuccio with terror.
"You heard--Cavalcanti."
Ah, really this is magnificent!
That gentleman appears to be well dressed for the first time in his life."
"See, they are here." And at the same minute a carriage with smoking horses, accompanied by two mounted gentlemen, arrived at the gate, which opened before them.
More likely he has been speculating on the Bourse, and has lost money."
"Who are those gentlemen?" asked Danglars of Monte Cristo.
A black satin stock, fresh from the maker's hands, gray moustaches, a bold eye, a major's uniform, ornamented with three medals and five crosses--in fact, the thorough bearing of an old soldier--such was the appearance of Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, that tender father with whom we are already acquainted.
"Stop!
"Which?"
After his wife the banker descended, as pale as though he had issued from his tomb instead of his carriage.
The baroness was astonished. "Why," said she, "you could plant one of the chestnut-trees in the Tuileries inside!
Five minutes afterwards the doors of the drawing-room were thrown open, and Bertuccio appearing said, with a violent effort, "The dinner waits."
"What is the matter?" said the count.
"Cavalcanti!" said Debray.
Divers descended in machines, made expressly on the discovery, into the bay where they were thrown; but of ten three only remained, the rest having been broken by the waves.
"Yes," said Chateau-Renaud, "these Italians are well named and badly dressed."
"Yes."
"A fine idea that of his," said Danglars, shrugging his shoulders. Madame Danglars looked at her husband with an expression which, at any other time, would have indicated a storm, but for the second time she controlled herself.
On the other side of the house, to match with the library, was the conservatory, ornamented with rare flowers, that bloomed in china jars; and in the midst of the greenhouse, marvellous alike to sight and smell, was a billiard-table which looked as if it had been abandoned during the past hour by players who had left the balls on the cloth.
"No; you see plainly he is not dead.
"Good heavens!" he exclaimed.
The library was divided into two parts on either side of the wall, and contained upwards of two thousand volumes; one division was entirely devoted to novels, and even the volume which had been published but the day before was to be seen in its place in all the dignity of its red and gold binding.
"The woman of the garden!--she that was enciente--she who was walking while she waited for"--Bertuccio stood at the open door, with his eyes starting and his hair on end.
"I?
"What do they do?"
I will introduce you to them."
Julie and Emmanuel have a thousand things to tell you.
Monte Cristo descended into the courtyard, walked all over the house, without giving any sign of approbation or pleasure, until he entered his bedroom, situated on the opposite side to the closed room; then he approached a little piece of furniture, made of rosewood, which he had noticed at a previous visit.
After a short time, the count saw Bertuccio, who, until then, had been occupied on the other side of the house, glide into an adjoining room.
"But they appear to speak French with a very pure accent," said Danglars.
"Stay," said Debray; "I recognize this Hobbema."
"Eight!" repeated Bertuccio.
Chapter 62.
"You are fastidious, Chateau-Renaud," replied Debray; "those clothes are well cut and quite new."
"An enormous one."
The count watched him.
"I think not," replied Chateau-Renaud.
"Ah, true."
Indeed, almost before the door opened, the scene changed.
"Your excellency has not stated the number of guests."
He offered his hand to the baroness, who, descending, took it with a peculiarity of manner imperceptible to every one but Monte Cristo.
"That woman--that woman!"
"No; and yet they refused to buy it."
"How so?--at what period can that have been?"
"Which, I believe, does not contain one?" said Monte Cristo.
They have some business with you, I think, from what they told me the day before yesterday.
Lean a little to the left.
"I do not know; I have only heard that an emperor of China had an oven built expressly, and that in this oven twelve jars like this were successively baked.
"How many covers?"
The three young people were talking together.
"Then they follow you?" asked Monte Cristo.
Bertuccio glanced through the door, which was ajar.
He translated into superb orchestral pages the dreams of the human heart, the soul's longing for liberty and all the holiest aspirations of the inner being.
The prelude developed into the operatic overture whose business it became to prepare the spectator for what followed.
Ultra romanticism was foreign to the nature and repulsive to the tastes of the refined, elegant Mendelssohn, yet in spite of himself its influence crept gently into his polished works.
The first composer to convey a message from the North in tones to the European world was Gade, the Dane, known as the Symphony Master of the North, who was born in 1817 and died in 1890.
One Titanic spirit, Johannes Brahms, (1833-1897) who succeeded in striking the dominant note of musical sublimity amid modern unrest, is reserved for our final consideration.
Grace and spirit, originality of invention, joyous abandon, a fancy controlled by a studious mind, a profusion of quaint humor and a proper division of light and shade, combine to give the dominant note to his music.
Time vastly increased its importance.
Camille Saint-Saens, without doubt the most original and intellectual modern French composer, who at sixty-seven years of age is still in the midst of his activity, and who has made his own the spirit of the classic composers, owes to the symphonic poem a great part of his reputation, and has also written symphonies of great value.
Symphony and Symphonic Poem
Wonderful is the power of instrumental music, absolute music without words, that may convey impressions, deep and lasting, no words could give.
The crowning glory of his graceful perfection of outline and detail is the noble spirit of serenity which illumines all its beauty.
Absolute music was set once for all on the right path by them.
By means of a generous employment of free counterpoint, in other words a kind of polyphony in which the various voices use different melodies in harmonious combination, he gained a potent auxiliary in his cunning workmanship, and emphasized the folly of rejecting the contrapuntal experiences, of, for instance, a Sebastian Bach. Musical instruments, as well as musical materials, were his servants in developing the glowing fancies of his marvelously constructive brain.
He lived from 1803 to 1869, and because of his audacity in using new and startling tonal effects was called the most flagrant musical heretic of the nineteenth century.
XII
This brings us to Hector Berlioz, the famous French symphonist, the exponent par excellence of programme music, that is, music intended to illustrate a special story.
From programme music came the symphonic poem of which Franz Liszt was the creator.
His four famous symphonic works are: "Fantastic Symphony," "Grand Funeral and Triumphal Symphony," "Harold in Italy" and "Romeo and Juliet." In a preface to the first he thus explains his ideas: "The plan of a musical drama without words, requires to be explained beforehand.
Dr. Riemann writes of him, "From Bach he inherited the depth, from Haydn, the humor, from Mozart, the charm, from Beethoven, the strength, from Schubert, the intimateness of his art.
Twenty-six years younger than Beethoven Schubert lived but a year after he had passed away and died in 1828, two years later than Weber, and felt the glow of the spirit of romanticism.
That adventurous spirit, Claudio Monteverde, who nearly three hundred years ago made himself responsible for the first feeble utterances of an orchestra that tried to say something for itself, divined the possibilities of expression in varying combinations of tone-quality and gave vigorous impulse to the germ of the symphony already existing in the formless instrumental preludes and interludes of his predecessors among opera-makers.
It ceased to be a mere grouping of dances, the name suite being applied to that, and struck out into independent excursions in the domain of fancy.
A strong national flavor is also felt in the work of Christian Sinding, the Norwegian, whose D minor symphony has been styled "a piece born of the gloomy romanticism of the North." Edward Grieg, known as the incarnation of the strong, vigorous, breezy spirit of the land of the midnight sun, has put some of his most characteristic work into symphonic poems and orchestral suites.
From the perennial fount of song within his breast there streamed fresh melodious strains through his symphonies, the ninth and last of which, the C major, ranks him with the great symphonists.
His profoundly poetic musical nature, with its high capacity for joy and sorrow and infinite longing, was reflected in all that he wrote.
A German critic has jocosely remarked that the early writers meant the sonata to show first what they could do, second what they could feel, and third how glad they were to have finished.
It is impossible to mention in a brief essay all the great workers in symphonic forms.
Two subjects, a melody in the tonic, another usually in the dominant, came to set forth the exposition of the opening movement, leading to a free development, with various episodes, and an assured return to the original statement.
He was the first to impress on the world the idea of music as a definite language. His recurrent themes, called "fixed ideas," prefigured Wagner's "leading motives." His skill in combining instruments added new lustre to orchestration.
His symphonies recall the fairy tale, with its sparkling "once upon a time," and yet like it are not without their mysterious shadows.
That unity of purpose was essential to the effectiveness of the diversity was instinctively discerned.
He discussed in tones problems of man's life and destiny, ever displaying sublime faith that Fate, however cruel, is powerless to crush the spiritual being, the real individuality.
The programme (which is indispensable to the perfect comprehension of the work) ought therefore to be considered in the light of the spoken text of an opera, serving to lead up to the piece of music, and indicate the character and expression."
His conflicts never fail to end in triumph.
The prevailing melody of its monophonic style proved suitable to furnish a subject for the most animated discussion.
Beethoven further advanced the technique of the symphony, and proved its power to "strike fire from the soul of man." Varying his themes while repeating them, adding spice to his episodes and working out his entire scheme with consummate skill, he was able to construct from a motive of a few notes a mighty epic tone-poem.
Their individual characteristics afforded him continually new suggestions in regard to tone-coloring, and he rose often to audacity, for his time, in his harmonic devices.
His thirty years of musical service to the house of Esterhazy, with an orchestra increasing from 16 to 24 pieces to experiment on, as the solo virtuoso experiments on piano or violin, brought him wholly under the spell of the instruments.
These compositions were usually written for the harpsichord and perhaps three instruments of the viol order, the master himself playing the leading melody on the violin.
With Mozart, whose life-work began after, but ended before that of Haydn, influencing and being influenced by the latter, the symphony broadened in scope and grew richer in warmth of melodious expression, definiteness of plan and completeness of form.
His orchestration is distinguished by its clarity, power and exquisite coloring.
Truly a wonderfully gifted nature that was able to absorb such a fulness of great gifts and still not lose the best of gifts--the strong individuality which makes the master."
As the vocal aria was the result of the simple folk-song combined with the intense craving of song's master molders for individual expression, so instrumental music striving to walk alone, without support from words, gained vital elements through the discovery that various phases of mental disposition might be indicated by alternating dance tunes differing in rhythm and movement, according to Nature's own law of contrasts.
I mean it intensely--with all my soul.
"Of course," said Wilson.
"I didn't mean that.
Through sheer repetition, Paul began almost to believe in it.
"What about your own past life?
The spectre of the prison had risen up against him.
My love to them both."
"It's hateful," said he, "to think I may win the election on account of this.
"None of our people would resort to a dirty trick like that."
"Certainly not," said the agent, fervently.
But we want to make sure.
If it weren't, do you think I would not let you win?"
There's a chap in the old French play--what's his name?"
He rang off.
Paul could not plead.
It was but the final artistic touch to this comedy of mockery of which he had been the victim....
Almost immediately Wilson was announced.
It's tragic.
If he could have met enthusiasm with enthusiasm, all would have been well.
"But while I'm candidate everything I say I mean.
"No, no," came the voice, now curiously tearful.
He was a chubby little man of forty, with coarse black hair and scrubby moustache, not of the type that readily appreciates the delicacies of a situation.
Not a little tuppenny damn. What the devil does it matter to me whether I get into Parliament or not?
He went about the constituency an anxious, haggard man, working himself to death without being able to awaken a spark of emotion in the heart of anybody.
It was final, as far as he was concerned.
"Then if God supported it, it wouldn't be common sense on His part.
"And Barney Bill?"
"You were right about the divine common-sensicality," said he.
As in his first speech, so in his campaign, he failed.
Whereupon Paul conceived a sudden hatred for the car.
"That's rot," said Paul.
Paul addressed his last meeting on the eve of the poll.
An ex-convict--it's enough to damn any candidate.
"He upbraids me bitterly for what I have said."
"They want stirring up a bit," said the Conservative agent despondently.
"It's the difference between dirt and cleanliness," said Paul. "Besides, as I told you at the outset, Mr. Finn and I are close personal friends, and I have the highest regard for his character.
It would have been a counter-blaze to that lit by his opponent, which flamed in all the effulgence of a reckless reformer's promise, revealing a Utopia in which there would be no drunkenness, no crime, no poverty, and in which the rich, apparently, would have to work very hard in order to support the poor in comfortable idleness.
He thanked them simply.
"That's the advantage of a belief in the Almighty's personal interest," he answered, with a touch of irony: "whatever happens, one is not easily disillusioned."
"A young lady?"
But before he arrived at the door leading from the public offices to the back of the house, he was stopped by a gentlemanly-looking man, who came forward from a desk in some shadowy region, and intercepted the stranger.
I am quite content to be a sleeping-partner in the house of Dunbar, Dunbar, and Balderby.
There was a stoppage upon Ludgate Hill.
He rarely, spent as much as that; sometimes he spent less than half.
There was no anger, no impatience in the banker's voice now, but a tone of deep feeling.
Henry Dunbar looked at the deposit account.
"She is not in distress, Mr. Dunbar," interrupted Clement Austin.
"It's rather a large amount of capital to withdraw from the business," he said, rubbing his chin, thoughtfully.
He was looking round the room, and remembering the day upon which he had last seen it.
Between the end of the passage and the outer doors of the bank, Henry Dunbar saw the figure of a woman sitting near one of the desks and talking to Clement Austin.
It is taken as a strong proof of a man's innocence that he should look you full in the face with a steadfast gaze when you look at him with suspicion plainly visible in your eyes; but would he not be the poorest villain if he shirked that encounter of glances when he knows full surely that he is in that moment put to the test?
"I suppose the bank can afford it!" Mr. Dunbar exclaimed, with a tone of surprise.
But as Mr. Dunbar went towards the familiar parlour at the back of the banking-house, he stopped for a minute, and looked at the cashier.
Now that the meeting had come to pass, he looked at Henry Dunbar with an earnest, scrutinizing gaze, as if he would fain have discovered the secret of the man's guilt or innocence in his countenance.
Most of the remainder is floating in Exchequer bills."
I am a rich man, but I don't exactly know how rich I am, and I want to realize rather a large sum of money."
"Yes, sir."
"You have no need to be surprised that I shrink from seeing Margaret Wilmot," he said.
You will hold yourself ready after Wednesday, we'll say, to cash some very heavy cheques on my account?"
The Exchequer bills shall be realized immediately."
There was very little heartiness in the tone of this invitation; and Mr. Balderby perfectly understood that it was only a formula which Mr. Dunbar felt himself called upon to go through.
It was not till seven o'clock, when the liveried servant who waited upon him came to inform him that his dinner was served in an adjoining chamber, that Mr. Dunbar rose from his seat and put away the book in the despatch-box.
He had drawn his chair close to the fire, and on a table near his elbow were arranged the open despatch-box, a tall crystal jug of Burgundy, with a goblet-shaped glass, on a salver, and a case of cigars.
He looked Henry Dunbar full in the face as he spoke.
"There's fifty thousand in India stock," Mr. Balderby answered, as indifferently as if fifty thousand pounds more or less was scarcely worth speaking of; "and there's five-and-twenty in railway debentures, Great Western.
The cashier closed the parlour-door and returned to his desk in the public office.
Mr. Balderby bowed, but his eyebrows went up a little, as if he found it impossible to control some slight evidence of his surprise.
"No; it is seldom locked till four o'clock; the clerks use it sometimes, when they go in and out."
That's not very business-like, is it, Mr. Austin?
There was something very straightforward, very simple, in all this.
"All I want is a large sum of money at my command.
The business had gone on without him very well during his absence, and it went on without him now, for his place in India had been assumed by a very clever man, who for twenty years had acted as cashier in the Calcutta house.
Dark thoughts came back upon his mind, and the shadows deepened on his face as he gave one rapid glance round the familiar office.
This passage was very dark; but the offices were well lighted by lofty plate-glass windows.
You understand?"
"He did."
I have not yet recovered from the shock of that horrible business at Winchester.
The income which Mr. Percival Dunbar set aside for his own use was seven thousand a year.
For a time, at least, Clement Austin's mind wavered.
Henry Dunbar did not return his partner's greeting.
I am an old man, and I have been thirty-five years in India.
"What brings her here?"
While the banker loitered near the window, Clement Austin came into the room, to show some document to the junior partner.
"Yes.
"You are very punctual, Mr. Dunbar," he said.
I shall buy the diamonds myself, direct from the merchant-importers.
"Then I think that is really all I have to say.
"I am."
I am not a demonstrative man, and I have never made any great fuss about my love for my daughter; but I do love her, nevertheless."
The twopence seemed a ridiculous anti-climax; but business-men are necessarily as exact in figures as calculating-machines.
He looked about him a little absently as he re-entered the room.
The balance of this income, and his double share in the profits of the business, went to the credit of his deposit account, and various sums have been withdrawn from time to time, and duly invested under his order."
Five minutes afterwards Mr. Dunbar rose to leave the room.
"The daughter of that unfortunate man, Joseph Wilmot, who was cruelly murdered at Winchester!" answered the cashier, very gravely.
He still lingered in the parlour, putting on his gloves very slowly, and looking out of the window into the dismal backyard, where there was a dingy little wooden door set deep in the stone wall.
"Then I shall go out that way," said Mr. Dunbar, who was almost breathless in his haste.
"It may seem late in the day to bid you welcome to the bank, Mr. Dunbar," said the junior partner, "but I do so, nevertheless--most heartily!"
"I did, in concurrence with Mr. Lovell."
"I received your letter announcing your journey to London, and your desire for a private interview, on Saturday afternoon," Mr. Balderby said, after a pause.
However, the capital is yours, Mr. Dunbar; and you've a right to dispose of it as you please.
"Yes, there is a door, I believe."
"Is it locked?"
Mr. Balderby winced as if some one had trodden upon one of his corns.
"And those two accounts have gone on since my return in the same manner as during his lifetime?"
This young person can have no possible motive for wishing to see me.
Mr. Balderby opened both ledgers, and placed them before his senior partner.
"Most certainly."
"She is a young lady, sir."
There was a black fog upon this November day, and the atmosphere out of doors was cold and bleak.
He was very pale as he rode citywards, in the comfortable brougham, from the Clarendon; and his face had a stern, fixed look, like a man who has nerved himself to meet some crisis, which he knows is near at hand.
His eyes ran eagerly down the long row of figures before him until they came to the sum total.
He pointed to the dark little yard outside the window as he spoke.
There was very little alteration in the appearance of the dismal city chamber. There was the same wire-blind before the window, the same solitary tree, leafless, in the narrow courtyard without.
The banker's gaze never flinched during that encounter.
But the room in which Henry Dunbar sat looked the very picture of comfort and elegance.
"How is this money invested?" asked Henry Dunbar, pointing to the page. His fingers trembled a little as he did so, and he dropped his hand suddenly upon the ledger.
"What is her name?--who--who is she?"
Lord Yarsfield--a very old customer--talks of buying an estate in Wales; he may come down upon us at any moment for a very stiff sum of money.
The house got on very well without his aid; it will get on equally well without mine.
If she is poor and wants money of me, I am ready and willing to assist her.
Clement returned to the office, where he had left Margaret, in order to repeat to her Mr. Dunbar's message.
He was a banker heart and soul, and he did not at all relish the idea of any withdrawal of the bank's resources, however firm that establishment might stand.
Henry Dunbar arrived in London a couple of hours after Mr. Vernon left the Abbey.
But he drew a long breath, and held his head proudly erect as he pushed open the doors and went in.
"I have made arrangements to assure our being undisturbed so long as you may remain here.
Margaret was, perhaps, wrong, after all, and Henry Dunbar might be an innocent man.
He had no servant with him, and his luggage consisted only of a portmanteau, a dressing-case, and a despatch-box; the same despatch-box whose contents he had so carefully studied at the Winchester hotel, upon the night of the murder in the grove.
WHAT HAPPENED IN THE BACK PARLOUR OF THE BANKING-HOUSE.
Good morning."
Neither Laura nor her husband will have any reason for dissatisfaction.
He walked straight towards the private parlour in which that well-remembered scene had occurred five-and-thirty years ago.
The last figures in the page were these:
Until long after dark that evening, Henry Dunbar sat by the fire, smoking and drinking, and reading the manuscript volume.
"Oh, perfectly," answered Mr. Balderby; "I shall be most happy to be of any use to you in the matter."
"Indeed; and you are one of those friends, I suppose, Mr. Austin?"
The first introduction of a symbolic worship was in the veneration of the cross, and of relics.
But I have reviewed, with diligence and pleasure, the objects of ecclesiastical history, by which the decline and fall of the Roman empire were materially affected, the propagation of Christianity, the constitution of the Catholic church, the ruin of Paganism, and the sects that arose from the mysterious controversies concerning the Trinity and incarnation.
In the connection of the church and state, I have considered the former as subservient only, and relative, to the latter; a salutary maxim, if in fact, as well as in narrative, it had ever been held sacred.
At first, the experiment was made with caution and scruple; and the venerable pictures were discreetly allowed to instruct the ignorant, to awaken the cold, and to gratify the prejudices of the heathen proselytes.
The most audacious pencil might tremble in the rash attempt of defining, by forms and colors, the infinite Spirit, the eternal Father, who pervades and sustains the universe.
For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.
Vol. 5
Alfred himself was obliged to flee for his life.
"Oh, what a lovely book!" exclaimed the boys.
Alfred was the son of Ethelwulf, king of the West Saxons.
It was a long and tiresome journey, made mostly on horseback.
They kept the people in constant alarm. Alfred therefore determined to meet the pirates on their own element, the sea.
Much to the surprise of his brothers, Alfred proved to be the best reader and his mother gave him the book.
At last, Guth'rum, the commander of the Danes, ordered the minstrel to be brought to his tent.
When Alfred was a boy there were no printed books.
Guthrum was taken prisoner and brought before Alfred.
Some great battles were fought, and Alfred's elder brother Ethelred, king of the West Saxons, was killed.
Thus Alfred became king.
Moreover, the art of making paper had not yet been invented.
Once, when very hungry, he went into the house of a cowherd and asked for something to eat.
ALFRED THE GREAT
Alfred went.
III
EGBERT
The mind of the people in Wessex had changed and they had elected him king.
They learned much about Britain; for trading vessels, even at that early day, crossed the Channel.
Soon after this a welcome message came to Egbert.
He asked the dealer who they were.
After the Roman legions had left Britain, the Jutes, led, it is said, by two great captains named Hengist and Horsa, landed upon the southeastern coast and made a settlement.
Still, though both Angles and Saxons called themselves Christians, they were seldom at peace; and for more than two hundred years they frequently fought.
"Angles," was the answer.
Aid came to them in a singular way.
His son Otto succeeded him.
"Our truce is ended."
The infantry also were carefully drilled.
I cannot believe it.
HENRY THE FOWLER
Kneeling at his feet, the messenger said:
Then he exclaimed:
Then they would swiftly dart at their prey and bear it to the ground.
It is a better claim and it is a double claim."
"That is true, my cousin of Warwick," replied the duke of York, "but we must not plunge England into war."
The earl himself was behind them.
One person did claim it.
But Richard was determined to make himself king.
But the people were still discontented.
I entrust him to your care."
Passing through it and on to the castle, the earl and his company were soon within its strong stone walls.
The earl spoke the truth.
The gate was opened.
It lasted for thirty years.
The man was pleased with the confidence that she showed.
Richard was a bad man, but he was brave, and he fought like a lion. However, it was all in vain.
So he put both the young princes in the Tower.
She left London and the kingmaker entered the city in triumph.
"Let us first ask for reform.
His claim comes through his father only--yours through both your father and mother.
A robber met them, but Margaret, with wonderful courage, said to him, "I am your queen and this is your prince.
Those who fought on the king's side were called Lancastrians, because Henry's ancestor, John of Gaunt, was the duke of Lancaster.
But though Edward had fled, he was not discouraged.
The earl of Warwick, known as the "kingmaker," was the most famous man in England for many years after the death of Henry V. He lived in a great castle with two towers higher than most church spires. It is one of the handsomest dwellings in the world and is visited every year by thousands of people.
The king paid no attention to it.
The earl of Warwick added: "You are the rightful heir to the throne. The claim of Henry VI comes through Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward III--yours through Lionel, the second.
Then a war began.
An armed troop was approaching.
LIVED FROM 1428-1471
WARWICK THE KINGMAKER
III
But he was mistaken.
The duke of York was killed, and the queen ordered some of her men to cut off his head, put upon it a paper crown in mockery, and fix it over one of the gates of the city of York.
To this they gladly agreed.
Suddenly and swiftly they poured from the gate of Alcocer, and a terrible battle was fought.
In time the Cid's health began to fail.
With that the vision vanished.
This awakened the knight, who turned quickly in his bed and found that the leper was gone.
The knight called for a light and searched, but in vain.
They crossed from Africa to Spain and laid siege to Valencia.
The Saracens called him "The Cid," or Lord.
Soon they reached the town of Alcocer, and after a siege captured it and lived in it.
He was determined to capture Toledo.
At midnight, while the young man was fast asleep, the leper breathed upon his back.
One of the knights, a handsome young man, was touched by the cries.
Wheat, barley and cheese were all so dear that none but the rich could buy them.
After supper the knight shared his own bed with the leper.
The king awoke.
If the knight had not done this, the leper would have been driven out of the town, with nothing to eat and no place in which to sleep.
As they were passing a deep mire they heard cries for help, and turning, saw a poor leper who was sinking in the mud.
Food became very scarce in Valencia.
Then on the fifteenth of June, 1094, the governor went to the camp of the Cid and delivered to him the keys of the city.
Each was to choose a champion. The champions were to fight, and the king whose champion won was to have the city.
When a man prides himself on being able to understand and interpret the writings of Chrysippus, say to yourself:--
So I seek one to interpret that.
We should act as we do in seafaring.
It is absurd for a crowd of persons to be dancing attendance on half a dozen chairs.
If death surprise me thus employed, it is enough if I can stretch forth my hands to God and say, "The faculties which I received at Thy hands for apprehending this thine Administration, I have not neglected.
It is a shame that one who sweetens his drink with the gifts of the bee, should embitter God's gift Reason with vice.
III
Lead me, O God, and Thou, O Destiny Be what it may the goal appointed me, Bravely I'll follow; nay, and if I would not, I'd prove a coward, yet must follow still!
If I might choose, I would be found doing some deed of true humanity, of wide import, beneficent and noble.
XIX
For I am not Eternity, but a human being--a part of the whole, as an hour is part of the day.
What life is fairer and more noble, what end happier than his?
XVIII
Accordingly I ask who is the Interpreter. On hearing that it is Chrysippus, I go to him.
So when any one says to me, Prithee, read me Chrysippus, I am more inclined to blush, when I cannot show my deeds to be in harmony and accordance with his sayings.
He says that Fame is but the empty noise of madmen.
If Chrysippus had not written obscurely, this fellow would have had nothing to be proud of.
He says that Death is no evil; for it need not even bring shame with it.
Another supplies my food, whose care it is; another my raiment; another hath given me perceptions of sense and primary conceptions.
It is hard to combine and unite these two qualities, the carefulness of one who is affected by circumstances, and the intrepidity of one who heeds them not.
Have I in anything transgressed the relations of life?
Freedom is the name of virtue: Slavery, of vice. . . .
Keep neither a blunt knife nor an ill-disciplined looseness of tongue.
VIII
VII
XII
At meals, see to it that those who serve be not more in number than those who are served.
None is a slave whose acts are free.
Again:
Thus no sudden wrath will betray you into unreasonable conduct, nor will you behave harshly by irritating another.
my part has been fully done.
(APPENDIX A)
When Xanthippe was chiding Socrates for making scanty preparation for entertaining his friends, he answered:--"If they are friends of ours they will not care for that; if they are not, we shall care nothing for them!"
XXII
Behold how I have used the senses, the primary conceptions which Thous gavest me.
XV
But if I admire the interpretation and that alone, what else have I turned out but a mere commentator instead of a lover of wisdom?--except indeed that I happen to be interpreting Chrysippus instead of Homer.
A life entangled with Fortune is like a torrent.
The above selection includes some of doubtful origin but intrinsic interest.--Crossley.
But it seems I do not understand what he wrote.
Fragments Attributed to Epictetus
Asked, Who is the rich man?
What then have I to do?
What matters it to me?
XVII
Have I ever laid anything to Thy charge?
This itself is the only thing to be proud of.
As for me, Anytus and Meletus can indeed put me to death, but injure me, never!
That to be clothed in sackcloth is better than any purple robe; that sleeping on the bare ground is the softest couch; and in proof of each assertion he points to his own courage, constancy, and freedom; to his own healthy and muscular frame.
The matter is in the hands of another--the Master of the ship. The ship is foundering.
Diogenes, who was sent as a spy long before you, brought us back another report than this.
But it is not impossible: else were happiness also impossible.
So far there is nothing to pride myself on.
On all occasions these thoughts should be at hand:--
Once more:--
At feasts, remember that you are entertaining two guests, body and soul. What you give to the body, you presently lose; what you give to the soul, you keep for ever.
XIV
With thoughts like these, beholding the Sun, Moon, and Stars, enjoying earth and sea, a man is neither helpless nor alone!
I do the only thing that remains to me--to be drowned without fear, without a cry, without upbraiding God, but knowing that what has been born must likewise perish.
To understand Nature, and to follow her!
Who to Necessity doth bow aright, Is learn'd in wisdom and the things of God.
Crito, if this be God's will, so let it be.
"There is no enemy near," he cries, "all is perfect peace!"
Take them back and place them wherever Thou wilt!
XIII
But what is it that I desire?
Epictetus replied, "He who is content."
"What can I do?"--Choose the master, the crew, the day, the opportunity. Then comes a sudden storm.
XVI
Give me by all means the shorter and nobler life, instead of one that is longer but of less account!
XXIII
(APPENDIX B)
XXIV
It is best to share with your attendants what is going forward, both in the labour of preparation and in the enjoyment of the feast itself.
The soul that companies with Virtue is like an ever-flowing source.
We shall then be like Socrates, when we can indite hymns of praise to the Gods in prison.
Have I ever murmured at aught that came to pass, or wished it otherwise?
THE CABALLERO'S WAY
He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman.
He killed for the love of it--because he was quick-tempered-- to avoid arrest--for his own amusement--any reason that came to his mind would suffice.
Tonia brought it from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter.
"And then what?"
But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing--a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.
The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him.
I never had mullygrubs like them before.
Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon- tinted arm over the ranger's shoulder.
He tied his big dun in a clump of brush on the arroyo, took his Winchester from its scabbard, and carefully approached the Perez /jacal/.
The meeting brought a slight ripple of some undercurrent of feeling to his smooth, dark face that was usually as motionless as a clay mask.
Sandridge and one or two others turned out to investigate the row.
There was only the half of a high moon drifted over by ragged, milk-white gulf clouds.
The newly lighted sun-god asked for a drink of water.
Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia's slim, slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing lariata.
He moodily shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and then rode away, morose and unsatisfied.
And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid.
When the form of Sandridge had disappeared, loping his big dun down the steep banks of the Frio crossing, the Kid crept back to his own horse, mounted him, and rode back along the tortuous trail he had come.
The Kid looked keenly into the shadows up and down the arroyo and toward the dim lights of the Mexican village.
This before he goes, so he can tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him.
One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with "/quien sabes/" and denials of the Kid's acquaintance.
I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia.
"He must die," said the girl.
Will you be gone again to-morrow, leaving me to grieve, or will you be longer with your Tonia?"
But you are here, beloved one, and I will not scold.
A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly openings.
"It's kill or be killed for the officer that goes up against Mr. Cisco Kid."
I thought I had another sack in my coat.
It is dark in there.
As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.
He dismounted, and his girl sprang into his arms.
Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly.
"I must go over to Fink's," said the Kid, rising, "for some tobacco.
A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves.
I have an idea you might run across him at--but I guess I don't keer to say, myself.
Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'll do--
A gun- scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six- shooter suddenly.
And thou art kind and good, as well as strong.
"I'll get him easy enough," said the lieutenant.
"Throw up your hands," he ordered loudly, stepping out of the wagon- shed with his Winchester at his shoulder.
Sandridge thought he would take his chance then before Tonia rode back.
I'll get him by myself or not at all.
Let him die; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me."
Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of the pear.
"Oh, I might stay two or three days this trip," said the Kid, yawning. "I've been on the dodge for a month, and I'd like to rest up."
He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.
He was /muy caballero/, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned.
Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the /gitanas/ of the Basque province.
While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties.
But this Kid's got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see.
"Hasten," said Tonia, "and tell me--how long shall I call you my own this time?
To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends hovering about.
But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia's fingers needed close attention.
Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'll do--
Maybe she--no, I don't suppose she would, but that /jacal/ would be a good place to watch, anyway."
But not far.
He looked at me so strange that I am frightened.
There was no danger of missing at ten paces, even in that half moonlight.
"They're afraid to tell.
Knowing all, you should do that.
But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six- strand plait.
Old Luisa, the /lavendera/, had persuaded him to bring it, he said, her son Gregorio being too ill of a fever to ride.
Sandridge lighted the camp lantern and read the letter.
At midnight a horseman rode into the rangers' camp, blazing his way by noisy "halloes" to indicate a pacific mission.
"You are not afraid--no one could make my brave little one fear."
Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday.
The Guadalupe country is burning up about that old Dutchman I plugged down there."
Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch.
An hour before daybreak this is to be.
And bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is '/El Chivato/,' as they call him, to send a ball from his /pistola/."
There was a quick turn of the figure, but no movement to obey, so the ranger pumped in the bullets--one--two--three--and then twice more; for you never could be too sure of bringing down the Cisco Kid.
The men she had known had been small and dark.
"But then," she murmured in liquid Spanish, "I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man!
"Always the same, little one," said Tonia, her dark eyes lingering upon him.
And then the other figure, in skirt, waist, and mantilla over its head, stepped out into the faint moonlight, gazing after the rider.
Like the Spring-time, fresh and green
Like the cold breath of the grave
Like the sap that turns to nectar, in the velvet of the peach
Like the stern-lights of a ship at sea, illuminating only the path which has been passed over
Like the bellowing of bulls
Like the whole sky when to the east the morning doth return
Lithe as a panther
Like the shadow of a great hill that reaches far out over the plain
Like the sudden impulse of a madman
Like the dim scent in violets
Like vaporous shapes half seen
Like to diamonds her white teeth shone between the parted lips
Like the music in the patter of small feet
Like the faint cry of unassisted woe
Like the embodiment of a perfect rose, complete in form and fragrance
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past
Like the dew on the mountain
Love smiled like an unclouded sun
Like wine-stain to a flask the old distrust still clings
Love brilliant as the morning
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yielded proof that they were born for immortality
Lost like the lightning in the sullen clod
Loneliness struck him like a blow
Like village curs that bark when their fellows do
Like the dawn of the morn
Like the swell of Summer's ocean
Like the quivering image of a landscape in a flowing stream
Like the tattered effigy in a cornfield
Like the jewels that gleam in baby eyes
Like the awful shadow of some unseen power
Love shakes like a windy reed your heart
Love as clean as starlight
Like the faint exquisite music of a dream
Lofty as a queen
Lovely as starry water
Like those great rivers, whose course everyone beholds, but their springs have been seen by but few
Like the foam on the river
Like the jangling of all the strings of some musical instrument
Looking as sulky as the weather itself
Like the cry of an itinerant vendor in a quiet and picturesque town
Like the rainbow, thou didst fade
Looked back with faithful eyes like a great mastiff to his master's face
Like winged stars the fire-flies flash and glance
Like pouring oil on troubled waters
Like footsteps upon wool
Like planets in the sky
Like apparitions seen and gone
Like mariners pulling the life-boat
Like serpents struggling in a vulture's grasp
Like ghosts, from an enchanter fleeing
Like building castles in the air
Like cliffs which have been rent asunder
Like some grave night thought threading a dream
Like rowing upstream against a strong downward current
Like laying a burden on the back of a moth
Like ships that have gone down at sea
Like dead lovers who died true
Like dew upon a sleeping flower
Like splendor-winged moths about a taper
Like an icy wave, a swift and tragic impression swept through him
Like great black birds, the demons haunt the woods
Like an enraged tiger
Like lighting a candle to the sun
Like skeletons, the sycamores uplift their wasted hands
Like one pale star against the dusk, a single diamond on her brow gleamed with imprisoned fire
Like sunlight, in and out the leaves, the robins went
Like some poor nigh-related guest, that may not rudely be dismist
Like mountain streams we meet and part
Like having to taste a hundred exquisite dishes in a single meal
Like sheep from out the fold of the sky, stars leapt
Like separated souls
Like bright Apollo
Like an unseen star of birth
upon the cool and still piazza
Like some new-gathered snowy hyacinth, so white and cold and delicate it was
Like echoes from an antenatal dream
Like mountain over mountain huddled
Like shy elves hiding from the traveler's eye
Like dining with a ghost
I have an appointment with him at one o'clock.
Then his chest heaved, and he drew a long breath, like a man who feels almost stifled by some internal oppression.
Henry Dunbar turned round as the cashier was about to leave the parlour.
I don't want to see that girl.
All the width of thirty-five years between the present hour and that day might not be wide enough to separate the memory of the past from the thoughts which were busy this morning in the mind of Henry Dunbar.
"I don't remember seeing one in your hand."
The cashier hesitated for a moment before he replied, "She--wishes to see you, Mr. Dunbar," he said, after that brief pause.
"Good; and if you can dispose of the railway bonds to advantage, you may do so."
"Precisely; Lovell wrote me a letter to that effect.
For ten years prior to my father's death he took no active part in the business.
He laid down the volume on the table while he replaced other papers in the box, and it fell open at the first page.
He only paused now and then to take pencil-notes of its contents in a little memorandum-book, which he carried in the breast-pocket of his coat.
"Nothing is farther from my thoughts than any such design," he said. "No, Mr. Balderby, I have only been a man of business because all chance of another career, which I infinitely preferred, was closed upon me five-and-thirty years ago.
"Certainly, Mr. Dunbar."
Henry Dunbar saw the look, and it seemed as if he endeavoured to answer it.
I want to give my daughter a diamond-necklace as a wedding present, and I want it to be such as an Eastern prince or a Rothschild might offer to his only child.
Who is the woman?"
"Perhaps you can let me see the ledgers containing those two accounts?"
So far so good.
Mr. Dunbar waved his hand with a deprecatory air.
Mr. Dunbar spoke very slowly here, and stopped once or twice to pass his handkerchief across his forehead, as he had done in the hotel at Winchester.
"Precisely.
The cashier bowed and opened the door.
My father kept two accounts here, I believe--a deposit and a drawing account?"
The junior partner was sitting at an office table near the fire writing, but he rose as the banker entered the room, and went forward to meet him.
The vehicle travelled very slowly, for the traffic was concentrated in this quarter by reason of the stoppage on Ludgate Hill, and Mr. Dunbar was able to contemplate at his leisure the black prison-walls, and the men and women selling dogs'-collars under their dismal shadows.
Clement Austin locked at him, astonished by the change in his manner.
It may be that the banker's face grew a shade paler after that contemplation.
It is rather innocence whose eyelids drop when you peer too closely into its eyes, for innocence is appalled by the stern, accusing glances which it is unprepared to meet.
The business that brings me to London is an entirely personal matter.
The banker passed across the threshold, which he had not crossed for five-and-thirty years until to-day.
If you are--as I suspect from your manner--something more than a friend: if you love her, and she returns your love, marry her, and she shall have a dowry that no gentleman's wife need be ashamed to bring to her husband."
"Then you can realize the Exchequer bills?"
I may go rather recklessly to work and make a large investment in this necklace; it will be something for Lady Jocelyn to bequeath to her children.
Never since the day of the discovery of the forged bills had that man entered the banking-house.
Our calls are sometimes heavy.
If you wish to make any investigation of the affairs of the house, I----"
Henry Dunbar opened it, went out into the court, and closed the door behind him.
My health is shattered, and I have a horror of all tragic scenes.
Mr. Balderby touched the spring of a handbell upon his table.
Clement Austin was scarcely less pale than Henry Dunbar himself.
"Shut that door, sir!" he said, impatiently, to the cashier; "the draught from the passage is strong enough to cut a man in two.
The day after his arrival was Sunday, and all that day the banker occupied himself in reading a morocco-bound manuscript volume, which he took from the despatch-box.
I have already offered to do so--I can do no more.
This was the book the banker had been studying all that winter's day.
"Oh, yes; the bank can afford it well enough.
No sooner had the door of the parlour closed upon the cashier than Henry Dunbar turned abruptly to his junior partner.
Clement Austin opened the door of Mr. Balderby's parlour; Mr. Dunbar went in unannounced.
"You can send the carriage back to the Clarendon by-and-by.
Clement Austin appeared five minutes afterwards, carrying two ponderous morocco-bound volumes.
The banker stopped suddenly, and went back to the parlour.
He went straight to the Clarendon Hotel.
On that first page was written, in Henry Dunbar's bold, legible hand--
I have suffered enough already on account of that hideous business at Winchester, and I shall most resolutely defend myself from any further persecution.
But if she is in distress----"
"I think of reinvesting the money.
Even the Turkey carpet was in the very stage of dusky dinginess that had distinguished the carpet on which Henry Dunbar had stood five-and-thirty years before.
My name is Dunbar."
But this is not quite enough, Mr. Balderby.
I have an offer of an estate north of the metropolis, which I think will realize cent per cent a few years hence: but that is an after consideration.
The junior partner murmured his acknowledgment of Henry Dunbar's politeness; and then the two men talked together for a few minutes on indifferent subjects.
"Ah, then, I suppose I was mistaken."
"She has friends who love her well enough to shield her from that."
He hurried out of the parlour, and into a passage leading to the yard, followed by Mr. Balderby, who wondered at his senior partner's excitement.
The door in the yard was not locked.
"You think of spending----"
"Prove your friendship, then, by teaching Margaret Wilmot that she has a friend and not an enemy in me.
"Yes, I am generally punctual."
It was by no means wonderful, then, that, after becoming possessor of the united fortunes of his father and his uncle, Henry Dunbar should keep aloof from a place that had always been obnoxious to him.
The morocco-covered arm-chairs had been re-covered, perhaps, during that five-and-thirty years; but if so, the covering had grown shabby again.
This man was Clement Austin, the cashier.
"Do you wish to see Mr. Balderby, sir?" he asked.
Great wooden barricades and mountains of uprooted paving-stones, amidst which sturdy navigators disported themselves with spades and pickaxes, and wheelbarrows full of rubbish, blocked the way; so the brougham turned into Farringdon Street, and went up Snow Hill, and under the grim black walls of dreadful Newgate.
This belt had never quitted him since the night upon which he made it.
He got out and went upon the platform.
His establishment was composed of the old housekeeper, who had waited on the deceased admiral, and a young man-of-all-work, who was nephew to the housekeeper, and who had also been in the service of the late owner of the cottage.
"I want to see what the French jewellers can do before I trust Lady Jocelyn's necklace into the hands of English workmen.
There was no such thing as bustle and confusion in a household organized like that of Mr. Dunbar.
"So much the better," Major Vernon answered, coolly.
You can follow me in a day or two with some more things."
The carriage conveyed him to the Shorncliffe station.
It was past twelve o'clock when he had stitched both sides and one end of the double chamois-leather belt; the other end he left open.
"I flatter myself I was just in the nick of time," the Major thought, as he walked back to Woodbine Cottage, "for as sure as my name's what it is, my friend means a bolt.
Lord Herriston was an active old fellow.
"I do."
"Am I to go with you, sir?" the man asked.
I'm very ill, I saw a physician while I was in London; and he told me that my heart is diseased, and that if I wish to live I must avoid any agitation, any sudden emotion, as I would avoid a deadly poison.
No, I won't take you to Paris with me.
"There's an express from the north stops at Rugby at six o'clock, sir. You might meet that, if you left Shorncliffe by the 4:35 train."
The jeweller ventured to suggest the inferiority of Parisian workmanship as compared with that of a first-rate English establishment; but Mr. Dunbar did not condescend to pay any attention to the young man's remonstrance.
"Do you mean to say that you have bought property in this neighbourhood?"
"Are you going by the next train?
He dined, drank the best part of a bottle of Burgundy, and then ordered a cup of strong tea to be taken to his dressing-room.
"I thought you were in London?" he said.
And you've my best wishes, dear boy; but--you must pay for them--you must pay for them, Henry Dunbar."
When he had made these purchases, he hailed the first empty cab that passed him, and went back to his hotel.
At another shop he bought some large needles, half-a-dozen skeins of stout waxed thread, a pair of large scissors, a couple of strong steel buckles, and a tailor's thimble.
"You seem to be running the talking match," said Tom.
"A raft!" exclaimed the Judge.
CAPTURED
We need it."
"I can think of better company if you're going to keep that rifle waving around in the air.
"Oh, he's hot-headed," said the Judge.
"There you are!" Alf shouted triumphantly.
"And you might have the decency," answered Wilson, "to ask us who we are before you go any further."
"Where did you find them?"
Tom jumped to his feet.
"I can tell a fool just as far away as I can see you," interrupted Wilson.
The Judge sat across the table from them, talking with some of his friends.
Obviously, the atmosphere had changed, now that Alf was no longer there to incite trouble, but they noticed that the Judge took good care to keep the revolvers out of their reach.
It was a request which amounted to a command.
"Chattanooga," answered Tom.
Alf had just returned to the room.
He opened the window and looked down.
"You can take the other things."
"Then let's go," said Tom.
"He's crazier than any Yank I've ever seen in my life," remarked Shadrack, nodding toward Alf.
I ain't believing you and I ain't disbelieving you.
I'll keep these for the present, if you don't mind." He motioned towards the revolvers.
He said it coolly but it required an effort.
"Joe, you show them their rooms.
"We were trying to get to Chattanooga," Tom replied, "We got started on the wrong road this morning."
But first he barred the door with a chair.
"Why not take 'em to Chattanooga now?" he was demanding.
"I'll walk you back to Judson, an' you can tell yer story there.
Easier to do it there."
"Bridges," replied Tom, laughing.
"You better keep your mouth shut," yelled Alf.
"Burning bridges!" shouted the man.
"It's not so near to Beauregard as you think," the Judge answered.
He waved the rifle from one to the other.
Here was a man they couldn't talk down.
If only they could get him at a disadvantage, and pull their revolvers before he could fire.
It was nearly six o'clock when they reached the little town of Judson.
The air was cloudy with smoke.
"Burning what?"
"Halt there!"
"Do you think we could get some supper here?"
Lock the door, Joe, so we won't be disturbed.
"Where do you men say you come from!"
What's that?" demanded the man.
"Here's the other," said Joe, leading the way down the corridor.
"They have?" asked Tom.
Did he believe their story?
"Yes, out of logs.
"Where're you going?" he demanded.
He was probably a good shot, and ready to keep his threat.
They were trying to pull me aboard, but every time they came to help me the raft tilted so that they had to crawl back."
One of the men beside the Judge interrupted: "There aren't any ferries running up there."
They whipped about and found themselves facing a raised rifle.
"Huh?"
We've sneaked through the Union lines from Kentucky, and came across the Tennessee yesterday.
I'll let a bullet go smack into the first man that makes a move he shouldn't."
"I'm asking what sort of a Yank trick this is?
"And finally," said Wilson, "I got down on my stomach and held to his wrists, while Shadrack sat on the other side and balanced us."
Alf, still protesting, disappeared reluctantly into the kitchen.
"Now let's sit down here and talk this thing over," said the Judge.
The man who had entered announced: "They've captured two of the engine stealers over at Julian's Gap!
Dinner came and they ate ravenously.
"No--not exactly," replied the Judge.
"That's what I arrested you for."
"Joe, run out to the kitchen and see if Mrs. James can give these boys some dinner.
"And so you're going to enlist, eh?" asked the Judge finally.
It's near Beauregard and we'll probably get into action pretty soon."
I'm going over to Chattanooga with them in the morning and turn them over to the authorities.
"We thought that Chattanooga would be a good place for us.
"I'd rather walk at the end of a rifle than drown in this mud.
The right wheel was nearly a foot off the track.
"Wood!" yelled Brown.
On a curve."
"They've dropped the second box-car in there," explained Fuller.
How had they done it? How had they passed the broken rail, the ties along the track, the box-cars and the snag?
It appeared intact, but Fuller knew that long curving shed too well through his years of travel over the road not to be suspicious of what lurked inside.
"At Tilton--just a few miles farther on." Andrews waved to Knight to shut off the power.
They coasted down upon the box-car, picked it up and carried it on with them. Fuller and Murphy climbed to the top of it; Murphy, staying at the rear end to repeat the signals of Fuller, who was perched on the front.
The Reseca bridge which ran over the Oostenaula River was covered by a long shed.
The idea of running after a locomotive would have seemed too ridiculous.
They could see no more.
Ties streamed out upon the track.
It struck one wheel of the detached car, bounded, struck again and then bounded out of the way. The men silently watched the car rolling along behind them.
"Throw that wood aboard, men," he said.
Apparently the car had struck the tie just at the moment of losing momentum.
Andrews waved him aside.
Sometimes there was a mumble of satisfaction as a tie fell squarely across the rails; or a grunt of disgust when one tumbled end for end and landed out of position.
And still they pressed on.
There was no talking now.
Later on we shall see that a passing stranger is often taken for a deity or the personification of some natural power.
It is the old fallacy that the effect resembles its cause: if you would make wet weather, you must be wet; if you would make dry weather, you must be dry.
A similar mode of making rain is still practised, as we have seen, in Halmahera near New Guinea.
The blood is thought to represent the rain, and the down the clouds.
Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour.
The oldest woman, or the priest's wife, wears the priest's dress, while the others, dressed as men, drag the plough through the water against the stream.
The examples cited in preceding pages prove that the purveyors of food--the hunter, the fisher, the farmer--all resort to magical practices in the pursuit of their various callings; but they do so as private individuals for the benefit of themselves and their families, rather than as public functionaries acting in the interest of the whole people.
The one signifies his sympathy with water by receiving the rain on his person and speaking of it respectfully; the others light a lamp or a fire and do their best to drive the rain away.
In all such cases the practice is probably at bottom a sympathetic charm, however it may be disguised under the appearance of a punishment or a threat.
This is the clue which has guided our devious steps through the maze, and brought us out at last on higher ground, whence, resting a little by the way, we can look back over the path we have already traversed and forward to the longer and steeper road we have still to climb.
In Mingrelia, when the crops are suffering from want of rain, they take a particularly holy image and dip it in water every day till a shower falls; and in the Far East the Shans drench the images of Buddha with water when the rice is perishing of drought.
The Nootka Indians of British Columbia also believe that twins are somehow related to salmon. Hence among them twins may not catch salmon, and they may not eat or even handle the fresh fish.
When they desired a shower they shook the chariot and the shower fell.
The Arabs of North Africa fling a holy man, willy-nilly, into a spring as a remedy for drought.
This curious superstition prevails among some of the Indian tribes of British Columbia, and has led them often to impose certain singular restrictions or taboos on the parents of twins, though the exact meaning of these restrictions is generally obscure.
The wound is then tapped with a flat stick to increase the flow of blood, and red ochre is rubbed into it.
It is recorded in official documents that during a drought in 1790 the peasants of Scheroutz and Werboutz collected all the women and compelled them to bathe, in order that rain might fall.
In the fire he burns various kinds of wood, which are supposed to possess the property of driving off rain; and he puffs in the direction from which the rain threatens to come, holding in his hand a packet of leaves and bark which derive a similar cloud-compelling virtue, not from their chemical composition, but from their names, which happen to signify something dry or volatile.
Then drought ensues, the most dreaded of all calamities in China, because bad harvests, dearth, and famine follow in its train.
In Manipur, on a lofty hill to the east of the capital, there is a stone which the popular imagination likens to an umbrella.
That is supposed to stop the downpour.
I will now illustrate them by instances drawn from the practice both of public and private magic.
Water is an essential of life, and in most countries the supply of it depends upon showers.
After that he throws water all over himself, scatters it about, and returns quietly to the camp.
The impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense importance of the institution itself.
When its life-blood bespatters the rocks, the peasants throw down their weapons and lift up their voices in supplication to the dragon divinity of the stream, exhorting him to send down forthwith a shower to cleanse the spot from its defilement.
This the Mura-muras see, and at once they cause clouds to appear in the sky.
To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their life. This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the most powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is actually to know it.
But if fine weather is wanted, the victim must be white, without a spot.
The hymn, which bears the name of the Sakvari¯ song, was believed to embody the might of Indra's weapon, the thunderbolt; and hence, on account of the dreadful and dangerous potency with which it was thus charged, the bold student who essayed to master it had to be isolated from his fellow-men, and to retire from the village into the forest.
We have seen that in practice the magic art may be employed for the benefit either of individuals or of the whole community, and that according as it is directed to one or other of these two objects it may be called private or public magic.
At the chosen spot they tether the beast to a stone, and make it a target for their bullets and arrows.
He is not merely the receptacle of a divine spirit.
If clouds should appear in the sky while he is at work, he takes lime in the hollow of his hand and blows it towards them.
After that the rain is sure to come driving up in heavy clouds.
This had a salutary effect.
Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature.
Some of the party beat the corpse, or what was left of it, about the head, exclaiming, "Give us rain!" while others poured water on it through a sieve.
When they have thus visited all the houses, they strip the Rain King of his leafy robes and feast upon what they have gathered.
In the Keramin tribe of New South Wales the wizard retires to the bed of a creek, drops water on a round flat stone, then covers up and conceals it.
Should rain afterwards be wanted, he has only to pour water on his fire, and immediately the rain will descend in sheets.
Here the putting out the fire with water, which is an imitation of rain, is reinforced by the influence of the dead man, who, having been burnt to death, will naturally be anxious for the descent of rain to cool his scorched body and assuage his pangs.
After that all he does is to sing over the snake and the mimic rainbow; sooner or later the rain will fall.
The people of Crannon in Thessaly had a bronze chariot which they kept in a temple.
The sky is supposed to melt with pity at the sight.
Some years ago the emperor Menelik forbade the custom.
However, the foregoing ceremonies are religious rather than magical, since they involve an appeal to the compassion of higher powers.
Women are sometimes supposed to be able to make rain by ploughing, or pretending to plough.
This may also appropriately be called the inspired or incarnate type of man-god.
This saves the corn.
When the Sulka of New Britain wish to procure rain they blacken stones with the ashes of certain fruits and set them out, along with certain other plants and buds, in the sun.
After the rains have fallen, some of the tribe always undergo a surgical operation, which consists in cutting the skin of their chest and arms with a sharp flint.
Apparently the operation is not very painful, for the patient laughs and jokes while it is going on.
They were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.
After this the rain was sure to fall within twenty-four hours.
When their corn is being burnt up by the sun, the Zulus look out for a "heaven bird," kill it, and throw it into a pool.
At Sagami in Japan there is a stone which draws down rain whenever water is poured on it.
On the other hand, if the wished-for rain falls, the god is promoted to a higher rank by an imperial decree.
Some of the Indians of the Orinoco held the toad to be the god or lord of the waters, and for that reason feared to kill the creature.
Thus troubled, the water sent up a misty cloud, from which rain soon fell upon the land.
The Dieri also imagine that the foreskins taken from lads at circumcision have a great power of producing rain.
OF THE THINGS which the public magician sets himself to do for the good of the tribe, one of the chief is to control the weather and especially to ensure an adequate fall of rain.
In their childhood they can summon any wind by motions of their hands, and they can make fair or foul weather, and also cure diseases by swinging a large wooden rattle.
These wretched souls, therefore, do all in their power to prevent the rain from falling, and often their efforts are only too successful.
In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making god, and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession and dipped it in a stream.
Thus the Sulka of New Britain heat stones red hot in the fire and then put them out in the rain, or they throw hot ashes in the air.
No layman may approach the sacred spot while the mystic ceremony is being performed.
For example, in Arcadia, when the corn and trees were parched with drought, the priest of Zeus dipped an oak branch into a certain spring on Mount Lycaeus.
If all their efforts to procure rain prove abortive, they will remember that such and such a twin was buried in a dry place on the side of a hill.
The reader may smile at the meteorology of the Far East; but precisely similar modes of procuring rain have been resorted to in Christian Europe within our own lifetime.
Sometimes the Toradjas attempt to procure rain as follows.
They cut a branch from a certain tree in the desert, set it on fire, and then sprinkled the burning brand with water. After that the vehemence of the rain abated, just as the water vanished when it fell on the glowing brand.
When a man is about to give a great feast in the rainy season and has invited many people, he goes to a weather-doctor and asks him to "prop up the clouds that may be lowering." If the doctor consents to exert his professional powers, he begins to regulate his behaviour by certain rules as soon as his customer has departed.
The evidence we have, so far as it goes, tends to show that the South American fauna always has been more archaic in type than the arctogeal fauna of the same chronological level.
The zoologist who works to most advantage in the wilderness must take his time, and therefore he must normally follow in the footsteps of, and not accompany, the first explorers. The man who wishes to do the best scientific work in the wilderness must not try to combine incompatible types of work nor to cover too much ground in too short a time.
Unquestionably, the distribution of many forms of life, past and present, offers problems which with our present paleontological knowledge we are wholly unable to solve.
Mr. Haseman drags it in continually when its use is either pointless and redundant or else serves purely to darken wisdom. He speaks of the "Antillean complex" when he means the Antilles, of the "organic complex" instead of the characteristic or bodily characteristics of an animal or species, and of the "environmental complex" when he means nothing whatever but the environment.
A hundred years ago, even seventy or eighty years ago, before the age of steamboats and railroads, it was more difficult than at present to define the limits between this class and the next; and, moreover, in defining these limits I emphatically disclaim any intention of thereby attempting to establish a single standard of value for books of travel.
Modern scientists, like modern historians and, above all, scientific and historical educators, should ever keep in mind that clearness of speech and writing is essential to clearness of thought and that a simple, clear, and, if possible, vivid style is vital to the production of the best work in either science or history.
He visited places which had been settled and inhabited for centuries and traversed places which had been travelled by civilized men for years before he followed in their footsteps.
The explorer is merely the most adventurous kind of field geographer; and there are two or three points worth keeping in mind in dealing with the South American work of the field geographer and field zoologist.
Haseman made his long journey with a very slender equipment, his extraordinarily successful field-work being due to his bodily health and vigor and his resourcefulness, self-reliance, and resolution.
His own views and his quotations from the views of others about the static and dynamic theories of distribution are examples of an important principle so imperfectly expressed as to make us doubtful whether it is perfectly apprehended by the writer.
These travellers of the second category can give us most interesting and valuable information about quaint little belated cities; about backward country folk, kindly or the reverse, who show a mixture of the ideas of savagery with the ideas of an ancient peasantry; and about rough old highways of travel which in comfort do not differ much from those of mediaeval Europe.
But he generalized with complete recklessness from the slenderest data; and even these data he often completely misunderstood or misinterpreted.
Humboldt's work had a profound effect on the thought of the civilized world; his trip was one of adventure and danger; and yet it can hardly be called exploration proper.
Roughly, the travellers who now visit (like those who for the past century have visited) South America come in three categories-- although, of course, these categories are not divided by hard-and-fast lines.
To cross the Andes on mule-back along the regular routes is a feat comparable to the feats of the energetic tourists who by thousands traverse the mule trails in out-of-the-way nooks of Switzerland.
He holds that life has been intermittently distributed southward along these continental masses when there were no breaks in their southward connection, and intermittently exchanged between them when they were connected in the north; and he also upholds the view that from a common ancestral form the same species has been often developed in entirely disconnected localities when in these localities the conditions of environment were the same.
The thought is essential, but ability to give it clear expression is only less essential.
Ability to write well, if the writer has nothing to write about, entitles him to mere derision.
The only two other continents where such work, of like volume and value, remains to be done are Africa and Asia; and neither Africa nor Asia offers a more inviting field for the best kind of field worker in geographical exploration and in zoological, geological, and paleontological investigation.
Haseman's primary object was to study the characteristics and distribution of South American fishes, but as a matter of fact he studied at first hand many other more or less kindred subjects, as may be seen in his remarks on the Indians and in his excellent pamphlet on "Some Factors of Geographical Distribution in South America."
By parity of reasoning, the land bridges could be made a hundred instead of merely ten in number.
Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" is to me the best book of the kind ever written; it is one of those classics which decline to go into artificial categories, and which stand by themselves; and yet Darwin, with his usual modesty, spoke of it as in effect a yachting voyage.
There is no better example of the kind of zoologist who does first- class field-work in the wilderness than John D. Haseman, who spent from 1907 to 1910 in painstaking and thorough scientific investigation over a large extent of South American territory hitherto only partially known or quite unexplored.
The Work of the Field Zoologist and Field Geographer in South America
First, there are the travellers who skirt the continent in comfortable steamers, going from one great seaport to another, and occasionally taking a short railway journey to some big interior city not too far from the coast.
The trouble is that as more groups of animals are studied from the standpoint of this hypothesis the number of such land bridges demanded to account for the existing facts of animal distribution is constantly and indefinitely extended.
But of his main theses he proves none, and what evidence we have tells against them. At the Museum of La Plata I found that the authorities were practically a unit in regarding his remains of tertiary men and proto- men as being either the remains of tertiary American monkeys or of American Indians from strata that were long post-tertiary.
This is a trip well worth taking by all intelligent men and women who can afford it; and it is being taken by such men and women with increasing frequency.
A recent book by one of the most learned advocates of this hypothesis calls for at least ten such land bridges between South America and all the other continents, present and past, of the world since a period geologically not very remote.
Travel of the third category includes the work of the true wilderness explorers who add to our sum of geographical knowledge and of the scientific men who, following their several bents, also work in the untrodden wilds.
These land bridges, moreover, must, many of them, have been literally bridges; long, narrow tongues of land thrust in every direction across the broad oceans.
The scientific work proper of these early explorers must be of a somewhat preliminary nature; in other words the most difficult and therefore ordinarily the most important pieces of first-hand exploration are precisely those where the scientific work of the accompanying cartographer, geologist, botanist, and zoologist must be furthest removed from finality.
This is true even of exploration done along the courses of unknown rivers; it is more true of the exploration, which must in South America become increasingly necessary, done across country, away from the rivers.
He never went off the native routes of ordinary travel. But he was a devoted and able naturalist.
Of course travellers of this kind need to remember that their experiences in themselves do not qualify them to speak as wilderness explorers.
In economic, social, and political matters the studies and observations of these travellers are essential in order to supplement, and sometimes to correct, those of travellers of the first category; for it is not safe to generalize overmuch about any country merely from a visit to its capital or its chief seaport.
If we consider only the biological facts concerning some one group of animals it is not only easy but inevitable to conclude that its distribution must be accounted for by the existence of some former direct land bridge extending, for instance, between Patagonia and Australia, or between Brazil and South Africa, or between the West Indies and the Mediterranean, or between a part of the Andean region and northeastern Asia.
He can take pains to see that his whole thought is expressed, instead of leaving vacancies which must be filled by the puzzled and groping reader.
Such travelling is difficult in the sense that travelling in parts of Spain or southern Italy or the Balkan states is difficult.
There is, however, one serious criticism to be made on Haseman: the extreme obscurity of his style--an obscurity mixed with occasional bits of scientific pedantry, which makes it difficult to tell whether or not on some points his thought is obscure also.
In addition to valuable investigations of fossil-bearing beds in the Argentine, he made some excellent general suggestions, such as that the pithecoid apes, like the baboons, do not stand in the line of man's ancestral stem but represent a divergence from it away from humanity and toward a retrogressive bestialization.
But as a rule the work must be specialized; and in its final shape it must be specialized everywhere.
They can add little to our geographical knowledge; but if they are competent zoologists or archaeologists, especially if they live or sojourn long in a locality, their work may be invaluable from the scientific standpoint.
It can be accomplished with reasonable thoroughness only by the efforts of very many different workers, each in his own special field.
Surely, if he will take as much pains with his writing as he has with the far more difficult business of exploring and collecting, he will become able to express his thought clearly and forcefully.
The opposite view is that there have been frequent connections between the great land masses, alike in the tropics, in the south temperate zone, and in the Antarctic region.
But these places were in Spanish colonies, and access to them had been forbidden by the mischievous and intolerant tyranny-- ecclesiastical, political, and economic--which then rendered Spain the most backward of European nations; and Humboldt was the first scientific man of intellectual independence who had permission to visit them.
In that year he succeeded to the Presidency himself, by an electoral vote of 183 out of 217, as the candidate of the party now generally known as Democratic.
He was chosen a justice of the peace, and as such sat in the county court.
These were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe.
On the last day of that year a treaty was concluded, but because of the omission of any provision against the impressment of seamen, and its doubtfulness in relation to other leading points the president sent it back for revisal.
In person, Monroe was tall and well-formed, with light complexion and blue eyes.
As aide-de-camp to Lord Sterling, with the rank of major, he served in the campaign of 1777 and 1778, and distinguished himself in the battles of Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth.
In early youthhood Monroe received a good education, but left school to join the army and soon after was commissioned a lieutenant.
In the Senate he became a strong representative of the anti-Federal party, and acted with it until his term expired in 1794.
JAMES MONROE.
On his return to America he published a 'View of the conduct of the Executive in the Foreign Affairs of the United States,' which widened the breach between him and the administration, but socially Monroe remained upon good terms with both Washington and Jay.
Although Monroe had received $350,000 for his public services alone, he was greatly harrassed with creditors toward the latter part of his life. Toward the last he made his home with his son-in-law, Samuel L. Gouverneur of New York city, where he was originally buried, but in 1830 he was removed to Richmond with great pomp and re-interred in Holleywood Cemetery.
He encouraged the army, increased the navy, augmented the national defences, protected commerce, approved of the United States Bank, and infused vigor into every department of the public service.
Madison thought the country had never fully appreciated the robust understanding of Monroe.
When the British appeared soon afterward in the State, Monroe exerted himself to the utmost in organizing the militia of the lower counties; and when the enemy proceeded southward, Jefferson sent him as military commissioner to the army in South Carolina.
On this occasion he received a ball in the shoulder, and was promoted to a captaincy.
He took an active part in the campaign on the Hudson, and in the attack on Trenton, at the head of a small detachment, he captured one of the British batteries.
The resolution was referred to a committee of which he was chairman, and a report was made in favor of the measure.
The time was approaching for the election of a president, and a considerable body of the Republican party had brought Monroe forward as their candidate, but the preference of Jefferson for Madison was well known and of course had its influence.
His attention was also directed to the defence of New Orleans, and finding the public credit completely prostrated, he pledged his private means as subsidary to the credit of the Government, and enabled the city to successfully oppose the forces of the enemy.
Monroe believed that the rejection of the treaty and the predilection expressed for his rival indicated hostility on the part of the retiring President, and a correspondence on the subject ensued.
The fifth president of the United States was a native of the grand Old Dominion, being born in Westmoreland county, Virginia, April 28, 1758. Like his predecessor, Madison, he was the son of a planter.
On this tour he wore the undress uniform of a continental officer.
Leaving the army, he returned to Virginia and commenced the study of law under Thomas Jefferson, then Governor of the State.
In 1782, he was elected to the assembly of Virginia from the county of King George, and was appointed by that body, although but twenty-three years of age, a member of the executive council.
His honesty, good faith, and simplicity were generally acknowledged, and disarmed the political rancor of the strongest opponents.
In 1785 he married a daughter of Peter Kortright, a lady of refinement and culture.
In the same year he was commissioned Minister Plenipotentiary to England, and endeavored to conclude a convention for the protection of neutral rights, and against the impressment of seamen.
In the midst of these negotiations he was directed to proceed to Madrid as Minister Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to adjust the difficulties between the United States and Spain, in relation to the boundaries of the new purchase of Louisiana.
In 1829 he became a member of the Virginia convention to revise the constitution, and was chosen to preside over the deliberations of that body but he was obliged, on account of ill-health, to resign his position in that body and return to his home.
Another strange incident:--Within sight of Blue Ridge in Virginia, lived three presidents of the United States, whose public career commenced in the revolutionary times and whose political faith was the same throughout a long series of years.
Thus, having quietly settled themselves down, and provided for their own comfort, they bethought themselves of testifying their gratitude to the great and good St. Nicholas, for his protecting care in guiding them to this delectable abode.
For my part, I have not so bad an opinion of mankind as many of my brother philosophers.
It is hinted that Oloffe the Dreamer encouraged these notions; having, as has been shown, the inherent spirit of a land speculator, which had been wonderfully quickened and expanded since he had become a landholder.
A mutual good-will, however, existed between these wandering beings and the burghers of New Amsterdam.
CHAPTER IX.
Thus loom on my imagination those happier days of our city, when as yet New Amsterdam was a mere pastoral town, shrouded in groves of sycamores and willows, and surrounded by trackless forests and wide-spreading waters, that seemed to shut out all the cares and vanities of a wicked world.
As however, in spite of the most diligent search, I cannot lay my hands upon this little book, I must confess that I entertain considerable doubt on the subject.
He was accompanied by Mynheer Ten Breeches, as land measurer, in case of any dispute with the Indians.
But as this opens a new era in the fortunes of New Amsterdam I will here put an end to this second book of my history, and will treat of the maternal policy of the mother country in my next.
At this early period was instituted that pious ceremony, still religiously observed in all our ancient families of the right breed, of hanging up a stocking in the chimney on St. Nicholas Eve; which stocking is always found in the morning miraculously filled; for the good St. Nicholas has ever been a great giver of gifts, particularly to children.
Shortly after the Peach War however, a restless spirit was observed among the New Amsterdammers, who began to cast wistful looks upon the wild lands of their Indian neighbors; for somehow or other wild Indian land always looks greener in the eyes of settlers than the land they occupy.
Hordes of painted savages, it is true, still lurked about the unsettled parts of the island.
There is something exceedingly delusive in thus looking back, through the long vista of departed years, and catching a glimpse of the fairy realms of antiquity.
Like a landscape melting into distance, they receive a thousand charms from their very obscurity, and the fancy delights to fill up their outlines with graces and excellences of its own creation.
The hunter still pitched his bower of skins and bark beside the rills that ran through the cool and shady glens, while here and there might be seen, on some sunny knoll, a group of Indian wigwams whose smoke arose above the neighboring trees, and floated in the transparent atmosphere.
The result of these dreams were certain exploring expeditions sent forth in various directions to "sow the seeds of empire," as it was said.
What was the consequence of these exploring expeditions?
I do not think poor human nature so sorry a piece of workmanship as they would make it out to be; and as far as I have observed, I am fully satisfied that man, if left to himself, would about as readily go right as wrong.
The legend of this sylvan war was long current among the nurses, old wives, and other ancient chroniclers of the place; but time and improvement have almost obliterated both the tradition and the scene of battle; for what was once the blood-stained valley is now in the center of this populous city, and known by the name of Dey Street.
Thus benignly fostered by the good St. Nicholas, the infant city thrived apace.
And in this particular I greatly admire the wisdom and sound knowledge of human nature displayed by the sage Oloffe the Dreamer and his fellow legislators.
I know not whether it was to this "Peach War," and the acquisitions of Indian land which may have grown out of it, that we may ascribe the first seeds of the spirit of "annexation" which now began to manifest themselves.
To this end they built a fair and goodly chapel within the fort, which they consecrated to his name; whereupon he immediately took the town of New Amsterdam under his peculiar patronage, and he has even since been, and I devoutly hope will ever be, the tutelar saint of this excellent city.
How could there be a wolf?" he muttered, reassuring me.
No one would know that he had been kind to me and reward him for it.
But why describe my impressions; I sometimes dream even now of those times at night, and I have no dreams more agonising.
When I met him now and then afterwards, I never even spoke to him about the wolf or anything else; and all at once now, twenty years afterwards in Siberia, I remembered this meeting with such distinctness to the smallest detail.
Why, it was your fancy!
It would begin from some point, some little thing, at times unnoticed, and then by degrees there would rise up a complete picture, some vivid and complete impression.
At last a sudden fury flamed up in my heart.
He was our serf and I was his little master, after all.
"A shout ... some one shouted: 'wolf' ..." I faltered out.
With Voltchok I felt quite safe, and I turned round to Marey for the last time; I could not see his face distinctly, but I felt that he was still nodding and smiling affectionately to me.
All this I recalled all at once, I don't know why, but with extraordinary minuteness of detail.
And I plunged right into the midst of the bushes, and heard a peasant ploughing alone on the clearing about thirty paces away.
"Well, I will go then," I said, looking at him timidly and inquiringly.
I remembered the month of August in our country house: a dry bright day but rather cold and windy; summer was waning and soon we should have to go to Moscow to be bored all the winter over French lessons, and I was so sorry to leave the country.
Come, run along then," and he made the sign of the cross over me and then over himself.
The air was warm, the sky was blue, the sun was high, warm, bright, but my soul was very gloomy.
Cross yourself!"
I walked away, looking back almost at every tenth step.
I walked past the threshing-floor and, going down the ravine, I went up to the dense thicket of bushes that covered the further side of the ravine as far as the copse.
When I got home that day I told no one of my "adventure" with Marey.
It was our peasant Marey.
I knew almost all our peasants, but I did not know which it was ploughing now, and I did not care who it was, I was absorbed in my own affairs.
I don't know if there is such a name, but every one called him Marey--a thick-set, rather well-grown peasant of fifty, with a good many grey hairs in his dark brown, spreading beard.
Now on returning I noticed on the bed in the furthest corner of the room Gazin lying unconscious, almost without sign of life.
He put out his thick, black-nailed, earth-stained finger and softly touched my twitching lips.
"Well, do, and I'll keep watch on you as you go.
I walked about, looking into the faces that I met. That shaven peasant, branded on his face as a criminal, bawling his hoarse, drunken song, may be that very Marey; I cannot look into his heart.
It was the second day in Easter week.
Yet that shout had been so clear and distinct, but such shouts (not only about wolves) I had imagined once or twice before, and I was aware of that. (These hallucinations passed away later as I grew older.)
Gradually I sank into forgetfulness and by degrees was lost in memories. During the whole course of my four years in prison I was continually recalling all my past, and seemed to live over again the whole of my life in recollection.
"There, there, you have had a fright, little one!" And I remembered particularly the thick earth-stained finger with which he softly and with timid tenderness touched my quivering lips.
"There, dear....
Some people are.
I may add by the way that since then, very many persons have supposed, and even now maintain, that I was sent to penal servitude for the murder of my wife.
And indeed it was hardly an adventure.
Several of the convicts who had been sentenced by their comrades, for special violence, to be beaten till they were half dead, were lying on the platform-bed, covered with sheepskins till they should recover and come to themselves again; knives had already been drawn several times.
I used to analyse these impressions, give new features to what had happened long ago, and best of all, I used to correct it, correct it continually, that was my great amusement.
Lizzie also said some unpleasant things,--which, perhaps, were the more unpleasant because they were true.
You are pretty, you know,--uncommonly pretty."
Of course I would not give them up, because they were my own."
"Not laughing, Lord George."
The man, she thought, had behaved very badly to her,--had accepted very much from her hands, and had refused to give her anything in return; had become the first depository of her great secret, and had placed no mutual confidence in her.
You are no more than a child to me, but you have surprised me."
"Good-bye," said Lizzie.
"Pray don't talk about the horrid necklace."
Lizzie might have saved herself the trouble, had it not been that it was a pleasure to her to insult her late friend, even though in doing so new insults were heaped upon her own head. As for the trumpery spoons, they,--so said Mrs. Carbuncle,--were the property of Miss Roanoke, having been made over to her unconditionally long before the wedding, as a part of a separate pecuniary transaction.
She could have forgiven the want of deferential manner, had there been any devotion;--but Lord George was both impudent and indifferent.
"I hope I have not injured you, Lord George."
"I was alluding particularly to Mrs. Carbuncle."
"They don't do much good;--do they?
And you thought that I had done it!
"Oh, Lord George, that was the happiest day of my life.
So Lord Fawn is done with, is he?"
"All that surprised me.
"You need not come here to tease me, Lord George."
CHAPTER LXXV
"God knows I do not want to make complaints," said Lizzie, covering her face with her hands.
He attends you down to Scotland;--does he?
I shouldn't have begrudged even Benjamin the pull, if he'd got it."
What was the good of being so clever?"
Then, when you found you couldn't eat the kernel, that you couldn't get rid of the swag without assistance, you came to me to help you.
Does Mr. Emilius go too?"
"Yes, I will.
Of course, we understand that now." On hearing this, Lizzie smiled, but did not say a word.
"Mrs. Carbuncle is--is--is-- Oh, Lord George, don't you know what she is?"
"My cousin attends me down to Scotland."
What an experience I have had since I have been here!"
You'll be up here before the season is over, with fifty more wonderful schemes in your little head.
I believe you care more for that odious vulgar woman down-stairs than you do for anybody else in the world."
By Jove, I did!
"I am going to Portray on Monday."
"And never coming back any more?
"Much you thought about it, Lord George."
This, of course, was unpleasant; but Mrs. Carbuncle did not have the honours of the battle all to herself.
They're a queer lot;--ain't they,--the sort of people one meets about in the world?"
Mr. Benjamin was too clever for us both, and now he is going to have penal servitude for the rest of his life.
Lady Eustace did not leave the house during the Saturday and Sunday, and engaged herself exclusively with preparing for her journey.
But even were there anything due to Lady Eustace, Mrs. Carbuncle would decline to pay it, as she was informed that all moneys possessed by Lady Eustace were now confiscated to the Crown by reason of the PERJURIES,--the word was doubly scored in Mrs. Carbuncle's note,--which Lady Eustace had committed.
And so is the prettiness, Lord George;--if there is any."
But you might as well own the truth now.
Well; you--you were laughing at me in your sleeve all the time."
"Well;--I hope so.
But, nevertheless, there would be some excitement in a farewell in which some mock affection might be displayed, and she would have an opportunity of abusing Mrs. Carbuncle.
Didn't you think that it was I who stole the box?"
"Who wanted it to do?" said Lizzie.
"Just what you were saying, when you talked of your experiences. These experiences do surprise one.
"Then I perceived that I--I was supposed to be the thief.
"Well;--I did.
"I believe you are trying to insult me, sir."
"You mean to me?--disinterested friendship to me?" And Lord George tapped his breast lightly with his fingers.
That surprised me."
"I ain't clever at all," said Lizzie, beginning to whimper.
He had been harsh to her, and unjust; and then, too, he had declined to be in love with her!
"Good-bye, my dear."
She had sent for him, and now she didn't know what to say to him.
He was now silent, but still looking down upon her as he stood motionless upon the rug,--so that she was compelled to speak again.
I thought that you were a very dangerous companion."
The spoons and forks were out of Mrs. Carbuncle's power,--in Albemarle Street; and the money had of course been spent.
If you have any complaint to make against me,--I will at least listen to it."
"Ah, dear!
"And when I found that you always travelled with ten thousand pounds' worth of diamonds in a box, that surprised me very much.
I hate the diamonds.
You--you yourself couldn't have suspected me of taking the diamonds, because--because you'd got them, you know, all safe in your pocket.
She was full of spite against Lord George, and would have been glad to injure him.
"Yes, you were.
Mrs. Carbuncle had no power of disposing of Miss Roanoke's property.
I suppose that's real at any rate?"
And I liked the idea of it very much." Lizzie pricked up her ears.
"And when Tewett got that girl to say she'd marry him, the coolness with which you bore all the abomination of it in your house,--for people who were nothing to you;--that surprised me!"
"I don't know what you mean by that, Lord George."
He stood there, still looking down upon her, speaking with a sarcastic subrisive tone, and, as she felt, intending to be severe to her.
"And cousin Frank?"
They resulted in nothing. Lizzie was desirous of getting back the spoons and forks, and, if possible, some of her money.
"Don't, Lord George."
"Lady Eustace, I cannot take charge of Mrs. Carbuncle's friendships. I have enough to do to look after my own.
"Oh, no," said Lizzie
How little happiness there is for people!"
I have knocked about the world a great deal, and would have almost said that nothing would surprise me.
If I may give you one bit of advice at parting, it is to caution you against being clever when there is nothing to get by it."
"I meant to be so kind to you all."
"Goes to-morrow, does she?" said Lord George to the servant.
You had got the kernel yourself, and thought that I had taken all the trouble to crack the nut and had found myself with nothing but the shell.
"Unfortunately you didn't; but I thought you did.
"I never doubted that, Lady Eustace.
I hope I may never see you again.
"No woman ever intended to show a more disinterested friendship than I have done; and what has been my return?"
That makes it altogether another thing.
There's my poor friend, Mrs. Carbuncle, declares that all her credit is destroyed, and her niece unable to marry, and her house taken away from her,--all because of her connexion with you."
But with his jeering words, and sneering face, he was as hard to her as a rock.
It may not look like common sense to say that these things had been stationary over the town of Bath, several days--
A few minutes of exposure to the air changed the buff color to "a livid color resembling venous blood." It absorbed moisture quickly from the air and liquefied.
That the twinkling of stars is penetration of light through something that quivers?
There in the first place;
We are told that, in 1841 and 1846, a similar substance had fallen in Asia Minor.
I incline, then, to think that the objects that fell at Bath were neither jellyfish nor masses of frog spawn, but something of a larval kind--
If we think of how hard the exclusionists have fought to reject the coming of ordinary-looking dust from this earth's externality, we can sympathize with them in this sensational instance, perhaps.
"The fact that the supposed deposits were so uniformly described as gelatinous substance forms a presumption in favor of the supposition that they had the origin ascribed to them."
It looked like boiled starch:
That, according to a communication from A.C.
Usually these things of the accursed have been hushed up or disregarded--suppressed like the seven black rains of Slains--but, upon March 3, 1876, something occurred, in Bath County, Kentucky, that brought many newspaper correspondents to the scene.
That's one of the most important of the details.
Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky--"from a clear sky." We'd like to emphasize that it was said that nothing but this falling substance was visible in the sky.
That, upon the 13th of August, 1819, something had fallen from the sky at Amherst, Mass.
It fell in flakes of various sizes; some two inches square, one, three or four inches square.
Or they were not fish at all.
What rain, I don't know.
Graves to examine it.
I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often fallen from the sky--
I think, myself, that it would be absurd to say that the whole sky is gelatinous: it seems more acceptable that only certain areas are.
When we come to reported falls of gelatinous substances, I'd like it to be noticed how often they are described as whitish or grayish.
Upon removing this nap, a buff-colored, pulpy substance was found.
Hitchcock recognized it in a moment.
"It has been comparatively easy to identify the substance and to fix its status.
The Kentucky 'wonder' is no more or less than nostoc."
That fragments are brought down by storms?
Something that looked like beef: one flake of it the size of a square envelope.
But, before evening, two others sprang up.
They were dead and dry.
To give completeness to "the proper explanation," it is said that Mr. Brandeis had identified the substance as "flesh-colored" nostoc.
The flake-formation is interesting: later we shall think of it as signifying pressure--somewhere.
Graves, formerly lecturer at Dartmouth College.
It is described as like gelatine, but much firmer: but, having been in water 24 hours, it swelled out, and looked altogether gelatinous--
The four red rains of Siena.
In looking up the subject, myself, I have read only of greenish nostoc.
He tries to account for their segregation.
Up from one place, in a whirlwind, and down in another.
Now, I can't say that nostoc is always greenish, any more than I can say that blackbirds are always black, having seen a white one: we shall quote a scientist who knew of flesh-colored nostoc, when so to know was convenient.
He gives earlier dates, but I practice exclusions, myself.
Olmstead, who collected these lost souls, says:
Newspaper correspondents wrote broadcast and witnesses were quoted, and this time there is no mention of a hoax, and, except by one scientist, there is no denial that the fall did take place.
If the whole world should seem to combine against you, it is only unreal combination, or intermediateness to unity and disunity.
It was an object that had upon it a nap, similar to that of milled cloth.
The seven black rains of Slains;
Edward Hitchcock went to live in Amherst.
We shall be opposed by the standard resistances:
He did not satisfy himself as to just the exact species it belonged to, but he predicted that similar fungi might spring up within twenty-four hours--
"The Kentucky Phenomenon."
It was a gelatinous fungus.
This thing was said to have fallen with a brilliant light.
It would seem acceptable that, if many reports of white birds should occur, the birds are not blackbirds, even though there have been white blackbirds. Or that, if often reported, grayish or whitish gelatinous substance is not nostoc, and is not spawn if occurring in times unseasonable for spawn.
Or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous?
Or this is why, against the seemingly insuperable odds against all things new, there can be what is called progress--
A flock of gorged, heavy-weighted buzzards, but far up and invisible in the clear sky--
A whirlwind seems anything but a segregative force.
Exactly like the first one.
But he had also called upon Dr. Hamilton, who had a specimen, and Dr. Hamilton had declared it to be lung-tissue.
So it was called, in its day, and now we have an occurrence that attracted a great deal of attention in its own time.
Garland, of Nelson County, Virginia, had found a jelly-like substance of about the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece:
That, in Wilna, Lithuania, April 4, 1846, in a rainstorm, fell nut-sized masses of a substance that is described as both resinous and gelatinous.
That, June 24, 1911, at Eton, Bucks, England, the ground was found covered with masses of jelly, the size of peas, after a heavy rainfall. We are not told of nostoc, this time: it is said that the object contained numerous eggs of "some species of Chironomus, from which larvae soon emerged."
Also it is spoken of as "dried" several times.
Greg's comment in this instance is: "Curious if true." But he records without modification the fall of a meteorite at Gotha, Germany, Sept. 6, 1835, "leaving a jelly-like mass on the ground." We are told that this substance fell only three feet away from an observer.
Or we've arrived at one of the oldest of the exclusionists' conventions--or nostoc.
The chemic reactions were the same.
It was odorless until burned: then it spread a very pronounced sweetish odor.
Dewey's family.
They returned next morning and found a gelatinous mass of grayish color.
"As to whence it came, I have no theory." Nevertheless he endorses the local explanation--and a bizarre thing it is:
It will mean that something had been in a stationary position for several days over a small part of a small town in England: this is the revolutionary thing that we have alluded to before; whether the substance were nostoc, or spawn, or some kind of a larval nexus, doesn't matter so much.
The simplest strategy seems to be--never bother to fight a thing: set its own parts fighting one another.
L. Jenyns, of Bath.
Lawrence Smith, of Kentucky, one of the most resolute of the exclusionists:
The mystery of it is: What could have brought so many of them together?
The rival convention is "spawn of frogs or of fishes." These two conventions have made a strong combination.
The substance that looked like beef that fell from the sky.
An interesting sidelight on the mechanics of orthodoxy is that Mr. Jenyns dutifully records the second fall, but ignores it in his explanation.
This is what had occurred at Bath, England, 23 years before.
That nothing is positive, in the aspects of homogeneity and unity:
That, according to a newspaper, of Newark, N.J., a mass of gelatinous substance, like soft soap, had been found.
The young man came and sat beside the hypnotist.
But the sunlight of the flying stage was in her heart, and the wisdom of all the best lecturers in the world seemed folly in that light.
She loved the dream, but she feared the leap; and she put him off with "Some day, dearest one, some day," to all his pleading that it might be soon; and at last came a shrilling of whistles, and it was time for him to go back to his duties on the stage.
Denton!
How old is she?"
"Elizabeth?" he said.
The little seat in the open air?
"Tripped coming down from the flying-machine from Paris--and fell into his arms.
But I will.
It seemed quite impossible and quite uninteresting to imagine anything happening after he was dead.
For a space Denton stood over him irresolute, trembling.
I don't propose to respect your little fancies.
He sought for weeks and months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair, over-excitement and anger.
"That is all right."
He seemed to dominate the seated figure by his side.
The others were her father and her chaperone.
It was a very different meal from a Victorian breakfast.
Even to the neglect of her philosophy.
From her mother.
Hack about with swords and revolvers and things--bloodshed galore--horrible!--and about young men on torpedo catchers who blow up--Spaniards, I fancy--and all sorts of irregular adventurers.
Among other things, he fell to praising a new historical romance that one of the great popular story-tellers of the day had just put forth.
"That's easy enough with you.
He sat as if incapable of action until the four figures were remote and small, and then he rose up possessed with the one idea of pursuit.
"Oh, I do not know you!"
Of course no sort of proposal or suggestion must come from you--because no doubt she already distrusts you in the matter."
She looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze passed beyond him.
At first he was energetic and headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep.
He had grave doubts, indeed, if there was any future for mankind after he was dead.
Overcoming the instinctive repugnance of one who had seen no act of violence in all his life before, he knelt down beside his antagonist and felt his heart.
My fee is high."
He underwent various changes according to the accepted custom in these cases, and long before this story begins his bones even had become dust, and were scattered to the four quarters of heaven.
"Well?"
She drew herself away from him.
"But the problem is to get her hypnotised.
"She does not know you," said the chaperone.
"It's unprofessional."
You must not annoy us on the public ways."
It is doubtful which would have been the more shocked and pained to find himself in the clothing of the other.
Denton's grip tightened.
They fell together....
Physicians by the thousand, of course--frightfully clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like sheep--but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there were none."
If anything goes wrong you shall not live five minutes.
"These pithy sentences," he said, "are admirable.
Not know me!
"There's a sum--in fact, a considerable sum--invested in the Patent Road Company.
He stood still, robbed of all power of motion, his eyes wide, his lips apart.
"You will tell that chaperone you are going to order the girl to marry that knobby little brute with the red hair and ferrety eyes.
Even in Victorian days London was a maze, that little London with its poor four millions of people; but the London he explored, the London of the twenty-second century, was a London of thirty million souls.
Curious times they were, with their smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and their horse vehicles.
"Hypnotism is not magic," said the man in green, putting both arms on the table.
That's what makes the thing so exasperating."
The hypnotist watched him with quiet eyes, studied his face and clothes and bearing.
He felt he must speak to her forthwith, or die.
The surface of the table, to judge by touch and eye, would have appeared to a nineteenth-century person to be covered with fine white damask, but this was really an oxidised metallic surface, and could be cleaned instantly after a meal.
"I do not know you," she cried, hand to brow.
"Oh, precisely!
"You must not....
"I will tell you.
"With that I can quite easily smash your skull.
The other two girls, encouraged by her enthusiasm, also placed themselves in the hands of the hypnotist and had plunges into the romantic past.
They show at a glance those headlong, tumultuous times, when men and animals jostled in the filthy streets, and death might wait for one at every corner.
"He is"--and his voice sank with shame--"a mere attendant upon the stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight.
"Give her me back."
And instead of communicating by telephone, like sensible people, they write and deliver--what is it?"
"You can go on sponging," said the hypnotist sulkily.
"No," he said aloud, and came back to the middle of the room.
For a moment Denton stood white and wild-eyed; then came a terrible faintness, and he sat before one of the little tables.
"I feared you would never come," he said.
In practice, that is.
So rest assured."
"And, pretending to do that, you will restore her memory of me."
Her face was the face of one who is tormented.
"Give her me back!"
The hypnotist raised his eyebrows.
I've done much harder things. Quite recently.
Nowadays we have almost abolished wonder, we lead lives so trim and orderly that courage, endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind."
"I looked about for a weapon also.
And so the mischief was done.
"Yes?"
There was an interval of thought.
"Precisely."
"But--" said Denton, and for a moment his miserably haggard face appealed against fate.
The hypnotist did not speak.
"Egyptians--very probably.
"No, sonny, that ain't a tenth of what it's worth to me," he said.
"Don't want your old stamps," declared Keith, stoutly.
Down-stairs, Malcolm and Keith were almost quarrelling about her.
All the time that they were dressing for the party, they were trying to decide where to put it for the night, so that neither the tramp nor the family could discover it.
It looks mighty good, but somehow it doesn't seem proper to have it stuck out here in the hall.
"Seems to me I have everything I want except a camera, and I couldn't buy the kind I want for two dollars."
"Will you keep it to remember me by?" he asked, bashfully.
They had been invited for half-past six, and dinner was to be served soon after that time.
It was so awful!" she wailed.
Keith took Lloyd down to dinner, and his grandmother heard him apologising all the way down for having frightened her.
Daphne, who had just been coaxed into filling a basket with a generous supply of cold victuals, pretended not to hear until he repeated his question.
She had a horror of tramps.
"I'd rather have the Little Colonel for my partner."
One by one the lights went out in every home in the valley, and only the stars were left shining, in the cold wintry sky.
Before she could ask any questions, the boys began an excited explanation.
"But a bear like this would be nicer than any of them.
It was some time before they could make their story understood.
In the midst of it Virginia beckoned to the Little Colonel.
While they were busily scooping out a big hollow in the hay, they were startled by a rustling behind them.
She fooled us, sure, Malcolm," called back Keith, who had run on ahead to look.
Two voices were uttering piercing shrieks, one after another, so loud and frantic that even the servants in the back part of the house came running.
Her dark eyes peered anxiously around the big shadowy room, lighted only by her flickering taper.
"She is the prettiest girl here."
"I think that Aunt Allison must have left those arrows in the blue room," she said, leading the way down the cross hall which went to the north wing.
But isn't it a splendid imitation?"
"Come up-stairs with me for a minute, Lloyd," she whispered, "and help me look for something.
They couldn't find anything down on the coast that they thought we would like."
A little while later, the old coloured coachman saw them run past the window, where he was warming himself by the kitchen stove.
They looked into each other's frightened faces, and then glanced around the dark barn in alarm.
It was a pretty picture that the little "Queen of Hearts" made, as she stood in the doorway, with the tall silver candlestick held high in both hands.
The last to arrive was the Little Colonel.
Just then a terrific scream sounded in the upper hall, followed by another that made every one down-stairs turn pale with fright.
I'll never forget the little kid's givin' me the coat off his own back, if I live to be a hundred.
"The Queen of Hearts," announced Aunt Allison, leading her forward.
There was a hurried consultation in the hay-mow.
After some grumbling the man consented, and pocketed the four dollars, first asking very particularly the exact spot in the barn where they expected to hide their huge pet.
"Now match your verses," cried her Majesty again, opening her own to read what was in it.
Virginia forgot her fear of him when he stood up and presented arms like a real soldier, and even went up and patted him when the show was over, joining with the boys in begging that he might be allowed to stay in the house until morning.
"Let's do it!" exclaimed Keith, turning a handspring in the snow to show his delight.
He was used to being pulled out to perform whenever a crowd could be collected.
"I used to practise so much with my Indian bow and arrow out at the fort, that I could hit centre nearly every time.
Malcolm and Keith, with guilty faces, went dashing up the stairs, and the whole party followed them at a respectful distance.
The little Queen of Hearts listened smilingly, but her colour did not come back all evening, until after the archery contest.
The big music-box in the hall began playing one of its liveliest waltzes, the children gathered around the great pie, and twenty-four little hands reached out to grasp the floating ends of ribbon.
He had set his heart on having that bear.
CHAPTER III.
Throwing herself into her aunt's outstretched arms, she began to sob out her story between great, trembling gasps.
"I guess he'll not mind, though.
Daphne had seen them setting rabbit traps there, but she knew well enough that was not what they had gone for now, and that the food they carried was not for the game of Robinson Crusoe, which they had played in the deserted cabin the summer before.
Miss Allison, thinking of the candle she had told Virginia to light, and remembering the thin, white dress the child wore, instantly thought she must have set herself afire.
Every mail brought a few valentines to each of them, but it was not until the five o'clock train came that they found the long-looked-for letters from their father and mother.
Aunt Allison thinks it wouldn't be fair."
"Yes, and the gold-fish, and the little baby alligator that froze to death in its tank," added Keith.
Their grandmother was horrified, and insisted on sending the animal away at once.
There was no answer, and, after peering intently through the dusk for a moment, the old darkey concluded that he must have been mistaken, and passed on.
He never saw the bear till two months ago, and he sold it to you cheap because he's a-goin' to steal it back again to-night, and make off up the road with it.
The huge figure was certainly enough to frighten any one coming upon it unexpectedly in the dark, and when Miss Allison saw it she drew Virginia's trembling hand into hers with a sympathetic clasp.
The poor beast's foot is still too lame for him to do his best, and you're too kind-hearted, I am sure, to want anything to suffer in order to give you pleasure."
Before she could reach the staircase, Virginia came flying down the steps, white as a little ghost, and her eyes wide with terror.
"But there's one comfort," she added, gathering all her gay valentines together, "there needn't be any end to the remembering of it.
There was no time for teasing, however, as the first guest arrived while they were still in the blue room.
The guests came promptly.
Let me bring him into the light, and show you what a kind old pet he is."
You can leave the bear here till we go."
The tears sprang to Keith's eyes.
By the time they were dressed, they had decided to put it in the blue room, a guest-chamber in the north wing, seldom used in winter, because it was so hard to heat.
"I knew they'd each send us a valentine," cried Keith, tearing both of his open.
"I don't know what to get with mine," said Keith, folding his two bills together.
"I want to take her myself."
Give us one more day to rest up and get in a little better trim.
It wouldn't seem like he is really ours if we couldn't take him with us."
Aunt Allison has forgotten where she put the box of arrows that we are to use in the archery contest after dinner.
"I'll bet that papa's is a comic one.
Her hair shone like gold in the candlelight, and her glittering crown flashed as if a circle of fairy fireflies had been caught in its soft meshes.
It rose up and came after us out of the corner, and if I hadn't slammed the door just in time, it would have eaten us up.
"Pull!" cried the little Queen of Hearts.
When they came back from reciting their lessons to the minister, she sent them on several errands, but the rest of the time they divided between the cabin and the post-office.
"Come on, we'll ask the man now."
It was in a bright new tin pan, and its daintily browned crust would have made them hungry even if their appetites had not been sharpened by the cold and exercise of the afternoon.
When they opened the door the room looked very big and shadowy, and the bear, roused from its nap, was standing on its hind legs beside the high-posted bed.
I am not going to shoot to-night.
Virginia, pleased to have caught them so cleverly, showed them the ends of twenty-four pieces of narrow ribbon, peeping from under the delicately brown top crust.
He started to the store for some tobacco as soon as you left.
Maybe it was not so much for the soft light hair, the star-like beauty of her big dark eyes, or the delicate colour in her cheeks that made them as pink as a wild rose, as it was for the valentine costume she wore.
He turned away, too disappointed to trust himself to answer any other way.
Lak enough dee's settin' a rabbit trap.
They scarcely dared breathe until it was safe in their own room.
As soon as papa comes home I am going to ask him to buy us one."
"Then in the morning we can tell everybody."
As soon as he was gone, the boys came out from behind the cedars, and crept up the snowy hillside.
It began by Malcolm taking his brother aside and offering to trade valentines with him.
Keith whistled and kept time with his feet in a funny little shuffling jig he had learned from Jonesy, and the bear obligingly went through all his tricks.
"Jonesy's nearly done for," said the tramp, pointing to the boy who lay curled up in the hay, coughing at nearly every breath.
The man was a shrewd one, and knew well how to make these unsuspecting little souls serve his purpose, like puppets tied to a string.
There seemed no other way to settle it just then, so Bruin was allowed to go back to his rug in the blue room, and the door was securely locked.
It's nicer than any pets we ever had, except the ponies.
'He's dead, sir.
Mr. Upton looked amused.
You know it was very naughty of you to act so.
'Yes, my boy.'
And then suddenly, a short time after, they came upon a fisherman.
Having got his hands free, Teddy stood up bravely and told the story briefly and clearly, to the great amusement of his hearers.
And if sailors fight, I can be a sailor for Jesus.'
You haven't told me ever what I asked you about Jesus' sailors.
'If he wakes, all is up with us; now let's get past him on tiptoe.'
'It isn't right,' he said, after a long pause.
I'm not a very good soldier, am I? Do you think I ought to love old Farmer Green?
Her respect for Teddy was gradually increasing, though nothing seemed to quench her self-assertion and independence of thought and action.
'It will be sure and certain defeat.'
I didn't really think it was naughty.
'Please, sir, may I speak to you?'
He's Farmer Green, and he's an awful angry man; he gave Sam such a thrashing for tying an old saucepan to one of his pigs' tails. He won't know who has done it, and I did tie the knots awful tight.'
The colonel laughed heartily.
'Yes, sir,' said Teddy humbly.
'But you are not such a paragon of goodness generally,' said the colonel.
'Have you had any battles with him yet?'
This was accomplished safely; but having passed him Teddy stood still, and the spirit of mischief seized hold of him.
And I was very happy then, and I jumped right out, and then I remembered, but I didn't want to go back again.'
I'll teach you to stop playing such impish tricks on decent folk.'
'Have you got a pain?'
Their conversation was interrupted by voices and steps approaching, and in another moment two ladies and a gentleman appeared, evidently going home after a fishing excursion.
But I don't care, it doesn't hurt.
I shan't never change to soldiers.
Was that being a soldier?'
'Your father was John Platt, who enlisted in one of the line regiments--the 24th, wasn't it?
I wrote "Love" in ink right across it; and I took such pains, for I wanted to show it to Nancy.
'And who is the little girl?
'I feel shooken up dreadful, he's so awful strong; but I'm not very hurt, only I'm sorry, and I've been telling my Captain about it, and asking Him to forgive me.'
It isn't fair on you, for you didn't do anything.'
'It's great fun.
It seemed a harder business to untie the knots than to tie them, but at length it was done, and the unwinding process began.
'What a sensitive, refined little face it is!'
'And then the fight began?' suggested the rector, as the boy paused.
Turning to Nancy, he said, with sparkling eyes, 'What fun to take him prisoner and tie him up to the tree with his own fishing-line!
Grandfather read me about Nelson the other evening, and showed me a picture of sailors cutting the enemy's arms off, as they tried to scramble on board ship.
When he discovered his condition he swore a round oath, and turned upon Teddy in great wrath, as he vainly tried to extricate himself.
'Come on quick.
Don't shirk the hottest part of the field; that isn't being brave.'
'Wasn't it you and some others who scared our dairymaid into fits one night last winter, by playing pranks, after dark, outside the dairy window?'
He turned his head and looked at her.
'No, that's mine; I must have a name for him--a different one, you know.'
'Too good to be spoilt by house service,' said Colonel Graham. 'His mother is a superior young woman, with a very good education, and the Platts are highly respected about here.'
'There are two of you, are there?
It was only a burly farmer, who was evidently making a day of it, for he sat under the shade of a tree with the remnants of a substantial lunch around him; his fishing-rod was in his hand, but the line was out of the water, and he, with head thrown back and mouth wide open, was fast asleep.
'But they won't.'
Farmer Green's nap was over, and with a hasty start he was roused to the full use of his faculties.
'What's the matter?' asked Nancy.
'I thought your enemy's name was Teddy.'
'Will you give me a horrid, ugly name, please, sir?'
'It's dreadful difficult to remember in time, mother.
Neither of the children appreciated these remarks, but the colonel good-naturedly put down his fishing-basket and cut the piece of rope that bound them.
Well, you shall share the same fate till I think fit to release you.
I remember now, though I'm not sure that I recollect the details,' said the colonel musingly.
'Why, he was undoing you when you woke up, which was very kind of him.
'I never run away from anybody,' said Teddy, his head more erect than ever.
The children ran back to their playfellows considerably sobered by their experience, and Teddy very soon made his way home, and told his mother all that had befallen him.
'I went back when I remembered it was wrong to have done it,' he said simply.
'Sailors fight, I know they do.
'I want you to give me a name for my enemy, please, sir.'
'You'll wake him up, and then you'll catch it!
'And granny let me out soon after; and I kissed her and said I was sorry, but I told her how nearly I had run away, and asked her to see that the window was locked next time, so that I shouldn't have to fight so hard.'
'That's why I came down this way: there are always a lot of people fishing in the river.
'I'm a soldier's son.'
At length Teddy announced his intention of going off on an expedition as a scout, and on Nancy's insisting that she should come too, the two children started, made their way out of the wood and down to the banks of the stream, which soon joined the river.
'What funny names!
'Shall we stay here all the evening and all the night?'
'And he would never have been caught if he hadn't gone back to undo him,' put in Nancy; 'so he oughtn't to have been punished at all.'
she looks a regular little gipsy!'
You're the plague of the parish, and a good thrashing is what you will get, sure as my name's Jonathan Green!'
Granny was very angry with me because I had made Uncle Jake's best handkerchief into a banner of love.
He told it as he always did, with enthusiastic effect, and when he offered to show the ladies his button they were charmed with him.
What fun! how I should like to see him!'
'What made you go back, my boy?' asked Mrs. Graham gently.
He recognised the newcomers to be the squire, Colonel Graham, and his wife, with a visitor staying with them. 'Please, sir, will you undo us?' he asked appealingly.
It was Saturday afternoon, and they were playing their favourite war game, Teddy, of course, being prime instigator of the whole affair.
May I tell you father's story?'
What regiment?'
'You must make believe they will.' Teddy's tone was stern, and Nancy was too occupied in holding her hat on her head as they crept through some low bushes to advance any more sceptical opinions.
Let him undo himself!' Teddy shook his head, and then stole softly back to the tree, Nancy following him at a respectful distance.
'Oh no! he'll come and let us go soon.
And when I got home granny was so angry that she took me by the collar and she locked me into the back kitchen; and mother was out, and I cried, I was so miserable.
You stay here and watch me.'
'Oh, you mustn't!' cried Nancy.
'I think you must wait a little, sonny.
'And if we don't meet anybody?'
'You will have plenty of fighting.
Teddy nodded.
He's an enemy; I really think it's our duty to do it.
I wish he'd left you tied up, I do!'
'I laughed at him, and I wanted you to leave him tied up.
The words were uttered almost in a whisper, and Nancy looked on with wonder.
'I think I had one yesterday.
'Perhaps God will send it to me for a Christmas surprise.
He takes very little soldiers.
They have a room to themselves, and the chaplains have classes for them.'
In the effort to keep the children that were well and those that were sick apart, their mother and I had to camp out in improvised fashion.
The small boy was busily reciting the phases of the fight, which now approached its climax, and the little girl evidently suspected that her monitor was destined to play the part of victim.
The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city small enough so that one can get out into the country.
And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as an end--why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a by-product of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is met in the doing.
"Brother, don't you sink my monitor!"
He was holding it inside his coat, and it contrived to wiggle partly down the sleeve.
Little boy.
He had been loaned a king-snake, which, as all nature-lovers know, is not only a useful but a beautiful snake, very friendly to human beings; and he came rushing home to show the treasure.
It stood at the meeting-spot of three fences.
When their mother and I returned from a row, we would often see the children waiting for us, running like sand-spiders along the beach.
As he leaned over, his broad straw hat tilted on end, and pony Grant meditatively munched the brim; whereupon the small boy looked up with a wail of anguish, evidently thinking the pony had decided to treat him like a radish.
And will he bring me back a bear?" When, some five months later, I returned, of course in my uniform, this little boy was much puzzled as to my identity, although he greeted me affably with "Good afternoon, Colonel." Half an hour later somebody asked him, "Where's father?" to which he responded, "I don't know; but the Colonel is taking a bath."
I wish to express my warmest gratitude for such books--not of avowedly didactic purpose--as Laura Richards's books, Josephine Dodge Daskam's "Madness of Philip," Palmer Cox's "Queer People," the melodies of Father Goose and Mother Wild Goose, Flandreau's "Mrs. White's," Myra Kelly's stories of her little East Side pupils, and Michelson's "Madigans." It is well to take duties, and life generally, seriously.
The small boy was convalescing, and was engaged in playing on the floor with some tin ships, together with two or three pasteboard monitors and rams of my own manufacture.
It was real country, and--speaking from the somewhat detached point of view of the masculine parent--I should say there was just the proper mixture of freedom and control in the management of the children.
There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener's Valley, Virginia, which sums up one's duty in life: "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."
When they were little, their respective fathers were expected also to take part in the obstacle race, and when with the advance of years the fathers finally refused to be contestants, there was a general feeling of pained regret among the children at such a decline in the sporting spirit.
Like other children, they were apt to take to bed with them treasures which they particularly esteemed.
The children were strictly trained not to interrupt business, but on this particular occasion the little boy's feelings overcame him.
It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.
In the three houses there were at one time sixteen of these small cousins, all told, and once we ranged them in order of size and took their photograph.
As for the dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies.
At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things--birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.
But outside the members of my own family I have never met a human being who had even heard of it, and I don't suppose I ever shall meet one.
He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.
Some of the originals go back to the sixteenth century, and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York's translation of Gaston Phoebus, and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian.
He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.
Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.
We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings.
The books are everywhere.
A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.
I suppose there must be many big-game libraries in Continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive than mine, but I have not happened to come across any such library in this country.
If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry.
But the books have overflowed into all the other rooms too.
Now I am humbly and sincerely conscious that this is a demerit in me and not in Hamlet; and yet it would not do me any good to pretend that I like Hamlet as much as Macbeth when, as a matter of fact, I don't.
Milton is best for one mood and Pope for another.
But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years.
We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.
I am not speaking of these, for they are not properly "books" at all; they come in the category of time-tables, telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life.
If the book is not interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of cases it gives scant benefit to the reader.
Personally, granted that these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand that they all submit is that of being interesting.
Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it.
We love to hear the flickers call, and we readily pardon any one of their number which, as occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof.
The discipline and the mutual respect are complementary, not antagonistic.
Now, I am very proud of my big-game library.
There is on our book-shelves a little pre-Victorian novel or tale called "The Semi-Attached Couple." It is told with much humor; it is a story of gentlefolk who are really gentlefolk; and to me it is altogether delightful.
Let me add that ours is in no sense a collector's library.
It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read.
Naturally, any man who has been President, and filled other positions, accumulates such things, with scant regard to his own personal merits.
They must almost be AEschylus or Euripides, Goethe or Moliere, in order that I may not feel after finishing them a sense of virtuous pride in having achieved a task.
I need scarcely add, but I will add for the benefit of those who do not know, that this attitude of self-respecting identification of interest and purpose is not only compatible with but can only exist when there is fine and real discipline, as thorough and genuine as the discipline that has always obtained in the most formidable fighting fleets and armies.
The big piazza is for the hot, still afternoons of summer.
Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels--including short stories under the head of novels.
Now, all this time Prince Asmund and his sister sat in their trees just outside the window and saw all that was going on.
And that is the end of the story.
The horrid pair set to and greedily devoured it all, and when the chest was quite empty the giant put it on his shoulder and disappeared as he had come, without leaving any trace of his visit.
'I am Signy, the king's daughter,' was the reply.
Ring was quite deceived by her, and never guessed that she was not Princess Signy at all, but a strong, gigantic, wicked witch bent on deceiving him under a beautiful shape.
'Then,' replied Ring, 'let us decide on this day fortnight.
The witch listened to all he said and, much pleased, ended by accepting his offer; but she begged him to return to his ship for a little while as she wished to go some way further into the forest, promising to join him later on.
'What was SHE to do with such things?' she roared.
The witch was raving and roaring as usual, and said to her brother:
The prince was not a little surprised, but he consented to hide himself with Asmund behind the panelling of the room, from where they could see all that went on through a little slit.
The prince gave orders to set sail at once, and after a fine voyage landed in his own country, where his parents and his only sister received him with the greatest joy and affection.
Now, I must tell you, in another country a long way off, there reigned a king who had an only son named Ring.
When it was finished she climbed to the top of her tree and contrived to throw the clothes on to a table through the open window.
'Oh, Asmund!' exclaimed Signy, 'what a delightful idea!
'I will try,' said Signy; 'it won't be an easy matter, but it's worth while taking some trouble to have a little peace.'
He went to Prince Ring and said: 'Do come with me and see the strange things that are happening in the new princess's room.'
Prince Ring had heard so much about the beauty and goodness of Princess Signy that he determined to marry her if possible.
The king and queen were very anxious to bring their children up well, and the young prince and princess were taught everything likely to make them clever and accomplished.
But his sister did not keep quiet for long, and tore and pulled at the rich brocade as if she wanted to destroy it, stamping about and shouting angrily.
Unfortunately sadder days were to come.
After this Prince Asmund and his bride returned to his country to live with the king his father.
'Yes,' said she, quite pleased, 'I am quite ready to marry you whenever you like.'
And see, I have brought you some stuff to make your wedding-dress of.' So saying he gave her a large piece of the most beautiful brocade, all woven over with gold threads, and embroidered with pearls and other jewels.
The prince had hardly left her before the witch resumed her proper shape and tore about the room, raging and storming and flinging the beautiful silk on the floor.
Then she set to work, cutting out and sewing as best she could, and by the end of six days she had turned it into an elegant robe with a long train and a mantle.
Here she resumed her own gigantic shape, tore up the trees by their roots, threw one of them over her back and clasped the other to her breast, carried them down to the shore and waded out with them to the ship.
He was married to a wife whom he dearly loved, and had two most promising children--a son called Asmund, and a daughter who was named Signy.
The prince lost no time in setting out for the royal palace, and on his way there he met such a wonderfully lovely woman that he felt he had never seen such beauty in all his life.
But he had scarcely left the house when the witch began to rage as furiously as ever, and never stopped till her brother Ironhead appeared.
So he begged his father to let him have a ship for the voyage, set sail with a favourable wind, and after a time landed in the country where Signy lived.
So she watched for an opportunity and managed to carry off the brocade the first time the witch left her room.
He fell in love with her at once, and entreated her to marry him, which, after a time, she consented to do.
'Now,' said he to his sister, 'I will have the trees hollowed out, and then I will make rooms in them and furnish them so that I shall be able to live out in the forest.'
Long, long ago, in the days when fairies, witches, giants and ogres still visited the earth, there lived a king who reigned over a great and beautiful country.
I will bring all my pretty things and ornaments, and the trees are so near home we shall be quite safe in them.'
In their hands they bear either a dagger, scourge, torch, or serpent.
THE HARPIES.
In any case, if they had learned to use their hands and their inventiveness or adaptability, they would have been the better for it.
And the result of the investigation was that the two hundred were in advance of the one hundred and ten thousand in every branch--geography, arithmetic, history, and so on.
That the innumerable multitude of people who can do nothing of the kind, and who take no real interest in anything except spending money and gossiping, are to be really pitied, is true.
The manner in which most artists form an idea, or project their minds to a plan or invention, be it a statue or picture; and the way they think it over and anticipate it--very often actually seeing the picture in a finished state in imagination--all amounts to foresight and hypnotic preparation in a crude, imperfect form.
The same principle is applicable to all kinds of designs, with the proviso that they be at first very easy.
Nearly all of the pupils, who were from ten to sixteen years of age, acquired two or three, if not all, of these arts, and then very easily found employment in factories or fabrics, etc.
These were from the public schools of the city.
They had at least one topic on which they could converse intelligently with any grown-up person, and in which they were really superior to most.
It is probable that half the general average cleverness of men is due to their having learned, as boys, games, or the art of making something, or mending and repairing.
Those who desire to become artists, can greatly facilitate their work, if beginning for example with very simple outline decorative designs, and having learned the principles on which they are constructed, they would repeat or revise them to themselves before sleep, resolving to remember them.
It was not remarkable, because boys and girls who had, at an average age of twelve or thirteen, learned the principles of design and its practical application to several kinds of handiwork, and knew the differences and characteristics of Gothic, Arabesque, or Greek patterns, all developed a far greater intelligence in general thought and conversation than others.
"He would have taught you how you might employ Yourself; and many did to him repair, And, certes, not in vain; he had inventions rare." --WORDSWORTH.
Many people believed that this was all waste of money and time, and, quite unknown to me, at their instigation an inquiry was made of all the teachers in the public schools as to the standing of my art pupils in their other classes, it being confidently anticipated that they would be found to have fallen behind.
Some of them once had minds--and these are the most pitiful or pitiable of all.
At this moment Athos perceived a man walking on the seashore parallel to the jetty, and hastening his steps, as if to reach the other side of the port, scarcely twenty steps from the place of embarking.
"Yes, but the son has done us no harm."
"I see them about twenty paces behind my lord.
"Hold your tongue," replied Aramis; "you would make me weep, if such a thing were possible."
"Ah! here is De Winter coming," said Athos.
"It matters not; you were wrong to reply to him as you did," continued Aramis, following with his eyes the young man, now vanishing behind the cliffs.
"He is and he is not," replied Athos; "that is to say, he is dismissed by one-half of France, but by intrigues and promises he makes the other half sustain him; you will perceive that this may last a long time."
Athos glanced at Aramis.
The young man burst into a laugh.
"In beauty or on the contrary?" asked Aramis, laughing.
When De Winter perceived them, in his turn he advanced toward them with surprising rapidity.
Athos smiled sadly, for it was evident that he was thinking of other things as he listened to his friend and moved toward De Winter.
It was soon time for Grimaud to recall the past.
The latter, to make a short cut, had appeared on a sluice.
They had reached the ladder which led to the boat.
See if he is still in the same place."
In which it is proved that first Impulses are oftentimes the best.
"I am always afraid of a quarrel when I am expected at any place and when such a quarrel might possibly prevent my reaching it.
At this instant the three friends turned, in spite of themselves, a last look on the rock, upon the menacing figure which pursued them and now stood out with a distinctness still.
"The monk!" exclaimed Grimaud.
She was obliged to pass between the point of the jetty, surmounted by a beacon just lighted, and a rock which jutted out.
"He who followed us and spoke to us awaits us there; behold!"
In truth, the walker, who, during the observations of the two friends, had passed and repassed behind them several times, stopped at the name of De Winter; but as his face betrayed no emotion at mention of this name, it might have been by chance he stood so still.
"Ah! Egad!" cried Aramis, "you set me thinking.
This man, whom they had noticed from the first for the same reason they had themselves been remarked by others, was walking in a listless way up and down the jetty. From the moment he perceived them he did not cease to look at them and seemed to burn with the wish to speak to them.
"Hold, Athos," said Aramis, "perhaps there is yet time.
"Ah, it is certainly you!" he cried.
The beacon bathed with light the little strait through which they were about to pass and the rock where the young man stood with bare head and crossed arms.
"If Mousqueton were with us," observed Athos, on reaching the spot where they had had a dispute with the paviers, "how he would tremble at passing this!
Tony carries our muskets."
"But if he be a spy----"
"Hush!" said Athos, "we are overheard."
Athos and Aramis walked down toward the port.
On reaching the jetty Athos and Aramis stopped to look at a little boat made fast to a pile and ready rigged as if waiting to start.
"But let us go," continued De Winter; "let us be off; the boat must be waiting for us and there is our sloop at anchor--do you see it there?
"Fire!" cried Grimaud, unconsciously.
"A quarrel?" asked Athos.
And Athos sprang into the boat, which was immediately pushed off and which soon sped seawards under the efforts of four stalwart rowers.
Boulogne was a strong position, then almost a deserted town, built entirely on the heights; what is now called the lower town did not then exist.
"Nothing warranted me to answer him otherwise; he was polite to me and I was so to him."
The three gentlemen took the road to Picardy, a road so well known to them and which recalled to Athos and Aramis some of the most picturesque adventures of their youth.
"He certainly bodes us no good," said Athos; "but let us embark; once out at sea, let him come."
"Let us go and see your beggar, sir, and if he is such as you describe him, you are right--it will be you who have discovered the true treasure."
He therefore hastened to the palace to congratulate the queen on the battle of Lens, determined beforehand to act with or against the court, as his congratulations were well or ill received.
"My dear Monsieur Louvieres," said the coadjutor, "believe me, I am truly concerned for the misfortune which has happened to you."
"Capital," answered the mendicant.
The only precaution he had taken in coming to the archbishopric was to leave his arquebuse in the hands of a friend.
"I think," said the beggar, "I can undertake things more difficult and more important than that."
D'Artagnan and Porthos pointed to their dusty and torn dresses, but the cardinal shook his head.
"Permit me, madame," said D'Artagnan, "to reserve a portion for my friend; like myself" (he laid an emphasis on these words) "an ancient musketeer of the company of Treville; he has done wonders."
"And could you count on fifty resolute men, good, unemployed, but active souls, brawlers, capable of bringing down the walls of the Palais Royal by crying, 'Down with Mazarin,' as fell those at Jericho?"
Whilst the two friends were with the cardinal, the queen sent for him. Mazarin, thinking that it would be the means of increasing the zeal of his two defenders if he procured them personal thanks from the queen, motioned them to follow him.
"What is his name?"
Thirty thousand crowns in alms is not given, as you have done for the last six months, out of pure Christian charity; that would be too grand.
"Is that true, and do you speak seriously?" asked Louvieres.
I believe this man paid his predecessor a hundred pistoles for his."
"My lord, he has been for three days at the Rue Cassette."
I dislike these quarrels among men of the church."
"I answer for him," said the curate.
He was a man between sixty-six and sixty-eight years of age, little, rather stout, with gray hair and light eyes.
The eyes of the mendicant dashed with cupidity, but he quickly suppressed his emotion.
"And can you find him?"
"Exactly your man."
"Oh!" he murmured, as he left the threshold of the palace: "ungrateful court! faithless court! cowardly court!
In the meantime they were advancing toward the square, and the moment the coadjutor and the curate put their feet on the first church step the mendicant arose and proffered his brush.
His speech, therefore, was so well turned, that in spite of the great wish felt by the courtiers to laugh, they could find no point on which to vent their ridicule.
The coadjutor went to him and held out his hand.
The Marechal de la Meilleraie added that in case the coadjutor should appear on the field of battle it would be a pity that he should not be distinguished in the melee by wearing a red hat, as Henry IV. had been distinguished by his white plume at the battle of Ivry.
"We hope so," answered the curates.
The coadjutor possessed, perhaps, as much wit as all those put together who were assembled at the court to laugh at him.
"I know that, sir; I have known that," said the queen, "a long time; therefore I am delighted to be able thus publicly to mark my gratitude and my esteem."
"And how many hours of reflection do you ask?"
Monsieur de Retz wished to become archbishop in his uncle's place, and cardinal, like Mazarin; and the popular party could with difficulty accord him favors so entirely royal.
On arriving at the Rue des Prouvaires, the curate pointed toward the square before the church.
Although the coadjutor had preached that same morning it was well known that he leaned much to the side of the Fronde; and Mazarin, in requesting the archbishop of Paris to make his nephew preach, had evidently had the intention of administering to Monsieur de Retz one of those Italian kicks he so much enjoyed giving.
But whilst they were indulging in extravagant joy at the Palais Royal, to increase the hilarity of the queen, Mazarin, a man of sense, and whose fear, moreover, gave him foresight, lost no time in making idle and dangerous jokes; he went out after the coadjutor, settled his account, locked up his gold, and had confidential workmen to contrive hiding places in his walls.
"Madame," replied D'Artagnan, "I have nought to say, save that my life is ever at your majesty's service, and that I shall only be happy the day I lose it for you."
Then, turning toward Porthos, "The devil!" said he, "this has a bad look.
At last Mr. Burwell determined to reward my mother, by making an arrangement with the owner of my father, by which the separation of my parents could be brought to an end.
My old mistress encouraged me in rocking the cradle, by telling me that if I would watch over the baby well, keep the flies out of its face, and not let it cry, I should be its little maid.
He came in with a bright face, was placed in the scales, and was sold, like the hogs, at so much per pound. His mother was kept in ignorance of the transaction, but her suspicions were aroused.
My mother went to the spring in the morning for a pail of water, and on looking up into the willow tree which shaded the bubbling crystal stream, she discovered the lifeless form of her brother suspended beneath one of the strong branches.
We were living at Prince Edward, in Virginia, and master had just purchased his hogs for the winter, for which he was unable to pay in full.
My old mistress said to her: "Stop your nonsense; there is no necessity for you putting on airs.
6, 1833.
As I cannot condense, I must omit many strange passages in my history.
From such a wilderness of events it is difficult to make a selection, but as I am not writing altogether the history of myself, I will confine my story to the most important incidents which I believe influenced the moulding of my character.
To take care of this baby was my first duty.
AGNES HOBBS
As I glance over the crowded sea of the past, these incidents stand forth prominently, the guide-posts of memory.
The black-eyed baby that I called my pet grew into a self-willed girl, and in after years was the cause of much trouble to me.
This was the first time I was punished in this cruel way, but not the last.
Time seemed to soften the hearts of master and mistress, and to insure kinder and more humane treatment to bondsmen and bondswomen.
They kept up a regular correspondence for years, and the most precious mementoes of my existence are the faded old letters that he wrote, full of love, and always hoping that the future would bring brighter days.
The shadow eclipsed the sunshine, and love brought despair.
One of my uncles, a slave of Colonel Burwell, lost a pair of ploughlines, and when the loss was made known the master gave him a new pair, and told him that if he did not take care of them he would punish him severely.
The parting was eternal.
My recollections of childhood are distinct, perhaps for the reason that many stirring incidents are associated with that period.
I note a few extracts from one of my father's letters to my mother, following copy literally:
His mother was ordered to dress him up in his Sunday clothes, and send him to the house.
The visions are so terribly distinct that I almost imagine them to be real.
We who are crushed to earth with heavy chains, who travel a weary, rugged, thorny road, groping through midnight darkness on earth, earn our right to enjoy the sunshine in the great hereafter.
But the golden days did not last long.
Every day seems like a romance within itself, and the years grow into ponderous volumes.
My birthplace was Dinwiddie Court-House, in Virginia.
While living at Hampton Sidney College, Prince Edward County, Va., Mrs. Burwell gave birth to a daughter, a sweet, black-eyed baby, my earliest and fondest pet.
The baby was named Elizabeth, and it was pleasant to me to be assigned a duty in connection with it, for the discharge of that duty transferred me from the rude cabin to the household of my master. My simple attire was a short dress and a little white apron.
This was a golden promise, and I required no better inducement for the faithful performance of my task. I began to rock the cradle most industriously, when lo! out pitched little pet on the floor.
Colonel Burwell at one time owned about seventy slaves, all of which were sold, and in a majority of instances wives were separated from husbands and children from their parents.
CHAPTER I
Rather than be punished the way Colonel Burwell punished his servants, he took his own life.
I was my mother's only child, which made her love for me all the stronger.
When I was eight, Mr. Burwell's family consisted of six sons and four daughters, with a large family of servants.
I presume that I must have been four years old when I first began to remember; at least, I cannot now recall anything occurring previous to this period.
One day she was whipped for grieving for her lost boy.
When I was quite a child, an incident occurred which my mother afterward impressed more strongly on my mind.
Your husband is not the only slave that has been sold from his family, and you are not the only one that has had to part.
A. Burwell, was somewhat unsettled in his business affairs, and while I was yet an infant he made several removals.
Little Joe, the son of the cook, was selected as the victim.
"MRS.
To escape from his embarrassment it was necessary to sell one of the slaves.
She turned away in stoical silence, with a curl of that loathing scorn upon her lips which swelled in her heart.
One reason why the art of conversation has so degenerated in these days is that so few have a real interest in hearing the fine thoughts of good thinker and talkers.
Certainly the first requisites are intelligence, a good knowledge of standard literature, a general knowledge of the more important events that are taking place in the world, and such a knowledge of the best current literature as may be obtained from the regular reading of one or two of the standard monthly magazines.
It is safe to say that unless one happens to meet a very congenial mind among conversers in general society, to introduce the subject of books is liable to be misconstrued.
And here it may help you if I particularize a little in regard to a knowledge of important events of the day and also of general and current literature.
Avoid all sentimentality, or the discussion of subjects that would expose the private and sacred feelings of the heart.
How shall a young girl fit herself to enjoy and to afford enjoyment in general society?
Of course the main source of knowledge of the more important events that are going on in the world is the daily or weekly newspaper; and yet there is scarcely any reading so utterly demoralizing to good mental habits as the ordinary daily paper.
Do not quote poetry; do not ask people's opinions on delicate and individual questions.
Nor is there any excuse for unpleasant, harsh, rough, nasal tones of voice in these days when in every good school instruction is given in the management of the voice for reading and conversation.
"'I'm afraid I don't, very much,' Corey owned.
"The young man looked at her, and then said seriously, 'You'll want Green, of course, and Motley, and Parkman.'
She must avoid a kind of joking and badinage that should never be heard among well-bred young people in society--that about courtship and marriage.
The world has never been exactly alike any two successive days from the time its foundations were laid to the present moment.
CHAPTER XXIX.
What the water was doing while these coal beds were forming will be brought out in some future chapter.
Still, science teaches us that with all this turmoil and change nothing either of matter or energy is lost, but that it is simply undergoing one eternal round of change.
This has been determined by borings at different points to ascertain the depth of the drift that was lodged during the glacial period in the trough of the Ohio River.
Great bodies of salt are found at that low level, constantly dissolved by the water percolating through the sand and gravel of the glacial drift.
In the animal and vegetable world there is a period of life and growth, and a period of decay and death; and this seems to be the destiny of planets themselves as well as the things that live and grow upon them.
He paused to look back.
We must run the risk."
"Why, yes," returned Galliard sardonically, "we can linger here until we are taken.
"Back!" growled Galliard.
"Someone will die," muttered Crispin back.
His foot was upon the topmost stair of the flight, when of a sudden the stillness of the house was broken by a loud knock upon the street door. Instantly--as though they had been awaiting it there was a stir of feet below and the bang of an overturned chair; then a shaft of yellow light fell athwart the darkness of the hall as the guardroom door was opened.
"The Fates are kind, Kenneth," he whispered.
CHAPTER X. THE ESCAPE
Another step Galliard descended; then from the guardroom came a loud yawn, to send the boy cowering against the wall. It was followed by the sound of someone rising; a chair grated upon the floor, and there was a movement of feet within the chamber.
But he did not pause.
The guardroom door stood ajar, and he caught the murmurs of subdued conversation.
"Come, sirs," he heard him say, "light me to their garret.
An instant later and the light had vanished, eclipsed by those who followed in the fellow's wake.
Softly he tried it; it gave, and the door opened.
Had the door stood wide he would not have paused then.
"Oh, God!" gasped Kenneth, as the soldier set foot upon the stairs. Under his breath Crispin swore a terrific oath.
"The drop is a long one, and we should but light in the streets, and be little better than we are here.
A bolt was drawn and a chain rattled, then followed the creak of hinges, and on the stone flags rang the footsteps and the jingling of spurs of those that entered.
But, there lead on, fellow."
He ran his hand along until he caught the latch.
I would see them--leastways, one of them, before he dies.
In the hall Crispin could now make out the figures of Colonel Pride and of three men who came with him.
Hey! Have a care, boy.
And as he spoke he drew the lad along.
Slowly, step by step, they moved, and with every stride Crispin looked behind him, prepared to rush the moment he had sign they were discovered.
But Kenneth laid his hand upon Galliard's sleeve.
Quietly he opened it, then with calm gallantry he motioned to his companion to go first, holding it for him as he passed in, and keeping watch with eye and ear the while.
"Is all well?" came a voice, which Crispin recognized as Colonel Pride's, followed by an affirmative reply from one of the soldiers.
Partly his eyes and partly his instinct told him that not six paces behind him there must be a door, and if Heaven pleased it should be unlocked, behind it they must look for shelter. It even crossed his mind in that second of crowding, galloping thought, that perchance the room might be occupied.
He listened.
"Get in, Kenneth," Crispin commanded.
Cautiously, and leaning well upon the stout baluster, he began the descent.
The faint grey of the dawn was the only light that penetrated the gloom of that pit.
Wait."
"But pray God that it may not.
Kenneth was by then beside him.
Not more than a dozen steps were there; but at the bottom stood the guardroom door, and through the chink of its opening a shaft of light fell upon the nethermost step.
Kenneth tugged at the skirts of his doublet.
"Back, man!"
Then slowly--painfully slowly--to avoid their steps from ringing upon the stone floor, they crept across towards the door that meant safety to Sir Crispin.
But it was not needed.
The footsteps had turned the corner leading to the floor above.
Kenneth followed him mechanically, with white face and a feeling of suffocation in his throat.
"What now?" he inquired.
But, oddslife, I'm not so minded.
He opened the door, partly at first, then wide.
During the days which followed Gilgamesh sorrowed for his lost friend Ea-bani, whose spirit was in the Underworld, the captive of the spirits of death.
The burning of straw figures, representing gods of fertility, on May-Day bonfires may have been a fertility rite, and perhaps explains the use of straw birth-girdles.
At length we beheld a great cavern.
His head is supported by his parents: beside him sits his wife.
In Babylonia, as elsewhere, the priests utilized the floating material from which all mythologies were framed, and impressed upon it the stamp of their doctrines.
The two travellers then resumed their journey, performing religious acts from time to time; chanting dirges and holding feasts for the dead, and at length Gilgamesh returned to Erech.
And when it was a fit and proper thing for him to do so, Mr. Morris died.
But you--?"
"You see?" she said, with the faint shadow of a smile.
He was one of those people who do everything that is right and proper and sensible with inevitable regularity.
He made a strange gesture of appeal towards the remote glass roof of the public way, then turned and went plunging recklessly from one moving platform to another, and vanished amidst the swarms of people going to and fro thereon.
There followed a week of misery.
When presently the hypnotist recovered his senses, his head ached severely, his back was against Denton's knees and Denton was sponging his face.
"Who is the other young man?"
And soon after this the celebrated hypnotist who dressed in green and yellow had another client.
He began to see more of the situation.
"You have assaulted me, you scoundrel!"
He was afraid.
Ah--poems."
"We might be in the Stone Age," said the hypnotist.
She turned in unfeigned astonishment.
It is unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this--mainly because there is so little in life that is worth being violent about."
Then he peered at the wound.
He was disappointed, and a little angry.
"The chaperone will see you directly she comes--"
"You can--?"
The verses--"
To hide his fear from himself, he set to work to write sonnets for her when she should come again....
For a space he feared he had lost them, and then he came upon Elizabeth and her chaperone again in one of the streets of moving platforms that intersected the city.
I like a good swaggering story before all things.
He nodded to an acquaintance--it was not in those days etiquette to talk before breakfast--and seated himself on one of these chairs, and in a few seconds he had been carried to the doors of a lift, by which he descended to the great and splendid hall in which his breakfast would be automatically served.
Two hundred years ago even--not one!
"People cannot be hypnotised without their consent.
The hypnotist thought again.
Behind you."
Excessively.
Then--"
"Give whom?"
It was a lengthy interview.
He has--as they say in the romances--good looks.
His boys went to good solid schools, and were put to respectable professions; his girls, in spite of a fantastic protest or so, were all married to suitable, steady, oldish young men with good prospects.
So his toilet was complete; and, conscious of being soberly and becomingly attired, he was ready to face his fellow-beings with a tranquil eye.
"Look here!
And, by the bye, is there any money in the affair?"
The chaperone was the first to be hypnotised, and the dream, she said, was wonderful, when she came to again.
That is what I want to consult you about.
Life was life then!
"Exactly," said the hypnotist.
For an instant Denton sat stunned.
A girl.
The hypnotist shook his head.
"I've met similar cases," said the hypnotist.
Instead were pastes and cakes of agreeable and variegated design, without any suggestion in colour or form of the unfortunate animals from which their substance and juices were derived. They appeared on little dishes sliding out upon a rail from a little box at one side of the table.
They used it--for painless dentistry and things like that!
He stopped.
"You must not persist, young man," protested the chaperone.
"Of that I am sure."
He gripped the shoulder of green and gold.
"No--not notes....
One day, when Denton went down to that quiet seat beneath the flying stage, Elizabeth was not in her wonted place.
There is something....
"In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman," said Denton.
His manner was a forced calm.
The next day she did not come, and the next also.
I hardly expected to do it: the thing was done against the will of the hypnotised person.
But if once she can be hypnotised--even by somebody else--the thing is done."
If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not.
His tomb was of marble, and, without any art nonsense or laudatory inscription, quietly imposing--such being the fashion of his time.
He turned towards the door.
Well, you know I have given her--ah--every educational advantage.
"Yes--that's how things stand."
He stood up.
"Dear," asked Elizabeth, clasping her hand, and too deeply moved to heed observation, "who was that man?
It is an astonishing thing how few weapons there are nowadays.
"Oh, certainly!
"Never, dear.
He lived in a vast hotel near that part of London called Seventh Way, and had very large and comfortable apartments on the seventeenth floor.
She spoke in a clear, audible voice. "Some half-witted creature.
"I have been awake for forty hours."
The chaperone raised her eyebrows.
All I know is that I do not know him." Her face was a face of infinite distress.
In that instant he knew.
"It is practically an artificial dream.
He was hungry; he had paid the inclusive fee and had gone into one of the gigantic dining-places of the city; he was pushing his way among the tables and scrutinising by mere force of habit every group he passed.
He had not gone far when he met friend Fox, on his rounds that way.
"I'll peep.
So Jasper took the deserted post by the pillar, and whistled a Strauss waltz.
Well, I must catch him." So without the preamble of knocking, the boy dashed into the dressing-room.
"Do let me bathe it," she begged.
"May I?"
"Mrs. Chatterton, have you seen him?"
"I'm a splendid markswoman."
Oh!
"No, I won't," said Dick.
"No, not a bit," declared Dick, shaking his brown poll.
"Turn the creature over and let us see how he looks," said Mr. King, hurrying in as the last knot of the rope was made fast.
"Oh!" Polly gasped.
"Oh, Dick! do tell over again how it all happened."
Just see Polly."
Thereupon a most extraordinary hopping up and down the hall was commenced, the two figures bobbing like a pair of corks on a quivering water-surface.
I'm all right, Phronsie.
"A burglar--a burglar!" and he dashed into Mrs. Chatterton's room.
There was only a moment to think, but Dick dashed in, and with a mighty spirit, but small fists, he flung himself against the stalwart arms and shoulders.
"If I wasn't such an old fellow, I'd try; that is, if anybody asked me."
"Go back!" cried Mrs. Chatterton hoarsely, "you'll be killed."
Polly threw wide the door.
"Where are you, Dick?" cried Polly's voice outside, and rapping at the door.
That's just it, Polly, you did.
With that Mrs. Chatterton's spirit returned.
"Yes," said Jasper, "you did.
Help--help!"
Lucky you two caperers didn't break anything."
Let me give him the last knot." He staggered blindly to his feet.
"Go back!" she screamed again.
"How can we ever leave the boys!
Polly rushed over to Dick.
And dropping her fingers quickly and turning away from the glass, she exclaimed, "How dare you, Hortense, come in without knocking?"
"Humph!" laughed Mr. King, "it looks like it.
Jasper had seized a table-spread, and as Michael and the undergardeners advanced, he went back of the robber, and cleverly threw it over his head.
"I've seen that fellow round here for many a day," said Michael, giving the recumbent legs a small kick.
It was easy to secure and bind him then.
Hurry!"
"I will," said Polly, laughing.
"Do you like it, Polly?" asked Mr. King, holding out his hand.
'Tisn't manly to be fixed up."
"Well, if you've got through laughing," observed Dr. Fisher, "I'll remark that the secret is out."
There was no chance for her to escape, she knew, but she could save Dick.
"Worse and worse."
"I think he's all right, Polly." She dared say no more, for Dick had not stirred.
Now Providence has given us one, though rather an obstinate specimen," he pointed to Father Fisher.
"He's no beauty, and that's a fact."
See his wings now--he's stretching."
"I'm almost tempted to dance myself," said Dr. Fisher.
"Tell his mother so, do, somebody," said old Mr. King.
"Oh, Papa Fisher!" cried Polly with a merry peal in which Jasper, unpuckering his lips from the Strauss effort, had joined, "we must have looked"--Here she went off again.
"All right," said Dr. Fisher bravely.
"When?" demanded Polly breathlessly.
"Oh, Dick!" cried Polly in a breath, with a fearful glance at the boy lying there.
"Say, my girl?" And then before she could answer, he went on, "You see, we can't do anything without a doctor on our travels.
"I won't stir."
As they danced lightly down the long hall, Dr. Fisher leaned against a pillar, and watched them.
I saw stars, but I've got over it, I guess.
"Well, here are the men."
"There he goes!" cried Dick, "in her room.
"Not exactly money, ma'am," said the man, "for I don't suppose you have much here.
She put me up to it; we was goin' shares on the old lady's stuff."
"Come, Papa Fisher," holding out her hand, "do give me the honor."
"I'm all right, Polly.
"I want to tie one rope," cried a voice.
"Have to," said Jasper, guiding his partner deftly in the intricacies of the chairs and statuary.
THE SECRET
"It smells awfully, and I've had so much of it for my leg.
"I'll take care of him till you get help.
Dick made a wry face.
Should she dare to scream?
"It looked so nice to see Jasper and Polly, I thought I'd try it.
"I couldn't help it," said the little doctor, coming up red and animated, and wiping his forehead.
"Boys like to get hurt, you know.
Call Hortense, will you?"
Dick opened his eyes, rubbed them, and felt of his head.
Phronsie gave a sigh, which so went to Dick's heart, that he said, "All right, bring on some water if you want to.
Meanwhile the other men gather gypsum, pound it fine, and throw it into a water-hole.
It is interesting to observe that where an opposite result is desired, primitive logic enjoins the weather-doctor to observe precisely opposite rules of conduct.
Masses, vespers, concerts, illuminations, fire-works--nothing could move him.
In time of severe drought the Dieri of Central Australia, loudly lamenting the impoverished state of the country and their own half-starved condition, call upon the spirits of their remote predecessors, whom they call Mura-muras, to grant them power to make a heavy rain-fall.
At Solaparuta, in accordance with a very old custom, the dust swept from the churches on Palm Sunday had been spread on the fields.
After that he pours water and medicine into a vessel; if the charm has succeeded, the water boils up and rain follows.
He does not bathe, he eats with unwashed hands, he drinks nothing but palm wine, and if he has to cross a stream he is careful not to step in the water.
Men, women, and children, telling their beads, had lain whole nights before the holy images.
At the head of the procession walks a girl adorned with flowers, whom her companions drench with water at every halting-place, while they sing an invocation, of which the following is part:
Then the wizards who were bled carry away the two stones for about ten or fifteen miles, and place them as high as they can in the tallest tree.
Thus, whereas a man-god of the former or inspired type derives his divinity from a deity who has stooped to hide his heavenly radiance behind a dull mask of earthly mould, a man-god of the latter type draws his extraordinary power from a certain physical sympathy with nature.
On the other hand, if the sorcerer wishes to prevent rain from falling, he withdraws into the interior of the hut, and there heats a rock-crystal in a calabash.
Among the objects of public utility which magic may be employed to secure, the most essential is an adequate supply of food.
Custom has prescribed that on these occasions the colour of the victim shall be black, as an emblem of the wished-for rain-clouds.
One of them drummed with a hammer on a kettle or small cask to imitate thunder; the second knocked two fire-brands together and made the sparks fly, to imitate lightning; and the third, who was called "the rain-maker," had a bunch of twigs with which he sprinkled water from a vessel on all sides.
The Public Magician
Sometimes, when a drought has lasted a long time, people drop the usual hocus-pocus of imitative magic altogether, and being far too angry to waste their breath in prayer they seek by threats and curses or even downright physical force to extort the waters of heaven from the supernatural being who has, so to say, cut them off at the main.
They can make fair or foul weather, and can cause rain to fall by painting their faces black and then washing them, which may represent the rain dripping from the dark clouds.
If a man walked in the way of all these precepts, the rain-god Parjanya, it was said, would send rain at the wish of that man.
1.
They have been known to keep frogs under a pot and to beat them with rods when there was a drought.
We must perish indeed.
When the Wakondyo, a tribe of Central Africa, desire rain, they send to the Wawamba, who dwell at the foot of snowy mountains, and are the happy possessors of a "rain-stone." In consideration of a proper payment, the Wawamba wash the precious stone, anoint it with oil, and put it in a pot full of water.
Lastly, the men, young and old, surround the hut, and, stooping down, butt at it with their heads, like so many rams.
Here, as in New Caledonia, we find religion blent with magic, for the prayer to the dead chief, which is purely religious, is eked out with a magical imitation of rain at his grave.
In these practices we see a combination of religion with magic; for while the scattering of the water-drops by means of branches is a purely magical ceremony, the prayer for rain and the offering of beer are purely religious rites. In the Mara tribe of Northern Australia the rain-maker goes to a pool and sings over it his magic song.
"Perperia all fresh bedewed, Freshen all the neighbourhood; By the woods, on the highway, As thou goest, to God now pray: O my God, upon the plain, Send thou us a still, small rain; That the fields may fruitful be, And vines in blossom we may see; That the grain be full and sound, And wealthy grow the folks around."
So among the Toradjas the rain-doctor, whose special business it is to drive away rain, takes care not to touch water before, during, or after the discharge of his professional duties.
THE READER may remember that we were led to plunge into the labyrinth of magic by a consideration of two different types of man-god.
At last the peasants began to lose patience.
Then the women dig the children out and feel sure that rain will soon follow.
The rain ceased and the god was restored to liberty.
Among the Wambugwe of East Africa, when the sorcerer desires to make rain, he takes a black sheep and a black calf in bright sunshine, and has them placed on the roof of the common hut in which the people live together.
Then he makes an arched bundle of grass stalks in imitation of a rainbow, and sets it up over the snake.
Akkemat is your country.
In it the human body is merely a frail earthly vessel filled with a divine and immortal spirit.
In ordinary years these holy sweepings preserve the crops; but that year, if you will believe me, they had no effect whatever. At Nicosia the inhabitants, bare-headed and bare-foot, carried the crucifixes through all the wards of the town and scourged each other with iron whips.
They are, or used to be, common enough among outwardly civilised folk in the moister climate of Europe.
Next they take branches of trees and dance and sing for rain. When they return to the village they find a vessel of water set at the doorway by an old woman; so they dip their branches in it and wave them aloft, so as to scatter the drops.
If they wish to make rain they simulate it by sprinkling water or mimicking clouds: if their object is to stop rain and cause drought, they avoid water and resort to warmth and fire for the sake of drying up the too abundant moisture.
The Thompson Indians of British Columbia and some people in Europe think that to kill a frog will cause rain to fall.
It is otherwise when the rites are performed, not by the hunters, the fishers, the farmers themselves, but by professional magicians on their behalf.
It is clear, as Professor Oldenberg well points out, that "all these rules are intended to bring the Brahman into union with water, to make him, as it were, an ally of the water powers, and to guard him against their hostility.
In a district of Transylvania when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the fields to a brook, where they set it afloat.
Thus, however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of this class of men has, take it all in all, been productive of incalculable good to humanity.
The people of Egghiou, a district of Abyssinia, used to engage in sanguinary conflicts with each other, village against village, for a week together every January for the purpose of procuring rain.
Food was becoming scarce.
After that the rain cannot fail to come.
However, they were not so well pleased next day, when they felt their wounds stiff and sore.
Indeed he declared that he was actually Zeus, and caused sacrifices to be offered to himself as such.
After that rain should follow.
Thus they force their way through it and reappear on the other side, repeating the process till the hut is wrecked.
Lastly, they squirt the water into the air, making a fine mist.
Let us take as an illustration a matter about which none of us, in fact, feel the slightest doubt.
b)
We have experience of past futures, but not of future futures, and the question is: Will future futures resemble past futures?
The second is that the reign of law would seem to be itself only probable, and that our belief that it will hold in the future, or in unexamined cases in the past, is itself based upon the very principle we are examining.
Thus all knowledge which, on a basis of experience tells us something about what is not experienced, is based upon a belief which experience can neither confirm nor confute, yet which, at least in its more concrete applications, appears to be as firmly rooted in us as many of the facts of experience.
Why?
'Unsupported bodies in air fall' is a general rule to which balloons and aeroplanes are exceptions.
As just stated, the principle applies only to the verification of our expectation in a single fresh instance.
The existence and justification of such beliefs--for the inductive principle, as we shall see, is not the only example--raises some of the most difficult and most debated problems of philosophy.
But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed.
The reference to the future in this question is not essential.
If we are challenged as to why we believe that it will continue to rise as heretofore, we may appeal to the laws of motion: the earth, we shall say, is a freely rotating body, and such bodies do not cease to rotate unless something interferes from outside, and there is nothing outside to interfere with the earth between now and to-morrow.
We have therefore still to seek for some principle which shall enable us to know that the future will follow the same laws as the past.
If this doubt is raised, we find ourselves in the same position as when the doubt about the sunrise was first raised.
We are all convinced that the sun will rise to-morrow.
We may therefore repeat the two parts of our principle as regards the general law, thus:
This brings us back to the question: Have we any reason, assuming that they have always held in the past, to suppose that they will hold in the future?
Now in dealing with this question we must, to begin with, make an important distinction, without which we should soon become involved in hopeless confusions.
Thus probability is all we ought to seek.
It can never quite reach certainty, because we know that in spite of frequent repetitions there sometimes is a failure at the last, as in the case of the chicken whose neck is wrung.
"Why shouldn't she?"
"What is it?"
"Really?"
He was an inveterate old gossip, and was acquainted with the business of everybody in the neighborhood.
Jonathan responded by saying that, in so far as he knew, there hadn't been a burglary for many a year.
The venerable gate-keeper had conjectured right.
Lapierre couldn't see it.
What are you talking about?
Even then, however, she did not give up the hope of her husband's arrival sometime during the night.
She had not only seen Savareen sitting on his black mare at the door, immediately after the town bell ceased ringing for eight o'clock; but she had listened to the conversation between him and her husband, and had heard pretty nearly every word.
"Where?
Well, of course, the key to the situation was not hard to find. Savareen had left the toll-gate and proceeded northward not more than two or three minutes before Lapierre, riding southward along the same road, had reached the same point.
While he sat there pondering, the first stroke of the town bell proclaiming the hour was borne upon his ear.
"Is that Mister Stollifer?" he asked.
And then, didn't he tell me about his row with Shuttleworth, and that he had the four hundred pounds in his pocket.
He passed through here on his way home just before you came up."
He might return to the toll gate and ascertain whether Jonathan Perry was certain as to the identity of the man from whom he had parted a few minutes before.
"Now," resumed the old man, "just tell Mr. Lapierre whether you saw Mr. Savareen talking to me a few minutes since, and whether you saw him ride off up the road just before Mr. Lapierre came down.
Old Stolliver was a boorish, cross-grained customer, who paid slight regard to the amenities, and did not show to advantage in conversation.
Q. E. D.
Depend upon it, Mr. Lapierre, you've missed him somehow in the darkness, and he's safe and sound at home by this time."
A moment's conference with him was sufficient to convince Lapierre that there could be no question of mistaken identity.
Didn't you meet him just now?"
"Ah," said he to himself, "here he comes.
You may be sure that her anxiety was not lessened when she heard the strange tale which Lapierre had to tell her.
"I'll act upon it without more words.
On his way down!
I suppose you saw him on his way down?"
This seemed incredible.
Why, don't I tell you, not two minutes.
"Don't you know me?
They'll be anxious about you at home.
Before the ringing had ceased, he caught the additional sound of a horse's hoofs rapidly advancing up the road.
They were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs. Peter Van Degen--the one who had been a Dagonet--and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked.
Though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine was disappointed in the Fairford dinner.
"That delightful Popple--he paints so exactly as he talks!" the white-haired lady took it up.
Mrs. Van Degen was neither beautiful nor imposing: just a dark girlish-looking creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent laugh.
All the ladies in Apex City were more voluble than Mrs. Fairford, and had a larger vocabulary: the difference was that with Mrs. Fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo.
But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to Undine.
"Yes--he's doing me," Mrs. Peter Van Degen was saying, in her slightly drawling voice.
We'll dine together first--Peter's got a club dinner." They exchanged what seemed a smile of intelligence, and Undine heard the young man accept.
"All his portraits seem to proclaim what a gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women!
"--TO DINE WITH ME TOO?" That must be what she was going to say, and Undine's heart gave a bound.
"Ralphie, dear, you'll come to the opera with me on Friday?
This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said.
Yet in the drawing-room, with the ladies, where Mrs. Fairford came and sat by her, the spirit of caution once more prevailed.
But though Undine thought silent people awkward she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency.
Mrs. Fairford smiled.
"Good-bye, Miss Spragg.
"I think he'll do you capitally--you must let me come and see some day soon." Marvell's tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she could not be sure of its being as indifferent as it sounded.
She liked Mrs. Fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles.
Undine found Mrs. Van Degen putting on her cloak.
This discovery resulted in her holding her vivid head very high, and answering "I couldn't really say," or "Is that so?" to all Mr. Fairford's ventures; and as these were neither numerous nor striking it was a relief to both when the rising of the elderly lady gave the signal for departure.
She wanted to be noticed but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess's gradations of tone were confusing.
Then Mrs. Van Degen turned to her.
The house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby.
Undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that "people" went to see them; and she had read no new book but "When The Kissing Had to Stop," of which Mrs. Fairford seemed not to have heard.
In the hall, where young Marvell had managed to precede her.
She had not expected much of Mr. Fairford, since married men were intrinsically uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background; but she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age--in her inmost heart she had looked for Mr. Popple.
She looked down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side-glance through her lashes at Mrs. Peter Van Degen.
In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called "stylish"; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father's manner when he was not tired or worried about money.
Undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty-coloured entrees in ruffled papers. Instead, there was only a low centre-dish of ferns, and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize--as if they'd been dyspeptics on a diet!
Something in her tone made all Undine's perceptions bristle, and she strained her ears for the answer.
Undine sat between Mr. Bowen and young Marvell, who struck her as very "sweet" (it was her word for friendliness), but even shyer than at the hotel dance.
She had turned on Marvell a gaze at once pleading and possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man's reply might have expressed the open avowal of good-fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment.
Undine's face burned as she turned to receive her cloak.
But a glance about the table convinced her that Mrs. Fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly.
They're not pictures of Mrs. or Miss So-and-so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he's made on them."
The conversation was revived for a moment by her recalling that she had seen Sarah Bernhard in a play she called "Leg-long," and another which she pronounced "Fade"; but even this did not carry them far, as she had forgotten what both plays were about and had found the actress a good deal older than she expected.
I hope you'll come--"
I return to the scriptural periods or ages of the world, conventionally called 'days,' long before the appearance of man, when the unfinished world was as yet unfitted for his support.
"Is he mad?" cried the Professor.
CHAPTER XXXII.
My feverish hand has vainly attempted to describe upon paper its strange and wonderful details.
My staring eyes are fixed vacantly upon him.
I made no answer, but went and sat forward.
I shall therefore reproduce here these daily notes, written, so to speak, as the course of events directed, in order to furnish an exact narrative of our passage.
For two hours nothing was caught.
The Professor, the guide, the raft--are all gone out of my ken.
"What is the matter?" my uncle breaks in.
The Professor eyes the creature attentively, and his opinion differs from mine.
An illusion has laid hold upon me.
I was aware of the great powers of vegetation that characterise these plants, which grow at a depth of twelve thousand feet, reproduce themselves under a pressure of four hundred atmospheres, and sometimes form barriers strong enough to impede the course of a ship.
There are sufficient fish for their support.
A mast was made of two poles spliced together, a yard was made of a third, a blanket borrowed from our coverings made a tolerable sail. There was no want of cordage for the rigging, and everything was well and firmly made.
After supper I laid myself down at the foot of the mast, and fell asleep in the midst of fantastic reveries.
We went with it at a high rate of speed.
At this rate, he said, we shall make thirty leagues in twenty-four hours, and we shall soon come in sight of the opposite shore.
No, there's a pull at the line.
He took the tiller, and unmoored; the sail was set, and we were soon afloat.
On the 13th of August we awoke early.
We were now to begin to adopt a mode of travelling both more expeditious and less fatiguing than hitherto.
He baited it with a small piece of meat and flung it into the sea.
The provisions, the baggage, the instruments, the guns, and a good quantity of fresh water from the rocks around, all found their proper places on board; and at six the Professor gave the signal to embark. Hans had fitted up a rudder to steer his vessel.
Soon we entirely lost sight of land; no object was left for the eye to judge by, and but for the frothy track of the raft, I might have thought we were standing still.
"What is it all about?" at last I cried, returning to myself.
I have forgotten everything that surrounds me.
The head of this fish was flat, but rounded in front, and the anterior part of its body was plated with bony, angular scales; it had no teeth, its pectoral fins were large, and of tail there was none.
Intensity of light the same.
"What!" I cried.
This unhoped-for catch recruited our stock of provisions.
But this one displays a peculiarity confined to all fishes that inhabit subterranean waters.
At the moment of leaving the harbour, my uncle, who was tenaciously fond of naming his new discoveries, wanted to give it a name, and proposed mine amongst others.
Whither is it carrying me?
Nothing in sight before us.
The eastern and western strands spread wide as if to bid us farewell.
I took up the telescope and scanned the whole horizon, and found it everywhere a desert sea.
At that moment I felt the sinewy hand of Hans seizing me vigorously. But for him, carried away by my dream, I should have thrown myself into the sea.
"A sturgeon," I cried; "a small sturgeon."
It was a constant condition, the permanency of which might be relied upon.
"But to what family does it belong?"
"Do you feel ill?" my uncle asked.
Higher up, the protopitheca--the first monkey that appeared on the globe--is climbing up the steep ascents.
Though awake I fell into a dream.
Vegetation becomes accelerated.
But supposing it might be a solitary case, we baited afresh, and threw out our line.
Hans, keeping fast by the helm, let the raft run on, which, after all, needed no steering, the wind blowing directly aft.
Weather fine; that is to say, that the clouds are flying high, are light, and bathed in a white atmosphere resembling silver in a state of fusion.
I gaze upward in the air.
Then the zoophytes of the transition period also return to nothing.
At noon Hans prepared a hook at the end of a line.
Hans draws it in and brings out a struggling fish.
I thought I could see floating on the surface of the waters enormous chelonia, pre-adamite tortoises, resembling floating islands.
Before our eyes lay far and wide a vast sea; shadows of great clouds swept heavily over its silver-grey surface; the glistening bluish rays of electric light, here and there reflected by the dancing drops of spray, shot out little sheaves of light from the track we left in our rear.
I looked: nothing could be more certain.
But is it not a dream?
And I myself am floating with wild caprice in the midst of this nebulous mass of fourteen hundred thousand times the volume of the earth into which it will one day be condensed, and carried forward amongst the planetary bodies.
The animal belonged to the same order as the sturgeon, but differed from that fish in many essential particulars.
"But I have a better to propose," I said: "Grauben.
The wind was from the north-west.
The mammals disappear, then the birds vanish, then the reptiles of the secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, molluscs, and articulated beings.
The dense atmosphere acted with great force and impelled us swiftly on.
"This fish belongs to an extinct family, of which only fossil traces are found in the devonian formations."
Perhaps we may yet meet with some of those saurians which science has reconstructed out of a bit of bone or cartilage.
To have in one's possession a living specimen is a happy event for a naturalist."
Is all going on right?"
My body is no longer firm and terrestrial; it is resolved into its constituent atoms, subtilised, volatilised.
I survey the whole space that stretches overhead; it is as desert as the shore was.
Thus it is evident that this sea contains none but species known to us in their fossil state, in which fishes as well as reptiles are the less perfectly and completely organised the farther back their date of creation.
Inertia and its inhospitality.
So, authoritatively, falling stones were damned.
The mathematical parts are especially impressive: distribution of the dust of Krakatoa; velocity of translation and rates of subsidence; altitudes and persistences--
We believe no more.
I know of no aerolite that has ever been acceptably traced to terrestrial origin.
The stock means of exclusion remained the explanation of lightning that was seen to strike something--that had been upon the ground in the first place.
Said to have fallen at Nashville, Tenn., Jan. 24, 1891.
The only trouble is the universal trouble: that the major premise is not real, or is intermediate somewhere between realness and unrealness.
I suppose, in Alaska and in the South Sea Islands, all the medicine men were similarly upon trial.
We see, to start with, that the virgins of science have fought and wept and screamed against external relations--upon two grounds:
But Krakatoa: that's the explanation that the scientists gave.
We're told that the sound was heard 2,000 miles, and that 36,380 persons were killed.
In the autumn of 1883, and for years afterward, occurred brilliant-colored sunsets, such as had never been seen before within the memory of all observers.
Upon the 28th of August, 1883, the volcano of Krakatoa, of the Straits of Sunda, had blown up.
That the atmospheric effects that have been attributed to Krakatoa were seen in Trinidad before the eruption occurred:
Black rains--red rains--the fall of a thousand tons of butter.
One reads in the newspapers of hailstones the size of hens' eggs.
We accept.
Size of saucers.
I blurt out something that should, perhaps, be withheld for several hundred pages--but that damned thing was the size of an elephant.
Or nothing more reasonable or scientific or logical than that could be said upon any subject.
In the topography of intellection, I should say that what we call knowledge is ignorance surrounded by laughter.
But positiveness and the fate of every positive statement.
Therefore no stones can fall from the sky.
The writer abandons the first, or absolute, exclusion, and modifies it with the explanation that the day before a reported fall of stones in Tuscany, June 16, 1794, there had been an eruption of Vesuvius--
It was issued after an investigation that took five years.
Or raw meat should not be fed to babies.
Or up from one part of this earth's surface and down to another.
Or snowflakes.
The stone of Luce showed signs of fusion.
It is not customary to think of damned stones raising an outcry against a sentence of exclusion, but, subjectively, aerolites did--or data of them bombarded the walls raised against them--
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
Jet-black snow--pink snow--blue hailstones--hailstones flavored like oranges.
That makes a difficulty for us.
The volume of smoke that went up must have been visible to other planets--or, tormented with our crawlings and scurryings, the earth complained to Mars; swore a vast black oath at us.
You have never tried to demonstrate to a hypnotic that a table is not a hippopotamus.
I fear me, I fear me: this is one of the profoundly damned.
Something had to be thought of.
It's more than one hundred and twenty years later.
You can oppose an absurdity only with some other absurdity.
We shall have a few data initiatorily.
My own chief reason for indignation here:
There's nothing to prove.
The orthodox explanation:
This book is an assemblage of data of external relations of this earth. We take the position that our data have been damned, upon no consideration for individual merits or demerits, but in conformity with a general attempt to hold out for isolation of this earth.
Hailstones, for instance.
Punk and silk and charcoal.
It would cost me too much explaining, if I should have to admit that this earth's atmosphere has such sustaining power.
Terrific.
But Science is established preposterousness.
It is said that these phenomena were caused by particles of volcanic dust that were cast high in the air by Krakatoa.
Lavoisier analyzed the stone of Luce.
Then you haven't studied hypnosis.
Except that, in the seven, there was a lapse of several years--and where was the volcanic dust all that time?
At Seringapatam, India, about the year 1800, fell a hailstone--
See Chambers' Encyclopedia for three-pounders.
This is one of the profundities that we advertised in advance.
The exclusionists' explanation at that time was that stones do not fall from the sky: that luminous objects may seem to fall, and that hot stones may be picked up where a luminous object seemingly had landed--only lightning striking a stone, heating, even melting it.
Science had to account for these unconventionalities.
You couldn't think of anything done more efficiently, artistically, authoritatively.
It's virginal.
This is attempted positiveness.
But for seven years the atmospheric phenomena continued--
In 1772, a committee, of whom Lavoisier was a member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France.
That they were seen in Natal, South Africa, six months before the eruption.
We laugh.
Nevertheless they were as common as were green suns in 1883.
In all text-books that mention this occurrence--no exception so far so I have read--it is said that the extraordinary atmospheric effects of 1883 were first noticed in the last of August or the first of September.
There in the first place;
Butter and paper and wool and silk and resin.
I don't know what whopper the medicine men told.
That this preposterous explanation interferes with some of my own enormities.
I fear me that the horse and the barn were a little extreme for our budding liberalities.
One smiles.
That meteors tear through and detach fragments?
Then the exclusionists.
It seems to me that the exclusionists are still more emphatically conservators.
That such marksmanship is not attributable to whirlwinds seems to me to be what we think we mean by common sense:
Or that it had not fallen; that it had been upon the ground in the first place, and had swollen in rain, and, attracting attention by greatly increased volume, had been supposed by unscientific observers to have fallen in rain--
It was grayish.
And what have this young maid done to you?'
'I don't think there's any fellers left for you to fight with, so you're pretty safe.
There was something very restful in the scene.
I forget when I tell it how many it was; but she said she didn't believe a word!'
The boy continued in a slow, thoughtful tone, 'I saw some one to-day that I feel might be an enemy, but she's a girl; men don't fight with women.'
'Of course it's true,' was the indignant shout of all.
The boy looked at her with a twinkle in his eye, put his little hand to his forehead, and gave her a military salute.
Five o'clock struck by the old church clock close by.
'That's what mother says.
'What is her husband?' inquired Teddy's mother, as with work in hand she came out and took a seat in the old-fashioned porch.
I've promised my mother I won't fight again till she gives me leave.
They had two carpet bags and a box and a poll parrot in a cage.
A sweet gentle-faced young woman she was, with the same deep blue eyes as her little son; she bore no resemblance to the elder woman, and looked, as she indeed was, superior to her surroundings.
'A sailor.
He cut and he slashed, and heads and arms and legs rolled off as quick as lightning, one after the other.
There was silence; the uncle puffed away at his pipe; he was a good man, and had more brains than his appearance warranted, but Teddy's speeches were often a sore puzzle to him.
'Never, granny?
My father drew his sword--and no one could stand against him, no one!
There was none in the village so quick-footed as Teddy, and for daring feats and downright pluck he held the foremost place.
'What have you been doing, sonny?' asked the young mother, whose eyes had brightened at the sight of him.
With one hand he was fingering a large brass button, which figured conspicuously in the centre of his small waistcoat, and this button was the subject of his theme.
CHAPTER I
'Sorry,' was all he said as he slipped into the chair that was waiting for him.
'I'd rather tackle a man than a woman any day.
Not when he was a boy?
That was something like a soldier!'
'To fight?' asked his uncle.
TEDDY'S BUTTON
And she laughed, and walked away.'
He got up to the colours, and with a shout he plunged his sword right through the enemy's body that had stolen them!
'Oh, I say!' murmured a small sceptic from the crowd, 'it was twenty bullets last time; make it fifty, Teddy!'
'Uncle Jake!'
'To carry on with, you know; he would lay traps for me, and I would for him, like David and Saul; we should have a fine time of it.
There was a round of applause at this, but the small maiden remained undaunted.
Teddy turned his face upwards to the speaker.
'That was coming it strong; and who is she, to talk so?'
You see, I fought four boys in one week last time, and she says she won't have it.
'I seed her come yesterday in a cab from the town to old Sol at the turnpike--she and her mother, I reckon.
It was a race for life, and he ran backwards the whole way; he wasn't going to turn his back to the enemy.
'Gals is no good, never!
'Fightin' ain't the only grand thing in this world; peace is grander,' was the slow response to this appeal.
'She's a stranger; Sam said she's come to live with old Sol at the turnpike.'
An Antagonist
I think it was six bullets and three sword cuts.
'And that's the story of my button,' pursued the boy, ignoring with scorn this last remark.
Besides, it was only Tom Larken, who set them on to try and get your button from you, and he's gone off to another part of the country now.'
She was not dressed as an ordinary village child, but in a little rough serge sailor suit, with a large hat to match, set well back on a quantity of loose dark hair.
I suppose her husband is at sea again.'
'Then I tell you, boy, I don't believe a word of it!' And with set determined lips she turned on her heel and walked away, having sown seeds of anger and resentment in more than one boyish breast.
A rosy-cheeked square-set little figure she was, and her brown eyes, fringed with long black lashes, looked straight at Teddy with something of defiance and scorn in their glance.
Young Mrs. John, as she was called, was now her right hand, and the dairy work of the farm was made over entirely to her.
'That must be Grace's child,' said old Mrs. Platt, coming up and joining in the conversation.
'Telling father's story,' replied Teddy with alacrity.
No; he gave a loud "Hurrah!" picked up his sword, and fought his way back, the enemy hard after him.
The little orator paused as he sank his voice to a tragic whisper, then raising it again, he added triumphantly, 'And thirty bullets and six swords had gone through my father's body!
'She didn't believe me,' murmured Teddy, chewing a wisp of grass meditatively.
'Late again, you young scamp!' was the stern greeting of his grandmother, as Teddy appeared on the scene.
Then, whilst tea was being taken away by the women, he turned to his uncle, who, pulling out a pipe from his pocket, sat down by the open door to smoke.
Presiding at the tea-tray was a stern, forbidding-looking woman of sixty or more, opposite her was seated her son, the master of the farm, a heavy-faced, sleepy-looking man; and at his side, facing the door, sat Teddy's mother.
A grunt was the only response; but that was sufficient.
She was maid to our squire's lady then, and went to foreign parts with her; but folks say she's steadied down now wonderful.
'Is that a true story you told?' she demanded, with severity in her tone.
He was alone! The other soldiers had been beaten back.
He pressed on, shouting "Hurrah!" till he got to his own side again, and then he reached his colonel.
The two perfectly understood each other, and a minute after Teddy was perched on his knee.
He stood in the centre of a little crowd of village boys; his golden head was bare in the blazing sun, but the crop of curls seemed thick enough to protect him from its rays, and he was far too engrossed in his occupation to heed any discomfort from the heat.
Two years ago she had come with her child to make her home amongst her husband's people, and though at first her mother-in-law, Mrs. Platt, was inclined to look upon her contemptuously as a poor, delicate, useless creature, time proved to her that for steady, quiet work no one could eclipse her daughter-in-law.
I shall be always in time when I'm a soldier.'
Don't you think that would be nice?'
'And did your father have only one button to his coat?'
I don't see if it is right for soldiers to fight, why it isn't right for boys!'
'Who is she?' asked Teddy as, tired and exhausted by his recital, he threw himself on the grass to rest.
'Better begin now, then; bad habits, like weeds, grow apace!'
One of the bigger boys answered him.
She made me learn this morning--"Blessed are the peacemakers!" but you must have an enemy to make peace with, and I haven't got one.'
They be a powerful enemy sometimes, lad!
'No, I couldn't have fought her, Sam, if she'd been a boy.
'I'm wondering if I can't get an enemy!' the boy proceeded, folding his small arms and looking up at his uncle steadily; 'all good people had enemies in the Bible, and I haven't one, I should like to have a good right down enemy!'
But was he in a funk?
'Your father was never late for his meals,' the grandmother put in with asperity.
Teddy was upon his feet in an instant, and with a wild whoop and shout he was scudding across the green, his curls flying in the wind, and his little feet hardly seeming to touch the ground.
Grace was always a roving nature herself.
The enemy fell stone dead.
They were dancing and flashing with excitement now, and his whole frame was quivering with enthusiasm; with head thrown back, and tongue, hand, and foot all in motion, he seemed to have his audience completely spell-bound, and they listened with open eyes and mouths to his oration.
Not long after this, Teddy and his schoolfellows were having a delightful afternoon in the woods.
Teddy was the first to speak.
'Hush!' said Teddy, in an excited whisper.
Is thinking fighting?'
First Victories
'I asked God to drive my enemy away, but I was an awful long time thinking it out.
'And why didn't you run away when the old man woke?' asked Lady Helen.
Dancing like an elf with the line in his hand, he spun round and round the tree till the line was wound round to its very last extremity, and the farmer looked like some big bluebottle fly entangled in the fine meshes of a spider's web.
'What have we to do?' asked Nancy.
You wouldn't think it to look at him, would you?'
He smiled when he saw the boy.
And in another few minutes he had bound the boy securely to the tree, tying his hands together with his handkerchief; then, as Nancy stepped forward, indignant at this severe treatment, he turned upon her.
'Button-boy, did he hurt you?' asked Nancy anxiously; for all this time Teddy had not said a word.
'I did ask mother, and she said sailors were soldiers, they were sea soldiers.
Will that be deserting to the enemy?'
Offer your aid, as a faithful friend, to watch their lapses, and refine their sense of truth.
Most persons have an opportunity of becoming acquainted, if they will, with the lower classes of Irish, as they are so much employed among us in domestic service, and other kinds of labor.
You will not speak in vain.
It is shocking to think to what falsehoods human beings like ourselves will resort, to excuse a love of amusement, to hide ill-health, while they see us indulging freely in the one, yielding lightly to the other; and yet we have, or ought to have, far more resources in either temptation than they.
We hear people blaming it in their servants, who can and do go to Niagara, to the South, to the Springs, to Europe, to the seaside; in short, who are always on the move whenever they feel the need of variety to reanimate mind, health, or spirits.
In this respect we are much worse situated than the same parties have been in Europe.
Between employer and employed there is not sufficient pains taken on the part of the former to establish a mutual understanding.
Why, let them go and carry the good seed elsewhere.
And you, O giver! how did you give?
How natural that they should incline to it!
Then, the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table might be received with gratitude, and, if any but the dogs came to tend the beggar's sores, such might be received as angels.
Once more; put yourself in their places, and then judge them gently from your own, if you would be just to them, if you would be of any use.
But the institutions which sustained such ideas have fallen to pieces.
It is a simple duty we ask you to engage in; it is, also, a great patriotic work.
If we look fairly into the history of their people, and the circumstances under which their own youth was trained, we cannot expect that anything short of the most steadfast patience and love can enlighten them as to the beauty and value of implicit truth, and, having done so, fortify and refine them in the practice of it.
People meet, in the relations of master and servant, who have lived in two different worlds.
We answer first with regard to those who have grown up in another land, and who, soon after arriving here, are engaged in our service.
Do what you do for them for God's sake, and as a debt to humanity--interest to the common creditor upon principal left in your care.
First, as to ingratitude.
We have sometimes tried; but the want of real gratitude which, in them, is associated with such warm and wordy expressions of regard, with their incorrigible habits of falsehood and evasion, have baffled and discouraged us.
Did you say, "James, I shall expect you to do right in everything, and to attend to my concerns as I should myself; and, at the end of the quarter, I will give you my old clothes and a new pocket-handkerchief, besides seeing that your mother is provided with fuel against Christmas?"
They are so fond of change, they will leave us." What then?
Second, Dismiss from your minds all thought of gratitude.
Line upon line, and precept upon precept, the tender parent expects from the teacher to whom he confides his child; vigilance unwearied, day and night, through long years.
It is understood, even In Europe, that
He has now got some ground on which to stand for intercourse.
Gratitude!
But this must be for another day.
Or, with affability and condescending sweetness, made easy by internal delight at thine own wondrous virtue, didst thou give five dollars to balance five hundred spent on thyself?
We feel, say these persons, the justice of what has been said as to the duty and importance of improving these people.
The priest, too, will have to learn the duties of an American citizen; he will live less and less for the church, and more for the people, till at last, if there be Catholicism still, it will be under Protestant influences, as begins to be the case in Germany.
"Not very well," the boy replied.
The boy's dress was rich and expensive, even to his fine silk stockings and tan shoes; but the umbrella looked old and disreputable.
"When I was in Chicago I saw Lake Michigan," he went on dreamily, "and it looked just as big as this water does."
"Cap'n Bill told me," she said.
Button-Bright turned also and looked solemnly at the old sailor who came stumping along the path toward them.
"My 'sperience with boys is that they don't know much, but think they do."
There was something very winning--something jolly and care-free and honest and sociable--about the ancient seaman that made him everybody's friend; so the strange boy was glad to meet him.
Button-Bright nodded.
"What's your real name?" she inquired.
Trot looked the boy over carefully.
But I'm afraid you won't believe me, and--" he suddenly broke off and looked toward the white house in the distance--"Didn't you say you lived over there?" he inquired.
"Thank you," said Trot.
"I don't try to," he said.
"I don't b'lieve this is bigger than any other ocean," said he.
I guess I am.
"No, for I'm on my way back," said she.
I'm glad of it, 'cause Cap'n Bill knows ev'rything.
The boy scowled a little.
"Oh!" she said suddenly, clapping her hands together; "I know now."
They can't help being girls, of course.
"Guess I'll call you Button-Bright," said Trot, sighing.
"All right; let's go, then," said the girl, jumping up.
"Hello," answered Trot, looking up surprised.
"Yes," said Trot.
"Where did you come from?"
"You had to get up in the air before you could drop down, an'--oh, Cap'n Bill! he says he's from Phillydelfy, which is a big city way at the other end of America."
"That's true," he answered.
A one-legged sailor can't know much."
But I know a few things that are wonderful.
He nodded, rather absently, and tossed a pebble into the water.
"That's all.
Button-Bright liked the sailor's looks.
The three walked silently along the path.
The long trunk of the elephant was curved to make a crook for the handle.
"They're called parashoots, mate; but why, I can't say.
"Well, well, Trot," he said, coming up, "is this the way you hurry to town?"
"How did what happen?"
"No," said Button-Bright; "I didn't come by water."
"Oh, here comes Cap'n Bill!" as she glanced over her shoulder.
"Yes," said Button-Bright; "that was the way."
It was of wood and carved to resemble an elephant's head.
Animals, again, often play an important part in these weather-charms.
So when the Siamese need rain, they set out their idols in the blazing sun; but if they want dry weather, they unroof the temples and let the rain pour down on the idols.
When they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove.
Others again, stripped of their beautiful robes, were exiled far from their parishes, threatened, grossly insulted, ducked in horse-ponds.
In Java, when rain is wanted, two men will sometimes thrash each other with supple rods till the blood flows down their backs; the streaming blood represents the rain, and no doubt is supposed to make it fall on the ground.
Consecrated candles had burned day and night in the churches.
Other saints were turned, like naughty children, with their faces to the wall.
When the land suffers from unseasonable drought, the people go to this grave, pour water on it, and say, "O grandfather, have pity on us; if it is your will that this year we should eat, then give rain."
"No wonder," says the wizard in such a case, "that the sky is fiery.
Among some tribes of North-western Australia the rain-maker repairs to a piece of ground which is set apart for the purpose of rain-making.
Thus disguised she is called the Dodola, and goes through the village with a troop of girls.
The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.
In Kursk, a province of Southern Russia, when rain is much wanted, the women seize a passing stranger and throw him into the river, or souse him from head to foot.
Further, the women must repair to the house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench her with water, which they carry in little pitchers.
The Magical Control of Rain
The Shuswap Indians, like the Thompson Indians, associate twins with the grizzly bear, for they call them "young grizzly bears." According to them, twins remain throughout life endowed with supernatural powers.
Thus the Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia believe that twins control the weather; therefore they pray to wind and rain, "Calm down, breath of the twins." Further, they think that the wishes of twins are always fulfilled; hence twins are feared, because they can harm the man they hate.
In Kumaon a way of stopping rain is to pour hot oil in the left ear of a dog.
At Palermo they dumped St. Joseph in a garden to see the state of things for himself, and they swore to leave him there in the sun till rain fell.
Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered to them after better had been propounded.
Water is sprinkled on the stone and huge fires are kindled.
Among the Greeks of Thessaly and Macedonia, when a drought has lasted a long time, it is customary to send a procession of children round to all the wells and springs of the neighbourhood.
In the arid wastes of Arizona and New Mexico the Apaches sought to make rain by carrying water from a certain spring and throwing it on a particular point high up on a rock; after that they imagined that the clouds would soon gather, and that rain would begin to fall.
"We go through the village; The clouds go in the sky; We go faster, Faster go the clouds; They have overtaken us, And wetted the corn and the vine."
In particular they can make good or bad weather.
If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him aside.
The pipes were perforated like the nozzle of a watering-can, and through the holes the rain-maker blew the water towards that part of the sky where the clouds hung heaviest.
He catches a snake, puts it alive into the pool, and after holding it under water for a time takes it out, kills it, and lays it down by the side of the creek.
There is a widespread belief that twin children possess magical powers over nature, especially over rain and the weather.
They produce rain by spilling water from a basket in the air; they make fine weather by shaking a small flat piece of wood attached to a stick by a string; they raise storms by strewing down on the ends of spruce branches.
At other times they threaten and beat the god if he does not give rain; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of deity.
The methods by which they attempt to discharge the duties of their office are commonly, though not always, based on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic.
Having done so they go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing immodest dances.
By the end of April 1893 there was great distress in Sicily for lack of water.
Yet the principle on which all three act is the same; each of them, by a sort of childish make-believe, identifies himself with the phenomenon which he desires to produce.
When rain is wanted, the rajah fetches water from a spring below and sprinkles it on the stone.
Then a handful of twigs is dipped in water and weighted with stones, while a spell is chanted.
The people were in great alarm.
But a great step in advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of general utility.
"Send soon, O frog, the jewel of water! And ripen the wheat and millet in the field."
Most of the saints were banished.
The Chinese are adepts in the art of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm.
Here for a space of time, which might vary, according to different doctors of the law, from one to twelve years, he had to observe certain rules of life, among which were the following.
In Minahassa, a province of North Celebes, the priest bathes as a rain-charm.
The drought had lasted six months.
At Caltanisetta the golden wings of St. Michael the Archangel were torn from his shoulders and replaced with wings of pasteboard; his purple mantle was taken away and a clout wrapt about him instead.
An Armenian rain-charm is to throw the wife of a priest into the water and drench her.
Every day the sun rose and set in a sky of cloudless blue.
The intimate association of frogs and toads with water has earned for these creatures a widespread reputation as custodians of rain; and hence they often play a part in charms designed to draw needed showers from the sky.
Thus, when rain is wanted they make a huge dragon of paper or wood to represent the rain-god, and carry it about in procession; but if no rain follows, the mock-dragon is execrated and torn to pieces.
At the same time the two bleeding men throw handfuls of down about, some of which adheres to the blood-stained bodies of their comrades, while the rest floats in the air.
Then the heaven melts with tenderness for the death of the bird; "it wails for it by raining, wailing a funeral wail." In Zululand women sometimes bury their children up to the neck in the ground, and then retiring to a distance keep up a dismal howl for a long time.
The host, on his side, and his servants, both male and female, must neither wash clothes nor bathe so long as the feast lasts, and they have all during its continuance to observe strict chastity.
As a result of the foregoing discussion, the two types of human gods may conveniently be distinguished as the religious and the magical man-god respectively.
Palm branches, blessed on Palm Sunday, had been hung on the trees.
It often happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard they go and pour water on the graves of twins.
Even the great St. Francis of Paolo himself, who annually performs the miracle of rain and is carried every spring through the market-gardens, either could not or would not help.
Having thus prepared himself for his task he has a small hut built for himself outside of the village in a rice-field, and in this hut he keeps up a little fire, which on no account may be suffered to go out.
Like other peoples, the Greeks and Romans sought to obtain rain by magic, when prayers and processions had proved ineffectual.
Girls yoke themselves to a plough and drag it into a river, wading in the water up to their girdles.
But the line between these two types of man-god, however sharply we may draw it in theory, is seldom to be traced with precision in practice, and in what follows I shall not insist on it.
Raised scars are thus produced.
Thus in New Caledonia the rain-makers blackened themselves all over, dug up a dead body, took the bones to a cave, jointed them, and hung the skeleton over some taro leaves.
Some of the foregoing facts strongly support an interpretation which Professor Oldenberg has given of the rules to be observed by a Brahman who would learn a particular hymn of the ancient Indian collection known as the Samaveda.
When the rains do not come in due season the people of Central Angoniland repair to what is called the rain-temple.
He must observe a fast, and may neither drink nor bathe; what little he eats must be eaten dry, and in no case may he touch water.
Sometimes an appeal is made to the pity of the gods.
Further, I pointed out that the public magician occupies a position of great influence, from which, if he is a prudent and able man, he may advance step by step to the rank of a chief or king.
Thus, for example, in a village near Dorpat, in Russia, when rain was much wanted, three men used to climb up the fir-trees of an old sacred grove.
The Garos of Assam offer a black goat on the top of a very high mountain in time of drought.
Hence in savage communities the rain-maker is a very important personage; and often a special class of magicians exists for the purpose of regulating the heavenly water-supply.
Put down your water-cask, close it properly, that not a drop may fall out." While he utters this prayer the sorcerer looks upwards, burning incense the while.
In order to procure rain the Wagogo sacrifice black fowls, black sheep, and black cattle at the graves of dead ancestors, and the rain-maker wears black clothes during the rainy season.
This was but for two or three moments.
'Her name is Caroline.
'I'm from aboard the Victory,' said the sailor.
'If he had been dead I could have borne it, but this I cannot bear!'
When are they going to be married?'
What 'a did next I can't say, for the wind had dropped, and the smoke was like a cloud.
After that he and some other lads jumped aboard the French ship, and I believe they was in her when she struck her flag.
Good God! what can a man be made of to go on as he does?
If so--'
'When are you coming to the hall again?'
The two households were on this account even more closely united in the garden than within the mill.
The soil within was of that intense fat blackness which is only seen after a century of constant cultivation.
The paths were grassed over, so that people came and went upon them without being heard.
'Father's behind,' said John.
'What a weathercock you are, mother!
They passed on to the tents of the German Legion, a well-grown and rather dandy set of men, with a poetical look about their faces which rendered them interesting to feminine eyes.
It made her think of things which she tried to forget, and to look into a little drawer at something soft and brown that lay in a curl there, wrapped in paper.
'I'll overtake you in a minute,' she said to the younger pair, and went back, her colour, for some unaccountable reason, rising as she did so. The miller and she then came on slowly together, conversing in very low tones, and when they got to the bottom they stood still.
This garden was undivided from Loveday's, the two having originally been the single garden of the whole house.
The grass harboured slugs, and on this account the miller was going to replace it by gravel as soon as he had time; but as he had said this for thirty years without doing it, the grass and the slugs seemed likely to remain.
Out there they were almost one family, and they talked from plot to plot with a zest and animation which Mrs. Garland could never have anticipated when she first removed thither after her husband's death.
'Leave her alone, leave her alone,' said Festus, his gaze blackening. 'Now I think of it I am glad she can't come with me, for I am engaged;' and he stalked away.
He thus gave her accounts at fifteen paces of his experiences in camp, in quarters, in Flanders, and elsewhere; of the difference between line and column, of forced marches, billeting, and such-like, together with his hopes of promotion.
The brooks were so far overhung at their brinks by grass and garden produce that, had it not been for their perpetual babbling, few would have noticed that they were there.
At last she could bear it no longer, and went downstairs.
'Don't mention him, mother, don't!'
'Because you must not.
At length the earnest trumpet-major obtained Mrs. Garland's consent to take her and her daughter to the camp, which they had not yet viewed from any closer point than their own windows.
It was a quaint old place, enclosed by a thorn hedge so shapely and dense from incessant clipping that the mill-boy could walk along the top without sinking in--a feat which he often performed as a means of filling out his day's work.
So poor Anne, who really had not the slightest wish to throw her heart away upon a soldier, but merely wanted to displace old thoughts by new, turned into the inner garden from day to day, and passed a good many hours there, the pleasant birds singing to her, and the delightful butterflies alighting on her hat, and the horrid ants running up her stockings.
'Where are you going?' said Mrs. Garland.
'Never, perhaps.'
'Well, where's Mr. Loveday?' asked Mrs. Garland.
'That you do not care for Derriman, and mean to encourage John Loveday. What's all the world so long as folks are happy!
The figures of these rural sutlers could be seen creeping up the slopes, laden like bees, to a spot in the rear of the camp, where there was a kind of market- place on the greensward.
Festus looked from Anne to the trumpet-major, and from the trumpet-major back to Anne, with a dark expression of face, as if he suspected that there might be a tender understanding between them.
Thus the month of July passed.
'Well then, dear, walk in the garden.'
The villagers were by this time driving a roaring trade with the soldiers, who purchased of them every description of garden produce, milk, butter, and eggs at liberal prices.
The widow looked unhappily in her daughter's face, distressed between her desire that Anne should encourage Festus, and her wish to consult Anne's own feelings.
But Mrs. Garland could not keep the secret long.
'Are you offended with me?' he said to her in a low voice of repressed resentment.
She always spoke to him when she saw him there, and he replied in deep, firm accents across the gooseberry bushes, or through the tall rows of flowering peas, as the case might be.
And now we come to Nibbler the House Mouse, who, like Robber the Brown Rat, has no business here at all, but who has followed man all over the world and like Robber has become a pest to man."
Neighbors and close relatives are the Spiny Pocket Mice."
"There is one little fellow living right near here who looks to me as if he must be a member of the Mouse family, but he isn't like any of the Mice you have told us about," continued Happy Jack.
"Probably other members of his family were. He is perfectly at home in any building put up by man, just as is Robber the Rat.
"Have any of you seen Nibbler?" asked Old Mother Nature.
"As I was saying, this is all about our native Mice; that is, the Mice who belong to this country.
Old Mother Nature smiled.
His fur is like velvet.
If they are living in a barn, they make their nest of hay and any soft material they can find.
"If Mr. and Mrs. Nibbler are living in a house, their nest is made of scraps of paper, cloth, wool and other soft things stolen from the people who live in the house.
He is found all over the West from well up in the North to the hot dry regions of the Southwest. When he cannot find a convenient deserted burrow of some other animal, he digs a home for himself and there raises several families each year.
In getting this material they often do great damage.
Peter Rabbit looked rather sheepish when he discovered that Old Mother Nature hadn't for gotten, and resolved that in the future he would hold his tongue.
His back and sides are yellow, and beneath he is white.
"You've guessed it," laughed Old Mother Nature.
In appearance he is much like Nibbler, but his coat is browner and there are fine hairs on his tail.
Because of his small size he can go where Robber cannot.
"But there are others who have even greater need of pockets, and among them are the Pocket Mice.
In fact, he is one of the smallest of the entire family.
"No, marm," answered Happy Jack the Gray Squirrel, who, you remember, had laughed at Peter Rabbit for wanting to go to school.
"I wouldn't be without my pockets for any thing," spoke up Striped Chipmunk.
He is fond of meat when he can get it. He also eats seeds of many kinds.
A Cat is Nibbler's worst enemy.
He has some larger cousins, one of them being a little bigger than Nibbler the House Mouse.
"I have," replied Danny Meadow Mouse.
"While Nibbler prefers to live in or close to the homes of men, he sometimes is driven out and then takes to the fields, especially in summer.
Man brought him here and now he is here to stay and quite as much at home as if he belonged here the way the rest of you do.
By day the entrances are closed with earth from inside, for the Mice are active only at night. Sometimes the burrows are hidden under bushes, and sometimes they are right out in the open.
Without pockets in which to carry the seeds, I am afraid some of them would never be able to store up enough food for winter," began Old Mother Nature, as soon as everybody was on hand the next morning.
Inside is a warm, soft bed made of milkweed or cattail down, the very nicest kind of a bed for the babies.
He is called the Grasshopper Mouse."
"He is so small he can hide under a leaf.
In each cheek is a pocket opening from the outside, and these pockets are lined with hair. He is called Silky Pocket Mouse because of the fineness and softness of his coat.
"It is largely because of Robber the Rat and Nibbler that men keep the Cats you all hate so.
He is very timid, ready to dart into his hole at the least sound.
There he lives in all sorts of hiding places, and isn't at all particular what the place is, if it promises safety and food can be obtained close by.
Of course, they have pockets in their cheeks.
"Another Mouse of the West looks almost enough like Whitefoot to be a member of his branch of the family.
"How impatient some little folks are and how fearful that their curiosity will not be satisfied," remarked Old Mother Nature.
He eats many kinds of insects, Moths, Flies, Cutworms, Beetles, Lizards, Frogs and Scorpions. Because of his fondness for the latter he is called the Scorpion Mouse in some sections.
This is placed in thick grass or weeds close to the ground or in bushes or low trees several feet from the ground.
He has a beautiful yellowish-brown coat and white waistcoat, and his feet are white. But his tail is short in comparison with Whitefoot's and instead of being slim is quite thick.
"Is that because he eats Grasshoppers?" asked Peter Rabbit at once.
I suspect these are the only ones in whom you take any interest, and so you will not care to come to school any more.
Nibbler is slender and graceful, with a long, hairless tail and ears of good size.
"Do they have spines like Prickly Porky?" demanded Peter Rabbit.
"Now this is all about the native Mice and--what is it, Peter?"
Isn't that so?" Happy Jack turned to the others and every one nodded, even Prickly Porky.
But this does not happen often.
In the early evening he often utters a fine, shrill, whistling call note.
"He is very, very fond of Grasshoppers and Crickets.
"I don't wonder you ask," said she. "I think it is a foolish name myself, for they haven't any spines at all.
They are more slender than their Silky cousins, and their tails are longer in proportion to their size and have little tufts of hair at the ends.
He eats all sorts of food, but spoils more for man, by running about over it, than he eats.
Sometimes he uses a hole in a tree or post and sometimes a deserted birds' nest, but more frequently he builds a nest for himself--a little round ball of grass and other vegetable matter.
The most interesting thing about this little Mouse is the way he builds his home.
He isn't even a Rodent.
Lena Houghton, still dominated by me, knelt longer than the rest, but at last she got up and walked down the aisle, and I felt a great sense of relief and satisfaction.
True, he was becoming well accustomed to this sort of thing, since the ladies of Muddleton were far more fond of seeking advice from the young and good-looking curate than from the elderly and experienced rector.
"But I don't know anything exactly against him."
To keep my tongue from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering." What is more, she took great pains to teach these words to a big class of Sunday School children, and went, rain or shine, to spend two hours each Sunday in a stuffy school- room for that purpose.
"On no account," said the curate, warmly.
"Every one has taken him up," said the curate, with the least little touch of resentment in his tone.
Lena Houghton's attention could only have been given to the drearily read lesson by a very great effort; she was a little lazy and did not make the effort, she thought how nice it was to sit down again, and then the melancholy voice lulled her into a vague interval of thoughtless inactivity.
"Do you happen to know if your brother is at home?
Finding me burdensome, she had passed me on to somebody else with additions that vastly increased my working powers, and then she talked of leaving it to chance!
But my progenitor is clever, and doubtless knows very well, whom to select as his tools.
"Good afternoon, Miss Houghton," he exclaimed.
Hardly had the rector announced, "Here beginneth the forty-fourth verse of the sixteenth chapter of the book of the prophet Ezekiel," than a sort of relaxation took place in the mind I was attacking.
All through the prayers and psalms I had fought a desperate fight without gaining a single inch.
In my first stage the reader will perceive that I was a comparatively weak and harmless little slander, with merely that taint of original sin which was to be expected in one of such parentage.
Bear not false witness, slander not, nor lie; Truth is the speech of inward purity.
But I developed with great rapidity; and I believe men of science will tell you that this is always the case with low organisms.
Leave it to chance indeed!
But the strange stillness and quiet oppressed me, I did not feel nearly so much at home as in Mrs. O'Reilly's drawing-room--to use a terrestrial simile, I felt like a fish out of water.
He seemed to fancy, however, that with the poor his work ended, and he was not always so wise as he might have been in Muddleton society.
Whether this clergyman had a toothache, or a headache, or a heavy load on his mind, I cannot say, but his reading was more lugubrious than the wind in an equinoctial gale.
I knew well enough that I should be able to dominate his thoughts as I had done hers.
For though he liked the honour of being consulted, he did not always like the trouble it involved, and he remembered with a shudder that Miss Houghton had once asked him his opinion about the 'Ethical Concept of the Good.'
"Why, I don't profess to like Mr. Zaluski," he said.
Try as I would, I could not distract her attention or gain the slightest hold upon her, and I really believe I should have been altogether baffled, had not the rector unconsciously come to my aid.
Still, it has been a great relief just to tell you about it and get it off my mind.
He was a good well-meaning fellow, a little narrow, a little prejudiced, a little spoiled by the devotion of the district visitors and Sunday School teachers; but he was honest and energetic, and as a worker among the poor few could have equalled him.
"I knew that the Morleys were his special friends; I imagine that he admires Miss Morley."
"I am so glad to have this chance of speaking to you," she began rather nervously.
It was a fine old Gothic building, and the afternoon sunshine seemed to flood the whole place; even the white stones in the aisle were glorified here and there with gorgeous patches of colour from the stained glass windows.
MY SECOND STAGE
I suppose we can only hope that something may put a stop to it all--we must just leave it to chance."
And not only that, but she says he is altogether a dangerous, unprincipled man with a dreadful temper.
"Yes, that is the worst of it," she replied, with a sigh.
This sentiment amused me not a little.
It was strange that she should be so ready to believe evil of her neighbour, and so eager to spread the story.
"Well, you know Mr. Zaluski, and how the Morleys have taken him up?"
The congregation rose.
We were out in the open air once more, and I had triumphed; I was quite sure that she would tell the first person she met, for, as I have said before, she was entirely taken up with me, and to have kept me to herself would have required far more strength and unselfishness than she at that moment possessed.
She was an excitable, impressionable sort of girl, and when once I had obtained an entrance into her mind I found it the easiest thing in the world to dominate her thoughts.
Then the rector walked over to the lectern, and the moment he opened his mouth I knew that my time had come, and that there was a very fair chance of victory before me.
"I am very sorry to hear about it," said Mr. Blackthorne, "but I don't see that anything can be done.
I crowded out the Magnificat with a picture of Zaluski and Gertrude Morley.
But I received orders to attend evensong at the parish church, and to haunt the mind of Lena Houghton.
That, for instance, while it takes years to develop the man from the baby, and months to develop the dog from the puppy, the baby monad will grow to maturity in an hour.
"What did she tell you?" he asked with some curiosity.
You can't think how unhappy she is about poor Gertrude, and so am I, for we were at school together and have always been friends."
"It was only that I was so troubled about something Mrs. O'Reilly has just told me," said Lena Houghton.
"I wanted particularly to ask your advice."
Mr. Blackthorne, being human and young, was not unnaturally flattered by this remark.
You see, one does not like to interfere in these sort of things.
And yet Lena Houghton was a good sort of girl, and had from her childhood repeated the catechism words which proclaim that, "My duty to my neighbour is to love him as myself . . .
The hypnotist helped himself to some attractive amber-coloured jelly.
Things must be stopped.
"But--but ...
"If only I can forget--"
"No, I do not know him.
There was another pause.
Filled her mind with unutterable nonsense about soldiers who fight--what is it?--Etruscans?"
And she has got it into her head that she must marry for Love, and that poor little Bindon--"
However, you know your own concern.
The hypnotist turned an attentive eye upon him, and continued eating.
You must not go on talking to us after that.
I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible.
"I want to forget," he cried.
It is I--Denton.
And, strange to tell, and much as Mr. Morris would have been angered if any one had foreshadowed it to him, all over the world there were scattered a multitude of people, filled with the breath of life, in whose veins the blood of Mr. Morris flowed.
"Not yet," said Denton.
Over this he flung a scarlet cloak with its edge fantastically curved.
"But what--?
"I must confess I do," said the hypnotist.
I hit at last upon this lamp.
The hypnotist tried to free himself; he rose to his feet.
For a time he could not find words.
He could not control himself to patience.
He had some small private means of his own, and so he threw over his appointment on the flying stage, and set himself to find this girl who had become at last all the world to him.
I don't see.
Think!"
Do not trouble your mind about a thing like this."
Of course I'm not a hypnotist; my knowledge is limited.
"Let me get up," he said.
"The world did very well without us for some thousands of years.
Then he stood up and groaned aloud.
"Let go!" cried the hypnotist, thrusting an arm against Denton's chest.
The excellent Mr. Morris was an Englishman, and he lived in the days of Queen Victoria the Good.
"Violence! Struggle!"
He looked into the hypnotist's eyes.
And then he knew she was the only thing on earth worth having, and that he must seek her, however hopeless the search, until she was found once more.
Life was so easy-going then.
Everything that it was right and proper for a man in his position to possess, he possessed; and everything that it was not right and proper for a man in his position to possess, he did not possess.
"She will bring her chaperone."
He sat down with his back to her, and for a time he did not dare to look at her again. When at last he did, she and Bindon and two other people were standing up to go.
He rose quietly and looked about him.
The mischief was done in a moment!"
The chaperone had a visitor that day, a man in green and yellow, with a white face and vivid eyes, who talked amazingly.
At first Elizabeth did not join in the conversation, but after a time the subject became so interesting that she made a few shy interpolations.
"Well--that's all.
On his head, which had been skilfully deprived of every scrap of hair, he adjusted a pleasant little cap of bright scarlet, held on by suction and inflated with hydrogen, and curiously like the comb of a cock.
A love affair too--like yours.
"What do you mean?" gasped the hypnotist.
When his toilet was completed he went towards one of the two doors of his apartment--there were doors at opposite ends, each marked with a huge arrow pointing one one way and one the other--touched a stud to open it, and emerged on a wide passage, the centre of which bore chairs and was moving at a steady pace to the left.
You hypnotists have your work to do."
He went on to describe a new method of entertaining people.
I believe that's how things stand?"
There was a girl.
"You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely thought of.
In a moment the two men were locked in a clumsy wrestle.
I don't know if you attend to that rubbish."
"Do you know him, dear?"
His white face was convulsed with half-hysterical excitement.
I telephoned.
"I happen to be a good deal in request," he said modestly.
He laid his hand on her wrist.
"Yes," said the hypnotist, "go on.
No competition worth speaking of--no pressure.
Nothing but the fear of a strange man showed in her face.
The hypnotist thought.
Well ..."
Then, you know, they clapped 'em away in what they called a lunatic asylum."
The chaperone's eyes followed him, and then she looked at the curious faces about her.
"No," cried Elizabeth,--"no.
"We are alone," said Denton, "and the door is secure."
You wish it.
"But, dear--the songs--the little verses--"
"Notes?"
Elizabeth sat scarcely twenty yards away from him, looking straight at him.
I suppose you don't read books?"
"Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course"; and surveyed the table for his next choice.
"A prominent politician--ahem!--suffering from overwork." He glanced at the breakfast and seated himself.
Phonographs are good enough for me."
You have made a mistake.
I have wrenched off the wires and things, and I hold it so." He extended it over the hypnotist's shoulders.
"You are a determined young man," he said, "and only half civilised.
This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you.
As this person, walking amidst the tables with measured steps, drew near, the pallid earnestness of his face and the unusual intensity of his eyes became apparent.
His legs he encased in pleasant pink and amber garments of an air-tight material, which with the help of an ingenious little pump he distended so as to suggest enormous muscles.
The young man paced his consulting-room, pale and disordered.
And yet I cannot understand the appearance of these quadrupeds in a granite cavern."
I eagerly accepted, and we began to coast along this new sea.
"These are the molar teeth of the deinotherium; this femur must have belonged to the greatest of those beasts, the megatherium.
When I was able to reopen them, I stood more stupefied even than surprised.
"The sea!" I cried.
"It is only a forest of mushrooms," said he.
Had the cooling of the globe produced it?
I felt rather tired, and went to sit down at the end of a promontory, at the foot of which the waves came and beat themselves into spray. Thence my eye could sweep every part of the bay; within its extremity a little harbour was formed between the pyramidal cliffs, where the still waters slept untouched by the boisterous winds.
On the left huge pyramids of rock, piled one upon another, produced a prodigious titanic effect.
And as this unpleasant notion got hold of me, I surveyed with anxious scrutiny the open spaces before me; but no living creature appeared upon the barren strand.
And he was right.
Providence seems to have preserved in this immense conservatory the antediluvian plants which the wisdom of philosophers has so sagaciously put together again."
But what were these cavities compared to that in which I stood with wonder and admiration, with its sky of luminous vapours, its bursts of electric light, and a vast sea filling its bed?
Where did it lead to?
Look at that dust under your feet; see the bones scattered on the ground."
We were the only living creatures in this subterranean world.
If the grotto of Guachara, in Colombia, visited by Humboldt, had not given up the whole of the secret of its depth to the philosopher, who investigated it to the depth of 2,500 feet, it probably did not extend much farther.
Anxious queries arose to my lips.
As for its height, it must have been several leagues.
The vault that spanned the space above, the sky, if it could be called so, seemed composed of vast plains of cloud, shifting and variable vapours, which by their condensation must at certain times fall in torrents of rain.
My uncle made no doubt about it at all; I both desired and feared.
My imagination fell powerless before such immensity.
They were lowly shrubs of earth, here attaining gigantic size; lycopodiums, a hundred feet high; the huge sigillaria, found in our coal mines; tree ferns, as tall as our fir-trees in northern latitudes; lepidodendra, with cylindrical forked stems, terminated by long leaves, and bristling with rough hairs like those of the cactus.
"Yes; no doubt of it.
There they stood in thousands.
I had rushed upon these remains, formed of indestructible phosphates of lime, and without hesitation I named these monstrous bones, which lay scattered about like decayed trunks of trees.
Deep shadows reposed upon their lower wreaths; and often, between two separated fields of cloud, there glided down a ray of unspeakable lustre.
Where this vault rested upon its granite base no eye could tell; but there was a cloud hanging far above, the height of which we estimated at 12,000 feet, a greater height than that of any terrestrial vapour, and no doubt due to the great density of the air.
CHAPTER XXX.
I should have thought that under so powerful a pressure of the atmosphere there could be no evaporation; and yet, under a law unknown to me, there were broad tracts of vapour suspended in the air.
It certainly is a menagerie, for these remains were not brought here by a deluge.
Where did that sea terminate?
My eyes, unaccustomed to the light, quickly closed.
"Well, take my arm, Axel, and let us follow the windings of the shore."
These, humble garden plants with us, were tall trees in the early ages.
"Here is the entire flora of the second period of the world--the transition period.
But this illusion lasted a very short time.
"No doubt; and there is a geological explanation of the fact.
Yet I wanted to penetrate farther underneath, though a chill fell upon me as soon as I came under those cellular vaults.
It will be easily conceived that after an imprisonment of forty seven days in a narrow gallery it was the height of physical enjoyment to breathe a moist air impregnated with saline particles.
There stood before me productions of earth, but of gigantic stature, which my uncle immediately named.
It was not the light of the sun, with his dazzling shafts of brightness and the splendour of his rays; nor was it the pale and uncertain shimmer of the moonbeams, the dim reflection of a nobler body of light.
I could not give any name to these singular creations.
"Because animal life existed upon the earth only in the secondary period, when a sediment of soil had been deposited by the rivers, and taken the place of the incandescent rocks of the primitive period."
It was composed of trees of moderate height, formed like umbrellas, with exact geometrical outlines.
"Wonderful, magnificent, splendid!" cried my uncle.
"We shall see it no more," I said, with a sigh.
I felt as if I was in some distant planet Uranus or Neptune--and in the presence of phenomena of which my terrestrial experience gave me no cognisance.
A light foam flew over the waves before the breath of a moderate breeze, and some of the spray fell upon my face. On this slightly inclining shore, about a hundred fathoms from the limit of the waves, came down the foot of a huge wall of vast cliffs, which rose majestically to an enormous height.
Never had botanist such a feast as this!"
The waves broke on this shore with the hollow echoing murmur peculiar to vast inclosed spaces.
Farther on the eye discerned their massive outline sharply defined against the hazy distant horizon.
"Yes," my uncle replied, "the Liedenbrock Sea; and I don't suppose any other discoverer will ever dispute my claim to name it after myself as its first discoverer."
But the subterranean vegetation was not confined to these fungi. Farther on rose groups of tall trees of colourless foliage and easy to recognise.
My uncle, already familiar with these wonders, had ceased to feel surprise.
Besides I could not tell upon what geological theory to account for the existence of such an excavation.
The deeply indented shore was lined with a breadth of fine shining sand, softly lapped by the waves, and strewn with the small shells which had been inhabited by the first of created beings.
No light could penetrate between their huge cones, and complete darkness reigned beneath those giants; they formed settlements of domes placed in close array like the round, thatched roofs of a central African city.
"Why?"
Amongst these streams I recognised our faithful travelling companion, the Hansbach, coming to lose its little volume quietly in the mighty sea, just as if it had done nothing else since the beginning of the world.
If my eyes were able to range afar over this great sea, it was because a peculiar light brought to view every detail of it.
Probably there were subsidences of the outer crust, when a portion of the sedimentary deposits was carried down sudden openings."
It was quite an ocean, with the irregular shores of earth, but desert and frightfully wild in appearance.
When the wind lulled, a deeper silence than that of the deserts fell upon the arid, naked rocks, and weighed upon the surface of the ocean.
The general effect was sad, supremely melancholy.
Words failed me to express my feelings.
Here are entire skeletons.
No; when we arrived under their shade my surprise turned into admiration.
I almost fancied I should presently see some ship issue from it, full sail, and take to the open sea under the southern breeze.
Meanwhile he and Mr. Damon, together with their machinist, were kept busy.
My plans are missing, and I think he took them.
However, he was more interested in what Andy Foger would turn out.
Then came a flight for height; and while no records were broken, the crowd was well satisfied.
"I'm going to beat you!" the bully boasted, "and I haven't a machine like yours, after all.
"Poor night, but doctor thinks day will show improvement.
"Get ready to make your protest," advised Mr. Damon to the young inventor.
I hope you beat him!"
"So I see," stammered Tom, hardly knowing what to think.
Would it prove to be a copy of his speedy Humming-Bird?
"Get the evidence against him, and we'll act quickly enough."
It was this:
Andy caught sight of Tom Swift.
But the smoke of it leaped into the air.
His helper thrust the Humming-Bird forward.
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Good!"
Don't worry."
He pushed his way through the crowd.
Tom started the propeller.
He felt his craft soar upward.
"How much thrust?" cried Tom to his machinist.
It will meet at once, and I'll let you know what they say."
"I never had them!"
I wonder who could help it," mused poor Tom.
That is, they need not bring them out until just before the races," he added.
No, I've either got to stop Andy before the race, or not at all.
"Don't worry!
Over the smooth ground it rushed.
I will try to think of a plan."
Then he exclaimed:
"We have great hopes."
But don't tire yourself.
"They tell me you--you made a great trip to get Dr. Hendrix--broken bridge--came through the air with him.
"He has talked long enough. He must sleep now, and get up his strength."
"You will have to hope for the best, that is all, Tom.
"I--because--well, I don't want to."
"Why not?" Mr. Swift spoke more strongly.
"We can't say for sure," was the answer.
"Now you must go," said Dr. Gladby to Tom.
Tom's heart felt better.
Over a hundred, and the motor wasn't at its best."
"Nonsense, Tom!
"Yes, dad," was the eager answer
"I will go to the meet.
Now promise me you'll go in it and--and--win!"
"Andy's here at last!
Have you heard from home to-day, Tom?"
Is that right?"
If I were you I'd go in the race.
By that time the bridge will have been repaired, and he can go back by train.
Unless Dr. Hendrix wants to go back in it," he added as an after thought.
I'll take the Humming-Bird apart at once, and ship it to Eagle Park.
It would be just like him."
"I--I promise!" exclaimed Tom, and the aged inventor sank back with a smile of satisfaction on his pale face.
He looked around feebly.
"I--I---," began Tom.
"Yes, dad."
"I think he's going to get well," she whispered.
But listen to me.
You must get well and strong."
The doctor thought for a moment.
Dr. Hendrix made a hasty move toward the bed.
"Yes, dad.
"No one can say for a certainty that he will recover," spoke the physician.
"Good news!" he exclaimed.
But tell me; did you go in--in the Humming-Bird?"
"Bless my elevation rudder!" cried Mr. Damon.
He listened a moment.
"That's good.
His face looks very familiar!"
Only let the mist, which veils from men's eyes the true meaning of certain acts of violence, pass away, and the Christian public opinion which is springing up would overpower the extinct public opinion which permitted and justified acts of violence.
Everywhere throughout the Christian world the same rulers, and the same governments, the same armies, the same law courts, the same tax-gatherers, the same priests, the same rich men, landowners, manufacturers, and capitalists, as ever, but the attitude of the world to them, and their attitude to themselves is altogether changed.
As the positions based on the rule of force become less attractive and fewer men are found willing to fill them, the more will their uselessness be apparent.
The emperor engages them and they begin to sew at them, but they explain that the clothes have the extraordinary property of remaining invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position.
And when there are no longer men willing to fill these offices, these offices themselves will disappear too.
All these phenomena might seem to be mere exceptions, except that they can all be referred to one common cause.
The rich are not at ease in spending their wealth only on themselves, and lavish it on works of public utility.
Just as one might fancy the first leaves on the budding trees in April were exceptional if we did not know that they all have a common cause, the spring, and that if we see the branches on some trees shooting and turning green, it is certain that it will soon be so with all.
The officer was bored, he had nothing to do.
And even this duty they perform less and less successfully.
The majority of them do not keep up their old unapproachable majesty, but become more and more democratized and even vulgarized, casting aside the external prestige that remained to them, and thereby destroying the very thing it was their function to maintain.
The answer is like that of the wise man who, when asked whether it was far to the town, answered, "Walk!"
The same tax collectors, but they are less and less capable of taking men's property from them by force, and it becomes more and more evident that people can collect all that is necessary by voluntary subscription without their aid.
One may often nowadays hear from persons in authority the naive complaint that the best people are always, by some strange--as it seems to them--fatality, to be found in the camp of the opposition.
And what is the use of these lawyers and judges who don't decide civil cases with justice and recognize themselves the uselessness of punishments in criminal cases?
And to bring this to pass, nothing new need be brought before men's minds.
But when will it be?
The policeman turned his horse and went off without a word.
They are the men whose praises are celebrated in poetry, who are honored by sculpture and received with triumphant jubilations.
The position of a government official or of a rich man is no longer, as it once was, and still is among non-Christian peoples, regarded as necessarily honorable and deserving of respect, and under the special blessing of God.
But remembering the magic property of the clothes, no one ventures to say that he has nothing on till a little child cries out: "Look, he is naked!"
And it often happens (there was a case, indeed, within the last few days) that when called upon to quell disturbances they refuse to fire upon the people.
I once took part in Moscow in a religious meeting which used to take place generally in the week after Easter near the church in the Ohotny Row.
But the rising Christian ideal, which must at a certain stage of development replace the heathen ideal of life, already makes its influence felt.
The oppressors, that is, those who take part in government, and those who profit by oppression, that is, the rich, no longer imagine, as they once did, that they are the elect of the world, and that they constitute the ideal of human happiness and greatness, to attain which was once the highest aim of the oppressed.
It was absolutely unnecessary for the officer to disperse it.
And hence they must become more and more superfluous.
The same lawyers and judges, and the same assizes, but it becomes more and more evident that the civil courts decide cases on the most diverse grounds, but regardless of justice, and that criminal trials are quite senseless, because the punishments do not attain the objects aimed at by the judges themselves.
Millowners and manufacturers build hospitals, schools, savings banks, asylums, and dwellings for their workpeople.
One year, ten, twenty years pass by.
But this is not the only way in which public opinion is leading men to the abolition of the prevailing order and the substitution of a new order.
How can we tell whether it is far to the goal which humanity is approaching, when we do not know how men are going toward it, while it depends on them whether they go or do not go, stand still, slacken their pace or hasten it?
And what is the use of capital in the hands of private persons, when it can only be of use as the property of all?
And what has been established by public opinion can be destroyed by public opinion--and, indeed, is being destroyed by public opinion.
In the last plots against the Russian Government many of the conspirators were in the army.
And already they are beginning to understand it.
They can do nothing but give orders, and they give orders and send their messengers, as the officer sent the policeman, to interfere with people.
Military exploits are openly reprobated by the military themselves, and are often the subject of jests among them.
And this is the position in which all these unlucky rulers, ministers, members of parliament, governors, generals, officers, archbishops, priests, and even rich men find themselves to some extent already, and will find themselves altogether as time goes on.
And it becomes less and less possible to rely on the army for the pacification of riots, and more and more evident, consequently, that generals, and officers, and soldiers are only figures in solemn processions--objects of amusement for governments--a sort of immense--and far too expensive--CORPS DE BALLET.
The time will come and is inevitably coming when all institutions based on force will disappear through their uselessness, stupidity, and even inconvenience becoming obvious to all.
Men cannot know when the day and the hour of the kingdom of God will come, because its coming depends on themselves alone.
CHAPTER XI.
The emperor undresses and puts on his new clothes, that is to say, remains naked, and naked he walks through the town.
Some of them form co-operative associations in which they have shares on the same terms as the others. Capitalists expend a part of their capital on educational, artistic, philanthropic, and other public institutions.
A group of twenty men was no obstruction to anyone, but he had been standing there the whole morning, and he wanted to do something.
He had been put, poor fellow, in a position in which he had no choice but to give orders.
THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LIFE HAS ALREADY ARISEN IN OUR SOCIETY, AND WILL INFALLIBLY PUT AN END TO THE PRESENT ORGANIZATION OF OUR LIFE BASED ON FORCE--WHEN THAT WILL BE.
And that we all know.
Wouldn't it be better, as some humorist suggested, to make a queen of india-rubber?"
A dead tree stands apparently as firmly as ever--it may even seem firmer because it is harder--but it is rotten at the core, and soon must fall.
In very hot weather, it is difficult to corn beef in cold brine before it spoils.
It is good corned a few days, and then boiled.
The joints of the brisket should be separated, the sharp ends of the ribs sawed off, the outside rubbed over with a little piece of butter--salt it, and put it in a bake pan, with a pint of water.
If you wish to have your calf's head look brown, take it up when tender, rub a little butter over it, sprinkle on salt, pepper, and allspice--sprinkle flour over it, and put before the fire, with a Dutch oven over it, or in a brick oven where it will brown quick.
If the weather is hot, cut a gash to the bone of the meat, and fill it with salt.
Boil a piece of lean veal till tender.
Boiling is the cheapest way of cooking meat, provided you make a soup of the liquor; if not, it is the dearest, as most of the gelatine is extracted by the process of boiling, which is the most nourishing part, and if not used for soup, is completely lost.
Sprinkle salt and pepper on the lamb, turn the bony side towards the fire first; if not fat, rub a little butter on it, and put a little in the dripping pan; baste it frequently.
The rack is good for broiling--it should be divided, each bone by itself, broiled quick, and buttered, salted and peppered.
When it has stewed a couple of hours, turn the reserved dressing on top of the meat, heat the bake pan lid hot enough to brown the dressing, stew it an hour and a half longer.
The dressing is made of soaked bread, a little butter, salt, and pepper, and a couple of eggs.
The neck of mutton makes a good soup.
When it is put down to roast, there should be a little water in the dripping pan.
10.
9.
Heat the platter very hot that the steak is to be put on, lay the butter on it, take up the steak, salt and pepper it on both sides.
The fillet is good baked, the bone should be cut out, and the place filled with a dressing, made of bread soaked soft in cold water, a little salt, pepper, a couple of eggs, and a table spoonful of melted butter put in--then sew it up, put it in your bake pan, with about a pint of water, cover the top of the meat with some of the dressing.
16.
If it is a thick piece, allow fifteen minutes to each pound to roast it in--if thin, less time will be required.
Allow fifteen minutes boiling to each pound of meat.
If you wish for gravy for them, when you have taken them up, stir a little flour into the fat they were fried in; season it with salt, pepper, and mace.
14.
15.
The breast and rack are good roasted.
Liver is very good fried, but the best way to cook it, is to broil it ten minutes, with four or five slices of salt pork.
Put the beef in the brine.
12.
The bars of the gridiron should be concave, and terminate in a trough, to catch the juices, or they will drop in the fire and smoke the meat.
The bony side should be turned towards the fire first, and roasted.
When the bones get well heated through, turn the meat, and keep a brisk fire--baste it frequently while roasting.
A leg of veal is nice prepared in this manner, and roasted.
Put in a piece of butter, of the size of a hen's egg; season it with salt, pepper, and sweet herbs if you like; stew it gently till the rice is tender, and the water nearly stewed away.
Boil them with the head, until tender, then split and lay them round the head, or dredge them with flour after they have been boiled tender, and fry them brown.
It should be kept in a cool, airy place, away from the flies, and if there is any danger of its spoiling, a little salt should be rubbed over it.
If the weather is hot, it will keep but a short time.
If the meat is tough, it will be better to stew it half an hour before frying it.
Thicken the gravy and turn it over the whole.
When it boils, take off the scum, put in two or three onions, a blade of mace, a little salt and pepper.
Before the head is done, tie the brains in a bag, and boil them with it; when the brains are done, take them up, season them with salt, pepper, butter, and sweet herbs, or spices if you like--use this as a dressing for the head.
Parsely or celery-heads are a pretty garnish for mutton.
The same pieces that are good broiled are good for frying.
Do them up into balls about the size of half an egg, and fry them brown.
A little salt, pepper, and butter, should be put on it when you take it up.
3.
Some people like the liver stuffed and baked.
Supposing the names written were Mary, Joseph, and Samuel, being, respectively, the investigator's mother, father, and brother.
The reply was, an emphatic affirmative.
Your loving wife, BETSEY."
"But I say Mister, what has them papers to do with a sperit communication?"
"That paper," says he to the investigator, "probably contains the name of the spirit who rapped; please hold it in your hand."
Dropping that and taking another:
"You will see, directly," replied the medium.
His mode of operating was "the ballot-test," and was as follows:
For instance:
His terms are only five dollars an hour.
CHAPTER XI.
"BROTHER SAMUEL:--Will you communicate with me through this medium? WILLIAM FRANKLIN."
THE "BALLOT-TEST."--THE OLD GENTLEMAN AND HIS "DISEASED" RELATIVES.--A "HUNGRY SPIRIT."--"PALMING" A BALLOT.--REVELATIONS ON STRIPS OF PAPER.
Rinaldo and his brothers, for some slight offence to the imperious young prince, were forced to fly from Paris, and to take shelter in their castle of Montalban; for Charles had publicly said, if he could take them he would hang them all.
Malagigi then hastened back to Rinaldo, and told him what he had learned.
Malagigi did not go far, but having changed his disguise, returned to where the king was, and employed his best art in getting the brothers of Rinaldo out of prison.
Then the king said to Malagigi, "Give me a morsel from your cup, that I may be cleared of my sins." Malagigi answered, "Illustrious lord, I dare not do it, unless you will forgive all who have at any time offended you.
He gave them to the beggar, and said, "Here, take my spurs.
Malagigi said to Rinaldo, "I will go meet the monks, and see what news I can learn."
When they were all assembled the king came also, and Charlot with him, near whom the horse Bayard was led, in the charge of grooms, who were expressly enjoined to guard him safely.
Next to God, my trust is in you.
Help my brothers to escape out of prison, I entreat you.
When Rinaldo heard that he stayed his hand, and gazed doubtingly on the old man, who now threw aside his disguise, and appeared to be indeed Malagigi.
I tell you truly if it were not for shame to beat one so helpless, I would teach you better manners." The old man said, "Of a truth, sir, if you did so you would do a great sin.
They looked like two pilgrims, very old and poor.
He bade Rinaldo good day.
They are the first present my mother gave me when my father, Count Aymon, dubbed me knight.
At last Charles himself raised a great army, and went in person to compel the paladin to submit.
RINALDO AND BAYARD
When this was done, the king said to Charlot, "Son, I request that you will let this sick pilgrim sit on your horse, and ride if he can, for by so doing he will be healed of all his infirmities." Charlot replied, "That will I gladly do." So saying, he dismounted, and the servants took the pilgrim in their arms, and helped him on the horse.
It seems to be worth a hundred ducats." "That is true," said Charlot; "Let us go and ask where they got it." So they rode to the place where the pilgrims stood, and Charlot stopped Bayard close to them.
Malagigi pretended to be in great alarm.
Malagigi was suffered to depart, unsuspected, and he went his way, making sad lamentation for the fate of his comrade, who he pretended to think must surely be dashed to pieces.
The king has taken my brothers, and means to put them to death.
When Rinaldo woke he looked round for his horse, and, finding him not, he groaned, and said, "O unlucky hour that I was born! how fortune persecutes me!" So desperate was he that he took off his armor and his spurs, saying, "What need have I of these, since Bayard is lost?" While he stood thus lamenting, a man came from the thicket, seemingly bent with age.
While the messenger was gone Rinaldo, impatient to learn what tidings he might bring, rode out to meet him.
They did so, but it was in vain.
If I catch them I will certainly have them hanged. But tell me, pilgrim, who is that man who stands beside you?" "He is deaf, dumb, and blind," said Malagigi.
He sent numbers of his bravest knights to arrest them, but all without success.
I did not know you.
His brothers had been taken prisoners in a skirmish, and his only hope of saving their lives was in making terms with the king.
Let us take him, and carry him to King Charles, who will pay us well for our trouble." They did so, and the king was delighted with his prize, and gave them a present that made them rich to their dying day.
He had a long beard hanging over his breast, and eyebrows that almost covered his eyes.
CHARLEMAGNE was overwhelmed with grief at the loss of so many of his bravest warriors at the disaster of Roncesvalles, and bitterly reproached himself for his credulity in resigning himself so completely to the counsels of the treacherous Count Gan.
I am a poor man, have you not something to give me?" Rinaldo said, "I have nothing to give," but then he recollected his spurs.
Yet he soon fell into a similar snare when he suffered his unworthy son, Charlot, to acquire such an influence over him, that he constantly led him into acts of cruelty and injustice that in his right mind he would have scorned to commit.
The pilgrim took the mantle, folded it up, and put it into his bag. Then a third time he said to Rinaldo, "Sir, have you nothing left to give me that I may remember you in my prayers?"
"Yes," said Rinaldo, "I am healed of all my infirmities." When the king heard it he said to Bishop Turpin, "My lord bishop, we must celebrate this with a procession, with crosses and banners, for it is a great miracle."
"Dear cousin," said Rinaldo, "pray forgive me.
These two shall never live in my kingdom again.
"O noble king and master," he cried, "my poor companion is run away with; he will fall and break his neck." The king ordered his knights to ride after the pilgrim, and bring him back, or help him if need were.
Rinaldo left them all behind him, and kept on his way till he reached Montalban.
They ought to bring you ten pounds."
Just then came along some country people, who said to one another, "Look, is not that the great horse Bayard that Rinaldo rides?
Then he sat down, and, as he waited, he fell asleep.
So he sent a messenger, offering to yield himself and his castle if the king would spare his and his brothers' lives.
I thought to rescue them by means of my horse Bayard, but while I slept some thief has stolen him." The old man replied, "I will remember you and your brothers in my prayers.
The morning of the feast-day Rinaldo and Malagigi came to the place where the sports were to be held.
Malagigi gave Rinaldo his spurs back again, and said, "Cousin, put on your spurs, for you will need them." "How shall I need them," said Rinaldo, "since I have lost my horse?" Yet he did as Malagigi directed him.
When the two had taken their stand on the border of the field among the crowd the princes and ladies of the court began to assemble.
The old man took the spurs, and put them into his sack, and said, "Noble sir, have you nothing else you can give me?" Rinaldo replied, "Are you making sport of me?
Rinaldo thanked him, and said, "A good day I have hardly had since I was born." Then said the old man, "Signor Rinaldo, you must not despair, for God will make all things turn to the best." Rinaldo answered, "My trouble is too heavy for me to hope relief.
Presently she realized that a logical explanation of her grandfather's action was impossible with her present knowledge.
Mary Louise reflected, with a little shock of pain, that her mother had never been very near to her and that Miss Stearne might well perform such perfunctory duties as the girl had been accustomed to expect.
"Then why did your grandfather run away?" she asked.
"Thank you, Miss Stearne," she said.
Is my room ready?"
Where is he?"
"He--he left by the morning train, which goes west," stammered Miss Stearne, anxious to placate the officer and fearful of the girl's stubborn resistance.
The old serpent is slippery as an eel; but I'm going to catch him, this time, as sure as fate, and this girl must give me all the information she can."
"The jury will decide that when his case comes to trial.
"There is no night train," said the girl, seating herself thoughtfully at the table.
Miss Stearne reflected.
"I do not know to whom you refer," she answered quietly.
"I do not know," she persisted.
Mary Louise went to her room and was promptly pounced upon by Dorothy Knerr and Sue Finley, who roomed just across the hall from her and were delighted to find she was to become a regular boarder.
"How could they go, Uncle?"
He begged me to take you in as a regular boarder and of course I consented.
"But Gran'pa Jim is no criminal, we all know.
Where did he go?"
Colonel Weatherby came to me last evening and said he had been suddenly called away on important matters that would brook no delay, and that your mother was to accompany him on the journey.
"What DID he say?"
"How about this girl's board money?" he asked.
"My grandfather is not a criminal, sir."
You have interrupted my game of tennis."
But the school is quite full, as you know; so at first I was uncertain that I could accommodate you here; but Miss Dandler, my assistant, has given up her room to you and I shall put a bed for her in my own sleeping chamber, so that difficulty is now happily arranged.
At the noon luncheon Mary Louise was accorded a warm reception by the assembled boarders and this cordial welcome by her school-mates did much to restore the girl to her normal condition of cheerfulness.
He uttered a growl and then threw back his coat, displaying a badge attached to his vest.
"Aren't you his granddaughter?"
"Foxy old boy!
You have been one of my most tractable and conscientious pupils and I have been proud of your progress.
"Not yet you won't," said the man in a less boisterous tone.
"What are you and Aunt Polly going to do, Uncle?"
"This is Mary Louise Burrows," said Miss Stearne, in a weak voice.
"Take my racquet," she said to Jennie Allen; "I'll be back in a minute."
Let me know, my dear, if there is anything you need."
"You will be lonely for a time, of course, but presently you will feel quite at home in the school because you know all of my girls so well. It is not like a strange girl coming into a new school.
"It would be, if it were true," said the girl.
Not always were her rules and regulations dictated by good judgment.
"I thought not." He turned toward the principal.
Therefore he was the patron of husbandry.
Hurakan, Haokah, Tlaloc, and probably Heno, are plural as well as singular nouns, and are used as nominatives to verbs in both numbers.
They typified the paradoxical nature of the storm under the character of the giant Haokah. To him cold was heat, and heat cold; when sad he laughed, when merry groaned; the sides of his face and his eyes were of different colors and expressions; he wore horns or a forked headdress to represent the lightning, and with his hands he hurled the meteors.
It constitutes a sort of Trinity, not in any point resembling that of Christianity, nor yet the Trimurti of India, but the only one in the New World the least degree authenticated, and which, as half seen by ignorant monks, has caused its due amount of sterile astonishment.
Moreover, as has already been pointed out, the thunder god was usually ruler of the winds, and thus another reason for his quadruplicate nature was suggested.
"There is no end to the fancies entertained by the Sioux concerning thunder," observes Mrs. Eastman.
From Quito to Cuzco not an Indian but would give all he possessed to conciliate him.
Ribbons of silver, crossing to form squares, covered the robe, and the shield was composed of feathers of four colors, yellow, green, red, and blue.
They were in appearance small, round, smooth stones, but had the admirable properties of securing fertility to the fields, protecting from lightning, and, by a transition easy to understand, were also adored as gods of the Fire, as well material as of the passions, and were capable of kindling the dangerous flames of desire in the most frigid bosom.
Apocatequil's statue was erected on the mountains, with that of his mother on one hand, and his brother on the other.
Five priests, two stewards, and a crowd of slaves served his image.
The former was the more powerful.
Tlaloc was appealed to as inhabiting each of the cardinal points and every mountain top.
Tohil, the god who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint-stone. He is distinctly said to be the same as Quetzalcoatl, one of whose commonest symbols was a flint (tecpatl).
In this pretty waif that has floated down to us from the wreck of a literature now forever lost, there is more than one point to attract the notice of the antiquary.
Again, twice in this poem is the triple nature of the storm adverted to. This is observable in many of the religions of America.
Garcilasso de la Vega, a descendant of the Incas, has preserved an ancient indigenous poem of his nation, presenting the storm myth in a different form, which as undoubtedly authentic and not devoid of poetic beauty I translate, preserving as much as possible the trochaic tetrasyllabic verse of the original Quichua:--
As nations rose in civilization these fancies put on a more complex form and a more poetic fulness.
Therefore they were in great esteem as love charms.
Fire from water, warmth and moisture from the destructive breath of the tempest, this was the riddle of riddles to the untutored mind.
His statue rested on a square stone pedestal, facing the east, and had in one hand a serpent of gold.
The impressive phenomena which characterize it, the prodigious noise, the awful flash, the portentous gloom, the blast, the rain, have left a profound impression on the myths of every land.
For this crime they destroyed him, but their sister proved pregnant, and died in her labor, giving birth to two eggs.
He rode through the heavens on the clouds, and the thunderbolts which split the forest trees were the stones he hurled at his enemies.
"Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness." It was the visible synthesis of all the divine manifestations, the winds, the waters, and the flames.
He was invoked at seed time and harvest; and as purveyor of nourishment he was addressed as grandfather, and his worshippers styled themselves his grandchildren.
Few villages were willing to be without one or more of these.
He it was, they thought, who produced the thunder and the lightning by hurling stones with his sling; and the thunderbolts that fall, said they, are his children.
"He was Prince of Evil and the most respected god of the Peruvians.
For this reason they adored him as their maker.
He could not live for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body.
Behind the words, moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy.
It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes.
Only with the last two years or so--with his own increasing age, and physical decline perhaps--had come this marked growth of passionate interest in the welfare of the Forest.
At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.
Merely for herself, the nightmare might have left her cold.
Mrs. Bittacy had never liked their present home.
Cut off from them he languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat monotony of the plains.
All the world can love them in the spring.
It stood between them.
"My selfishness afflicts me--" he began, but she would not let him finish.
"My dear," she murmured, "God will direct.
They had angered its great soul.
The Forest never let her go completely.
"Yes," he replied, "I do.
Mrs. Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions.
In this particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had passed.
The terror Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her very eyes. For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment, conveyed the unutterable implication that while he could not spare the trees, they equally could not spare him.
Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him.
She loved to suffer for them both.
And it's not of the body only, I feel it in my soul."
"My duty and my happiness lie here with the Forest and with you. My life is deeply rooted in this place.
He stopped abruptly, and sank back in his chair.
In those weeks of solitude the feeling had matured.
But instinctively she felt it; and more besides.
"David, He will direct.
They laughed in her face.
This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances for.
I think you need me really,--don't you?" Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.
You've never once been selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things.
Nothing shall harm you.
It was ever ready to encroach. All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way--towards their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and merge them in itself.
God bless you for you sweet unselfishness. And your sacrifice," he added, "is all the greater because you cannot understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay."
And then he had suggested that she should go alone perhaps for a shorter time, and stay in her brother's villa with the children, Alice and Stephen.
He loved the Forest better than herself, for he placed it first.
Something higher than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the beginning.
In all but this one passion his unselfishness was ever as great as her own.
He consented to a cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it.
She almost felt the rush of foliage in the wind.
The reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow-covered room like an actual Presence and stood beside them.
All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees.
My hold on life would weaken; here is my source of supply.
Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular.
If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able to--forgive." His tone grew tender, gentle, soft.
"David, you feel it as strongly as that!" she said, forgetting the tea things altogether.
She liked to see things coming.
This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and pleasant place to settle down in.
The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each regarded very differently, of course.
This newes was brought to Eddenborrow, Where Scotlands king did raigne, That brave Erle Douglas suddenlye Was with an arrow slaine.
And with Sir George and stout Sir James, Both knights of good account, Good Sir Ralph Rabby there was slaine, Whose prowesse did surmount.
[Yet bides Earl Douglas on the bent, As Chieftain stout and good, As valiant Captain, all unmov'd The shock he firmly stood.
And the Lord Maxwell in like case Did with Erle Douglas dye; Of twenty hundred Scottish speres, Scarce fifty-five did flye.
So thus did both these nobles dye, Whose courage none could staine; An English archer then perceiv'd The noble erle was slaine.
God save our king, and bless this land In plentye, joy, and peace; And grant henceforth, that foule debate 'Twixt noblemen may cease!
This vow full well the king perform'd After, at Humbledowne; In one day, fifty knights were slayne, With lordes of great renowne.
Lord Percy to the quarry went, To view the tender deere; Quoth he, "Erle Douglas promised This day to meet me heere;
"O heavy newes," King James did say; "Scottland can witnesse bee, I have not any captaine more Of such account as hee."
And throwing strait their bows away, They grasp'd their swords so bright: And now sharp blows, a heavy shower, On shields and helmets light.]
This fight did last from breake of day Till setting of the sun; For when they rung the evening bell, The battel scarce was done.
"Now God be with him," said our king, "Sith it will noe better bee; I trust I have, within my realme, Five hundred as good as hee.
"The fact of Desertion I will not dispute; But its guilt, as I trust, is removed (So far as related to the costs of this suit) By the Alibi which has been proved.
And when quarrels arose--as one frequently finds Quarrels will, spite of every endeavour-- The song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds, And cemented their friendship for ever!
"'Tis the note of the Jubjub!
But the Judge said he never had summed up before; So the Snark undertook it instead, And summed it so well that it came to far more Than the Witnesses ever had said!
The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw, That the sty was deserted when found: And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law In a soft under-current of sound.
Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became, Have seldom if ever been known; In winter or summer, 'twas always the same-- You could never meet either alone.
Fit the Sixth
"Its habit of getting up late you'll agree That it carries too far, when I say That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea, And dines on the following day.
Fit the Second
The Bellman looked scared, And was almost too frightened to speak:
The Beaver's best course was, no doubt, to procure A second-hand dagger-proof coat-- So the Baker advised it--and next, to insure Its life in some Office of note:
PREFACE
This the Banker suggested, and offered for hire (On moderate terms), or for sale, Two excellent Policies, one Against Fire, And one Against Damage From Hail.
The Bellman perceived that their spirits were low, And repeated in musical tone Some jokes he had kept for a season of woe-- But the crew would do nothing but groan.
And that, after all, Is the thing that one needs with a Snark."
It strongly advised that the Butcher should be Conveyed in a separate ship: But the Bellman declared that would never agree With the plans he had made for the trip:
There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck, Or would sit making lace in the bow: And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck, Though none of the sailors knew how.
He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.
There was one who was famed for the number of things He forgot when he entered the ship: His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings, And the clothes he had bought for the trip.
This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out That the Captain they trusted so well Had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tingle his bell.
I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew. Just the place for a Snark!
"Let us take them in order.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
"Under which king, Bezonian?
"The third is its slowness in taking a jest. Should you happen to venture on one, It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed: And it always looks grave at a pun.
"We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks, (Four weeks to the month you may mark), But never as yet ('tis your Captain who speaks) Have we caught the least glimpse of a Snark!
One could see he was wise, The moment one looked in his face!
"Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again The five unmistakable marks By which you may know, wheresoever you go, The warranted genuine Snarks.
He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed, With his name painted clearly on each: But, since he omitted to mention the fact, They were all left behind on the beach.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs!
Yet still, ever after that sorrowful day, Whenever the Butcher was by, The Beaver kept looking the opposite way, And appeared unaccountably shy.
THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK
"We have sailed many weeks, we have sailed many days, (Seven days to the week I allow), But a Snark, on the which we might lovingly gaze, We have never beheld till now!
"For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm, Yet, I feel it my duty to say, Some are Boojums--"
He served out some grog with a liberal hand, And bade them sit down on the beach: And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand, As he stood and delivered his speech.
The first is the taste, Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp: Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist, With a flavour of Will-o'-the-wisp.
While, for those who preferred a more forcible word, He had different names from these: His intimate friends called him "Candle-ends," And his enemies "Toasted-cheese."
The last of the crew needs especial remark, Though he looked an incredible dunce: He had just one idea--but, that one being "Snark," The good Bellman engaged him at once.
But the principal failing occurred in the sailing, And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed, Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East, That the ship would not travel due West!
He came as a Butcher: but gravely declared, When the ship had been sailing a week, He could only kill Beavers.
He was thoughtful and grave--but the orders he gave Were enough to bewilder a crew. When he cried "Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!" What on earth was the helmsman to do?
He came as a Baker: but owned, when too late-- And it drove the poor Bellman half-mad-- He could only bake Bridecake--for which, I may state, No materials were to be had.
The Beaver, who happened to hear the remark, Protested, with tears in its eyes, That not even the rapture of hunting the Snark Could atone for that dismal surprise!
The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances, used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished, and it more than once happened, when the time came for replacing it, that no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to.
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank:" (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-- A perfect and absolute blank!"
This is a LibriVox recording.
The crew was complete: it included a Boots-- A maker of Bonnets and Hoods-- A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes-- And a Broker, to value their goods.
The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-- Such a carriage, such ease and such grace! Such solemnity, too!
"Just the place for a Snark!
The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but alas!
Such is Human Perversity.
"His form is ungainly--his intellect small--" (So the Bellman would often remark) "But his courage is perfect!
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes: A thing, as the Bellman remarked, That frequently happens in tropical climes, When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."
He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry, Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!" To "What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!" But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!"
A Billiard-marker, whose skill was immense, Might perhaps have won more than his share-- But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense, Had the whole of their cash in his care.
Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one." So remonstrance was impossible, and no steering could be done till the next varnishing day.
Humpty-Dumpty's theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all.
Now open your mouth and speak.
I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."
Fit the First
Speak or die!"
THE LANDING
But at length he explained, in a tremulous tone, There was only one Beaver on board; And that was a tame one he had of his own, Whose death would be deeply deplored.
Navigation was always a difficult art, Though with only one ship and one bell: And he feared he must really decline, for his part, Undertaking another as well.
If the northern soldiers would only come quickly and set the slaves free!
"You can do whatever you please with it," was what Grandmother Fulton had said.
Sylvia had thought that she would ask her mother to buy her a watch with the money, but she did not remember that now.
"Oh, that's just like Uncle Robert," she declared.
"When he knows it stands for slavery," she thought, wondering if he had entirely forgotten about Dinkie.
"For Estralla?
Why, it is all ice and snow and cold weather up there, and here it is warm and pleasant.
"A little white missy to see you, Massa Robert," he said, and in a moment Sylvia found herself standing before a smiling gentleman, whose red face and white whiskers made her think of the pictures of Santa Claus.
I'll go tell him so this very day," declared Sylvia, her face brightening, as she remembered the twenty dollars in gold which her Grandmother Fulton had given her when she had left Boston.
Estralla had hidden herself behind some shrubbery, and joined Sylvia at the gate.
Well!
"I see!
"I'll have to run, or I'll be late for school," declared Grace.
I knowed it."
"If you please, sir, she is Aunt Connie's little girl, and she lives with us, and I like her, and I thought--" began Sylvia, but Mr. Waite raised his hand, and she stopped suddenly.
Estralla's face had brightened instantly at Sylvia's promise.
"Father thought it was best for the family to be out of the city.
He greeted them smilingly, and stopped his horse to speak with them.
"No, but I could go sleighing," responded Sylvia.
"If you want to go to the forts you must be on hand early."
Yes, indeed!" and Mr. Waite smiled and bowed, and seemed exactly like Santa Claus.
I must see that whatever you wish is carried out.
Yes, indeed!
And I please to pay it to Mr. Waite."
My mammy says how nobody can."
Oh, Estralla!
"Nuffin', Missy.
"Won't you be seated, young lady?" he said, very politely, waving his hand toward a low cushioned chair, and bowing "as if I were really grown up," thought Sylvia.
But even if they did not come for a long time the money would surely pay Mr. Waite wages for Estralla, so that he would not insist on selling her.
Mr. Waite says I may have you without paying him.
"Yes, sir," said Sylvia meekly, wondering whether she would ever dare tell him her errand.
Sylvia hurried home, eager to tell her mother of her wonderful new friend, and of Flora's departure to the plantation.
"Why, they are all going away!
"The Christmas holidays will soon be here, so a half day out of school will not matter," Mrs. Waite said smilingly, and gave Grace a note for Miss Patten.
Now, of course, I ought to know all about Estralla.
"You can't do that.
Yes, I will; and pay wages for you to Mr. Waite.
"What's the matter, Estralla?" Sylvia called; for usually Estralla was all smiles, and had a good deal to say.
"Oh, yes, I was named for that song.
"I'll walk to Flora's with you," said Grace.
Sylvia was sorry that Flora was going away, but that Philip should want the palmetto flag to take the place of the Stars and Stripes over Fort Sumter seemed a much greater misfortune.
Sylvia ate her breakfast hurriedly, and ran upstairs for her cape and hat, to find Estralla waiting just inside the door of her room.
"I think I will take the money," Sylvia said, not answering Estralla's question; "then Mr. Waite will be sure that I can pay him."
There was a little silence, and then Mr. Waite took a seat near his little visitor and said:
It had seemed to Mrs. Fulton that her little daughter was tired, and not as well as usual, and she was glad that the sailing expedition would take her out for a long afternoon on the water.
Aunt Connie was as delighted as it was possible for a mother to be who knows that her youngest child is safe under the same roof with herself. She tried to thank Sylvia for protecting Estralla, but Sylvia was too happy over her success to listen to her.
And I hope you will come again, Miss Sylvia.
And, if you please, Mr. Waite, would you let me pay you wages for Estralla?"
'Then to Sylvia let us sing,'" he hummed, beating time with his right hand.
"I like Estralla."
And when Sylvia explained that she had money of her very own, and even opened her writing desk and showed Estralla the shining gold pieces, the little darky's fears vanished.
"Estralla, if you were earning wages for Mr. Robert Waite would he let you stay here?" Sylvia asked eagerly.
Estralla shook her head.
"Wait, Estralla!
"Would he hire me out, Missy?" she asked eagerly.
"Poor little darky!
But you has been mighty good to me," Estralla replied.
That meant of course that the Fultons would have to return to Boston, if that were possible, but all communication with northern states might be prevented.
Mrs. Fulton saw Sylvia, closely followed by Estralla, running across the garden toward the house where Grace Waite lived.
"I am Sylvia Fulton," she said, wondering why her voice sounded so faint.
MR.
As they came in sight of Flora's home they both exclaimed in surprise:
"Keep still, Estralla!
ROBERT WAITE
What can I do?" and Sylvia was out of bed in a second, standing close beside the little colored girl.
Philip, evidently giving some directions to the negroes who were loading trunks and boxes into a cart, rode down the driveway just as Grace and Sylvia reached the entrance.
But when Sylvia finished her story of Mr. Waite's kindness, declaring that he was just like Santa Claus, she did not reprove her for going on such an errand without permission, but agreed with her little daughter that Mr. Robert Waite was a very kind and generous gentleman.
Sylvia went up the flight of stone steps which led to Mr. Waite's door a little fearfully.
I am greatly pleased to have made your acquaintance," and the polite gentleman escorted her to the door, where he bade her good-bye with such an elegant bow that Sylvia nearly fell backward in her effort to make as low a curtsey as seemed necessary.
What will she do when Sylvia goes north?" she thought.
The night was as black as had been the previous one, and I could see absolutely nothing; but I knew the general direction in which to fire and accordingly emptied my magazine at the beast.
I of course assented to this proposal, and in a very few minutes the skin had been neatly taken off, and the famishing natives began a ravenous meal on the raw flesh.
As the piers and abutments progressed in height, the question of how to lift the large stones into their positions had to be solved.
Wild dogs are also very destructive, and often caused great losses among our sheep and goats.
I called out that he was dead, and at once everyone in the boma turned out, bringing all the lanterns in the place.
As far as I could make out, he kept dodging in and out through the broken wall of the goat-house; but in a short time my shots evidently told, as his struggles ceased and all was still.
On it came, and with it an additional bank of stormy-looking water.
He was a fine-looking beast, bigger than a collie, with jet-black hair and a white-tipped bushy tail.
I confess that I witnessed the whole occurrence with a thrill of pride.
As we approached the shed, the leopard made a frantic spring in our direction as far as the chain would allow him, and this so frightened the chaukidar that he fled in terror, leaving me in utter darkness.
When the last girder was thus successfully placed, no time was lost in linking up the permanent way, and very soon I had the satisfaction of seeing the first train cross the finished work.
These animals did a great deal of damage to the herds of sheep and goats which were kept to supply the commissariat, and there was always great rejoicing when a capture was made in one of the many traps that were laid for them.
These were bolted together at the top, while the other ends were fixed at a distance of about ten feet apart in a large block of wood. This contrivance acted capitally, and by manipulation of ropes and pulleys the heavy stones were swung into position quickly and without difficulty, so that in a very short time the masonry of the bridge was completed.
Whereupon he levelled his revolver at the dead leopard, and shutting his eyes tightly, fired four shots in rapid succession.
One particularly dark night we were startled by a tremendous commotion in this shed, but as this was before the man-eaters were killed, no one dared stir out to investigate the cause of the disturbance.
He had not eaten one of the flock, but had killed them all out of pure love of destruction.
I happened at the time to have a flock of about thirty sheep and goats which I kept for food and for milk, and which were secured at sundown in a grass hut at one corner of my boma.
CHAPTER X
It was next "jacked" up from the trucks, which were hauled away empty, the temporary bridge was dismantled, and the girder finally lowered gently into position.
Curiously enough, only a day or so after the bridge had been completed and the intermediate cribs cleared away, a tremendous rain-storm broke over the country.
The terror of the sudden charge had proved too much for Mahina, and both he and the carbine were by this time well on their way up a tree.
To my dismay, however, it was not there.
It was the man-eater, cautiously stalking us.
"For what purpose?"
He could, like the king, touch the greatest of us on the head, and touching them make such heads shake on their shoulders.
"Where were they taken?" asked Athos.
"Well, what has happened to them?"
Aramis shook his head.
The Road to Picardy.
They both alighted.
"No, I thank you."
The two friends departed--Aramis to return to Paris, Athos to take measures preparatory to an interview with the queen.
Aramis stopped.
"To whom?"
"Arrested, were they?" inquired Athos; "is it known why?"
"You know well that I don't like to leave things half finished."
"Where?"
"For what reason is all this fume and fury?" asked Athos.
"Why?"
"What?
I beg you to do so."
"No."
Come, come."
Swear first, on your honor, not to inform him of our return."
Our duty is fulfilled."
"Speak, sir!
Oh, my God! my God! what has happened?"
"One moment, yes," answered the queen.
Come and converse with us for just five minutes, sword in hand, upon this deserted terrace."
"Mistaken!" cried the queen, almost suffocated by emotion; "mistaken! what has happened, then?"
Yet I could not face the mystery.
If only I had thought of a Kodak!
'I was in an agony of discomfort.
I don't know if you will understand my feeling, but I never felt quite safe at my back.
And not simply fatigued!
'The next night I did not sleep well.
And they were filthily cold to the touch.
I felt a peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies.
Once or twice I had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite reason.
I fell upon my face.
The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous!
At first she watched me in amazement.
I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt.
With the last twenty or thirty feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me.
"Back, my boy! Francis, quick!"
"He was to send the dog in search of us if we did not join him in two hours; and if we were in trouble I was either to tie something to his collar or take it off."
He started and looked in the same direction as I did which was right down the gully, and saw what had taken my attention, namely, the stooping bodies of a couple of blacks hurrying away through the bushes at a pretty good rate.
"Jimmy go look 'bout.
"No, no!" I cried.
I recoiled shuddering.
"Come along."
"How do you know?"
Mr Francis turned his head without a word, and, leaning upon a stout stick, started at once; and we followed in silence, just as the stars were coming out.
Why, we've found your father.
Hist!
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE.
"No!" he said.
I'll creep forward and listen."
Good-bye."
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO.
There."
Where is my father?"
"I say, though, hadn't you better take Gyp?"
"Mass Joe, Mass Joe, he go eat up black fellow.
"Yes.
"Only a bit stunned," it said; and then I gasped out the one word:
"Black fellow come along."
No black fellow.
Mass Joe no gun, no powder pop, no chopper, no knife, no fight works 'tall."
These people are too strong.
"Much good him.
Tom hurried back again over the wood pile.
"Why not break 'through the ends of all the cars--so we can get back and forth without having to climb over the roofs!"
Then, when the decreasing speed of the train gave his legs the advantage, Fuller was ahead, heaving ties from the road.
As he climbed into the cab of the General, Tom saw that his face had become suddenly drawn.
As it was, the cars cleared it.
If ever a man combined determination with luck it was Fuller.
That bent rail!"
"Water there, too?" asked Brown.
Go back and tell them.
It was the one they had ripped from the ties north of Calhoun.
They're too close upon us."
Uncouple just as soon as you can."
Fuller's arms went up again, and he was on the ground removing ties.
"What was that?" he asked.
"The wood's wet," said Knight.
The wheels of the abandoned car knocked several out of the way; then, as the train swung about the curve, leaving the car hidden in the shed, Tom saw one tie resting at an angle across the track.
Tom climbed up over the end of the tender and reported to Andrews.
Tom drew the pin.
They passed the remaining ties and the rails forward.
Now, for the first time, Tom realized that the raid might fail in its purpose.
Andrews slapped him on the back.
They were past it before they knew what had happened.
We'll drop another car on the Reseca bridge.
The left wheel followed back along the groove its flange had cut in the tie.
The men paused and looked at Andrews.
"Yes," answered Fuller.
The left forward wheel of the box-car had mounted upon one of the ties thrown before it.
"I don't dare to stop and build a fire.
Hurry!" he yelled.
"Put an obstruction here!
The tie was wedged diagonally across the track, and the flange had cut a deep groove in it.
The wheels struck it, and the car lurched heavily....
And, as it was built upon a curve in the road, a box-car--either wrecked or merely left standing--could not be seen until the pursuing engine was almost upon it.
The snag caught on the low cow-catcher of the engine and gave the train a mighty jerk.
Instinctively they turned toward Andrews. He was in the fireman's seat, hands clenched and face set, staring ahead. He did not move until they were within sight of Green's Station.
"Now run back slowly--an inch at a time," ordered Fuller.
There were moments when the smoke paused and mounted straight into the sky; then a few seconds later it flattened out and rose in a long black stream.
While Tom, in the tender, yanked logs loose from the pile, Andrews stood ready to pass them to Knight, who shoved them into the fire-box.
"They'll probably stop at Green's for wood," said Fuller.
"What's this train!"
Once again they took the rail up and battered their way through.
He motioned Murphy ahead.
"Careful now," yelled Fuller, as the two box-cars came closer together. "Easy--easy!" The cars met gently.
The keeper of the yard came running toward them.
"There are bridges ahead--the Chickamauga bridges.
"All right--but hurry.
"We'll have to stop for fuel," yelled Murphy.
"We'll have to break the wires above here," he said as the little station in Reseca flashed past them.
Fuller watched it breathlessly.
"I'll pull the pin," said Tom.
"Keep dropping ties, men," ordered Andrews.
The hole was large enough so that he could climb down the ladder, swing around the corner, and enter.
But they had already attacked the pile.
"Can't we stop and fight?" he asked.
Try to wreck it in the shed."
Tom put the last of the fuel in the fire, and leaned wearily against the cab.
The excitement of the race, of reaching this point where the road to Chattanooga lay clear before them, had been upon him; it had never entered his head that their long struggle against so many obstacles could end in anything but glorious success.
Andrews seemed not to hear him.
We can drag it back, I think.
He worked with the drafts, coaxing the fire.
"Let's knock the ends of these cars out," he said.
"Stop about a mile up here, Knight.
In an instant he had swung himself over and was running down the roofs of the cars, silhouetted against the cloudy sky.
Those questions were pounding in the brains of Andrews' men.
They swept out of the shed, pushing the two cars.
Fuller and Murphy, still sitting on the edge of the tender, saw the abandoned box-car as they swerved around the bend.
Something on the track.
Undoubtedly, if he had known that a party of Northern raiders had taken it, he would have waited until a locomotive came from Atlanta.
"No--here, shove a tie off.
We're all armed."
"Wait here," he yelled, sliding down the ladder.
"Yes," answered Tom.
"The front wheels are off the track.
Andrews nodded and leaned from the cab.
Four Confederate soldiers who were standing several hundred yards away yelled and pointed in the direction of the whistling.
Fuel was running low.
Thought the engine was going off for a second."
The others heard him and made no reply.
Then they swept around the curve and the bridge lay before them, indistinct in the drizzle of rain.
The race had reached the final test of strength.
Fuller waved his arms up and down slowly to the engineer as a signal to come to a gradual stop.
"Get ready," yelled Ross; then, as they entered the shed, "Go!"
Occasionally, Brown glanced at the steam gauge; then the two engineers would exchange glances.
Well see if we can wreck her."
We'll have to find a coupling pin."
"'Board," called Andrews.
"At Green's Station," said Andrews.
"We're within a mile of Reseca bridge," he said slowly.
He stopped once, and pointed to the wood pile.
Like bursting waves from the ocean
Like an unwelcome thought
Like mice that steal in and out as if they feared the light
Like crystals of snow
Like Heaven's free breath, which he who grasps can hold not
Like leviathans afloat
Like earth's decaying leaves
Like sweet thoughts in a dream
Like an unbidden guest
Like an eagle clutching his prey, his arm swooped down
Like making a mountain out of a mole-hill
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun
Like bright lamps, the fabled apples glow
Like notes which die when born, but still haunt the echoes of the hill
Like an eagle dallying with the wind
Like organ music came the deep reply
Like ghosts the sentries come and go
Like an engine of dread war, he set his shoulder to the mountain-side
Like Death, who rides upon a thought, and makes his way through temple, tower, and palace
Like fixed eyes, whence the dear light of sense and thought has fled
Like music on the water
Like blasts of trumpets blown in wars
Like bells that waste the moments with their loudness
Like straws in a gust of wind
Like some unshriven churchyard thing, the friar crawled
Like one who talks of what he loves in dream
Like golden boats on a sunny sea
Like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy
Like a distant star glimmering steadily in the darkness
Like a star, his love's pure face looked down
Like a long arrow through the dark the train is darting
Like a caged lion shaking the bars of his prison
Like a star, unhasting, unresting
Like a thing at rest
Like a damp-handed auctioneer
Like a shadow never to be overtaken
Like a triumphing fire the news was borne
Like a festooned girdle encircling the waist of a bride
Like a ball of ice it glittered in a frozen sea of sky
Like a poet hidden
Like a great tune to which the planets roll
Like a whirlwind they went past
Like a cloud of fire
Like a stone thrown at random
Like a sea of upturned faces
Like a summer-dried fountain
L
Like a vaporous amethyst
Like a great ring of pure and endless light
Like a calm flock of silver-fleeced sheep
Laughter like the sudden outburst of the glad bird in the tree-top
Lights gleamed there like stars in a still sky
Like a dipping swallow the stout ship dashed through the storm
Let thy mouth murmur like the doves
Like a dream she vanished
Like a game in which the important part is to keep from laughing
Light as a snowflake
Like a knight worn out by conflict
Laboring like a giant
Like a dew-drop, ill-fitted to sustain unkindly shocks
Like a blast from a horn
Like a flower her red lips parted
Like a great express train, roaring, flashing, dashing head-long
Like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the faraway past
Like a stalled horse that breaks loose and goes at a gallop through the plain
Like a jewel every cottage casement showed
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks pursue
Like a living meteor
Like a noisy argument in a drawing-room
Like a blade sent home to its scabbard
Like a withered leaf the moon is blown across the bay
Like a wandering star I fell through the deeps of desire
Like a sheeted ghost
Let his frolic fancy play, like a happy child
Like a bright window in a distant view
Laughter like a beautiful bubble from the rosebud of baby-hood
Like a shadow on a fair sunlit landscape
Like a golden-shielded army
Like a star that dwelt apart
"Our opponent undoubtedly has been making free with the name of the Almighty in his speeches.
The same old cry.
Such were the essential facts in the somewhat highly coloured newspaper story which Paul read in stupefied horror.
"I challenge the candidate to deny," said the man, as soon as he could be heard, "that his real name is Silas Kegworthy, and that he underwent three years' penal servitude for murderously assaulting his wife."
But it has broken him.
Suddenly he remembered that he had not told her of this incident in his family history.
"Well, has He or not?"
All the papers say that the vote of confidence was passed amid scenes of enthusiasm."
Jane's voice met his ear.
In his father's eyes he recognized, with a pang, the glow of a faith which he had lost.
He came to them with outstretched arms--a familiar gesture, one doubtless inherited from his Sicilian ancestry.
"Jane is well?" Paul asked, after an instant's pause, breaking off the profitless discussion.
"But I don't like," said Paul.
But beyond proving fallacies, Paul could do nothing--and even then, has there ever been a mob since the world began susceptible to logical argument?
"I can't see much difference," said Paul.
"He did it on his own," Wilson replied warmly.
Oh, it was a cruel, cowardly blow."
He could do nothing--not even beg his dearest lady to plead for him.
CHAPTER XIX
It would be merely mysterious?"
Nothing.
Now I've got an idea."
He went downstairs, and found the Colonel and Miss Winwood in the dining-room.
He had his life to reconstruct in the darkness threatening and mocking; but at last he had truth for a foundation; on that he would build in defiance of the world.
There was an angry tumult, and the interrupter would have fared badly, but for Silas Finn holding up his hand and imploring silence.
"But in politics one has often to put up with hateful things in order to serve one's country. That's the sacrifice a high-minded man is called upon to make."
Paul looked at the headline indicated by the man.
Paul smiled at the curiously stilted phrase.
By a supreme effort he regained some of his former fire and eloquence.
I never thought of it before.
Oh, Paul, it was splendid to see him face the audience.
"If there's an Almighty, He must move in a common-sense way; otherwise the whole of this planet would have busted up long ago.
The agent, not being versed in speculations regarding the attributes of the Deity, stared; then, disinclined to commit himself, took refuge in platitude.
"Were you at the meeting?"
"I see you're putting up an excellent fight."
He swept the multitude.
I have sought absolution for a moment of mad anger under awful provocation in unremitting prayer and in trying to save the souls and raise the fortunes of my fellow-men.
Liberal Candidate's Confession.
He turned suddenly to his companion, the Conservative agent.
I forgot you've not had time to find out."
"It's the Lord's battle.
He drove home exhausted, and going straight to bed slept like a dog till morning.
"It is for you, electors of Hickney Heath, to judge me."
He dressed quickly and went to his sitting-room, where he rang up his father's house on the telephone.
"That's quite a different matter."
He sat down amid tumultuous cheers, and the man who had interrupted him, after some rough handling, managed to make his escape.
You told me this honey was yours; am I right in suspecting that it belongs to Simba?"
He can't hurt you, you know."
Just then Mr. Simba, who owned the honey, came out again, and, looking up, inquired, "Who are you, up there?"
"Oh, all right; I'm with you," said the tortoise, eagerly; and away they went.
But she replied, "I will not go back; I will follow you, my husband."
So, when the lion asked again, "Who are you?" he answered, "It's only us." The lion said, "Come down, then;" and the tortoise answered, "We're coming."
Without loss of time the lion climbed the mountain, and soon arrived at the place indicated, only to find that there was no one at home.
So he went in, sat down, and remarked: "My father has died, and has left me a hive of honey.
Didn't you see him when I threw him down?"
Immediately on hearing this, Simba carried Kobay to the water, placed him in the mud, and began, as he supposed, to rub his back; but the tortoise had slipped away, and the lion continued rubbing on a piece of rock until his paws were raw.
Go back."
As soon as he was within reach, the lion caught hold of him, and asked, "Who was up there with you?"
Then Soongoora burst out laughing, and shouted: "Oho, Mr. Simba!
Speak, I tell you!"
I'll wait for you below.
Angry and disappointed, he turned to the tree and called to Kobay, "You come down, too."
Looking up, and seeing them eating, he asked, "Who are you?"
So he persuaded her, and she went back; but he kept on, following the footmarks, and saw--as he had suspected--that they went into his house.
When he glanced down at them he saw they were bleeding, and, realizing that he had again been outwitted, he said, "Well, the hare has done me to-day, but I'll go hunting now until I find him."
I would like you to come and help me to eat it."
This made Bookoo so scared that he blurted out, "It's only us!"
So the lion, being deceived, took him by the tail and whirled him around, but just as he was going to knock him on the ground he slipped out of his grasp and ran away, and Simba had the mortification of losing him again.
"All right," said Kobay; but while he was wrapping the hare up he said to himself: "This fellow wants to run away, and leave me to bear the lion's anger.
"Oh, I think you'll have to do the waiting," cried the hare; and then he ran away, the lion following.
"Whose honey?" inquired Kobay, cautiously.
"Of course I didn't see him," replied the lion, in an incredulous tone, and, without wasting further time, he ate the big rat, and then searched around for the hare, but could not find him.
When they arrived at the great calabash tree they climbed up with their straw, smoked out the bees, sat down, and began to eat.
Upon this the hare said to him: "You just wrap me up in this straw, call to the lion to keep out of the way, and then throw me down.
As he was passing the house of Boo'koo, the big rat, that worthy gentleman invited him in.
In the midst of the feast, who should appear at the foot of the tree but Sim'ba, the lion?
After waiting a minute or two, Simba roared out, "Well, come down, I say!" and, there being no help for it, the big rat came down.
Of course Bookoo jumped at the offer, and he and the hare started off immediately.
"Oh, that's easy," laughed Kobay; "just put me in the mud and rub my back with your paw until my shell comes off."
When the tortoise reached the ground, the lion said, "You're pretty hard; what can I do to make you eatable?"
Simba, the lion, has passed this way, and I think he must be looking for me."
Stopping at once, he said to Mrs. Soongoora: "You go back, my dear.
Lion is inside, is he?" Then, cautiously going back a little way, he called out: "How d'ye do, house?
Then Tubby's son saw his folly, and while the two canaries flew away he sank on the ground, where, exhausted by his last effort, he lay unconscious.
VII
Fearing lest it should be a wolf, she hid herself in the hollow trunk of a willow tree which hung over the fountain.
The traveller having recovered, mounted his horse, and at the first streak of dawn he saw a stream dancing in front of him, and stooped down and drank his fill.
On her side she seemed quite bewildered, but she looked about her with happy eyes, and was not at all afraid of her deliverer.
He must be mad! fit for a strait waistcoat!' cried the good man, when he was able to speak.
As she was always being teased about her complexion, she got as noisy and cross as a titmouse.
XVI
You will come to a vast park surrounded by high walls.
'What a pretty face!' she exclaimed, 'Why, it must be mine!
When the moment arrived to serve the roast goose, there was a pause, and Tubby took the opportunity to lay down his knife and fork for a little. But as the goose gave no sign of appearing, he sent his head carver to find out what was the matter in the kitchen.
Was I wrong, my lovely Zizi?'
'Ah!' he said to himself.
'Iron gate, iron gate,' cried the voice, growling like thunder, 'fall on him and grind him to powder.'
Instead of chatting with them in the dusk, he wandered about the woods, whispering to the moon.
'None of the girls of my own country are beautiful in my eyes, and that is why I came to look for a wife in the land of the sun.
XV
Your choice once made, be very careful never to leave your bride for an instant, and remember that the danger which is most to be feared is never the danger we are most afraid of.'
It was not long before she did think of it.
It is she I am seeking.'
This time it was Zizi's turn to be silent.
Now, fifteen years before this time, the father in walking through the forest found a little girl, who had been deserted by the gypsies.
At last her arms grew so tired that when she did manage to get the can properly under the water she had no strength to pull it up, and it rolled to the bottom.
Let him go in peace.'
As she grew older, the little gypsy became much more remarkable for strength and cunning than for sense or beauty. She had a low forehead, a flat nose, thick lips, coarse hair, and a skin not golden like that of Zizi, but the colour of clay.
'As if it wasn't enough,' he grumbled between his teeth, 'that the boy should pick up a hag without a penny, but the goose must go and burn now.
He asked her name.
She was alone for the first time in her life, and in the middle of a thick forest.
The marriage took place a few days later.
'No; I don't mean to be a beast of burden any longer.' And she flung the bucket so high in the air that it stuck in the branches of an oak.
Here he was seized with dreadful thirst; he took his gourd and raised it to his lips.
'Here! quick! bring him back to me.'
He spitted a third goose, lit a huge fire, and seated himself by it.
The gypsy had often seen the young Prince pass by, with his gun on his shoulder, when he was going after crows.
'My faith!' cried Tubby; 'do you want to marry a negress, and give me grandchildren as ugly as monkeys and as stupid as owls?'
Then he took out his bottle and oiled the hinges, when the gate opened of itself, and he saw an old castle standing inside.
Lastly he went round the castle, and plunged into the orange grove. There he gathered the three most beautiful oranges he could find, and turned to go back to the gate.
Lastly, you will find a well on your left; do not forget to take the cord of the bucket and spread it in the sun.
Let us see who this creature was.
Then there appeared, not a wolf, but a creature quite as wicked and quite as ugly.
Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.'
How in the world can they call me ugly?
'That accursed bird,' said the Cook; 'it will end by getting me sent away.
The Prince entered boldly into the courtyard.
Oh! why did I not follow the old man's advice?
He had the strength to lift himself up and put his hand into his bag.
'A yellow wife!
Next, you will see a baking woman leaning over her heated oven.
'Does she say so?
YOU never cared to give me a brush; but he has given me one, and he shall go in peace.'
Then all the cooks and scullions sprang after it, knocking at it with their aprons. At length one of them caught it just at the very moment that Tubby entered the kitchen, waving his sceptre.
So marry, and you will be perfectly happy.'
Well, if you believe that, you may drink cold water and think it bacon,' the unhappy Tubby answered crossly.
Out of each orange will come a princess, and you can choose which you like for your wife.
When his hunger was satisfied the old man said to him:
'If only these oranges were real fruit--fruit as refreshing as what I ate in Flanders!
Let him go in peace.'
The Master Cook himself mounted to the hall to make his excuses, and to beg his lord to have a little patience.
XII
He had come to see for himself why the goose had never made its appearance.
Why, I am yellow too, and if I could only think of a way----'
They all pretended to believe it, and the ladies at once put on the false princess the rich dresses they had brought for Zizi.
'So he likes yellow women!
Zizi obtained Titty's pardon, and she was sent back to the brick-fields, followed and hooted at by all the boys.
The Scullion stopped at once, just as he was about to wring the Canary's neck.
While you were away the wicked witch came, and turned me into this.
Don't try to press it open, but oil the hinges with this,' and the old man gave him a small bottle.
'What is the matter with you?' his father often said to him.
Suddenly he heard fierce howls, and a dog as tall as a donkey, with eyes like billiard balls, came towards him, showing his teeth, which were like the prongs of a fork.
He was at that moment close to the corner of a wood where stood a little hut, before the door of which his horse stopped of his own accord.
'The wood that you saw in your dream is not far from here,' said the old man.
He sprang to the ground, fastened his horse to a tree, and soon found the iron gate.
It was not at all easy to fill the milk-can, which was large and round.
He pulled it out, and lo! the Canary at once became a beautiful girl with a golden skin who jumped lightly to the ground.
The traveller entered, and his host put before him a simple meal.
Suddenly she heard a noise among the trees.
'Good-morning, lovely golden bird,' replied the chief of the scullions, who had been well brought up.
'Well, and the other one?' asked Tubby.
'You have everything you can possibly wish for: a good bed, good food, and tuns full of beer.
He mounted his horse and took her in front of him, and, holding her carefully in his arms, they began their journey.
Still his heart was light, for he felt that he had got through the most difficult part of his task, and the rest was easy.
'No,' replied the baker; 'a long time has passed since I first began to scour this oven with my own flesh.
"You wouldn't think so by to-morrow evening," Ester said, shortly. "No, I can't go."
She did not look very much as if she were asleep, nor acted as though she expected to get a chance to be very soon.
There was no end to the things which she had to do, for the kitchen was long and wide, and took many steps to set it in order, and it was drawing toward tea-time of a Tuesday evening, and there were fifteen boarders who were, most of them, punctual to a minute.
I did not know it was so late, and I'm nearly tired to death."
"O, my patience!" was her greeting.
The work was all done at last, and Ester betook herself to her room. How tired she was!
So Ester hurried to and from the pantry, with quick, nervous movements, as the sun went toward the west, saying to Maggie who was ironing with all possible speed:
"I'm just ironing Mr. Holland's shirt," objected Maggie.
Ester's cheeks glowed yet more.
Have you much more to do?"
Sadie Ried opened the door that led from the dining-room to the kitchen, and peeped in a thoughtless young head, covered with bright brown curls:
"Something besides keeping cool," Ester answered soberly.
"I don't know, sir; if I had nothing to do but that, I think I could manage it."
Sadie, are you going to the lyceum tonight?"
"O, yes; I'm better.
I've been worried half to pieces about you all day."
"Come, Birdie, Auntie Essie's cross, isn't she?
Ester, can't you go down?
"Why, Minnie! you must not tell what Aunt Sadie says.
"I have found trouble sometimes in keeping myself at the right temperature even in January."
"How are you, Ester?"
Her pink gingham dress, and white, ruffled apron--yes, and the very school books which she swung by their strap, waking a smothered sigh in Ester's heart.
The tall clock in the dining-room struck five, and the dining-bell pealed out its prompt summons through the house.
Ester's lip curled a little.
"Here, Julia"--to the ten-year old newcomer--"Go away from that raisin-box, this minute.
Then school is out".
"Only to trim the lamps, and make three beds that I had not time for this morning, and get things ready for breakfast, and finish Sadie's dress."
"I gave it up long ago in despair."
There was a moment's hush while Mr. Hammond asked a blessing on the food; then the merry talk went on.
"Sadie, won't you come and cut the beef and cake, and make the tea?
Mrs. Ried sighed.
"It was as much as I could do to keep cool in the store, and we generally ARE well off for a breeze there."
It was a pleasant little room, this one which she entered, with its low windows looking out toward the river, and its cosy furniture all neatly arranged by Sadie's tasteful fingers.
Back and forth, from dining-room to pantry, from pantry to dining-room, went the quick feet At last she spoke:
"We've been down to the river since school."
"Miss Ester looks as though the heat had been too much for her cheeks," Mrs. Brookley said, laughing.
Every nerve seemed to quiver with weariness.
No one knows what prompted Minnie to speak just then.
The household laughed, and Sadie came to the rescue.
Sadie looked sober.
"Maggie is ironing."
"Which is a difficult thing to do, however," Dr. Van Anden said, speaking soberly too.
Go up stairs out of my way, and Alfred too. Sadie, take Minnie with you; I can't have her here another instant. You can afford to do that much, perhaps."
"Yes, ma'am.
Besides, Mr. Hammond said he would show me about my algebra if I'd go out on the piazza this minute."
Mrs. Holland had nothing in the world to do, from morning until night, but to keep herself cool.
Were you, Auntie Essie?"
Sadie hovered around the pale, sad-faced woman while she ate.
And Minnie--Ester's darling, who never received other than loving words from her--went gleefully off, leaving another heartburn to the weary girl.
"Can't Maggie do any of these things?"
Then: "No, no, Birdie, don't touch!" in quite a different tone to Minnie, who laid loving hands on a box of raisins.
Never mind that dress; let it go to Guinea."
And she emerged fully into the great warm kitchen, looking like a bright flower picked from the garden, and put out of place.
ESTER'S HOME.
Ester, you look dreadfully tired.
CHAPTER I.
She understood Dr. Van Anden, and she knew her face did not look very self-controlled.
"This has been one of the scorching days," Mr. Holland said.
"O, Ester, you're cross!" said Sadie, in a good-humored tone, coming forward after the little girl.
--Take another person with you if possible.
WINTER STORMS
If there isn't time to do this--or if you are walking--take cover and lie flat in the nearest depression, such as a ditch, culvert, excavation, or ravine.
In winter weather, and especially in winter storms, be aware of this danger, and avoid overexertion.
If you run the engine to keep warm, remember to open a window enough to provide ventilation and protect you from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Then stay in your car and wait for help to arrive.
TORNADOES
Keep your radio or television set tuned to a local station for information and advice from your local government or the Weather Bureau.
If not, go to a corner of your home basement and take cover under a sturdy workbench or table (but not underneath heavy appliances on the floor above).
In earthquakes, most injuries occur as people are entering or leaving buildings (from falling walls, electric wires, etc.).
--Don't be daring or foolhardy.
--Keep an adequate supply of heating fuel on hand and use it sparingly, as your regular supplies may be curtailed by storm conditions.
However, if you are forced to use your automobile for a trip of any distance, take these precautions:
You should:
If your furnace is controlled by a thermostat and your electricity is cut off by a storm, the furnace probably would not operate and you would need emergency heat.
If you must travel, use public transportation if possible.
You should also understand the terms commonly used in weather forecasts:
--Have emergency "winter storm supplies" in the car, such as a container of sand, shovel, windshield scraper, tow chain or rope, extra gasoline, and a flashlight.
This could be a camp stove with fuel, or a supply of wood or coal if you have a fireplace.
--Drive with all possible caution.
(When a tornado watch is announced during the approach of a hurricane, however, keep watching the sky to the east.) If you see any revolving, funnel-shaped clouds, report them by telephone immediately to your local police department, sheriff's office or Weather Bureau office.
Set your directional lights to flashing, raise the hood of your car, or hang a cloth from the radio aerial or car window.
If your area is one of the places in the United States where earthquakes occur, keep these points in mind:
If you are on a well-traveled road, show a trouble signal.
--Make sure your car is in good operating condition, properly serviced, and equipped with chains or snow tires.
Stay away from windows and outside doors.
Some of this food should be of the type that does not require refrigeration or cooking.
Wherever you are, if there is no house or other source of help in sight, do not leave your car to search for assistance, as you may become confused and get lost.
Your best protection is an underground shelter or cave, or a substantial steel-framed or reinforced-concrete building. But if none of these is available, there are other places where you can take refuge:
Avoid all unnecessary trips.
Stop, turn back, or seek help if conditions threaten that may test your ability or endurance, rather than risk being stalled, lost or isolated.
EARTHQUAKES
Don't run or panic.
--If you are outdoors, stay away from overhead electric wires, poles or anything else that might shake loose and fall (such as the cornices of tall buildings).
The warning means that a tornado has actually been sighted, and this (or other tornadoes) may strike in your vicinity.
--Consult page 72 of this handbook for other supplies and equipment that you may need if isolated at home.
If your car breaks down during a storm, or if you become stalled or lost, don't panic.
Also, flashlights or lanterns would be needed.
Every winter many unnecessary deaths occur because people--especially older persons, but younger ones as well--engage in more strenuous physical activity than their bodies can stand.
It combines cold air, heavy snow, and strong winds that blow the snow about and may reduce visibility to only a few yards.
Arguments must be fostered and preserved.
Diplomacy is an evil game, chiefly because it has been so exclusive.
We are willing to accept modifications, but the scheme would work.
Reviewers look for motives.
How could symbolism be more perfect?
XXXII
Always see the scab hit the striker.'"
That is, not among umpires.
"You see," he went on, "there are seven or eight other newspapers in town who will see it just the other way and I've got to keep the balance straight."
ART FOR ARGUMENT'S SAKE
It is all part of a great scheme of sex propaganda.
Instinct is not what it used to be.
Even before her head had bumped, he would be hard at work. With him the thrill lay in the inspiration of the competitive spirit.
At least all will do.
At this point, interruption is inevitable.
Probably he will think that they are part of your own handiwork turned out for his pleasure.
No, there is nothing dull in feeding a child.
When Adam delved and Eve span, the fiction that man is incapable of housework was first established.
To this declaration men gave immediate and eager assent and they have kept it up.
He brought his technic into the home.
Perhaps it has been too convenient.
A dish is an unresponsive thing.
As I ventured to suggest before, almost any firm grip will do.
It has been convenient.
'How do you do it?' he would say. And he would right Annabel and try to still her protests.
It is pretty generally held that all a woman needs to do to know all about children is to have some. This wisdom is attributed to instinct.
This seems to us laborious and rather tiresome, both for father and child.
This simply isn't true.
The pretense of incapacity is impudent in its audacity, and yet it works.
Like children in a toy shop, we have chosen to live with the most amusing of talking-and-walking dolls, without ever attempting to tear down the sign which says, "Do not touch." In fact we have helped to set it in place. That is a pity.
Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn.
Nature is the great teacher."
Nature herself is cavalier.
But to return to our quotation: "If Richard tried to take up the bundle, his fingers fell away like the legs of the brittle crab and the bundle collapsed, incalculable and helpless.
It would be interesting to figure out just how many foot-pounds of energy men have saved themselves, since the creation of the world, by keeping up the pretense that a special knack is required for washing dishes and for dusting, and that the knack is wholly feminine.
It is a brand-new world for the child.
It gives back nothing.
Holding a Baby
"He doesn't seem to have the proper touch," she explained.
He was discovering, to his amazement, that he was still alive and practically unhurt.
Her hair and face were covered with sugar and a fork was embedded in the front of her dress.
William crept round to the back of the house beneath the bushes.
The main road was empty except for a caravan--a caravan gaily painted in red and yellow.
His aim was fairly good, and he succeeded in knocking off the hat and finally prostrating the wooden framework.
The fat woman and the donkey man joined the pursuit.
Never, in his future life of noble merit, would he be able to annex a caravan.
I'll help you," she added sweetly.
The next day dawned bright and fair.
"All right, I will," he said.
And William had not been really loth to retire at once to bed.
Then, bracing himself for the effort, he delivered himself up to justice.
THE REFORM OF WILLIAM
The precious hours of such a day as this could not be wasted in school.
Conscience stirred faintly in his breast, but he silenced it sternly.
Soon he was contemplating with a satisfied smile a green and enraged cat and a green and enraged hen.
He felt reluctant to return home.
It appeared to be a mule--a mule with a jaundiced view of life.
But this Sunday the tall, pale lady who, for her sins, essayed to lead William and his friends along the straight and narrow path of virtue, was almost inspired.
William's fascinated eye wandered from the cherries to the distant view out of the window.
Then out of the window of the caravan climbed a woman--a fat, angry woman, shaking her fist at the world in general.
There came a rattle of crockery from within.
To William it was like some ghastly nightmare after an evening's entertainment at the cinematograph.
William considered.
He could see the gardener smiling in the distance.
From within the caravan came inhuman female yells of fear and anger.
It had little lace curtains at the window.
Opposite him sat a small girl in a pink and white checked frock.
No one else was in the dining-room.
It was a female scream.
He took up his pea-shooter and aimed carefully.
The pea did not embed itself deeply into the gardener's skull as William had sometimes thought it would. It bounced back.
William gazed upon caravan and steed fascinated.
The mule was standing meekly by and smiling to himself.
William sat on the further outskirts of the wood and panted.
It rolled a sad eye towards William, then with a deep sigh returned to its contemplation of the landscape.
But the mule refused to be warned.
Carelessly he flicked the mule with the whip.
The gardener had a perfectly bald head.
The reins dropped from William's hands; he clung for dear life on to his seat, as the caravan, swaying and jolting along the uneven road, seemed to be doing its utmost to fling him off.
The gardener also bounced back with a yell of anger, shaking his fist at William's window.
"Say day after to-morrow."
The point was all innocently driven in later by the Sunday-school mistress.
He was reviewing his day.
He dressed briskly and went down to breakfast with a frown of concentration upon his face.
William was deeply interested.
He surveyed the scene with a deep sigh of satisfaction.
He thought suddenly of the noble burglar who had turned his back upon the mysterious, nefarious tools of his trade and now dispensed margarine to his former victims.
William arose with a distinct sense that something important had happened.
To-morrow it would all be impossible.
Mules are notoriously accessible to wandering demons.
All that mattered was, it was a bright sunny morning, and all the others were in school, and he was driving a red and yellow caravan along the high road.
To-morrow began the blameless life.
He was driving a caravan.
He felt almost thrilled by the prospect.
There was a whole normal lifetime of crime to be crowded into one day.
Followed--an exciting chase by an angry farmer.
He saw himself leading a quiet and blameless life, walking sedately to school, working at high pressure in school, doing his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite to his family, his instructors, and the various foolish people who visited his home for the sole purpose (apparently) of making inane remarks to him.
They rent the still summer air, mingled with the sound of breaking glass and crockery.
Fortunately for William, most of his friends' parents were inspired by the same zeal, so that he met his old cronies of the week-days--Henry, Ginger, Douglas and all the rest--and together they beguiled the monotony of the Sabbath.
He saw all this, and the picture was far from unattractive--in the distance.
Otherwise she, too, had escaped undamaged.
School, of course, was impossible.
Then one of them pointed to William, who sat, feeling still slightly shaken, upon the bank.
He was to be converted.
The wickedness of a lifetime was somehow or other to be crowded into this day.
It was his last chance.
Mr. Brown's rhetoric had been rather lost on William, because its pearls of sarcasm had been so far above his head.
There was a kind of dresser with crockery hanging from it, a small table and a little oil stove.
He saw himself from to-morrow onward leading a quiet and blameless life, walking sedately to school, working at high pressure in school, doing his homework conscientiously in the evening, being exquisitely polite to his family and instructors--and the vision failed utterly to attract.
It did not trouble William.
William wandered round the neighbourhood experiencing all the thrill of the outlaw.
"Very well," she said at last reluctantly, "day after to-morrow."
Then he thought of the reformation.
They were all things that he had at one time or another vaguely thought of doing, but for which he had never yet seemed to have time or opportunity.
He often whiled away the dullest hours of Sunday-school by putting out his tongue at her or throwing paper pellets at her (manufactured previously for the purpose).
It must all be worked off to-day.
He went down the road full of his noble purpose.
He was so enthralled that he received absent-mindedly, and without gratitude, the mountainous bull's-eye passed to him from Ginger, and only gave a half-hearted smile when a well-aimed pellet from Henry's hand sent one of the prophetess's cherries swinging high in the air.
It is always well to follow a morning's absence from school by an afternoon's absence from school.
William's hair stood on end.
The question as to what exactly would happen when the pea met the baldness was now for ever solved.
What a comfort to be blessed with a placid disposition and an optimistic frame of mind!
I caught his hand and gazed into his face with horrified eyes.
Of his features I could see nothing.
Was it indeed a wild fancy of his, or had he really heard this voice which had stirred him so deeply?
Presently he opened his eyes, and raised his head a little, looking half fearfully around.
I smothered a laugh.
The man was nearest to me, and I could see him more distinctly.
"Are you wise to be without a hat, Kate?
"Daughters, I believe--I heard some one say that there were two.
To look at your airy attire one would imagine that it was summer instead of autumn.
A curious thought had taken possession of me.
I watched her coming towards me, and I almost envied her.
He wore no collar, and there was a great rent in his shabby shooting coat.
"So I do sometimes," I answered; "but to-day my callers have been all women, winding up with an hour and a half of Lady Naselton.
There was nothing to look at.
Yet, I thought--I thought----"
She brought it in a moment.
The little sober figure turned the bend and disappeared without looking around.
ON THE MOOR
I had no desire to go in; on the other hand, there was nothing to stay out for.
Already he was better.
He was lashing the thistles by the side of the road with his long whip.
Where is she?
When the fit came I could neither work nor read nor think connectedly.
"I remember the study was close, and I came to get cool.
His cry was so natural, his terror so apparent!
He had heard a voice.
His cheeks were ghastly pale, and his eyes were still closed.
I could not.
One gets so tired of one's own sex!
Her friends knew that her retirement on this occasion was timed to finish on the morning of her reception and had not the least misgiving that her doors would still be closed.
To all eager questions Mrs. McLane merely replied that "they" would "be here." She had the dramatic instinct of the true leader and had commanded the doctor not to bring his bride before four o'clock.
They all met her in the course of the afternoon.
The girls drew little unconscious sighs of relief.
She had made the grand tour in Europe, they discovered, and enjoyed a season in Washington.
A magnificent crystal chandelier depended from the high and lightly frescoed ceiling and there were side brackets beside the doors and the low mantel piece.
In love with her husband but a woman-of-the-world.
And she was bright, unaffected, responsive.
The effect was by no means accidental.
Today this would be a rest cure and was equally beneficial.
Mrs. Abbott, who was given to primitive sounds, snorted.
Her skin was as white as the San Francisco fogs, her lips were scarlet, her cheeks pink, her hair and eyes a bright golden brown.
That was known to all San Francisco, for her carriage had stood in front of the Occidental Hotel for an hour.
She was exquisitely dressed in dark blue velvet with a high collar of point lace tapering almost to her bust, and revealing a long white throat clasped at the base by a string of pearls.
No one wasted time on a second effort to gossip with their leader; it was known that just so often Mrs. McLane drew down the blinds, informed her household that she was not to be disturbed, disposed herself on the sofa with her back to the room and indulged in the luxury of blues for three days.
The South could have done no better.
Mrs. Talbot was unquestionably a product of the best society.
Her skirt was full but straight and did not disguise the lines of her graceful figure; above her small waist it fitted as closely as a riding habit.
When the attack was over Mrs. McLane would arise with a clear complexion, serene nerves, and renewed strength for social duties.
Manners as fine as Mrs. McLane's, but too aloof and sensitive to care for leadership.
As she moved forward and stood in front of Mrs. McLane, or acknowledged introductions to those that stood near, the women gave another gasp, this time of consternation.
She should continue to live at the Occidental Hotel as her husband would be out so much at night and she was rather timid.
If they took up less room than the women they certainly were more decorative.
Mrs. Abbott succumbed.
And her figure, her face, her profile!
In short they all took her to their hearts.
She was sweet and gracious, but although there was not a hint of embarrassment she made no attempt to shine, and they liked her the better for that.
The colored butler had announced with a grand flourish:
The poor thing could no more help being plain and dowdy than born in Boston, and as their leader had satisfied herself that she "would do," they would never let her know how deeply they deplored her disabilities.
"Dr. and Mrs. Talbot."
She was tall and supple and self-possessed.
Or was this lovely creature of surpassing elegance, a law unto herself?
The doctor looked as rubicund, as jovial, as cynical as ever.
She wore her prematurely white hair in a tall pompadour, and this with the rich velvets she affected, ample and long, made her look like a French marquise of the eighteenth century, stepped down from the canvas.
On her head, as proudly poised as Mrs. McLane's, was a blue velvet hat, higher in the crown than the prevailing fashion, rolled up on one side and trimmed only with a drooping gray feather.
Mrs. McLane's grandmother had been French and she resembled her.
But Mrs. Abbott, a lady of three chins and an eagle eye, who had clung for twenty-five years to black satin and bugles, was too persistent to be denied.
Its men were gentlemen and the sons and grandsons of gentlemen.
The young men soon discovered they could make no impression on this lovely importation, for her eyes strayed constantly to her husband; until he disappeared in search of cronies, whiskey, and a cigar: then she looked depressed for a moment, but gave a still closer attention to the women about her.
They should have an entrance.
But few cast him more than a passing glance.
At ten minutes after the hour the buzz and chatter stopped abruptly and every face was turned, every neck craned toward the door.
Mrs. McLane stood before the north windows receiving her friends with her usual brilliant smile, her manner of high dignity and sweet cordiality.
They had been prepared to forgive, to endure, to make every allowance.
Dr. Talbot and his wife had not arrived.
Then they gave an audible gasp, induced by an ingenuous compound of amazement, disappointment, and admiration.
She extracted the information that the Bostonian had sent her own furniture by a previous steamer and that her drawing room was graceful, French, and exquisite.
The rooms filled early.
She took no nourishment but milk and broth and spoke to no one.
Unlike as a reception of that day was in background and costumes from the refinements of modern art and taste, it possessed one contrast that was wholly to its advantage.
Mrs. McLane had called on Mrs. Talbot.
The reception began at three.
Her features were delicate and regular, the mouth not too small, curved and sensitive; her refinement was almost excessive.
Mrs. Ballinger, who had been the belle of Richmond and was still adjudged the handsomest woman in San Francisco, lifted the eyebrows to which sonnets had been written with an air of haughty resignation; but made up her mind to abate her scorn of the North and order her gowns from New York hereafter.
It was a young lady, the loveliness of whose very striking features was enhanced by the animation of the chase and the glow of the exercise, mounted on a beautiful horse, jet black, unless where he was flecked by spots of the snow-white foam which embossed his bridle.
"I see," she replied,--"I see; but make no noise about it: if Phoebe," she said, patting the neck of the beautiful animal on which she rode, "had not got among the cliffs, you would have had little cause for boasting."
He shook hands with me, however, and then intimated his intention of leaving me that he might help the huntsman and his brothers to couple up the hounds,--a purpose which he rather communicated by way of information to Miss Vernon than as apology to me.
It served as an apology for me to ride close up to her, as if to her assistance.
The dogs pursued the trace of Reynard with unerring instinct; and the hunters followed with reckless haste, regardless of the broken and difficult nature of the ground.
"Very little to the purpose, Miss Vernon; something, however, I can pretend to--When my groom has dressed my horse I can ride him, and when my hawk is in the field, I can fly him."
Amidst some remnants of old armour, which had, perhaps, served against the Scotch, hung the more valued weapons of silvan war, cross-bows, guns of various device and construction, nets, fishing-rods, otter-spears, hunting-poles, with many other singular devices, and engines for taking or killing game.
what do they resemble? especially, what do they resemble, if they are born to enjoy life, and feel its blessings?"
"Indeed I do not; I was thinking--forgive me--of some person much nearer me."
I was left awkwardly enough stationed in the centre of the court of the old hall, mounted on one horse, and holding another in my hand.
Bred to the church, but in no hurry to take orders."
"You have seen convents?"
I had, therefore, a full view of her uncommonly fine face and person, to which an inexpressible charm was added by the wild gaiety of the scene, and the romance of her singular dress and unexpected appearance.
The hubbub among the servants rather increased than diminished as this crisis approached.
But what on earth brings you to Cub-Castle?--for so the neighbours have christened this hunting-hall of ours.
Is that true, Mr. Osbaldistone?"
I was too happy to acknowledge myself to be the party inquired after, and to express my thanks for the obliging inquiries of the young lady.
"I must not deny the charge."
The mode had been introduced while I was in France, and was perfectly new to me.
"I was afraid you had been a very degenerate Osbaldistone.
dead!
I had just time to give a glance at these matters, when about twelve blue-coated servants burst into the hall with much tumult and talk, each rather employed in directing his comrades than in discharging his own duty.
She thanked my good intentions, however, by a smile, and I felt encouraged to put my horse to the same pace, and to keep in her immediate neighbourhood.
"Can you do this?" said the young lady, putting her horse to a canter.
"Why, we must forswear your alliance.
I was bound in point of honour to follow, and was in a moment again at her side.
We did, however, at length reach a long vaulted room, floored with stone, where a range of oaken tables, of a weight and size too massive ever to be moved aside, were already covered for dinner.
I could not help saying, "that, judging of the family from what I saw, I should suppose the toilette a very unnecessary care."
Her long black hair streamed on the breeze, having in the hurry of the chase escaped from the ribbon which bound it.
A few old pictures, dimmed with smoke, and stained with March beer, hung on the walls, representing knights and ladies, honoured, doubtless, and renowned in their day; those frowning fearfully from huge bushes of wig and of beard; and these looking delightfully with all their might at the roses which they brandished in their hands.
All tramped, kicked, plunged, shouldered, and jostled, doing as little service with as much tumult as could well be imagined.
But there is not one of them to mend another.--Have you read Markham?" said Miss Vernon.
"But I forgot--they told me you are a heretic.
I felt I was by this time on a very intimate footing with my beautiful apparition, and therefore replied, in a confidential under-tone--"Indeed, my dear Miss Vernon, I might have considered it as a sacrifice to be a temporary resident in Osbaldistone Hall, the inmates being such as you describe them; but I am convinced there is one exception that will make amends for all deficiencies."
But nature has given him a mouthful of common sense, and the priest has added a bushelful of learning; he is what we call a very clever man in this country, where clever men are scarce.
His drooping brush, his soiled appearance, and jaded trot, proclaimed his fate impending; and the carrion crow, which hovered over him, already considered poor Reynard as soon to be his prey.
This he employed (as I was given to understand by some inquiries which I made on the road) in maintaining the prodigal hospitality of a northern squire of the period, which he deemed essential to his family dignity.
My knowledge of life was sufficient to enable me to take up a corresponding tone as I expressed my gratitude to her for her condescension, and my extreme pleasure at having met with them.
The abode of my fathers, which I was now approaching, was situated in a glen, or narrow valley, which ran up among those hills.
If he could find out a blind mistress, never man would be so secure of conquest; but the eye breaks the spell that enchants the ear.--But here we are in the court of the old hall, which looks as wild and old-fashioned as any of its inmates.
But, seriously, I deserve your exception, for I am the only conversable being about the Hall, except the old priest and Rashleigh."
"I confess I trust all these matters to an ostler, or to my groom."
dead!"--and the corresponding flourish of the French horn, soon announced to us that there was no more occasion for haste, since the chase was at a close.
If there was any coquetry in the action, it was well disguised by the careless indifference of her manner.
"I suppose it would be proper not to understand your civility?--But that is not my way--I don't make a courtesy for it because I am sitting on horseback.
"And do you not blush to own it?" said Miss Vernon.
They met as she spoke, and I observed them both look at me, and converse a moment in an under-tone, the young lady apparently pressing the sportsman to do something which he declined shyly, and with a sort of sheepish sullenness.
"Often; but I have not seen much in them which recommended the Catholic religion."
The clamour of "Whoop!
I approached my native north, for such I esteemed it, with that enthusiasm which romantic and wild scenery inspires in the lovers of nature.
"They are like imprisoned singing-birds," replied I, "condemned to wear out their lives in confinement, which they try to beguile by the exercise of accomplishments which would have adorned society had they been left at large."
But to return to Rashleigh," said she, in a more lively tone, "you will think him the pleasantest man you ever saw in your life, Mr. Osbaldistone,--that is, for a week at least.
You might have stayed away, I suppose, if you would?"
Some very broken ground, through which she guided her horse with the most admirable address and presence of mind, retarded her course, and brought her closer to me than any of the other riders had passed.
"Read whom, ma'am?--I do not even remember the author's name."
Those who have adopted a life of seclusion from sudden and overstrained enthusiasm, or in hasty resentment of some disappointment or mortification, are very miserable. The quickness of sensation soon returns, and like the wilder animals in a menagerie, they are restless under confinement, while others muse or fatten in cells of no larger dimensions than theirs."
This service he performed with much such grace and good-will, as a peasant who is compelled to act as guide to a hostile patrol; and in the same manner I was obliged to guard against his deserting me in the labyrinth of low vaulted passages which conducted to "Stun Hall," as he called it, where I was to be introduced to the gracious presence of my uncle.
"And what," continued Miss Vernon, "becomes of those victims who are condemned to a convent by the will of others?
"Incredible carelessness!--And you cannot shoe a horse, or cut his mane and tail; or worm a dog, or crop his ears, or cut his dew-claws; or reclaim a hawk, or give him his casting-stones, or direct his diet when he is sealed; or"--
"I am, indeed, Miss Vernon."
"For nearly four years."
So do you hold my palfrey, like a duteous knight, until I send some more humble squire to relieve you of the charge."
"And yet you have been abroad, and in Catholic countries?"
A vision that passed me interrupted these reflections.
"Rashleigh is one who would fain have every one like him for his own sake.
I paused, therefore, on a rising ground, and, not unmoved by the sense of interest which that species of silvan sport is so much calculated to inspire (although my mind was not at the moment very accessible to impressions of this nature), I expected with some eagerness the appearance of the huntsmen.
"There are hopes of you yet," she said.
She wore, what was then somewhat unusual, a coat, vest, and hat, resembling those of a man, which fashion has since called a riding habit.
As she passed me, her horse made, in his impetuosity, an irregular movement, just while, coming once more upon open ground, she was again putting him to his speed.
There was, however, no cause for alarm; it was not a stumble, nor a false step; and, if it had, the fair Amazon had too much self-possession to have been deranged by it.
The fox, hard run, and nearly spent, first made his appearance from the copse which clothed the right-hand side of the valley.
The building afforded little to interest a stranger, had I been disposed to consider it attentively; the sides of the quadrangle were of various architecture, and with their stone-shafted latticed windows, projecting turrets, and massive architraves, resembled the inside of a convent, or of one of the older and less splendid colleges of Oxford.
There was a mixture of boldness, satire, and simplicity in the manner in which Miss Vernon pronounced these words.
To say the truth, the compliment was so expressed, that the lady might easily appropriate the greater share of it, for Thorncliff seemed an arrant country bumpkin, awkward, shy, and somewhat sulky withal.
"The Catholic Church? what Church else?" said the young lady.
How melts my beating heart as I behold Each lovely nymph, our island's boast and pride, Push on the generous steed, that sweeps along O'er rough, o'er smooth, nor heeds the steepy hill, Nor falters in the extended vale below! The Chase.
November 19, Gettysburg Cemetery address.
Made Eastern tour "to get acquainted."
December 9, pardon to rebels proclaimed.
1835--Postmaster, New Salem; appointed by President Jackson.
Henry Clay, Whig platform.
1862--September 22, emancipation announced.
April 19, body lay in state at Washington.
April 21 to May 4, funeral-train through principal cities North, to Springfield, Illinois.
April 26, Booth slain in resisting arrest, by Sergeant Boston Corbett, near Port Royal.
October, debated with Douglas.
Captain and private (re-enlisted) in Black Hawk War.
The completed monument dedicated.
Declined the governorship in favor of Bissell.
1864--Unanimous nomination as Republican presidential candidate for re-election, June 7.
Leaving home, he found, in a venture at "Yankee notion-pedling," that glibness meant three hundred per cent, in disposing of flimsy wares.
His state papers suited the war tragedies, but still he delighted the people with those tales, tagging all the events of what may be called the Lincoln era.
It is the Anglo-Saxon trait, distinguishing all great preachers, actors, and authors of that breed.
A Judicious Collection of the Best Stories and Anecdotes of the Great President, Many Appearing Here for the First Time in Book Form
Even his official letters were in the same vein.
In the camp of the lumber-jacks and of the Indian rangers he was regarded as the pride of the mess and the inspirator of the tent. From these stages he rose to be a graduate of the "college" of the yarn-spinner--the village store, where he became clerk.
Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings placed him under the trained politicians.
Their praise emboldened him to stand forward as the spokesman at schoolhouse meetings, lectures, log-rollings, huskings auctions, fairs, and so on--the folk-meets of our people.
The store we know is the township vortex where all assemble to "swap stories" and deal out the news.
He worked out Euclid to brace his fantasies, as the steel bar in a cement fence-post makes it irresistibly firm.
Instead of the erect, impressive, penetrative platform orator we see a long, gaunt figure, divided between two chairs for comfort, the head bent forward, smiling broadly, the lips curved in laughter, the deep eyes irradiating their caves of wisdom; the story-telling Lincoln, enjoying the enjoyment he gave to others.
COMPILED BY
Mrs. Lincoln, the first to weigh this man justly, said proudly, that "Lincoln was the great favorite everywhere."
Lincoln was hailed as the "capper" of any "good things on the rounds."
The Abraham Lincoln Statue at Chicago is accepted as the typical Westerner of the forum, the rostrum, and the tribune, as he stood to be inaugurated under the war-cloud in 1861.
He stood upon his "imperfect education," his not belonging "to the first families, but the seconds"; and his shunning society as debarring him from the study he required.
One watching him in 1830 said foresightedly: "Lincoln has touched land at last."
H. Stephens, President and Vice-President of the C. S. A.; Adams, Winthrop, Sumner, and the galaxy over whom his solitary star was to shine dazzlingly.
He imbibed all the political ruses, and returned home with his quiver full of new and victorious arrows for the Presidential campaign, for his bosom friends urged him to try to gratify that ambition, preposterous when he first felt it attack him. He had grown out of the sensitiveness that once made him beg the critics not to put him out by laughing at his appearance.
In commencing electioneering, he cultivated the farming population and their ways and diction.
He learned by their parlance and Bible phrases to construct "short sentences of small words," but he had all along the idea that "the plain people are more easily influenced by a broad and humorous illustration than in any other way."
Lincoln was their puzzle; for he had a sweet sauce for every "roast," and showed the smile of invigoration to every croaking prophet.
Repulsed at the polls, he turned to the law as another channel, supplementing forensic failings by his artful story-telling.
But he allowed his vehement fervor to carry him into such flights as left the reporters unable to accompany his sentences throughout.
PREFACE.
The longing for elevation was fanned by the association with the notables--Buchanan, to be his predecessor as President; Andrew Johnson, to be his vice and successor; Jefferson Davis and Alex.
This talkativeness, as Lincoln himself realized, was a very valuable asset.
It was here, too, that his stereotyped prologue to his digressions--"That reminds me"--became popular, and even reached England, where a publisher so entitled a joke-book.
These formed the rapt ring around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional chat-room.
The camp and the press echoed them though the Cabinet frowned--secretaries said that they exposed the illustrious speaker to charges of "clownishness and buffoonery."
He was not of the universities, but of the universe; the Mississippi of Eloquence, uncultivated, stupendous, enriched by sweeping into the innumerable side bayous and creeks.
THE LINCOLN STORY BOOK
Even then his friends saw the germs of the statesman in the lank, homely, crack-voiced hobbledehoy.
Time has refuted the purblind purists, the chilly "wet-blankets"; and the Lincoln stories, bright, penetrative, piquant, and pertinent are our classics.
Lincoln, from behind the counter--his pulpit--not merely repeated items of information which he had heard, but also recited doggerel satire of his own concoction, punning and emitting sparks of wit.
Lincoln displaced "Sam Slick," and opened the way to Artemus Ward and Mark Twain.
Elected and re-elected President, he continued to be a surprise to those who shrank from levity.
A sound authority who knew him of old pronounced him "as good at telling an anecdote as in the '30's." But the fluent chatterer reined in and became a good listener.
Such loquacious witchery fitted him for the Congress.
But there is another Lincoln as dear to the common people--the Lincoln of happy quotations, the speaker of household words.
The United States to Old World Critics
Memories
[III] You Tides with Ceaseless Swell
The Female equally with the Male, I sing. Nor cease at the theme of One's-Self.
After the dazzle of day is gone, Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars; After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band, Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
My Captain!
what clue to all in you?
Abraham Lincoln, Born Feb. 12, 1809
Have you learn'd lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?
After the Supper and Talk
The First Dandelion
Twilight
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons, All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old, Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love, A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother, Chair'd in the adamant of Time.
Yonnondio
A Prairie Sunset
To those who've fail'd, in aspiration vast, To unnam'd soldiers fallen in front on the lead, To calm, devoted engineers--to over-ardent travelers--to pilots on their ships, To many a lofty song and picture without recognition--I'd rear laurel-cover'd monument, High, high above the rest--To all cut off before their time, Possess'd by some strange spirit of fire, Quench'd by an early death.
Broadway
A Font of Type
Washington's Monument February, 1885
A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine
SANDS AT SEVENTY
you power that does this work! You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space's spread, Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations, What are the messages by you from distant stars to us?
With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea!
To get the final lilt of songs, To penetrate the inmost lore of poets--to know the mighty ones, Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakespere, Tennyson, Emerson; To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt-- to truly understand, To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price, Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.
Beat!
That, for the use of the New World, I sing. Man's physiology complete, from top to toe, I sing.
Stronger Lessons
The Dismantled Ship
Small the theme of my Chant, yet the greatest--namely, One's-Self-- a simple, separate person.
As the Greek's Signal Flame
Red Jacket (From Aloft)
After a week of physical anguish, Unrest and pain, and feverish heat, Toward the ending day a calm and lull comes on, Three hours of peace and soothing rest of brain.
My Canary Bird
BOOK XXXIV.
How sweet the silent backward tracings! The wanderings as in dreams--the meditation of old times resumed --their loves, joys, persons, voyages.
Proudly the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, advancing, Long it holds at the high, with bosom broad outswelling, All throbs, dilates--the farms, woods, streets of cities--workmen at work, Mainsails, topsails, jibs, appear in the offing--steamers' pennants of smoke--and under the forenoon sun, Freighted with human lives, gaily the outward bound, gaily the inward bound, Flaunting from many a spar the flag I love.
[VII] By That Long Scan of Waves
Death of General Grant
Thanks in Old Age
Mannahatta
Old Salt Kossabone
Not Meagre, Latent Boughs Alone
Life
Out of May's Shows Selected
Approaching, nearing, curious, Thou dim, uncertain spectre--bringest thou life or death? Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier? Or placid skies and sun?
Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn, The earth's whole amplitude and Nature's multiform power consign'd for once to colors; The light, the general air possess'd by them--colors till now unknown, No limit, confine--not the Western sky alone--the high meridian-- North, South, all, Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.
Halcyon Days
Election Day, November, 1884
Now Precedent Songs, Farewell
Of That Blithe Throat of Thine
How they sweep down and out!
Apple orchards, the trees all cover'd with blossoms; Wheat fields carpeted far and near in vital emerald green; The eternal, exhaustless freshness of each early morning; The yellow, golden, transparent haze of the warm afternoon sun; The aspiring lilac bushes with profuse purple or white flowers.
While not the past forgetting, To-day, at least, contention sunk entire--peace, brotherhood uprisen; For sign reciprocal our Northern, Southern hands, Lay on the graves of all dead soldiers, North or South, (Nor for the past alone--for meanings to the future,) Wreaths of roses and branches of palm.
As I Sit Writing Here
[VIII] Then Last Of All
The Dead Emperor
Drums! or To the Leaven'd Soil they Trod, Or Captain!
On to oblivion then! On, on, and do your part, ye burying, ebbing tide! On for your time, ye furious debouche!
Paumanok
Simple and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging, As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been, Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grass--innocent, golden, calm as the dawn, The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.
To-day, from each and all, a breath of prayer--a pulse of thought, To memory of Him--to birth of Him.
America
The Bravest Soldiers
what boundless aggregate of all? What subtle indirection and significance in you?
Here first the duties of to-day, the lessons of the concrete, Wealth, order, travel, shelter, products, plenty; As of the building of some varied, vast, perpetual edifice, Whence to arise inevitable in time, the towering roofs, the lamps, The solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars.
What of the future?)
Old Age's Lambent Peaks
it serves to purify--while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.
Then last of all, caught from these shores, this hill, Of you O tides, the mystic human meaning: Only by law of you, your swell and ebb, enclosing me the same, The brain that shapes, the voice that chants this song.
Thine eyes, ears--all thy best attributes--all that takes cognizance of natural beauty, Shall wake and fill.
To Get the Final Lilt of Songs
what Sirius'? what Capella's? What central heart--and you the pulse--vivifies all?
True Conquerors
how they mutter! Poets unnamed--artists greatest of any, with cherish'd lost designs, Love's unresponse--a chorus of age's complaints--hope's last words, Some suicide's despairing cry, Away to the boundless waste, and never again return.
Now, if she had been the heroine of a moral storybook, she ought at this period of her life to have become quite saintly, renounced the world, and gone about doing good in a mortified bonnet, with tracts in her pocket.
"I can't do it.
But you are right in one thing.
You are like a chestnut burr, prickly outside, but silky-soft within, and a sweet kernal, if one can only get at it.
Or was it the waking up of a sentiment which had bided its time as patiently as its inspirer?
Was it all self-pity, loneliness, or low spirits?
She had often said she wanted to do something splendid, no matter how hard, and now she had her wish, for what could be more beautiful than to devote her life to Father and Mother, trying to make home as happy to them as they had to her?
An hour afterward her mother peeped in and there she was, scratching away, with her black pinafore on, and an absorbed expression, which caused Mrs. March to smile and slip away, well pleased with the success of her suggestion.
"Why don't you write?
And holding the little paper fast, as if it were a promise yet to be fulfilled, Jo laid her head down on a comfortable rag bag, and cried, as if in opposition to the rain pattering on the roof.
Brooms and dishcloths never could be as distasteful as they once had been, for Beth had presided over both, and something of her housewifely spirit seemed to linger around the little mop and the old brush, never thrown away.
I'm sure it would do you good, and please us very much."
She gave him entire confidence, he gave her the help she needed, and both found consolation in the act.
"We do.
A little more sunshine to ripen the nut, then, not a boy's impatient shake, but a man's hand reached up to pick it gently from the burr, and find the kernal sound and sweet.
"Wait for me, my friend.
"May I try you on a page?"
"Ah! indeed!
"I heerd, sir, you wanted somebody to teach the State school, and I'm come to let you know I'm willing to take the place."
"Are you a linguist?"
"Done the Latin!"
To give evidence of competency, he once told me he was arranging a new spelling-book, the publication of which would make him known as a literary man, and be an unspeakable advantage to "the rising generation." And this naturally brought on the following colloquy about the work:
Deeming it waste of time to prepare for any station till he was certain of obtaining it, he wisely demanded the place first, and then set to work to become qualified for its duties, being, I suspect, the very man, or some relation of his, who is recorded as not knowing whether he could read Greek, as he had never tried.
Only to think of cyphering by letters!
For his chair there was one with a hickory bottom; and doubtless he would have filled it, and even lapped over its edges, with equal dignity in the recitation room of Big College.
"Yes, yes--but translate."
"Why, yes, render it into English--give me the meaning of it."
"On what new principle do you go, sir?"
"Indeed!"
"Mr. Rapid, I do not mean to question your abilities; but if you are now wholly unacquainted with the dead languages, it is impossible for you or any other talented man to learn them under four or five years."
"Mr. Jimmy, my company is nearly out of sight--if you can get along this way through simple and quadratic equations by our meeting, your chance will not be so bad--good morning, sir."
But our man of "letters" quit cyphering the new way, and returned to plain figures long before reaching equations; and so he could not become our professor.
"That will do, Mr. Rapid--"
BY BAYNARD RUST HALL
James Jimmy, A.S.S., and Mr. Solomon Rapid, A. to Z.
Why, sir, I done a whole slate full of letters and signs; and afterward, when I tried by figures, they every one of them came out right and brung the answer!
He was now somewhat advanced into the shaving age, and was ready to assume offices the most opposite in character; although justice compels us to say Mr. Rapid was as fit for one thing as another.
Try me, sir,--let's have the furst one furst--how many are there?"
Mr. Jimmy, who aspired to the mathematical chair, was master of a small school of all sexes, near Woodville.
I mean to cypher by letters altogether."
In a few weeks, to my no small surprise, Mr. Solomon Rapid again presented himself; and drawing forth the book began with a triumphant expression of countenance:
"An example--"
I allow school-books for schools are all too powerful obstruse and hard-like to be understood without exemplifying illustrations."
"Yes, sir! but it is such a pretty thing!
"Yes, sir, we are going to elect a professor of languages who is to be the principal and a professor--"
"I do not understand you, Mr. Jimmy, give me a specimen--"
"Well, sir, I have done the Latin."
"You, of course, understand the dead languages?"
Mr. Jimmy?"
The most extraordinary candidate, however, was Mr. Solomon Rapid.
At the first, he was kindly, yet honestly told, his knowledge was too limited and inaccurate; yet, notwithstanding this, and some almost rude repulses afterward, he persisted in his application and his hopes.
"Render it!! how's that?" (forehead more wrinkled.)
"That's your sort, let's have it, that's all I want, fair play."
"Translate!" (eyebrows elevating.)
But of all our unsuccessful candidates, we shall introduce by name only two--Mr.
I told you so."
"Why, sir, by clear explifications of the words in one column, by exemplifying illustrations in the other."
Why, sir, the sums come out, and bring the answers exactly like figures.
"Oh! my dear sir, it is not possible--we--can't--"
"Yes, as fast as English--and I didn't find it hard at all."
"Indeed it is, Mr. Jimmy--have you been looking into it?"
SELECTING THE FACULTY
"Mr. Rapid, it is utterly impossible; but if you insist, I will loan you a Latin book--"
"Yes, translate, render it."
"Well, Mr. Carlton, this algebra is a most powerful thing--ain't it?"
"Try away, try away; that's what I've come for."
"Looking into it!
"Yes, but Mr. Jimmy, how is a child's spelling-book to be made any plainer?"
"Sir?"
"Sir?"
But an emphatic word needs emphatic expression, and this is precisely what it does not get when concentration flags by leaping too soon to that which is next to be uttered.
"Count your blessings" and they will multiply.
Read the following selection through to get its meaning and spirit clearly in your mind.
We pray for love but prepare for hate.
If you concentrate your thought on a pain which may be afflicting you, that pain will grow more intense.
Center your thought on your strokes and your tennis play will gradually improve.
Let it come from its proper source--within yourself.
At Magdeburg 30,000 out of 36,000 were killed regardless of sex or age.
When mankind rises above creeds, colors and countries, when we are citizens, not of a nation, but of the world, the armies and navies of the earth will constitute an international police force to preserve the peace and the dove will take the eagle's place.
Two-thirds of Germany's property was destroyed and 18,000,000 of her citizens were killed, because men quarrelled about the way to glorify "The Prince of Peace." Marching through rain and snow, sleeping on the ground, eating stale food or starving, contracting diseases and facing guns that fire six hundred times a minute, for fifty cents a day--this is the soldier's life.
In a well-prepared written speech the emphatic word usually comes at one end of the sentence.
It may seem like a harsh saying, but the man who cannot concentrate is either weak of will, a nervous wreck, or has never learned what will-power is good for.
5.
We spend more money preparing men to kill each other than we do in teaching them to live.
To concentrate is simply to attend to one thing, and attend to nothing else.
The financial loss resulting from destroying one another's homes in the civil war would have built 15,000,000 houses, each costing $2,000.
Select from any source several sentences suitable for speaking aloud; deliver them first in the manner condemned in this chapter, and second with due regard for emphasis toward the close of each sentence.
Unless your powers of cooerdination are well developed you will find it confusing, if not impossible.
It is a very common thing for the imagination to paint for the senses, both in the visible and invisible world.
"I cannot tell precisely; it seems a considerable time." "But how did you and your child become so wet?
If Peter Rugg, thought I, has been travelling since the Boston Massacre, there is no reason why he should not travel to the end of time.
But that which excited his surprise most was the strange conduct of his horse, for that, long before he could distinguish the man in the chair, his own horse stood still in the road and flung back his ears.
In the meantime the distant thunder gave notice of a shower at hand, and just as we reached Polley's tavern the rain poured down in torrents.
His impatient horse leaped off, his hind flanks rising like wings--he seemed to devour all before him and to scorn all behind.
"Do you look," said he, "in the direction whence the man came, that is the place to look; the storm never meets him, it follows him." We presently approached another hill, and when at the height, the driver pointed out in an eastern direction a little black speck as big as a hat.
Here the stranger seemed disconcerted, and muttered to himself quite audibly: "Strange mistake!
"Peter Rugg!" said I, "and who is Peter Rugg?" "That," said the stranger, "is more than anyone can tell exactly.
I took my leave of Mrs. Croft, and proceeded to my lodgings at the Marlborough Hotel.
It is entirely owing to the humane interest you seemed to take in the report, that I have pursued the inquiry to the following result.
It is a much finer city than the town of Boston.
On Rugg's declining to stop, Mr. Cutter urged him vehemently.
Accordingly.
How much this looks like the town of Boston!
The toll-gatherer asserted that sometimes, on the darkest and most stormy nights, when no object could be discerned about the time Rugg was missing, a horse and wheelcarriage, with a noise equal to a troop, would at midnight, in utter contempt of the rates of toll, pass over the bridge.
By many a wet jacket do I remember him.
The stranger replied, "How can you deceive me so?
This, sir, is all that I could learn of Peter Rugg in Boston....
"I have never known him to stop anywhere longer than to inquire the way to Boston; and, let him be where he may, he will tell you he cannot stay a moment, for he must reach Boston that night."
I sailed in the packet to Providence, and when I arrived there I learned that every seat in the stage was engaged.
In a moment after he passed us, the horses' ears were up and bent themselves forward so that they nearly met.
Accordingly I took my seat by his side, and soon found him intelligent and communicative.
I was thus obliged either to wait a few hours or accept a seat with the driver, who civilly offered me that accommodation.
It is cruel to deceive a traveller.
Are the streets gone? Orange-Tree Lane is at the head of Hanover Street, near Pemberton's Hill." "There is no such lane now." "Madam! you cannot be serious.
Sir--Agreeably to my promise, I now relate to you all the particulars of the lost man and child which I have been able to collect.
And thus Peter Rugg and his child, horse and carriage, remain a mystery to this day."
Others, of a different opinion, shook their heads and said nothing.
The man's fancy was doubtless at fault.
You may as well tell me there is no King George.
I know of no other Boston." "City of Boston it may be, but it is not the Boston where I live.
The stranger asked for Mrs. Rugg, and was informed that Mrs. Rugg had died, at a good old age, more than twenty years before that time.
It was evident that the generation to which Peter Rugg belonged had passed away.
He went a long voyage; he is my kinsman. If I could see him, he could give me some account of Mrs. Rugg." "Sir," said Mrs. Croft, "I never heard of John Foy.
I must find a resting place.
He seemed dejected, and looked anxiously at the passengers, particularly at the stage-driver and myself.
This was all the account of Peter Rugg I could obtain from Mrs. Croft; but she directed me to an elderly man, Mr. James Felt, who lived near her, and who had kept a record of the principal occurrences for the last fifty years.
I recollect now, I came over a bridge instead of a ferry.
Where did he live?" "Just above here, in Orange-Tree Lane." "There is no such place in this neighbourhood." "What do you tell me!
Soon after I was enabled to collect the following particulars from Mrs. Croft, an aged lady in Middle Street, who has resided in Boston during the last twenty years.
As the appearance passed, he threw the stool at the horse, but heard nothing except the noise of the stool skipping across the bridge.
I stepped into the street, and as the horse approached I made a feint of stopping him.
Under which Peter Rugg now labours I cannot say; therefore I am rather inclined to pity than to judge." "You speak like a humane man," said I, "and if you have known him so long, I pray you will give me some account of him.
Has his appearance much altered in that time?"
But no such man as Hart has kept there these twenty years."
It was soon over, the cloud passing in the direction of the turnpike toward Providence.
Mrs. Croft, on coming to the door, perceived a stranger, with a child by his side, in an old, weather-beaten carriage, with a black horse.
But you doubtless know my brother, William Rugg.
For Peter has already, to my knowledge, been more than twenty years travelling to that place." "But," said I, "does the man never stop anywhere, does he never converse with anyone?
"Have the rivers, too, changed their courses as the cities have changed places?
Soon after a small speck appeared in the road.
He said he had met them; that the man seemed bewildered, and inquired the way to Boston; that he was driving at great speed, as though he expected to outstrip the tempest; that the moment he had passed him a thunderclap broke distinctly over the man's head and seemed to envelop both man and child, horse and carriage.
That Peter Rugg is living is highly probable, as he was only ten years older than myself; and I was only eighty last March, and I am as likely to live twenty years longer as any man." Here I perceived that Mr. Felt was in his dotage, and I despaired of gaining any intelligence from him on which I could depend.
But in truth I saw no such thing.
"In Middle Street." "When did you leave Boston?"
How long would it take, in that case, to send a letter to Boston?
You may remember that business called me to Boston in the summer of 1820.
The appearance of this cloud attracted the notice of all the passengers; for after it had spread itself to a great bulk, it suddenly became more limited in circumference, grew more compact, dark, and consolidated.
In a few moments after, a respectable-looking man in a chaise stopped at the door.
Is not this town Newburyport, and the river that I have been following the Merrimac?" "No, sir; this is Hartford, and the river the Connecticut." He wrung his hands and looked incredulous.
Her narration is this: The last summer a person, just at twilight, stopped at the door of the late Mrs. Rugg.
In the course of the evening I related my adventure in Middle Street. "Ha!" said one of the company, smiling, "do you really think you have seen Peter Rugg?
"There," said my companion, "comes the storm-breeder; he always leaves a Scotch mist behind him.
Indeed, everything here seems to be misplaced.
I saw the same man more than three years since, near Providence, and I heard a strange story about him. Pray, sir, give me some account of this man." "Sir," said the stranger, "those who know the most respecting that man say the least. I have heard it asserted that heaven sometimes sets a mark on a man, either for judgment or trial.
To have killed Laploshka was one thing; to have kept his beloved money would have argued a callousness of feeling of which I am not capable.
"You owe me two francs from last night," was his breathless greeting.
That evening, at the crowded corner by the Cafe de la Paix, I caught a fleeting glimpse of Laploshka.
He said horrid things about other people in such a charming way that one forgave him for the equally horrid things he said about oneself behind one's back.
An English lady behind me was making ineffectual efforts to convey a coin into the still distant bag, so I took the money at her request and helped it forward to its destination. It was a two-franc piece.
It was now or never. Putting a strong American inflection into the French which I usually talked with an unmistakable British accent, I catechised the Baron as to the date of the church's building, its dimensions, and other details which an American tourist would be certain to want to know.
As I turned into my club on a rainy afternoon I would see him taking inadequate shelter in a doorway opposite.
If that were really the case my way seemed clear.
Poring over the bill of fare with the absorbed scrutiny of one who seeks the cheapest among the cheap was Laploshka. Once he looked across at me, with a comprehensive glance at my repast, as though to say, "It is my two francs you are eating," and then looked swiftly away.
Laploshka said nothing, but his eyes bulged a little and his cheeks took on the mottled hues of an ethnographical map of the Balkan Peninsula. That same day, at sundown, he died.
For the first time in my experience I missed the charm and gaiety of Vienna life.
The Baron was slightly taken aback, but accepted the situation with a good grace. Walking over to a small box fixed in the wall, he dropped Laploshka's two francs into the slot.
Evidently the poor of Monsieur le Cure had been genuine poor.
A collecting-bag, for "the poor of Monsieur le Cure," was buffeting its tortuous way across the seemingly impenetrable human sea, and a German in front of me, who evidently did not wish his appreciation of the magnificent music to be marred by a suggestion of payment, made audible criticisms to his companion on the claims of the said charity.
I should have liked to have left off Laploshka.
On the other hand, the bestowal of two francs on the rich was an operation which called for some tact.
Thus, although possessed of only moderate means, he was able to live comfortably within his income, and still more comfortably within those of various tolerantly disposed associates.
My friends began to comment on my changed looks, and advised me to leave off heaps of things.
Having acquired such information as the Baron was able to impart on short notice, I solemnly placed the two-franc piece in his hand, with the hearty assurance that it was "pour vous," and turned to go.
Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves, we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.
Some three weeks later chance had taken me to Vienna, and I sat one evening regaling myself in a humble but excellent little Gasthaus up in the Wahringer quarter.
On a certain Sunday--it was probably Easter, for the crush was worse than ever--I was again wedged into the crowd listening to the music in the fashionable Paris church, and again the collection-bag was buffeting its way across the human sea.
I spoke evasively of the situation in Portugal, where more trouble seemed brewing.
"They do not want money," he said; "they have too much money.
After that, in Paris or London or wherever I happened to be, I continued to see a good deal of Laploshka.
The knowledge of this amiable weakness offered a perpetual temptation to play upon Laploshka's fears of involuntary generosity.
Even if I indulged in the modest luxury of a penny chair in the Park he generally confronted me from one of the free benches, never staring at me, but always elaborately conscious of my presence.
An easy way out of the difficulty seemed, however, to present itself the following Sunday, as I was wedged into the cosmopolitan crowd which filled the side-aisle of one of the most popular Paris churches.
There arose the problem of what to do with his two francs.
The ordinary solution, of giving it to the poor, would by no means fit the present situation, for nothing would have distressed the dead man more than such a misuse of his property.
The delicate mission of bestowing the retrieved sum on the deserving rich still confronted me.
Again I trusted to the inspiration of accident, and again fortune favoured me.
Naturally Laploshka had a large circle of acquaintances, and as he exercised some care in their selection it followed that an appreciable proportion were men whose bank balances enabled them to acquiesce indulgently in his rather one-sided views on hospitality.
They are all pampered."
To offer him a lift in a cab and pretend not to have enough money to pay the fair, to fluster him with a request for a sixpence when his hand was full of silver just received in change, these were a few of the petty torments that ingenuity prompted as occasion afforded.
But towards the poor or to those of the same limited resources as himself his attitude was one of watchful anxiety; he seemed to be haunted by a besetting fear lest some fraction of a shilling or franc, or whatever the prevailing coinage might be, should be diverted from his pocket or service into that of a hard-up companion.
And Laploshka did it really well.
Laploshka was one of the meanest men I have ever met, and quite one of the most entertaining.
The appointments were primitive, but the Schnitzel, the beer, and the cheese could not have been improved on. Good cheer brought good custom, and with the exception of one small table near the door every place was occupied.
Then he slowly made his way over to a milk-hall.
"I'm afraid I must owe it to you," I said lightly and brutally.
He smiled, slightly raised his hat, and vanished.
They have no poor.
I lunched next day at an expensive restaurant which I felt sure that the living Laploshka would never have entered on his own account, and I hoped that the dead Laploshka would observe the same barriers.
He had the air of a man who had not slept.
I was not mistaken, but as I came out I found him miserably studying the bill of fare stuck up on the portals.
But Laploshka listened with the abstraction of the deaf adder, and quickly returned to the subject of the two francs.
For three days I had to lie all the time in the cradle: if your grandfather caught me out of it, he would swear at me, and put me back again.
You know she always bangs things when she is cross, but I never could see what good it does.
There are some houses in which I lived, before I came to live with you, about which I could tell strange stories if I chose.
I am so glad to know that you are coming home next week, that I cannot think of any thing else.
Sick as I was, I could not help laughing at the sight of her face.
And, oh, my dear Helen, such good things as I had to eat!
Your affectionate Pussy.
I only trust that your love for me will not be entirely killed by my unfortunate appearance.
The thing I am most concerned about is my fur; it is coming off in spots: there is a bare spot on the back of my neck, on the place by which they lifted me up out of the soap barrel, half as large as your hand; and whenever I wash myself, I get my mouth full of hairs, which is very disagreeable.
I heard your mother say to-day that she really believed the cat had the rheumatism.
The cradle is carried upstairs, and I sleep on Charlie's blanket behind the stove.
The bandages were wet with something which smelled so badly it made me feel very sick, for the first day or two.
Don't you remember when you had that big double tooth pulled out, and he gave you five dollars, how he swore then?
I will begin where I left off in my last letter.
I might as well fire off a gun to let them know I am coming, as to go about scented up so that they can smell me a great deal farther off than they can see me.
This morning your grandfather sat looking at me for a long time and stroking his chin: at last he said, "Do you suppose it would do any good to shave the cat all over?" At this I could not resist the impulse to scream, and your mother said, "I do believe the creature knows whenever we speak about her." Of course I do!
At first they thought it was broken, but finally decided that it was only sprained, and must be bandaged.
My Dear Helen:
I try to be resigned to whatever may be in store for me, but it is very hard to look forward to being a fright all the rest of one's days.
VII.
Caesar has one of the finest, deepest-toned voices I ever heard.
One day, after I got well enough to be in the kitchen, he slipped in, between the legs of the butcher's boy who was bringing in some meat; but before I had time to say one word to him, Mary flew at him with the broom, and drove him out.
It was enough to make any cat laugh.
I hope you will come home soon.
I do not know what that is, but I think I have got it: it hurts me all over when I walk, and I feel as if I looked like Bill Jacobs's old cat, who, they say, is older than the oldest man in town; but of course that must be a slander.
Why in the world shouldn't I! People never seem to observe that cats have ears.
My Dear Helen:
As you may imagine, I did not get any sleep that night, not even so much as a cat's nap, as people say, though how cat's naps differ from men's and women's naps, I don't know.
Your grandfather has tried several things of his, which are said to be good for hair; but they have not had the least effect.
Well, he took me up in his arms, and carried me into the dining-room; it was quite cool; there was a nice wood fire on the hearth, and Mary was setting the table for breakfast.
There is only one drawback to my pleasure, and that is, I am so ashamed to have you see me in such a plight.
But you know me well enough to be sure that every thing I say is perfectly natural.
I do not think I shall ever again be contented to eat in the shed, and have only the old pieces which nobody wants.
I am afraid it will be some days yet before I can see him again, for they do not let me go out at all, and the bandages are not taken off my leg.
After breakfast I tried to walk, but my right paw was entirely useless.
If it were not for this dreadful state of my fur, I should be perfectly happy, for I feel much better than I ever did before in my whole life, and am twice as fat as when you went away.
When your mother came into the room she laughed almost as hard as she did when she saw me in the soft-soap barrel, and said, "Why, father, you are rather old to play cat's cradle!"
Not so much for my prowess in war did Jason take me with him in quest of the fleece, far from Parthenia, as for my knowledge of ships.
For then a second time the heroes heaped up a barrow for a comrade dead.
For when with due honours they had buried him also hard by the seer, they cast themselves down in helplessness on the sea-shore silently, closely wrapped up, and took no thought for meat or drink; and their spirit drooped in grief, for all hope of return was gone.
And from it towards the land a hollow glen slopes gradually away, where there is a cave of Hades overarched by wood and rocks.
And for a time they went no further, for Persephone herself sent forth the spirit of Actor's son which craved with many tears to behold men like himself, even for a moment.
Helpless amazement seized them as they looked; and no one dared to gaze face to face into the fair eyes of the god.
This flows down to the plain from lofty mountains, which, men say, are called the Amazonian mountains.
And she in her craftiness asked of him virginity.
No river is like this, and none sends forth from itself such mighty streams over the land.
And never does silence hold that grim headland, but there is a continual murmur from the sounding sea and the leaves that quiver in the winds from the cave.
For indeed the river saved them with their ships when they were caught in a violent tempest.
Quickly they drew in sail and threw out hawsers, and on the strand paid honour to the tomb of Sthenelus, and poured out drink offerings to him and sacrificed sheep as victims.
Next, on the opposite side they saw and passed the mouth of the river Sangarius and the fertile land of the Mariandyni, and the stream of Lycus and the Anthemoeisian lake; and beneath the breeze the ropes and all the tackling quivered as they sped onward.
And with a sharp cry the hero fell to the ground; and as he was struck his comrades flocked together with answering cry.
But quickly tell forth all this and boldly urge them to call to mind their task."
And at the cruel woe they were seized with unbearable grief.
For they dwelt not gathered together in one city, but scattered over the land, parted into three tribes.
But him there on the spot a short sickness laid to rest far from his native land, when the company had paid due honours to the dead son of Abas.
For he longed for her love, and he promised to grant her whatever her hearts desire might be.
Wherefore let us not delay our attempt, but rouse yourselves to the work and cast away your griefs."
And again he entered the vast gloom; and they looked and marvelled; and Mopsus, son of Ampycus, with word of prophecy urged them to land and propitiate him with libations.
And quickly with the oars they passed out through the river Acheron and, trusting to the wind, shook out their sails, and with canvas spread far and wide they were cleaving their passage through the waves in fair weather.
For those whom we once deemed to be men of skill, they even more than I are bowed with vexation of heart.
And after him Erginus and Nauplius and Euphemus started up, eager to steer. But the others held them back, and many of his comrades granted it to Ancaeus.
And besides the drink offerings they built an altar to Apollo, saviour of ships, and burnt thigh bones; and Orpheus dedicated his lyre; whence the place has the name of Lyra.
During the night the wind ceased and at dawn they gladly reached the haven of the Acherusian headland.
Be gracious, O king, be gracious in thy appearing."
And mounting on the edge of the barrow he gazed upon the ship, such as he was when he went to war; and round his head a fair helm with four peaks gleamed with its blood-red crest.
And so they went up all together into the city, and all that day with friendly feelings made ready a feast within the palace of Lycus and gladdened their souls with converse.
The tale goes that Tiphys son of Hagnias died; nor was it his destiny thereafter to sail any further.
And quickly they sighted and sailed past his shrine and the broad banks of the river and the plain, and deep-flowing Calpe, and all the windless night and the day they bent to their tireless oars.
From here an icy breath, unceasingly issuing from the chill recess, ever forms a glistening rime which melts again beneath the midday sun.
It rises aloft with steep cliffs, looking towards the Bithynian sea; and beneath it smooth rocks, ever washed by the sea, stand rooted firm; and round them the wave rolls and thunders loud, but above, wide-spreading plane trees grow on the topmost point.
And none but Leto, daughter of Coeus, strokes them with her dear hands.
And even as ploughing oxen toil as they cleave the moist earth, and sweat streams in abundance from flank and neck; and from beneath the yoke their eyes roll askance, while the breath ever rushes from their mouths in hot gasps; and all day long they toil, planting their hoofs deep in the ground; like them the heroes kept dragging their oars through the sea.
And now I bid you propitiate him with the steam of sacrifice and libations.
Wherefore, I pray, let there be no fear for the ship.
If a man should count every one he would lack but four of a hundred, but the real spring is only one.
First entrust the attempt to a dove when ye have sent her forth from the ship.
But instead of that, may the god grant me death at once, and after death I shall take my share in perfect bliss."
The rest the old man pleased with words of wisdom and let them go; Paraebius only he bade remain there with the chiefs; and straightway he sent him and bade him bring back the choicest of his sheep.
To all alike, however poor he was that came, the aged man gave his oracles with good will, and freed many from their woes by his prophetic art; wherefore they visited and tended him.
And further than this ask me not."
And quickly they called upon Apollo, lord of prophecy, and offered sacrifice upon the health as the day was just sinking.
But what need is there that I should sin yet again declaring everything to the end by my prophetic art?
For the rocks were again parting asunder.
And quickly Aeson's son, with good will exceeding, addressed him:
And Colchian Aea lies at the edge of Pontus and of the world."
And up rose Jason and up rose the sons of Boreas at the bidding of the aged sire.
But Athena soared up to Olympus, when they had escaped unscathed.
But as they rowed they trembled, until the tide returning drove them back within the rocks.
Nevertheless the rocks, ceaselessly clashing, shore off as she passed the extreme end of the stern-ornament.
I was infatuated aforetime, when in my folly I declared the will of Zeus in order and to the end.
But, my friends, take thought of the artful aid of the Cyprian goddess.
Thereupon having well feasted they turned themselves to rest, some near the ship's hawsers, others in groups throughout the mansion.
So high in the air does it rise turned towards the sea.
Next the current whirled the ship round.
And there, when they had taken their fill of food and drink, they kept awake all night waiting for the sons of Boreas.
And the younger comrades made ready a feast to their hearts' desire.
Their spirit melted within them; and Euphemus sent forth the dove to dart forward in flight; and they all together raised their heads to look; but she flew between them, and the rocks again rushed together and crashed as they met face to face.
And the rocks in one spot at that moment were rooted fast for ever to each other, which thing had been destined by the blessed gods, when a man in his ship should have passed between them alive.
Then most awful fear seized upon all; for over their head was destruction without escape.
But he was paying the sad penalty of his father's sin.
I indeed knew of the sin when he came; and I bid him build an altar to the Thynian nymph, and offer on it an atoning sacrifice, with prayer to escape his father's fate.
What shall I do, how shall I go over again such a long path through the sea, unskilled as I am, with unskilled comrades?
And afterwards they raised an altar to the blessed twelve on the sea-beach opposite and laid offerings thereon and then entered their swift ship to row, nor did they forget to bear with them a trembling dove; but Euphemus seized her and brought her all quivering with fear, and they loosed the twin hawsers from the land.
For it seemed about to leap down upon the ship's whole length and to overwhelm them.
And the eddying current held her between the clashing rocks; and on each side they shook and thundered; and the ship's timbers were held fast. Then Athena with her left hand thrust back one mighty rock and with her right pushed the ship through; and she, like a winged arrow, sped through the air.
For ye could not escape an evil doom from the rocks, not even if Argo were of iron."
For they are not firmly fixed with roots beneath, but constantly clash against one another to one point, and above a huge mass of salt water rises in a crest, boiling up, and loudly dashes upon the hard beach.
But if she flies onward and perishes midway, then do ye turn back; for it is better to yield to the immortals.
Here, ever since he escaped the god-sent doom, never has he forgotten or neglected me; but sorely and against his will do I send him from my doors, so eager is he to remain with me in my affliction."
So to him the nymph thereafter made her death a curse, to him and to his children.
For they deemed that they were saved from Hades; and Tiphys first of all began to speak:
Wherefore now obey my counsel, if indeed with prudent mind and reverencing the blessed gods ye pursue your way; and perish not foolishly by a self-sought death, or rush on following the guidance of youth.
Son of Aeson, no longer fear thou so much the hest of thy king, since a god hath granted us escape between the rocks; for Phineus, Agenor's son, said that our toils hereafter would be lightly accomplished."
Even as this man, loyal as he is, came hither to learn his fate.
Below the sides of this area are still seen the massive rooms that are called Solomon's stables.
This was built on Mount Moriah which was a great flat mountain top of uneven rock.
In this connection it is interesting to note that at the gate entrance to the Pool of Bethesda the scripture story of the healing of the impotent man is written, or rather inscribed, beneath the arch, in fifty-one different languages.
Some of the great cities of today are famous for their size, such as New York and London; some for their beauty, like Paris and Rio Janeiro; some for their culture and learning, as Boston and Oxford; some for their manufacturing and commercial supremacy, as Detroit and Liverpool.
When excavating about it a wall was found which proved to be a garden wall the end of which butts up against Mount Calvary.
Great arches were built around the sides and then the top leveled off until the large temple area was formed.
To get an idea of the city as it was when the war broke out you must imagine a city of about sixty thousand people, without street cars, electric lights, telephones, waterworks, sewer system or any modern improvements whatever.
While in and about Jerusalem the writer visited the famous "Upper Room," the "Jew's Wailing Place," the "Mosque of Omar," which stands upon the very spot where Solomon's Temple used to stand, the "Way of Sorrows," the "Ecco Homo Arch," the "Castle of Antonio," "Tower of David," the "Pool of Siloam," and a great many other interesting places.
But when the English started from Egypt they not only built a railroad as they went toward Jerusalem, but not far from the Nile they prepared a great filtering process to cleanse the water, and then laid a twelve-inch pipe and brought the pure water along with them for both man and beast.
It is a remarkable fact that in sinking shafts alongside the temple wall, great stones have been discovered but no stone chips are found by them.
The writer rambled for hours through these great underground vaults and saw the holes in the stone pillars where the horses were tied.
It is the city of Jerusalem.
There was a time, however, when this city boasted of having the finest building ever erected by the hands of man, viz: Solomon's Temple.
Then the "rolling stone" and the groove in which it was placed is very interesting.
CHAPTER XVI
To the writer, however, perhaps the most interesting place in or about the entire city is the Garden Tomb and Mount Calvary.
But there is one city on the globe not nearly as large as Des Moines, not at all beautiful, its people neither cultured nor learned, has no factories and one narrow gauge railway takes care of most of its commerce, and yet it is by far the most famous city of all time.
Jerusalem is to this day a walled city.
This tomb was discovered many years ago by General Gordon and is often spoken of as Gordon's Tomb, also called the Garden Tomb.
Jerusalem has several large churches the most noted of which is the one built over the traditional tomb of Christ.
Near this Skull Place is an old tomb that just fits the Bible narrative, viz: "Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulchre wherein never man was yet laid."
That it was a "rich man's tomb" is also very certain, as is the fact that it dates back to the Herodian period in which Jesus lived.
It was later found out that this German church was built for military purposes.
There is also some frescoed work upon it showing that it was held sacred by the early Christians.
Before soldiers were placed there, scenes of conflict and bloodshed were very common indeed--a sad spectacle for Jews and Moslems and other enemies of the Christ to gaze upon.
They made their tombs different from those of any other people.
The sad thing about it is the fact that it is divided up into various chapels, each held by sects of so-called Christians, and a large-armed guard has to be kept in the church to keep these fanatical people from killing each other.
Not far away are the great vaults known as Solomon's Quarries.
However, General Allenby's entrance into the city in December, 1917, was the beginning of a new era.
This was something like a gigantic grindstone which rolled in the groove and was large enough to cover the opening when the tomb was closed.
Here is where the massive stones were "made ready" and the master builder's plans were so perfect that, "there was neither hammer nor ax nor any tool of iron heard in the temple while it was in building." The marks of the mason's tools and the niches where their lamps were placed can be seen to this day.
The site of the city was once owned by a farmer whose name was Oman.
The hotel at which the writer stopped while visiting the city some years ago, was located outside the wall, as are many of the best buildings.
There is an old Arab legend which says: "Not until the River Nile flows into Palestine will the Turk be driven from Palestine." Of course this was their way of saying that such a thing would never come to pass for the Turk actually believed that he had such a hold on that country that there was no power on earth that could make him give it up.
He had a threshing floor on the top of Mount Moriah.
A WORLD-FAMOUS CITY--JERUSALEM
When the ex-kaiser entered the city of Jerusalem, a breach was made in the wall near the Jaffa Gate, so instead of entering through the gate like an ordinary mortal, he went in through a hole in the wall. He would no doubt be glad now to go through another "hole in the wall" to have his liberty.
In this same building the ex-kaiser is represented as a crusader by a figure and the Psalmist is painted with the moustache of a German general.
This is almost north of the Damascus gate and on the great highway from Jerusalem from the north.
The walls average some thirty feet high and are about fifteen feet thick at the top.
This church as it stands today is a magnificent building with two great entrances.
The city as it is today is on top of two mountains, but the valley between has been filled up so that it is almost like one continuous mountain top.
One of the large churches in the city was dedicated by the ex-kaiser when he visited the city in 1898.
Here multiplied thousands took refuge during some of the memorable sieges that the city went through.
One of the first things noted as the writer went into this tomb was the fact that it is a Jewish tomb.
It is said that no Jew cares to pass this place after night and if he passes it in daylight he will mutter a curse upon the memory of him who presumed to be the King of the Jews.
In the Church of Pater Noster I counted the Lord's Prayer in thirty-two different languages inscribed on marble slabs so that almost any person from any country can read this prayer in his own language.
The streets are narrow, the houses have flat tops and many of them are but one or two stories high.
It is a little less than two and one-half miles around the city wall, but the city itself has outgrown these limitations, quite a portion of it being on the outside of the wall.
This self-appointed world ruler is represented on the ceiling of the chapel of a building on Mount Olivet in a companion panel with the Deity.
In three months the English did more for the city than the Turk did in a thousand years.
"I don't know where he was," says I; "where was he?"
There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it.
Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing.
They got him out and emptied him; Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great.
And did the sad hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry?
"Well, nobody come after me, and it ain't right I'm always kept down; I don't get no show."
Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on the windows: white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink.
They all laughed, and Bob says:
"George Jackson, sir."
Other times it was hid with a little curtain.
Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy.
There was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out behind those things.
George Jackson, is there anybody with you?"
But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard.
Come in."
She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker—the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler.
"I bet you can't spell my name," says I.
I took one slow step at a time and there warn't a sound, only I thought I could hear my heart. The dogs were as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind me.
Rouse out Bob and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns.
The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside.
Now, all ready.
Step forward, George Jackson.
"Why, Buck, they might have scalped us all, you've been so slow in coming."
He told me to make myself easy and at home, and tell all about myself; but the old lady says:
"Look here, if you're telling the truth you needn't be afraid—nobody'll hurt you.
Go 'long with you now, and do as your mother told you."
Who's there?"
"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.
"Be done, boys!
There was some books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table.
I reckon I'd better put 'em on, but I'd ruther not, it's so warm.
"Yes," he says.
It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out.
"G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n—there now," he says.
Despised love struck not with woe That head of curly knots, Nor stomach troubles laid him low, Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
I'm only a boy."
All right.
Are you all ready?
"Can you spell, Buck?"
Do you own a dog?
And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die?
That's where he was!"
It's just as easy."
It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day, and it was a cool, comfortable place.
You got to stay always.
"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think you could.
The young women had quilts around them, and their hair down their backs.
So he didn't pry into my pockets, but only felt outside with his hands, and said it was all right.
"I don't want nothing, sir.
It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said.
One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why.
Do you like to comb up Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness?
"Oh, you did, did you?
O no. Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell.
"Why, blame it, it's a riddle, don't you see?
I says:
"Well," he says, "if they'd a ben some, I reckon I'd a got one."
There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown, same as they do in town.
They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a saw-log.
There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books.
And there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too—not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.
Poor thing, many's the time I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me and I had soured on her a little.
Strike a light there, somebody.
"Ain't they no Shepherdsons around?"
Bob, if you and Tom are ready, take your places."
If there's anybody with you, let him keep back—if he shows himself he'll be shot. Come along now.
Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr. Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead.
Cold corn-pone, cold corn-beef, butter and buttermilk—that is what they had for me down there, and there ain't nothing better that ever I've come across yet.
She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined away and did not live long.
Buck looked about as old as me—thirteen or fourteen or along there, though he was a little bigger than me.
"There; I reckon it's all right.
She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold.
When we got up-stairs to his room he got me a coarse shirt and a roundabout and pants of his, and I put them on.
They squeaked through underneath.
So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:
Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow.
This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry.
"Betsy" (this was a nigger woman), "you fly around and get him something to eat as quick as you can, poor thing; and one of you girls go and wake up Buck and tell him—oh, here he is himself.
They said, no, 'twas a false alarm.
"All right," says I, "go ahead."
"Well, guess," he says.
When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard them unlocking and unbarring and unbolting.
"No, sir, nobody."
Buck, take this little stranger and get the wet clothes off from him and dress him up in some of yours that's dry."
"I warn't prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off of the steamboat."
He hadn't on anything but a shirt, and he was very frowzy-headed.
It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too.
They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked.
"Who's me?"
"But you can guess, can't you?
"Snatch that light away, Betsy, you old fool—ain't you got any sense? Put it on the floor behind the front door.
She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance.
"True for you, Rachel—I forgot."
Another was Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry.
"What do you want?"
"Now, George Jackson, do you know the Shepherdsons?"
"Why, any candle," he says.
"George Jackson, sir.
The statements was interesting, but tough.
I heard the people stirring around in the house now, and see a light. The man sung out:
"Oh, merciful Heaven?
"I'll get you a nurse," he said, noting her extreme paleness.
At last they came in sight of a tumbled-down cottage on the edge of what had once been a clearing, but which was now overgrown with weeds and brushwood.
And I'll promise you more than that.
"I have ten thousand dollars here.
And see that you keep your jaw closed over this," he added harshly.
"That will not be such a hardship.
"Not very far."
If I tell them that I caught you, that you begged me to let you get away--that you even said you would marry me, if I would aid you, what then?
Look here." He drew a big roll of bank bills from his pocket, each bill of a large denomination.
Marry me, and I will clear you as surely as the sun is shining."
I--I was not myself when I ran away.
She felt much stronger than when at the home of Martha Sampson, in spite of what she had experienced in running away.
Once inside of the cottage, he took up a glass of water standing on the table, and to this added a powder taken from his pocket, stirring it up well.
I'll give her some of it now, and make sure."
But I've been talking to the coroner and the chief of police, and they have all of the evidence as straight as a string."
"Perhaps you committed the foul deeds yourself."
"No, I can prevent that."
She had administered some sort of drug--what, the girl did not know--and it had put her into a sound sleep.
"Mat, you always were a plum with the pen.
It was a very foolish thing to do."
"Do not dare to do that!
"When she rouses up she will be dry, and she will drink this," he muttered to himself.
I can easily raise five times this amount in forty-eight hours.
It is so, and I can easily prove it.
"I know what is best, and you must do as I say.
"Come, will you accept, Margaret?"
The Englishman was well dressed, and newly shaven, and wore a rosebud in his buttonhole.
She looked out of the window, but the scenery was strange to her.
"But think of what is before you."
"I was afraid your running away would hurt you."
I knew that from the start.
I love you--love you more than Raymond Case ever did, or will."
Then he recovered quickly and smiled a bitter smile.
"I--I do not wish to go to your home."
You're not strong enough to go. Besides--" the Englishman paused impressively.
"You are sick--out of your head," he interrupted.
"Of course not!
"I wouldn't if it wasn't so.
Margaret could do nothing but stare at the man before her.
"Yes."
I'm not going to hurt you.
She might find it before she drank that dose." He paused again.
"You need one."
Besides, you know my feeling for you.
Isn't that far better than to stay here, to be hung by a lot of country bumpkins, who don't understand the matter at all?"
But I must be getting back soon. You will show me the road?"
He came and caught her by the arm, his face blazing with sudden passion.
"I do not want to think it over.
She tried to think, but her mind was almost a blank.
Don't you know things look beastly black for you?"
"You'll not be needed here any more.
"Because the world will know that you are innocent."
We can go to Europe, or Australia, or anywhere we wish.
"I--I must thank you for what you have done for me, Mr. Styles," she answered.
"I do."
She remembered the scene at the inquest, and remembered how she had fainted, and how Raymond had supported her and taken her to the nurse's house.
When Margaret looked around again, she was surprised to see that it was morning.
I am not guilty, Mr. Styles."
"Thank you," she murmured, and then closed her eyes, for she was too far gone to say more, or to make a move.
"I wish she was dead! Curse her and her beauty!"
"Bah!
She tried to resist, but could not, and he took her into the cottage and placed her on a couch.
Come!" And again he made her move on.
I said I was going back."
CHAPTER XXIX
"Then you know the real murderer?" she panted.
She offered no resistance, and pausing in his madness he realized that she had swooned away.
Margaret said no more and the woman went about some little work. Presently the girl arose and dressed herself.
Besides, your folks and myself were on good terms.
"If I answer that question, will you become my wife?"
"Fainted!" he hissed between his set teeth.
"I'm glad to see you up and looking so well," he said pleasantly.
I'll add a line telling where she can be found and then send it to the coroner.
"Where am I?" asked Margaret feebly.
That will be better than leaving it around here.
"Perhaps I am a monster when aroused.
Then she burst into tears.
I can hand you over to the police whenever I will."
He took a step back as if struck a blow.
Promise to give up Case, and be my wife, and I will attend to all of the rest.
But things do look black, no use of talking.
"Who was it?"
"All in, are you?" he said, not unkindly, and, stooping, he picked her up bodily.
"Half a glass will do the work and she will never bother me or anybody else any more."
"I feel that you are, and that is why I side with you.
"What's the use of going back?
I must go back and give myself up.
Can a man do more than that?
"You--you monster!"
As the man entered the room, Margaret arose and faced him.
He breathed heavily through his set teeth.
She sank down in a rocking chair, to think matters over.
I want to help you." He came closer, at which she retreated a step.
It was also pretended that Gustavus Adolphus transmuted a quantity of quicksilver into pure gold.
Helvetius repeated the experiment alone, and converted six ounces of lead into very pure gold.
The learned Borrichius relates, that he saw coins which had been struck of this gold; and Lenglet du Fresnoy deposes to the same circumstance.
Van Helmont also pretended to have once performed with success the process of transmuting quicksilver, and was in consequence invited by the Emperor Rudolph II. to fix his residence at the court of Vienna.
With this diminution of splendour came a diminution of renown.
She even obtained permission that he should leave his prison occasionally for a day or two, and reside in her palace, she being responsible for his return to captivity.
Besides the pretenders to the philosopher's stone whose lives have been already narrated, this and the preceding century produced a great number of writers, who inundated literature with their books upon the subject.
The abandoned rake put on the outward sedateness of a philosopher; the scoffing sinner proclaimed that he had forsaken his evil ways, and would live thenceforth a model of virtue.
Poetry and romance are deeply indebted to the Rosicrucians for many a graceful creation.
M. Geoffroy produced several of these nails to the Academy of Sciences, and shewed how nicely the two parts were soldered together.
The same result was produced in many other ways.
He was too much of an impostor to be deeply tinged with fanaticism, and was not unwilling to make a public recantation of his heresies, if he could thereby save his life.
The reputation of his great sanctity had gone before him; and he found many persons ready to attach themselves to his fortunes.
In sign of it I saw a palm-tree, surrounded with all the glory of paradise.
He only keeps two horses and two men-servants.
He knew that his sleight of hand would be too narrowly watched in the royal presence; and upon some pretence or other he delayed the journey for more than two years.
My former bad opinion of Delisle was now indeed shaken.
Suspecting that all was not right, he left Aix secretly the same evening, and proceeded to Marseilles.
A good deal of that was only hearsay, but now I am enabled to speak from my own experience.
Still, however, I was not quite satisfied.
He told me that it generally took him six months to make all his preparations.
He turns lead into gold, and iron into silver, by merely heating these metals red hot, and pouring upon them in that state some oil and powder he is possessed of; so that it would not be impossible for any man to make a million a day, if he had sufficient of this wondrous mixture.
He discoursed learnedly upon projections, cimentations, sublimations, the elixir of life, and the universal alkahest; and on the death of Delisle gave out that the secret of that great adept had been communicated to him, and to him only.
"I have something to relate to you, my dear cousin, which will be interesting to you and your friends.
But this did not suit the plans of Delisle.
It was his usual practice to pretend that he possessed only a few grains of his powder, with which he would operate in any house where he intended to fix his quarters for the season.
This mere suspicion, without any proof whatever, had caused him to be condemned for contumacy; a common case enough with judges, who always proceed with much rigour against those who are absent.
He came; and I had him escorted by eight or ten vigilant men, to whom I had given notice to watch his hands strictly. Before all of us he changed two pieces of lead into gold and silver.
He promised to give me one of them, in a long conversation which I had with him the other day, by order of the Bishop of Senes, who saw his operations with his own eyes, and detailed all the circumstances to me.
All the country have their eyes upon this gentleman; some deny loudly, others are incredulous; but those who have seen acknowledge the truth.
At all events, posterity will hear of him."
What I have now told you, sir, removes the third objection, and is the reason why, at the present time, he cannot go to Paris to the king, in fulfilment of his promises made two years ago.
He did not deny it, but began to smile.
He has, in consequence, been unable to work, and has not collected a sufficient quantity of his oil and powder, or brought what he has got to the necessary degree of perfection.
He rubs the lead or iron with his powder, and puts it over burning charcoal.
Delisle transmutes his metals in public.
"Permit me, sir, in conclusion, to repeat, that such an artist as this should not be driven to the last extremity, nor forced to seek an asylum offered to him in other countries, but which he has despised, as much from his own inclinations as from the advice I have given him.
I offered him some iron nails, which he changed into silver in the chimney-place before six or seven credible witnesses.
I have read the passport that has been sent to him from court, with orders that he should present himself at Paris early in the spring.
Besides, he loves his liberty, has no politeness, and speaks very bad French; but his judgment seems to be solid.
Here all trace of him is lost.
He is unpolite, fantastic, and a dreamer, and acts by fits and starts."
Delisle, it would appear, was afraid of venturing to Paris.
A hundred persons in my diocese have been witnesses of these things.
He then disguised himself as a pilgrim, and returned to France.
He told me that he would go willingly, and that it was himself who fixed the spring for his departure; as he wanted to collect his materials, in order that, immediately on his introduction to the king, he might make an experiment worthy of his majesty, by converting a large quantity of lead into the finest gold.
I have in my possession a nail, half iron and half silver, which I made myself.
In fact, this man is the miracle of art.
They travelled about the Continent for several years, sponging upon credulous rich men, and now and then performing successful transmutations by the aid of double-bottomed crucibles and the like.
His year, strictly speaking, consists only of the four summer months; and when by any means he is prevented from making the proper use of them, he loses a whole year.
I therefore summoned the alchymist to come to me at Castellane.
That Delisle was no ordinary impostor, but a man of consummate cunning and address, is very evident from this letter.
You risk nothing in giving him a little time, and in hurrying him you may lose a great deal.
In the provinces he was regarded as a man of no small importance; the servile flattery that awaited him wherever he went was so grateful to his mind that he could not willingly relinquish it, and run upon certain detection at the court of the monarch.
Delisle is altogether an illiterate person.
He withdrew secretly in the night, and retired to Paris.
When he left Marseilles, he had not a shoe to his foot or a decent garment to his back, but was provided with some money and clothes by his wife in a neighbouring town.
The duke afterwards boasted to Lenglet du Fresnoy of his achievements as an alchymist, and regretted that he had not been able to discover the secret of the precious powder by which he performed them.
As I had the honour to dine with him on Thursday last, the 20th of this month, being seated at his side, I told him in a whisper that he could, if he liked, humble all the enemies of France.
They then found their way to Brussels, and by dint of excessive impudence, brought themselves into notice.
He replied that he could not exercise his art in every place, as a certain climate and temperature were absolutely necessary to his success. The truth is, that this man appears to have no ambition.
The fate of Delisle was no inducement for them to stop in France.
I told him that, apparently, the king wanted to see him.
As the proofs against him were too convincing to leave him much hope of an acquittal, he planned an escape from durance.
Two, or even three, summers have been lost to him, owing to the continual inquietude he has laboured under.
For five years this man was looked upon as a madman or a cheat; but the public mind is now disabused with respect to him.
He took a house, fitted up a splendid laboratory, and gave out that he knew the secret of transmutation.
My reason was convinced by my eyes; and the phantoms of impossibility which I had conjured up were dissipated by the work of my own hands.
Delisle performed the part of a father towards him, and thought he could shew no stronger proof of his regard, than by giving him the necessary instructions to carry on the deception which had raised himself to such a pitch of greatness.
This excellent workman received, a short time ago, a very kind letter from the superintendent of the royal household, which I read.
He offered to use all his influence with the ministers to prevent any attempts upon his liberty, which has twice been attacked by the agents of government.
He also sold twenty pounds weight of it to a merchant of Digne, named Taxis.
At the sight of the hideous gypsy he was struck dumb with surprise and horror.
'And no doubt,' went on the Princess, 'one of them is your intended bride?'
Why did I leave her alone?
The Prince got down from his horse and asked leave to rest.
He has stretched me out in the sun.
Let him go in peace.'
On seeing the can disappear, she made such a miserable face that Zizi, who had been watching her all this time, burst into fits of laughter.
No sooner did Zizi feel the prick of the pin than she became a bird again, and, spreading her wings, she flew away.
At last one day at sunset Desire felt the sun so warm, that he thought he must now be near the place of his dream.
'It is in the depth of the forest, and this road will lead you there.
I gathered one of them, and when I opened it there came out a lovely princess with a golden skin.
'If I do not mistake, you come from far.
Just as she was stooping to fill it, she saw reflected in the water the lovely image of the Princess.
At the sight of the hideous creature he almost fell backwards.
Tubby showed his patience by abusing his son.
Now, as he was longing to see the princesses, he was very anxious to come to a river or a fountain, but, though he rode for hours, a river or fountain was nowhere to be seen.
And besides, it depends on me to break the spell, and I love her too much to let her remain like this.'
It was she who had frightened Zizi by appearing with her pitcher on her shoulder.
Once out of the gate, leave the forest by the opposite side.
'Why should I laugh?' asked the old man.
It was big enough to hold her altogether, but she peeped out, and her pretty head was reflected in the clear water.
'I pray that Heaven may send you to sleep,' said the golden bird, 'and that the goose may burn, so that there may be none left for Titty.'
This idea put some life into him.
And instantly the chief of the scullions fell fast asleep, and the goose was burnt to a cinder.
'Is this the wonderful beauty?'
He rode on, struggling with his sufferings, but at last he could bear it no longer.
The other one was stealing quietly to the door.
XIII
'Where is your pitcher?' asked the bricklayer.
When she was left by herself the poor girl began to feel afraid.
'No,' he said at last.
When you have done this, do not enter the castle, but go round it and enter the orange grove.
Well, here is a bucket that will not break.'
She was then perched on the top of a magnificent ambling palfrey, and they set forth to the castle.
The gypsy began to comb her long brown locks, when suddenly she drew a pin from her stays, and, just as the titmouse digs its beak into the heads of linnets and larks, Titty dug the pin into the head of Zizi.
The bird flew into the kitchen.
All the girls here are pink and white, and I am tired to death of their eternal lilie and roses.
He drew out an orange and opened it with his knife.
Once outside, the young adventurer put his oranges into a bag that hung from his saddle, mounted his horse, and rode quickly out of the forest.
But there must be women somewhere in the world who are neither pink nor white, and I tell you, once for all, that I will never marry until I have found one exactly to my taste.'
Now this was what had happened.
Once she inquired what the girls in his country were like.
That evening Tubby and his son ate the golden apples at supper, and thought them delicious.
She was too ugly and ragged for him ever to have noticed her, but Titty on her side had admired him, though she thought he might well have been a little fatter.
'But at last it is broken.
In order to do her more honour, Tubby came to meet her at the foot of the great marble staircase.
And, after all, who knows?'
'Good-morning, my fine Scullion!'
'The gate will open of itself,' he continued, 'and a huge dog which guards the castle will come to you with his mouth wide open, but just throw him this oat cake.
'Well, what do you expect?
'Stop her! called Tubby.
'We will judge her cause at once.'
He took his knife and cut it open.
'Dear, dear!' she said to herself.
And he seated himself solemnly on the oven, and condemned Titty to be burned alive.
Then he went, all dressed for a journey, to the bedside of Tubby, and found him smoking his first pipe.
It is so delightful to teach those one loves!
Scarcely had the canary drunk when she became a beautiful girl, tall and straight as a poplar tree, with black eyes and a golden skin.
'They are pink and white,' he replied, 'and their eyes are blue.'
'I am thirsty; give me something to drink.'
All the boys in the country side were there, armed with wooden swords, and decorated with epaulets made of gilt paper.
'Now, attend to this: whatever happens, do not open your oranges till you reach the bank of a river, or a fountain.
'Father,' he said gravely, 'I have come to bid you farewell.
The next day the Prince arose early and took leave of his host.
However, to make up, the other guests ate greedily, and, as for Tubby, nothing ever took away his appetite.
While the Master Cook was upstairs, the golden bird came again to perch on the window-sill, and called in his clear voice to the head scullion, who was watching the spit:
Still, with all his practice he shot very badly, he was so fat and heavy, and as he grew daily fatter, he was at last obliged to give up walking, and be dragged about in a wheel-chair, and the people made fun of him, and gave him the name of my Lord Tubby.
'Come in, my young friend,' said the old man; 'my house is not large, but it is big enough to hold a stranger.'
'Gracious! what a pretty girl!' said Tubby.
'But she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.'
A few yards further he saw a huge oven, with a wide, red-hot gaping mouth.
About mid-day he reached a sandy plain, scorching in the sun.
The innocent Zizi came down at once, and stood by Titty.
What a lovely bird!' said Tubby, and in stroking its head he touched a pin that was sticking between its feathers.
Last night I dreamed that I was walking in a wood, where the trees were covered with golden apples.
The pitcher may go many times to the well....'
'Rope, O rope!' cried the voice again, 'twine yourself round his neck and strangle him.'
'Nonsense!
However, he was determined not to let this bird fly away; so he took up some water in the palm of his hand and held it to its beak.
Get down at once, my poor child, and let me dress your hair for you!'
'Dog, my good dog,' cried the voice, more and more angry, 'jump at his throat and eat him up.'
He let himself slide to the earth, and lay down beside his horse, his throat burning, his chest heaving, and his head going round.
Neither Pilate nor they ask the one true question, 'How am I to be a true man?
I came into the world to show him.
They will kill him, but it matters not: the truth is as he says!
When his witness is treated as a lie, then most he witnesses, for he gives it still.
When contempt is cast on the truth, do we smile?
Is every Christian expected to bear witness?
His subjects must be of his own kind, in their very nature and essence kings.
If I mistake, he will forgive me.
Are we careful to be true?
Jesus is a king because his business is to bear witness to the truth. What truth?
He is righteousness itself.
My right is--what I desire. The more I am all in all to myself, the greater I am.
The truth is God; the witness to the truth is Jesus.
I fear nothing you can do to me.
He might have had them.
My will is all for his will, for his will is right.
We are not bound to say all we think, but we are bound not even to look what we do not think.
You do not like to hear it because you are not like him.
He did not care for government.
He is the truth, and I am the truth.
Government, I repeat, was to him flat, stale, unprofitable.
To understand his answer to Pilate, see wherein consists his kingship; what it is that makes him a king; what manifestation of his essential being gives him a claim to be king.
Of the men who before Christ bare witness to the truth, some were sawn asunder, some subdued kingdoms; it mattered nothing which: they witnessed.
The thought of God is the truth of everything.
The man who responds to this with his whole being, is of the truth.
I am low in your eyes which measure things by their show; therefore you say I blaspheme.
My judgment is the faultless rule of things.
The Lord's is a kingdom in which no man seeks to be above another: ambition is of the dirt of this world's kingdoms.
The question is called forth by what the Lord had just said concerning his kingdom, closing with the statement that it was not of this world.
But is the reality intended, less or more than the figure?
"Because there the moth and rust and the thief come."
This: that what is with the treasure must fare as the treasure; that the heart which haunts the treasure-house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure, will itself be rusted and moth-eaten.
Many a man, many a woman, fair and flourishing to see, is going about with a rusty moth-eaten heart within that form of strength or beauty.
It has to be sought for because of its depth at once and its simplicity.
"Of course the heart will be where the treasure is; but what has that to do with the argument?"
"Why not lay up for ourselves treasures upon earth?"
But it is so complete, so imaginatively comprehensive, so immediately operative on the conscience through its poetic suggestiveness, that when it is once understood, there is nothing more to be said, but everything to be done.
Let us try to understand him.
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.
True.
"But this is only a figure."
"Yes; by the moth and the rust and the thief."
Therein lies the hurt.
It may have been all in one.
Whither else dare we send them?
Thou wilt know every shade of my suffering; thou wilt care for me with thy perfect fatherhood; for that makes my sonship, and inwraps and infolds it.
Go away, and be good, and then come to me?" And shall we dare to think God would send us away if we came thus, and would not be pleased that we came, even if we were angry as Jonah?
Would he say to his child: "How dare you!
Was it the cry of victory?
Am I going to do a good deed?
I am thine, and therefore I am mine.'" The vast operations of the spiritual as of the physical world, are simply a turning again to the source.
Think, brothers, think, sisters, we walk in the air of an eternal fatherhood.
Bread, at least, will be given, and not a stone; water, at least, will be sure, and not vinegar mingled with gall.
Thou knowest, if only from the cry of thy Son, how terrible that is; and if it comes not to me in so terrible a shape as that in which it came to him, think how poor to bear I am beside him.
I do not know what the struggle means; for, of the thousands who pass through it every day, not one enlightens his neighbour left behind; but shall I not long with agony for one breath of thy air, and not receive it?
For he cannot be our father save as he is their father; and if we do not see him and feel him as their father, we cannot know him as ours.
Was it the cry of relief at the touch of death?
I care not for the pain, so long as my spirit is strong, and into thy hands I commend that spirit.
Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us.
We may commend any brother, any sister, to the common fatherhood.
Am I going to die?
How the earthly father would love a child who would creep into his room with angry, troubled face, and sit down at his feet, saying when asked what he wanted: "I feel so naughty, papa, and I want to get good"!
And the mighty story ends with a cry.
But Beauty, happily married to her Prince, went secretly to the statues every day and wept over them.
In the meantime the merchant went his way to the city, full of hope and great plans as to what he would do with his money.
There was a big fire in the hall, and when he had warmed himself, he set out to look for the master of the house.
They led their sister a dreadful life too, with their complaints, for not only did they refuse to do anything themselves, but they said that everything she did was done wrong.
When he awoke he was quite surprised to find himself in such a soft and comfortable bed, but presently he remembered all that had happened to him.
"I shall never be happy again."
Marigold and Dressalinda were very cross to think that they had lost all their money, and after being so rich and sought after, they must now live in a miserable cottage.
Immediately the Beast opened his eyes, sighed, and said:
Alas! alas! then I, too, will die, for I cannot live without you."
And by her tears their stony hearts were softened, and they were changed into flesh and blood again, and were good and kind for the rest of their lives.
"Is she a good girl?"
"Yes, yes, dear Beast, for I love you dearly."
All this time she was waited on by invisible hands, as though she had been a queen.
Never a day passed but these two went out to some feast or junketing; but Beauty, the youngest, loved to stay at home and keep her old father company.
Then the Beast said, "I will not let you go empty-handed."
The two eldest were called Marigold and Dressalinda.
And now tell me, girls, what shall I bring you when I come back?"
"Dear Beast, you are so good to me, will you let me go home to see my father?
"No, Beast," said Beauty gently.
"This is some fairies' work.
Beautiful music came to her ears without her being able to see the musicians, but the magic looking-glass was best of all, for in it she could see whatever she wished.
"Oh!" he cried, "what will my poor children do without me?"
"I will send it home for you," said the Beast, shutting down the lid.
And with that he sat down and told them the whole story.
But he did not look far, for behind the first door he opened was a cosy little room with supper set for one, a supper the mere look of which made you hungry.
As the stalk snapped in his fingers, he started back in terror, for he heard an angry roar, and the next minute a dreadful Beast sprang upon him.
When he went downstairs, he found a good breakfast waiting for him in the little room where he had supped the night before, and when he had made a good meal, he thought he would go for a stroll in the garden.
And the merchant filled it up with precious things from the Beast's treasure-house.
I had better not look any farther for the master of the house."
He ate his supper with her, and then asked her if she would marry him.
And every night the same thing happened.
ADAPTED BY E. NESBIT
I did not think, after all you have given me, that you would grudge me a flower."
"My dear children," he said, "at last our luck has turned.
And with that he tumbled into bed, and, being very tired, he went to sleep at once, and slept like a top till it was time to get up in the morning.
Only this time the table was laid for two.
But the next moment the Beast came into the room.
Her father went with her, to show her the way.
The two eldest sisters would do nothing but sulk in corners, while Beauty swept the floors and washed the dishes, and did her best to make the poor cottage pleasant.
If we could only make her forget the day, the Beast might be angry and kill her, and then there would be a chance for us."
There, on the floor of the hall, lay a great and beautiful chest of wrought silver.
We shall not be so rich as before, but we shall have enough to keep us in comfort.
At last Dressalinda said to Marigold:
And she always said, "No, Beast."
But the palace was empty, and no one answered her when she called.
He started off and opened another door, but there he saw a bed, merely to look at which made you sleepy, so he said to himself:
"She has promised to return in a week.
"Come, father dear," said Beauty, "take comfort.
"Oh! what shall I do if I cannot find him?" she said.
Then she ran through the gardens, calling his name again and again, but still there was silence.
Her father kissed her fondly, and set out.
"Yes," said Beauty, trembling.
"No," said the Beast, "you must die!"
"You silly girl," said Marigold, "you just want our father to think you are more unselfish than we are--that's what you want!
So the Beast sat down to supper with her, and when it was finished, he said:
Now, it happened that misfortune came upon the merchant.
"You should have thought of that before you stole the rose," said the Beast.
"Oh, dear!" she said; "if only I could see my poor father I should be almost happy."
Get me my traveling-cloak, Beauty.
He knelt at Beauty's feet and clasped her hands.
He knocked at the gates, but no one answered, and presently, driven by hunger and cold, he made bold to enter, and mounted the marble steps into the great hall.
Once upon a time there was a rich merchant, who had three daughters. They lived in a very fine house in a beautiful city, and had many servants in grand liveries to wait upon them.
"Mercy! mercy!" cried the merchant.
She did not know where his rooms in the palace were, but she felt she could not wait till supper-time before seeing him, so she ran hither and thither, calling his name.
"That must be as you please," said Beauty.
They went to bed and slept soundly, and the next morning the father departed, weeping bitterly.
And the Prince whispered to one of his attendants, who went out, and in a very little time came back with Beauty's father and sisters.
The merchant put these into Beauty's hand when she ran to meet him at the door of their cottage.
The two elder sisters wept and wailed, and of course blamed Beauty for all that had happened.
The poor merchant fell upon his knees and tried to think of something to say to soften the heart of the cruel Beast; and at last he said, "Sir, I only stole this rose because my youngest daughter asked me to bring her one.
But when he got there, he found that some one had played a trick on him, and no ship of his had come into harbor, so he was just as badly off as before.
"And what shall I bring for you, my Beauty?" asked the father, as his little daughter helped him to put on his traveling-cloak.
"Take them, my child," he said, "and cherish them, for they have cost your poor father his life."
So Beauty, thinking it would amuse them to hear, told them, and their envy increased day by day.
That night, when Beauty sat down to supper, the Beast came in.
So he stretched out his hand and plucked the biggest red rose within his reach.
Do let me go and cheer him up, and I will promise faithfully to return to you."
"Indeed, sister," said Beauty, "that was not the reason.
There was still left to him a little house in the country, and to this, when everything else had been sold, he retired.
"I am very ugly, Beauty, and I am very stupid, but I love you; will you marry me?"
But Beauty's only thought was to cheer her old father, and while her two sisters sat on wooden chairs and cried and bewailed themselves, Beauty lighted the fire and got the supper ready, for the merchant was now so poor that he could not even keep a servant.
"How shall I do that?" asked Popopo.
Popopo after this found much enjoyment in visiting every millinery shop he could find and giving new life to the stuffed birds which were carelessly tossed aside as useless.
Entering he found two women, one of whom leaned her head upon the table and sobbed bitterly, while the other strove to comfort her.
The astonished birds at once obeyed, and when they had soared away into the night air the knook closed the door and continued his wandering through the streets.
What law is there, among birds or knooks, that requires us to be the slaves of fashion?"
So he set off to find the birds.
"Because I find the woman considers you her property, and your loss has caused her much unhappiness," answered Popopo.
Sometimes a hunter fires his gun at a bird and then wonders why he did not hit it.
Moreover, they now pass their lives in stealing, and were they obliged to remain always upon women's hats their morals would be much improved."
Our birds cannot be enslaved, that is certain; therefore you must have the fashions changed, so it will no longer be stylish for women to wear birds upon their hats."
"Even though your pretty birds have all been stolen the hats themselves remain."
"Pooh!" exclaimed the blue jay, "we cannot be shot now, for we are stuffed.
"A mouse!" gasped the milliner, trembling with terror.
His nerves were so shocked that before he had looked around three minutes he decided to give up the adventure, and instantly returned home.
By dawn he saw many interesting sights, but day broke before he had finished the city, and he resolved to come the next evening a few hours earlier.
To be sure, wicked men shot and stuffed us, and sold us to the milliner; but the idea of our being her property is nonsense!"
"But remember how unhappy we were in her glass case," said a robin redbreast, gravely.
The following morning when the poor milliner looked over her newspaper she was overjoyed to read that "no woman could now wear a bird upon her hat and be in style, for the newest fashion required only ribbons and laces."
"Just so.
Finally, by chance, Popopo thought of the earth people who dwell in cities, and so he resolved to visit them and see how they lived. This would surely be fine amusement, and serve to pass away many wearisome hours.
He would visit them at night.
Therefore one morning, after a breakfast so dainty that you could scarcely imagine it, Popopo set out for the earth and at once was in the midst of a big city.
Popopo did not know the birds were stuffed; but, stuffed or not, every bird is bound to obey a knook's whistle and a knook's call.
Oh! what is it?"
"Cheer up, sister," said one.
So he went home to think what could be done.
"But since you have caused all this trouble, it is your duty to remedy it.
"Poor dears!" said the kind-hearted knook, "you long to be in the fields and forests again."
"Come, friends; the door is open--fly out!"
Instantly they all jumped from the hats, dashed out the open door of the glass case and scampered away to their cellar.
Then he opened the outer door for them and cried: "Off with you!
"What is it?
"Here are just the creatures," thought Popopo, "to place upon the woman's hats.
"If it were the fashion to wear knooks perched upon women's hats would you be contented to stay there?
His nerves being soothed by the stillness, Popopo began to enjoy himself.
Thank you for setting us free."
"Why?" demanded a blue jay, angrily, while the others stopped their songs.
But when she saw a tiny gray mouse nestling among the ribbons and laces she gave a loud shriek, and, dropping the hat, sprang with one bound to the top of the table.
"Easily enough.
Answer me, Popopo!"
"Listen!" said Popopo, sternly, for he felt the birds were getting the best of the argument; "the poor milliner's business will be ruined if I do not return you to her shop.
When they saw the knook the birds cried:
So you must visit the newspapers and magazines and enchant the types."
He could not wrong the birds by sending them back to the milliner, nor did he wish the milliner to suffer by their loss.
Fashions often change among the earth people, who tire quickly of any one thing.
Indeed, some of the most elaborate hats had two or three birds upon them.
To see so many of his little friends shut up in a glass case annoyed and grieved Popopo, who had no idea they had purposely been placed upon the hats by the milliner.
Even the policemen slumbered slyly and there happened to be no prowling thieves abroad.
Popopo was puzzled.
As soon as it was dark the following day he came again to the city and on passing the millinery shop noticed a light within.
He had lived thousands of years, and had enjoyed all the wonders he could think of.
She came in the early morning, accompanied by her sister, and her face wore a sad and resigned expression.
"And as for being her property, you are a knook, and the natural guardian of all birds; so you know that Nature created us free.
So he exercised a charm that drew all the mice from the cellar and placed them upon the hats in the glass case, where they occupied the places the birds had vacated and looked very becoming--at least, in the eyes of the unworldly knook.
"Thank you, Popopo.
"Do not thank me," returned the knook, "for I have come to send you back to the millinery shop."
So they left the hats, flew out of the case and began fluttering about the room.
"Alas!" cried the other, who was the milliner, "no one will buy my hats partly trimmed, for the fashion is to wear birds upon them.
So he slid back one of the doors of the case, gave the little chirruping whistle of the knooks that all birds know well, and called:
When they read in their newspapers and magazines that the style is so-and-so, they never question the matter, but at once obey the mandate of fashion.
"What have we to do with fashions, anyway?" screamed a linnet.
Everyone was in bed.
We do not fear men now."
After much meditation he decided to consult the king of the knooks, and going at once to his majesty he told him the whole story.
This thought brought him back to the millinery shop later in the night, when the two women had gone home.
Popopo, seeing this commotion, now realized that mice are especially disagreeable to human beings, and that he had made a grave mistake in placing them upon the hats; so he gave a low whistle of command that was heard only by the mice.
But such was not the case with Popopo, the knook we are speaking of.
So the poor milliner's wares, although beautified by lace and ribbons, are worthless unless you are perched upon them."
To prevent their running about and leaving the hats Popopo rendered them motionless, and then he was so pleased with his work that he decided to remain in the shop and witness the delight of the milliner when she saw how daintily her hats were now trimmed.
Popopo thanked the wise king and followed his advice.
The king frowned.
During his wanderings he entered a millinery shop, and was surprised to see within a large glass case a great number of women's hats, each bearing in one position or another a stuffed bird.
Popopo was a kind-hearted knook, but on witnessing all this misery, caused by his own ignorance of the ways of humans, he straightway wished himself at home, and so left the poor women to recover as best they could.
We will add, that at Paris, a young man ought to avoid approaching, and even saluting a young lady of his acquaintance, out of regard to the natural timidity of her sex.
CHAPTER I.
And so three days afterwards a full account of all that Ruth Powlett had said, and of the circumstances of the case, was despatched to "Sergeant Blunt, Cape Mounted Rifles, Kaffirland."
I would have told then, but I did not know who to tell it to, or what good it could do if told.
Ruth had given a little gasp as Mary Armstrong began, then she sat rigid and immovable.
Why, now, to look at you, I should have thought you could hardly have known what trouble meant, you always seem so bright and happy; that's what Ruth has said, again and again."
"I don't, my dear.
"It was all wrong and wicked," Ruth said, "and it will be quite right if they punish me; but that would be nothing to what I have suffered lately.
The girl shook her head.
This complicates matters a good deal."
"What is it?" Mr. Armstrong asked in surprise.
Besides, as this is the fourth that you have had since you have been here, it is not of such extreme importance."
I am thankful, indeed, my child; how did it all come about?"
"You know what I was telling you the other day about my girl?"
She found her quiet and pale.
"What is it, my dear; has he changed his mind and married a Kaffir woman?
"Well, my dear, that would be serious; at least I should have thought you would consider it so."
"I firmly believe," Ruth said, "he would have murdered me had he not heard people coming along the road." Then she told how she found the open knife stained with blood at Margaret Carne's bedside, and how she had hidden it.
I don't think any reasonable man could have a doubt that the scoundrel did it; and now, my dear, what is to be done next?"
Now, after what you said to me the other night, I don't know what to do.
"I can spare an hour--I can spare the whole morning, Mr. Powlett.
She has always been a good girl: not one of your light sort, but earnest and steady.
"Yes, but I can't help it.
"Ruth Powlett nearly knocked me down in the passage, and rushed off without even the ordinary decency of apologising."
She is going about the house again this morning, but that white and still that it is cruel to look at her.
I believe she has got some secret or other that is just wearing her out, and if we can't get to the bottom of it I don't believe Ruth will see Christmas," and Hiram Powlett wiped his eyes violently.
If I did, I would cut my tongue out before I would speak a word.
"Why, child, you have been a benefactor to us both!
The Cape mail touched at Plymouth yesterday."
"It was Captain Mervyn," she said, at last, in a low whisper.
I never did hear such expressions!"
"You think he knows a great deal better what ought to be done than I do?"
I must speak to my father, and he will think it over, and perhaps he will write and ask Ronald how he would like it done.
I will be off back again to my work now; I feel all the better for having had this talk with you.
There is not much in that, you would say; after a girl has fainted she likes to lie quiet a bit; but she didn't lie quiet.
"My love seemed to have been killed.
I think Ronald ought to be consulted."
"I will tell you another time, Ruth," Mary said, in equally low tones, and then rising, put on her hat again, said good-bye, and went out.
"Oh, Mary, how terrible!" Ruth said, pitifully, "how terrible!
I came in an hour ago, expecting to find tea ready, and there are no signs of it visible.
It is a grave question altogether, Mary, and at any rate we will wait.
"I think so too, father.
And now, having told you this first, so that you should not think too hardly of me, I will tell you all."
Who shall I go to first?"
Ruth Powlett did not speak for a minute or two, then she said, slowly:
"Yes, there's no doubt about it this time," her father said.
"As you say, there could be no mistake about the knife, because she had given it to him herself, and had had his initials engraved upon it at Plymouth.
Well, we shall see; we shall see.
Anyhow, we must go cautiously to work.
"They tried to kill me, and I killed them.
She came in yesterday afternoon as white as a sheet, and fainted right off at the door.
The two girls accordingly went back to the cottage.
"That cannot be all," Ruth whispered; "there must be something more to tell, Mary."
"Well, I thought I would just step over and speak to you," Hiram began, in a slow, puzzled sort of a way.
"You need not be afraid about that," Mary said, laying her hand assuringly on Ruth's shoulder.
"That's it; that's it," Hiram said, stroking his chin, thoughtfully, "that murder is at the bottom of it.
However, it cannot be helped.
"Why did you not tell me of it before, father?" the girl said, reproachfully.
It has been dreadful," she said, wanly.
I shouldn't think so much of that, because she has often fainted since her illness, but that wasn't all. When her mother got her round she went upstairs to her room, and didn't come down again.
It quite made my flesh creep; didn't it yours?"
Ruth, who for a long time had scarcely taken up a needle, sat with her hands before her.
I feel that myself, but there is no one in the village I should like to open my mind to about Ruth, and seeing that you are father of a girl about the same age, and that I feel you are a true sort of a man, I come to you.
"You shall not be," Ruth said, more firmly than she had before spoken. "You shall not be, Mary.
Taylor wasn't sure he was alive.
Sharks!
We thought for a minute just after we were wrecked that we were to get help from a ship that passed us.
We burned blue lights, but she kept on.
I hurried them to the seashore, where we boarded a small steamship, in which we made the trip in safety to Fort de France.
The last we saw of him or his dead body it was drifting shoreward on that hatch.
As I worked it grew hotter and hotter.
The mysterious force levelled a row of strong trees, tearing them up by the roots and leaving bare a space of ground fifteen yards wide and more than one hundred yards long. Transfixed I stood, not knowing in what direction to flee.
It was still raining fire and hot rocks and you could hardly see a ship's length for dust and ashes, but we could stand that.
What the stuff was we could not at first conjecture, or rather, we didn't have much time to speculate on it, for we had to get our ship in shape to withstand we hardly knew what.
"Captain Muggah went overboard, still clinging to the fragments of his wrecked bridge.
They seemed like they were scared to death.
"The ship was on fire, of course, what was left of it.
The following is the story told by Captain Eric Lillien-skjold:
His hair and all his clothing had been burned off, but he was alive.
"There would suddenly come great flashes of light from the dark bank toward Martinique.
"That all happened a long way inside of half a minute; then something new happened.
More than half the ship's company had been killed in that first rush of flame.
I shed my coat and vest and got into what little shade there was.
The air seemed heavy and oppressive.
We were about 700 miles off Cape Henlopen.
You could almost see the pitch softening in the seams.
Taylor managed to push the captain on to a hatch that had floated off from us and then they swam back to the ship for more assistance, but nothing could be done for the captain.
We quote engineer Anderson's story:
Some of them jumped clear out of it.
And sea birds!
We found parts of some bodies--a hand, or an arm or a leg.
Cattle lowed in the night.
"I kept to the bridge all night.
He reeled and fell on the bridge with his face toward me.
A few moments later, the lookout called down that we were running into a fog-bank dead ahead.
Probably it was only a few seconds, but so vivid were my impressions that it now seems as though I stood as a spectator for many minutes.
The weather conditions were not at all unlike those which precede the great West Indian hurricanes, but, knowing it was not the season of the year for them, we all remarked in the engine room that there must be a heavy storm approaching.
It moved with a rapidity that made it impossible for anything to escape it.
GREAT FLASHES OF LIGHT
All night this continued, and it was not until day came that the flashes disappeared. The dark bank that covered the horizon toward Martinique, however, did not fade away with the breaking of day, and at eight in the morning of the 9th (Friday) the whole section of the sky in that direction seemed dark and troubled.
Below decks there were some twenty alive.
It was a little before eight o'clock on the morning of May 8 that the end came.
The British steamer Horace experienced the effect of the explosion when farther from land.
He was a likely boy.
As we went forward we met one or two of the sailors from the forecastle, who wanted to know about the dust that was falling on the ship.
FIERY STREAM CONTAINED POISONOUS GASES
While deep crevices had been formed on the land, a still greater effect had seemingly been produced beneath the water.
His escape from death had in it something of the marvellous.
The French Cable Company, which was at work trying to repair the cables broken by the eruption, found the bottom of the Caribbean Sea so changed as to render the old charts useless.
He was facing the fire cloud with both hands gripped hard to the bridge rail, his legs apart and his knees braced back stiff.
"Then, as quick as you could toss a biscuit over its rail, the Nordby dropped--regularly dropped--three or four feet down into the sea.
There were just four of us left aboard who could do anything. The four were Thompson, Dan Taylor, Quashee, and myself.
"Before we knew it, we went into the fog, which proved to be a big dense bank of this same sand, and it rained down on us from every side. Ventilators were quickly brought to their places, and later even the hatches were battened down.
"My own son's gone, too.
The cook was burned to death in his galley.
"Then there was another anxious moment shortly after nine o'clock.
I wasn't looking at the mountain at all.
We learned afterward that she was the Roddam."
The stumps of both masts were blazing.
It is impossible for me to tell how long I stood there inert.
The air was dead about me, so dead that the floating dust seemingly was not disturbed.
I didn't know what to make of it.
We made some experiments, and found the stuff was superior to emery dust.
Even the officers began to think that the world was coming to an end.
Not just burned, but burning, then, when we got to them.
MATE SCOTT'S GRAPHIC STORY
Morne Rouge, a beautiful summer resort, frequented by the people of the island during the hot season as a place of recreation, also escaped.
Dogs howled and sought the company of their masters, and when driven forth they gave every evidence of fear.
Even the snakes, which at ordinary times are found in great numbers near the volcano, crawled away.
We put provisions on for two days and rigged up a make-shift mast and sail, for we intended to go to sea.
Soundings showed seven fathoms where before the eruption there were thirty-six fathoms of water.
A few minutes later we looked at him and he was dead.
I noticed a sort of grit that got into my mouth from the end of the cigar I was smoking.
"It was like a terrible hurricane, and where a fraction of a second before there had been a perfect calm, I felt myself drawn into a vortex and I had to brace myself firmly.
It is believed that Mont Pelee threw off a great gasp of some exceedingly heavy and noxious gas, something akin to firedamp, which settled upon the city and rendered the inhabitants insensible.
Our boats had gone overboard with the masts and funnel.
We rolled him in a blanket and put him in a sailor's bunk.
THE ENGINE BECAME CHOKED
THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF THE "NORDBY"
Nothing worth while talking about occurred until two days afterward--Wednesday, May 7th.
But we did not have to risk the raft, for about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, when we were almost ready to put the raft overboard, the Suchet came along and took us all off.
"Something else we could see, too.
Before I could get up three men tumbled in on top of me.
There wasn't a breath of wind.
We sort of ducked, expecting an awful crash of thunder, but it didn't come.
For an instant we could see nothing but the water and the flame.
A terror came upon me, but I could not explain my fear.
"We made that raft for something over thirty that were alive.
"Did you ever see the tide come into the Bay of Fundy.
"In another instant it was all over for him.
Mighty strange things happen on the sea, but this topped them all.
"That tidal wave picked the ship up like a canoe and then smashed her. After one list to starboard the ship righted, but the masts, the bridge, the funnel and all the upper works had gone overboard.
WHAT HAPPENED ON THE "HORACE"
Should he? Should he save the lives of his killers?
The man in the light wore a protective helmet, thick boots and a pouch-hung uniform.
"Would you keep a hold on his arm, sir, just in case," the soldier said, glancing warily at Ulv's blowpipe.
After that it was just a matter of following tracks--and the transmitter you planted."
Enough to kill the guards without bringing the roof down.
"When it was a matter of war and killing, my planet could never agree on an intelligent course. War is so alien to our philosophy that it couldn't even be considered correctly.
In spite of everything he had done to prevent it, Nyjord had dropped the bombs. And this act alone may have destroyed their own planet.
Brion's shots crashed into the control board, shorting and destroying it, removing the menace to Nyjord for all time.
Then one of the magter came in the entrance, but Brion hesitated before shooting.
The bent form of the leader of the rebel Nyjord army pushed through the crowd of taller men until he stood next to Krafft.
"Of course," Professor Krafft said, astonished at Brion's lack of understanding.
It was not long in coming.
Two magter rushed in, and died.
They retreated into the darkness, still firing.
And they did.
Doctors and nurses are on the way here now. Plans were put under way to evacuate what part of the population we could until the bombs were found.
"Let's go!"
Once inside, they found cover behind a ridge and waited. The end was certain.
"Would you kindly explain what is going on?" Brion said thickly.
Right and wrong were forgotten.
It struck one of the technicians, who gasped and fell to the floor.
The beam passed over the two hidden men, and at the same instant Brion fired.
The planet is united again, and working hard."
A believer in life, he destroyed the anti-life.
Brion had heard the bombs fall.
As the magter turned, Ulv's breath pulsed once and death stung the back of the other man's hand. He collapsed into a crumpled heap.
With this realization came the painful knowledge that the planet and the people that had produced this understanding were dead.
"I know what those darts can do." He pulled a microphone from one of his pockets and spoke into it.
The magter knocked him down and beat him into silence.
You're easy prey for the first one that lands on your back.
XVIII
The two facts couldn't be accepted together.
It may kill in self-defense, but it is essentially not a killer or destroyer.
The realization was almost impossible to accept.
The magter are sick!"
Your mind-parasite drew us back from the brink."
The score would be even, and his and the Disans' death avenged.
As the technicians worked, their attitude changed from shocked numbness to anger.
It worked like a charm.
He literally had to do nothing.
They pushed it over to the latticework of the jump-field.
Swiftly they brought their work to completion, with a speed and precision they had concealed before.
"We are civilized, after all. You can't expect us to fight a war--and you surely can't expect us to ignore the plight of sick neighbors?"
He was a Nyjorder.
"A simple matter of definition.
More soldiers crowded into the cave, and Professor-Commander Krafft came in behind them.
The caveman first had this feeling for his mate, then for his family.
Let's find a spot we can defend and settle into it."
They waited for the attack.
"What else could we do?
"Don't shoot," a voice called from outside the cave, and a man stepped through the swirling dust and smoke to stand in the beam from the light.
"Yes, but what luck for Lazarev!
The battalions shouted "Hurrah!" and "Vive l'Empereur!" Napoleon said something to Alexander, and both Emperors dismounted and took each other's hands.
"But I never said a word about the Emperor!" said the officer, justifying himself, and unable to understand Rostov's outburst, except on the supposition that he was drunk.
It could be no one else.
Boris, too, with his friend Zhilinski, came to see the Preobrazhensk banquet.
And it really did.
On his way back, he noticed Rostov standing by the corner of a house.
Nicholas ate and drank (chiefly the latter) in silence.
Rostov stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from a distance.
"But we must give him an answer."
He was riding a very fine thoroughbred gray Arab horse with a crimson gold-embroidered saddlecloth.
"Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhenskis will give them a dinner."
He feared to give way to his thoughts, yet could not get rid of them.
Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lazarev's breast and, dropping his hand, turned toward Alexander as though sure that the cross would adhere there.
He must respond in kind."
"What d'you think of the treat?
First-rate!"
"Nothing, nothing," replied Rostov.
But Rostov did not listen to him.
The Preobrazhensk battalion, breaking rank, mingled with the French Guards and sat down at the tables prepared for them.
Alexander listened attentively to what was said to him and, bending his head, smiled pleasantly.
If once we begin judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left!
"Sire, I ask your permission to present the Legion of Honor to the bravest of your soldiers," said a sharp, precise voice, articulating every letter.
"Lazarev!" the colonel called, with a frown, and Lazarev, the first soldier in the rank, stepped briskly forward.
Napoleon, without looking, pressed two fingers together and the badge was between them.
"Here's a cap, lads!" shouted a Preobrazhensk soldier, donning a shaggy French cap.
The crowd unexpectedly found itself so close to the Emperors that Rostov, standing in the front row, was afraid he might be recognized.
It has to be done.
"Yes, I will."
Two officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and happy, passed by Rostov.
"Rostov!
He caught himself harboring such strange thoughts that he was frightened.
"Yes, and to drink," assented Nicholas.
"If we are ordered to die, we must die.
Napoleon slightly turned his head, and put his plump little hand out behind him as if to take something.
Officious hands, Russian and French, immediately seized the cross and fastened it to the uniform.
If we're punished, it means that we have deserved it, it's not for us to judge.
"You'll call round?"
I suppose she thought it was only some common strolling cat who was hungry.
I had almost the same things for my dinner that the rest of them did: it must be a splendid thing to be a man or a woman!
Then your grandfather made up a nice bed in the cradle, out of Charlie's winter blanket and an old pillow, and laid me down in it, all rolled up as I was in your petticoat.
I felt afraid myself, though all the time he was stroking my head, and saying, "Poor pussy, there, poor pussy, lie still." In a few minutes Mary came down with the cradle, and set it down by the fire with such a bang that I wondered it did not break.
And now, my dear Helen, I hope I have prepared you to see me looking perfectly hideous.
I have always noticed that people do not observe any difference between one cat's voice and another's; now they really are just as different as human voices.
"You do as I tell you," said he, in that most awful tone of his, which always makes you so afraid.
However, he has been so good to me, that I let him do any thing he likes, and every day he rubs in some new kind of stuff, which smells a little worse than the last one.
I told you, in my last letter, that my fur was beginning to come off.
The old gentleman laughed at this, till the tears ran down his red cheeks.
I often think how much more careful they would be if they did.
I shivered all night, and it hurt me terribly whenever I moved.
I don't suppose such a thing was ever seen in the world as a cat without any fur.
Every morning he put the soft white stuff on my eyes, and changed the bandages on my leg.
He said to her in a very gruff voice, "Here you, Mary, you go up into the garret and bring down the cradle."
However, he saw that I was alive, and that was something.
You see I spend so much more time in the society of men and women than of cats, that I find myself constantly using expressions which sound queerly in a cat's mouth.
Be as bright and lively as you can; the poor man's got a fit of the glooms."
THE BAG
"Russians never can; but he shoots."
In fact, he conveyed the impression that if a destroying angel had been lent to him for a week it would have had very little time for private study. In the lulls of his outcry could be heard the querulous monotone of Mrs. Hoopington and the sharp staccato barking of the fox-terrier.
"The Major is coming in to tea," said Mrs. Hoopington to her niece. "He's just gone round to the stables with his horse.
In a torrent of agitated words she tried to explain the horror of the situation.
Meanwhile, the Major, roaming round the hall like an imprisoned cyclone, had caught sight of and joyfully pounced on the telephone apparatus, and lost no time in ringing up the hunt secretary and announcing his resignation of the Mastership.
That young gentleman, however, was supremely unconscious of any shortcomings, and burst into the hall, tired, and less sprucely groomed than usual, but distinctly radiant.
The boy understood nothing, but was thoroughly alarmed.
He reviled and railed at fate and the general scheme of things, he pitied himself with a strong, deep pity too poignent for tears, he condemned every one with whom he had ever come in contact to endless and abnormal punishments.
"What is exciting him?" asked his mistress, as the dog suddenly broke into short angry barks, with a running accompaniment of tremulous whines.
His game-bag looked comfortably full.
At that moment Mrs. Hoopington and the Major entered the hall.
The Major could plead reasonable excuse for his fit of the glooms.
"No; a large beast; I don't know what you call it in English.
His mind strayed back to the youth in the old Russian folk-tale who shot an enchanted bird with dramatic results.
Norah sat down suddenly, and hid her face in her hands.
"Nothing--nothing worth speaking of," said the boy.
She dared not raise her eyes above the level of the tea-table, and she almost expected to see a spot of accusing vulpine blood drip down and stain the whiteness of the cloth.
In ranging herself as a partisan on the side of Major Pallaby Mrs. Hoopington had been largely influenced by the fact that she had made up her mind to marry him at an early date.
"That's no excuse for including a woodpecker in his game-bag."
Most people with whom Vladimir came in contact found his high spirits infectious, but his present hostess was guaranteed immune against infection of that sort.
We're going to have it here in the hall.
Major Pallaby was a victim of circumstances, over which he had no control, and of his temper, over which he had very little.
"Hide it, hide it!" said Norah frantically, pointing to the still unopened bag.
"Merciful Heaven!" she wailed; "he's shot a fox!"
"Why," she continued, "it's your game-bag, Vladimir!
"I'm sure I hope so; I hope so," said the Major moodily.
"Yes; and what does he shoot?
"Bury it," said Norah.
Yesterday he brought home a woodpecker in his game-bag."
Mrs. Hoopington sniffed.
"Anyhow, my dear Norah, he can't ride."
Just compare him for a moment with some of your heavy hunting men--"
"Aha, we'll have a good gallop after that brush to-morrow," said the Major, with a transient gleam of good humour.
Vladimir swung the bag with fair aim; but the strap caught in its flight on the outstanding point of an antler fixed in the wall, and the bag, with its terrible burden, remained suspended just above the alcove where tea would presently be laid.
One hears so often that a fox has settled down as a tenant for life in certain covers, and then when you go to turn him out there isn't a trace of him.
"I shall go and get ready for tea.
"Pheasants, woodpigeons, rabbits," hazarded Norah.
"Major, if any one tried that game on in my woods they'd get short shrift," said Mrs. Hoopington.
"Vladimir isn't stupid," protested her niece; "he's one of the most amusing boys I ever met.
"Just plain burial?" said Vladimir, rather relieved.
"Does it live in a tree and eat nuts?" she asked, hoping that the use of the adjective "large" might be an exaggeration.
The Major's plans on the subject of matrimony were not at present in such an advanced stage as Mrs. Hoopington's, but he was beginning to find his way over to Hoopington Hall with a frequency that was already being commented on.
The Major's fury clothed and reclothed itself in words as frantically as a woman up in town for one day's shopping tries on a succession of garments.
"Why you didn't bring one or two hunting men down with you, instead of that stupid Russian boy, I can't think."
Brown, with a darkish tail." Norah changed colour.
Anyhow, I've explained to Vladimir that certain birds are beneath his dignity as a sportsman.
"What did you shoot to-day?" asked Mrs. Hoopington suddenly of the unusually silent Vladimir.
"Yesterday morning; a fine dog-fox, with a dark brush," confided Mrs. Hoopington.
Norah's heart, which had stood still for a space, made up for lost time with a most disturbing bound.
I'm certain a fox was shot or trapped in Lady Widden's woods the very day before we drew them."
And then a simultaneous idea flashed on himself and Mrs. Hoopington. Their faces flushed to distinct but harmonious tones of purple, and with one accusing voice they screamed, "You've shot the fox!"
Her aunt's manner signalled to her the repeated message to "be bright"; for the present she was fully occupied in keeping her teeth from chattering.
He had almost expected that some of the local clergy would have insisted on being present, or that a salute might have to be fired over the grave.
"I wish you'd find something that was worth speaking about," said the hostess; "every one seems to have lost their tongues."
"My aunt and the Major will be here in a moment.
Throw it on the top of that chest; they won't see it there."
Against his notorious bad temper she set his three thousand a year, and his prospective succession to a baronetcy gave a casting vote in his favour.
Entertain the Major if he comes in before I'm down, and, above all, be bright."
But after the Major's display her best efforts at vocal violence missed their full effect; it was as though one had come straight out from a Wagner opera into a rather tame thunderstorm.
A servant had by this time brought his horse round to the door, and in a few seconds Mrs. Hoopington's shrill monotone had the field to itself.
"Guess what I have shot," he demanded.
On one side of her loomed the morose countenance of the Major, on the other she was conscious of the scared, miserable eyes of Vladimir.
Norah tried hastily to palliate Vladimir's misdeed in their eyes, but it is doubtful whether they heard her.
"By Gad," said the Major, who was now standing up; "there's a pretty warm scent!"
"The Major is going to draw our covers to-morrow," announced the lady, with a certain heavy satisfaction.
A Grand Duke pots a vulture just as seriously as we should stalk a bustard.
Beneath him his knees buckled.
Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat lightning in a still midsummer night.
"Hell's fury!
As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on the boat-deck at the head of the companion-ladder greeted him with pistol fire.
A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring together in the German tongue.
That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and, swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....
Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless, shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their lungs with the sweet air.
It vanished instantly.
With him, whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils, each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to make the two seem one.
He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere rattle from his throat.
For a moment Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a rib-crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the defensive.
What had happened?
The thing came up too rapidly.
The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
The officer turned back sharply.
"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck--or was thrown--"
A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul.
Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour, panting.
"He may be telling the truth.
He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to cope with this untoward development.
At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his attention.
His hands passed over a riveted joint of metal plates.
The men rushed Lanyard toward the conning tower.
Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered through the port.
Following that first mad thrill of contact with it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air.
Even as he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that guttered toward its swift extinction....
No reading that riddle!...
Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....
Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended in frigid purgatory.
"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.
During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard caught the attention of an officer.
A shell shrieked over the submarine and dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard.
No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it could only be through immediate pursuit.
Death's countenance was kind.
A hatch forward of the tower opened, and a quick-firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung smoothly and silently up from its lair.
Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught broken phrases, snatches of sentences:
OFF NANTUCKET
The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck-house and pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....
Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a patent cigar-lighter in the hands of the spy.
They had got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page torn from the Book of Doom.
What must be, must....
A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths.
"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.
Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth chattered uncontrollably.
Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind.
Yet the will to live persisted amazingly.
He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths unguessable.
With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back.
His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar of metal.
"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered--"Personal Division--Wilhelmstrasse Number 27--"
One officer had already popped through the conning-tower hatch, followed by several of the crew.
what's that searchlight?"
He tried feebly to help them.
Withal he was aware he could not live.
He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk beneath him.
Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by insensible degrees losing force.
Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the shoulder of the superstructure.
He imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some gigantic hand plucked her under.
He lay upon its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge round the conning tower.
He could not escape.
"What's that?"
The cold was killing.
For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost unbelievable rapidity.
As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted to the smoking-room door.
Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the bullets clearing narrowly--or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath fanned his cheek.
Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
Almost instantly he was floundering in knee-deep waters that parted, cascading away on either hand.
Vaguely he wondered how people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's self go down.
And how I blessed you for not TELLING me those lines were there!
"He wouldn't.
Some way, I--" She stopped short, with a quick indrawing of her breath.
When thinkin' won't mend it, Then thinkin' won't end it.
"You're at home now, and you have all your old friends, and--"
"I know.
So what's the use?
"I mean just that."
"When did you come?"
But, come--look!
You will come?"
What IS the matter?" demanded Susan concernedly.
"But, Keith, I'm sure that Dorothy liked--"
And there it was, wasted, WASTED, worse than wasted on--me!"
FOR THE SAKE OF JOHN
"Do what?"
He never talked like this, until to-day.
He couldn't do it.
"How?"
Couldn't he do it?"
"Susan, I can't! I can't--stand it," he moaned.
But, what is it--now?"
"I wonder if you think I'd do it!" he demanded.
Oh, he's told me a little, from time to time.
I can see that now.
"Listen!
The town, aware now of the stupendous change that had come to the fortunes of the Burton family, stared, gossiped, shook wise heads of prophecy, then passed on to the next sensation--which happened to be the return of four soldiers from across the seas; three crippled, one blinded.
"Oh, Susan, if we only could!" A dawning hope had come into Keith Burton's face, but almost at once it faded into gray disappointment. "We couldn't do it, though, Susan.
"Yes, you're quite right--John wouldn't know a thing about it," broke in Keith, with a passion so sudden and bitter that Susan fell back in dismay.
His mother told me.
He couldn't do it.
"John McGuire.
No, no, don't look like that," she protested hurriedly, as Keith began to frown.
Keith shook his head.
I could hear it.
Now, tell me, what is it?"
However, we'll see.
But, Keith, couldn't YOU do it?--take it down, I mean, as he talked, like a stylographer?"
And to hear him tell it--it was wonderful, wonderful!"
Why, Susan, I could see it--SEE it, I tell you, and, oh, I did so want to be there to help.
Even one man counted there--counted for, oh, so much!--for at the last there was just one man left----John McGuire.
His step was slow, his head was bowed.
"It would--help some." Keith drew in his breath and held it a moment suspended.
But Susan, John McGuire wouldn't TELL it to HIM.
He's nervous as a witch since he quit his job."
He's only begun to practice a little bit.
He looked like anything but the happy possessor of new wealth.
You want others to hear it--what you heard--don't you?"
Tell me that?"
But I couldn't, I know I couldn't.
"I wish I could.
There could be only one end to such a struggle--THE end.
'Well, Arthur?'
'But why Mrs Sherwin?
A few callers had called. Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of sympathy.
You really must try to think of--of us all.'
I am a poor one to preach, I am afraid; but you know what that will mean--a worse breakdown still.
'Ask me not to come back,' he said; 'that's nearer your hope.' He turned his face to the fire.
'Now, speaking quite frankly, what is it in you suggests these remarks at such a time? That's what baffles me.
Lawford eyed her coldly and stubbornly--thinking of the empty room he would leave awaiting his return, its lamp burning, its fire-flames shining.
'I am going out.'
You have scarcely touched anything to-day, Arthur.
'Oh yes; poor child, she looks so pale and miserable.
Honestly, Arthur, when I think over it calmly, the whole tragedy comes back on me with such a force it sweeps me off my feet; I am for the moment scarcely my own mistress.
The very monotony had eased his mind.
'Yes, a suicide; that's why our Christian countrymen have buried him outside of the fold.
'Perhaps,' he said, 'you will give me the pleasure of some day continuing our talk.
'Answer back?'
There's a tombstone near that little old hawthorn, and there are two others side by side under the wall, still even legibly late seventeenth century.
And a sheer enormous abyss of silence seemed to follow the unanswerable question.
His companion leant his hand on the old stooping tombstone.
'But it is an absolutely new one to me.
'Often,' said the stranger rather curtly.
It's narrow quarters; how would he begin?'
'Has anything--ever--occurred?'
My name is Herbert--Herbert Herbert to be precise.'
'It's astonishingly quiet and beautiful,' he said.
The congregation is rapt.'
'is Lawford--at least...' It was really the first time that either had seen the other's face at close quarters and clear-lit; and on Lawford's a moon almost at the full shone dazzlingly.
'Call and see!' taunted the stranger softly.
Lawford took out his watch, 'You are really very kind,' he said.
I fancied I was his only friend.
It's the old story of Bluebeard.
But there, it's merely a matter of time, I suppose.' He paused, and together they slowly ascended the path already glimmering with a heavy dew.
He made another effort--for conversation with strangers had always been a difficulty to him--and advanced towards the seat.
It was almost too dark now to distinguish the stranger's features but there seemed a faint suggestion of irony in his voice.
'Mine,' he said, handing it gravely to his companion.
'But, surely,' said Lawford, 'was it so entirely a matter of choice--the laws of the Church?
Lawford took out his pocket-book and a card.
'It's a flat wooden house, on the left-hand side.
He could hear a steady, rather nasal voice through its open lattices.
'What is it?' he cried, hastily stooping close.
The stranger turned with a little shrug.
'Of course, of course,' said Lawford eagerly.
wouldn't you?' he added.
'I have no privileges here; at least as yet.'
'But I believe in the resurrection of the body; that is what we say; and supposing, when a man dies--supposing it was most frightfully against one's will; that one hated the awful inaction that death brings, shutting a poor devil up like a child kicking against the door in a dark cupboard; one might surely one might--just quietly, you know, try to get out?
The stranger raised his eyebrows.
Lawford's mind was as calm and shallow as a millpond.
There was a low rotting wall of stone encompassing Sabathier's grave; on this the stranger sat down.
May I venture to ask why you are interested in the poor old thing?'
'And how do you suppose your angry naughty child would set about it?
After all, it's not when a thing is, but what it is, that much matters.
'Yes, it is, very,' he replied.
He would not be seen down there.
At the porch they paused once more.
'It is my own modest fashion of attending divine service.
The old stone church with its square tower stood amid trees, its eastern window faintly aglow with crimson and purple.
He saw an expression--dismay, incredulity, overwhelming astonishment--start suddenly into the dark, rather indifferent eyes.
Perhaps to-morrow?'
'Why,' said the other, laughing and turning away, 'I think the moon must have bewitched me too.'
He glanced up rather curiously at his companion.
The stranger turned away from him.
'You say--I hope I am not detaining you--you say you have come here, sat here often, on this very seat; have you ever had--have you ever fallen asleep here?'
Dead or alive, they try to keep the wolf out.'
Lawford sat quite still.
Come at any time of the evening'; he paused again and smiled--'the third house after the Rectory, which is marked up on the gate.
'"For in that sleep of death what dreams may come must give us pause,"' he said slowly, with a little satirical catch on the last word.
There was the faintest accent, a little drawl of unfriendliness in the remark.
But she's still sleep-walking while these old tombstones dream.
'Is this, then, unconsecrated ground?' said Lawford.
If he did kill himself, he did.'
'To tell you the truth,' he replied, picking his way as it were from word to word, 'it's "history," as people call it, does not interest me in the least.
'But, perhaps--well, whatever that history may be, I think you would agree that mine is even--but, there, I've talked too much about myself already.
'You mustn't please let me intrude upon you,' he said, 'but really I am very interested in this queer old place.
'I don't suppose it's a matter of much consequence to HIM.
Even if you don't.'
'I am afraid,' called Lawford rather nervously--'I hope I am not intruding?'
Good God!' said Lawford, 'how he must have wanted to get home!
You will forgive my intrusion?' There was a kind of old-fashioned courtesy in his manner that he himself was dimly aware of.
'Of course, the church itself is centuries older, drenched with age.
You came here for solitude, and I have been trying to convince you that we are surrounded with witnesses.
'You say you often come?'
There was also Sir Richard Grenville, immortalized by Tennyson in "The Revenge," and John Pascoe Grenville, the right-hand man of Admiral Cochrane, who boarded the Spanish admiral's ship, the Esmeralda, on the port side, while Cochrane came up on the starboard, when together they made short work of the capture.
"As the Lord wills, whether for wreck or service, I am about His business." On November 9th of the preceding year, the King of England gave one of his "Birthday Honors" to the same man, making him a Companion of St. Michael and St. George (C.M.G.).
A couple of terms at Queen's College, Oxford, followed the London experience, but here the conditions were too easy and luxurious for one who, by both inheritance and training, had within him the incentive to the strenuous life.
The eldest fought with distinction throughout the Indian Mutiny and in the defence of Lucknow, and another commanded the crack cavalry regiment, the "Guides," at Peshawar, and fell fighting in one of the turbulent North of India wars.
"He was a man of much learning, with a keen interest in science, a remarkable eloquence, and a fervent evangelistic faith."
Mostyn House School still stands, enlarged and modernized, in the charge of Dr. Grenfell's elder brother, and in it his mother is still the real head and controlling genius.
On his father's side were the Grenvilles, who made good account of themselves in such cause as they approved, among them Basil Grenville, commander of the Royalist Cornish Army, killed at Lansdown in 1643 in defence of King Charles.
"Four wheels to Charles's wain: Grenville, Trevanion, Slanning, Godolphin slain."
With these fitting words was presented a man whose simple faith has been the motive power of his works, to whom pain and weariness of flesh have called no stay since there was discouragement never, to whom personal danger has counted as nothing since fear is incomprehensible.
Of teachers, there was Dr. Grenfell's paternal grandfather, the Rev. Algernon Grenfell, the second of three brothers, house master at Rugby under Arnold, and a fine classical scholar, whose elder and younger brothers each felt the ancestral call of the sea and became admirals, with brave records of daring and success.
Parkgate, at one time a seaport of renown, when Liverpool was still unimportant, and later a seaside health resort to which came the fashion and beauty of England, had fallen, through the silting of the estuary and the broadening of the "Sands of Dee," to the level of a hamlet in the time of Dr. Grenfell's boyhood.
"A citizen of Britain is before you, once a student in this University, now better known to the people of the New World than to our own.
The broad stretch of seaward trending sand, with its interlacing rivulets of fresh and brackish water, made a tempting though treacherous playground, alluring alike in the varied forms of life it harbored and in the adventure which whetted exploration.
Thus, up to the measure of human ability, he seems to follow, if it is right to say it of any one, in the footsteps of Christ Himself, as a truly Christian man.
"When you set out to commend your gospel to men who don't want it, there's only one way to go about it,--to do something for them that they'll be sure to understand.
From the school-days at Parkgate came the step to Marlborough College, where three years were marked by earnest study, both in books and in play, for the one gained a scholarship and the other an enduring interest in Rugby football.
The conditions of the life were onerous, the existing traffic in spirituous liquors and in all other demoralizing influences had to be fought step by step, prejudice and evil habit had to be overcome and to be replaced by better knowledge and better desire, there was room for both fighting and teaching, and the medical mission won its way.
Rightly then we praise him by whose praise not he alone, but our University also is honored.
"MOST NOBLE VICE-CHANCELLOR, AND YOU, EMINENT PROCTORS:
With plenty of work to the fore, as a hospital interne, the ruling spirit still asserted itself, and the young doctor became an inspiration among the waifs of the teeming city; he was one of the founders of the great Lads' Brigades which have done much good, and fostered more, in the example that they have set for allied activities.
Nor were the needs of his own bodily machine neglected; football, rowing, and the tennis court kept him in condition, and his athletics served to strengthen his appeals to the London boys whom he enrolled in the brigades.
Need called, misery appealed, the message of life, of hope, and of salvation awaited, and the young doctor turned from Oxford to the medical mission work in which his record stands among the foremost for its effectiveness and for the spirituality of its purpose.
To accomplish this, to make of the scattered settlements a united and independent people, to safeguard their future by such measures as the establishment of a Seamen's Institute at St. John's, Newfoundland, and the insurance of communication with the outside world, and to raise, by personal solicitation, the money needed for these enterprises, requires an unusual personality.
On his mother's side, four of her brothers were generals or colonels in the trying times of service in India.
In these excursions the youthful Wilfred was a participant, and therein he learned some of his first lessons in that accuracy of observation essential to his later life work.
Algernon Sydney Grenfell and Jane Georgiana Hutchinson, was born on the twenty-eighth day of February, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, at Mostyn House School, Parkgate, by Chester, England, of an ancestry which laid a firm foundation for his career and in surroundings which fitted him for it.
This is the man who fifteen years ago went to the coast of Labrador, to succor with medical aid the solitary fishermen of the northern sea; in executing which service he despised the perils of the ocean, which are there most terrible, in order to bring comfort and light to the wretched and sorrowing.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
On both sides of his inheritance have been exhibited the courage, patience, persistence, and fighting and teaching qualities which are exemplified in his own abilities to command, to administer, and to uplift.
Matriculating later at the University of London, Grenfell entered the London Hospital, and there laid not only the foundation of his medical education, but that of his friendship with Sir Frederick Treves, renowned surgeon and daring sailor and master mariner as well.
He founded the inter-hospital rowing club at Putney and rowed in the first inter-hospital race; he played on the Varsity football team, and won the "throwing the hammer" at the sports.
Dr. Grenfell's father, after a brilliant career at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, became assistant master at Repton, and later, when he married, head master of Mostyn House School, a position which he resigned in 1882 to become Chaplain of the London Hospital.
Thither came Charles Kingsley, Canon of Chester, who married a Grenfell, and who coupled his verse with scientific study and made geological excursions to the river's mouth with the then Master of Mostyn House School.
ADRIFT ON AN ICE-PAN
Nor has the strain died out, as is demonstrated in the present generation by many of Dr. Grenfell's cousins, among them General Francis Wallace Grenfell, Lord Kilvey, and by Dr. Grenfell himself on the Labrador in the fight against disease and disaster and distress along a stormy and uncharted coast.
Seeking some way in which he could satisfy his medical aspirations, as well as his desire for adventure and for definite Christian work, he appealed to Sir Frederick Treves, a member of the Council of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, who suggested his joining the staff of the mission and establishing a medical mission to the fishermen of the North Sea.
It was not the one he had anticipated, but it came near to it. It was that of James Wellgood.
He could stop this stranger in mid-street, with some plausible excuse, but it did not follow that he would succeed in luring him to the hotel where Mr. Grey could see him.
But that was nothing.
"He is a patent-medicine man," he then explained, "and manufactures his own concoctions in a house he has rented here on a lonely road some half-mile out of town."
He replied with a decided no; that it was not his adventure which had upset him, but the news he had to bring.
Not till he had found what he wished, and installed the Englishman in his room, did he venture to open the precious memorandum and read the name he had been speculating over for an hour.
The man behind the boxes was used to the name and reached out a hand toward a box unusually well stacked, but stopped half-way there and gave Sweetwater a sharp look.
"Ask Dick over there; he knows him."
If it sells as he says it will--then he will soon be rich: and so on, till Sweetwater brought the garrulous Dick to a standstill by asking whether Wellgood had been away for any purpose since he first came to town.
Once on the platform of the small station at which Mr. Grey had bidden him to stop, he noticed two things: the utter helplessness of the man in all practical matters, and his extreme anxiety to see all that was going on about him without being himself seen.
"I want you to get me a room at a very quiet hotel.
Mr. Grey was a very stately man, difficult of approach, and was absorbed, besides, by some overwhelming care.
Sauntering to the door, he watched for the owner of that buggy.
Money for this, money for that, a horse where another man would walk, and mail--well, that alone would make this post-office worth while.
For a hardy chap he looked strangely nervous and indisposed, so much so that, after the first short greeting, the inspector asked him what was up, and if he had had another Fairbrother-house experience.
Count them, some one, and think of the bottles and bottles of stuff they stand for.
"I must see him.
Mr. Grey rose precipitately.
Sweetwater had just come to town,--this was evident from the gripsack he had set down in a corner on entering, also from a certain tousled appearance which bespoke hasty rising and but few facilities for proper attention to his person.
"Yes; Wellgood, James Wellgood.
Then the district attorney, with one glance at the inspector, rose and locked the door.
They produced a most unhappy sensation.
His calculation was a correct one.
I thought, perhaps, you could tell me where to find him.
I see that his letters pass through this office."
Sweetwater took the opportunity to slide away.
This was a great stroke of luck, he thought, but he little knew how big a stroke or into what a series of adventures it was going to lead him.
"Who are you?" he asked.
The train on which he had just come had been a mail-train, and he calculated that he would find half the town there.
In this way he would soon be looking upon the very man whose steps he had followed through the Fairbrother house a few nights before, and through whose resolute action he had very nearly run the risk of a lingering death from starvation.
The detective had just been with Mr. Grey to the coast of Maine. Why there, will presently appear.
These details counted little, however, in the astonishment created by his manner.
Here he learned whatever else there was to know, and, armed with definite information, he appeared before Mr. Grey, who, to his astonishment, was dining in his own room.
Two of them were officials--the district attorney himself, and our old friend, the inspector.
How, then, go to work to secure his cooperation in a scheme possibly as mysterious to him as it was to himself?
But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England.
It is as easy as lying; because it is lying. The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth. I find myself under the same intolerable bondage.
I add one purely pedantic note which comes, as a note naturally should, at the beginning of the book.
But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.
What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again?
Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth.
I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.
These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact that the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics.
It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed.
Beyond stating what he proposes to prove he should always state what he does not propose to prove. The thing I do not propose to prove, the thing I propose to take as common ground between myself and any average reader, is this desirability of an active and imaginative life, picturesque and full of a poetical curiosity, a life such as western man at any rate always seems to have desired.
I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible. If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes.
While everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same.
When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed.
We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable. It is THIS achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.
Many critics complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge.
And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.
And I was punished in the fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not mine.
I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century.
I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it.
But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale.
For the very word "romance" has in it the mystery and ancient meaning of Rome. Any one setting out to dispute anything ought always to begin by saying what he does not dispute.
I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull.
I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool.
Gilbert K. Chesterton.
To show that a faith or a philosophy is true from every standpoint would be too big an undertaking even for a much bigger book than this; it is necessary to follow one path of argument; and this is the path that I here propose to follow.
The man from the yacht thought he was the first to find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe.
What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book.
What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there?
THE only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge.
This is a LibriVox recording.
If a man says that extinction is better than existence or blank existence better than variety and adventure, then he is not one of the ordinary people to whom I am talking. If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.
PREFACE
They are not intended to discuss the very fascinating but quite different question of what is the present seat of authority for the proclamation of that creed.
How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
This book is meant to be a companion to "Heretics," and to put the positive side in addition to the negative.
It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths.
This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography.
I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it.
It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer.
This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things. Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric.
The only thing which is still old-fashioned enough to reject miracles is the New Theology. But in truth this notion that it is "free" to deny miracles has nothing to do with the evidence for or against them.
For freeing the church now does not even mean freeing it in all directions.
But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.
It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch.
We concluded the last chapter with the discovery of one of them.
The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those quite opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.
But in the case of the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely a similarity.
I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them.
The author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different.
We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves.
If you wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible--but you cannot think it illiberal. If you really want poor children to go to the seaside, you cannot think it illiberal that they should go there on flying dragons; you can only think it unlikely.
It is often suggested that all Liberals ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that is free.
There was indeed. Those words have a profound and even a horrible truth.
A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society.
These scraps of puerile pedantry would indeed matter little if it were not also true that the alleged philosophical resemblances are also of these two kinds, either proving too much or not proving anything.
You may walk round and round them and subject them to the most personal and offensive study without seeing anything Swedenborgian in the hat or anything particularly godless in the umbrella.
Here is a case. There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach."
Most of humanity agrees that there is some way out. But as to what is the way out, I do not think that there are two institutions in the universe which contradict each other so flatly as Buddhism and Christianity.
Just in the same way he calls the desire for immortality a paltry selfishness, forgetting that he has just called the desire for life a healthy and heroic selfishness. How can it be noble to wish to make one's life infinite and yet mean to wish to make it immortal?
Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.
This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all.
And those who assist this process are called the "liberal theologians."
In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself.
A miracle only means the liberty of God. You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea.
It is exactly the opposite. They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts.
Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about.
It is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the two ceremonies of the sword: when it taps a man's shoulder, and when it cuts off his head.
You might as well say that it was a remarkable coincidence that they both had feet to wash.
The thing is a mere accident of words.
The second example of it can be found in the question of pantheism--or rather of a certain modern attitude which is often called immanentism, and which often is Buddhism. But this is so much more difficult a matter that I must approach it with rather more preparation.
The Catholic Church believed that man and God both had a sort of spiritual freedom. Calvinism took away the freedom from man, but left it to God. Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil.
Students of popular science, like Mr. Blatchford, are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.
Tennyson, a very typical nineteenth century man, uttered one of the instinctive truisms of his contemporaries when he said that there was faith in their honest doubt.
But I must pass on to the larger cases of this curious error; the notion that the "liberalising" of religion in some way helps the liberation of the world.
But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think.
Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.
Thus, as a case of the first class, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal-cellar.
Sometimes this truth is ignored in a singularly naive way, even by the ablest men. For instance, Mr. Bernard Shaw speaks with hearty old-fashioned contempt for the idea of miracles, as if they were a sort of breach of faith on the part of nature: he seems strangely unconscious that miracles are only the final flowers of his own favourite tree, the doctrine of the omnipotence of will.
But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so; because they mean first, the freedom of the soul, and secondly, its control over the tyranny of circumstance.
Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world.
It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard.
It is not at all similar for the man.
I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
In fact, it is a remarkable circumstance (indeed not so very remarkable when one comes to think of it) that most things are the allies of oppression. There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy.
The doctrine seemingly most unpopular was found to be the only strength of the people. In short, we found that the only logical negation of oligarchy was in the affirmation of original sin.
It is common to find trouble in a parish because the parish priest cannot admit that St. Peter walked on water; yet how rarely do we find trouble in a parish because the clergyman says that his father walked on the Serpentine?
This great publication marks an era in astronomy.
So he set out the whole weary way again, and said that with those eight minutes he would yet find out the law of the universe.
He specially attacked the motion of the planet Mars, because that was sufficiently rapid in its changes for a considerable collection of data to have accumulated with respect to it.
To simplify calculation, he divided the orbit into triangles, and tried if making the triangles equal would do.
Ultimately he was sent to a monastic school and thence to the University of Tuebingen, where he graduated second on the list.
Mars was finally conquered, and remains in his prison-house to this day.
Death of Rudolph in 1612, and subsequent increased misery and misfortune of Kepler.
A man of keen imagination, indomitable perseverance, and uncompromising love of truth, Kepler overcame ill-health, poverty, and misfortune, and placed himself in the very highest rank of scientific men.
But now that Kepler had the accurate observations of Tycho to refer to, he found immense difficulty in obtaining the true positions of the planets for long together on any such theory.
We do not find that his circumstances were ever prosperous, and though 8,000 crowns were due to him from Bohemia he could not manage to get them paid.
The other, poor, sickly, devoid of experimental gifts, and unfitted by nature for accurate observation, but strong almost beyond competition in speculative subtlety and innate mathematical perception.
KEPLER AND THE LAWS OF PLANETARY MOTION
For two months you have liberally and gratuitously maintained me, and my whole family; you have provided for all my wishes; you have done me every possible kindness; you have communicated to me everything you hold most dear; no one, by word or deed, has intentionally injured me in anything; in short, not to your children, your wife, or yourself have you shown more indulgence than to me.
The equants might divide the line in any arbitrary ratio.
To illustrate Tycho's kindness and generosity, I must read you a letter written to him by Kepler.
Tycho accepted the apology thus heartily rendered, and the temporary breach was permanently healed.
Those which failed seem to us now fanciful, those which succeeded appear to us sublime.
I shall only sketch in its broad features, so that we may have more time to attend to his work.
Is there any connection between their orbital distances, or between their orbits and the times of describing them? These things tormented him, and he thought about them day and night.
He gave a very accurate explanation of the action of the human eye, and made many hypotheses, some of them shrewd and close to the mark, concerning the law of refraction of light in dense media: but though several minor points of interest turned up, nothing of the first magnitude came out of this long research.
Aristotle had taught that circular motion was the only perfect and natural motion, and that the heavenly bodies therefore necessarily moved in circles.
If for any reason the earth had to be placed out of the centre, the main planetary orbit was called an Excentric, and so on.
On his way to Prague he was seized with one of his periodical illnesses, and all his means were exhausted by the time he could set forward again, so that he had to apply for help to Tycho.
Grope he did, however, with unexampled diligence.
In 1620 had to intervene to protect his mother from being tortured for witchcraft.
At last he determined to pay for the type himself.
This honour, however, gave Kepler no satisfaction--it rather occasioned him dismay, especially as it deprived him of all pecuniary benefit, and made it almost impossible for him to get a publisher to undertake another book.
A great piece of luck, they did beautifully: the rate of description of areas (not arcs) is uniform.
In fact, Kepler could not get even his own salary paid: he got orders, and promises, and drafts on estates for it; but when the time came for them to be honoured they were worthless, and he had no power to enforce his claims.
LECTURE III
About this time occurred a singular interruption to his work.
Something of the laws of cyclone and anticyclone are known, and rude weather predictions across the Atlantic are roughly possible.
One most disheartening circumstance appeared, viz. that when he made the circuit oval his law of equable description of areas broke down.
But what about the shape of the orbit--Was it after all possible that Aristotle, and every philosopher since Aristotle, had been wrong?
His laws, so extraordinarily discovered, introduced order and simplicity into what else would have been a chaos of detailed observations; and they served as a secure basis for the splendid erection made on them by Newton.
All the complications of epicycle, equant, deferent, excentric, and the like, were swept at once away, and an orbit of striking and beautiful properties substituted.
The book in which this law was published ("On Celestial Harmonies") was dedicated to James of England.
Kepler repents instantly, and replies:--
"While thus triumphing over Mars, and preparing for him, as for one already vanquished, tabular prisons and equated excentric fetters, it is buzzed here and there that the victory is vain, and that the war is raging anew as violently as before.
But fortunately this time there was a connection, and he lived to have the joy of discovering it.
When in search of what really existed he sometimes found it; when in pursuit of a chimaera he could not but fail; but in either case he displayed the same great qualities, and that obstinate perseverance which must conquer all difficulties except those really insurmountable."
Well, he tried the ellipse, and to his inexpressible delight he found that it did satisfy the condition of equable description of areas, if the sun was in one focus.
It matters little one way or the other whether Germany, having almost refused him bread during his life, should, a century and a half after his death, offer him a stone.
Brewster says of him:--"Ardent, restless, burning to distinguish himself by discovery, he attempted everything; and once having obtained a glimpse of a clue, no labour was too hard in following or verifying it.
He tried all manner of circular orbits for the earth and for Mars, placing them in all sorts of aspects with respect to the sun.
This also Kepler made continual attempts to discover.
Much, nevertheless, he did; more one cannot but feel he might have done had he been properly helped.
Still he worked on at the Rudolphine tables of Tycho, and ultimately, with some small help from Vienna, completed them; but he could not get the means to print them.
Thus he announces it himself:--
Meanwhile home affairs had gone to rack and ruin. His father abandoned the home, and later died abroad.
A change of judge having in process of time occurred, the defendant saw his way to turn the tables on the old lady by accusing her of sorcery.
This being remembered, it will be found that his methods do not differ so utterly from those used by other philosophers in like case.
Nowadays, we should simply record the fact and look out for a seventh.
He says:--"The intense pleasure I have received from this discovery can never be told in words. I regretted no more the time wasted; I tired of no labour; I shunned no toil of reckoning, days and nights spent in calculation, until I could see whether my hypothesis would agree with the orbits of Copernicus, or whether my joy was to vanish into air."
He had been there eleven years, but they had been hard years of poverty, and he could leave without regret were it not that he should have to leave Tycho's instruments and observations behind him.
So firmly had this idea become rooted in men's minds, that no one ever seems to have contemplated the possibility of its being false or meaningless.
One of his ideas concerning the law of the successive distances was based on the inscription of a triangle in a circle.
While Bohemia suffered, however, the world has benefited at his hands; and the tables upon which Tycho was now engaged are well called the Rudolphine tables.
Nevertheless, the idea gave him great delight.
A few of his attempts succeeded--a multitude failed.
Well, he speedily became a thorough Copernican, and as he had a most singularly restless and inquisitive mind, full of appreciation of everything relating to number and magnitude--was a born speculator and thinker just as Mozart was a born musician, or Bidder a born calculator--he was agitated by questions such as these: Why are there exactly six planets?
If you forgive me, I rejoice; if you are angry, I can bear it; the die is cast, the book is written, to be read either now or by posterity, I care not which; it may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer."
Frederick and Sophia of Denmark, and Rudolph of Bohemia, are therefore to be remembered as co-workers with him.
He succeeded in saving her from the torture, but she remained in prison for a year or so.
He applied to the Court till he was sick of applying: they lay idle four years.
Away he started through his calculations again.
His parents seem to have been of fair condition, but by reason, it is said, of his becoming surety for a friend, the father lost all his slender income, and was reduced to keeping a tavern.
that circular motion was not the perfect and natural motion, but that planets might move in some other closed curve?
But his methods were the same.
This (however stated) is called Kepler's third law.
Tycho immediately replied, "Come, not as a stranger, but as a very welcome friend; come and share in my observations with such instruments as I have with me, and as a dearly beloved associate." After this visit, Tycho wrote again, offering him the post of mathematical assistant, which after hesitation was accepted.
The one, rich, noble, vigorous, passionate, strong in mechanical ingenuity and experimental skill, but not above the average in theoretical and mathematical power.
His rapture on detecting the law was unbounded, and he breaks out into an exulting rhapsody:--
The science of the weather, the succession of winds and rain, sunshine and frost, clouds and fog, is now very much in the condition of astronomy before Kepler.
In a paroxysm of delight Kepler celebrates his victory by a triumphant figure, sketched actually on his geometrical diagram--the diagram which proves that the law of equable description of areas can hold good with an ellipse.
Now, however, the geometrical and mathematical difficulties of calculation, which before had been tedious and oppressive, threatened to become overwhelming; and it is with a rising sense of despondency that Kepler sees his six years' unremitting labour leading deeper and deeper into complication.
Published the Rudolphine tables in 1627, embodying Tycho's observations and his own theory.
It might well have been that there was no connection, that it was purely imaginary, like his old idea of the law of the successive distances of the planets, and like so many others of the guesses and fancies which he entertained and spent his energies in probing.
Suppose he tried an oval.
He then went on to speculate as to the cause of the planets' motion. The old idea was that they were carried round by angels or celestial intelligences.
A long course of work night and day was rewarded by finding that he was now able to hit off the motions better than before; but what a singularly complicated motion it was.
The outward life of Kepler is to a large extent a mere record of poverty and misfortune.
He was a sickly lad, subject to violent illnesses from the cradle, so that his life was frequently despaired of.
But take some other science still barely developed: meteorology, for instance.
Such is a crude and bald sketch of the steps by which Kepler rose to his great generalizations--the two laws which have immortalized his name.
All the children stood with folded hands and sang.
How could that happen?"
"Why don't you come oftener up on the cliff?" said he.
They all looked up as Oeyvind and his mother entered, and as he was going to find a seat they all wanted to make room for him.
"Come, make haste!" said grandpapa, up on the hill; and Marit rose, and walked with reluctant feet upwards.
"Yes, just like this; I have a goat now," she said.
"You are not forgetting your garter?" Oeyvind cried after her.
"Grandpapa knows one about a dance.
"I have taken such a fancy to the goat.
"Thank you!"
He would not confess immediately.
"Is it you who have come with it?"
"Yes, very much."
One fine day the goat leaped down, and away to the cliff; he went straight up, and came where he never had been before.
"Here it is," she said, and threw it down.
"They would not let me keep it; grandfather is sitting up there, waiting."
He looked up at the girl.
Oeyvind looked up. She got up, and began pulling at the goat.
"Oh, nothing to thank for!" she answered, but drew a long sigh, and walked on.
"What! have you got back?"
"Oh, the goat, the goat!"
And she told him what they all said, down to the ant who crawled in the moss, and the worm who worked in the bark.
"Is it always like this here?" he whispered to Marit.
"Grandpapa does too, you can believe."
He gathered up every bit with the utmost care; he could not help tasting the very smallest, and that was so good he had to taste another, and, before he knew it himself, he had eaten up the whole cake.
The boy stopped with the last bit in his mouth, the girl lay and laughed, and the goat stood by her side, with white breast and dark brown hair, looking sideways down.
"What has become of the goat?"
says the cock."
Oeyvind and Marit also folded their hands, but they could not sing.
Oeyvind did not see him when he came out after dinner, and thought immediately of the fox.
But then came the cock, with all the hens.
She had covered her face with both hands, and sat peeping at him through her fingers.
His mother came up humming from the beach, with wooden pans which she had scoured; she saw the boy sitting with his legs crossed under him on the grass, crying, and she went up to him.
But beside the goat there kneeled a little girl.
"What are you crying about?"
It was as if the touch of that shadow had loosed a powerful spring.
This particular kind of owl, as he knew, was a most formidable antagonist; but with his substantial weight and his long, punishing jaws, he felt himself much more than a match for her.
There were still some trout left, but he wanted to get away.
In any case, the attraction seldom fails.
The mink stuffed himself till he could not get another mouthful down. There were still a couple of trout untouched.
The hole in the top of the basket, though he might have squeezed his head through it, was not large enough to let him reach the fish.
Beneath the bank was an old musquash hole which he was well acquainted with.
It seemed easy enough to get them.
Half a dozen of the finest fish he took out and strung upon a forked twig.
And, anyhow, he saw that the horse was tethered to the tree.
By all means, let the mink stay in there.
Selecting a fish to his taste, he ate it at great leisure, leaving the head and the tail upon the grass.
He simply shot from his place, at such speed that the eye could not distinguish how he did it, and in the minutest fraction of a second was curled within the empty fishing-basket, which still lay on its side, half open.
Satisfied at length that there was no danger within range, the mink glided up to the wagon.
He could not imagine a fiery-tempered personage like the mink tamely submitting to the rape of his banquet.
But the fox had no thought of returning.
Trust in my promise, for it is true."
"Let us out, dear Pandora--pray let us out!
"And, besides, I never do have any. This ugly box!
The child could not quite satisfy herself whether she had heard anything or no. But, at all events, her curiosity was stronger than ever.
"But until Quicksilver comes back and tells us so, we have neither of us any right to lift the lid of the box."
How shall I make him believe that I have not looked into the box?"
Suddenly there was a gentle little tap on the inside of the lid.
And so perhaps she might, if the enchanted face on the lid of the box had not looked so bewitchingly persuasive at her, and if she had not seemed to hear, more distinctly, than before, the murmur of small voices within.
I need not open the box, and should not, of course, without the foolish boy's consent, even if the knot were untied."
But then that lovely and lightsome little figure of Hope!
Her name was Pandora.
Still, however, she could not help thinking and talking about the box.
Neither did he himself know what ailed him, any better than they did.
It supplied her with such a variety of ideas to think of, and to talk about, whenever she had anybody to listen!
"Pandora, what are you thinking of?" exclaimed Epimetheus.
What a beautiful day it was!
But just then, by the merest accident, she gave the knot a kind of twist, which produced a wonderful result.
"Pray, who are you, beautiful creature?" inquired Pandora.
"I know him," said Pandora, thoughtfully.
Even Epimetheus would not blame me for that.
The gold cord untwined itself, as if by magic, and left the box without a fastening.
"Oh, the most curious staff you ever saw!" cried Epimetheus.
"And what in the world can be inside of it?"
The truth is, those ugly little winged monsters, called Troubles, which are now almost as numerous as mosquitoes, had never yet been seen on the earth.
"Nobody else has such a staff. It was Quicksilver; and he brought me hither, as well as the box.
As she drew back her head, her eyes fell upon the knot of gold cord.
She was crying bitterly, and sobbing as if her heart would break.
When life is all sport, toil is the real play.
A sweet little voice spoke from within--
"What can that be?" cried Pandora, lifting her head.
Come, come, my pretty Pandora!
Do you think that you should be less curious than Pandora?
Oh, fie! No, no! Only, if you thought there were toys in it, it would be so very hard to let slip an opportunity of taking just one peep!
Then, everybody was a child.
I am resolved, at least, to find the two ends of the cord."
"But who gave it to you?" asked Pandora.
The fingers of little girls, it has always appeared to me, are the fittest to twine flower wreaths; but boys could do it, in those days, rather better than they can now.
"My dear little Pandora," answered Epimetheus, "that is a secret, and you must be kind enough not to ask any questions about it.
What in the world could we do without her?
But either Epimetheus had not heard the tap, or was too much out of humour to notice it.
Only let us out!"
At any rate, he made no answer.
"I wish, dear Pandora, you would try to talk of something else.
"Always talking about grapes and figs!" cried Pandora, pettishly.
Again the tap!
She was too intent upon her purpose.
He could not find a sweet grape or a ripe fig (if Epimetheus had a fault, it was a little too much fondness for figs); or, if ripe at all, they were overripe, and so sweet as to be cloying.
I have the greatest mind in the world to run away!"
You need never think that I shall be so foolish as to let you out!"
Pandora stopped to listen.
Or was it merely the singing in Pandora's ears? Or could it be the beating of her heart?
"Oh tell us," they exclaimed--"tell us what it is!"
"And what of it?"
He entered softly, for he meant, if possible, to steal behind Pandora, and fling the wreath of flowers over her head, before she should be aware of his approach.
"What will Epimetheus say?
Or, if she chanced to be ill-tempered, she could give it a push, or kick it with her naughty little foot.
And many a kick did the box--(but it was a mischievous box, as we shall see, and deserved all it got)--many a kick did it receive.
I am so taken up with thinking about it all the time.
"And where did it come from?"
Ah, naughty Pandora!
Yes, my dear children, and I know something very good and beautiful that is to be given you hereafter!"
"What a dull boy he is!" muttered Pandora, as Epimetheus left the cottage.
"That face looks very mischievous," thought Pandora.
There needed no fathers and mothers to take care of the children; because there was no danger, nor trouble of any kind, and no clothes to be mended, and there was always plenty to eat and drink.
Naughty Pandora! why have you opened this wicked box?"
"It was like two serpents twisting around a stick, and was carved so naturally that I, at first, thought the serpents were alive."
Corollary II.--It follows: 2.
Note.--Others think that God is a free cause, because he can, as they think, bring it about, that those things which we have said follow from his nature--that is, which are in his power, should not come to pass, or should not be produced by him.
That God is the sole free cause.
Further, although they conceive God as actually supremely intelligent, they yet do not believe that he can bring into existence everything which he actually understands, for they think that they would thus destroy God's power.
For if they could be changed in respect to existence, they must also be able to be changed in respect to essence--that is, obviously, be changed from true to false, which is absurd.
This manner of treating the question attributes to God an omnipotence, in my opinion, far more perfect.
God, therefore, is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
Moreover, I will show below, without the aid of this proposition, that neither intellect nor will appertain to God's nature.
For intellect and will, which should constitute the essence of God, would perforce be as far apart as the poles from the human intellect and will, in fact, would have nothing in common with them but the name; there would be about as much correspondence between the two as there is between the Dog, the heavenly constellation, and a dog, an animal that barks.
But this is the same as if they said, that God could bring it about, that it should follow from the nature of a triangle that its three interior angles should not be equal to two right angles; or that from a given cause no effect should follow, which is absurd.
of my "Principles of the Cartesian Philosophy"), I have proved the eternity of God, in another manner, which I need not here repeat.
Corollary III.--It follows, thirdly, that God is the absolutely first cause.
As, therefore, God's intellect is the sole cause of things, namely, both of their essence and existence, it must necessarily differ from them in respect to its essence, and in respect to its existence.
This seems to have been recognized by those who have asserted, that God's intellect, God's will, and God's power, are one and the same.
Corollary II.--It also follows that God is a cause in himself, and not through an accident of his nature.
Further (to say a word here concerning the intellect and the will which we attribute to God), if intellect and will appertain to the eternal essence of God, we must take these words in some significance quite different from those they usually bear.
Wherefore, in order to establish that God is perfect, we should be reduced to establishing at the same time, that he cannot bring to pass everything over which his power extends; this seems to be a hypothesis most absurd, and most repugnant to God's omnipotence.
This I will prove as follows.
Therefore the same attributes of God which explain his eternal essence, explain at the same time his eternal existence--in other words, that which constitutes God's essence constitutes at the same time his existence.
God, and all the attributes of God, are eternal.
Wherefore, a thing which is the cause both of the essence and of the existence of a given effect, must differ from such effect both in respect to its essence, and also in respect to its existence.
I know that there are many who think that they can show, that supreme intellect and free will do appertain to God's nature; for they say they know of nothing more perfect, which they can attribute to God, than that which is the highest perfection in ourselves.
This is our second point.
The existence of God and his essence are one and the same.
For a cause differs from a thing it causes, precisely in the quality which the latter gains from the former.
For, otherwise, we are compelled to confess that God understands an infinite number of creatable things, which he will never be able to create, for, if he created all that he understands, he would, according to this showing, exhaust his omnipotence, and render himself imperfect.
Extended substance, in so far as it is substance, consists, as they think, in parts, wherefore they deny that it can be infinite, or consequently, that it can appertain to God.
Corollary.--It follows, that no substance, and consequently no extended substance, in so far as it is substance, is divisible.
Perhaps there will be many who will be unable to see the force of this proof, inasmuch as they are accustomed only to consider those things which flow from external causes.
From the latter it must follow, either that a triangle necessarily exists, or that it is impossible that it should exist.
But these I pass over.
For if extended substance could be so divided that its parts were really separate, why should not one part admit of being destroyed, the others remaining joined together as before?
Thus, the perfection of a thing does not annul its existence, but, on the contrary, asserts it. Imperfection, on the other hand, does annul it; therefore we cannot be more certain of the existence of anything, than of the existence of a being absolutely infinite or perfect--that is, of God.
Lastly, if from a single point there be conceived to be drawn two diverging lines which at first are at a definite distance apart, but are produced to infinity, it is certain that the distance between the two lines will be continually increased, until at length it changes from definite to indefinable.
Hence we drew the conclusion that extended substance is one of the infinite attributes of God.
For, as the potentiality of existence is a power, it follows that, in proportion as reality increases in the nature of a thing, so also will it increase its strength for existence.
Surely in the case of things, which are really distinct one from the other, one can exist without the other, and can remain in its original condition.
Corollary II.--It follows: 2.
This reason or cause must either be contained in the nature of the thing in question, or be external to it.
Of this they find excellent proof in the fact that we understand by body a definite quantity, so long, so broad, so deep, bounded by a certain shape, and it is the height of absurdity to predicate such a thing of God, a being absolutely infinite.
Substance absolutely infinite is indivisible.
If, then, no cause or reason can be given, which prevents the existence of God, or which destroys his existence, we must certainly conclude that he necessarily does exist.
I answer, that quantity is conceived by us in two ways; in the abstract and superficially, as we imagine it; or as substance, as we conceive it solely by the intellect.
This will be plain enough to all who make a distinction between the intellect and the imagination, especially if it be remembered, that matter is everywhere the same, that its parts are not distinguishable, except in so far as we conceive matter as diversely modified, whence its parts are distinguished, not really, but modally.
I think I have now answered the second argument; it is, in fact, founded on the same assumption as the first--namely, that matter, in so far as it is substance, is divisible, and composed of parts.
For if it were of the same nature, God, by that very fact, would be admitted to exist.
But meanwhile by other reasons with which they try to prove their point, they show that they think corporeal or extended substance wholly apart from the divine nature, and say it was created by God.
It follows, therefore, that extended substance does not appertain to the essence of God.
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
On the other hand, the existence of substance follows also solely from its nature, inasmuch as its nature involves existence.
To make such an affirmation about a being absolutely infinite and supremely perfect is absurd; therefore, neither in the nature of God, nor externally to his nature, can a cause or reason be assigned which would annul his existence.
However, in order to explain more fully, I will refute the arguments of my adversaries, which all start from the following points:----
Note.--Some assert that God, like a man, consists of body and mind, and is susceptible of passions.
Things which are produced by external causes, whether they consist of many parts or few, owe whatsoever perfection or reality they possess solely to the efficacy of their external cause; and therefore their existence arises solely from the perfection of their external cause, not from their own.
If such a reason or cause should be given, it must either be drawn from the very nature of God, or be external to him--that is, drawn from another substance of another nature.
Proof.--If it could be divided, the parts into which it was divided would either retain the nature of absolutely infinite substance, or they would not.
Note.--In this last proof, I have purposely shown God's existence a posteriori, so that the proof might be more easily followed, not because, from the same premises, God's existence does not follow a priori.
As, then, there does not exist a vacuum in nature (of which anon), but all parts are bound to come together to prevent it, it follows from this that the parts cannot really be distinguished, and that extended substance in so far as it is substance cannot be divided.
So much is self--evident.
As these absurdities follow, it is said, from considering quantity as infinite, the conclusion is drawn, that extended substance must necessarily be finite, and, consequently, cannot appertain to the nature of God.
Further, if an infinite line be measured out in foot lengths, it will consist of an infinite number of such parts; it would equally consist of an infinite number of parts, if each part measured only an inch: therefore, one infinity would be twelve times as great as the other.
If anyone asks me the further question, Why are we naturally so prone to divide quantity?
All things, I repeat, are in God, and all things which come to pass, come to pass solely through the laws of the infinite nature of God, and follow (as I will shortly show) from the necessity of his essence.
Of such things, they see that those which quickly come to pass--that is, quickly come into existence--quickly also disappear; whereas they regard as more difficult of accomplishment--that is, not so easily brought into existence--those things which they conceive as more complicated.
If the former, then infinite substance is composed of two finite parts, which is absurd.
For instance, water, in so far as it is water, we conceive to be divided, and its parts to be separated one from the other; but not in so far as it is extended substance; from this point of view it is neither separated nor divisible.
For instance, the reason for the non--existence of a square circle is indicated in its nature, namely, because it would involve a contradiction.
Wherefore it can in nowise be said, that God is passive in respect to anything other than himself, or that extended substance is unworthy of the Divine nature, even if it be supposed divisible, so long as it is granted to be infinite and eternal.
If, from this absurdity of theirs, they persist in drawing the conclusion that extended substance must be finite, they will in good sooth be acting like a man who asserts that circles have the properties of squares, and, finding himself thereby landed in absurdities, proceeds to deny that circles have any center, from which all lines drawn to the circumference are equal.
Contrariwise, whatsoever perfection is possessed by substance is due to no external cause; wherefore the existence of substance must arise solely from its own nature, which is nothing else but its essence.
If the latter, then one infinite will be twice as large as another infinite, which is also absurd.
If extended substance, they say, is infinite, let it be conceived to be divided into two parts; each part will then be either finite or infinite.
If, then, that which necessarily exists is nothing but finite beings, such finite beings are more powerful than a being absolutely infinite, which is obviously absurd; therefore, either nothing exists, or else a being absolutely infinite necessarily exists also.
Another proof.--The potentiality of non--existence is a negation of power, and contrariwise the potentiality of existence is a power, as is obvious.
If it could be conceived, it would necessarily have to be conceived as existent; but this (by the first part of this proof) is absurd.
In our idle hours we always improved our higher selves by ratiocination and mental thought.
Five dollars for one--that's what J. Smith offers, and he'll have to keep his contract if he does business with Bill Murkison.'
He was a loud, red man, breathing hard, but fat and respectable beyond all reason.
"'Boys,' says Murkison, 'I've got it in my mind that them fellows can't fool me.
He wires J. Smith that he will set foot in the spider web on a given date; and the three of us lights out for Chicago.
You have a kind nucleus at the interior of your exterior after all.
Yes, I'd really take it as a pastime and regalement if you boys would go along too.'
You come up here to rob these men of their money.
"On the train Andy was a long time silent.
If it wasn't for you they'd go out of business. The green goods man you was going to rob,' says I, 'studied maybe for years to learn his trade.
I guess your high position there is worth more than $2,000 to you.'
"One summer me and Andy decided to rest up a spell in a fine little town in the mountains of Kentucky called Grassdale.
You come up here all sanctified and vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to swindle him.
It was one of them old time typewritten green goods letters explaining how for $1,000 you could get $5,000 in bills that an expert couldn't tell from the genuine; and going on to tell how they were made from plates stolen by an employee of the Treasury at Washington.
If you get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing.
We knew him pretty well from pitching quoits in the afternoons in the court house yard.
They said telegraph to J. Smith when I would start.
'No, I don't want it,' says I. 'Lay it on the table and you sit in that chair till it ticks off an hour.
Then you can go.
"'"Bring 'em along," he'll say, of course, "if they care to invest." Now, how does that scheme strike you?'
Obey with velocity,' says I, 'for otherwise alternatives are impending.
That's the kind of trader Bill Murkison is.
You are ten times worse,' says I, 'than that green goods man. You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but you'll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible scoundrels as you have tried to be to-day.
"'Ah, yes,' says Andy, gaping, 'it's the same old game.
Andy had his standards and I had mine.
Mexico gave a protesting grunt as if to say: "What's the use of that, now we're so near?" He quickened his gait into a languid trot. Rounding a great clump of black chaparral he stopped short.
I live in the bresh here like a varmint, never seein' nor hearin' nothin', and what other 'musement kin I have?
Marthy was afraid of the country--afraid of Mexicans, of snakes, of panthers, even of sheep.
Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their footprints have attested.
But in Sam's case it was different.
At length he came out, ready for his ride.
The ranch house--a two-room box structure--was on the rise of a gently swelling hill in the midst of a wilderness of high chaparral.
It was when Sam Webber was fullest of contrition and good resolves that Mexico, with a heavy sigh, subsided from his regular, brisk trot into a slow complacent walk.
At the moment his master's sureness of the route had failed his horse had divined the fact.
He should have started three hours earlier.
"Oh, well," said his wife, carelessly, "put on your necktie--that'll keep it together."
Sam rode down the sloping hill and plunged into the great pear flat that lies between the Quintanilla and the Piedra.
If so he was now something like fifty miles from home.
Marthy, serene and comfortable, sat in her rocking-chair before the door in the shade of the house, with her feet resting luxuriously upon the steps.
Randy, who was playing with a pair of spurs on the ground, looked up for a moment at his father and went on spinning the rowels and singing a little song.
The straight line is Art.
Sam shook himself queerly, like a man coming out of a dream, and slowly dismounted.
There were no hills now that they could climb to obtain a view of the country.
He gave Randy, his three-year-old son, a pat on the head, and hurried out to where Mexico, his favorite saddle horse, was standing.
They came upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was the brush that scarcely could a rabbit penetrate the mass.
Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and mesquite.
Sam thought of roving, marauding Mexicans, of stealthy cougars that sometimes invaded the ranches, of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a dozen possible dangers.
He turned now to his right up a little hill, pebble-covered, upon which grew only the tenacious and thorny prickly pear and chaparral.
Sam climbed awkwardly into the saddle.
A straightforward man is more an artificial product than a diplomatist is.
Sam had traveled round the circle and was himself again.
Only a few feet back of it began the thorny jungle.
He moistened his dry lips.
The thing often happened.
The tight white collar awkwardly constricted his muscular, mahogany-colored neck.
Nature moves in circles.
This being a business trip of some importance, and the Chapman ranch being almost a small town in population and size, Sam had decided to "dress up" accordingly.
In about two hours he discovered that he was lost.
"When do you expect--she will come home?" he enquired, glancing at the grandfather clock in the corner.
But, upon the threshold, she stopped, and stood there utterly still, gazing, and gazing upon the trim orderliness of everything.
Pride!--with a capital P!"
And when the hall was, once more, its old, familiar, comfortable self, when the floor had been swept of its litter, and every trace of the sale removed,--then Miss Priscilla sighed, and Bellew put on his coat.
"Ah!"
And, in that moment, instinctively she knew how things came to be as they were,--and, because of this knowledge, her cheeks flamed with a swift, burning colour, and with a soft cry, she hid her face in Miss Priscilla's gentle bosom.
But, slowly as they went, they came within sight of the house, at last, with its quaint gables, and many latticed windows, and the blue smoke curling up from its twisted chimneys,--smiling and placid as though, in all this great world, there were no such thing to be found as--an auctioneer's hammer.
"I understand!"
I am glad you are going," she went on, "because to-day is--well, a day apart, Mr. Bellew.
For here was Miss Priscilla, looking smaller than ever, in a great arm chair whence she directed the disposal and arrangement of all things, with quick little motions of her crutch-stick.
"Well, if she drove straight back from Cranbrook she would be here now,--but I fancy she won't be so very anxious to get home to-day,--and may come the longest way round; yes, it's in my mind she will keep away from Dapplemere as long as ever she can."
"Lord!" said Adam, pausing with a chair under either arm, "Lord, Mr. Belloo sir,--I wonder what Miss Anthea will say?" with which remark he strode off with the two chairs to set them in their accustomed places.
As she came, Anthea raised her head, and looked for one who should have been there, but was not.
"And what message do you send him?"
"Tell me--tell me--all about it."
"Which means," said Bellew, smiling down into Miss Priscilla's young, bright eyes, "that you don't know."
For the most part, too, she drove in silence seemingly deaf to Small Porges' flow of talk, which was also very unlike in her.
He had conspired with Tyrconnel and with France against Mary's rights, and had made arrangements for depriving her of one at least of the three crowns to which, at his death, she would have been entitled.
It was necessary, and it was pronounced necessary by all those who invited him over, that he should carry an army with him.
He had done all in his power to disturb her domestic happiness, and had established a system of spying, eavesdropping, and talebearing under her roof.
It was important to take some decisive step while things were in this state.
That she should love such a father was impossible. Her religious principles, indeed, were so strict that she would probably have tried to perform what she considered as her duty, even to a father whom she did not love.
These considerations might well have made William uneasy; even if all the military means of the United Provinces had been at his absolute disposal.
A defeat would be fatal to the whole undertaking.
Yet who could answer for the effect which the appearance of such an army might produce?
On the present occasion, however, she judged that the claim of James to her obedience ought to yield to a claim more sacred.
If any part of the royal forces resolutely withstood the invaders, would not that part soon have on its side the patriotic sympathy of millions?
The enterprise would be far more arduous if it were deferred till the King, by remodelling boroughs and regiments, had procured a Parliament and an army on which he could rely.
The States General could not make war or peace, could not conclude any alliance or levy any tax, without the consent of the States of every province.
This paper was signed in cipher by the seven chiefs of the conspiracy, Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Danby, Lumley, Compton, Russell and Sidney. Herbert undertook to be their messenger.
In some town councils the party which had, during several generations, regarded the influence of the Stadtholders with jealousy had great power.
Her understanding had been completely subjugated by his; and, what is more extraordinary, he had won her entire affection.
He had not taken advantage of the opinion which the great body of the English people had formed respecting the late birth.
But, though she carefully abstained from doing or saying anything that could add to his difficulties, those difficulties were serious indeed. They were in truth but imperfectly understood even by some of those who invited him over, and have been but imperfectly described by some of those who have written the history of his expedition.
But would the English people, altogether unaccustomed to the interference of continental powers in English disputes, be inclined to look with favour on a deliverer who was surrounded by foreign soldiers?
The States of a province could not give such consent without the consent of every municipality which had a share in the representation.
On one point they thought it their duty to remonstrate with his Highness.
The conspirators, therefore, implored the Prince to come among them with as little delay as possible.
Not one person in a thousand doubted that the boy was supposititious; and the Prince would be wanting to his own interests if the suspicious circumstances which had attended the Queen's confinement were not put prominently forward among his reasons for taking arms.
From his wife William had no opposition to apprehend.
He instantly hastened to the Prince.
During June the meetings of those who were in the secret were frequent. At length, on the last day of the month, the day on which the Bishops were pronounced not guilty, the decisive step was taken.
She had ventured to intercede with him on behalf of her old friend and preceptor Compton, who, for refusing to commit an act of flagitious injustice, had been suspended from his episcopal functions; but she had been ungraciously repulsed.
If his Highness would appear in the island at the head of some troops, tens of thousands would hasten to his standard.
Every municipality was, in some sense, a sovereign state, and, as such, claimed the right of communicating directly with foreign ambassadors, and of concerting with them the means of defeating schemes on which other municipalities were intent.
In the navy Protestant feeling was still stronger.
He felt that it would be madness in him to imitate the example of Monmouth, to cross the sea with a few British adventurers, and to trust to a general rising of the population.
The obstacles which he might expect to encounter on English ground, though the least formidable of the obstacles which stood in the way of his design, were yet serious.
The only constitutional remedy in such cases was that deputies from the cities which were agreed should pay a visit to the city which dissented, for the purpose of expostulation.
This was a grave error, and had damped the zeal of many.
The officers were discontented; and the common soldiers shared that aversion to Popery which was general in the class from which they were taken.
He had, on the contrary, sent congratulations to Whitehall, and had thus seemed to acknowledge that the child who was called Prince of Wales was rightful heir of the throne.
Bentinck and Dykvelt were summoned, and several days were passed in deliberation.
The government was indeed justly odious.
The first result of this deliberation was that the prayer for the Prince of Wales ceased to be read in the Princess's chapel.
A formal invitation, transcribed by Sidney but drawn up by some person more skilled than Sidney, in the art of composition, was despatched to the Hague.
The number of deputies was unlimited: they might continue to expostulate as long as they thought fit; and meanwhile all their expenses were defrayed by the obstinate community which refused to yield to their arguments.
He assumed the garb of a common sailor, and in this disguise reached the Dutch coast in safety, on the Friday after the trial of the Bishops.
Propositions brought forward by the Stadtholder as indispensable to the security of the commonwealth, sanctioned by all the provinces except Holland, and sanctioned by seventeen of the eighteen town councils of Holland, had repeatedly been negatived by the single voice of Amsterdam.
His errand was one of no ordinary peril.
This is the undoubted rule even when the husband is in the wrong; and to Mary the enterprise which William meditated appeared not only just, but holy.
I watched him leaning slightly upon Alice's arm, and walking on slowly in front of me towards the house.
I was the pale-faced, black-haired chit, but it was scarcely a polite way of alluding to me, Mr. Bruce Deville.
His eyes were half closed, and his hands were cold.
There have been people here all the afternoon.
"Get some brandy!" I cried, breathlessly.
A deep voice rang out upon the still, damp air--
I must see a doctor; I must certainly see a doctor!"
There was not one shred of it in my disposition.
The most favorable thing about him was his carriage, which was upright and easy, but even that was in a measure spoiled by a distinct suggestion of surliness.
Alice pursed up her lips, and turned her head away with a look of displeasure.
"It is only a fainting fit."
She had the supreme good fortune to be in accord with her environment.
Suddenly I heard an unexpected sound--the sound of voices close at hand.
I don't like it though.
The landscape was grey, colorless, monotonous.
"Do you think that it is quite good taste?"
He was still white and shaken, but evidently his memory was returning.
He was by no means an ordinary looking person, but he was certainly not prepossessing.
There was a rustling of the leaves--and then I heard her speak!"
He had not moved.
"I am surprised to hear you talk like that, Kate," she said, quietly.
Are you better?"
I leaned over the gate with my face turned towards the great indistinct front of Deville Court.
There was a contemptuous snort, and a moment's silence.
Whose was the voice--whence his fear of it?
Not a single man all the afternoon.
I could not get rid of the impression of my father's first words, and his white, terrified face.
It was my father.
The parson was bound to come, I suppose, but what the mischief does he want with a daughter?"
The man's huge form stood out with almost startling distinctness against the grey sky.
I turned round with a terrified start.
There was a difference indeed between my muslin gown and the plain black skirt and jacket, powdered with dust, which was Alice's usual costume.
He was tall and very broad, with a ragged beard and long hair.
"So I have--after a fashion," she answered, good humoredly.
It was my first glimpse of Mr. Bruce Deville of Deville Court.
"It was her voice," he whispered, hoarsely.
I laughed at her in contempt.
He must have been within a yard of me when he fell.
What have you done with her?
I fancy I heard that one was expected."
I walked behind him in silence.
Come back into the house with me."
"Have you ever known me to catch cold through wearing thin clothes or going without a hat?" I asked.
As they came nearer to me, I slipped from the drive on to the verge of the shrubbery, standing for a moment in the shadow of a tall laurel bush.
I looked at him with new and curious eyes.
Quick!"
I met Alice in the hall.
I must have fainted!" he exclaimed.
His features had reassumed their customary air of delicate and reserved strength.
I was not seen, but I could hear their voices.
I realized with a start that I was becoming morbid, and turned from the gate towards the house.
"You must have been fancying things.
Alice bent over him full of sympathy, and he took her arm.
Almost at my side some heavy body had fallen to the ground with a faint groan.
After tea my father went to his study, for it was late in the week, and he was a most conscientious writer of sermons.
"Better!"
He had been stricken with a sudden terror.
"Ah!
It was a phase of incipient dissatisfaction with life, morbid, but inevitable.
The woman was speaking.
"Be off, you little goose!" I called after her as she passed on towards the house with quickened step and rigid head.
The sound of their voices came to me indistinctly; but I could hear the deep bass of the man as he slung some scornful exclamation out upon the moist air.
"I am tired of being indoors.
I was in an evil mood, and I determined to shock her.
A single step, and I was bending over the prostrate form of a man.
I read for an hour, and then, tired alike of my book and my own company, I strolled up and down the drive.
"There is nothing serious the matter--at least I think not," I whispered to Alice.
I looked after her and sighed.
Get over, Marvel!"
This restlessness was one of my greatest troubles.
He wore knickerbockers, and stockings, and thick shoes.
She was the right person in the right place.
The trees had taken to themselves fantastic shapes, little wreaths of white mist were rising from the hollows of the park.
Alice was always so painfully literal.
I tried to laugh at the idea.
My whole life was like that, I thought, with a sudden despondent chill.
At the end of the drive nearest the road, I met Alice, my youngest sister, walking briskly with a book under her arm, and a quiet smile upon her homely face.
His great figure, looming unnaturally large through the misty twilight, was the last to vanish.
In our little family Alice absorbed the domesticity.
There must have been quite twenty of them, all of the same breed--beagles--and amongst them two people were walking, a man and a woman.
I felt his pulse and his heart, and unfastened his collar.
"I remember it was close in the study," he said--"very close; I was tired too.
The woman by his side I could only see very indistinctly.
A little laugh from the woman--a pleasant, musical laugh.
I waited till they were some twenty yards apart, and then put the Watch a minute back.
"I hope they will be happy," a strange voice said.
At last all the work was picked to pieces and put away, and the lady led the way into the next room, walking backwards, and making the insane remark "Not yet, dear: we must get the sewing done first."
"But I hope to run down again in a month," I added.
Yes, it's all right: Eric has got his commission; and, now that he has arranged matters with Muriel, he has business in town that must be seen to at once."
And ye'll send us word if she writes?"
"Did you not hear?
"I would stay now, if I could.
AN OUTLANDISH WATCH.
"But you will return, will you not?"
The next few days passed wearily enough.
I felt no inclination to call by myself at the Hall; still less to propose that Arthur should go with me: it seemed better to wait till Time--that gentle healer of our bitterest sorrows should have helped him to recover from the first shock of the disappointment that had blighted his life.
Now and then one of the children would pause, as the recovered thread became inconveniently long, wind it on a bobbin, and start again with another short end.
"How much of human suffering I have--not only relieved, but actually annihilated!" And, in a glow of conscious virtue, I stood watching the unloading of the cart, still holding the Magic Watch open in my hand, as I was curious to see what would happen when we again reached the exact time at which I had put back the hand.
I helped them in emptying the cart, and placing in it some pillows for the wounded man to rest on; and it was only when the driver had mounted to his place, and was starting for the Surgery, that I bethought me of the strange power I possessed of undoing all this harm.
"Delightful power of magic!" I thought.
I had not long to wait for an opportunity of testing this property also of the Magic Watch, for, even as the thought passed through my mind, the accident I was imagining occurred.
The longer I thought over this strange adventure, the more hopelessly tangled the mystery became: and it was a real relief to meet Arthur in the road, and get him to go with me up to the Hall, to learn what news the telegraph had brought.
Oh, I had forgotten: it came in after you left the Station.
After which, I was not surprised to see the children skipping backwards after her, exclaiming "Oh, mother, it is such a lovely day for a walk!"
You may fold up your work, girls." But the children took no notice whatever of the remark; on the contrary, they set to work at once sewing--if that is the proper word to describe an operation such as I had never before witnessed.
"But don't think about me.
Good night!"
I told him, as we went, what had happened at the Station, but as to my further adventures I thought it best, for the present, to say nothing.
Each of them threaded her needle with a short end of thread attached to the work, which was instantly pulled by an invisible force through the stuff, dragging the needle after it: the nimble fingers of the little sempstress caught it at the other side, but only to lose it again the next moment.
"Ah, she'll like 'em, I war'n' ye!
The instantaneous change was startling: the two figures seemed to flash back into their former places.
Good night!"
"Oh mocking Magic Watch!" I said to myself, as I passed out of the little town, and took the seaward road that led to my lodgings.
"Do you mean that they are engaged?"
"Who spoke?" he exclaimed.
When the needle-work had been unfolded, and they were all ready to begin, their mother said "Come, that's done, at last!
I never understood those words till now."
And as to being expelled with violence, that event would necessarily come first in this case.
"Thank you," the old man said, simply and heartily.
"Do," said Arthur: "and you shall write and tell me of our friends.
Instantly I stepped out into the street, picked up the box, and replaced it in the cart: in the next moment the bicycle had spun round the corner, passed the cart without let or hindrance, and soon vanished in the distance, in a cloud of dust.
'This life of mine I guard, as God's high gift, from scathe and wrong, Not greatly care to lose!'"
And at last they parted.
A light cart was standing at the door of the 'Great Millinery Depot' of Elveston, laden with card-board packing-cases, which the driver was carrying into the shop, one by one. One of the cases had fallen into the street, but it scarcely seemed worth while to step forward and pick it up, as the man would be back again in a moment.
They would first wonder who I was, then see me, then look down, and think no more about me.
"He that takes my life," he seemed to be saying, wheezily, to himself, "takes trash: But he that takes the Daily Telegraph--!" But this awful contingency I did not face.
"But the real usefulness of this magic power," I thought, "would be to undo some harm, some painful event, some accident--"
They'll not treat her bad, yer may depend.
"Good night!
"So, if I can once get in," I said to myself, "all risk of expulsion will be over!"
A silence followed: then I rose, feeling sure that Arthur would wish to be alone, and bade our gentle host 'Good night': Arthur took his hand, but said nothing: nor did he speak again, as we went home till we were in the house and had lit our bed-room candles.
CHAPTER 23.
As I entered the little town, I came upon two of the fishermen's wives interchanging that last word "which never was the last": and it occurred to me, as an experiment with the Magic Watch, to wait till the little scene was over, and then to 'encore' it.
I could never be happy with my child married to a man without an object to live for--without even an object to die for!"
"Here is my chance," I thought, "for testing the reverse action of the Magic Watch!" I pressed the 'reversal-peg' and walked in.
A casual observer might have thought "and there ends the dialogue!" That casual observer would have been mistaken.
"Muriel is gone to bed--the excitement of that terrible scene was too much for her--and Eric has gone to the hotel to pack his things, to start for London by the early train."
I have made up my mind to accept a post in India, that has been offered me.
Weeks grew to months, and months to years: Peter was worn to skin and bone: And once he even said, with tears, 'Remember, Paul, that promised Loan!' Said Paul' I'll lend you, when I can, All the spare money I have got-- Ah, Peter, you're a happy man! Yours is an enviable lot!
'Peter is poor,' said noble Paul, 'And I have always been his friend: And, though my means to give are small, At least I can afford to lend. How few, in this cold age of greed, Do good, except on selfish grounds! But I can feel for Peter's need, And I WILL LEND HIM FIFTY POUNDS!'
PETER AND PAUL.
Yet why so strict? Is this to act a friendly part? However legal it may be To pay what never has been lent, This style of business seems to me Extremely inconvenient!
How great!' poor Peter cried. 'Yet I must sell my Sunday wig-- The scarf-pin that has been my pride-- My grand piano--and my pig!' Full soon his property took wings: And daily, as each treasure went, He sighed to find the state of things Grow less and less convenient.
'You well remember, I am sure, When first your wealth began to go, And people sneered at one so poor, I never used my Peter so! And when you'd lost your little all, And found yourself a thing despised, I need not ask you to recall How tenderly I sympathised!
You'll see in a moment what the difference is between 'convenient' and 'inconvenient.' You quite understand it now, don't you?" he added, looking kindly at Bruno, who was sitting, at Sylvie's side, on the floor.
"Yes," said Bruno, very quietly.
'Then the advice I've poured on you, So full of wisdom and of wit: All given gratis, though 'tis true I might have fairly charged for it! But I refrain from mentioning Full many a deed I might relate For boasting is a kind of thing That I particularly hate.
'Not so,' was Peter's mild reply, His cheeks all wet with grateful tears; No man recalls, so well as I, Your services in bygone years: And this new offer, I admit, Is very very kindly meant-- Still, to avail myself of it Would not be quite convenient!'
'No scare-crow would accept this coat: Such boots as these you seldom see. Ah, Paul, a single five-pound-note Would make another man of me!' Said Paul 'It fills me with surprise To hear you talk in such a tone: I fear you scarcely realise The blessings that are all your own!
'Well, well!' said Peter, with a sigh. 'Hand me the cash, and I will go. I'll form a Joint-Stock Company, And turn an honest pound or so.' 'I'm grieved,' said Paul, 'to seem unkind: The money shalt of course be lent: But, for a week or two, I find It will not be convenient.'
You little guessed How deep it drained my slender store: But there's a heart within this breast, And I WILL LEND YOU FIFTY MORE!'
Said Peter 'I am well aware Mine is a state of happiness: And yet how gladly could I spare Some of the comforts I possess! What you call healthy appetite I feel as Hunger's savage tooth: And, when no dinner is in sight, The dinner-bell's a sound of ruth!
Peter said. 'The First of April, as I think. Five little weeks will soon be fled: One scarcely will have time to wink! Give me a year to speculate-- To buy and sell--to drive a trade--' Said Paul 'I cannot change the date. On May the Fourth it must be paid.'
In fact, he climbed up into Sylvie's lap as he spoke, and rested his head against her shoulder.
Said Paul 'How bitterly I rue That fatal morning when I called! Consider, Peter, what you do! You won't be richer when you're bald! Think you, by rending curls away, To make your difficulties less? Forbear this violence, I pray: You do but add to my distress!'
'One can't be too deliberate,' Said Paul, 'in parting with one's pelf. With bills, as you correctly state, I'm punctuality itself: A man may surely claim his dues: But, when there's money to be lent, A man must be allowed to choose Such times as are convenient!'
The Fourth arrived, and punctual Paul Came, with his legal friend, at noon. 'I thought it best,' said he, 'to call: One cannot settle things too soon.' Poor Peter shuddered in despair: His flowing locks he wildly tore: And very soon his yellow hair Was lying all about the floor.
Such a short speech was very unusual, for him: but just then he seemed, I fancied, a little exhausted.
"As I was saying," the other Professor resumed, "if you'll just think over any Poem, that contains the words--such as,
'But pay your debts!' cried honest Paul. 'My gentle Peter, pay your debts! What matter if it swallows all That you describe as your "assets"? Already you're an hour behind: Yet Generosity is best. It pinches me--but never mind! I WILL NOT CHARGE YOU INTEREST!'
Said Peter 'Though I cannot sound The depths of such a man as you, Yet in your character I've found An inconsistency or two. You seem to have long years to spare When there's a promise to fulfil: And yet how punctual you were In calling with that little bill!'
It chanced one day, as Peter sat Gnawing a crust--his usual meal-- Paul bustled in to have a chat, And grasped his hand with friendly zeal. 'I knew,' said he, 'your frugal ways: So, that I might not wound your pride By bringing strangers in to gaze, I've left my legal friend outside!
So, week by week, poor Peter came And turned in heaviness away; For still the answer was the same, 'I cannot manage it to-day.' And now the April showers were dry-- The five short weeks were nearly spent-- Yet still he got the old reply, 'It is not quite convenient!'
"Impossible!"
This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
Even were an alarm to be given, were she to stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too late.
Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.
"A Yankee destroyer--in all probability the one we dodged yesterday afternoon."
"Take him below!" the latter ordered.
As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric-blue glare that must have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.
"How the devil did he get out here?"
Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him.
"Have him up and see...."
Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them.
For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands.
Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived.
His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.
Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space.
It must not be!...
Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation.
If not...."
He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.
His most desperate efforts were all unavailing.
One leaned over the conning-tower hatch and shouted to his mates below.
The crew on deck leaped to attention.
Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?
The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.
The first phase of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance, seized Lanyard from behind.
Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him.
Half blinded, Lanyard clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill and strength to effect a throw.
In the distance a gun boomed.
The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship. She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck.
Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end. His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function altogether.
Looking up, he made out the truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae-like periscope tubes stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star-strewn sky.
Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration whatever.
And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that, while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.
A target for what?...
"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck--"
A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he poised himself with athletic grace--the lower part of his face masked by what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.
And the darkness in the shadow of the boat was dense, an excellent screen.
The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold his breath.
"On the Emperor's service--"
He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night that yawned for him....
She seemed absurdly small.
Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action.
But the distance was too great.
There fell one final blow, ruthless as the wrath of God.
Rousing, Lanyard saw several figures emerge from the conning tower.
What's this?"
Had Lanyard wished it he could not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat.
The first rejoined him.
Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.
Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let go; his head dropped weakly to one side.
The man who had struck him said quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away, striking him repeatedly.
His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of bursting wide.
The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge him.
The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the face of the waters.
Death, then, was but a little delayed.
When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship.
His confederate was in the act of stepping across the raised threshold.
Forward, there--house that gun! And get below--quickly!"
A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.
VIII
Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it seemed desirable to live as long as possible.
He felt very sleepy.
He followed, closed the door.
Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master.
That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that all but matched his own.
On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea. The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly opiate.
He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of nausea.
But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he was too weak and faint.
"Aha!
"First we find a sapling and clear the branches from it with the hatchet--like this.
His invariable habit, my boy!"
The Phoenix gave a pleased laugh.
Aunt Amy came bumping down the stairs with a candle.
Child's play!
Have you the tools here?"
"Electricity," said the Phoenix thoughtfully, "is a complicated and profound subject.
The sapling had to be in the right place--one by the goat trail, the other at the far end of the ledge.
"They're sure strong enough," David agreed, flexing his fingers to take the stiffness out of them.
One of my favorite proverbs.
Well, shall we begin?"
"Phoenix, please tell me what we're going to do.
Now, my boy, since we must continue your education during the night, it is necessary that we have some way of getting in touch with each other.
I shall meet you tonight after dark, as soon as it is safe for me to come down.
There are wires between your house and the telephone pole already--one more would not be noticed.
A hardware store should have what we need.
"Yes, they're down in the cellar.
A very important Thought has just come to me. I must Meditate a while." The Phoenix glanced at the thicket and hid a yawn behind one wing.
Then he brought the package home, hid it behind the woodpile in the garage, and sat down to think. Wire--bell--pushbutton.
And the hatchet?
"Splendid!
I've been thinking about the rope and wire and bell all night, and I can't make heads or tails out of it."
In the blackness which followed, each stage of the Phoenix's descent could be heard as clearly as cannon shots: the twanging and snapping as it tumbled through the wires, a drawn-out squawk and the flop of wings in the air below, the crash into the hedge, the jarring thud against the ground.
"The lights are out!"
"Well?"
It took the repair men an hour to untangle the wires and fix them.
Well, let us get on with the Plan.
And our archenemy dangling by the foot in mid-air, completely at our mercy! Magnificent!"
But there was another thing to consider.
One of the wires vibrated on a low note like a slack guitar string.
Our particular Scientist is a daytime creature--that is to say, he comes at dawn and goes at dusk.
Fire trucks, repair trucks, and police cars pulled up in front of the house.
"Is that you, dear?" came Mother's anxious voice from the dining room.
"Quick, my boy," it gasped.
"Now, my boy," said the Phoenix, when they got back to the ledge that afternoon, "are the shops still open?"
Perhaps I had better investigate up there.
Screw driver, please."
The question now is, how will you know when I have arrived?
"The telephone's dead!" Dad shouted from the hall.
"Yes, that's true." It still sounded impractical.
I might also mention positive and negative and--ah--all that sort of thing.
He slipped through a cellar window, hid the equipment under a stack of old boxes, and ran noisily up the stairs into the kitchen.
"Precisely, my boy.
"Look!" David shouted, "the line's broken in our back yard!"
"Perhaps later we can install another bell at this end.
"I think they're open till six," said David, shaking the sand out of his shoes.
"Just imagine it!" the Phoenix continued enthusiastically.
They certainly would have to hurry.
Next we get a stake, cut a notch in it, and drive it into the ground--so.
The unwary footstep!
"We must not forget the difference between alternating and direct current, my boy," said the Phoenix as it flew down again.
"Yes, here they are."
"Oh," said David.
"Oh.
Now, do you have the pliers, wire-cutters, and screw driver below?"
The Phoenix returned to the top of the pole with the cutters, and worked on the wires for five more minutes.
"Nothing to it, my boy!
"My boy, we are going to install this bell in your room, and the pushbutton on the base of that telephone pole.
"Phoenix," he whispered, "how did you do it?
The noise?
We shall have to use the wire-cutters."
Most profound.
David had the presence of mind to gather up all the tools, the wire, bell, and pushbutton, and one of the Phoenix's feathers, which had been torn out during the fall.
"... and a hatchet," the Phoenix concluded.
The more he puzzled over it the more confused he became, and finally he just gave up. There was only one thing he was sure about: whatever the Plan was, they would have to carry it out as soon as possible.
He couldn't spend pirate gold pieces, or even show them to anyone, without being asked a lot of embarrassing questions.
"No, everything is coming along beautifully, thank you.
There are amperes, and there are volts, and there are kilowatt hours.
The tinkering sounds began again, and a spurt of falling debris rattled in the leaves of the hedge.
Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today.
The telephone pole is simply loaded down with power lines waiting to be tapped."
"Hand me that twig, my boy." The Phoenix took the twig, found a bare spot of earth, and sketched a picture.
The Phoenix was evidently set on carrying out the Plan, and David did not want to wear out the bird's patience with more objections. And--well, why not?
"We must make a strategic retreat!
The wires?
The Phoenix took the screw driver in one claw and flew up to the top of the pole.
"Are we going to buy something?"
A risk, I admit, but a necessary one.
Splendid.
You will be told when the time comes.
The whole snare is hidden under grass and leaves." The Phoenix beamed and flung out its wings in a dramatic gesture.
There is a hedge at the back of your house, is there not?
"Turning out all the lights so he can murder us in our beds!"
And all the time policemen were going through the crowd, asking questions and writing things down in their notebooks.
"Precisely, my boy.
And what was the rope for?
They sat down and looked proudly at each other.
Trailing one end of the wire in its beak, the Phoenix flew up into the darkness once more.
You may await me there."
"Of course you cannot, my boy.
Better to say 'a stroke of genius.' Only I, Phoenix, could have thought of it.
"Precisely, my boy.
"Ah, splendid, my boy!
The covering on the lines is rather tough, however.
In his official capacity he had been received courteously by his English colleagues: Mr. Pitt had shaken him by the hand; Lord Grenville had entertained him more than once; but the more intimate circles of London society ignored him altogether; the women openly turned their backs upon him; the men who held no official position refused to shake his hand.
"Ah! who is it?" asked the Prince.
His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales had promised to be present. He was coming on presently from the opera.
"His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and suite, Sir Percy Blakeney, Lady Blakeney."
I think there are times when Andy don't exactly understand my system of ethics and moral hygiene.
"I put the two thousand, which was all in $20 bills, in my inside pocket.
I wrote to them rascals again just for fun.
I didn't approve of all of Andy's schemes for levying contributions from the public, and he thought I allowed my conscience to interfere too often for the financial good of the firm.
"'I've always--I see by the papers that it always is,' says Andy.
I'd hate to see any money dropped in it as bad as you would.'
Wasn't it yours, too?'
Murkison was to meet the gray man at half past 9.
"Sometimes Murkison was serious and tried to talk himself out of his cogitations, whatever they was.
"Me and Andy tries to get this financial misquotation out of Murkison's head, but we might as well have tried to keep the man who rolls peanuts with a toothpick from betting on Bryan's election.
I've often read about it in the papers.
If you answer it they write again asking you to come on with your money and do business.'
Does it excuse you?' I asks, 'that they were trying to skin you?
"In about half an hour Andy spoke again.
If he gets the money you can squeal to the police.
There is but one way it can end.
Then I am to ask him how the water is, and he knows it's me and I know it's him.'
I have yet,' says I, 'to shake hands with a subpoena server.'
"I got up and shook Andy Tucker's hand hard and long.
Maybe you could help some when it comes to cashing in the ticket to that 5 to 1 shot.
We was supposed to be horse drovers, and good decent citizens besides, taking a summer vacation.
It's you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on the lookout to get something for nothing,' says I, 'that support the lotteries and wild-cat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of this country.
"The only times," said he, "that me and Andy Tucker ever had any hiatuses in our cordial intents was when we differed on the moral aspects of grafting.
Then he conducts you to the private abattoir in the hotel, where Mr. Jones is already waiting.
"'I don't call myself a religious man,' says I, 'or a fanatic in moral bigotry, but I can't stand still and see a man who has built up his business by his own efforts and brains and risk be robbed by an unscrupulous trickster who is a menace to the public good.'
"'Jeff,' says he, 'some time when you have the leisure I wish you'd draw off a diagram and foot-notes of that conscience of yours.
"'I don't know how you mean that, Andy,' says I, 'but we have been friends too long for me to take offense at a taunt that you will regret when you cool off.
"'No, boys,' says he.
Of course it's brown paper when you come to look at it afterward.'
No, sir; you was going to rob Peter to stand off Paul.
"On the way Murkison amuses himself with premonitions and advance pleasant recollections.
Don't you think we would both feel better if we was to intervene in some way and prevent the doing of this deed?'
"'Right, Jeff,' says Andy. 'We'll stick right along with Murkison if he insists on going and block this funny business.
"'Now get out your watch,' says I to Murkison.
"After we talk on all the notorious themes of the day, this Murkison-- for such was his entitlements--takes a letter out of his coat pocket in a careful, careless way and hands it to us to read.
"Well, we went to see Murkison.
"'Now, boys,' says Murkison, 'let's get our gumption together and inoculate a plan for defeating the enemy.
If he is determined to go let us go with him and prevent this swindle from coming off.'
"'Why, certainly,' says I. 'What else could it have been?
"One day the leading hardware merchant of Grassdale drops around to the hotel where me and Andy stopped, and smokes with us, sociable, on the side porch.
'I can't consent to let the song of this Chicago siren waft by me on the summer breeze.
"'Andy,' says I, 'I may have had one or two hard thoughts about the heartlessness of your corporation, but I retract 'em now.
It does you credit.
How do you know,' says I, 'that that green goods man hasn't a large family dependent upon his extortions?
"'Lot's of good men get 'em,' says Andy.
The Grassdale people liked us, and me and Andy declared a cessation of hostilities, never so much as floating the fly leaf of a rubber concession prospectus or flashing a Brazilian diamond while we was there.
"'Jeff,' says Andy after a long time, 'quite unseldom I have seen fit to impugn your molars when you have been chewing the rag with me about your conscientious way of doing business.
"Andy agreed with me; and I was glad to see that he was in earnest about breaking up this green goods scheme.
"'Boys,' says he, 'I know you are all right or I wouldn't confide in you.
I was just thinking the same thing that you have expressed. It would not be honorable or praiseworthy,' says I, 'for us to let Murkison go on with this project he has taken up.
"A few days later he drops around again.
They answered and told me to come on to Chicago.
When I get there I'm to wait on a certain street corner till a man in a gray suit comes along and drops a newspaper in front of me.
Besides, look at our country; God's gift of freedom is stamped upon it.
Thus time flew, till the sand-glass told her it was the eighth hour.
"Then it is worthy its destination.
Lady Mar looked at her.
Our mountains are his seal.
No, Halbert!
Thunder now peaked over her head, and lightning shot across the mountains.
"My lord," answered the affrighted woman, "you know best.
You have slain her!"
"Oh!" cried she, "to what am I betrayed?
You terrified the poor young creature.
I was very tired, but in spite of my fatigue it was some while before I fell asleep.
"Thank you," she murmured.
She slept with the untroubled sleep of a child.
It was purely human, it was a kecking sound in the throat, such as one makes who gasps for breath.
She was of a slight figure as I knew from the ease with which I carried her, but tall.
She nestled down beneath it and her lips smiled very prettily, and she uttered a little purring murmur of content; but this she did in her sleep.
And then it made a sound, and all the blood in my veins stood still.
I sprang up on the bed and jumped to the foot of it.
I looked round the room.
I knelt down by her side, and setting down the water gently lifted her head.
The scarf was the streak of white.
Parmiter had thrown a new light upon the business tonight, and by the help of that light I arrayed afresh my scanty knowledge.
I heard again that unearthly screeching which had so frightened Dick and perplexed me, It perplexed me still.
I flung up the window and the cold fog poured into the room.
She can't have a personal taste any more than, when her husband succeeds, she can have a personal crown, and her opinion on any matter is rusty and heavy and plain--made, in the night of ages, to last and be transmitted.
The clear thing is that Mrs. Wimbush doesn't guard such a treasure so jealously as she might.'
Don't enquire too closely,' he said last night; 'only believe that I feel a sort of terror.
Last night I had some talk with him about going to-day, cutting his visit short; so sure am I that he'll be better as soon as he's shut up in his lighthouse.
"'I haven't lost it.
When I hint that a violent rupture with our hostess would be the best thing in the world for him he gives me to understand that if his reason assents to the proposition his courage hangs woefully back.
You see therefore that the beautiful book plays a great part in our existence.
"I suppose I ought to enjoy the joke of what's going on here," I wrote, "but somehow it doesn't amuse me.
They haven't time to look over a priceless composition; they've only time to kick it about the house.
'She didn't have time, so she gave me a chance first; because unfortunately I go to-morrow to Bigwood.'
None of the uses I have yet seen him put to infuriate me quite so much.
I feel as if I ought to 'tip' some custode for my glimpse of it.
He's too beastly intelligent.
I appreciate it--it keeps me warm; there are no fires in the house.
He's perpetually detailed for this job, and he tells me it has a peculiarly exhausting effect.
"'I thought she was Mr. Paraday's greatest admirer.'
I told my maid to give it to Lord Dorimont--or at least to his man.'
Why should I take the occasion of such distinguished honours to say that I begin to see deeper into Gustave Flaubert's doleful refrain about the hatred of literature?
I declared to Lady Augusta briefly that nothing in the world can ever do so well as the thing that does best; and at this she looked a little disconcerted.
He told me that this is what he would like to do; reminding me, however, that the first lesson of his greatness has been precisely that he can't do what he likes.
All the disinterested people here are his particular admirers and have been carefully selected as such. There's supposed to be a copy of his last book in the house, and in the hall I come upon ladies, in attitudes, bending gracefully over the first volume.
I never willingly talk to these people about him, but see what a comfort I find it to scribble to you!
At any rate, I'd as soon overturn that piece of priceless Sevres as tell her I must go before my date.' It sounds dreadfully weak, but he has some reason, and he pays for his imagination, which puts him (I should hate it) in the place of others and makes him feel, even against himself, their feelings, their appetites, their motives.
When I asked her what she was looking for she said she had mislaid something that Mr. Paraday had lent her.
Their questions are too delightful!
He makes no secret of being mortally afraid of her, and when I ask what harm she can do him that she hasn't already done he simply repeats: 'I'm afraid, I'm afraid!
"'And Lord Dorimont went away directly after luncheon.'
"'And your chance has only proved a chance to lose it?'
"'She spoke, you mean, as if it were the morning paper?'
Mrs. Wimbush goes by the calendar, the temperature goes by the weather, the weather goes by God knows what, and the Princess is easily heated.
Somebody else presently finds it and transfers it, with its air of momentary desolation, to another piece of furniture.
"'Of course he gave it back to my maid--or else his man did,' said Lady Augusta. 'I dare say it's all right.'
When I expressed my surprise that he should have bandied about anything so precious (I happen to know it's his only copy--in the most beautiful hand in all the world) Lady Augusta confessed to me that she hadn't had it from himself, but from Mrs. Wimbush, who had wished to give her a glimpse of it as a salve for her not being able to stay and hear it read.
Meanwhile Mrs. Wimbush has found out about him, and is actively wiring to him.
"Lady Augusta stared--my irony was lost on her.
"'If you can't dissemble your love?' I asked as Lady Augusta was vague. She said at any rate she'd question her maid; and I'm hoping that when I go down to dinner I shall find the manuscript has been recovered."
I've a strong impression, too, that the second volume is lost--has been packed in the bag of some departing guest; and yet everybody has the impression that somebody else has read to the end.
She has been told everything in the world and has never perceived anything, and the echoes of her education respond awfully to the rash footfall--I mean the casual remark--in the cold Valhalla of her memory.
Oh the Princess will get up!' said Lady Augusta.
But what's the use of being a Princess--'
"'Poor dear, she has the Princess to guard!
Mystery of the human heart--abyss of the critical spirit! Mrs. Wimbush thinks she can answer that question, and as my want of gaiety has at last worn out her patience she has given me a glimpse of her shrewd guess.
"'I dare say she is--she's so awfully clever.
Mr. Paraday lent her the manuscript to look over.'
There's a sociable circle or a confidential couple, and the relinquished volume lies open on its face and as dropped under extreme coercion.
I refer you again to the perverse constitution of man.
I delight in his nonsense myself; why is it therefore that I grudge these happy folk their artless satisfaction?
I'm sure it's rather smudgy about the twentieth page.
To be intimate with him is a feather in my cap; it gives me an importance that I couldn't naturally pretend to, and I seek to deprive him of social refreshment because I fear that meeting more disinterested people may enlighten him as to my real motive.
Every one's beginning--at the end of two days--to sidle obsequiously away from her, and Mrs. Wimbush pushes him again and again into the breach.
Some people called attention to him because he was an old Confederate soldier who had given his good right arm to the cause he loved, some because they thought he resembled Napoleon, and others because they had some amusing tale to tell of the eccentric things he had said or done.
"Number two is all right," said Rob, with an approving nod.
"Don't you see?
"Then what did you do?" asked Rob, with a grin.
Jolly for you!" before he answered more politely, "Thank you, Lloyd, you can count on me for my part.
THE INVITATIONS ARE SENT.
Heads were thrust out of the windows as the two vanished up the dusty pike, and an old graybeard loafing in front of the corner grocery gave an amused chuckle.
It isn't a bit becoming," said Rob, with the frankness of old comradeship.
Down the long avenue that led from the house to the great entrance gate came the Little Colonel on her pony.
But their course did not lie together long.
"Hello!
Then her hand flew up to her head.
He had experimented with Lloyd's temper himself in the past.
"Not a thing.
It had to be brushed and plaited a dozen times a day."
"You don't know how good it feels to get back to the country again, Lloyd.
She hoped for the sight of a familiar freckled face or the sound of a welcoming whoop.
"I think so, too," agreed the Little Colonel, stooping to fasten the locust blossoms more securely behind the pony's ears.
I've had my hair cut.
He was proud of her delicate, flower-like beauty, of her dainty ways, and all her little schoolgirl accomplishments.
A little while later the three white envelopes were jogging sociably along, side by side in a mail-bag, on their way to Louisville.
He is always so busy there's no one to pay any attention to her but her maid.
He snatched it off with a flourish as he came within speaking distance of the Little Colonel, his freckled face all ashine with pleasure.
"Beats all how them two do get over the ground," he said.
As she spoke, she passed through the gate at the end of the avenue and turned into the public road, a wide pike with a railroad track on one side of it and a bridle-path on the other.
"And you don't know anything about this one?" questioned Rob.
"I was eleven last week.
What it saw was a slender girl of eleven, taller than most children of that age, and more graceful.
"Number one doesn't sound very inviting," said Rob, with a sour grimace. "Who is your number two?" Lloyd held out the second envelope.
"Come and go down to the post-office with me.
"I don't care," answered Lloyd, her eyes flashing dangerously.
It balanced itself on the limb, leaning over and cocking its bright bead-like eyes at her, as if admiring the sight.
She was turning slowly away when down the pike behind her came the quick beat of a horse's hoofs and a shrill whistle.
I imagine she's stuck up, too.
It was a sweet, white way that morning, filled with the breath of the locusts; white overhead where the giant trees locked branches to make an arch of bloom nearly a quarter of a mile in length, and white underneath where the fallen blossoms lay like scattered snowflakes along the path.
Judge Moore was Rob's grandfather, and she and Rob had played together every summer since she could remember.
I'll be on hand every time you turn around, if you want me. Who all's coming?"
They had reached the post-office by this time, and Rob held out his hand for the letters.
Lloyd," he called, "I was just going to your house."
A twelve-year-old boy was riding toward her as fast as his big gray horse could carry him.
That's why she invited them."
There was a colour in her cheek like the delicate pink of a wild rose, and the big hazel eyes had a roguish twinkle in them, as they looked out fearlessly on the world from under the little Napoleon hat with its nodding cockade of locust blossoms.
"Well, the invitations are off now.
She's like Amanthis!
Then, dropping them into the box, one by one, he repeated the rhyme:
"You look like a boy.
"Eugenia is a sort of cousin of mine," explained Lloyd.
She's like Amanthis,--sweet-souled and starry-eyed; we were here when you brought her home, a bride.
Lloyd added, quickly:
"Tarbaby" she called him, partly because he was so black, and partly because that was the name of her favourite Uncle Remus story.
The Little Colonel held out the third envelope.
Under the blossoms rode the Little Colonel, all in white herself this May morning, except the little Napoleon hat of black velvet, set jauntily over her short light hair.
"And I was looking for you, Bobby," she answered, as informally as if it were only yesterday they had parted, instead of eight months before.
I shouldn't be su'prised if she's mighty countrified, for the farm is several miles from a railroad, and the people she lives with don't think of anything but work, yeah in and yeah out."
She used to be, and she's always had her own way about everything."
We'll expect you at all the pahties and picnics and candy-pullin's that we have.
"Well, who is she?" he asked, reading it aloud.
I want you to help me give the girls a good time, Bobby."
"I'll put them in for you," he said.
Come on, Tarbaby, and see if you can't beat Bobby Moore's old gray hawse so bad it will be ashamed to evah race again."
She had outgrown it somewhat since she had first been nicknamed the Little Colonel.
"One flew east and one flew west, so I s'pose this will fly into the cuckoo's nest," said Rob, as he read the address:
"It's comfortable this way, and grandfathah likes it.
"I don't like it that way.
That's why she is named Elizabeth Lloyd.
The wide white gate was standing open now, and she drew rein, peering anxiously in.
"Next!"
Like Amanthis!"
It pleased him that people had given her his title of Colonel on account of the resemblance to himself.
"When you were a little thing!" laughed Rob, teasingly.
CHAPTER I.
"Joyce," said Rob, promptly.
"One flew east and one flew west. And one flew into the cuckoo's nest."
He was proud of the fact that she had inherited his lordly manner, his hot temper, and imperious ways.
Mother is her godmothah.
As they jogged along, side by side, the Little Colonel chatting gaily of all that had happened since their last meeting, Rob kept casting curious glances at her.
"Just Eugenia's age, I believe, and she must be an interestin' sort of girl, for she draws beautifully.
"How old is she?" interrupted Rob.
The dust flew, dogs barked, and chickens ran squawking across the road out of the way.
Oh, it was just like a fairy tale, all the things that Joyce did when she was in Touraine."
She was dreadfully spoiled.
Everybody, in Lloydsboro Valley knew Locust.
"It is one of the prettiest places in all Kentucky," they were fond of saying, and every visitor to the Valley was taken past the great entrance gate to admire the long rows of stately old trees, and the great stone house at the end, whose pillars gleamed white through the Virginia creeper that nearly covered it.
Then she was only a spoiled baby of five; but now his pride in her was even greater, since she had grown into a womanly little maid of eleven.
Betty led the way across the road to a plain little wooden church, set back in a grove of cedar-trees. Behind the church was a graveyard, where they often strolled on summer afternoons, through the tangle of grass and weeds and myrtle vines, to read the names on the tombstones and smell the pinks and lilies that struggled up year after year above the neglected mounds.
It had been a tiresome day for the child.
When her big brown eyes, wistful and questioning as a fawn's, were reflected in it, there was no room for the sensitive little mouth.
Eugene Field's poems had come in the last box, with Riley's "Songs of Childhood" and Kipling's jungle tales. Twelve beautiful books, all of Mrs. Sherman's giving, and they were like twelve great windows to Betty, opening into a new strange world, far away from the experiences of her every-day life.
Jake got up, dragged his bare feet across the floor, and leaned lazily on the counter as he reached for his paper.
Under such an influence all that was gentlest and sweetest in his nature might well develop with rapidity, and every accidental roughness--and in him there was no other--by swift degrees vanish from both speech and manners.
It is left to a certain school of weak enthusiasts, who believe that such growth, such embellishment, such creation, is all God cares about; these enthusiasts can not indeed see, so blind have they become with their fixed idea, how God could care for anything else.
There soon came a change, however, and the lessons ceased altogether.
Letty's heart felt one little throb of gladness at the thought of being again at Thornwick, and in peace.
But the print of him was deep in the heart of Letty, and not shallow in the affection of Mary; nor were such as these, insignificant records for any one to leave behind him, as records go.
Tom had come down to his old quarters, and, in the arrogance of convalescence, had presumed on his imagined strength, and so caught cold.
Of such a nobility, good Lord, deliver us from all envy!
To the first he brought her she contrived to put a poor little faulty accompaniment; and when she played his air to him so accompanied, his delight was touching, and not a little amusing.
Mary's delight was great when first he brought her one of his compositions very fairly written out--after which others followed with a rapidity that astonished her.
O my brother, what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother beautiful!
What the gift of such an instructor was to Joseph, my reader may be requested to imagine.
Children must learn to walk, but not by being turned out alone in Cheapside.
The large-hearted, delicate-souled woman felt nothing strange in the presence of the workingman, but, on the contrary, was comfortably aware of a being like her own, less privileged but more gifted, whose nearness was strength.
He was sorry for his past life, and thoroughly ashamed of much of it, saying in all honesty he would rather die than fall for one solitary week into the old ways--not that he wished to die, for, with the confidence of youth, he did not believe he could fall into the old ways again.
Tom speedily became aware that his days were numbered--phrase of unbelief, for are they not numbered from the beginning?
Are our hairs numbered, and our days forgotten--till death gives a hint to the doctor?
With all the probable unpleasant accompaniments of the visit, nowhere else, she thought, could she feel the same sense of shelter as where her childhood had passed.
For some time Tom made progress toward health, and was able to read a good part of the day.
ANOTHER CHANGE.
Nay, are there none such even now?
An alarming relapse was the consequence, and there was no more playing; for now his condition began to draw to a change, of which, for some time, none of them had even thought, the patient had seemed so certainly recovering.
When he had done with Joseph, or when he did not want him, Mary was always ready to give the latter a lesson; and, had he been a less gifted man than he was, he could not have failed to make progress with such a teacher.
The cold settled on his lungs, and he sank rapidly.
Indeed, all about its office had loved him, each after his faculty.
After all, he had not been one of the worst of babies.
She belonged to another world from his, a world which his world worshiped, waiting. He might miss her even to death; her absence might, for him, darken the universe as if the sun had withdrawn his brightness; but who thinks of falling in love with the sun, or dreams of climbing nearer to his radiance?
The day will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like St. Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention.
And no teacher, not to say no woman, could have failed to be pleased at the thorough painstaking with which he followed the slightest of her hints, and the delight his flushed face would reveal when she praised the success he had achieved.
She was little more than a baby yet, not silly from youth, but young from silliness.
Joseph, whose violin was useless now, was not the less in attendance. Every evening, when his work was over, he came knocking gently at the door of the parlor, and never left until Tom was settled for the night. The most silently helpful, undemonstrative being he was, that doctor could desire to wait upon patient.
Plainly he thought the accompaniment a triumph of human faculty, and beyond anything he could ever develop.
But what was Mary to do now with Letty?
For what is the loudest praise of posterity to the quietest love of one's own generation?
They enabled her also to understand the man better and better; for to have a thing to brood over which we are capable of understanding must be more to us than even the master's playing of it.
The letter contained a poverty-stricken expression of sympathy, and an invitation to spend the summer months with them at her old home.
It might, the letter said, prove but a dull place to her after the gayety to which she had of late been accustomed, but it might not the less suit her present sad situation, and possibly uncertain prospects.
The angels do not want tailors to make their clothes: their habits come out of themselves.
Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the swiftest and highest growth.
When it was his turn to watch, he never closed an eye, but at daybreak--for it was now spring--would rouse Mary, and go off straight to his work, nor taste food until the hour for the mid-day meal arrived.
But Mrs. Wardour's letter was kind-perhaps a little repentant; it is hard to say, for ten persons will repent of a sin for one who will confess it--I do not mean to the priest--that may be an easy matter, but to the only one who has a claim to the confession, namely, the person wronged.
"Show Miss Marston out," said his master; "and tell my coachman to bring the hansom round directly."
But Sepia knew that Mr. Redmain had now to himself justified his dislike of her; and, as he said nothing, she was the more certain he meant something.
Then he took a file, and, looking at Galofta, in whose well-drilled features he believed he read something that was not mere curiosity, said, "I am going to show you something very curious," and began to file asunder that part of the ring which immediately clasped the sapphire, the setting of which was open.
"I will tell you who found it, if you will tell me who put it there."
At last, with a sigh, as if she waked from a reverie, she laid the ring on the table.
"No!" roared Mr. Redmain; and Mewks darted from the room, followed more leisurely by Mary.
Who searched the box last?"
That done, he began to examine the ring intently, as Mary had been doing, and did not speak a word.
There is something mysterious about it."
You needn't believe a word I said about myself.
A scarcely perceptible sign of question was made by the master, and answered in kind by the man.
If he was right in this theory of the affair, then the Count had certainly a hold upon her, and she dared not or would not expose him!
Can you suggest any explanation of the fact that it was found, after all, in a corner of my wife's jewel-box?
"That is just why I sent for you!
It was all hum to make the villain show his game."
But here Mary all at once came to herself, and was aware that she was in quite a false position.
He looked hard at Mary.
"I want you to come back to the house," he said, abruptly, the moment she entered his room.
Then turning to Mary, "Go out that way, Miss Marston, if you will go," he said, and pointed to the dressing-room.
She made, consequently, what preparation she could against surprise.
"I will not prosecute the jeweler," answered Mr. Redmain; "but I have taken some trouble to find out who changed the stones."
What do you think of yourself, hey?--But I don't believe it."
"That ring, when I bought it--the stone of it," said Mr. Redmain, "was a star sapphire, and worth seven hundred pounds; now, the whole affair is worth about ten."
He looked at her keenly, expecting a response, but Mary made him none. For some moments he regarded her curiously, then turned away into the study, saying:
Having greeted the Count with the greatest composure, she turned to Mr. Redmain with question in her eyes.
Her look went to what he had of a heart, and the slightest possible color rose to his face.
Casting a glance at him as he gave the message, Mr. Redmain could read nothing; but this was in itself suspicious to him--and justly, for the man ought to have been surprised at such a close to the conversation they had been having.
The talk then veered in another direction--that of personal adventure, so guided by Mr. Redmain.
"I have always heard it called a splendid stone," said Sepia, whose complexion, though not her features, passed through several changes while all this was going on: she was anxious.
"You haven't the face to hint that the stone has been changed?"
A fine thing if your pretended squeamishness ruin my plot!
"I have not heard a word, Mr. Redmain," she said with indignation.
"Oh, you needn't trouble yourself!" he returned.
"Miss Marston!"
I did think I was past being taken in, but it seems possible for once again.
"I was only plaguing myself between my recollection of the stone and the actual look of it.
"I do not know, sir."
It is not like a small thing, you see.
"There's the point!" he returned.
humbug!" he returned, with annoyance.
Mr. Redmain filed away, heedless; then with the help of a pair of pincers freed the stone, and held it up in his hand.
He had dropped it into a letter-box with mingled hope and fear, and read it now through tears of joy and pride.
Much better to die doing." The idea of giving public readings from his stories suggested itself to him, and he was soon engaged in preparation.
Before another year had passed, his father was put into prison for debt--the same prison in which Little Dorrit, in the story of that name, grew up.
When he was four years old, his father moved to the town of Chatham, near the old city of Rochester.
He was seen in public but a few times more--once at the last dinner party he ever attended, to meet the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians, and once when the Queen invited him to Buckingham Palace.
This was his beginning.
A public banquet was given him in Edinburgh, and he was much sought after and entertained.
Everyone, old and young throughout the neighborhood, liked him.
Often, too, Dickens's stories are, in a sense, sermons against very human sins.
People called him a "very queer small boy" because he was always thinking or reading instead of playing.
Soon after, the end came.
It is sad to reflect that he who has painted so beautifully for others the joys and sorrows of perfect love and home, was himself destined to know neither.
Some of his early experiences of this kind he has told in the adventures of Nicholas Nickleby at Mr. Crummles's theater.
When he was nine years old, his father became poor and the family was obliged to move to London, where it lived in a shabby house in a poor suburb.
It was not long before he withdrew also from this second venture.
In spite of his weakness, he decided on another trip to America, and here, in 1867, he began a series of readings which left him in a far worse condition.
He did not like the rougher sports of his school-fellows and preferred to amuse himself in his own way, or to wander about with his older sister, Fanny, whom he especially loved.
He lived part of the time in the country near London, in Brighton, in Dover, and in France and Italy.
He wrote with a purpose.
His much loved sister, his father, and his own little daughter, the youngest of his family, had died.
He bought a house on Gad's Hill--a place near Chatham, where he had spent the happiest part of his childhood--and settled down to a life of comfort and labor.
He was unable to sleep and his appetite entirely failed him.
More than all, it made people acquainted with a new company of characters, none of whom had ever existed, or could ever exist, and yet whose manners and appearance were pictured so really that they seemed to be actual persons whom one might meet and laugh with anywhere.
So earnest was he in this that he was not pleased at all when a person praised one of his stories, unless the other showed that he had grasped the lesson that lay beneath it.
Children, dogs and horses were his friends.
One of the secrets of this, no doubt, was his love of order.
When he was less than thirty, Dickens was invited to visit Scotland, and there he received his first great national tribute.
His hand was open for charity, and he was always the champion of the poor, the helpless and the outcast.
When he was in London he often walked the streets half the night, thinking out his stories, or searching for the odd characters which he put in them.
But his acting was for his own amusement, and it is doubtful if he ever thought seriously of adopting the stage as a profession.
He was the most systematic of men.
Five days later he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, where are buried so many of the greatest of England's dead.
He found himself for the first time in his life feeling, as he said, "giddy, jarred, shaken, faint, uncertain of voice and sight, and tread and touch, and dull of spirit." He was obliged to discontinue the course and to rest.
He had a great affection for Chatham and Rochester, and after he began to write stories that were printed, he often used to put these places into them.
She placed the crown upon her head, the sceptre and orb she carried in her hands, so that all should take her for the Princess.
She hastened to fill a basket, and gave it to him, saying, "I fear that if you pass a night without shelter some harm may come to you.
One day when the Queen was staying in a watering-place, some distance from home, she was sitting by a fountain alone, sadly thinking of the daughter she longed to have, when she perceived a crab coming in her direction, who, to the Queen's surprise, addressed her thus:
She was frightfully thin, and her nose, which was more hooked than a parrot's beak, shone like a danger signal.
"But where have you seen her?" enquired the King.
Giroflee and the Fawn walked in the direction the Fairy had pointed out, and arrived at a neat little cottage where an old woman showed them a room which they could occupy.
It did not take Giroflee long to discover that this was her dearly-loved mistress, and she promised the White Fawn never to forsake her, for she found she could hear all that was said although she could not speak.
Then taking the bouquet into her hand, the Queen, one by one, pronounced the names of the flowers, when there immediately appeared, flying through the air in elegant chariots drawn by different kinds of birds, the six Fairies who entered the apartment, bearing beautiful presents for the little baby.
And, in accordance with the wish of Princess Desiree, Longue Epine and her mother, the false Lady in Waiting, were set at liberty.
"Stay, dear little Fawn," he cried, "I would not hurt you for the world." But the wind carried off the words before they reached her ears.
The next day for a long time she hid from the Prince, but at last he found her, and as she dashed off he shot an arrow which wounded her in the leg.
But, best of all, the Fairies endowed the little Princess with beauty, and virtue, and health, and every good thing that could be desired.
It is a long time since we left the White Fawn, that is to say the charming Princess.
The crab smiled, and transforming herself into a beautiful little old woman, said:
One can guess the astonishment of Becafigue and of the Prince. Guerrier would almost have died of pleasure had he not thought that it must be some enchantment, for did he not know that Desiree and her Lady in Waiting were shut up in the castle.
The next day the young Prince sought in vain for the White Fawn, and finally tired out threw himself upon the grass and fell asleep.
He tied her to a tree.
Meanwhile once more Becafigue came to the capital where Desiree's father lived, and throwing himself at the King's feet, besought him in most touching words to let his daughter go with him at once to the Prince, who would surely die if he could not behold her.
I can offer you a poor one, but at any rate it is secure from the lions."
"I am not going to scold you," she said, "although it is through not following my advice that you are in this misfortune, for it goes to my heart to see you thus.
Becafigue went back to the Prince and together they returned to the cottage, where they were led into the room next to that occupied by the Princess.
Next morning the Prince arose early and went out; he had not long been in the forest when he saw a beautiful little Fawn.
To be a Fawn all the day, to hear him speaking, and not to be able to tell him of my sad fate."
Then, with three waves of a wand, the Fairies caused a high tower to spring up; it had neither door nor window, an underground passage was made, through which everything necessary could be carried, and in this tower the little Princess was shut up and there she lived by candlelight, where never a glimpse of the sun could come.
It will be the death of me."
You have only to hold this bouquet, and mention each flower, thinking of us, and be assured that we shall at once appear in your chamber."
With her mother bearing her train she gravely walked in the direction of the town.
At first the Prince could not speak a word, he simply gazed at her in amazement.
Towards night the fear of having no shelter made the two friends so dreadfully dismayed that the Fairy Tulip suddenly appeared before them.
The Queen, transported with joy, and overcome with gratitude, threw herself upon their necks, and warmly embraced them; she then spent several hours admiring the wonders of the palace and its gardens, and it was not until evening that she returned to her attendants, who were in a serious state of anxiety at the prolonged absence of Her Majesty.
After three or four days' journeying, the wanderers found themselves in a thick forest.
THE WHITE FAWN
Come with me, and I beg of you to look upon me as your friend." She then escorted the Queen to the most magnificent palace that could possibly be imagined, it was built entirely of diamonds.
Quite wearied out, the Prince threw himself upon the ground, while Becafigue went on further in search of fruit wherewith to refresh his royal master.
"Great Queen, if you will condescend to be conducted by a humble crab, I will lead you to a Fairies' palace and your wish shall be fulfilled."
He addressed her politely and asked for the things he required for his master.
Who would have thought that the most beautiful Princess in the world would be treated thus?
Then he and the Prince turned towards the town, and the false Princess and the Lady in Waiting, without any ceremony, were mounted each behind a soldier and taken to be shut up in a castle.
So the King despatched as ambassador a rich young lord named Becafigue.
"Now, madam, it is not necessary to go backwards.
Coming nearer and nearer she presently touched him and he awoke.
When the Princess Desiree was fourteen years old, the Queen had her portrait painted, and copies of it were carried to all the Courts in the world.
"Sir, you will see; apparently the fatigue of the journey has somewhat changed her." The Prince was surprised, but when he saw Longue Epine words fail to express what he felt.
"I would certainly come with you," replied the Queen, "but I am afraid that I cannot walk backwards."
While she was straining at the ribbons trying to break them, Giroflee arrived, and was leading her away when the Prince met them and claimed the Fawn as his.
Then it was found that it was the Fairy Tulip in disguise of the old woman who had provided that sheltering cottage in the forest.
No one replied at first, and then one of the boldest said,
Not very long afterwards, when the Queen was once more at home in her Royal Palace, a baby Princess was born, whom she named Desiree.
When Princess Desiree heard of the Prince's illness, she suggested that she should set out without delay, but in a dark carriage, that only at night should be opened to give her food.
"It is no use talking thus, when I am a Fawn this room is stifling to me and I must depart from it."
Then he said, turning to his father, "We have been deceived, that portrait was painted to mislead us.
"It is not to be wondered at," remarked the King, "that your father kept such a treasure shut up for fifteen years."
"Beautiful Fawn," said he, "do not fear me, I shall lead you with me everywhere." Then he covered her with roses and fed her with the choicest leaves and grasses.
Marvellously fine linen, but so strong that it could be worn a hundred years without going into holes, lace of the finest, with the history of the world worked into its pattern, toys of all descriptions that a child would love to play with, and a cradle ornamented with rubies and diamonds, and supported by four Cupids ready to rock it should the baby cry.
But with morning dawn she felt a little safer, and the sun appeared a marvellous sight to her from which she could hardly turn her eyes.
Then her teeth were black and uneven, and, in fact, she was as ugly as Desiree was beautiful.
Sad that he should have done so cruel a thing, the Prince took herbs and laid them upon the wound, and at last he went to fetch Becafigue to help him carry her to the house.
There was once upon a time a King and Queen who were perfectly happy, with one exception, and that was that they had no child.
Very desolately she wept when in a stream she saw her figure reflected, and when night came she was in great fear, for she heard wild beasts about her, and sometimes forgetting she was a fawn she would try to climb a tree.
He went softly and knocked at the chamber door, which Giroflee opened, thinking it was the old woman, for she required help for the wounded arm.
He was received with great cordiality, as a man persecuted for his religious opinions, and withal a great alchymist.
By the aid of his friends he established himself as a physician in Rome, and also obtained some situation in the pope's household.
Some weeks afterwards, when he had almost forgotten the subject, he received another visit from the stranger.
He thereupon determined to shame them by printing his book, which he did at Leyden the same year.
He contended that the divine grace operated by the same rules, and followed the same methods, that the divine providence observed in the natural world; and that the minds of men were purged from their vices and corruptions in the very same manner that metals were purified from their dross, namely, by fire.
Queen Christina, during her residence at Rome, frequently visited the old man, to converse with him upon chemistry and the doctrines of the Rosicrucians.
German romance and lyrical poetry teem with allusions to sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders; and the French have not been behind in substituting them, in works of fiction, for the more cumbrous mythology of Greece and Rome.
Having these obligations to the Rosicrucians, no lover of poetry can wish, however absurd they were, that such a sect of philosophers had never existed.
At the age of sixteen Joseph was sent to finish his education at the Jesuits' college in Rome, where he distinguished himself by his extraordinary memory.
He found that sphere too narrow for his aspiring genius, and retired in the same year to the more wealthy city of Amsterdam.
From that time he began to neglect his leather, and buried his brain under the rubbish of metaphysics.
Borri's trial proceeded in his absence, and lasted for upwards of two years.
Boehmen died in 1624, leaving behind him a considerable number of admiring disciples.
He was detained in prison, and a letter despatched to the Emperor Leopold, to know what should be done with him.
He was born at Goerlitz, in Upper Lusatia, in 1575, and followed till his thirtieth year the occupation of a shoemaker.
He learned every thing to which he applied himself with the utmost ease.
He says, that, sitting one day in his study, a man, who was dressed as a respectable burgher of North Holland, and very modest and simple in his appearance, called upon him, with the intention of dispelling his doubts relative to the philosopher's stone.
It is now time to speak of Jacob Boehmen, who thought he could discover the secret of the transmutation of metals in the Bible, and who invented a strange heterogeneous doctrine of mingled alchymy and religion, and founded upon it the sect of the Aurea-crucians.
After his departure, Helvetius procured a crucible and a portion of lead, into which, when in a state of fusion, he threw the stolen grain from the philosopher's stone.
He neglected this good advice, and continued his studies; burning minerals and purifying metals one day, and mystifying the Word of God on the next.
This prince was a firm believer in the transmutation of metals.
I shall soon bring my chemical studies to a happy conclusion, by the discovery of the philosopher's stone, and by this means we shall all have as much gold as we desire.
Besides the sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders, he acknowledged various ranks and orders of demons.
He performed several able cures, and increased his reputation so much that he was vaunted as a prodigy.
In vain he protested his innocence, and divulged his real name and profession.
In this obscurity he remained, with the character of a visionary and a man of unsettled mind, until the promulgation of the Rosicrucian philosophy in his part of Germany, toward the year 1607 or 1608.
He procured an introduction to her, and requested her patronage in his endeavour to discover the philosopher's stone.
To his friends this reformation was as pleasing as it was unexpected; and Borri gave obscure hints that it had been brought about by some miraculous manifestation of a superior power.
They then put in their lead, quicksilver, or other ingredients, and placed their pot upon the fire.
He became in time much attached to him; and defended him from the jealous attacks of his courtiers, and the indignation of those who were grieved to see their monarch the easy dupe of a charlatan.
The States-General wisely resolved to have nothing to do with him.
I am assured of the aid of the angelic hosts, and more especially of the archangel Michael's.
Like his predecessor, Jacob Boehmen, he mixed up religious questions with his philosophical jargon, and took measures for declaring himself the founder of a new sect.
With this view he borrowed money wherever he could get it, and succeeded in obtaining two hundred thousand florins from a merchant named De Meer, to aid, as he said, in discovering the water of life.
When the proposition was made to him, he accepted it with eagerness.
He pretended to find the elixir of life, and Louis expected by his means to have enjoyed the crown for a century.
All at once a sudden change was observed in his conduct.
Nothing at one time was more common than to see coins, half gold and half silver, which had been operated upon by alchymists, for the same purposes of trickery.
He lived six years in this manner at the court of Frederick; but that monarch dying in 1670 he was left without a protector.
Borri now thought it high time to change his quarters.
He afterwards wrote three other works, as sublimely ridiculous as the first.
It may well be supposed that Borri benefited most by this acquaintance, and that Christina got nothing but experience.
With this booty he stole away secretly by night, and proceeded to Hamburgh.
As the number of his followers increased, he appears to have cherished the idea of becoming one day a new Mahomet, and of founding, in his native city of Milan, a monarchy and religion of which he should be the king and the prophet.
At the age of thirty-seven he found that he could not live by the practice of medicine, and began to look about for some other employment.
The angels come to me whenever I call, and reveal to me all the secrets of the universe.
The trick to which they oftenest had recourse was to use a double-bottomed crucible, the under surface being of iron or copper, and the upper one of wax, painted to resemble the same metal.
"Whoever shall refuse," said he, "to enter into my new sheepfold shall be destroyed by the papal armies, of whom God has predestined me to be the chief.
On his arrival in that city, he found the celebrated Christina, the ex-queen of Sweden.
He pretended to invisibility and absolute chastity.
To those who follow me all joy shall be granted.
He went first to Saxony; but met so little encouragement, and encountered so much danger from the emissaries of the Inquisition, that he did not remain there many months.
He also obtained six diamonds of great value, on pretence that he could remove the flaws from them without diminishing their weight.
He was disappointed to find that the grain evaporated altogether, leaving the lead in its original state.
He pretended that he held converse with beneficent spirits; that the secrets of God and nature were revealed to him; and that he had obtained possession of the philosopher's stone.
This hope never abandoned him, even in the worst extremity of his fortunes; and in his prosperity it led him into the most foolish expenses: but he could not long continue to live so magnificently upon the funds he had brought from Italy; and the philosopher's stone, though it promised all for the wants of the morrow, never brought any thing for the necessities of to-day.
Between the two they placed as much gold or silver dust as was necessary for their purpose.
JACOB BOeHMEN.
Just at the time that Michael Mayer was making known to the world the existence of such a body as the Rosicrucians, there was born in Italy a man who was afterwards destined to become the most conspicuous member of the fraternity.
They tried the experiment, and succeeded to their heart's content.
But he was nothing daunted by the miseries and privations of the flesh; his mind was fixed upon the beings of another sphere, and in thought he was already the new apostle of the human race.
The request was complied with; and Borri, closely manacled, was sent under an escort of soldiers to the prison of the Inquisition at Rome.
A nail of this description was, for a long time, in the cabinet of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
She encouraged him to search for the great secret of the alchymists, and provided him with money for the purpose.
He applied to the States-General to grant him a public audience, that he might explain the tenets of the sect, and disclose a plan for rendering Holland the happiest and richest country on the earth, by means of the philosopher's stone and the service of the elementary spirits.
The literature of England, France, and Germany contains hundreds of sweet fictions, whose machinery has been borrowed from their day-dreams.
They were to the full as ridiculous as his philosophical pretensions.
Some of them used a hollow wand, filled with gold or silver dust, and stopped at the ends with wax or butter.
All the alchymists were in arms immediately, to refute this formidable antagonist.
He afterwards went to Strasbourg, intending to fix his residence in that town.
Sir Walter Scott also endowed the White Lady of Avenel with many of the attributes of the undines or water-sprites.
Sylvia and Grace were being entertained at tea by Misses Molly and Polly, while Estralla with shining eyes and a wide smile carried tiny cups and little cakes to the guests, and chuckled delightedly over the clever things which Sylvia and Grace declared Molly and Polly had said.
"What is it, Grace?" Sylvia asked eagerly.
I wouldn't have believed that a Charleston girl would do such a mean trick," declared Grace.
A TWILIGHT TEA-PARTY
Estralla, who was carefully putting the little table in order, heard Sylvia's defense of her, and for a moment she stood very straight, holding one of the tiny cups in each hand.
"It's because she is ill.
But I didn't," and Grace laughed good-naturedly; but Flora turned her face from them and began to cry.
"We don't get whipped every time we make a mistake.
"I wouldn't want anybody else to hear.
I saw her just as plainly as I could see you when you sat up in bed," Sylvia declared.
I 'spec' now I'll get whipped."
"After breakfast you must go up and stay with her a little while," said Mrs. Hayes.
"I didn't see it," said Grace.
We will have a tea-party for Molly and Polly, and you shall wait on them.
She thought it would make us laugh."
"And, truly, I believe Sylvia just dreamed it."
"Mammy doesn't seem to know just how it happened," she concluded.
As Grace spoke they both turned quickly, for there was a sudden noise of an overturned chair in the further corner of the room, and they could see a dark figure sprawling on the floor.
Flora sat up in bed suddenly.
Both the girls assured her that it was a good time just to be at the Hayes plantation.
Mr. Fulton seemed greatly pleased with Sylvia's account of her visit. He said Philip was a fine boy, and that there were many like him in South Carolina.
She told them about poor Dinkie, and what Philip had said: that Dinkie should not be sold away from her children, or whipped.
It was decided that Ralph and Philip should ride back to Charleston that afternoon when Uncle Chris drove the little visitors home, and that Flora should stay at the plantation with her mother for a day or two.
"Flora dressed up in her mother's things, and then came up the stairs to our room.
And she's disappointed because you didn't see Lady Caroline," Sylvia whispered.
Sylvia and Grace looked at each other in amazement.
"Don't, Grace!" Sylvia exclaimed.
Just about midnight," said Sylvia.
"Why, Flora was never ill in her life," declared Ralph; "what's the matter?"
"Well, then why didn't she?" asked Grace.
"I can't think what you want to tell me that makes you look so sober."
Before Sylvia could speak she heard the little wailing cry which Estralla always gave when in trouble, and then: "Don't be skeered, Missy!
Grace looked all about the room and then closed the door, not seeing a little figure crouching in a shadowy corner.
In a moment Flora looked up with a little smile.
"Oh, girls!
Nobody seems to know how she got hurt.
Not a bit," replied Sylvia laughingly.
They weren't there yesterday, for the door was open, just as it was to-day."
"I know all about it.
"I don't think it was fair," she said slowly.
"You ought to tell her mother to whip her.
It's too bad that I can't help you to have a good time to-day," she said, "and all because I was so clumsy."
For it wore a big hat, like the one in the picture, and its dress trailed all about it," replied Sylvia.
"After my being hurt, and--" she sobbed, but stopped quickly.
When Mrs. Fulton came up-stairs a little later to tell Grace that her black Mammy had come to take her home she found three very happy little girls.
"Sylvia, I'm coming over to-night.
Of course it was Flora.
She's no business up here," said Grace.
"Well, what of that?" asked Sylvia.
There was a little note of entreaty in Sylvia's voice, as if she were pleading with Grace not to blame Flora.
"Of course it wasn't fair.
"I know one thing, Sylvia.
"I begin to think she did," Grace owned laughingly.
Yes, it was!" she continued quickly.
"Flora!
It was late when Grace and Sylvia awoke the following morning, but they were down-stairs before the boys appeared.
Of course Sylvia promised, but she was puzzled by Flora's request.
Flora was bolstered up in bed, and had on a dainty dressing-gown of pink muslin tied with white ribbons.
I'll tell you after supper," Grace responded and ran on to her own home.
"The moon was shining right where she stood.
"Keep still, Estralla.
It was Flora herself!
Nevertheless she was glad when the carriage stopped in front of her own home, and she saw Estralla, smiling and happy in the pink gingham dress, waiting to welcome her.
"Oh, Missy!
Run down and ask your mother to give us some little cakes."
She was determined to make us think she had a truly ghost in her house. Then when you called out, she got frightened and stumbled on the stairs.
Mrs. Hayes greeted them smilingly, but she said that Flora was not well and that Mammy would take her breakfast to her up-stairs.
Estralla had scrambled to her feet and now stood looking at the little white girls with a half-frightened look in her big eyes.
"Sylvia did not dream it.
"You must forgive me.
Just think, your Uncle Robert can sell her away from her own mother.
These preliminaries settled, the commanders retired to their respective corps.
Whitcomb was one of the most notable shots on our side, though he was not much to boast of in a rough-and-tumble fight, owing to the weakness before mentioned.
Six North-Enders, having rushed out to harass the discomfited enemy, were gallantly cut off by General Ames and captured.
The victory, however, had not been without its price.
The interview had taken place on the hillside between the opposing lines.
Already there were two bad cases of black eye, and one of nosebleed, in the hospital.
General Mat Ames, a veteran commander, was no less wide-awake in the disposition of his army.
Five companies, each numbering but six men, in order not to present too big a target to our sharpshooters, were to charge the fort from different points, their advance being covered by a heavy fire from the gunners posted in the rear.
They could not get within ten yards of the fort, our fire was so destructive.
In less than an hour it was known all over town, in military circles at least, that the "Puddle-dockers" and the "River-rats" (these were the derisive sub-titles bestowed on our South-End foes) intended to attack the fort that Saturday afternoon.
It was also their duty, when not otherwise engaged, to manufacture snow-balls.
As it was impossible for the North-Enders to occupy the fort permanently, it was stipulated that the South-Enders should assault it only on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between the hours of two and six.
The rest retired confused and blinded by our well-directed fire.
At sunset, the garrison of Fort Slatter was still unconquered, and the South-Enders, in a solid phalanx, marched off whistling "Yankee Doodle," while we cheered and jeered them until they were out of hearing.
The walls were four feet high, and twenty-two inches thick, strengthened at the angles by stakes driven firmly into the ground.
snow-balls containing marbles.
If I had been going into a real engagement I could not have been more deeply impressed by the importance of the occasion.
Seven North-Enders had been seriously wounded, and a dozen South-Enders were reported on the sick list. The selectmen of the town awoke to the fact of what was going on, and detailed a posse of police to prevent further disturbance.
A snow-ball soaked in water and left out to cool was a projectile which in previous years had been resorted to with disastrous results.
The enemy was not slow in making his approach--fifty strong, headed by one Mat Ames.
Slatter's Hill, or No-man's-land, as it was generally called, was a rise of ground covering, perhaps, an acre and a quarter, situated on an imaginary line, marking the boundary between the two districts.
General Ames handled his men with great skill; his deadliest foe could not deny that.
Perceiving that it was impossible with their small number to dislodge us, the watch sent for reinforcements.
Those battle-scarred ramparts were razed to the ground, and humiliating ashes sprinkled over the historic spot, near which a solitary lynx-eyed policeman was seen prowling from time to time during the rest of the winter.
Chapter Thirteen--The Snow Fort on Slatter's Hill
This formidable array brought us to our senses: we began to think that maybe discretion was the better part of valor.
The battle raged.
The street ran on either side of the hill, from one part of which a quantity of rock had been removed to form the underpinning of the new jail. This excavation made the approach from that point all but impossible, especially when the ragged ledges were a-glitter with ice.
Matters grew worse and worse.
Their call was responded to, not only by the whole constabulary force (eight men), but by a numerous body of citizens, who had become alarmed at the prospect of a riot.
Our forces were under the command of General J. Harris.
After this, both sides never failed to freeze their ammunition.
The repellers were called light infantry; but when they carried on operations beyond the fort they became cavalry.
It was not an infrequent occurrence for the combatants to hold up a flag of truce while they removed some insensible comrade.
At every assault three or four boys on each side were disabled.
Fancy the rage of the South-Enders the next day, when they spied our snowy citadel, with Jack Harris's red silk pocket handkerchief floating defiantly from the flag-staff.
You ought to have been at the fights on Slatter's Hill!"
A ball stuck full of sand-bird shot came tearing into Fort Slatter.
I forget whether it was on that afternoon or the next that we lost Fort Slatter; but lose it we did, with much valuable ammunition and several men.
At two o'clock all the fighting boys of the Temple Grammar School, and as many recruits as we could muster, lay behind the walls of Fort Slatter, with three hundred compact snowballs piled up in pyramids, awaiting the approach of the enemy.
General Ames put him among the gunners, and we were quickly made aware of the loss we had sustained, by receiving a frequent artful ball which seemed to light with unerring instinct on any nose that was the least bit exposed.
It was glorious excitement, those pell-mell onslaughts and hand-to-hand struggles.
The fort opened fire first--a single ball from the dexterous band of General Harris taking General Ames in the very pit of his stomach.
Nothing on earth could represent the state of things after the first volley.
An immense stratum of granite, which here and there thrust out a wrinkled boulder, prevented the site from being used for building purposes.
When General Harris (with his right eye bunged up) said, "Soldiers, I am proud of you!" my heart swelled in my bosom.
At length the provision against using heavy substances in the snow-balls was disregarded.
For them to take possession of the place at any other time was not to constitute a capture, but on the contrary was to be considered a dishonorable and cowardly act.
The shouts of the leaders, and the snowballs bursting like shells about our ears, made it very lively.
General Ames remained behind to effect an exchange of prisoners.
The thrilling moment had now arrived.
Meanwhile, four companies of the enemy's scalers made a detour round the foot of the hill, and dashed into Fort Slatter without opposition.
The watch were determined fellows, and charged the boys valiantly, driving them all into the fort, where we made common cause, fighting side by side like the best of friends.
Twice we were within an ace of being driven from our stronghold, when General Harris and his staff leaped recklessly upon the ramparts and hurled the besiegers heels over head down hill.
But we had no time for vain regrets.
It was no longer child's play to march up to the walls of Fort Slatter, nor was the position of the besieged less perilous.
Each scaler was provided with only two rounds of ammunition, which were not to be used until he had mounted the breastwork and could deliver his shots on our heads.
We held thirteen of his men, and he eleven of ours.
So, after one grand farewell volley, we fled, sliding, jumping, rolling, tumbling down the quarry at the rear of the fort, and escaped without losing a man.
But we lost Fort Slatter forever.
The rear of the entrenchment, being protected by the quarry, was left open.
The event passed into a legend, and afterwards, when later instances of pluck and endurance were spoken of, the boys would say, "By golly!
Instantly they who stood waiting began crying and tearing their clothes and beating their hands.
When the crowd that stood waiting saw the young man appear, they shouted: "Welcome!
"He has asked the question!" she screamed--"he has asked the question!"
No one since that time has been permitted to enter the palace--it is forbidden for any one even to ask a question concerning it; but every year, on the day on which the queen was turned to stone, the whole land mourns with weeping and wailing.
He drew from his girdle a wand, half of gold and half of silver, as he spoke, and gave it to the young man.
Be thou also further advised: do not question the Demon Zadok."
He led the way and the young man followed; they passed through the vaulted rooms and out through the door of adamant, and Zadok locked it behind them and gave the key to the young man.
In a moment he set the young man again upon the ground, and Aben Hassen the Fool found himself at the end of what appeared to be a vast and splendid garden.
The young man was drunk with happiness.
But of all these things the young man thought nothing and saw nothing; for at the end of the marble avenue there arose a palace, the like of which was not in the four quarters of the earth--a palace of marble and gold and carmine and ultramarine--rising into the purple starry sky, and shining in the moonlight like a vision of Paradise.
Instantly the beautiful slave dropped the golden basin upon the stone floor, and began shrieking and tearing her clothes.
When the young man saw this vast and amazing wealth he stood speechless and breathless with wonder.
"This," said he, "is great, but it is little.
She was cold and dead--of stone as white as marble.
"All--all this," he exulted, "belongs to me.
"Well, let us have it.
"Then open the door, and let me see what lies within."
"This," said he, "is nothing; come with me."
The queen smiled--her teeth sparkled like pearls.
Wilt thou not let me pay for having it filled?"
"That," said the Lad who fiddled when the Jew was in the bramble-bush, "may be as you please, Sir Knight; and, to tell the truth, I will be mightily glad for a drop to moisten my throat withal."
It grew louder and louder--it became a shout.
Nor had he any fear of an end coming to it, for he knew that his treasure was inexhaustible.
Six times you would have deprived me of joys that should have been mine, and each was greater than that which went before.
"Be silent," said the young man.
And now thou knowest all!"
"Oh, fool!
Each held a flaming torch of sandal-wood.
"Then give it to me; I command you to give it to me."
Then the young man bethought himself of the Talisman of Solomon.
O Zadok!
Welcome!
Zadok laughed aloud.
"I command you," said the young man, "to carry the queen and myself to the garden where my treasure lies hidden."
"Nevertheless, if I do not find out what it all means, I shall go mad myself."
Ill-Luck and the Fiddler
There was a key of brass in the door.
"I have come," said Zadok, "and first let me cure thy smarts, O master."
"Then, as you love me, I beg one boon on you.
Aben Hassen the Fool fell upon his knees.
The young man lived in a golden cloud of delight.
"Are you mad?" cried the young man.
"Now," said Zadok, "what is thy bidding?"
They went forward together.
He stamped his foot upon the ground.
"Tell me, O Talisman," said he, "why all these people weep and wail so continuously?"
"I bring the treasure," said Zadok, "from the treasure-house of the ancient kings of Egypt.
"What a fool I am," said he, "not to have thought to call upon Zadok before this!" Then he called aloud, "Zadok, Zadok!
"What a fool am I!" he cried.
"Thou shalt enter," said Zadok.
"Thou shalt see it all," said he.
Then, for the first time, the Talisman spoke without being questioned. "Fool!" it cried; "wilt thou not be advised?"
"Tell me, Zadok," cried the young man; "I command you to tell me, where is that wand of silver and gold?"
The young man began to grow frightened; he arose from his couch, and with uneven steps went out into the anteroom.
Then he bethought himself, for the first time since he came to that land, of the Talisman of Solomon.
The young man entered after him.
He made friends with the princes and nobles of the land.
But they were without life--they were all of stone as white as alabaster.
Instantly the earth opened, and there appeared a flight of marble steps leading downward into the earth.
"Nothing is easier," said Zadok.
The palace was illuminated from top to bottom and from end to end; the windows shone like crystal, and from it came sounds of music and rejoicing.
"Tell me," said the young man; "I command thee to tell me, O Zadok!
Thy father possessed a wand, half of silver and half of gold.
"My father turned you to cold stone, and I--I have brought you back to warm life again."
Why are the people all gone mad this morning, and why do they weep and wail, and why do they go crazy when I do but ask them why they are so afflicted?"
"Then open the door for me," said the young man; "for I cannot open it for myself, as there is neither lock nor key to it."
The Demon Zadok laughed.
"I do not know," said the young man.
They went into the next room, and when the queen saw the basin of gold her face turned as white as ashes.
The young man descended the steps with the queen behind him, and behind them both came the Demon Zadok.
"Then," said the young man, "I command you to take me thither instantly, and to show me the treasure."
In the meantime bear thy punishment; perhaps it will cure thee of thy folly.
"Tell me, O Talisman," said he, "how shall I open yonder door?"
"Thou art the first man," said Zadok, "who has seen what thou art about to see for seven-and-thirty years.
A flaming lamp hung from the ceiling above.
"That also I am forbidden to do," said Zadok.
They had both forgotten that the Demon Zadok was there.
"What is the matter with you?"
Instantly all the slaves began howling and beating their heads, and he to whom the young man had spoken fell down with his face in the dust, and lay there twisting and writhing like a worm.
"I hear and obey," said the Demon.
Instantly the pain and smarting ceased, and the merchant's son had perfect ease.
He struck his heel upon the circle.
That was the way he came back to the treasure of the ancient kings of Egypt, and to the palace of enchantment that his father had quitted.
The young man approached and looked into her face, and when he looked his breath became faint and his heart grew soft within him like wax in a flame of fire.
The young man could not believe what he saw with his own eyes.
"She was really alive as thou art alive, and he did truly transform her to this stone," said Zadok.
When men would praise any one they would say, "He is as rich," or as "magnificent," or as "generous, as Aben Hassen the Fool."
He was dizzy with joy.
Fool!
There stood guards in armor of brass and silver and gold.
Suppose he had recognized you?" cried Henriette.
Fortune favored us in that it was a beautiful day and the number of guests was large.
"Remember, Bunny--calm deliberation--your gloves now," were her last words to me.
"All pearls, Bunny, of the finest water," said Henriette, enthusiastically.
"These, madam," said I, handing her a small plush bag into which I had poured the "salvage" taken from my sticky palms.
A rope-walk won't be in it with her, and every single little jewel will be worth a small fortune.
"I shouldn't call that rope.
"There isn't one of the thousands that isn't worth anywhere from five hundred to twenty-five hundred."
"I, Bunny?
"Oh, he did--or at least he thought he did," I replied, smiling broadly at the recollection.
Again I laughed.
He was very genial."
Henriette was charming in her new gown specially imported from Paris--a gown of Oriental design with row upon row of brilliantly shining, crescent-shaped ornaments firmly affixed to the front of it and every one of them as sharp as a steel knife.
"Well," I replied, pluming myself a bit, "I don't wish to boast, Henriette, but I think it is pretty good.
You do what I tell you and some of those pearls will be ours.
"Hush!
Why, I haven't seen you since dinner," she demurred.
An hour later our victim arrived and scarce an inch of her but shone like a snow-clad hill with the pearls she wore.
Are you ready for a coup requiring a lot of it?"
Cable, yes--frankly, when she came into the dining-room the other night I thought it was a feather-boa she had on."
At my cry of dismay over the accident--"
"Here, dear," she added, holding out a pair of teacups.
His clothes I took, as a well-ordered valet should, from his bed-chamber into an adjoining room, where, after removing the contents of his pockets, I hung them neatly over a chair and departed, taking with me, of course, everything of value the young gentleman had about him, even down to the two brilliant rubies he wore in his garter buckles.
You are a first-class tool, but as a principal--well--well, never mind.
"Better call it the incident," I put in.
I am delighted to have you show your nerve now and then, but please don't take any serious chances.
"Well, Bunny," said Henriette, "you are very clever at times, but do be careful.
"Rope?" I laughed.
You know you are likely to complicate matters for all of us if you work on the side. What, pray, did you do last night?"
Where most people nod she describes a complete circle with her head.
Even then we'll be thirty-five thousand dollars to the good.
"I shall provide for that," said this wonderful woman.
"Splendid!" cried Henrietta "Roughly speaking, Bunny, we've pulled in between forty and fifty thousand dollars to-day."
"I was spending the evening at the Gentlemen's Gentlemen's Club," I explained, "when word came over the telephone to Digby, Mr. de Pelt's valet, that Mr. de Pelt was at the Rockerbilts' and in no condition to go home alone.
When a cold, formal handshake is necessary she perpetrates an embrace, and that is where we come in.
"Tell me quickly--what was the result?"
It happened that it was I who took the message, and observing that Digby was engaged in a game of billiards, and likely to remain so for some time to come, I decided to go after the gentleman myself without saying anything to Digby about it.
"There!" she said--and at last I understood.
You know Mrs. Gushington-Andrews?"
There was a cry of dismay both from Henriette and her guest, and the rug beneath their feet was simply white with riches. In a moment I was upon my knees scooping them up by the handful.
She will wear her pearls--she'll be strung with them from head to foot.
"Instinct will carry you through the rest of it."
"Sarcasm does not suit your complexion, Bunny," retorted Henriette. "Your best method is to follow implicitly the directions of wiser brains.
"No, Bunny--you will behave like a gentleman, that is all," she responded, haughtily; "or rather like a butler with the instincts of a gentleman.
The following Tuesday at five the second of Mrs. Van Raffles's Tuesday afternoons began.
"You dear, sweet thing!" cried Mrs. Gushington-Andrews.
"Hush!
"About that," said I, with an inward chuckle, for I, of course, did not tell Henriette of eight beauties I had kept out of the returns for myself.
You, Bunny, will be in the room to announce her when she arrives.
Just watch me," she replied.
"Nothing of the sort, Bunny; just do as I tell you--only bring your gloves to me just before the guests arrive, that is all," said Henriette.
I could see at a glance that even if so little as one of these fastened its talons upon the pearl rope of Mrs. Gushington-Andrews nothing under heaven could save it from laceration.
Now, do you see?"
"Mercy, Bunny, that was a terribly risky thing.
I managed to raise twenty-seven hundred dollars on my own account by the use of it last night."
Muffling myself up so that no one could recognize me, I hired a cab and drove out to the Rockerbilt mansion, sent in word that Mr. de Pelt's man was waiting for him, and in ten minutes had the young gentleman in my possession.
I took him to his apartment, dismissed the cab, and, letting ourselves into his room with his own latch-key, put him to bed.
What a marvellous mind there lay behind those exquisite, childlike eyes of the wonderful Henriette!
"Indeed?" said Henriette, with a slight frown.
And then the conspiracy stopped for the moment.
"How, Bunny?
"You possibly observed also that wherever she goes she wears about sixty-nine yards of pearl rope upon her person."
"Yes," said I. "She is the lady who asked me for the olives at your last dinner."
This consisted of two handfuls of crumpled twenty-dollar bills from his trousers, three rolls of one-hundred-dollar bills from his waistcoat, and sundry other lots of currency, both paper and specie, that I found stowed away in his overcoat and dinner-coat pockets.
At my next Tuesday tea she will be present.
And, egad, it was: seventeen pearls of a value of twelve hundred dollars each, fifteen worth scarcely less than nine hundred dollars apiece, and some twenty-seven or eight smaller ones that we held to be worth in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars each.
"The top oven bakes too quickly," said Ribby to herself.
"Just a shade longer; I will pour out the tea, while we wait. Do you take sugar, my dear Duchess?"
When Ribby had laid the table she went out down the field to the farm, to fetch milk and butter.
"Oh, what lovely flowers!
"I am dreadfully afraid it WILL be mouse!" said Duchess to herself--"I really couldn't, COULDN'T eat mouse pie.
When he got to the top, he thought, he would build a little tower of stones, the way explorers always do.
When the car finally stopped, the rest of them got out stiffly and went into the new house.
He looked back.
You never know what you will find when you climb a mountain, even if you have climbed them before--which, of course, David never had. Looking up from the foot of the mountain, he had thought that it was a smooth slope from bottom to top.
"C'mere," Aunt Amy said, grabbing him by the arm.
But David walked slowly into the back yard with his eyes fixed on the ground.
Was it a bird of some sort, or just one of those dots that swim before your eyes when you stare too long at the sky?
Then it would fade and be drowned out by the breeze.
David's curiosity was aroused, but it occurred to him that it might be wise to be cautious.
It would be so easy to go!
And when the meadow had been discovered, there would be a something else beyond.
When David finally got a chance to sneak out for a breathing spell, he felt his heart sink.
David propped himself up on his elbows and listened more intently.
Regretfully, he waved his hand at the peak and whispered, "It shouldn't take long--I'll be back as soon as I can." Then he went around to the front door to see what could be done about speeding things up.
And just beyond the hedge the mountainside awaited him, going up and up in one smooth sweep until the green and tawny faded into hazy heights of rock.
Even the peak could not give him a better view than this.
But there was a great deal to do first.
Truly it was an enchanted place!
But he was discovering as he climbed that it was not smooth at all, but very much broken up.
But he did not care now.
Then he started upward again.
It was too late now.
He dropped down on his stomach and carefully began to worm his way under the thicket.
The noise did not sound dangerous, but--well, he had never been up a mountain before, and there was no telling what he might find.
When the ironing board was finally located, Mother had something for him to do.
The moving van was standing out in front, the car must be unloaded.
He dropped into a crouch and crept silently up to the tangle of bushes.
To scale the rock face itself was impossible, however: there were no hand or foot holds.
But David could not eat until he had found the courage to ask one question:
It was warm and soft and sweet-smelling; it soothed away the hurt of his aching muscles and the sting of his scratches.
He sat up.
At the top of a rise would be an outcropping of strangely colored rock, invisible from below.
Dad was pushing chairs and tables around in an aimless way.
Who could it possibly be?
"May I climb the mountain tomorrow?"
Vines clutched at his feet, and the close-set bushes seemed unwilling to let him pass.
Then he took a deep breath, clenched his hands tightly, and lifted his head.
He had one nasty slip, which might have been his last if he had not grabbed a tough clump of weeds at the crucial instant.
David threw himself on the grass and rolled in it.
The back yard was hedged in (with part of the hedge growing right across the toes of the mountain), but there was a hole in the privet large enough to crawl through.
Beckie crooned happily over her bottle, and the rest of them gathered in the kitchen for a late supper of sandwiches and canned soup.
His heart began to pound, and he swallowed to relieve the dryness in his throat.
He felt so tight and shivery inside that he didn't know whether he wanted to laugh, or cry, or both.
"Help me look for that ironing board."
As he gazed up miserably at the glowing summit, he thought he saw a tiny speck soar out from it in a brief circle.
Aunt Amy muttered something about landslides, which were firmly fixed in her mind as the fate of people who climbed mountains.
And when he was finished with that, Dad called for his help.
David asked, "Can I do anything?"--hoping that the answer would be no.
There were terraces, ledges, knolls, ravines, and embankments, one after another.
Inside, everything was in confusion.
It swept upward from the valley floor, beautifully shaped and soaring, so tall that its misty blue peak could surely talk face to face with the stars.
Already the evening sun was throwing shadows across the side of the mountain and touching its peak with a ruddy blaze.
But, oh! it was worth it.
"Come and climb," it whispered, "come and climb."
It was long after dark before the moving van drove away.
So the afternoon wore on without letup--and also without any signs of progress in their moving.
The noise, whatever it was, came from the other side of the thicket.
Mother said, "Well ... be very careful," in a doubtful tone, and that was that.
It almost seemed like the mountain waving its hand, as if to say that it was quite all right for him to wait until morning.
He would have to wait until morning before he could climb.
Mother was saying, "They'll all have to go out again; we forgot to put down the rug first." Aunt Amy was making short dashes between the kitchen and the dining room, muttering to herself.
Halfway up the scarp was a dark horizontal line of bushes, something like a hedge.
Now he noticed that the ledge was divided by a thicket which grew from the inner side to the outer.
The exciting part of it was that each feature concealed the ones above it.
All the way there David had saved this moment for himself, struggling not to peek until the proper time came.
But Dad said, "I don't see why not, do you?" and looked to Mother for agreement.
And when he closed his eyes, he seemed to hear a voice which whispered, "Come along, then, and climb."
He was a real explorer now.
It was waiting for him.
Well, there was only one way to find out.
Just before they had moved, Uncle Charles had given him a ten-dollar bill as a farewell present.
"How about electricity, Phoenix?"
What are we going to do with it?"
The sapling is bent down to it and fitted into the notch, which holds it down.
Then he had to make two stakes from stout, hard wood, cut a notch at one end, and drive them into the ground with the flat of the hatchet.
"You might have brought more," said the Phoenix, fifteen minutes later.
"Here's the stuff, Phoenix," he called out as he stepped onto the ledge.
What could the Phoenix possibly want with them?
There was a terrific burst of blue light, a sharp squawk from the Phoenix, and a shower of sparks.
This is exactly the sort of trap that the Scientist once set for me!
As an afterthought he had added a paper bag full of cookies.
Exactly like a private telephone line!"
A smell of singed feathers and burning rubber filled the air.
"Now, scientists, you know, have fixed habits.
"Phoenix," said David, "I'm not going to ask you again what your Plan is, because I know you'll tell me when it's time.
"My boy," said the Phoenix, "I have had a wide, and sometimes painful, experience with traps; so you may believe me when I say that these are among the best I have seen.
Now, you will take our gold and purchase the following." And the Phoenix listed the things it wanted, and told David which to bring to the ledge and which to leave below.
The lights in the house, and down the whole street, flickered and went out.
That, my boy, is the nub, or crux, of the situation.
He had been saving it for a model airplane, but the excitement of the last few days had driven it completely out of his mind.
We are going to construct a snare at each end of the ledge."
"Do you need any help up there?" David asked.
Perhaps even today, when they had been digging up the pirate treasure, the Scientist had got his new rifle and had started to hunt through the mountains.
What to do?
David could hear the creak of the lines under the Phoenix's weight and the rattling of the screw driver against the porcelain insulators.
"Alas!" she said.
"Accept two or three, and, along with them, you may grow the third sucker."
And certainly the unfortunate prisoner would have fallen ill but for the counterpoise which Providence had granted to his grief, and which was called Rosa.
"Oh, it would be very easy!"
"Oh!" said Rosa, with a sigh, "you are very fond of your bulbs."
"But with whom else?"
In the evening she came back.
"'How so?'
Poor Cornelius, thus left alone with his bitter grief, muttered to himself,--
"I see one thing."
"What?"
"What do you see?"
"Certainly."
"The word certainly struck me just as much as it does you.
"What?"
"Be easy, Mynheer Cornelius," said Rosa, with a sweet mixture of melancholy and gravity, "be easy; your wishes are commands to me."
"Not one, indeed."
I only know--as unfortunately it is our lot to live with prisoners--that for them any pastime is of value.
"So he did."
"Well?"
"Well, that is true; but only think! you are depriving yourself, as I can easily see, of a very great pleasure."
"Well, and what then?"
Rosa felt her heart sink within her, and her eyes were filling with tears.
"And how do you know that?" the prisoner asked, with a doleful look.
"What is it?" asked Cornelius.
"'Indeed I have.'
"Halloa, halloa!" said Cornelius.
"Tell me."
"Which proposition?"
This poor Mynheer van Baerle amused himself with this bulb.
"Who else, then?"
"'Are you mad, too?' he asked his friend."
"'You have done that,' he cried, 'you have crushed the bulb?'
"That not one of your movements escaped him?"
"Did you say that I have three?"
Saying this, she fled.
If I thus give up the only and last resource which we possess to the uncertain chances of the bad passions of anger and envy, I should never deserve to be forgiven.
I cannot, therefore, bring to you this wonderful flower.
Rosa made her escape.
"What's the name of the President?"
"Say, 'My very dear friend.'"
"Your cheek,--your fresh cheek, your soft, rosy cheek.
"Well?"
"And if on your return you find it open?"
As soon as it is open, I shall send a messenger to you, with the request that you will come and fetch it in person from the fortress at Loewestein.
"Well, and I will tell you now what I have decided on.
"Oh!"
"Well?"
Night came, and with it Rosa, joyous and cheerful as a bird.
The messenger! the messenger!"
"Without a speck of any other colour."
"Is it, indeed?"
"By Jove!"
"Well?" asked Cornelius.
Touch it gently, Rosa.
"Rosa," said Cornelius, almost gasping, "Rosa, there is not one moment to lose in writing the letter."
Oh, Rosa, give it me of your own free will, and not by chance.
"Without one speck."
Cornelius uttered a cry, and was nearly fainting.
"Rosa, Rosa, I don't know to what wonder under the sun I shall compare you."
"One single thing.
I 'spec' dar ain't nuffin' you kin do.
Twenty dollars was a good deal of money, she reflected.
"I'll ask them right away after breakfast, before they start for school," Sylvia promised eagerly.
"Now, Sylvia, own up that you think Charleston is nicer than Boston.
But don't be frightened, Estralla.
CHAPTER XIV
"Yes," Sylvia responded.
Mrs. Fulton listened in surprise.
"We really ought to have started an hour ago." For a moment the little group looked at each other in silence.
Then with a sudden cry Estralla darted off.
"Yes, indeed!
"She must be somewhere about the fort," declared Captain Carleton.
It was rather difficult walking.
It had not occurred to Sylvia that Estralla would go back to the fort.
They were singing as they worked, and Sylvia resolved to remember the words of the song:
While Captain Carleton questioned the soldiers, Mr. Fulton and Mrs. Carleton and Grace hastened back to the officers' quarters, and a thorough search for the little girl was begun at once.
Mr. Fulton came to meet them and helped them on board the boat.
"Of course she could if she had a compass and was familiar with the stars," said Mr. Fulton; and he called Grace's attention to the compass fastened securely near Sylvia's seat, and explained the rules of navigation.
"All ready to start!" said Mr. Fulton, "and it will be dusk before we reach home.
Negroes were at work on the wharf loading bales of cotton on a big ship.
No response came to her calls, so she went down the steps and along the walk which led to the sand-bars, past the houses and barracks on Sullivan's island.
CHAPTER XV
"The Adventures of Don Quixote," was the title of the book, and after Grace began to read she entirely forgot Sylvia, Estralla, and Mrs. Carleton.
"Is that the way the big ships know how to find their harbors?" asked Grace, when Mr. Fulton told her of the stars, and how the pilots set their course.
"Where is Sylvia?" asked Mr. Fulton, looking at his watch.
"Oh!" exclaimed Grace, looking up in surprise.
It was nearly dark before she gave up trying to find her way to the fort, and, shivering and half afraid, crawled under the scraggly branches of some stunted trees on a sheltered slope.
She helped herself to the rich creamy chocolate and the little frosted cakes, and then curled up on a broad couch near the window with a book full of wonderful pictures.
"Probably Estralla is there before this, and they will be looking for me," she thought, and climbed another sandy slope, expecting to see the houses and barracks directly in front of her.
She thought of the little compass on board the Butterfly, and wondered if a compass would help anyone find her way on land as well as on the sea.
"Where is Sylvia?" echoed Mrs. Carleton, who came in at that moment. "Has she gone to the boat?"
"Tell Sylvia I won't be gone long," she had said to Grace.
"Yes, and if Sylvia understood how to steer by the compass she could steer the Butterfly as well at night as she can now."
I wonder where she can be," thought Sylvia, calling "Estralla!
"I am making a new flag for Fort Sumter," she said.
Mrs. Carleton was in her pleasant sitting-room and declared that she had been wishing for company, and held up some strips of red and white bunting.
"Why, I don't know.
Sylvia wondered if she would have a chance to tell Mrs. Carleton that she had safely delivered the message.
No one was in sight whom she could ask if Estralla had passed that way.
"Why, here is Estralla now," he added, as the little colored girl appeared at the door.
"Of course I can't be lost, because I know exactly where I am.
"I will go to the wharf with you.
It was too bad to leave you.
Sylvia sat in the stern beside her father, and very soon the tiller was in her hand and she was shaping the boat's course toward the forts. Grace watched her admiringly.
Mr. Fulton said for us to come right to the landing," said Grace, her thoughts still full of the faithful Sancho Panza of whom she had been reading.
The pictures were of a tall man on horseback, and a short, fat man on a donkey.
As the Butterfly made its way out into the channel the little girls looked back at the long water-front, where lay many vessels from far-off ports.
Grace did not mind being alone until Sylvia returned.
Captain Carleton seemed very glad to welcome them, and sent a soldier to escort the girls to the officers' quarters, while Mr. Fulton went in search of Major Anderson.
While Grace and Sylvia were so pleasantly occupied Estralla had wandered out, crossed the bridge which connected the officers' quarters with the fort, and now found herself near the landing-place, so that when Mrs. Carleton made the girls a cup of hot chocolate and looked about to give Estralla her share, the little colored girl was not to be seen.
At last she began to call aloud: "Estralla!
Mrs. Carleton has just gone to the next house."
"Oh, dear!
"I believe you could steer in the dark," she declared.
She climbed a small sand-hill covered with stunted little trees and looked about, but could see no trace of the little darky.
But she found herself facing the open sea, and look which way she would there was only shore, sand heaps and blue water.
Perhaps I may not be permitted to have visitors much longer," said Mrs. Carleton, and she and Grace left the pleasant room and, followed closely by Estralla, made their way over the bridge to the landing-place.
"Well, put on your things and run after them, that's a good girl," said Mr. Fulton.
"Oh, yes," agreed Mr. Fulton, "but we had best lose no time in finding her."
Perhaps she has.
In the distance they could see the spire of St. Philip's, one of the historic churches of Charleston, and everywhere fluttered the palmetto flag.
"I'll call her," said Sylvia, and ran out on the veranda.
One of the first stars on the flag was for South Carolina," replied Mrs. Carleton, "and this very fort was named for a defender of America's rights."
"My father will come and find me, I know he will," she said aloud, almost ready to cry. "I'll wait here, and keep calling 'Estralla,' so he will hear me."
There had been many changes at Fort Moultrie since Sylvia's last visit. A deep ditch had been dug between the fort and the sand-bars, and many workmen were busy in strengthening the defences, and Sylvia and Grace wondered why so many soldiers were stationed along the parapet.
The minute I saw that plumed hat I knew just the trick she had played.
Grace lit the candles on Sylvia's bureau, while Sylvia picked up her treasured dolls, "Molly" and "Polly," which her Grandmother Fulton had sent her on her last birthday.
She had happened to look toward the open closet and had seen certain things which made her quite ready to own that Flora might be right.
Estralla was off in an instant, and while she was away Sylvia and Grace spread the little table, brought cushions from the window-seats and advised Molly and Polly to forgive the disturbance.
Flora will tell us just as soon as we see her again."
Not insensible to flattery, or unconscious of that pleasure with which almost every woman beholds the influence of her own beauty. Formed with the qualities which we love, not with the talents that we admire, she was an agreeable woman rather than an illustrious queen.
Her passion for Darnley was rash, youthful, and excessive; and though the sudden transition to the opposite extreme was the natural effect of her ill-requited love, and of his ingratitude, insolence, and brutality, yet neither these nor Bothwell's artful address and important services can justify her attachments to that nobleman.
Mary's sufferings exceed, both in degree and duration, those tragical distresses which fancy has feigned to excite sorrow and commiseration; and while we survey them, we are apt altogether to forget her frailties: we think of her faults with less indignation, and approve of our tears, as if they were shed for a person who had attained much nearer to pure virtue.
ROBERTSON.
Sudden, however, and violent in all her attachments, because her heart was warm and unsuspicious.
With regard to the queen's person, a circumstance not to be omitted in writing the history of a female reign, all contemporary authors agree in ascribing to Mary the utmost beauty of countenance and elegance of shape of which the human form is capable.
No stranger, on some occasions, to dissimulation, which in that perfidious court where she received her education was reckoned among the necessary arts of government.
She danced, walked, and rode with equal grace. Her taste for music was just; and she both sung and played upon the lute with uncommon skill.
Impatient of contradiction, because she had been accustomed from her infancy to be treated as a queen.
Her hair was black, although, according to the fashion of that age, she frequently wore borrowed locks, and of different colours.
Her eyes were a dark grey, her complexion was exquisitely fine, and her hands and arms remarkably delicate, both as to shape and colour.
Her stature was of an height that rose to the majestic.
Polite, affable, insinuating, sprightly, and capable of speaking and writing with equal ease and dignity.
Humanity will draw a veil over this part of her character which it cannot approve, and may perhaps prompt some to impute her actions to her situation more than to her dispositions; and to lament the unhappiness of the former, rather than accuse the perverseness of the latter.
To all the charms of beauty and the utmost elegance of external form, Mary added those accomplishments which render their impression irresistible.
He was received with honour at the court of Stockholm, where he lived with the prime minister, in the enjoyment of a salary from the government. During this period of prosperity he had continued to send large sums of money to his wife, who was now making arrangements to leave England with her only child and join her husband.
The first event of her life which is now known, was her secret marriage with Alexander Blackwell, and her elopement with him to London.
She had in her girlish days practised the drawing and colouring of flowers, a suitable and amiable accomplishment of her sex.
JAMES BRUCE.
It was this circumstance that brought into practice the talents and virtues of Mrs Blackwell.
He had received a finished education, and was an accurate Greek and Latin scholar.
After having in vain attempted to get into practice as a physician, and having now a wife also to provide for, he applied for the situation of corrector of the press to a printer of the name of Wilkins, and for some time continued in that employment.
Elizabeth Blackwell was the daughter of a stocking merchant in Aberdeen, where she was born about the beginning of last century.
Amongst those who were honoured in patronising her labour of piety was Mr Rand of the Botanical Garden at Chelsea.
The adventures of Blackwell after his release are well known.
ELIZABETH BLACKWELL.
He was, however, unsuccessful in his endeavours to secure a comfortable livelihood.
She resolved, by an unexampled labour for a woman, to effect the delivery of her husband.
[1720.]
A conspiracy against the constitution of Sweden was formed by Count Tessin; and Blackwell, it is believed innocently, was suspected of being concerned in the plot.
Blackwell."
He then set up a printing establishment in the Strand, but became involved in debt, and was thrown into prison.
She also received the kindest countenance from Mr Philip Miller, a well-known writer on horticulture.
Having submitted her first drawings to Sir Hans Sloane and Dr Mead, these eminent physicians encouraged her to proceed with the work.
Of these she made drawings, which she engraved on copper, and coloured with her own hands.
He went there, leaving his wife in England.
Her husband supplied the Latin names and the descriptions of the plants, which were taken principally from Miller's "Botanicum Officinale," with the author's permission.
By his advice Mrs Blackwell took lodgings in the neighbourhood of this garden, from which she was furnished with all the flowers and plants which she required for her work.
The profits which Mrs Blackwell received from this work enabled her to relieve her husband from prison.
She now engaged in a labour which is at once a noble and marvellous monument of her enthusiastic and untiring conjugal affection, and interesting evidence of the elegant and truly womanly nature of her own mind.
He had studied medicine under the famous Boerhaave, and, in travelling over the Continent, had lived in the best society, and had acquired an extensive knowledge of the modern languages.
Overcome at length by the entreaties rather than the reasons of her father and father-in-law, and above all of her husband, she submitted to their will, and was prevailed on to relinquish her own judgment.
The Protestant teachers themselves, who were employed to convince the people of Jane's title, found their eloquence fruitless; and Ridley, Bishop of London, preached a sermon to that purpose, which wrought no effect upon his audience.
Her heart, full of this passion for literature and the elegant arts, and of tenderness towards her husband [Lord Guildford], who was deserving of her affections, had never opened itself to the flattering allurements of ambition, and the intelligence of her elevation to the throne was nowise agreeable to her.
All the councillors were obliged to attend her to that fortress, and by this means became in reality prisoners in the hands of Northumberland, whose will they were necessitated to obey. Orders were given by the council to proclaim Jane throughout the kingdom, but their orders were executed only in London and the neighbourhood.
HUME.
She even refused to accept of the present; pleaded the preferable title of the two princesses; expressed her dread of the consequences attending an enterprise so dangerous, not to say criminal; and desired to remain in the private station in which she was born.
It was then usual for the kings of England, after their accession, to pass their first days in the Tower, and Northumberland thither conveyed the new sovereign.
DIED 1554.]
She saw her husband led to execution, and, having given him from the window some token of remembrance, she waited with tranquillity till her own appointed hour should bring her to a like fate.
It had been intended to execute the Lady Jane and Lord Guildford together on the same scaffold at Tower Hill; but the council, dreading the compassion of the people for their youth, beauty, innocence, and noble birth, changed their orders, and gave directions that she should be beheaded within the verge of the Tower.
The people heard the proclamation with silence and concern; some even expressed their scorn and contempt; and one Pot, a vintner's apprentice, was severely punished for this offence.
The queen's zeal, under colour of tender mercy to the prisoner's soul, induced her to send divines, who harassed her with perpetual disputations; and even a reprieve for three days was granted, in hopes that she should be persuaded during that time to pay, by a timely conversion, some regard to her eternal welfare.
LADY JANE GREY.
She even saw his headless body carried back in a cart, and found herself more confirmed by the reports which she heard of the constancy of his end, than shaken by so tender and melancholy a spectacle.
The Lady Jane had presence of mind in those melancholy circumstances not only to defend her religion by all the topics then in use, but also to write a letter to her sister in the Greek language, in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, she exhorted her to maintain in every feature a like steady perseverance.
Sir John Gage, constable of the Tower, when he led her to execution, desired her to bestow on him some small present which he might keep as a perpetual memorial of her.
No applause ensued.
[BORN 1537.
Nay, said Balin, for this sword will I keep, but it be taken from me with force.
So it befell on a time when King Arthur was at London, there came a knight and told the king tidings how that the King Rience of North Wales had reared a great number of people, and were entered into the land, and burnt and slew the king's true liege people.
Then Balan said, I little weened to have met with you at this sudden adventure; I am right glad of your deliverance out of your dolorous prisonment, for a man told me, in the castle of Four Stones, that ye were delivered, and that man had seen you in the court of King Arthur, and therefore I came hither into this country, for here I supposed to find you.
Peradventure, said Balin, it had been better to have holden you at home, for many a man weeneth to put his enemy to a rebuke, and oft it falleth to himself.
This was the cause that the damosel came into this court.
And as the damosel took her leave of Arthur and of all the barons, so departing, this knight Balin called unto her, and said, Damosel, I pray you of your courtesy, suffer me as well to assay as these lords; though that I be so poorly clothed, in my heart meseemeth I am fully assured as some of these others, and meseemeth in my heart to speed right well.
Then Arthur took the sword by the sheath and by the girdle and pulled at it eagerly, but the sword would not out.
Well, said the king, let make a cry, that all the lords, knights, and gentlemen of arms, should draw unto a castle called Camelot in those days, and there the king would let make a council-general and a great jousts.
Then the king buried her richly.
It is truth, said the knight, for I saw the host myself.
Say not so, said they.
BOOK II.
The name of it, said the lady, is Excalibur, that is as much to say as Cut-steel.
And she came on horseback, richly beseen, and saluted King Arthur, and there asked him a gift that he promised her when she gave him the sword.
If this be true, said Arthur, it were great shame unto mine estate but that he were mightily withstood.
CHAPTER II.
And when she arose she made great dole out of measure, the which sorrow grieved Balin passingly sore, and he went unto her for to have taken the sword out of her hand, but she held it so fast he might not take it out of her hand unless he should have hurt her, and suddenly she set the pommel to the ground, and rove herself through the body.
CHAPTER III.
Anon the knight Balin told his brother of his adventure of the sword, and of the death of the Lady of the Lake, and how King Arthur was displeased with him.
CHAPTER VI.
By my faith, said Arthur, here are good knights, as I deem, as any be in the world, but their grace is not to help you, wherefore I am displeased.
Sir, said the damosel, you need not to pull half so hard, for he that shall pull it out shall do it with little might.
CHAPTER IV.
In King Arthur's court, said Balin.
Now, said Balin, we must depart, take thou this head and bear it to my friends, and tell them how I have sped, and tell my friends in Northumberland that my most foe is dead.
And then she said unto the knight, Sir, it needeth not to put me to more pain or labour, for it seemeth not you to speed there as other have failed.
Then the most part of the knights of the Round Table said that Balin did not this adventure all only by might, but by witchcraft.
I will ask none other thing, said the lady.
She hath a brother, a passing good knight of prowess and a full true man; and this damosel loved another knight that held her to paramour, and this good knight her brother met with the knight that held her to paramour, and slew him by force of his hands.
Anon after, Balin sent for his horse and armour, and so would depart from the court, and took his leave of King Arthur.
And therewith she took the sword from her love that lay dead, and fell to the ground in a swoon.
Then Balin took the sword by the girdle and sheath, and drew it out easily; and when he looked on the sword it pleased him much.
Ah! fair damosel, said Balin, worthiness, and good tatches, and good deeds, are not only in arrayment, but manhood and worship is hid within man's person, and many a worshipful knight is not known unto all people, and therefore worship and hardiness is not in arrayment.
And when she came before King Arthur, she told from whom she came, and how she was sent on message unto him for these causes.
Then Balin took up the head of the lady, and bare it with him to his hostelry, and there he met with his squire, that was sorry he had displeased King Arthur and so they rode forth out of the town.
And so he went privily into the court, and saw this adventure, whereof it raised his heart, and he would assay it as other knights did, but for he was poor and poorly arrayed he put him not far in press.
Then she let her mantle fall that was richly furred; and then was she girt with a noble sword whereof the king had marvel, and said, Damosel, for what cause are ye girt with that sword? it beseemeth you not.
So after, for great trust, Arthur betook the scabbard to Morgan le Fay his sister, and she loved another knight better than her husband King Uriens or King Arthur, and she would have had Arthur her brother slain, and therefore she let make another scabbard like it by enchantment, and gave the scabbard Excalibur to her love; and the knight's name was called Accolon, that after had near slain King Arthur.
By my faith, said Arthur, they are two marvellous knights, and namely Balin passeth of prowess of any knight that ever I found, for much beholden am I unto him; would God he would abide with me.
As for that, said Balin, I fear not greatly, but I am right heavy that I have displeased my lord King Arthur, for the death of this knight.
CHAPTER IX.
Come on, said Merlin, ye shall have great worship, and look that ye do knightly, for ye shall have great need.
All this made Merlin by his subtle craft, and there he told the king, When I am dead these tapers shall burn no longer, and soon after the adventures of the Sangreal shall come among you and be achieved.
Sir, said Balin, I pray you make you ready, for ye must go with me, or else I must fight with you and bring you by force, and that were me loath to do.
said King Lot of Orkney; whether is me better to treat with King Arthur or to fight, for the greater part of our people are slain and destroyed?
Then he went up into the tower, and leapt over walls into the ditch, and hurt him not; and anon he pulled out his sword and would have foughten with them.
Abide, said Merlin, here in a strait way ye shall meet with him; and therewith he showed Balin and his brother where he rode.
In the meanwhile came one to King Lot, and told him while he tarried there Nero was destroyed and slain with all his people.
And so Balin made her to bleed by her good will, but her blood helped not the lady.
As for Pellinore, said Merlin, he will meet with you soon; and as for Balin he will not be long from you; but the other brother will depart, ye shall see him no more.
Then said he thus: Knights full of prowess, slay me not, for by my life ye may win, and by my death ye shall win nothing.
Alas, said Balin, it is not the first despite he hath done me; and there the hermit and Balin buried the knight under a rich stone and a tomb royal.
Now what is best to do?
And as they came by an hermitage even by a churchyard, there came the knight Garlon invisible, and smote this knight, Perin de Mountbeliard, through the body with a spear.
As for that, said Balin, dread you not, we will do what we may.
Ah! said Balin, ye are Merlin; we will be ruled by your counsel.
We have little to do, said the two knights, to tell thee.
That shall I do, said Balin, and that I make vow unto knighthood; and so he departed from this knight with great sorrow.
CHAPTER XII.
For I would wit it, said the dwarf.
By whom? said King Arthur.
Well, said Balin, she shall bleed as much as she may bleed, but I will not lose the life of her whiles my life lasteth.
CHAPTER XI.
WITHIN a day or two King Arthur was somewhat sick, and he let pitch his pavilion in a meadow, and there he laid him down on a pallet to sleep, but he might have no rest.
But, sir, are ye purveyed, said Merlin, for to-morn the host of Nero, King Rience's brother, will set on you or noon with a great host, and therefore make you ready, for I will depart from you.
Alas he might not endure, the which was great pity, that so worthy a knight as he was one should be overmatched, that of late time afore had been a knight of King Arthur's, and wedded the sister of King Arthur; and for King Arthur lay by King Lot's wife, the which was Arthur's sister, and gat on her Mordred, therefore King Lot held against Arthur.
Then said Merlin to Balin, Thou hast done thyself great hurt, because that thou savest not this lady that slew herself, that might have saved her an thou wouldest.
SO at the interment came King Lot's wife Margawse with her four sons, Gawaine, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER XIII.
First, said the king, tell me your name.
Now go we hence, said Balin, and well be we met.
So as they talked together, there came a king of Cornwall riding, the which hight King Mark.
Also he told Arthur how Balin the worshipful knight shall give the dolorous stroke, whereof shall fall great vengeance.
So King Arthur let bury this knight richly, and made a mention on his tomb, how there was slain Herlews le Berbeus, and by whom the treachery was done, the knight Garlon.
Therewith Merlin vanished away suddenly.
He was twelve years old.
DANIEL BURTON TAKES THE PLUNGE
"Well, it did.
Then came Keith's letter.
It was just the way he told it.
He could make others see--everything. But now--that's all over now.
It was always like that with my John.
I'll never forget.
I couldn't help it.
She went at once to the studio.
Meanwhile, the boy was as comfortable where he was as he could be anywhere, and, moreover, there were certain treatments which should still be continued.
I tell you it made me sick, Mr. Jenkins, sick!"
Mrs. McGuire, her eyes dreamily fixed out the window, nodded her head slowly.
One day he went to a fire.
His face had grown a little white.
And Susan went.
He then went on to explain.
"I shall want breakfast at seven o'clock, Susan." He turned away plainly indicating that for him the matter was closed.
And--Susan."
Like this," she finished, producing from somewhere about her person a half-sheet of note-paper.
You may go."
You know that's all the rage now.
But will he PAY anything for them things?"
CHAPTER XVII
It was a bitter blow.
But not yet for Susan was the matter closed.
But for Susan the matter was not closed.
"Oh, but I didn't," she laughed a little embarrassedly.
But inwardly--
And it was the WAY you did it, with never a word or a hint that I was different.
"Yesterday."
"A little, but not much.
"Miss Stewart, I don't say this sort of thing very often.
I never said it before--to anybody.
She brought them all, and read them to him.
He spoke--beautifully about that to-day.
"Susan, how--how IS he?" she finished unsteadily.
He'd never forgive it--I know he wouldn't--to think I'd taken advantage of his not being able to see."
"I mean, about your being 'Miss Stewart'?"
"Good!
But the words just wouldn't come.
WOULD he see me, do you think?"
In the doorway down the hall stood Keith.
"You've helped more--than you'll ever know.
"It's only--There are so many--"
"No, no, it isn't that," protested the girl quickly.
"He ought to.
There isn't any one here that UNDERSTANDS--like you.
"Indeed I'm here," she cried gayly, giving a warm clasp to his eagerly outstretched hand "How do you do?
"Susan, I thought I heard--WAS Miss Stewart here?" he demanded excitedly.
"There he goes," said the young lady, following him with eyes in which disdain was admirably painted--"the prince of grooms and cock-fighters, and blackguard horse-coursers.
No longer interrupted by the babble of my companion, I could now remark the difference which the country exhibited from that through which I had hitherto travelled.
This venerable apartment, which had witnessed the feasts of several generations of the Osbaldistone family, bore also evidence of their success in field sports. Huge antlers of deer, which might have been trophies of the hunting of Chevy Chace, were ranged around the walls, interspersed with the stuffed skins of badgers, otters, martins, and other animals of the chase.
"That's very politely said--though, perhaps, I ought not to understand in what sense it was meant," replied Miss Vernon; "but you will see a better apology for a little negligence when you meet the Orsons you are to live amongst, whose forms no toilette could improve.
The Major liked Joe Wegg, and says he's a clean-cut, fine young feller.
PEGGY PRESENTS HIS BILL.
Peggy smiled cheerfully.
"Hens at a dollar apiece?"
"I hadn't expected a dollar back, for folks usually take advantage of a stranger if he gives them half a chance.
"Ain't much to tell, sir, 'bout them folks," replied the agent.
"But I think this is where they are most likely to grow, Uncle," persisted the girl, "just consider.
With these words Uncle John arose and sauntered around to the barn, to look at the litter of new pigs that just then served to interest and amuse him.
She carried a book, but did not open it.
So I thank you for your honesty as well as for your services.
"And that finished the romance, Louise."
A retired sea captain hides inland, with no companions but a grinning sailor and his blind housekeeper --except his pale wife, of course; and she is described as sad and unhappy.
You've been readin' too many novels.
"I don't think," said Uncle John, smiling and patting the fair check of his niece.
The agent was thoroughly ashamed of himself.
"I suppose they overcharged you because a city man wanted the animals. But of course you would not allow me to be robbed."
"That is the case everywhere," responded Mr. Merrick, thoughtfully; "and between us, McNutt, I'm glad wages are better in these prosperous times. The man who works by the day should be well paid, for he has to pay well for his living.
The boys don't seem to wanter do nuthin' without big pay."
You've charged them twice."
It is the key to the whole mystery.
"Didn't the man rob you, Uncle?" asked Louise, when the agent had disappeared.
Here she practiced persistently, shooting at sixty yards with much skill.
You're getting theatric--and so early in the morning, too!
When the bill was made out and figured up it left him a magnificent surplus for his private account; but at the last his heart failed him, and he made out another bill more modest in its extortions. He had brought them both along, though, one in each pocket, vacillating between them as he thought first of the Merrick millions and then of the righteous anger he might incur.
Old Hucks could go out before breakfast and bring in an ample supply of speckled beauties for Mary to fry; but Uncle John's splendid outfit seemed scorned by the finny folk, and after getting her dress torn in sundry places and a hook in the fleshy part of her arm Patsy learned to seek shelter behind a tree whenever her uncle cast his fly.
"Here it is, sir," responded McNutt, taking the money from his pocket-book.
"Are they here?"
The cow seems reasonably priced, for a Jersey."
Such delightful laziness could brook no interference for the first days of their arrival, and it was not until Peggy McNutt ventured over on Monday morning for a settlement with Mr. Merrick that any from the little world around them dared intrude upon the dwellers at the Wegg farm.
"That was what I thought.
The boy grew up in this dismal place and brooded on his mother's wrongs.
Also he charged a round commission on the wages of Lon Taft and Ned Long, and doubled the liveryman's bill for hauling the goods over from the Junction.
This was said so sternly that it sent McNutt into an ague of terror.
"I'm sure it does.
He's an inventor, too, even if an unlucky one, and I've no doubt he'll make his way in the world and become a good citizen."
"Most things is high in Millville," he faltered, "an' wages has gone up jest terr'ble.
I raised 'em myself."
I am very much pleased.
I'm glad to have them.
"It's--it's--a--'count of what I spent out," he stammered.
"Nice boy?" asked Uncle John.
"Figglepiff, Louise!
Adequately paid labor is the foundation of all prosperity."
Millville waited in agonized suspense for three days for tangible evidence that "the nabob was in their midst," as Nib Corkins poetically expressed it; but the city folks seemed glued to the farm and no one of them had yet appeared in the village.
Romances don't grow in parts like these."
Uncle John took the money.
"I tried fer to do my best, sir," he said.
A hundred and forty dollars; When would he have a chance to get such a windfall again?
As it was now too late to add it to the bill he replied, grudgingly:
"Very good.
Joe Wegg ran away from here to get busy in the world. Major Doyle helped him with my money, in exchange for this farm, which the boy was sensible to get rid of--although I'm glad it's now mine.
He had learned from the liveryman at the Junction that Mr. Merrick had paid five dollars for a trip that was usually made for two, and also that the extravagant man had paid seventy-five cents more to Lucky Todd, the hotel keeper, than his bill came to.
By the time Uncle John came out to him, smiling and cordial, he had not thoroughly made up his mind which account to present.
"Mystery!" cried Uncle John.
"Here's an item: 'Twelve Plymouth Rocks, twelve dollars;' and farther down: 'Twelve Plymouth Rocks, eighteen dollars.'"
But occasionally, when Louise tired of her novel and her cushions in the hammock, the two girls would play tennis or croquet together--Beth invariably winning.
"Thoroughbreds, sir.
Although the agent had been late in starting from Millville and Nick Thorne's sorrel mare had walked every step of the way, Peggy was obliged to wait in the yard a good half hour for the "nabob" to finish his breakfast.
His stern, sulky old father died suddenly.
"Yes, dear; but I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of knowing I realized it."
Uncle John seemed thoughtful, but asked no more questions, and McNutt appeared to be relieved that he refrained.
As a matter of fact, Patsy and Uncle John were enthusiastically fishing in the Little Bill, far up in the pine woods, and having "the time of their lives" in spite of their scant success in capturing trout.
Even the fine house the Captain built failed to interest her.
"What are Plymouth Rocks?" he demanded.
Want to saddle my new farm with a murder, do you?
"It is.
Extry fine stock.
During that time he tried to decide which of the two statements of accounts that he had prepared he was most justified in presenting.
Even millionaires do not allow themselves to be swindled, if they can help it.
"You are an honest fellow, McNutt," said he.
"I hope you kept your expenditures well within bounds?"
There seems to be a hundred and forty dollars my due, remaining from the five hundred I sent you."
McNutt was reassured.
I cannot explain it better than that." He looked up steadily into her face across the table so that she saw the gravity of his expression and the shining of his steady eyes.
"My selfishness, I know, must seem quite unforgivable.
The vividness with which he managed to conceal and yet betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed the border between presentiment and warning into positive alarm.
I cannot help it somehow; these trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me live, and if I go--"
"There is this deep, tremendous link,--some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy and--alive.
Something I can't define connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make me ill--might even kill me.
I wish to stay with them particularly then.
It did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection.
It has the genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and there and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as Bittacy of the Department knew them.
I even feel I ought to--and I must."
Chiefly, moreover, for her husband.
And after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as though he had not heard it--"I cannot explain it better than that, you see," his grave voice answered.
The discipline would certainly be severe--she did not dream at the moment how severe!--but this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it, too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed was of the martyr order.
My life and happiness lie here together."
It would absorb and smother them if it could.
She felt suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened.
"Perhaps in the spring instead--" she said, with a tremor in the voice.
And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made.
It was David's peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation.
"There are things--some things," she faltered, "we are not intended to know, I think." The words expressed her general attitude to life, not alone to this particular incident.
Her husband should never know the cost.
I cannot leave this Forest that I love so well.
Far from morbid naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it.
"In the spring--perhaps," he answered gently, almost beneath his breath. "For they will not need me then.
It was in abeyance--hidden round the corner.
"Now more than ever, dear.
She preferred a flat, more open country that left approaches clear.
It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when it went--went only to watch her from another point of view.
We need not add that had those young girls been sold for mere house servants or field hands, they would not have brought one half the sums they did.
Soon the breath infected the air with a fetid odour, the lips were glazed, despair painted itself in the eyes, and sobs, with long intervals of silence, formed the only language.
Nearly 2000 dead bodies lay uncovered in the burial-ground, with only here and there a little lime thrown over them, to prevent the air becoming infected.
She had taken poison.
If, then, a happy crisis came not, all hope was gone.
In the midst of disorder and confusion, death heaped victims on victims.
The inhabitants of New Orleans look with as much certainty for the appearance of the yellow-fever, small-pox, or cholera, in the hot season, as the Londoner does for fog in the month of November.
The slow recovery of her reason settled into the most intense melancholy, which gained at length the compassion even of her cruel master.
Now mucous secretions surcharged the tongue, and took away the power of speech; now the sick one spoke, but in speaking had a foresight of death.
On an average, more than 400 died daily.
The beautiful bright eyes, always pleading in expression, were now so heart-piercing in their sadness, that he could not endure their gaze.
Yet such was the fact.
The disorder began in the brain, by an oppressive pain accompanied or followed by fever.
Sometimes death was the immediate consequence.
From each side of the mouth spread foam, tinged with black and burnt blood.
The girls themselves had never heard that their mother had been a slave, and therefore knew nothing of the danger hanging over their heads.
An inventory of the property was made out by James Morton, and placed in the hands of the creditors; and the young ladies, with their uncle, were about leaving the city to reside for a few days on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, where they could enjoy a fresh air that the city could not afford.
At this moment the sharp sound of a rifle was heard, and the young man fell weltering in his blood, at the feet of his mistress.
Jane wrote a hasty note and threw it out of the window, which was eagerly picked up by the young man, and he soon disappeared in the woods. Night passed away in dreariness to her, and the next morning she viewed the spot beneath her window with the hope of seeing the footsteps of him who had stood there the previous night.
This was a most singular spot, remote, in a dense forest spreading over the summit of a cliff that rose abruptly to a great height above the sea; but so grand in its situation, in the desolate sublimity which reigned around, in the reverential murmur of the waves that washed its base, that, though picturesque, it was a forest prison.
Fiery veins streaked the eye; the face was inflamed, and dyed of a dark dull red colour; the ears from time to time rang painfully.
In a few days the poor girl died of a broken heart, and was buried at night at the back of the garden by the Negroes; and no one wept at the grave of her who had been so carefully cherished, and so tenderly beloved.
The sick were avoided from the fear of contagion, and for the same reason the dead were left unburied.
But just as they were about taking the train, an officer arrested the whole party; the young ladies as slaves, and the uncle upon the charge of attempting to conceal the property of his deceased brother.
This was the Yellow Fever.
The patient was devoured with burning thirst. The stomach, distracted by pains, in vain sought relief in efforts to disburden itself.
He's as far From the enjoyment of the earth and air Who watches o'er the chains, as they who wear."
Friend followed friend in quick succession.
The poverty of the young man, and the youthful age of the girl, had caused their feelings to be kept from the young lady's parents.
Morton was overwhelmed with horror at the idea of his nieces being claimed as slaves, and asked for time, that he might save them from such a fate.
Jane fell senseless by his side.
Like too many, Morton had been dealing extensively in lands and stocks; and though apparently in good circumstances was, in reality, deeply involved in debt. Althesa, although as white as most white women in a southern clime, was, as we already know, born a slave.
In the summer of 1831, the people of New Orleans were visited with one of these epidemics.
There she remained more than a fortnight, and with the exception of a daily visit from her master, she saw no one but the old Negress who waited upon her.
Jane was purchased by a dashing young man, who had just come into the possession of a large fortune.
TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION
It appeared in a form unusually repulsive and deadly.
The progress of the heat within was marked by yellowish spots, which spread over the surface of the body.
It seized persons who were in health, without any premonition.
Ellen, the eldest, was sold to an old gentleman, who purchased her, as he said, for a housekeeper.
Soon the young maiden was seen descending, and the enthusiastic lover, with his arms extended, waiting to receive his mistress.
But the creditors pleaded that they were "an extra article," and would sell for more than common slaves; and must, therefore, be sold at auction.
They were given up, but neither ate nor slept, nor separated from each other, till they were taken into the New Orleans slave market, where they were offered to the highest bidder.
He even offered to mortgage his little farm in Vermont for the amount which young slave women of their ages would fetch.
At the death of his master, Volney had returned to his widowed mother at Mobile, and knew nothing of the misfortune that had befallen his mistress, until he received a letter from her.
One bright moonlight evening as she was seated at the window, she perceived the figure of a man beneath her window.
He had no sooner received her letter, than he set out for New Orleans; and finding on his arrival there, that his mistress had been taken away, resolved to follow her.
"Is the poor privilege to turn the key Upon the captive, freedom?
She dared not trust the old Negress with her secret, for fear that it might reach her master.
This, reader, is an unvarnished narrative of one doomed by the laws of the Southern States to be a slave.
Who on earth is to know me?'
'"Going out!"--you will not be so mad, so criminal; and after your promise!'
Now and again he had lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling.
Lawford had spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft slippers.
And for the first time she realised the power and mastery of that eager and far too hungry face.
She watched him curiously.
His eyelids twitched; the fire before him had for an instant gone black out.
If I do not go out, I shall certainly go mad.
He started up; and the remembrance of the morning returned to him--the glassy light, the changing rays, the beaming gilt upon the useless books.
The voices and footsteps, even the frou-frou of worshippers going to church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church, had floated up to the patient's open window.
Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made inquiries on his way home from chapel.
'And I do hope Arthur--nothing rash!'
It was almost a physical discomfort, this longing unspeakable for the twilight, the green secrecy and the silence of the graves.
why do you seem to delight in trying to estrange me?' Husband and wife faced each other across the clear-lit room.
Mrs Lawford's attitude intensified in its stillness.
It was as if a child had asked on the verge of terror for a candle in the dark.
Anyhow, he said that I looked worried and run-down.
He seemed to see slow-gesturing branches, grass stooping beneath a grey and wind-swept sky.
Now, at last, at the windows; afternoon had begun to wane.
Sheila came hastily in again.
It seems so childish, so needlessly blind.'
He stood up.
'I think, Sheila,' replied a low, infinitely weary voice, 'I think I should marry again.' It was the same wavering, faintly ironical voice that had slightly discomposed Dr Simon that same morning.
'I wish you could stay with me,' he said slowly.
But the door was already closed.
She'd worm a secret out of one's grave.'
'Is Alice going with you?'
'YOU, dear!'
'For the last time,' she said in a quiet, hard voice, 'I ask you not to go.'
But an hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity. Sheila sighed.
A change, that seemed almost the effect of actual shadow, came over his face.
We must remember, this is not the beginning of your illness.
'Will you want anything more, do you think, for an hour?' she asked.
'Alice says you are to eat every one of those delicious sandwiches, and especially the tiny omelette.
'It is useless to argue.
Sheila lowered her eyes softly on to the rich-toned picture in the glass.
The Sabbath, pale with September sunshine, and monotonous with chiming bells, had passed languidly away.
'Keep them out of the way,' he said in a low voice; 'it will be dark when I come in.' His hardened face lit up.
A consciousness had begun to stir in him that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been fully aware of before, nor of this strange ghostly intelligence that haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his distracted nerves.
He sat down with elbows on knees and head on his hands, thinking of night, its secrecy, its immeasurable solitude.
As for criminal--why, that's a woman's word.
In spite of all her reason, of her absolute certainty, she wondered even again for a moment if this really could be Arthur.
'I think,' she said, 'I too might say that.
He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him.
You will lock your door?'
'Sheila!' he called in a burst of anger.
'Supposing,' she said, watching her lips move, 'supposing--of course, I know you are getting better and all that--but supposing you don't change back as Mr Bethany thinks, what will you do?
Her mind seemed to pause, fluttering in air, like a bird in the wind.
'Your latchkey?'
Sheila turned softly round, conscious in a most humiliating manner that she had ever so little flushed.
But Dr Simon advised me most particularly to go out at least once a day.
But I'm not, say what you like, blind.
Her husband was pouring out his tea, unaware, apparently, of her change of position.
Let us both try for each other's sakes, or even if only for Alice's, to--to do all we can.
'You have taken my latchkey.'
'I am very sorry, Sheila, to be so childish.
I must not harass you; but is there any--do you see the slightest change of any kind?'
We are going to Mrs Sherwin's, and then on to Church.
You ARE pretty: I'd repeat it if I was burning at the stake.'
'You always look pretty, Sheila; to-night you look prettier: THAT is the only change, I think.'
'It's useless to attempt to dissuade me.'
'Yes, I will lock my door.'
It would, of course, wear him down in time.
Without moving he heard her go out, return, pause, and go out again.
'I don't think you have any idea what--what I go through.'
'Oh, well--' he began.
And when Sheila brought up his tea, as if Chance had heard his cry, she entered in hat and stole.
'It's useless to discuss that, Arthur; you have always consistently disliked my friends.
Sunlight had drawn across his room in one pale beam, and vanished.
What would you do?'
All day he had longed for freedom, on and on, with craving for the open sky, for solitude, for green silence, beyond these maddening walls.
He had hardly been aware of the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards clarifying his point of view.
But there; giving way will do nothing for either of us.
He shrugged his shoulders.
She put down the tray, and paused at the glass, looking across it out of the window.
He did not answer.
Her husband looked up over his little table.
He had dozed and had awakened, cold and torpid with dream.
And above all, betwixt dread and an almost physical greed, he hungered for night.
Dr Simon had come and gone, optimistic and urbane, yet with a faint inward dissatisfaction over a patient behind whose taciturnity a hint of mockery and subterfuge seemed to lurk.
'Are you going to church?' he asked in a low voice.
Even Mrs Lawford had appeared to share her husband's reticence. But Dr Simon had happened on other cases in his experience where tact was required rather than skill, and time than medicine.
He wrote soon after, and from that time our correspondence began to be a very diligent one.
This he did a year after we had seen one another for the first time.
But the fourth day he departed!
I had only to look at her, and could see in her face when even a syllable pleased or displeased her; and when I led her to explain the reason of her remarks, no demonstration could be more true, more accurate, or more appropriate to the subject.
At the least, my thoughts were ever with him filled, especially because his friend told me very much of his character.
I could not speak.
At the last, Klopstock said plainly that he loved; and I startled as for a wrong thing.
I could not play.
I wrote immediately to the same friend, for procuring, by his means, that I might see the author of the 'Messiah' when in Hamburg.
In one happy night I read my husband's poem, 'The Messiah.' I was extremely touched with it.
Thus it continued eight months, in which time my friends found as much love in Klopstock's letters as in mine.
We saw; we were friends; we loved; and we believed that we loved; and a short time after I could even tell Klopstock that I loved.
I believe I fell immediately in love with him.
They rallied me, and said I was in love.
This was written in March 1758, after they had been about four years married.
The two following months they spent together at Hamburg.
You may think that persons who love as we do have no need of two chambers; we are always in the same.
The next day I asked one of his friends who was the author of this poem, and this was the first time I heard Klopstock's name.
"I saw him the next day, and the following, and we were very seriously friends.
META MOLLER.
It was the first time that they had been separated.
With this we may compare what Klopstock says, writing of her: "How perfect was her taste! how exquisitely fine her feelings! she observed everything even to the slightest turn of the thought.
At this time, knowing Klopstock, she loves him as her lifely son, and thanks God that she has not persisted.
I, with my little work, still only regarding sometimes my husband's sweet face, which is so venerable at that time with tears of devotion and all the sublimity of the subject, my husband reading me the young verses and suffering my criticism."
Writing again in the beginning of May, she thus sketches the life they led together: "It will be a delightful occupation for me to make you more acquainted with my husband's poem.
It is remarkable that she seems to have had more than a mere apprehension, almost an assured foreboding, of what awaited her.
He told him that a certain girl in Hamburg wished to see him, and for all recommendation showed him some letters in which I made bold to criticise Klopstock's verses.
LETTERS.
He has many great fragments of the whole work ready.
I sincerely believed my love to be friendship.
I answered that it was no love, but friendship, as it was what I felt for him; we had not seen one another enough to love (as if love must have more time than friendship).
Klopstock first beheld Meta Moeller in passing through Hamburg in April 1751.
I perceived it likewise, but I would not believe it.
Here is Meta's own narrative of the rise and course of their true love, given in one of her letters to Richardson, a narrative which will bear a hundred readings, and a hundred more after that, and still be as fresh and as touching as ever:--
I must confess that, though greatly prepossessed of his qualities, I never thought him the amiable youth whom I found him.
From that place poor Meta was never to return.
In a letter to one of his friends, written soon after this, he describes her as mistress of the French, English, and Italian languages, and even conversant with Greek and Latin literature.
And love shall be all what I will tell you in this letter.
Nobody can do it better than I, being the person who knows the most of that which is not yet published, being always present at the birth of the young verses, which begin always by fragments here and there of a subject of which his soul is just then filled.
Their marriage took place about three years afterwards.
After having seen him for two hours I was obliged to pass the evening in a company which never had been so wearisome to me.
[1750.]
But I had no hopes ever to see him, when quite unexpectedly I heard that he should pass through Hamburg.
I spoke to my friends of nothing but Klopstock, and showed his letters.
I could marry then without her consentment, as by the death of my father my fortune depended not upon her; but this was an horrible idea for me, and thank heaven I have prevailed by prayers.
We married, and I am the happiest wife in the world."
"You will know all what concerns me.
This made its effect.
But all this happiness, too bright for earth, or for long endurance, was about to be suddenly extinguished.
But, in general, this gave us very little trouble, for we understood each other when we had scarcely began to explain our ideas."
Love, dear sir, is all what me concerns.
I rallied them again, and said that they must have a very friendshipless heart if they had no idea of friendship to a man as well as to a woman.
But we were obliged to part again, and wait two years for our wedding.
Klopstock came, and came to me.
Towards the end of her life, long confinement, and the coldness of the houses in which she had been imprisoned, brought on a rheumatism which often deprived her of the use of her limbs.
[BORN 1542.
Even the manners of the age, licentious as they were, are no apology for this unhappy passion; nor can they induce us to look on that tragical and infamous scene which followed upon it with less abhorrence.
DIED 1587.]
The vivacity of her spirit, not sufficiently tempered with sound judgment, and the warmth of her heart, which was not at all times under the restraint of discretion, betrayed her both into errors and into crimes. To say that she was always unfortunate will not account for that long and almost uninterrupted succession of calamities which befell her; we must likewise add, that she was often imprudent.
There could be no mistaking it--it was that of Aunt Joanna, clothed in the tattered sheet that Elizabeth Hockin had allowed for her grave-clothes.
The Hockins saw the glint of the metal, and the shadow cast by each piece of money as it rolled.
"What?"
"I reckon it's the old lady be down," replied her husband, and, throwing open the bedroom door, he said: "Sure enough, and no mistake--there her be, dead as a dried pilchard."
Then it groped again, and gathered up the spoons, that flashed in the moonbeams.
Aunt Joanna was given an elm, and not a mean deal board coffin, such as is provided for paupers; and a handsome escutcheon of white metal was put on the lid.
She and her husband crept from bed, and, treading on tiptoe across the room, descended the stair.
Elizabeth caught her husband by the arm and pointed.
Together they heaped the articles that had belonged to Aunt Joanna upon the fresh grave, but as they did so the wind caught the linen and unfurled and flapped it, and they were forced to place stones upon it to hold it down.
It would be handy to have a little maid by you."
In fact, she had repeatedly made overtures to her great-aunt to be reconciled, but these overtures had been always rejected.
"I reckon us had best go down together."
The moonlight poured in through the broad, low window.
During the night, at what time she did not know, Mrs. Hockin awoke with a start, and found that her husband was sitting up in bed listening. There was a moon that night, and no clouds in the sky.
But she remembered that the old woman had at one time befriended her, and she was ready to forgive the harsh treatment to which she had finally been subjected.
There was no door at the bottom, but the staircase was boarded up at the side; it opened into the kitchen.
The first coin lodged at the further left-hand corner and the second rested near it; and so on, the pieces were rolled, and ranged themselves in order, ten in a row.
There was no sleep for them that night.
AUNT JOANNA
Again sleep was impossible.
"What have it come to?"
Then they saw Aunt Joanna go to the cupboard, open it, and return with the silver spoons; she placed all six on the sheet, and with a lean finger counted them.
Rose sighed, and went away.
Again the lean hand with long fingers appeared above the soil, and this was seen groping about the grass till it laid hold of the teapot.
The night was dark and stormy, with scudding clouds, so dense as to make deep night, when they did not part and allow the moon to peer forth.
She had never been allowed to look at the treasures in the oak chest.
Then, quaking with fear, they retreated to the church porch, and Jabez, uncorking the bottle, first took a long pull himself, and then presented it to his wife.
They walked timorously, and side by side, looking about them as they proceeded, and on reaching the churchyard gate they halted to pluck up courage before opening and venturing within.
We've spent some pounds over her buryin'."
They saw it drag the sheet by one corner, and then it went down underground, and the sheet followed, as though sucked down in a vortex; fold on fold it descended, till the entire sheet had disappeared.
It was thatched with heather, and possessed but a single chimney that rose but little above the apex of the roof, and had two slates set on the top to protect the rising smoke from being blown down the chimney into the cottage when the wind was from the west or from the east.
As far as she had been aware, Aunt Joanna had been extremely poor.
The moon was obscured by thick clouds, and neither of the two had the courage to descend to the kitchen.
That was good enough to moulder in the grave.
It's my opinion us ought to go and see."
But dancing, though denounced, still drew the more independent spirits together.
The woman who lived in the cottage was called by the people of the neighbourhood Aunt Joanna.
This coincidence, in his own words, woke him out of sleep; and for some reason or other impelled him instantly to try making the planet oscillate in the diameter of its epicycle instead of revolve round it--a singular idea, but Copernicus had had a similar one to explain the motions of Mercury.
It had little of the special dignity with which the labours of Kepler himself were destined so greatly to aid in endowing it.
The problem to be solved was to choose such an orbit and such a law of speed, for both the earth and Mars, that a line joining them, produced out to the stars, should always mark correctly the apparent position of Mars as seen from the earth.
"MOST NOBLE TYCHO," (these are the words of his letter), "how shall I enumerate or rightly estimate your benefits conferred on me?
We have passed through the stage of ascribing atmospheric disturbances--thunderstorms, cyclones, earthquakes, and the like--to supernatural agency; we have had our Copernican era: not perhaps brought about by a single individual, but still achieved.
This narration renders the unflagging energy shown by her son in his mathematical wrestlings less surprising.
The product of the distance into the square of the speed is the same for each planet.
Published his second book containing these laws in 1609.
No money could be got at Prague, so after a short time he accepted a professorship at Linz, and withdrew with his two quite young remaining children.
Still, a part of the truth had been gained, and was not to be abandoned any more.
Astronomy is so clear and so thoroughly explored now, that it is difficult to put oneself into a contemporary attitude.
At length he hit upon a point that seemed nearly right.
Strange that he had not thought of it before. It was a famous curve, for the Greek geometers had studied it as one of the sections of a cone, but it was not so well known in Kepler's time. The fact that the planets move in it has raised it to the first importance, and it is familiar enough to us now.
His imagination was perhaps more luxuriant and was allowed freer play than most men's, but it was nevertheless always controlled by rigid examination and comparison of hypotheses with fact.
What Kepler might have achieved had he been relieved of those ghastly struggles for subsistence one cannot tell, but this much is clear, that had Tycho been subjected to the same misfortune, instead of being born rich and being assisted by generous and enlightened patrons, he could have accomplished very little.
The one is the complement of the other; and from the fact of their following each other so closely arose the most surprising benefits to science.
But fresh trouble was averted by the death of the poor old dame at the age of nearly eighty.
While at Prague his salary was in continual arrear, and it was with difficulty that he could provide sustenance for his family.
Part of the hesitation Kepler expresses by saying that "for observations his sight was dull, and for mechanical operations his hand was awkward.
Besides, the world would have been free from the reproach of accepting the fruits of his bright genius while condemning the worker to a life of misery, relieved only by the beauty of his own thoughts and the ecstasy awakened in him by the harmony and precision of Nature.
He had to arrange the size of the orbits that suited best, then the positions of their centres, both being supposed excentric with respect to the sun; but he could not get any such arrangement to work with uniform motion about the sun.
This first book of his brought him into notice, and served as an introduction to Tycho and to Galileo.
An astronomical lectureship at Graz happening to offer itself, he was urged to take it, and agreed to do so, though stipulating that it should not debar him from some more brilliant profession when there was a chance.
It welds the planets together, and shows them to be one system.
He thought he had found the truth; but no, before long the position of the planet, as calculated, and as recorded by Tycho, differed by eight minutes of arc, or about one-eighth of a degree.
He concludes his book on the motions of Mars with a half comic appeal to the Emperor to provide him with the sinews of war for an attack on Mars's relations--father Jupiter, brother Mercury, and the rest--but the death of his unhappy patron in 1612 put an end to all these schemes, and reduced Kepler to the utmost misery.
Ultimately discovered the connection between the times and distances of the planets for which he had been groping all his mature life, and announced it in 1618:--
Well, there are a great variety of ovals, and several were tried: with the result that they could be made to answer better than a circle, but still were not right.
In other words, the ratio of r^3 to T^2 for every planet is the same.
His old mother, of whose fierce temper something has already been indicated, had been engaged in a law-suit for some years near their old home in Wuertemberg.
Made a last effort to overcome his poverty by getting the arrears of his salary paid at Prague, but was unsuccessful, and, contracting brain fever on the journey, died in November, 1630, aged 59.
All the time he had been at Prague he had been making a severe study of the motion of the planet Mars, analyzing minutely Tycho's books of observations, in order to find out, if possible, the true theory of his motion.
We must now devote a little time to the main work of Kepler's life.
Over this discovery he greatly rejoices.
It is not eighteen months since I got the first glimpse of light, three months since the dawn, very few days since the unveiled sun, most admirable to gaze upon, burst upon me.
Once more Kepler made a determined attempt to get his arrears of salary paid, and rescue himself and family from their bitter poverty.
Yes, the curve so described by the planet is a comparatively simple one: it is a special kind of oval--the ellipse.
The true law of refraction was discovered some years after by a Dutch professor, Willebrod Snell.
So, moving the planet in a selected ellipse, with the sun in one focus, at a speed given by the equable area description, its position agreed with Tycho's observations within the limits of the error of experiment.
He was rewarded by finding that at any rate the plane of the orbit did not tilt up and down: it was fixed, and this was a simplification on Copernicus's theory.
For the enemy left at home a despised captive has burst all the chains of the equations, and broken forth from the prisons of the tables."
It is clear, indeed, that for some time now he subsisted entirely on the bounty of Tycho, and he expresses himself most deeply grateful for all the kindness he received from that noble and distinguished man, the head of the scientific world at that date.
The orbit was found.
In 1601, Kepler was appointed "Imperial mathematician," to assist Tycho in his calculations.
She was sent to prison, and condemned to the torture, with the usual intelligent idea of extracting a "voluntary" confession. Kepler had to hurry from Linz to interpose.
He maps out his route like a traveller.
Then try inscribing and circumscribing squares, hexagons, and other figures, and see if the circles thus defined would correspond to the several planetary orbits. But they would not give any satisfactory result.
Her spirit, however, was unbroken, for no sooner was she released than she commenced a fresh action against her accuser.
First of all, eight planets are now known; and secondly, their real distances agree only very approximately with Kepler's hypothesis.
Kepler, with his ill-health and inferior physical energy, was unable to command the like advantages.
The imagined discovery is purely fictitious and accidental.
The carrying circle was called the Deferent.
Kepler tried to establish some propelling force emanating from the sun, like the spokes of a windmill.
He proceeded to see if by making the planet librate, or the plane of its orbit tilt up and down, anything could be done.
After this, the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent Kepler a golden chain, which is interesting inasmuch as it must really have come from Galileo, who was in high favour at the Italian Court at this time.
All sorts of combinations had to be tried, the relative positions of the earth and Mars to be worked out for each, and compared with Tycho's recorded observations.
The Imperial funds were by this time, however, so taxed by wars and other difficulties that the tables could only be proceeded with very slowly, a staff of calculators being out of the question.
Well might he be called, as he was, "the legislator," or law interpreter, "of the heavens."
Observation is heaped on observation; tables are compiled; volumes are filled with data; the hours of sunshine are recorded, the fall of rain, the moisture in the air, the kind of clouds, the temperature--millions of facts; but where is the Kepler to study and brood over them?
Brooding over this disappointment, the idea of trying solid figures suddenly strikes him. "What have plane figures to do with the celestial orbits?" he cries out; "inscribe the regular solids." And then--brilliant idea--he remembers that there are but five.
Could it be expressed no more simply?
The law of speed was fixed: that which is now known as his second law.
But did it satisfy the law of speed?
He feels as though he had been carrying on a war against the planet and had triumphed; but his gratulation was premature.
His body was buried at Ratisbon, and a century ago a proposal was made to erect a marble monument to his memory, but nothing was done.
It was easy to get them to agree for a short time, but sooner or later a discrepancy showed itself.
These tables of planetary motion Tycho had always regarded as the main work of his life; but he died before they were finished, and on his death-bed he intrusted the completion of them to Kepler, who loyally undertook their charge.
The above is a tracing of it.
Accepted a professorship at Linz.
The connection is this, that if one compares the distance of the different planets from the sun with the length of time they take to go round him, the cube of the respective distances is proportional to the square of the corresponding times.
Once more, the further the planet the slower it moved; there seemed to be some law connecting speed and distance.
He suffered much from weak eyes, and dare not expose himself to night air." In all this he was, of course, the antipodes of Tycho, but in mathematical skill he was greatly his superior.
Tycho's secretary replied quietly enough, pointing out the groundlessness and ingratitude of the accusation.
He is continually attacking and throwing sarcasm at astrology, but it was the only thing for which people would pay him, and on it after a fashion he lived.
Young John Kepler was thereupon taken from school, and employed as pot-boy between the ages of nine and twelve.
His instruments, his observatory--the tools by which he did his work--would have been impossible for him.
But although the planetary paths might be roughly represented by a combination of circles, their speeds could not, on the hypothesis of uniform motion in each circle round the earth as a fixed body.
While he was hesitating what best to do, and reduced to the verge of despair, his wife, who had long been suffering from low spirits and despondency, and his three children, were taken ill; one of the sons died of small-pox, and the wife eleven days after of low fever and epilepsy.
In fact he compares himself to Columbus or Magellan, voyaging into unknown lands, and recording his wandering route.
The contiguity of the lives of Kepler and Tycho furnishes a moral too obvious to need pointing out.
For astronomy in those days seems to have ranked as a minor science, like mineralogy or meteorology now.
No, he had known Tycho, and knew that he was never wrong eight minutes in an observation.
So everything but brooding had to be abandoned as too expensive, and he proceeded to study optics.
On the other hand, he inscribes in the sphere of the earth's orbit an icosahedron; and inside the sphere determined by that, an octahedron; which figures he takes to inclose the spheres of Venus and of Mercury respectively.
Could the rate of description of areas be uniform with it?
"That means 'angel'...
Another has seen....
"It is gone."
"That is a betrothal ring," Aunt Rachel replied.
"Will you rock again?"
It was not meant to be seen by another.
The door does not always shut behind us suddenly. Perhaps one who has toddled but a step or two over the threshold might, by looking back, catch a glimpse....
For a minute the gipsy watched Aunt Rachel, and then she got up from the sewing machine box and crossed the floor.
Say good-bye to your companions; they are very welcome to what they have had; and God speed you."
"Ghosts," the gipsy whispered presently, "are of the dead.
"No more."
It may be that Life has not yet sealed the little one's eyes. Will you let Annabel ask her if she sees what it is you hold in your arms?"
I think not.
"I have never had a husband," she said.
"She means, Aunt Rachel,
The children were in their nightgowns, hardly fully awake; a low voice outside was heard giving orders; and then there arose on the night the carol.
"No; but yet....
"Except yourself, none.
"Yes, we will, presently, Aunt Rachel; gee up, horse!...
Then slowly Aunt Rachel rose from her chair.
Aunt Rachel did not look up from her work.
"You were young, and beautiful?..."
It was a childish game of funerals at which the children played.
The hand of Death, hovering over the dolls, had singled out Flora, the articulations of whose sawdust body were seams and whose boots were painted on her calves of fibrous plaster.
As she worked, she cast curious glances into the old hall-kitchen.
"... and Joseph wouldn't pluck the cherries," somebody was whispering to the tiny Angela....
"Sometime, perhaps--if I'm very careful--"
The little Angela, within the arms that held her, murmured, "It's the gipsies, isn't it, mother?"
The gipsy's eyes rested on the bridal party....
"It is there."
There was merry talk, but Aunt Rachel took no part in it.
"Annabel fears she has taken away your comfort."
"Look where?"
"To their mothers babes never grow.
Though all the chairs were mended, Annabel still came daily to the farm, sat on the box they used to cover the sewing machine, and wove mats.
It was a curious thing that followed.
The gipsy glanced at the ring.
The gipsy's face became grave....
"It is a new kind--but no more wonderful than the other.
None other has ever seen it?"
"Only for a little while.
At the other end of the room Flora was now bestowed on Jack, the disreputable sailor.
The gipsy set one shoulder forward, and Sabrina put the shawl gently aside, peering at the dusky brown morsel within.
In the ancient walnut chair by the hearth sat the old, old lady who had told them to bring the chairs.
When at midnight, faintly on the air from the church below, there came the chiming of Christmas morning, all bestirred themselves.
I speak of eyes--these eyes."
Then she departed with her companions.
"Nothing, thank you," said Aunt Rachel.
"Ah!..." said Annabel.
Again the message was taken, and this time it seemed as if Annabel, the gipsy, was not warm enough, for she gathered up her loops of cane and brought the chair she was mending a little way into the hall-kitchen itself.
But you could see that she was not properly asleep....
Her hands moved.
The interment of Flora proceeded....
The other I have seen, now I have seen this also.
An hour later Flora had taken up the burden of Life again.
It was his chair."
"Why do you rock?" she asked slowly.
Aunt Rachel had been awakened for the conclusion of Flora's funeral, but her eyes were closed again now, and once more her cheek was dropped in that tender suggestive little gesture, and she rocked.
Maybe you'll help us find our sheep too--"
But again Aunt Rachel shook her head.
"That cannot be.
The swarthy woman turned her almond eyes on her once more.
"Rock..." urged the cajoling voice.
"Without the kiss, no....
Therefore it must have lived."
She opened her eyes with a start.
She leaned so close towards her that she had to put up a hand to steady the babe at her back.
Only Aunt Rachel sat, still and knitting, in the black walnut chair; and the children played on the floor.
"As God wills."
She sat down on the square box they used to cover the sewing machine.
The gipsy sat suddenly erect.
The door closes behind us, but it opens again."
"They'll be here in a few minutes," they said; "somebody go and bring the children down;" and within a very little while subdued noises were heard outside, and the lifting of the latch of the yard gate.
I sit here; presently it creeps into my arms; it is small and warm; I rock, and then... it goes."
It was on the morning of Christmas Eve that they came down in a body to the Abbey Farm to express their thanks to those who had befriended them; but the bailiff was not there.
Keep still in your chair," she ordered, "and I will tell you when--"
The gipsy sat with her own hands folded over the mat on her knees.
It was more than a minute before Aunt Rachel spoke.
"None except I have seen it.
But there came a sudden note of masterfulness into the gipsy's voice.
The unbroken whiteness of the uplands told that, and, even as they spoke, there came up the hill the dark figures of the farm men with shovels, on their way to dig out the sheep.
But Aunt Rachel only turned the betrothal ring on her finger.
When at last she spoke it was in a voice scarcely audible.
"Angela."
But the gipsy shook her head.
Aunt Rachel was trembling.
The buildings here, as throughout Peru, were all constructed of hewn stone, and had doors and windows with posts, sills, and thresholds of stone.
These vast structures have been ruined for centuries, but still the work of excavation is going on.
17.
6.
They believed in the resurrection of the body, and accordingly embalmed their dead.
They were the work of the white, auburn-haired, bearded men from Atlantis, thousands of years before the time of the Incas.
They are variously wrought, and some of them, having the form of men, must have been idols. Near the walls are many caves and excavations under the earth; but in another place, farther west, are other and greater monuments, such as large gate-ways with hinges, platforms, and porches, each made of a single stone.
In Peru we find vases with very much the same style of face.
7.
A work from such a source, upon so curious and important a subject, will be looked for with great interest.]
8.
Their descendants are to this day an olive-skinned people, much lighter in color than the Indian tribes subjugated by them.
Was not the Nubian "Island of Merou," with its pyramids built by "red men," a similar transplantation?
It is impossible to do more than refer to the supposed Aryan roots contained in the glossary, but it may be noticed that the future of the Quichuan verb is formed in s--I love, Munani; I shall love, Munasa--and that the affixes denoting cases in the noun are curiously like the Greek prepositions."
The king opened the agricultural season by a great celebration, and, like the kings of Egypt, he put his hand to the plough, and ploughed the first furrow.
Even the mode of decorating their palaces and temples finds a parallel in the Old World.
16.
"that a study of ancient Peruvian pottery has constantly reminded me of forms with which we are familiar in Egyptian archaeology."
14.
Atlantis was the older country, the parent country, the more civilized country; and, doubtless, like the Peruvians, its people regarded the precious metals as sacred to their gods; and they had been accumulating them from all parts of the world for countless ages.
12.
They were a great race.
13.
They drank toasts and invoked blessings.
A recent writer says:
They regarded agriculture as the principal interest of the nation, and held great agricultural fairs and festivals for the interchange of the productions of the farmers.
Can any one read these details and declare Plato's description of Atlantis to be fabulous, simply because he tells us of the enormous quantities of gold and silver possessed by the people?
11.
15.
They had carried irrigation, agriculture, and the cutting of gems to a point equal to that of the Old World.
To which of the stages of language does this belong--the agglutinative, in which one root is fastened on to another, and a word is formed in which the constitutive elements are obviously distinct, or the inflexional, where the auxiliary roots get worn down and are only distinguishable by the philologist?
But many of these forms are due to a scanty alphabet, and really express familiar sounds; and many, again, result from the casual spelling of the Spaniards.
They built triumphal arches for their returning heroes, and strewed the road before them with leaves and flowers.
[Since the above was written I have received a letter from Dr. Falb, dated Leipsic, April 5th, 1881.
Their weapons were the same as those of the Old World, and made after the same pattern.
They had bards and minstrels, who sung at the great festivals.
In it were rooms and cells which were used as tombs.
They possessed castes; and the trade of the father descended to the son, as in India.
Their works in cotton and wool exceeded in fineness anything known in Europe at that time.
The evidence from language is treated scientifically, and not as a kind of ingenious guessing.
"In this place, also," says De Leon, "there are stones so large and so overgrown that our wonder is excited, it being incomprehensible how the power of man could have placed them where we see them.
It is enough for me to quote Mr. Ferguson's words, that the coincidence between the buildings of the Incas and the Cyclopean remains attributed to the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece "is the most remarkable in the history of architecture."
THE PERUVIAN COLONY.
There was a striking resemblance between the architecture of the Peruvians and that of some of the nations of the Old World.
Tombs, temples, and palaces arise on every hand, ruined but still traceable.
The Incas were simply an offshoot, who, descending from the mountains, subdued the rude races of the sea-coast, and imposed their ancient civilization upon them.
5.
The priest examined the entrails of the animals offered in sacrifice, and, like the Roman augurs, divined the future from their appearance.
It surprised me to see these enormous gate-ways, made of great masses of stone, some of which were thirty feet long, fifteen high, and six thick."
CHAPTER V.
1.
The public roads of the Peruvians were most remarkable; they were built on masonry.
10.
"Senor Lopez's view, that the Peruvians were Aryans who left the parent stock long before the Teutonic or Hellenic races entered Europe, is supported by arguments drawn from language, from the traces of institutions, from religious beliefs, from legendary records, and artistic remains.
But it is impossible that the Quichuas and Aimaras could have passed across the wide Atlantic to Europe if there had been no stepping-stone in the shape of Atlantis with its bridge-like ridges connecting the two continents.
They divided the year into twelve months.
But its remains exist to-day, the marvel of the Southern Continent, covering not less than twenty square miles.
Senor Lopez first combats the idea that the living dialect of Peru is barbarous and fluctuating.
It is not one of the casual and shifting forms of speech produced by nomad races.
Their accumulations of the precious metals exceeded anything previously known in the history of the world.
One of the centres of the ancient Quichua civilization was around Lake Titicaca.
At Cuelap, in Northern Peru, remarkable ruins were found.
I have already shown, in the chapter upon the similarities between the civilizations of the Old and New Worlds, some of the remarkable coincidences which existed between the Peruvians and the ancient European races; I will again briefly, refer to a few of them:
Think of a stone aqueduct reaching from the city of New York to the State of North Carolina!
I might pursue those parallels much farther; but it seems to me that these extraordinary coincidences must have arisen either from identity of origin or long-continued ancient intercourse.
These roads were from twenty to twenty-five feet wide, were macadamized with pulverized stone mixed with lime and bituminous cement, and were walled in by strong walls "more than a fathom in thickness." In many places these roads were cut for leagues through the rock; great ravines were filled up with solid masonry; rivers were crossed by suspension bridges, used here ages before their introduction into Europe.
9.
They worshipped the sun, moon, and planets.
Along about 2 o'clock in the afternoon it was so hot that all hands got to talking about it.
The changes in sea levels were not confined to the immediate centre of volcanic activity, but extended as far north as Porto Rico, and it was believed that the seismic wave would be found to have altered the ocean bed round Jamaica.
The donkey engineman was killed on deck sitting in front of his boiler.
But he wasn't.
At 2 o'clock in the morning all the queer goings on stopped just the way they began--all of a sudden.
A flock of them, squawking and crying, made for our rigging and perched there.
Then we found that the grayish-looking ash was sifting all over the ship, both forward and aft.
Daniel Taylor, the ship's cooper, and a Kitts native jumped overboard to save him.
It was quite dark, the sun being obscured by ashes and fine volcanic dust.
About noon I took the bridge to make an observation.
Aft she was like a furnace, but forward the flames had not got below deck, so we four carried those who were still alive on deck into the fo'c's'l.
When the wave of fire was going over us, a tidal wave of the sea came out from the shore and did the rest.
PREPARED TO TRUST TO LUCK
We were all pretty much tired out by that time, but there was no such thing as trying to sleep.
It cut deeper and quicker, and only about half as much was required to do the work.
He says:
We reckoned that something queer was coming off, but none of us could explain what it was.
When I recovered possession of my senses I ran to my house and collected the members of the family, all of whom were panic stricken.
Nobody could tell me where he was.
We lay to until daylight; then we took our reckonings and started off again.
We loved each other.
"In England," she said, "ladies never converse with their servants, particularly in the presence of guests."
I think he felt I was not ready for it, although even in after years, when we talked frankly about many things, he would never admit this.
It was like a great family party--not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever so much more fun.
I felt myself slipping. Once my head dropped and came up with a jerk.
I learned the ways of Europe, of the Orient, and of South America.
When we were together I felt tongue-tied.
My new friends in Paris discovered my happy secret.
I was dumb with loneliness and sick with the fear of lost faith.
Irving was interesting and striking, though certainly not handsome; but he took the compliment to himself, smiled, bowed his thanks, and said:
If your watch stopped you were sure to break a social law.
He never did.
Then I laughed about it.
No one ever speaks of himself in England.
It was the last bad break I made.
"What do you do if you can't keep awake?" I asked.
Life was a stage.
I was homesick for Wisconsin, homesick for real and simple people. I wanted to go home!
I began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard.
Mr. MacLeod, the member of Parliament from Scotland, and Lord Lansdowne happened to be calling when I arrived, and Tom and the Scotch lady were there.
The chef waiter was taking the coats of the gentlemen callers. I received the guests, acknowledged the introductions, and then, as I removed my own coat, I handed him the little package.
After more of the same kind of talk, he began to cook up some yarn to tell the valet.
So I was glad to return to England.
Happiness came back to me.
In all the years together, which he made so rich and happy, Tom never understood how hard and bitter a school was that first year of my married life.
Mr. Gladstone, too, could indulge in small talk.
It "was n't done" in England.
"You slip out quietly, go to your room ask a maid to call you after you have had forty winks, then you go back and pretend you are having a good time," said Tom.
I tried to say a few words now and then to wake myself.
But Tom did try to give me a good time in London.
I watched the great French clock.
Up to eleven o'clock certain attire was proper.
"Oh," I explained happily, "it is n't that--I 'm not tired.
No one was critical.
Motherhood is the great and natural event in the life of a woman in France, and no one makes a secret of it.
I enjoyed its art, its fascinating shops, its picturesque streets and people, and its beautiful women.
Tom became very attentive. He took me sightseeing.
He had tried to be gentle with me; but I was strange in this world of his, and lonely and sensitive.
Everybody participated.
Finally I rebelled.
The free winds of the prairie had swept it from mine.
Liveried coachmen collected our baggage.
I looked at Tom.
I loved the French.
The thought of the country and a visit with some good simple country folk appealed to me too, so I packed the bags and met Tom at Victoria Station at eleven o'clock.
"Ladies never make gifts to their servants," she added.
I batted my eyes to keep them open.
She made me talk French with her. My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise.
In France one guest speaks to any or all of the others; all one's friends extend congratulations if a baby is coming; one shares all his joys with friends.
You are at ease anywhere in the world.
I saw Mr. Balfour, so handsome and gracious that I refused to believe there had ever been cause to call him "Bloody Balfour." There was something kingly about him--yet he was simply Mr. Balfour.
"The fault is with you," he said.
There had been hours in England when only the knowledge that a woman's rarest gift was coming to me, and that Tom was proud and happy about it, kept me from running away--back to the simple life of my own United States.
He never accepted intimacy.
But in England nobody must know, and everybody must be surprised.
He took me to interesting places and we were entertained by a number of people, mostly ponderous and stupid.
But I never loved the city.
That night Tom and I had our first real quarrel, and it was over my dismissal of the Scotch lady of aristocratic birth. Life became intolerable for a while.
We were led to a handsome cart drawn by a fine tandem team, and Tom and I were alone for a minute.
And I was thinking--Tom would n't fit into my world, and I could not belong to his.
Tom went back to London on the next train, and reached the "farm" with our baggage before it was time to dress for the eight-o'clock dinner.
I confessed to a little homesickness.
Tom did not suggest that we entertain in our turn.
I was not well, and Tom, manlike, felt sure the change, a trip down to Essex and new people, would do me good.
Nothing surprises you.
Watching over this peaceful and gambolling flock of Armenian lambkins is a lone Circassian watchdog; he is of a stalwart, warlike appearance; and although wearing no arms - except a cavalry sword, a shorter broad-sword, a dragoon revolver, a two-foot horse-pistol, and a double-barrelled shot-gun slung at his back - the Armenians seem to feel perfectly safe under his protection.
East of Yennikhan, the road develops into an excellent macadamized highway, on which I find plenty of genuine amusement by electrifying the natives whom I chance to meet or overtake. Creeping noiselessly up behind an unsuspecting donkey-driver, until quite close, I suddenly reveal my presence.
These people invite me to remain with them until to-morrow; but of course I excuse myself from this, and, after spending a very agreeable hour in their company, take my departure.
The Yuzgat maiden of "sweet sixteen" is a coy, babyish creature, possessed of a certain doll-like prettiness, but at twenty-three is a rapidly fading flower, and at thirty is already beginning to get wrinkled and old.
The country develops into an undulating plateau, which is under general cultivation, as cultivation goes in Asiatic Turkey.
CHAPTER XVI.
Eggs there are none; they are devoured, I fancy, almost before they are laid.
When properly played, it produces soft, melodious music that, to say nothing else, must exert a gentle soothing influence on the wild, turbulent souls of a herd of goats.
"The laws of life are written upon the face of Nature.
He was delighted.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Oh!" I replied, "I always bought my pills at the drug stores."
Although the pills were but twenty-five cents per box, they were soon sold to such a great extent, that tons of huge cases filled with the "purely vegetable pill" were sent from the new and extensive manufactory every week.
He was so afraid of being drowned before the water would soak off the candy and when the children tried to pull it off it nearly killed him with pain, for it took all the little fine hairs of his coat with it.
"Wait till I get something to wrap him in so I won't get all stuck up with the candy."
The sudden appearance of a hamper apparently on legs coming toward her, surprised her, but nothing like the queer thing that was rolling about her feet, and which she could not see for the big tray in her hands.
Looking up, he saw that the house was lighted more than was usual, and he knew right away that they must be having a little dance or a children's party of some kind.
"Here, you Zip, keep still, or you'll slip out of the apron you're wrapped in and get my best suit all sticky," called the little boy who held him in his arms and was carrying him up to the bathroom.
He would never hear the last of it.
Besides, the doctor had been her family physician for years, and they were all very, very fond of him as well as of Zip.
The children ran after it, screaming with laughter, but when they caught up to the rolling ball and discovered their well-known, mischievous Zip rolled up so tight he was helpless, they clapped their hands with delight. He looked so crestfallen and funny that they forgave him on the spot for the loss of their candy.
Instead it got between his toes and held him still faster.
When he appeared in the door all the children stopped laughing and stepped back to give him a chance to see Zip.
ZIP AT THE CANDY PULL
"Just the very thing!" one of the boys replied.
As the children began to come down the back steps, he gave one yelp, doubled himself up and began to roll, so that what the children saw was a big ball of molasses candy rolling down the sloping walk.
A few feet from the door was the maid, sitting with limbs outspread, too dazed to move, while from under the corner of her skirt rolled a big, sticky ball of some kind that howled as it rolled.
Beyond him was an overturned hamper of soiled clothes, with stockings, collars, sheets and petticoats spilling out of it.
As he still heard Zip howling and several people were talking all at once, he made bold to open the door and step in.
In doing this he pulled backwards so far that his feet slipped somehow, and he sat down in the candy.
Yes, it was molasses he smelled!
At last when Zip was entirely clean and had been wrapped in a big bath towel to dry, Doctor Elsworth apologized to Helen for his little dog spoiling her candy pull.
She could not seem to escape it, and finally she stumbled and fell, sending the glasses of delicious lemonade flying in all directions.
For his four feet, mouth, one ear and tail were all sticking to the pan of candy.
Hearing a noise on the back stairs, as if the house was falling, Mrs. Hardway went to see what the trouble was, and opened the kitchen door just in time to receive a full glass of lemonade squarely on the chest.
He knocked repeatedly but no one answered.
Yes, they were surely coming!
This brought more of the guests to the spot, and you would have laughed could you have seen their faces when first they peered into the kitchen, which looked as if a cyclone had struck it.
He stuck his nose up in the air and gave a long sniff.
Just then he thought he got a whiff of boiling molasses.
Another roll sent him tumbling bumpety-bump down the long flight that led to the kitchen.
He tried to bite it off, but instead of coming off, it only stuck to his teeth and he found himself sticking to the pan with his mouth as well as his feet.
The children had never thought that the poor dog could not move his head to keep out of the water.
That evening the doctor had no calls to make, so Zip was left to amuse himself as best he could.
"I know the best way to get the sticky stuff off," said Helen Hardway, the little girl who was giving the party.
That was all that could be seen of Zip at that moment, for in his numerous rolls, the candy had spread all over him until he was no longer a dog with legs but just one round ball of molasses candy.
It was hard to think of the doctor without Zip, as they were always together.
That's what is going on!
As by this time the children had started to bathe Zip, the doctor was told to go right upstairs.
In his roll down the stairs, he had lost some of the candy, so that now his mouth and nose were free, though he was minus a tooth and several of his long smeller whiskers.
He could not stand it to have these children he saw every day find him in such a fix.
"They are having a candy pull.
But alas!
He was so busy gazing up at the lighted windows to see what was going on inside the house, that he neglected to look where he was stepping, and the first thing he knew, he was standing with all four feet in a pan of hot molasses candy.
The window of the bathroom was open and the doctor, coming out on his front porch to look at the sky before retiring, heard Zip howling somewhere across the street.
First he released the little dog's head, which had been bent down between his fore legs.
Indeed, he was held securely by the sticky, stringy candy.
Just then he thought he heard the children coming to see if their sweets were cool.
Just one of Zip's eyes stuck out of a hole where the candy had dropped off, and his poor little tail stuck out like a handle on the other side of the ball.
At the other end of the room stood Mrs. Hardway, wiping the lemonade off her dress, while all over the place were slices of lemon and pieces of fruit and Maraschino cherries.
And this is what he saw.
Now he began to howl as if being killed.
So he made a frantic effort to loosen himself.
Now the doctor hurriedly took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and in a jiffy had Zip and the molasses ball in his hands and was holding it so that the water could not get to Zip's head.
When the waitress stumbled, she fell on Zip, pinning him under her.
As the candy began to loosen and drop off, first one black ear stood up and then the other, and last the little legs began to shoot out.
But she declared that he had given them more fun than if he had not come over, and the molasses had cooled and they had had a regular candy pull.
The doctor made the circuit of the house and stable yard but could find no Zip.
He was crying in such a pitiful, frightened manner that the doctor knew he must be fast somewhere or hurt so he could not get home.
What he saw you already know.
Then with one hand he gently threw the water upon the candy until it began to loosen and fall off.
The candy was just in that state of cooling when the top is a little hard and the bottom is soft and sticky.
All this made the children laugh to see what appeared to be a big ball of candy develop into a little dog.
"Let's put him in the bath tub and soak it off."
All they could see in the semi-darkness was the candy, for Zip was too balled up to show a bit of dog sticking out of the soft mess.
So when he tried to lift his feet, the candy pulled up from the bottom of the pan and made long, stringy ends, but did not leave his feet.
One of the boys gave it a jerk to loosen it, but sad to relate, he gave too vigorous a pull and Zip dropped from the boy's arms, not into the tub, but at one side and by a mighty effort he gave himself two rolls which brought him to the head of the stairs.
Consequently he hurried across the street to see where his pet was, with the worried Tabby close at his heels.
On hearing this, Zip began to struggle and squirm, for he had visions of hot water and soapsuds in his eyes, with each one of the children feeling it was their duty to give him an extra scrub.
I knew that kind of look--I'd seen it at the Cruelty.
And still I lingered.
"Yes, paper.
I'm going to have that paper."
What?
His manner changed.
Risk!
Oh, we were friends, we two!
But there was nothing for it.
Me?
"Paper?"
I looked at her with respect; it was both real and feigned.
"A small paper," he said eagerly.
The woman looked at me.
"I must have lost it."
"Look here, I give you one more chance," he squeaked; "if you don't--"
"It's been disagreeable but I'm obliged to you for--why, where's my purse!
I knew what that meant.
Here, Sergeant!"
Oh, that admirable woman!
Denver cannot fight Chicago and Iowa cannot fight Ohio.
Put into about one hundred words your impression of the effect produced.
He laments thus pointedly:
7.
In Germany schools were closed for a third of a century, homes burned, women outraged, towns demolished, and the untilled land became a wilderness.
If you find that you cannot do that, there is something wrong--attend to that first.
The wages of war are the wages of sin, and the "wages of sin is death."
Triumphantly they wrote "In Solomon's Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses."
A parrot is equally eloquent.
Like rival "gun gangs" in a back alley, the nations of the world, through the bloody ages, have fought over their differences.
Warriors were saviours.
Remember that the mind of your audience follows yours very closely, and if you withdraw your attention from what you are saying to what you are going to say, your audience will also withdraw theirs.
Remove the cause and the symptom will disappear.
History is an appalling tale of war.
When high power is used attention is confined within very circumscribed limits, but its action is exceedingly intense and absorbing.
What relation does pause bear to concentration?
Words." That is a world-old trouble.
In times of peace prepare for peace.
Our differences will be settled by an international court with the power to enforce its mandates.
Try to rub the top of your head forward and backward at the same time that you are patting your chest.
"What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet replied, "Words.
We spend more money building one battleship than in the annual maintenance of all our state universities.
3.
6.
They may not do so consciously and deliberately, but they will surely cease to give importance to the things that you yourself slight.
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Concentrate all your mental energies on the present sentence.
What effect do such habits have on the audience?
Think of how a lens gathers and concenters the rays of light within a given circle.
Tell why concentration naturally helps a speaker to change pitch, tempo, and emphasis.
The cave man's club made law and procured food.
The brain needs special training before it can do two or more things efficiently at the same instant.
Words are only a result.
It is fatal to either the actor or the speaker to cross his bridges too soon.
Little children with tearful faces pressed against the pane watch and wait. Their means of livelihood, their home, their happiness is gone. Fatherless children, broken-hearted women, sick, disabled and dead men--this is the wage of war.
Painful experience alike to audience and to speaker!
Might decreed right.
Its power may be high or low; its field of view narrow or broad.
Whatever is the psychological truth of this contention it is undeniable that the mind measurably loses grip on one idea the moment the attention is projected decidedly ahead to a second or a third idea.
In Nazareth a carpenter laid down the saw and preached the brotherhood of man.
Such speeches lose nothing by repetition for the perfectly patent reason that they arise from concentrated thought and feeling and not a mere necessity for saying something--which usually means anything, and that, in turn, is tantamount to nothing.
Their trouble is a mental one--they are not concentratedly thinking thoughts that cause words to issue with sincerity and conviction, but are merely enunciating word-sounds mechanically.
Attention is the microscope of the mental eye.
Read the chapter on "Will Power." Cultivate your will by willing and then doing, at all costs. Concentrate--and you will win.
The truth is, that as a speaker your words must be born again every time they are spoken, then they will not suffer in their utterance, even though perforce committed to memory and repeated, like Dr. Russell Conwell's lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," five thousand times.
Divide your attention and you divide your power.
Words.
Then read it aloud, concentrating solely on the thought that you are expressing--do not trouble about the sentence or thought that is coming.
At the window sits the widowed mother crying.
Do not try to get the result without stimulating the cause.
In the seventeenth century Germany, France, Sweden, and Spain warred for thirty years.
It centers them by a process of withdrawal.
Twelve centuries afterwards his followers marched to the Holy Land to destroy all who differed with them in the worship of the God of Love.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
You cannot deliver a broadside without concentrated force--that is what produces the explosion.
CONCENTRATION IN DELIVERY
You must concentrate by resolutely withdrawing your attention from everything else.
Why should Germany be permitted to fight France, or Bulgaria fight Turkey?
War only defers a question.
Did you ever notice how hollow a memorized speech usually sounds?
You have listened to the ranting, mechanical cadence of inefficient actors, lawyers and preachers.
1.
Tell of any peculiar methods you may have observed or heard of by which speakers have sought to aid their powers of concentration, such as looking fixedly at a blank spot in the ceiling, or twisting a watch charm.
Of course Popopo was invisible to mortal eyes, so he stood by and listened to their conversation.
But Popopo was in despair.
Locks and bolts made no difference to a knook, and he saw as well in darkness as in daylight.
And they flew to the fields and forests with songs of thanks to the good knook who had rescued them.
He loved the birds, and disliked to condemn them to slavery again; but that seemed the only way to end the trouble.
That will afford relief to your poor milliner and at the same time set free thousands of our darling birds who have been so cruelly used."
"Enchant the types!" echoed Popopo, in wonder.
He wanted, in some way, to replace the birds upon the hats, that the poor woman might be happy again.
Indeed, two men fired several shots at us this morning, but the bullets only ruffled our feathers and buried themselves in our stuffing.
So at the proper time Popopo transported himself in a jiffy to a great city, where he began wandering about the streets.
There were not quite chairs enough for ten, since the family had rarely all wanted to sit down at once, somebody always being out, or in bed, but the wood box and the coal-hod finished out the line nicely.
Ask Mis' Bird how she's feelin' this evenin', or if Mr. Bird's havin' a busy season, or somethin' like that.
CAROL BIRD."
You other boys clear out from under foot!
The little Ruggleses hung their diminished heads.
Now, can you remember?"
Now, look me in the eye.
I say, "complete;" but I do not know whether they would be called so in the best society.
"Very good, indeed!
Mr. Peter, do you speak for white or dark meat?"
RUGGLES,--
Now, is there anything more ye'd like to practice?"
"You just stop your gruntin', Peter Ruggles; that was all right.
SOME OTHER BIRDS ARE TAUGHT TO FLY.
Breakfast was on the table promptly at seven o'clock, and there was very little of it, too; for it was an excellent day for short rations, though Mrs. Ruggles heaved a sigh as she reflected that even the boys, with their India-rubber stomachs, would be just as hungry the day after the dinner-party as if they had never had any at all.
Won't yer, Peory?"
"Oh, don't fret," said her mother, good naturedly, "I guess you'll git along.
A row of seats was formed directly through the middle of the kitchen.
"Clement Ruggles, do you mean to tell me that you'd say that to a dinner party?
"ABOUT ONCE IN SO OFTEN!" Could any words in the language be fraught with more terrible and wearing uncertainty?
"First rate!
The third time brought deserved success, and the pupils took their seats in the row.
"Dunno!" said Cornelius, turning pale.
Gala day!
I should think so!
nobody could speak more genteel than that.
The matter began to assume a graver aspect; the little Ruggleses stopped giggling and backed into the bed-room, issuing presently with lock step, Indian file, a scared and hunted expression in every countenance.
"Well, I have what I call a 'window-school.' It is too cold now; but in warm weather I am wheeled out on my little balcony, and the Ruggleses climb up and walk along our garden fence, and sit down on the roof of our carriage-house.
P.S.--The reason I like 'Carol, brothers, carol,' is because the choir-boys sang it eleven years ago, the morning I was born, and put it into Mama's head to call me Carol.
CAROL BIRD."
"Yes; isn't it nice to see so many together?
She didn't remember then that my other name would be Bird, because she was half asleep, and couldn't think of but one thing at a time.
"And the fat youngster?"
That brings them quite near, and I read to them and tell them stories; On Thanksgiving Day they came up for a few minutes, it was quite warm at eleven o'clock, and we told each other what we had to be thankful for; but they gave such queer answers that Papa had to run away for fear of laughing; and I couldn't understand them very well.
I want to know if you can let the boys sing 'Carol, brothers, carol,' on Christmas night, and if the one who sings 'My ain countree' so beautifully may please sing that too.
Just think!"
Mama says she supposes that ever so many other children have been born on that day.
CAROL BIRD.
"No; Sarah Maud is the oldest--she helps do the washing; and Peter is the next.
Oh, I do hope that none of them are poor, or cold, or hungry; and I wish, I wish they were all as happy as I, because they are my little brothers and sisters.
If it isn't too much trouble, I hope they can sing them both quite early, as after ten o'clock I may be asleep.
"Is Peter the oldest?"
Susan was thankful for 'TRUNKS,' of all things in the world; Cornelius, for 'horse cars;' Kitty, for 'pork steak;' while Clem, who is very quiet, brightened up when I came to him, and said he was thankful for 'HIS LAME PUPPY.' Wasn't that pretty?"
"And that freckled one?"
Now I'm going to give this whole Christmas to the Ruggleses; and, Uncle Jack, I earned part of the money myself."
"That large and interesting brood of children in the little house at the end of the back garden?"
Will you see if it is all right?"
"And which is the pretty little red-haired girl?"
Villikins barked, and sniffed, and howled in impatience, and after many vain attempts succeeded in dragging off the prize, though he singed his nose in doing it.
Donald came, too; Donald, with a line of down upon his upper lip, and Greek and Latin on his tongue, and stores of knowledge in his handsome head, and stories--bless me, you couldn't turn over a chip without reminding Donald of something that happened "at College."
And what are you going to do with this wonderful 'own' money of yours?"
He is a dressmaker's boy."
"Carol, you are joking."
The days flew by, as they always fly in holiday time, and it was Christmas eve before anybody knew it.
This was really only done for fun, but it pleased Carol.
"Well, well," cried Uncle Jack, "my little girl a real author!
I think it is the loveliest song in the world, but it always makes me cry; doesn't it you?
--Yours truly,
Elfrida had scattered handfuls of seeds over the snow in the garden, that the wild birds might have a comfortable breakfast next morning, and had stuffed bundles of dried grasses in the fireplaces, so that the reindeer of Santa Claus could refresh themselves after their long gallops across country.
The snow-storm came also; and the turkey nearly died a natural and premature death from over-eating.
"BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER."
"No, really, Uncle dear.
Dinah, meanwhile, watched him placidly, her delicate nostrils quivering with expectation, and, after all excitement had subsided, walked with dignity to the table, her beautiful gray satin tail sweeping behind her, and, calmly putting up one velvet paw, drew the sausage gently down, and walked out of the room without "turning a hair," so to speak.
DEAR MR.
The dog and the cat had enjoyed their celebration under Carol's direction. Each had a tiny table with a lighted candle in the center, and a bit of Bologna sausage placed very near it, and everybody laughed till the tears stood in their eyes to see Villikins and Dinah struggle to nibble the sausages, and at the same time evade the candle flame.
Carol's hand (all too thin and white these latter days) lay close clasped in Uncle Jack's, and they talked together quietly of many, many things.
Then, one day, 'Cary,' my pet canary, flew out of her cage, and Peter Ruggles caught her and brought her back, and I had him up here in my room to thank him."
He was not detained by business, nor did he get left behind nor snowed up, as frequently happens in stories, and in real life too, I am afraid.
"It might teach some of us a lesson, mightn't it, little girl?"
WILKIE,--
"That's what Mama said.
"I shall give the nine Ruggleses a grand Christmas dinner here in this very room--that will be Papa's contribution, and afterwards a beautiful Christmas tree, fairly blooming with presents--that will be my part; for I have another way of adding to my twenty-five dollars, so that I can buy everything I like.
Uncle Jack thought the letter quite right, and did not even smile at her telling the organist so many family items.
There were Papa's stout top boots; Mama's pretty buttoned shoes next; then Uncle Jack's, Donald's, Paul's and Hugh's; and at the end of the line her own little white worsted slippers.
"Now, don't laugh--that's Peoria!"
Of course she thought of something lovely; she always does; Mama's head is just brimming over with lovely thoughts, and all I have to do is ask, and out pops the very one I want.
"No," laughed Carol, "the others are Susan, and Clement, and Eily, and Cornelius."
That was to keep the dear ones from quarreling all through the year.
Last, and sweetest of all, like the little children in Austria, she put a lighted candle in her window to guide the dear Christ-child, lest he should stumble in the dark night as he passed up the deserted street.
I have written a letter to the organist, and asked him if I might have the two songs I like best.
We ought to call them the Ruggles children, of course; but Donald began talking of them as the 'Ruggleses in the rear,' and Papa and Mama took it up, and now we cannot seem to help it.
"And is the next boy Oshkosh?"
"Baby Larry."
This thought was, to let her write down, just as I told her, a description of how a little girl lived in her own room three years, and what she did to amuse herself; and we sent it to a magazine and got twenty-five dollars for it.
I am the little sick girl who lives next door to the church, and, as I seldom go out, the music on practice days and Sundays is one of my greatest pleasures.
She was born in Peoria; that's all."
I often wonder where they are, Uncle Jack, and whether it is a dear thought to them, too, or whether I am so much in bed, and so often alone, that it means more to me.
"That's Kitty."
The house was built for Mr. Carter's coachman, but Mr. Carter lives in Europe, and the gentleman who rents his place doesn't care what happens to it, and so this poor Irish family came to live there.
Carol and Elfrida, her pretty German nurse, had ransacked books, and introduced so many plans, and plays, and customs and merry-makings from Germany, and Holland, and England and a dozen other places, that you would scarcely have known how or where you were keeping Christmas.
"Yes, we all thought it very funny, and I smiled at them from the window when I was well enough to be up again.
"Well, you see, it could not be my own, own Christmas if Papa gave me all the money, and I thought to really keep Christ's birthday I ought to do something of my very own; and so I talked with Mama.
--Yours respectfully,
"How did you ever learn all their names?"
He did not at that time, however, engage in a serious search for another form of storage battery, being tremendously occupied with his lighting system and other matters.
5.
Actual tests, long continued under very severe conditions, have shown that the construction is right, and fulfils the most sanguine expectations."
The article then treats of Edison's investigations into means for supporting and making electrical connection with the active materials, showing some of the difficulties encountered and the various discoveries made in developing the perfected cell, after which the writer continues his description of the "A" type cell, as follows:
Even in those early days he arrived at the conclusion that the lead-sulphuric-acid combination was intrinsically wrong, and did not embrace the elements of a permanent commercial device.
4), are all made of nickel-plated steel--a material in which lightness, durability and mechanical strength are most happily combined, and a material beyond suspicion as to corrosion in an alkaline electrolyte....
By reason of this, both the element and the electrolyte that have been used up must be renewed from time to time, in order to obtain a continued supply of electric current.
3.
"An idea of the conditions inside a loaded tube can best be had by microscopic examination.
9.
Entire absence of corrosive fumes.
"The perforated tubes into which the nickel active material is loaded are made of nickel-plated steel of high quality.
The storage battery, as a commercial article, was introduced into the market in the year 1881.
GENERICALLY considered, a "battery" is a device which generates electric current.
No loss of active material, hence no sediment short-circuits. 2.
The tremendously complex nature of the chemical reactions which take place in the lead-acid storage battery also renders it an easy prey to many troublesome diseases.
In the year last named Edison first brought out his new form of nickel-iron cell with alkaline electrolyte, as we have related in the preceding narrative.
EDISON'S NEW STORAGE BATTERY
11.
To the lay mind a "storage" battery presents itself in the aspect of a device in which electric energy is STORED, just as compressed air is stored or accumulated in a tank.
The vertical bounding walls are edges of the perforated metal containing tube; the dark horizontal lines are layers of nickel flake, while the light-colored thicker layers represent the nickel hydrate.
The active metals of the electrodes--which will oxidize and reduce in this electrolyte without dissolution or chemical deterioration--are nickel and iron.
This type of cell, however, has many serious disadvantages inherent to its very nature.
5) has the familiar flat-pocket construction.
The frame is slit at the inner horizontal edges, and then folded in such a way as to make individual clamping-jaws for each end-flange. The clamping-in is done at great pressure, and the resultant plate has great rigidity and strength.
"It will be seen that the 'A' positive plate has been given the theoretically best design to prevent expansion and overcome trouble from that cause.
At that time, and all through the succeeding years, until about 1905, there was only one type that was recognized as commercially practicable--namely, that known as the lead-sulphuric-acid cell, consisting of lead plates immersed in an electrolyte of dilute sulphuric acid.
It is only when specially prepared iron oxide of exceeding fineness, and nickel hydrate conforming to certain physical, as well as chemical, standards can be made that the alkaline battery is practicable.
Possibility of quick disconnection or replacement of any cell without employment of skilled labor.
But Gawayne chose the lower road, and passed Along the desolate shore.
There, that's right; And now your helmet?
You are punctual to the day; That's good!
By noon the next day, Gawayne and his host Rode side by side along the perilous coast Of the gray Mere, from whose unquiet sleep Reverberating murmurs of the deep Startled the still December's listening air. The baron, shuddering, pointed seaward.
"Nay, nay, not so," The other softly said.
Let me see;-- Suppose I brew a cup of hot green tea? You'ld rather not?
"Well, my friend, I'll go no further with you.
Thanks; and if you please Perhaps you'll kindly kneel down on your knees, As I did when I came to Camelot; So! Are you all ready?
You're pressed for time?
CONCLUSION
The "taking" camera must have its parts enclosed in a light-tight box, because of the undeveloped, sensitized film, but the projecting kinetoscope, using only a fully developed positive film, may, and, for purposes of convenient operation, must be accessibly open.
The positive film is moved intermittently but swiftly throughout its length between the objective lens and a beam of light coming through the condenser, being exposed by the shutter during the periods of rest.
It reads as follows:
Application filed August 24, 1891.
In appearance it is somewhat different; indeed, it is in two parts, the one containing the lighting arrangements and condensing lens, and the other embracing the mechanism and objective lens.
In practice, the operation would be somewhat as follows, generally speaking: The lens would first be focussed on the animate scene to be photographed.
As in practice the pictures are taken at a rate of twenty or more per second, it will be quite obvious that each period of rest is infinitesimally brief, being generally one-thirtieth of a second or less.
There is nothing surprising in this, however, as the possibility of photographing and reproducing actual scenes of animate life are so thoroughly exemplified and rendered practicable by the apparatus and methods disclosed in the patents above cited, that these basic inventions in themselves practically constitute the art--its development proceeding mainly along the line of manufacturing details.
The negatives so obtained are developed in the regular way, and the positive prints subsequently made from them are used for reproduction.
This results in a projection of the photographs upon a screen in such rapid succession as to present an apparently continuous photograph of the successive positions of the moving objects, which, therefore, appear to the human eye to be in motion.
Still it is sufficient to bring the film to a momentary condition of complete rest, and to allow for a maximum time of exposure, comparatively speaking, thus providing means for taking clearly defined pictures.
The mechanism of such a camera, as now used, consists of many parts assembled in such contiguous proximity to each other that an illustration from an actual machine would not help to clearness of explanation to the general reader.
The philosophy of reproduction is very simple, and is illustrated diagrammatically in Fig. 3, reference letters being the same as in Fig. 1.
While the film is passing through the various parts of the machine it is guided and kept straight by various sets of rollers between which it runs, as indicated in the diagram.
As to the additional reference letters, I is a condenser J the source of light, and K a reflector.
A full view of this shutter is also represented, with its opening, D, in the small illustration to the right.
After this they went forth and took all the arms of the guards and Sahim said to them, "Go to your own camp;" while he re entered Ajib's pavilion and, wrapping him in his cloak, lifted him up and made for the Moslem encampment.
Let no sluggard come out nor weakling!" Whereupon there rushed at him a horseman of the Kafirs, as he were a flame of fire; but Sahim let him not stand long before him ere he overthrew him with a thrust.
Then ruled the Kazi of Battle, in whose ordinance is no wrong, for a seal is on his lips and he speaketh not; and the blood railed in rills and purfled earth with curious embroidery; heads grew gray and hotter waxed battle and fiercer.
But an thou obey not my bidding, behold, I will hasten to thee and cut off thy head and lay waste thy dominions.
Who is for jousting?
Who is for jousting?
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So he cried out at the guards, saying, "Woe to you!
And it was thus.
Whoso knoweth me hath enough of my mischief and whoso knoweth me not, I will make myself known to him.
--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
Then Ajib cried to his men, "Charge once more," and sturdy host on sturdy host down bore and great was the clash of arms and battle-roar.
When it was the Six Hundred and Thirty-seventh Night,
Then a second came forth and he slew him also, and a third and he tare him in twain, and a fourth and he did him to death; nor did they cease sallying out to him and he left not slaying them, till it was noon, by which time he had laid low two hundred braves.
Ajib and his men also took horse and host charged down upon host.
Then dashed out the Ghul of the Mountain, with a club on his shoulder, two hundred pounds in weight, and wheeled and careered, saying, "Ho, worshippers of idols, come ye out and renown it this day, for 'tis a day of onslaught!
When it was the Six Hundred and Thirty-eighth Night,
-- And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased to say her permitted say.
Thereupon he loosed their bonds and collars, and when they saw him, they blessed him and rejoiced In him.
So he made him smell the vinegar mixed with incense, and he opened his eyes and, finding himself bound and shackled, hung down his head earth wards.
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When it was the Six Hundred and Thirty-ninth Night,
But afterwards.
Victory!" And he blessed Sahim and bade him arouse Ajib.
If we prove the victors, we shall have power to him and, if we be beaten, his being alive in our hands will be a strength to us." And the Emirs said, "The Minister speaketh sooth"!
Peace on Abraham the Friend await!
So he entered and going up to the candles which burnt in the tent snuffed them and sprinkled levigated henbane on the wicks; after which he withdrew and waited without the marquee, till the smoke of the burning henbane reached Ajib and his Princes and they fell to the ground like dead men.
Verily, I give thee good counsel, and the Peace be on those who pace the path of salvation and obey the Most High King!" When Ajib read these words and knew the threat they contained, his eyes sank into the crown of his head and he gnashed his teeth and flew into a furious rage.
Who is for fighting? Let no faintheart come forth to me to-day nor weakling." And there rushed upon him a Champion of the Infidels, as he were a flame of fire, and drove at him, but Sa'adan charged home at him and dealt him with his club a blow which broke his ribs and cast him lifeless to the earth.
It makes your lungs work twice as hard as usual, and it's also a sign."
But as they advanced the sounds of an army ahead of them increased, and when they reached the edge of the covert they saw a great Confederate division on their side of the stream, in full possession of the cottages and occupying all the ground about them.
The sun was setting once more over the Virginia hills destined to be scarred so deeply by battle, but attack and defense went on.
The North with its great numbers, its fine courage and its splendid patriotism should never be retreating.
"It must be a feint or a blind," he said.
Dick was not wrong.
"Have we any definite news from the other side, sir?"
The colonel obtained leave to go up the Rappahannock until nightfall, but only his own regiment, now reduced to less than four hundred men, was allotted to him.
"Then what do you think they're up to, sir?"
But later in the day a heavy crash came from a ford further up the stream.
It ain't no place for health just at this time."
But little ever escapes him, and he says that the whole Southern army is up.
"There must be seven or eight thousand men here," said Dick, who did not miss the full significance of the fact.
All of you have hunted the 'coon and 'possum at night, and you should know how to step without making noise."
"Depends upon what happens before she busts.
Warner and Pennington joined him on the height where he stood, and they saw that in the early hours before dawn the Northern generals had not been idle.
"What will it mean to the two armies, sergeant?" he asked.
This, I take it, is the end of the drought, and a flood will come tumbling down from the mountains."
"Some big sulphur springs spout out of the bank and run down to the river.
The Confederate commanders did have a plan and the omens which seemed sinister to him were sinister in fact.
He heard faintly the sound of voices, and the clank and rattle which many men with weapons cannot keep from making now and then.
They're attacking one of the fords now!"
It was also late in the afternoon and Dick was quite sure that they would not reach Sulphur Springs before nightfall.
See that cloud edging itself over the horizon.
There was a well defined road and Shattuck now led them at a gallop. As they approached the springs they checked their speed, owing to the increasing darkness.
I wish I could divine what is in the mind of those two men, Lee and Jackson. They surely have a plan of some kind, but what is it?"
"That's a certainty," said Colonel Winchester.
They are fine and healthy to drink an' there's a lot of cottages built up by people who come there to stay a while.
The whole army of Pope was massed along the left bank of the river and every high point was crowned with heavy batteries of artillery.
"It's my own feeling, Dick.
If we could only stave off battle long enough for it to reach us!"
He saw from the crest of a hill great numbers of Confederate troops on the other side of the river, the August sun glittering over thousands of bayonets and rifle barrels, and along the somber batteries of great guns.
The little troop stopped at the command of its leader and all listened intently.
"Don't you think we could do it, sir?
Colonel Winchester's anxiety increased fast.
"Beyond a doubt.
But Dick's good ears soon told him that something was happening at the springs.
The pitiless August sun burned on and the dust that had been trodden up by the scores of thousands hung in clouds low, but almost motionless.
The water brought a great relief.
"Will they try to cross, sir?" asked Dick of the colonel.
"Fortunately.
But he could only stare into the darkness and guess and guess.
Sergeant Whitley was standing near them regarding the cloud attentively.
Colonel Winchester himself came a moment or two later and joined them as they gazed at the two armies and the river between.
They would leave McClellan and the Army of the Potomac nearer to Richmond, their own capital, than they were.
The enemy was in plain view beyond the stream, and Shepard and the other spies reported that the Southern army showed no signs of retiring.
They had another great force, the Army of the Potomac, which should have been there, and then they could have bade defiance to Lee and Jackson.
Nevertheless Lee, full of daring despite his years, followed, and the dangers were growing thicker every hour around Pope.
Dick was silent.
"Yes, Dick.
But Shepard had said also that he would not be able to cross the river again.
The sign may not be so strong here, but it applies just as it does on the great plains.
Dick learned that there was a little place called Sulphur Springs some miles ahead, and that the river there was spanned by a bridge which the Union cavalry had wrecked the day before.
Dick smiled a little at the sergeant's solemn tone, and formal words, but he saw that he was very much in earnest.
"They're there, and they're on our side of the river.
Shattuck advanced with certainty, and the others, true to their training, came behind him in single file, and without noise.
Warner and Pennington slept near him and not far away was the brave sergeant. Even he was overpowered by fatigue and he slept like one dead, never stirring.
Dick remained upborne by a confidence in the future rather than in the present, and throughout the morning he remained with his comrades, under arms, but doing little, save to hear the fitful firing which ran along a front of several miles.
"Hello," said the boy.
"No; but they can't get around, without legs, to find out things."
So they always call me Button-Bright."
"What's a league?" asked the boy.
"'Riddlecum, riddlecum ree; What can the answer be?'"
Trot laughed.
"No one but you two," said the boy, following after Trot, with his umbrella tucked carefully underneath his arm.
"No; I'm not smart.
"Why not?" asked Trot, a little indignantly.
"I ought to tell you my story," he said, "and then you'd understand.
Button-Bright nodded, very seriously.
Button-Bright shook his head.
"That's why he don't sailor any more.
"Much obliged," laughed Trot.
I s'pose he knows more than anyone else in all the world."
"Just like your own nickname happened," he answered gloomily.
"I'd like to," replied Button-Bright.
The only queer thing about him was his big umbrella.
"That's it," he said.
"I can't see any more of it than I can of the Atlantic."
He wore a blouse waist, a short jacket and knickerbockers. Under his arm he held an old umbrella that was as tall as he was.
"Shoot," said Cap'n Bill.
Button-Bright nodded again.
He shook his head, still gazing far out over the water.
"Button-Bright."
"'Bout as far as I can get, in this country," the boy replied, gazing out over the water.
Say, what's your name?"
"That's the town," said Trot.
"No," said Button-Bright.
He was old, not very tall, somewhat stout and chubby, with a round face, a bald head and a scraggly fringe of reddish whisker underneath his chin.
"Who's Cap'n Bill?"
"Yes," said Trot, proudly.
Some folks think I'm stupid.
"If you do you're pretty smart," said Trot.
"Guess as you're a stranger, my lad."
"Oh; is that your home?"
"How did it happen?"
"I don't know," said Button-Bright; "I've never seen one."
"Yes, 'ndeed; Cap'n Griffith is my father; but he's gone, most of the time, sailin' on his ship.
The sailor glanced around him.
"Of course."
"Philadelphia," said he.
"Haven't you any father?"
"Because it's the biggest lot of water in all the world."
Did you drop down in that way, my lad?" he asked the boy.
"Isn't this the Pacific Ocean?"
The eyes of the beast were small red stones, and it had two tiny tusks of ivory.
He lives at my house, too--the white house you see over there on the bluff."
"Yes.
"How do you know?"
"Folks don't learn things with their legs, do they?"
"Then it doesn't make any difference how big an ocean is," he replied. "What are those buildings over there?" pointing to the right, along the shore of the bay.
The old sailorman had refilled his pipe and lighted it again, and he smoked thoughtfully as he pegged along beside the children.
"What is it, then?"
"Looks don't count, with oceans," she asserted.
The boy sat down beside her on the flat rock.
"No," said Button-Bright.
Cap'n Bill looked at the boy curiously.
"Dear me," said Trot; "you're a long way from home, then."
"My father once said I was bright as a button, an' it made ever'body laugh.
"You'd find out, if you had to sail across it," she declared.
"Won't you come home with us?"
Trot wasn't very big herself, but the boy was not quite as big as Trot. He was thin, with a rather pale complexion and his blue eyes were round and earnest.
"Such a funny name."
Of this malady, Desire was slowly dying, for no medicine could cure him or even give him any relief from his constant pain.
You can then try Marianna for having killed the Prince, and condemn her to be thrown from the precipice."
The King gave orders that she be brought before him.
The lookers-on, who had expected to see him spring up entirely cured, began to murmur, and Marianna herself, terrified at what had happened, let fall the flask, which broke into a thousand sparkling pieces.
It was empty.
Marianna replied that she would do her best to help the Prince; so the Court Chamberlain gave her his arm, and escorted her to the Prince's sick room.
Three giant gusts drove fiercely by, the first one blowing the King and the magician head-over-heels over the precipice, the second carrying away the soldiers, and the third the rascally favorites.
Great is the debt I owe thee."
Am I not fit to be Emperor?
With a great crowd of select followers, amongst whom were both the worthy statesmen who had already been there before, he went to the cunning impostors, who were now weaving with all their might, but without fibre or thread.
What colours!
No, I must certainly not say that I cannot see the cloth!'
'I should like very much to know how far they have got on with the cloth,' thought the Emperor.
'Those must indeed be splendid clothes,' thought the Emperor.
'If I had them on I could find out which men in my kingdom are unfit for the offices they hold; I could distinguish the wise from the stupid!
'Is it not splendid!' said both the old statesmen who had already been there.
'It has my gracious approval.' And then he nodded pleasantly, and examined the empty loom, for he would not say that he could see nothing.
What colours!' And then they pointed to the empty loom, for they believed that the others could see the cloth quite well.
'What a texture!
That were the most dreadful thing that could happen to me.
'Yes, it is quite beautiful,' he said to the Emperor.
'What!' thought the Emperor, 'I can see nothing!
But he remembered when he thought about it that whoever was stupid or not fit for his office would not be able to see it.
In the great city in which he lived there was always something going on; every day many strangers came there.
Am I stupid?
I have never thought that, and nobody must know it!
Both the impostors begged him to be so kind as to step closer, and asked him if it were not a beautiful texture and lovely colours.
Yes, this cloth must be woven for me at once.' And he gave both the impostors much money, so that they might begin their work.
Now the Emperor wanted to see it himself while it was still on the loom.
Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not.
I would if I could, but I can't."
Winterbourne was impatient to see her again, and he was vexed with himself that, by instinct, he should not appreciate her justly.
"The young girl is very pretty," said Winterbourne in a moment.
"I can't think where they pick it up; and she dresses in perfection--no, you don't know how well she dresses.
"That she is the sort of young lady who expects a man, sooner or later, to carry her off?"
I guess he'll stay at home with Randolph if mother does, and then we can go to the castle."
Miss Miller looked at him a moment, and then, very placidly, "I wish YOU would stay with him!" she said.
The young girl looked at him through the dusk.
Miss Daisy Miller stopped and stood looking at him.
Her nephew, who had come up to Vevey expressly to see her, was therefore more attentive than those who, as she said, were nearer to her.
"Eugenio's our courier.
Well, we ARE exclusive, mother and I. We don't speak to everyone--or they don't speak to us.
"Yes; you can go in the cars," Winterbourne assented.
I know just what YOUR aunt would be; I know I should like her.
"You too, I suppose, have seen it?"
"I am afraid you don't approve of them," he said.
Winterbourne fancied there was a tremor in her voice; he was touched, shocked, mortified by it.
He leaned back in his seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt.
And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva?
"I should like to see my granddaughters do them!" she declared grimly.
She suffers dreadfully from dyspepsia.
He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment.
You can drive, you know, or you can go by the little steamer."
"No; she doesn't like to go to bed," said the young girl.
He wants to stay at the hotel.
But I really think that you had better not meddle with little American girls that are uncultivated, as you call them.
She's gone somewhere after Randolph; she wants to try to get him to go to bed.
"You can go in the cars," said Miss Miller.
"She will talk to him all she can; but he doesn't like her to talk to him," said Miss Daisy, opening her fan.
"Of course she's pretty.
But he's a splendid courier.
She didn't rise, blushing, as a young girl at Geneva would have done; and yet Winterbourne, conscious that he had been very bold, thought it possible she was offended.
You haven't been twenty-four hours in the house."
She admitted that she was very exclusive; but, if he were acquainted with New York, he would see that one had to be.
"I think that she fully intends it."
"Oh, the mother is just as bad!
You will be sure to make some great mistake.
He immediately perceived, from her tone, that Miss Daisy Miller's place in the social scale was low.
Randolph wouldn't go either; he says he doesn't think much of old castles.
Every two days she had a headache.
Winterbourne listened with interest to these disclosures; they helped him to make up his mind about Miss Daisy.
He had imbibed at Geneva the idea that one must always be attentive to one's aunt.
But mother gets tired walking round," she answered.
Her prettiness was still visible in the darkness; she was opening and closing her enormous fan.
He had known, here in Europe, two or three women--persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands--who were great coquettes--dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations were liable to take a serious turn.
"You won't let the poor girl know you then?" he asked at last.
She said she couldn't go.
"Couldn't you get some one to stay for the afternoon with Randolph?"
"But she is wonderfully pretty, and, in short, she is very nice.
Eugenio's tone apparently threw, even to Miss Miller's own apprehension, a slightly ironical light upon the young girl's situation.
"She is a young lady," said Mrs. Costello, "who has an intimacy with her mamma's courier."
He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like an indolent sylph, and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld.
He sits with them in the garden in the evening. I think he smokes."
It was ten o'clock.
"I have known her half an hour!" said Winterbourne, smiling.
He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt--a pretty American flirt.
She was very quiet and very comme il faut; she wore white puffs; she spoke to no one, and she never dined at the table d'hote.
"I want to know her ever so much.
And her picture of the minutely hierarchical constitution of the society of that city, which she presented to him in many different lights, was, to Winterbourne's imagination, almost oppressively striking.
You are too innocent."
Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed.
She would be very exclusive.
"I haven't the least idea what such young ladies expect a man to do.
I can't think where they get their taste."
She turned to Winterbourne, blushing a little--a very little.
"She has that charming look that they all have," his aunt resumed.
But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt.
I shouldn't wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman.
"But don't they all do these things--the young girls in America?" Winterbourne inquired.
"It's a very pretty excursion," said Winterbourne, "and very easy to make.
"Oh yes, I have observed them.
It appeared that Randolph's vigil was in fact triumphantly prolonged, for Winterbourne strolled about with the young girl for some time without meeting her mother.
"She tells me she does," he answered at last, not knowing what to say.
Evidently she was rather wild. "Well," he said, "I am not a courier, and yet she was very charming to me."
"Let us hope she will persuade him," observed Winterbourne.
"Think what, sir?" said his aunt.
"You had better have said at first," said Mrs. Costello with dignity, "that you had made her acquaintance."
She did not know where to look, but wherever she looked, it should not be at Hopkins.
The ones that contain six pounds."
"A small pot of ginger then, please," said Diva recklessly.
Then there was the big cupboard under the stairs, but that could scarcely be the site of this prodigious cache, for it was full of cardboard and curtains and carpets and all the rubbishy accumulations which Elizabeth could not bear to part with.
That was luck.
There were twelve volumes of "The Beauties of Nature", a shelf full of "Elegant Extracts", there were volumes simply called "Poems", there were "Commentaries", there were "Travels" and "Astronomy" and the lowest and tallest shelf was full of "Music".
"We've only two of the big tins of corned beef," he said; and there was a pause, during which, to a psychic, Diva's ears might have seemed to grow as pointed with attention as a satyr's.
Another hour's work would give her sufficient bunches for her purpose, and unless the dyer was as perfidious as Elizabeth, her now purple jacket and skirt would arrive that afternoon.
He put the basket on his head and came down the street again, shrilly whistling.
"So mousie shall only find tins on the floor now," thought Miss Mapp.
It seemed more likely that another motive (one strangely Elizabethan) was the cause of it.
"Good morning, dear one," she said sycophantically.
"And what a lovely idea to have a blue floor, dear," she said. "How original you are.
She would attempt it, anyhow, and if it proved to be beyond her, she could entrust the more difficult parts to that little dressmaker whom Elizabeth employed, and who was certainly very capable.
Miss Mapp sincerely hoped that he did, and that it was nothing else of less pure and innocent allurement that kept him up. . . .
He had little bathing-drawers on. . . .
"Got any big tins of corned beef?
I'll send them up at once," he added, and came forward into the shop.
"Come and have a look round my new studio.
By degrees she calmed down, for it was no use attempting to plan revenge with a brain at fever-heat.
"Tongue as well.
This with considerable exertion she transferred to a high shelf in the cupboard, instead of allowing it to remain standing on the floor, for Withers had informed her of an unpleasant rumour about a mouse, which Mary had observed, lost in thought in front of the cupboard.
Miss Mapp had not imagined that Time and Eternity combined could hold so embarrassing a moment.
As the cooling process went on she began to wonder whether it was worsted alone that had prompted her friend's diabolical suggestion.
Told me she had hardly got any."
Having refreshed himself he turned up the steep street.
The window of his bedroom was dark too: he must have already put out his light, and Miss Mapp made haste over her little tidyings so that she might not be found a transgressor to her own precepts.
She could allow herself to wonder with a little more definiteness, now that the Major's lights were out and he was abed, what it could be which rendered Captain Puffin so oblivious to the passage of time, when he was investigating Roman roads.
Now she had already noticed that Elizabeth had paid visits to the grocer's on three consecutive days (three consecutive days: think of it!), and given that her purchases on other occasions had been on the same substantial scale as to-day, it became a matter of thrilling interest as to where she kept these stores.
How had Irene started the overtures that led to this?
Her voice was tremulous with anxiety and investigation.
And all because of a wretched piece of rose-madder worsted. . . .
Very good.
"Will you send it round immediately?"
But she never could summon up sufficient nerve to be rude to so awful a mimic. . . .
"Well, Irene darling, I must be trotting, and leave you to your--" she hardly knew what to call it-- "to your work."
From this Miss Mapp instantly averted her eyes.
This was a favourite place for observation, for you appeared to be quite taken up by the topics of the day, and kept an oblique eye on the true object of your scrutiny. . . .
She took her poppy-bordered skirt over her arm, and smiled her thankful way to bed.
The walls were hung with specimens of Irene's art, there was a stout female with no clothes on at all, whom it was impossible not to recognize as being Lucy; there were studies of fat legs and ample bosoms, and on the easel was a picture, evidently in process of completion, which represented a man.
"Very sorry, ma'am.
But a change of habits was invariably known to be upsetting, and Miss Mapp was hopeful that in a day or two he would feel quite a different man.
"Not a bit: they stimulate your sense of colour."
That, no doubt, was the explanation, though it would be nice to know for certain, if the information positively forced itself on her notice. . . .
"Shall I peep in for a moment?"
"Good morning," said Diva.
Mr. Wootten turned up his ledger.
Miss Mapp naturally guessed that the gentleman who was almost in the same costume was Adam, and turned completely away from him.
"Oh, but, Mr. Wootten," she said, "Miss Mapp popped--dropped in to see me just now.
"You know Miss Mapp, don't you?"
But there was a light in Captain Puffin's house: he had a less impressionable nature than the Major and was in so many ways far inferior.
She would see about that now, for, busy though she was, she could not miss the shopping-parade.
"But we've had a good supply all the summer," added agreeable Mr. Wootten, "and all my customers have got their cellars well stocked."
He spoke in a lucid telephone-voice.
Bridge-party!"
"Yes, but don't go behind it, Mapp," said Irene, "or you'll see my model undressing."
It was dreadful to think that there could be any man in Tilling so depraved as to stand to be looked at with so little on. . . .
And that pretty scarlet ceiling.
"Tongue" led to a new train of thought, and presently she paused in her work, and pulling the card-table away from the deceptive book-case, she pressed the concealed catch of the door, and peeped in.
They were approaching the corner of the room where the screen stood, when a movement there as if Adam had hit it with his elbow made Miss Mapp turn round.
She attacked her chintz curtains again with her appetite for the pink roses agreeably whetted.
We've only got two, and they've just been ordered."
There was tea and coffee in abundance, jars of jam filled the kitchen shelves, and if this morning she laid in a moderate supply of dried fruits, there was no reason to face the future with anything but fortitude.
But she would now cross him--dear man--and his late habits, out of the list of riddles about Tilling which awaited solution.
Legs and things!
She could not keep them in the coal-cellar, for that was already bursting with coal, and Diva, who had assisted her (the base one) in making a prodigious quantity of jam that year from her well-stocked garden, was aware that the kitchen cupboards were like to be as replete as the coal-cellar, before those hoardings of dead oxen began.
The screen fell flat on the ground and within a yard of her stood Mr. Hopkins, the proprietor of the fish- shop just up the street.
She tripped from the room, which seemed to be entirely full of unclothed limbs, and redder than one of Mr. Hopkins's boiled lobsters hurried down the street.
How glad she was that the Major was not with him. . . . "Benjamin Flint!" she said to herself as, having put her window open, she trod softly (so as not to disturb the slumberer next door) across her room on her fat white feet to her big white bed. "Good night, Major Benjy," she whispered, as she put her light out.
"Mousie shall try his teeth on tins." . . .
In the corner was a very large orange-coloured screen.
"Good morning, Hopkins," she said.
Had she not been so prudent as to make inquiries, as likely as not she would have sent a ton of coal that very day to the hospital, so strongly had Elizabeth's perfidious warning inflamed her imagination as to the fate of hoarders, and all the time Elizabeth's own cellars were glutted, though she had asserted that she was almost fuelless.
There was still room for further small precautions against starvation owing to the impending coal strike, and she took stock of her provisions.
Terrible though it all was, she was conscious of an unbridled curiosity to know who Adam was.
Sometimes in moments of gallantry he called her "Miss Elizabeth", and she meant, when she had got accustomed to it by practice, to say "Major Benjy" to him by accident, and he would, no doubt, beg her to make a habit of that friendly slip of the tongue. . . .
Miss Mapp tried to steel herself for the hundredth time to appear quite unconscious that she was being addressed when Irene said "Mapp" in that odious manner.
But when you have your bridge-party, won't you perhaps cover some of them up, or turn them to the wall?
It was not etiquette to disclose the affairs of one client to another, but if there was a cantankerous customer, one who was never satisfied with prices and quality, that client was Miss Mapp. . . .
It was certainly very odd that, having gone to bed at so respectable an hour last night, he should be calling for his porridge only now, but with an impulse of unusual optimism, she figured him as having been at work on his diaries before breakfast, and in that absorbing occupation having forgotten how late it was growing.
"How clever!
But she could only hear little hollow quacks from the other end.
"Hullo, Hopkins, are you ready," said Irene.
Her head was in a whirl at the brazenness of mankind, especially womankind.
He had no errand to the Major's house or to the Captain's.
That would be fun!
Miss Mapp moved towards the screen.
But (wherever she looked) she could not be unaware that Hopkins raised his large bare arm and touched the place where his cap would have been, if he had had one.
The boy's just going out."
Whatever it had been (diaries or what not) that used to keep him up, he had broken the habit now, whereas Captain Puffin had not.
That made it clear that he was still at breakfast, and that if he had been working at his diaries in the fresh morning hours and forgetting the time, early rising, in spite of his early retirement last night, could not be supposed to suit his Oriental temper.
There was a German stove in the corner made of pink porcelain, the rafters and roof were painted scarlet, the walls were of magenta distemper and the floor was blue.
An old cap pushed up through the hay.
No, there was one lamp that still burned.
I've taught it, and fed it, and looked to it for company when I hadn't nobody in the world to care for me.
There is the prettiest prize for the one who hits the red heart in the centre of the target."
You've been so kind to me that I ought to be willing to make any sacrifice for you.
"What a queer place to serve pie," said Malcolm, in a disapproving undertone to his brother.
A few minutes later, when she appeared in the parlours, there was a buzz of admiration.
But the man shook his head, when they dashed into the cabin and told their errand.
"Of course," answered both the boys, agreeing so quickly to all the man's smooth speeches that, before they left the cabin, they had renewed their promise to keep silent one more day.
"Haven't we had a lot of things, when you come to think of it?" exclaimed Malcolm.
"Then let's go down before breakfast," exclaimed Keith, springing out of bed and beginning to dress himself.
"We'll put him away back in the hay-mow where he'll be warm and comfortable to-night," whispered Malcolm.
The child was so hidden in her wraps when Mom Beck led her up-stairs, that no one could tell how she looked.
I'll give you that Chinese puzzle you've been wanting so long if you will." Keith shook his head.
Nobody comes over in this part of the house much in winter, unless there happens to be a great deal of company."
THE VALENTINE PARTY.
She came in charge of an old coloured woman, Mom Beck, who had been her mother's nurse as well as her own.
"I'll give you the pick of any six stamps in my album if you will."
"The man will beat him if he finds out that Jonesy warned us," pleaded Keith.
But the boys begged her to wait until daylight for Jonesy's sake.
"Why don't they have it in the dining-room?
"No!
Isn't it a stunner?
a base-ball player.
Miss Allison was so busy with preparations for the party that she had no time all that day to notice what the boys were doing.
The paper crust flew off, and twenty-four yards of ribbon, each with a valentine attached, fluttered brightly through the air for an instant.
Looking over the banisters, the boys saw that a table had been drawn into the middle of the wide reception-hall, and on it sat the largest pie that they had ever seen.
"Papa will get us one when he comes home and finds how much we want one."
Mamma would never do such a thing."
When they reached the top of the stairs, Virginia went into her room to light a wax taper in one of the tall silver candlesticks on her dressing-table.
"We'll tell her that we have a valentine six feet long, and keep her guessing."
They were leading the bear between them.
"'Cause yours matches the Little Colonel's, and I want to take her out to dinner," admitted Malcolm.
"Oh, goody!" cried Keith.
"See what an enormous valentine pie Aunt Allison has made!"
They were amazed that any one could be so mean, and longed to tell their Aunt Allison all about it; still, one of the conditions on which they had bought the bear was that they were to "keep mum," and they stuck strictly to that promise.
"Now we can tell Ginger about the bear," was Keith's first remark, when he awoke early next morning.
They were half-way home when a happy thought came to Malcolm.
She had an eiderdown quilt wrapped around her over her dressing-gown.
To-night he had read later than usual, and his fire was nearly out.
"I called the professor out in the hall, and told him so," said Keith, "and asked him if he couldn't adopt Jonesy, or something, until papa comes home.
Presently the old man left the room and Keith sat down on the side of the bed.
He has only a few dollars a month to live on.
"There is nobody in the valley so generous and kind to the poor as your grandmother." "Yes'm," said Virginia, meekly, "but you'll ask her, won't you please, auntie?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Maclntyre; "and when this little tramp is sent away, I want the children to go there often.
"Well, we'll see what we can do," said Malcolm, as he heard the professor coming back.
"Barney is my brother, you know."
That is why he saw something that happened soon after midnight, while everybody else in the valley was sound asleep.
"Yes, so grandmother said," answered Keith.
But I've got somebody!" he cried.
"Then what made him take to his heels so fast if he didn't?" some one asked.
"Shouldn't be surprised," said Malcolm, beginning to whistle.
I shall see what can be done about it, as soon as possible."
He was bending over Jonesy, trying to restore him to consciousness.
"Somebody vill shust in his bed be burnt, if old Johann does not haste make!"
They walked all the way from Chicago to Lloydsborough, Jones told me, excepting three days' journey they made in a wagon.
He comes from the worst of the Chicago slums.
CHAPTER IV.
There was no opposing the old man's masterful way.
Now the bear's sold and the boss has run away, and I don't know how I can get back to Barney.
The man sprang to a window and made his escape, but as the outside air rushed in through the opening he left, it seemed to fan the smoke instantly into flame.
"S'pose that you and I were left of all the family, and didn't have any friends in the world, and I was to get separated from you and couldn't get back?"
Jonesy took his little snub nose out of the pillow as the professor came in, and looked around defiantly as if ready to fight the first one who dared to hint that he had been crying.
Then there had been an awful moment of groping through the blinding, choking smoke, trying to find a way out.
I questioned him very closely this morning.
We can have the Little Colonel and the bear for 'Beauty and the Beast.'"
"I don't want nothing but him."
But he was a lean, snub-nosed little fellow, with a freckled face and neglected hair.
He was too poor to keep a servant, so when he found that the coal-hod was empty he had to go out to the kitchen to fill it himself.
"I must make arrangements for him to be put into one as soon as he is able to be moved."
"I think he will be very loath to leave the old professor," answered Miss Allison.
Mrs. MacIntyre hesitated.
"But I feel responsible for him," urged Miss Allison.
While the professor was bending over Jonesy, trying to bring him back to consciousness, Miss Allison came running down the path.
They could think of nothing else but the loneliness of the little waif, and his pitiful appeal: "Oh, don't let them shut me up where I can't never get back to Barney."
A blinding rush of smoke was his only answer as he backed away from the overpowering heat, but something fell across the door-sill in a limp little heap.
"If we could only keep you here until spring, I am sure that papa would send you back all right.
"I'll help print the tickets," said Keith, "and go around selling them, and be in anything you want me to be.
"Then I'll go down-stairs and put the matter before her, and report to you at dinner-time.
How many tableaux are you going to have, Ginger?"
We were always having them out at the fort."
We'll give Jonesy a benefit, like great singers have.
He's always helping people that get into trouble."
"But he is so little, mother, and so sick and pitiful looking," pleaded Miss Allison.
When Miss Allison kept her promise she did not go to her mother with the children's story of Jonesy, to move her to pity.
"Since it happened on our place, and my little nephews brought him here, it seems to me that we ought to have the care of him."
Over in the cabin by the spring-house where the boys had left the tramp and Jonesy, a puff of smoke went curling around the roof.
On days when shines were plentiful they had something to eat, otherwise they starved or begged."
He was a noted criminal who had escaped from a Northern penitentiary some two months before, and had been arrested by the Louisville police.
It isn't for Jonesy's sake I ask it, but for the children's own good."
"We nearly froze to death that night," he said, when questioned about it afterward, "and the boss piled on an awful big lot of wood just before he went to bed."
Maybe if Jonesy had been an attractive child, with a sensitive mouth, and big, appealing eyes, he might have found his way more easily into people's hearts.
"I was thinking about Barney," he answered, keeping his face turned away.
"I bid to show off the bear," cried Malcolm, entering into Virginia's plan at once.
It shone full across the window of Virginia's room, but she was dreaming of being chased by bears, and only turned uneasily in her sleep.
I doubt if he ever heard the word.
Then a tongue of flame shot up through the cedars, and another and another until the sky was red with an angry glare.
Surely they could do something to block the way of the pursuing engine.
The train's speed decreased.
"No," answered Andrews; "they'll be better armed." He still believed that the engine in their rear had come from Atlanta--probably with a detachment of soldiers aboard, prepared for a battle.
"Will this be all right?" he asked, holding up a short crow-bar.
"We tried to wreck it," he said, "but the tie bounced out of the way."
Tom shook his head in disgust.
Murphy was coming forward to meet him.
When he reached the end of the train he lay on his stomach and looked down.
At the sight of ties lying across the track, Fuller's arms shot up.
Tom climbed over the logs in the tender; then, balancing carefully, he stood up and clutched the top of the swaying freight car.
He had started on foot from Big Shanty in complete ignorance of what was happening to his stolen train.
In the box-car the men silently dropped ties upon the tracks.
Slowly the needle of the gauge crept up.
Then, too...." She faltered and stopped.
"You can't leave by the main road.
"They'll stop there, old fellow," he confided.
"Wonder how much ground we covered then.
I've been here two years now.
Take my horse."
And remember, I'll always be proud of it.
There were more horses on the road.
"But how did they know that I was in this part of the country?"
"I heard him say that more men were coming.
With Marjorie leading Star, they made their way through the woods.
You hold Star while I fix the stirrups." He slid to the ground and stood there, while she measured the straps with her arms and fixed the buckles.
I'm going back just as soon as I can.
Ahead of them was the black wall of the rail fence.
"There!" she said.
"Yes.
"Now," she said, "if you'll help me mount." He held his hands braced against his knees so that they formed a step for her.
"It's all so terrible, isn't it?
Laboriously, he did as he was told to do.
"He's a beautiful horse....
You!" called the man.
Then he watched her, as she retreated into the black background of the woods, his heart thumping so that it hurt.
"I want to do it," she said.
I'm going to show you the way through the woods.
Tom's protest was smothered under Marjorie's hand.
Uncle gave him to me, and I give him to you.
Presently he eased Star's gait, for the horse was beginning to breath too heavily.
"My horse," she explained.
You must....
As they shot forward, he saw the other horse rear up, pawing the air.
"I can never thank you," he began.
The first light of dawn found him a mile south of Manchester.
Tom, flat against Star's neck, with the black mane whipping his face, sped down the road--past the spot where they had met Andrews that first day of the raid, past the Widow Fry's and down the one street of Manchester at a full gallop.
"Let me mount now.
"Poor Tom!" she said softly.
"Yours?"
Once again he did as he was told to do.
He had cleared it by a foot.
Men are going out in all directions, and Kirby is taking the road to Wartrace.
He leaned forward, riding easily, peering ahead at the road.
His head drooped and each breath came as a great heave.
There was no mistaking it.
Huh!"
Oh, Tom, they'll surely catch you if you try it." She clutched his arm as though to hold him from running into the woods.
Go on back."
You'll have to stay here, Tom.
Then, when they turned northward, Tom could feel all the strength of the fine, valiant animal he was riding.
Please!"
I'm...."
Must be pretty close...."
His neck was outstretched and his head was thrust forward as though he were devouring the road.
If they get me, they'll get me in the open.
"I won't let you. Here!--Joe and Sam--put those things down and stay here.
"They're coming to join Kirby," she said.
Star snorted and shook his head.
"There they are--General Marjorie," he said presently.
He mounted and for a moment they delayed the parting.
Then with his hat he slapped the man's horse on the head.
Ahead of them Tom distinguished a man who had dismounted and was standing beside his horse.
"But tomorrow when they find...."
"We don't talk about the war.
"Put your hands up!"
"None of your business!" he replied.
Race me--on that hunk o'--dog meat.
He could see her plainly now in the soft moonlight which was flooding the world.
Are you strong enough?" she asked anxiously.
"They're starting.
It was found ashore a few miles down the river, and there was a report from Chattanooga that the boat had been taken.
Joe!
He reached down and took her hand.
"Halt there!" came the second warning as Star came to a stop.
Won't we--Star?
Then there's a fence to jump.
"Don't--please don't even try," she interrupted.
Tom could see Marjorie crouching, riding to his gait, holding him down for the jump.
They trotted around a bend in the road.
"But they'll know...."
You, Marianna, are the rightful Queen of this country."
Scarcely had she done so, when the yellow bird burst into a joyous and golden song, and flying to the window, beat madly against the panes.
Nothing seemed changed; the water within seemed as pure and diamond-like as ever.
But the bird uttered only a forlorn little cry, and hid his head again under his wings.
Then the peasant girl threw open the casement, and the yellow bird flew out into the streaming sun.
The dwarf took pity on the Queen, but his efforts were vain, for the poor woman was so weak and exhausted that she died without telling the dwarf anything about herself or the child she carried.
The procession was then passing directly underneath the window, and Desire's eyes met the eyes of Marianna.
All afternoon, however, she trudged bravely on through the silence and the cold, her heart sinking as mile after mile revealed no sign of a house or a shelter.
Suddenly, Garabin cried at the top of his voice, "Seize the witch; she has killed the Prince!"
Once upon a time a wicked nobleman rose in rebellion against his rightful king, and taking the royal forces by surprise, defeated them and seized the kingdom.
That very night, the magician filled Marianna's flask with the poisonous water, and departed, thinking that nobody had noticed him.
"Cruel King!" cried the dwarf sternly, "and thou, wicked and perfidious magician, the hour of thy punishment is at hand."
When the sky cleared, only the dwarf, Marianna, and Desire were left of the company.
This girl recognized the yellow bird, and instead of wringing its neck, let it fly out of the window.
"Stop!
One spring morning a little yellow bird flew into the cedar grove, and gave the dwarf a letter which it held in its beak.
So Marianna, walking between two halberdiers and followed across the courtyard by crowds of curious people, was led before the King.
To this Marianna replied, "Do not fear, dear father.
"Nay, he returns," said Marianna, gently, as the yellow bird flew back and perched in the sheltering bower of Marianna's arms.
I shall then replace the flask before Marianna wakes.
Desire lay in a great old-fashioned bed, his face flushed with fever.
At high noon, a trial was held, and since the doctors declared that the Prince was dying, Marianna was condemned to be thrown from the precipice.
Had he not been very old and crafty, he would have started from his golden throne, for he knew that the little golden heart set with diamonds had been one of the crown jewels, and that therefore Marianna must be the missing Princess, and rightful queen of the kingdom.
The magician lived in a gloomy tower, and had an enchanted black dog that he fed with flaming coals.
Desire still lay in a heap by the window, and over him the yellow bird poured the contents of the phial.
Stop!" cried the poor Prince, wildly; "I forbid--"
His wing is broken."
Perplexed, and with fear in his heart, the King sought the cruel magician who had cast the spell on Desire.
By great good fortune, the cook's helper was no other than the peasant girl whom Marianna had saved.
But late in the afternoon, when the red shield of the sun could scarcely be seen through the tangle of the wild wood-branches, she perceived a light coming from a little grove of cedars by the shore of a frozen lake.
Garabin, seeing his precious plot miscarry, grew mad with rage.
Into the dark forest which lay behind the palace ran the Queen, holding her baby daughter in her arms.
Garabin rubbed his hands together with glee.
"He is gone forever," said the peasant girl.
The yellow bird flew to the window of the magician's room.
This pleasant land, unknown to Marianna, was part of her father's kingdom, and she was really its queen because her father had been the last rightful king.
When they reached the foot of the path, the peasant girl cried:--
So the soldiers rushed at Marianna and the Prince, intending to carry out their wicked master's orders.
Alas, what are we to do?
The bell kept on sadly tolling and tolling.
"Seize them," cried he, "and toss them both over the precipice!"
Now just as Marianna bent over the Prince to touch his forehead with the water of healing, the yellow bird screamed and cried as madly as if he were caught in a net.
"To-night I shall cast a spell of sleep on Marianna, steal the crystal flask, empty it of the water of healing, and refill it with a liquid which will cause death within a night and a day.
Alas, in a moment, so terrible was the magician's poison that the Prince turned white as the driven snow, and fell back on the pillows insensible.
Presently there was a great confusion, rough hands seized Marianna, and somebody caught the yellow bird.
"Poor little bird," said Marianna, bending down and taking him up in her hands, "why criest thou so mournfully?
Immediately the sky grew black, the lightning crashed, and there arose a terrible, howling wind.
He arrived at the cliff just as the poor maiden was about to be pushed off into space, and standing by her side, dared anyone to lay hands upon her.
When the Prince reached his twentieth year, Garabin would certainly have killed him openly had he dared; but, fearing the people, he resolved to use secret methods, and bribed a cruel magician to afflict poor Desire with a deadly and mysterious malady.
"Dear lady," said the peasant girl, pressing Marianna's hand to her lips, "how sweet and kind thou art!
First came a troop of soldiers, then Marianna, weighted down with chains, and last of all, a little group in which were Garabin, the magician, and some of Garabin's favorites.
Marianna looked at the crystal flask.
The bird flew to the window of Prince Desire's room, and saw that he was still insensible.
So Marianna was hurried to a dark prison-room and loaded with chains, and the yellow bird was taken to the castle kitchen, and given to the cook.
The magician was in the chamber, stirring the giant cauldron.
So weak was the poor Prince, that he could scarcely lift his head to look at his visitors.
For some time he had enjoyed undisturbed the possession of his stolen throne; but as Desire grew taller and stronger every year, Garabin began to fear the day when he would be compelled to resign in favor of his nephew.
"Welcome, thrice welcome, lovely maiden," said Garabin with the most dreadful hypocrisy.
An instant later he sank fainting to the floor.
His brother, the dwarf of the mountain, made her the prettiest red-leather shoes, and his cousins, the dwarfs of the pines, made the little girl dresses from cloth woven on fairy looms.
So the little dwarf, who was a good, kind old fellow, brought the little girl up as if she were his own child.
"Someone has wounded him.
I will destroy both claimants to the throne at once."
It was winter time, and a heavy snow had hidden the foot-paths and the roads.
So pleased was Garabin with this horrid plot, that he could have danced for joy.
The procession went on.
What was he to do with Marianna, whose right to the throne was superior even to his nephew's?
It roused the Prince from his swoon, and with his last measure of strength, poor Desire dragged himself to the window.
He listened to Garabin's story, stirring a great cauldron all the while, and said, "Do not fear.
When somebody asked about the yellow bird, Garabin laughed, and gave orders that the cook should wring its neck, and toss it to the cat.
The Queen made her way toward this light, and discovered a little thatched hut in the silent wood; it was the house of one of the dwarfs of the forest.
Garabin had just returned from a visit to the Prince, who was rapidly failing, when the Captain of the Castle Guard came to him with the news that the wonderful Marianna had arrived in the kingdom.
The Count of Monte Cristo offered his arm to Madame de Villefort.
When he had finished with the orange-tree, he began at the cactus; but this, not being so easily plucked as the orange-tree, pricked him dreadfully.
"Count for yourself."
You understand now that if he were to get rid of the animal before the time named, he would not only lose his bet, but people would say he was afraid; and a brave captain of Spahis cannot risk this, even to gratify a pretty woman, which is, in my opinion, one of the most sacred obligations in the world."
But tell me, count, will your people take care of my horse?"
The instant Debray had touched the ground, he was at the carriage-door.
"Not yet, I think.
Two broke, from the heat of the fire; the other ten were sunk three hundred fathoms deep into the sea.
"Upon what subject?" asked Madame Danglars.
"The baron appears thoughtful to-day," said Monte Cristo to her; "are they going to put him in the ministry?"
"How so?"
"What was?"
"Yes; but"--
This path was formed in the shape of the figure of 8, thus, in its windings, making a walk of sixty feet in a garden of only twenty.
"Yes."
"That is to say, the half that was left--you understand; it was exquisite, sir.
"Fifty-five years old."
They passed to the third story; it was the telegraph room.
"And do you understand them?"
"No, you will lose it, for you are going to alter your correspondent's message."
"How do you know?" Debray shrugged his shoulders.
"Not having repeated them, through negligence, I should be fined."
"Ah, that is another case; I should be turned off, and lose my pension."
At first my neck was cramped with looking at it, but at the end of a year I became used to it; and then we have our hours of recreation, and our holidays."
"Yes; yours--your own property."
"Sir," said the gardener, glancing at the sun-dial, "the ten minutes are almost up; I must return to my post.
"Why do you like that best?"
"Does it require much study to learn the art of telegraphing?" asked Monte Cristo.
Monte Cristo looked in turn at the two iron handles by which the machine was worked.
Never had Flora, the fresh and smiling goddess of gardeners, been honored with a purer or more scrupulous worship than that which was paid to her in this little enclosure.
"You are--"
"Has it ever happened to you?" said Monte Cristo.
"Sir, you alarm me."
"Of course," said the gardener, "but that does not make it the less unpleasant.
"It is very interesting," he said, "but it must be very tedious for a lifetime."
"Sir, I should make a terrestrial paradise of it."
Why should I?"
"Sir, you have distracted me; I shall be fined."
"What am I to do?"
"Excuse me, sir," replied the man, raising his hand to his cap; "I am not up there, I know, but I have only just come down."
"How long have you been here?"
"Now you are rich," said Monte Cristo.
"To repeat these signs." Monte Cristo took a paper from his pocket, upon which were drawn three signs, with numbers to indicate the order in which they were to be worked.
"Is it possible," said Monte Cristo to himself, "that I can have met with a man that has no ambition?
"Oh, sir, twenty-five years."
"What?
They can't be nice, though they do say 'as fat as a dormouse.' It is not a wonder they are fat, sleeping all day, and only waking to eat all night.
"Did you come here, sir, to see the telegraph?" he said.
"Because Don Carlos has fled from Bourges, and has returned to Spain."
"And how much is the pension?"
"Let him signal."
The tower contained implements, such as spades, rakes, watering-pots, hung against the wall; this was all the furniture.
"It is nothing."
"No; but then we are lodged, as you perceive."
"When we have a fog."
Not on the same night, as he had intended, but the next morning, the Count of Monte Cristo went out by the Barrier d'Enfer, taking the road to Orleans.
"The study does not take long; it was acting as a supernumerary that was so tedious."
"Nothing very difficult."
"Calm yourself, my friend," said the count, with the smile which he made at will either terrible or benevolent, and which now expressed only the kindliest feeling; "I am not an inspector, but a traveller, brought here by a curiosity he half repents of, since he causes you to lose your time."
All that evening nothing was spoken of but the foresight of Danglars, who had sold his shares, and of the luck of the stock-jobber, who only lost five hundred thousand francs by such a blow.
"They are always the same."
Those who had kept their shares, or bought those of Danglars, looked upon themselves as ruined, and passed a very bad night.
He had twelve leaves and about as many strawberries, which, on rising suddenly, he let fall from his hand.
"None at all."
"How much?"
"Yes.
"I should not see him."
"Why?"
The baroness did not wait for a repetition; she ran to her husband, who immediately hastened to his agent, and ordered him to sell at any price.
"And whose are they?"
"What is it?"
"Mine?" exclaimed the man, half-suffocated.
Many other quaint relics are to be seen in and around the city of elms, mementos of the past which bring to the younger generation a knowledge and respect for things gone.
It was here, for example, in 1893, that Yale defeated Harvard at football, and the historic Pigskin which was used that day is still preserved intact.
After the purchase of a complete outfit, it will be necessary to say goodbye to one's local friends.
While he is sitting there alone, the entire school will walk slowly, one by one, past the open door and look in at him.
The next morning, tired but unhappy, you will reach New York.
Take Fifth Avenue Bus to Times Square.
Next to a hare lip, this is the safest protection for a travelling young girl that I know of; it has, however, the one objection that all the old ladies on the train are likely to tell you what they think of Katherine Fullerton Gerould, or their rheumatism.
Let him choke, but do not be too hopeful, as the chances are that he will dislodge the bone. All will go well until the dessert, when his wife will begin telling how raspberry sherbet always disagrees with her.
Transfer to 42nd Street Crosstown.
One of them will remind you of the angel painted on the ceiling of the Victory Theatre back home, until she starts telling about her summer at Narragansett; from the other you will learn how to inhale.
If you are compelled to go to the dining car alone, you will probably sit beside an Elk with white socks, who will call the waiter "George." Along about the second course he will say to you, "It's warm for September, isn't it?" to which you should answer "No." That will dispose of the Elk.
P. C." ("pour prendre conge," i.e., "to take leave") card to a gentleman who remains at home, if the gentleman is her husband and if she has left town with his business partner.
Take Fifth Avenue bus, and a light lunch.
We advise: Go slow at first.
A lady who has left town may send a brief note or a "P.
Having selected an educational institution, the next requisite is a suitable equipment.
Get off at 44th Street, and walk one block south to the Biltmore.
Across the table from you will be a Grand Army man and his wife, going to visit their boy Elmer's wife's folks in Schenectady.
Grant's Tomb.
It will also be found that the light in your berth does not work, so you will be awake for a long time; finally, just as you are leaving Buffalo, you will at last get to sleep, and when you open your eyes again, you will be--in Buffalo.
A VISITOR FROM PRINCETON
The Aquarium.
In your first day at school you will be shown your room; in your room you will find a sad-eyed fat girl.
When the fish is served, the Grand Army man will choke on a bone.
This will cause Charley to perspire freely and to wish to God he had worn his dark suit.
A JOURNEY AROUND NEW YORK
In case you do not happen to meet any friends on the train, the surest way to protect yourself from any unwelcome advances is to buy a copy of the Atlantic Monthly and carry it, in plain view.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And their auction is worse.
Across the hall from you there will be two older girls who are back for their second year.
The most interesting fish will be found underneath the hanging clock, near the telephone booths.
You will be nice to her for the first week, because you aren't taking any chances at the start; you will tolerate her for the rest of the year, because she will do your lessons for you every night.
You will find that you have drawn a blank, that she comes from Topeka, Kan., that her paw made his money in oil, and that she is religious.
CORRECT EQUIPMENT FOR THE SCHOOLGIRL
Charley will come and will be ushered into the reception room.
After dinner you may wish to read for a while, but the porter will probably have made up all the berths for the night.
It is not at all likely that you will be allowed to go to New Haven during your first year, which is quite a pity, as this city, founded in 1638, is rich in historical interest.
THE FIRST DAYS IN THE NEW SCHOOL
When you have visited all these places, it will probably be time to take the train to your school.
Take three oranges, a lemon, three of gin, to one of vermouth, with a dash of bitters.
She sniffs at the "cousin" and tell's you that she must have a letter from Charley's father, one from Charley's minister, one from the governor of your state, and one from some disinterested party certifying that Charley has never been in the penitentiary, has never committed arson, and is a legitimate child.
Offer her your raspberry sherbet.
Answer: A, because life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.
In this connection, however, it would be well to avoid making any rash statements regarding undying friendship and affection, because, when you next see Eddie or Walter, at Christmas time, you will have been three months in the East, while they have been at the State University, and really, after one starts dancing with Yale men--well, it's a funny world.
The Bronx.
Take taxicab and fifty dollars.
Serve cold.
The first week of school life is apt to be quite discouraging, and we can not too emphatically warn the young girl not to do anything rash under the influence of homesickness.
Brooklyn Bridge.
In the month of June, for example, there is really nothing which quite conjures up for the college youth of today a sense of the mutability and impermanence of this mortal life so much as the sight of a member of the class of 1875 after three days' intensive drinking.
This is, of course, mainly a parent's problem and is best solved by resorting to the following formula: Let A and B represent two young girls' finishing schools in the East.
The Ritz.
I would, therefore, recommend the following list, subject, of course, to variation in individual cases.
SELECTING A PROPER SCHOOL
Then return the same way you came, followed by three fast sets of tennis, a light supper and early to bed. If you do not feel better in the morning, cut out milk, fresh fruit and uncooked foods for a while.
Partings are always somewhat sad, but it will be found that much simple pleasure may be derived from the last nights with the various boys to whom one is engaged.
Terrible.
Take Subway to Brooklyn. (Flatbush.) Then ask the subway guard where to go; he will tell you.
FROM PETROLEUM V. NASBY
Why harrow up the public bosom, or lasserate the public mind?
General Ewing made another extemporaneous address, which he read from manuscript, and we adjourned for dinner.
"Be quiet, yoo idiot!" remarked I, soothingly, to him.
So, receevin transportashen and suffishent money from the secret service fund for expenses, I departed for Cleveland, and after a tejus trip thro' an Ablishn country, I arrived there.
My esteemed and life-long friend and co-laborer, Rev.
Are you quite shoor--quite shoor?
That is, to-night."
So! he had netted Jones' quondam waiter at the first cast!
He had not been long in town and was somewhat of a stranger yet, but he wouldn't be so long.
Sweetwater felt all his convictions confirmed, and ended the colloquy with the final question:
The man was commonplace,--commonplace in feature, dress and manner, but his eye gave him away.
He looked up eagerly, however, when Sweetwater entered, and asked what news.
His manner had changed.
the man named Wellgood?" Mr. Grey exclaimed with all the astonishment the other secretly expected.
"A dangerous customer," thought he.
The detective, with some semblance of respect, answered that he had seen Wellgood, but that he had been unable to detain him or bring him within his employer's observation.
SWEETWATER IN A NEW ROLE
Of this he was made absolutely certain a little later.
It was enough.
"And where is his manufactory?
Women did not interest him in the least. They could pass and repass without arousing his attention, but the moment a man stepped his way, he shrank from him only to betray the greatest curiosity concerning him the moment he felt it safe to turn and observe him.
But how, with the conditions laid on him by Mr. Grey, was this to be done?
Both the men, hardened as they were by duties which soon sap the sensibilities, started and turned as pale as the speaker himself.
The least glimpse of his face would satisfy me.
"A stranger," that young man put in volubly, "looking for James Wellgood.
He was guided, and he did talk and to some effect.
Couldn't you rap him up at his own door, and hold him in talk a minute, while I looked on from the carriage or whatever vehicle we can get to carry us there?
He knew nothing of the man's circumstances or of his position in the town.
All of which convinced Sweetwater that the Englishman's errand was in connection with a man whom he equally dreaded and desired to meet.
"That is his buggy standing before the drug-store on the opposite side of the way."
That is, he gave information of the man which surprised Sweetwater.
Do this and you will earn a week's salary in one day."
Returning to the stables, he ordered the team.
"Lucky!" was what he said to himself, "still lucky!"
What you tell me makes it all the more necessary for me to see him.
"I'll try," said Sweetwater, not very sanguine as to the probable result of this effort.
He was going to make things hum, he was.
"Ah!"
"Wellgood does?
"I wonder if my instinct will go so far as to make me recognize his presence.
A few days later three men were closeted in the district attorney's office.
But he was better pleased yet when Dick--a fellow with a squint whose hand was always in the sugar--told him that Mr. Wellgood would probably be in for his mail in a few moments.
His task had been to follow this gentleman, and follow him he did.
Then the drugs ordered by wholesale.
Those boxes over there were his, ready to be carted out to his manufactory.
He had learned, as such fellows do, that there was a secret hue and cry after this very man by the New York police; that he was supposed by some to be Sears himself.
The third was the detective, Sweetwater, chosen by them to keep watch on Mr. Grey.
"You're taking up another man's time," complained the postmaster.
Here he glanced at every door and window; and then, leaning forward over the table at which the two officials sat, he brought his head as nearly to them as possible and whispered five words.
Might be worth visiting, perhaps."
He had all the evening before him, and reentering the store, he took up his stand near the sugar barrel.
The detective was glad enough to escape and ask Dick.
XVII.
It was a prelude to this tale which I give, not as it came from his mouth, but as it was afterward related to me.
How can you bring it about?"
Wellgood, or, as he believed, Sears, knew too much of life to be beguiled by any open clap-trap, and Sweetwater was obliged to see him drive off without having made the least advance in the purpose engrossing him.
The other made a gesture, said something about northwest and rushed to help a customer.
He had perceived that in the pauses of weighing and tasting, Dick talked; if he were guided with suitable discretion, why should he not talk of Wellgood?
He had taken in Sweetwater as he passed, but Sweetwater was of a commonplace type, too, and woke no corresponding dread in the other's mind; for he went whistling into the store, from which he presently reissued with a bundle of mail in his hand.
Sweetwater made only one stop on his way to Mr. Grey's hotel rooms, and that was at the stables.
Lady Chiltern and Madame Goesler were present, and also Phineas Finn.
The gentleman did not appear at dinner, nor was he ever again seen in those parts.
We have pensioned poor Mr. Fothergill, and he retires from the administration."
I'd go and nurse the foxes myself if I knew how, wouldn't I, Marie?"
"Of course you'll come.
The preservation of foxes might be an open question in such counties as Norfolk and Suffolk, but could not be so in the Brake country.
There had been a threat that he would give up the country, in which case it was declared that it would be impossible to carry on the Brake Hunt in a manner satisfactory to masters, subscribers, owners of coverts, or farmers, unless a different order of things should be made to prevail in regard to Trumpeton Wood.
The Duke, however, had declined to interfere personally.
"And if they go on being not properly brought up and educated, they'll make an old woman of me.
To ordinary thinkers, to unprejudiced outsiders,--to Americans, let us say, or Frenchmen,--there does not seem to be room even for an argument.
Now he had consented to come to Matching, bringing his wife with him, in order that the matter might be settled.
The Duke might have his foxes destroyed if he pleased, but he could hardly do so and remain a popular magnate in England.
But what can one do?"
And she did prevent it.
Vested interests have been attended to.
Is a landed proprietor bound, or is he not, to keep foxes for the amusement of his neighbours?
But our dear old friend, only the other day a duke, Planty Pall as he was lately called, devoted to work and to Parliament, an unselfish, friendly, wise man, who by no means wanted other men to cut their coats according to his pattern, was the last man in England to put himself forward as the enemy of an established delight.
The guests, indeed, at the Duke's house were never his guests, but always hers.
Mr. Redmain asked his visitor what he would have, as if, although it was quite early, he must, as a matter of course, stand in need of refreshment.
I will now relate what passed while Mary sat deaf in the corner.
"I can not live in a house where the lady mistrusts and the gentleman insults me."
Even since the ring was found, so long a time had passed that she never expected to hear from the house again.
"It is impossible," Mary answered.
"I fancy you've had a dose of it!" he said.
Mr. Redmain, who had pleasure in behaving handsomely so far as money was concerned, bought his wife the best sapphire he could find, and, for once, really pleased her.
"Now what is it you've got in your head?" he said at last.
She was less disinclined to go this time, however, for she felt not a little curious about the ring.
Turning the first corner he came to, and the next and the next, he stepped into a mews, the court of which seemed empty, and slipped behind the gate.
Mrs. Redmain swears it was not, and could not have been, there when she looked for it.
Nor did her inquisitor fail to surprise the uneasy glances she threw, furtively though involuntarily, in the face of the Count--who never once looked in hers: tolerably sure of himself, he was not sure of her.
"Gone a step too far, damn it!" he murmured to himself.
Her face was set and colorless, and strange to look upon.
When he turned, Sepia too was gone.
And whatever he told, his guest capped, narrating trick upon trick to which on different occasions he had had recourse.
Come, out with it!"
Go to Mrs. Perkin.
But Hesper, free, rich, and beautiful, and far from wise, with Sepia for counselor, was not an idea to be contemplated with equanimity.
Presently a man came out of the mews in a Scotch cap and a full beard.
When he spoke again, his words sounded like thunder, for she had removed her hands from her ears.
He was seated, evidently waiting for her.
She stood long, looking closely at it, moving it about a little, and changing the direction of the light; and, while her gaze was on the ring, Mr. Redmain's gaze was on her, watching her with equal attention.
"I have been watching you think for three minutes and a half, I do believe.
But Mary took no notice, and left the house.
But the Count had not studied non-expression in vain, and had brought it to a degree of perfection not easily disturbed.
"You are very kind, sir," Mary answered.
So saying, he took the ring from one drawer, and from another a bottle, from which he poured something into a crystal cup.
"That's the point again!
"Of course," said the Count, "you will prosecute the jeweler."
You must hear what passes: I want you for a witness."
When he turned, the Count was gone, as he had expected, and Sepia stood with eyes full of anger and fear.
She raised her head, and saw the white, skin-drawn face of Mr. Redmain grinning at her from the open door.
He did not at once make up his mind how he would act on this last; while he lived, it did not matter so much; and he had besides a certain pleasure in watching his victim.
"Mr. Redmain," she answered, "you must see that I can not do so at your desire."
She left the room, and Mr. Redmain did not try to prevent her.
I offered to help Mrs. Redmain to look for the ring, but she said it was no use.
Till Sepia came, he had been conventionally faithful--faithful with the faith of a lackey, that is--but she had found no difficulty in making of him, in respect of her, a spy upon his master.
"For Miss Marston?" inquired Mewks, who had learned not a little cunning in the service.
As he spoke, she rose to her feet, her countenance illumined both with righteous anger and the tender shine of prayer.
She withdrew therefore to the farthest corner, sat down, closed her ears with the palms of her hands, and waited.
It must have been there all the time."
She did not much like it, neither did she hesitate.
I do not believe there was a word of truth in it.
A good deal of conversation followed about a disputed point in a late game of cards at one of the clubs.
"I can not do it, Mr. Redmain," said Mary; "the thing is impossible." And she turned to leave the room.
"I see!" he said; "it's been a trifle too much for you, and I don't wonder!
"Such a thing never came into my head, sir; but now that you have put it there, I could almost believe it."
It was enough he had found him out, proved his suspicion correct, and obtained evidence against Sepia.
The visitor answered agreeably, with a touch of merriment that seemed to indicate a soul at ease with itself and with the world.
It is so annoying to find what seemed a clear recollection prove a deceitful one!
"A splendid sapphire!" answered Count Galofta, taking it in his fingers, but, as Mr. Redmain saw, not looking at it closely.
THE SAPPHIRE.
"Did you search it?"
"Stop, stop!" cried Mr. Redmain, and jumped from his chair to prevent her.
She lived, therefore, in constant dread of his sudden vengeance, against which she could take no precaution, for she had not even a conjecture as to what form it might assume.
She was shown into the room Mr. Redmain called his study, which communicated by a dressing-room with his bedroom.
Count Galofta thought it was to order something more in the way of "refreshment," and was not a little surprised when he heard his host desire the man to request the favor of Miss Yolland's presence.
In the meantime Mr. Redmain had been prosecuting certain inquiries he had some time ago begun, and another quite new one besides.
But Mr. Redmain still stared in her face.
But I have reasons for wanting to have you within call.
For such a request Mary was not prepared.
Bewildered and annoyed, Mary stood motionless in the middle of the room, and presently heard a man, whose voice seemed not quite strange to her, greet Mr. Redmain like an old friend.
When he went out of the door of Mr. Redmain's study, he vanished from the house and from London.
"You see this?" he said.
Now, Mary had very much admired the ring, as any one must who had an eye for stones; and had often looked at it--into the heart of it--almost loving it; and while they were talking now, she kept gazing at it.
I won't take a refusal."
Mewks came.
But it was capped by the other with a narrative that seemed specially pleasing to the listener. In the midst of a burst of laughter, he rose and rang the bell.
"I am so glad!" she said, and took it in her hand.
"What a pity!" cried Sepia; "you are destroying the ring!
"Go along with you!" he cried, casting at her a strange look which she could not understand, and the same moment pulling the bell hard.
What had become of him Mr. Redmain did not care.
Of course, you will return to Mrs. Redmain now that all is cleared up."
But Tom was now so much better, and Letty so much like her former self, that, if Mrs. Redmain had asked her, she might perhaps have consented.
Still he shrank from the outcry and scandal of sending her away; for certainly his wife, if it were but to oppose him, would refuse to believe a word against her cousin.
"Show him here directly," said Mr. Redmain.
Who found it, sir?"
"No, sir.
"Very odd--ain't it?" said Mr. Redmain, and, opening the door of his dressing-room, called out:
Mary laughed.
It may appear a presumptuous thing to say, but my recollection seems of a finer color."
"On the contrary, do not look at him, but at this."
"True, the garden is not large."
"Listen, friend," said Monte Cristo.
Did the Romans eat them?" said the gardener--"ate dormice?"
"And then?"
"And you would be pleased to have, instead of this terrace of twenty feet, an enclosure of two acres?"
"What is it, sir?"
"But what is it?"
"You are gathering your crop, sir?" said Monte Cristo, smiling.
"Those are indeed holidays to me; I go into the garden, I plant, I prune, I trim, I kill the insects all day long."
That would spoil my plans."
"Yes."
"Three hundred francs?"
"Ten years, and five as a supernumerary make fifteen."
"Badly enough; but yet I do live."
"And you reply?"
"Sir, my right-hand correspondent redoubles his signals; he is impatient."
"Holidays?"
"There, you see it will not take long."
"Here are ten thousand more francs," he said, "with the fifteen thousand already in your pocket, they will make twenty-five thousand.
"I think so, indeed!
This, reckoning his loss, and what he had missed gaining, made the difference of a million to Danglars.
"And a thousand francs a year."
"I could not repeat the signals."
"Yes, if it isn't contrary to the rules."
"Once, sir, when I was grafting a rose-tree."
He has six millions' worth."
Monte Cristo looked for the entrance to the enclosure, and was not long in finding a little wooden gate, working on willow hinges, and fastened with a nail and string.
The garden was crossed by a path of red gravel, edged by a border of thick box, of many years' growth, and of a tone and color that would have delighted the heart of Delacroix, our modern Rubens.
"This is simple enough," said the count; "but look, is not your correspondent putting itself in motion?"
But, sir, once more I beg pardon; perhaps you are an officer that I am detaining here." And he glanced timidly at the count's blue coat.
"What did you say, sir?" asked the man.
"I have been told," said the count, "that you do not always yourselves understand the signals you repeat."
"Now this is not all," he said; "you cannot live upon your fifteen thousand francs."
"Well, suppose you were to alter a signal, and substitute another?"
"And what is the pay?"
Will you go up with me?"
"Certainly."
"Just so; fifteen thousand francs, do you understand?"
"Yes; it asks if I am ready."
"A garden with two acres of land!"
"All you were showing me.
"That will cost you a hundred francs; you see it is your interest to take my bank-notes."
"I follow you." Monte Cristo entered the tower, which was divided into three stories.
Leaving the village of Linas, without stopping at the telegraph, which flourished its great bony arms as he passed, the count reached the tower of Montlhery, situated, as every one knows, upon the highest point of the plain of that name.
"Ah, they are my scourges."
"Exactly; there are fifteen of them."
"Bank-notes!"
But this year," continued the horticulturist, "I'll take care it shall not happen, even if I should be forced to sit by the whole night to watch when the strawberries are ripe." Monte Cristo had seen enough.
"A hundred crowns."
"A hundred francs."
"What?
Listen.
"I shall still have my place."
"Nothing new; You have an hour; or To-morrow."
"Yes; but you have a wretchedly small garden."
"Yours, if you like."
This is the reason that, instead of the sixteen I had last year, I have this year, you see, eleven, already plucked--twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
"Oh, sir, what are you proposing?"
"Never.
"That is true, sir, and that is what I like best," said the man, smiling.
"Oh, no," said the gardener; "not in the least, since there is no danger that anyone can possibly understand what we are saying."
"Indeed, I should think not," replied Monte Cristo; "dormice are bad neighbors for us who do not eat them preserved, as the Romans did."
"The tenth of your income--that would be fine work."
"I think I can effectually force you;" and Monte Cristo drew another packet from his pocket.
Last year I had four apricots--they stole one, I had one nectarine, only one--well, sir, they ate half of it on the wall; a splendid nectarine--I never ate a better."
"You ate it?"
"And what is it saying--anything you understand?"
"A thousand francs, sir."
"Never mind--take these;" and the count placed the packet in the man's hands.
"Then what would happen?"
Monte Cristo looked at the room.
"You live badly on your thousand francs?"
These are the recipes as he wrote them for us:
Select six nice fresh sand-dabs.
Artistic Japan
"Yes," they cried in chorus, "you're on our side.
No one would ever find his cheek a tempting one to kiss, and no one would be moved, by any feeling save pity, to stoop and put affectionate arms around Jonesy.
He had been a professor in a large university until he grew too old to keep his position.
"I can't tell yet," she answered, but a moment after she cried out, her eyes shining with pleasure, "Oh, I've thought of a lovely one.
"Wait until I finish this," she said.
"What a blessing that there are such places as orphan asylums for children of that class," said Mrs. Maclntyre, after one of her visits to him.
I do want to keep them unspotted from a knowledge of the world's evils, but I do not want to make them selfish. If this little beggar at the gate can teach them where to find the Holy Grail, through unselfish service to him, I do not want to stand in the way.
His shuffling feet, in their flapping old carpet slippers, forgot their rheumatism, and his shoulders dropped the weight of their seventy years.
He could not sleep anyhow, he said, after such great excitement.
The little fellow's lip quivered, and he put up one bandaged hand to wipe away the hot tears that would keep coming, in spite of his efforts not to make a baby of himself.
"And to think that that terrible man was harboured on my place!" exclaimed Mrs. MacIntyre when she heard of it.
"Well, what is it you want me to do?" she asked, finally.
They had come back before the little water-colour sketch she was making was quite finished.
They did not know that he had written two big books about the birds and insects he loved so well, or that he could tell them facts more wonderful than fairy tales about these little wild creatures of the woodland.
"Now you've made me think of it," cried Virginia, excitedly.
He ran like a boy across the meadow, through the gap in the fence, and down the hill to the cabin by the spring.
"I do not believe their mother would like it," she answered.
Is any one else hurt?
The fire was curling around the front door and bursting through the windows with fierce cracklings.
Not waiting to close the door behind him, or even to catch up something to protect his old bald head from the intense cold of the winter night, he ran out across the garden.
"What makes you so still, Jonesy?" he asked.
They were still talking about Jonesy.
It's all right now!" With a series of hearty hugs that left her almost breathless, they hurried away.
He has a brother only a little older, who is a bootblack.
Then they walked slowly up to the house, their arms thrown across each other's shoulders.
"I don't know," answered Jonesy.
"Don't you s'pose Jonesy feels as badly about it as we would?" asked Keith.
He said that he knew how to prepare the cooling bandages that were needed, and that he would sit up all night to apply them.
"A child of the slums!" Malcolm and Keith repeated the expression afterward, with only a vague idea of its meaning.
The sight of the poor little blistered face brought the tears to Miss Allison's eyes, and she called two of the coloured men, directing them to carry Jonesy to the house, and then go at once for a doctor.
I love to arrange tableaux.
But he said that he is too poor.
"'Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare.'
The old professor shook his head, but did not look up.
I am glad we have discovered him."
"He has been so good to the child, amusing him by the hour with his microscopes and collections of insects, telling him those delightful old German folk-lore tales, and putting him to sleep every night to the music of his violin.
It seemed to set poor Jonesy apart from themselves as something unclean,--something that their happy, well-filled lives must not be allowed to touch.
Miss Allison smiled at her persistence.
He was crying violently now.
Is the tramp in the cabin?"
"Yes," said Malcolm, "but that doesn't help matters much, for we children are the only ones who want him to stay, and our monthly allowances, all put together, wouldn't be enough."
It was Jonesy.
This was the first time that she had touched her brushes since the children's coming, and she had hoped that this one afternoon would be free from interruption, when she heard them planning their afternoon's occupations at the lunch-table.
The tramp had evidently walked on the rail some distance.
There was no mistaking him.
"May be I'll learn something to recite, too."
"You haven't said a word for the last half hour."
Dashing frantically around to the back door, he threw himself against it, shouting to know if any one was within.
His speech is something shocking; nothing but the slang of the streets, and so ungrammatical that I could scarcely understand him at times.
"Let's get Aunt Allison on our side," suggested Virginia.
He found some tracks presently, and followed them over the meadow in the starlight, across the road, and down the railroad track several rods.
They took the bear with them, which Jonesy welcomed like a lost friend. They spent an interesting hour among the professor's collections, listening to his explanations in his funny broken English.
I asked him if he could not teach them this spring, at least make a beginning with them in natural history, and he appeared much pleased.
Sat beside him and talked with him!
"I've thought of a good way.
There was something so pitiful in the gesture that Keith looked across at Malcolm and then patted the bedclothes with an affectionate little hand.
The old professor, on his way to the kitchen, noticed that it seemed strangely light outside.
"Why don't you write to your father?" asked Virginia, when they had told her the story of their visit.
He is as poor as a church mouse, and would be very glad of the money."
Dragging the child to a safe distance from the burning building, he ran back, fearing that some one else might be in danger, but this time the flames met him at the door, and it was impossible to go in.
Virginia found them in the library, a little while later, sitting on the hearth-rug, tailor-fashion.
What a child-lover he is, and what a delightful old man in every way!
It is probably the only thing that can save him from growing up to be a criminal like the man who brought him here.
Now are you satisfied?"
He was only a common little street gamin, as unlovely as he was unloved.
Jonesy had struck out at the wall of fire with his helpless little hands, and then, half-crazed by the scorching pain, dropped to the floor and crawled in the opposite direction, just as the professor burst open the door.
Notwithstanding Mrs. Maclntyre's fears, she consented to the boys visiting Jonesy that afternoon.
Aunt Allison answered Malcolm's last remark a little sternly.
Some people said that old Johann Heinrich never slept, for no matter what hour of the night one passed his lonely little house, a lamp was always burning.
"How big is he?"
You can't pick fruit in the dead of winter, can you? or pull weeds, or rake leaves? What other way is there?"
Keith joined in, and keeping step to the tune, like two soldiers, they marched on into the house.
"Poor little lamb," murmured Miss Allison.
"How?" demanded Malcolm.
Then they explored his cottage, much amused by his queer housekeeping, cracked nuts on the hearth, and roasted apples on a string in front of the fire.
That big, ugly scar branded him on cheek and forehead like another Cain.
Malcolm promptly turned a somersault on the rug, to express his approval, but came up with a grave face, saying, "I'll bet that grandmother will say we can't have it."
"This would be a real sharing of themselves, all their time and best energies, for they will have to work hard to get up such an entertainment as this.
Why he should have chosen Lloydsborough Valley as the place to settle for the remainder of his life, no one could tell.
It was not much, only a horrible recollection of being awakened by a feeling that he was choking in the thick smoke that filled the room; of hearing the boss swear at him to be quick and follow him or he would be burned to death.
They have been two months on the road, and showed the bear in the country places they passed through. They avoided the large towns."
"Then he would keep him till Uncle Sydney comes, if somebody would pay his board?" asked Virginia.
She had been elected to tell it, but before it was done all three had had a part in the telling, and all three were waiting with wistful eyes for her answer.
I could ride back on the cars and take a whole trunk full of nice things to Barney,--clothes, and candy, and a swell watch and chain, and a bustin' beauty of a bike.
"Who is going to put you in an asylum?" asked Malcolm, lifting an end of the pillow under which Jonesy's head had burrowed, to hide the grief that his eight-year-old manhood made him too proud to show.
"I've got Barney!
A FIRE AND A PLAN.
"He said that luck was always against him, and maybe he thought nobody would believe him if he did say that he didn't do it."
The boys took their leave soon after, leading the bear back to his new quarters in the carriage house, where they had made him a comfortable den.
There they suddenly disappeared.
He slept in the cellar of one of its poorest tenement houses, and lived in the gutters.
He shuffled to the door and looked out.
But if he could see Jonesy,--how pitiful looking he is, and hear him crying to go back to his brother, I know he'd feel the way we do about it."
"Is the child badly burned?
"Surely he cannot know so very much badness or hurt the boys if they go down to cheer him up for a little while."
It lighted up the eastern window-panes of the servants' cottage, but the inmates, tired from the unusual serving of the evening before, slept on.
There was no disappointment, however, in the bright face she turned toward them, and Virginia lost no time in beginning her story.
It will cost you forty-eight dollars.
"Easily, madam," said Sikes.
I drew myself up with dignity, however, in a moment and answered her.
"It's done all the time in the smart set."
And I have always remembered dear old Raffles's remark, "Take everything in sight, Bunny," he used to say; "but, damn it, do it like a gentleman, not a professional."
"I am going to a little fancy-dress dance, Mr. Sikes," she explained, "as Queen Catharine of Russia, and this tiara is a copy of the very famous lost negligee crown of that unhappy queen.
Besides, what's to prevent my wife from blabbing when we try to ship her?"
"Just the thing!" cried Henriette.
"Well, you're a wonder, Henriette," said I, with a sigh.
"Pretty good," said I. "Chiefly architectural drawings, however--details of facades and ornamental designs."
Mrs. Rockerbilt will sit at my left--Tommy Dare to the right.
"Dear me!" cried Henriette, rising hurriedly and full of warm sympathy. "How very awkward!"
"Theatricals?" said I.
It was so like that none but an expert in gems could have told the copy from the original, and when I bore the package back to Newport and displayed its contents to my mistress she flew into an ecstasy of delight.
VII
"Very," said I. "The only safe way out of it would be to kill the young woman, and my religious scruples are strongly against anything of the sort.
ROCKERBILT'S TIARA
"In fact, she placed the bogus affair in her hair herself.
Henriette had been unwontedly reserved for a whole week, a fact which was beginning to get sadly on my nerves when she broke an almost Sphinxlike silence with the extraordinary remark:
"There are splendid opportunities for acquiring the gems these Newport ladies wear by one who may be stationed in the dressing-room.
"No, indeed," said Henriette.
"Isn't it a beauty, Bunny," said Henriette the next morning, as she held up the tiara to my admiring gaze, a flashing, coruscating bit of the jeweler's art that, I verily believe, would have tempted the soul of honor itself into rascally ways.
"But--which is this, the forty-eight-dollar one or the original?"
There is Mrs. Rockerbilt's tiara, for instance.
She will wear her tiara, and I want you when she is in the gardens to hide behind some convenient bit of shrubbery and make an exact detail sketch of the tiara.
"I don't understand," said I, affecting denseness, for I understood only too well.
"What I meant, my dear boy, was not a permanent affair but one of these Newport marriages.
No, indeed--a dinner.
Not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith," she explained.
"It's only a temporary arrangement, Bunny," she pleaded.
"It is a beautiful thing and it will give me real pleasure to reproduce it.
But, alas! later on Henriette made a discovery herself that for the time being turned her eyes red with weeping.
"I hadn't thought of that--it would be dangerous, wouldn't it?"
Next morning we went to New York, and Henriette, taking my design to a theatrical property-man we knew on Union Square, left an order for its exact reproduction in gilt and paste.
"It is simply perfect, Bunny," she cried, delightedly, as she looked at it.
"Stupid!" cried Henriette.
"Then what shall we do, Bunny?" demanded Mrs. Van Raffles.
The copy was in the table drawer, and while my right hand was apparently engaged in manipulating the refractory light, and my voice was laughingly calling down maledictions upon the electric lighting company for its wretched service, my left hand was occupied with the busiest effort of its career in substituting the spurious tiara for the other."
"Oh, don't speak of it," laughed Mrs. Rockerbilt, amiably.
"The original," said Henriette, caressing the bauble.
"Bring it to me; I'll attend to the rest," said she.
"She won't, Bunny," said Henriette.
Do you think you can let me have it by Tuesday next?"
Get the whole thing to a carat," she commanded.
There wasn't a real stone in the whole outfit, and the worst part of it was that under the circumstances Henriette could not tell anybody over the teacups that Mrs. Rockerbilt was, in vulgar parlance, "putting up a shine" on high society.
"And then?" I asked, excitedly.
"I fail to see the necessity for a maid of that kind," said I.
To say that I was shocked by the observation is putting it mildly.
Understand?"
You must have banked enough by this time to be able to support me in the style to which I am accustomed."
These electric lights are so very uncertain these days, and I am sure James is not at all to blame for hitting me as he has done; it's the most natural thing in the world, only--may I please run up-stairs and fix my hair again?"
The following Tuesday afternoon brought to my New York apartment--for of course Mrs. Raffles did not give Sikes her right name--an absolutely faultless copy of Mrs. Rockerbilt's chiefest glory.
"And Mrs. Rockerbilt never even suspected?"
"Magnificent!" I asserted.
All was as Henriette had foretold, Mrs. Rockerbilt's lovely blond locks were frightfully demoralized, and the famous tiara with it had slid aslant athwart her cheek.
And Sikes was true to his word.
They adjoin ours.
"That's because you are a man, Bunny," said Henriette.
"No," said Henriette.
Meanwhile Henriette and Mrs. Rockerbilt had gone above.
"We'll have the original in a week if you keep your nerve, Bunny," she cried.
It is at present the finest thing of its kind in existence and of priceless value.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, Henriette," I returned, with more positiveness than I commonly show, "I will not marry a lady's maid, and that's all there is about it.
You forget that I am a gentleman."
"You have even got the sparkle of that incomparable ruby in the front."
"I do," said I.
The Rockerbilt tiara itself was as bogus as our own copy.
As you must by this time have realized yourself, there was only one woman in the world that I could possibly bring myself to think fondly of, and that woman was none other than Henriette herself.
"That is a good idea," said Henriette; "only I hate amateur theatricals. I'll think it over."
I could not believe, however, that this was at all the notion she had in mind, and what little poise I had was completely shattered by the suggestion.
At the moment you are passing the poisson I will throw the room into darkness, and you--"
"That is not what I meant, Bunny," she retorted, coldly, frowning at me.
You must get married."
"Well, the morals of the smart set are not my morals," I retorted.
"It is nothing, dear Mrs. Van Raffles.
Why, darn it all, she'd scream the minute I tried it," I protested.
"She'll never have occasion to test the genuineness of her tiara.
"Agreed," said Henriette.
Tommy Dare gave three cheers for Mrs. Van Raffles, and Mrs. Gramercy Van Pelt, clad in a gorgeous red costume, stood up on a chair and toasted me in a bumper of champagne.
But sometimes a woman will lie through her life, and at the graveside still will lie....
"Lady dear, you must rock or you cannot live."
Aunt Rachel did not appear to hear her.
He and the farm men had ceased work, and were down at the church, practising the carols.
Shall we go and ask the chair-woman if she's warm enough?"
"You cannot live without it," she said as she also rose....
"Tell the lady, when she wakes, that I will tack a strip of felt to the rocker, and then it will make no noise at all," said the low and wheedling voice; and the child retired again.
Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism.
They know that the calamities they apprehend are remote, and flatter themselves that they will only fall upon future generations, for which the present generation takes but little thought.
The principle of equality may be established in civil society, without prevailing in the political world.
But independently of this reason there are several others, which will at all times habitually lead men to prefer equality to freedom.
Chapter I: Why Democratic Nations Show A More Ardent And Enduring Love Of Equality Than Of Liberty
In our age, freedom cannot be established without it, and despotism itself cannot reign without its support.
Everybody has remarked that in our time, and especially in France, this passion for equality is every day gaining ground in the human heart.
Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself.
In democratic ages, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race are much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed.
But the pleasures of equality are self-proffered: each of the petty incidents of life seems to occasion them, and in order to taste them nothing is required but to live.
Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves.
But political liberty is more easily lost; to neglect to hold it fast is to allow it to escape.
Chapter II: Of Individualism In Democratic Countries
Men therefore not only cling to equality because it is dear to them; they also adhere to it because they think it will last forever.
Several other combinations might be easily imagined, by which very great equality would be united to institutions more or less free, or even to institutions wholly without freedom. Although men cannot become absolutely equal unless they be entirely free, and consequently equality, pushed to its furthest extent, may be confounded with freedom, yet there is good reason for distinguishing the one from the other.
Democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for it swells to the height of fury.
A kind of equality may even be established in the political world, though there should be no political freedom there.
It is true that in those ages the notion of human fellowship is faint, and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men.
The evils which extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are only seen at intervals, and at the moment at which they become most violent habit already causes them to be no longer felt.
But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism--but they will not endure aristocracy.
Men cannot enjoy political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never obtain it without great exertions.
I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret.
Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism.
As none is different from his fellows, none can exercise a tyrannical power: men will be perfectly free, because they will all be entirely equal; and they will all be perfectly equal, because they will be entirely free.
As each class approximates to other classes, and intermingles with them, its members become indifferent and as strangers to one another.
This occurs at the moment when the old social system, long menaced, completes its own destruction after a last intestine struggle, and when the barriers of rank are at length thrown down.
What I have said is applicable to all democratic nations: what I am about to say concerns the French alone.
The passion for equality penetrates on every side into men's hearts, expands there, and fills them entirely.
Show them not freedom escaping from their grasp, whilst they are looking another way: they are blind--or rather, they can discern but one sole object to be desired in the universe.
Freedom cannot, therefore, form the distinguishing characteristic of democratic ages.
Ask not what singular charm the men of democratic ages find in being equal, or what special reasons they may have for clinging so tenaciously to equality rather than to the other advantages which society holds out to them: equality is the distinguishing characteristic of the age they live in; that, of itself, is enough to explain that they prefer it to all the rest.
That political freedom may compromise in its excesses the tranquillity, the property, the lives of individuals, is obvious to the narrowest and most unthinking minds.
He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him.
A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them.
As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above the other, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim.
Aristocratic institutions have, moreover, the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow-citizens.
Such is the completest form that equality can assume upon earth; but there are a thousand others which, without being equally perfect, are not less cherished by those nations.
To this ideal state democratic nations tend.
A man may be the equal of all his countrymen save one, who is the master of all without distinction, and who selects equally from among them all the agents of his power.
Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with his own person, and to prefer himself to everything in the world.
Its social condition must be modified, its laws abolished, its opinions superseded, its habits changed, its manners corrupted.
Absolute kings were the most efficient levellers of ranks amongst their subjects.
Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king: democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.
This is true at all times, and especially true in our own. All men and all powers seeking to cope with this irresistible passion, will be overthrown and destroyed by it.
It is possible to imagine an extreme point at which freedom and equality would meet and be confounded together.
Chapter XVIII: That Amongst The Americans All Honest Callings Are Honorable
In those countries in which unhappily irreligion and democracy coexist, the most important duty of philosophers and of those in power is to be always striving to place the objects of human actions far beyond man's immediate range.
Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor in men's estimation, but it raises the notion of labor as a source of profit.
As the desire of well-being is universal--as fortunes are slender or fluctuating--as everyone wants either to increase his own resources, or to provide fresh ones for his progeny, men clearly see that it is profit which, if not wholly, at least partially, leads them to work.
He must constantly endeavor to show his contemporaries, that, even in the midst of the perpetual commotion around them, it is easier than they think to conceive and to execute protracted undertakings.
But these two desires only intermingle in the innermost depths of his soul: he carefully hides from every eye the point at which they join; he would fain conceal it from himself.
Their salary is an incident of which they think but little, and of which they always affect not to think at all.
Chapter XVII: That In Times Marked By Equality Of Conditions And Sceptical Opinions, It Is Important To Remove To A Distance The Objects Of Human Actions
The instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man's desires.
In aristocratic countries there are few public officers who do not affect to serve their country without interested motives.
He lives in Royal Exchange Lane, near King Street."
I suppose the poor fellow suffers much himself, much more than is known to the world." Presently a man with a child beside him, with a large black horse, and a weather-beaten chair, once built for a chaise body, passed in great haste, apparently at the rate of twelve miles an hour. He seemed to grasp the reins of his horse with firmness, and appeared to anticipate his speed.
They could not enough admire the magnificent apartments, and ran from one to another praising everything they beheld.
"Sister Anne, Sister Anne, look once again, can you see no one coming?" whispered the young wife wringing her hands.
He swiftly fled, but they speedily followed, and for his many crimes slew him then and there.
Nothing but the green grass, and the sun which shines upon it."
Can you see no one coming?" And Sister Anne, looking out, answered:
As soon as Mrs. Bluebeard's friends and relations knew that her husband was away, they came flocking to visit her, for they longed to see all her splendid possessions, but had feared to come before.
Bluebeard noticed this directly and sent her to fetch it.
About a month later, Bluebeard told his wife that he must leave her for several weeks, having to travel on business.
You shall die!!!"
"Wretched woman!" shouted Bluebeard, "you have used this key, you have unlocked the door of that room at the end of the passage.
"Let me have a few moments alone, to prepare for death,"
At last she could bear it no longer, but slipping away from her visitors, she ran along the passages and stairs, nearly falling down them, so great was her haste, until she came to that door at the end of the corridor.
Hunting and fishing expeditions, picnics and balls went on from morning till night, and all the night through, so that there was not time even to think of sleep, only feasting and pleasure the whole week long.
"Alas!
And so, not long afterwards, there was a grand wedding, and the widow's younger daughter became Mrs. Bluebeard.
Most sumptuous was the entertainment provided for them.
In vain did his wife plead with him to spare her, kneeling before him with tears streaming from her eyes.
Now, not far from Bluebeard's house there dwelt a widow with two very lovely daughters, and one of these Bluebeard wished to marry, but which he did not mind, they might settle that between themselves.
No!
In the long ago times, in a splendid house, surrounded by fine gardens and a park, there lived a man who had riches in abundance, and everything to make him popular except one, and that was his beard, for his beard was neither black as a raven's wing, golden as the sunlight, nor just an ordinary every-day colour, but it was blue, bright blue.
For the key was enchanted.
The poor young woman hastened to a room at the foot of the turret stairs where was her Sister Anne, and called to her.
BLUEBEARD
She wiped it with her handkerchief, but alas! it was blood that would not be wiped away.
"I see two horsemen afar off," cried Sister Anne.
Then Bluebeard invited the widow and her daughters to spend a week with him, and many of their neighbours he also invited.
Unlock rooms and chests and use freely what you will."
"I see a cloud of dust, but it is only a flock of sheep on the road."
The younger said, "I would not for a moment take away Sister Anne's chance of marrying such a wealthy man," while Sister Anne declared that, although the elder, she would much prefer to give way to her sister.
However, in spite of his blue beard this man had married several times, though what had become of his wives nobody could say.
Her brothers, she knew, were to visit her that day--if only they would come in time!
So well, indeed, did the younger sister enjoy this, that by the end of the week she had begun to think perhaps after all her host's beard was not so very blue, and that it would be a fine thing to be the mistress of such a magnificent mansion, and the wife of such a rich husband.
"You shall die!" he cried again, more savagely than before.
Of course had blue beards come into fashion his would have been considered beautiful beyond words, but, as far as we know, blue beards have never as yet been fashionable, nor are they likely to be so.
Next morning he called for the keys; his wife brought them to him, but not the little one; that she left behind.
Not pausing an instant, she thrust the key into the lock, and the door sprang open.
Neither of these girls had the least desire to have a husband with a blue beard, and also, not knowing the fate of the other wives, they did not like to risk disappearing from the world as those had done, but being very polite young women they would not refuse Bluebeard's proposals outright.
Trembling, and white as a sheet, she was forced to give it into his hand.
She washed the key and rubbed it, and scraped it and polished it, but all to no purpose, if she succeeded in cleansing one side, the mark came out on the other.
In fact, should you open that door, or even put this key into the lock, I should be dreadfully angry, indeed I should make you suffer for it in a terrible way."
"Sister Anne, Sister Anne, look from the tower window.
At first she could distinguish nothing, for the room was dark and gloomy, but then, all of a sudden, she knew what had become of Bluebeard's other wives, for there they lay, in a long, straight row, all dead.
He would not, however, give heed to her prayers, and was just brandishing his sword, so that it might come down straight and true upon her slender neck, when the door burst open and two young army officers came rushing in, whom Bluebeard recognised as the brothers of his wife.
"Alas, No!" Sister Anne replied.
So the rock-house they were making was tumbled about in the dirt, and the rolling pebbles knocked the corners off, and the mud worked its way into the cracks and destroyed its beautiful whiteness.
By David Starr Jordan
THE STORY OF A STONE
Now she leaves the scene, and our story henceforth concerns only one of these eggs.
Only, unlike Holger, he didn't go to sleep, but proceeded to make himself at home.
So he looked around until he found a flat bit of shell that just suited him, when he sat down upon it, and grew fast, like old Holger Danske, in the Danish myth.
He kept taking them in and tried to wall himself up inside with them, as a person would stone a well or as though a man should swallow pebbles and stow them away in his feet and all around under the skin, till he had filled himself full.
There it lay, imbedded in the rock for centuries and centuries.
They were like the gar-pike in our Western rivers, only much larger,--as big as a stove-pipe,--and with a crust as hard as a turtle's shell. Then there came sharks, of strange forms, savage and ferocious, with teeth like bowie-knives.
At last, having paddled about long enough, he thought of settling in life.
Then, the time of the first fishes came, and the other animals looked on them in awe and wonder as the Indians eyed Columbus.
There it lay for ages, till the earth gave a great, long heave, that raised the rest of Wisconsin out of the ocean, and the mud around our Favosites' house packed and dried into hard rock and closed it in; and so it became part of the dry land.
They didn't like the taste of iron, so they all died; but we know that their house was not spoiled, for we have it here.
So he made an opening in his upper side, and rigged for himself a mouth and a stomach, and put a whole row of feelers out, and began catching little worms and floating eggs and bits of jelly and bits of lime,--everything he could get,--and cramming them into his little stomach.
Well, the old ones died or swam away or were walled up, and new ones filled their places, and the colony thrived for a long time, and had accumulated quite a stock of lime.
Ages after, a farmer in Grand Chote, Michigan, plowing up his clover field, to sow for winter wheat, picked up a curious bit of "petrified honeycomb," and gave it to the schoolboys to take to their teacher, to hear what he would say about it.
So it kept on for about a million years, until once when the spring came and the south winds blew, it began to thaw up.
Then, one morning, down among the sea-weeds, she laid a whole lot of tiny eggs, transparent as crab-apple jelly and much smaller than a dew-drop on the end of a pine-leaf.
Then it would thaw a little, and streams of water would run over the snow; then it would freeze again, and pack it into solid ice.
But none of these got the little fellow, else I should not have any story to tell.
"From first to last, everything was just right.
Good night, Mama.
I never saw it before, and I thought of the Star in the East, that guided the wise men to the place where Jesus was.
The candles flickered and went out, the tree was left alone with its gilded ornaments, and Mrs. Bird sent the children down stairs at half-past eight, thinking that Carol looked tired.
"WHEN THE PIE WAS OPENED, THE BIRDS BEGAN TO SING!"
"Yes, I have opened the window a little, and put the screen in front of it, so that you will not feel the air."
"Oh, well, cheer up!" cried Uncle Jack.
"But we mustn't talk any longer about it to-night," said Mrs. Bird, anxiously; "you are too tired, dear."
"Nonsense," laughed Carol; "as I never have to get up to breakfast, nor go to bed, nor catch trains, I think my old clock will do very well! Now, Mama, what were you going to give me?"
"Now, my darling, you have done quite enough for one day," said Mrs. Bird, getting Carol into her little night-dress; "I am afraid you will feel worse to-morrow, and that would be a sad ending to such a good time."
Now, Papa, submit, or I shall have to be very firm and disagreeable with you!"
"Larry!
"Mama, dear, I do think that we have kept Christ's birthday this time just as He would like it.
"Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do or die."
"My dear child," whispered Uncle Jack, as he took Carol an orange, "there is no doubt about the necessity of this feast, but I do advise you after this to have them twice a year, or quarterly, perhaps, for the way they eat is positively dangerous; I assure you I tremble for that terrible Peoria.
"Perhaps; I hope so.
Uncle Jack dried his tears, carried him upstairs, and soon had him in breathless fits of laughter, while Carol so made the other Ruggleses forget themselves that they were soon talking like accomplished diners-out.
The other Ruggleses stood rooted to the floor.
"Good night, my precious little Christmas Carol--mother's blessed Christmas child."
Perhaps this has done me good."
It blazed with tall colored candles, it gleamed with glass and silver, it blushed with flowers, it groaned with good things to eat; so it was not strange that the Ruggleses, forgetting that their mother was a McGrill, shrieked in admiration of the fairy spectacle.
Now, what were you going to give me?
The feast being over, the Ruggleses lay back in their chairs languidly, and the table was cleared in a trice; then a door was opened into the next room, and there, in a corner facing Carol's bed, which had been wheeled as close as possible, stood the brilliantly lighted Christmas-tree, glittering with gilded walnuts and tiny silver balloons, and wreathed with snowy chains of pop-corn.
Then, when Carol and Uncle Jack perceived that more turkey was a physical impossibility, the meats were taken off and the dessert was brought in--a dessert that would have frightened a strong man after such a dinner as had preceded it.
"Oh, I'm willing to stay alone; but I am not sleepy yet, and I am going to hear the music by and by, you know."
"I guess he's not lost--only mislaid.
Confess!"
Just then Sarah Maud came up the back-stairs, so radiant with joy from her secret interview with the cook, that Peter could have pinched her with a clear conscience, and Carol gave them a joyful welcome.
"I am not so very tired, Mama.
There was great bustle behind a huge screen in another part of the room, and at half-past five this was taken away, and the Christmas dinner-table stood revealed.
"I know they need the clothes," she had said, when they were talking over the matter just after Thanksgiving, "but they don't care much for them, after all.
Larry!" Good Gracious, where was Larry?
However, Mrs. Bird said, pleasantly, "Of course you wouldn't wear hats such a short distance--I forgot when I asked.
Carol's bed had been moved into the farthest corner of the room, and she was lying on the outside, dressed in a wonderful soft white wrapper.
Don't you?"
I'll go and find him before you can say Jack Robinson!"
Her golden hair fell in soft fluffy curls over her white forehead and neck, her cheeks flushed delicately, her eyes beamed with joy, and the children told their mother, afterwards, that she looked as beautiful as the pictures of the Blessed Virgin.
There was turkey and chicken, with delicious gravy and stuffing, and there were half-a-dozen vegetables, with cranberry jelly, and celery, and pickles; and as for the way these delicacies were served, the Ruggleses never forgot it as long as they lived.
They were all sure that he had come in with them, for Susan remembered scolding him for tripping over the door-mat.
"I think so, sir," said Peoria, timidly; "but, anyhow, there was Larry;" and she showed signs of weeping.
You never look half as happy when you are getting your presents as when you are giving us ours.
Then every girl had a pretty plaid dress of a different color, and every boy a warm coat of the right size.
Each girl had a blue knitted hood, and each boy a red crocheted comforter, all made by Mama, Carol and Elfrida ("because if you buy everything, it doesn't show so much love," said Carol).
Uncle Jack went into convulsions of laughter.
"But where is Baby Larry?" she cried, looking over the group with searching eye.
"I declare to goodness," murmured Susan, on the other side, "there's so much to look at I can't scarcely eat nothin!"
Such a happy, happy day!"
"But that isn't the thing," objected Carol, nestling close to her father; "it wouldn't be mine.
Now, may I close the door and leave you alone?
He was afraid to yell!
Kitty chose ice-cream, explaining that she knew it "by sight," but hadn't never tasted none; but all the rest took the entire variety, without any regard to consequences.
What a wonderful sight it was to the poor little Ruggles children, who ate their sometimes scanty meals on the kitchen table!
Here the useful presents stopped, and they were quite enough; but Carol had pleaded to give them something "for fun."
Sarah Maud went out through the hall, calling, "Larry!
I'm going to run races with her after dinner."
"Bend your head a minute, mother dear," whispered Carol, calling her mother back.
Accordingly, they walked upstairs, and Elfrida, the nurse, ushered them into a room more splendid than anything they had ever seen.
The other Ruggleses stood in horror-stricken groups as the door closed behind their commanding officer; but there was no time for reflection, for a voice from above was heard, saying, "Come right up stairs, please!"
There was no noise or confusion; it was just a merry time.
Haven't I almost everything already, and am I not the happiest girl in the world this year, with Uncle Jack and Donald at home?
I will steal in softly the first thing in the morning, and see if you are all right; but I think you need to be quiet."
"You can have both," said Mr. Bird, promptly; "is there any need of my little girl's going without her Christmas, I should like to know? Spend all the money you like."
Oh, you would never give it up if you could see it."
I have felt well all day; not a bit of pain anywhere.
"A bronze figure of Santa Claus; and in the little round belly, that shakes, when he laughs, like a bowl full of jelly, is a wonderful clock.
"Didn't he come?"
"Oh, wasn't it a lovely, lovely time," sighed Carol.
"That's a dear Papa!
Peter rang the door bell, and presently a servant admitted them, and, whispering something in Sarah's ear, drew her downstairs into the kitchen.
A few more books, and a gold thimble, and a smelling-bottle, and a music-box."
"Are you sure there were nine of you?" he asked, merrily.
"Very well, your Highness, I surrender."
"I am sure of it," said Mrs. Bird, softly.
"Can I have the shutters open; and won't you turn my bed a little, please?
"Poor Carol," laughed the child, merrily, "she can afford to give up these lovely things, for there will still be left Uncle Jack, and Donald, and Paul, and Hugh, and Uncle Rob, and Aunt Elsie, and a dozen other people."
Now, will you come right in to Miss Carol's room, she is so anxious to see you?"
"Oh, I hadn't decided.
What is the use?
Clem, you and Con hop into bed with Larry while I wash yer underflannins; 'twont take long to dry 'em.
Mr. Clement, will you take some of the cramb'ry?"
The law of compensation had been well applied; he that had necktie had no cuffs; she that had sash had no handkerchief, and vice versa; but they all had boots and a certain amount of clothing, such as it was, the outside layer being in every case quite above criticism.
Speak up, Sarah Maud."
"Quick!"
I want them every one, please, from Sarah Maud to Baby Larry.
"That's a lady;" cried her mother.
"Now, Sarah Maud," said Mrs. Ruggles, her face shining with excitement, "everything is red up an' we can begin.
Mrs. Ruggles looked severe.
Mama says dinner will be at half-past five, and the Christmas tree at seven; so you may expect them home at nine o'clock.
All the little Ruggleses shouted, "Yes, marm," in chorus.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I am, yours truly,
The children took their places according to age, Sarah Maud at the head and Larry on the coal-hod, and Mrs. Ruggles seated herself in front, surveying them proudly as she wiped the sweat of honest toil from her brow.
Before the earliest Ruggles could wake and toot his five-cent tin horn, Mrs. Ruggles was up and stirring about the house, for it was a gala day in the family.
This was too much for the boys.
But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.
So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society.
And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion.
THE FEDERALIST PAPERS
General Introduction
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The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon too many local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.
Saturday, October 27, 1787
Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good.
In the course of the preceding observations, I have had an eye, my fellow-citizens, to putting you upon your guard against all attempts, from whatever quarter, to influence your decision in a matter of the utmost moment to your welfare, by any impressions other than those which may result from the evidence of truth.
And a further reason for caution, in this respect, might be drawn from the reflection that we are not always sure that those who advocate the truth are influenced by purer principles than their antagonists.
It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.
You will, no doubt, at the same time, have collected from the general scope of them, that they proceed from a source not unfriendly to the new Constitution.
They shall at least be offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth.
For nothing can be more evident, to those who are able to take an enlarged view of the subject, than the alternative of an adoption of the new Constitution or a dismemberment of the Union.
Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.
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This shall accordingly constitute the subject of my next address.
HAMILTON
If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.
I frankly acknowledge to you my convictions, and I will freely lay before you the reasons on which they are founded.
To the People of the State of New York:
I propose, in a series of papers, to discuss the following interesting particulars:
Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question.
Candor will oblige us to admit that even such men may be actuated by upright intentions; and it cannot be doubted that much of the opposition which has made its appearance, or may hereafter make its appearance, will spring from sources, blameless at least, if not respectable--the honest errors of minds led astray by preconceived jealousies and fears.
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.
Yes, my countrymen, I own to you that, after having given it an attentive consideration, I am clearly of opinion it is your interest to adopt it. I am convinced that this is the safest course for your liberty, your dignity, and your happiness.
I shall not, however, multiply professions on this head.
For the Independent Journal.
It may perhaps be thought superfluous to offer arguments to prove the utility of the UNION, a point, no doubt, deeply engraved on the hearts of the great body of the people in every State, and one, which it may be imagined, has no adversaries.
In the progress of this discussion I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance, that may seem to have any claim to your attention.
This idea will add the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism, to heighten the solicitude which all considerate and good men must feel for the event.
Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants.
They considered that the Congress was composed of many wise and experienced men.
Or why is it suggested that three or four confederacies would be better than one?
Still continuing no less attached to union than enamored of liberty, they observed the danger which immediately threatened the former and more remotely the latter; and being persuaded that ample security for both could only be found in a national government more wisely framed, they as with one voice, convened the late convention at Philadelphia, to take that important subject under consideration.
That, being convened from different parts of the country, they brought with them and communicated to each other a variety of useful information.
It is not to be wondered at, that a government instituted in times so inauspicious, should on experiment be found greatly deficient and inadequate to the purpose it was intended to answer.
Admit, for so is the fact, that this plan is only RECOMMENDED, not imposed, yet let it be remembered that it is neither recommended to BLIND approbation, nor to BLIND reprobation; but to that sedate and candid consideration which the magnitude and importance of the subject demand, and which it certainly ought to receive.
This intelligent people perceived and regretted these defects.
Wednesday, October 31, 1787
It has until lately been a received and uncontradicted opinion that the prosperity of the people of America depended on their continuing firmly united, and the wishes, prayers, and efforts of our best and wisest citizens have been constantly directed to that object.
Many, indeed, were deceived and deluded, but the great majority of the people reasoned and decided judiciously; and happy they are in reflecting that they did so.
As a nation we have made peace and war; as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts and conventions with foreign states.
But politicians now appear, who insist that this opinion is erroneous, and that instead of looking for safety and happiness in union, we ought to seek it in a division of the States into distinct confederacies or sovereignties. However extraordinary this new doctrine may appear, it nevertheless has its advocates; and certain characters who were much opposed to it formerly, are at present of the number.
Whatever may be the arguments or inducements which have wrought this change in the sentiments and declarations of these gentlemen, it certainly would not be wise in the people at large to adopt these new political tenets without being fully convinced that they are founded in truth and sound policy.
WHEN the people of America reflect that they are now called upon to decide a question, which, in its consequences, must prove one of the most important that ever engaged their attention, the propriety of their taking a very comprehensive, as well as a very serious, view of it, will be evident.
For the Independent Journal.
They formed it almost as soon as they had a political existence; nay, at a time when their habitations were in flames, when many of their citizens were bleeding, and when the progress of hostility and desolation left little room for those calm and mature inquiries and reflections which must ever precede the formation of a wise and well-balanced government for a free people.
In the mild season of peace, with minds unoccupied by other subjects, they passed many months in cool, uninterrupted, and daily consultation; and finally, without having been awed by power, or influenced by any passions except love for their country, they presented and recommended to the people the plan produced by their joint and very unanimous councils.
Experience on a former occasion teaches us not to be too sanguine in such hopes.
But this (as was remarked in the foregoing number of this paper) is more to be wished than expected, that it may be so considered and examined.
A strong sense of the value and blessings of union induced the people, at a very early period, to institute a federal government to preserve and perpetuate it.
That they were individually interested in the public liberty and prosperity, and therefore that it was not less their inclination than their duty to recommend only such measures as, after the most mature deliberation, they really thought prudent and advisable.
To the People of the State of New York:
That certainly would be the case, and I sincerely wish that it may be as clearly foreseen by every good citizen, that whenever the dissolution of the Union arrives, America will have reason to exclaim, in the words of the poet: "FAREWELL!
It is not yet forgotten that well-grounded apprehensions of imminent danger induced the people of America to form the memorable Congress of 1774. That body recommended certain measures to their constituents, and the event proved their wisdom; yet it is fresh in our memories how soon the press began to teem with pamphlets and weekly papers against those very measures.
This convention composed of men who possessed the confidence of the people, and many of whom had become highly distinguished by their patriotism, virtue and wisdom, in times which tried the minds and hearts of men, undertook the arduous task.
For the Independent Journal.
Various difficulties and inconveniences would be inseparable from such a situation; whereas one government, watching over the general and common interests, and combining and directing the powers and resources of the whole, would be free from all these embarrassments, and conduce far more to the safety of the people.
Apply these facts to our own case.
To the People of the State of New York:
With them and with most other European nations we are rivals in navigation and the carrying trade; and we shall deceive ourselves if we suppose that any of them will rejoice to see it flourish; for, as our carrying trade cannot increase without in some degree diminishing theirs, it is more their interest, and will be more their policy, to restrain than to promote it.
But the safety of the people of America against dangers from FOREIGN force depends not only on their forbearing to give JUST causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to INVITE hostility or insult; for it need not be observed that there are PRETENDED as well as just causes of war.
But if one national government, had not so regulated the navigation of Britain as to make it a nursery for seamen--if one national government had not called forth all the national means and materials for forming fleets, their prowess and their thunder would never have been celebrated.
The Same Subject Continued (Concerning Dangers From Foreign Force and Influence)
How, and when, and in what proportion shall aids of men and money be afforded?
It can harmonize, assimilate, and protect the several parts and members, and extend the benefit of its foresight and precautions to each.
It can apply the resources and power of the whole to the defense of any particular part, and that more easily and expeditiously than State governments or separate confederacies can possibly do, for want of concert and unity of system.
Wednesday, November 7, 1787
In the trade to China and India, we interfere with more than one nation, inasmuch as it enables us to partake in advantages which they had in a manner monopolized, and as we thereby supply ourselves with commodities which we used to purchase from them.
JAY
Leave America divided into thirteen or, if you please, into three or four independent governments--what armies could they raise and pay--what fleets could they ever hope to have?
What would the militia of Britain be if the English militia obeyed the government of England, if the Scotch militia obeyed the government of Scotland, and if the Welsh militia obeyed the government of Wales? Suppose an invasion; would those three governments (if they agreed at all) be able, with all their respective forces, to operate against the enemy so effectually as the single government of Great Britain would?
But whatever may be our situation, whether firmly united under one national government, or split into a number of confederacies, certain it is, that foreign nations will know and view it exactly as it is; and they will act toward us accordingly.
If they see that our national government is efficient and well administered, our trade prudently regulated, our militia properly organized and disciplined, our resources and finances discreetly managed, our credit re-established, our people free, contented, and united, they will be much more disposed to cultivate our friendship than provoke our resentment.
One government can collect and avail itself of the talents and experience of the ablest men, in whatever part of the Union they may be found.
It can place the militia under one plan of discipline, and, by putting their officers in a proper line of subordination to the Chief Magistrate, will, as it were, consolidate them into one corps, and thereby render them more efficient than if divided into thirteen or into three or four distinct independent companies.
We have heard much of the fleets of Britain, and the time may come, if we are wise, when the fleets of America may engage attention.
Spain thinks it convenient to shut the Mississippi against us on the one side, and Britain excludes us from the Saint Lawrence on the other; nor will either of them permit the other waters which are between them and us to become the means of mutual intercourse and traffic.
In the formation of treaties, it will regard the interest of the whole, and the particular interests of the parts as connected with that of the whole.
Who shall settle the terms of peace, and in case of disputes what umpire shall decide between them and compel acquiescence?
But admit that they might be willing to help the invaded State or confederacy.
That situation consists in the best possible state of defense, and necessarily depends on the government, the arms, and the resources of the country.
The most beautiful set of rooms in the palace had written over the doors, "Beauty's Rooms," and in them she found books and music, canary-birds and Persian cats, and everything that could be thought of to make the time pass pleasantly.
One day, she saw in her mirror that her father was ill, so that night she said to the Beast:
So they returned to the palace, which by this time was crowded with courtiers, eager to kiss the hands of the Prince and his bride.
"I want a new silk dress," said Dressalinda, "an apple-green one, sewn with seed-pearls, and green shoes with red heels, and a necklace of emeralds, and a box of gloves."
Beauty, left alone, tried not to feel frightened.
I will set out at once to claim my ship.
"I wish we had gone," said Marigold.
"I must be going," he said to himself, "but I wish I could thank my host for my good rest and my good supper."
I do not think the Beast means to kill me, or surely he would not have given me such a good supper."
"Oh, bring me a rose," said Beauty hastily.
The poor Beast sighed and went away.
So the merchant followed him back into the palace.
When she wanted to come back, she was to do the same thing.
Beauty flung herself on her knees beside him.
"Dear Beauty," he said, "nothing but your love could have disenchanted me.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
He spent the whole day looking about to make sure there was no truth in the letter he had received, and it was beginning to get dusk when he started out, with a sad heart, to make the journey home again.
At the end of that time her sleep grew troubled, and she dreamed that She saw the Beast lying dead among the roses in the beautiful gardens of his palace; and from this dream she awoke crying bitterly.
His three daughters, of course, went with him.
"At any rate," he thought, "I shall have three months more of life."
"Ungrateful wretch!" said the Beast.
As the days went by, and her slightest wish was granted, almost before she knew what she wanted, she began to feel that the Beast must love her very dearly, and she was very sorry to see how sad he looked every night when she said "No" to his offer of marriage.
"Oh, dear Beast," she cried, "and are you really dead?
So the merchant sat down as bold as you please, and made a very hearty supper, after which he again thought he would look for the master of the house.
When he got out of bed he found he had something else to be grateful for, for on the chair by the bedside lay a fine suit of new clothes, marked with his name, and with ten gold pieces in every pocket.
As she spoke, she happened to look at a big mirror, and in it she saw the form of her father reflected, just riding up to the door of his cottage.
"May I have supper with you?" said he.
The wretched man promised.
"Don't be frightened," said the Beast gently, "but tell me, do you come here of your own free will?"
So on the day before she ought to have gone back, they put, some poppy juice in a cup of wine which they gave her, and this made her so sleepy that she slept for two whole days and nights.
But Beauty bore all their unkindness patiently, for her father's sake.
He is ill, and he thinks that I am dead.
Down the marble steps he went, and when he came to the garden, he saw that it was full of roses, red and white and pink and yellow, and the merchant looked at them, and remembered Beauty's wish.
It is, thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with arms, conquers Europe.
"Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be feared from these people.
A squadron of magnificent body-guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries.
Give him a pike, he will produce the 10th of August; give him a gun, you will have Austerlitz.
Take care! he will make of the first Rue Grenetat which comes to hand Caudine Forks.
Proportion his song to his nature, and you will see!
There is nothing to be feared on the part of the populace of Paris the capital.
It is not dangerous.
The sun was setting; their appetites were satisfied.
"They made beneath the table A noise, a clatter of the feet that was abominable,"
The Russian mountains having been exhausted, they began to think about dinner; and the radiant party of eight, somewhat weary at last, became stranded in Bombarda's public house, a branch establishment which had been set up in the Champs-Elysees by that famous restaurant-keeper, Bombarda, whose sign could then be seen in the Rue de Rivoli, near Delorme Alley.
He is Napoleon's stay and Danton's resource.
The ingenuous police of the Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too "rose-colored" a light; it is not so much of "an amiable rabble" as it is thought.
The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.
This was the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon.
In short, it is an amiable rabble."
These are very pretty men, Sire.
He sings; it is his delight.
CHAPTER V--AT BOMBARDA'S
Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of liberty, he tears up the pavements.
says Moliere.
The horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud of gold.
"Give us back our father from Ghent, Give us back our father."
Carriages were going and coming.
When the hour strikes, this man of the faubourgs will grow in stature; this little man will arise, and his gaze will be terrible, and his breath will become a tempest, and there will issue forth from that slender chest enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps.
Having awaited a favourable opportunity, father and son commenced their flight, and were well on their way when Icarus, pleased with the novel sensation, forgot altogether his father's oft-repeated injunction not to approach too near the sun.
The murder being discovered, Daedalus was summoned before the court of the Areopagus and condemned to death; but he made his escape to the island of Crete, where he was received by king Minos in a manner worthy of his great reputation.
Daedalus constructed for the king the world-renowned labyrinth, which was an immense building, full of intricate passages, intersecting each other in such a manner, that even Daedalus himself is said, upon one occasion, to have nearly lost his way in it; and it was in this building the king placed the Minotaur, a monster with the head and shoulders of a bull and the body of a man.
In the course of time the great artist became weary of his long exile, more especially as the king, under the guise of friendship, kept him almost a prisoner.
Unprepared for this sudden attack he admitted his guilt, but pointed to the wife of Xuthus as the instigator of the crime.
And now to return to Creusa.
ION.
The body of the unfortunate Icarus was washed up by the tide, and was buried by the bereaved father on an island which he called after his son, Icaria.
DAEDALUS and ICARUS.
Daedalus, a descendant of Erechtheus, was an Athenian architect, sculptor, and mechanician.
Cocalus feigned compliance and invited Minos to his palace, where he was treacherously put to death in a warm bath.
Ion was about to avenge himself upon Creusa, when, by means of the divine intervention of Apollo, his foster-mother, the Delphic priestess appeared on the scene, and explained the true relationship which existed between Creusa and Ion.
But great as was his genius, still greater was his vanity, and he could brook no rival.
The body of their king was brought to Agrigent by the Cretans, where it was buried with great pomp, and over his tomb a temple to Aphrodite was erected.
Now his nephew and pupil, Talus, exhibited great talent, having invented both the saw and the compass, and Daedalus, fearing lest he might overshadow his own fame, secretly killed him by throwing him down from the citadel of Pallas-Athene.
During a war with the Euboeans, in which the latter were signally defeated, Xuthus, son of AEolus, greatly distinguished himself on the side of the Athenians, and as a reward for his valuable services, the hand of Creusa, the king's daughter, was bestowed upon him in marriage.
Apollo, pitying his deserted child, sent Hermes to convey him to Delphi, where he deposited his charge on the steps of the temple.
The young child was carefully tended and reared by his kind foster-mother, and was brought up in the service of the temple, where he was intrusted with some of the minor duties of the holy edifice.
When, upon the occasion of the public adoption of his son, Xuthus gave a grand banquet, the old servant of Creusa contrived to mix a strong poison in the wine of the unsuspecting Ion.
The response was, that Xuthus should regard the first person who met him on leaving the sanctuary as his son.
Fearing the anger of Erechtheus, Creusa placed her new-born babe in a little wicker basket, and hanging some golden charms round his neck, invoked for him the protection of the gods, and concealed him in a lonely cave.
Next morning the Delphic priestess discovered the infant, and was so charmed by his engaging appearance that she adopted him as her own son.
Daedalus passed the remainder of his life tranquilly in the island of Sicily, where he occupied himself in the construction of various beautiful works of art.
Ion was the son of Creusa (the beauteous daughter of Erechtheus, king of Athens) and the sun-god Phoebus-Apollo, to whom she was united without the knowledge of her father.
When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind.
In democratic communities these two notions are, on the contrary, always palpably united.
The sudden and undeserved promotion of a courtier produces only a transient impression in an aristocratic country, because the aggregate institutions and opinions of the nation habitually compel men to advance slowly in tracks which they cannot get out of.
Circumscribed by the character of his country and his age, the moralist must learn to vindicate his principles in that position.
Religions give men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter; and this is one of their chief political characteristics.
He would think himself in bad repute if he employed his life solely in living.
The notion of labor is therefore presented to the mind on every side as the necessary, natural, and honest condition of human existence.
In aristocracies it is not exactly labor that is despised, but labor with a view to profit.
Not only is labor not dishonorable amongst such a people, but it is held in honor: the prejudice is not against it, but in its favor. In the United States a wealthy man thinks that he owes it to public opinion to devote his leisure to some kind of industrial or commercial pursuit, or to public business.
If the social condition of a people, under these circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which I here point out is thereby increased.
In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the morrow.
When men have accustomed themselves to foresee from afar what is likely to befall in the world and to feed upon hopes, they can hardly confine their minds within the precise circumference of life, and they are ready to break the boundary and cast their looks beyond.
It is for the purpose of escaping this obligation to work, that so many rich Americans come to Europe, where they find some scattered remains of aristocratic society, amongst which idleness is still held in honor.
But in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range of man's sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human actions appeared every day to be more within his reach.
Yet in aristocratic society it constantly happens that he who works for honor is not insensible to the attractions of profit.
No profession exists in which men do not work for money; and the remuneration which is common to them all gives them all an air of resemblance.
Even those who are principally actuated by the love of fame are necessarily made familiar with the thought that they are not exclusively actuated by that motive; and they discover that the desire of getting a living is mingled in their minds with the desire of making life illustrious.
He is paid for commanding, other men for obeying orders.
Thus the notion of profit is kept distinct from that of labor; however they may be united in point of fact, they are not thought of together.
In the ages of faith the final end of life is placed beyond life.
I do not doubt that, by training the members of a community to think of their future condition in this world, they would be gradually and unconsciously brought nearer to religious convictions.
When they are obliged to yield to the former, they strive at least to escape from the latter.
It is, then, commonly at the outset of democratic society that citizens are most disposed to live apart.
But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy--namely, political freedom.
He stigmatizes as turbulent and unruly spirits those who would combine their exertions to promote the prosperity of the community, and, perverting the natural meaning of words, he applauds as good citizens those who have no sympathy for any but themselves.
Democratic communities not only contain a large number of independent citizens, but they are constantly filled with men who, having entered but yesterday upon their independent condition, are intoxicated with their new power.
When the members of a community are forced to attend to public affairs, they are necessarily drawn from the circle of their own interests, and snatched at times from self-observation.
The plan was a wise one.
These two things mutually and perniciously complete and assist each other.
The Americans have combated by free institutions the tendency of equality to keep men asunder, and they have subdued it.
This truth does not take root at once in the minds of the rich.
Such evils are doubtless great, but they are transient; whereas the benefits which attend them remain.
When the vices and weaknesses, frequently exhibited by those who govern in America, are closely examined, the prosperity of the people occasions--but improperly occasions--surprise.
Men learn at such times to think of their fellow-men from ambitious motives; and they frequently find it, in a manner, their interest to forget themselves.
Chapter IV: That The Americans Combat The Effects Of Individualism By Free Institutions
He does not ask them to assist him in governing the State; it is enough that they do not aspire to govern it themselves.
They might spend fortunes thus without warming the hearts of the population around them;--that population does not ask them for the sacrifice of their money, but of their pride.
They entertain a presumptuous confidence in their strength, and as they do not suppose that they can henceforward ever have occasion to claim the assistance of their fellow-creatures, they do not scruple to show that they care for nobody but themselves.
No vice of the human heart is so acceptable to it as egotism: a despot easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.
The general affairs of a country only engage the attention of leading politicians, who assemble from time to time in the same places; and as they often lose sight of each other afterwards, no lasting ties are established between them.
I must say that I have often seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have remarked a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to each other.
Pride must be dissembled; disdain dares not break out; egotism fears its own self. Under a free government, as most public offices are elective, the men whose elevated minds or aspiring hopes are too closely circumscribed in private life, constantly feel that they cannot do without the population which surrounds them.
The period when the construction of democratic society upon the ruins of an aristocracy has just been completed, is especially that at which this separation of men from one another, and the egotism resulting from it, most forcibly strike the observation.
They every instant impress upon his mind the notion that it is the duty, as well as the interest of men, to make themselves useful to their fellow-creatures; and as he sees no particular ground of animosity to them, since he is never either their master or their slave, his heart readily leans to the side of kindness.
They know that the rich in democracies always stand in need of the poor; and that in democratic ages you attach a poor man to you more by your manner than by benefits conferred.
Freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.
They look upon all those whom this state of society has made their equals as oppressors, whose destiny can excite no sympathy; they have lost sight of their former equals, and feel no longer bound by a common interest to their fate: each of them, standing aloof, thinks that he is reduced to care for himself alone.
The free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society.
When the public is supreme, there is no man who does not feel the value of public goodwill, or who does not endeavor to court it by drawing to himself the esteem and affection of those amongst whom he is to live. Many of the passions which congeal and keep asunder human hearts, are then obliged to retire and hide below the surface.
Many people in France consider equality of conditions as one evil, and political freedom as a second.
The magnitude of such benefits, which sets off the difference of conditions, causes a secret irritation to those who reap advantage from them; but the charm of simplicity of manners is almost irresistible: their affability carries men away, and even their want of polish is not always displeasing.
Despotism, which is of a very timorous nature, is never more secure of continuance than when it can keep men asunder; and all is influence is commonly exerted for that purpose.
An aristocracy seldom yields without a protracted struggle, in the course of which implacable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society.
These passions survive the victory, and traces of them may be observed in the midst of the democratic confusion which ensues.
Thus the vices which despotism engenders are precisely those which equality fosters.
Elected magistrates do not make the American democracy flourish; it flourishes because the magistrates are elective.
I liked all that family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between us.
No whooping-cough did rack his frame, Nor measles drear with spots; Not these impaired the sacred name Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
One was a big family Bible full of pictures.
"Well, if you knowed where he was, what did you ask me for?"
But don't try to budge; stand right where you are.
"All ready."
"No, sir; I never heard of them."
In brief, Mitya was informed that he was, from that moment, a prisoner, and that he would be driven at once to the town, and there shut up in a very unpleasant place.
He let his outstretched hand fall at once.
Saying good-by to you, I say it to all men."
Oh, he believed almost without doubt in Mitya's guilt.
But Trifon Borissovitch did not even turn round.
All stared at Mitya.
The peasant persisted and besought them to wait.
"You see what our peasants are, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch.
"Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, for ruining you, too, with my love."
All of us here, if I may make bold to speak for all, we are all ready to recognize that you are, at bottom, a young man of honor, but, alas, one who has been carried away by certain passions to a somewhat excessive degree...."
"We will continue it in the town, and I, for my part, of course, am ready to wish you all success ... in your defense.... As a matter of fact, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I've always been disposed to regard you as, so to speak, more unfortunate than guilty.
Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, a sturdy, thick-set man with a wrinkled face, was annoyed about something, some sudden irregularity.
"The preliminary inquiry is not yet over," Nikolay Parfenovitch faltered, somewhat embarrassed.
"Oh, well, if it must be so, it must!"
I'm not 'old fellow' to you, and you can keep your advice for another time!" Mavriky Mavrikyevitch snapped out savagely, as though glad to vent his wrath.
It is true that he was out of humor and greatly disliked the task that had been laid upon him.
He flushed all over.
They've no shame!" exclaimed Trifon Borissovitch.
Grushenka made a deep bow to Mitya.
I'm simply surprised at your good-nature, with our low peasants, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, that's all I can say."
Mitya was reduced to silence.
I shan't forget your generosity," he cried warmly.
"Gentlemen, we're all cruel, we're all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all I am the lowest reptile!
It appeared that everything was not yet ready in the second cart, in which two constables were to accompany Mavriky Mavrikyevitch.
Mitya listened attentively, and only shrugged his shoulders.
I accept my punishment, not because I killed him, but because I meant to kill him, and perhaps I really might have killed him.
"Certainly, but considering ... in fact, now it's impossible except in the presence of--"
Mitya instantly noticed this, and started.
At last Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, too, got into the cart, sat down heavily, and, as though without noticing it, squeezed Mitya into the corner.
He was at once surrounded by men who kept a constant watch on him.
Oh, I was still such a fool then....
He had no cap on.
Is it worth it?" exclaimed the boy in his grief.
He, too, was shouting and fussing about something.
"Good-by to you, too, Trifon Borissovitch!"
I will follow you for ever, wherever they may send you.
"But what do we want a second cart for?" Mitya put in.
Still I mean to fight it out with you.
At that moment he had no desire to live.
Never, never should I have risen of myself!
Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?
"Good-by, Trifon Borissovitch!" Mitya shouted again, and felt himself, that he had not called out this time from good-nature, but involuntarily, from resentment.
Mitya had time to seize and press his hand.
Nikolay Parfenovitch's little figure was positively majestic by the time he had finished speaking.
At the gates there was a crowd of people, peasants, women and drivers.
I warn you of that. I'll fight it out with you to the end, and then God will decide.
He asked Mitya to get into the cart with somewhat excessive surliness.
Farewell; you are guiltless, though you've been your own undoing."
"Good-by, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, good-by!" he heard all at once the voice of Kalganov, who had suddenly darted out.
He was, perhaps, too busy.
I've sworn to amend, and every day I've done the same filthy things.
You've drunk it all and now you cry out.
Running up to the cart he held out his hand to Mitya.
He was shouting angrily.
What do we want an escort for?"
His voice quivered and he stretched out his hand, but Nikolay Parfenovitch, who happened to stand nearest to him, with a sudden, almost nervous movement, hid his hands behind his back.
"Forgive us too!" he heard two or three voices.
But the thunderbolt has fallen.
The bell began ringing and Mitya was driven off.
What can men be after this?" he exclaimed incoherently, in bitter despondency, almost despair.
Nikolay Parfenovitch informed him gently that he would be escorted at once by the rural police officer, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, who happened to be on the spot....
"I'll trouble you, sir, to learn how to speak to me if you've never been taught.
"Well, gentlemen, I don't blame you.
For a long while he sat like that, crying as though he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty.
"Forgive me at parting, good people!" Mitya shouted suddenly from the cart.
A moment later he felt suddenly very cold.
"Is it worth it?
But the cart moved and their hands parted.
I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified.
Mitya would have said something more, but he broke off and went out.
"I've taken a chill," thought Mitya, twitching his shoulders.
"What are these people?
Her lips quivered, tears flowed from her eyes.
Kalganov ran back, sat down in a corner, bent his head, hid his face in his hands, and burst out crying.
The rain had ceased, but the dull sky was still overcast with clouds, and a keen wind was blowing straight in his face.
I understand that there's nothing else for you to do."
"Let's start with the one, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch.
I won't be unruly, I won't run away from you, old fellow.
"I have told you I am yours, and I will be yours.
But listen, for the last time, I am not guilty of my father's blood.
I am responsible for his fever.
Oh, my vile temper was the cause of everything!
"All that is only momentary, I know him, I know his heart only too well.
You may be sure he will consent to escape. It's not as though it would be immediately; he will have time to make up his mind to it.
I don't know yet--"
To-morrow perhaps I will show you in detail the whole plan which Ivan Fyodorovitch left me on the eve of the trial in case of need....
And yet it was she who had betrayed him.
We quarreled because, when he told me that if Dmitri Fyodorovitch were convicted he would escape abroad with that creature, I felt furious at once--I can't tell you why, I don't know myself why....
Three days later, on the evening you came, he brought me a sealed envelope, which I was to open at once, if anything happened to him.
It's you he's most afraid of, he is afraid you won't approve of his escape on moral grounds.
Then he left me money, nearly ten thousand--those notes to which the prosecutor referred in his speech, having learnt from some one that he had sent them to be changed.
"You can for a moment.
That was when--do you remember?--you found us quarreling.
In the latitude of New York and southward it hatches, as a rule, five or six broods in a season, with from four to six young in a brood.
WHEN A MAN BECOMES OF AGE.
FEMININE HEIGHT AND WEIGHT.
But the two great apostles of the evolution theory were Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
Since then it has taken possession of the country. Its fecundity is amazing.
THE ENGLISH SPARROW.
The first English sparrow was brought to the United States in 1850, but it was not until 1870 that the species can be said to have firmly established itself.
It need hardly be said that the revelations they have claimed to receive have been, thus far, without element of benefit to the human race.
It is often asked how stout a woman ought to be in proportion to her height.
The name is from the Greek word theosophia--divine wisdom--and the object of theosophical study is professedly to understand the nature of divine things.
The eccentric Lord Monboddo was the first to suggest the possible descent of man from the ape, about 1774. In 1813 Dr. W. C. Wells first proposed to apply the principle of natural selection to the natural history of man, and in 1822 Professor Herbert first asserted the probable transmutation of species of plants.
The first writer to suggest the transmutation of species among animals was Buffon, about 1750, and other writers followed out the idea.
The authorship of this book was never revealed until after the death of Robert Chambers, a few years since, it became known that this publisher, whom no one would ever have suspected of holding such heterodox theories, had actually written it.
THEOSOPHY.
Since the Christian era we may class among theosophists such sects as Neo-Platonists, the Hesychasts of the Greek Church, the Mystics of mediaeval times, and, in later times, the disciples of Paracelsus, Thalhauser, Bohme, Swedenborg and others.
It is taken to be an established fact in nature, a valid induction from man's knowledge of natural order.
"It has its difficulties," said he slowly.
"Firm and regular," he announced at last, and dropped the wrist.
"But...
I do desire to live; and even more do I desire that my son may live.
"Among other things." The swarthy gentleman continued his study of the patient's pulse.
Don Diego struggled up into a sitting position on the red velvet couch.
Why, if the service you would propose is one that cannot hurt my honour...."
And yet, stirrings of memory coming now to the assistance of reflection, compelled him uneasily to insist that here something was not as it should be.
True, we are fortunately a small number, but you and your party inconveniently increase it.
He was beginning to torture his mind with conjecture, when the door opened, and to Don Diego's increasing mystification he beheld his best suit of clothes step into the cabin.
Fourteen of them mattered little to him, but the remaining two were his own and his son's.
Don Diego bowed his head upon his breast, and strode away in thought to the stern windows.
Just as you, Don Diego, are my prisoner."
He put a hand to the back of his head, and there discovered, in confirmation of the story, a lump as large as a pigeon's egg.
Captain Blood pursed his lips.
This ship, like this handsome suit of clothes, is mine by right of conquest.
Captain Blood perched himself on the edge of the long oak table.
But he was too bewildered to make any answer.
Captain Blood bowed, went out, and locked the door.
Captain Blood's blue eyes approved his bearing.
This is my ship, and these are my clothes."
He composed himself.
This is not your ship.
"And my son?
"You flatter my Castilian accent.
As before he perched himself on the corner of the table.
The stranger's fingers touched the top of Don Diego's head, whereupon Don Diego winced and cried out in pain.
"The question is offensive, sir."
"Then...."
After all, he possessed the stoicism proper to his desperate trade.
He swung his legs from the couch, and sat now upon the edge of it, his elbows on his knees.
"And what the devil are you doing in my clothes and aboard my ship?"
"Am I mad?" he asked at last.
There memory abruptly and inexplicably ceased.
His mind went back over the adventure of yesterday, if of yesterday it was.
Then the alternative occurred to him.
"But is that necessary?" he asked, without apparent perturbation.
For it means that you'll be put to the trouble of dying all over again."
Will you pledge me your honour, if I release you upon parole, that you will navigate us thither?
He took Don Diego's wrist between thumb and second finger.
The low position of the sun, flooding the cabin with golden light from those square ports astern, suggested to him at first that it was early morning, on the assumption that the vessel was headed westward.
"I realize that even a pirate has his honour." And forthwith he propounded his offer.
"Then let me put it in another way--perhaps more happily: You do not desire to live?"
Are you not Spanish, then?"
They scanned the cabin once again, scrutinizing each familiar object.
"I feared it would be so." Don Diego sighed again, and stood up.
So that on every hand, you see, prudence suggests to us that we should deny ourselves the pleasure of your company, and, steeling our soft hearts to the inevitable, invite you to be so obliging as to step over the side."
"You've taken no great harm."
"Are you a doctor?"
And what time he watched, the lines in his lean brown face grew deeper.
He accepted the situation with the fortitude of a fatalist.
"Ah, that I can answer.
But... then...." Wildly his eyes looked about him.
The dice had fallen against him in this venture.
"Your ship?" quoth the other, aghast, and still more aghast he added: "Your clothes?
"I confess," he admitted, "that there is much force in what you say."
With the utmost calm he enquired:
"To earn it?" said Don Diego, and the watchful blue eyes did not miss the quiver that ran through him.
The suit paused to close the door, then advanced towards the couch on which Don Diego was extended, and inside the suit came a tall, slender gentleman of about Don Diego's own height and shape.
My head aches so damnably that I am incapable of thought.
The Spaniard broke off.
"Will you tell me also that you are Don Diego de Espinosa?"
The light-blue eyes played over him like points of steel.
That was in one scale; in the other were the lives of sixteen men.
You and your ten surviving scoundrels are a menace on this ship. More than that, she is none so well found in water and provisions.
Startling as was the explanation, yet it proved soothing to Don Diego, being so much less startling than the things he was beginning to imagine.
He was clear on the matter of the easily successful raid upon the Island of Barbados; every detail stood vividly in his memory up to the moment at which, returning aboard, he had stepped on to his own deck again.
Captain Blood stood up.
"Surely this ship is the Cinco Llagas?"
"No, they won't...."
"They haven't started yet," she said.
"Go back now," she said to the negroes.
If Matty is up, tell her that I'll be home in a few minutes."
When Uncle went down to let them in, I went to the head of the stairs to hear what they were saying.
He knows about you.
"Huh!
If you're ahead of him they'll never catch you.
"Now--now, go."
"Please go back. Don't you see what it'll mean if I'm found near here?
We're almost there, old boy.
We'll race--anything that--wears four legs.
"Good-by."
"Friend," answered Tom.
And so wonderful!
They disappeared into the darkness.
She jumped up and ran to the horse.
"No!
"Always, little soldier, always," he said.
"You're worth a dozen soldiers!" he exclaimed.
Hurry!
I'm going to take Star over it."
"You've come to me for help, and it's my right to help you all I can.
"But you--you're from the North."
There was a moment of silence.
"There was something about a boat.
You men have left the whole South gasping at your bravery.
Run!"
"Put it on the top rail as a marker," she said, as she turned back for the run.
It was a strength which seemed to flow into the road, which carried him forward in long, swinging leaps.
"Can you ride?
Oh, I wish they'd hurry." There was anguish in her voice.
Uncle took them into the dining-room to give them something to eat and drink; then I dressed and stole down."
I'm going on--so that they won't catch me here."
The sounds of shouting came from the Beecham's.
When mother and father were alive I lived in Albany.
"Password?"
"Yes," she answered.
He gave Star the reins, and above the beat of hoofs heard her call: "Good luck, Tom!" He glanced back and saw her standing there, her arms raised above her head.
Go straight ahead until you come to the road, then to your left."
"You've shown them what a pair of hind hoofs look like."
"Hey!
"Here we are, Marjorie." He went forward to meet her.
It was useless to protest, for she became calm again and determined.
"Get ready, boy," he whispered, reining in slightly.
"Matty's husband is the stableman.
Star was willing, but no horse could stand such a pace forever, so he reined in to a trot.
"Why don't you go back to the house now!"
No, Marjorie.
He whooped, and dug his heels into Star's flanks.
Star, almost winded, seemed propped upon his legs, rather than standing upon them.
Oh, so proud!" She slipped her hand into his and they sat there quietly, straining to catch the first sounds of the negroes returning.
A few minutes later she stopped again.
"Keep it up, Star!" he urged.
Tom did not look back, but he cast out short, broken sentences to console his pursuer.
I'll hide you in the house--Matty'll hide you over the kitchen.
Let me do that for you--let me take the risk.
"Go it, Star!
"Go it, boy!"
"No, don't argue!
I didn't wait to hear it all.
Tom spread the handkerchief on the fence--a tiny spot of white to guide Star over.
Tom dropped the reins and raised his hands.
"Thanks a thousand times for all you've done.
Tom could see her pressing her cheek to the horse's nose, stroking its head and neck.
"What?"
Star's hoofs pounded upon the soft turf, then his body emerged from the shadows.
"Guess we'd better begin to step lively, Star," he said, reaching forward and stroking the horse's neck.
"Then take a horse from the stable.
"Good luck once again. Good-by, Star dear." She pressed her cheek against the horse's head. "Good-by, Tom.
"There's the fence," she said.
"Go it, Star!" he said.
It was a cry that brought a yell of exultation to Tom's lips.
Sam!
"Why not?
"Haven't got it.
An hour passed ... two hours ... three hours.
"Take everything with you.
She was up, adjusting herself to the saddle, stroking Star's neck, talking to him softly.
You must...."
He just takes it for granted that I believe everything he believes.
Once she stopped and listened.
Please go back now."
"Yes--if I once get my legs wrapped around him I can stick there.
No civilian could say halt in that tone.
Through each settlement he walked Star quietly, but always ready to throw himself forward, dig his heels into the horse's flanks and race away.
Marjorie wheeled about, dismounted, and readjusted the stirrups.
"Star?"
Star can run like the wind."
Tom pulled on the reins and Star planted his feet; they went sliding past the Sentry with his rifle glinting in the moonlight.
"Once I was carried to Farmer Brown's barn in a shock of corn and I found Nibbler living in the barn."
The smallest of the Spiny Pocket Mice is about the size of Nibbler the House Mouse and the largest is twice as big.
All of these pretty little fellows live in the dry parts of the Far West and Southwest in the same region where Longfoot the Kangaroo Rat lives.
"As a rule he does little harm to man, for his food is chiefly seeds of weeds, small wild fruits and parts of wild plants of no value to man.
He weighs less than an ounce and is a dear little fellow.
"He isn't a Mouse.
"Another little member of the Mouse family found clear across the country is the Harvest Mouse.
Old Mother Nature laughed.
"What did he look like?" asked Old Mother Nature.
"Striped Chipmunk saw him in summer and you saw him in winter. He changes his coat according to season, just as you do yourself, Jumper.
"I may be ever so much bigger, but he is so quick I wouldn't stand the least chance in the world.
Striped Chipmunk is all wrong, excepting about the end of his tail," interrupted Jumper the Hare.
I can forgive them for that.
If I could climb a tree like Chatterer, it would be different."
"I don't know a single good thing about him," he continued, "but I know plenty of bad things.
It is because of his wonderful ability to disappear in an instant that he is called Shadow.
You see he moves so quickly, dodging out of sight in a flash, that whoever catches him must be quick indeed.
"He is the most awful fellow in all the Great World," declared Whitefoot the Wood Mouse.
He is about the size of Billy Mink, but instead of the rich dark brown of Billy's coat his coat is a creamy yellow.
"Hasn't he any enemies?" asked Peter Rabbit.
He is hot-blooded, quick-tempered and fearless.
"He was hunting me just the same way, running with his nose in the snow and following every twist and turn I had made.
His front feet were white, and his hind feet rather whitish, but not clear white.
I ran for my life."
A little farther south in the East is a cousin very much like him called the New York Weasel.
He was brown above and white below.
"He was all white, every bit of him but the end of his tail, that was black."
"I just know, that's all," retorted Whitefoot in a very positive though squeaky voice.
"Striped Chipmunk," said Old Mother Nature, "you know something about Shadow the Weasel, tell us what you know."
"I know it," replied Striped Chipmunk and shivered again.
"No, it wouldn't!" interrupted Chatterer.
Robber, as you know, is big and savage and always ready for a fight when cornered.
His short, round tail was black at the end.
But for that black-tipped tail I wouldn't have seen him until too late."
Every one must eat to live.
His feet are black and so is the tip of his tail.
His smallest cousin is the Least Weasel. The latter is not much longer than a Mouse.
That fellow just loves to kill. He takes pleasure in it.
In winter he is all white, even the tip of his tail.
He had found a hole in a certain tree where I was living, and it was just luck that I wasn't at home when he called.
"Shadow is known as the Common Weasel, Short-tailed Weasel, Brown Weasel, Bonaparte Weasel and Ermine, and is found all over the forested parts of the northern part of the country.
When I suspect Shadow is about, I go somewhere else, the farther the better.
"Whitefoot is right," declared Old Mother Nature, and she spoke sadly.
You see, all felt they must be there so that they might learn all they possibly could about one they so feared.
"I know I hate him!" declared Striped Chipmunk, and all the others nodded their heads in agreement.
"I know it.
I don't like to think about him!"
He was about as long as Chatterer the Red Squirrel but looked longer because of his slim body and long neck.
"You are lucky to be alive," declared Chatterer the Red Squirrel.
I was just returning when he popped out.
"Pooh!" exclaimed Jimmy Skunk.
Any hole I can get into he can.
"Striped Chipmunk is quite right and so are you," declared Old Mother Nature.
"Like a snake on legs," declared Striped Chipmunk.
"A lot you know about the Great World," he said.
But Shadow hunts me even when his stomach is so full he cannot eat another mouthful.
In summer he is a purer white underneath than his larger cousins.
'I suppose there is no doubt that you did leave it open?'
That certainly was empty,--and not only empty, but it showed no traces of recent occupation.
But, on the other hand, what could have become--in the space of fifty seconds!--of his 'old gent'?
'Don't tell me!
As he himself suggested, what inducement could he have had to tell a lie like that?
'It was up when I went, that I'll swear.
'How long ago is it since you left?'
I glanced up,--there was no trap door which led to the roof.
'What do you mean with your old gent at the window?--what window?'
I stared.
Atherton leaped out on to the grass-grown rubble which was meant for a footpath.
When he was in, he shouted at the top of his voice,
Only silence answered.
The dust lay thick upon the floor,--there was that mouldy, earthy smell which is so frequently found in apartments which have been long untenanted.
'Well, that I shouldn't hardly like to say.
He referred to his watch.
How could I come to think I saw something when I didn't?'
The words echoed through the house.
No practicable nook or cranny, in which a living being could lie concealed, was anywhere at hand.
WHAT WAS HIDDEN UNDER THE FLOOR
He shoves his old nose right through the smash in the pane, and wags his old head at me like a chattering magpie.
'The blind's down!' I had noticed, when we were outside, that the blind was down at the front room window.
'My stars!--here's a sudden clearance!--Why, the place is empty,-- everything's clean gone!'
'Are you sure, Atherton, that there is no one at the back?'
'One's eyes are apt to play us tricks;--how could you see what wasn't there?'
While he spoke, he scrambled over the sill.
It is strange, to say the least of it, that the cabman should be the only person to see or hear anything of him.'
While we waited for a response I questioned him.
'Something tripped me up,--what's this?' He was stamping on the floor with his foot.
Together we prised it out of its place,--Lessingham standing by and watching us the while.
The room behind was small, and, despite the splintered glass in the window frame, stuffy.
'What's the idiot mean!--with his old gent!
In matters of prestidigitation, Champnell, we Westerns are among the rudiments,--we've everything to learn,--Orientals leave us at the post.
The kitchen window was open.
We followed.
Fragments of glass kept company with the dust on the floor, together with a choice collection of stones, brickbats, and other missiles,--which not improbably were the cause of their being there.
'Why did you leave the door open when you went?'
Suddenly he stopped.
He kept a thing over his head all the time, as if he didn't want too much to be seen.'
They seem to have evaporated into smoke,--which may be a way which is common enough among Eastern curiosities, though it's queer to me.'
There was not even an apology for a yard, still less a garden,--there was not even a fence of any sort, to serve as an enclosure, and to shut off the house from the wilderness of waste land.
Marjorie!
'Not a sign.' Going to the window he drew up the blind,--speaking as he did so.
His stepping on it unawares had caused his stumble.
'How am I to know what the thing's called?
But when you pulls up the blind downstairs, to my surprise back he come once more.
'Here's a board loose.
'If Miss Lindon has returned, it does not look as if she were in the house at present.'
'That's what I want to know.
'Go to!--you're dreaming, man!--there's no one here.'
CHAPTER XXXVII
Jehu's drunk.' Throwing up the sash he addressed the driver.
'Something over an hour,--possibly an hour and a half; I couldn't swear to the exact moment, but it certainly isn't more.'
He moved towards the door.
He returned into the front room,--I at his heels.
'Some devil's trick has been played,--I know it, I feel it!--my instinct tells me so!'
'Hollo!' he cried.
'It strikes me that this is another case of seeking admission through that hospitable window at the back.'
'Why the old gent peeping through the window of the room upstairs?'
'I hardly know,--I imagine that it was with some dim idea of Marjorie's being able to get in if she returned while I was absent,--but the truth is I was in such a condition of helter skelter that I am not prepared to swear that I had any reasonable reason.'
He knocked.
'Was it open when you returned from your pursuit of Holt?'
'What do you mean?--was it furnished when you left?'
'A burnoose do you mean?'
The room was empty enough then.
Nor did I,--I saw nothing but what appeared to be an unoccupied ramshackle brick abomination.
The door at the side, which Sydney had left wide open, opened on to a closet, and that was empty.
I'd old gent him if I got him!--There's not a creature about the place!'
Sydney perceived him too.
'Why,--one of them cloak sort of things, like them Arab blokes used to wear what used to be at Earl's Court Exhibition,--you know!'
In the corner stood a cupboard,--but a momentary examination showed that that was as bare as the other.
The cab pulled up in front of a tumbledown cheap 'villa' in an unfinished cheap neighbourhood,--the whole place a living monument of the defeat of the speculative builder.
That someone has been here is pretty plain,--let's hope it's Marjorie.'
'What's the matter with you?'
'None,--there were no signs of anything.
Atherton was staring about him as if he found it difficult to credit the evidence of his own eyes.
'Begging your pardon, sir, but there was someone there not a minute ago.'
He must be somewhere about,--he can't have got away,--he's at the back.
'There is no place in which anyone could hide, and there is no one in either of the rooms,--you must have been mistaken, driver.'
Who knows what mystery's beneath?'
It wasn't much of his face I could see, only his face and his eyes,--and they wasn't pretty.
I saw him peeping through that bottom broken pane on your left hand as plainly as I see you.
Atherton put a question.
'That window, sir.'
'What did he look like,--this old gent of yours?'
But for you to say that he wasn't there, and never had been,--blimey! that cops the biscuit.
He came out shouting.
"Extremely singular!" said the young Baron, with a musing air, and apparently unconscious of the meaning of his words.
His castles were without number.
"Whose horse?
As the flames, when first seen, had already made so terrible a progress that all efforts to save any portion of the building were evidently futile, the astonished neighborhood stood idly around in silent and pathetic wonder.
The prophecy seemed to imply--if it implied anything--a final triumph on the part of the already more powerful house; and was of course remembered with the more bitter animosity by the weaker and less influential.
The career of the horseman was indisputably, on his own part, uncontrollable.
The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell--the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry.
There were circumstances, moreover, which coupled with late events, gave an unearthly and portentous character to the mania of the rider, and to the capabilities of the steed.
But a new and fearful object soon rivetted the attention of the multitude, and proved how much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.
"Shocking!" said the youth, calmly, and turned quietly into the chateau.
A rapid smile shot over the countenance of the listener.
Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly.
"In his rash exertions to rescue a favorite portion of his hunting stud, he has himself perished miserably in the flames."
"How died he?"
"He is, as you say, a remarkable horse--a prodigious horse!
If such had been the case, we know our duty better than to bring him into the presence of a noble of your family."
But there are some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity.
With much difficulty, and at the imminent peril of their lives, they were restraining the convulsive plunges of a gigantic and fiery-colored horse.
We caught him flying, all smoking and foaming with rage, from the burning stables of the Castle Berlifitzing. Supposing him to have belonged to the old Count's stud of foreign horses, we led him back as an estray.
The horse itself, in the foreground of the design, stood motionless and statue-like--while farther back, its discomfited rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein.
His mother, the Lady Mary, followed him quickly after.
Up the long avenue of aged oaks which led from the forest to the main entrance of the Chateau Metzengerstein, a steed, bearing an unbonneted and disordered rider, was seen leaping with an impetuosity which outstripped the very Demon of the Tempest.
He soon, however, recovered his composure, and an expression of determined malignancy settled upon his countenance, as he gave peremptory orders that a certain chamber should be immediately locked up, and the key placed in his own possession.
"Indeed;" repeated the vassal.
In the glare of noon--at the dead hour of night--in sickness or in health--in calm or in tempest--the young Metzengerstein seemed rivetted to the saddle of that colossal horse, whose intractable audacities so well accorded with his own spirit.
The action, however, was but momentary, his gaze returned mechanically to the wall.
Least of all had the more than feudal magnificence, thus discovered, a tendency to allay the irritable feelings of the less ancient and less wealthy Berlifitzings.
To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position.
Frederick, Baron Metzengerstein, was, on the other hand, not yet of age. His father, the Minister G--, died young.
It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake.
Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves--that is, of their falsity, or of their probability--I say nothing.
To be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning.
Upon the succession of a proprietor so young, with a character so well known, to a fortune so unparalleled, little speculation was afloat in regard to his probable course of conduct.
Indeed, the Baron's perverse attachment to his lately-acquired charger--an attachment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal's ferocious and demon-like propensities--at length became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous and unnatural fervor.
The fury of the tempest immediately died away, and a dead calm sullenly succeeded.
although, as you very justly observe, of a suspicious and untractable character, let him be mine, however," he added, after a pause, "perhaps a rider like Frederick of Metzengerstein, may tame even the devil from the stables of Berlifitzing."
"The letters W. V. B. are also branded very distinctly on his forehead," interrupted a second equerry, "I supposed them, of course, to be the initials of Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing--but all at the castle are positive in denying any knowledge of the horse."
Some there were, indeed, who suggested a too haughty idea of self-consequence and dignity.
"Will the Baron join us in a hunting of the boar?"--"Metzengerstein does not hunt;" "Metzengerstein will not attend," were the haughty and laconic answers.
The agony of his countenance, the convulsive struggle of his frame, gave evidence of superhuman exertion: but no sound, save a solitary shriek, escaped from his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through in the intensity of terror.
At the principal gate of the palace he encountered three equerries.
From some peculiar circumstances attending the administration of his father, the young Baron, at the decease of the former, entered immediately upon his vast possessions.
Indeed, his behavior disappointed every expectation, and proved little in accordance with the views of many a manoeuvering mamma; while his habits and manner, still less than formerly, offered any thing congenial with those of the neighboring aristocracy.
Besides, the estates, which were contiguous, had long exercised a rival influence in the affairs of a busy government.
On Frederick's lip arose a fiendish expression, as he became aware of the direction which his glance had, without his consciousness, assumed. Yet he did not remove it.
Stupified with terror, the young nobleman tottered to the door.
The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron.
He was never to be seen beyond the limits of his own domain, and, in this wide and social world, was utterly companionless--unless, indeed, that unnatural, impetuous, and fiery-colored horse, which he henceforward continually bestrode, had any mysterious right to the title of his friend.
"Will the Baron honor our festivals with his presence?"
From this date a marked alteration took place in the outward demeanor of the dissolute young Baron Frederick Von Metzengerstein.
One tempestuous night, Metzengerstein, awaking from a heavy slumber, descended like a maniac from his chamber, and, mounting in hot haste, bounded away into the mazes of the forest.
The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy--"A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing."
Why then give a date to this story I have to tell?
His stable, too, was appointed at a distance from the rest; and with regard to grooming and other necessary offices, none but the owner in person had ventured to officiate, or even to enter the enclosure of that particular stall.
Moreover, near neighbors are seldom friends; and the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing might look, from their lofty buttresses, into the very windows of the palace Metzengerstein.
The young Frederick, during the conference, seemed agitated by a variety of emotions.
Among all the retinue of the Baron, however, none were found to doubt the ardor of that extraordinary affection which existed on the part of the young nobleman for the fiery qualities of his horse; at least, none but an insignificant and misshapen little page, whose deformities were in everybody's way, and whose opinions were of the least possible importance.
"True!" observed the Baron, dryly, and at that instant a page of the bedchamber came from the palace with a heightened color, and a precipitate step.
The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his gigantic and disgusting teeth.
These repeated insults were not to be endured by an imperious nobility. Such invitations became less cordial--less frequent--in time they ceased altogether.
As he threw it open, a flash of red light, streaming far into the chamber, flung his shadow with a clear outline against the quivering tapestry, and he shuddered to perceive that shadow--as he staggered awhile upon the threshold--assuming the exact position, and precisely filling up the contour, of the relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing.
"And, as the lid seems very heavy," cried Epimetheus, running across the room, "I will help you!"
"No, no," answered Pandora, again beginning to sob, "I have had enough of lifting the lid!
And then, for the rest of the day, there was the box!
But you would not do it.
"We hear."
Quick as a flash a pair of arms encircled his neck.
With that they gave the boy a swing, one holding to the feet the other the shoulders of the lad.
Quick as a cat in his movements Tad turned over before he landed, going down on all fours.
"Who are you?" returned Tad boldly.
"Say, do you fellows sleep in your hats as well as wash and eat in them?" he demanded.
"Just in time to have chuck with us.
He thought he was going to strike on the hard ground.
"Yes, shot."
Dippy stepped to the edge of the pool and leaning over peered down somewhat anxiously.
All this made a favorable impression on the Rangers.
The boys realized that they had taken a rather active part in what might prove for them a serious affair.
About noon they made camp for dinner and a rest, not taking up their journey until about four o'clock in the afternoon.
I'll die first!"
He did not even have time to cry out.
"Then take your punishment!"
"You forget that I'm a wounded man.
Let him take the watch," approved Rector.
CHAPTER X
"I reckon you kin go back and dry off now," drawled Dippy.
The Rangers fell in behind the two who were carrying Butler, in solemn procession.
"They've got us again."
"Shot?"
Instead he crawled up to the bank, under which he hid.
They had a rough and tumble scrimmage in the cold water, coming out choking, dripping and laughing.
If you're going to have fun with me you'll have to earn it.
Of course we don't carry it wherever we go.
"I reckon my question gits the first answer, seeing as I've got the drop on you."
"Do you sleep in your skin?" retorted Dippy.
Huh!
"Like it?
"Chop it!" commanded a Ranger.
The same thought was in the minds of all except Chunky, who held his head erect, his chest swelled out.
The night passed without incident, Tad Butler keeping a vigilant watch all during the dark hours of the night.
"I reckon you'd better drag me.
"Can we stand for any more remarks, boys?" asked Dippy.
They were agreed upon this, and by common consent Butler was given the watch for the night.
He came up choking, then pretended to go down again.
This attracted the attention of the fat boy.
"Are you going to brag about yourself?" demanded Polly.
"Why don't you look the other way then?" interjected Stacy.
I don't propose to help you out."
When they let go, Tad sailed several feet through the air.
Tad all at once realized that the sound of falling water was in the air.
He was full of their great achievements and was telling what he would do if any of the bandits came to visit their camp.
Instead he landed at the bottom of a deep pool of water cold as ice it seemed to him.
"Well, don't tell us.
With it came the thought that these must be the Rangers.
He had plenty of time to think matters over.
Hands up!
"Yeow!" bowled the fat boy as a figure appeared beside him and a pair of iron arms grasped his hands pulling him down, nearly unseating him.
He already had a brisk fire going, but before lighting it, the lad had walked down to the edge of the canyon for a survey of the plain.
"Don't you like it?" asked Ned, flushing.
All hands sat down to the evening meal after the men had washed up, in most instances without removing their hats.
"We haven't had our baths yet and I reckon we need them."
They expected the boy to resist, which would have given them still further excuse to handle him roughly.
Don't you know I've been shot?"
"Do you hear?" demanded Dippy in a deep, hoarse voice.
If, by any chance, the bandits learned who had interfered with them, it might be necessary for Professor Zepplin and his charges to make lively tracks for the border and seek other fields of adventure.
Dippy plunged in head first.
"I'm telling you, and---"
"Do you withdraw the flippant words you used to a member of this august body?" demanded a deep voice.
You see we have our chuck wagon here.
"Yes, you might fetch me a piece of soap," answered Butler laughingly.
Not expecting anything of this sort the boy was not holding his breath. The result was that he got a mouthful of water.
Clambering out he squared off for fight, but the only fight he got was another ducking in the pool.
Boys who could take rough handling such as this, without losing their tempers or even offering any objection, surely must be worth while.
Within sixty seconds from that time half of the crowd were threshing about in the cold waters of the pool, while Tad, who had crawled out, sat on the bank dripping, watching their struggles.
We usually have some central point where we make headquarters.
Tad was taken out where the gentle murmur of the Spring falling over the rocks could be heard when the Pony Rider Boys were not making too much noise.
What you got to say about it, young man?" demanded Dippy, glancing at Tad Butler, who was smiling.
At the lieutenant's reassuring words the Rangers---for the boys had stumbled upon the camp of the men of Captain McKay's command---crowded forward, talking and laughing, three of them taking the horses as the party dismounted, then leading the way into the bushes and in among the rocks where the lads came upon a campfire, around which were seated five or six other Rangers.
Tad knew that if Dunk ever got into communication with his fellows it would go hard with the Pony Rider Boys.
The boys slept with their rifles beside them that night.
He went in all over.
Why, it's the hottest thing that ever crossed the Staked Plains since the Apaches came down in---"
"I---I wish we did have a little daylight," stammered Chunky, which elicited a short laugh from his companions.
"Yes."
"That's the idea!"
The King of Sweden had, of course, nothing now to do but to advance from Riga to Narva and attack the army of the Czar.
The government of Holland was particularly displeased, on account of the interference and interruption which the war would occasion to all their commerce in the Baltic.
Indeed, the officers do not wish to arrest them until it is sure that the enemy is so completely overwhelmed that their rallying again is utterly impossible.
Still, the negotiations had not been closed, and the government of Sweden had no idea that the misunderstanding would lead to war.
They cut their clothes in such a manner that they could only be prevented from falling off by being held together by both hands; and the weather was so cold--the ground, moreover, being covered with snow--that the men could only save themselves from perishing by keeping their clothes around them.
The news, too, of this war occasioned great dissatisfaction among the governments of western Europe.
The preparations were made with great dispatch, and the fleet sailed for Riga.
The camp was defended by a rampart and by a double ditch, but on went the assaulting soldiers over all the obstacles, pushing their way with their bayonets, and carrying all before them.
The advanced posts were driven in, and the Swedes pressed on, the Russians flying before them, and carrying confusion to the posts in the rear.
So exactly were all his plans laid, that the war with Sweden was declared on the very next day after the truce of the Turks was concluded.
Augustus, for that was the name of the King of Poland, finding that now, since so great a force had arrived to succor and strengthen the place, there was no hope for success in any of his operations against it, concluded to make a virtue of necessity, and so he drew off his army, and sent word to the Dutch government that he did so in compliance with their wishes.
"They have beaten us once," said he, "and they may beat us again; but they will teach us in time to beat them."
The number of prisoners was so very great that it was not possible for the Swedes to retain them, on account of the expense and trouble of feeding them, and keeping them warm at that season of the year; so they determined to detain the officers only, and to send the men away.
The person whom the Czar had made commander-in-chief at the siege of Narva was a German officer.
Indeed, at the same time while he was commencing the siege of Narva, his ally, the King of Poland, advanced from his own dominions to Riga, and was now prepared to attack that city at the same time that the Czar was besieging Narva.
When at length the Swedes, having thus driven in the advanced posts, reached the Russian camp itself, they immediately made an assault upon it.
General Croy had been many weeks before Narva at the time when the King of Sweden arrived at Riga, but he had made little progress in taking the town.
The Russians were entirely defeated and put to flight.
It was in the dead of winter, and the roads which he followed, besides being rough and intricate, were obstructed with snow, and the Russians had thought little of them, so that at last, when the Swedish army arrived at their advanced posts, they were taken entirely by surprise.
He also calculated that when Narva was in his hands the way would be open for him to advance on Riga.
CHAPTER X.
He said that he expected to be beaten at first by the Swedes.
Narva, as appears by the map, is situated on the sea-coast, near the frontier--much nearer than Riga.
Although his army was very much smaller than that of the Russians, he immediately set out on his march to Narva; but, instead of moving along the regular roads, and so falling into the ambuscade which the Russians had laid for him, he turned off into back and circuitous by-ways, so as to avoid the snare altogether.
In this case twenty thousand of the Russian soldiers were left dead upon the field.
Riga was a very important commercial port, and there were a great many wealthy Dutch merchants there, whose interests the Dutch government were very anxious to protect.
The place was strongly fortified, and the garrison, though comparatively weak, defended it with great bravery.
The King of Sweden at this time was Charles XII.
The only cause of quarrel which Peter pretended to have against the king was the uncivil treatment which he had received at the hands of the Governor of Riga in refusing to allow him to see the fortifications when he passed through that city on his tour.
The Swedes, on the other hand, lost only two or three thousand.
His name was General Croy.
The surprise of the Russians, and the confusion consequent upon it, were greatly increased by the state of the weather; for there was a violent snow-storm at the time, and the snow, blowing into the Russians' faces, prevented their seeing what the numbers were of the enemy so suddenly assaulting them, or taking any effectual measures to restore their own ranks to order when once deranged.
In this pitiful plight the whole body of prisoners were driven off, like a flock of sheep, by a small body of Swedish soldiery, for a distance of about a league on the road toward Russia, and then left to find the rest of the way themselves.
He set about raising recruits in all parts of the empire.
So he set a train of negotiations on foot for making a long truce with the Turks, not wishing to have two wars on his hands at the same time. When he had accomplished this object, he formed a league with the kingdoms of Poland and Denmark to make war upon Sweden.
Besides those who were killed, immense numbers were taken prisoners. General Croy, and all the other principal generals in command, were among the prisoners.
They call themselves Conservatives, and wish to preserve every thing as it is.
But these assurances of the priests proved, unfortunately for the poor Guards, to be entirely unfounded.
From the agony of these sufferers he extorted the names of innumerable victims, who, as fast as they were named, were seized and put to death.
Their plan was, first, to take possession of the city by means of the Guards, who were to be recalled for this purpose from their distant posts, and by their assistance to murder all the foreigners.
It was so in this case.
However this may have been, the affection seemed to increase as he grew older, and as the attacks of it were most decided and violent when he was in a passion, they had the effect, in connection with his coarse and dreadful language and violent demeanor, to make him appear at such times more like some ugly monster of fiction than like a man.
The ugly aspect which his countenance and demeanor exhibited at such times was greatly aggravated by a nervous affection of the head and face which attacked him, particularly when he was in a passion, and which produced convulsive twitches of the muscles that drew his head by jerks to one side, and distorted his face in a manner that was dreadful to behold.
The number of men was about ten thousand.
But the effect was the contrary.
Many of the leading families, anticipating serious trouble, moved away.
Two or three thousand of them were killed, and all the rest were surrounded and made prisoners.
Peter, however, caused the three authors of the address, which was to have been made to Sophia, calling upon her to assume the crown, to be sent to the convent, and there hung before Sophia's windows.
They could not depend upon the rumors which came to them at so great a distance, and they were determined to inform themselves on the spot whether he were alive or dead, and when he was coming home.
It was this sympathy on the part of the clergy which gave the officers and soldiers of the Guards their courage and confidence in daring to persist in their march to Moscow in defiance of the army of General Gordon, brought out to oppose them.
Of course, all her ambitious aspirations were now forever extinguished, and the last gleam of earthly hope faded away from her mind.
If it is good, let it stand.
The sanction of religion--the thought that they are fighting in the cause of God and of duty, nerves their arms, and gives them that confidence in the result which is almost essential to victory.
General Gordon came up with the rebels about forty miles from Moscow.
The two armies approached each other.
The deputies returned with all speed to Moscow, and reported that the Guards were on their march in full strength toward the city.
He immediately set out on his return to Moscow in a state of rage and fury against the rebels that it would be impossible to describe.
They wished to ascertain for themselves whether Peter was dead or alive, and if alive, what had become of him.
A furious battle followed, in which the Guards were entirely defeated.
In civil commotions of this kind occurring in any of the ancient non-Protestant countries in Europe, it is always a question of the utmost moment which side the Church and the clergy espouse.
In executing this plan, negotiations were first cautiously opened with the Guards, and they readily acceded to the proposals made to them.
At such times he would utter most dreadful imprecations against those who should dare to oppose him, and would work himself up into such a fury as to give those who conversed with him an exceedingly unfavorable opinion of his temper and character.
Others packed up and concealed their valuables.
Such were the horrible means by which Peter attempted to strike terror into his subjects, and to put down the spirit of conspiracy and rebellion.
They were fighting for the honor of his cause and for the defense of his holy religion, and they might rely upon it that he would not suffer them to be harmed.
The Princess Sophia was closely confined in her convent.
She took the veil in the convent where she was confined, and went as a nun into the cloisters with the other sisters.
But, notwithstanding all these precautions, Peter did not feel entirely safe.
The Princess Sophia, worn out with the agitations and dangers through which she had passed, and crushed in spirit by the dreadful scenes to which her brother had exposed her, now determined to withdraw wholly from the scene.
At length he stepped forth mincingly into full view, trotted up, and sniffed inquisitively.
Why should he not climb up and help himself?
This he did not regard as stealing, but merely as the exaction of a small and reasonable tribute from a Society which had of late neglected to feed him any too well.
What, then, was in the basket?
Something of an expert in dealing with traps, he made up his mind that he would try to circumvent this one.
The look which he kept upon the basket was no less vigilant than before, but there was now a tinge of scorn in it.
The mink was puzzled.
To the bird on the basket the coming of those velvet footsteps were like the scamper of a frightened sheep.
The fox was surprised to find the trout lying scattered about the grass, some of them bitten and mangled.
Seeing nothing to take alarm at, it made a wide circuit, ran behind the cabin, and reappeared, as the fox had done, at the corner nearest the wagon.
The trout were there in the basket simply because the fishing had been so good.
He settled himself back upon his haunches to spring into the wagon.
At a deliberate pace, quite unlike his usual eager and darting movements, he made off down the clearing toward the water.
A Basket of Fish
He might have feasted to his heart's content, and incurred no penalty more serious than the disapproval of the tethered horse, had he not been quite so amazingly clever.
The horse it paid no heed to.
He had once been nipped.
The fox, having swallowed as much as he could hold, stood up, stretched himself, and licked his chaps.
But it was just here that the red prowler's cunning overreached itself. The basket in the wagon was full of trout, and there was no trap to be feared.
He did not take time to look up and see what it was.
But the fox did not want him to come out.
Thereupon--for the mink lacks the fox's hair-splitting astuteness, and does not take long to make up its mind--it clambered nimbly up through one of the wheels and fell straightway upon the fish-basket.
But what did he care for the disapproval of the sorrel horse?
He drew back hastily and sat down on his tail, ears cocked and head tilted to one side, to consider.
He shifted his fore-paws to the back of the wagon, and studied the situation.
He saw the basket lying on the ground, and the angry owl clawing at it.
As her talons clawed at the wickerwork, feeling for a hold, the head of the mink, on its long, snaky neck, darted forth, reached up, and struck its fine white fangs into her thigh.
It was just at this point in the mink's adventure that the fox returned to the clearing.
But the great owl's armor of feathers, though it looked so soft and fluffy, was in fact amazingly resistant.
He snatched up the two biggest fish in his jaws and trotted off with them to the woods, glancing back over his shoulder as he went.
They can catch the squeak of a mouse at a distance which, for ordinary ears, would make the sharp clucking of a chipmunk inaudible.
He was not to be caught again, not he.
But never for an instant did he take his eyes off that slightly moving lid. He lay with his feet gathered under him, every muscle ready for action, expecting each moment to find himself involved in a desperate battle for the prize he was enjoying.
What was the great owl trying to get at, when the precious fish were all spread out before her?
At the back of the clearing, beneath a solitary white birch tree just bursting into green, stood a squatter's log cabin, long deserted, its door and window gone, its roof of poles and bark half fallen in.
There is no peace counsellor like a contented belly.
He halted to take it in thoroughly.
He concluded that they were still in the basket, and that the owl was trying to get at them.
At first he thought it was a rabbit; but it was too big for a rabbit, and besides, it did not hop.
He forbade them to touch the wolf.
Then the hunters came tearing up on their foaming horses.
But the hunter carried little Ailbe home with him on the horse's back. And he found a new mother there to receive him.
And there, with her five children about her in a happy circle, the kind wolf-mother sat and ate the good things which the Bishop's friends had sent him.
It was Ailbe's wolf-mother.
And the good Bishop was true to her.
But the child she loved best was none of those in furry coats and fine whiskers that looked like her; it was the blue-eyed Saint at the top of the table in his robes of purple and white.
So he screamed and struggled to get away from the big hunter, and he called to the wolves in their own language to come and help him.
But the Bishop himself was not with them.
And so it was.
So after following them for miles, the five wolves gradually dropped farther and farther behind.
ABBIE FARWELL BROWN
His second mother was the kind wolf.
William drew a deep breath.
He was intoxicated with pride.
Determined and eager was the eye that the small girl turned upon William, and William realised that his time had come.
The kitten, a mass of fury and lust for revenge, came flying through the window. William hid behind a laurel bush till it had passed, then set off down the road.
She was like some prophetess of old.
It was the work of a few minutes to remove the bacon from beneath the big pewter cover and substitute the kitten, to put a tablespoonful of salt into the coffee, and to put a two-days'-old paper in place of that morning's.
Now his thoughts were going over some of its most exquisite moments--the moments when the pea and the gardener's head met and rebounded with such satisfactory force; the moment when he swung along the high road, monarch of a caravan and a mule and the whole wide world; the moment when the scarecrow hunched up and collapsed so realistically; the cat covered with green paint....
William had fallen on to a soft bank of grass.
His spirits sank a little as he approached the gate.
But the fat man was very fat, and the fat woman was very fat, and the donkey man was very old, and William was young and very fleet, so in less than ten minutes they gave up the pursuit and returned panting and quarrelling to the road.
Whatever the explanation, the mule suddenly started forward and galloped at full speed down the hill.
He felt that the time had come to give himself up to justice, but he wanted, as the popular saying is, to be sure of "getting his money's worth." There was the tin half full of green paint in the tool shed. He'd had his eye on it for some time.
The mule continued his mad career down the hill, his reins trailing in the dust.
A small boy came down the road and saw William hesitating at the open gateway.
She screamed at him furiously in reply. Then along the road could be seen the figure of a fat man carrying a fishing rod.
Hearing, therefore, a heavy step on the stairs, he seized several pieces of toast and fled.
The mule may not have been used to the whip; a wasp may have just stung him at that particular minute; a wandering demon may have entered into him.
There was a small blue bruise on his shining head.
There were several things that he had wanted to do for some time, but hadn't managed to do yet.
William had sometimes idly imagined the impact of a pea sent violently from a pea-shooter with the gardener's bald head.
William's family had no real faith in the Sunday-school as a corrective to William's inherent wickedness, but they knew that no Sabbath peace or calm was humanly possible while William was in the house.
No one seemed to be near it. William looked through the windows.
He was driving a caravan.
It was quite a suitable adventure for his last day of unregeneration.
But William had discreetly retired.
William judged from the smile that he had laid his formal complaint before authority.
There were, in short, whole fields of crime entirely unexplored.
In the immediate future, however, there were various quite important things to be done.
With one wild glance at the scene of devastation and anger, William turned and fled through the wood.
It bounced back quite hard.
After the class the pink-checked girl (whose name most appropriately was Deborah) stalked William for several yards and finally cornered him.
All these things--and others--must be done before the reformation.
He went quietly round to the tool shed.
Before there had been a lifetime of experiment before him, and he had put off this one idly in favour of something more pressing.
To William the idea of reform was new and startling and not wholly unattractive.
Phrases floated to him through the summer air.
"William, I think you ought to turn.
He skirted the school by a field path in case any of those narrow souls paid to employ so aimlessly the precious hours of his youth might be there. They would certainly be tactless enough to question him as he passed the door.
He felt on the whole exhilarated by the adventure.
CHAPTER XII
He could see through the trees the fat caravan-owner gesticulating at the door.
The gardener retired grumbling to the potting shed, so, for the present, all was well.
He had almost forgotten the stormy and decidedly unpleasant scene with his father.
He almost forgot to cling to the seat. For not one scream came but many.
William gazed pensively from his bedroom window.
It was altogether a most fascinating caravan.
She heaved a sigh of relief.
William did not know how to drive, but it did not seem to matter.
The air was rent by their angry shouts. A group of highly appreciative villagers collected round them.
"They've wrote to say you wasn't in school."
A return in the afternoon is ignominious and humiliating.
There are several explanations of what happened then.
Certainly by this time the gardener would have complained to his father, probably the schoolmistress would have sent a note. Also--someone had been scratched by the cat.
William noticed that his father looked pale and harassed.
Later in the day the gardener might lay his formal complaint before authority, but later in the day was later in the day.
Dusk was falling.
William decided that all things considered it was best to make a day of it.
"'E's got conversion," she said to William.
It was the last day of his old life.
He hid the pea-shooter, assumed his famous expression of innocence, and felt distinctly cheered.
After all it was his last day.
But he felt also in need of bodily sustenance, so he purchased a bun and a bottle of lemonade at a neighbouring shop and sat by the roadside to recover.
Then he joined the main road.
He neatly escaped the donkey cart himself, but he crashed the caravan into it with such force that the caravan broke a shaft and overturned completely on to the donkey cart, scattering pots and pans far and wide.
What ultimately he was going to do with his caravan he neither knew nor cared.
It originated with the housemaid whose brother was a reformed burglar now employed in a grocer's shop.
In the distance was a little gipsy's donkey cart full of pots and pans.
He began to run wildly towards the caravan.
She was so emphatic that the red cherries that hung coquettishly over the edge of her hat rattled against it as though in applause.
When all was said and done no punishment could be really adequate to a day like that.
He was driving a caravan. The very telegraph posts seemed to gape with envy and admiration as he passed.
She considered this for a minute.
But to-day, meeting her serious eye, he looked away hastily.
After all, it had been a very tiring day.
"You mean ole oppressor!"
He spoke with the bitterness that always characterised his statements of the injustice of the grown-up world.
He's shut up.
"I won't forget about the drink of ginger-ale."
"I'll go--"
"I think the village will enjoy it."
It looks like a place where there might be someone to rescue."
"Anyway, it's never very critical, is it?
Yes, I replied, in the form of amusement; and at first sight it appears harmless.
Wealth, I said, and poverty.
You ought to speak of other States in the plural number; not one of them is a city, but many cities, as they say in the game.
Very true.
they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited.
How do they act?
And yet rich men probably have a greater superiority in the science and practise of boxing than they have in military qualities.
Certainly not.
Very true, he said.
That is my belief, he replied.
Yes.
What may that be?
That is most true, he said.
And supposing he were to do this several times under the heat of a scorching sun, might he not, being an expert, overturn more than one stout personage?
That is not to be denied.
That is evident.
Very possibly, he said.
What evils?
Yes.
Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
And when they have made a good beginning in play, and by the help of music have gained the habit of good order, then this habit of order, in a manner how unlike the lawless play of the others! will accompany them in all their actions and be a principle of growth to them, and if there be any fallen places in the State will raise them up again.
Yes, I said; and you may add that they are only fed, and not paid in addition to their food, like other men; and therefore they cannot, if they would, take a journey of pleasure; they have no money to spend on a mistress or any other luxurious fancy, which, as the world goes, is thought to be happiness; and many other accusations of the same nature might be added.
he asked.
What may that be?
And therefore we must consider whether in appointing our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness individually, or whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State as a whole.
That is not likely; and yet there might be a danger to the poor State if the wealth of many States were to be gathered into one.
I said.
I would allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity; that, I think, is the proper limit.
Does not like always attract like?
And what, I said, will be the best limit for our rulers to fix when they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go?
Hardly, if they came upon him at once.
Is that true?
Yes, he said; the lawlessness of which you speak too easily steals in.
Our potters also might be allowed to repose on couches, and feast by the fireside, passing round the winecup, while their wheel is conveniently at hand, and working at pottery only as much as they like; in this way we might make every class happy--and then, as you imagine, the whole State would be happy.
And the result will be that he becomes a worse potter?
What are they?
Also, I said, the State, if once started well, moves with accumulating force like a wheel.
And for this reason, I said, I shall not attempt to legislate further about them.
And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was perfect in his art would easily be a match for two stout and well-to-do gentlemen who were not boxers?
Yes, he said; that is not so difficult.
And thus the whole State will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will receive the proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them.
Here then, I said, is another order which will have to be conveyed to our guardians: Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing.
But do not put this idea into our heads; for, if we listen to you, the husbandman will be no longer a husbandman, the potter will cease to be a potter, and no one will have the character of any distinct class in the State.
What do you mean?
Why so?
Certainly not.
How so?
So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;--he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.
To be sure.
That is true, he said.
I think that you are quite right.
Very true, he said.
But, if so, we mean different things, and he is speaking of something which is not a State.
Very good, he said.
Likely enough.
You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?
What, now, I said, if he were able to run away and then turn and strike at the one who first came up?
The red dragon was slain, and the white one, gliding through a cleft in the rock, disappeared.
Merlin became his chief adviser, and often assisted the king by his magical arts.
At this time Vortigern reigned in Britain.
At one time he appeared as a dwarf, at others as a damsel, a page, or even a greyhound or a stag.
The edifice, when brought by the workmen to a certain height, three times fell to the ground, without any apparent cause.
Merlin was the son of no mortal father, but of an Incubus, one of a class of beings not absolutely wicked, but far from good, who inhabit the regions of the air.
[Footnote: Buried under beare.
But do thou hasten to King Arthur, and charge him from me to undertake, without delay, the quest of the Sacred Graal.
After this event Merlin was never more known to hold converse with any mortal but Viviane, except on one occasion.
CHAPTER III
They could find no praise warm enough for the man who had "organized the echoes" and "tamed the lightning," and whose career was so picturesque with eventful and romantic development.
Nobody was there.
He contrived so many little tools to cheapen the work that he made lots of money.
The main pipe, which was full of mercury, was about seven and one-half feet from the floor.
Another glimpse of the "social side" is afforded in the following little series of pen-pictures of the same place and time: "I had my laboratory at the top of the Bergmann works, after moving from Menlo Park.
The wanderings led to the old ore-milling plant at Edison, now practically a mass of deserted buildings all going to decay. It was a depressing sight, marking such titanic but futile struggles with nature.
I didn't see a single exception except the waiters and myself.
"I have often been surprised at Edison's wonderful capacity for the instant visual perception of differences in materials that were invisible to others until he would patiently point them out.
In fact, for weeks together it seemed as though no Parisian paper was considered complete and up to date without an article on Edison.
Edison never sought Society; but "Society" has never ceased to seek him, and to-day, as ever, the pressure upon him to give up his work and receive honors, meet distinguished people, or attend public functions, is intense.
We stayed a couple of hours, and Gounod sang and played for us.
I walked out and tried to find the boat.
Over 1500 men were finally employed.
Invention does not smooth the way for the practical men and make them possible.
The exuberant wit and fancy of the feuilletonists seized upon his various inventions evolving from them others of the most extraordinary nature with which to bedazzle and bewilder the reader.
He has often said that time meant very little to him, that he had but a small realization of its passage, and that ten or twenty years were as nothing when considering the development of a vital invention.
It was the first linguistic concourse since Babel times.
When I came back to the depot, Mr. Roberts was there, and insisted on carrying my satchel for me.
'There,' said Bergmann, 'you see it's not here that you must look for your loss.' This satisfied the landlord, and he started off to his other tenants.
We must let Edison tell the story of some of his experiences:
Then the telephone company gave me a dinner, and the engineers of France; and I attended the dinner celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of photography.
One day one of the directors brought in three or four ladies to the works to see the new electric-light system.
But woe betide the one who has committed an act of bad faith, treachery, dishonesty, or ingratitude; THEN Edison can show what it is for a strong man to get downright mad.
It rather bores him.
We started out of the little inlet and got into the Channel, and that boat went in seventeen directions simultaneously.
One very cold winter's day he entered the laboratory library in fine spirits, "doing" the decayed dandy, with imaginary cane under his arm, struggling to put on a pair of tattered imaginary gloves, with a self-satisfied smirk and leer that would have done credit to a real comedian.
"Soon after, the business had grown so large that E. H. Johnson and I went in as partners, and Bergmann rented an immense factory building at the corner of Avenue B and East Seventeenth Street, New York, six stories high and covering a quarter of a block.
It might be expected that Edison would have extreme and even radical ideas on the subject of education--and he has, as well as a perfect readiness to express them, because he considers that time is wasted on things that are not essential: "What we need," he has said, "are men capable of doing work.
At other times the unsettled condition persists, and his spleen is vented not only on the original instigator but upon others who may have occasion to see him, sometimes hours afterward.
In fact, when I was examined by the Mutual Life Insurance Company, in 1873, my lung expansion was taken by the doctor, and the old gentleman was there at the time.
But the contrast was none the less striking and effective.
It was felt that, after all, that which the great exposition exemplified at its best--the triumph of genius over matter, over ignorance, over superstition--met with its due recognition when Edison came to participate, and to felicitate a noble nation that could show so much in the victories of civilization and the arts, despite its long trials and its long struggle for liberty.
"President Diaz, of Mexico, visited this country with Mrs. Diaz, a highly educated and beautiful woman.
Some were mere consumers of time; others were gladly welcomed, like Lord Kelvin, the greatest physicist of the last century, with whom Edison was always in friendly communication.
Simply because if ice sank to the bottoms of rivers, lakes, and oceans as fast as it froze, those places would be frozen up and there would be no water left.
Man is a social animal, and that describes Edison; but it does not describe accurately the inventor asking to be let alone.
Then the caller, no matter how important or what his mission, is likely to realize his utter insignificance and be sent away without accomplishing his object.
Edison has been seen sometimes almost beside himself with anger at a stupid mistake or inexcusable oversight on the part of an assistant, his voice raised to a high pitch, sneeringly expressing his feelings of contempt for the offender; and yet when the culprit, like a bad school-boy, has left the room, Edison has immediately returned to his normal poise, and the incident is a thing of the past.
Undoubtedly in the days to come Edison will not only be recognized as an intellectual prodigy, but as a prodigy of industry--of hard work.
That he has had the usual experience in running machines will be evidenced by the following little story from Mr. Mallory: "About three years ago I had a motor-car of a make of which Mr. Edison had already two cars; and when the car was received I made inquiry as to whether any repair parts were carried by any of the various garages in Easton, Pennsylvania, near our cement works.
He was then less than fourteen years old.
For over a score of years, dating from his marriage to Miss Miller, Edison's happy and perfect domestic life has been spent at Glenmont, a beautiful property acquired at that time in Llewellyn Park, on the higher slopes of Orange Mountain, New Jersey, within easy walking distance of the laboratory at the foot of the hill in West Orange.
The managing director of the English railroad owning this line was Forbes, who heard I was coming over, and placed the private saloon at my disposal.
He then turned around, and to my great surprise explained the whole thing to his friends.
Among all the men I have had associated with me, he had the commercial instinct most highly developed."
Bergmann was a man of great executive ability and carried economy of manufacture to the limit.
In a short time he became salivated, and his teeth got loose.
It was taken home to Glenmont.
I thought it was only Philadelphia!'"
I asked one of the waiters concerning the boat itself, and was taken to see the engineer, and went down to look at the engines, and saw the captain.
The reason why those little preliminary explosions took place was that a little had spattered out on the edge of the filter paper, and had dried first and exploded.
My wife had me wear the little red button, but when I saw Americans coming I would slip it out of my lapel, as I thought they would jolly me for wearing it."
When my wife and I arrived at the top, we found that Gounod, the composer, was there.
She stayed there about an hour and a half.
Nobody knew where it was; hours passed before it could be found; and when at last the accompanying letter was produced, it had an office date stamp right over the signature of the royal president.
If the visitor persists until Edison has seen both sides of the controversy, he is always willing to frankly admit that his own views may be unsound and that his opponent is right.
His father was with him.
There are many individuals who derive an intense and not improper pleasure in regalia or military garments, with plenty of gold braid and brass buttons, and thus arrayed, in appearing before their friends and neighbors.
He has confronted many a serious physical risk, and counts himself lucky to have come through without a scratch or scar.
A modification of this was afterward used on the French Atlantic lines for making an artificial horizon to take observations for position at sea.
She was a terrific 'rubberneck.' She jumped all over the machinery, and I had one man especially to guard her dress.
In fact, after such a controversy, both parties going after each other hammer and tongs, the arguments TO HIM being carried on at the very top of one's voice to enable him to hear, and FROM HIM being equally loud in the excitement of the discussion, he has often said: "I see now that my position was absolutely rotten."
No one ever goes away from Edison in doubt as to what he thinks or means, but he is ever shy and diffident to a degree if the talk turns on himself rather than on his work.
He was bitten too near the top of the spinal column, and came too late!'"
But it didn't work. We had an arc there of a most terrifying character, but they never moved a muscle." Another episode at Goerck Street did not find the visitors quite so stoical.
Anger with him, however, is a good deal like the story attributed to Napoleon:
If the authors were asked, after having written the foregoing pages, to explain here the reason for Edison's success, based upon their observations so far made, they would first answer that he combines with a vigorous and normal physical structure a mind capable of clear and logical thinking, and an imagination of unusual activity.
No theory of education that aggravates this danger is consistent with national well-being."
It was only during the past summer (1910) that one of the writers spent a Sunday with him riding over the beautiful New Jersey roads in an automobile, Edison in the highest spirits and pointing out with the keenest enjoyment the many beautiful views of valley and wood.
At the conclusion of the ore-milling experiments, when practically his entire fortune was sunk in an enterprise that had to be considered an impossibility, when at the age of fifty he looked back upon five or six years of intense activity expended apparently for naught, when everything seemed most black and the financial clouds were quickly gathering on the horizon, not the slightest idea of repining entered his mind.
I did not know that it would decompose by water.
His sense of humor is intense, but not of the hothouse, overdeveloped variety.
I was in the dark-room, where I had a lot of chloride of sulphur, a very corrosive liquid.
Nature at another point had outstripped him, yet he had broadened his own sum of knowledge to a prodigious extent.
From now until I am seventy-five years of age, I expect to keep more or less busy with my regular work, not, however, working as many hours or as hard as I have in the past.
I wouldn't give a penny for the ordinary college graduate, except those from the institutes of technology.
Before the visitor can fully explain his side of the matter some point is brought up that starts Edison off again, and new arguments from his viewpoint are poured forth.
"In my experimental plant for concentrating iron ore in the northern part of New Jersey, we had a vertical drier, a column about nine feet square and eighty feet high.
She wanted to know everything.
I even helped him get up tools until it occurred to me that this was too rapid a process of getting rid of my money, as I hadn't the heart to cut the price when it was originally fair.
Then they sent to Reid my decoration, and they tried to put a sash on me, but I could not stand for that.
One of his favorite jokes is to enter the legal department with an air of great humility and apply for a job as an inventor!
Near by may be noticed a bronze replica of the Edison gold medal which was founded in the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the first award of which was made to Elihu Thomson during the present year (1910).
He said that some twenty years ago a suit was sent to him from Orange, and measurements were made from it, and that every suit since had been made from these measurements.
One of the cars equipped with his battery is the Bailey, and Mr. Bee tells the following story in regard to it: "One day Colonel Bailey, of Amesbury, Massachusetts, who was visiting the Automobile Show in New York, came out to the laboratory to see Mr. Edison, as the latter had expressed a desire to talk with him on his next visit to the metropolis.
An ordinary optic nerve is about the thickness of a thread, but his is like a cord.
But in this respect he is singularly free, and his spells of anger are really few.
No better illustration of this characteristic can be found than in the development of the nickel pocket for the storage battery, an element the size of a short lead-pencil, on which upward of five years were spent in experiments, costing over a million dollars, day after day, always apparently with the same tubes but with small variations carefully tabulated in the note-books.
He had the grand dining-room for his laboratory.
I did not know it at the time, but I had made bromide of nitrogen.
There must have been 100 people aboard.
"While at Foot's Cray, I met some of the backers of Ferranti, then putting up a gigantic alternating-current dynamo near London to send ten or fifteen thousand volts up into the main district of the city for electric lighting.
"When the first lamp-works were started at Menlo Park, one of my experiments seemed to show that hot mercury gave a better vacuum in the lamp than cold mercury.
I am interested in every department of science, arts, and manufacture. I read all the time on astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, music, metaphysics, mechanics, and other branches--political economy, electricity, and, in fact, all things that are making for progress in the world.
I thereupon started to heat it.
Then the king made it known to all the land, that if any person could discover the secret, and find out where it was that the princesses danced in the night, he should have the one he liked best for his wife, and should be king after his death; but whoever tried and did not succeed, after three days and nights, should be put to death.
But the youngest said, 'I don't know how it is, while you are so happy I feel very uneasy; I am sure some mischance will befall us.' 'You simpleton,' said the eldest, 'you are always afraid; have you forgotten how many kings' sons have already watched in vain? And as for this soldier, even if I had not given him his sleeping draught, he would have slept soundly enough.'
However, on the third night the soldier carried away one of the golden cups as a token of where he had been.
When the twelve princesses heard this they laughed heartily; and the eldest said, 'This fellow too might have done a wiser thing than lose his life in this way!' Then they rose up and opened their drawers and boxes, and took out all their fine clothes, and dressed themselves at the glass, and skipped about as if they were eager to begin dancing.
Just as he was going to lie down, the eldest of the princesses brought him a cup of wine; but the soldier threw it all away secretly, taking care not to drink a drop.
And the king asked the soldier which of them he would choose for his wife; and he answered, 'I am not very young, so I will have the eldest.'--And they were married that very day, and the soldier was chosen to be the king's heir.
That never happened before.' But the eldest said, 'It is only our princes, who are shouting for joy at our approach.'
He was as well received as the others had been, and the king ordered fine royal robes to be given him; and when the evening came he was led to the outer chamber.
Now it chanced that an old soldier, who had been wounded in battle and could fight no longer, passed through the country where this king reigned: and as he was travelling through a wood, he met an old woman, who asked him where he was going.
When they came to the stairs, the soldier ran on before the princesses, and laid himself down; and as the twelve sisters slowly came up very much tired, they heard him snoring in his bed; so they said, 'Now all is quite safe'; then they undressed themselves, put away their fine clothes, pulled off their shoes, and went to bed.
But the king's son soon fell asleep; and when he awoke in the morning he found that the princesses had all been dancing, for the soles of their shoes were full of holes.
As soon as the time came when he was to declare the secret, he was taken before the king with the three branches and the golden cup; and the twelve princesses stood listening behind the door to hear what he would say.
And when the king asked him.
Then they came to another grove of trees, where all the leaves were of gold; and afterwards to a third, where the leaves were all glittering diamonds.
They danced on till three o'clock in the morning, and then all their shoes were worn out, so that they were obliged to leave off. The princes rowed them back again over the lake (but this time the soldier placed himself in the boat with the eldest princess); and on the opposite shore they took leave of each other, the princesses promising to come again the next night.
The same thing happened the second and third night: so the king ordered his head to be cut off.
There was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters.
One of the princesses went into each boat, and the soldier stepped into the same boat with the youngest.
A king's son soon came.
'Where do my twelve daughters dance at night?' he answered, 'With twelve princes in a castle under ground.' And then he told the king all that had happened, and showed him the three branches and the golden cup which he had brought with him.
There they all landed, and went into the castle, and each prince danced with his princess; and the soldier, who was all the time invisible, danced with them too; and when any of the princesses had a cup of wine set by her, he drank it all up, so that when she put the cup to her mouth it was empty.
They slept in twelve beds all in one room; and when they went to bed, the doors were shut and locked up; but every morning their shoes were found to be quite worn through as if they had been danced in all night; and yet nobody could find out how it happened, or where they had been.
There he was to sit and watch where they went to dance; and, in order that nothing might pass without his hearing it, the door of his chamber was left open.
"I wish you luck with him."
I knew in a moment by the way he handled me, that he was used to horses; he spoke gently, and his gray eye had a kindly, cheery look in it.
We soon turned up one of the side streets, and about halfway up that we turned into a very narrow street, with rather poor-looking houses on one side, and what seemed to be coach-houses and stables on the other.
I'll give twenty-four for him."
32 A Horse Fair
"Yes, Dolly, as gentle as your own kitten; come and pat him."
"Have you got a good one?"
Half an hour after we were on our way to London, through pleasant lanes and country roads, until we came into the great London thoroughfare, on which we traveled steadily, till in the twilight we reached the great city.
I could not help reaching out my head toward him.
"I think so," replied my owner.
"Thank you, governor," and he rode on.
"Done," said the salesman; "and you may depend upon it there's a monstrous deal of quality in that horse, and if you want him for cab work he's a bargain."
The gas lamps were already lighted; there were streets to the right, and streets to the left, and streets crossing each other, for mile upon mile.
"Say twenty-five and you shall have him."
I was put with two or three other strong, useful-looking horses, and a good many people came to look at us.
He offered twenty-three pounds for me, but that was refused, and he walked away.
He stroked my face kindly.
Then the hard-faced man came back again and offered twenty-three pounds.
"Do, Polly, it's just what he wants; and I know you've got a beautiful mash ready for me."
No doubt a horse fair is a very amusing place to those who have nothing to lose; at any rate, there is plenty to see.
"Halloo!" cried a voice.
A very close bargain was being driven, for my salesman began to think he should not get all he asked, and must come down; but just then the gray-eyed man came back again.
My owner pulled up at one of the houses and whistled.
"Twenty-four ten," said my friend, in a very decided tone, "and not another sixpence--yes or no?"
He gave me a good feed of oats and stood by while I ate it, talking to himself and talking to me.
"Is he gentle, father?"
How good it felt!
There was one man, I thought, if he would buy me, I should be happy. He was not a gentleman, nor yet one of the loud, flashy sort that call themselves so.
One or two more came who did not mean business.
"I am afraid," cut in a voice shaken with emotion.
She had brought this thing upon herself.
"Bobby McGinnis, why don't you help me?" she demanded, tearfully.
She paused again, and again the man was silent.
Two minutes later Bobby McGinnis himself stood tall and straight just inside the door.
They all looked to her.
"Don't you know that I am alone here--that I have no friends but you and Patty?" she went on tremulously.
It was her own fault.
Sometimes it seems almost as if you were afraid----"
"Didn't I ask you to help me?
"But you don't mean--you can't mean----" McGinnis paused, his breath suspended.
Why don't you come to me frankly and freely, and tell me the best way to deal with these people?"
The man had half turned his face so that only his profile showed clean-cut and square-chinned against the close-shut door.
Frank, in particular, was disturbed, they said.
Gradually her confused senses were coming into something like order.
We--we will do it together--this work."
"Bobby, I did not understand--I did not know," she said gently.
Their letters showed unmistakably their impatience at the delay, and questioned her as to her health and welfare, but could set no date for their return.
Very softly Margaret crossed the room and touched the man's shoulder.
Added to all this, she was lonely.
He had stepped forward as she fell back, and his eyes still blazed into hers.
If the man heard, he did not heed.
Margaret made an impatient gesture.
Slowly her dazed thoughts were taking shape.
She was still the little girl with the teaspoon and the bowl of sand; and the chasm yawned as wide as ever.
She was, in fact, perilously near a breakdown.
Didn't I appoint us a committee of two to do the work?" Her voice shook, and her chin trembled like that of a grieved child.
Even Bobby McGinnis, when she saw him at all--which was seldom--treated her with a frigid deference that was inexpressibly annoying to her.
"No.
Over by the table Margaret stood silent, motionless, her eyes on the bowed figure of the man before her.
To tell the truth, Margaret was tired, discouraged, and homesick.
To Margaret, however, the whole thing seemed hopelessly small: there was so much to do, so little done!
"You sent for me?" he asked.
"Yes." The lips closed firmly over the single word.
"Yes." Again that strained, almost harsh monosyllable.
Then had come the good news that Frank was out of danger, though still far too weak to undertake the long journey home.
I will see him now." And Patty, wondering vaguely what had come to her gentle-eyed, gentle-voiced mistress--as she insisted upon calling Margaret--fled precipitately.
There was no answer.
Here she was the head, the strong tower of defense, the one to whom everybody came with troubles, perplexities, and griefs.
Of course she loved him!
There was no human being to whom she could turn for comfort.
She should have seen--have understood.
As for Frank himself--he had not written her since his illness.
For months her strength, time, nerves, and sympathies had been taxed to the utmost; and now that there had come a breathing space, when the intricate machinery of her scheme could run for a moment without her hand at the throttle, she was left weak and nerveless.
"Margaret!" choked the man, as he fell on his knees and caught the girl's two hands to his lips.
"I always send for you--if I see you at all, and yet you know how hard I'm trying to help these people, and that you are the only one here that can help me."
Margaret sprang to her feet.
And why should she not--love him?
All the pent loneliness of the past weeks and months burst forth in a stinging whip of retort.
Perhaps I do let you send for me, instead of coming of my own free will; but I'm never without the thought of you, and the hope of catching somewhere a glimpse of even your dress.
But, after all, why should he not love her?
He was good and true and noble, and for years he had loved her--she remembered now their childish compact, and she bitterly reproached herself for not thinking of it before--it might have saved her this....
Still, did she want to save herself this?
"Bobby!" breathed Margaret in surprised dismay, falling back before the fire in the eyes that suddenly turned and flashed straight into hers. "Why, Bobby!"
"I don't dare to trust myself within sight of your dear eyes, or within touch of your dear hands--though all the while I'm hungry for both.
Where, and how could she do more good in the world than right here with this strong, loving heart to help her?...
Was it not, after all, the very best thing that could have happened?
"Won't have to--stay--away!"
From the Spencers she heard irregularly.
"Don't you know what I'm trying to do?" she asked.
Margaret raised an imperious hand.
"Yes, I sent for you." She paused, but the man did not speak, and in a moment she went on hurriedly, feverishly.
Doctor, what shall I do?"
CHAPTER II
The doctor laughed.
"As if you weren't always doing things for people," he said fondly.
When I arrived on the scene they were the center of an admiring crowd of children,"--Mrs.
Her heart is all right."
"Just there lies the greatest problem of all.
It was not easy for "Mag of the Alley" to become at once Margaret Kendall, the dainty little daughter of a well-bred, fastidious mother.
So far her horror is tempered by the fact that she is sure I didn't know before that there were any people who did not have all these things.
It's in her--the gentleness and the refinement.
Mrs. Kendall laughed softly.
"Why, he's almost twice her size."
Why, Harry,"--Mrs.
ain't that what she's always doin' for folks--somethin' ter make 'em happy?
Then he grew suddenly grave.
Grass and leaves were strewn over the snares; chips, hewn branches, and other evidences of their work were removed.
I shall have everything finished in a flash."
The power lines merely come up to the pole on one side, pass through the insulators, and go away from the pole on the other side.
If you know those habits, you can predict just what they will do at any time.
"Just picture it, my dear chap!
He thought about this a while, then asked, "But suppose the Scientist comes up on the ledge during the day and catches you asleep?"
He jumped to the bird's side, but the Phoenix waved him away with its wing.
And consider the poetic justice of it!
The Scientist may show up any minute."
"What did you say?"
"I have been hunted long enough, my boy, to have learned a few tricks. It is merely a matter of gliding close to the ground, selecting the best shadows, and keeping a sharp lookout.
"We have one at home already," said David.
More embarrassing questions.... Well, he would have to rob his bank.
I shall now explain the rope and hatchet."
"Patience, patience!
Two days had passed since the Scientist had shown up.
But wait--why hadn't he remembered?
Now we make a noose--so--from a piece of rope, tie it to the end of the sapling, and spread the loop out on the path--this way.
"Now, run along, my boy.
It did not seem very practical to David.
We shall begin immediately--"
"How?"
The Scientist, smiling evilly as he skulks along the path!
"Hey!" he shouted.
Where is our wire?
That is where the rope and hatchet come in.
When I arrive here at night, I shall press the button to let you know that I am ready to go. A magnificent idea, isn't it?"
The Plan is far too profound for you to guess what it is.
"Well, Phoenix, that's a good idea," he said carefully.
I was just--ah--Thinking."
You have a pillow on your bed, under which the bell can be muffled."
The pliers, please."
"Curiosity killed the cat," explained the Phoenix.
Put in this way, the idea had a certain appeal, and David found himself warming to it.
Early next morning David climbed up to the ledge, bringing with him the coil of rope and the hatchet.
Of course the Phoenix's Plan was more important than any model plane could be.
But--"
But I have worked out the solution."
The thought gave David a creepy feeling on the back of his neck.
Suddenly it happened.
Everyone in the block turned out to see what had happened.
Another blue flash blazed up.
The sapling, jarred out of the notch, springing upward!
"An important problem, that.
"But how are we going to hide the wires? And what about the noise of the bell?"
When they had been chosen, David had to shinny up them to lop off their branches.
They could hear the wailing of sirens now.
"Golly, Phoenix," said David, "that's pretty clever."
But at last the saplings were set in the notches, the nooses were formed and fastened on.
First they had to find the right kind of sapling, springy and strong.
David leaned forward eagerly.
Never fear, my boy--I thought of that also.
By the light of the sparks David saw the Phoenix staggering to its feet.
"Look above you, my boy!
They gathered up the tools and walked along the hedge to the telephone pole, which was in one corner of the yard.
Then we could learn Morse code and send messages to each other.
Broken wires began to sputter ominously and fire out sparks.
There was a crash from the thicket as though someone had jumped up in it suddenly, and the Phoenix stumbled out, rubbing its eyes.
"But what are we going to do if the Scientist does get caught in one?"
He glanced over the brink. The sheer face of the scarp fell away beneath them, plunging down to the tiny trees and rocks below.
"Oh, Phoenix, Phoenix!" David jumped up and began to caper, while the Phoenix beamed.
The problems of Life, my dear fellow!--classical education completely ignores them!
"I'm glad you like them," David said politely.
"Do not be so modest, my boy!
There was a thrashing sound in the thicket, and the Phoenix appeared, looking very rumpled and yawning behind its wing.
I shall carry you on my back, of course."
For example, how do you tell a true Unicorn from a false one?"
"Well, I go to school, if that's what you mean.
As I was saying, let this be a lesson to you, my boy.
And David would settle back against a rock and watch.
It looked as though they would not get back to it.
"That's different.
Your education will include--"
"No," said David faintly.
"Now, Phoenix," he said firmly, "you have to promise me you won't go away to South America.
"Absolutely without equal!
You cut me to the quick.
Will we go to Africa?"
"Do not be so dense, my dear fellow.
The Phoenix drew itself up to its full height.
"Let's--let's do it tomorrow," he quavered.
I realize that mathematics, Greek, and Latin are excellent for the discipline of the mind.
Are there any more cookies? Ah, there are.
Your education will--"
At last the Phoenix weakly raised its head.
And I should be avoiding my clear-cut duty if I did not take this task in hand myself.
But suddenly he stopped.
They crawled through the air.
"Just as I suspected--a classical education.
The Phoenix dashed back and forth at top speed, wheeled in circles, shot straight up like a rocket--plunged, hovered, looped--rolled, soared, fluttered.
"I thought not.
"As many as you want, Phoenix.
I--puff--"
"Puff--I repeat, I am--puff--an exceedingly powerful flyer.
"What do they look like?"
The truth of the matter is that you are a lot--puff--heavier than you look.
They only bowed to one another; they did not speak, because they were going to have a party.
She sat down before the fire to wait for the little dog.
"Do you not think that I had better go home before it gets dark?"
Well I never did! . . .
"Oh what a good idea!
10 O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
O Captain!
15 To the tally of my soul, Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim, Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume, And I with my comrades there in the night.
This Dust Was Once the Man
"What do you suppose she is doing here?" I asked.
"As if I cared about my losses at bridge!
"He pointed her out to me in Piccadilly once and I have never forgotten her face."
"No, Bunny, no--the eaves," whispered Henriette.
"No," returned Henrietta, "rather that we--but there, there, Bunny, I'll manage this little thing myself.
We must get her, Bunny."
"Where then?" I asked.
For the good of our cause it is my task to lose steadily and with good grace.
"I want you during her absence to go with me to her room--"
"And now, Bunny, for the Gaster jewels."
THE ADVENTURE OF MRS.
How did you guess?"
This establishes my credit, proves my amiability, and confirms my popularity."
I must do something to warn her against this momentary weakness.
"I don't--but it is the prospect of future gain, not the reality of present losses, that has taken me off my poise," she said.
This won't do, Henriette.
There were religious pictures upon the bureau, prayer-books, and some volumes of essays of a spiritual nature were scattered about--nothing was there to indicate that the occupant was anything but a simple, sweet child of innocence except--
Oh, that woman!
This went very much against the grain at first, for, although I am scarcely more than a thief after all, I am an artistic one, and still retain the prejudice against inferior associations which an English gentleman whatever the vicissitudes of his career can never quite rid himself of.
"Yes, madam," I said, responding immediately to her call.
"To disappear now would be a confession of guilt.
"She'll skip now," said I.
Poor old Raffles used to say that she diminished his income a good ten thousand pounds a year by getting in her fine work ahead of his," explained Henriette.
"No, indeed--she never saw me before, so how could she?
Few opportunities for personal profit escaped her eye, and I was able to observe as time went on and I noted the accumulation of spoons, forks, nutcrackers, and gimcracks generally that she brought home with her after her calls upon or dinners with ladies of fashion that she had that quality of true genius which never overlooks the smallest details.
"The fact is," she added, "I have already engaged her.
Well, Henriette was right--except the Gaster jewels.
When I got the cloak back both were gone.
"What for--to rob you?"
If I had not adored her before I--but enough.
This is no place for sentiment.
Two days after my bargain with Mr. Harold Van Gilt, in which he acquired possession of the Scrappe jades and Mrs. Van Raffles and I shared the proceeds of the ten thousand dollars check, I was installed at Bolivar Lodge as head-butler and steward, my salary to consist of what I could make out of it on the side, plus ten per cent. of the winnings of my mistress.
It did not take me many days to discover that Henriette was a worthy successor to her late husband.
"You don't understand," said Henriette.
"All this powwow over another woman's maid!"
I am inclined to think--well, the moment she leaves the city let me know.
It's a trifle too subtle for a man's intellect--especially when that man is you."
"Yes!" said I. "What of it?"
"Yes," she replied.
Henriette and I, of course, knew that Fiametta de Belleville had accomplished her mission, but apparently no one else knew it.
"How should I?" I demanded.
"But you are very much excited by something, Henriette," said I. "You cannot deny that."
III
The woman's presence in our household could not be but a source of danger to our peace of mind as well as to our profits, and for the life of me I could not see why Henriette should want her there.
"She was Fiametta de Belleville, one of the most expert hands in our business.
"All right, Bunny, I'll remember," smiled Mrs. Van Raffles, and there the matter was dropped for the moment.
"That cuts us out, doesn't it?"
"And search her trunks?"
You don't suppose that I am going to risk my popularity with these Newport ladies by winning, do you?
Henriette had been to a bridge afternoon at Mrs. Gaster's and upon her return manifested an extraordinary degree of excitement.
"Yes!" I cried, breathlessly.
I followed out Henriette's instructions to the letter, and an hour later returned with the information that Fiametta was, indeed, safely on her way.
I have just sent Fiametta on an errand to Providence.
A week after Fiametta's arrival Mrs. Raffles rang hurriedly for me.
You can't guess who she was."
But I knew her the minute she took my cloak," said Henriette.
GASTER'S MAID
I had to join their club--an exclusive organization of butlers and "gentlemen's gentlemen"--otherwise valets--and in order to quiet all suspicion of my real status in the Van Raffles household I was compelled to act the part in a fashion which revolted me.
Otherwise the position was pleasant, and, as I have intimated, more than lucrative.
Her color was high, and when she spoke her voice was tremulous.
"Does it?" asked Henriette, enigmatically.
11.
5.
13.
14.
Do I practise what I preach?
Observe the Turnip in the pot. The Tern is glad that he is not!
The Shamrock.
The Cat-nip.
The Cow Bird.
The Turnip.
For Eskimos, perhaps, the Auk Performs the duties of the Stork.
The Cat-bird.
At least we can do that much.
So it was agreed that the monkey, Chee-Chee, was to do the cooking and mending; the dog was to sweep the floors; the duck was to dust and make the beds; the owl, Too-Too, was to keep the accounts, and the pig was to do the gardening.
So in this way he went on getting more and more pets.
With all these mouths to fill, and the house to look after, and no one to do the mending, and no money coming in to pay the butcher's bill, things began to look very difficult.
But he wept such big tears, and begged so hard to be allowed to stay, that the Doctor hadn't the heart to turn him out.
And often even after they got well, they did not want to go away--they liked the Doctor and his house so much.
"Never mind.
But to every one in the house he was always as gentle as a kitten.
So long as the hens lay eggs and the cow gives milk we can have omelettes and junket.
This is the last straw.
"It's a nasty thing to find under the bed.
So he took the monkey away from the Italian, gave the man a shilling and told him to go.
Don't fuss.
Don't be so fussy."
He asked couldn't he sleep in the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, if he promised not to eat the fish.
But still they didn't seem to make enough money to pay all the bills--and still the Doctor wouldn't worry.
"But he has promised me," the Doctor answered, "that he will not bite any one.
The Winter is still a long way off.
"I don't care what you call it," said his sister.
Freddie Fisher fairly fussed When he came to eat his crust! Often on the floor he'd throw it, Hoping mother wouldn't know it! Goops all hate to eat the crust; If you're told to, then you must!
Young Alexander B. McGiff Each day had a clean handkerchief. In spite of this, if you'll believe, He wiped his nose upon his sleeve! Nobody but a Goop would do it; His mother'd scold him, if she knew it.
How thoughtless was Roberto Lees! (For only thoughtless children tease). He teased the little pussy cat, He teased the puppy! Think of that! He even teased his sister, too! I think he was a Goop--don't you?
"I won't!" says young Amelia Pratt; "I won't do this!" "I won't do that!" Now isn't "won't" the naughtiest word That anyone has ever heard? Now isn't that the rudest way A Goop could answer? I should say!
A Goop that always makes me smile Is this one: Marmaduke Argyll. His mouth is full from cheek to cheek, Why should he then attempt to speak? It makes me smile, but still, the fact is, It is a most unpleasant practice.
Just look at Percival B. Sloop, A most unpleasant sort of Goop; He pokes his fingers in his nose And wipes his hands upon his clothes; He does a lot of things that you, I know, would never, never do!
When, however, substantial form is received imperfectly, so as to be, as it were, in process of being received, rather than fully impressed, the consequent quality lasts for a time but is not permanent; as may be seen when water which has been heated returns in time to its natural state.
Objection 1: It would seem that light is not a quality.
Now no local movement of a body can be instantaneous, as everything that moves from one place to another must pass through the intervening space before reaching the end: whereas the diffusion of light is instantaneous.
Therefore light is not a quality.
But if taken in its common and extended use, as applied to manifestation of every kind, it may properly be applied to spiritual things.
First, because light gives a name to the air, since by it the air becomes actually luminous.
First, the work of the first day; secondly, the work of the second day; thirdly the work of the third day.
Therefore the production of light, dividing night from day, ought not to be assigned to the first day.
Nor does the nature of a luminous body seem to admit of the withdrawal of light, so long as the body is actually present; though this might be effected by a miracle.
Others have said that light is the sun's substantial form, but this also seems impossible for two reasons.
It was fitting, then, as an evidence of the Divine wisdom, that among the works of distinction the production of light should take first place, since light is a form of the primary body, and because it is more common quality.
For this reason light disappears on the disappearance of its active cause.
But unless we are to say that darkness is a body, this does not appear to be the case.
But such names are used in their proper sense in spiritual things.
Of these movements, one is common to the entire heaven, and is the cause of day and night.
But there can be no day without light.
(2) Whether light, in corporeal things, is itself corporeal?
The second reason is because light is a common quality.
But mention is made of several kinds of formlessness, in regard to the corporeal creature.
Objection 1: It would seem that "light" is used in its proper sense in spiritual things.
Neither does it appear from what matter a body can be daily generated large enough to fill the intervening hemisphere.
And there is yet a fourth, already touched upon in the objections; that day cannot be unless light exists, which was made therefore on the first day.
Hence it appears that the diffusion of light is not the local movement of a body.
Thus, then, in the production of this light a triple distinction was made between light and darkness. First, as to the cause, forasmuch as in the substance of the sun we have the cause of light, and in the opaque nature of the earth the cause of darkness.
This, too, is impossible to those at least who believe that the sun is different in its nature from the four elements, and naturally incorruptible.
But the light of the heavenly bodies is a cause of substantial forms of earthly bodies, and also gives to colors their immaterial being, by making them actually visible.
Whether the Production of Light Is Fittingly Assigned to the First Day?
For light is common to terrestrial and celestial bodies.
We hold, then, that the movement of the heavens is twofold.
Whether the Word "Light" Is Used in Its Proper Sense in Speaking of Spiritual Things?
But color does not do this, for we do not speak of the air as colored.
In the second place, because it is impossible that what is the substantial form of one thing should be the accidental form of another; since substantial forms of their very nature constitute species: wherefore the substantial form always and everywhere accompanies the species.
Light, then, is not a sensible quality, but rather a substantial or spiritual form.
Under the first head there are four points of inquiry:
Objection 1: It would seem that the production of light is not fittingly assigned to the first day.
In its primary meaning it signifies that which makes manifest to the sense of sight; afterwards it was extended to that which makes manifest to cognition of any kind.
Hence it cannot be the substantial form of the sun.
The production of light, then, ought not to be assigned to the first day.
Therefore also does light.
Therefore the production of light ought not to be assigned to the first day.
Whether Light Is a Quality?
The other varies in proportion as it affects various bodies, and by its variations is the cause of the succession of days, months, and years.
Yet as soon as the sun is at the horizon, the whole hemisphere is illuminated from end to end.
But light is not produced by the transmutation of matter, as though matter were in receipt of a substantial form, and light were a certain inception of substantial form.
55, we use terms belonging to local movement in speaking of alteration and movement of all kinds.
But this is not the case with light since darkness is merely a privation of light.
But light is not the substantial form of air, for if it were, the air would be destroyed when light is withdrawn.
Therefore light is used in its proper sense in spiritual matters.
Light therefore is not a sensible quality.
A proof of this is that the rays of different stars produce different effects according to the diverse natures of bodies.
Thus it is, that in the account of the first day the distinction between day and night alone is mentioned; this distinction being brought about by the common movement of the heavens.
But qualities are accidents, and as such should have, not the first, but a subordinate place.
On this account it is held by some that the sun's body was made out of this nebula.
But this is the case with light and air.
For when matter receives its form perfectly, the qualities consequent upon the form are firm and enduring; as when, for instance, water is converted into fire.
Objection 1: It would seem that light is a body.
The third reason is from generation and corruption.
ON THE WORK OF DISTINCTION IN ITSELF (In Four Articles)
The forming, therefore, of this spiritual nature is signified by the production of light, that is to say, of spiritual light.
Therefore light is not a body.
Also it would be absurd to say that a body of so great a bulk is corrupted by the mere absence of the luminary.
We must consider next the work of distinction in itself.
And thus it is with the word light.
For if light were a body, its diffusion would be the local movement of a body.
Secondly, because light produces natural effects, for by the rays of the sun bodies are warmed, and natural changes cannot be brought about by mere intentions.
Whether Light Is a Body?
(3) Whether light is a quality?
But movement of this kind is an attribute of the firmament, and we read that the firmament was made on the second day.
Since, therefore, these things are repugnant, not only to reason, but to common sense, we must conclude that light cannot be a body.
Other writers think that the production of spiritual creatures was purposely omitted by Moses, and give various reasons.
For a spiritual nature receives its form by the enlightenment whereby it is led to adhere to the Word of God.
But this cannot well be maintained, as in the beginning of Genesis Holy Scripture records the institution of that order of nature which henceforth is to endure.
This, as it seems, had its beginning on the first day.
But this cannot be the case for two reasons.
Others, therefore, held that this luminous nebula continues in existence, but so closely attached to the sun as to be indistinguishable.
It must also be borne in mind on the part of movement that whereas all bodies have their natural determinate movement, that of light is indifferent as regards direction, working equally in a circle as in a straight line.
The second reason is from movement.
For in that case its matter cannot take on another form.
Therefore light is a body.
Therefore light must have been made on the first day.
For if light were a body, it would follow that whenever the air is darkened by the absence of the luminary, the body of light would be corrupted, and its matter would receive a new form.
For the place of any one body is different from that of any other, nor is it possible, naturally speaking, for any two bodies of whatever nature, to exist simultaneously in the same place; since contiguity requires distinction of place.
Therefore the production of light could not have been on the first day.
QUESTION 67
We cannot, then, say that what was made at that time afterwards ceased to exist.
To put a corrective upon this mark of regard, a lady who addresses a gentleman, should be earnest in her inquiries of the health of his family, however little intimacy she may have with them.
It is incivility with affectation.
I repeat, as I have often said, let there be moderation in everything.
SECTION III.
Be assured that the spirit of contradiction can be conquered only by silence.
Politeness is not less opposed to making excessive complaints to the first person you meet, than to the frequent and extravagant eulogiums which you bestow improperly upon those from whom you expect a favor in return.
It is much better to cause people to think more than we say, and not outrage language, and run the risk of going beyond what we ought to say.
This method of speaking in italics may be striking and artless; but it often becomes obscure and trivial; the habit is dangerous, and one should use this difficult digression only before intimate friends.
The rules of politeness in this respect, are the same in speaking of the husband.
They are not so used, if, in the course of a discussion, you suppose a respectable person to supply the place of a madman, an ill-bred person, or a robber; or, if you suppose him to be in a situation disgraceful or even ridiculous.
Questions are therefore necessary, but they demand infinite delicacy and tact, in order neither to fatigue nor ever wound the feelings.
If your opinion is asked, give it frankly, and without wishing to appear better informed than the narrator himself.
In the last case, there is a method of manifesting our interest, without violating etiquette; it consists in making these inquiries of the domestics, or of other persons of the house, and of saying afterwards when introduced; 'I am happy Sir, to hear that you are in good health.'
It signifies a want of due regard to, and a forgetfulness of, the delicate attentions which seem to identify us with the situation of others.
Frequently, in the midst of a recital, the narrator, through forgetfulness, hesitates, and thinks that he can recall it.
The next thing is to take a suitable opportunity.
This is a mistake, gentlemen, and I can with relation to this point, reveal to you what my sex prefers to these vulgar eulogiums.
If you strike against any one in the least, ask pardon for it immediately.
Thus we see, in such a case, and even among very clever persons too, those who reply by silly exclamations and by rude assertions.
By the word improprieties, we generally understand all violations of politeness.
We, however, give to this word a particular and limited sense.
We can put a general question, designating the most important members.
Madame Necker ingeniously observes that these favorite and frequently repeated terms with which we fill our conversation, serve, ordinarily as a mark of people's character.
I only speak to censure; I entreat my readers not to suffer themselves to be the manufacturers of puns, and to despise this talent of fools and childish means to excite a passing laugh.
Politeness infuses into visits of some little ceremony, a coloring of modesty, grace, and deference, which should be preserved with the greatest care.
But if it is an affair of nothings succeeding nothings, let it flow on.
When arrived at this point, abstain from these kinds of analysis, which though indeed more correct, seem labored.
It requires but a moment to lose those delicate shades of character which constitute a man of the world, and which cost us so much labor to acquire.
They embarrass and overwhelm our conversation, turn away the attention of those who listen to us, and render us importunate, and ridiculous, without our being able to perceive it.
Those who are less engaged in these things, should content themselves with simply and briefly explaining a subject, and of mentioning the emotion they felt; with speaking of some brilliant passage, and adding that they do not pretend to pronounce judgment.
If he is in doubt, declare that you are altogether ignorant of the subject in question.
If you do not bring over your opponent to your own opinion, you will at least gain his esteem.
Lawyers, literary people, military men, travellers, invalids and aged ladies, ought to have a prudent and continual distrust of the abuse of digressions.
They, on their part, ask the same of us.
But if you have to do with one of those people who, possessed with a mania of discussion, commence by contradicting before they hear, and who are always ready to sustain the contrary opinion, yield to him; you will have nothing to gain with him.
What pleasure can we find in causing ladies to blush, and in meriting the name of a man of bad society?
We shall, necessarily, have little to say on this head; there are, however, some little rules which are not to be neglected.
When your narrations have had success, keep a modest countenance; leave others to point out the striking parts which have pleased them.
They have besides less freedom, appropriateness, and grace.
The two shoals to be avoided in this form of language are directly opposed to each other; the one is triviality, the other bombast.
It would moreover be improper to make long compliments; indirect, and ingenious praise, is all that is proper.
If they are frequent, conversation becomes a tedious gossipping; if introduced without a short previous remark, one of two things will take place, they will either prevent the speaker from being understood, or they will give him the air of Sancho Panza.
In case of the absence of near relations, we ask the person we are visiting, if they have heard from them lately, if the news is favorable.
Many persons ask this question mechanically, without waiting for the answer, or else hasten to reply, before they have received it.
But is it then necessary to proscribe eulogiums entirely?
Know this, and remember it well, that every other preparation than thinking what you are about to say, will make you acquire two intolerable faults, affectation and stiffness.
It is customary to employ the few moments of a visit of mere politeness, in looking at the portraits which adorn the fireplace, and even taking them down, if you are invited to do it.
If we remain silent, we appear to be inhaling the incense with complacency; if we repel it, we only seem to excite it the more.
Look at him attentively.
Under any circumstances, complaining has always a bad grace.
The first degree of digression is the parenthesis; provided it is short, natural, and seldom repeated; and that you take care to announce it always; and finally, in order not to abuse it, you should make a skilful use of it.
There are but too many people who discover the secret of wearying while telling very good things, on account of their too great eagerness to tell them.
A proverb well applied, and placed at the end of a phrase, frequently makes a very happy conclusion.
This delicate politeness is particularly to be observed towards old persons.
Popular quotations and proverbs, as well as other quotations, require some care; and, except in familiar conversation, are altogether misplaced.
It is proper to vary the phraseology of these formal questions, as much as possible; and we must abstain from them entirely, towards a superior, or a person with whom we are but little acquainted, for such inquiries presuppose some degree of intimacy.
The surest means of not having the approbation of others, in actions as well as other things, is to solicit it, whether it be by looks, or by words.
With these forms, they think they comply with the rules of politeness.
There are many conditions indispensable to the success of a narrative. These conditions are, first, novelty; the best stories weary when they are multiplied too much, because every one wishes to be an actor in his turn upon the stage of the world.
"That impudent Scarlet Pimpernel would slip through clumsy fingers.
"At least five, I should say, your Excellency," he replied obsequiously.
"I did not say anything," said the Jew in an injured tone, "Reuben Goldstein, that accursed traitor, that son of Belial . . ."
Reuben's nag was lame as usual; she refused to budge at first.
These royalists are good swordsmen, and the Englishman is devilish cunning, and looks very powerful.
"Where?"
I am sure that, not two leagues from here, we shall come across that wily Reuben, his nag, his cart and the tall stranger all in a heap in the middle of the road."
She had heard the peremptory question; she looked anxiously at the Jew, but could not read his face beneath the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat.
There was so much rage and hatred in his superior's whole attitude.
About five minutes later, Desgas returned, followed by an elderly Jew, in a dirty, threadbare gaberdine, worn greasy across the shoulders.
"Yes, citoyen."
"Here, man! through that door!
"The tall stranger, citoyen--" he stammered.
"On the road which the Englishman took, Miquelon is the nearest village, not two leagues from here."
He again assured me that the watch had been constant all day, and that no stranger could possibly get to the beach, or reach a boat, without being sighted."
"Enough, do you think, to loosen that honest tongue of yours?"
One rolled away, and he had some trouble to get it, for it had lodged underneath the dresser.
Will your Excellency deign to look."
Apparently he trusted no one: this last trick played upon him by the daring Scarlet Pimpernel had made him suddenly doubtful of success, unless he himself was there to watch, direct and superintend the capture of this impudent Englishman.
"But if he had no choice?"
"Yes--and?" queried Chauvelin, impatiently.
"The citoyen tells me," said Chauvelin peremptorily to him, "that you know something of my friend, the tall Englishman, whom I desire to meet . . .
Evidently he had no desire to terrorize the man, but to conciliate him, for his own purposes, for his manner was pleasant and suave.
"Twenty francs, your Excellency," replied the Jew, "and I have been an honest man all my life."
The Pere Blanchard's hut is--an I mistake not--a lonely spot upon the beach, and our men will enjoy a bit of rough sport there with the wounded fox.
His red hair, which he wore after the fashion of the Polish Jews, with the corkscrew curls each side of his face, was plentifully sprinkled with grey--a general coating of grime, about his cheeks and his chin, gave him a peculiarly dirty and loathsome appearance.
"Can you?"
Whilst he gave these curt and concise orders, he had completed his change of attire.
He gazed at them thoughtfully, then remarked, in a quiet tone of voice,--
Which road leads to it?"
"Three!"
I wonder who she was?"
"Oh, dear, yes; with very stiff mustaches, turned up high at the corners, and pink cheeks, and a very sharp, nobby-looking hat, with a light-colored grey coat, and light gloves.
How are Minna, and Brenda, and Potsey?"
"Business!
This came from his afflicted wife, who, in spite of all his misfortunes, would ever speak with some respect of her husband's employments.
"Do you think that you hate people when you go to church as much as when you don't?"
"It is Dolly's only fault that she won't."
"I should lay down the law to him--" began Dolly.
I have got a frock which I will bring with me as a present for Potsey; and I will make her sew on the buttons for herself.
Georgina, the third, was still at school under similar circumstances, and was pardoned her egregious noisiness and romping propensities under the score of youth.
"As to settling some farther sum for himself."
"It comes from eating too much toffy," said Georgina.
Then Mr. Grey got out his check-book and wrote the check for twenty pounds.
If my father had seen it he'd have had the prince off the box of the coach in no time."
"I know she is.
"We were out to-day on the Brompton Road," said the eldest, "and there came up Prince Chitakov's drag with four roans."
I don't think she ever has a nice dinner at home."
"If I had my way," said Dolly, after ten minutes' silence, "I would punish him.
That she should be sitting at table with a girl who could boast that a reprobate foreigner had kissed his hand to her from the box of a fashionable four-horsed coach!
"Well, Aunt Carroll, how does the world use you?"
Poor Jane suffers worse from this gnat than you or I. Put up with it; and understand in your own mind that when he comes for another twenty pounds he must have it.
Go there prepared with your opinion.
Tell Minna I will lend her that book I spoke of.
You needn't tell him, but so it must be."
I didn't know there was such a prince."
When they had waited three-quarters of an hour Amelia began to complain,--certainly not without reason.
"He'd only spend it, my dear."
"She does not know what it is to want for anything."
What was the result of the consultation on Mr. Grey's mind he did not declare, but he resolved to take his daughter's advice in all that she said to him.
"You propose it all as though it were the easiest thing in the world."
"Then you certainly ought to go to church."
"Papa has, unfortunately, something to do with his time, which is not altogether his own." There was not much in these words, but the tone in which they were uttered would have crushed any one more susceptible than Amelia Carroll.
"Mrs. Chitakov, probably," said the attorney.
What did the prince do?"
Don't married ladies wear little fluffy fur ornaments?"
"Uncle John would not like not to have any clothes."
It was very necessary that she should do so, if the family was to be kept on its legs at all. "I don't think any good can come from discussing what my uncle does with the money."
Of course, papa is a trouble."
"It's the most impertinent thing I ever heard.
It was, in fact, his aversion to these articles that Dolly had to encounter.
"Except those green ones he wore at the races," said Georgina.
"Jane, you will have a glass of port-wine?
"But if you don't hate them it is because you won't take the trouble, and that again is not right.
"I wouldn't hurry for her," said Dolly; "but of course you'll hurry. You always do, don't you, papa?" Then they sat down to dinner.
She despatched her father in a cab, the cab having been procured because he was supposed to be a quarter of an hour late, and then went to work to order her dinner.
"That girl up-stairs is nearly famished."
Amelia, the eldest, entertained an idea that she was more of a personage in the world's eyes than her cousin,--that she went to more parties, which certainly was true if she went to any,--that she wore finer clothes, which was also true, and that she had a lover, whereas Dolly Grey,--as she called her cousin behind her back,--had none.
"But it isn't the Princess of Christian, nor yet the Princess of Teck, nor the Princess of England.
But the one auditor whom she feared was her niece.
In the evening, when the dinner-things had been taken away, a matter of business came up, and took the place of the prince and his mustaches. Mrs. Carroll was most anxious to know whether her brother could "lend" her a small sum of twenty pounds.
But at that moment the cab arrived, and Dolly went down to meet her father.
The name of the recipient of the good Quaker friend's bounty and Aunt Hannah's companion, was Thomas Todd.
Her mind was deeply imbued with religious feeling, and an unshaken confidence in God as her only trust; she connected herself with the A.M.E.
He was afraid I was going to die, or he would lose me, and I would not be of any service to him, so he took and traded me off for a wagon.
Bethel Church, of Philadelphia, where she has walked, blameless and exemplary up to this day.
In the eyes of the mistress this procedure was so extraordinary that she became very much excited and for a moment threatened them with the "broomstick," but her raving had no effect on Messrs.
"Moore bought me from a man named McCaully, who owned me about a year.
One day she began scolding and said the kitchen wasn't kept clean.
The cats about the place came and slept with me, and was all the company I had.
I was something better when he traded me off; well enough to be about.
This is the way I was told that Scott came by me.
Under Hackler I was treated more like a brute than a human being.
I never knowed anything about my mother or father, but I have always believed that my mother was a white woman, and that I was put away to save her character; I have always thought this.
Without means they lived as poor people commonly live, on small farms in the woods.
So I was kept for seven or eight years after his death.
I had to work with the hoe in the field and help do everything in doors and out in all weathers.
If such were her calculations she was greatly mistaken.
She soon ordered me to come in to her.
After a few years they all became dissatisfied, and moved to Missouri.
Both times that I was beat the blood run down from my head to my feet.
McKim and Wise, who did not rest contented until Aunt Hannah was safely in their hands.
A bed of straw and old rags was made for me in a big trough called the tan trough (a trough having been used for tanning purposes).
One day she beat me as bad as he did.
Scott, wishing to know of the young man what he had in his bundle, was told that he had a baby.
Fifty-seven years were passed in bondage before she reached Philadelphia.
After I growed up to be a woman my master thought nothing of taking my clothes off, and would whip me until the blood would run down to the ground.
After that he beat the cherry-tree limb all to pieces over me.
I crept out of doors and throwed up blood; some days I was hardly able to creep. With this beating I was laid up several weeks.
I went in as she ordered me; she met me with a mule-rope, and ordered me to cross my hands.
Gillingham's), whose hearts had been in deep sympathy with the slave for many years.
"AUNT HANNAH MOORE."
The little girl was not able to do it; Mr. McCaully then untied me himself.
The half of what she passed through in the way of suffering has scarcely been hinted at in this sketch.
After I was twenty-five years old they did not treat me so bad; they both professed to get religion about that time; and my master said he would never lay the weight of his finger on me again. Once after that mistress wanted him to whip me, but he didn't do it, nor never whipped me any more.
It was prior to her coming into the possession of Moore that Aunt Hannah had been made to drink the bitter waters of oppression.
I done my best to keep my mistress from suffering.
My health remained bad for about four years, and I never got my health until Moore bought me. Moore took me for a debt.
I still lived with my mistress.
He could tell all about how he was kidnapped, but could not find anybody to do anything for him, so he had to content himself.
After awhile my master died; if they had gone according to law I would have been hired out or sold, but my mistress wanted to keep me to carry on the place for her support.
'What are you going to do with it?' said Scott.
The store-keeper quickly made known her condition at the Anti-slavery Office, and in double-quick time J.M.
For although Aunt Hannah was destitute of book-learning she was nevertheless a woman of thought and natural ability, and while she wisely kept her counsel from her mistress she took care to make her wants known to an abolitionist.
From this point, therefore, we shall present some of the incidents of her life, from infancy, and very nearly word for word as she related them:
Another time Mistress McCaully got very angry.
"They wouldn't give you anything to eat hardly.
Scott offered the young man a horse for it, and the young man took him up.
Hackler bought me from a man named William Scott.
I must go back by good rights to the beginning and tell all: Scott bought me first from a young man he met one day in the road, with a bundle in his arms.
I was not born in Missouri but was born in Virginia.
From my earliest memory I was owned by Conrad Hackler; he lived in Grason County.
Some of the heirs got dissatisfied, and sued for their rights or a settlement; then I was sold with my child, a boy."
She was a woman who would get very mad in a minute.
One day in a rage he undertook to beat me with the limb of a cherry-tree; he began at me and tried in the first place to snatch my clothes off, but he did not succeed.
It was understood between my mistress, and her children, and her friends, who all met after master died, that I was to take care of mistress, and after mistress died I should not serve anybody else.
I crossed my hands and she tied me to the bedstead.
He said to his wife she has begged and begged and you have whipped her enough.
I fared dreadful bad under McCaully.
Probably there is not a member in that large congregation whose simple faith and whose walk and conversation are more commendable than Aunt Hannah's.
And the suggestion of a separate club for the Infants seemed to be well received.
Yet the suggestion attracted Helen, too.
We will take you to the office of the Preceptress."
I don't want either."
"We won't keep the older girls out of it, if they want to join," laughed Sarah.
"Two of them came into our room at once--the girl they call The Fox, and Miss Steele.
"Hear! hear!" cried Miss Fish.
"Yes!" agreed Sarah Fish, one of the Infants just arrived.
Most of the girls laughed at that.
"I think it would be nicer for us Infants, as they call us, to keep together.
Mary Cox pulled open the door and the first newcomer popped out as though she had been clinging to the handle when The Fox made the movement.
"Here we be!" he croaked.
It would look silly," cried Helen.
"We will lead the march."
I, for one, want to get into the real school society----"
All the time I've been touching you I've been learning about you.
Or a rabbi?"
He knew that his hunches were infallible.
Buzz-saws are small, too, and sticks of dynamite. Shall we go hunt up the parson--or should it be a priest?
"Just the biggest on Earth, is all.
"You've picked out your girl friend for the trip, I suppose?"
If you hadn't been as psychic as I am, you'd've jumped clear out into subspace when a perfectly strange girl attacked you."
"You'd play footsie with the Archangel Michael's sister if she'd let you; and she probably would.
"Not necessarily.
Cabin two eight one."
So I guess I wouldn't, at that."
Everybody wonders how he does it.
Take over." Eddie did so.
She's been trying to make me marry an old goat of a prince and I finally told her to go roll her hoop--to get a divorce and marry the foul old beast herself.
I can support you, sweetheart."
Jackknifing double, she put both forearms flat on the carpet and lifted both legs into the vertical.
She paused.
Any who are not seated will seat themselves at once.
All I can do at dowsing is find water, oil, coal, and gas.
"I thought at first I'd tell my parents first--they're both aboard--but I decided not to.
You teach a few courses.
"Yes, but----"
They'd fire you?"
How soon can we get married?"
"Found a big new field, didn't they?
So who's Barbara Warner?"
Even if they fire me for not waiting until we ground, there's lots of jobs.
"I can't imagine doing anything else," and the two set out, arms around each other, to find a minister.
First Officer, Carlyle Deston.
"How do you know so much about me?"
"My record is good enough, I think, to get a good ground job.
Eddie Thompson gazed at his superior pityingly.
"That's right, Barbara Warner.
Oh, that witch stuff.
Every well he drills is a gusher that blows the rig clear up into the stratosphere.
I couldn't have you with me in space, and I'd like that a lot less.
"Talk about poetry in motion!
So if you ever happen to accidentally get mad at me you'll tie me right up into a pretzel?"
If you did, you'd've got a tingle, too."
I've been wondering, every time out, if I could do a thing, and now I'm going to find out."
"Of course not.
Watching a hundred lights and half that many instruments, listening to two phone circuits, one with each ear, and hands moving from switches to rheostats to buttons and levers, he was completely informed as to the instant-by-instant status of everything in his department.
It's wonderful that you're so strongly psychic, too."
Then, silver slippers pointing motionlessly ceilingward, she got up onto her hands and walked twice around a vacant chair.
We lift in twenty seconds; I will count down the final five seconds....
"After twenty years of her?
"I doubt it; very seriously.
That was when I read your name in the list of officers on the board.
Her eyes were a deep, cool blue.
"You nor me neither, brother.
"Excuse me, please," she said to the other three at her table.
More like hearing a siren when you're driving along a street.
"This is the fourth and last cautionary announcement.
The only change was that at the word "Two" his right forefinger came to rest upon a red button and his eyes doubled their rate of scan.
I've heard--but you aren't a colonial; you're as Terran as I am."
"No buts, buster.
He himself never went down to the Middle, which was passenger territory. There was nothing there he wanted.
For the first time in all his three years of deep-space service he felt an overpowering urge to go down into the very middle of the Middle; to the starship's main lounge.
So I'll tell you this." Her eyes looked steadily into his.
"Not yet.
"Certainly, if I loved...." Deston paused, thought a moment, then went on: "Maybe I wouldn't, either.
"Newmartian?
"A man grows up.
Perfect signal and zero noise.
One ...
"More!" "Keep it up, gal!" "Do it again!"
I got sidetracked watching Bobby Warner.
"I majored in Physical Education and I love it.
A good big man can always take a good little one, you know."
It happens, you know."
"Uh-huh." She nodded brightly.
"Some details, of course, but nothing of any importance and we'll have plenty of time to learn them."
That was that.
Comet-gas!
Right now, or as soon as you can. You can't, without resigning, can you?
"You'll be raving about another one tomorrow," Deston said, unfeelingly, as he turned away.
She'd make me dress for dinner.
He was that kind of a man.
However, I never expected to----"
He operates in all the systems for a hundred parsecs around, and he never sinks a dry hole.
"Uh-uh." She shook her yellow head.
That was why he had stopped gambling, years before, before anybody found out.
"Anything else but.
I read you ten and zero.
In South America somewhere?"
"You're either psychic or the biggest wolf in the known universe, and I know you aren't a wolf.
How could it?"
Our actual and legal residence has always been there.
She then performed a series of flips that would have done credit to a professional acrobat; the finale of which left her sitting calmly in the previously empty seat.
"That was Eddie Thompson."
"By blood, yes; but I was born on Newmars.
"Listen, darling.
She stooped once more to pick up something which had fallen out when the cover was jarred open.
From their close resemblance in their misery, it was not hard to believe in the kinship of all animal life.
THE NOAH'S ARK
It is a shame to think how every one seems bound to spoil children, especially at Christmas time.
A flare of light almost blinded her eyes.
About laying fires, as about most other things, Miss Terry had her own positive theories.
Finally she lifted it But immediately she shivered and acted so strangely that Miss Terry thought she was about to break the toy in pieces on the steps or throw it into the street. Evidently she detested the sight of it.
"It happened just about as I expected.
Once more she lifted the window and tossed the dog to the sidewalk.
"Yes'm," said Norah, as she set down the box with a thump.
"What is our Christmas, anyway?
Why, nobody wants such truck as this.
But his mother drew him after her.
"I had quite forgotten it." Then as if it burned her fingers she thrust the little image back into the box and turned to Norah brusquely.
You let it alone!
Miss Terry eyed him with disfavor.
"Give it here!" commanded the bigger boy.
With this about her shoulders she was prepared to brave the December frost.
"The Flanton Dog!" she said.
"They would spill.
Her mistress looked up from the fire, where the bit of writing was writhing painfully, and caught the expression of Norah's face.
She was dressed in the most uncompromising of mourning, and she walked slowly, with bent head, never glancing at the lighted windows on either side.
"I hate those horrid machines!" she exclaimed.
I am quite independent; blessedly independent of the whole foolish business.
"I will try an experiment," she said.
Didn't take her long to get ready!" muttered Miss Terry, giving the fire a vicious poke.
She glanced once more at the letter in her hand, then with a sniff tossed it upon the fire.
"Please'm, may I go?" asked Norah again.
"The Christmas Angel!" she exclaimed under her breath.
Was there not a stalwart officer waiting for her on the nearest corner?
He pounced across the sidewalk, and soon the twain were struggling in the snowdrift, pummeling one another with might and main.
I wish somebody would find the thing.
At last she spied two little ragamuffins approaching.
"Yes, I'll burn them all.
They say he is a millionaire. Well, he isn't even going to see the Flanton Dog."
Fiddlestick!" retorted Miss Terry, poker in hand. "What decorations?
CHAPTER III
I am tired of seeing it lying there."
"If you please'm, it's Christmas Eve."
"What have you there?" she asked, frowning, as she took the object into her own hands.
She smiled with satisfaction, and trotted upstairs to find her red knit shawl.
An automobile honked past, and Miss Terry shuddered, recalling the pathetic end of the Flanton Dog, which had given her quite a turn.
"And choir-boys are going about the streets, they say, singing carols in front of the lighted houses," continued Norah enthusiastically.
But the sidewalks were neatly shoveled and swept clean, as became the eminently respectable part of the city where Miss Terry lived.
I see!
His ears, which had originally stood up saucily on his head, now drooped in limp dejection.
Christmas spirit?
It was of her own doing.
She crowded the elephant with Noah and the rest of his charge back into the ark and closed the lid.
They are good for nothing else.
Norah stood holding it between thumb and finger, staring amazedly.
Now let's see what becomes of the next experiment."
No need to think of him now.
"Decorations?
With some difficulty she drew out the object, for it was of good size.
I suppose they are going to hear the singing.
How like Tom!
Lemme look at it."
The smaller boy first caught sight of the box in the middle of the sidewalk.
"Now, what comes next?" Miss Terry rummaged in the box until her fingers met something odd-shaped, long, and smooth-sided.
"I saw it first.
Angrily she shook off the hand of the other woman, and clutching the box yet more firmly under her arm, she hurried away.
"Go away!
But it looked so--so--" She hesitated for a word, and did not finish her sentence, but bit her lip and sniffed cynically.
This accounted for everything, even to his not being in his sister's house this very night. How unreasonable he had been!
He rolled upon his back and lay pathetically with crooked legs yearning upward, still smiling.
Miss Terry began to grow impatient.
But the second woman caught hold of her skirt and began to speak earnestly.
The fire's going out!
It happened to be a wooden box, with a wire hasp for fastening the cover.
Miss Terry returned to the play box and drew out between thumb and finger the topmost toy.
Every window opposite her along the block, as far as she could see, was illuminated with a row of lighted candles across the sash.
She crossed to the window, which she opened quickly, and tossed out the box, so that it fell squarely in the middle of the sidewalk.
The bigger boy advanced threateningly.
At the same moment an instinct seemed to warn the struggling urchins.
"I remember when Tom stepped on him and smashed his trunk.
"Give it here.
I had forgotten all about him. It was Tom who coined the name for him because he was made of Canton flannel."
The woman in black drew haughtily away and clutched the Noah's ark with a gesture of proprietorship.
What singing?"
But as she watched, a quaint idea came to her.
Just then Miss Terry spied a blue-coated figure leisurely approaching.
Hand it over, or I'll smash you!"
And presently the area door banged behind her quick-retreating footsteps.
The street was white with snow which had fallen a few hours earlier, piled in drifts along the curb of the little-traveled terrace.
And they won't let her go to him, so he is bound to escape.
"Of course he did not tell you.
Chapter I. Plans For Mitya's Escape
"I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him yourself. Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be dishonorable, cowardly, or something ... unchristian, perhaps?" Katya added, even more defiantly.
"You ought to go, you ought to go," Alyosha repeated with merciless emphasis.
"He talks about some hymn," she went on again, "some cross he has to bear, some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great deal about it, and if you knew how he talked!" Katya cried suddenly, with feeling she could not repress, "if you knew how he loved that wretched man at the moment he told me, and how he hated him, perhaps, at the same moment.
EPILOGUE
She started, and drew back a little from him on the sofa.
I've told you something already....
He told me that the envelope contained the details of the escape, and that if he died or was taken dangerously ill, I was to save Mitya alone.
He wanted to show me that he was an honorable man, and that, even if I loved his brother, he would not ruin him for revenge or jealousy.
He has agreed already: do you suppose he would give up that creature?
So he came to the court ...
He had just gone down-stairs, but seeing you I made him come back; do you remember?
Men like him never suffer!"
"Me?
And I heard his story and his tears with sneering disdain.
No, you cannot understand the greatness of such self-sacrifice, Alexey Fyodorovitch.
He realizes that he has injured you beyond all reckoning.
Katerina Ivanovna was pale and terribly fatigued, yet at the same time in a state of hysterical excitement.
"Perhaps because she feels how she's wronged him she hates him at moments," Alyosha thought to himself.
I would not give an explanation, I could not ask forgiveness.
"It can and ought to be!" Alyosha began emphatically, growing more animated.
"Oh, no. I'll tell him everything," muttered Alyosha.
Oh, you will see, I shall end by driving him, too, to abandon me for another with whom he can get on better, like Dmitri.
You ought to do it, you ought to!" Alyosha concluded, laying immense stress on the word "ought."
"Your eyes ought to meet.
I was tremendously impressed to find that Ivan Fyodorovitch had not given up his idea of saving his brother, and was confiding this plan of escape to me, though he was still jealous of me and still convinced that I loved Mitya.
It is not to be reconciled with you that he wants you, but only that you would go and show yourself at his door.
Do you know what we were quarreling about then?"
"As soon as Ivan Fyodorovitch saw that I was furious about that woman, he instantly imagined I was jealous of Dmitri and that I still loved Dmitri.
They had been talking for a quarter of an hour.
But he dreaded that moment and longed to spare her.
It's my character, my awful, unhappy character!
"Then you will come," said Alyosha firmly, seeing her tears.
So much has happened to him since that day.
She paused and smiled.
"Can such a man suffer?
Yes, I am a brute.
How will you live all your life, if you don't make up your mind to do it now?"
For the sake of his infinite sufferings in the future visit him now.
He does not ask your forgiveness--'It's impossible to forgive me,' he says himself--but only that you would show yourself in his doorway."
She was suffering for her "treachery" at the trial, and Alyosha felt that her conscience was impelling her to confess it to him, to him, Alyosha, with tears and cries and hysterical writhings on the floor.
Brute!
I said that malicious thing on purpose to wound him again.
Oh, I am unhappy!
He had never, never persuaded me that his brother was a murderer.
"It's all right, it's all right, don't be anxious about him!" she began again, sharply and stubbornly.
Varvinsky and Herzenstube were attending him.
It was only resentment against that creature that made me angry with him.
Only think, he realizes for the first time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life; he had never grasped it before so fully.
"It's so sudden...." faltered Katya.
I would not tell you a lie; have pity on him!"
I can't leave our patient--"
She gasped for breath.
Katerina Ivanovna had immediately after the scene at the trial ordered the sick and unconscious man to be carried to her house, disregarding the inevitable gossip and general disapproval of the public.
Ivan Fyodorovitch will be well by that time and will manage it all himself, so that I shall have nothing to do with it.
In the next room Ivan Fyodorovitch lay unconscious in a high fever.
Oh, that was a sacrifice!
"Better suffer all my life."
"But why to-day, why at once?...
But if both had gone away, Katerina Ivanovna would have adhered to her resolution, and would have gone on nursing the sick man and sitting by him day and night.
"I've had a presentiment all these days that you would come with that message.
We will expect you," he concluded emphatically, and went out of the room.
He must escape. That unhappy man, that hero of honor and principle--not he, not Dmitri Fyodorovitch, but the man lying the other side of that door, who has sacrificed himself for his brother," Katya added, with flashing eyes--"told me the whole plan of escape long ago.
He had another engagement that could not be put off for that same morning, and there was need of haste.
On the contrary, it was I who persuaded him!
I can't."
It made the commission on which he had come even more difficult.
There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words.
"He will look at me....
I would not have opened the subject and worried you, if it were not necessary.
Can that be?" she faltered, turning pale.
"He needs you particularly just now.
"That's just why you must go now, to avoid meeting any one.
"I will come, but don't tell him beforehand, for perhaps I may go, but not go in....
But this time he had specially urgent business, and he foresaw how difficult it would be to approach the subject, yet he was in great haste.
Though the doctors encouraged Katerina Ivanovna and Alyosha, it was evident that they could not yet give them positive hopes of recovery.
I wanted to fall at his feet in reverence, but I thought at once that he would take it only for my joy at the thought of Mitya's being saved (and he certainly would have imagined that!), and I was so exasperated at the mere possibility of such an unjust thought on his part that I lost my temper again, and instead of kissing his feet, flew into a fury again!
But that man in prison is incapable of suffering," Katya concluded irritably.
She sat and talked to him in the very room in which she had once received Grushenka.
Think--you must visit him; though he is ruined, he is innocent," broke like a challenge from Alyosha.
The famous doctor had gone back to Moscow, refusing to give an opinion as to the probable end of the illness.
"No, don't tell him so on any account," cried Katya in alarm.
It was about that plan of escape.
Oh, it's a long way off yet.
He had told me the main idea three days before, and we began quarreling about it at once and quarreled for three days.
"I'll go and tell him you will come directly."
But ... no, I could not bear it, I should kill myself.
Oh, he foresaw his illness!
Oh, Alyosha knew another terrible reason of her present misery, though she had carefully concealed it from him during those days since the trial; but it would have been for some reason too painful to him if she had been brought so low as to speak to him now about that.
Go, greet him on his way into the darkness--stand at his door, that is all....
"I ought to ... but I cannot...." Katya moaned.
Alyosha came to see his sick brother twice a day.
He is ill, he is beside himself, he keeps asking for you.
Very early, at nine o'clock in the morning, five days after the trial, Alyosha went to Katerina Ivanovna's to talk over a matter of great importance to both of them, and to give her a message.
I paved the way to that hideous scene at the trial.
That is how our first quarrel began.
I knew he would ask me to come.
If you don't come, he will be in delirium by to-night.
And it seemed very neglectful not to come to see after you, poor dear child! but really I couldn't raise my head."
The Captain liked girls.
There was the young girl going out to join her parents under the care of a severe governess, whom everybody on board rather pitied.
Pleasant people turned up among the passengers, as always happens on an ocean steamship, and others not so pleasant, perhaps, who were rather curious and interesting to watch.
Mrs. Ashe had by no means got to the tea-and-toast stage yet, and was feeling miserable enough.
The deck had dried fast in the fresh sea-wind, and the Captain had just arranged Katy in her chair, and was wrapping the rug about her feet in a fatherly way, when Mrs. Barrett, all smiles, appeared from below.
He was a Martinet on board his ship.
"Perhaps she hasn't noticed it at all.
"How lovely it will be to sleep in a bed that doesn't tip or roll from side to side!" said Mrs. Ashe.
When she woke the sun was struggling through the clouds, and she felt better.
It was late afternoon when they entered the Mersey, and dusk had fallen before the Captain got out his glass to look for the white fluttering speck in his own window which meant so much to him.
Captain Bryce was exactly the kind of sea-captain that is found in story-books, but not always in real life.
Not a sailor under him would have dared dispute his orders for a moment; but he was very popular with them, notwithstanding; they liked him as much as they feared him, for they knew him to be their best friend if it came to sickness or trouble with any of them.
"If you would give my little girl something to eat!
Nearer and nearer they came; and Katy opening her eyes saw a procession of boots and shoes of all sizes and shapes, which had evidently been left on the floors or at the doors of various staterooms, and which in obedience to the lurchings of the vessel had collected in the cabin.
Twice Katy was thrown out of her berth on the floor; then the stewardess came and fixed a sort of movable side to the berth, which held her in, but made her feel like a child fastened into a railed crib. At intervals she could still hear Amy crying and scolding her mother, and conjectured that they were having a dreadful time of it in the other stateroom.
Later in the morning, Katy, going down to her stateroom for something, came across a pallid, exhausted-looking lady, who lay stretched on one of the long sofas in the cabin, with a baby in her arms and a little girl sitting at her feet, quite still, with a pair of small hands folded in her lap.
How did it happen?"
It's a load taken from my mind."
I never thought that going to Europe meant such dreadful things as this!"
Mamma! do you hear me?
He had a bluff weather-beaten face, lit up with a pair of shrewd blue eyes which twinkled when he was pleased; and his manner, though it was full of the habit of command, was quiet and pleasant.
"They say that you don't feel the motion half so much in the bottom of the ship," said Katy.
"Everybody has been sick on our side the ship," explained the poor lady, "and I suppose the stewardess thought, as I had a maid with me, that I needed her less than the others.
"Mabel looks quite pale; she was sick, too," said Amy, regarding the doll in her arms with an anxious air.
break! There is no good left in me; For the dinner I ate on the shore so late Has vanished into the sea!"
"And they call this travelling for pleasure!" thought poor Katy.
"Could you?
"I thought I was never going to see you again," she said, with a little squeeze.
And then came another storm of sobs, but never a sound from Mrs. Ashe, who, Katy suspected, was too ill to speak.
"That was what that woman called it,--the fat one who made me come up here.
Mamma, why don't you speak to me?
Katy did not care particularly for the dumpling, but she valued it as a mark of regard, and always ate it when she could.
The night seemed endless, for she was too frightened to sleep except in broken snatches; and when day dawned, and she looked through the little round pane of glass in the port-hole, only gray sky and gray weltering waves and flying spray and rain met her view.
"Well, the worst is over with all of us, I hope.
"They had served out their apprenticeships," the kindly old captain told them, "and were made free of the nautical guild from that time on." So it proved; for after these two bad days none of the party were sick again during the voyage.
"She'll be on the lookout when the steamer comes in," said the Captain. "There's a signal we've arranged which means 'All's well,' and when we get up the river a little way I always look to see if it's flying.
She seemed such a very nice girl, and Katy thought she should like to know her.
The gale increased as the day wore on, and the vessel pitched dreadfully.
I won't stay in this ship!
"And 'ere's a letter, ma'am, which has come for you by post this morning," said the nice old stewardess, producing an envelope from her pocket, and eying her patient with great satisfaction.
There was the other girl on her way to study art, who was travelling quite alone, and seemed to have nobody to meet her or to go to except a fellow student of her own age, already in Paris, but who seemed quite unconscious of her lonely position and competent to grapple with anything or anybody.
He had one of his own, about Katy's age, and was fond of talking about her.
"I didn't mean to be naughty, but I couldn't help crying.
She seemed to be angry as well as sick, for she was scolding her poor mother in the most vehement fashion.
Katy never forgot the thrill that went through her when, after so many days of sea, her eyes first caught sight of the dim line of the Irish coast.
"Oh, let us have a hansom!
But what made you behave so, Amy, and cry and scold poor mamma when she was sick? I could hear you all the way across the entry."
It contained a pretty little green-bound copy of Emerson's Poems, with Katy's name and "To be read at sea," written on the flyleaf.
With a half-happy, half-tearful pleasure Katy recognized the fact that distance counts for little if people love one another, and that hearts have a telegraph of their own whose messages are as sure and swift as any of those sent over the material lines which link continent to continent and shore with shore.
"Can I do anything for you?" she asked.
On the whole, Katy preferred to have her own side of the ship, the downward one; for it was less difficult to keep herself in the berth, from which she was in continual danger of being thrown.
"But this horrible ship keeps on, And is never a moment still, And I yearn for the touch of the nice dry land, Where I needn't feel so ill!
You would have cried too, and so would Johnnie, if you had been cooped up in a dreadful old berth at the top of the wall that you couldn't get out of, and hadn't had anything to eat, and nobody to bring you any water when you wanted some.
Then came Mr. Howells's "A Foregone Conclusion," which Katy had never seen; then a box of quinine pills; then a sachet for her trunk; then another burlesque poem; last of all, a cake of delicious violet soap, "to wash the sea-smell from her hands," the label said.
CHAPTER IV.
The little girl did not seem to be more than four years old. She had two pig-tails of thick flaxen hair hanging over her shoulders, and at Katy's approach raised a pair of solemn blue eyes, which had so much appeal in them, though she said nothing, that Katy stopped at once.
"Yes, and that is wide enough and long enough and soft enough to be comfortable!" replied Katy.
Amid the rush of the wind, the creaking of the ship's timbers, and the shrill buzz of the screw, she heard a sound of queer little footsteps in the entry outside of her open door, hopping and leaping together in an odd irregular way, like a regiment of mice or toy soldiers.
Katy grew to feel as if she knew a great deal about her fellow travellers as time went on.
At last he shut the glass with a satisfied air.
I'm h'ashamed that such a thing should 'appen on the 'Spartacus,' ma'am,--I h'am, h'indeed.
Toward morning the gale abated, the sea became smoother, and she dropped asleep.
But I'm glad she did, for I feel heaps better already; only I keep thinking of poor little Maria Matilda shut up in the trunk in that dark place, and wondering if she's sick.
"I won't stay in this nasty old ship.
It was all like a bad dream.
So a hansom cab was called, the two ladies got in, Amy cuddled down between them, the folding-doors were shut over their knees like a lap-robe, and away they drove up the solidly paved streets to the hotel where they were to pass the night.
On the sixth appeared a long narrow box containing a fountain pen.
"Is she going to have any fresh hair?" asked Katy, wilfully misunderstanding.
"By post!" cried Katy, in amazement; "why, how can that be?" Then catching sight of Rose's handwriting on the envelope, she understood, and smiled at her own simplicity.
"All day yesterday, when she wasn't sick she was raging at me from the upper berth, and I too ill to say a word in reply.
She heard them going down the cabin; but how it ended, or whether the owners of the boots and shoes ever got their own particular pairs again, she never knew.
He gave Mrs. Ashe and herself the seats next to him at table, looked after their comfort in every possible way, and each night at dinner sent Katy one of the apple-dumplings made specially for him by the cook, who had gone many voyages with the Captain and knew his fancies.
Chap. XXXII.
Of one that was cured of a palsy at his tomb.
Following the example of the blessed Apostles, he adorned the episcopal dignity by his virtuous deeds; for he both protected the people committed to his charge by constant prayer, and roused them, by wholesome admonitions, to thoughts of Heaven.
The brother having long laboured under this malady, when no human means availed to save his eye, but rather, it grew daily worse, on a sudden, through the grace of the mercy of God, it came to pass that he was cured by the relics of the holy father, Cuthbert.
In order to correct the error of both sorts, he often went forth from the monastery, sometimes on horseback, but oftener on foot, and went to the neighbouring townships, where he preached the way of truth to such as had gone astray; which Boisil also in his time had been wont to do.
Gradually the pain departed and health returned.
The miracles of healing, sometimes wrought in that place testify to the merits of them both; of some of these we have before preserved the memory in the book of his life.
They thought to find them dry and all the rest of the body consumed and turned to dust, after the manner of the dead, and they desired to put them into a new coffin, and to lay them in the same place, but above the pavement, for the honour due to him.
There was a certain priest, called Herebert, a man of holy life, who had long been united with the man of God, Cuthbert, in the bonds of spiritual friendship.
He was wont chiefly to resort to those places and preach in those villages which were situated afar off amid steep and wild mountains, so that others dreaded to go thither, and whereof the poverty and barbarity rendered them inaccessible to other teachers.
Nor is that cure to be passed over in silence, which was performed by his relics three years ago, and was told me lately by the brother himself, on whom it was wrought.
It was then the custom of the English people, that when a clerk or priest came to a township, they all, at his summons, flocked together to hear the Word; willingly heard what was said, and still more willingly practised those things that they could hear and understand.
Chap. XXVII.
Cuthbert, humbly submitting himself to this man's direction, from him received both a knowledge of the Scriptures, and an example of good works.
After he had departed to the Lord, Cuthbert became provost of that monastery, where he instructed many in the rule of monastic life, both by the authority of a master, and the example of his own behaviour.
He did accordingly as he had determined, and supporting his weak limbs with a staff, entered the church.
The most reverend father died in the isle of Farne, earnestly entreating the brothers that he might also be buried there, where he had served no small time under the Lord's banner.
When they had done this relying upon the faith and prayers of the servant of God, the next day it was found to be full of water, and to this day affords abundance of its heavenly bounty to all that resort thither.
He first showed in his own life what he taught others to do, a practice which greatly strengthens all teaching; for he was above all things inflamed with the fire of Divine charity, of sober mind and patient, most diligently intent on devout prayers, and kindly to all that came to him for comfort.
One of the priests of the monastery, named Thruidred, who is now abbot there, had a small part of these relics by him at that time.
For when the brethren found his body uncorrupted, after having been many years buried, they took some part of the hair, to give, as relics, to friends who asked for them, or to show, in testimony of the miracle.
The physicians endeavoured to mitigate it by applying ointments, but in vain. Some said it ought to be cut off; others opposed this course, for fear of greater danger.
Then he awoke, and rose up in perfect health, and returning thanks to the Lord for his recovery, told the brothers what had been done for him; and to the joy of them all, returned the more zealously, as if chastened by the trial of his affliction, to the service which he was wont before to perform with care.
And when he offered up to God the Sacrifice of the saving Victim, he commended his prayer to the Lord, not with uplifted voice, but with tears drawn from the bottom of his heart.
How the same St. Cuthbert, living the life of an Anchorite, by his prayers obtained a spring in a dry soil, and had a crop from seed sown by the labour of his hands out of season.
In that monastery was a youth whose eyelid was disfigured by an unsightly tumour, which growing daily greater, threatened the loss of the eye.
But the islanders, while to the utmost of their power they repelled force with force, implored the assistance of the Divine mercy, and with constant imprecations invoked the vengeance of Heaven; and though such as curse cannot inherit the kingdom of God, yet it was believed, that those who were justly cursed on account of their impiety, soon suffered the penalty of their guilt at the avenging hand of God.
Of one who was lately cured of a disease in his eye at the relics of St. Cuthbert.
But in this History we have thought fit to add some others which have lately come to our knowledge.
They made known their resolve to Bishop Eadbert, and he consented to it, and bade them to be mindful to do it on the anniversary of his burial.
As he prayed, he seemed to fall into a deep sleep, and, as he was afterwards wont to relate, felt a large and broad hand touch his head, where the pain lay, and likewise pass over all that part of his body which had been benumbed by the disease, down to his feet.
When he got up, he felt one half of his body, from the head to the foot, struck with palsy, and with great trouble made his way home by the help of a staff.
The priest, having given his friend as much as he thought fit, gave the rest to the youth to put back into its place.
Moreover, the very garments which had been on Cuthbert's body, dedicated to God, either while he was alive, or after his death, were not without the virtue of healing, as may be seen in the book of his life and miracles, by such as shall read it.
There prostrating himself before the body of the man of God, he prayed with pious earnestness, that, through his intercession, the Lord might be propitious to him.
Whilst they alternately entertained one another with draughts of the celestial life, the bishop, among other things, said, "Brother Herebert, remember at this time to ask me and speak to me concerning all whereof you have need to ask and speak; for, when we part, we shall never again see one another with bodily eyesight in this world.
He also desired that instruments for husbandry might be brought him, and some wheat; but having prepared the ground and sown the wheat at the proper season, no sign of a blade, not to speak of ears, had sprouted from it by the summer.
In order to show forth the great glory of the life after death of the man of God, Cuthbert, whereas the loftiness of his life before his death had been revealed by the testimony of many miracles, when he had been buried eleven years, Divine Providence put it into the minds of the brethren to take up his bones.
When, after expelling the enemy, he had, with the help of the brethren, built himself a narrow dwelling, with a mound about it, and the necessary cells in it, to wit, an oratory and a common living room, he ordered the brothers to dig a pit in the floor of the room, although the ground was hard and stony, and no hopes appeared of any spring.
'Yes, father; he and Mr. St. Clare are the men I like best here.
You must have enjoyed yourself there.'
'Never mind, best not to ask....
He only muttered that the time had come to put his house in order.
'I will not make a scene,' he said at last.
'Father!'
'I think I picked it up pretty quickly.
Your mother said, in reply to some question about me, that I was "merely an expense." I believe the phrase was considered very clever, it went the round of society, and eventually was put into a play.
I don't want to marry any one, and mother doesn't seem to understand that.
I promise you that I will not make a scene, but I must go down to the drawing-room in these clothes.
'Mother will want me to marry.'
He's been an expense too.'
'Who, then, is the worst?
She noticed that his step was heavy and irresolute and hoped he would refrain.
Agnes did not answer for a long while, at last she said,--
'Will you, father?
And that is why I told you that money is everything, that it is difficult to be truthful, honourable, or respectable if you have no money, a little will do, but you must have a little, if you haven't you aren't respectable, you're nothing, you become like me, a mere expense.... I've borne it for your sake, dearest.'
She was too intent on what she was saying to notice the light which flashed in the Major's eyes.
I'll tell you, Agnes, but you must not breathe a word of it to any one, if you did, they would take the machine from me: for they'd like me to remain a mere expense.
I'll teach you--you'd soon pick it up.'
'I shall be able to sweep out all those you don't like.
'They shall not force you to marry, they shall not ask you to do anything you do not like.
I can get one out of the butler's room.
He won't mind just for once.
'Yes; but, father, you cannot speak to him now, there are people in the drawing-room.'
As long as I'm that, they can do what they like, but as soon as I gain an independence, as soon as I am able to pay for my meals,' he whispered, 'I mean to put my house in order But you mustn't breathe a word.'
'But that will take a long time, father; in the meantime----'
'Your mother would say you were wasting your time.
'Yes; tell me about it.
'I don't wish you to be violent, father, but you might hint to Mr. Moulton that I do not wish----'
I can do seventy words a minute.
And he speaks in a way that I do not like--I don't know....
He is--no, I cannot marry him.
It took me a long while, but I have found the way--there it is,' he said, pointing to the type-writing machine.
'No, dear, you're not selfish....
Listen to me, I've only you.'
'Frightens you!
'I'm not disturbing you, father?'
That fellow--that fellow!'
Lord Chiselhurst ought to be ashamed, a man of his age to want to marry a young girl like you.
'I shan't be many minutes before I finish this lot,' he said; 'then we shall be able to talk.
But I've taken your chair.'
'Yes; he asks me questions.'
'But no, father, I can't take your chair.
We could sit together, you in that corner, I in this.
How selfish I am.'
His lips moved but he did not speak.
I cannot, father, dear, I cannot, I feel so far away; I do not know what to say to the people I meet.
I could pay her back out of the money I earned, just like you.'
'But, father, you're not listening.
I was thinking. Somehow it seems to me that I rather like him, though I have no reason to do so.
'He has dined and lunched here every day for the last ten years.
Here, take your chair.'
But I'll tell him I took it for you.'
He gave it to Agnes and resumed his place at the machine.
'I want you to speak to Mr. Moulton....
'There's something, father, dear, that I must speak to you about.... Mother thinks I ought to marry Lord Chiselhurst, that I ought to make up to him and catch him if I can.
Lord Chiselhurst is not the worst.'
'Tell me, father, do you like Lord Chadwick?' The Major's face changed expression.
'Is he a fast man, father, is he like Lord Chiselhurst?'
I don't think he's a bad man--no worse than other men.
'Of what?'
'No, dear.
I don't want to stop you from working.
They are very pleased with my work....
But, father, I cannot marry him.
He's a very particular man.
You asked me if I liked Lord Chadwick.
'Mother said he is so poor that she has often to lend him money.'
I promised to get them finished this evening.'
'It doesn't matter.
I'll put my house in order.'
'Oh, father, don't, for my sake, please.'
'They think me a sheep, I have been a sheep too long, but they shall see that even the sheep will turn to save its lamb from the butcher. I'll go to them, yes, and in these clothes--Agnes, let me go.'
I thought I'd like to sit and watch you.
Whatever his faults may be, I feel sure when he sees that I do not want him, that he will cease to think of me...
Amy gave a scream of joy at the sight of Katy, and cuddled down in her lap under the warm rug with a sigh of relief and satisfaction.
The "Spartacus" had the reputation of being a dreadful "roller," and seemed bound to justify it on this particular voyage.
"She couldn't answer; she was too ill," explained Katy.
There they remained for several moments executing what looked like a dance; then the leading shoe turned on its heel as if giving a signal to the others, and they all hopped slowly again into the passage-way and disappeared.
"What!" cried simple Katy.
"Lucy never forgets, bless her!
Stewardesses are all-powerful on board ship, and Mrs. Barrett was so persuasive as well as positive that it was not possible to resist her. She got Katy into her dress and wraps, and seated her on deck in a chair with a great rug wrapped about her feet, with very little effort on Katy's part.
"Oh no, h'indeed, mum,--no, you won't," put in Mrs. Barrett, who at that moment appeared, gruel-cup in hand.
I do!"
Down, down, down the great hull would slide till Katy would hold her breath with fear lest it might never right itself again; then slowly, slowly the turn would be made, and up, up, up it would go, till the cant on the other side was equally alarming.
The ulster and the felt hat soon came off again, for a head wind lay waiting in the offing, and the "Spartacus" began to pitch and toss in a manner which made all her unseasoned passengers glad to betake themselves to their berths.
A great sea-going steamer is a little world in itself, and gives one a glimpse of all sorts and conditions of people and characters.
One droll thing happened in the course of the second night,--at least it seemed droll afterward; at the time Katy was too uncomfortable to enjoy it.
It's a bit of a towel hung from a particular window; and when I see it I say to myself, 'Thank God! another voyage safely done and no harm come of it.' It's a sad kind of work for a man to go off for a twenty-four days' cruise leaving a sick wife on shore behind him.
But my maid has been sick, too; and oh, so selfish!
The moon had risen and was shining softly on the river as the crowded tender landed the passengers from the "Spartacus" at the Liverpool docks.
Amy and Katy both felt suddenly ravenous; and when Mrs. Ashe awhile later was helped up the stairs, she was amazed to find them eating cold beef and roasted potatoes, with the finest appetites in the world.
Don't you wish you were dead?
Mrs. Barrett was enlisted in the plot, there could be no doubt of that, and enjoyed the joke as much as any one, as she presented herself each day with the invariable formula, "A letter for you, ma'am," or "A bundle, Miss, come by the Parcels Delivery." On the fourth morning it was a photograph of Baby Rose, in a little flat morocco case.
"Which, Katy?"
I wish they would bring us something to eat."
Lucy was his mainstay at home, he told Katy. Her mother had been "weakly" now this long time back, and Bess and Nanny were but children yet, so Lucy had to take command and keep things ship-shape when he was away.
She tried to speak, but to Katy's dismay began to cry instead; and when the words came they were strangled with sobs.
Tell the captain to take me back to the land.
"Four-wheeler or hansom, ma'am?" said a porter to Mrs. Ashe.
I couldn't think what 'ad come to you so early; and you're looking ever so well again, I'm pleased to see; and 'ere's a bundle just arrived, Miss, by the Parcels Delivery."
She wanted to get up and see how Mrs. Ashe had lived through the night, but the attempt to move made her so miserably ill that she was glad to sink again on her pillows.
I want to go back, mamma.
At the sound of her voice the lady on the sofa opened her eyes.
And mamma wouldn't answer when I called to her."
The stewardess looked in with offers of tea and toast, the very idea of which was simply dreadful, and pronounced the other lady "'orridly ill, worse than you are, Miss," and the little girl "takin' on dreadful in the h'upper berth." Of this fact Katy soon had audible proof; for as her dizzy senses rallied a little, she could hear Amy in the opposite stateroom crying and sobbing pitifully.
It grew to be one of the little excitements of ship life to watch for the arrival of these daily gifts; and "What did the mail bring for you this time, Miss Carr?" was a question frequently asked.
I never saw one, and they look so nice in 'Punch.'"
It wasn't a bit kind of you to bring me to such a horrid place.
ON THE "SPARTACUS."
"I hope the fresh h'air will do her good."
She felt very sorry for poor little Amy, raging there in her high berth like some imprisoned creature, but she was powerless to help her.
She wouldn't even take the baby into the berth with her; and I have had all I could do to manage with him, when I couldn't lift up my head.
Mamma!
It might with equal propriety have been called "The Adventures of two little Girls who didn't have any Adventures," for nothing in particular happened to either Violet or Emma during the whole course of their long-drawn-out history.
I h'always gets them on deck as soon as possible to get the h'air.
The letter was not long, but it was very like its writer.
"This is only the beginning; we shall get across the sea in a few days, and then we shall find out what going to Europe really means.
On the whole, there was no one on the "Spartacus" whom Katy liked so well as sedate little Gretchen except the dear old Captain, with whom she was a prime favorite.
"I wanted to; but I was sick too, so sick that I couldn't move.
They now seemed to be acting in concert with one another, and really looked alive as they bumped and trotted side by side, and two by two, in at the door and up close to her bedside.
"Neither could I, and I felt just as guilty not to be taking care of you," said Katy.
Meanwhile, every morning brought a fresh surprise from that dear, painstaking Rose, who had evidently worked hard and thought harder in contriving pleasures for Katy's first voyage at sea.
"Break! break!
Amy, however, found them perfectly enchanting, and was never weary of hearing how they went to school and came home again, how they got into scrapes and got out of them, how they made good resolutions and broke them, about their Christmas presents and birthday treats, and what they said and how they felt.
Amy had fallen asleep at last and must not be waked up, so their interview was conducted in whispers.
The vessel doesn't pitch half so much now, and the stewardess says we shall feel a great deal better as soon as we get on deck.
"Oh, Miss Katy, it has been so horrid!
The little uncomplaining thing was evidently half starved, but with the mouthfuls the pink began to steal back into her cheeks and lips, and the dark circles lessened under the blue eyes.
"I feel as if I could sleep for a fortnight to make up for the bad nights at sea."
Mrs. Ashe and Amy were among the earliest victims of sea-sickness; and Katy, after helping them to settle in their staterooms, found herself too dizzy and ill to sit up a moment longer, and thankfully resorted to her own.
"We shall meet again in London or in Paris," said one to another, and cards and addresses were exchanged.
Then she laughed at her own foolishness, and took the "bundle," which was directed in Rose's unmistakable hand.
Then why didn't you come to me?"
"I am afraid you have been very ill."
All the time that she talked Mrs. Barrett was busy in making Mrs. Ware--for that, it seemed, was the sick lady's name--more comfortable; and Katy was feeding Gretchen out of a big bowl full of bread and milk which one of the stewards had brought.
She could only resign herself to her own discomforts, and try to believe that somehow, sometime, this state of things must mend,--either they should all get to land or all go to the bottom and be drowned, and at that moment she didn't care very much which it turned out to be.
A good many passengers had come up by this time; and Robert, the deck steward, was going about, tray in hand, taking orders for lunch.
The fifth brought a wonderful epistle, full of startling pieces of news, none of them true.
"I hate being at sea," Katy heard her say.
Long he studied before he made quite sure that it was there.
"It's all right," he said to Katy, who stood near, almost as much interested as he.
Little Gretchen has had to go without anything; and she has been so good and patient!"
He was stout and grizzled and brown and kind.
Katy lost no time, but ran for Mrs. Barrett, whose indignation knew no bounds when she heard how the helpless party had been neglected.
Katy and he grew quite intimate during their long morning talk.
"Oh, dear, why do people ever go to sea, unless they must?" she thought feebly to herself.
They kept her on deck with them a great deal, and she was perfectly content with them and very good, though always solemn and quiet.
It was exactly like one of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tales, Katy wrote to Clover afterward.
Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures.
The ancients, however, not properly realizing the force of intelligence, and failing to make a proper distinction between sense and intellect, thought that nothing existed in the world but what could be apprehended by sense and imagination.
It is, however, quite foreign to the custom of the Scriptures for the powers of irrational things to be designated as angels.
Therefore, every creature is corporeal.
And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat.
Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty; for every body is limited to "here" and "now." Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature.
Objection 1: It would seem that an angel is composed of matter and form.
Hence the nature itself is related to its own existence as potentiality to act.
Therefore, since the angels were made by God, it would appear that they are corruptible of their own nature.
For the operation belonging to anything is according to the mode of its substance.
Therefore it would follow that the matter of spiritual things is subject to quantity; which cannot be.
Hence material things which are below our intellect exist in our intellect in a simpler mode than they exist in themselves.
Hence it must be said that the angels, even inasmuch as they are immaterial substances, exist in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude.
Therefore the form of an angel is in matter.
But one glance is enough to show that there cannot be one matter of spiritual and of corporeal things.
Hence it is reasonable to conclude that the immaterial substances as it were incomparably exceed material substances as to multitude.
But things distinguished by the intellect are not necessarily distinguished in reality; because the intellect does not apprehend things according to their mode, but according to its own mode.
But the movements of the heavenly bodies fall within some small determined number, which we can apprehend.
We see, in fact, that incorruptible bodies, exceed corruptible bodies almost incomparably in magnitude; for the entire sphere of things active and passive is something very small in comparison with the heavenly bodies.
Now as regards incorporeal substance, the intellect apprehends that which distinguishes it from corporeal substance, and that which it has in common with it.
Now the medium compared to one extreme appears to be the other extreme, as what is tepid compared to heat seems to be cold; and thus it is said that angels, compared to God, are material and corporeal, not, however, as if anything corporeal existed in them.
But this would not be so if there were but one individual under one species.
But immaterial created substances are finite in their being; whereas they are infinite in the sense that their forms are not received in anything else; as if we were to say, for example, that whiteness existing separate is infinite as regards the nature of whiteness, forasmuch as it is not contracted to any one subject; while its "being" is finite as determined to some one special nature.
Objection 1: It would seem that an angel is not entirely incorporeal. For what is incorporeal only as regards ourselves, and not in relation to God, is not absolutely incorporeal.
Objection 1: It would seem that the angels are not in great numbers. For number is a species of quantity, and follows the division of a continuous body.
Consequently a subject composed of matter and form ceases to be actually when the form is separated from the matter.
For such things as agree in species but differ in number, agree in form, but are distinguished materially.
For thus the immaterial substances would exist to no purpose, unless some movement from them were to appear in corporeal things.
And such a kind of composition is understood to be in the angels; and this is what some say, that an angel is composed of, "whereby he is," and "what is," or "existence," and "what is," as Boethius says.
Objection 1: It would seem that the angels exercise functions of life in assumed bodies.
Therefore they cannot exercise functions of life through assumed bodies.
For whatever belongs to any nature as an accident is not found universally in that nature; thus, for instance, to have wings, because it is not of the essence of an animal, does not belong to every animal.
Consequently, the angel perceives by the assumed body; and this is the most special function of life.
We next inquire about the angels in comparison with corporeal things; and in the first place about their comparison with bodies; secondly, of the angels in comparison with corporeal places; and, thirdly, of their comparison with local movement.
Now by such a vision only a body can be beheld.
Hence by the sons of God are to be understood the sons of Seth, who were good; while by the daughters of men the Scripture designates those who sprang from the race of Cain.
QUESTION 51
But it is evident from many passages of Sacred Scripture that angels spoke in assumed bodies.
Yet the angels are moved accidentally, when such bodies are moved, since they are in them as movers are in the moved; and they are here in such a way as not to be elsewhere, which cannot be said of God.
Moreover that angels assumed bodies under the Old Law was a figurative indication that the Word of God would take a human body; because all the apparitions in the Old Testament were ordained to that one whereby the Son of God appeared in the flesh.
Yet Divine Scripture from time to time introduces angels so apparent as to be seen commonly by all; just as the angels who appeared to Abraham were seen by him and by his whole family, by Lot, and by the citizens of Sodom; in like manner the angel who appeared to Tobias was seen by all present.
Accordingly, although God is not moved when the things are moved in which He exists, since He is everywhere; yet the angels are moved accidentally according to the movement of the bodies assumed.
Consequently not all intellectual substances are united to bodies; but some are quite separated from bodies, and these we call angels.
Therefore angels have bodies naturally united to them.
For pretence is unbecoming in angels of truth.
But the food taken by angels was neither changed into the assumed body, nor was the body of such a nature that food could be changed into it; consequently, it was not a true eating, but figurative of spiritual eating.
Objection 1: It would seem that angels have bodies naturally united to them.
Objection 1: It would seem that angels do not assume bodies.
Whether Angels Assume Bodies?
This could not so fittingly be done if they were to assume true men; because the properties of such men would lead us to men, and not to angels.
Therefore an angel does not assume a body.
For the bodies are assumed merely for this purpose, that the spiritual properties and works of the angels may be manifested by the properties of man and of his works.
For there is nothing superfluous in the work of an angel, as there is nothing of the kind in the work of nature.
Consequently it can in no way be said that the angels perceive through the organs of their assumed bodies.
Hence it is folly to deny it.
Therefore in their assumed bodies they exercise functions of life.
The letter was this: 'Acme to king Herod.
But Antipater fell down on his face, and appealed to God and to all men for testimonials of his innocency, desiring that God would declare, by some evident signals, that he had not laid any plot against his father.
Then Varus got up, and departed out of the court, and went away the day following to Antioch, where his usual residence was, because that was the palace of the Syrians; upon which Herod laid his son in bonds.
But others advised him to sail home without delay; for that if he were once come thither, he would soon put an end to all accusations, and that nothing afforded any weight to his accusers at present but his absence.
This last news affected him deeply; not out of any affection for Pheroras, but because he was dead without having murdered his father, which he had promised him to do.
He also offered himself to the torture.
But what were Varus's discourses to Herod was not known to the generality, and upon what words it was that he went away; though it was also generally supposed that whatsoever Herod did afterward about his son was done with his approbation.
Now some of his friends advised him that he should tarry a while some where, in expectation of further information.
But while the king was in doubt about it, one of Herod's friends seeing a seam upon the inner coat of the slave, and a doubling of the cloth, [for he had two coats on,] he guessed that the letter might be within that doubling; which accordingly proved to be true.
CHAPTER 5.
Hereupon Herod was in such great grief, that he was ready to send his son to Rome to Caesar, there to give an account of these his wicked contrivances.
And now was Antipater evidently in a miserable condition, while nobody came to him nor saluted him, as they did at his going away, with good wishes of joyful acclamations; nor was there now any thing to hinder them from entertaining him, on the contrary, with bitter curses, while they supposed he was come to receive his punishment for the murder of his brethren.
The porters indeed received him in, but excluded his friends.
So Herod ordered him to be brought into the midst, and then lamented himself about his children, from whom he had suffered such great misfortunes; and because Antipater fell upon him in his old age.
He also distributed among his sons and their sons his money, his revenues, and his lands.
He then cried out, that these men had not abstained from affronting him, even in his lifetime, but that in the very day time, and in the sight of the multitude, they had abused him to that degree, as to fall upon what he had dedicated, and in that way of abuse had pulled it down to the ground.
But then, as to the affairs of his family and children, in which indeed, according to his own opinion, he was also very fortunate, because he was able to conquer his enemies, yet, in my opinion, he was herein very unfortunate.
Concerning Herod's Death, And Testament, And Burial.
And when he had given a treat to the multitude, and left off his motoring, he went up into the temple; he had also acclamations and praises given him, which way soever he went, every one striving with the rest who should appear to use the loudest acclamations.
Now Herod's ambassadors made haste to Rome; but sent, as instructed beforehand, what answers they were to make to the questions put to them. They also carried the epistles with them.
Accordingly, they were a great number that came, because the whole nation was called, and all men heard of this call, and death was the penalty of such as should despise the epistles that were sent to call them.
When he had got the knife, he looked about, and had a mind to stab himself with it; and he had done it, had not his first cousin, Achiabus, prevented him, and held his hand, and cried out loudly.
CHAPTER 6.
CHAPTER 7.
They pretended, indeed, that they did it to affront him; but if any one consider the thing truly, they will find that they were guilty of sacrilege against God therein.
Concerning The Disease That Herod Fell Into And The Sedition Which The Jews Raised Thereupon; With The Punishment Of The Seditious.
Now it happened, that during the time of the high priesthood of this Matthias, there was another person made high priest for a single day, that very day which the Jews observed as a fast.
But Herod now fell into a distemper, and made his will, and bequeathed his kingdom to [Antipas], his youngest son; and this out of that hatred to Archclaus and Philip, which the calumnies of Antipater had raised against them.
But then Salome and Alexas, before the king's death was made known, dismissed those that were shut up in the hippodrome, and told them that the king ordered them to go away to their own lands, and take care of their own affairs, which was esteemed by the nation a great benefit.
He also sent for physicians, and did not refuse to follow what they prescribed for his assistance, and went beyond the river Jordan, and bathed himself in the warm baths that were at Callirrhoe, which, besides their other general virtues, were also fit to drink; which water runs into the lake called Asphaltiris.
And now Herod altered his testament upon the alteration of his mind; for he appointed Antipas, to whom he had before left the kingdom, to be tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, and granted the kingdom to Archclaus.
And that very night there was an eclipse of the moon.
The body was carried upon a golden bier, embroidered with very precious stones of great variety, and it was covered over with purple, as well as the body itself; he had a diadem upon his head, and above it a crown of gold: he also had a scepter in his right hand.
But as for Herod, he dealt more mildly with others [of the assembly] but he deprived Matthias of the high priesthood, as in part an occasion of this action, and made Joazar, who was Matthias's wife's brother, high priest in his stead.
Nay, further, his privy-member was putrefied, and produced worms; and when he sat upright, he had a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath, and the quickness of its returns; he had also convulsions in all parts of his body, which increased his strength to an insufferable degree.
CHAPTER 8.
Accordingly we will undergo death, and all sorts of punishments which thou canst inflict upon us, with pleasure, since we are conscious to ourselves that we shall die, not for any unrighteous actions, but for our love to religion." And thus they all said, and their courage was still equal to their profession, and equal to that with which they readily set about this undertaking.
"No such luck," answered Ned, who had come up beside Walter and replied to Tad's question.
"If he gets back then we are in great luck.
"They're gone!"
Ned Rector thought it time to leave.
"Never mind, Tad, the moon soon will be up and you can get warm by that," shouted the fat boy.
"What's that you say?" demanded Ned, turning on him.
"Not until all other means have been exhausted," declared the Professor.
"It can't be possible."
Ned and Stacy's foot race continued until both were out of breath and thoroughly awake.
I have most of the blankets."
"Are you warm enough down there?" called Ned.
"Suppose he had to stop to smoke a pipe of peace with his friend," suggested Ned.
"Hello, up there!" he shouted, pulling himself to a sitting position.
I'll do that, with your permission, Professor," offered Ned Rector promptly.
"Chunky has suddenly developed into a wit, Tad.
He did so, with Stacy a close second and the rubber pillow brushing Ned's cheek in transit.
"Yes, there's their tracks," agreed the Professor.
"I'll wake up Tad, I guess," announced Ned after recovering his breath.
"Hello!" answered Walter.
"Wait till Tad comes up.
"What is it?
"What is there to eat?" asked the Professor.
Over went the cot, with Stacy beneath it. From the confusion of blankets emerged the red face of the fat boy.
Were you ever an Indian?" asked Stacy innocently.
"Right you are," laughed Ned.
After replenishing the fire, determined to remain awake until daylight, the lad rolled up in his blankets.
If anything occurs during the night, remember you are to let me know at once.
"What are we going to do?" asked Stacy dolefully.
Instead, a few moments afterward, they lost the trail.
"I'll make a suggestion, young gentlemen," said the Professor.
"Is it possible?" sputtered the Professor, striding to the place where their stock had been tethered.
The ponies!"
Chunky is the only one who--"
They have broken away, I think.
All hands hurried to him.
"Yes.
Supper finished, all hands turned in to help wash the dishes, and in a few moments the camp was again in perfect order.
"No; we're trying to burn it down, so we can pick you up," called Ned Rector.
"That will be fine," cried Walter.
"Maybe he's fallen into the stream during the night and drowned," suggested Chunky.
I'm stiff in every joint," he mumbled.
Then Walter and Stacy had better go to their tents.
"Then there would be a certain amount of grunting to do before Eagle-eye could state his business, and after that much talk, talk.
"That's a good idea.
"That means we freeze, I guess," interjected Stacy.
Then both boys added their voices to the effort, joined a few minutes later by the Professor and Walter Perkins.
"I think perhaps Master Tad is right.
"Wake up," he commanded, pinching one of the fat boy's big-toes.
"The ponies!
Boys!" he cried.
You had better all turn in now.
"Yes, sir, what is it?" asked the boys in chorus.
Has anything happened to them?" asked the Professor, striding toward the excited Ned Rector.
I don't know what's happened to the boy.
"That's right," agreed Ned.
"Sure thing.
BOY AND PONIES STRANGELY MISSING
"All right," answered Ned and Walter at once.
They were unable to get any reply at all; nor was there the slightest movement or sign of life where Tad had last been seen.
"Never mind Chunky.
They cannot be far away.
"Very well, sir," answered Ned.
"I wouldn't worry," comforted Walter Perkins.
"Look around, boys.
Then they sat down, laughing, the color flaming in their cheeks and eyes sparkling with pleasurable excitement.
"Trying to burn up the mountain?" shouted Tad.
Ned awoke with a start.
"Even if I were, I couldn't be called a savage," retorted Ned.
"I--I was just thinking to myself," explained Chunky, edging away.
"If the Indian ever gets here with a rope, I'll go down there and see if I can find out anything," said Ned.
"Yes, that's so.
"What about them?" asked Walter, pausing as he was about to strike a match to the wood.
But he was left in peace only a moment.
"Haven't any matches."
"Happened?
"I'm going to bed.
"Chunky's and Tad's."
Quickly carrying the dried wood to the place indicated, they piled it so that it would make a long fire, then lighted it from three sides at the same time.
Don't keep us waiting in suspense all--"
"You can go cut yourself a few chopsticks and sleep under them," retorted Ned Rector.
In youth there are always two forces fighting in people.
Pushing his way through the crowds in Main Street, young George Willard concealed himself in the stairway leading to Doctor Reefy's office and looked at the people.
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life.
It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town.
Thoughts kept coming into his head and he did not want to think.
He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.
"Come on," he said and took hold of her hand.
He felt old and a little tired.
As for Helen White, she also had come to a period of change.
The two started to walk back along the road toward town.
The boy's voice failed and in silence the two came back into town and went along the street to Helen White's house.
Now he wanted to see her for another purpose.
During the day she was happy, but when night came on she began to grow restless.
When the moment of sophistication came to George Willard his mind turned to Helen White, the Winesburg banker's daughter.
Helen White was thinking of George Willard even as he wandered gloomily through the crowds thinking of her. She remembered the summer evening when they had walked together and wanted to walk with him again.
He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up.
"There are people here in whom you are interested?" To the girl his voice sounded pompous and heavy.
To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure.
The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been rather stupidly spent. They had walked out of town along a country road.
He wants, most of all, understanding.
The dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with colors.
She wanted to drive the instructor away, to get out of his presence.
He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world.
She was no longer a girl and hungered to reach into the grace and beauty of womanhood.
"A scholar needs money. I should marry a woman with money," he mused.
George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts had been coming into his mind.
If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness.
She thought that the months she had spent in the city, the going to theaters and the seeing of great crowds wandering in lighted thoroughfares, had changed her profoundly.
In a room above one of the stores, where a dance was to be held, the fiddlers tuned their instruments.
Sensing his mood, Helen walked beside him filled with respect.
Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life.
"I thought--I used to think--I had it in my mind you would marry Seth Richmond.
It has never been painted and the boards are all warped out of shape.
His voice trembled.
"I've been reading books and I've been thinking.
What he felt was reflected in her.
"Well," he explained, "that isn't the point.
Where are you, George?" she cried, filled with nervous excitement.
Speeches he had thought out came into his head, but they seemed utterly pointless.
At the Fair she was glad to be seen in his company as he was well dressed and a stranger.
In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little animals.
The boy is walking through the street of his town.
Have I done all this waiting for nothing?" he muttered.
From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure.
During the day she sat in the grand-stand with a young man, one of the instructors from the college, who was a guest of her mother's.
"I wasn't afraid, I knew I had 'em beat all the time.
Already he hears death calling.
She knew that the fact of his presence would create an impression.
Once, running swiftly forward, Helen tripped George and he fell.
"Your life is still bound up with the life of this town?" he asked.
Now I know you won't," was all he could find to say as she went through the gate and toward the door of her house.
You see the point.
Then they had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and George had taken off his coat and let it hang on his arm.
He stamped impatiently on the wooden steps and looked sharply about.
George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the path past Waterworks Pond.
The confused boy put his hand on the girl's arm.
He squirmed and shouted.
While they sat together in the grand-stand and while the eyes of former schoolmates were upon them, she paid so much attention to her escort that he grew interested.
He stopped and stared stupidly.
The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity.
Dry leaves rustled under foot.
She had come home from Cleveland, where she was attending college, to spend a day at the Fair.
In the darkness she stopped and stood trembling.
He wanted to run away by himself and think.
The mood that had taken possession of him was a thing known to men and unknown to boys.
The Fair Ground stands on top of a low hill rising out of the valley of Wine Creek and from the grand-stand one can see at night, over a cornfield, the lights of the town reflected against the sky.
He had tried to make her think of him as a man when he knew nothing of manhood and now he wanted to be with her and to try to make her feel the change he believed had taken place in his nature.
In his desperation George boasted, "I'm going to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived here in Winesburg," he declared.
He wanted to tell her of the new impulses that had come to him.
"George!
"Well, I've stayed here in Winesburg--yes--I've not yet gone away but I'm growing up," he had said.
He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death.
Perhaps I'd better quit talking."
Ambitions and regrets awake within him.
Again the voice was soft and wheedling....
She stood in the latticed porch, dark and handsome against the whiteness, and then, advancing, put her head into the great hall-kitchen.
Before replying, the gipsy once more turned her almond eyes towards Aunt Rachel's chair.
Sabrina, the eldest, interpreted.
As the child settled, Annabel gave Aunt Rachel a long look.
She did not reply.
"You should not have spoken.
(The children at the other end of the apartment had converted a chest into an altar, and were solemnising the nuptials of the resurrected Flora and Jack, the raffish sailor-doll.)
She approached the chair in which Aunt Rachel sat.
The gipsy woman wouldn't go without her little baby, would she?"
"The hares and foxes were down four days ago, and the liquid-manure pumps like a snow man," the bailiff said....
Annabel stooped and kissed the hand that bore the betrothal hoop of pearls.
Noiselessly on the rockers that the gipsy had padded with felt the chair began to rock.
It was as Angela, the youngest, was chastising her for some offence, that Sabrina, the eldest, looked with wondering eyes on the babe in the gipsy's sling. She approached on tiptoe.
The little regular noise of the rocker ceased.
That afternoon, Jack and Flora had shaken down to wedlock as married folk should, and sat together before the board spread with the dolls' tea-things.
Coming back again, they had had some ado to discover the spot where their three caravans made a hummock of white against a broken wall.
"Yes, dear?"
"All leave me."
It was always the white-haired lady who spoke first, and Annabel made all sorts of salutes and obeisances with her eyes before replying.
"Has the lady any chairs for the gipsy woman to mend?" she asked in a soft and insinuating voice....
He died on the eve of his wedding.
The youngest of the children passed the high-backed walnut chair in which the old lady sat.
"In a what, dear?"
Annabel made roving play with her eyes.
I no longer want it.
"Would it come to another chair?"
Tell me, does it come to any other chair?"
They took my white garments away and gave me black ones.
How then could it have lived?"
"Then that is--?"
Please go."
The old lady, when she smiled, did so less with her lips than with her faded cheeks.
It was a hoop of pearls.
The gipsy woman beckoned to one of the children.
"Did what die?" she asked slowly and guardedly....
"Lady dear, we are a strange folk to you, and even among us there are those who shuffle the pack of cards and read the palm when silver has been put upon it, knowing nothing...
"They thank you, lady dear....
It was, somehow, less to Sabrina, still peering at the babe in the sling, than to Aunt Rachel, apparently asleep, that the gipsy seemed to reply.
She broke another long silence.
It trembled as it rested there, but the tremor passed, and Annabel, turning once at the porch, gave her a last look.
There was little need for the swart gipsies to explain, as they stood knee-deep in the snow round the bailiff of the Abbey Farm, what it was that had sent them.
"No, Annabel," she said gently.
"Ah!...
In the intervals of kissing they told one another in whispers that Aunt Rachel was not very well, and Angela woke Flora to tell her that Aunt Rachel had Brown Titus also.
"None has."
Aunt Rachel shook her head.
With that ineffable smile still on her face, she rocked....
"Is there anything Annabel can bid him do?"
In a voice soft as sliding water the gipsy continued:
"Ah!...
"You'll know some day, little missis, that a wean knows its own pair of arms," her seductive voice came.
Annabel lifted one hand.
"He died on the eve of his wedding.
So sweet was her face that you could not help wondering, when you looked on it, how many men had also looked upon it and loved it. Somehow, you never wondered how many of them had been loved in return.
Then, after some minutes, there crossed her face such a look as visits the face of one who, waking from sleep, strains his faculties to recapture some blissful and vanishing vision....
"Lady dear," she murmured with irresistible softness, "your husband died, didn't he?"
Her eyes avoided those of the gipsy, sought them, and avoided them again.
"No, darling.
Aunt Rachel opened her eyes again.
It is long ago, and now I wear neither black nor white, but--" her hands made a gesture.
The child at the gipsy's back did not need suck; nevertheless, Annabel's fingers worked at her bosom, and she moved the sling.
"But for that little time, rock--"
A night in the toy-box had apparently bred discontent between Jack and Flora--or perhaps they sought to keep their countenances before the world; at any rate, they sat on opposite sides of the room, Jack keeping boon company with the lead soldiers, his spouse reposing, her lead-balanced eyes closed, in the broken clockwork motor-car.
Still the shake of the head.
She repeated dully after Annabel:
"May I look at it, please?" she asked timidly.
She stopped.
Look, the doll who died yesterday is now being married....
It's the carol-singers, singing because Jesus was born."
"Flora's dead!"
Then, after a minute, she drew still closer.
Once more her head dropped.
"No, Annabel," said Aunt Rachel faintly.
"And you--shall you die in it?"
Tell me the truth."
Over at the altar Jack was leering at his new-made bride, past decency; and little Angela held the wooden horse's head, which had parted from its body.
For my bridal clothes they made me black garments instead.
"Do, dears."
"No.
It was the Cherry Tree Carol that rose outside, of how sweet Mary, the Queen of Galilee, besought Joseph to pluck the cherries for her Babe, and Joseph refused; and the voices of the singers, that had begun hesitatingly, grew strong and loud and free.
Aunt Rachel had given a little start, but had become quiet again.
The board was spread with ale and cheese and spiced loaf for the carol-singers; and the time drew near for their coming.
"Rock, and comfort yourself--" tempted the voice.
"It was his chair; he died in it," said Aunt Rachel.
"Many years; but it is always small; it never grows."
Along both forks strips of meadow extend almost to their heads.
And it is all the more interesting since it is the highest and most enduring remnant of the great Tuolumne Glacier, whose traces are still distinct fifty miles away, and whose influence on the landscape was so profound.
Northward and southward the great snowy mountains, marshaled along the axis of the Range, are seen in all their glory, crowded together in some places like trees in groves, making landscapes of wild, extravagant, bewildering magnificence, yet calm and silent as the sky.
For miles the river is one wild, exulting, on-rushing mass of snowy purple bloom, spreading over glacial waves of granite without any definite channel, gliding in magnificent silver plumes, dashing and foaming through huge boulder-dams, leaping high into the air in wheel-like whirls, displaying glorious enthusiasm, tossing from side to side, doubling, glinting, singing in exuberance of mountain energy.
The best time to make it is from about the middle of July.
It is about eight miles long and from 2000 to 3000 feet deep.
Tracing the river, we find that it forks a mile above the Soda Springs, the main fork turning southward to Mount Lyell, the other eastward to Mount Dana and Mount Gibbs.
It is in the heart of the High Sierra east of Yosemite, 8500 to 9000 feet above the level of the sea.
None of mine when I was exploring the Sierra cost over a dollar a week, most of them less.
The most showy and interesting of them are mostly in the upper part of the canyon, above the point of entrance of Cathedral Creek and Hoffman Creek.
The sheer falls, except when the snow is melting in early spring, are quite small in volume as compared with those of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy; though in any other country many of them would be regarded as wonders.
The excursion to the top of Mount Dana is a very easy one; for though the mountain is 13,000 feet high, the ascent from the west side is so gentle and smooth that one may ride a mule to the very summit.
The principal grass of these meadows is a delicate calamagrostis with very slender filiform leaves, and when it is in flower the ground seems to be covered with a faint purple mist, the stems of the panicles being so fine that they are almost invisible, and offer no appreciable resistance in walking through them.
There is not a dull step all the way.
At one place near the summit careful climbing is necessary, but it is not so dangerous or difficult as to deter any one of ordinary skill, while the views are glorious.
Another fine trip was up, bright and early, by Avalanche Canyon to Glacier Point, along the rugged south wall, tracing all its far outs and ins to the head of the Bridal Veil Fall, thence back home, bright and late, by a brushy, bouldery slope between Cathedral rocks and Cathedral spires and along the level Valley floor.
These spurs like distinct ranges meet at your feet; therefore you look at them mostly in the direction of their extension, and their peaks seem to be massed and crowded against one another, while immense amphitheaters, canyons and subordinate ridges with their wealth of lakes, glaciers, and snow-fields, maze and cluster between them.
Some eight glaciers are in sight.
Its falls and cascades are innumerable.
The most beautiful portions of the meadows are spread over lake basins, which have been filled up by deposits from the river.
All the High Sierra excursions that I have sketched cost from a dollar a week to anything you like.
Next morning climb Mount Hoffman; thence push on past Tenaya Lake into the Tuolumne Meadows and establish a central camp near the Soda Springs, from which glorious excursions can be made at your leisure.
The Tuolumne grove was passed on the Big Oak Flat road, the Merced grove by the Coulterville road and the Mariposa grove by the Raymond and Wawona road.
To the southward there is a well defined range of pale-gray extinct volcanoes, and though the highest of them rises nearly two thousand feet above the lake, you can look down from here into their circular, cup-like craters, from which a comparatively short time ago ashes and cinders were showered over the surrounding sage plains and glacier-laden mountains.
In October the nights are frosty, and then the meadows at sunrise, when every leaf is laden with crystals, are a fine sight.
Other Trips From The Valley
Along the edges of the meadows beneath the pines and throughout the greater part of the Valley tall ribbon-leaved grasses grow in abundance, chiefly bromus, triticum and agrostis.
The gray, picturesque Cathedral Range bounds it on the south; a similar range or spur, the highest peak of which is Mount Conness, on the north; the noble Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Mammoth, Lyell, McClure and others on the axis of the Range on the east; a heaving, billowing crowd of glacier-polished rocks and Mount Hoffman on the west.
The McClure Glacier, once a tributary of the Lyell, is smaller.
It is from twelve hundred to about five thousand feet deep, and is comparatively narrow, but there are several roomy, park-like openings in it, and throughout its whole extent Yosemite natures are displayed on a grand scale--domes, El Capitan rocks, gables, Sentinels, Royal Arches, Glacier Points, Cathedral Spires, etc.
To the westward the landscape is made up of exceedingly strong, gray, glaciated domes and ridge waves, most of them comparatively low, but the largest high enough to be called mountains; separated by canyons and darkened with lines and fields of forest, Cathedral Peak and Mount Hoffman in the distance; small lakes and innumerable meadows in the foreground.
My own Sierra trip was ten years long.
The canyon begins near the lower end of the meadows and extends to the Hetch Hetchy Valley, a distance of about eighteen miles, though it will seem much longer to any one who scrambles through it.
We come now to the grandest of all the Yosemite excursions, one that requires at least two or three weeks.
To the eastward you gaze far out over the desert plains and mountains of the "Great Basin," range beyond range extending with soft outlines, blue and purple in the distance.
A more interesting problem than a walk over a glacier thus sculptured and adorned is seldom presented to the mountaineer.
One-Day Excursions
For a two-day trip I would go straight to Mount Hoffman, spend the night on the summit, next morning go down by May Lake to Tenaya Lake and return to the Valley by Cloud's Rest and the Nevada and Vernal Falls.
The main lateral moraines that bound the view below the canyon are from a hundred to nearly two hundred feet high and wonderfully regular, like artificial embankments covered with a magnificent growth of silver fir and pine. But this garden and forest luxuriance is speedily left behind, and patches of bryanthus, cassiope and arctic willows begin to appear.
The most telling of all the wide Hoffman views is the basin of the Tuolumne with its meadows, forests and hundreds of smooth rock-waves that appear to be coming rolling on towards you like high heaving waves ready to break, and beyond these the great mountains.
Two-Day Excursions
The walking is good and almost level and from the west end of Clouds' Rest take the Clouds' Rest Trail which will lead direct to the Valley by the Nevada and Vernal Falls.
Northward lies Yosemite's wide basin with its domes and small lakes, shining like larger crystals; eastward the rocky, meadowy Tuolumne region, bounded by its snowy peaks in glorious array; southward Yosemite and westward the vast forest.
One-Day Excursions
There instead of returning to the Valley, follow the Tioga road around the northwest side of the lake, over to the Tuolumne Meadows and up to the west base of Mount Dana.
You will find it a magnificent sky camp.
The path of the vanished glacier shone in many places as if washed with silver, and pushing up the canyon on this bright road I passed lake after lake in solid basins of granite and many a meadow along the canyon stream that links them together.
Dragging yourself away, go to the head of the Ribbon Fall, thence across the beautiful Ribbon Creek Basin to the Big Oak Flat stage-road, and down its fine grades to the Valley, enjoying glorious Yosemite scenery all the way to the foot of El Capitan and your camp.
From the foot of the Fall the trail zigzags up a narrow canyon between the fall and a plain mural cliff that is burnished here and there by glacial action.
From that point push straight up to the summit.
The best three-day excursion, as far as I can see, is the same as the first of the two-day trips until you reach Lake Tenaya.
Early next morning I set out to trace the ancient glacier to its head.
Another grand one-day excursion is to the Upper Yosemite Fall, the top of the highest of the Three Brothers, called Eagle Peak on the Geological Survey maps; the brow of El Capitan; the head of the Ribbon Fall; across the beautiful Ribbon Creek Basin; and back to the Valley by the Big Oak Flat wagon-road.
Chapter 12
You should stop a while on a flat iron-fenced rock a little below the head of the fall beside the enthusiastic throng of starry comet-like waters to learn something of their strength, their marvelous variety of forms, and above all, their glorious music, gathered and composed from the snow-storms, hail-, rain- and wind-storms that have fallen on their glacier-sculptured, domey, ridgy basin.
Most of the broad summit is comparatively level and thick sown with crystals, quartz, mica, hornblende, feldspar, granite, zircon, tourmaline, etc., weathered out and strewn closely and loosely as if they had been sown broadcast.
From Glacier Point you look down 3000 feet over the edge of its sheer face to the meadows and groves and innumerable yellow pine spires, with the meandering river sparkling and spangling through the midst of them.
As on the foregoing excursion, you leave the Valley by the Yosemite Falls trail and follow it to the Tioga wagon-road, a short distance east of Porcupine Flat.
Its southern slopes are low and easily climbed, and adorned here and there with castle-like crumbling piles and long jagged crests that look like artificial masonry; but on the north side it is abruptly precipitous and banked with lasting snow.
A Three-Day Excursion
With your heart aglow, spangling Lake Tenaya and Lake May will beckon you away for walks on their ice-burnished shores.
Thence returning to the trail, follow it to the head of the Nevada Fall.
Climbing to the top of it, I discovered a very small but well-characterized glacier swooping down from the shadowy cliffs of the mountain to its terminal moraine.
Yet, strange to say, amid all this arctic repression the mountain pine on ledges and buttresses of Red Mountain seems to find the climate best suited to it.
Refreshed and exhilarated, you follow your trail-way through silver fir and pine woods to Eagle Peak, where the most comprehensive of all the views to be had on the north-wall heights are displayed.
Mount Hoffman is a mass of gray granite that rises almost in the center of the Yosemite Park, about eight or ten miles in a straight line from the Valley.
Early next morning visit the small glacier on the north side of Merced Peak, the first of the sixty-five that I discovered in the Sierra.
Two-Day Excursions
How Best to Spend One's Yosemite Time
At first sight only these radiant crystals are likely to be noticed, but looking closely you discover a multitude of very small gilias, phloxes, mimulus, etc., many of them with more petals than leaves.
Then Dot and Tot stepped out upon land, and as they did so every Clown present turned a backward somersault and shouted, "Here we are again!"
"Welcome to my dwelling," he said.
On many of these raised and padded platforms, Dot and Tot saw groups of funny-looking Clowns, all dressed in wide, baggy trousers, puffy jackets and soft, pointed caps.
You are welcome to remain our guests as long as you please, and while you are with us you must consider us your slaves, for Clowns have always been the slaves of children." Then he turned to the others.
Yet in their costumes was an endless variety of colorings and combinations of colors, making the groups look remarkably bright and pleasing.
As his lips seemed to move, she took away her fingers from her ears that she might hear what he was saying.
"We are delighted to have you with us, however you came here," replied the Clown; "and as for your getting home again, why, that is worry, and no one ever worries in the Valley of Clowns.
Then the leader of the Clowns again spoke, "If you will graciously consent to land in our country, where everything we have is at your service, we shall be delighted to amuse you to the best of our ability."
"Come on!" he cried, and jumping down the hole, disappeared from view.
These feats were greeted with shouts of laughter by other Clowns who were resting and looking on, and these spectators also cried out their approval or poked fun at the performers when they failed to accomplish the acts they were attempting.
CHAPTER 6 THE FIRST VALLEY
"When they do not," said Flippityflop, gravely, "they are imitation Clowns, and were never trained in this Valley of Merryland.
"They look very jolly," said Dot.
Therefore I am proud of them."
But you must be hungry, and I trust you will allow me to offer you some dinner.
So the water was sent for, and Dot and Tot took long and refreshing drinks, although their action alarmed Flippityflop, who urged them to eat a few handfuls of sawdust afterward to absorb the dampness.
"Course not," said Tot.
"Of course, they are foolish things," agreed Flippityflop, cheerfully.
"No, thank you," said Dot; "we couldn't drink those.
"If you'll send to the boat for our basket, I think we will prefer to eat the things we brought with us," declared Dot.
"But we have some excellent green paint, or, if you prefer it, I can give a bottle of red mucilage."
Do they make the children laugh?"
In less than a minute Dot and Tot were fast asleep, curled up side by side, with their arms entwined.
After each verse another Clown cracked a long whip at the singer, which made him leap into the air and screw his face up in such a comical way that Dot and Tot were greatly amused, and applauded him rapturously.
"Don't want 'em!" cried Tot.
This singer had so droll an expression on his face that Tot yelled with rapture, and Dot found herself laughing heartily.
When this happened they were not hurt, for the platform was soft and yielding; so they sprang up at once and tried it over again, laughing at their own mishaps.
"Wouldn't you like something to drink?" asked the Prince.
The trees were full of electric lights, which shed brilliant rays over the scene and enabled the children to see everything distinctly.
One of these placed a light ladder on his shoulders, and another ran up it and stood upon his head on the top rung.
They left the Prince's platform and came to the next, where three gaily dressed Clowns were bounding into the air and whirling around before they came down again.
You certainly can't expect wisdom in a country of Clowns."
"You see, we train them all very carefully, and every year one is selected to go into the world."
"Oh, yes; we're accustomed to drinking water," said the girl.
"These seem rather foolish things to eat," remarked Dot.
Perhaps you will bring us some fresh water from the river."
Would you like to watch them?"
Indeed, the whole performance was a delight to the children, and they were sorry when a bell rang and put a stop to the antics of the Clowns.
"Everything we do here is foolish.
"What you got?" inquired Tot.
"I've seen 'em--in circuses."
The walls were covered with bright-yellow silk hangings and on the floor was a crimson carpet.
"I think it's a lovely clock," said Tot.
But come, it is time our people were gathering on the platforms for their evening practice.
"They were jolly, and proved a comfort to thousands of children.
"What peculiar tastes you children have!"
"But a very good one," returned the Clown.
But he allowed them to breakfast from their own stock of food, and when the meal was finished Dot said, "We must be going now; but first I wish to thank you for the pleasant time we have had in your Valley. We enjoyed the Clowns very much indeed."
"Yes, indeed!" cried Dot, joyfully; and Tot clapped his hands and echoed: "'Deed, yes!"
So Flippityflop lifted them through the hole to the top of the padded platform, where they saw a strange and merry sight.
"Nice Clowns," declared Tot, with emphasis.
"It's a queer alarm clock," said the girl.
"At the upper edge of our Valley there is one place not so steep as the rest.
Flippityflop's house proved to be one big room, built under the platform, and lighted by a soft glow from hidden electric lamps.
The real Clowns are sure to make you laugh.
They stopped to listen while he sang as follows:
"Certainly!" answered the Prince, and immediately sticking his head through the trapdoor, he asked a Clown who stood outside to fetch the basket.
"But the water is quite wet," exclaimed the Clown, "and is liable to make you damp.
CHAPTER 7 THE CLOWN COUNTRY
"Well, I have in my cupboard some fried goldfish, boiled buttercups and pickled shoelaces," he answered.
It came in a remarkably short time, and then Flippityflop assisted Dot to lay the cloth on the blue and silver table, while the children proceeded to eat of the sandwiches, cake and apple-tarts that remained in the basket.
"That is my alarm clock," answered Flippityflop, who had been reclining upon a bench at the other side of the room.
What will you have?"
"It is really a big music-box under the bench, which starts playing every morning at seven o'clock.
SEPTEMBER
Dahlias are now at their full growth.
Hardy Poppies should be sown even earlier; August is the best time.
It is a native plant, but not found in this neighbourhood; I brought it from Cornwall, where it is so plentiful in the chinks of the granite stone-fences.
QUESTION 76
For although sensibility does not give incorruptibility, yet it cannot deprive intellectuality of its incorruptibility.
This is, however, absurd for many reasons.
But all men are of one species.
But one cannot sense without a body: therefore the body must be some part of man.
This can be made clear by three different reasons.
For the common nature is understood as apart from the individuating principles; whereas such is not its mode of existence outside the soul.
But, according to the opinion of Plato, the thing understood exists outside the soul in the same condition as those under which it is understood; for he supposed that the natures of things exist separate from matter.
Therefore the species of things would be received individually into my intellect, and also into yours: which is contrary to the nature of the intellect which knows universals.
Therefore there is but one intellect in all men.
This is clear if, as Plato maintained, man is the intellect itself.
This is not the case with other non-subsistent forms.
Whether the Intellectual Principle Is Multiplied According to the Number of Bodies?
But if the species be abstracted from the conditions of individual matter, there will be a likeness of the nature without those things which make it distinct and multiplied; thus there will be knowledge of the universal.
Therefore there are not many human souls in one species.
Whence Aristotle concludes (Ethic.
If, on the contrary, we suppose one instrument and several principal agents, we might say that there are several agents, but one act; for example, if there be many drawing a ship by means of a rope; there will be many drawing, but one pull.
Thus from the very operation of the intellect it is made clear that the intellectual principle is united to the body as its form.
For we observe that the species and forms of things differ from one another, as the perfect and imperfect; as in the order of things, the animate are more perfect than the inanimate, and animals more perfect than plants, and man than brute animals; and in each of these genera there are various degrees.
But "rational," which is the difference constituting man, is taken from the intellectual soul; while he is called "animal" by reason of his having a body animated by a sensitive soul.
Thus through the intelligible species the possible intellect is linked to the body of this or that particular man.
Therefore in man the intellectual soul is not essentially the same as the sensitive soul, but presupposes it as a material subject.
There remains, therefore, no other explanation than that given by Aristotle--namely, that this particular man understands, because the intellectual principle is his form.
Therefore the intellect is not united to the body as its form.
But if there is one intellect, no matter how diverse may be all those things of which the intellect makes use as instruments, in no way is it possible to say that Socrates and Plato are otherwise than one understanding man.
(6) Whether it be united to such a body by means of another body?
But if anyone says that the intellectual soul is not the form of the body he must first explain how it is that this action of understanding is the action of this particular man; for each one is conscious that it is himself who understands.
The reason therefore why Socrates understands is not because he is moved by his intellect, but rather, contrariwise, he is moved by his intellect because he understands.
But it is impossible that a soul, one in species, should belong to animals of different species. Therefore it is impossible that one individual intellectual soul should belong to several individuals.
For this reason the human soul retains its own existence after the dissolution of the body; whereas it is not so with other forms.
Whether the Intellectual Principle Is United to the Body As Its Form?
But the form of the thing understood is not received into the intellect materially and individually, but rather immaterially and universally: otherwise the intellect would not be capable of the knowledge of immaterial and universal objects, but only of individuals, like the senses.
It follows therefore that the intellectual principle is the proper form of man.
Thirdly, because the action of a motor is never attributed to the thing moved, except as to an instrument; as the action of a carpenter to a saw.
First, because the intellect does not move the body except through the appetite, the movement of which presupposes the operation of the intellect.
But the sensitive soul in the horse, the lion, and other brute animals, is corruptible.
Therefore the intellectual soul may be compared to the body animated by a sensitive soul, as form to matter.
For it is manifest that, supposing there is one principal agent, and two instruments, we can say that there is one agent absolutely, but several actions; as when one man touches several things with his two hands, there will be one who touches, but two contacts.
And since knowledge is begotten according to the assimilation of the knower to the thing known, it follows that the same thing may happen to be known by several knowers; as is apparent in regard to the senses; for several see the same color, according to different likenesses.
(3) Whether in the body the form of which is an intellectual principle, there is some other soul?
(2) Whether the intellectual principle is multiplied numerically according to the number of bodies; or is there one intelligence for all men?
Therefore since, as we have said, the intellectual soul contains virtually what belongs to the sensitive soul, and something more, reason can consider separately what belongs to the power of the sensitive soul, as something imperfect and material.
Thus the intellectual soul contains virtually whatever belongs to the sensitive soul of brute animals, and to the nutritive souls of plants.
If, however, there is one principal agent, and one instrument, we say that there is one agent and one action, as when the smith strikes with one hammer, there is one striker and one stroke.
And if to this we add that to understand, which is the act of the intellect, is not affected by any organ other than the intellect itself; it will further follow that there is but one agent and one action: that is to say that all men are but one "understander," and have but one act of understanding, in regard, that is, of one intelligible object.
For since the form is an act, and matter is only in potentiality, that which is composed of matter and form cannot be the form of another by virtue of itself as a whole.
Therefore the intellectual principle is the form of man.
Therefore if understanding is attributed to Socrates, as the action of what moves him, it follows that it is attributed to him as to an instrument.
Therefore, if there were one intellect for all men, the diversity of phantasms which are in this one and that one would not cause a diversity of intellectual operation in this man and that man.
But to be united to matter belongs to the form by reason of its nature; because form is the act of matter, not by an accidental quality, but by its own essence; otherwise matter and form would not make a thing substantially one, but only accidentally one. Therefore a form cannot be without its own proper matter.
Some, however, tried to maintain that the intellect is united to the body as its motor; and hence that the intellect and body form one thing so that the act of the intellect could be attributed to the whole.
It seems, therefore, that the same individual knowledge which is in the master is communicated to the disciple; which cannot be, unless there is one intellect in both.
Objection 1: It would seem that besides the intellectual soul there are in man other souls essentially different from one another, such as the sensitive soul and the nutritive soul.
But this link or union does not sufficiently explain the fact, that the act of the intellect is the act of Socrates.
Now whatever is received into anything must be received according to the condition of the receiver.
"I stand by Andrew Johnson and his policy, and I don't want no office!"
My thots were gloomy beyond expression.
"Beg your pardon" might serve as a napkin to wipe the stain from one's honor, but did not touch the question of the greased and spotted regimentals.
After the squire got older, and a family grew up around him, he was not always victorious in his contests.
Sir, I had a ram once--"
Friend Crayon, that's a capital gun of yours, and you shot well."
Barring his modern costume, he might have suggested to the artist's mind a picture of one of the Patriarchs.
An attack from behind, so sudden and unexpected, threw the squire sprawling on his face into a stone pile.
"A sheep!" he exclaimed; "did you call a sheep a peaceful animal?
The outraged citizen calmly laid down his knife and fork, and looked at his frill, the officer, and the pig, one after another.
"My dear sir," cried the astonished lecturer, "on the authority of our most distinguished writers, the sheep is an emblem of peace and innocence."
Oh, never was the thunder's jar, The red tornado's wasting wing, Or all the elemental war,
Crayon leveled his piece and fired.
The colonel, unmindful of the pallid countenance and significant glances of the burning eye, leaned back in his chair, with arms akimbo, regarding the young farmer with cool disdain.
"Quick, quick! young man--your gun; let me shoot the cursed brute on the spot."
"What!" said he, in a towering passion, "isn't it enough that you spend your time and money in vinegar to sour sweet peaches, and your sugar to sweeten crab-apples, that you must turn the house you were born in topsy-turvy?
like the fury of Squire Hardy on that occasion.
Begone with your nonsense, ye demented jades!"
Stunned by the squashing blow, astounded and blinded with streams of gravy and wads of stuffing, he attempted to rise, but blow after blow from the fat pig fell upon his bewildered head.
In the progress of his discourse, the lecturer, for purposes of illustration, introduced the skulls of several animals, mapped off in the most correct and scientific manner.
Such, at least, was Squire Hardy.
The timid flock looked all aghast, while the audacious offender, so far from having shown any disposition to skulk, stood shaking his head and threatening, as if he had a mind to follow up the dastardly attack.
we've a house with windows to let the light in, and you want curtains to keep it out; we've plastered the walls to make them white, and now you want to paste blue paper over them; we've waxed floors to walk on, and we must pay two dollars a yard for a carpet to save the oak plank!
As the isolated oak that spreads his umbrageous top in the meadow surpasses his spindling congener of the forest, so does the country gentleman, alone in the midst of his broad estate, outgrow the man of crowds and conventionalities in our cities.
The company reassembled, and finished their dinner as best they might. In reply to a toast, Hardy made a speech, wherein he apologized for sacrificing the principal dinner-dish, and, as he expressed it, for putting public property to private uses.
The western horizon was blushing rosy red at the coming of the sun, whose descending chariot was hidden by the thick Indian-summer haze that covered lowland and mountain as it were with a violet-tinted veil.
He deliberately took the pig by the hind legs, and with a sudden whirl brought it down upon the head of the unlucky officer.
The squire dropped the stones which he had in his hands, and looking back at the dead body of the belligerent sheep, observed, with a thoughtful air, "He was a fine animal, Mr. Crayon--a fine animal, and this will teach him a good lesson."
On their return from a visit to Richmond the ladies took it into their heads that the parlors looked bare and old-fashioned, and it was decided by them in secret conclave that a change was necessary.
"It will be time enough for them to hive," quoth the Squire, "when the old box is full."
The squire, who had listened with great attention up to this point, hastily rose to his feet.
Dick Hardy, whose wrath waxed hotter and hotter, followed, belaboring him unmercifully at every step, around the table, through the hall, and into the street, the crowd shouting and applauding.
"You are an ignorant impostor, and your science a humbug.
In due time, however, the parlors were furnished with carpets, curtains, paper, and all the fixtures of modern luxury.
Not long after this occurrence, Squire Hardy went to hear an itinerant phrenologist who lectured in the village.
"By your leave, Squire, and by your orders, I'll do the shooting myself. Which of them was it?"
God help us!
The oak may have the advantage in the comparison, as his locality and consequent superiority are permanent.
Notwithstanding his contempt for fast men nowadays, he is rather pleased with any allusion to his own youthful reputation in that line, and not unfrequently tells a good story on himself.
A murmur of surprise and indignation arose from the congregated guests.
"There, now," exclaimed the squire, with infinite satisfaction, "you've got it, you ungrateful brute!
At Culpepper Court-house, or some court-house thereabout, Dick Hardy, then a good-humored, gay young bachelor, and the prime favorite of both sexes, was called upon to carve the pig at the court dinner.
In reply to this speech a treat was ordered.
The squire smote the oak floor with his heavy cane, and the rosy petitioners fled from his presence laughing.
The Squire, out of his own district, we ignore.
"An emblem of the devil," interrupted the squire, boiling over.
Now these were times when the war spirit was high, and chivalry at a premium.
The black ram halted, and the long procession of ewes and well-grown lambs moved up in a dense semicircle, and also halted, expressing their pleasure at the expected treat by gentle bleatings.
You've found something harder than your own head at last, you cursed reptile!
The squire let fly one stone, which grazed the villain's head and killed a lamb.
The colonel, swelling with wrath, seized a spoon, and deliberately dipping it into the gravy, dashed it over Dick's prominent shirt-frill.
"Observe, ladies and gentlemen, the head of the wolf: combativeness enormously developed, alimentiveness large, while conscientiousness is entirely wanting.
He seized a carving-knife and attempted to defend himself with blind but ineffectual fury, and at length, with a desperate effort, rose and took to his heels.
The ladies were, of course, greatly delighted; and while professing great aversion and contempt for the "tawdry lumber," it was plain to see that the worthy man enjoyed their pleasure as much as they did the new furniture.
The district judge was at the table, the lawyers, justices, and everybody else that felt disposed to dine.
With the other he crippled a favorite ewe.
The squire stooped to spread the salt.
Whether intrinsically, or simply in default of comparison, at home he is invariably a great man.
The offender made a bound and fell dead, the black blood spouting from his forehead in a stream as thick as your thumb.
There's no law in Christendom against basting a man with a roast pig!" Dick's weapon failed before his anger; and when at length the battered colonel escaped into the door of a friendly dwelling, the victor had nothing in his hands but the hind legs of the roaster.
He had probably been engaged on some court-martial, imposing fifty-cent fines on absentees from the last general muster. Howbeit Dick, in thrusting his fork into the back of the pig, bespattered the officer's regimentals with some of the superfluous gravy.
The black ram, either from most uncivil impatience, or mistaking the movement of the proprietor's coat-tail for a challenge, pitched into him incontinently.
Here combativeness is a nullity--absolutely wanting--while the fullness of the sentimental organs indicate at once the mild and peaceful disposition of the sheep."
All saw the act, and with open eyes and mouth sat in astonished silence, waiting to see what would be done next.
"Beg your pardon," said Dick, as he went on with his carving.
Either because the little white rose in Ilusha's hand had caught her fancy or that she wanted one from his hand to keep in memory of him, she moved restlessly, stretching out her hands for the flower.
I shall be for some time with my two brothers, of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death's door. But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall part.
"Father, give me a flower, too; take that white one out of his hand and give it me," the crazy mother begged, whimpering.
But on seeing that precious little face, which for the last three days she had only looked at from a distance, she trembled all over and her gray head began twitching spasmodically over the coffin.
"Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!" he muttered anxiously.
Then he was reminded that he must crumble the bread and he was awfully excited, snatched up the bread and began pulling it to pieces and flinging the morsels on the grave.
"The valet killed him, my brother is innocent," answered Alyosha.
During the mass Snegiryov became somewhat calmer, though at times he had outbursts of the same unconscious and, as it were, incoherent anxiety.
"Every day, every day!" said the captain quickly, seeming cheered at the thought.
"The landlady is laying the table for them now--there'll be a funeral dinner or something, the priest is coming; shall we go back to it, Karamazov?"
Let us wait a minute and then go back."
And after looking at the grave, and as it were, satisfying himself that everything had been done and the bread had been crumbled, he suddenly, to the surprise of every one, turned, quite composedly even, and made his way homewards.
Everything is his, nothing is yours!"
"Karamazov, we love you!" a voice, probably Kartashov's, cried impulsively.
"Mamma, poor crippled darling, Ilusha has sent you these flowers," he cried, holding out to her a little bunch of flowers that had been frozen and broken while he was struggling in the snow.
They reached the church at last and set the coffin in the middle of it. The boys surrounded it and remained reverently standing so, all through the service.
"What do you mean?
"And so do I!" the boy, who had once declared that he knew who had founded Troy, cried suddenly and unexpectedly, and he blushed up to his ears like a peony as he had done on that occasion.
"What is it, Kolya?" said Alyosha.
"We love you, we love you!" they all caught it up.
He was a fine boy, a kind-hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father's honor and resented the cruel insult to him and stood up for him.
"No, it's no use, it's awful," Kolya assented.
"Ah, how I loved him!" exclaimed Kolya.
"So he will perish an innocent victim!" exclaimed Kolya; "though he is ruined he is happy!
"There in the churchyard the ground has been crossed.
He did not seem to understand fully what was happening.
"To be sure, I'll stay with them, we are Christians, too." The old woman wept as she said it.
His thin face was hardly changed at all, and strange to say there was no smell of decay from the corpse.
Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know whether he exists or not.
"And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!" Alyosha added again with feeling.
She took away his little cannon and he gave it to her," the captain broke into loud sobs at the thought of how Ilusha had given up his cannon to his mother.
"It's awful here.
"I won't give away anything and to her less than any one!
My little doves--let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces.
Where have you taken him?" the lunatic cried in a heartrending voice.
Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other!
He really was late.
"Yes, yes, mamma!" Snegiryov suddenly recollected, "they'll take away the bed, they'll take it away," he added as though alarmed that they really would.
Seeing the old, patched, rusty-looking, stiff boots he flung up his hands and rushed to them, fell on his knees, snatched up one boot and, pressing his lips to it, began kissing it greedily, crying, "Ilusha, old man, dear old man, where are your little feet?"
With a serious and earnest expression he looked from one to another of the bright, pleasant faces of Ilusha's schoolfellows, and suddenly said to them:
Was it he killed your father or was it the valet?
But his steps became more and more hurried, he almost ran.
As Alyosha went out of the house he begged the landlady to look after those who were left behind, but she interrupted him before he had finished.
"Ah, so would I," said Alyosha.
"And the crust of bread, we've forgotten the crust!" he cried suddenly in dismay.
There was something crazy about his gestures and the words that broke from him.
Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty years.
Nina pressed her lips to her brother's for the last time as they bore the coffin by her.
He seemed suddenly to shrink together and broke into rapid, short sobs, which he tried at first to smother, but at last he sobbed aloud.
There were about twelve of them, they all had their school-bags or satchels on their shoulders.
"The flowers are for mamma, the flowers are for mamma!
May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!"
They all stood still by the big stone.
As you say, so it will be.
But why am I talking about those two?
But it was not far off and they all arrived together.
He jumped up and ran homewards again.
But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes.
He looked at them and a new idea seemed to dawn upon him, so that he apparently forgot his grief for a minute.
How can you?
They had all been impatiently expecting him and were glad that he had come at last.
Ilusha told me to.
"They are his flowers, not yours!
"Of course," said Alyosha.
"He was brave, he was good!"
It was the coffin of poor little Ilusha.
He had been saying for the last three days that he would bury him by the stone, but Alyosha, Krassotkin, the landlady, her sister and all the boys interfered.
Nina, too, broke into sobs.
"Is your brother innocent or guilty?
and afterwards we all grew so fond of him.
He had died two days after Mitya was sentenced.
But there were flowers too from Katerina Ivanovna, and when Alyosha opened the door, the captain had a bunch in his trembling hands and was strewing them again over his dear boy.
I give you my word for my part that I'll never forget one of you.
But he would not do this and seemed indeed suddenly alarmed for his flowers, as though they wanted to take them from him altogether.
The expression of his face was serious and, as it were, thoughtful.
They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more than three hundred paces.
"Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!" Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.
At last came the funeral service itself and candles were distributed.
"I beg you most earnestly, Kartashov, not to interrupt again with your idiotic remarks, especially when one is not talking to you and doesn't care to know whether you exist or not!" Kolya snapped out irritably.
Snegiryov opened the door hurriedly and called to his wife with whom he had so cruelly quarreled just before:
"Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya shouted ecstatically.
He missed them, of course, and went on crying as he ran.
That's only from thoughtlessness.
But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust of bread already and that it was in his pocket.
They had waited for him and had already decided to bear the pretty flower-decked little coffin to the church without him.
Alyosha looked and the whole picture of what Snegiryov had described to him that day, how Ilusha, weeping and hugging his father, had cried, "Father, father, how he insulted you," rose at once before his imagination.
When they began taking leave of the dead and closing the coffin, he flung his arms about, as though he would not allow them to cover Ilusha, and began greedily and persistently kissing his dead boy on the lips.
"I don't want him to be buried in the churchyard," Snegiryov wailed suddenly; "I'll bury him by the stone, by our stone!
And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they're the same questions turned inside out.
I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic.
Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself.
At thirty, though, I shall be sure to leave the cup, even if I've not emptied it, and turn away--where I don't know.
And therefore I tell you that I accept God simply. But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in space.
"Joking?
Would you believe, it, I sat here eating my dinner and was nearly ordering champagne to celebrate my first hour of freedom.
But how she tormented me!
What happened after I departed?"
They don't matter.
"I must find out.
David's legs slipped from the bird's back.
He felt a hopping sensation, then a long, sickening downward swoop that seemed to leave his stomach far behind.
But in the broad view, a classical education is not a true education.
The Phoenix sobbed as it stretched its neck in the last effort. Fifty feet ... twenty feet ... ten....
I hope you are not being overfed at home?"
This was the part David liked best.
The Phoenix drew itself up indignantly.
And sometimes he did not think at all, but just sat with his eyes half shut, feeling the sunlight on his face and listening to the rustle of the wind in the thicket.
"You do not have a true, practical education--you are not ready for Life.
I speak the truth.
It was a magnificent sight.
The Phoenix was not in sight when he arrived, and for an instant David was stricken with fright.
Yesterday you showed an intelligent interest in my problems and asked intelligent questions. You did not scoff, as others might have done.
"No time like the present.
"There you are!" cried the Phoenix.
"Yes, but I don't."
Understand me--I have nothing against a classical education as such.
"I do perform that rather well, don't I?
The thought gave him a sinking feeling.
"Gryffins," explained the Phoenix, "are the small, reddish, friendly ones.
Oh, Phoenix, that'll be wonderful!
"Oh, reading and writing and arithmetic, and things like that."
He opened his eyes and choked with fright.
"Oh, well," it continued, more mildly, "one does not fight fate, does one?
It stopped and swallowed again.
What is the first rule of defense when attacked by a Chimera?"
"How are we going to travel, Phoenix?"
They are very stupid."
Up ... up ... up....
Where will we go?"
Are you ready?"
"On my back.
"You're doing better and better, Phoenix.
"Yes.
David would wrap the wet towel around the Phoenix's neck.
"Do you mean--are you going to give me--lessons?" Through his mind flashed a picture of the Phoenix (with spectacles on its beak and a ruler in its wing) writing out sentences on a blackboard.
"I don't know."
He stepped back quickly with a shudder.
"What were those last three, please?"
We shall do it yet!"
After this, the bird would jog trot up and down the ledge and practice jumping.
The full benefit of my vast knowledge, plus a number of trips to--"
You have very rare qualities."
The proof is to be demonstrated, the--to be brief, we are off!"
We shall visit my friends and acquaintances."
And Arabia?"
"I am hurt--yes, deeply hurt--by your lack of faith.
At the end of the week the Phoenix, after a brilliant display of acrobatics, landed on the ledge, clasped its wings behind its back, and looked solemnly at David.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
The bush saved them.
"My boy," said the Phoenix at last, brushing the crumbs from its chest, "I take a modest pride in my way with words, but nothing in the language can do these--ah--baked poems justice.
Life is real, life is earnest.
But to continue: Sea Monsters, Leprechauns, Rocs, Gnomes, Elves, Basilisks, Nymphs--ah--and many others.
Where do you find the Philosopher's Stone?"
The great wings were outstretched.
Courage, my dear fellow!
Are you sure that--isn't there some other--I mean, can you do it?"
"Oh, do you have--"
A tremendous rush of air snatched at his shirt.
He dangled over the abyss from the outstretched neck, and prayed.
They were gaining--slipping back--gaining again.
Gryffons are the quick-tempered proud ones.
I shall give you proof positive."
After all, it was summer--and summer was supposed to be vacation time.
"I--I don't know."
Rigorous diet.
"Well, my course is clear," said the Phoenix firmly.
"And what do they teach you there?"
The scarp loomed before them, solid and blank.
Above them--high above them--was the ledge.
Then there would be a fifteen-minute rest and refreshment period.
"I must practice. Setting-up exercises, roadwork, and what not.
"I trust you see signs of progress, my boy?"
But just the thing for acquiring (ouch!) muscle tone.
David thrust the bag of cookies behind his back.
"And now, my boy," continued the Phoenix, as it settled back comfortably, "I have been thinking.
It came from the thicket, and it sounded very much like a snore.
The earth reeled under him and would not stop no matter how tightly he clutched the grass.
Next day it took less than an hour to reach the ledge, and David was sure that he could shorten the time even more when he was familiar with the goat trail.
The wings flapped wildly, faster and faster.
The Phoenix was breathing in hoarse gasps; its wings were pounding the air frantically.
"Aha!" said the Phoenix triumphantly.
So they sat down on the grass together, and for a long time nothing was heard but sounds of munching.
And your education will cost you nothing.
Of course, I suppose some attempt to educate you has already been made, has it not?"
"Of course, my boy!
Now and then it would swoop back to the ledge beside David and wipe the sweat from its brow.
David smiled to himself and shouted, "Hello, Phoenix!"
Lots of sleep.
The Phoenix would take wing again.
"I'm afraid I don't know that, either," he said in a small voice.
"Splendid!
It came to me that such a mind as yours, having these qualities, should be further cultivated and refined.
"I see," said David doubtfully.
Ready?"
David reluctantly followed the Phoenix to a spot on the edge of the shelf where there was a gap in the bushes.
He looked again into all the corners and cupboards, and then began turning round, and round, as fast as he could in the middle of the room, thinking there was somebody behind him, when the same voice struck again on his ear. It was singing now very merrily, "Lala-lira-la;" no words, only a soft running, effervescent melody, something like that of a kettle on the boil.
When they were gone, Gluck took a farewell look at his old friend in the melting-pot.
When the dwarf had finished his self-examination, he turned his small eyes full on Gluck, and stared at him deliberately for a minute or two.
This was certainly rather an abrupt and unconnected mode of commencing conversation.
Gluck determined to say something at all events.
"No it wouldn't, Gluck," said a clear, metallic voice close at his ear.
It might indeed be supposed to refer to the course of Gluck's thoughts, which had first produced the dwarf's observations out of the pot; but whatever it referred to, Gluck had no inclination to dispute the dictum.
"That's right!" said the dwarf, stretching out first his legs, and then his arms, and then shaking his head up and down, and as far round as it would go, for five minutes without stopping; apparently with the view of ascertaining if he were quite correctly put together, while Gluck stood contemplating him in speechless amazement.
This pause gave time for Gluck to collect his thoughts a little, and, seeing no great reason to view his diminutive visitor with dread, and feeling his curiosity overcome his amazement, he ventured on a question of peculiar delicacy.
Gluck looked out of the window.
"Oh!" cried poor Gluck, running to look up the chimney after him; "oh dear, dear, dear me!
So they melted all their gold, without making money enough to buy more, and were at last reduced to one large drinking-mug, which an uncle of his had given to little Gluck, and which he was very fond of, and would not have parted with for the world; though he never drank anything out of it but milk and water.
He ran to the opening, and looked in: yes, he saw right; it seemed to be coming, not only out of the furnace, but out of the pot.
On which the little man turned sharp round, walked straight up to Gluck, and drew himself up to his full height.
The King of the Golden River had evaporated.
He uncovered it, and ran back in a great fright, for the pot was certainly singing!
"Wouldn't it, sir?" said Gluck, very mildly and submissively indeed.
Gluck summoned all his energies, walked straight up to the crucible, drew it out of the furnace, and looked in.
No, it was certainly in the house.
Gluck, my boy," said the pot again.
"And no wonder," thought Gluck, "after being treated in that way." He sauntered disconsolately to the window, and sat himself down to catch the fresh evening air, and escape the hot breath of the furnace.
The mug was a very odd mug to look at.
"Not at all, my boy," said the same voice, louder than before.
What I have seen of you, and your conduct to your wicked brothers, renders me willing to serve you; therefore, attend to what I tell you.
Southwest Wind, Esquire, was as good as his word.
"I hope your Majesty is very well," said Gluck.
The features of the face, however, were by no means finished with the same delicacy; they were rather coarse, slightly inclining to coppery in complexion, and indicative, in expression, of a very pertinacious and intractable disposition in their small proprietor.
The thought was agreed to be a very good one; they hired a furnace, and turned goldsmiths.
The shape you saw me in was owing to the malice of a stronger king, from whose enchantments you have this instant freed me.
"Listen!" said the little man, deigning no reply to this polite inquiry.
There was nobody there.
"No, it wouldn't, Gluck, my boy," said the little man.
His figure became red, white, transparent, dazzling--a blaze of intense light--rose, trembled, and disappeared.
what's that?" exclaimed Gluck, jumping up.
Still Gluck couldn't move.
Gluck made no answer.
"Pray, sir," said Gluck, rather hesitatingly, "were you my mug?"
"Suppose we turn goldsmiths?" said Schwartz to Hans, as they entered the large city.
The flowing hair was all gone; nothing remained but the red nose, and the sparkling eyes, which looked more malicious than ever.
"Bless me!
When it came to the mug's turn to be made into spoons, it half broke poor little Gluck's heart: but the brothers only laughed at him, tossed the mug into the melting-pot, and staggered out to the ale-house: leaving him, as usual, to pour the gold into bars, when it was all ready.
"I'm too hot."
"I am the King of what you mortals call the Golden River.
Now this window commanded a direct view of the range of mountains, which, as I told before, overhung the Treasure Valley, and more especially of the peak from which fell the Golden River.
After which, he again walked up to Gluck and stood still, as if expecting some comment on his communication.
"No," said the dwarf, conclusively.
"Come, Gluck, my boy," said the voice out of the pot again, "I'm all right; pour me out."
Upstairs, and downstairs.
He had been compelled to abandon his basket of food, which became a perilous incumbrance on the glacier, and had now no means of refreshing himself but by breaking off and eating some of the pieces of ice.
The sun was setting; it plunged toward the horizon like a red-hot ball.
And he did not know how it was, but he thought that a strange shadow had suddenly come across the blue sky.
He was, moreover, surprised, on surmounting them, to find that a large glacier, of whose existence, notwithstanding his previous knowledge of the mountains, he had been absolutely ignorant, lay between him and the source of the Golden River.
It was a fair child, stretched nearly lifeless on the rock, its breast heaving with thirst, its eyes closed, and its lips parched and burning.
"I have none," replied Hans; "thou hast had thy share of life." He strode over the prostrate body, and darted on.
He entered on it with the boldness of a practised mountaineer; yet he thought he had never traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life.
He turned, and saw a gray-haired old man extended on the rocks.
He opened the flask, and was raising it to his lips, when his eye fell on an object lying on the rock beside him; he thought it moved.
The path became steeper and more rugged every moment; and the high hill air, instead of refreshing him, seemed to throw his blood into a fever.
On his way out of the town he had to pass the prison, and as he looked in at the windows, whom should he see but Schwartz himself peeping out of the bars, and looking very disconsolate.
Next morning he got up before the sun rose, put the holy water into a strong flask, and two bottles of wine and some meat in a basket, slung them over his back, took his alpine staff in his hand, and set off for the mountains.
At this instant a faint cry fell on his ear.
He paused for a moment to breathe, and sprang on to complete his task.
HANS SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN
Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains--their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from the floating vapour, but gradually ascending till they caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy colour along the angular crags, and pierced, in long level rays, through their fringes of spear-like pine.
The sun was sinking, but its descent seemed to bring no coolness; the leaden weight of the dead air pressed upon his brow and heart, but the goal was near.
The waters closed over his cry.
How to get the holy water was the question.
This, however, relieved his thirst; an hour's repose recruited his hardy frame, and, with the indomitable spirit of avarice, he resumed his laborious journey.
In the morning, however, the steadiness with which he adhered to his story obtained him some degree of credence; the immediate consequence of which was, that the two brothers, after wrangling a long time on the knotty question, which of them should try his fortune first, drew their swords and began fighting.
He saw the cataract of the Golden River springing from the hillside, scarcely five hundred feet above him.
Intense thirst was soon added to the bodily fatigue with which Hans was now afflicted; glance after glance he cast on the flask of water which hung at his belt.
Its tongue was out, its jaws dry, its limbs extended lifelessly, and a swarm of black ants were crawling about its lips and throat.
It was a small dog, apparently in the last agony of death from thirst.
It was, indeed, a morning that might have made anyone happy, even with no Golden River to seek for.
As he did so, an icy chill shot through his limbs: he staggered, shrieked, and fell.
He raised it, drank, spurned the animal with his foot, and passed on.
He stopped to open it, and again, as he did so, something moved in the path above him.
The King of the Golden River had hardly made the extraordinary exit related in the last chapter, before Hans and Schwartz came roaring into the house, very savagely drunk.
"You did what I ordered you to do," said Chauvelin, with impatience. "I know that, but you were a precious long time about it.
Chauvelin without another word threw the five pieces of gold one by one before the Jew, who knelt down, and on his hands and knees struggled to collect them.
How far could Percy go, thus arrayed in his gorgeous clothes, without being sighted and followed?
Thoughtfully the Jew rubbed his dirty chin.
"How far is the nearest village from here?"
The Englishman is ahead of us, and not likely to look behind him."
The Jew again thoughtfully rubbed his chin.
Chauvelin seemed pleased with his interview, for he rubbed his hands together, with that usual gesture of his, of malignant satisfaction.
He could not now advance many steps, without spying eyes to track and denounce him.
"A few minutes' walk from this door."
"A tall Englishman had a long conversation about three-quarters of an hour ago with a Jew, Reuben by name, who lives not ten paces from here."
Chauvelin quietly waited while the old man scrambled on the floor, to find the piece of gold.
The group of the three men were standing just underneath the hanging oil-lamp, and Marguerite had a clear view of them all.
"Whether your horse and cart can take me to where I can find my friend the tall stranger, who has driven off in Reuben Goldstein's cart?"
Fortunately, there's not much harm done, or it had fared ill with you, Citoyen Desgas."
"Yes, your Excellency," replied the Jew, who spoke the language with that peculiar lisp which denotes Eastern origin, "I and Reuben Goldstein met a tall Englishman, on the road, close by here this evening."
"How soon can your horse and cart be ready?"
We must let him get to the Pere Blanchard's hut now; there surround and capture him."
"You know the place?
Thus several minutes went by.
Chauvelin, who had all the Frenchman's prejudice against the despised race, motioned to the fellow to keep at a respectful distance.
"Every stone, every blade of grass, your Honour," replied the Jew quietly.
"He took the words out of my mouth, your Excellency: when I was about to offer the wealthy Englishman my horse and cart, to take him wheresoever he chose, Reuben had already spoken, and offered his half-starved nag, and his broken-down cart."
"To a place called the Pere Blanchard's hut?"
When she realised what had happened, a curious mixture of joy and wonder filled her heart.
How far can you drive me in it?"
"Did you speak to him?"
Her own helplessness struck her with the terrible sense of utter disappointment.
With a final, most abject and cringing bow, the old Jew shuffled out of the room.
"How many gold pieces are there in the palm of my hand?" he asked quietly.
"Your Honour has guessed?" said the Jew in astonishment.
"That's good.--Do the men know their work?" "They have had very clear orders, citoyen: and I myself spoke to those who were about to start. They are to shadow--as secretly as possible--any stranger they may see, especially if he be tall, or stoop as if he would disguise his height."
"Cut that short, man," interrupted Chauvelin, roughly, "and go on with your story."
For the moment, even her chance of ever seeing the man she loved again, had become a remote one.
He would not listen.
Do you accept the bargain?"
Chauvelin was evidently devoured with impatience.
The possibility of being the slightest use to her husband had become almost NIL, and her only hope rested in being allowed to share his fate, whatever it might ultimately be.
Still, she was determined to keep a close watch over his enemy, and a vague hope filled her heart, that whilst she kept Chauvelin in sight, Percy's fate might still be hanging in the balance.
For obvious reasons, I dared not tackle him alone. Brogard is too big a fool, and that cursed Englishman appears to have the strength of a bullock, and so he slipped away under your very nose."
"Not ten meters from this door.
"That is right," said Chauvelin, rubbing his hands, well pleased.
Chauvelin was still absolutely helpless, far more so than he could even have been under a blow from the fist, for now he could neither see, nor hear, nor speak, whilst his cunning adversary had quietly slipped through his fingers.
"Aye! that I have, your Excellency, and if your Excellency wants to drive . . ."
"I accept."
"You know the road?" repeated Chauvelin, roughly.
Reuben is such a liar, and has such insinuating ways. The stranger was deceived.
After a moment's pause, he said deliberately,--
There will be hot work presently, if I mistake not, in the Pere Blanchard's hut.
She had come all this way, and with such high hopes and firm determination to help her husband, and so far she had been able to do nothing, but to watch, with a heart breaking with anguish, the meshes of the deadly net closing round the daring Scarlet Pimpernel.
"Then they started?"
Chauvelin had partially recovered; his sneezing had become less violent, and he had struggled to his feet.
Some of our men will, I presume, be put HORS DE COMBAT.
"The conversation was all about a horse and cart, which the tall Englishman wished to hire, and which was to have been ready for him by eleven o'clock."
"No, citoyen," replied Desgas, "Reuben could not be found, so presumably his cart has gone with the stranger; but this man here seems to know something, which he is willing to sell for a consideration."
"Is this the man?" asked Chauvelin.
"Send one of the men to find out if the stranger has driven off in Reuben's cart."
We shall corner our game there, I'll warrant, for this impudent Scarlet Pimpernel has had the audacity--or the stupidity, I hardly know which--to adhere to his original plans.
"What did you say?"
"It is past that now.
Where does that Reuben live?"
"I don't want to see it.
Blakeney was gone, obviously to try and join the fugitives at the Pere Blanchard's hut.
The Jew, with characteristic patience, stood humbly on one side, leaning on the knotted staff, his greasy, broad-brimmed hat casting a deep shadow over his grimy face, waiting for the noble Excellency to deign to put some questions to him.
"That is my intention," said Chauvelin very quietly, "but remember, if you have deceived me, I shall tell off two of my most stalwart soldiers to give you such a beating, that your breath will perhaps leave your ugly body for ever.
Still, we shall be five against one at least.
Every place was watched, and every stranger kept in sight.
"He cannot go far without being sighted, citoyen."
Marguerite's heart was beating well-nigh to bursting.
An Englishman too!--He ought to have known Reuben's nag was not fit to drive."
If he was in a hurry, he would have had better value for his money by taking my cart."
"We saw nothing, citoyen!
"He could--if he ever got so far."
But if we find my friend the tall Englishman, either on the road or at the Pere Blanchard's hut, there will be ten more gold pieces for you.
not five minutes ago."
Desgas went to give the necessary orders to one of the men.
Now she blamed herself terribly for not having gone down to him sooner, and given him that word of warning and of love which, perhaps, after all, he needed.
"He spoke to us, your Excellency.
"What is it?"
"And, of course, the horse and cart were ready?"
CHAPTER XXVI THE JEW
No doubt he feared that threats of the guillotine, and various other persuasive methods of that type, might addle the old man's brains, and that he would be more likely to be useful through greed of gain, than through terror of death.
Hence he concludes that what distinguishes incorporeal from corporeal substance is a kind of form to it, and whatever is subject to this distinguishing form, as it were something common, is its matter.
Whether the Angels Exist in Any Great Number?
Hence it is much better for the species to be multiplied in the angels than for individuals to be multiplied in the one species.
Material creatures are infinite on the part of matter, but finite in their form, which is limited by the matter which receives it.
Therefore an angel is composed of matter and form.
Now to understand is an altogether immaterial operation, as appears from its object, whence any act receives its species and nature.
Hence it must be that every individual substance is altogether immaterial.
Therefore it is impossible that corporeal and spiritual things should have the same matter.
And this can be made evident if we consider the nature of material things which contain a twofold composition.
But among other created natures the angelic nature approaches nearest to God. Therefore since God is supremely one, it seems that there is the least possible number in the angelic nature.
But this is clearly false. For matter receives the form, that thereby it may be constituted in some species, either of air, or of fire, or of something else.
But the angels seem to differ only from one another according to more and less--namely, as one is simpler than another, and of keener intellect.
Therefore the angels cannot exist in any great number.
But an angel is not pure act, for this belongs to God alone.
But it is not true that the immaterial substances exist on account of the corporeal, because the end is nobler than the means to the end.
For everything which is contained under any genus is composed of the genus, and of the difference which added to the genus makes the species.
Whether the Angels Are Incorruptible?
Objection 1: It would seem that the angels do not differ in species. For since the "difference" is nobler than the 'genus,' all things which agree in what is noblest in them, agree likewise in their ultimate constitutive difference; and so they are the same according to species.
Therefore, he asserts the universal matter of spiritual and corporeal things is the same; so that it must be understood that the form of incorporeal substance is impressed in the matter of spiritual things, in the same way as the form of quantity is impressed in the matter of corporeal things.
Plato contended that the separate substances are the species of sensible things; as if we were to maintain that human nature is a separate substance of itself: and according to this view it would have to be maintained that the number of the separate substances is the number of the species of sensible things.
Nevertheless, this differs in our mode of conception; for, inasmuch as our intellect considers it as indeterminate, it derives the idea of their genus; and inasmuch as it considers it determinately, it derives the idea of their "difference."
But this is impossible.
But there is nothing against a creature being considered relatively infinite.
But the form of an angel is not infinite, for every creature is finite.
Therefore the angels are not in greater number than the movements of the heavenly bodies.
For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself.
Their substance we consider absolutely and in relation to corporeal things.
Hence it is not repugnant to a necessary or incorruptible being to depend for its existence on another as its cause.
It is, further, impossible for an intellectual substance to have any kind of matter.
He was forced to make use of this argument, since only through sensible things can we come to know intelligible ones.
For it would be necessary for matter to be the principle of distinction of one from the other, not, indeed, according to the division of quantity, since they are incorporeal, but according to the diversity of their powers; and such diversity of matter causes diversity not merely of species, but of genus.
But an intelligible object, being above time, is everlasting.
Therefore, when it is said that all things, even the angels, would lapse into nothing, unless preserved by God, it is not to be gathered therefrom that there is any principle of corruption in the angels; but that the nature of the angels is dependent upon God as its cause.
Concerning their substance absolutely considered, there are five points of inquiry:
Therefore it seems that the multiplication of intellectual substances can only be according to the requirements of the first bodies--that is, of the heavenly ones, so that in some way the shedding form of the aforesaid rays may be terminated in them; and hence the same conclusion is to be drawn as before.
For it is not possible that a spiritual and a corporeal form should be received into the same part of matter, otherwise one and the same thing would be corporeal and spiritual.
But all angels agree in what is noblest in them--that is to say, in intellectuality.
For what belongs to anything considered in itself can never be separated from it; but what belongs to a thing, considered in relation to something else, can be separated, when that something else is taken away, in view of which it belonged to it.
For a thing is understood according to its degree of immateriality; because forms that exist in matter are individual forms which the intellect cannot apprehend as such.
So the form which is not in matter is an infinite form.
Now to be belongs to a form considered in itself; for everything is an actual being according to its form: whereas matter is an actual being by the form.
The reason for this is, that nothing is corrupted except by its form being separated from the matter.
The first is that of form and matter, whereby the nature is constituted.
Now the species and nature of the operation is understood from the object.
So what is form only is pure act.
Therefore everything which is in a genus is composed of matter and form.
Such a composite nature is not its own existence but existence is its act.
But the very fact that intellect is above sense is a reasonable proof that there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
Whether an Angel Is Composed of Matter and Form?
Consequently the separate substances cannot be the exemplar species of these sensible things; but have their own fixed natures, which are higher than the natures of sensible things.
Therefore he is composed of matter and form.
Therefore the angels do not differ specifically.
Roundness can never be taken from the circle, because it belongs to it of itself; but a bronze circle can lose roundness, if the bronze be deprived of its circular shape.
Therefore an angel is called an ever mobile substance, because he is ever actually intelligent, and not as if he were sometimes actually and sometimes potentially, as we are.
Hence it would follow that one part of matter receives the corporeal form, and another receives the spiritual form.
The little dog-eared books in the meeting-house proved poor reading sometimes after such entertainment.
Then Betty stood up and put on her sunbonnet.
Betty stopped reading to listen, and Davy sat up to look.
As she slipped her hand around the post to unfasten the chain that held the gate, little bare feet came pattering behind her, and a shrill voice called: "Wait, Betty, wait a minute!"
Excepting a few school-books and some out-of-date census reports, they were the only books in the Appleton house.
It was Davy Appleton.
The two never tired of each other.
"What do you think? It is an invitation to a house party at Locust; Lloyd Sherman's house party.
All the Appleton children were boys,--three younger and two older than Davy, whose last birthday cake should have had eight candles if there had been any celebration of the event.
"Oh, Davy," she exclaimed, in a low, wondering tone.
Betty's little lamb, they called him, and Betty's shadow, and Betty's sticking-plaster, because everywhere she went there was Davy just at her heels.
There was the dinner-table to set for the hungry farm-hands, and after the dinner was over more dishes to wash. Then there were some towels to iron.
It wasn't much of a post-office; only an old case of pigeon-holes set up in one corner of a cross-roads store.
Any-how, they're all she's got, and her father made some arrangement with them before he died.
The letter for Jaynes's Post-office reached the end of its journey first.
Davy's mind, like his legs, could not climb as far as Betty's, and she usually had to stop at the bottom of every page to explain something.
If Jake expected her to tear it open instantly and share the news with him before she had examined every inch of the big square envelope, he was disappointed.
CHAPTER II.
But it was cool and pleasant down in the spring-house with the water trickling out in a ceaseless drip-drip on the cold stones.
It was two miles to the Appleton farm, down a hot, dusty road, and he took his time in going. Well for little Betty that she did not know what wonderful surprise was on its way to her, or she would have been in a fever of impatience for the letter to arrive.
Davy's short fat legs could not climb from the board to the window-sill, and since this little Mahomet could not come to the mountain, Betty had to carry the mountain to him.
"Why are you crying?" he demanded.
They were twelve in all, and had come in several different Christmas boxes, and each one had Betty's name on the fly-leaf, with the date of the Christmas on which it happened to be sent.
The next moment she had scrambled over the sill, pulled the window down after her, and walked down the slanting board to the ground.
"I didn't know it.
"He's looking this way," said Davy, who had stood up for a better view, but squatted down again at Betty's command.
Then she spread the letter out on her knees, drawing a long breath of pleasure as the faintest odour of violets floated up from the paper with its dainty monogram at the top.
Wish she'd happen down here.
Queer little books they were, time-yellowed and musty smelling, but to story-loving little Betty, hungry for something new, they seemed a veritable gold-mine.
Often he fell asleep in the middle of the most interesting part, and then Betty read on to herself, with nothing to break the stillness around her but the buzzing of the wasps, as they darted angrily in and out of the open window above her head.
Once out of the house, she walked slowly along through the shady orchard, swinging her sunbonnet by the strings.
"Reckon you might as well," answered the old man, giving a final close scrutiny before handing it to the boy.
"Is there?" asked Betty, brushing it away with the back of her hand.
As she reached the bench-like altar, extending in front of the pulpit, she slipped to her knees a moment.
It held all that was left of a scattered Sunday-school library, that had been in use two generations before.
"It might lie here all week in case none of them happened to come to the store, and it looks as if it might be important."
Talk about bringin' up.
Then he set aside his usual custom and asked a question.
He did not have to follow far to-day.
At the end there was always the word MORAL, in big capital letters, as if the readers were supposed to be too blind to find it for themselves, and it had to be put directly across the path for them to stumble over.
Catching Davy by the hand, and swinging it back and forth as they ran, she went skipping across the road regardless of the dust.
But she could not loiter long.
He was content to follow and ask no questions, for he had learned long ago to look twice before he spoke once.
At that, Betty leaned so far out of the window that she nearly lost her balance and toppled over.
Jake mounted and rode off slowly, his bare feet dangling far below the stirrups.
The Appletons' Betty.
Her breath came short and her heart beat fast.
Down the lane they went, between the rows of cherry-trees; across the orchard and up the path.
It's Betty that 'pears to be bringin' up the little Appletons."
I'll take it up to her, squire, if you say so.
It was such a tiny mirror that she could see only a part of her face at a time.
There was no one in the store to answer the question but an overgrown boy who had stopped to get his father's weekly paper.
"Here you are," he said, riding alongside the window and dropping the letter into her eager hands.
"That's the truth," said Jake; "she does.
She had found that no key barred her way into this little red treasure-house of a bookcase, and a board propped against the wall under the window outside gave her an easy entrance into the church.
But there never had been a birthday cake with candles on it on the Appleton table.
Don't you know?
Underneath was always written: "From your loving godmother, Elizabeth Lloyd Sherman."
Betty guarded them like a little dragon.
"Thank you, God," came in a happy whisper from the depths of a glad little heart.
She was free now to do as she pleased until supper-time.
It was two o'clock before her work was all done, and she had time to go up to her little room in the west gable.
He sat on the counter dangling his big bare feet against a nail-keg, and catching flies in his sunburned hands, while he waited for the mail to be opened.
A little red bookcase inside the church was the attraction.
So few letters found their way into this, particular bag that Squire Jaynes, who kept the store and post-office, felt a personal interest in every envelope that passed through his hands.
After the orchard came the long leafy lane, with its double rows of cherry-trees, and then the gate at the end, leading into the public highway.
Then she walked slowly down the narrow aisle of the little meeting-house, between its double rows of narrow straight-backed pews.
Davy was a queer little fellow.
It would have been considered a foolish waste of time and money, and birthdays came and went sometimes, without the children knowing that they had passed.
Even Davy, when he was permitted to look at the wonderful pictures in her "Arabian Nights," or "Pilgrim's Progress," or "Mother Goose," had to sit with his hands behind his back while she carefully turned the leaves.
"Miss Elizabeth Lloyd Lewis," he spelled aloud, examining the address through his square-bowed spectacles with a critical squint.
In Betty's little room under the roof at home was a pile of handsomely bound books, lying on a chest beside her mother's Bible.
They were the only things she owned that the children were not allowed to touch.
Surely it must have learned a great many on its underground way among the roots of things, and all else that lies hidden in the earth.
Or if she stood on tiptoe so that she could see her plump round chin, dimpled cheeks, and white teeth, the eyes were left out, and she could see no more of her inquisitive little nose than lay below the big freckle in the middle of it.
I shall be there a whole month, and she knew my mamma and was her dearest friend.
He tagged along after Betty, switching at the grass with a whip he carried, never saying a word after that first eager call for her to wait.
But that was not their errand to-day.
"That's Betty.
A man riding over from the nearest town twice a week brought the mail-bag on horseback.
As he caught up with her at the gate, he did not even ask where she was going, knowing that he would find out in due time if he only followed far enough.
They might think it wasn't respectful."
I'd ask her who it's from."
The reading was slow work sometimes.
Lloydsboro Valley it's postmarked.
Davy waited in silence, watching a flush spread over Betty's face as she read.
Here she came day after day, when her work was done, to pore over the musty old volumes of tales forgotten long ago.
Betty laughed at them sometimes, but she touched the little books with reverent fingers, when she remembered how old they were, and how long ago their first childish readers laid them aside.
Many an afternoon she had spent, perched in the high window, with her feet drawn up under her on the sill, reading aloud to Davy, who lay outside on the grass, staring up at the sky.
"ONE FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO'S NEST."
While ploughmen were at their work they whistled a sweet, slow, and sad strain, which had as powerful an effect in soothing the horses at their hard labour as the milking-songs had on the cows: and these Plough-whistles also were quite usual till about half a century ago.
So that his greatest misfortune turned out, after all, to be his greatest good.
Opening her eyes at last, she begged that they would kiss her once again.
But for a long time Quilp could get no trace.
In the room an old man bent low over a fire crooning to himself, and Kit, seeing that it was his old master, opened the door, ran in, knelt by him and caught his hand.
So he tried to find some one they had loved to go with him to show that he intended only kindness.
All night and all the next day, they rode, and it was midnight before they came to the town where the two wanderers had taken refuge.
He screamed in terror, but the water filled his throat and the knocking on the gates was so loud that no one heard him.
So he muttered on, and the cheeks of the others were wet with tears, for they had begun to understand the sad truth.
The water swept him close to a ship, but its keel was smooth and slippery and there was nothing to cling to.
But Kit promised the Stranger that his mother should go in his place, and went to tell her at once.
Give me but one word, dear brother, to say you know me, and life will still be precious to us again."
He had soon learned the story of their misfortune and how the fear of Quilp had driven them away.
The old grandfather did not recognize Kit.
A gentleman who lived in the village to which they were now bound, who had himself been kind to the child and to the old man whom the new schoolmaster had brought with him, had written of the pair to Kit's employer, and the letter had been the lost clue, so long sought, to their hiding-place.
He soon learned that if Kit knew anything about it he would not tell, so he and his lawyer (a sleek, oily rascal named Brass) made many plans for finding them.
He used to keep her locked in the moldy cellar and gave her so little to eat that she would creep into the office at night (she had found a key that fitted the door) to pick up the bits of bread that Dick Swiveller, Brass's clerk, had left when he ate his luncheon.
They buried him beside the child he had loved, and there in the churchyard where they had often talked together they both lie side by side.
Here he had set up the battered figurehead of a wrecked ship and, imagining that its face resembled that of Kit whom he so fiendishly hated, he used to amuse himself by screwing gimlets into its breast, sticking forks into its eyes and beating it with a poker.
She never told me that.
They had read and talked to her a while, and then she had sunk peacefully to sleep.
Another who tried to find them was a curious lodger who roomed in Brass's house.
The stove had a lot of little openings. In one he would put an egg, in another some coffee, in another a piece of meat and in the fourth some water.
The younger had become a traveler in many countries and had never seen his brother since.
Even the rough canal boatmen were not forgotten.
And finally, in this way, he did find the very same pair the wanderers had met!
The village was very still, and the air was frosty and cold.
No, no, God bless her!
As for Kit, he found himself all at once not only free, but a hero.
After Kit was arrested she ran away from Brass's house and told her story to Kit's employer, who had all along believed in his innocence.
One day he did not return at the usual hour and they went to look for him.
When Kit learned that The Stranger had discovered where little Nell was he was overjoyed; but he knew he himself was not the one to go, because before they disappeared she had told him he must never come to the Old Curiosity Shop again and that her grandfather blamed him as the cause of their misfortune.
They did not know at first that she was dead.
He thought he could climb over the wall to the next wharf and so escape, but in his fright he missed his way and fell over the edge of the platform into the swift-flowing river.
And I have remembered since how she walked behind me, that I might not see how lame she was, but yet she had my hand in hers and seemed to lead me still."
All might have gone wrong but for a little maid-servant of Brass's, whom the lawyer had starved and mistreated for years.
Jarley of the waxwork, the Punch-and-Judy showmen, he found them all.
Kit took her home, packed her box and bundled her into the coach which the Stranger brought, and away they went to find the wanderers.
Snow began falling as the daylight wore away, and the coach wheels made no noise.
The waves threw his drowned body finally on the edge of a dismal swamp, in the red glare of the blazing ruin which the overturned stove that night made of the building in which he had framed his evil plots.
None of those who had known little Nell ever forgot her story.
After the death of the old man, his brother, the Stranger who had sought them so long, traveled in the footsteps of the two wanderers to search out and reward all who had been kind to them--Mrs.
When she left with the Stranger he took another coach and pursued, feeling certain he was on the right track.
Now Quilp had all along suspected that Kit and his mother knew something of their whereabouts, and he had made it his business to watch either one or the other.
He was much changed, and it seemed as if some great blow or grief had crazed him.
Kit was arrested, and the note, of course, was found on his person.
The little maid whose evidence cleared Kit of the terrible charge against him lived to marry Dick Swiveller, the clerk of Brass, the lawyer, while meek Mrs. Quilp, after her husband's drowning, married a clever young man and lived a pleasant life on the dead dwarf's money.
A few minutes before the officers arrived the dwarf received warning from Sally Brass, but he had no time to get away.
One of these was Quilp, the ugly dwarf.
He kept in his room a big box-like trunk, in which was a silver stove that he used to cook his meals.
He was the queerest sort of boarder!
They told me afterward that the stones had cut and bruised them.
He had come back now to England, a rich man, to find the other had vanished with little Nell, his grandchild.
Officers were sent at once to arrest Quilp at a dingy dwelling on a wharf in the river where he often slept with the object of terrifying his wife by his long absences.
That done, she turned to the old man with a lovely smile on her face--such, he said, as he had never seen--and threw both arms about his neck.
They left the driver to take the horses to the inn and approached the building afoot.
Then he would light a lamp that stood under it, and in five minutes the egg would be cooked, the coffee boiled and the meat done--all ready to eat.
Pushing them aside, he went into the next room, calling little Nell's name softly as he went.
After much inquiry he had discovered they had been seen with a Punch-and-Judy show and now he was trying to find the showmen.
But they were all too late.
He tried to cover the light of the fire, but only succeeded in upsetting the stove.
Kit's story got abroad and he found himself with hosts of friends, who gave him a good position and secured his mother from want.
The strangest habit he had was this: He seemed to be very fond of Punch-and-Judy shows, and whenever he heard one on the street he would run out without his hat, make the showmen perform in front of the house and then invite them to his rooms, where he would question them for a long time.
He had a dress of little Nell's in his hand and smoothed and patted it as he muttered that she had been asleep--asleep a long time now, and was marble cold and would not wake.
One night, while this little drudge was prowling about above stairs, she overheard Brass telling his sister, Sally (who was his partner and colder and crueler and more wicked even than he was), the trick he was going to play.
But he dreamed often of the days when they had been children and at last he forgot the thing that had driven them apart.
You see where her feet went bare upon the ground.
But he remembered that his brother, little Nell's grandfather, could not be expected to know him after all the years he had been gone, and as for little Nell herself, she had never seen him, and he was afraid if they heard a strange man had come for them they would take fright and run away again.
It was a black, foggy night, and he could not see a foot before him.
The part Kit had played in this made the dwarf hate him, if possible, more than ever, and he agreed to pay Brass, his rascally lawyer, to ruin the lad by making a false charge of theft against him.
And this was the end of Quilp, the dwarf.
The dwarf, in fact, was in the church when Kit came for his mother, and he followed.
He had been so wicked that he was afraid to die and he fought desperately, but the rapid tide smothered his cries and dragged him down--to death.
One day, when Kit came to Brass's house to see the Stranger, who lodged up stairs, the lawyer cunningly hid a five-pound note in the lad's hat and as soon as he left ran after him, seized him in the street and accused him of taking it from his office desk.
"And see here--these shoes--how worn they are!
He was lying dead upon the stone.
The evidence seemed so strong that the poor fellow was quickly tried, found guilty and sentenced to prison for a long time.
They laid little Nell to rest the next day in the churchyard where she had so often sat.
Say that you had a brother, long forgotten, who now at last came back to you to be what you were then to him.
They followed.
He was not long in hearing of Kit, who had found a situation as footman, and he gained his employer's leave to take the lad with him.
The schoolmaster told them of her last hours.
Only a single light was to be seen, coming from a window beside a church.
They went quite close and looked through the window.
He had loaned the grandfather more money than the shop would bring, and he made up his mind now that the old man had a secret hoard somewhere, which might be his if he could find it.
The fate of the others, whose wickedness has been a part of this story, was not so pleasant.
Thereupon the gate opened slowly, and they passed into a beautiful flower garden, and walked along the green-bordered paths until they came to the high-arched doorway of the palace.
If that happened, all our comfort and fun would be spoiled, for strangers would be coming here every day."
The Queen turned to the wooden Captain and commanded:
His neck was rather weak, and that caused his head to lean slightly to one side, giving him a somewhat broken-down appearance; but he held the reins firmly in his stuffed hands and looked straight ahead, like a well-trained servant.
Her silken hair was long and of a golden color, while her eyes were blue, and had in their depths a sweet and gentle expression.
As they trudged along Tot asked the Captain:
The carriage itself was of the kind that are sold in toy shops, and it was drawn by two horses standing upon wooden platforms with rollers underneath, so that instead of the horses themselves running, the wheels of the platforms whirled around, taking the carriage wherever the driver might direct.
"It is not time for sleep yet, for you haven't had your dinner.
"Because they're made that way, I suppose," was the reply.
"It was we who disobeyed. But we really couldn't help it, for we had to go wherever the boat carried us."
Then the Queen again smiled upon them.
"Cotton," answered the Captain.
"Are you the Queen?" asked the girl.
To match the rest of the furniture, the carpet had woven upon it in bright colors all kinds of laughing children's faces, and the effect of the queer room was to make Tot himself laugh until the tears roll down his cheeks.
You see, I am so perplexed that I have stopped smiling, and that will never do in the world; for should the weather change and cool my wax, I would remain solemn until it warmed up again, and my people would then think me unworthy to be the Queen of Merryland."
"This is private property, and I have placed guards to prevent anyone entering my Valleys."
"To the laughing chamber," replied Scollops; and having reached the top of the stairs, they walked down a long hallway and entered a room so odd and pretty that Tot stopped short and gazed at it in astonishment.
She touched a bell that stood upon a table near by, and at once there came into the room a little boy doll, dressed in a brown suit with brass buttons.
What do they feed horses on in your country?"
"We came in a boat," replied the girl; "and this is my friend, Tot Thompson, and I am Dot Freeland."
Until then you must come to my palace and be treated as my guests."
"Then what are you going to do with us?" inquired the girl.
"Have strangers been here before?" asked Dot, timidly.
This curious doll walked straight up to the Queen and bowed before her, while she said, "Scollops, show this young man to the laughing chamber, and wait upon him while he arranges his toilet."
But the laughing faces will make you slumber peacefully when the time comes, and give you pleasant dreams, too."
Then the Queen rode swiftly up the street to her royal palace.
After she had heard the story, the little lady looked puzzled for a moment and then said, "No one who enters my kingdom should ever be allowed to leave it again, for if they did the world should soon know all about me and my people.
"Why do the horses go on wheels?"
He was larger in size than any doll Tot had seen outside of Merryland, yet he was not so big as the Queen herself. When the children looked at him closely, they could see that his face and hands and feet were knitted from colored worsteds, while his eyes were two big black beads.
"I see," said Tot again, in a rather bewildered voice.
When the boy had looked the room over and seen all the faces, Scollops helped him to wash his hands and face, to comb his hair and to brush his clothes, and when this task was finished, the woolly doll said:
"Never," answered the Queen.
That's what makes them look so plump and healthy.
This driver looked for all the world like a rag doll dressed in a coachman's uniform.
"It would tire them too much," answered the Captain.
"Oh!" said Tot, "I see." Then, after a pause, he asked:
Dot and Tot followed more slowly, for the Captain who escorted them was exceedingly small and walked stiffly, having no joints in his knees.
"I'm sorry to have caused you so much trouble," said Dot, softly. "I'd much rather be at home again, if I could, although your Valleys are so queer and delightful."
"We keep them quite full of it all the time.
The posts of the bed were also carved into laughing baby faces; the chairs and the dresser showed a face upon every spot where there was a place for one, and every face throughout the whole room had a smile upon it.
Scollops, as the knitted boy seemed named, bowed again and murmured, "Your Majesty shall be obeyed." Then, turning to Tot, he took his hand and led him from the room.
"Thank you," said Dot and Tot together.
But upon the wall were painted hundreds of heads of children--boys and girls of all countries, with light and dark hair, straight and curly hair, blue and black and brown and gray eyes, and all with laughing faces.
Then the Queen stepped into her carriage, the rag coachman cracked his whip, and the wheels of the horses' platform began spinning around.
"We tried stuffing ours with hay once," remarked the Captain; "but it made their skins look lumpy, it was so coarse; so now we use cotton altogether."
Softly his eyes closed, and in another moment he would have been sound asleep had not Scollops raised him to his feet and said:
"Escort these strangers to my royal palace, and see that you treat them most politely; for although they are in reality my prisoners, they have been guilty of no intentional wrong and seem to be nice children."
"Being on platforms, the horses never get tired, you see, for the wheels do all the work."
As for her complexion, it was a dainty pink-and-white, delicately blended.
I beg you will allow me to escort you to my dwelling; but first I should like to know your names, and how you came here."
Just beneath her was Flippityflop, holding out his arms.
Instantly every Clown stood upon his head and knocked his heels together in the air.
Then, so suddenly that it quite startled the childish voyagers, the boat glided from the archway into the most beautiful country one could imagine.
The Prince carried them to one of the prettiest platforms and set them gently upon its cushioned top.
We've come in a boat, long, long ways off.
Then, with another bow, the leader addressed her, speaking in a sweet and most pleasing tone of voice, "Welcome, O King and Queen of Children, to the Valley of Clowns!
Let us enter."
"You are very kind," answered Dot, "and as we are tired by sitting in the boat so long, we shall be glad to accept your invitation."
Some of the voices sounded loud and shrill, others low and deep, but all rang with a happy tone that aroused the children's interest at once, and made them wonder what occasion could cause so much amusement.
"Allow me to introduce you to our friends Dot and Tot, of the Big Round World.
It was a Valley, as the Watch-Dog had said; but it was level and sunny and dotted with broad-leaved trees; while soft, tender grasses, mingled with brilliant flowers, covered the ground in every direction.
Dot did not hesitate, but dropped through the opening, and the Prince caught her safely in his arms.
"Come on!" he said again; "I'll catch you."
The one who had first spoken to them now came forward and shook hands with both Dot and Tot in a very polite manner.
The Inspector was explanatory.
'The beetle!'
I knows 'ow particular you pleesmen is.'
It doesn't bear the best of characters, and if you asked me what I thought of it, I should say in plain English that it was a disorderly house.'
At one of the doors stood an old lady with a shawl drawn over her head.
The arrival of the brandy was not long delayed,--but the man on the bed had regained consciousness before it came.
I doubt if there was an ounce of flesh on the whole of his body.
This was Mrs Henderson.
Now he opened them, wide; there came into them the former staring horror.
Sydney, stooping over him, endeavoured to explain.
It looks to me like a case of starvation, or exhaustion,--possibly a combination of both.'
'What sort of looking bloke is it who's been murdered?'
I felt a sudden pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me with probably unconscious violence.
The man's eyelids were partially closed.
'Yes--all the afternoon--and evening--God help me!'
Then, after an effort, spoke again.
'The Inspector wants to know how you got here, has anyone been doing anything to you?
'What's he mean about a beetle?'
We all four went hastily forward.
I'm an Inspector of police, and I want you to tell me what has brought you into this condition.
We lifted him on to the bed,--a featherweight he was to lift.
Atherton collared the youth by the shoulder which Mr Pleesman had left disengaged.
'Then send for some,--to the tap downstairs, if that's the nearest!
The Inspector spoke to me.
He raised the patient's head, allowing it to trickle down his throat.
He referred to two abrasions of the skin,--one on either side of the man's neck.
That the one was gone was plainly nothing to him in comparison with the fact that the other was left.
He kept them closed as he continued to speak.
'They might be, joined to an already weakened constitution.
The man relapsed into a state of lethargy.
'You'll find it a joke if you have to hang, as you ought to, you--' The doctor said what he did say to himself, under his breath.
The man swallowed it mechanically, motionless, as if unconscious what it was that he was doing.
Atherton replied.
'I'm glad to see you looking better, Mr Holt.
His first pronouncement, made as soon as he commenced his examination, was, under the circumstances, sufficiently startling.
There, on the floor in the space which was between the bed and the wall, lay the murdered man.
'Now, Mrs Henderson, perhaps you'll tell us what all this means.
She turned the key.
The parties what's in my 'ouse is most respectable,--most! and they couldn't abide the notion of there being police about the place.'
'They look to me like scratches.
'Mrs Henderson keeps a sort of lodging-house,--a "Sailors' Home" she calls it, but no one could call it sweet.
He was evidently struggling to speak.
Who is this man, and how did he come in here, and who came in with him, and what do you know about it altogether?
The doctor had some in a tumbler.
Atherton had reached a chord in the man's consciousness.
'Yes,--in my old clothes.
'Never you mind who they are.
Well, has the beetle done anything to you?'
'I understand from this gentleman--' signifying Atherton--'that your name's Robert Holt.
They opened on to two or three stone steps which led directly into the street.
On his skeleton features there came a look of panic fear.
The Inspector was puzzled;--and said so.
She greeted us with garrulous volubility.
Even his nose was wasted, so that nothing but a ridge of cartilage remained.
Then, turning to the Inspector, he said to him in an undertone;
Has anyone been hurting you?'
'I think I understand what he means,--and my friends do too.
If this man dies before you've brought it I'll have you locked up as sure as you're a living woman.'
The lids closed.
'Don't you speak so loud, Mr Phillips.
A small iron bedstead stood by its side, the clothes on which were all tumbled and tossed.
How are you feeling?'
Why didn't you send for me directly you found him?'
CHAPTER XLIV
The skin was drawn tightly over his cheek bones,--the bones themselves were staring through.
I don't see anything here.'
A more deplorable spectacle than he presented I have seldom witnessed.
'The beetle killed me.'
Opening his eyes he looked up at the doctor bending over him.
'We quite believe that, Mrs Henderson.'
Mrs Henderson led the way up a staircase which would have been distinctly the better for repairs.
The Inspector's tone was grim.
His whole frame quivered.
'And where is Miss Lindon now?'
His cheeks and the sockets of his eyes were hollow.
I doubt if it was flattering to Mrs Henderson. 'Have you got any brandy in the house?'
We went four in the hansom which had been waiting in the street to Mrs Henderson's in Paradise Place,--the Inspector and we three.
Fact is, it was business that finally brought me around here.
That, Rand agreed, would be all right.
And seven Paterson Colts, including a couple of cased sets.
Ten snaphaunces.
Lane Fleming would know a loaded revolver when he saw one.
Twenty-five wheel locks!
I understand that you and some others are forming a pool to buy the Lane Fleming collection."
"This fellow who bought it, now; did he see Belden and Haven's Colt book, when it came out in 1940?"
"Why, that story's been absolutely disproved," Rand said.
Ordinarily, Lane was a careful buyer; he must have let himself get hypnotized by all that ivory and gold, and all that documentation on crested notepaper.
Boone' and 'Davy Crockett' to prove it?"
Of course we had to vacate the fort.
In vain the four guardians of the peace rushed up the hill, flourishing their clubs and calling upon us to surrender.
A cloud rested on General Harris's military reputation until his superior tactics enabled him to dispossess the enemy.
Once he outgeneralled our commander in the following manner: He massed his gunners on our left and opened a brisk fire, under cover of which a single company (six men) advanced on that angle of the fort.
The memory of man, even that of the Oldest Inhabitant, runneth not back to the time when there did not exist a feud between the North End and the South End boys of Rivermouth.
I am sure that the reader who has followed me thus far will be willing to hear what became of her, and Sailor Ben and Miss Abigail and the Captain.
For several months after leaving Rivermouth I carried on a voluminous correspondence with Pepper Whitcomb; but it gradually dwindled down to a single letter a month, and then to none at all.
I have reserved my pleasantest word for the last.
The new life upon which I entered, the new friends and foes I encountered on the road, and what I did and what I did not, are matters that do not come within the scope of these pages.
So ends the Story of a Bad Boy--but not such a very bad boy, as I told you to begin with.
With the close of my school-days at Rivermouth this modest chronicle ends.
It is touching the Captain.
I hope all the praises she received and all the spangled trappings she wore did not spoil her; but I am afraid they did, for she was always over much given to the vanities of this world!
A month after my departure from Rivermouth the Captain informed me by letter that he had parted with the little mare, according to agreement.
The old house became very lonely when the family got reduced to Captain Nutter and Kitty; and when Kitty passed away, my grandfather divided his time between Rivermouth and New York.
She had been sold to the ring-master of a travelling circus (I had stipulated on this disposal of her), and was about to set out on her travels.
He also expressed a wish to have his body stitched up in a shotted hammock and dropped into the harbor; but as he did not strenuously insist on this, and as it was not in accordance with my grandfather's preconceived notions of Christian burial, the Admiral was laid to rest beside Kitty, in the Old South Burying Ground, with an anchor that would have delighted him neatly carved on his headstone.
She did not disappoint my glowing anticipations, but became quite a celebrity in her way--by dancing the polka to slow music on a pine-board ball-room constructed for the purpose.
First about Gypsy.
Young Conway went into the grocery business with his ancient chum, Rodgers--RODGERS & CONWAY!
Great events no longer considered it worth their while to honor so quiet a place.
He knew that the faithful old sailor would not let me come to any harm, and even if I had managed for the time being to elude him, was sure to bring me back sooner or later.
I had evidently got off by the train and Sailor Ben had followed me.
It was not only a bad investment, it was lunacy.
There was no telegraphic communication between Boston and Rivermouth in those days; so my grandfather could do nothing but await the result. Even if there had been another mail to Boston, he could not have availed himself of it, not knowing how to address a message to the fugitives. The post-office was naturally the last place either I or the Admiral would think of visiting.
I must turn back for a moment to that eventful evening.
As the carriage swept round the corner, I leaned out of the window to take a last look at Sailor Ben's cottage, and there was the Admiral's flag flying at half-mast.
My mother had arrived at New York, and would be with us the next day.
Little Black Sam, by the by, had been taken by his master from my father's service ten months previously, and put on a sugar-plantation near Baton Rouge.
'We adopted Uncle Snow's views so far as to accede to his proposition forthwith.
The letter bearing these tidings had reached Rivermouth the evening of my flight--had passed me on the road by the down train.
I do not like to look back to the agony and suspense of that moment.
It was hard to give up the long-cherished dream of being a Harvard boy; but I gave it up.
His fears were based upon the fact that I had published in the Rivermouth Barnacle some verses addressed in a familiar manner "To the Moon." Now, the idea of a boy, with his living to get, placing himself in communication with the Moon, struck the mercantile mind as monstrous.
My mother, I neglected to say, was also to reside in New York.
My grandfather, however, was too full of trouble to allow this to add to his distress.
He handed it to me.
In the midst of our discussions a letter came from my Uncle Snow, a merchant in New York, generously offering me a place in his counting-house.
The decision once made, it was Uncle Snow's wish that I should enter his counting-house immediately.
A letter with a great black seal!
How all these simple details interested me will be readily understood by any boy who has been long absent from home.
When I failed to make my appearance at supper, the Captain began to suspect that I had really started on my wild tour southward--a conjecture which Sailor Ben's absence helped to confirm.
As the days went by my first grief subsided, and in its place grew up a want which I have experienced at every step in life from boyhood to manhood.
There were many tranquil, pleasant hours in store for me at that period, and I prefer to turn to them.
Everything was changed with us now.
I shall not dwell on this portion of my story.
The Captain wished to carry out his son's intention and send me to college, for which I was nearly fitted; but our means did not admit of this.
But which was it, father or mother?
My father had died at New Orleans during one of his weekly visits to the city.
The cause of my good uncle's haste was this--he was afraid that I would turn out to be a poet before he could make a merchant of me.
Our return, therefore, by the first train on the following day did not surprise him.
There were consultations with lawyers, and signing of papers, and correspondence; for my father's affairs had been left in great confusion.
In the excitement of preparing for the journey I didn't feel any very deep regret myself.
Chapter Twenty-One--In Which I Leave Rivermouth
"I thought I could."
"I can't read it, Tom," said the old gentleman, breaking down.
With my mother's hand in mine once more, all the long years we had been parted appeared like a dream.
If I accepted my uncle's offer, I might hope to work my way to independence without loss of time.
I was sorry when it became necessary to discuss questions more nearly affecting myself.
I was to go to Boston with the Captain to meet her and bring her home.
Often, even now, after all these years, when I see a lad of twelve or fourteen walking by his father's side, and glancing merrily up at his face, I turn and look after them, and am conscious that I have missed companionship most sweet and sacred.
I had been removed from school temporarily, but it was decided, after much consideration, that I should not return, the decision being left, in a manner, in my own hands.
It was time, indeed, that he helped himself.
"Never see them again?" she repeated, puzzled.
"No!
Good night!"
CHAPTER V
"Well?"
"J.L. POTTS."
He laughed.
BEATRICE."
Paul Lawton of Brockton.
"I want to look at you," he confessed.
"Of course you are!
Why, you have quite light hair, and I thought it was dark!"
You couldn't.
"I'm with you," Mr. Raymond Greene chimed in.
And the story itself.
"What about luncheon?
Am I right?"
"What the mischief is a last?" he inquired.
"Dear Mr. Romilly,
What am I to do?
This morning--why, surely they are brown?"
"The bathrooms are exactly opposite."
"To-night!" Kauf's eyes went wide, then he started to flush.
"Good!
Then I forswore travel and vowed to Allah the Most High I would venture no more by land or sea, for that this seventh and last voyage had surfeited me of travel and adventure; and I thanked the Lord (be He praised and glorified!), and blessed Him for having restored me to my kith and kin and country and home.
Then we embarked, I and my wife, with all our moveables, leaving our houses and domains and so forth, and set sail, and ceased not sailing from island to island and from sea to sea, with a fair wind and a favouring, till we arrived at Bassorah safe and sound.
A Translation of The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad the Seaman
But after.
Some days after I craved his leave to depart, but could not obtain it except by great pressing, whereupon I farewelled him and fared forth from his city, with merchants and other companions, homewards-bound without any desire for travel or companions, homewards-bound without any desire for travel or trade.
He carried me still unconscious till he reached the place for which he was making, when he rolled me off his back and presently went his ways followed by the others.
I likewise bought for myself a beast and we fared forth and crossed the deserts from country to country till I reached Baghdad.
How sweet and how grateful!"
Know, O my brothers and friends and companions all, that when I left voyaging and commercing, I said in myself, "Sufficeth me that hath befallen me;" and I spent my time in solace and pleasure.
In the evening I reported my success to my master who was delighted in me and entreated me with high honour; and next morning he removed the slain elephant.
which differs in essential form from the preceding tale
They fell upon us and wounded and slew all who opposed them; then, having captured the ship and her contents, carried us to an island, where they sold us at the meanest price.
I trembled at these words and rejoined, "By Allah the Omnipotent, O my lord, I have taken a loathing to wayfare, and when I hear the words 'Voyage' or 'Travel,' my limbs tremble for what hath befallen me of hardships and horrors.
We continued voyaging and coasting along many islands; but, when we were half-way, we were surrounded by a number of canoes, wherein were men like devils armed with bows and arrows, swords and daggers; habited in mail- coats and other armoury.
As soon as we had made fast we landed and I took the present and the letter; and, going in with them to the King, kissed ground before him.
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Sindbad the Seaman thus continued:--When I smote the serpent on the head with my golden staff she cast the man forth of her mouth.
I made no stay there, but freighted another vessel and, transferring my goods to her, set out forthright for Baghdad-city, where I arrived in safety, and entering my quarter and repairing to my house, foregathered with my family and friends and familiars who laid up my goods in my warehouses.
After this, he entreated me with increased favour and said, "O my son, thou hast shown us the way to great gain, wherefore Allah requite thee!
When it was the Five Hundred and Sixty-sixth Night,
Here I went in to the Caliph and, after saluting him and kissing hands, informed him of all that had befallen me; whereupon he rejoiced in my safety and thanked Almighty Allah; and he bade my story be written in letters of gold.
Then I dropped down from Baghdad to the Gulf, and with other merchants embarked, and our ship sailed before a fair wind many days and nights till, by Allah's aid, we reached the island of Sarandib.
according to the version of the Calcutta Edition
Now I was bought by a wealthy man who, taking me to his house, gave me meat and drink and clothing and treated me in the friendliest manner; so I was heartened and I rested a little.
Now when Shahrazad had ended her story of the two Sindbads, Dinarzad exclaimed, "O my sister, how pleasant is thy tale and how tasteful!
By Allah Omnipotent we were longing to see thee, and glory be to God who hath again shown us thy face!" Then taking me by the hand he made me sit by his side, rejoicing, and he welcomed me with familiar kindness again and entreated me as a friend.
I fell down fainting amongst the beasts when the monster elephant wound his trunk about me and, setting me on his back, went off with me, the others accompanying us.
Then I gave the wand of gold to him whom I had delivered from the serpent and bade him farewell, and my friend took me on his back and flew with me as before, till he brought me to the city and set me down in my own house.
And wet territory voted dry will bring about a greatly accelerated patronage of the photoplay houses. There is every strategic reason why these two forces should patch up a truce.
The photoplays have done something to reunite the lower-class families. No longer is the fire-escape the only summer resort for big and little folks.
Now they have fire pouring into their eyes instead of into their bellies.
"With thoughts on white ships And the King of Spain's Daughter."
For no pious reason, surely.
But they are outstanding groups.
The talk with this man was worth it all to me.
But now, to speak in an Irish way, the crowd takes the platform, and looking down, sees itself swaying.
The larger the county-seat, the larger the non-church-going population and the more stubborn the fight.
When a county goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county-seat.
The men who do this, drink freely at their own clubs or parties.
And a whole evening costs but a dime apiece.
The shame of the American drinking place is the bar-tender who dominates its thinking.
Through their office they are committed to prohibition.
After a day's work a street-sweeper enters the place, heavy as King Log.
But it is not too late for the dry forces to repent.
As Padraic Colum says in his poem on the herdsman:--
There are almost as many bar rooms to-day, yet this new thing breaks the lines as nothing else ever did.
Since I have announced myself a farmer and a puritan, let me here list the saloon evils not yet recorded in this chapter.
Their leadership seldom dries up a factory town or a mining region, with all the help the Anti-Saloon League can give.
The women's vote, a little more puritanical than the men's vote, will make the result sure.
Here is more fancy and whim than ever before blessed a hot night. Here, under the wind of an electric fan, they witness everything, from a burial in Westminster to the birthday parade of the ruler of the land of Swat.
Below the cliff caves were bar rooms in endless lines.
Blood is drawn from the guts to the brain.
It refers as well to every other type of moving picture that gets into the slum.
I beg to be allowed to relate a personal matter.
THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON
They sit in majestic rows.
Humanity takes on its sacred aspect.
The Greeks, the wisest people in our limited system of classics, bowed down before the Egyptian hierarchy.
It was the force behind every mummification.
We built the mysteriousness of the Universe into the Pyramids, carved it into every line of the Sphinx.
He is carried past a dreadful place on the back of the cow Hathor.
We retire to the shaded porch.
ON COMING FORTH BY DAY
CHAPTER XIX
We need not call it the Arabian's cave.
In the imaginative pictures the principle begins to be applied more largely, till throughout the fairy story the figures float in and out from the unknown, as fancies should.
At last he is declared justified.
Now we have a darkness on which we can paint, an unspoiled twilight.
It takes two more steps toward quietness of light to read the human face and figure.
The Nile flows through his heart.
She makes sacrifice with him there.
So he bathed his hot face, took a cool drink, and lay on the moss, staring up into the green gloom of the pines, blissfully dreaming of the joys of a hunter's life,--till a peculiar cry startled him to his feet, and sent him creeping warily toward the sound.
The start and the scare made it hard to go to sleep again, and he sat looking at the solemn sky, full of stars that seemed watching over him alone there, like a poor, lost child on the great mountain's stony breast.
He did his best, but when they passed opening after opening into the green recesses of the wood, and the granite boulders grew more and more plentiful, his patience gave out, and he began to plan what he could say to excuse himself.
I'll keep the feather anyway, to prove that I really saw an eagle; that's better than nothing."
I'll turn up all right by sundown; so don't worry.
As Abner spoke, the procession set forth.
"No, I haven't!
It was long past noon when Corny came out near the waterfall, so tired and hungry that he heartily wished himself back among the party, who had lunched well and were now probably driving gayly homeward to a good supper.
"I'll rest a bit, and then go along down, keeping a look out for puss by the way," thought Corny, feeling safe and free, and very happy, for he had his own way, at last, and a whole day to lead the life he loved.
Chris is a capital fellow, and I just wish I had him here to make things jolly," thought the lonely lad.
Gun smashed in that confounded fall, so I can't even fire a shot to call help.
"Caught in a tree, by Jupiter!" and all visions of heaven vanished in a breath, as he sat up and stared about him, wide awake now, and conscious of many aching bones.
Don't care who shot her, I'll kill her, and have her too, if I pay my last dollar," thought Corny; and catching up a stout bit of timber fallen from the old roof, he struck one quick blow, which finished poor puss, who gave up the ghost with a savage snarl, and a vain effort to pounce on him.
A pretty hard prospect, either way."
Corny kept awake as long as he could, fearing to dream and fall; but by-and-by he dropped off, and slept soundly till the chill of dawn waked him.
The ladies went more slowly, enjoying the grand beauty of the scene, while Chris carried the lunch-basket, and Corny lingered in the rear, waiting for a good chance to "plunge."
Where did you shoot her?" asked Abner, stooping to examine the creature.
Granite's cheap up here; just mention what you'd like on your tombstone and I'll see that it's done, if it takes my last cent."
"But I won't give up, and I never say 'Beat.' I'm not going to be laughed out of it, and I'll do what I said I would, if it takes all summer, Chris Warner."
"This is a first-class scrape.
"Come now, stop joking and lend a hand, and I'll do anything I can for you.
My hands smart like fury, and I guess the mosquitoes have about eaten my face up.
More cuts and bruises, more vain shots, and all the reward of his eager struggles was a single feather that floated down as the great bird soared serenely away, leaving the boy exhausted and disappointed in a wilderness of granite boulders, with no sign of a path to show the way out.
It was Abner, Chris, and some of the neighbors, setting out again on their search, after a night of vain wandering.
I hit her a rap with a club, in the cabin where I found her," answered Corny, heartily wishing he need not share the prize with any one.
Right about face, neighbors, and home we go, to the tune of Hail Columby."
Whether it was a rabbit, woodchuck or dog, he had not seen, as a turn in the path prevented a clear view; and hoping it was old Buff looking for him, he ran in, to find himself face to face with a catamount at last.
So vivid was it that he woke himself by crying out, "Here I am!" and nearly went over the ledge, stretching out his arms to Abner.
"The fellows we read about always come to grief in a place where they can shoot a bird, catch a fish, or knock over some handy beast for supper," he said, talking to himself for company.
Now which way will I go,--up or down?
"Wait till I get out my handkerchief; if you're going to be affectin' I may want it.
He was desperately tired with these hours of rough travel, and very hungry; but would not own it, and sat considering what to do next, for he saw by the sun that the afternoon was half over.
Here's a nice rock, and the last spring we are likely to see till we get to the top.
"Now, Chris, it's mean of you to keep on making fun when I'm in dead earnest; and this may be the last thing you can do for me."
To shoot the king of birds and take him home in triumph would cover the hunter with glory.
Hunting is mighty hard work on a hot day, and this is going to be a blazer," answered Chris, pulling his big straw hat lower over his eyes.
See, I've got a bottle of cold tea in this pocket, and a lot of grub in the other.
Hope some house isn't very far off, for I don't believe I can lug this brute much farther, I'm so starved and shaky."
I can't make them hear, and must wait till morning.
Now you hold your tongue, and let me slip away when I think we've hit the right spot.
Don't worry, mammy; I'm old enough to take care of myself."
Three merry girls, a pair of small boys, two amiable mammas, Chris and Corny, made up the party, with Abner to drive the big wagon drawn by Milk and Molasses, the yellow span.
Anxious to report himself alive, and relieve his mother's anxiety, he pressed on till he struck the path, and soon saw, not far away, the old cabin Abner had spoken of.
Utterly used up, he could not get home now if he had known the way; and suddenly all the tales he had ever heard of men lost in the mountains came into his head.
"Even the old chap lost in the bush in Australia had a savage with him who dug a hole in a tree, and pulled out a nice fat worm to eat.
I shall take some lunch and plenty of shot, and have a glorious time, even if I don't meet that confounded beast.
There she was, the big, fierce cat, crouched in a corner, with fiery eyes, growling and spitting at sight of an enemy, but too badly wounded to fight, as the blood that dripped from her neck, and the tremble of her limbs plainly showed.
He lay a few minutes drowsily musing, for the fall had stunned him; then, as he moved his hand something pricked it, and he felt pine-needles in the fingers that closed over them.
The tale was soon told, and received with the most flattering signs of interest, wonder, sympathy, and admiration.
This he fastened firmly round the trunk of the pine, and finished his preparations by tying his handkerchief to one of the branches, that it might serve as a guide for him, a signal for others, and a trophy of his grand fall.
Then, hoping to forget his woes in sleep, he nestled under the low-growing branches of the pine, and lay blinking drowsily at the twilight world outside.
Feeling like a prisoner set free, he hurried as fast as bare feet and stiff legs would carry him along the bed of the stream, coming at last into the welcome shelter of the woods, which seemed more beautiful than ever, after the bleak region of granite in which he had been all night.
All he could see was a narrow ledge where the tree stood, and anxious to reach a safer bed for the night, he climbed cautiously down to drop on the rock, so full of gratitude for safety that he could only lie quite still for a little while, thinking of mother, and trying not to cry.
It should be done!
He seemed floating in the air, for he swayed to and fro on a soft bed, a pleasant murmur reached his ear, and when he looked down he saw what looked like clouds, misty and white, below him.
A dream came, and he saw the old farm-house in sad confusion, caused by his absence,--the women crying, the men sober, all anxious, and all making ready to come and look for him.
The sight of an eagle soaring above him seemed to answer his question, and fill him with new strength and ardor.
"Chris did it; he fired a spell back and see the critter run, but we was too keen after you to stop for any other game.
But I'll stand ready to pick up the pieces, if you come to grief."
Stunted pines grew in the fissures of the rocks, and their strong roots helped the clinging hands and feet as the boy painfully climbed, slipped, and swung along, fearing every minute to come to some impassable barrier in the dangerous path.
"No fear of that; I've tramped round all summer, and know my way like an Indian.
"The very next path I see, I'll dive in and run; Chris can't leave the rest to follow, and if I once get a good start, they won't catch me in a hurry," thought the boy, longing to be free and alone in the wild woods that tempted him on either hand.
"The only thing to do now is to get down to the valley, if I can, before dark.
"Now's my chance!
"Didn't shoot her; broke my gun when I took that header down the mountain.
May break my bones, but I can't sit and starve up here, and I was a fool to come.
He liked to tell the story of that day and night when his friends were recounting adventures by sea and land; but he never said much about the hours on the ledge, always owned that Chris shot the beast, and usually ended by sagely advising his hearers to let their mothers know, when they went off on a lark of that kind.
He was stiff, and full of pain, but daylight and the hope of escape cheered him up, and gave him coolness and courage to see how best he could accomplish his end.
"That ain't just square; but it's not my funeral, so I won't meddle. Hope you'll have first rate sport, and bag a brace of cats.
Abner said there was an old cabin, where the hunters used to sleep, somewhere round that way.
I'll go slap down, and come out in the valley.
He sunk up to his knees, and with great difficulty got out by clinging to the tussocks that grew near.
He could do no more till morning, and resigned himself to a night on the mountain side, glad to be there alive, though doubtful what daylight would show him.
So he washed as well as he could, hoping the sun would dry him, picked out a few bits of bread unspoiled by the general wreck, and trudged on with less ardor, though by no means discouraged yet.
And away he went, climbing, tumbling, leaping from rock to rock, toward the place where the eagle had alighted.
Abner said they purred and snarled and gave a mewing sort of cry; but which it was now he could not tell, having unfortunately been half asleep.
I'll pull through, I guess, and when it's all over, it will be a jolly good story to tell."
To reach it he must leap, at risk of his bones, or find some means to swing down ten or twelve feet.
He was much shaken by the fall, his flesh bruised, his clothes torn, and his spirit cowed; for hunger, weariness, pain, and danger, showed him what a very feeble creature he was, after all.
All below was wrapped in mist, and not a sound reached him but the sigh of the pine, and the murmur of the waterfall.
Scattered around were mighty trees, but conspicuous above any, in the very center, was a giant sycamore, split at its base into three large trees, whose waving branches seemed to sweep the face of heaven, and whose roots, like miserly fingers, clutched deep into the black muck of Rainbow Bottom.
He kept his dignified Quaker mate stuffed to discomfort; he clung to the side of the nest trying to help brood until he almost crowded her from the eggs.
I've knowed that for forty year.
From morning until night he bathed, dressed his feathers, sunned himself, fluffed and flirted. He strutted and "chipped" incessantly.
How they sleeked and flattened their plumage, and with half-open beaks and sparkling eyes, hopped closer and closer as if charmed.
The newly mated pair finally made up; the females speedily resumed their coquetting, and forgot the captivating stranger--all save the poor little one that had been kissed by accident.
Man!
Glad to hear you!
Yes, I have, too!
"I know what I'll do with you.
It was a meager egg, and a feeble baby that pipped its shell.
Wet year!"
He flared his crest high, swelled his throat with rolling notes, and appeared so big and brilliant that among the many cardinals that had gathered to hear, there was not one to compare with him.
The Cardinal went to the top rail and feasted on the sweet grains of corn until his craw was full, and then nestled in the sumac and went to sleep.
He darted among them, scattering them right and left, and made for the sycamore.
The thrush came gliding up the river bank, a rusty-coated, sneaking thing of the underbrush, and taking possession of a thorn bush just opposite the sumac, he sang for an hour in the open.
How they coquetted!
Only that morning he had swelled with pride as he heard Mrs. Jay tell her quarrelsome husband that she wished she could exchange him for the Cardinal.
The river bed was limestone, and the swiftly flowing water, clear and limpid.
Yet no one had come to seek him.
Look at the grass a-creepin' right down till it's a trailin' in the water!
Wet year!"
Abram set a foot on the third rail and leaned his elbows on the top. The Cardinal chipped delightedly and hopped and tilted closer.
How they flirted!
So her troubles continued.
But it came nearer being a scared man than a frightened bird, for the Cardinal flashed straight toward him until only a few yards away, and then, swaying on a bush, it chipped, cheered, peeked, whistled broken notes, and manifested perfect delight at the sight of the white-haired old man.
You're foolish if you go!
The females scattered for cover with all their might.
Abram went peering and dodging beside the fence, peeping into the bushes, searching for the bird.
Look this way!
I haven't a scrap about me now.
Well, you struck it all right, Mr. Redbird.
He went out, closing the door softly, and with an utter disregard for the corn field, made a bee line for the musician.
In turn the Cardinal struck him like a flashing rocket, and then red war waged in Rainbow Bottom.
He pitied himself as he wondered if fate had in store for him the trials he saw others suffering.
Perish the thought!
He had little trouble with the robins.
He squared his shoulders and stood very erect.
He screamed a "Chip" of such savage jealousy at a pair of killdeer lovers that he sent them scampering down the river bank without knowing that the crime of which they stood convicted was that of being mated when he was not.
Here!" whistled the Cardinal.
Wet year!" called the Cardinal after his retreating figure.
"Bosh!" exclaimed Maria.
It's jest the old Wabash rollin' up the echoes.
The sumac seemed to fill his idea of a perfect location from the very first.
I've hung on to it like grim death, for it's jest that much o' Paradise I'm plumb sure of.
"Hear that, Maria!
She was so frail and weak she lost her family in migration, and followed with some strangers that were none too kind.
Who will come and be my mate?"
The remainder of the family stood and took nearly all the food so that she almost starved in the nest, and she never really knew the luxury of a hearty meal until her elders had flown.
Have you seen any other of so great size?
He decided to prospect in the opposite direction, and taking wing, he started up the river.
With care and deliberation the brown thrush selected the most attractive, and she followed him to the thicket as if charmed.
She was left so badly frightened that she could not move for a long time.
The Cardinal worked in a kiss on one poor little bird, too frightened to escape him; then the males closed in, and serious business began.
You bet I will!
See you in the mornin', right after breakfast, no count taken o' the weather."
How do you like it?
"Thanky, old fellow!
Above all, the sycamore waved its majestic head.
The heart of the Cardinal sank as he watched.
He poured out a tumultuous cry vibrant with every passion raging in him.
But then you WARNED me, didn't you, old fellow?
By this time he confidently had expected results.
Black envy filled their hearts.
Being the son of a king, he was much too dignified to beg for a mate, and besides, it took all his time to guard the sumac; but his eyes were wide open to all that went on around him, and he envied the blackbird his glossy, devoted little sweetheart, with all his might.
Abram took out his jack-knife, and dotting a row of grains along the top rail, he split and shaved them down as fine as possible; and as he reached one end of the rail, the Cardinal, with a spasmodic "Chip!" dashed down and snatched a particle from the other, and flashed back to the bush, tested, approved, and chipped his thanks.
Behold me!
The performance of a brown thrush drove him wild with envy.
There were many unmated cardinals in Rainbow Bottom, and many jealous males.
Every other female cardinal in Rainbow Bottom had several males courting her, but this poor, frightened, lonely one had never a suitor; and she needed love so badly!
Then she stopped and listened, and rolling with the river, she heard those bold true tones.
Life in the South had been full of trouble. Once a bullet grazed her so closely she lost two of her wing quills, and that made her more timid than ever.
Have you any to equal my grace?
It's a dratted shame!
It was not an endurable thought.
Startled, the Cardinal took wing.
Abram straightened and touched his hat brim in a trim half military salute.
Wet year!"
Settin' on a sawed stick in a little wire house takes all the ginger out of any bird, an' their feathers are always mussy.
Following the channel, he winged his flight for miles over the cool sparkling water, between the tangle of foliage bordering the banks.
He had a lot of adventures and fighting and he helped beautiful, persecuted damsels."
"Follow me!" he whispered and crept on all fours nearer the window. They could see a man now, an elderly man with white hair and a white beard.
Have another cake, darling boy," she said in a tone of honeyed sweetness.
"You might go an' milk that," suggested William.
"I'll carry the bugle," said Ginger, "'cause I'm squire."
He stopped.
"All right," said Ginger.
It'll be three weeks off 'cause they're takin' the next two weeks to pay for an ole window wot my ball slipped into by mistake."
You first," he added hastily.
"Then I won't try killin' him--not straight off.
"Well," said William after a pause, "let's be squires in turn.
Then he brightened.
"Suckin' wot?" said William, bewildered.
William's spirits rose.
What's this tomfool trick?
It's a shed in the garden that he uses.
Perhaps I'd better go and find him."
Well, let's set off."
Nothing loth, Ginger selected an ornate pyramid of icing.
She turned her eyes upon them sadly.
He said he'd come straight back.
He had a very mad look, I thought, when he was standing at the window."
He looks mad.
"Will you kill him?" said the awed squire.
"Who the deuce----?" exploded the voice.
"An abominable attack ... utterly unprovoked ... dastardly ruffians!"
Miss Greene began to laugh hysterically.
Could you see?" said William the discreet.
"Golly!" murmured William.
Ginger remembered the pangs of hunger, of which excitement had momentarily rendered him oblivious, and, deciding that there was no time like the present, took a cake from the stand and began to consume it in silence.
"Well, I will, then!" said William with reckless bravado, and advanced boldly upon the animal.
"Oh, let me go, Miss Greene," said one of the youths ardently.
"You low ole caitiff!" said William through the keyhole.
And it loves a melodrama."
William's respect for the knight rose.
They walked on down the road till they came to a pair of iron gates and a drive that led up to a big house.
"Who the deuce are you?
"Go on!" said the knight to his reluctant squire.
"Yes.
We knew our parts, anyway."
Great big face he had, too, with a beard."
William was loth to give up his treasure.
I can't think why father doesn't come."
Miss Greene sank back into her chair, suddenly white. One of the young men let a cup of tea fall neatly from his fingers on to the floor and there crash into fragments.
"Well, I don't know whether you'd find the place.
"You're the squire.
William, ready for all contingencies, marshalled his forces.
"It's all right now," he said.
"A knight," said Miss Drew, who was struggling to inspire her class with enthusiasm for Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," "a knight was a person who spent his time going round succouring the oppressed."
"How much did he get for it?" asked William.
"He's got out," he said reproachfully.
"Did you make that horrible noise?"
What the devil----"
His hunger was forgotten.
William took his bugle proudly in one hand and his pistol (the glorious result of a dip in the bran tub at a school party) in the other, and, sternly denying themselves the pleasures of afternoon school, off the two set upon the road of romance and adventure.
Unchallenged they went up to the house.
Suckin'--I mean helpin' people an' fightin' an' all that.
William's bugle had just returned to public life after one of its periodic terms of retirement into his father's keeping.
"No, I'm not squire.
William quivered with excitement.
"Here!" came an angry shout from inside.
"Crumbs!" ejaculated William.
I bet squires did the milkin'.
"He was ever so big.
Then at the open French window appeared a small boy holding a bugle, purple-faced with the effort of his performance.
Me an' William shut him up."
A resounding kick shook the door.
Do you hear?"
Go an' blow the bugle at the front door, then they'll know something's happened," he added simply.
"Nothing, of course," said Miss Drew, appalled by the base commercialism of the twentieth century.
Anyway she said we could still be knights an' help people, di'n't she?
"Do have some tea now you've come," she said to Ginger.
"Oh, quite well.
Anyway, I'll get my bugle.
They walked along for about a mile without meeting anyone.
You're not much of a squire not to have brought sumthin' for me to eat."
"How did it go off?"
At this point there came a bellowing and crashing and tramping outside and Miss Priscilla's father, roaring fury and threats of vengeance, hurled himself into the room.
William considered.
"How big was he?
Like lightning the gallant pair made for the road.
The young lady visitor emitted a scream that would have done credit to a factory siren.
And she was speaking fast and passionately.
CHEST--The chest, deep and capacious, but not too wide.
The hound required three centuries ago even was all the better esteemed for being slow and unswerving on a line of scent, and in many parts of the Kingdom, up to within half that period, the so-called Southern Hound had been especially employed.
They show a considerable amount of the haw. NOSE--The nose is large and well developed, the nostrils expanding. MUZZLE--The muzzle well protected from wiry hair.
His holt can very well be passed, his delicious scent may be overrun; but the pure-bred Otterhound is equal to all occasions.
It is thick and well covered, to serve as a rudder.
FEET--The feet, fairly large and spreading, with firm pads and strong nails to resist sharp rocks. STERN--The stern when the hound is at work is carried gaily, like that of a rough Welsh Harrier.
The dewlap is loose and folded.
With a narrow forehead, ascending to a moderate peak.
To be equal to such prey, the hound must have a Bulldog's courage, a Newfoundland's strength in water, a Pointer's nose, a Retriever's sagacity, the stamina of the Foxhound, the patience of a Beagle, the intelligence of a Collie.
BACK--The back is strong, wide and arched.
Why the breed was first called the Southern Hound, or when his use became practical in Great Britain, must be subjects of conjecture; but that there was a hound good enough to hold a line for many hours is accredited in history that goes very far back into past centuries.
COLOUR--Grey, or buff, or yellowish, or black, or rufus red, mixed with black or grey.
NECK--The neck is strong and muscular, but rather long.
SHOULDERS--The shoulders ought to be sloping, the arms and thighs substantial and muscular.
In appearance the Dalmatian should be very similar to a Pointer except in head and marking.
Yet he is of friendly disposition, and it must be insisted that he is by no means so destitute of intelligence as he is often represented to be.
The ground colour in both varieties should be pure white, very decided, and not intermixed.
It should not be inserted too low down, but carried with a slight curve upwards, and never curled.
THE RIM ROUND THE EYES in the black-spotted variety should be black, in the liver-spotted variety brown--never flesh-colour in either.
The density and pureness of colour, in both blacks and browns, is of great importance, but should not be permitted to outweigh the evenness of the distribution of spots on the body; no black patches, or even mingling of the spots, should meet with favour, any more than a ring-tail or a clumsy-looking, heavy-shouldered dog should command attention.
He appears almost to prefer equine to human companionship, and he is as fond of being among horses as the Collie is of being in the midst of sheep.
LEGS AND FEET--The legs and feet are of great importance.
Berolina.
The fore-legs should be perfectly straight, strong, and heavy in bone; elbows close to the body; fore-feet round, compact with well-arched toes (cat-footed), and round, tough, elastic pads.
It should be spotted, the more profusely the better.
On the contrary, he is capable of being trained into remarkable cleverness, as circus proprietors have discovered.
The standard of points as laid down by the leading club is sufficiently explicit to be easily understood, and is as follows:--
Of late years, however, these dogs have so far degenerated as to be looked upon simply as companions, or as exhibition dogs, for only very occasionally can it be found that any pains have been taken to train them systematically for gun-work.
They should be carried close to the head, be thin and fine in texture, and always spotted--the more profusely the better. NOSE--The nose in the black-spotted variety should always be black, in the liver-spotted variety always brown.
MUZZLE--The muzzle should be long and powerful; the lips clean, fitting the jaws moderately close.
The spots should not intermingle, but be as round and well-defined as possible, the more distinct the better; in size they should be from that of a sixpence to a florin.
GENERAL APPEARANCE--The Dalmatian should represent a strong, muscular, and active dog, symmetrical in outline, and free from coarseness and lumber, capable of great endurance combined with a fair amount of speed.
EARS--The ears should be set on rather high, of moderate size, rather wide at the base, and gradually tapering to a round point.
There should not be the shadow of a mark or spot on them.
COLOUR AND MARKINGS--These are most important points.
WEIGHT--Dogs, 55 lbs.; bitches, 50 lbs.
At that period they were looked upon as a novelty, and, though the generosity and influence of a few admirers ensured separate classes being provided for the breed at the leading shows, it did not necessitate the production of such perfect specimens as those which a few years afterwards won prizes.
TAIL--The tail should not be too long, strong at the insertion, and gradually tapering towards the end, free from coarseness.
When about a fortnight old, however, they generally develop a dark ridge on the belly, and the spots will then begin to show themselves; first about the neck and ears, and afterwards along the back, until at about the sixteenth day the markings are distinct over the body, excepting only the tail, which frequently remains white for a few weeks longer.
The clearer and whiter they are the better they are likely to be.
Those which are flesh-coloured in this particular should be discarded, however good they may be in other respects.
And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world.
Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. (Indeed one cannot refuse to suppose that, if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful.
He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.
And as all choice and reasoning can be really calculated--because there will some day be discovered the laws of our so-called free will--so, joking apart, there may one day be something like a table constructed of them, so that we really shall choose in accordance with it.
Is it monotonous?
Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities?
Stay, gentlemen, I meant to begin with that myself I confess, I was rather frightened.
It may be at the cost of his skin, it may be by cannibalism!
And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots.
Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life.
In short, one may say anything about the history of the world--anything that might enter the most disordered imagination.
In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.
What will you see?
I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics.
"Ha! ha!
Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.
It is profitable and sometimes even praiseworthy.
I was just going to say that the devil only knows what choice depends on, and that perhaps that was a very good thing, but I remembered the teaching of science ... and pulled myself up.
Is it many-coloured?
Good heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four?
As if free will meant that!
I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!
It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary--that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.
Let us reckon the chances--can such a thing happen or not?
Some, you see, maintain that this really is the most precious thing for mankind; choice can, of course, if it chooses, be in agreement with reason; and especially if this be not abused but kept within bounds.
And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one.
And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!
Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases.
Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?
VIII
Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of mankind.
May be it is many-coloured, too: if one takes the dress uniforms, military and civilian, of all peoples in all ages--that alone is worth something, and if you take the undress uniforms you will never get to the end of it; no historian would be equal to the job.
In short, if this could be arranged there would be nothing left for us to do; anyway, we should have to understand that.
For who would want to choose by rule?
With good reason Mr. Anaevsky testifies of it that some say that it is the work of man's hands, while others maintain that it has been created by nature herself.
We sometimes choose absolute nonsense because in our foolishness we see in that nonsense the easiest means for attaining a supposed advantage.
Take the Colossus of Rhodes, for instance, that's worth something.
The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.
The very word sticks in one's throat.
Is it a grand spectacle? Grand, if you like.
Twice two makes four without my will.
May be it's monotonous too: it's fighting and fighting; they are fighting now, they fought first and they fought last--you will admit, that it is almost too monotonous.
But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like," you will interpose with a chuckle.
He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key!
Indeed, if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices--that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula--then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to.
Then I should be able to calculate my whole life for thirty years beforehand.
And here you have begun upon it.
I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically.
What do you think?
If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!
But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual--from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity.
But very often, and even most often, choice is utterly and stubbornly opposed to reason ... and ... and ... do you know that that, too, is profitable, sometimes even praiseworthy?
Gentlemen, you must excuse me for being over-philosophical; it's the result of forty years underground! Allow me to indulge my fancy.
And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm, and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our individuality.
His clothes were cut in a way that harrowed Psmith's sensitive soul every time he looked at them.
He will be getting above himself.'
I evolved a slightly bright thought on life just now.
I tell you, Comrade Jackson, I feel like some lion that has been robbed of its cub.
I am a broken man.
'No.
It was part of Psmith's philosophy that a man who wore detachable cuffs had passed beyond the limit of human toleration.
Exactly.
His worst defect--which he could not help--was that he was not Mike.
'Oh, Jackson,' said Mr Waller, 'will you kindly take my place for a few minutes?
'I shall look forward to Sunday with every fibre quivering.
And yet I do not give way.'
The London branch of the bank was really only a nursery.
It's discouraging, this sort of thing.
'Excellent.
'I am delighted,' he said.
'I have never liked to speak of it to anybody in the office,' said Mr Waller, 'but I, too, am heart and soul in the movement.'
'It shall not occur again.
Strictly speaking, perhaps, Mr Waller was wrong to leave such an important task as the actual cashing of cheques to an inexperienced person of Mike's standing; but the New Asiatic Bank differed from most banks in that there was not a great deal of cross-counter work.
From ledger to ledger they hurry me, to stifle my regret.
Mike would sometimes stroll round to the Postage Department to listen to the conversations between the two.
CHAPTER VIII
A fourth wolf joined the pack, and a fifth, and half an hour later the trail of three other wolves cut at right angles across the one they were following and disappeared in the direction of the thickly timbered plains.
He reached the store at night and expected to leave for home the next noon, which would bring him to his camp before dark.
You might call it animal vengeance.
They could see, however, that the top of the, rock was flat, and Mukoki called attention to this fact with an exultant chuckle.
When he had finished his task he held it up with an air of unbounded satisfaction.
The sky was clear of clouds and so bright was the light that objects on the farther side of the lake were plainly visible.
"Yes, wolves.
The old Indian looked silently at him for a moment, some mysterious, all-absorbing joy revealed in every lineament of his face.
See wolf-tracks on red deer trail.
There was Mukoki--peeling potatoes!
When he finally fell asleep it was to dream of the Indian mother and her child; only after a little there was no child, and the woman changed into Minnetaki, and the ravenous wolves into men.
"What is it, Mukoki?" he asked.
"What does Mukoki mean by 'wolf night'?" he asked.
What do you think of it?"
But Rod was not thinking of bears.
"Wolf night!" he whispered.
And for another hour after that the former found it impossible to sleep.
Besides, it was bitter cold--so cold that his face began to tingle as he stood there.
It was a brilliantly clear night and a flood of moonlight was pouring into the camp.
When the boy had come near enough he passed back his rifle, and his lips formed the almost noiseless word, "Shoot!"
In places the snow was literally packed with deer tracks.
Rod noticed that the captive wolf received no breakfast that morning, and he easily guessed the reason.
One day Mukoki came to the Post with a little bundle of fur, and most of the things he got in exchange for it, mother says, were for the kid.
Mukoki was peering up into space.
Mukoki gazed a moment, cast an observant eye along the trail, and at once threw off his pack.
Trails ran in every direction, the bark had been rubbed from scores of saplings, and every step gave fresh evidence of the near presence of game.
Hardly had Rod seen the effect of his shot before Mukoki was traveling swiftly toward the fallen game, unstrapping his pack as he ran.
"Build house to keep snow off traps.
After taking the heart, liver and one of the hind quarters of the buck Mukoki drew a long rope of babeesh from his pack, tied one end of it around the animal's neck, flung the other end over a near limb, and with his companion's assistance hoisted the carcass until it was clear of the ground.
Smell um--come make big shoot to-night.
A little farther still they came across a fisher trail and another trap was laid.
Much fine sunshine to-day. Find wolves on mountain--plenty wolves!"
He spoke in whispers, and Rod followed his example.
Several times Mukoki stopped and leaned perilously close to the dizzy edge of the mountain, peering down with critical eyes, and once when he pulled himself back cautiously by means of a small sapling he explained his interest by saying:
"Is a mink worth much?"
"T'ree wolf!" continued the Indian jubilantly.
Rod took out his watch.
Every twig was pressed behind him noiselessly, and once when Rod struck his snow-shoe against the butt of a small tree the old Indian held up his hands in mock horror.
"Wolves!" exclaimed Rod.
The boys tumbled from their blankets and began dressing.
These things he noticed, but he could see nothing to hold Mukoki's vision in the sky above unless it was the glorious beauty of the night.
When he was done his face still bore traces of suppressed excitement.
We caught Wolf in a lynx trap, Mukoki and I. He wasn't much more than a whelp then--about six months old, Mukoki said. And while he was in the trap, helpless and unable to defend himself, three or four of his lovely tribe jumped upon him and tried to kill him for breakfast.
The second time he raised himself upon his elbows and quietly watched the old warrior.
Mukoki no longer maintained his usual quiet, and it was evident to Rod that the Indian considered his mission for that day practically accomplished.
Rod looked, and caught his breath.
"Well, once in a great while Mukoki has--not exactly a fit, but a little mad spell!
He nodded cheerfully and proceeded with the preparation of breakfast as though he had just risen from his blankets after a long night's rest.
Wolf and fox, too."
At its farther edge the ground rose gently from the creek toward the hills, and this sloping plain was covered with huge boulders and a thin growth of large spruce and birch. Just beyond the creek was a gigantic rock which immediately caught Mukoki's attention.
He will choose the mountain trail." When their companion returned, he said: "We had better split up this morning, hadn't we, Muky?
Yet neither seemed possessed with a desire to return to their interrupted sleep.
"Better get up," he advised.
Seven--eight dollar for good one."
"Did Minnetaki ever tell you--anything--queer--about Mukoki, Rod?"
At the foot of this hill Mukoki and his companion struck the creek.
During the next mile six other mink traps were set.
"Big day's hunt.
Heem like blood.
No shot."
The stealth with which Mukoki now advanced was almost painful.
I should say it proved just the contrary.
"You two are going off there together?
"We were going last week, but my mother gave out.
"I shall not be happy till we go!" he protested.
"What a dreadful girl!"
Though he was impatient to see her, he hardly knew what he should say to her about his aunt's refusal to become acquainted with her; but he discovered, promptly enough, that with Miss Daisy Miller there was no great need of walking on tiptoe.
"Then we may arrange it.
"Eugenio?" the young man inquired.
I am an old woman, but I am not too old, thank Heaven, to be shocked!"
I don't believe he'll go to bed before eleven."
"Yes, formerly, more than once," said Winterbourne.
But it seemed that both his audacity and his respect were lost upon Miss Daisy Miller.
Seen them--heard them--and kept out of their way." Mrs. Costello was a widow with a fortune; a person of much distinction, who frequently intimated that, if she were not so dreadfully liable to sick headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time.
"An intimacy with the courier?" the young man demanded.
He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable!
Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent.
She's dreadfully nervous.
"I should much rather go to Chillon with you."
Possibly he would have done so and quite spoiled the project, but at this moment another person, presumably Eugenio, appeared.
"Then, my dear Frederick," said Mrs. Costello, "I must decline the honor of her acquaintance.
Of course I mean to go there.
I want to go there dreadfully.
"He says he don't care much about old castles.
He probably corresponds to the young lady's idea of a count.
"My dear aunt, I am not so innocent," said Winterbourne, smiling and curling his mustache.
"She is completely uncultivated," Winterbourne went on.
"She's going to try to get Eugenio to talk to him.
Winterbourne hesitated a moment.
Her nephew was silent for some moments.
He doesn't like to go to bed."
Winterbourne was embarrassed.
They treat the courier like a familiar friend--like a gentleman.
You have lived too long out of the country.
"I guess my mother won't go, after all," she said.
And pray what did you say?"
"And pray who is to guarantee hers?"
"You don't say that as if you believed it," Mrs. Costello observed.
"They are very common," Mrs. Costello declared.
"She's your aunt." Then, on Winterbourne's admitting the fact and expressing some curiosity as to how she had learned it, she said she had heard all about Mrs. Costello from the chambermaid.
"No; we haven't been there.
"Oh, Eugenio!" said Miss Miller with the friendliest accent.
I suppose it's about the same thing.
"I have been walking round with mother.
Mrs. Costello stared a moment.
It presently became apparent that he was on the way to learn.
"She doesn't sleep--not three hours.
But I guess we'll go this week, if we can get Randolph."
"I am much obliged to you."
"With your mother," he answered very respectfully.
The young man, at least, thought his manner of looking an offense to Miss Miller; it conveyed an imputation that she "picked up" acquaintances.
"I can't, my dear Frederick.
"She don't like to ride round in the afternoon.
But she is very common."
You needn't be afraid.
And he did so.
He was not prepared for such a speech; he did not know what to say, although he wanted to say something witty.
'Slap! bang! here I am again!
'How do you--um.'
'Hullo!' bawled Blockhead-Hans, 'here I am!
'I will not give you a horse. YOU can't speak; YOU don't know how to choose your words.
'With the crow?
'Of course it is!' said Blockhead-Hans, 'and it is the best kind!
My father is roasting young chickens to-day!' said the Princess.
'It doesn't matter!' said the Princess. 'Take him out!'
'We are going to Court, to woo the Princess!
'Dear father!' cried Blockhead-Hans, 'I must have a horse too.
'Of course!
Just look what I found on the road!'--and he showed them a dead crow which he had picked up.
'With the greatest of pleasure!' said the Princess; 'but have you anything you can roast them in? for I have neither pot nor saucepan.'
'Well,' said Blockhead-Hans, 'if I can't have a horse, I will take the goat which is mine; he can carry me!'
'Slap! bang! here I am!' cried Blockhead-Hans; 'better and better--it is really famous!'
'That was neatly done!' said the Princess. 'I couldn't have done it; but I will soon learn how to!'
Look what I have just found!
'That's good!' replied Blockhead-Hans; 'then can I roast a crow with them?'
Blockhead-Hans became King, got a wife and a crown, and sat on the throne; and this we have still damp from the newspaper of the editor and the reporters--and they are not to be believed for a moment.
'Why!' said the brothers, 'this is pure mud, straight from the ditch.'
I shall give it to the Princess!'
You are in your Sunday-best clothes!'
'I have so much that I can quite well throw some away!' and he poured some mud out of his pocket.
'Hurrah!
'How do you--um!' he said, and the reporters wrote down.
And the reporters giggled, and each dropped a blot of ink on the floor.
This was a very good thing, for otherwise they would have torn each other in pieces, merely because the one was in front of the other.
'Oh,' said Blockhead-Hans, 'it is really too good!
Your brothers! Ah! they are very different lads!'
What a desire for marriage has seized me!
'It doesn't matter!' said the Princess. 'Away! out with him!'
BLOCKHEAD-HANS
'I like you!' said the Princess.
How pleased the Princess will be!'
'Of course!
Look how it runs through one's fingers!' and, so saying, he filled his pocket with the mud.
'Stop that nonsense!' said the old man.
All the servants stood in the courtyard and saw them mount their steeds, and here by chance came the third brother; for the squire had three sons, but nobody counted him with his brothers, for he was not so learned as they were, and he was generally called 'Blockhead-Hans.'
I'll go to!' cried Blockhead-Hans; and the brothers laughed at him and rode off.
Are you going to send that, too, to the Princess?'
'Do so, certainly!' they said, laughing loudly and riding on.
'It is hot in here, isn't it!' said the suitor.
'Blockhead!' said his brothers, 'what are you going to do with it?'
"We are told by the Church apologists that during the Middle Ages the priests and monks kept up the torch of learning, that, being the only literate people, they brought back the study of the classics. Historically speaking, this is about the most impudent statement that one could imagine.
THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION
The theologians point to this as a proof of the existence of a supreme being.
It is much easier and much more pleasant to give oneself passively to that delusion of grandeur, that delusion that pleasantly drugs the mind with the assumption that there is a supreme being who is personally interested in our well-being; a providence who, like a school master, at his pleasure dispenses rewards and punishments; as immortality, Heaven and Hell.
It was Karl Marx who remarked that, "The tradition of all the generations of the past weighs down like an Alp upon the brain of the living."
Most men have to accept their religions ready made.
Similarly, generations of men have been born with a weakened mental vitality towards superstition; a weakened mental capacity that renders their minds an easy prey to that fear which manifests itself in superstition, creed, religion--the God-idea.
They built enormous monasteries with well filled cellars, and lived on the fat of the land, while the people lived in wretched hovels, working their lives away for a crust of bread. The beasts, the domestic animals lived a more comfortable life than did the men, women, and children of the people.
Having gotten enormous tracts of the best land into their hands, so that the people were starving, they were willing to throw a bone occasionally to the latter.
The force of repetition is great; it is, in fact, taken by a vast majority of men as the equivalent of proof.
Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science.
The toil for bread is incessant, there is not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs.
CHAPTER V
LLEWELYN POWYS.
Most of these are born, not with an active tuberculosis, but some as yet imperfectly understood tendency, a defect in their protoplasmic make-up that renders them an easy prey to the tubercle bacillus if they are exposed to it.
This will be shown in the subsequent chapters.
In a purely civil matter, the infallible Church from its inception had displayed a marked hostility to loans at interest.
From the earliest period the whole weight of the Church was brought to bear against the taking of interest for money.
Dr. Max Carl Otto, considering the implications of evolution, calls attention to the following: "Take the evolution of living forms.
RELIGION AND GEOLOGY, PHILOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Language was considered God-given and complete.
Darwinism, which at first was declared by the clergy to be brutal, degrading, atheistic, and anti-Christian, is now included as part of the Bible teaching.
The diversity of language was firmly held to be explained by the story of the Tower of Babel; and since the writers of the Bible were merely pens in the hand of God the conclusion was reached that not only the sense, but the words, letters, and even the punctuation proceeded from the Holy Spirit.
Babel thus takes its place quietly among the other myths of the Bible.
CHAPTER XI
The course of evolution itself is their refutation."
The theological faculty of the Sorbonne dismissed him from his high position and forced him to print a recantation stating, "I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of the Scripture; that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and matter of fact.
In 1877, an eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James, published an elaborate answer to Darwin's book.
In a similar manner, the Copernican theory, the theory of gravitation, the nebular hypothesis, the theory of uniformity in geology, and every scientific advance has been opposed on the same grounds; that is, that these are against the teachings of the Christian Church.
Tertullian asserted that fossils resulted from the flood of Noah.
Pope Leo the Great solemnly adjudged it a sin worthy of severe punishment.
In the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon, in France, produced a thesis attempting to state simple geological truths.
When the Egyptologists, Assyriologists, archeologists, and anthropologists showed that man had reached a far advanced stage of civilization long before the 6000 years given as the age of the earth, their efforts were ridiculed by the clergy, and these scientists were forced to bring their findings before the world in the face of the well known methods of ecclesiastical opposition.
There have been futile experiments without number; highly successful achievements have been thrown aside; one type of life after another has arisen and has pushed up a blind alley to extinction.
In this maelstrom, the human species, as Thomas Huxley said--'plashed and floundered amid the general stream of evolution, keeping its head above water as best it might, and thinking neither of whence nor whither.' Many volumes have been written to give a purposive interpretation of the rise and evolutionary ramifications of living forms.
The theological faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed their treatises, and banished their authors from Paris.
LLEWELYN POWYS.
Dr. Duffield, both leading authorities at Princeton University.
To the religionist, knowledge is something that is contained in an infallible and supernatural statement or insight. Religion exalts the transcendental; science manipulates only the material.
MAYNARD SHIPLEY, "The War on Modern Science."
We understand why it was that Copernicus did not permit his book to be published until he was dying.
Some sixty years ago in the "Dogmatic Constitution of the Catholic Faith," the Church stated, "But never can reason be rendered capable of thoroughly understanding mysteries as it does those truths which form its proper subject.
Thus declared the Church.
And only sixty years ago!
Science is the embodiment of the sense of control, religion yields the control to that power which moves in the shadow of the woods by night, and the glory of the morning hills....
It renounces authority, cuts athwart custom, violates the sacred, rejects the myths.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE
The two rival divisions of the Christian Church, Protestant and Catholic, have always been in accord on one point, that is, to tolerate no science except such as they considered to be agreeable to the Scriptures.
We, therefore, pronounce false every assertion which is contrary to the enlightened truth of faith....
The attitude of the Church on geography was hostile to the truth, as witness the persecutions of those who dared to venture that the earth was round. Botany, mathematics, and geometry, as well as the natural sciences, slumbered.
"Science does not justify by faith, but by works.
It was this myth which had stultified the mind of man for 1500 years (during the period in which the Church was dominant); it was this that had killed the urge to search and seek for the truth, which is the goal of all science, the means by which humanity is set on the road to progress.
The religionist closes his mind to all facts which he is unwilling to believe, everything which will endanger his creed.
Truth to the scientific mind is something provisional, a hypothesis that for the present moment best conforms to the recognized tests.
Religion teaches the individual to place all hope, all desire, in a problematical hereafter. The stay on earth is so short compared to the everlasting life to come, that of what interest is this life; all things are vain.
The true scientist is the man with the open mind, one who will discard the worthless and accept only the proven good.
HORACE M. KALLEN, "Why Religion?"
If the theory is adopted it must account for the facts known.
Hence, all the Christian faithful are not only forbidden to defend as legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, especially when condemned by the Church, but are rather absolutely bound to hold them for errors wearing the deceitful appearance of truth.
Geology, which proved that the earth was more than 6000 years old, was anathematized; archeologists had the greatest difficulty to expound the truth concerning the antiquity of the human race.
Science, on the other hand, does not hesitate to tear down old conceptions, and has only one motive, the ultimate truth.
Bruno was burnt at the stake.
CHAPTER VI
Let him be anathema....
It is but the restatement of what the Church has uttered so many times and for so long--that all knowledge, material as well as spiritual, is to be found in the Bible as interpreted by the Church.
"I doubt it," said Don Quixote, "but never mind that just now; if our journey lasts long enough, I trust in God I shall show your worship that you do wrong in going with the stream of those who regard it as a matter of certainty that they are not true."
The trappings of the mare were of the field and jineta fashion, and of mulberry colour and green.
Have I ever been by any chance his enemy?
He, then, who shall embrace and cultivate poetry under the conditions I have named, shall become famous, and his name honoured throughout all the civilised nations of the earth.
"I, Senor Don Quixote," answered the gentleman, "have one son, without whom, perhaps, I should count myself happier than I am, not because he is a bad son, but because he is not so good as I could wish.
She is the product of an Alchemy of such virtue that he who is able to practise it, will turn her into pure gold of inestimable worth.
"In truth," replied he on the mare, "I would not pass you so hastily but for fear that horse might turn restive in the company of my mare."
In short, to sum up all in a few words, or in a single one, I may tell you I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, otherwise called 'The Knight of the Rueful Countenance;' for though self-praise is degrading, I must perforce sound my own sometimes, that is to say, when there is no one at hand to do it for me.
The reason is, that art does not surpass nature, but only brings it to perfection; and thus, nature combined with art, and art with nature, will produce a perfect poet.
"I am no saint," replied the gentleman, "but a great sinner; but you are, brother, for you must be a good fellow, as your simplicity shows."
"That's your affair," returned Samson, "but to suppose that I am going home until I have given Don Quixote a thrashing is absurd; and it is not any wish that he may recover his senses that will make me hunt him out now, but a wish for the sore pain I am in with my ribs won't let me entertain more charitable thoughts."
When the traveller came up with them he saluted them courteously, and spurring his mare was passing them without stopping, but Don Quixote called out to him, "Gallant sir, if so be your worship is going our road, and has no occasion for speed, it would be a pleasure to me if we were to join company."
I hear mass every day; I share my substance with the poor, making no display of good works, lest I let hypocrisy and vainglory, those enemies that subtly take possession of the most watchful heart, find an entrance into mine.
"In that case," said Tom Cecial, "I was a madman of my own accord when I volunteered to become your squire, and, of my own accord, I'll leave off being one and go home."
Poetry, gentle sir, is, as I take it, like a tender young maiden of supreme beauty, to array, bedeck, and adorn whom is the task of several other maidens, who are all the rest of the sciences; and she must avail herself of the help of all, and all derive their lustre from her.
CHAPTER XVI.
What are these kisses for?"
But this maiden will not bear to be handled, nor dragged through the streets, nor exposed either at the corners of the market-places, or in the closets of palaces.
Thus discoursing, the pair proceeded until they reached a town where it was their good luck to find a bone-setter, with whose help the unfortunate Samson was cured.
To this, he in the green gaban replied "I, Sir Knight of the Rueful Countenance, am a gentleman by birth, native of the village where, please God, we are going to dine today; I am more than fairly well off, and my name is Don Diego de Miranda.
Am I his rival, or does he profess arms, that he should envy the fame I have acquired in them?"
Seeing this the gentleman asked him, "What are you about, brother?
Mike came to the office next morning prepared for a repetition of the previous day.
If you had stopped there, all might have been well.
Then, quite suddenly, an idea came to him.
We repeat it now because of its profound truth.
'He's getting it hot on the carpet.'
He told me about the cheque.
He did not know much about the City and its ways, but he knew enough to understand that summary dismissal from a bank is not the best recommendation one can put forward in applying for another job.
It was a curious crooked way, but at that moment it stretched clear and broad before him.
It was this which drew to him those who had intelligence enough to see beyond his sometimes rather forbidding manner, and to realize that his blunt speech was largely due to shyness.
I was too jolly glad to get away.
Bristow chuckled.
He got up, smiling.
The place was full of quaint characters.
'I couldn't wait to hear.
Once more Mike was tongue-tied.
'It seems to me,' said Mike, 'that it has gone too far.
He walked listlessly.
He was stunned.
The manager was in his chair at the big table.
Jerk it out, Comrade Bristow.'
It's hard, Comrade Jackson, it's hard, I tell you.'
My time from now onward is his.
Mr Waller caught sight of him and quickened his pace.
I shall be dismissed.
I could not have missed it.
'Jackson wasn't saying much.
Old Bick was shooting it out fourteen to the dozen.'
Waller was up all night.
The day passed quickly.
I yield to nobody in my respect for our manager.
I was in Bick's room just now with a letter to sign, and I tell you, the fur was flying all over the bally shop.
It came in the morning, rather late.'
'Look here, Smith,' said Mike, 'I wish you'd go round to the Cash and find out what's up with old Waller.
There was no one in the department at the moment of his arrival; but a few minutes later he saw Mr Waller come out of the manager's room, and make his way down the aisle.
He was amazed to find the cashier not merely cheerful, but even exuberantly cheerful.
I shall be dismissed.' He was talking more to himself than to Mike.
Henceforth my services, for what they are worth, are at the disposal of Comrade Bickersdyke.
Mike found himself, by degrees, growing quite attached to the New Asiatic Bank.
I must look into this.
Mr Waller's face had the unreasonable effect on him of making him feel shy and awkward.
It was his hour for pottering, so he pottered round to the Postage Department, where he found the old Etonian eyeing with disfavour a new satin tie which Bristow was wearing that morning for the first time.
'Well, Mr Jackson?'
He had started jawing Jackson again before I was out of the room.'
When you were free and without ties, it did not so much matter.
For the life of him he could not think of anything to say.
I could not believe that I had passed it.
He never liked me.
But my absence will not spell irretrievable ruin, as it would at a period of greater commercial activity.
Mr Waller was still sitting staring out across the aisle. There was something more than a little gruesome in the sight of him.
And, the outside world offering so few attractions, the worker, perched on his stool, feels that he is not so badly off after all.
The cashier did not notice the movement.
The hours dragged slowly by till five o'clock struck, and the cashier, putting on his coat and hat, passed silently out through the swing doors.
'This habit of taking on to your shoulders the harvest of other people's bloomers,' he said meditatively, 'is growing upon you, Comrade Jackson.
And for the first time he began to wonder what they would say about this at home.
From half past three till half past four tea in the tearoom, with a novel.
If the man Bickersdyke is proved to have had good grounds for his outbreak, he shall escape uncensured.
He is hauled into the presence of the foaming customer, cursed, and sacked.
He didn't cash it at all.'
The habit of years had made his work mechanical.
He saw a way out.
Now, possibly, in your case--'
Comrades Rossiter and Bristow have studied my methods.
From ten to eleven he would potter.
There was a silence.
It continued to spin; but he never lost sight of the fact round which it revolved, namely, that he had been dismissed from the service of the bank.
If he sees that I am opposed to this step, he may possibly reconsider it.
No!
Let us, as you say, scud forth.
He sat silent.
There is a pleasant air of solidity about the interior of a bank.
Naturally I shall be missed, if I go out.
They are fully competent to conduct the business of the department in my absence.
Mike, except for a fortnight at the beginning of his career in the New Asiatic Bank, had not had to stand the test of sunshine.
He jolly well hadn't a chance.
Mike came forward.
The employees of the New Asiatic Bank, having plenty of time on their hands, were able to retain their individuality.
Mike remembered the cheque perfectly well, owing to the amount.
But if I find, as I suspect, that he has wronged Comrade Jackson, I shall be forced to speak sharply to him.'
Cricket was his line.
Psmith's injunction to him not to talk much was unnecessary.
However, we shall see.'
He went about his duties in a costume which suggested the sportsman of the comic papers.
A customer came to the desk to cash a cheque.
I came to explain.'
He's got the hump about something. He's sitting there looking absolutely fed up with things.
All was joy, jollity, and song.
'I can assure you, Sir John--' he was saying.
He felt confused and rattled.
Mike's was one of those direct, honest minds which are apt to concentrate themselves on the crisis of the moment, and to leave the consequences out of the question entirely.
I don't remember the cheque or anything about it.
'Jackson,' he said.
In spite of his prejudice against Edward, he could put himself into Mr Waller's place, and see the thing from his point of view.
But calm will succeed storm, and we may be able to do something yet.
In the pauses of her painting she wondered if he thought of her, if he missed her.
'Then he'd want to come round to the studio.
Miss Lawson, Miss Cissy Clive.'
He was a good-looking, blond man, somewhat inclined to the poetical and melancholy type; his hair bristled, and he wore a close-cut red beard; the moustache was long and silky; there was a gentle, pathetic look in his pale blue eyes; and a slight hesitation of speech, an inability to express himself in words, created a passing impression of a rather foolish, tiresome person.
The girls laughed heartily.
It was more difficult than sketching from nature.
Time went by without her perceiving it; she was startled by the sound of her master's voice and looked in glad surprise.
But beneath this exterior there lay a deep, true nature, which found expression in twilit landscapes, the tenderness of cottage lights in the gloaming, vague silhouettes, and vague skies and fields.
She studied the delicate bloom of their cheeks, and wondered what mysterious proportions of white, ochre, and carmine she would have to use to obtain it.
It will take you at least a couple of days to get it right....
'You must tell me which you use.'
'Let me introduce you to Miss Lawson.
She glanced at the work, seeking eagerly for copies, worse than any she was likely to perpetrate.
You're going there I suppose.'
Mildred heard Cissy ask who she was.
'This way,' said Miss Laurence, and she opened a glass door, and Mildred found herself in what looked like an eating-house of the poorer sort.
But he had not given Mildred her fourth lesson in landscape painting when he received an advantageous offer to copy two pictures by Turner in the National Gallery.
I shall be back about lunch time.'
It did not exist in lines which she could measure, which she could follow.
It quickly disappeared, and he said, 'Will you take Miss Lawson to the refreshment room, Miss Laurence?
She was anxious to get away from Sutton, and the prospect of long days spent in London pleased her, and on the following Thursday Harold took her up to London by the ten minutes past nine.
The contrast between its twilight and the brightness of the courtyard is quite in his manner.'
If you get them exactly right the rest will come easily.
But Cissy had insisted, and he had put her and the picture into a little room off the main gallery, where she could pursue her nefarious work unperceived.
But before she began to paint she would have to draw those heavenly faces in every feature.
Freddy has just come back from Monte Carlo.
He has lost all his money....
Will you let me sit down?
She could not follow the drawing, it seemed to escape her.
'So you are here, Elsie,' and she stared at Mildred.
'No, not so badly.
Elsie asked for whom Cissy was making the copy.
I'm dining with him to-night.'
'So his name is Ralph,' Mildred said to herself, and thought that she liked the name.
Ralph Hoskin was very poor: his pathetic pictures did not find many purchasers, and he lived principally by teaching.
He says he's "stony" and doesn't know how he'll pull through.'
They went up to the galleries.
When lunch was over Cissy and Elsie took each other's arms and went upstairs together.
I don't like to put him off.'
Is this your first day?'
'No, I forgot to tell you, I'm staying with you, so be careful not to give me away if you should meet mother.
I've got your easel, and your place is taken.'
Johnny and Herbert are coming.
The girl in front of her was making, it seemed to Mildred, a perfect copy.
He told her where she would find him, in the Turner room, and that she must not hesitate to come and fetch him whenever she was in difficulties.
Let me introduce you to Miss Laurence,' he said.
'Yes, this is my first day.'
Already she despaired.
Elsie whispered, 'A pupil of Ralph's.
'I paint portraits when I can get them to do; when I can't, I come here and copy....
The men turned to the left top to go to their room, the women turned to the right to go to theirs.
'You've only just begun painting,' said Miss Laurence.
'Only a few months,' said Mildred.
He'll do anything I ask him.'
'Mr. Hoskin can tell you better than I. You can't have a better master.'
'He ran in for a moment to see me....
'You're doing an excellent copy, Miss Laurence.'
'I should like you to see the drawing,' she said, 'before I begin to paint.'
This was a disappointment.
But you don't know what it is to want money,' and in a rapid glance Miss Laurence roughly calculated the price of Mildred's clothes.
A tall, rather handsome girl, with dark coarse hair and a face lit up by round grey eyes, entered.
For the first time she found something romantic in that train.
Will you give me your charcoal?'
You shouldn't have talked so openly before her.'
'You can put him off.
'For a friend of Freddy's--a very rich fellow.
'As you like....
'Was he here this morning?'
This way.
Don't be afraid,' he said, glancing round; 'lots of them can't do as well as you.
'I'm so frightened,' she said; 'I'm afraid I don't paint well enough.'
She grew absorbed in her work; she did not see the girl in front of her, nor the young man copying opposite; she did not notice their visits to each other's easels; she forgot everything in the passion of drawing.
'I would give anything to paint like that,' said Mildred.
'I promised to go out with Walter to-night.'
But how had she become mad?
What had happened?
When I reached the landing, dashing out of the front room he rushed into the one at the back,--then through a door at the side.
That he believed himself to have seen what he declared he saw was plain.
The cabman's manner was so extremely earnest that I went myself to see.
This piece of information seemed to interest my companions more than anything he had said before.
I returned to Sydney's shoulder to tell the cabman so.
Having removed it, we peered into the cavity it disclosed.
Ain't there a cupboard nor nothing where he could hide?'
I went to his aid.
When the gentleman took to knocking, back he came,--to the same old spot, and flopped down on his knees.
He led the way to the front room.
'Marjorie!
That the man was serious was unmistakable.
I followed rather more soberly,--his methods were a little too flighty for me.
It did not,--unless silence had such meaning.
Atherton led the way to the rear.
There was something there.
'Excuse me, sir, but who's the old gent?'
'Did you notice any signs of packing up?'
Everything was just as I had left it, with the exception of the ring which I trod on in the passage, and which Lessingham has.'
He threw up the sash.
'Wide open,--I walked straight in expecting to find her waiting for me in the front room,--I was struck all of a heap when I found she wasn't there.'
The man waxed wroth.
'By the Lord, I believe the Apostle's right,--the whole place reeks to me of hankey-pankey,--it did as soon as I put my nose inside.
Mr Lessingham turned to me, all quivering with excitement.
'What do you mean?'
Thrusting the bed more into the centre of the room I knelt down beside the man on the floor.
I was of the same opinion, as, apparently, were Lessingham and Sidney.
Then they opened wider and wider.
'What's that on his neck?' asked the Inspector,--he was kneeling at my side.
He proved to be Dr Glossop, the local police surgeon, who had been sent for before our quitting the Station House.
His lips moved,--in painful articulation.
I put my arm beneath his shoulder and raised him from the floor; no resistance was offered by the body's gravity,--he was as light as a little child.
'What's he mean?' asked the Inspector.
that's more like the time of day!
You won't be able to get much out of him,--he's too far gone, and I shouldn't bustle him, but get what you can.'
At sight of him an exclamation burst from Sydney's lips.
The question was put to Mrs Henderson.
I could see nothing in the shape of a murdered man.
The Inspector came to the front, a notebook in his hand.
The relief in his tone was unmistakable.
The doctor laid him back upon the bed, feeling his pulse with one hand, while he stood and regarded him in silence.
'If what the boy says is correct it sounds as if the person whom you are seeking may have had a finger in the pie.'
'This time he's gone for good, there'll be no conjuring him back again.'
'It's Holt!'
'I know who you are.
They seem pretty deep, but I don't think they're sufficient in themselves to cause death.'
A momentary paroxysm seemed to shake the very foundations of his being.
He trembled.
"'Gustus Barley," she says, "a bloke's been murdered.
'You've been with Miss Lindon all the afternoon and evening, haven't you, Mr Holt?'
'I hope God will help you my poor fellow; you've been in need of His help if ever man was.
'It took me by the throat!'
Mr Phillips dismissed her inquiry, curtly.
'The beetle!' He stopped.
So far as could be seen in the dark it consisted of a row of houses of considerable dimensions,--and also of considerable antiquity.
There isn't much--only seconds.'
That's all I knows about it.'
'I doubt,' I said, 'if this man has been murdered.
Atherton bent down beside the doctor.
'The beetle's going to kill Miss Lindon.'
Miss Lindon is disguised in your old clothes, isn't she?'
I turned to the doctor.
'If you want him to make a statement he'll have to make it now, he's going fast.
No one don't know nothing about it as yet.
A candle was guttering on a broken and dilapidated single washhand stand.
'Is that the meaning of the marks upon your neck?'
And I daresay you're feeling pretty well done up, and in want of something to eat and drink,--here's some brandy for you.'
Words came from his quivering lips as if they were only drawn from him by the force of his anguish.
I locked the door so that nothing mightn't be disturbed.
The doctor examined him in silence--while we too were still.
'Doctor, if there is any of that brandy left will you let me have it for my friend?'
While the Inspector was examining his pockets--to find them empty --a tall man with a big black beard came bustling in.
My God!'
You know me don't you?
His mouth opened too.
Is there anything in his pockets?--let's lift him on to the bed.'
Sydney endeavoured to rouse the man from his stupor.
We'll explain afterwards.
'I don't believe the man's dead.
'You are--you are--' The man's eyes closed, as if the effort at recollection exhausted him.
The Inspector was speaking to the woman of the house.
'Mr Pleesman' and ''Gustus Barley' followed on foot.
I've been running about after you all day long.'
At last words came.
Atherton and I went to the head of the bed, Lessingham and the Inspector, leaning right across the bed, peeped over the side.
Nor, it appeared, could the Inspector either.
We all went in--we, this time, in front, and she behind.
He became possessed by uncontrollable agitation,--half raising himself in bed.
The stoves were provided, and an uncommonly full attendance the next Sabbath showed the very general interest the matter had excited.
ENLARGED, 1795." I remember hearing a wag propose to add as another remarkable fact, "SCOURED, 1818."
No one could see across the church, and the minister loomed up, as if in a dense fog; all eyes were fountains of tears.
This was the golden legend: "BUILT, 1770.
The chorister, even, was frequently among the missing, but was charitably supposed to be subject to the ague. Efforts were made to prevail upon the elderly part of the parish to permit the introduction of stoves with long funnels.
For my part, I see no necessary connection between discomfort and devotion.
Their fathers had worshipped in the cold, and their sons might.
Opposite to the singing-seats towered the pulpit, from which the clergyman looked down upon us like a sparrow upon the house-top.
Would any one faint?
But in winter the vast airy space had a peculiar and searching chill.
The singing-seats, projecting from the central portion of the gallery, furnished me with another hebdomadal study, in large gilt letters of antique awkwardness, which so impressed themselves on my mind that I see them now.
How would it seem?
The minister stood upon a heated slab of soap-stone.
The exhibits afforded pathetic evidence that the older immigrants do not expect the solace of art in this country; an Italian expressed great surprise when he found that we, although Americans, still liked pictures, and said quite naively that he didn't know that Americans cared for anything but dollars--that looking at pictures was something people only did in Italy.
"The roaring of the wheels has filled my ears, The clashing and the clamor shut me in, Myself, my soul, in chaos disappears, I cannot think or feel amid the din."
ARTS AT HULL-HOUSE
CHAPTER XVI
"Who was it made the coal? Our God as well as theirs."
seemed to relieve the tension of the moment.
"Mukoki--the gold was found between those mountains!"
"Big moon--might get shot," grunted Mukoki.
The two now continued through the swamp.
The snow on this log was beaten by tiny footprints.
"Travel early this morning.
Wolf, as well as Mukoki, has good cause for what he does.
It was two hours later when Rod and Wabigoon extinguished the candles and returned to their blankets.
"Wolf night!" he repeated, and slipped like a shadow to the side of the unconscious young hunter.
But the Indians at the Post believe that at certain times he goes crazy over wolves."
And then, the people at the Post say, the mother must have slipped and hurt herself.
"Plenty bear there in spring!"
He was the happiest Indian at the Post, and one of the poorest.
The buck was standing broadside, his head and neck stretched up, offering a beautiful shot at the vital spot behind his fore leg.
Suddenly Mukoki stopped, and a hand was held out behind him warningly. He turned his face back, and Rod knew that he saw game.
There followed several minutes of silence.
With a powerful effort Rod steadied himself.
No do that, be digging out traps all winter.
They followed now in the wolf trail.
HOW WOLF BECAME THE COMPANION OF MEN
We hove in sight just in time to drive the cannibals off. We kept Wolf, sewed up his side and throat, tamed him--and to-morrow night you will see how Mukoki has taught him to get even with his people."
It lacked only ten minutes of midnight.
He ran back to the door and whistled loudly.
By Rod's watch it was now nearly noon and the two sat down to eat the sandwiches they had brought with them.
Inch by inch he crouched upon his snow-shoes, and beckoned for Rod to approach, slowly, quietly.
Wolf night!"
To-morrow night, if Mukoki comes back by then, we shall have some exciting sport with the wolves, and then you will see how Wolf out there does his work!"
Mukoki's face was crinkled with joy.
"Many wolf near," he exclaimed.
The dark and gloomy silence that hung between those two walls of rock, the death-like desolation, the stealthy windings of the creek--everything in that dim and mysterious world between the two mountains, unshattered by sound and impenetrable to the winter sun, seemed in his mind to link itself with the tragedy of long ago.
The young Indian had joined Rod at the open door and together they watched Mukoki's gaunt figure as it sped swiftly across the lake, up the hill and over into the wilderness desolation beyond.
He can catch them in every trap he sets, which no other trapper in the world can do; he can tell you a hundred different things about a certain wolf simply by its track, and because of his wonderful knowledge he can tell, by some instinct that is almost supernatural, when a 'wolf night' comes.
Frequently the two would stop and scan the openings for signs of life.
"You two go north--I take ridges."
"See if I'm not right.
"Mink!" he explained.
The old Indian looked up with a grin.
Perhaps that very chasm held the priceless secret that had died with its owners half a century ago.
Build trap-house right here!"
"If somethin' happen we no come back to-night heem safe from wolf," he explained.
Again he whistled, a dozen times, twenty, but there came no reply.
He calls this a 'wolf night.' No one can stop him from going out; no one can get him to talk; he will allow no one to accompany him when in such a mood.
Soon the creek swung out from the ridge and cut a circuitous channel through a small swamp.
"What were you doing last night?" he questioned.
The moon was directly above the cabin.
"I'm going with you, Mukoki!"
Caribou and deer tracks crossed and recrossed the creek, but the Indian paid little attention to them.
"Hello, Muky!" he shouted.
Well--"
Smart fellow--lynx.
Twice that night Rod was awakened by Mukoki opening the cabin door.
Good place for night hunt."
At this the young hunter aimed and fired.
And he has good reason.
But he will come back.
His face bore no signs of his mad night on the trail.
The sun was just beginning to show itself above the wilderness when the hunters left camp.
We call heem here.
Something in the air to-night, something in the sky--in the moon--in the very way the wilderness looks, tells him that stray wolves in the plains and hills are 'packing' or banding together to-night, and that in the morning the sun will be shining, and they will be on the sunny sides of the mountains.
Shoot from there!" He pointed to a clump of spruce a dozen rods away.
Ten minutes, fifteen--twenty of them passed in this cautious, breathless trailing of the swamp.
Here Mukoki set another trap.
Did that chasm hold the secret of the dead men?
With one spasmodic bound the animal dropped dead.
He sat down by the blown hawthorn bush that stands by the burgh.
Perhaps it were better so; the reasons that prompted suicide were better unrevealed....
She had lent him this book--she who was now but clay.
Mr. Hare stood looking at his dead daughter; John Norton sat by the window.
The contrary habit.'
But how others acted was not his concern; he must consider his own competence to bear the burden--the perilous burden he had asked, and which had been promised to him.
He must not adventure into a life he was not fitted for; he must not wreck another's life; in considering himself he was considering her; their interests were mutual, they were identical; there was no question of egotism.
And now, as he returned home after the tragedy, about midway in his walk across the downs, the thought came upon him that the breaking off of his engagement might have been sufficient reason in an affected mind for suicide.
Shadow-like is human life! one moment it is here, the next it is gone.
On this point he was uncertain, this was nature's secret.
'She was here with me yesterday,' he said.
But each time he thought, 'I shall be able to control it better than the last, and it will grow weaker and weaker until at last it will pass and to return no more.'
If so, he was in a measure responsible.
like a bolt from the blue.
She had consented, and, alarmed at the prospect of the new duties he had contracted, he had returned home.
He would never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in memory of her, of her whom yesterday he had parted with on the hills--her little Puritan look, her external girlishness, her golden brown hair, and the sudden laugh so characteristic of her....
The last six months had been the unhappiest of his life.
He knew that Kitty had thrown herself out of the window and was dead.
She had walked with him on the hills, she had accompanied him as far as the burgh; she had waved her hand to him before they walked quite out of each other's sight.
He had walked up and down his study, his mind aflame; he had sat in his arm-chair, facing the moonlight, considering a question, to him so important, so far-reaching, that his mind at moments seemed as if like to snap, to break, but which was accepted by nine-tenths of humanity without a second thought, as lightly as the most superficial detail of daily life.
Something must have happened. Did madness fall like that?
By what strange alienation of the brain, by what sudden snapping of the sense had madness come?
Had she guessed that when it came to the point that he would not, that he might not have been able to marry her?
And the work of the good and wise man is to use appearances according to Nature.
He knew it was not so.
He had often said he had no pity for those who accepted burdens and then complained that they had not sufficient strength to carry them.
He saw things moving, moving, but they were all far away.
He took up his hat and set forth to walk home across the downs, all the while thinking, thinking over what had happened.
But this was not so.
For chastity had never afflicted him; it had ever been to him a source of strength and courage.
A desire had come he knew not whence; and he asked himself if it were a passing weakness of the flesh, or if this passion abided in him, if it had come at last to claim satisfaction?
A passing emotion of which I am ashamed, of which I would speak to no one.
Only three days ago she had been sitting in that basket-chair.
He had gone to bed hoping to find counsel in the night, and in the morning he had waked firm in his resolve, and had gone to Shoreham in the intention of breaking his engagement.
He crept downstairs.
He had exchanged it for the life of the hearth, of the family; that private life--private, and yet so entirely impersonal-which he had hitherto loathed.
Now she was dead.
He envied the hard-sobbing father's grief, the father who held his dead daughter's hand, and showed a face on which was printed so deeply the terror of the soul's emotion, that John felt a supernatural awe creep upon him; felt that his presence was a sort of sacrilege.
He had been spared that!
Had he loved her?
A temptation of the flesh had come upon him; he had yielded to it instead of opposing it with the contrary habit of chastity.
Such had been his theory; he must now make his theory and practice coincide.
I got tired of the drawing- room, and thought I'd like to come and sit with you.
I do not like him, I'm only sixteen, and he's forty or fifty.
So you think you'll never get on in society.'
Some typists can do eighty, but my fingers are too old for that.
He thinks me crazy, but so do others; I know that my conversation bores him, he always tries to get away from me, yet somehow it seems to me that I do like him.'
'I'm afraid she would.
In these clothes,' he repeated.
The Major returned a moment after with a chair.
'You shall not be persecuted by his attentions.'
Who is it that you wish me to rid you of?'
'Nothing, at least nothing in particular.
'I am sure, father, that it is not right of him to put his arms round me--he tried to kiss me.
'I don't think I'm suited for society.'
'I'm thinking.'
Last night at Lord Chiselhurst's----'
'Poor father, you have a great deal to think of, and I come interrupting your work.
'A great deal of it is my fault, dear.
Agnes answered, 'Father, for my sake ... not now.' But he must obey the idea which pierced his brain, and before she could prevent him he slipped past her and opened the door.
'What, dear?'
I don't want to say anything against mother; she loves me, I'm sure: but we're so different, I shall never understand mother, I shall never get on in society.
When I've got together a little independence, when I can pay for my meals and my clothes, you shall see; none that you dislike shall ever come here, dearest.
'I will not make a scene, but I must do something....
I can stand, I've been sitting so long.'
When I lost my money I got disheartened, and little by little I lost control.
Is he kind to you, dear; tell me that; do you like him?'
I will go and tell him so.'
But why is he here so much, father, he's no relation.'
Still, seventy is a good average, and I have hardly any corrections to make.
'That man--he, too, is merely an expense.'
But not now, this is not the time.'
'No, dear: you never disturb me,' he said, getting up from the type- writer and giving her his chair.
She said if that were so, she really didn't see why I left the convent.'
The Major stood up, he was pale, and Agnes noticed that his lips trembled.
'I can get another.
"I have thought of an alternative, sir captain; but it depends upon your charity.
They might be sailing eastward, in which case the time of day would be late afternoon. That they were sailing he could feel from the gentle forward heave of the vessel under him.
Then he uttered a moan, and closed his eyes again, impelled to this by the monstrous ache in his head.
Punctually as the last grains ran out, the door reopened.
"But, my friend, I did not agree so much."
The Spaniard sighed, and sat upright to face the returning Captain Blood with the answer for which he came.
"Could I be guilty of that?" protested the Captain.
"He was in the boat that brought me aboard."
"To earn it, do you say?
And then, at last, the intrigued Spaniard spoke.
"The Cinco Llagas it is."
But the desire shall not make a coward of me for your amusement, master mocker." It was the first sign he had shown of the least heat or resentment.
"I see," said the Spaniard pensively.
All day we have been sailing east before the wind with but one intent--to set as great a distance between Barbados and ourselves as possible.
So it has--a miracle wrought by my genius, which is considerable."
Don Diego stroked his pointed black beard.
"Ah!" Don Diego drew a deep breath.
Seeing the wide, startled eyes of the Spaniard upon him, the gentleman lengthened his stride.
"Oh, no, my name is Blood--Captain Peter Blood.
CHAPTER X. DON DIEGO
Lastly, he stared wild-eyed at the sardonic Captain Blood.
It was a narrative that painted red and white by turns the Spaniard's countenance.
And so it comes to this: We desire to make for the Dutch settlement of Curacao as straightly as possible.
It is that you put us ashore on one of the islands of this pestilent archipelago, and leave us to shift for ourselves."
From a shelf he took a half-hour glass, reversed it so that the bulb containing the red sand was uppermost, and stood it on the table.
"You take a load from my mind," said Captain Blood.
121.
DIMPLE.
HAND.
Mole above breath Means wealth.
FOOT.
122.
If it burns slowly you will have a long life.
129.
119.
A well-known children's rhyme runs:--
Another formula:--
110.
131.
126.
Vertical wrinkles in the brow show the number of husbands one will have.
123.
125.
137.
Count on finger-nail spots:--
108.
111.
Clasp your fingers, and if the right thumb lap over the left you were born in the daytime.
EARS.
CHAPTER III.
Put some of your hair in the fire.
113.
FOREHEAD.
A mole on the eyebrow denotes that one will be hanged.
124.
117.
EYES AND EYEBROWS.
103.
If the left overlap, you were born at night.
A dimple in the chin is lucky.
A single white hair means genius; it must not be pulled out.
In clasping your own hand, you put uppermost either your right or your left thumb.
120.
If the ends of the fingers are capable of being bent far back, it indicates a thief.
Small ears indicate that a person is stingy.
FINGER-NAILS.
136.
115.
104.
102.
Some say "it shows you're no fool."
114.
106.
HAIR.
An almost identical variant is found in Prince Edward Island.
135.
130.
128.
127.
116.
The color of the hair growing on the neck indicates the color of the hair of one's future husband.
107.
MOLES.
A white spot in the nail, when it comes, means a present.
112.
We do not claim originality for the statement that things never happen quite as one expects them to.
I will reel round and make inquiries.'
He was evidently tired out.
It was the same limp, crushed walk which Mike had seen when Edward's safety still hung in the balance.
He did not pick his words.
'Explain?'
'I know.
Mike had expected sentence of dismissal, and he had got it.
On this particular day, however, the cashier was silent and absent-minded.
The thing must stop before it goes too far.'
They had leisure to think of other things besides their work.
It was dreadful to see him sitting there, all limp and broken.
He wore a crushed, beaten look, as if all the life and fight had gone out of him.
His attitude towards the latest actions of His Majesty's Government was that of one who felt that, after all, there was probably some good even in the vilest of his fellow creatures, if one could only find it.
Mike led the way to a quiet corner of the Telegrams Department.
At the conclusion of the narrative he sipped his coffee in silence for a moment.
The Edward's pneumonia episode having ended satisfactorily (or, rather, being apparently certain to end satisfactorily, for the invalid, though out of danger, was still in bed), Mike looked forward to a series of days unbroken by any but the minor troubles of life.
I will go and see if the orgy is concluded.
'I don't understand you, Mr Jackson.'
Opposite him, facing slightly sideways, was a small, round, very red-faced man.
'Yes.
When my informant left, he tells me, Comrade B. had got a half-Nelson on you, and was biting pieces out of your ear.
Indeed, they had so much leisure that it is a wonder they thought of their work at all.
There was old Bick cursing for all he was worth, and a little red-faced buffer puffing out his cheeks in an armchair.'
You must check it.
The cashier was overflowing with happiness and goodwill towards his species.
It was the only three-figure cheque which had come across the counter during the day.
'I have already seen Mr Waller.'
More work from two till half past three.
I'm in a bit of a hole, and perhaps you can tell me what to do.
Naturally, to pacify the aggrieved bart., Comrade B. had to lay it on regardless of expense.
And that kind of thing is a little overwhelming at short range.
We will go to a Mecca.
I prefer to think that Comrade Bickersdyke regards me as his friend and well-wisher, and will lend a courteous ear to any proposal I see fit to make.
Mike went.
'I shall lose my place.
Oh it's hard.
Comrade Jackson is essentially a Sensitive Plant, highly strung, neurotic.
He could earn his pay at that.
The sky was blue and free from all suggestions of approaching thunderbolts.
At present, the weather being cold and dismal, he was almost entirely contented. Now that he had got into the swing of his work, the days passed very quickly; and with his life after office-hours he had no fault to find at all.
He sat at his desk, occupying himself as best he could with the driblets of work which came to him.
'It was a forgery,' muttered Mr Waller, sitting down heavily.
Focusing his attention with some reluctance upon this blot on the horizon, he discovered that the exploiter of rainbow waistcoats and satin ties was addressing him.
Which I jolly well did.
The green shaded lamps look cosy.
If it were only summer, he might get taken on somewhere as a cricket professional.
Mike sat staring miserably in front of him.
Is this so?'
He shall have the full educative value of my exclusive attention.
That generous temperament was stirred to its depths.
Mike went for his morning stroll round the office feeling that things had settled down and had made up their mind to run smoothly.
Tell me all.'
Mike's head was still spinning.
'You have our ear. You would seem to have something on your chest in addition to that Neapolitan ice garment which, I regret to see, you still flaunt.
My mind was far away.
He has, as you suggest, a ready flow of speech.
'Get some of his own back!' he repeated.
The whole pressure of the atmosphere seemed to lift.
'A forgery.
I have some little influence with Comrade Bickersdyke.
I think perhaps it would be as well not to leave it just yet.'
Up till now the matter had seemed entirely a personal one.
'So other people have troubles as well as myself,' he murmured musingly.
By the end of the day Mike had had enough of Edward.
His voice died away.
I am good for nothing. Nobody will take an old man like me.'
Then there was no doubt that it was an interesting little community, that of the New Asiatic Bank.
It is no affair of yours whether life is treating the machine well or ill that day.
Buck along.'
I don't know how much farther you want it to go.'
Things never happen quite as one expects them to.
Comrade Bristow has blown into the office today in patent leather boots with white kid uppers, as I believe the technical term is.
He told him that he had knocked them at the Bedford the week before, and in support of the statement showed him a cutting from the Era, in which the writer said that 'Other acceptable turns were the Bounding Zouaves, Steingruber's Dogs, and Arthur Hignett.' Mike wished him luck.
That was the point.
I should have seen it on any other day but that.
After all, most people look on the cashier of a bank as a sort of human slot-machine.
I may even look in on him and throw him a word of praise.
Made straight for the corner flag, you understand,' he added, as Mr Rossiter emerged from his lair, 'and centred, and Sandy Turnbull headed a beautiful goal.
I've got the sack.
And from half past four till five either a little more work or more pottering, according to whether there was any work to do or not.
His life was very regular.
He confided to Mike his intention of leaving the bank as soon as he had made a name, and taking seriously to the business.
If it is one tithe as painful as that, you have my sympathy.
Mike could guess what he was feeling, and what he was thinking about.
The former had been so very cheery and breezy, the latter so dazed and silent.
Mike could not take it in all at once.
Mr Waller, in the intervals of work, talked a good deal, mostly of Edward, his doings, his sayings, and his prospects.
Why so-called I do not know, nor, indeed, do I ever hope to know.
He spoke in rather an awed voice.
Mike, as always, was rendered utterly dumb by the sight of suffering.
'Why,' he said.
Again, what could he do by way of earning a living?
Man, in his infancy, is neither criminal nor barbarous, but ignorant and inexperienced.
A society of beasts is a collection of atoms, round, hooked, cubical, or triangular, but always perfectly identical.
Each one, without inquiring as to the object of his labor, and without troubling himself about the extent of his task, would obey orders, bring his product, receive his salary, and would then rest for a time; keeping meanwhile no accounts, envious of nobody, and satisfied with the distributor, who never would be unjust to any one.
The union of the two remainders will give us the true form of human association.
But notice that the learned observer defines the kind of reflection which distinguishes us from the animals as the POWER OF CONSIDERING OUR OWN MODIFICATIONS.
This progressive and painful education of our instinct, this slow and imperceptible transformation of our spontaneous perceptions into deliberate knowledge, does not take place among the animals, whose instincts remain fixed, and never become enlightened.
The practice of justice is a science which, when once discovered and diffused, will sooner or later put an end to social disorder, by teaching us our rights and duties.
He keeps an account of his experience, and preserves the record; so that the race, as well as the individual, becomes more and more intelligent.
Communism--or association in a simple form--is the necessary object and original aspiration of the social nature, the spontaneous movement by which it manifests and establishes itself.
In reflecting, he becomes deluded; in reasoning, he makes mistakes, and, thinking himself right, persists in them.
Though this expression is inaccurate, the fact to which it refers is none the less true; namely, the classification of talents and capacities.
The animals do not transmit their knowledge; that which each individual accumulates dies with him.
This I shall endeavour to interpret, by developing to the best of my ability the laconism of the philosophical naturalist.
Thus, moral evil, or, in this case, disorder in society, is naturally explained by our power of reflection.
Cuvier: Introduction to the Animal Kingdom.
I have said that human society is COMPLEX in its nature.
But, in man, almost every thing is accomplished by intelligence; and intelligence supplements instinct.
But, just as reflection and reason are subsequent to spontaneity, observation to sensation, and experience to instinct, so property is subsequent to communism.
Therefore it is necessary, by a final examination of their characteristics, to eliminate those features which are hostile to sociability.
If, like the bees, every man were born possessed of talent, perfect knowledge of certain kinds, and, in a word, an innate acquaintance with the functions he has to perform, but destitute of reflective and reasoning faculties, society would organize itself.
Man esteems only the products of reflection and of reason.
This fact is one of the most curious and indisputable which philology has observed.
The labors which animals perform, whether alone or in society, are exact reproductions of their character.
In the bee, the will is constant and uniform, because the instinct which guides it is invariable, and constitutes the animal's whole life and nature.
Instinct is the source of passion and enthusiasm; it is intelligence which causes crime and virtue.
A final illustration will make these facts still clearer.
This lacks clearness, and requires an explanation.
The Origin of Property.
In man, talent varies, and the mind wavers; consequently, his will is multiform and vague.
Property, born of the reasoning faculty, intrenches itself behind comparisons.
The most wonderful works of instinct are, in his eyes, only lucky GOD-SENDS; he reserves the name DISCOVERY--I had almost said creation--for the works of intelligence.
If to the blind but convergent and harmonious instincts of a swarm of bees should be suddenly added reflection and judgment, the little society could not long exist.
In the first place, the bees would not fail to try some new industrial process; for instance, that of making their cells round or square.
Communism--the first expression of the social nature--is the first term of social development,--the THESIS; property, the reverse of communism, is the second term,--the ANTITHESIS.
Evil would be introduced into the honey-producing republic by the power of reflection,--the very faculty which ought to constitute its glory.
He reflects, then, since to observe and experiment is to reflect; he reasons, since he cannot help reasoning.
Just as the swarm of bees is composed of individual bees, alike in nature and equal in value, so the honeycomb is formed of individual cells, constantly and invariably repeated.
It is the first phase of human civilization.
When we have discovered the third term, the SYNTHESIS, we shall have the required solution.
Man, by his nature and his instinct, is predestined to society; but his personality, ever varying, is adverse to it.
In this state of society,--which the jurists have called NEGATIVE COMMUNISM--man draws near to man, and shares with him the fruits of the field and the milk and flesh of animals.
He is wedded to his opinions; he esteems himself, and despises others.
But man acquires skill only by observation and experiment.
The difficulty of satisfying these various desires at the same time is the primary cause of the despotism of the will, and the appropriation which results from it.
The true form of human society cannot be determined until the following question has been solved:--
Thus, evil--or error and its consequences--is the firstborn son of the union of two opposing faculties, instinct and reflection; good, or truth, must inevitably be the second child.
He seeks society, but dislikes constraint and monotony; he is an imitator, but fond of his own ideas, and passionately in love with his works.
The intelligence acquired by animals never modifies the operations which they perform by instinct: it is given them only as a provision against unexpected accidents which might disturb these operations.
Intelligence and instinct being common, then, though in different degrees, to animals and man, what is the distinguishing characteristic of the latter?
On the other hand, man always needs a market for his products; unable to compare values of different kinds, he is satisfied to judge approximately, according to his passion and caprice; and he engages in dishonest commerce, which always results in wealth and poverty.
We should see one man plowing a field, another building houses; this one forging metals, that one cutting clothes; and still others storing the products, and superintending their distribution.
PART SECOND.
Property not being our natural condition, how did it gain a foothold? Why has the social instinct, so trustworthy among the animals, erred in the case of man?
If we grant intelligence to animals, we must also grant them, in some degree, reflection; for, the first cannot exist without the second, as F. Cuvier himself has proved by numerous examples.
To express this idea by an Hegelian formula, I will say:
Consequently, he isolates himself; for he could not submit to the majority without renouncing his will and his reason,--that is, without disowning himself, which is impossible.
Unhappy he who shall dare to trifle with them!
But, sir, the stoppage of private industry is the result of over-production, and insufficient markets.
That such a measure may be justly executed, it must be generalized; that is, the law which provides for it must decree also that interest on sums lent on deposit or on mortgage throughout the realm, as well as house and farm-rents, shall be reduced to three per cent.
For the rest, the present system is only a continuation of the municipal system, which, in the middle ages, sprang up in connection with feudalism,--an oppressive, mischief-making system, full of petty passions and base intrigues.
The most remarkable feature of this business was precisely that to which the least attention was paid; namely, that, in one way or another, property had to be violated.
Finally, did they prefer to cultivate the two varieties of sugar at the nation's expense, just as different varieties of tobacco are cultivated?
And upon what will the tax be levied?
make haste to seize this glorious initiative; let the watchwords of equality, uttered from the heights of science and power, be repeated in the midst of the people; let them thrill the breasts of the proletaires, and carry dismay into the ranks of the last representatives of privilege!
It is not two years since I saw a proprietor destroy a forest more than five hundred acres in extent.
Naboth, and the miller of Sans-Souci, would have protested against French law, as they protested against the caprice of their kings.
Did they impose on each industry a proportional tax, so as to preserve a balance in the market?
But, to keep the peasant in his village, his residence there must be made endurable: to be just to all, the proletaire of the country must be treated as well as the proletaire of the city.
There are thousands of documents, even official documents, to prove this, if necessary.
This certainly is not my plan for the abolition of property.
He allowed a broad grin to overspread his agreeable face.
It lay embedded in the wall of the garden-room, cloaked and concealed behind the shelves of a false book-case, which contained no more than the simulacra of books, just books with titles that had never yet appeared on any honest book.
You haven't seen it yet.
Farther down the street was quaint Irene lounging at the door of her new studio (a converted coach-house), smoking a cigarette and dressed like a jockey.
"Yes, ma'am.
"Well, ma'am, if in a month's time I'm short of coal, there are friends of yours in Tilling who can let you have plenty," he permitted himself to say. . . .
"What a delicious big screen," she said.
Often and often had Miss Mapp had pleasant little conversations with him, with a view to bringing down the price of flounders.
I'll serve you with the same spoon some day, at least I would if I thought it sportsmanlike.
That's a queer time of day to recommend an old campaigner to be awake at!
"Upset you a bit.
Food hoarding, too.
"Now where's that soda water you offered me just now?" he shouted to the steward.
He hated saying he was sorry (no man more) and he wouldn't have been sorry if he had been able to get a drink.
He had paid for the whisky which Major Flink had drunk (or owed for it) in his wine-merchant's bill.
"It was the wool I ordered at Heynes's, and then he sold it you, and I couldn't get any more."
So it's my hole, Major!"
But he was so excessively pleased with himself over the adroitness with which he had claimed the last hole, that he quite overstepped the bounds of his habitual parsimony.
That about settles it," said Major Flint boisterously. "Bad place to top a ball!
Said good-bye to us on her doorstep as if she thought she was a perfect Venus Ana--Ana something."
"Done with you," said the other.
"Such a lovely little chat!
"Yes, dear; I see you did.
While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work-cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations.
Her eye fell on it the moment she entered the room, and she tucked the two chintz roses more securely into her glove.
But no more solitary confinement of an evening for Benjamin Flint, as long as you're agreeable."
Puffin added his falsetto cackle to this merriment.
Not been hoarding food, too, dear Diva?
The jacket and skirt had already gone to the dyer's, and would be back in a day or two, white no longer, but of a rich purple hue, and by that time she would have hundreds of these little pink roses ready to be tacked on.
"No one can work as neatly as you, Withers," she said gaily, "and I shall ask you to do the most difficult part.
I want you to sew my lovely poppies over the collar and facings of the jacket, just spacing them a little and making a dainty irregularity.
He opened and shut his mouth and foamed.
Tiresome to go into long explanations.
"I'll tell my maid to pop down and open the door."
Just about the time that this harmonious party began their work, a far from harmonious couple were being just as industrious in the grand spacious bunker in front of the tee to the last hole on the golf-links.
This seemed to do him little good.
"I thought I would just pop across from the grocer's," she said. "What a pretty scarf, dear!
Brain-work's an exhausting process; requires a little stimulant now and again," said Puffin.
"Camouflage for the fair sex," he said.
She let the circumcised roses fall on to the window-seat, and from time to time, when they grew numerous, swept them into a cardboard box.
Meet you there?
"After all, it was a most amusing incident," he said.
This was clearly ironical, and had best be answered by irony.
Puffin naturally saw it in another light.
"Lunching at the Poppit's to-morrow?" asked Major Flint.
"Unless you washed the dust down just once in a while," said Major Flint.
There was lemonade and stone ginger-beer. . . .
"There's a good tramp in front of us now that the last tram has gone.
"No doubt you're right, dear," said Miss Mapp brightly.
So the Army played three more, and, sweating profusely, got out.
By the time the refreshed Puffin had penetrated half-way down his glass, the Major found it impossible to be proud and proper any longer.
"I know it's awfully hard to lose like a gentleman."
"I'm not a marrying man any more than you are. Better if I had been perhaps, more years ago than I care to think about.
Major Flint gave a loud, choking guffaw and beat his fat leg.
Major Flint choked and laughed and inhaled tobacco smoke till he got purple in the face.
Her trained faculties were all on the alert, and she thrust them both inside her glove for future consideration, without stopping to examine them just then.
"Hit you, I think," said Captain Puffin.
There certainly used to be, and they matched with the chintz cover of the window-seat, which was decorated with little bunches of pink roses peeping through trellis.
"May I pop up for a moment, dear?" said Miss Mapp.
It was odd to go to your grocer's every day like that: groceries twice a week was sufficient for most people.
Major Flint had a short fit of aphasia.
Without the smallest doubt Diva had taken down her curtains (and high time too, for they were sadly shabby), and was cutting the roses out of them.
Even among her sweet flowers.
"There's old Mapp.
I'm blessed if I ever heard of two such pompous old frauds as you and I, Captain!
The advent of the taxi was announced, and arm in arm they limped down the steep path together to the road.
His forced abstemiousness was rendered the more intolerable by the fact that Captain Puffin, hobbling in immediately afterwards, fetched from his locker a large flask of the required elixir, and proceeded to mix himself a long, strong tumblerful. After the Major's rudeness in the matter of the half-crown, it was impossible for any sailor of spirit to take the first step towards reconciliation.
"So she was," said the Major.
"Yes, love, pooh by all means, if you like poohing!" said Miss Mapp.
You naughty thing: I believe that great cupboard is full of sardines and biscuits and Bovril."
Puffin gave his alto cackling laugh.
Bridge afterwards I suppose."
It will be delicious in the garden."
"Have a drink, old chap?"
We'll all work together in the garden, shall we, and you and Mary must scold me if you think I'm not working hard enough.
A drink (or two) from a flask was not the same thing. . . .
Miss Mapp appeared to recollect, and smiled as far back as her wisdom-teeth. (Diva couldn't do that.)
"Oh, quite a little: enough to go on with.
Withers had answered the telephone, and came to announce that Twemlow the grocer regretted he had only two large tins of corned beef, but--
"Oh, that's all right, Major," he said.
She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said "pop" in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever.
I shall be at home to nobody, Withers, this afternoon, even if the Prince of Wales came and sat on my doorstep again.
This casual drink did not constitute the usual drink stood by the winner, and paid for with cash over the counter.
As soon as Miss Mapp had gained her garden-room, she examined the mysterious treasures in her left-hand glove.
"Ha!
"You shall see for yourself"--and then she suddenly remembered that the cupboard was full of chintz curtains and little bunches of pink roses, neatly cut out of them, and a pair of nail scissors.
"Unplayable."
Six and eight in the morning!
"They can take away every atom of coal you've got, if so, and fine you I don't know what for every hundredweight of it."
Summoning his last remaining strength Major Flint roared for whisky, and was told that, according to regulation, he could not be served until six.
Thanks to this pleasant plan, there was not much opportunity for Withers and Mary to be idle. . . .
Miss Mapp crossed the street to the pavement below Diva's house, and precisely as she reached it, Diva's maid opened the door into the drawing-room, bringing in the second post, or rather not bringing in the second post, but the announcement that there wasn't any second post.
'A forgery?' he said.
Your secretarial duties must be paramount.
But the thing, once started, fascinated you.
From eleven to half past twelve he would put in a little gentle work.
That was at ten o'clock.
I can't tell you about it here.'
Most of the goals towards which the average man strives struck him as too unambitious for the prodigy.
You must recollect that Comrade Bickersdyke spoke in the heat of the moment.
What he did not expect was any big calamity.
The fight is beginning to be too much for me.
I cannot have his nervous system jolted and disorganized in this manner, and his value as a confidential secretary and adviser impaired, even though it be only temporarily.
'Good man,' said Mike.
I may now think of my own troubles.
They are both furious.
Mr Bickersdyke was speaking as Mike entered.
'Yes.
'Look here, Smith,' he said, 'I want to speak to you.
Mike could not make it out.
No action of this young prodigy was withheld from Mike.
Mr Waller, still chirpy, had nothing but good news of Edward.
They know how I like things to be done.
Somebody had come in to cash a cheque, and he was working mechanically.
He did not like to ask if there was anything the matter.
I shall lose my place.
Mike almost laughed.
He had thundered at Mike as if Mike had been his Majesty's Government or the Encroaching Alien, or something of that sort.
For these he was prepared.
I will hear what Comrade Jackson has to say on the matter.
The Mecca, except for the curious aroma which pervades all Meccas, was deserted.
In America, as possibly you are aware, there is a regular post of mistake-clerk, whose duty it is to receive in the neck anything that happens to be coming along when customers make complaints.
Old Bick looked at me as if he could eat me, snatched the letter out of my hand, signed it, and waved his hand at the door as a hint to hop it.
A cousin of mine, who secured his chess blue at Oxford, would, they tell me, have represented his University in the dominoes match also, had he not unfortunately dislocated the radius bone of his bazooka while training for it.
I can't make another start.
When he got back, barely half an hour later, the storm had burst.
Look here, you'd better nip back and do as much of the work as you can.
I shall be dismissed.
Mr Bickersdyke has wanted to get rid of me for a long time.
He's not a bad sort.
Pneumonia.
He had always envied the cooing readiness of the hero on the stage when anyone was in trouble.
He recollected the man who had presented it, a tallish man with a beard.
Blooming hurricane, more like it.
I don't remember doing it.
Probably few of the customers who came to cash cheques suspected that there was anything the matter with the man who paid them their money.
21.
All he could understand was that a far worse thing had happened than anything he could have imagined.
'Mr Waller has told me--' he began.
He meant every word.
Yet there it is.'
'Pretty badly too, from what I can gather.
But he had not expected it to come to him riding high on the crest of a great, frothing wave of verbal denunciation.
He looked up as the door opened.
What, exactly was the cause of the turmoil?'
'Just so, just so.
I hope there's nothing up.
'Dominoes,' he said, 'is one of the few manly sports which have never had great attractions for me.
'In my case,' interrupted Mike, 'there was none of that rot. Bickersdyke wasn't putting it on.
'I bet we shall!' said Mike ruefully.
But get on with your work, Smith.
And if he did not get another job in the City, what could he do?
I shall not act rashly, Comrade Bristow.
There was West, who had been requested to leave Haileybury owing to his habit of borrowing horses and attending meets in the neighbourhood, the same being always out of bounds and necessitating a complete disregard of the rules respecting evening chapel and lock-up.
20.
'Jackson isn't half copping it from old Bick.'
But he could find nothing that would not sound horribly stilted and cold.
But, then, trouble is such an elastic word.
What can I do? I'm an old man.
He oughtn't to be here at all today.
When all the world outside is dark and damp and cold, the light and warmth of the place are comforting.
He listened gravely while Mike related the incidents which had led up to his confession and the results of the same.
And a clumsy one.
Yes.
There was also Hignett, who added to the meagre salary allowed him by the bank by singing comic songs at the minor music halls.
I was just telling Jackson about the match against Blackburn Rovers,' he said to Mr Rossiter.
I shouldn't talk to him much if I were you.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with them.
What exactly did you say?'
He was a small, dried-up youth, with black hair plastered down on his head.
'His kid's ill, poor chap,' he said briefly.
Concerning a Cheque
From such a connection she could not wonder that he would shrink.
GARDINER."
It soon led to another; and Mrs. Bennet found, with amazement and horror, that her husband would not advance a guinea to buy clothes for his daughter.
You were not by, when I told mamma and the others all about it.
Smiles decked the face of Mrs. Bennet as the carriage drove up to the door; her husband looked impenetrably grave; her daughters, alarmed, anxious, uneasy.
Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy, and her husband's love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.
He has given in all his debts; I hope at least he has not deceived us.
Elizabeth could bear it no longer.
But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.
The principal purport of his letter was to inform them that Mr. Wickham had resolved on quitting the militia.
Wickham was not at all more distressed than herself, but his manners were always so pleasing, that had his character and his marriage been exactly what they ought, his smiles and his easy address, while he claimed their relationship, would have delighted them all.
Elizabeth was surprised, however, that Wickham should consent to such a scheme, and had she consulted only her own inclination, any meeting with him would have been the last object of her wishes.
He was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother-in-law, and he was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance, and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could.
And as for men of the old conservative type, a learned woman was as much an object of horror as is a militant suffragette in conservative England to-day.
That some of the women had literary ability of a high order is indicated by a letter of Pliny to one of his correspondents, in which occurs the following passage:
The gist of his teaching is contained in the statement that:
Far from being kept in oriental seclusion, like her Athenian sister, she was at liberty to receive and dine with the friends of her husband, and to appear in public whenever she desired.
For, when some of the sterner old moralists wished to exclude women from all participation in public affairs, the Senate, after a heated debate, decided by a large majority that the cooperation of women in questions of administration, far from being a menace, as some contended, was so beneficial to the state that it should be continued.
Like Plato, he contended that women should have the same training as men and that the faculties of both should be equally developed.
These were Servilia, the mother of Brutus, Porcia, the wife of Brutus and the daughter of Cato, and Tertulla, the wife of Cassius and sister of Brutus.
It is not only a defence of his course, but also a splendid tribute to his two illustrious friends, and a tribute also to the great and good women of all time.
As we learn from Tacitus, their counsels and assistance were considered of peculiar value by the Commonwealth.
In the first place the Roman matron had much more freedom than was accorded the Greek wife during the age of Pericles.
"There are people, O Paula and Eustochium," exclaims the Christian Cicero, vibrant with emotion and in a burst of eloquence that recalls one of the burning philippics of Marcus Tullius, "who take offence at seeing your names at the beginning of my works.
These people do not know that Olda prophesied when the men were mute; that while Barach was atremble, Deborah saved Israel; that Judith and Esther delivered from supreme peril the children of God.
After he had completed his version of the first Book of Kings, he turned it over to them, saying: "Read my Book of Kings--read also the Latin and Greek translations and compare them with my version." And they did read and compare and criticise.
Thus, Cicero tells us of an interview which he had at Antium with Brutus and Cassius. Besides the men, there were present on this occasion three women, who took an active part in the discussion.
Among the pioneers of the intellectual movement in Rome, and one of the most beautiful types of the learned women of her time, was the celebrated daughter of the elder Scipio Africanus--Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi.
The condition of women in Rome, especially from 150 B.C. to 150 A.D., was quite different from what it was in Athens, even during her palmiest days.
And more than this, they frequently suggested modifications and corrections which the great man accepted with touching humility and incorporated in a revised copy.
Considering the number of educated women that lived in the latter days of the Republic and during the earlier part of the Empire, and their well known culture and love of letters, it is reasonable to suppose that they may have written much in both prose and verse of which we have no record.
They not only went to, but presided over, public games and religious ceremonies.
According to Cicero, his daughter Tulia was "the best and most learned of women"; but her literary work, it is probable, did not extend much beyond her letters to her illustrious father.
But there were others who chose a wider field for their activities, and who, by reason of their unerring judgment, well-poised and highly cultivated minds, had so won the confidence of the nation's greatest leaders that they were frequently consulted on important affairs of state.
So great was Jerome's confidence in their scholarship and so high was his appreciation of their ability and judgment that he did not hesitate to submit his translations to them for their criticism and approval.
This was, in great measure, due to the wave of Hellenism which, shortly after the conquest of Greece, broke upon the Roman capital with such irresistible force.
Scarcely less distinguished for her taste in literature, and for her talent as a letter writer, was Pliny's wife, Calphurnia, who, at his request, wrote to him in his absence every day and sometimes even twice a day.
Yet more.
Did not Themista philosophize with the sages of Greece?
I believed that Plautus or Terence was being read in prose.
He gives his opinion of them in the following characteristic fashion:
With the extension of the empire and the consequent enormous increase in wealth and the rapid progress in social and intellectual freedom, there was a notable change in the character of the education given to women, at least to those of the wealthier and patrician families.
"Mere woman's work Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn."
As early as 450 B.C., when the laws of the Twelve Tables were promulgated, the girls of Rome received instruction in reading, writing and arithmetic.
Then there was the cultured and devoted Aurelia, the mother of Julius Caesar.
Then, most probably, her education in the scholastic sense came to an end.
She was never supposed to have reached the age of reason or experience." And her noblest epitaph, it was averred, was couched in the following words:
And the mother of the Gracchi, your Cornelia, and the daughter of Cato, wife of Brutus, before whom pale the austere virtue of the father and the courage of the husband--are they not the pride of the whole of Rome?
Among other noteworthy makers of Roman history, besides those just mentioned, is Livia, the wife of Augustus and the mother of Tiberius.
And, although many Greek women, some of them of rare beauty and culture, found their way to Rome, especially under the empire, they were always kept in the background and never succeeded in achieving anything approaching the ascendancy which distinguished them during the time of Aspasia.
So great was her influence and so persistent was her activity in government affairs, that it is sometimes asserted that she was the prime mover of most of the public acts of both these rulers.
Then there was the gracious, the virtuous, the self-sacrificing Octavia, sister of the Emperor Augustus, who was so successful in composing grave differences between her brother and her husband, and who so exerted her influence for peace during the troublous times in which she lived that she lives in history as a peacemaker.
In many respects she was the most commanding personality of her age, and exhibited in an eminent degree those sterling qualities which we are wont to associate with the strong, dignified, courageous women of ancient Rome, who gave to the world so many and so great men in every sphere of human endeavor.
Highly educated and of commanding personalities, both these women, like many others of their time, contributed much to the making of Roman history by the success they achieved in molding the characters of some of the greatest men of their own or of any age.
She went to the theater and the Forum; she took part in all reputable entertainment, whether public or private. Besides this, she had more and greater legal rights than Greek women had ever known, and was treated rather as the peer and companion of man than as his toy or his slave.
Besides this, foreign women were never so conspicuous in Rome as in Athens.
To become thoroughly versed in Greek poetry and proficient in the teachings of Greek philosophy was the ambition of scores of Roman women, who soon became noted for the extent and variety of their attainments, as well as for their rare culture and charming personality.
Scarcely less distinguished and accomplished was another Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, the Great.
Everything in her plays that is not formal but essential, everything that is original and individual, belongs wholly to the Christianized Germany of the tenth century. Everywhere we can trace the influence of the atmosphere in which she lived; every thought and every motive is colored by the spiritual conditions of her time.
In marked contrast to her model, who invariably exhibits the frailties and lapses of woman, Hroswitha's plays turn on the resistance of her sex to temptation, and on their steadfast adherence to duty and to vows voluntarily assumed.
In England they were invested with extraordinary powers, and in certain cases owed obedience to none save the Pope.
Of the monastic institutions for men there is no occasion to speak, except in so far as they contributed to the intellectual advancement of woman.
"The educational influence of convents during centuries," continues the same writer, "cannot be rated too highly.
Similarly, the properties of other nunneries, large and small, were appropriated for the foundation of collegiate institutions at Oxford, all of which were for the benefit of men.
A recent writer sums up in a few words the status and the accomplishments of the lady of the abbey in the following paragraph:
In form, all the plays preserve the simple directness of their model, Terence, while, in conception, they embody the noblest ideals of Christian teaching.
For this reason they still have a special claim on the attention of students of art and literature, as well as those of theology and mysticism.
At a later period during the prolonged absence in Italy of Otto III, the control of affairs was entrusted to the abbess alone; and so successful was her administration, and so vigorous were the measures which she adopted against the invading Wends, that she commanded the admiration of all.
And, if we accept the criterion that influence is measured by the number and nature of one's relations, it would be difficult to find in any age relations that were more select or more cosmopolitan.
20).
They must rather be taught that they have been thus imprisoned, not with the purpose of their being justified or gaining merit in this way, but in order that they might avoid wrong-doing, and be more easily instructed in that righteousness which is by faith, a thing which the headlong character of youth would not bear unless it were put under restraint.
For just as a man is not righteous merely because he serves and is devoted to works and ceremonial rites, so neither will he be accounted righteous merely because he neglects and despises them.
Thus, though we ought boldly to resist those teachers of tradition, and though the laws of the pontiffs, by which they make aggressions on the people of God, deserve sharp reproof, yet we must spare the timid crowd, who are held captive by the laws of those impious tyrants, till they are set free.
They appear to wish to build, they make preparations, and yet they never do build; and thus they continue in a show of godliness, but never attain to its power.
Still it is not on them that our justification is based, but on faith; and yet they ought not on that account to be despised or neglected.
If you wish to use your liberty, do it secretly, as Paul says, "Hast thou faith?
3)!
Thus, too, we do not contemn works and ceremonies--nay, we set the highest value on them; but we contemn the belief in works, which no one should consider to constitute true righteousness, as do those hypocrites who employ and throw away their whole life in the pursuit of works, and yet never attain to that for the sake of which the works are done.
We must bear with their infirmity, till they shall be more fully instructed.
And yet it would be death to them to persevere in believing that they can be justified by these things.
For unless He himself teach us inwardly this wisdom hidden in a mystery, nature cannot but condemn it and judge it to be heretical.
In this way Paul also would not have Titus circumcised, though these men urged it; and Christ defended the Apostles, who had plucked ears of corn on the Sabbath day; and many like instances.
You see here how the Apostle blames those who, not from religious feeling, but in mere contempt, neglect and rail at ceremonial observances, and teaches them not to despise, since this "knowledge puffeth up." Again, he teaches the pertinacious upholders of these things not to judge their opponents.
It is not from works that we are set free by the faith of Christ, but from the belief in works, that is from foolishly presuming to seek justification through works.
Such were the Jews of old, who would not understand, that they might act well.
In this matter we must listen to Scripture, which teaches us to turn aside neither to the right hand nor to the left, but to follow those right precepts of the Lord which rejoice the heart.
7).
Faith redeems our consciences, makes them upright, and preserves them, since by it we recognise the truth that justification does not depend on our works, although good works neither can nor ought to be absent, just as we cannot exist without food and drink and all the functions of this mortal body.
This is a thing which easily happens, and defiles very many, unless faith be constantly inculcated along with works.
Both these parties are plainly culpable, in that, while they neglect matters which are of weight and necessary for salvation, they contend noisily about such as are without weight and not necessary.
But take care not to use it in the presence of the weak.
We have therefore need to pray that God will lead us and make us taught of God, that is, ready to learn from God; and will Himself, as He has promised, write His law in our hearts; otherwise there is no hope for us.
It is impossible to avoid this evil, when faith is passed over in silence, and only the ordinances of men are taught, as has been done hitherto by the pestilent, impious, and soul-destroying traditions of our pontiffs and opinions of our theologians.
When the structure is completed, they are laid aside.
For since these men do not act thus from hardened malice, but only from weakness of faith, therefore, in order to avoid giving them offence, we must keep fasts and do other things which they consider necessary.
Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep.
Meanwhile they please themselves with this zealous pursuit, and even dare to judge all others, whom they do not see adorned with such a glittering display of works; while, if they had been imbued with faith, they might have done great things for their own and others' salvation, at the same cost which they now waste in abuse of the gifts of God.
He may meet with hardened and obstinate ceremonialists, who, like deaf adders, refuse to listen to the truth of liberty, and cry up, enjoin, and urge on us their ceremonies, as if they could justify us without faith.
Finally, for the sake of those to whom nothing can be stated so well but that they misunderstand and distort it, we must add a word, in case they can understand even that.
These we must spare, lest they should be offended.
The Christian must therefore walk in the middle path, and set these two classes of men before his eyes.
An infinite number of souls have been drawn down to hell by these snares, so that you may recognise the work of antichrist.
On the other hand, in the presence of tyrants and obstinate opposers, use your liberty in their despite, and with the utmost pertinacity, that they too may understand that they are tyrants, and their laws useless for justification, nay that they had no right to establish such laws.
22).
On the other hand, they are most pertinaciously resisted by those who strive after salvation solely by their observance of and reverence for ceremonies, as if they would be saved merely because they fast on stated days, or abstain from flesh, or make formal prayers; talking loudly of the precepts of the Church and of the Fathers, and not caring a straw about those things which belong to our genuine faith.
Or else we may meet with simple-minded and ignorant persons, weak in the faith, as the Apostle calls them, who are as yet unable to apprehend that liberty of faith, even if willing to do so.
There are very many persons who, when they hear of this liberty of faith, straightway turn it into an occasion of licence.
This is required of us by charity, which injures no one, but serves all men.
Hence in the Christian life ceremonies are to be no otherwise looked upon than as builders and workmen look upon those preparations for building or working which are not made with any view of being permanent or anything in themselves, but only because without them there could be no building and no work.
Translated by F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
I have accordingly compiled these articles and presented them to our side.
How shall I complain?
For what shall I say?
If such chief matters of the spiritual and worldly estates as are contrary to God would be considered in the Council, they would have all hands so full that the child's play and absurdity of long gowns [official insignia], large tonsures, broad cinctures [or sashes], bishops' or cardinals' hats or maces, and like jugglery would in the mean time be forgotten.
This causes me to shudder and fear that at some time He may send a council of angels upon Germany utterly destroying us, like Sodom and Gomorrah, because we so wantonly mock Him with the Council.
Just as though He were bound to honor our jugglery as a reward of our treading His solemn commandments under foot.
Therefore I have presented few articles; for we have without this so many commands of God to observe in the Church, the state and the family that we can never fulfil them.
Indeed, I ought to reply to everything while I am still living.
I must tell a story.
If we first had performed God's command and order in the spiritual and secular estate we would find time enough to reform food, clothing, tonsures, and surplices.
Not that we need It, for our churches are now, through God's grace, so enlightened and equipped with the pure Word and right use of the Sacraments, with knowledge of the various callings and of right works, that we on our part ask for no Council, and on such points have nothing better to hope or expect from a Council.
But we see in the bishoprics everywhere so many parishes vacant and desolate that one's heart would break, and yet neither the bishops nor canons care how the poor people live or die, for whom nevertheless Christ has died, and who are not permitted to hear Him speak with them as the true Shepherd with His sheep.
eternally.
Regarding the rest it will be said, Woe, and, alas!
But our sins weigh upon us and cause God not to be gracious to us; for we do not repent, and, besides, wish to defend every abomination.
For while they have lied so shamefully against us and by means of lies wished to retain the people, God has constantly advanced His work, and been making their following ever smaller and ours greater, and by their lies has caused and still causes them to be brought to shame.
But if we want to swallow such camels, and, instead, strain at gnats, let the beams stand and judge the motes, we also might indeed be satisfied with the Council.
I often think of the good Gerson who doubts whether anything good should be [written and] published.
What, then, is the use, or what does it profit that many decrees and statutes thereon are made in the Council, especially when these chief matters commanded of God are neither regarded nor observed?
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[Good God!] Alas! what first will happen when I am dead?
But, again, how can I alone stop all the mouths of the devil?
God convert to repentance those who can be converted!
Glow-worms and crickets are not such bad bedfellows.'
'I envy you the novelty.' There was again the same faint unmistakable antagonism in voice and attitude; and yet so deep was the relief in talking to a fellow creature who hadn't the least suspicion of anything unusual in his appearance that Lawford was extremely disinclined to turn back.
'A suicide,' said Lawford, under his breath.
'Oh yes, it's old right enough, as things go; but even age, perhaps, is mainly an affair of the imagination.
The last light of sunset lay in the west; and a sullen wrack of cloud was mounting into the windless sky when Lawford entered the country graveyard again by its dark weather-worn lych-gate.
Perhaps you would tell me something of its history?' He sat down.
I come here simply, as I have said, because it's quiet; because I prefer the company of those who never answer me back, and who do not so much as condescend to pay me the least attention.' He smiled and turned his face towards the quiet fields.
He was cold and shivering.
Lawford, after a long pause, lifted his eyes.
He paused a moment, however; his hat was drawn down over his eyes; he was shivering.
'You often sit here?' Lawford persisted.
He stood hesitating, gazing steadily and yet half vacantly at the motionless figure, and in a while a face was lifted in his direction, and undisconcerted eyes calmly surveyed him.
'"Occurred?"' He raised his eyebrows.
But there'--he rose stiff and chilled--'I am afraid I have bored you with my company.
'"One ever could?"'
And I confess I too should very much like a peep into his cupboard.
'Haven't you noticed,' drawled the other, 'how green the grass grows down here, and how very sharp are poor old Sabathier's thorns?
What this is'--he glanced, with head bent, across the shadowy stones, 'is pretty evident.
'Why, to-morrow, then,' said his companion.
'And is this very old?'
He killed himself, poor wretch, think of the fret and fever he must have been in--just before.
'Oh yes, often.' He smiled.
He held out his hand.
Lawford found himself staring with unusual concentration into the rather long and pale face.
The moon cast lean grey beams of light between the cypresses.
Lawford again hesitated, then slowly advanced.
'Have you ever noticed it?' he said, putting out his hand towards his unknown companion; 'this stone is cracked from head to foot?...
But to his wide and wandering eyes it seemed that a radiance other than hers haunted these mounds and leaning stones.
Of course, age has its charms.'
Perhaps you could spare the time now?'
He felt instinctively it was madness to sit on here in the thin gliding mist that had gathered in swathes above the grass, milk-pale in the rising moon.
His companion moved slowly to the other side of the broken gravestone.
'My visits,' said Lawford, 'have been very few--in fact, so far as I know, I have only once been here before.'
'He was a stranger; it says so.
'Do you think,' he said softly, 'it is possible one ever could?'
'Not, I suppose,' he resumed faintly--'not, I suppose, beyond what's there.'
But the stooping stones and the cypresses were out of sight of its porch.
'But it might, you know,' suggested the other with a smile--'might have been sheer indifference.'
Far over the harvest fields showed a growing pallor in the solitary seat beneath the cypresses.
I don't mean that I have never had such an idea, just in one's own superficial way; but'--he paused and glanced swiftly into the fast-thickening twilight--'I wonder: are they, do you think, really, all quite dead?'
I live only at the foot of the hill, not half a mile distant.
'What did you dream?'
Lawford glanced helplessly about him.
The stranger turned his head to glance over the fields.
They went quickly downstairs, Sheila with less dignity, perhaps, than she had been surprised into since she had left a slimmer girlhood behind.
Besides, Arthur, as for believing--without in the least desiring to hurt your feelings--I must candidly warn you, some people won't.'
'You take such formidable risks, Lawford,' said Mr Bethany in a dry, difficult voice.
And there looked out at him, it seemed, the same dark sallow face that had so much appalled him only two nights ago--expressionless, cadaverous, with shadowy hollows beneath the glittering eyes.
This morning he was as sane, as lucid as I hope I am now.
But now, because I ask it, and this poor child here entreats it, you will say nothing to a living soul about the matter, say, till Friday?
Mr Bethany, with a convulsive effort, woke.
Mr Bethany sat down at the table.
We all know what that MEANS.'
'Oh, but you know you are,' drawled on the slightly hesitating long-drawn syllables; 'it's your parochial metier.
But his mind was wearier even than his body.
As he leaned his head on his hands, gladly conscious that he could not possibly bear this incessant strain for long, Sheila opened the door.
His every thought was vainly wandering round and round the one curious hint that had drifted in, but which he had not yet been able to put into words.
'Why do you ask?'
'How could I possibly fall asleep with that fellow talking there?' he had said to himself angrily; yet knew in his heart that their talk had driven every other idea out of his mind.
You look positively at death's door.'
'Arthur thought he would prefer to come down and see you himself.'
And even as he watched it, its lips, of their own volition, drew together and questioned him--'Whose?'
He turned swiftly on Mrs Lawford. 'Why, why, could you not have seen?' he cried.
You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?'
So,' he briskly brightened, 'say, between us we're six score all told.
And now, just while we are all three alone here together in friendly conclave, wouldn't it be as well, don't you think, to confront ourselves with the difficulties? I know--we all know, that that poor half-demented creature IS Arthur Lawford.
'It's no good, Vicar.
'Yes,' said Danton, taking refuge in Mrs Lawford's white and intent gaze.
I refuse to be watched and guarded and peeped on like this.' He knew that his hands were trembling, that he could not keep his eyes fixed, that his voice was nearly inarticulate.
I will only remark just this--that Mrs Lawford and I, in our inmost hearts, know.
Then, if nothing has occurred, we will, we shall HAVE to call a friendly gathering, we shall be compelled to have a friendly consultation.'
'Not finally.
And yet the slightest, the most infinitesimal change is instantly apparent.'
However ridiculous that idea, it was not more ridiculous, more incredible than the actual fact.
'I rather feared some such temporary breakdown as this, Danton.
And fat, postmortem, Danton.
I had no more doubt in my own mind and heart that he was he than I have in my mind that I--am I. We do in some mysterious way, you'll own at once, grow so accustomed, so inured, if you like, to each other's faces (masks though they be) that we hardly realise we see them when we are speaking together.
'Very well,' said Mr Bethany crisply, 'that's settled, then.
You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you--in layers!
'Good,' said Mr Bethany; 'and I'm seventy-one, and this child here'--he pointed an accusing finger at Sheila--is youth perpetual.
If he had remained there, he might, it was just possible that he would by now, have actually awakened just his own familiar every-day self again.
His small eyes wandered, and instantaneously met and rested on those of Mrs Lawford.
He heard voices in the dining-room.
Another custom is to steadily point a finger at the hiccougher, or to make him hold up his arm and shake it.
The following is a copy of the charm:--
For nose-bleed, place a wad of paper between the upper lip and the gum.
Nightmare is caused by the nightmare man, a kind of evil spirit, struggling with one.
WATER.
A variant,--
For nose-bleed, put a key down the back.
Rain-water caught the first of June will cure freckles.
Sty, sty, go off my eye, Go on the first one that passes by.
For toothache take an eyelash, an eyebrow, trimmings of the finger-nails, and toe-nails of the patient, bore a hole in a beech-tree, and put them in.
To cure a sty repeat at a cross-roads,--
For nose-bleed, hold up the right arm.
An Indian doctor used for inflammation of the eyes rain-water caught on the third, fourth, and fifth of June.
Toothache may be cured by a written charm, sealed up and worn around the neck of the afflicted person.
APPAREL.
Itching in the palm is a sign of a fight, or of seeing a stranger.
If your left ear itches, some one is saying unpleasant things about you; but if your right ear, pleasant things.
If your nose itches, it is a sign of a present.
If you break your needle in making a dress, you will live to wear it out.
An unexpected scratch denotes surprise.
Some say,--
If, when a newly-married couple go to housekeeping, she slyly takes her mother's dish-cloth or dish-wiper, she will never be homesick.
On cutting the finger-nails:--
Wet the finger and touch the "letter" on the candle.
DOMESTIC LIFE.
Sweep the floor after dark, you'll see sickness before morning.
Wrap it up in a paper, and throw it away.
Go out of doors, count three, stop and pick up the stone nearest to your toe.
CURES.
Rub the wart with a cotton rag, spit on the rag and hide it under a water-board (a wooden gutter used as a duct for rain-water off the roof of a house), where the water will drip on it.
Make a wart bleed, and put the blood on a penny, throw the latter away, and the finder will get the wart.
Warts are cured by stealing pork from the family barrel of salted pork, rubbing the warts with it, and throwing it into the road.
Take a potato and rub it over the wart, then wrap the potato in a piece of paper and throw it away.
As the joints rot, the warts disappear.
Roll them in paper and throw them away.
If you find an old bone in the field, rub the wart with it, then lay it down exactly as you found it.
By what law of God or man can a man be bound to maintain a parcel of injurious vermin on his property, in the pursuit of which he finds no sport himself, and which are highly detrimental to another sport in which he takes, perhaps, the keenest interest?
He did not hunt himself,--but neither did he shoot, or fish, or play cards.
You owe it to us to come.
"Nobody can,--unless he does the work himself.
Gorse coverts make, no doubt, the charm of hunting, but gorse coverts will not hold foxes unless the woodlands be preserved.
The question was argued at considerable length.
His huntsman was always well mounted, with two horses; but Lord Chiltern would give up his own to the man and take charge of a weary animal as a common groom when he found that he might thus further the object of the day's sport.
"Then nobody can manage his own property as he pleases?"
"My dear Lord Chiltern, everything has been done.
Why should foxes be demanded from him then any more than a bear to be baited, or a badger to be drawn, in, let us say, his London dining-room?
On the next day Lord and Lady Chiltern went back to Harrington Hall. When the end of August comes, a Master of Hounds,--who is really a master,--is wanted at home.
"We may have traps if we like it, Lord Chiltern."
His feelings were so acute and his remorse so great that, in their pity, they had resolved to spare him; and then, on the spot, entered into a solemn compact that no one should be told.
Encouraged by the forbearing tenderness, the unfortunate one ventured to return to the house of his friend, the owner of the wood, hoping that, in spite of the sacrilege committed, he might be able to face a world that would be ignorant of his crime.
As the vulpicide, on the afternoon of the day of the deed, went along the corridor to his room, one maid-servant whispered to another, and the poor victim of an imperfect sight heard the words--"That's he as shot the fox!"
It had fallen out in this wise.
Surely all that was understood in England by this time.
He devoted his life to the Brake Hounds.
If I were to go and live in Trumpeton Wood I could do it; but you see I have to live here.
"Why couldn't you keep it all out of the newspapers?"
The Duchess was made to understand that she must prevent any such awkwardness.
I vote that we have an officer of State, to go in and out with the Government,--with a seat in the Cabinet or not according as things go, and that we call him Foxmaster-General.
But he could not allow himself to be brought into an argument with Lord Chiltern as to the management of his own property.
"Change your keepers," said Lord Chiltern energetically.
The fox is a travelling animal.
It would be just the thing for Mr. Finn."
Lady Chiltern, before she went, made a little speech to Phineas Finn.
Knowing well that "home-staying youths have ever homely wits," he goes out and sees the world.
He had mistaken it for a hare, and had done the deed in the presence of keepers, owner, and friends.
How am I to set about it? To whom can I apply to appoint others?
"I don't write the newspapers, Duchess.
Keepers shall prefer foxes to pheasants, wires shall be unheard of, and Trumpeton Wood shall once again be the glory of the Brake Hunt.
"But we don't like traps, Lord Chiltern;--nor yet poison, nor anything that is wicked.
"Then it'll be all right," said Lord Chiltern.
To kill a certain number of foxes in the year, after the legitimate fashion, had become to him the one great study of life;--and he did it with an energy equal to that which the Duke devoted to decimal coinage.
"He was an impudent old man, and that's the truth," said the Duchess;--"and he has always been my thorough detestation.
As it happened, Trumpeton Wood was, and always had been, the great nursery of foxes for that side of the Brake country.
But a good deal had been said which, though not perhaps capable of convincing the unprejudiced American or Frenchman, had been regarded as cogent arguments to country-bred Englishmen.
It won't cost the Duke above a thousand or two a year."
"I should like."
The animal becomes sacred, and his preservation is a religion.
No one was truer to you than we were, you know.
If all foxes so wandering be doomed to death, if poison, and wires, and traps, and hostile keepers await them there instead of the tender welcome of the loving fox-preserver, the gorse coverts will soon be empty, and the whole country will be afflicted with a wild dismay.
"Your Grace shall at any rate have one of them," said Lord Chiltern.
The Duke's property, indeed!
"Well;--how about them?" said the lord, showing by the fiery eagerness of his eye, and the increased redness of his face, that though the matter had been introduced somewhat jocosely, there could not really be any joke about it.
Don't you know what vested interests mean, Lord Chiltern?"
And may I say this? If there be anybody to come with you, that will make it only so much the better.
In these fine early autumn days spent at Matching, the great Trumpeton Wood question was at last settled.
"Oh, Lady Chiltern!"
As for the Duke, he can't be comfortable in his arithmetic for thinking of them.
"I am so glad," said his wife.
"Certainly;--only say so, and we shall know where we are." He looked very angry, and poor Lady Chiltern was covered with dismay.
"I should be very sorry indeed to put the Duke to any unnecessary expense," said Lord Chiltern solemnly,--still fearing that the Duchess was only playing with him.
"Then I suppose that nothing can be done," said Lord Chiltern.
CHAPTER LXXV.
And even the Duke was angry.
Trumpeton Wood was the Duke's own,--to do just as he pleased with it.
And it was too much for him that such a one as Mr. Fothergill should be allowed to wire foxes in Trumpeton Wood!
The Duke was angry because Lord Chiltern had been violent;--and Lord Chiltern had been violent because Mr. Fothergill's conduct had been, to his thinking, not only sacrilegious, but one continued course of wilful sacrilege.
He had told his wife that he should be delighted to welcome Lord and Lady Chiltern,--as he would any other friends of hers.
"And so the great Mr. Fothergill falls from power, and goes down into obscurity," said Madame Goesler.
He recreated himself with Blue Books, and speculations on Adam Smith had been his distraction;--but he knew that he was himself peculiar, and he respected the habits of others.
Nothing short of an embassy on behalf of the great coverts of his country would have kept this master away at present; and now, his diplomacy having succeeded, he hurried back to make the most of its results.
"You'll come to us in the winter, Mr. Finn?"
"You must.
Mr. Fothergill had become angry.
"Do not think of it.
The Brake Hunt had been established for a great many years, and was the central attraction of a district well known for its hunting propensities.
But if you only knew what I have gone through to get rid of him,--and all on account of Trumpeton Wood,--you'd send me every brush taken in the Brake country during the next season."
During the summer considerable acerbity had been added to the matter by certain articles which had appeared in certain sporting papers, in which the new Duke of Omnium was accused of neglecting his duty to the county in which a portion of his property lay.
"They have robbed the Duchess of her sleep for the last six months," said Madame Goesler.
Shielded by the forest, Jackson marched his gray columns rapidly to the left along the narrow country roads until he was square on the flank of the Union right wing, which was held by the Eleventh Corps, under Howard.
He was a master of strategy and tactics, fearless of responsibility, able to instil into his men his own intense ardor in battle, and so quick in his movements, so ready to march as well as fight, that his troops were known to the rest of the army as the "foot cavalry."
Thus perished Stonewall Jackson, one of the ablest of soldiers and one of the most upright of men, in the last of his many triumphs.
Lee fully realized his danger, and saw that his only chance was, first to beat back Hooker, and then to turn and overwhelm Sedgwick, who was in his rear.
The Eleventh Corps had not the slightest idea that it was about to be assailed.
In the first battle in which Jackson took part, the confused struggle at Bull Run, he gained his name of Stonewall from the firmness with which he kept his men to their work and repulsed the attack of the Union troops.
While they were thus utterly unprepared Jackson's gray-clad veterans pushed straight through the forest and rushed fiercely to the attack.
Many of them had stacked their muskets and were lounging about, some playing cards, others cooking supper, intermingled with the pack-mules and beef cattle.
We have in us nobler capacities for what is great and good because of the infinite woe and suffering, and because of the splendid ultimate triumph.
Then the old Puritan died.
Few generals as great as Lee have ever had as great a lieutenant as Jackson.
Some of the regiments resisted for a few moments, and then they too were carried away in the flight.
At the end his mind wandered, and he thought he was again commanding in battle, and his last words were.
Yet all the while the battle was going on elsewhere, and Berdan's sharpshooters had surrounded and captured a Georgia regiment, from which information was received showing definitely that Jackson was not retreating, and must be preparing to strike a heavy blow.
In another minute the frightened pickets came tumbling back, and right behind them came the long files of charging, yelling Confederates; With one fierce rush Jackson's men swept over the Union lines, and at a blow the Eleventh Corps became a horde of panicstruck fugitives.
The Confederates advanced in a dense mass, yelling and cheering, and the discharge of the guns fairly blew them back across the work's they had just taken.
Like a servant of the Lord, with his bible and his sword, Our general rode along us, to form us for the fight. --Macaulay.
We are the richer for each grim campaign, for each hard-fought battle.
It was about this time that Jackson himself was mortally wounded.
Both were Virginians, and both were strongly opposed to disunion.
From that time until his death, less than two years afterward, his career was one of brilliant and almost uninterrupted success; whether serving with an independent command in the Valley, or acting under Lee as his right arm in the pitched battles with McClellan, Pope, and Burnside.
"You must hold your ground."
But when Virginia joined the Southern Confederacy, and the war had actually begun, both men cast their lot with the South.
The Union scouts got track of the movement and reported it at headquarters, but the Union generals thought the Confederates were retreating; and when finally the scouts brought word to Howard that he was menaced by a flank attack he paid no heed to the information, and actually let his whole corps be surprised in broad daylight.
He had under him 120,000 men when, toward the end of April, he prepared to attack Lee's army, which was but half as strong.
The country was thickly covered with a forest of rather small growth, for it was a wild region, in which there was still plenty of game.
It is often said that the Civil War was in one sense a repetition of the old struggle between the Puritan and the Cavalier; but Puritan and Cavalier types were common to the two armies.
The vein of fanaticism that ran through his character helped to render him a terrible opponent.
We are the richer for valor displayed alike by those who fought so valiantly for the right, and by those who, no less valiantly, fought for what they deemed the right.
North and South, all Americans, now have a common fund of glorious memories.
Lee consented, and Jackson at once made off.
But we recognize gladly that, South as well as North, when the fight was once on, the leaders of the armies, and the soldiers whom they led, displayed the same qualities of daring and steadfast courage, of disinterested loyalty and enthusiasm, and of high devotion to an ideal.
Keenan himself fell, pierced by bayonets, and the charge was repulsed at once; but a few priceless moments had been saved, and Pleasanton had been given time to post twenty-two guns, loaded with double canister, where they would bear upon the enemy.
The Union army lay opposite Fredericksburg, looking at the fortified heights where they had received so bloody a repulse at the beginning of the winter.
The greatest general of the South was Lee, and his greatest lieutenant was Jackson.
For a while it seemed as if the whole army would be swept off; but Hooker and his subordinates exerted every effort to restore order.
It was quite in keeping with his character that this gentle, high-minded, and religious man should, early in the contest, have proposed to hoist the black flag, neither take nor give quarter, and make the war one of extermination.
In the spring of 1863 Hooker had command of the Army of the Potomac. Like McClellan, he was able to perfect the discipline of his forces and to organize them, and as a division commander he was better than McClellan, but he failed even more signally when given a great independent command.
In dash and light-hearted daring, Custer and Kearney stood as conspicuous as Stuart and Morgan; and, on the other hand, no Northern general approached the Roundhead type--the type of the stern, religious warriors who fought under Cromwell--so closely as Stonewall Jackson.
The first notice the troops of the Eleventh Corps received did not come from the pickets, but from the deer, rabbits and foxes which, fleeing from their coverts at the approach of the Confederates, suddenly came running over and into the Union lines.
He was put in a litter and carried back; but he never lost consciousness, and when one of his generals complained of the terrible effect of the Union cannonade he answered:
It was imperative to gain time so that the untouched portions of the army could form across the line of the Confederate advance.
For several days he lingered, hearing how Lee beat Hooker, in detail, and forced him back across the river.
Again they charged, and again were driven back; and when the battle once more began the Union reinforcements had arrived.
"Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade."
He knew no such word as falter, and when he had once put his hand to a piece of work, he did it thoroughly and with all his heart.
He consulted with Jackson, and Jackson begged to be allowed to make one of his favorite flank attacks upon the Union army; attacks which could have been successfully delivered only by a skilled and resolute general, and by troops equally able to march and to fight.
He was a man of intense religious conviction, who carried into every thought and deed of his daily life the precepts of the faith he cherished.
Jackson fell, struck in several places.
The captains and the armies that, after long years of dreary campaigning and bloody, stubborn fighting, brought the war to a close, have left us more than a reunited realm.
Keenan's regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry, but four hundred sabers strong, was accordingly sent full against the front of the ten thousand victorious Confederates.
Lee went so far as to deny the right of secession, while Jackson insisted that the South ought to try to get its rights inside the Union, and not outside.
He and his staff were fired at, at close range, by the Union troops, and, as they turned, were fired at again, through a mistake, by the Confederates behind them.
Everything, however, in this campaign, depended on quickness, and Grant's decision, as well as all his movements, marked the genius of the great soldier, which consists very largely in knowing just when to abandon the accepted military axioms.
While he was thus engaged, an intercepted message revealed to him the fact that Pemberton, in accordance with Johnston's orders, had come out of Vicksburg with twenty-five thousand men, and was moving eastward against him.
You and he were close friends, and, knowing how you must feel to be batted out, he was loath to go in.
For some time before that game you and Grant were very chummy; you were nearly always together, so that everybody noticed it.
"Look at Hook!" whooped Chipper Cooper.
It's your work alone that has prevented us from scoring in either of these innings.
Look out for him, Roddy, or he'll add you to his list.
A moment later Hooker pulled him handsomely on a wide one, and the first strike was called, Cooper being again awakened to a wondering, whooping state of merriment.
Phil started.
It was a blow below the belt, and, in spite of himself, Phil could not help showing the effect.
Everybody seemed to be watching Roy, and Phil walked on to the field and toward one of the benches without attracting attention.
Roger Eliot lingered to speak a word to Hooker, and Springer, still unnoticed, plainly heard what he said.
Having a chance to speak privately with Springer, he said:
I want to have a little chin with you.
"All right," agreed Phil.
It doesn't pay, Phil; you're hurting yourself far more than any one else."
Leaning against the fence, the captain of the nine faced his companion.
He was reluctant about going on to the slab when I called him."
"Perhaps that was because he was afraid he'd get his, too," muttered Springer.
There were no runners on the sacks.
Eliot went on, steadily and earnestly:
"How's your cold, Phil?"
You've been wonderfully successful in coaching Grant, and all the time you were training him to relieve you in a measure when the hardest work should come.
Where did this new Christy Mathewson come from, anyhow?
"They say Eliot has said Grant will make a better pitcher than you, because you lack heart."
"You wanted to see it," yelled Cooper.
"I hear Eliot has expressed his estimation of you and Rod Grant."
"Every-bub-body seems to think Grant is pretty good," mumbled Springer.
At noon that day Roy Hooker returned to school, bringing a written excuse from his mother.
"Perhaps we've made a mistake in sizing you up, Roy, old fellow.
Together they walked to the fence at the back of the yard, pausing beneath one of the tall old trees which was putting forth tender green leaves.
Apparently not at all discomposed by these remarks, Hooker continued steadily about his business, and presently, rousing a shout of surprise, he succeeded in fanning the captain of the nine.
"It's folly, Springer," said Eliot, "sheer childish folly.
CHAPTER XV.
PLAIN TALK FROM ELIOT.
"We need two pitchers--we must have them if we hope to make a decent showing in the series.
By and by we'll have to play two games a week, and some of those games come so close together that one pitcher alone, unless he has an arm of iron, can't do all the flinging.
"Not a word."
"I don't think you've got any right to call it sulking," objected Springer in a low tone.
There'll be a practice game to-night; we'll play against a picked up scrub team.
"Is that the reason why you've been giving Rod Grant the cold shoulder?"
It was Eliot who asked the question, and Springer, pausing with one foot on the academy steps, replied:
Roger stepped back from the plate, after striking out, and stood there gazing at Roy, with one of his strange, rare smiles.
"Oh, it's some bub-better, I think."
Weakly Springer sought to protest against this, but stopped in the midst of it, fully comprehending how feeble his words were.
It will be ten minutes yet before school begins."
I'll tell you honestly, if I were in his place to-day, I'd feel it.
"I suppose he'll be the whole shooting match, now."
Nevertheless, when he reached home by a roundabout course, and found it impossible to dismiss thoughts of the boys engaged in that practice game, he eventually decided that he was a fool.
It did not take him long to shed his outer clothes and get into a baseball suit.
For he himself had vainly sought to put aside the depressing and unnerving conviction that in steadiness, stamina and self-confidence, Rodney Grant was his superior; something he had determined never to breathe to any one else, but which the keen judgment of the team captain had found out.
Now, I'm your friend, old fellow, and I want you to listen to me and take my advice.
Nevertheless, he was so much disturbed that, in spite of his promise to Roger, he was not with the team when it took the field that night for the practice game.
"Yes; that's just what you've been doing.
"You got a look, all right. Oh, say!
"I don't believe it would hurt his feelings a great deal."
"I know that," said Phil, poking his toe into an ant's nest and declining to meet Roger's steady, level gaze; "but, really, I--I was feeling pretty rotten, you know, and I didn't have mum-much heart for practice."
Crane followed.
Now, I want to see you at the field in a suit and ready to do your part."
You'll have plenty of chances to show the stuff you're made of."
"He'll get you if you don't.
"Glad to hear it," said Roger, slipping his arm through Springer's. "Come on, let's walk over yonder to the fence.
I made up my mind to speak plainly to you, and I'm going to do so--for your own good.
If the score had been heavy against us at the time, some fellows might have fancied Grant's reluctance was prompted by fear and a disinclination to shoulder another man's load in the first game he pitched.
Even old stagers get into that condition sometimes when pitching, and it's not an infrequent occurrence that a slabman who is not thought so good steps in and stops the slaughter."
I hardly thought it of you, Phil; I didn't expect you to play the baby."
The game was in the second inning, with the regular team at bat and Hooker pitching for the scrub, which was made up partly of grammar school boys.
Barville had you going, Phil, and you couldn't seem to steady down.
"As a rule," he began, "you've been a great enthusiast over baseball, and I didn't think you'd let a slight cold keep you away from practice. Exercise is one of the best remedies for a cold, if a person takes care of himself when he's through exercising."
You've been trapped by the green-eyed monster.
Unless they're chumps, they know every pitcher has his off days.
"He certainly did amazingly well, for which he generously gave you all the credit."
And Grant, having begun to feel piqued, made no further advances.
"Look out! look out!" shouted the little fellow.
"You ought to know him better than any one else around here; you ought to know whether he's at all sensitive or not.
You lost heart in the game, and you haven't braced up yet.
Crane, setting his teeth, made two fouls, and then sent Chipper into real convulsions by whiffing at a high one which Roy whistled across his shoulders with surprising accuracy.
"Those words betray you, my boy.
"I haven't been giving him---- What has he said to you, Eliot?
"The baby!" exclaimed Springer resentfully.
"He's actually trying to strike Roger out!"
Rodney Grant did not strike out, but, nevertheless, he failed to meet one of Hooker's shoots squarely, and the grammar school shortstop gathered in an easy grounder and threw to first for the third put-out.
List' to my warning."
But if you continue to sulk, as you have for the past few days, you'll lose the sympathy of your teammates; but you won't hurt Grant--otherwise than his feelings."
We were all sorry to see you get your bumps and lose control, and I don't believe any one was any sorrier than Grant himself; for, somehow, I've come firmly to believe that he's on the square.
You've always had speed and curves, but now you seem able to get the pill over.
Eliot was at bat, and the umpire had just called the second strike on him.
Who said Hooky couldn't pitch?
Roger was vexed, but he continued to maintain his calm manner.
I've not sized it up as anything of the sort.
"Now, that isn't generous, and you know it.
The color mounted into Phil's cheeks and slowly receded, leaving him pale, and still with downcast eyes.
"It was apparent to the dullest, Phil.
"Yes," said the captain, "I'm afraid that was the principal trouble--you didn't have much heart for it.
You must realize it was a mighty lucky thing for us that we had a pitcher to take your place.
You've been sulking, old fellow.
"I guess that's got him puffed up some."
"I don't suppose the fellows have much confidence in me now."
There's more pitch in him than you can find in a big chew of spruce gum."
So many persons wished to shake hands with Rodney Grant that he laughingly protested, saying they would put his "wing out of commission." Suddenly perceiving Phil, the Texan pushed aside those between them, sprang forward and placed a hand on Springer's shoulder, crying:
Great spiritual rewards and great worldly prizes were alike within her grasp.
But her astonishing collection of letters is the slightest product of her intellectual activity.
The strangest and saddest result, consequent on the suppression of the convents, was that men were made to profit by the loss which women had sustained.
I cannot, however, refrain from referring to that group of learned English nuns who are chiefly known by their Latin correspondence with St. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, and by the assistance which they gave him in his arduous labors.
As a writer of history and legends she ranks with the best authors of her time, while as a writer of dramas she stands absolutely alone.
From what has been said of the accomplishments and achievements of the Anglo-Saxon nuns just mentioned, it is evident that they were, of a truth, women of exceptional worth and of sterling character.
As to the monks subject to her authority, she inspired them with so great a love of knowledge, and urged them to so thorough a study of the Scriptures, that her monastery became, as Venerable Bede informs us, a school not only for missionaries but for bishops as well.
Celebrated, however, as Hilda was for her great educational work at Whitby, she is probably better known to the world as the one who first recognized and fostered the rare gifts of the poet Caedmon.
The Bollandists, than whom there is no more competent authority, express their amazement at the amount and quality of Hildegard's work.
They made provision only for the boys.
Among her most distinguished subjects were two religious by the name of Matilda, one of whom was her sister, and a third, who, to distinguish her from the abbess, is known as "Gertrude the Great."
In certain convents Latin was almost the sole medium of communication,--to such an extent, indeed, that a special rule was made prohibiting "the use of the Latin tongue except under special circumstances."
Practically the only schools for girls during the Middle Ages were the convents.
Possessing such power and prestige, it is not surprising to learn that abbesses wielded great influence in temporal as well as spiritual matters; that it pervaded politics and extended to the courts of kings and emperors.
And so great was her reputation for knowledge and wisdom that not only priests and bishops, but also princes and kings sought her counsel in important matters of church and state.
Her dramas, which, of all her works, have attracted the most attention, are seven in number.
The lady-abbess, on the other hand, was part of the two great social forces of her time, feudalism and the Church.
At one time the center was in Italy, at another in Gaul, and, at still another, it was in Britain or Ireland or Germany.
A woman's education, at this time, was not complete unless she could write Latin and speak it fluently.
By some it is considered as synonymous with the Dark Ages, because of the decline of learning and civilization during this long interval of time.
But whether it was in the south, or the west or the north of Europe that letters flourished, it was always the convent or the monastery that was the home of learning and culture.
Nor is this all.
The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it, since the college for women has arisen at a time when colleges in general are under a cloud.
But no.
In England, they ranked with lords temporal and spiritual, and had the right to attend the king's council or to send proxies to represent them, while in Germany, where they held property directly from the king or emperor, they enjoyed the rights and privileges of barons and, as such, took part in the proceedings of the imperial diet either in person or through their accredited representatives.
The truth is, when anything was achieved for the intellectual advancement of women it was due either to private instruction or to the result of a protracted struggle on the part of women themselves for what they deemed their indefeasible rights.
Her works on theology, Scripture and science make no less than six or eight large octavo volumes.
Both of these noted women were worthy prototypes of that long list of learned Italian women who, during the Renaissance, won such honor for themselves and such undying glory for their country.
The progress of intellectual culture was, indeed, greatly retarded, but there was no time when the light of learning was entirely extinguished.
Among her correspondents were people of the humble walks of life as well as the highest representatives of Church and State.
Her convent and adjoining monastery for monks soon became the most noted center of learning and culture in Britain.
Among the first convent schools to achieve distinction were those of Arles and Poitiers in Gaul, in the latter part of the sixth century.
And in these homes of piety and learning the inmates enjoyed a peace and a security that it was impossible to find elsewhere.
For even during the most troublous times there were centers of culture in one part of Europe or another.
Of the abbess Gertrude we read that her enthusiasm for knowledge was so great that she not only inspired others with the same enthusiasm, but that she was an incessant collector of books, which she had her nuns transcribe.
There were simple monks and noble abbots; dukes, kings and queens; archbishops and cardinals and no fewer than four Popes.
It exhibits Herrad's intense interest in the intellectual advancement of her nuns and pupils as well as her superior talent and acquirements.
They are, likewise, distinguished by originality of treatment, complete mastery of the material used, as well as by genuine beauty of rhyme and rhythm.
Herrad, the gifted abbess of Hohenburg in Alsace, was a contemporary of Hildegard, and, like her, was noted for her culture and wide range of knowledge.
During the "wandering of the nations" in the fourth and fifth centuries, and the long and fierce struggles between the barbarian hordes from the north with the decadent peoples of the once great Roman empire, there was, no doubt, a partial eclipse of the sun of civilization; but the consequent darkness was not so dense nor so general and long-continued as is sometimes imagined.
As his poetical faculty became more developed, his profoundly original genius became more marked, and his inspiration more earnest and impassioned.
Within these holy precincts the literary treasures of antiquity were preserved and multiplied.
Never was woman more highly honored, never was her power and influence greater than during the period of conventual life extending from Hilda of Whitby to Gertrude and the Matildas of Helfta, and especially during that golden period of monasticism and chivalry when cloister and court were the radiant centers of learning and culture.
Here were educated rich and poor, gentle and simple.
She was treated as an equal by the men of her class, as is witnessed by letters we still have from popes and emperors to abbesses.
In Saxony, the abbesses had the right to strike coins bearing their own portraits, notably the abbesses of Gandersheim and Quedlinburg.
So great was her reputation for sanctity and for the extent and variety of her attainments that she was called "the marvel of Germany." She is without doubt one of the most beautiful and imposing as well as one of the greatest figures of the Middle Ages--great beside such eminent contemporaries as Abelard, Martin of Tours and Bernard of Clairvaux.
People from all parts of the Christian world sought her counsel; and her convent at Bingen became a Mecca for all classes and conditions of men and women.
Unfortunately the manuscript copy of this work was destroyed at the time of the bombardment of Strasburg by the Germans in 1870, and our knowledge of it is limited to portions of it which had previously been transcribed or to accounts left of it by those who had examined it before its destruction.
She is without doubt the most voluminous woman writer of the Middle Ages.
In Kent abbesses, as representatives of religion, came immediately after bishops.
The Anglo-Saxon convents developed few writers, whereas those of Germany produced several who not only shed luster on their sex but who also showed what woman is capable of accomplishing when accorded some measure of encouragement and full liberty of action.
They were free from the dangers and annoyances that so often menaced them in their own homes and were able to pursue their studies under the most favorable auspices.
When they were appropriated by Henry VIII, it never occurred to him or his ministers to make any provision for the education of women in lieu of that which had so ruthlessly been wrested from them.
Nor is there any other work that gives us a better knowledge of the manners, customs and ideals of the twelfth century, or one that, in its particular sphere, is of more value to the student of art, philology and archaeology.
But this is not all.
Mrs. Presty recovered the command of her temper.
"My indiscretion has deserved it.
The servant looked at her with vague misgivings.
"Now," the spoiled child declared, addressing the company present, "I'm going to play."
She dropped into a chair.
Sit down, if you please.
Chapter XIII.
Then there came a pause.
One by one the tourists disappeared under the portico of the front door.
"In the shrubbery."
May I take the parasol?"
She never once looked at her mother; her face, white and rigid, was turned toward Randal.
"What is there to look at?" he inquired.
She refused to hear him.
Wondering what had become of her father and her governess, Kitty had asked the nursemaid to look for them.
The parasol caught her eye.
The thoughts from which she recoiled forced their way back into her mind; the narrative of the nursemaid's discovery became a burden on her memory once more.
The reply only increased his perplexity.
She looked round.
"Yes, ma'am."
Kitty Keeps Her Birthday.
"I might have been mistaken," the maid repeated--"but I thought Miss Westerfield was crying."
The girl paused, and looked confused.
I might have been mistaken--"
Sydney laid her down again on the pillow, gave her a last kiss, and ran out of the room.
The child was still too drowsy to hear plainly.
She went back to her bed-chamber.
"They're as good as spoiled now," she thought; "they're no longer fit for anybody but me." She paused, and abruptly took up the third and last photograph--the likeness of Herbert Linley.
Her longing eyes stole a last look at him--a frenzy seized her--she pressed her lips to the photograph in a passion of hopeless love.
"This is your birthday present.
Was it an offense, now, even to look at his portrait?
"We will breakfast early, my precious child.
Waiting for Sydney to come into the bedroom as usual and wish her good-night, Kitty was astonished by the appearance of her grandmother, entering on tiptoe from the corridor, with a small paper parcel in her hand.
You mustn't look at it till you wake to-morrow morning." She pushed the parcel under the pillow--and, instead of saying good-night, took a chair and sat down.
The present hidden under the paper wrapper was a sixpenny picture-book. Kitty's grandmother disapproved of spending money lavishly on birthday gifts to children.
"Show it, of course; and take the greatest care of it," Mrs. Presty answered gravely.
Sydney's heart ached when she thought of the separation that was to come with the next day; her despair forced its way to expression in words.
She hesitated; her tears dropped on the photographs.
As yet, he had failed to find the opportunity of addressing to Sydney the only words of encouragement he could allow to pass his lips: he had asked for her earlier in the evening, and nobody could tell him where she was.
Chapter XII.
....The merest outline of the subject is terrifying!
Although the power of making visible the forms of the dead has been claimed for one sort of incense only, the burning of any kind of incense is supposed to summon viewless spirits in multitude.
It is the custom In some families to enter all such records in a book especially made for the purpose, and furnished with an index which enables the Ko-kwai player to refer immediately to any interesting fact belonging to the history of any past game.
This is very cheap.
But with the "guest-incense" no experiment is made.
III
In this economical era, the Ko-kwai takes of necessity a much humbler form than it assumed in the time of the great daimyo, of the princely abbots, and of the military aristocracy.
A full set of the utensils required for the game can now be had for about $50.00; but the materials are of the poorest kind.
The olfactory nerves are apt to become somewhat numbed long before the game is concluded; and, therefore it is customary during the Ko-kwai to rinse the mouth at intervals with pure vinegar, by which operation the sensitivity is partially restored.
To 21 pastilles
But it is quite a feat to make ten correct judgments in succession.
When the Emperor had lost his beautiful favorite, the Lady Li, he sorrowed so much that fears were entertained for his reason.
Recipe for Baikwa.
Finally I may observe that, while judging the incense, a player is expected to take not less than three inhalations, or more than five.
We shall suppose the game to be arranged for a party of six,-- though there is no rule limiting the number of players.
RECORD OF A KO-KWAI.
He takes the six tablets out of the box, and wraps them up in the paper which contained the incense guessed about.
When the rich Sudatta wished to invite the Buddha to a repast, he made use of incense.
But the faces of the tablets bear numbers or marks; and each set comprises three tablets numbered "1," three numbered "2," three numbered "3," and one marked with the character signifying "guest." After these tablet-sets have been distributed, a box called the "tablet-box" is placed before the first player; and all is ready for the real game.
Then Niimi took me to see his worms.
He left the guest-room, and presently returned with a white paper-fan, on which a silkworm-moth was sleepily reposing.
III
They only pair, lay eggs, and die.
In a silkworm-paradise such as our mundane instincts lead us to desire, the seraph freed from the necessity of toil, and able to satisfy his every want at will, would lose his wings at last, and sink back to the condition of a grub....
Those silkworms have all that they wish for,--even considerably more.
They have mouths, but do not eat.
Let pain and its effort be suspended, and life must shrink back, first into protoplasmic shapelessness, thereafter into dust.
The silkworm-moth has very beautiful eyebrows."
"Is it possible," he exclaimed, "that you never saw a silkworm- moth?
As they approach maturity, the creatures need almost constant attention.
"Well, call them what you like," returned Niimi;--"the poets call them eyebrows....
Now look at the eyebrows."
It cannot fly, of course: none of them can fly....
'Lawford!' the little man's voice was as sharp as the crack of a whip; 'I forbid it.
He poised himself, as if it were, on the monolithic stability of his legs.
'I suppose,' began Danton, with an obvious effort to disentangle himself from the humiliation of the moment, 'I suppose he was--wandering?'
But when I had seen the poor fellow face to face, heard him talk, and watched him there upstairs in the silence stir and awake and come up again to his trouble out of his sleep.
'Excuse the confidence, Mrs Lawford, I'm forty-three.'
'It was not my wish, Vicar, to come at all,' said a voice from the doorway.
I never SAID I disbelieved him.'
Supposing, though, that he had really fallen into a deep sleep, with none to watch or spy--what then?
Personally, I refuse to discuss the matter.
He very gently let himself in, and unheard, unseen, mounted the stairs.
And'--he lifted a long arm--'I must positively refuse to produce the least, the remotest proof that I am not, so far as I am personally aware, even the Man in the Moon.
Lawford peered as if out of a gathering dusk, that thickened and flickered with shadows before his eyes.
We don't attempt to explain; we can't.
He agrees with me it really would be advisable to take such a very old and prudent and practical friend into our confidence.
'I have merely come to tell you, Arthur, that Mr Bethany has brought Mr Danton in to supper.
You'll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism.
I say Friday because it will be exactly a week then.
What step-by-step creatures we are, to be sure!
You do nothing I ask of you.
He had not yet even glanced into the glass.
But Danton merely continued to stare, as if into the quiet of an aquarium.
You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom, merely incredulously grope.
With your permission, my dear,' he added, turning untarnishably clear childlike eyes on Sheila, 'I will take all risks--even to the foot of the gibbet: accessory, Danton, AFTER the fact.' And so direct and cloudless was his gaze that Sheila tried in vain to evade it and to catch a glimpse of Danton's small agate-like eyes, now completely under mastery, and awaiting confidently the meeting with her own.
He was not to be given much leisure, however, for fantastic reveries like this.
'I am sure, Bethany, you will--My dear Mrs Lawford!' said he, stirring vaguely, glancing restlessly.
I simply cannot bear the burden of this incessant anxiety.
I have heard Lawford's own account.
He only knew for certain that so far as his first hope and motives had gone his errand had proved entirely futile.
A light shone faintly between the blinds of his bedroom.
I forbid it.
'What's he mean, then,' he muttered huskily, 'coming here with his black, still carcase--peeping, peeping--what's he mean, I say?' There was a moment's silence.
There's nothing to be got from poor Sheila but....
Mr Danton composed his chin in his collar, and deliberately turned himself towards his companion.
'And Danton, of all people in the world!
But then, I am a sceptic; I own it.
'Oh yes, Vicar; but you see--'
Other and keener and more knowledgeable minds than mine or yours will some day bring him back to us again.
Blow hot, blow cold. North, south, east, west--to have a weathercock for a wife is to marry the wind.
I own frankly at the first sheer shock it staggered me as I think for the moment it has staggered you.
Has he had supper?'
He started up.
Aren't you, T. D.?
But still, Friday be it.
He sat down in front of the fire, tired out and bitterly cold in spite of his long walk home.
Mr Bethany rose cheerfully.
He'll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage.
Oh, what a basting's there!'
And the thought of that--though he hardly realised its full import--actually did send him on tip-toe for a glance that more or less effectually set the question at rest.
Do you hear me?
Faith versus Reason--that prehistoric Armageddon. Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will come back to us.
And 'pon my word, Mrs Lawford, there's plenty of room for sceptics in a world like this.'
It was surely rather a curious, a thoughtless choice.
'I don't see quite...' smiled Danton with recovered ease, and rapidly mobilising forces.
Sheila drew in her lips.
Are we--can we, deliberately, with this mere pinch of years at our command out of the wheeling millions that have gone--can we say, "This is impossible," to any single phenomenon?
'He won't believe: too--bloated.'
That's all very well, but'--he paused, and nodded, nodding his round head upward as if towards the inaudible overhead, 'I suppose he can't HEAR?'
And that, my dear Danton, is just where we come in. We know the man himself; and it is to be our privilege to act as a buffer-state, to be intermediaries between him and the rest of this deadly, craving, sheepish world--for the time being; oh yes, just for the time being.
'My dear good Danton,' persisted Mr Bethany with cherubic patience, 'how old are you?'
'All right, Danton; I am afraid you are exactly what the poor fellow in his delirium solemnly asseverated. And, jesting apart, it is in delirium that we tell our sheer, plain, unadulterated truth: you're a nicely covered sceptic.
And what's a week?--to Nature scarcely the unfolding of a rose.
Some experience, which would be nothing but a hideous cruelty and outrage to ask too closely about--one, perhaps, which he could, even if he would, poor fellow, give no account of--has put him temporarily at the world's mercy.
Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic.
We simply believe.'
'Bless me, yes,' said Mr Bethany cordially--'fever.
He tried in vain to catch up the thread of his thoughts.
Mr Bethany raised a small lean hand: 'One moment, please.
This--this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by some inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put up.
Look, now, what your night walk has done for you!
An awful calamity has suddenly fallen upon him--this change.
'Am I really to believe,' Danton began huskily.
'Come along,' said Lawford, with a faint gust of laughter; 'let's see.'
Danton inserted a plump, white finger between collar and chin.
CAN we?'
Then with lifted brows and wide eyes that to every one of his three witnesses left an indelible memory of clear and wolfish light within their glassy pupils, he turned heavily, and climbed back to his solitude.
'What--what an instinct you have for the right word,' said Lawford softly.
Lampreys!
Mere dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry, if you like.
'Oh yes. But--eh?--needlessly abusive?
A smile can turn a face we dread into a face we'd die for.
'To tell you the truth, I am too tired to care a jot either way.
I think I foresaw it.
What more likely, more inevitable than that such a thing should leave its scar, its cloud, its masking shadow?--call it what you will.
Some of you children take the trick.
He realized that Dunk Tucker, the prisoner, had overheard all that had been said during their talk with Withem out on the plain.
Every man of you is covered!"
"Can't I say what I've got to say?" demanded the fat boy indignantly.
"I haven't said anything yet."
Soon after daybreak, Tad awakened his fellows.
"No, but you've overlooked two of us," announced Ned stepping out.
"I guess if we expect to get any sleep we had better let some one else do it," agreed Tad.
He saw a solitary horseman far out over the rolling plain.
"Any of the rest of you kiddies been wounded in the fracas?" demanded Folly.
Darkness overtook them, finding them still without sight or sound of the Spring where Withem said they would find the Rangers' camp.
To look at their faces one would have thought they were performing a solemn duty.
All at once he was picked up in a pair of strong arms and tossed in bodily. Stacy howled lustily.
"Wait a minute.
I've got to take care of my health."
But their troubles for the night were not wholly over yet.
Their initiation was not yet complete.
"On guard?"
"But you're going to?"
Let go!"
"Will you go peaceably or must we drag you?"
The Pony Rider Boys were out of their tents in a twinkling.
"No; they were out for a play.
"It won't be the first time, Mr. Stevens.
"Say, moon-face, didn't you ever hear tell of a prairie schooner!"
Then again--that's three times, ain't it?--he's got a temper like angels ain't supposed to have."
"Tom Parry didn't," objected the guide.
The coyotes, frightened beyond their power of reasoning, if such a faculty was possessed by them, were now no more than so many black streaks lengthening out across the desert.
After breakfast we'll look around a bit.
I presume that's the purpose of your visit here?" asked the Professor.
"I told you so.
"I don't know whether you'd call it an angel or not.
"Yeow! Scat!" shrieked the fat boy.
Tom Parry, piling fresh fuel on the embers of the camp-fire, soon had the scene brightly lighted.
"Yes, how did you know that!" questioned Tad.
"They'll go away when the moon comes up," called the guide when the boys protested that the beasts kept them awake.
Yet they were destined not to pass the night without a further disturbance, though the Professor did not use his shoe to chastise the noisy ones.
"Get up!" shouted Tad.
The can landed right between the eyes of the animal. The coyote uttered a grunt of surprise, hesitated an instant, then, with tail between his legs, bounded away with a howl of fear.
We'll let you help point the bunch into the corral when we get them going.
"A schooner, did you say?" questioned Stacy, edging closer to the cowboy.
"Young men, the very next one who raises a disturbance in this camp to-night is going to get a real old-fashioned trouncing.
Tad lost no time in getting ready for the trip to trail the wild horses to their lair, and in a few moments the horse-hunters rode from the camp, followed by the envious glances of the Pony Rider Boys.
We'll get the old gentleman this time or break every cinch strap in the outfit."
"Why do you call him that?"
"Shake," glowed Bud, extending his hand to Tad.
By this time, with his companions, he had dismounted, turning the ponies loose to roam where they would.
Better look out where you're shooting to!" warned Stacy.
FUN IN THE FOOTHILLS
"Well, you've got something coming to you, then," replied Bud, turning to the others again.
Not having any slipper, I'll use my shoe.
"Go to sleep!" commanded the Professor.
"Our chuck wagon'll be along when it gets here.
Tad took the horse-hunter to the trail that he had followed up the mountain side.
In one hand he held a can of condensed milk that he had smuggled from the commissary department that afternoon.
"Where's the water?"
There was no more sleep in camp that night.
They approached the camp until a circle of them surrounded it.
Two bullets flicked the dirt up into his face.
"Haven't any rope," answered Tad, with a muttered "Ouch!" as his big-toe came in contact with the can of condensed milk.
Professor Zepplin accepted the new disturbance with good grace.
"Wow!" piped Stacy.
Don't let him get into any difficulties, Mr. Stevens.
The whole camp, aroused by the shouting and shooting, had turned out after pulling on their trousers and shoes.
"Come along; take a hunch on your cinch straps, a chunk of grub in your pocket; then we're ready to find where the Angel washes his face every morning and night."
"The Professor'll take you over his knee and chastise you with his shoe, if you don't watch sharp," said Stacy.
Some of the boys darted by him, the others crawling out under the sides of the tent, all making a lively sprint for their own quarters.
Tom Parry, aroused by this new note in the midnight medley, tumbled out just in time to see Stacy disappearing over the ridge.
Professor Zepplin glanced at the guide inquiringly.
"That's what I was telling the bunch," nodded Bud.
The tall, gaunt figure of the Professor appeared suddenly at the tent entrance.
So--but Tom Parry told you, of course."
It lacked only a few hours to daylight when the second interruption occurred.
Just after breakfast, to which the camp had sat down at break of day, the horse-hunters began their preliminary work.
"We saw one of them and the tracks of the rest----"
"That's him.
"We're going to eat breakfast with you," Bud Stevens informed them.
"Get after him, boys!
A volley of shots was fired as an accompaniment to the startling yells. A moment later and a body of horsemen dashed into camp, which they had easily located by the smouldering camp-fire.
"Of course, you've seen about the room.
"Is it snowing again, Mr. Conroy?" asked Lily.
"And his poor mother made him take the pledge on New Year's Eve.
The poor child!
Good-night, Mrs. Conroy."
"He's really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom's eyes at night and making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout.
And then it was long after ten o'clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife.
Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.
He walked rapidly towards the door.
"God help me," he said, smiling, "it's the doctor's orders."
Just... here's a little...."
Julia, there's Miss Daly and Miss Power will take some refreshment.
She's not the girl she was at all."
"O, Mr. Conroy," said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, "Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming.
They were fussy, that was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.
Lily, the caretaker's daughter, did housemaid's work for them. Though their life was modest, they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout.
Both of them kissed Gabriel's wife, said she must be perished alive, and asked was Gabriel with her.
They both kissed Gabriel frankly.
"Don't mind him, Aunt Kate," she said.
Julia! Julia!
"Miss Kate, here's Mrs. Conroy."
He did not know that that machine, when the wires were connected, could stop his engine.
Bergmann was induced to enter the game.
At that moment Edison, stripped pretty nearly down to the buff, was at the very crisis of an important experiment, and refused absolutely to be interrupted.
When I started from Berlin on the trip, I began to tell American stories. Siemens was very fond of these stories and would laugh immensely at them, and could see the points and the humor, by his imagination; but Helmholtz could not see one of them.
We could make some very good pyrotechnics there, so we determined to give the Indians a scare.
Going along the dock I saw two small smokestacks sticking up, and looking down saw a little boat.
I poured in a beakerful of water, and the whole thing exploded and threw a lot of it into my eyes.
We learned a great deal.
Reference has already been made to the callers upon Edison; and to give simply the names of persons of distinction would fill many pages of this record.
"While at the Exposition I visited the Opera-House.
I think it was five and one-half inches.
Often he is in the highest spirits, with all the spontaneity of youth, and again he is depressed, moody, and violently angry.
For protection he varies the number of his suits of underclothing, sometimes wearing three or four sets, according to the thermometer.
It was suggested that the secret of it might be that he did not live in the past, but was always looking forward to a greater future, to which he replied: "Yes, that's it.
She spoke very good English.
How can such a trait--and scores of similar experiences could be given--be explained except by the fact that, evidently, he felt the need of special schooling in industry--that under no circumstances must he allow a thought of indolence to enter his mind?
I seldom went to dinners.
There were only three or four could beat it.
Another and second characteristic of Edison's personality contributing so strongly to his achievements is an intense, not to say courageous, optimism in which no thought of failure can enter, an optimism born of self-confidence, and becoming--after forty or fifty years of experience more and more a sense of certainty in the accomplishment of success.
One of the ladies had a little poodle led by a string.
People who come in contact with him and who may have occasion to oppose his views, may leave with the impression that he is hot-tempered; nothing could be further from the truth.
The old man said to him, one day: 'Let's run up-stairs.' Bergmann agreed and ran up.
In connection with this a gentleman came to me a number of years afterward, and I got out a part of some plans for him.
What other factors are there to be taken into consideration to explain this phenomenon?
Finally I made him a promise that I would go to his country house at Foot's Cray, near London.
"After years of watching the processes of nature," he says, "I can no more doubt the existence of an Intelligence that is running things than I do of the existence of myself.
I waited awhile to see what was going to occur, and then went into the smoking-compartment.
Sounds of all kinds and varieties were heard in every direction. They were all sick.
Power was supplied from a fifty-horse-power engine to other tenants on the several floors.
He did so very conscientiously, and it was an interesting experience, for he was kept busy answering Mr. Edison's numerous questions.
I put the large bulk of it in three filters, and after it had been washed and all the water had come through the filter, I opened the three filters and laid them on a hot steam plate to dry with the stuff.
So I went there, and spent two or three days telling him stories.
Among the more distinguished visitors of the electric-lighting period was President Diaz, with whom Edison became quite intimate.
When they got there Bergmann was all done up, but my father never showed a sign of it.
This shop was very successful both scientifically and financially.
At Jersey City a poker game was started by one of the delegates.
At present we want engineers, industrial men, good business-like managers, and railroad men." It is hardly to be marvelled at that such views should elicit warm protest, summed up in the comment: "Mr.
We had one of those celebrated dinners that only Mr. Childs could give, and I heard speeches from Charles Francis Adams and different people.
Four instances of personal danger may be noted in his own language: "When I started at Menlo, I had an electric furnace for welding rare metals that I did not know about very clearly.
One day Epstein appeared and said: 'Good-morning, Mr. Bergmann, have you any chips to-day?' 'No,' said Bergmann, 'I have none.' 'That's strange, Mr. Bergmann; won't you look?' No, he wouldn't look; he knew he had none.
Then he said: 'Well, Epstein, good-bye, I've got to go down to Wall Street.' Epstein and his assistant then attempted to lift the boxes to carry them out, but couldn't; and then discovered that calculations as to quantity had been thrown out because the boxes had all been screwed down to the floor and mostly filled with boards with a veneer of brass chips.
One need not wonder at Edison's reminiscent remark that, "In any trade any of my 'boys' made with Bergmann he always got the best of them, no matter what it was.
Edison says: "I get a suit that fits me; then I compel the tailors to use that as a jig or pattern or blue-print to make others by.
"Bergmann came to work for me as a boy," says Edison.
If one could divorce Edison from the idea of work, and could regard him separate and apart from his embodiment as an inventor and man of science, it might truly be asserted that his temperament is essentially mercurial.
Edison has no opinion to offer as an expert on art, but has his own standard of taste: "Of course I visited the Louvre and saw the Old Masters, which I could not enjoy.
I made about a pound of it.
We had the private car of Mr. Roberts, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
I did not care about eating, and did not go to the restaurant, but my family did.
To stop meant not only to pocket a great loss already incurred, facing a dark and uncertain future, but to most men animated by ordinary human feelings, it meant more than anything else, an injury to personal pride.
After we got in, the ore did come down and there were fourteen tons of it above us.
We spent a day at Meudon, an old palace given by the government to Jansen, the astronomer. He occupied three rooms, and there were 300.
This did not altogether complete the European trip of 1889, for Edison wished to see Helmholtz.
For some little time past Mr. Edison had noticed that he was bothered somewhat in reading print, and I asked him to have an oculist give him reading-glasses.
As a general rule, Edison does not get genuinely angry at mistakes and other human weaknesses of his subordinates; at best he merely simulates anger.
When the oculist finished, he turned to me and said: 'I have been many years in the business, but have never seen an optic nerve like that of this gentleman.
At last Edison was overpersuaded, and, all dirty and perspiring as he was, received the medal rather than cause the visitor to come again. On one occasion, receiving a medal in New York, Edison forgot it on the ferry-boat and left it behind him.
"After leaving Paris we went to Berlin.
By-and-by the fun began.
The English Channel is a holy terror, all right, but it didn't affect me.
I have spilt lots of it, and while I have always felt it for a few days, it is quickly forgotten, and I turn again to the future." During another talk on kindred affairs it was suggested to Edison that, as he had worked so hard all his life, it was about time for him to think somewhat of the pleasures of travel and the social side of life.
Glenmont is a rather elaborate and florid building in Queen Anne English style, of brick, stone, and wooden beams showing on the exterior, with an abundance of gables and balconies.
This was played right through to Chicago without any sleep, but the boys didn't mind that.
Edison had a few minor corrections to make, probably not more than a dozen all told.
Ice, I say, doesn't, and it is rather lucky for us mortals, for if it had done so, we would all be dead.
Siemens would quickly, in German, explain the point, but Helmholtz could not see it, although he understood English, which Siemens could speak.
After I had been an hour at the play, the manager came around and asked me to go underneath the stage, as they were putting on a ballet of 300 girls, the finest ballet in Europe.
In this instance it was not occupied, and I was given the position in the prompter's seat, and saw the whole ballet at close range.
He had been bitten in the face, and was taking the treatment.
To which he replied laughingly: "I already have a schedule worked out.
One of the most conspicuous features of the room is a phonograph equipment on which the latest and best productions by the greatest singers and musicians can always be heard, but which Edison himself is everlastingly experimenting with, under the incurable delusion that this domestic retreat is but an extension of his laboratory.
When I came into the box, the orchestra played the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' and all the people in the house arose; whereupon I was very much embarrassed.
To my mind, the Old Masters are not art, and I suspect that many others are of the same opinion; and that their value is in their scarcity and in the variety of men with lots of money." Somewhat akin to this is a shrewd comment on one feature of the Exposition: "I spent several days in the Exposition at Paris.
Had the main body exploded there would have been nothing left of the laboratory I was working in.
But it was two weeks before I could see.
I never could understand that."
His own exhibit, made at a personal expense of over $100,000, covered several thousand square feet in the vast Machinery Hall, and was centred around a huge Edison lamp built of myriads of smaller lamps of the ordinary size.
This particular bit of acting was heightened by the fact that even in the coldest weather he wears thin summer clothes, generally acid-worn and more or less disreputable.
There were a lot of representatives from the East, and a private car was hired.
The dog was whirled around forty or fifty times, and a little flat piece of leather came out--and the ladies fainted."
I don't live with the past; I am living for to-day and to-morrow.
The lounging-room on the ground floor is more or less of an Edison museum, for it is littered with souvenirs from great people, and with mementos of travel, all related to some event or episode.
Little Bergmann hadn't much lung power.
At Heidelberg, my assistant, Mr. Wangemann, an accomplished German-American, showed the phonograph before the Association."
His simplicity as to clothes has already been described.
Any one having these capacities developed to the same extent, with the same opportunities for use, would probably accomplish as much.
That was 'within an inch of your life,' as they say.
And I attended the Luxembourg, with modern masters, which I enjoyed greatly.
His very first question was: 'Well, Colonel, how did you come out on that experiment?'--referring to some suggestions he had made at their last meeting a year before.
After a year or so, Bergmann got enough money to start a small shop in Wooster Street, New York, and it was at this shop that the first phonographs were made for sale.
It might appear strange on the surface, but one of the reasons that most influenced Edison to regrets in connection with the "big trade" of 1889 was that it separated him from his old friend and ally, Bergmann, who, on selling out, saw a great future for himself in Germany, went there, and realized it.
He showed me a gyroscope he had got up which made the incredible number of 4000 revolutions in a second.
I had gotten them immune to it.
'Oh!
But I kept mostly in the smoking-room.
At the bottom there was a space where two men could go through a hole; and then all the rest of the column was filled with baffle plates.
At one minute he stretched out his hand to support the head of the coffin and only hindered the bearers, at another he ran alongside and tried to find a place for himself there.
The distracted father began fussing about again, but the touching and impressive funeral prayers moved and roused his soul.
Kolya Krassotkin was the foremost of them.
"Captain, give over, a brave man must show fortitude," muttered Kolya.
"I say this in case we become bad," Alyosha went on, "but there's no reason why we should become bad, is there, boys?
The boys and Alyosha kept up with him.
I respect your brother!"
What's more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, 'Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!' Let him laugh to himself, that's no matter, a man often laughs at what's good and kind.
"They are going to have salmon, too," the boy who had discovered about Troy observed in a loud voice.
When they began filling up the grave, he suddenly pointed anxiously at the falling earth and began trying to say something, but no one could make out what he meant, and he stopped suddenly.
"Of course ...
There were tears in the eyes of many of them.
But her head still twitched like an automaton and with a face contorted with bitter grief she began, without a word, beating her breast with her fist.
"Where have you taken him away?
"But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horror!" said Alyosha.
"Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole school."
One of the boys observed that it was awkward for him to crumble the bread with the flowers in his hands and suggested he should give them to some one to hold for a time.
I haven't slept for the last four nights for thinking of it."
"That's a good thing," said Alyosha, "we must often take some."
The poor, crazy creature was bathed in noiseless tears, hiding her face in her hands.
People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.
If we all come together we shall remind them of everything again," Alyosha suggested.
"Yes, yes," the boys repeated enthusiastically.
I am always manly, but this is awful. Karamazov, if I am not keeping you, one question before you go in?"
The Speech At The Stone
Some one called to him to put on his hat as it was cold.
At the gate of the house Alyosha was met by the shouts of the boys, Ilusha's schoolfellows.
Nina had been pushed in her chair by the boys close up to the coffin.
"Perhaps he will.
It was an expensive one in the churchyard close to the church, Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it.
"Boys, we shall soon part.
"What an idea, bury him by an unholy stone, as though he had hanged himself!" the old landlady said sternly.
Well, and who has united us in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember all our lives?
Ilusha lay with his hands folded and his eyes closed in a blue coffin with a white frill round it.
A sudden impulse seemed to come into his soul.
And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don't meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by the bridge?
Alyosha went into the room.
"I won't give it to any one, I won't give you anything," Snegiryov cried callously.
At last they succeeded in persuading him to come away from the step, but suddenly he impulsively stretched out his hand and snatched a few flowers from the coffin.
"How glad I am you've come, Karamazov!" he cried, holding out his hand to Alyosha.
Ilusha's little bed is still there--"
The boys, seeing that the father would not leave the coffin and that it was time to carry it out, stood round it in a close circle and began to lift it up.
Don't be put out at our eating pancakes--it's a very old custom and there's something nice in that!" laughed Alyosha.
Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men's tears and at those people who say as Kolya did just now, 'I want to suffer for all men,' and may even jeer spitefully at such people.
"I was sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: 'Father, when my grave is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.' "
"Let them weep," he said to Kolya, "it's no use trying to comfort them just now.
His hands, crossed over his breast, looked particularly beautiful, as though chiseled in marble.
He seemed in a state of bewildered anxiety.
And so in the first place, we will remember him, boys, all our lives.
Let us come together, you and I, that will be enough, to spend an hour with them, with the mother and Nina.
"Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner.
I say that again.
I won't let him be carried out!"
How good life is when one does something good and just!"
I was unkind to mamma," he began exclaiming suddenly.
They carried the coffin past her.
But at that instant he saw in the corner, by the little bed, Ilusha's little boots, which the landlady had put tidily side by side.
Let us never forget him.
The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes upon him.
I could envy him!"
The boys were excited and they, too, wanted to say something, but they restrained themselves, looking with intentness and emotion at the speaker.
"Father will cry, be with father," Ilusha had told them as he lay dying, and the boys remembered it.
It was his habit to call Ilusha "old man," as a term of affection when he was alive.
"Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!" the boys cried in their ringing voices, with softened faces.
"That will be so, I understand you, Karamazov!" cried Kolya, with flashing eyes.
He instantly pulled it out and was reassured.
If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.
And now we go hand in hand."
"Mother, make the sign of the cross over him, give him your blessing, kiss him," Nina cried to her.
You are all dear to me, boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me!
"There's Ilusha's stone, under which they wanted to bury him."
"Well, let us go!
A flower fell on the snow and he rushed to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the loss of that flower.
During the prayer, "Like the Cherubim," he joined in the singing but did not go on to the end.
It was an old and rather poor church; many of the ikons were without settings; but such churches are the best for praying in.
"For ever!" the boys chimed in again.
"Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place."
"Father, give mother a flower!" said Nina, lifting her face wet with tears.
One can hear the singing in church and the deacon reads so plainly and verbally that it will reach him every time just as though it were read over his grave."
Hurrah for Karamazov!" Kolya cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his exclamation: "Hurrah for Karamazov!"
"Ilusha told me to, Ilusha," he explained at once to Alyosha.
Then he fell helpless on the snow as though he had been knocked down, and struggling, sobbing, and wailing, he began crying out, "Ilusha, old man, dear old man!" Alyosha and Kolya tried to make him get up, soothing and persuading him.
He scarcely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, and he would not look at any one, even at his crazy weeping wife, "mamma," who kept trying to stand on her crippled legs to get a nearer look at her dead boy.
"You'll spoil the flowers," said Alyosha, "and mamma is expecting them, she is sitting crying because you would not give her any before.
He'll be prayed for there.
"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?"
The boy flushed crimson but did not dare to reply.
But the boys instantly overtook him and caught hold of him on all sides.
Chapter III.
"Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!" said Kolya with enthusiasm.
It was a still, clear day, with a slight frost.
"Do you know, Karamazov," he dropped his voice so that no one could hear them, "I feel dreadfully sad, and if it were only possible to bring him back, I'd give anything in the world to do it."
Had we better come back here to-night? He'll be drunk, you know."
Gradually he seemed to sink into brooding and did not resist when the coffin was lifted up and carried to the grave.
"What do you think, Karamazov?
But I assure you, boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, 'No, I do wrong to laugh, for that's not a thing to laugh at.' "
But he flung the hat in the snow as though he were angry and kept repeating, "I won't have the hat, I won't have the hat." Smurov picked it up and carried it after him.
And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great misfortune--still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.
I should like to die for all humanity, and as for disgrace, I don't care about that--our names may perish.
The Southern vanguard could not assail such a powerful force, and before the night was over the whole Union army passed to the Northern side of the Rappahannock.
But Colonel Winchester shook his head.
"You wish then to be sure of the junction between our two armies before Lee and Jackson strike?"
The note of anxiety in his voice did not escape Dick.
"Shepard came in this morning.
Hear that booming ahead!
The sun now darkened and the clouds gathered heavily on the Western horizon.
Under cover of a great artillery fire Stuart's cavalry dashed into the ford, and drove off the infantry and a battery posted to defend it.
He stood up, rubbed his eyes and then looked in the direction whence came the cannonade.
"All Europe, eager to see the Union split, would then help the Confederacy in every possible manner.
Remember, Dick, my boy, that this republic is the hope of the world, and that we must save it."
Then came a silence and a great looking back and forth.
But the feeling of exultation soon passed and gave way wholly to chagrin.
Dick felt a mixture of chagrin and satisfaction as he crossed the river, chagrin that this great army should draw back, as McClellan's had been forced to draw back at the Seven Days, and satisfaction that they were safe for the time being and could prepare for a new start.
They have every reason to strike before the Army of the Potomac can come.
He remembered Colonel Winchester's words earlier in the day, and, as the darkness came, he began to wonder what Lee and Jackson were thinking.
It became evident that the regiment could not reach Sulphur Springs until far into the night, and, still full of alarms, he resolved to take a small detachment, chiefly of his staff, and ride forward at the utmost speed.
"I don't think so, but if they do we ought to beat them back.
They were retreating before an army not exceeding their own, in numbers, perhaps less.
"Then you lead us.
Things will turn loose to-night.
And these things would injure us in ways that we cannot afford.
"It's simple enough.
It was thrilling, awe-inspiring, but it made his heart miss a beat or two at the thought of the wounds and death to come, all the more terrible because those who fought together were of the same blood, and the same nation.
It was full of sinister omens.
He had become so much used to such sounds that he would have slept on had not the crashes been so irregular.
"It's well that we're showing vigilance," said Colonel Winchester to Dick.
"Mr. Shattuck," said Colonel Winchester, "how near do you think we can approach without being seen?"
As night came the thudding of cannon added to the tumult, and then the three boys saw the Rappahannock, a deep and wide stream flowing between high banks crested with timber.
But I guess them people have gone away.
They charged with so much impetuosity that Stuart's cavalry abandoned such dangerous ground.
Jackson with his forces was marching up his side of the Rappahannock and the great brain under the old slouch hat was working hard.
A West Virginian named Shattuck knew something of the country, and led them.
"They fire a great deal, but they don't make any dash for the stream.
"It will be done, sir," said Dick, almost in the tone of a young prophet.
Both he and the boys used their glasses and they distinctly saw the Southern masses.
The threatening armies stared at each other across the water, but throughout the afternoon they lay idle.
"I know the spirit of the men.
Nor was he one to underrate weather effects upon movements in war.
It gave us two chances, when we had but one before.
McClellan is landing his army at Aquia Creek, whence it can march in two days to a junction with us, when we would become overwhelming and irresistible. But I wish it didn't take so long to disembark an army!"
You've been out in my country."
He chose about twenty men, including Dick, Warner, Pennington, Sergeant Whitley, and another veteran who were mounted on the horses of junior officers left behind, and pressed forward with speed.
It means that a storm is coming. Anybody could tell that.
There had been a long drought, and at some points the Rappahannock could be forded, but not in the face of such a defence as the North here offered.
Dick, with his regiment, moved the next morning up the river.
"What is this place, Sulphur Springs?" asked Colonel Winchester of Shattuck.
Yet he was sure that Lee and Jackson would attempt to force a passage higher up, where the drought had made good fords.
"Yes, Mr. Pennington," he replied.
"I was out there a long time and I'd rather be there now fighting the Indians, instead of fighting our own people, although no other choice was left me.
The old monarchies would say that despite our superior numbers we're not able to maintain ourselves outside the defenses of Washington.
"Tell your sign, old weather sharp," said Warner.
They say that Stonewall Jackson never sleeps, and they make no mistake, when they call his infantry foot cavalry!"
He confided at last to his favorite aide his belief that what lay behind the cannonade was more important than the cannonade itself.
"You're right, Dick," said Colonel Winchester, bitter mortification showing in his tone.
Now follow softly, lads!
Then he went back to Colonel Winchester and his comrades, and waited patiently with them until evening.
Long after darkness came the firing continued between skirmishers across the stream, but finally it, too, waned and Dick was permitted to throw himself upon the ground and sleep with the sleeping thousands.
Then they triumphantly placed heavy lines of pickets about the ford on the Union side.
Besides, it is in accord with the character of their generals.
Oh, we might have known it!
He says that they are all flushed with confidence in their own courage and fighting powers and the ability of their leaders.
And we must meet them there, with my regiment only, if we can obtain no other men."
I've seen some terrible hurricanes on the plains, winds that would cut the earth as if it was done with a ploughshare, and these armies are going to be rained on mighty hard to-night."
They ought not to be hiding behind a river.
The evening was now at hand.
He believed that two such redoubtable commanders must have formed a plan by this time, and, perhaps in the end, it would be worth a hundred thousand men to know it.
"They must be sending a heavy force higher up the river to cross where there is no resistance.
Look there, in the southwest.
The night seemed portentous to him.
He had fallen into the habit of talking much and confidentially to the boy, because he liked and trusted him, and for another reason which to Dick was yet in the background.
It was a strange sight to Dick, one that is not looked upon often, two great armies gazing across a river at each other, and, sure to meet, sooner or later, in mortal combat.
No matter how many defeats are inflicted upon us by our own brethren we'll triumph in the end."
Dick went down into a little creek, emptying into the Rappahannock, and bathed his face and hands.
It seemed to the Union generals that they must defend the fords where the Southern army lay massed before them.
Couldn't General Pope retreat on Washington then, and, as they continued to follow us, we could turn and spring on them with both armies."
But, Dick, I'm afraid.
But can't we go a little faster, boys?"
Ahead of them Pope's army was crossing on the bridge and in boats, and masses of infantry supported by heavy batteries had turned to protect the crossing.
The hostile scouts and sharpshooters had become too vigilant.
"I'm afraid, sir," he said to Colonel Winchester, "that they're already across."
Dick was awakened next morning by the booming of cannon.
He divined at once that Colonel Winchester had that ford in mind, and he was glad to be with him on the march to it.
Meanwhile, Dick, my boy, every day's delay is a fresh card in our hand.
It cannot, it must not be any other way!"
In truth his division commander thought his purpose useless, but yielded to the insistence of Winchester who was known to be an officer of great merit.
Oh, if only the Army of the Potomac would come!
The firing, so far as he could determine, was merely to feel out or annoy the Northern army.
"Beat it!" he cried in a hoarse whisper.
"Oh, yes, I could, and I ought.
"Why not?" asked the man sharply.
No one of that group but Shirley could fully appreciate the ludicrous picture he made.
"Yes, Mr. Barnard, they got my note-book, but not the notes!
Hennie!
The man met her gaze for an instant, a flippant reply upon his lips, but checked it and dropping his eyes, was silent.
You will see, we shall not forget it!" he puffed as he rose with beads of perspiration on his brow.
"Buck up, girlie!" he growled.
But she tried to look a bit brighter.
"I say, pard!
And say!
Then, quietly, Graham led her away to his car with Barnard and the detectives following.
We'll just take out the leaves.
Bring in them things from the cupboard and let's get to work."
"It wouldn't be your fault.
You certainly had your nerve!"
It was then she heard Graham's voice calling:
"You shut up or I'll shoot you!" he said with an oath.
"Oh, my dear Miss Hollister!
"Your boss would never know it got out through you."
Well, anyhow, buck up, and let's have some tea.
The man frowned when she declined to come to supper, but a moment later stumbled awkwardly across the room with a slopping cup of coffee and set it down beside her.
Won't you please get them out, for I'm afraid I can't hold them on any longer, my feet ache so!"
"She's rounded up the whole gang for us, and that's more than anybody else has been able to do yet!
"Shirley!
See?
"Drink that and you'll feel better."
"Shut up!
"You were--as fine as you could be to me under the circumstances, I suppose!
You couldn't have helped it!"
I guess you're the winner!
The man swore at her, grasped her arm till he hurt her and she cried out.
I'm coming!"
Joe stood between two policemen with a rope bound about his body spirally, and the boy Hennie, also bound, beside his fallen bicycle, turned his ferret eyes from side to side as if he hoped even yet to escape.
I bet they heard her singin'!
Girlie!
"Thank you," she said, wearily, "but that wouldn't do me any good."
There was a pain too intense, a memory too dark, associated with the events of that period.
He knew himself to be the wretch and outcast he was; and, looking back at his start in life, he could but remember how different his career might have been had he so chosen.
He must be ill.
The difference in their social position made no difference to her; and no more frequent or more welcome guests were seen at Raynham than Captain Duncombe, his daughter and son-in-law, and honest Joyce Harker.
She had loved him but little, whose only virtue was that he had loved her much.
In those hours the slow tears made furrows in his haggard cheeks--the tears of remorse, vain repentance, that came too late for earth; but not, perhaps, utterly too late for heaven, since, even for this last and worst of sinners, there might be mercy.
Victor Carrington's mother retired into a convent, and was probably as happy as she had ever been.
He was almost jealous of Rosamond Jernam, when he found how great a hold she had obtained on the heart of her charge; but his jealousy was mingled with gratitude, and he joined Lady Eversleigh in testifying his friendship for the tender-hearted woman who had protected and cherished the heiress of Raynham in the hour of her desolation.
"I have not seen him to-day nor yesterday, nor for many days.
Yes, Anna was at peace; surrounded by friends; delighted day by day to watch the budding loveliness, the sportive grace of Gertrude Eversleigh, the idolized heiress of Raynham.
If he has failed in all else, he has succeeded at least in this: he has ruined the happiness of two lives.
"Her husband left her magnificent estates, and an enormous amount of funded property; and now a mother drops down from the skies for her benefit--a mother who is reported to be almost as rich as herself."
But now he found himself quite alone; and there was no voice to promise future triumph.
But in the heart of Douglas Dale there is an empty place which can never be filled upon earth.
During the brief interval of each day in which he was sober, Sir Reginald Eversleigh was wont to reflect upon the past.
Thus his life passed--a changeless routine, unbroken by one bright interval, one friendly visit, one sign or token to show that there was any link between this lonely wretch and the rest of humanity.
As Lady Eversleigh paced the terraces of an Italian garden, her mother by her side, with Gertrude clinging to her side; as she looked out over the vast domain which owned her as mistress--it might seem that fortune had lavished her fairest gifts into the lap of her who had been once a friendless stranger, singing in the taverns of Wapping.
That subject was tacitly avoided by both.
Lady Eversleigh's widowhood, Douglas Dale's lonely life, are the work of Victor Carrington--a work not to be undone upon this earth.
And so the story ends.
Before his departure he saw Lady Eversleigh and her mother, and established with them a bond of friendship as close as that of their kin.
Douglas Dale could not attend that inquest.
Had he any consciousness of his degradation?
He knew that the game of life had been played to the last card, and that it was lost.
Form and features, complexion and expression, were alike degraded.
Is it not the fate of the innocent to suffer in this life for the sins of the wicked?
Yes; that was the undying vulture which preyed upon his entrails--the consuming fire that was never quenched.
He was stricken down with fever; the fate of the woman he had so loved, so unjustly suspected, nearly cost him his life, and when he recovered sufficiently, he left England, not to return for three years.
Had not Paulina been "weary, and heavy laden," bowed down by the burden of a false accusation, friendless, hopeless, from her very cradle?
Instead of this, he heard of her exaltation, and he hated her with an intense hatred which was almost childish in its purposeless fury.
Here he could afford to buy brandy, for at that date brandy was much cheaper in France than it is now.
"That woman's wealth must be boundless," exclaimed aristocratic dowagers, for whom the grip of poverty's bony fingers had been tight and cruel.
A trap-door in the roof, which he had been accustomed to open for the ventilation of his garret, had been closed by the wind, and the baronet had passed unconsciously from sleep to death.
He thought of the illimitable Mercy, and he dared to hope for the day in which he should meet her he loved "Beyond the Veil."
Lady Eversleigh had a particular regard for the man who had so true and faithful a heart, and she would often talk to him; but she never mentioned the subject of that miserable night on which he had seen her down at Wapping.
Amongst those who envied Lady Eversleigh's good fortune, there was none whose envy was so bitter as that of her husband's disappointed nephew, Sir Reginald.
"Her heart, doctor!" she exclaimed.
But she'll come out straight.
"'Good'--a delicate girl!"
"Harry!" gasped Mrs. Kendall.
From the very nature of the case it was, of necessity, a period of adjustment; and to Mrs. Kendall's consternation there was every indication of friction, if not disaster.
"Yes, I know, but that didn't seem to occur to Margaret," returned Mrs. Kendall.
Kendall shivered visibly--"and Margaret was just delivering herself of a final blow that sent the great bully off blubbering."
Nor was this all.
Not only the cakes and the tidies, however, gave Mrs. Kendall food for thought during those first few days after Margaret's return.
Now that she has told me of them, she confidently looks to me to do my obvious duty at once."
Kendall went for advice.
"What shall I do?" she asked anxiously.
But there!
"I have seen it myself.
At heart she's so gentle and--why, what"--he broke off with an unspoken question, his eyes widely opened at the change that had come to her face.
She was not ungrateful, certainly, but she was overwhelmed.
"Oh, nothing," returned Mrs. Kendall, almost despairingly, "only if you'd seen Joe Bagley yesterday morning I'm afraid you'd have changed your opinion of her gentleness.
"The child is so good and loving," she went on a little hurriedly, "that it makes it all the harder--but I must do something.
You'll see.
"Good for her!"--it was an involuntary tribute, straight from the heart.
what's past is past, and there ain't no use frettin' over it.
To be lost at five years of age in a great city, to be snatched from wealth, happiness, and a loving mother's arms, only to be thrust instantly into poverty, misery, and loneliness; and then to be, after four long years, suddenly returned--no wonder Houghtonsville held its breath and questioned if it all indeed were true.
"I know, I know," nodded the man.
For four years now her young daughter had been away from her tender care and influence; and for only one of those four years--the last--had she come under the influence of any sort of refinement or culture, and then under only such as a city missionary and an overworked schoolteacher could afford, supplemented by the two trips to Mont-Lawn.
"But, there!
Bit by bit the little girl's history was related in every house in town; and many a woman--and some men--wept over the tale of how the little fingers had sewed on buttons in the attic sweat shop, and pasted bags in the ill-smelling cellar.
"But are you going to do nothing but that all the time--just teach those dreadful creatures, and--and live there?"
A week later Margaret learned that Rosy and Katy were out of school. When she looked them up she found them at work in the mills.
You should hear Patty say it really to appreciate it.
Margaret's task was not an easy one.
Margaret smiled, but she made no comment--it was enough to fight present battles without trying to win future ones.
This state of affairs she could not seem to remedy, however, in spite of her earnest efforts.
In due time the Mill House, as Margaret called her new home, was ready for occupancy, and the family moved in.
"Oh, but I thought you weren't going to New York," laughed Margaret. "Besides--I'm going with Patty."
"Oh, that will be fine--lovely!
"Margaret, how can you--laugh!"
"Certainly not," declared Margaret, with a bright smile.
Egypt had seemed desirable, but if Margaret was going to New York, that altered the case.
His shoulders straightened.
They must go to school--get an education."
The parents, in many cases, were indifferent, and the children more so.
"I understand all that, and I'll help about that part.
This matter of the school question was a great puzzle to Margaret.
The mill people, however, were not the only ones that learned something during the next few months.
"Never mind," said Margaret, "we shall grow.
"But that is regular settlement work," sighed Mrs. Merideth.
It is just one of the mill houses."
"But thar ain't a boss but what said if I'd got kids I might send them along.
"It is not so dreadful at all," Margaret had assured them.
Why didn't you tell us?
They would go to New York, not Egypt.
"What absurd names!" Mrs. Merideth spoke sharply.
"Ugh!" shuddered Mrs. Merideth.
"They got ter eat--first," he said.
"To New York?" Mrs. Merideth sat up suddenly, her face alight.
"I have taken a large house not far from the mills, and I am having it papered and painted and put into very comfortable shape.
The household at Hilcrest did not break up as early as usual that year. A few days were consumed in horrified remonstrances and tearful pleadings on the part of Mrs. Merideth and Ned when Margaret's plans became known.
Very early in her efforts she had sought out the public school-teachers, and asked their help and advice.
You'll see!"
And the "Mill House" it was from that day.
"Well, perhaps it is. Anyway, I hope that just the presence of one clean, beautiful home among them will do some good.
Even the most urgent entreaties on the part of Margaret failed to start the Spencers on their trip, and not until she finally threatened to make the first move herself and go down to the town, did they consent to go.
Patty and her family will live with me, and we are going to open classes in simple little things that will help toward better living."
Conscious that there must be a school law, Margaret went vigorously to work to find and enforce it.
"I would rather wait until you go, as you seem so worried about the 'break,' as you insist upon calling it; but if you won't, why I must, that is all.
A sudden flash came into the man's eyes.
Sometimes it was ambition.
"Yes, yes, I know," interposed Margaret, eagerly.
Both she and her house were looked upon with suspicion, and she had some trouble in finding the two or three teachers of just the right sort to help her.
She told herself, however, that all this was well and good; and she ate the supper and laid herself down upon the hard bed with an exaltation that rendered her oblivious to taste and feeling.
Some of the children in the mills, indeed, were there solely--according to the parents' version--because they could not "get on" in school.
Poor dear, you'll need a rest all right, I'm thinking, and we'll keep you just as long as we can, too." With lightning rapidity Mrs. Merideth had changed their plans--in her mind.
She was appalled at the number of children who appeared scarcely to understand that there was such a thing as school.
"With Patty!"
There were other phases, too.
I mean to try it, at all events."
"Patty doesn't think them absurd," laughed Margaret.
For about a week she heard nothing.
She had to draw back to avoid him, and the man, perceiving at once how things were, closed the door the moment he entered, and stood with his back against it.
He would not have succeeded had not Mewks met her in the doorway full in the face.
When Mr. Redmain ended, she stood silent.
One morning, as Mary sat at her piano, Mewks was shown into the room. He brought the request from his master that she would go to him; he wanted particularly to see her.
Thoroughly capable of managing her features, her anxiety was sufficient nevertheless to deprive her of power over her complexion, and she entered the room with the pallor peculiar to the dark-skinned.
Sepia had been told that Galofta was in the study, and therefore received the summons thither--a thing that had never happened before--with the greater alarm.
At all of them Mr. Redmain laughed heartily, and applauded their cleverness extravagantly, though some of them were downright swindling.
"I don't know what you mean, sir.
She turned, and knocked.
What will Cousin Hesper say?"
The latter made a slight apology for having sent for him to his study--claiming the privilege, he said, of an invalid, who could not for a time have the pleasure of meeting him either at the club or at his wife's parties.
"Count Galofta," said Mr. Redmain in reply, "has just been telling me a curious story of how a certain rascal got possession of a valuable jewel from a lady with whom he pretended to be in love, and I thought the opportunity a good one for showing you a strange discovery I have made with regard to the sapphire Mrs. Redmain missed for so long.
As she left the house she burst into tears; and the fact Mewks carried to his master.
I would not have my reader take Sepia for an accomplice in the robbery. Even Mr. Redmain did not believe that: she was much too prudent!
He was acquainted with many people of many different sorts, and had been to jewelers and pawnbrokers, gamblers and lodging-house keepers, and had learned some things to his purpose.
"Oh, rubbish!
She had no doubt he would do as he said; she knew Mr. Redmain would just enjoy selling her horses.
"We have had a sermon on the forgiveness of injuries, Mr. Redmain," she said.
The check I gave you yesterday will not last you long."
Do you imagine, madam, I have found you a hair worse than I expected?"
"So you came to forgive me?" he said.
Hesper started up in a rage.
Mrs. Redmain carried the letter, with ill-concealed triumph, to her husband; nor did he conceal his annoyance.
You can best answer that question yourself."
"The money is my own, Mr. Redmain."
I will go myself a thousand times rather!--But will you not feel the want of pocket-money when you come to pay a rough cabman?
She had to show him half a score ere he was satisfied, declaring he would do it himself, if she could not make a better job of it.
"And Marston," she answered.
"You must write so as to make it possible to accept your offer."
We can not read each other's hearts."
They know better which side their bread is buttered."
"But you have done your best now--short of a Christian apology, which it would be folly to demand of you.
"You shall at least find me capable of a good deal.
"And what, pray, was your foolish ring compared to the girl's character?"
"But you have not yet opened a banking-account in your own name."
She had a week to think about it, and she would see!
"You must have behaved to her very cruelly," he said.
Why, you goose, if I send a telegram before you, they won't so much as open the door to you!
"You are not.
"Then we understand each other."
How was I to know?
"Well, I will accept the condescension--that is, if the terms of it are to my mind."
"Then you had better get into the habit; for I swear to you, madam, if you don't fetch that girl home within the week, I will, next Monday, discharge your coachman, and send every horse in the stable to Tattersall's!
But Mary lay awake at night, and thought of many things she might have said and done better when she was with Hesper, and would gladly have given herself another chance; but she could no longer flatter herself she would ever be of any real good to her.
"I do not know what you mean," she answered, scarcely raising her eyes from her novel--and spoke the truth, for she knew next to nothing of the Bible, while the Old Testament was all the literature Mr. Redmain was "up in."
"You really ought to consider before you utter such an awful threat!
During the interval, he took care not once to refer to his threat, for that would but weaken the impression of it, he knew.
"Oh, don't!" he cried, in a tone of pretended alarm.
"If you please."
"I will make no terms.
"You need not.
A man must be fair, even to his wife."
His pleasure was great, for he had succeeded in stinging the impenetrable.
"You must write and ask her."
But, as to her character, that of persons in her position is in constant peril.
"I will show you the letter I write."
"Not where there is no heart in the reader."
She said nothing, and her husband resumed:
"I understand, Mrs. Redmain," he began, "that you wish to bring the fate of Sodom upon the house."
However indifferent a woman may be to the opinion of her husband, he can nevertheless in general manage to make her uncomfortable enough if he chooses; and Mr. Redmain did choose now, in the event of her opposition to his wishes: when he set himself to do a thing, he hated defeat even more than he loved success.
She believed there was more hope of Mr. Redmain even.
But she could not at once give in.
They have to lay their account with that, and must get used to it.
The moment Mary was out of the study, he walked into his wife's boudoir, and shut the door behind him.
"You'll hear worse before long, if you keep on at this rate.
"Mr. Redmain, if you do not leave the room, I will."
"Of course, Mr. Redmain.
Good morning."
"You have taught me to believe you capable of anything."
Badly as he had himself behaved to Mary, he was now furious with his wife for having treated her so heartlessly that she could not return to her service; for he began to think she might be one to depend upon, and to desire her alliance in the matter of ousting Sepia from the confidence of his wife.
"I never took the trouble to imagine anything about you."
"You have turned out of it the only just person in it, and we shall all be in hell soon!"
"By Jove!" interrupted her husband, "it would have been more to the purpose if I, or poor Mary Marston, had had it; for I swear you put our souls in peril!"
Perhaps that will be taken into the account one day."
At length one was dispatched, received, and answered: Mary would not return.
I fear we have seen the last of her."--"And there was I," he said to himself, "for the first time in my life, actually beginning to fancy I had perhaps thrown salt upon the tail of that rare bird, an honest woman!
On the Sunday, after service, she knocked at his door, and, being admitted, bade him good morning, but with no very gracious air--as, indeed, he would have been the last to expect.
"We do not, Mr. Redmain; and, if this occurs again, I shall go to Durnmelling."
Marston may return when she pleases."
His presence there was enough to make her angry, but she took no notice of it.
He burst into a loud and almost merry laugh.
Just imagine, if you can, such an excruciating situation: a woman, her husband, and two men who used to be her husbands, all compelled to meet together and think of something to say!
We have quoted the old maxim, "Marry in haste and repent at leisure," and we suggested that parents and guardians should have the right to ask the young to wait before marriage, and make certain of the state of their hearts.
If any man or woman tries three times to find happiness in love, and fails each time, we have a right to assume that the fault must lie with that person, and not with the three partners.
I visited his home, and met his wife and two little children, and saw a man and woman living in domestic happiness.
He lays claim to extraordinary spiritual gifts, and uses the language of the highest idealism known.
In the first place, there are or may be children, and society should try to preserve for every child a home with a father and a mother in it.
I know another whose wife turned into an ultra-pious Catholic, and turned over the care of his domestic life to a priest.
In order to illustrate this problem, I will tell you about a certain man known to me.
There is in successful operation in Switzerland a wise and sane divorce law, based upon common sense and not upon superstition.
Except for grave offenses, such as adultery, insanity, crime or venereal disease, I do not think that anyone should receive a divorce in less than six months, nor do I think that any personal right is contravened by the imposing of such a delay.
Now, I will assert it as a mathematical certainty that a considerable percentage of marriages must fail.
But I think we might begin by refusing to let any man or woman have more than two divorces in one lifetime, in any state or part of the world.
Second, there are property rights, of which every marriage is a tangle, and the settlement of which the law should always oversee.
We can perform what to our ignorant ancestors would have seemed to be miracles; we can actually make all sorts of new plants, which will continue to breed their own kind, and survive forever if we give them proper care.
Therefore it follows that "strict" divorce laws, such as the clerical propaganda urges upon us, are in reality laws for the promotion of fornication and prostitution.
In other words, Luther Burbank has shown us that we can "change plant nature."
Who does not know the man who masters life and becomes a vital force, while his wife remains dull and empty?
(Discusses the circumstances under which society has the right to forbid divorce, or to impose limitations upon it.)
They know this because God has told them so, and in the name of God they seek to keep people tied in sex unions which have come to mean loathing instead of love.
There lives in California a student of plant life, who has shown us what we can do, not by magic or by superhuman efforts, but simply by loving plants, by watching them ceaselessly, understanding their ways, and guiding their sex-life to our own purposes.
At present the great mass of the public has sympathy for the law-breaker; just as, in old days, the peasants could not help admiring the outlaw who resisted unjust land laws and robbed the rich, or as today, under the capitalist regime, we can not withhold our sympathy from political prisoners, even though they have committed acts of violence which we deplore.
I would not say that they should choose to be intimate friends--though even that may be possible occasionally.
I know, because I have seen it happen.
This particular man happens to call himself a "radical"; but I could tell you of similar men in the highest social circles, or in the political world, the theatrical world, the "sporting" world; they are in every rank of life, and are just as definitely and certainly menaces to human welfare and progress as pirates on the high seas or highwaymen on the road.
For ten years or so I used to see him about once in six months, and invariably he had a new woman, a young girl of fine character, who had been ensnared by him, and was in the agonizing process of discovering his moral and mental derangement.
Also we are coming to take what we believe with more seriousness; the intellectual life means more and more to us, and it becomes harder and harder for us to find sexual and domestic happiness with a partner who does not share our convictions, but, on the contrary, may be contributing to the campaign funds of the opposition party.
He gives them advice about their disagreement, and sends them away for three months to think it over.
THE PROBLEM OF DIVORCE
THE RESTRICTION OF DIVORCE
I cite this story because it is a perfect illustration of the extent to which the "divorce problem" is a problem of our lack of sense. Mrs. Wharton will, I fear, consider me a very vulgar person if I assert that there is absolutely no reason whatever why any of those four people in her story should have had a moment's discomfort of mind, except that they thought there was.
We have shown elsewhere how genius multiplies to infinity the joy and power of life by means of the arts; and one of the greatest of the arts is the art of love.
She ought in common sense to have broken the engagement; but she was in love, and she married, as many another fool woman does, with the idea of "reforming" the man.
When we refuse divorce under such circumstances we are not fostering marriage, as we fondly imagine; we are really fostering adultery.
But it is a fact that intellectual convictions are the raw material out of which characters and lives are made, and it is inevitable that some characters and lives that fit quite well at twenty should fit very badly at thirty or forty.
To my knowledge he was three times married in six years, and each time he deserted the woman, and forced her to divorce him, and to take care of herself, and in one case of a child.
She failed, and was utterly and unspeakably wretched.
We clear out foul-smelling weeds from our garden, because we wish to raise beautiful flowers and useful herbs therein.
A couple wish to break their marriage, and they go before a judge, and in private session, as to a friendly adviser, they tell their troubles.
It seems to me that society has the same right to protect love against extreme outrage, as it has to forbid indecent exposure of the person on the street.
You will hear sermons and read newspaper editorials about the "divorce evil," and you will find that to the preacher or editor this "evil" consists of the fact that more and more people are refusing to stay unhappily married.
There is a short story by Edith Wharton, in which the "divorce evil" is exhibited to us in its naked horror; the story called "The Other Two," in the volume "The Descent of Man." A society woman has been divorced twice and married three times, and by an ingenious set of circumstances the woman and all three of the men are brought into the same drawing-room at the same time.
(Defends divorce as a protection to monogamous love, and one of the means of preventing infidelity and prostitution.)
And finally, there is the respect which all men and women owe to love.
Yet there was absolutely nothing in the law to place restraint upon this man; he could wander from state to state, or to the other side of the world, preying upon lovely young girls wherever he went.
The man had also two grown sons, and after a few days he remarked that he would like me to meet the mother of these young men.
I know another man, a conservative capitalist of narrow and aggressive temper, whose wife turned into an ardent Bolshevik.
In both cases, the parties directly interested have the right to decide their own fate, but the rest of the world requires them to think carefully about it, and to listen to counsel.
In addition, he had begotten one child out of marriage, and left the mother and child to starve.
Third, there is the question of venereal disease, which society has an unquestionable right to keep down, by every reasonable restriction upon sexual promiscuity.
This lady had been the writer's wife for ten years or so, and there had been a terrible uproar when they voluntarily parted.
Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest language possible.
There will be, among others, the great American tired business man.
Then, being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools.
What is life, and how does it come to be?
No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.
A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read?
He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is, to begin with the great fundamental questions.
INTRODUCTORY
And then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who say, "Oh, shucks!
A man is unable to make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women?
The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way.
A man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to do about it?
A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast?
As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes.
It is not only in the class-room and the schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin.
He wrestles with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the American perfect lady.
If you really believe that, you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively little concerned about the success or failure of your business.
Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws?
There are several ways for such a book to begin.
And can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing? Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we believe what we are told?
Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness?
What am I anyhow?
Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange thing this life is!
Of these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to date.
Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly.
Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and how shall we be punished?
What does it owe us, and what do we owe to it?
I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing." You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the baseball page.
Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble?
There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year, asking him questions, some of them of the strangest.
What does it mean, and what have we to do with it? Are we its masters or its slaves?
It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches.
You do not refuse to engage in the automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are words of four syllables.
Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog.
Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and what is your place in it.
A large order, as the boys phrase it!
For the present book the following claims may be made.
Where do I come from, and what is going to become of me?
It might begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.
Finally, it is a kind book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of your life.
The things they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend.
Finally, he thought for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself.
A step startled her, and looking up she saw her brother coming down the path with folded arms, bent head, and the absent air of one absorbed in deep thought.
She is all I want for my son; and I don't mean to lose the dear, brave creature if I can help it.
Was it wise and kind to ask him to wait, to bind him by any promise, or even to put into words the love and honour she felt for him?
Now, Jack, I'm fond of you, and want to help; it's so interesting--all these lovers and weddings and things, and we ought to have our share.
'I'm so glad his choice suits you, mother, and he is spared the saddest sort of disappointment.'
'Oh, well, there are various ways, you know.
'Bless my soul! the Deacon really meant business last summer and never told me.
The kind boy thinks it would make me unhappy.
'You got it there, Doll.
Better not try to fence with these superior girls.
'So she will be, and I hope they will find it out.
'I've got it! perfectly lovely!
He leaned back all weak and hiccoughy, and shook his finger at the Butterfly and said, 'O great wizard, what is the sense of returning to me my Palace if at the same time you slay me with mirth!'
We were living peacefully in our golden palace, as is our custom, when upon a sudden the Palace disappeared, and we were left sitting in a thick and noisome darkness; and it thundered, and Djinns and Afrits moved about in the darkness!
That is our trouble, O Head Queen, and we are most extremely troubled on account of that trouble, for it was a troublesome trouble, unlike any trouble we have known.'
Stamp!
The Djinns jerked the Palace and the gardens a thousand miles into the air: there was a most awful thunder-clap, and everything grew inky-black.
'I promised Suleiman-bin-Daoud that I wouldn't,' said the Butterfly, 'and I don't want to break my promise.'
Away flew the Butterfly to his wife, who was crying, 'I dare you to do it!
So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.
It was I who told the Butterfly's Wife to ask the Butterfly to stamp, because I hoped that for the sake of the jest my Lord would make some great magic and that the Queens would see it and be frightened.' And she told him what the Queens had said and seen and thought.
If it pleases my husband to believe that I believe he can make Suleiman-bin-Daoud's Palace disappear by stamping his foot, I'm sure I don't care.
Once he tried to feed all the animals in all the world in one day, but when the food was ready an Animal came out of the deep sea and ate it up in three mouthfuls.
Ask him to stamp, and see what will happen.
So, when they quarrelled too much, he only walked by himself in one part of the beautiful Palace gardens and wished he had never been born.
I said that to quiet her.'
The Butterfly was nearly as frightened as his wife, and Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, 'Stamp again, little brother.
'Yes, give him back his Palace,' said the Butterfly's Wife, still flying about in the dark like a moth.
Go back to your wife, little brother, and let me hear what you say.'
The Butterfly's Wife fluttered about in the dark, crying, 'Oh, I'll be good!
No! Suleiman-bin-Daoud must be dead, and what we heard and saw was the earth thundering and darkening at the news.'
'Now, little brother,' he said, 'go back to your wife and stamp all you've a mind to.'
There was never a King like Solomon, Not since the world began; But Solomon talked to a butterfly As a man would talk to a man.
He'll forget all about it to-morrow.'
Then they put their veils over their heads, and they put their hands over their mouths, and they tiptoed back to the Palace most mousy-quiet.
Tell me, therefore, O my Lady and Heart of my Heart, how did you come to be so wise?' And Balkis the Queen, beautiful and tall, looked up into Suleiman-bin-Daoud's eyes and put her head a little on one side, just like the Butterfly, and said, 'First, O my Lord, because I loved you; and secondly, O my Lord, because I know what women-folk are.'
They stood on the marble steps one hundred abreast and shouted, 'What is our trouble?
But by means of your wisdom I made the magic for the sake of a jest and for the sake of a little Butterfly, and--behold--it has also delivered me from the vexations of my vexatious wives!
It is the story of the Butterfly that Stamped.
The sun shone on the dark-green orange leaves; the fountains played among the pink Egyptian lilies; the birds went on singing, and the Butterfly's Wife lay on her side under the camphor-tree waggling her wings and panting, 'Oh, I'll be good!
'Slaves,' said Suleiman-bin-Daoud, 'when this gentleman on my finger' (that was where the impudent Butterfly was sitting) 'stamps his left front forefoot you will make my Palace and these gardens disappear in a clap of thunder.
Away flew the Butterfly's Wife to her husband, and in five minutes they were quarrelling worse than ever.
'I should very much like to see it done.
Stamp!
I dare you to do it!
Presently two Butterflies flew under the tree, quarrelling.
Then Suleiman-bin-Daoud rose up from his seat under the camphor-tree, and stretched his arms and rejoiced and said, 'O my Lady and Sweetener of my Days, know that if I had made a magic against my Queens for the sake of pride or anger, as I made that feast for all the animals, I should certainly have been put to shame.
Stamp!'
What made you tell that awful fib to your wife?--for doubtless she is your wife.'
Suppose you stamp now.'
Balkis--The tender and Most Lovely Balkis--said, 'O my Lord and Regent of my Existence, I hid behind the camphor-tree and saw it all.
We know what men-folk are like, don't we?
They never mean half they say.
When he stamps again you will bring them back carefully.'
'Gracious!' said his wife, and sat quite quiet; but Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed till the tears ran down his face at the impudence of the bad little Butterfly.
I'll be good!'
Give me back my Palace, most great magician.'
I dare you to do it,' she said. Stamp!
When he turned it twice, Fairies came down from the sky to do whatever he told them; and when he turned it three times, the very great angel Azrael of the Sword came dressed as a water-carrier, and told him the news of the three worlds, Above--Below--and Here.
Suleiman-bin-Daoud smiled in his beard and said, 'Yes, I know, little brother.
'Remember!' said the Butterfly.
The Butterfly's Wife looked at Balkis, and saw the most beautiful Queen's eyes shining like deep pools with starlight on them, and she picked up her courage with both wings and said, 'O Queen, be lovely for ever.
'I don't believe you one little bit,' said the Butterfly's Wife.
'It wouldn't matter if you did,' said his wife.
Presently the Butterfly, very hot and puffy, came whirling back under the shadow of the camphor-tree and said to Suleiman, 'She wants me to stamp!
Go in peace, little folk!' And he kissed them on the wings, and they flew away.
I'm so sorry I spoke.
Of course it doesn't make any difference to me--I'm used to this kind of thing--but as a favour to you and to Suleiman-bin-Daoud I don't mind putting things right.'
And Suleiman-bin-Daoud, still looking after the Butterflies where they played in the sunlight, said, 'O my Lady and Jewel of my Felicity, when did this happen?
She is my wife; and you know what wives are like.
Then up and spoke an Egyptian Queen--the daughter of a Pharoah--and she said, 'Our Palace cannot be plucked up by the roots like a leek for the sake of a little insect.
He just laughed with joy, and Balkis, on the other side of the tree, smiled because her own true love was so joyful.
She thought, 'If I am wise I can yet save my Lord from the persecutions of these quarrelsome Queens,' and she held out her finger and whispered softly to the Butterfly's Wife, 'Little woman, come here.' Up flew the Butterfly's Wife, very frightened, and clung to Balkis's white hand.
Don't you know that if I stamped with my foot all Suleiman-bin-Daoud's Palace and this garden here would immediately vanish in a clap of thunder.'
When he turned it once, Afrits and Djinns came Out of the earth to do whatever he told them.
And Balkis the Most Beautiful said, 'O my Lord and Treasure of my Soul, what will you do?'
'Remember what I can do if I stamp my foot.'
'You couldn't bend a blade of grass with your stamping.
Stamp now!
He understood what the beasts said, what the birds said, what the fishes said, and what the insects said.
Back flew the Butterfly to his wife, who was all of a twitter behind a leaf, and she said, 'He heard you!
Suleiman-bin-Daoud, sitting under the camphor-tree, heard every word of this, and he laughed as he had never laughed in his life before.
Just such an image those presented there; And as about such strongholds from their gates Unto the outer bank are little bridges,
Unto their cries my Teacher paused attentive; He turned his face towards me, and "Now wait," He said; "to these we should be courteous.
Was Manto, who made quest through many lands, Afterwards tarried there where I was born; Whereof I would thou list to me a little.
Passing that way the virgin pitiless Land in the middle of the fen descried, Untilled and naked of inhabitants;
And the good Master yet from off his haunch Deposed me not, till to the hole he brought me Of him who so lamented with his shanks.
The Guide said: "Now perforce must turn aside Our way a little, even to that beast Malevolent, that yonder coucheth him."
Inferno: Canto XVIII
Whereat the spirit writhed with both his feet, Then, sighing, with a voice of lamentation Said to me: "Then what wantest thou of me?
Valour and courtesy, say if they dwell Within our city, as they used to do, Or if they wholly have gone out of it;
And he, the scourged one, thought to hide himself, Lowering his face, but little it availed him; For said I: "Thou that castest down thine eyes,
Soon as the water doth begin to run, No more Benaco is it called, but Mincio, Far as Governo, where it falls in Po.
With colours more, groundwork or broidery Never in cloth did Tartars make nor Turks, Nor were such tissues by Arachne laid.
There tenderly he laid his burden down, Tenderly on the crag uneven and steep, That would have been hard passage for the goats:
Even such became I at those proffered words; But shame in me his menaces produced, Which maketh servant strong before good master.
For all upon one side towards the Castle Their faces have, and go unto St. Peter's; On the other side they go towards the Mountain.
And one of which, not many years ago, I broke for some one, who was drowning in it; Be this a seal all men to undeceive.
Thus, wheeling round, did every one his visage Direct to me, so that in opposite wise His neck and feet continual journey made.
Perchance indeed by violence of palsy Some one has been thus wholly turned awry; But I ne'er saw it, nor believe it can be.
But as I should have burned and baked myself, My terror overmastered my good will, Which made me greedy of embracing them.
There of necessity must fall whatever In bosom of Benaco cannot stay, And grows a river down through verdant pastures.
But come now, for already holds the confines Of both the hemispheres, and under Seville Touches the ocean-wave, Cain and the thorns,
The face was as the face of a just man, Its semblance outwardly was so benign, And of a serpent all the trunk beside.
He screamed to me: "Wherefore art thou so eager To look at me more than the other foul ones?" And I to him: "Because, if I remember,
Now was I where was heard the reverberation Of water falling into the next round, Like to that humming which the beehives make,
And after we are come to him, I see A little farther off upon the sand A people sitting near the hollow place.
To me less ample seemed they not, nor greater Than those that in my beautiful Saint John Are fashioned for the place of the baptisers,
Out of their eyes was gushing forth their woe; This way, that way, they helped them with their hands Now from the flames and now from the hot soil.
And he thereon, belabouring his pumpkin: "The flatteries have submerged me here below, Wherewith my tongue was never surfeited."
And he to me: "Unwillingly I tell it; But forces me thine utterance distinct, Which makes me recollect the ancient world.
And fearing lest my longer stay might vex Him who had warned me not to tarry long, Backward I turned me from those weary souls.
Ah me! how very cautious men should be With those who not alone behold the act, But with their wisdom look into the thoughts!
Still what a royal aspect he retains! That Jason is, who by his heart and cunning The Colchians of the Ram made destitute.
Nor Peter nor the rest asked of Matthias Silver or gold, when he by lot was chosen Unto the place the guilty soul had lost.
Our Lord demanded of Saint Peter first, Before he put the keys into his keeping? Truly he nothing asked but 'Follow me.'
Therefore I stayed my feet to make him out, And with me the sweet Guide came to a stand, And to my going somewhat back assented;
As champions stripped and oiled are wont to do, Watching for their advantage and their hold, Before they come to blows and thrusts between them,
Within this place, down shaken from the back Of Geryon, we found us; and the Poet Held to the left, and I moved on behind.
And while I sang to him such notes as these, Either that anger or that conscience stung him, He struggled violently with both his feet.
And whilst below there with mine eye I search, I saw one with his head so foul with ordure, It was not clear if he were clerk or layman.
I leave the gall, and go for the sweet fruits Promised to me by the veracious Leader; But to the centre first I needs must plunge."
And as I gazing round me come among them, Upon a yellow pouch I azure saw That had the face and posture of a lion.
Not an Amen could possibly be said So rapidly as they had disappeared; Wherefore the Master deemed best to depart.
Could I have been protected from the fire, Below I should have thrown myself among them, And think the Teacher would have suffered it;
Thence we heard people, who are making moan In the next Bolgia, snorting with their muzzles, And with their palms beating upon themselves
Not the sole Bolognese am I who weeps here; Nay, rather is this place so full of them, That not so many tongues to-day are taught
Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?
And people saw I through the circular valley, Silent and weeping, coming at the pace Which in this world the Litanies assume.
The men, thereafter, who were scattered round, Collected in that place, which was made strong By the lagoon it had on every side;
Which is above called Acquacheta, ere It down descendeth into its low bed, And at Forli is vacant of that name,
He who shall bring the satchel with three goats;'" Then twisted he his mouth, and forth he thrust His tongue, like to an ox that licks its nose.
We had already on the following tomb Ascended to that portion of the crag Which o'er the middle of the moat hangs plumb.
Ye have made yourselves a god of gold and silver; And from the idolater how differ ye, Save that he one, and ye a hundred worship?
I saw upon the sides and on the bottom The livid stone with perforations filled, All of one size, and every one was round.
Onward he goeth, swimming slowly, slowly; Wheels and descends, but I perceive it only By wind upon my face and from below.
I heard already on the right the whirlpool Making a horrible crashing under us; Whence I thrust out my head with eyes cast downward.
I of your city am; and evermore Your labours and your honourable names I with affection have retraced and heard.
Inferno: Canto XVII
But longer I my feet already toast, And here have been in this way upside down, Than he will planted stay with reddened feet;
Then was I still more fearful of the abyss; Because I fires beheld, and heard laments, Whereat I, trembling, all the closer cling.
Even as the flame of unctuous things is wont To move upon the outer surface only, So likewise was it there from heel to point.
In this wise I exclaimed with face uplifted; And the three, taking that for my reply, Looked at each other, as one looks at truth.
But tell me of the people who are passing, If any one note-worthy thou beholdest, For only unto that my mind reverts."
Behold the wretched ones, who left the needle, The spool and rock, and made them fortune-tellers; They wrought their magic spells with herb and image.
The Evangelist you Pastors had in mind, When she who sitteth upon many waters To fornicate with kings by him was seen;
Nor did he tire to have me clasped to him; But bore me to the summit of the arch Which from the fourth dike to the fifth is passage.
Even as he returns who goeth down Sometimes to clear an anchor, which has grappled Reef, or aught else that in the sea is hidden,
For silver and for gold do prostitute, Now it behoves for you the trumpet sound, Because in this third Bolgia ye abide.
Two paws it had, hairy unto the armpits; The back, and breast, and both the sides it had Depicted o'er with nooses and with shields.
While I was going on, mine eyes by one Encountered were; and straight I said: "Already With sight of this one I am not unfed."
Even as the little vessel shoves from shore, Backward, still backward, so he thence withdrew; And when he wholly felt himself afloat,
There did he leave her pregnant and forlorn; Such sin unto such punishment condemns him, And also for Medea is vengeance done.
They built their city over those dead bones, And, after her who first the place selected, Mantua named it, without other omen.
I would make use of words more grievous still; Because your avarice afflicts the world, Trampling the good and lifting the depraved.
And yesternight the moon was round already; Thou shouldst remember well it did not harm thee From time to time within the forest deep."
Why dost leave the war?' And downward ceased he not to fall amain As far as Minos, who lays hold on all.
Even as the Romans, for the mighty host, The year of Jubilee, upon the bridge, Have chosen a mode to pass the people over;
Among the marbles white a cavern had For his abode; whence to behold the stars And sea, the view was not cut off from him.
Its people once within more crowded were, Ere the stupidity of Casalodi From Pinamonte had received deceit.
Behold Guido Bonatti, behold Asdente, Who now unto his leather and his thread Would fain have stuck, but he too late repents.
And, "If the misery of this soft place Bring in disdain ourselves and our entreaties," Began one, "and our aspect black and blistered,
There let thy conversation be concise; Till thou returnest I will speak with him, That he concede to us his stalwart shoulders."
By a thousand springs, I think, and more, is bathed, 'Twixt Garda and Val Camonica, Pennino, With water that grows stagnant in that lake.
Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, the President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wrote:
He seemed to acquiesce in this view, and reminded me that the women had been unmolested at the White House gates for over five months, adding that he had even ordered the head usher to invite the women on cold days to come into the White House and warm themselves and have coffee.
I observed that although we might not agree with the "manners" of picketing, citizens had a right to petition the President or any other official of the government for a redress of grievances.
You sacrifice nothing by my resignation.
It will hearten the mothers of the nation, eliminate a just grievance, and turn the devoted energies of brilliant women to a more hearty support of the Government in this crisis.
Mrs. James Lees Laidlaw, Vice Chairman of the New York Suffrage Party, said:
I told you that I found your strength with women voters lay in the fact that you had with great patience and statesmanship kept this country out of the European war.
The subject of the creation of a committee on suffrage was almost entirely forgotten.
His sacrifice lightened ours.
I was in the midst of these preparations for appeal the next day when I learned to my surprise that the President had pardoned the women.
I told Mr. Wilson everything I had witnessed from the time we saw the suffragists arrested in front of the White House to their sentence in the police court.
September 7, 1917.
My reply to this was, "With all respect for you, Mr. President, my explanation to the public will not be as difficult as yours, if I am compelled to remind the public that you have appointed to office and can remove all the important officials of the city of Washington."
Frank P. Walsh, Amos Pinchot, Frederic C. Howe, J. A. H. Hopkins, Allen McCurdy and I were present throughout the trial of the sixteen women in July.
It, therefore, now becomes my profound obligation actively to keep my promise to the women of the West.
I, therefore, accept your resignation, to take effect as you have wished.
But I think it is high time that men in this generation, at some cost to themselves, stood up to battle for the national enfranchisement of American women.
He had known and supported the President from the beginning of the President's political career.
It yielded on a point of machinery.
Mr. Malone has consented to tell for the first time, in this record of the militant campaign, what happened at his memorable interview with President Wilson in July, 1917, an interview which he followed up two months later with his resignation as Collector of the Port of New York.
I have not approved all the methods recently adopted by women in pursuit of their political liberty; yet, Mr. President, the Committee on Suffrage of the United States Senate was formed in 1883, when I was one year old; this same federal
"The manhandling of the women by the police was outrageous and the entire trial (before a judge of your own appointment) was a perversion of justice," I said.
Alice Stone Blackwell, the daughter of Lucy Stone, herself a pioneer suffrage leader and editor, wrote to Mr. Malone:
After a most careful re-reading of my letter, I am unable to understand how you could judge that any discussion by you of my reasons for resigning would not be acceptable to me since my letter was an appeal to you on specific grounds for action now by the Administration on the Federal Suffrage amendment.
Mr. Meeker of Missouri, Democrat, protested against Congress "yielding to the nagging of a certain group."
I called a taxicab, drove direct to the executive offices and met him.
In more than twenty states it is a practical impossibility to amend the state constitutions; so the women of those States can only be enfranchised by the passage of the federal suffrage amendment.
You ask if I am going to sacrifice you.
"Mr.
The President's answer has never before been published:
The Administration Yields
"If the situation is as you describe it, it is shocking," said the President'.
The very idea was appalling to Representative Stafford of Wisconsin, anti-suffrage Republican, who joined in the Democratic protests.
THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON
The incident was closed.
It is no small sacrifice now for me, as a member of your Administration, to sever our political relationship.
Mr. Malone called to the attention of the nation the true cause of the obstruction and suppression.
Throughout those states, and particularly in California, which ultimately decided the election by the votes of women, the women voters were urged to support you, even though Judge Hughes had already declared for the federal suffrage amendment, because you and your party, through liberal leadership, were more likely nationally to enfranchise the rest of the women of the country than were your opponents.
"The picketing seems to me a very silly business, and I am sure it is doing the cause harm instead of good; but the picketers are being shamefully and illegally treated, and it is a thousand pities, for President Wilson's own sake, that he ever allowed the Washington authorities to enter on this course of persecution.
Representative Volstead, of Minnesota, Republican, came the closest of all to real courage in his protest:-
But the present policy of the Administration, in permitting splendid American women to be sent to jail in Washington, not for carrying offensive banners, not for picketing, but on the technical charge of obstructing traffic, is a denial even of their constitutional right to petition for, and demand the passage of, the federal suffrage amendment.
It was three o'clock.
"Do you mean to tell me," he said, "that you intend to resign, to repudiate me and my Administration and sacrifice me for your views on this suffrage question?"
But that your great weakness with women voters was that you had not taken any step throughout your entire Administration to urge the passage of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, which Mr. Hughes was advocating and which alone can enfranchise all the women of the nation.
He had not even consulted me as their attorney.
I reiterated to the President my earlier appeal that he assist suffrage as an urgent war measure and a necessary part of America's program for world democracy, to which the President replied: "The enfranchisement of women is not at all necessary to a program of democracy and I see nothing in
And if the women of the West voted to reelect you, I promised them that I would spend all my energy, at any sacrifice to myself, to get the present Democratic Administration to pass the federal suffrage amendment.
The pickets had not influenced their actions!
I returned to New York.
Dear Mr. President:
This seemed to annoy the President and he replied with asperity, "Why do you come to me in this indignant fashion for things which have been done by the police officials of the city of Washington?"
The creation of this committee, which had been pending since 1913, was now finally granted in September, 1917.
The President, The White House, Washington, D. C.
Moreover, I was amazed that since the President had said he considered the treatment of the women "shocking," he had pardoned them without stating that he did so to correct a grave injustice.
Under this development it seemed to me that self-respect demanded action, so I sent my resignation to the President, publicly stated my attitude and regretfully left his Administration."
Dear Mr. President:
He reproached the President and his colleagues after mature consideration, in the most honorable and vital way,-by refusing longer to associate himself with an Administration which backed such policies.
We were now for a moment the object of sympathy; the Administration was the butt of considerable hostility.
And from the women voters of California with whom Mr. Malone had kept faith came the message:
It is impossible to overemphasize what a tremendous acceleration Mr. Malone's fine, solitary and generous act gave to the speedy break-down of the Administration's resistance.
It was high time for some one to make a protest, and you have made one that has been heard far and wide . . . ."
The most difficult argument to meet among the seven million voters was the failure of the Democratic party, throughout four years of power, to pass the federal suffrage amendment looking toward the enfranchisement of all the women of the country.
I am sure that I am only one of many women who feel thankful to you for it.
The women of
I gather from the press that this is what took place.
Some indirectly and many, inadvertently, however, paid eloquent tribute to the suffrage picket.
Scores of Congressmen, anxious to refute the idea that the indomitable picket had had anything to do with their action, revealed naively how surely it had.
During the next two months I carefully watched the situation.
Last autumn, as the representative of your Administration, I went into the woman suffrage states to urge your reelection.
the nation are, and always will be, loyal to the country, and the passage of the suffrage amendment is only the first step toward their national emancipation.
It is true that this amendment would have to come from Congress, but the present Congress shows no earnest desire to enact this legislation for the simple reason that you, as the leader of the party in power, have not yet suggested it.
I advised them that as a matter of law no one could compel them to accept the pardon, but that as a matter of fact they would have to accept it, for the Attorney
However, I am profoundly grateful to you for your prompt acceptance of my resignation.
"May I express my appreciation and gratitude for the excellent and manly letter that you have written to President Wilson on woman suffrage?
"Mr.
of the banners of the pickets without permitting the women carrying them to be the objects of mob violence.
The President, The White House, Washington, D. C.
"The liberty-loving women of California greet you as one of the few men in history who have been willing to sacrifice material interests for the liberty of a class to which they themselves do not belong.
This he never denied.
But I cannot and will not remain in office and see women thrown into jail because they demand their political freedom."
My dear Mr. Collector:
As she sat looking sadly down on the symbols of an affection that grew dearer every moment, she listened half unconsciously to the murmur of voices in the adjoining room.
DEAR ALICE, You know what the flowers mean.
'Both; you get the one, and I'll give you the other.'
I know he's rich in that; I see and feel it; and any woman should be glad to get it.'
The room was very still before the first verse ended; and Alice skipped the next, fearing she could not get through; for John's eyes were on her, showing that he knew she sang for him and let the plaintive little ballad tell what her reply must be.
'Getting flowers for "our brides".
With eyes that saw but dimly, and a hand that lingered on the stem he had stripped of thorns, she laid the half-blown flower by the rose, and asked herself if even the little bud might be worn.
I understood--I don't deserve it--we are too young, we must wait, but--I'm very proud and happy, John!'
'So deuced sarcastic!
I don't wonder he was pleased and proud.
He took it as she meant it, and smiled at her so happily that her heart got the better of her voice, and she rose abruptly, saying something about the heat.
As she bent to turn a page, the eager young man behind the piano saw the rose and was struck speechless with delight.
'What is it?
'I fear me sair they're failing baith; For when I sit apart, They talk o' Heaven so earnestly, It well nigh breaks my heart. So, laddie, dinna urge me now, It surely winna be; I canna leave the auld folk yet. We'd better bide a wee.'
You were superb today, and held us all like magic, though it was so hot there, I really think I couldn't have stood it for anyone else,' added Dolly, labouring to be gallant and really offering a touching proof of devotion; for the heat melted his collar, took the curl out of his hair, and ruined his gloves.
It looked very poor and pale beside the others; yet being in the self-sacrificing mood which real love brings, she felt that even a small hope was too much to give, if she could not follow it up with more.
He saw her standing by the piano now, idly turning over music as she talked with several gentlemen.
Later we give up childish things, you see.
'It must.
But he forgets that love is everything.
'Yes, mother.
I want to tell her so; but I lose my head when I try, and don't care to make a fool of myself.
'I saw no wine at any of the spreads; but it is plain that young Brooke has had too much.
Open windows, thin partitions, and the stillness of summer twilight made it impossible to help hearing, and in a few moments more she could not refrain; for they were talking of John.
Demi meantime was escorting certain venerable personages about the college, and helping his grandfather entertain them with discussion of the Socratic method of instruction, Pythagoras, Pestalozzi, Froebel, and the rest, whom he devoutly wished at the bottom of the Red Sea, and no wonder, for his head and his heart were full of love and roses, hopes and fears.
As she thought thus, the half-blown rose went to join the bud; and then, after a pause, she slowly kissed the perfect rose, and added it to the tell-tale group, saying to herself with a sort of sweet solemnity, as if the words were a vow:
'It is his having nothing to offer that keeps him silent, I think.
A moment he gazed, then hastened to seize the coveted place before a new detachment of bores arrived.
Daisy's voice broke there; and a sudden rustle, followed by a soft murmur, seemed to tell that she was in her mother's arms, seeking and finding comfort there.
BIDE A WEE
'Wish I could!' and Demi picked a little bud, with a sigh that went to Josie's warm heart.
No jokes, dear, if you love me.'
People are thinning out, and we all want a little refreshment.
I'm faint with so much talking.
Scotch songs are always charming.'
'Ah, now you are too hard upon us!
My brain fairly reels with the 'ologies and 'isms I've heard discussed tonight.
'You are very kind, child.
We can't grind all the time and you ladies don't seem to mind taking a turn at the two latter "branches" you mention,' returned Dolly, with a glance at George which plainly said, 'I had her there.'
Won't Dora laugh?' And Tom departed in hot haste to impart and exult over his discovery.
Must look her up; she's a jolly little thing, and doesn't bother about anything but keeping in step.'
The elderly persons in question retired at length, but only to be replaced by two impetuous youths who begged Miss Heath to accompany them to Parnassus and join the dance. Demi thirsted for their blood, but was appeased by hearing George and Dolly say, as they lingered a moment after her refusal:
Alice did not hear what Daisy answered, for she was busy with her own emotions--happy ones now, to judge from the smile that shone in her eyes and the decided gesture with which she put the little bud in her bosom, as if she said: 'He deserves some reward for that good deed, and he shall have it.'
'A bride or a flower?' asked Demi calmly, though he eyed the blooming bush as if it had a sudden and unusual interest for him.
Hiding his impatience under an air of scholastic repose, Demi hovered near, ready to advance when the happy moment came, wondering meantime why elderly persons persisted in absorbing young ones instead of sensibly sitting in corners with their contemporaries.
You would like it, mother?'
just suit her, and you too, being a poet!' cried Josie, with a skip.
It wouldn't.
'I trust you, Jo.
'No; and I guess why.
I spoilt my gloves clapping, and quite forgot my dislike of seeing women on platforms, she was so earnest and unconscious and sweet after the first moment.'
What was said in the garden was never exactly known; but the Brooke family sat up very late that night, and any curious eye at the window would have seen Demi receiving the homage of his womankind as he told his little romance.
He was in despair, sick and poor, and too proud to beg; and our dear boy found it out, and took every penny he had, and never told even his mother till she made him.'
He was young; he would forget; and she would do her duty better, perhaps, if no impatient lover waited for her.
Yes, she has a flower at her throat; one, two, oh, blessed sight! he saw it all across the room, and gave a rapturous sigh which caused Miss Perry's frizzled crop to wave with a sudden gust.
Mrs Meg was speaking, and still of John, when she could hear again:
'Some of us do in our first years.
'Don't be a hypocrite.
'Heartily; for a better, nobler girl doesn't live.
She is coming to dress with Daisy, so I can do it nicely.'
He told me last night, and I've had no time since to tell you.
Her heart is big enough for both love and duty; and they can wait more happily if they do it together--for wait they must, of course.'
Quite gentlemanly, but evidently a trifle intoxicated, my dear.'
'Yes, by Jove! we fellows will have to look out or you'll carry off all the honours.
Did you see him jump up when Alice ended her oration? He'd have gone to her if I hadn't held him back.
Sure to be routed, horse, foot, and dragoons,' said Stuffy, lumbering away, somewhat cross with too many spreads.
You've tried it, I dare say.'
But she is so dutiful and good, I'm afraid she won't let herself be happy.
'Really, you know, I'm quite converted to co-education and almost wish I'd remained here.
'I promised Dora West I'd give her a turn.
'Music?
'What are you at here, Mischief?' asked Demi, with an Irvingesque start, as he felt rather than saw a disturbing influence in his day-dream.
'There is room for all; and if you will leave us the books, we will cheerfully yield the baseball, boating, dancing, and flirting, which seem to be the branches you prefer,' answered Alice sweetly.
Don't be ridiculous, please,' begged the bashful lover, eager, but afraid of this sharp-tongued bit of womanhood.
It's lovely to see people so happy.
'Alice, I can't believe it--did you understand--how shall I ever thank you?' murmured Demi, bending as if he, too, read the song, not a note or word of which did he see, however.
Old Plock cornered me and made my head spin with Kant and Hegel and that lot.'
'Right, dear.
'Yes, you are tired; come out and rest, my dearest'; and with a masterful air Demi took her into the starlight, leaving Tom to stare after them winking as if a sky-rocket had suddenly gone off under his nose.
No; it would be more generous to make the sacrifice alone, and spare him the pain of hope deferred.
Yes, give us this; sweet thing!
Now, the debtor's sentence is irrevocable: he has but a few days of grace.
This grand right--the sword of thought, which elevates the virtuous citizen to the rank of legislator, and makes the malicious citizen an agent of discord--frees us from all preliminary responsibility to the law; but it does not release us from our internal obligation to render a public account of our sentiments and thoughts.
They created a maximum PRICE for each variety of sugar; and, as this maximum PRICE was not the same, they attacked property in two ways,--on the one hand, interfering with the liberty of trade; on the other, disregarding the equality of proprietors.
The tendency of society in favor of compelling proprietors to support national workshops and public manufactories is so strong that for several years, under the name of ELECTORAL REFORM, it has been exclusively the question of the day.
They sacrificed the property of the tax-payer.
Already we have a minister of public works.
Man leaves his imprint, stamps his character, upon the objects of his handiwork. This plastic force of man, as the modern jurists say, is the seal which, set upon matter, makes it holy.
The Chamber of Deputies, in the early part of this year, 1841, discussed this project, and the law was passed almost unanimously.
He disgraces himself and fails in respect for his fellows, who, in publishing his opinions, employs evasion and cunning.
There is nothing more just, nothing more reasonable, nothing more philosophical apparently, than the motives which gave rise to this reform.
To protect the property of the one, it became necessary to violate the property of the other.
For a long time, a revision of the law concerning mortgages was clamored for; a process was demanded, in behalf of all kinds of credit and in the interest of even the debtors themselves, which would render the expropriation of real estate as prompt, as easy, and as effective as that which follows a commercial protest.
National workshops will follow; and soon, as a consequence, the excess of the proprietor's revenue over the workingman's wages will be swallowed up in the coffers of the laborers of the State.
"It is the field of our fathers," they would have cried, "and we will not sell it!" Among the ancients, the refusal of the individual limited the powers of the State.
Little by little the government will become manufacturer, commission-merchant, and retail dealer.
TO CHECK THE CONTINUAL EMIGRATION OF LABORERS FROM THE COUNTRY INTO THE CITIES.
Did they suppress the beet-root by granting an indemnity to the manufacturer?
Under the system of competition which is killing us, and whose necessary expression is a plundering and tyrannical government, the farmer will need always capital in order to repair his losses, and will be forced to contract loans.
If public utility had interfered, that forest--the only one for miles around--would still be standing.
But it is not my purpose here to pass upon the theory of the right of possession.
Soon, in the name of public utility, methods of cultivation and conditions of enjoyment will be prescribed; inspectors of agriculture and manufactures will be appointed; property will be taken away from unskilful hands, and entrusted to laborers who are more deserving of it; and a general superintendence of production will be established.
3.
For the people are credulous, but they are strong.
I have used, in all its fulness, and concerning an important question, the right which the charter grants us.
This last motive seems the most plausible one; for in spite of the clamors of interested parties, and the flagrant violation of certain rights, the public conscience is bound to fulfil its desire, and is no more affected when charged with attacking property, than when listening to the complaints of the bondholders.
But it is a law of political economy that an increase of production augments the mass of available capital, consequently tends to raise wages, and finally to annihilate interest.
It will be the sole proprietor.
Any one who, wishing to publish a treatise upon the constitution of the country, could not satisfy this threefold condition, would be obliged to procure the endorsement of a responsible patron possessing the requisite qualifications.
Far from mobilizing the soil, I would, if possible, immobilize even the functions of pure intelligence, so that society might be the fulfilment of the intentions of Nature, who gave us our first possession, the land.
These arguments, and others besides, you clearly stated, sir, in your first lectures of this academic year.
Did they leave these two industries to themselves?
You have criticised in a kindly spirit--I had almost said with partiality for the writer--a work which teaches a doctrine that you thought it your duty to condemn.
What is, after all, this electoral reform which the people grasp at, as if it were a bait, and which so many ambitious persons either call for or denounce?
Henceforth, the promptness of expropriation will save him from total ruin.
How many supporters do you think, sir, can be claimed for the project of the conversion of the public funds?
PARIS, April 1, 1841.
Even now the legislative power is asked, no longer simply to regulate the government of factories, but to create factories itself.
Poets have sung of it in their hymns; philosophers have dreamed of it in their Utopias; priests teach it, but only for the spiritual world.
1.
Like a stone thrown into a mass of serpents, the First Memoir on Property excited intense animosity, and aroused the passions of many. But, while some wished the author and his work to be publicly denounced, others found in them simply the solution of the fundamental problems of society; a few even basing evil speculations upon the new light which they had obtained.
See! If at the moment of conversion a piece of real estate yields an income of one thousand francs, after the new law takes effect it will yield only six hundred francs.
Lower interest on money!
SECOND MEMOIR
WHAT IS PROPERTY?
Before the people act, they need to know the whole truth.
They abolished, so far as the sugar industry was concerned, the right of property.
But to fix their minimum wages is to compel the proprietor, is to force the master to accept his workman as an associate, which interferes with freedom and makes mutual insurance obligatory.
What becomes, during this progressive invasion, of independent cultivation, exclusive domain, property?
In this case, instinctive justice belies legal justice.
But we Frenchmen have the liberty of the press.
There should be no secrets or reservations from peoples and powers.
Now, this so-called conversion is an extensive expropriation, and in this case with no indemnity whatever. The public funds are so much real estate, the income from which the proprietor counts upon with perfect safety, and which owes its value to the tacit promise of the government to pay interest upon it at the established rate, until the fund-holder applies for redemption.
Always depending upon the future for the payment of his debts, he will be deceived in his hope, and surprised by maturity.
If, then, production continues in the national workshops, how will the crisis be terminated? Undoubtedly, by the general depreciation of merchandise, and, in the last analysis, by the conversion of private workshops into national workshops.
3.
A flagrant violation of the right of property.
I omit, for the sake of brevity, the numerous considerations which the professor adduces in support of what he calls, too modestly in my opinion, his Utopia.
MONSIEUR,--
Very well; but from this exception we will pass to another, from that to a third, and so on from exceptions to exceptions, until we have reduced the rule to a pure abstraction.
I address this question to all whom this pitiless Nemesis pursues, and even troubles in their dreams.
What, think you, will become, in this fatal circle, of the possibility of profit,--in a word, of property?
So the government thinks.
Upon property.
By taxation.
It was not to be expected that a system of inductions abstractly gathered together, and still more abstractly expressed, would be understood with equal accuracy in its ensemble and in each of its parts.
But, it is said, expropriation on the ground of public utility is only an exception which confirms the principle, and bears testimony in favor of the right.
But, as we have just seen, that is to limit property.
They formed a conspiracy against property! Their law to regulate the labor of children in factories will, without doubt, prevent the manufacturer from compelling a child to labor more than so many hours a day; but it will not force him to increase the pay of the child, nor that of its father.
To maintain the beet-root, the cane had to be taxed.
The native manufacturer was ruined by the colonist.
On the other hand, the government will need capital with which to pay its workmen; now, how will this capital be obtained?
There seems to be some justice in repaying out of the property that which was lent to the property when by Mr. Scarborough's own doing the property was supposed to go into the eldest son's hands.
"If he is to have it, let him have it, but let him have as little as possible."
"That was a pair I made up for him and sent them to the man to get pressed."
She was sixteen, and was possessed of terrible vitality.
"Your cousin Dorothy is very fortunate," said Mrs. Carroll.
"I am not sure that I hate anybody very much."
"Well, girls, what is your news?"
"It's the Princess of Wales."
You must know the prince."
You must come to church, in order that some idea of what Christianity demands of you may make its way into your heart.
"It really isn't becoming."
"How very nasty you are!" said Miss Carroll.
"My dear," said Mr. Grey, "you cannot get rid of the gnats of the world. They will buzz and sting and be a nuisance.
This lover had something to do with horses, and had only been heard of, had never been seen, at the Manor-house. Sophy was a good deal hated also, being a forward, flirting, tricky girl of seventeen, who had just left the school at which Uncle John had paid for her education.
"I do."
I would not discuss anything of which the justice may hereafter be disputed."
This was Dolly's first speech.
"Do leave the child and her ailments alone!"
"We were not disappointed in the least," said Amelia.
But he made it payable, not to Mr. but to Mrs. Carroll.
"He must have clothes, you know," said the poor woman, wailing.
On the present occasion Miss Grey simply took up her book to show that the subject was one which had no interest for her; but she did undoubtedly listen to all that was said on the subject. "There was never anything settled about poor Patrick's clothes," said Mrs. Carroll, in a half-whisper.
It was understood that Mr. Carroll was never asked to the Manor-house.
"Papa, don't bamboozle her," said his daughter.
"He was tooling his own drag, and he had a lady with him on the box.
"He wasn't at all in a fit state to go to-night, but he had promised, and that was enough."
"But in that case he should have nothing more.
I never saw anything more tasty than her dress,--dark red silk, with little fluffy fur ornaments all over it.
At half-past six punctually they came.
He is an evil thing, and should be made to reap the proper reward.
If his son is willing to pay these money-lenders what sums they have actually advanced, and if by any effort on his part the money can be raised, let it be done.
"I dare say something ought to be done at some time," said Mr. Grey, who knew that he would be told, when the evening was over, that he would give away all his substance to that man if he were asked.
"Nothing nearly so interesting," said Sophy.
The discussion was held in the dining-room, and may, therefore, be supposed to have been premeditated. Those at night in Mr. Grey's own bedroom were generally the result of sudden thought.
"That is because the prince did not kiss his hand to you," said Sophy. Then Miss Grey sunk again into silence, crushed beneath this last blow.
"They must have their dinner, at any rate," said Mr. Grey.
This was said by Dolly as soon as the family had withdrawn.
It is not that I wish to avoid my share of the world's burdens, but that justice should be done.
His "own" income consisted of what had been saved out of his wife's fortune, and was thus named as in opposition to the larger sum paid to Mrs. Carroll by Mr. Grey.
Dolly had gone back to her book, and disdained to make any farther reply.
"That would be intended," said Dolly.
"I know you would, you dear, sweet, kind-hearted, but most un-Christian, father.
"Papa has not had a new pair of trousers this year," said Sophy.
"I haven't counted; but when I do come I don't often do any good.
"I won't be half a moment," said the repentant father, hastening up-stairs to go through his ordinary dressing arrangement.
"He does want them very badly--for decency's sake," said the poor wife, thus winding up her plea.
"Very badly.
"I hope his state of health will not debar him from dining with his friends to-night," said Miss Grey.
I don't know which I hate the worst,--Uncle Carroll or Mr. Scarborough."
That is the intention; but somehow it fails with me sometimes."
"Because she has it all done for her," said Amelia.
"Poor Potsey has got a nasty boil under her arm."
It has been said that Miss Grey hated the Carrolls; but she hated the daughters worse than the mother, and of all the people she hated in the world she hated Amelia Carroll the worst.
You'd hate Uncle Carroll's idleness and abominable self-indulgence worse than you do."
The next day was Sunday, and Dolly was very anxious before breakfast to induce her father to say that he would go to church with her; but he was inclined to be obstinate, and fell back upon his usual excuse, saying that there were Scarborough papers which it would be necessary that he should read before he started for Tretton on the following day.
"I suppose, papa, nothing can be done about Mr. Carroll."
"But," continued the attorney, "why shouldn't the lady have been his wife?
"Poor papa isn't very well, either," said Sophy, who was supposed to be her father's pet.
"Easy or difficult.
They said their papa would be away on business."
The loan had to be arranged in full conclave, as otherwise Mrs. Carroll would have found it difficult to obtain access to her brother's ear.
"I wonder why Uncle John always keeps us waiting in this way?"
It is not what the clergyman may say of you, but that your mind will get away for two hours from that other reptile and his concerns." Then Mr. Grey, with a loud, long sigh, allowed his boots, and his gloves, and his church-going hat, and his church-going umbrella to be brought to him.
"And then he would come back just the same."
For it was in that light that Miss Grey regarded it. "And did you have any farther adventures besides this memorable encounter with the prince?"
"I don't think they should suffer because he drinks."
"You asked them yourself on Sunday."
This had been a subject much discussed between them, but on the present occasion Miss Grey would not renew it.
"I don't think the prince is a married man," said Sophy.
"That was hardly to be expected," said the attorney.
"And the three eldest girls are coming."
There was one hundred and fifty pounds a year coming from settled property, which had been preserved by the lawyer's care, and which was regarded in the family as "papa's own."
"I am sure they take after their father altogether," Mr. Grey had once said when the three left the Manor-house together.
Dolly heard a great clatter of four people leaving their clogs and cloaks in the hall, and would not move out of the unused drawing-room, in which for the moment she was seated.
"Hold your tongue, miss!" said her mother.
Girls, you must have a glass of port-wine to support you after your disappointment with the prince."
"I told her it would."
"I don't mean the law in that sense.
Have a nice dinner for her.
"In what way 'done,' my dear?"
"He did," said Sophy.
But if either father or son will not accept it, then depart, and shake the dust from your feet."
Then we'll make a start.
Now I could see that the ring was not continuous.
I'll look after Ruth--er--I mean Miss Ventnor."
He might get away."
"Anywhere you say suits me," he answered.
"Where are you going?"
There was no wise woman to be seen; and she hastened into the hall.
She turned once more to the city picture.
Between it and the square was a marble-paved court, with gates of brass, at which stood sentries in gorgeous uniforms, and to which was affixed the following proclamation in letters of gold, large enough for Agnes to read:--
In proportion as the other, to the eyes of her mind, receded into the background, this, to her present bodily eyes, appeared to come forward and assume reality.
It was the very country where her father fed his flocks.
Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible?
There was the picture, with the marble palace, and the proclamation shining in letters of gold upon its gates of brass.
"By the will of the King, from this time until further notice, every stray child found in the realm shall be brought without a moment's delay to the palace.
VIII.
The wise woman, however, asked no questions, but began to talk about her work, approving of some of it, which filled her with arrogance, and showing how some of it might have been done better, which filled her with resentment.
Ere it had time to sink down again, the wise woman caught up the little mirror, and held it before her: Agnes saw her Somebody--the very embodiment of miserable conceit and ugly ill-temper.
"What a poor, miserable spot it is compared with this lordly palace!" she said.
There was the city far away on the horizon.
After gazing a while at the palace picture, during which her ambitious pride rose and rose, she turned yet again in condescending mood, and honored the home picture with one stare more.
Nestling in her very heart, where most of all she had her company, and least of all could see her.
How she has ill used me!"
She stood before it, and gazed and gazed; and all the time it kept growing upon her in some strange way, until at last she was fully persuaded that it was no picture, but a real city, square, and marble palace, seen through a framed opening in the wall.
"Ah, there I am myself!" she said.
That frame is only a trick of the woman to make me fancy it a picture lest I should go and make my fortune.
The shepherd-child was now worse than ever the poor princess had been. For the wise woman had given her a terrible lesson one of which the princess was not capable, and she had known what it meant; yet here she was as bad as ever, therefore worse than before.
How I do wish I could find the way to the good king's palace!
By this time her old disposition had begun to rouse again.
What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets?
"I do believe it is real!
Anyhow I will try my luck without asking her leave.
When she had done, she found her dinner--of the same sort she was used to at home, but better--in the hole of the wall.
THERE would be the place for a clever girl like me!"
"If I only knew where it was, I should set out for it at once.
Her eyes fell on the picture which had so enticed Rosamond.
When she woke in the morning, instead of getting up to do the work of the house, she lay thinking--to evil purpose.
As soon as she was left alone, Agnes set to work tidying and dusting the cottage, made up the fire, watered the bed, and cleaned the inside of the windows: the wise woman herself always kept the outside of them clean.
She had been doing her duty, and had in consequence begun again to think herself Somebody.
And in this mood she went into the picture-gallery.
The same moment a terrible storm of thunder and lightning, wind and rain, came on.
It's the old witch's; and she ought to do it herself."
They little thought what I could be, if I had the chance.
She gave such a scream of horror that the wise woman pitied her, and laying aside the mirror, took her upon her knees, and talked to her most kindly and solemnly; in particular about the necessity of destroying the ugly things that come out of the heart--so ugly that they make the very face over them ugly also.
That snub-nosed little fright could never be meant for me!
If I don't run away, that frightful blue prison and the disgusting girl will come back, and I shall go out of my mind.
The first picture she saw represented a square in a great city, one side of which was occupied by a splendid marble palace, with great flights of broad steps leading up to the door.
"If I stay here longer, I shall be miserable, It is nothing better than slavery.
But presently she spied something in it she had not seen before, and drew nearer.
But at that moment, she heard the voice of the wise woman calling, "Agnes!" and, smoothing her face, she tried to look as good as she could, and walked back into the cottage.
Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.
So Agnes began to stroke herself once more, forgetting her late self-stroking companion, and never reflecting that she was now doing what she had then abhorred.
But the wise woman seemed to take no care of what she might be thinking, and went straight on with her lesson.
"Ah!" she said, "they didn't know me there.
Then the wise woman laid her gently down upon the heather-bed, and she fell fast asleep, and had an awful dream about her Somebody.
It would serve her right to tell the king and have her punished for not taking me to the palace--one of his poor lost children he is so fond of!
Without once turning to take a farewell look of the place she was leaving, she set off, as fast as her feet would carry her, in the direction of the city.
The uproar was appalling.
Would you believe it?--instead of thinking how to kill the ugly things in her heart, she was with all her might resolving to be more careful of her face, that is, to keep down the things in her heart so that they should not show in her face, she was resolving to be a hypocrite as well as a self-worshipper.
"Can there be such a city in the world?" she said to herself.
A thief who was trying to reform would.
If I were but in this good, kind, loving, generous king's palace, I should soon be such a great lady as they never saw!
When she had eaten it, she went to look at the pictures.
She fixed her eyes upon Agnes in a way that confused her, and made her cast hers down, for she felt as if she were reading her thoughts.
There stood the wise woman, looking all round the place, and examining her work.
Agnes threw herself upon the ground, hid her face in her hands, and there lay until it was over.
I should like to see her ugly old head cut off.
Her heart was wormy, and the worms were eating very fast at it now.
As she said this, she turned her back with disdain upon the picture of her home, and setting herself before the picture of the palace, stared at it with wide ambitious eyes, and a heart whose every beat was a throb of arrogant self-esteem.
It's not my work.
The work can wait.
To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it.
It was the form of a little girl, building a bridge of stones over one of the hill-brooks.
In place of taking her dream as a warning, and thinking over what the wise woman had said the night before, she communed with herself in this fashion:--
"That is just how I used to do.--No," she resumed, "it is not me.
However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes.
And what a life to lead there!"
And now a strange thing took place.
Just round the shoulder of the hill was the cottage where her parents lived, where she was born and whence she had been carried by the beggar-woman.
I shall go and look at the picture again--if it be a picture--as soon as I've got my clothes on.
She is a witch, the ugly old creature!
She jumped out of bed, and hurried on her clothes.
FREE was she, with that creature inside her?
What a dull, dirty, insignificant spot it is!
I had my back to them for a moment.
You heard of it?
This Haljan is a trickster!
I stood another few seconds at the window.
The fellow turned his scowl on me, but Anita brought his gaze back to her.
I gazed, stricken.
Did we dare linger here?
"You speak English?" I asked.
She said sweetly, "Are you in charge of this room?
He scowled, but when we reached the trap in the room floor grid, we found him standing aside to admit us.
It's Miko down there!
And a broad belt with bombs in its padded compartments.
"I know.
She felt instinctively that this was wrong and mean, and whenever the feeling of remorse was strong within her she made a desperate effort to please her grim and difficult relative.
"What princes?
The searching look of the eyes, the sharp voice, the hard knotty fingers, the thin straight lips, the long silences, the "front-piece" that didn't match her hair, the very obvious "parting" that seemed sewed in with linen thread on black net,--there was not a single item that appealed to Rebecca.
But Mr. Watson says he'll take back part of it, and let us have pink and blue for the same price."
The effect of this piece of doggerel was entirely convincing, and for days afterwards whenever Minnie met the Simpsons even a mile from the brick house she shuddered and held her peace.
This was the note:--
RIVERBORO SECRETS
"I'll take that piece of coral away from you, and I THINK I shall slap you besides!"
"She THREATENED me," whispered Minnie, "but I never believe a word she says."
Let me wipe off that strawberry jam over your mouth."
"You wouldn't darst," retorted Minnie.
R. Randall.
"If you do, I'll tell my mother and the teacher, so there!"
First they had it I wanted to marry the minister, and when he took a wife in Standish I was known to be disappointed.
I thought we should never come to the end of them.
"Now, then, Harry, my boy, open the gates, and mother will bring us the lantern."
Scarcely drawing the rein, Blantyre shouted, "Which way?" "To the right!" cried the woman, pointing with her hand, and away we went up the right-hand road; then for a moment we caught sight of her; another bend and she was hidden again.
About halfway across the heath there had been a wide dike recently cut, and the earth from the cutting was cast up roughly on the other side. Surely this would stop them!
We had hardly turned on the common, when we caught sight again of the green habit flying on before us.
When Lord George took Ginger for hunting, York shook his head; he said it ought to be a steady hand to train a horse for the first season, and not a random rider like Lord George.
Steady!" On the highroad we were all right; and at the doctor's and the hall he did his errand like a good man and true.
After awhile she was taken to the carriage, and we came home together.
This Lizzie was a bright bay mare, almost thoroughbred, and a great favorite with the gentlemen, on account of her fine action and lively spirit; but Ginger, who knew more of her than I did, told me she was rather nervous.
"Are you tired of your good Black Auster?"
A woman was standing at her garden gate, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking eagerly up the road.
I had not long to wait.
It was so sudden that Lady Anne was nearly unseated, but she soon recovered herself.
The Lady Harriet, who remained at the hall, was a great invalid, and never went out in the carriage, and the Lady Anne preferred riding on horseback with her brother or cousins.
"Can you ride?"
"Annie, dear Annie, do speak!"
I heard my master say to a gentleman who stopped him to inquire, that he hoped no bones were broken, but that she had not spoken yet."
It seemed a long time before Ginger came back, and before we were left alone; and then she told me all that she had seen.
"I will not be five minutes," he said.
He had no whip, which seemed to trouble him; but my pace soon cured that difficulty, and he found the best thing he could do was to stick to the saddle and hold me in, which he did manfully.
My young mistress was sitting easily with a loose rein, humming a little song.
There was no more to be said; he placed her carefully on the saddle, looked to the bit and curb, gave the reins gently into her hand, and then mounted me.
Gently he turned her face upward: it was ghastly white and the eyes were closed.
"I can't tell much," she said.
"Do let me advise you not to mount her," he said; "she is a charming creature, but she is too nervous for a lady.
Long before we came to the bend she was out of sight.
Blantyre's halloo soon brought them to the spot.
Which way had she turned?
"We went a gallop nearly all the way, and got there just as the doctor rode up.
At no great distance there were two men cutting turf, who, seeing Lizzie running wild without a rider, had left their work to catch her.
She was a perfect horsewoman, and as gay and gentle as she was beautiful.
I enjoyed these rides very much in the clear cold air, sometimes with Ginger, sometimes with Lizzie.
I listened to my rider's footsteps until they reached the house, and heard him knock at the door.
"Would they ask this question for her at Dr. Ashley's, and bring the answer?"
"Oh, do not hurry yourself; Lizzie and I shall not run away from you."
My lady's hat was gone, and her long brown hair was streaming behind her.
I gathered myself well together and with one determined leap cleared both dike and bank.
But there was no answer.
We went along gayly enough till we came to his gate.
The village was about a mile off, and the doctor's house was the last in it.
Lizzie was standing quietly by the side of the road a few paces off, with her back to me.
Woah!
"My dear cousin," said Lady Anne, laughing, "pray do not trouble your good careful head about me.
Ginger used to like it very much, but sometimes when she came back I could see that she had been very much strained, and now and then she gave a short cough.
There was a short drive up to the house between tall evergreens.
I assure you, she is not perfectly safe; let me beg you to have the saddles changed."
He unbuttoned her habit, loosened her collar, felt her hands and wrist, then started up and looked wildly round him for help.
He looked at her doubtfully.
"Oh, no, not at all," she replied, "but I am amiable enough to let you ride him for once, and I will try your charming Lizzie.
I gave a loud, shrill neigh for help; again and again I neighed, pawing the ground impatiently, and tossing my head to get the rein loose.
Ginger was saddled and sent off in great haste for Lord George, and I soon heard the carriage roll out of the yard.
Two days after the accident Blantyre paid me a visit; he patted me and praised me very much; he told Lord George that he was sure the horse knew of Annie's danger as well as he did.
The doctor poured something into her mouth, but all that I heard was, 'She is not dead.' Then I was led off by a man to a little distance.
They intend using their share of the collection, plus such culls and duplicates as the rest of us can consign to them, to go into the arms business, with a general-antique sideline, which Karen can manage while Pierre's writing....
Why, here; I'm going to be in Rosemont, staying at the Fleming place, working on the collection, for the next week or so.
I want my money, and if I don't get it in cash, I'm going to beat it out of that dirty little swindler's hide," Gresham replied, an ugly look appearing on his face.
You can look us up, if you wish.
You see, the Fleming estate has just employed me to expertize the collection and handle the sale for them." Rand got his pipe lit and drawing properly.
What have you been doing, and why don't you come out to Rosemont to see us?
"No; the National Rifle Association stopped his ad, and lifted his membership card for good measure," Gresham said.
A Hall flintlock breech-loader; an Elisha Collier flintlock revolver; a pair of Forsythe detonator-lock pistols....
"Why, hello, Jeff!" he greeted the detective, grasping his hand heartily. "You haven't been around for months.
He could afford litigation like that; I can't.
CHAPTER 4
And about a hundred and fifty Colts, all models and most variants.
"I'd say made in Japan, about 1920," Rand replied.
Tell you what; I'll call a meeting at my place tomorrow evening, say at eight thirty.
We didn't have time to see everything," Gresham said. "My God, Jeff!
Karen has a little general-antique business in Rosemont.
"I can't believe that, Jeff.
"Yes, so can I. Of course, if he'd call me a crook, I'd take that as a compliment," Rand said.
But we aren't anxious to make any premature offers.
I want to be in a position to assure the Fleming family and Humphrey Goode that you're all serious and responsible."
Stephen Gresham was in his early sixties, but he could have still worn his World War I uniform without anything giving at the seams, and buckled the old Sam Browne at the same hole.
"I think you're entirely within your rights, but naturally, we won't mention this outside.
"About two years ago; right after I got back from Germany.
Gresham frowned.
I can imagine Arnold Rivers, for instance, taking a very righteous view of such an arrangement."
"Made in Germany, about 1870 or '80, about the time arms-collecting was just getting out of the family-heirloom stage, wouldn't you say?"
"I wonder if I could meet your group, say tomorrow evening?
Humphrey Goode isn't competent to handle that.
You know, Fleming's death was an undeserved stroke of luck for Arnold Rivers.
Pierre was a Marine captain, invalided home after being wounded on Peleliu; he writes science-fiction for the pulps.
"And not necessarily on account of Rivers.
"Worst thing they could do; a collection like that would go for peanuts at auction.
I believe he deliberately shot himself, and the family faked the accident and fixed the authorities.
Gresham shook his head.
That suit you?"
"Wasn't there some talk about Whitneyville Walker Colts that had been made out of 1848 Model Colt Dragoons?" Rand asked.
"I'm afraid you will, at that, Stephen," Rand told him.
"I never heard of Fleming having any troubles worth killing himself over."
"Yes, that's right.
What we were all afraid of was a public auction at some sales-gallery."
If he hadn't been killed just when he was, he'd have run Rivers out of the old-arms business."
"By the way, Humphrey Goode showed me a pair of big ball-butt wheel locks, all covered with ivory inlay," Rand mentioned.
"Rivers sold a rifle to a collector down in Virginia, about three years ago, while you were still occupying Germany.
"Want in on it?
This fellow Umholtz was practically turning them out on an assembly-line, for a while.
They were Lane Fleming's one false step.
Rand nodded.
That story you find in Sawyer's book."
"Rivers claimed, I suppose, that he had gotten it from a family that had owned it ever since it was made, and showed letters signed 'D.
"You might not have gotten anything, but you'd have given him a lot of dirty publicity. That's all Fleming was expecting to do about those wheel locks."
I suppose your crowd wouldn't want to make an offer until I have everything listed, but I'd like to talk to your associates, in a group, as soon as possible."
I have an example of Umholtz's craftsmanship, myself.
You know, that bastard took me, once, just one-tenth as badly, with a fake U.S. North & Cheney Navy flintlock 1799 Model that had been made out of a French 1777 Model." The lawyer muttered obscenely.
"But good Lord, why?" Rand demanded.
Oh, that's a collection to end collections."
"Not till Umholtz made one," Gresham replied.
I'm not obliged to call for sealed bids, or anything like that, so when I've heard from everybody, I'll give you a chance to bid against the highest offer in hand.
"Lane Fleming's death is on record as accidental, Jeff.
"Aren't they the damnedest ever seen, though?" he asked.
"I'm afraid I've been neglecting too many of my old friends lately," Rand admitted, sitting down and getting his pipe out.
"Jeff, I'm not supposed to talk about this, but the fact is that I believe Fleming was about to lose control of the Premix Company," he said.
"I wouldn't blame you.
He was familiar with the type.
"Why, Jeff, I appreciate that," Gresham said.
"The story is that Fleming found it hanging back of the counter at some roadside lunch-stand, along with a lot of other old pistols, and talked the proprietor into letting it go for a few dollars," Gresham continued. "It was supposed to have been loaded at the time, and went off while Fleming was working on it, at home." He shook his head.
Gresham laughed heartily.
It's been written off as such.
And our coroner, out in Scott County, is eminently fixable, if you go about it right; a pitiful little nonentity with a tremendous inferiority complex."
The police never made any investigation; it was handled by the coroner alone.
The collector who bought this spurious flintlock spotted what had been done, and squawked to the Rifle Association, and to the postal authorities."
"Yes, and he was plenty burned up, but what could he do?
You remember, we went there together, one evening in March."
"Oh Lord, yes!
He got that one in 1924, at the Fred Hines sale, at the old Walpole Galleries.
"Well, we all know pretty much what's in the collection," Gresham said. "We were neighbors of his, and collectors are a gregarious lot.
I hate to see him prostitute his talents the way he does by making these fake antiques for Rivers.
Rivers was dug in behind this innocent-purchase-and-sale-in-good-faith Maginot Line of his.
"Yes!" Gresham became enthusiastic.
Rand shook his head.
"Remember, there were a couple of small human figures on each pistol, a knight and a huntsman? Did you notice that they had slant eyes?" He stopped laughing, and looked at Gresham seriously.
"They're all.
"Been busy as the devil.
"I really don't know; I didn't see it.
A fine, early flintlock Kentuck, that had been made out of a fine, late percussion Kentuck by sawing off the breech-end of the barrel, rethreading it for the breech-plug, drilling a new vent, and fitting the lock with a flint hammer and a pan-and-frizzen assembly, and shortening the fore-end to fit.
We're going to need all the money we can scrape together, with this damned Rivers bidding against us."
Dot and Irene were wondering what had become of you."
"No, he claimed to have gotten it in trade from some wayfaring collector," Gresham replied.
"I'm not Fleming.
His eye was caught by a flaming red-and-gold Christmas-carol book.
'I can't call him off his trip to sit down and sympathise with me.
Looking down, he saw that his life-blood was going from him.
'But I have a little more time allowed me,' he said.
The next good joy that Mary had, It was the joy of three, To see her good Son Jesus Christ Making the blind to see; Making the blind to see, good Lord, And happy we may be.
Come here and let me pet you, Binkie.'
The Melancolia began to flame on the canvas, in the likeness of a woman who had known all the sorrow in the world and was laughing at it.
She used to shriek with rage when Dick stared at her between half-closed eyes.
We must do something.
So I am going blind.
I must pull through this business alone,' he said.
One cannot ascertain the exact amount of injury inflicted by the sword-cut.
He paced up and down the room, quietly at first, but afterwards with the hurried feet of fear.
After a time the culprit began to feel the need of a little self-respect.
Let's see how it feels to be blind.' Dick shut his eyes, and flaming commas and Catherine-wheels floated inside the lids.
'Verdict?' he said faintly.
The stupid bewilderment on his face was so intensely comic that both Dick and Torpenhow, still panting and unstrung from a fight for life, had roared with laughter, in which the man seemed as if he would join, but, as his lips parted in a sheepish grin, the agony of death came upon him, and he pitched grunting at their feet.
He rose, tried to straighten his shoulders, and spoke to the face he could hardly see.
'The Nilghai knows, and so does the Keneu.
If only Torp were back, now!'
I did not know I was drunk till I was told, but I must go on with my work.
Little children came to that eye-doctor, and they needed large-type amusement.
Binkie swung head downward for a moment without speaking.
CHAPTER X
'How could it have come without any warning?
He would have answered, but at that moment there unrolled itself from one corner of the studio a veil, as it were, of the flimsiest gauze.
'Little dorglums, we aren't at all well.
Sit down.
He was quite sure that he had not in any way departed from virtue, and there were reasons, too, of which Torpenhow knew nothing.
'That's the writer-type.
Our time is short.
Bessie looked through the keyhole after a long pause, and saw the two walking up and down as usual, Torpenhow's hand on Dick's shoulder.
His letters were brief and full of mystery.
What can I do?
Dick found a glass of liqueur brandy in his hand.
Dick smiled wearily.
Torpenhow turned to his companions appealingly, and they left the room to find lunch elsewhere.
'I beg your pardon, but it has come without any warning.
You haven't been sober for three weeks.
It was as though a black shadow stood at his elbow and urged him to go forward; and there were only weaving circles and floating pin-dots before his eyes.
Many sentences were pronounced in that darkened room, and the prisoners often needed cheering.
'As far as I can gather,' he said, coughing above the spirit, 'you call it decay of the optic nerve, or something, and therefore hopeless.
Binkie smiled from ear to ear, as a well-bred terrier should, but made no suggestion.
'Drinking like a fish,' Bessie whispered.
That's for myself.
I shouldn't have believed that this morning; but now things are different.
Binkie went to his own chair, and as often as he looked saw Dick walking up and down, rubbing his hands and chuckling.
'I've neglected the warnings of my lord the stomach too long.
'Binkie, we must think.
Even as he thought, a great fear came upon Dick, a fear that made him hold his breath as he walked into the oculist's waiting room, with the heavy carved furniture, the dark-green paper, and the sober-hued prints on the wall.
It was not long to wait.
Just as badly as we can get it. We'll go to the Park to think it out.'
He argued, in the loneliness of his studio, henceforward to be decorated with a film of gray gauze in one corner, that, if his fate were blindness, all the Torpenhows in the world could not save him.
'That's idolatrous bad Art,' he said, drawing the book towards himself.
'I really could not say.
'I don't know if that's any worse than sitting to a drunken beast in a studio.
He fell to work, whistling softly, and was swallowed up in the clean, clear joy of creation, which does not come to man too often, lest he should consider himself the equal of his God, and so refuse to die at the appointed time.
'We need to be calm, Binkie; we must be calm.' He talked aloud for the sake of distraction.
He forgot Maisie, Torpenhow, and Binkie at his feet, but remembered to stir Bessie, who needed very little stirring, into a tremendous rage, that he might watch the smouldering lights in her eyes.
An oculist, by all means.'
I'd like to catch you!
All those studies of Bessie's head were nonsense, and they nearly brought your master into a scrape.
As he entered the dark hall that led to the consulting-room a man cannoned against him.
Hence these spots before the eyes, Binkie.
'But I am right, too.
He recognised a reproduction of one of his own sketches.
He would explain.
'You won't do, and you won't do,' he said, at each inspection.
There was no answer.
She explained her enduring hatred for Dick, and made it clear to him that she only sat for the sake of his money.
'We all want a little patching and repairing from time to time,' he chirped.
Not quite so gentle as we could wish, but we'll discuss that later.
So I went to an oculist, and he turned a gasogene--I mean a gas-engine--into my eye.
Shall us take some liver pills?'
'Allah Almighty!' he cried despairingly, 'help me through the time of waiting, and I won't whine when my punishment comes.
He rubbed his eyes, but the gray haze would not go.
'Is this you?' said Torpenhow.
Torpenhow met Bessie on the staircase without a sign of feeling.
An incoherent note heralded his return.
We're all back on Thursday.
'Well,' said Dick, brutally, 'you're better as you are, instead of making love to some drunken beast in the street.' He felt that he had rescued Torpenhow from great temptation.
After he had been gone away for some months they began to conspire against him.
The government, too, though not yet suspecting the real design of the Guards in the movement which they were making, were greatly alarmed.
The rebellion was completely suppressed, and all open opposition to the progress of the Czar's proposed improvements and reforms ceased.
About two thousand of the Guards were beheaded.
The government--that is, the regency that Peter had left in charge--sent out deputies, who attempted to pacify them, but could not succeed.
But if they have the Church and the clergy on their side, this state of things is quite changed.
The name that she assumed was Marpha.
Now, if a thing is good, it is better, of course, to preserve it; but, on the other hand, if it is bad, it is better that it should be pulled down.
If it is bad, let it be destroyed.
They were determined, they said, to march to Moscow.
But the Guards refused to be satisfied.
It was in this state of the affair that the tidings of what had occurred reached Peter in Vienna, as is related in the last chapter.
The Guards insisted that they would go with their complaints to Moscow.
In the case of Peter's proposed improvements and reforms the Church and the clergy were Conservatives of the most determined character.
It is said that Peter took such a savage delight in these punishments, that he executed many of the victims with his own hands.
It is not that they are really opposed to improvement itself for its own sake, but that they are so afraid of change.
They hate the process of pulling down.
He took a drink of brandy after each execution while the officers were bringing forward the next man.
They pretended that they were only going to the city to represent their case themselves directly to the government, and then to march back again in a peaceable manner.
This story is almost too horrible to be believed, but, unfortunately, it comports too well with the general character which Peter has always sustained in the opinion of mankind in respect to the desperate and reckless cruelty to which he could be aroused under the influence of intoxication and anger.
They covered more than an acre of ground.
It will be recollected by the reader that Peter, before he set out on his tour, took every possible precaution to guard against the danger of disturbances in his dominions during his absence.
After enduring their tortures as long as human nature could bear them, they confessed that the movement was a concerted one, made in connection with a conspiracy within the city, and that the object was to subvert the present government, and to liberate the Princess Sophia and place her upon the throne.
As for the Princess Sophia, she was still in the convent where Peter had placed her, the conspirators not having reached the point of liberating her before their plot was discovered.
They therefore were going on, and, if General Gordon and his troops attempted to oppose them, they would fight it out and see which was the strongest.
The result, in respect to the conduct of his enemies during his absence, was what he feared.
Moscow itself was garrisoned with troops selected expressly with reference to their supposed fidelity to his interests, and the men who were to command them, as well as the great civil officers to whom the administration of the government was committed during his absence, were appointed on the same principle.
Here they were allowed to lie all the remainder of the winter, as long, in fact, as the flesh continued frozen, and then, when the spring came on, they were thrown together into a deep ditch, dug to receive them, and thus were buried.
It is true that the Church and the clergy do not fight themselves, and so do not add any thing to the physical strength of the party which they befriend, but they add enormously to its moral strength, that is, to its confidence and courage.
The whole city was thrown into a state of consternation.
General Gordon, as is usual in such cases, ordered a battery of artillery which he had brought up in the road before the Guards to fire, but he directed that the guns should be pointed so high that the balls should go over the heads of the enemy. His object was to intimidate them.
Thus was brought to an end the earthly personal career of Peter the Great.
There were troops of guards mounted on horseback and splendidly caparisoned--there were bands of music, and heralds, and great officers of state, bearing successively, on cushions ornamented with gold and jewels, the imperial mantle, the globe, the sceptre, and the crown.
It is said that on this occasion Peter shut himself up alone for three days and three nights in his own chamber, where he lay stretched on the ground in anguish and agony, and would not allow any body to come in.
The admiral stationed himself at the helm to steer, and the vice admirals took the oars.
In ordinary attacks of this kind Catharine had power to soothe and allay the spasmodic action of the muscles, and gradually release her husband from the terrible gripe of the disease, but now he would not suffer her to come near him.
All the great officers of state and all the foreign ministers were invited to be present at the consecration. The company embarked on board yachts provided for them, and went down the river following the Little Grandfather, which was borne on its galliot in the van--drums beating, trumpets sounding, and banners waving all the way.
And now, since both his sons were dead, his mind revolved anxiously the question what provision he should make for the government of the empire after his decease.
A grand ceremony was accordingly arranged for the "consecration of the Little Grandfather." The little vessel was brought in triumph from Moscow to Petersburg, where it was put on board a sort of barge or galliot to be taken to Cronstadt.
This platform, with the steps leading to it, was carpeted with crimson velvet, and it was surmounted by a splendid canopy made of silk, embroidered with gold.
At length the Czar allowed the door to be opened, and the minister, with all the senators, came together into the room.
Peter was entirely overwhelmed with grief at this new calamity.
His apprehensions proved to be well founded, for about a year after the unhappy death of Alexis he also died.
He therefore declared his intention of joining her with himself in the supreme power, and to celebrate this event by a solemn coronation.
The emperor went on board of it.
Notwithstanding the stern severity of Peter's character, the terrible violence of his passions, and the sort of savage grandeur which marked all his great determinations and plans, there was a certain vein of playfulness running through his mind; and, when he was in a jocose or merry humor, no one could be more jocose and merry than he.
Every window was filled, and the house-tops, wherever there was space for a footing, were crowded.
He was accompanied by the admirals and vice admirals of the fleet, who were to serve as crew.
This child was now about three years old, but he was of a very weak and sickly constitution, and the Czar watched him with fear and trembling.
The canopy was ornamented, too, on every side with fringes, ribbons, tufts, tassels, and gold lace, in the richest manner.
In this way the skiff rowed to and fro over the sea, and then passed along the fleet, saluted every where by the shouts of the crews upon the yards and in the rigging, and by the guns of the ships. Three thousand guns were discharged by the ships in these salvos in honor of their humble progenitor.
He finally concluded to leave it in the hands of Catharine herself, and, to prepare the way for this, he resolved to cause her to be solemnly crowned empress during his lifetime.
This skiff was built at Moscow, where it remained for twenty or thirty years, an object all this time, in Peter's mind, of special affection and regard.
He was seized with the convulsions to which he was subject when under any strong excitement, his face was distorted, and his neck was twisted and stiffened in a most frightful manner.
He had no farther serious difficulty with the opponents of his policy, though he was always under apprehensions that difficulties might arise after his death.
It was only two years before his death that a striking instance of this occurred.
He had the right, according to the ancient constitution of the monarchy, to designate his own successor, choosing for this purpose either one of his sons or any other person.
At the time of the death of Alexis the Czar's hopes in respect to a successor fell upon his little son, Peter Petrowitz, the child of Catharine, who was born about the time of the death of Alexis's wife, when the difficulties between himself and Alexis were first beginning to assume an alarming form.
In this proclamation Peter cited many instances from history in which great sovereigns had raised their consorts to a seat on the throne beside them, and then he recapitulated the great services which Catharine had rendered to him and to the state, which made her peculiarly deserving of such an honor.
This declaration, printed forms of which were sent all over the kingdom, was signed by the people very readily.
He could not endure it, for the sight of her renewed so vividly the anguish that he felt for the loss of their child, that it made the convulsions and the suffering worse than before.
The steps of the altar, and all that part of the pavement of the church over which the Czarina would have to walk in the performance of the ceremonies, were covered with rich tapestry embroidered with gold, and the seats on which the bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries were to sit were covered with crimson cloth.
His death took place on the 28th of January, 1725.
These grand officials were not required, however, to do much hard work at rowing, for there were two shallops provided, manned by strong men, to tow the skiff.
The next day the whole fleet, which had been collected in the bay for this purpose, was arranged in the form of an amphitheatre.
It was generally supposed that a certain Prince Naraskin would be appointed to the succession.
The sudden appearance of so many persons, and the boldness of the minister in taking this decided step, made such an impression on the mind of the Czar as to divert his mind for the moment from his grief, and he allowed himself to be led forth and to be persuaded to take some food.
The name which he had given to the skiff was The Little Grandfather, the name denoting that the little craft, frail and insignificant as it was, was the parent and progenitor of all the great frigates and ships of the line which were then at anchor in the Roads about Cronstadt and off the mouth of the Neva.
When the appointed hour arrived the procession was formed at the royal palace, and moved toward the Cathedral through a dense and compact mass of spectators that every where thronged the way.
At length, when the naval power of the empire was firmly established, Peter conceived the idea of removing this skiff from Moscow to Petersburg, and consecrating it solemnly there as a sort of souvenir to be preserved forever in commemoration of the small beginnings from which all the naval greatness of the empire had sprung.
Next Year
I knew what it meant--Eve had eaten that fruit, and death was come into the world....
I still think it is a fish, but she is indifferent about what it is, and will not let me have it to try.
She did it, and after this we crept down to where the wild-beast battle had been, and collected some skins, and I made her patch together a couple of suits proper for public occasions.
She used to carry the young tigers around so, and play with them, before we lost our property; but it was only play; she never took on about them like this when their dinner disagreed with them.
I escaped that night, and rode a horse all night as fast as he could go, hoping to get clear out of the Park and hide in some other country before the trouble should begin; but it was not to be.
She accuses me of being the cause of our disaster!
We have named it Cain.
It was this.
I turned pale at that, for I have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they were new when I made them.
Found me out, and has named the place Tonawanda--says it looks like that.
Her mind is disordered--everything shows it.
I will superintend.
Wednesday
At such times the water comes out of the places in her face that she looks out of, and she pats the fish on the back and makes soft sounds with her mouth to soothe it, and betrays sorrow and solicitude in a hundred ways.
She asked me if I had made one just at the time of the catastrophe.
That is what she thinks, but this is an error, in my judgment.
I have had a variegated time.
I was obliged to eat them, I was so hungry.
They are uncomfortable, it is true, but stylish, and that is the main point about clothes. ...
I do not understand this.
She said the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term meaning an aged and mouldy joke.
She says, with apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured her that the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts.
I found this place, outside the Park, and was fairly comfortable for a few days, but she has found me out.
I said I was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts.
Sometimes she carries the fish in her arms half the night when it complains and wants to get to the water.
This resemblance to words may be purely accidental, of course, and may have no purpose or meaning; but even in that case it is still extraordinary, and is a thing which no other bear can do.
She was not like this before she lost her mind.
Meantime the bear has learned to paddle around all by itself on its hind legs, and says "poppa" and "momma."
It makes more noise now than it ever did before--and mainly at night.
That seemed cruel and not like her; and yet she may be right.
The kangaroo still continues to grow, which is very strange and perplexing.
If I could tame it--but that is out of the question; the more I try, the worse I seem to make it.
The old one is tamer than it was, and can laugh and talk like the parrot, having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty in a highly developed degree.
I have moved out.
It would be an irreparable loss to science if they should get away.
I shall be astonished if it turns out to be a new kind of parrot, and yet I ought not to be astonished, for it has already been everything else it could think of, since those first days when it was a fish.
I have offered to get her a kangaroo if she would let this one go, but it did no good--she is determined to run us into all sorts of foolish risks, I think.
It is not a kangaroo.
She calls it Abel.
I wanted to let it go, but she wouldn't hear of it.
No, for it supports itself by holding to her finger, and thus goes a few steps on its hind legs, and then falls down.
It has no tail yet.
I never knew one to be so long getting its growth. It has fur on its head now; not like kangaroo fur, but exactly like our hair, except that it is much finer and softer, and instead of being black is red.
I examined its mouth.
A Fortnight Later
It might be lonelier than ever; for since I cannot find another one, how could it?
Four Months Later
Ten Years Later
Bears are dangerous--since our catastrophe--and I shall not be satisfied to have this one prowling about the place much longer without a muzzle on.
I was going to stuff one of them for my collection, but she is prejudiced against it for some reason or other; so I have relinquished the idea, though I think it is a mistake.
There is no danger yet; it has only one tooth.
It is probably some kind of a bear; and yet it has no tail--as yet--and no fur, except on its head.
They are boys; we found it out long ago.
Next Day
Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit!
EXTRACTS FROM ADAM'S DIARY
Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it "looks like a dodo." It will have to keep that name, no doubt.
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
This is probably doubtful; yet it is all one to me; what she is were nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk.
I have never heard the human voice before, and any new and strange sound intruding itself here upon the solemn hush of these dreaming solitudes offends my ear and seems a false note.
This morning found the new creature trying to clod apples out of that forbidden tree.
Saturday
Monday
There is the dodo, for instance.
Wednesday
I already had six of them per week, before.
It is the finest thing on the estate, I think.
Dodo!
That sounds like a cheap fling at the poor creature, a slur; but I do not mean it so.
And always that same pretext is offered--it looks like the thing.
Privately, I continue to call it that, but not any longer publicly.
This day is getting to be more and more trying. It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest.
Where did I get that word?...
The word evidently raised me in its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word, and will bear repetition.
The new creature says it is all woods and rocks and scenery, and therefore has no resemblance to a garden. Says it looks like a park, and does not look like anything but a park.
Built me a shelter against the rain, but could not have it to myself in peace.
"We" again--that is its word; mine too, now, from hearing it so much.
Since then I have deciphered some more of Adam's hieroglyphics, and think he has now become sufficiently important as a public character to justify this publication.--M.
Good deal of fog this morning.
I wish it would not talk; it is always talking.
I get no chance to name anything myself.
I remember now --the new creature uses it.
Sunday
They had almost reached another village when they came to a tiny painted house on wheels with horses to draw it.
She knew, to be sure, that her grandfather was not a thief and that he did not know what he was doing when he stole her money; but she knew, too, that if people found out he was crazy they would take him away from her and shut him up where she could not be with him, and of this she could not bear to think.
The child's strength was almost gone, when they met a traveler who was reading in a book as he walked along.
The place to which they finally came was a town of wretched workmen who toiled all day in iron furnaces for little wages, and were almost as miserable and hungry as the wanderers themselves.
So they bade the schoolmaster good-by and walked on.
He made her give him the money she had earned from the waxwork, joined the gamblers and in a few hours had lost it all.
When she was abed she could not sleep for fear of the wicked men she had seen gambling.
This she had to change into silver and to pay a part for their lodging.
We must go."
That night they slept at a cottage where the people were kind to them, and all the next day they walked on and on.
He made them sleep in the school-room that night, and he begged them to stay longer next day, but little Nell was anxious to get as far as possible from London and from the dwarf, who she was all the time in fear might find them.
She explained that the child's duty would be to point out the wax figures to the visitors and tell their names, while her grandfather could help dust them.
The pale old schoolmaster sat smoking in the garden.
He looked up as they came near.
She told him all the story of their wanderings, and he heard it with astonishment and wonder to find such a great heart and heroism in a child.
If she could get to her grandfather, she thought, she would be safe.
THE WANDERERS
He seemed to understand that he was not wholly in his right mind.
But it was easy to see that they were not ordinary beggars, and she was kind-hearted and wanted to help them.
At sunset they stopped to rest in a churchyard, where two men were sitting patching a Punch-and-Judy show booth, while the figures of Punch, the doctor, the executioner and the devil were lying on the grass waiting to be mended.
The schoolmaster carried her to an inn near by, where she was put to bed and doctored under his care, for she was very weak.
At last she could bear it no longer.
They begged, but no one would help them.
He dressed himself in fear, and with her little basket on her arm she led him out of the house, on, away from the town, into the country, far away from Mrs. Jarley, who had been so kind to them, and from the new home they had found.
She ran home in terrible grief.
She was dreadfully afraid he might return to harm her.
One, she saw, was her grandfather, and the others were the gamblers with whom he had played at the inn on the night of the storm.
The men were mending the dolls very badly, so little Nell took a needle and sewed them all neatly.
This, she soon knew, he gambled away, for often he was out all night, and even seemed to shun her; so she was sad and took many long walks alone through the fields.
"This, ladies and gentlemen," little Nell learned to say, "is Jasper Packlemerton, who murdered fourteen wives by tickling the soles of their feet," or, "this is Queen Elizabeth's maid of honor, who died from pricking her finger while sewing on Sunday."
She went to the old man's room and wakened him.
When she saw him little Nell shrieked and fell unconscious at his feet.
The child sewed the tattered curtains and mended the worn carpet and the schoolmaster trimmed the long grass and trained the ivy before the door. In the evening a bright fire was kindled and they all three took their supper together, and then the schoolmaster said a prayer before they went gladly to bed.
So, after much thought, she asked little Nell if they would take a situation with her.
These alarms and the exposure had begun to affect the old man.
As the wheels rattled on the old man fell asleep, and the stout lady made little Nell sit by her and talk.
I can not stay!
They were very happy in this new home.
It was the second day of the races before a chance came, and then, while the showmen's backs were turned, they slipped away in the crowd to the open fields again.
She was quick to learn and soon became a great favorite with the visitors.
Little Nell crept close.
She tried to sleep, but could not.
She was too frightened to scream, and lay very still and trembled. The robber searched her clothing, took the rest of the money and went out.
They were tempting the poor daft old man to steal the money from Mrs. Jarley's strong box, and while she listened he consented.
When at last she fell asleep she waked suddenly to see a figure in the room.
They accepted this offer very thankfully (for almost all the money they had brought was now spent), and when the wagon arrived at the place of exhibition and the waxwork had been set up, Mrs. Jarley put a long wand in little Nell's hand and taught her to point out each figure and describe it:
So the weeks passed into winter, and though she came soon to know that she was not long for earth, she thought of death without regret and of heaven with joy.
She caught a view of his face and then she knew that the figure was her own grandfather, and that, crazed by the gambling scene, he himself had robbed her!
He had been appointed schoolmaster, he told her, in another town, to which he was then on his way, and he declared they should go with him and he would care for them.
Trumpets were used for various purposes:--in war; in hunting; for signals during meetings and banquets; as a mark of honour on the arrival of distinguished visitors; and such like.
Of the entire body of Irish airs that are preserved, we know the authors of only a very small proportion; and these were composed within the last two hundred years.
There were special spinning-wheel songs, which the women sang, with words, in chorus or in dialogue, when employed in spinning.
This practice was common down to fifty or sixty years ago; and I well remember seeing cows grow restless when the song was interrupted, and become again quiet and placid when it was resumed.
In the religious tales music is always one of the delights of heaven; and a chief function of the angels who attend on God is to chant music of ineffable sweetness to Him, which they generally do in the shape of beautiful white birds.
The old Irish harps were of a medium size, or rather small, the average height being about thirty inches: and some were not much more than half that height.
The man who did most in modern times to draw attention to Irish music was Thomas Moore.
The Irish had numerous war-marches, which the pipers played at the head of the clansmen when marching to battle, and which inspired them with courage and dash for the fight.
From the very earliest ages Irish musicians were celebrated for their skill, not only in their own country but all over Europe.
HOW THE ANCIENT IRISH EXCELLED IN MUSIC.
But the bagpipe was the great favourite of the common people.
From that period, in spite of wars and troubles, music continued to be cultivated, and there was an unbroken succession of great professional harpers, till the end of the eighteenth century, when, for want of encouragement in the miserable condition of the country under the penal laws, the race died out.
They had strings of brass wire which were tuned by a key, not very different from the present tuning-key.
Our native literature, whether referring to pagan or Christian times, is full of references to music and to skilful musicians, who are always spoken of in terms of the utmost respect.
They were usually sung to put children to sleep.
The music of ancient Ireland consisted wholly of short airs, each with two strains or parts--seldom more.
Harpers and timpanists were honoured in Ireland beyond all other musicians; and their rights and privileges were even laid down in the law. Kings had always harpers in their service, who resided in the palaces and were well paid for their services.
In the National Museum in Dublin is a collection of twenty-six ancient trumpets, varying in length from 8 feet down to 18 inches.
At milking-time the girls were in the habit of chanting a particular sort of air, in a low gentle voice.
Everywhere through the Records we find evidences that the ancient Irish, both high and low, were passionately fond of music.
The same custom was common in the Highlands of Scotland.
On many of the great stone crosses are sculptured harp-players and pipe-players, from which we learn a great deal about the shapes and sizes of the several instruments.
At a later time it was quite common among the Welsh bards to come over to Ireland to receive instruction from the Irish harpers.
The form in use was what we now call the Highland or Scotch pipes--slung from the shoulder: the bag inflated by the mouth.
Ireland was long the school for Scottish harpers also, who regularly came over, like those of Wales, to finish their musical education--a practice which continued down to about 150 years ago.
Special airs and songs were used during working time by smiths, by weavers, and by boatmen.
In most cases words suitable to the several occasions were sung with lullabies, laments, and occupation-tunes.
The musical branch figures much in Irish romantic literature.
It was mixed up with their daily home-life, and formed part of their amusements, meetings, and celebrations of every kind.
The Harp is mentioned in the earliest Irish literature: it is constantly mixed up with our oldest legends; and it was in use from the remotest pagan times.
Among the household of every king and chief there was a band of trumpeters--as there were harpers--who were assigned their proper places at feasts and meetings.
He composed his exquisite songs to old Irish airs.
It had a body like a flat drum, to which at one side was attached a short neck: the strings were stretched across the flat face of the drum and along the neck: and were tuned and regulated by pins or keys and a bridge.
For war purposes, trumpeters had different calls for directing movements--for battle, for unyoking, for marching, for halting, for retiring to sleep, for going into council, and so forth.
Examples of all the preceding classes of melodies will be found in the collections of Irish airs by Bunting, Petrie, and Joyce.
Such airs are now known as lullabies, or nurse-tunes, or cradle-songs, of which numerous examples are preserved in collections of Irish music.
It cannot be said that they are united by the one body; because rather does the soul contain the body and make it one, than the reverse.
The distinction between Socrates and Plato would be no other than that of one man with a tunic and another with a cloak; which is quite absurd.
Therefore, if we suppose two men to have several intellects and one sense--for instance, if two men had one eye--there would be several seers, but one sight.
Seemingly, therefore, the intellect of the disciple and master is but one; and, consequently, the same applies to all men.
Whether Besides the Intellectual Soul There Are in Man Other Souls Essentially Different from One Another?
But the phantasm itself is not a form of the possible intellect; it is the intelligible species abstracted from the phantasm that is a form.
From this it is clear how to answer the Second and Third objections: since, in order that man may be able to understand all things by means of his intellect, and that his intellect may understand immaterial things and universals, it is sufficient that the intellectual power be not the act of the body.
For the soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding.
It seems, therefore, to follow that there is one intellect in all men.
Therefore, as a surface which is of a pentagonal shape, is not tetragonal by one shape, and pentagonal by another--since a tetragonal shape would be superfluous as contained in the pentagonal--so neither is Socrates a man by one soul, and animal by another; but by one and the same soul he is both animal and man.
Therefore this principle by which we primarily understand, whether it be called the intellect or the intellectual soul, is the form of the body.
(5) Of the qualities required in the body of which the intellectual principle is the form?
We must therefore say either that Socrates understands by virtue of his whole self, as Plato maintained, holding that man is an intellectual soul; or that intelligence is a part of Socrates.
Secondly, this is proved to be impossible by the manner in which one thing is predicated of another.
Now the human soul is the highest and noblest of forms.
(7) Whether by means of an accident?
Now this would not be the case if the various principles of the soul's operations were essentially different, and distributed in the various parts of the body.
(1) Whether the intellectual principle is united to the body as its form?
This is heretical; for it would do away with the distinction of rewards and punishments.
If we suppose, however, that the soul is united to the body as its form, it is quite impossible for several essentially different souls to be in one body.
Now the proper operation of man as man is to understand; because he thereby surpasses all other animals.
Therefore there is nothing to prevent some power thereof not being the act of the body, although the soul is essentially the form of the body.
Yet it is the stone which is understood, not the likeness of the stone; except by a reflection of the intellect on itself: otherwise, the objects of sciences would not be things, but only intelligible species.
And the higher we advance in the nobility of forms, the more we find that the power of the form excels the elementary matter; as the vegetative soul excels the form of the metal, and the sensitive soul excels the vegetative soul.
Therefore the intellectual principle is not united to the body as its form.
Man must therefore derive his species from that which is the principle of this operation.
But this is contrary to the nature of the intellect; for then the intellect would seem not to be distinct from the imagination.
He proves this from the fact that "man and the sun generate man from matter." It is separate indeed according to its intellectual power, because the intellectual power does not belong to a corporeal organ, as the power of seeing is the act of the eye; for understanding is an act which cannot be performed by a corporeal organ, like the act of seeing.
For corruptible and incorruptible are not of the same substance.
We now consider the union of the soul with the body; and concerning this there are eight points of inquiry:
(4) Whether in the body there is any other substantial form?
It follows, therefore, that it is altogether impossible and unreasonable to maintain that there exists one intellect for all men.
Therefore it is not united to the body as its form.
The Commentator held that this union is through the intelligible species, as having a double subject, in the possible intellect, and in the phantasms which are in the corporeal organs.
For an immaterial substance is not multiplied in number within one species.
Objection 1: It seems that the intellectual principle is not united to the body as its form.
But with regard to the intellectual part, he seems to leave it in doubt whether it be "only logically" distinct from the other parts of the soul, "or also locally."
This power is called the intellect.
For that whereby primarily anything acts is a form of the thing to which the act is to be attributed: for instance, that whereby a body is primarily healed is health, and that whereby the soul knows primarily is knowledge; hence health is a form of the body, and knowledge is a form of the soul.
Therefore the intellect is not united to the body as its form.
When, therefore, a soul is sensitive only, it is corruptible; but when with sensibility it has also intellectuality, it is incorruptible.
But the materiality of the knower, and of the species whereby it knows, impedes the knowledge of the universal.
We must therefore conclude that in man the sensitive soul, the intellectual soul, and the nutritive soul are numerically one soul. This can easily be explained, if we consider the differences of species and forms.
But both of these consequences are clearly false: because "animal" is predicated of man essentially and not accidentally; and man is not part of the definition of an animal, but the other way about. Therefore of necessity by the same form a thing is animal and man; otherwise man would not really be the thing which is an animal, so that animal can be essentially predicated of man.
Therefore, as the species of colors are in the sight, so are the species of phantasms in the possible intellect. Now it is clear that because the colors, the images of which are in the sight, are on a wall, the action of seeing is not attributed to the wall: for we do not say that the wall sees, but rather that it is seen.
In the first place, an animal would not be absolutely one, in which there were several souls.
And so the difference of corruptible and incorruptible which is on the part of the forms does not involve a generic difference between man and the other animals.
Whereas the act of intellect remains in the agent, and does not pass into something else, as does the action of heating. Therefore the action of understanding cannot be attributed to Socrates for the reason that he is moved by his intellect.
Thirdly, this is shown to be impossible by the fact that when one operation of the soul is intense it impedes another, which could never be the case unless the principle of action were essentially one.
If, therefore, my intellect is distinct from yours, what is understood by me must be distinct from what is understood by you; and consequently it will be reckoned as something individual, and be only potentially something understood; so that the common intention will have to be abstracted from both; since from things diverse something intelligible common to them may be abstracted.
Now man is corruptible like other animals.
Again, this is clearly impossible, whatever one may hold as to the manner of the union of the intellect to this or that man.
For it would follow that Socrates and Plato are one man; and that they are not distinct from each other, except by something outside the essence of each.
But the difference which constitutes man is "rational," which is applied to man on account of his intellectual principle.
It is well to remark that if anyone holds that the soul is composed of matter and form, it would follow that in no way could the soul be the form of the body.
If we could persuade this duty man to turn the projector on them!
I saw too, what seemed to be weapons: a row of small fragile glass globes, hanging on clips along the wall--bombs, each the size of a man's fist.
And this is the sister of George Prince--what do you want up here?"
"I can't hit him," I gasped.
The signals were proceeding.
I was aiming the projector.
It's obvious: I'm skilled at trajectory firing.
He had gone back to his camp, equipped all his lights with the Benson curve. He was somewhere at the crater base now.
He sent up a signal--you saw it, didn't you?--just before Miss Prince and I came aboard.
His signals still coming. And I noticed now a faint distortion about them, the glow of his little group of hand lights faintly distorted and vaguely shot with a greenish cast.
Go up to the dome--"
It forced our hand.
"We are not skilled with Martian."
I had missed!
I lay panting.
And they were being answered from the ship!
He was dead, his fragile Martian skull split open by my blow.
We went down together, falling partly upon Anita.
"Put on your helmet!"
Abruptly I knew it was not that.
Where is he? Braile--Braile, you accursed fool!
Get your helmet: I'll try firing the projector."
But down in the Earth glow at the crater base, Miko's lights had not vanished!
"This is not the control room."
Blood from the giant's head was welling out, hot and sticky against my face as I lay sprawled on him.
At the deck window the giant projector spat its deadly electronic stream.
I must gain his confidence at once. Anita had laid her helmet aside.
I tried to gauge the distance; it was not over two miles from here.
Miko's lights were still there.
It seemed that down there in the Earthlit shadows, where the spreading base of the giant crater joined the plains, a light was bobbing.
I'll give you the word."
"I am a navigator.
And they are answering him!
Four feet above the room's roof was the arch of the dome, with the entrance to the exit-lock directly above us.
And the signaling apparatus was here!
I flung a swift glance around.
A tremendous, beetle-browed, scowling fellow. He stood with hands on his hips, his leather-garbed legs spread wide; and as I confronted him, I felt like a child.
And my heart suddenly leaped into my throat.
An error in the range?
I cast him off.
Show me how the projector is operated.
The range finder for the giant projector was here; its telescope with the trajectory apparatus and the firing switch were unmistakable.
She put in quickly:
But that was what we did not want to do.
Then Potan looked up and saw me.
By the Almighty--his giant stature--Brotow, look!
I pushed her back.
There had been no alarm.
He saw me coming.
"Oh Gregg--"
There were instrument panels.
I hoped not: it would not be easy to trick him and find an opportunity to flash a signal.
It had only been a moment.
I had dropped back from the window.
I grasped its barrel, reached upward and struck with its heavy metal butt.
Anita and I crouched by the floor.
He did not speak: he was still scowling.
"Disconnect that projector!
With the naked eye, I could not be sure. Perhaps there was a telescope finder here in the cubby....
He was trying to pretend he was your Earth party, Miko and Coniston."
Should I try the flash signal to Earth?
"Is it connected?" Anita demanded boldly.
Then go."
He held her with one arm! his other flung at me, caught me, knocked me backward.
"Gregg, come."
It was a metallic cubby, not much over fifteen feet square, with an eight foot arched ceiling.
I gestured.
Anita was plucking at me.
"Yes," he said.
You have its firing mechanism here."
We may fire on them.
One of them called up to me, but I ignored him.
Benson curve lights!
"I see it here.
The ship rang with the alarm.
There would be no time to do both: we must escape out of here.
"Why?"
I heard Potan's voice, his shout of protest and anger.
Are Haljan and the girl up there with you?"
"Get out of here!
But that task was some hours away as yet; I would worry about it when the time came.
He shouted in Martian at the duty man, whom he doubtless thought was behind me: "Be ready!
But the duty man lay in his blood at our feet.
"Dead."
This upper trap was open.
Miko's lights?
She spoke first.
We know where the treasure is."
I rushed to it.
"Got a cellar-full," said Diva.
Captain Puffin helped himself to rather more than half of what now remained in the flask.
Diva managed to beat most of them down again, but two fluttered out of the window.
"Yes, that's true enough," said Puffin.
"Diva would have sent the cover of the window-seat too, if that was the case. Liar," she thought again as she kissed her hand to Diva, who was looking gloomily out of the window.
She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses.
That she humbly hoped that she had accomplished.
The Major's laughter boomed out again.
"Why there's enough cream in this situation to make a dishful of meringues.
The pattern was of little bunches of pink roses peeping out through trellis work, and it was these which she had just begun to cut out.
You and I, you know, the students of Tilling!
Diva's head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.
"Just so.
The ice was not broken, but it was cracking in all directions under this unexampled thaw.
A little way off to the left was the great bunker which, primarily, was the cause of their present amity.
Let's have an end to such unsociable arrangements, old friend; you lining your Roman roads and the bottle to lay the dust over to me one night, and I'll bring my diaries and my peg over to you the next.
I just took the trouble to come and warn you."
At his third attempt nothing happened; at the fourth the ball flew against the boards, rebounded briskly again into the bunker, trickled down the steep, sandy slope and hit the Major's boot.
"Poppies in the corn," said Miss Mapp over and over to herself, remembering some sweet verses she had once read by Bernard Shaw or Clement Shorter or somebody like that about a garden of sleep somewhere in Norfolk. . . .
"Liar," thought Miss Mapp, as she tripped downstairs.
Dear me, my wound's going to trouble me to-night."
"Couldn't say, I'm sure," she said.
This insolent question needed no answer, and Major Flint drove, skying the ball to a prodigious height.
Diva was very ingenious: she used up all sorts of odds and ends in a way that did credit to her undoubtedly parsimonious qualities.
Tram and tramp!
"We shall miss the tram," said the Major, and, with the intention of giving annoyance, he sat down in the bunker with his back to Captain Puffin, and lit a cigarette.
But what on earth was she doing that for?
Though she worked with zealous diligence, she had an eye to the movements in the street outside, for it was shopping-hour, and there were many observations to be made.
"Must be going," she said.
"Diva, you've not been hoarding, have you?" asked Miss Mapp with great anxiety.
Upon my word, I've half a mind to telephone for a taxi."
The two had clearly indicated a mutual suspicion of each other's industrious habits after dinner. . . . They had never got quite so far as this before: some quarrel had congealed the surface again.
"Want me?"
When carefully sewn on they looked as if they were a design in the stuff.
Twemlow--such a civil man-- tells me that he thinks we shall have plenty of food, or anyhow sufficient for everybody for quite a long time, provided that there's no hoarding.
"Now none of your sailor-talk ashore, Captain," said the Major, in high good humour.
I must remember that.
Then it was the Navy's turn, and the Navy had to lie on its keel above the boards of the bunker, in order to reach its ball at all, and missed it twice.
In fact," added Puffin in a burst of confidence, "the study I've done on Roman roads these last six months wouldn't cover a threepenny piece."
"But all these orders were only for the period of the war," she said.
Fine thing to be an enthusiastic archæologist like that.
Weak and trembling from passion, Major Flint found that after a few tottering steps in the direction of Tilling he would be totally unable to get there unless fortified by some strong stimulant, and turned back to the club-house to obtain it.
Then he took a half-crown from his pocket.
"Help yourself, Major," he said.
"And you sitting up one side of the street," he gasped, "pretending to be interested in Roman roads, and me on the other pulling a long face over my diaries, and neither of us with a Roman road or a diary to our names.
Even the threat that he would instantly resign his membership unless provided with drink produced no effect on a polite steward, and he sat down to recover as best he might with an old volume of Punch.
"Long roads they were, and dry roads at that, and if I stuck to them from after my supper every evening till midnight or more I should be smothered in dust."
"Well, if that's not the best joke I've heard for many a long day," he said.
There was a perfectly perceptible pause, during which Miss Mapp noticed that there were no curtains over the window.
Major Flint in his eagerness had put most of his moustache into the life-giving tumbler, and dried it on his handkerchief.
"Bless them, the funny little fairies," said the Major.
"A woman will lick up half a bottle of brandy if it's called plum-pudding, and ask for more, whereas if you offered her a small brandy-and-soda, she would think you were insulting her."
"There I've been in the house opposite you these last two years, seeing your light burning late night after night, and thinking to myself: 'There's my friend Puffin still at it!
"I sit in my chair, you understand, and perhaps doze for a bit after my supper, and then I'll get my maps out, and have them handy beside me.
Recommended me to get earlier to bed, and do my work between six and eight in the morning!
Give me the hole?"
Diva was no coward.
"And I never kept a diary in my life!" he cried.
"Better give it up, old chap," said Major Flint.
Often she's talked to you, too, I bet my hat, about sitting up late and exhausting the nervous faculties."
"That's to say if you're not very busy."
Think of old times a bit over my diaries."
Precisely then, and at no other time, Miss Mapp looked up, and one settled on her face, the other fell into her basket.
I bought it."
"Well, thank ye, I don't mind if I do," he said, reversing the flask over the tumbler.
But it had to come to earth sometime, and it fell like Lucifer, son of the morning, in the middle of the same bunker. . . .
"No, sir, I am not," said Major Flint.
"But how much do they allow you to have?" she asked.
She got up.
Major Flint flew to his feet.
That was money just as much as a florin pushed across the counter.
Good.
Thirst is a great leveller.
But that wasn't what I popped in about. This coal-strike, you know."
The three went to work with feverish energy, for Diva had got a start, and by four o'clock that afternoon there were enough poppies cut out to furnish, when in seed, a whole street of opium dens. The dress selected for decoration was, apart from a few mildew- spots, the colour of ripe corn, which was superbly appropriate for September.
"Give that to the Captain," he said to his caddie, and without looking round, walked away in the direction of the tram.
There was the wool in the shop.
For what garish purpose could she want to use bunches of roses cut out of chintz curtains?
"Perhaps a hundred years hence--the date I have named in my will for their publication-- someone may think them not so uninteresting.
Perhaps a piece of the chintz, trellis and all, could be sewn over the belt, but she was determined to have single little bunches of roses peppered all over the collar and cuffs of the jacket, and, if possible, round the edge of the skirt.
The hot weather had continued late into September and showed no signs of breaking yet, and it would be agreeable to her and acutely painful to others that just at the end of the summer she should appear in a perfectly new costume, before the days of jumpers and heavy skirts and large woollen scarves came in.
"Well, what I tell you is true, Major," said Puffin.
There was one--it had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room--covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out), and Miss Mapp dragged it dustily from its corner, setting in motion a perfect cascade of cardboard lids and some door-handles.
Diva did remember something about hoarding; there had surely been dreadful exposures of prudent housekeepers in the papers which were very uncomfortable reading.
This one had been a shade more acute than most, and the drop into amity again was a shade more precipitous.
But what has happened to your pretty curtains?"
She only knew that they were little pink roses, and that they had fluttered out of Diva's window. . . .
So, since they refused to pay for their mending any more she was preparing to make them pay, pretty smartly too, in other ways.
Miss Mapp had put the two specimens of which she had so providentially become possessed in her lap, and they looked very pretty against the navy-blue of her skirt.
From here on the floor above the street she could easily look into Elizabeth's basket, and she certainly was carrying nothing away with her from the grocer's, for the only thing there was a small bottle done up in white paper with sealing wax, which, Diva had no need to be told, certainly came from the chemist's, and was no doubt connected with too many plums.
"Sure to be.
"Then say I will have the tongue as well, Withers," said Miss Mapp. "Just a tongue--and then I shall want you and Mary to do some cutting out for me."
"A man's no business to let a game ruffle him."
"Shut up," he said.
"Hush!
"Felicity, put on the kettle.
Aunt Janet had forgotten to warn Uncle Roger to keep an eye on our bedtime snacks, and we ate what seemed good unto us.
The mince pie was to blame for THAT wish.
I don't think she did.
That cannibal story was simply grand.
Mrs. Ray says if she isn't better by the morning she's going to send for the doctor.
"Sara must not do penance in that way.
I guess the Presbyterians can get along without it, and look after their own heathen."
"I've thought of a great penance," said Cecily eagerly.
And she had.
"Yes.
"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Aunt Janet.
"No, it's only after they're converted that they're anything in particular," said Felicity.
"He can see it anyhow, without your doing anything," said Cecily.
Felicity ate two in her very presence, and then brought the rest out to us in the orchard.
"It wouldn't do," said Felicity decidedly.
The Story Girl looked piteous.
But the Story Girl would not come.
Pat came over, but his most seductive purrs won no notice from his mistress, who refused herself the pleasure of even patting him.
But I'll do the best I can.
Are there any Methodist heathen?
"You could see through it."
I hate it so.
"Before that, they're just plain heathen. But if you want your money to go to a Methodist missionary you can give it to the Methodist minister at Markdale.
"Thank you.
Go right home and dress yourself decently--or eat your supper in the kitchen."
"Well, my conscience will feel better."
"Oh, do you suppose she caught them at the magic lantern show?" she said miserably.
CHAPTER XI.
Wasn't the missionary splendid?
But she worked on at her buttonholes.
But, for all that, there was a certain exhilaration about her.
"It isn't any good.
Two cents more a week out of Cecily's egg money, meant something of a sacrifice.
"Penance?" we murmured in bewilderment.
"I'm going to do penance all day for coaxing Sara to disobey her mother," she announced with chastened triumph.
"No.
"Her roses are all out and that bed of Sweet William is a sight by daylight."
And if any of you think of anything I don't, just mention it to me.
The Story Girl slipped over home, and when she came back we gasped.
I thought it out last night.
So I'm going to do penance all day.
You'd find that penance enough."
I want to mortify the flesh--"
I'm going to deny myself everything I like, and do everything I can think of that I don't like, just to punish myself for being so wicked.
"Then I suppose I'll have to do without.
I never thought of that.
"Don't go to the missionary meeting to-night."
All day she sat in the kitchen and worked buttonholes, subsisting on bread and water and Mexican Tea.
But now I understood it all.
"I wouldn't SAY anything," retorted Aunt Janet.
So it doesn't matter what you do, whether it's useful or not, so long as it's nasty.
The smell of raisin pies is something to tempt an anchorite; and the Story Girl was exceedingly fond of them.
"There isn't any; I used the last in the soup yesterday."
You don't mind, do you?"
"She has a cold and sore throat, and she is feverish.
To sit down to one of Aunt Janet's meals, in ordinary health and appetite, and eat nothing but bread and water--that would be penance with a vengeance!
"In fact, I'll begin to-night.
And she had tied her hair with a snuff-brown ribbon which was very unbecoming to her.
THAT will be penance.
But the rest of us rather looked with favour on the Story Girl's idea. We felt sure that she would do penance as picturesquely and thoroughly as she did everything else.
But the Story Girl did it.
I had read the story before, and it had been my opinion that it was "rot." No king, I felt certain, would ever marry a beggar maid when he had princesses galore from whom to choose.
The first person we saw in the church porch was Mrs. Ray.
She would wear holes in her stockings, and might seriously bruise her feet."
I MUST hear that missionary speak.
"Not if you don't go too far with your nonsense," she said tolerantly.
We felt WE could never do it.
It inspired the rest of us.
I s'pose I ought to give my box to them, rather than to Presbyterian heathen."
No, I must go, but I'll tell you what I'll do.
"Sara is real sick," she said, with regret, and something that was not regret mingled in her voice.
I feel better since I punished myself.
"Where else could she have caught them?" said Felicity mercilessly.
And I'm going to work buttonholes all over this cotton.
"I thought of that myself--but I CAN'T stay home, Cecily.
"I'd like to be a missionary and have adventures like that," said Felix.
"Oh, I don't know.
The Story Girl was not to be comforted.
THE STORY GIRL DOES PENANCE
I'll wear my school dress and hat.
It's such dreadful tasting stuff--but it's a good blood purifier, so Aunt Janet can't object to it."
I'll get some after breakfast. I'm not going to eat a single thing all day, except bread and water--and not much of that!"
I won't be able to give much.
The Story Girl was crimson with indignation.
But I'm going to make up for it to-morrow," said the Story Girl energetically.
Yea, wilt thou comfort their souls in Christ.
Amen.
And may God grant that it may be done according to my words, even as I have spoken.
Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.
O Lord, wilt thou give me strength, that I may bear with mine infirmities.
Nevertheless, there was no law against a man's belief; therefore, a man was punished only for the crimes which he had done; therefore all men were on equal grounds.
And he said unto me: There is no God; yea, and he taught me that which I should say.
Why do ye look for a Christ?
For I am infirm, and such wickedness among this people doth pain my soul.
For behold, I say unto you, I know there is a God, and also that Christ shall come.
I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy.
Now this is not all; little children do have words given unto them many times which confound the wise and the learned.
Why do ye speak against all the prophecies of the holy prophets?
Now this was according to the prayer of Alma; and this because he prayed in faith.
And he came over into the land of Gideon, and began to preach unto them also; and here he did not have much success, for he was taken and bound and carried before the high priest, and also the chief judge over the land.
And Korihor said unto him: Because I do not teach the foolish traditions of your fathers, and because I do not teach this people to bind themselves down under the foolish ordinances and performances which are laid down by ancient priests, to usurp power and authority over them, to keep them in ignorance, that they may not lift up their heads, but be brought down according to thy words.
Amen.
Behold, I say unto you, that it is on the one hand even as it is on the other; and it shall be unto every man according to his work.
Why do ye teach this people that there shall be no Christ, to interrupt their rejoicings?
And behold, as he clapped his hands upon them, they were filled with the Holy Spirit.
Behold, I say they are in bondage.
Behold, O God, they cry unto thee with their mouths, while they are puffed up, even to greatness, with the vain things of the world.
And Korihor did go about from house to house, begging food for his support.
Then I realised that I was in that little hell of mine again, now half swamped; and looking back over the gunwale, I saw the schooner standing away from me, with the red-haired captain mocking at me over the taffrail, and turning towards the island saw the launch growing smaller as she approached the beach.
It was no good answering the brute; but I certainly did not expect his next move.
Then it occurred to me that it was exactly the thing I wanted.
"Look here," I began, turning to the captain.
The hands in the launch shouted derisively, and I heard Montgomery curse at them; and then the captain, the mate, and one of the seamen helping him, ran me aft towards the stern.
He distorted his lower lip, and nodded his head hopelessly at the grey-haired man beside him, to indicate his powerlessness to help me.
IN the early morning (it was the second morning after my recovery, and I believe the fourth after I was picked up), I awoke through an avenue of tumultuous dreams,--dreams of guns and howling mobs,--and became sensible of a hoarse shouting above me.
In a passion of despair I struck with my fists at the water in the bottom of the boat, and kicked savagely at the gunwale.
"But, Montgomery," I appealed.
At first I could scarcely believe what had happened.
He held out his hand to the gangway by which Montgomery stood talking to a massive grey-haired man in dirty-blue flannels, who had apparently just come aboard.
Then began a curious three-cornered altercation. Alternately I appealed to one and another of the three men,--first to the grey-haired man to let me land, and then to the drunken captain to keep me aboard.
The poor brute seemed horribly scared, and crouched in the bottom of its little cage.
"Shut-up,--that's your name. Mister Shut-up."
It needed no expert eye to tell that the man was still drunk.
I've had enough of it."
He stood in my way, so that I had perforce to tap his shoulder to come on deck.
I'm king here." At last I must confess my voice suddenly broke in the middle of a vigorous threat. I felt a gust of hysterical petulance, and went aft and stared dismally at nothing.
The lost prospect of a journey as sole passenger with this quarrelsome sot was not one to mourn over. I turned towards Montgomery.
He had the squarest and most resolute face I ever set eyes upon.
"Can't have you," said Montgomery's companion, concisely.
Presently that work was finished, and then came a struggle. I was hauled, resisting weakly enough, to the gangway. Even then I noticed the oddness of the brown faces of the men who were with Montgomery in the launch; but the launch was now fully laden, and was shoved off hastily.
I did not turn my head to follow her.
The tears ran down my face.
"What do you mean?" I said.
I jumped into my clothes and went on deck.
Neither Montgomery nor his companion took the slightest notice of me, but busied themselves in assisting and directing the four or five sailors who were unloading the goods. The captain went forward interfering rather than assisting. I was alternately despairful and desperate.
"Prendick be damned!" said he.
"That way, Mister Blasted Shut-up! that way!" roared the captain.
"This ship aint for beasts and cannibals and worse than beasts, any more.
I drifted slowly from the schooner.
"Prendick," said I.
The dingey of the "Lady Vain" had been towing behind; it was half full of water, had no oars, and was quite unvictualled. I refused to go aboard her, and flung myself full length on the deck. In the end, they swung me into her by a rope (for they had no stern ladder), and then they cut me adrift.
A broadening gap of green water appeared under me, and I pushed back with all my strength to avoid falling headlong.
I stared at him dumfounded.
Montgomery and his companion turned as he spoke.
"That way, Mister Blasted Shut-up,--that's what I mean! Overboard, Mister Shut-up,--and sharp!
He came round with a start, and staggered back a few paces to stare at me.
I crouched in the bottom of the dingey, stunned, and staring blankly at the vacant, oily sea.
If they can't have you, you goes overboard. But, anyhow, you go--with your friends.
I stared before me out at the green sea, frothing under a freshening breeze, and let these and other strange memories of the last few days chase one another through my mind.
"I'm in your hands," said I. I had no idea of what he meant by "over there."
Indeed, they had all seemed remarkably taciturn, and when they did speak, endowed with very uncanny voices. What was wrong with them?
"Decidedly," said I, "I should be a fool to take offence at any want of confidence."
Just as I was thinking of him he came in.
"Your breakfast, sair," he said.
I felt convinced that this must be the same man.
Under his stringy black locks I saw his ear; it jumped upon me suddenly close to my face.
I stared at his face without attempting to answer him.
What could it all mean?
What are we to do with him?"
That long-forgotten pamphlet came back with startling vividness to my mind. I had been a mere lad then, and Moreau was, I suppose, about fifty,--a prominent and masterful physiologist, well-known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination and his brutal directness in discussion.
"That's it," said the elder man, promptly, looking at Montgomery; and all three of us went towards the enclosure.
Then I recalled the eyes of Montgomery's ungainly attendant.
He twisted his heavy mouth into a faint smile--he was one of those saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down,--and bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance.
I followed the llama up the beach, and was overtaken by Montgomery, who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure. I noticed then that the puma in its cage and the pile of packages had been placed outside the entrance to this quadrangle.
I followed him, and found myself in a small apartment, plainly but not uncomfortably furnished and with its inner door, which was slightly ajar, opening into a paved courtyard.
It sent my memory back ten years.
"I'm itching to get to work again--with this new stuff," said the white-haired man, nodding towards the enclosure. His eyes grew brighter.
"He knows something of science," said Montgomery.
Was this the same Moreau?
The doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be that he deserved to be; but I still think that the tepid support of his fellow-investigators and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers was a shameful thing.
"The Moreau Horrors!"
Chicago!
Some of the stories were told for this volume.
As he was a rapid workman and paid no attention to the clock, I took a fancy to him, and gave him piece-work.
The landlord kept going among his tenants and finally discovered the dynamo.
This constant interruption is taken by many to mean that Edison has a small opinion of any arguments that oppose him; but he is only intensely in earnest in presenting his own side.
He awoke at once, smiling, jumped up, was instantly himself as usual, and advanced and greeted the visitor.
Bergmann gave him a withering look of scorn, and said, 'Come here and I will show you.' Throwing off the belt and disconnecting the wires, he spun the armature around by hand.
They were diamonds for exhibition purposes --probably glass."
But perhaps this further story is a better indication of developed humor and shrewdness: "A man by the name of Epstein had been in the habit of buying brass chips and trimmings from the lathes, and in some way Bergmann found out that he had been cheated.
For instance, he had gone to bed the night before exactly at twelve and had arisen at 4.30 A. M. to read some New York law reports.
This had puzzled me for years, but one day I was unexpectedly let into part of the secret.
Quite a different exhibition was given two weeks later by another well-known Englishman, also an electrician, who came in with his friends, and I was trying for two hours to explain it to him and failed."
In a sense this is true, for no one is more impatient or intolerant of interruption when deeply engaged in some line of experiment.
Why?
Bergmann thought it real, and never after that would he permit the whistle to blow."
It is no exaggeration to say that Edison was greeted with the enthusiastic homage of the whole French people.
He had the faculty of understanding and quickly seeing the point of the stories; and for three days after I could not get rid of him.
'Where is the steamer that goes across the Channel?' 'This is the boat.' There had been a storm in the North Sea that had carried away some of the boats on the German steamer, and it certainly looked awful tough outside.
I said to Sadler: 'What is that?' 'I don't know,' he said, and we paid no attention.
It was for me to meet Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.
He insisted I should go--that a special car would leave New York.
Hard work, nothing to divert my thought, clear air and simple food made my life very pleasant.
It was hopeless--an appeal based on sentiment.
Incidentally it may be noted here that during the same year (1889) the various manufacturing Edison lighting interests in America were brought together, under the leadership of Mr. Henry Villard, and consolidated in the Edison General Electric Company with a capital of no less than $12,000,000 on an eight-per-cent.-dividend basis.
The moment my family got in the room with the French lady's maid and the rest, they commenced to get sick, so I felt pretty sure I was in for it.
He rented power from a Jew who owned the building.
Here were made all the small things used on the electric-lighting system, such as sockets, chandeliers, switches, meters, etc.
Bergmann had won all the money, and when the porter came in and said 'Chicago,' Bergmann jumped up and said: 'What!
While in Paris, in 1889, he wore the decoration of the Legion of Honor whenever occasion required, but at all other times turned the badge under his lapel "because he hated to have fellow-Americans think he was showing off." And any one who knows Edison will bear testimony to his utter absence of ostentation.
Mr. Bergmann, now I know where my power goes to,' pointing to the dynamo.
One evening, Robert L. Cutting, of New York, brought her out to see the light.
"At another time, I had a briquetting machine for briquetting iron ore. I had a lever held down by a powerful spring, and a rod one inch in diameter and four feet long.
My father came there when he was eighty years of age.
The belt was running so smoothly and evenly, the poodle did not notice the difference between it and the floor, and got into the belt before we could do anything.
In the early days of work on the incandescent lamp, also, there was considerable trouble with mercury.
One day this drier got blocked, and the ore would not run down.
They both took a deep interest in all they saw.
Finally came the electric light.
For many years a suit was used as a measurement; once or twice they took fresh measurements, but these didn't fit and they had to go back.
I took them to railroad buildings, electric-light plants, fire departments, and showed them a great variety of things.
I would take a wire with similar apparatus at both ends, and would throw it over on one set of instruments, take it away, and get it back so quickly that you would not miss it, thereby taking advantage of the rapidity of electricity to perform operations.
"He started in on stock-quotation printers.
I had been over the ocean three times and did not know what seasickness was, so far as I was concerned myself.
It was not, of course, by way of theatrical antithesis that Edison appeared in Paris at such a time.
Edison naturally met many of the celebrities of France: "I visited the Eiffel Tower at the invitation of Eiffel.
While in Paris, Edison had met Sir John Pender, the English "cable king," and had received an invitation from him to make a visit to his country residence: "Sir John Pender, the master of the cable system of the world at that time, I met in Paris.
They aren't filled up with Latin, philosophy, and the rest of that ninny stuff." A further remark of his is: "What the country needs now is the practical skilled engineer, who is capable of doing everything.
When Sir William Thomson (Kelvin) came in the room, he was introduced to me, and had a number of friends with him. He said: 'What have you here?' I told him briefly what it was.
It would be difficult to imagine Edison in a stiffly formal house, and this big, cozy, three-story, rambling mansion has an easy freedom about it, without and within, quite in keeping with the genius of the inventor, but revealing at every turn traces of feminine taste and culture.
As a rule we never wake Mr. Edison from sleep, but as he wanted to see Colonel Bailey, who had to go, I felt that an exception should be made, so I went and tapped him on the shoulder.
She would speak in French, and Cutting would translate into English.
Before him was something real--work to be accomplished--a problem to be solved.
The sanctimonious hypocrite, the sleek speculator, and others whom he has probably encountered in life are done "to the queen's taste."
As I had no intention of offering to sell anything I was showing, and was pushing no companies, the whole exhibition was made for honor, and without any hope of profit.
He must be a remarkable man in some walk of life.
A few years later came the consolidation with the Thomson-Houston interests in the General Electric Company, which under the brilliant and vigorous management of President C. A. Coffin has become one of the greatest manufacturing institutions of the country, with an output of apparatus reaching toward $75,000,000 annually.
I thought that commercially the thing was too ambitious, that Ferranti's ideas were too big, just then; that he ought to have started a little smaller until he was sure.
I was fortunately absent, and she was mollified somehow by my other assistants.
A large cabinet contains awards, decorations, and medals presented to Edison, accumulating in the course of a long career, some of which may be seen in the illustration opposite.
I get all the proceedings of the scientific societies, the principal scientific and trade journals, and read them.
He wanted to make a gigantic gyroscope weighing several tons, to be run by an electric motor and put on a sailing ship.
As noted already, the latter part of each winter is spent at Fort Myers, Florida, where Edison has, on the banks of the Calahoutchie River, a plantation home that is in many ways a miniature copy of the home and laboratory up North.
Some dinners he had to attend, but a man who ate little and heard less could derive practically no pleasure from them.
The net result of both financial operations was, however, to detach Edison from the special field of invention to which he had given so many of his most fruitful years; and to close very definitely that chapter of his life, leaving him free to develop other ideas and interests as set forth in these volumes.
His hair has whitened, but is still thick and abundant, and though he uses glasses for certain work, his gray-blue eyes are as keen and bright and deeply lustrous as ever, with the direct, searching look in them that they have ever worn.
A very interesting period, on the social side, was the visit paid by Edison and his family to Europe in 1889, when he had made a splendid exhibit of his inventions and apparatus at the great Paris Centennial Exposition of that year, to the extreme delight of the French, who welcomed him with open arms.
I found several beautiful diamonds, but they seemed a little light weight to me when I was picking them out.
There is always too much danger of neglecting thoughts for things, ideas for machinery.
When such a fit is on him the word is quickly passed around, and but few of his associates find it necessary to consult with him at the time.
At that occasion it was pointed out to him that he should make every possible sacrifice to go, that the compliment was great, and that but few Americans had been so recognized.
Pride?
Along the length of the pipe were outlets to which thick rubber tubing was connected, each tube to a pump.
Several instruments were provided, and every day, all day long, while the Exposition lasted, queues of eager visitors from every quarter of the globe were waiting to hear the little machine talk and sing and reproduce their own voices.
Such incidents brought out in narration the fact that many of the men working with him had been less fortunate, particularly those who had experimented with the Roentgen X-ray, whose ravages, like those of leprosy, were responsible for the mutilation and death of at least one expert assistant.
Being asked whether he did not get imposed upon with bad bank-bills, he replied that he subscribed to a bank-note detector and consulted it closely whenever a note of any size fell into his hands.
As I could not understand or speak a word of French, I went to see our minister, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and got him to send a deputy to answer for me, which he did, with my grateful thanks.
Upon this platform he was going to mount a telescope to observe an eclipse off the Gold Coast of Africa.
"Oh yes," he said, "I have a couple of quarts more up at the house!" All this sounds like lack of appreciation, but it is anything else than that.
"Sire, how is it that your judgment is not affected by your great rage?" asked one of his courtiers.
At the close of the Exposition Edison was created a Commander of the Legion of Honor.
I was making some stuff to squirt into filaments for the incandescent lamp.
In private life they show him to be a good citizen, a good family man, absolutely moral, temperate in all things, and of great charitableness to all mankind.
This hurt his pride, and he determined to get even.
The big library--semi-boudoir--up-stairs is also very expressive of the home life of Edison, but again typical of his nature and disposition, for it is difficult to overlay his many technical books and scientific periodicals with a sufficiently thick crust of popular magazines or current literature to prevent their outcropping into evidence.
Bernhardt gave me two pictures, painted by herself, which she sent me from Paris."
It is as if the storm-clouds within are moving like a whirling cyclone.
At any rate the people invited to dinner were very much interested, and they questioned me as to what I thought of the proposition.
The genuine anger can generally be distinguished from the imitation article by those who know him intimately by the fact that when really enraged his forehead between the eyes partakes of a curious rotary movement that cannot be adequately described in words.
I had used ammonia and bromine.
So I and the vice-president of the company, Mr. Mallory, crowded through the manhole to see why the ore would not come down.
I was told that while a man might not get seasick on the ocean, if he met a good storm on the Channel it would do for him.
"The first time I saw Lord Kelvin, he came to my laboratory at Menlo Park in 1876." (He reported most favorably on Edison's automatic telegraph system at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876.) "I was then experimenting with sending eight messages simultaneously over a wire by means of synchronizing tuning-forks.
One would be startled to see him with a bright tie, a loud checked suit, or a fancy waistcoat, and yet there is a curious sense of fastidiousness about the plain things he delights in.
I asked his advice as to what I should order, to which he replied: 'I don't think it will be necessary to order an extra top.'" Since that episode, which will probably be appreciated by most automobilists, Edison has taken up the electric automobile, and is now using it as well as developing it.
The French papers then came out and attacked me because I went to Germany; and said I was now going over to the enemy.
He had neither sought nor expected the medal; and if the delegate didn't care to leave it he could take it away.
The little house covered with ivy, isn't it?"
But he could not say "a fool," because Sviazhsky was unmistakably clever, and moreover, a highly cultivated man, who was exceptionally modest over his culture.
The shooting turned out to be worse than Levin had expected.
His brilliant black eyes were looking straight at the excited country gentleman with gray whiskers, and apparently he derived amusement from his remarks.
He imagined, probably mistakenly, that this low-necked bodice had been made on his account, and felt that he had no right to look at it, and tried not to look at it; but he felt that he was to blame for the very fact of the low-necked bodice having been made.
The marsh was dry and there were no grouse at all.
He has so much to do, and he has the faculty of interesting himself in everything.
If it had not been a characteristic of Levin's to put the most favorable interpretation on people, Sviazhsky's character would have presented no doubt or difficulty to him: he would have said to himself, "a fool or a knave," and everything would have seemed clear.
He believed neither in God nor the devil, but was much concerned about the question of the improvement of the clergy and the maintenance of their revenues, and took special trouble to keep up the church in his village.
He was five years older than Levin, and had long been married.
It seemed to Levin that he had deceived someone, that he ought to explain something, but that to explain it was impossible, and for that reason he was continually blushing, was ill at ease and awkward.
Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions.
"But do you know you are preparing trouble for yourself," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, finding his cap and getting up.
"But listen, there are women's voices singing, and, on my word, not badly too.
That's all very well as an idyllic episode, but for your whole life that won't answer.
"No, excuse me, that's a paradox."
"He really is a capital fellow, isn't he?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, when Veslovsky had gone out and the peasant had closed the door after him.
"Not a bit of it." Levin could hear that Oblonsky was smiling as he spoke.
"There's not a chance of sleeping.
There had arisen of late something like a secret antagonism between the two brothers-in-law; as though, since they had married sisters, a kind of rivalry had sprung up between them as to which was ordering his life best, and now this hostility showed itself in the conversation, as it began to take a personal note.
Well, it can't be helped! Negative again...."
But of course you think the railways useless."
No sooner were the spirit monopolies abolished than the railways came up, and banking companies; that, too, is profit without work."
"Perfectly!
"Well, I shall go by myself," said Veslovsky, getting up eagerly, and putting on his shoes and stockings.
"Ah, what a night!" said Veslovsky, looking out at the edge of the hut and the unharnessed wagonette that could be seen in the faint light of the evening glow in the great frame of the open doors.
"Do you suppose I don't see the line you've taken up with your wife?
"You say," Levin went on, "that it's unjust for me to receive five thousand, while the peasant has fifty; that's true.
"Yes, capital," answered Levin, still thinking of the subject of their conversation just before.
"That's the maids from hard by here."
"Yes, but how am I to give it up?
There should be nothing in the home.
The great thing is to respect the sanctity of the home.
"We are going out for the night with the beasts."
"It's just this, my dear boy.
"Surely that's not a matter of principle too," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he felt about in the dark for his cap.
"Making profit by dishonest means, by trickery," said Levin, conscious that he could not draw a distinct line between honesty and dishonesty. "Such as banking, for instance," he went on.
He was obviously convinced of the correctness of his position, and so talked serenely and without haste.
They were entertaining you, to be sure.
Do you call it work to get hold of concessions and speculate with them?"
And they would not take a penny for anything. And they kept saying: 'Excuse our homely ways.'"
Why is it we spend our time riding, drinking, shooting, doing nothing, while they are forever at work?" said Vassenka Veslovsky, obviously for the first time in his life reflecting on the question, and consequently considering it with perfect sincerity.
This disconcerted him.
Such bread, it was exquisite!
"But that's not work, like the work of a peasant or a learned profession."
"Oh, by what work?
Just fancy, they gave me drink, fed me!
"I simply don't consider him more dishonest than any other wealthy merchant or nobleman.
"Why not, if it amuses him?
"We shan't go to sleep, you know.
"Can it be that it's only possible to be just negatively?" he was asking himself.
In spite of the dirtiness of the hut, which was all muddied by their boots and the filthy dogs licking themselves clean, and the smell of marsh mud and powder that filled the room, and the absence of knives and forks, the party drank their tea and ate their supper with a relish only known to sportsmen.
"How so?"
"Well, but I can tell you: your receiving some five thousand, let's say, for your work on the land, while our host, the peasant here, however hard he works, can never get more than fifty roubles, is just as dishonest as my earning more than my chief clerk, and Malthus getting more than a station-master.
Chapter 11
"What should they take anything for?
"Is it really only negative?" he repeated to himself.
"Good-bye, gentlemen.
"How strong the smell of the fresh hay is, though," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up.
"Yes, that may all be very true and clever....
"Of course it's work.
He heard the horses munching hay, then he heard the peasant and his elder boy getting ready for the night, and going off for the night watch with the beasts, then he heard the soldier arranging his bed on the other side of the barn, with his nephew, the younger son of their peasant host.
The Cardinal would have enjoyed a fight vastly with two or three opponents; but a half-dozen made discretion better than valour.
Cage never touched you!
He located them, but it was only several staid old couples, a long time mated, and busy with their nest-building.
There was no way to improve that music.
She sprang into air, and fled a mile before she realized that she was flying.
He almost strained his voice trying to rival the love-song of a skylark that hung among the clouds above a meadow across the river, and poured down to his mate a story of adoring love and sympathy.
Because of these things he held fast to his conviction that he was a prince indeed; and he decided to remain in his chosen location and with his physical and vocal attractions compel the finest little cardinal in the fields to seek him.
Who can whistle so loud, so clear, so compelling a note?
All day she hid and waited, and the following days were filled with longing, but he never came again.
He was compelled almost hourly to wage battles for his location, for there was something fine about the old stag sumac that attracted homestead seekers.
He was a very Beau Brummel while he waited.
She cried pitifully, and was almost dead when a brown-faced, barefoot boy, with a fishing-pole on his shoulder, passed and heard her.
I'll take you over and set you in the bushes where I heard those other redbirds, and then your ma will feed you."
he's fat as a young shoat now.
Well, you never was more welcome any place in your life.
The mist and shimmer of early spring were in the air.
Abram grinned sheepishly.
Was it all to be wasted?
All the tribulations of birdland fell to her lot.
The Cardinal flew to the very top of the highest sycamore and looked across country toward the Limberlost.
Feed you?
Look at that topknot a wavin' in the wind!
Abram stared in astonishment.
Crowded around it were thickets of papaw, wild grape-vines, thorn, dogwood, and red haw, that attracted bug and insect; and just across the old snake fence was a field of mellow mould sloping to the river, that soon would be plowed for corn, turning out numberless big fat grubs.
"Well, I'm mighty glad if you're sayin' you'll stay!
He knew he would appear brighter when it was past, and he seemed to know, too, that every day of sunshine and shower would bring nearer his heart's desire.
Early next morning he was abroad and in fine toilet, and with a full voice from the top of the sumac greeted the day--"Wet year!
For several days he had boasted, he had bantered, he had challenged, he had on this last day almost condescended to coaxing, but not one little bright-eyed cardinal female had come to offer herself.
Every morning brought new arrivals--trim young females fresh from their long holiday, and big boastful males appearing their brightest and bravest, each singer almost splitting his throat in the effort to captivate the mate he coveted.
From there she glided through the bushes and underbrush, trembling and quaking, yet pushing stoutly onward, straining her ears for some note of the brilliant stranger's.
He perched on a limb, and between dressing his plumage and pecking at last year's sour dried berries, he sent abroad his prediction.
"I don't jest rightly s'pose I should go; but I'm free to admit I'd as lief be dead as not to answer when I get a call, an' the fact is, I'm CALLED down beside the river."
It was the Cardinal's dream materialized for another before his very eyes, and it filled him with envy.
"Well, good-bye, Mr. Redbird.
You needn't even 'rastle for grubs if you don't want to.
Wet year!" rolled the Cardinal's prediction.
For miles she sneaked through the underbrush, and watched and listened; until at last night came, and she returned to Rainbow Bottom.
High in the sumac the Cardinal had sung until his throat was parched, and the fountain of hope was almost dry.
Leaning toward Abram, the Cardinal turned his head from side to side, and peered, "chipped," and waited for an answering "Chip" from a little golden-haired child, but there was no way for the man to know that.
The Cardinal was left boasting and strutting in the sumac, but in his heart he found it lonesome business.
Land's sake!
No bird beside the shining river had plumed, paraded, or made more music than he.
The Cardinal, with a royal flourish, sprang in air to seek her; but her outraged mate was ahead of him, and with a scream she fled, leaving a tuft of feathers in her mate's beak.
Should he, the proudest, most magnificent of cardinals, be compelled to go seeking a mate like any common bird?
With every mile the way he followed grew more beautiful.
No doubt she devoutly wished her plain pudgy husband wore a scarlet coat.
He pestered her with caresses and cooed over his love-song until every chipmunk on the line fence was familiar with his story.
Lord! the Limberlost ain't to be compared with the river, Mr. Redbird.
"I'm willin' to call it the bird if you are, Maria.
He rounded curve after curve, and frequently stopping on a conspicuous perch, flung a ringing challenge in the face of the morning.
The dove had no dignity; he was so effusive he was a nuisance.
The Cardinal mounted to the tip-top limb of the ash and looked around him.
I swanny, if that bird doesn't stop predictin' wet weather, I'll get so scared I won't durst put in my corn afore June.
But it is praise from one's own sex that is praise indeed, and only an hour ago the lark had reported that from his lookout above cloud he saw no other singer anywhere so splendid as the Cardinal of the sumac.
She was such a shy, fearsome little body, the females all flouted her; and the males never seemed to notice that there was material in her for a very fine mate.
He went to the river to bathe.
Most anything you can name, you can find it 'long this ole Wabash, if you only know where to hunt for it.
On the tip-top antler of the old stag sumac, he perched and strained until his jetty whiskers appeared stubby.
Those dreadful feathered females!
Hunger-driven, she climbed to the edge and exercised her wings until she managed some sort of flight to a neighbouring bush. She missed the twig and fell to the ground, where she lay cold and shivering.
"Big as a blackbird, red as a live coal, an' a-comin' right at me.
I'm really curious to set eyes on him.
As Abram opened the door, "Wet year!
He caught up his own rolling echoes and changed and varied them.
He had intended it for the bold creature that had answered his challenge, but since it came to her, it was hers, in a way, after all.
The Cardinal's temper was worn to such a fine edge that he darted at the dove one day and pulled a big tuft of feathers from his back.
Looks as if you might be stayin' round these parts!
It was in this lovely spot that the rainbow at last materialized, and at its base, free to all humanity who cared to seek, the Great Alchemist had left His rarest treasures--the gold of sunshine, diamond water-drops, emerald foliage, and sapphire sky.
"Poor little thing, you are almost dead," he said.
She had been hatched from a fifth egg to begin with; and every one knows the disadvantage of beginning life with four sturdy older birds on top of one.
Who will fly to me for protection?
He whistled and whistled until all birdland and even mankind heard, for the farmer paused at his kitchen door, with his pails of foaming milk, and called to his wife:
Now she had been kissed by this magnificent stranger!
Abram lifted his old hat, and the raindrops glistened on his white hair.
"Here!
The river circled in one great curve.
Old Mother Nature verified his wisdom by sending a dashing shower, but he cared not at all for a wetting.
Well!
He claimed that sumac for his very own, and stoutly battled for possession with many intruders.
Before his next watch, Eddie would bring up one of the prettiest girls aboard for a gold badge; the token that would let her--under approved escort, of course--go through the Top.
"Come with me, dear, where we can talk," she said, finally; eying with disfavor the half-dozen highly interested spectators.
I told him if I got married a thousand times I'd pick every one of my husbands myself, without the least bit of help from either him or her.
Lips met lips in a kiss that lasted for a long, long time.
"But really, Miss Warner, it's regulations, and if you should fall...."
"I think so." Deston thought for a moment.
In?"
"Procyon One to Control Six.
How do you read me, Control Six?"
And Deston, outside the door, grinned sardonically to himself.
No, I'm done with space, as of now.
"Definitely I couldn't.
"I know how you feel.
It was not a passionate embrace--passion would come later--it was as though each of them, after endless years of bootless, fruitless longing, had come finally home.
"Oh, you're Barbara Warner, then."
"I can tell."
You'll live down here in the Middle with me, won't you, all the time you aren't actually on duty?"
And to consolidate two empires, he's been wanting me to marry a multi-billionaire--who is also a louse and a crumb and a heel.
K., O. K., don't blow a fuse," Deston said, resignedly.
Out." Deston flipped a toggle and the solitary green light went out.
The way she walked; poetry in motion ... the oil-witch ... two empires ... more millions than he had dimes....
However, every ounce of her one hundred fifteen pounds was exactly where it should have been.
Lift!"
Prepare for take-off acceleration of one and one-half gravities; that is, everyone will weigh one-half again as much as his normal Earth weight for about fifteen minutes.
You came aboard at exactly zero seven forty-three."
Nothing like when we actually saw each other, of course.
He looked at her questioningly; she shrugged and went on: "We aren't what you'd call a happy family.
Her skin, what could be seen of it--she was wearing breeches and a long-sleeved shirt--was lightly tanned.
My guess is that his wife's an oil-witch, which is why he lugs his whole family along wherever he goes.
So bring her up, next watch, and I'll give her a gold badge.
He was too busy, had too many worthwhile things to do, to waste time that way ... but the hunch was getting stronger and stronger all the time.
You've been fighting it.
She was only about five-feet-three, and her build was not spectacular.
"I don't know, no. Taxes don't bother me much.
"I made it a point to.
Only at books and tapes, even on ground leaves; more fool you.
And I'm a Newmartian, you know, so I teach a few courses----"
Oh, you're Miss Warner...."
"Oh, I didn't do that to show off!" Barbara Warner flushed hotly as she met the eyes of the nearby spectators.
"I know you can, sweetheart." Then he had another thought, and with strong, deft fingers he explored the muscles of her arms and back.
Did you ever hear of Warner Oil?"
"I'd say right now, except...." She caught her lower lip between her teeth and thought.
"All black, Babe?" the newcomer asked.
"No, no 'except'.
"That's right, you don't.
He plugged a jack into a socket below the one remaining green light and spoke:
"Control Six to Procyon One.
Flight Eight Four Nine.
From now until Emergence--unless something happened--he might as well be a passenger. Everything was automatic, unless and until some robot or computer yelled for help.
"Ouch!
"And we'll love every second of it.
"Oh, I know you can.
"Yes, and I'm going to call you 'Babe', too, and mean it the same way they do.
And you've been learning about me."
Deston leaned back in his bucket seat and lighted a cigarette. He didn't need to scan the board constantly now; any trouble signal would jump right out at him.
"Don't worry about that," he grinned.
I won't fall.
Didn't you--but of course you didn't--you never read passenger lists.
I got a tingle that went from the tips of my toes up and out through the very ends of my hair.
Just walking across a stage, she'd bring down the house and stop the show cold in its tracks."
"That's spreading the good old oil, Bobby, but I'll never tangle with you if I can help it.
On the other, the signal doesn't carry much information.
"I know. You'll love her undyingly; all this trip, maybe.
We both knew the truth, then.
Just a little guy, as spacemen go. Although narrow-waisted and, for his heft, broad-shouldered, he was built for speed and maneuverability, not to haul freight.
"See?" she informed the flabbergasted stewardess.
And as they strolled along:
"Well, is that bad?"
by
"Huh?" Eddie snorted.
Five ...
At cards, dice, or wheels he had always had hunches and he had always won.
"I don't make passes."
How do you read me, Procyon One?"
Then a girl stood up.
"But I'm not big; I'm just a little squirt.
He backed hastily out into the corridor, and as the door closed behind her they went naturally and wordlessly into each other's arms.
I must insist....
He had been resisting it for hours, because he had never visited the lounge and did not want to visit it now.
"Ten and zero.
Although attentive, he was not tense, even during the countdown.
"I don't know about that," he said, thoughtfully.
"As the pit, Eddie.
And again, well out beyond the orbit of the moon, just before the starship's mighty Chaytor engines hurled her out of space as we know it into that unknowable something that is hyperspace, he poised a finger. But Immergence, too, was normal; all the green lights except one went out, needles dropped to zero, both phones went dead, all signals stopped.
The tax situation, you know."
I'm no good at all on metals--I couldn't feel gold if I were perched right on the roof of Fort Knox; I couldn't feel radium if it were frying me to a crisp.
Entering the lounge, he did not have to look around.
"What difference does that make?" he asked, in honest surprise.
That is, he thought it was terrible--outrageous--a betrayal of the whole officer caste--but to me it makes everything just absolutely perfect."
Of course not."
"I must go now." She tossed her cards down onto the table and walked straight toward him; eyes still holding eyes.
"If it bothers you the least bit, later on, I'll give every dollar I own to some foundation or other, I swear it."
Dmitri doesn't come in.
Would you believe it?
I am in earnest in what I say.
Well, damn it all, I can't stay here to be their keeper, can I? I've finished what I had to do, and I am going.
Alyosha, shall I call for some champagne?
How you rushed into the discussion this morning!
"But are you really going so soon, brother?"
"No."
"Well?"
God gave woman hysterics as a relief.
I believe in the Word to Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was 'with God,' and Which Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity.
"Well, tell me where to begin, give your orders.
It's first-rate soup, they know how to make it here.
"That you are just as young as other young men of three and twenty, that you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact!
And now I've been here more than three months, and so far we have scarcely said a word to each other.
I should have left long ago, so far as he is concerned.
To-morrow I am going away, and I was just thinking as I sat here how I could see you to say good-by and just then you passed."
I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it's a most precious graveyard, that's what it is!
"No, only perhaps it wasn't love."
And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern?
But there's one Russian boy called Alyosha I am awfully fond of."
"I think not."
It's all too funny.
Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I'm convinced in my heart that it's long been nothing but a graveyard.
There has been a continual look of expectation in your eyes, and I can't endure that.
I began our talk as stupidly as I could on purpose, but I've led up to my confession, for that's all you want.
They have it here.
"What of Dmitri and father?
You are a riddle to me even now.
And secondly, the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality.
"Yes, of course, if you are not joking now."
Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see it and say that they've met, but still I won't accept it.
"You are always harping upon it!
"Would you believe it that ever since that scene with her, I have thought of nothing else but my youthful greenness, and just as though you guessed that, you begin about it.
"You won't be angry?" Alyosha laughed too.
Of course I am just such a little boy as you are, only not a novice.
And what does your second half mean?"
For what are we aiming at now?
I am going.
I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy.
Nobody dies of hysterics, though.
I could never have guessed even yesterday, how easy it would be to put an end to it if I wanted."
"Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless of logic, and it's only then one will understand the meaning of it.
You know, on the contrary, that Dmitri behaved as though there was an understanding between us.
Father doesn't want to turn aside from his cup till he is seventy, he dreams of hanging on to eighty in fact, so he says.
It's not a matter of intellect or logic, it's loving with one's inside, with one's stomach.
"You remember that?
Why do you look so surprised?
So holy it is, so touching, so wise and so great a credit it does to man.
I was told at the elder's yesterday that I was joking.
"I remember everything, Alyosha, I remember you till you were eleven, I was nearly fifteen.
"If you are going away to-morrow, what do you mean by an eternity?"
Though I am laughing, I am serious.
Isn't it so?"
I finished it just now, you were witness."
"Very.
We shall meet before I am thirty, when I shall begin to turn aside from the cup.
"You will explain why you don't accept the world?" said Alyosha.
You seem to love me for some reason, Alyosha?"
The Brothers Make Friends
Alyosha, look straight at me!
I have come to the conclusion that, since I can't understand even that, I can't expect to understand about God.
You are a steadfast person, Alexey.
Just when the old folks are all taken up with practical questions.
"Besides I feel somehow depressed."
You do stand firm, don't you? I like people who are firm like that whatever it is they stand by, even if they are such little fellows as you.
"Yes, you've been depressed a long time, I've noticed it."
"But you told her that she had never cared for you."
I had my own business to settle with Katerina Ivanovna.
I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why.
"But how could I tell that I didn't care for her a bit!
Of the Emperor Napoleon?
Let me have jam too, I like it still."
"Perhaps so," smiled Alyosha.
They've never met in their lives before and, when they go out of the tavern, they won't meet again for forty years.
And yet how she attracted me!
When I went away to Moscow for the first few years I never thought of you at all.
It appears after all I didn't.
I didn't say I should go in the morning....
"I see you are feeling inspired.
I won't go to her at all.
"Me laughing!
What have I to do with it?
Answer: why have we met here?
But perhaps it may be the morning.
And do you know she attracts me awfully even now, yet how easy it is to leave her.
And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I mean?
That's how it is I've kept away from you.
"You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost!
The only customer in the room was an old retired military man drinking tea in a corner.
"We've time enough for our talk, for what brought us here.
Would you believe it, I dined here to-day only to avoid dining with the old man, I loathe him so.
It's been going on nearly six months, and all at once I've thrown it off.
"Of my love, if you like.
"Morning?
how will it end?" asked Alyosha anxiously.
Is it true that you mean to leave the monastery?"
Is that it?"
"On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence," cried Ivan, warmly and good-humoredly.
Alyosha told him she had been hysterical, and that she was now, he heard, unconscious and delirious.
I thought our gentlemen would be asleep, but I heard them chattering.
"In what way?
"Perhaps so," said Levin dryly, and he turned on his side.
Am I to go to him and make a deed of conveyance?"
Who's that singing, my friend?"
They don't care for their contempt, and then they use their dishonest gains to buy off the contempt they have deserved."
"No, that's another question; I am prepared to admit that they're useful.
"Gentlemen, tomorrow before daylight!" and fell asleep.
He could only hear the snort of the horses, and the guttural cry of a snipe.
"It's not a matter of principle, but why should I go?"
Come, let's go!"
He was sitting in the middle of the hut, clinging with both hands to the bench from which he was being pulled by a soldier, the brother of the peasant's wife, who was helping him off with his miry boots.
"But you have not drawn the line between honest and dishonest work.
Do you suppose they keep vodka for sale?" said the soldier, succeeding at last in pulling the soaked boot off the blackened stocking.
Oblonsky, come along!"
When I come back there'll be the note from Kitty.
I heard how it's a question of the greatest consequence, whether or not you're to be away for a couple of days' shooting.
"No, I'm not coming," answered Levin.
Levin did not answer.
Work in this sense, that if it were not for him and others like him, there would have been no railways."
"Let's go, let's have a walk!
"No, excuse me, but if you consider this inequality is unjust, why is it you don't act accordingly?..."
Washed and clean, they went into a hay-barn swept ready for them, where the coachman had been making up beds for the gentlemen.
"I'm not at all convinced.
Hadn't we better go?
"Well, I do act negatively on that idea, so far as not trying to increase the difference of position existing between him and me."
"Well, what of it? It's not my fault." And he began thinking about the next day.
You've treated me to some good sport, and I won't forget you."
"Tomorrow I'll go out early, and I'll make a point of keeping cool. There are lots of snipe; and there are grouse too.
Vassenka has been getting up some fun there.
"No, that's unfair," said Veslovsky; "how could envy come in?
Levin pretended to be asleep, while Oblonsky, putting on his slippers, and lighting a cigar, walked out of the barn, and soon their voices were lost.
A man has to be manly," said Oblonsky, opening the door.
Half asleep, he heard the laughter and mirthful talk of Veslovsky and Stepan Arkadyevitch.
"I've only just come.
Veslovsky was laughing his infectious, good-humored laugh.
But don't tie your own hands."
Stepan Arkadyevitch was saying something of the freshness of one girl, comparing her to a freshly peeled nut, and Veslovsky with his infectious laugh was repeating some words, probably said to him by a peasant: "Ah, you do your best to get round her!" Levin, half asleep, said:
Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his money by speculation in railway shares.
"Give it to this peasant, he would not refuse it."
No, quite the contrary; I see that society takes up a sort of antagonistic attitude to these people, which is utterly baseless, and I fancy there's envy at the bottom of it...."
For an instant he opened his eyes: the moon was up, and in the open doorway, brightly lighted up by the moonlight, they were standing talking.
"I don't know; but if you are convinced that you have no right..."
"What do you say, why not go after all?" said Stepan Arkadyevitch, evidently weary of the strain of thought.
She won't bite?" he added, stepping cautiously with his bare feet.
"I don't understand you," said Levin, sitting up in the hay; "how is it such people don't disgust you?
It is unfair, and I feel it, but..."
"Yes, there's something of a sophistry about that," Veslovsky agreed. "Ah! our host; so you're not asleep yet?" he said to the peasant who came into the barn, opening the creaking door.
That I receive a bigger salary than my chief clerk, though he knows more about the work than I do--that's dishonest, I suppose?"
"Granted, but it's work in the sense that his activity produces a result--the railways.
"It's capital lying here."
But all profit that is out of proportion to the labor expended is dishonest."
"I can't say."
Stepan Arkadyevitch described what grouse moors this Malthus had bought in the Tver province, and how they were preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in which the shooting party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion that had been rigged up at the marsh.
To go running after servant girls?" said Levin.
It won't do my wife any harm, and it'll amuse me.
They've all made their money alike--by their work and their intelligence."
The great thing for me is to feel that I'm not to blame."
What they had said in the conversation, that he acted justly only in a negative sense, absorbed his thoughts.
Though it was dusk, not one of them wanted to go to sleep.
I want to get a hook from here.
Yes, Stiva may be right, I'm not manly with her, I'm tied to her apron-strings....
"That is what I have come to see you about.
"True, General," replied Calhoun, "but if Morgan can keep thousands of the enemy in the rear guarding their communications, the great armies of the North will be depleted by that number."
Much depends on your success.
If possible (and I think it is), I shall try to reach Kentucky.
"Then you escaped?" queried Morgan.
"Well, good-bye, John, if you try it," said one of the officers, laughing.
I expect to be in Glasgow by the tenth of May at the latest."
This hope was almost realized, when it suddenly perished: twenty thousand fresh troops had arrived upon the field, and the Confederates were forced to retreat.
"Yes," he answered; "but why do you say the late Colonel Shackelford?
"Now that he has gone, what do you propose doing?"
"A thousand times, yes.
Good night, now, for it is getting late."
Let's see!
My present force is small--not much over four hundred.
"Yes," replied Calhoun; and his voice trembled, and tears came into his eyes in spite of himself, as he thought of the death of his beloved chief.
To my mind, Pennington is no better than that sneak of a cousin of his, and Morgan will find it out some day."
They had fought as only brave men can fight; they left one-third of their number on the field, killed and wounded.
"Then you believe, Captain, that Corinth could be lost, and our cause not greatly suffer?"
May God bless you, and crown your efforts with victory!"
Morgan gave him a swift glance, and then exclaimed: "Bless my heart!
Calhoun's brow clouded.
I am rejoiced to hear it.
Of course you are going to accept?"
"A perfect dare-devil.
Do you think you could dodge the Yankees?"
But as I failed to get him, I believe you would make a splendid substitute.
I do not look for much help from the Confederate Government.
I have recommended him for a colonelcy.
But that is not all.
I noticed that he greeted me rather coldly."
No charge could pierce that line of heroes.
"Better keep a still tongue in your head, Conway," dryly replied the officer, a Captain Matthews, to whom Conway was complaining.
"What! would you give up Corinth without a struggle?" asked the officer, in surprise.
I am in favor of holding Corinth to the last man."
AFTER SHILOH.
"Why good-bye, Colonel?"
Just as Calhoun was ready to start, Morgan gave him his secret instructions.
When can you start?"
"Captured?" echoed Morgan, in surprise.
"It looks to me," said Breckinridge, with a sigh, "that if we are forced to give up Corinth, our cause in the West will be lost.
Thus dismissed Calhoun went away with a light heart.
A murmur of surprise arose, and then Trabue asked: "Will Beauregard let you make the hazardous attempt?"
Corinth is nothing; the army is everything."
With faces to the foe, they slowly fell back, contesting every inch of ground.
Uncle Dick is not dead."
"He was desperately wounded," answered Calhoun, "but he did not die, and he is now a prisoner in the hands of the Yankees.
Morgan's eyes sparkled.
How would you like to go back to Kentucky?"
But they had fallen back unmolested, for the Federal army had been too severely punished to think of pursuing.
With these words he turned on his heel and stalked away.
"No joke about it.
"Is that so?
"He can never forget that trick your cousin played on him."
CHAPTER I.
I could at least try," answered Calhoun, his face aglow with the idea.
Let's see! You were on the staff of the late lamented Governor Johnson, were you not?"
Conway fairly turned purple with rage.
They had set forth from Corinth in the highest hopes, fully expecting to drive Grant's army into the Tennessee River.
I was dressed in citizen's clothes.
"He said he must see you," continued the orderly, "and if necessary he would wait all night."
"What is your opinion, Morgan?" asked one of the officers, turning to the captain of whom we have spoken.
"I believe I could.
If I could be joined by a thousand when I reach Kentucky, I believe I could sweep clear to the Ohio River.
"All right," replied Calhoun, "I will try to meet you there at that time, with at least one or two good companies."
Although defeated they had not been conquered.
"Certainly.
"Yes, to recruit for my command.
"I have heard a cousin of mine speak of him."
"Perhaps!" answered Morgan, dryly, as he arose to go.
"I believe I have heard of Captain Conway," said Calhoun, with a smile.
After you get the guard posted, we will search the house."
"You must admit yourself vanquished!"
"Some of them were rich," laughed Haines; "they were written by loving swains to their girls.
"Why, Miss Osborne, what can you do with them?" asked Haines, in surprise.
Near Mount Pleasant he met a Confederate officer with a party of recruits which he was taking south.
"Yes, but to all appearances a most gallant one."
"Yes, sir," answered the soldier, saluting, and handing the package to his commander.
'My dearest Polly!' it commenced, 'I----' "
Bet your life, they are a part of the plunder from Shiloh.
I see nothing more we can accomplish here," answered the Lieutenant.
"Yes."
Sergeant Latham, see that both of those men are put on extra duty to-night."
They were mostly country boys, rough, uncouth, and with little or no education.
"From letters captured with his horse, I take it he was from Corinth," said Haines.
"Surrender, you Rebel!" cried the officer, but quick as a flash, Calhoun snatched a small revolver which he carried in his belt, and fired.
But do not let this circumstance spoil our good nature, or our dinner."
I trust that the telegraph wire has not been cut, or the railroad torn up again."
"From those letters we learned that his name was Calhoun Pennington, that he was a lieutenant in the command of Captain John H. Morgan, a gentleman who has given us considerable trouble, and may give us more, and that he was on his way back to Kentucky to recruit for Morgan's command."
Oh! give them to me, Lieutenant Haines, and you will sleep the sweeter to-night."
He had read but a few lines when he exclaimed, with a strong expletive, "Boys, I would give a month's pay if we had captured that fellow!"
But the splash of the waterfall, and the rush of the night wind deadened the sounds to his ear, and drowned his own reply.
Away they rattled with a parting cheer, and peace fell upon the farm-house for a few hours, to the great contentment of the good people left behind.
I will keep dashing in and out of the woods as we go; then no one will miss me for a while, and when they do you just say, 'Oh, he's all right; he'll be along directly,' and go ahead, and let me alone."
But Mrs. Barker got on bravely, with the support of his strong arm, and chatted away so delightfully that Corny would really have enjoyed the walk, if his soul had not been yearning for catamounts.
To-morrow we are going up the mountain, and I'm set on trying again, for Abner says the big woods are the place to find the 'varmint'.
I'm not lucky enough even to find a sassafras bush to chew, or a bird's egg to suck.
Oh, well!
"I'm too high for any game but birds, and those I don't want.
Who cares for hunger and mosquito bites? Not I. Hunters can bear more than that, I guess.
Mrs. Barker wants a drink, and so do I," called the young hunter, driven to despair at last.
But he got on wonderfully well, and was feeling much encouraged, when his foot slipped, the root he held gave way, and down he went, rolling and bumping to his death on the rocks below, he thought, as a crash came, and he knew no more.
Corny spoke so confidently, and looked so pleased with his plan, that honest Chris could not bear to tell him how much danger he would run in that pathless forest, where older hunters than he had been lost.
No chance for a bath appeared, so he washed his burning face and took a rest, enjoying the splendid view far over valley and intervale through the gap in the mountain range.
In this order they reached home, and Corny tumbled into his mother's arms, to be no more seen for some hours.
Then putting a little sprig of the evergreen tree in his jacket, with a grateful thought of all it had done for him, he swung himself off and landed safely below, not minding a few extra bumps after his late exploits at tumbling.
Just before this happy moment he had heard a shot fired somewhere in the forest, and as he hurried toward the sound he saw an animal dart into the hut, as if for shelter.
Never saw such clouds of stingers before," said Corny, looking at his scratched hands, and rubbing his hot face in great discomfort,--for it was the gnat that drove the lion mad, you remember.
"No fun without it.
Mother won't let me go off far enough, so of course I don't do it, and then you all jeer at me.
Just as he paused to take breath and shift his burden from one shoulder to the other, a loud shout startled him, and a moment after, several men came bursting through the wood, cheering like lunatics as they approached.
Abner said any brook would show the way, and this rascal that led me into a scrape shall lead me out," he said, as he followed the little stream that went tumbling over the stones, that increased as the ground sloped toward the deep ravine, where a waterfall shone like silver in the sun.
Here he was, alone, without a guide, in this wild region where there was neither food nor shelter, and night coming on.
I can try for it, and perhaps shoot something on the way.
There was time to go back the way he had come, and by following the path down the hill he could reach the hotel and get supper and a bed, or be driven home.
"Certainly ma'am," answered Corny, obeying at once, and inwardly resolving to deposit his fair burden on the first fallen log they came to, and make his escape.
The other lad appeared to be absorbed in shaping an arrow from the slender stick in his hand, but he watched his neighbor with a grin, saying a few words occasionally which seemed to add to his irritation, though they were in a sympathizing tone.
Blessed little tree! set there to save a life, and teach a lesson to a wilful young heart that never forgot that hour.
"That isn't a wild goose, is it?" proudly demanded Corny, pointing to the cat, which now lay on the ground, while he leaned against a tree to hide his weariness; for he felt ready to drop, now all the excitement was over.
"I won't go home, to be laughed at by Chris and Abner.
But a hawk was all he saw above, an ugly snake was the only living thing he found among the logs, and a fat woodchuck's hind legs vanished down the most attractive hole.
CORNY'S CATAMOUNT
"The hardest part is coming now, and we'd better rest a moment.
Poor Chris will get an awful scolding for letting me go.
Yes, there he lay among the branches of one of the sturdy pines, into which he had fallen on his way down the precipice.
I'll try, though." And getting up on his weary legs, Corny shouted till he was hoarse; but echo alone answered him, and after a few efforts he gave it up, trying to accept the situation like a man.
I said I'd kill one, and I did, and want to keep the skin; for I ought to have something to show after all this knocking about and turning somersaults half a mile long," answered Corny stoutly, as he tried to shoulder his load again.
If he had seen Chris dart behind the barn, and there roll upon the grass in convulsions of laughter, he would have been both surprised and hurt.
It was easy to say, "I'll follow the brook," but not so easy to do it; for the frolicsome stream went headlong over rocks, crept under fallen logs, and now and then hid itself so cleverly that one had to look and listen carefully to recover the trail.
"They all failed, so there was nothing to tell.
Nothing to eat or drink, and very likely a day or so to spend here till I'm found, if I ever am. Chris said, 'Yell, if you want us.' Much good that would do now!
"Here, give me the varmint, and you hang on to Chris, my boy, or we'll have to cart you home.
Guess you've had enough of catamounts for one spell, hey?" and Abner laughed as he looked at poor Corny, who was a more sorry spectacle than he knew,--ragged and rough, hatless and shoeless, his face red and swelled with the poisoning and bites, his eyes heavy with weariness, and in his mouth a bit of wild-cherry bark which he chewed ravenously.
"We are going to walk up, and leave the horses to rest; so I can choose my time.
Don't believe he told a word till he had to.
Corny's mother was one of them, and her last words were,--"A pleasant day, dear.
I'll make things straight with her after the fun is over."
Holding fast, lest a rash motion should set him bounding further down, like a living ball, Corny took an observation as rapidly as possible, for the red light was fading, and the mist rising from the valley.
In his struggles the lunch was lost, for the bottle broke and the pocket where the sandwiches were stored was full of mud.
"All aboard!" shouted our young Nimrod, in a hurry to be off, as the lunch-basket was handed up, and the small boys packed in the most uncomfortable corners, regardless of their arms and legs.
The next live thing I see I'll shoot it, and make a fire and have a jolly supper.
On he went, looking up into the trees for a furry bunch, behind every log, and in every rocky hole, longing and hoping to discover his heart's desire.
He shot at all three and missed them, so pushed on, pretending that he did not care for such small game.
Better take old Buff; he'll bring you home when you get lost, and keep puss from clawing you.
The big boy in the blue overalls spoke with such a comical drawl that the slender city lad could not help laughing, and with a slap that nearly sent his neighbor off his perch, Corny said good-naturedly:
Poor mammy will mourn over me and coddle me up as if I'd been to the wars.
No deacon could have been more sober, however, than Chris when they met next morning, while the party of summer boarders at the old farm-house were in a pleasant bustle of preparation for the long expected day on the mountain.
Once there, it was pretty certain that by following the rough road he would come into the valley, from whence he could easily find his way home.
"I intend to be spry, and if you won't go and blab, I'll tell you a plan I made last night."
No danger of my starving, is there?" whispered Corny, as he leaned over to Chris, who sat, apparently, on nothing, with his long legs dangling into space.
He made no more boasts of skill and courage that summer, set out on no more wild hunts, and gave up his own wishes so cheerfully that it was evident something had worked a helpful change in wilful Corny.
You won't like that part of the fun as much as you expect to, maybe," said Chris, with a sly twinkle of the eye, as he glanced at Corny and then away to the vast forest that stretched far up the mighty mountain's side.
"You'll have to be pretty spry, then, for there's only two more days to August," replied the whittler, shutting one eye to look along his arrow and see if it was true.
"Wish I didn't look so like a scare-crow; but perhaps my rags will add to the effect.
Come on, Chris, and give us the dipper.
"Here's a mess!" thought poor Corny, surveying himself with great disgust and feeling very helpless, as well as tired, hungry, and mad. "Luckily, my powder is dry and my gun safe; so my fun isn't spoiled, though I do look like a wallowing pig.
Corny could have hugged them all and cried like a girl; but pride kept him steady, though his face showed his joy as he nodded his hatless head with a cool--
"Don't seem to feel anxious a mite.
I'm not a bit afraid, and while the rest go poking to the top, I'll plunge into the woods and see what I can do."
But he was honest, and added at once, "Some one else had put a bullet into her; I only finished her off."
Too tired to move, he lay watching the western sky, where the sun set gloriously behind the purple hills.
Keep the girls quiet, and let me have a good lark.
One thing you mind, don't get too nigh before you fire; and keep out of sight of the critters as much as you can."
I'll shoot something, if I stay all night.
That was the wise thing to do, but his pride rebelled against returning empty-handed after all his plans and boasts of great exploits.
I wish you'd leave that gun at home; I'm so afraid you'll get hurt with it.'
Won't the girls laugh at my swelled face, and scream at the cat.
I'll make it up to him.
"All right.
Not a word to mother, mind, or she won't let me go.
Coming to the ravine, he found the only road was down its precipitous side to the valley, that looked so safe and pleasant now.
More angel.
He's proud as a peacock with a new spread of tail feathers."
Out of Stacy Brown's tent crept a figure in its night clothes.
Bud directed two of his men to work south, two more to ride north, while he would take the center of the range.
The Professor found difficulty even in driving the lads to their beds that night.
But be careful.
Suddenly the figure of the Pony Rider Boy rose up before them, right in the middle of one of the unearthly wails.
Where's the kiddie?
That shows they had had plenty to eat and drink.
What we have is free," answered the Professor hospitably.
"We don't want to chase them off the range.
Then, if you'll look at his hoof-mark, you'll see the frog is shaped like a heart.
Come along, kiddie, and show me that trail.
I want to see my kiddie!" laughed Bud Stevens.
And when it arrived it was even more startling than had been the fat boy's chase of the cowardly coyotes.
That's the Angel," he emphasized.
The whole pack turned tail and ran with Stacy after them in full flight, headed for the desert.
Finally he paused over one particular spot, and with a frown peered down upon it.
Laughing and shouting, they soon came up with Stacy, however, because he could not run as fast as the other boys.
"Somebody's standing on my neck."
The lads set up a whoop as they started on the chase after their companion.
"What I want," he explained to the boys, "is to find where the wild horses are waterin' these days.
It was none other than Stacy himself.
"Yep.
In another minute the rest of the party had piled on the heap.
"Yep; schooner."
Bang!
If he falls they're liable to pile on him and chew him up before we can get to him!" commanded the guide.
They grew bolder.
"That's right.
"The white stallion, fellows," nodded Bud.
The fat boy paid no attention to him.
"Boo!" said Stacy explosively, at the same time hurling the can of condensed milk full in the face of the coyote nearest to him.
"Come out of that.
CHAPTER XIV
Soon as the wagon gets here with the trappings.
Reaching his tent, they threw the fat boy into his bed.
"Master Tad read the trail himself."
The guide was followed quickly by the other three boys of the party and Professor Zepplin.
Tad caught up with him first, and the two lads went down together.
There was a sudden sound of hoof-beats.
When they did finally tumble in and pull the blankets over them they were unable to sleep, between the howling of the coyotes and their laughter over Stacy Brown's new-found talent.
"Hey, come back here!" shouted Parry.
"Yes, you may go, Tad.
"Rope him, somebody!" shouted Parry.
Do you hear?"
It struck me that it was quite the opposite," laughed Tad.
I'll tell you in a minute if he's the one."
The animals would elevate their noses in the air, and, as if at a prearranged signal, all would strike the first note of their mournful wail at identically the same instant.
He could see them plainly now and Stacy's eyes looked like two balls.
"You're the right sort for this outfit.
His aim was true.
"You mustn't mind our talk, Professor," explained Walter.
"And he won't be back till morning," sang the boy down there in the shadows.
I would suggest, however, that one of you roll up in his blankets outside here, so that he can hear if Master Tad calls," suggested Professor Zepplin.
"They went this way," shouted Ned.
After all, the supper proved a very jolly meal, now that they were sure Tad was all right.
"It means," said Ned, "that Tad isn't there.
"We say things to each other, but it's all in fun.
Beyond that, I would not venture an opinion."
The result was a bright blaze that flared high, lighting the rocks far down into the canyon, but not sufficiently far to reach Tad.
"What?"
"Get out," mumbled Stacy sleepily, at the same time kicking viciously with the disturbed foot.
"Well, what is it?
The other two boys began preparing for the camp-fire.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes and blinking in the strong morning light.
But there was no answer to his summons.
No amount of searching brought it to view again, and after more than an hour of persistent effort, the Professor called the hunt off, and the crestfallen party returned to camp.
"No; wait till morning.
Pile it right up on the edge of the cliff and light it.
I'd be likely to get hurt if I did.
"Of course not.
Ned was glaring at him ferociously, at the same time struggling to keep back the laughter that rose to his lips because of Stacy's sharp retort.
There will be no need for you to sit up."
Ned pulled himself to his feet, yawning broadly.
I wouldn't care to try to climb up in the dark.
Ned recovered himself and returned to the charge.
Thus encouraged, Ned pulled the other big-toe.
"Isn't it about time that lazy Indian were back, Professor?" asked Walter.
Then, again, the beans and bacon were pronounced excellent by each of them, and Stacy had made fully as good time with his crude chopsticks as had the others with the tablespoons.
I wish them carried out.
The neighbors came and made their friendly visits, and ate apples and drank cider, as was the fashion, but the lad never noticed their coming or their going.
The editor looked at the small, tow-haired boy, shook his head, and said, "You are too young." With a heavy heart the child walked the long nine miles back again.
Mr. Greeley received nearly three million votes, while General Grant received a half million majority.
Meantime the young editor had married Miss Mary Y. Cheney, a schoolteacher of unusual mind and strength of character.
As he grew older, every book within seven miles was borrowed, and perused after the hard day's work of farming was over.
Greeley will hold the first place with posterity on the roll of emancipation."
When he found the war inevitable, after General McClellan's defeat at the Chickahominy, he urged upon Mr. Lincoln immediate emancipation, which was soon adopted. The "New York World" said after his death, "Mr.
It was, of course, a comfort to have some one to share his sorrows; but it pained his tender heart to make another help bear his burdens.
To a high position had come the printer-boy.
From earliest childhood he had determined to be a printer; so, when eleven years of age, he walked nine miles to see the publisher of a newspaper, and obtain a situation.
The partner was drowned shortly after, and his brother-in-law took his place.
These volumes, dedicated to John Bright, have had a sale of several hundred thousand copies.
The latter paper was a great success, the circulation running up to ninety thousand, though very little money was made; but it gave Mr. Greeley a reputation in all parts of the country for journalistic ability.
Putting fifteen dollars in his pocket, he took the balance of sixty-three in a note, and gave it to his father.
In 1848 he was elected to Congress for three months to fill out the unexpired term of a deceased member, and did most effective work with regard to the mileage system and the use of the public lands.
St. Louis, Albany, Indianapolis, Nashville, and other cities held memorial meetings.
When really forced to leave his precious books for bed, he would repeat the information he had learned, or the lessons for the next day, to his brother, who usually, most ungraciously, fell asleep before the conversation was half completed.
Fifteen of his friends promised to subscribe for it.
His earnings were sent, as before, to his parents.
All day Friday and Saturday he walked the streets of New York, looking for work.
He had fought against slavery with all the strength of his able pen; but he advocated buying the slaves for four hundred million dollars rather than going to war,--a cheaper method than our subsequent conflict, with enormous loss of life and money.
The "New Yorker" was begun, and so well conducted was it that three hundred papers throughout the country gave it complimentary notices.
Mr. Greeley worked sixteen hours a day.
He soon joined a debating society, composed of the best-informed persons of the little town of East Poultney,--the minister, the doctor, the lawyer, the schoolteachers, and the like.
He hastened thither, and, though unprepossessing, from his thin voice, short pantaloons, lack of stockings, and worn hat, he was hired on trial.
The father Greeley ought to have foreseen that such energy and will would produce results; but because Horace, in a fit of abstraction, tried to yoke the "off" ox on the "near" side, he said, "Ah! that boy will never get along in the world.
The people with whom he boarded gave him a brown overcoat, not new, and with moistened eyes said good-by to the poor youth whom they had learned to love as their own.
Avoid pecuniary obligation as you would pestilence or famine.
He wrote four columns of editorial matter (his copy, wittily says Junius Henri Browne, "strangers mistook for diagrams of Boston"), dozens of letters, often forgot whether he had been to his meals, and was ready to see and advise with everybody.
The years passed on.
And then through an enormous concourse of people, Fifth Avenue being blocked for a mile, the body was borne to Greenwood Cemetery.
Her first two children having died, this boy was especially dear.
When at his type, he would often compose paragraphs for the paper, setting up the words without writing them out.
At this time he was also prominently in the lecture-field, speaking twice a week to large audiences all over the country.
It requires no great discernment to see from whence Horace Greeley derived his intense love for reading, and his boundless energy.
He soon left his desk, spent an hour in washing the ink from his hair, and returned to his duties.
After the war Mr. Greeley, while advocating "impartial suffrage" for black as well as white, advocated also "universal amnesty." He believed nothing was to be gained by punishing a defeated portion of our nation, and wanted the past buried as quickly as possible.
The first day he worked at the types in silence.
I have not slept one hour in twenty-four for a month.
What did Zaccheus think now of his boy of whom he prophesied "would never know more than enough to come in when it rains"?
Out of a life earnestly devoted to the good of human kind, your children will select my going to Richmond and signing that bail-bond as the wisest act."
Horace earned a few pennies all his own; sometimes by selling nuts, or bundles of the roots of pitch-pine for kindling, which he carried on his back to the store.
He'll never know more than enough to come in when it rains." Alas! for the blindness of Zaccheus Greeley, whose name even would not be remembered but for his illustrious son.
If she lasts, poor soul, another week, I shall go before her."
After trying various towns, he found a situation in Erie, taking the place of a workman who was ill, and for seven months he did not lose a day.
For some months he worked on various papers, when a printer friend, Mr. Story, suggested that they start in business, their combined capital being one hundred and fifty dollars.
He left his speech-making, and for weeks attended her with the deepest devotion.
As usual, though always scrupulously clean, he wore his poor clothes, no stockings, and his wristbands tied together with twine.
No criticism was too scathing; but Mr. Greeley took the denunciations like a hero, because he had done what his conscience approved.
What was their surprise to find that the young printer knew almost every thing, and was always ready to speak, or read an essay.
Success did not come at first.
Flags on the shipping, in the harbor, were at half-mast; and bells tolled from one to three o'clock.
Some of these debts were paid, thirty years afterward, by his noble son.
But just a month before the election came the crushing blow of his life, in the death of his noble wife.
The Union League Club, the Lotos, the Typographical Society, the Associated Press, German and colored clubs, and temperance organizations passed resolutions of sorrow.
He said, "Seeing how passion cools and wrath abates, I confidently look forward to the time when thousands who have cursed will thank me for what I have done and dared in resistance to their own sanguinary impulses....
Two hundred and fifty carriages, containing the President of the United States, governors, senators, and other friends, were in the procession.
At once the North was aflame with indignation.
The next morning Horace was at the shop at half-past five!
After a year, business grew dull, and he was without a place.
President Harrison died after having been a month in office; and seven days after his death, Mr. Greeley started, April 10, 1841, a new paper, the "New York Tribune," with the dying words of Harrison as its motto: "I desire you to understand the true principles of the government.
"Yes; we need help, and he was the best I could get," said the foreman.
He took him to the foreman, who decided to try him on a Polyglot Testament, with marginal references, such close work that most of the men refused to do it.
The following Sabbath clergymen all over the country preached about this wonderful life: its struggles succeeded by world-wide honor.
In the draft riots in New York, in 1863, the mob burst into the Tribune Building, smashing the furniture, and shouting, "Down with the old white coat!" Mr. Greeley always wore a coat and hat of this hue.
His paper molded the opinions of hundreds of thousands.
By beginning his labors before six in the morning, and not leaving his desk till nine in the evening, working by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, he could earn six dollars a week.
Alas!
'He loves you, Henrietta,' said her father.
Henrietta seemed plunged in thought. Suddenly she said, 'I cannot rest until this is settled.
Why------'
Lean upon your father, listen to him, be guided by his advice.
For his sake, for my sake, for all our sakes, dearest Henrietta, grant his wish.
It is my wish.'
He seated himself at her side, but he was unusually constrained.
You make me wretched.
'If he knew all that had occurred he would shrink from blending his life with mine.'
No, Lord Montfort cannot love me.
'The only aim of my life is to make you happy,' said Lord Montfort.
'Indeed!' said Miss Temple.
CHAPTER V.
But it is too late.'
At the end of the principal gallery, Henrietta perceived an open door which admitted them into a small octagon chamber, of Ionic architecture. The walls were not hung with pictures, and one work of art alone solicited their attention.
Short visits, but numerous ones, was his system.
Perhaps he prided himself upon his skill as a physician, but he certainly watched the apparent convalescence of his friend's daughter with zealous interest.
The colour returned to Henrietta's cheek and the lustre to her languid eye: her form regained its airy spring of health; the sunshine of her smile burst forth once more.
All the best families in Rome were present, and not a single English person.
It was they whom he wished to catch.
Lord Montfort approached Miss Temple. 'There is one room in the palace you have never yet visited,' he said, 'my tribune; 'tis open to-night for the first time.'
Frank, yet always dignified, smiling, apt, and ever felicitous, it seemed that he had a pleasing word for every ear, and a particular smile for every face.
The cheek, by an ancient process, the secret of which has been recently regained at Rome, was tinted with a delicate glow.
That constraint which at first she had attributed to reserve, but which of late she had ascribed to modesty, now entirely quitted him.
I would not ask this favour of you unless I thought you would be pleased.'
Henrietta accepted his proffered arm.
'I should like it very much,' said Mr. Temple.
The apartments were supplied with every book which it could have been supposed might amuse her; there were guitars of the city and of Florence, and even an English piano; a library of the choicest music; and all the materials of art.
Elevated on a pedestal of porphyry, surrounded by a rail of bronze arrows of the lightest workmanship, was that statue of Diana which they had so much admired at Pisa.
Her lively and refined taste, and her highly cultured mind, could not refrain from responding to these glorious spectacles.
Sometimes they entered merely to see a statue or a picture they were reading or conversing about the preceding eve; and then they repaired to some modern studio, where their entrance always made the sculptor's eyes sparkle.
Madame Fontaine, under her husband's instructions, assisted in nursing the sick man, and in giving the nourishment prescribed when he was able to eat.
But she remembered that the results had exceeded his anticipations, and that only a part of the remedy had been used.
Doctor Dormann behaved like a gentleman.
I guessed of course that it meant a visit to Madame Fontaine.
No such thing was known to be in existence--she reminded me that her husband had made up the medicine himself.
We arranged that I should write to Fritz by that night's mail, on the chance that my announcement of the better news might reach him before he left London.
What a charming substitute for the crabbed old housekeeper who had just left us!
Alone among them Doctor Fontaine understood the case.
I held the bottle up to the light, and found that it was still nearly half full.
CHAPTER XIX
"Of course you asked her for the prescription?" I said.
What would Mr. Keller say when he recognized his nurse, and when he heard that she had saved his life?
Or it might be in a small portmanteau belonging to her husband, which she had found in his bedroom, and had brought away with her, to be examined at some future time.
I told her that one of the doctors was evidently puzzled, and that the other had acknowledged that the malady was so far incomprehensible to him.
I was far from blaming him--and I said so.
She clasped her hands in despair--she said, 'Oh, if my poor husband had been alive!' I naturally asked what she meant.
It was very important, he said, that no air should be admitted to the bottle, except when there was an actual necessity for administering the remedy.
"I can show it to you, if you like.
So the night passed.
With those words Mr. Engelman lit his pipe, and waited in silence until the good eating and drinking had done their good work.
The door opened as he spoke, and I found myself confronted by a second surprise.
The wise woman saw it, for all her business was with Agnes though she little knew it, and, rising, went and offered the cup to the child, where she sat with her knitting in a corner.
Some foolish people think they take another's part when they take the part he takes.
They were accustomed to such an absence now and then, and were not at first frightened; but when it grew dark and she did not appear, the husband set out with his dogs in one direction, and the wife in another, to seek their child.
The wise woman waited till she had finished it--then, looking into the empty cup, said:
Her hair hung in tangles from her head; her clothes were tattered, and through the rents her skin showed in many places; her cheeks were white, and worn thin with hunger; the hollows were dark under her eyes, and they stood out scared and wild.
Perhaps her words were not just like these, but her thoughts were.
As time went on, this disease of self-conceit went on too, gradually devouring the good that was in her.
Then the whole country-side arose to search for the missing Agnes; but day after day and night after night passed, and nothing was discovered of or concerning her, until at length all gave up the search in despair except the mother, although she was nearly convinced now that the poor woman had carried her off.
She never went into rages like the princess, and would have thought Rosamond--oh, so ugly and vile! if she had seen her in one of her passions.
They would even say sometimes that she ought not to hear her own praises for fear it should make her vain, and then whisper them behind their hands, but so loud that she could not fail to hear every word.
Agnes looked at it, did not want it, was inclined to refuse it from a beggar, but thinking it would show her consequence to assert her rights, took it and drank it up.
True, there is more hope of helping the angry child out of her form of selfishness than the conceited child out of hers; but on the other hand, the conceited child was not so terrible or dangerous as the wrathful one. The conceited one, however, was sometimes very angry, and then her anger was more spiteful than the other's; and, again, the wrathful one was often very conceited too.
Impertinent and rude things done by THEIR child they thought SO clever! laughing at them as something quite marvellous; her commonplace speeches were said over again as if they had been the finest poetry; and the pretty ways which every moderately good child has were extolled as if the result of her excellent taste, and the choice of her judgment and will.
Had she been, the wise woman would have only pitied and loved her, instead of feeling sick when she looked at her.
Agnes was not by nature a greedy girl, as I have said; but self-conceit will go far to generate every other vice under the sun.
So that, on the whole, of two very unpleasant creatures, I would say that the king's daughter would have been the worse, had not the shepherd's been quite as bad.
The wise woman looked at the mother.
Then she turned again to Agnes, who had never looked round but sat with her back to both, and suddenly lapped her in the folds of her cloak.
Now as the least atom of conceit is a thing to be ashamed of, you may fancy what she was like with such a quantity of it inside her!
Her name was Agnes.
By degrees, from thinking herself so clever, she came to fancy that whatever seemed to her, must of course be the correct judgment, and whatever she wished, the right thing; and grew so obstinate, that at length her parents feared to thwart her in any thing, knowing well that she would never give in.
The consequence was that she soon came to believe--so soon, that she could not recall the time when she did not believe, as the most absolute fact in the universe, that she was SOMEBODY; that is, she became most immoderately conceited.
Her father and mother were poor, and could not give her many things. Rosamond would have utterly despised the rude, simple playthings she had.
The shepherd wondered where she could be going--right up the hill.
The wise woman walked close past the shepherd and his dogs, and through the midst of his flock of sheep.
For whoever is possessed by a devil, judges with the mind of that devil; and hence Agnes was guilty of such a meanness as many who are themselves capable of something just as bad will consider incredible.
The wise woman took it, for she made it a rule to accept every kindness that was offered her.
The shepherd's wife looked at her, liked her, and brought her a cup of milk.
But she never turned her head; and the mother went back into her cottage.
Perhaps you do not know it, but the monkeys think that all the bananas belong to them.
The nice big fat ones he kept for himself and carried them home to let them ripen in the dark.
The monkey was at last able to pull out one of his hands.
The sun poured down more of his hottest rays and soon the monkey was able to pull out his two hands.
The monkey shouted, "O, peddler boy, peddler boy, let go my foot.
The other hand remained firmly embedded in the wax.
The monkey with the loudest voice on top of the pyramid made the sun hear.
After a while the wax began to melt.
Then she placed a large flat basket on the top of the image's head and in the basket she placed the best ripe bananas she could find.
It was the very littlest monkey who thought of a plan to help the biggest monkey out of his plight.
The sun came at once.
This is what all the big-sized, little-sized, middle-sized monkeys did.
The monkey ran toward the image of wax and struck it hard with his hand.
Then the monkey made such an uproar with his cries and shouts that very soon monkeys came running from all directions.
Let go my two hands and give me a banana or else I will give you a kick with my foot." The image of wax did not let go.
The image of wax did not let go.
Let go my two feet and my two hands and give me a banana or else I'll give you a push with my body." The image of wax did not let go.
He had often pushed over boy banana peddlers, upset their baskets and then had run away with the bananas.
The monkeys were to climb up into the biggest tree and pile themselves one on top of another until they made a pyramid of monkeys.
A whole army of monkeys had come to the aid of the biggest monkey.
Then the monkey who was now very angry, gave the image of wax a kick with his foot and his foot remained stuck fast in the wax.
The above, signed 'Allan Quatermain', is an extract from my diary written two years and more ago.
And many an elephant have I shot with that old gun.
Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring.
We do not prostrate ourselves before it like the poor Indians; we fly hither and thither--we cry for mercy; but it is of no use, the black Fate thunders on and in its season reduces us to powder.
They looked very white upon the black cloth!
I might have saved him, too--I have money enough for both of us, and much more than enough--King Solomon's Mines provided me with that; but I said, "No, let the boy earn his living, let him labour that he may enjoy rest." But the rest has come to him before the labour.
December 23
The great wheel of Fate rolls on like a Juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late--it does not matter when, in the end, it crushes us all.
'I am like the man in the Bible who laid up much goods and builded barns--goods for my boy and barns for him to store them in; and now his soul has been required of him, and I am left desolate.
But, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years lived the life I have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim English country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff formal manners, and its well-dressed crowds.
It seems to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried away by the pride of knowledge.
Ah! this civilization, what does it all come to?
That extract was penned seven thousand miles or so from the spot where I now lie painfully and slowly writing this, with a pretty girl standing by my side fanning the flies from my august countenance. Harry is there and I am here, and yet somehow I cannot help feeling that I am not far off Harry.
'I have just buried my boy, my poor handsome boy of whom I was so proud, and my heart is broken.
This is a LibriVox recording.
Civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted.
But that was not all. A robin redbreast came as bold as could be and lit upon the coffin and began to sing.
In the centre of the room, however, over the wide fireplace, there was a clear space left on which I had fixed up all my rifles.
In a savage land they do not exist. Besides, the question will arise: How many of these blessings are due to Christianity as distinct from civilization?
I dare say that the highly civilized lady reading this will smile at an old fool of a hunter's simplicity when she thinks of her black bead-bedecked sister; and so will the superfine cultured idler scientifically eating a dinner at his club, the cost of which would keep a starving family for a week.
A vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark.
No, only a very little one, that a plain man's thought may spring across.
They are beautiful specimens, as I never keep any horns which are not in every way perfect, unless it may be now and again on account of the associations connected with them.
It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.
It is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions that we fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial twentieth.
It is the one fixed unchangeable thing--fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the Eternal.
Some of them I have had for forty years, old muzzle-loaders that nobody would look at nowadays.
Of course they have great advantages--hospitals for instance; but then, remember, we breed the sickly people who fill them.
By H. Rider Haggard
'We buried him this afternoon under the shadow of the grey and ancient tower of the church of this village where my house is.
So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly.
A great gulf fixed?
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
And then he must needs go to that smallpox hospital.
Who am I that I should complain?
I copy it down here because it seems to me that it is the fittest beginning to the history that I am about to write, if it please God to spare me to finish it.
There was a little hitch about getting the coffin down into the grave--the necessary ropes had been forgotten: so we drew back from it, and waited in silence watching the big flakes fall gently one by one like heavenly benedictions, and melt in tears on Harry's pall.
I make no apology for this digression, especially as this is an introduction which all young people and those who never like to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip.
But the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.
I would go again where the wild game was, back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom I love, although some of them are almost as merciless as Political Economy.
He was doing so well at the hospital, he had passed his last examination with honours, and I was proud of them, much prouder than he was, I think.
There, I might go on for ever, but what is the good?
He wrote to me that he was not afraid of smallpox and wanted to gain the experience; and now the disease has killed him, and I, old and grey and withered, am left to mourn over him, without a chick or child to comfort me.
The coffin was put down by the grave, and a few big flakes lit upon it.
On all the four walls of this vestibule were placed pairs of horns--about a hundred pairs altogether, all of which I had shot myself.
ALLAN QUATERMAIN
Do not let me, however, be understood as decrying our modern institutions, representing as they do the gathered experience of humanity applied for the good of all.
Yes, as I walked, I began to long to see the moonlight gleaming silvery white over the wide veldt and mysterious sea of bush, and watch the lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water.
And so in my trouble, as I walked up and down the oak-panelled vestibule of my house there in Yorkshire, I longed once more to throw myself into the arms of Nature.
The ruling passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that night.
P.S.--The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva have now been put up in the hall here, over the pair of buffalo horns you gave me, and look magnificent; and the axe with which I chopped off Twala's head is fixed above my writing-table.
P.S.--Just as I had written the last word, a Kafir came up my avenue of orange trees, carrying a letter in a cleft stick, which he had brought from the post.
He told me that since he had been home he hadn't seen a woman to touch her, either as regards her figure or the sweetness of her expression.
It was impossible.
I was walking along quietly, some way in front of the other two, down the banks of the stream which runs from the oasis till it is swallowed up in the hungry desert sands, when suddenly I stopped and rubbed my eyes, as well I might.
"Well, you've got to shake it in time for the game with Clearport. That's when you'll even things up."
"That's a hard way to practice," said Springer.
How careless!
"Not quite.
I didn't know you ever did such a thing."
"I suppose I did.
"I can't tell.
"You can't get much good out of that."
"Oh, thanks," said Phil, weakly returning the warm grasp of Rod's strong hand.
You never hear of such a thing happening around this town.
"You're very kind, Grant," was Springer's only response.
"Oh, is it you?" said Roy.
You put your foot in it, all right, old man."
You weren't at school to-day."
"Working?
Phil felt his face burn.
When I put the ball over, they pup-pounded it."
"How did that happen?"
Phil got away from the others as soon as he could, and hurried home to brood over it.
"He may get his some time."
"Oh, I don't know.
They did so, but that cheer lacked the spontaneous enthusiasm and genuine admiration which had been thrown into the cheering for Grant, something which Springer did not fail to note.
"I thought perhaps it was Rackliff.
"I--I took a walk," faltered Phil, flushing.
"Yes; lost it, or--or something," Roy replied stumblingly.
Shortly before dark, Phil, chancing to take a cross cut from Middle Street to High Street, observed Roy Hooker pelting away with a baseball at the white shingle on the barn.
I'm getting so I can hit that shingle once in a while, and use a curve, too.
Thinking the matter over in solitude, he was forced into a realization of the fact that he lacked, in a great measure, the confidence and steadiness characteristic of Rodney Grant, and he could not put aside the conviction that it was Grant, the fellow he had coached, who was destined to become the star pitcher of the nine.
When he arrived at school, a few minutes before time for the morning session to begin, Grant was waiting for him.
I knew the time would come when you'd be mighty sore with yourself.
"Control is necessary," he admitted; "but it isn't everything.
He did not come out for practice that night, and Grant explained to the others that Phil was knocked out by a cold, whereupon Cooper chucklingly remarked that he thought it was Barville that had knocked Springer out.
He was sorry now that he had ever spent his time teaching the Texan to pitch, and it occurred to him that the same amount of coaching and encouragement bestowed upon Hooker would not have resulted in the training of a man to outdo him upon the slab and push him into the background.
If you'd only spent your time with me, I would have been willing to act as second string pitcher, and you would not have been crowded out.
At the close of the game there was another boy on the field who was quite as glum and downcast as Hooker himself.
"Yes; I suppose that's right," said Roy.
But let's not talk about it.
"Well," said Roy slowly, "this was a case of necessity, you see."
"How did she happen to lul-lose it?"
"You haven't given up the idea of pitching?"
After watching your performance Saturday--seeing you soak a batter in the ribs, and then hand out free passes enough to force a run--I came to realize what control means.
She doesn't quite know herself.
He was jealous--bitterly so; but he forced himself to join the cheering crowd and to make a half-hearted pretense of rejoicing.
I'm trying to get it."
She'd saved up a little at a time to buy material for a new dress."
"They didn't seem to pound Grant much, and he appeared able to put the ball just about where he wanted to."
Do you know, lots of times we're liable to misjudge some one until something happens to show us just the sort of a person he is."
I'm going to talk plain to you.
Presently he realized that this behavior on his part must attract attention the moment the excitement relaxed, and he got up with the intention of hurrying at once to the gymnasium.
"That sounds like a robbery instead of a loss."
"Grant!" snarled Phil furiously.
Let's give him a cheer, fellows."
Only for him, I'd never been able to do it.
"Working."
For Phil had long entertained the ambition of becoming the first pitcher on the academy nine, and this year he had been fully confident until the present hour that the goal he sought was his beyond dispute.
You'll make up for that next time."
Then he hastened to make an observation that snapped Springer's self-restraint.
"Lost it?"
Well, say, didn't you realize what you were doing while you were coaching that fellow?
You won't be in it hereafter; he'll be the whole show."
JEALOUSY.
I didn't suppose you'd stoop to work, even under such circumstances.
Anyhow, it's gone, and I'm going to try to earn enough to replace it."
But he did not look Phil in the eyes.
It had been a hard blow, and he had stood up poorly beneath it.
"I piked over to your ranch looking for you, but you had disappeared. Your mother said you were around a few moments before, and she thought you must be somewhere about; all the same, I couldn't find hide or hair of you."
Grant, Grant, Grant!
Drawing near, Phil asked Roy what he was doing, and the latter, startled and perspiring, looked round.
I couldn't seem to hit it with a straight ball when I began."
"Well, say, Hooker," exclaimed Phil, "you're all right!
"Here's my mentor.
Barely had he started, however, when something brought him to a halt, and beneath his breath he muttered:
"It does, does it?
Perhaps mother mislaid it somewhere.
I remember now that you didn't even put on your sweater."
"The best professional pitchers in the business get their bumps sometimes, and I might have got mine, all right, if I'd started the game on the slab, as you did.
When practice time came after school was over, he put on his suit and appeared upon the field, but soon complained that he was not feeling well, and departed.
"He may, and then again he may not; you can't be sure of it.
I'm practicing a little by my lonesome."
All that day Springer sought to avoid talking baseball with any of the fellows, for invariably they spoke of Grant's surprisingly successful performance; and when they did so something like a sickening poison seemed to bubble within the jealous youth, who told himself that he could not long continue to join in this praise, but must soon betray himself by bursting forth into a tirade against the Texan.
"Don't you feel so bad about it, old partner," he said.
"I didn't do anything--except blow up."
"But they wouldn't if it hadn't been for----" Choking, as he realized what he had so nearly said, Hooker bit his tongue.
This fellow Grant is practically an outsider; he doesn't belong in Oakdale. He's a presuming cub, too--always pushing himself forward.
In a measure he did relieve his feelings by expressing his opinion of Herbert Rackliff, who was brazenly seeking to ignore the open disdain of his schoolmates.
I owe what little I know about pitching to Springer.
I knew what would happen.
"It wasn't much, but it was all she had.
"Got a cold, eh?" said Rodney sympathetically.
"That won't do.
"Yes, I guess that's when I got it," agreed Phil.
This was Phil Springer, who remained seated on the bench while his team-mates and a portion of the enthusiastic crowd swarmed, cheering, around Grant and lifted him to their shoulders.
"What became of you after breakfast, partner?" questioned Rod.
"But it couldn't be a robbery," protested Hooker quickly and earnestly. "Nobody would come into the house and take money out of that drawer--nobody around here.
Under cover of the chatter, joking and laughter, while they were changing their clothes in the dressing room of the gymnasium, Grant, observing the dejection Springer could not hide to save himself, again uttered some friendly words of encouragement.
"You caught it sitting on the bench during the last four innings of that game, I reckon.
CHAPTER XIV.
It makes me tired!"
In spite of himself, this thought, aided by other unpleasant contemplations, awoke in his heart a sensation of envious resentment toward Rodney.
XII.
RESURRECTION.
TRANSPLANTED.
THE WIFE.
I CANNOT live with you, It would be life, And life is over there Behind the shelf
XVI.
XV.
I'm ceded, I've stopped being theirs; The name they dropped upon my face With water, in the country church, Is finished using now, And they can put it with my dolls, My childhood, and the string of spools I've finished threading too.
I could not die with you, For one must wait To shut the other's gaze down, -- You could not.
BEQUEST.
My river waits reply. Oh sea, look graciously!
LOVE.
VIII.
Baptized before without the choice, But this time consciously, of grace Unto supremest name, Called to my full, the crescent dropped, Existence's whole arc filled up With one small diadem.
No lifetime set on them, Apparelled as the new Unborn, except they had beheld, Born everlasting now.
VII.
XVIII.
I'll fetch thee brooks From spotted nooks, --
XIV.
And I, could I stand by And see you freeze, Without my right of frost, Death's privilege?
LOVE'S BAPTISM.
THE OUTLET.
Alter?
XIII.
Surfeit?
11.
8.
6.
And what is a sportsman to-day?
Among other things, it is time for a list of species to be published which no man claiming to be either a gentleman or a sportsman can shoot for aught else than preservation in a public museum.
13.
The Lewis and Clark Club, of Pittsburgh, John M. Phillips, President.
I asked no other thing, No other was denied. I offered Being for it; The mighty merchant smiled.
We trust, in plumed procession, For such the angels go, Rank after rank, with even feet And uniforms of snow.
IN A LIBRARY.
VII.
Glee!
Yes!
Life is but life, and death but death! Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath! And if, indeed, I fail, At least to know the worst is sweet. Defeat means nothing but defeat, No drearier can prevail!
XXIII.
Read, sweet, how others strove, Till we are stouter; What they renounced, Till we are less afraid; How many times they bore The faithful witness, Till we are helped, As if a kingdom cared!
Some things that stay there be, -- Grief, hills, eternity: Nor this behooveth me.
THE SECRET.
How they will tell the shipwreck When winter shakes the door, Till the children ask, "But the forty? Did they come back no more?"
XXV.
XVIII.
Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory,
XV.
XIX.
LIFE.
As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear!
THE BOOK OF MARTYRS.
Within my reach! I could have touched! I might have chanced that way! Soft sauntered through the village, Sauntered as soft away! So unsuspected violets Within the fields lie low, Too late for striving fingers That passed, an hour ago.
XII.
XIII.
VIII.
XXVI.
And get the dimples ready, And wonder we could care For that old faded midnight That frightened but an hour.
DAWN.
Mirth is the mail of anguish, In which it cautions arm, Lest anybody spy the blood And "You're hurt" exclaim!
THE MYSTERY OF PAIN.
"Judge:--Seeing that the feudal lords planted a screen at their gates, he too would have one at his!
"Promote those whom you do know," said the Master.
he asked.
"That will scarcely do," he answered.
"Lead the way in it," said the Master, "and work hard at it."
"Why so late?" he asked.
"Instruct them."
And when he employs others he requires them to be fully prepared for everything."
"And after enriching them, what more would you do for them?"
Duke Ting asked if there were one sentence which, if acted upon, might have the effect of making a country prosperous.
Of King, a son of the Duke of Wei, he observed that "he managed his household matters well.
Again, "Suppose the ruler to possess true kingly qualities, then surely after one generation there would be good-will among men."
Why such rectification?"
Answers on the Art of Governing--Consistency
Fan Ch'i requested that he might learn something of husbandry.
If terms be incorrect, language will be incongruous; and if language be incongruous, deeds will be imperfect.
Better if he were liked by the good folk in the village, and disliked by the bad."
Chung-kung, on being made first minister to the Chief of the Ki family, consulted the Master about government, and to him he said, "Let the heads of offices be heads.
If he be unable to rectify himself, how is he to rectify others?"
"As to those of whom you are uncertain, will others omit to notice them?"
"What, then, if they all disliked him?"
If he be not personally upright, his directions will not be complied with."
"What multitudes of people!" he exclaimed.
If you wish for speedy results, they will not be far-reaching; and if you regard trivial advantages you will not successfully deal with important affairs."
"The firm, the unflinching, the plain and simple, the slow to speak," said he once, "are approximating towards their duty to their fellow-men."
Hence, a man of superior mind, certain first of his terms, is fitted to speak; and being certain of what he says can proceed upon it.
Requested to say more, he added, "And do not tire of it."
"The superior man," he once observed, "is easy to serve, but difficult to please.
Excuse small faults.
Once when Yen Yu was leaving the Court, the Master accosted him.
"The details of it," suggested the Master; "had it been legislation, I should have been there to hear it, even though I am not in office."
"Enrich them," replied the Master.
"Such as are sure to be true to their word, and effective in their work--who are given to hammering, as it were, upon one note--of inferior calibre indeed, but fit enough, I think, to be ranked next."
In the language of such a person there is nothing heedlessly irregular--and that is the sum of the matter."
"The nobler-minded man," he remarked, "will be agreeable even when he disagrees; the small-minded man will agree and be disagreeable."
The Master was on a journey to Wei, and Yen Yu was driving him.
"One thing of necessity," he answered--"the rectification of terms."
Try to please him by the adoption of wrong principles, and you will fail.
Also, when such a one employs others, he uses them according to their capacity.
But there is a proverb people use which says, 'To play the prince is hard, to play the minister not easy.' Assuming that it is understood that 'to play the prince is hard,' would it not be probable that with that one sentence the country should be made to prosper?"
"That, too," said he, "is scarcely enough.
Again, "The superior man can be high without being haughty.
"Him who is spoken of by his kinsmen as a dutiful son, and whom the folks of his neighborhood call' good brother.'"
"But," he asked, "how am I to know the sagacious and talented, before promoting them?"
Do not look at trivial advantages.
"A man of little mind, that!" said the Master, when Fan Ch'i had gone out.
Once he made the remark, "The governments of Lu and of Wei are in brotherhood."
"The Southerners," said he, "have the proverb, 'The man who sticks not to rule will never make a charm-worker or a medical man,' Good!--'Whoever is intermittent in his practise of virtue will live to be ashamed of it.' Without prognostication," he added, "that will indeed be so."
The inferior man is, on the other hand, difficult to serve, but easy to please.
Confucius again replied, "A sentence could hardly be supposed to do so much as that.
Try to please him by the adoption of wrong principles, and you will succeed.
Confucius answered, "A sentence could hardly be supposed to do so much as that.
"Let a leader," said he, "show rectitude in his own personal character, and even without directions from him things will go well.
"I am not equal to an old gardener." was the reply.
The master replied, "He who can properly be so-called will have in him a seriousness of purpose, a habit of controlling himself, and an agreeableness of manner: among his friends and associates the seriousness and the self-control, and among his brethren the agreeableness of manner."
The Duke of Sheh in a conversation with Confucius said, "There are some straightforward persons in my neighborhood.
On his coming into possession, he thought, 'What a strange conglomeration!'--Coming to possess a little more, it was, 'Strange, such a result!' And when he became wealthy, 'Strange, such elegance!'"
'Torp's away; Bessie hates me; I can't get at the notion of the Melancolia; Maisie's letters are scrappy; and I believe I have indigestion.
It seemed so exactly like his own case.
The days passed without event.
Dick saw the face as it hurried out into the street.
I have some work to do before I go blind, and I suppose that I must do it.
The doctor wrapped himself in a mist of words.
That night Dick wrote a letter to Maisie full of the tenderest regard for her health, but saying very little about his own, and dreamed of the Melancolia to be born.
Many people were waiting their turn before him.
He threw himself without reservation into his work, and did not think of the doom that was to overtake him, for he was possessed with his notion, and the things of this world had no power upon him.
'Perhaps one year.'
It's the living death, Binkie.
'We've got it very badly, little dog!
What can I do now, before the light goes?'
'Understand the speech and feel a stir Of fellowship in all disastrous fight. "In all disastrous fight"?
What do you make of it?'
You'll see when Mr. Torpenhow comes back.'
'He's been at it for nearly a month.' She followed the men stealthily to hear judgment done.
After you went away I had some trouble with my eyes.
Yet when he looked across the Park the scope of his vision was not contracted.
'News! great news!' he wrote.
He was lying on the sofa, eating his moustache and wondering what the darkness of the night would be like.
The drink had been at work as steadily as Dick.
It was true that the corners of the studio draped themselves in gray film and retired into the darkness, that the spots in his eyes and the pains across his head were very troublesome, and that Maisie's letters were hard to read and harder still to answer.
I really could not say?'
That's why he went away.
I think I see my way to it now.
Get lunch and clean your accoutrements.'
Dick sought an oculist,--the best in London.
He could see perfectly, until a procession of slow-wheeling fireworks defiled across his eyeballs.
Dick laughed again, remembering the horror.
What give a man pains across the head and spots before his eyes, Binkie?
There was a delightful sense of irresponsibility upon him, such as they feel who walking among their fellow-men know that the death-sentence of disease is upon them, and, seeing that fear is but waste of the little time left, are riotously happy.
They came into the studio, rejoicing, to be welcomed over effusively by a drawn, lined, shrunken, haggard wreck,--unshaven, blue-white about the nostrils, stooping in the shoulders, and peering under his eyebrows nervously.
He said, "Scar on the head,--sword-cut and optic nerve." Make a note of that.
Probably heard something he didn't like.'
Again the whirl of words, but this time they conveyed a meaning.
'What can I do?
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost To all eternity! Dick read and re-read the verse till his turn came, and the doctor was bending above him seated in an arm-chair.
The doctor's hand touched the scar of the sword-cut on Dick's head, and Dick explained briefly how he had come by it.
'All that's left of me.
His hands were shaking, and he prided himself on their steadiness; he could feel that his lips were quivering, and the sweat was running down his face.
It is not pleasant to live in the company of a notion that will not work out, a fox-terrier that cannot talk, and a woman who talks too much.
'And Mr. Torpenhow's ten times a better man than you,' she concluded.
Let's go home.
I can see as well as I ever could.'
Not till morning did he remember that something might happen to him in the future.
Torpenhow said nothing, and Dick began to whimper feebly, for joy at seeing Torpenhow again, for grief at misdeeds--if indeed they were misdeeds--that made Torpenhow remote and unsympathetic, and for childish vanity hurt, since Torpenhow had not given a word of praise to his wonderful picture.
And if I don't take care of myself?'
That's better than painting the thing merely to pique Maisie.
'Like a ship, my dear sir,--exactly like a ship.
I cannot see much now, but I can see best when I am drunk.
Sudden death comes home too nearly, and this is battle and murder for me.'
But the furious days of toil and the nights of wild dreams made amends for all, and the sideboard was his best friend on earth.
Come here.'
He was lashed by fear, driven forward by the desire to get to work at once and accomplish something, and maddened by the refusal of his brain to do more than repeat the news that he was about to go blind.
A little patching and repairing from time to time is all we want.
'It's a humiliating exhibition,' he thought, 'and I'm glad Torp isn't here to see.
He could not tell her of his trouble, and he could not laugh at her accounts of her own Melancolia which was always going to be finished.
'Rather like holding a guinea-pig; but you're a brave little dog, and you don't yelp when you're hung up.
'To me!
Dick waved his mahl-stick in mystic circles and went to the sideboard for a drink.
'Can you give me anything to drink?'
Dick showed Bessie the letter, and she abused him for that he had ever sent Torpenhow away and ruined her life.
I can do it now because I have it inside me.
The doctor was an affable local practitioner with white hair, and he said nothing till Dick began to describe the gray film in the studio.
Torpenhow had been absent for six weeks.
Dick waited till he could regain some sort of control over himself.
Binkie's quite well, and I've been doing some good work.' He reeled where he stood.
If you will let me, I'll sit here for a minute, and then I'll go.
When the flame was removed, Dick saw the doctor's face, and the fear came upon him again.
The doctor said I was to avoid mental worry.
The scar is an old one, and--exposure to the strong light of the desert, did you say?--with excessive application to fine work?
'You're pleased to-day,' said Bessie.
--The Fight of Heriot's Ford. 'THIS is a cheerful life,' said Dick, some days later.
Binkie, we will go to a medicine-man. We can't have our eyes interfered with, for by these we get our bread; also mutton-chop bones for little dogs.'
He has the same modelling of the forehead as Torp.
They headed for a certain tree that Dick knew well, and they sat down to thin, because his legs were trembling under him and there was cold fear at the pit of his stomach.
He looks very sick.
What is my time-limit, avoiding all strain and worry?'
'What d'you mean?' said Dick.
'Mean!
But I lose much.
(Signed) DUDLEY FIELD MALONE.
Chapter 7
I quote the story in his own words:
"No words of mine can tell you how our hearts have been lifted and our purposes strengthened in this tremendous struggle in New York State by the reading of your powerful and noble utterances in your letter to President Wilson.
I need not say that our long association in public affairs makes me regret the action you have taken most sincerely.
Chapter 8
An Administration Protest-Dudley Field Malone Resigns
He had campaigned twice through New Jersey with Mr. Wilson as Governor; he had managed Mr. Wilson's campaigns in many states for the nomination before the Baltimore Convention; he had toured the country with Mr. Wilson in 1912 ; and it was he who led to victory President Wilson's fight for California in 1916.
Indeed, I judge from your letter that any discussion of the reasons would not be acceptable to you and that it is your desire to be free of the restraints of public office.
And if, with our troops mobilizing in France, you will give American women this measure for their political freedom, they will support with greater enthusiasm your hope and the hope of America for world freedom.
I reprint Mr. Malone's letter of resignation which sets forth in detail his position.
longed sacrifices.
The conservative suffrage leaders, although they heartily disapproved of , picketing, were as outspoken in their gratitude.
To be sure this was accomplished only after an inordinate amount of time, money and effort had been spent on a sustained and relentless campaign of pressure.
He laid the responsibility squarely and dramatically where it belonged.
So in order effectively
He said:
"Gentlemen, there is only one question before the House today and that is, if you look at it from a political aspect, whether you wish to approve of the practices of these women who have been disgracing their cause here in Washington for the past several months."
You were pleased and approved of what I had done.
For the whole country gladly acknowledges, Mr. President, that no vital piece of legislation has come through Congress these five years except by your extraordinary and brilliant leadership.
It gave us a report in the Senate and a committee in the House and expected us to be grateful.
I was sent twice as your spokesman in the last campaign to the Woman Suffrage States of the West.
To see women roughly handled by rough men on the streets of the capital of the nation is not a pleasing sight to Kentuckians and to red-blooded Americans, and let us hope the like will never again be seen here."
My opinion was confirmed.
He spoke the truth, and finished dramatically with:
The Report, which he had so long delayed because he wanted [he said] to make it a particularly brilliant and elaborate one, read:
Women ought to be willing to make sacrifices for their own liberation, but for a man to have the courage and imagination to make such a sacrifice for the liberation of women is unparalleled.
Yours respectfully,
It was the noblest act that any man
And Mr. Malone's resignation was not only welcomed by the militant group.
The resolution was sponsored by Representative Pou, Chairman of the Rules Committee and Administration leader, himself an anti- suffragist.
to keep my promise made in the West and more freely to go into this larger field of democratic effort, I hereby resign my office as Collector of the Port of New York, to take effect at once, or at your earliest convenience.
The President was visibly moved as I added, "You are the President now, reelected to office.
If we keep up this sort of practices, we will compel the House, when they come to vote on the constitutional amendment, to surrender obediently likewise'."
Mr. Malone's resignation in September, 1917, came with a sudden shock, because the entire country and surely the Administration thought him quieted and subdued by the President's personal appeal to him in July.
We are deeply grateful for the incalculable benefit of your active assistance in the struggle of American women for political liberty and for a real Democracy."
I give up a powerful office in my own state.
The President asserted his ignorance of all this.
Since England and Russia, in the midst of the great war, have assured the national enfranchisement of their women, should we not be jealous to maintain our democratic leadership in the world by the speedy national enfranchisement of American women?
Mrs. Norman de R. Whitehouse, the President of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, with which Mr. Malone had worked for years, wired:
I also informed him that I had offered to act as counsel for the suffragists on the appeal of their case.
I felt certain that the high-spirited women in the workhouse would refuse to accept the pardon as a mere "benevolent" act on the part of the President.
In every circumstance throughout those years I have served you with the most respectful affection and unshadowed devotion.
But most of all I sever a personal association with you of the deepest affection which you know has meant much to me these past seven years.
No stenographic record of the trial had been taken, which put me under the greatest legal difficulties.
Under this published interpretation of his pardon the women at Occoquan accepted the pardon and returned to Washington.
The Suffrage Committee in the House was appointed.
Mr. Wilson and his Administration were shocked that any one should care enough about the liberty of women to resign a lucrative post in the Government.
I returned to California and repeated this promise, and so far as I am concerned, I must keep my part of that obligation."
The Congressmen were utterly unable to shake off the ghosts of the pickets.
Some women did in a peaceable, and perfectly lawful manner, display suffrage banners on the public street near the White House.
Mr. Cantrill of Kentucky, Democrat, believed that "millions of Christian women in the nation should not be denied the right of having a Committee in the House to study the problem of suffrage because of the mistakes of some few of their sisters."
While I do not approve of picketing, I disapprove more strongly of the hoodlum methods pursued in suppressing the practice.
Your letter of September 7th reached me just before I left home and I have, I am sorry to say, been unable to reply to it sooner.
Scarcely had the women recovered from the surprise of his visit when the Senator, on the following day, September 15th, filed the favorable report which had been lying with his Committee since May 15th, exactly six months.
"Although we disagree with you on the question of picketing every suffragist must be grateful to you for the gallant support you are giving our cause and the great sacrifice you are making."
I, who have no money, sacrifice a lucrative salary, and go back to revive my law practice.
"The Committee on Woman Suffrage, to which was referred the joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, conferring upon women the right of suffrage, having the same under consideration, beg leave to report it back to the Senate with the recommendation that the joint resolution do pass."
There flashed through my mind all the memories of Knights of chivalry and of romance that I have ever read, and they all paled before your championship, and the sacrifice and the high-spirited leadership that it signifies. Where you lead, I believe, thousands of other men will follow, even though at a distance, and most inadequately . . . ."
For this reason many of your most ardent friends and supporters feel that the passage of the federal suffrage amendment is a war measure which could appropriately be urged by you at this session of Congress.
We had said so but it would have taken months to convince the public that the President was in any way responsible.
The nation was shocked into the realization that this was not a street brawl between women and policemen, but a controversy between suffragists and a powerful Administration.
President, if there is any sacrifice in this unhappy circumstance, it is I who am making the sacrifice.
There was just a day and a half left to perfect the exceptions for the appeal under the rules of procedure.
Sensing their predicament and fearing any loss of prestige, they risked a slight advance.
Will not this Administration, reelected to power by the hope and faith of the women of the West, handsomely reward that faith by taking action now for the passage of the federal suffrage amendment?
"But," I said, "Mr.
I must frankly say that I cannot regard your reasons for resigning your position as Collector of Customs as convincing, but it is so evidently your wish to be relieved from the duties of the office that I do not feel at liberty to withhold my acceptance of your resignation.
I began by reminding the President that in the seven years and a half of our personal and political association we had never had a serious difference.
To this Mr. Malone replied:
I was the first man of your Administration, nearly five years ago, to publicly advocate preparedness, and helped to found the first Plattsburg training camp.
He asked me for full details of my complaint and attitude.
This vote was indicative of the strength of the amendment in the House.
I agreed to this, and we closed the interview with the President saying, "If you consider my personal request and do not resign, please do not leave Washington without coming to see me." I left the executive offices and never saw him again.
The letter itself was a high minded appeal . . . .
As you well know, in dozens of speeches in many states I have advocated your policies and the war.
"The President's pardon is an acknowledgment by him of the grave injustice that has been done:"
Mr. Malone did what we could only have done with the greatest difficulty and after more pro-
The President earnestly urged me not to resign, saying, "What will the people of the country think when they hear that the Collector of the Port of New York has resigned because of an injustice done to a group of suffragists by the police officials of the city of Washington?"
I quit a political career.
Also tiny sailboats, some of them with bright red or blue sails; while every now and then a crew of young men from one of the colleges sculled past them, practising for the forthcoming boat-race.
Edith would run each morning into the breakfast-room, a bright-faced little girl with sparkling blue eyes and golden brown hair tied up with a pink ribbon and waving loosely over her shoulders--as all English girls wear their hair until they are quite young ladies.
All made way for these swift racing boats, for one of the unwritten rules of the river is that boat crews must not be interfered with while practising.
"Now, Clarence," said Miss Green, "you fill the teakettle while the girls help me."
Always she finished with marmalade.
EDITH'S HOME ON THE THAMES
"Does not the river look gay?" said Eleanor.
Tom, Edith's brother, was at school at Eton College, so Edith had a double share of petting, and led a very happy existence with plenty of work and plenty of play.
Then the tea-basket was brought from the punt.
There are special keepers to look after them, and any person who injured a swan in any way would be punished.
Thursday was a red-letter day for Edith, for in the afternoon she always took tea with mamma and papa in state, in the drawing-room.
In the midst of it all were to be seen the swans gliding in and out among the boats.
Her dress was very simply made, and around the neck was a pink ribbon--pink was her favourite colour--tied in a bow.
The children were soon seated on cushions in the neat little shallow punt.
In a few minutes the water boiled in spite of everybody watching it attentively, and Miss Green filled the teapot.
You may imagine it did not take Edith long to put away her books; then giving her good-natured governess a hug she skipped off for her hat and coat.
"There are Eleanor and Clarence waiting for us now," cried Edith, as she and Miss Green, who was carrying the tea-basket, crossed the gardens. Running over the lawn, which stretched down to the river, she greeted her two little playmates from the vicarage.
Then they all gathered around the dainty cloth spread on the grass, and the slices of bread and butter, known as "cut bread and butter," and the lovely strawberry jam quickly disappeared.
Another hobby of Colonel Howard's was his fancy chickens and ducks, of which he had a great variety.
CHAPTER I.
Along the banks, under the shade of overhanging trees, were merry boat-loads of family parties making a picnic of their afternoon tea, as our little party intended to do.
"Why do we always eat more out-of-doors," said Edith, "than when we are indoors eating in the proper way?
So the little girls amused themselves with their housekeeping, while Clarence and Towser ran races up and down the greensward until it was time to return.
The Thames swans are as well known as the river itself. They are very privileged birds and directly under the protection of the government itself.
She had a pretty little room, with a little brass bed, and an old-fashioned chest of drawers for her clothes.
"Now you rest, Miss Green, and we will pack up everything," said Eleanor.
Their kettle was especially constructed for these occasions with a hollow space in the bottom into which fits a small spirit-lamp,--this so the wind cannot blow out the flame.
It will be fun," said Edith, "and Betty will be surprised."
Daintily fitted up rowboats with soft-cushioned seats, the ladies in their bright summer dresses, with parasols of gay colours; the men in white flannel suits and straw hats.
There were many punts like their own.
Miss Green smiled indulgently as she closed her book.
"Yes, and let's wash up the tea-things.
All three were bubbling over with glee at the prospect of an outing this bright June afternoon upon the river Thames.
Colonel Howard was very proud of his roses, and the rose garden of the manor was quite famous; many of the rose-bushes were trained to form great arches over the walks.
Oldham Manor, Edith's home, was a fine old house built in the "Tudor" style, of red brick with stone doorways and windows, and quaint, tall, ornamental chimneys, with the lower story entirely covered with ivy.
But no harm ever happens to them, for the lovely white birds are great pets with every one, and the children especially like nothing better than to feed them.
"My! we have got a jolly lot of cake; that's good," and Clarence looked very approvingly at the nice plum-cake and the Madeira cake, which is a sort of sponge cake with slices of preserved citron on top of it,--a favourite cake for teas.
Occasionally our party in the punt would get the effect of a gentle wave from an automobile boat or a steam-launch as it rushed by.
Colonel Howard was a retired army officer who had seen much service in far-away India.
The chairs were covered with a bright, pretty pink, green, and white chintz, and the carpet was pale green with pink roses.
From the window of this delightful room, one overlooked the rose-garden. Adjoining was the schoolroom, a big room where Miss Green and Edith spent much of their time.
"Perhaps the fresh air has more to do with it than anything else," laughed Miss Green, as she cut them the sixth piece of cake all around.
Towser, the big collie dog, was already in the boat, for he knew he was a welcome companion on these trips.
This looks like an easy thing to do, but it takes a great deal of skill to handle a punt.
"I take two lumps of sugar only, thank you." Rainy afternoons she often worked on fancy articles for the bazaars held by the Children's League of Mercy. Edith was a member, and the money from the sales was given to help the very poor children in their neighbourhood.
Edith had her pet chickens, too, and she and her papa could never agree as to whose chickens were the finest, when they went to feed them in the morning.
Presently the punt glided behind a clump of trees.
The sun was setting when they pulled up at the steps of their boat-landing where Colonel and Mrs. Howard, Edith's parents, were sitting in comfortable wicker garden-chairs, waiting for them.
Edith usually dressed quickly, for, when the weather was fine, she and her papa always took a walk around the gardens before breakfast.
I may mention here, that next time this same cat had kittens they were all drowned again; but this time she did a wiser thing. She found out that a cat, belonging to one of the neighbours, was the happy mother of three kittens which she had been allowed to keep.
This was accordingly done, and turned out to be a very satisfactory arrangement for all parties concerned; for either cat could now go abroad when she pleased, happy in the thought that nothing could go wrong at home.
In fact about this time she always appears jollier than at any other, apparently looking upon the whole business as a capital lark--a rather enjoyable practical joke.
NURSING CHICKENS.--I know several instances of cats supplying the place of their lost kittens with a chicken.
Pussy went after him nevertheless, lying down in front of him, and mewing piteously up in his face.
Off goes puss to this neighbour's house, and having thrashed the mother to begin with, she kidnapped and carried home one of her family.
So it became a sort of household pet, and when not eating, it was always cuddling down beside its funny foster-mother.
Cats are greatly sensible of the honour of maternity, and when deprived of their kittens feel very wretched indeed.
My own cat, Muffie, invariably gives due notice of the coming event, by some of the most wonderful specimens of cantation I ever listened to.
The cat, unlike most animals, seems singularly exempt from the pains of parturition.
I know of another similar instance, where a cat was house-mate with a rather valuable bitch; this bitch brought forth a litter of seven pups. The cat had five kittens at the same time.
I'll seek the mountain, and be it what it may, I'll have something to love, something to suckle me."
Miss G---- is an old maid, and a great lover of cats and poultry.
One of these pussy, watching her chance, sprang upon and seized by the neck, and although hotly pursued by the enraged mother, managed to reach the house in safety, and went straight to her own bed.
She had the bite and was satisfied.
Squirrels thus reared make most delightful little pets.
NURSING VAGARIES.
One cat, for example, had had all her offspring,--it was her first litter,--drowned; she went at once out into the court-yard, where a hen was gathering crumbs to a large brood of chickens.
The poor thing died giving birth to a litter of four puppies.
We see, then, that chicken-rearing by cats does not give that amount of satisfaction which is desired.
He repeated this so often, walking backward and forward in front of the palace, that the princess, who was then in the hall with the four-and-twenty windows, hearing a man cry something, and seeing a great mob crowding about him, sent one of her women slaves to know what he cried.
The lords who had courted him in the days of his splendour, now declined to have any communication with him.
They told the strange tidings to the grand vizier, who informed the sultan, who exclaimed, "It must be Aladdin's palace, which I gave him leave to build for my daughter.
The slave obeyed, went out of the hall, and no sooner got to the palace gates than he saw the African magician, called to him, and showing him the old lamp, said, "Give me a new lamp for this."
They came again several times for more, and in a month's time had not finished half their work.
On his return he had recourse to an operation of geomancy to find out where the lamp was--whether Aladdin carried it about with him, or where he left it.
The vases, basins, and goblets were gold also, and of exquisite workmanship, and all the other ornaments and embellishments of the hall were answerable to this display.
In his perplexity he ordered the grand vizier to be sent for with expedition.
"I sent for you," said he, "to fit up this window in as great perfection as the rest.
Thus Aladdin, while he paid all respect to the sultan, won by his affable behaviour and liberality the affections of the people.
Lay one down immediately." The genie disappeared, and Aladdin saw what he desired executed in an instant.
The genie then returned, and carried him to his own home.
The next morning the attendants of Aladdin presented themselves to dress him, and brought him another habit, as rich and magnificent as that worn the day before.
The slave picked out one and carried it to the princess; but the change was no sooner made than the place rung with the shouts of the children, deriding the magician's folly.
As he approached, he began crying, "Who will exchange old lamps for new ones?" As he went along, a crowd of children collected, who hooted, and thought him, as did all who chanced to be passing by, a madman or a fool, to offer to change new lamps for old ones.
Let its walls be massive gold and silver bricks laid alternately.
The princess, who knew not the value of this lamp, and the interest that Aladdin had to keep it safe, entered into the pleasantry, and commanded a slave to take it and make the exchange.
He has wished to surprise us, and let us see what wonders can be done in only one night."
The sultan returned to the palace, and after this went frequently to the window to contemplate and admire the wonderful palace of his son-in-law.
The sultan consented with pleasure, rose up immediately, and, preceded by the principal officers of his palace, and followed by all the great lords of his court, accompanied Aladdin.
If the princess chooses, she may have the pleasure of trying if this old man is so silly as to give a new lamp for an old one, without taking anything for the exchange."
In short, they used all the jewels the sultan had, and borrowed of the vizier, but yet the work was not half done.
The genie led him through all the apartments, where he found officers and slaves, habited according to their rank and the services to which they were appointed.
Aladdin returned home in the order he had come, amidst the acclamations of the people, who wished him all happiness and prosperity.
the children and mob crowding about him, so that he can hardly stir, make all the noise they can in derision of him."
"I command thee," replied the magician, "to transport me immediately, and the palace which thou and the other slaves of the lamp have built in this city, with all the people in it, to Africa." The genie made no reply, but with the assistance of the other genies, the slaves of the lamp, immediately transported him and the palace, entire, to the spot whither he had been desired to convey it.
Go and execute my wishes."
He then quickly learnt about the wealth, charities, happiness, and splendid palace of Prince Aladdin.
On the very next day, the magician set out and travelled with the utmost haste to the capital of China, where, on his arrival, he took up his lodgings in a khan.
The slave returned, laughing so heartily that the princess rebuked her. "Madam," answered the slave, laughing still, "who can forbear laughing, to see an old man with a basket on his arm, full of fine new lamps, asking to change them for old ones?
Bands of music led the procession, followed by a hundred state ushers, and the like number of black mutes, in two files, with their officers at their head.
As soon as he dismounted, he retired to his own chamber, took the lamp, and summoned the genie as usual, who professed his allegiance.
The genie then showed him the treasury, which was opened by a treasurer, where Aladdin saw large vases of different sizes, piled up to the top with money, ranged all round the chamber.
But what most surprises me is, that a hall of this magnificence should be left with one of its windows incomplete and unfinished." "Sire," answered Aladdin, "the omission was by design, since I wished that you should have the glory of finishing this hall." "I take your intention kindly," said the sultan, "and will give orders about it immediately."
On his son-in-law being brought before him, he would not hear a word from him, but ordered him to be put to death.
When Aladdin had examined every portion of the palace, and particularly the hall with the four-and-twenty windows, and found it far to exceed his fondest expectations, he said, "Genie, there is one thing wanting, a fine carpet for the princess to walk upon from the sultan's palace to mine.
The African magician stayed no longer near the palace, nor cried any more, "New lamps for old ones," but made the best of his way to his khan.
The next day the magician called for the twelve lamps, paid the man his full price, put them into a basket hanging on his arm, and went directly to Aladdin's palace.
Aladdin went out of the hall, and returning soon after, found the window, as he wished it to be, like the others.
Aladdin, who knew that all the sultan's endeavours to make this window like the rest were in vain, sent for the jewellers and goldsmiths, and not only commanded them to desist from their work, but ordered them to undo what they had begun, and to carry all their jewels back to the sultan and to the vizier.
When the sultan returned to his palace, he ordered his jewels to be brought out, and the jewellers took a great quantity, particularly those Aladdin had made him a present of, which they soon used, without making any great advance in their work.
When the sultan's porters came to open the gates, they were amazed to find what had been an unoccupied garden filled up with a magnificent palace, and a splendid carpet extending to it all the way from the sultan's palace.
He went to a coppersmith, and asked for a dozen copper lamps: the master of the shop told him he had not so many by him, but if he would have patience till the next day, he would have them ready.
Let there be also kitchens and storehouses, stables full of the finest horses, with their equerries and grooms, and hunting equipage, officers, attendants, and slaves, both men and women, to form a retinue for the princess and myself.
The next day the magician learnt, from the chief superintendent of the khan where he lodged, that Aladdin had gone on a hunting expedition, which was to last for eight days, of which only three had expired.
Early the next morning, when the sultan, according to custom, went to contemplate and admire Aladdin's place, his amazement was unbounded to find that it could nowhere be seen.
"Well," said he, rubbing his hands in glee, "I shall have the lamp, and I shall make Aladdin return to his original mean condition."
He took the lamp, which he carried about him, rubbed it, and presently the genie appeared.
The princess, dazzled to see so much riches collected in one place, said to Aladdin, "I thought, prince, that nothing in the world was so beautiful as the sultan my father's palace, but the sight of this hall alone is sufficient to show I was deceived."
The result of his consultation informed him, to his great joy, that the lamp was in the palace.
Aladdin had conducted himself in this manner several years, when the African magician, who had for some years dismissed him from his recollection, determined to inform himself with certainty whether he perished, as he supposed, in the subterranean cave or not.
When Aladdin gave these commands to the genie, the sun was set.
He fancied at first that he was mistaken, and examined the two windows on each side, and afterward all the four-and-twenty; but when he was convinced that the window which several workmen had been so long about was finished in so short a time, he embraced Aladdin and kissed him between his eyes.
After the sultan had finished this magnificent entertainment, provided for him and for his court by Aladdin, he was informed that the jewellers and goldsmiths attended; upon which he returned to the hall, and showed them the window which was unfinished.
I beg you to give me forty days, and if in that time I cannot restore it, I will offer my head to be disposed of at your pleasure." "I give you the time you ask, but at the end of the forty days, forget not to present yourself before me."
I made this apology to the good woman, and when she had set the table and closed the door took another turn or two about my den, continuing as I did so my angry thoughts.
Dare I say it?
It was only on reaching home I noticed the hospital porters had omitted to take the dead man's carpet from the roof of the cab when they carried him in, and as the cabman did not care about driving back to the hospital with it, and it could not well be left in the street, I somewhat reluctantly carried it indoors with me.
Most strange-looking man, and none of us can even guess at his age.
I gave a wild yell and made one frantic struggle, but it was too late.
Broke his neck like a pipe-stem.
It belongs to this old chap here who has just dropped out of the skies on to his head; chuck it on top and shut the door!" And that rug, the very mainspring of the startling things which followed, was thus carelessly thrown on to the carriage, and off we went.
In the centre appeared a round such as might be taken for the sun, while here and there, "in the field," as heralds say, were lesser orbs which from their size and position could represent smaller worlds circling about it.
Not a friend of yours, I suppose?"
"Gone, sir--clean gone!
He slipped on the pavement and fell in front of me just now, and as a matter of common charity I brought him in here.
In five minutes the house-surgeon on duty came in to see me, and with a shake of his head said briefly--
Even as I spoke the magic carpet quivered responsively under my feet, and an undulation went all round the fringe as though a sudden wind were shaking it.
I WISH I WERE IN THE PLANET MARS!"
What a fool I had been!
The bead was of no seeming value and slipped unintentionally into my waistcoat pocket as I chatted for a few minutes more with the doctor, and then, shaking hands, I said goodbye, and went back to the cab which was still waiting outside.
"Is this your rug, captain?" asked a bystander just as we were driving off.
Little did I guess how dear it would be at any price!
Altogether, I thought as I kicked it out straight upon my floor, it was a strange and not unhandsome article of furniture--it would do nicely for the mess-room on the Carolina, and if any representatives of yonder poor old fellow turned up tomorrow, why, I would give them a couple of dollars for it.
How can I describe what followed those luckless words?
Much else though I have forgotten, THAT fact remains as clear as the last sight of a well-remembered shore in the mind of some wave-tossed traveller.
At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh, and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen and collect the scattered pages, for I MUST write it--the pallid splendour of that thing I loved, and won, and lost is ever before me, and will not be forgotten.
"Not mine," I answered somewhat roughly.
How lonely I was!
"Nothing whatever to do with me, sir.
Were there any means of identification on him?"
"Yes, yes," I said at last, returning to the stove and taking my stand, hands in pockets, in front of it, "anything were better than this, any enterprise however wild, any adventure however desperate.
It made no difference to me, of course.
I must and will write--it relieves me; read and believe as you list.
It humped up in the middle so abruptly that I came down sitting with a shock that numbed me for the moment.
But was I to lose my only chance of shore?
Quick as thought the beast twisted his head aside and tossed his antlers so that the try was fruitless.
But it was too late.
"Good!" I shouted.
What that Martian mountain elk had hoped for can only be guessed, what he met with was a tangle of floating finery carrying a numbed traveller on it, and with a snort of disappointment he turned again.
And as I wondered a keen, bright picture of the hapless maid as I saw her last blossomed before my mind's eye, the ambassadors on either side holding her wrists, and she shrinking from them in horror while her poor, white face turned to me for rescue in desperate pleading--oh!
With all my strength I hurled myself upon him, missing my clutch again by a hair's-breadth and going headlong into the salt furrow his chest was turning up.
Be this as it may, the beast came hurtling down on me lip deep in the waves, a mighty brown head with pricked ears that flicked the water from them now and then, small bright eyes set far back, and wide palmated antlers on a mighty forehead, like the dead branches of a tree.
It was better than nothing perhaps, yet it was a poor awakening.
Was it a real feast we had shared in overnight, or only a quaint dream? Was Heru real or only a lovely fancy?
Wherever I looked eyes dropped and timid hands fidgeted as their owners backed off from my dangerous enthusiasm.
How long after I know not, but presently a tissue of daylight crept into my eyes, and I awoke again.
Closer and closer we came, one of us drifting helplessly, and the other swimming strongly for the islands.
With hasty feet I rushed down the hall out into the cool, sweet air of the planet morning.
It was a huge beast as it loomed up against the glow, bigger than any mortal stag ever was--the kind of fellow-traveller no one would willingly accost, but even if I had wished to get out of its path I had no power to do so.
And those hairy ruffians of whom a horrible vision danced before my waking eyes, were they fancy too? No, my wrists still ached with the strain of the tussle, the quaint, sad wine taste was still on my lips--it was all real enough, I decided, starting up in bed; and if it was real where was the little princess? What had they done with her?
As the full meaning of the scene dawned upon her she started to her feet, looking wonderfully beautiful amongst those dusky forms, and extending her hands to me began to cry in the most piteous way.
That last red beast turned on my blade, and as he fell dragged me half down with him.
Nearer it came and nearer, right across my road, until I could see a black dot at the point, a head presently developed, then as we approached the ears and antlers of a swimming stag.
I would not listen to more.
There was obviously no help to be had from them, and meantime the precious moments were flying, so with a disdainful glance I turned on my heels and set off alone as hard as I could go for the harbour.
But blue-mantle, biting his thumbs, murmured he had not breakfasted yet and edged away behind his companions.
Amongst the litter little sapphire-coloured finches were feeding, twittering merrily to themselves as they hopped about, and here and there down the long tables lay asprawl a belated reveller, his empty oblivion-phial before him, his curly head upon his arms, dreaming perhaps of last night's feast and a neglected bride dozing dispassionate in some distant chamber.
The cashier seemed to have taken a fancy to Mike; and Mike, as was usually the way with him when people went out of their way to be friendly, was at his best.
'Hyde Park?'
New men were constantly wanted in the Eastern branches, so they had to be put into the London branch to learn the business, whether there was any work for them to do or not.
I try work, but that is no good either.
It was after one of these visits of Psmith's that Mr Waller displayed a new and unsuspected side to his character.
Comrade Rossiter awaits me.'
Just so.
The truth of the matter was that the New Asiatic Bank was over-staffed.
The important task of shooting doubloons across the counter did not belong to Mike himself, but to Mr Waller.
'Oh--er--Smith,' said Mr Waller, 'when you were talking to Jackson just now--'
Mike was becoming accustomed to deputizing for the cashier for short spaces of time.
'Well, well, I will go back and do my best to face it, but it's a tough job.'
There were too many men for the work.
'Perhaps you would speak yourself?'
Of course, if you have nothing better to do.'
Clapham Common.
There was nobody to tell it to except the new man.
Mr Waller shook it with enthusiasm.
By all means pay us a visit now and then, if it does not interfere with your own work.
I saw the thing unexpectedly.
No.
In the cart.
The manager did not often perambulate the office, but he did occasionally, and the interview which ensued upon his finding Hutchinson, the underling in the Cash Department at that time, with his stool tilted comfortably against the wall, reading the sporting news from a pink paper to a friend from the Outward Bills Department who lay luxuriously on the floor beside him, did not rank among Mr Waller's pleasantest memories.
Mr Waller intervened at this point.
But I noticed just now that you spoke to Bristow as Comrade Bristow.'
'I think you must really let Jackson go on with his work, Smith,' he said.
We still talk brokenly about Manchester United--they got routed in the first round of the Cup yesterday and Comrade Rossiter is wearing black--but it is not the same.
Mike at his ease and unsuspicious of hostile intentions was a different person from Mike with his prickles out.
But Mr Waller was too soft-hearted to interfere with his assistants unless it was absolutely necessary.
'Excellent,' said Mr Waller.
'Just so.
The moment I concentrate myself on Comrade Bickersdyke for a brief spell, and seem to be doing him a bit of good, what happens?
Mr Waller's face grew animated.
'Yes, yes.'
It generally happened that he had to do so once or twice a day.
It is the suddenness of that waistcoat which hits you.
I try always to think well of my fellow man.
The fact that he wore detachable cuffs, which he took off on beginning work and stacked in a glistening pile on the desk in front of him, was no proof of innate viciousness of disposition, but it prejudiced the Old Etonian against him.
He enjoyed being in the Cash Department.
Well, I am perhaps a little bitter--'
'Thanks very much.'
'A little mordant and ironical.'
Why should I dislocate the work of your department in my efforts to win a sympathetic word?
And when they win a smile from me, they think that I forget.
I tell you I was shaken.
I will bear Comrade Bristow like a man here.
His others--which he could--were numerous.
He stammered in his eagerness.
Mike's work was less ostentatious, and was performed with pen, ink, and ledgers in the background. Occasionally, when Mr Waller was out at lunch, Mike had to act as substitute for him, and cash cheques; but Mr Waller always went out at a slack time, when few customers came in, and Mike seldom had any very startling sum to hand over.
It was an unheard-of thing, he said, depriving a man of his confidential secretary without so much as asking his leave.
It was this tolerance which sometimes got him into trouble with Mr Bickersdyke.
Now, as you are interested in the movement, I was thinking that perhaps you might care to come and hear me speak next Sunday.
I seldom speak.
Bristow was always friendliness itself.
Having completed his business with the Inward Bills, Mr Waller made his way back by a circuitous route, taking in the Postage desk.
I also--'
And Comrade Jackson shall be at my side.'
I shall be back very soon.'
One of Nature's blighters.
'There seems to be too much talking.'
Bring Jackson with you, and both of you come to supper afterwards, if you will.'
The work was easy; and when he did happen to make mistakes, they were corrected patiently by the grey-bearded one, and not used as levers for boosting him into the presence of Mr Bickersdyke, as they might have been in some departments.
He tottered wearily away in the direction of the Postage Department.
But I don't.
People came in fairly frequently to cash cheques of two or three pounds, but it was rare that any very large dealings took place.
'It has caused me the greatest inconvenience,' he told Mike, drifting round in a melancholy way to the Cash Department during a slack spell one afternoon.
14.
He liked Mr Waller.
'I miss you at every turn.
'And when you were speaking to Jackson, you spoke of yourself as a Socialist.'
Why, Comrade Bristow sneaks off and buys a sort of woollen sunset.
The department into which Mike was sent was the Cash, or, to be more exact, that section of it which was known as Paying Cashier.
Mr Waller Appears in a New Light
After all, there are worse things at the Zoo.'
The whisper is beginning to circulate, "Psmith's number is up--As a reformer he is merely among those present.
But it would be a treat to listen to you.
"Three drops are enough," at last thought he; "I may, at least, cool my lips with it."
I am dying."
Its eye moved to the bottle which Hans held in his hand.
The discovery of the total loss of their last piece of plate had the effect of sobering them just enough to enable them to stand over Gluck, beating him very steadily for a quarter of an hour; at the expiration of which period they dropped into a couple of chairs, and requested to know what he had to say for himself.
Hans eyed it deliberately, drank, and passed on.
On this object, and on this alone, Hans's eyes and thoughts were fixed; forgetting the distance he had to traverse, he set off at an imprudent rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before he had scaled the first range of the green and low hills.
And a flash of blue lightning rose out of the east, shaped like a sword; it shook thrice over the whole heaven, and left it dark with one heavy, impenetrable shade.
III.--HOW MR.
The noise of the fray alarmed the neighbours who, finding they could not pacify the combatants, sent for the constable.
They beat him again, till their arms were tired, and staggered to bed.
When Hans heard this, he was much delighted, and determined to set out immediately for the Golden River.
Hans struggled on.
Gluck told them his story, of which, of course, they did not believe a word.
"Good morning, brother," said Hans; "have you any message for the King of the Golden River?"
He stood at the brink of the chasm through which it ran.
It was past noon, and the rays beat intensely upon the steep path, while the whole atmosphere was motionless, and penetrated with heat.
The ice was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds of gushing water; not monotonous or low; but changeful and loud, rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then breaking off into short melancholy tones, or sudden shrieks, resembling those of human voices in distress or pain.
Hans, on hearing this, contrived to escape, and hid himself; but Schwartz was taken before the magistrate, fined for breaking the peace, and, having drunk out his last penny the evening before, was thrown into prison till he should pay.
And partly comforted by the temporary conclusion, I got a little troubled sleep.
I turned my face in the direction of it, so far as I could judge, and went on.
Good heavens!
"At least," resumed Polwarth, "I have this advantage over some, that I cannot be fooled with the fancy that this poor miserable body of mine is worth thinking of beside the smallest suspicion of duty.
The bare sound made me shudder before I had time to say to myself it was a cry.
Meantime I have the relief of the confessional."
I can't even bear to think of it even in the house, and yet I don't quite care to destroy it."
I might, in the morning, be of service to them.
There was no one there!
"It was a still, warm night, no moon, but plenty of star-light, the wind blowing as now, gentle and sweet and cool--just the wind my lungs sighed for.
I opened it and peeped in.
Still no answer.
"I don't in the least mind taking charge of it," answered Wingfold.
She soothed, she expostulated, she condoled, she coaxed.
I knocked again.
And had not Faber said there seemed something unusual about the character of his illness?--What could it mean?--It was impossible of course--but yet--and yet--
THE SHEATH.
I knew the place perfectly, for I had often wandered all over it, sometimes spending hours there.
"Do you think," he said, "we are in any way bound to inquire further into the affair?"
I heard the sounds of the workmen's hammers on the new one as I went.
There MUST be some simple explanation of the matter, however strange it showed!
I must go in, and see whether anyone was there in want of help.
An old bedstead was all I saw.
There was something in the tone that seemed to me unusually frightful.
"One night, some weeks ago--I can, if necessary, make myself certain of the date,--I was--no uncommon thing with me--unable to sleep.
Laying my ear therefore against the door, I heard what was plainly a lady's voice.
"If I had thought so, I should not have left it unmentioned till now," answered Polwarth.
You may well smile at the idea of my helping anyone, for what could I do if it came to a struggle?"
I followed instantly, saw her run up the steps, and heard her open and shut the door.
So down the slope I went, got into the garden, and made my way through the tangled bushes to the house.
What is it but a cracked jug?
There was her brother ill!
When I got into the garden I began to sing and knock the bushes about, then opened the door noisily, and clattered about in the hall and the lower rooms before going up the stair.
The turf was soft under my feet, the dusk soft to my eyes, and the wind to my soul; I had breath and room and leisure and silence and loneliness, and everything to make me more than usually happy; and so I wandered on and on, neither caring nor looking whither I went: so long as the stars remained unclouded, I could find my way back when I pleased.
The trees hid the sky, and the little human nest was dark around them.
I crept out of the house, and up to the higher ground.
"Would you mind taking care of it, Mr. Wingfold?" the gate-keeper continued as the curate examined it; "I don't like having it.
All else was silence.
And the lady might be his wife, who had gone as soon as she could leave him to find help, but had failed.
I rose, dressed, and went out.
Along every passage and into every room I went, to give good warning ere I approached that in which I had heard the voices.
Ere I could breathe again after it, the tall figure of a woman rushed past me, tearing its way through the bushes towards the door.
I cannot describe the horror of it.
"You will know how much I have already learned to trust you when I say that what I am about to confide to you plainly involves the secret of another."
He led the way to his room, and the curate followed.
Seated there, in the shadowy old attic, through the very walls of which the ivy grew, and into which, by the open window in the gable, from the infinite west, blew the evening air, carrying with it the precious scent of honeysuckle, to mingle with that of old books, Polwarth recounted and Wingfold listened to a strange adventure.
His large face grew paler as he spoke, and something almost like fear grew in his eyes, but they looked straight into those of the curate, and his voice did not tremble.
I stood and listened for a moment, but all seemed still as the grave.
The only result certain to follow, was more trouble to the troubled already.
"I had been out perhaps an hour, when through the soft air came a cry, apparently from far off.
Certainly he had never till then thought of her with the slightest interest, and why should she come up to him now?
"I am going to make a confidant of you, Mr. Wingfold," said the dwarf, with troubled face, and almost whispered word.
I approached it softly, and finding that door inside a small closet, knew at once where I was. As I was in office on the ground, and it could hardly be any thing righteous that led to such an outcry in the house, which, although deserted, was still my master's, I felt justified in searching further into the matter.
I cannot run, for, if I attempt it, I am in a moment unable even to walk--from palpitation and choking.
Why should he think of her now?
"As soon as I had had a cup of tea, I set out for the old house.
"On the contrary," interrupted Wingfold, "I was smiling with admiration of your pluck."
I got into the open park, avoiding the trees, and wandered on and on, without thinking where I was going.
I went straight home, and to bed again--but had brought little repose with me: I must do something--but what?
But I had no longer any pleasure in the world.
Good again!" he cried.
The mind, like the body, grows quickly hard, simple, uncomplex.
"Good!
"I declare, Hubbard, you're tanned like an aboriginal, and you look like one, too," laughed Maloney.
"We'll have the first decent breakfast we've had this year.
Some folk, of course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss.
I propose a swim and then bed.
He asked the question with his eyes straight on the other's face.
"The wind's gusty and we've got hardly any ballast."
"Exactly," he said.
"But what makes you think the creature is starved?"
Lemme hep you, Mister.
Will Mr. Matthews keep me, do you think?"
As the stranger walked, he looked searchingly into the mists on every hand, and paused frequently as if questioning the proper course.
As the stranger came in sight of the Lane cabin, a young woman on a brown pony rode out of the gate and up the trail before him; and when the man reached the open ground on the mountain above, and rounded the shoulder of the hill, he saw the pony, far ahead, loping easily along the little path.
"That all with one consent praise new-born gawds, Tho they are made and moulded of things past, And give to dust that is a little gilt More laud than gilt o'er-dusted."
The man returned Jed's greeting cordially, and, resting his satchel on a rock beside the narrow path, added, "I am very glad to meet you.
IN MEMORY OF THAT BEAUTIFUL SUMMER IN THE OZARK HILLS, WHEN, SO OFTEN, WE FOLLOWED THE OLD TRAIL AROUND THE RISE OF MUTTON HOLLOW--THE TRAIL THAT IS NOBODY KNOWS HOW OLD--AND FROM SAMMY'S LOOKOUT WATCHED THE DAY GO OVER THE WESTERN RIDGES.
TO FRANCES, MY WIFE
In an old tree that leaned far out over the valley, a crow shook the wet from his plumage and dried himself in the warm light; while far below the mists rolled, and on the surface of that gray sea, the traveler saw a company of buzzards, wheeling and circling above some dead thing hidden in its depth.
A moment he watched, and horse and rider passed from sight.
Must be from New York, sure!"
The lower hills were wrapped as in a winding sheet; dank and cold.
"You think then that Mr. Matthews will keep me?"
'Bout three mile, I'd say.
Again Jed's question was ignored.
"Durned if I know, Mister.
What might YER name be, Mister?"
I know they're to home 'cause they was a fixin' t' leave the mill when I left 'bout an hour ago. Was the river up much when you come acrost?" As the native spoke he was still peering uneasily into the woods.
CHAPTER I.
"No," said the other, "I am not looking for mines of lead or zinc; there is greater wealth in these hills and forests, young man."
The other, looking back over the way he had come, seemed not to hear Jed's question, and the native continued, "Mine's Holland. Pap an' Mam they come from Tennessee.
"A hant, a ghost, some calls 'em," explained Jed.
The other interrupted.
The trees were dripping with moisture.
It was a face marked deeply by pride; pride of birth, of intellect, of culture; the face of a scholar and poet; but it was more--it was the countenance of one fairly staggering under a burden of disappointment and grief.
All day a fine rain had fallen steadily, and the mists hung heavy over the valley.
They'll take anybody in.
I'll hep you hunt hit, if you want me to, Mister."
"What is it?" he asked.
The clouds were drifting far away.
Hit'll be plumb dark 'gin I git home.
"Jest foller this Old Trail.
"Reckon you must be from Kansas City or Chicago?
His form stooped a little in the shoulders, perhaps with weariness, but he carried himself with the unconscious air of one long used to a position of conspicuous power and influence; and, while his well-kept hair and beard were strongly touched with white, the brown, clear lighted eyes, that looked from under their shaggy brows, told of an intellect unclouded by the shadows of many years.
Thank you, very much, for your assistance.
I fear that I am lost."
As the figure of the traveler emerged from the mists, the native checked his horse to greet the newcomer with the customary salutation of the backwoods, "Howdy."
I heard tell they're mighty big towns."
The native shook his head.
The voice was marvelously pure, deep, and musical, and, like the brown eyes, betrayed the real strength of the man, denied by his gray hair and bent form.
"Where am I trying to get to?" As the man repeated Jed's question, he drew his hand wearily across his brow; "I--I--it doesn't much matter, boy.
The stranger looked tired and wet.
It was corn-planting time, when the stranger followed the Old Trail into the Mutton Hollow neighborhood.
TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.
"Very true, very true, indeed," he mused.
Do you live near here?"
"I did not cross the river.
"Jim Lane lives up the trail 'bout half a quarter.
The stranger's only answer was a curt "Good-by," as his form vanished in the mist.
How far is it to this Matthews place, and how do I go?"
The boy looked at the speaker in wide-eyed wonder; he had a queer feeling that he was in the presence of a superior being.
You know the Matthews's, I reckon?"
Ever hear tell o' Jim?"
I will go on, now, for I must hurry, or night will overtake me, and I shall not be able to find the path."
Slowly the old man toiled up the mountain; up from the mists of the lower ground to the ridge above; and, as he climbed, unseen by him, a shadowy form flitted from tree to tree in the dim, dripping forest.
They 'mind me now of him that blackened my life; he used to take on powerful about the beauty of the country and all the time he was a turnin' it into a hell for them that had to stay here after he was gone."
For some time the stranger sat thus, while his host spoke no word. Then lifting his head, the man looked away over the ridges just touched with the lingering light, and the valley below wrapped in the shadowy mists.
Sammy coming from the house with an empty bucket met the young man at the gate, and the two went toward the spring together.
"You live in the city, then, when you are at home?" asked Mr. Matthews, looking curiously at his guest.
But the girl is a daughter of a neighbor, and no kin at all."
I reckon she'll get over it alright, though," he added with a smile, as he raised his arms to assist the girl to dismount.
As he spoke, anger and hatred grew dark in the giant's face, and the stranger saw the big hands clench and the huge frame grow tense with passion.
The others lie over there." He pointed with his pipe to where a clump of pines, not far from the house, showed dark and tall, against the last red glow in the sky.
Mr. Matthews coming quietly to the door a few minutes later saw the boy standing there, and the rugged face of the big mountaineer softened at the sight.
The worst of it is, there ain't much show to get a man; unless that one over on Bear Creek will come.
And still, throughout the country side, the old folks tell with pride tales of the marvelous feats of strength performed in the days when "Old Matt" was young.
"Why didn't you tell me before?
It was a weird scene, almost supernatural in its beauty.
"Didn't you know that Mandy was stoppin' with me?
M
Opoline Jones
Addicted to rhetoric.
The ion differs from the molecule, the corpuscle and the atom in that it is an ion.
The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
Something acted upon by magnetism.
Something acting upon a magnet.
A staff of office signifying authority.
The state and title of a king.
Popularly, a woman found out.
There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.
An attribute beloved of detected offenders.
Each is all three.
Less objectionable.
A child of two races, ashamed of both.
When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
In England the word is pronounced Maudlin, whence maudlin, adjective, unpleasantly sentimental.
A bird whose thievish disposition suggested to someone that it might be taught to talk.
The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive.
Important.
Whence comes it?
In Christian countries, the day after the baseball game.
They were in a state of dull discomfort until the bodies from which they had exhaled were buried and burned; and they seem not to have been particularly happy afterward.
Five minutes before midnight Tommy Tonker, instructed by Mr. Nuth, who waited outside, came away with one pocketful of rings and shirt-studs.
Mrs. Eggins, the caretaker, glanced up the street, and then she let them in, and left them to wait in the drawing-room amongst furniture all mysterious with sheets.
"Oh, no, my child" (for such a question is childish).
He has a way with tapestry; you would scarcely notice that the edges had been cut.
They did not speak of it there, and elsewhere it is unheard of.
His terms are moderate, so much cash down when the goods are delivered, so much in blackmail afterwards.
To them as they looked abroad the World far-off seemed happy.
With cobbled agates were its streets a glory.
Through small square panes of rose-quartz the citizens looked from their houses.
When urged to arm the office, he said, "No; all my life I have worked for the workingmen; if they would now burn my office and hang me, why, let them do it."
But the boy who could walk nearly six hundred miles to see his parents, and be laughed at for poor clothes, while he saved his money for their use, was not to be overcome at thirty years of age, by the failure of one or of a dozen papers.
His little son Pickie, called "the glorious boy with radiant beauty never equalled," died suddenly.
When two years old, he would pore over the Bible, as he lay on the floor, and ask questions about the letters; at three, he went to the "district school," often carried through the deep snow on the shoulders of one of his aunts, or on the back of an older boy.
If you have but fifty cents, and can get no more for a week, buy a peck of corn, parch it, and live on it, rather than owe any man a dollar."
They did so, and their first work was the printing of a penny "Morning Post," which suspended in three weeks, they losing sixty dollars.
Can't you possibly let me in to have one last look?"
After her death he could not sleep at all, and brain-fever soon set in. Friday, Nov. 29, the end came.
Overworked, not having had "a good night's sleep in fifteen years!"
Among the hills of New Hampshire, in a lonely, unpainted house, Horace Greeley was born, Feb. 3, 1811, the third of seven children.
In 1855 he again visited Europe; and four years later, California, where he was received with great demonstrations of honor and respect.
He gathered a stock of pine knots, and, lighting one each night, lay down by the hearth, and read, oblivious to all around him.
Finally the boys began to tease him with saucy remarks, and threw type at him; but he paid no attention.
Everybody has troubles; and very wise are they who do not tell them, either in their faces or by their words.
After some weeks he returned, with a few more cents in his purse than when he started!
Beside editing the "New Yorker," he had also taken charge of the "Jeffersonian," a weekly campaign paper published at Albany, and the "Log-Cabin," established to aid in the election of General Harrison to the Presidency.
Fortunately, though it was the almost universal custom to use liquors, Horace was a teetotaler, and despised chewing or smoking tobacco, which he regarded "as the vilest, most detestable abuse of his corrupted sensual appetites whereof depraved man is capable;" therefore he had no fear of temptation from these sources.
They were very poor, the children sitting on the floor and eating their porridge together out of a tin pan; but they were happy in the midst of their hard work and plain food.
Going to Westhaven, Vt., Mr. Greeley obtained work on a farm, and moved his family thither.
Of the five thousand copies published and to be sold at a cent each, Mr. Greeley says, "We found some difficulty in giving them away." The expenses for the first week were five hundred and twenty-five dollars; receipts, ninety-two.
I would rather be a convict in a State prison, a slave in a rice-swamp, than to pass through life under the harrow of debt. Hunger, cold, rags, hard work, contempt, suspicion, unjust reproach, are disagreeable, but debt is infinitely worse than them all.
He learned to read, one can scarcely tell how.
The following year he visited England as one of the "jury" in the awarding of prizes; and while there made a close study of philanthropic and social questions.
It grew to a subscription list of nine thousand persons; but much of the business was done on trust, times were hard, and, after seven years, the enterprise had to be abandoned.
New York was scarcely awake; even the newsboys were asleep in front of the paper offices.
Stores were closed, and houses along the route were draped in black.
He was opposed to the hanging of Jefferson Davis; and with Gerritt Smith, a well-known abolitionist, and about twenty others, he signed Mr. Davis's bail-bond for one hundred thousand dollars, which released him from prison at Fortress Monroe, where he had been for two years.
In 1850 his first book was published by the Harpers, "Hints toward Reform," composed of ten lectures and twenty essays.
Before he was six years old he had read the Bible through, and "Pilgrim's Progress." Their home contained only about twenty books, and these he read and re-read.
He had written only a short time before, "With an awe that is not fear, and a consciousness of demerit which does not exclude hope, I await the opening, before my steps, of the gates of the eternal world." Dead at sixty-one!
Seeing that he could not be irritated, and that he was determined to work, he became a great favorite.
In 1872 considerable disaffection having arisen in the Republican party at the course pursued by President Grant at the South, the "Liberal Republicans," headed by Sumner, Schurz, and Trumbull, held a convention at Cincinnati, and nominated Horace Greeley for President.
No doubt the defeat was a great disappointment to one who had served his country and the Republican party for so many years with very little political reward.
The pressman and editor both stopped their labors to witness a fight; but they were disappointed, for the boy never turned from his work.
Mrs. Greeley was a great reader of such books as she could obtain, and remembered all she read.
He remained a few weeks with his family, then walked fifty miles east to a town in New York State, where he found plenty of work, but no money, and in six weeks returned to the log-cabin.
By the side of his wife and their three little children the great man was laid to rest, the two daughters stepping into the vault, and laying flowers tenderly upon the coffin.
Had he been present, doubtless he would have been killed at once.
And then came the sad and impressive burial.
At first his fellow-workmen called him "the ghost," from his white hair and complexion; but they soon found him friendly, and willing to lend money, which, as a rule, was never returned to him; they therefore voted him to be a great addition to the shop.
When his death became known, the whole nation mourned for him. Newspapers from Maine to Louisiana gave touching tributes to his greatness, his purity, and his far-sightedness as a leader of the people.
He soon stood at the head of his little class in spelling and reading, "and took it so much to heart when he did happen to lose his place, that he would cry bitterly; so that some boys, when they had gained the right to get above him, declined the honor, because it hurt Horace's feelings so."
On the third day, one of the apprentices took a large black ball, used to put ink on the type, and remarking that Horace's hair was too light, daubed his head four times.
Young Greeley, now twenty-three, and deeply interested in politics, determined to start a weekly paper.
Years after this he wrote, "Through most of this time I was very poor, and for four years really bankrupt, though always paying my notes, and keeping my word, but living as poorly as possible. My embarrassments were sometimes dreadful; not that I feared destitution, but the fear of involving my friends in my misfortunes was very bitter....
When Horace was fourteen, he read in a newspaper that an apprentice was wanted in a printing-office eleven miles distant.
Once he bought a second-hand black suit of a Jew, for five dollars, but it proved a bad bargain.
His father was a plain farmer, hard-working, yet not very successful, but aided by a wife of uncommon energy and good spirits, notwithstanding her many cares.
He waited for an hour and a half,--a day, it seemed to him,--when one of the journey-men arrived, and, finding the door locked, sat down beside the stranger.
Some of the New York journals fought the new sheet; but it lived and grew till, on the seventh week, it had eleven thousand subscribers. A good business-manager was obtained as partner.
In 1860 he was at the Chicago Convention, and helped to nominate Abraham Lincoln in preference to William H. Seward.
Soon after he had learned his trade, the newspaper suspended, and he was thrown out of work.
HORACE GREELEY.
Late in the day, a friend who called upon the owner of the house, learning that the printer wanted work, said he had heard of a vacancy at Mr. West's, 85 Chatham Street.
At noon he said distinctly, his only remaining children, Ida and Gabriella, standing by his bedside, "I know that my Redeemer liveth;" and at half-past three, "It is done." He was ready for the great change.
And now came a great sorrow, harder to bear than poverty.
In 1842, when he was thirty-one, he visited Washington, Niagara, and his parents in Pennsylvania, and wrote delightful letters back to his paper.
A noble son indeed, who would not buy a single garment for himself, but carried the money home, so as to make the poor ones a trifle more comfortable!
But he must do something; and, a little later, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, and some food tied in a bundle, which he hung on the end of a stick, slung over his shoulder, he walked one hundred and twenty miles back to New Hampshire, to see his relatives.
"Well, pay him off to-night, and let him go about his business."
The Democratic party saw the hopelessness of nominating a man in opposition to Grant and Greeley, and accepted the latter as their own candidate. The contest was bitter and partisan in the extreme.
Margaret Fuller came upon the editorial staff; for Mr. Greeley was ever the advocate of the fullest liberty for woman in any profession, and as much pay for her work as for that of men.
The man stood a moment by the open coffin, and then, pulling his hat low down to hide the tears, was lost in the crowd.
The same year he began his "History of the Civil War" for a Hartford publisher.
When Horace was nearly ten years old, his father, who had speculated in a small way in lumber, became a bankrupt; his house and furniture were sold by the sheriff, and he was obliged to flee from the State to avoid arrest.
When told that he was losing time by thus seeing people, he said, "I know it; but I'd rather be beset by loafers, and stopped in my work, than be cooped up where I couldn't be got at by men who really wanted to and had a right to see me." So warm as this were his sympathies with all humanity!
John Bright sent regrets over "our friend, Horace Greeley." Congress passed resolutions of respect for his "eminent services and personal purity and worth."
"Most joyfully will we do our best, dear Queen," said the Elves, as they folded their wings beside her.
"Now," said the Queen, "call hither Moon-light and Summer-Wind, for they have seen many pleasant things in their long wanderings, and will gladly tell us them."
"Ah, that is very lovely," cried the Elves, gathering round little Sunbeam as she ceased, to place a garland in her hair and praise her song.
CLOVER-BLOSSOM.
After the water in the lower vessel has boiled a while, if the rice seems a little dry, add more water.
54.
Among the Hindustani Christians it is the Christmas dinner. Sometimes it is served with rivers of hot curry flowing over it, but often it is eaten without the curry.
57.
This is the first solid food that babies of English or American parents in India are allowed.
Rice.
It can hardly be cooked too much.
There is another method of preparing rice which is almost as satisfactory, and by which all the nutrition is retained.
Boil with this a little bag of mixed spices and two onions.
There should be about three inches of liquid above the rice.
In case tomatoes are not in season, a can of tomatoes, or, better, a large-sized can of tomato soup will do nicely.
Pea Pullao.
Remove from the fire, pour over all a half ounce of rose water and stir well.
Plain Boiled Rice.
59.
Cook a tablespoonful of rice in this broth and shredded mutton.
In India it is usually made with chicken, but any kind of meat does nicely.
Often it is given to ducks and fowl to fatten them, and sometimes it is put into the curry pot.
55.
Fry 3 onions, 6 tomatoes, 2 peppers or pimentos together.
Do not add the rice until the water is boiling briskly.
A ten-cent tin of Baker's cocoanut does very nicely if one doesn't care to prepare the fresh cocoanut.
Fry a cup of uncooked rice and a cup of brown sugar in a tablespoonful of butter or crisco.
That is by cooking it in a regular rice boiler.
Cook until the broth is absorbed, then steam.
The process is very simple.
Cocoanut Rice.
When cold, cut into squares and serve like fudge.
(A fine dish for a missionary tea.)
Very delicious pullao may be made from the cheapest cuts of beef and mutton.
Cook until it is very tender.
Be sure and have plenty of liquid to start with.
When the pullao is ready to be served, pile on a platter, then strew thickly over the pullao the fried onions, almonds, and raisins.
Baby's Pesh-Pash.
Put a little bag of "mixed spices," such as are used in making pickles, on to cook with the fowl.
Pour over the mixture a half cupful of milk or cream; add a tablespoonful of butter or crisco, and cook in a rice boiler or steamer until the peas are nicely done.
It stands for all that roast turkey does in this country.
Cook all together until rice is thoroughly done.
Get about two pounds of beef or mutton, cut in bits.
Always use the unpolished rice.
Boil the rice and cocoanut together, being sure to add to the water the cocoanut milk.
Two cups of rice will be the right amount to use with two pounds of meat. Use the same method that is used in making chicken pullao.
If rice boiler is used there should be at least two inches of broth above the mixture.
Put all in a rice boiler if you have it and cook slowly until the rice is done. Retain the spices.
Shred it finely and return to the broth.
Cook until a grain feels soft when rubbed between the thumb and finger, then turn into a colander.
Rice Cutlets.
Drain that off, too, and place the rice where it can have moist heat for a while before serving.
A quarter as much uncooked rice as there is meat is a good proportion.
Press in plates and sprinkle well with minced almonds, or any kind of nuts will do.
As a rule rice is badly cooked in the average American home.
Pullao is the most festive dish in India.
Fried Rice (Parsi).
In the first place, very few know how to cook just plain boiled rice. Many know that there is a way of preparing it so that when done it will be a fluffy mass of separate grains, but they have no idea how to go about making it look like this.
After the rice has browned a little, add the two together, turn into a rice boiler or steamer and cook until rice is tender.
In another pan fry a cup of rice in a very little oil or crisco.
In India this is not the case, for every ounce of rice water is there carefully saved. It is used in various ways.
Rice served with curry is always prepared in this way.
Cook until the sugar melts and begins to bubble; then quickly add two cups of boiling water.
For chicken pullao, take a good fat hen, not too old, cut up and stew until almost tender.
For every cup of rice have about eight cups of water.
A half cupful of grated or diced cheese is an improvement to this dish.
A very nice way of making hash is to use rice instead of potatoes.
In that case fry the onions and peppers and rice together.
When the onion is nearly done, add to the broth the rice.
Drain off the water and pour over the rice several cups of cold water.
60.
Then throw in the rice, and give it an occasional stir until the water begins to boil again.
Pullao.
58.
Cook slowly and let every grain swell to its utmost.
In the latter case do not cook until it becomes soggy.
If you have no rice boiler, but must boil it on the stove, more broth will be required.
They must all be cut into small bits.
52.
Beef or Mutton Pullao.
53.
There is one objection, however, to rice prepared in this way.
At weddings, feasts, and holidays it is the chief dish.
Usually it is fed to the babies and weaker children.
56.
When the chicken is nearly done, add the fried rice and onions to the chicken and chicken broth.
Put just enough water over the rice to well cover it.
"Rely upon Philanthropy.
The questioner on coming out said, "The Master does not take his part."
The Master answered:--
"Let there," he said, "be three men walking together: from that number I should be sure to find my instructors; for what is good in them I should choose out and follow, and what is not good I should modify."
Again, "The man of superior mind is placidly composed; the small-minded man is in a constant state of perturbation."
Said the Master:--
"Are such available?" asked the Master.
"As I came not into life with any knowledge of it," he said, "and as my likings are for what is old, I busy myself in seeking knowledge there."
I am not of these.
Addressing his favorite disciple, he said, "To you only and myself it has been given to do this--to go when called to serve, and to go back into quiet retirement when released from office."
"It is not given to me," he said, "to meet with a sage; let me but behold a man of superior mind, and that will suffice.
"Maintain firm hold upon Virtue.
"With a meal of coarse rice," said the Master, "and with water to drink, and my bent arm for my pillow--even thus I can find happiness.
"'A Sage and a Philanthropist?' How should I have the ambition?" said he.
"Concentrate the mind," said he, "upon the Good Way.
He said, "I have heard that superior men show no partiality; are they, too, then, partial?
Neither is it given to me to meet with a good man; let me but see a man of constancy, and it will suffice.
"Their aim and object," he answered, "was that of doing the duty which every man owes to his fellows, and they succeeded in doing it;--what room further for feelings of resentment?"
"Although in letters," he said, "I may have none to compare with me, yet in my personification of the 'superior man' I have not as yet been successful."
But seeing that it is not, I go after those objects for which I have a liking."
Better, however, the hard than the disorderly."
On one day on which he had wept, on that day he would not sing.
To his disciples he once said, "Do you look upon me, my sons, as keeping anything secret from you?
Four things there were which he kept in view in his teaching--scholarliness, conduct of life, honesty, faithfulness.
Strange occurrences, exploits of strength, deeds of lawlessness, references to spiritual beings--such-like matters the Master avoided in conversation.
That is so with me."
When the Master fished with hook and line, he did not also use a net. When out with his bow, he would never shoot at game in cover.
Characteristics of Confucius--An Incident
As to wealth, he remarked, "If wealth were an object that I could go in quest of, I should do so even if I had to take a whip and do grooms' work.
The Master's regular subjects of discourse were the "Books of the Odes" and "History," and the up-keeping of the Rules of Propriety.
"Why so much ado," said the Master, "at my merely permitting his approach, and not rather at my allowing him to draw back? If a man have cleansed himself in order to come and see me, I receive him as such; but I do not undertake for what he will do when he goes away."
Once he exclaimed, "Alas!
"Had they any feelings of resentment?" was the next question.
On one occasion he exclaimed, "Heaven begat Virtue in me; what can man do unto me?"
He has gone away without a word of censure."
Say even that he does certainly contend with others, as in archery competitions; yet mark, in that case, how courteously he will bow and go up for the forfeit-cup, and come down again and give it to his competitor.
"In archery," he said, "the great point to be observed is not simply the perforation of the leather; for men have not all the same strength.
In offering to other spirits it was the same.
"He knew the Rules of Propriety, I suppose?"
And why cannot they do so?
"To serve one's ruler nowadays," he remarked, "fully complying with the Rules of Propriety, is regarded by others as toadyism!"
Because they have not documents enough, nor men learned enough.
"Dimples playing in witching smile, Beautiful eyes, so dark, so bright! Oh, and her face may be thought the while Colored by art, red rose on white!"
On entering the grand temple he inquired about everything."
He would say, "If I do not myself take part in my offerings, it is all the same as if I did not offer them."
"Coloring," replied the Master, "requires a pure and clear background." "Then," said the other, "rules of ceremony require to have a background!" "Ah!" exclaimed the Master, "you are the man to catch the drift of my thought.
On a question being put to him by Lin Fang, a disciple, as to what was the radical idea upon which the Rules of Propriety were based, the Master exclaimed, "Ah! that is a large question.
Referring to the First of the Odes, he remarked that it was mirthful without being lewd, and sad also without being painful.
I follow Chow!"
This remark coming to the Master's ears, he said, "What I did is part of the ceremonial!"
Some one asked what was the purport of this great sacrifice, and the Master replied, "I cannot tell.
In a discourse to the Chief Preceptor of Music at the court of Lu, the Master said, "Music is an intelligible thing.
The position in the empire of him who could tell you is as evident as when you look at this"--pointing to the palm of his hand.
"Was he miserly?" some one asked.
As to some rules, where there is likelihood of extravagance, they would rather demand economy; in those which relate to mourning, and where there is likelihood of being easily satisfied, what is wanted is real sorrow."
Of "the superior man," the Master observed, "In him there is no contentiousness.
If he knew the Rules of Propriety, who is there that does not know them?"
"I promise you to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people.
I wish you may not catch cold."
Emma spared no exertions to maintain this happier flow of ideas, and hoped, by the help of backgammon, to get her father tolerably through the evening, and be attacked by no regrets but her own.
All manner of solemn nonsense was talked on the subject, but I believed none of it.
Poor Mr. Elton!
"Not at all, sir.
We must go in the carriage, to be sure."
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse's family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma.
I made the match, you know, four years ago; and to have it take place, and be proved in the right, when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for any thing."
It was Miss Taylor's loss which first brought grief.
I planned the match from that hour; and when such success has blessed me in this instance, dear papa, you cannot think that I shall leave off match-making."
I think very well of Mr. Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service."
"Dirty, sir!
You got Hannah that good place.
What a horrible idea!
Oh dear, no! Mr. Weston, who had been a widower so long, and who seemed so perfectly comfortable without a wife, so constantly occupied either in his business in town or among his friends here, always acceptable wherever he went, always cheerful--Mr.
Being pretty well aware of what sort of joy you must both be feeling, I have been in no hurry with my congratulations; but I hope it all went off tolerably well.
Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know--in a joke--it is all a joke.
If I had not promoted Mr. Weston's visits here, and given many little encouragements, and smoothed many little matters, it might not have come to any thing after all.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
A worthy employment for a young lady's mind!
The event had every promise of happiness for her friend.
CHAPTER I
Who cried most?"
"Ah! poor Miss Taylor!
The backgammon-table was placed; but a visitor immediately afterwards walked in and made it unnecessary.
But if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only your planning it, your saying to yourself one idle day, 'I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her,' and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards, why do you talk of success?
Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks: not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen.
Not a speck on them."
"Well! that is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here.
His spirits required support.
What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her!"
You like Mr. Elton, papa,--I must look about for a wife for him.
I could not walk half so far."
"I do not understand what you mean by 'success,'" said Mr. Knightley. "Success supposes endeavour.
Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to chuse his own wife.
Her father composed himself to sleep after dinner, as usual, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost.
We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night.
Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her--James is so obliged to you!"
All looked up to them.
It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour while we were at breakfast.
"Only one more, papa; only for Mr. Elton.
"Well," said Emma, willing to let it pass--"you want to hear about the wedding; and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly.
How did you all behave?
And after such success, you know!--Every body said that Mr. Weston would never marry again.
He was a nervous man, easily depressed; fond of every body that he was used to, and hating to part with them; hating change of every kind.
That will be a much better thing.
"No, papa, nobody thought of your walking.
Mr. Knightley had a cheerful manner, which always did him good; and his many inquiries after "poor Isabella" and her children were answered most satisfactorily.
The wedding over, and the bride-people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening.
What are you proud of?
"My dearest papa!
But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;--and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?"
Some people even talked of a promise to his wife on her deathbed, and others of the son and the uncle not letting him.
By Jane Austen
"With a great deal of pleasure, sir, at any time," said Mr. Knightley, laughing, "and I agree with you entirely, that it will be a much better thing.
It is the greatest amusement in the world!
"My dear, how am I to get so far?
It was very lucky, for I would not have had poor James think himself slighted upon any account; and I am sure she will make a very good servant: she is a civil, pretty-spoken girl; I have a great opinion of her.
He saw, the history says, the very countenance, the very face, the very look, the very physiognomy, the very effigy, the very image of the bachelor Samson Carrasco!
"That is understood," replied he of the Mirrors.
As soon as he saw it he called out in a loud voice, "Make haste here, Sancho, and behold what thou art to see but not to believe; quick, my son, and learn what magic can do, and wizards and enchanters are capable of."
Don Quixote examined his adversary, and found that he already had his helmet on and visor lowered, so that he could not see his face; he observed, however, that he was a sturdily built man, but not very tall in stature.
"Well then," said Don Quixote, "while we are mounting you can at least tell me if I am that Don Quixote whom you said you vanquished."
I call her peerless because she has no peer, whether it be in bodily stature or in the supremacy of rank and beauty.
Sancho came up, and when he saw the countenance of the bachelor Carrasco, he fell to crossing himself a thousand times, and blessing himself as many more.
"It seems to me rather, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that thou wouldst mount a scaffold in order to see the bulls without danger."
"Calm yourself, sir knight," said Don Quixote, "and give ear to what I am about to say to you.
"To tell the truth," returned Sancho, "the monstrous nose of that squire has filled me with fear and terror, and I dare not stay near him."
"Very good," said he of the Grove; "God will send the dawn and we shall be all right."
CHAPTER XIV.
"Body of my father!" said Sancho, "see what marten and sable, and pads of carded cotton he is putting into the bags, that our heads may not be broken and our bones beaten to jelly!
Now he thought his opinion was evidently correct.
"Here you can dream yourself back again in the old home in the cave," said the King; "here is the work with which you employed yourself.
All nature was still, and the soft, mild air fanned her forehead.
During the whole of the following day, while her brothers were absent, she sat in solitude, but never before had the time flown so quickly.
At sunset her brothers returned and were very much frightened when they found her dumb.
Toward evening the rest came back, and as the sun went down they resumed their natural forms.
The eleven brothers were princes, and each went to school with a star on his breast and a sword by his side.
They sank so rapidly that at the moment their feet touched the rock the sun shone only like a star, and at last disappeared like the last spark in a piece of burned paper.
Then she offered a prayer from her inmost heart, but still no appearance of the rock.
Then poor Eliza wept, and thought of her eleven brothers who were all away.
Oh, if she had only been able to confide in him and tell him of her grief!
Poor little Eliza was alone in her room playing with a green leaf, for she had no other playthings, and she pierced a hole through the leaf and looked through it at the sun, and it was as if she saw her brothers' clear eyes, and when the warm sun shone on her cheeks she thought of all the kisses they had given her.
When the wicked Queen saw this, she rubbed her face with walnut juice, so that she was quite brown; then she tangled her beautiful hair and smeared it with disgusting ointment, till it was quite impossible to recognize the beautiful Eliza.
How should she get out there?
At fifteen she returned home, but when the Queen saw how beautiful she was, she became full of spite and hatred toward her.
Break them to pieces with your hands and feet, and they will become flax, from which you must spin and weave eleven coats with long sleeves; if these are then thrown over the eleven swans the spell will be broken.
They saw her vanish through the wicket gate into the churchyard, and when they came nearer they saw the ghouls sitting on the tombstone as Eliza had seen them, and the King turned away his head, for he thought she was with them--she whose head had rested on his breast that very evening.
Even on the way to death she would not give up her task.
Then the King opened the door of a little chamber in which she was to sleep; it was adorned with rich green tapestry, and resembled the cave in which he had found her.
Immediately a great dog came bounding toward her out of the ravine, and then another and another; they barked loudly, ran back, and then came again.
When the sun set they would change to men, fall into the sea, and be drowned.
It is God who makes the wild apples grow in the wood to satisfy the hungry, and He now led her to one of these trees, which was so loaded with fruit that the boughs bent beneath its weight.
In a very few minutes all the huntsmen stood before the cave, and the handsomest of them was the King of the country.
Altogether it formed a more beautiful picture than she had ever seen; but as the sun rose higher, and the clouds were left behind, the shadowy picture vanished away.
She saw them writing with their diamond pencils on golden slates, while she looked at the beautiful picture book which had cost half a kingdom.
But Eliza shook her head.
"I must venture; I shall not be denied help from heaven." Then with a trembling heart, as if she were about to perform a wicked deed, she crept into the garden in the broad moonlight, and passed through the narrow walks and the deserted streets till she reached the churchyard.
It was still twilight and at least an hour before sunrise when the eleven brothers stood at the castle gate and demanded to be brought before the King.
Let us tear it in a thousand pieces."
These things had been brought away from the cave as curiosities by one of the huntsmen.
So she bruised the nettles with her bare feet and spun the flax.
She kept at her work all night, for she could not rest till she had released her dear brothers.
Every piece of fagot in the pile had taken root, and thrown out branches, and appeared a thick hedge, large and high, covered with roses, while above all bloomed a white and shining blossom that glittered like a star.
No one but the watchdog and the swallows knew her, and they were only dumb animals and could say nothing.
As Eliza dipped her head under the water one of the toads sat on her hair, a second on her forehead, and a third on her breast, but she did not seem to notice them, and when she rose out of the water there were three red poppies floating upon it.
The first word you utter will pierce through the hearts of your brothers like a deadly dagger. Their lives hang upon your tongue.
Their father, who was King of the country, married a very wicked Queen who did not love the poor children at all. They knew this from the very first day after the wedding.
"Now I may speak!" she exclaimed.
And then they pressed toward her, and would have destroyed the coats of mail, but at the same moment eleven wild swans flew over her and alighted on the cart.
"Yes, she is innocent," said the eldest brother; and then he related all that had taken place, and while he spoke there rose in the air a fragrance as from millions of flowers.
And all the church bells rang of themselves and the birds came in great troops.
Then the guard appeared, and even the King himself, inquiring what all the noise meant.
The heavens were lighted up with continual flashes, and peal after peal of thunder rolled.
There was but just room enough for them, and not the smallest space to spare.
It was very large and strong.
"The people must condemn her," said he, and she was very quickly condemned by everyone to suffer death by fire.
"Come with me," he said; "here you cannot remain.
By her side lay a branch full of beautiful ripe berries and a bundle of sweet roots; the youngest of her brothers had gathered them for her, and placed them by her side.
The ten coats of mail lay at her feet, she was working hard at the eleventh, while the mob jeered her and said, "See the witch, how she mutters!
All was not right with the Queen.
But she loved the kind, handsome King, who did everything to make her happy, more and more each day; she loved him with her whole heart, and her eyes beamed with the love she dared not speak.
This flower the King plucked and placed in Eliza's bosom, when she awoke from her swoon with peace and happiness in her heart.
From day to day his brow became darker, and Eliza saw it and did not understand the reason, but it alarmed her and made her heart tremble for her brothers.
In the picture book, too, everything was living.
These you must gather even while they burn blisters on your hands.
Early one morning the Queen went into the bathroom; it was built of marble, and had soft cushions trimmed with the most beautiful tapestry.
As the executioner seized her by the hand to lift her out of the cart, she hastily threw the eleven coats of mail over the swans, and they immediately became eleven handsome princes; but the youngest had a swan's wing instead of an arm, for she had not been able to finish the last sleeve of the coat.
She sits there with her ugly sorcery.
FAR away in the land to which the swallows fly when it is winter, dwelt a king who had eleven sons, and one daughter named Eliza.
An old horse drew the cart on which she sat. They had dressed her in a garment of coarse sackcloth.
These hideous creatures took off their rags, as if they intended to bathe, and then, clawing open the grassy graves with their long skinny fingers, pulled out the bones and threw them about!
When her father saw her, he was much shocked and declared she was not his daughter.
She dared not speak, at the cost of her brothers' lives.
She thought with terror of the solitary walk, and of the horrible ghouls, but her will was firm, as well as her trust in Providence.
Have you courage to go with us?
"I am innocent."
So there continued to pass before her eyes a constant change of scene, till at last she saw the real land to which they were bound, with its blue mountains, its cedar forests, and its cities and palaces.
Glass, iron, stones, everything that lay there mingled together, had taken its shape from the same power, and felt as smooth, or even smoother, than her own delicate hand.
The sound came nearer and nearer; she heard the dogs barking, and fled with terror into the cave.
Then they flapped their large wings and the crowd drew on one side in alarm.
The light of hundreds of glowworms shone amidst the grass and the moss, like green fire; and if she touched a twig with her hand ever so lightly, the brilliant fireflies fell down around her like shooting stars.
Two days longer we can remain here, and then must we fly away to a beautiful land which is not our home; and how can we take you with us?
And now all the people came streaming forth from the gates of the city to see the witch burned.
Therefore at night she crept away into her little chamber, which had been decked out to look like the cave, and quickly wove one coat after another.
Her lovely hair hung loose on her shoulders, her cheeks were deadly pale, her lips moved silently, while her fingers still worked at the green flax.
She thought of her brothers, and their release made her so joyful that she kissed the King's hand.
She looked the very picture of grief.
They hovered over the roof, twisted their long necks, and flapped their wings; but no one heard them or saw them, so they were at last obliged to fly away, high up in the clouds; and over the wide world they flew till they came to a thick, dark wood, which stretched far away to the seashore.
She heard water rippling from a number of springs, all flowing into a lake with golden sands. Bushes grew thickly around the lake, and at one spot an opening had been made by a deer, through which Eliza went down to the water.
Their sister Eliza sat on a little stool of plate glass, and had a book full of pictures which had cost as much as half a kingdom.
They were told it could not be, it was yet almost night, and as the King slept they dared not disturb him.
The week after she sent little Eliza into the country to a peasant and his wife, and then she told the King so many untrue things about the young princes that he gave himself no more trouble respecting them.
They threatened, they entreated.
If you are as good as you are beautiful, I will dress you in silk and velvet, I will place a golden crown on your head, and you shall dwell and rule and make your home in my richest castle." And then he lifted her on his horse.
There was a sweet fragrance from the fresh verdure, and the birds almost perched upon her shoulders.
Then, with a strange cry, they flew through the windows of the palace, over the park, to the forest beyond.
She thought of her brothers, and felt sure that God would not forsake her.
The archbishop withdrew, uttering bitter words against her; but poor Eliza knew that she was innocent, and diligently continued her work.
"Go out into the world and get your own living," said the Queen.
Then the archbishop whispered wicked words in the King's ear, but they did not sink into his heart.
Eliza laid herself down on the net, and when the sun rose and her brothers again became wild swans, they took up the net with their beaks and flew up to the clouds with their dear sister, who still slept. The sunbeams fell on her face, therefore one of the swans soared over her head, so that his broad wing might shade her.
The situation was this: The enemy had about sixty thousand men at Vicksburg, Haines' Bluff, and at Jackson, Mississippi, about fifty miles east of Vicksburg.
To do this, however, it first would have been necessary to withdraw the army from the positions it then held not far above Vicksburg, on the western bank of the river.
Grant then crossed the Big Black and the next day was before Vicksburg, with his enemy inside the works.
His plan, in brief; was to fight and defeat a superior enemy separately and in detail.
Grant destroyed the factories and the munitions of war which were gathered there, and also came into possession of the line of railroad which ran from Jackson to Vicksburg.
But such a movement, at that time, would not have been understood by the country, and would have had a discouraging effect on the public mind, which it was most essential to avoid.
He did not wait the coming of Pemberton. Leaving Jackson as soon as he heard of the enemy's advance from Vicksburg, he marched rapidly westward and struck Pemberton at Champion Hills.
The elections of 1862 had gone against the government, and there was great discouragement throughout the North. Voluntary enlistments had fallen off, a draft had been ordered, and the peace party was apparently gaining rapidly in strength.
"The bearer of the despatch insisted that I ought to obey the order, and was giving arguments to support the position, when I heard a great cheering to the right of our line, and looking in that direction, saw Lawler, in his shirt-sleeves, leading a charge on the enemy.
He, therefore, took another and widely different line, and determined to cross the river from the western to the eastern bank below Vicksburg, to the south.
There was a sharp fight, but Grant easily defeated the enemy, and took possession of the town.
With the aid of the fleet, which ran the batteries successfully, he moved his army down the west bank until he reached a point beyond the possibility of attack, while a diversion by Sherman at Haines' Bluff, above Vicksburg, kept Pemberton in his fortifications.
After this useless turn to the southward Pemberton resumed his march to the east, as he should have done in the beginning, in accordance with Johnston's orders; but Grant was now more than ready.
It was absolutely necessary for success that Grant, with inferior numbers, should succeed in destroying the smaller forces to the eastward, and thus prevent their union with Pemberton and the main army at Vicksburg.
A sharp engagement followed, and the Confederates were again defeated.
He lost no time in putting his plan into action, and pressing forward quickly, met a detachment of the enemy at Port Gibson and defeated them.
With an inferior force, Grant was superior at every point of contest, and he won every fight.
This was an important point, for Jackson was the capital of the State of Mississippi, and was a base of military supplies.
This enabled him to move with great rapidity, but deprived him of his wagon trains, and of all munitions of war except cartridges.
On April 26, Grant began to move his men over the river and landed them at Bruinsburg.
With an inferior force, and abandoning his lines of communication, moving with a marvelous rapidity through a difficult country, Grant struck the superior forces of the enemy on the line from Jackson to Vicksburg.
He crushed Johnston before Pemberton could get to him, and he flung Pemberton back into Vicksburg before Johnston could rally from the defeat which had been inflicted.
He took nothing with him except ammunition, and his army was in the lightest marching order.
A strong base should have been established at Memphis, and then the army and the fleet moved gradually forward, building storehouses and taking strong positions as they went.
Vicksburg was not yet taken, it is true, nor were its defenders demoralized by any of our previous movements.
This was not a success, for, as Grant says, with grim humor, "I had no line of communication to break"; and, moreover, it delayed Pemberton when delay was of value to Grant in finishing Johnston.
When he reached Grand Gulf, however, he found that he would be obliged to wait a month, in order to obtain the reinforcements which he expected from General Banks at Port Hudson.
He, therefore, gave up the idea of making Grand Gulf a base, and Sherman having now joined him with his corps, Grant struck at once into the interior.
In this determination he never faltered, but drove straight at his object until, five months later, the great Mississippi stronghold fell before him.
As soon as the National troops reached Vicksburg an assault was attempted, but the place was too strong, and the attack was repulsed, with heavy loss.
I was now in the enemy's country, with a vast river and the stronghold of Vicksburg between me and my base of supplies, but I was on dry ground, on the same side of the river with the enemy."
His lines were soon made so strong that it was impossible for the defenders of Vicksburg to break through them, and although Johnston had gathered troops again to the eastward, an assault from that quarter on the National army, now so largely reinforced, was practically out of the question.
It was the most brilliant single campaign of the war.
The natural way to invest and capture so strong a place, defended and fortified as Vicksburg was, would have been, if the axioms of the art of war had been adhered to, by a system of gradual approaches.
Pressing forward, Grant met the enemy, numbering between seven and eight thousand, at Raymond, and readily defeated them.
Thence he marched to Grand Gulf, on the Mississippi, which he took, and which he had planned to make a base of supply.
The authorities at Washington then saw plainly enough what had been done in the interior of Mississippi, far from the reach of telegraphs or mail.
I immediately mounted my horse and rode in the direction of the charge, and saw no more of the officer who had delivered the message; I think not even to this day." When Grant reached Vicksburg, there was no further talk of recalling him to Grand Gulf or Port Hudson.
The complete possession of the Mississippi was absolutely essential to the National Government, because the control of that great river would cut the Confederacy in two, and do more, probably, than anything else, to make the overthrow of the Rebellion both speedy and certain.
He no longer needed to ask for them.
All these expedients failed, however, one after another, as Grant, from the beginning, had feared that they would.
With a broken army, Pemberton fell back on Vicksburg. Grant pursued without a moment's delay, and came up with the rear guard at Big Black River.
Grant's campaign against Vicksburg deserves to be compared with that of Napoleon which resulted in the fall of Ulm.
"When this was effected," he writes, "I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since.
The forces were at this time very nearly matched, and the severest battle of the campaign ensued, lasting four hours.
His campaign had explained itself, and in a short time he had seventy thousand men under his command.
Efforts were made through the winter to reach Vicksburg from the north by cutting canals, and by attempts to get in through the bayous and tributary streams of the great river.
Grant, however, defeated Pemberton completely, and came very near capturing his entire force.
Grant, when he started, had about thirty-three thousand men.
What flag is this you carry Along the sea and shore? The same our grandsires lifted up-- The same our fathers bore. In many a battle's tempest It shed the crimson rain-- What God has woven in his loom Let no man rend in twain. To Canaan, to Canaan, The Lord has led us forth, To plant upon the rebel towers The banners of the North. --Holmes.
Measured by the skill displayed and the result achieved, there is no campaign in our history which better deserves study and admiration.
He then marched on toward Jackson, fighting another action at Clinton, and at Jackson he struck General Joseph Johnston, who had arrived at that point to take command of all the rebel forces.
Grant then settled down to a siege, and Lincoln and Halleck now sent him ample reinforcements.
General Grant, looking at this grave political situation with the eye of a statesman, decided, as a soldier, that under no circumstances would he withdraw the army, but that, whatever happened, he would "press forward to a decisive victory."
Pemberton, however, instead of holding a straight line against Grant, turned at first to the south, with the view of breaking the latter's line of communication.
On the same day Lee was beaten at Gettysburg, and these two great victories really crushed the Rebellion, although much hard fighting remained to be done before the end was reached.
"That is bad, but it might have been worse.
I kept that card among my other relics, and hoped to meet Joe again somewhere in the world.
"All right, ma'am;" and Joe proved himself a good soldier by obeying orders, and falling asleep like a tired child, as the first step toward recovery.
'Pears to me I couldn't ask her to take care of three invalids for my sake.
"What is the matter?
"All that's left of me.
"Eat!
"He will have a hard time of it, but I think he will pull through, as he is a temperate fellow, with a splendid constitution," was the doctor's verdict, as he left us for the next man, who was past help, with a bullet through his lungs.
He must have been suffering terribly, but he thought of the women who loved him before himself, and, busy as I was, I snatched a moment to send a few words of hope to the old mother.
"Think so?
Shot off as slick as a whistle.
"Woolidge, ma'am."
"You see, Jim went last year, and got pretty well used up; so I felt as if I'd ought to take my turn now.
There was just time for this, a hearty shake of the big hand, and a grateful "Good-by, ma'am;" then the word was given, and they were off.
As the inspiring music, the grand tramp, drew near, the old thrill went through the crowd, the old cheer broke out.
Do you leave a family?"
I see a piece in the paper describing it, and it sounded dreadful nice.
For an instant I could not speak to him, and, encumbered with baby, dish, spoon, and children, he could only stare at me with a sudden brightening of the altered face that made it full of welcome before a word was uttered.
I used to lay and kind of dream about it when I couldn't stir without yellin' out; but I never thought it would ever come to happen.
"I reckon not as I don't own any clothes but what I set in, except a couple of old shirts and them socks.
There was such a beautiful absence of red tape about the new institution that it only needed a word in the right ear to set things going; and then, with a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together, Joe Collins was taken up and safely landed in the Home he so much needed and so well deserved.
But he did, trotting baby gently, dealing out sweet morsels patiently, and whistling to himself, as if to beguile his labors cheerfully.
"Really, ma'am?
God bless her!" and, as if to find a vent for the emotion that filled his eyes with grateful tears, Joe led off the cheer, which the children shrilly echoed, and I joined heartily.
I'll go and see him; I've a weakness for soldiers, sick or well."
How he managed with one arm to keep the baby from squirming on to the floor, the plate from upsetting, and to feed the hungry urchins who stood in a row with open mouths, like young birds, was past my comprehension.
You should have gone home to Woolwich, and let your friends help you," I said, feeling provoked with him for hiding himself.
He won't go to his own town, because there is nothing for him there but the almshouse, and he dreads a hospital; so struggles along, trying to earn his bread tending babies with his one arm.
My hat's stoppin' up the winder, and my old coat is my bed-cover.
It won't take you long to pack up, will it?" I asked, as we subsided with a general laugh.
As for asking help of folks I used to know, I couldn't do it; and if you think I'd go to Lucindy, though she is wal off, you don't know Joe Collins.
Hooray for Biddy Flanagin!
"No, ma'am!" he answered, with a look I never shall forget, it was so full of mingled patience, pride, and pain.
I don't know much about him, except that he was in the army, has been very ill with rheumatic fever, and is friendless.
You go in the corner, and take turns lickin' the dish, while I see company," said Joe, disbanding his small troop, and shouldering the baby as if presenting arms in honor of his guest.
But my orders ain't come yet, and I am doing the fust thing that come along.
I'm awful shabby, ma'am, and that's one reason I don't go out more.
Pansy shook her head with a little wise smile.
"Your father would like you to encourage him," Isabel went on mechanically.
Such a ceremony would be odious and monstrous; she tried to shut her eyes to it meanwhile.
"That is all we've said to each other.
"That he cared for you, Mrs. Osmond."
Under the influence of this sentiment she threw out another suggestion before she retired--a suggestion with which it seemed to her that she should have done her utmost.
"Ah, what Warburton really thinks--!" said Ralph.
"He knows me well enough not to have expected me to push.
But the nonsense is Warburton's, not mine."
"There has been a question of that.
She blushed red and threw back her head.
Ralph waited a moment.
Fortunately, however, he has not said a word to disturb her.
"It was natural that as an old friend of Lord Warburton's--an older friend, that is, than Gilbert--I should take an interest in his intentions."
He had not yet formally forbidden her to call upon Ralph; but she felt sure that unless Ralph should very soon depart this prohibition would come.
And it was of no use that, when catching herself in this state of mind, she called herself a feeble spirit, a coward. It was not that she loved Ralph less, but that almost anything seemed preferable to repudiating the most serious act--the single sacred act--of her life.
But she made no reply; she only pulled her hand out of his own, which he tried still to hold, and rapidly withdrew from the room.
"That may easily happen, among the most united couples!" She took up her parasol; he saw she was nervous, afraid of what he might say.
"I think Mr. Rosier looks like one!" she remarked very gravely.
Ralph never said a word against him, but Osmond's sore, mute protest was none the less founded.
"How would your husband like that?"
That knowledge was very present to her as she went to her cousin's hotel the day after she had invited Lord Warburton to give a tangible proof of his sincerity; and at this moment, as at others, she had a sufficient perception of the sources of Osmond's opposition.
And I have myself so little money; why should I look for a fortune?"
It little mattered that Isabel would know much better; it was for his own satisfaction more than for hers that he longed to show her he was not deceived.
"Very possibly you guess it.
Isabel thought this rather sharp; she also got up and stood a moment looking into the fire.
I can make that out."
The weather as yet made it impossible.
She stood there a moment with her small hands unclasped and then quavered out: "Well, I hope no one will ask me!"
"Yes--to marry some one else."
He would have liked to warn Isabel of it--to let her see at least how he judged for her and how he knew.
"Yes, he has been very kind," Pansy answered.
"No, cruel to her," said Isabel.
For them there could be no condonement, no compromise, no easy forgetfulness, no formal readjustment.
There was something brilliant in her lucidity, and it made her companion draw a long breath.
"Be frank with me and you'll see," he answered.
It was the first time she had alluded to the need for help, and the words shook her cousin with their violence.
Then he wasn't ready!"
"I should be very sorry to attempt it," said the Madonna with unusual frigidity.
Isabel was touched with wonder at the depths of perception of which this submissive little person was capable; she felt afraid of Pansy's wisdom--began almost to retreat before it.
You know, however, how that always surprised me.
"You'll be decidedly at variance, all the same," he said in a moment.
She can see at a glance that Lord Warburton isn't."
"If he had been sure?
"He has spoken very well of her--very properly.
"To jealousy of his daughter."
If he should positively interpose, if he should put forth his authority, she would have to decide, and that wouldn't be easy.
She appeared to have accepted the idea of eternal singleness; but Isabel of course was free to reflect that she had no conception of its meaning. She was perfectly sincere; she was prepared to give up her lover.
Pansy's after all his daughter--not mine." And she put out her hand to wish him goodbye.
"That would be very tiresome." She spoke, as she flattered herself, with much subtlety.
It was this that made him exclaim in a moment: "How unhappy you must be!"
"I don't know how I can undertake that.
CHAPTER XLV
Isabel had a difficult task--the only thing was to perform it as simply as possible.
She felt bitter and angry, but she warned herself against betraying this heat.
Is Miss Osmond capable of giving us a surprise?"
I seem to see that after all he'll let the matter drop."
"To jealousy?"
"Ah!" said Isabel with a certain dryness.
"But I'm rather nervous lest your husband should think you haven't pushed him enough."
Pansy presently told her that the only thing she wanted in life was to marry Mr. Rosier.
Only he must obtain satisfaction himself."
He tried and tried again to make her betray Osmond; he felt cold-blooded, cruel, dishonourable almost, in doing so.
"I want you to answer me a question.
"He has been good to her already.
It was what she was doing for Osmond; it was what one had to do for Osmond!
It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition.
Osmond would do nothing to help it by beginning first; he would put that burden upon her to the end.
"He ought to succeed easily," said Ralph.
"But you said just now he did."
"It's difficult for me to advise you," Isabel returned.
"Your father has expressly requested he shouldn't."
But Warburton isn't obliged to mind that."
"Take an interest in his renouncing them, you mean?"
And many did look and live.
If ye have, how can ye disbelieve on the Son of God?
And behold, it will become a tree, springing up in you unto everlasting life.
But there were many who were so hardened that they would not look, therefore they perished.
Now, if a man murdereth, behold will our law, which is just, take the life of his brother?
Amen.
And then may God grant unto you that your burdens may be light, through the joy of his Son.
Nay, ye cannot say this; for that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world.
We owe it to the Absolute that we have a world of fact at all.
Our difficulties and our ideals are all piecemeal affairs, but the Absolute can do no piecework for us; so that all the interests which our poor souls compass raise their heads too late.
Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove "spirit-return," though I have the highest respect for the patient labors of Messrs.
If not regular transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events.
We should have spoken earlier, prayed for another world absolutely, before this world was born.
I consequently leave the matter open, with this brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why immortality got no mention in the body of this book.
Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail--all of us are willing, whenever our activity-excitement rises sufficiently high.
It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the existence of systematic pessimism proves.
The ideal world, for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is a point of view for judging facts.
If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our religious consolation would thus fail to be complete.
In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only, ALL is saved.
It seems to me that it is eminently a case for facts to testify.
I therefore add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but little the defect.
Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so still to-day) that unless there be one all-inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect.
In this universalistic way of taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to evaporate.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a familiar head.
I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest.
It appertains to a different "-ology," and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain.
Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both "pass to the limit" and identify the something with a unique God who is the all-inclusive soul of the world.
The difference in natural "fact" which most of us would assign as the first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I imagine, be personal immortality.
Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the example which they set.
"A world" of fact!--that exactly is the trouble.
God is the producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written down as an atheist without farther trial.
All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves.
POSTSCRIPT
Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details.
Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves, and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them noble, I know not how to decide.
Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their favorable conclusions.
For practical life at any rate, the CHANCE of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.
At these places at least, I say, it would seem as though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.
I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked.
The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part.
Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief.
For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points.
In this the refined supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.
It cannot get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in response to prayer, are bound to think it must.
I think, in fact, that a final philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it.
An entire world is the smallest unit with which the Absolute can work, whereas to our finite minds work for the better ought to be done within this world, setting in at single points.
It takes the facts of physical science at their face-value, and leaves the laws of life just as naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are bad.
About the most unpleasant feature is the little tiny ants.
Of all the islands in the eastern seas, none are more interesting than our own Philippines.
The old walls of this inner city were built some four hundred years ago and could they speak, the whole world would listen with amazement and horror.
America was criticised and even ridiculed for her altruism in dealing with this problem.
The stories that center around this old fort make one shudder to hear them. Possibly they are exaggerated, but there are many today who believe them.
The child had never had even a glimpse of the sunlight.
The idea of training tropical people for independence was thought to be idealistic and impracticable.
I drove out from Manila to the home of Mr. Lyon, who is a regular Burbank. He located on some of the worst soil to be found and undertook to demonstrate that anything that will grow on any spot on the earth will grow there and he practically succeeded.
The river and dirty canals divided and subdivided the city.
The number of cases of small-pox has been reduced from forty thousand to a few hundred per year.
A water system brings pure water to almost every household and a great sewer system takes away the filth. The Manila Hotel is worth a million and a park or square on the water front covers hundreds of acres of ground.
There was practically no water system and disease and death lurked in almost every shadow.
The band played throughout and as the men were formed into companies we from the tower could see each individual company although they were hidden from each other.
This prison covers seventeen acres of ground, making it one of the largest in the world. Many of its fifty buildings are built around a circle and in the tower at the center, watchmen, who can see the entire prison, stand night and day.
The city contains an area of more than fifteen square miles and is more densely populated per mile of street than New York.
Mr. Stuntz said the whole thing seemed so strange to him that he was silent for a moment, when the man continued: "Sir, this is a very important question to us Filipinos.
Through the kindness of the officials the writer was allowed to go into this tower one afternoon as the five thousand prisoners came from the shops, formed into companies and went through a thirty-minute drill.
Books soon become mildewed or unglued and the finest library will soon have the appearance of a secondhand bookshop.
The great Y. M. C. A. buildings were thronged as in no other city the writer ever visited.
Children are born, grow to manhood, old age, and die without ever seeing fire to keep them warm for they never need it.
With a dozen or more great hospitals and more than three hundred boards of health, great things have been accomplished.
I want to know if it is safe."
This is a land where the storms of winter never blow but where from month to month and age to age there is good old summer time.
The story of how these islands came into our possession is still fresh and vivid in the memory of thousands.
The streets have been widened, many of them, and are kept clean.
THE PEARL OF THE ORIENT--PHILIPPINES
The transformation brought about since that memorable day is almost unbelievable.
For a whole week they were afraid to venture from their homes.
It is the old, old capital city and its story is the story of the Philippines.
Now the city is fast becoming one of the world's great cities and one of the most healthful cities on the globe.
Table legs must be placed in jars of water and yet they find their way to the top of the tables.
They mingle in companies in large sunny, clean, dormitories, where they visit, read and sing.
They find their way into everything.
There were seven gates in this old wall and they were closed and opened by means of gigantic windlasses.
They stood, knelt, touched hands, lay down, arose, walked and exercised, keeping time with the music in a way that was wonderful to behold.
This force is somewhat similar to the mounted police system of Saskatchewan in Canada and is a terror to evil doers.
Then there is dampness everywhere.
A range of twenty degrees is about all that the spirits in the thermometer ever show, for the minimum is seventy-two and the maximum ninety-two degrees.
But where that happened, all that was because such men's religion was all rooted outside of themselves; in the best things outside of themselves, indeed, but because, in our Lord's words, their religion was rooted in something outside of themselves and not inside, they were by and by offended, and threw off their faith.
Had Pliable only had a genuine and original slough of his own to so sink and be bedaubed in, he would have got out of it at the right side of it, and been a tender- stepping pilgrim all his days.--'Is this the happiness you have told me all this while of?
They love their earthly home with that supreme satisfaction and that all-absorbing affection that truly religious men entertain for their heavenly home.
Our Lord knew this man quite well who had no root in himself.
'Here is wisdom': not to know the number of the beast, but to know his mark, and to read it written so indelibly in our own heart.
He that hath not the root of the matter in himself dureth for a while, but by and by, for one reason or another, he is sure to be offended.
They suffer and make sacrifices for their church. They are proud of the size and the income of their church; her past contendings and sufferings, and present dangers, all endear their church to their heart.
Pliable, at least, is a gentleman compared with Obstinate, and his gentlemanly feelings and his good manners make him at once take sides with Christian.
Came to Cuttiehillock.
His root, what he had of a root, was all in Christian's companionship and impassioned appeals, and then in those impressive passages of Scripture that Christian read to him.
We call the text a parable, but our Lord's parables are all portraits--portraits and groups of portraits, rather than ordinary parables.
Our Lord's short preliminary description of Pliable goes, like all His descriptions, to the very bottom of the whole matter.
It is a deceit and a mischief to think that the Christian doctrines can either be understood or aright accepted by any outward means.
But let us now pass on to Pliable, as he so soon and so completely discovers himself to us under John Bunyan's so skilful hand.
All the great artists in this walk build up their best portraits from the inside of their subjects.
I am not rightly principled as to the time.
Our Lord had crowds of such men always running after Him, and He threw off this rapid portrait from hundreds of men and women who caused discredit to fall on His name and His work, and burdened His heart continually.
There is another well- known class of men all whose religion is rooted in their church, and in their church not as a member of the body of Christ, but as a social institution set up in this world.
Other men's religion, again, and all their interest in it, is rooted in their shop; you can make them anything or nothing in religion, according as you do or do not do business in their shop.
We sometimes see students destined for the Christian ministry also with all their religion so without root in themselves that a session in an unsympathetic class, a sceptical book, sometimes just a sneer or a scoff, will wither all the promise of their coming service.
'The writer of this diary desires to be cast down under the facileness and plausibleness of his nature, by which he labours to please men more than God, and whence it comes that the wicked speak good of him . . .
Obstinate's foul tongue has almost made Pliable a Christian.
We must open our hearts to our religion; we must have the inward soil broken up, freely and deeply its roots must penetrate our inner being.
Look well at our author's speaking portrait of a well-known man in Bedford who had no root in himself, and who, as a consequence, was pliable to any influence, good or bad, that happened to come across him.
No kind of book sells better among those of our people who have no root in themselves than just picture-books about heaven.
And at home a magic-lantern filled with the splendours of the New Jerusalem would carry multitudes of rootless hearts quite captive for a time.
There also you shall meet with thousands and ten thousands who have gone before us to that place.
Our missionaries make use of lantern-slides to bring home the scenes in the Gospels to the dull minds of their village hearers, and with good success.
'Well said; and what else?
'Civil men,' says Thomas Goodwin, 'are this world's saints.' And poor Pliable was one of them.
They believe in their church.
Our Lord in this passage is like one of those masterly artists who begin their portrait- painting with the study of anatomy.
As David says in his so honest psalm, 'Behold, Thou desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt make me to know wisdom.' And, indeed, all the preachers and writers in Scripture, and all Scriptural preachers and writers outside of Scripture, are at one in this: that all true wisdom begins at home, and that it all begins at the heart.
Where men are in dead earnest about religion it always arouses the bad passions of bad men; and where earnest preachers and devoted workers are assailed with violence or with bad language, there is always enough love of fair play in the bystanders to compel them to take sides, for the time at least, with those who suffer for the truth.
And we are sometimes too apt to count all that love of common fairness, and that hatred of foul play, as a sure sign of some sympathy with the hated truth itself.
Honest, that is, with itself, and with God and man about itself.
And it is always found in the long-run that the cross of Christ and its crucifixion of the human heart goes quite as hard with the gentlemanly-mannered man, the civil and urbane man, as it does with the man of bad behaviour and of brutish manners.
So much, then,--not enough, nor good enough--for our Lord's swift stroke at the heart of His hearers.
'My heart really inclines to go with my neighbour,' said Pliable next.
Lord, he is unsound and double in his heart, politically crafty, selfish, not savouring nor discerning the things of God . . .
And so on through the whole of human life.
He had no burden on his back, and therefore no doubt in his heart.
PLIABLE
They worship their church.
And where this first and best of all wisdom is not, there, in our Lord's words, there is no deepness of earth, no root, and no fruit.
Christian was bound to fall sooner or later into a slough filled with his own despondency about himself, his past guilt, his present sinfulness, and his anxious future.
But Pliable had not knowledge enough of himself to make him ever despond.
But even the Bible, and, much more, the best preaching, is all really outside of a man till true religion once gets its piercing roots down into himself.
Elders with golden crowns, and holy virgins with golden harps, and all clothed with immortality as with a garment.' 'The hearing of all this,' cried Pliable, 'is enough to ravish one's heart.' 'An overly faith,' says old Thomas Shepard, 'is easily wrought.'
And thus it is that when anything happens to disturb or break up their earthly home their rootless religiosity goes with it.
And they all teach us that he is the wisest of men who has the worst opinion of his own heart, as he is the foolishest of men who does not know his own heart to be the worst heart that ever any man was cursed with in this world.
As the picture of a man's soul being pulled for rises before my mind, I can think of no better companion picture to that of Pliable than that of poor, hard-beset Brodie of Brodie, as he lets us see the pull for his soul in the honest pages of his inward diary.
It is just in proportion as we search our own hearts and understand our own nature that we shall ever feel what a blessing the removal of sin will be; redemption, pardon, sanctification, are all otherwise mere words without meaning or power to us.
'Without self- knowledge,' says one of the greatest students of the human heart that ever lived, 'you have no real root in yourselves.
'Don't revile,' are the first words that come from Pliable's lips, and they are not unpromising words.
Come, good neighbour, let us be going.'
But the religion of Jesus Christ cuts far deeper into the heart of man than to the dividing asunder of justice and injustice, civility and incivility, ribaldry and good manners.
This is excellent; and what else?' Christian could not tell Pliable fast enough about the glories of heaven. 'There we shall be with seraphim and cherubim, creatures that will dazzle your eyes to look on them.
The Lord pity the proneness of his heart to comply with the men who have the power . . .
'He hath not root in himself.'--Our Lord.
When an onlooker says 'Don't revile,' we are too ready to set down that expression of civility as at least the first beginning of true religion.
But if tribulation and persecution arise, that is to say, if anything arises to vex or thwart or disappoint them with their church, they incontinently pull up their roots and their religion with it, and transplant both to any other church that for the time better pleases them, or to no church at all.
How often have we ourselves heard these very words of challenge and reproof from the pliable frequenters of emotional meetings, and from the emotional members of an emotional but rootless ministry.
We have perhaps all heard of men, and men of no small eminence, who were brought up to believe the teaching of the Bible and the pulpit, but who, when some of their inherited and external ideas about some things connected with the Bible began to be shaken, straightway felt as if all the grounds of their faith were shaken, and all the roots of their faith pulled up.
Let all public men tempted and afflicted with a facile, pliable, time-serving heart have honest Brodie at their elbow.
But Christian had enough of both for any ten men, and it was Christian's overflowing despondency and doubt at this point of the road that suddenly filled his own slough, and, I suppose, overflowed into a slough for Pliable also.
Yes, I will cast in my lot with him.
Come on, let us mend our pace.' This is delightful, this is perfect.
This was all the religion that poor Pliable ever had.
Brodie's diary is one of the most humiliating, heart-searching, and heart-instructing books I ever read.
Come on, let us mend our pace!
This poor creature had a certain slight root of something that looked like religion for a short season, but even that slight root was all outside of himself.
Let us go home thinking about that.
One of her painted fans cost five thousand francs.
This he could not do.
Nothing can make it right.
To complete the histrionic performance, eight young girls, each bearing a beautiful gold-embroidered bag, and attended by a young gentleman, "took up a collection" for the poor, which yielded seven thousand francs.
He would take a great deal of trouble to avoid crossing a temporary bridge or scaffolding, though assured by an engineer that it was strong enough to bear ten elephants.
Every quarter day Mr. Astor had nearly half a million dollars to invest in the industries of the country.
He paid for everything which he consumed the market price--no more, no less--and he made his purchases with prudence and forethought.
One fault he had as a public servant--for we may fairly regard in that light a man who wields so large a portion of our common estate.
For the conveyance of the wedding party from the house to the synagogue, he caused twenty-five magnificent carriages to be made, such as monarchs use when they are going to be crowned, and these vehicles were drawn by horses imported from England for the purpose.
No useless or premature scheme had had any encouragement from him.
I read some time ago of a wedding in Paris.
As he lived for many years next door to the Astor Library, the frequenters of that noble institution had an opportunity of observing that he laid in his year's supply of coal in the month of June, when coal is cheapest.
There was nothing which he so much abhorred as waste.
Nor can it be said that he was morally brave.
He was very far from being miserly, though keenly intent upon accumulation.
Mr. Astor could, if he had chosen, have thrown his millions about in this style.
Some discredit also would have been cast upon those who live in moderate and modest ways.
In the life of the Old World there is nothing so shocking to a republicanized mind as the awful contrast between the abodes of the poor and the establishments of the rich.
The mere fact that the lord can look upon such a scene and not stir to mend it, is proof positive of a profound vulgarity.
He was one of the most timid of men.
Nor did he appear to carry this principle to an extreme.
He subscribed money for the relief of the victims of recent inundations, and dowered a number of portionless girls; expending in these ways a quarter of a million francs.
Year after year he saw a gang of thieves in the City Hall stealing his revenues under the name of taxes and assessments, but he never led an assault upon them nor gave the aid he ought to those who did.
HOUSE-OWNER.
He was even timorous.
He who had the most immediate and the most obvious interest in exposing and resisting the scoundrels, ought to have taken the lead in putting them down.
The bridal veil was composed of ineffable lace, made from an original design expressly for this bride.
In estimating the character and merits of such a man as the late Mr. Astor, we are apt to leave out of view the enormous harm he might have done if he had chosen to do it.
Administrations might change, and Parliaments might dissolve; but he was a fixture as long as he did his duty.
Happily he had the candor to admit this humiliating fact to himself, and he put forth earnest and steadfast exertions to bring himself up to the level of modern times.
English furniture, wall-papers, carpets, curtains, cutlery, garments, upholstery, ranged from the tolerable to the hideous, and were inferior to the manufactures of France and Germany.
SIR HENRY COLE.
In due time, having proved his capacity and peculiar fitness, he was promoted to the post of Assistant Keeper, which gave him a respectable position and some leisure.
During three days of every week admission to this superb assemblage of exhibitions is free, and on the other three days sixpence is charged.
The son of an officer in the British army, he was educated at that famous Blue-Coat School which is interesting to Americans because Lamb and Coleridge attended it.
Henry Cole was the life and soul of the movement.
When the subject of cheap postage came up in 1840, the government offered four prizes of a hundred pounds each for suggestions in aid of Sir Rowland Hill's plan.
This is to be regretted, for there is no character more respectable, and there are few so useful, as an intelligent and patriotic man of long standing in the public service.
He has borne a leading part in all the industrial exhibitions held in London during the last quarter of a century, and served as English commissioner at the Paris exhibitions of 1855 and 1867.
As the London "Times" said some time ago:--
There are schools for instruction in every branch of art and science which can be supposed to enter into the products of industry.
The prizes which are offered for excellence in design and invention have attracted, in some years, as many as two hundred thousand objects.
At length, about the year 1845, he entered upon the course of proceedings which rendered him one of the most influential and useful persons of his time.
Yes, said Prince Albert, and let us also invite competition from foreign countries on equal terms with native products.
One of these prizes was assigned to Henry Cole. He was one of the persons who first became converts to the idea of penny postage, and he lent the aid of his pen and influence to its adoption.
They asked him to undertake the reconstruction of the schools of design, and they gave him an office which placed him practically at the head of the various institutions designed to promote the application of art to manufacture.
The merit of that scheme must be shared between Henry Cole and Prince Albert.
This man was enabled to render all this service to his country, to Europe, and to us, because he was not obliged to waste any of his energies in efforts to keep his place.
The chief of these now is the Museum of South Kensington, which is to many Americans the most interesting object in London.
Some of the most celebrated pictures in the world are there, and there is an art library of thirty thousand volumes.
These objects, chiefly selected by Cole, were arranged by him for exhibition in temporary buildings of such extreme and repulsive inconvenience as to bring opprobrium and ridicule upon the undertaking.
At the age of fifteen he received an appointment as clerk in the office of Public Records.
Magnificent buildings, filled with a vast collection of precious and interesting objects, greet the visitor.
He had long lamented the backward condition of arts of design in England, and the consequent ugliness of the various objects in the sight and use of which human beings pass their lives.
He saw himself beaten in some things by the French, in some by the Germans, in others by the Italians, and in a few (O wonder!) by the Yankees.
This has already led to important corrections in history, and to a great increase in the sum of historical knowledge.
It was one of the most difficult things in the world to excite public interest in the exhibition.
He organized a series of exhibitions on a small scale, somewhat similar to those of the American Institute in New York, which has held a competitive exhibition of natural and manufactured objects every autumn for the last fifty years.
He was an "Old Public Functionary" in the service of the British people.
He proved to be in an eminent sense the right man in the right place. Besides publishing, from time to time, curious and interesting documents which he discovered in his office, he called attention, by a series of vigorous pamphlets, to the chaotic condition in which the public records of Great Britain were kept.
There are collections of armor, relics, porcelain, enamel, fabrics, paintings, statues, carvings in wood and ivory, machines, models, and every conceivable object of use or beauty.
The Exhibition of 1851 was admirably managed, and had every kind of success.
The formation of this Museum, the chief work of Sir Henry Cole's useful life, was far from exhausting his energies.
The influence of this institution upon British manufactures has been in many branches revolutionary.
It benefited England more than all other nations put together, because it revealed to her people their inferiority in many branches both of workmanship and design.
It came to pass in this way: After the close of the Crystal Palace in 1851, Parliament gave five thousand pounds for the purchase of the objects exhibited which were thought best calculated to raise the standard of taste in the nation.
His exhibitions attracted attention, and they led at length to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851.
The records were rearranged, catalogued, rendered safe, and made accessible to students.
It was he who called attention to the obstacles placed in the way of improvement by the patent laws, and some of those obstacles, through him, were speedily removed.
Henceforth he was called Sir Henry Cole, K. C. B.
During this series of services to his country, he remained in the office of Public Records.
We all know how conceited people are apt to become who have no opportunity to compare themselves with superiors. John Bull, never over-modest, surveyed the Exhibition of 1851, and discovered, to his great surprise, that he was not the unapproachable Bull of the universe which he had fondly supposed.
When President Buchanan spoke of himself as an Old Public Functionary he was a good deal laughed at by some of the newspapers, and the phrase has since been frequently used in an opprobrious or satirical sense.
But by that energy which comes of strong conviction and patriotic feeling, and of the opportunity given him by his public employment, Henry Cole wrung from a reluctant Parliament the annual grants necessary to make South Kensington Museum what it now is.
His absence being remarked orders were despatched for his immediate attendance in parliament; and the new general was directed to employ some other officer in that service.
This ordinance was the subject of great debate, and for a long time rent the parliament and city into factions.
These violent dissensions brought matters to extremity, and pushed the Independents to the execution of their designs.
The present generals, they thought, were more desirous of protracting than finishing the war; and having entertained a scheme for preserving still some balance in the constitution, they were afraid of entirely subduing the king, and reducing him to a condition where he should not be entitled to ask any concessions.
A pension of ten thousand pounds a year was settled on Essex.
On the day subsequent to these devout animadversions when the parliament met, a new spirit appeared in the looks of many.
At the time when the other officers resigned their commissions, care was taken that he should be sent with a body of horse to relieve Taunton besieged by the royalists.
He was saved by a subtlety, and by that political craft in which he was so eminent.
During the progress of military operations, there have arisen in the parliamentary armies many excellent officers, who are qualified for higher commands than they are now possessed of.
That such persons, who fatten on the calamities of their country, will ever embrace any effectual measure for bringing them to a period, or insuring final success to the war, cannot reasonably be expected.
Fairfax was a person equally eminent for courage and for humanity; and though strongly infected with prejudices, or principles derived from religious and party zeal, he seems never, in the course of his public conduct, to have been diverted by private interest or ambition from adhering strictly to these principles.
A fast, on the last Wednesday of every month, had been ordered by the parliament at the beginning of these commotions; and their preachers on that day were careful to keep alive, by their vehement declamations, the popular prejudices entertained against the king, against prelacy, and against Popery.
In opposition to this reasoning of the Independents, many of the Presbyterians showed the inconvenience and danger of the projected alteration.
The advantages gained during the campaign and the great distresses of the royalists, had much elevated their hopes; and they were resolved to repose no trust in men inflamed with the highest animosity against them, and who, were they possessed of power, were fully authorized by law to punish all their opponents as rebels and traitors.
Carried by his natural temper to magnanimity, to grandeur, and to an imperious and domineering policy, he yet knew, when necessary, to employ the most profound dissimulation, the most oblique and refined artifice, the semblance of the greatest moderation and simplicity.
Cromwell, by whose sagacity and insinuation Fairfax was entirely governed, is one of the most eminent and most singular personages that occurs in history: the strokes of his character are as open and strongly marked, as the schemes of his conduct were, during the time, dark and impenetrable.
His extensive capacity enabled him to form the most enlarged projects: his enterprising genius was not dismayed with the boldest and most dangerous.
But how to effect this project was the difficulty. The authority, as well as merits, of Essex was very great with the parliament.
In the hands of those members, they said, are lodged all the considerable commands of the army, all the lucrative offices in the civil administration: and while the nation is falling every day into poverty, and groans under an insupportable load of taxes, these men multiply possession on possession, and will in a little time be masters of all the wealth of the kingdom.
But affairs are now changed.
And by using well that authority which he had attained by fraud and violence, he has lessened, if not overpowered, our detestation of his enormities, by our admiration of his success and of his genius.
On that day, the preachers, after many political prayers, took care to treat of the reigning divisions in the parliament, and ascribed them entirely to the selfish ends pursued by the members.
During this important transaction of the self-denying ordinance, the negotiations for peace were likewise carried on, though with small hopes of success.
Lingering expedients alone will be pursued; and operations in the field concurring in the same pernicious end with deliberations in the cabinet, civil commotions will forever be perpetuated in the nation.
The army, indeed, he was sorry to say it, did not correspond by its discipline to the merit of the officers; nor were there any hopes, till the present vices and disorders which prevail among the soldiers were repressed by a new model that their forces would ever be attended with signal success in any undertaking.
Notwithstanding these reasonings, a committee was chosen to frame what was called the "self-denying ordinance," by which the members of both houses were excluded from all civil and military employments, except a few offices which were specified.
A new model alone of the army could bring complete victory to the parliament, and free the nation from those calamities under which it labored.
The parliament, no doubt, continued he, had done wisely on the commencement of the war, in engaging several of its members in the most dangerous parts of it, and thereby satisfying the nation that they intended to share all hazards with the meanest of the people.
The doctrines too of fate or destiny were deemed by them essential to all religion. In these rigid opinions the whole sectaries, amidst all their other differences, unanimously concurred.
Waller had approached within two miles of the royal camp, and was only separated from it by the Severn, when he received intelligence that the king was advanced to Bewdly, and had directed his course towards Shrewsbury.
When ready to seize on their carriages and baggage, he perceived Cromwell, who was now returned from pursuit of the other wing.
This event was in itself a mighty blow to the king; but proved more fatal in its consequences.
Ruthven, a Scotchman, who had been created earl of Brentford, acted under the king as general.
He marched towards Worcester; and Waller received orders from Essex to follow him and watch his motions, while he himself marched into the west, in quest of Prince Maurice.
During the ensuing years, till the restoration, he lived abroad in great necessity, and saw with indifference his opulent fortune sequestered by those who assumed the government of England.
Of all Christian sects, this was the first which, during its prosperity as well as its adversity, always adopted the principle of toleration; and it is remarkable that so reasonable a doctrine owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the height of extravagance and fanaticism.
The great zeal of the city facilitated this undertaking.
There had long prevailed in that party a secret distinction, which, though the dread of the king's power had hitherto suppressed it, yet, in proportion as the hopes of success became nearer and more immediate, began to discover itself with high contest and animosity.
Many speeches were made to the citizens by the parliamentary leaders, in order to excite their ardor.
While these events passed in the north, the king's affairs in the south were conducted with more success and greater abilities.
Essex, Robarts, and some of the principal officers escaped in a boat to Plymouth; Balfour with his horse passed the king's outposts in a thick mist, and got safely to the garrisons of his own party.
The two armies faced each other at Cropredy Bridge, near Banbury; but the Charwell ran between them.
When Prince Rupert, contrary to his advice, resolved on this battle, and issued all orders without communicating his intentions to him, he took the field, but, he said, merely as a volunteer; and, except by his personal courage, which shone out with lustre, he had no share in the action.
Popery and prelacy alone, whose genius seemed to tend towards superstition, were treated by the Independents with rigor.
Prince Rupert, with equal precipitation, drew off the remains of his army, and retired into Lancashire.
According to their principles, each congregation, united voluntarily and by spiritual ties, composed within itself a separate church, and exercised a jurisdiction, but one destitute of temporal sanctions, over its own pastor and its own members.
That general, having obliged Prince Maurice to raise the siege of Lyme, having taken Weymouth and Taunton, advanced still in his conquests, and met with no equal opposition.
Waller ordered a considerable detachment to pass the bridge, with an intention of falling on the rear of the royalists.
The front of the battle was now exactly counterchanged; and each army occupied the ground which had been possessed by the enemy at the beginning of the day.
The dangers of war were disregarded by his valor; but its fatigues were oppressive to his natural indolence.
Next morning early, he sent word to the prince, that he was instantly to leave the kingdom; and without delay, he went to Scarborough, where he found a vessel, which carried him beyond sea.
The two generals had orders to march with their combined armies towards Oxford; and, if the king retired into that city, to lay siege to it, and by one enterprise put a period to the war.
Charles, leaving his baggage and cannon in Dennington Castle, near Newbury, forthwith retreated to Wallingford, and thence to Oxford.
The soldier, the merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal, and guided by the illapses of the spirit, resigned himself to an inward and superior direction, and was consecrated, in a manner, by an immediate intercourse and communication with heaven.
That the king might have less reason to exult in the advantages which he had obtained in the west, the parliament opposed to him very numerous forces.
Every man, as prompted by the warmth of his temper, excited by emulation, or supported by his habits of hypocrisy, endeavored to distinguish himself beyond his fellows, and to arrive at a higher pitch of saintship and perfection.
Next day, the king decamped, and marched towards Daventry.
The doctor rekindled the light in the cylinder; the spiral became heated; the current of hydrogen came in a few minutes, and the gas dilated; but the balloon did not stir an inch.
What passions, what greed, what crimes, the knowledge of such a mine as that would cause!
The doctor watched him with a smile; and, while Joe went on, he took the bearings, and found that the missionary's grave lay in twenty-two degrees twenty-three minutes east longitude, and four degrees fifty-five minutes north latitude.
Joe in a Fit of Rage.--The Death of a Good Man.--The Night of watching by the Body.--Barrenness and Drought.--The Burial.--The Quartz Rocks.--Joe's Hallucinations.--A Precious Ballast.--A Survey of the Gold-bearing Mountains.--The Beginning of Joe's Despair.
He had to feed his cylinder continually; and he even began to find that he had not enough to quench the thirst of his party.
Joe at once rushed like a crazy man among the scattered fragments, and Kennedy was not long in following his example.
His countenance shone.
"Take care, my friend!
"Do you want to stay forever in this desert?"
"See, my dear Dick!" the doctor went on.
"Those blocks which you are trampling under foot, like worthless stones, contain gold-ore of great purity."
"Heaven has given him a lovely night, Joe--his last on earth, perhaps! He will suffer but little more after this, and his dying will be only a peaceful falling asleep."
And Joe went to work.
"We can't take any of it with us, indeed?"
"Then your cylinder don't work," said the obstinate fellow.
"No, not yet," was the invariable response.
And Joe, picking up one more block, desperately tossed it out of the car.
"Impossible!
"The millions are rather heavy, you know," resumed the doctor, "and cannot very easily be put into one's pocket."
"You must still hope," replied Kennedy.
"Humph!" said he; "we're not going up yet."
Let us reflect a little.
"God will recognize it!" said Kennedy.
In the mean while, Kennedy and Joe had strolled away a few paces, looking up a proper spot for the grave.
"Keep on yet," said Kennedy.
"What! a philosopher of your mettle--"
Do you know, now, in what kind of soil that man of self-denial, that poor one in spirit, has just been buried?"
"Keep on throwing."
Joe looked on uneasily, but kept silent.
He therefore opened the valve of the outside balloon.
"About a singular freak of Nature, a curious effect of chance.
Let us fill our car with the precious mineral, and what remains at the end of the trip will be so much made."
Let me look it in the face!
"No! what do you mean, doctor?"
Then, casting one glance at the swelling of the soil, beneath which the body of the poor Frenchman reposed, he went back to his car.
Would you yield to the thirst for gold?
His breathing became difficult, and he asked for air.
"Mr. Kennedy, you and I weigh, unless I am mistaken, about four hundred pounds--so that you'll have to get rid of at least that weight, since it was put in here to make up for us."
"Very good!
"Dead!" said the doctor, bending over him, "dead!" And with one common accord, the three friends knelt together in silent prayer.
I even hesitated to tell you any thing about it, for fear of exciting your regret!"
Upon getting back to the car, he found it burdened with the quartz-blocks that Joe's greed had heaped in it.
"But, doctor, you gave me leave--"
"Perhaps! but at all events, here's what I'll do to console you."
Kennedy took his customary place, and Joe followed, but not without casting a covetous glance at the treasures in the ravine.
"This is a singular discovery!" said the doctor, mentally.
"All that is true," replied Joe, "but gold!
It is sad to think of it!"
Joe now threw out some ten pounds, but the balloon stood still.
"What are you thinking about, doctor?" asked Kennedy.
"Poor young fellow--scarcely thirty years of age!"
Joe made no reply.
"It's rather too heavy for our car!
"Now, Joe," resumed the doctor, "there still remains a handsome fortune for you; and, if we can only keep the rest of this with us until the end of our trip, there you are--rich for the balance of your days!"
"Yes, my friend, this is a reservoir in which Nature has been heaping up her wealth for centuries!
At last he threw it out.
What good would all this wealth do you?
The body of the martyred missionary was then solemnly placed in it.
Place me upon my knees, my brethren, I beseech you!"
"I gave you leave to replace the ballast; that was all!"
The noonday sun poured down its rays perpendicularly into it.
As soon as the car touched the ground, the doctor shut the valve.
"Yes, a gold-mine," said the doctor, quietly.
"Just see the power of this metal over the cleverest lad in the world!
Joe got very pale.
"Death is at hand," replied the missionary, "I know it!
May God requite you, and bring you to your safe harbor!
The first thing to be done was to clear the surface of the fragments of rock that encumbered it, and then a quite deep grave had to be dug, so that the wild animals should not be able to disinter the corpse.
"Are you going up?"
The brave fellow, heaving deep sighs, began at last to lighten the balloon; but, from time to time, he would stop, and ask:
"He'll not get over it!" sighed Joe.
"My God! my God!" exclaimed the dying apostle, "have pity on me!"
"It's going up; I'm sure."
"Listen!
It was a fragment of about three or four pounds.
"Joe!
"Poor fellow!" said the doctor.
The soil, in fact, was bestrewn with quartz and porphyritic rocks.
Don't you hear me?"
"Do me the kindness to throw out some of that quartz!"
"But--"
"Keep on!" replied the doctor.
"This is but a passing fit of weakness.
"Keep cool, Joe," said his master.
impossible!" repeated Joe.
Joe leaped out, holding on the while to the rim of the car with one hand, and with the other gathering up a quantity of stones equal to his own weight.
Besides, to return looks to me quite as perilous as the other course.
"Yes, my dear Dick!"
Toward morning, the sky had resumed its brilliant purity and its heat. The balloon ascended, and, after several ineffectual attempts, fell into a current that, although not rapid, bore them toward the northwest.
They conversed less, and were more wrapt in their own thoughts.
Was I not right in saying, 'Wait a little?' eh?"
Consequently, they could not keep on longer than fifty-four hours--and all this was a mathematical calculation!
"Thanks, my gallant friends!" replied the doctor, with much real feeling, "I expected such devotion as this; but I needed these encouraging words.
"I hope so."
Two gallons only then remained to supply the cylinder.
"I, doctor, I'm not the man to despair; no one was less ignorant than I of the perils of the enterprise, but I did not want to see them, from the moment that you determined to brave them.
"And you, Kennedy?"
Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody.
I do not advise the custard.
Ours are all apple-tarts.
As she sat one morning, looking forward to exactly such a close of the present day, a note was brought from Mrs. Goddard, requesting, in most respectful terms, to be allowed to bring Miss Smith with her; a most welcome request: for Miss Smith was a girl of seventeen, whom Emma knew very well by sight, and had long felt an interest in, on account of her beauty.
She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness.
He had not much intercourse with any families beyond that circle; his horror of late hours, and large dinner-parties, made him unfit for any acquaintance but such as would visit him on his own terms.
CHAPTER III
"Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs.
This was all that was generally known of her history. She had no visible friends but what had been acquired at Highbury, and was now just returned from a long visit in the country to some young ladies who had been at school there with her.
Not unfrequently, through Emma's persuasion, he had some of the chosen and the best to dine with him: but evening parties were what he preferred; and, unless he fancied himself at any time unequal to company, there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card-table for him.
The acquaintance she had already formed were unworthy of her.
He liked very much to have his friends come and see him; and from various united causes, from his long residence at Hartfield, and his good nature, from his fortune, his house, and his daughter, he could command the visits of his own little circle, in a great measure, as he liked.
Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible.
The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself.
An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome.
Her daughter enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married. Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.
Somebody had placed her, several years back, at Mrs. Goddard's school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour-boarder.
Emma allowed her father to talk--but supplied her visitors in a much more satisfactory style, and on the present evening had particular pleasure in sending them away happy.
She was a plain, motherly kind of woman, who had worked hard in her youth, and now thought herself entitled to the occasional holiday of a tea-visit; and having formerly owed much to Mr. Woodhouse's kindness, felt his particular claim on her to leave her neat parlour, hung round with fancy-work, whenever she could, and win or lose a few sixpences by his fireside.
She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited Mr. Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.
These were the ladies whom Emma found herself very frequently able to collect; and happy was she, for her father's sake, in the power; though, as far as she was herself concerned, it was no remedy for the absence of Mrs. Weston.
The happiness of Miss Smith was quite equal to her intentions.
Such another small basin of thin gruel as his own was all that he could, with thorough self-approbation, recommend; though he might constrain himself, while the ladies were comfortably clearing the nicer things, to say:
The friends from whom she had just parted, though very good sort of people, must be doing her harm.
Mrs. Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille.
I do not think it could disagree with you."
It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couple now walked after her to church.
I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk."
Mr. Weston was a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age, and pleasant manners; and there was some satisfaction in considering with what self-denying, generous friendship she had always wished and promoted the match; but it was a black morning's work for her.
"I cannot agree with you, papa; you know I cannot.
I think you must know Hartfield enough to comprehend that."
How was she to bear the change?--It was true that her friend was going only half a mile from them; but Emma was aware that great must be the difference between a Mrs. Weston, only half a mile from them, and a Miss Taylor in the house; and with all her advantages, natural and domestic, she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude.
Miss Taylor has been used to have two persons to please; she will now have but one.
She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her.
Randalls is such a distance.
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She recalled her past kindness--the kindness, the affection of sixteen years--how she had taught and how she had played with her from five years old--how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health--and how nursed her through the various illnesses of childhood.
"Emma never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others," rejoined Mr. Woodhouse, understanding but in part.
Mr. Knightley shook his head at her.
"Emma knows I never flatter her," said Mr. Knightley, "but I meant no reflection on any body.
"Poor Miss Taylor!--I wish she were here again.
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Sorrow came--a gentle sorrow--but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.--Miss Taylor married.
A large debt of gratitude was owing here; but the intercourse of the last seven years, the equal footing and perfect unreserve which had soon followed Isabella's marriage, on their being left to each other, was yet a dearer, tenderer recollection.
There is always some talent in it.
"I am very glad I did think of her.
Her father fondly replied, "Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretell things, for whatever you say always comes to pass.
Highbury, the large and populous village, almost amounting to a town, to which Hartfield, in spite of its separate lawn, and shrubberies, and name, did really belong, afforded her no equals.
Mr. Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it, as the elder brother of Isabella's husband.
He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful.
You have drawn two pretty pictures; but I think there may be a third--a something between the do-nothing and the do-all.
The chances are that she must be a gainer."
It was a melancholy change; and Emma could not but sigh over it, and wish for impossible things, till her father awoke, and made it necessary to be cheerful.
When this was over, Mr. Woodhouse gratefully observed, "It is very kind of you, Mr. Knightley, to come out at this late hour to call upon us.
"They are to be put into Mr. Weston's stable, papa.
It was a happy circumstance, and animated Mr. Woodhouse for some time.
I wanted them to put off the wedding."
We always say what we like to one another."
Then he could pull out one foot, then another, and in a little while his body, too.
It was very difficult for the old woman to gather the bananas herself, so she made a bargain with the largest monkey.
The little old woman was very angry.
Let go my two hands and my foot and give me a banana or else I'll give you a kick with my other foot." The image of wax did not let go.
His body remained caught fast in the wax.
Then the monkey called out, "O, peddler boy, peddler boy, let go my two hands.
"O, peddler boy, peddler boy," the monkey shouted, "let go my body! Let go my body and my two feet and my two hands or I'll call all the other monkeys to help me!"
She decided to move to another part of the world where she raised cabbages instead of bananas.
When the little old woman saw what had happened she was very much discouraged about raising bananas.
She told him that if he would gather the bunches of bananas for her she would give him half of them. The monkey gathered the bananas.
Then the monkey called out in his loudest voice, "O, peddler boy, peddler boy, if you don't give me a banana I'll give you such a push that it will upset all of your bananas." The image of wax was silent.
"O, peddler boy, peddler boy," he said to him, "please give me a banana." The image of wax answered never a word.
The monkey gave the image of wax a push with his body.
"O, peddler boy, peddler boy, let go my hand," the monkey called out. "Let go my hand and give me a banana or else I'll give you a hard, hard blow with my other hand." The image of wax did not let go.
The monkey gave the image a kick with his foot and his foot remained stuck fast in the wax.
When he took his half he gave the little old woman the bananas which grow at the bottom of the bunch and are small and wrinkled.
The monkey gave the image a hard, hard blow with his other hand.
The children begged him to dance some more.
O, children!
The monkey danced over to the door and out of the door away to the tree top.
Let us put something into the pot to cook."
Then he fished the empty cocoanut shell out of the pot.
If he had not had the good luck to catch the monkey napping one day there is no knowing when he would have got his hands upon him.
The ox was found to be very good, and so was the sheep, and the armadillo.
"If you will open the door a little bit so that I can have more air to breathe I'll show you a new dance," said the monkey.
Some of the beasts were good to eat and others were not good at all.
After that the man tried harder than ever to catch the monkey.
At last he became tired of waiting and went away.
People had to eat meat.
He did not think that the man would hear him, but the man had very sharp ears.
The children opened the door.
One day, however, he caught the monkey napping.
That was the last they ever saw of him.
Then he said, "O, children!
You have nothing at all cooking in that pot over the fire.
How the Monkey Escaped
When the man returned the little boy did not dare to tell him that the monkey had escaped.
When the little boy was rubbing his eyes to get the dirt out of them the monkey made a sudden dash out of the cave and escaped to the tree tops.
He fished a hard stick out of the pot and bit into it.
"Just let me out and I'll show you how well I can dance."
After a while the man became thirsty and went to get a drink.
They let him think that the sticks and the cocoanut shell in the pot was the monkey.
He shut him up in a box and carried him home to the children for supper.
"That is not the monkey's head," he said as he tasted it, "That is just an empty cocoanut shell." He couldn't find a single trace of the monkey in that monkey stew.
When the man came home with fuel for the fire the children did not dare to tell him that the monkey had escaped.
After that every time the man heard the monkey play the guitar he would come near and try to catch him.
The monkey and his guitar were shut up in the box, and there, inside the box, the monkey played on his guitar.
He moved to another part of the country after that experience.
The monkey was playing his guitar.
Just as he was about to stretch out his hand and seize the monkey, the monkey gave a sudden leap to the tree and hurried away to the tree top.
The man waited and waited and waited there by the hole in the ground.
I heard the puma growling through the wall, and one of the dogs yelped as though it had been struck.
VII.
Everything pointed to it.
"We can't send him over there, and we can't spare the time to build him a new shanty; and we certainly can't take him into our confidence just yet."
Yet surely, and especially to another scientific man, there was nothing so horrible in vivisection as to account for this secrecy; and by some odd leap in my thoughts the pointed ears and luminous eyes of Montgomery's attendant came back again before me with the sharpest definition.
I sat down before the window, took out the biscuits that still remained to me, and ate them with an excellent appetite.
Through the window I saw one of those unaccountable men in white, lugging a packing-case along the beach.
It dawned upon me to what end the puma and the other animals--which had now been brought with other luggage into the enclosure behind the house--were destined; and a curious faint odour, the halitus of something familiar, an odour that had been in the background of my consciousness hitherto, suddenly came forward into the forefront of my thoughts.
THE LOCKED DOOR.
Nothing very dreadful, really, to a sane man; but just now, as we don't know you--"
"Moreau!" I heard him call, and for the moment I do not think I noticed. Then as I handled the books on the shelf it came up in consciousness: Where had I heard the name of Moreau before?
"I daresay you are," said Montgomery, in anything but a cordial tone.
From that my thoughts went to the indefinable queerness of the deformed man on the beach. I never saw such a gait, such odd motions as he pulled at the box. I recalled that none of these men had spoken to me, though most of them I had found looking at me at one time or another in a peculiarly furtive manner, quite unlike the frank stare of your unsophisticated savage.
Then astonishment paralysed me.
Yet some of his experiments, by the journalist's account, were wantonly cruel. He might perhaps have purchased his social peace by abandoning his investigations; but he apparently preferred the latter, as most men would who have once fallen under the overmastering spell of research. He was unmarried, and had indeed nothing but his own interest to consider.
"And now comes the problem of this uninvited guest.
This inner door Montgomery at once closed. A hammock was slung across the darker corner of the room, and a small unglazed window defended by an iron bar looked out towards the sea.
"I've been thinking of the same things," Montgomery answered. "There's my room with the outer door--"
He turned and went towards the door, regarding me oddly over his shoulder. I followed him out with my eyes; and as I did so, by some odd trick of unconscious cerebration, there came surging into my head the phrase, "The Moreau Hollows"--was it?
"I'm sorry to make a mystery, Mr. Prendick; but you'll remember you're uninvited. Our little establishment here contains a secret or so, is a kind of Blue-Beard's chamber, in fact.
The phrase drifted loose in my mind for a moment, and then I saw it in red lettering on a little buff-coloured pamphlet, to read which made one shiver and creep. Then I remembered distinctly all about it.
I turned and saw that the launch had now been unloaded, run out again, and was being beached, and the white-haired man was walking towards us. He addressed Montgomery.
He had to leave England. A journalist obtained access to his laboratory in the capacity of laboratory-assistant, with the deliberate intention of making sensational exposures; and by the help of a shocking accident (if it was an accident), his gruesome pamphlet became notorious. On the day of its publication a wretched dog, flayed and otherwise mutilated, escaped from Moreau's house.
It was the antiseptic odour of the dissecting-room.
"We usually have our meals in here," said Montgomery, and then, as if in doubt, went out after the other.
It was not until I had got the water under (for the water in the dingey had been shipped; the boat was perfectly sound) that I had leisure to look at the people in the launch again.
Then, "When you will be able to get away, I can't say. We're off the track to anywhere.
"Montgomery says you are an educated man, Mr. Prendick; says you know something of science.
He left me abruptly, and went up the beach past this group, and I think entered the enclosure.
The white-haired man I found was still regarding me steadfastly, but with an expression, as I now fancied, of some perplexity. When my eyes met his, he looked down at the staghound that sat between his knees.
"It was you," said I, "that saved me again."
I was struck especially by the curious movements of the legs of the three swathed and bandaged boatmen,--not stiff they were, but distorted in some odd way, almost as if they were jointed in the wrong place.
"I wish you'd help me with these rabbits," he said.
That captain was a silly ass. He'd have made things lively for you."
He had a large, almost lipless, mouth, extraordinary lank arms, long thin feet, and bow-legs, and stood with his heavy face thrust forward staring at us. He was dressed like Montgomery and his white-haired companion, in jacket and trousers of blue serge.
From one point a thin white thread of vapour rose slantingly to an immense height, and then frayed out like a down feather. We were now within the embrace of a broad bay flanked on either hand by a low promontory.
"Increase and multiply, my friends," said Montgomery. "Replenish the island.
This is a biological station--of a sort." His eye rested on the men in white who were busily hauling the puma, on rollers, towards the walled yard.
Presently the white-haired man seemed to recollect my presence, and came up to me.
Montgomery, having unshipped the rudder, landed likewise, and all set to work at unloading.
As I stared at them, they met my gaze; and then first one and then another turned away from my direct stare, and looked at me in an odd, furtive manner.
As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a brandy-flask and some biscuits.
It was low, and covered with thick vegetation,--chiefly a kind of palm, that was new to me.
May I ask what that signifies?"
Hitherto we've had a certain lack of meat here."
His procedure with the rabbits was singular.
I made no ado, but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits. Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma. The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from my birth.
Now you are our guest, we must make you comfortable,--though you are uninvited, you know." He looked keenly into my face.
The dogs were still snarling, and strained at their chains after these men, as the white-haired man landed with them.
There were three other men besides,--three strange brutish-looking fellows, at whom the staghounds were snarling savagely. Montgomery, who was steering, brought the boat by me, and rising, caught and fastened my painter to the tiller to tow me, for there was no room aboard.
As we came still nearer, this individual began to run to and fro on the beach, making the most grotesque movements.
"As it happens, we are biologists here.
He was a powerfully-built man, as I have said, with a fine forehead and rather heavy features; but his eyes had that odd drooping of the skin above the lids which often comes with advancing years, and the fall of his heavy mouth at the corners gave him an expression of pugnacious resolution. He talked to Montgomery in a tone too low for me to hear.
He raised his eyebrows slightly at that.
"I and Montgomery, at least," he added.
You'll find this island an infernally rum place, I promise you.
It occurred to me that I was perhaps annoying them, and I turned my attention to the island we were approaching.
I told him I had spent some years at the Royal College of Science, and had done some researches in biology under Huxley.
BUT the islanders, seeing that I was really adrift, took pity on me. I drifted very slowly to the eastward, approaching the island slantingly; and presently I saw, with hysterical relief, the launch come round and return towards me.
At a word of command from Montgomery, the four men in the launch sprang up, and with singularly awkward gestures struck the lugs. Montgomery steered us round and into a narrow little dock excavated in the beach.
"That depends.
"Something to go on with, Prendick," said he, in a far more familiar tone than before.
I fancied while we were still far off that I saw some other and very grotesque-looking creatures scuttle into the bushes upon the slope; but I saw nothing of these as we drew nearer.
I had recovered from my hysterical phase by this time and answered his hail, as he approached, bravely enough. I told him the dingey was nearly swamped, and he reached me a piggin. I was jerked back as the rope tightened between the boats. For some time I was busy baling.
If one was found, the sportsmen viewed his track in the mud, to find which way he had taken.
How these impatient climb, While others at the root incessant bay!-- They put him down."--SOMERVILLE.
With quick sensation now The fuming vapour stings; flutter their hearts, And joy redoubled bursts from every mouth In louder symphonies.
The sportsmen went on each side of the river, beating the banks and sedges with the dogs.
The otter preys during the night, and conceals himself in the daytime under the banks of lakes and rivers, where he generally forms a kind of subterraneous gallery, running for several yards parallel to the water's edge, so that if he should be assailed from one end, he flies to the other.
The jaws of the otter are so constructed, that even when dead it is difficult to separate them, as they adhere with the utmost tenacity.
The alleged cause of the owner's parting with them was in consequence of their having cleared the rivers of three counties (Staffordshire being one) of all the otters, and the number captured and killed in the last few years was mentioned.
The above is an animated and beautiful description of an otter hunt, an old English sport fast falling into disuse, and the breed of the real otter-hound is either extinct or very nearly so.
Few things in nature are more curious and interesting than this formation, and it shows forcibly how beautifully everything has been arranged for the instincts and several habits of animals.
In stating this, I am aware that there are still many dogs which are called otter-hounds; but it may be doubted whether they possess that peculiar formation which belongs exclusively to the true breed.
The best time to find it is early in the morning.
When the otter is seized, or upon the point of being caught by the hounds, he turns upon his pursuers with the utmost ferocity.
It may frequently be traced by the dead fish and fish-bones strewed along the banks of the river.
Those who saw the exhibition of pictures in the Royal Academy in 1844 will recollect a large, interesting, and beautiful picture by Sir Edwin Landseer of a pack of otter-hounds.
This animal was supposed to be eight years old, and to have destroyed for the last five years a ton of fish annually.
When an otter is wounded, he makes directly to land, where he maintains an obstinate defence:--
Indeed, as lately as the year 1844, a pack of otter-hounds was advertised in the newspapers to be sold by private contract.
The male otter never makes any complaint when seized by the dogs, or even when transfixed with a spear, but the females emit a very shrill squeal.
In the year 1796, near Bridgenorth, on the river Wherfe, four otters were killed.
A gipsy was, indeed, said to have possessed one, but he refused to part with it.
When he takes to the water, it is necessary that those who have otter-spears should watch the bubbles, for he generally vents near them.
It was a present from Sir Walter Scott.
See! how the morning dews They sweep, that from their feet besprinkling drop Dispersed, and leave a track oblique behind. Now on firm land they range, then in the flood They plunge tumultuous; or through reedy pools Rustling they work their way; no holt escapes Their curious search.
Yon hollow trunk, That with its hoary head incurv'd salutes The passing wave, must be the tyrant's fort And dread abode.
It measured from the nose to the end of the tail, four feet ten inches, and weighed thirty-four and a half pounds.
Instances are recorded of dogs having been drowned by otters, which they had seized under water, for they can sustain the want of respiration for a much longer time than the dog.
"How greedily They snuff the fishy steam, that to each blade Rank scenting clings!
The destruction of fish by this animal is, indeed, very great, for he will eat none unless it be perfectly fresh, and what he takes himself.
Otters bite very severely, and they will seize upon a dog with the utmost ferocity, and will shake it as a terrier does a rat.
The picture describes the hunt at the time of the termination of the chase and the capture of the otter.
By his mode of eating them he causes a still greater consumption, for so soon as an otter catches a fish he drags it on shore, devours it to the vent, and, unless pressed by extreme hunger, always leaves the remainder, and takes to the water in search of more.
An otter-hunt is a cheerful and inspiriting sport, and it is still carried on in some of the lakes of Cumberland.
One stood three, another four hours before the dogs, and was scarcely a minute out of sight.
Otters are frequently found on the banks of the Thames, and a large one was caught in an eel-basket, near Windsor, but the hunting of them is discontinued.
In rivers it is always observed to swim against the stream, in order to meet its prey.
The spears were used in aid of the dogs.
The animal is impaled on the huntsman's spear, while the rough, shaggy, and picturesque-looking pack are represented with eyes intently fixed on the amphibious beast, and howling in uncouth chorus round their agonized and dying prey.
Lord Cadogan offered one hundred pounds for another dog of the same breed, but of a different sex; but I believe without being able to procure one with those true marks which are confined to the authentic breed.
And on that bank Behold the glitt'ring spoils, half-eaten fish, Scales, fins, and bones, the leavings of his feast."
The Earl of Cadogan has, what his Lordship considers, the last of the breed of the true otter-hound.
"On the soft sand, See there his seal impress'd!
"Lo! to yon sedgy bank He creeps disconsolate; his numerous foes Surround him, hounds and men.
Nature had denied him the qualities required for such a contest.
By acting in that manner in all the transactions of life, a rich man diffuses around him an atmosphere of corruption, and raises the scale of expense to a point which is oppressive to many, ruinous to some, and inconvenient to all.
Unless he is grossly belied, he preferred to compromise than fight, and did not always disdain to court the ruffians who plundered him.
What he could have done safely, other men would have attempted to whom the attempt would have been destruction.
He refrained from doing so.
In pursuing this inquiry, he caused the wedding festivals of Louis XIV's court, once so famous, to seem poverty-stricken and threadbare.
He, too, could have had his park, his half a dozen mansions, his thirty carriages, his hundred horses and his yacht as big as a man-of-war.
This was a grave fault.
And then what doings in the synagogue!
It was both an instinct and a principle with him to avoid waste.
The consequence was, that all his life he invested money in the way that was at once best for himself and best for the country.
The rich fool who tosses a dollar to a waiter for some trifling service, debases the waiter, injures himself, and wrongs the public.
His timidity was constitutional and physical.
It is monstrous.
We needed such an example.
He began by a burst of ostentatious charity.
"William will never make money," his father used to say; "but he will take good care of what he has." And so it proved.
He gave his daughter a portion of five millions of francs.
He was one of a score or two of men in North America who could have maintained establishments in town and country on the dastardly scale so common among rich people in Europe.
A thriving banker there, who is styled the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, having a daughter of seventeen to marry, appears to have set seriously to work to find out how much money a wedding could be made to cost.
He provided such enormous quantities of clothing for her little body, that his house, if it had not been exceedingly large, would not have conveniently held them.
To invest his surplus income in the best and safest manner was the study of his life.
He did not have the gas turned down low in a temporarily vacated room because he would save two cents by doing so, but because he justly regarded waste as wicked. His example in this particular, in a city so given to careless and ostentatious profusion as New York, was most useful.
That he was above such atrocious vulgarity as this, was much to his credit and more to our advantage.
A magnificent park of a thousand acres of the richest land set apart and walled in for the exclusive use of one family, while all about it are the squalid hovels of the peasants to whom the use of a single acre to a family would be ease and comfort, is the most painful and shameful spectacle upon which the sun looks down this day.
He had his enormous estate, and he had mind enough to take care of it in ordinary ways; but he had nothing more.
Here, again, we were lucky.
WILLIAM B. ASTOR.
The late Mr. Astor, with an income from invested property of nearly two millions a year, could have made life more difficult than it was to the whole body of people in New York who are able to live in a liberal manner.
A choir of one hundred and ten trained voices, led by the best conductor in Europe--the first tenor of this generation engaged, who sang the prayer from "Moses in Egypt"--a crowd of rabbis, and assistant-rabbis, with the grand rabbi of Paris at their head.
When we wanted houses more than we wanted coal, he built houses for us; and when we wanted coal more than we wanted houses, he set his money to digging coal; charging nothing for his trouble but the mere cost of his subsistence.
It is possibly due to the tension of my mind, at the time, but even now that start into the hot stillness of the tropical afternoon is a singularly vivid impression.
Then Montgomery hiccoughed, "Who--said he was dead?"
"The Other with the Whip--" began the grey Thing.
"It is this way, Man who walked in the Sea," said the grey Thing.
My left arm was in a sling (it was lucky it was my left), and I carried my revolver in my right. Soon we traced a narrow path through the wild luxuriance of the island, going northwestward; and presently M'ling stopped, and became rigid with watchfulness.
Montgomery fired and missed, bowed his head, threw up his arm, and turned to run. I fired, and the Thing still came on; fired again, point-blank, into its ugly face.
"Confound you!" said I, and gripped my pistol.
He is--there," I pointed upward, "where he can watch you.
Yet it passed me, gripped Montgomery, and holding him, fell headlong beside him and pulled him sprawling upon itself in its death-agony.
They flinched.
You cannot see him, but he can see you. Fear the Law!"
Montgomery almost staggered into him, and then stopped too.
THE FINDING OF MOREAU.
Some have died. Show us now where his old body lies,--the body he cast away because he had no more need of it."
"Hullo!" suddenly shouted Montgomery, "Hullo, there!"
The grey Thing leapt aside. M'ling, with a snarl, flew at it, and was struck aside.
Twice we heard unseen creatures howling and shrieking past our little band, and once the little pink sloth-creature appeared and stared at us, and vanished again. But we were not attacked again.
"Well?" said I.
Then, listening intently, we heard coming through the trees the sound of voices and footsteps approaching us.
And they all stood watching us.
XVIII.
Montgomery turned him over. Resting at intervals, and with the help of the seven Beast People (for he was a heavy man), we carried Moreau back to the enclosure. The night was darkling.
And with these six creatures guiding us, we went through the tumult of ferns and creepers and tree-stems towards the northwest. Then came a yelling, a crashing among the branches, and a little pink homunculus rushed by us shrieking.
He peered at the body.
"See," said I, pointing to the dead brute, "is the Law not alive? This came of breaking the Law."
There was nothing threatening about this detachment, at any rate. They seemed awestricken and puzzled.
"They saw."
He was already more than half fuddled. I told him that some serious thing must have happened to Moreau by this time, or he would have returned before this, and that it behoved us to ascertain what that catastrophe was. Montgomery raised some feeble objections, and at last agreed. We had some food, and then all three of us started.
For a space no one spoke.
I had been standing behind him during this colloquy. I began to see how things lay with them.
"Is it still to be this and that?
"Is there a Law, thou Other with the Whip?"
"Where is he?" said Montgomery.
"He is great, he is good," said the Ape-man, peering fearfully upward among the dense trees.
"And the other Thing?" I demanded.
"Is there a Law now?" asked the Monkey-man.
I looked at them squarely.
"He is dead," said this monster.
I turned and walked towards the dead bodies, keeping my face towards the three kneeling Beast Men, very much as an actor passing up the stage faces the audience.
I was far more afraid of him than of any other two of the Beast Folk. His continued life was I knew a threat against mine.
As I watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M'ling, I heard a light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine perhaps a dozen yards away.
What was the Hyena-swine telling them? My imagination was running away with me into a morass of unsubstantial fears.
There was nothing for it but courage.
Then putting my whip in my teeth, I stooped for a stone, and with that threat drove the creature away.
"The stubborn beast-flesh grows day by day back again." Then I came round to the Hyena-swine.
I took half-a-dozen steps, picked up the blood-stained whip that lay beneath the body of the Wolf-man, and cracked it.
"Good!" said I, with a break in my voice; and they came back, hurrying and fearful, to the margin of the water, leaving long wakes of black in the silver.
"No; go away," I insisted, and snapped my whip.
"There is food in the huts," said an Ox-boar-man, drowsily, and looking away from me.
"I want food," said I, almost apologetically, and drawing near.
"Go away!" cried I.
Carry him far."
ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK.
I heard him yelp, saw him run sideways and turn, knew I had missed, and clicked back the cock with my thumb for the next shot. But he was already running headlong, jumping from side to side, and I dared not risk another miss.
For some time I stood staring after him.
"Now these," said I, pointing to the other bodies.
I turned to my three obedient Beast Folk again and signalled them to drop the body they still carried. Then I went back to the place by the fire where the bodies had fallen and kicked the sand until all the brown blood-stains were absorbed and hidden.
Among the chips scattered about the beach lay the two axes that had been used to chop up the boats. The tide was creeping in behind me.
I dismissed my three serfs with a wave of the hand, and went up the beach into the thickets.
I was perhaps a dozen seconds collecting myself.
"Salute!" said I. "Bow down!"
His teeth flashed upon me in a snarl.
"Stand there," said I.
"May I not come near you?" it said.
I was now so nervous with my own imaginings that I immediately drew my revolver. Even the propitiatory gestures of the creature failed to disarm me. He hesitated as he approached.
Towards noon certain of them came and squatted basking in the hot sand. The imperious voices of hunger and thirst prevailed over my dread. I came out of the bushes, and, revolver in hand, walked down towards these seated figures.
Come and see."
I repeated my command, with my heart in my mouth, and advanced upon them.
"None escape," said I. "Therefore hear and do as I command." They stood up, looking questioningly at one another.
Perhaps a little too spasmodically I drew my revolver, aimed quickly and fired.
Then cried I, "Salute! Bow down!"
They hesitated.
"They broke the Law," said I, putting my foot on the Sayer of the Law. "They have been slain,--even the Sayer of the Law; even the Other with the Whip.
They went in up to their armpits and stood regarding me.
I dropped the whip and snatched at the pistol in my pocket; for I meant to kill this brute, the most formidable of any left now upon the island, at the first excuse. It may seem treacherous, but so I was resolved.
One bent his knees.
For a moment we stood eye to eye.
Every now and then he looked back at me over his shoulder.
Great is the Law!
None attempted to rise or salute me. I felt too faint and weary to insist, and I let the moment pass.
One knelt, then the other two.
"Take him," said I, standing up again and pointing with the whip; "take him, and carry him out and cast him into the sea."
They came forward, evidently still afraid of Montgomery, but still more afraid of my cracking red whip-lash; and after some fumbling and hesitation, some whip-cracking and shouting, they lifted him gingerly, carried him down to the beach, and went splashing into the dazzling welter of the sea.
I knew what that object was, but I had not the heart to go back and drive them off. I began walking along the beach in the opposite direction, designing to come round the eastward corner of the island and so approach the ravine of the huts, without traversing the possible ambuscades of the thickets.
They stopped and stared at me.
He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes a little averted.
I felt sure that if I did not kill that brute, he would kill me. The Sayer of the Law was dead: worse luck.
"None escape," said one of them, advancing and peering.
I went back to the beach, and turning eastward past the burning enclosure, made for a point where a shallow spit of coral sand ran out towards the reef.
At the water's edge they stopped, turning and glaring into the sea as though they presently expected Montgomery to arise therefrom and exact vengeance.
I carried my pistol in my hand, my whip thrust with the hatchets in the sling of my arm. I was anxious to be alone, to think out the position in which I was now placed.
One, a Wolf-woman, turned her head and stared at me, and then the others.
They have been working all winter, but not quite so busily as now; for since yesterday they have cracked that big rock in two, and dug the great cave under the hill, and now they are gathered in council on the mountain-side that overlooks a dashing little stream.
Have you sometimes seen great boulder stones, as big as a small house, that stand alone by themselves in some field, or on some seashore, where no other rocks are near?
And this is what the Frost Giants did to Nannie's Run.
WHAT THE FROST GIANTS DID TO NANNIE'S RUN
It is indeed a very little settlement,--a few houses clustered together upon the sandy beach close to the blue water; behind the houses rises a cliff crowned with great fir-trees, standing tall and dark in thick ranks, making a dense forest; and beyond this forest, cold, snow-covered mountains lift their peaks against the sky,--a fitting home for the Frost Giants.
Why, Nannie is Nannie Dwight,--a little girl not yet five years old, who lives in the small square house standing under the cliff.
Well, listen to my story, which is a really true one, and then answer my question.
NANNIE'S RUN
Now and then they have to rake off a steep mountain- side as you might a garden-bed; and sometimes to bury a whole village so quickly that the poor inhabitants do not know what strange hand brought such sudden destruction upon them.
Three streams, straying from the far-away mountains, and fed by their melted snows and hidden springs, find their way through the forest, leap and tumble over the cliff, and, passing through the little settlement, reach the sea.
Do you believe in giants?
Here in our New-England towns it would seem hard enough to have one's house swept away before one's eyes; but then you know you could take the next train of cars, and go to your aunt in Boston, or your uncle in New York, to stay until a new house could be prepared for you.
THE FROST GIANTS
In its deep water the largest vessels might ride at anchor, but at the time of my story a lonelier place could scarcely be found.
Perhaps you will some day read about it all, but at present we have only to do with the Frost Giants; for I want to tell you, that, although no one now thinks of believing about the serpent or the flat earth or the rainbow bridge, yet the Frost Giants still live, and their home is really among the mountains.
For a moment the water leaps into the air, all foam and sparkle, as if it would jump over the barrier, and find its way to the sea at any rate.
The Flatheads are Nannie's only neighbors, and perhaps you would consider them rather undesirable friends; but when I tell you how they came at once with blankets and food, and all sorts of friendly offers of shelter and help, you will think that some white people might well take a lesson from them.
What will the stream do now?
Five minutes afterwards, sitting breathless on the roots of an old tree, with her children safe beside her, she sees the whole shore covered with surging water, and the houses swept into the bay, tossing and drifting there like boats in a stormy sea.
And the day comes at last, when, summoning all its waters to the attack, it makes a breach in the great earth wall, and in a strong, grand column, as high as this room, marches away towards the sea.
We have not long to wait before we shall see, and hear too; for a great creaking and cracking begins, and, while we gaze astonished, the mountain-side begins to slide, and presently, with a rush and a roar, dashes into the stream, and chokes it with a huge dam of earth and rocks and trees.
Before many weeks have passed, some of the tall fir-trees are cut down, and a new house is built, this time safely perched on top of the cliff; and, so far as I know, the Frost Giants have never succeeded in touching it.
But, alas! here it stands, just in the path that the torrent will take, and we have no power to tell of the danger that is approaching.
Peep in at the window, and see how Nannie stands at the kitchen table, cutting out little cakes from a bit of dough that her mother has given her; she is all absorbed in her play, and her mother has gone to look into the oven at the nicely browning loaves.
Sometimes they are sent to make a bridge over Niagara Falls, or to build a dam across a mountain torrent in an hour's time.
And, now, who is Nannie?
Now, if you will stay and watch it day after day, you will see what good result will come from this waiting; for every hour more and more water is running to its aid, and, as its forces increase, we begin to feel sure, that, although it can neither pass over nor under, it will some day be strong enough to break through the Frost Giants' dam.
You remember reading in your history, how, when our great-great- grandfathers came to this country to live, they found it occupied by Indians.
THE INDIANS
What will Nannie do now?
Now that you are introduced, you will perhaps like to join a Frost party that started out to work, one day in the early spring of 1861, from their homes among the Olympic Mountains.
But this proves entirely unsuccessful; and at last, after whirling and tumbling, trying to creep under; trying to leap over, it settles itself quietly in its prison, as if to think about the matter.
The people who live here call these little streams RUNS, and one of them is Nannie's Run.
But here is Nannie hundreds and thousands of miles away from any such help; for there are not only no railroads to travel upon, but not even common roads nor horses nor wagons; nevertheless, there are neighbors who will bring help.
Their deeds often seem to be cruel, and we cannot understand their meaning; but we shall some time know that the loving Father who sent them orders nothing for our hurt, but has always a loving purpose, though it may be hidden.
Her father and mother came here to live when she was but a baby, and before there was a single house built in the place; and it is out of compliment to her that one of the streams has been named Nannie's Run.
Oh, don't we wish the house had been built up on the cliff among the fir-trees, safe above the reach of the water!
No, do you say?
Can you imagine a beautiful oval-shaped bay, almost encircled by a long arm of sand stretching out from the mainland?
"Women are such out-and-out fools." Then he took his candle, and carrying his letter with him, went into his bedroom.
Whether you remember those few words I cannot tell; but certainly you would not have remembered them,--would not even have noticed them,--had your heart been at Nethercoats.
Vavasor, as he sat alone in his room, after Fitzgerald had left him, began to think of the days in which he had before wished to assist his friend in his views with reference to Lady Glencora;--or rather he began to think of Alice's behaviour then, and of Alice's words. Alice had steadfastly refused to give any aid.
He had paid the cost of the last attempt, and might, in a great degree, carry on this present attempt on credit.
Indeed I do not think that you ever doubted my love.
Then personal love for each other was most in our thoughts.
It can hardly be your desire to go through life unmarried.
I am so anxious that you should think of it that I will not expect your reply till this day week.
The next morning was the morning of Christmas Eve.
Yours, in any event, most affectionately,
I run great risk of failing.
If he thoroughly respected any woman he respected her.
--My father got over it, Mr Boffin, and so shall I.'
I thought I'd try another room, and shake it off.
Harness-maker's estimate, so much.
'As property?' inquired John Rokesmith.
Yes.
The fact is, my literary man named to me that a house with which he is, as I may say, connected--in which he has an interest--'
'Every day.
Then came correspondence.
We didn't want the rest.'
It seemed to him (so skilful was Wegg) that he was plotting darkly, when he was contriving to do the very thing that Wegg was plotting to get him to do.
But you are; you are.'
'I suppose it would, sir.
I have already thought of that, and taken my measures.
On all accounts, I am sure.' (This, as a philanthropic aspiration.)
My stall and I are for ever parted.
'With the faces?'
And the sooner I can get you into your new house, complete, the better you will be pleased, sir?'
'Mr Rokesmith.'
'That was the treatment, you see.
'Yes, deary,' said Mrs Boffin, laying aside her shawl.
--And equally,' said Mr Wegg, repairing the want of direct application in the last line, 'behold myself on a similar footing!'
Now, Noddy!' cried Mrs Boffin, clapping her hands, 'That IS a good one!'
'Yes; and then it was gone.'
Anybody but you.
Being here, would you care at all to look round the Bower?'
A face that I don't know.
'I am acquainted with my faults.
His Christian name was Thomas.
The collection of ballads will in future be reserved for private study, with the object of making poetry tributary'--Wegg was so proud of having found this word, that he said it again, with a capital letter--'Tributary, to friendship.
Now, I no longer
His words at the time (I was then an infant, but so deep was their impression on me, that I committed them to memory) were:
In remembrance of our old master, our old master's children, and our old service, me and Mrs Boffin mean to keep it up as it stands.'
'What face?' asked her husband, looking about him.
'Yes,' said Mr Boffin, 'it's to be a Spanker.
Mr Boffin then put on his hat, and Mrs Boffin her shawl; and the pair, further provided with a bunch of keys and a lighted lantern, went all over the dismal house--dismal everywhere, but in their own two rooms--from cellar to cock-loft.
Mr Rokesmith appeared.
'That's it!
Mr and Mrs Boffin have comforted him, sitting with his little book on these stairs, often.'
'Let me get on my considering cap, sir,' replied that gentleman, turning the open book face downward.
'For a moment it was the old man's, and then it got younger.
I always was, from a child, too sensitive.'
And his poor sister too,' said Mrs Boffin. 'And here's the sunny place on the white wall where they one day measured one another.
'And then it was gone?'
He was very timid of his father.
'And won't again, my dear,' said Mr Boffin. 'Depend upon it, it comes of thinking and dwelling on that dark spot.'
Now, as to a letter.
Mrs Boffin has carried the day, and we're going in neck and crop for Fashion.'
'Not any, Rokesmith.
Mrs Boffin has a wonderful memory.
Horse-dealer's estimate, so much.
This old house had wasted--more from desuetude than it would have wasted from use, twenty years for one.
'It would have been enough for us,' said Mr Boffin, 'in case it had pleased God to spare the last of those two young lives and sorrowful deaths.
'"The gay, the gay and festive scene, The halls, the halls of dazzling light."'
Mr Boffin drew a long breath, laid down his pen, looked at his notes as doubting whether he had the pleasure of their acquaintance, and appeared, on a second perusal of their countenances, to be confirmed in his impression that he had not, when there was announced by the hammer-headed young man:
'Yes, and I even felt that they were in the dark behind the side-door, and on the little staircase, floating away into the yard.
'And I hope you'll like it, Wegg.'
The two children's faces, and they get older.
'So it is, my dear,' said Mr Boffin, 'when not literary.
'Ah!
Mrs Boffin, lost in her own fluttered inability to make this out, looked at Mr Boffin.
All compact and methodical.
'Well,' said Mr Boffin, 'I suppose it would be added.'
Whatever is built by man for man's occupation, must, like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon perish.
Coach-maker's estimate, so much.
So did Mrs Boffin.
Well, sir, I am rather unprepared to see you, for, to tell you the truth, I've been so busy with one thing and another, that I've not had time to turn your offer over.'
'Why, as to Steward, you see,' returned Mr Boffin, with his hand still to his chin, 'the odds are that Mrs Boffin and me may never go upon the water.
'Well!
If not remote enough, I can go remoter.
'I should greatly like it.
Ain't that your opinion?'
Mr Boffin was no less delighted; indeed, in his own bosom, he regarded both the composition itself and the device that had given birth to it, as a very remarkable monument of human ingenuity.
My literary man was so friendly as to drop into a charming piece of poetry on that occasion, in which he complimented Mrs Boffin on coming into possession of--how did it go, my dear?'
Now let me think.' (as if there were the least necessity) 'Yes, to be sure I do, Mr Boffin.
It impressed her in his favour, for she nodded aside to Mr Boffin, 'I like him.'
'Yes; but why didn't it come before?' asked Mrs Boffin.
'I said Secretary,' assented Mr Rokesmith.
He now darted it at his patron, who took it, and felt his mind relieved of a great weight: observing that as they had arranged their joint affairs so satisfactorily, he would now be glad to look into those of Bully Sawyers.
'I know it must sound foolish, and yet it is so.'
Rejection of Mr Boffin's proposal of such a date and to such an effect.
'We must take care of the names, old lady,' said Mr Boffin. 'We must take care of the names.
No need to be bought out, sir. Would Stepney Fields be considered intrusive?
'Might I ask, without seeming impertinent, whether you have any intention of selling it?'
'What is it, my dear?
Mr Wegg (who had had nothing else in his mind for several nights) took off his spectacles with an air of bland surprise.
'I hope it may prove so.
For these reasons Mr Boffin passed but anxious hours until evening came, and with it Mr Wegg, stumping leisurely to the Roman Empire.
'I rather inferred that, sir,' replied John Rokesmith, 'from the scale on which your new establishment is to be maintained.'
Much obliged to you, I'm sure.
Being both bad sailors, we should want a Steward if we did; but there's generally one provided.'
There was the tight-clenched old bureau, receding atop like a bad and secret forehead; there was the cumbersome old table with twisted legs, at the bed-side; and there was the box upon it, in which the will had lain.
Is it your pleasure, sir, that we decline and we fall?' with a feint of taking up the book.
The man of low cunning had, of course, acquired a mastery over the man of high simplicity.
Mr John Rokesmith will please enter on his duties immediately."'
'In this house?'
A tender caress accompanied the words, and was returned with equal ardor.
"Yes, that is what some of the doctors here, and the oldest inhabitants, tell us," remarked Mr. Allison, "and I believe it is the better plan."
He told me he had been, at one time, a little wild, but surely he ought not to be condemned for that, after he had repented and reformed."
"You have not answered my question about the letter.
"You may as well speak the truth, sir; it will be much better for you in the end," said Mr. Dinsmore, sternly, his eyes flashing with indignant anger.
"Your system should become used to that before you take more."
"You love her too much a great deal; you'd never make her sorry unless she'd be naughty; and she's never one bit naughty,--always minds you and mamma the minute you speak."
But I must say that your persistent denial of your complicity with that scoundrel Jackson does not look much like contrition, or intended amendment."
Have you any message to send?" and laying down his pen he drew her to his knee.
I hoped to find you penitent and ready to forsake your evil courses; and in that case, intended to help you to pay off your debts and begin anew, without paining father with the knowledge that his confidence in you has been again so shamefully abused.
After tea the Allisons flocked in to bid her welcome.
"And feel too, I am thankful to be able to say.
"I can adopt that hand on occasion, as I'll prove to your satisfaction."
"Mamma, I do feel it to be very, very sweet to be so loved and cared for.
You know that no trial can come to you without your heavenly Father's will, and that He means this for your good.
It will be altogether better for her health."
I don't know how we could any of us do without you, darling.
"You would hardly attempt that if you were in perfect health, Arthur."
She could never hope to see again the man she still fondly imagined to be good and noble, and with a heart full of deep, passionate love for her.
"I ask no favors from a man who throws the lie in my teeth," muttered Arthur angrily.
"You certainly were acquainted with Tom Jackson, and how, but through you, could he have gained any knowledge of Elsie and her whereabouts?"
"I know papa is far wiser than I, but, oh, my heart will not believe what they say of--of him!" she cried with sudden, almost passionate vehemence.
"Come here, daughter," he said, "and tell me if you obeyed orders last night."
I presume you have put yourself in Jackson's power; but if you will now make a full and free confession to me, and promise amendment, I will help you to get rid of the rascal's claims upon you, and start afresh.
"Not one; and if I could only convince Elsie of his true character she would detest him as thoroughly as I do.
"You don't look bright and merry, as you did when you went away," said the child, bending a gaze of keen, loving scrutiny upon the sweet face, paler, sadder, and more heavy-eyed than he had ever seen it before.
"I have no fault to find with you on that score, my dear child," he said tenderly, "but if you can be cheerful, it will be for your own happiness, as well as ours."
Rose followed her to her room, a pleasant, breezy apartment, opening on a veranda, and looking out upon the sea, whose dark waves, here and there tipped with foam, could be dimly seen rolling and tossing beneath the light of the stars and of a young moon that hung like a golden crescent just above the horizon.
"Almost, darling?
"But, Arthur, I give you one more chance, and for our father's sake I hope you will avail yourself of it.
"I don't believe a word of it," said Mr. Dinsmore, looking sternly at him.
Elsie lay all night in a profound slumber, and awoke at an early hour the next morning, feeling greatly refreshed and invigorated.
He found Arthur nearly recovered, and at once asked a full explanation of the affair of Tom Jackson, alias Bromly Egerton; his designs upon Elsie, and Arthur's participation in them.
"The dear child; my heart aches for her," he remarked to his wife, as they went out together, "and I find it almost impossible yet to forgive either that scoundrel Jackson or my brother Arthur."
"Sister is tired with her journey," said mamma tenderly; "we won't tease her to-night."
And this seems to be really my only one, while my cup of blessings is full to overflowing.
"But suppose papa was the one who had made her sorry; what then?" asked Mr. Dinsmore.
Egerton was at the depot, but could get neither a word with Elsie, nor so much as a sight of her face.
"Thank you, Miss Stanhope; and mother and I would be delighted to see you at Ion."
As the train sped onward, again Elsie laid her head down upon her father's shoulder and wept silently behind her veil.
"I do not think you can help grieving, darling, though I agree with you that it is your duty to try to be cheerful, as well as patient and submissive; and I trust you will find it easier as the days and weeks move on.
"Arthur, you had better be frank and open with me.
"And you may as well remember that it isn't Elsie you are dealing with.
I'd be happy, sir, at any time when you can make it convenient for me to see you here, with Horace and the child, or without them."
"I thought it was only permission, papa, not command," she answered, lifting her eyes to his face, and moving to make room for him by her side.
Elsie walked to the window and looked out.
Her feelings had been wrought up to a high pitch of excitement in the struggle to be perfectly submissive and obedient, and now the overstrained nerves claimed this relief.
"We will excuse you and let you retire at once."
"You are greatly fatigued, my child," he said.
She caught it in both of hers and laying her cheek lovingly against it, looked up at him with tears trembling in her eyes.
I'm not afraid of you."
"Yes, papa, I did."
Her veil was not once lifted, and her father never left her side for a moment.
I'll be down in five minutes."
She came down looking sweet and fresh as the morning; a smile on the full red lips, and a faint tinge of rose color on the cheeks that had been so pale the night before.
At one time he had resolved to confess everything, throw himself upon the mercy of his father and brother, and begin to lead an honest, upright life; but a threatening letter received that morning from Jackson had led him to change his purpose, and determine to close his lips for a time.
Will you do it?"
"It has been no easy matter for me to forgive the suffering you have caused my child, Arthur; but I came here to-day with kind feelings and intentions.
"I would."
"Yes, tell papa I will.
How well you look."
"Thank you, mamma, I am very glad to be here; and I had such a good restful sleep.
You know He tells us it is through much tribulation we enter the kingdom of God; and that whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.
You are very young, and have plenty of time to wait; indeed, if all had gone right, you know your papa would not have allowed you to marry for several years yet."
He passed his arm about her waist, drew her closer to him, and taking her hand in his, held it in a warm, loving clasp.
"Yes, papa, and then she'll be all right to-morrow, won't she?
"A likely story; it is in a very different hand from yours."
All seemed glad of her coming, Richard, Harold, and Sophy especially so.
The gentle murmur of old ocean came pleasantly to her ear, and sweetly in her mind arose the thought of Him whom even the winds and the sea obey; of His never failing love to her, and of the many great and precious promises of His word.
How it soothed and comforted her.
"It is not so bad as that, I hope, dear," said Rose, folding her tenderly in her arms; "think how we all love you, especially your father.
"I am writing a few lines to Aunt Wealthy, to tell her of our safe arrival.
If he had his deserts, he would be in the State's Prison; and to think of his daring to approach my child, and even aspire to her hand!"
"I know nothing about it," was the sullen rejoinder.
Daughter, put down your veil."
"Yes, dear; papa told me; for you know you are my darling daughter too, and I have a very deep interest in all that concerns you."
She was very glad to avail herself of the permission.
"Mr. Darcy!" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.
It is an advantage to have it so far from this part of the kingdom.
And will you give yourself the trouble of carrying similar assurances to his creditors in Meryton, of whom I shall subjoin a list according to his information?
Had he done his duty in that respect, Lydia need not have been indebted to her uncle for whatever of honour or credit could now be purchased for her.
It was borne in the latter with decent philosophy.
I am sure my sisters must all envy me.
But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible; or at least it was impossible not to try for information.
"I thank you for my share of the favour," said Elizabeth; "but I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands."
Are not you curious to hear how it was managed?"
The easy assurance of the young couple, indeed, was enough to provoke him.
He protested that she should receive from him no mark of affection whatever on the occasion.
"Oh! certainly," said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity; "we will ask you no questions."
It is Mr. Wickham's intention to go into the regulars; and among his former friends, there are still some who are able and willing to assist him in the army.
She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.
No sentiment of shame gave a damp to her triumph.
She was more alive to the disgrace which her want of new clothes must reflect on her daughter's nuptials, than to any sense of shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a fortnight before they took place.
Elizabeth was disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked.
One morning, soon after their arrival, as she was sitting with her two elder sisters, she said to Elizabeth:
"You may readily comprehend," she added, "what my curiosity must be to know how a person unconnected with any of us, and (comparatively speaking) a stranger to our family, should have been amongst you at such a time.
Mr. Wickham had received his commission before he left London, and he was to join his regiment at the end of a fortnight.
His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes.
The marriage of a daughter, which had been the first object of her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was now on the point of accomplishment, and her thoughts and her words ran wholly on those attendants of elegant nuptials, fine muslins, new carriages, and servants.
This was one point, with regard to Lydia, at least, which was now to be settled, and Mr. Bennet could have no hesitation in acceding to the proposal before him.
His countenance rather gained in austerity; and he scarcely opened his lips.
A long dispute followed this declaration; but Mr. Bennet was firm.
Not one party, or scheme, or anything.
The bride and her mother could neither of them talk fast enough; and Wickham, who happened to sit near Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in that neighbourhood, with a good humoured ease which she felt very unable to equal in her replies.
The good news spread quickly through the house, and with proportionate speed through the neighbourhood.
In terms of grateful acknowledgment for the kindness of his brother, though expressed most concisely, he then delivered on paper his perfect approbation of all that was done, and his willingness to fulfil the engagements that had been made for him.
I shall like it of all things.
My uncle and aunt and I were to go together; and the others were to meet us at the church.
But when they had withdrawn, he said to her: "Mrs. Bennet, before you take any or all of these houses for your son and daughter, let us come to a right understanding.
"If it was to be secret," said Jane, "say not another word on the subject.
Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend it.
On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it out of her power, by running away.
We shall be at Newcastle all the winter, and I dare say there will be some balls, and I will take care to get good partners for them all."
But my dear Lydia, I don't at all like your going such a way off.
His daughter's request, for such it might be considered, of being admitted into her family again before she set off for the North, received at first an absolute negative.
He had never before supposed that, could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his daughter, it would be done with so little inconvenience to himself as by the present arrangement.
"Well, mamma," said she, when they were all returned to the breakfast room, "and what do you think of my husband?
"It was greatly my wish that he should do so," he added, "as soon as his marriage was fixed on.
We were married, you know, at St. Clement's, because Wickham's lodgings were in that parish.
"Very true; and if I had my will, we should.
The carriage was sent to meet them at ----, and they were to return in it by dinner-time.
But gracious me!
Haggerston has our directions, and all will be completed in a week.
Elizabeth had not before believed him quite equal to such assurance; but she sat down, resolving within herself to draw no limits in future to the impudence of an impudent man.
The wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself of his feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation survive such a blow as this.
Well, Monday morning came, and I was in such a fuss!
Mr. Gardiner soon wrote again to his brother.
They came.
These parties were acceptable to all; to avoid a family circle was even more desirable to such as did think, than such as did not.
Mr. Bennet had very often wished before this period of his life that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him.
His letter was soon dispatched; for, though dilatory in undertaking business, he was quick in its execution.
The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.
I will not encourage the impudence of either, by receiving them at Longbourn."
Her ease and good spirits increased.
This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving.
"She is so fond of Mrs. Forster," said she, "it will be quite shocking to send her away!
You may depend upon my seeking no further."
"I should like it beyond anything!" said her mother.
But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.
But I must tell you how it went off.
But Mrs. Bennet was not so well pleased with it.
He would scarcely be ten pounds a year the loser by the hundred that was to be paid them; for, what with her board and pocket allowance, and the continual presents in money which passed to her through her mother's hands, Lydia's expenses had been very little within that sum.
Chapter 51
What a pity it is, mamma, we did not all go."
They must all go to Brighton.
Their arrival was dreaded by the elder Miss Bennets, and Jane more especially, who gave Lydia the feelings which would have attended herself, had she been the culprit, and was wretched in the thought of what her sister must endure.
Her father lifted up his eyes.
It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment from which she had been so wholly free at first.
"Oh, yes!--he was to come there with Wickham, you know.
I could not bear to have her ten miles from me; and as for Pulvis Lodge, the attics are dreadful."
They seemed each of them to have the happiest memories in the world.
I quite forgot!
She was busily searching through the neighbourhood for a proper situation for her daughter, and, without knowing or considering what their income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and importance.
"Haye Park might do," said she, "if the Gouldings could quit it--or the great house at Stoke, if the drawing-room were larger; but Ashworth is too far off!
Their reception from Mr. Bennet, to whom they then turned, was not quite so cordial.
How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence, she could not imagine.
"Thank you," said Lydia, "for if you did, I should certainly tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry."
That his anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege without which her marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all she could believe possible.
He promises fairly; and I hope among different people, where they may each have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent.
Their visitors were not to remain above ten days with them.
I longed to know whether he would be married in his blue coat."
He begged to know further particulars of what he was indebted to his brother, but was too angry with Lydia to send any message to her.
She turned from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations; and when at length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there.
Lydia's voice was heard in the vestibule; the door was thrown open, and she ran into the room.
But, luckily, he came back again in ten minutes' time, and then we all set out.
"No really," replied Elizabeth; "I think there cannot be too little said on the subject."
And it was settled that we should all be there by eleven o'clock.
There was no want of discourse.
I promised them so faithfully!
She got up, and ran out of the room; and returned no more, till she heard them passing through the hall to the dining parlour.
Yet Paul never seems to have met Jesus, or to have heard of his teachings or miracles.
One of our Sunday programs, the other day, found its way into a church.
Hypatia was murdered in church, and by the clergy, because she was not orthodox.
There is not a single miracle, parable or moral teaching attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of which Paul seems to possess any knowledge whatever.
How does the true story of Hypatia compare with the fable of "a nude woman placed on a pedestal in the city of Paris?" The Reverend must answer, or never tell an untruth again.
But our clerical neighbor from Oak Park has one more argument: "Why is Sunday observed instead of Saturday?" Well, why?
After two thousand years, it is still uncertain to whom we are indebted for the story of Jesus.
Without actually telling any untruths, it suggests indirectly two falsehoods: First, that Jesus was not much in Jerusalem--that he was there only on a few occasions; and that, therefore, it is not strange that Paul did not see him or hear of his preaching or miracles; and second, that Paul was absent from the city when Jesus was there.
VIII
Therefore, after announcing the subject, he dismissed it, by remarking that Paul's testimony was enough.
What are the remaining nine doing in the Holy Bible?
Mangasarian's arguments, fortunately, do not require to be taken very seriously, for they are not in themselves serious."
How does the Reverend Barton like the conclusion to which his own reasoning leads him?
The tired warrior fell asleep from great weariness. Then Jael picked a tent-peg and with a hammer in her hand "walked softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground...So he died."
The looking forward of the world to Him."
Does it justify hasty language?
Under the circumstances, there is no comparison between the public career of a Caesar or a Socrates covering from fifty to seventy years of time, and that of a Jesus of whose life only one brief year is thrown upon the canvas.
The minister of the South Congregational Church, who heard the debate, has publicly called your lecturer an "unscrupulous sophist," who "practices imposition upon a popular audience" and who "put forth sentence after sentence which every scholar present knew to be a perversion of the facts so outrageous as to be laughable."
All church historians admit the existence of sects that denied the New Testament Jesus--the Gnostics, the Essenes, the Ebionites, the Marcionites, the Cerinthians, etc.
The gospel of John also hints at the existence in the primitive church of Christians who did not accept the reality of Jesus.
Does he insist on remaining ignorant of the facts?
Mithraism is a variant religion, which at one time spread over the Roman Empire and came near outclassing Christianity.
It sounds quite a period to speak of "following his public career" from beginning to end, especially when compared with Caesar's, until it is remembered that the entire public career of Jesus covers the space of only one year.
ANSWER: How long was "the time from the opening of Jesus' public career until the time that it closed?"--One year!--according to the three gospels.
But I have no proof for this beyond my feeling that the movement with which the name is associated could even for Paul not have taken its nomenclature without a personal substratum.
To answer that Jesus is historical, but The Anointed is not, is to evade the question.
And what was the statement which, while it crippled his memory, it did not moderate his zeal?
No one's knowledge is perfect.
It is a stock argument and not to the point."
REV. DR.
ANSWER: But in the same sentence the doctor takes all this back by adding: "There are a great many things in his history that are not historical." If so, then we do not possess "a very distinctly outlined history," but at best a mixture of fact and fiction.
To charge that we have said 'Gospel,' where we should have said 'Epistle,' or 'Trullum' instead of 'Trullo'; that it was not Barnabas, but Nicholas who denied the Gospel Jesus, and that there were variations of this denial, does not at all disprove the fact that, according to the Christian scriptures themselves, among the apostolic followers there were those to whom Jesus Christ was only a phantom.
Religions, as well as their variations, appear as new branches do upon an old tree.
This is extraordinary; and as the Rabbi does not question the statement, we infer that it is a correct report of what he said.
This is his most serious complaint.
Critics have discovered mistakes in Darwin and Haeckel, but are these mistakes of such a nature as to prove fatal to the theory of evolution?
As the debate is now in print, further comment on this would not be necessary.
One instance, however, he is able to remember which "when it fell upon my ears," he writes, "it struck me with such amazement, that it completely drove from my mind a series of most astonishing statements of various sorts which had just preceded it."
John did not write the epistles, then, which the Christian church for two thousand years, and at a cost of millions of dollars, and at the greater sacrifice of truth and progress has been proclaiming to the world as the work of the inspired John!
Was ever such a view entertained of Caesar, Socrates or of any other historical character?
Because Mohammed is historical, it does not follow that Moses is also historical.
"Paul tells us nothing of the kind.
Paul tells us that he lived in Jerusalem at a time when Jesus must have been holding the attention of the city; yet he never met him." To this the clergyman replies:
But the question is, does a teacher suppress the facts?
But if the 'Christ' which the Hebrews expected was "purely mythical," what makes the same 'Christ' in the supposed Tacitus passage historical?
Invited by several people to prove these charges, the Reverend replies: "In the absence of any full report of what he (M.
REV. DR.
If the criticism is just, it prevents us from making the same mistake twice; if it is unjust, it gives us an opportunity to correct the error our critic has fallen into.
In other words, only those passages in the bible are authentic which the clergy quote; those which the rationalists quote are spurious.
REV. DR.
With the exception of one year, his whole life is hid in impenetrable darkness.
We know nothing of his childhood, nothing of his old age, if he lived to be old, and of his youth, we know just enough to fill up a year.
FROM THE SUNDAY PROGRAMS
But it is with pleasure that the Independent Religious Society gives Rabbi Hirsch this opportunity to explain his position.
The strength of a given criticism is determined by asking: Does it in any way impair the soundness of the argument against which it is directed?
Incidents like the above, however, should change every lukewarm rationalist into a devoted soldier of truth and honor.
As early as John's time, if he is the writer of the epistle, Jesus' historicity was questioned.
"The Apostle John never made any such complaint.
APPENDIX
REV. DR.
I personally believe Jesus lived.
But the popular imagination craves a Maker for the Universe, a founder for Rome, a first man for the human race, and a great chief as the starter of the tribe.
In his recent letter he denies that the apostle ever made such a complaint.
It is the blow that disables which counts.
John did not write the epistles, and Paul's speech in the Book of Acts was put into his mouth!
III
Critical scholarship is pretty well agreed that he did not write the epistles ascribed to him."
To us, more important than anything presented on this subject, is this evidence of the existence of a very early dispute among the first disciples of Jesus on the question of whether he was real or merely an apparition.
We refrain from commenting on the excuse given to explain so significant a failure of memory.
We shall present these together with our reply as they appeared on the Sunday Programs of the Independent Religious Society.
Our desire, in engaging in this argument, is to turn the thought and love of the world from a mythical being, to humanity, which is both real and present.
William Tell is a myth--not the name, but the man the name stands for.
The editor promised to locate the responsibility for the contradiction.
ANSWER: The only way this question can be settled is by appealing to history.
When Mosheim declares that "The prevalent opinion among early Christians was that Christ existed in appearance only," he could not have meant by 'Christ' only a title.
Now that the debate on one of the most vital questions of modern religious thought--The Historicity of Jesus--is in print, a few further reflections on some minor points in Dr. Crapsey's argument may add to the value of the published copy.
The News reports the Rabbi as saying, "But we know through the Rabbinical Books that Jesus lived."
Criticism is welcome.
The Hebrew illusion said, Christ was coming; the Christian illusion says, Christ has come.
REV. DR.
Why?"
As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O'Leary and Paula Quinton.
"Ha!
Just stay scientific about it and I'll be satisfied.
"Feel better, now?...
"As we use it, the word's pure onomatopoeia.
Von Schlichten allowed himself to be smitten by an idea.
In the north, metallurgy and food-preparation have always been combined that way."
Well, we had to break that up.
"That's a fair question," Blount replied, inverting a cocktail jug over his glass to extract the last few drops.
No danger, I hope; we all like him."
I won't deny that there's a lot of unnecessary brutality on the part of the native foremen and overseers, which we're trying, gradually, to eliminate. You'll have to remember, though, that we're dealing with a naturally brutal race."
"You know what the seasons are like, at the poles of this planet.
You know what the setup is, there, don't you? The Terran Federation Space Navy discovered and explored both Uller and Niflheim, which made both planets public domain.
"Of course, they're always glad to have the peasants taken off their hands during a slack agricultural season," Blount added, "and we train workers to handle contragravity power-equipment.
Then, when the winds fall, we move in for a couple of months. It isn't really mining, or even quarrying; we just scoop up ore from the surface, load it onto ore-boats, and fly it down to Skilk and Krink and Grank, where it's smelted through the winter.
Mohammed Ferriera was still unconscious, the girl reported; he had a minor concussion, but the medics were not greatly disturbed, and expected him to be fully recovered in a few weeks.
That's Rakkeed the Prophet's whole gospel."
Even in the absence of any native, she used her handkerchief to mask the act.
At Skilk, Rakkeed comes and goes openly; at Krink he has a price on his head."
"It's been played on us till it's lost its humor."
"Well, I must admit, the Ullerans who work there are very well treated.
"I suppose you think it's a joke, our being nearly murdered by the people we came to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.
"They're the nomads who hire out to the northern merchants as caravan-drivers, and also prey, or used to prey, on the caravans as brigands.
Blount told him.
If you think the Kragans are 'pathetic cultural mongrels,' what you'll see there will open your eyes.
"You find races like that all through the explored galaxy--pathetic cultural mongrels."
Von Schlichten invited her and her escort to join him and Blount.
"I suspect that of being a principle you'd like me to bear in mind at the polar mines, when I see, let's say, some laborer being beaten by a couple of overseers with three foot lengths of three-quarter-inch steel cable."
Both jugs were empty.
That's four days from today."
"Well, general, I'll take you up," she said.
They raided into Konkrook and Keegark territory, too.
"Carlos tells us he found you standing over poor Mohammed Ferriera, fighting like a commando.
"That isn't the reason, though," von Schlichten said.
That would give us about two to three hours.
"I'm sure I could.
"So you see," Eric Blount rammed home the moral, "this is just another case of nobody with any right to call anybody else's kettle black.... Cigarette?"
"Oh, but they're just a parasite-race on the Terrans," Dr. Paula Quinton objected.
And most of the geek landowners are bitterly critical of the way we treat our labor at the mines; they claim we make them dissatisfied with the treatment they get at home."
There's the most intense sort of thermal erosion you can imagine--the ice-cap melts in the spring to a sea, which boils away completely by the middle of the summer.
Going to a bartending machine, von Schlichten dialed the cocktail they had decided upon and inserted his key to charge the drinks to his account, filling a four-portion jug.
"I put in two years there, too," Blount supported him.
You'll like them."
"Stanley-Browne is one author you can depend on," O'Leary assured her. "If you read it in Stanley-Browne, it's wrong.
"Delighted, Miss Quinton," Blount said.
"But I warn you; if this is some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Uller Company's side of the case and blind me to unjust exploitation of the natives here, I don't propagandize very easily."
Miss Quinton, this is Lieutenant-Governor Blount.
"Why, that's exactly how they'd pronounce it!"
If You Read It in Stanley-Browne
We've taught them a lot--you'll see how much when you visit their town--but they aren't cultural mongrels.
"That's been SOP on every planet our Association's had any experience with."
Eric, Miss Paula Quinton."
"When you get up north, watch how the peasants kill these little things like six-legged iguanas that they raise for food."
The Portuguese lost only ten men, and had four wounded; so that he had still remaining twenty fighting men, whereas the Spaniards had double the number.
Being masters of the ship, they immediately weighed anchor and set sail from the port, lest they should be pursued by other vessels.
No prey, no pay.
It macerates its opium and percolates its own laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its tall prescription desk--pills rolled out on its own pill-tile, divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round pasteboard pill-boxes.
To you alone of my acquaintance would I intrust a powder like that.
Mr. Riddle was a stout man, brick-dusty of complexion and sudden in action.
The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was Chunk McGowan.
The store is on a corner about which coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become candidates for the cough drops and soothing syrups that wait for them inside.
Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed--a condition opposed to his usual line of demeanour.
I'll just go up there myself after supper and load the shot-gun and wait.
"Not any Dagoes.
McGowan ceased, a prey to his doubts.
"Tim Lacy told me he got some once from a croaker uptown and fed 'em to his girl in soda water.
The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream soda.
One day she says she will; the same evenin' she says nixy.
"For a week he hasn't let Rosy step outside the door with me.
"I must make a prescription that is to be called for soon."
My own room's just above Rosy's.
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan.
"You will excuse me, Chunk," said Ikey.
Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan continued:
I sat down at the supper table last night at Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself, 'Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square--don't try any hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her.' And I keeps the paper you give me in my pocket.
The circumlocution has been in vain--you must have guessed it--Ikey adored Rosy.
Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?"
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's two squares away.
But you've located the diagnosis all right enough--it's under my coat, near the ribs.
Mr. McGowan smiled.
Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the mortar, holding it steady.
I've got a job down near the bridge, and that's where I'm heading for now."
The Blue Light Drug Store is downtown, between the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the two streets is the shortest.
At nine old Parvenzano lets me through to his back yard, where there's a board off Riddle's fence, next door.
"I guess already that you have been stuck in the ribs with a knife.
Taken by an adult this powder would insure several hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a liquid if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the backyard Lochinvar.
But it's five hours yet till the time, and I'm afraid she'll stand me up when it comes to the scratch."
"The--the--powder?" stammered Ikey.
She's up at the flat--she cooked eggs this mornin' in a blue kimono--Lord! how lucky I am!
There he crushed to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a grain of morphia.
It's all dead easy if Rosy don't balk when the flag drops.
At eight Rosy goes to bed with a headache.
They was married in less than two weeks."
"Oh, that stuff you gave me!" said Chunk, broadening his grin; "well, it was this way.
"Chunk," said he, "it is of drugs of that nature that pharmaceutists must have much carefulness.
You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us.
But he was no outfielder as Ikey was; he picked them off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey's friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the Bowery.
"I don't see then yet," said Ikey, shortly, "what makes it that you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it."
I have many times told you those Dagoes would do you up."
"The lazy Irish loafer!
We've agreed on to-night, and Rosy's stuck to the affirmative this time for two whole days.
"Much obliged," he said, briefly, to Ikey.
He made a patent-medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable carefulness about his finger.
The young man sighed again, turned his face for one last look at the house of his relinquished hopes--and cried aloud profane words of holy rapture.
I beg of you to accept my advice or aid.
"I am a master of philosophy, a graduate in art, and I hold the purse of a Fortunatus.
She's always on time, to the minute.
Sonorous and startling came the stroke of 9 from the clock tower.
The young man threw himself upon the bench with a reckless laugh.
"Twenty-nine and a half minutes past eight, sir."
The jig's up.
The day has been fatiguing."
This watch of mine never varies a--"
I have wealth and power and knowledge above most men, but when the clock strikes I am afraid.
"He hits the pipe every night.
The other policeman stooped and looked at something crumpled and crisp in the hand of the sleeper.
Clocks are an evil, women a blessing.
These thoughts strayed dreamily through the mind of Prince Michael, as he smiled under the stubble of his polychromatic beard.
The benches were not filled; for park loungers, with their stagnant blood, are prompt to detect and fly home from the crispness of early autumn.
You will know by that that all is as was before, and you may come to me.
"Glad to meet you, Prince," he said, good humouredly.
The young man looked up brightly at the Prince.
I had been doing wrong, my dear Prince--I had been a naughty boy, and she had heard of it.
A hand organ--Philomel by the grace of our stage carpenter, Fancy--fluted and droned in a side street.
Oh, earth!
But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses paused, and I fainted.
Nature decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me; mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard and chill, and bare, and I found no shelter.
"'Do you consider,' said his companion to him, 'that you will be obliged to pay three months' rent and to lose the produce of your garden?
That hour passed, the sun mounted high in the heavens, but the cottagers did not appear.
There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies?
Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with thankfulness towards the blessed sun, which bestowed such joy upon me.
Chapter 16
"After some weeks my wound healed, and I continued my journey.
The inside of the cottage was dark, and I heard no motion; I cannot describe the agony of this suspense.
"I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair.
You dare not keep me.'
The crime had its source in her; be hers the punishment!
"This was then the reward of my benevolence!
From you only could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred.
His power and threats were not omitted in my calculations; a creature who could exist in the ice caves of the glaciers and hide himself from pursuit among the ridges of inaccessible precipices was a being possessing faculties it would be vain to cope with.
"I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me.
I felt as if I were placed under a ban--as if I had no right to claim their sympathies--as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them.
He continued,
This passion is detrimental to me, for you do not reflect that YOU are the cause of its excess.
I am malicious because I am miserable.
Chapter 17
"You swear," I said, "to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you?
"Indeed?"
"And the steamboat?"
The count bowed.
The steward entered.
"And alone?"
"By what right, sir?"
Chapter 46.
Ali," cried he, striking at the same time on the brazen gong.
"Oh, my dear count," exclaimed Danglars, "I never for an instant entertained such a feeling towards you."
"Summon Bertuccio," said the count.
'They laugh best who laugh last!'"
"At five o'clock," replied the count.
"So much so," replied Monte Cristo, "that while you call yourself baron you are not willing to call anybody else count."
"Whatever you say, my dear count; I am at your orders."
Ali appeared.
But," pursued Danglars with one of his sinister smiles, "an order for unlimited credit calls for something like caution on the part of the banker to whom that order is given.
in gold, silver, or notes?"
Then offer him double that sum; a banker never loses an opportunity of doubling his capital."
"I beg your excellency's pardon," interposed the steward in a deprecating manner, "for venturing to observe that it is already two o'clock."
"I did," replied the count.
If you will permit me, I shall be happy to show you my picture gallery, composed entirely of works by the ancient masters--warranted as such.
Not a modern picture among them.
"How would you like to have it?
I took the trouble this morning to call on the pretended count--if he were a real count he wouldn't be so rich. But, would you believe it, 'He was not receiving.' So the master of Monte Cristo gives himself airs befitting a great millionaire or a capricious beauty.
Then, throwing himself back in his carriage, Danglars called out to his coachman, in a voice that might be heard across the road, "To the Chamber of Deputies."
"Ah, ha, you are acquainted with the young viscount, are you?"
"Then how comes it," said Monte Cristo with a frown, "that, when I desired you to purchase for me the finest pair of horses to be found in Paris, there is another pair, fully as fine as mine, not in my stables?" At the look of displeasure, added to the angry tone in which the count spoke, Ali turned pale and held down his head.
Danglars felt the irony and compressed his lips.
"And the yacht."
CHAPTER V
Two days after this misfortune, there arose a great storm, which separated the ships from one another.
Afterwards, for provisions and victualling, they draw out of the same common stock about two hundred pieces of eight; also a salary for the surgeon, and his chest of medicaments, which usually is rated at two hundred or two hundred and fifty pieces of eight.
All of which would have made this a greater prize than he could desire, which he had certainly carried off, if his main-mast had not been lost, as we said before.
Every vessel has at least two negroes in it, who are very dextrous in diving to the depth of six fathoms, where they find good store of pearls.
Another bold attempt like this, no less remarkable, I shall also give you.
All which sums are taken out of the common stock of what is gotten by their piracy, and a very exact and equal dividend is made of the remainder.
Having possessed themselves of the ship, the wind being contrary to return to Jamaica, they resolved to steer to Cape St. Anthony (which lies west of Cuba), there to repair and take in fresh water, of which they were then in great want.
Being all come aboard, they consider where to get provisions, especially flesh, seeing they scarce eat anything else; and of this the most common sort is pork; the next food is tortoises, which they salt a little: sometimes they rob such or such hog-yards, where the Spaniards often have a thousand head of swine together.
The pirates knowing these seasons (being very diligent in their inquiries) always cruise between the places above-mentioned; but in case they light on no considerable booty, they commonly undertake some more hazardous enterprises: one remarkable instance of which I shall here give you.
First, therefore, they mention how much the captain is to have for his ship; next, the salary of the carpenter, or shipwright, who careened, mended, and rigged the vessel: this commonly amounts to one hundred or one hundred and fifty pieces of eight, according to the agreement.
Those of the city next day made diligent search for him in the woods, where they concluded him to be.
They refresh themselves at one island or another, but especially at those on the south of Cuba; here they careen their vessels, while some hunt, and others cruise in canoes for prizes.
A certain pirate of Portugal, thence called Bartholomew Portugues, was cruising in a boat of thirty men and four small guns from Jamaica, upon the Cape de Corriente in Cuba, where he met a great ship from Maracaibo and Carthagena, bound for the Havannah, well provided with twenty great guns and seventy men, passengers and mariners; this ship he presently assaulted, which they on board as resolutely defended.
From the bottom of the sea I saw them take up an anchor of six hundredweight, tying a cable to it with great dexterity, and pulling it from a rock.
Their arms are made of wood, without any iron point; but some instead thereof use a crocodile's tooth.
Our pirates therefore had many canoes of the Indians in the isle of Sambale, five leagues from the coasts of Jucatan.
They had good provision of Spanish wheat, bananas, racoven, and other things; with the wheat they made bread, and baked it in portable ovens, brought with them.
These, because they were now considerably strengthened, to effect with greater satisfaction their designs. Hereupon, as soon as they were arrived at Gracias a Dios, they all put themselves into canoes, and entered the river, being five hundred men, leaving only five or six persons in each ship to keep them.
The ship being taken, they found not in her what they thought, being already almost unladen.
They brought away some of the inhabitants as prisoners, with all they had, which was of no great importance, by reason of the poverty of the place, which exerciseth no other trade than working in the mines, where some of the inhabitants constantly attend, while none seek for gold, but only slaves.
One of his companions gave me an exact account of this tragedy, affirming that himself had escaped the same punishment with the greatest difficulty; he believed also that many of his comrades, who were taken in that encounter by those Indians, were, as their cruel captain, torn in pieces and burnt alive.
Through this sea no vessels can pass, unless very small, it being too shallow.
Hither Lolonois came (brought by his evil conscience that cried for punishment), thinking to act his cruelties; but the Indians within a few days after his arrival took him prisoner, and tore him in pieces alive, throwing his body limb by limb into the fire, and his ashes into the air, that no trace or memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature.
In the lands that are surrounded by this sea, is found much Campechy wood, and other things that serve for dyeing, much esteemed in Europe, and would be more, if we had the skill of the Indians, who make a dye or tincture that never fades.
The nimble Frenchman escaped; but the Spaniard being not so swift, was taken and heard of no more.
Here is great quantity of amber, but especially when any storm arises from towards the east; whence the waves bring many things, and very different.
This fellow came from Jamaica, with intent to land at Gracias a Dios, and from thence to enter the river with his canoes, and take the city of Carthagena.
Brasiliano, perceiving their imminent danger, encouraged his companions, telling them they were better soldiers, and ought rather to die under their arms fighting, as it became men of courage, than surrender to the Spaniards, who would take away their lives with the utmost torments.
His intent was to rob the churches, and rifle the houses of the chief citizens of Nicaragua.
The fight continued for an hour, till at last the Spaniards were put to flight.
But no sooner had they weighed anchor, when they saw a troop of about five hundred Spaniards, all well armed, at the sea-side: against these they let fly several guns, wherewith they forced them to quit the sands, and retire, with no small regret to see these pirates carry away so much plate of their churches and houses, though distant at least forty leagues from the sea.
Nor less considerable are the actions of another pirate who now lives at Jamaica, who on several occasions has performed very surprising things. He was born at Groninghen in the United Provinces.
My own master would buy sometimes a pipe of wine, and, placing it in the street, would force those that passed by to drink with him, threatening also to pistol them if they would not.
He would do the like with barrels of beer or ale; and very often he would throw these liquors about the streets, and wet peoples' clothes without regarding whether he spoiled their apparel.
Nor did they spare the churches and most sacred things; all of which were pillaged and profaned, without any respect or veneration.
These, believing them to be friends, opened the doors; and the pirates, suddenly possessing themselves of the houses, stole all the money and plate they could find.
Having given notice to their companions, they boarded them, and also took the little man-of-war, their convoy.
Such of these pirates will spend two or three thousand pieces of eight in a night, not leaving themselves a good shirt to wear in the morning.
He went first ashore, and instantly killed the sentinel: this done, they entered the city, and went directly to three or four houses of the chief citizens, where they knocked softly.
They stripped the dead, and took from them what was most for their use; such as were also not quite dead they dispatched with the ends of their muskets.
In taverns and alehouses they have great credit; but at Jamaica they ought not to run very deep in debt, seeing the inhabitants there easily sell one another for debt.
They got in this voyage, all together, five hundred pieces of eight; so that they tarried not long there after their arrival.
Of these he commanded several to be roasted alive on wooden spits, for not showing him hog-yards where he might steal swine.
This happened to my patron, to be sold for a debt of a tavern wherein he had spent the greatest part of his money.
The pirates were but thirty; yet, seeing their brave commander oppose the enemy with such courage, resolved to do the like: hereupon they faced the troop of Spaniards, and discharged their muskets on them so dextrously, that they killed one horseman almost with every shot.
He began his new command by directing his fleet to the north of Cuba, there to wait for the fleet from New Spain; but missing his design, they determined for Florida.
To the Spaniards he was always very barbarous and cruel, out of an inveterate hatred against that nation.
Being arrived at the city the third night, the sentinel, who kept the post of the river, thought them to be fishermen that had been fishing in the lake: and most of the pirates understanding Spanish, he doubted not, as soon as he heard them speak. They had in their company an Indian who had run away from his master, who would have enslaved him unjustly.
Providing themselves with necessaries, they returned to Jamaica, from whence they set forth again to sea, committing greater robberies and cruelties than before; but especially abusing the poor Spaniards, who fell into their hands, with all sorts of cruelty.
But the bold attempts and actions of John Davis, born at Jamaica, ought not to be forgotten, being some of the most remarkable; especially his rare prudence and valour showed in the fore-mentioned kingdom of Granada.
But neither was this of any service; for the pirates, finding few ships at sea, began to gather into companies, and to land on their dominions, ruining cities, towns, and villages; pillaging, burning, and carrying away as much as they could.
This pirate, having long cruised in the Gulf of Pocatauro, on the ships expected to Carthagena, bound for Nicaragua, and not meeting any of them, resolved at last to land in Nicaragua, leaving his ship hid on the coast.
Being thus masters of this fleet, they wanted only provisions, of which they found little aboard those vessels: but this defect was supplied by the horses, which they killed, and salted with salt, which by good fortune the wood-cutters had brought with them, with which they supported themselves till they could get better.
Thus they got to their ship, and with all speed put to sea, forcing the prisoners, before they let them go, to procure them as much flesh as was necessary for their voyage to Jamaica.
One day some of the mariners quarrelled with their captain to that degree, that they left the boat. Brasiliano following them, was chosen their leader, who having fitted out a small vessel, they made him captain.
Having vanquished the enemy, they mounted on horses they found in the field, and continued their journey; Brasiliano having lost but two of his companions in this bloody fight, and had two wounded.
John Lexman looked down.
Where could he go?
"Get out," said a voice.
The warder's step on the stones outside reduced them to silence. Suddenly his voice came up the stairs.
He clicked over a lever and with a roar the big three-bladed tractor screw spun.
Kara was by his side.
Then with a jerk the monoplane flattened out and came like a skimming bird to the surface of the water; her engines stopped.
"Forty-three," he called sharply, "I want you down here."
"He's coming out next month, too, and we are all fixed up proper.
We are going to get the pile and then we're off to South America, and you won't see us for dust."
He heard his warder's voice behind him.
He could see the feathery wake in her rear, and as the aeroplane fell he had time to observe that a boat had been put off.
They were desperate men, peculiarly interesting to him, and he had watched their faces furtively in the early period of his imprisonment.
"Right turn, 43, quick march."
John Lexman looked at him enviously.
"Where's the other man?" asked the warder, in a low voice.
Now it was going fast, now faster, now it rocked and swayed as it gathered speed.
John Lexman read:
Up, up, they climbed in one long sweeping ascent, passing through drifting clouds till the machine soared like a bird above the blue sea.
"If you cannot swim there is a life belt under your seat."
The drive in the brake to the station, the ride to London in creased, but comfortable clothing, free as the air, at liberty to go to bed and rise when he liked, to choose his own dinner, to answer no call save the call of his conscience, to see--he checked himself.
"He's upstairs in the back room."
"Hardly," said Lexman, drily.
"What have you got!"
Get down into the bottom and pull a sack over you, and do not get up until the car stops."
CHAPTER VI
The future meant Sunday chapel; the present whatever task they found him.
John took his paint pot and brush and went clattering down the uncarpeted stairs.
John Lexman--A.
They discovered your escape," he said. "Get in."
A white steam yacht, long and narrow of beam, was steaming slowly westward.
"But, I do not understand.
When that car comes abreast of the gate, ask no questions and jump into it.
The house was as yet without a tenant.
From time to time he consulted the compass on the board before him, and changed his course ever so slightly.
Coming up from Princetown was a big, grey car.
Kara was evidently a skilful pilot.
A day to him was the beginning and the end of an eternity.
At the foot there was a smooth stretch of green sward.
Talking was impossible.
It was usual to have twelve months at the Scrubbs before testing the life of a convict establishment.
Like an automaton John put down his brushes, and walked slowly to the gate.
"Conspiracy and fraud," said the other cheerfully.
"Put down your paint pot," he said.
"We ought to be able to keep afloat for ten minutes," said Kara, "and by that time they will pick us up."
He believed there was some talk of sending him to Parkhurst, and here he traced the influence which T. X. would exercise, for Parkhurst was a prisoner's paradise.
Damn rough luck, wasn't it?"
In less than five minutes the boat had come alongside, manned, as Lexman gathered from a glimpse of the crew, by Greeks.
"I am going upstairs.
"Here!
I know what happened--he used to let them have money for short financial transactions--to be refunded within a very brief space.
Mr. Falkiner Wraye, after cheating and deceiving Brake, and leaving him to pay the penalty of his over-trustfulness, cleared out of England and carried his money-making talents to foreign parts.
"Lots!" answered Bryce.
I went back--to the time when Braden was married.
"You'd never think it--it's a hundred feet deep--and more!
"You've got some limitation to it, I should think.
"Of the other--the man of lesser importance--Flood."
"When I left Glassdale--at noon," continued Bryce, "I'd no idea--and I don't think he had--that he was coming to see you.
"Had that put in," he continued, "and turned the top of the building into a little snuggery.
"I will!--it's deeply interesting.
"Aye, doctor," he said.
Ever since Braden was found at the foot of those stairs in Paradise, and I was fetched to him, I've interested myself.
"Good stuff, those."
"Oh!" he said after a pause.
But Bryce saw that his cool, almost indifferent manner was changing--he was beginning, under the surface, to get anxious.
He had to stand the racket.
"The name of the particular one was Wraye--Falkiner Wraye," replied Bryce promptly.
"What!" he exclaimed.
"Deepest well in all Wrychester under that," he remarked.
"Collishaw?"
"Never!
He was evidently thinking deeply, and Bryce made no attempt to disturb him.
Some minutes went by before Folliot took the cigar from his lips and leaning against the chimneypiece looked fixedly at his visitor.
Come up!"
Let's go where it's quiet."
"What might you know, now?" he asked after another pause.
But all that Glassdale knows is nothing--to what I know."
What is it?"
Look here!
"I came to tell you--on seeing that Glassdale had been with you.
He threw it away, took a fresh one from the box, and slowly struck a match and lighted it.
Bryce looked in the direction pointed out.
"That's about it," assented Folliot laconically.
A sharp exclamation from him took Bryce to his side.
"Private talk.
"The fact is--I came here to tell you so!--I know a good deal about everything."
He got to know--got into close touch with a Barthorpe man who, about the time of Brake's marriage, left Barthorpe end settled in London.
"You're a bit mistaken.
"Dear me!
"Then who had?" demanded Bryce.
Come, now!--whose?"
Bryce laughed cynically.
"Supposing that all you say is true about--about past matters?
Because--I was with Glassdale this morning."
What--"
"We've not come to that," retorted Bryce.
"Hell and--What's this mean?"
He stood it--to the tune of ten years' penal servitude.
"As if there must be!" interrupted Bryce.
"That's a fact?"
"It's for you.
"Tell June to come down here.
She's growed some--an' if she ain't purty, well I'd tell a man!
With this thought in his brain, he rode down from the luminous upper world of the moon and stars toward the nether world of drifting mists and black ravines.
"Go away!" she said, digging her fist into her eyes until her face was calm again.
"No, indeed, she ain't."
"Shore!
I'm a-gittin' too big."
Keep yo' mouth plum' shut about this here war.
He's too old fer her."
"I reckon you can," laughed Hale.
"I hate her," she said fiercely.
"Would--I like--to--go--over--"
"I reckon I will," she said with a happy smile.
Sarved you right fer blabbin' things that hain't yo' business." He shook with laughter.
Uncle Billy was bewildered.
"She ain't?"
Hale watched her while she munched a striped stick of peppermint.
Uncle Billy turned back from the gate to the porch.
They had reached the spot on the river where he had seen her first, and beyond, the smoke of the cabin was rising above the undergrowth.
Her teeth were even and white, and most of them flashed when her red lips smiled.
Straightway her face was a ray of sunlight.
Hale opened his eyes next morning on the little old woman in black, moving ghost-like through the dim interior to the kitchen.
Strive to find a plan by which we may speak as friend to friend, if you would have me live.
I purpose in this place to show you the story of Milon, and--since few words are best--I will set out the adventure as briefly as I may.
She took the bird kindly, and smoothing his head and neck, felt the letter that was hidden beneath its feathers.
Father and son kissed each other tenderly, with many comfortable words.
You will send messages with the babe--both in writing and by speech--that the little innocent is her sister's child.
He placed the ring in her hand, saying that he had done her will, as he was bidden to do.
She is a rich dame, pitiful and good, and is wedded to a lord of Northumberland.
He was a passing fair knight, open and brave, courteous to his friends, and stern to his foes.
With this baron dwelt his daughter, a passing fair and gracious damsel.
The varlet put the swan in his lady's hands.
I have seen much, and gone to and fro about the world.
One thing he determined, that he would cross the sea without delay, so that he might joust with the dansellon, and abate his pride.
The knight prayed her in his letter to send him an answer by means of the swan.
She approved his desire to quit the realm for the sake of his honour, and far from putting let and hindrance in his path, trusted that in the end he would bring again her son.
Folk told how a certain knight from beyond the Humber, who had passed the sea in quest of wealth and honour, had so done, that by reason of his prowess, his liberality, and his modesty, men called him the Knight Peerless, since they did not know his name.
Very comely showed the varlet, and much to Milon's mind.
Milon struck his adversary so fiercely, that the lance splintered in his gauntlet; but the young knight kept his seat without even losing a stirrup.
So great was his prowess that from the day he was dubbed knight there was no champion who could stand before him in the lists.
In hope and wish I purpose to cross the sea, and return to my own realm.
The servitors set forth, bearing the infant with them.
These having bestowed the boy in accordance with their lord's commandment, returned to their own land.
He got him swiftly from his horse, and taking the lad by the fringe of his hauberk, he cried, "Praise be to God, for now am I healed.
He rode to Southampton, that he might find a ship equipped for sea, and so came to Barfleur.
At that time a tournament was proclaimed to be held at Mont St. Michel.
The lady caused the swan to fast for three full days; then having concealed the message about his neck, let him take his flight.
XII
Milon rejoiced greatly when he knew this thing.
In you--he wrote--is all my pleasure, and in your white hands it lies to heal me or to slay.
They embarked in a propitious hour, for a fair wind carried the ship right swiftly to its haven.
They rode to their hostel, and with the knights of their fellowship, passed the hours in mirth and revelry.
The porter entered in the hall, where he found none but two lords seated at a great table, playing chess for their delight.
When the swan was proffered to the lady it pleased her to receive the gift.
He gave over the sealed writing with which he was charged, praying the knight to hasten to his friend without any tarrying, since her husband was in his grave.
They served their lord so faithfully, keeping such watch upon the way, that at the last they won to the lady to whom they were bidden.
Of their love and content the minstrel wrought this Lay.
Though this baron was a worthy knight, justly esteemed of all his fellows, the damsel was grieved beyond measure when she knew her father's will.
The child was then placed in his cradle, swathed close in white linen.
He opened out to her all his thought, and craved her permission to depart.
He considered within himself, saying to his own heart, that much should be required of his father's son, and that he would not be worthy of his blood if he did not endeavour to merit his name.
The lad struck so heavily, he thrust home so shrewdly, that Milon's hatred changed to envy as he watched.
"Friend," said he, "hearken to me.
Now in this tournament a knight could joust with that lord who was set over against him, or he could seek to break a lance with his chosen foe.
The swan is fit to serve at a royal table, for the bird is plump as he is fair."
Nevertheless, by reason of his skill with the spear, he was counted a very worshipful knight, and was honourably entreated by many a prince in divers lands.
This day I am overthrown by a boy, and yet I cannot help but love thee."
If this be done, perchance the orphan will not be fatherless all his days."
Since he was praised by the frank, he was therefore envied of the mean.
She held him for a month within her chamber, but this was less from choice, than for the craft that was necessary to obtain the ink and parchment requisite for her writing.
I am of Caerleon, and a fowler by craft.
They went therefore to the chamber of the lady.
There was no speech between them, save that carried by the bird.
He glanced from head to head of the letter, seeking the means that he hoped to find, and the salutation he so tenderly wished.
When they had parted the lady called a maiden to her aid. She broke the seal, and unfastening the letter, came upon the name of Milon at the head.
Whether it be a boy or girl his mother will have suffered much because of him, and for her sister's sake you will pray her to cherish the babe.
"Friend," said he, "hearken to me.
Their love was fair to see, and those who looked upon their meeting, wept for joy and pity.
His task was done long before sundown in chancing on the knight.
Milon caused his friend to know of his wishes.
He rejoiced greatly to hear of his father's prowess, and was proud beyond measure of his renown.
The old nurse who tended her mistress was privy to the damsel's inmost mind.
THE LAY OF MILON
He went by the nearest road, and passing through the streets of the city, came before the portal of the castle.
Milon observed him curiously.
Fair friend, by my faith thou art my very son, for whom I came forth from my own land, and have sought through all this realm."
But the Knight Peerless carried the cry from all his fellows, for none might stand before him, nor rival him in skill and address.
What he took from the rich he bestowed on such knights as were poor and luckless.
Milon sprang upon his steed.
"When the child is born," replied the lady, "you must carry him forthwith to my sister.
Milon rejoiced greatly when he marked his own.
At the end she wrote a letter according to her heart, and sealed it with her ring.
The varlet climbed from the saddle, and stood upon his feet.
"Sir," said he, "I pray you to get upon your horse.
"In faith, fair father, let us return to our own land.
He marvelled greatly that the stout spears of the past had not put on their harness and broken a lance for their ancient honour.
She kissed the name a hundred times through her tears.
He to whom the letter came, saw to it that the messenger was fed to heart's desire.
These loved him greatly, since he gained largely and spent freely, granting of his wealth to all.
So on the appointed day the lady was wedded to the baron, and her husband took her to dwell with him in his fief.
"Friend," replied the porter, "fowlers are not always welcomed of ladies.
He made him ready quickly, and went forth, bearing the swan with him.
She summoned a varlet of her household and gave the bird to his charge, commanding him to keep it safely, and to see that it ate enough and to spare.
Alas! there are so many great thoughts that do nothing more than the bellows: they inflate, and make emptier than ever.
XVII.
A self-rolling wheel?
Most of all, however, is the flying one hated.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Thou goest beyond them: but the higher thou risest, the smaller doth the eye of envy see thee.
Many a one hath cast away his final worth when he hath cast away his servitude.
Alas! there is so much lusting for loftiness!
But art thou capable of it--to be a murderer?
To many a one mayest thou not give thy hand, but only thy paw; and I wish thy paw also to have claws.
All isolation is wrong": so say the herd.
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way to thyself!
All is unholy to it that is not simple; fain, likewise, would it play with the fire--of the fagot and stake.
The voice of the herd will still echo in thee.
Be on thy guard, also, against holy simplicity!
There are feelings which seek to slay the lonesome one; if they do not succeed, then must they themselves die!
To create, desireth the loving one, because he despiseth!
And be on thy guard, also, against the assaults of thy love!
Show me that thou art not a lusting and ambitious one!
Terrible is aloneness with the judge and avenger of one's own law. Thus is a star projected into desert space, and into the icy breath of aloneness.
A heretic wilt thou be to thyself, and a wizard and a sooth-sayer, and a fool, and a doubter, and a reprobate, and a villain.
Thy ruling thought would I hear of, and not that thou hast escaped from a yoke.
Hast thou ever known, my brother, the word "disdain"?
And be on thy guard against the good and just!
Then show me thine authority and thy strength to do so!
Art thou a new strength and a new authority?
Art thou one ENTITLED to escape from a yoke?
Tarry yet a little and hearken unto me.
Free from what?
Thou forcest many to think differently about thee; that, charge they heavily to thine account.
But the worst enemy thou canst meet, wilt thou thyself always be; thou waylayest thyself in caverns and forests.
"He who seeketh may easily get lost himself.
A first motion?
There are so many convulsions of the ambitions!
Free, dost thou call thyself?
I love him who seeketh to create beyond himself, and thus succumbeth.--
What knoweth he of love who hath not been obliged to despise just what he loved!
And when thou sayest, "I have no longer a conscience in common with you," then will it be a plaint and a pain.
Canst thou also compel stars to revolve around thee?
And the anguish of thy justice in being just to those that disdain thee?
Thou camest nigh unto them, and yet wentest past: for that they never forgive thee.
Lo, that pain itself did the same conscience produce; and the last gleam of that conscience still gloweth on thine affliction.
Too readily doth the recluse reach his hand to any one who meeteth him.
Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?
They would fain crucify those who devise their own virtue--they hate the lonesome ones.
Injustice and filth cast they at the lonesome one: but, my brother, if thou wouldst be a star, thou must shine for them none the less on that account!
Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way of the creating one: a God wilt thou create for thyself out of thy seven devils!
Canst thou give unto thyself thy bad and thy good, and set up thy will as a law over thee?
Canst thou be judge for thyself, and avenger of thy law?
And past thyself and thy seven devils leadeth thy way!
And long didst thou belong to the herd.
With my tears, go into thine isolation, my brother.
"How could ye be just unto me!"--must thou say--"I choose your injustice as my allotted portion."
The case is the same with the probability of causes, as with that of chance.
Though we give the preference to that which has been found most usual, and believe that this effect will exist, we must not overlook the other effects, but must assign to each of them a particular weight and authority, in proportion as we have found it to be more or less frequent.
Here then it seems evident, that, when we transfer the past to the future, in order to determine the effect, which will result from any cause, we transfer all the different events, in the same proportion as they have appeared in the past, and conceive one to have existed a hundred times, for instance, another ten times, and another once.
The concurrence of these several views or glimpses imprints the idea more strongly on the imagination; gives it superior force and vigour; renders its influence on the passions and affections more sensible; and in a word, begets that reliance or security, which constitutes the nature of belief and opinion.
Let any one try to account for this operation of the mind upon any of the received systems of philosophy, and he will be sensible of the difficulty.
It seems evident, that, when the mind looks forward to discover the event, which may result from the throw of such a dye, it considers the turning up of each particular side as alike probable; and this is the very nature of chance, to render all the particular events, comprehended in it, entirely equal.
If we allow, that belief is nothing but a firmer and stronger conception of an object than what attends the mere fictions of the imagination, this operation may, perhaps, in some measure, be accounted for.
There are some causes, which are entirely uniform and constant in producing a particular effect; and no instance has ever yet been found of any failure or irregularity in their operation.
Has not the same custom the same influence on all?
Is it not experience, which renders a dog apprehensive of pain, when you menace him, or lift up the whip to beat him?
When we reason from analogies, the man, who has the greater experience or the greater promptitude of suggesting analogies, will be the better reasoner.
Where there is a complication of causes to produce any effect, one mind may be much larger than another, and better able to comprehend the whole system of objects, and to infer justly their consequences.
By means of this general habitual principle, we regard even one experiment as the foundation of reasoning, and expect a similar event with some degree of certainty, where the experiment has been made accurately, and free from all foreign circumstances.
A horse, that has been accustomed to the field, becomes acquainted with the proper height which he can leap, and will never attempt what exceeds his force and ability.
These we denominate Instincts, and are so apt to admire as something very extraordinary, and inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding.
The forming of general maxims from particular observation is a very nice operation; and nothing is more usual, from haste or a narrowness of mind, which sees not on all sides, than to commit mistakes in this particular.
After we have acquired a confidence in human testimony, books and conversation enlarge much more the sphere of one man's experience and thought than those of another.
Few men can think long without running into a confusion of ideas, and mistaking one for another; and there are various degrees of this infirmity.
But where the objects have not so exact a similarity, the analogy is less perfect, and the inference is less conclusive; though still it has some force, in proportion to the degree of similarity and resemblance.
One man is able to carry on a chain of consequences to a greater length than another.
Is it not even experience, which makes him answer to his name, and infer, from such an arbitrary sound, that you mean him rather than any of his fellows, and intend to call him, when you pronounce it in a certain manner, and with a certain tone and accent?
The separation of it often requires great attention, accuracy, and subtilty.
When we have lived any time, and have been accustomed to the uniformity of nature, we acquire a general habit, by which we always transfer the known to the unknown, and conceive the latter to resemble the former.
It would be easy to discover many other circumstances that make a difference in the understandings of men.
The circumstance, on which the effect depends, is frequently involved in other circumstances, which are foreign and extrinsic.
We shall make trial of this, with regard to the hypothesis, by which we have, in the foregoing discourse, endeavoured to account for all experimental reasonings; and it is hoped, that this new point of view will serve to confirm all our former observations.
It is therefore considered as a matter of great importance to observe the consequences of things; and as one man may very much surpass another in attention and memory and observation, this will make a very great difference in their reasoning.
We shall here endeavour briefly to explain the great difference in human understandings: After which the reason of the difference between men and animals will easily be comprehended.
The ignorance and inexperience of the young are here plainly distinguishable from the cunning and sagacity of the old, who have learned, by long observation, to avoid what hurt them, and to pursue what gave ease or pleasure.
An old greyhound will trust the more fatiguing part of the chace to the younger, and will place himself so as to meet the hare in her doubles; nor are the conjectures, which he forms on this occasion, founded in any thing but his observation and experience.
For if there be in reality any arguments of this nature, they surely lie too abstruse for the observation of such imperfect understandings; since it may well employ the utmost care and attention of a philosophic genius to discover and observe them.
Where the causes are entirely similar, the analogy is perfect, and the inference, drawn from it, is regarded as certain and conclusive: nor does any man ever entertain a doubt, where he sees a piece of iron, that it will have weight and cohesion of parts; as in all other instances, which have ever fallen under his observation.
All our reasonings concerning matter of fact are founded on a species of Analogy, which leads us to expect from any cause the same events, which we have observed to result from similar causes.
I'll talk to you.' He was, however, at last prevailed on to dictate to me, while I wrote as follows:--
'I am glad if you got credit by your cause, and am yet of opinion, that our cause was good, and that the determination ought to have been in your favour.
He said, 'Walpole was a minister given by the King to the people: Pitt was a minister given by the people to the King,--as an adjunct.'
'I therefore return to my original position, that a law, to have its effect, must be permanent and stable.
The degrees of scholastick, as of military punishment, no stated rules can ascertain. It must be enforced till it overpowers temptation; till stubbornness becomes flexible, and perverseness regular.
Some think Swift's the best; others prefer a fuller and grander way of writing.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, you must first define what you mean by style, before you can judge who has a good taste in style, and who has a bad.
Dr. Johnson said, 'the cards used by such persons must be less polished than ours commonly are.'
No scholar has gone from him either blind or lame, or with any of his limbs or powers injured or impaired. They were irregular, and he punished them: they were obstinate, and he enforced his punishment.
'The charge is, that he has used immoderate and cruel correction. Correction, in itself, is not cruel; children, being not reasonable, can be governed only by fear.
If the duty enjoined by the law were of difficult performance, omission, though it could not be justified, might be pitied.
What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life?
He that intromits, is criminal; he that intromits not, is innocent.
When I came, I found him unwilling to exert himself. I pressed him to write down his thoughts upon the subject.
If temptation were rare, a penal law might be deemed unnecessary.
JOHNSON.
We talked of sounds.
He said, 'There's no occasion for my writing.
Its end is the security of property; and property very often of great value.
JOHNSON.
Of this accusation the meaning is not very easy to be found. No instrument of correction is more proper than another, but as it is better adapted to produce present pain without lasting mischief. Whatever were his instruments, no lasting mischief has ensued; and therefore, however unusual, in hands so cautious they were proper.
I expressed a liking for Mr. Francis Osborne's works, and asked him what he thought of that writer.
In a place like Campbelltown, it is easy for one of the principal inhabitants to make a party.
If the authours who apply to me have money, I bid them boldly print without a name; if they have written in order to get money, I tell them to go to the booksellers, and make the best bargain they can.' BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, if a bookseller should bring you a manuscript to look at?' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, I would desire the bookseller to take it away.'
'DEAR SIR,
BOSWELL.
Yet, as good things become evil by excess, correction, by being immoderate, may become cruel.
'To permit a law to be modified at discretion, is to leave the community without law.
It has been said, that he used unprecedented and improper instruments of correction.
JOHNSON.
It is necessary that the law should be adequate to its end; that, if it be observed, it shall prevent the evil against which it is directed.
The law is the measure of civil right; but if the measure be changeable, the extent of the thing measured never can be settled.
For such an institution makes a very important part of the history of mankind.
He answered, 'A conceited fellow.
To permit Intromission, and to punish fraud, is to make law no better than a pitfall.
'Sir, he is attached to some woman.' BOSWELL. 'I rather believe, Sir, it is the fine climate which keeps him there.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, how can you talk so?
Correction must be proportioned to occasions.
A stubborn scholar must be corrected till he is subdued.
At their evening meal, the water was strictly measured out, and the brandy was increased in quantity in the punch they drank.
Where he goes, there I'll go!"
He kept entirely silent, and gazed incessantly upon the stony fragments heaped up in the car--worthless to-day, but of inestimable value to-morrow.
It took six thousand years to invent propellers and screws; so we have time enough yet."
"You don't regret, though, what you did, doctor?"
This circumstance gave the doctor some hope, since it recalled to his mind the conjectures of geographers concerning the existence of a vast stretch of water in the centre of Africa.
Ferguson's Anxieties.--The Situation flatly stated.--Energetic Replies of Kennedy and Joe.--One Night more.
Barely a few dwarf plants could now be noticed, like those on the wild heaths of Scotland; then came the first tract of grayish sand and flint, with here and there a lentisk tree and brambles.
"Here, at last, is Africa, such as you pictured it to yourself, Joe!
It was the Desert!
However, there was no going back; they must go forward; and, indeed, the doctor asked for nothing better; he would even have welcomed a tempest to carry him beyond this country.
So onward, then! you may count upon us!"
"Let us wait with resignation," said the hunter.
"The savage wretches!" exclaimed Joe, trembling with indignation. "Suppose they should kill him to-night!"
As usual, he took the nine-o'clock watch, and at midnight Dick relieved him.
"Undoubtedly, that supernatural cry, 'A moi! a moi!' comes from a Frenchman in the hands of these barbarians!"
"Very good!"
"Let us speak below our breath."
"But let us act at once!" said the hunter.
Joe gently brought his rifle to his shoulder as he spoke.
Joe will see to throwing out the ballast, and Dick will carry off the prisoner; but let nothing be done until I give the word.
"But, think of that poor wretch, hoping for aid, waiting there, praying, calling aloud.
"Why so?" asked Kennedy.
The sacks were placed as requested, and the arms were put in good order.
"A missionary, perhaps."
"Agreed!"
"The poor captive cannot be far off," said Joe, "because--"
I am acting for the common good; and if by any accident you should be taken by surprise, all would be lost."
A terrific howl from the savages responded to these words--no doubt drowning the prisoner's reply.
"And how would you get him to know that?"
"Did you hear that?" the doctor asked them.
"Now, if I were to take advantage of the darkness to slip down to the poor fellow?" said Kennedy.
"Fire!"
"How do you expect to manage the balloon?" asked Kennedy.
Take care to have all our weapons close at hand.
"Yes, let us waken Joe."
Three friends are watching over you."
"Help! help!"
"They are, doctor, and we are ready to obey you."
"Dick, I implore you, heed what I say.
"Do you hear, doctor," resumed Kennedy, seizing the doctor's hand. "Suppose they should kill him to-night!"
Strange Sounds.--A Night Attack.--Kennedy and Joe in the Tree.--Two Shots.--"Help! help!"--Reply in French.--The Morning.--The Missionary.--The Plan of Rescue.
"Has any thing happened?"
"It's quite clear to me, from the way in which they made off, that they are unacquainted with fire-arms.
The doctor kept silent for a few moments; he was thinking.
"Yes, and it's coming nearer."
"Let us go down, then!" said Joe.
"Your plans are impracticable, my dear friends.
"That's plain enough."
"We can reassure him, on that score," said Dr. Ferguson--and, standing erect, making a speaking-trumpet of his hands, he shouted at the top of his voice, in French: "Whoever you are, be of good cheer!
"Keep a sharp lookout, Dick!" was the doctor's good-night injunction.
"Is there any thing new on the carpet?"
"Very good!" said the doctor.
"Don't you hear that?" he whispered.
Ferguson at last resumed:
The night came on very dark.
But, in the midst of these yells and howls, a strange, unexpected--nay what seemed an impossible--cry had been heard!
"I, master?
"Perhaps we may," said the doctor, throwing considerable stress upon the words.
"Oh!" ejaculated the astonished friends.
"Wait!" said Kennedy.
Are you ready?"
We must, therefore, profit by their fears; but we shall await daylight before acting, and then we can form our plans of rescue according to circumstances."
"Attention!" said Kennedy.
"I'll do so, doctor; rest easy."
Well, then, in throwing out this overplus of ballast at a given moment, I am certain to rise with great rapidity."
"It hides our preparations, and will be dispersed only when they are finished.
Now, the gas is precious; but we must not haggle over it when the life of a fellow-creature is at stake."
"Keep watch on this side, and I'll take care of the other."
"Help! help!" repeated the voice, but much more feebly this time.
"Let us, then, lay our heads together to devise some plan, and in the morning we'll try to rescue him."
We must act!"
"But this darkness?"
"It is not at all likely, my friends.
"Let us work, then, and get these bags all arranged on the rim of the car, so that they may be thrown overboard at one movement."
"The blacks!
"Nothing more simple, doctor," said Kennedy.
Was that the cry of an animal or of a night-bird, or did it come from human lips?
He then took out the two perfectly-isolated conducting-wires, which served for the decomposition of the water, and, searching in his travelling-sack, brought forth two pieces of charcoal, cut down to a sharp point, and fixed one at the end of each wire.
why, I'd act more prudently, maybe, by telling the prisoner to make his escape in a certain direction that we'd agree upon."
"Suppose it should be a serpent?
No! we must put ALL the chances on OUR side, and go to work differently."
"Pause, my friends--pause!
These savage tribes kill their captives in broad daylight; they must have the sunshine."
"This is the idea, Dick: you will admit that if I can get to the prisoner, and throw out a quantity of ballast, equal to his weight, I shall have in nowise altered the equilibrium of the balloon.
"Oh, he's just the lad to get safely out of the scrape, I repeat.
He found that there were still left some thirty pounds of pemmican, a supply of tea and coffee, about a gallon and a half of brandy, and one empty water-tank.
All the dried meat had disappeared.
"We must absolutely come to a halt," said he, "and even alight.
One horrible thought glanced across the minds of both Kennedy and the doctor: caymans swarm in these waters!
"Perhaps Joe is not lost after all," he said.
Speak!"
The dilating apparatus appeared to be in good condition, and neither the battery nor the spiral had been injured.
"At the first streak of day, the doctor aroused Kennedy.
We cannot be far away from the scene of our accident."
"I hope so.
"Let us set out, then!" said the hunter.
On the other side of the street a mother and her little boy were passing at the time.
Miss Terry tossed the poor jumping-jack on the fire, and eyed his last contortions with grim satisfaction.
"One would think they had something really important on hand.
Then closing the window and turning down the lights in the room behind her, Miss Terry hid in the folds of the curtain and watched to see what would happen to Jack.
I am glad I am out of it.
She tapped the floor impatiently with her slipper.
"Yes, go along," assented her mistress ungraciously.
I suppose some folks would try to give them away, and bore a lot of people to death.
A bit of paper there was crumbling into ashes. Alone on Christmas Eve!
CHAPTER IV
The soft, unusual glow threw into relief the pretty curtains and wreaths of green, and gave glimpses of cosy interiors and flitting happy figures.
Just then a woman approached.
A time for shopkeepers to sell and for foolish folks to kill themselves in buying.
"I knew that fellow was a brute.
Miss Terry herself was surprised to feel a pang shoot through her as the car passed over the queer old toy.
Fiddlestick!"
Then she raised the cover.
With envious curiosity she hurried up to see what a luckier mortal had found, crowding to look over her shoulder.
"What a waste of candles!" scolded Miss Terry.
"They really wanted it, that old Noah's ark!" exclaimed Miss Terry in amazement.
"I told you so!" commented Miss Terry from behind the curtain.
"They had much better be at home in bed.
Even Norah could feel a simple childish pleasure in candles and carols and merriment, and the old, old superstition.
"Stuff and nonsense!" mused Miss Terry scornfully.
A long flight of steps, with iron railing at the side, led down from the front door, upon which a silver plate had for generations in decorous flourishes announced the name of Terry.
"There, that's all. You can go now, Norah," she said.
Humph!
'I guess I'm going to be an expressman when I grow up,' he said, looking sorry.
"Tom was continually frightening me with it, I remember." As if to be rid of unwelcome memories she shut her mouth tight, even as she shut Jack back into his box, snapping the spring into place.
The baby across the street uttered a howl of anguish at the sight.
The street was quiet.
It is all foolishness, this craze for giving. Most things are better destroyed as soon as you are done with them.
"I can scarcely believe it.
A man hastened by under the window; a woman; two children, a boy and a girl, running and gesticulating eagerly.
Just then up came a second woman with two small boys hanging at her skirts. They were ragged and sick-looking.
In one corner thrust up a doll's arm; in another, an animal's tail pointed heavenward.
It was a box full of children's battered toys, old-fashioned and quaint; the toys in vogue thirty--forty--fifty years earlier, when Miss Terry was a child.
"I know there isn't a child in the city who wants such a looking thing.
She was famous for eccentric ideas.
Why think of Tom to-night?
It's mine!" asserted the other, edging away along the curbstone.
Tom was always full of his jokes.
Well, no one can say that I have added to the shameful waste."
Who would think to find such a bit of frivolity in the house of Miss Terry!
Only because she found they cared for it.
Then with something like a chuckle she drew out a soft, pale creature with four wobbly legs.
At the sound of footsteps along the hall Miss Terry looked up from the letter which she was reading for the sixth time.
He was dirty and discolored, and his tail was gone.
"Well, I believe so," snapped Miss Terry, who seemed to be in a particularly bad humor this evening.
Then, with a savage gesture at the two children, she disappeared beyond Miss Terry's straining eyes.
I've long threatened to get rid of the stuff that has been accumulating in that corner of the attic.
They were nearly all hurrying in one direction.
No!
Now I'll try this and see what happens to the ark on its last voyage."
"Idiotic!
CHAPTER II
"No ragamuffin this time," she said.
"They seem like Juggernaut. I'd like to forbid their going through this street."
It was too late to appease her.
Just then an automobile came panting through the snow.
Moreover she was young and warm and enthusiastic.
Just then there was a noise outside.
Years ago he had deliberately cut himself adrift from her interests.
She pointed to the Noah's ark, then to her two children.
CHAPTER I
She hesitated.
Once, twice, she turned and shook her head at the ragged woman who followed her.
But here were all these toys to be got rid of.
"Cop!" said a muffled voice from the pile of arms and legs, and in an instant two black shadows were flitting down the street; but not before the bigger boy had wrenched the box from the pocket of the little chap.
"Certainly not!"
There was a great deal in that "humph." It meant: Yes, Tom's name had plenty of room, while poor little Angelina had to squeeze in as well as she could.
It is all humbug,--all selfishness, and worry; an unwholesome season of unnatural activities.
Well, it was what she wanted.
THE PLAY BOX
It was so this Christmas Eve; but she made her request with apparent calmness.
There was something about the expression of even the tiny knot of hair at the back of the woman's head which told of anxious poverty.
A bump on the library door, as from an opposing knee, did duty for a knock.
One of them was a mere shapeless rag hanging by a thread.
If she had wished--
"Thank you, 'm," said the servant demurely, but with a brightening of her blue eyes.
It is that good-for-nothing young Cooper fellow from the next block.
Then he poked the object with his stick.
Some were running in the middle of the street.
Few persons passed on either side.
She retreated from the window quickly.
But still he smiled with his red-thread mouth and seemed trying to make the best of things.
The fact that it affected the sections differently was due to physical causes--that is, geographical differences.
These good intentions, if it be conceded that the danger was real which it was designed to avert, were most unfortunate as the beginning of a policy the end of which was fraught with the greatest evils that have ever befallen the Union.
In the Articles of Confederation, the first Constitution of the United States, the theory was that of direct taxation, and the manner was to impose upon the States an amount which each was to furnish to the common Treasury to defray expenses for the common defense and general welfare.
When duties were imposed, not for revenue, but as a bounty to a particular industry, it was regarded both as unjust and without warrant, expressed or implied, in the Constitution.
Before an actual collision of arms occurred, Congress wisely adopted the compromise act of 1833.
In the law there was nothing which necessarily gave to it or in its terms violated the obligation that duties should be uniform throughout the United States.
From this it followed that legislation for the benefit of manufacturers became a Northern policy.
In the decline of the Roman Empire, the epoch in which the hopelessness of renovation was made manifest was that in which the people accepted corn from the public granaries: it preceded but a little the time when the post of emperor became a matter of purchase.
It was not the stamp duty nor the tea-tax, but the principle involved in taxation without representation, against which our colonial fathers took up arms.
Water-power being relied on before the steam-engine had been made, and ships the medium of commerce before railroads and locomotives were introduced, it followed that the staples of the Southern plains were economically sent to the water-power of the North to be manufactured.
In the Convention which framed the Constitution for a "more perfect Union," one of the greatest difficulties in agreeing upon its terms was found in the different interests of the States, but, among the compromises which were made, there prominently appears the purpose of a strict equality in the burdens to be borne, as well as the blessings to be enjoyed, by the people of the several States.
It was not, as has been erroneously stated, because of the agricultural character of the Southern people, that they were opposed to the policy inaugurated by the tariff act of 1816.
For a long time after the formation of the "more perfect Union," but little capital was invested in manufacturing establishments; and, though in the early part of the present century the amount had considerably increased, the products were yet quite insufficient for the necessary supplies of our armies in the War of 1812.
It was not found that the possession of power mitigated the injustice of its use by the North, and discontent therefore was steadily accumulating, and, as stated in the beginning of this chapter, I think was due to class legislation in the form of protective duties and its consequences more than to any or all other causes combined.
I do not deny the existence of other causes, such as the fertile region of the Northwest, the better harbors, the greater amount of shipping of the Northeastern States, and the prejudice of Europeans against contact with the negro race; but the causes I have first stated were, I think, the chief, and those only which are referable to the action of the General Government.
In the train of wealth and demand for labor followed immigration and the more rapid increase of population in the Northern than in the Southern States.
If the common Treasury of the States had, as under the Confederation, been supplied by direct taxation, who can doubt that a rigid economy would have been the rule of the Government; that representatives would have returned to their tax-paying constituents to justify appropriations for which they had voted by showing that they were required for the general welfare, and were authorized by the Constitution under which they were acting?
The streams of the Southern Atlantic States ran over wide plains into the sea; their last falls were remote from ocean navigation; and their people, almost exclusively agricultural, resided principally on this plain, and as near to the seaboard as circumstances would permit.
For the first time a tariff law had protection for its object, and for the first time it produced discontent.
South Carolina, oppressed by onerous duties and stung by the injustice of a refusal to allow her the ordinary remedy against unconstitutional legislation, asserted the right, as a sovereign State, to nullify the law.
The law derived much of its support from the assurance that it was only a temporary measure, and intended to shield those whose patriotism had exposed them to danger, thus presenting the not uncommon occurrence of a good case making a bad precedent.
During the period of our colonial existence, the policy of the British Government had been to suppress the growth of manufacturing industry.
Nothing could be more fatal to the independence of the people and the liberties of the States than dependence for support upon the public Treasury, whether it be in the form of subsidies, of bounties, or restrictions on trade for the benefit of special interests.
This is shown by the fact that anterior to that time they had been the friends of manufacturing industry, without reference to its location.
So the tariff act in 1828, known at the time as "the bill of abominations," was resisted by Southern representatives, because it was the invasion of private rights in violation of the compact by which the States were united.
When the money was obtained by indirect taxation, so that but few could see the source from which it was derived, it readily followed that a constituency would ask, not why the representative had voted for the expenditure of money, but how much he had got for his own district, and perhaps he might have to explain why he did not get more.
Not so with the tariff law of 1816: though sustained by men from all sections of the Union, and notably by so strict a constructionist as Mr. Calhoun, there were not wanting those who saw in it a departure from the limitation of the Constitution, and sternly opposed it as the usurpation of a power to legislate for the benefit of a class.
We should not omit to refer once more to the most prolific source of sectional strife and alienation, which is believed to have been the question of the tariff, or duties upon imports.
Those who had passed the bill refused to allow the opportunity to test the validity of a tax imposed for the protection of a particular industry.
Though the debates showed clearly enough the purpose to be to impose duties for protection, the phraseology of the law presented it as enacted to raise revenue, and therefore the victims of the discrimination were deprived of an appeal to the tribunal instituted to hear and decide on the constitutionality of a law.
Government contracts, high prices, and to some extent, no doubt, patriotic impulses, led to the investment of capital in the articles required for the prosecution of the war.
As long as duties were imposed for revenue, so that the object was to supply the common Treasury, it had been cheerfully borne, and the agriculture of one section and the manufacturing of another were properly regarded as handmaids, and not unfrequently referred to as the means of strengthening and perpetuating the bonds by which the States were united.
This remark, of course, applies to such articles as were not exported to foreign countries, and is intended to explain how the North became the seat of manufactures, and the South remained agricultural.
Is it doubtful that this would lead to extravagance, if not to corruption?
Then arose the controversy, quadrennially renewed and with increasing provocation, in 1820, in 1824, and in 1828--each stage intensifying the discontent, arising more from the injustice than the weight of the burden borne.
Turning from the consideration of this question in its sectional aspect, I now invite attention to its general effect upon the character of our institutions.
In the Northern Atlantic States the highlands approached more nearly to the sea, and the rivers made their last leap near to harbors of commerce.
Its influence extended to and affected subjects with which it was not visibly connected, and finally assumed a form surely not contemplated in the original formation of the Union.
The Congress of the United States, in 1816, from motives at least to be commended for their generosity, enacted a law to protect from the threatened ruin those of their countrymen who had employed their capital for purposes demanded by the general welfare and common defense.
Now that fanaticism can no longer inflame the prejudices of the uninformed, it may be hoped that our statesmen will review the past, and give to our country a future in accordance with its early history, and promotive of true liberty.
As the Southern representatives were mainly those who denied the constitutional power to make such expenditures, it naturally resulted that the mass of those appropriations were made for Northern works.
Now that direct taxes had in practice been so wholly abandoned as to be almost an obsolete idea, and now that the Treasury was supplied by the collection of duties upon imports, two golden streams flowed steadily to enrich the Northern and manufacturing region by the impoverishment of the Southern and agricultural section.
Men do not fight to make a fraternal union, neither do nations.
To such fiction was Mr. Lincoln compelled to resort to give even apparent justice to his cause.
Nothing could be more erroneous than such views.
Such must be the verdict of mankind.
A new union might subsequently be formed, but the original one could never by coercion be restored.
It was early seen that, although acts of Congress established ports of entry where commerce existed, they might be repealed, and the ports nominally closed or declared to be closed; yet such a declaration would be of no avail unless sustained by a naval force, as these ports were located in territory not subject to the United States.
Neither is it a "government of the people by the same people"; but it is known and designated as "the Government of the United States." It is an anomaly among governments.
The Convention assembled on December 17th, and on the 20th passed "an ordinance to dissolve the union between the State of South Carolina and other States united with her under the compact entitled 'The Constitution of the United States of America.'" The ordinance began with these words: "We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain," etc.
This we will, we must, resist to the direst extremity.
This is the ground upon which the rectitude of his cause was placed.
All were in favor of secession.
Though President Lincoln designated her as a "combination," it did not make her a combination.
This is decided to be justifiable.
This property thus destroyed had been accumulated and constructed with laborious care and skillful ingenuity during a course of years to fulfill one of the objects of the Constitution, which was expressed in these words, "To provide for the common defense" (see Preamble of the Constitution).
Finally, that the intent of the President of the United States, already developed, to invade our soil, capture our forts, blockade our ports, and wage war against us, rendered it necessary to raise means to a much larger amount than had been done, to defray the expenses of maintaining independence and repelling invasion.
The Government of the United States is like no other government.
"Here," he says, "no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government." For what purpose must he call out this war power?
Whichever of them denies it and seeks to retire, is declared to be guilty of insurrection, its citizens are stigmatized as "rebels," as if they had revolted against a master, and a war of subjugation is begun.
It is a plain declaration of war, which I am not at liberty to disregard, because of my knowledge that, under the Constitution of the United States, the President is usurping a power granted exclusively to Congress."
But we had not got as far as that yet.
In his place I should have done what he did.
But for you we might never have known Madame Fontaine."
Half an hour since we tried the second.
Can you guess what that meant?"
"A tumbler of the old Marcobrunner, David, and a slice of the game pie--before I say one word about what we owe to that angel upstairs.
She has herself requested me to keep it under lock and key, so long as it is wanted in this house."
"Now carry your mind back to last night," he began.
'Why should you distress yourself, mamma?' she said.
I interrupted Mr. Engelman at that point.
"Well," Mr. Engelman resumed, "Doctor Dormann asked his questions, and smelt and tasted the medicine, and with Madame Fontaine's full approval took away a little of it to be analyzed.
I was just in time to catch the special mail which left this morning.
"No, David; you don't understand it yet.
His extraordinary recovery is remembered in the University to this day."
I certainly asked her for the prescription.
'I have not had the heart to open it yet,' she said; 'but for Mr. Keller's sake, I will look it over before you go away.' There is a Christian woman, David, if ever there was one yet! After the manner in which poor Keller had treated her, she was as eager to help him as if he had been her dearest friend.
The next morning, soon after you fell asleep, the doctors came.
Minna came in, wearing a cook's apron, and asked if her mother had rung for her yet.
The bottle might still perhaps be found at Wurzburg.
"I took it away with me the same night," he went on.
'Tell me what the bottle is like, and let me try if I can find it.' No!
He said, 'Let me see the lady, and speak to her myself, before the new remedy is tried.' As for the other, what do you think he did?
You may imagine what they thought of poor Keller, when I tell you that they recommended me to write instantly to Fritz in London summoning him to his father's bedside.
Off with the wine, my dear boy; you look as pale as death!"
Don't blame me, David.
Under the widow's instructions, she was preparing the peculiar vegetable diet which had been prescribed by Doctor Fontaine as part of the cure.
That came to nothing!
What would Fritz think, when he knew of it?
No label appeared on it; but, examining the surface of the glass carefully, I found certain faintly-marked stains, which suggested that the label might have been removed, and that some traces of the paste or gum by which it had been secured had not been completely washed away.
Mr. Engelman forbade me to remove the stopper.
He opened an old cabinet, and took out a long narrow bottle of dark-blue glass.
The medicine kept its own secret.
It was quite enough for Madame Fontaine that there was an act of mercy to be done.
I wish I could give her explanation, David, in her own delightful words.
"All's well that ends well" is a good proverb.
At any sacrifice of her own feelings, she was prepared to do it."
'If the remedy is tried,' she said, 'I must ask you to give it a fair chance by permitting me to act as nurse; the treatment of the patient when he begins to feel the benefit of the medicine is of serious importance.
The glass stopper was carefully secured by a piece of leather, for the better preservation, I suppose, of the liquid inside. Down one side of the bottle ran a narrow strip of paper, notched at regular intervals to indicate the dose that was to be given.
After what I had seen myself of the housekeeper's temper on the previous evening, this last piece of news failed to surprise me.
"My letter despatched," Mr. Engelman continued, "I begged both the doctors to speak with me before they went away, in my private room.
There I told them, in the plainest words I could find, exactly what I have told you.
Minna offered to take her place.
Madame Fontaine, always just in her views, said, 'You had better wait and consult the doctors.' She made but one condition (the generous creature!) relating to herself.
I interrupted him again, eager to hear the end.
"You remember my going out to get a breath of fresh air.
He made up the medicine that he administered with his own hand.
I could not feel absolutely sure of the new medicine; and, with time of such terrible importance, and London so far off, I was really afraid to miss a post."
"I begin to understand it now."
"Quite right, David.
I know this from my husband's instructions, and it is due to his memory (to say nothing of what is due to Mr. Keller) that I should be at the bedside.' It is needless to say that I joyfully accepted the offered help.
The good girl was eager to make herself useful to us in any domestic capacity.
Walked out of the house (the old brute!) and declined any further attendance on the patient.
Some person in her husband's employment at the University of Wurzburg had been attacked by a malady presenting exactly the same symptoms from which Mr. Keller was suffering.
"It's I."
'You're such a pretty dear!'"
At the same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat.
He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world.
He is so obviously not a god.
His attitude to a large part of life might be described as one of good-natured disgust.
He is a man and a medical doctor.
As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter.
Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps.
He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popular novelists.
And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she added after a pause.
"'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese....' Have you written it?"
He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like--to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice.
She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It was the aim and object of her life.
A crow ...
She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy.
A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:
She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed.
He portrays his characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the judgment.
But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background.
There is bound to be a break in the meanest life.
That is out of the question.
He was one of the first great novelists to endow his women with independence of soul. With the majority of novelists, women are sexual or sentimental accidents.
He is one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal a personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful.
My friend, return to literary activity!
My friend--great writer of our Russian land, listen to my request!...
It would be foolish, I know, to pretend to sum up Dostoevsky as a contortionist; but he has that element in him.
almost caresses, from people of the opposite camp, from enemies. This confused me, wounded me; but my conscience did not reproach me.
In an access of self-reproach he once declared that his character was comprised in one word--'poltroon!'" He showed neither timidity nor cowardice, however, in his devotion to truth.
He had that sense of truth which always upsets the orthodox.
We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming.
He had always to draw from the life.
"I ought to confess," he once wrote, "that I never attempted to create a type without having, not an idea, but a living person, in whom the various elements were harmonized together, to work from.
He "simply did not know how to work otherwise," as he said.
He was a man whom it was possible to disgust.
This is bound to be the fate of every artist who takes his political party or his church, or any other propagandist group to which he belongs, as his subject.
One can guess exactly the frame of mind he was in when, in the course of an argument with Dostoevsky, he said: "You see, I consider myself a German."
I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep.
It is wearisome even to repeat it all!
The other shook his head; "I don't know--I don't know, sir; I always said I didn't believe, but some things is mighty queer." He seemed to be shaping his thought for further speech, when again the girl's laugh rang clear along the mountain side.
"Yes, indeed," replied Mr. Howitt, in an odd tone.
WHAT!
Just as the little company were seating themselves at the table, the dog in the yard barked loudly.
The other returned with a gay laugh, "I was never sick a minute in my life that anybody ever heard tell.
THE VOICE FROM OUT THE MISTS.
Anyone meeting the pair, as they walked with the long swinging stride of the mountaineer up the steep mill road that gray afternoon, would have turned for a second look; such men are seldom seen.
Young Matt went to the door. The stranger, whom Jed had met on the Old Trail, stood at the gate.
"Is it alright, son?" he asked gruffly; and the boy answered, as he returned his father's look, "It's alright, Dad."
But with some a stayin' out on the range, an' not comin' in, an' the wolves a gettin' into the corral at night, we'll lose mighty nigh all the profits this year.
The teasing light vanished as the young woman placed her hands on the powerful shoulders of the giant, and as she felt the play of the swelling muscles that swung her to the ground so easily, her face flushed with admiration.
"Difficult, no; there ain't nothing to do but tendin' to the sheep.
Fully six feet four inches in height, with big bones, broad shoulders, and mighty muscles.
Of the son, "Young Matt," the people called him, it is enough to say that he seemed made of the same metal and cast in the same mold as the father; a mighty frame, softened yet by young manhood's grace; a powerful neck and well poised head with wavy red-brown hair; and blue eyes that had in them the calm of summer skies or the glint of battle steel.
I'm powerful hungry, though. You'd better put in another pan of corn bread." She turned her pony's head toward the barn.
The horse stopped at the house and a voice, that stirred the blood in the young man's veins, called, "Howdy, Aunt Mollie."
"This is good for me; it somehow seems to help me know how big God is.
"You find it hard to get help on the ranch?" inquired the stranger.
How are you, honey?"
I reckon, though, he'll be like the rest." He sat staring gloomily into the night.
But what is the use?
Young Matt rose to his feet and moved closer to the girl, who was also standing.
The mountaineer's companion spoke again half to himself; "I wish that my dear ones had a resting place like that.
It was a countenance fearless and frank, but gentle and kind, and the eyes were honest eyes.
Howitt, you've got education; it's easy to see that; I've always wanted to ask somebody like you, do you believe in hants?
When all this is written, those who knew Sammy will say, "'Tis but a poor picture, for she is something more than all this." Uncle Ike, the postmaster at the Forks, did it much better when he said to "Preachin' Bill," the night of the "Doin's" at the Cove School, "Ba thundas!
Young Matt had not been chopping long when he heard, coming up the hill, the sound of a horse's feet on the Old Trail.
The stranger glanced at the big man's face in quick sympathy.
"Seems like you are always hungry," laughed the older woman, in return.
When they reached the big log house that looks down upon the Hollow, the boy went at once with his axe to the woodpile, while the older man busied himself with the milking and other chores about the barn.
The mountaineer puffed hard at his pipe for a while, then said gruffly, "Seems that way, Mister, to them that don't know.
Quietly he withdrew to the other side of the barn, to return later when the saddle and bridle had been removed, and the young man stood stroking the pony, as the little horse munched his generous feed of corn.
Do you reckon folks ever come back once they're dead and gone?"
Old Matt leaned forward in his chair as if to speak again; then paused; someone was coming up the hill; and soon they distinguished the stalwart form of the son.
The elder man laid his hand on the broad shoulder of the lad so like him, and looked full into the clear eyes.
So wild and weird was the melody; so passionately sweet the voice, it seemed impossible that the music should come from human lips.
The man from the city saw that his big host was terribly in earnest, and answered quietly, "No, I do not believe in such things, Mr. Matthews; but if it should be true, I do not see why we should fear the dead."
There is a bond of fellowship in sorrow that knows no conventionalities.
"My name is Howitt, Daniel Howitt," the man said in answer to the host's question.
Operations at the woodpile suddenly ceased and Young Matt was first at the barn-yard gate.
The boy grew to be a man, and now he has left me." The deep voice faltered.
When the girl was gone, the big fellow led the horse away to the stable, where he crossed his arms upon the saddle and hid his face from the light.
"Is the work so difficult?" Mr. Howitt asked.
The amused smile left the face of the old mountaineer, as he answered slowly, "There was six boys, sir; this one, Grant, is the youngest.
It'll fair up by morning, I reckon.
CHAPTER III.
"I'll ride over on Bear Creek to-morrow, and see if I can get that fellow Buck told us about," returned the father.
"We've just naturally got to find somebody to stay with them sheep, Dad," said the son; "there ain't nobody there to-night, and as near as I can make out there's three ewes and their lambs missing.
But, as he spoke, there was in his manner a touch of embarrassment, and he continued quickly as if to prevent further question, "You have two remarkable children, sir; that boy is the finest specimen of manhood I have ever seen, and the girl is remarkable--remarkable, sir.
"I've been a lookin' for you over," said Sammy, a teasing light in her eyes.
CHAPTER II.
I used to feel like you do, but I can't no more.
The mountaineer relighted his pipe, while Young Matt and Sammy seated themselves on the step, and Mrs. Matthews coming from the house joined the group.
Mr. Matthews 'lowed maybe you was sick."
You can see a long way from here, of a clear day, Mister."
Mr. Matthews was a giant.
The man has to stay at the ranch of nights, though."
"Then let's go to the house; Mother called supper some time ago."
The grim face of the elder Matthews showed both pleasure and amusement.
It was more as though some genie of the forest-clad hills wandered through the mists, singing as he went with the joy of his possessions.
"Yes, sir, we do," answered Old Matt.
The young people were returning from the spring.
Mr. Howitt was wondering what staying at the ranch nights could have to do with the difficulty, when, up from the valley below, from out the darkness and the mists, came a strange sound; a sound as if someone were singing a song without words.
I doubt if there's a man in the hills can match him to-day; not excepting Wash Gibbs; an' he's a mighty good boy, too.
What!" And the little shrivelled up old hillsman, who keeps the ferry, removed his cob pipe long enough to reply, with all the emphasis possible to his squeaky voice, "She sure do, Ike. She sure do.
As the two men sat in the hush of the coming night, their faces turned toward the somber group of trees, they felt strongly drawn to one another.
There ain't a bit of use in us trying to depend on Pete."
"It's about time you was a comin' over," replied the woman in the doorway; "I was a tellin' the menfolks this mornin' that you hadn't been nigh the whole blessed week.
Mrs. Matthews appeared in the doorway; by her frank countenance and kindly look anyone would have known her at a glance as the boy's mother.
While Young Matt was gone to the corral in the valley to see that the sheep were safely folded for the night, and the two women were busy in the house with their after-supper work, Mr. Matthews and his guest sat on the front porch.
Arcturus right overhead.
Early came the
He kept pretty fair health, though so old.
I was almost conscious of a definite presence, Nature silently near.
"I love you very much, but your father loves you better."
"Your father would like you to make a better marriage," said Isabel. "Mr.
"Very well then, it's impossible," Isabel pronounced.
I've told you that before, without eliciting a comment from you.
But your father would like it extremely."
"There's no danger--no danger!" she declared at last.
Some one else would have been ready to ask you."
"To marry some one else, you mean--if he should ask me?"
"Very much, I think.
"Before I say yes I must know what such things are."
She shook her head, rather dryly--not discouragingly--and he went on.
What had she come for then, and why did she seem almost to offer him a chance to violate their tacit convention? Why did she ask him his advice if she gave him no liberty to answer her? How could they talk of her domestic embarrassments, as it pleased her humorously to designate them, if the principal factor was not to be mentioned?
At this Pansy stopped her with the assurance that she would never disobey him, would never marry without his consent.
"Perhaps I am.
Ralph took an inward resolution that she shouldn't leave him without his letting her know that he knew everything: it seemed too great an opportunity to lose.
"Very true.
"Your having so little is a reason for looking for more." With which Isabel was grateful for the dimness of the room; she felt as if her face were hideously insincere.
To repair her self-respect she was on the point of saying that Lord Warburton had let her know that there was a danger.
Once they missed it nothing else would do; there was no conceivable substitute for that success.
"Ah, but I don't admit Mr. Rosier's right!" Isabel hypocritically cried.
"Your father takes for granted at least that you would like to marry a nobleman."
"Lord Warburton has shown you great attention," she resumed; "of course you know it's of him I speak." She found herself, against her expectation, almost placed in the position of justifying herself; which led her to introduce this nobleman more crudely than she had intended.
He has the merit--for Pansy--of being in love with Pansy.
"To a certain extent--yes.
"You oughtn't to let him have false hopes."
And that will be an advantage for me," said the child very lucidly.
It's as if he said to me: 'I like you very much, but if it doesn't please you I'll never say it again.' I think that's very kind, very noble," Pansy went on with deepening positiveness.
"Do you know what his interest will make him say?" he asked as he took her hand.
So long as he believes that Lord Warburton intends anything of the kind you say, papa won't propose any one else.
"I think I'd rather not," Pansy unreservedly answered.
"I advise you then to pay the greatest respect to your father's wishes."
These contradictions were themselves but an indication of her trouble, and her cry for help, just before, was the only thing he was bound to consider.
This indeed was Gilbert's business as well as her own.
Pansy only gazed at her, evidently much puzzled; and Isabel, taking advantage of it, began to represent to her the wretched consequences of disobeying her father.
It was just because he was this, Isabel said to herself, that it was a refreshment to go and see him.
"You must tell your father that," she remarked reservedly.
At this Pansy dropped her eyes; for a moment she said nothing.
Now her papa wouldn't allow it.
But if you mean that he'll propose for me I think you're mistaken."
"I don't know.
"But if I speak to you now about your getting married it's not for your own sake, it's for mine," Isabel went on.
"I know Mr. Rosier thinks of me."
Pansy's solemn eyes, fixed on her own, almost embarrassed her; she was ashamed to think she had made so light of the girl's preference.
"It will make him say that your want of zeal is owing to jealousy." He stopped a moment; her face made him afraid.
"He ought not to," said Isabel loftily.
Pansy stood in the open doorway; she had drawn back the curtain for Isabel to pass.
"How do you mean better--if that would be good enough?
That's the meaning of his kindness.
They had attempted only one thing, but that one thing was to have been exquisite.
"It's a matter we can hardly quarrel about, however," she added; "for almost all the interest is on his side.
"That's what I like him for."
Isabel fell to smoothing her gloves again; they were long, loose gloves on which she could freely expend herself.
That's for your father; you must get his advice and, above all, you must act on it."
Rosier's fortune is not at all large."
"He has been very kind to me, and I like him very much.
And she announced, in the serenest, simplest tone, that, though she might never marry Mr. Rosier, she would never cease to think of him.
But it scarcely mattered, for he only failed.
It makes such a very queer relation to you!" said Ralph, smiling.
And as she answered nothing, looking as if she scarce understood, "You'll find yourselves thinking very differently," he continued.
The girl's father would have qualified this as rank treachery; and indeed Isabel knew that if Pansy should display the smallest germ of a disposition to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue.
"To remember all the pleasure it's in your power to give your father."
"Yes--but he has not always succeeded."
"I thought you knew.
There was a conviction in the way she said this, and a felicity in her believing it, which conduced to Isabel's awkwardness.
But she didn't; she only said--in her embarrassment rather wide of the mark--that he surely had been most kind, most friendly.
Isabel shook her head gravely.
What Isabel wished to do was to hear from her own lips that her mind was not occupied with Lord Warburton; but if she desired the assurance she felt herself by no means at liberty to provoke it.
"Yes, it's impossible," said Pansy without a sigh and with the same extreme attention in her clear little face.
Please then answer it."
Ralph was certain that this was her situation; he knew by instinct, in advance, the form that in such an event Osmond's displeasure would take.
"You think of those who think of you," she said with a faint smile.
"Why should he dissimulate?
"I don't think he can have been ready," said Pansy.
"I ought to tell you indeed," Ralph went on, "that to me he has denied it."
"The idea of my troubling you with my domestic embarrassments! The matter's very simple; Lord Warburton must get on by himself.
Before they gained the edge of the copse she suddenly snatched her hand away from his very violently and cried out, so that he instantly turned his head.
They were still at this time like lovers in their behaviour and were always together.
We are shutting up the house, and I must give you and Mrs. Brant a month's wages and ask you to leave to-morrow morning at seven o'clock.
Mr. Tebrick had persuaded her to hunt on Boxing Day, but with great difficulty, and she had not enjoyed it (though of hacking she was fond enough).
He propped her up in an armchair with some cushions, and they took tea together, she very delicately drinking from a saucer and taking bread and butter from his hands.
But after a moment he saw something stirring in a corner of the room, and then behold! she came forth dragging her dressing-gown, into which she had somehow struggled.
Nothing would satisfy him then till he had clothed her suitably, bringing her dresses from the wardrobe for her to choose.
All this he said in a dry, compelling kind of voice which made the fellow do as he was bid, though it was against his will, for he was curious.
"Janet," says he, "Mrs. Tebrick and I have had some bad news, and Mrs. Tebrick was called away instantly to London and left this afternoon, and I am staying to-night to put our affairs in order.
What adds to the difficulty to my mind is that the metamorphosis occurred when Mrs. Tebrick was a full-grown woman, and that it happened suddenly in so short a space of time.
What do you do there?" And then in a moment saw for himself what she would be at, and began once more to blame himself heartily--because he had not guessed that his wife would not like to go naked, notwithstanding the shape she was in.
He only called to her softly:
It was made of a flowered silk, trimmed with lace, and the sleeves short enough to sit very well on her now.
Please tell the others, and now get me my tea and bring it into my study on a tray." Janet said nothing for she was a shy girl, particularly before gentlemen, but when she entered the kitchen Mr. Tebrick heard a sudden burst of conversation with many exclamations from the cook.
Now there were two dogs, one a handsome Irish setter that was his wife's dog (she had brought it with her from Tangley Hall on her marriage); the other was an old fox terrier called Nelly that he had had ten years or more.
But the strange event which I shall here relate came alone, unsupported, without companions into a hostile world, and for that very reason claimed little of the general attention of mankind.
Her old nurse said: "Miss Silvia was always a little wild at heart," though if this was true it was never seen by anyone else except her husband.
For the first moment he thought the room was empty, and his vixen got away, for he could see no sign of her anywhere.
They sat thus till it was getting near dusk, when he recollected himself, and the next thing was that he must somehow hide her, and then bring her home.
Mr. Tebrick had three servants living in the house, the cook, the parlour-maid, and an old woman who had been his wife's nurse.
He carried her to the bedroom in his arms and then went downstairs again.
So they passed a good while, till at last the tears welled up in the poor fox's eyes and she began weeping (but quite in silence), and she trembled too as if she were in a fever.
When he came out into the yard both dogs saluted him by barking and whining twice as much as they did before, the setter jumping up and down at the end of his chain in a frenzy, and Nelly shivering, wagging her tail, and looking first at her master and then at the house door, where she could smell the fox right enough.
They were an ancient family, and have had their seat at Tangley Hall time out of mind.
So that with his gazing on her and knowing her well, even in such a shape, yet asking himself at every moment: "Can it be she?
In manner she was reserved almost to shyness, but perfectly self-possessed, and perfectly well-bred.
But though she said this she did not care to look again, and kept her eyes turned away so as not to meet the foxy slit ones of her mistress, for that was too much for her.
When she had gone Mr. Tebrick took the tray upstairs.
At this he could not contain his own tears, but sat down on the ground and sobbed for a great while, but between his sobs kissing her quite as if she had been a woman, and not caring in his grief that he was kissing a fox on the muzzle.
When she came back with his tea, Mr. Tebrick said: "I shall not require you upstairs.
That she did not grow up a country hoyden is to be explained by the strictness of her governess and the influence of her uncle.
But as might have been expected, they were too big for her now, but at last he picked out a little dressing-jacket that she was fond of wearing sometimes in the mornings.
Mr. Tebrick had all this time gone about paying off his servants and shooting his dogs as if he were in a dream.
She had been strictly brought up by a woman of excellent principles and considerable attainments, who died a year or so before the marriage.
It is perhaps worth noting that there was nothing at all foxy or vixenish in her appearance. On the contrary, she was a more than ordinarily beautiful and agreeable woman.
The bitch was clean gone, till, looking to see how she had broken her chain, he found her lying hid in the back of her kennel. But that trick did not save her, for Mr. Tebrick, after trying to pull her out by her chain and finding it useless--she would not come,--thrust the muzzle of his gun into the kennel, pressed it into her body and so shot her.
Old Nanny, though she was not expecting to find her mistress there, having been told that she was gone that afternoon to London, knew her instantly, and cried out:
He waited till it was quite dark that he might the better bring her into her own house without being seen, and buttoned her inside his topcoat, nay, even in his passion tearing open his waistcoat and his shirt that she might lie the closer to his heart.
It seems she took great fright or disgust at it, and vomited after it was done.
Thus there may be not one marvel to speak of in a century, and then often enough comes a plentiful crop of them; monsters of all sorts swarm suddenly upon the earth, comets blaze in the sky, eclipses frighten nature, meteors fall in rain, while mermaids and sirens beguile, and sea-serpents engulf every passing ship, and terrible cataclysms beset humanity.
I am busy now, but I will see you again before you go."
For the sudden changing of Mrs. Tebrick into a vixen is an established fact which we may attempt to account for as we will.
The only things which go any way towards an explanation of it are but guesswork, and I give them more because I would not conceal anything, than because I think they are of any worth.
His wife hung back, and he, holding her hand, began almost to drag her.
Indeed to this day there is no proper road to it, which is all the more remarkable as it is the principal, and indeed the only, manor house for several miles round.
Certainly it is in the explanation of the fact, and the reconciling of it with our general notions that we shall find most difficulty, and not in accepting for true a story which is so fully proved, and that not by one witness but by a dozen, all respectable, and with no possibility of collusion between them.
This must surely have been a comical sight, but poor Mr. Tebrick was altogether too distressed then or at any time afterwards to divert himself at such ludicrous scenes.
But perhaps living in so wild a place gave her some disposition to wildness, even in spite of her religious upbringing.
While they were walking they heard the hounds and later the huntsman's horn in the distance.
The bride was in her twenty-third year. She was small, with remarkably small hands and feet.
Am I not dreaming?" and her beseeching and lastly fawning on him and seeming to tell him that it was she indeed, they came at last together and he took her in his arms.
Besides these women there was a groom or a gardener (whichever you choose to call him), who was a single man and so lived out, lodging with a labouring family about half a mile away.
And owing to the circumstance that her mother had been dead many years, and her father bedridden, and not altogether rational for a little while before his death, they had few visitors but her uncle.
One point indeed I have not been able to ascertain and that is how they first became acquainted.
There was a bright moon, so that Mr. Tebrick could see the dogs as clearly as could be.
But however they became acquainted the marriage was a very happy one.
From this too sanguine dream he was aroused by hearing the gardener speaking to the dogs, trying to quiet them, for ever since he had come in with his vixen they had been whining, barking and growling, and all as he knew because there was a fox within doors and they would kill it.
Wonderful or supernatural events are not so uncommon, rather they are irregular in their incidence.
Mr. Tebrick going downstairs pitched upon the parlour-maid.
What dreadful change is this?"
Tangley Hall is over thirty miles from Stokoe, and is extremely remote.
"Oh, my poor precious!
Mr. Tebrick went downstairs, and taking his gun from the rack loaded it and went out into the yard.
She was married in the year 1879 to Mr. Richard Tebrick, after a short courtship, and went to live after their honeymoon at Rylands, near Stokoe, Oxon.
Whether it was from a chance meeting on the roads, or less romantic but more probable, by Mr. Tebrick becoming acquainted with her uncle, a minor canon at Oxford, and thence being invited by him to visit Tangley Hall, it is impossible to say.
There is no explaining that away by any natural philosophy.
Then, seeing her mistress start and look at her, she cried out: "But never fear, my darling, it will all come right, your old Nanny knows you, it will all come right in the end."
For when we are overcome with the greatest sorrow we act not like men or women but like children whose comfort in all their troubles is to press themselves against their mother's breast, or if she be not there to hold each other tight in one another's arms.
She lay very close to him, nestling under his coat and fell to licking his face, but never taking her eyes from his.
A grown lady is changed straightway into a fox.
Then, leaving the dogs as they were, chained up, Mr. Tebrick went indoors again and found the gardener, who had not yet gone home, gave him a month's wages in lieu of notice and told him he had a job for him yet--to bury the two dogs and that he should do it that same night.
While he tied the ribands his poor lady thanked him with gentle looks and not without some modesty and confusion.
All this showed him, or so he thought, that his wife was still herself; there was so little wildness in her demeanour and so much delicacy and decency, especially in her not wishing to run naked, that he was very much comforted, and began to fancy they could be happy enough if they could escape the world and live always alone.
Hearing the hunt, Mr. Tebrick quickened his pace so as to reach the edge of the copse, where they might get a good view of the hounds if they came that way.
Yet I would not dissuade any of my readers from attempting an explanation of this seeming miracle because up till now none has been found which is entirely satisfactory.
But here we have something very different.
You may well think if he were aghast: and so maybe was his lady at finding herself in that shape, so they did nothing for nearly half-an-hour but stare at each other, he bewildered, she asking him with her eyes as if indeed she spoke to him: "What am I now become? Have pity on me, husband, have pity on me for I am your wife."
We shall probably go away to the Continent, and I do not know when we shall come back.
So the gentleman asked the woman what she was doing.
It takes me the best part of an hour to get into mine every morning, and I get so hot!
And the woman was trying to get her cow to go up a ladder to the grass, and the poor thing durst not go.
And the gentleman went on his way, but he hadn't gone far when the cow tumbled off the roof, and hung by the string tied round her neck, and it strangled her.
And he ran straight and turned the tap. Then he said: "Whatever are you three doing, sitting there crying, and letting the beer run all over the floor?" "Oh!" says the father, "look at that horrid mallet!
Then after a bit the father began to wonder that they didn't come back, and he went down into the cellar to look after them himself, and there they two sat crying, and the beer running all over the floor.
Well, that was one big silly.
"Why, lookye," she said, "look at all that beautiful grass.
It must have been there a long, long time, but somehow or other she had never noticed it before, and she began a-thinking.
Every evening he used to come and see her, and stop to supper at the farmhouse, and the daughter used to be sent down into the cellar to draw the beer for supper.
I can't think who could have invented such things.
At last he stopped and wiped his face with his handkerchief.
"Oh, mother!" says she, "look at that horrid mallet!
what a dreadful thing it would be!" said the mother, and she sat her down beside the daughter and started crying too.
So the gentleman turned back home again and married the farmer's daughter, and if they didn't live happy for ever after, that's nothing to do with you or me.
So one evening she had gone down to draw the beer, and she happened to look up at the ceiling while she was drawing, and she saw a mallet stuck in one of the beams.
ADAPTED BY JOSEPH JACOBS
THE THREE SILLIES
Suppose you and our daughter was to be married, and was to have a son, and he was to grow up, and was to come down into the cellar to draw the beer, and the mallet was to fall on his head and kill him!" And then they all started crying worse than before.
And they had rakes, and brooms, and pitchforks, reaching into the pond; and the gentleman asked what was the matter. "Why," they say, "matter enough!
Well, he set out, and he traveled a long way, and at last he came to a woman's cottage that had some grass growing on the roof.
Once upon a time there was a farmer and his wife who had one daughter, and she was courted by a gentleman.
There he stuck fast; and as for the cow, she hung half-way down the wall, swinging between heaven and earth, for she could neither get down nor up.
Yes, the husband thought that would do very well.
So he got up on the house to tie her up.
I'll go out with the mowers and mow, and you shall mind the house at home."
When he had done that, he thought the cow might perhaps fall off the thatch and break her legs or her neck.
He was quite willing, he said.
He caught it, too, just as it ran out of doors, and gave it such a kick that piggy lay for dead on the spot.
Then all at once he remembered he had the tap in his hand; but when he got down to the cellar, every drop of ale had run out of the cask.
Now their house lay close up against a steep down, and he thought if he laid a plank across to the thatch at the back he'd easily get the cow up.
"That would be the right sort of thing for us," said the cock.
"Ah, but you, Red-comb," replied the ass, "rather come away with us. We are going to Bremen, to find there something better than death; you have a good voice, and if we make music together it will have full play."
"What do you see, Gray-horse?" asked the cock.
"Go with us to Bremen.
But now good advice is dear, and I do not know what to do."
The messenger, finding all still, went into the kitchen to strike a light, and, taking the glistening, fiery eyes of the cat for live coals, he held a lucifer match to them, expecting it to take fire.
The cock consented to this plan, and so all four traveled on together. They could not, however, reach Bremen in one day, and at evening they came into a forest, where they meant to pass the night.
The ass and the dog laid themselves down under a large tree, the cat and the cock climbed up into the branches, but the latter flew right to the top, where he was most safe.
The three vagabonds soon came near a farmyard, where, upon the barn door, the cock was sitting crowing with all his might.
"That is the way I prophesy fine weather," said the cock; "but because grand guests are coming for the Sunday, the housewife has no pity, and has told the cook-maid to make me into soup for the morrow; and this evening my head will be cut off.
Then these animals took counsel together how they should contrive to drive away the robbers, and at last they thought of a way.
I answered him.
I turned once more, almost passionately now, to hammering together stakes and branches to form a raft for my escape.
For them and for me it came without any definite shock.
The Monkey-man bored me, however; he assumed, on the strength of his five digits, that he was my equal, and was for ever jabbering at me,--jabbering the most arrant nonsense. One thing about him entertained me a little: he had a fantastic trick of coining new words.
Had I possessed sufficient cartridges, I should not have hesitated to begin the killing.
I am told that even now my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift alertness of movement.
My clothes hung about me as yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew long, and became matted together.
But from that night until the end came, there was but one thing happened to tell save a series of innumerable small unpleasant details and the fretting of an incessant uneasiness. So that I prefer to make no chronicle for that gap of time, to tell only one cardinal incident of the ten months I spent as an intimate of these half-humanised brutes.
I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject.
When I awoke, it was dark about me.
That danger at least was over; but this, I knew was only the first of the series of relapses that must come.
"What the Master wishes to kill, the Master kills," said the Dog-man with a certain satisfaction in his voice.
But with a certain lack of practical sense which has always been my bane, I had made it a mile or more from the sea; and before I had dragged it down to the beach the thing had fallen to pieces.
The creatures had lost the art of fire too, and recovered their fear of it.
The Dog-man scarcely dared to leave my side.
Then one of the dappled things objected, and an animated discussion sprang up round the fire. Every moment I began to feel more convinced of my present security. I talked now without the catching in my breath, due to the intensity of my excitement, that had troubled me at first.
As I did so, the Thing rose straight at me in a leap, and I was knocked over like a ninepin. It clutched at me with its crippled hand, and struck me in the face. Its spring carried it over me.
I snatched my hand away.
They say, 'The Master is dead. The Other with the Whip is dead.
I turned my back upon them, struck the lug and began paddling out to sea.
I always had a bonfire ready, but no doubt the volcanic reputation of the island was taken to account for that.
XXI.
We love the Law, and will keep it; but there is no Pain, no Master, no Whips for ever again.' So they say. But I know, Master, I know."
That Other who walked in the Sea is as we are.
This, I say, was in the earlier weeks of my solitude among these brutes. During that time they respected the usage established by the Law, and behaved with general decorum.
My arm ached in its bandages.
Then something soft and warm and moist passed across my hand.
"Even now he watches us!"
It was only about September or October that I began to think of making a raft.
All my muscles contracted.
In the course of about an hour I had really convinced several of the Beast Folk of the truth of my assertions, and talked most of the others into a dubious state. I kept a sharp eye for my enemy the Hyena-swine, but he never appeared. Every now and then a suspicious movement would startle me, but my confidence grew rapidly.
In the first month or so the Beast Folk, compared with their latter condition, were human enough, and for one or two besides my canine friend I even conceived a friendly tolerance. The little pink sloth-creature displayed an odd affection for me, and took to following me about.
Let them not know that I am the Master."
"And that their sins may grow," I said, "let them live in their folly until their time is ripe.
I could not bring myself to look behind me.
After the death of this poor dog of mine, my last friend, I too adopted to some extent the practice of slumbering in the daytime in order to be on my guard at night. I rebuilt my den in the walls of the enclosure, with such a narrow opening that anything attempting to enter must necessarily make a considerable noise.
"The same, Master."
The brute made no sign of retreat; but its ears went back, its hair bristled, and its body crouched together. I aimed between the eyes and fired.
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
"The Master's will is sweet," said the Dog-man, with the ready tact of his canine blood.
I began to realise what its presence meant, and the tide of my courage flowed.
We have no Master, no Whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end.
Suddenly a great white bird flew up out of the boat, and neither of the men stirred nor noticed it; it circled round, and then came sweeping overhead with its strong wings outspread.
As the day grew brighter, I began waving the last rag of my jacket to them; but they did not notice me, and sat still, facing each other.
It was not afraid and not ashamed; the last vestige of the human taint had vanished.
"Presently you will slay them all," said the Dog-man.
"He is not dead," said I, in a loud voice.
I was delighted with it.
At first I did not understand, but presently it occurred to me that he wished me to follow him; and this I did at last,--slowly, for the day was hot.
Perhaps it is as well that I was saved from launching it; but at the time my misery at my failure was so acute that for some days I simply moped on the beach, and stared at the water and thought of death.
None about the fire attempted to salute me.
With an affectation of indifference I began to chop idly at the ground in front of me with my hatchet. They looked, I noticed, at the deep cuts I made in the turf.
Then, with such patience as I could command, I collected a quantity of fruit, and waylaid and killed two rabbits with my last three cartridges.
At last I had him face to face.
I burnt both of the bodies on a pyre of brushwood; but after that I saw that unless I left the island my death was only a question of time. The Beast People by that time had, with one or two exceptions, left the ravine and made themselves lairs according to their taste among the thickets of the island.
They looked curiously at one another.
"Even now they talk together beyond there.
I heard something breathing, saw something crouched together close beside me.
Few prowled by day, most of them slept, and the island might have seemed deserted to a new-comer; but at night the air was hideous with their calls and howling. I had half a mind to make a massacre of them; to build traps, or fight them with my knife.
"They are mad; they are fools," said the Dog-man.
Altogether, perhaps twenty of the Beast Folk squatted, staring into the fire or talking to one another.
"The Man with the Bandaged Arm speaks a strange thing," said one of the Beast Folk.
But I could think of nothing.
"True, true!" said the Dog-man.
They held things more clumsily; drinking by suction, feeding by gnawing, grew commoner every day. I realised more keenly than ever what Moreau had told me about the "stubborn beast-flesh." They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.
But it sailed strangely.
The head was not kept to the wind; it yawed and fell away.
They were staggered at my assurance.
For a moment the opening of the hut was blackened by the exit of the Dog-man.
One of my spasms of disgust came upon me.
"It is well," I said again.
Indeed, I may say--without vanity, I hope--that I held something like pre-eminence among them. One or two, whom in a rare access of high spirits I had scarred rather badly, bore me a grudge; but it vented itself chiefly behind my back, and at a safe distance from my missiles, in grimaces.
Woe be to him who breaks the Law!"
As the carelessness and disorganisation increased from day to day, the lane of dwelling places, at no time very sweet, became so loathsome that I left it, and going across the island made myself a hovel of boughs amid the black ruins of Moreau's enclosure. Some memory of pain, I found, still made that place the safest from the Beast Folk.
"Where are the others?" I asked.
I would have swum out to it, but something--a cold, vague fear--kept me back.
Five times I saw sails, and thrice smoke; but nothing ever touched the island.
"Presently," I answered, "I will slay them all,--after certain days and certain things have come to pass.
My Dog-man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he became dumb, quadrupedal, hairy.
"Are you the one I met on the beach?" I asked.
There came a season of thunder-storms and heavy rain, which greatly retarded my work; but at last the raft was completed.
"It is well," I said, extending my hand for another licking kiss.
I looked round for the Hyena-swine, but he was not there.
Once I found another rabbit torn to pieces,--by the Hyena-swine, I am assured,--but that was all. It was about May when I first distinctly perceived a growing difference in their speech and carriage, a growing coarseness of articulation, a growing disinclination to talk.
I did not, however, mean to die, and an incident occurred that warned me unmistakably of the folly of letting the days pass so,--for each fresh day was fraught with increasing danger from the Beast People.
I found a thousand difficulties.
By that time my arm had healed, and both my hands were at my service again.
"I--Master."
Then I stopped shouting, and sat down on the headland and rested my chin on my hands and stared.
The moon was just riding up on the edge of the ravine, and like a bar across its face drove the spire of vapour that was for ever streaming from the fumaroles of the island.
"Prendick," said Montgomery, turning his dull eyes to me. "He's dead, evidently."
"Some," said I, "have broken the Law: they will die.
A political office known as the Crook's Road to Wealth.
In this age of the arduous pursuit of peace, prosperity and pleasure, the smallest contribution to the gaiety, if not to the wisdom, of nations can scarcely be unwelcome.
With half a million English words to choose from, modesty has been the watchword, and the author has confined himself to the treatment of only about half a thousand.
Hence, water-tankard, or "water wagon."
Pain, just the same.
As for the rest, the jury will please acknowledge a plea of guilty from
How wise, flippant, sober or stupid, this treatment has been, it is for the reader alone to judge. However, if from epigram, derivative or pure absurdity, there be born a single laugh between the lids, the laborer will accredit himself worthy of his hire.
Often shy on meal-tickets but strong on technique and the price of tripe sandwiches.
A
Distilled waters run deep.
It's a long lane that has no ashbarrel.
With this in mind, the author has prepared "The Foolish Dictionary," not in serious emulation of the worthier--and wordier--works of Webster and Worcester, but rather in the playful spirit of the parodist, who would gladly direct the faint rays from his flickering candle of fun to the shrine of their great memories.
Contains 26 letters and only three syllables.
In further explanation it should be said that some slight deference has been made to other wits, and the definitions include a few quotations from the great minds of the past and present.
SONG VIII.
Can ye ever surpass the elephant in bulk or the bull in strength?
What curse shall I call down On hearts so dull?
HUMAN FOLLY.
VIII.
Why, thou must wrest it from its present possessor!
Again, on how slight and perishable a possession do they rely who set before themselves bodily excellences!
Look upon the infinitude, the solidity, the swift motion, of the heavens, and for once cease to admire things mean and worthless.
Dost thou long for power?
"I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable.
Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
Pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops.
Even concubinage has been corrupted--by marriage.
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
One occasionally embraces some one or other, out of love to mankind (because one cannot embrace all); but this is what one must never confess to the individual.
86.
What?
APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
95.
99.
"I did that," says my memory.
A great man?
96.
Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy; around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes--what? perhaps a "world"?
76.
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.
97.
One should part from life as Ulysses parted from Nausicaa--blessing it rather than in love with it.
One may indeed lie with the mouth; but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.
Or--or---"
89.
100.
71.
90.
Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she--forgets how to charm.
81.
"What!
To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame--and something precious.
69.
Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse--the tyrant in us.
67.
79.
Rest from all bitter thoughts and things! How many a poor one's blessing went With thee beneath the low green tent Whose curtain never outward swings!
SNOW-BOUND.
At the time referred to in Snow-Bound she was boarding at the Rocks Village about two miles from us.
She early embraced the doctrine of the Second Advent, and felt it her duty to proclaim the Lord's speedy coming.
My father when a young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French villages.
In my boyhood, in our lonely farm-house, we had scanty sources of information; few books and only a small weekly newspaper.
The younger lady's conversation would have shocked the prim maids and matrons of that day.
On the other hand, it is certain that from comparatively early in the seventeenth century there were to be found here and there women who smoked.
There is a tradition that Queen Elizabeth herself once smoked--with unpleasant results.
Even Quakeresses sometimes smoked.
On this occasion the passage though stormy was very quick, for it lasted only thirty-four days.
Nor has the practice by any means yet died out.
"George Thresher kept a shoppe in Romford and sold tobacco there.
The woman is plainly a convivial soul; but there is no pipe for her, and such provision was no doubt unusual.
Mother gave in soon--I think she only did it out of vanity.
Mrs. Garbutt had been twice married, her husbands having been sailors during the Napoleonic wars.
But what quite disgusted our visitor was "that when one drinks the health of any person in company, the custom of the country does not permit you to drink more than half the cup, which is filled up and presented to him or her whose health you have drunk.
There is direct evidence, too, besides the story in the first paragraph of this chapter, that women disliked the prevalence of smoking.
But even this was not all.
She asked Dickens if he had ever "read such infernal trash" as Mrs. Gore's; and exclaimed "Oh God! what a sermon we had here, last Sunday." Dickens and his two daughters--"who were decidedly in the way, as we agreed afterwards"--dined by invitation with the mother and daughter.
In 1851, steady-going folk were alarmed and shocked at a sudden and short-lived outburst of "bloomerism," imported from the United States.
She had burned herself more than once before in performing the same operation; but her pipe she was bound to have, and so met her end.
He tells us that according to the custom of the country the landladies sup with strangers and passengers, and if they have daughters, these also are of the company to entertain the guests at table with pleasant conceits where they drink as much as the men.
She certainly smoked six or eight.
But this was satire and hardly had much relation to fact.
Many royal ladies of Europe, contemporaries of Queen Victoria and her son, have had the reputation of being confirmed smokers.
SMOKING BY WOMEN
However, he sent gifts in return to her Britannic Majesty, and among them were a West African state umbrella, a selection of highly coloured clothing materials, and some native pipes and tobacco for the Queen to smoke.
Her death was caused by the accidental ignition of her clothes as she was lighting her pipe at the fire.
Possibly she was not a smoker at all, but needed the tobacco for some medicinal purpose.
Among women of the lowest class smoking was probably common enough.
There are many colours in the rainbow; so there are many tastes in people.
She said she had smoked it for twenty years, and "it always makes me giddy!" The writer, in August 1913, saw a woman seated by the roadside in County Down, Ireland, calmly smoking a large briar pipe.
The list of provisions taken is truly formidable.
The cut, which is very rough, heads a bacchanalian ballad characteristic of the Elizabethan period, called "A Knotte of Good Fellows," and beginning:
We are informed in the usual style of such pages, that "the well-dressed woman has begun to consider the little smoking-jacket indispensable." This jacket, we are told "is a very different matter to the braided velvet coats which were donned by our masculine forbears in the days of long drooping cavalry moustaches, tightly buttoned frock-coats, and flexible canes.
Ladies, when pipes are brought, affect to swoon; They love no smoke, except the smoke of Town.
After that it need not be stirred.
Take cold meat and gravy and stew together with onion.
Cook until the rice is soft, then turn the fire very low, so that the water in the lower vessel does not boil but retains its heat.
It may be served in place of potatoes with meat, and may also be used as a basis for many inexpensive and attractive dishes, just as macaroni and spaghetti are.
Simmer very slowly until the gravy is all absorbed, shaking the pan occasionally.
Stew until tender.
Thicken the sauce with flour rubbed into butter and serve with the calves' head.
Add three glasses of sherry and madeira and allow it to boil once, when it is ready to serve.
Serve the remaining sauce over them in a very hot dish.
Lay half a dozen sweetbreads in cold water for twelve hours, changing the water several times.
Devil Chops
Cook for one hour, then add the brains cut in bits, the shaved peel and piece of one lemon and three hard-boiled eggs sliced. Cook thirty minutes.
Puree of Chestnuts with Chops
Pour the frogs legs and sauce into the bread cup, garnish with mushrooms and truffles.
Shell them, season with salt and pepper, add a piece of butter and wet with milk.
Put this on each side of the cutlets and cover with crepinette.
Brush them with the well-beaten yolk of an egg, sprinkle with fine bread crumbs, and fry in butter to a light brown. Serve with green peas in the center of the dish.
Eggs with Tomatoes
Lard lamb cutlets with strips of truffle, anchovy and gherkin.
Cook until the sauce is reduced one-half.
Let it cook two minutes, take from the fire and stir in the yolks of six eggs beaten well with one-half cup of cream.
Remove them and in the same butter place two onions, sliced, four green peppers minced, one can of mushrooms minced, and two stalks of celery chopped; salt, pepper, cayenne, and the juice of a lime. Cook until these ingredients are soft.
Mash through a colander and heap lightly on a platter, arranging broiled chops around the puree.
Fill the dish and on the top layer put truffles.
Boil four calves' feet until tender.
Rub this on the chops and broil rare.
Rub into a paste the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs, half the white of one egg chopped, one tablespoonful of butter, one teaspoonful of flour, three whole cloves, salt, pepper, cayenne and mace.
When cold dip in egg and bread crumbs and fry a light brown.
Trim carefully one dozen young lamb chops.
Then with a biscuit cutter, cut it into rounds about the size of a chop.
Cook this gently for ten minutes and add a cup of milk thickened with flour and butter, the juice of a lemon and one teaspoonful of sugar.
Cook a pint or less of macaroni in well salted water; drain and put into a stew pan, with a little good gravy.
Place in the oven until set.
Dust a plate with cracker crumbs and on this place a spoonful of the fried mixture.
Boil chestnuts in salted water for twenty minutes.
Make a dressing of the following ingredients mixed together: One ounce of butter, one teaspoonful of made mustard, one-half teaspoonful of French mustard, one teaspoonful of grated horseradish, one teaspoonful of chutney, a little Chili vinegar, the juice of one lime, salt, pepper and cayenne.
Drain and place in a stew pan with two ounces of butter, one ounce of flour and a pint of well seasoned stock or gravy.
Then add a glass of sherry and stir it well before adding also a cup of rice, four cups of stock, several sweet Chili peppers chopped and some salt.
A good recipe for the Bechamel sauce is the following: One ounce of butter browned with one ounce of flour.
Tie the brains in a cloth, put them in the saucepan with the head and cook two hours longer.
Add the corn cut from half a dozen ears, and cook fifteen minutes longer.
When cold cut into slices, brush with egg and bread crumbs and fry in butter until a light brown.
Boil the terrapin for one hour, and clean carefully.
Then extract the bones and cut the meat in pieces, return it to the saucepan without the brains, adding two ounces of butter, two dozen stoned olives, one dozen cloves, salt, pepper, cayenne, and a cup of white wine.
Place in the oven a few minutes and serve with grated Parmesan cheese on a separate dish.
ENTREES
Lamb Chops a la Nesselrode
Macaroni a la Rossini
Simmer a calves' head for two hours.
Fry in two ounces of butter two small dry onions and two green peppers, chopped.
Add the juice of a lime, take from the fire and stir in the well-beaten yolks of two eggs.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish, and break over it six eggs.
Repeat with each chop, and when cold roll each in beaten egg and cracker crumbs, and fry a light brown.
Stew gently fifteen minutes, stirring once or twice. If then tender, add one teaspoonful cornstarch rubbed into one ounce of butter.
Cook slowly for twenty minutes.
Fry one dozen lamb chops in butter and set aside to cool.
Terrapin
Joint the hind legs and backs of twelve frogs; put in a closely covered saucepan with some truffles, a small can of mushrooms sliced, a glass of white wine, salt, white pepper, cayenne, mace and four ounces of butter.
Serve with a browned veal gravy and sliced lemon.
Take from the fire and add the yolks of four eggs well beaten.
Trim twelve lamb chops very closely and fry lightly in six ounces of butter.
Cut in inch length pieces and simmer for twenty minutes in one quart of milk, being careful that it does not boil.
Season with salt, pepper, mace and cayenne.
Frogs a la Poulette
Sweetbreads with Mushrooms
Add one cup of cream, stir until very smooth, add the beaten yolks of eight eggs and one can of mushrooms sliced.
To this add half a glass of sherry, some finely chopped truffles, one cup and a half of stock, salt and pepper, and cook for ten minutes.
Pour over the hot sweetbreads.
Stir well and then add the macaroni with one pound of sweetbreads, cut in small pieces and two dozen Eastern oysters.
Simmer fifteen minutes.
Cook for half an hour or until pasty.
Place this mixture where it will keep hot without cooking.
Then boil them five minutes, drop into cold water, remove the skin and lard with fat bacon.
Cut the crust from a loaf of bread, scoop out the center, brush with butter and brown in the oven.
Stir in six ounces of flour. Then add two cups of milk and cook until the mixture is thick and smooth.
Cover the chops with this and set aside to cool.
Put a layer of the macaroni in a baking dish, sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and sliced truffles mixed with a little good sauce espagnole.
Add half a dozen tomatoes peeled and cut up, salt and pepper.
Lamb Cutlets a la Condi
Serve with a mushroom sauce, made as follows: Take a small bottle of mushrooms or one dozen fresh mushrooms sliced and boil them five minutes in water and lime juice.
Put in a stew pan two ounces of butter with half a can of mushrooms, one small onion and a teaspoonful of parsley, all minced fine; salt, pepper, cayenne and a little mace.
Boil one-half pound of macaroni in water for five minutes.
Cook a few minutes.
Place a chop on top of this, cover it with another spoonful of the mixture and dust with cracker crumbs.
Timbale of Macaroni for Twelve Persons
Put them in a saucepan with a pint of stock, two small onions and one carrot chopped, a teaspoonful of minced parsley, salt, pepper, cayenne, and a little mace.
On each one of these rounds place a chop and cover the top with Bechamel sauce.
Then remove from the fire and beat in the yolks of two eggs which have been mixed with the juice of a lime and a tablespoonful of water.
"I am afraid you would not understand," he replied.
How far it extended east and west he could not see, but apparently it was no more than three or four miles across from north to south.
As Numa rose from his second victim and shook himself, Tarzan could not but again note the wondrous proportions and symmetry of the beast.
"What makes you think there is a man there?" asked the girl.
"May I smoke?" questioned the officer of Tarzan.
"Leave that thing where it is, Lieutenant," he said.
The girl shuddered.
"What if they do charge?" asked the girl; "there is no means of escape."
"There is something out there in the darkness."
The Night Attack
Tarzan nodded affirmatively.
I have a theory, but it is utterly preposterous."
It was as though he had been suddenly transported to another world and he felt a strange restlessness that might easily have been a premonition of danger.
"They would tear him to pieces."
But this time Numa was too quick for him and he was but partially up when a great paw struck him on the side of the head and bowled him over.
His efforts had been for naught.
Tarzan saw the involuntary movement and shook his head.
With a final effort he threw himself from Numa's back and sought, by his quickness, to elude the frenzied beast for the fraction of an instant that would permit him to regain his feet and meet the animal again upon a more even footing.
Tarzan squatted on the opposite side.
With outspread, raking talons and bared fangs Numa sprang for the naked chest of the ape-man.
The lions they had bested were splendid specimens themselves and in their coats Tarzan noted a suggestion of the black which was such a strongly marked characteristic of Numa of the pit.
Immediately Numa stepped from above him.
"There are seven of them out there now."
"Yes," replied Tarzan.
"Good Lord! exclaimed Smith-Oldwick.
"You mean the water?" asked the girl.
The trail became more difficult but was well marked and showed indications of great antiquity, and, in places, the handiwork of man.
Preceded by the lion Tarzan descended into the valley, which, at this point, was forested with large trees.
"Aren't they unusually quiet for lions?" he asked.
Yet something held him there in futile self-sacrifice.
In falling his head struck the rocky surface of the cliff, stunning him.
Hadn't you noticed it before?"
What difference does it make which it is, or whether it comes tonight or next year or in ten years? After it is over it will be all the same."
"Three?" said Tarzan.
Thus reassured, the ape-man spoke to the lion and at the same time made a motion as though he would arise.
For some time they sat in silence which was broken only by an occasional sound of movement from the outer darkness.
Immediately Numa of the pit pricked up his ears and, regarding the ape-man steadily for a moment, he answered the call of hunger and started briskly off toward the south, stopping occasionally to see if Tarzan was following.
A man is out there now with those lions."
Raucous-voiced birds of brilliant plumage screamed among the branches while innumerable monkeys chattered and scolded above him.
"Well," said Tarzan, "if you had been born without eyes you could not understand sense impressions that the eyes of others transmit to their brains, and as you have both been born without any sense of smell I am afraid you cannot understand how I can know that there is a man there."
"What is it?" asked the girl.
"Come," said Tarzan suddenly and grasping the lion's mane with his left hand he moved toward the other lions, his companion pacing at his side.
"It is impossible!" exclaimed Smith-Oldwick.
To have attempted to meet the full shock of a lion's charge would have been suicidal even for the giant Tarmangani.
"I couldn't help it, you know, old man," he said; "instinct of self-preservation and all that."
"It would prove an instinct of self-destruction," said Tarzan. "There are at least three hunting lions out there watching us.
The first dim impression borne to his awakening mind was a confusion of savage sounds which gradually resolved themselves into the growling of lions, and then, little by little, there came back to him the recollections of what had preceded the blow that had felled him.
"You mean that you scent a man?" asked the girl.
Smith-Oldwick was dozing against the rocky wall of the cavern entrance, while the girl, exhausted by the excitement and fatigue of the day, had fallen into deep slumber.
"Oh!" cried the girl, breathing a sigh of relief, "is it our lion?"
"I have been hoarding a few cigarettes and if it won't attract those bouncers out there I would like to have one last smoke before I cash in. Will you join me?" and he proffered the ape-man a cigarette.
"We can't know," replied Tarzan, "and the chances are that the very place we are seeking is the place they don't wish us to trespass on."
They are very quiet when they are stalking their quarry."
Strong in his nostrils was the scent of Numa, the lion, and against one naked leg he could feel the coat of some animal.
"Yes," said Tarzan.
With an angry toss of his head, the ape-man turned upon the two lions who had continued to pace back and forth a few yards from him.
He of the black coat tremendously outclassed his adversary in point of size and strength as well as in ferocity.
Smith-Oldwick sat in the entrance and leaned against the cliff.
Fruits were growing among the trees and some of these he saw that Manu, the monkey, ate.
The officer laughed nervously.
"He is," replied the ape-man. Smith-Oldwick fingered the grip of his pistol.
It was Smith-Oldwick who broke the silence.
If you are very anxious that they should, fire your pistol and hit one of them."
There was little change in the formation of the gorge; it still wound its erratic course between precipitous cliffs.
As he fell he saw a black streak shoot above him and another lion close upon his antagonist.
Just knowing that they are there and occasionally seeing something like a shadow in the darkness and the faint sounds that come to us from them are getting on my nerves. But I hope," he said, "that all three don't charge at once."
Here and there were indications of ancient rapids and waterfalls.
If we had a fire or the moon were up you would see their eyes plainly. Presently they may come after us but the chances are that they will not.
Slowly Tarzan opened his eyes.
"One must die sometime," he said.
"What do you mean by that?" asked the officer.
Instead he resorted to methods of agility and cunning, for quick as are the great cats, even quicker is Tarzan of the Apes.
The great Tarmangani had not even the satisfaction of striking a blow in self-defense.
Smith-Oldwick lighted his cigarette and sat puffing slowly upon it.
Being hungry he swung to the lower branches and, amidst a great chattering of the monkeys, proceeded to eat such of the fruit as he saw the monkeys ate in safety.
"What chance would we three have against them?" asked the girl.
And then Tarzan turned his eyes into the cave and saw that the girl and Smith-Oldwick were gone.
That it was a well-watered valley was indicated by the wealth of vegetation that carpeted its floor from the rocky cliffs upon the north to the mountains on the south.
Chapter XVI
The ape-man was puzzled by the possibilities suggested by the tracks, but in the light of any previous experience he could not explain satisfactorily to himself what his perceptions indicated.
With the full return of his senses Tarzan's nose told him that the beast above him was Numa of the Wamabo pit.
"No," he said, "I cannot understand."
Presently the bottom of the gorge began to slope more rapidly.
"Yes," she said in a dull, hopeless voice, "after it is over it will be all the same."
An instant after Tarzan arose, Smith-Oldwick and the girl were aroused by a volley of thunderous roars and the noise of many padded feet rushing toward them.
"I wish you would come back with us, Greystoke," he said, "and if my appeal carries no inducement possibly that of Smith-Oldwick and the young lady who just left us may.
For an hour the little party rested and then Tarzan suddenly rose and, motioning the others to silence, listened.
"No," replied the ape-man.
Tarzan turned away scowling, and if any had been close by they might have heard a low growl rumble from his chest.
Possibly then we might hold them off.
Concerning Mr Boffin's scheme of such another date to such another effect.
Who, being something drowsy after his plentiful repast, and constitutionally of a shirking temperament, was well enough pleased to stump away, without doing what he had come to do, and was paid for doing.
They had opened the door at the bottom of the staircase giving on the yard, and they stood in the sunlight, looking at the scrawl of the two unsteady childish hands two or three steps up the staircase.
In fact, I have got another offer to make you.'
Far be it from me to deny them.
'Thank you, sir,' returned that reticent individual.
Ask him to come in.'
No.'
'But listen,' pursued the Golden Dustman; 'hear me out, Wegg.
'"Mr Boffin presents his compliments to Mr John Rokesmith, and begs to say that he has decided on giving Mr John Rokesmith a trial in the capacity he desires to fill.
Decorator's estimate, so much.
And I am bound to bear in mind that I took Wegg on, at a time when I had no thought of being fashionable or of leaving the Bower.
'Now, Wegg, Wegg, Wegg,' remonstrated the excellent Boffin.
'Don't you, indeed, sir?'
Now let us (for the purposes of argueyment) suppose that man to be engaged as a reader: say (for the purposes of argueyment) in the evening.
'I don't know that I think I saw them anywhere.
'Well, it ain't that I'm in a mortal hurry,' said Mr Boffin; 'only when you DO pay people for looking alive, it's as well to know that they ARE looking alive.
Astonished by his friend's unusual heat, Lightwood stared too, and then said: 'What can have become of this man?'
It's a wild tempestuous evening when this man that was,' stooping to wipe some hailstones out of his hair with an end of his own drowned jacket, '--there!
They were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself; craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore.
And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water--discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green dank deposit--that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.
'Why what bloodshot, draggled, dishevelled spectacle is this!' cried Mortimer.
Now he's more like himself; though he's badly bruised,--when this man that was, rows out upon the river on his usual lay.
'Come!'
He tried easy now; but the luck resisted; wouldn't come.
He makes ready to secure that object.
It was broad daylight now, and he looked about.
I thought I heard you call me twice before!
Such a night for plumage!'
Because he's got it here.' The lecturer held up the tightly clenched right hand.
The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.
'I mean to have it, and the boat too,' said Mr Inspector, playing the line.
In short, the night's work had so exhausted and worn out this actor in it, that he had become a mere somnambulist.
THE BIRD OF PREY BROUGHT DOWN
Go ahead you, and keep out in pretty open water, that I mayn't get fouled again.'
Father, was that you calling me?
He makes it too secure, as it happens.
Mr Inspector having to Mr Riderhood announced his official intention of 'keeping his eye upon him', stood him in a corner of the fireplace, like a wet umbrella, and took no further outward and visible notice of that honest man, except ordering a separate service of brandy and water for him: apparently out of the public funds.
'Likewise you will have observed how he had run the other end of this rope to his boat.'
'What is to be done with the remains?' asked Lightwood.
He dodges about in his boat, does this man, till he gets chilled.
'Take care,' said Riderhood.
It's Gaffer!'
Father!
They ran to the rope, leaving him gasping there.
'I told you so,' quoth Mr Inspector, pulling off his outer coat, and leaning well over the stern with a will.
'By the Lord, he's done me!'
Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold.
'Look at the broken scull.
Father, was that you calling me?
In a public-house kitchen with a large fire.
While they were doing so, Riderhood still sat staring disconsolate.
'And you will have observed before, and you will observe now, that this knot, which was drawn chock-tight round his neck by the strain of his own arms, is a slip-knot': holding it up for demonstration.
Sit close, Mortimer.
Steady!' cried Eugene (he had recovered immediately on embarking), as they bumped heavily against a pile; and then in a lower voice reversed his late apostrophe by remarking ('I wish the boat of my honourable and gallant friend may be endowed with philanthropy enough not to turn bottom-upward and extinguish us!) Steady, steady!
The wind sweeps jeeringly over Father, whips him with the frayed ends of his dress and his jagged hair, tries to turn him where he lies stark on his back, and force his face towards the rising sun, that he may be shamed the more.
He sees some object that's in his way of business, floating.
Here's the hail again.
Mr Inspector could not exactly say that he had seen him go, but had noticed that he was restless.
His directions were obeyed, and they pulled ashore directly; two in one boat, two in the other.
I also felt that I had committed every crime in the Newgate Calendar.
He had just come home.
'If you wouldn't object to standing by him half a minute, sir,' was the reply, 'I'll find the nearest of our men to come and take charge of him;--I still call it HIM, you see,' said Mr Inspector, looking back as he went, with a philosophical smile upon the force of habit.
'You'll disfigure.
'She's fast enough till the tide runs back.
'Singular and entertaining combination, sir, your friend.'
'And had hot brandy and water too, you see,' said Mr Inspector, 'and then cut off at a great rate.'
He carries with him this coil of rope.
'Can't imagine.
Perhaps fire, like the higher animal and vegetable life it helps to sustain, has its greatest tendency towards death, when the night is dying and the day is not yet born.
Last evening he does this. Worse for him!
Was it you, the voiceless and the dead?
Now see!
Why not speak, Father?
Speak, Father.
'Gaffer's boat, Gaffer in luck again, and yet no Gaffer!' So spake Riderhood, staring disconsolate.
'This is Hexam's boat,' said Mr Inspector. 'I know her well.'
But he offered such ample apologies, and was so very penitent, that when Lightwood got out of the cab, he gave the driver a particular charge to be careful of him.
His object drifts up, before he is quite ready for it.
His luck's got fouled under the keels of the barges.
('With a morbid expectation,' murmured Eugene to Lightwood, 'that somebody is always going to tell him the truth.')
How do I make that out? Simple and satisfactory.
But still the luck resisted; wouldn't come.
You'll ask me how I make out about the pockets?
He pointed behind him at the boat, and gasped to that degree that he dropped upon the stones to get his breath.
'I must have it up,' said Mr Inspector. 'I am going to take this boat ashore, and his luck along with it.
He raised his voice and called 'Eugene!
'All right.
'Here just before us, you see,' said Mr Inspector.
They had helped to release the rope, and of course not.
We could, and we did.
But consider.
Mr Inspector stepped into the boat.
'I am not going to do either, not even to your Grandmother,' said Mr Inspector; 'but I mean to have it.
Indeed he had the full benefit of it, and it so mauled him, though he bent his head low and tried to present nothing but the mangy cap to it, that he dropped under the lee of a tier of shipping, and they lay there until it was over.
You MUST come up. I mean to have you.'
Subspace Radio Test One.
Very few people, and almost no stewardesses, either actually bustle in or really enjoy one point five gees.
"I got plenty of tingle without reading, believe me.
"A few minutes before that.
She was doing handstands and handwalks and forward and back flips in the lounge--under one point five gees yet.
Why else would he?"
You've probably heard what they call me?"
"Maybe he loves her.
"O.
"Oh, bars, trapeze, ground-and-lofty tumbling, acrobatics, aerialistics, high-wire, muscle-control, judo--all that kind of thing."
"Dowsing?
Besides, who wants a man a foot taller than she is and twice as big?
You know you have to pull over and stop, but that's all you know.
She was playing bridge, and as eyes met eyes and she rose to her feet a shock-wave swept through him that made him feel as though his every hair was standing straight on end.
Her hair was an artificial yellow.
As usual."
He didn't even think of it; the .41 automatic at his hip was as much a part of his uniform as his pants.
But go ahead.
"Why, of course; but my friends call me 'Bobby'.
"I see." Lopresto forced his anger down.
The twenty-four-hour "day" measured off by the brute-force machine that was their masterclock carried no guarantee, expressed or implied, as to either accuracy or uniformity.
I've got a ...
The only thing is, when?
Newman went to his cabin and the muscle called Moose spoke thoughtfully. That is, as nearly thoughtfully as his mental equipment would allow.
But the girls can't start packing pistols now."
"Not quite, Vince.
And three days later, within an hour after the last flight-datum had been "put in the tank," the four intended victims allowed themselves to be inveigled into the lounge.
Two of them, Ferdy Blaine and Moose Mordan, were playing cards for small stakes.
Their biggest chore, however, was to see to it that Adams got sleep, food, and exercise.
Too big.
A couple of evenings later, in Lifecraft Two, Barbara said: "You're worried, Babe, and everything's going so smoothly.
That routine, however, was in no sense dull.
This does.
"But it's necessary, my dear child," Adams explained, unmoved.
O. K.?"
Really," and both Joneses began to realize what Deston already knew--just how deadly those harmless-seeming weapons could be.
The sooner the better. Tomorrow?"
"Since they don't want to shoot us two--yet--these are all the weapons I'll need."
But suddenly "BRAHMS!" rang out, with four voices in absolute unison; followed a moment later by Lopresto's stentorian "NOW!"
Until then, we'll let him think he's Top Dog.
Moose Mordan was big and strong; and, for such a big man, was fairly fast physically.
"Anything I can reach," she replied, confidently.
For, if left to his own devices, he would never have exercised at all, would have grabbed a bite now and then, and would have slept only when he could no longer stay awake.
Bernice, grinning openly now, stopped Deston's floundering.
"Morning," "afternoon," "evening," and "night" were, of course, purely conventional terms.
Chew on that a while, and you'll know who's boss."
"Oh, yeah?" Lopresto sneered.
After just the right amount of holding back and objecting, Lopresto agreed.
Lopresto's hand barely touched his gun.
Ferdy was of medium size; compact rather than slender; built of rawhide and spring steel.
"And he'll kill you," Jones said, flatly.
"I'll answer that," Barbara said, quietly.
"Too smoothly altogether.
I'm that good.
If he had had time to get his muscles ready, he might have had a chance.
"I always do." Barbara held out her hands.
"In with a mob of normal-space pirate-smugglers.
Bernice, even while shrieking the battle-cry, leaped to her feet, hurled her chair, and reached for another; but one chair was enough.
I'll buy that, but there wouldn't be enough plunder to----"
"This material is new.
"So you'll have plenty of warning?"
He didn't know his new wife very well, either.
"With the added attraction," Jones went on, coldly and steadily, "of having two extremely desirable female women for eleven months before killing them, too."
As for motive--salvage. With either of us alive, none.
"But we're going to surprise 'em, ain't we?"
Perhaps even more so."
Bullets through the brain do.
"O.
The officers had plenty to do; operating the whole ship and rebuilding the mechanisms that were operating on jury rigging or on straight "bread-board" hookups.
Me and you will match draws to see who----"
As soon as his job's done he'll wish he'd never been born.
It was O. K., and the four--Adams was still hard at work in the lounge--went to bed.
The whole battle had lasted only a few seconds.
"No he won't!
That nails it down solid."
"I don't like that ape, boss.
"You win, Newman, the way the cards lay.
That's it.
Both girls shrank visibly, and Deston said: "Check.
He had at least one of the qualities of a leader.
I like the little yellowhead a lot better."
"Considering the enormous amounts of supplies carried; the scope, quantity, and quality of the safety devices employed; it is improbable that we are the first survivors of a subspace catastrophe to set course for a planet."
The old alarm clock has never failed me yet.
There was plenty of time.
I'll tell you when."
The survivor would lock the ship in null-G and it'd be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Ferdy will take Deston----"
I thought that was the main feature, but it didn't add up.
Deston could have set any hours he pleased, but he didn't.
And socially, outside of working hours, the two groups did not mix.
"So I think I'll blow his brains out tomorrow morning on sight."
These four men died instantly of gunshot wounds."
In electronics I maybe ain't got the theory Pretty Boy has, but at building and repairing the stuff I've forgot more than he ever will know.
He was listless too, preferring others to read to him and dictating nearly all his letters.
"I've told your coachman to drive me in your carriage.
Both men possessed, too, the reticence the Borlsovers had always shown, and which their enemies sometimes called hypocrisy.
Confound it all!
"It's too late, Adrian," he read.
The old man, propped up in bed with pillows, had sunk into a light sleep.
"Well, bring me some brandy, and hurry up about it.
"If you please, sir, when the postman brought it he told me that they'd bored the holes in the lid at the post-office.
"Never you mind," wrote the hand of Adrian.
Instead of speaking his next question, Borlsover wrote it.
Someone had pulled the cord attached to one of the blinds, and it had rolled up with a snap.
The whole thing, in fact, had the appearance of a copy-book, and on a more careful scrutiny Eustace thought that there was ample evidence to show that the handwriting at the beginning of the book, good though it was was not nearly so good as the handwriting at the end.
It will be a thing to look back upon with pride when he grows to be a man."
In a wonderfully short time he had adapted himself to the new conditions of life.
And if by any chance I don't see you again, my will is at my solicitor's.
He was completely satisfied, both with himself and with Captain Lockwood's taste in wines.
BY W.F.
His grandfather had placed a little gate at the top of the stair, so that children could run and romp in the gallery without fear of accident.
I think that's the carriage, sir; I'll go and call Mr. Saunders."
Beautiful Belinda Borlsover."
I've not left you any legacy, because I know you're well provided for, but I thought you might like to have my books.
Two years before his death Adrian Borlsover developed, unknown to himself, the not uncommon power of automatic writing.
We'll get it back into the box."
"How are you getting there?"
Very likely it's the six-toed albino.
I'm up here, Saunders."
"Infectious fiddlesticks!" said Eustace, his face white with anger; "bring the thing downstairs.
They made the room feel cold, in spite of the heavy red damask curtains and great gilt cornices.
"Amen!" said my father, and I followed him out of the room, feeling as if I wanted to cry.
What was that?
Eustace took it.
"Sir?"
"What was it?" asked Eustace.
"You have got over your difficulties in a way not one in a hundred thousand would have done.
"Oh, my prophetic soul, mine uncle."
One by one, as they took out the books, the space behind grew smaller and smaller.
But I think I see how we can manage it.
Eustace resolved to go on quietly reading.
Morton the butler often used to come round about eleven to see that the windows were fastened, but he might not come.
His uncle, he thought, looked older.
You've got to help me catch it."
Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment.
There was, too, in its touch a subtle sense of intimacy.
Choose your friends well.
Then, picking up the pencil, they wrote:
"You'll find your correspondence in the library," went on Saunders. "Most of it I've seen to.
As he came back into the library with an empty cage in his hand he heard the sound of something falling, and then of something scuttling along the floor.
Like his uncle, he was a remarkable man.
It was not altogether easy, but they were successful at last.
"What's all the row?" asked Saunders, as he lounged forward with his hands in his pockets.
And what in the name of all that's holy is that?"
Eustace was thoroughly unstrung.
There was a noise at the other end of the room, as if something was crawling up the iron corkscrew stair.
The mere passing of his long supple fingers over a flower was sufficient means for its identification, though occasionally he would use his lips.
When I was a little boy I once went with my father to call on Adrian Borlsover.
Once they caught sight of fingers pressing outward for a way of escape.
Can't he see at all?"
I've read about such cases before."
The letter was from the family solicitor.
Any objection?"
His elder brother George had married late in life, leaving one son, Eustace, who lived in the gloomy Georgian mansion at Borlsover Conyers, where he could work undisturbed in collecting material for his great book on heredity.
While he was looking, too surprised to stir, the hand disappeared round the corner Eustace ran forward.
The visits of Eustace were confined to a week in the summer or autumn: long weeks, that dragged almost as slowly as the bath-chair in which the old man was drawn along the sunny sea front.
He thought his uncle looked ill when he said good-by, and the old man spoke despondently of the failure his life had been.
He turned on the electric light.
But for a week I prayed that those dark tender eyes might see.
Borlsovers' sons, for some reason, always seemed to marry very ordinary women, which perhaps accounted for the fact that no Borlsover had been a genius, and only one Borlsover had been mad.
But on his return he was at first disappointed.
Now it can't get out."
It spoke of his uncle's death and of the valuable collection of books that had been left to him in the will.
I'm up here in the gallery, you duffer."
Should a stranger make his way thither at dull noonday, or during the sleepy hours of the silent afternoon, he would find no acknowledged temple of power and beauty, no fitting fane for the great Thunderer, no proud facades and pillared roofs to support the dignity of this greatest of earthly potentates.
It may probably be said that no place in this 19th century is more worthy of notice.
where can you be so sure of all the pleasures of society?
Ill as he had fared in his interview with the archdeacon, he was not the less under the necessity of carrying out his pledge to Eleanor; and he went about his ungracious task with a heavy heart.
On such a course was he now intent; and not without much inward palpitation did he betake himself to the quiet abode of wisdom, where Tom Towers was to be found o' mornings inhaling ambrosia and sipping nectar in the shape of toast and tea.
MOUNT OLYMPUS
But let it not be supposed that his chambers were such, or so comfortless, as are frequently the gaunt abodes of legal aspirants.
The whole spot is redolent of typography.
No treasury mandate armed with the signatures of all the government has half the power of one of those broad sheets, which fly forth from hence so abundantly, armed with no signature at all.
It was not to Mount Olympus that our friend Bold betook himself.
It was here that Tom Towers lived, and cultivated with eminent success the tenth Muse who now governs the periodical press.
Chapter XIV
But to whom was he, Tom Towers, responsible?
It is true he wore no ermine, bore no outward marks of a world's respect; but with what a load of inward importance was he charged!
No one could insult him; no one could inquire into him.
He was lingering over his last cup of tea, surrounded by an ocean of newspapers, through which he had been swimming, when John Bold's card was brought in by his tiger.
Nevertheless Bold believed that to him were owing those dreadful words which had caused such panic at Barchester,--and he conceived himself bound to prevent their repetition.
He loved to watch the great men of whom he daily wrote, and flatter himself that he was greater than any of them.
It was easy, from his rooms, to see that Tom Towers was a Sybarite, though by no means an idle one.
Not far removed from Mount Olympus, but somewhat nearer to the blessed regions of the West, is the most favoured abode of Themis.
No one here will ask whether you are out or at home; alone or with friends; here no Sabbatarian will investigate your Sundays, no censorious landlady will scrutinise your empty bottle, no valetudinarian neighbour will complain of late hours.
But they are anything but happy in their change.
Tom Towers, and he alone, knows all about it.
It is a throne because the most exalted one sits there,--and a sceptre because the most mighty one wields it.
The attorneys whom he had employed in London received his instructions with surprise and evident misgiving; however, they could only obey, and mutter something of their sorrow that such heavy costs should only fall upon their own employer,--especially as nothing was wanting but perseverance to throw them on the opposite party.
If doomed to live within the thickest of London smoke you would surely say that that would be your chosen spot.
He did not even know, as a fact, that they had been written by his friend.
Why, oh why, ye earthly ministers, why have ye not followed more closely this heaven-sent messenger that is among us?
what has so afflicted him?
With what endless care, with what unsparing labour, do we not strive to get together for our great national council the men most fitting to compose it.
To the outward and uninitiated eye, Mount Olympus is a somewhat humble spot,--undistinguished, unadorned,--nay, almost mean.
Is not Tom Towers here, able to guide us and willing?
Where can retirement be so complete as here?
Would you worship the Paphian goddess, the groves of Cyprus are not more taciturn than those of the Temple. Wit and wine are always here, and always together; the revels of the Temple are as those of polished Greece, where the wildest worshipper of Bacchus never forgot the dignity of the god whom he adored.
Each of them was responsible to his country, each of them must answer if inquired into, each of them must endure abuse with good humour, and insolence without anger.
Wretched in spirit, groaning under the feeling of insult, self-condemning, and ill-satisfied in every way, Bold returned to his London lodgings.
With this view he betook himself from the attorneys' office to that laboratory where, with amazing chemistry, Tom Towers compounded thunderbolts for the destruction of all that is evil, and for the furtherance of all that is good, in this and other hemispheres.
"Is this Mount Olympus?" asks the unbelieving stranger.
"Is it from these small, dark, dingy buildings that those infallible laws proceed which cabinets are called upon to obey; by which bishops are to be guided, lords and commons controlled, judges instructed in law, generals in strategy, admirals in naval tactics, and orange-women in the management of their barrows?" "Yes, my friend--from these walls.
This kind of hidden but still conscious glory suited the nature of the man.
Our modern artists, whom we style Pre-Raphaelites, have delighted to go back, not only to the finish and peculiar manner, but also to the subjects of the early painters.
Velvet and gilding do not make a throne, nor gold and jewels a sceptre.
It is true his name appeared in no large capitals; on no wall was chalked up "Tom Towers for ever;"--"Freedom of the Press and Tom Towers;" but what member of Parliament had half his power?
Who has not heard of Mount Olympus,--that high abode of all the powers of type, that favoured seat of the great goddess Pica, that wondrous habitation of gods and devils, from whence, with ceaseless hum of steam and never-ending flow of Castalian ink, issue forth fifty thousand nightly edicts for the governance of a subject nation?
Look at our generals, what faults they make; at our admirals, how inactive they are.
From a bishopric in New Zealand to an unfortunate director of a North-west passage, is he not the only fit judge of capability?
This picture was not hung, as pictures usually are, against the wall; there was no inch of wall vacant for such a purpose: it had a stand or desk erected for its own accommodation; and there on her pedestal, framed and glazed, stood the devotional lady looking intently at a lily as no lady ever looked before.
He indulged in four rooms on the first floor, each of which was furnished, if not with the splendour, with probably more than the comfort of Stafford House.
What money, honesty, and science can do, is done; and yet how badly are our troops brought together, fed, conveyed, clothed, armed, and managed. The most excellent of our good men do their best to man our ships, with the assistance of all possible external appliances; but in vain. All, all is wrong--alas! alas!
He next thought of the newspapers.
From here issue the only known infallible bulls for the guidance of British souls and bodies. This little court is the Vatican of England.
On this occasion, after twisting the card twice in his fingers, he signified to his attendant imp that he was visible; and the inner door was unbolted, and our friend announced.
Here, on the choicest spot of this choice ground, stands a lofty row of chambers, looking obliquely upon the sullied Thames; before the windows, the lawn of the Temple Gardens stretches with that dim yet delicious verdure so refreshing to the eyes of Londoners.
Why should we look to Lord John Russell;--why should we regard Palmerston and Gladstone, when Tom Towers without a struggle can put us right?
If you love books, to what place are books so suitable?
Tom Towers had never said that such a view of the case, or such a side in the dispute, would be taken by the paper with which he was connected.
This tiger never knew that his master was at home, though he often knew that he was not, and thus Tom Towers was never invaded but by his own consent.
With such ideas, half ambitious and half awe-struck, had Bold regarded the silent-looking workshop of the gods; but he had never yet by word or sign attempted to influence the slightest word of his unerring friend.
There was no very great difference in their ages, for Towers was still considerably under forty; and when Bold had been attending the London hospitals, Towers, who was not then the great man that he had since become, had been much with him.
He had been very intimate with Tom Towers, and had often discussed with him the affairs of the hospital.
Would it not be wise in us to abandon useless talking, idle thinking, and profitless labour?
No established religion has ever been without its unbelievers, even in the country where it is the most firmly fixed; no creed has been without scoffers; no church has so prospered as to free itself entirely from dissent.
He rises in the morning degraded, mean, and miserable; an object of men's scorn, anxious only to retire as quickly as may be to some German obscurity, some unseen Italian privacy, or indeed, anywhere out of sight.
Yes indeed, able and willing to guide all men in all things, so long as he is obeyed as autocrat should be obeyed,--with undoubting submission: only let not ungrateful ministers seek other colleagues than those whom Tom Towers may approve; let church and state, law and physic, commerce and agriculture, the arts of war, and the arts of peace, all listen and obey, and all will be made perfect.
Yes, you, you whom I now address, my dear, middle-aged bachelor friend, can nowhere be so well domiciled as here.
He says: "Nor is it of consequence that Paul values comparatively lightly, having known him in the flesh."
The ancient Greeks reckoned time by the Olympiads, which fact, according to this interesting clergyman, ought to prove that the Olympic games were instituted by the God Heracles or Hercules, son of Zeus; the Roman Chronology began with the building of Rome by Romulus, which by the same reasoning would prove that Romulus and Remus, born of Mars, and nursed by a she-wolf, are historical.
In other words, the church has proceeded on the theory that two uncertainties make a certainty.
The above reply, we are compelled to say, much to our regret, is not even honest.
What, in Dr. Barton's opinion, could have influenced the framers of the life of Jesus to suppress their identity?
Your own church began with Henry the Eighth in 1534, with persecution and murder, when the king, his hands wet with the blood of his own wives and ministers, made himself the supreme head of the church in England.
Our point is, that if the New Testament is reliable, in the time of the apostles themselves, the Gnostics, an influential body of Christians, denied that Jesus was any more than an imaginary existence.
We are not sure either of Jesus' words or of his character, intimates the Reverend preacher.
III. JAMES CLEMENT, a Catholic, assassinated Henry III.
1908 years after what?
It is only where there is intelligence and inquiry that "four of them" at least are reliable.
Paul has thirteen epistles in the bible, and of only four of them is Dr. Barton certain.
Once more; we say that the only Jesus Paul knew was the one he met in a trance on his way to Damascus.
Rev. Shayler concludes: "Haven't time to go deeper now," and he intimates that to deny his 'facts' is either to be a fool or a "liar." We will not comment on this.
Only four?
The Reverend debater attempts to belittle the Jerusalem career of Jesus, by suggesting that he was not there much, when according to the Gospels, it was in that city that his ministry began and culminated.
In the effort to untie the Jesus-knot by Paul, the church has increased the number of knots to two.
W. E. Barton, of Oak Park, is one of the ablest Congregational ministers in the West.
The clergyman's words, however, convey the impression that Paul knew Jesus in the flesh, but he valued that, knowledge "comparatively lightly," that is to say, he did not think much of it.
"In answer to your query, which I received, I beg to give the following statement.
While this is amusing, we are going to deny ourselves the pleasure of laughing at it; we will do our best to give it a serious answer.
Edwin Hatch, D. D., Vice-Principal, St. Mary Hall, Oxford, England.
VII
Sisera, a heathen, having lost a battle, begged for shelter at the tent of Jael, a friendly woman, but of the Bible faith.
The Catholics and the other sects do not believe that Anderson is a descendant of Jesus.
Nor is it true that it is of no consequence that "Paul seldom quotes the words of Jesus." For it proves that the Gospel Jesus was unknown to Paul, and that he was created at a later date.
The doctor admits the charge, except that he calls it by another name.
She was murdered not by a crazed individual but by the orders of the bishop of Alexandria.
I believe the legend of Jesus was made by many minds working under a great religious impulse--one man adding a parable, another an exhortation, another a miracle story;"--and George Eliot to write: "The materials for a real life of Christ do not exist."
Let us see how much the church scholars themselves know about Paul:
This gave the clergyman a splendid opportunity to present in clear and convincing form the evidence for the reality of Jesus.
Why then is there a different date every year?
In commenting on our remark that in the eighth century "Pope Hadrian called upon the Christian world to think of Jesus as a man," Dr. Barton replies with considerable temper: "To date people's right to think of Jesus as a man from that decree is not to be characterized by any polite term." Our neighbor, in the first place, misquotes us in his haste.
Her innocent blood stained the hands of the clergy, who also handle the Holy Sacraments.
It concedes all that higher criticism contends for.
Rev. Shayler has an original way of proving the historicity of Jesus. Every time we date our letters, suggests the clergyman, we prove that Jesus lived.
It went farther; it made its appearance in the pulpit.
Notwithstanding this protest, Dr. Barton proceeds to do his best to reply to our position.
But one thing prevented him:--the lack of evidence.
Precisely.
The story of a "nude woman," etc., is pure fiction, and that the two murders were caused by unbelief is mere assumption.
The date of your own letter 1908 tells what?
We wonder how many kinds of flesh there are according to Dr. Barton.
Did the priests of Baal or Moloch prove that these beings existed?
And which 'four' does the clergyman accept as doubtlessly "genuine?" Only yesterday all thirteen of Paul's letters were infallible, and they are so still wherever no questions are asked about them.
Morton Culver Hartzell, in a letter, offers the same argument.
The good man controls his appetites and passions, but his flesh is not any different from anybody else's.
The difference between fiction and forgery is this: the former is, what it claims to be; the latter is a lie parading as a truth.
Gibbon writes of Constantine that "the same year of his reign in which he convened the council of Nice was polluted by the execution, or rather murder, of his eldest son."
If the existence of such a country as Palestine proves that Jesus is real, the existence of Switzerland must prove that William Tell is historical; and the existence of an Athens must prove that Athene and Apollo really lived; and from the fact that there is an England, Rev. Shayler would prove that Robin Hood and his band really lived in 1160.
The argument in a nutshell is this: Jesus is historical because he is guaranteed by Paul.
And Dr. Barton is one of the foremost divines of the country.
The Reverend gentleman begins by an uncompromising denial of our statements, and ends by virtually admitting all that we contend for. This morning we will write of his denials; next Sunday, of his admissions.
"At the very least, four of Paul's epistles are genuine," says the same clergyman.
III.
To this the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Oak Park replies in the same we-do-not-care- to-explain style.
The question is not how often Jesus visited Jerusalem, but how conspicuous was the part he played there.
Facts, not theories.
"Mr. Mangasarian," says Dr. Barton, "has not given evidence of his skill as a logician or of his accuracy in the use of history." Then he proceeds to apologize, in a way, for the character of his reply to our argument, by saying that "Mr.
To help his creed, the preacher resorts to fable.
If Jesus rose at all, he rose on a certain day, and the apostles must have known the date.
Speaking in this city, Rev.
If the Gospel was a novel, no one would object to its mythology, but pretending to be historical, it must square its claims with the facts, or be branded as a forgery.
Forgery is dishonest because its object is to deceive.
Goldwin Smith to exclaim: "Jesus has flown.
This date prevailed in many countries until 1745.
We say Paul gives not a single quotation to prove that he knew of a teaching Jesus.
"This, too, just as though Paul never bore testimony."
But we are satisfied to rest the case on orthodox admissions alone.
Fiction is honest because it does not try to deceive.
According to this clergyman, scientists, instead of studying the crust of the earth and making geological investigations to ascertain the probable age of the earth, ought to look at the date in the margin of the bible which tells exactly the world's age.
Rev. Shayler continues: "The places where he was born, labored and died are still extant, and have no value apart from such testimony."
"Let Mr. Mangasarian first disprove Paul," he writes.
For this act the clergy placed his portrait on the altar in the churches between two great lighted candle-sticks.
W. H. Wray Boyle of Lake Forest, declared that unbelief was responsible for the worst crimes in history.
Jesus is historical because a man by the name of Paul says so, though we do not know much about Paul.
He has recently expressed himself on the Mangasarian-Crapsey Debate.
As honesty and culture increase, the number of inspired epistles decreases.
"A line of apostles and bishops coming right down from him by his appointment to Anderson of Chicago," shows that Jesus is historical. It does, but only to Episcopalians.
He mentioned the placing.
From where she stood she could see an angle of the long latticed window that was to have been cosy with curtains and gay with bowls of flowers.
Then, as she retraced her steps towards the kitchen, she came suddenly on her cousin, young Mr. Jim, as every one called him, who divided his time between amateur horse-dealing, rabbit-shooting, and flirting with the farm maids.
He had been a riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and washed, fetched and carried.
Old Shep, the white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman.
“Martha Crale” was the name written on that yellow page.
There had been a Palmerston, that had been a name down Tiverton way; Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow flies, but to Martha it was almost a foreign country.
“She may be actually dying at this moment, or it may just be the beginning of the break-up,” persisted Emma, with a feeling of contempt for the slowness and dulness of the young man.
I knew it.
Into her mind came the thought that for months, perhaps for years, long after she had been utterly forgotten, a white, unheeding face would be seen peering out through those latticed panes, and a weak muttering voice would be heard quavering up and down those flagged passages.
Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a peasant’s distrust of the outside world.
For longer than anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and wash-house and dairy, and out to chicken-run and garden, grumbling and muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly.
It would have been an unworthy meanness to have wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it might be, lurking at the back of her mind.
“Who’s dead, then, old Mother?” called out the young man.
On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, and paid bills, rested a worn and ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a baptism dated ninety-four years ago.
Emma Ladbruk, of whose coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a window on a summer’s day, used at first to watch her with a kind of frightened curiosity.
She told me so, and she’ll do it.”
Emma had come to the farm full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the result of training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of her own ideas and fancies.
A basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest of overdue feeding-time.
“When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the kitchen habitable,” said the young woman to her occasional visitors. There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed as well as unspoken.
Martha had never been on one side or the other; none of “they” had ever done the farm a stroke of good.
The young woman’s eyes clouded with pity.
The old thing sitting there so white and shrunken had once been a merry, noisy child, playing about in lanes and hay-lofts and farmhouse garrets; that had been eighty odd years ago, and now she was just a frail old body cowering under the approaching chill of the death that was coming at last to take her.
“’Tis young Mister Ladbruk,” she shrilled back; “they’ve just a-carried his body in.
The battery itself soon underwent modifications, and new types were evolved--the storage, the double-fluid, and the dry.
Electroplating became an art, and telegraphy sprang into active being on both sides of the Atlantic.
The farthest western reach of the telegraph lines in 1847 was Pittsburg, with three-ply iron wire mounted on square glass insulators with a little wooden pentroof for protection.
The poles were two hundred feet apart and could barely hold up a wash-line.
THE AGE OF ELECTRICITY
But the retrospect indicates that many reforms and political changes were accomplished, although the process involved the exile of not a few ardent spirits to America, to become leading statesmen, inventors, journalists, and financiers.
By the rational compromise with England in the dispute over the Oregon region, President Polk had secured during 1846, for undisturbed settlement, three hundred thousand square miles of forest, fertile land, and fisheries, including the whole fair Columbia Valley. Our active "policy of the Pacific" dated from that hour.
To all the coal-fields and all the waterfalls Faraday had directly hitched the wheels of industry.
But these few appliances made up the meagre kit of tools with which the nineteenth century entered upon its task of acquiring the arts and conveniences now such an intimate part of "human nature's daily food" that the average American to-day pays more for his electrical service than he does for bread.
Thus in about eighteen months there had been pieced into the national domain for quick development and exploitation a region as large as the entire Union of Thirteen States at the close of the War of Independence.
That which was wild had become domesticated; regular crops took the place of haphazard gleanings from brake or prairie; the possibility of electrical starvation was forever left behind.
But the little battery with its metal plates in a weak solution proved a perennial reservoir of electrical energy, safe and controllable, from which supplies could be drawn at will.
Then came the great outburst of activity.
The old absolutist system of government was fast breaking up, and ancient thrones were tottering.
Into such times Thomas Alva Edison was born, and his relations to them and to the events of the past sixty years are the subject of this narrative.
The gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the smelting furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought with it, like the friction match, one of the most profound influences in modifying domestic life, and making it different from that of all preceding time.
But the business was fortunately small at the outset, until the new device, patronized chiefly by lottery-men, had proved its utility.
THE year 1847 marked a period of great territorial acquisition by the American people, with incalculable additions to their actual and potential wealth.
Not only was it now possible to convert mechanical energy into electricity cheaply and in illimitable quantities, but electricity at once showed its ubiquitous availability as a motive power.
Chloroform, nitrous oxide gas, and ether had been placed at the service of the physician in saving life, and the revolver, guncotton, and nitroglycerine added to the agencies for slaughter.
But it is when we turn to electricity that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new kingdom of discovery is seen.
Viewed from the standpoint of inventive progress, the first half of the nineteenth century had passed very profitably when Edison appeared--every year marked by some notable achievement in the arts and sciences, with promise of its early and abundant fruition in commerce and industry.
The little glass-knob insulators made seductive targets for ignorant sportsmen. Attempts to insulate the line wire were limited to coating it with tar or smearing it with wax for the benefit of all the bees in the neighborhood.
In that office, where Andrew Carnegie was a messenger boy, the magnets in use to receive the signals sent with the aid of powerful nitric-acid batteries weighed as much as seventy-five pounds apiece.
CHAPTER I
Boats were propelled by it, cars were hauled, and even papers printed.
In England, Wheatstone and Cooke had introduced a ponderous magnetic needle telegraph.
Within a score of years telegraph wires covered the whole occupied country with a network, and the first great electrical industry was a pronounced success, yielding to its pioneers the first great harvest of electrical fortunes.
In England the fierce fervor of the Chartist movement, with its violent rhetoric as to the rights of man, was sobering down and passing pervasively into numerous practical schemes for social and political amelioration, constituting in their entirety a most profound change throughout every part of the national life.
The useful results obtainable previously from the current of a frictional machine were not much greater than those to be derived from the flight of a rocket.
Aside from the personal interest that attaches to the picturesque career, so typically American, there is a broader aspect in which the work of the "Franklin of the Nineteenth Century" touches the welfare and progress of the race.
No art or trade could be founded on it; no diminution of daily work or increase of daily comfort could be secured with it.
In 1847, too, Russia began her tremendous march eastward into Central Asia, just as France was solidifying her first gains on the littoral of northern Africa.
Everything was crude and primitive.
The application of machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in primitive prototypes.
The first photographs had been taken.
At the time Edison was born, in 1847, telegraphy, upon which he was to leave so indelible an imprint, had barely struggled into acceptance by the public.
Equally momentous were the times in Europe, where the attempt to secure opportunities of expansion as well as larger liberty for the individual took quite different form.
Almost all the electrical arts now employed made their beginnings in the next twenty-five years, and while the more extensive of them depend to-day on the dynamo for electrical energy, some of the most important still remain in loyal allegiance to the older source.
"Hitch your wagon to a star," said Emerson.
Various analogies next pointed to the use of heat, and the thermoelectric cell emerged, embodying the application of flame to the junction of two different metals.
With swift and clinching succession came the melodramatic Mexican War, and February, 1848, saw another vast territory south of Oregon and west of the Rocky Mountains added by treaty to the United States.
For the first time man had command of a steady supply of electricity without toil or effort.
The slim, bare, copper wire snapped on the least provocation, and the circuit was "down" for thirty-six days in the first six months.
Yes, it's the literal truth."
But why are you so worried about my going away? We've plenty of time before I go, an eternity!"
"Her feeling for Dmitri was simply a self-laceration.
I don't want to wound my little brother who has been watching me with such expectation for three months.
Waiters were continually darting to and fro in it.
I finished it.
"To be sure I will, it's not a secret, that's what I've been leading up to.
Russian conversations on such subjects are always carried on inconceivably stupidly.
"To begin with, for the sake of being Russian.
That's what we care about.
Yet Dmitri was not there.
But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over everything--every disillusionment, every disgust with life.
It's different for other people; but we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all.
All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions.
Some driveling consumptive moralists--and poets especially--often call that thirst for life base.
There are all sorts of phrases for it.
"Begin where you like.
"Let me have soup, and tea afterwards, I am hungry," said Alyosha gayly.
The stupider one is, the clearer one is.
I believe it's always best to get to know people just before leaving them.
And so I've told you."
"You seem very merry about it now," observed Alyosha, looking into his face, which had suddenly grown brighter.
Then, when you came to Moscow yourself, we only met once somewhere, I believe.
"Love life more than the meaning of it?"
"I said that yesterday at dinner on purpose to tease you and I saw your eyes glow.
To talk of my love for Katerina Ivanovna, of the old man and Dmitri? of foreign travel? of the fatal position of Russia?
"But he begged me not to tell Dmitri that he had told me about him," added Alyosha.
The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha.
I've led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me."
"Well, Alyosha, it's sometimes very unwise to be a Russian at all, but anything stupider than the way Russian boys spend their time one can hardly imagine.
But now I've no objection to discussing with you, and I say so very seriously.
You know, dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented.
Chapter III.
I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them.
I want to be friends with you, Alyosha, for I have no friends and want to try it.
"Why, one has to raise up your dead, who perhaps have not died after all. Come, let me have tea.
I acknowledge humbly that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not.
I want to get to know you once for all, and I want you to know me. And then to say good-by.
"Yes, and I've released myself once for all.
Now, have I insulted you dreadfully?"
Do you think I am boasting?"
Let us drink to my freedom.
Ah, Alyosha, if you only knew how light my heart is now!
"How nicely you put that in!" Alyosha laughed suddenly.
The existence of God, eh?"
"Isn't Madame Hohlakov laying it on?"
"Are you frowning on Smerdyakov's account?" asked Alyosha.
And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.
She loved me and not Dmitri," Ivan insisted gayly.
Why have you been looking at me in expectation for the last three months?
It certainly was sitting by a 'laceration.' Ah, she knew how I loved her!
Why push myself forward again?"
"And why did you begin 'as stupidly as you could'?" asked Alyosha, looking dreamily at him.
And I won't go through all the axioms laid down by Russian boys on that subject, all derived from European hypotheses; for what's a hypothesis there, is an axiom with the Russian boy, and not only with the boys but with their teachers too, for our Russian professors are often just the same boys themselves.
"Yes, on his account.
You declared yesterday at father's that there was no God." Alyosha looked searchingly at his brother.
One loves the first strength of one's youth.
There's such a difference between fifteen and eleven that brothers are never companions at those ages.
But I understand something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning."
And after all, what have I to do with Dmitri?
It's a feature of the Karamazovs, it's true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base?
Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring.
"And cherry jam?
I won't accept it.
I don't know whether I was fond of you even.
That's what's at the root of me, Alyosha; that's my creed.
I've noticed how you've been looking at me these three months.
"No, brother, we had better not drink," said Alyosha suddenly.
As for me, I've long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man.
Do you understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?" Ivan laughed suddenly.
It's not that I don't accept God, you must understand, it's the world created by Him I don't and cannot accept.
But there was the usual bustle going on in the other rooms of the tavern; there were shouts for the waiters, the sound of popping corks, the click of billiard balls, the drone of the organ.
Well, it's better so; I can simply go away for good.
"I did that on purpose.
"Then you know what for.
Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality.
"Cain's answer about his murdered brother, wasn't it? Perhaps that's what you're thinking at this moment?
I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature, that is what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope, that's it, isn't it?
Here they have brought the soup for you, eat it, it will do you good.
"Were you very anxious to see me, then?"
Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.
Damn him, I certainly did want to see Dmitri, but now there's no need," said Ivan reluctantly.
I fell in love with the young lady, I worried myself over her and she worried me.
To ask me, 'What do you believe, or don't you believe at all?' That's what your eyes have been meaning for these three months, haven't they?"
Let me make it plain.
The little man stands firm, I thought.
But to hang on to seventy is nasty, better only to thirty; one might retain 'a shadow of nobility' by deceiving oneself.
And so I omit all the hypotheses.
I sat watching over her ... and all at once it's collapsed!
You didn't want to hear about God, but only to know what the brother you love lives by.
You remember how you used to love cherry jam when you were little?"
"Yes, for real Russians the questions of God's existence and of immortality, or, as you say, the same questions turned inside out, come first and foremost, of course, and so they should," said Alyosha, still watching his brother with the same gentle and inquiring smile.
In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down in a corner.
Ha ha!
Your expectant eyes ceased to annoy me, I grew fond of them in the end, those expectant eyes.
And masses, masses of the most original Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions!
How attractive she was just now when I made my speech!
I seem to be on the right path, don't I? Yet would you believe it, in the final result I don't accept this world of God's, and, although I know it exists, I don't accept it at all.
So he must have come here, he reflected, simply to meet Dmitri by arrangement.
Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in Euclid's geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.
Henry thrown from his horse?
"Well!" cried his master, without waiting for him to speak, "is he there?"
Beyond doubt he was under the influence of some extraordinary agitation.
Where can he have gone?
And why, pray, do you grieve about that?"
The question was not asked.
"Ho--ho!
This habit is exacted by a sort of necessity, arising out of the nature of some of the viands peculiar to the country; many of which, as "Virginia biscuit," "buckwheat cakes," and "waffles," are only relished coming fresh from, the fire: so that the hour when breakfast is being eaten in the dining-room, is that in which the cook is broiling her skin in the kitchen.
"Where can the boy be?" asked his father, for the fourth time, in that tone of mild conjecture that scarce calls for reply.
Louise only gave expression to a similar conjecture.
It could scarce be caused by the absence of her brother from the breakfast-table?
"Henry from home; and at night too.
"No, Mass' Woodley," replied the black, in a voice that betrayed a large measure of emotion, "he are not dar--Massa Henry am not.
A sight was there awaiting them, calculated to inspire all three with the most terrible apprehensions.
No--no--he never lies so late.
He wouldn't go there," interposed Calhoun, who appeared as much mystified by the absence of Henry as was Poindexter himself.
"Go to Henry's sleeping-room.
"If not, it may still remain a secret between brother and myself.
"Very strange Henry not being here to his breakfast!" remarked the planter, for about the tenth time.
There can be little harm in it: since he has gone astray in good company?"
I think I can manage Henry.
He sate nervously in his chair; and once or twice might have been seen to start, as a servant entered the room.
The dark red spots on which they were distractedly gazing had spurted from the veins of Henry Poindexter.
Her father did not notice anything odd in her look.
All present knew him to be the horse of Henry Poindexter.
Not at the tavern, I hope?"
"His horse at the gate?
Go instantly, and see!"
As several minutes passed without his coming in, the planter quietly observed that it was rather strange of Henry to be behind time, and wonder where he could be.
I've sate up all night waiting for him.
The negro had caught him, on the outside plain, as, with the bridle trailing among his feet, he was instinctively straying towards the hacienda.
Who could blame him if he has?
The animal wet with the dews of the night, and having been evidently uncared for in any stable, was snorting and stamping the ground, as if but lately escaped from some scene of excitement, in which he had been compelled to take part.
Nonsense, Pluto!
Or is it his tail that is missing?"
Nor did any one ask whose blood bedaubed the saddle-flaps.
My son is too good a rider for that.
Ever since entering the room he had maintained a studied silence; keeping his eyes averted, instead of, according to his usual custom, constantly straying towards his cousin.
Whence came that horse?
What was it?
"Oh, no!
From the prairies.
Pluto!"
No one put the inquiry.
Only the conjecture: that he would shortly make his appearance.
What because?
"He no dar, Mass' Woodley."
Henry was the absent one.
But why is he still absent?
"There's something strange in all this," pursued the planter, as Pluto shuffled out of the sala.
As the laggard, or late riser, may have to put up with cold biscuit, and no waffles or buckwheat cakes, there are few such on a Southern plantation.
It was interrupted by the reappearance of Pluto; whose important air, as he re-entered the room, proclaimed him the bearer of eventful tidings.
"What!
The "field hands" labouring near had collected around the "quarter;" and in groups, squatted upon the grass, or seated upon stray logs, were discussing their diet--by no means spare--of "hog and hominy" corn-bread and "corn-coffee," with a jocosity that proclaimed a keen relish of these, their ordinary comestibles.
"Perhaps better not.
"No.
Scouts were sent out in advance; and professed "trackers" employed to pick up, and interpret the "sign."
It can't be a great ways off."
"Oh, no; not so much as that comes to.
This observation appeared to be more particularly pointed at the planter and his nephew; as the tracker, on making it, glanced furtively towards both.
Is there a dead body?"
It may be artificial: some old "war-trail" of the Comanches, erst trodden by their expeditionary parties on the maraud to Tamaulipas, Coahuila, or New Leon.
As for the time, they've taken long enough to smoke a cigar apiece--close to the teeth too.
The turf, hard and dry, only showed the tracks of a horse when going in a gallop.
But," continued the scout in a muttered undertone, "if you wish me to follow up the sign as it ought to be done, you'll order the others to stay back--'specially them as are now nearest you."
"Sign?"
Goin' west the mustang was foremost; you can tell that by the overlap.
Having issued the command, in a voice loud enough to be heard by his following, the major rode away from the bloodstained spot, preceded by the tracker.
How on earth can you know all that?"
He knows enough already.
"Let us proceed thither, then," said the major.
They must have quarrelled afterwards."
"What then?"
"Dead before that blood had turned purple--as it is now."
That it did come there can be no doubt.
I shall remember it."
When he met her the week before, she treated him with the utmost disdain; now she greeted him with a smile, and said, "I trust you have not come to carry papa away in captivity.
"Thank you, Sergeant, for your watchfulness.
No wonder Lieutenant Haines felt his heart beat faster when he looked upon her.
As Mr. Osborne said this, Miss Osborne gave a little gasp and turned pale, but quickly recovering herself, she turned a pair of inquiring eyes on the Lieutenant--eyes that emitted flames of angry light and seemed to look him through and through.
The invitation nearly took away the Lieutenant's breath, but he accepted it gladly.
I took a crack at him, but missed."
Did you get him?" asked the Lieutenant.
Are you afraid of an attack?
Lieutenant Haines turned very red.
But he may have carried important dispatches on his person.
"The truth is," replied Haines, "we ran into a lone Confederate about a mile from here.
I have no fears but that you can capture it, even with your small force."
"Nothing."
The Sergeant turned back to carry out the order, muttering, "Confederate! Confederate!
Sergeant Latham took the roll, which was securely strapped behind Calhoun's saddle, and began to unroll it as carefully as if he suspected it might be loaded.
The Lieutenant scowled, but did not reply.
All the letters were read and passed around.
"Who was he?
"Yes, a whole package of them.
The subject was rather a painful one to the Lieutenant, for during his visit to the Osbornes the week before, when he tried to make himself agreeable to the daughter, the lady told him in very plain words what she thought of Yankees.
I suspected something was wrong all the time."
Morgan--Morgan, I have heard of that fellow before.
"Do as you please," replied Mr. Osborne, coldly; "I have seen no such Confederate; but if I had, I should have concealed him if I could.
"Already thousands of her sons are flocking to the Southern standard.
"A fine rubber and a good woollen blanket," remarked the Sergeant.
"Now, you must stay and take dinner with us while your men rest."
He played the deuce with us in Kentucky last winter: burned the railroad bridge over Bacon Creek, captured trains, tore up the railroad, and played smash generally.
They were from members of Morgan's command to their friends back in Kentucky.
Lower that weapon!"
"I reckon he is right," sighed the Doctor; "but may the time never come when he will have to give it up."
Will you not give them to me?"
"Shut up, or I will have you reduced to the ranks," growled the Lieutenant.
"Gods!
Wonder who that feller can be.
"I did not intend that Lieutenant Pennington should show himself.
"Can't be helped now," dryly remarked Sergeant Latham.
He was a Lieutenant Calhoun Pennington, and he was from the Rebel army at Corinth.
"Oh, how could you betray us!" and stood with clasped hands, and with face as pale as death.
I know of no body of Confederates in the vicinity."
I strove to entertain you and keep you from searching the house, and I accomplished my purpose."
I thought you had him sure, Lieutenant."
'Under no consideration,' says Morgan, 'should Beauregard allow himself to be cooped up in Corinth.' "
We let a rare prize slip through our fingers."
"My leg is sprained," he groaned; "but the worst of it is, Jupiter is dead.
We captured his horse, but he succeeded in escaping to the woods, after killing my horse.
"Yes; the girl worked it fine."
As my guest, you are entitled to my protection, and I shall make what reparation is in my power." Then turning to the colored boy who had stood by with mouth and eyes wide open, he said, "Tom, go and saddle and bridle Starlight, and bring him around for this gentleman."
He got across that field as if Old Nick was after him.
"Stop that!" roared the Lieutenant, "or I will have you both bucked and gagged when we get to camp.
"Thank you," she answered, with a smile.
From underneath a rock near the house gushed forth a spring, whose waters, clear as crystal, ran away in a rippling stream.
The family had accompanied Lieutenant Haines to the porch.
"Golly!
I will catch up with you in a few moments.
The Sergeant saluted and turned to go, when the officer stopped him with, "Say, Sergeant, you can gather up all those letters we captured and send them up here with my horse."
The place for true knights, at this time, is at Corinth."
I would make him pay dearly for that horse."
The Lieutenant sighed.
"Or took fire from their warmth," put in a boyish looking soldier.
A scattering volley was fired by the foremost of the pursuers, but it did no harm, and Calhoun was soon across the field.
"Only my poor horse; he was killed," answered Haines.
I tell you it was hot stuff.
"I can at least keep them sacred.
"Very well, you may go now."
He was discovered by a squad of Federal cavalry, which immediately gave chase. But he was mounted on a splendid horse, one that he had brought with him from Kentucky.
"Only one," muttered Calhoun, looking back, as a pistol-ball whistled by his head; "I can settle him," and he reached for a revolver in his holster.
Lieutenant Haines groaned.
Here he found little trouble in finding means to cross the Tennessee River.
Mr. Osborne now spoke.
I caught him!" exclaimed one of the men, leading up Calhoun's horse, which he had captured.
So you see, after all, I am out nothing."
"Thank you!
"The whelps and robbers!" he exclaimed; "how I should like to get at them! But their time will come.
"Better let the Lieutenant tell the story, for I know nothing of it," answered Mr. Osborne; "but he spoke of searching the house for a supposed concealed Confederate."
It was a beautiful place. The country had not yet been devastated by the cruel hand of war, and the landscape, rich with the growing crops, lay glowing under the bright April sky.
"Lieutenant, there was nothing in those letters of value to you from a military standpoint, was there?" suddenly asked Miss Osborne.
"Give them to me," said the Lieutenant.
"Your father has assured me he has neither seen nor concealed any Confederate officer, and his word is good with me. Make yourself easy.
We will see." He tore open one of the letters.
Mr. Osborne flushed deeply, but before he could reply, his daughter sprang in front of him, and faced Lieutenant Haines with flashing eye.
"If you had captured him it might have put one bar, if not two, on your shoulder-strap."
"A fight! a fight!" shouted the men, and crowded around to see the fun.
It was thought he sheltered these wandering bands of Confederates who make it dangerous to step outside the camp.
It was near this spring that Lieutenant Haines, for that was the officer's name, halted his troops.
Just then they met Sergeant Latham returning from posting the guard. "Sergeant, you may withdraw the guard," said the Lieutenant; "Mr.
"She will, she must," cried Calhoun.
I alone am to blame, and I told you nothing.
If not, you are welcome."
"He can if any one can.
At the time Calhoun started for Kentucky, General Halleck was concentrating his immense army at Pittsburg Landing, preparatory to an attack on Corinth.
Both the males and females in these cases are conspicuous, and it is not credible that their difference in colour should stand in any relation to ordinary protection.
Even within the same genus we often find species presenting extraordinary differences between the sexes, whilst others have their sexes closely alike.
The females, as several entomologists have remarked to me, lie in an almost torpid state, and appear not to evince the least choice in regard to their partners.
No language suffices to describe the splendour of the males of some tropical species.
Hence I am led to believe that the females prefer or are most excited by the more brilliant males; for on any other supposition the males would, as far as we can see, be ornamented to no purpose.
For instance, in the Australian Gastrophora the upper surface of the fore-wing is pale greyish-ochreous, while the lower surface is magnificently ornamented by an ocellus of cobalt-blue, placed in the midst of a black mark, surrounded by orange-yellow, and this by bluish-white. But the habits of these three moths are unknown; so that no explanation can be given of their unusual style of colouring.
During the night colours are not visible, and there can be no doubt that the nocturnal moths, taken as a body, are much less gaily decorated than butterflies, all of which are diurnal in their habits.
The common Yellow Under-wings (Triphaena) often fly about during the day or early evening, and are then conspicuous from the colour of their hind-wings.
Most Moths rest motionless during the whole or greater part of the day with their wings depressed; and the whole upper surface is often shaded and coloured in an admirable manner, as Mr. Wallace has remarked, for escaping detection.
In some cases, however, to which I shall hereafter allude, the females are coloured more splendidly than the males.
Dr. Wallace, who has had great experience in breeding Bombyx cynthia, is convinced that the females evince no choice or preference.
Nevertheless, it is probable that conspicuous colours are indirectly beneficial to many species, as a warning that they are unpalatable.
The Saturniidae include some of the most beautiful of all moths, their wings being decorated, as in our British Emperor moth, with fine ocelli; and Mr. T.W.
As I hear from Mr. Doubleday, the common white butterfly often flies down to a bit of paper on the ground, no doubt mistaking it for one of its own species.
I have not alluded to the well-known noise made by the Death's Head Sphinx, for it is generally heard soon after the moth has emerged from its cocoon.
Some facts, however, are opposed to the belief that female butterflies prefer the more beautiful males; thus, as I have been assured by several collectors, fresh females may frequently be seen paired with battered, faded, or dingy males; but this is a circumstance which could hardly fail often to follow from the males emerging from their cocoons earlier than the females.
DISPLAY.
With animals of all kinds, whenever colour has been modified for some special purpose, this has been, as far as we can judge, either for direct or indirect protection, or as an attraction between the sexes.
Many analogous and striking facts could be given.
With our beautiful English butterflies, the admiral, peacock, and painted lady (Vanessae), as well as many others, the sexes are alike.
The courtship of butterflies is, as before remarked, a prolonged affair. The males sometimes fight together in rivalry; and many may be seen pursuing or crowding round the same female.
The bright colours of many butterflies and of some moths are specially arranged for display, so that they may be readily seen.
Before attempting to answer these questions a body of facts must be given.
In some other cases the lower surfaces of the wings are brilliantly coloured, and yet are protective; thus in Thecla rubi the wings when closed are of an emerald green, and resemble the young leaves of the bramble, on which in spring this butterfly may often be seen seated.
This is also the case with the magnificent Heliconidae, and most of the Danaidae in the tropics.
In the third place, we have seen that when the sexes nearly resemble each other, this appears due either to the male having transferred his colours to the female, or to the male having retained, or perhaps recovered, the primordial colours of the group.
In the tenth species the female still retains the same general colouring, but the male resembles her, so that he is coloured in a much less gaudy and contrasted manner than the males of the previous species.
In this latter species the difference in colour between the two sexes is strongly marked; and Mr. Wallace informs me that we here have, as he believes, an instance of protective mimicry confined to one sex, as will hereafter be more fully explained.
Hence in these two latter species the bright colours of the males seem to have been transferred to the females; whilst in the tenth species the male has either retained or recovered the plain colours of the female, as well as of the parent-form of the genus.
The process of sexual selection will have been much facilitated, if the conclusion can be trusted, arrived at from various kinds of evidence in the supplement to the ninth chapter; namely, that the males of many Lepidoptera, at least in the imago state, greatly exceed the females in number.
But in certain other tropical groups, and in some of our English butterflies, as the purple emperor, orange-tip, etc. (Apatura Iris and Anthocharis cardamines), the sexes differ either greatly or slightly in colour.
Hence the lower surface generally affords to entomologists the more useful character for detecting the affinities of the various species.
It is a singular fact that no British moths which are brilliantly coloured, and, as far as I can discover, hardly any foreign species, differ much in colour according to sex; though this is the case with many brilliant butterflies.
Hence in most groups the females of the several species resemble each other much more closely than do the males.
It also deserves notice that in those groups in which the sexes differ, the females usually somewhat resemble the males, so that when the males are beautiful to an extraordinary degree, the females almost invariably exhibit some degree of beauty.
We know that ants and certain Lamellicorn beetles are capable of feeling an attachment for each other, and that ants recognise their fellows after an interval of several months. Hence there is no abstract improbability in the Lepidoptera, which probably stand nearly or quite as high in the scale as these insects, having sufficient mental capacity to admire bright colours.
Nevertheless, as a general rule, the upper surface, which is probably more fully exposed, is coloured more brightly and diversely than the lower.
Hence it is this side which is often coloured so as to imitate the objects on which these insects commonly rest.
Other such cases could be added.
They certainly discover flowers by colour.
Hence we may infer that these nine species, and probably all the others of the genus, are descended from an ancestral form which was coloured in nearly the same manner.
It would naturally be thought that this would be a source of danger; but Mr. J. Jenner Weir believes that it actually serves them as a means of escape, for birds strike at these brightly coloured and fragile surfaces, instead of at the body.
From the several foregoing facts it is impossible to admit that the brilliant colours of butterflies, and of some few moths, have commonly been acquired for the sake of protection.
Another striking case was pointed out to me in the British Museum by Mr. A. Butler, namely, one of the tropical American Theclae, in which both sexes are nearly alike and wonderfully splendid; in another species the male is coloured in a similarly gorgeous manner, whilst the whole upper surface of the female is of a dull uniform brown.
Hence the lower surface of the wings being brighter than the upper surface in certain moths is not so anomalous as it at first appears.
I have given the foregoing details in order to shew, in the first place, that when the sexes of butterflies differ, the male as a general rule is the more beautiful, and departs more from the usual type of colouring of the group to which the species belongs.
With many species of butterflies the upper surfaces of the wings are obscure; and this in all probability leads to their escaping observation and danger. But butterflies would be particularly liable to be attacked by their enemies when at rest; and most kinds whilst resting raise their wings vertically over their backs, so that the lower surface alone is exposed to view.
Or have successive variations been accumulated and determined as a protection, or for some unknown purpose, or that one sex may be attractive to the other? And, again, what is the meaning of the colours being widely different in the males and females of certain species, and alike in the two sexes of other species of the same genus?
It has just been stated that the male Gelasimus does not acquire his conspicuous colours until mature and nearly ready to breed.
In other cases the male alone appears to change colour.
Throughout this great division of the animal kingdom, as far as I can discover, secondary sexual characters, such as we are here considering, never occur.
But these actions are probably instinctive, so that they would be performed as well by a young animal as by an old one.
In about five minutes the crab brought out the shell which had fallen in, and carried it away to a distance of a foot; it then saw the three other shells lying near, and evidently thinking that they might likewise roll in, carried them to the spot where it had laid the first.
As I am informed by Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys, the sole external difference between the sexes consists in the shell sometimes differing a little in form; for instance, the shell of the male periwinkle (Littorina littorea) is narrower and has a more elongated spire than that of the female.
The Gasteropoda, though capable of locomotion and furnished with imperfect eyes, do not appear to be endowed with sufficient mental powers for the members of the same sex to struggle together in rivalry, and thus to acquire secondary sexual characters.
In many cases where the sexes are separate, both are permanently attached to some support, and the one cannot search or struggle for the other.
They are also, as we have seen, highly intelligent animals.
It should be borne in mind that in no case have we sufficient evidence that colours have been thus acquired, except where one sex is much more brilliantly or conspicuously coloured than the other, and where there is no difference in habits between the sexes sufficient to account for their different colours.
In this great class we first meet with undoubted secondary sexual characters, often developed in a remarkable manner.
After a short time the strong and healthy individual disappeared, and was traced by its track of slime over a wall into an adjoining well-stocked garden.
Even in the highest class of the Mollusca, the Cephalopoda or cuttle- fishes, in which the sexes are separate, secondary sexual characters of the present kind do not, as far as I can discover, occur.
Unfortunately the habits of crustaceans are very imperfectly known, and we cannot explain the uses of many structures peculiar to one sex.
But many brightly-coloured, white, or otherwise conspicuous species, do not seek concealment; whilst again some equally conspicuous species, as well as other dull-coloured kinds live under stones and in dark recesses.
Any one who tries to catch one of the shore-crabs, so common on tropical coasts, will perceive how wary and alert they are. There is a large crab (Birgus latro), found on coral islands, which makes a thick bed of the picked fibres of the cocoa-nut, at the bottom of a deep burrow.
Spiders are possessed of acute senses, and exhibit much intelligence; as is well known, the females often shew the strongest affection for their eggs, which they carry about enveloped in a silken web.
But differences of this nature, it may be presumed, are directly connected with the act of reproduction, or with the development of the ova.
It then breaks through one of these eyes by hammering with its heavy front pincers, and turning round, extracts the albuminous core with its narrow posterior pincers.
After a time the male was put again into the same vessel; and he then, after swimming about for a time, dashed into the crowd, and without any fighting at once took away his wife.
From these several considerations, we may admit with some confidence that the well-marked differences in colour between the sexes of certain species are the results of sexual selection; though we have not here the best kind of evidence,-- the display by the male of his ornaments.
These naked sea-slugs are hermaphrodites, yet they pair together, as do land-snails, many of which have extremely pretty shells.
The colours do not appear in most cases to be of any use as a protection; they are probably the direct result, as in the lowest classes, of the nature of the tissues; the patterns and the sculpture of the shell depending on its manner of growth.
We shall hereafter find the same law prevailing throughout the great sub-kingdom of the Vertebrata; and in all cases it is eminently distinctive of characters which have been acquired through sexual selection.
In the next higher class of the Gasteropoda, or univalve shells, the sexes are either united or separate.
From these various considerations it seems probable that the male in this species has become gaily ornamented in order to attract or excite the female.
Mr. Lonsdale concluded that it had deserted its sickly mate; but after an absence of twenty-four hours it returned, and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall.
In this species, as I may add, the male is testaceous and the female black with legs banded with red.
Nevertheless with the pulmoniferous gasteropods, or land-snails, the pairing is preceded by courtship; for these animals, though hermaphrodites, are compelled by their structure to pair together.
In some species of the genus, probably in all, the sexes pair and inhabit the same burrow.
This fact shews that in the Amphipoda, an order low in the scale, the males and females recognise each other, and are mutually attached.
So that with these nudibranch molluscs, colour apparently does not stand in any close relation to the nature of the places which they inhabit.
I am informed by Mr. Blackwall that the sexes whilst young usually resemble each other; and both often undergo great changes in colour during their successive moults, before arriving at maturity.
But these extraordinary differences between the two sexes are no doubt related to their widely different habits of life, and consequently do not concern us.
The mental powers of the Crustacea are probably higher than at first sight appears probable.
These animals are often beautifully coloured, but as the sexes do not differ in this respect, we are but little concerned with them.
Bearing in mind how many substances closely analogous to natural organic compounds have been recently formed by chemists, and which exhibit the most splendid colours, it would have been a strange fact if substances similarly coloured had not often originated, independently of any useful end thus gained, in the complex laboratory of living organisms.
It feeds on the fallen fruit of this tree by tearing off the husk, fibre by fibre; and it always begins at that end where the three eye-like depressions are situated.
THE SUB-KINGDOM OF THE MOLLUSCA.
In various crustaceans, belonging to distinct families, the anterior antennae are furnished with peculiar thread-like bodies, which are believed to act as smelling-organs, and these are much more numerous in the males than in the females.
In the Lamellibranchiata, or bivalve shells, hermaphroditism is not rare.
Mr. Bate put a large male Carcinus maenas into a pan of water, inhabited by a female which was paired with a smaller male; but the latter was soon dispossessed.
Conspicuous colours are likewise beneficial to many animals as a warning to their would-be devourers that they are distasteful, or that they possess some special means of defence; but this subject will be discussed more conveniently hereafter.
We have not here the case of a number of males becoming mature before the females, with the more beautiful males selected by the more vigorous females.
The males search eagerly for the females, and have been seen by Canestrini and others to fight for possession of them. This same author says that the union of the two sexes has been observed in about twenty species; and he asserts positively that the female rejects some of the males who court her, threatens them with open mandibles, and at last after long hesitation accepts the chosen one.
It is conceivable that two hermaphrodites, attracted by each other's greater beauty, might unite and leave offspring which would inherit their parents' greater beauty.
Moreover it is almost certain that these animals have too imperfect senses and much too low mental powers to appreciate each other's beauty or other attractions, or to feel rivalry.
But in the latter case the males never possess special organs for finding, securing, or charming the females, or for fighting with other males.
This seems a general rule in the whole class in respect to the many remarkable structural differences between the sexes.
As soon as we stood still, they recommenced The old refrain, and when they overtook us, Formed of themselves a wheel, all three of them.
As falcon who has long been on the wing, Who, without seeing either lure or bird, Maketh the falconer say, "Ah me, thou stoopest,"
Of a new pain behoves me to make verses And give material to the twentieth canto Of the first song, which is of the submerged.
Now we descend by stairways such as these; Mount thou in front, for I will be midway, So that the tail may have no power to harm thee."
"Master, who is that one who writhes himself, More than his other comrades quivering," I said, "and whom a redder flame is sucking?"
As God may let thee, Reader, gather fruit From this thy reading, think now for thyself How I could ever keep my face unmoistened,
Reverberates there above San Benedetto From Alps, by falling at a single leap, Where for a thousand there were room enough;
"Whoe'er thou art, that standest upside down, O doleful soul, implanted like a stake," To say began I, "if thou canst, speak out."
And he to me: "If thou wilt have me bear thee Down there along that bank which lowest lies, From him thou'lt know his errors and himself."
And afterwards was forced to strike once more The two entangled serpents with his rod, Ere he could have again his manly plumes.
He said to me: "Soon there will upward come What I await; and what thy thought is dreaming Must soon reveal itself unto thy sight."
As soon as this my Lord said unto me Words, on account of which I thought within me That people such as you are were approaching.
This side and that, along the livid stone Beheld I horned demons with great scourges, Who cruelly were beating them behind.
And truly was I son of the She-bear, So eager to advance the cubs, that wealth Above, and here myself, I pocketed.
Therefore stay here, for thou art justly punished, And keep safe guard o'er the ill-gotten money, Which caused thee to be valiant against Charles.
There is a place in Hell called Malebolge, Wholly of stone and of an iron colour, As is the circle that around it turns.
New Jason will he be, of whom we read In Maccabees; and as his king was pliant, So he who governs France shall be to this one."
See, he has made a bosom of his shoulders! Because he wished to see too far before him Behind he looks, and backward goes his way:
The same who with the seven heads was born, And power and strength from the ten horns received, So long as virtue to her spouse was pleasing.
Then said to me the Master: "So that full Experience of this round thou bear away, Now go and see what their condition is.
He by the isle of Lemnos passed along After the daring women pitiless Had unto death devoted all their males.
Even thus did Geryon place us on the bottom, Close to the bases of the rough-hewn rock, And being disencumbered of our persons,
Right in the middle of the field malign There yawns a well exceeding wide and deep, Of which its place the structure will recount.
"It must needs be some novelty respond," I said within myself, "to the new signal The Master with his eye is following so."
Thus farther still upon the outermost Head of that seventh circle all alone I went, where sat the melancholy folk.
And that uncleanly image of deceit Came up and thrust ashore its head and bust, But on the border did not drag its tail.
Inferno: Canto XIX
And I, who with them on the cross am placed, Jacopo Rusticucci was; and truly My savage wife, more than aught else, doth harm me."
Above in beauteous Italy lies a lake At the Alp's foot that shuts in Germany Over Tyrol, and has the name Benaco.
His tail was wholly quivering in the void, Contorting upwards the envenomed fork, That in the guise of scorpion armed its point.
When I had turned mine eyes upon the faces Of some, on whom the dolorous fire is falling, Not one of them I knew; but I perceived
Not far it runs before it finds a plain In which it spreads itself, and makes it marshy, And oft 'tis wont in summer to be sickly.
There where his breast had been he turned his tail, And that extended like an eel he moved, And with his paws drew to himself the air.
I was already thoroughly disposed To peer down into the uncovered depth, Which bathed itself with tears of agony;
Thus downward from a bank precipitate, We found resounding that dark-tinted water, So that it soon the ear would have offended.
There with his tokens and with ornate words Did he deceive Hypsipyle, the maiden Who first, herself, had all the rest deceived.
Inferno: Canto XVI
See that thou speak of us unto the people." Then they broke up the wheel, and in their flight It seemed as if their agile legs were wings.
Upon my right hand I beheld new anguish, New torments, and new wielders of the lash, Wherewith the foremost Bolgia was replete.
Let the renown of us thy mind incline To tell us who thou art, who thus securely Thy living feet dost move along through Hell.
I do not know if I were here too bold, That him I answered only in this metre: "I pray thee tell me now how great a treasure
As where for the protection of the walls Many and many moats surround the castles, The part in which they are a figure forms,
And one, who with an azure sow and gravid Emblazoned had his little pouch of white, Said unto me: "What dost thou in this moat?
The margins were incrusted with a mould By exhalation from below, that sticks there, And with the eyes and nostrils wages war.
Athwart that dense and darksome atmosphere I saw a figure swimming upward come, Marvellous unto every steadfast heart,
Not otherwise in summer do the dogs, Now with the foot, now with the muzzle, when By fleas, or flies, or gadflies, they are bitten.
I was the one who the fair Ghisola Induced to grant the wishes of the Marquis, Howe'er the shameless story may be told.
Wisdom supreme, O how great art thou showest In heaven, in earth, and in the evil world, And with what justice doth thy power distribute!
Eryphylus his name was, and so sings My lofty Tragedy in some part or other; That knowest thou well, who knowest the whole of it.
We therefore on the right side descended, And made ten steps upon the outer verge, Completely to avoid the sand and flame;
Out of the mouth of each one there protruded The feet of a transgressor, and the legs Up to the calf, the rest within remained.
But he, who other times had rescued me In other peril, soon as I had mounted, Within his arms encircled and sustained me,
And I: "My Master, thy discourses are To me so certain, and so take my faith, That unto me the rest would be spent coals.
Below there I shall likewise fall, whenever That one shall come who I believed thou wast, What time the sudden question I proposed.
This very easily did we ascend, And turning to the right along its ridge, From those eternal circles we departed.
Down at the bottom were the sinners naked; This side the middle came they facing us, Beyond it, with us, but with greater steps;
The other, who close by me treads the sand, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi is, whose fame Above there in the world should welcome be.
I found my Guide, who had already mounted Upon the back of that wild animal, And said to me: "Now be both strong and bold.
So from the precipice's base did crags Project, which intersected dikes and moats, Unto the well that truncates and collects them.
O Simon Magus, O forlorn disciples, Ye who the things of God, which ought to be The brides of holiness, rapaciously
Such as he is who has so near the ague Of quartan that his nails are blue already, And trembles all, but looking at the shade;
"If other times so little it doth cost thee," Replied they all, "to satisfy another, Happy art thou, thus speaking at thy will!
Thus spake he to me, and we walked the while.
I followed him, and little had we gone, Before the sound of water was so near us, That speaking we should hardly have been heard.
That from the neck of each there hung a pouch, Which certain colour had, and certain blazon; And thereupon it seems their eyes are feeding.
There to escape all human intercourse, She with her servants stayed, her arts to practise And lived, and left her empty body there.
"Behold the monster with the pointed tail, Who cleaves the hills, and breaketh walls and weapons, Behold him who infecteth all the world."
For Guglielmo Borsier, who is in torment With us of late, and goes there with his comrades, Doth greatly mortify us with his words."
After her father had from life departed, And the city of Bacchus had become enslaved, She a long season wandered through the world.
As lower down my sight descended on them, Wondrously each one seemed to be distorted From chin to the beginning of the chest;
I saw then, for before I had not seen it, The turning and descending, by great horrors That were approaching upon divers sides.
Therefore I caution thee, if e'er thou hearest Originate my city otherwise, No falsehood may the verity defraud."
Amphiaraus?
Therefore with both his arms he took me up, And when he had me all upon his breast, Remounted by the way where he descended.
Proceeding then the current of my sight, Another of them saw I, red as blood, Display a goose more white than butter is.
When shadows three together started forth, Running, from out a company that passed Beneath the rain of the sharp martyrdom.
Behold Tiresias, who his semblance changed, When from a male a female he became, His members being all of them transformed;
Such I became, as people are who stand, Not comprehending what is answered them, As if bemocked, and know not how to answer.
Towards us came they, and each one cried out: "Stop, thou; for by thy garb to us thou seemest To be some one of our depraved city."
Beneath my head the others are dragged down Who have preceded me in simony, Flattened along the fissure of the rock.
I stood even as the friar who is confessing The false assassin, who, when he is fixed, Recalls him, so that death may be delayed.
Then said Virgilius: "Say to him straightway, 'I am not he, I am not he thou thinkest.'" And I replied as was imposed on me.
When it was the Six Hundred and Tenth Night,
As for the brand, if its bearer draw it and brandish it against an army, the army will be put to the rout; and if he say the while, 'Slay yonder host,' there will come forth of that sword lightning and fire, that will kill the whole many.
When it was the Six Hundred and Ninth Night,
Quoth the Moor, "Bring me the two caskets that are in the saddle bags." So Judar brought them and opened them to him, and he laid in each casket a fish and shut them up.
Our father was wont to make use of this book, of which we had some small matter by heart, and each of us desired to possess it, that he might acquaint himself with what was therein.
Then he waited awhile; presently the Moor thrust both hands forth of the water and called out to him, saying, "Ho, good fellow, cast out thy net!" So Judar threw the net over him and drew him ashore, and lo! in each hand he held a fish as red as coral.
Then he pressed Judar to his bosom and kissed him on the right cheek and the left, saying, "Allah save thee from all stress!
Then Judar sat watching and after awhile, his feet appeared above the water and the fisher said, "He is dead and damned!
"Nay," answered the Maghribi, "they are Ifrits in the guise of fish.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eleventh Night,
"Whither went they?" enquired the Moor, and Judar replied, "I pinioned their hands behind them and cast them into the lake, where they were drowned, and the same fate is in store for thee." The Moor laughed and rejoined, saying, "O unhappy!
An out-an'-out rotter, that's what he is.
There was something dramatically biblical in the idea of Robert Bludward's neighbours and acquaintances hissing him for very scorn.
Send him to Parliament to represent us--not much!
Properly exposed him, hip and thigh, I tell you."
Alethia pounced on it, in the expectation of finding a cultured literary endorsement of the censure which these rough farming men had expressed in their homely, honest way.
He had goaded them to desperation with his shameless depravity till they spoke openly of putting him to a violent death, and he laughed.
He had the frank open countenance, neatly brushed hair and tidy clothes that betoken a clear conscience and a good mother.
Robert would come spurring after her and seize her bridle just as she was turning in at Sir John's gates.
He stared straight at the occupants of the car, and, after he had passed them, sang in his clear, boyish voice:
The train stopped at another small station, and the two men got out.
And now, in her twenty-ninth year, her aunt's death had left her, well provided for as regards income, but somewhat isolated in the matter of kith and kin and human companionship.
Ought to be ashamed to look any decent man in the face.
What indeed!
One was seeking to have his enemy done to death, the other was apparently trying to stir up his supporters to an act of "Lynch law".
It was probable, Alethia considered, that Robert came into the last category, in which case she was certain to enjoy the companionship of one or two excellent women, and might possibly catch glimpses of undesirable adventuresses or come face to face with reckless admiration-seeking married women.
Robert was more of a problem.
So these were the sort of associates that Robert Bludward consorted with, thought Alethia.
She had not far to look; "Mr.
Possibly the attempt would be made within the next few hours.
"A serpent in duckling's plumage," was her private comment; merciful chance had revealed him to her in his true colours.
She could hardly remember ever having met them, but once or twice in the course of the last three or four years they had expressed a polite wish that she should pay them a visit; they had probably not been unduly depressed by the fact that her aunt's failing health had prevented her from accepting their invitation.
He was mean, evasive, callously indifferent to his country's interests, a cheat, a man who habitually broke his word, and who was responsible, with his associates, for most of the poverty, misery, crime, and national degradation with which the country was afflicted.
A friend is very seriously ill and I have been sent for."
FOREWARNED
He was also a candidate for Parliament, it seemed, and as there was only one seat in this particular locality, it was obvious that the success of either Robert or Sir John would mean a check to the ambitions of the other, hence, no doubt, the rivalry and enmity between these otherwise kindred souls.
It was a considerable shock to her to find that Robert was fair, with a snub nose, merry eye, and rather a schoolboy manner.
It was dreadful to have to concoct lies, but it would be more dreadful to have to spend another night under that roof.
"He was hissed down at Shoalford yesterday," said one of the speakers.
"Robert Bludward?
Mrs. Bludward was something of an invalid, and Robert was a young man who had been at Oxford and was going into Parliament.
She had come unscathed through it, but what might have happened if she had gone unsuspectingly to visit Sir John Chobham and warn him of his danger?
What manner of evildoer was Robert Bludward?
Alethia locked her door that night, and placed such ramparts of furniture against it that the maid had great difficulty in breaking in with the early tea in the morning.
Robert merely laughed.
There was a certain scornful ring in his question.
She would know him at once; he would have the dark beetling brows, the quick, furtive glance, the sneering, unsavoury smile that always characterised the Sir Jaspers of this world.
As they drove away from the station a dissipated-looking man of the labouring class waved his hat in friendly salute.
Suddenly she started, and began to read with breathless attention a prominently printed article, headed "A Little Limelight on Sir John Chobham." The colour ebbed away from her face, a look of frightened despair crept into her eyes.
Robert Bludward, Swanker," was the title of one of the principal articles in the paper.
The chances were that she would be watched.
Her ideas on life in general had been acquired through the medium of popular respectable novel-writers, and modified or emphasised by such knowledge as her aunt, the vicar, and her aunt's housekeeper had put at her disposal.
"Oh, one of my supporters," laughed Robert; "a bit of a poacher and a bit of a pub-loafer, but he's on the right side."
He must certainly be warned.
The train which carried Alethia towards her destination was a local one, with the wayside station habit strongly developed.
"I must go back to Webblehinton at once," Alethia informed her astonished hostess at lunch time; "I have had a telegram.
Tells a pack of lies to get our votes, that's all that he's after, damn him.
It was too late to escape; she must force herself to meet him with outward calm.
Sir John, the Hugo of her imagination, was, if anything, rather more depraved and despicable than Robert Bludward.
And this monster was going to meet her at Derrelton Station in a few short minutes.
We'll break old Chobham's neck for him."
After breakfast Alethia, on the pretext of going to look at an outlying rose-garden, slipped away to the village through which they had passed on the previous evening.
"Good luck to you, Mr. Bludward," he shouted; "you'll come out on top!
So there was an upright man, possibly a very Hugo in character, who was thwarting and defying the evildoer in his nefarious career, and there was a dastardly plot afoot to break his neck!
"Who is the person he referred to as old Chobham?" she asked.
Further than that Alethia's information did not go; her imagination, founded on her extensive knowledge of the people one met in novels, had to supply the gaps.
"Who was that man?" asked Alethia quickly.
From her no help was to be expected.
Had it come to that?
In placid Saxon-blooded England people did not demonstrate their feelings lightly and without some strong compelling cause.
When it was the Six Hundred and Seventeenth Night,
Then said he, "Weep not, for it was Satan and covetise that led you to do thus.
She continued, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Judar said to his brothers, "How could you do with me thus?
After awhile, his master the merchant set out on a pilgrimage to Meccah, taking Judar with him, and when they reached the city, the Cairene repaired to the Haram temple, to circumambulate the Ka'abah.
Moreover, he sent other four score, who fetched comely black girls, and forty others brought male chattels and carried them all to Judar's house, which they filled.
When it was the Six Hundred and Nineteenth Night,
So he looked out and listening, heard all the angry words that passed between them and saw the division of the spoil.
Judar was delighted with it while he was passing along the highway and withal it had cost him nothing.
They swooned away for excess of fear, and when they recovered, they found themselves in their mother's house and saw Judar seated by her side.
As for me, I pardon you and welcome you: no harm shall befall you."
Then Judar brought forth food and they ate and took their ease and lay down to sleep.
So he gave a great cry and fell down in a fit.
If ye allow me aught to clothe me, 'twill be of your bounty, and each of you shall traffic with the folk for himself.
When it was the Six Hundred and Eighteenth Night,
But repent unto Allah and crave pardon of Him, and He will forgive you both, for He is the Most Forgiving, the Merciful.
Meanwhile, Al-Ra'ad summoned his attendant Jinn and bade them build the palace.
Ye are my sons and I am your mother; wherefore let us abide as we are, lest your brother come back and we be disgraced." But they accepted not her words and passed the night, wrangling with each other.
How could you sell me?
But I comfort myself with the thought of Joseph, whose brothers did with him even more than ye did with me, because they cast him into the pit."--And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
Quoth he, "I salute you, O my brothers! you have cheered me by your presence." And they bowed their heads and burst into tears.
Donald Francisco, Commissioner of the Water Supply, a sanitary engineer of international standing, accepted a position in the Science Community as Water Director.
He had the most practical common sense--well-balanced habits of thinking and living, supported by an intellect so clear and so keen that I knew of none to excel it.
At the time of which I now speak, the novelty had worn off, and no one paid any more attention to it than they do to Zion City or the Dunkards.
I do not know just how many letters I received from him from the Science Community before I noted the difference, but I have one from the third month of his stay there (he wrote every two or three weeks), characterized by a verbosity that sounded strange for him.
It was obvious that as an organization, the Science Community must also be wealthy.
"Fill that out." He handed me a card.
As usual, the observation burst harmlessly over the heads of most of the students in the class, who were preoccupied with more immediate things--with the evening's movies and the week-end's dance.
The average man would have done that, but my long years of training in psychological interpretation told me that a character and a friendship built during forty years does not change in six months, and that there must be some other explanation for this.
All around were low, wild-looking hills.
If any of its individual citizens were wealthy, no one knew it.
That the Science Community would want Benda was easy to understand; but, that it could outbid the New York Bell, was, to say the least, a surprise.
He was right.
He seemed to be writing merely to cover the sheet, trifles such as he had never previously considered worth writing letters about.
The rumors that it was a vast socialistic organization, without private property, with equal sharing of all privileges, were never confirmed.
The next letter announced his acceptance of the position.
It was modern to the highest degree in construction and operation; there was very little manual labor there; no poverty; every person had all the benefits of modern developments in power, transportation, and communication, and of all other resources provided by scientific progress.
I looked about in consternation.
One of these young men was myself, and the other was my lifelong friend and chum, Carl Benda, who saved his country by solving a tremendously difficult scientific puzzle in a simple way, by sheer reasoning power, and without apparatus.
It looked for all the world as though they had something to conceal; Czarist Russia couldn't beat that for keeping track of people and prying into their business.
(This part is related by Peter Hagstrom, Ph.D.)
The increase and refinement of this ability to communicate is an index of the degree of civilization of a people.
As it happens, I was also intimately acquainted with John Edgewater Smith, recently Power Commissioner of New York City and the most capable power engineer in North America, who, following Benda by two or three months, resigned his position, and accepted what his letter termed the place of Director of Power in the Science Community.
His letters had always been crisp and direct, and thoroughly familiar and confidential.
As I have stated, Benda and I had been on the most intimate terms for forty years.
The Science Community, situated in Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, had first been heard of many years ago, when it was already a going concern.
In the meanwhile, New York City lost a third technical man to the Science Community.
Of course, it was commonly known that Benda was being sought by Universities and corporations: I know personally of several tempting offers he had received.
This, for many reasons, was a most amazing piece of news to myself and to anyone who knew Benda.
But we still kept up our intimate friendship and our intense interest in our beloved subject.
Benda's first letter to me stated that he was at the Science Community on a visit.
But the New York Bell is a wealthy corporation and had thus far managed to hold Benda, both by the munificence of its salary and by the attractiveness of the work it offered him.
An impertinent thing, that card was.
That was the state of affairs between us up to a year ago.
We were just as close chums at the age of fifty as we had been at ten, and just as thrilled at new advances in communication: at television, at the international language, at the supposed signals from Mars.
PART I
I pondered on it a good deal, and could think of no hypothesis to account for it.
I should like to see them because I am curious as to whether they exhibit the characteristics of the subsequent letters, some of which I now have.
Furthermore, that a man like Benda would want to have anything at all to do with the Science Community seemed strange enough in itself.
There followed several months of letters like that: a lot of words, evasion of coming to the point about anything; just conventional letters.
"The ability to communicate ideas from one individual to another," said a professor of sociology to his class, "is the principal distinction between human beings and their brute forbears.
"Far as we go!" the driver shouted.
I knew Benda as well as I knew myself, and if I was sure of anything in my life, it was that he was not the type of man to leave a fifty thousand dollar job and join a communist city on an equal footing with the clerks in the stores.
The city of my destination was back in the hills, and very much isolated.
What the Science Community was, no one knew exactly; but that there was something abnormal, fanatical, about it, no one doubted.
Besides asking for my name, address, nationality, vocation, and position, it requested that I state whom I was visiting in the Science Community, the purpose of my visit, the nature of my business, how long I intended to stay, did I have a place to stay arranged for, and if so, where and through whom.
So much, visitors and reporters were able to say.
The road went on ahead through a narrow pass.
I did not know whether to laugh and compare it to the National Baseball League's trafficking in "big names," or to hunt for some sinister danger sign in it.
Something had changed Benda.
Yet Benda was, if anything, a man of ideas.
Four pages of letter conveyed not a single idea.
During the last ten miles we met no traffic at all, and I was the only passenger left in the bus. Suddenly the vehicle stopped.
It turned out that both of us actually did devote our lives to the cause of communication; but the passing years saw us engaged in widely and curiously divergent phases of the work.
Sign here, the card said.
It crystallized within them certain vague conceptions and brought them to a conscious focus, enabling the young men to turn formless dreams into concrete acts.
I would give a month's salary to get a look at those letters now; but I neglected to preserve them.
"Nothing," he said curtly.
At about that time Benda resigned his position with the New York Bell Telephone Company to accept a place as the Director of Communication in the Science Community.
He had heard of the place, and while at Washington on business had taken advantage of the opportunity to drive out and see it. Fascinated by the equipment he saw there, he had decided to stay a few days and study it.
A small, neat-looking bus drove through the pass and stopped for me.
Thirty years later, I was Professor of the Psychology of Language at Columbia University, and Benda was Maintenance Engineer of the Bell Telephone Company of New York City; and on his knowledge and skill depended the continuity and stability of that stupendously complex traffic, the telephone communication of Greater New York.
I wrote him that I was coming.
I was personally in a position to state that neither of these men could be lightly persuaded into such a step, and that neither of them would work for a small salary.
"What do I owe you?"
The sociology professor struck a responsive chord in us: for since our earliest years we had wigwagged to each other as Boy Scouts, learned the finger alphabet of the deaf and dumb so that we might maintain communication during school hours, strung a telegraph wire between our two homes, admired Poe's "Gold Bug" together and devised boyish cipher codes in which to send each other postcards when chance separated us.
But upon two young men in the class, it made a powerful impression.
It involved a drive of about fifty miles northwest, through a picturesque section of the country.
Not only did we then and there cease feeling guilty about our secret ciphers and our dots and dashes, but the determination was born within us to make of communication our life's work.
That is why I take the position that the above enthusiastic words of this sociology professor, whose very name I have forgotten, were the prime moving influence which many years later succeeded in saving Occidental civilization from a catastrophe which would have been worse than death and destruction.
But we had always felt a little foolish about what we considered our childish hobbies, until the professor's words suddenly roused us to the realization that we were a highly civilized pair of youngsters.
Now, look at mine, large and finely shaped.
She was right.
Carry it carefully so it won't get mussed before the company see it, and come not back late for milking."
My delighted sister was soon in touch with a crowd of other little girls, and brought home many of their bright sayings for my edification.
He conceived a special grudge against Georgia, whom he had caught slyly laughing when she first observed the change in his appearance.
The sleeves, small at the wrist, were trimmed with folds of the material and a quilling of white lace at the hand.
Its wide skirt reached to my shoetops, and the gathers to its full waist were gauged to a sharp peak in front.
True enough, the least taste of anything sour produced the tell-tale shock.
The Seminary playground was so noisy with chatter and screams of joy, that it was impossible to remember all the games we played; and later the dining-room and its offerings were so surprising and so beautifully decorated that the sight nearly deprived me of my appetite.
Count its strokes.
Yes, for grandma said, "Thou art like a picture I saw somewhere long ago." Then she continued brightly, "Here are thy mits, and thy little embroidered handkerchief folded in a square.
In her perplexity, she besought Mrs. Bergwald's advice.
"Mrs. Brunner has become too childish to have the responsibility of young girls," had been frequently remarked before Elitha's visit; and after her departure, the same friends expressed regret that she had not taken us away with her.
We were also allowed to go to Sunday school oftener, and later, she sent me part of the term to the select school for girls recently established by Dr. Ver Mehr, an Episcopalian clergyman.
Did I look old fashioned?
Sometimes she would let us bring her, from under the sofa, her gorgeous prints, illustrating "Wilhelm Tell," and would repeat the text relating to the scenes as we examined each picture with eager interest.
I do not remember a death among her patients, and only two who were badly disfigured.
The bell rang, I followed to the recitation hall, and was assigned a seat below the rest, because I was the only small Sonoma girl yet enrolled.
Now, Mrs. Bergwald was a native of Stockholm, a lady of rare culture, and used the French language in conversing with grandma.
Though a native of Rhode Island, and of Puritan ancestry, he was quite Western in appearance.
They came to our house, and we had a hurried little talk with a closed window between us, and were favorably impressed by our tall "Brother Ben," who had very blue eyes and soft brown hair.
He was then a handsome, rugged fellow, and particularly proud of the shape of his nose.
Georgia went to Mrs. Bergwald's, and remained quite a while.
I was eager for knowledge.
I also expected to meet familiar faces in that great building, which had been the home of Mr. Jacob Leese.
These whispered comments, which did not improve our situation, suddenly ceased, for the smallpox made its appearance in Sonoma, and helpers were needed to care for the afflicted.
Later he came to us to recuperate, and was the most exacting and profane man we ever waited on.
Poor grandma was conscience-stricken, drew me into her own room, and did not let me leave it until after she had soothed my hurts and we had become friends again.
Georgia fled, and cried in anger over this indignity, declaring that she hated Castle and would not be sorry if something should happen to spoil his fine nose.
In fact, she had such confidence in her method of treating it, that she would not have Georgia and me vaccinated while the epidemic prevailed, insisting that if we should take the disease she could nurse us through it without disfigurement, and we would thenceforth be immune.
And yet, under these disadvantages, he seemed, as a matter of course, to treat the rest of the company with the cool and condescending politeness which implies a real, or imagined, superiority over those towards whom it is used.
He had the hard features and athletic form said to be peculiar to his country, together with the national intonation and slow pedantic mode of expression, arising from a desire to avoid peculiarities of idiom or dialect.
Dire was the screaming--deep the oaths!
His dress was as coarse as it could be, being still decent; and, at a time when great expense was lavished upon the wardrobe, even of the lowest who pretended to the character of gentleman, this indicated mediocrity of circumstances, if not poverty.
My companion made up to him, and taking him by the button, drew him aside into one of the windows.
The Scottish mercantile men, whom he was under the necessity of employing as a sort of middle-men on these occasions, were also suspected by my father of having secured, by one means or other, more than their own share of the profit which ought to have accrued.
There was much about him that coincided with my previous conceptions.
He had engaged in some large speculations concerning oak-woods, the property of Highland proprietors, and alleged, that he found them much more ready to make bargains, and extort earnest of the purchase-money, than punctual in complying on their side with the terms of the engagements.
But thou kens I'm an outspoken Yorkshire tyke.
So saying, he eagerly whetted his knife, assumed his seat of empire at the head of the board, and loaded the plates of his sundry guests with his good cheer.
Mine host and his Sunday guests, after an effort or two to support their consequence by noise and bold averment, sunk gradually under the authority of Mr. Campbell, who thus fairly possessed himself of the lead in the conversation.
Warmed by such tales, I looked upon the Scottish people during my childhood, as a race hostile by nature to the more southern inhabitants of this realm; and this view of the matter was not much corrected by the language which my father sometimes held with respect to them.
Men talk of their filth and their poverty: but commend me to sterling honesty, though clad in rags, as the poet saith.
But his designs, as will happen occasionally to the wisest, were, in some degree at least, counteracted by a being whom his pride would never have supposed of importance adequate to influence them in any way.
Next day I parted company with my timid companion, as I left the great northern road to turn more westerly in the direction of Osbaldistone Manor, my uncle's seat.
D.--
"That gentleman," I replied, looking towards the traveller, "is no friend of mine, but an acquaintance whom I picked up on the road.
His ambition was only to be distinguished as William Osbaldistone, the first, at least one of the first, merchants on Change; and to have proved him the lineal representative of William the Conqueror would have far less flattered his vanity than the hum and bustle which his approach was wont to produce among the bulls, bears, and brokers of Stock-alley.
"Upon my word, sir," replied my acquaintance, "I should be happy to have the pleasure of your company on my journey--I go northward, sir."
Yet, from an early period, they had occupied and interested my imagination.
His conversation intimated that he was engaged in the cattle trade, no very dignified professional pursuit.
In the latter respect he offered no competition, and it was easy to see that his natural powers had never been cultivated by education.
The excise-man, as in duty bound, and the attorney, who looked to some petty office under the Crown, together with my fellow-traveller, who seemed to enter keenly into the contest, staunchly supported the cause of King George and the Protestant succession.
"A gentleman!--what sort of a gentleman?" said my companion somewhat hastily--his mind, I suppose, running on gentlemen of the pad, as they were then termed.
All our family renown was acquired--all our family misfortunes were occasioned--by the northern wars.
When he gave his opinion on any point, it was with that easy tone of confidence used by those superior to their society in rank or information, as if what he said could not be doubted, and was not to be questioned.
I cannot tell whether he felt relieved or embarrassed by my departure, considering the dubious light in which he seemed to regard me.
So saying, he called for a reckoning for the wine, and throwing down the price of the additional bottle which he had himself introduced, rose as if to take leave of us.
Each party appealed to Mr. Campbell, anxious, it seemed, to elicit his approbation.
Oh, the oak, the ash, and the bonny ivy tree, They flourish best at home in the North Countrie!
We have seen recently the breath of a demagogue blow these sparks into a temporary flame, which I sincerely hope is now extinguished in its own ashes.
Mr. Campbell made no farther observation, but merely wished me a good journey, and the party dispersed for the evening.
The quarrel betwixt him and his relatives was such, that he scarcely ever mentioned the race from which he sprung, and held as the most contemptible species of vanity, the weakness which is commonly termed family pride.
In justification, or apology, for those who entertained such prejudices, I must remark, that the Scotch of that period were guilty of similar injustice to the English, whom they branded universally as a race of purse-proud arrogant epicures.
"It is quite impossible," said Campbell, somewhat contemptuously; "I have business at Rothbury."
"We can scarce travel together," he replied, drily.
The divisions of Whig and Tory then shook England to her very centre, and a powerful party, engaged in the Jacobite interest, menaced the dynasty of Hanover, which had been just established on the throne.
The curate and the apothecary, with a little man, who made no boast of his vocation, but who, from the flourish and snap of his fingers, I believe to have been the barber, strongly espoused the cause of high church and the Stuart line.
On the subject of politics, Campbell observed a silence and moderation which might arise from caution.
Interdicted by her master from speaking to him on the subject of the heaths, glades, and dales of her beloved Northumberland, she poured herself forth to my infant ear in descriptions of the scenes of her youth, and long narratives of the events which tradition declared to have passed amongst them.
His nurse, an old Northumbrian woman, attached to him from his infancy, was the only person connected with his native province for whom he retained any regard; and when fortune dawned upon him, one of the first uses which he made of her favours, was to give Mabel Rickets a place of residence within his household.
Was it not Wat the Devil, who drove all the year-old hogs off the braes of Lanthorn-side, in the very recent days of my grandfather's father?
"I will pay your charges, sir," said the traveller, in a tone as if he thought the argument should bear down all opposition.
And how could it be otherwise?
Now, in the legends of Mabel, the Scottish nation was ever freshly remembered, with all the embittered declamation of which the narrator was capable.
I could not help overhearing him pressing something--I supposed his company upon the journey, which Mr. Campbell seemed to decline.
Every alehouse resounded with the brawls of contending politicians, and as mine host's politics were of that liberal description which quarrelled with no good customer, his hebdomadal visitants were often divided in their opinion as irreconcilably as if he had feasted the Common Council.
"I respect the Scotch, sir; I love and honour the nation for their sense of morality.
This piece of gratuitous information concerning the route he proposed to himself, the first I had heard my companion bestow upon any one, failed to excite the corresponding confidence of the Scotchman.
Such seeds of national dislike remained between the two countries, the natural consequences of their existence as separate and rival states.
And had we not many a trophy, but, according to old Mabel's version of history, far more honourably gained, to mark our revenge of these wrongs?
"You, sir, doubtless, are well mounted, and I for the present travel on foot, or on a Highland shelty, that does not help me much faster forward."
"And did you, sir, really," said my fellow-traveller, edging his chair (I should have said his portmanteau) nearer to Mr. Campbell, "really and actually beat two highwaymen yourself alone?"
It was on such a day, and such an occasion, that my timorous acquaintance and I were about to grace the board of the ruddy-faced host of the Black Bear, in the town of Darlington, and bishopric of Durham, when our landlord informed us, with a sort of apologetic tone, that there was a Scotch gentleman to dine with us.
"The gentleman," replied I, "knows his own affairs best, and I should be sorry to constitute myself a judge of them in any respect."
The inhabitants of the opposite frontier served in her narratives to fill up the parts which ogres and giants with seven-leagued boots occupy in the ordinary nursery tales.
But I was not prepared for the air of easy self-possession and superiority with which he seemed to predominate over the company into which he was thrown, as it were by accident.
This was the first time I had heard the Scottish accent, or, indeed, that I had familiarly met with an individual of the ancient nation by whom it was spoken.
By Sir Walter Scott
And hurry, hurry, off they rode, As fast as fast might be; Hurra, hurra, the dead can ride, Dost fear to ride with me? Burger.
ROB ROY
In other words, he prefers death and murder due to ambition, to abstinence and wisdom.
He does not grasp the natural character of the positions of his personages, nor the language of the persons represented, nor the feeling of measure without which no work can be artistic.
Gervinus devotes the concluding chapter of his second volume, about fifty pages, to an explanation of this.
The ethical authority of this supreme teacher of life consists in the following: The starting point of Shakespeare's conception of life, says Gervinus, is that man is gifted with powers of activity, and therefore, first of all, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare regarded it as good and necessary for man that he should act (as if it were possible for a man not to act):
Without this condition there can be no work of art, as the essence of art consists in the contemplation of the work of art being infected with the author's feeling.
And he who will attentively read Shakespeare's works can not fail to recognize that the description of this Shakespearian view of life by his admirers is quite correct.
Such is Shakespeare's view of life as demonstrated by his greatest exponent and admirer.
"There are classes of men whose morality is best guarded by the positive precepts of religion and state law; to such persons Shakespeare's creations are inaccessible.
He did not admit that the limits of duties should exceed the biddings of Nature.
"Activity is good, inactivity is evil. Activity transforms evil into good," says Shakespeare, according to Gervinus.
And happiness and success, according to Shakespeare, are attained by individuals possessing this active character, not at all owing to the superiority of their nature; on the contrary, notwithstanding their inferior gifts, the capacity of activity itself always gives them the advantage over inactivity, quite independent of any consideration whether the inactivity of some persons flows from excellent impulses and the activity of others from bad ones.
And indeed, Shakespeare always held that there are no unconditional prohibitions, nor unconditional duties.
If the author does not actually feel what he expresses, then the recipient can not become infected with the feeling of the author, does not experience any feeling, and the production can no longer be classified as a work of art.
How could a man who so eloquently attracts people toward honors, permit that the very aspiration toward that which was great be crushed together with rank and distinction for services, and, with the destruction of all degrees, "the motives for all high undertakings be stifled"?
They are comprehensible and accessible only to the educated, from whom one can expect that they should acquire the healthy tact of life and self-consciousness by means of which the innate guiding powers of conscience and reason, uniting with the will, lead us to the definite attainment of worthy aims in life.
Property, the family, the state, are sacred; but aspiration toward the recognition of the equality of men is insanity.
The second condition also, with the exception of the rendering of the scenes in which the movement of feelings is expressed, is quite absent in Shakespeare.
The third and most important condition, sincerity, is completely absent in all Shakespeare's works.
But even for such educated people, Shakespeare's teaching is not always without danger. The condition on which his teaching is quite harmless is that it should be accepted in all its completeness, in all its parts, without any omission.
In order thus to accept all, one should understand that, according to his teaching, it is stupid and harmful for the individual to revolt against, or endeavor to overthrow, the limits of established religious and state forms.
Even if the attraction of honors and false power treacherously obtained were to cease, could the poet admit of the most dreadful of all violence, that of the ignorant crowd?
So, indeed, say Shakespeare's admirers.
But, perhaps, the height of Shakespeare's conception of life is such that, tho he does not satisfy the esthetic demands, he discloses to us a view of life so new and important for men that, in consideration of its importance, all his failures as an artist become imperceptible.
That one may do too much good (exceed the reasonable limits of good) is convincingly proved by Shakespeare's words and examples.
The merit of every poetic work depends on three things:
Margaret herself learned much.
"Why, it's funny, I think," laughed Margaret again, as she turned away.
"I've planned a trip to New York."
Then, and not until then, did she realize the seriousness of even this one phase of the problem she had undertaken to solve.
I will," cried Margaret.
Naming the place had given Margaret no little food for thought.
"That would spoil everything.
To this end and aim were sacrificed all the life and strength of whatever was theirs.
We be n't charity folks." And he turned away.
The news of Margaret's broken engagement had been received at Hilcrest with a joyous relief that was nevertheless carefully subdued in the presence of Margaret herself; but Mrs. Merideth could not conceal her joy that she was to take Margaret away from the "whole unfortunate affair," as she expressed it to her brothers.
Why, Frank, Ned never cared for me--that way!"
For a moment the girl was silent; then she turned swiftly and faced him.
Her elbows were on the table, and her linked fingers were shielding her eyes. Involuntarily the man reached his hand toward the bowed head.
It's no failure at all.
And now--Margaret, my Margaret," he said softly and very tenderly.
"And he doesn't even love me now, besides."
"I do see, Margaret," he began gently, "and you are right.
Spencer grew sober instantly.
"But what--what more could you do?" ventured the man.
"Of course not!
I--I have made a failure of it."
When he came back the girl had sat down again.
Frank Spencer, however, was not so pleased at the proposed absence.
With one hand I relieve the children's suffering; with the other I take dividends from the very mills that make the children suffer.
McGinnis taught an evening class at the Mill House, and she knew that it could not be easy for him to see her so frequently now that the engagement was broken.
"The Mill House is good and does good, I acknowledge; but it's so puny after all.
For some time after McGinnis went away, Margaret remained at the Mill House; but she was restless and unhappy in the position in which she found herself.
in Pilgrim's Progress?--of the fire.
It stayed with me day after day, and month after month, and it only grew stronger and deeper until there was nothing left me in all this world but you--just you.
Frank Spencer stirred uneasily.
She gave a nervous little laugh and picked up a bit of paper from the floor.
Margaret rose, and moved restlessly around the room.
Margaret shook her head slowly.
"A failure of it!"
From the time when I was a tiny little girl he has been that.
The tone and the one word were enough.
'Twas only the fancy of a moment.
It is very simple, after all.
It did not take much persuasion on the part of Margaret to convince Mrs. Merideth that a winter abroad would be delightful--just they two together.
My two hands are the two men.
"Merely this.
"Margaret, it did not go--that love.
"But, Margaret, I don't see why you must go," he protested.
"It's so little--so very little compared to what ought to be done," she sighed.
"That's what I mean to find out." She stopped suddenly, facing him.
I touch only the surface. The great cause behind things I never reach.
As for Hilcrest--she certainly would not stay at Hilcrest anyway--now.
He could see no reason for Margaret's going, and one evening when they were alone together in the library he spoke of it.
She raised a protesting hand.
"Margaret!
"But you will be away--from him--if you are here," he suggested.
You've done wonders down there at the Mill House."
I am going away."
Frank Spencer had already left the Mill House and gone to Hilcrest when McGinnis was well enough to go back to his place in the mills.
He will be happier now if I am quite out of his sight at present.
Sometimes it seems as if it were like that old picture--where was it?
"Frank, Bobby McGinnis was my good friend.
Later, when she had come to her senses, perhaps--but not now.
Those long hours of misery when the mills burned had opened Margaret's eyes; and now that her eyes were opened, she was frightened and ashamed.
He is good and true and noble, but I have brought him nothing but sorrow.
There was no answer.
What can you mean?"
It's like a tiny little oasis in a huge desert of poverty and distress."
He, too, got to his feet and walked nervously up and down the room.
"Yes.
With one I feed a hungry child, or nurse a sick woman; with the other I make more children hungry and more women sick."
And did you think it was Ned I was pleading for, when all the while it was I who was hungering for you with a love that sent me across the seas to rid myself of it?
He never did, for that matter.
The man frowned.
"Don't you see?
Still no answer.
For one moment Margaret gazed into the man's face with startled eyes; then she turned and covered her own telltale face with her hands--and because it was a telltale face, Spencer took a long stride toward her.
On one side is the man trying to put it out; on the other, is the evil one pouring on oil.
"Of course it is useless," she retorted in what she hoped was a merry voice.
"No, no, you do not understand.
Did you, Margaret?"
"Margaret, are you mad?
"You poor child, of course you do, and no wonder!
Don't let that rogue off for less than a hundred and twenty.--Yours, B. F." Vavasor, therefore, having nothing better to do, spent his Christmas morning in calling on Mr. Magruin.
I think you love me.
"Christmas-day, Mr. Vavasor!
"Yes, to-morrow.
And the same dull monotony of his days was continued for a week, during which he waited, not impatiently, for an answer to his letter.
DEAR ALICE,
I now once again ask you to be my wife.
But how was he to bear the cost of this for the next year, or the next two years?
And now, once again, Alice,--dearest Alice, will you be my wife?
"Do tell him to be punctual," said Mr. Magruin, when Vavasor took his leave.
For myself I know that there is much in my character and disposition to make me unfit to marry a woman of the common stamp.
But all this is nothing.
There had grown upon him lately certain Bohemian propensities,--a love of absolute independence in his thoughts as well as actions,--which were antagonistic to marriage.
"I needn't send it when it's written," he said to himself, "and the chances are that I won't." Then he took his paper, and wrote as follows:--
"Then let her teach him to be otherwise," Alice had answered.
Your woman's pride towards me has been great and good and womanly; but it has had its way; and, if you love me, might now be taught to succumb.
No less likely assistant for such a purpose could have been selected.
Dear Alice, will you be my wife?
"This will be brought to you by Stickling," the note said; but who Stickling was Vavasor did not know.
But, oh, Alice! do not let it be adverse.
"That might have been a good reason for refusing his offer when he first made it; but it can be no excuse for untruth, now that she has told him that she loves him!"
Are you going to give him the money?"
And now, at this moment, what was his outlook into life generally?
Jem scrutinized the coin, and declared that the uppermost surface showed a tail.
"I send the bill.
He was still a poor man, having been once nearly a rich man; but still so much of the result of his nearly acquired riches remained to him, that on the strength of them he might probably find his way into Parliament.
You're a trump; and will do the best you can.
"I think he is," said George Vavasor, as he went away.
"Then take that letter and post it," said George Vavasor.
The beasts of the field do not treat each other so badly.
"Time and tide wait for no man, Mr. Magruin, and my friend wants his money to-morrow."
You cannot accuse my love.
And if he did it at all, he must do it now.
"He is a desperate spendthrift," Kate Vavasor had said to her.
"But is the lady sure, Mr. Vavasor?" asked Mr. Magruin, anxiously.
But chance did not so decide, and the letter was put back upon the table at his elbow.
But you have found,--with a thorough honesty of purpose than which I know nothing greater,--that it has behoved you to withdraw that privilege also.
He at any rate did not so dare;--and after dinner he wandered about through the streets, wondering within his mind how he would endure the restraints of married life.
The time was when the privilege was mine of beginning my letters to you with a warmer show of love than the above word contains,--when I might and did call you dearest; but I lost that privilege through my own folly, and since that it has been accorded to another.
She should learn,--nay, she had already learned from his own lips,--how perilous was his enterprise.
He has misunderstood me and has ill-used me. But I am ready to forgive that, if he will allow me to do so.
I need hardly say that I should not have written as I now write, had you not found it expedient to do as you have done.
Whereupon Jem, asking no question and thinking but little of the circumstances under which the command was given, did take the letter and did post it.
"Jem," he said to the boy, "there's half a crown lying there on the looking-glass." Jem looked and acknowledged the presence of the half-crown.
It is because I believe that in this respect we are fitted for each other, as man and woman seldom are fitted, that I once again ask you to be my wife.
I have told her nothing of my purpose in writing this letter.
Then came the episode of Mr. Grey; and bitter as have been my feelings whilst that engagement lasted, I never made any attempt to come between you and the life you had chosen.
If you were my wife to-morrow I should expect to use your money, if it were needed, in struggling to obtain a seat in Parliament and a hearing there.
If time and tide won't wait, neither will love. Come, Mr. Magruin, out with your cheque-book, and don't let's have any nonsense."
But that idea of tying himself down to a household was in itself distasteful to him.
I will hardly stoop to tell you that I do not ask you to be my wife for the sake of this aid;--but if you were to become my wife I should expect all your cooperation;--with your money, possibly, but certainly with your warmest spirit.
As Mr. Pickwick uttered this adieu, the crowd raised a loud shout.
'I can't see any lady,' replied Mr. Pickwick, whose mind was filled with visions of Mrs. Bardell.
This one hundred and fifty pounds, or whatever it may be--take it in round numbers--is nothing to you.
When they had in some measure recovered from their trance of admiration, Job Trotter discharged himself of the rest of his commission.
'Why, my dear girl,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'how has all this come about?
'The papers in Bardell and Pickwick,' replied Perker, undoing the knot with his teeth.
'Only three days, eh?' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Why, what have you been doing these three months?'
'From Pickwick, eh?' said the little man, turning quickly to Job. 'Well, what is it?'
Bardell, the plaintiff in the action, is within these walls, Sir.'
'Yes; at least I have heard Sam's account of the matter,' said Mr. Pickwick, with affected carelessness.
'Me, Sir,' replied Sam Weller, putting in his head.
How well she looks, doesn't she, Perker?' added Mr. Pickwick, surveying Arabella's face with a look of as much pride and exultation, as if she had been his daughter.
It rests solely, wholly, and entirely with you.'
Will you take a glass of wine, Lowten?' 'No, thank you, Sir.'
He is my only relation in the world, Mr. Pickwick, and unless you plead for me, I fear I have lost even him.
Mr. Pickwick's nature was a good deal worked upon, by these same tears; but when Mrs. Winkle, drying her eyes, took to coaxing and entreating in the sweetest tones of a very sweet voice, he became particularly restless, and evidently undecided how to act, as was evinced by sundry nervous rubbings of his spectacle-glasses, nose, tights, head, and gaiters.
Winkle.
'No, Sir,' replied Lowten.
'Mrs.
I do mean to say, however, that the whole facts, taken together, will be sufficient to justify you, in the minds of all reasonable men.
'Who is it?' inquired Mr. Pickwick.
'There,' said Lowten, 'it's too late now.
Now, is there anything more?'
'See after your friend, and be in the way to-morrow at one.
You can't get in to-night; you've got the key of the street, my friend.'
Mr. Samuel Weller looked at the little lawyer, then at Mr. Pickwick, then at the ceiling, then at Perker again; grinned, laughed outright, and finally, catching up his hat from the carpet, without further explanation, disappeared.
'It must be mentioned.
And when I had persuaded her, it was a long time more before we could find an opportunity.
'I know the rascal,' replied Perker good-humouredly.
'I say, my dear Sir,' resumed the little man, who seemed to gather confidence from the snuff--'I say, that her speedy liberation or perpetual imprisonment rests with you, and with you alone.
'Very good, my dear Sir,' replied Perker, looking hard at Jingle. 'You will see me again, young man, to-morrow.
'Now, Lowten,' said little Mr. Perker, shutting the door,'what's the matter?
At three o'clock that afternoon, Mr. Pickwick took a last look at his little room, and made his way, as well as he could, through the throng of debtors who pressed eagerly forward to shake him by the hand, until he reached the lodge steps.
Many among them were pressing forward to shake him by the hand again, when he drew his arm through Perker's, and hurried from the prison, far more sad and melancholy, for the moment, than when he had first entered it.
'What papers are those?' inquired Mr. Pickwick, as the little man deposited on the table a small bundle of documents tied with red tape.
'Oh, nothing, nothing,' replied Perker. 'Come, my dear Sir, draw up your chair to the table.
'Job you know, I think?' said Mr. Pickwick, presenting that gentleman.
Punctually at the appointed hour next morning, the good-humoured little attorney tapped at Mr. Pickwick's door, which was opened with great alacrity by Sam Weller.
Mr. Perker had had a dinner-party that day, as was testified by the appearance of lights in the drawing-room windows, the sound of an improved grand piano, and an improvable cabinet voice issuing therefrom, and a rather overpowering smell of meat which pervaded the steps and entry.
Now, are you ready to hear what I have to say, my dear Sir?
'Well, well,' said Mr. Pickwick, with a sigh, but softening into a smile at the same time.
No hurry; if you are not, I can wait.
'No, I do not indeed,' replied Mr. Pickwick.
Jingle bowed respectfully, trembled very much as he took Mr. Pickwick's proffered hand, and withdrew.
I have never ceased to think how great your sufferings must have been in this shocking place.
'Delightful, my dear Sir,' replied the little man.
IS CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO MATTERS OF BUSINESS, AND THE TEMPORAL ADVANTAGE OF DODSON AND FOGG--Mr.
Arabella looked bashfully at her lord and master, who replied, 'Only three days.'
As Lowten DID mean yes, he said no more on the subject, but inquired of Job, in an audible whisper, whether the portrait of Perker, which hung opposite the fireplace, wasn't a wonderful likeness, to which Job of course replied that it was.
He is so violent, so prejudiced, and has been so--so anxious in behalf of his friend, Mr. Sawyer,' added Arabella, looking down, 'that I fear the consequences dreadfully.'
Hot blood, hot blood.' And the little man took a warning pinch, and shook his head doubtfully.
'Oh, no, no,' replied Arabella, changing colour.
Well now, my dear Sir, the first question I have to ask, is, whether this woman is to remain here?'
In all the crowd of wan, emaciated faces, he saw not one which was not happier for his sympathy and charity.
'I know nothing of the kind,' retorted Perker firmly.
'I can sleep anywhere.
'Ah, to be sure!' interposed Perker; 'come, account for this idleness. You see Mr. Pickwick's only astonishment is, that it wasn't all over, months ago.'
Tell him so.
Mr. Pickwick, whose face had been undergoing most surprising changes during this speech, and was evidently on the verge of a strong burst of indignation, calmed his wrath as well as he could.
'What does this mean?' inquired Mr. Pickwick, looking at Perker with astonishment.
'A valuable document, indeed!'
'I suppose I must,' said Mr. Pickwick, looking at Perker.
'With a difference, my dear Sir; with a difference,' rejoined Perker, deliberately folding up the paper and putting it into his pocket again. 'Mrs.
'Sir,' called out Mr. Weller to his master.
'Say what you have to say; it's the old story, I suppose?'
'No, indeed I do not, my dear Sir,' replied Arabella. 'I never have forgotten it.
Perker, strengthening his argumentative powers with another pinch of snuff, proceeded--
But won't it be better to see Mr. Perker to-night, so that we may be there, the first thing in the morning?'
'Very good,' retorted Perker.
I have done wrong, very, very wrong, I know.'Here poor Arabella hid her face in her handkerchief, and wept bitterly.
I rather think the gov'nor wants to have a word and a half with you, Sir.'
'It does NOT rest with Dodson and Fogg; you know the men, my dear Sir, as well as I do.
Perker nodded and smiled.
'Sorry for that,' resumed Perker, 'because it will form the subject of our conversation.'
'Dear Mr. Pickwick, he must only know it from you--from your lips alone.
The gentleman in the plush shorts and cottons considering it no part of his duty to show the people from the office out, consistently declined to answer the bell, and they showed themselves out.
'There is the very letter I speak of.
'Not quite,' replied Perker.
'By Jove!' said Perker, taking both hands out of his pockets, and striking the knuckles of his right against the palm of his left, emphatically, 'those are the cleverest scamps I ever had anything to do with!'
'I have seen the woman, this morning.
'Miss Arabella Allen!' exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, rising from his chair.
WINKLE REAPPEARS UNDER EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES--Mr.
'To remain here!' echoed Mr. Pickwick.
And now, my dear Sir, I put it to you.
Sit down, and let me hear it all.
Who is that?'
'No "if" in the case, my dear Sir,' said Perker triumphantly.
Mr. Lowten had still to be ferreted out from the back parlour of the Magpie and Stump; and Job had scarcely accomplished this object, and communicated Sam Weller's message, when the clock struck ten.
To reduce hereditary royalty to the condition of an elective authority, the only means that I am acquainted with are to circumscribe its sphere of action beforehand, gradually to diminish its prerogatives, and to accustom the people to live without its protection.
Ten of these elections took place simultaneously by the votes of the special electors in the different States.
The House of Representatives has only twice exercised its conditional privilege of deciding in cases of uncertainty; the first time was at the election of Mr. Jefferson in 1801; the second was in 1825, when Mr. Quincy Adams was named.
Why The President Of The United States Does Not Require The Majority Of The Two Houses In Order To Carry On The Government It is an established axiom in Europe that a constitutional King cannot persevere in a system of government which is opposed by the two other branches of the legislature.
In Europe, harmony must reign between the Crown and the other branches of the legislature, because a collision between them may prove serious; in America, this harmony is not indispensable, because such a collision is impossible.
The nation possessed two of the main causes of internal peace; it was a new country, but it was inhabited by a people grown old in the exercise of freedom.
The President of the United States is responsible for his actions; but the person of the King is declared inviolable by the French Charter.
In America the President exercises a certain influence on State affairs, but he does not conduct them; the preponderating power is vested in the representatives of the whole nation.
The fundamental principle of legislation--a principle essentially republican--is the same in both countries, although its consequences may be different, and its results more or less extensive. Whence I am led to conclude that France with its King is nearer akin to a republic than the Union with its President is to a monarchy.
The political maxims of the country depend therefore on the mass of the people, not on the President alone; and consequently in America the elective system has no very prejudicial influence on the fixed principles of the Government.
He may make, but he cannot conclude, a treaty; he may designate, but he cannot appoint, a public officer.
The Election may be considered as a national crisis--Why?--Passions of the people--Anxiety of the President--Calm which succeeds the agitation of the election.
Election Of The President
In America society is so constituted that it can stand without assistance upon its own basis; nothing is to be feared from the pressure of external dangers, and the election of the President is a cause of agitation, but not of ruin.
It is clear that the greater the privileges of the executive authority are, the greater is the temptation; the more the ambition of the candidates is excited, the more warmly are their interests espoused by a throng of partisans who hope to share the power when their patron has won the prize.
This mode of election rendered a majority more probable; for the fewer the electors are, the greater is the chance of their coming to a final decision.
Here, now, it is the simple conformity to law in general, without assuming any particular law applicable to certain actions, that serves the will as its principle and must so serve it, if duty is not to be a vain delusion and a chimerical notion.
This is a good which is already present in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
These, however, far from concealing it, or rendering it unrecognizable, rather bring it out by contrast and make it shine forth so much the brighter.
The common reason of men in its practical judgements perfectly coincides with this and always has in view the principle here suggested.
Hence there arises a natural dialectic, i.e., a disposition, to argue against these strict laws of duty and to question their validity, or at least their purity and strictness; and, if possible, to make them more accordant with our wishes and inclinations, that is to say, to corrupt them at their very source, and entirely to destroy their worth- a thing which even common practical reason cannot ultimately call good.
In the physical constitution of an organized being, that is, a being adapted suitably to the purposes of life, we assume it as a fundamental principle that no organ for any purpose will be found but what is also the fittest and best adapted for that purpose.
For to deviate from the principle of duty is beyond all doubt wicked; but to be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advantageous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer.
For without the principles of a good will, they may become extremely bad, and the coolness of a villain not only makes him far more dangerous, but also directly makes him more abominable in our eyes than he would have been without it.
But here again, without looking to duty, all men have already the strongest and most intimate inclination to happiness, because it is just in this idea that all inclinations are combined in one total.
Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself.
It is the same with the gifts of fortune.
For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my own coin.
As I have deprived the will of every impulse which could arise to it from obedience to any law, there remains nothing but the universal conformity of its actions to law in general, which alone is to serve the will as a principle, i.e., I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.
Accordingly it is something which is considered neither as an object of inclination nor of fear, although it has something analogous to both.
In order to do this, we will take the notion of duty, which includes that of a good will, although implying certain subjective restrictions and hindrances.
FIRST SECTION
It is only what is connected with my will as a principle, by no means as an effect- what does not subserve my inclination, but overpowers it, or at least in case of choice excludes it from its calculation- in other words, simply the law of itself, which can be an object of respect, and hence a command.
For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
In the latter, if common reason ventures to depart from the laws of experience and from the perceptions of the senses, it falls into mere inconceivabilities and self-contradictions, at least into a chaos of uncertainty, obscurity, and instability.
This is practical love and not pathological- a love which is seated in the will, and not in the propensions of sense- in principles of action and not of tender sympathy; and it is this love alone which can be commanded.
I also set aside those actions which really conform to duty, but to which men have no direct inclination, performing them because they are impelled thereto by some other inclination.
We have then to develop the notion of a will which deserves to be highly esteemed for itself and is good without a view to anything further, a notion which exists already in the sound natural understanding, requiring rather to be cleared up than to be taught, and which in estimating the value of our actions always takes the first place and constitutes the condition of all the rest.
Nay, it is almost more sure of doing so, because the philosopher cannot have any other principle, while he may easily perplex his judgement by a multitude of considerations foreign to the matter, and so turn aside from the right way.
But in the practical sphere it is just when the common understanding excludes all sensible springs from practical laws that its power of judgement begins to show itself to advantage.
Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; only, on the other hand, it is very sad that it cannot well maintain itself and is easily seduced.
For in this case we can readily distinguish whether the action which agrees with duty is done from duty, or from a selfish view.
The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in nothing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this conception, and not the expected effect, determines the will.
Nay, it may even reduce it to nothing, without nature thereby failing of her purpose.
In what, then, can their worth lie, if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect?
Accordingly the action was done neither from duty nor from direct inclination, but merely with a selfish view.
Moderation in the affections and passions, self-control, and calm deliberation are not only good in many respects, but even seem to constitute part of the intrinsic worth of the person; but they are far from deserving to be called good without qualification, although they have been so unconditionally praised by the ancients.
Now it is a wholly different thing to be truthful from duty and to be so from apprehension of injurious consequences.
It is in this manner, undoubtedly, that we are to understand those passages of Scripture also in which we are commanded to love our neighbour, even our enemy.
For reason recognizes the establishment of a good will as its highest practical destination, and in attaining this purpose is capable only of a satisfaction of its own proper kind, namely that from the attainment of an end, which end again is determined by reason only, notwithstanding that this may involve many a disappointment to the ends of inclination.
It is clear from what precedes that the purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will, cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth.
But even in this case, if the general desire for happiness did not influence his will, and supposing that in his particular case health was not a necessary element in this calculation, there yet remains in this, as in all other cases, this law, namely, that he should promote his happiness not from inclination but from duty, and by this would his conduct first acquire true moral worth.
In the first case, the very notion of the action already implies a law for me; in the second case, I must first look about elsewhere to see what results may be combined with it which would affect myself.
But it is soon clear to me that such a maxim will still only be based on the fear of consequences.
The third proposition, which is a consequence of the two preceding, I would express thus Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law.
Respect for a person is properly only respect for the law (of honesty, etc.) of which he gives us an example.
Thus, then, without quitting the moral knowledge of common human reason, we have arrived at its principle.
Now reason issues its commands unyieldingly, without promising anything to the inclinations, and, as it were, with disregard and contempt for these claims, which are so impetuous, and at the same time so plausible, and which will not allow themselves to be suppressed by any command.
Nature would not only have taken on herself the choice of the ends, but also of the means, and with wise foresight would have entrusted both to instinct.
The second proposition is: That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire.
In a word, nature would have taken care that reason should not break forth into practical exercise, nor have the presumption, with its weak insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness, and of the means of attaining it.
The object of respect is the law only, and that the law which we impose on ourselves and yet recognise as necessary in itself.
In the former aspect it has an analogy to fear, in the latter to inclination.
Against all the commands of duty which reason represents to man as so deserving of respect, he feels in himself a powerful counterpoise in his wants and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up under the name of happiness.
I omit here all actions which are already recognized as inconsistent with duty, although they may be useful for this or that purpose, for with these the question whether they are done from duty cannot arise at all, since they even conflict with it.
OF MORALITY TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL
A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition; that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favour of any inclination, nay even of the sum total of all inclinations.
As a law, we are subjected too it without consulting self-love; as imposed by us on ourselves, it is a result of our will.
This will then, though not indeed the sole and complete good, must be the supreme good and the condition of every other, even of the desire of happiness.
For love, as an affection, cannot be commanded, but beneficence for duty's sake may; even though we are not impelled to it by any inclination- nay, are even repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion.
Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add nor take away anything from this value.
The new creature does.
The new creature calls it Niagara Falls--why, I am sure I do not know.
Says it is to call it by when I want it to come. I said it was superfluous, then.
My life is not as happy as it was.
It looks no more like a dodo than I do.
We are going to run short, most likely.
And this new sound is so close to me; it is right at my shoulder, right at my ear, first on one side and then on the other, and I am used only to sounds that are more or less distant from me.
Tuesday
I wish it would stay with the other animals.
That is all right, I have no objections.
T.]
Says it looks like Niagara Falls.
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And talks. It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.
The new creature eats too much fruit.
It says it is not an It, it is a She.
by Mark Twain
Friday
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This is sufficiently high-handed, it seems to me.
Consequently, without consulting me, it has been new-named --NIAGARA FALLS PARK.
Pulled through.
I do not go out in the fog myself.
The new creature says its name is Eve.
Monday
The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest.
I don't like this; I am not used to company.
I had a very good name for the estate, and it was musical and pretty --GARDEN-OF-EDEN.
The new creature intruded.
She fell in the pond yesterday, when she was looking at herself in it, which she is always doing.
Saturday
What is a summer resort?
I have not missed any rib....
What harm does it do?
They have no other use that I can see, and they must have been made for something.
I wonder why.
I went over the Falls in a barrel--not satisfactory to her.
Friday
Tuesday
This is at least doubtful, if not more than that.
Sunday
She says they were only made for scenery--like the rhinoceros and the mastodon.
She says this park would make a tidy summer resort, if there was any custom for it.
That was a mistake--it had been better to keep the remark to myself; it only gave her an idea--she could save the sick buzzard, and furnish fresh meat to the despondent lions and tigers.
She told me she was made out of a rib taken from my body.
She has been climbing that tree again.
The buzzard must get along the best it can with what is provided.
Seems to consider that a sufficient justification for chancing any dangerous thing.
I foresee trouble.
Clodded her out of it.
We cannot overturn the whole scheme to accommodate the buzzard.
THIS WAY TO GOAT ISLAND.
Will emigrate.
She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of that tree, and says the result will be a great and fine and noble education.
Pulled through.
It seems a good idea....
Thursday
She engages herself in many foolish things: among others, trying to study out why the animals called lions and tigers live on grass and flowers, when, as she says, the sort of teeth they wear would indicate that they were intended to eat each other.
Swam the Whirlpool and the Rapids in a fig-leaf suit.
Friday
Sunday
I told her there would be another result, too--it would introduce death into the world.
When night comes I shall throw them out-doors.
She has taken up with a snake now.
The other animals are glad, for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them; and I am glad, because the snake talks, and this enables me to get a rest.
Saturday
THIS WAY TO THE WHIRLPOOL.
She has taken to beseeching me to stop going over the Falls.
Monday
Says it makes her shudder.
She said nobody was looking.
But it is best not to ask her, she has such a rage for explaining.
She is in much trouble about the buzzard; says grass does not agree with it; is afraid she can't raise it; thinks it was intended to live on decayed flesh.
Hence, tedious complaints about my extravagance.
Summer resort--another invention of hers--just words, without any meaning.
Went over in a tub--still not satisfactory.
It is a good word.
Told her that. The word justification moved her admiration--and envy too, I thought.
She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive signs:
It got much damaged.
I supposed it was what the Falls were for.
This is foolish, because to do that would be to kill each other, and that would introduce what, as I understand it, is called "death;" and death, as I have been told, has not yet entered the Park.
Tuesday
The old Noah's ark," she said.
I believe people are losing their minds!"
JACK-IN-THE-BOX
Well, that is a happy spirit for Christmas time, I should say!
"What rubbish!" she said.
She tugged the packing-case an inch nearer the fire.
They are Jews; but that doesn't make any difference about the Christmas spirit.
Nonsense!
The poor woman and her boys followed forlornly at a distance.
"I wonder if all the animals are in there."
Hardly had Miss Terry time to conceal herself behind the curtain when she saw a figure approaching, airily waving a stick.
This isn't going to bring out any Christmas spirit," she sneered.
Mrs. Noah and her sons had long since disappeared.
Her eyes were beseeching.
"Only to ask if I may go out for a little while to see the decorations and hear the singing."
Norah flushed; but she was hardened to her mistress's manner.
She lifted the cover, and turned out into her lap the long-imprisoned animals and their round-bodied chief.
They seemed to be Jewish lads of the newsboy class, and they eyed the display of candles appraisingly.
She caught glimpses of glitter and tinsel, wheels and fragments of unidentifiable toys.
"I can't throw this out of the window," she reflected.
To few of them the years had spared a tail.
The fire was hungry for them.
He started to run, but the bigger fellow was too quick for him.
She laid the Noah's ark on the table, and going to the closet tugged out several big logs, which she arranged geometrically.
She gave a reminiscent sniff as she threw up the cover and saw on the under side of it a big label of pasteboard unevenly lettered.
I must take it out on the sidewalk.
Miss Terry stooped to poke over the contents of the box with lean, long fingers.
"Hello!
Such toys are demoralizing for children--weaken their minds.
I am going to look it over and burn up the rubbish this evening."
With a quick movement Cooper picked up the dog on the end of his stick and tossed it into the street, under the wheels of the machine.
"This was the elephant," she mused.
There were a good many people passing, but they seemed too preoccupied to glance down at the sidewalk.
It is a good time to begin clearing up for the new year.
"So that is the end of experiment number one," quoth Miss Terry, smiling grimly.
She returned to the play box by the fire, and rummaged for a few minutes among the tangled toys.
When he reached the spot in the sidewalk where the Flanton Dog lay, he paused a moment looking down.
"Fiddlestick!" again snarled her mistress.
But some wicked spirit seemed to have seized the finder of the ark.
Now I will begin."
"I will try it and see."
"Hello!
Land!
"I will prove once for all my point about the 'Christmas spirit.' I will drop some of these old toys out on the sidewalk and see what happens.
"Yes'm," answered the maid.
But the ark-builder, hatless and one-armed, still presided over a menagerie of sorry beasts.
Miss Terry rose and crossed two rooms to the front window, looking out upon the street.
None of them noticed the Noah's ark lying at the foot of the steps.
"Of course I would not see him," she said, pursing her lips into a hard line.
I know better.
"Are they all blind?" she fretted. "What is the matter with them?
Now, could any child ever have cared for so silly a thing?" She pulled out a faded jumping-jack, and regarded it scornfully.
"Folks are growing terribly extravagant."
Half unconsciously she pressed the spring, and a hideous Jack-in-the-box sprang out to confront her with a squeak, a leering smile, and a red nose.
The child's eyes caught sight of the dog on the sidewalk, and he hung back, watching to see what the young man would do to it.
But why did that other creature keep the thing?
One of the black beads which had served him for eyes was gone.
I saw it first myself.
"Set it down on the rug by the fire-place.
Down the steps she went, and deposited the ark discreetly at their foot; then returned to take up her position behind the curtains.
"What do you want?"
I'm glad I thought of it.
You can't have it."
"It must sound so pretty!"
The little boys crowded forward eagerly.
"This will do to begin with," she thought.
Taking the bellows in hand she blew furiously, and was presently rewarded with a brisk blaze.
She took them up and examined them curiously one by one. Finally she selected a shapeless slate-colored block from the mass.
"They are in a great hurry," sniffed Miss Terry disdainfully.
It may be interesting."
"I always did hate that thing," she said.
I am glad no one expects anything of me,--nor I of any one.
Miss Terry shrugged impatiently.
"Here's the first show of the beautiful Christmas spirit that is supposed to be abroad. Look at the little beasts fighting over something that neither of them really wants!"
Why not begin?
And sure enough, she did.
She stopped at the doorstep, drew her skirts aside, and bent over to look at the strange-shaped box at her feet.
"Why, all the windows along the street are full of candles," answered Norah; "rows of candles in every house, to light the Christ Child on his way when he comes through the city to-night."
They will be fighting again as soon as they are out of sight.
It was like Miss Terry to insist upon that nearer inch.
That girl doesn't know how to build fires so they will keep."
I might have expected something like that.
This is my affair." Miss Terry read her expression and sniffed. "There is the Christmas spirit coming out again," she said to herself. "Look at her face!"
She stood the thing up on the table as well as his weak legs would allow, and inspected him critically.
Singing?
Here was shade, and the fresh water of a spring, that, gliding among the turf, under the trees, thence precipitated itself from rock to rock, till its dashing murmurs were lost in the abyss, though its white foam was long seen amid the darkness of the pines below.
CHAPTER III
He looked again from the window, and then saw a young man spring from the bushes into the road, followed by a couple of dogs.
Soon after mid-day, they reached the summit of one of those cliffs, which, bright with the verdure of palm-trees, adorn, like gems, the tremendous walls of the rocks, and which overlooked the greater part of Gascony, and part of Languedoc.
Here, light was admitted, and smoke discharged, through an aperture in the roof; and here the scent of spirits (for the travelling smugglers, who haunted the Pyrenees, had made this rude people familiar with the use of liquors) was generally perceptible enough.
He declared that his beasts were as honest beasts, and as good beasts, as any in the whole province; and that they had a right to be well treated wherever they went.
This good woman seemed very willing to accommodate the strangers, who were soon compelled to accept the only two beds in the place.
But she thought not of herself, and the animated smile she gave him, told how much she felt herself obliged for the preference of her father.
Rocks on rocks piled, as if by magic spell, Here scorch'd by lightnings, there with ivy green.
They parted with mutual regret.
Two hundred yards from the embouchure of the avenue, it ran into it; and fifty paces further on Zeb came to a spot where the horse had stood tied to a tree.
But before going so far, he was stayed by the discovery of some fresh "sign"--too interesting to be carelessly examined.
He was soon within identifying distance.
There could be no difficulty in ascertaining his occupation.
He was not surprised at their bringing him out into the avenue--close to the pool of blood--by the coyotes long since licked dry.
They were things to be remembered; and he soon remembered them.
The blue cloth frock of semi-military cut--the forage cap--the belt sustaining a bowie-knife, with a brace of revolving pistols--all have been mentioned before as enveloping and equipping the person of Captain Cassius Calhoun.
He soon discovered two sets of them--one going--another coming back.
He had no thoughts of keeping the latter in view.
There was no turf, and the loose mould was baked hard and smooth, evidently by the sole of a boot or shoe.
He was tracking the headless rider.
He followed the former.
The episode--strange as unexpected--had caused some disarrangement in his ideas, and seemed to call for a change in his plans.
Zeb guessed so, by seeing the other, at some distance before him, riding to and fro, in transverse stretches, like a pointer quartering the stubble in search of a partridge.
He had learnt enough to know that this last promised a rich reward for its exploration.
Zeb saw that the animal had proceeded no further: for there was another set of tracks showing where it had returned to the prairie--though not by the same path.
Nor did he lose any in following it up.
While thus absorbed, in considering what course he had best take, he had forgotten the puff of smoke, and the report heard far off over the prairie.
If there was reason before for taking the trail of the Headless Horseman, it was redoubled now.
The last speech was an apostrophe to the "maar"--after which Zeb waxed silent, with his head among the spray of the acacias, and his eyes peering through the branches in acute scrutiny of him who was coming along.
Zeb Stump guessed it at a glance.
Still closely scrutinising the trail of the Headless Horseman, Calhoun trotted past.
Once only did he make pause; at a point where the tracks of two horses converged with that he was following.
He might have traced them right up to it, but for the hundreds of horse tracks that had trodden the ground like a sheep-pen.
It was he.
He did not stay to inquire which had gone first over the ground.
Then only for a second or two did he stand erect--taking council with himself as to what course he should pursue.
From this point the three coincided--at times parting and running parallel, for a score of yards or so, but again coming together and overlapping one another.
For once in his life, Zeb Stump had made a mistake.
He needed no such guidance.
The old mare, relishing the recumbent attitude, had still kept to it; and there was no necessity for re-disposing of her.
Zeb had not long to wait for the gratification of his wish.
It led him along the edge of an extended tract of chapparal; which, following all three, he had approached at a point well known to him, as to the reader,--where it was parted by the open space already described.
With this confidence he cleared out from among the acacias, and took the path just trodden by Calhoun.
He too had lost the trail, and was endeavouring to recover it.
But there was care upon it now--a care that seemed to speak of apprehension--keen, prolonged, yet looking forward with a hope of being relieved from it.
These consisted in taking hold of the bridle, and giving the old mare a kick; that caused her to start instantaneously to her feet.
The attempt terminated in a failure.
The States horse had followed; and behind him, the roadster with the broken shoe-- also an American.
As the trail was fresh, the strange horseman could take it up at a trot--in which pace he was approaching.
On rounding the mezquite grove, behind which both had made disappearance, he discovered he had done so.
He showed no signs of having done so.
"Wonder now what thet's for?" he continued, after standing awhile to consider.
This was a man, who, once seen, was not likely to be soon forgotten. Scarce thirty years old, he showed a countenance, scathed, less with care than the play of evil passions.
But upon the branches of a tree between, Zeb Stump saw something that had escaped the eyes not only of the searchers, but of their guide Spangler--a scrap of paper, blackened and half-burnt--evidently the wadding of a discharged gun!
In a place where the underwood grew thick, he came upon a spot where a man had remained for some time.
Still continuing his fleet career, the Headless Horseman galloped on over the prairie--Zeb Stump following only with his eyes; and not until he had passed out of sight, behind some straggling groves of mezquite, did the backwoodsman abandon his kneeling position.
All three had gone over the same ground, at separate times, and each by himself.
With this apostrophe to his "critter," ending in a laugh at the conceit of her "tallow," the hunter turned off on the track of the third horse.
Withal it was a handsome face: such as a gentleman need not have been ashamed of, but for that sinister expression that told of its belonging to a blackguard.
This Zeb Stump could tell with as much ease and certainty, as one might read the index of a dial, or thermometer.
By keeping to the former, he might find out much; but by changing to the latter he might learn more?
The two fresh trails would be sufficient for him; and he felt as sure of finding the direction in which both would lead, as if he had ridden alongside the horseman without a head, or him without a heart.
With but short time spent in consideration, so Zeb concluded; and commenced making preparations for a stalk after Cassius Calhoun.
Beyond, extended a tract of chalk prairie; over which one of the horsemen appeared to have passed--him without the head.
But despite his superior attainments in the tracking craft, he was compelled to relinquish it.
Leaving his critter to occupy the "stall" where broken-shoe had for some time fretted himself, the old hunter glided off upon the footmarks of the dismounted rider.
Should he continue along the trail he was already deciphering; or forsake it for that of the steed that had just swept by?
The backwoodsman's brain having become the recipient of new thoughts, required a fresh exercise of its ingenuity.
Whatever may have been in his thoughts, he said nothing, beyond giving utterance to the simple exclamation "Good!" and, with satisfaction stamped upon his features, he moved on, the old mare appearing to mock him by an imitative stride!
On the contrary, he was sitting stooped in the saddle, his breast bent down to the pommel, and his eyes actively engaged in reading the ground, over which he was guiding his horse.
That was as clear to him, as if he had been a spectator at their passing. The stallion had been in the lead,--how far Zeb could not exactly tell; but certainly some distance beyond that of companionship.
Dazed almost to blindness, the backwoodsman determined upon turning late back; and once more devoting his attention to the trail from which he had been for a time seduced.
The chalk surface defied interpretation--at least by skill such as that of Cassius Calhoun.
He remained in shadow, to have a better view of what was passing under the sunlight.
The new trail skirted the timber only for a short distance.
By the timber island in question--about two hundred yards from its edge--a horse is quietly pasturing.
There were still further speculations, that related less to the apparition itself than to its connection with the other grand topic of the time--the murder of young Poindexter.
Three times one of the birds has alighted thus--first upon the right shoulder, then upon the left, and then midway between--upon the spot where the head should be!
At times too can a glimpse be obtained of the face.
A prairie-man would call it an "island," and with your eyes upon the vast verdant sea that surrounds it, you could not help being struck with the resemblance.
I am neither cold nor hot.
'Yes,' he said, 'I begin to come to a point.
Let not self-love, wit, craft, and timorousness corrupt his mind, but indue him with fortitude, patience, steadfastness, tenderness, mortification . . . Shall I expose myself and my family to danger at this time?
I really think I will go along with this good man.
At your first attention to these things you would think that no possible root could be better planted than in the Bible and in earnest preaching.
The apocalyptic side of some men's imaginations is very easily worked upon.
If they happen to fall in with godly lovers and friends, they are sincerely godly with them; but if their companions are indifferent or hostile to true religion, they gradually fall into the same temper and attitude.
He is indeed terrible, but it is with a terror that purifies the heart and keeps the life in the hour of temptation.
It is fit, surely, that the ephemeral should minister to the eternal, and time to eternity, and all else in this world to the only thing in this world that shall endure and survive this world.
Butler had not that splendid imagination which those two masters in character-painting possessed, but he had very great gifts of his own, and he has done us very great service by means of his gifts.
Have you acknowledged to God that you have at last discovered the true key of your life?
We naturally turn to Bishop Butler when we think of moral character. Butler is an author who has drawn no characters of his own.
It is really either of his likeness or unlikeness to Jesus Christ we speak, and then, through Him, his likeness or unlikeness to God Himself.
And here, again, Butler steps forward at our call with his key to our own and to all Bunyan's characters in his hand, and in three familiar and fruitful words he answers our question and gives us food for thought and solemn reflection for a lifetime.
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In seeking a solid bottom for our subject, then, we naturally turn to Butler.
But the last enemy, with all his malice and all his resistless power, cannot touch our moral character--unless it be in some way utterly mysterious to us that he is made under God to refine and perfect it.
He was made perfect on this same principle.
And we cease to wonder so much at the care God takes of human character, and the cost He lays out upon it, when we think that it is the only work of His hands that shall last for ever.
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And yet so true is it that the world loves its own, that all men worship talent, and even bodily strength and bodily beauty, while only one here and one there either understands or values or pursues moral character, though it is the strength and the beauty and the sweetness of the soul.
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All Butler's prophetic burden is bound up in these three great words--acts, habits, character. Remember and ponder these three words, and you will in due time become a moral philosopher.
There are but three steps, says Butler, from earth to heaven, or, if you will, from earth to hell--acts, habits, character.
Character comes up out of the will and out of the heart.
Bishop Butler has helped many men in the intelligent formation of their character, and what higher praise could be given to any author?
we ask the sagacious bishop.
A man's character does not have its seat or source in his body; character is not a physical thing: not even in his mind; it is not an intellectual thing.
The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.
It is not in the great tragedies of life only that character is tested and strengthened and consolidated.
Riches, honours, possessions, pleasures of all kinds: death, with one stroke of his desolating hand, shall one day strip us bare to a winding-sheet and a coffin of all the things we are so mad to possess.
There are more clever people than good people; character,--high, spotless, saintly character,--is a far rarer thing in this world than talent or even genius.
Paul sometimes arms himself with the same terror; only he composes in another style than that of Butler, and, with all his vivid intensity, he calls it the terror of the Lord.
But, then, moral character is well worth achieving here and then carrying there, for it is nothing else and nothing less than the divine nature itself; it is the divine nature incarnate, incorporate, and made manifest in man.
Whatever other passing uses this present world, so full of trial and temptation and suffering, may have, this surely is the supreme and final use of it--to be a furnace, a graving-house, a refining place for human character.
For it is of the outstanding good or evil in a man that we think when we speak of his character.
Christian and Christiana, Obstinate and Pliable, Mr. Fearing and Mr. Feeblemind, Temporary and Talkative, Mr. By- ends and Mr. Facing-both-ways, Simple, Sloth, Presumption, that brisk lad Ignorance, and the genuine Mr. Brisk himself.
He carried up to heaven all the love to God and angels and men He had learned and practised on earth, with all the earthly fruits of it.
And thus it is that the severe and laconic bishop has so often made us shudder as he demonstrated it to us that we are all with our own hands shaping our character not only for this world, but much more for the world to come, by every act we perform, by every word we speak, almost by every breath we draw.
And, as He was, so are we in this world.
And thus it is that the adjective 'moral' usually accompanies our word 'character'--moral or immoral.
The Son is thus the Father's character stamped upon and set forth in human nature.
This world's evil and ill-desert made it but the better arena and theatre for the development and the display of His moral character; and the same instruments that fashioned Him into the perfect and express image He was and is, are still, happily, in full operation. Take that divinest and noblest of all instruments for the carving out and refining of moral character, the will of God.
Bunyan will people the house for us once it is built, but Butler lays bare for us the naked rock on which men like Bunyan build and beautify and people the dwelling-place of God and man.
Have you discovered that in your life, or any measure of that?
Our Lord Himself came to be the express image He was and is by living and acting under this same universal law of human life--acts, habits, character.
And so of all the other forms and features of moral character; so of humility and meekness, so of purity and temperance, so of magnanimity and munificence, so of all self-suppression and self-extinction, and all corresponding exalting and magnifying and benefiting of other men.
As Butler says, there is 'a providential disposition of things' around every one of us, and it is as exactly suited to the flaws and excrescences, the faults and corruptions of our character as if Providence had had no other life to make a disposition of things for but one, and that one our own.
And we see to our salvation some of the uses to which those parts of His moral character are at this moment being put in His Father's House; and what we see not now of all the ends and uses and employments of our Lord's glorified humanity we shall, mayhap, see hereafter.
Abraham's character was not like David's, nor David's like Christ's, nor Christ's like Paul's.
And we also shall carry our moral character to heaven; it is the only thing we have worth carrying so far.
Butler will lie on our table all winter beside Bunyan; the bishop beside the tinker, the philosopher beside the poet, the moralist beside the evangelical minister.
But let us ask in this introductory lecture if we can find out any law or principle upon which all our own characters, good or bad, are formed.
All else we possess and pursue shall fade and perish, our moral character shall alone survive.
He learned obedience both by the things that He did, and the things that He suffered.
3.
This is the highest and best use to which our so expressive word 'character' has ever been put, and the use to which it is put when we speak of Bunyan's Characters partakes of the same high sense and usage.
Paul and Bunyan are of the same school of moralists and stylists; Butler went to school to the Stoics, to Aristotle, and to Plato.
Character is an infinitely better thing than either of these, and it is of corresponding rarity.
He carried back His humility, His meekness, His humanity, His approachableness, and His sympathy.
And those three foundation stones of our Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to bear and to suffer as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice, goodness, and truth.
The Word was made flesh.
For acts, often repeated, gradually become habits, and habits, long enough continued, settle and harden and solidify into character.
Ponder and practise them, and you will become what is infinitely better--a moral man.
Butler's genius was not creative like Shakespeare's or Bunyan's.
INTRODUCTORY
Do our characters come to be what they are by chance, or have we anything to do in the formation of our own characters, and if so, in what way?
Butler is one of the most terrible authors in the world.
His forgiveness of injuries, and thus His splendid benevolence, had not yet come to its climax and crown till He said on the cross, 'Father, forgive them'.
Have you given Him the satisfaction to know that He is not making His providential dispositions around a stock or a stone, but that He has one under His hand who understands His hand, and responds to it, and rises up to meet and salute it?
Butler says in one deep place, that benevolence and justice and veracity are the basis of all good character in God and in man, and thus also in the God-man.
You do not put a pearl under the potter's wheel; you do not cast clay into a refining fire.
The Express Image carried up to His Father's House, not only the divine life He had brought hither with Him when He came to obey and submit and suffer among us; He carried back more than He brought, for He carried back a human heart, a human life, a human character, which was and is a new wonder in heaven.
The word 'character' occurs only once in the New Testament, and that is in the passage in the prologue of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the original word is translated 'express image' in our version.
"Why did you bite poor Primrose?"
"She'll come by-and-by." "You will never see her." "She went home to dies, "Till the new year." "Snowdrop!" "'Tis no good To invite her." "Primrose is very rude, "I will bite her."
"There is something in it I do not understand.
"Do they live IN the flowers?" I said.
"Look there!" she said; "look at his fingers!"
Indeed, there were more instruments at work about her than there could have been sparks in her.
The woman with a smile begged me not to trouble myself, for money was not of the slightest use there; and as I might meet with people in my journeys whom I could not recognise to be fairies, it was well I had no money to offer, for nothing offended them so much.
"He is almost awake, mother; and greedier than usual to-night."
Now it came about in this wise.
I noticed too that her hands were delicately formed, though brown with work and exposure.
I could not help speaking to her, for I stood near her.
If the cat were at home, she would have her back up; for the young fairies pull the sparks out of her tail with bramble thorns, and she knows when they are coming.
These soon sank with them; whereupon they swam ashore and got others.
I wondered at finding a human dwelling in this neighbourhood; and yet it did not look altogether human, though sufficiently so to encourage me to expect to find some sort of food.
Half of them were on the cat's back, and half held on by her fur and tail, or ran beside her; till, more coming to their help, the furious cat was held fast; and they proceeded to pick the sparks out of her with thorns and pins, which they handled like harpoons.
I said, "Pocket, how could you be so naughty?"
During the latter part of the song-talk, they had formed themselves into a funeral procession, two of them bearing poor Primrose, whose death Pocket had hastened by biting her stalk, upon one of her own great leaves.
Then she turned suddenly and left me, walking still with the same unchanging gait.
Their manners and habits are now so well known to the world, having been so often described by eyewitnesses, that it would be only indulging self-conceit, to add my account in full to the rest. I cannot help wishing, however, that my readers could see them for themselves.
Even the most mischievous of the fairies would not tease him, although he did not belong to their set at all, but was quite a little country bumpkin.
I read on and on, till the shades of the afternoon began to deepen; for in the midst of the forest it gloomed earlier than in the open country.
At last, after another good cry, she chose the biggest she could find, and ran away laughing, to launch her boat amongst the rest.
"Never mind, never mind, we shall find her again; and by that time she will have laid in a fresh stock of sparks.
Quiet!
Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable.
My eyes followed her; but as the window was too small to allow anything to be seen from where I was sitting, I rose and looked over her shoulder.
Accordingly I sat down, and feeling rather tired, and disinclined for further talk, I asked leave to look at the old book which still screened the window.
So do I, in another way."
But even here I was struck with the utter stillness.
I seemed to be advancing towards a second midnight.
A woman sat beside it, preparing some vegetables for dinner.
"I should like to stay here till the evening," I said; "and then go on my journey, if you will allow me."
No insect hummed.
I had eaten nothing that day, and for an hour past had been feeling the want of food.
I concluded from the flowers that she carried, that the forest could not be everywhere so dense as it appeared from where I was now walking; and I was right in this conclusion.
Then I remembered that night is the fairies' day, and the moon their sun; and I thought--Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.
She replied--
I could not conjecture what she meant, but satisfied myself with thinking that it would be time enough to find out her meaning when there was need to make use of her warning, and that the occasion would reveal the admonition.
"I cannot tell," she replied.
They talked singing, and their talk made a song, something like this:
"Trust the Oak," said she; "trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech.
"Are the trees fairies too, as well as the flowers?" I asked.
"You are welcome to do as you please; only it might be better to stay all night, than risk the dangers of the wood then.
"Because she said we should never see Snowdrop; as if we were not good enough to look at her, and she was, the proud thing!--served her right!"
When she reached its stem, she stopped and looked round.
As I came near, she looked up, and seeing me, showed no surprise, but bent her head again over her work, and said in a low tone:
"Now, Pussy, be patient.
From the cups or bells of tall flowers, as from balconies, some looked down on the masses below, now bursting with laughter, now grave as owls; but even in their deepest solemnity, seeming only to be waiting for the arrival of the next laugh. Some were launched on a little marshy stream at the bottom, in boats chosen from the heaps of last year's leaves that lay about, curled and withered.
Yet you would see a strange resemblance, almost oneness, between the flower and the fairy, which you could not describe, but which described itself to you.
Pussy, quiet!"
"All for the good of the community!" said one, and ran off with a great hollow leaf.
It contained many wondrous tales of Fairy Land, and olden times, and the Knights of King Arthur's table.
"You can't wear half you've got," said some.
As soon as she had shut the door and set a chair--
This was homely and comforting.
"Did you see my daughter?"
"What did you mean by speaking so about the Ash?"
At length I came to this passage--
"What do you see?"
You know quite well it is all for your good. You cannot be comfortable with all those sparks in you; and, indeed, I am charitably disposed to believe" (here he became very pompous) "that they are the cause of all your bad temper; so we must have them all out, every one; else we shall be reduced to the painful necessity of cutting your claws, and pulling out your eye-teeth.
Having said this, she rose and led the way into the cottage; which, I now saw, was built of the stems of small trees set closely together, and was furnished with rough chairs and tables, from which even the bark had not been removed.
These I speak of, however, are the fairies of the garden. They are more staid and educated than those of the fields and woods. Of course they have near relations amongst the wild flowers, but they patronise them, and treat them as country cousins, who know nothing of life, and very little of manners.
"Oh, you naughty Pocket! "Look, she drops her head." "She deserved it, Rocket, "And she was nearly dead." "To your hammock--off with you!" "And swing alone." "No one will laugh with you." "No, not one."
"But how then do you come to live here?"
Pocket, who had been expelled from the company by common consent, went sulkily away towards her hammock, for she was the fairy of the calceolaria, and looked rather wicked.
CHAPTER III
But when we met, instead of passing, she turned and walked alongside of me for a few yards, still keeping her face downwards, and busied with her flowers. She spoke rapidly, however, all the time, in a low tone, as if talking to herself, but evidently addressing the purport of her words to me.
A smile passed between the mother and daughter; and then the latter began to help her mother in little household duties.
I may as well mention here, that the conclusion I arrived at from the observations I was afterwards able to make, was, that the flowers die because the fairies go away; not that the fairies disappear because the flowers die.
Yet somehow the whole environment seemed only asleep, and to wear even in sleep an air of expectation.
"Oh, Pocket, Pocket," said I; but by this time the party which had gone towards the house, rushed out again, shouting and screaming with laughter.
"Shall I be able to see these things?" said I.
If I speak to one, he or she looks up in my face, as if I were not worth heeding, gives a little laugh, and runs away." Here the woman started, as if suddenly recollecting herself, and said in a low voice to her daughter, "Make haste--go and watch him, and see in what direction he goes."
The flowers seem a sort of houses for them, or outer bodies, which they can put on or off when they please.
Only, as soon as they have done, they burst into peals of tiny laughter, as if it was such a joke to have been serious over anything.
In the midst of the intervening twilight, however, before I entered what appeared to be the darkest portion of the forest, I saw a country maiden coming towards me from its very depths.
I had just time to see, across the open space, on the edge of the denser forest, a single large ash-tree, whose foliage showed bluish, amidst the truer green of the other trees around it; when she pushed me back with an expression of impatience and terror, and then almost shut out the light from the window by setting up a large old book in it.
Soon, however, I became again anxious, though from another cause.
Especially do I desire that they should see the fairy of the daisy; a little, chubby, round-eyed child, with such innocent trust in his look!
Here, however, the young woman, whom I had met in the morning, entered.
The woman brought it to me directly, but not before taking another look towards the forest, and then drawing a white blind over the window.
I could hardly see her face; for, though she came direct towards me, she never looked up.
"But what danger is to be dreaded from him?"
Sometimes they will act a whole play through before my eyes, with perfect composure and assurance, for they are not afraid of me.
"And the sooner it grows dark, the sooner the Ash will be awake," added she.
I pulled out my purse, but to my dismay there was nothing in it.
I think I see it."
Here, to my great pleasure, all was life and bustle.
Those who took fresh rose-leaves for their boats floated the longest; but for these they had to fight; for the fairy of the rose-tree complained bitterly that they were stealing her clothes, and defended her property bravely.
Instead of answering the question, she went again to the window and looked out, saying she feared the fairies would be interrupted by foul weather, for a storm was brewing in the west.
The whole garden was like a carnival, with tiny, gaily decorated forms, in groups, assemblies, processions, pairs or trios, moving stately on, running about wildly, or sauntering hither or thither.
"There, I told you!" said the woman.
"How do you know that?" she retorted.
"I did; but I meant something quite different from what you seem to think."
Now, to the point.
"Not even to me," she emphasized.
The difficulties will not be great to a discreet person.
"You are discreet, and you evidently desire a position.
You understand me?"
"Well--yes.
"I doubt if Mrs. Packard more than knows of his presence.
I have political enemies, of course men, who, influenced by party feeling, are not above attacking methods and possibly my official reputation; but personal ones--wretches willing to stab me in my home-life and affections, that I can not believe.
I knew all the current gossip about Mrs. Packard before I had parted with Miss Davies.
In doing this she had walked into a fortune.
So she hurried out soon, fearing to be found there by Mr. Tebrick, and who knows, perhaps shot, like the dogs, for knowing the secret.
Having got her into the house, the next thing he thought of was to hide her from the servants.
But here I will confine myself to an exact narrative of the event and all that followed on it.
Her eyes were of a clear hazel but exceptionally brilliant, her hair dark, with a shade of red in it, her skin brownish, with a few dark freckles and little moles.
Now he fortified himself with two or three glasses of strong whisky and went to bed, taking his vixen into his arms, where he slept soundly.
But by all this going on with so much strangeness and authority on his part, as it seemed to them, the servants were much troubled.
First he shot his wife's setter dead, and then looked about him for Nelly to give her the other barrel, but he could see her nowhere.
On one of the first days of the year 1880, in the early afternoon, husband and wife went for a walk in the copse on the little hill above Rylands.
He started up now, calling to the gardener that he would come down to the dogs himself to quiet them, and bade the man go indoors again and leave it to him.
Had she followed her impulse, she would have darted by with her fingers in her ears, but instead, she dropped the shilling in the old man's hand, and quietly turned toward the door.
The room seemed to sway and tip as the ship had done, and there was a continuous sound as of thunder, a strange undercurrent that seemed to her strained nerves like the moaning of the lost souls of all the ages, who had lived and toiled and smothered in this monstrous and terrible city.
We'll let in a little more light.
She made her way to the office and inquired how she might find Lord Thryng's country home.
"Yes, ma'm.
A narrow opening at the top of the window let in a little air; still she felt smothered, and tried to raise the lower sash, but could not move it.
Her pallor struck him then, even as the red spot on her cheek deepened, and he held out his arms for the child.
'E's our son.
'E's lived in America five years, but if you never were in Canada and never met our Sammy, it's more likely you never saw 'im either."
The child was dressed in a fresh white coat, and Cassandra had much ado to keep him clean.
"Oh, yes.
"Babies are always dear," said the mother, with a smile.
What was she?
Her ring for a messenger had not been answered, and she did not know how to find her husband's country-seat. She felt faint and weary, but did not think of hunger, nor that it was long past the dinner-hour, and that she had eaten nothing since her early breakfast.
Cassandra looked up to see a rosy-cheeked girl, a little too stout and florid, with a great mop of dark hair tied with a wide black ribbon.
He had learned nothing of this young woman to tell his old wife, except that she came from America, and had never met Samuel Cutter.
She felt herself moving in an unreal world.
She soothed and comforted him until her panic passed, and when, at last, they stopped before a great house built in on either side by other houses, with wide steps of stone descending directly upon the street, she had regained a measure of composure.
She neither wept nor prayed; and the red spot burned against the creamy whiteness of her skin.
"I couldn't go with you myself, ma'm--but--"
She had a silver shilling in her hand, for Betty Towers had told her all servants expected a tip, and this was intended for the cabman.
She followed slowly in the old man's wake, never opening her lips until they had made the circuit and were again standing before the portrait of the fair-haired youth.
"Thank you," his fingers closed over the shilling.
Cassandra had no idea of the distance, but she knew how long David and Hoyle were journeying there, so she answered as best she could.
"It's a big country--America is.
That's gossip, you know."
Then, too, if only she had some one with her to whom she could speak now and then, it would be better.
Cassandra rose and stood suddenly poised for flight.
England may be a small place, but she 'as tremendous big possessions." He felt it all belonged to England, and spoke with swelling pride as his short legs carried him toward the door. There again he paused.
Oh, if her soul could only reach to him, wherever he was, and penetrate this impalpable veil that stretched between them!
"Will you tell me, please, have you a sister?" she said.
And of course, he might be out.
He would be glad to see his little son.
"What a perfectly lovely child!" said a pleasant voice.
She must hurry--hurry and find David.
Betty Towers had procured clothing for her--a modest supply--using her own good taste, and not disguising Cassandra's natural grace and dignity by a too-close adherence to the prevailing mode.
Cassandra watched him cross the floor, his short bow legs reflected grotesquely in its shining surface as he walked, then turned and gazed again at the life-size, half-length portrait of a young man with sunny hair like David's and warm brown eyes.
Seized by an inward terror of the small eyes fixed curiously on her, she intuitively shrank from betraying her identity, and the old servant had told her what she needed to know.
She was not thinking, only looking, seeing into the past and down the long vista of her future.
Again he coughed behind his hand.
In the radiance of the spring, she saw them, and in the glory of the autumn; she breathed the fragrance of the pines in winter and heard the soft patter of summer rains on widespreading leaves.
The clerk wrote the address promptly on a card, but the keen look of interest with which he handed it to her caused her to shrink inwardly.
She had tried to put them one side that she might look out when she awoke, but she could see only chimney-pots and grimy, irregularly tiled roofs.
Is it a boy?"
"'Is lordship is still in Hafrica, mam.
She must get out of that house and hear no more.
But her arms closed tighter about her baby.
"About 'ow far do you think, ma'm?"
She saw the terrible sea which she had crossed to come to him--the white-crested waves, with turquoise lights and indigo depths, shifting and sliding unceasingly where all the world seemed swallowed in space, and the huge steamship so small a thing in the vast and perilous deep; and now--now she was here.
A gray-haired lady followed, and paused beside her.
"Let me carry 'im for you, ma'm.
Everything was being impressed upon her mind as upon sensitized paper.
Shown that long, empty gallery resounding with those aged footsteps, and the pictures--pictures--pictures--of men and women who had once been babes like her little son and David's, now dead and gone--not one soul among them all to greet her.
Cabs and carriages were rushing up and down the street below them.
Although dazed and baffled, Cassandra betrayed no sign of the tumult within, and the little old man stood before her hesitating, his curiosity piqued into a determination to discover her business and identity.
Did not the old man say it was only gossip?
Presently a young man came and bent down to her as if listening.
"No, I never met any one by that name.
The girl reached over and patted his cheek.
A Vandyke--and worth it's weight in gold."
Then her tea and crisp, hot muffins were brought.
She lifted her head proudly.
I mustn't talk here.
She could not touch them without blackening her hands, nor let her baby sit on the floor for the dirt he wiped up on his clothing as he rolled and kicked about.
And now she was in "Vanity Fair," and must be wise and not go to David's mother unattended.
Isn't he, though?"
"Yes, 'is young lordship do look amazing like that picture.
"It takes three or four days to get there from my home."
"Come, Laura, we can't wait, you know," and they passed on.
David--her David--she had not come to him after all; she had come to an empty place.
Keep your own secrets, and go your own way.
Deeming her a weak, quiet old creature, Berwin, in spite of his suspicious nature, entrusted Mrs. Kebby with the key of the front door, so that she could enter for her morning's work without disturbing him. The sitting-room door itself was not always locked, but Berwin usually bolted the portal of his bedroom, and had invariably to rise and admit Mrs. Kebby with his breakfast.
Well, I don't care.
"No, I think not," replied the man, who looked wretchedly ill.
Berwin!
"Good-night, then," said Denzil, seeing that nothing could be done.
Also, she could tell fortunes by reading tea-leaves and shuffling cards, and was not above aiding the maid servants in their small love affairs.
"At nine, sir?"
She had a firm idea that Berwin had, in her own emphatic phrase, "done something" for which he was wanted by the police, and was always on the look out to learn the secret of his isolated life, in order to betray him, or blackmail him, or get him in some way under her thumb.
As she left the house eight o'clock chimed from the steeple of a near church, and Mrs. Kebby, clinking her newly-received wages in her pocket, hurried out of the square to do her Christmas marketing.
But later on certain events took place which forced him to alter his determination.
"They deal with danger to myself," interrupted Berwin.
Usually at nine o'clock she brought in her employer's breakfast from the Nelson Hotel, which was outside the Square, and while he was enjoying it in bed, after his fashion, she cleaned out and made tidy the sitting-room.
As yet she had been unsuccessful.
For these services Berwin paid her well, and only enjoined her to keep a quiet tongue about his private affairs, which Mrs. Kebby usually did until excited by too copious drams of gin, when she talked freely and unwisely to all the servants in the Square.
He's paid me up till to-night.
I will have nothing to do with your business.
It was almost nine when she reached the Nelson Hotel, and found the covered tray with Mr. Berwin's breakfast waiting for her; so she hurried with it to Geneva Square as speedily as possible, fearful of a scolding. Having admitted herself into the house, Mrs. Kebby took up the tray with both hands, and pushed open the sitting-room door with her foot.
Here she began to celebrate the season, and afterwards went shopping; then she celebrated the season again, and later carried home her purchases to the miserable garret she occupied.
Oh, was there ever so unhappy a creature as I? False name, false friend, in disgrace, in hiding!
Also, he made him look out of the window into the yard itself, with its tall black fence dividing it from the other properties.
"You are ill!" said Lucian, amazed by the man's fury.
"I saw him an hour ago," explained Blinders, "and I thought he looked ill."
"Yet they may interest the three kingdoms one day," said Berwin softly.
What of that?
He could make nothing of Berwin--as he chose to call himself--he could see no meaning in his wild words and mad behaviour; but as he walked briskly back to his lodgings he came to the conclusion that the man was nothing worse than a tragic drunkard, haunted by terrors engendered by over-indulgence in stimulants.
I cannot explain what I saw to-night, but as surely as you were out of this house, some people were in it.
Henceforth I'll neither see nor think of this drunken lunatic," and with such resolve he dismissed all thoughts of his strange acquaintance from his mind, which, under the circumstances, was perhaps the wisest thing he could do.
Berwin then dressed and went out for a walk, despite Miss Greeb's contention that he took the air only at night, like an owl, and during his absence Mrs. Kebby attended to the bedroom.
She laid the table, made up the fire, and before taking her leave asked Mr. Berwin if he wanted anything else.
Besides," added Lucian, with a shrug, "they do not interest me."
"Well! well!
"Oh, if they deal with danger to society," said Denzil, thinking his strange neighbour spoke of anarchistic schemes, "I would----"
As she went down the street which led to it, Blinders, a burly, ruddy-faced policeman, who knew her well, stopped to make an observation.
Berwin, who was holding a full tumbler of rich, strong port, drank the whole of it in one gulp.
Next morning she woke in anything but an amiable mood, and had to fortify herself with an early drink before she was fit to go about her business.
"That is true enough, Mr. Berwin, so I'll say good-night!"
"Here, Mr. Denzil," said he in good-natured tones, "drink this and draw near the fire; you must be chilled to the bone after our Arctic expedition."
I wish you good-night, sir," and Lucian moved towards the door.
"At the usual time," answered Berwin impatiently.
This exploration finished, and Lucian being convinced that himself and his host were the only two living beings in the house, Berwin conducted his half-frozen guest back to the warm sitting-room and poured out a glass of wine.
A very good name, Berwin, but not for me.
MRS. KEBBY'S DISCOVERY
In short, Mrs. Kebby was a dangerous old witch, who, a century back, would have been burnt at the stake; and the worst possible person for Berwin to have in his house.
"Garn!" grunted the old beldame.
"I hope you will be better in the morning."
Curse everybody!
She had neither kith nor kin, nor friends, nor even acquaintances; but, being something of a miser, scraped and screwed to amass money she had no need for, and dwelt in a wretched little apartment in a back slum, whence she daily issued to work little and pilfer much.
"I'm taking the place of a sick comrade, and I'll be on duty all night. That's my Christmas."
When Lucian stood up to take his departure, he addressed him directly:
"People with whom you have no concern," replied the man sullenly.
Go! go!
Mrs. Margery Kebby, who attended to the domestic economy of Berwin's house, was a deaf old crone with a constant thirst, only to be assuaged by strong drink; and a filching hand which was usually in every pocket save her own.
"So he do, like a corpse.
Berwin shook his head, and with a silent tongue, which contrasted strangely with his late outcry, ushered Denzil out of the house.
"Don't you get drunk, Mrs. Kebby, or I'll lock you up."
Mr. Denzil, and leave me to die here like a rat in its hole!"
Here, at the sight which met her eyes, she dropped the tray with a crash, and let off a shrill yell.
We've all got to come to it some day.
The man was as great a mystery to Mrs. Kebby as he was to the square, in spite of her superior opportunities of learning the truth.
She then went about her own business, which was connected with the cleaning of various other apartments, and only returned at midday and at night to lay the table for Berwin's luncheon and dinner, or rather dinner and supper, which were also sent in from the hotel.
Fate, with her own ends to bring about is not to be denied by her puppets; and of these Lucian was one, designed for an important part in the drama which was to be played.
The same routine was observed each morning, and everything went smoothly.
CHAPTER IV
"You can bring my breakfast to-morrow."
"Is that good gentleman of yours home, Mrs. Kebby?" he asked, in the loud tones used to deaf people.
"Every inch of it, and with the result that I have found nothing.
"Vengeance!" repeated Link, raising his eyebrows.
"No; I asked him," replied the detective, "but he stated that houses nowadays were not built with secret passages.
"Your third conclusion brings us round to the point whence we started," retorted Link.
Within the week he received a visit from the detective.
"Who is the lady?"
"I'll think of it," said Link, too jealous of his dignity to give way at once.
And how is the business to be accomplished?"
But if you succeed in identifying Berwin, will you let me know?"
"Is not that word a trifle melodramatic?"
He gave neither cheque nor notes, but paid always in gold; and beyond the fact that he called himself Mark Berwin, the landlord knew nothing about him.
"How am I to discover the man's past?"
"What's the matter?
Oh, and there's just one other thing.
"But I saw his eyes," I said.
There are a lot of books that have fallen down by accident; bring them up and put them back in their shelves."
"Shove in a book quickly.
I suppose this is a sort of infectious hallucination.
In no case was there anything to show that he was afflicted with blindness and this in spite of the fact that he exercised undue economy in the spacing of lines.
"There's something there right enough," he said.
"Where shall you not?"
"I suppose that it will be necessary to have the billiard-room fitted up with book cases."
Marry some good, sensible girl.
Put your book away, Eustace.
To search for it did indeed seem hopeless.
"We'll have all the lights on at any rate," he said, as he turned the switches.
"Oh, dear me, no! We've had all things in common for far too many years for me to raise objections at this hour of the day."
"What about a landing net?"
"And, Morton," he added, when the butler brought the coffee, "get me a screwdriver or something to undo this box.
He doesn't know what to make of it, and I won't have poor old Adrian disturbed.
"I've been dreaming again," he said; "such queer dreams of leaguered cities and forgotten towns.
I have found several letters of his among my father's correspondence.
"Poor old fellow!" he said.
Uncle and nephew saw little of each other.
You know, before the end people often lose control over themselves and make absurd requests.
You were mixed up in this one, Eustace, though I can't remember how.
"Nonsense, uncle!" said his nephew.
"Don't go to bed yet, Morton.
At last they had it pressed between the two big books.
He went along the promenade, but stopped at the first shelter, and seating himself in the corner best protected from the wind, he examined the book at leisure.
Just before we left my father said, "Mr. Borlsover, may my son here shake hands with you?
Adrian Borlsover was exceedingly clever with his hands.
"Oh, I'll see to it," said Eustace, "while you and the Captain earn an honest penny."
Adrian mustn't find us working at this sort of thing.
"Very well; you'll starve for this, my beauty!" he said.
"It seems to be a hand right enough, too.
"All right, Morton, you can go now.
It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole.
Occasionally he would relieve one or other of the local clergy.
But I've got it cornered behind these books.
The Borlsovers had always been born naturalists, but Eustace possessed in a special degree the power of systematizing his knowledge.
"I wonder where I shall find room for all his books."
His penmanship was exquisite.
Every one marvels at your splendid perseverance in teaching your hand to take the place of your lost sight.
In his fear lest it should escape him again, he seized the first book that came to his hand and plugged it into the hole.
He no longer saw it, but he could hear it as it squeezed its way behind the books on one of the shelves.
Give me some brandy."
Adrian Borlsover awoke with a start.
I tell you, Saunders, it can cover the ground far faster than I can walk.
He quickly learned to read Braille.
"That old gentleman, Jim," said he, "is the most wonderful man in the whole town.
"His spaniel may have puppies," I said in my prayers, "and he will never be able to know how funny they look with their eyes all closed up. Please let old Mr. Borlsover see."
If you don't believe me take out one of those books and put your hand in and feel."
This Eustace closed, and having considerably narrowed the circle of his search, returned to his desk by the fire.
"Thanks," said Eustace, as he emptied the glass.
"Morton!" he shouted; "Morton!"
He did not dare to leave the shelf unwatched, even to run downstairs to ring the bell.
Why these dress togs?" He himself was wearing an old shooting-jacket.
The beast's got out.
It was arranged on the plan of many college libraries, with tall, projecting bookcases forming deep recesses of dusty silence, fit graves for the old hates of forgotten controversy, the dead passions of forgotten lives.
What is it?
Towards the close of his life the old man was credited with powers of touch that seemed almost uncanny: it has been said that he could tell at once the color of a ribbon placed between his fingers.
The two men met for the first time after many weeks in the dining-room that evening.
He spoke to me kindly, and hoped that I should always try to please my father.
There's also a box with a rat, or something, inside it that came by the evening post.
HARVEY
"An excellent proof," he would add, "of the truth of the doctrine of direct verbal inspiration."
"It's no game, you silly idiot!
But he could see nothing.
At the end of the room, behind the bust of some unknown eighteenth-century divine, an ugly iron corkscrew stair led to a shelf-lined gallery. Nearly every shelf was full.
There are a few private letters I haven't opened.
Adrian was sitting reading in bed, the forefinger of his left hand tracing the Braille characters, when his nephew noticed that a pencil the old man held in his right hand was moving slowly along the opposite page.
"No good.
The ape-man returned her serious look with a smile.
So far we have found a way.
He is the man who murdered Lady Greystoke."
Numa wandered restlessly to and fro and finally, after sprawling for a moment close beside the ape-man, rose and moved off up the gorge to be lost to view a moment later beyond the nearest turn.
It must be as evident to you as it is to me that you cannot save us, for though you succeeded in dragging us from the path of our pursuers, even your great strength and endurance could never take one of us across the desert waste which lies between here and the nearest fertile country."
"He will tell the parrots," said the black, "and the parrots will tell the madmen."
With the sweetness of the voice of an angel from heaven the Europeans heard the sharp-barked commands of an English noncom.
"No;" said Tarzan, "I shall go my own way.
Tarzan and Otobu declined the offers of the British captain to accompany his force overland on the return march as Tarzan explained that his country lay to the west, as did Otobu's, and that they would travel together as far as the country of the Wamabos.
To be sure it was open at both ends but at least they could not be attacked upon all sides at once.
Toward this they directed their steps and when finally they reached their goal they found a space about two feet wide and ten feet long between the rock and the cliff.
We could not hope to hide from them."
"I believe I could make a go of it now for a short way.
"Hold up your hands, you, then," he commanded Tarzan.
"I can go no farther.
"They are yet some distance away, though not far, for the sandaled feet of the men and the pads of the lions make little noise upon the soft sands."
They asked me to urge you to return to civilization."
"Can this be true?
How terribly I have wronged Miss Canby, but how could I know?
He looked at her a moment in silence.
"I wish that your Numa would return," said the girl.
Miss Kircher and Lieutenant Smith-Oldwick were only prompted by a sense of gratitude in considering my welfare."
Yes, surely I can go on."
"I will return with you, of course.
They had gone no great distance when the others of the party became aware of the sounds of pursuit, for now the lions were whining as though the fresh scent spoor of their quarry had reached their nostrils.
"You are not going back with us, then?" asked the girl.
Smith-Oldwick's wounds were dressed, as well as were those of the ape-man, and in half an hour they were on their way to the camp of their rescuers.
"What shall we do--try to go on?" asked Smith-Oldwick.
"We shall never see you again?"
And so they moved to the side of the gorge beneath the shade of an overhanging rock and lay down in the hot sand to rest.
At this juncture the British sergeant who had been in command of the advance guard approached and when Tarzan and the girl spoke to him in English, explaining their disguises, he accepted their word, since they were evidently not of the same race as the creatures which lay dead about them.
But we need not be concerned with them until they come."
That night it was arranged that the following day Smith-Oldwick and Bertha Kircher should be transported to British headquarters near the coast by aeroplane, the two planes attached to the expeditionary force being requisitioned for the purpose.
"I wish," said the girl, "that I possessed your philosophy but I am afraid it is beyond me."
"Yes," he said, "they probably will.
She cast appealing eyes toward him.
"What is it?" asked the girl.
"It's no use," he said to Tarzan.
He saw Colonel Capell walk toward her with outstretched hands and smiling face and, although he could not hear the words of his greeting, he saw that it was friendly and cordial to a degree.
Nor could he help but admire her fortitude and the uncomplaining effort she was making to push on.
Tarzan knew that neither of them quite spoke the truth, that people do not recover so quickly from utter exhaustion, but he saw no other way and there was always the hope that just beyond the next turn would be a way out of the gorge.
Rolling the body of the warrior to one side Tarzan struggled to his feet, the spear still protruding from his shoulder.
Let us rest now because you and Lieutenant Smith-Oldwick need the rest, and when you are stronger we will go on again."
Then she heard footsteps running rapidly toward Smith-Oldwick and, as his pistol spoke, there was a scream and the sound of a falling body.
Listen!" and he read an excerpt from the closely written page:
"Is this the end?" asked the girl.
As he fell his pistol dropped from his fingers, and the girl, seeing, snatched it up.
Otobu had seen the monkey too.
"Don't shoot," she cried to the latter, "we are both friends."
I will continue my journey in that direction."
Capell looked at him questioningly.
Again they came, this time a man opposing Tarzan and a lion seeking to overcome Smith-Oldwick.
Simultaneously there broke upon the astonished ears of both attackers and attacked a volley of shots from the gorge.
"You are not dead," he said to her, "nor is the lieutenant, nor Otobu, nor myself.
"You were not born and reared in the jungle by wild beasts and among wild beasts, or you would possess, as I do, the fatalism of the jungle."
"She lives!" cried Tarzan.
We have all been through so much together and the chances of our escape are still so remote that whatever comes, let us remain together, unless," and she looked up at Tarzan, "you, who have done so much for us to whom you are under no obligations, will go on without us.
The Tommies, their packs and accouterments slung, were waiting the summons to continue their return march.
Smith-Oldwick fired his pistol twice when he too was struck down, the weapon entering his right leg midway between hip and knee.
"You will go back into that terrible jungle?" she asked.
The minutes that dragged by seemed veritable eternities to Bertha Kircher and then at last, and almost with relief, she knew that the pursuers were upon them.
"Yes," he replied, "I knew that she was Bertha Kircher, the German spy?"
I even told Smith-Oldwick, who loves her, that she was a German spy.
"It is all the same," replied Tarzan; "the lions would have found us here.
"No," said the girl, "we cannot do that.
Because we remain here and rest is no indication that we shall die here.
He knew that his country was at war with Germany and that not only his duty to the land of his fathers, but also his personal grievance against the enemy people and his hatred of them, demanded that he expose the girl's perfidy, and yet he hesitated, and because he hesitated he growled--not at the German spy but at himself for his weakness.
"Yes," said Tarzan, "but we shall have to do the best we can without him.
Evidently disheartened by the failure of their first attempt the assaulters drew off, but only for a short time.
"Not only must I return to find my wife but I must right this wrong."
In the morning Colonel Capell came from the base camp in one of the planes that was to carry Smith-Oldwick and the girl to the east. Tarzan was standing some distance away as the ship landed and the officer descended to the ground.
You will have to go on without me."
The lions don't bother me so much. Sometimes they are stupid animals, and I am sure that these that pursue us, and who are so dependent upon the masters that have raised and trained them, will be easily handled after the warriors are disposed of."
I should like to find some place where we can barricade ourselves against attack from all sides.
Let us take things as they come.
"Oh, yes," she said, "I am much stronger.
"We are still alive," was his only answer.
"They are coming," he replied.
"Never," he said, and without another word turned and walked away.
Smith-Oldwick is a good shot and if there are not too many men he might be able to dispose of them provided they can only come at him one at a time.
"The diary of Hauptmann Fritz Schneider!" repeated Tarzan in a constrained voice.
How about you Miss Kircher?"
He saw the colonel greet his junior in command of the advance detachment, and then he saw him turn toward Bertha Kircher who was standing a few paces behind the captain.
"'Played a little joke on the English pig.
It was beyond him to conceive that a British officer should thus laconically speak of an enemy spy whom he had had within his power and permitted to escape.
"And now?"
Look!
There were places where the ape-man alone might have negotiated the ascent but none where the others could hope successfully to reach the plateau, nor where Tarzan, powerful and agile as he was, could have ventured safely to carry them aloft.
I am much rested.
It was a jagged fragment of rock which rose some ten feet above the surface of the sand, leaving a narrow aperture between it and the cliff behind.
In attempting to shield the girl, Tarzan received one of the shafts in the shoulder, and so heavily had the weapon been hurled that it bore him backward to the ground.
It seemed barbarous to me.
It floated to earth, nose down, and since it was unarmed and unarmored, they had no difficulty in shooting it to pieces and massacring its crew and passengers.
During this period, a sharp check was kept upon Han messages, for the phone plant had been one of the first to be put in operation, and when it became evident that the Hans did not intend any immediate reprisals, the entire membership of the community was summoned back, and normal life was resumed.
On the whole, I thought I would be wise to stay with a group which had already proved its friendliness, and in which I seemed to have prospects of advancement.
But they've been beaming those paths so hard, it looks as though they even had information of this strategy.
We were assigned to location 1017.
On our return, we had a camp of our own, of course.
This entire modern life, it appeared to me, judging from my ancient viewpoint, was organized along what I called "political" lines.
And as might be expected, we had a great deal of banter over which one of us was Camp Boss.
I'm thinking of developing a permanent field force, along the lines of the regular armies of the 20th Century you told me about.
Incredible Treason
The Sand-snipers, practically invisible in their sand-colored clothing, and half buried along the beaches, lay in wait for days, risking the play of dis beams along the route, and finally registering four hits within a week.
As near as we can gather from their reports, their laboratories have developed a new alloy of great tensile strength and elasticity which nevertheless lets the rep rays through like a sieve.
But many of the gangs, I found, were badly organized, lacked strong hands in authority, and were rife with intrigue.
CHAPTER VII
A dozen Sacramentos had caught the hazy outlines of its rep rays approaching them, head-on, in the twilight, like ghostly pillars reaching into the sky.
Our victory over the seven Han ships had set the country ablaze.
The ammunition plant, and the rocket-ship plant, which had just been about to start operation at the time of the raid, were intact, as were the other important plants.
Then, the Hans quite obviously have learned that we are picking up their electrophone waves, for they've gone back to their old, but extremely accurate, system of directional control.
"Just what evidence is there that anybody has been clearing information to the Hans?" I asked.
That first Han ship knew the location of our plants exactly.
All this, however, is wandering afar from my story, which concerns our early battles against the Hans, and not our more modern problems of self-control.
The trick would be to locate the goods.
As society was organized in the 20th Century, I do not believe the system could have worked in anything but politics.
"Well," he replied, "first of all there was that raid upon us.
They got one rep ray. The other was not strong enough to hold it up.
I have been made Superboss of the Mid-Atlantic Zone.
The Wyomings had a high morale, and had prospered under the rule of Big Boss Hart for many years.
But owing to the centuries of desperate suffering the people had endured at the hands of the Hans, there developed a spirit of self-sacrifice and consideration for the common good that made the scheme applicable and efficient in all forms of human co-operation.
There was feverish activity in the ammunition plants, and the hunting of stray Han ships became an enthusiastic sport.
It sounds like a bit of occasional barter, rather than an out-and-out alliance.
Under these modern social and economic conditions, the kind of individual freedom to which I had been accustomed in the 20th Century was impossible.
"Then it's quite clear," I ventured, "that whoever is 'clearing' us to them is doing it piecemeal.
They're putting armor of great thickness in the hulls of their ships below the rep-ray machines.
Our reports indicate that the Eries' rockets bounced off harmlessly.
I found myself a full-fledged member of the Gang now, for I had elected to search no farther for a permanent alliance, much as I would have liked to familiarize myself with this 25th Century life in other sections of the country.
Finally, we've picked up three of their messages in which they discuss, with some nervousness, the existence of our 'mysterious' ultrophone."
From the Pacific Coast came the report of a great transpacific liner of 75,000 tons "lift" being brought to earth from a position of invisibility above the clouds.
The synthetic-fabrics plant had been partially wiped out, though the lower levels underground had not been reached by the dis ray.
But I hardly suspect the Pineys. There is little intelligence among them.
They wouldn't have the information to give the Hans, nor would they be capable of imparting it. They're absolute savages."
One of them will become public property in a few days, I think.
"Tony," he said, "There are two things I want to talk to you about.
You know, a hundred and fifteen or twenty years ago there were certain of these people's ancestors who actually degraded themselves by mating with the Hans, sometimes even serving them as slaves, in the days before they brought all their service machinery to perfection.
The eternal cycle seems to be at work.
But I fired pointblank with my hand-gun, pressing the button as fast as I could and aiming at their feet to make sure my explosive rockets would make contact and do their work.
I know it took all the courage I had to utter it.
In a moment they would be picking their way into the wreck.
Afraid of accidents.
A dial on it glowed and a faint hum came from within its shielding metallic case.
At last they were on the far side.
"At this point projectoscope RB-3 of the ship now out of focus control, dimly showed the landing party walking back toward the ship.
"Ships overhead still standing.
Then startled, they turned their eyes upward.
"Oh, my head!" she groaned, coming to as I lifted her gently in my arms and strode out in the open with her.
Taking the lift of that wonderful inertron belt into her calculation, she dove headforemost, like a green projectile, through the door.
That seems to be all.
They can't see over this wreck."
We had made some noise within the ship.
CHAPTER VI
Again there was a chorus of assent.
Shoot at the word, but not before.
So who will I knock out with the first chair?"
"O.
"You can have her.
Everything was peaceful; everyone was full of friendship and brotherly love.
"All my life.
"By no means, my dear.
One evening, then, four hard-faced men sat at two small tables in the main room of Lifecraft Three.
For Bernice and Jones, like Barbara and Deston, had for each other an infinite number of endless vistas of personality; the exploration of which was sheerest delight.
I got to get back myself, don't I?
I will photograph the cadavers, of course, and perform the customary post-mortem examinations for the record; but I know already what the findings will be.
I'll take Jones; you will gun the professor; Moose will grab the dames, one under each arm, and keep 'em out of the way until the shooting's over.
Bobby and I let our back hair down long ago--we were both tremendously surprised to know that both you boys are just as strongly psychic as we are.
Let him rave.
"Huh?" Jones asked.
With both of us dead, can you guess within ten million bucks of how much they'll collect?"
So you'll throw your chairs or whatever at that unspeakable oaf Newman."
"For a man that's actually as smart as you are, I swear you've got the least sense of anybody I know!"
They can do it a lot faster and some better than I can.
"You do it, Vince," Newman said, grandly.
"Yes, but ...
He's a professional--probably one of the fastest guns in space."
"It's high time you fellows told each other the truth.
"Why?" Barbara asked.
With the four gangsters gone, life aboardship settled down quickly into a routine.
Shoot him through the right elbow if he makes one sour move."
After some argument, the officers agreed.
"I'll throw things I'm very good at that."
Lithe and poised, he was the epitome of leashed and controlled action.
Let 'em finish figuring course, time, distance, all that stuff.
Before you gun him, let me work him over just a little bit, huh?"
The two at the other table had been planning for days.
That ended it.
That fiercely but accurately-sped missile knocked the half-drawn pistol from Newman's hand and sent his body crashing to the floor, where Deston's second bullet made it certain that he would not recover consciousness.
"I get you, boss."
Or that them subspace Boy Scouts can be fixed?
Have you ever planned this kind of an operation or do you want me to?"
Now, how will they figure the battle?
No ... much better to use their own trap----"
"For hell's sake, act your age!" Newman snorted in disgust.
Why?"
Or I don't know where the heavy grease is at?
Clean-up was going nicely, at the union rate of six hours on and eighteen hours off.
Both girls flung themselves, sobbing, into their husband's arms.
"I wouldn't know how to shoot one if I did," Bernice laughed.
"I don't know.
The starship, now a mere spaceship, was on course at one gravity.
Brahms.
I'm as good an astrogator as Jones is, and a damn sight better engineer.
There are many extremely difficult problems involved, and I have less than a year to work on them.
"They could, and I'm very much afraid they intend to.
Flying chairs are really hard to cope with.
Really?"
That's why.
"How come you aren't ticketed for subspace, then?"
The big man could very well have been dying on his feet. To make sure, however--or to keep the girl from knowing that she had killed a man?--Deston and Jones each put a bullet through the falling head before it struck the rug.
So he's a pretty good rule-of-thumb astrogator, too, and we're computing every element of the flight.
"Play it my way and we've got it made, I tell you!" Newman pounded the table with his fist.
"Baseballs, medicine balls, cannon balls, rocks, bricks, darts, discus, hammer, javelin--what-have-you.
Barbara went on: "We should have a signal, in case one of us gets warning first.
Jones' dark face did not lighten.
K., we'll let Ferdy have him.
I mean I think I can----"
Both of us at once, of----"
It was a very good thing that Deston had had ample warning, for he was indeed competing out of his class.
Judo techniques, however skillfully and powerfully applied, do not and can not kill instantly.
"I can draw twice to your once, but I suppose I'll have to prove it to you.
What are you using for a brain?
"Just a sec.
"Could be," Deston said, doubtfully.
"Uh-uh.
Can't you see the guy's chain lightning on ball bearings?"
Something that wouldn't mean anything to them ... musical, say ...
The lifecraft were in their slots, but the five and the four still lived in them rather than in the vast and oppressive emptiness that the ship itself now was.
Ferdy will probably draw on me----"
The other pistol duel wasn't even close!
In a for-real battle I'd prefer ... chairs, I think.
"Good God!" Deston exclaimed.
"And get killed yourself?
"It'll be quite a while yet, but that's a promise, Moose.
Eleven months in deep space is a fearfully, a tremendously long time.
"If it's Blaine against Babe, it'll be Lopresto against Herc.
"Huh?" She raised her head from Deston's shoulder; the contrast between her streaming eyes and the relief dawning over her whole face was almost funny.
"You didn't kill him, Barbara," Adams said.
They had had many vitriolic arguments, but neither had made any motion toward his weapon.
Barbara's hand-to-hand engagement took about one second longer.
"Precisely."
The girls--each of whom became joyously pregnant as soon as she could--kept house and helped their husbands whenever need or opportunity arose.
As it was, his bullet crashed through Blaine's head, while the gunman's went harmlessly into the carpet.
There's going to be shooting for sure."
But Ferdy, any time he's behind me or out of sight, watch him like a hawk.
"Why, I did the foulest things possible, and as hard as I possibly could.
From the facts: One, that in the absence of that field the subspace radio will function normally; and Two, that no subspace-radio messages have ever been received from survivors; the conclusion seems inescapable that the discharge of this unknown field is in fact of extreme violence."
K., and I'll give the signal.
'I don't QUITE know yet,' Alice said, very gently.
'No, but I meant--please, may we wait and pick some?' Alice pleaded.
'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.
'A dear little crab!' thought Alice. 'I should like that.'
'And this one is the most provoking of all--but I'll tell you what--' she added, as a sudden thought struck her, 'I'll follow it up to the very top shelf of all.
Alice laughed.
'That accounts for the bleeding, you see,' she said to Alice with a smile.
'Well, I don't want any TO-DAY, at any rate.'
'What IS the matter?' she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard.
'Twopence a week, and jam every other day.'
Alice carefully released the brush, and did her best to get the hair into order.
'Oh, please!
The Sheep took the money, and put it away in a box: then she said 'I never put things into people's hands--that would never do--you must get it for yourself.' And so saying, she went off to the other end of the shop, and set the egg upright on a shelf.
'Are there many crabs here?' said Alice.
'I'm seven and a half exactly.'
She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool.
Feather!' the Sheep cried again, taking more needles.
'I don't know what's the matter with it!' the Queen said, in a melancholy voice.
'Fivepence farthing for one--Twopence for two,' the Sheep replied.
'But if you HADN'T done them,' the Queen said, 'that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!' Her voice went higher with each 'better,' till it got quite to a squeak at last.
'WHY do you say "feather" so often?' Alice asked at last, rather vexed. 'I'm not a bird!'
'Come, you look rather better now!' she said, after altering most of the pins.
'Only I never can remember the rule.
I didn't see it,' Said Alice, peeping cautiously over the side of the boat into the dark water.
'Why, I've done all the screaming already,' said the Queen. 'What would be the good of having it all over again?'
'Every single thing's crooked,' Alice thought to herself, 'and she's all over pins!--may I put your shawl straight for you?' she added aloud.
'Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up another pair of needles.
'Have you pricked your finger?'
'The brush has got entangled in it!' the Queen said with a sigh.
'There really are--and SUCH beauties!'
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
'Suppose he never commits the crime?' said Alice.
'You'll be catching a crab directly.'
'Oh, much better!' cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went on.
She couldn't make out what had happened at all.
'How do you sell them?'
Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere--,' when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished.
Why, it's got branches, I declare!
'The crow must have flown away, I think,' said Alice: 'I'm so glad it's gone.
Consider anything, only don't cry!'
'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.'
'I can't remember things before they happen.'
'It's very good jam,' said the Queen.
Alice felt there was no denying THAT. 'Of course it would be all the better,' she said: 'but it wouldn't be all the better his being punished.'
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
'Was it?
'Only you MUST eat them both, if you buy two,' said the Sheep.
However, she wasn't hurt, and was soon up again: the Sheep went on with her knitting all the while, just as if nothing had happened.
Consider what o'clock it is.
For she thought to herself, 'They mightn't be at all nice, you know.'
'Consider what a great girl you are.
'That was a nice crab you caught!' she remarked, as Alice got back into her place, very much relieved to find herself still in the boat.
Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. 'Can YOU keep from crying by considering things?' she asked.
And was that really--was it really a SHEEP that was sitting on the other side of the counter?
'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first--'
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.
'Didn't you hear me say "Feather"?' the Sheep cried angrily, taking up quite a bunch of needles.
'But why don't you scream now?' Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.
By this time it was getting light.
'If you don't mind stopping the boat for a minute.'
Only I couldn't quite reach it.' 'And it certainly DID seem a little provoking ('almost as if it happened on purpose,' she thought) that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach.
'I only hope the boat won't tipple over!' she said to herself.
There goes the shawl again!'
The Queen spread out her arms again, and went flying after it, and this time she succeeded in catching it for herself.
'Yes, but then I HAD done the things I was punished for,' said Alice: 'that makes all the difference.'
'I should like to buy an egg, please,' she said timidly.
'Then I hope your finger is better now?' Alice said very politely, as she crossed the little brook after the Queen.
'What sort of things do YOU remember best?' Alice ventured to ask.
'I can't believe THAT!' said Alice.
Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again.
'Crabs, and all sorts of things,' said the Sheep: 'plenty of choice, only make up your mind.
It'll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!'
'Only for faults,' said Alice.
'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.
'Oh, don't go on like that!' cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair.
'Then two are cheaper than one?' Alice said in a surprised tone, taking out her purse.
Let's consider your age to begin with--how old are you?'
'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone.
'No, Mr Boffin, not you sir.
Well!
I little thought then, sir, how familiar that name would come to be!'
'I would keep exact accounts of all the expenditure you sanctioned, Mr Boffin.
You'll begin to take charge at once, of all that's going on in the new house, will you?'
'Where were you then, old lady?'
Mr Rokesmith again explained; defining the duties he sought to undertake, as those of general superintendent, or manager, or overlooker, or man of business.
'Mrs Boffin you're already acquainted with.
'No,' pursued Mr Boffin; 'because that would express, as I understand it, that you were not going to do anything to deserve your money.
'I am acquainted with my faults.
The Secretary's eyes glanced with so much meaning in them at the Mounds, that Mr Boffin said, as if in answer to a remark:
They shan't be rubbed out in our time, nor yet, if we can help it, in the time after us.
It is quite understood that Mr Boffin is in no way committed on that point.
Bare of paint, bare of paper on the walls, bare of furniture, bare of experience of human life.
Do not fear, Mr Boffin, that I shall contaminate the premises which your gold has bought, with MY lowly pursuits.
Now let us hear what they're all about; will you be so good?'
Mr Boffin, don't allow yourself to be made uncomfortable by the pang it gives me to part from my stock and stall.
A few old chairs with patch-work covers, under which the more precious stuff to be preserved had slowly lost its quality of colour without imparting pleasure to any eye, stood against the wall.
Furniture estimate, so much. Estimate for furniture of offices, so much.
'No, no. I have got other plans for this house.
Would that man, sir--we will say that man, for the purposes of argueyment;' Mr Wegg made a smiling demonstration of great perspicuity here; 'would that man, sir, be expected to throw any other capacity in, or would any other capacity be considered extra?
'What is, my dear?'
I hold myself quite at your disposal.
'Now, for instance--come!' said Mr Boffin, in his pouncing way.
'I think, sir,' replied Wegg, 'that I should like to be shown the gentleman prepared to make it worth my while!'
Mrs Boffin replied:
Mr Boffin, lost in amazement, looked at Mrs Boffin.
I've seen him sit on these stairs, in his shy way, poor child, many a time.
Exactly my own views, Mr Boffin.' Here Wegg rose, and balancing himself on his wooden leg, fluttered over his prey with extended hand.
At about this period Mr Boffin had become profoundly interested in the fortunes of a great military leader known to him as Bully Sawyers, but perhaps better known to fame and easier of identification by the classical student, under the less Britannic name of Belisarius.
'I never had the feeling in the house before,' said Mrs Boffin; 'and I have been about it alone at all hours of the night.
Mr Boffin takes Mr John Rokesmith at his word, in postponing to some indefinite period, the consideration of salary.
'What do you think,' said Mr Boffin, 'of not keeping a stall, Wegg?'
For a moment it was both the children's, and then it got older.
I can price the Mounds to a fraction, and I know how they can be best disposed of; and likewise that they take no harm by standing where they do.
John Rokesmith read his abstracts aloud.
'Lor!' cried Mrs Boffin. 'What I say is, the world's wide enough for all of us!'
'I'm not nervous any more.
We'll go down this way, as you may like to see the yard, and it's all in the road.
'Certainly not.
"Lor!" I says, "I'll think of something else--something comfortable--and put it out of my head." So I thought of the new house and Miss Bella Wilfer, and was thinking at a great rate with that sheet there in my hand, when all of a sudden, the faces seemed to be hidden in among the folds of it and I let it drop.'
Whereas we know better.
'Correct to the letter!' said Mr Boffin. 'And I consider that the poetry brings us both in, in a beautiful manner.'
This draft on Mr Boffin's philosophy could only be met by that gentleman with the remark that everything that is at all, must begin at some time. Then, tucking his wife's arm under his own, that she might not be left by herself to be troubled again, he descended to release Wegg.
I ain't a scholar in much, Rokesmith, but I'm a pretty fair scholar in dust.
They were all about the new house.
In short, everything in the house was kept exactly as it came to us, for him to see and approve.
'I know I am, sir,' returned Wegg, with obstinate magnanimity.
I felt them.'
'That will be as you please, Mr Boffin.
'Touched them?'
Weep for the hour, When to Boffinses bower, The Lord of the valley with offers came; Neither does the moon hide her light From the heavens to-night, And weep behind her clouds o'er any individual in the present Company's shame.
Mrs Boffin took the opportunity of his being so engaged, to get a better observation of his face than she had yet taken.
Acceptance of Mr Boffin's offer of such a date, and to such an effect.
'Mr Boffin, consider it done.
I will begin this very day.
'And I tell you, my deary,' said Mrs Boffin, 'that if you don't close with Mr Rokesmith now at once, and if you ever go a muddling yourself again with things never meant nor made for you, you'll have an apoplexy--besides iron-moulding your linen--and you'll break my heart.'
In the words of the poet's song, which I do not quite remember:
It was at my corner. To be sure it was!
Mr Boffin hurried out, and found her on the dark staircase, panting, with a lighted candle in her hand.
But--'
Mr Boffin's face denoted Care and Complication.
There's no hurry about it; that's all I say at present.
Now, my independence as a man is again elevated.
'Oh!' said Mr Boffin. 'Oh indeed!
I shall therefore cast about for comfortable ways and means of not calling up Wegg's jealousy, but of keeping you in your department, and keeping him in his.'
The scanty moveables partook of it; save for the cleanliness of the place, the dust--into which they were all resolving would have lain thick on the floors; and those, both in colour and in grain, were worn like old faces that had kept much alone.
I would write your letters, under your direction.
Well; I got the better of it, and went on sorting, and went on singing to myself.
'That's apology for both of us: for Mr Boffin, and for me as well,' said the smiling Mrs Boffin. 'But Lor! we can talk it over now; can't us?'
'The room was kept like this, Rokesmith,' said Mr Boffin, 'against the son's return.
You'll look in to-morrow, will you be so kind?'
Yourself.'
When the son came home for the last time in his life, and for the last time in his life saw his father, it was most likely in this room that they met.'
'Here, at the chest.
'It rather puzzled me at the time,' said Mr Boffin, 'and it rather puzzled me and Mrs Boffin when we spoke of it afterwards, because (not to make a mystery of our belief) we have always believed a Secretary to be a piece of furniture, mostly of mahogany, lined with green baize or leather, with a lot of little drawers in it.
There was the old grisly four-post bedstead, without hangings, and with a jail-like upper rim of iron and spikes; and there was the old patch-work counterpane.
I would transact your business with people in your pay or employment.
'It was Secretary that you named; wasn't it?'
'Association?' the Secretary suggested.
You had first asked me whether I liked your name, and Candour had compelled a reply in the negative case.
'Apple-pie order!' said Mr Boffin, after checking off each inscription with his hand, like a man beating time.
The old man's face, and it gets younger.
How long such conquests last, is another matter; that they are achieved, is every-day experience, not even to be flourished away by Podsnappery itself.
As the Secretary looked all round it, his eyes rested on a side door in a corner.
It is curious to consider, in such a case as Mr Boffin's, what a cheap article ink is, and how far it may be made to go.
Mr Rokesmith quickly wrote, and then read aloud:
But he had used the word in the sense of Steward.
I HAVE taken it into my head.'
Mr Wegg was going to say, My Benefactor, and had said My Bene, when a grandiloquent change came over him.
Mr Boffin repeated it, and the Secretary wrote it down in his pocket-book.
Mr Wegg resumed his spectacles therefore.
You have taken it into your head that I mean to pension you off.'
Certainly not, said Mr Rokesmith.
Will you repeat it, my dear?'
There is a head; and, as also stated, with a hat upon it--a black sombrero, with bullion band as described.
Rejecting many tales told of the Headless Horseman--most of them too grotesque to be recorded--one truthful episode must needs be given-- since it forms an essential chapter of this strange history.
He is the same that carries the headless rider; and this weird equestrian is still bestriding him, with but little appearance of change, either in apparel or attitude, since first seen by the searchers.
Most people believed there was some connection between the two mysteries; though no one could explain it.
The aboriginal of America might not perceive it.
I am not certain as to the exact year--the unit of it--though I can with unquestionable certainty record the decade.
He, whom everybody believed, could have thrown some light upon the subject, was still ridden by the night-mare of delirium.
No one denied that it had been seen.
The only question was, how to account for a spectacle so peculiar, as to give the lie to all the known laws of creation.
Its features are well formed, but wearing a sad expression; the lips of livid colour, slightly parted, showing a double row of white teeth, set in a grim ghastly smile.
By the horse they are certainly not liked; as is proved by the snorting and stamping of his hoof, when one of them ventures upon a too close proximity to his heels.
In the midst of the open, prairie there is a "motte"--a coppice, or clump of trees--of perhaps three or four acres in superficial extent.
The practised eye of the prairie-man would soon decide which.
Those who asserted that they saw a head, only told the truth.
The former would simply be followed by the reflection: "A drove of mustangs." The latter conducts to a different train of thought, in which there is an ambiguity.
To have done so would have been to ignore the evidence of two hundred pairs of eyes, all belonging to men willing to make affidavit of the fact--for it could not be pronounced a fancy.
No one doubted that such a thing had been seen.
But there were others who saw it elsewhere and on different occasions-- hunters, herdsmen, and travellers--all alike awed, alike perplexed, by the apparition.
I can speak more precisely as to the place; though in this I must be allowed latitude.
It cannot be called agreeable;--consisting as it does of wolves--half a score of them squatting closely upon the plain, and at intervals loping around him.
Such a horse; and just such a rider, were seen upon the prairies of South-Western Texas in the year of our Lord 1850 something.
Hitherto he has been seen going alone.
At least half a score of theories were started--more or less feasible-- more or less absurd.
It had become the talk not only of the Leona settlement, but of others more distant.
If the horse browsed with a bit in his mouth, and a saddle on his shoulders, there would be no ambiguity--only the conjecture, as to how he had escaped from his rider.
Now thur ain't the ghost o' a chance.
"That ere's the backin' o' a letter," muttered he.
The branch contorted to afford passage for a human form--the displaced tendrils of a creeping plant-- the scratched surface of the earth--all told that a man had passed that way.
It was about three-quarters of a mile from the edge of the venue.
Zeb Stump was more inquisitive, and paused upon this spot.
There was a forking in the open list, through which the supposed murderer had made his way.
His eye only sought those of Henry Poindexter's horse. Though the others were of an after time, and often destroyed the traces he was most anxious to examine, he had no difficulty in identifying the latter.
It was a sterile tract, without herbage, and covered with shingle and sand.
"Tells a goodish grist o' story; more'n war wrote inside, I reck'n.
He had heard the whole story of that collateral investigation--how Spangler and his comrades had traced Henry Poindexter's horse to the place where the negro had caught it--on the outskirts of the plantation.
He had made one more splice of the broken thread.
As he would have himself said, any greenhorn could do that. The young planter's horse had gone over the ground at a gallop.
But Zeb scarce cared for their guidance.
So saying, he drew out a small skin wallet, which contained his tinder of "punk," along with his flint and steel; and, after carefully stowing away the scrap of paper, he returned the sack to his pocket.
Only in one or two places were the footprints at all distinct.
It was not necessary for him to go further.
It was not a halt the galloping horse had made, but only a slight departure from his direct course; as if something he had seen--wolf, jaguar, cougar, or other beast of prey--had caused him to shy.
Another, and his clue would be complete!
"The writin' air in a sheemale hand," he continued, looking anew at the piece of paper.
Beyond the party along with Spangler had proceeded--without staying to inquire why the horse had shied from his track.
ANOTHER LINK.
The sign signified more--that the man was disabled--had been crawling--a cripple!
It air somethin' to be tuk care o'."
With an elastic step--his countenance radiant of triumph--the old hunter strode away from the tree, no longer upon the cattle path, but that taken by the man who had been so violently dismounted.
He observed an abrasion upon the bark; that, though very slight, must have been caused by contact with some substance, as hard, if not sounder, than itself.
To the hoof-marks of these he paid but slight attention; at times, none whatever.
A huge tree overshadowed it, with limbs extending horizontally. One of these ran transversely to the path over which the horses had passed--so low that a horseman, to shun contact with it, would have to lower his head.
Zeb saw that several shod horses had passed along it, some days before: and it was this that caused him to come back and examine it.
It was a well-marked path entering the opening on one side, and going out on the other: in short, a cattle-track.
Zeb Stump did not seem to think so.
As he stood looking along it, his attitude showed indecision.
But Zeb was conducted by signs which, although obscure to the ordinary eye, were to him intelligible as the painted lettering upon a finger-post.
He had turned to go out of the glade, when a thought once more stayed him.
A portion of it perhaps had not.
Beyond he had continued his career; rapid and reckless as ever.
The ole maar kin wait till I kum back."
"I thort so.
To one unaccustomed to the chapparal, he might have appeared going without a guide, and upon a path never before pressed by human foot.
With this grotesque apostrophe to himself, he commenced retracing the footmarks that had guided him to the edge of the opening.
At this branch Zeb Stump stood gazing.
Having already noted that the man who made them had returned to the place where the horse had been left, he knew the back track would lead him there.
Zeb Stump continued on, till he had traced this cripple to the banks of a running stream.
After a short examination, he observed a trail altogether distinct, and of a different character.
The trackers had ridden slowly.
It was caused by an obstruction,--a patch of impenetrable thicket.
There was one place, however, where the two trails did not go over the same ground.
Ho, I say, officials, obey my orders; or by the word of an honest man, ye shall see what ye were born for."
Sancho surveyed himself from head to foot and saw himself all ablaze with flames; but as they did not burn him, he did not care two farthings for them.
Rhadamanthus bade Sancho put away his wrath, as the object they had in view was now attained.
"Thou shalt die," said Rhadamanthus in a loud voice; "relent, thou tiger; humble thyself, proud Nimrod; suffer and be silent, for no impossibilities are asked of thee; it is not for thee to inquire into the difficulties in this matter; smacked thou must be, pricked thou shalt see thyself, and with pinches thou must be made to howl.
As the duke and duchess mounted the stage Don Quixote and Sancho rose and made them a profound obeisance, which they returned by bowing their heads slightly.
Don Stockfish, soul of a mortar, stone of a date, more obstinate and obdurate than a clown asked a favour when he has his mind made up, if I fall upon you I'll tear your eyes out!
CHAPTER LXIX.
If it should be good, faithful, and true, it will have ages of life; but if it should be bad, from its birth to its burial will not be a very long journey."
Try those jokes on a brother-in-law; 'I'm an old dog, and "tus, tus" is no use with me.'"
She lay with her head resting upon a cushion of brocade and crowned with a garland of sweet-smelling flowers of divers sorts, her hands crossed upon her bosom, and between them a branch of yellow palm of victory.
No sooner had Minos the fellow judge of Rhadamanthus said this, than Rhadamanthus rising up said:
Leave me alone; or else by God I'll fling the whole thing to the dogs, let come what may."
Nor was this all, for Don Quixote had perceived that the dead body on the catafalque was that of the fair Altisidora.
O harder thou than marble to my plaint;
At this point one of the two that looked like kings exclaimed, "Enough, enough, divine singer!
For of course that's where one who dies in despair is bound for."
On hearing this Sancho broke silence and cried out, "By all that's good, I'll as soon let my face be smacked or handled as turn Moor.
In the middle of the court was a catafalque, raised about two yards above the ground and covered completely by an immense canopy of black velvet, and on the steps all round it white wax tapers burned in more than a hundred silver candlesticks.
At this moment an official crossed over, and approaching Sancho threw over him a robe of black buckram painted all over with flames of fire, and taking off his cap put upon his head a mitre such as those undergoing the sentence of the Holy Office wear; and whispered in his ear that he must not open his lips, or they would put a gag upon him, or take his life.
All that you have seen to-night has been make-believe; I'm not the woman to let the black of my nail suffer for such a camel, much less die!"
Thereupon the duke seized the opportunity of practising this mystification upon him; so much did he enjoy everything connected with Sancho and Don Quixote.
Here Don Quixote, too, broke silence, saying to Sancho, "Have patience, my son, and gratify these noble persons, and give all thanks to heaven that it has infused such virtue into thy person, that by its sufferings thou canst disenchant the enchanted and restore to life the dead."
"Less politeness and less paint, senora duenna," said Sancho; "by God your hands smell of vinegar-wash."
Upon the catafalque was seen the dead body of a damsel so lovely that by her beauty she made death itself look beautiful.
To which Sancho made answer, "That's trick upon trick, I think, and not honey upon pancakes; a nice thing it would be for a whipping to come now, on the top of pinches, smacks, and pin-proddings!
For example:
SNAKES.--Mr.
The locality was Wellington, Sumner County, Kansas.
It is not open to argument, or academic treatment of any kind. The cold fact is:
"Repeat your father's name," said the president.
The judges themselves appeared to be stupefied, and the jury manifested tokens of disgust for cynicism so unexpected in a man of fashion.
"And now, prisoner, will you consent to tell your name?" said the president.
The audience felt that a startling revelation was to follow this ominous prelude.
The public astonishment had reached its height.
Come, recover."
In the midst of this tumult the voice of the president was heard to exclaim,--"Are you playing with justice, accused, and do you dare set your fellow-citizens an example of disorder which even in these times has never been equalled?"
They ask my age; I tell it.
The whole assembly manifested great surprise, but Andrea appeared quite unmoved.
"I cannot tell you my name, since I do not know it; but I know my father's, and can tell it to you."
"Gentlemen," said Andrea, commanding silence by his voice and manner; "I owe you the proofs and explanations of what I have said."
During the scene of tumult, Andrea had turned his smiling face towards the assembly; then, leaning with one hand on the oaken rail of the dock, in the most graceful attitude possible, he said: "Gentlemen, I assure you I had no idea of insulting the court, or of making a useless disturbance in the presence of this honorable assembly.
You appear to consider this a point of honor, and it may be for this reason, that you have delayed acknowledging your name.
"I said anything I pleased, in order that the solemn declaration I have just made should not be withheld, which otherwise would certainly have been the case.
Not a whisper, not a breath, was heard in that vast assembly; every one waited anxiously.
"The proofs?" said Benedetto, laughing; "do you want proofs?"
Order was re-established in the hall, except that a few people still moved about and whispered to one another.
Scarcely had he entered the hall when he glanced at the whole body of magistrates and assistants; his eye rested longer on the president, and still more so on the king's attorney.
The lawyer was a young man with light hair whose face expressed a hundred times more emotion than that which characterized the prisoner.
Benedetto was thus forever condemned in public opinion before the sentence of the law could be pronounced.
A painful giddiness overwhelmed Villefort; great drops of acrid sweat fell from his face upon the papers which he held in his convulsed hand.
We need no proofs; everything relating to this young man is true." A dull, gloomy silence, like that which precedes some awful phenomenon of nature, pervaded the assembly, who shuddered in dismay.
"Your age?" said the president; "will you answer that question?"
His features bore no sign of that deep emotion which stops the beating of the heart and blanches the cheek.
"But," said the irritated president, "you called yourself Benedetto, declared yourself an orphan, and claimed Corsica as your country."
"Yes."
"And moreover, it kills," said Beauchamp.
They ask my name, I cannot give it, since my parents abandoned me.
"Accused," said the president, "your name and surname?" Andrea arose. "Excuse me, Mr. President," he said, in a clear voice, "but I see you are going to adopt a course of questions through which I cannot follow you.
"I will tell you, Mr. President.
"Your profession?"
"But your mother?" asked the president.
"My father is king's attorney," replied Andrea calmly.
I have an idea, which I will explain by and by, of making an exception to the usual form of accusation.
By the side of Andrea was stationed the lawyer who was to conduct his defence, and who had been appointed by the court, for Andrea disdained to pay any attention to those details, to which he appeared to attach no importance.
"My mother thought me dead; she is not guilty.
"Gendarmes," said the president, "lead in the accused."
His hands, gracefully placed, one upon his hat, the other in the opening of his white waistcoat, were not at all tremulous; his eye was calm and even brilliant.
"Father," said Benedetto, "I am asked for proofs, do you wish me to give them?"
But though I cannot give my own name, not possessing one, I can tell them my father's.
As for Benedetto, he gracefully wiped his lips with a fine cambric pocket-handkerchief.
Every one looked with astonishment on that grave and severe face, whose calm expression personal griefs had been unable to disturb, and the aspect of a man who was a stranger to all human emotions excited something very like terror.
"Well," said the president; "your name?"
One division of La Force, in which the most dangerous and desperate prisoners are confined, is called the court of Saint-Bernard.
"You speak first."
"Do you think you have to do with galley-slaves, or novices in the world?
"I will return to-morrow," said Bertuccio.
Who sent you?"
"Read?" he said.
"My father--I will know who my father is," said the obstinate youth; "I will perish if I must, but I will know it.
Just then the door opened, and the jailer, addressing himself to Bertuccio, said,--"Excuse me, sir, but the examining magistrate is waiting for the prisoner."
"Oh," cried Andrea, leaping with joy.
"Oh, yes."
He had done his best, he declared; he had inquired at the desk, and waited and waited, but the hotel people had failed to notify him of Lackman's arrival.
Peter read this news, and knew that he was in for another stormy hour with his boss.
She had hit on old "Nelse" Ackerman, the banker. Ackerman was enormously and incredibly wealthy; he was called the financial king of American City.
If Peter had stood alone, would he have dared so perilous a dream as this?
But I'll try to get myself free, and then maybe--I won't promise, but I'll think over your problem, Peter, and I'll certainly try to help, so that McGivney and Guffey and those fellows can't play you for a sucker any longer."
He was the boldest and most defiant of all the Reds that Peter had yet come upon.
Nell had spent the night figuring over it, trying to pick out the right person.
Or was he a "piker"; a little fellow, the victim of his own fears and vanities?
Could it be that Nell had any sympathy for these Reds?
"Won't he come again?" asked grief-stricken Peter.
Nell wanted to know forthwith what was he doing; he answered that he could not tell, it was a secret of the most desperate import; he was under oath.
Also "Mac" was Peter's personal enemy; "Mac" had just returned from his organizing trip in the oil fields, and had been denouncing Peter and gossiping about him in the various radical groups.
It wasn't writing poems and passing resolutions that was wanted; it wasn't even men who would refuse to put on the uniform, but men who would take the guns that were offered to them, and drill themselves, and at the proper time face about and use the guns in the other direction.
So here was Peter dressed in his best clothes, as for his temporary honeymoon with the grass widow, and on the way to the rendezvous an hour ahead of time.
Peter offered to follow the young man to his home city, and find some way to lure him back into McGivney's power.
What Peter must do was to work up something of his own, and get the real money, and make himself one of the big fellows.
"He'd cut my throat, and yours too, if he knew I was here.
"All right.
The rat-faced man hadn't intended to tell Peter so much, but in his rage he let it out.
Peter's heart leaped.
Peter walked the streets all day and a part of the night, thinking about Nell, and thrilling over the half promises she had made him.
"I mean," she answered, "that he'd have been worth more to you than all the rest put together."
They met next day in the park.
Peter had the facts, he knew the people; he had watched in the Goober case exactly how a "frame-up" was made, and now he must make one for himself, and one that would pay.
All this was strictly true; but it did not pacify McGivney, who was in a black fury.
"They'll get him at his home city."
"He's the biggest fish we'll ever get on our hook."
Peter had been made so bold by Nell's flattery and what she had said about his importance, that he did not go back to McGivney to take his second scolding about the Lackman case.
But for God's sake forget Nell Doolin.
No one was following them, and they found a solitary place, and Nell let him kiss her several times, and in between the kisses she unfolded to him a terrifying plan.
He must surely be one of the dynamiters!
She named a spot in the city park which would be easy to find, and yet sufficiently remote for a quiet conference.
"You damned fool!" was McGivney's response.
After McGivney had stormed for a while, he decided that this might be possible.
Section 39
So he said all right, he would go in on that plan; and proceeded to discuss with Nell the various personalities he might use.
Meet me in the waiting-room of Guggenheim's Department Store at two o'clock this afternoon.
He told about the sums he had been making and was expecting to make; he told about Lackman, and showed Nell the newspaper with pictures of the young millionaire and his school.
He and a couple of his friends had planned to "get something" on this young millionaire, and scare the wits out of him, with the idea that he would put up a good many thousand dollars to be let off.
"Mac," with his grim, set face and his silent, secretive habits, fitted perfectly to Peter's conception of a dynamiter.
"It might have been worth thousands of dollars to you!" he declared.
"How do you mean?" asked Peter, a little puzzled.
She would meet Peter again the next day, and in a more private place than here.
"No," declared the other.
Section 40
"Mac" was the most dangerous Red of them all!
Peter had been doing the hard work, and these big fellows had been using him, handing him a tip now and then, and making fortunes out of the information he brought them.
They're getting the swag, and just giving you tips.
And now he was to meet one; it was to be a part of his job to cultivate one!
Section 35
It was a famous clergyman who achieved it for him--saying that if he could have his way he would take all the Reds, and put them in a ship of stone with sails of lead, and send them forth with hell for their destination.
The huge military machine was getting under way, the storm of public feeling was rising.
Peter was so much of an American that the very sight of a foreigner filled him with a fighting impulse.
They were his creatures of dreams, belonging to a world above reality, above pain and inconvenience.
It was the fashion these days for orators and public men to vie with one another in expressing the extremes of patriotism, and Peter would read these phrases, and cherish them; they came to seem a part of him, he felt as if he had invented them.
You're getting your pay every week.
"The matter is, I'm tired of listening to these fellows ranting," Peter would say.
"I want to stop their mouths."
Peter would ask this question of McGivney again and again, and McGivney would answer: "Keep your shirt on.
"Well," said McGivney one day, "I've got something interesting for you now.
All life was a gigantic bluff, and you encouraged yourself in your bluffing by the certainty that everybody else was bluffing just as hard.
The address of young Lackman was the Hotel de Soto; and as he heard this, Peter's heart gave a leap.
What's the matter with you?"
But young Lackman was a real millionaire, McGivney positively assured him; and so Peter was free to admire him in spite of all his freak ideas, which the rat-faced man explained with intense amusement.
However, he would try it; McGivney must be right, for it was the same thing Mrs. James had impressed upon him many times.
"Maybe not.
I mind very much.
Say, Mr. Tom, who WAS her A lover?
"But, Aunt Polly, if you LOVED Dr. Chilton--"
So she never told her."
"I told ye she wa'n't--old."
"MISS POLLY!"
Pollyanna still looked unconvinced.
She's actually almost--"
"WHAT, Pollyanna?" Aunt Polly's voice was very sharp now.
"How is she, ter-day--the little gal?"
If--if you don't mind VERY much, I WOULD LIKE to have Dr. Chilton--truly I would!"
She told me long ago." The old man hesitated, then went on, his lips twitching a little.
It is a new doctor--a very famous doctor from New York, who--who knows a great deal about--about hurts like yours."
An' Miss Polly--young as she was--couldn't never forgive him; she was that fond of Miss Jennie--in them days.
The New York doctor is coming to-morrow."
Old Tom stiffened.
I hain't found that out, yet; I hain't, I hain't!"
Nancy shook her head.
"She looks like FOLKS, now.
"Dr. Chilton!
Old Tom chuckled.
And believe me, he can NOT know so much about--about your trouble, as this great doctor does, who will come from New York to-morrow."
Nancy laughed.
A long engagement doesn't often turn out well.
I wonder what HIS fate was."
It is about sixty years old--the oldest house in Four Winds.
In spite of the fact--as Mrs. Rachel Lynde would say--that she had married a millionaire, her marriage had been happy.
It was well built to begin with.
I can't realize that she's grown up.
"Well, it's the property of the Glen St. Mary Presbyterian Church now, and I rented it from the trustees.
Are there TREES about this house?"
But there's never been a wedding before.
"Who owns the house?"
It does seem so strange to think of Anne being married.
She died last spring, and as she had no near relatives she left her property to the Glen St. Mary Church.
It's what I've always prayed for," said Mrs. Rachel, in the tone of one who is comfortably sure that her prayers have availed much.
"Heaps of them, oh, dryad!
Her lines had fallen in pleasant places.
"Who is Captain Jim?"
Their boughs form an arch overhead."
"Well, it was a fortunate mistake," said Mrs. Rachel Lynde, "though, mind you, there was a time I didn't think so--that evening I came up to see Anne and she treated us to such a scene.
"Well, the Blythes generally keep their word when they've once passed it, no matter what happens.
"Gilbert looks very young for a doctor.
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS
I made them of the nicest rags, and braided them in stripes.
But there's a month yet, and dew-bleaching will work wonders."
"He's Gilbert Blythe," said Marilla contentedly.
"But there IS a brook--and it actually cuts across one corner of the garden."
Yet these two worthy ladies were not enemies of Anne; on the contrary, they were really quite fond of her, and would have defended her as their own young had anyone else attacked her.
And this last spring they were white, and such a crop of plums I never remember at Green Gables."
Human nature is not obliged to be consistent.
"I'm going to give Anne two of my cotton warp spreads," she resumed. "A tobacco-stripe one and an apple-leaf one.
Only a month!
There's a splendid living room with a fireplace in it downstairs, and a dining room that looks out on the harbor, and a little room that will do for my office.
It is certain, at least, that some human beings do not.
Long ago, just after we moved into this house, we had a married hired man for a little while, and his wife had a baby here.
Life had developed in her a sense of humor which helped her over many difficulties; but as yet nothing had availed to steel her against a reference to her hair.
You haven't yet mentioned one very important thing.
Many things have changed since then, that's what."
When weddings were in order Mrs. Rachel was ready to let the dead past bury its dead.
THAT would be expecting too much."
And I'll make her enough blue plum preserve to stock her jam closet for a year.
Wealth had not spoiled her.
What is it like?"
I never supposed she'd want them--they're so old-fashioned, and nobody seems to want anything but hooked mats now.
"Oh, I'm so glad!
I understand that there was some romantic story connected with its building, but the man I rented it from didn't know it."
But it belonged until lately to a very old lady, Miss Elizabeth Russell.
He was rich, to be sure, and Gilbert is poor--at least, to begin with; but then he's an Island boy."
CHAPTER 2
"But, Gilbert, people cannot live by furniture alone.
But it has been kept in pretty good repair, and was all done over about fifteen years ago--shingled, plastered and re-floored.
We've had deaths here--my father and mother died here as well as Matthew; and we've even had a birth here.
"There's no telling what queer freaks fashion will take.
I shall never forget what I felt when I saw Matthew bringing in a GIRL.
Her furniture is still in the house, and I bought most of it--for a mere song you might say, because it was all so old-fashioned that the trustees despaired of selling it.
"So far, good," said Anne, nodding cautious approval.
If she thought she was getting any particular prize in young Dr. Blythe, or if she imagined that he was still as infatuated with her as he might have been in his salad days, it was surely their duty to put the matter before her in another light.
"I'm giving Anne that half dozen braided rugs I have in the garret.
"When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a house was not a real home until it had been consecrated by a birth, a wedding and a death.
There is a big grove of fir trees behind it, two rows of Lombardy poplars down the lane, and a ring of white birches around a very delightful garden.
"But when it comes to this scheme of yours for the wholesale distribution of wealth--you've got a problem on your hands that you might have difficulty with."
"Say, look a-here," he demanded one afternoon, irritably.
"But not all of it?" smiled Mr. Pendleton.
Then there are other folks--Mrs.
"YOU!"
The sultan, my father, shared the same fate, for he was metamorphosed into a black stone, as he is to be seen in this palace, and the queen, my mother, had the like destiny.
It had, as we have in our mosques, a niche, to direct us whither we are to turn to say our prayers: there were also lamps hung up, and two candlesticks with large tapers of white wax burning.
Believe what I say, and let us live together as comfortably as we can." All my persuasion was in vain; they were resolved to marry, and soon accomplished their wishes.
"These two black bitches are your sisters, whom I have transformed into this shape.
The young prince, my sisters and myself, enjoyed ourselves for some time very agreeably.
What surprised me most was a sparkling light which came from above the bed.
She happened to die, but not before she had perfectly instructed me in all that was necessary to convince me of the truth of the Moosulmaun religion.
All these expressions, and particularly the last, greatly increased my love for him.
After the caliph had heard Zobeide with much astonishment, he desired his grand vizier to request Amene to acquaint him wherefore her breast was disfigured with so many scars.
I soon dried my clothes in the sun, and as I walked along I found several kinds of fruit, and likewise fresh water, which gave me some hopes of preserving my life.
I looked after it for some time till it disappeared.
In the mean time night came on, which reminded me that it was time to retire.
As soon as I was capable of understanding it, she explained to me all the passages of this excellent book, and infused piety into my mind, unknown to my father or any other person.
I came to the closet-door, and stood still, not doubting that it came from thence.
I laid myself down upon a couch, not without some dread to be alone in a desolate place; and this fear hindered my sleep.
After I had presented my sisters to the prince, I told them what had hindered my return the day before, how I had met with the young prince, his story, and the cause of the desolation of so fine a city.
I received her with every possible tenderness, and inquiring into the cause of her distress, she told me with tears how inhumanly her husband had behaved towards her.
The other, finding itself at liberty, took wing and flew away.
But alas!
Several other rarities detained my curiosity in this room, which was inestimable in value, were it only for the diamond I mentioned.
It was a very high mountain, at the bottom of which we perceived a great town: having a fresh gale, we soon reached the harbour, and cast anchor.
In short, the wonders that everywhere appeared so wholly engrossed my attention, that I forgot my ship and my sisters, and thought of nothing but gratifying my curiosity.
I entered the town and passed through several streets, where at different intervals stood men in various attitudes, but all motionless and petrified. In the quarter inhabited by the merchants I found most of the shops shut, and in such as were open I likewise found the people petrified.
After our father's death, the property that he left was equally divided among us, and as soon as these two sisters received their portions, they left me to live with their mother.
I will acquaint you with the most remarkable effect of his greatness and power.
The treachery of your sisters was well known to me, and to avenge your wrongs, as soon as I was liberated by your generous assistance, I called together several of my companions, fairies like myself, conveyed into your storehouses at Bagdad all the lading of your vessel, and afterwards sunk it.
At this sight I was transported with admiration.
I observed, that if putting me to expense was the only reason, they might lay those thoughts aside, and be welcome to remain: for what I had would be sufficient to maintain us all three, in a manner answerable to our condition.
I entered; and in a large hall I found several black eunuchs turned into stone. I went from thence into a room richly furnished, where I perceived a lady in the same situation.
Judge what was my surprise when I awoke, to see standing by me a black woman of lively and agreeable features, who held in her hand two bitches of the same colour, fastened together.
We lived very comfortably together for some months.
The words were these: Inhabitants, abandon the worship of Nardoun, and of fire, and worship the only God who shews mercy.'
Commander of the faithful, the relation which I am about to give your majesty is singularly extraordinary.
"But," I added, "I rather believe you wish to marry again; I shall feel much surprised if such be the case.
I sat up, and asked her who she was?
I told him in a few words whence I had come, what had made me undertake the voyage, and how I safely arrived at the port after twenty days' sailing; when I had done, I prayed him to perform his promise, and told him how much I was struck by the frightful desolation which I had seen in the city.
My other two sisters and myself stayed with our mother, who was then alive, and who when she afterwards died left each of us a thousand sequins.
I took her to a bath, clothed her with my own apparel, and thus addressed her: "Sister, you are the elder, and I esteem you as my mother: during your absence, God has blest the portion that fell to my share, and the employment I follow of breeding silk-worms. Assure yourself there is nothing I have but is at your service, and as much at your disposal as my own."
We set sail with a fair wind, and soon cleared the Persian gulf; when we had reached the open sea, we steered our course to the Indies; and the twentieth day saw land.
I had not patience to wait till my sisters were dressed to go along with me, but went ashore alone in the boat.
"I am the only person who did not suffer under that heavy judgment, and ever since I have continued to serve God with more fervency than before.
I wondered how it came to pass that he should be the only living creature in a town where all the people were turned into stones, and I did not doubt but there was something in the circumstance very extraordinary.
"This voice was heard three years successively, but no one was converted.
Her misfortunes affected me: and I mingled my tears with hers.
Hear me, O Lord, and grant my request."
I looked into the offices and store-rooms, which were full of riches.
I then sought another shady spot for repose, and fell asleep.
We continued thus a whole year in perfect love and harmony. Seeing that God had increased my small stock, I projected a voyage, to embark some of it in a commercial speculation.
I went towards a dark spot, that, by what I could discern, seemed to be land, and proved to be a flat on the coast, which, when day appeared, I found to be a desert island, lying about twenty miles from Bussorah.
Since that time I have whipped them every night, though with regret, whereof your majesty has been a witness.
I instantly arose, and perceived that it was pursued by a larger serpent which had hold of its tail, and was endeavouring to devour it.
Being extremely glad to hear it, I immediately arose, and taking a torch in my hand, passed from one chamber to another on that side from whence the sound proceeded.
"Madam," said the young man, "by the prayer you just now addressed to him, you have given me to understand that you have a knowledge of the true God.
They did the same to the prince, who was drowned.
Having reached a vast square, in the heart of the city, I perceived a large folding gate, covered with plates of gold, which stood open; a curtain of silk stuff seemed to be drawn before it: a lamp hung over the entrance.
I floated some minutes on the water, and by good fortune, or rather miracle, I felt ground.
After the experience you have had of the little satisfaction there is in wedlock, is it possible you dare venture a second time?
THE BONDAGE OF PASSION.
SONG II.
Essex, retreating into Cornwall, informed the parliament of his danger, and desired them to send an army which might fall on the king's rear. General Middleton received a commission to execute that service; but came too late.
From this distinction, as from a first principle, were derived, by a necessary consequence, all the other differences of these two sects.
In the other wing, Sir Thomas Fairfax and Colonel Lambert, with some troops, broke through the royalists; and, transported by the ardor of pursuit, soon reached their victorious friends, engaged also in pursuit of the enemy.
After a short combat, the cavalry of the royalists gave way; and such of the infantry as stood next them were likewise borne down and put to flight.
The Independents rejected all ecclesiastical establishments, and would admit of no spiritual courts, no government among pastors, no interposition of the magistrate in religious concerns, no fixed encouragement annexed to any system of doctrines or opinions.
In proportion to its degree of fanaticism, each sect became dangerous and destructive; and as the Independents went a note higher than the Presbyterians, they could less be restrained within any bounds of temper and moderation.
Newcastle's regiment alone, resolute to conquer or to perish, obstinately kept their ground, and maintained, by their dead bodies, the same order in which they had at first been ranged.
By terrifying others with the fear of vengeance from the offended prince, they had engaged greater numbers into the opposition against peace, than had adopted their other principles with regard to government and religion.
Equally indulgent to their friends and rigorous to their enemies, they employed with success these two powerful engines of reward and punishment, in confirmation of their authority.
This second battle was equally furious and desperate with the first: but after the utmost efforts of courage by both parties, victory wholly turned to the side of the parliament.
We must here endeavor to explain the genius of this party, and of its leaders, who henceforth occupy the scene of action.
That nobleman the ornament of the court and of his order, had been engaged, contrary to the natural bent of his disposition, into these military operations merely by a high sense of honor and a personal regard to his master.
The king followed him, and having reenforced his army from all quarters, appeared in the field with an army superior to the enemy.
Sir Henry Vane, Oliver Cromwell, Nathaniel Fiennes, and Oliver St. John, the solicitor-general, were regarded as the leaders of the Independents. The earl of Essex, disgusted with a war of which he began to foresee the pernicious consequences, adhered to the Presbyterians, and promoted every reasonable plan of accommodation.
The marquis of Newcastle was entirely lost to the royal cause.
Both sides were not a little surprised to find that they must again renew the combat for that victory which each of them thought they had already obtained.
The Independents, who had at first taken shelter and concealed themselves under the wings of the Presbyterians, now evidently appeared a distinct party, and betrayed very different views and pretensions.
In consequence of this scheme, they were declared enemies to all proposals of peace, except on such terms as they knew it was impossible to obtain; and they adhered to that maxim, which is in the main prudent and political, that whoever draws the sword against his sovereign, should throw away the scabbard.
The foot under Skippon were obliged to surrender their arms, artillery, baggage, and ammunition; and being conducted to the parliament's quarters, were dismissed.
In order to prevent him, Waller presently dislodged, and hastened by quick marches to that town while the king, suddenly returning upon his own footsteps reached Oxford; and having reenforced his army from that garrison, now in his turn marched out in quest of Waller.
Though the king's troops defended themselves with valor, they were overpowered by numbers; and the night came very seasonably to their relief, and prevented a total overthrow.
No sooner did this intelligence reach London, than the committee of the two kingdoms voted thanks to Essex for his fidelity, courage, and conduct; and this method of proceeding, no less politic than magnanimous, was preserved by the parliament throughout the whole course of the war.
Laud and his associates, by reviving a few primitive institutions of this nature, corrected the error of the first reformers, and presented to the affrightened and astonished mind some sensible, exterior observances, which might occupy it during its religious exercises, and abate the violence of its disappointed efforts.
Sincere he undoubtedly was, and, however misguided, actuated by pious motives in all his pursuits; and it is to be regretted that a man of such spirit, who conducted his enterprises with so much warmth and industry, had not entertained more enlarged views, and embraced principles more favorable to the general happiness of society.
After all these were granted, it would be necessary to proceed to the discussion of those other demands, still more exorbitant, which a little before had been transmitted to the king at Oxford.
Few or no instances occur in history of an equal, peaceful, and durable accommodation that has been concluded between two factions which had been inflamed into civil war.
Had Charles been of a disposition to neglect all theological controversy, he yet had been obliged, in good policy, to adhere to episcopal jurisdiction; not only because it was favorable to monarchy, but because all its adherents were passionately devoted to it; and to abandon them, in what they regarded as so important an article, was forever to relinquish their friendship and assistance.
When the debates had been carried on to no purpose during twenty days among the commissioners, they separated, and returned; those of the king to Oxford, those of the parliament to London.
Whether there were any equity in securing only one party, and leaving the other, during the space of seven years, entirely at the mercy of their enemies?
Such ignominious terms were there insisted on, that worse could scarcely be demanded, were Charles totally vanquished, a prisoner, and in chains.
Amidst such violent animosities, power alone could insure safety; and the power of one side was necessarily attended with danger to the other.
Toleration had hitherto been so little the principle of any Christian sect, that even the Catholics, the remnant of the religion professed by their forefathers, could not obtain from the English the least indulgence.
He was accused of high treason, in endeavoring to subvert the fundamental laws, and of other high crimes and misdemeanors.
Seven peers alone voted in this important question.
Notwithstanding the low condition into which the house of peers was fallen, there appeared some intention of rejecting this ordinance; and the popular leaders were again obliged to apply to the multitude, and to extinguish, by threats of new tumults, the small remains of liberty possessed by the upper house.
Even the English church, though it had retained a share of Popish ceremonies, may justly be thought too naked and unadorned, and still to approach too near the abstract and spiritual religion of the Puritans.
What rendered an accommodation more desperate was, that the demands on these three heads, however exorbitant, were acknowledged, by the parliamentary commissioners, to be nothing but preliminaries.
The Presbyterians, it must be confessed, after insisting on such conditions, differed only in words from the Independents, who required the establishment of a pure republic.
That he deserved a better fate was not questioned by any reasonable man: the degree of his merit in other respects was disputed.
If the power of the militia, said the opposite party, be intrusted to the king, it would not now be difficult for him to abuse that authority.
Some accused him of recommending slavish doctrines, of promoting persecution, and of encouraging superstition; while others thought that his conduct in these three particulars would admit of apology and extenuation.
These concessions, though considerable gave no satisfaction to the parliamentary commissioners; and, without abating any thing of their rigor on this head, they proceeded to their demands with regard to the militia.
The king's partisans had all along maintained, that the fears and jealousies of the parliament, after the securities so early and easily given to public liberty, were either feigned or groundless; and that no human institution could be better poised and adjusted than was now the government of England.
But Charles had never attained such enlarged principles.
Whatever ridicule, to a philosophical mind, may be thrown on pious ceremonies, it must be confessed that, during a very religious age, no institutions can be more advantageous to the rude multitude, and tend more to mollify that fierce and gloomy spirit of devotion to which they are subject.
We shall not enter into a detail of this matter, which at present seems to admit of little controversy.
It was insisted that forty-eight more, with all the members who had sitten in either house at Oxford, all lawyers and divines who had embraced the king's party, should be rendered incapable of any office, be forbidden the exercise of their profession, be prohibited from coming within the verge of the court, and forfeit the third of their estates to the parliament.
He deemed bishops essential to the very being of a Christian church; and he thought himself bound, by more sacred ties than those of policy, or even of honor, to the support of that order.
That the letter of the law, as much as the most flaming court sermon, inculcates passive obedience, is apparent; and though the spirit of a limited government seems to require, in extraordinary cases, some mitigation of so rigorous a doctrine, it must be confessed, that the presiding genius of the English constitution had rendered a mistake in this particular very natural and excusable.
The great and important advantage which the party gained by Strafford's death, may in some degree palliate the iniquity of the sentence pronounced against him: but the execution of this old, infirm prelate, who had so long remained an inoffensive prisoner, can be ascribed to nothing but vengeance and bigotry in those severe religionists by whom the parliament was entirely governed.
In this situation, surely the nation, governed by so virtuous a monarch, may for the present remain in tranquillity, and try whether it be not possible, by peaceful arts, to elude that danger with which it is pretended its liberties are still threatened.
They openly challenged the superiority, and even menaced the established church with that persecution which they afterwards exercised against her with such severity.
Were the arms of the state, therefore, put entirely into such hands, what public security, it may be demanded, can be given to liberty, or what private security to those who, in opposition to the letter of the law, have so generously ventured their lives in its defence?
After the union with Scotland, the bigoted prejudices of that nation revived the like spirit in England; and the sectaries resolved to gratify their vengeance in the punishment of this prelate, who had so long, by his authority, and by the execution of penal laws, kept their zealous spirit under confinement.
To inflict death, at least, on those who depart from the exact line of truth in these nice questions, so far from being favorable to national liberty, savors strongly of the spirit of tyranny and proscription.
The thought, no longer bent on that divine and mysterious essence, so superior to the narrow capacities of mankind, was able, by means of the new model of devotion, to relax itself in the contemplation of pictures, postures, vestments, buildings; and all the fine arts which minister to religion, thereby received additional encouragement.
With regard to Ireland, there were no greater hopes of agreement between the parties.
But though the royalists insisted on these plausible topics before the commencement of war, they were obliged to own, that the progress of civil commotions had somewhat abated the force and evidence of this reasoning.
CHAPTER VIII
Where had we come to?
They peeped and peered all about the room, then one said, "Is Princess Heru with you, sir?"
The big bullies are very few; the sea runs behind them; the maid in their clutch is worth fighting for; it needs but one good onset, five minutes' gallantry, and she is ours again.
"What!" I roared, "Heru taken from the palace by a handful of men and none of you infernal rascals--none of you white-livered abortions lifted a hand to save her--curse on you a thousand times.
I staggered up, and tugging the metal from him turned on the next.
"No," I answered roughly.
"Saints alive, man, do you think I would have you tumbling in here over each other's heels if she were?"
Five of the crew managed to escape in the cutter's boat and were picked up some days later by a passing vessel.
One eminent ruler of ancient times, in that region, when asked what the sea was like, replied, "The sea is a huge beast which silly folk ride like worms on logs." But it afterwards became clear that the Moors had a strong fancy for the "worms" and "logs" too.
The risk, the uncertainty, the danger, the sense of superior skill and ingenuity, that attract the adventurous spirit, and the passion for sport, are stated by some writers to have brought such a state of things into existence.
Each man pulled an oar, and knew how to fight as well as row.
Settling along a portion of the northern coast of Africa, they immediately proceeded to first attack all Spanish vessels that could be found.
Without hesitating for a moment he released the crew, who were confined below, hoisted sail and stood out to sea.
No strong measures, however, were really taken until the above episode occurred.
One fact seems to be pretty certain, that when these depredations were first made, they took the form of reprisals upon the Spaniards.
Soon, however, their supply of ammunition became exhausted, and the pirates boarded the schooner without further opposition.
Then oars out, and a quick stroke for a few minutes.
It is said that in early days the Moors were some time in accustoming themselves to the perils of the deep.
Those who remained on board the cutter fared very badly.
As far back as the sixteenth century the Spanish forts at Alhucemas--not to mention other places--were established for the purpose of repressing piracy in its vicinity.
They gave up marvelling at those who went to sea, and went on it themselves in search of plunder.
The other pirates had left very little for the new arrivals to take, and this seemed to annoy them so much that they gave vent to their ill-feelings in several ways, not the least wanton being the pollution of the ship's fresh water.
This step apparently had some moral effect upon the pirates, for from that time onwards attacks upon foreign vessels practically ceased. Something more than this, however, was needed, for no one could say how soon the marauding expeditions might be renewed upon a larger scale than ever, so as to make up for lost opportunities.
For years past the Governments of several European Powers have sought to put friendly pressure upon the Sultan of Morocco to effectually stop the depredations of the Riffian coast pirates.
Only a short time before the attack on the French barque took place, a notice was issued by the British Board of Trade, in which the attention of ship-owners and masters of vessels was called to the dangers attending navigation off the coast of Morocco.
There were only three revolvers on board the schooner, and with these the crew prepared to defend themselves.
After the vessel had been pillaged, the rigging and sails destroyed, the men were all securely bound and left to their fate.
For some reason or other, the pirates seemed very much disinclined to part with these prisoners.
Drawing little water, a small squadron of these craft could be pushed up almost any creek, or lie hidden behind a rock, till the enemy came in sight.
The Spaniard was compelled to retire, leaving the captain of the barque in the hands of the Moors.
THE LAST OF THE SEA-ROVERS
Often, too, they were maltreated to such an extent that they were glad to escape with their lives.
Some of them went so far as to send warships to cruise along the Riffian coast.
The ship's own boat was lowered, and into this the marauders put their booty, and took it ashore, also carrying the captain and one of the crew with them.
No sooner was Granada fallen, than thousands of desperate Moors left the land, disdaining to live under a Spanish yoke.
When, however, the latter got within a hundred yards or so of the helpless vessel, the suspicions of the crew were aroused.
When near enough they opened fire, and ordered the captain to lower his sails, which was done, as the Spaniards were, practically speaking, without arms.
When close to the land the captain was rowed ashore, and the pirates spent part of the night in unloading the cargo.
Probably this got monotonous in course of time, for in their wild sea courses they took to harrying the vessels belonging to other nations, and so laid the foundation for a race of pirates, which has continued down to quite recently.
The crew of the schooner hoisted a shirt as a signal, which was fortunately seen, and a boat sent off in response thereto.
The Moors who had been left in the boat were speedily cut adrift, much to their amazement, for it so happened that none of the pirates had stayed on board.
W. B. LORD
Next they were alongside their unsuspecting prey, and pouring in a first volley.
As nowadays, the Moors cruised in boats from the commencement of their marauding expeditions.
Ultimately the prize was usually taken, the crew put in irons, and the pirates returned home with their capture, no doubt being received with acclamation upon their arrival.
Here she got becalmed, and while in that condition two boats approached her from the shore.
Probably thinking that some of their comrades were on the barque, but unable to set the necessary canvas to return, only two Moors were sent off with the captain, and these remained in the boat when the vessel was reached. Upon gaining the deck of the barque the captain was surprised to find himself alone.
They also smashed the vessel's compass, and tore up the charts. For the next two days the crew existed on a few biscuits, which the pirates had left behind.
The crew, seeing that they could offer no effective resistance, hid themselves away in the hold.
About an hour later another boat, containing about twenty pirates, came off and fired on the ship.
They then completely pillaged the ship, removing almost everything of any use or value.
Some of the neighboring tribes continually endeavored to purchase captives for the pleasure of killing them, but it is satisfactory to learn that no sales are recorded, as the anticipated ransom was always largely in excess of the sums offered by the bloodthirsty natives.
I don't think she would have eaten them.
Once she had a cat nursing a litter of kittens, and one of the chickens in the yard being rather deformed and not thriving, Miss G. brought it and flung it to the cat, thinking it would be a great treat to her.
Her song, moreover, is interlarded with little hysterical squeaks, as if she were brim-full of some strange joy, and running over.
I never heard what eventually became of the rats.
She proved a good mother to them, and successfully reared every one of them.
"No," she said; exhibiting no sort of surprise at my question, for a dish of French missionary was by no means unknown in those parts.
But still another died, and probably she could not find any more, for she contented herself with nursing, and tending the two remaining ones, along with her own two kittens.
I thought at the time this was rather surprising; but I should not be surprised now at anything a cat did.
She was a mighty huntress, and it was no uncommon thing, to see her coming waddling across the fields with a rabbit as big as herself in her mouth.
No one cat, they thought, could nurse and suckle ten kits, and it was equally evident that three kittens did not require the services of two cats.
SUCKLING RATS.--Some years ago there was a cat in Scotland who, when three of her kittens were drowned, supplied their place by bringing in three young rats to make up the number.
Several times was the kitten taken back, and each time pussy went and stole it again; and as she never failed to give the other cat a preliminary hiding, it was at last deemed most prudent to let her retain it.
In fact she becomes a small opera in herself, chorus and all.
NURSING HEDGEHOGS.--Yes, three of those thorny little things were actually nursed, suckled, and reared lately by a cat belonging to a gentleman, who is very fond of trying experiments of this sort.
CATS EATING THEIR KITTENS.--Numerous instances might be cited of cats eating their kittens as soon as born.
CATS REARING DOGS.--A cat of mine, a few years ago, suckled and reared a beautiful Pomeranian dog.
A gentleman, the other day, had a very nice fox-terrier bitch.
NURSING SQUIRRELS.--This is by no means uncommon in cats.
In this case the adopted chicken was nursed alone, pussy's kittens having been drowned.
"But, in the name of goodness," said I, "what have you got in the pot? French missionary?"
I think the reader will now be prepared to hear of cats--
At the same time she lavishes more caresses than usual upon Nero, who, not knowing what to make of it, looks very foolish indeed.
But three pairs of bright beady eyes were keeking at her from among the thorns; and before she had reached the fender, the little pigs were all unfolded and after her at the galop.
Or the princess who had her husband killed; she ate part of him, and had the remainder salted for future consumption.
Both these cats had kittens at the same time, but the daughter seemed determined, that nursing should not interfere with her hunting expeditions.
As he was now a full-grown dog, and had a great regard for his own respectability, he didn't see the fun of it.
There being no chance of finding homes for so many, they were all drowned with the exception of three.
Under these circumstances, they will nurse and suckle almost any creature.
NURSING A HARE.--A certain carpenter whom I knew had a cat which in due season,--as all cats will,--produced a litter of kittens which--very cruel and thoughtless was the action--were all drowned.
"In sorrow shalt thou bring forth," was never meant to apply to pussy.
One day she gave birth to her kittens in an out-house, and at once leaving them to shift for themselves, she entered the dwelling house and insisted on giving suck to the dog of her first adoption.
When, to get rid of her importunities, the dog went out, she even followed him to the street, and only ceased pestering him, when her kittens were discovered and brought to her.
A gentleman in New Deer, also possessed a cat who reared a chicken to hen-hood.
We trust the baker was.
More probably they lived and grew, and went back as missionaries to their own people.
The mother was of a quiet, domesticated turn of mind, and preferred fire-side enjoyments to out-of-door sports; but the daughter was quite the reverse.
It might pay, though, if they could do the hatching; but cats at present cannot be taught to sit upon eggs.
While I have you and my children well before my eyes, I am capable of facing any news which can arrive; for what ill news can come (unless, indeed, it concerns my little babe in the country) which doth not relate to the badness of our circumstances? and those, I thank Heaven, we have now a fair prospect of retrieving.
I own, I have not the least reason to conceive any anger against you; and yet, curse me if I should not have been less displeased at your lying with my own wife; nay, I could almost have parted with half my fortune to you more willingly than have suffered you to receive that trifle of my money which you received at her hands.
Booth was greatly overjoyed at this success.
And what was her present behaviour more than that of a fine lady who considered form and show as essential ingredients of human happiness, and imagined all friendship to consist in ceremony, courtesies, messages, and visits?
"Why, my dear colonel," said he, "would you not acquaint me with that secret which this letter hath disclosed?" James read the letter, at which his countenance changed more than once; and then, after a short silence, said, "Mr.
nor could she, upon telling her name, obtain any admission.
Vanity is plainly her predominant passion, and, if you will administer to that, it will infallibly throw her into your arms.
Booth and his wife, the moment their companion was gone, sat down to supper on a piece of cold meat, the remains of their dinner.
At length the conversation began, in which the weather and the diversions of the town were well canvassed.
believe me, for my own sake, you ought not; for, as you cannot hide the consequences, you make me always suspect ten times worse than the reality.
Amelia, who had no suspicion that Mrs. James was really at home, and, as the phrase is, was denied, would have made a second visit the next morning, had she not been prevented by a cold which she herself now got, and which was attended with a slight fever.
This confined her several days to her house, during which Booth officiated as her nurse, and never stirred from her.
Booth, I have been to blame, I own it; and you upbraid me with justice.
She went from Amelia directly to a rout, where she spent two hours in a croud of company, talked again and again over the diversions and news of the town, played two rubbers at whist, and then retired to her own apartment, where, having past another hour in undressing herself, she went to her own bed.
Indeed, women generally love to be of the obliging side; and, if we examine their favourites, we shall find them to be much oftener such as they have conferred obligations on than such as they have received them from."
The rest of their conversation turned on Booth's affairs.
Down therefore the company sat, and silence prevailed for some time, during which Mrs. James surveyed the room with more attention than she would have bestowed on one much finer.
At length they retired, happy in each other.
The little actions of their children, the former scenes and future prospects of their life, furnished them with many pleasant ideas; and the contemplation of Amelia's recovery threw Booth into raptures.
After a visit of twenty minutes, during which not a word of any former occurrences was mentioned, nor indeed any subject of discourse started, except only those two above mentioned, Mrs. James rose from her chair and retired in the same formal manner in which she had approached.
To this I attribute my own unfortunate success.
A servant of any acuteness would have formed strange conjectures from such an injunction; but this poor girl was of perfect simplicity; so great, indeed, was her simplicity, that, had not Amelia been void of all suspicion of her husband, the maid would have soon after betrayed her master.
His fear, moreover, betrayed him into a meanness which he would have heartily despised on any other occasion. This was to order the maid to deliver him any letter directed to Amelia; at the same time strictly charging her not to acquaint her mistress with her having received any such orders.
The colonel again reassumed the part of a friend, gave him the remainder of the money, and promised to take the first opportunity of laying his memorial before a great man.
We will pursue her for the sake of the contrast during the rest of the evening.
Booth exprest much astonishment at this declaration; he said he could not conceive how it was possible to have such an affection for a woman who did not shew the least inclination to return it.
While she relieved my wants and distresses she was daily feeding her own vanity; whereas, as every gift of yours asserted your superiority, it rather offended than pleased her.
It is possible some readers may be no less surprized at the behaviour of Mrs. James than was Amelia herself, since they may have perhaps received so favourable an impression of that lady from the account given of her by Mr. Booth, that her present demeanour may seem unnatural and inconsistent with her former character.
Damnation seize the proud insolent harlot! the devil take me if I don't love her more than I ever loved a woman!"
Poor Amelia, who was going to rush into her friend's arms, was struck motionless by this behaviour; but re-collecting her spirits, as she had an excellent presence of mind, she presently understood what the lady meant, and resolved to treat her in her own way.
After which, over a pint of wine, they entertained themselves for a while with the ridiculous behaviour of their visitant.
I know what the impertinence of virtue is, and I can submit to it; but to be treated thus by a whore--You must forgive me, dear Booth, but your success was a kind of triumph over me, which I could not bear.
There should be no repetition of his harrowing experience with Naratu. This wife and the twenty-four others should be carefully selected and well trained.
It was a good take-off--as good as Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick could make himself but he realized that it was only so by chance.
"It is useless," she said.
When morning dawned Usanga could scarce wait for an opportunity to put his scheme into execution, and the moment that he had eaten, he called several of his warriors aside and talked with them for some moments.
To have been thus close to safety and then to have all hope snatched away by a cruel stroke of fate seemed unendurable.
The thought having taken form persisted, but always it was more than outweighed by the fact that the black sergeant was actually afraid of his woman, so much afraid of her in fact that he would not have dared to attempt to put her out of the way unless he could do so secretly while she slept.
"If it was not for losing the machine," the Englishman explained to the girl, "I'd let the bounder take it up and break his fool neck as he would do inside of two minutes."
"Good-bye, and God bless you!" he called back--his voice the least bit husky--and then: "The thing I wanted to say--may I say it now, we are so very near the end?"
"It is nothing to me whether you go willingly or not.
The Englishman attempted to dissuade him, but immediately the black became threatening and abusive, since, like all those who are ignorant, he was suspicious that the intentions of others were always ulterior unless they perfectly coincided with his wishes.
For two days they camped there, and constantly during daylight hours Usanga compelled the Englishman to instruct him in the art of flying.
He had in mind that he would start properly with this woman.
The girl cast a quick glance at him.
Smith-Oldwick lay in such a position that he could see nearly the entire expanse of meadow and the aeroplane a short distance away. Usanga was talking to the girl who was shaking her head in vehement negatives.
Then the plane rose from the ground and in a moment soared gracefully in a wide circle until it topped the trees.
"What is it you want?" he inquired.
Several times, too, he saw the eyes of the Negroes turned upon him and once they flashed simultaneously toward the white girl.
No, it is better thus.
It was with these thoughts in mind that Usanga lay down to sleep in the evening of the second day.
"He would not understand and if he did understand, he would not trust you.
A moment later Smith-Oldwick had righted the machine and was dropping rapidly toward the earth.
At any instant the machine might plunge to earth and even if, by some miracle of chance, the black could succeed in rising above the tree tops and make a successful flight, there was not one chance in one hundred thousand that he could ever land again without killing his fair captive and himself.
"Tell him," said the Englishman, "that if you are not standing in plain sight in this meadow when I return, I will not land, but will carry Usanga back to the British camp and have him hanged."
Anything that you want.
"Forgive me," he said quickly.
Constantly, however, the thought of Naratu and her temper arose to take the keen edge from his pleasant imaginings.
However, as one plan after another was conjured by the strength of his desires, he at last hit upon one which came to him almost with the force of a blow and brought him sitting upright among his sleeping companions.
The girl put the question to Usanga, who, degraded, cunning, and entirely unprincipled, was always perfectly willing to promise anything whether he had any intentions of fulfilling his promises or not, and so immediately assented to the proposition.
The black had learned his lesson sufficiently well so that the motor was started without bungling and the machine was soon under way across the meadowland.
Her lips moved but whether they voiced consent or refusal he did not know, for the words were drowned in the whir of the propeller.
Chapter XII
"Good-bye!" she cried.
I am going to be a great king and you will do whatever I tell you to do."
"All right, old top," muttered the Englishman, "I will give you the lesson of your life," and then turning to the girl: "Persuade him to let you accompany us.
That is all I ask of you.
He circled slowly a few times above the meadow until he had assured himself that Bertha Kircher was there and apparently unharmed, then he dropped gently to the ground so that the machine came to a stop a short distance from where the girl and the warriors awaited them.
Bertha Kircher looked her astonishment, but repeated the demand to the lieutenant.
"If I go willingly with you?"
With it he can buy anything that money will purchase, fine clothes and food and women, all the women he wants.
If you will grant him his freedom and his life, I will go willingly with you.
When they had finally secured him to their satisfaction, they rolled him over on his side and then it was he saw Bertha Kircher had been similarly trussed.
When Bertha Kircher had repeated Usanga's proposition to the aviator, the latter shrugged his shoulders and with a wry face finally agreed.
"You know where they are, white woman," he replied. "They are dead, and if this white man does not do as I tell him, he, too, will be dead."
"You will go with me anyway," growled Usanga.
Suddenly she turned to the black.
I am sorry that you cannot go with us, for if he goes high enough my death will be much easier than that which probably awaits you."
"I want him to teach me how to fly like a bird," replied Usanga.
Smith-Oldwick, in recalling the long months of arduous training he had undergone himself before he had been considered sufficiently adept to be considered a finished flier, smiled at the conceit of the ignorant African who was already demanding that he be permitted to make a flight alone.
The girl shook her head.
Even the spear that he had had when captured had been taken away from him, so that now he was unarmed and absolutely at the mercy of the black sergeant and his followers.
The Englishman meditated for a moment.
The girl turned her eyes toward the Englishman.
He noted the remnants of the uniforms upon the blacks and immediately he demanded to know where were their officers.
He saw the earth dropping rapidly from beneath him.
She smiled and thanked him, but the thing had been said and could never be unsaid, and Bertha Kircher knew even more surely than as though he had fallen upon his knees and protested undying devotion that the young English officer loved her.
He saw the plane tilt and the machine rise from the ground.
"Please forget what that remark implied.
I have money, more money than that poor fool could imagine there was in the whole world.
"What do you want of him?" asked the girl.
"They cannot understand you," said the girl and so in the bastard tongue that is the medium of communication between the Germans and the blacks of their colony, she repeated the white man's question.
"They will not harm her unless you fail to bring me back safely."
He can never catch us.
She was very pale but her lips smiled bravely.
Usanga grinned.
"The white woman will remain here with my people," he said.
He attempted to concentrate his mind upon the twenty-four wives which this great bird most assuredly would permit him to command.
The black sergeant was in a veritable collapse of terror.
She regretted that he had spoken as he had and he, too, regretted it almost instantly as he saw the shadow cross her face and realized that he had unwittingly added to the difficulties of her already almost unbearable situation.
If I accept his offer it will at least be the means of assuring your safe return to civilization and that" he added, "is worth more to me than all the planes in the British Air Service."
"I fancy there is no other way out of it," he said. "In any event the plane is lost to the British government.
"Tell your men to free the white man after we are gone.
Without a word of explanation the warriors seized the young officer and threw him to the ground upon his face.
Once seated within what he already considered his new possession, the black's courage began to wane and when the motor was started and the great propeller commenced to whir, he screamed to the Englishman to stop the thing and permit him to alight, but the aviator could neither hear nor understand the black above the noise of the propeller and exhaust.
He saw the trees and river and at a distance the little clearing with the thatched huts of Numabo's village.
"He wants to learn to fly, does he?" he repeated.
"God!" cried the man.
The blacks are so unprincipled themselves that they can imagine no such thing as principle or honor in others, and especially do these blacks distrust an Englishman whom the Germans have taught them to believe are the most treacherous and degraded of people.
I shall be afraid to leave you here with these devilish scoundrels." But when she put the suggestion to Usanga the black immediately suspected some plan to thwart him--possibly to carry him against his will back to the German masters he had traitorously deserted, and glowering at her savagely, he obstinately refused to entertain the suggestion.
Bertha Kircher saw that it was useless to appeal to the brute and so she held her peace though she was filled with sorrow in contemplating the fate that awaited the young officer, scarce more than a boy, who had impulsively revealed his love for her.
"What is he saying?" called the Englishman.
If I refuse the black scoundrel's request, there is no doubt but what he will make short work of me with the result that the machine will lie here until it rots.
"Let the white man teach me to fly," he said, "and I will take you back close to the settlements of your people, but in return for this I shall keep the great bird," and he waved a black hand in the direction of the aeroplane.
"I said I'd give this beggar the lesson of his life," he murmured as he heard, even above the whir of the propeller, the shriek of the terrified Negro.
Usanga promised that the girl would be in evidence upon their return, and took immediate steps to impress upon his warriors that under penalty of death they must not harm her.
He tried hard not to think of the results of a sudden fall to the rapidly receding ground below.
So jealous was the black of his new-found toy that he would not return to the village of Numabo, but insisted on making camp close beside the plane, lest in some inconceivable fashion it should be stolen from him.
Usanga had been continually interrupting their brief conversation in an attempt to compel the girl to translate it to him, for he feared that they were concocting some plan to thwart him, and to quiet and appease him, she told him that the Englishman was merely bidding her farewell and wishing her good luck.
A single slight tip of the plane would have cast them both into eternity.
We do not know why they left."
Dangling at the end of the rope the ape-man swung pendulum-like in space.
"No," replied the ape.
Twenty feet above the running ape-man soared the huge plane.
A dozen steps, perhaps, and he came to a sudden stop.
Again and again the plane circled above the meadow.
For an instant he paused, listening intently, "An aeroplane!" he muttered, and hastened forward at greatly increased speed.
"They have gone away," replied Zu-tag.
"Neither of you belong in the jungle." A slight smile touched his lips as he spoke.
Usanga had reaped his reward.
Instantly the weight upon the rope was removed and a moment later Tarzan of the Apes raised his body above the side and threw a leg over the edge. He glanced forward at Usanga and then, placing his mouth close to the girl's ear he cried: "Have you ever piloted a plane?" The girl nodded a quick affirmative.
They walked to the plane together.
He said we was representing prisoners; and prisoners don't care how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody don't blame them for it, either.
"Why, to dig with.
And yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that, when I stole a watermelon out of the nigger-patch and eat it; and he made me go and give the niggers a dime without telling them what it was for.
Why, it's perfectly ridiculous."
Then his next move will be to advertise Jim, or something like that.
But there's one thing, anyway—Jim's too old to be dug out with a case-knife. He won't last."
"No, it wouldn't do—there ain't necessity enough for it."
Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy way as that?
"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain off."
"Well, spos'n it is?
I never heard of such a thing."
Why, half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes on a tin plate, or anywhere else."
They feed him in a pan."
ain't it there in his bed, for a clew, after he's gone? and don't you reckon they'll want clews? Of course they will.
"Everything's all right now except tools; and that's easy fixed."
"Well, we can't resk being as long as we ought to, because it mayn't take very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He'll hear Jim ain't from there.
And that gave him another idea, and he says:
Well, we can't help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we've got.
Neither did that other fellow.
"What do we want of a saw?"
Jim could a got out of that window-hole before this, only there wouldn't be no use trying to travel with a ten-foot chain on his leg.
"Well, then," I says, "if we don't want the picks and shovels, what do we want?"
Huck, you don't ever seem to want to do anything that's regular; you want to be starting something fresh all the time.
A month and a half."
"I don't know.
Now look at just that one thing of the lantern.
"I don't know."
"What do we want of a shirt, Tom?"
So I let it go at that, though I couldn't see no advantage in my representing a prisoner if I got to set down and chaw over a lot of gold-leaf distinctions like that every time I see a chance to hog a watermelon.
We fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down to rest, and Tom says, kind of dissatisfied:
By and by he come out, and we went and set down on the woodpile to talk.
And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin-headed nigger, and don't send nobody to watch the nigger.
They always dig out with a case-knife—and not through dirt, mind you; generly it's through solid rock.
And it takes them weeks and weeks and weeks, and for ever and ever.
"Borrow a shirt, too."
Hain't we got to saw the leg of Jim's bed off, so as to get the chain loose?"
But there's one thing—he can have a rope ladder; we can tear up our sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough.
Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the clothes-line; and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went down and got the fox-fire, and put that in too.
"A couple of case-knives."
I wish there was a moat to this cabin.
Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning till everybody was settled down to business, and nobody in sight around the yard; then Tom he carried the sack into the lean-to whilst I stood off a piece to keep watch.
He had forgot me and everything else.
"Yes."
"Many makes it out of iron-rust and tears; but that's the common sort and women; the best authorities uses their own blood.
"Tools?" I says.
Well, I says, I needed the watermelon.
"Jim ain't got no tin plates.
Who ever heard of a state prisoner escaping by a hickry-bark ladder?
So we allowed we would steal everything there was that come handy.
But he never heard me.
He said that would do.
"Confound it, it's foolish, Tom."
"Well, if that ain't just like you, Huck Finn.
It's gaudy, Huck.
"Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better one; and quicker, too."
Why can't you stick to the main point?"
"How long will it take, Tom?"
He turns on me, looking pitying enough to make a body cry, and says:
They couldn't get the chain off, so they just cut their hand off and shoved.
There ain't even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to.
"Want it for Jim to keep a journal on."
"To dig the foundations out from under that cabin with?"
So we cleared out for the house.
Why, we could work with a torchlight procession if we wanted to, I believe.
"Yes."
"Well, some of the best authorities has done it.
And what would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?"
"For what?" I says.
Now, the way I look at it, a hickry-bark ladder don't cost nothing, and don't waste nothing, and is just as good to load up a pie with, and hide in a straw tick, as any rag ladder you can start; and as for Jim, he ain't had no experience, and so he don't care what kind of a—"
Jim can do that; and when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message to let the world know where he's captivated, he can write it on the bottom of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window.
And there's Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain.
"Tools for what?"
By rights I reckon we ought to be a couple of years; but we can't.
He broke off there, because we heard the breakfast-horn blowing.
"That ain't nothing; we can get him some."
And you wouldn't leave them any?
"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"
He looked at me curiously at first, as taking note of the bearded man that had grown out of the boy he remembered, but gave me very kindly greeting, and sat down beside me on a bench.
So fare you well, and remember that there are other treasures besides this, and that a good woman's love is worth far more than all the gold and jewels of the world--as I once knew.' And with that he left me.
what use was freedom to me now?
And of the Mohune Hospital--for that was what the alms-houses were now called--Master Glennie was first warden, with fair rooms and a full library, and Master Ratsey head of the Bedesmen.
The intimate union of activity and undergoing its consequences which leads to recognition of meaning is broken; instead we have two fragments: mere bodily action on one side, and meaning directly grasped by "spiritual" activity on the other.
(a) In part bodily activity becomes an intruder.
But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
Blind and capricious impulses hurry us on heedlessly from one thing to another.
Only what is finished, completed, is wholly assured.
(b) Even, however, with respect to the lessons which have to be learned by the application of "mind," some bodily activities have to be used. The senses--especially the eye and ear--have to be employed to take in what the book, the map, the blackboard, and the teacher say.
The nervous strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning.
To take it by itself as a complete existence is to take it unreflectively. Reflection also implies concern with the issue--a certain sympathetic identification of our own destiny, if only dramatic, with the outcome of the course of events.
And the body is, of necessity, a wellspring of energy; it has to do something.
The possibility of hypothetical conclusions, of tentative results, is the fact which the Greek dilemma overlooked.
Judgment is employed in the perception; otherwise the perception is mere sensory excitation or else a recognition of the result of a prior judgment, as in the case of familiar objects.
It also follows that all thinking involves a risk.
He will anticipate certain future moves, and will be on the alert to see whether they happen or not.
The senses are then regarded as a kind of mysterious conduit through which information is conducted from the external world into the mind; they are spoken of as gateways and avenues of knowledge.
The failure arises in supposing that relationships can become perceptible without experience--without that conjoint trying and undergoing of which we have spoken.
This implies that the situation as it stands is, either in fact or to us, incomplete and hence indeterminate.
But the flagrant partisanship of human nature is evidence of the intensity of the tendency to identify ourselves with one possible course of events, and to reject the other as foreign.
Thinking is the accurate and deliberate instituting of connections between what is done and its consequences.
Then the suggested solution--the idea or theory--has to be tested by acting upon it.
In discovery of the detailed connections of our activities and what happens in consequence, the thought implied in cut and try experience is made explicit.
It notes not only that they are connected, but the details of the connection.
Because of our education we use words, thinking they are ideas, to dispose of questions, the disposal being in reality simply such an obscuring of perception as prevents us from seeing any longer the difficulty.
The Greeks acutely raised the question: How can we learn?
Mere activity does not constitute experience.
Something which is called mind or consciousness is severed from the physical organs of activity.
But its activities, not being utilized in occupation with things which yield significant results, have to be frowned upon.
The conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical.
The action which rests simply upon the trial and error method is at the mercy of circumstances; they may change so that the act performed does not operate in the way it was expected to.
When we experience something we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences.
The Nature of Experience.
Thinking, in other words, is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous. Their isolation, and consequently their purely arbitrary going together, is canceled; a unified developing situation takes its place.
An experience, a very humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory.
That is not his problem.
Its point, its meaning lies literally in what it is going to be, in how it is going to turn out.
It is such isolation of an act from a purpose which makes it mechanical.
The episode is, by assumption, past.
To "learn from experience" is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence.
It makes it possible to act with an end in view.
Having nothing, so it is thought, to do with mental activity, it becomes a distraction, an evil to be contended with.
Yet a thoughtful survey of conditions is so careful, and the guessing at results so controlled, that we have a right to mark off the reflective experience from the grosser trial and error forms of action.
They lead the pupil away from the lesson with which his "mind" ought to be occupied; they are sources of mischief.
The latter makes the momentary act a measure of value, and ignores the connections of our personal action with the energies of the environment.
Otherwise his later "I told you so" has no intellectual quality at all; it does not mark any testing or verification of prior thinking, but only a coincidence that yields emotional satisfaction--and includes a large factor of self-deception.
It tends to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine theorizing, unnecessary and impossible.
The teachers' business is to hold the pupils up to these requirements and to punish the inevitable deviations which occur.
Tentative means trying out, feeling one's way along provisionally.
The almost insurmountable difficulty of achieving this detachment is evidence that thinking originates in situations where the course of thinking is an actual part of the course of events and is designed to influence the result.
The neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into equally meaningless fooling--both very different from the normal play of children.
Then we anticipate consequences.
This extension of our insight makes foresight more accurate and comprehensive.
But even for an onlooker in a neutral country, the significance of every move made, of every advance here and retreat there, lies in what it portends. To think upon the news as it comes to us is to attempt to see what is indicated as probable or possible regarding an outcome.
As soon as an infant begins to expect he begins to use something which is now going on as a sign of something to follow; he is, in however simple a fashion, judging.
The method extends our practical control.
But we may contrast two types of experience according to the proportion of reflection found in them.
Born in partiality, in order to accomplish its tasks it must achieve a certain detached impartiality.
The boy flying a kite has to keep his eye on the kite, and has to note the various pressures of the string on his hand.
Two conclusions important for education follow. (1) Experience is primarily an active-passive affair; it is not primarily cognitive.
Hence the quality of the experience changes; the change is so significant that we may call this type of experience reflective--that is, reflective par excellence.
Our most elaborate and rationally consistent thought has to be tried in the world and thereby tried out.
We desire this or that outcome.
Mathematics, even in its higher branches, when undue emphasis is put upon the technique of calculation, and science, when laboratory exercises are given for their own sake, suffer from the same evil.
Experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it.
On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned.
Callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate.
On the active hand, experience is trying--a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment.
In other cases we push our observation farther.
The obvious result is a mechanical use of the bodily activities which (in spite of the generally obtrusive and interfering character of the body in mental action) have to be employed more or less.
It says, virtually, "things are to be just as I happen to like them at this instant," as routine says in effect "let things continue just as I have found them in the past." Both refuse to acknowledge responsibility for the future consequences which flow from present action.
But if we know in detail upon what the result depends, we can look to see whether the required conditions are there.
Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction--discovery of the connection of things.
The opposites, once more, to thoughtful action are routine and capricious behavior.
Certain other facts about thinking accompany this feature.
His inference is more or less dubious and hypothetical.
Some experiences have very little else in them than this hit and miss or succeed process.
On the passive, it is undergoing.
The muscles of eye, hand, and vocal organs accordingly have to be trained to act as pipes for carrying knowledge back out of the mind into external action.
If it brings about certain consequences, certain determinate changes, in the world, it is accepted as valid.
There is no before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning.
Chapter Eleven: Experience and Thinking
The perplexities of the situation suggest certain ways out.
We do not really know a chair or have an idea of it by inventorying and enumerating its various isolated qualities, but only by bringing these qualities into connection with something else--the purpose which makes it a chair and not a table; or its difference from the kind of chair we are accustomed to, or the "period" which it represents, and so on.
The connection of these two phases of experience measures the fruitfulness or value of the experience.
The stimulus to thinking is found when we wish to determine the significance of some act, performed or to be performed.
We analyze to see just what lies between so as to bind together cause and effect, activity and consequence.
Its quantity increases so that its proportionate value is very different.
While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking.
In any case, some active steps are taken which actually change some physical conditions. And apart from such steps and the consequent modification of the situation, there is no completion of the act of thinking.
The former is then thought to be purely intellectual and cognitive; the latter to be an irrelevant and intruding physical factor.
To recur to our illustration.
A premium is put on physical quietude; on silence, on rigid uniformity of posture and movement; upon a machine-like simulation of the attitudes of intelligent interest.
An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance.
The former accepts what has been customary as a full measure of possibility and omits to take into account the connections of the particular things done.
Apparatus is arranged; possibly an expedition is made to some far part of the globe.
(c) On the intellectual side, the separation of "mind" from direct occupation with things throws emphasis on things at the expense of relations or connections.
They each squeaked the Alligator when they came to him, and left him feeling joyful and contented.
These hammocks were lined with soft, silken cushions and looked very pleasant and cozy to the sleepy children.
"It's almost like a side show!" cried Dot enthusiastically, as she seated herself upon a camel.
"Then we may as well go back," said the officer, grumpily.
But when it came to winding up the animals he had to separate in order that he might use each hand in a different place, and so get around quicker."
Tot bestrode a dapple-gray horse, and the Queen sat upon a lion and took hold of its mane to steady herself.
"Mr. Split's name suits him very well," said Dot, who was enjoying the fruit.
The Queen now joined Dot and they called Tot to breakfast, for Mr. Split had loaded the cloth with a variety of cool, fresh fruit and berries.
Springing to their feet they saw the tin train lying upside down near the track, with its wheels whirling around like the wind, and near by was a wooden goat and cart, completely wrecked and splintered into many pieces.
Dot's heart now began to beat rapidly, for she thought she would at last discover what the Queen's name was.
Tot was already up and sitting near the railway track watching the tin train go round.
I don't see the good of a merry-go-round if it isn't used."
By the time they finished their meal it had become twilight, and the Queen declared it would soon be dark.
"Then," said Tot, sharply, "tell it!"
"Certainly it does," answered the Queen.
"Oh, I shall be glad to make a change," she cried, and leaping off the camel's back she sprang upon the tiger, who thereupon dried his tears and smiled in a most delightful manner.
"You are too late," said the Queen; "the trouble is all over."
But Dot looked around and saw that Mr. Split was fastening three big hammocks between the trees at the edge of the forest.
The little girl was awakened next morning by a sharp clicking sound near by, and opening her eyes she saw a tin monkey running up and down a string fastened to a branch of the tree.
"Yes, it would be hard to call him anything else," replied the Queen.
"Well," said the Queen, when the Patrol and the Fire Engine had gone back to their stables, "it is time for us to go."
"I wonder where we can sleep," said Tot.
The Queen and Dot and Tot each climbed into one of the hammocks and were covered over with silk-quilted comfortables, after which Mr. Split turned a key at the end of each hammock and set them moving gently to and fro like the rocking of a cradle.
"Yes, indeed," replied the monkey, still busily climbing his string; "Mr.
There is no reason in the world why you should not know my name."
"Well," she said, "it's--"
Split was here some time ago.
The little Queen laughed merrily.
"I'm sorry not to say good-bye to Mr. Split," said Dot, as the boat glided out into the river.
Mr. Split had spread a white cloth upon the grass close to one edge of the forest, and Dot and Tot and the Queen sat around this and ate of the delicious fruit the queer man had gathered.
"I suppose your own name fits you in the same way," ventured the girl.
It started to run again in its usual rushing way, but Dot noticed that the cow-catcher was badly bent and that some of the paint had been knocked off.
But it is wrecked now, beyond repair, so there is nothing more to worry about."
Before she went to sleep Dot looked over the edge of her hammock and saw that the merry-go-round and the tin train were now motionless, while all the animals seemed to have run down and were standing quite still waiting for morning, when Mr. Split would come and wind them up again.
"He gathered those before he unhooked himself," said the Queen, "for then he had two arms to carry them.
Tot also looked interested, and forgot his slice of melon as he listened.
They looked around for Mr. Split, but not seeing him they walked across the opening to the path that led through the forest to the river.
The boat was lying where they had left it, and they at once stepped in and seated themselves.
They waited until the cars had passed the spot where they stood and then quickly ran across the track before the engine came around again.
There were melons, grapes, bananas, oranges, plums, strawberries, and pears and all were ripe and exquisitely flavored.
"Dear me!" she said, looking at him intently; "are you wound up so early in the morning?"
"Isn't it funny," she exclaimed, "that I always forget to tell you?
It is considered probable that our fine English tabbies have a trace of the British wild-cat blood in their veins, although it may be obscure.
As the domestic cat in different parts of the world will breed occasionally with the wild races of the locality, and as cats are conveyed from country to country, it is probable that our cats are of somewhat compound pedigree.
Kittens born of such parents have no desire for the domestic hearth, and are wild and suspicions to a degree.
In country places, where rabbits are abundant,--and, we may add, the smaller, but not less destructive, rodents, and a variety of feathered game,--the barn-door cat is sometimes tempted to abscond and take to a romantic and semi-wild life in the woods.
It is not found very far north, and neither in Norway nor Sweden; there the lynx reigns supreme. The wild cat is a fine animal, of larger growth than the cat of our familiar acquaintance, and stands tall.
"Why?" asked the Blueskin.
"Try it and see," answered Trot, biting into an apple herself.
Why, he couldn't do that," observed the King, who was trying to rearrange the ruffle around his neck.
"Are they good to eat?" asked the Boolooroo.
"We live on the Earth, when we're at home," replied the girl.
"The Earth?
We'll go home, pretty soon."
What else could it be?
"Where in the Sky did you come from, then, and where is your country located?"
He retreated a little way to a marble seat beside the fountain, but watched the strangers carefully.
"I don't believe it.
"You surely are," added Cap'n Bill.
"They're awful good."
How?" asked the Boolooroo.
What are apples?" he asked.
"Kill me?
"All right," agreed Trot, jumping up.
"If you don't behave, your Majesty, this Blue Island'll have to get another Boolooroo."
"Why not?" asked Cap'n Bill.
"Of course it's Sky Island.
Trot took some from the basket.
"No," said Trot; "we've got to eat our apples yet."
"I'm no murderer, thank goodness, and I wouldn't kill you if I could--much as you deserve it."
"Well," said he, "let's go home.
Don't you know you will be punished for your impudence?
"Guess they don't grow anywhere but on the Earth," remarked Cap'n Bill.
"Sail away?
"Glad to meet you, sir," said Cap'n Bill.
It ought to be for life.
"Have you nearly finished?" he inquired.
"But I'll punish you.
"Go ahead, then, and eat your lunch."
"Seems to me," said Trot, "you're actin' rather imperlite to strangers. If anyone comes to our country to visit us, we always treat 'em decent."
"Oh, you're wrong about that," said Button-Bright.
The Boolooroo tells them whom to vote for, and if they don't obey they are severely punished.
I'm an ol' man, myself, but if you don't behave I'll spank you like I would a baby, an' it won't be any trouble at all to do it, thank'e.
I've heard of the Earth, my child, but it isn't inhabited.
"How long have you lived?" asked Button-Bright.
"It's a fact," said the King.
The Magic Umbrella fell to the ground and Button-Bright promptly seized it.
"You brutes!
Aren't you sorry for yourselves?"
"Yes, you are.
It can't be done."
Then the sailor let go his hold and the King staggered to a seat, choking and coughing to get his breath back.
When the final minute is up, we die; but we're obliged to live all of the six hundred years, whether we want to or not.
"I told you to let things alone," growled Cap'n Bill.
"Nothing can kill me."
"Apples--apples?
As the machines are expensive and cannot be worked properly by men not highly expert, men past thirty-five years of age have not been allowed to learn their use.
While many factory districts are forlorn, there may be seen around many factories more happy conditions, better buildings, better sanitation, increased leisure for workers, workmen's clubs, educational agencies, and many other evidences of civic and social progress.
The increased demand resulting from the cheapening of a product may call for more workers than were employed before the new machinery came in, and yet some of the former workmen may be thrown out of employment.
There seems to be practically no limit to the consumption of textiles, provided their price falls; the demand for dress alone is indefinitely expansible.
That portion of the work is being more and more shifted upon machines.
Until of late, engineering science has not been able to deal with the problems that arise where population is densely crowded, and the early factories with their surroundings were most unsanitary. Under the degrading conditions that resulted in some places, especially in England, the effect of machinery on the intelligence of the workers was bad.
3.
Here for the first time were inventions in such numbers, of such a nature, and under such conditions, that they were rapidly and widely applied, affecting the lives of a great number of workers.
The labor needed to produce food for one hundred people is a fraction of what it was one hundred years ago.
The benefits are unequally distributed, but nearly all share in them to some degree.
The amount of raw-food products required for each hundred persons is quite inelastic.
Because the extensive introduction of machinery in England was at first accompanied by the unhappy result of a lengthening of the hours of labor in factories, this result was deemed to be necessary in all other cases.
5.
New methods of puddling iron sent many old men into the poorhouses of Pennsylvania only a few years ago.
If machines displace labor rapidly, men who cannot adjust themselves to the new conditions suffer, and there are always some who cannot adjust themselves, always some who suffer.
If the workers can do nothing but blindly pursue the same tasks, it is to be expected that the wages of hand-labor will fall in a particular trade into which machinery is suddenly introduced.
But the crude physical labor which can compete only on the plane of automatic machines, must find its field of employment more and more hedged in.
Few, however, would go on to the further conclusion that in the aggregate the existing machinery, like an enormous vampire, is sucking the life-blood of the working-people,--though traces of such a notion frequently appear.
Even where the total employment increases, the individual sometimes suffers.
6.
The alertness of the city dweller is due doubtless to social contact more than to the immediate work he does. This work may or may not be less thought-awakening than work with simple tools.
It is not yet clear what social effects great corporations will have on our democratic institutions.
It has not as yet, for example, been found practicable to apply steam to ploughing to any great extent. As the profitable use of most farm machinery requires a level surface and a large area given to a single crop, it cannot be used as well east of the Alleghany Mountains as in the Mississippi Valley, and it is still uneconomical in large portions of the civilized world.
It has been clearly answered by experience and explained by theory: the economic effect of machinery is to lift the productiveness and efficiency of the average man.
In other cases also, new industries are made possible as machines liberate energy from the production of the more necessary goods.
In many cases there is a clearly marked distinction between tool and machine.
Happily such pathetic incidents are relatively not numerous.
When, as sometimes happens, employers introduce machines for the immediate purpose of breaking a strike, the workmen are convinced that machinery is the enemy of labor.
The notion is that there is exactly so much labor predetermined to be done; therefore, if machines are introduced, there is that much less for men to do.
The effect of machinery must not be judged by the extreme cases.
The conditions in the cities as regards health and morals are approaching those of agricultural communities.
In all other countries of Europe and in America, where the introduction of machinery has been more gradual and normal, it has been followed immediately by a shortening of working hours, as eventually it was in England also.
There is a constant increase relatively, as well as absolutely, in the number employed in transportation, as each census shows; there are more railroad men relatively than there were stage-drivers and teamsters before the day of railroads.
The question in the old form, as to the effect of machinery on labor, is no longer open.
The more perfect the economic environment, the higher the incomes even of those who own no part of the machinery.
Planters and seeders, reapers, harvesters, corn-shellers, hay-loaders, automatic unloading-forks, elevators, water-power-, steam-, and gasoline-engines allow great economies.
Since that time, have taken place in all Western countries that rapid expansion in the use of machines and those notable changes in industrial organization which distinguish our era from all others.
MACHINERY AND LABOR
As it becomes possible to expend more for food, the change is made in quality, variety, flavor, rather than in quantity.
There is a general improvement along all the lines of intelligence, morals, and health.
Whether this is its natural result is debatable, but the factory worker in general does not appear to be less intelligent than the agricultural worker.
Machinery is most applicable where there is a compact plant; not so easily where the power has to be distributed over a wide area, unless a special track can be provided.
Tools are portions of matter, such as bone, wood, iron, which man guides and directs in applying his energy to things.
It was in fact quite abnormal, and has not been seen elsewhere. The owners of factories wished to keep their machines employed as many hours as possible; the laboring classes of England, being at the same time demoralized and depressed by industrial and social influences that had no logical connection with machinery, had no power to resist this movement.
In 1840 a man's work in spinning cotton was three hundred and twenty times as effective as in 1769, in 1855 it was seven hundred times; and though the rate of improvement is diminishing, to-day the productivity of such labor is still greater.
It is said that in the world, in 1870, three and one half million horse-power was furnished by stationary engines, ten millions by locomotives.
Machinery, therefore, has affected manufactures much more immediately and greatly than it has agriculture.
A part of this benefit may appear in the form of higher money wages received, a part in the form of the lower price of things bought.
If the wages of unskilled labor are not depressed, it is because of the enterprise of others who rise to more skilled employments and thus reduce the competitors of the lowest rank.
The steam-engine at the same time opened up the long line of mechanical inventions by which wood and iron are shaped and wrought, and the iron industry underwent notable developments.
Factories compel great numbers of laborers to live near each other and to work together.
The physical tasks are to-day much lighter than ever before, and a larger proportion of society is engaged in industries that require skill and thought rather than physical labor.
Men cannot quickly change their methods of working or their place of work.
Many problems of large industry remain to be solved in the near future.
1.
The number of people now engaged in printing books and papers is larger by far than in the days when all the books of the world were written by the old monks in their cloisters.
The industrial changes in England at the end of the eighteenth century on the contrary were due mainly to great mechanical inventions. The development of the textile machines for cotton and wool spinning and weaving mark the beginning of the movement.
3.
The spinning-stick, a tool used in ancient times, developed into the Saxon spinning-wheel of the sixteenth century, the form used when America was colonized.
The logical conclusion easily drawn is that every machine reduces wages.
Queen Elizabeth, who had a different dress for every day in the year, has many potential imitators.
Real wages are the essential thing, and as a consumer the laborer shares with every other member of society in the benefits of improved machinery.
The use of power derived from nature, as that of wind and water and steam, while not the essential mark of machines, is the most characteristic feature of their modern development.
Most machinery is introduced in commercial centers, and gradually spreads to other factories in such a way that most men can adapt themselves to the change.
1.
The drag develops into the cart, a simple machine.
Every intelligent laborer who can adjust, adapt, fit himself for more intelligent action will rise above the machine and profit by its presence.
II. EFFECT OF MACHINERY ON THE WELFARE AND WAGES OF THE MASSES
Men are moral under the eyes of their neighbors, acquaintances, and families; habits become adjusted to right standards, and the temptations in new conditions are always great.
The benefits resulting from greater abundance are diffused, and as goods are brought from the high, or scarcity, end of the scale of value down toward the level of free goods, everybody gains by the abundance and cheapness.
If extreme examples are taken, it may be made to appear either that an increase or that a decrease of employment results from machinery. Industries grade off from those that are capable of developing a greater and greater demand, to those at the other extreme that are capable of a very slight increase, as a result of a lowering of the price.
Machinery is applicable with especial advantage to industries that change the form of materials easily transported and widely used.
In the United States, in 1870, in manufactures alone, two and one third million horse-power were used; in 1900, eleven and one third million, the increase being five-fold.
The general, or average, gain is not to be judged by comparing the conditions of the lowest grade of society with those of fifty years ago, for while that grade may have been bettered only a little, it has been possible for large numbers to rise to higher grades because of the use of machinery.
ALLAN QUATERMAIN.
CHAPTER XX
Finally, we prevailed upon him to consent to this arrangement, but George Curtis did not know of it until some time afterwards.
"They belong to Quatermain and Good.
Then I came up.
To-day is Tuesday.
As for the note I had sent him by Jim, that worthy lost it, and he had never heard of it till to-day.
With a spring Sir Henry was by his side.
In so doing he loosened a great boulder of rock, which fell upon George Curtis's right leg, crushing it frightfully.
It is the most wonderful thing that I have ever heard of, and the most merciful too."
Good is coming, and George; and so, by the way, is your boy Harry (there's a bribe for you).
"Look here, you fellows," I said, "is that a white man, or am I mad?"
At the sound of this disturbance, another figure, also clad in skins, emerged from the hut, a gun in his hand, and ran towards us.
He was to go to-morrow, but I had little hope of ever seeing him back again.
It is all so very strange, and, when a man has ceased to hope, so very happy!"
We got off the boat at Southampton, and went up to town.
They offer, however, a hundred and eighty thousand for a very small portion of them.
That evening, over the camp fire, George Curtis told us his story, which, in its way, was almost as eventful as our own, and, put shortly, amounted to this.
Do come; the sooner the better; you can finish writing the story of our adventures on board ship.
I wish that we could have managed to bring away the coats of chain armour.
H.C.
These they shot, or trapped in pitfalls, using the flesh for food, and, after their clothes wore out, the hides for clothing.
You have done your day's work, and have lots of money now, and there is a place for sale quite close which would suit you admirably.
"By Jove!" said George Curtis, when I showed him some of the diamonds: "well, at least you have got something for your pains, besides my worthless self."
"And so," George Curtis ended, "we have lived for nearly two years, like a second Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, hoping against hope that some natives might come here to help us away, but none have come. Only last night we settled that Jim should leave me, and try to reach Sitanda's Kraal to get assistance.
This remark set me thinking, and having spoken to Good, I told Sir Henry that it was our joint wish that he should take a third portion of the diamonds, or, if he would not, that his share should be handed to his brother, who had suffered even more than ourselves on the chance of getting them.
I have had him down for a week's shooting, and like him.
If you start on receipt of this you will reach here by Christmas, and I book you to stay with me for that.
I thought that I must have got a touch of the sun.
As for food, however, they got on pretty well, for they had a good supply of ammunition, and the oasis was frequented, especially at night, by large quantities of game, which came thither for water.
There, not twenty yards in front of me, placed in a charming situation, under the shade of a species of fig-tree, and facing to the stream, was a cosy hut, built more or less on the Kafir principle with grass and withes, but having a full-length door instead of a bee-hole.
I want you to come home, my dear old comrade, and to buy a house near here.
I stared and stared, and so did the other man, and just at that juncture Sir Henry and Good walked up.
Then Sir Henry set to work, and told him the main facts of our adventures, sitting till late into the night to do it.
To come to business, Good and I took the diamonds to Streeter's to be valued, as we arranged, and really I am afraid to tell you what they put them at, it seems so enormous.
When he was close he fell down in a sort of faint.
And now I come to perhaps the strangest adventure that happened to us in all this strange business, and one which shows how wonderfully things are brought about.
"Macumazahn," he halloed, "don't you know me, Baas?
It turned out to be from Sir Henry, and as it speaks for itself I give it in full.
Sir Henry looked, and Good looked, and then all of a sudden the lame white man with a black beard uttered a great cry, and began hobbling towards us.
Sir Henry laughed.
In the desert he and Jim had suffered great hardships, but finally they reached this oasis, where a terrible accident befell George Curtis.
But we did accomplish it somehow, and to give its details would only be to reproduce much of what happened to us on the former occasion.
I'm Jim the hunter. I lost the note you gave me to give to the Baas, and we have been here nearly two years." And the fellow fell at my feet, and rolled over and over, weeping for joy.
But whatever they had quarrelled about in the past--I suspect it was a lady, though I never asked--it was evidently forgotten now.
Don't lose poor Foulata's basket in which you brought away the diamonds.
He is furious, especially as some ill-natured person has printed it in a Society paper.
On the day of their arrival he was sitting by the stream, and Jim was extracting the honey from the nest of a stingless bee which is to be found in the desert, on the top of a bank immediately above him.
He is a cool young hand; he shot me in the leg, cut out the pellets, and then remarked upon the advantages of having a medical student with every shooting party!
Good-bye, old boy; I can't say any more, but I know that you will come, if it is only to oblige
No hunter ever came to such a place as this.
His time is too much occupied in shaving, and other matters connected with the vain adorning of the body.
"My dear old fellow," burst out Sir Henry at last, "I thought you were dead.
We have refused to tell the tale till it is written by you, for fear lest we shall not be believed.
But, acting upon information he had received from the natives, he headed not for Sheba's Breasts, but for the ladder-like descent of the mountains down which we had just come, which is clearly a better route than that marked out in old Dom Silvestra's plan.
"Maybe you could find one like it somewhere and buy it for her."
At half past one Marilla again emerged from the parlor.
But really, Marilla, the flying part IS glorious as long as it lasts . . . it's like soaring through a sunset.
It was surely time for Priscilla and Mrs. Morgan to arrive.
His clean blouse was ruined for that time and the pies for all time.
"It was my fault.
But I feel that I can't expect to do it before then, for it has truly been a bitter disappointment."
At half past twelve the Allans and Miss Stacy came.
After all, it was NOT too good to be true . . . things just as good and far better are coming true for me all the time.
"Davy," said Marilla ominously, "did you throw that conch down ON PURPOSE?"
Don't you like it?"
"No, I never did," whimpered Davy.
When Diana dished the peas she tasted them and a very peculiar expression crossed her face.
"You'll probably have a good many more and worse disappointments than that before you get through life," said Marilla, who honestly thought she was making a comforting speech.
All this splendor and color, mingled with the sunshine falling through the honeysuckle vines at the windows in a leafy riot of dancing shadows over walls and floor, made of the usually dismal little room the veritable "bower" of Anne's imagination, and even extorted a tribute of admiration from Marilla, who came in to criticize and remained to praise.
He seems to have a prejudice against marriage."
But everybody has her own way of living . . .
"No, thank you," said Marilla, with indignant emphasis.
"I'd rather walk calmly along and do without both flying and thud.
"Suppose they don't come at all?" she said piteously.
"No, I'm sure there isn't.
And I suppose the events of today have a funny side too.
A great blue bowlful of snowballs overflowed on the polished table.
It is, however, an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the pig was eventually the gainer by Davy's mischance.
"Don't suppose it.
But I'm afraid I'll be tongue-tied and stupid.
Everything was going well but Anne was beginning to feel nervous.
"Get out a crock of strawberry preserves," said Marilla consolingly. "There's plenty of whipped cream left in the bowl for it."
"Well," sighed Anne, laying the letter down on the red sandstone step of the back porch, where she was sitting, while the twilight rained down out of a dappled sky, "I always thought it was too good to be true that Mrs. Morgan should really come.
"Well, you can never tell about those old bachelors.
"Well, maybe it does," admitted Marilla.
I think I hear Rachel pronouncing on it.
She had, in accordance with her promise to Mrs. Lynde, written to Miss Barry of Charlottetown, asking for the loan of it.
One o'clock came . . . but no Priscilla or Mrs. Morgan.
It cannot be said that that dinner was a notable success socially. The Allans and Miss Stacy exerted themselves to save the situation and Marilla's customary placidity was not noticeably ruffled.
It was examined and admired; then, just as Anne had taken it back into her own hands, a terrific crash and clatter sounded from the kitchen pantry. Marilla, Diana, and Anne fled out, the latter pausing only long enough to set the precious platter hastily down on the second step of the stairs.
"Well, you know she only bought it, so it isn't the same as if it was an heirloom," said Diana, trying to console.
To be sure, he insisted on remaining in the kitchen, for his curiosity wanted to see all that went on.
Then Diana went home with a headache and Anne went with another to the east gable, where she stayed until Marilla came home from the post office at sunset, with a letter from Priscilla, written the day before.
I'm punishing him for his disobedience.
I really feel sorry for Mr. Harrison; I don't believe he feels satisfied with his life.
Go, Davy, I say."
"I do hope I'll be able to say something once in a while, and not sit like a mute," said Diana anxiously.
At the bottom of the stairs lay a big pink conch shell amid the fragments of what had been Miss Barry's platter; and at the top of the stairs knelt a terrified Davy, gazing down with wide-open eyes at the havoc.
Of course, the original agreement was that he must be good. But he TRIED to be good . . . and I hadn't the heart to disappoint him."
"Oh, all right," said Davy, somewhat comforted.
But I notice Mr. Harrison doesn't like to be pitied.
"I put a spoonful of sugar in.
"It seems to me, Anne, that you are never going to outgrow your fashion of setting your heart so on things and then crashing down into despair because you don't get them."
"I'd be a nice sight, wouldn't I, rowing down the pond in a flat?
Anne and Diana set about lifting the dinner, with all the zest gone out of the performance.
Let's carry the things in and get it over."
"I don't believe they're coming after all," said Marilla crossly.
"You can come down after dinner is over and have yours in the kitchen."
The table was set in the sitting room, with Marilla's finest linen and the best china, glass, and silver.
The guests in the parlor heard peal after peal of laughter from the kitchen, but they never knew what the fun was about.
I'm always forgetting it . . . so I popped a spoonful in."
I'm not punishing him because he spoiled your pies . . . that was an accident.
The parlor at Green Gables was a rather severe and gloomy apartment, with rigid horsehair furniture, stiff lace curtains, and white antimacassars that were always laid at a perfectly correct angle, except at such times as they clung to unfortunate people's buttons.
"Where's Davy?" said Marilla, with an indifferent glance at the star.
"What shall we do for dessert?" asked Anne, looking regretfully at the wreck and ruin.
I only wish I could, for of course Miss Barry would just as soon have one platter as another, if both were equally old and genuine.
I'm so thankful it wasn't a cherished heirloom because then no money could replace it."
We'll shut Green Gables up and spend the whole day at the shore, daffing the world aside."
But it is wonderful what flowers can accomplish if you give them a fair chance; when Anne and Diana finished with the room you would not have recognized it.
And what about Davy all this time?
I don't believe Mr. Harrison will ever marry.
"Well, it's never too late to mend," said Anne roguishly.
"I know I'm too much inclined that, way" agreed Anne ruefully.
Every shelf of the what-not held a sheaf of bluebells; the dark corners on either side of the grate were lighted up with jars full of glowing crimson peonies, and the grate itself was aflame with yellow poppies.
"I'm nervous about a good many things," said Anne, "but I don't think there is much fear that I won't be able to talk."
We always do.
You may be perfectly certain that every article placed on it was polished or scoured to the highest possible perfection of gloss and glitter.
"All Mrs. Morgan's heroines converse so beautifully.
What are you going to do about Miss Barry's platter?"
She made frequent trips to the gate and looked as anxiously down the lane as ever her namesake in the Bluebeard story peered from the tower casement.
"Pay her back the twenty dollars she paid for it, I suppose.
"Yes," said Anne, mashing the potatoes with the air of one expected to do her duty.
Then he had gone into the pantry to put it up on the shelf above the table, where he already kept a score or so of similar balls, which, so far as could be discovered, served no useful purpose save to yield the joy of possession.
Just as Mr. Allan had finished returning thanks there arose a strange, ominous sound on the stairs, as of some hard, heavy object bounding from step to step, finishing up with a grand smash at the bottom.
He just called there one evening on business with Mr. Harmon Andrews and Mrs. Lynde saw him and said she knew he was courting because he had a white collar on.
Even Anne had never been able to infuse much grace into it, for Marilla would not permit any alterations.
Then she made a grimace.
Davy had to climb on the table and reach over to the shelf at a dangerous angle . . . something he had been forbidden by Marilla to do, as he had come to grief once before in the experiment.
And I'll be sure to say 'I seen.' I haven't often said it since Miss Stacy taught here; but in moments of excitement it's sure to pop out.
"In bed.
"Girls, we MUST have dinner.
The shining black mantelpiece was heaped with roses and ferns.
Davy slipped and came sprawling squarely down on the lemon pies.
He slid the door into place, turned sullenly.
"Those who are unlike us smote those who are like us and drove them back when they would have taken and slain us.
"Cherkis," he whined.
Is it what many call the soul?
Cleave to your kind.
Over the floor he slid, still holding fast to me, and pressed against the farther wall.
Does your way lead to them, Yuruk?"
Equally, of course--Alexander.
He spat--in a way that made me want to kill him.
So thinking I became aware of increasing light; strode past Yuruk to the door and peeped out.
The goddess was born here.
A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us?
"And turn your back to me."
I had not been blind to the flash of malice, of cunning, that had shot across the wrinkled face.
"Goodwin, you ought not to have let me sleep so long.
There was a familiar sound to that.
"You will take them and go by that path?"
I stooped over Drake, shook him.
"Long ago," he answered; "long, long ago there was trouble in their city, even in the great dwelling place of Cherkis.
On the instant he was awake, alert.
"But watch the eunuch closely."
And was brought abruptly to full alertness, vigilance, by the flame of rage that filled the eyes thrust so close.
"Sit," I ordered the eunuch.
"Lead back," I directed curtly.
"The way leads to them; to their place.
"Not yet."
And by that curious human habit of seeking for the complex when the simple answer lies close, failed to recognize that it was jealousy of us that was the root of his behavior; that he wished to be, as it would seem he had been for years, the only human thing near Norhala; failed to realize this, and with Ruth and Drake was terribly to pay for this failure.
Cherkis?
"Cherkis would forgive much for her.
"Cleave to your kind!
"I only need a little sleep, Dick," I said.
"Take those who came with you and follow it."
And Iskander?
Was not the father of Iskander the god Zeus Ammon, who came to Iskander's mother in the form of a great snake?
"Cherkis?" I asked.
I can show it to you."
Clearly it came to me that these were sense organs!
"Why, it's dawn," he whispered.
Well?
Of course--it was the name of Xerxes, the Persian Conqueror, corrupted by time into this--Cherkis.
Go then to him--unafraid."
Ventnor had been right.
I feel like a damned pig."
"Follow it." He pointed.
Answer my questions truthfully and it may be that we shall return through that door."
"Not yet," I answered absently.
Much, I think.
Cherkis?
At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously.
She raised her head.
That beast in the box got out, and I've been chasing it all over the place."
"All right," said Saunders; "but wait till I've rolled up my sleeve.
Someone must be in the gallery, for a second blind did the same.
The accumulated dust of centuries, eh?"
On the following day Eustace Borlsover left.
Not until the day before he left had Eustace an opportunity of observing Adrian Borlsover's new-found faculty.
Honesty is the Best Policy.
Very likely the animal might gain confidence and show itself.
He illustrated all his scientific papers, made his own woodcuts, and carved the reredos that is at present the chief feature of interest in the church at Borlsover Conyers.
"Good Lord!" said Eustace; "what in the world was the old boy driving at?
He came of an eccentric family.
The question occurred to him again with greater force when three days later he found himself standing in the library at Borlsover Conyers, a huge room built for use, and not for beauty, in the year of Waterloo by a Borlsover who was an ardent admirer of the great Napoleon.
Adrian was an authority on the fertilization of orchids.
To me it's been a revelation of the possibilities of education."
B, for Borlsover.
His two hands lay on the coverlet, his left hand tightly clasping his right.
"How goes the world, Saunders?
"The world," said Saunders, "goes the same as usual, confoundedly slow.
Go on! Chuck them down!
Then he placed his right hand on my head and asked for a blessing to rest upon me.
"What is the time?"
It certainly seemed to be the best plan.
He wished his body to be embalmed (he gave us the address of the man we were to employ--Pennifer, Ludgate Hill), with orders that his right hand was to be sent to you, stating that it was at your special request.
Good-by!" and he held out his hand.
There were still the private letters.
I played on the floor with a black spaniel while my father appealed for a subscription.
"Drive in the screws," said Eustace, "we won't run any risks.
"That old devil of an uncle of mine," began Eustace--"oh, I can't explain it all.
Don't walk in doubtful paths.
Your poor grandfather----"
It would be too smart for us.
"What's up with you, Eustace?
"Now let's hear more about your uncle."
"I haven't got to the bottom of this yet," said Eustace, "but I will do before the night is very much older," and he hurried up the corkscrew stair.
"Hullo!" said Eustace, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets.
My father would neither confirm nor deny the story.
Why are you dawdling?"
"It was something that wanted very much to get hold of me.
"Is it my uncle who is writing?"
"We're friends already; aren't we, Eustace Borlsover?"
Adrian Borlsover, as my father had said, was a wonderful man.
The Beast with Five Fingers
"Is it anyone I know?"
"I wish Saunders was back," he said; "one can't tackle this sort of thing alone." It was after eleven, and there seemed little likelihood of Saunders returning before twelve.
"They were ever so black and shiny; they weren't shut up like Nora's puppies.
Quickly he stole on tiptoe in the dim moonshine in the direction of the noise, feeling as he went for one of the switches.
You look to me to be in an absolute blue funk."
There was no sense of intimacy about the room.
"Ten minutes before four.
"If it's gone into the gallery," he said, "well and good." He hastily turned on the lights, crossed the room, and climbed up the stair.
That was the only time I saw Adrian Borlsover.
"Bother it!
"What curious nonsense!" said Eustace to himself.
With a crash two heavy books fell from the gallery to the floor; then, as Borlsover looked, another and yet another.
I didn't look, because I didn't want to mess up my things but I should gather from the way it's jumping about that it's pretty hungry."
Two sharp clicks and the lights in the hideous candelabra that hung from the ceiling suddenly went out.
Eustace took an empty manuscript book and placed a pencil within reach of the fingers of the right hand.
"It's culpably careless of the man, whoever he was," said Eustace, as he removed the screws, "packing an animal like this in a wooden box with no means of getting air.
He left his seat in the window and sat down beside the bed.
The luck had been with him all the evening.
His fingers touched the metal knob at last.
The other arrangements as to the funeral remained unaltered."
Then he stopped.
And so I learnt for the first time that a man might have eyes that looked dark and beautiful and shining without being able to see.
Now I suppose I shall have to get one myself."
Then, emptying two shelves of their contents, he took the wooden boards and propped them up in front to make his barrier doubly sure.
Eustace, I want to warn you.
Eustace made the discovery by accident.
Almost immediately it began to write.
At last he heard steps down below.
"It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab.
The dress togs are accounted for by an invitation from Captain Lockwood to bridge."
"Who is to prove it?
"I was not even at the cottage at the time; I swear it to you.
I am terrified for your safety.
"In London!" interrupted Barbara.
"What!" she exclaimed.
Not that I wish it to come out; the man has done no harm to me, and he may go on poaching with impunity till doomsday for all I care.
Barbara threw back her neck with a haughty gesture.
"Richard!"
"The truth as to what he is may come out, some time.
Perhaps my mother can let me have it; it is what I have come to ask for."
CHAPTER IV.
"It is impossible to think of it to-night," returned Barbara in an alarmed tone.
Why should she think so?"
Richard's.' I think the woman did it heedlessly, not maliciously, to provoke papa; she was a good servant, and had been with us three years you know.
"You surely do not mean to throw the guilt on Bethel?"
Barbara Hare reflected before she spoke.
"I do know it, Barbara."
"I have been working in London ever since--"
It is a hundred pounds that I want."
What at?"
"Did you know me, Barbara?" was his rejoinder.
The latter walked on; the former came in.
THE MOONLIGHT INTERVIEW.
There would be eight of them. Here in the gathering light Were waiting eight women or more Who were destined forever to pay, Who never again would laugh back Into the eyes of life In the old glad, confident way. Each huddled dumbly to each; But eyes could not lift from the sea, Only hands touched in the dawn.
Brave, but with quivering lips, Each alone in the press of the crowd, Was saying it over and over.
On such a night as this I saw the last crew go Out of a world too beautiful to leave. Only a chosen few Beside the crew Were gathered on the pier; And in the ebb and flow Of dark and moon, we saw them fare Straight past the row of coffins Where the fifth crew lay Waiting their last short voyage Across the bay.
And as each body spent out of its ebbing store Of strength and hope, I felt the forward thrust, At first so sure, Fail in its rhythm, Falter slow, And slower-- Hang an endless moment-- Till in a rush came fear-- Fear of the sea, that it might win again, Gathering one crew more, Making them pay in vain.
Then through the horror of it, like a clear Sweet wind among the stars, I felt the lift And drive of heart and will Working their miracles until Spent muscles tensed again to offer all In one transcendent gift.
III
Out of the blackness wave on livid wave Leapt into being--thundered to our feet; Counting the moments for us, beat by beat, Until the last and smallest dwindled past, Trailing its pallor like a winding-sheet Over the last crew and its chosen grave.
He had been too much expected by the best judges, for surprize--but there was great joy.
You may imagine how desirable!
I shall write to Mrs. Partridge in a day or two, and shall give her a strict charge to be on the look-out for any thing eligible."
You are afraid of giving me trouble; but I assure you, my dear Jane, the Campbells can hardly be more interested about you than I am.
Have you finished it?
"Read it, read it," said he, "it will give you pleasure; only a few lines--will not take you long; read it to Emma."
"But have you really heard of nothing?"
"Oh! my dear, human flesh!
They will stay a good while when they do come, and he will be half his time with us.
Mr. Weston, however, too eager to be very observant, too communicative to want others to talk, was very well satisfied with what she did say, and soon moved away to make the rest of his friends happy by a partial communication of what the whole room must have overheard already.
There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something--Offices for the sale--not quite of human flesh--but of human intellect."
"Here is April come!" said she, "I get quite anxious about you.
He had returned to a late dinner, and walked to Hartfield as soon as it was over.
In this style she ran on; never thoroughly stopped by any thing till Mr. Woodhouse came into the room; her vanity had then a change of object, and Emma heard her saying in the same half-whisper to Jane,
"But I have never fixed on June or any other month--merely looked forward to the summer in general."
I must put on a few ornaments now, because it is expected of me.
"Something that would do!" repeated Mrs. Elton.
"Trouble!
June will soon be here."
"You may well class the delight, the honour, and the comfort of such a situation together," said Jane, "they are pretty sure to be equal; however, I am very serious in not wishing any thing to be attempted at present for me.
Mrs. Weston was most comfortably pleased on the occasion.
A cousin of Mr. Suckling, Mrs. Bragge, had such an infinity of applications; every body was anxious to be in her family, for she moves in the first circle. Wax-candles in the schoolroom!
He gave her a letter, it was from Frank, and to herself; he had met with it in his way, and had taken the liberty of opening it.
Put it up, put it up; we will have a good talk about it some other time, but it will not do now.
Do you think it will look well?"
"Well, he is coming, you see; good news, I think.
As to her illness, all nothing of course.
How do you like it?--Selina's choice--handsome, I think, but I do not know whether it is not over-trimmed; I have the greatest dislike to the idea of being over-trimmed--quite a horror of finery.
All the place is peopled with sweet airs
Aghast at his own helplessness
An antagonist worth her steel
An air half quizzical and half deferential
An expression of rare and inexplicable personal energy
An air of affected civility
Across the gulf of years
An eager and thirsty ear
Administering a little deft though veiled castigation
After an eternity of resolutions, doubts, and indecisions
An exquisite perception of things beautiful and rare
An expression of mildly humorous surprise
An oppressive sense of strange sweet odor
Affecting a tone of gayety
All was instinctive and spontaneous
Affected an ironic incredulity
All hope of discreet reticence was ripped to shreds
An eternity of silence oppressed him
An answering glow of gratitude
Ardent words of admiration
After a first moment of reluctance
All her gift of serene immobility brought into play
An atmosphere thick with flattery and toadyism
Appalled in speechless disgust
All embrowned and mossed with age
And day peers forth with her blank eyes
Apprehensive solicitude about the future
As if smitten by a sudden spasm
Absolutely vulgarized by too perpetual a parroting
Artless and unquestioning devotion
An unsuspected moral obtuseness
Appealing to the urgent temper of youth
An impersonal and slightly ironic interest
An air of uncanny familiarity
An attack of peculiar virulence and malevolence
An artful stroke of policy
And what is all this pother about?
All the sky was mother-of-pearl and tender
All the lesser lights paled into insignificance
An increased gentleness of aspect
An inexpressible fervor of serenity
An impenetrable screen of foliage
Accidents which perpetually deflect our vagrant attention
An air of inimitable, scrutinizing, superb impertinence
I feel keenly myself impelled by every duty
I find myself called upon to say something
I feel tempted to introduce here
I do not desire to call in question
I do not believe it possible
I especially hail with approval
I do not desire to put too much emphasis
I do not question for a moment
I foresaw the consequence
I do not complain of
I do not know with what correctness
I feel the greatest satisfaction
I flatter myself
I do not vouch for
I had almost said
I gratefully accept
I do not see much difference between
I, for my part, would rather
I do not at this moment remember
I do not see how it is possible
I do not mean now to go further than
I feel bound to add my expression
I do not disguise the fact
I had in common with others
I do not propose to take up your time
I do not pretend to argue
I do not fear a contradiction
I feel that it is not true
I happen to differ
I had a kind of hope
I feel constrained to declare
I do not contend
I fervently trust
I do not mean to impute
I find no fault with
I had occasion to criticize
A peculiar phenomenon, for the river displaces itself to feed its own tributaries!
During dinner Torres showed himself more talkative than usual.
These Indians are no longer the Indians of days gone by.
Many times they passed by the mouths of iguarapes, or little affluents, with black waters.
An extra passenger was on board.
Instead of being clothed in the national fashion, with a frontlet of macaw feathers, bow, and blow-tube, have they not adopted the American costume of white cotton trousers, and a cotton poncho woven by their wives, who have become thorough adepts in its manufacture?
Assuredly if the adventurer was taciturn he was not inquisitive.
It is peculiar to a certain number of these tributaries of the Amazon, which differ greatly in importance.
At present the capital of the Upper Amazon, it began as a simple Mission, founded by the Portuguese Carmelites about 1692, and afterward acquired by the Jesuit missionaries.
Like everything else, that has changed; heads have re-taken their natural form, and there is not the slightest trace of the ancient deformity in the skulls of the chaplet-makers.
It is of this hand that the traveler, Emile Carrey, has so justly observed: "The tiger himself would perish in its grasp."
If he appeared more open with any one, it was with Fragoso.
STILL DESCENDING
CHAPTER XIV.
"Yes, little sister," replied Benito, "and you were not there to ask for mercy!
Take a little of the water, Minha, and drink it; you will find it all right."
It was a creature of a dark color, something like a large Newfoundland dog.
Manoel and Benito had gone shooting in the neighborhood, and brought back some feathered game, which was well received in the larder.
They had passed the island of Araria, the Archipelago of the Calderon islands, the island of Capiatu, and many others whose names have not yet come to the knowledge of geographers.
During the morning the raft passed by the picturesque group of islands situated in the vast estuary of the Javary.
But, after all, why not?
It may, perhaps, seem singular that the ancient lords of the country, Tupinambas and Tupiniquis, should find their principal occupation in making objects for the Catholic religion.
The ant-eater looked superb, with his long tail and grizzly hair; with his pointed snout, which is plunged into the ant-hills whose insects form its principal food; and his long, thin paws, armed with sharp nails, five inches long, and which can shut up like the fingers of one's hand.
Manoel remarked how thick the cloudiness was, for it could be clearly seen on the surface of the whitish waters of the river.
It was marked enough for even Benito to notice it, not without surprise, and he observed that his father gave particular attention to the questions so curiously propounded by Torres.
"Good!" exclaimed Benito.
He maintained a good deal of reserve, answering if addressed, but never provoking a reply.
The town is composed of some sixty houses, arranged on the plain which hereabouts crowns the river-bank.
There is nothing certain in the matter. Under any circumstances, they are excellent to drink, of a freshness quite enviable for the climate, and without after-taste, and perfectly harmless.
He and the family received an excellent reception from the principal authorities of the town, the commandant of the place, and the chief of the custom-house, whose functions did not in the least prevent them from engaging in trade.
"Perhaps," said Fragoso, "they might ask the opinions of the caymans, dolphins, and manatees, for they certainly prefer the black waters to the others to enjoy themselves in."
"They have tried to explain this coloring in many ways," said he, "but I do not think the most learned have yet arrived at a satisfactory explanation."
The coloration of these waters is a very curious phenomenon.
"They are particularly attractive to those animals," replied Manoel, "but why it is rather embarrassing to say.
No one exactly knew.
When it has got hold of anything you have to cut it off to make it let go!
Till then we must keep our eyes on him!"
"What are you talking about, Benito?
Fragoso!" shrieked Lina, kneeling on the edge of the raft.
I know not--but to force my father to get rid of Torres would perhaps be imprudent!
No reply.
He only struck the animal's carapace, and the scales flew to splinters but the ball did not penetrate.
I do not know!
Minha was flying aft, pursued by the monster, who was not six feet away from her.
Minha fell.
No, Benito!
"Yes, Benito."
"No!
A second shot from Benito failed to stop the cayman.
"Decidedly not!
Not only can the old ones, the centenarians, be recognized by the greenish moss which carpets their carcass and is scattered over their protuberances, but by their natural ferocity, which increases with age.
You have remarked his attentions to my sister! Nothing can be truer!
"Bring the guns!
"No!" replied Manoel.
"She is not there!" replied Lina, who had just run to her mistress' room.
By what mysterious bond could these two men--one nobleness itself, that was self-evident--be connected with each other?
But I dare not!"
"Ah!
At this place the jangada halted for twelve hours, so as to give a rest to the crew.
These occupations do not end here, for they are intrepid hunters, or, if they prefer it, intrepid fishers for the manatee.
The operation commences with sunset and finishes with the dawn.
"What causes the noise?" asked Minha.
Six brown points were seen moving along the surface, and these were the two pointed snouts and four pinions of the lamantins.
It required all the address of the pilot to steer through the archipelago, going from one bank to another, avoiding the shallows, shirking the eddies, and maintaining the advance.
'I think I'm glad it's only a game; it IS only a game, isn't it?' said Jane.
'I got them this morning - cook - and I'd quite forgotten,' he explained as he divided them with scrupulous fairness into four heaps.
Another man had swum over, and his fingers were on the window-ledge.
'I should just hope we HAD!' he said; 'I'd give something for a jolly good boiling kettle of lead.
'No,' bawled Robert, 'of course we don't!
'Look here!
The pavement they stood on seemed to tremble.
'Then if we HAD the mutton it would be real,' said Robert. 'Oh, don't I wish we could find it!'
Never,
Biscuits.'
'Look here,' she said, 'it's just come into my head.
They looked at Robert with surprised respect.
She went to Martha and said, 'May we have just biscuits for tea?
'He's been getting ready to be brave all the afternoon.
Then they stood in the arched gate-house, breathing hard and looking at each other.
'Yes, but look here, Squirrel,' said Robert; 'you're so clever at explaining about invisibleness and all that.
It is true that, directly he bit a piece off, the rest vanished; but it was all right, because he knew he had it in his hand though he could neither see nor feel it.
Never, NEVER!'
'Cheer up, jenny,' said Robert - 'it won't last much longer.'
But he saw the clinging fingers, and hit them as hard as he could with an iron bar that he caught up from the floor.
They heard a splash below, but no one below seemed to have felt it.
And I'll tell the others to fetch theirs.'
'Cheer to show them we aren't afraid, and rattle the daggers to make more noise.
A new cap, and everything!'
Rather broken and crumbled, certainly, but still biscuits.
'Cheer,' said Robert in a fierce whisper.
'Dodson and Fogg have taken Mrs. Bardell in execution for her costs, Sir,' said Job.
'I would rather that the subject should be never mentioned between us, Perker,' interposed Mr. Pickwick hastily.
'I shall not forget your exertions in the garden at Clifton.'
Perker nodded his head thoughtfully, and pulled out his watch.
'If I pay her costs for her,' said Mr. Pickwick indignantly.
PICKWICK'S BENEVOLENCE PROVES STRONGER THAN HIS OBSTINACY
There!' Hereupon, the little man threw one leg over the other, and made a show of beginning to read with great composure and application.
Do you hear?
As Sam Weller spoke, he threw the door open, and there rushed tumultuously into the room, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, leading after him by the hand, the identical young lady who at Dingley Dell had worn the boots with the fur round the tops, and who, now a very pleasing compound of blushes and confusion, and lilac silk, and a smart bonnet, and a rich lace veil, looked prettier than ever.
'It rests with Dodson and Fogg; you know that very well.'
'Sam is quite right.
Summoning the cab of most promising appearance, he directed the driver to repair to Montague Place, Russell Square.
'I can't speak to you just now, Sam,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'I am engaged at this moment, Sam.'
And is your brother acquainted with all this, my dear?'
'You have delivered the little parcel I gave you for your old landlord, Sam?'
The wine being by this time poured out, Lowten drank to Mrs. Perker and the children, and Job to Perker.
'I know it,' was Mr. Pickwick's reply.
The attorney betook himself to his drawing-room, the clerk to the Magpie and Stump, and Job to Covent Garden Market to spend the night in a vegetable basket.
Come!
I hope you may live to remember and feel deeply, what I shall have to communicate, Sir.'
Mr. Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass arrived, most opportunely, in this stage of the pleadings, and as it was necessary to explain to them all that had occurred, together with the various reasons pro and con, the whole of the arguments were gone over again, after which everybody urged every argument in his own way, and at his own length.
'Can you forgive my imprudence?'
I have come here on purpose.
If my brother hears of this, first, from you, I feel certain we shall be reconciled.
The little man gave a double-knock on the lid of his snuff-box, opened it, took a great pinch, shut it up again, and repeated the words, 'With you.'
'This is a messenger from Mr. Pickwick, Sir.'
A jury had decided against you; well, their verdict is wrong, but still they decided as they thought right, and it IS against you.
'Pooh, pooh, my dear Sir,' said the little man, untying the bundle, and glancing eagerly at Mr. Pickwick out of the corners of his eyes.
'I have, Sir,' replied Sam.
'And you know how she comes here, I suppose; I mean on what grounds, and at whose suit?'
He turned here, to look about him, and his eye lightened as he did so.
You must prevent mischief, my dear Sir.
I have a good deal to say to you.'
'Is this all you have to say to me?' inquired Mr. Pickwick mildly.
'You must take this matter in hand for them, my dear sir.
'Mary, my dear, sit down,' said Mr. Pickwick, cutting short these compliments.
'You forget, my love,' said Mr. Pickwick gently, 'you forget that I am a prisoner.'
No important letter come in a parcel, is there?'
'Sam's account of the matter,' replied Perker, 'is, I will venture to say, a perfectly correct one.
'No!' exclaimed Perker, putting his hands in his pockets, and reclining against the sideboard.
'Ah, to be sure,' said Perker gravely.
'What has put Sam into this extraordinary state?'
'With me!' ejaculated Mr. Pickwick, rising nervously from his chair, and reseating himself directly afterwards.
'Oh, you wouldn't like that, ma'am,' replied Mrs. Bardell, rather hastily; for it was not at all advisable, with reference to the lodgings, to encourage such notions; 'you wouldn't like it, ma'am.'
'What place is this?' inquired Mrs. Bardell, pausing.
'Well?'
'Now, ladies,' cried the man with the ash stick, looking into the coach, and shaking Mrs. Sanders to wake her, 'Come!' Rousing her friend, Mrs. Sanders alighted.
'Mother said I wasn't to,' rejoined Master Bardell, 'I'm a-goin' to have some, I am.' Cheered by this prospect, the precocious boy applied himself to his infantile treadmill, with increased vigour.
'What is there, Tommy?' said Mrs. Cluppins coaxingly.
'Yes.
I want him directly.
Mr. Raddle, ma'am; Mrs. Cluppins, ma'am; Mrs. Raddle, ma'am.'
'I have been a good deal flurried,' replied Mrs. Raddle, in a reproachful manner.
Mrs. Bardell, not yet thoroughly awake, complied.
'Mrs.
'This is Mrs. Bardell.'
'Drat the boy,' said little Mrs. Cluppins. 'He thinks of nobody but himself.
The door swung heavily after them, and they descended a small flight of steps.
'But won't you refresh yourself after your walk, Mr. Jackson?' said Mrs. Bardell persuasively.
'Dear me, how slow the gentleman is,'exclaimed Mrs. Rogers.
'Certainly,' replied Jackson drily.
'My dear,' remonstrated Mr. Raddle, 'I didn't mean anything, my dear.'
Mrs. Sanders, who, according to custom, was very busy with the bread-and-butter, expressed the same opinion, and Mr. Raddle quietly retired.
Of course Mrs. Bardell burst into tears, and requested to be led from the table instantly; upon which the affectionate child began to cry too, most dismally.
'Lor!' ejaculated that lady, starting at the sudden nature of the communication.
'Is anything the matter?
'A prisoner!' said Sam, quickly replacing his hat.
'Oh! Mrs. Rogers is a-goin',' replied Master Bardell, opening his eyes very wide as he delivered the intelligence.
'Bless us!' said the lady.'Are we at Freeman's Court?'
If you'll order the waiter to deliver him anything short, he won't drink it off at once, won't he!--only try him!' Mr. Jackson's fingers wandered playfully round his nose at this portion of his discourse, to warn his hearers that he was speaking ironically.
'Who else is a-goin', lovey?' said Mrs. Cluppins, in an insinuating manner.
'The house with the red door, cabmin.
'Safe and sound,' replied the man with the ash stick.
Sanders is going, she is,' replied Tommy; 'I'm going too, I am.'
I've kept the coach on purpose for you to go back in.'
'You really must consider yourself, my dear, which you never do.
'Who's the plaintives?
Come, Tommy, tell your dear Cluppy.'
'Don't bother the woman,' said the turnkey to Weller; 'she's just come in.'
'You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Raddle,' said the other little woman, who was no other than Mrs. Cluppins. 'What have I been a-doing of?' asked Mr. Raddle.
'Stop at the house with a green door, driver,' said the heavy gentleman.
'It's put me all over in such a tremble, Betsy,' replied Mrs. Raddle. 'Raddle ain't like a man; he leaves everythink to me.'
As Jackson hurried away in company with the man with the ash stick another man, with a key in his hand, who had been looking on, led the bewildered female to a second short flight of steps leading to a doorway.
Mr. Jackson then said he was afraid it was time to go; upon which, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs. Cluppins, and Tommy (who it was arranged should accompany Mrs. Bardell, leaving the others to Mr. Raddle's protection), got into the coach.
'Only one of our public offices,' replied Jackson, hurrying her through a door, and looking round to see that the other women were following. 'Look sharp, Isaac!'
Even the lodger's little servant, who was thirteen years old and three feet high, murmured her sympathy.
'Now vere am I to pull up?' inquired the driver.
This is the Fleet, ma'am. Wish you good-night, Mrs. Bardell.
Mabel herself was inclined to these clauses.
All down the long brown seats members were shifting and arranging themselves more decorously, uncrossing their legs, slipping their hats beneath the leather fringes.
She clenched her hands on the rail, and stared steadily before her on the ranks of heads, the open gangways, the great mace on the table, and heard, above the murmur of the crowd outside and the dying whispers within, her own heart beat.
To-morrow he was to be in Spain.
A rumour had spread that his volor had been seen passing over Lake Como, and had been instantly contradicted.
Her heart had yearned for some such thing as this--some public corporate profession of what all now believed.
And through swimming eyes she saw the long ridges of heads rise beneath her, and through drumming ears heard the murmur of many feet. All faces looked this way; and she watched them as a mirror to see the reflected light of His presence.
Where then was the difficulty?
"Englishmen, I assent to the Bill of Worship."
Ah! but the Bill must pass first....
He would come in from beneath through the door that none but He might use, straight into the seat beneath the canopy.
A month ago he had assented to a similar Bill in Germany, and had delivered a speech on the same subject at Turin.
These four things were facts--they were the manifestations of what she called the Spirit of the World--and if others called that Power God, yet surely these ought to be considered as His functions.
Ah! there was silence now outside; the soft roar had died.
These penalties were not vindictive: on a first offence a week's detention only was to be given; on the second, one month's imprisonment; on the third, one year's; and on the fourth, perpetual imprisonment until the criminal yielded.
The house was full from end to end; a late comer ran in from the twilight of the south door and looked distractedly about him in the full light before he saw his vacant place.
But she would hear His voice--that must be joy enough for her....
He had said Twenty-One, so it was to be twenty-one.
When that ceased she would know that he was come.
As she looked, too, she saw the President of the House coming down the three steps from his chair, for Another would need it in a few moments.
There were a few clauses in the Bill--notably those bearing on the point as to when the new worship was to be made compulsory on all subjects over the age of seven--it might be he would object and veto these.
A sharp bell-note impinged from beneath, and in a moment the drawling voice of the speaker stopped.
No one knew either what he would say to-night.
She knew well enough by now that the President of Europe would not be half-a-minute either before or after his time.
For herself she intended to go at least once a week to the little old church half-a-mile away from her home, to kneel there before the sunlit sanctuary, to meditate on sweet mysteries, to present herself to That which she was yearning to love, and to drink, it might be, new draughts of life and power.
She had so resented the dulness of folk who were content with action and never considered its springs.
His supreme punctuality was famous all over the continent.
For herself the new worship was a crowning sign of the triumph of Humanity.
Once more she lifted her wrist, saw that it wanted five minutes of the hour; then she leaned forward from her corner and stared down into the House.
Mabel, seated in the gallery that evening behind the President's chair, had already glanced at her watch half-a-dozen times in the last hour, hoping each time that twenty-one o'clock was nearer than she feared.
It might be three words or twenty thousand.
Ah! these Christians had understood human nature, she had told herself a hundred times: it was true that they had degraded it, darkened light, poisoned thought, misinterpreted instinct; but they had understood that man must worship --must worship or sink.
He had come then.
But she was not mistress of the kitchen.
“Is anything the matter, Martha?” asked the young woman.
She was so old and so much a part of the place, it was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing.
Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way, in ordering its affairs.
Old Martha was not working.
She was still harping on the theme of death coming to the farm.
She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with a qualm of self-reproach one day when she came into the kitchen and found an unaccustomed state of things in that usually busy quarter.
Her husband, she knew, was down at a tree-felling some little distance off, but she might find some other intelligent soul who knew the old woman better than she did.
And they always quarrelled and shouted as to who was right and who was wrong.
The poultry followed her in interested fashion, and swine grunted interrogations at her from behind the bars of their styes, but barnyard and rickyard, orchard and stables and dairy, gave no reward to her search.
Young Mrs. Ladbruk, whose husband had just come into the farm by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china.
Old Martha stood in the middle of a mob of poultry scattering handfuls of grain around her.
“It don’t look like it,” he said, nodding towards the yard.
A grin spread over his good-natured features.
“Nonsense,” he said; “Martha means to live to a hundred.
When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman. She was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and picturesque—but she was dreadfully in the way.
Above all, the coveted window corner, that was to be a dainty, cheerful oasis in the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and lumbered with a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; over them seemed to be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb. Decidedly Martha was in the way.
It was difficult for anyone, let alone a stranger like Emma, to get her to talk of the days that had been; her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose feeding-time was overdue, and the various little faults and lapses that chequer a farmhouse routine.
The one they quarrelled about most was a fine old gentleman with an angry face—she had seen his picture on the walls. She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it, for the farm had changed its politics from time to time.
And what memories she must have of human generations that had passed away in her time.
The farm was a family property, and passed to the rabbit-shooting cousin as the next-of-kin.
“I’m afraid old Martha is dying,” said Emma.
The farm, she soon found out, had that faculty common to farmyards of swallowing up and losing its human population.
But she threw the grain deftly amid the wilderness of beaks, and her quavering voice carried as far as the two people who were watching her.
The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort or decoration.
Emma turned to catch the meaning of his remark.
I knew it were a-coming.”
On a cold grey morning she stood waiting, with her boxes already stowed in the farm cart, till the last of the market produce should be ready, for the train she was to catch was of less importance than the chickens and butter and eggs that were to be offered for sale.
The window nook made almost a little room in itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as situation and capabilities went.
And she turned to fling a handful of barley at a belated group of guinea-fowl that came racing toward her.
She made her way to a narrow barred casement that opened into the farm larder.
If there were something in these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last good-bye word to in that old kitchen.
Jim was not the sort of person to whom one had to break news gently.
Dairy and poultry-yard, and herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where there was room for everything and where muddy boots left traces that were easily swept away.
"I believe that nobody is home."
"Twenty dollars," said Anne, who was never meant to match business wits with a Copp, or she would not have offered her price at the start.
"You'd better drive the horse and buggy into that open shed.
"I believe we're going to have a heavy thunder-shower," she exclaimed in dismay, "Oh, Anne, what will we do?"
The latter, somewhat tired and stiff, ducked down into the interior of her prison and thankfully emerged into liberty once more.
But if it isn't it may be too late to go to Wesley Keyson's afterward."
The Tory government ran the road through when they were in power just to show they were doing something."
Green Gables folk had always been Conservatives.
But she could not release herself.
"If I were sure the platter was the right kind I would not mind waiting until they came home.
Finally the rain ceased, the sun came out, and Diana ventured across the puddles of the yard.
I didn't see anything else--I didn't LOOK for anything else."
Diana untied the pony and drove into the shed, just as the first heavy drops of rain fell.
"Well, I'm doing my best to grow," said Davy, "but it's a thing you can't hurry much.
If Marilla wasn't so stingy with her jam I believe I'd grow a lot faster."
"You needn't worry--there's no harm done.
"Oh, Anne, it's sweet . . . just sweet.
Don't pity me, Diana, for I haven't minded it at all.
The house was a very old-fashioned one, situated on a slope, which fact had necessitated the building of a stone basement under one end.
The shade isn't down, so if we climbed up on the roof of that little house we could look into the pantry and might be able to see the platter.
As for my garden, it hurts me every time I go into it.
"Everything is so parched up.
She always does, because she says I'm too extravagant with them if company comes."
But it's worth twenty-five dollars.
"No, I don't think so," decided Anne, after due reflection, "since our motive is not idle curiosity."
"If you do the story of this will get out everywhere and I shall be ashamed to show my face. No, we must just wait until the Copp girls come home and bind them to secrecy.
Paul Irving would have known the meaning of this, or made a meaning out of it for himself, if he didn't; but practical Davy, who, as Anne often despairingly remarked, hadn't a particle of imagination, was only puzzled and disgusted.
"Mother and I have just got home from Carmody, and I saw Mary Sentner from Spencer vale in Mr. Blair's store.
Fortunately my parasol is in the buggy.
Fortunately for Anne, Marilla called out at this moment from her room.
Both girls laughed over the old memory . . . concerning which, if any of my readers are ignorant and curious, I must refer them to Anne's earlier history.
"Lean on the window sill," advised Diana, and Anne accordingly leaned. Much to her delight, she saw, as she peered through the pane, a willow-ware platter, exactly such as she was in quest of, on the shelf in front of the window.
But you might as well argue with a post as with Martha.
"I've good news for you, Anne," said Diana.
"That is the pantry window, I feel sure," she said, "because this house is just like Uncle Charles' at Newbridge, and that is their pantry window.
In her joy Anne forgot the precarious nature of her footing, incautiously ceased to lean on the window sill, gave an impulsive little hop of pleasure . . . and the next moment she had crashed through the roof up to her armpits, and there she hung, quite unable to extricate herself. Diana dashed into the duck house and, seizing her unfortunate friend by the waist, tried to draw her down.
I like writing such things, but of course nothing of the sort would ever do for publication, for editors insist on plots, so Priscilla says.
"I'm afraid it won't bear my weight," she said as she gingerly stepped on the roof.
When the girls were safely away, Diana driving and Anne holding the coveted platter carefully on her lap, the green, rain-freshened solitudes of the Tory Road were enlivened by ripples of girlish laughter.
When I go home I mean to write it down.
She hurriedly unlocked the back door, produced the axe, and with a few skillfull blows set Anne free.
It's just a string of fancies.
You'd better see what she wants."
If you can find an axe you might chop me out, though.
She says the old Copp girls on the Tory Road have a willow-ware platter and she thinks it's exactly like the one we had at the supper.
Oh, there's Miss Sarah Copp now. PLEASE, Diana, go and explain."
"Nor I don't want to go out to Uncle Richard neither.
"Of course, I was, dear boy.
"Miss Copp," she said earnestly.
"If they're not back by sunset you'll have to go for other assistance, I suppose," said Anne reluctantly, "but you mustn't go until you really have to.
If Marilla had been stingy she wouldn't have taken you and Dora when your mother died.
"Did you get very wet?" she asked anxiously.
"My head and shoulders are quite dry and my skirt is only a little damp where the rain beat through the lathes.
"You just bet I wouldn't!" Davy was emphatic on that point.
I imagined out a most interesting dialogue between the asters and the sweet peas and the wild canaries in the lilac bush and the guardian spirit of the garden.
Thunder it was undoubtedly, and Diana, having made a hasty pilgrimage around the house, returned to announce that a very black cloud was rising rapidly in the northwest.
But come in, come in.
"Well, I'll see," said Miss Sarah cautiously.
Allan says it is on the principle of calling a place a grove because there are no trees in it," said Diana, "for nobody lives along the road except the Copp girls and old Martin Bovyer at the further end, who is a Liberal.
"No . . . the splinters hurt too badly.
She turned her head at Davy's question and answered dreamily,
"Oh, no, it wouldn't be suitable at all.
I wouldn't mind my misfortunes so much if they were romantic, as Mrs. Morgan's heroines' always are, but they are always just simply ridiculous.
Martha locked up all the cake and cheese and preserves afore she went.
Diana hastily dragged in the previously mentioned keg and Anne found that it was just sufficiently high to furnish a secure resting place for her feet.
Thank goodness, we Copps keep our pantries presentable at all times and don't care who sees into them.
The next afternoon the girls fared forth on their platter hunting expedition.
Although scrupulously whitewashed it had become somewhat shaky, and Anne felt rather dubious as she scrambled up from the vantage point of a keg placed on a box.
And you want to buy my platter.
I wish I had a pencil and paper to do it now, because I daresay I'll forget the best parts before I reach home."
Fancy what the Copp girls will think when they drive into their yard and see a girl's head and shoulders sticking out of the roof of one of their outhouses. Listen . . . is that a wagon?
Martha's the boss of this establishment I can tell you.
Don't you know that it is only very foolish folk who talk sense all the time?"
Yet here she was doing it . . . so wide sometimes is the gulf between theory and practice.
"We're not home yet," said Diana rather pessimistically, "and there's no telling what may happen before we are.
A thunderstorm seemed a trifle in comparison with what had already happened.
Occasionally Anne slanted back her parasol and waved an encouraging hand to her friend; But conversation at that distance was quite out of the question.
Would you have liked to live with Mrs. Wiggins?"
I'm getting awful tired of living under another woman's thumb.
Diana the faithful had a pencil and discovered a sheet of wrapping paper in the box of the buggy.
It will be such a weight off my mind, for I have to go to town day after tomorrow and how can I face your Aunt Josephine without a willow-ware platter?
I wonder what the Copp girls value this house at.
We've had a rather trying time but it's over now.
I kept thinking how much good the rain will do and how glad my garden must be for it, and imagining what the flowers and buds would think when the drops began to fall.
As for that old duckhouse, I'm glad it's smashed, for maybe now Martha will agree to having it taken down.
"Well, I guess you may have it.
I'm not uncomfortable, as long as I keep perfectly still . . . not uncomfortable in BODY I mean.
So much she saw before the catastrophe came.
Diana looked at a certain little square window over the basement.
It was very warm and windless, and the dust on the road was such as might have been expected after six weeks of dry weather.
It was a diverting thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of those close-ranged, bulky, window-lit mansions that faced him, if he chose.
The young man glanced at the clock again and frowned darkly.
"He's doped out a fifty-dollar bill, anyway.
Prince Michael, of the Electorate of Valleluna, sat on his favourite bench in the park.
At half-past eight,' she said, 'at exactly half-past eight you may be watching the middle upper window of the top floor.
"Come to me when your marriage day is set and I will give you a cheque for the money."
The comings and goings of people in hurry and dread, controlled by the little metal moving hands of a clock, always made him sad.
Park bum for twenty years.
"I think," said Prince Michael, "that I will sleep a little.
"It's Dopy Mike," said one.
Stay by me until then.
In the shadowed spots fauns and hamadryads wooed, unconscious of the gaze of mortal eyes.
"Let me repeat to you," said Prince Michael, in his even, well-modulated tones, "that women are the natural enemies of clocks.
Wish I knew the brand of hop that he smokes."
The young man lifted it, placed it over the frowsy face and moved one of the grotesquely relaxed limbs into a more comfortable position.
"Ten minutes to nine!" exclaimed the young man, with an impatient gesture of despair.
Prince Michael smiled his enigmatic, gentle, comprehending smile and caught the coat sleeve of the other.
The shades were drawn, and the lights in many rooms shone dimly through them.
And then, from habit, he glanced at the clock in the tower, and made further oration.
Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled.
This woman shall be yours.
His courteous manner and words forbade that.
The hands stood at three minutes to nine.
THE CALIPH, CUPID AND THE CLOCK
His battered hat rolled from the bench to the ground.
I have observed you looking persistently at that clock.
"By George! that clock's half an hour fast!
The time for the signal to appear has passed twenty-three minutes ago.
He found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him.
For he had tasted of the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his mouth, had stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the unarmoured, beating heart of the world.
"I beg your pardon for addressing you," he said, "but I perceive that you are disturbed in mind.
You have the word of the hereditary Prince of Valleluna.
And above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an illuminated clock in the tower of an antique public building.
"You don't know Marian--of course.
I appear incognito, of course, as you may gather from my appearance.
The park was deserted save for one dilapidated figure that sprawled, asleep, on a bench.
If I decide to forgive I will hang out of that window a white silk scarf.
"Never, on your principality!" exclaimed the young man, hopelessly.
If it may serve to mitigate the liberty I have taken I will add that I am Prince Michael, heir to the throne of the Electorate of Valleluna.
"'I want time to think it over,' said she.
That was the first thing about her that attracted me.
It was his chief solace and satisfaction to alleviate individual distress, to confer favours upon worthy ones who had need of succour, to dazzle unfortunates by unexpected and bewildering gifts of truly royal magnificence, bestowed, however, with wisdom and judiciousness.
"Sit down," said the Prince calmly.
I'll try Jack's ranch awhile and top off with the Klondike and whiskey.
"It doesn't look as if I would need that palace on the Hudson, but I appreciate your offer, just the same."
And as Prince Michael's eye rested upon the glowing face of the great clock in the tower, his smile, altruistic as it was, became slightly tinged with contempt.
'There is one thing certain; I will either fully forgive you, or I will never see your face again. There will be no half-way business.
The coolness of the September night quickened the life in him like a rare, tonic wine.
But there must be no clocks in that palace--they measure our follies and limit our pleasures.
There are few mortal misfortunes that I cannot alleviate or overcome.
Do you wonder that I am a little disturbed, my Prince of Rags and Whiskers?"
Do you agree to that?"
I wanted to be forgiven, of course--we are always wanting women to forgive us, aren't we, Prince?"
If you will so far confide in me I would ask you to relate to me your story."
The moon was just clearing the roofs of the range of dwellings that bounded the quadrangle on the east. Children laughed and played about the fine-sprayed fountain.
He glanced again at the clock in the tower.
"Your Royal Highness, I will," he said, in tones of mock deference.
He laughed, and even then it did not.
I've got the mitten instead of the scarf.
"I carry a watch except when I've got my radiant rags on."
It is a fancy of mine to render aid to others whom I think worthy of it.
They stopped and gazed upon it.
But he accepted the momentary diversion.
"Wait," he said solemnly, "till the clock strikes.
"Remain!" commanded Prince Michael, in so potent a voice that the disturbed one wheeled around with a somewhat chagrined laugh.
He was often rebuffed but never offensively.
"Do you see yonder house--the one with three upper windows lighted?
A king has a great opportunity to make himself loved.
There was a slight pause, then, with a sigh, Pollyanna resumed.
He said 'twas a sissy name, and he hated it.
And I know somebody else that said so, too."
I'd like to be one."
"And, anyway, I DON'T understand why some folks should have such a lot, and other folks shouldn't have anything; and I DON'T like it.
It would be such a lot nicer if they did!
But everybody was so good to me, and I saw such a lot of wonderful things--Bunker Hill, and the Public Garden, and the Seeing Boston autos, and miles of pictures and statues and store-windows and streets that didn't have any end.
She says I don't understand; that 'twould--er--pauperize her and be indiscriminate and pernicious, and--Well, it was SOMETHING like that, anyway," bridled the little girl, aggrievedly, as the man began to laugh.
Nor did Pollyanna lose any time in starting on a round of fly-away minute calls on all her old friends.
Here was something she understood. Here was no problem that had to deal with big, fearsome-sounding words.
"I had a perfectly lovely time, and lots of things were so queer and different, you know--like eating dinner at night instead of noons, when you ought to eat it.
"And I've known you ever since."
Indeed, for the next few days, according to Nancy, "There wasn't no putting of your finger on her anywheres, for by the time you'd got your finger down she wa'n't there."
"But, then, I ain't 'JAMIE,' you know," he finished with scornful emphasis, as he turned loftily away, leaving a distressed, bewildered Pollyanna behind him.
If it's anything like that, I don't mind being one, a mite.
Why, he can MAKE stories right out of his own head! Besides, it isn't 'Lady Lancelot,'--it's 'Sir Lancelot.' If you knew half as much as he does you'd know that, too!" she finished, with flashing eyes.
CHAPTER XIV
This time Beldingsville did not literally welcome Pollyanna home with brass bands and bunting--perhaps because the hour of her expected arrival was known to but few of the townspeople.
But there certainly was no lack of joyful greetings on the part of everybody from the moment she stepped from the railway train with her Aunt Polly and Dr. Chilton.
"Your--dad?" repeated Pollyanna, in amazement.
And if I ever have a lot I shall just give some of it to folks who don't have any, even if it does make me pauperized and pernicious, and--" But Mr. Pendleton was laughing so hard now that Pollyanna, after a moment's struggle, surrendered and laughed with him.
Then, with some spirit: "Jamie isn't loony!
"Oh, I liked it--I just loved it--some of it."
Pollyanna had, for the moment, forgotten all about the original subject of the controversy--the name "Jamie" that was dubbed "sissy."
She assumed that everybody would be as interested as she herself was.
Why, just think, Mr. Pendleton, there are lots of folks that live on dirty, narrow streets, and don't even have beans and fish balls to eat, nor things even as good as missionary barrels to wear.
"And what happened next?" she prompted.
"Well, anyway," she reiterated, when she had caught her breath, "I don't understand it, all the same."
And Mrs. Carew wouldn't let me.
"That's the way Mrs. Carew talked.
He is a very nice boy.
Growing more and more jealous moment by moment, still doggedly he held his ground.
"I--I don't think I know what a socialist is.
She was good to me."
It came through Jimmy Pendleton.
Pollyanna nodded, all sympathy and interest.
Dad helped about the hayin'--and I did, too, some. The farmer's wife was awful good to me, and pretty quick she was callin' me 'Jamie.' I don't know why, but she just did.
But, tell me," he added, after a minute, "who is this Jamie you've been talking so much about since you came?"
"I do." Pollyanna frowned again and pondered.
"Wasn't there ANYBODY else down to Boston but just that everlasting 'Jamie'?"
He got awful mad--so mad that I remembered it always--what he said.
JIMMY AND THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER
"Why, how could he know Jamie?"
I was kind of sorry, 'cause I liked her--the farmer's wife, I mean.
The boy sighed.
Carew, and a whole lot like her--that live in perfectly beautiful houses, and have more things to eat and wear than they know what to do with.
And always, everywhere she went, Pollyanna met the question: "Well, how did you like Boston?" Perhaps to no one did she answer this more fully than she did to Mr. Pendleton.
"Oh, Pollyanna, Pollyanna," he chuckled; "I'm afraid you're getting into pretty deep water.
"A--what?" questioned the little girl, dubiously.
"Oh, but some of them do," maintained Pollyanna, in eager defense. "Now there's Sadie Dean--she sells bows, lovely bows in a big store--she WANTS to know people; and I introduced her to Mrs. Carew, and we had her up to the house, and we had Jamie and lots of others there, too; and she was SO glad to know them!
In talking of Jamie, Pollyanna lost her worried, baffled look. Pollyanna loved to talk of Jamie.
She said folks didn't, down there."
And I mean that I should think, from your talk, that there wasn't ANYBODY down to Boston but just that loony boy who calls them birds and squirrels 'Lady Lancelot,' and all that tommyrot."
As was usually the case when this question was put to her, she began her reply with a troubled frown.
She didn't know 'em herself.
"Oh, yes--and you've known me ever since," repeated Jimmy--but in a far different voice: Jimmy had suddenly come back to the present, and to his grievance.
Jimmy Pendleton flushed miserably and looked utterly wretched.
"Why, Jimmy Bean, what do you mean?" cried Pollyanna.
"No, dear, I'm afraid you don't," agreed the man, growing suddenly very grave and tender-eyed; "nor any of the rest of us, for that matter.
On most occasions she was not disappointed in the interest shown; but one day she met with a surprise.
Besides, in this particular instance--would not Mr. Pendleton be especially interested in Mrs. Carew's taking the boy into her home, for who better than himself could understand the need of a child's presence?
"Why, Jimmy Be--Pendleton!" gasped Pollyanna.
"And then you ran away and I found you that day, down by Mrs. Snow's," exulted Pollyanna, softly.
He said 'Jamie' wasn't no sort of a name for a boy, and that no son of his should ever be called it.
There's parts of it--Oh, I was glad to be there," she explained hastily.
We stopped 'most a week with a farmer.
Now if THOSE folks only knew the other folks--" But Mr. Pendleton interrupted with a laugh.
"I don't doubt it, Pollyanna," smiled the man.
Then they put me in the 'sylum."
And Pollyanna told him.
I'm Jimmy Pendleton.
"Who was it?"
It was not often that Jimmy said much of that mysterious past life of his, before she had known him.
And 'twas there dad--died.
But if they COULD know each other, so that the rich people could give the poor people part of their money--"
For that matter, Pollyanna talked to everybody about Jamie.
And he knows a lot--books and stories!
The boy lifted his chin a little.
There was no answer.
He wouldn't even stay to finish the work, but him and me took to the road again that night.
And one day father heard her.
And folks.
But again Mr. Pendleton interrupted with a laugh.
"We just went on till we found another place.
"Well, I'm sure--I thought you liked folks," commented the man.
"He didn't. 'Twasn't about that Jamie. 'Twas about me." The boy still spoke sullenly, with his eyes turned away.
Yet there was a curious softness in his voice that was always noticeable whenever he spoke of his father.
"My dear child, did it ever occur to you that these people don't CARE to know each other?" he asked quizzically.
3.
These Romans being in great fear, lest the place should be taken by force, made an agreement with them to depart upon certain conditions; and when they had obtained the security they desired, they delivered up the citadel, into which the people of Machaerus put a garrison for their own security, and held it in their own power.
6.
The Prince went home, told his father all that had happened, and asked him to have a leather rope plaited, long enough to reach to the other world.
And then they all went to the place from which they had to be hoisted into the upper world.
Perhaps he'll be killed; but then if he isn't, he'll never give us these beauties as wives.'
And when the Prince came to the blue sea, he looked--there slept the Norka on a stone in the middle of the sea; and when it snored, the water was agitated for seven miles around.
The King did all he could, but he was unable to destroy it. So at last he called his sons together and said, 'Whoever will destroy the Norka, to him will I give the half of my kingdom.'
So much the worse for wear was he, so thoroughly had he altered in appearance, that nobody would have suspected him of being a Prince.
'Well, brothers, farewell!
It fled back, and the Prince ran after it.
Having entered into the service of this master, the Prince began to ask what was going on in that country.
Well, on the third day the youngest son undertook the task.
The head jumped off, saying the while, 'Well, I'm done for now!' and rolled far away into the sea.
Then he laughed at them for being such cowards, and said:
Well, he walked and walked.
And the master, having handed over the clothes, went home, but he no longer found his dear journeyman there.
Each of them turned her palace into an egg--for they were all enchantresses--and they taught him how to turn the eggs into palaces, and back again, and they handed over the eggs to him.
'Go along, master!
Midnight sounded.
'Hail, Prince Ivan!
They fought and fought; the Prince gave the beast three wounds.
'Allow me, my father, to go and give alms to the beggars.'
Into that park there used to come a huge beast--Norka was its name--and do fearful mischief, devouring some of the animals every night.
The next day the second son went, and did just the same.
By the time the princely workman had gone the round of all the artificers, the Princesses had received what they had asked for; all their clothes were just like what they had been in the other world. Then they wept bitterly because the Prince had not come, and it was impossible for them to hold out any longer; it was necessary that they should be married.
And his master replied: 'Our two Princes--for the third one has disappeared--have brought away brides from the other world, and want to marry them, but those brides refuse. For they insist on having all their wedding-clothes made for them first, exactly like those which they used to have in the other world, and that without being measured for them.
'However can I undertake to make clothes of that sort?
There he found a bed, on which he lay down to rest.
Neither of them offered to do so.
His father ordered this to be done.
I work for quite common folks,' says his master.
As soon as it was night, he took his weapons and set out.
The Prince pulled himself together, leapt to his feet, crossed himself, and went straight at the beast.
'Thou who art in my house, name thyself!
So he went on to the youngest sister, who lived in a golden palace.
And when she saw him she was delighted with him, and said:
Neither of them could so much as stir it, but as soon as he touched it, away it flew to a distance, though it was ever so big--big as a hill. And when he had flung the stone aside, he spoke a second time to his brothers, saying:
He was delighted, and he seized them and carried them off to the King.
When the Princesses saw that the clothes were those which had been theirs in the other world, they guessed that Prince Ivan was in this world, so they exchanged glances with each other, but they held their peace.
After killing the beast, the Prince went back again, picking up all the three sisters by the way, with the intention of taking them out into the upper world: for they all loved him and would not be separated from him.
But he went to the house of a certain tailor, and engaged himself as his servant.
The earth began to shake, and the Norka came rushing up, and burst right through the fence into the park, so huge was it.
In return, ask of me anything thou desirest.
His brothers lowered him accordingly, and when he had reached the other world, underneath the earth, he went on his way.
And when they came to where the rope was, the Prince took hold of it and made the maidens fast to it.
'Then carry me into the other world,' he replied.
I will do anything for thee.'
So the tailor went.
Well, the eldest son undertook the task.
His brothers hoisted the stone to a great height, and then cut the rope.
When he came to his senses it was too late; the day had already dawned.
Thanks!
Presently he came up with the beast, and they began a fight.
The Prince crossed himself, went up to it, and smote it on the head with his sword.
Into each of these he entered, took the maidens' robes, went out again, turned the palaces back into eggs, and went home.
But when they were ready for the wedding, the youngest bride said to the King:
I bound up three of the wounds which thou didst give him.'
And when he got there he hung up the robes on the wall, and lay down to sleep.
Then he told her all that had happened, and she said:
They had three sons, two of them with their wits about them, but the third a simpleton.
At last they were both utterly exhausted, so they lay down to take a short rest.
Thereupon he came forth.
The Prince caught it up, and again gave it three wounds.
They all laughed him to scorn, because he was so stupid, feeling sure he wouldn't do anything.
But their brother was no fool; he guessed what they were at, so he fastened the rope to a stone, and then gave it a pull.
So she seized him by the hand, and brought him into the hall, and said to the King:
But before he reached the park, he went into a traktir (or tavern), and there he spent the whole night in revelry.
In one of the rooms a dinner was laid out. He sat down and dined, and then went into a bedroom.
Presently there came in a lady, more beautiful than can be imagined anywhere but in a fairy tale, who said:
Presently there came flying a bird--such a big one that the light was blotted out by it.
Long have I awaited thee!'
But he soon saw that he couldn't catch it on foot, so he hastened to the stable, laid his hands on the best horse there, and set off in pursuit.
He went up to a tree in order to take shelter under it, and on that tree he saw some young birds which were being thoroughly drenched.
So when they had agreed on this, they lowered the rope.
But all of a sudden, just as the Prince began chasing it for the fourth time, the beast fled to a great white stone, tilted it up, and escaped into the other world, crying out to the Prince: 'Then only will you overcome me, when you enter here.'
It had been dark there before, but now it became darker still.
Well, after this they drank, and enjoyed themselves, and held sweet converse together, and then the Prince took leave of her, and went on to the second sister, the one who lived in the silver palace, and with her also he stayed awhile.
Now the King had a deer park in which were quantities of wild animals of different kinds.
Again the Prince gave the beast three wounds, and then he and the beast lay down again to rest.
'Here is he who brought us out of the other world.
All this the Prince did.
When they got there, they built a palace on the spot, and lived in it for some time. But when everything was ready, the youngest brother said to the others: 'Now, brothers, who is going to lift this stone?'
When the rope was made, the Prince called for his brothers, and he and they, having taken servants with them, and everything that was needed for a whole year, set out for the place where the beast had disappeared under the stone.
I will answer for everything,' says the Prince.
The Prince arose, went out of the city into the fields, took out of his pocket the eggs which the maidens had given him, and, as they had taught him, turned them into three palaces.
Their father scolded them both soundly, and there was an end of it.
'Make me a large vessel with a partition in the middle,' she said; 'catch all sorts of game, and put them into one half of it, and into the other half pour water; so that there may be meat and drink for me.'
He entered the courtyard, tied up his horse, and went indoors.
THE NORKA
He felt himself disgraced in the eyes of his father, but there was no help for it.
And the Prince said to him:
If thou art an old man, thou shalt be my father; if a middle-aged man, my brother; but if a young man, thou shalt be my husband dear.
But the moment the Prince closed his eyes, up jumped the beast and took to flight.
Presently the midnight hour sounded.
'Who is going into the other world, to overcome the Norka?'
And after flying some distance she brought him to his journey's end, took leave of him, and flew away back.
He is staying just now with my second sister, who lives not far from here in a silver palace.
Then the bird--having taken the vessel on her back, with the Prince sitting in the middle of it--began to fly.
So he took off his coat and covered them over with it, and he himself sat down under the tree.
And when they had hauled it up, and had set eyes on the wondrous maidens, they went aside and said: 'Let's lower the rope, pull our brother part of the way up, and then cut the rope.
Thereupon away fled the beast as before.
But it is a sickly thing to them, and gladly would they get out of their skin.
Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once seem to me.
This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction's image and imperfect image--an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:--thus did the world once seem to me.
Verily, not in backworlds and redeeming blood-drops: but in the body do they also believe most; and their own body is for them the thing-in-itself.
A new pride taught me mine ego, and that teach I unto men: no longer to thrust one's head into the sand of celestial things, but to carry it freely, a terrestrial head, which giveth meaning to the earth!
Thus spake Zarathustra.
To me the convalescent would it now be suffering and torment to believe in such phantoms: suffering would it now be to me, and humiliation.
Too well, also, do I know what they themselves most believe in.
Good and evil, and joy and woe, and I and thou--coloured vapours did they seem to me before creative eyes.
From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for them.
But that "other world" is well concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world, which is a celestial naught; and the bowels of existence do not speak unto man, except as man.
I surpassed myself, the suffering one; I carried mine own ashes to the mountain; a brighter flame I contrived for myself.
The dream--and diction--of a God, did the world then seem to me; coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Beyond man, forsooth?
Believe me, my brethren!
The work of a suffering and tortured God, did the world then seem to me.
Neither is Zarathustra indignant at a convalescent who looketh tenderly on his delusions, and at midnight stealeth round the grave of his God; but sickness and a sick frame remain even in his tears.
It was the body which despaired of the body--it groped with the fingers of the infatuated spirit at the ultimate walls.
Then they sighed: "O that there were heavenly paths by which to steal into another existence and into happiness!" Then they contrived for themselves their by-paths and bloody draughts!
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!
And then it sought to get through the ultimate walls with its head--and not with its head only--into "the other world."
More uprightly and purely speaketh the healthy body, perfect and square-built; and it speaketh of the meaning of the earth.--
Backward they always gaze toward dark ages: then, indeed, were delusion and faith something different.
A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego.
And verily, it came not unto me from the beyond!
Hearken rather, my brethren, to the voice of the healthy body; it is a more upright and pure voice.
Therefore hearken they to the preachers of death, and themselves preach backworlds.
Many sickly ones have there always been among those who muse, and languish for God; violently they hate the discerning ones, and the latest of virtues, which is uprightness.
And lo!
Verily, it is difficult to prove all being, and hard to make it speak. Tell me, ye brethren, is not the strangest of all things best proved?
Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones.
It was the body which despaired of the earth--it heard the bowels of existence speaking unto it.
Yea, this ego, with its contradiction and perplexity, speaketh most uprightly of its being--this creating, willing, evaluing ego, which is the measure and value of things.
But to what did they owe the convulsion and rapture of their transport?
The creator wished to look away from himself,--thereupon he created the world.
Raving of the reason was likeness to God, and doubt was sin.
Thereupon the phantom WITHDREW from me!
Gentle is Zarathustra to the sickly.
May they become convalescents and overcomers, and create higher bodies for themselves!
Thus, once on a time, did I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen.
Too well do I know those godlike ones: they insist on being believed in, and that doubt is sin.
What happened, my brethren?
Once on a time, Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen.
Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all Gods and backworlds.
The sick and perishing--it was they who despised the body and the earth, and invented the heavenly world, and the redeeming blood-drops; but even those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and the earth!
To their body and this earth.
Life is easy to live for a man who is without shame, a crow hero, a mischief-maker, an insulting, bold, and wretched fellow.
Let no man ever look for what is pleasant, or what is unpleasant. Not to see what is pleasant is pain, and it is pain to see what is unpleasant.
Make thyself an island, work hard, be wise!
Let a man leave anger, let him forsake pride, let him overcome all bondage!
Thy life has come to an end, thou art come near to death (Yama), there is no resting-place for thee on the road, and thou hast no provision for thy journey.
No sufferings befall the man who is not attached to name and form, and who calls nothing his own.
He who walks in the company of fools suffers a long way; company with fools, as with an enemy, is always painful; company with the wise is pleasure, like meeting with kinsfolk.
O mendicants! throw off that taint, and become taintless!
As the impurity which springs from the iron, when it springs from it, destroys it; thus do a transgressor's own works lead him to the evil path.
Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relationships, Nirvana the highest happiness.
He who possesses virtue and intelligence, who is just, speaks the truth, and does what is his own business, him the world will hold dear.
From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear; he who is free from pleasure knows neither grief nor fear.
He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquillity, is free from fear and free from sin, while he tastes the sweetness of drinking in the law.
Chapter XVIII.
Chapter XVI.
When thy impurities are blown away, and thou art free from guilt, thou wilt not enter again into birth and decay.
Make thyself an island, work hard, be wise!
Pleasure
Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing, have no fetters.
Beware of bodily anger, and control thy body!
There is no fire like passion; there is no losing throw like hatred; there is no pain like this body; there is no happiness higher than rest.
The wise who control their body, who control their tongue, the wise who control their mind, are indeed well controlled.
Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy.
Chapter XVII.
In like manner his good works receive him who has done good, and has gone from this world to the other;--as kinsmen receive a friend on his return.
But life is hard to live for a modest man, who always looks for what is pure, who is disinterested, quiet, spotless, and intelligent.
And the man who gives himself to drinking intoxicating liquors, he, even in this world, digs up his own root.
He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented, is happy.
Leave the sins of the tongue, and practise virtue with thy tongue!
Impurity
There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.
Let us live happily then, though we call nothing our own!
But there is a taint worse than all taints,--ignorance is the greatest taint.
He who gives himself to vanity, and does not give himself to meditation, forgetting the real aim (of life) and grasping at pleasure, will in time envy him who has exerted himself in meditation.
Anger
Leave the sins of the body, and with thy body practise virtue!
O man, know this, that the unrestrained are in a bad state; take care that greediness and vice do not bring thee to grief for a long time!
The sight of the elect (Arya) is good, to live with them is always happiness; if a man does not see fools, he will be truly happy.
Thou art now like a sear leaf, the messengers of death (Yama) have come near to thee; thou standest at the door of thy departure, and thou hast no provision for thy journey.
He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins.
The building of railroads in western America had an effect on English rents identical in nature with that which would have been produced had an equal area of somewhat less fertile land touching England, risen out of the ocean.
Some replenishing agents will restore themselves if given time; the forest will grow up if left untouched by man; the field will recover its fertile quality if allowed to lie fallow.
Here is a source of wealth and a field for enterprise.
Progress, population, prosperity, are not primarily conditioned on their amount; limitation will be felt far earlier elsewhere.
The water in the Western rivers long flowed on, undiminished by the uses made of it.
In the attempt to get some food-products in greater quantity from a given area at a given time, increasing difficulty is met with at once.
This is true of clay, stone, water, and the commonest kinds of labor.
Where the same agents have not been multiplied, substitutes have been found that are just as effective in meeting the economic need.
Subsoil ploughing annexes to agricultural land new layers of soil that are just as important as new acres added to the surface.
Some kinds of goods are produced from such very common materials that it might seem possible, by the substitution of agents, to produce an unlimited supply.
Wealth looked at in the older way was valued for what it did immediately for its owner, for its concrete fruits; looked at in the modern way, it is valued as a marketable income-bearer readily convertible into a multitude of other forms.
The growth of society may cause some of the poorer agents in time to become the best.
Every country in Europe has repeatedly felt the shock of these great economic changes which have compelled the recapitalization on a lower plane, of nearly all kinds of their landed wealth.
Great areas on the edge of civilization still await the pioneer, the prospector, and the miner.
Undeveloped areas will be opened to the world, and new geologic realms will be explored.
CHAPTER 18
The existence of coal-mines in Venus or Mars is of no economic importance to us, but coal-mines on the earth, yet undiscovered, present a potential supply that at any moment may be realized.
The land in America for centuries was not, but now has become, for some purposes, a part of the supply in the same market as the land of England.
3.
The first thought is of the value of the wealth invested, which has been carefully measured and expressed in dollars and cents.
3.
The difference in increasableness of the various forms of wealth is of importance in considering various social questions such as the effects of an increase of population, and the kinds of taxation most equitable and most favorable to the progress of society.
This is recognized of late by writers that perhaps do not fully mark its significance to economic theory.
Indeed, the principle just discussed is no more than one phase of the law of economic diminishing returns, which has a universal application to the realm of values.
Most, if not all, belong to the class that is increasable, although it may be with much difficulty. Even when the exact thing cannot be duplicated, as a bust by an ancient sculptor or an autograph of a dead author, many substitutes serving the same or closely related wants, affect and limit the demand, and thus increase the supply.
The word supply means the amount that is available at the moment or during the period spoken of. The land in Greenland is not, and probably never can be, a part of the supply of land in England.
But progressing civilization required more water for cities, for mining, and for irrigation, and now states and corporations are going to law over these formerly undiminished free goods.
The second part of the opening proposition expresses the view here held: the supply of no important class of goods is absolutely fixed, in any reasonable sense.
But they are undiminished only in a relative sense and in reference to present need.
4.
But this self-replenishing of agents is a slow process, and time is costly.
Investment takes the form of putting in a sum of money in the hope of getting an income bearing a certain relation to it.
There are still great areas of fens, swamps, and marshlands, such as those on the Jersey coast in this country, which with moderate effort could be reclaimed.
Man therefore tries in other ways to force more uses out of goods, until checked by the increasing difficulty.
While, therefore, bricks are scarce and hard to get from the outset in some places, the scarcity grows more marked in many places at first well supplied.
New trade routes and new means of transportation add to the supplies available in the older countries as effectively as if their areas were increased.
Some natural resources belong at one end, and some at the other end of this scale.
No money can buy that which to them is beyond price.
4.
2.
1.
It is the result, the gratification, that man seeks: any particular good is but the means to an end.
Thus investments come to be thought of in terms of general purchasing power, from which it is expected to realize an income of a given percentage.
The pioneer annexes new areas to the economic world and to the market in which he has lived.
Yet the notion criticized above is found in all the older text-books.
But the largest clay banks are limited in size; a large proportion of the places where bricks are needed are not near a supply of clay of good quality; and after a brick-yard has been used for a time there is increasing difficulty in getting out the material.
But, in our money economy, efforts are largely directed toward the increase of the capital sum.
Working on the soil that is at once their livelihood and their home, they do not consciously reckon the value of the labor they are putting upon it.
But it can now be seen that the law may apply ultimately, though in differing degrees, to every kind of economic goods.
2.
Changes are still in progress, for of late the smaller ports to the south have increased their trade at a more rapid pace than New York has.
How can bricks be limited in number, being made as they are from one of the commonest materials on the earth's surface?
The different forms of wealth may be ranged on a scale according to the ease with which they can be increased by effort.
Account must be taken of the fact that the number of bricks can be increased more easily than the amount of land; but there must not be overlooked the possibility of increase in any of these forms of wealth, nor the limits to the increase of any one of them.
5.
When men crossed the ocean to settle on Manhattan Island, it was a wilderness; but the growth of commerce has caused the land in New York city to become more valuable than that in London.
When one wishes to save or increase wealth, he turns to these great unappropriated fields, unused things or things imperfectly used, and tries to convert them into effective agents.
There must be a large output to justify the use of machinery.
It is not yet evident how many can own a share in great factories, but the control drifts into few hands.
Despite this difficulty the methods of the farmer of to-day contrast strongly with those of one hundred or fifty years ago.
It is important, though, to distinguish between classes of workers in judging of the benefits and evils of machines.
In part the change is, however, the effect of the use of machinery and other improvements in agricultural processes.
A machine is "an iron man," it has been said, and comes into competition with other men to lower their wages by outworking and underbidding them.
But this iron man can do only automatic tasks; it is not capable of exercising judgment.
The great industrial changes in the Middle Ages generally grew out of political changes, or of changes of routes of trade whereby large industries were disturbed, or of changes in the use of land through new methods and the bringing into use of land in other places.
The sudden crowding together of people into new social relations is usually bad for morals.
Probably to-day the total is four-fold as great.
The change crushes hardest the man at the margin of employment.
It is especially adapted to the application of power.
Similar examples are found in the manufacture of shoes, and in all varieties of wood- and iron-work.
A simple, single piece that can be taken into the hand, as a spade, a hammer, a knife, is a tool; a combination of wheels, levers, pulleys, etc., is a machine.
The more skilled workman can hasten his pace and still earn a living wage in competition with a machine, while the less skilled can but drop out entirely, innocent victims of an economic change, sacrifices to the cause of industrial progress.
It is rarely possible for a man past middle life to shift over into a new trade where his efficiency will be as great and his pay as high as in the old.
MAP.
POLITICS.
No matter how many good things our friends say about us, we are never surprised.
He says what he thinks it will be and then the weather is what it pleases.
NEXT.
OLD HEN.
A man who has all the money he wants but wants more.
A man who can size himself up and forget the result.
Perhaps you have met the man who is so wrapped up in himself that he thinks he is a warm baby.
PALPITATION OF THE TONGUE.
The place where some people think they think.
A book that sells better than it reads.
OLIVE.
ONION.
Something which any fool can lay, but it takes patience like a hen to hatch it.
Philosophers do not believe half the things they tell themselves.
A large principality ready to go to war at a moment's notice. For example: Carrie Nation.
OBEY.
PATHOS.
OSLER.
Nothing is so astonishing to us as another man's success.
The mother of many an empty stomach.
Fun you have to-day so you can worry over it to-morrow.
POSTERITY.
PLEASURE.
Quitters cannot be trained to quit quitting.
Money is the root of much friendship.
OPPORTUNITY.
OPERA.
Pleasure travels with a brass band, but Trouble sneaks in on rubber shoes.
NIT.
To pour chloroform over an old man's breakfast food and telephone for the undertaker.
PREDICTION.
A lot of people who will forget all about you before they are born.
PRACTICAL JOKE.
PEACH.
NODDLE.
NATURE.
PROMISE.
Quotation marks cover a multitude of plagiarists.
NECK.
NATION.
A polite name for balloon juice.
The place where a man gets it--sometimes in the neck, sometimes in the bank.
Money cannot buy happiness, but most of us are willing to make the experiment.
PEEKABOO.
OATS.
The battle cry in a barber shop before blood is shed.
MACARONI.
ORIGINALITY.
NECESSITY.
An attack of hysteria which broke out at a banquet and became epidemic in the newspapers.
An abbreviation of Nix.
See the bartender.
When Nature makes a pink lobster look like a man.
OIL. See John D. Rockerfeller--if you can.
NABOB.
MARVEL.
POLITICIAN.
"And you, are you one of the doctors?"
That's our center.
Yesterday our left flank was there at Shevardino, you see, where the oak is, but now we have withdrawn our left wing--now it is over there, do you see that village and the smoke?
All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor the right side of the field fully satisfied his expectations.
Our right flank is over there"--he pointed sharply to the right, far away in the broken ground--"That's where the Moskva River is, and we have thrown up three redoubts there, very strong ones.
"One can see them with the naked eye...
His having moved his troops there is only a ruse; he will probably pass round to the right of the Moskva.
"There they are, there... you can see them."
"Ah, those are the French!
"Well, send number three company again," the officer replied hurriedly.
"The Smolensk Mother of God," another corrected him.
"May I ask you," said Pierre, "what village that is in front?"
An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was giving these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish speaking, but at this point, evidently not liking the officer's remark, interrupted him.
"Are those our men there?" Pierre inquired.
Below the village the road crossed the river by a bridge and, winding down and up, rose higher and higher to the village of Valuevo visible about four miles away, where Napoleon was then stationed.
"Where?
With a long overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round-shouldered body, with uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the eye he had lost, Kutuzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and stopped behind the priest.
"Gabions must be sent for," said he sternly.
The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up to Pierre.
And over there?..." Pierre pointed to a knoll on the left, near which some troops could be seen.
Despite the presence of the commander-in-chief, who attracted the attention of all the superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers continued their prayers without looking at him.
Why, there!"
Behind the priest and a chanter stood the notabilities on a spot reserved for them.
"Our position?" replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction.
Between the hollows the villages of Bezubova and Zakharino showed in the distance.
From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheater, wound the Smolensk highroad, passing through a village with a white church some five hundred paces in front of the knoll and below it.
"That's his again," said the officer. (It was the Shevardino Redoubt.) "It was ours yesterday, but now it is his."
Where?" asked Pierre.
The crowd round the icon suddenly parted and pressed against Pierre.
"But the battle will hardly be there.
"Borodino," the other corrected him.
Behind Kutuzov was Bennigsen and the suite.
Here and there over the whole of that blue expanse, to right and left of the forest and the road, smoking campfires could be seen and indefinite masses of troops--ours and the enemy's.
"Yes, and there, further on, are the French," said the officer.
There they are...
"I can tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our entrenchments.
A bald general with a St. George's Cross on his neck stood just behind the priest's back, and without crossing himself (he was evidently a German) patiently awaited the end of the service, which he considered it necessary to hear to the end, probably to arouse the patriotism of the Russian people.
He crossed himself with an accustomed movement, bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and bowed his white head with a deep sigh.
Following the battalion that marched along the dusty road came priests in their vestments--one little old man in a hood with attendants and singers.
His white head twitched with the effort.
"That's where one crosses the Kolocha.
At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had been holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by others, the chanters relit their censers, and service began.
That's Semenovsk, yes, there," he pointed to Raevski's knoll.
Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which way was made for him, was approaching the icon.
Nowhere could he see the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields, meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds, and streams; and try as he would he could descry no military "position" in this place which teemed with life, nor could he even distinguish our troops from the enemy's.
"Well, you see, that's difficult to explain....
"I must ask someone who knows," he thought, and addressed an officer who was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure.
It was about eleven o'clock.
The left flank..." here the officer paused.
Pierre recognized him at once by his peculiar figure, which distinguished him from everybody else.
The singing did not sound loud under the open sky.
Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling militiamen, ascended the knoll from which, according to the doctor, the battlefield could be seen.
This was Borodino.
The ground to the right--along the course of the Kolocha and Moskva rivers--was broken and hilly.
On the left the ground was more level; there were fields of grain, and the smoking ruins of Semenovsk, which had been burned down, could be seen.
The Iberian Mother of God!" someone cried.
"Well, then, listen!
Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and his invasion were connected in their minds with the same sort of vague notions of Antichrist, the end of the world, and "pure freedom."
Until Prince Andrew settled in Bogucharovo its owners had always been absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character from those of Bald Hills.
He had told her that after the sixteenth he could not be responsible for what might happen.
On the evening of the day the old prince died the Marshal went away, promising to return next day for the funeral.
He noticed this hesitation in Dron's look and therefore frowned and moved closer up to him.
They differed from them in speech, dress, and disposition.
"Eh, Dron, drop it!" Alpatych repeated, withdrawing his hand from his bosom and solemnly pointing to the floor at Dron's feet.
And so it was, for when evening came no carts had been provided.
On the fifteenth, the day of the old prince's death, the Marshal had insisted on Princess Mary's leaving at once, as it was becoming dangerous.
"What am I to do with the people?" said Dron.
Now in 1812, to anyone living in close touch with these people it was apparent that these undercurrents were acting strongly and nearing an eruption.
The old prince used to approve of them for their endurance at work when they came to Bald Hills to help with the harvest or to dig ponds, and ditches, but he disliked them for their boorishness.
And don't go to any meeting yourself, do you hear?"
Yet there was no time to waste.
As proof of this the peasant had brought from Visloukhovo a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that they were false) paid to him in advance for hay.
Take the keys from me and discharge me, for Christ's sake!"
"Stop that!" cried Alpatych sternly.
But this he was unable to do, for he received tidings that the French had unexpectedly advanced, and had barely time to remove his own family and valuables from his estate.
Alpatych looked intently at Dron and frowned.
Alpatych named others, but they too, according to Dron, had no horses available: some horses were carting for the government, others were too weak, and others had died for want of fodder.
It seemed that no horses could be had even for the carriages, much less for the carting.
Dron replied that the horses of these peasants were away carting.
In the vicinity of Bogucharovo were large villages belonging to the crown or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they pleased.
They were called steppe peasants.
"They're quite beside themselves; I have already told them..."
"You drop this nonsense and tell the people to get ready to leave their homes and go to Moscow and to get carts ready for tomorrow morning for the princess' things.
He learned from domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant Karp, who possessed great influence in the village commune and had recently been away driving a government transport, had returned with news that the Cossacks were destroying deserted villages, but that the French did not harm them.
"'Told them,' I dare say!" said Alpatych.
What are you thinking of, eh?"
Anyone who stays is a traitor to the Tsar.
His excellency Prince Andrew himself gave me orders to move all the people away and not leave them with the enemy, and there is an order from the Tsar about it too.
Though the peasants paid quitrent, Alpatych thought no difficulty would be made about complying with this order, for there were two hundred and thirty households at work in Bogucharovo and the peasants were well to do.
"Are they drinking?" he asked abruptly.
Alpatych also knew that on the previous day another peasant had even brought from the village of Visloukhovo, which was occupied by the French, a proclamation by a French general that no harm would be done to the inhabitants, and if they remained they would be paid for anything taken from them.
He had managed people for a long time and knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion that they can possibly disobey.
Soon after the migration to the "warm rivers," in which he had taken part like the rest, Dron was made village Elder and overseer of Bogucharovo, and had since filled that post irreproachably for twenty- three years.
"Quite beside themselves, Yakov Alpatych; they've fetched another barrel."
"Now just listen, Dronushka," said he.
"I understand."
One instance, which had occurred some twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to emigrate to some unknown "warm rivers." Hundreds of peasants, among them the Bogucharovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in whole families toward the southeast.
I'll go to the police officer, and you tell them so, and that they must stop this and the carts must be got ready."
'You haven't been thinking of selling me out--after all the business I've given you?'
It shook its head again.
Then the children hustled the old folks into the tonneau and they were off, just as the train started.
'And say, can I use your telephone?'
He lost a stirrup, he slipped sidewise on the saddle; then in a panicky fright he began to shout and saw at the bit.
'Good-bye, dear,' she caroled.
He had never before looked at the country except as real estate, never seen the plains, and a curious new sense of the bigness of the earth oppressed him.
He told you to!--No, I dunno anything about a court decision.
A long yellow feather dangled from her orange hat, big pearls were set in her ears, and her shoe-buckles glittered as she walked.
The gentleman put his wallet back hurriedly as if some one had laughed at it, and cast a quick, hurt look at his broker.
From somewhere a saying floated into his head: 'Doing good unto others is the only happiness.' 'By heck, that's true,' he commented aloud, and sat smoking peacefully, his mind aglow with pleasant thoughts.
She was a stiff woman, a little faded, quietly dressed.
'Say, Martha, you look great,' he chuckled.
Cargan had heard that bluff before.
Cargan was tempted.
It was Waldron.
The sky was enormous; he was only a speck on the vast floor.
'Walk then,' said the conductor stolidly.
That face lingered.
'Sell, Mr. Waldron,' he answered earnestly, 'sell right off.
Cargan suddenly became conscious of his appearance--his serge suit, his straw hat, his awkward seat in the saddle.
The clock ticked in a hush; the chickens droned in whispers; the woman herself worked over the stove with slow fingers, moving the kettles gently.
Well what do you think--' He gulped down the sudden reversal and felt for words.
'Hello, is that Annie?' came faintly across the silence.
Cargan nodded.
A lurch of the train swung him heavily out among the chairs; to save himself he caught a shoulder and dropped into a seat.
I'm sure glad.'
His eye caught an explanatory note: the dividend on the preferred had been cut; the surplus was heavily reduced. His mind, searching rapidly over their business, fixed upon two marginal accounts--Jim Smith's and Waldron's.
Then he slid inside the door, and ordered a chocolate soda.
'Or a--horse?' Cargan hesitated.
I've borrowed money from my wife--and other places.'--He was too proud to add, 'This is confidential.'--'My boy's just entered college, my girl's just come out. It isn't just the money--' a gush of emotion reddened his face--'You've got to pull me through, Cargan.
'Ab-so-lute-ly, we won't take the risk.'
Mrs. Waldron followed.
Cargan turned first, as usual, to the stock-market reports.
He had never ridden a horse.
The clerk, swirling a cataract of milk from glass to glass, revealed the inner sheet of the paper propped before him.
He kissed her admiringly.
He felt better and better.
'Business is business,' he thought, and remembered, with a little angry satisfaction, Anita Waldron's coming-out dance and how the Runkles, who were invited, kept talking about it all winter. 'Old Waldron won't be so darn particular next year.'
'Good gosh,' he gulped inwardly, 'what a chance!' It was a sure thing for the man with the money.
They told me I'd find you on the train, and I thought I'd ask your advice.'
There was a row of customers along the soda-water counter, and through the open windows came scraps of conversation: two boys were teasing each other about a girl; a group of men were talking auctions, options, prices, real estate.
'Or a team?'
It's impossible; it's out of the question for me to break now!'
He scarcely noticed the loiterers who stared at him, or thought of his streaked face, his trousers split at the knee, his hat lost on the wild ride.
A profound pity for himself stirred him.
'Go ahead,' said the operator,--and, at the word, 'Hey there, Casey,' he yelled at the dim voice on the wires, 'I've gotta have five thousand quick!
Different worlds of imagination revolved in the two men's minds. Theophilus Waldron thought of the children, and of his father the governor, and of the family pride.
Her face was troubled, and when they reached the motor, she caught her husband's elbow gently as if to ask him something, but he merely nodded and turned her glance toward Cargan's window.
Cargan offered him a cigar, but he put it aside quickly.
'I mean,' he faltered, 'that I may not be able to stand up under it.' And then his voice resumed its desperate certainty.
"It's impossible!" Nevertheless, in self-defense he began to calculate what it might have cost to carry the account, until the appalling magnitude of the risk shut off the discussion.
'How much do I lose?' he asked feebly.
God saw into his heart.
I mean that ab-so-lute-ly you cannot sell me out.'
He dared not pull on the reins; he could only hold on grimly and shut his eyes.
Once he slipped, and, screaming, saw for an instant a blur of grass before he could pull himself back to safety.
The face faded away leaving a dull pity behind it, a struggling remorse.
Mr. Cargan, there are considerations above business.' His voice failed a little.
What is it, Bill?'
Waldron looked at him in doubt.
Montana Pacific's off two points more.
But David would know she did not need one; bringing him his little son in her own arms, what would he care for anything more?
He opened his large, clear eyes, and suddenly it seemed that her wish was granted,--that the veil was rent and she was looking into David's eyes and seeing his soul free, no longer chained by invisible links to those dead and gone beings, and their traditions.
She had given her written instructions how to conduct herself under all ordinary circumstances, at her hotel or on the street--how to ring for a servant, order her meals, or call a cab.
She held her now sleeping baby close to her breast as she followed the old man about from picture to picture.
A mystery!
Surely all was good and well with the world!
She must get used to all this, and not expect to find all the world like her own sunny mountains.
She gathered the child in her arms and held him with his sweet, warm lips pressed to her breast and his soft little hand thrust in her bosom. David's little son--David's little son!
"Yes, I'm a stranger." She caught at the word.
What they had felt--what they had thought and striven for--was it all intensified and concentrated in him?
"How perfectly dear.
Quickly she packed her few belongings and rang for a messenger, and as she stood an instant waiting for an answer to her ring, the white-capped nurse she had noticed in the morning passed by with the baby in her arms.
"Oh, never mind, then." Cassandra turned away in sudden shame lest she had not done the right thing.
IN WHICH CASSANDRA VISITS DAVID THRYNG'S ANCESTORS
Mrs. Darling is very particular."
He would hold them both to his heart.
"Will you go to Daneshead Castle itself, ma'm, or stop in Queensderry?" As she had no idea what the question involved, she replied at hazard.
She leaned over the bed, half dressed as she was, and murmured pretty cooing phrases, kissing and cuddling him to contented laughter.
"I am from America, and I would like to see the gallery." She must do so to give a pretext for having come to visit an empty house.
And David--her David--was one of these!
She would go to his mother and wait for his return, and there she would bring her precious gift--David's little son.
"No, it was not the house--it was--" Again she waited, not knowing how to introduce her husband's name.
Cassandra felt more abashed under the round-eyed gaze of the maid than if she had encountered the queen.
Had not evil things been said of David even on her own mountain?
If you'd ever seen 'im, you'd think 'e'd dressed up in velvet and lace and stood for it.
"I saw you this morning, ma'm, as you went out.
Cassandra stood a long moment before the two gowns.
The mystery was still unsolved.
She saw David walking at her side, and heard his laugh, sun-bright and glorious he seemed, her Phoebus Apollo--the father of her little son.
Her brain whirled, and a new feeling to which she had hitherto been blessedly a stranger crept over her, a feeling of fear.
"I wish to go there.
"Or--any friend like yourself?
"He is my little son." It was almost a cry, as she said it, but again she forced herself to calmness, and, walking slowly out, added, with a quiet smile: "I always keep him myself.
Why, what was it to him what place she asked for?
This had been all a dream--a dream.
Yes, surely women of David's state did not travel about alone.
For a moment, bewildered, she could hardly understand what he was saying to her.
So the address was given the cabman, and they were rattled away over the rough paving, a long, lonely ride through the wonderful city--so many miles of houses and splendid buildings, of gardens and monuments.
Here only a small triangle of blue sky could be seen--not a tree, not a bit of earth--and in the small room all those heavy furnishings closed around her, dark red, stuffy, and greasy with London smoke.
Of course her husband was "his lordship," over here.
The young woman stood still in astonishment.
She placed her little son on the seat beside her and held him with sheltering arm, while he watched the moving vehicles and looked from them to his mother's face.
He would take him in his arms.
Wait," cried Cassandra.
I'll see what I can do. What number is your room? and what name?
As the great two-story coaches and trams thundered by, she clasped her baby closer, until he looked up in her face with round-eyed wonder and put up his lip in pitiful protest.
He had not confided his sacred secret to these people, and they had thought what they pleased.
Cassandra had placed her little son in the middle of a huge bed which nearly filled the small room she had been given in a hotel, recommended to her by Betty Towers as one where "nice ladies travelling alone" could stop.
"Yes."
A visitor at this hour, and seemingly a lady, yet with a baby in her arms, and alone, and not to see the house.
"Yes," said Cassandra, faintly.
Then they were swallowed up in the dark interior.
He explained to her courteously--almost deferentially.
There were the nursemaids--the babies--the beggars--the ragged urchins and the venders of the street, with their raucous cries rending the air.
While waiting with her baby in her arms for the hotel boy to call her cab, she observed another lady, young and graceful, enter a cab, and a maid following her wearing a pretty cap, and carrying a child.
"I will take what they have."
"I would like tea, please."
The young girl's pleasant words had warmed her heart, and the refreshment gave her more courage.
What if David were not there!
Ought she then to arrive attended by a maid, carrying her baby?
She had tried to find him, her David, and had been shown the dead, and the glory of the dead--all past and gone--her David's glory.
Eager, for David's sake, to draw no adverse comment upon herself, she took note of everything.
She had seated herself in the hall, for her heart throbbed chokingly, and the lump was heavy in her throat.
She drew a deep breath and looked down the length of the long gallery.
She only thought that she must be brave and try--try to think how to reach David's people.
As Cassandra looked up in the mother's face, something stirred vaguely in her heart.
She was to go nowhere alone, without taking a cab, and never start out on foot, carrying her baby in her arms, as she might do at home.
"And it is right hard to go about alone with my baby, so I thought I would ask you if you have a sister."
Her gravity and silence gave her a poise and dignity that allayed suspicion, but he and his old wife liked diversion, and a spice of gossip lightened the monotony of their lives, so he waited, then coughed behind his hand.
It was the trail of the serpent of ill report.
Therefore, without further consideration, she walked swiftly down the corridor after the tidy nurse.
The old servant was saying: "You 'aven't 'appened to meet a Samuel Cutter in America, 'ave you?
Darker, dingier, stuffier, seemed the box of a room, as she walked into it and laid her still sleeping babe on the bed.
In a moment she was gone.
Will you tell me how, please?"
Then Cassandra knew that she was hungry and sat herself in one of the windows apart, before a table.
The old man's eyes opened wide, and his jaw dropped.
The nurse watched her return to her room as swiftly as she had left it, and took note of the number.
We do in America."
She privately wrote to the solicitors employed by her family, inclosing a description of Dermody and his mother and daughter and directing inquiries to be made at the various coach-offices in London.
After the insulting words which his master had spoken to him, Dermody's pride was concerned in leaving no trace of his whereabouts; my father might consider it as a trace purposely left with the object of reuniting Mary and me.
"Good-by, dear.
The woman was suspected and followed, and the letter was taken from her.
Useless!
Don't forget Mary."
She was quite unfit, poor soul, to intercede for me, or to serve my interests in any way.
It comforted me--it was like a farewell touch from Mary's hand.
We neither of us possessed money enough to advertise in the newspapers.
The door stood open; the parlor was empty.
I ran, I flew, along the path that led to Dermody's cottage.
I looked closer--it was writing in Mary's hand! The unformed childish characters traced these last words of farewell:
A light touch roused me.
The furniture still remained in the cottage.
No friend or neighbor lingered near with a message; no letter lay waiting for me; no hint was left to tell me in what direction they had taken their departure.
THE CURTAIN FALLS.
My father himself took me to the carriage.
My father tore it up with his own hands.
My father had completely overwhelmed her by announcing that his wife and his son were to accompany him, when he returned to America.
Later in the day, my mother was permitted to see me.
I followed my mother quietly to the carriage.
I sat down in our customary corner, by Mary's empty chair, and looked again at the pretty green flag, and burst out crying.
An hour afterward the post-chaise was at the door.
I stooped, and discovered some writing in pencil.
I knelt down and kissed the writing.
I went into the kitchen; I went into the upper rooms. Solitude everywhere.
Something low down on the clean white door-post caught my eye as we passed it.
I broke away from him, with a desperation which not even his resolution could resist.
We have no home, George, and no choice but to go with him."
The bailiff had left the place; and his mother and his daughter had gone with him.
She also referred the lawyers to two of Dermody's relatives, who lived in the city, and who might know something of his movements after he left my father's service.
My good mother did all that the most compassionate kindness could do (in her position) to comfort me.
When she had done this, she had done all that lay in her power.
A week afterward we sailed for the United States.
With this the first epoch in my love story comes to an end.
I rose and silently gave her my hand.
Late that night we were in London.
I had no keepsake to speak to me of my lost darling but the flag which she had embroidered with her own hand.
For ten long years afterward I never again met with my little Mary; I never even heard whether she had lived to grow to womanhood or not.
For the rest, the waters of oblivion had closed over the old golden days at Greenwater Broad.
The next morning I made an effort to escape, and was discovered before I had got free of the house.
FOR the rest of the day, and through the night, I was kept a close prisoner in my room, watched by a man on whose fidelity my father could depend.
I still kept the green flag, with the dove worked on it.
"We shall not find Mary here, George," she said, gently.
Come with me."
He has raised money in London; he has let the house to some rich tradesman for seven years; he has sold the plate, and the jewels that came to me from his mother.
Sir William Fitz-Williams, high admiral, was created earl of Southampton; Sir William Paulet, Lord St. John; Sir John Russel, Lord Russel.
But while they were preparing to pass the ford, rain fell a second time in such abundance, as made it impracticable for them to execute their design; and the populace, partly reduced to necessity by want of provisions, partly struck with superstition at being thus again disappointed by the same accident, suddenly dispersed themselves.
Before his execution, he accused Norfolk of having secretly encouraged the rebels; but Henry, either sensible of that nobleman's services, and convinced of his fidelity or afraid to offend one of such extensive power and great capacity, rejected the information.
But there are certain bounds, beyond which the most slavish submission cannot be extended.
His prudent conduct, however, seems to acquit him of this imputation.
The first rising was in Lincolnshire.
The abbots and monks knew the danger to which they were exposed; and having learned by the example of the lesser monasteries that nothing could withstand the king's will, they were most of them induced, in expectation of better treatment, to make a voluntary resignation of their houses.
It was agreed that two gentlemen should be despatched to the king with proposals from the rebels; and Henry purposely delayed giving an answer, and allured them with hopes of entire satisfaction, in expectation that necessity would soon oblige them to disperse themselves.
The duke of Norfolk was appointed general of the king's forces against the northern rebels; and as he headed the party at court which supported the ancient religion, he was also suspected of bearing some favor to the cause which he was sent to oppose.
Even the most moderate and reasonable deemed it somewhat iniquitous, that men who had been invited into a course of life by all the laws, human and divine, which prevailed in their country, should be turned out of their possessions, and so little care be taken of their future subsistence.
He published, however, a manifesto against the rebels, and an answer to their complaints; in which he employed a very lofty style, suited to so haughty a monarch.
There were some gentry whom the populace had constrained to take part with them, and who kept a secret correspondence with Suffolk. They informed him, that resentment against the king's reply was the chief cause which retained the malecontents in arms, and that a milder answer would probably suppress the rebellion.
The secular priests, finding themselves thus reduced to a grievous servitude, instilled into the people those discontents which they had long harbored in their own bosoms.
"And we," he added, "with our whole council, think it right strange that ye, who be but brutes and inexpert folk, do take upon you to appoint us who be meet or not for our council."
Lord Darcy, though he pleaded compulsion, and appealed for his justification to a long life spent in the service of the crown, was beheaded on Tower Hill.
As Cromwell's person was little acceptable to the ecclesiastics, the authority which he exercised, being so new, so absolute, so unlimited, inspired them with disgust and terror.
Sir Edward Seymour, the queen's brother, formerly made Lord Beauchamp, was raised to the dignity of earl of Hertford.
He sent forces against the rebels, under the command of the duke of Suffolk; and he returned them a very sharp answer to their petition.
The males of all ranks, if endowed with industry might be of service to the public; and none of them could want employment suited to his station and capacity.
There was only one particular in which Henry was quite decisive; because he was there impelled by his avarice, or, more properly-speaking, his rapacity, the consequence of his profusion: this measure was the entire destruction of the monasteries.
He published, in the king's name, without the consent either of parliament or convocation, an ordinance by which he retrenched many of the ancient holy days; prohibited several superstitions gainful to the clergy, such as pilgrimages, images, relics; and even ordered the incumbents in the parishes to set apart a considerable portion of their revenue for repairs and for the support of exhibitioners and the poor of their parish.
Henry would by no means acknowledge any error in these particulars; and was displeased that they should pretend to prescribe rules to so great a monarch and theologian.
The concurrence of these two national assemblies served, no doubt, to increase the king's power over the people, and raised him to an authority more absolute than any prince in a simple monarchy, even by means of military force, is ever able to attain.
Anew visitation was appointed of all the monasteries in England; and a pretence only being wanted for their suppression, it was easy for a prince, possessed of such unlimited power, and seconding the present humor of a great part of the nation, to find or feign one.
Some, also, having secretly embraced the doctrine of the reformation, were glad to be freed from their vows; and on the whole, the design was conducted with such success, than in less than two years the king had got possession of all the monastic revenues.
Every place was full of jealousy and complaints.
Lord Hussey was found guilty, as an accomplice in the insurrection of Lincolnshire, and was executed at Lincoln.
The prince, not six days old, was created prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall, and earl of Chester.
He found arguments and syllogisms enough to defend his cause; and he dismissed the ambassadors without coming to any conclusion.
The northern rebels, as they were more numerous, were also on other accounts more formidable than those of Lincolnshire; because the people were there more accustomed to arms, and because of their vicinity to the Scots, who might make advantage of these disorders.
It seemed unjust to abolish pious institutions for the faults, real or pretended, of individuals.
Chicago! great city of the West! All that wealth, all that power invest; Thou sprang like magic from the sand, As touched by the magician's wand.
are dreadful, and 'his brains festooned the thorn' is not a very happy way of telling the reader how the boar died.
Hadji is a wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem--for there is a moral--seems to be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the human sympathies.
To say that the sun kisses the earth 'with flame-moustachoed lip' is awkward and uncouth, and yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines.
It is heavy, abstract and prosaic, and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions and the most earnest beliefs.
are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter's poem The Banshee.
Mr. Peacock is an American poet, and Professor Thomas Danleigh Supplee, A.M., Ph.D., F.R.S., who has written a preface to his Poems of the Plains and Songs of the Solitudes, tells us that he is entitled to be called the Laureate of the West.
The Maniac, The Bandit Chief, and The Outlaw can hardly be called light reading, but we strongly recommend the poem on Chicago:
They are often distinguished by a grave and chastened beauty of style, and their solemn cadences have something of the 'grand manner' about them.
The volume is nicely printed, but Mr. Strang's frontispiece is not a great success, and most of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to the size of the page.
Mr. Ian Hamilton's Ballad of Hadji is undeniably clever.
Though a staunch Republican, Mr. Peacock, according to the enthusiastic Professor, is not ashamed of his ancestor King William of Holland, nor of his relatives Lord and Lady Peacock who, it seems, are natives of Scotland.
All through the volume we find the same curious mixture of good and bad.
In the course of the chase a little child is drowned, a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to render any assistance.
The sonnet on Shelley's room at University College would be admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.
Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably one beginning
Indeed, from the point of view of art, the few little poems at the end of the volume are worth all the ambitious pseudo-epics that Mr. Todhunter has tried to construct out of Celtic lore.
The 'literary culture' that produced these lines is, we fear, not of a very high order.
Yes--like a bubble filled with smoke-- The curd-white moon upswimming broke The vacancy of space;
His poems seem to be extremely popular, and have been highly praised, the Professor informs us, by Victor Hugo, the Saturday Review and the Commercial Advertiser.
'I study Poetry simply as a fine art by which I may exercise my intellect and elevate my taste,' wrote the late Mr. George Morine many years ago to a friend, and the little posthumous volume that now lies before us contains the record of his quiet literary life.
A Bacchic Day is charming, and the sonnet on the open-air performance of The Faithfull Shepherdesse is most gracefully phrased and most happy in conception.
The opening lines of The Vendetta also deserve mention:
The first line is certainly a masterpiece, and, indeed, the whole volume is full of gems of this kind.
has, of course, an archaeological interest, but has no artistic value at all.
Mr. Ian Hamilton should prune.
(2) Poems in the Modern Spirit, with The Secret of Content.
(6) Poems.
I hung as close as keepsake locket On maiden breast--but from its socket He wrenched my bridle arm,
To throw away the natural grace of rhyme from a modern song is, as Mr. Swinburne once remarked, a wilful abdication of half the power and half the charm of verse, and we cannot say that Mr. Todhunter has given us much that consoles us for its loss.
Green in the wizard arms Of the foam-bearded Atlantic, An isle of old enchantment, A melancholy isle, Enchanted and dreaming lies; And there, by Shannon's flowing In the moonlight, spectre-thin, The spectre Erin sits.
When stars are glowing through day's gloaming glow, Reflecting from ocean's deep, mighty flow, At twilight, when no grim shadows of night, Like ghouls, have stalked in wake of the light.
The Professor remarks in his elaborate preface that Mr. Peacock 'frequently rises to the sublime,' and the two passages quoted above show how keenly critical is his taste in these matters and how well the poet deserves his panegyric.
In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing things.
but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the fight with the boar--
The preface is the most amusing part of the book, but the poems also are worth studying.
(5) Holiday Recreations and Other Poems.
He has a placid, pleasant way of writing, and, indeed, his verses cannot do any harm, though he really should not publish such attempts at metrical versions of the Psalms as the following:
It is an interesting specimen of poetic writing but it is not a perfect work of art.
A gallant fish, all flashing in the sun In silver mail inlaid with scarlet gems, His back thick-sprinkled as a leopard's hide With rich brown spots, and belly of bright gold.
Here is the opening:
There is something very pleasant in coming across a poet who can apostrophise Byron as
We do not care for 'palely fair' in the first line, and the repetition of the word 'strikes' is not very felicitous, but the grace of movement and delicacy of touch are pleasing.
Lift thee o'er thy 'here' and 'now,' Look beyond thine 'I' and 'thou,'
are very graceful and suggestive, and he will probably make his mark in literature.
The prettiest thing in the whole volume is this little lyric on Spring:
Foxes have holes, in which to slink for rest, The birds of air find shelter in the nest; But He, the Son of Man and Lord of all, Has no abiding place His own to call.
David Westren ultimately becomes a mild Unitarian, a sort of pastoral Stopford Brooke with leanings towards Positivism, and we leave him preaching platitudes to a village congregation.
If Theology desires to move us, she must re-write her formulas.
The hero of the poem is a young clergyman of the muscular Christian school:
Mr. Isaac Sharp's Saul of Tarsus is an interesting, and, in some respects, a fine poem.
Immortality, even in the nineteenth century, is not granted to those who rhyme 'awe' and 'war' together.
(5) Highland Daydreams.
Mr. Hayes states the problem of life extremely well, but his solution is sadly inadequate both from a psychological and from a dramatic point of view.
and can speak of Longfellow as a 'mighty Titan.' Reckless panegyrics of this kind show a kindly nature and a good heart, and Mr. Mackenzie's Highland Daydreams could not possibly offend any one.
Nothing could be much worse than this, and if the line 'Where fierce hyaenas seek their awful feast' is intended to frighten us, it entirely misses its effect.
(6) The Story of the Cross.
Suddenly calamity comes upon him, his wife and children die and he finds himself alone and desolate. Then begins his struggle.
are two strong, simple verses, and indeed the spirit of the whole poem is dignified and stately.
He finds no comfort in contemplating Leviathan:
As if we lacked reminding of brute force, As if we never felt the clumsy hoof, As if the bulk of twenty million whales Were worth one pleading soul, or all the laws That rule the lifeless suns could soothe the sense Of outrage in a loving human heart! Sublime? majestic?
It is somewhat lacking in actuality, and the picturesque style in which it is written rather contributes to this effect, lending the story beauty but robbing it of truth.
Saul of Tarsus, silently, With a silent company, To Damascus' gates drew nigh.
And his eyes, too, and his mien Were, as are the eagles, keen; All the man was aquiline--
"Upon the gibbet," returned Richard Hare.
"Why can't she come out to me as you have done?
"And--you say that you were not?"
"I must go, Richard," said Barbara, hastily; "I dare not stay another minute.
Barbara, I must be allowed an interview with my mother."
Barbara, we are here alone in the still night, with God above us; as truly as that you and I must sometime meet Him face to face, I told you the truth.
"I get twelve shillings a week, and that has to find me in everything!"
"Be silent for your life," she whispered, "here's papa."
Mr. Hare closed the gate and walked on up the path.
"If you are discovered, it is certain death; death--upon--you know!"
"Quite.
"Let me in, papa," she called out.
"Richard!"
Is she up, or in bed?"
After the delivery of the verdict, he took an oath in the justice-room, in the presence of his brother magistrates, that if he could find you he would deliver you up to justice, and that he would do it, though you might not turn up for ten years to come.
He was a friend of Afy's."
Where is it they suppose that I am, Barbara?"
"In a stable-yard."
You know his disposition, Richard, and therefore may be sure he will keep it.
I wish I did; I wish I could unearth him.
"I went down to the gate to look for you," she panted, "and had--had-- strolled over to the side path.
"How the conviction arose at first, I cannot tell you; I do not think she knows herself.
"This was a solemn one, Richard.
A report arose that you had been seen at Liverpool, in an Australian-bound ship, but we could not trace it to any foundation."
"What?"
He takes many."
"He had nothing to do with it.
"And about the money?
"I could not do better.
I was not brought up to anything, and I did understand horses.
"Well," returned Richard.
In spite of his smock-frock and his straw-wisped hat, and his false whiskers, black as Erebus, she knew him for her brother.
"Bethel!" lightly returned Richard Hare.
The man who did the deed was Thorn."
And you know that he is true as steel."
"Barbara," was the whispered, eager answer, "don't you recognize me?"
"It is hard to have been separated from her for eighteen months, and to go back without seeing her," returned Richard.
"I did not commit it at all," he replied.
Papa took an oath--did you hear of it?"
"It had none.
"A stable-yard!" she uttered, in a deeply shocked tone.
"Is he a myth?" said Barbara, in a low voice.
"Thorn!" echoed Barbara, lifting her head.
"Working in a stable-yard?"
"Then why risk it?
"Did you expect it would be as a merchant, or a banker, or perhaps as secretary to one of her majesty's ministers--or that I was a gentleman at large, living on my fortune?" retorted Richard Hare, in a tone of chafed anguish, painful to hear.
It was Thorn murdered Hallijohn, and I had nothing whatever to do with it."
"Richard," interrupted his sister, in a hushed voice, "mamma entertains one fixed idea, which she cannot put from her.
The brother and sister cowered together, scarcely daring to breathe; you might have heard Barbara's heart beating.
A thought crossed my mind that it might be some one from you, and even that made me sick with terror.
"You forget yourself when you mention that name to me."
"If my health was delicate, causing my poor mother to indulge me, ought that to have been a reason for his ridiculing me on every possible occasion, public and private?
"Poor Richard, poor Richard!" she wailed, caressing his hand and weeping over it.
"What oath?
"I don't know who.
Indeed, it is most dangerous for you to be here."
"So, even you doubt me?"
The moment that this pretension is abandoned, the sword will drop from our grasp, and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amity and commerce that can not but be mutually beneficial.
An act was subsequently passed authorizing the President of the United States, in his discretion, to close our ports, but it was never executed.
A forced union is a political absurdity.
To be prepared for self-defense, I called Congress together at Montgomery on April 29th, and, in the message of that date, thus spoke of the proclamation of the President of the United States: "Apparently contradictory as are the terms of this singular document, one point is unmistakably evident.
Any effort on the part of the others to force the seceding State to consent to come back is an attempt at subjugation.
How unreasonable, how blind with rage must have been that administration of affairs which so quickly brought the Government to the necessity of destroying its own means of defense in order, as it publicly declared, "to maintain its life"!
He says, "No choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government, and so to resist force employed for its destruction by force for its preservation."
The answer to this question is very plain.
The great ship Pennsylvania was burned, and the frigates Merrimac and Columbus, and the Delaware, Raritan, Plymouth, and Germantown were sunk.
The ambitious and aggressive States obtain possession of the central authority which, having grown strong in the lapse of time, asserts its entire sovereignty over the States.
That was the chart which he had just solemnly pledged himself to the country faithfully to follow.
It, therefore, assumed that the withdrawal of the Southern States from the Union was an insurrection.
Volunteers were ordered to be enrolled and held in readiness in every part of the State.
No less absurd is President Lincoln's effort to dissever the sovereignty of the people from that of the State; as if there could be a State without a people, or a sovereign people without a State.
About four months afterward, when the State, in union with others which had joined her, had possessed herself of the forts within her limits, which the United States Government had refused to evacuate, President Lincoln issued the above-mentioned proclamation.
In their efforts to subjugate us, the destruction of our commerce was regarded by the authorities at Washington as a most efficient measure.
The answer which he seems to infer would be given "by the whole family of man" is that such a government as he supposes "can maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes." And, therefore, he concluded that he was right in the judgment of "the whole family of man" in commencing hostilities against us.
In the nature of things, no union can be formed except by separate, independent, and distinct parties.
If any further evidence had been required to show that it was the determination of the Northern people not only to make no concessions to the grievances of the Southern States, but to increase them to the last extremity, it was furnished by the proclamation of President Lincoln, issued on April 15, 1861.
Already the Northern officer in charge had evacuated Harper's Ferry, after having attempted to destroy the public buildings there.
On the contrary, we wished to leave it alone.
In three minutes or less, both of the arsenal buildings, containing nearly fifteen thousand stand of arms, together with the carpenter's shop, which was at the upper end of a long and connected series of workshops of the armory proper, were in a blaze.
For a State or union of States to attack with military force another State, is to make war.
It had belonged to all the States in common, and to each one equally with the others.
Though he refused to recognize her as a State, it did not make her any less a State.
When certain sovereign and independent States form a union with limited powers for some general purposes, and any one or more of them, in the progress of time, suffer unjust and oppressive grievances for which there is no redress but in a withdrawal from the association, is such withdrawal an insurrection?
It further declared that all persons who should under their authority molest any vessel of the United States, or the persons or cargo on board, should be treated as pirates.
All its powers are there expressed, defined, and limited.
Our separation did not involve its destruction.
Planting himself on this position, he commenced the devastation and bloodshed which followed to effect our subjugation.
Where is the value of constitutional liberty?
By designating the State as a "combination," and considering that under such a name it might be in a condition of insurrection, he assumed to have authority to raise a great military force and attack the State. Yet, even if the fact had been as assumed, if an insurrection had existed, the President could not lawfully have derived the power he exercised from such condition of affairs.
I then proceeded to say that I did not feel at liberty to disregard the fact that many of the States seemed quite content to submit to the exercise of the powers assumed by the President of the United States, and were actively engaged in levying troops for the purpose indicated in the proclamation.
By assertion, he attempted to annihilate seven States; and the war which followed was to enforce the revolutionary edict, and to establish the supremacy of the General Government on the ruins of the blood-bought independence of the States.
His report says: "I gave the order to apply the torch.
The assertion is not only incorrect, in stating that force was employed by us, but also in declaring that it was for the destruction of the Government of the United States.
These powers are to be exercised only for certain specified objects; and the purposes, declared in the beginning of the deed or instrument of delegation, were "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
Its authority consists solely of certain powers delegated to it, as a common agent, by an association of sovereign and independent States.
It is a wrong which no lapse of time or combination of circumstances can ever make right.
The President of the United States calls for an army of seventy-five thousand men, whose first service is to be the capture of our forts.
In it the President called for seventy-five thousand men to suppress "combinations" opposed to the laws, and obstructing their execution in seven sovereign States which had retired from the Union.
The scheme of blockade was resorted to, and a falsehood was asserted on which to base it.
Was it an insurrection?
An act was also passed to provide revenue from imports; another, relative to prisoners of war; and such others as were necessary to complete the internal organization of the Government, and establish the administration of public affairs.
He soon deviated widely from it--and fatally erroneous was his course.
This proclamation, which has already been mentioned, requires a further examination, as it was the official declaration, on the part of the Government of the United States, of the war which ensued.
The value of the property destroyed was estimated at several millions of dollars.
The gravity of age and the zeal of youth rivaled each other in the desire to be foremost in the public defense.
So long as this pretension is maintained, with a firm reliance on that Divine Power which covers with its protection the just cause, we must continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence, and self-government."
It was only to that instrument Mr. Lincoln as President should have gone to learn his duties.
The administration of the affairs of a great people, at a most perilous period, is decided by the answer which it is assumed "the whole family of man" would give to a supposed condition of human affairs which did not exist and which could not exist.
He says, "So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power of the Government." That is the power to make war against foreign nations, for the Government has no other war power.
Seventy-five thousand men organized and equipped are a powerful army, and, when raised to operate against these States, nothing else than war could be intended.
What strength is there in bills of rights--in limitations of power?
But the question which Mr. Lincoln presents "to the whole family of man" deserves a further notice.
On November 6, 1860, the Legislature of South Carolina assembled and gave the vote of the State for electors of a President of the United States.
The State authorities immediately conformed to this action of the Convention, and the laws and authority of the United States ceased to be obeyed within the limits of the State.
The supposed case which he presents is entirely unlike the real case.
On the next day an act was passed calling a State Convention to assemble on December 17th, to determine the question of the withdrawal of the State from the United States.
He now goes to the Constitution for the exercise of his war power, and here we have another fiction.
Under the laws of nations, separate governments when at war blockade each other's ports.
But the Government of the United States could not consent to justify its blockade of our ports on this ground, as it would be an admission that the Confederate States were a separate and distinct sovereignty, and that the war was prosecuted only for subjugation.
Then a couple of them made a break for the doorway.
The Base Captain now believes, and the stills of the photorecord support his belief, that this was not the crew member who had been left in the control room.
I'll follow.
We're not discovered yet.
Have a ruling against it."
The other, farther away, drifted down diagonally, its disintegrator ray playing viciously over the ground below it.
Before the Base Captain could speak to him he left the room, nor was any response given to the attention signal the Captain flashed throughout the ship.
Above all else, I was afraid that some automatic telephone apparatus existed in the room, through which I might be heard on the other ships. The risk of trying to jam the controls was too great.
The distance between Wilma's hiding place and the door in the side of the Han ship was not more than fifteen feet.
Abandon the ring target.
No beams have been broken out.
I crouched at the far side of the compartment, motionless.
I think my "three" was a bit weak.
Stand a bit longer, but be ready."
Then the forward rep-ray generator exploded, and all signals went dead.
She was already crouched with her feet braced against a metal beam.
For an instant they stood frozen with horror at whatever they saw.
"Just knives," came the reply.
They had been fairly bunched, and I got them all.
I abandoned the idea and withdrew softly.
"Wilma, leap!" I almost whispered the order.
The rest followed.
"Good," I said quickly.
But I had no time to study it.
"All but one crashed and that one is drifting down toward the south; we've captured this one we're in intact.
I gazed at the mass of controls.
But it never reached it.
"They're coming out of the ship." I spoke quietly, with my hand over my mouth, for fear they might hear me.
I leaped back into the compartment of the Han ship and knelt beside my Wilma.
I think my last words must have been heard by the man who was approaching, for he stopped suddenly.
Apparently reassured at the absence of any further sound, a man came around a sort of bulkhead--and I leaped.
You, on the hilltops, all train on the repellors of the ships to the south.
"Wilma, crawl over to your left where you can make a straight leap for the door in that ship.
His commands, sending out jumpers in pursuit of the descending ship, rang in my ears, but I paid no attention to them.
I ran back to the entrance compartment.
It grazed my cheek.
"How are they armed?" I asked.
I would not draw my sword if there were only one of them.
So unless further evidence actually is developed, or the Heaven-Born orders to the contrary, the Military will hold to a defensive policy.
It was time to act.
Wilma still lay where she had slumped down.
In the center of the compartment, on a massively braced universal joint mounting, was what I took for the repellor generator.
"Any signs we have been observed?" I asked my men on the hillsides.
The projectoscope relays, swinging in wide arcs, recorded little of value except at the ends of their swings.
The party debarked, leaving one man on board in the control cabin.
Some eighth of a mile away I saw one of the ships crash to earth.
Most of them have crawled into it out of sight."
"Are you boys all ready?" I asked, creeping to a position opposite the door and drawing my hand-gun.
It was in the form of a public warning and news item, and read as follows:
I spoke.
I'll take care of them.
These men are all walking around the wreck in a bunch.
One hurled his knife at me.
Maybe we won't be seen. We'll overpower the guard inside, but don't shoot.
For an agonizing instant nothing happened, except that the landing party from the ship strolled into my range of vision.
"As its control room was shattered, verbal report from its Action Captain was precluded.
I followed in a split second, more clumsily, but no less speedily, bruising my shoulder painfully, as I ricocheted from the edge of the opening and brought up sliding against the unconscious girl; for she evidently had hit her head against the partition within the ship into which she had crashed.
And it was deserted.
Knocked out.
One of these, from a machine which happened to be set in telescopic focus, shows several views of great value in picturing the falls of the other ships, and all of the rear projectoscope records enable the reconstruction in detail of the pendulum and torsional movements of the ship, and its sag toward the earth.
An instant later confused sounds reached the control-room electrophone, such as might be made by a man falling heavily, and footsteps reapproached the control room, a figure entering and leaving the control room hurriedly.
"One--two--three--four, five--six--seven--eight--nine.
"Not yet," I heard the Boss reply.
With a simple circuit, therefore, between two stations and where an intermediate battery is not necessary, a relay is not used.
By a combination of the neutral relay and the polar relay two operators, by manipulating two telegraph keys in the ordinary way, can simultaneously send two messages over one line in the SAME direction with the SAME current, one operator varying its strength and the other operator varying its polarity or direction of flow.
The armature lever, L, is long, pivoted in the centre, and is bent over at the end.
Inasmuch as unlike poles of magnets are attracted to each other and like poles repelled, it follows that this north pole will be repelled by the north pole of the electromagnet, but will swing over and be attracted by its south pole.
Hence, the bar would remain non-magnetic.
The underlying phenomena were similar, the difference consisting largely in the arrangement of the circuits and apparatus.
The result would be that these currents would oppose and neutralize each other, and, therefore, none would flow in wire A. Inasmuch, however, as there is nothing to hinder, current would flow from battery C through wire B, and the bar would therefore be magnetized.
"It may well be doubted whether in the whole range of applied electricity there occur such beautiful combinations, so quickly made, broken up, and others reformed, as in the operation of the Edison quadruplex.
The compensating resistances and condensers necessary for a duplex arrangement are shown in the diagram.
As the path to the quadruplex passes through the duplex, let us consider the Stearns system, after noting one other principle--namely, that if more than one path is presented in which an electric current may complete its circuit, it divides in proportion to the resistance of each path.
If the direction is reversed, the polarity will also be reversed.
As the reader will probably be interested to learn something of the theoretical principles of this fascinating invention, we shall endeavor to offer a brief and condensed explanation thereof with as little technicality as the subject will permit.
The duplexes above described could not be used on a railroad telegraph system, because of the necessity of electrically balancing the line, which, while entirely feasible on a through line, would not be practicable between a number of intercommunicating points. Edison's phonoplex normally doubled the capacity of telegraph lines, whether employed on way business or through traffic, but in actual practice made it possible to obtain more than double service.
This device being a relay, its purpose is to repeat transmitted signals into a local circuit, as before explained.
Thus far we have referred to two systems, one the neutral or differential duplex, and the other the combination of the neutral and polar relays, making a diplex system.
These phenomena are easy of comprehension and demonstration.
There is a battery, C, and a key, K. When the key is depressed, current flows through the relay coils at A, but no magnetism is produced, as they oppose each other.
The necessity for this invention arose out of the problem of increasing the capacity of telegraph lines employed in "through" and "way" service, such as upon railroads.
When the operator releases the pressure on his key the circuit is broken, current does not flow, the magnetic effect ceases, and the armature is drawn back by its spring. These movements give rise to the clicking sounds which represent the dots and dashes of the Morse or other alphabet as transmitted by the operator.
In April of that year, however, Edison took up the study of the subject and filed two applications for patents.
Hence, two messages can be sent in opposite directions over the same line simultaneously.
It will be understood, of course, that the polar relay, as used in the quadruplex system, is wound differentially, and therefore its operation is somewhat similar in principle to that of the differentially wound neutral relay, in that it does not respond to the operation of the key at the home office, but only operates in response to the movements of the distant key.
To accomplish this object Edison introduced another and distinct feature--namely, the using of the same current, but ALSO varying its DIRECTION of flow; that is to say, alternately reversing the POLARITY of the batteries as applied to the line and thus producing corresponding changes in the polarity of another specially constructed type of relay, called a polarized relay.
If, therefore, there be placed in the same circuit a regular telegraph relay and a special telephone, an operator may, by manipulating a key, operate the relay (and its sounder) without producing a sound in the telephone, as the makes and breaks of the key are far below the limit of audibility.
The name suggests the use of the telephone, and such indeed is the case.
It is well known that the diaphragm of a telephone vibrates with the fluctuations of the current energizing the magnet beneath it.
If both transmitters be closed simultaneously, both batteries will be placed to the line, which would practically result in doubling the current in each of the main-line coils, in consequence of which both relays are energized and their armatures attracted through the operation of the keys at the distant ends.
With the duplex, as we have seen, the current on the main line is changed in strength only when both keys at OPPOSITE stations are closed together, so that a current due to both batteries flows over the main line.
All magnets have two poles, north and south.
Its attractive power draws the armature toward the poles.
Thus there was introduced a new feature into the art of multiplex telegraphy, for, whereas duplexing (accomplished by varying the strength of the current) permitted messages to be sent simultaneously from opposite stations, diplexing (achieved by also varying the direction of the current) permitted the simultaneous transmission of two messages from the same station and their separate reception at the distant station.
EDISON'S work in stock printers and telegraphy had marked him as a rising man in the electrical art of the period but his invention of quadruplex telegraphy in 1874 was what brought him very prominently before the notice of the public.
The flow of current will cause two equal opposing actions to be set up in the bar; one will exactly offset the other, and no magnetic effect will be produced.
An idea of their complexity may be gathered from the following, which is quoted from American Telegraphy and Encyclopedia of the Telegraph, by William Maver, Jr.:
When the key is released the battery is again connected to earth.
If the direction of flow of current be reversed, by reversing the battery, the electromagnetic polarity also reverses and the end of the permanent magnet swings over to the other side.
There is naturally much intercommunication, which would be greatly curtailed by a system having the capacity of only a single message at a time.
An essential part of this relay consists of a swinging PERMANENT magnet, C, whose polarity remains fixed, that end between the terminals of the electromagnet being a north pole.
When the distant operator presses down his key the circuit is closed and a current passes along the line and through the (generally two) coils of the electromagnet, thus magnetizing the iron core.
This difficulty was solved by dividing the battery at each station into two unequal parts, the smaller battery being always in circuit with the pole-changer ready to have its polarity reversed on the main line to operate the distant polar relay, but the spring retracting the armature of the neutral relay is made so stiff as to resist these weak currents.
If a rod of soft iron be wound around with a number of turns of insulated wire, and a current of electricity be sent through the wire, the rod will be instantly magnetized and will remain a magnet as long as the current flows; but when the current is cut off the magnetic effect instantly ceases.
The current, however, flows out through the main-line coil over the line and through the main-line coil 1 at B, completing its circuit to earth and magnetizing the bar of the relay, thus causing its armature to be attracted.
The non-technical reader may wonder what use can possibly be made of an apparently non-operative piece of apparatus.
It should be stated, however, that between the outline and the filling in of the details there was an enormous amount of hard work, study, patient plodding, and endless experiments before Edison finally perfected his quadruplex system in the year 1874.
It has been in practical use for many years on some of the leading railroads of the United States.
This action of the pole-changer is effected by movements of the armature of an electromagnet through the manipulation of an ordinary telegraph key by an operator at the home station, as in the operation of the "transmitter," above referred to.
Besides these there are the compensating resistances and condensers.
In the early part of 1873, and for some time afterward, the system invented by Joseph Stearns was the duplex in practical use.
On releasing the key the circuit is broken and magnetism instantly ceases.
The artificial line, as well as that to which the two coils are joined, are connected to earth.
It must be borne in mind, however, in considering a duplex system, that a differential relay is used AT EACH END of the line and forms part of the circuit; and that while each relay must be absolutely unresponsive to the signals SENT OUT FROM ITS HOME OFFICE, it must respond to signals transmitted by a DISTANT OFFICE.
If it were attempted to offer here a detailed explanation of the varied and numerous operations of the quadruplex, this article would assume the proportions of a treatise.
The quadruplex was the tempting goal toward which Edison now constantly turned, and after more than a year's strenuous work he filed a number of applications for patents in the late summer of 1874.
A relay thus wound is known as a differential relay--more generally called a neutral relay.
Assuming, for instance, the bar to be end-on toward the observer, that end will be a south pole if the current is flowing from left to right, clockwise, around the bar; or a north pole if flowing in the other direction, as illustrated at the right of the figure.
Edison made another notable contribution to multiplex telegraphy some years later in the Phonoplex.
The relay at A would be unresponsive, but the core of the relay at B would be magnetized and its armature respond to signals from A. In like manner, if the transmitter at B be closed, current would flow through similar parts and thus cause the relay at A to respond.
In practice this is done by means of a special instrument known as a continuity preserving transmitter, or, usually, as a transmitter.
Hence, the next figure (4), with its accompanying explanation, will probably make the matter clear.
The relay coils are connected by wire to the spring piece, S, and the armature lever is connected to earth.
This explanation will necessarily be of somewhat elementary character for the benefit of the lay reader, whose indulgence is asked for an occasional reiteration introduced for the sake of clearness of comprehension.
For example, it is quite demonstrable that during the making of a simple dash of the Morse alphabet by the neutral relay at the home station the distant pole-changer may reverse its battery several times; the home pole-changer may do likewise, and the home transmitter may increase and decrease the electromotive force of the home battery repeatedly.
This consists of an electromagnet, T, operated by a key, K, and separate battery.
The arrows indicate the direction of flow.
This instrument consists essentially of an electro-magnet of horseshoe form with its two poles close together, and with its armature, a bar of iron, maintained in close proximity to the poles, but kept normally in a retracted position by a spring.
"A Cat may look at a king."
"The wandering Cat gets many a rap."
"When candles are out, all Cats are grey." Otherwise, "Joan is as good as my Lady in the dark."
Again:--
That I am very safe and happy in the hands of my heavenly Father--and those of the kind earthly one He has given me," she added in a whisper, putting her arms about his neck, and looking in his face with eyes brimful of filial tenderness and love.
She shall never know a pang a father's love and care can save her from." And again his hand rested caressingly on Elsie's head.
And love's young dream, the first, and sweetest, was over and gone.
The chirography was precisely that of the letter. While slowly convalescing, Arthur had prepared for this expected interview with Horace, by spending many a solitary hour in laboriously teaching himself to imitate Jackson's ordinary hand, in which most of the letters he had received from him were written.
He opened his desk, wrote a sentence on a scrap of paper, and handed it to Mr. Dinsmore.
"You shall never go away again," said the little fellow, hugging her tight.
"I know you love your foolish little daughter very dearly; almost as dearly as she loves you."
Chloe was just putting the finishing touches to her young lady's toilet when little Horace came running down the hall, and rapping on Elsie's door, called out, "Sister, papa says put on a short dress, and your walking shoes, and come take a stroll on the beach with us before breakfast."
Walter looked at Arthur in surprise.
"Horace, don't look so stern and angry, I know he means to turn over a new leaf; for he told me so.
Oh, what a feeble fort's a woman's heart, Betrayed by nature, and besieged by art.
"That's true, my son; I do love her far too well ever to grieve her if it can be helped.
"But you wouldn't, papa," said the boy, shaking his head with an incredulous smile.
Throwing on a dressing-gown over her night dress, she sat down before the open window with her Bible in her hand.
"No, you've called me a liar, and what's the use of my telling you anything?
But there, your father is calling to you from the sitting-room."
"How I love the sea," she said, sighing, "but, mamma, to-night it makes me think of a text--'All Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me.'"
He walked back to his boarding-house, cursing his ill luck and Messrs. Dinsmore and Travilla, and gave notice to his landlady that his room would become vacant the next morning.
--FANE'S "LOVE IN THE DARK."
And if anybody's been making her sorry, I'll kill him.
There, good-night.
"Yes, aunt, if she wants to come.
"Well, dear, that is perfectly natural, but try to be entirely submissive to your father, and wait patiently; and hopefully too," she added with a smile; "for if Mr. Egerton is really good, no doubt it will be proved in time, and then your father will at once remove his interdict.
Be patient, darling, and try to trust both your heavenly and your earthly father.
"Horace, will you bring her to see me again?"
"You have no lingering doubts as to the identity and utter unworthiness of the man?"
"I don't deny that I've had some dealings with Jackson, but your Egerton I know nothing of whatever."
"That is right, my darling," he said, "and you shall never want for love while your father lives.
I fear I am very wicked to feel so sad."
Mr. Travilla was with them most of the time.
She still loved, as of old, to spend the first hour of the day in the study of its pages, and in communion with Him whose word it is.
I could not tell you how dear you and my little brother are to me, and as for papa--sometimes I am more than half afraid I make an idol of him; and yet--oh, mamma," she murmured, hiding her face in Rose's bosom, "why is it that I can no longer be in love with the loves that so fully satisfied me?"
And you will help him, won't you?"
Mr. and Mrs. Dinsmore were still youthful in their feelings, and joined with great zest in the sports of the young people, going with them in all their excursions, taking an active part in all their pastimes, and contriving so many fresh entertainments, that during those few weeks life seemed like one long gala day.
She kept her promise faithfully, and had her reward in much real enjoyment of the many pleasures provided for her.
"Come, Art, speak, why don't you?" he said.
Arthur listened in sullen silence, though his rapidly changing color showed that he felt the cutting rebuke keenly.
I have no doubt that you sent that villain to Lansdale to try his arts upon Elsie; and for that you are richly deserving of my anger, and of any punishment it might be in my power to deal out to you.
"No, son," answered Mr. Dinsmore, patting his rosy cheek, and softly stroking Elsie's hair, "and it is just the same with a man who has but one daughter."
Well, that was right, but take it now.
"And didn't like to take it before folks?
"Only my love, papa, and--and that she must not be anxious about me, as she said that she should.
"I say it's a cowardly piece of business for you to give the lie to a fellow that hasn't the strength to knock you down for it."
If you go on as you have for the last three or four years, you will bring down his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.
CHAPTER XIX.
How it rejoices my heart to see you looking so bright and well this morning."
But he believes you have been deceived in the man's character; and don't you think, daughter, that he is wiser than yourself, and more capable of finding out the truth about the matter?"
"But you need rest too, and ought not to stay up any longer."
Mr. Dinsmore took this opportunity to pay another flying visit to his two young brothers.
"It will be moonlight next week," said Sophy; "and we'll have some delightful drives and walks along the beach.
"And in the meantime we can take some rides and drives,--down to Diamond Beach, over to the light-house, and elsewhere," said Edward Allison, his brother Richard adding, "and do a little fishing and boating."
I know you need comfort, my poor little pet," he said, taking the offered seat, and passing his arm round her waist.
Bless her for it!
But don't ask me to leave her again."
And if you are mistaken, you will one day discover it, and feel thankful, indeed, to your papa for taking just the course he has."
"I wrote it myself."
The whole party left the shore about the last of September, the Allisons returning to their city residence, Mr. Travilla to his Southern home, and the Dinsmores travelling through Pennsylvania and New York, from one romantic and picturesque spot to another; finishing up with two or three weeks in Philadelphia, during which Rose and Elsie were much occupied with their fall and winter shopping.
She could never be very wretched while thus tenderly loved, and cherished.
Then the train came thundering up, and the fair girl was hurried into it, Mr. Travilla, on one side, and her father on the other, effectually preventing any near approach to her person on the part of the baffled and disappointed fortune-hunter.
Her father understood and sympathized with it all.
If there were any gauge by which to measure love, I know not whose would be found the greatest."
"Perhaps not, but you may well fear Him who has said, 'a lying tongue is but for a moment.' How do you reconcile such an assertion as you have just made with the fact of your having that letter in your possession?"
She was making an effort to be interested in the conversation, but looking worn, weary, and sad.
"Let us sit down on this couch while we talk; you are too tired to stand," said Rose, drawing her away from the window to a softly-cushioned lounge.
"I know it, papa," she murmured.
"Has she, darling?
Mr. Dinsmore was watching his daughter.
From the first he seemed to be a perfect gentleman, educated, polished, and refined; and afterward he became--at least so I thought from the conversations we had together--truly converted, and a very earnest, devoted Christian.
Mr. Travilla bought the tickets, and Simon attended to the checking of the baggage.
'Cause she's my sister, and I've got to take care of her."
They were full of plans for giving her pleasure, and crowding the greatest possible amount of enjoyment into the four or five weeks of their expected sojourn on the island.
Look to Him and he will help you to bear it, and send relief in His own good time and way.
He had tarried behind in Philadelphia, as Mr. Dinsmore and his daughter passed through, but followed them to Cape Island a few days later.
"But surely papa knows I cannot go to bed without my good-night kiss when he is in the same house with me," she said, winding her arms about his neck.
But, mamma, I wasn't teasing her, not a bit; was I, Elsie?
"No, dear; and your father would agree with you in that.
"Thank you, best and kindest of mothers; I should never want anything kept from you."
'Aggrawatin' thing!' said the vixenish lady last-mentioned, darting a withering glance at the heavy gentleman.
'Sad thing about these costs of our people's, ain't it,' said Jackson, when Mrs. Cluppins and Mrs. Sanders had fallen asleep; 'your bill of costs, I mean.'
'What do you mean?' said Mrs. Bardell, with a palpitating heart.
'Isaac,' said Jackson, as Mrs. Bardell prepared to get in, looking up at the man with the ash stick, who was seated on the box, smoking a cigar.
I see some good in this.
'It's very important and pressing business, which can't be postponed on any account.
CHAPTER XLVI.
The lady as has taken the lodgings!' ejaculated Mrs. Cluppins.
'Why, Mrs. Rogers, ma'am,' said Mrs. Bardell, 'you've never been introduced, I declare!
'Oh, indeed!' said Mrs. Rogers graciously; for she was the lodger, and her servant was in waiting, so she was more gracious than intimate, in right of her position.
'Why, thank'ee, I'd rather not,' said Mr. Jackson, with some embarrassment of manner.
'Which is Mrs. Cluppins's sister,' suggested Mrs. Sanders.
She was awakened, after some time, by the stopping of the coach.
'It's quite a party!'
All the ladies concurred in this opinion; so Mr. Raddle was pushed out of the room, and requested to give himself an airing in the back yard. Which he did for about a quarter of an hour, when Mrs. Bardell announced to him with a solemn face that he might come in now, but that he must be very careful how he behaved towards his wife.
As the lady spoke these words, Mr. Jackson turned from the coach where he had been addressing some observations to a shabby man in black leggings, who had just emerged from the vehicle with a thick ash stick in his hand, and made his way to the place where the ladies were seated; winding his hair round the brim of his hat, as he came along.
The room they turned into was even more odd-looking than the porch.
'Nothing whatever, ma'am,' replied Mr. Jackson.
Good-night, Tommy!'
The country for a wounded spirit, they say.'
'My dear, it's not my fault,' said the gentleman.
'Well, Tommy,' said Mrs. Cluppins, 'how's your poor dear mother?'
'I called in Goswell Street,' resumed Mr. Jackson, 'and hearing that you were here, from the slavey, took a coach and came on.
I can't bear the sight on you, you brute.'
Shrewd creatures, those lawyers.
Thereupon the ladies cast indignant glances at Mr. Raddle.
The whole edge of the thing had been taken off--it was flatter than walking.
'Would anybody believe, ma'am,' exclaimed Mrs. Raddle, turning fiercely to the first-floor lodger, 'that a woman could be married to such a unmanly creetur, which can tamper with a woman's feelings as he does, every hour in the day, ma'am?'
Surely Mr. Pickwick can't have paid the damages.'
'Or hoffered marriage!' said Mrs. Cluppins.
Quite.'
'Perhaps I am, ma'am.
But that description of fainting fits, which is contagious among ladies, seldom lasts long; so when he had been well kissed, and a little cried over, Mrs. Bardell recovered, set him down again, wondering how she could have been so foolish, and poured out some more tea.
This was scarcely fair upon the unfortunate Mr. Raddle, who had been thrust aside by his good lady in the commencement of the dispute, and peremptorily commanded to hold his tongue.
Mrs. Bardell was unanimously voted into the chair, and Mrs. Rogers being stationed on her right hand, and Mrs. Raddle on her left, the meal proceeded with great merriment and success.
'Don't talk to me, you creetur, don't,' retorted the lady.
Now go away, Raddle, there's a good soul, or you'll only aggravate her.'
'Ah, what has decomposed you, ma'am?' inquired Mrs. Rogers.
'Oh!
It was their duty in the way of business, to take you in execution for them costs; but they were anxious to spare your feelings as much as they could.
'How sweet the country is, to be sure!' sighed Mrs. Rogers; 'I almost wish I lived in it always.'
There was a certain degree of pride and importance about being wanted by one's lawyers in such a monstrous hurry, that was by no means displeasing to Mrs. Bardell, especially as it might be reasonably supposed to enhance her consequence in the eyes of the first-floor lodger.
Mrs. Bardell screamed violently; Tommy roared; Mrs. Cluppins shrunk within herself; and Mrs. Sanders made off, without more ado.
'Oh!
Here, Tommy, dear.'
It was at this moment, that the sound of approaching wheels was heard, and that the ladies, looking up, saw a hackney-coach stop at the garden gate.
The waiter was at once despatched to the bashful gentleman, and the bashful gentleman took something; Mr. Jackson also took something, and the ladies took something, for hospitality's sake.
'Oh, indeed!'
I'm ready too, I am.' Here Master Bardell put his hands in his pockets, and jumped off and on the bottom step of the door.
'Yes,' said Mr. Jackson, biting his lip.
What a comfort it must be, to you, to think how it's been done!
'It's a gentleman,' said Mrs. Raddle.
Mrs. Bardell got in, Mr. Jackson got in after her, and away they drove. Mrs. Bardell could not help ruminating on what Mr. Jackson's friend had said.
'Oh, she's very well,' replied Master Bardell. 'She's in the front parlour, all ready.
'I'm very sorry they can't get them,' replied Mrs. Bardell. 'But if you law gentlemen do these things on speculation, why you must get a loss now and then, you know.'
'You must not flurry yourself, Mary Ann,' interposed Mrs. Cluppins.
'What?
'He's not much used to ladies' society, and it makes him bashful.
'Indeed, to tell you the truth, I said, as we was a-coming along in the cabrioily--'
'More company!' said Mrs. Sanders.
'Oh, ask your friend to come here, Sir,' said Mrs. Bardell. 'Pray ask your friend here, Sir.'
What for?
'Bless us!' said Mrs. Cluppins.
Such a number of men standing about!
'Settle it among yourselves.
'We're not going quite so far,' replied Jackson.
Master Bardell put his hands deeper down into his pockets, and nodded exactly thirty-five times, to imply that it was the lady-lodger, and no other.
DODSON AND FOGG
They followed.
Mrs. Bardell, leaning on Jackson's arm, and leading Tommy by the hand, had already entered the porch.
The ladies agreed that it WAS very strange, but were unanimously of opinion that it must be very important, or Dodson & Fogg would never have sent; and further, that the business being urgent, she ought to repair to Dodson & Fogg's without any delay.
Lastly, the two vixenish ladies and the heavy gentleman were giving the driver contradictory directions, all tending to the one point, that he should stop at Mrs. Bardell's door; which the heavy gentleman, in direct opposition to, and defiance of, the vixenish ladies, contended was a green door and not a yellow one.
Mrs. Rogers whispered Mrs. Raddle that he was really an elegant young man.
Mrs. Raddle smiled sweetly, Mr. Raddle bowed, and Mrs. Cluppins said, 'she was sure she was very happy to have an opportunity of being known to a lady which she had heerd so much in favour of, as Mrs. Rogers.' A compliment which the last-named lady acknowledged with graceful condescension.
'For lone people as have got nobody to care for them, or take care of them, or as have been hurt in their mind, or that kind of thing,' observed Mr. Raddle, plucking up a little cheerfulness, and looking round, 'the country is all very well.
'Here we are at last.
'Don't talk to me, don't, you brute, for fear I should be perwoked to forgit my sect and strike you!' said Mrs. Raddle.
'Well, Mr. Raddle,' said Mrs. Bardell; 'I'm sure you ought to feel very much honoured at you and Tommy being the only gentlemen to escort so many ladies all the way to the Spaniards, at Hampstead.
Perhaps I am,' sighed the first-floor lodger.
'Have the goodness to step out.'
Oh!
Speak up, old feller.'
'Ah, poor thing!' said Mrs. Rogers, 'I know what her feelin's is, too well.' 'Ah, poor thing! so do I,' said Mrs. Sanders; and then all the ladies moaned in unison, and said they knew what it was, and they pitied her from their hearts, they did.
On they drove, and Mrs. Bardell fell asleep.
And they stared so!
'Why doesn't he make haste!'
Lord bless us, how they find people out!
Now, of all things in the world that the unfortunate man could have said, any would have been preferable to this.
'You didn't mean!' repeated Mrs. Raddle, with great scorn and contempt. 'Go away.
He learned to write, first, that he might have an accomplishment his playmates had not; then that he might help his elders by writing their letters, and enjoy the feeling of usefulness which this gave him; and finally that he might copy what struck him in his reading and thus make it his own for future use.
He had heard of rich and unoccupied lands in Perry County in that State, and thither he determined to go.
One aged man says that he has seen him pick up and carry away a chicken-house weighing six hundred pounds.
She dressed the children in warmer clothing and put them to sleep in comfortable beds.
The Sparrows, husband and wife, died early in October, and Nancy Hanks Lincoln followed them after an interval of a few days. Thomas Lincoln made the coffins for his dead "out of green lumber cut with a whipsaw," and they were all buried, with scant ceremony, in a little clearing of the forest.
He was merely a good boy, with sufficient wickedness to prove his humanity.
But there is evidence that he felt too large for the life of a farmhand on Pigeon Creek, and his thoughts naturally turned, after the manner of restless boys in the West, to the river, as the avenue of escape from the narrow life of the woods.
We have known a man to gain the sobriquet of "Split-log Mitchell" by indulging in the luxury of building a cabin of square-hewn timbers.
They numbered men enough to build without calling in their neighbors, and immediately put up a cabin on the north fork of the Sangamon River.
They were full of strange superstitions.
At Posey's they hired a wagon and literally hewed a path through the wilderness to their new habitation near Little Pigeon Creek, a mile and a half east of Gentryville, in a rich and fertile forest country.
There was little public worship.
If a man was possessed of a wagon, the family rode luxuriously; but as a rule the men walked and the women went on horseback with the little children in their arms.
Despite his Quaker ancestry and his natural love of peace, he was no non-resistant, and when he once entered upon a quarrel the opponent usually had the worst of it.
But he was generous and placable, and some of his best friends were those with whom he had had differences, and had settled them in the way then prevalent,--in a ring of serious spectators, calmly and judicially ruminant, under the shade of some spreading oak, at the edge of the timber.
Thomas Lincoln, concluding that Kentucky was no country for a poor man, determined to seek his fortune in Indiana.
He would sit in the twilight and read a dictionary as long as he could see.
In these affairs the women naturally took no part; but weddings, which were entertainments scarcely less rude and boisterous, were their own peculiar province.
It was a happy and united household: brothers and sisters and cousins living peacefully under the gentle rule of the good stepmother, but all acknowledging from a very early period the supremacy in goodness and cleverness of their big brother Abraham.
Thomas Lincoln, with the assistance of his wife and children, built a temporary shelter of the sort called in the frontier language "a half- faced camp"; merely a shed of poles, which defended the inmates on three sides from foul weather, but left them open to its inclemency in front.
At home he was the life of the singularly assorted household, which consisted, besides his parents and himself, of his own sister, Mrs. Lincoln's two girls and boy, Dennis Hanks, the legacy of the dying Sparrow family, and John Hanks (son of the carpenter Joseph with whom Thomas Lincoln learned his trade), who came from Kentucky several years after the others.
She had a store of household goods which filled a four-horse wagon borrowed of Ralph Grume, Thomas Lincoln's brother-in-law, to transport the bride to Indiana.
But it is questionable whether he lost anything by being deprived of the ministrations of the backwoods dominies.
A dog crossing the hunter's path spoiled his day, unless he instantly hooked his little fingers together, and pulled till the animal disappeared.
She said to Mr. Herndon: "I can say, what scarcely one mother in a thousand can say, Abe never gave me a cross word or look, and never refused in fact or appearance to do anything I asked him.
They relied on Lincoln's kit of tools for their furniture, and on his rifle for their food.
The rank woods were full of malaria, and singular epidemics from time to time ravaged the settlements.
But perhaps, after all, the thing which gained and fixed his mastery over his fellows was to a great degree his gigantic stature and strength.
The next autumn, John Hanks, the steadiest and most trustworthy of his family, went to Illinois.
He wrought his appointed tasks ungrudgingly, though without enthusiasm; but when his employer's day was over, his own began.
Insufficient bedding and clothing, a few pans and kettles, were their sole movable wealth.
Some of his greatest work in later years was done in this grotesque Western fashion,--"sitting on his shoulder-blades."
"We are making no claim of early saintship for him.
He was not remarkably precocious.
Before we close our sketch of this period of Lincoln's life, it may not be amiss to glance for a moment at the state of society among the people with whom his lot was cast in these important years.
With this slight addition to their resources the family were much improved in appearance, behavior, and self-respect.
INDIANA
You know I am never sanguine; but I believe we will carry the State.
He sought a quarrel with the latter, during their canvass in 1838, in a grocery, with the usual result.
This demoralizing doctrine had been promulgated by Jackson, and acted upon for so many years that it was too much to expect of human nature that the Whigs should not adopt it, partially at least, when their turn came, But we are left in no doubt as to the way in which Lincoln regarded the unseemly scramble.
The suits consisted of actions of tort and assumpsit.
I can write no more.
It may be true; if it must, let it.
To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.
EARLY LAW PRACTICE
The very moment a speaker is elected, write me who he is.
We give this remarkable letter entire, from the manuscript submitted to us by the late John T. Stuart:
But if after all we should fail, be it so.
Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to consider himself insulted by something in the 'Journal,' undertook to cane Francis in the street.
I was much, very much, wounded myself, at his being left out.
Douglas has not been here since you left.
It shall not deter me.
Noah, I still think, will be elected very easily.
Broken by it I, too, may be; bow to it, I never will.
If I could be myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan.
"No," replied the boy, mystified.
"I'll risk that," said the child, excited at the prospect of gaining the side of Cap'n Bill in this adventurous way.
But be careful not to let any Blueskin touch you, for while you are in contact with any person you will become visible.
"We were all thirsty."
When it was finished, the three--Rosalie, Trot and Button-Bright--stole out into the moonlight and crept unobserved into the shadow of the wall.
The Witch tossed up the ladder, trying to catch it upon this point, and on the seventh attempt she succeeded.
"Please make the rope ladder at once, Rosalie!"
"And here--keep my polly till I come back," added Trot, giving him the bird.
"Now," she said to them, "you will be powerful enough to defeat the Blueskins, whatever they may do."
"The Queen of the Mermaids gave it to me," answered Trot; "but Sky Island is so far away from the sea that the ring won't do me any good while I'm here.
"Strikes me, ma'am," returned the sailor, "that what we need most on this expedition is to capture the Blueskins.
There were few such projections, but after creeping along the wall for a distance they saw the end of a broken flagstaff near the top edge.
After this experience the invaders were careful to keep a safe distance from the wall.
So the soldiers and citizens all set to work preparing long sharp sticks, and while they were doing this Rosalie the Witch had a vision in which she saw exactly what was going on inside the City wall.
"Don't you want me to go with you?" asked Button-Bright, a little wistfully.
Finding themselves so suddenly disarmed, the amazed Blueskins turned about and ran again, while Cap'n Bill, greatly excited by his victory, shouted to his followers to pursue the enemy, and hobbled after them as fast as he could make his wooden leg go, swinging his sharp stick as he advanced.
"Can't you see me?"
So the Witch took some ropes and knotted together a ladder long enough to reach to the top of the wall.
Their sticks were twice as long as those of the Pinkies and the Boolooroo chuckled with glee to think what fun they would have in punching holes in the round, fat bodies of his enemies.
What we need, in order to oppose them successfully, is a number of sharp sticks which are longer than their own."
The cord didn't wind around the Pinkie, as he was too far off, but the weight hit him in the eye and made him howl lustily as he trotted back to his comrades at full speed.
The Boolooroo, having made all preparations to receive the enemy, was annoyed because they held back.
Of course the Blueskins couldn't run against these sharp points, so they halted a few feet away and began to swing their cord-and-weights.
"Get to work at once and make yourselves long sharp sticks, and then we will attack the enemy again."
At once Button-Bright exclaimed:
"Be brave, my dear," she said, "and I am sure you will be able to find Cap'n Bill without getting in danger yourself.
Queen Trot and Cap'n Bill and Button-Bright saw the vision, too, for they were all in the tent together, and the sight made them anxious.
"Why, where has she gone?"
Out from the gate they marched very boldly and pressed on to attack the Pinkies, who were drawn up in line of battle to receive them, with Cap'n Bill at their head.
"We can make a rope ladder that will enable you to climb to the top of the wall, and then you can lower it to the other side and descend into the City.
Then a panic fell upon the Pinkies at the loss of their leader, and Trot and Button-Bright called out in vain for them to rescue Cap'n Bill.
"Oh, thank you!" cried Trot.
The Boolooroo went out, too, but he kept well behind his people, remembering the sharp sticks with which the enemy were armed.
"Your High and Mighty Spry and Flighty Majesty," remarked the Captain, respectfully, "it occurs to me that the weapons of the Pinkies are superior to our own.
Rosalie smiled and kissed her again.
The band tried to enliven them by playing the "Dead March," but it was not a success.
Then he ordered the gate thrown open and immediately the Blueskins poured out into the open plain and began to run toward the Pinkies.
"I am not a fairy, my dears, but merely a witch, and so my magic powers are limited.
"The Blueskins are bigger and stronger than the Pinkies, and if they have sharp sticks which are longer than ours they will surely defeat us."
Keep out of their way and you will be perfectly safe.
The result was that the lances of the Boolooroo's people could not touch the Pinkies, but were thrust aside with violence and either broken in two or sent hurling through the air in all directions.
"I merely ran back to the City to get a drink of water, for I was thirsty," declared the Boolooroo.
"Three days is a long time," remarked Trot, dismally.
It is one of my witchcraft treasures and I need it in my business."
But take all the prisoners you can, my brave men, and to-morrow we will have a jolly time patching them.
Unfortunately the Pinkies had not followed their commander, being for the moment dazed by their success, so that Cap'n Bill was all alone among the Blueskins when he stepped his wooden leg into a hole in the ground and tumbled full length, his sharp stick flying from his hand and pricking the Boolooroo in the leg as it fell.
Where did you get it?"
"So did we!
By the time the army recovered their wits and prepared to obey, it was too late.
"Very well," replied Rosalie; "I will take your advice, Cap'n, and enchant the weapons of the Pinkies."
They saw the moon rise for the first time in their lives, and its cold, silvery radiance made them shudder and prevented them from going to sleep.
If we don't, we'll need plenty of magic to help us back to the Pink Country; but if we do, we can take care of ourselves without magic."
The Blues were in such a frightened, confused mass that they got in one another's way and could not make very good progress on the retreat, so the old sailor soon caught up with them and began jabbing at the crowd with his stick.
It's only to call the mermaids to me if I need them, and they can't swim in the sky, you see."
She then went out and had all the Pinkies come before her, one by one, and she enchanted their sharp sticks by muttering some cabalistic words and making queer passes with her hands over the weapons.
"True--true!" exclaimed the Boolooroo, enthusiastically.
"I have one magic charm," said Rosalie, thoughtfully, "that will save our army; but I am allowed to work only one magic charm every three days--not oftener--and perhaps I'll need the magic for other things."
The hardest part of Rosalie's task was to toss up one end of the rope ladder until it would catch on some projection on top of the wall.
"No," said the girl; "you must stay to lead the army.
He was himself so nervous and excited that he became desperate and after an hour of tedious waiting, during which time he pranced around impatiently, he decided to attack the hated Pinkies and rid the country of them.
And, if you can think of a way, you must try to rescue us.
"I'll do my best," he promised.
Perhaps I'll be able to save Cap'n Bill myself; but if I don't it's all up to you, Button-Bright."
The Pinkies were despondent in spite of the fact that they had repulsed the attack of the Blues, for as yet they had not succeeded in gaining the City or finding the Magic Umbrella, and the blue dusk of this dread country--which was so different from their own land of sunsets--made them all very nervous.
Don't lose the ring, for you must give it back to me when you return.
As the beautiful Witch kissed the little girl good-bye she slipped upon her finger a curious ring.
When the opposing forces came together, however, and the Blueskins pushed their points against the Pinkies, the weapons which had been enchanted by Rosalie began to whirl in swift circles--so swift that the eye could scarcely follow the motion.
So did we!" cried the soldiers, eagerly.
A little way off she found a bluestone seat, near to the inner edge, and attaching the ladder to this she easily descended it and found herself in the Blue City.
"That will be fine."
The Pinkies were overjoyed at this promise and it made them very brave indeed, since they now believed they would surely be victorious.
We can only hope that the Boolooroo won't patch Cap'n Bill for three days."
Trot tried to interest them by telling them that on the Earth the people had both the sun and the moon, and loved them both; but nevertheless it is certain that had not the terrible Fog Bank stood between them and the Pink Land most of the invading army would have promptly deserted and gone back home.
"What can be done?" asked the girl.
"It is evident," panted the Boolooroo, facing his defeated soldiers wrathfully, "that you are a pack of cowards!"
The Pinkies did not run like rabbits, but formed a solid line and knelt down with their long, sharp sticks pointed directly toward the Blueskins, the other ends being set firmly upon the ground.
Marilla, look at that big star over Mr. Harrison's maple grove, with all that holy hush of silvery sky about it.
"I think he only put it on because he wanted to conclude a business deal with Harmon Andrews," said Anne.
We must have dinner at sharp one, for the soup must be served as soon as it's done."
"I've heard him say that's the only time a man needs to be particular about his appearance, because if he looks prosperous the party of the second part won't be so likely to try to cheat him.
There were no green peas on the dinner table that day, however.
Was he redeeming his promise to be good?
And it would be almost as bad to have nothing to say."
Priscilla and Mrs. Morgan are not coming, that's plain, and nothing is being improved by waiting."
Mrs. Lynde couldn't find one anywhere for the supper.
I happened to think of it, for a wonder . . .
There may have been two happier and more excited girls somewhere in Canada or the United States at that moment, but I doubt it.
"Davy Keith," said Marilla, shaking him by the shoulder, "didn't I forbid you to climb up on that table again?
Everything was done to a turn and the soup was just what soup should be, but couldn't be depended on to remain so for any length of time.
Platters as old as that are very scarce.
"You'll drown yourself or the twins, rowing about the pond in that flat," grumbled Marilla.
"And oh, Anne dear," wrote Priscilla, "I'm so sorry, but I'm afraid we won't get up to Green Gables at all now, for by the time Aunty's ankle is well she will have to go back to Toronto.
Everybody ran out into the hall.
"I forgot," whimpered Davy.
"I've lived here for sixty years and I've never been on the pond yet."
At half past eleven the lettuce salad was made, the golden circles of the pies were heaped with whipped cream, and everything was sizzling and bubbling that ought to sizzle and bubble.
And, to do her justice, there wasn't.
But Anne and Diana, between their disappointment and the reaction from their excitement of the forenoon, could neither talk nor eat.
Every snip of the scissors, as rose and peony and bluebell fell, seemed to chirp, "Mrs. Morgan is coming today." Anne wondered how Mr. Harrison COULD go on placidly mowing hay in the field across the lane, just as if nothing were going to happen.
It must be very lonely to have no one to care about except a parrot, don't you think?
Didn't I?"
"I don't believe I'll be able to eat a mouthful," said Diana dolefully.
There is an old proverb that really seems at times to be inspired . . . "it never rains but it pours." The measure of that day's tribulations was not yet full.
I think it almost pays for the thud."
Perhaps you'll get them sorted out in your memory by that time.
"When I think something nice is going to happen I seem to fly right up on the wings of anticipation; and then the first thing I realize I drop down to earth with a thud.
"I'm afraid not.
But there . . . that speech sounds as pessimistic as Miss Eliza Andrews and I'm ashamed of making it.
"It's a case of too many cooks, I guess," said Marilla, who had listened to this dialogue with a rather guilty expression.
I am properly punished for my carelessness; but oh, what will Miss Barry say?"
She has to be there by a certain date."
"Now, we must set the table," said Anne, in the tone of a priestess about to perform some sacred rite in honor of a divinity.
"Ain't I to have any dinner?" wailed Davy.
The guests went away soon after, feeling that it was the most tactful thing to do, and Anne and Diana washed the dishes, talking less than they had ever been known to do before.
Perhaps when Diana and I are old and gray we shall be able to laugh over them.
"Suppose you come with us tomorrow.
Davy had finished ravelling out his herring net and had wound the twine into a ball.
"No, indeed, you won't," said Anne vehemently.
Diana searched faithfully but no axe was to be found.
"Oh, you are too little to understand," said Anne.
You must be real tired and hungry.
Miss Sarah Copp was a small person, garbed in shabby black, with a hat chosen less for vain adornment than for qualities that would wear well. She looked as amazed as might be expected on seeing the curious tableau in her yard, but when she heard Diana's explanation she was all sympathy.
After a wearisome drive the girls reached Spencervale and turned down the "Tory" Road . . . a green, solitary highway where the strips of grass between the wheel tracks bore evidence to lack of travel.
They'll know where the axe is and get me out.
The Copp girls had given up keeping ducks . . .
It was ten miles to Spencervale and the day was not especially pleasant for traveling.
She went to town today--I drove her to the station.
Besides, I didn't know men were so skurse."
No, Diana, I believe it is thunder."
This important point of ethics being settled, Anne prepared to mount the aforesaid "little house," a construction of lathes, with a peaked roof, which had in times past served as a habitation for ducks.
She never would before for fear it might come in handy sometime and I've had to whitewash it every spring.
"It is very ungrateful of you to say such a thing."
She promptly agreed to give twenty-five and Miss Sarah looked as if she felt sorry she hadn't asked for thirty.
So 'all's well that ends well.'"
I want all the money I can scare up just now.
See if you can put something under my feet . . . then perhaps I can draw myself up."
He wanted me twenty years ago.
Finally the girls came to the old Copp homestead . . . a place of such exceeding external neatness that even Green Gables would have suffered by contrast.
"I'll have to go for help," she said, returning to the prisoner.
I've got the platter, and that rain has laid the dust beautifully.
"Could I pull you out if I crawled up?" suggested Diana.
But she felt rather ashamed of saying it; for had she not, in keen remembrance of many similar snubs administered in her own early years, solemnly vowed that she would never tell any child it was too little to understand?
It would be even worse than the time I had to confess about jumping on the spare room bed."
"Bless you, that's all right," said Miss Sarah amiably.
"I don't know what to do," said Anne.
Along most of its extent it was lined with thick-set young spruces crowding down to the roadway, with here and there a break where the back field of a Spencervale farm came out to the fence or an expanse of stumps was aflame with fireweed and goldenrod.
"We must prepare for it," said Anne tranquilly.
Diana's father was a Liberal, for which reason she and Anne never discussed politics.
"Mr.
Mr. Harrison says his pastures are so scorched up that his poor cows can hardly get a bite to eat and he feels guilty of cruelty to animals every time he meets their eyes."
"If you mean ECONOMICAL, it's a VERY different thing from being stingy. It is an excellent trait in a person if she is economical.
I shall have to pay for the damage I've done, but I wouldn't mind that if I were only sure they would understand my motive in peeping in at their pantry window.
This proved to be the case.
I don't want a fairy story.
"I assure you I looked into your pantry window only to discover if you had a willow-ware platter.
It's a very old platter."
Here . . . take my hat with you.
"I heard Marilla say she was it, herself, the other day."
"I'll go right over to Spencervale after it tomorrow," said Anne resolutely, "and you must come with me.
The girls looked at each other in perplexity.
I suppose I shouldn't complain about a garden when the farmers' crops are suffering so.
"Marilla is not stingy, Davy," said Anne severely.
The fact is--" Miss Sarah threw up her head importantly, with a proud flush on her thin cheeks--"I'm going to be married--to Luther Wallace.
"The shades are all down," said Diana ruefully.
The house and out-buildings were all whitewashed to a condition of blinding perfection and not a weed was visible in the prim kitchen garden surrounded by its white paling.
"'Over the mountains of the moon, Down the valley of the shadow.'"
He had read these stories as a child reads fairy tales.
Peter had met "Parlor Reds" at the home of the Todd sisters; the large shining ladies who came in large shining cars to hear him tell of his jail experiences.
They were noisy in their fervors, and repelled Peter as much as the Holy Rollers.
Congress had voted a huge loan, a country-wide machine of propaganda was being organized, and the oratory of Four Minute Men was echoing from Maine to California.
"That's the point--you've been in jail, you've really done something as a pacifist.
Peter had never known one of these fortunate beings, but he was for them--he had always been for them.
You must watch what other people did, and practice by yourself, and then go in and do it as if you had never done anything else.
"But will he pay any attention to me?" demanded Peter.
Peter must pretend to be interested in this kind of "education," said McGivney, and he must learn at least the names of Lackman's books.
In the first place it was low; its devotees were wholly lacking in the graces of life, in prestige, and that ease which comes with assurance of power.
As for the Reds--well, Peter groped for quite a time before he finally came upon a formula which expressed his feelings.
So Peter was to meet a millionaire!
Young Lackman conducted a school for boys, and when one of the boys did wrong, the teacher would punish himself instead of the boy!
"These people are spending lots of money for printing," said McGivney, "and we hear this fellow Lackman is putting it up.
Sometimes there would be talk about spies and informers, and then these people would exhaust their vocabulary of abuse, and Peter, of course, would apply every word of it to himself and become wild with anger.
Now since Peter had come to know the Reds, who wanted to blow up the palaces of the millionaires, he was more than ever on the side of his gods and goddesses.
His fervors for them increased every time he heard them assailed; he wanted to meet some of them, and passionately, yet respectfully, pour out to them his allegiance.
The Reds had a religion, as you might call it; but this religion had failed to attract Peter.
Yes, Peter had come to take it as a personal affront that these radicals should go on denouncing the cause which Peter had espoused. They all thought of Peter as a comrade, they were most friendly to him; but Peter had the knowledge of how they would regard him when they knew the real truth, and this imagined contempt burned him like an acid.
Peter had walked by the vast white structure, and seen the bronze doors swing outward, and the favored ones of the earth emerging to their magic chariots; but never had it occurred to him that he might pass thru those bronze doors, and gaze upon those hidden mysteries!
The world had changed much since then, and for the worse; those who had power must take it as their task to restore beauty and splendor to the world, and to develop the gracious possibilities of being.
I was well cared for.
Previous to being sold he was under a master by the name of Jonathan Bailey, who followed farming in the neighborhood of Laurel, Delaware, and, as a master, was considered a moderate man--was also well to do in the world; but the new master he could not endure, as he had already let the secret out that Levin was to be sent South.
"Within the last four or five years, times have gone pretty hard with me.
So he got a ticket as soon as possible, and came through without accident, leaving Amos Barnes to do the best he could for a living.
Richard Williams gave a full account of himself, but only a meagre report was recorded.
My cousin was badly beat last year in the presence of his wife, and he was right sick.
To Joe's great joy he heard the sound of the Underground Rail Road bell in Richmond,--had a satisfactory interview with the conductor,--received a favorable response, and was soon a traveler on his way to Canada.
She let on to be very good."
She was of a dark chestnut color, well-formed, with a large and high forehead, indicative of intellect.
No very serious charges were made against Lewis, but on the contrary they said, that he had been looked upon as a "moderate slave-holder;" they also said, that "he had been a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church for fifty years, and stood high in that body." Furthermore they stated, that he sold slaves occasionally.
On Christmas week he allowed me no board money, but made me a present of seventy-five cents; my mistress added twenty-five cents, which was the extent of their liberality.
Both believed in nothing as they did in Slavery; they would sooner see a black man dead than free.
I believed that God would assist me if I would try.
He gave Smith credit for being a tolerable fair kind of a slave-holder, but added, that "his wife was a notoriously hard woman;" she had made a very deep impression on Richard's mind by her treatment of him.
Joseph was a fair specimen of a man physically and mentally, could read and write, and thereby keep the run of matters of interest on the Slavery question.
He and his sister own well on to one hundred head, though within the last few years he has been thinning off the number by sale.
He suffered greatly under the said Barnes, and finally his eyes were open to see that there was an Underground Rail Road for the benefit of all such slavery-sick souls as himself.
Henry could find no justification for such treatment.
The spirit of freedom in this passenger was truly the "one idea" notion.
He left his wife, Julia, who was free.
Three weeks before Sarah fled, her mistress was called away by death; nevertheless Sarah could not forget how badly she had been treated by her while living.
He said that he came from Richmond, and left because he was on the point of being sold by John A. Smith, who owned him.
Fortunately, Caroline was a single woman.
Eight had been sold by him some time before this party escaped (two of them to Georgia); besides William James had been sold and barely found opportunity to escape.
My mistress, Mrs. Mary F. Price, had lately put me in charge of her brother, Samuel M. Bailey, a tobacco merchant of Richmond.
FACE CANADA-WARD FOR YEARS.
Joseph Henry Hill.
ARRIVAL FROM RICHMOND, 1859.
As I was often threatened by my master, with the auction-block, I felt I must give up all and escape for my life."
Quite an agreeable interview took place between Cornelius and the Committee.
In finding himself on free ground, however, with cheering prospects ahead, he did not stop to brood over the ills that he had suffered, but rejoiced heartily.
He promised to take care of her in her old age, and not compel her to labor, so she is only required to cook and wash for a dozen slaves.
He gave his experience of Slavery pretty fully, and the Committee enlightened him as to the workings of the Underground Rail Road, the value of freedom, and the safety of Canada as a refuge.
This candidate for Canada was twenty-one years of age, and a likely-looking boy.
If they did not get well as soon as he thought they should, he would order them to their work, and if they did not go he would beat them.
He had been sold twice, but he never meant to be sold again.
He left his mother, a free woman, and two sisters in chains.
My mother is now old, but is still in the service of Bailey.
William James Conner, his wife, child, and four brothers came next.
James Thomas, Jr., a tobacco merchant, in Richmond, had Joe down in his ledger as a marketable piece of property, or a handy machine to save labor, and make money.
She stated that she had been very cruelly treated, that she was owned by a man named Joseph O'Neil, "a tax collector and a very bad man." Under said O'Neil she had been required to chop wood, curry horses, work in the field like a man, and all one winter she had been compelled to go barefooted.
I then made up my mind to put my case in the hands of God, and start for the Underground Rail Road.
SUNDRY ARRIVALS IN 1859.
According to Sarah's testimony the mistress was no better than her husband.
But to bid good-bye to my old mother in chains, was no easy job, and if my desire for freedom had not been as strong as my desire for life itself, I could never have stood it; but I felt that I could do her no good; could not help her if I staid.
The same is true of the encouragement given to the growth of "college spirit," college athletics, and the like, in the higher institutions of learning.
This last statement may need very material qualification.
Indeed, the leisure class claims the distinction as a matter of pride, and no doubt with some grounds.
Admission to the class is gained by exercise of the pecuniary aptitudes--aptitudes for acquisition rather than for serviceability. There is, therefore, a continued selective sifting of the human material that makes up the leisure class, and this selection proceeds on the ground of fitness for pecuniary pursuits.
In cases where the predatory activity is a collective one, this propensity is frequently called the martial spirit, or, latterly, patriotism.
In the male child the predaceous interval is ordinarily fairly well marked and lasts for some time, but it is commonly terminated (if at all) with the attainment of maturity.
The most immediate and unequivocal expression of that archaic human nature which characterizes man in the predatory stage is the fighting propensity proper.
Her face expressed the pleasure she took in the smooth petals of the flower she was working.
His little eyes, of a calm blue, were like bits of steel.
This young man with a livid face--a blonde of the type with black eyes, whose immovable glance has an indescribable fascination, sober in speech as in conduct, dressed in black, lean as a consumptive, but nevertheless vigorously framed--visited the family of his former master and the house of his cashier less from affection than from self-interest.
Modeste,--blossom enclosed, like that of Catullus,--was she worth all these precautions?
A PORTRAIT FROM LIFE
It was eight o'clock.
The young fellow looked at Modeste precisely as he would have looked at a cheap lithograph.
His physical strength, well-known to every one, put him above all danger of attack.
It seemed, like a pearl, to have its orient.
Smith-Oldwick pressed the ape-man's hand and clambered into the pilot's seat.
It seemed to her that those lifeless fingers must relax at any instant and then, when she had about given up hope, she saw a strong brown hand reach up and grasp the side of the fuselage.
"Kudu has come out of his lair twice since they left."
"And the Tarmangani she and bull--" asked Tarzan, "are they safe?"
As he was about to leave the hut he saw a paper pinned upon the wall with a sliver of wood and taking it down, he read:
Then the girl unsnapped the strap that held her to her seat.
I have lived all my life in the jungle, and I shall die in the jungle.
After what you told me about Miss Kircher, and knowing that you dislike her, I feel that it is not fair to her and to you that we should impose longer upon you.
The aviator dug his toe into the ground and still looking down, blurted something which he evidently hated to say.
I do not wish to live or die elsewhere."
Usanga's Reward
An expression of pain crossed Bertha Kircher's face.
Bound and helpless, the English officer lay upon the ground at one side of the meadow, while around him stood a number of the black deserters from the German command.
He felt a certain sense of relief from responsibility and was glad that they had taken the matter out of his hands.
An inexplicable urge spurred Tarzan to increasing, speed.
With one hand Tarzan grasped the girl's arm and steadied her as the two crawled slowly across the few feet which intervened between the two seats.
Tarzan had seen these men before and knew who they were.
They were gone and would forget, but somehow he could not forget.
"What does Zu-tag want?" asked the ape-man.
We both thank you for your kindness and protection.
Tarzan realized that only through a miracle of chance could they reach Usanga and effect the change in pilots and yet he knew that that chance must be taken, for in the brief moments since he had first seen the plane, he had realized that the black was almost without experience as a pilot and that death surely awaited them in any event should the black sergeant remain at the control.
"I have plenty," he replied.
The Englishman, lying bound upon the ground, had been a witness of all these happenings. His heart stood still as he saw Tarzan's body hurtling through the air toward the tree tops among which it seemed he must inevitably crash; but the plane was rising rapidly, so that the beast-man cleared the top-most branches.
The day is still young.
It might be a minute or it might be an hour before the fish would swim into the little pool above which he crouched, but sooner or later one would come.
When Tarzan of the Apes finally reached the edge of the meadowland where Smith-Oldwick's plane had landed, he took in the entire scene in one quick glance and grasped the situation, although he could scarce give credence to the things he saw.
The first intimation Usanga had that all was not well with him was when the girl slipped suddenly to his side and grasped the control and at the same instant steel-like fingers seized his throat.
Upon the other side of the range he would search for a stream running downward toward the west coast, and thus following the rivers he would be sure of game and water in plenty.
Usanga clutched wildly at the control and the machine shot upward at a steep angle.
If there was any way that I might repay the obligation I feel, I should be only too glad to do so.
Tarzan glanced downward.
They saw a giant white man leap from the branches of a tree to the turf and race rapidly toward the plane.
The girl looked toward Usanga and shuddered.
Tarzan drew his hunting knife from its sheath and reaching down, severed the thongs that bound her ankles.
Tarzan swung quickly through the trees toward the clearing.
Simultaneously Tarzan was dragged from his feet and the plane lurched sideways in response to the new strain.
"No," he said.
Usanga, all unconscious of what was going on behind him, drove the plane higher and higher into the air.
In a moment more it would rise swiftly out of reach.
These things Tarzan did not know.
They saw him take a long grass rope from about his shoulders as he ran.
Tarzan depended upon his own quickness and the suddenness of his attack, for he had no bait or hook.
You can easily cover the distance in a few hours if you have sufficient petrol." He looked inquiringly toward the aviator.
"Have you the courage to climb up there beside the black and seize the control while I take care of him?"
Tarzan laughed.
"The quicker you go, the quicker you will reach safety."
Why don't you come back to civilization with us?"
Smith-Oldwick nodded his head affirmatively.
Usanga clawed the air and shrieked but he was helpless as a babe.
"Where is the tribe?" asked Tarzan.
The moment that he turned he saw that the author of the disturbance was Zu-tag.
"Tarzan of the Apes is a fool and a weak, old woman," and he turned back toward the south.
Coming toward him down the meadow was an aeroplane piloted by the black Usanga and in the seat behind the pilot was the white girl, Bertha Kircher.
He walked out across the boma and into the clearing.
He had told them that he would take the captive to a sultan of the north and there obtain a great price for her and that when he returned they should have some of the spoils.
Both were empty, and his trained nostrils told him that they had been gone for at least two days.
I was born in the jungle.
Tarzan's conscience was troubling him, which accounted for the fact that he compared himself to a weak, old woman, for the ape-man, reared in savagery and inured to hardships and cruelty, disliked to admit any of the gentler traits that in reality were his birthright.
"Before I go won't you tell me you don't hate me any more?" Tarzan's face clouded. Without a word he picked her up and lifted her to her place behind the Englishman.
"Zu-tag comes to the water to drink," replied the ape.
Then slowly, hand over hand, he climbed toward the fuselage.
"This jungle is no place for us at least," said Smith-Oldwick, "and it is no place for any other white man.
They could not understand him.
"I know what you are trying to say. It is not that.
At last there came to the ears of the ape-man a peculiar whirring, throbbing sound.
He felt uneasy and restless.
"I prefer the jungle," he said.
He had spent the night in a large tree that overhung the river only a short distance from the clearing, and now in the early morning hours he was crouching at the water's edge waiting for an opportunity to capture Pisah, the fish, thinking that he would take it back with him to the hut where the girl could cook it for herself and her companion.
Chapter XIII
The blacks, at first dismayed at the death of their leader, were now worked to a frenzy of rage and a determination to be avenged.
Tarzan shrugged his shoulders, crumpled the note in his hand and tossed it aside.
They saw the white girl in the machine glance down and discover him.
Far below the watchers in the meadow could see the aeroplane careening in the sky, for with the change of control it had taken a sudden dive.
Dead and dying they lay strewn for fifty feet along the turf.
His knowledge of the ways of the denizens of the water told him where to wait for Pisah.
It seemed to Bertha Kircher that the fingers of her hands were dead. The numbness was running up her arms to her elbows.
Crossing the clearing, he entered the boma and then the hut.
"Good-bye," said the girl as she extended her hand to Tarzan.
His knowledge of Usanga, together with the position of the white man, told him that the black sergeant was attempting to carry off the white girl.
At first Tarzan thought of fitting an arrow to his bow and slaying Usanga, but as quickly he abandoned the idea because he knew that the moment the pilot was slain the machine, running wild, would dash the girl to death among the trees.
I know that our presence is keeping you from continuing your journey to the west coast, and so I have decided that it is better for us to try and reach the white settlements immediately without imposing further upon you.
For two days Tarzan of the Apes had been hunting leisurely to the north, and swinging in a wide circle, he had returned to within a short distance of the clearing where he had left Bertha Kircher and the young lieutenant.
"We did not see them go.
But he did not go far.
The girl, clinging desperately to the noose, strained every muscle to hold the great weight dangling at the lower end of the rope.
The girl and the Englishman smiled too.
"You saved yourself," he insisted, "for had you been unable to pilot the plane, I could not have helped you, and now," he said, "you two have the means of returning to the settlements.
Tarzan shook his head.
"They are hunting for pisangs and scimatines farther back in the forest," replied Zu-tag.
The hut and boma were as he had left them, but there was no sign of either the man or the woman.
"Yes," she replied, "but my feet are bound."
The others shook their heads.
Motionless as a bronze statue was the wily ape-man, for well he knew how wary is Pisah, the fish.
"Did the tribe chase them away?" asked Tarzan.
Turning and twisting in mid-air it fell with ever-increasing velocity and the Englishman held his breath as the thing hurtled toward them.
Manu, the monkey, had seen the two Tarmangani pass two days before. Chattering and scolding, he told Tarzan all about it.
Once he started toward the north in response to a sudden determination to continue his way to the west coast.
Already the machine was slowly leaving the ground.
Usanga did not see him, being too intent upon the unaccustomed duties of a pilot, but the blacks across the meadow saw him and they ran forward with loud and savage cries and menacing rifles to intercept him.
The slightest movement would frighten him away and only by infinite patience might he be captured at all.
We sat down again with this lady at table, where we continued some time, conversing upon indifferent subjects; and now and then filling a glass to each other's health.
We continued a long time at table, and after we had both supped; "Cousin," said he, "you will hardly be able to guess how I have been employed since your last departure from hence, about a year past.
I very readily took the oath required of me: upon which he said to me, "Stay here till I return, I will be with you in a moment; and accordingly he came with a lady in his hand, of singular beauty, and magnificently apparelled: he did not intimate who she was, neither did I think it would be polite to enquire.
His majesty listened to me with some sort of comfort, and when I had done, "Nephew," said he, "what you tell me gives me some hope.
I arrived at my father's capital, where, contrary to custom, I found a numerous guard at the gate of the palace, who surrounded me as I entered.
After a while, casting his eyes upon me, "Dear nephew," cried he, embracing me, "if I have lost that unworthy son, I shall happily find in you what will better supply his place." The reflections he made on the doleful end of the prince and princess his daughter made us both weep afresh.
But first you are to promise me upon oath, that you will keep my secret, according to the confidence I repose in you."
Then my cousin, speaking to the lady, said, "Madam, it is by this way that we are to go to the place I told you of:" upon which the lady advanced, and went down, and the prince began to follow; but first turning to me, said, "My dear cousin, I am infinitely obliged to you for the trouble you have taken; I thank you.
Being in such a condition, I could not travel far at a time; I retired to remote places during the day, and travelled as far by night as my strength would allow me.
I gave him a long detail of the tragical cause of my return, and of the sad condition he saw me in.
I went regularly every year to see my uncle, at whose court I amused myself for a month or two, and then returned again to my father's.
The last time I saw him, he received me with greater demonstrations of tenderness than he had done at any time before; and resolving one day to give me a treat, he made great preparations for that purpose.
But good fortune having brought us to your gate, we made bold to knock, when you received us with so much kindness, that we are incapable of rendering suitable thanks.
The sultan went up, and opening the curtains, perceived the prince his son and the lady in bed together, but burnt and changed to cinder, as if they had been thrown into a fire, and taken out before they were consumed.
We were scarcely got thither, when we saw the prince following us, carrying a pitcher of water, a hatchet, and a little bag of mortar.
But that unfortunate creature had swallowed so much of the poison, that all the obstacles which by my prudence I could lay in the way served only to inflame her love.
You must know, that all this while the sultan my uncle was absent, and had been hunting for several days; I grew weary of waiting for him, and having prayed his ministers to make my apology at his return, left his palace, and set out towards my father's court.
From this antechamber we came into another, very large, supported by columns, and lighted by several branched candlesticks.
The hatchet served him to break down the empty sepulchre in the middle of the tomb; he took away the stones one after another, and laid them in a corner; he then dug up the ground, where I saw a trap-door under the sepulchre, which he lifted up, and underneath perceived the head of a staircase leading into a vault.
This tenderness increased as they grew in years, and to such a height, that I dreaded the end of it.
After which the prince said, "Cousin, we must lose no time; therefore pray oblige me by taking this lady along with you, and conducting her to such a place, where you will see a tomb newly built in form of a dome: you will easily know it; the gate is open; enter it together, and tarry till I come, which will be very speedily."
"I shall move him to compassion," said I to myself, "by the relation of my uncommon misfortunes, and without doubt he will take pity on a persecuted prince, and not suffer me to implore his assistance in vain."
But the usurper's cruelty did not stop here; he ordered me to be shut up in a machine, and commanded the executioner to carry me into the country, to cut off my head, and leave me to be devoured by birds of prey.
"This, madam," said he, "is, in obedience to your commands, the account I was to give how I lost my right eye, wherefore my beard and eye-brows are shaved, and how I came to be with you at this time."
I was sensibly afflicted, and went to the public burying-place, where there were several tombs like that which I had seen: I spent the day in viewing them one after another, but could not find that I sought for, and thus I spent four days successively in vain.
These journeys cemented a firm and intimate friendship between the prince my cousin and myself.
As I returned to my uncle's palace, the vapours of the wine got up into my head; however, I reached my apartment, and went to bed.
What are you disputing about?"
What with drinking and your society, I am quite beside myself.
"No matter," said the caliph, "I command you to knock." Jaaffier complied; Safie opened the gate, and the vizier, perceiving by the light in her hand, that she was an incomparable beauty, with a very low salutation said, "We are three merchants of Mossoul, who arrived here about ten days ago with rich merchandise, which we have in a warehouse at a caravan-serai, where we have also our lodging.
Soon after, the ladies took their places, and made the porter sit down by them, who was overjoyed to see himself seated with three such admirable beauties.
The next business was to settle who should carry the message.
This, madam, is my history."
At another shop, she took capers, tarragon, cucumbers, sassafras, and other herbs, preserved in vinegar: at another, she bought pistachios, walnuts, filberts, almonds, kernels of pine-apples, and such other fruits; and at another, all sorts of confectionery.
If thy own breast cannot keep thy counsel, how canst thou expect the breast of another to be more faithful?'"
When the calenders were seated, the ladies served them with meat; and Safie, being highly pleased with them, did not let them want for wine.
That as the wind bears with it the sweet scents of the purfumed places over which it passes, so the wine he was going to drink, coming from her fair hands, received a more exquisite flavour than it naturally possessed.
STORY OF THE THREE CALENDERS, SONS OF SULTANS; AND OF THE FIVE LADIES OF BAGDAD.
In a short time the lady stopped before a gate that was shut, and knocked: a Christian, with a venerable long white beard, opened it; and she put money into his hand, without speaking; but the Christian, who knew what she wanted, went in, and in a little time, brought a large jug of excellent wine.
The frightened porter interrupted her thus: "In the name of heaven, do not put me to death for another man's crime.
"My ladies," replied the porter, "by your very air, I judged at first that you were persons of extraordinary merit, and I conceive that I am not mistaken.
As she went by a butcher's stall, she made him weigh her twenty five pounds of his best meat, which she ordered the porter to put also into his basket.
But before I proceed farther, I hope you will not take it ill if we desire one favour of you." "Alas!" said the vizier, "what favour?
Each man took the instrument he liked, and all three together began to play a tune The ladies, who knew the words of a merry song that suited the air, joined the concert with their voices; but the words of the song made them now and then stop, and fall into excessive laughter.
"Pray, Sister," said the beautiful portress, "come in, what do you stay for?
In short, they were all very pleasant during the repast, which lasted a considerable time, and nothing was wanting that could serve to render it agreeable.
Safie made the business known to her sisters, who considered for some time what to do: but being naturally of a good disposition, and having granted the same favour to the three calenders, they at last consented to let them in.
The porter was well satisfied with the money he had received; but when he ought to have departed, he could not summon sufficient resolution for the purpose.
There are three calenders at our gate, at least they appear to be such by their habit; but what will surprise you is, they are all three blind of the right eye, and have their heads, beards, and eye-brows shaved.
In the reign of Caliph Haroon al Rusheed, there was at Bagdad, a porter, who, notwithstanding his mean and laborious business, was a fellow of wit and good humour.
The vizier, in vain represented to him that the noise proceeded from some women who were merry-making, that without question their heads were warm with wine, and that it would not be proper he should expose himself to be affronted by them: besides, it was not yet an unlawful hour, and therefore he ought not to disturb them in their mirth.
The song pleased the ladies much, and each of them afterwards sung one in her turn.
Night being come on, and the music and dancers making a great noise, the watch, passing by, caused the gate to be opened and some of the company to be taken up; but we had the good fortune to escape by getting over the wall.
The day drawing to a close, Safie spoke in the name of the three ladies, and said to the porter, "Arise, it is time for you to depart." But the porter, not willing to leave good company, cried, "Alas! ladies, whither do you command me to go in my present condition?
Being strangers, and somewhat overcome with wine, we are afraid of meeting that or some other watch, before we get home to our khan.
However, this gave her no ease, for she fell into a fit.
The caliph Haroon al Rusheed was frequently in the habit of walking abroad in disguise by night, that he might discover if every thing was quiet in the city, and see that no disorders were committed.
At their entrance they made a profound obeisance to the ladies, who rose up to receive them, and told them courteously that they were welcome, that they were glad of the opportunity to oblige them, and to contribute towards relieving the fatigues of their journey, and at last invited them to sit down with them.
They walked till they came to a magnificent house, whose front was adorned with fine columns, and had a gate of ivory. There they stopped, and the lady knocked softly.
We are not censorious, nor impertinently curious; it is enough for us to notice affairs that concern us, without meddling with what does not belong to us." Upon this they all sat down, and the company being united, they drank to the health of the new-comers.
We have but too much reason to be cautious of acquainting indiscreet persons with our counsel; and a good author that we have read, says, Keep thy own secret, and do not reveal it to any one.
"Honest man," said the calender, "do not put yourself in a passion; we should be sorry to give you the least occasion; on the contrary, we are ready to receive your commands." Upon which, to put an end to the dispute, the ladies interposed, and pacified them.
They care not what place we put them in, provided they may be under shelter; they would be satisfied with a stable.
The caliph, his grand vizier, and the chief of the eunuchs, being introduced by the fair Safie, very courteously saluted the ladies and the calenders.
The porter went and read these words, written in large characters of gold: "He who speaks of things that do not concern him, shall hear things that will not please him." Returning again to the three sisters, "Ladies," said he, "I swear to you that you shall never hear me utter a word respecting what does not relate to me, or wherein you may have any concern."
But I cannot without laughing think of their amusing and uniform figure." Here Safie laughed so heartily, that the two sisters and the porter could not refrain from laughing also.
Those who tell us their history, and the occasion of their coming, do them no hurt, let them go where they please; but do not spare those who refuse to give us that satisfaction."
In the height of this diversion, when the company were in the midst of their jollity, a knocking was heard at the gate; Safie left off singing, and went to see who it was.
When they were all in the best humour possible, they heard a knocking at the gate.
She then went to a druggist, where she furnished herself with all manner of sweet-scented waters, cloves, musk, pepper, ginger, and a great piece of ambergris, and several other Indian spices; this quite filled the porter's basket, and she ordered him to follow her.
We shall be still more to blame, if any mischief befall us; for it is not likely that they would have extorted such a promise from us, without knowing themselves to be in a condition to punish us for its violation."
The ladies fell a laughing at the porter's reasoning; after which Zobeide gravely addressed him, "Friend, you presume rather too much; and though you do not deserve that I should enter into any explanation with you, I have no objection to inform you that we are three sisters, who transact our affairs with so much secrecy that no one knows any thing of them.
Just as he was about to ask her some questions upon this head, another lady came to open the gate, and appeared to him so beautiful, that he was perfectly surprised, or rather so much struck with her charms, that he had nearly suffered his basket to fall, for he had never seen any beauty that equalled her.
While the vizier, entertained the ladies in conversation, the caliph could not forbear admiring their extraordinary beauty, graceful behaviour, pleasant humour, and ready wit; on the other hand, nothing struck him with more surprise than the calenders being all three blind of the right eye.
She went towards Safie and opened the case, from whence she took a lute, and presented it to her: and after some time spent in tuning it, Safie began to play, and accompanying the instrument with her voice, sung a song about the torments that absence creates to lovers, with so much sweetness, that it charmed the caliph and all the company.
After holding on for a long while without either giving way, the Athenians aided by their horse, of which the enemy had none, at length routed the Corinthians, who retired to the hill and, halting, remained quiet there, without coming down again.
"So far as regards the Athenians, such are the great advantages proved inherent in a wise policy.
After walling off this spot, the fleet sailed off home.
Battus, one of the two generals present at the action, went with a company to defend the village of Solygia, which was unfortified; Lycophron remaining to give battle with the rest.
But if both should happen to have chosen the wrong moment for acting in this way, advice to make peace would not be unserviceable; and this, if we did but see it, is just what we stand most in need of at the present juncture.
The battle was an obstinate one, and fought throughout hand to hand.
These last, however, gave them the slip by coming in the dark; and being informed by signals of the fact the Corinthians left half their number at Cenchreae, in case the Athenians should go against Crommyon, and marched in all haste to the rescue.
And so it turned out.
CHAPTER XIII
This town afterwards also submitted upon the approach of the Athenians and their allies, and gave hostages and all other securities required.
A similar inundation also occurred at Atalanta, the island off the Opuntian Locrian coast, carrying away part of the Athenian fort and wrecking one of two ships which were drawn up on the beach.
The plan which they recommended was to attack first the Apodotians, next the Ophionians, and after these the Eurytanians, who are the largest tribe in Aetolia, and speak, as is said, a language exceedingly difficult to understand, and eat their flesh raw.
The winter following, the plague a second time attacked the Athenians; for although it had never entirely left them, still there had been a notable abatement in its ravages.
The same summer the Aetolians, who before the Athenian expedition had sent an embassy to Corinth and Lacedaemon, composed of Tolophus, an Ophionian, Boriades, an Eurytanian, and Tisander, an Apodotian, obtained that an army should be sent them against Naupactus, which had invited the Athenian invasion.
At the same time took place the numerous earthquakes in Athens, Euboea, and Boeotia, particularly at Orchomenus in the last-named country.
The same winter the Athenians purified Delos, in compliance, it appears, with a certain oracle.
The same winter the Athenians in Sicily and the Rhegians, with thirty ships, made an expedition against the islands of Aeolus; it being impossible to invade them in summer, owing to the want of water.
Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen.
Nothing can be clearer on this point than the following verses of Homer, taken from a hymn to Apollo:
These were by far the best men in the city of Athens that fell during this war.
His preparations completed, Eurylochus lodged the hostages in Kytinium, in Doris, and advanced upon Naupactus through the country of the Locrians, taking upon his way Oeneon and Eupalium, two of their towns that refused to join him.
That there was also a poetical contest in which the Ionians went to contend, again is shown by the following, taken from the same hymn. After celebrating the Delian dance of the women, he ends his song of praise with these verses, in which he also alludes to himself:
The settlement effected, they fortified anew the city, now called Heraclea, distant about four miles and a half from Thermopylae and two miles and a quarter from the sea, and commenced building docks, closing the side towards Thermopylae just by the pass itself, in order that they might be easily defended.
The winter ensuing, the Athenians in Sicily with their Hellenic allies, and such of the Sicel subjects or allies of Syracuse as had revolted from her and joined their army, marched against the Sicel town Inessa, the acropolis of which was held by the Syracusans, and after attacking it without being able to take it, retired.
CHAPTER XI
It had been purified before by Pisistratus the tyrant; not indeed the whole island, but as much of it as could be seen from the temple.
While the fleet off Olpae blockaded the hill from the sea, the Acarnanians and a few of the Amphilochians, most of whom were kept back by force by the Ambraciots, had already arrived at Argos, and were preparing to give battle to the enemy, having chosen Demosthenes to command the whole of the allied army in concert with their own generals.
On their part, the Ambraciots at Olpae sent a messenger to their own city, to beg them to come with their whole levy to their assistance, fearing that the army of Eurylochus might not be able to pass through the Acarnanians, and that they might themselves be obliged to fight single-handed, or be unable to retreat, if they wished it, without danger.
Summer was now over.
Demosthenes led them near to Olpae and encamped, a great ravine separating the two armies. During five days they remained inactive; on the sixth both sides formed in order of battle.
Uniting here at daybreak, they sat down at the place called Metropolis, and encamped.
These once subdued, the rest would easily come in.
Now, I've got some fairly good news for you.
She would go back by train, alone, unhampered.
Step lively."
Marry her, cheat her, and stay young. Green stones, accursed.
She is going to return to Broadway this autumn, and she has a trunkful of plays to read.
When this heartrending business was over she summoned Tony Bernini.
That's the plain fact.
When Hawksley returned to the starting line the walls rocked, there were two or three blinding stabs of pain; but he faced this unusual Irishman with never a hint of the torture.
His itinerary began at Piraeus, in Greece, and might end in Vladivostok.
You're an actress, but the Big Dramatist writes your business for you.
Kitty's days were pleasant enough, but her nights were sieges.
Why not?
About the same time in Cutty's apartment rather an amusing comedy took place.
This will be the most scrumptious event in my life.
"I'm not frightened," said Kitty.
"Miss Conover, the moment Karlov puts his hands on you the whole game goes blooey.
His splendid health and vigorous mentality were the results of thinking young.
I want you to note her ways, how she amuses herself, eats, exercises.
Make him think his wife is a lucky woman.
He hasn't lost any blood.
Just wanted to dodge convention, and give her freedom and happiness.
"I do," said the ex-pugilist.
And all this unhappiness because he had been touched with the lust for loot.
"All right," said Ryan.
Kitty's youth would shore up the debacle, suspend it indefinitely.
"Nothin' the matter with you, Bo, but the crack on the conk."
Truth is, Kitty, you'd better dress in monotones.
A crack on the conk.
She was not surrendering her right to that.
These madmen expect to blow up the United States on May first.
That could not be it.
Either he was a false alarm, or he'd attempt the job even if he fell down.
If he's got any pride, dig it up.
Kitty laughed; and that was what he wanted.
"Better not go by train.
I'll follow on your heels."
Cheat her.
He knew all about this trip, having been advised by Cutty over the wire.
That's it.
"Anybody would consider that Karlov was after me instead of Hawksley."
The Tschaikowsky waltz.
The political and commercial aspects of the polyglot peoples, what they wanted, what they expected, what they needed; racial enmities.
"What's the matter?"
And Cutty wanted her out of town for a few days.
He could dig up all this dry information with the precise accuracy of an economist, all the while his actual thoughts upon Kitty. His nights were nightmares.
There was a touch of horror in the suggestion.
He would grow old swiftly, thunderously.
Comfy.
But we wish to the Lord you were, Miss Conover.
Believe me!
"It's odd, isn't it, that I shouldn't possess a little histrionic ability.
Another fragment.
There is death in this game.
I can get a fast roadster and run you out in a couple of hours.
"Yep.
She might wake up to the fact that you're a mighty pretty young woman and suddenly become temperamental.
What is it?"
It mighta killed him.
"But," began Miss Frances in protest.
Miss Frances stood at one side, her arms folded, her expression skeptical.
What they wanted to know was an American's point of view, based upon long and intimate associations.
"Well?" greeted Karlov, moodily.
"I told him to.
What was a year out of her life if afterward she would be in comfortable circumstances, free to love where she willed?
A Knight of the Round Table, a prince of chivalry.
The coat tree stood at the right of the single window, and out of this window Kitty stared solemnly, at everything and at nothing.
Eve didn't have anything to speak of, but she travelled a lot.
I'm wild about her!
I may be gone a week."
I'll take care of your grips and camera.
Come, who is my father?"
"Ah," cried Benedetto, his eyes sparkling with joy.
"Well, then, lend him the twenty francs," said the keeper, leaning on the other shoulder; "surely you will not refuse a comrade!"
Come, speak, my worthy Corsican, speak!"
The prisoners then approached and formed a circle.
"He's a fine looking fellow," said another; "if he had only a comb and hair-grease, he'd take the shine off the gentlemen in white kids."
"Oh, no.
The prisoners, in their expressive language, have named it the "Lions' Den," probably because the captives possess teeth which frequently gnaw the bars, and sometimes the keepers also.
"What do you wish me to say?"
It was too soon for a visit from the examining magistrate, and too late for one from the director of the prison, or the doctor; it must, then, be the visitor he hoped for.
And yet, frightful though this spot may be, it is looked upon as a kind of paradise by the men whose days are numbered; it is so rare for them to leave the Lions' Den for any other place than the barrier Saint-Jacques or the galleys!
The cut of his clothes would have made him pass for an elegant man, if those clothes had not been torn to shreds; still they did not show signs of wear, and the fine cloth, beneath the careful hands of the prisoner, soon recovered its gloss in the parts which were still perfect, for the wearer tried his best to make it assume the appearance of a new coat.
"How did you know I was in prison?"
Benedetto, you are fallen into terrible hands; they are ready to open for you--make use of them.
Andrea felt his heart leap with joy.
In the court which we have attempted to describe, and from which a damp vapor was rising, a young man with his hands in his pockets, who had excited much curiosity among the inhabitants of the "Den," might be seen walking.
You great people always lose something by scandal, notwithstanding your millions.
On this paved yard are to be seen,--pacing to and fro from morning till night, pale, careworn, and haggard, like so many shadows,--the men whom justice holds beneath the steel she is sharpening.
"You--you?" said the young man, looking fearfully around him.
"Oh, these are fine words."
The Lions' Den.
The keeper turned his back, and shrugged his shoulders; he did not even laugh at what would have caused any one else to do so; he had heard so many utter the same things,--indeed, he heard nothing else.
He has two means of extricating me from this dilemma,--the one by a mysterious escape, managed through bribery; the other by buying off my judges with gold.
"You, sir?--you are my adopted father.
"See, the prince is pluming himself," said one of the thieves.
"Well, be it so.
I know all these things.
"Well?"
What does scandal signify to me?
He had borne with the public prison, and with privations of all sorts; still, by degrees nature, or rather custom, had prevailed, and he suffered from being naked, dirty, and hungry.
And, then, to be here so young!
"What is that?" asked Andrea.
"Of course--of course," said the prisoners;--"any one can see he's a gentleman!"
Who sends you?"
There, crouched against the side of the wall which attracts and retains the most heat, they may be seen sometimes talking to one another, but more frequently alone, watching the door, which sometimes opens to call forth one from the gloomy assemblage, or to throw in another outcast from society.
Do not play with the thunderbolt they have laid aside for a moment, but which they can take up again instantly, if you attempt to intercept their movements."
The gratings are every day carefully examined by jailers, whose herculean proportions and cold pitiless expression prove them to have been chosen to reign over their subjects for their superior activity and intelligence.
Chapter 107.
The keeper relaxed his hold.
Let us talk of those, if you please.
Some of the inmates of the "Lions' Den" were watching the operations of the prisoner's toilet with considerable interest.
You have continued your course of villany; you have robbed--you have assassinated."
Gendarmes, I am at your service.
It is a prison within a prison; the walls are double the thickness of the rest.
"Benedetto!" exclaimed an inspector.
"Do not let us jest," gravely replied Bertuccio, "and dare not to utter that name again as you have pronounced it."
Some voices were heard to say that the gentleman was right; that he intended to be civil, in his way, and that they would set the example of liberty of conscience,--and the mob retired.
"The Count of Monte Cristo?"
"Good!
"Can I be deceived?" he murmured, as he stepped into the oblong and grated vehicle which they call "the salad basket." "Never mind, we shall see!
"Silence,--be silent!" said Andrea, who knew the delicate sense of hearing possessed by the walls; "for heaven's sake, do not speak so loud!"
"Who, then, am I?"
He bestowed the same attention upon the cambric front of a shirt, which had considerably changed in color since his entrance into the prison, and he polished his varnished boots with the corner of a handkerchief embroidered with initials surmounted by a coronet.
"Gods of Greece," after declaring in his wild way that he has never loved the old deities, that to him the Greek are repugnant, and the Romans thoroughly hateful, yet avows that when he considers how dastardly and windy are the gods who overcame them, the new reigning sorrowful gods, malignant in their sheep's, clothing of humility, he feels ready to fight for the former against these.
The Hebrew dynasty of the gods is no more; it has done much evil in its long sovranty, which we will try to forget now it ceases to reign; it has done some little good, whose remembrance we will cherish when it is sepulchred, Christ the Great is dead, but Pan the Great lives again, as Mr. Maccall told us in some lines published in this paper several years ago.
He is the good Pan, the great Shepherd.... at whose death were moanings, sighs, trepidations and lamentations in all the machine of the universe, heavens, earth, sea, hells.
So the priesthood and the shrines of the Olympians kept possession of the Roman Empire centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus.
Jesus on his cross must dwindle to a point, even in the realms of legend under Prometheus on Caucasus.
GREAT CHRIST IS DEAD
For ages already the Father has been as spectral as Jupiter; for ages already the Holy Ghost has been but the shadow of a shade.
The poets have chanted this momentous revolution according to their religion, their phantasy, or their mood.
With this my interpretation the time agrees.
Fate, in the form of Science, has decreed the extinction of the gods.
Mary and her babe must join Venus and Love, Isis and Horus; living with them only in the world of art.
Pan lives, not as a God, but as the All, Nature, now that the oppression of the Supernatural is removed.
When the noblest hearts worship not at its altars, when the most vigorous intellects abandon its creeds, the knell of its doom has rung.
I may be told that Christianity is yet alive and flourishing, that its priesthood and its churches hold possession of Europe and America and Australia.
Milton in his Hymn on the Nativity shouts harsh Puritanical scorn on the oracles stricken dumb, and the deities overthrown.
(1875.)
More than eighteen hundred years have passed since the death of the great god Pan was proclaimed; and now it is full time to proclaim the death of the great god Christ.
Heine in his.
Therefore, while confident that even on these grounds the case must go against the Christian believer, I wish to add a few words on its wider relations, in order that the decision may be established, not merely by the letter of the law, but also by the spirit of justice.
But I could not consider this argument adequate or conclusive, for there are large general considerations of incomparably greater importance which it leaves out altogether.
This prodigal multiplicity and superfluity of resurrections seems to have been not a little embarrassing to modern Christian champions, though doubtless it did not in the least trouble the primitive non-scientific believers, to whom nothing was more natural than the unnatural, including the supernatural and the infranatural.
We might go on asking Why? and Why? and Why? in this fashion on a hundred points, confident that to not one of our questions could the Christian apologist give a straightforward and satisfactory answer.
"The sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."
In reviewing Mr. R. H. Hutton's Essay on "Christian Evidences, Popular and Critical," I was obliged to follow his lead, joining issue on such pleas as he put forward.
(1876.)
When Peter and the others were preaching the resurrection of Christ, why did they not adduce and produce some of these many, risen saints, whose visible, tangible, living and speaking evidence would have been irresistible?
But the difficulties of the poor apologist are enormously increased if he must further contend that many bodies of the saints came out of their graves, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many, and still there is no external evidence.
Once in the imperial archives, the record of the miracle would have spread everywhere; all subsequent historians would have related it, all subsequent writers referred to it.
We have seen that it cannot be because of any superiority of evidence for the former, since the evidence for the latter is in many cases infinitely greater and better authenticated, and since he does not attempt to weigh evidence before either accepting or rejecting, though he may seek evidence and argument to confirm what he has already given himself to believe.
Thus, what Christian has ever deigned to examine critically the marvels affirmed in the Koran, such as Mohammed's visit to heaven; although the Koran can be traced far more surely to the Prophet of Islam than can the Gospels to their reputed authors, and this Prophet bears a far higher character for truthfulness than do the early Christians?
Thus with regard to the resurrection of Jesus, as Mr. Hutton adduced what he thought confirmatory evidence only from the New Testament itself, I confined myself to showing or attempting to show that such evidence is unsubstantial.
Their earth was a plane, vaulted by the sky, lamped by the little sun and moon and stars; above this vault was Heaven, where their God dwelt enthroned; they knew nothing of the law of gravitation; their Christ, standing in the flesh on the Mount of Olives, floated up through this vault to sit enthroned beside his Father in the most natural supernatural manner.
Just as the resurrection of Jesus could be accepted without misgiving by the non-scientific early Christians, to whom miracles appeared among the most frequent occurrences of life, so could the ascension.
We leave thus the torturing of texts in the dim cells of the theological Inquisition, a process by which almost any confession required can be and has been wrung from the unfortunate victims, and emerge into the open daylight of common-sense and reason.
Why did their risen Lord only slink about among his own disciples, appearing to these but at flying instants: why did he not, with his well-known features and with the wounds of the nails and the spear in his body, confront the chief priests and Pilate and the whole of Jerusalem, and compel them to acknowledge and bear enduring witness to his resurrection?
So it is no wonder that, recoiling from these manifold impossibilities, the Christian advocates prefer to dwell on the one resurrection as if it were unique, and avoid dwelling on the others that by the very same testimony immediately followed it.
It is worth noting that while our Christian advocates insist with all their might, such as it is, upon the resurrection of Jesus, they willingly pass over as lightly as possible, if they do not altogether ignore, a similar miracle guaranteed by the very same authority.
Why did he not summon all the people from the highest to the lowest to the solemn spectacle of his ascension, securing multitudinous and permanently recorded evidence such as none of us could doubt?
It is very significant that neither in the Acts nor in the Epistles is there any allusion to these resurrections.
And here I venture to assert that if the story of the resurrection and ascension were recorded of any other than Jesus in any other sacred book than the Bible, Mr. Hutton and all other intelligent Christians would not only disbelieve it, but would not even condescend to investigate it, condemning it offhand as too preposterous to be worthy of serious attention.
Where is the Heaven for its God? where the Hell for its Devil?
Sometimes, when musing upon this doctrine, I have a vision of the God-man getting old upon the earth, horribly anxious and wretched, because no one will murder him.
Benjamin Disraeli attained the cynical sublime when he suggested a monument of gratitude to Judas.
The same man, who muffles himself in as many furs as he can get in Greenland, will strip himself to a linen robe in Jamaica.
When we find sentences of the purest beauty and wisdom in the records of a man's conversation, we may safely proportion the whole philosophical character of the speaker to such sentences.
Hannibal, whose business it is to get into Italy from Gaul, sets about blasting the Alps.
The situation is desperate; he has again and again prayed his Father to despatch a special murderer to despatch him, yet none appears: shall he have to perish by old age or disease? may he be compelled to commit suicide?
Need one say more?
He lived an example of holiness to us all: if God, how can our humanity imitate Deity?
The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus, which, in whatever relation regarded, is full of self-contradictions and absurdities, is, above all, pernicious in its moral and spiritual results.
Stephenson, whose business it is to get from Manchester to Liverpool, sets about filling up Chat Moss.
must he go back to Heaven unsacrificed, foiled for want of an assassin?
His words, as reported by the Evangelists, are ever-flowing fountains of spiritual refreshments; and I feel that he was in himself even far more wise and good than he appears in the gospel.
Every proverb has its antagonist proverb, each being true to a certain extent, or in certain relations.
What disciple could be expected to report perfectly the words of a teacher so mystically sublime?
He associated with publicans and sinners: if God, why did he make publicans and sinners at all?
The wise man finds himself surrounded and obstructed by certain concrete errors, and he attacks these errors with relative truths.
No wonder this poor Atonement has been attacked on all sides; it invites attack; one may say that in every aspect it piteously implores us to attack it and relieve it from the misery of its spectral existence.
JESUS: AS GOD; AS A MAN
But much matters to what we may attain.
When deity speaks and deity reports the speeches, all should be absolute truth transparently self-consistent, else what advantage or gain have we by the substitution of God for Man?
We are but completing the circle from the clearest fragment-arc left.
He cured many sick: if God, why did he not give the whole world health?
Everything for which we love and venerate the man Jesus becomes a bitter and absurd mockery when attributed to the Lord Christ.
Exactly so; and because one sage, seeing him roll down to the right, has pushed him up on the right, while another sage, seeing him roll down to the left, has pushed him up on the left, are the two sages to be accounted antagonists?
Is it not the worst of sacrilege, a foul profanation of our human nature, which for us, at least, should be holy and awful, when the heroic and saintly martyrdom of a true Man is thus falsified into the self-schemed sham sacrifice, ineffectual, of a God?
Little matters whence we sprang; we are what we are.
It is so full of breaches that one does not know where to storm.
The whole scheme of the Atonement, as planned by God, is based upon a crime--a crime infinitely atrocious, the crime of murder and deicide, is essential to its success: if Judas had not betrayed, if the Jews had not insisted, if Pilate had not surrendered, if all these turpitudes had not been secured, the Atonement could not have been consummated.
They mark the altitude at which his spirit loved to dwell.
It climbs to God by trampling on Man, it builds Heaven in contempt of Earth, its soul is a phosphorescence from the slain and rotting Body; its fervent faith vilifies us worse than the coldest sneer of Mephistopheles.
Jesus, as a man, commands my heart's best homage.
He loved the poor, he taught the ignorant: if God, why did he let any remain poor and ignorant?
He preached the kingdom of heaven: if God, why did he not bring the kingdom with him and make all mankind fit for it?
Most myths have a certain justification in their beauty, in their symbolism of high truth.
This one distorts the beauty, degrades the sublimity, stultifies the meaning of the facts and the character wherein it has been founded, taking away all true grandeur from Jesus, benumbing our love and reverence.
Could we conceive an abstract intellect, we might conceive it dwelling continually in the sphere of abstract and absolute truth; but no man, however wise, dwells continually in this sphere.
But the world, even the religious world, has always been ungrateful to its most generous benefactors.
Why bring in God to utter and record what could have been as well uttered and recorded by man?
Jesus as a man, whose words have been recorded by fallible men, is not lowered in my esteem by such contradictions as I find between his various speeches.
For a wise man only attacks the errors that are in his way; things which he never meets he can scarcely think of as obstructions.
"These hereditary enemies of the Truth... have even had the heart to degrade this first preacher of the Mountain, the purest hero of Liberty; for, unable to deny that he was earth's greatest man, they have made of him heaven's smallest god."--Heine: Reisebilder.
He went about doing good: if God, why did he not do all good at once?
Luther said that the human mind is like a drunken peasant on horseback: he is rolling off on the right, you push him up, he then rolls over on the left.
And while one is grinding such chaff in the theological mill, he may as well have a turn at the Atonement, which is, in fact, the essence of the dogma of the Incarnation.
Now he loveth her, but she loatheth him; and when he chanced to take an oath of triple divorcement and broke it, forthright she left him.
Now one was an old man of comely face and the other a youth; and he heard the younger say to the elder, "O my uncle,, I conjure thee by Allah, give me back my cousin!"
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that Ala al-Din continued, "So he packed me fifty loads of goods and gave me ten thousand dinars, wherewith I set out for Baghdad; but when I reached the Lion's Copse, the wild Arabs came out against me and took all my goods and monies.
And when she drew near him, and there remained but two paces between them, he recited these two couplets,
And when he heard her chant these lines he ended his recitation of the chapter, and began also to sing and repeated the following couplet,
Now is thy time!" And behold, a scorpion stung the Badawi in the palm and he cried out, saying, "Help, O Arabs!
When it was the Two Hundred and Fifty-fifth Night,
The old man replied, "Did I not forbid thee, many a time, when the oath of divorce was always in thy mouth, as it were Holy Writ?"
Thereupon she came forward, swinging her haunches and gracefully swaying a shape the handiwork of Him whose boons are hidden; and each of them stole one glance of the eyes that cost them a thousand sighs.
When it was the Two Hundred and Fifty-seventh Night,
What a lost wretch she saw!
"I think I see you look up from my letter, with your big black eyes staring straight before you, and say and swear that this must be one of my mystifications.
You have heard it of other girls, over and over again.
The instructions in my father's will, under which Sandyseal has been sold, are peremptory.
She was ashamed of her wickedness; she was eager to sacrifice herself, for the good of the once-dear friend whom she had wronged.
The Divorce, the merciless Divorce, answered:--No!
The best of good women--a Sister of Charity--happened to be near enough to the river to rescue her.
The next letter which she picked out from the little heap was of some length, and was written in a clear and steady hand.
Instantly she rang for the maid.
Miss Westerfield.
So the letter ended.
She locked the door of her bedchamber, and threw off her walking-dress; light as it was, she felt as if it would stifle her.
What religious consolations would encourage her penitence? What prayers, what hopes, would reconcile her, on her death-bed, to the common doom?
Sydney dwelt with reluctant attention on the latter half of it.
Unfortunately (for I am fond of the old house in which I was born) it is only too true.
She loved and trusted; she was deceived and deserted.
She turned to the signature.
I would rather have kept the house.
She paused, thinking of the marriage that was now a marriage no more. The toilet-table was close to her; she looked absently at her haggard face in the glass.
She could think of nothing but what the judge had said, in speaking of Mrs. Linley.
Had she heard her father mention it at home in the time of her early childhood?
My last letter told you of my father's death.
The composing influence of prayer on a troubled mind was something that she had heard of.
Let it be sold.'
No!
And yet, he might have found a kinder way of reproving a sensitive woman than looking into the street--as if he had forgotten her in the interest of watching the strangers passing by!
An overpowering impatience to make the speediest and completest atonement possessed her.
While she held her place in the world as high as ever, what was the prospect before Sydney Westerfield?
She regretted it bitterly.
But she was too young to follow any train of repellent thought persistently to its end.
"The delay in the sailing of your ship offers me an opportunity of writing to you again.
The generous impulses which other women were free to feel were forbidden luxuries to her.
For the present good-by, and a prosperous voyage outward bound."
Was there nothing she could find to do which would offer some other subject to occupy her mind than herself and her future?
My father was therefore dealing with his own property when he ordered the house to be sold.
It addressed her father familiarly as "My dear Roderick," and it proceeded in these words:--
Slowly and sadly she submitted, and went back to her room.
"You will now understand how my mother's grateful remembrance associated her with the interests of more than one community of Nuns; and you will not need to be told what she had in mind when she obtained my father's promise at the time of her last illness.
By comparison with the blotted scrawls which she had just burned, it looked like the letter of a gentleman.
Looking absently round the room, she noticed the packet of her father's letters placed on the table by her bedside.
Her overburdened heart found no relief in tears.
Perhaps he was not thinking of the strangers; perhaps his mind was dwelling fondly and regretfully on his wife?
In the cooler atmosphere her memory recovered itself; she recollected the newspaper, that Herbert had taken from her.
Useless longings! Too late!
That end was attained in a Priory of Benedictine Nuns, established in France.
"I was only thinking," she said.
Must she wait till Herbert Linley no longer concealed that he was weary of her, and cast her off?
Our old moated house at Sandyseal, in which we have spent so many happy holidays when we were schoolfellows, is sold.
She read the letter.
One of the windows was open already; she threw up the other to get more air.
If I die first--oh, there is a chance of it!
She was sheltered; she was pitied; she was encouraged to return to her family.
In deference to my mother's wishes it was kept strictly a secret from me while my father lived.
Her mind was still pursuing its own sad course of inquiry; she was wondering in what part of England Sandyseal might be; she was asking herself if the Nuns at the old moated house ever opened their doors to women, whose one claim on their common Christianity was the claim to be pitied--when she heard Linley's footsteps approaching the door.
Chapter XXXII.
Even in his absence he pleaded with her to have some faith in him still.
"You and I were both very young when my poor mother died; but I think you must remember that she, like the rest of her family, was a Roman Catholic.
In case of the worst, therefore, I shall leave the interests of my contemplated Home in your honest and capable hands.
Why?
For having been too ready to forgive the wretch who had taken her husband from her, and had repaid a hundred acts of kindness by unpardonable ingratitude.
"Oh, God, how can I give that woman back the happiness of which I have robbed her!"
It was not something that she experienced now.
too late!
It is needless to make this long letter longer by dwelling on the girl's miserable story.
They all related to race-horses, and to cunningly devised bets which were certain to make the fortunes of the clever gamblers on the turf who laid them. Absolute indifference on the part of the winners to the ruin of the losers, who were not in the secret, was the one feeling in common, which her father's correspondents presented.
Prepare yourself to be surprised.
It should be her own act that parted them, and that did it at once.
The good Sister of Charity won her confidence.
He had been kind and considerate; he had listened to her little story of the relics of her father, found in the garret, as if her interests were his interests.
There were no associations with it that she could now call to mind.
They are the result of a promise made, many years since, to his wife.
Comparing Mrs. Linley's prospects with hers, was there anything to justify regret for the divorced wife?
If she had been a few years older, Herbert Linley might never again have seen her a living creature.
A cruel reproof, and worse than cruel, a public reproof, administered to the generous friend, the true wife, the devoted mother--and for what?
The poor deserted creature absolutely refused; she could never forget that she had disgraced them.
Mrs. Peterkin tasted each, and said the flavor was pleasant, but not precisely that of coffee.
He came near throwing his crucible--that was the name of his melting-pot--at their heads.
They saw her digging with her trowel round a sassafras bush.
Then she tried a little flagroot and snakeroot, then some spruce gum, and some caraway and some dill, some rue and rosemary, some sweet marjoram and sour, some oppermint and sappermint, a little spearmint and peppermint, some wild thyme, and some of the other tame time, some tansy and basil, and catnip and valerian, and sassafras, ginger, and pennyroyal.
Then he added some tartaric acid and some hypersulphate of lime.
But could they get the whole subject on a postal?
THIS was Mrs. Peterkin.
First he looked at the coffee, and then stirred it.
And all she would take for pay was five cents in currency.
Then the family were in despair, and all sat and thought a great while. It was growing late in the day, and Mrs. Peterkin hadn't had her cup of coffee.
Mrs. Peterkin tasted, and did the same.
They knew her by her hat.
And in time came the answer of the lady from Philadelphia:--"Yes, of course; publish them."
The children tasted after each mixture, but made up dreadful faces.
Then he tried, each in turn, some oxalic, cyanic, acetic, phosphoric, chloric, hyperchloric, sulphuric, boracic, silicic, nitric, formic, nitrous nitric, and carbonic acids.
The more the old woman stirred, and the more she put in, the worse it all seemed to taste.
At last Elizabeth Eliza said, "They say that the lady from Philadelphia, who is staying in town, is very wise.
Meanwhile Mrs. Peterkin was getting quite impatient for her coffee.
Mrs.
Mr. Peterkin believed there could be no difficulty, there was but one question:--
It was steeple-crowned, without any vane.
The chemist was not discouraged.
She believed the coffee was bewitched.
By Lucretia P. Hale
It was a mistake.
"Why didn't we think of that?" said Elizabeth Eliza; and they all went back to their mother, and she had her cup of coffee.
"Publish them, of course."
But he didn't.
But no; it was no better.
The chemist said that all he had done ought to have taken out the salt.
It tasted bad.
There she stopped, and stuffed her huge pockets with some of all the kinds of herbs.
He could turn things into almost gold.
He should like to be paid, and go.
Their card had been addressed to the lady from Philadelphia, with the number of her street.
"I have it!" exclaimed the chemist,--"a little ammonia is just the thing!" No, it wasn't the thing at all.
Shall the adventures of the Peterkin family be published?
Suppose I go and ask her what is best to be done." To this they all agreed, it was a great thought, and off Elizabeth Eliza went.
It would not take so long to write as a letter, and would not be so expensive.
He sat himself down to do it.
But there was no ink.
"That's the book-case part," said Elizabeth Eliza; "but where are the books?"
After the crowd had dispersed, Solomon John sat down to think of his writing again.
So did Elizabeth Eliza, only she had to have her back to the moon.
When they got there, the fowls were all at roost, so they could look at them quietly.
One day, when she was talking with the lady from Philadelphia, she spoke of this trouble.
"We shall have to whip him," said Elizabeth Eliza.
How could Elizabeth Eliza open it?
"It comes from books," said one of the family.
"We might make those," said Mrs. Peterkin, thoughtfully.
ELIZABETH ELIZA had a present of a piano, and she was to take lessons of the postmaster's daughter.
How could she reach the keys to play upon it?
So Solomon John sat down again, but there was no paper.
So they decided to make some. The little boys said they could find some nutgalls up in the woods. So they all agreed to set out and pick some.
And now the bookstore was shut up.
The bookseller was just shutting up his shop.
"People who have a great many books are very wise." Then they counted up that there were very few books in the house,--a few school-books and Mrs. Peterkin's cook-book were all.
But there were no geese!
"Yes," said Solomon John, "books will make us wise, but first I must make a book."
It was very pleasant, too, moonlight evenings.
They carried some out to the horse, who swallowed it down very quickly.
The little boys jumped out as quickly as they could; they were eager to go and ask the lady from Philadelphia.
What should he do for ink?
Mrs. Peterkins put on her cape-bonnet, and the little boys got into their india-rubber boots, and off they went.
"That is just what he wanted," said Mrs. Peterkin; "now he will certainly go!"
So they went into the parlor, and sat down to make a book.
"No geese but ourselves," said Mrs. Peterkin, wittily, as they returned to the house. The sight of this procession roused up the village.
In meeting woods, whereon a film of mist Slept like the bloom upon the purple grape,
The ode is followed by some sonnets which are destined, we fear, to be ludibria ventis.
Ordinary theology has long since converted its gold into lead, and words and phrases that once touched the heart of the world have become wearisome and meaningless through repetition.
It must be admitted that they are rather old-fashioned, but this is usually the case with natural spontaneous verse.
Mr. Nash, who styles himself 'a humble soldier in the army of Faith,' expresses a hope that his book may 'invigorate devotional feeling, especially among the young, to whom verse is perhaps more attractive than to their elders,' but we should be sorry to think that people of any age could admire such a paraphrase as the following:
However, in spite of this commonplace conclusion there is a great deal in Mr. Hayes's poem that is strong and fine, and he undoubtedly possesses a fair ear for music and a remarkable faculty of poetical expression.
The Wind, by Mr. James Ross, is a rather gusty ode, written apparently without any definite scheme of metre, and not very impressive as it lacks both the strength of the blizzard and the sweetness of Zephyr.
are excessively tedious.
These last have all the brilliancy of a clever pastel.
By Alfred Hayes, M.A.
They naturally fall in love with each other and marry, and for many years David Westren leads a perfectly happy life.
Some of his descriptive touches of nature, such as
The Story of the Cross, an attempt to versify the Gospel narratives, is a strange survival of the Tate and Brady school of poetry.
But when Mr. Rodd leaves the problem of the Unconditioned to take care of itself, and makes no attempt to solve the mysteries of the Ego and the non-Ego, he is very pleasant reading indeed. A Mazurka of Chopin is charming, in spite of the awkwardness of the fifth line, and so are the verses on Assisi, and those on San Servolo at Venice.
The rest of the volume, however, is disappointing.
"It's locked on the inside," he said in a low tone.
How did it get there?
"It's kept in the door," Liddy snapped.
He--he ought to be here."
At the door he was to force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it.
But the key was not in it.
"The key's in it."
"Warner," I called, "come back here.
Then he turned the handle.
As I went down the drive, my thoughts were busy.
The mystery seemed to deepen constantly.
so that unless a thief was as blind as--as some detectives, he could walk right in."
Which way had the fugitive escaped?
When he stood up his face was exultant.
I might have known."
If it was some member of the household, who could it have been?
But my attention was busy with the room below.
What have you locked in the laundry?"
Mr. Jamieson examined the windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape. The window or the door?
Warner, whose bag is this?"
"There's somebody locked in the laundry," I panted.
Without the slightest difficulty the door opened, revealing the blackness of the drying-room beyond!
"Lord have mercy!" gasped Liddy, and turned to run.
It was true enough.
The basket had been overturned, but that was all.
If Gertrude had been on the circular staircase that night, why had she fled from Mr. Jamieson?
He was completely but somewhat incongruously dressed, and his open, boyish face looked abashed.
"That whole end of the cellar is kept locked, so nobody can get at the clothes, and then the key's left in the door?
Gertrude and her injured ankle!
"I fell over the carriage block," she explained.
"Confound such careless work!
"Get him up," I said, "and for goodness' sake open the door, Thomas. I'll wait for Warner."
Whose bag is this?"
If the fugitive had come from outside the house, how did he get in?
We got the lights on finally and looked all through the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement. Everything was quiet and empty.
"Gone!" he said.
"Liddy," I called, "go through the house at once and see who is missing, or if any one is.
To Thomas!
"That's the door," she said sulkily.
I tried to put the thought away, but it would not go.
He was in the doorway by this time, and he pretended not to hear.
"It's--it belongs to Thomas," he said, and fled up the drive.
"Where's the laundry key kept?"
"I--I think he's in bed, ma'm."
If you came out for air, you'd better put on your overshoes." And then I noticed that Gertrude was limping--not much, but sufficiently to make her progress very slow, and seemingly painful.
It was filled with gold-topped bottles and brushes, and it breathed opulence, luxury, femininity from every inch of surface.
However, I put the bag in the back of my mind, which was fast becoming stored with anomalous and apparently irreconcilable facts, and followed Warner to the house.
And yet, every way I turned I seemed to find something that pointed to such a connection.
Mr. Jamieson shook it, but it was a heavy door, well locked.
"He'll do nothing dishonourable," said Ralph.
Lord Warburton tells me he wants, of all things in the world, to marry Pansy.
For the moment, Isabel went to the Hotel de Paris as often as she thought well; the measure of propriety was in the canon of taste, and there couldn't have been a better proof that morality was, so to speak, a matter of earnest appreciation.
"Cruel to the other person perhaps--the one she cares for.
Isabel got up, slowly smoothing her gloves and eyeing them thoughtfully. "It's after all no business of mine."
"Perhaps not; but it will be good for me that he should.
Isabel found herself able to smile as well as he.
I can't undertake to see him through."
The prospect made her heart beat and her cheeks burn, as I say, in advance; there were moments when, in her wish to avoid an open rupture, she found herself wishing Ralph would start even at a risk.
That's very natural.
I'm very glad he shouldn't become your stepdaughter's husband.
That's not his nature."
"Ah, for Pansy, no!" cried Ralph very positively.
Your father must tell you that."
Isabel debated.
You might risk one this morning, I think.
As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness of the situation, she looked to Isabel like a childish martyr decked out for sacrifice and scarcely presuming even to hope to avert it.
"When I talk of your helping me I talk great nonsense," she said with a quick smile.
Is it your belief that he really cares for her?"
"Let me understand.
Pansy said nothing for a moment; she only continued to smile as if she were in possession of a bright assurance.
She made up her mind to speak to Pansy, and she took an occasion on the same day, going to the girl's room before dinner.
"I wish you would try to find one," the girl exclaimed as if she were praying to the Madonna.
Isabel hesitated, frowning a little.
It relieved this friend of a heavy responsibility. Pansy had a sufficient illumination of her own, and Isabel felt that she herself just now had no light to spare from her small stock. Nevertheless it still clung to her that she must be loyal to Osmond, that she was on her honour in dealing with his daughter.
That appeared to make the whole future hideous. To break with Osmond once would be to break for ever; any open acknowledgement of irreconcilable needs would be an admission that their whole attempt had proved a failure.
"Very true.
She cares for another person, and it's cruel to attempt to bribe her by magnificent offers to give him up."
She came very soon to what she wished to speak of.
"No one can think of me as Mr. Rosier does; no one has the right."
"Not at all; and he may be right in not liking it.
He wished her to have no freedom of mind, and he knew perfectly well that Ralph was an apostle of freedom.
"Of course it is.
"Not in the least.
Isabel's application of that measure had been particularly free to-day, for in addition to the general truth that she couldn't leave Ralph to die alone she had something important to ask of him.
"You shouldn't think of him.
It's about Lord Warburton."
She felt accused of dishonesty, and the idea was disgusting.
The child's eyes grew more penetrating; Isabel believed she was doubting her sincerity, and the impression took force from her slowly getting up from her cushion.
Pansy stared, and then very quickly, "Will you do everything I want?" she asked.
"You must think of something else then," Isabel went on; but Pansy, sighing at this, told her that she had attempted that feat without the least success.
I'm not afraid I shall not be able to justify myself!" she said lightly.
It will be perceived that she partook of this refreshment in spite of her husband's aversion to it, that is partook of it, as she flattered herself, discreetly.
He had no sooner spoken than she recovered her self-possession, and the first use she made of it was to pretend she had not heard him.
She could perfectly understand her husband's wish for the event; she didn't, to be just, see how he COULD like her to be with her cousin.
"What should you like me to do?" her companion softly demanded.
It could only take the meanest and cruellest.
"You're intimate with him," she said; "you've a great deal of observation of him."
She was afraid even of looking too grave, or at least too stern; she was afraid of causing alarm.
The question was a terrible one, and Isabel took refuge in timorous vagueness.
He had asked her and she had told him she would do so if her papa would allow it.
"You're very philosophic," said her cousin.
"A lady can advise a young girl better than a man."
"Has he commissioned you to obtain it?" Ralph ventured to ask.
"If I try to learn from you what you expect, what you desire, it's only that I may act accordingly."
"How can I encourage him?"
"That's nonsense, you know."
She felt no bitterness toward her father; there was no bitterness in her heart; there was only the sweetness of fidelity to Edward Rosier, and a strange, exquisite intimation that she could prove it better by remaining single than even by marrying him.
He gave a long murmur of relief, of pity, of tenderness; it seemed to him that at last the gulf between them had been bridged.
"You're not kind," she said in a voice that he had never heard on her lips.
For a moment Isabel's answer caused itself to be waited for; then she heard herself utter it in the stillness that Pansy's attention seemed to make.
And he doesn't care for me either.
Are you pleading his cause?"
He has let me know, of course, that he thinks she would do very well at Lockleigh."
She had not as yet undertaken to act in direct opposition to his wishes; he was her appointed and inscribed master; she gazed at moments with a sort of incredulous blankness at this fact.
But think how he must dissimulate!"
"He can't help it, because he knows I think of HIM."
Her mask had dropped for an instant, but she had put it on again, to Ralph's infinite disappointment.
"It will come from him, rather.
How could poor Ralph depart?
This might seem an important step toward taking another, but for Pansy, evidently, it failed to lead in that direction.
"Why then is the difficulty so great?"
"Oh, I don't say I can do that."
Ralph looked at her as if his mild hilarity had been touched with mystification.
"It would appear so if he had been sure he'd succeed."
On his part the king returned to his apartment.
The queen entered the great hall; and it was remarked that, like the king, she looked dull and even weary.
The only question was, had she ten or twelve?
At three o'clock came two companies of the Guards, one French, the other Swiss.
The king called the cardinal.
The cardinal was speaking to him in a low voice, and the king was very pale.
After the reward of his devotion, that of his love was to come.
At midnight great cries and loud acclamations were heard.
At ten o'clock, the king's collation, consisting of preserves and other delicacies, was prepared in the little room on the side of the church of St. Jean, in front of the silver buffet of the city, which was guarded by four archers.
A cold sweat covered the brow of the cardinal.
On her left shoulder sparkled the diamond studs, on a bow of the same color as the plumes and the petticoat.
The opening of this door disclosed a brilliant light, and she disappeared.
"This means, sire," replied the cardinal, "that I was desirous of presenting her Majesty with these two studs, and that not daring to offer them myself, I adopted this means of inducing her to accept them."
In fact the king counted them, and the twelve studs were all on her Majesty's shoulder.
"You at last?" cried d'Artagnan.
D'Artagnan placed the ring on his finger, and again waited; it was evident that all was not yet over.
At ten o'clock in the morning the Sieur de la Coste, ensign in the king's Guards, followed by two officers and several archers of that body, came to the city registrar, named Clement, and demanded of him all the keys of the rooms and offices of the hotel.
All at once the king appeared with the cardinal at one of the doors of the hall.
Half an hour after the entrance of the king, fresh acclamations were heard; these announced the arrival of the queen.
These keys were given up to him instantly.
At nine o'clock Madame la Premiere Presidente arrived.
Supper was to be served at three, and the clock of St. Jean had struck three quarters past two.
She wore a beaver hat with blue feathers, a surtout of gray-pearl velvet, fastened with diamond clasps, and a petticoat of blue satin, embroidered with silver.
At that moment the violins sounded the signal for the ballet.
This was the costume that best became the king.
As fast as they entered, they were placed in the grand saloon, on the platforms prepared for them.
Everybody looked and listened with astonishment, comprehending nothing of what passed.
Porthos knocked with his hand.
32 A PROCURATOR'S DINNER
The cousin was received with resignation, that was all.
The time for wine came.
"Well, then!
Porthos smiled.
"Then," continued he, "there is a horse for my lackey, and my valise.
Coquenard.
Madame uttered fresh sighs.
He looked to see if the dish of beans was still there; the dish of beans had disappeared.
I have seen at times, a little, both of one and of the other, and making more than due allowance for the difficulties of language, and the difference of training, upon the whole, the balance is in favour of our people.
Twenty sheep a week, and one fat ox, and two stout red deer (for wholesome change of diet), as well as threescore bushels of flour, and two hogsheads and a half of cider, and a hundredweight of candles, not to mention other things of almost every variety which they got by insisting upon it--surely these might have sufficed to keep the people in their place, with no outburst of wantonness.
In spite of tears, and shrieks, and struggles, they tore the babe from the mother's arms, and cast it on the lime ash floor; then they bore her away to their horses (for by this time she was senseless), and telling the others to sack the house, rode off with their prize to the valley.
Now being in a hurry--so far at least as it is in my nature to hurry--to get to the end of this narrative, is it likely that I would have dwelled so long upon my coat of arms, but for some good reason?
Fetch down the staves of the rack, my boy.
And who would have her two girls now, clever as they were and good?
This I will tell in most careful language, so as to give offence to none, if skill of words may help it.
Lorna was moved with equal longing towards the country and country ways; and she spoke quite as much of the glistening dew as she did of the smell of our oven.
Now these two maidens were known, because they had served the beer at an ale-house; and many men who had looked at them, over a pint or quart vessel (especially as they were comely girls), thought that it was very hard for them to go in that way, and perhaps themselves unwilling.
And although they themselves must be the losers--which was a handsome thing to say--they would wait until I was a little older and more aware of my own value.
Enough that I resolved to go; and as Lorna could not come with me, it was even worse than stopping.
Now while I was walking daily in and out great crowds of men (few of whom had any freedom from the cares of money, and many of whom were even morbid with a worse pest called 'politics'), I could not be quit of thinking how we jostle one another.
Yet before the land itself has acknowledged touch of man, upon one in a hundred acres; and before one mile in ten thousand of the exhaustless ocean has ever felt the plunge of hook, or combing of the haul-nets; lo, we crawl, in flocks together upon the hot ground that stings us, even as the black grubs crowd upon the harried nettle!
And right glad was I--for even London shrank with horror at the news--to escape a man so bloodthirsty, savage, and even to his friends (among whom I was reckoned) malignant.
By evil luck, this child began to squeal about his mother, having been petted hitherto, and wont to get all he wanted, by raising his voice but a little.
And their mother (although she had taken some money, which the Doones were always full of) declared that it was a robbery; and though it increased for a while the custom, that must soon fall off again.
And half in fun, and half in earnest, she called me 'Sir John' so continually, that at last I was almost angry with her; until her eyes were bedewed with tears; and then I was angry with myself.
Such a man must be very wretched in this pure dearth of morality; like a fisherman where no fish be; and most of us have enough to do to attend to our own morals.
Moreover, the name of our farm was pure proof; a plover being a wild bird, just the same as a raven is.
What was farmer to have for supper?'
Christopher Badcock was a tenant farmer, in the parish of Martinhoe, renting some fifty acres of land, with a right of common attached to them; and at this particular time, being now the month of February, and fine open weather, he was hard at work ploughing and preparing for spring corn.
It had been intended to keep me in waiting, until the return of Lord Jeffreys, from that awful circuit of shambles, through which his name is still used by mothers to frighten their children into bed.
Therefore his wife was not surprised although the dusk was falling, that farmer Christopher should be at work in 'blind man's holiday,' as we call it.
Here I was inclined to pause, and admire the effect; for even De Whichehalse could not show a bearing so magnificent.
Earl Brandir was greatly pleased with me, not only for having saved his life, but for saving that which he valued more, the wealth laid by for Lord Alan.
The coat of arms, devised for me by the Royal heralds, was of great size, and rich colours, and full of bright imaginings.
While this good maid was in the oven, by side of back-kitchen fireplace, with a faggot of wood drawn over her, and lying so that her own heart beat worse than if she were baking; the men (as I said before) came downstairs, and stamped around the baby.
And here let me mention--although the two are quite distinct and different--that both the dew and the bread of Exmoor may be sought, whether high or low, but never found elsewhere.
Upon this chain of reasoning, and without any weak misgivings, they charged my growing escutcheon with a black raven on a ground of red.
But the heralds said that it looked a mere sign-board, without a good motto under it; and the motto must have my name in it.
God has made the earth quite large, with a spread of land large enough for all to live on, without fighting. Also a mighty spread of water, laying hands on sand and cliff with a solemn voice in storm-time; and in the gentle weather moving men to thoughts of equity.
And being a little vexed herein (for the Badcocks were not a rich couple) and finding no more than bacon, and eggs, and cheese, and little items, and nothing to drink but water; in a word, their taste being offended, they came back, to the kitchen, and stamped; and there was the baby lying.
The cruelty of this man is a thing it makes me sick to speak of; enough that when the poor baby fell (without attempt at cry or scream, thinking it part of his usual play, when they tossed him up, to come down again), the maid in the oven of the back-kitchen, not being any door between, heard them say as follows,--
Before we had finished meditating upon this loose outrage--for so I at least would call it, though people accustomed to the law may take a different view of it--we had news of a thing far worse, which turned the hearts of our women sick.
CHAPTER LXIX
Then let us have a game of loriot with the baby!
But I answered that to push was rude, and I left it to people who had no room; and thought that my fortune must be heavy, if it would not move without pushing.
Surely we are too much given to follow the tracks of each other.
All this was very fierce and fine; and so I pressed for a peaceful corner in the lower dexter, and obtained a wheat-sheaf set upright, gold upon a field of green.
But she was surprised, nay astonished, when by the light of the kitchen fire (brightened up for her husband), she saw six or seven great armed men burst into the room upon her; and she screamed so that the maid in the back kitchen heard her, but was afraid to come to help.
Beginning to be short of money, and growing anxious about the farm, longing also to show myself and my noble escutcheon to mother, I took advantage of Lady Lorna's interest with the Queen, to obtain my acquittance and full discharge from even nominal custody.
And from the description of one of those two, who carried off the poor woman, I knew beyond all doubt that it was Carver Doone himself.
Now this child was too old to be nursed, as everybody told her; for he could run, say two yards alone, and perhaps four or five, by holding to handles.
If it had been her own baby, instinct rather than reason might have had the day with her; but the child being born of her mistress, she wished him good luck, and left him, as the fierce men came downstairs.
Nearly everybody vowed that I was a great fool indeed, to neglect so rudely--which was the proper word, they said--the pushing of my fortunes.
This, as well, is full of food; being two-thirds of the world, and reserved for devouring knowledge; by the time the sons of men have fed away the dry land.
They did me the honour to consult me first, and to take no notice of my advice.
Yet some people may be surprised that men with any love of justice, whether inborn or otherwise, could continue to abide the arrogance, and rapacity, and tyranny of the Doones.
Now the mark of the floor was upon his head, as the maid (who had stolen to look at him, when the rough men were swearing upstairs) gave evidence.
They shook hands with me; and said that they could not deny but that there was reason in my view of the matter.
As for the furrier, he could never have enough of my society; and this worthy man, praying my commendation, demanded of me one thing only--to speak of him as I found him.
And being alarmed by their power of language (because they had found no silver), she crept away in a breathless hurry, and afraid how her breath might come back to her.
And he introduced me to many great people, who quite kindly encouraged me, and promised to help me in every way when they heard how the King had spoken.
And he had a way of looking round, and spreading his legs, and laughing, with his brave little body well fetched up, after a desperate journey to the end of the table, which his mother said nothing could equal.
NOT TO BE PUT UP WITH
'No game!
Did you not think to tell me you were come?
And that was let again, and men left the Choughs at Ringstave and came back to their old haunt, and any shipwrecked or travel-worn sailor found board and welcome within its doors.
After this I thought he was going, but he cleared his throat in such a way that I guessed he had something important to say, and he drew a long folded blue paper from his pocket.
It was addressed to the Reverend Horace Glennie, Perpetual Curate of Moonfleet, in the County of Dorset, England, and written in English by Heer Roosten, Attorney and Signariat of the Hague in the Kingdom of Holland.
Said I not to you, Have a care how you touch the treasure, it was evilly come by and will bring a curse with it?
And that this is so let what I am about to read to you prove; so light a candle and set it by me, for my eyes cannot follow the writing in this dancing firelight.'
I said nothing, not being able to speak, but marvelling how she had come just in the point of time to prove me wrong to think I had no friend; and she went on:
What need to tell this tale at any more length, since you may know, by my telling it, that all went well? for what man would sit down to write a history that ended in his own discomfiture?
'Twas with thoughts like this that I was busy while the short afternoon was spent, and the story went up and down the village, how that Elzevir Block and John Trenchard, who left so long ago, were come back to Moonfleet, and that the old lander was drowned saving the young man's life.
And while she spoke I thought how Elzevir had gone to shoot her father, and only failed of it by a hair's-breadth, and yet she spoke so well I thought he never really meant to shoot at all, but only to scare the magistrate.
And of ourselves let me speak last.
I was already dozing, but not asleep, when there was a knock at the door, and in walked Mr. Glennie.
And so a dread which was just waking was laid to rest for ever; and when Ratsey went I made up the fire, and lay down in the blankets in front of it, for I was dog-tired and longed for sleep.
And still I could not speak.
'He made a good end, John,' he said, rising from his knees, 'and I pray that our end may be in as good cause when it comes.
Did you not see the light, did you not know there was a friend that waited for you?'
But that great vault below it, with its memories, was set in order, and then safely walled up, and after that nothing was more ever heard of Blackbeard and his lost Mohunes.
First, we rebuilt and enlarged the almshouses beyond all that Colonel John Mohune could ever think of, and so established them as to be a haven for ever for all worn-out sailors of that coast.
The candle had long burnt out, but the fire was bright, and he knelt a moment by the trestle-table before he went out.
First, he lifted the sail from the dead body, and looked at the sleeping face.
He therefore left to John Trenchard everything of which he should die possessed, and being near death begged his forgiveness if he had wronged him in aught.
And of that money I never touched penny piece, having learnt a bitter lesson in the past, but laid it out in good works, with Mr. Glennie and Grace to help me.
The village, too, renewed itself with the new almshouses and church. There were old houses rebuilt and fresh ones reared, and all are ours, except the Why Not? which still remains the Duchy Inn.
Uncle Clem and Henny each caught hold of a foot of Raggedy Andy and let him slide down into the hole.
Then the man measured with his stick, so that he knew just where the place was, and with a pair of tin shears he cut a section from the pipe and found Raggedy Andy.
They stayed out upon the shiny new tin gutter until it began raining and hoped and hoped that Raggedy Andy could get back up to them.
So along about ten o'clock that morning one of the men came to fix the pipe.
She wondered where Raggedy Andy was, although she did not get worried about him until she had asked Mama where he might be.
"The drain pipe is plugged up.
Then they went inside the nursery and sat looking out the window until it was time for the folks to get up and the house to be astir.
Now Henny and Uncle Clem thought that Raggedy Andy meant for them to let go of his feet and this they did.
Inside his waist were the two little penny dolls.
"I hope their heads were not broken!" Raggedy Ann said.
It was a rather tight fit, but Raggedy Andy wiggled and twisted until all the dolls could see of him were his two feet.
"They must have scooted right into the hole," Henny, the Dutch doll said.
"I'm so sorry I scooted them!" Raggedy Andy cried, as he brushed his hand over his shoe button eyes.
This was a signal for all the dolls to sit up and smooth out the wrinkles in their clothes.
Raggedy Andy tried to wiggle backward up the pipe, but his clothes caught upon a little piece of tin which stuck out from the inside of the pipe and there he stayed.
Then they went back to the position each had been in, when Marcella had left them.
"But they are putting new shingles or something on the roof!"
He felt very happy within and he liked to smile, anyway, because his smile was painted on.
He could neither go down nor come back up.
"I guess your little girl must have dropped this rag doll down into the drain pipe!" the man said to Mama.
All the other dolls climbed upon the window sill beside him.
See her go!" Raggedy Andy cried.
"Are you down there, penny dolls?" he called.
"Let me down farther and I think I'll be able to reach them!"
The dolls were all very sad.
All day Sunday it rained and all of Sunday night, and Monday morning when Daddy started to work it was still raining.
And another reason Raggedy Andy smiled was because he was not lonesome.
Then Raggedy Andy climbed into the gutter himself and, taking a few steps, spread out his feet and went scooting down the shiny tin.
Raggedy Andy lay flat upon the shiny tin and looked down into the hole.
The man had punched Raggedy Andy farther down into the pipe, and he had been able to reach the two little dolls and tuck them into a safe place.
When Raggedy Andy came to the place where he expected to find the penny dolls lying, they were nowhere about.
"Tomorrow night if we have a chance, we dolls must take a stick and see if we can reach Raggedy Andy from the bottom of the pipe and pull him down to us!" she thought.
Daddy came right back into the house and called up the men who had put in the new shiny tin gutters.
And although they were very quiet, each one was so sorry to lose Raggedy Andy, and each felt that he would never be found again.
"I'm so glad you found him!" Mama said to the man.
"Here's a grand place to have a lovely slide!" he said as he gave one of the penny dolls a scoot down the shiny tin gutter.
"We will send a man right up to fix it!" the men said.
THE NEW TIN GUTTER
All day Saturday the men had worked out upon the eaves of the house and the dolls facing the window could see them.
"Perhaps I did!" Raggedy Andy said, "We will look around the bend in the eave!"
He was lying with his head beneath a little bed quilt, just as Marcella had dropped him when she left the nursery; so he could not see what was going on.
The men made quite a lot of noise with their hammers, for they were putting new gutters around the eaves, and pounding upon tin makes a great deal of noise.
"Perhaps you scooted them farther than you thought!" Uncle Clem said.
The man laughed and carried little water-soaked Raggedy Andy into the house.
And as he sat there he smiled and smiled, even though there was no one to see him.
"I can't find them!" he said in muffled tones.
"I cannot remember where I left him!" Marcella said.
"What are they doing now?" Raggedy Andy asked.
After the men had left their work and gone home to supper and the house was quiet, Raggedy Andy cautiously moved his head out from under the little bed quilt and, seeing that the coast was clear, sat up.
But although he punched a long pole down the pipe, and punched and punched, he could not dislodge whatever it was which plugged the pipe and kept the water from running through it.
"He must be just where you left him!" Mama said.
Some of you must have left shavings or something in the eaves, and it has washed down into the pipe, so that the water pours over the gutter in sheets!"
"We can only see the men's legs as they pass the window," answered Uncle Clem.
"Oh dear!" he exclaimed when he had peeped around the corner of the roof, "the gutter ends here and there is nothing but a hole!"
Marcella came up to the nursery and played all day, watching the rain patter upon the new tin gutter.
As Daddy walked out of the front gate, he turned to wave good-bye to Mama and Marcella and then he saw something.
Then Raggedy Ann remembered that there was an opening at the bottom of the pipe.
"What shall we do?" Uncle Clem cried, "The folks will never find him down there, for we can not tell them where he is, and they will never guess it!"
The other dolls followed his example and scooted along behind him.
One wholly indifferent to the outcome does not follow or think about what is happening at all.
Where there is reflection there is suspense.
A wagon is not perceived when all its parts are summed up; it is the characteristic connection of the parts which makes it a wagon.
It is the extent and accuracy of steps three and four which mark off a distinctive reflective experience from one on the trial and error plane.
For either we know already what we are after, or else we do not know.
The nature of experience can be understood only by noting that it includes an active and a passive element peculiarly combined.
But in the degree in which he is actively thinking, and not merely passively following the course of events, his tentative inferences will take effect in a method of procedure appropriate to his situation.
Reflection is the acceptance of such responsibility.
To fill our heads, like a scrapbook, with this and that item as a finished and done-for thing, is not to think.
It is seeking, a quest, for something that is not at hand.
But he cannot give a thoughtful account of the war save as he preserves the time sequence; the meaning of each occurrence, as he deals with it, lies in what was future for it, though not for the historian.
When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance.
The deliberate cultivation of this phase of thought constitutes thinking as a distinctive experience.
Systematic advance in invention and discovery began when men recognized that they could utilize doubt for purposes of inquiry by forming conjectures to guide action in tentative explorations, whose development would confirm, refute, or modify the guiding conjecture.
We see that a certain way of acting and a certain consequence are connected, but we do not see how they are.
Hence the deluge of half-observations, of verbal ideas, and unassimilated "knowledge" which afflicts the world.
A separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience.
The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance.
The occurrence is now understood; it is explained; it is reasonable, as we say, that the thing should happen as it does.
Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance.
But he acts upon it. He develops a plan of procedure, a method of dealing with the situation. The consequences which directly follow from his acting this way rather than that test and reveal the worth of his reflections.
The lips and vocal organs, and the hands, have to be used to reproduce in speech and writing what has been stowed away.
As this is written, the world is filled with the clang of contending armies.
He then infers certain prospective movements, thus assigning meaning to the bare facts of the given situation.
For an active participant in the war, it is clear that the momentous thing is the issue, the future consequences, of this and that happening.
Reflection in Experience.
Then judgment or thought is called upon to combine the separated items of "knowledge" so that their resemblance or causal connection shall be brought out.
It is alleged that the mind perceives things apart from relations; that it forms ideas of them in isolation from their connections--with what goes before and comes after.
It would be impossible to state adequately the evil results which have flowed from this dualism of mind and body, much less to exaggerate them. Some of the more striking effects, may, however, be enumerated.
But it is also true that as long as men kept a sharp disjunction between knowledge and ignorance, science made only slow and accidental advance.
No experience having a meaning is possible without some element of thought.
For the pupil has a body, and brings it to school along with his mind.
We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what is coming--no added control.
Thought or reflection, as we have already seen virtually if not explicitly, is the discernment of the relation between what we try to do and what happens in consequence.
We do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return: such is the peculiar combination.
Physically active children become restless and unruly; the more quiescent, so-called conscientious ones spend what energy they have in the negative task of keeping their instincts and active tendencies suppressed, instead of in a positive one of constructive planning and execution; they are thus educated not into responsibility for the significant and graceful use of bodily powers, but into an enforced duty not to give them free play.
The dilemma makes no provision for coming to know, for learning; it assumes either complete knowledge or complete ignorance. Nevertheless the twilight zone of inquiry, of thinking, exists.
We try these ways, and either push our way out, in which case we know we have found what we were looking for, or the situation gets darker and more confused--in which case, we know we are still ignorant.
But if they originally learned the sensory-motor technique of reading--the ability to identify forms and to reproduce the sounds they stand for--by methods which did not call for attention to meaning, a mechanical habit was established which makes it difficult to read subsequently with intelligence.
The latter are thought to come after the former in order to compare them.
In the degree in which he is intellectually concerned, or thoughtful, he will be actively on the lookout; he will take steps which although they do not affect the campaign, modify in some degree his subsequent actions.
A commanding general cannot base his actions upon either absolute certainty or absolute ignorance. He has a certain amount of information at hand which is, we will assume, reasonably trustworthy.
But will this account apply in the case of the one in a neutral country who is thoughtfully following as best he can the progress of events?
It is the condition of our having aims.
They make thinking itself into an experience.
Only gradually and with a widening of the area of vision through a growth of social sympathies does thinking develop to include what lies beyond our direct interests: a fact of great significance for education.
There is no difference of opinion as to the theory of the matter.
His senses are avenues of knowledge not because external facts are somehow "conveyed" to the brain, but because they are used in doing something with a purpose.
It is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating.
To consider the bearing of the occurrence upon what may be, but is not yet, is to think.
It is not experience when a child merely sticks his finger into a flame; it is experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence. Henceforth the sticking of the finger into flame means a burn.
In form, yes, though not of course in content.
Our discernment is very gross.
Taken by itself, the Greek argument is a nice piece of formal logic.
The projection of consequences means a proposed or tentative solution.
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students.
He is identified, for the time at least, with the issue; his fate hangs upon the course things are taking.
It is customary for teachers to urge children to read with expression, so as to bring out the meaning.
We do not see the details of the connection; the links are missing.
It is to turn ourselves into a piece of registering apparatus.
It is altogether too common to separate perceptions and even ideas from judgments.
For he takes one thing as evidence of something else, and so recognizes a relationship.
The very word pupil has almost come to mean one who is engaged not in having fruitful experiences but in absorbing knowledge directly.
And since it can never take into account all the connections, it can never cover with perfect accuracy all the consequences.
Nor will the reflective experience be different in kind if we substitute distance in time for separation in space.
It makes connecting links explicit in the form of relationships.
Knowledge, already attained knowledge, controls thinking and makes it fruitful.
The chief source of the "problem of discipline" in schools is that the teacher has often to spend the larger part of the time in suppressing the bodily activities which take the mind away from its material.
It remains suspended.
The general who allows his hopes and desires to affect his observations and interpretations of the existing situation will surely make a mistake in calculation.
To say that thinking occurs with reference to situations which are still going on, and incomplete, is to say that thinking occurs when things are uncertain or doubtful or problematic.
Thinking is thus equivalent to an explicit rendering of the intelligent element in our experience.
So far as this happens, everything is writ in water.
To keep the eyes on the book and the ears open to the teacher's words is a mysterious source of intellectual grace. Moreover, reading, writing, and figuring--important school arts--demand muscular or motor training.
It is assumed that "mind" can grasp them if it will only give attention, and that this attention may be given at will irrespective of the situation.
If we cannot take sides in overt action, and throw in our little weight to help determine the final balance, we take sides emotionally and imaginatively.
Imagine the war done with, and a future historian giving an account of it.
For neutrals, it is indirect and dependent upon imagination.
Summary.
In determining the place of thinking in experience we first noted that experience involves a connection of doing or trying with something which is undergone in consequence.
So much for the general features of a reflective experience.
Being burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action.
We simply do something, and when it fails, we do something else, and keep on trying till we hit upon something which works, and then we adopt that method as a rule of thumb measure in subsequent procedure.
And these connections are not those of mere physical juxtaposition; they involve connection with the animals that draw it, the things that are carried on it, and so on.
Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue, in fact.
To perfect this hypothesis, existing conditions have to be carefully scrutinized and the implications of the hypothesis developed--an operation called reasoning.
It may be seriously asserted that a chief cause for the remarkable achievements of Greek education was that it was never misled by false notions into an attempted separation of mind and body.
For the general in the war, or a common soldier, or a citizen of one of the contending nations, the stimulus to thinking is direct and urgent.
The object of thinking is to help reach a conclusion, to project a possible termination on the basis of what is already given.
But (2) the measure of the value of an experience lies in the perception of relationships or continuities to which it leads up.
Thinking includes all of these steps,--the sense of a problem, the observation of conditions, the formation and rational elaboration of a suggested conclusion, and the active experimental testing.
In schools, those under instruction are too customarily looked upon as acquiring knowledge as theoretical spectators, minds which appropriate knowledge by direct energy of intellect.
Since the situation in which thinking occurs is a doubtful one, thinking is a process of inquiry, of looking into things, of investigating.
The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on, something which just as it stands is incomplete or unfulfilled.
Get de Berulle to persuade him.
"This humble priest," he predicted one day to a friend, "will render great service to the Church and will work much for God's glory."
The man was conscious, and Vincent--moved, no doubt, by the direct inspiration of God--urged him to make a General Confession.
Can you do nothing to help them?"
While he spoke, Madame de Gondi prayed, and the result far surpassed their expectations.
St. Francis de Sales, who made Vincent's acquaintance while he was with de Berulle, was of the same opinion.
Fearful of being caught in the snare of worldly honors, he resolved to seek safety in flight.
At last Vincent's desire seemed about to be fulfilled.
The de Gondi children, unfortunately, did not take after their parents, and the two boys whose education Vincent was to undertake and whose character he was to form were described by their aunt as "regular little demons." The youngest of the family, the famous, or rather infamous, Cardinal de Retz, was not yet born, but Vincent's hands were sufficiently full without him.
Here, amidst his beloved poor, Vincent was completely happy.
They were in desperation.
"Ah, Monsieur Vincent," cried the great lady, "how many souls are being lost!
He shall live exactly as he likes if he will only come back.
The result of all this for the preacher, however, was a certain prestige, and his humility took alarm.
At Vincent's suggestion she soon afterwards undertook certain works of charity, which were destined to be the seed of a great enterprise.
It was a terrible thought.
Only when he had been already established for some time in his new parish did it dawn on the de Gondis that his absence was not to be merely temporary.
"I should like my children to be saints rather than great noblemen," said Madame de Gondi when she presented the boys to their tutor, but the prospect seemed remote enough.
A friend of de Berulle's, cure of the country parish of Clichy, near Paris, announced his intention of entering the Oratory, and at de Berulle's request chose Vincent de Paul as his successor.
VINCENT remained two years in the house of Father de Berulle, in the hope of obtaining permanent work.
His work as a tutor had been a failure, he told him; he could do nothing with his pupils, and he was receiving honor which he in no way deserved. He ended by begging to be allowed to work for the poor in some humble and lonely place, and de Berulle decided to grant his wish.
Nothing less than the resignation of his beloved Clichy was now asked of him by this friend to whom he owed so much.
With the servants, and there were many of every grade, he was always cordial and polite, losing no chance of winning their confidence, that he might influence them for good.
Her words found an echo in Vincent's heart.
Although the prospect of such a post filled the humble parish priest with consternation, he owed too much to de Berulle to refuse.
How many others might be in like case!
It happened one day that Vincent was sent to the bedside of a dying peasant who had always borne a good character and was considered an excellent Christian.
The incident made a lasting impression on both Vincent and the Countess.
De Berulle decided at once that Vincent de Paul was the man for the position and that, as he was evidently destined to do great work for God, it would be to his advantage to have powerful and influential friends.
The "little demons" were as headstrong and violent as ever; it was only on their parents that he had been able to make any impression.
Knowing enough of his humility to be certain that he would refuse such a request, she applied to Father de Berulle to use his influence in the matter, and thus obtained her desire.
The other villages on the estate were visited in turn, with equal success. Vincent used to look back in later life to this first mission sermon as the beginning of his work for souls.
Next Sunday he preached a sermon in the parish church on the necessity of General Confession. It was the first of the famous mission sermons destined to do so much good in France.
But the influence of sanctity is strong, and the Count was noble; for him it was the beginning of a better life.
So great were the crowds that flocked to Confession that Vincent was unable to cope with them and had to apply to the Jesuits at Amiens for help.
Setting out from Clichy with his worldly goods on a hand-barrow, he arrived at the Oratory, from whence he was to proceed to his new abode.
"He will be the holiest priest of his time," he said one day as he watched him.
The Count, too, began to feel the effects of Vincent's presence in his household.
"Monsieur," he said, "I know that you intend to fight a duel; and I tell you, as a message from my Saviour, before whom you kneel, that if you do not renounce this intention His judgment will fall on you and yours." The Count, after a moment's silence, promised to give up his project, and faithfully kept his word.
Vincent waited till everyone had gone out, and then approached him softly.
Chapter 3 A GREAT HOUSEHOLD
The country parish of Chatillon was in need of workers, was the answer; let him go there and exercise his zeal for souls.
De Gondi was present at Mass in the morning and remained on afterwards in the chapel, praying, probably, that he might prevail over his enemy.
Vincent, without the slightest allusion to this treatment, quietly escorted him downstairs and saw him into his carriage.
But the summoning of the Council rested with Mazarin, and the intervals between its meetings became longer and longer.
Nearly all the priests of Paris had passed through his hands at the ordination retreats and those who belonged to the "Tuesday Conferences" were intimately known to him.
What was to be done?
"God forbid!" he would cry indignantly.
To resist would only provoke; submission seemed the wisest, if not the only course.
"A nice clodhopper you are!" he said amiably to his own reflection, and passed on, smiling.
He was shown into the lady's presence and carried out his mission with the greatest possible tact, but the Duchess could not control her fury.
Well did Vincent know that he was no match for such a diplomatist; but having once realized that the duty must be undertaken, he determined that there should be no flinching.
In France the Crown was almost supreme in such matters; the Queen therefore determined to appoint a "Council of Conscience" consisting of five members, whose business it would be to help her with advice as to ecclesiastical preferment.
"Come on," said Vincent; "our business lies in another direction." "Is it not strange," he said, smiling, a few moments later, as he tried to staunch the blood with his handkerchief, "to what lengths the affection of a mother for her son will go!"
Some would come with a recommendation from the Queen herself, which made things doubly embarrassing; but in spite of everything Vincent remained faithful to his first determination to choose for bishoprics no priests save those worthy of the position by reason of their virtue and learning.
As time went on he resolved at any cost to rid the Court of the presence of this man, whose simple, straightforward conduct baffled the wily and defeated their plans; but an attempt to get him ejected from the Council met with such stormy opposition that the Prime Minister determined to change his tactics.
Vincent's reception of these proposals was disconcerting.
The form is not drawn up at all!"
She was a good-natured woman, quite ready to do right when it was not too inconvenient, and it was clear to her that of late years bishoprics and abbeys had been too often given to most unworthy persons.
Certain reforms on which Vincent insisted were not to his mind either, although he offered no opposition.
Chapter 8 AT COURT
Some remarks made by the King during his illness and certain other words of Vincent's were remembered by the Queen, Anne of Austria, who had been left Regent during the minority of her son.
Another day a gentleman who had come to recommend his son for a bishopric was so angry when Vincent explained that he did not see his way to grant his request that he answered the "impertinent peasant" with a blow.
In the meantime it began to dawn upon the public that the Superior of St. Lazare was for the moment a man of influence.
He went to Court in the old cassock in which he went about his daily work, and which was probably the only one he had.
"You are an old lunatic," said a young man who had been refused a benefice through Vincent's agency.
"You are quite right," was the only answer, accompanied by a good-natured smile.
Anne of Austria's sudden spurt of energy--she was a thoroughly indolent woman by nature--began to die out as she became accustomed to her new responsibilities; she was only too glad to leave all matters of State to a man who declared that his only desire was to save her worry and trouble.
Catching her royal mistress in an unguarded moment, this lady succeeded in inducing the Queen to promise the bishopric of Poitiers to her son, a young man of very bad character.
"Suppose you go and make my peace with her," she said pleasantly, despatching the unfortunate Vincent on this very disagreeable errand.
Who could be better fitted to select those who were suitable for preferment?
Vincent, aghast, begged her to sit down and talk the matter over, but Madame declined curtly.
"Why not?" replied Vincent quietly; "it is neither stained nor torn."
Here, where the conditions were perhaps even worse than in Paris, Vincent met them in the same spirit and conquered by the same means. The fact that he had once been a slave himself gave him an insight into the sufferings of the galley slaves and a wonderful influence over them.
But the new rector had his own ideas on the subject, and the ill-assorted pair soon became very good friends.
This enabled Vincent to carry his mission farther afield, and he determined to visit all the convict prisons in the seaport towns, taking Marseilles as his first station.
Vincent's representations of what a priest's life ought to be astonished them at first and convinced them later--all the more so in that they saw in him the very ideal that he strove to set before them.
They were ignorant and easygoing men, for the most part, who thought a good deal more of their own amusement than of the needs of their flock, but they were not bad at heart.
Delighted to have him back at any price, Vincent's noble patrons asked for nothing better than to further all his schemes for the welfare of the poor and infirm.
And he kept his word.
Confraternities of charity like that of Chatillon were established on all the de Gondi estates, Madame de Gondi herself setting the example of what a perfect Lady of Charity should be. Neither dirt, discourtesy nor risk of infection could discourage this earnest disciple of Vincent.
Then she saw that his faculties were now fully restored, and came a step forward.
Was that a sob?
But before she could begin her story, he added this searching question:
Why should interruption come then?
"You were not--quite--quite yourself," she softly explained, wondering at her own composure.
Bela!
Miss Weeks sighed and betrayed fluster.
"She stood there! the woman stood there and I saw her!
With one accord, and without stopping to pick their way, they made for the open doorway, knocking the smaller pieces of furniture about and creating havoc generally.
Bela sees to that."
Dead!
Where is she now?"
We did not like the looks of her, and so followed her in to prevent mischief."
"She was here, then?--a woman with a little child?
They are never open.
Evidently this intrusive little body did not know Bela or his story, or--
He seemed to be trying to adjust himself to some mental experience he could neither share with others nor explain to himself.
Then quickly, as she saw his thoughts revert to the dead friend at his feet, "Bela was not hurt here. He was down town when it happened; but he managed to struggle home and gain this place, which he tried to hold against the men who followed him.
Stopping short, he gazed down from his great height upon the trembling little body of whose identity he had but a vague idea, and thundered out in great indignation:
"AND WHERE WAS I WHEN ALL THIS HAPPENED?"
"I must have had an attack of some kind," he calmly remarked.
Was it he who unlocked my gates?"
A pebble had done it all,--a pebble placed in the gateway by Bela's hands.
No single arm could have knocked down Bela.
"How dared you!
He thought you were dead, you sat there so rigid and so white, and, before he quite gave up, he asked us all to promise not to let any one enter this room till your son Oliver came."
But on both occasions he was unsuccessful.
She was one of the world's unknown martyrs, and her fate merits tears rather than laughter.
Ghosts and vampires and crawling spectres live in it--that they do."
On the third evening he was more fortunate, for having worked at his law books until late at night, he went out for a brisk walk before retiring to rest.
On the morning after his meeting with Berwin, the young barrister sat at breakfast, with Miss Greeb in anxious attendance.
Miss Greeb attended to his needs herself, and brought up his breakfast with her own fair hands, happy for the day if her admired lodger conversed with her for a few moments before reading the morning paper.
"In what way is he a mystery?" demanded Denzil, approaching the matter with more particularity.
"Why not?
His first word made Miss Greeb flutter back to the table like a dove to its nest.
"Just because I don't," replied the landlady, with feminine logic.
He's full of secrets and underhand goings on.
"Perhaps not, Mr. Denzil; but where do those he sees come from?"
Even as he looked, two shadows darkened the white surface--the shadows of a man and a woman.
"There's a yard and a fence, but no entrance.
CHAPTER II
Again Miss Greeb shook her head.
Nevertheless, she continued to keep boarders, and to make attempts to captivate the hearts of such bachelors as she judged weak in character.
On two occasions I've asked the day policeman, and he says no one passed."
"I thought of that myself, and as my duty to the square I have inquired--that I have.
The two figures seemed to be arguing, for their heads nodded violently and their arms waved constantly.
"It ain't for me to say what I think.
"Such as--"
But this was the worst and most frivolous side of her character, for she was really a good-hearted, cheery little woman, with a brisk manner, and a flow of talk unequalled in Geneva Square.
This question also puzzled the landlady, as she had no reasonable grounds for her wild statements.
"Well! well!
There ain't a thing I don't know about that house.
He was her god, her ideal of manhood, and to him she offered worship, and burnt incense after the manner of her kind.
"This much, Mr. Denzil, that Blinders has gone round the square, after seeing Mr. Berwin, and has seen shadows--two or three of them--on the sitting-room blind.
"No; nor nothing half so respectable.
In the distance she looked a girlish twenty; close at hand various artifices aided her to pass for thirty; and it was only in the solitude of her own room that her real age was apparent.
On coming to the house of Berwin, the barrister saw that the sitting-room was lighted up and the curtains undrawn, so that the window presented a square of illuminated blind.
Almost before the sound died away the light in the room was extinguished, and he could see nothing more.
I am the last person in the world to meddle with what don't concern me--that I am." And thus ending the conversation, Miss Greeb vanished, with significant look and pursed-up lips.
Again and again he rang, but without attracting attention; so Lucian finally left the house and went in search of Blinders, the policeman, to narrate his experience.
For the next week Lucian resolutely banished the subject from his thoughts, and declined to discuss the matter further with Miss Greeb. That little woman, all on fire with curiosity, made various inquiries of her gossips regarding the doings of Mr. Berwin, and in default of reporting the same to her lodger, occupied herself in discussing them with her neighbours.
"Of course I do, Mr. Denzil.
"I know the back of No. 13 as well as I know my own face," she declared.
Thinking that something was wrong, he rushed up the steps and rang the bell violently.
SHADOWS ON THE BLIND
"Oh, I don't know," cried Miss Greeb, tossing her head and gliding towards the door.
"He has no right to behave so, in a respectable square," replied Miss Greeb, shaking her head.
At present, Miss Julia Greeb was an unwedded damsel of forty summers, who, with the aid of art, was making desperate but ineffectual efforts to detain the youth which was slipping from her.
The struggling figures reeled out of the radiance and Lucian heard a faint cry.
"Perhaps by the back," conjectured Lucian.
What of that?" said Denzil impatiently.
She pinched her waist, dyed her hair, powdered her face, and affected juvenile dress of the white frock and blue sash kind.
But such dismissal of unworthy curiosity was more difficult to effect than he expected.
Then he has his meals sent in from the Nelson Hotel round the corner, and eats them all alone.
"There's only two rooms of that large house furnished, and all the rest is given up to dust and ghosts.
Miss Greeb still shook her head.
Curious to see the end of this shadow pantomime, Lucian stood still and looked intently at the window.
Poor brainless, silly, pitiful Miss Greeb; she would have made a good wife and a fond mother, but by some irony of fate she was destined to be neither; and the comedy of her husband-hunting youth was now changing into the lonely tragedy of disappointed spinsterhood.
They retreated out of the sphere of light, and again came into it, still continuing their furious gestures. Unexpectedly the male shadow seized the female by the throat and swung her like a feather to and fro.
Nevertheless, he held that he had no right to pry into the secrets of the stranger, and honourably strove to dismiss the tenant of No. 13 and his tantalising environments from his mind.
Do you want one of them to stay inside?
Has not my long life of solitude within these walls sufficiently proved this?
Unexpectedly to himself, the judge's intentions were in the direction of his own wishes.
"Judge, I will be one of the men.
"Because of something I have lately heard in its connection.
President's Office, September 30, 1895.
This, this, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
The picture painted was a rather black one--or, since I am black, shall I say "white"?
A line by telegraph will be welcomed.
I do not think so.
Yours very truly,
October 6, 1895.
The following is the address which I delivered:--
He is too great for that.
Yours very truly,
If he is right, time will show it.
D.C. Gilman
Let me illustrate my meaning.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore,
Certainly, he said, what you say is true.
But will you let me assume, without reciting them, that these things are true?
Yes, he said; and they are fair and lasting.
"I cannot exist without a cat!" she wept.
"I dare say it is all nonsense," said Mrs. Sefton slowly, "but if you had lived a whole year in the same house with Miriam Gordon, you would have been tainted too.
Miriam seemed like a new creature then, and rapidly recovered her spirits.
"I soon realized that Miriam was in some mysterious fashion different from other people.
You may be mistaken.'
I think everyone who met her felt the same way.
As for what Dick called her 'little queernesses'--well, we got used to them in time.
Her father had died when she was a child. When Miriam was twenty her mother had married a second time and went to Europe with her husband.
When a person has once seen a spirit--or thinks he has--he thenceforth believes it.
When she and I were left alone, she turned to me.
At least, people who you know wouldn't lie say so.
I had known that before, though I think I hardly expected to see such wonderful loveliness.
One night we went to the opera to hear a celebrated prima donna.
"'No, I did not say that.
It makes people think there is something queer about you.
"I was quite alarmed about Miriam in the days that followed.
"'Well, spirits then--to return after death, or to appear to anyone apart from the flesh?'
You must tell me the story."
He was dead--he had died at the very hour at which Miriam had seen him."
Anyhow, she had to content herself with the means of communication used by ordinary mortals.
I hear from him every day--every hour.
"'How do you know?' I cried.
Miriam's Lover
"What utter nonsense!" I said.
"'Sidney is ill--dangerously ill.
"We have no proof that they do not, my dear."
He writes when it is absolutely necessary.'
"Well, two days afterwards she got a note from her lover--the first I had ever known her to receive--in which he said he had been thrown from his horse and had broken his left arm.
Suppose two people, both sensitively organized individuals, loved each other with a love stronger than life.
I shall not get it at all now.'
Not that she had 'theories'--at least, she never aired them if she had.
She seemed as one dead.
"'I wish you hadn't spoken to me just then,' she said.
Besides, in this particular instance the story isn't very exciting.
Her face was oval, with very large and dark eyes.
Talk about spirits!
"I'm not an authority on telepathy, or whatever you call it.
But you know queer things do happen at times--things you can't account for.
"'Sidney,' said Miriam simply.
I'm sure you must think so too in your rational moments."
Her arrival was unexpected, and I was absent from home when she came.
"'Don't look like that, Miriam!' I said, with a little shiver.
Then, as she looked at me strangely, I added hastily, 'You haven't been receiving any more unearthly messages, have you?
She grieved and fretted continually.
She was very pale.
"Suddenly she sat straight up with a sort of convulsive shudder, and at the same time--you may laugh if you like--the most horrible feeling came over me.
I looked up, and he was standing between me and you.
"You're getting into too deep waters for me, Mary," I said, shaking my head.
After Dick went out, I asked her if anything were wrong.
Yet it was a feeling hard to define.
Then I made some teasing remark about her love-letters--just for a joke, you know. Miriam looked at me with an odd little smile and said quickly:
I looked up and saw that Miriam's work had dropped on her knee and she was leaning forward, her lips apart, her eyes gazing upward with an unearthly expression.
It requires people of a certain organization--with a spiritual eye, as it were.
"'I thought you were all merely talking against time,' she retorted evasively.
Miriam came to live with us while they were away.
I knew she loved him very deeply.
"The doctor talked of some fearful shock, but I kept my own counsel. At dawn Miriam came back to life at last.
Then she lifted it again and looked at me with a sudden contraction of her level brows that betokened vexation.
But there was simply something about the girl herself that gave a person strange impressions.
And I don't think that everybody can see spirits either, provided they are to be seen.
"Surely, Mary," I exclaimed, "you don't mean to say that you believe people ever do or can see spirits--ghosts, as the word goes?"
"'Sidney is dead,' she said quietly.
"I screamed for Dick, rang the bell and rushed to her.
Two hours later she had a telegram from her lover's college chum, saying that Mr. Claxton was dangerously ill with typhoid fever.
Try me; I may be convinced."
"That is.
Of course, they may be mistaken.
"But Miriam only gave another queer smile and made no answer at all. Whatever her beliefs or theories were, she would never discuss them.
"What do you think of it?" she queried as we rose.
She would sit there, perhaps in the centre of a gay crowd, and gaze right out into space, not hearing or seeing a single thing that went on around her.
"'Aerial communication isn't perfected yet then?' I said mischievously.
The landlord of the Rough and Ready, who had come uncalled to the council, after forcing his way through the crowd, proclaimed himself willing to communicate some facts worth their hearing--in short, the very facts they were endeavouring to find out: when Henry Poindexter had been last seen, and what the direction he had taken.
It was decided that the searchers should proceed in a body.
His father and cousin were first appealed to.
The argument was deemed conclusive.
The answer of Calhoun was less direct, and, perhaps, less satisfactory. He had conversed with his cousin at a later hour, and had bidden him good night, under the impression that he was retiring to his room.
Calhoun, upon his own horse, followed close after.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT.
The blood drops pretty clearly, proclaimed the first.
On one of these the village Boniface supposed him to have gone.
According to them the blood was scarce "ten hours old:" in other words, must have been shed about ten hours before.
In what direction?
The party must be kept together, or run the risk of being attacked, and perhaps cut off, in detail!
He who had shed them must have been shot, or speared, while sitting in his saddle.
It was simply a question of how, when, and where.
This still remained the subject of discussion.
If the missing man had gone off with Maurice the mustanger, or after him, he should be looked for on the road the latter himself would be likely to have taken.
Oberdoffer's testimony, delivered in a semi-Teutonic tongue, was to the effect: that Maurice the mustanger--who had been staying at his hotel ever since his fight with Captain Calhoun--had that night ridden out at a late hour, as he had done for several nights before.
The last was of special importance.
What had all this to do with the question before the council?
Whatever was the reason, the truth was shunned; and an answer given, the sincerity of which was suspected by more than one who listened to it.
After that, where should the assassins be sought for?
Henry Poindexter--the noble generous youth who had not an enemy in all Texas!
Who but Indians could have spilled such innocent blood?
THE AVENGERS.
The tiny microscopic animals that secrete this polypary live by the billions in the depths of their cells. Their limestone deposits build up into rocks, reefs, islets, islands. In some places, they form atolls, a circular ring surrounding a lagoon or small inner lake that gaps place in contact with the sea.
Its tree grew tall, catching steam off the water. A brook was born.
Pretty perplexed, Dumont d'Urville didn't know if he should give credence to these reports, which had been carried in some of the less reliable newspapers; nevertheless, he decided to start on Dillon's trail.
"The earth doesn't need new continents, but new men!"
CHAPTER 19
What's more, the formation of coal-- in other words, the petrification of forests swallowed by floods-- and the cooling of basaltic rocks likewise call for a much longer period of time.
These polyps grow exclusively in the agitated strata at the surface of the sea, and so it's in the upper reaches that they begin these substructures, which sink little by little together with the secreted rubble binding them.
The Nautilus had cleared 8,100 miles.
"And could you kindly tell me what everybody knows?" he asked me in a gently ironic tone.
I related to him what the final deeds of Captain Dumont d'Urville had brought to light, deeds described here in this heavily condensed summary of the whole matter.
Followed by Captain Nemo, I climbed onto the platform, and from there my eyes eagerly scanned the horizon.
But just then the renowned French explorer Captain Dumont d'Urville, unaware of Dillon's activities, had already set sail to search elsewhere for the site of the shipwreck.
This bay, repeatedly dredged, furnished a huge supply of excellent oysters.
They boarded two sloops of war, the Compass and the Astrolabe, which were never seen again.
THIS DREADFUL SIGHT was the first of a whole series of maritime catastrophes that the Nautilus would encounter on its run. When it plied more heavily traveled seas, we often saw wrecked hulls rotting in midwater, and farther down, cannons, shells, anchors, chains, and a thousand other iron objects rusting away.
In 1791, justly concerned about the fate of these two sloops of war, the French government fitted out two large cargo boats, the Search and the Hope, which left Brest on September 28 under orders from Rear Admiral Bruni d'Entrecasteaux.
In this way animal life developed, and drawn by the greenery and fertile soil, man appeared. And that's how these islands were formed, the immense achievement of microscopic animals.
The day I expounded this theory to Captain Nemo, he answered me coldly:
I hadn't seen Captain Nemo for over a week, when, on the morning of the 27th, he entered the main lounge, as usual acting as if he'd been gone for just five minutes.
"And how do you know all this?" I exclaimed.
Vanikoro
As the Roman playwright Seneca recommended, we opened them right at our table, then stuffed ourselves. These mollusks belonged to the species known by name as Ostrea lamellosa, whose members are quite common off Corsica.
After touching the Tropic of Capricorn at longitude 135 degrees, it headed west-northwest, going back up the whole intertropical zone.
"Very easily."
Nobody knew.
"We already have, professor."
"Therefore," he said to me, "to build these walls, it took . . . ?"
It was the name of those islets where vessels under the Count de La Pérouse had miscarried. I straightened suddenly.
Thanks to the work of polyps, a slow but steady upheaval will someday connect these islands to each other. Later on, this new island will be fused to its neighboring island groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia as far as the Marquesas Islands.
It was the Dutch navigator Tasman who discovered this group in 1643, the same year the Italian physicist Torricelli invented the barometer and King Louis XIV ascended the French throne.
That day it was yuletide, and it struck me that Ned Land badly missed celebrating "Christmas," that genuine family holiday where Protestants are such zealots.
"Nobody knows."
Little by little, vegetation spread. Tiny animals--worms, insects--rode ashore on tree trunks snatched from islands to windward.
"Yes, professor," the captain replied.
Just then Captain Nemo asked me what I knew about the shipwreck of the Count de La Pérouse.
Where?
I could observe these strange walls quite closely: our sounding lines indicated that they dropped perpendicularly for more than 300 meters, and our electric beams made the bright limestone positively sparkle.
"What everybody knows, captain," I answered him.
There Dillon collected many relics of the shipwreck: iron utensils, anchors, eyelets from pulleys, swivel guns, an eighteen-pound shell, the remains of some astronomical instruments, a piece of sternrail, and a bronze bell bearing the inscription "Made by Bazin," the foundry mark at Brest Arsenal around 1785. There could no longer be any doubt.
Its shores seemed covered with greenery from its beaches to its summits inland, crowned by Mt. Kapogo, which is 476 fathoms high.
"Here's what I found at the very site of that final shipwreck!"
"So," he said to me, "the castaways built a third ship on Vanikoro Island, and to this day, nobody knows where it went and perished?"
"If you like, professor."
This is the substance of the account I gave Captain Nemo.
The Nautilus sank a few meters beneath the waves, and the panels opened.
Although the summer sun lavished its rays on us, we never suffered from the heat, because thirty or forty meters underwater, the temperature didn't go over 10 degrees to 12 degrees centigrade.
"The Nautilus is bringing us to Vanikoro?" I asked.
The captain approached, placed a finger over a position on the chart, and pronounced just one word:
It was an old hand at the Pacific, the English adventurer Captain Peter Dillon, who was the first to pick up the trail left by castaways from the wrecked vessels.
Dillon returned to Calcutta.
He opened it and I saw a bundle of papers, yellowed but still legible.
And as I stared at this desolate wreckage, Captain Nemo told me in a solemn voice:
Sell that Benningham Common--yes, Waldron's.' At the name his anger broke loose.
'Gimme a cigar,' he called to the boy at the magazine counter; bit off the end, lit it, and began to think business.
Gotta sell Waldron out. Must have made a thousand dollars out of that account first and last. Too bad.' A momentary sense of Waldron's calamity swept over him, but quickly evaporated.
That Brogan crowd's runnin' the company now, and they're no good, sell quick.'
'Maybe they'll think I stole this horse.
The speed sickened him.
He called Cargan & Casey, then waited, fidgeting.
Drawing out his note-book he swiftly figured.
There was no house in sight, no road, nothing but the dead train, the new land of endless shimmering prairies, and, beyond the ditch, a single horseman looking curiously at the long cars and the faces strained against the glass of the windows.
What!!--' The connection failed and left him gasping.
'No, thank you; no, thank you--Well--they cut the dividend.' He looked at Cargan with a wan smile.
'Say, is Hamden near here?' he asked of a slim woman in a gingham dress who appeared at the door.
He saw that he had forgotten to replace the receiver, and putting it to his ear caught Casey's voice again:--
The connection roared and failed.
He could see her tiptoeing at their telephone.
'This is Bloomfield, I think,' he said coldly.
'I didn't mean it that way,' he answered hurriedly.
He saw him looking vaguely out of the car window--saying that he couldn't stand up under it--that it was 'impossible.' He wondered if it was a bluff, after all.
He hung up the instrument.
'The old high-brow tried to bluff me.
Up 15 points on a merger!
'Martha,' he called quickly,--'tell Casey not to sell out Waldron--tell him right away.
'What!
The figure looked at him impassively, then shook its dusty head.
Give me a kiss, dear, and take your old shirt.' She was a graceful woman, stiffened by an obvious corset, and faintly powdered.
Never had he so felt the need of humanity, of human aid.
BUSINESS IS BUSINESS
With punctilious care he unbuttoned his gray cutaway, took out a wallet from under the button of the Society of Colonial Wars, drew forth a sheet of note paper, and with a pencil inscribed a broad O. 'There's my collateral, Mr. Cargan,' he said whimsically.
'I mean, sir, that what you propose is impossible.
The reaction was complete.
He walked his horse onward, not daring to trot, struck the dusty highway, rode on over an imperceptible roll of the plains, and was alone on a vast bare earth, naked as when born from the womb of time.
'You cannot! It's impossible!' he said firmly.
Sold it!
But as he plodded onward the atmosphere of town had its effect.
He felt very small and very mean.
The world again was empty, and this time there was no road.
In each case the collateral deposited had already been insufficient.
The well-trained horse stopped and began to graze; he too was quivering with fatigue, but his fright was over.
Soft-headed donkey!
He did not note how far they ran; but at last came a slower motion, a gallop, and then a trot.
Except for Waldron he could have scooped it all in; but now four hundred was all he dared touch,--and perhaps not that.
'Say, tell him,--' he licked his lips,--'tell him I'm sure glad I saved him.
The train was starting; indeed he had just time to dash up the steps of his car.
Incredulity, horror, resolve, passed over Waldron's face.
The old man blinked rapidly, then conquered his pride.
He bowed and felt his way down the corridor.
The flat earth swung beneath, the sky swam dizzily.
'Gimme it to take for you.
'What'll I do, Cargan?
In the mirror of the soda fountain he saw himself, torn, dirty, shrinking, and the sight filled him with disgust and anger.
'Business is business, Mr. Waldron,' he said curtly.
He brushed furtively at the caked dust on his legs, remembering, irritably, the elegance of Waldron, whom he had saved.
'Eccentrics or hot-box,' said the man who jumped off the step beside him.
It, too, was lost.
Waldron got up stiffly and carefully brushed the cinders from his coat.
'Sell out the old gambler!
Guess I'll go round,' he said aloud.
'Say, you!' Cargan called, 'can you get an auto anywhere here?'
Say--do you want to?'
Flinging himself outward, he rolled over on the soft ground, and lay groaning on the prairie.
'What'll I do with my suit-case?'
'I'm sure glad,' he repeated more vigorously; 'carryin' him to-day was what did it.' A vision of Mrs. Waldron's happy face rose to bless him; the exhilaration of the morning coursed back into his heart, with a comfortable feeling of good business about it.
He was alone with God.
They will then see how the will alone, without the aid of feeling, can produce acts of all the christian virtues.
They should, however, not give way to anxiety, nor exhaust themselves by vain efforts to excite in their hearts a sensibility that God has not given them.
The natural virtues are gratuitous gifts of God.
Yes, this love is so great a good that God wishes to be the sole dispenser of it: He bestows it only in proportion as we ask it of Him, and ordinarily makes us wait for some time before He grants it.
These usually make the mistake of taking for granted the invariable existence of sentiment, and of addressing it exclusively.
Act of Hope.
God has placed them at the disposal of our will as means to an end, and we can make a good or bad use of them just as we can of all God's other gifts.
Faith, hope and charity seem to be extinct in my heart, but I know that Thou never withdrawest these virtues when we do not voluntarily renounce them.
If you have an ardent desire for the sensible love of God, a desire that cannot but be pleasing to Him provided you are at the same time resigned to be deprived of it, remember that according to Saint John Chrysostom it can be obtained only by fidelity to prayer.
No, I am not indifferent, Thou knowest, O my God! that I am not indifferent to this Most Holy Sacrament which I approach unmoved by any sensible feeling: for Thou seest that although I find in Holy Communion neither relish nor consolation, I would yet make any sacrifice in order to receive it.
How many souls do we not see who in consequence grow alarmed about their condition, believing they are devoid of grace notwithstanding their firm will to shun sin and to please God!
There are few prayers better calculated to dispose the soul to receive this great grace than the XVI. and XVII. chapters of the IVth.
ADDITIONS. FINAL ADVICE IN REGARD TO HOLY COMMUNION.
The faculty of willing is the only one we possess as our own, the only one we can use freely and at all times.
Misery and infirmity are claims for admission to Thy Feast, but nothing can dispense from the nuptial garment.
Pious persons can make use of the following prayers with profit when they are habitually or accidentally in the condition described above.
Hence it follows that it is by the will alone that we can in reality acquire merit or commit sin.
Act of Love.
Thus we find Saint Francis de Sales, who possessed in such a high degree sensible love of God and all the natural virtues, making this positive declaration: "The greatest proof we can have in this life that we are in the grace of God, is not sensible love of Him, but the firm resolution never to consent to any sin great or small."
Act of Confidence.
Act of Faith.
Act of Contrition.
We may be deprived of these natural virtues and live by the will alone, spiritually dry and devoid of sentiment, and yet in a state of intimate union with God.
This explanation is intended to reassure such persons as are disposed to feel anxious when they find nothing in their hearts to correspond with the effusions of sensible love with which books of devotion abound in the preparation for Holy Communion.
Act of Desire.
I accept, O my God!--be it a well merited punishment or a salutary trial,--this privation of light and sensible devotion, this coldness and distraction, which accompany me even into Thy presence when all the faculties of my soul should be absorbed and confounded in sentiments of adoration and of love.
Percentage Of Illegitimacy In Protestant And Catholic Countries Of Europe.
The sum of the whole matter is, that semi-Presbyterian and semi-Scotch Ulster is fully three times more immoral than wholly Popish and wholly Irish Connaught--which corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that Scotland, as a whole, is three times more immoral than Ireland as a whole."
It has been gravely asserted that the confession of sin and the doctrine of absolution tend to the spread of crime and immorality.
But we are not disposed to parade these monstrous vices, no matter by whom committed.
Protestant.
We frankly admit and heartily deplore the disorders which Catholics commit, but we deny that they are worse than their Protestant neighbors; and still more emphatically do we deny that the Church is responsible for their disorders.
The estimate which so many Protestants set on the virtue of even the lower classes of Roman Catholics is clearly enough evinced in the preference which they constantly manifest in their employment of Catholics--practical Catholics--Catholics who go to confession.
It is a great mistake to suppose that the most ignorant Catholic believes he can procure the pardon of his sins by simply confessing them without being truly sorry for them.
We do not wish to be understood as advocating the immaculateness of Catholic communities.
We certainly do not wish to excuse or palliate the evil deeds of Catholics, who, with all the blessed aids which their religion affords, ought to be much better than they are.
Taking Ireland according to the registration divisions, the proportion of illegitimate births varies from 6.2 to 1.3.
And the same remark is applicable to Ireland.
Ireland: 19 homicides to the million of inhabitants France: 31 England: 4
Here again we shall meet statistics with counter-statistics to refute unjust declarations.
These figures, which are from authenticated sources, do not bear out our accusers in their assertion that murders are more prevalent in Catholic than in Protestant countries.
On The Relative Morality Of Catholic And Protestant Countries.
But is it true that crimes, especially murder and illegitimacy, are more prevalent in Catholic than in Protestant countries?
I utterly deny the assertion, and also appeal to statistics in support of the denial.
Rev. Mr. Seymour gives the following list of the number of murders in England, France and Ireland:
As all our catechisms teach, and as every Catholic knows, there is no pardon of sin without sorrow of heart and purpose of amendment.
The moral atmosphere of these countries, compared with England, must be as a healthful breeze to a pestilential marsh.
I maintain, therefore, that confession, far from being an incentive to sin, as our adversaries have the hardihood to affirm, is a most powerful check on the depravity of men and a most effectual preventive of their criminal excesses.
Whence do our opponents derive their information?
"The proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births is in Ireland 3.8 per cent.; in England the proportion is 6.4; in Scotland 9.9; in other words, England is nearly twice, and Scotland nearly thrice worse, than Ireland.
It is worthy, too, of notice, that in the tabular statement above presented the percentage of illegitimacy in Holland and Switzerland, where there are large Catholic minorities, is lower than in any other Protestant country.
The division showing this lowest figure is the western, being substantially the Province of Connaught, where about nineteen-twentieths of the population are Celtic and Roman Catholic.
Something worse has to be added, from which no consolation can be derived.
The statistics of this crime are limited, or they are not in very general circulation.
M. Hobart Seymour's "Nights Among Romanists" and similar absolutely unreliable compilations, the false statements of which have been again and again refuted.
The division showing the highest proportion of illegitimacy is the north-eastern, which comprises, or almost consists of, the Province of Ulster, where the population is almost equally divided between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and where the great majority of Protestants are of Scotch blood and of the Presbyterian church.
XV
They willingly take their pens to contribute to the edification and satisfy the lawful curiosity of their brethren.
They bless God when they hear good news, and grieve at bad news, losses by death, and, above all, scandalous losses of vocation.
In other words, be alternately disciple and master.
THEY who are animated by charity support patiently and in silence, in sentiments of humility and sweetness, as if they had neither eyes nor ears, the difficult, odd, and most inconstant humours of others, although they may find it very difficult at times to do so.
Charity possesses this art in a high degree, and, besides, raises a mere worldly art into a virtue and fruit of the Holy Ghost.
It is most necessary for religious, as, not being able to seek comfort abroad, they are obliged to live in the same house, often in the same employment with characters less sympathetic than their own.
By charity we store up in ourselves the gifts of grace enjoyed by every member of the community, in order to dispense them to all by a happy commerce and admirable exchange.
FOURTH CHARACTERISTIC
NINTH CHARACTERISTIC
It is vain to trample the violet, as it never resists, and he who crushes it only becomes aware of the fact by the sweetness of its perfume.
The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent.
Is it not, because he thus returns to his primitive condition?
I must now beg leave to stop one moment to consider the perplexities attending the origin of languages.
How often have they let it go out, before they knew the art of reproducing it?
When a monkey leaves without the least hesitation one nut for another, are we to think he has any general idea of that kind of fruit, and that he compares these two individual bodies with his archetype notion of them?
But exclusive of the uncertain testimonies of history, who does not perceive that everything seems to remove from savage man the temptation and the means of altering his condition?
Beings perfectly abstract are perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable by the assistance of speech.
The first that offers is how languages could become necessary; for as there was no correspondence between men, nor the least necessity for any, there is no conceiving the necessity of this invention, nor the possibility of it, if it was not indispensable.
We must allow that the words, first made use of by men, had in their minds a much more extensive signification, than those employed in languages of some standing, and that, considering how ignorant they were of the division of speech into its constituent parts; they at first gave every word the meaning of an entire proposition.
As yet I have considered man merely in his physical capacity; let us now endeavour to examine him in a metaphysical and moral light.
His soul, which nothing disturbs, gives itself up entirely to the consciousness of its actual existence, without any thought of even the nearest futurity; and his projects, equally confined with his views, scarce extend to the end of the day.
His imagination paints nothing to him; his heart asks nothing from him.
How many different accidents must have concurred to make them acquainted with the most common uses of this element?
They parted with the same ease.
How many ages perhaps revolved, before men beheld any other fire but that of the heavens?
The definition of a triangle can alone give you a just idea of that figure: the moment you form a triangle in your mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and colour to its area.
Endeavour to represent to yourself the image of a tree in general, you never will be able to do it; in spite of all your efforts it will appear big or little, thin or tufted, of a bright or a deep colour; and were you master to see nothing in it, but what can be seen in every tree, such a picture would no longer resemble any tree.
Every general idea is purely intellectual; let the imagination tamper ever so little with it, it immediately becomes a particular idea.
And how often perhaps has not every one of these secrets perished with the discoverer?
Besides, general ideas cannot be conveyed to the mind without the assistance of words, nor can the understanding seize them without the assistance of propositions.
Let moralists say what they will, the human understanding is greatly indebted to the passions, which, on their side, are likewise universally allowed to be greatly indebted to the human understanding. It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves: we covet knowledge merely because we covet enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a man exempt from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason.
I might here barely cite or repeat the researches made, in relation to this question, by the Abbe de Condillac, which all fully confirm my system, and perhaps even suggested to me the first idea of it.
Let us suppose this first difficulty conquered: Let us for a moment consider ourselves at this side of the immense space, which must have separated the pure state of nature from that in which languages became necessary, and let us, after allowing such necessity, examine how languages could begin to be established.
The first language of man, the most universal and most energetic of all languages, in short, the only language he had occasion for, before there was a necessity of persuading assembled multitudes, was the cry of nature.
This is one of the reasons, why mere animals cannot form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility which depends on such an operation.
We must therefore make use of propositions; we must therefore speak to have general ideas; for the moment the imagination stops, the mind must stop too, if not assisted by speech.
In a word, how could this situation engage men to cultivate the earth, as long as it was not parcelled out among them, that is, as long as a state of nature subsisted.
The horse, the cat, the bull, nay the ass itself, have generally a higher stature, and always a more robust constitution, more vigour, more strength and courage in their forests than in our houses; they lose half these advantages by becoming domestic animals; it looks as if all our attention to treat them kindly, and to feed them well, served only to bastardize them.
Man therefore, in a state of nature where there are so few sources of sickness, can have no great occasion for physic, and still less for physicians; neither is the human species more to be pitied in this respect, than any other species of animals.
Nakedness therefore, the want of houses, and of all these unnecessaries, which we consider as so very necessary, are not such mighty evils in respect to these primitive men, and much less still any obstacle to their preservation.
Comparative anatomy has not as yet been sufficiently improved; neither have the observations of natural philosophy been sufficiently ascertained, to establish upon such foundations the basis of a solid system.
It is thus with man himself.
We need only call to mind the good constitution of savages, of those at least whom we have not destroyed by our strong liquors; we need only reflect, that they are strangers to almost every disease, except those occasioned by wounds and old age, to be in a manner convinced that the history of human diseases might be easily composed by pursuing that of civil societies.
Had he a horse, would he with such swiftness shoot along the plain?
Allowing that nature intended we should always enjoy good health, I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.
We may add, that there must be still a wider difference between man and man in a savage and domestic condition, than between beast and beast; for as men and beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences with which men indulge themselves more than they do the beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which make them degenerate more sensibly.
But savage man living among other animals without any society or fixed habitation, and finding himself early under a necessity of measuring his strength with theirs, soon makes a comparison between both, and finding that he surpasses them more in address, than they surpass him in strength, he learns not to be any longer in dread of them.
I could only form vague, and almost imaginary, conjectures on this subject.
The earth left to its own natural fertility and covered with immense woods, that no hatchet ever disfigured, offers at every step food and shelter to every species of animals.
Ask those who make hunting their recreation or business, if in their excursions they meet with many sick or feeble animals.
Hobbes would have it that man is naturally void of fear, and always intent upon attacking and fighting.
Nature behaves towards all animals left to her care with a predilection, that seems to prove how jealous she is of that prerogative.
DISCOURSE FIRST PART
There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped.
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This species of inequality consists in the different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful, and even that of exacting obedience from them.
His most famous work, the "Confessions," was published after his death.
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QUESTION PROPOSED BY THE ACADEMY OF DIJON
I shall therefore maintain with confidence the cause of mankind before the sages, who invite me to stand up in its defence; and I shall think myself happy, if I can but behave in a manner not unworthy of my subject and of my judges.
O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are liars, but in the book of nature which never lies.
'Tis in a manner the life of your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave, but could not destroy.
During Rousseau's later years he was the victim of the delusion of persecution; and although he was protected by a succession of good friends, he came to distrust and quarrel with each in turn.
A DISCOURSE UPON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG MANKIND
A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind
Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of your contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the misfortune of succeeding you.
It is to point out, in the progress of things, that moment, when, right taking place of violence, nature became subject to law; to display that chain of surprising events, in consequence of which the strong submitted to serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the expense of real happiness.
What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse?
This is then the question I am to answer, the question I propose to examine in the present discourse.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
All that I shall repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood, but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own conceits.
What is the Origin of the Inequality among Mankind; and whether such Inequality is authorized by the Law of Nature?
Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the question.
He died at Ermenonville, near Paris, July 2, 1778, the most widely influential French writer of his age.
His education was irregular, and though he tried many professions--including engraving, music, and teaching--he found it difficult to support himself in any of them.
How much you are changed from what you once were!
Religion commands us to believe, that men, having been drawn by God himself out of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure they should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjectures solely from the nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of the beings which surround him, concerning the fate of mankind, had they been left to themselves.
You can see how treacherous these Indians are, and how very far from noble is their method of warfare!
But we could see that the pace was really terrific--that Lieutenant Baldwin was freely using the spur, and that his swift thoroughbred was stretched out like a greyhound, straining every muscle in his effort to keep up.
All this time the other Indians were on their ponies in front, watching every move that was being made around them.
We were glad enough to get in the ambulance and start on our way to the post, but alas! our troubles were not over.
Much depends upon the horse, too, for so many horses are afraid of a buffalo, and lunge sideways just at the critical moment.
Three tired, disheveled women walked from the corral to their homes; and very glad one of them was to get home, too!
But he would not go back one step, assuring me that my horse was a trained hunter and accustomed to such sights.
We are to remain with General and Mrs. Phillips several days, while our own house is being made habitable, and in the meantime our trunks and boxes will come, also the colored cook.
He thinks this way because, having graduated at West Point this year, he is only a second lieutenant just now, and General Phillips is his captain and company commander.
They are full of mischief, and full of wisdom, too, even for government mules, and when one says, "Let's take a sprint," the others always agree--about that there is never the slightest hesitation.
There was nothing for me to say or do--at least not just then--so I went back to the little living-room and forced myself to be halfway pleasant to the four men who were there, each one looking precisely like the cat after it had eaten the canary!
These were their scalp locks.
The bachelors' set of quarters is next to ours, so we all got ready together, and I must say that the deliberate way in which each girth was examined, bridles fixed, rifles fastened to saddles, and other things done, was most exasperating.
They looked, in the moonlight, like huge cakes of clay, where spooks and creepy things might be found.
As soon as Faye got there I put my fingers over my ears so that I would not hear the report of the pistol.
This is a rare treat out here, where we are so far from shops and beautiful Christmas displays. We all went to the bachelors' quarters, almost everyone taking over some little remembrance--homemade candy, cakes, or something of that sort.
It must be a most dreadful place--with old log houses built in the hot sand hills, and surrounded by almost every tribe of hostile Indians.
Even the low roof is of dirt.
There was the same performance this morning, and at breakfast I asked General Phillips why soldiers required such a beating of drums, and deafening racket generally, to awaken them in the morning.
A week or so ago it was decided that a party of enlisted men should be sent out to get buffalo meat for Thanksgiving dinner for everybody--officers and enlisted men--and that Lieutenant Baldwin, who is an experienced hunter, should command the detail.
Well, for two long, tiresome days I worked over that cake, preparing with my own fingers every bit of the fruit, which I consider was a fine test of perseverance and staying qualities.
They could have killed every one of us, and ridden far away before anyone in the sleepy town found it out.
Any attempt to "rise" when on a trot is ridiculed at once here, and it does look absurd after seeing the splendid and graceful riding of the officers.
So, one morning after an early breakfast, the horses were led up from the stables, each one having on a strong halter, and a coiled picket rope with an iron pin fastened to the saddle.
The drumming became less loud, and then ceased altogether, when a big gun was fired that must have wasted any amount of powder, for it shook the house and made all the windows rattle.
As soon as they got to the counter they demanded powder, balls, and percussion caps, and as these things were given them, they were stuffed down their muzzle-loading rifles, and what could not be rammed down the barrels was put in greasy skin bags and hidden under their blankets.
OUR first Christmas on the frontier was ever so pleasant, but it certainly was most vexatious not to have that box from home.
Their early Christmas had been a fine one.
It was a beautiful little dinner, very delicious, and served in the daintiest manner possible.
The buffalo was wounded and unable to run, but he could still turn around fast enough to keep his head toward the horse, and this he did every time Lieutenant Alden tried to get an aim at his side.
He would have done it, too, and then put all the blame upon me, without loss of time.
Faye says that only a cool head and experience could have done that.
Yesterday morning--our first here--we were awakened by the sounds of fife and drum that became louder and louder, until finally I thought the whole Army must be marching to the house.
Lieutenant Baldwin has been on the frontier many years, and is an experienced hunter of buffalo and antelope.
We are going out now for a little ride.
We heard this morning that those very savages rode out on the plains in a roundabout way, so as to get in advance of the Cheyennes, and then had hidden themselves on the top of a bluff overlooking the trail they knew the Cheyennes to be following, and had fired upon them as they passed below, killing two and wounding a number of others.
He got up on his old legs as we approached him, and tried to show fight by dropping his head and throwing his horns to the front, but a child could have pushed him over.
All the little presents were spread out on a table, and in a way to make them present as fine an appearance as possible.
The girls East may have better music to dance by, and polished waxed floors to slip down upon, but they cannot have the excellent partners one has at an army post, and I choose the partners!
They instantly mounted their ponies, and all rode down the street and out of sight at race speed, some leaning so far over on their little beasts that one could hardly see the Indian at all. The pony that was ridden into the store door was without a bridle, and was guided by a long strip of buffalo skin which was fastened around his lower jaw by a slipknot.
So it is apparent to me that the safest thing to do is to call everyone general--there seem to be so many here.
The pitiful bleary eyes of the helpless old beast have haunted me ever since we saw him.
I saw no glory in shooting a wounded animal, so I turned my horse back again, but had not gone far before I heard the pistol shot.
Lieutenant Baldwin and the buffalo were soon far away, and when our horses had quieted down we recalled that shots had been fired in another direction, and looking about, we saw a pathetic sight.
He had eaten the grass as far as he could reach, and had turned around and around until the ground looked as though it had been spaded.
Their coming was so sudden we did not have a chance to get out of their way, and it so happened that Mrs. Phillips and I were in their line of march, and when the one in the lead got to us, we were pushed aside with such impatient force that we both fell over on the counter.
Both General Phillips and Major Pierce have fine voices.
One of the officers tried to persuade me to shoot him, saying it would be a humane act, and at the same time give me the prestige of having killed a buffalo!
If I make a mistake, it will be on the right side, at least.
And I expect that it has been at Kit Carson for days, waiting to be brought down.
They were simply, and only, painted, dirty, and nauseous-smelling savages!
The skin he intends to take to an Indian camp, to be tanned by the squaws. Lieutenant Baldwin followed his buffalo until he got in the position he wanted, and then killed him with one shot.
A soldier in uniform waited upon us at dinner, and that seemed so funny.
And how I longed to run some place, too--but not to laugh, oh, no!
Later on, however, I learned that only captains and officers of higher rank can have such things.
We got only enough to make ourselves comfortable during the winter, for it seems to be the general belief here that these companies of infantry will be ordered to Camp Supply, Indian Territory, in the spring.
It seemed only a few minutes when we saw the buffalo start, going from some of the men, of course, who at once began to chase them.
Even the few small windows had iron bars across.
I had a splendid cake to send over that morning, and I will tell you just what happened to it.
Lieutenant Baldwin saying that the hunt would be worth seeing, and well repay one for the fatigue of the hard ride.
Dinner was served soon after we arrived, and the cheerful dining room, and the table with its dainty china and bright silver, was such a surprise--so much nicer than anything we had expected to find here, and all so different from the terrible places we had seen since reaching the plains.
It was dark when we reached the post, so of course we could see nothing that night.
He said that the Utes were very cross--ready for the blood of Indian or white man--therefore he had permitted them to do about as they pleased while in the store, particularly as we were there, and he saw that we were frightened.
But it seemed that the only way to get it was to make it.
But out here one is never quite sure of what one is eating, for sometimes the most tempting dishes are made of almost nothing.
Mounted orderlies led extra horses that officers and men were to ride when they struck the herd.
Hereafter I shall confine myself to horseback riding--for, even if John is frisky at times, I prefer to take my chances with the one horse, to four little long-eared government mules!
General and Mrs. Phillips gave us a most cordial welcome--just as though they had known us always.
The officers are excellent dancers--every one of them--and when you are gliding around, your chin, or perhaps your nose, getting a scratch now and then from a gorgeous gold epaulet, you feel as light as a feather, and imagine yourself with a fairy prince.
By this time our feet and hands were almost frozen, and Faye suggested that I should remain at the ranch until they returned; but that I refused to do--to give up the hunt was not to be thought of, particularly as a ranchman had just told us that a small herd of buffalo had been seen that very morning only two miles farther on.
And I am to learn to shoot pistols and guns, and do all sorts of things.
The cake was scarcely cold, and must have been horribly sticky--and I remember wondering, as I sat there, which one would need the doctor first, and what the doctor would do if they were all seized with cramps at the same time.
The bachelors have been exceedingly kind to me, and I rejoiced at having a nice cake to send them Christmas morning.
This kept them running straight ahead, and, fortunately, in Lieutenant Baldwin's direction, who apparently was holding his horse in, waiting for them to come.
They were all hideous--with streaks of red or green paint on their faces that made them look like fiends.
But we got over the narrow bridge without meeting more than one man, who climbed over the railing and seemed less anxious to meet us than we were to meet him. As soon as we got on the road again, those mules, with preliminary kicks and shakes of their big heads, began to demonstrate how fast they could go.
Mrs. Phillips insists upon my using her saddle until I can get one from the East, so I can ride as soon as our trunks come.
And then, to make my shortcomings the more vexatious, Faye will be simply fine all the time, in his brand new uniform!
They were not tall, but rather short and stocky.
Faye is wonderfully amiable about it, and assures me that when he gets to be a captain I will see that it is just and fair.
He and I rode over the hill, stopping when we got where we could command a good view of the valley and watch the run.
FORT LYON, COLORADO TERRITORY, October, 1871.
There were three long tables, fairly groaning with things upon them: buffalo, antelope, boiled ham, several kinds of vegetables, pies, cakes, quantities of pickles, dried "apple-duff," and coffee, and in the center of each table, high up, was a huge cake thickly covered with icing. These were the cakes that Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Barker, and I had sent over that morning.
That soldier, who had been so dignified and stiff, put his hand over his mouth and fairly rushed from the room so he could laugh outright.
We had quite a little Christmas without it, however, for a number of things came from the girls, and several women of the garrison sent pretty little gifts to me.
I have not missed my dresses very much--there has been so much else to think about.
Two large army wagons followed us, each drawn by four mules, and carrying several enlisted men.
In fact, my tuition was expected to offset the school's milk bill, yet that did not lessen my enthusiasm.
A wide open V from the shoulder down to the peak displayed an embroidered white Swiss chemisette.
He was also interested in a stage line running between Sacramento and the gold regions.
Grandma was called hurriedly in the night, because the afflicted girl, in delirium, had loosened the straps which held her upon her bed, and while her attendant was out of the room had rushed from the house into the rain, and was not found until after she had become thoroughly drenched.
Nor was there a class for me.
So when he came to us from the sick-room, soured and crestfallen because disease had deeply pitted and seamed that feature which had formerly been his pride, she laughingly whispered, "Well, I don't care, my nose could never look like his, even if I had the smallpox, for there is not so much of it to spoil."
But the most aggravating feature of the illness was that it developed the week that sister Elitha and Mr. Benjamin W. Wilder were married in Sacramento; and when they reached Sonoma on their wedding tour, we could not visit with them, because neither had had the disease.
"Mumps.
He was the second of the three Wilder brothers, who had been among the early gold-seekers, and tried roughing it in the mines.
The other was our arch-enemy, Castle, who seemed so near death that one night as grandma was peering into the darkness for signal lights from the homes of the sick, she exclaimed impulsively, "Hark, children! there goes the Catholic bell.
She did not expose us during what she termed the "catching-stage," but after that had passed, she called us to share her work and become familiar with its details, and taught us how to brew the teas, make the ointments, and apply them.
Turkey, chicken, and wild duck, at the ends; a whole roasted pig in the centre, and more than enough delicious accompaniments to cover the spaces between.
I raised my sleeve, showed the welt on my arm, and replied, "I am going to see if I can't find a home where they will treat me kindly."
I caught much of Georgia's spirit of delight, for I had a vivid recollection of the grand dinner given in commemoration of our very first legally appointed Thanksgiving Day in California; I had only to close my eyes, and in thought would reappear the longest and most bountifully spread table I had ever seen.
MARY'S HALL--THANKSGIVING DAY IN CALIFORNIA--ANOTHER BROTHER-IN-LAW.
Thereafter grandma changed her methods.
Grandma was pleased that I was invited, and declared that she would send a liberal donation of milk and cheese as a mark of appreciation.
When she came back speaking English, and insisting that she was an American, grandma became very angry, and threatened to send her away among strangers; then hesitated, as if realizing how fully Georgia belonged to me and I to her, and that we would cling together whatever might happen.
Yet months previous, he had laid the foundation for her mirth.
There, I wore a dark calico dress and sun-bonnet, both made by poor Mrs. McCutchen of the Donner Party, who had to take in sewing for a livelihood; but to the Seminary, I should wear grandpa's gift, a costly alpaca, changeable in the sunlight to soft mingling bluish and greenish colors of the peacock.
"It seems to me," said the Wizard after a brief silence had followed Glinda's speech, "that there are three fishes in this lake that used to be Adepts at Magic and from whom Coo-ee-oh stole much of her knowledge. If we could find those fishes and return them to their former shapes, they could doubtless tell us what to do to bring the sunken island to the surface."
"But what could they do then?" inquired another Skeezer.
Don't you admire my beauty, Strangers?"
Before anyone could speak Coo-ee-oh called to them in a rasping voice--for the voice of a swan is always harsh and unpleasant--and said with much pride:
"She's wonderfully beautiful now," remarked the Frogman.
What I am trying to discover is how the boat came to be on this shore, while the island on which it belongs is under water yonder.
"But how can we raise the island?"
"They would have no homes and no place to go, and would be at the mercy of their enemies, the Flatheads."
I wouldn't go back to it if I could.
These were set closely together, the branches, which came quite to the ground, being so tightly interlaced that even the Glass Cat could scarcely find a place to squeeze through.
"However," said she, "the boat is merely a boat, and I believe I can make it obey a command of sorcery, as well as it did the command of witchcraft.
"If the boat would obey my commands to enter the basement door, it would also obey my commands to come out again, and I could bring Ozma and Dorothy back with me."
The path which the Flatheads used was some distance away.
"Handsome is as handsome does," replied the Scarecrow.
Afterward we can visit the mountain and punish the cruel magician of the Flatheads."
As their island was under water and they could not get back to it, the three Skeezers had no place to go, and so had waited patiently beside their boat for something to happen.
"If you belong on the island, why are you here?" demanded Glinda.
"Very well," agreed the Wizard.
Admire me!"
You will understand, of course, that had Glinda been at home in her castle, where the Great Book of Records was, she would have known that Ervic the Skeezer already had taken the gold and silver and bronze fishes from the lake.
The young men told how, in the night when they were asleep, their comrade Ervic had mysteriously disappeared, while the boat in some strange manner had floated to the shore and stranded upon the beach.
All of Ozma's counsellors applauded this sentiment, for they knew well the powers of the Sorceress.
What deeds can a swan do but swim around and give pleasure to all beholders?" said the sparkling bird.
"I quite agree with you."
"Not so, friend Wizard," replied Glinda.
We would only Join them as prisoners."
I believe the best plan will be to summon the three fishes and learn from them how to raise the island."
When they had gleaned all the information they could from these Skeezers, the Wizard said to Glinda:
It was a mere shell of blackened steel, with a collapsible roof that, when in position, made the submarine watertight, but at present the roof rested in slots on either side of the magic craft.
"Tell us, Coo-ee-oh," said Glinda earnestly, "if you can recall enough of your witchcraft to enable us to raise the sunken island to the surface of the lake.
Of course every eye was at first fixed upon this dome, where Ozma and Dorothy and the Skeezers were still fast prisoners.
"But how?" asked Uncle Henry in a grave voice, for he could not bear to think of his dear niece Dorothy being out there under water; "how shall we do it?"
I do not despair in the least, but it will require some deep study to solve this difficult problem.
Under the Great Dome
"Have you forgotten your former life?
But, most noble Sorceress, provided you can make the boat go, of what use will it be to us?"
They walked around the lake to where the boat was stranded upon the beach, but found it empty.
"Not all of us," returned the Wizard, "for it won't hold so many.
They had searched in vain for three days for Ervic.
"Who are you, and where did you come from?" inquired the Wizard.
"I think I can find a way."
After I have given a little thought to the matter, the boat will take us wherever we desire to go."
"Let us go to the boat," said the Wizard.
"That is something we must consider carefully," responded stately Glinda, with a serene smile.
Being questioned by Glinda and the Wizard, they told all they knew about Ozma and Dorothy and declared the two girls were still in the village under the Great Dome.
"I think I see a boat yonder on the shore," said Ojo the Munchkin boy, pointing to a place around the edge of the lake.
"I am sure Coo-ee-oh is punished," said Glinda, "for she has lost all her magic power and her grand palace and can no longer misrule the poor Skeezers."
But soon their attention was caught by a more brilliant sight, for here was the Diamond Swan swimming just before them, its long neck arched proudly, the amethyst eyes gleaming and all the diamond-sprinkled feathers glistening splendidly under the rays of the sun.
They were quite safe and would be well cared for by Lady Aurex, now that the Queen who opposed them was out of the way.
The others, too, seemed to think the Wizard's plan the best, and Glinda herself commended it, so on they marched toward the line of palm trees that hid the Skeezers' lake from view.
No one could answer that question, of course; but while they pondered the matter three young men advanced from the line of trees, and rather timidly bowed to the strangers.
"If you find you can make this boat obey your sorcery, you could have it return to the island, submerge itself, and enter the door in the basement from which it came.
"It's no use," said Button Bright; "the old Swan is too much in love with herself to think of anything else."
Chapter Seventeen
We ran away when we saw you coming, and hid behind the trees, but as you are Strangers and seem to be friendly we decided to meet you, for we are in great trouble and need assistance."
"Wherever in the lake the enchanted fishes may be, they will answer to my call.
Tell us that and I'll give you a string of pearls to wear around your neck and add to your beauty."
"If we could get that boat and row all over the lake, calling to the magic fishes, we might be able to find them."
"Just watch me circle around and see me glitter!
That was all they knew.
But I cannot see that our going to the sunken island would enable our friends to escape.
If ever I knew I've forgotten, and I'm glad of it," was the response.
There were no oars or sails, no machinery to make the boat go, and although Glinda promptly realized it was meant to be operated by witchcraft, she was not acquainted with that sort of magic.
"And leave all of our people still imprisoned?" asked one of the Skeezers reproachfully.
"It doesn't seem like much of a punishment," said Trot.
Have you forgotten your magic and witchcraft?" inquired the Wizard.
"That is sensible," approved the Shaggy Man.
"Admire me, Strangers!
The little Wizard seemed to think that this was rather a forlorn hope.
So I think our best plan will be to go to the Skeezer Country, raise the sunken island and save our friends and the imprisoned Skeezers.
"If it were just an ordinary sunken island," said the powerful sorceress, "there would be several ways by which I might bring it to the surface again.
"Nothing can add to my beauty, for I'm the most beautiful creature anywhere in the whole world."
"Here's a job for the Tin Woodman," said the Scarecrow.
"By making several trips in the boat, Glinda could fetch all your people to the shore," replied the Wizard.
Pretty soon they came to the palms.
"We are Skeezers," answered one of them, "and our home is on the Magic Isle of the Lake.
Did Coo-ee-oh come here in the boat to meet the Flatheads before the island was sunk, or afterward?"
"Can't we use it to catch the three fishes?" asked Button Bright.
"It will not be necessary to use the boat for that purpose," replied Glinda.
"That is true," said Glinda the Good.
CHAPTER V
"You know your own business best.
However, Mr. Link," added Lucian, "I have come to certain conclusions.
"Well," said Link, rather gratified by this tribute to his power, "I shall indulge your fancy."
"Can she identify the dead man?"
Gordon Link, the detective charged with the conduct of the case, confessed as much to Denzil.
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
"Yes, but found nothing; yet," said Lucian, with an air of conviction, "however the man and woman entered, they were in the house."
To add to the wonderment of the public, it came out in the evidence of Lucian Denzil at the inquest that Berwin was not the real name of the victim; so here the authorities were confronted with a three-fold problem.
"In the newspapers, also?" asked Lucian, nettled by the detective's tone.
"I do not see the slightest chance of tracing Berwin's past," said he to the barrister.
When she returned, shortly after nine, on Christmas morning, the man was dead and cold.
"By advertisement."
"Yes.
Berwin--so called--was dead; he was buried under his assumed name, and there, so far as the obtainable evidence went, was an end to the strange tenant of the Silent House.
Berwin--so called--was dead, his assassin had melted into thin air, and the Silent House had added a second legend to its already uncanny reputation.
"A Mrs. Vrain, who writes from Bath."
"Why do you wish to know about the matter?" he asked.
"Out of simple curiosity.
"I don't agree with you.
Formerly it had been simply haunted, now it was also blood-stained, and its last condition was worse than its first.
"No; it is not necessary."
"Absolutely none; even the weapon with which the crime was committed cannot be found."
"Are you sure there is no clue, Mr. Link?"
Link looked keenly at the young man.
The policeman knew every one, even to the errand-boys of the neighbourhood, who brought parcels of Christmas goods, and in many cases had exchanged greetings with the passers-by; but he was prepared to swear, and, in fact, did swear at the inquest, that no stranger either came into or went out of Geneva Square.
"Advertisement!"
"She thinks she can, but, of course, she cannot be certain until she sees the body.
"You have searched the house?"
"Which you did?"
Search was immediately made for the murderer, but no trace could be found of him, nor could it be ascertained how he had entered the house. The doors were all locked, the windows were all barred, and neither at the back nor in the front was there any outlet left open whereby the man--if it was a man who had done the deed--could have escaped.
The firm who had furnished the rooms made almost the same report, quite as meagre and unsatisfactory.
"I guess not!
I guess I'm sorry that Vrain got stuck like a pig; but it wasn't my fault, and I've done my best to show respect by wearing black.
"That's a frozen fact, sir," cried Clyne, "and both Lyddy and I want to lynch the reptile as did it; but we neither of us know who laid him out."
But you know your heart is better than your tongue."
"The man called Berwin was murdered."
"Wasn't he murdered?"
"I beg your pardon!
"You did not get on well together?" said Link sharply.
If he hadn't left me, I'd have left him--that's an almighty truth."
"No, not with a bowie," corrected Lucian, "but with some long, sharp instrument."
He was half baked!"
And isn't his first name Mark?" pursued the pretty widow.
He was rather astonished to find that Mrs. Vrain had arrived, and was deep in conversation with the detective, while a third person, who had evidently accompanied her, sat near at hand, silent, but attentive to what was being discussed.
"Vrain!" struck in Lydia, the widow, "Mark Vrain."
It seemed likely that Mrs. Vrain, who asserted herself to be the wife of the deceased, would be able to answer these questions in full; therefore, he was punctual in keeping the appointment at the office of Link.
As the dead man had been close on sixty years of age, and Mrs. Vrain claimed to be his wife, Denzil had quite expected to meet with an elderly woman.
"He was a widower with a grown-up daughter when I took him to church.
In spite of her grief her demeanour was lively and engaging, and her smile particularly attractive, lighting up her whole face in the most fascinating manner.
Her hands and feet were small, her stature was that of a fairy, and her figure was perfect in every way.
"Is this all your proof?" asked Link calmly.
"He," said Mrs. Vrain, with supreme contempt, "why, he hadn't backbone enough for folks to get riz at him!
"Say, now," said Mrs. Vrain, casting an approving glance on Lucian's face, "I'm right down glad to see you.
Then he lost part of his little finger--left-hand finger--in an accident out West. What other proof do you want, Mr. Link?"
"It was, to put up so long with Mr. Vrain," said Lydia resentfully; "but I'm honest, if I'm nothing else.
But it is no good going on in this way, poppa, for I've no call to excuse myself to strangers.
"If you want to know how he died," explained Link, "I can tell you.
Where was he during the other four?"
He was stabbed."
"Crazy, that is," remarked Clyne; "always thought the world was against him, and folks wanted to get quit of him."
"So the journals said; with a bowie!"
"Well, my husband was called Mark, too, so there you are--Mark Berwin."
"Was Mr. Berwin--I beg pardon, Vrain--was he married twice?"
"I know nothing about it," retorted the widow.
But then, on occasions, he was disposed to be hyper-critical.
Well, Mark Vrain took the house in Geneva Square six months back.
Well, can I get this assurance money?"
"The proofs you have given seem sufficient, Mrs. Vrain, but may I ask when your husband left his home?"
CHAPTER VI
"Let us continue.
How should I?"
"I knew him as Mr. Berwin--Mark Berwin," replied Denzil, taking a seat.
"I should say a stiletto--an Italian stiletto."
"All your evidence goes to prove it, yet the assurance company may not be satisfied with the proof. I expect the grave will have to be opened, and the remains identified."
"I suppose so," said Link, "provided you can prove your husband's death."
"Have you any idea who killed him?"
"A dagger?" suggested Clyne.
'That beast which thou wishest to overcome is my brother.
Then the King was wroth with those sons, and punished them as he thought best.
His brothers forbade us to say that he was alive, threatening to slay us if we did.'
This kind of soap is excellent for shaving, and chapped hands--it is also good for eruptions on the face.
Silk and woollen goods should not be boiled in the dye-stuff, but it should be kept at a scalding heat for twenty minutes. Drain the goods without wringing, and hang them in a dry, shady place, where they will have the air.
Let the goods remain in it till cold; then hang them where they will dry; (they should not be wrung.) Boiling hot suds is the best thing to set the color of black silk--let it remain in it till cold.
Take it from the fire when melted, and when it is just lukewarm, add enough of the oil of caraway to scent it.
To make Castile soap, boil common soft soap in lamp oil three hours and a half.
COMMON SIMPLE DYES.
When the dye-stuff is strained, steep the articles in it.
Set the kettle on the fire, and let the water boil fifteen or twenty minutes; then put in sufficient cold water to make it lukewarm, put in the goods, and boil them an hour and a quarter--take them out without wringing, and dry them in a shady place.
When dissolved, take it from the fire; when cool, put in the goods, which should previously be washed free from spots, and color; set them on a moderate fire, where they will keep hot, till the goods are of the shade you wish.
For woollen goods, the East indigo will answer as well as the Spanish, and comes much lower.
When they have been scalding an hour, increase the fire till they boil.
When the water boils, stir the alum and tartar up in it, put in the goods, and let them boil a couple of hours; then rinse them in fair water--empty the kettle, and put in three gallons of water, and the madder; rub it fine in the water, then put in the goods, and set them where they will keep scalding hot for an hour, without boiling--stir them constantly.
Turn it into a barrel, and fill it up with water.
If the goods are cotton, set the vessel on the fire, and let the goods boil ten or fifteen minutes, stirring them constantly to prevent their spotting.
To make the celebrated Windsor soap, nothing more is necessary than to slice the best white soap as thin as possible, and melt it over a slow fire.
It is too expensive a dye for bulky goods, but for faded fancy shawls and ribbons, it is quite worth the while to use it, as it gives a beautiful shade of pink.
If you wish to have it a yellow color, put in a little palm oil, and turn it out into wooden vessels. When cold, separate it again from the lye, and cut, it in bars--let them remain in the sun several days to dry.
They should be boiled in it, and then hung where they will drain and dry.
Let it boil a quarter of an hour, then take it from the fire.
This method of making soap is much easier than to make a lye of your ashes, while it is as cheap, if you sell your ashes to the soap-boiler.
Dip the goods in--when saturated with it, turn the whole into the logwood dye.
To make a dye of it, allow for half a pound of it three ounces of alum, and one of cream of tartar, and six gallons of water.
This dye will make a salmon or orange color, according to the strength of it, and the time the goods remain in.
The dye for slate color should be strained before the goods are put into it.
The blossoms of the Balm of Gilead, steeped with fair water in a vessel, then strained, will dye silk a pretty red color.
Heat twenty-six pounds of strained grease.
Peach leaves, fustic, and saffron, all make a good straw or lemon color, according to the strength of the dye.
The silk should be washed clean, and free from color, then rinsed in fair water, and boiled in the strained dye, with a small piece of alum.
Madder makes a good durable red, but not a brilliant color.
Goods dyed in this manner should never be rinsed in clear water.
To make a good dark slate color, boil sugar-loaf paper with vinegar, in an iron utensil--put in alum to set the color.
For green dye, take a pound of oil of vitriol, and turn it upon half an ounce of Spanish indigo, that has been reduced to a fine powder.
The succeeding day, separate it from the lye, and heat it over a slow fire.
Allow a pound of logwood to each pound of goods that are to be dyed. Soak it over night in soft water, then boil it an hour, and strain the water in which it is boiled.
Heat twenty pounds of strained grease, then mix it with the dissolved potash, and boil them together till the whole becomes a thick jelly, which is ascertained by taking a little of it out to get cold.
For each pound of logwood, dissolve an ounce of blue vitriol in lukewarm water sufficient to wet the goods.
Chemic blue is made in the same manner, only using half the quantity of vitriol.
This dye will not answer for cotton goods, as the vitriol rots the threads.
Turn it into moulds, and let it remain in a dry situation for five or six days.
Soaking black-dyed goods in sour milk, is also good to set the color.
This proportion of ingredients will make sufficient dye for six or seven pounds of goods. Heat half of the water scalding hot, in a clean brass kettle, then put in the alum and cream of tartar, and let it dissolve.
Take it from the fire, stir in cold water till it grows thin, then put to each pailful of soap a pint of blown salt--stir it in well.
If you wish for a lively bright green, mix a little of the above composition with yellow dye.
Let the whole stand in the sun, stirring it frequently.
Tea grounds, set with copperas, makes a good slate color.
To dye a fine delicate pink, use a carmine saucer--the directions for dyeing come with the saucers.
In the course of a week, fill the barrel with weak lye.
Let them boil five minutes; then drain them out of the dye, and rinse them, without wringing, in fair water, and hang them in the shade, where they will dry.
They should be dyed when the weather is dry--if not dried quick, they will not look nice.
When perfectly dry, wash them in lukewarm suds, to keep the vitriol from injuring the texture of the cloth.
To produce a light slate color, boil white maple bark in clear water, with a little alum--the bark should be boiled in a brass utensil.
He was ferried over the river on a raft formed of two logs lashed together with strips of rawhide.
Bear River was running high, and the plain between it and Sutter's Fort seemed a vast quagmire, but John Rhodes volunteered to deliver the letter.
Women left the room sobbing, and men called those passing, in from the street, to join the knots of earnest talkers.
Its contents aroused all the tender emotions known to human nature.
Captain Kerns in charge at the Fort, pledged his aid, and influence to the cause of relief.
Meanwhile, before Alcalde Sinclair's letter had time to reach San Francisco, he and Captain Sutter began outfitting the men destined to become the "First Relief." Aguilla Glover and R.S.
All were ready and willing to do; but, alas, the obstacles which had prevented Mr. Reed getting men for the mountain work still remained to be overcome.
Some of the listeners had parted from members of the Donner Party at the Little Sandy, when its prospects appeared so bright, and the misfortunes which had since befallen the party seemed incredible.
Mr. Tucker, fearing that others might become disheartened and do likewise, guaranteed each man who would persevere to the end, five dollars per diem, dating from the time the party entered the snow.
Part of the flour was sacked, and part converted into bread by the women in the vicinity.
Soon thereafter "Old Trapper Greenwood" appeared in San Francisco, asking for assistance in fitting out a following to go to the mountains with himself and McCutchen, Mr. George Yount and others in and around Sonoma and Napa having recommended him as leader.
Thornton says:
Racine Tucker, Aguilla Glover, R.S.
He had crossed the Sierras before, when the snow lay deep on the summit, and now proposed to drive over horses and kill them at the camps as provisions for the sufferers.
Donations of horses, mules, beef, and flour had already been sent to his camp in Napa Valley.
RELIEF MEASURES INAUGURATED IN CALIFORNIA--DISTURBED CONDITIONS BECAUSE OF MEXICAN WAR--GENEROUS SUBSCRIPTIONS--THREE PARTIES ORGANIZE--"FIRST RELIEF," UNDER RACINE TUCKER; "SECOND RELIEF" UNDER REED AND GREENWOOD; AND RELAY CAMP UNDER WOODWORTH--FIRST RELIEF PARTY CROSSES SNOW-BELT AND REACHES DONNER LAKE.
It was decided to fit out an expedition, under charge of Past Midshipman Woodworth, who had tendered his services for the purpose, he to act under instructions of the Military Governor and cooeperate with the committee aiding Reed.
The following morning ten men started on their toilsome march to Bear Valley, where they arrived on the thirteenth, and at once began searching for the abandoned wagon and provisions which Reed and McCutchen had cached the previous Autumn, after their fruitless attempt to scale the mountains. The wagon was found under snow ten feet in depth; but its supplies had been destroyed by wild beasts.
A treasurer and two committees were appointed; the one to solicit subscriptions, and the other to purchase supplies.
Indians were kept at the handmill grinding wheat.
Upon reaching Mule Springs, the party found the snow from three to four feet deep, and, contrary to expectations, saw that it would be impossible to proceed farther with the horses.
Tucker, Johnson, Richey and others, who, being anxious to assist in the good work, had killed, and were fire-drying, beef to take up the mountains.
Mr. Eddy was now ill of fever, and unfit to continue the climb; whereupon his companions promised to bring out his loved ones if he would return with Joe Varro, whom Mr. Johnson had sent along to bring the pack animals home after they should cease to be of use.
Captain Mervine of the United States Navy, and Mr. Richardson, United States Collector, each subscribed fifty dollars to the cause on his own account.
These, he said, he could secure if he had the ready money to make advances and to procure the necessary warm clothing and blankets.
The remaining seven pushed ahead, and on the eighteenth, encamped on the summit overlooking the lake, where the snow was said to be forty feet in depth.
Existing war between Mexico and the United States was keeping California in a disturbed condition.
Here two days were spent making pack-saddles, driving in horses, and getting supplies in shape.
Moreover, all felt that each man who should attempt to cross the snow belt would do so at the peril of his life.
While the early sunlight of January 19 was flooding his room with cheer and warmth, he dictated a letter to Mr. John Sinclair, Alcalde of the Upper District of California, living near Sutter's Fort, in which he stated as briefly as possible the conditions and perils surrounding the snow-bound travellers, and begged him to use every means in his power toward their immediate rescue.
It was dark when he reached Sutter's Fort, nevertheless from house to house he spread the startling report: "Men, women, and little children are snow-bound in the Sierras, and starving to death!"
At Mule Springs, the party built a brush store-house for the extra supplies and appointed George Tucker and William Coon camp-keepers. Then they prepared packs containing jerked beef, flour, and bread, each weighing between forty and seventy-five pounds, according to the temperament and strength of the respective carriers.
Seven hundred dollars was subscribed before the meeting adjourned.
Most of the able-bodied male emigrants had enlisted under Captain Fremont as soon as they reached the country, and were still on duty in the southern part of the province; and the non-enlisted were deemed necessary for the protection of the colonies of American women and children encamped on the soil of the enemy.
This party is generally known as the "First Relief." Their route to the snow-belt lay through sections of country which had become so soft and oozy that the horses often sank in mire, flank deep; and the streams were so swollen that progress was alarmingly slow.
While Captain Kerns at Sutter's Fort was sending messengers to different points, and Mrs. Sinclair was collecting clothing to replace the tattered garments of the members of the Forlorn Hope, her husband despatched an open letter to the people of San Francisco, describing the arrival of the survivors of the Forlorn Hope, and the heart-rending condition of those remaining in the mountains.
The Alcalde was requested to act with both committees.
If this scheme should fail, he and his sons with others would get food to the camp on snowshoes.
The letter was taken to the City Hotel in San Francisco, and read aloud in the dining-room.
The Governor-General of California, after due form, and trusting to the generosity and humanity of the Government which he represented, appropriated four hundred dollars on Government account toward outfitting this relief party.
Reed and McCutchen, who were known to be endeavoring to raise a second expedition.
As a result of these appeals, Alcalde Bartlett called a public meeting; and so intense was the feeling that Mr. Dunleary, "the first speaker, had scarcely taken his seat on the platform when the people rushed to the chairman's table from all parts of the house with their hands full of silver dollars," and could hardly be induced to stay their generosity until the meeting was organized.
When ready to mount, he shook hands with each man, and recorded the names in a note-book as follows:
On the second day they were driven into camp early by heavy rains which drenched clothing, blankets, and even the provisions carefully stored under the saddles and leather saddle-covers.
This caused a delay of thirty-six hours, for everything had to be sun or fire dried before the party could resume travel.
Greenwood urged that he should have ten or twelve men on whom he could rely after reaching deep snow.
He is seized by the monster and carried to her cavern, where the combat ensues.]
[Fifty years have elapsed.
His body is burned, and a barrow erected.]
With furious grapple She gave him requital early thereafter, And stretched out to grab him; the strongest of warriors Faint-mooded stumbled, till he fell in his traces, Foot-going champion.
Uncanny the place is: Thence upward ascendeth the surging of waters, Wan to the welkin, when the wind is stirring The weather unpleasing, till the air groweth gloomy, Then the heavens lower.
He had come to them mysteriously, alone in a ship, when an infant.]
Firm-mooded after, Not heedless of valor, but mindful of glory Was Higelac's kinsman; the hero-chief angry Cast then his carved-sword covered with jewels That it lay on the earth, hard and steel-pointed; He hoped in his strength, his hand-grapple sturdy. So any must act whenever he thinketh To gain him in battle glory unending, And is reckless of living.
The stranger perceived then The sword would not bite, her life would not injure, But the falchion failed the folk-prince when straitened: Erst had it often onsets encountered, Oft cloven the helmet, the fated one's armor; 'Twas the first time that ever the excellent jewel Had failed of its fame.
BY J. T. TROWBRIDGE
Burke, keep still! He's a climbin' out now--Of all the things! What's he got on?
This elder Minos had been accounted the wisest of men--so wise, indeed, that Jupiter chose him to be one of the judges of the Lower World.
By and by he had made for himself a pair of strong wings, and for Icarus another pair of smaller ones; and then, one midnight, when everybody was asleep, the two went out to see if they could fly.
"He shall have plenty of room to roam about," said Daedalus; "and if you will only now and then feed one of your enemies to him, I promise you that he shall live and thrive."
ICARUS.
The next night Daedalus made some changes in the wings.
"Hitherto," said the king, "I have honored you for your skill and rewarded you for your labor.
"That would only bring greater misfortunes upon us."
They flew up to the top of the king's palace, and then they sailed away over the walls of the city and alighted on the top of a hill.
It was he who taught the people how to build better houses and how to hang their doors on hinges and how to support the roofs with pillars and posts.
The people of Crete would not have killed him if they could; for they thought that the Mighty Folk who lived with Jupiter on the mountain top had sent him among them, and that these beings would be angry if any one should take his life.
Day after day the little vessel sailed slowly southward, keeping the shore of the mainland always upon the right.
Walking one day by the sea, he picked up the backbone of a great fish, and from it he invented the saw.
So he flew up higher and higher, but his father who was in front did not see him.
But they were not ready to undertake a long journey yet; and so, just before daybreak, they flew back home. Every fair night after that they practiced with their wings, and at the end of a month they felt as safe in the air as on the ground, and could skim over the hilltops like birds.
One morning when the two were putting up an ornament on the outer wall of Athena's temple, Daedalus bade his nephew go out on a narrow scaffold which hung high over the edge of the rocky cliff whereon the temple stood.
Not long after this it happened that Daedalus was guilty of a deed which angered the king very greatly; and had not Minos wished him to build other buildings for him, he would have put him to death and no doubt have served him right.
Poor Perdix fell headlong through the air, and he would have been dashed in pieces upon the stones at the foot of the cliff had not kind Athena seen him and taken pity upon him.
Daedalus was not pleased when he saw that the lad was so apt and wise, so ready to learn, and so eager to do.
His grandfather, whose name was also Minos, was the son of Europa, a young princess whom a white bull, it was said, had brought on his back across the sea from distant Asia.
So it was not hard for him to persuade Daedalus to make his home with him and be the chief of his artisans.
So the wonderful artisan brought together his workmen, and they built a marvelous house with so many rooms in it and so many winding ways that no one who went far into it could ever find his way out again; and Daedalus called it the Labyrinth, and cunningly persuaded the Minotaur to go inside of it.
While Athens was still only a small city there lived within its walls a man named Daedalus who was the most skillful worker in wood and stone and metal that had ever been known.
Day after day, while at his work, Daedalus pondered over this matter, and soon his heart was filled with hatred towards young Perdix.
So, all through the day he pretended to be planning some great work for the king, but every night he locked himself up in his chamber and wrought secretly by candle light.
Daedalus had a nephew named Perdix whom he had taken when a boy to teach the trade of builder.
And Daedalus built for King Minos a most wonderful palace with floors of marble and pillars of granite; and in the palace he set up golden statues which had tongues and could talk; and for splendor and beauty there was no other building in all the wide earth that could be compared with it.
But although the wonderful artisan was thus held as a prisoner, he did not build any more buildings for King Minos; he spent his time in planning how he might regain his freedom.
"All my inventions," he said to his son Icarus, "have hitherto been made to please other people; now I will invent something to please myself."
"I will build a house for him then," said Daedalus, "and you can keep him in it as a prisoner."
He screamed to his father, but it was too late.
At last the famous Island of Crete was reached, and there Daedalus landed and made himself known; and the King of Crete, who had already heard of his wondrous skill, welcomed him to his kingdom, and gave him a home in his palace, and promised that he should be rewarded with great riches and honor if he would but stay and practice his craft there as he had done in Athens.
Now the name of the King of Crete was Minos.
At first they were for punishing Daedalus with the death which he so richly deserved, but when they remembered what he had done to make their homes pleasanter and their lives easier, they allowed him to live; and yet they drove him out of Athens and bade him never return.
There was a ship in the harbor just ready to start on a voyage across the sea, and in it Daedalus embarked with all his precious tools and his young son Icarus.
Towards noon the sun shone very warm, and Daedalus called out to the boy who was a little behind and told him to keep his wings cool and not fly too high.
"Shall I kill him?" asked Daedalus.
There lived in those days among the hills of Crete a terrible monster called the Minotaur, the like of which has never been seen from that time until now.
It passed Troezen and the rocky coast of Argos, and then struck boldly out across the sea.
Then he gave orders to the guards at the city gates that they should not let Daedalus pass out at any time, and he set soldiers to watch the ships that were in port so that he could not escape by sea.
While he was yet whirling through mid-air she changed him into a partridge, and he flitted away to the hills to live forever in the woods and fields which he loved so well.
All went well for a time, and the two bold flyers sped swiftly over the sea, skimming along only a little above the waves, and helped on their way by the brisk east wind.
They could not fly very far at first, but they did so well that they felt sure of doing much better in time.
He was the pest and terror of all the land. Where he was least expected, there he was sure to be; and almost every day some man, woman, or child was caught and devoured by him.
He was the first to fasten things together with glue; he invented the plumb-line and the auger; and he showed seamen how to put up masts in their ships and how to rig the sails to them with ropes.
But Perdix was a very apt learner, and soon surpassed his master in the knowledge of many things.
As for Daedalus, when the people of Athens heard of his dastardly deed, they were filled with grief and rage--grief for young Perdix, whom all had learned to love; rage towards the wicked uncle, who loved only himself.
He built a stone palace for AEgeus, the young king of Athens, and beautified the Temple of Athena which stood on the great rocky hill in the middle of the city.
Then, when the lad obeyed, it was easy enough, with a blow of a hammer, to knock the scaffold from its fastenings.
Seeing how a certain bird carved holes in the trunks of trees, he learned how to make and use the chisel.
Pretty soon, however, the heat of the sun began to melt the wax with which the boy's wings were fastened.
Then he invented the wheel which potters use in molding clay; and he made of a forked stick the first pair of compasses for drawing circles; and he studied out many other curious and useful things.
For those smelling-salts fit your prologues like a kid glove.
I'll show you.
But go on and turn your attention to his lyrics.
SEMI-CHORUS
March! march! lead forth, Lead forth manfully, March in order all; Bustling, hustling, justling, As it may befall; Flocking, shouting, laughing, Mocking, flouting, quaffing, One and all; All have had a belly-full Of breakfast brave and plentiful; Therefore Evermore With your voices and your bodies Serve the goddess, And raise Songs of praise; She shall save the country still, And save it against the traitor's will; So she says.
Recite another prologue to him and let me see.
[The point of the following selection lies in the monotony of both narrative style and metre in Euripides's prologues, and especially his regular caesura after the fifth syllable of a line.
Iacchus!
A PARODY OF EURIPIDES'S LYRIC VERSE
SEMI-CHORUS
Iacchus!
SEMI-CHORUS
SEMI-CHORUS
Iacchus!
Ceres, holy patroness, Condescend to mark and bless, With benevolent regard, Both the Chorus and the Bard; Grant them for the present day Many things to sing and say, Follies intermixed with sense; Folly, but without offense. Grant them with the present play To bear the prize of verse away.
Mighty Bacchus!
Who filched them?
From 'The Frogs'
I'll fix him next time.
Iacchus!
Now call again, and with a different measure, The power of mirth and pleasure; The florid, active Bacchus, bright and gay, To journey forth and join us on the way.
Zeus, as the word of sooth declared of old--
The burlesque tag used by Aristophanes to demonstrate this effect could not be applied in the same way to any of the fourteen extant plays of Sophocles and AEschylus.]
I've lots of prologues where he can't work 'em in.
From 'The Frogs': Frere's Translation
From 'The Frogs'
Pelops the Tantalid to Pisa coming With speedy coursers
He looked up at the solemn stars unafraid, and so murmured to himself.
Man dies in three score years and ten; but he, too, is born again.
The squirrels have grown still, and even the oak is silent.
The oak dies in centuries, but it is born again.
I think perhaps the oak knows or it would not thus for years have whispered reverently its distinct Amen!
"When the wind is soft, the oak says: 'Peace!
Grayer, grayer, more bent, more feeble--is it not so, Singing Mouse?
We do not know all things.
AT THE PLACE OF THE OAKS
Those who built this fire here, so many times, so many years, each time first craved pardon of the green grass of that happy glade, for they would not harm the grass.
One must suffer before one may comfort.
The oak had suffered somewhere.
The oak took pay in the vast shadows the fire made for it.
The one at the table pauses, as was the wont before the beginning of a meal.
It is the shadow of a shadow, the apparition of a soul!
Peace!' When the breeze is sharp it sighs and says: 'Pity!
Yet the years came, to the oaks and to the grasses and to the friends.
Do you know this place of the oaks?
He rose and looked about him, as one who had dreamed and was content.
That is the business of the fire, and of the oaks and of the shadows.
It had been thus for many years.
The table is still spread for two.
The glorious day sets on once more.
And each time at the close the oak with rustling leaves pronounced distinct Amen!
I know that the shadows dance strangely, and hover and come near at hand, in those late hours of the night; but what then occurs I do not know.
God is wise. Waken, waken!
God is good!"
At this table there is but one form now.
I saw them both.
They gave the oak its union with the sacred Past.
"Do you see the little lake?
Did I not know it well?
Doubt not, fear not, sorrow not, ye two.
So the fire, and the grass, and the oak, and the shadows of the Past were friends, and each year they met here.
As pure shining beads upon a thread of gold I saw this small, dear picture, reiterant and unchanged, year after year, always with the same calm and pure surroundings.
In shadow, I could see them smile.
Could one forget the tortured but noble soul of this oak?
Ever, the oak knew, the gray figure would first bow and ask the blessing of God.
After they had gone, the fire did strange things.
Here again is the little table, and here is the evening meal.
I ask not what nor who were these two who had come each year to this place of the oaks, but surely they were friends.
Near by the little fire I saw a small table formed of straight-laid boughs, and at either side of this were seats made cunningly in the workshop of the woods.
They knew it was the secret of the night, and gave the oak its own request, in pay for its protection and consent.
Now, the Past is a very sad but tender thing.
I gazed at the naked, cheerless wall, seamed and rent with cracks along its sallow width.
And now, this time, what was this gentle warning that the oak tried to whisper softly down?
These friends sat by the little fire a time before they went to rest in the tiny house of white.
Once the younger looked to the older for counsel, but now it seemed to me the bowed figure turned to the one that had become more strong.
And as I gazed yet more eagerly the map faded quite away, and there lay in its stead the smiling face of an enchanted land.
What is that opposite, across the table, at the seat long years held only by the elder of these two?
Even, it seemed to me, I could note a faint, clear odor of innocent potency.
One oak, a mighty one, now resolved itself more prominently forth.
Doubt not those words are heard this day.
Yet why?
"Do you see the oaks?" asked the Singing Mouse.
Perhaps the grayer friend heard it, as he sat musing by the fire.
The grass dies every year, but it is born again.
And as I gazed more intently the map took on color, and narrowed its semblance to that of a certain region.
Only as year added itself to year, slipping forward on the golden string, I saw the gray figure grow more gray, more bowed, more feeble.
In shadow, I could hear them talk.
Do you hear the talking of the leaves?...
Hush!
And there were the oaks. At the water's edge, near the lesser spring, the wild apple trees twisted, but upon the hills and over the great glades stood the reserved, mysterious oaks, tall and strong.
I saw the table laid, not with gleam of snow and silver, but with plain vessels which, nevertheless, seemed now to have a radiance of their own. I knew all this.
He looks across the table to the shadow, as if the shadow were his friend.
There were two forms at this small table.
I will not scoff.
The other was younger and more erect.
It is perhaps we who are ignorant.
Let those jest who will.
All men know that, though you see the fire burned down, when you go into the tent you will some time in the night see the walls lit up by a sudden flash or so, now and then, from the fire which was thought to be dead.
When he became pope, he had three objects: to recover and extend the temporal possessions of the papacy, to exercise to the full his spiritual power, and to drive the foreigner from Italy.
It blazed forth again immediately, but at first between the Venetians and the Emperor Maximilian almost alone by himself.
"Everybody knows, excellent gentlemen of the senate," said he, "that on the preservation of Padua depends all hope, not only of recovering our empire, but of maintaining our own liberty.
Maximilian was personally brave and free from depravity or premeditated perfidy, but he was coarse, volatile, inconsistent, and not very able.
Two other small towns, Marano and Osopo, followed her example; and for several months this was all that the Venetians preserved of their continental possessions.
On returning to his quarters he sent for a French secretary of his, whom he bade write to the lord of La Palisse a letter, whereof this was the substance: 'Dear cousin, I have this morning been to look at the breach, which I find more than practicable for whoever would do his duty.
The doge, Leonardo Loredano, the same who had but lately opposed the surprisal of Padua, rose up and delivered in the senate a long speech, of which only the essential and characteristic points can be quoted here:--
"The lord of La Palisse," continues the chronicler, "thought this a somewhat strange manner of proceeding; howbeit he hid his thought, and said to the secretary, 'I am astounded that the emperor did not send for my comrades and me for to deliberate more fully of this matter; howbeit you will tell him that I will send to fetch them, and when they are come I will show them the letter.
They all looked at one another, laughing, for to see who would speak first.
During the night between the 16th and 17th of July, a small detachment, well armed and well led, arrived beneath the walls of Padua, which was rather carelessly guarded.
I do not think there will be many who will not be obedient to that which the emperor shall be pleased to command.'
But at the commencement of July, 1509, they heard that the important town of Padua, which had fallen to the share of Emperor Maximilian, was uttering passionate murmurs against its new master, and wished for nothing better than to come back beneath the old sway; and, in spite of the opposition shown by the doge, Loredano, the Venetians resolved to attempt the venture.
I pray you, so soon as my big drum sounds, which will be about midday, that you do incontinently hold ready all the French gentlemen who are under your orders at my service, by command of my brother the King of France, to go to the said assault along with my foot; and I hope that, with God's help we shall carry it.'
If the defence of Padua is the pledge for the salvation of Venice, who would hesitate to go and defend it?
To save it who would refuse to risk his own life and that of his children?
The disputes soon took the form of hostilities.
He forgot, moreover, that Ferdinand had at the head of his armies a tried chieftain, Gonzalvo of Cordova, already known throughout Europe as the great captain, who had won that name in campaigns against the Moors, the Turks, and the Portuguese, and who had the character of being as free from scruple as from fear.
The King of France, whatever sacrifices he might already have made and might still make in order to insure their co-operation, could no more count upon it than upon the loyalty of the King of Spain in the conquest they were entering upon together.
Whilst matters were thus going on in the north of Italy, Louis XII. was preparing for his second great Italian venture, the conquest of the kingdom of Naples, in which his predecessor Charles VIII. had failed.
D'Aubigny fell ill; and Louis XII. sent to Naples, with the title of viceroy, Louis d'Armagnac, Duke of Nemours, a brave warrior, but a negotiator inclined to take umbrage and to give offence.
All the prisoners, captains, men-at-arms, and common soldiers were accordingly given up, put to sea, and sailed for Genoa, where they were well received and kindly treated by the Genoese, which did them great good, for they were much in need of it.
Gonzalvo, who was kept well informed of his enemies' condition, threw, on the 27th of December, a bridge over the Garigliano, attacked the French suddenly, and forced them to fall back upon Gaeta, which they did not succeed in entering until they had lost artillery, baggage, and a number of prisoners.
He marched rapidly on Naples, and entered it on the 14th of May, almost without resistance; and the two forts defending the city, the Castel Nuovo and the Castel dell' Uovo surrendered, one on the 11th of June and the other on the 1st of July.
In giving the senate an account of his mission, one of the ambassadors, Dominic of Treviso, drew the following portrait of Louis XII.: "The king is in stature tall and thin, and temperate in eating, taking scarcely anything but boiled beef; he is by nature miserly and retentive; his great pleasure is hawking; from September to April he hawks.
The Venetian, Dominic of Treviso, was quite right; Louis XII. was "of unstable mind, saying yes and no." On such characters discouragement tells rapidly.
The French captains, seeing that fortune was not kind to them, and that they had provisions for a week only, were all for taking this offer.
The very day after his success Gonzalvo heard that a Spanish corps, lately disembarked in Calabria, had also beaten, on the 21st of April, at Seminara, a French corps commanded by D'Aubigny.
The French essayed to drive the Spaniards from the points they had occupied in the disputed territories; and at first they had the advantage.
Gonzalvo of Cordova was already upon Neapolitan territory with a Spanish army, which Ferdinand the Catholic had hastily sent thither at the request of Frederick III. himself, who had counted upon the assistance of his cousin the King of Arragon against the French invasion. Great was his consternation when he heard that the ambassadors of France and Spain had proclaimed at Rome the alliance between their masters.
The great captain was as eager to profit by victory as he had been patient in waiting for a chance of it.
He found Gonzalvo of Cordova posted with his army on the left bank of the Garigliano, either to invest the place or to repulse re-enforcements that might arrive for it.
Fortified with this authority, the army continued its march, and arrived before Capua on the 6th of July.
The French army, under the command of Stuart d'Aubigny, a valiant Scot, arrived on the 25th of June, 1501, before Rome, and there received a communication in the form of a bull of the pope which removed the crown of Naples from the head of Frederick III., and partitioned that fief of the Holy See between the Kings of France and Spain.
The outset of the campaign was attended with easy success.
The unhappy King Frederick took refuge in the island of Ischia; and, unable to bear the idea of seeking an asylum in Spain with his cousin who had betrayed him so shamefully, he begged the French admiral himself to advise him in his adversity.
But the candidature of Cardinal d'Amboise failed; a four weeks' pope, Pius III., succeeded Alexander VI.; and, when the Holy See suddenly became once more vacant, Cardinal d'Amboise failed again; and the new choice was Cardinal Julian della Rovera, Pope Julius II., who soon became the most determined and most dangerous foe of Louis XII., already assailed by so many enemies.
A French fleet, commanded by Philip de Ravenstein, arrived off Naples when D'Aubigny was already master of it.
It does not appear that Frederick ever had an idea of doing so, for his name is completely lost to history up to the day of his death, which took place at Tours on the 9th of November, 1504, after three years' oblivion and exile.
With those political miscalculations was connected a more personal and more disinterested feeling.
The French and the Spaniards, D'Aubigny and Gonzalvo of Cordova, at first gave their attention to nothing but establishing themselves firmly, each in the interests of the king his master, in those portions of the kingdom which were to belong to them.
In one of the fights brought about by this sudden revolution the young Chevalier Bayard, carried away by the impetuosity of his age and courage, pursued right into Milan the foes he was driving before him, without noticing that his French comrades had left him; and he was taken prisoner in front of the very palace in which were the quarters of Ludovic Sforza.
And these vicissitudes in their policy did not bring about their ruin, for at the death of Louis XII. their power and importance in Southern Europe had not declined.
There is certainly a royal castle, in the which lives the queen, the wife of the deceased king; nevertheless his Majesty was pleased to give audience in this hostelry, all covered expressly with cloth of Alexandrine velvet, with lilies of gold at the spot where the king was placed.
The Duke of Milan, Ludovic, the Moor, had by his sagacity and fertile mind, by his taste for arts and sciences and the intelligent patronage he bestowed upon them, by his ability in speaking, and by his facile character, obtained in Italy a position far beyond his real power.
Outside of France, Milaness [the Milanese district] was Louis XII.'s first thought, at his accession, and the first object of his desire.
Milan and Cremona alone remained to be occupied.
Duke Ludovic Sforza opposed to it a force pretty nearly equal in number, but far less full of confidence and of far less valor.
It provided for an alliance between the King of France and the Venetian government, for the purpose of making war in common upon the Duke of Milan, Ludovic Sforza, on and against every one, save the lord pope of Rome, and for the purpose of insuring to the Most Christian king restoration to the possession of the said duchy of Milan as his rightful and olden patrimony.
Unfortunately Trivulzio was himself a Milanese and of the faction of the Guelphs.
We shall thus get at a better understanding and better appreciation of their character and their results.
As early as the 20th of April, 1498, a fortnight after his accession, Louis XII. addressed to the Venetians a letter "most gracious," says the contemporary chronicler Marino Sanuto, "and testifying great good-will;" and the special courier who brought it declared that the king had written to nobody in Italy except the pope, the Venetians, and the Florentines.
The Venetians did not deserve his censure.
Let us follow these two portions of Louis XII.'s reign, each separately, without mixing up one with the other by reason of identity of dates.
He looked upon it as his patrimony.
Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most eminent amongst the noble geniuses of the age, lived on intimate terms with him; but Ludovic was, nevertheless, a turbulent rascal and a greedy tyrant, of whom those who did not profit by his vices or the enjoyments of his court were desirous of being relieved.
As soon as the speech was ended, his Majesty rose up and gave quite a brotherly welcome to the brilliant ambassadors.
In less than three weeks the duchy was conquered; in only two cases was any assault necessary; all the other places were given up by traitors or surrendered without a show of resistance.
By allying themselves, in 1499, with Louis XII. against the Duke of Milan, they did not fall into Louis's hands, for, between 1499 and 1515, and many times over, they sided alternately with and against him, always preserving their independence and displaying it as suited them at the moment.
And, indeed, his government did present these two phases, so different and inharmonious.
A plot was formed in favor of the fallen tyrant, who was in Germany expecting it, and was recruiting, during expectancy, amongst the Germans and Swiss in order to take advantage of it.
On the 25th of January, 1500, the insurrection broke out; and two months later Ludovic Sforza had once more become master of Milaness, where the French possessed nothing but the castle of Milan.
The treaty, at the same time, regulated the number of troops and the military details of the war on behalf of the two contracting powers, and it provided for divers political incidents which might be entailed, and to which the alliance thus concluded should or should not be applicable according to the special stipulations which were drawn up with a view to those very incidents.
It was Louis XII. who deserved Machiavelli's strictures for having engaged, by means of diplomatic alliances of the most contradictory kind, at one time with the Venetians' support, and at another against them, in a policy of distant and incoherent conquests, without any connection with the national interests of France, and, in the long run, without any success.
And on account of the charges and expenses which would be incurred by the Venetian government whilst rendering assistance to the Most Christian king in the aforesaid war, the Most Christian king bound himself to approve and consent that the city of Cremona and certain forts or territories adjacent, specially indicated, should belong in freehold and perpetuity to the Venetian government.
Ludovic Sforza "appeared before his troops and his people like the very spirit of lethargy," says a contemporary unpublished chronicle, "with his head bent down to the earth, and for a long while he remained thus pensive and without a single word to say.
"You thought I was dead?
Reproach me.
"Laura?
Laura thought this, believed it; because she desired to believe it.
I thought you were--"
You think I am as powerless as that day I fell dead at your feet?"
"And you dare come with her, here, and tell me of it, here and mock me with it!
think!
These measured strokes have worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was moored.
Two harvests a year; villages resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound of guitars, dancing, castanets, love-making; houses clean and bright; storks in the belfries.
Hence the disastrous cold weather, which caused that winter to be noted as "memorable to the poor," on the margin of the old Bible in the Presbyterian chapel of the Nonjurors in London.
Vivacity profound and superb!
With no wind from the sea, the water of the creek was calm.
Certain indentations in their clothes were visible, and showed that they belonged to the class called in England the ragged.
But the merchant and contraband hookers were very feeble specimens.
Since that period what is called Roman cement has been made of the Portland stone--a useful industry, enriching the district, and disfiguring the bay.
It was less cold in the creek than out at sea, thanks to the screen of rock rising over the north of the basin, which did not, however, prevent the people from shivering.
It figured in the Armada.
PORTLAND BILL.
The hooker was primitive, just like the praam and the canoe; was kindred to the praam in stability, and to the canoe in swiftness; and, like all vessels born of the instinct of the pirate and fisherman, it had remarkable sea qualities: it was equally well suited to landlocked and to open waters.
They are hazardous to enter, fearful to leave.
The pick bites meanly, the wave grandly; hence a diminution of beauty.
They do not mend their rags, but they embroider them.
Let us return to Portland--that rugged mountain in the sea.
It could sail round a lake, and sail round the world--a strange craft with two objects, good for a pond and good for a storm.
The indistinctness of evening intermixed and blurred them; the mask of shadow was over their faces.
A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level projection of the cliff, the only point on which a landing could be made, placed the vessel in communication with the land.
At the other side of the roads, at the entrance of Ringstead Bay, you could just perceive a flotilla of shark-fishing boats, which were evidently out of their reckoning.
Two wheels in two pulleys at the end of the rudder corrected this defect, and compensated, to some extent, for the loss of strength.
They formed a busy and confused group, in rapid movement on the shore.
These Biscay hookers, even to the poorest, were gilt and painted. Tattooing is part of the genius of those charming people, savages to some degree.
Any one approaching the vessel's moorings would have recognized a Biscayan hooker.
These little ports (ports more in appearance than fact) are of small advantage.
The pathway of this creek, full of knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and better adapted for goats than men, terminated on the platform where the plank was placed.
An obstinate north wind blew without ceasing over the mainland of Europe, and yet more roughly over England, during all the month of December, 1689, and all the month of January, 1690.
Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists now but for trade.
The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher than its width, was minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening.
The twisting of the pathway could be distinguished vaguely in the relief of the cliff.
The Thames was frozen over--a thing which does not happen once in a century, as the ice forms on it with difficulty owing to the action of the sea.
Excepting the movement of embarkation which was being made in the creek, a movement visibly scared and uneasy, all around was solitude; no step, no noise, no breath was heard.
Their coaches, which you can hear grinding the wheels two leagues off, are illuminated, carved, and hung with ribbons.
To distinguish one from another was difficult; impossible to tell whether they were old or young.
The peninsula of Portland, looked at geometrically, presents the appearance of a bird's head, of which the bill is turned towards the ocean, the back of the head towards Weymouth; the isthmus is its neck.
This thick ice lasted two months.
The pathways of cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than incline.
CHAPTER I.
Dark figures were crossing and recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and in the shadow some people were embarking.
The compass was well housed in a case perfectly square, and well balanced by its two copper frames placed horizontally, one in the other, on little bolts, as in Cardan's lamps.
They had just taken refuge in the anchorage of Portland--a sign of bad weather expected and danger out at sea.
There was beginning to be felt that deep and sombrous melancholy which might be called anxiety for the absent sun.
An ox was roasted whole on the ice.
Biscay is Pyrenean grace as Savoy is Alpine grace.
Almost all the Portland creeks have sand-bars; and in heavy weather the sea becomes very rough, and, to pass in safety, much skill and practice are necessary.
This was, especially in winter, a lucky exception.
They were sketches in the night.
Sea-folk held them at their true value, and esteemed the model a very sorry one, The rigging of the hooker was made of hemp, sometimes with wire inside, which was probably intended as a means, however unscientific, of obtaining indications, in the case of magnetic tension.
It was already night at the bottom of the cliff; it was still day at top.
"I think as you about that."
"Blood, a regular pool of it--enough to have cleared out the carcass of a hull buffalo.
Give me ten minutes upon it, and then come on to my signal."
That's how I shed reckon it up.
"Not a spark, major.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE.
"What proof have you of what you say?
THE POOL OF BLOOD.
They have gone up this openin' a bit, and come back again."
"What is it?" demanded the major, spurring ahead of the others, and riding up to the tracker.
It will at least fall lighter upon him if he find things out by piecemeal.
None such were seen along the route.
"Not a bit of it," rejoined the scout, with an air of confidence.
As you see, both are shod; and they're the same that have come back again.
The other is the hoof of an American horse.
We may as well go back, major.
"'Tis very mysterious," remarked the major.
Before taking the back track, however, they had halted, and stayed some time in the same place--under the branches of a spreading cottonwood. The turf, much trampled around the trunk of the tree, was evidence of this.
"I should be blind if I didn't," replied the officer.
The trackers knew that it conducted to the Alamo; and, therefore, guided the expedition into it.
Say nothing of what we've seen.
"Yes, Spangler, you shall have every facility for your work.
There was reason.
That's why I didn't wish him to come forward."
"Mr Poindexter, you mean?"
"Most strange!" exclaimed the major, pronouncing the words with emphasis--"most mysterious!"
"By all means," replied the major.
"The tracks of a horse."
"That's what purplexes me most of all.
On the prairie, extending nearly ten miles to the westward of the Leona, no trail was discovered.
"By the same token," he continued, "I conclude that the two horsemen, whoever they were, while under this tree could not have had any very hostile feelins, the one to the tother.
At this point the trail ended--both horses, as was already known, having returned on their own tracks.
Only convinced that the horse the old gentleman is now riding is one of the two that's been over this ground last night--the States horse I feel sure.
If't hadn't been for the tale of Old Duffer I'd never have thought of Maurice the mustanger.
He can only take me along with him."
"And you may think so, major.
"How! by the Indians, of course?
There are two."
"If you are speaking the truth, Spangler, you must be a witch.
The tracker got off his horse to examine it; and, stooping to the earth, carefully scrutinised the sign.
Surely it can't be?
It's simple enough.
"Spangler! have you any suspicion as to who the other may be?"
"I shall command the people to stay where they are."
"You see that, major?" said he, pointing to the ground.
We must follow the trail, howsoever; and maybe it'll fetch us to some sensible concloosion.
That's what is puzzling me."
"Well, Spangler, my good fellow; what do you make of it?"
"True.
Look there!
About fifty yards further on, Spangler came to a stand.
We may make something out of that.
The young Irishman aint the man to stand nonsense from nobody; but as little air he the one to do a deed like this--that is, if it's been cold-blooded killin'."
The tracker, stooping as he spoke, picked up a brace of cigar stumps, and handed them to the major.
"Whose do you think it is, Spangler?"
"Yes.
"Dead!" pronounced the tracker.
Through this jungle, directly opposite the Fort, there is an opening, through which passes a path--the shortest that leads to the head waters of the Nueces.
Shortly after entering among the trees, one of the latter, who had gone afoot in the advance, was seen standing by the edge of the thicket, as if waiting to announce some recently discovered fact.
It was obeyed, however, just as if they had been; and one and all kept their places, while the officer, following his scout, rode away from the ground.
They were mostly on the off side; where they presented an appearance, as if something had been slaked over them.
Did any one know where the horse-hunter had his home?
Only the Comanches could have been so cruel?
It furnished a sort of clue to the direction they ought to take.
Of course it was the body of the rider as it slipped lifeless to the earth.
It was directly negatived by the major himself.
While the inquiry was going on, light came in from a quartet hitherto unthought of.
These were the questions discussed by the mixed council of settlers and soldiers, hastily assembled at Port Inge, and presided over by the commandant of the Fort--the afflicted father standing speechless by his side.
Who last saw Henry Poindexter?
Where he had procured the money "Gott" only knew, or why he left the hotel in such a hurry.
The Indians were out, and near at hand, reaping their harvest of scalps! That of young Poindexter was the firstfruits of their sanguinary gleaning!
This was all Mr Oberdoffer knew of the matter; and all he could be expected to tell.
Among the horsemen, who came quickly together on the parade ground of Port Inge, no one doubted that the Comanches had done the deed.
Where was the body to be found?
Hastily--perhaps too truly--construing the sinister evidence, the half-frantic father leaped into the bloody saddle, and galloped direct for the Fort.
If he died and left her a legacy she would accept it gratefully enough.
"Oh!
If he makes it, he follows my instructions."
It wasn't as if Cutty was asking her to be his wife; he wasn't.
"I've been set in the middle of a fairy story," said Kitty, "and I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble to try to find a way out.
This dogged his thoughts like a murderer's deed, terrible in the watches of the night. Marry her, and then tell her.
We carry our troubles to our windows; through windows we see the stars.
Remember, I want a page yarn.
Kitty hung up her hat and coat.
"Good news.
Karlov dry-washed his hands.
Here's all the dope--introduction, expenses, and tickets.
Cutty attended his conferences.
He learned immediately that he was booked to sail the first week in May.
At any rate, there would have been none of this peculiar intimacy--Kitty coming to him in tears, opening her young heart to him and discovering all its loneliness.
Fundamentally, this catastrophe could be laid to the drums of jeopardy.
"I knew I'd hear that yodel.
We did not care to frighten you."
"Bed?"
No flapdoodle or mush; straight stuff.
"I beg your pardon, Burly!"
She has a husband round the lot somewhere.
"All right, Miss Conover." Bernini hid a smile.
Something in her--she could not define it, she could not reach it, it defied analysis--something, then, revolted at the idea of marrying Cutty, divorcing him, and living on his money.
The ancient female fear of the trap?
What would you say if you saw one in spats and a black derby?"
No elevator goes up unless you have credentials. Our man is hiding there, Boris."
If she loved some chap it would not be so hard, the temptation would not be so keen--to cheat her.
An assignment."
You are formal only to the city editor, the managing editor, and the auditor.
"But who?"
I have found your judgment ace-high. Mornings you will read with her; afternoons you will visit.
She wasn't cheating herself or Cutty: she was cheating convention, a flimsy thing at best.
Break her heart and break his own.
"I am going out of town, Mr. Bernini.
It was tearing her to pieces, this hidden repellence. And yet this occult objection was so utterly absurd.
I want you to note the contents of her beautiful home; if she likes dogs or cats or horses. You will take a camera and get half a dozen good pictures, and a page yarn for Easter Sunday.
So she will be quite as interested in you as you are in her.
"Every day but Sunday."
Run along home and pack.
Windows.
Fifty-two.
He wasn't going to let them know, but that bed was going to be tolerably welcome.
She got up suddenly, excused herself, and went to her room.
"Why," answered Burlingame, "I suppose I'd consider July first as the best thing that could happen to me."
But I haven't any clothes!"
If you go at it right you two will react upon each other as a tonic."
"It is, Kitty; only not to mimic.
"Why wasn't I told this at the start?"
For Washington would go to sleep again, naturally.
So my dope is right.
But they detained him in Washington overtime because he was a fount of information the departments found it necessary to draw upon constantly.
Six days, and her problem was still unsolved.
"I don't see how he did it."
Burlingame had intended sending Kitty out of town on an assignment during Easter week. An exchange of telegrams that morning had closed the gap in time.
An evil thought had entered her head; fate had made it honourably possible.
Burlingame waved his hands.
But she would return to New York on the morrow.
"Well, you might say 'Good morning.'"
So Kitty sought her window and added her question to the countless millions forlornly wandering about up there, and finding no answer.
"Not that we know of.
Still, you never can tell.
"Work!
"Well!" said Miss Frances.
No serious body wound.
What had that old rogue been doing now--offering Kitty his eighteen-story office building?
"He and the Conover girl left that office building together this morning, and I followed them to Park Row.
In newspaper offices you belong at once or you never belong; and to belong is to have your name sheared to as few syllables as possible.
Never before had he thought old.
"Nope.
"Yes, all of them, I think.
She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet's height, or rather taller."
"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he; "that is rather singular."
"Why?" said the old man.
"Yes," I said, "and besides, it does not press hardly on the minority: for, take this matter of the bridge, no man is obliged to work on it if he doesn't agree to its building.
As a rule, the immediate outcome shows which opinion on a given subject is the right one; it is a matter of fact, not of speculation.
"Does not that make the world duller?" said I.
He sat musing for a little, and then started and said: "Are there any more questions, dear guest?
"Very good," said I; "but what happens if the divisions are still narrow?"
"The obliteration of national variety," said I.
If the division is a close one, the question is again put off for further discussion; if the division is a wide one, the minority are asked if they will yield to the more general opinion, which they often, nay, most commonly do.
He smiled, and said: "Shrewdly put; and yet from the point of view of the native of another planet.
The man is benefited by the bridge-building if it turns out a good thing, and hurt by it if it turns out a bad one, whether he puts a hand to it or not; and meanwhile he is benefiting the bridge- builders by his work, whatever that may be.
In such a district, as you would call it, some neighbours think that something ought to be done or undone: a new town-hall built; a clearance of inconvenient houses; or say a stone bridge substituted for some ugly old iron one,--there you have undoing and doing in one.
"But do you know," said I, "that there is something in all this very like democracy; and I thought that democracy was considered to be in a moribund condition many, many years ago."
The old boy's eyes twinkled.
Said I: "Why, nothing, I should hope.
Which?
"I should think so, indeed," said he.
Do you assert that there are none?"
In fact, I see no help for him except the pleasure of saying 'I told you so' if the bridge-building turns out to be a mistake and hurts him; if it benefits him he must suffer in silence.
Equally, if no one backs the proposer,--'seconds him,' it used to be called--the matter drops for the time being; a thing not likely to happen amongst reasonable men, however, as the proposer is sure to have talked it over with others before the Mote.
"I will," said I.
Well, at the next ordinary meeting of the neighbours, or Mote, as we call it, according to the ancient tongue of the times before bureaucracy, a neighbour proposes the change, and of course, if everybody agrees, there is an end of discussion, except about details.
"Well--I don't know how," said I.
Said he: "The only alternatives to our method that I can conceive of are these.
"How is that managed?" said I.
Come, tell me that!"
Said I: "How do you manage with politics?"
CHAPTER XIV: HOW MATTERS ARE MANAGED
"Well," said I, "I don't know."
"Cross the water and see.
"Well," said he, "let us take one of our units of management, a commune, or a ward, or a parish (for we have all three names, indicating little real distinction between them now, though time was there was a good deal).
"Human nature!" cried the old boy, impetuously; "what human nature?
They have weathered the storm, and may reasonably expect peace.
Evidently she disliked meeting Henry.
The heart of Mrs. Wilcox was alone hidden, and perhaps it is superstitious to speculate on the feelings of the dead.
No doubt Leonard was worth helping, but being Henry's wife, she preferred to help someone else.
Yet the main cause lay deeper still; she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things.
Don't you believe in having a permanent home, Henry?"
No sooner did I sign the agreement than she got engaged.
"If possible, something permanent.
"I see your point," said Margaret, getting up.
"If Oniton is really damp, it is impossible, and must be inhabited by little boys.
have you a skin?
Don't let this go any further."
"My dear girl!"--he flung out his hand--"have you eyes?
"Besides, I have only heard for certain this morning."
In the first place, the Grange is on clay, and built where the castle moat must have been; then there's that destestable little river, steaming all night like a kettle.
One might go on asking such questions indefinitely."
She moved south again, and spoke of wintering in Naples.
Ask Sir James or anyone.
Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth.
It had decayed in the spring, disintegrating the girls more than they knew, and causing either to accost unfamiliar regions.
What's it been reading?
Through its round-topped doorway passed furniture, and pictures, and books, until the last room was gutted and the last van had rumbled away.
She began to "miss" new movements, and to spend her spare time re-reading or thinking, rather to the concern of her Chelsea friends.
He did not rely upon the sandwich for lunch, but liked to have it by him in case he grew hungry at eleven.
"Where are we to live?" said Margaret, trying to laugh.
Mr. Wilcox was not sorry that the meeting failed.
"It is now what?" continued Henry.
His affection for his present wife grew steadily.
She has had her country wedding, and I've got rid of my house to some fellows who are starting a preparatory school."
They were married quietly--really quietly, for as the day approached she refused to go through another Oniton.
Margaret could not resist saying, "Why did you go there, then?"
Poor little girl!
"I loved the place extraordinarily.
Her cleverness gave him no trouble, and, indeed, he liked to see her reading poetry or something about social questions; it distinguished her from the wives of other men.
She showed her annoyance, and asked rather crossly why she had not been consulted.
Then it fell.
Only, in the spring, let us look before we leap.
He had only to call, and she clapped the book up and was ready to do what he wished.
Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others--and thus was the death of Wickham Place--the spirit slips before the body perishes.
Henry knew of a reliable hotel there, and Margaret hoped for a meeting with her sister.
The plate and the more valuable pictures found a safer home in London, but the bulk of the things went country-ways, and were entrusted to the guardianship of Miss Avery.
She cannot win in a real battle, having no muscles, only nerves.
Theo--theo--how much?"
"I didn't want to bother you," he replied.
Feel the cellar walls; look up under the eaves.
Margaret was silent.
How could it be anything but damp in such a situation?
Margaret demurred, but Tibby accepted the offer gladly; it saved him from coming to any decision about the future.
Paul did send a cablegram.
I never heard till this minute that Oniton was damp."
Navvies came, and spilt it back into the grey.
Margaret had a bad attack of these nerves during the honeymoon.
But he did not believe in a damp home.
Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux.
Chapter 31
When he had gone, there was the house to look after, and the servants to humanize, and several kettles of Helen's to keep on the boil.
By September it was a corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness.
We arrived early, because Lena liked to watch the people come in.
I had prudently brought along Mrs. Harling's useful Commencement present, and I took Lena home under its shelter.
I loved Nanine tenderly; and Gaston, how one clung to that good fellow!
Her conception of the character was as heavy and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the consonants.
Between the acts we had no time to forget.
Her sudden illness, when the gayety was at its height, her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips, the cough she smothered under the laughter while Gaston kept playing the piano lightly--it all wrung my heart.
I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world.
How far was I from questioning her unbelief!
I saw no inconsistency.
After all the others had gathered round the card tables, and young Duval had been warned by Prudence, Marguerite descended the staircase with Varville; such a cloak, such a fan, such jewels--and her face!
This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family resemblance.
This introduced the most brilliant, worldly, the most enchantingly gay scene I had ever looked upon.
The orchestra kept sawing away at the "Traviata" music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking.
She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine.
I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure.
Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.
She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff.
But what did it matter?
But not so much as her cynicism in the long dialogue with her lover which followed.
I wept unrestrainedly.
Toward the end of April, the billboards, which I watched anxiously in those days, bloomed out one morning with gleaming white posters on which two names were impressively printed in blue Gothic letters: the name of an actress of whom I had often heard, and the name "Camille."
As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the Junior dances, or whether the cadets would camp at Plattsmouth.
The men were dressed more or less after the period in which the play was written; the women were not.
I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness.
There was a note on the programme, saying that the "incidental music" would be from the opera "Traviata," which was made from the same story as the play.
When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery.
The actress who played Marguerite was even then old-fashioned, though historic.
She sat entranced through "Robin Hood" and hung upon the lips of the contralto who sang, "Oh, Promise Me!"
Their talk seemed to open to one the brilliant world in which they lived; every sentence made one older and wiser, every pleasantry enlarged one's horizon.
One could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a drawing-room!
The New Year's presents were not too much; nothing could be too much now.
The lilacs were all blooming in the yards, and the smell of them after the rain, of the new leaves and the blossoms together, blew into my face with a sort of bitter sweetness.
I tramped through the puddles and under the showery trees, mourning for Marguerite Gauthier as if she had died only yesterday, sighing with the spirit of 1840, which had sighed so much, and which had reached me only that night, across long years and several languages, through the person of an infirm old actress.
She was a woman who could not be taught, it is said, though she had a crude natural force which carried with people whose feelings were accessible and whose taste was not squeamish.
Through the scene between Marguerite and the elder Duval, Lena wept unceasingly, and I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall.
At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse. Lightness of stress or behavior was far from her.
The weather was warm and sultry and put us both in a holiday humor.
Decidedly, there was a new tang about this dialogue.
But the lines were enough.
Even the handkerchief in my breast-pocket, worn for elegance and not at all for use, was wet through by the time that moribund woman sank for the last time into the arms of her lover.
A couple of jack-rabbits, run in off the prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.
I called at the Raleigh Block for Lena on Saturday evening, and we walked down to the theater.
When Armand, with the terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with her hands.
After leaving her, I walked slowly out into the country part of the town where I lived.
IN Lincoln the best part of the theatrical season came late, when the good companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in New York and Chicago.
There were chandeliers hung from the ceiling, I remember, many servants in livery, gaming-tables where the men played with piles of gold, and a staircase down which the guests made their entrance.
She had been a member of Daly's famous New York company, and afterward a "star" under his direction.
When we reached the door of the theater, the streets were shining with rain.
I seem to remember gilded chairs and tables (arranged hurriedly by footmen in white gloves and stockings), linen of dazzling whiteness, glittering glass, silver dishes, a great bowl of fruit, and the reddest of roses.
"The Count of Monte Cristo," which I had seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew.
I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true.
I did so regretfully, and the dim objects in the room emerged from the shadows and took their place about me with the helpfulness which custom breeds.
But maybe you have all the friends you want.
I have to dress pretty well in my business." She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk.
Have you?" She turned her soft cheek to me.
I can't stay at home in the evening if there's one in town.
She looked about her with the naive curiosity I remembered so well.
Next summer I'll take her down new furniture and carpets, so she'll have something to look forward to all winter."
"You like my new suit?
She'd always believe him.
Larry's afraid of them. They ship so much grain, they have influence with the railroad people. What are you studying?" She leaned her elbows on the table and drew my book toward her.
I'm to meet some Swedes at the drug-store.
"Maybe you're prettier--though you were always pretty enough.
I watched Lena sitting there so smooth and sunny and well cared-for, and thought of how she used to run barefoot over the prairie until after the snow began to fly, and how Crazy Mary chased her round and round the cornfields.
How surprised Mrs. Burden would be!" Lena laughed softly as she rose.
When I caught up my hat she shook her head.
"Some of us could tell her things, but it would n't do any good.
Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage.
"She's fine.
That's Antonia's failing, you know; if she once likes people, she won't hear anything against them."
"No, I don't want you to go with me.
I hurried to the door and when I opened it saw a woman standing in the dark hall.
I'd be ever so pleased.
I won't be able to pay up on it at first, but I want her to have it before she is too old to enjoy it.
I guess they're engaged.
Perhaps it's your clothes that make a difference."
I board, to save time, but sometimes I cook a chop for myself, and I'd be glad to cook one for you.
"So that's Latin, is it?
Mrs. Gardener's health is n't what it was, and she can't see after everything like she used to.
How I loved to hear her laugh again!
"Look at me; I've never earned a dollar, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to."
In the evening, as I sat staring at my book, the fervor of his voice stirred through the quantities on the page before me.
Don't you just love a good play, Jim?
I walked with her to the door.
"This summer I'm going to build the house for mother I've talked about so long.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience.
Lena had brought them all back to me.
"Have you?" she whispered teasingly in my ear.
I understood that clearly, for the first time.
We left the classroom quietly, conscious that we had been brushed by the wing of a great feeling, though perhaps I alone knew Cleric intimately enough to guess what that feeling was.
Seemed like I'd ought to woke him up so he could run too. Yet I didn't feel like touchin' him.
I never think what the devil looks like without seein' that red demon with his snaky black eyes, grinnin' at me!
I went along too, but I didn't help much--for I was only six.
Josiah he stayed with her, an' between him an' 'Mord,' they helped her along, but I had to git out and scratch for a livin'.
My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky about 1781 or 2, where, a year or two later, he was killed by Indians--not in battle, but by stealth, when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest.
"Young as I was, I remember what happened that day like it was only yesterday.
When he was President, Abraham Lincoln, who had never given much attention to the family pedigree, said that the history of his family was well described by a single line in Gray's "Elegy":
Lincoln's grandfather, for whom he was named Abraham, was a distant cousin to Daniel Boone.
"You know, Dan'l Boone he had lived among the Injuns.
He had sacrificed part of his property to the pioneer spirit within him, and, with the killing of their father, his family lost the rest.
In a letter about his family history, just before he was nominated for the presidency, Abraham Lincoln wrote:
"Abe Lincoln had a very high opinion of his uncle, and on one occasion remarked, 'I have often said that Uncle Mord had run off with all the talents of the family.'"
HOW INDIANS KILLED "GRANDFATHER LINCOLN"
"MORD" LINCOLN, INDIAN FIGHTER
Mordecai Lincoln was a joker and humorist.
"He was a man of great drollery, and it would almost make you laugh to look at him.
That made the others mad an' they took after me, but 'Mord' he drops the head one jist when he's goin' to hit me.
"Mordecai was quite a story-teller, and in this Abe resembled his 'Uncle Mord,' as we called him.
Yet Grandfather Abraham was wealthy for his day.
'Mord' he wasn't satisfied with killin' a few Injuns that day to revenge Father's death.
He was rich for them times, as he had property worth seventeen thousand dollars; but Mr. Boone he told Father he could make a good deal more by trappin' and tradin' with the Injuns for valuable pelts, or fur skins.
"Well, your grandfather was a Quaker, you see, and believed in treatin' them red devils well--like William Penn done, you know.
They had been watchin' an', of course, 'twas all right to kill Father, but when 'Mord' killed one o' their bucks, that made a big difference.
His son Thomas told this story to his children:
He was a man for peace and quiet, and everything was goin' smooth with the tribes of what we called the Beargrass Country, till one day, when he and my brothers, Mordecai--'Mord' was a big fellow for his age--and Josiah, a few years younger--was out in the clearin' with the oxen, haulin' logs down to the crick.
He was an honest man, as tender-hearted as a woman, and to the last degree charitable and benevolent.
"I was standin' there, kind o' dazed, watchin' another puff o' white smoke, comin' out between two logs in the side of our house.
But, in the Summer of 1784, the tragic day dawned upon the Lincolns which has come to many a pioneer family in Kentucky and elsewhere.
"That was the breaking up of our family.
"My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, literally without education."
He made a business of shootin' 'em on sight--a reg'lar Injun stalker!
Josiah, he starts right off in the opposite direction to the Beargrass fort--we called it a fort, but it was nothin' but a stockade. The way we boys scattered was like a brood o' young turkeys, or pa'tridges, strikin' for cover when the old one is shot.
He was such a good fellow that them Injuns admired his shrewdness, and they let him do about what he pleased.
It was like hell broke loose.
Then I knowed 'Mord' had shot my Injun.
TOM LINCOLN CHASED BY INDIANS
I never saw but one other man whose quiet, droll look excited in me the disposition to laugh, and that was 'Artemus Ward.'
He couldn't see that he was jist as savage as the worst Injun, to murder 'em without waitin' to see whether Mr. Injun was a friend or a foe.
Seemed like I couldn't run half as fast as usual, but I must 'a' made purty good time, from what 'Mord' an' Mother said afterward.
An effort to identify them with the New England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like.
Folks didn't mind his shootin' an' Injun or two, more or less, when he got the chancet.
So he thought they'd let Father alone.
His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Little is known today of Mordecai Lincoln, and there would be less interest in poor Thomas if he had not become the father of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States.
It come like a bolt out of the blue.
"Injuns!" gasps Mord, and starts on the run for the house--to get his gun.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FOREFATHERS
One who knew him well said of him:
I had sense enough left to run for the house with them Injuns after me.
The Lincolns were of good old English stock.
"My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families--second families, perhaps I should say.
I think I must 'a' knowed he was dead.
My mother was of a family of the name of Hanks.
He was a sure shot with the rifle so's he could beat the redskins at their own game.
"The short and simple annals of the poor."
I knowed what he was goin' to do--skelp my father!
He was welcome to it too, for he was the only one of us that could take care of it.
The Boones and the Lincolns had intermarried for generations.
Grandfather Lincoln had built a solid log cabin and cleared a field or two around it, near the Falls of the Ohio, about where Louisville now stands.
He accompanied Boone from Virginia to Kentucky and lost his life there.
Waitin' till the ol' demon turns away, so's not to hit me, 'Mord' he aims at a silver dangler on Mr. Injun's breast and makes him drop in his tracks like I said.
I knowed I'd ought to run too, but I didn't want to leave my father layin' there on the ground.
CHAPTER I
Why, colonel, what a question!
"I suspect it's high living.
There are those five Misses Hornet--dreadful old maids!--as full of spite as they can live.
Put down the Hornets, though."
"Oh!" said the colonel.
"The Bees are a worthy family," said the colonel.
"How stupid of them," said Katy, "not to know better than to put their house in the garden-walk; that's just like those Ants."
Still less of the gods, as you say, he replied.
is it fit or conducive to temperance for a young man to hear such words? Or the verse
and who have
'Rolling in the dirt, calling each man loudly by his name.'
Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good.
Certainly not, he said.
Indeed, he said, I am strongly of opinion that they ought not to hear that sort of thing.
Assuredly.
They are ill spoken.
And for this reason the loss of a son or brother, or the deprivation of fortune, is to him of all men least terrible.
Neither is Phoenix, the tutor of Achilles, to be approved or deemed to have given his pupil good counsel when he told him that he should take the gifts of the Greeks and assist them; but that without a gift he should not lay aside his anger.
In the next place, we must not let them be receivers of gifts or lovers of money.
To be sure we shall, he replied.
True.
'The saddest of fates is to die and meet destiny from hunger?'
Again:--
It ought not to be.
'I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.'
Yes, he said, that is most true.
and the verses which follow,
True, he said.
They will go with the rest.
You are quite right, he replied.
And further they are likely to have a bad effect on those who hear them; for everybody will begin to excuse his own vices when he is convinced that similar wickednesses are always being perpetrated by--
That such things are or are not to be said about men is a question which we cannot determine until we have discovered what justice is, and how naturally advantageous to the possessor, whether he seem to be just or not.
Neither ought our guardians to be given to laughter.
'When the tables are full of bread and meat, and the cup-bearer carries round wine which he draws from the bowl and pours into the cups,'
For a fit of laughter which has been indulged to excess almost always produces a violent reaction.
And therefore let us put an end to such tales, lest they engender laxity of morals among the young.
Clearly.
Again of Tiresias:--
Certainly, he said.
Still, he said, I do not comprehend you.
That was my meaning when I said that we must teach music before gymnastics.
Perfectly right.
But no mad or senseless person can be a friend of God.
And no good thing is hurtful?
But may he not change and transform himself?
But when is this fault committed?
Then is God perfectly simple and true both in word and deed; he changes not; he deceives not, either by sign or word, by dream or waking vision.
But he may have friends who are senseless or mad?
That is inconceivable.
Yes.
By all means.
And I thought that the word of Phoebus, being divine and full of prophecy, would not fail.
Perhaps, he replied.
Am I not right?
That necessarily follows, he said, in my judgment.
--let us have no more lies of that sort.
None whatever.
True.
Assuredly.
but that he to whom is given the cup of unmingled ill,
I do not understand your meaning, he said.
Then the lying poet has no place in our idea of God?
What do you mean?
The true lie is hated not only by the gods, but also by men?
I said to him, You and I, Adeimantus, at this moment are not poets, but founders of a State: now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which poets should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them, but to make the tales is not their business.
Quite right, he said.
'Zeus, who is the dispenser of good and evil to us.'
'The gods, taking the disguise of strangers from other lands, walk up and down cities in all sorts of forms;'
Well, but can you imagine that God will be willing to lie, whether in word or deed, or to put forth a phantom of himself?
Shall we begin education with music, and go on to gymnastic afterwards?
The gods are not magicians who transform themselves, neither do they deceive mankind in any way.
Let this then be one of our rules and principles concerning the gods, to which our poets and reciters will be expected to conform,--that God is not the author of all things, but of good only.
First of all, I said, there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranus, and which was a bad lie too,--I mean what Hesiod says that Uranus did, and how Cronus retaliated on him.
And the same principle, as I should suppose, applies to all composite things--furniture, houses, garments: when good and well made, they are least altered by time and circumstances.
Very true.
Quite true.
And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?
I do.
Yes.
'Him wild hunger drives o'er the beauteous earth.'
There you are right, he replied; but if any one asks where are such models to be found and of what tales are you speaking--how shall we answer him?
Can we suppose that he is ignorant of antiquity, and therefore has recourse to invention?
And when he had spoken of my lot as in all things blessed of heaven he raised a note of triumph and cheered my soul.
Something of this kind, I replied:--God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.
Impossible.
Pray go on!
Let me persuade you
Let me speak frankly
My idea of it is quite the reverse
Oh, yes, you may take that for granted
So I inferred
Just trust to the inspiration of the moment
Surely we can speak frankly
No, I am speaking seriously
Relatively speaking
Now you are flippant
Please continue to be frank
Not at all
Really--you must go?
I hope the time may come again
I have before me the statistics
I have attempted thus hastily
I have thought it right on this day
I have thus been led by my feelings
I have all but finished
I have never whispered a syllable
I have thought it incumbent on me
I have a strong belief
I have already stated, and now repeat
I have only partially examined
I hope by this time we are all convinced
I have scant patience
I have been requested to say a word
I have watched with some attention
I have still two comments to make
I have been trying to show
I hope I have expressed myself explicitly
I have been asked several times
I hope not to occupy more than a few minutes
I have tried to convey to you
I have a very high respect for
I have long been of the conviction
I hope we may forget
I hope to be excused if
I have now said all that occurs to me
I have very much less feeling of
I have demonstrated to you
I have one step farther to go
I have yet to learn
I have always been under the impression
I have undertaken to speak
I have not time to present
I have now rather more than kept my word
I have generally observed
I have anticipated the objection
I have felt it almost a duty to
I have no doubt whatever
I have not particularly referred to
I have the honor to propose
I have a dark suspicion
I have barely touched some of the points
I have witnessed the extraordinary
I have but one more word to add
I hold the maxim no less applicable
I have not accustomed myself
I have depicted
I have found great cause for wonder
I have a profound pity for those
I hope the day may be far distant
I have now explained to you
I have often been struck with the resemblance
I have said and I repeat
I have gone so far as to suggest
I have a right to consider
I have often lingered in fancy
I have not been able to deny
I have noticed of late years
I have partly anticipated
I have read with great regret
I have pride and pleasure in quoting
I hold to the principle
I have racked this brain of mine
I hold it to be clearly expedient
I have touched very cursorily
I have now made bold to touch upon
I have been told by an eminent authority
Transparency is a virtue only in artificial instruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsic operation is not itself a portion of human life.
[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable.]
Recognition given to a man's talent or virtue is not properly friendship.
[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction.]
When the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strain become altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal liking may be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more political fellowships.
Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or comradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral appreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to produce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting, friendship does not arise.
The devotion which was, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed in fancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal.
Since the meaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and since the image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a real external object, meaning and image, as time goes on, will necessarily fall apart.
This poetic process is all the more successful for being automatic.
[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent.]
[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife.]
[Sidenote: Between master and disciple.]
Hero-worship is an imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapes and take actual persons for their symbols.
A disembodied ideal, however, is unmanageable and vague; it cannot exercise the natural and material suasion proper to a model we are expected to imitate.
That portion of a man's soul which he has not alienated and objectified is open only to those who know him otherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his public attributions.
He is an unmoved mover, like Aristotle's God and like every ideal to which thought or action is directed.
For friendship to flourish personal life would have to become more public and social life more simple and humane.
No natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is or should be transparent.
A legend or fable lying in the mind and continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some new eloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had already awakened, and was destined to awake again.
When a thought conveyed or a work done enters alone into the observer's experience, no friendship is possible.
[Sidenote: Automatic idealisation of heroes.]
A man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for the energies he exerts.
Discipleship and hero-worship are not stable relations.
[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas.]
The necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests is what makes true friendship so rare.
Friendship might thus be called ideal sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous affinity colouring a spiritual light.
Without claiming any share in the master's private life, perhaps without having ever seen him, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support and guidance in following the ideal which links us together.
Such companionship, perhaps wholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society. The unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence is irrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to the idealising mind.
If we approach friendship from above and compare it with more ideal loyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis in chance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it with mere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence of common ideal interests.
Friends must desire to live as much as possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures. Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them, and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human medium through which it beheld the good.
Certain capacities and tendencies in the worshipper are brought to a focus by the hero's image, who is thereby first discovered and deputed to be a hero.
All these sentimental feelings are at any rate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to more discriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture may possibly pitch on a higher key.
In spite of intellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are bound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection for children, and, what is of great importance, common financial interests.
It is in this way that heroes and gods have been created.
These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting unanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a marriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise of happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it requires.
Such persons are his friends.
Estimation has been partly arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely accent to universal discourse.
In looking through a field-glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbows about their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose its pigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns.
The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient ideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage.
The more fruitful procedure is accordingly to idealise some historical figure or natural force, to ignore or minimise in it what does not seem acceptable, and to retain at the same time all the unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that can help to give that model a persuasive vitality.
That is a silly and effeminate friendship in which the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and of how each stands in the other's eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort, in which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rather a feeble form of love than properly a friendship.
This is always the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructed personality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceived nexus for the work he performed.
This form is what consciousness corresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significant thoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seems to serve.
Noble ideas, although rare and difficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.
[Sidenote: Romantic egotism.]
He will then say that all experience is really his own and that some inexplicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions in his omniscient mind.
Consciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is ideal through and through.
[Sidenote: Vanity.]
The mind spreads and soars in proportion as the body feeds on the surrounding world.
In themselves events are perfectly mechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor avoiding what we call failures.
Interest in one's own social figure is to some extent a material interest, for other men's love or aversion is a principle read into their acts; and a social animal like man is dependent on other men's acts for his happiness.
It registers its own movement, like that of its objects, entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining, and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse.
A hostile word, by starting a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely and threatens to dissolve their being.
Primary mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great persistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into prodigious abstract systems of thought.
[Sidenote: The self an ideal.]
At first it establishes affections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later it grows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind and sympathetic purposes.
Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse, and impulse expresses a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
The more reflective and self-conscious a man is the more completely will his experience be subsumed and absorbed in his perennial "I." If philosophy has come to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may even regard all nature as nothing but his half-voluntary dream and encourage himself thereby to give even to the physical world a dramatic and sentimental colour.
What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed?
Nature's values are imputed to her retroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logical and moral primacy of its own.
These figures all represent some circle of events or forces in the real world; but such representation, besides being mythical, is usually most inadequate.
From this relative substantiality they fade into notions of country, posterity, humanity, and the gods.
Thus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancy in the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arise where an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself.
These ideal affinities, although grounded like the others on material relations (for sympathy presupposes communication), do not have those relations for their theme but rest on them merely as on a pedestal from which they look away to their own realm, as music, while sustained by vibrating instruments, looks away from them to its own universe of sound.
Its personages are all mythical, beginning with that brave protagonist who calls himself I and speaks all the soliloquies.
The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame.
They often identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed.
Reason is a principle of order appearing in a subject-matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be an irrational datum.
It is a passion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate.
Yet, beneath this desire for nominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an ideal ambition of which the ancients cannot have been unconscious when they set so high a value on fame.
Philosophers less pretentious and more worldly than these have sometimes felt, in their way, the absorbing force of self-consciousness.
For self is, after all, but one term in a primitive dichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it no longer contrasted with anything else.
But imagination here refines upon worldly interest. What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
"I think she will.
"Yes, all of them, I think.
"I wish it may."
The advice was followed readily, for the feverish symptoms increased, and her head ached acutely.
Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds.
"From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two of the silliest girls in the country.
"MY DEAREST LIZZY,--
"I shall be very fit to see Jane--which is all I want."
Their visits to Mrs. Phillips were now productive of the most interesting intelligence.
"Can I have the carriage?" said Jane.
"No, indeed, I do not wish to avoid the walk.
I shall be back by dinner."
"That would be a good scheme," said Elizabeth, "if you were sure that they would not offer to send her home."
"Oh!
Well, Jane, make haste and tell us; make haste, my love."
Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr. Hurst nothing at all.
The latter was thinking only of his breakfast.
"CAROLINE BINGLEY"
"If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it."
What does he say?
Her hopes were answered; Jane had not been gone long before it rained hard.
"It is from Miss Bingley," said Jane, and then read it aloud.
"But if you have got them to-day," said Elizabeth, "my mother's purpose will be answered."
"Well, my dear," said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the note aloud, "if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of illness--if she should die, it would be a comfort to know that it was all in pursuit of Mr. Bingley, and under your orders."
"Is this a hint to me, Lizzy," said her father, "to send for the horses?"
Elizabeth did not quit her room for a moment; nor were the other ladies often absent; the gentlemen being out, they had, in fact, nothing to do elsewhere.
"With the officers!" cried Lydia.
Elizabeth silently attended her.
"No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night."
"Dining out," said Mrs. Bennet, "that is very unlucky."
"We will go as far as Meryton with you," said Catherine and Lydia. Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young ladies set off together.
"I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to be imputed to my getting wet through yesterday.
She was received, however, very politely by them; and in their brother's manners there was something better than politeness; there was good humour and kindness.
I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced."
"This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed!" said Mrs. Bennet more than once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own.
She had a sister married to a Mr. Phillips, who had been a clerk to their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother settled in London in a respectable line of trade.
She was not equal, however, to much conversation, and when Miss Bingley left them together, could attempt little besides expressions of gratitude for the extraordinary kindness she was treated with.
Miss Bennet had slept ill, and though up, was very feverish, and not well enough to leave her room.
What is it about?
Thus much for my general intention in favour of matrimony; it remains to be told why my views were directed towards Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I can assure you there are many amiable young women.
And now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.
Mrs. Bennet and Kitty walked off, and as soon as they were gone, Mr. Collins began.
On finding Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth, and one of the younger girls together, soon after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words:
Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to plague you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart."
"Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary.
Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise, Mrs. Bennet answered instantly, "Oh dear!--yes--certainly.
"Really, Mr. Collins," cried Elizabeth with some warmth, "you puzzle me exceedingly.
As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females."
Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at the moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the observances, which he supposed a regular part of the business.
You will find her manners beyond anything I can describe; and your wit and vivacity, I think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite.
You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken.
He can have nothing to say to me that anybody need not hear.
Come, Kitty, I want you up stairs." And, gathering her work together, she was hastening away, when Elizabeth called out:
"I am not now to learn," replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a third time.
On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married."
I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time.
I am going away myself."
You must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the compliment of believing what I say.
My feelings in every respect forbid it.
"Dear madam, do not go.
I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.
"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections.
Let me do it without further loss of time.
Nay, were your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I am persuaded she would find me in every respect ill qualified for the situation."
Collins, you must marry.
"You are uniformly charming!" cried he, with an air of awkward gallantry; "and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of being acceptable."
I beg you will not go.
I am perfectly serious in my refusal.
I am very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is impossible for me to do otherwise than to decline them."
I am sure Lizzy will be very happy--I am sure she can have no objection.
The next day opened a new scene at Longbourn.
Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunction--and a moment's consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to get it over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again and tried to conceal, by incessant employment the feelings which were divided between distress and diversion.
This is my advice.
"Upon my word, sir," cried Elizabeth, "your hope is a rather extraordinary one after my declaration.
And you may be certain when I have the honour of seeing her again, I shall speak in the very highest terms of your modesty, economy, and other amiable qualification."
"May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter Elizabeth, when I solicit for the honour of a private audience with her in the course of this morning?"
I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long."
"You are too hasty, sir," she cried.
I wish you very happy and very rich, and by refusing your hand, do all in my power to prevent your being otherwise. In making me the offer, you must have satisfied the delicacy of your feelings with regard to my family, and may take possession of Longbourn estate whenever it falls, without any self-reproach.
"You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course.
Can I speak plainer?
I thank you again and again for the honour you have done me in your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible.
My reasons for believing it are briefly these: It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable.
Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications.
This matter may be considered, therefore, as finally settled." And rising as she thus spoke, she would have quitted the room, had Mr. Collins not thus addressed her:
Chapter 19
"You forget that I have made no answer.
Mr. Collins must excuse me.
For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.
The Diction viewed as a whole is made up of the following parts: the Letter (or ultimate element), the Syllable, the Conjunction, the Article, the Noun, the Verb, the Case, and the Speech. (1) The Letter is an indivisible sound of a particular kind, one that may become a factor in an intelligible sound.
Thus a cup (B) is in relation to Dionysus (A) what a shield (D) is to Ares (C).
Whatever its structure, a Noun must always be either (1) the ordinary word for the thing, or (2) a strange word, or (3) a metaphor, or (4) an ornamental word, or (5) a coined word, or (6) a word lengthened out, or (7) curtailed, or (8) altered in form.
In the Speech 'Cleon walks', 'Cleon' is an instance of such a part.
The earls of Huntingdon, Derby, and Rutland imitated his example.
This expedient had its effect: the populace was dispersed: Mackrel and some of their leaders fell into the king's hands, and were executed: the greater part of the multitude retired peaceably to their usual occupations: a few of the more obstinate fled to the north, where they joined the insurrection that was raised in those parts.
Soon after this prosperous success, an event happened which crowned Henry's joy--the birth of a son, who was baptized by the name of Edward.
Henry continued desirous of cementing a union with the German Protestants; and for that purpose he sent Christopher Mount to a congress which they held at Brunswick; but that minister made no great progress in his negotiation.
Norfolk, therefore, soon found himself in the same difficulty as before; and he opened again a negotiation with the leaders of the multitude.
The demands of the rebels were so exorbitant, that Norfolk rejected them; and they prepared again to decide the contest by arms.
He encamped near Doncaster, together with the earl of Shrewsbury; and as his army was small, scarcely exceeding five thousand men, he made choice of a post where he had a river in front, the ford of which he purposed to defend against the rebels.
It's a bit high up, but that don't matter much.'
That's the one thing as I couldn't bear. I ain't so young as I was, and I've had things as was hard to go through--I mean when the mother died and--and other things at that time.
Now that the girl could be removed from the infirmary, there was no retreat for her but her father's home.
'He has been--just now an' then.'
He looked about in an absent way, slowly drew off his overcoat, and when Amy offered to take it, bent and kissed her cheek.
They can come when they like, only they mustn't want me to talk to them.'
Having administered a scolding, Mrs. Eagles went into the room which she and her husband occupied.
Was it Mr. Kirkwood?'
Necessity brought the father back to London almost at once, but the news sent him at brief intervals continued to be favourable.
When her father had taken a place near her she asked him, 'Have you got that piece of newspaper still?'
'Why don't you like to tell me, father?
It was so encumbered with furniture that not more than eight or ten square feet of floor can have been available for movement.
Yes, you can pour me out a cup--and put another on the little tray.
Half a year ago, and what should he have done?
'Well, well; it do want to cool a bit.
He shall never come, if you don't wish it.'
Of late Amy Hewett had become the victim of a singular propensity; whenever she could obtain vinegar, she drank it as a toper does spirits.
'I suppose he's altered in some ways?'
No, not he.
You're a silly girl, that's what you are!'
'And how did you manage to buy this furniture?' Clara asked, after a pause.
When she had taken off her bonnet and was turning out the contents of her bag, Eagles remarked quietly:
He went softly from the room, and joined the children at their tea.
John hesitated before going.
Indefatigably he worked on, and the work had to be its own reward.
He would take Sidney into council.
He would not admit to himself that there were any difficulties ahead; if it came to that, he would manage to get some extra work in the evening and on Saturday afternoons.
'Only whilst I'm here.'
Is this stuff in the saucepan ready?' 'Mrs. Eagles said it would be in five minutes.'.
'Why, I haven't touched a drop, Mrs. Eagles!'
Do you know the Burial Club broke up just before she died?
I shall find some way of earning a living, and then I shall go and get a room for myself.'
Do you feel able to sit up?'
After travellin'--just a spoonful or two.'
'No.
'Shall I pour out the tea, father?' Amy ventured to ask, when there was again perfect silence.
Hewett took her hand, and for a while they kept silence.
The beauty of her form would have impressed anyone who approached her, the grace of her bent head; but the countenance was no longer that of Clara Hewett; none must now look at her, unless to pity. Feeling herself thus utterly changed, she could not speak in her former natural voice; her utterance was oppressed, unmusical, monotonous.
The tone was not exactly impatient; it spoke a weary indifference to everything and every person.
On the bed sat Mr. Eagles, a spare, large-headed, ugly, but very thoughtful-looking man; he and Sidney Kirkwood had been acquaintances and fellow-workmen for some years, but no close intimacy had arisen between them, owing to the difference of their tastes and views.
You won't speak about goin' away?'
'You shall do what else you like, my girl, but don't talk about goin' away from me.
The truth of the situation was, that John had received by post, from he knew not whom, a newspaper report of the inquest held on the body of Grace Danver, wherein, of course, was an account of what had happened to Clara Vale; in the margin was pencilled, 'Clara Vale's real name is Clara Hewett.' An hour after receiving this John encountered Sidney Kirkwood.
'I don't feel hungry, father.
Mrs. Eagles withdrew into her own room; Amy went to the door.
Clara sat by the fireside, in her attitude of last night, hiding her face as far as she was able.
'Yes--yes--it was there.'
Presently, perhaps.'
'They'll have a bad journey.'
Having already taken the cup of tea to Clara, Hewett now returned to her with this food.
Neither spoke for a long time.
'Not much; I don't see much change, myself, but then of course-- No, he's pretty much the same.'
'Yes, father.'
Overcome at first by the dark aspect of this home-coming, he now began to taste the joy of having Clara under his roof, rescued alike from those vague dangers of the past and from the recent peril.
'Well, my dear, to tell you the truth--it was a friend as--an old friend helped us a bit.'
'There's no harm.
The door closed, and for several minutes the three children stood regarding each other, alarmed, mute.
'What a day for her to be travelling all that distance, poor thing!
'And does he ever come here?'
Clara expressed reluctance.
Clara's head sank lower; she drew her hand away from her father's, and used it to shield her face.
Inadequate nourishment, and especially an unsatisfied palate, frequently have this result in female children among the poor; it is an anticipation of what will befall them as soon as they find their way to the publichouse.
'There it is in black and white!' But Sidney's faculties were quite unequal to calculations of this kind, and Eagles could never summon resolve to explain his schemes before an audience.
CHAPTER XXVII
When she spoke, it was as if to herself.
The old was all done for, you know.'
'Is there a light in the other room, Amy?' John inquired in a thick voice.
I couldn't get not a ha'penny!
Things is better with me now, but I'd rather beg my bread in the streets than you should go away.
The fluid had been thrown too low to effect the worst injury; the accident of a trembling hand, of a movement on her part, had kept her eyes untouched.
Her long absence had alarmed him; he feared she might be ill.
Alone and friendless in a foreign country; her fair fame blemished; her hope in the future utterly destroyed, she attempted to drown herself.
My mother thanked him and refused.
"But why did my mother make him promise to sell the place at his death?
I am her only child.
The strange surname struck her; it was "Bennydeck."
This took place in France.
We may have a naval war, perhaps, or I may turn out one of those incorrigible madmen who risk their lives in Arctic exploration.
When her wish had been gratified, when she had read it from beginning to end, one vivid impression only was left on her mind.
"Having reminded you of this, I may next tell you that Sandyseal Place was my mother's property.
"If my lot had fallen among good people," she thought, "perhaps I might have belonged to the Church which took care of that poor girl."
His store was a small one, containing a mixture of books, stationery, and fancy rubbish.
And then that harmless, but persistent, individual so numerous in the South--the man who is always clamoring for more cotton mills, and is ready to take a dollar's worth of stock, provided he can borrow the dollar--that man added his deadly work to the tourist's innocent praise, and Okochee fell.
J. Pinkney Bloom excused himself, went forward, and stood by the captain at the wheel.
The Colonel smoothed back, with a sweeping gesture, his long, smooth, locks.
The fate of the good town is quickly told.
"I want to buy your house and store," said Mr. Bloom.
One last trip he was making to Skyland before departing to other salad fields.
Very fair and stately they looked in the clear morning air.
OUT OF NAZARETH
Right to-day this boat's in the government service.
They were written to the music composed by a dear friend."
"Our home, sir," said Colonel Blaylock, removing his wide-brimmed, rather shapeless black felt hat, "is in Holly Springs--Holly Springs, Georgia.
Cold Branch lay on the edge of the grape and corn lands.
"Those years," said Mrs. Blaylock, "in Holly Springs were long, long, long.
And the great city of Skyland, all disconsolate, waiting for its mail?
"Practical affairs," he said, with a wave of his hand toward the promoter, "are, if I may use the comparison, the garden walks upon which we tread through life, viewing upon either side of us the flowers which brighten that journey.
Okochee, in Georgia, had a boom, and J. Pinkney Bloom came out of it with a "wad." Okochee came out of it with a half-million-dollar debt, a two and a half per cent. city property tax, and a city council that showed a propensity for traveling the back streets of the town.
It was conceded that nowhere could the Palisades be judged superior in the way of scenery and grandeur.
"We're going to buy it."
"All right, hunky--sail in and cut yer capers."
I'm ashamed of your extravagance, J. P."
He stepped forward, with that translucent, child-candid smile upon his fresh, pink countenance, with that air of unaffected sincerity that was redeemed from bluffness only by its exquisite calculation, with that promptitude and masterly decision of manner that so well suited his calling--with all his stock in trade well to the front; he stepped forward to receive Colonel and Mrs. Peyton Blaylock.
They were so simple, impractical, and unsuspecting.
Mr. Cooly showed signs of future promise, for he already had the deed spread out, and was reaching across the counter for the ink bottle.
"I'm only going down to the bank."
Business--and the Colonel was an authority on business--had dwindled to nothing.
Along the picturesque heights above the lake would rise in beauty the costly villas and the splendid summer residences of capital.
I consider the purchase a most fortuitous one.
"I wish I had looked up poetry more than I have.
The wooded peaks, the impressive promontories of solemn granite, the beautiful green slants of bank and ravine did all they could to reconcile Okochee to the delinquency of miserly gold.
He drew eight one-hundred-dollar bills from his money belt and planked them down on the counter.
Maybe we can scare up some fruit or a cup of tea on board.
Positively, no lot would be priced higher than five hundred dollars.
The big country road ran just back of the heights.
Sailboats and rowboats furrowed the lenient waves, popcorn and ice-cream booths sprang up about the little wooden pier.
He looked rather to be an old courtier handed down from the reign of Charles, and re-attired in a modern suit of fine, but raveling and seam-worn, broadcloth.
The spindle and the flywheel and turbine would sing the shrewd glory of Okochee.
Peyton--a little taste of the currant wine, if you will be so good.
Adjoining it was Henry's home--a decent cottage, vine-embowered and cosy.
My shawl, Peyton, if you please--the breeze comes a little chilly from yon verdured hills."
Never before or since was such quick action had in Cold Branch.
"I've got the United States mails on board.
Okochee rose, as it were, from its sunny seat on the post-office stoop, hitched up its suspender, and threw a granite dam two hundred and forty feet long and sixty feet high across the Cooloosa one mile above the town.
Again followed that wonderful bow, as the Colonel lightly touched the pale cheek of the poetess.
Secret of eternal youth--where art thou?
Thus in the great game of municipal rivalry did Okochee match that famous drawing card, the Hudson.
Thereupon, a dimpling, sparkling lake backed up twenty miles among the little mountains.
It is my intention to erect a small building upon it at once, and open a modest book and stationery store.
"You'll find the party at the Pinetop Inn," said J. Pinkney Bloom.
He purchased there a precipitous tract of five hundred acres at forty-five cents per acre; and this he laid out and subdivided as the city of Skyland--the Queen City of the Switzerland of the South.
In yachting caps and flowing neckties they pervaded the lake to its limits.
Okochee, true to the instinct of its blood and clime, was lulled by the spell.
Okochee felt that New York should not be allowed to consider itself the only alligator in the swamp, so to speak.
He went back and joined the Blaylocks, where he sat, less talkative, with that straight furrow between his brows that always stood as a signal of schemes being shaped within.
tax, J. Pinkney Bloom (unloving of checks and drafts and the cold interrogatories of bankers) strapped about his fifty-two-inch waist a soft leather belt containing eight thousand dollars in big bills, and said that all was very good.
His wife writes poetry.
"Get your hat, son," said Mr. Bloom, in his breezy way, "and a blank deed, and come along.
"And he thinks there's an open house up there."
J. Pinkney Bloom walked down Cold Branch's main street.
Mrs. Blaylock, sir, is one of those fortunate higher spirits whose mission it is to make the flowers grow.
"One," said the lawyer.
"My native hills!" she murmured, dreamily.
Mrs. Blaylock reclined at ease.
Now, you see that old babe-in-the-wood over there? Well, he's the boy that drew the prize.
Of course, Mrs. Blaylock would not personally serve behind the counter.
I do not argue
I do not want to discourage you
I feel some explanation is due
I do not think this at all an exaggeration
I grant all this
I find my reference to this
I fully recognize
I forbear to inquire
I, for one, greatly doubt
I do not think it possible
I feel the task is far beyond my power
I feel it a proud privilege
I do not choose to consume
I find it difficult to utter in words
I do not stop to discuss
I do, indeed, recollect
I hardly dare to dwell longer
I fearlessly appeal
I do not imagine
I do not think myself obliged to dwell
I do not despair of surmounting
I even add this
I do not think that I need further discuss
I do not countenance for a moment
I feel that I have a special right to
I greatly deplore
I do not in the least degree
I fear lest I may
I do not recount all
I do not seek to palliate
I feel only a great emotion of gratitude
I do not, of course, deny
I find it more easy
I go further
I do not forget the practical necessity
I give you, in conclusion, this sentence
I do not fail to admire
I do not belong to those who
I feel respect and admiration
I dwell with pleasure on the considerations
I do not think you will often hear
I do not myself pretend to be
I do not speak exclusively
One assumption you make I should like to contest
Join us, please, when you have time
Let me say how deeply indebted I feel for your kindness
May I ask to whom you allude?
So much the better for me
My attitude would be one of disapproval
Quibbling, I call it
Most dangerous!
She seems uncommonly appreciative
Of course I am delighted
Still, you might make an exception
Quite so
One thing I beg of you
Surely there can be no question about that
Now is it very plain to you?
Pardon me, I meant something different
Of course you will do what you think best
Really?
Oh, that's mere quibbling
Show me that the two cases are analogous
Pray don't apologize
Shall we have a compact?
Oh, yes, I quite admit that
No, I don't understand it
Perhaps not in the strictest sense
Precisely, that is just what I meant
Speaking with all due respect
On the contrary, I agree with you thoroughly
Many thanks--how kind and good you are!
Such conduct seems to me unjustifiable
Strangely it's true
Oh, that was a manner of speaking
Perhaps you think me ungrateful
May I speak freely?
Justify it if you can
May I be privileged to hear it?
One must be indulgent under the circumstances
Oh, do not form an erroneous impression
So when he had taken his bath, he became so handsome and sleek, and as red and white as milk and blood, and much stronger than he had been before.
'Well, I should just like to know if it's hot,' thought the lad, and stuck his finger down into the broth, and when he pulled it out again, lo! it was gilded all over.
Every one wondered what strange champion it could be that had helped them, but no one got so near him as to say a word to him; and no one guessed it could be the lad; that's easy to understand.
Then make yourself a wig of fir-moss, and go up to the king's palace, which lies close here, and ask for a place.
'Look behind you! can you see anything now?'
'Nay, nay', said the king's men; 'if he won't stick there till he's starved to death.'
So when they went home at night, and saw the lad still sitting there on his hack, they burst out laughing at him again, and one of them shot an arrow at him and hit him in the leg.
When he came back, the Horse told him to pull off his clothes and get into the cauldron which stood and boiled in the other room, and bathe himself there.
He it was who threw this Troll's shape over me, and sold me to the Troll.
So the lad did that; but in spite of all the pains he took, he still spilt one drop on the horse's flank.
'If I do', thought the lad, 'I shall look an awful fright'; but for all that, he did as he was told.
The King was only more wroth than ever.
'Do you feel any change?' asked the Horse.
So he got that, and an old broken-down hack besides, which went upon three legs and dragged the fourth after it.
But as soon as ever he had cut off the head, there stood the loveliest Prince on the spot where the horse had stood.
'Will you come and serve me?' said the man.
'Why they'd say next there was something between me and the Princess.'
After that the lad slept every night in the Princess' bedroom.
'Now I have helped you on, and now I won't live any longer.
'I think I hear a noise; look round! can you see anything?'
Then he took the pot of ointment and rubbed himself on the leg, and after that he rubbed all the wounded, and so they all got well again in a moment.
'Aye, aye, that's the Troll coming', said the Horse; 'now he's after us with his pack.'
'Aye, aye', said the Horse, 'that's the Troll, and now he's got his whole band with him, so throw the pitcher of water behind you, but mind you don't spill any of it upon me.'
'No, no; that I haven't', said the lad.
'Gee up! gee up!' he said to his hack.
And then they rode on, and laughed at him till they were fit to fall from their horses.
So the lad did that, and all at once a close, thick bramble-wood grew up behind them.
It stood upon beams, and had a high staircase.
But when the man had been gone three or four days, the lad couldn't bear it any longer, but went into the first room, and when he got inside he looked round, but he saw nothing but a shelf over the door where a bramble-bush rod lay.
'Yes, ever so many', said the lad, 'as many as would fill a large church.'
But now he is slain I get my own again, and you and I will be neighbour kings, but war we will never make on one another.'
But when the man came back, he asked if he had been into any of the rooms.
So when they had gone a long, long while, they came to a green patch in a wood.
Oh yes! he could do that, and as for the sword, he brandished it like a feather.
So, when he was to go up the steps in the evening, he tramped and stamped so on the way, that they had to beg him to tread softly lest the King should come to know it.
'You'd best go down to the gardener', said he; 'you're best fit to go about and dig in the garden.'
'No, I can't do that', said the lad; 'for I'm not quite right in my head.'
So after a while the man started off again, and this time he was to be away a month.
This day he slew the enemy's king, and then the war was over at once.
No, the lad hadn't done anything of the kind.
But still the Horse begged him to look behind him, and then he saw a troop like a whole army behind him, and they glistened in the sunbeams.
Then the lad thought this all wrong, so he changed them about, and put the hay at his head.
Then they went out to meet the foe; but they hadn't got far from the palace before the lad got stuck fast in a bog with his hack.
'Now saddle me', said the Horse, 'and put on the coat of mail, and then take the bramble-bush rod, and the stone, and the pitcher of water, and the pot of ointment, and then we'll be off as fast as we can.'
After that he lay down again, and began to snore.
'Yes; there are ever so many coming after us, at least a score', said the lad.
So, when he had been some time at the palace, it happened one morning, just as the sun rose, that the lad had taken off his wig, and stood and washed himself, and then he was so handsome, it was a joy to look at him.
So he came into the Princess' bedroom, lay down, and began to snore at once.
So he got leave to be with the gardener, but none of the other servants would sleep with him, and so he had to sleep by himself under the steps of the summerhouse.
Then the lad begged and prayed so hard that he got off with his life, but the man gave him a good thrashing.
'Do you think I'll do any such thing?' said the lad.
'Why, where in all the world did you come from?' asked the king.
All that she begged, and all that she prayed, for the lad and herself, was no good.
But before he went, he said to the lad, if he went into the fourth room he might give up all hope of saving his life.
Under that he got some turf for his bed, and there he lay as well as he could.
There he sat and dug his spurs in, and cried, 'Gee up, gee up!' to his hack. And all the rest had their fun out of this, and laughed, and made game of the lad as they rode past him.
In this room, too, he saw nothing but a shelf over the door, and a big stone, and a pitcher of water on it.
But when the Trolls came to the lake, they lay down to drink it dry; and so they swilled and swilled till they burst.
Then he went up to the king's palace and begged first for leave to be in the kitchen, and bring in wood and water for the cook, but then the kitchen-maid asked him:
Some time after the man set off again, and said he should be away fourteen days; but before he went he forbade the lad to go into any of the rooms he had not been in before; as for that he had been in, he might go into that, and welcome.
When she had passed the corner of the last house, Cosette paused.
What was to become of her?
While thus bent over, she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into the spring.
When the eye sees black, the heart sees trouble.
She was forced to sit down.
Black and desert space was before her.
Cosette did not take time to breathe.
Man requires light.
Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water, felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror, had returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed through the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows, to the lighted candles.
Is it a werewolf child?"
Jupiter was setting in the depths.
After some seconds of repose she set out again. She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms.
She took a good look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she distinctly saw spectres moving in the trees.
Whoever buries himself in the opposite of day feels his heart contract.
Then the woman recognized Cosette.
Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like masses of smoke.
A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little noise.
She plunged into it.
A remnant of instinct guided her vaguely.
As the Thenardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.
Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three, four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she had finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception of the things about her.
What was she to do?
She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it on the grass.
Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more terrible even than terror; she shivered.
But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened mechanically, as it were.
Strange to say, she did not get lost.
It was very dark, but she was in the habit of coming to this spring.
"Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"
Her glance fell upon the water which stood before her; such was the fright which the Thenardier inspired in her, that she dared not flee without that bucket of water: she seized the handle with both hands; she could hardly lift the pail.
She would have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill the bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step.
On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an atom.
The darkness was bewildering.
Where was she to go?
This anguish was mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest.
She only paused in her course when her breath failed her; but she did not halt in her advance.
The poor child found herself in the dark.
Was not he disguised?
That said, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we continue.
The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning himself, has been absent from Paris for many years.
The moon was full that night.
CHAPTER I--THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY
This manoeuvre is peculiar to the hunted stag.
And then she was with him, and she felt safe.
Cosette walked on without asking any questions.
May we, then, be permitted to speak of the past in the present?
There is no need for him to say that he loves Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city.
Moreover,--and this is a remark to which we shall frequently have occasion to recur,--she had grown used, without being herself aware of it, to the peculiarities of this good man and to the freaks of destiny.
He must be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed.
Jean Valjean instantly quitted the boulevard and plunged into the streets, taking the most intricate lines which he could devise, returning on his track at times, to make sure that he was not being followed.
Paris has been transformed since he quitted it.
He did not, perhaps, take sufficiently into consideration the fact that the dark side escaped him.
It will take place somewhere about the twenty-fourth of next month; and you must come down by the first, if you can.
Well, you know he left Brandon with some charges to my Cousin Dorcas.
My journey was from London.
The Wylders had not much to boast of, even in contrast with that wicked line.
Mark Wylder,' I exclaimed, a good deal relieved.
the estates were back again with the Wylders.
I went through half-a-dozen others, and recurred to it, and puzzled over its exterior again, and again postponed what I fancied would prove a disagreeable discovery; and this happened every now and again, until I had quite exhausted my budget, and then I did open it, and looked straight to the signature.
But, I beg your pardon.
She is a splendid beauty, and when you see her you'll say any fellow might be proud of such a bride; and so I am.
'P.S.--I stay at the Brandon Arms in the town, until after the marriage; and then you can have a room at the Hall, and capital shooting when we return, which will be in a fortnight after.'
There had been many lawsuits, frequent disinheritings, and even worse doings.
But I only laugh at trifles that would have riled me once.
Up Church-street I contrived a peep at the old gray tower where the chimes hung; and as we turned the corner a glance at the 'Brandon Arms.' How very small and low that palatial hostelry of my earlier recollections had grown!
Our ship was at Naples when she was there two years ago; and I saw a good deal of her.
Tell me all you can make out about him. It is a long time since I saw you, Charles; I'm grown brown, and great whiskers.
I was sick of the service, and no wonder: a lieutenant--and there likely to stick all my days.
Our ship was at Malta when I got the letter.
Then there was that beautiful apathetic Dorcas Brandon.
'Dear Charlie, ever most sincerely,
It had not a good countenance, somehow.
The first ten years of my life were longer than all the rest put together, and I think would continue to be so were my future extended to an ante-Noachian span.
The pretty mill-road, running up through Redman's Dell, dank and dark with tall romantic trees, was left behind in another moment; and we were now traversing the homely and antique street of the little town, with its queer shops and solid steep-roofed residences.
We had been for nearly three years at school together; and when his ship came to England, met frequently; and twice, when he was on leave, we had been for months together under the same roof; and had for some years kept up a regular correspondence, which first grew desultory, and finally, as manhood supervened, died out.
The old rector had long passed away; the shorts, gaiters, and smile--a phantom; and nature, who had gathered in the past, was providing for the future.
There was a complicated cousinship among these Brandons, Wylders, and Lakes--inextricable intermarriages, which, five years ago, before I renounced the bar, I had at my fingers' ends, but which had now relapsed into haze.
The original lines were not prepossessing.
Mark Wylder!
They had produced their madmen and villains, too; and there had been frequent intermarriages--not very often happy.
I do not think he is a year older than I, but takes airs because he's a trustee.
As I looked through the chaise-windows, every moment presented some group, or outline, or homely object, for years forgotten; and now, with a strange surprise how vividly remembered and how affectionately greeted! We drove by the small old house at the left, with its double gable and pretty grass garden, and trim yews and modern lilacs and laburnums, backed by the grand timber of the park.
The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end to end.
There were new faces at the door.
But he was certainly one of the oldest and most intimate acquaintances I had.
So there were Wylders of Brandon, and Brandons of Brandon.
They had not walked together very far, when Stanley recollected that he must take his leave, and walk back to Gylingden; and so the young lady and Lord Chelford were left to pursue their way towards Redman's Farm together.
But then she had been very guarded; not stiff or prudish, indeed, but frank and cold enough with him, and that was comforting.
There was not much in this little speech, but it was spoken in a low, sweet voice; and Rachel looked down on the ferns before her feet, as they walked on side by side, not with a smile, but with a blush, and that beautiful look of gratification so becoming and indescribable.
So they sat down together in her chamber.
The old woman looked up, with her watery eyes wide open, and there was a short pause.
She stopped, with something almost wild in her look.
The shock of her brief interview with her brother over, reflection assured her, knowing all she did, that Stanley's wooing would prosper, and so this cause of quarrel had really nothing in it; no, nothing but a display of his temper and morals--not very astonishing, after all--and, like an ugly picture or a dreadful dream, in no way to affect her after-life, except as an odious remembrance.
But the fitful evening breeze came up through Redman's Dell, with a gentle sweep over the autumnal foliage.
So the old nurse mounted her spectacles, glad of the invitation, and began to read.
'Stop,' said Rachel suddenly, as she reached about the middle of the chapter.
That perverse and utterly selfish brother, Stanley Lake, had chosen to take his leave.
But though he never hinted at an unfavourable estimate of the captain, his intimacies with him were a little reserved; and I think I have seen him, even when he smiled, look the least little bit in the world uncomfortable, as if he did not quite enter into the captain's pleasantries.
Lord Chelford raised his hat, smiling: 'I am so very glad I met you, I was beginning to feel so solitary!' he placed himself beside Miss Lake. 'I've had such a long walk across the park.
I think Lord Chelford perceived there was something amiss between the young people, for his eye rested on Rachel with a momentary look of enquiry, unconscious, no doubt, and quickly averted, and he went on chatting pleasantly; but he looked, once or twice, a little hard at Stanley Lake.
She has fine eyes--and I think no other good point--much too dark for my taste--but they say clever;' and not another word was there on this subject.
The dead themselves declare their dreadful secrets, open-mouthed, to the winds.
Sudden as a sigh, and cold; in her ear it sounded like a whisper or a shudder, and she lifted up her eyes and saw the darkening dell before her; and with a pang, the dreadful sense of reality returned.
But with an effort she smiled, and said, with a little shiver, 'The air has grown quite chill, and the sun nearly set; we loitered, Stanley and I, a great deal too long in the park, but I am now at home, and I fear I have brought you much too far out of your way already; good-bye.' And she extended her hand.
She seemed to like those lingering sentences--and hung upon them--and even smiled but in her eyes there was a vague and melancholy pleading--a wandering and unfathomable look that pained him.
But no. Nothing could be more perfectly distinct than 'Chelford,' traced in her fair correspondent's very legible hand.
He had a few pleasant, lingering words to say.
She turned into the little drawing-room at the left, and, herself unseen, did take that last look, and saw him go up the road again towards Brandon.
Rachel, Rachel, girl! what a fool you were near becoming!'
It was rather a marked thing--as lean Mrs. Loyd, of Gylingden, who had two thin spinsters with pink noses under her wing, remarked--this long walk of Lord Chelford and Miss Lake in the park; and she enjoined upon her girls the propriety of being specially reserved in their intercourse with persons of Lord Chelford's rank; not that they were much troubled with dangers from any such quarter.
The sun just touched the verge of the wooded uplands, as the young people began to descend the slope of Redman's Dell.
The Dulhamptons have arrived: the old Marchioness never appears till three o'clock, and only out in the carriage twice since they came.
'He treats the young lady very coolly,' thought Rachel, forgetting, perhaps, that his special relations to Dorcas Brandon had compelled his stay in that part of the world.
Lord Chelford was a lively and agreeable companion; but there was something unusually gentle, almost resembling tenderness, in his manner. She was so different from her gay, fiery self in this walk--so gentle; so subdued--and he was more interested by her, perhaps, than he had ever been before.
'How very short!' Lord Chelford paused, with a smile, at these words.
It is never the object of veneration or sacrifice, no myth brings it down to his comprehension, it is not installed in his temples.
It is related that about the year 1440, at a grand religious council held at the consecration of the newly-built temple of the Sun at Cuzco, the Inca Yupanqui rose before the assembled multitude and spoke somewhat as follows:--
They narrate the struggles between the rulers of the upper and the nether world, the descent of the former into Xibalba, the Realm of Phantoms, and their victory over its lords, One Death and Seven Deaths.
Moral dualism can only arise in minds where the ideas of good and evil are not synonymous with those of pleasure and pain, for the conception of a wholly good or a wholly evil nature requires the use of these terms in their higher, ethical sense.
A little reflection will convince the most incredulous that any such dualism as has been fancied to exist in the native religions, could not have been of indigenous growth.
The gods of the primitive man are beings of thoroughly human physiognomy, painted with colors furnished by intercourse with his fellows.
"Many say that the Sun is the Maker of all things.
They could not have made the beauty of the heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars which adorn it, and which light the earth, with its countless streams, its fountains and waters, its trees and plants, and its various inhabitants.
It is of undoubted native origin and venerable antiquity.
No better success attended the attempt of Nezahuatl, lord of Tezcuco, which took place about the same time.
Does he wish to express still more forcibly this sentiment, he doubles the word, or prefixes an adjective, or adds an affix, as the genius of his language may dictate.
A passage often quoted in support of this mistaken view is one in Winslow's "Good News from New England," written in 1622.
At length, in indignation and despair, the prince exclaimed, "Verily, these gods that I am adoring, what are they but idols of stone without speech or feeling?
Personal, family, or national feuds render some more inimical than others, but always from a desire to guard their own interests, never out of a delight in evil for its own sake.
But it still remains to him but an unapplied abstraction, a mere category of thought, a frame for the All.
These are his enemies or his friends, as he conciliates or insults them.
This notion, which has its historical origin among the Parsees of ancient Iran, is unknown to savage nations.
After a prolonged struggle, which brought on the general deluge and the destruction of the world, he won the victory.
Now many things happen when the Sun is absent; therefore he cannot be the universal creator.
They prove something in regard to a consciousness of divinity hedging us about, but nothing at all in favor of a recognition of one God; they exemplify how profound is the conviction of a highest and first principle, but they do not offer the least reason to surmise that this was a living reality in doctrine or practice.
And that he is alive at all is doubtful, for his trips do not tire him.
The confusion of these distinct ideas has led to much misconception of the native creeds.
At length the Good Mind turned upon his brother in anger, and crushed him into the earth.
Perhaps no myth has been so often quoted in its confirmation as that of the ancient Iroquois, which narrates the conflict between the first two brothers of our race.
But when they appeared it was terrible.
So in many instances it turns out that what has been reported to be the evil divinity of a nation, to whom they pray to the neglect of a better one, is in reality the highest power they recognize.
In neither case, be it observed, was any attempt made to substitute another and purer religion for the popular one.
This view, which has obtained without question in every work on the native religions of America, has arisen partly from habits of thought difficult to break, partly from mistranslations of native words, partly from the foolish axiom of the early missionaries, "The gods of the gentiles are devils." Yet their own writings furnish conclusive proof that no such distinction existed out of their own fancies.
He is like a tethered beast who makes a daily round under the eye of a master; he is like an arrow, which must go whither it is sent, not whither it wishes.
The writer adds of the latter, who clearly represent to his mind the Evil One and his adjutants, "in the old times they did not have much power; they were but annoyers and opposers of men, and in truth they were not regarded as gods.
Writers anxious to discover Jewish or Christian analogies, forcibly construed myths to suit their pet theories, and for indolent observers it was convenient to catalogue their gods in antithetical classes.
As if man ever did or ever could draw the idea of God from nature!
This firm belief has left its impress on language in the names devised to express the supernal, the spiritual world.
Numerous languages bear trace of this.
Very rarely do they bring any conception of personality to the native mind, very rarely do they signify any object of worship, perhaps never did in the olden times.
In every heart was an altar to the Unknown God.
THE IDEA OF GOD.
It is easy to guess the reason of this.
In most instances they are entirely of modern origin, coined at the suggestion of missionaries, applied to the white man's God.
If we accept the definition that mythology is the idea of God expressed in symbol, figure, and narrative, and always struggling toward a clearer utterance, it is well not only to trace this idea in its very earliest embodiment in language, but also, for the sake of comparison, to ask what is its latest and most approved expression.
The heavens, the upper regions, are in every religion the supposed abode of the divine.
But the breath is nothing but wind. How easy, therefore, to look upon the wind that moves up and down and to and fro upon the earth, that carries the clouds, itself unseen, that calls forth the terrible tempests and the various seasons, as the breath, the spirit of God, as God himself?
As the philosopher, pondering on the workings of self-consciousness, recognizes that various pathways lead up to God, so the primitive man, in forming his language, sometimes trod one, sometimes another.
Armed with these analogies, we turn to the primitive tongues of America, and find them there as distinct as in the Old World.
Of monotheism either as displayed in the one personal definite God of the Semitic races, or in the dim pantheistic sense of the Brahmins, there was not a single instance on the American continent.
The exhibitions of force in nature seemed to them the manifestations of that mysterious power felt by their self-consciousness; to combine these various manifestations and recognize them as the operations of one personality, was a step not easily taken.
In the identity of wind with breath, of breath with life, of life with soul, of soul with God, lies the far deeper and far truer reason, whose insensible development I have here traced, in outline indeed, but confirmed by the evidence of language itself.
Yet He is not far from every one of us.
He has shown that our reason, dwelling on the facts of experience, constantly seeks the principles which connect them together, and only rests satisfied in the conviction that there is a highest and first principle which reconciles all their discrepancies and binds them into one.
The soul is the life, the life is the breath.
This last expression leads to another train of thought.
They embrace all unseen agencies, they are void of personality, and yet to the illogical primitive man there is nothing contradictory in making them the object of his prayers.
It must be true, for it is evolved from the laws of reason, our only test of truth. Furthermore, the sense of personality and the voice of conscience, analyzed to their sources, can only be explained by the assumption of an infinite personality and an absolute standard of right.
Let none of these expressions, however, be construed to prove the distinct recognition of One Supreme Being.
How could they expect it?
Etymologically, in fact, ghosts and gusts, breaths and breezes, the Great Spirit and the Great Wind, are one and the same.
Therefore a word is usually found in their languages analogous to none in any European tongue, a word comprehending all manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity.
We are speaking of a people little capable of abstraction.
Invisible, imponderable, quickening with vigorous motion, slackening in rest and sleep, passing quite away in death, it is the most obvious sign of life.
There is at first no personification in these expressions.
There the sun and bright stars sojourn, emblems of glory and stability.
The descent is, indeed, almost imperceptible which leads to the personification of the wind as God, which merges this manifestation of life and power in one with its unseen, unknown cause.
The Latin Deus, the Greek Zeus, the Sanscrit Dyaus, the Chinese Tien, all originally meant the sky above, and our own word heaven is often employed synonymously with God.
Life had assumed a more settled and orderly course.
When his tasks ended, his studies became the chief pleasure of his life.
Their shoes were of the same, and a good Western authority calls a wet moccasin "a decent way of going barefoot." About the time, however, when Lincoln grew to manhood, garments of wool and of tow began to be worn, dyed with the juice of the butternut or white walnut, and the hides of neat-cattle began to be tanned.
He occasionally astounded his companions by such glimpses of occult science as that the world is round and that the sun is relatively stationary.
The nine miles of walking doubtless seemed to Thomas Lincoln a waste of time, and the lad was put at steady work and saw no more of school.
He selected a spot which pleased him in his first day's journey.
They moved into the latter before it was half completed; for by this time the Sparrows had followed the Lincolns from Kentucky, and the half-faced camp was given up to them.
John Hanks says: "When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn-bread, take down a book, sit down, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read." The picture may be lacking in grace, but its truthfulness is beyond question.
He was hired by Mr. Gentry, the proprietor of the neighboring village of Gentryville, to accompany his son with a flat-boat of produce to New Orleans and intermediate landings.
They must fell trees for fence-rails before noon, and in the waxing of the moon.
He wrote, for his own amusement and edification, essays on politics, of which gentlemen of standing who had been favored with a perusal said with authority, at the cross-roads grocery, "The world can't beat it." One or two of these compositions got into print and vastly increased the author's local fame.
He could not afford to waste paper upon his original compositions.
He attained his full growth, six feet and four inches, two years before he came of age.
In all the intervals of his work--in which he never took delight, knowing well enough that he was born for something better than that--he read, wrote, and ciphered incessantly.
A few three-legged stools; a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs in the angle of the cabin, the outside corner supported by a crotched stick driven into the ground; the table, a huge hewed log standing on four legs; a pot, kettle, and skillet, and a few tin and pewter dishes were all the furniture.
He met them with a frank and energetic welcome.
With the assistance of John Hanks he plowed fifteen acres, and split, from the tall walnut-trees of the primeval forest, enough rails to surround them with a fence.
Had it not been for that interior spur which kept his clear spirit at its task, his schools could have done little for him; for, counting his attendance under Riney and Hazel in Kentucky, and under Dorsey, Crawford, and Swaney in Indiana, it amounted to less than a year in all.
Their veterinary practice was mostly by charms and incantations; and when a person believed himself bewitched, a shot at the image of the witch with a bullet melted out of a half-dollar was the favorite curative agency.
He met with only one accident on his way: his raft capsized in the Ohio River, but he fished up his kit of tools and most of the ardent spirits, and arrived safely at the place of a settler named Posey, with whom he left his odd invoice of household goods for the wilderness, while he started on foot to look for a home in the dense forest.
But in 1828 an opportunity offered for a little glimpse of the world outside, and the boy gladly embraced it.
The pioneers believed in it for good and evil.
Mrs. Lincoln, not long before her death, gave striking testimony of his winning and loyal character.
At another time, seeing some men preparing a contrivance for lifting some large posts, Abe quickly shouldered the posts and took them where they were needed.
[Footnote: A stone has been placed over the site of the grave "by P. E. Studebaker, of South Bend, Indiana." The stone bears the following inscription: "Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of President Lincoln, died October 5th, A. D. 1818, aged 35 years.
The belief in witchcraft had long ago passed away with the smoke of the fagots from old and New England, but it survived far into this century in Kentucky and the lower halves of Indiana and Illinois--touched with a peculiar tinge of African magic.
His mind and mine--what little I had--seemed to run together....
There were some schools so-called, but no qualification was ever required of a teacher beyond 'readin', writin', and cipherin' to the Rule of Three.' If a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizard.
His daughter Sarah or Nancy, for she was called by both names, who married Aaron Grigsby a few years before, had died in childbirth. The emigrating family consisted of the Lincolns, John Johnston, Mrs. Lincoln's son, and her daughters, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Hanks, with their husbands.
The family thus housed and sheltered, one more bit of filial work remained for Abraham before assuming his virile independence.
The voyage was made successfully, and Abraham gained great credit for his management and sale of the cargo.
There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education." But in the case of this ungainly boy there was no necessity of any external incentive.
In many cases those who apparently recovered lingered for years with health seriously impaired.
A bird lighting in a window, a dog baying at certain hours, the cough of a horse in the direction of a child, the sight, or worse still, the touch of a dead snake, heralded domestic woe.
The habit remained with him always.
The guests assembled in the morning.
They were known as active and consistent members of that communion.
His budding talents as a writer were not always used discreetly.
But his voracity for anything printed was insatiable.
From this arose occasional heart- burnings and feuds, in which Abraham bore his part according to the custom of the country.
The lack of doors and floors was at once corrected.
His strength is still a tradition in Spencer County.
His mind was slow in acquisition, and his powers of reasoning and rhetoric improved constantly to the end of his life, at a rate of progress marvelously regular and sustained.
After a few months of desultory instruction young Abraham knew all that these vagrant literati could teach him. His last school-days were passed with one Swaney in 1826, who taught at a distance of four and a half miles from the Lincoln cabin.
Among these people, and in all essential respects one of them, Abraham Lincoln passed his childhood and youth.
Some of his comrades remember still his bursts of righteous wrath, when a boy, against the wanton murder of turtles and other creatures.
The commonest occurrences were heralds of death and doom.
Arriving at the place of meeting, which was some log cabin if the weather was foul, or the shade of a tree if it was fair, the assembled worshipers threw their provisions into a common store and picnicked in neighborly companionship.
Among the Pioneers of Pigeon Creek, so ill-fed, ill-housed, and uncared for, there was little prospect of recovery from such a grave disorder.
It is also reported that he sometimes impeded the celerity of harvest operations by making burlesque speeches, or worse than that, comic sermons, from the top of some tempting stump, to the delight of the hired hands and the exasperation of the farmer.
He rarely met with a man he could not easily handle.
Such a woman as Sarah Bush could not be careless of so important a matter as the education of her children, and they made the best use of the scanty opportunities the neighborhood afforded.
Their houses were usually of one room, built of round logs with the bark on.
Thomas Lincoln joined the Baptist church at Little Pigeon in 1823; his oldest child, Sarah, followed his example three years later.
The schools were much alike.
But it was already dark.
"Why did we not think of that before?" said Mrs. Peterkin.
"I have tried the whip," said Elizabeth Eliza.
Elizabeth Eliza shook the reins, and pulled them, and then she clucked to the horse; and Mrs. Peterkin clucked; and the little boys whistled and shouted; but still the horse would not go.
"Let us think how we shall get one," said Mrs. Peterkin.
They set out in procession for the poultry-yard.
So they tried this, but the horse would not stir.
"We have got plenty of cream," said Elizabeth Eliza.
"I am very glad now that I did not have cranberry," said Mrs. Peterkin, anxious to find a bright point.
"Squash, tomato, potato, and sweet potato," Mrs. Peterkin continued.
They asked him to bring a ladder, axes and pickaxe.
All had seated themselves at the dinner-table, and Amanda had gone to take out the dinner she had sent up from the kitchen on the dumb-waiter.
A part of the family thought it would not do; the rest wanted tea.
"Let us sit down and think about it," said Mr. Peterkin.
"Yes," said Mrs. Peterkin, "only put on your india-rubber boots." And they hurried out of the house.
"Let us try to think what she would advise us," said Mr. Peterkin.
Time passed on, and the question arose about tea.
It was decided that Mr. Peterkin, Solomon John, and the little boys should go in search of a carpenter.
Agamemnon and Elizabeth Eliza told her all the difficulty, and the lady from Philadelphia said, "But why don't you give the slices of fat to those who like the fat, and the slices of lean to those who like the lean?"
But Mr. Peterkin said he didn't like to go to her for everything; let the children try and eat their dinner as it was.
Mr. Peterkin sat down to cut the ham.
When the matter was explained to him, he went into the dining-room, looked into the dumb-waiter, untwisted a cord, and arranged the weight, and pulled up the dinner.
At last said Mrs. Peterkin, rather uncertainly, "Suppose we ask the lady from Philadelphia what is best to be done."
"All of us?" cried one of the little boys, in the excitement of the moment.
"If you think you could do it," said Mr. Peterkin.
"What is there for dinner?" asked Mr. Peterkin.
There was a family shout.
"A carpenter might have a ladder and an axe, and I think we have neither," said Mrs. Peterkin.
The dinner was put upon the table.
"Sweet potato!" exclaimed both the little boys.
"Very well, then." said Mr. Peterkin, "let them go and ask the lady from Philadelphia."
"Would it not be better to have a carpenter?" asked Elizabeth Eliza.
They went to the carpenter's house, but found he had gone out of town for a day's job.
This was at dinner-time.
"This affair of the turkey," he said, "reminds me of those buried cities that have been dug out,--Herculaneum, for instance."
Amanda went to the dumb-waiter for the dinner, but she could not move it down.
All the family, in turn, went and tried; all pulled together, in vain; the dinner could not be stirred.
At last Mr. Peterkin said, "I am not proud.
"The trouble was in the weight," said the carpenter.
Agamemnon proposed that, meanwhile, he should go and borrow a book; for he had another idea.
"Let us hear it," said Mr. Peterkin.
A carpenter!" exclaimed the rest.
But when Mr. Peterkin reached the carpenter's shop, there was no carpenter to be found there.
"I think," said Mr. Peterkin, "she would say, let them that want tea have it; the rest can go without."
"I wish she were here," said Elizabeth Eliza.
"Happy man," exclaimed Mr. Peterkin, "he has a dinner to eat!"
"Oh, yes," said Mrs. Peterkin.
Now, I should like to know how they did it; and I mean to borrow a book and read.
If I had a ladder and an axe, I could cut away the plastering and reach it."
"The turkey," said Agamemnon, "must be just above the kitchen door.
There was the dinner, but she could not reach it.
Nobody had what he could eat.
All consented to this.
And they all tried, but they couldn't.
"That is a great idea," said Mrs. Peterkin.
"Why didn't we think of that?" said they, and ran home to tell their mother.
So they had tea, and, as it proved, all sat down to it.
Each one went down, taking a napkin.
"A carpenter!
"Oh, yes," interrupted Elizabeth Eliza, "and Pompeii."
I think it was done with a pickaxe."
"That is why it is called a dumb-waiter," Solomon John explained to the little boys.
But something was the matter; she could not pull it up.
"What shall be done now?" said Mrs. Peterkin.
"Roast turkey," said Mrs. Peterkin.
It was a rule of the Peterkin family, that no one should eat any of the vegetables without some of the meat; so now, although the children saw upon their plates apple-sauce and squash and tomato and sweet potato and sour potato, not one of them could eat a mouthful, because not one was satisfied with the meat.
"No dinner!" exclaimed Agamemnon.
But at last, the Horse said again.
'Go gently, and just pull his wig off'; and she went up to him.
'Since you are so good at heart as to let me have some food, I'll set you free, that I will.
So the lad scraped and scrubbed it, but the gilding wouldn't go off, so he bound a piece of rag round it; and when the man came back, and asked what was the matter with his finger, the lad said he'd given it such a bad cut.
But the man tore off the rag, and then he soon saw what was the matter with the finger.
Then the Princess gave her maid a wink, and this time she whisked off the wig; and there lay the lad so lovely, and white and red, just as the Princess had seen him in the morning sun.
So just take the sword, and cut my head off.'
'Try to lift me, then', said the Horse.
'Well', said the Horse, 'If you don't do as I tell you, see if I don't take your life somehow.'
'Now throw your bramble-bush rod behind you, over your shoulder', said the Horse; 'but mind you throw it a good way off my back.'
So it became a great deep lake; and because of that one drop, the horse found himself far out in it, but still he swam safe to land.
If you do, I'll take your life when I come back.'
So when the eight days were out, the man came home, and the first thing he said was:
Then after fourteen days the lad couldn't bear it, but crept into the room, but he saw nothing at all in there but a trap door on the floor; and when he lifted it up and looked down, there stood a great copper cauldron which bubbled and boiled away down there; but he saw no fire under it.
'Aye, aye, that's the Troll and his crew', said the Horse; 'now he's got more to back him; but now throw down the stone, and mind you throw it far behind me.'
'Now, strip off all your arms', said the Horse, 'and only put on your ragged clothes, and take the saddle off me, and let me loose, and hang all my clothing and your arms up inside that great hollow lime- tree yonder.
So he began to shriek and to bewail; 'twas enough to break one's heart; and so the king threw his pocket-handkerchief to him to bind his wound.
So when the lad had got on the horse, off they went at such a rate, he couldn't at all tell how they went.
Whenever you need me, only come here and shake the bridle, and I'll come to you.'
And as soon as the lad did what the Horse said, up rose a great black hill of rock behind him.
For if the Troll comes back and finds you here, he'll kill you outright.
But when the lad came up the battle had begun, and the king was in a sad pinch; but no sooner had the lad rushed into the thick of it than the foe was beaten back, and put to flight.
But now you must go up to the room which lies just over this, and take a coat of mail out of those that hang there; and mind, whatever you do, don't take any of the bright ones, but the most rusty of all you see, that's the one to take; and sword and saddle you must choose for yourself just in the same way.'
When they were gone, he ran again to the lime, and came up to the battle just in the very nick of time.
Oh! what a darling!
'I don't care a farthing for such a pack of rubbish', said the wife; 'if they don't like what they get they may lump it, and eat what they brought with them.
'No! sell them I won't', said Boots; 'but all the same, if I can get leave to sleep one night on the floor of the Princess' bedroom, close by the door, I'll give her the scissors.
Yes! the Princess agreed to this, so Boots lay down on the bench by the bed-side, and the four men watched; but if the Princess hadn't much sleep the night before, she had much less this, for she could scarce get a wink of sleep; there she lay wide awake looking at the lovely lad the whole night through, and after all, the night seemed too short.
'Yes! he had such a tap in his waistcoat pocket', said Boots; but when the Princess wished with all her might to buy it, Boots said, as he had said twice before, he wouldn't sell it, even if the Princess bade half the kingdom for it.
'Well! well!' she said, 'as for them, I don't care a pin.
'But if I may have leave to lie on the bench by the Princess' bed- side to-night, she shall have the cloth; but if she's afraid, she is welcome to set four men to watch inside the room.'
'Into the kitchen with you, and don't stand glowering after lads', he said.
One of them, too, had smelt out that the lad had a pair of scissors which he cut out the clothes with.
So Boots lay on the floor inside the Princess' bedroom that night, and two men stood watch there too; but the Princess didn't get much rest after all; for when she ought to have been asleep, she must open her eyes to look at Boots, and so it went on the whole night.
After that, Boots pulled out his table- cloth, and spread it out, and so they got food too, the poor beggars. Such a feast had never been seen at the king's palace, as was served that day at the Beggars' Isle.
But the youngest wished something better still.
So when he came back to the palace, he couldn't keep his mouth shut this time any more than before; he went about telling high and low about the tap, and how easy it was to draw all sorts of drink out of it.
Now Boots' brothers saw very well that the guard was rowing him over to the island, but they were glad to be rid of him, and didn't pay the least heed to him.
'When he only snips with those scissors up in the air he snips and cuts out nothing but silk and satin', said he.
So when the Princess heard that, she was all for getting the tap, and was nothing loath to strike a bargain with the owner either.
'And as for the porridge and cheese we took, they wouldn't even taste them, so proud have they got', they said.
So when Boots came up to the palace, the Princess asked whether it were true he had a tap which could do such and such things?
'Wherever we go', they said, 'we shall be treated as counts and kings; but you, you starveling wretch, who haven't a penny, and never will have one, who do you think will care a bit about you?'
If they can't wait till the custards are baked, they may go without--that's all.
'But all the same', said Boots; 'if I may have leave to sleep on the Princess' bed to-night, outside the quilt, she shall have my tap. I'll not do her any harm; but, if she's afraid, she may set eight men to watch in her room.'
The Princess must and would have the cloth of him, and offered him gold and green woods for it, but Boots wouldn't sell it at any price.
Yes! the Princess was glad enough to give him leave, for she was ready to grant him anything if she only got the scissors.
At last, after begging and praying, he got leave to go with them, if he would be their servant, else they wouldn't hear of it.
So when he got back to the palace, he wasn't long before he said:
But when Boots got over there, he just pulled out his scissors and began to snip and cut in the air; so the scissors cut out the finest clothes any one would wish to see; silk and satin both, and all the beggars on the island were soon dressed far finer than the king and all his guests in the palace.
'If you only turn this tap', she said; 'you'll get the finest drink of whatever kind you choose, both mead, and wine, and brandy; and this you shall have because you are so handsome.'
What a darling!'
So the wife had off to her custards as fast as she could, for she knew that her husband would stand no nonsense; but as she stood there over the fire she stole out into the yard, and gave Boots a tap.
So, when they had all wished their wishes, the two elder were for setting out to see the world; and Boots, their youngest brother, asked if he mightn't go along with them; but they wouldn't hear of such a thing.
Yes, it was all true he had such a pair, said Boots, but sell it he wouldn't; and with that he took the scissors out of his pocket, and snipped and snipped with them in the air till strips of silk and satin flew all about him.
'Such hot joints and such custards I never saw the like of in the king's palace.'
But one of those who brought the food contrived to smell out that the lad who had owned the scissors owned also a table-cloth, which he only needed to spread out, and it was covered with all the good things he could wish for.
This the king had ordered, because he wouldn't have the mirth at the palace spoilt by those dirty blackguards; and thither, too, only just as much food as would keep body and soul together was sent over everyday.
But Boots, he had to stand outside here too, and look after the things in the carriage.
Well, she begged the king so long and hard, he was forced to send a messenger for the lad who owned the scissors; and when he came to the palace, the Princess asked him if it were true that he had such and such a pair of scissors, and if he would sell it to her.
So, when the Princess heard that, she had neither peace nor rest till she saw the lad and his scissors that cut out silk and satin from the air; such a pair was worth having, she thought, for with its help she would soon get all the finery she wished for.
There we see the sex every day exerting themselves in acts of benevolence and charity, in relieving the distresses of the body, and binding up the wounds of the mind; in reconciling the differences of friends, and preventing the strife of enemies; and, to sum up all, in that care and attention to their offspring, which is so necessary and essential a part of their duty.
SPANISH WOMEN.
There we meet with that inexpressible softness and delicacy of manners, which, cultivated by education, appears as much superior to what it does without it, as the polished diamond appears superior to that which is rough from the mine.
But, in no situation does their character appear so whimsical, or their power so conspicuous, as when they are pregnant.
Misconduct and divorces are not unfrequent among the former, because their mode of life corrupts their principles, and they deem themselves above the jurisdiction of popular opinion; the latter feel as if they were beneath the influence of public censure, and find it very difficult to be virtuous, on account of extreme poverty, and the consequent obstructions in the way of marriage.
She cannot be fined by any court of law; but is liable to be tried and punished for crimes by peers of the realm.
This quality is not peculiar to the men; it diffuses itself, in a great measure, among the women also.
The Spanish women are little or nothing indebted to education.
In the conversation and actions of the Russian ladies, there is hardly any thing of that softness and delicacy which distinguishes the sex in other parts of Europe.
The present empress, with the ladies of her court, sometimes divert themselves by shooting at a mark. Drunkenness, the vice of almost every cold climate, they are so little ashamed of, that not many years ago, when a lady got drunk at the house of a friend, it was customary for her to return next day, and thank him for the pleasure he had done her.
As the Spanish ladies are under a greater seclusion from general society, than the sex is in other European countries, their desires of an adequate degree of liberty are consequently more strong and urgent.
Their affections are not to be gained by a bit of sparkling lace, or a tawdry set of liveries.
A late empress of Russia, as a punishment for some female frailties, ordered a most beautiful young lady of family to be publicly chastised, in a manner which was hardly less indelicate than severe.
In this case, whatever they long for, whatever they ask, or whatever they have an inclination to do, they must be indulged in.
The king's wife is considered as a subject; but is exempted from the law which forbids any married woman to possess property in her own right during the lifetime of her husband; she may sue any person at law without joining her husband in the suit; may buy and sell lands without his interference; and she may dispose of her property by will, as if she were a single woman.
In England they consist not only in abstinence from evil, but in doing good.
This a few years ago, was enjoyed by an empress, whose head did honor to her nation and to her sex; although, on some occasions, the virtues of her heart have been much suspected. The sex, in general, are protected from insult, by many salutary laws; and, except among the peasants, are exempted from every kind of toil and slavery.
A free and open communication being denied them, they make it their business to secure themselves a secret and hidden one.
Females, however, in Russia, possess several advantages.
ENGLISH WOMEN.
RUSSIAN WOMEN.
She is then led home, with abundance of coarse ceremonies, which are now wearing off even among the lowest ranks; and the barbarous treatment of wives by their husbands is either guarded against by the laws of the country, or by particular stipulations in the marriage contract.
The women of England are eminent for many good qualities both of the head and of the heart.
A piece of sharp iron entered the mouth, and severely pricked the tongue whenever the culprit attempted to move it.
Hence it is that Spain is the country of intrigue.
There is in the Spaniards a native dignity; which, though the source of many inconveniences, has nevertheless this salutary effect, that it sets them above almost every species of meanness and infidelity.
Their nuptial ceremonies are peculiar to themselves; and formerly consisted of many whimsical rites, some of which are now disused.
But the general character of English women is modest, reserved, sincere, and dignified. They have strong passions and affections, which often develope themselves in the most beautiful forms of domestic life.
Perhaps the world does not present a lovelier or more graceful picture than the English home of a virtuous family.
Their deportment is rather grave and reserved; and, on the whole, they have much more of the prude than the coquette in their composition.
As soon as a young man is old enough to be married, his parents seek a wife for him, and all is settled before the young couple know any thing of the matter.
Thus in Spain, as in all countries where the sex is kept much out of sight, the thoughts of men are continually employed in devising methods to break into their concealments.
Even their exercises and diversions have more of the masculine than the feminine.
On her wedding day, the bride is crowned with a garland of wormwood; and, after the priest has tied the nuptial knot, his clerk or sexton throws a handful of hops upon the head of the bride, wishing that she might prove as fruitful as that plant.
A peeress can only be tried by a jury of peers.
They are in general remarkable for a healthy appearance, and an exquisite bloom of complexion.
A lady to whom a gentleman pays his addresses, is sole mistress of his time and money; and, should he refuse her any request, whether reasonable or capricious, it would reflect eternal dishonor upon him among the men, and make him the detestation of all the women.
They share the rank and splendor of the families from which they are sprung, and are even allowed the supreme authority.
Her rank of empress would not, perhaps, have been sufficient to subdue those bold spirits; but she joined to that the more powerful influences of wit and beauty.
The Roman matrons do not seem to have possessed that military courage which Plutarch has praised in certain Greek and barbarian women; they partook more of the nature of their sex; or, at least, they departed less from its character.
The Oppian law prohibited women from having more than half an ounce of gold employed in ornamenting their persons, from wearing clothes of divers colors, and from riding in chariots, either in the city, or a thousand paces round it.
Such was the influence of beauty at Rome before the licentious intercourse of the sexes had corrupted both.
The principal eunuch of Justinian the Second, threatened to chastise the Empress, his master's wife, in the manner that children are chastised at school, if she did not obey his orders.
She revived the memory of her father's abilities, and supported with intrepidity her own cause and that of her sex.
More powerful than the laws, the women ruled their judges.
A few sumptuary laws, a subordination to the men, and a total want of authority, do not so much affect the sex, as to be coldly and indelicately treated by their husbands.
The indulgence of the polity was proscribed by the manners.
Luxury, by degrees getting the better of decency, the men and women at last bathed promiscuously together.
Their first quality was decency.
The Roman women, for many ages, were respected over the whole world. Their victorious husbands re-visited them with transport, at their return from battle.
They were also liable to be divorced for barrenness, which, if it could be construed into a fault, was at least the fault of nature, and might sometimes be that of the husband.
For in all countries, in proportion as the love of virtue diminishes, we find the love of talents to increase.
Either from taste, from a desire to instruct herself, from a love of renown, or possibly from all these together, she spent her life with philosophers.
Their public ones, were such as were common to both sexes; as bathing, theatrical representations, horse-races, shows of wild beasts, which fought against one another, and sometimes against men, whom the emperors, in the plenitude of their despotic power, ordered to engage them.
Hortensia was conducted home in triumph, and had the honor of having given, in one day, an example of courage to men, a pattern of eloquence to women, and a lesson of humanity to tyrants.
Every father had power of life and death over his own daughters: but this power was not restricted to daughters only; it extended also to sons.
In vain the legislature, foreseeing the wants which exist only among a corrupt people, permitted divorce.
The women sought an orator to defend their cause, but found none.
Portia, the daughter of Cato, and wife of Brutus, showed herself worthy to be associated with the first of human kind, and trusted with the fate of empires.
Julia was, in short, an empress and a politician, occupied at the same time about literature, and affairs of state, while she mingled her pleasures freely with both.
They were places of public resort, where people met with their acquaintances and friends, where public libraries were kept for such as chose to read, and where poets recited their works to such as had patience to hear.
The Romans, of both sexes, spent a great deal of time at the baths; which at first, perhaps, were interwoven with their religion, but at last were only considered as refinements in luxury.
The daughter of the celebrated Hortensius alone appeared.
To these austere manners, the Roman women joined an enthusiastic love of their country, which discovered itself upon many great occasions.
In vain the too rigid laws made them the arbiters of life and death.
On the death of Brutus, they all clothed themselves in mourning.
The vast inequality of ranks, the enormous fortunes of individuals, the ridicule, affixed by the imperial court to moral ideas, all contributed to hasten the period of corruption.
Those warriors often came from imposing commands upon kings, and in their own houses accounted it an honor to obey.
This lady was born in Syria, and a daughter of a priest of the sun.
In her life time she obtained more praise than respect; and posterity, while it has done justice to her talents and her accomplishments, has agreed to deny her esteem.
For either of these faults they were liable to be divorced by their husbands.
In the earlier periods of Rome, separate baths were appropriated to each sex.
For that instance of their generosity, the senate granted them the honor of having funeral orations pronounced in the rostrum, in common with patriots and heroes.
Fabius Pictor relates, that the parents of a Roman lady, having detected her picking the lock of a chest which contained some wine, shut her up and starved her to death.
The senate decreed them public thanks, ordered the men to give place to them upon all occasions, caused an altar to be erected for them on the spot where the mother had softened her son, and the wife her husband; and the sex were permitted to add another ornament to their head-dress.
LAWS AND CUSTOMS RESPECTING THE ROMAN WOMEN.
Nobody would reason against those who had the power of life and death.
The Roman women saved the city a second time, when besieged by Brennus. They gave up all their gold as its ransom.
They were desirous to join admiration to esteem, 'till they learned to exceed esteem itself.
Julia arrived at the highest celebrity; but as among all her excellencies, we find not those of her sex, the virtues of a woman, our admiration is lost in blame.
The Roman women, as well as the Grecian, were under perpetual guardianship; and were not at any age, nor in any condition, ever trusted with the management of their own fortunes.
Such a treatment is touching them in the tenderest part.
With regard to the private diversions of the Roman ladies, history is silent.
In the time of Coriolanus they saved the city.
She had courtiers for her lovers, scholars for her friends, and philosophers for her counsellors.
It is said she was a philosopher.
But the empress Julia the wife of Septimius Severus, possessed a species of merit so very different from any of those already mentioned, as to claim particular attention.
The example of Portia was followed by that of Arria, who seeing her husband hesitating and afraid to die, in order to encourage him, pierced her own breast, and delivered to him the dagger with a smile.
The ruffians blushed and revoked their orders.
It was predicted that she would rise to sovereign dignity; and her character justified the prophecy.
They laid at their feet the spoils of the enemy, and endeared themselves in their eyes by the wounds which they had received for them and for the state.
These three kinds of empire rendered less necessary to her that which consists only in art; and which, attentive to their tastes and their weaknesses, govern great minds by little means.
Julia, while on the throne, loved, or pretended passionately to love, letters.
ROMAN WOMEN.
The time when the Roman women began to appear in public, marks a particular era in history.
The other Doones being left behind, and grieved perhaps in some respects, set to with a will to scour the house, and to bring away all that was good to eat.
Thirdly, they gave me, 'Ridd never be ridden,' and fearing to make any further objections, I let them inscribe it in bronze upon blue.
But the gentlemen would not hear of this; and to find something more appropriate, they inquired strictly into the annals of our family.
It will be the best thing that could befall a lusty infant heretic.
Mistress Margery Badcock, a healthy and upright young woman, with a good rich colour, and one of the finest hen-roosts anywhere round our neighbourhood, was nursing her child about six of the clock, and looking out for her husband.
And she put a dish-cloth under his head, and kissed him, and ran away again.
All these pieces are made of iron wire-gauze, having the interval between its threads the twenty-fifth part of an inch.
The fireman remained so long invisible that serious doubts were entertained of his safety. He at length, however, issued from the fiery gulf uninjured, and proud of having succeeded in braving so great a danger.
The natural moisture of the hand is usually sufficient for this result, but it is better to wipe the hand with a damp towel.
Sir H. Davy had long ago shown that a safety lamp for illuminating mines, containing inflammable air, might be constructed of wire-gauze, alone, which prevented the flame within, however large or intense, from setting fire to the inflammable air without.
This effect is owing not only to the heat being intercepted by the wire-gauze as it passes to the lungs, in consequence of which its temperature becomes supportable, but also to the singular power which the body possesses of resisting great heats, and of breathing air of high temperatures.
The firemen braved the danger with impunity.
Beckmann, in his History of Inventions, Vol.
Even mercury can be frozen in this way by a combination of chemicals.
This valuable property, which has been long in practical use, he ascribed to the conducting and radiating power of the wire-gauze, which carried off the heat of the flame, and deprived it of its power. The Chevalier Aldini conceived the idea of applying the same material, in combination with other badly conducting substances, as a protection against fire.
A familiar instance of this occurred in the heated room.
On one occasion Sir F. Chantrey, accompanied by five or six of his friends, entered the furnace, and, after remaining two minutes, they brought out a thermometer which stood at 320 degrees.
Sir David says:
On the other hand, if boiling water be dropped on the superheated disk its temperature will immediately be REDUCED to six degrees below the boiling point; thus the hot metal really cools the water.
His pulse was then 144, double its ordinary quickness.
By taking advantage of the fact that different liquids assume a spheroidal form at widely different temperatures, one may obtain some startling results.
Hence they concluded that the human body possesses the power of destroying a certain degree of heat when communicated with a certain degree of quickness.
Through the action of this principle it is possible to dip the hand for a short time into melted lead, or even into melted copper, the moisture of the skin supplying a vapor which prevents direct contact with the molten metal; no more than an endurable degree of heat reaches the hand while the moisture lasts, although the temperature of the fusing copper is 1996 degrees.
In the experiments which were made at Paris in the presence of a committee of the Academy of Sciences, two parallel rows of straw and brushwood supported by iron wires, were formed at the distance of 3 feet from each other, and extended 30 feet in length.
Sir Charles Blagden went into a room where the heat was 1 degree or 2 degrees above 260 degrees, and remained eight minutes in this situation, frequently walking about to all the different parts of the room, but standing still most of the time in the coolest spot, where the heat was above 240 degrees.
Thus far our interest in heat-resistance has uncovered secrets of no very great practical value, however entertaining the uses to which we have seen them put.
The head dress is a large cap which envelops the whole head down to the neck, having suitable perforations for the eyes, nose, and mouth.
The furnace which he employs for drying his moulds is about 14 feet long, 12 feet high, and 12 feet broad.
In order to prove the efficacy of this apparatus, and inspire the firemen with confidence in its protection, he showed them that a finger first enveloped in asbestos, and then in a double case of wire-gauze, might be held a long time in the flame of a spirit-lamp or candle before the heat became inconvenient.
Whenever they breathed upon a thermometer it sunk several degrees; every expiration, particularly if strongly made, gave a pleasant impression of coolness to their nostrils, and their cold breath cooled their fingers whenever it reached them.
While I was viewing this performance, I remarked a smell like that of singed horn or leather, though his hand was not burnt.
If, instead of a flat-iron, we use a concave metal disk about the size and shape of a watch crystal, some very interesting results may be obtained.
In our own times the art of defending the hands and face, and indeed the whole body, from the action of heated iron and intense fire, has been applied to the nobler purpose of saving human life, and rescuing property from the flames.
They told him that if the hand had been wet it would have been badly scalded.
As long ago as 1829, for instance, an English newspaper printed the following:
On other occasions the fireman handled blazing wood and burning substances, and walked during five minutes upon an iron grating placed over flaming fagots.
A fire of shavings was then lighted, and kept burning in a large raised chafing-dish; the fireman plunged his head into the middle of the flames with his face to the fuel, and in that position went several times round the chafing-dish for a period longer than a minute.
When it is raised to its highest temperature, with the doors closed, the thermometer stands at 350 degrees, and the iron floor is red hot.
In the space of twenty minutes the eggs were roasted quite hard, and in forty-seven minutes the steak was not only dressed, but almost dry.
The workmen often enter it at a temperature of 340 degrees, walking over the iron floor with wooden clogs, which are of course charred on the surface.
The fact is that the water never touches the hot iron at all, provided the heat is sufficiently intense, but assumes a slightly elliptical shape and is supported by a cushion of vapor.
The incombustible pieces of dress which he uses for the body, arms, and legs, are formed out of strong cloth, which has been steeped in a solution of alum, while those for the head, hands, and feet, are made of cloth of asbestos or amianthus.
TEMPERATURES THE BODY CAN ENDURE.
The pompiers were clothed in asbestos, over which was a network of iron. Some of them, it was stated, who wore double gloves of amianthus, held a red-hot bar during four minutes.
The violence of the fire was so great that he could not be seen, while a thick black smoke spread around, throwing out a heat which was unsupportable by spectators.
His experiment is stated to have given satisfaction.
The air, though very hot, gave no pain, and Sir Charles and all the other gentlemen were of opinion that they could support a much greater heat.
By a careful manipulation of the dropper, the disk may be filled with water which, notwithstanding the intense heat, never reaches the boiling point.
Everybody knows that if it is not too hot the water will spread over the surface and evaporate; but if it is too hot, the water will glance off without wetting the iron, and if this drop be allowed to fall on the hand it will be found that it is still cool.
Another beef-steak, similarly placed, was rather overdone in thirty-three minutes.
In a subsequent trial, at Paris, a fireman placed his head in the middle of a large brazier filled with flaming hay and wood, and resisted the action of the fire during five or six minutes and even ten minutes.
He then squeezed the fingers of his horny hand close together, put it for a few minutes under his armpit, to make it sweat, as he said; and, taking it again out, drew it over a ladle filled with melted copper, some of which he skimmed off, and moved his hand backwards and forwards, very quickly, by way of ostentation.
It is a remarkable result of these experiments, that the firemen are able to breathe without difficulty in the middle of the flames.
In order to prove that there was no mistake respecting the degree of heat indicated by the thermometer, and that the air which they breathed was capable of producing all the well-known effects of such a heat on inanimate matter, they placed some eggs and a beef-steak upon a tin frame near the thermometer, but more distant from the furnace than from the wall of the room.
All the pieces of metal there, even their watch-chains, felt so hot that they could scarcely bear to touch them for a moment, while the air from which the metal had derived all its heat was only unpleasant.
Two towers were erected two stories high, and were surrounded with heaps of inflamed materials consisting of fagots and straw.
In order to show how the head, eyes, and lungs are protected, the fireman put on the asbestos and wire-gauze cap, and the cuirass, and held the shield before his breast.
A pupil as sharp as Capitola soon mastered her tasks, and found herself each day with many hours of leisure with which she did not know what to do.
Their hands are red with murder and their souls black with darker crimes."
That path attracted her; she followed it, charmed alike by the solitude of the wood, the novelty of the scene and her own sense of freedom.
I, the little houseless wanderer through the streets and alleys of New York?
These hours were at first occupied with exploring the old house, with all its attics, cuddies, cock-lofts and cellars; then in wandering through the old ornamental grounds, that were, even in winter and in total neglect, beautiful with their wild growth of evergreens; thence she extended her researches into the wild and picturesque country around.
In a word, it was Indian summer.
In vain!
"I know that; but I cannot be mewed up here in the old house and deprived of my afternoon ride," exclaimed Capitola decidedly.
"Indeed I shall, though--and glad of the opportunity," added Cap, mentally.
No; it can't be!
But one thought was given to the story of Black Donald, and that was a reassuring one:
She had gone on for about a mile, and it was growing dark, and her horse was again slackening his pace, when she thought she heard the sound of another horse's hoofs behind her.
I've got over a great deal of ground in these two hours.
I'm too sharp for that.
"Yes, child, yes; there are darker crimes.
It's a great deal too pleasant to be mad, and I'll stay so.
Old Hurricane bought her books and maps, slates and copy-books, set her lessons in grammar, geography and history, and made her write copies, do sums and read and recite lessons to him.
The servants who come at my call are the keepers.
"Black Donald!
that's what I am, crazy!
"But, my dear love, it is improper, imprudent, dangerous."
"How I would like the glory of capturing Black Donald!" said Capitola.
The thundering footfalls of the pursuing horse were close in the rear.
If she could only get rid of Wool, she resolved to go upon a limited exploring expedition.
Only last winter he and three of his gang broke into a solitary house where there was a lone woman and her daughter, and--it is not a story for you to hear; but if the people had caught Black Donald then they would have burned him at the stake! His life is forfeit by a hundred crimes.
I, the little newsgirl in boy's clothes?
"There is no figure out of my past life in my present one except Herbert Greyson.
CHAPTER XV.
"Mrs. Condiment, once for all do tell me who this terrible Black Donald is?
Well, I must turn about and lose no time. Come, Gyp, get up, Gyp, good horse; we're going home."
Perhaps if such a prohibition had never been made Capitola would never have thought of doing the one or the other; but we all know the diabolical fascination there is in forbidden pleasures for young human nature.
Good gracious, child, you ask me who is Black Donald!"
"A willful elf--an uncle's child, That half a pet and half a pest, Was still reproved, endured, caressed, Yet never tamed, though never spoiled."
I didn't grow up in Rag Alley, New York, for nothing."
Sometimes, suddenly startled by an intense realization of the contrast between her past and her present life, she would mentally inquire:
what is he?
"Who is Black Donald?
where is he?
For, now I think of it, the last thing I remember of my former life was being brought before the recorder for wearing boy's clothes.
"Oh, by stratagem, I mean, not by force.
"Can this be really I, myself, and not another?
On her left hand the sun was sinking like a ball of fire below the horizon; all around her everywhere were the wintry woods; far away, in the direction whence she had come, she saw the tops of the mountains behind Hurricane Hall, looking like blue clouds against the southern horizon; the Hall itself and the river below were out of sight.
CAP'S COUNTRY CAPERS.
Can this be I, Capitola, the little outcast of the city, now changed into Miss Black, the young lady, perhaps the heiress of a fine old country seat; calling a fine old military officer uncle; having a handsome income of pocket money settled upon me; having carriages and horses and servants to attend me?
His very haunts are unknown, but are supposed to be in concealed mountain caverns."
I'm crazy!
She was never weary of admiring the great forest that climbed the heights of the mountains behind their house; the great bleak precipices of gray rock seen through the leafless branches of the trees; the rugged falling ground that lay before the house and between it and the river; and the river itself, with its rushing stream and raging rapids.
Black Donald is the chief of a band of ruthless desperadoes that infest these mountain roads, robbing mail coaches, stealing negroes, breaking into houses and committing every sort of depredation.
He is an outlaw, and a heavy price is set upon his head."
The invisible pursuer gained on her.
Oh, my child, may you never know more of Black Donald than I can tell you.
Her education was commenced, but progressed rather irregularly.
"Whither away so fast, pretty one?"
I shall not get back so soon; my horse is tired to death; it will take me three hours to reach Hurricane Hall.
"But, my dear, you must never think of riding out alone," exclaimed the dismayed Mrs. Condiment.
Dear me, I didn't mean to ride so far.
I, the wretched little vagrant that was brought up before the recorder and was about to be sent to the House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents?
Capitola had become a skilful as she had first been a fearless rider. But her rides were confined to the domain between the mountain range and the river; she was forbidden to ford the one or climb the other.
"I wonder how far I am from home?" said Capitola, uneasily; "somewhere between six and seven miles, I reckon.
Good gracious! it will be pitch dark before I get there.
Now, without being the least of a coward, Capitola thought of the loneliness of the woods, the lateness of the hour, her own helplessness, and--Black Donald!
But, pshaw! he is not 'the nephew of his uncle;' he is only my old comrade, Herbert Greyson, the sailor lad, who comes here to the madhouse to see me, and, out of compassion, humors all my fancies.
There is no one to attend you; Wool has gone with his master," said Mrs. Condiment, as she met Capitola in the hall, habited for her ride.
And she longed, above all things, to explore and find out for herself.
She drew rein and listened, and was sure of it.
"Darker crimes than murder!" ejaculated Capitola.
It was a day of unusual beauty, when autumn seemed to be smiling upon the earth with her brightest smiles before passing away.
"For a week reports continued favourable.
"In a few minutes the whole household was aroused, and Dick was off posthaste for the doctor, for we could not revive Miriam from her death-like swoon.
Yes, I have had a message.
The crisis was over and the doctor in attendance thought Sidney would recover.
"Then she fell to the floor in a dead faint.
"She bent her head for a minute or two.
It is a very commonplace story indeed.
"'But, Miriam, do you really think it is possible for ghosts--'
But I've no belief in such theories.
She would come out of her faint for a moment, give us an unknowing stare and go shudderingly off again.
"Miriam had been with us about eight months when one day she came into my room hurriedly.
"Possibly not.
That feeling wore off after a while, but she never seemed like other people to me.
I dare say you think I'm talking nonsense."
"'Something has happened to Sidney,' she replied, 'some painful accident--I don't know what.'
What shall I do?'
"You have excited my curiosity.
Everybody liked her.
If they ever appear, it must be for a better reason than that."
She rose to her feet and held out her hands.
Almost while we were talking a telegram came.
When I first met her I had the most uncanny feeling that she was all spirit--soul--what you will! no flesh, anyhow.
I tried to cheer her, but did not succeed.
"She was Mr. Sefton's niece.
There are better means of communication between two souls that are in perfect accord with each other.'
And when somebody else is intimately associated with that person and knows all the circumstances--well, he admits the possibility, at least.
Mrs. Sefton nodded abstractedly above her fancywork.
"'How do you know but that I was?'
Upon their return she was herself to be married.
I know that some accident has happened to Sidney--painful and inconvenient but not particularly dangerous.
Miriam said nothing at the time, but when we were alone I asked her what she thought of it.
'Belief or disbelief has nothing to do with it.
No matter where she was, this, whatever it was, would come over her.
I had been reading a ghost story to Mrs. Sefton, and I laid it down at the end with a little shrug of contempt.
"'Sidney!' she said.
You would remain as sceptical as ever."
'Do you mean to tell me you never hear from him at all?'
"'I will tell you what I know.
"Well, first tell me what you think of this.
When she showed me his photograph, I liked his appearance and said so.
"Well, yes, I think you are.
"No," returned Mrs. Sefton calmly.
"I didn't say I believed it.
"Miriam was gazing straight before her.
"'Sidney and I never write to each other.'
She was tall and extremely graceful, dark--at least her hair was dark, but her skin was wonderfully fair and clear.
On the contrary, it was the very reverse.
Her hair was gathered away from her face, and she had a high, pure, white forehead, and the straightest, finest, blackest brows.
"I recall another event was when some caller dropped in and we had drifted into a discussion about ghosts and the like--and I've no doubt we all talked some delicious nonsense.
"To what purpose?
Something must have come under your observation to develop such theories in your practical head.
"Miriam was a beauty.
"I knew she must have had another of those abominable messages--or thought she had--and really, remembering the incident of the broken arm, I couldn't feel as sceptical as I pretended to.
"Sidney's mother, who had gone to nurse him, wrote every day, and at last good news came.
"'I know,' she answered quickly.
But by the time it gets to the third person--the outsider--it loses power.
For five seconds I thought I had seen one.
I never saw anything of the sort.
Sidney will write me that.
Every mealtime, every year, for many years, it had been thus.
That was the way the oak saw the spirits of the Past, and when it saw them it sighed; but still it welcomed the shadows of the Past.
One was gray and bowed somewhat, stooped as the oaks are, silvered as the oaks are in the winter days.
In the night I have heard the oak sob.
And each year the oak dropped down food enough for the little fire.
"Do you know what the oak says?" it repeated.
Behold it now!" It waved a tiny hand.
The younger man is there, although now he has grown gray and stooped.
Yet in the morning, when the sun was silvering the wake of all the leaping fishes, the oak was always gentle, and it said, "Wake, wake!
Each year, for many years, the same hand had laid the little fire, in the same place, and so given back to the oak its Past.
Now as I looked, the gray figure bowed its head, there, under the arm of the oak, and asked on the humble board the blessing of the God who made the oak, and gave the fire and spread the pleasant waters on the land.
"Do you hear it?
But his convalescence is progressing, and if he continues to gain strength, in eight days from now--well, we shall see."
Nearly five minutes passed thus, Top rummaging, the reporter following him prudently when, all at once, the dog rushed towards a thick bush, and drew out a rag.
"What is that?" asked the reporter.
However, on his second sortie, on the 27th of November, Gideon Spilett, who had ventured a quarter of a mile into the woods, towards the south of the mountain, remarked that Top scented something.
Top, at the foot of the palisade, was jumping, barking, but it was with pleasure, not anger.
The engineer and Pencroft, each armed with a double-barreled gun, and Gideon Spilett carrying his rifle, had nothing to do but start.
The engineer felt his heart sink painfully.
Therefore, perhaps, he is still living!"
Eight days!
Would they not, on the contrary, by employing the cart leave every arm free? Was it impossible to place the mattress on which Herbert was lying in it, and to advance with so much care that any jolt should be avoided?
At that moment Pencroft stopped the onager, and in a hoarse voice,--
"But is he equal to five?" asked the engineer.
This incident was, therefore, favorably interpreted at the corral, and it no longer appeared impossible that they should find Ayrton again. On his side, if he was only a prisoner, Ayrton would no doubt do all he could to escape from the hands of the villains, and this would be a powerful aid to the settlers!
Several times he pressed Gideon Spilett, but the latter, fearing, with good reason, that Herbert's wounds, half healed, might reopen on the way, did not give the order to start.
Cyrus Harding expected to find it in its place; supposing that the convicts would have crossed it, and that, after having passed one of the streams which enclosed the plateau, they would have taken the precaution to lower it again, so as to keep open a retreat.
It was not probable that Top scented the presence of man, for in that case, he would have announced it by half-uttered, sullen, angry barks.
"Or Ayrton?"
But if the convicts had not killed him at first, if they had brought him living to another part of the island, might it not be admitted that he was still their prisoner? Perhaps, even, one of them had found in Ayrton his old Australian companion Ben Joyce, the chief of the escaped convicts.
"And Mr. Herbert?" asked Neb.
"I believe we're not fellows to be afraid of a bullet, and as for me, if Captain Harding approves, I'm ready to dash into the forest!
But we are at the corral, and it is best to stay here until we can leave it together."
"Neb."
"That is difficult to say, Cyrus," answered the reporter, "for any imprudence might involve terrible consequences.
Gideon Spilett returned to the cart.
Gideon Spilett approached Herbert; then, having looked at him,--
The forests of the island were in full leaf, and the time was approaching when the usual crops ought to be gathered.
Besides, it did not offer the same security, and its tenants, notwithstanding their watchfulness, were here always in fear of some shot from the convicts.
They would, therefore, be safe at that time, and if there was any occasion for firing, it would probably not be until they were in the neighborhood of Granite House. However, the colonists kept a strict watch.
"You are right; they will do all they can to retake the corral, which they know to be well stored; and alone you could not hold it against them."
There it was examined by the colonists, who found that it was a fragment of Ayrton's waistcoat, a piece of that felt, manufactured solely by the Granite House factory.
"Yes."
This was a hope, to which Ayrton's companions could still hold.
"Perhaps, indeed," replied the engineer, who remained thoughtful.
Certainly, it would have been safer to have taken a different road than that which led straight from the corral to Granite House, but the cart would have met with great difficulties in moving under the trees.
The convicts on Prospect Heights! that was disaster, devastation, ruin.
Do you imagine that the convicts will not see you leave it, that they will not allow you to enter the forest, and that they will not attack it during your absence, knowing that there is no one here but a wounded boy and a man?"
Pencroft had become a thorough farmer, heartily attached to his crops. But it must be said that Herbert was more anxious than any to return to Granite House, for he knew how much the presence of the settlers was needed there.
"I will join Pencroft," said the reporter, "and both of us, well-armed and accompanied by Top--"
He met with no misadventure and found no suspicious traces.
Cyrus Harding was not mistaken.
"Yes, if they had any interest in doing so."
"Well, captain," cried Pencroft, "a bullet does not always reach its mark."
However, it was not probable that the convicts would have yet left the plateau of Prospect Heights.
However well built and supplied the corral house was, it could not be so comfortable as the healthy granite dwelling.
"If only Ayrton was still one of us!" said Gideon Spilett.
The convicts had left the plateau nearly half-an-hour before, having devastated it!
They approached the plateau.
The weather was fine.
Chapter 9
"Oh, if we were only at Granite House!"
Pencroft harnessed the onager.
The gate of the corral was opened.
Gideon Spilett followed Top, encouraged him, excited him by his voice, while keeping a sharp look-out, his gun ready to fire, and sheltering himself behind the trees.
What were they to do?
The cart was brought.
"My friends," said the reporter, after they had talked of Neb and of the impossibility of communicating with him, "I think,--like you, that to venture on the road to the corral would be to risk receiving a gunshot without being able to return it.
He heard, and ran to meet them.
The weather was fine, and the heat began to be great.
"If he is dead," added Pencroft, in a peculiar tone.
"Neb, perhaps?"
At this time two months of spring had already passed.
I must go."
Since Ayrton's disappearance they were only four against five, for Herbert could not yet be counted, and this was not the least care of the brave boy, who well understood the trouble of which he was the cause.
The question of knowing how, in their condition, they were to act against the pirates, was thoroughly discussed on the 29th of November by Cyrus Harding, Gideon Spilett, and Pencroft, at a moment when Herbert was asleep and could not hear them.
"My dear Spilett, and you, Pencroft," answered Harding, "let us reason coolly.
But it seems to me that something may be learned from the incident."
"No, captain," answered the sailor, "and I repented of my suspicion a long time ago!
"Poor fellow! his return to social life will have been but of short duration."
"Let us go, then!" said he.
Indeed, they had before believed that, surprised in the corral, Ayrton had fallen by a bullet, as Herbert had fallen.
They waited, therefore, although they were anxious to be reunited at Granite House.
There, on the contrary, in the middle of that impregnable and inaccessible cliff, they would have nothing to fear, and any attack on their persons would certainly fail.
No details, please."
But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis.
I had no idea myself that my work would be over so soon."
"And you say that this man has got a wife?"
The great personage rose heavily, an imposing shadowy form in the greenish gloom of the room.
It appears we all ought to quake in our shoes at what's coming if those people are not suppressed all over the world.
"I never hoped to see you here to-night.
The Assistant Commissioner knew the lady.
"I'll see the Attorney-General to-night, and will send for you to-morrow morning.
"Clever enough--quite clever enough for that."
He knew he would be welcomed there.
She extended her hand to the Assistant Commissioner.
"Not stupid," interrupted the Assistant Commissioner, contradicting deferentially.
"Well, he tried to at least," amended the lady.
Mr Vladimir, affecting not to listen, leaned towards the couch, talking amiably in subdued tones, but he heard the Assistant Commissioner say:
Mr Vladimir and the Assistant Commissioner, introduced, acknowledged each other's existence with punctilious and guarded courtesy.
"I think not, Sir Ethelred, unless I were to enter into details which--"
The patroness of the ex-convict received this assurance indignantly.
"Theoretically.
Annie told me--"
Is there anything more you'd wish to tell me now?"
"Yes, a genuine wife.
At present he hasn't enough moral energy to take a resolution of any sort. Permit me also to point out that if I had detained him we would have been committed to a course of action on which I wished to know your precise intentions first."
From a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama."
The Assistant Commissioner had stood up also, slender and flexible.
"Why?
But even if there were no obstacles to his freedom of action he would do nothing.
The man at the foot of the couch had stopped speaking to the lady, and looked on with a faint smile.
This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade.
Were your people stupid enough to connect him with--"
A silence fell.
Nothing could be more characteristic of the respectable bond than that," went on, with a touch of grimness, the Assistant Commissioner, whose own wife too had refused to hear of going abroad.
How could he explain leaving it?
"Yes.
The Assistant Commissioner added in a low tone: "I am glad to tell you that Michaelis is altogether clear of this--"
Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bedroom and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist.
And the victim was a genuine brother-in-law.
"Force of habit perhaps," said the Assistant Commissioner, moved by an irresistible inspiration.
I had no idea this was such a grave affair."
He had it much at heart to begin. He walked slowly home, meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc's psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction.
The great shadowy form seemed to shrink away as if in physical dread of details; then came forward, expanded, enormous, and weighty, offering a large hand.
"I've no doubt that Mr Vladimir has a very precise notion of the true importance of this affair."
He walked all the way home.
The Assistant Commissioner withdrew quietly, unnoticed, as if already forgotten.
"You do not look frightened," he pronounced, after surveying her conscientiously with his tired and equable gaze.
On entering the smaller of the two drawing-rooms he saw his wife in a small group near the piano.
Behind the screen the great lady had only two persons with her: a man and a woman, who sat side by side on arm-chairs at the foot of her couch.
"Yes, Sir Ethelred," said the Assistant Commissioner, pressing deferentially the extended hand.
The Assistant Commissioner laughed a little; but the great man's thoughts seemed to have wandered far away, perhaps to the questions of his country's domestic policy, the battle-ground of his crusading valour against the paynim Cheeseman.
"He has been threatening society with all sorts of horrors," continued the lady, whose enunciation was caressing and slow, "apropos of this explosion in Greenwich Park.
Moreover, you must remember that he has got to think of the danger from his comrades too. He's there at his post.
Therefore the whole universe is to the image of God, and not only man.
Now the mode of origin is not the same in all things, but in each thing is adapted to the nature thereof; animated things being produced in one way, and inanimate in another; animals in one way, and plants in another.
Objection 1: It would seem that the image of God is to be found in irrational creatures.
First, because as the Son is like to the Father by a likeness of essence, it would follow of necessity if man were made in likeness to the Son, that he is made to the likeness of the Father.
For instance, a worm, though from man it may originate, cannot be called man's image, merely because of the generic likeness.
74): "Where there is an image there is not necessarily equality," as we see in a person's image reflected in a glass.
(5) Whether the image of God is in man by comparison with the Essence, or with all the Divine Persons, or with one of them?
(2) Whether the image of God is in irrational creatures?
74): "Where an image exists, there forthwith is likeness; but where there is likeness, there is not necessarily an image." Hence it is clear that likeness is essential to an image; and that an image adds something to likeness--namely, that it is copied from something else.
Now the intellectual nature imitates God chiefly in this, that God understands and loves Himself.
Or else we may say that a part is not rightly divided against the whole, but only against another part.
But the nature of an image requires likeness in species; thus the image of the king exists in his son: or, at least, in some specific accident, and chiefly in the shape; thus, we speak of a man's image in copper. Whence Hilary says pointedly that "an image is of the same species."
Therefore even what falls short of the nature of an image, so far as it possesses any sort of likeness to God, participates in some degree the nature of an image.
Objection 1: It would seem that the image of God does not exist in man as to the Trinity of Persons.
(6) Whether the image of God is in man, as to his mind only?
Nor, if anything is made white like something else, can we say that it is the image of that thing; for whiteness is an accident belonging to many species.
But these do not of themselves belong to the nature of the Divine image in man, unless we presuppose the first likeness, which is in the intellectual nature; otherwise even brute animals would be to God's image.
First, inasmuch as man possesses a natural aptitude for understanding and loving God; and this aptitude consists in the very nature of the mind, which is common to all men.
Now it is manifest that specific likeness follows the ultimate difference.
Wherefore it is manifest that the distinction of the Divine Persons is suitable to the Divine Nature; and therefore to be to the image of God by imitation of the Divine Nature does not exclude being to the same image by the representation of the Divine Persons: but rather one follows from the other.
Therefore all men have not the conformity of image.
But by sin man becomes unlike God.
Secondly, we may consider the image of God in man as regards its accidental qualities, so far as to observe in man a certain imitation of God, consisting in the fact that man proceeds from man, as God from God; and also in the fact that the whole human soul is in the whole body, and again, in every part, as God is in regard to the whole world.
Thus every creature is an image of the exemplar type thereof in the Divine mind.
We must, therefore, say that in man there exists the image of God, both as regards the Divine Nature and as regards the Trinity of Persons; for also in God Himself there is one Nature in Three Persons.
For an "image" is so called because it is produced as an imitation of something else; wherefore, for instance, an egg, however much like and equal to another egg, is not called an image of the other egg, because it is not copied from it.
Objection 1: It would seem that the angels are not more to the image of God than man is.
Objection 1: It would seem that the image of God is not found in every man.
Thus it is clear how to solve the first two objections.
Secondly, inasmuch as man actually and habitually knows and loves God, though imperfectly; and this image consists in the conformity of grace.
QUESTION 93
Now a thing is said to be one not only numerically, specifically, or generically, but also according to a certain analogy or proportion.
Whether the Image of God Is in Man According to the Trinity of Persons?
So when the Apostle had said that "man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man," he adds his reason for saying this: "For man is not of woman, but woman of man; and man was not created for woman, but woman for man."
Yet this is of the essence of a perfect image; for in a perfect image nothing is wanting that is to be found in that of which it is a copy.
Objection 1: It would seem that the image of God is not in man.
First, we may consider in it that in which the image chiefly consists, that is, the intellectual nature.
But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature.
51) "approach so near to God in likeness, that among all creatures nothing comes nearer to Him." It is clear, therefore, that intellectual creatures alone, properly speaking, are made to God's image.
But the intellectual nature does not admit of intensity or remissness; for it is not an accidental thing, since it is a substance.
(4) Whether the image of God is in every man?
Therefore, as in their intellectual nature, the angels are more to the image of God than man is, we must grant that, absolutely speaking, the angels are more to the image of God than man is, but that in some respects man is more like to God.
Therefore, as woman is an individual of the human species, it is clear that every individual is not an image of God.
51), "man is so much to God's image that God did not make any creature to be between Him and man: and therefore nothing is more akin to Him." But a creature is called God's image so far as it is akin to God.
Now it is manifest that in man there is some likeness to God, copied from God as from an exemplar; yet this likeness is not one of equality, for such an exemplar infinitely excels its copy. Therefore there is in man a likeness to God; not, indeed, a perfect likeness, but imperfect.
And Scripture implies the same when it says that man was made "to" God's likeness; for the preposition "to" signifies a certain approach, as of something at a distance.
5]
But this is quite impossible.
THE PRODUCTION OF THE WOMAN (In Four Articles)
For such an increase of matter would either be by a change of the very substance of the matter itself, or by a change of its dimensions.
Therefore she was not made immediately by God.
Secondly, that man might love woman all the more, and cleave to her more closely, knowing her to be fashioned from himself.
But there was no pain before sin.
So, if a rib was removed, his body remained imperfect; which is unreasonable to suppose.
For sex belongs both to man and animals.
There is another kind of subjection which is called economic or civil, whereby the superior makes use of his subjects for their own benefit and good; and this kind of subjection existed even before sin.
But man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation.
Objection 1: It would seem that the woman was not formed immediately by God.
(1) Whether the woman should have been made in that first production of things?
Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female.
But God foresaw that the woman would be an occasion of sin to man.
Now God alone, the Author of nature, can produce an effect into existence outside the ordinary course of nature.
On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature's intention as directed to the work of generation.
Objection 1: It would seem that the woman should not have been formed from the rib of man.
Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature.
Objection 1: It would seem that the woman should not have been made in the first production of things.
Wherefore, as no rarefaction is apparent in such multiplication of matter, we must admit an addition of matter: either by creation, or which is more probable, by conversion.
(2) Whether the woman should have been made from man?
(3) Whether of man's rib?
For by this is signified that the Church takes her origin from Christ.
On the other hand, the Divine Power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man.
One is servile, by virtue of which a superior makes use of a subject for his own benefit; and this kind of subjection began after sin.
But in the other animals the female was not made from the male.
Therefore neither should it have been so with man.
Wherefore multiplication of matter is quite unintelligible, as long as the matter itself remains the same without anything added to it; unless it receives greater dimensions.
Much more, therefore, was it possible that by the Divine power the body of the woman should be produced from the man's rib.
Therefore a rib of Adam belonged to the integrity of his body.
Whether the Woman Should Have Been Made in the First Production of Things?
We must next consider the production of the woman.
5:32): "This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the Church."
Fourthly, there is a sacramental reason for this.
Wherefore it was suitable for the woman to be made out of man, as out of her principle.
But the woman's body was formed from corporeal matter.
Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.
Under this head there are four points of inquiry:
THE BRITISH ISLES.
EASTERN NORTH AMERICA.
The waters which deposit vein stones and ores are commonly hot, and in many cases they have derived their heat from intrusions of igneous rock still uncooled within the crust.
In these regions the rocks have yielded to immense pressure.
Why do metamorphic rocks appear on the surface to-day?
MINERAL VEINS
The most thoroughly metamorphosed rocks may sometimes be traced out into unaltered sedimentary or igneous rocks, or among them may be found patches of little change where their history maybe read.
CONTACT METAMORPHISM.
Other factors, however, have played important parts.
In sedimentary rocks there may be produced crystals of mica and of GARNET (a mineral as hard as quartz, commonly occurring in red, twelve-sided crystals).
Thus in soluble rocks, such as limestones, joints enlarged by percolating water are sometimes filled with metalliferous deposits, as, for example, the lead and zinc deposits of the upper Mississippi valley.
Schists may contain rolled-out pebbles, showing their derivation from a conglomerate.
THE CRYSTALLINE SCHISTS, representing the finer types of foliation, consist of thin, parallel, crystalline leaves, which are often remarkably crumpled.
Pressure has hardened the marine muds, the arkose, or the volcanic ash from which slates are derived, and has caused them to cleave by the rearrangement of their particles.
CHAPTER XIII
Early stages of metamorphism are seen in SLATE.
The strongest heat effects are naturally caused by bosses and regional intrusions, and the zone of change about them may be several miles in width.
These few examples must suffice of the great class of metamorphic rocks.
ORIGIN OF MINERAL VEINS.
In contact metamorphism, thin sheets of molten rock produce less effect than thicker ones.
Of this structure, called FOLIATION, we may distinguish two types,--a coarser feldspathic type, and a fine type in which other minerals than feldspar predominate.
REGIONAL METAMORPHISM.
Many of the richest ore deposits are thus due to successive concentrations: the ores were leached originally from the rocks to a large extent by laterally seeping waters; they were concentrated in the ore deposits of the vein chiefly by ascending currents; they have been reconcentrated by descending waters in the way just mentioned.
The minerals of veins are therefore constantly being dissolved along their upper portions and carried down the fissures by ground water to lower levels, where they are redeposited.
Thus chemical reactions are greatly quickened; minerals are dissolved and redeposited in new positions, or their chemical constituents may recombine in new minerals, entirely changing the nature of the rock, as when, for example, feldspar recrystallizes as quartz and mica.
Under still stronger pressure the whole structure of the rock is altered.
Which will be more strongly altered, the rocks about a closed dike in which lava began to cool as soon as it filled the fissure, or the rocks about a dike which opened on the surface and through which the molten rock flowed for some time?
The most common vein stones are QUARTZ and CALCITE.
The steaming water rises through fissures in volcanic rocks and is now depositing in the rifts a vein stone of quartz, with metallic ores of iron, mercury, lead, and other metals.
MICA SCHIST, the most common of schists, and in fact of all metamorphic rocks, is composed of mica and quartz in alternating wavy folia.
Under somewhat greater pressure, slate becomes PHYLLITE, a clay slate whose cleavage surfaces are lustrous with flat-lying mica flakes.
Rock crushing develops heat, and allows a freer circulation of heated waters and vapors.
TALC SCHIST consists of quartz and TALC, a light-colored magnesian mineral of greasy feel, and so soft that it can be scratched with the thumb nail.
FLUORITE (calcium fluoride), a mineral harder than calcite and crystallizing in cubes of various colors, and BARITE (barium sulphate), a heavy white mineral, are abundant in many veins.
Now fissures, wherever they occur, form the trunk channels of the underground circulation. Water descends from the surface along these rifts; it moves laterally from either side to the fissure plane, just as ground water seeps through the surrounding rocks from every direction to a well; and it ascends through these natural water ways as in an artesian well, whenever they intersect an aquifer in which water is under hydrostatic pressure.
These processes are known as METAMORPHISM, and the rocks affected, whether originally sedimentary or igneous, are called METAMORPHIC ROCKS.
The fact of change is seen in their hardness arid cementation, their more or less complete recrystallization, and their foliation; but the change is often so complete that no trace of their original structure and mineral composition remains to tell whether the rocks from which they were derived were sedimentary or igneous, or to what variety of either of these classes they belonged.
METAMORPHISM AND MINERAL VEINS
Sandstone may be converted into quartzite, and shale into ARGILLITE, a compact, massive clay rock.
These folia can be distinguished from the laminae of sedimentary rocks by their lenticular form and lack of continuity, and especially by the fact that they consist of platy, crystalline grains, and not of particles rounded by wear.
Thus, next to a dike, bituminous coal may be baked to coke or anthracite, and chalk and limestone to crystalline marble.
FOLIATION.
The adjacent strata may be changed only in color, hardness, and texture.
The same pressure which has caused the rock to cleave has set free some of its mineral constituents along the cleavage planes to crystallize there as mica.
Under the action of internal agencies rocks of all kinds may be rendered harder, more firmly cemented, and more crystalline.
How the gold came in the placers we may leave the pupil to suggest.
At last a man of ability worked himself up to the surface. This was Alexius Comnenus, nephew of the emperor Isaac Comnenus, whose short reign we related in the opening paragraph of this chapter.
It is true that Romanus was led after his capture to the tent of the Sultan, and laid prostrate before him, that, after the Turkish custom, the conqueror might place his foot on the neck of his vanquished foe.
Romanus himself was wounded, thrown from his horse, and made prisoner.
When the released captive reappeared, John had him seized and blinded.
After the death of Romanus, every general in the empire seemed to think that the time had come for him to assume the purple buskins and proclaim himself emperor. History records the names of no less than six pretenders to the throne during the next nine years, besides several rebels who took up arms without assuming the imperial title.
But some of them always contrived to elude him; his heavy cavalry could not come up with the light Seljouk horse bowmen, who generally escaped and rode back home by a long detour, burning and murdering as they went.
The next ten years were a time of chaos and disaster.
Sometimes the invaders were driven back, sometimes they eluded the imperial troops and escaped with their booty.
During his captivity the conduct of affairs had fallen into the hands of John Ducas, uncle of the young emperor Michael.
He could fight when necessary, but he preferred to win by treason and perjury.
Though false, he was not cruel, and seven ex-emperors and usurpers, living unharmed in Constantinople under his sceptre, bore witness to the mildness of his rule.
Romanus took in hand with the greatest vigour the task of repelling the Turks, which his predecessor had so grievously neglected.
To secure her son's life and throne, the Empress-dowager Eudocia took a new husband, and made him guardian of the young Michael.
In 1071 came the final disaster.
After this fearful disaster Asia Minor was lost; there was no chief to take the place of Romanus, and the Seljouk hordes spread westward almost unopposed.
The usual result followed.
The reign of Constantine Ducas was troubled by countless Seljouk invasions of the Armeniac, Anatolic, and Cappadocian themes.
Ducas died in 1067, leaving the throne to his son, Michael, a boy of fourteen years.
The unscrupulous regent was determined that Romanus should not supersede him and mount the throne again.
In 1050, they had penetrated to Bagdad, and their great chief, Togrul Beg, had declared himself "defender of the faith and protector of the Caliph." Armenia had next been overrun, and those portions of it which had not been annexed to the empire, and still obeyed independent princes, had been conquered by 1064.
The cruel work was so roughly done that the unfortunate Romanus died a few days later.
Wherever they passed they not merely plundered to right and left, but slew off the whole population.
Alp Arslan showed himself more forbearing to his prisoner than might have been expected.
Either from treachery or cowardice Andronicus Ducas, the officer who commanded the reserve, led his men off without fighting.
The aged Theodora had named as her successor on the throne Michael Stratioticus, a contemporary of her own who had been an able soldier twenty-five years back.
Domestic troubles were the first inevitable consequence of the extinction of the Macedonian dynasty.
The Emperor's division was beset on all sides by the enemy, and broke up in the dusk.
Cappadocia was already desolated from end to end, and the Turkish raids had reached as far as Amorium, in Phrygia.
Yet as a ruler he had many virtues, and it will always be remembered to his credit that he dragged the empire out of the deepest slough of degradation and ruin that it had ever sunk into.
Hence the Emperor was not unfrequently able to catch and slay off one of the minor divisions of the Turkish army.
Alexius was a man of courage and ability, but he displayed one of the worst types of Byzantine character.
The moment that the last of the Macedonian dynasty was gone, the elements of discord seemed unchained, and the double scourge of civil war and foreign invasion began to afflict the empire.
The new Emperor-regent was Romanus Diogenes, an Asiatic noble, whose brilliant courage displayed in the Seljouk wars had dazzled the world, and caused it to forget that caution and ability are far more regal virtues than headlong valour.
Isaac Comnenus and his friends took arms, and dispossessed the aged Michael of his throne with little difficulty.
He was the most accomplished liar of his age, and, while winning and defending the imperial throne, committed enough acts of mean treachery, and swore enough false oaths to startle even the courtiers of Constantinople.
Before a year had passed a band of great Asiatic nobles entered into a conspiracy to overturn Michael, and replace him by Isaac Comnenus, the chief of one of the ancient Cappadocian houses, and the most popular general of the East.
The safety of the realm was entirely in the hands of its well-paid and well-disciplined national army, and anything that impaired the efficiency of the army was fraught with the deadliest peril.
The Seljouk Turks were now drawing near.
But after this humiliating ceremony the Emperor was treated with kindness, and allowed after some months to ransom himself and return home. He would have fared better, however, if he had remained the prisoner of the Turk.
But whether successful or unsuccessful, they displayed a reckless cruelty, far surpassing anything that the Saracens had ever shown.
But Michael VI. was grown aged and incompetent, and the empire was full of ambitious generals, who would not tolerate a dotard on the throne.
The greater part of his men were cut to pieces.
Trot couldn't sleep, either, she was so worried over Cap'n Bill.
The Blueskins hesitated until a few got pricked and began to yell with terror, when the whole of the Boolooroo's attacking party turned and ran back to the gate, their Ruler reaching it first of all.
"Their dreadful color makes me hysterical," he said to his soldiers, "so if I am to have any peace of mind we must charge the foe and drive them back into the Fog Bank.
If at any time you wish to be seen, take the ring from your finger; but as long as you wear it, no one can see you--not even Earth people."
The Blueskins were not keeping a very close watch, as they were confident the Pinkies could not get into the City.
So she went sorrowfully back to the camp, followed by the Pinkies, and asked Rosalie what could be done.
Don't be afraid; those pink creatures have no blue blood in their veins and they'll run like rabbits when they see us coming."
At this the Ruler of the Blues stopped short in his flight to yell with terror, but seeing that only the sailorman was pursuing them and that this solitary foe had tumbled flat upon the ground, he issued a command and several of his people fell upon poor Cap'n Bill, seized him in their long arms and carried him struggling into the City, where he was fast bound.
And, although Trot ran with them, in her eagerness to save her friend, the gate was found to be fast barred and she knew it was impossible for them to force an entrance into the City.
The Pinkies tried to chase them, but their round, fat legs were no match for the long, thin legs of the Blueskins, who quickly gained the gate and shut themselves up in the City again.
"I'm sure I do not know," replied the Witch.
But, if anyone should see you, you would be captured."
"The Boolooroo may decide to patch him at once," added Button-Bright, with equal sadness, for he too mourned the sailor's loss.
"It's a magic ring I've loaned you, my dear," said she, "and as long as you wear it you will be invisible to all eyes--those of Blueskins and Pinkies alike.
"Good!" cried Trot; "now I can climb up."
"Oh, that's worse than being patched!" cried Trot.
If he leaped down into the City he would be seized at once.
"We are not sure of that," responded Jimfred, "for we have a right arm, too, and it is pretty strong."
They were sitting on a bench outside the doorway and both stood up as she approached.
"I know a house where I can hide so snugly that all the Boolooroo's soldiers cannot find me."
They soon gave up the chase and returned to the City, while the runaway Majordomo was captured by Captain Coralie and marched away to the tent of Rosalie the Witch, a prisoner of the Pinkies.
It was locked, but the key had been left on the outside.
"Would you like to escape?" she asked the captive.
When she finally opened the door he slipped off and let himself fall to the wall, where he doubled up in a heap.
She waited until the sentry who was pacing the corridor had his back toward her and then she turned the key and slipped within, softly closing the door behind her.
More guards were yelling, now, running along the foot of the wall to keep the fugitive in sight, and people began to pour out of the houses and join in the chase.
After a moment's thought she began feeling her way to the window, stumbling over objects as she went.
It would be a dangerous leap, for as his arms were bound he might topple off the wall into the garden; but he resolved to take this chance.
Every time she made a noise some one groaned, and that made the child uneasy.
As the girl walked through these passages she could hear snores of various degrees coming from behind some of the closed doors and knew that all the regular inmates of the place were sound asleep.
"We thought we heard footsteps," said one.
She was tired, too, and thought she would find a vacant room--of which there were many in the big palace--and go to sleep until daylight.
"I would, indeed!" said he.
She remembered there was a comfortable vacant room just opposite the suite of the Six Snubnosed Princesses, so she stole softly up to it and tried the door.
"He may find some one else," suggested the prisoner.
"That may be," admitted Fredjim, "but we are much the strongest, because our right arm was by far the best before we were patched."
"I can't," said Tiggle.
Once or twice the little girl lost her way, for the streets were very puzzling to one not accustomed to them, but finally she sighted the great palace and went up to the entrance.
"If I get you out of the palace, can you hide yourself so that you won't be found?"
The next minute, however, he had scrambled to his feet and was running swiftly along the garden wall.
"All right," said Trot; "I'll do it; for when you're gone the Boolooroo will have no one to patch Cap'n Bill to."
Even while she spoke Trot was busy with the knots in the cords, and presently she had unbound Tiggle, who soon got upon his feet.
"We will test it," suggested the other, "by all pulling upon one end of this bench with our right arms.
There she found a double guard posted.
All the Blueskins except a few sentries had gone to bed and were sound asleep.
"I'll do that, all right," promised the delighted Tiggle.
So, suddenly he gave a mighty leap and came down into the field outside the City.
But now an idea occurred to the girl.
Just then he came opposite the camp of the Pinkies and decided to trust himself to the mercies of his Earth friends rather than be made a prisoner by his own people, who would obey the commands of their detested but greatly feared Boolooroo.
So she turned the key, opened the door, and walked in.
While they were tussling at the bench, dragging it first here and then there in the trial of strength, Trot opened the door of the palace and walked in.
It was locked, but the key was outside, as the Blueskins seldom took a door-key away from its place.
"We're sorry for anyone who has to be patched," replied Fredjim in a reflective tone, "for although it didn't hurt us as much as we expected, it's a terrible mix-up to be in--until we become used to our strange combination.
Then Trot started for the door and Tiggle could no longer see her because she was not now touching him.
You and we are about alike now, Jimfred, although we were so different before."
It was pretty dark in the hall and only a few dim blue lights showed at intervals down the long corridors.
"Are you condemned to be patched, too, little one?"
"Not so," said Jimfred; "we are really more intelligent than you are, for the left side of our brain was always the keenest before we were patched."
"Much worse," said Tiggle, with a groan.
"But it will take him time to do that, and time is all I want," answered the child.
In the center stood the Great Knife which the Boolooroo used to split people in two when he patched them, and at one side was a dark form huddled upon the floor and securely bound.
A little way to the right the wall joined the wall of the City, being on the same level with it.
So she mounted to the upper floor, and thinking she would be likely to find Cap'n Bill in the Room of the Great Knife she went there and tried the door.
At last she found a window and managed to open the shutters and let the moonlight in.
"The Boolooroo has hidden him until to-morrow morning, when he's to be patched to me.
"No," answered Trot.
Looking out, he found that a few feet below the window was the broad wall that ran all around the palace gardens.
A blue gloom hung over the City, which was scarcely relieved by a few bluish, wavering lights here and there, but Trot knew the general direction in which the palace lay and she decided to go there first.
"You see," remarked Jimfred, as they seated themselves again upon the bench, "the Boolooroo has ordered the patching to take place to-morrow morning after breakfast.
It was the first time the girl had seen them together and she marveled at the queer patching that had so strongly united them, yet so thoroughly separated them.
Trot hastened to this form and knelt beside it, but was disappointed to find it was only Tiggle.
"You've made a friend of me, little girl, and if ever I can help you I'll do it with pleasure."
The man was much surprised at her disappearance, but listened carefully and when he heard the girl make a noise at one end of the corridor he opened the door and ran in the opposite direction, as he had been told to do.
"Oh, it's the Earth Child," said he.
When Tiggle had safely escaped, the little girl wandered through the palace in search of Cap'n Bill, but soon decided such a quest in the dark was likely to fail and she must wait until morning.
"Tell me where Cap'n Bill is."
"Three Eyes," said the mother, "climb up, and try what you can do; perhaps you will be able to see better with your three eyes than One Eye can."
"'Little goat, if you're able, Pray deck out my table,'
On saying this the wise woman vanished.
"Little goat, when you are able, Come and clear away my table."
"'Little goat, when you're able, Remove my nice table,'
"Little goat, when you're able, Remove my nice table."
"Little goat, if you're able, Come and deck my pretty table."
III.
But Melbury would not even stop to hear him.
Some monstrous calumnies are afloat--of which I have known nothing until now!"
At last the bell rang: Mrs. Charmond could see him.
Knowing his mission, the younger man hastened down from the copse and managed to intercept the timber-merchant.
"I will," he said, in a husky tone.
Another man came and paid court to her--one her equal in breeding and accomplishments; in every way it seemed to me that he only could give her the home which her training had made a necessity almost. I urged her on, and she married him.
She disliked the woods, but they had the advantage of being a place in which she could walk comparatively unobserved.
Things came about which made me doubt if it would be for my daughter's happiness to do this, inasmuch as the young man was poor, and she was delicately reared.
"What! haven't you told her before?" said Melbury.
"Yes," said Melbury.
She had never so clearly perceived till now that her soul was being slowly invaded by a delirium which had brought about all this; that she was losing judgment and dignity under it, becoming an animated impulse only, a passion incarnate.
Tell me of it, I say."
"Oh, Melbury," she burst out, "you have made me so unhappy!
"Will you leave me to myself?" she said, with a faintness which suggested a guilty conscience.
His mind was made up, the appeal was to be made; and Winterborne stood and watched him sadly till he entered the second plantation and disappeared.
You have felled all the trees that were to be purchased by you this season, except the oaks, I believe."
Then "a strange gentleman who says it is not necessary to give his name," was suddenly announced.
It is too dreadful!
He waited thus an hour, an hour and a half, two hours. He began to look pale and ill, whereupon the butler, who came in, asked him to have a glass of wine.
Hence her words "very nice," "so charming," were uttered with a perfunctoriness that made them sound absurdly unreal.
But, ma'am, a fatal mistake was at the root of my reckoning.
She loved you once, ma'am; you began by liking her.
"Do sit down, Mr. Melbury.
I am not at home to anybody."
"Tell you, ma'am--not I. What the gossip is, no matter.
But he walked about the paved court till he was tired, and still nobody came to him.
While she sat, or rather crouched, unhinged by the interview, lunch-time came, and then the early afternoon, almost without her consciousness.
Her mother was a very dear wife to me, but she was taken away from us when the child was young, and the child became precious as the apple of my eye to me, for she was all I had left to love.
"This is so utterly unexpected--you obtain admission to my presence by misrepresentation--"
They had heard of his arrival, but had not seen him enter, and, imagining him still in the court, discussed freely the possible reason of his calling.
"Oh no," said the other.
I am just going up to tell her you are here."
He did not take a chair, and she also remained standing.
Plodding thoughtfully onward, he crossed a glade lying between Little Hintock Woods and the plantation which abutted on the park; and the spot being open, he was discerned there by Winterborne from the copse on the next hill, where he and his men were working.
"But surely, ma'am, you know the truth better than I?"
"You see you came so very early."
Melbury roused himself and said, "No, no. Is she almost ready?"
It must be so charming to work in the woods just now!"
This gossip--"
"Yes, what is it?" she said.
At nine o'clock the next morning Melbury dressed himself up in shining broadcloth, creased with folding and smelling of camphor, and started for Hintock House.
Melbury started, and looked at her simply.
Her features became a little pinched, and the touches of powder on her handsome face for the first time showed themselves as an extrinsic film.
CHAPTER XXXII.
"Yes, yes," said Melbury, in a reverie.
"I am an old man," said Melbury, "whom, somewhat late in life, God thought fit to bless with one child, and she a daughter.
Melbury sat with his hands resting on the familiar knobbed thorn walking-stick, whose growing he had seen before he enjoyed its use. The scene to him was not the material environment of his person, but a tragic vision that travelled with him like an envelope.
She was not in her private sitting-room when he reached it, but in a minute he heard her coming from the front staircase, and she entered where he stood.
"I cannot see him, whoever he may be.
But I saw it was the law of nature that this should be, and that it was for the maid's happiness that she should have a home when I was gone; and I made up my mind without a murmur to help it on for her sake.
"Never mind," said Melbury, retreating into the court, "I'll stand about here." Charged so fully with his mission, he shrank from contact with anybody.
Resting upon his stick, he began: "Mrs. Charmond, I have called upon a more serious matter--at least to me--than tree-throwing.
How could you come to me like this!
Now go away--go, go!"
And whatever mistakes I make in my manner of speaking upon it to you, madam, do me the justice to set 'em down to my want of practice, and not to my want of care."
Melbury rang at the tradesmen's door of the manor-house, and was at once informed that the lady was not yet visible, as indeed he might have guessed had he been anybody but the man he was.
He had chosen his time with a view, as he supposed, of conveniently catching Mrs. Charmond when she had just finished her breakfast, before any other business people should be about, if any came.
"Certainly I would do her no harm--I--" Melbury's eye met hers.
He said nothing of his destination either to his wife or to Grace, fearing that they might entreat him to abandon so risky a project, and went out unobserved.
She might have begun to guess his meaning; but apart from that, she had such dread of contact with anything painful, harsh, or even earnest, that his preliminaries alone were enough to distress her.
"I have been thinking of this, sir," he said, "and I am of opinion that it would be best to put off your visit for the present."
A wild longing to be gone from this kindly prison--to get away from the thought of the girl.
Now stand on that threshold.
Professor Ryan, late physical instructor at one of the aviation camps, stood Hawksley in front of him and ran his hard hands over the young man's body.
Right after lunch you go to the boss's garage and wait for me.
"I'm the doctor, miss," interrupted Ryan, crisply.
This was cruelty.
Romance?
Train leaves at two-fifty.
Two bolts; one or the other will go home."
Bernini smiled.
We are easing them along because we want the top men in our net. But if Karlov takes it into his head to get you, and succeeds, he'll have a stranglehold on the whole local service; because we'd have to make great concessions to free you."
Burlingame jerked his thumb toward a photograph on the wall.
Kitty realized that this little junket was the very thing she needed--open spaces, long walks in which to think out her problem. She hurried home and spent the morning packing.
"Right-o!" agreed Hawksley.
This man uses the loft of the building for his home.
Because he had loved her mother; because, but for an accident of chance, she, Kitty, might have been his daughter.
Stay as long as she wants you to."
Soft.
Sir, said Sir Tristram, I will go to the field and do what I may.
Then the barons gathered them together, and said plainly they would not have those ladies burnt for an horn made by sorcery, that came from as false a sorceress and witch as then was living.
What are ye, said Sir Lamorak, that knoweth me?
I will well, said Sir Lamorak, that ye have seen me and met with me.
And then by the assent of King Mark, and of Sir Andred, and of some of the barons, Sir Tristram was led unto a chapel that stood upon the sea rocks, there for to take his judgment: and so he was led bounden with forty knights.
Alas, said King Mark, this is a great despite, and sware a great oath that she should be burnt and the other ladies.
Then the lady prayed the fishers to bring him to her place.
When Sir Tristram saw the people draw unto him, he remembered he was naked, and sperd fast the chapel door, and brake the bars of a window, and so he leapt out and fell upon the crags in the sea.
So the knight went his way unto King Mark, and brought him that rich horn, and said that Sir Lamorak sent it him, and thereto he told him the virtue of that horn.
And at the last they were wedded, and solemnly held their marriage.
So Sir Tristram made great moan and was ashamed that noble knights should defame him for the sake of his lady.
Well, said he, an it were to do again, so would I do, for I had liefer strife and debate fell in King Mark's court rather than Arthur's court, for the honour of both courts be not alike.
And when King Howel wist that it was Sir Tristram he was full glad of him.
So there were many knights made their avow, an ever they met with Morgan le Fay, that they would show her short courtesy.
That forthinketh me, said Sir Lamorak, for that knight's death, for he was my cousin; and if I were at mine ease as well as ever I was, I would revenge his death.
Then said Sir Tristram: Heard ye anything of me?
So then Sir Tristram gat the chapel and kept it mightily.
Then King Howel embraced him in his arms, and said: Sir Tristram, all my kingdom I will resign to thee. God defend, said Sir Tristram, for I am beholden unto you for your daughter's sake to do for you.
And then Sir Tristram was received worshipfully with procession.
Then the king made Queen Isoud to drink thereof, and an hundred ladies, and there were but four ladies of all those that drank clean.
Then Sir Tristram and Gouvernail gat them shipping, and so sailed into Brittany.
That me repenteth, said Tristram, for of all knights I loved to be in his fellowship.
And then Sir Tristram took great sorrow, and endured with great pain long time, for the arrow that he was hurt withal was envenomed.
Then one told him there was a knight of King Arthur's that was wrecked on the rocks.
Therefore, said Sir Tristram, ye shall leave all your malice, and so will I, and let us assay how we may win worship between you and me upon this giant Sir Nabon le Noire that is lord of this island, to destroy him.
Then Sir Tristram issued out of the town with such fellowship as he might make, and did such deeds that all Brittany spake of him.
Then Gouvernail went to the king and said: Sir, I counsel you to desire my lord, Sir Tristram, as in your need to help you.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Well, said Sir Lamorak, since ye have said so largely unto me, my name is Sir Lamorak de Galis, son unto King Pellinore.
And then either saluted other.
Also Sir Tristram was passing wroth that Sir Lamorak sent that horn unto King Mark, for well he knew that it was done in the despite of him.
We wot not, said the fishers, but he keepeth it no counsel but that he is a knight of King Arthur's, and by the mighty lord of this isle he setteth nought.
Ah, sir, remember ye not of the fall ye did give me once, and after ye refused me to fight on foot.
Sir, said Gouvernail, she is put in a lazar-cote.
And then he took such a thought suddenly that he was all dismayed, and other cheer made he none but with clipping and kissing; as for other fleshly lusts Sir Tristram never thought nor had ado with her: such mention maketh the French book; also it maketh mention that the lady weened there had been no pleasure but kissing and clipping.
And then when Sir Tristram came toward the old manor he found the track of many horses, and thereby he wist his lady was gone.
What is his name? said Sir Tristram.
No! said Sir Andred, and therewith he drew his sword, and would have slain him.
I will do by your counsel, said the king.
Fie upon thee, said Sir Andred, false traitor that thou art, with thine avaunting; for all thy boast thou shalt die this day.
SO when they were departed, Gouvernail, and Sir Lambegus, and Sir Sentraille de Lushon, that were Sir Tristram's men, sought their master. When they heard he was escaped then they were passing glad; and on the rocks they found him, and with towels they pulled him up.
So they departed all save Gouvernail.
So on the morrow they brought him thither in a fisher's raiment; and as soon as Sir Tristram saw him he smiled upon him and knew him well, but he knew not Sir Tristram.
And these fishers told Sir Lamorak all the guise of Sir Nabon; how there came never knight of King Arthur's but he destroyed him.
And then, at the last, by great might and force, he slew the Earl Grip with his own hands, and more than an hundred knights he slew that day.
For that horn did never good, but caused strife and debate, and always in her days she had been an enemy to all true lovers.
Fair sir, said Sir Tristram, meseemeth by your cheer ye have been diseased but late, and also methinketh I should know you heretofore.
I am Sir Tristram de Liones.
And at the last battle that he did was slain Sir Nanowne le Petite, the which he put to a shameful death in despite of King Arthur, for he was drawn limb-meal.
And then Sir Segwarides brought Sir Tristram to a lady thereby that was born in Cornwall, and she told him all the perils of that valley, and how there came never knight there but he were taken prisoner or slain.
But in the end, Queen Guenever said, it shall be thus, that he shall hate her, and love you better than ever he did to-fore.
So the good knight bade his men go from him: For at this time I may not help you.
And therefore he thought to quite Sir Lamorak.
CHAPTER XVI
Du Pont to invite him to the chateau.
Amiable and unfortunate Valancourt!'
What are riches--grandeur--health itself, to the luxury of a pure conscience, the health of the soul;--and what the sufferings of poverty, disappointment, despair--to the anguish of an afflicted one!
When she had finished, she returned the miniature to Emily. 'Keep it,' said she, 'I bequeath it to you, for I must believe it is your right.
Du Pont he recited some particulars of his late sufferings, when it appeared, that he had been confined for several months in one of the prisons of Paris, with little hope of release, and without the comfort of seeing his wife, who had been absent in the country, endeavouring, though in vain, to procure assistance from his friends.
I tasted too what was called the sweet of revenge--but it was transient, it expired even with the object, that provoked it.
Blood--blood too!--There was no blood--thou canst not say it!--Nay, do not smile,--do not smile so piteously!'
Emily expressed her sincere concern.
What!
Hah! there again!
Bonnac, if it had been possible for him to forget the benevolent Valancourt, would have wished that Emily might accept the just Du Pont.
'Her death presents to us a great and awful lesson,' continued the abbess; 'let us read it, and profit by it; let it teach us to prepare ourselves for the change, that awaits us all!
Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine, than the physician. MACBETH
He succeeded; the heavy debt, that oppressed me, was discharged; and, when I would have expressed my sense of the obligation I had received, my benefactor was fled from my search.
I mean you are yet innocent of any great crime!--But you have passions in your heart,--scorpions; they sleep now--beware how you awaken them!--they will sting you, even unto death!'
'The guilty cannot claim that protection!' said sister Agnes, 'let the Count look to his conduct, that he do not forfeit his claim!
I see them now--now!'
'I do not doubt it,' replied the Count, 'and I will not deny myself and Blanche the pleasure of visiting you, if your affairs should allow you to be at La Vallee, about the time when we can meet you there.'
At first, she was frantic and melancholy by quick alternatives; then, she sunk into a deep and settled melancholy, which still, however, has, at times, been interrupted by fits of wildness, and, of late, these have again been frequent.'
Your services have already awakened her gratitude, and your sufferings her pity; and trust me, my friend, in a heart so sensible as hers, gratitude and pity lead to love.
Emily did not appear to notice this question, but remained thoughtful, for a few moments, and then said, 'It was about that same period that the Marchioness de Villeroi expired.'
There is hope for all who repent!'
Soon after, he took leave, and, when Emily joined some of the nuns, she was surprised to find them acquainted with a circumstance, which she had carefully avoided to mention, and expressing their admiration of his intrepidity in having dared to pass a night in the apartment, whence Ludovico had disappeared; for she had not considered with what rapidity a tale of wonder circulates.
In the evening, the Count called, as he had promised, at the convent, and Emily was surprised to perceive a mixture of playful ridicule and of reserve in his mention of the north apartment.
Give thy thoughts no tongue. SHAKESPEARE
Was not that the vesper-bell?'
'We are taught to hope, that prayer and penitence will work our salvation.
By what means he did this, I never could learn; but he secreted her in this convent, where he afterwards prevailed with her to take the veil, while a report was circulated in the world, that she was dead, and the father, to save his daughter, assisted the rumour, and employed such means as induced her husband to believe she had become a victim to his jealousy.
'That is an odd remark,' said Frances.
'No,' replied Frances, 'the evening service is passed.
'You are right,' replied sister Agnes, 'I shall be better there.
I do not scruple to tell you, that I am unhappy, and that the watch of the last night has not assisted me to discover Ludovico; upon every occurrence of the night you must excuse my reserve.'
Where, then, is justice, and where is injustice, and in what part of the State did they spring up?
Certainly.
We must.
And an art requiring as much attention as shoemaking?
The trait of which I am speaking, I replied, may be also seen in the dog, and is remarkable in the animal.
True.
And may we not say confidently of man also, that he who is likely to be gentle to his friends and acquaintances, must by nature be a lover of wisdom and knowledge?
That we may safely affirm.
What trait?
A difficulty by no means easy to overcome, he replied.
Will he not also require natural aptitude for his calling?
Yes, I know.
But is war an art so easily acquired that a man may be a warrior who is also a husbandman, or shoemaker, or other artisan; although no one in the world would be a good dice or draught player who merely took up the game as a recreation, and had not from his earliest years devoted himself to this and nothing else?
I replied.
And they will take care that their families do not exceed their means; having an eye to poverty or war.
True, he said.
No tools will make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any attention upon them.
The matter never struck me before; but I quite recognise the truth of your remark.
Did this never strike you as curious?
Certainly not.
Certainly.
Here feeling perplexed I began to think over what had preceded.--My friend, I said, no wonder that we are in a perplexity; for we have lost sight of the image which we had before us.
Probably in the dealings of these citizens with one another.
Why?
What is to be done then?
How then will he who takes up a shield or other implement of war become a good fighter all in a day, whether with heavy-armed or any other kind of troops?
And the higher the duties of the guardian, I said, the more time, and skill, and art, and application will be needed by him?
True.
Why, he said, you should give them the ordinary conveniences of life. People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.
They are the same, he replied.
And is not the love of learning the love of wisdom, which is philosophy?
True, he said.
And the selection will be no easy matter, I said; but we must be brave and do our best.
Undoubtedly.
What do you mean?
I have.
Why, because he distinguishes the face of a friend and of an enemy only by the criterion of knowing and not knowing.
It will.
Much greater.
Is not the noble youth very like a well-bred dog in respect of guarding and watching?
No doubt, he replied.
Whereas, I said, they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them.
Undoubtedly.
Yes, Socrates, he said, and if you were providing for a city of pigs, how else would you feed the beasts?
I do not apprehend your meaning.
I dare say that you are right in your suggestion, I said; we had better think the matter out, and not shrink from the enquiry.
Would not he who is fitted to be a guardian, besides the spirited nature, need to have the qualities of a philosopher?
Yes, he said, the tools which would teach men their own use would be beyond price.
Now nothing can be more important than that the work of a soldier should be well done.
And is he likely to be brave who has no spirit, whether horse or dog or any other animal?
Quite true.
Most certainly, he replied.
Quite true.
Yes, I said, now I understand: the question which you would have me consider is, not only how a State, but how a luxurious State is created; and possibly there is no harm in this, for in such a State we shall be more likely to see how justice and injustice originate.
And with such a diet they may be expected to live in peace and health to a good old age, and bequeath a similar life to their children after them.
I cannot imagine that they are more likely to be found any where else.
Certainly not.
But is not war an art?
And the country which was enough to support the original inhabitants will be too small now, and not enough?
Adeimantus thought that the enquiry would be of great service to us.
Many animals, I replied, furnish examples of them; our friend the dog is a very good one: you know that well-bred dogs are perfectly gentle to their familiars and acquaintances, and the reverse to strangers.
Why, a dog, whenever he sees a stranger, is angry; when an acquaintance, he welcomes him, although the one has never done him any harm, nor the other any good.
Why? he said; are they not capable of defending themselves?
All these qualities, he replied, will certainly be required by them.
And must not an animal be a lover of learning who determines what he likes and dislikes by the test of knowledge and ignorance?
Well, and your guardian must be brave if he is to fight well?
In my opinion the true and healthy constitution of the State is the one which I have described.
Then, I said, my dear friend, the task must not be given up, even if somewhat long.
Yes.
And living in this way we shall have much greater need of physicians than before?
Then we have found the desired natures; and now that we have found them, how are they to be reared and educated?
Certainly.
I mean that both of them ought to be quick to see, and swift to overtake the enemy when they see him; and strong too if, when they have caught him, they have to fight with him.
They must not be forgotten: and there will be animals of many other kinds, if people eat them.
he said.
Shall we not?
And surely this instinct of the dog is very charming;--your dog is a true philosopher.
I said; how shall we find a gentle nature which has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the other?
Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
"And I also," added the reporter quickly.
"That which struck Herbert did not miss, Pencroft," replied the engineer.
"You are right, captain," replied Pencroft, his chest swelling with sullen anger.
"That is just what I was thinking," answered Pencroft.
He would have been very useful to them, if they had been able to make him turn traitor!
It had left the corral at half-past seven.
If the convicts were hid in one spot of the island, if we knew that spot, and had only to dislodge them, I would undertake a direct attack; but is there not occasion to fear, on the contrary, that they are sure to fire the first shot?"
But if they were compelled to bow before necessity, they did not do so without impatience.
At Jup's neck hung a small bag, and in this bag was found a little note traced by Neb's hand.
"No, captain," replied the boy.
"But, I repeat, that we haven't any fire!"
"Let us wait," said the boy, "for he will soon come to the surface to breathe."
All went out.
First of all, Cyrus Harding was carried into the central passage.
"Yes," replied Spilett, "a mountain which must be rather high--"
"It will blaze, since my master has said so."
But the sailor had not gone fifty paces when he stopped, and again uttering a tremendous hurrah, pointed towards the angle of the cliff,--
"If, on my return, I find a fire at the house, I shall believe that the thunder itself came to light it." All three climbed the bank; and arrived at the angle made by the river, the sailor, stopping, said to his two companions,--
"Well, we will make matches.
Herbert, Neb, and Pencroft did the same, while Top slept at his master's feet.
"Yes," replied Pencroft.
However, Neb having tightened his grasp on his stick, was just going to fell the pig, when the latter, tearing itself from Top's teeth, by which it was only held by the tip of its ear, uttered a vigorous grunt, rushed upon Herbert, almost overthrew him, and disappeared in the wood.
"I am not complaining, my boy," replied Pencroft, "only I repeat, that meat is a little too much economized in this sort of meal."
This accident, which appeared so very serious to Pencroft, produced different effects on the companions of the honest sailor.
Smoke was escaping and curling up among the rocks.
If the last hypothesis is correct, it will be easy enough to get home again.
"With what?"
"Yes, fire!" said the obstinate sailor again.
"But I say, Mr. Spilett--"
"I could sooner light my arms by rubbing them against each other!"
"But he will make us a fire!" replied Gideon Spilett, "only have a little patience, Pencroft!"
As to the reporter, he simply replied,--
There were still the same trees, belonging, for the most part, to the pine family.
If the direction has been maintained from the northeast to the southwest, we have traversed the States of North Carolina, of South Carolina, of Georgia, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico, itself, in its narrow part, then a part of the Pacific Ocean.
All three directly darted after Top, but at the moment when they joined him the animal had disappeared under the waters of a large pond shaded by venerable pines.
The supper must necessarily be very meager.
"What?"
For a few minutes he remained absorbed in thought; then again speaking,--
The experiment, therefore, did not succeed.
"You don't know yet?"
This was his uppermost thought.
Top plunged into the water, but the capybara, hidden at the bottom of the pond, did not appear.
An instant later the capybara, dragged to the bank, was killed by a blow from Neb's stick.
"Alas! we have no fire," said Pencroft, "or rather, captain, we have it no longer!"
If there was game there this was not the time to discuss how it was to be cooked, but rather, how they were to get hold of it.
"Better to put things at the worst at first," replied the engineer, "and reserve the best for a surprise."
"Well?" asked the sailor.
Neb, Herbert, and Pencroft stopped, motionless.
"Isn't Cyrus here?" replied the reporter.
"That's capital!" cried the sailor.
Perhaps it saw men for the first time.
"Herbert!
The exploration, therefore, continued, and was usefully marked by a discovery which Herbert made of a tree whose fruit was edible.
The seaman looked at Spilett in a way which seemed to say, "If it depended upon you to do it, we wouldn't taste roast meat very soon"; but he was silent.
With Top's barking were mingled curious gruntings.
"We will make it, Pencroft," replied Harding.
"With nothing."
"Chemicals!"
This time, the hunters, instead of following the course of the river, plunged straight into the heart of the forest.
"Never?" cried the reporter.
Besides, the couroucous which had been reserved had disappeared.
Night had closed in, and the temperature, which had modified when the wind shifted to the northwest, again became extremely cold.
"Cyrus is here!"
"Top has found something!" cried Neb, who ran towards a thicket, in the midst of which the dog had disappeared, barking.
It stupidly rolled its eyes, deeply buried in a thick bed of fat.
The engineer's condition would, therefore, have been bad enough, if his companions had not carefully covered him with their coats and waistcoats.
Pencroft soon made a raft of wood, as he had done before, though if there was no fire it would be a useless task, and the raft following the current, they returned towards the Chimneys.
"We mustn't complain," said Herbert.
The hunters had scarcely entered the bushes when they saw Top engaged in a struggle with an animal which he was holding by the ear.
After working an hour, Pencroft, who was in a complete state of perspiration, threw down the pieces of wood in disgust.
"I feel dreadfully weak," replied Harding.
Chapter 9
In fact, this time had scarcely elapsed before the black points emerged at a little distance, and two jets of air mingled with vapor were noiselessly shot forth.
One of them, armed with a very primitive harpoon--a long nail at the end of a stick--kept himself in the bow of the boat, while the other two noiselessly paddled on.
The hunters were therefore in luck.
Between them were canals, iguarapes, lagoons, temporary lakes, an inextricable network which renders the hydrography of this country so difficult.
"Good!
What are these, after manatees twelve and fifteen feet long, which still abound in the rivers and lakes of Africa?
The booty was divided between the passengers and crew of the jangada, and if any lasted till the evening it did not last any longer.
The man had certainly seen a great deal, but his observations were those of a skeptic, and he often shocked the straightforward people who were listening to him.
These there was no wish to get out.
In this way they always have the meat of these animals fresh.
When the meat is smoke-dried it keeps for a long time, and is capital food.
Fonteboa has one thousand inhabitants, drawn from the Indians on both banks, who rear numerous cattle in the fields in the neighborhood.
"Certainly," answered Yaquita.
On the 19th of July, at sunrise, the jangada left Fonteboa, and entered between the two completely deserted banks of the river, and breasted some islands shaded with the grand forests of cacao-trees.
Turtles, or turtle eggs, are an object of very considerable trade throughout the Amazonian basin.
But the town of Ega is of some importance; it was worthy of a halt to visit it.
Their shell is still soft, their flesh extremely tender, and after they have cooked them they eat them just like oysters.
At this spot the Amazon appears under a truly grandiose aspect, but its course is more than ever encumbered with islands and islets.
CHAPTER XV.
The Rio Jurua, coming from the southwest, soon joins the river on the left.
Inexperienced fishermen would at first have taken these moving points for floating wreckage, but the natives of Fonteboa were not to be so deceived.
Its great length rendered it almost insensible to the swell of the Amazon, but during the torrential showers the Garral family had to keep indoors. They had to occupy profitably these hours of leisure.
If to this is added that the animal is easily caught, it is not to be wondered at that the species is on its way to complete destruction.
They tell of people, unconsciously submitted to this hemorrhage for many hours, who have never awoke!"
In this form large quantities are consumed.
"It is perhaps in these parts," said Manoel, "that we ought to look for those female warriors who so much astonished Orellana.
The night passed at the moorings near a slightly rising shore, and nothing disturbed the quiet.
Large bats of ruddy color skimmed with their huge wings the current of the Amazon.
On the shore they saw the little hillocks which indicated the places where, that very night, each packet of eggs had been deposited in the trench in groups of from one hundred and sixty to one hundred and ninety.
Representatives of different tribes of Indians are found in the neighborhood, which are easily recognizable by the differences in their tattoo marks.
On the morrow, at daybreak, Benito, Fragoso, and a few Indians took a pirogue and landed on the beach of one of the large islands which they had passed during the night.
The jangada continued to descend; but what a labyrinth the Amazon now appeared!
It was under these circumstances that little by little Torres had begun to take a more active part in the conversation.
The fishermen continued their cautious advance.
The sky was heavily charged with electric cumuli, warning them of renewed storms.
It was not a manatee of any size, for it only measured about three feet long.
These could not hinder the progress of the raft, which offered little resistance to the wind.
They knew they could catch her up.
"Never fear!" replied Manoel; "if necessary we will watch over them as they sleep."
"Tomorrow, at daybreak, there will be a rare treat for those who like fresh turtle eggs and little turtles!"
The details of his many voyages throughout the whole north of Brazil afforded him numerous subjects to talk about.
They proceed differently with the little turtles which are just hatched. There is no need to pack them or tie them up.
On the other hand, Minha felt for him an instinctive repulsion which she was at no pains to conceal.
In ten minutes or thereabouts the animals would certainly appear in a circle more or less confined.
A vessel can go up it into Peru without encountering insurmountable obstacles among its white waters, which are fed by a great number of petty affluents.
But an earlier laying had taken place two months before, the eggs had hatched under the action of the heat stored in the sand, and already several thousands of little turtles were running about the beach.
On the 5th of July the mouth of the Tunantins appeared on the left bank, forming an estuary of some four hundred feet across, in which it pours its blackish waters, coming from the west-northwest, after having watered the territories of the Cacena Indians.
The bad weather was at last met with.
THE CONTINUED DESCENT
Probably the hamlet has now finished with its nomadic existence, and has definitely become stationary.
The Putumayo is one of the most important affluents of the Amazon.
"Oh, the dreadful creatures!" cried Lina, hiding her eyes; "they fill me with horror!"
It did not show itself in continual rains, but in frequent storms.
The flesh of the manatee is excellent, superior even to that of pork, and the oil furnished by its lard, which is three inches thick, is a product of great value.
But it would be difficult to hinder their destruction.
"To be sure--very formidable," answered he.
They chatted together, communicated their observations, and their tongues were seldom idle.
They waited till the necessity of breathing would bring the manatees up again.
This would give a rest, which was deservedly due to the hard-working crew of the raft.
They watch for the arrival of the chelonians, and proceed to the extraction of the eggs to the sound of the drum; and the harvest is divided into three parts--one to the watchers, another to the Indians, a third to the state, represented by the captains of the shore, who, in their capacity of police, have to superintend the collection of the dues.
But if Araujo had no map to guide him, his experience served him more surely, and it was wonderful to see him unraveling the chaos, without ever turning aside from the main river.
Here in the sixteenth century missions were founded by the Spaniards, which were afterward destroyed by the Portuguese, and not a trace of them now remains.
These poor cetaceans have been so hunted that they have become very rare in the Amazon and its affluents, and so little time is left them to grow that the giants of the species do not now exceed seven feet.
The pirogue was filled with these interesting amphibians, and they arrived just in time for breakfast.
These were, in fact, the horrible vampires which suck the blood of the cattle, and even attack man if he is imprudent enough to sleep out in the fields.
The man is scarcely to blame for his name.'
This morning she was very business-like in her short skirt, belted jacket, and green felt Alpine hat with a feather in the side.
It's too bad of Gustavo!
'Oh, indeed!
He put forth this preposterous statement with a glance as grave and innocent as that of a little cherub.
She stifled a laugh of prophetic triumph and sauntered over to Beppo.
'I don't care if you do speak English; I prefer Italian--what is your name?' She repeated the question in Italian.
She suppressed it quickly and turned away.
'His name is Tony,' he added--even he had understood that much Italian.
'I suppose not,' she agreed, 'though I should have included that in my order.'
'Very convenient, I should say.'
The two guests were an Englishman and his wife, whom the chances of travel had brought over night to Valedolmo.
Constance looked after him, puzzled and suspicious.
He had not counted upon this addition to the party, and was as scowling as she could have wished.
She drew from her pocket a handful of coppers and dropped them into his grimy little palm.
'He's perfect!' she cried.
Constance patted their shaggy mouse-coloured noses, made the acquaintance of the boy, whose name was Beppo, and looked about for the driver proper.
Her father had finished his egg and hers too, before she appeared, as nonchalant and smiling as if she were out the earliest of all.
His skin was dark--not too dark--just a good healthy out-door tan: his brows level and heavy, his gaze candour itself.
There were four persons present, though there should have been five.
'The poor fellow is embarrassed,' apologized her father.
'Is Tony a good guide?'
'I am sorry not to wear my own Alpine hat, Aunt Hazel; I look so deliciously German in it, but I simply can't afford to burn all the skin off my nose.'
'You can't make us believe that,' said her father.
Constance eyed her father sharply.
He wore a loose white shirt--immaculately white--with a red silk handkerchief knotted about his throat, brown corduroy knee-breeches, and a red cotton sash with the hilt of a knife conspicuously protruding.
'English!' There was reproach, disgust, disillusionment, in her tone. 'Not really, father?'
'The reason is, that Lieutenant di Ferara and Captain Coroloni are going with us to-day, and that this hat is more becoming than the other.'
'And who is Carlo?'
Further discussion was precluded by the appearance of a station-carriage which turned in at the gate and stopped before them.
'And the driver?'
'Really!
'He is the guide who owns them.'
The table was set on the terrace; breakfast was served and the company was gathered.
'I don't know about his Italian, but he talks uncommonly good English.'
'How simply horrible!'
'My dear,' her father warned, 'he understands English.'
'If there's anything I detest, it's an Americanized Italian--and here in Valedolmo of all places, where you have a right to demand something unique and romantic and picturesque and real.
'Really?
Elizabetta appeared in the doorway with two rush-covered flasks, and Tony hurried forward to receive them.
The one insult which she could not brook was for an Italian to fail to understand her when she talked Italian.
Beppo considered.
Constance clasped her hands in an ecstasy of admiration.
'But yes, of the best!'
There was something at once guilty and triumphant about his expression.
'A word here, a word there; I learn it in school.'
CHAPTER IV
I shall never place any faith in his judgment again.
I only ordered one.'
There are two of him.'
'How long?'
Zat donk', signorina, he go all day and never one little stumble.'
'What is your name?'
He divined suspicion behind these persistent inquiries, and he knew that in case Tony were dismissed, his own munificent pay would stop.
The morning ended by his being left behind with a balking donkey, while the others completed the last ascent that led to their halting-place for lunch.
The two said nothing, but they looked at each other and shrugged.
Tony rejoined them somewhat short of breath, but leading a humbled Fidilini.
He has been in the United States and speaks English, which is a great convenience.'
He divided his flowers into two equal parts, and sweeping off his hat, presented them with a bow, not to Constance, but to the officers, who somewhat sulkily passed them on.
As they were about to start on, Constance spied high above their heads, where the stream burst from the rocks, a clump of starry white blossoms.
Whether Constance pulled the wrong rein, or whether, as she affirmed, it was merely his natural badness, in any case, he suddenly veered from the path and took a cross cut down the rocky slope below them.
It was very gracefully and easily done, and a burst of applause greeted his descent.
It was not a dignified rescue, but at least it was effective; Fidilini came to a halt.
After some delay--owing to Tony's inability to balance the chafing-dish on Cristoforo Colombo's back--they filed from the gateway, an imposing cavalcade.
But his moment was coming.
CHAPTER V
He chased Fidilini over half the mountainside while the others were resting, and he carried the chafing-dish for a couple of miles because it refused to adjust itself nicely to the pack.
The winding path was both stony and steep, and, from a donkey's standpoint, thoroughly objectionable.
Mr. Wilder, quite pale with anxiety, came scrambling to her side. Constance sat up and laughed hysterically, while she examined a bleeding elbow.
Captain Coroloni and her father helped Constance to her feet while Lieutenant di Ferara recovered a side-comb and the white sun hat.
She received them with a smile; for an instant her eyes met Tony's, and he fell back, rewarded.
Leaping forward, he dropped over the precipice, a fall of ten feet, to a narrow ledge below.
'Oh, I must have it--it's the first I ever saw growing; I hadn't supposed we were high enough.' She glanced at the officers.
It was owing to Beppo's knowledge of the mountain paths rather than Tony's which had guided them to this agreeable spot; though no one in the party except Constance appeared to have noted the fact.
A disease that affects many women.
A bit of domestic fruit, consisting of blonde tresses, a dimple, and three bows of pink ribbon.
A man who can put on a new suit of clothes every fifteen minutes.
NOVEL.
NIX.
POPULARITY.
PAINT.
NOPE.
PLAN.
The fellow who butts in and says you're not entitled to a medal.
NOISE.
Nothing ventured nothing wonderful.
It is constructed by making one stitch and forgetting seven. The Peekaboo is the only friend the mosquito has on earth.
A modern abbreviation of chloroform.
Oh, yes, the man with a jag can hold on to the fence, but he can't hold on to his reputation.
A poor man laughing at his rich wife's poor joke.
The cold storage house where the world sends her favorites before she forgets them.
A green grape dropped in a cocktail so the customer can pull it out with his fingers.
That part of the human face which is visible above the collar.
RIDDLE.
SCEPTIC.
She saved twenty cents for car fare and spent eighty cents for lunch.
REFORM.
--Oliver Goldsmith, page 34.
To get in some of the street cars about six o'clock is a problem, and to get out again is an assassination.
We are a very nervous and careless people in America.
Often while riding in the street cars I have felt a germ rubbing against my ankle like a kitten, but being a gentleman, I did not reach down and kick it away because the law says we must not be disrespectful to the dumb brutes of the field.
Something which can be opened on credit, but it takes cash to start a church.
Something which is said to have wings, but I can't prove it, because they never flew my way.
RICHES.
One evening I rode from Forty-second Street to Fifty-ninth without once touching the floor with my feet.
A man who marries for money and finds it is all in Confederate bills.
James wrote two letters, one to his wife and one to his lady typewriter.
The way you get roast beef when you order it well done.
Little Jack Horner Sat in a corner Riding down town on the "L." He jumped to his feet Gave a lady his seat-- I'm a liar, but don't it sound well.
RAKE.
A bird which is always flying towards us but which never gets here.
Some people's talk is too cheap at any price.
What were the clerks swearing at after Ann went out?
One of them paints sawdust in a delicatessen factory at twelve dollars per.
How old will Ann's mother be when the book gets back?
SALOON.
RAG.
What time does the dinner bell ring and who squares it with the grocer?
Many of our street cars are made out of the same idea as a can of condensed milk.
Some of our street cars lead a double life, because they are used all winter to act the part of a refrigerator.
Failure kicked to pieces by hard work.
SUCKERS.
The cure costs anywhere from $2 to $15 per day, according to the mood the landlord is in.
SATAN.
Brave and strong men climb into a street car and they are full of health and life and vigor, but a few blocks up the road they fall out backwards and inquire feebly for a sanitarium.
What our friends think about us when our backs are turned.
The only difference is that the street cars have a sour taste like a lemon squeezer.
Paying a nickle for a seat in a street-car and then waiting till you get it.
Ten minutes after mailing them he discovered that the right letter was in the wrong envelope.
A thirty-dollar Panama hat on a thirty-cent man.
A violent disease which breaks out all over people when the weather gets warm.
A question-mark gone mad.
Ann took a dollar bill and went to a department store.
The bait used by those who go fishing for compliments.
"Yes."
"In stock?"
What for?--that they may try, a month hence, to marry me again; and to whom?--M.
"But I cannot," said she; "I am not strong enough; do you shut it."
"M.
"Yes."
"Come and help me."
How did you get this passport?"
"Our passport?"
"Will you dress here?"
"What are you looking at?"
Debray, perhaps, as it was once proposed.
CHAPTER IX
"Just think of that!" said Jessica.
He would not argue, he would not talk freely.
"Is it?" said Mrs. Hurstwood.
"What?" said Hanson.
"Say, that fits like a T, don't it?" he remarked, feeling the set of it at the waist and eyeing it from a few paces with real pleasure.
They looked about, and now the thing was sinking, and Minnie heard the low sip of the encroaching water.
"We'll have a nice game of euchre."
You're talking in your sleep."
"You must be thinking," he said.
Here, wake up," said Hanson, disturbed, and shaking her by the shoulder.
Carrie put on her hat.
Stick 'em out.
The latter looked, not quite sure, and then turned her head and looked.
"I know you won't," she remarked, half truthfully.
Carrie obeyed.
He touched it now as he spoke of going.
She actually started.
I won't hurt you."
Let's go to breakfast."
"What you need now is a new skirt.
A struggle ensued, which ended in Zeb flinging his colossal arms around the young Irishman, and bearing him bodily to the bank.
But there was another name also often pronounced--with speeches less pleasant to his ear.
"Speel up thur, Pheelum!" shouted he.
In strong but tender arms the wounded man was transferred from the stretcher to the skin couch, on which he had been accustomed to repose.
It was not from any unfaithfulness on the part of the foster-brother, that he seemed thus to disregard his duty; but simply because Zeb had requested him to lie down--telling him there was no occasion for both to remain awake.
Zeb took no notice of these grotesque demonstrations; but, once more bending over the prostrate form, proceeded to complete the examination already begun.
He's no more dead than you air--only fented.
It was not all over.
Unlike the ordinary stretcher, it was not carried between two men; but a man and a mare--the mare at the head, the man bearing behind.
It was the name of Louise's brother.
It was he of Connemara who completed the ill-matched team.
The hunter suspected his intent.
How air it to be done?
He had arrived within sight, and fortunately within rifle-range of the spot, at that critical moment when the jaguar was preparing to spring.
He had already noticed the Panama hat, that still adhered to the head of the mustanger; and a strange thought at seeing it there, had passed through his mind.
But there were wild words upon his lips that forbade it--suggesting only serious thoughts.
"Hats, heads, an everythin'.
Still the struggle was not over.
He was experiencing an interval of calm.
Becoming satisfied that there was no serious wound, he rose to his feet, and commenced taking stock of the odd articles around him.
The hunter seemed to cogitate on how he was to effect this purpose.
The Galwegian, believing it so, began uttering a series of lugubrious cries--the "keen" of Connemara.
The hunter had all the talking to himself.
They air more like the claws o' a tom cat.
Two saplings of at least ten feet in length were cut from the chapparal, and trimmed clear of twigs.
It was possible he might have seen fit to change the fashion.
It was for that the mustanger was making!
In the mode of using it, it more resembled the latter than the former: since he who was to be borne upon it, again deliriously raging, had to be strapped to the trestles!
The speeches were disjointed--incongruous, and almost unintelligible.
By the 'tarnal thur's somethin' goed astray!
He was unconscious of where he was, and knew not the friendly faces bending over him.
The idea was not altogether original.
Fortunate for Zeb, that the mustanger's knife had been left upon land. As it was, he came near being throttled; and only after throwing aside his rifle, and employing all his strength, was he able to protect himself against the unlooked-for assault.
And alone he sate listening to them--throughout the live-long night.
No," he continued, after stooping down and giving a short examination, "I kin see no wound worth makin' a muss about.
The cloak now came under his notice.
He heard speeches that surprised him, and names that did not.
"HENRY POINDEXTER."
What kin they be?
It was not from any suspicion of its being honestly in possession of him now wearing it that the hunter stooped down, and took it off with the design to examine it.
He was taking it, or rather getting it--Zeb having appointed himself to the easier post of conductor.
Standing over six feet, he saw the bloody knife-blade lying along the cloak.
Nothing loth, the "critter" came to a stand; Zeb, at the same time, flinging himself out of the saddle.
Once more mounting her, he rode rapidly away.
"In welcome.
No longer looking listlessly around, he sate stooping forward, his eye carefully scanning the sward, over a wide space on both sides of the path he was pursuing.
From his first words, the latter appeared to have been expecting him.
It fitted.
Have you nothing more to communicate?"
After getting clear of the enclosures of Casa del Corvo, the hunter headed his animal up stream--in the direction of the Port and town.
What is it you have to say?"
"So far as I am concerned, I'm quite contented to wait for your return; the more willingly that I know you are acting on the side of justice. But what would you have me do?"
"I have.
He did not alight, nor show any sign of an intention to do so; but sate in the saddle, stooped forward, his eyes turned upon the ground, in that vacant gaze which denotes reflection.
Then drawing the piece of curved iron out of his capacious pocket, he applied it to a hoof-print conspicuously outlined in the turf.
Innocent or guilty, for that time he shall be protected."
"How long?
The old mare could go fast enough when required--that is when Zeb required her and he had a mode of quickening her speed--known only to himself, and only employed upon extraordinary occasions.
But it want.
Kin ye promise me three days?"
Having advanced about a mile in the direction of the Nueces river, he abruptly changed his course; but with a coolness that told of a predetermined purpose.
He looked round, as if in search of some one to answer the interrogatory.
There was a simultaneous change in his bearing--in the expression of his features--and his attitude in the saddle.
Mr Stump, you may rely upon my pledged word."
You may speak your mind freely."
It simply consisted in drawing the bowie knife from his belt, and inserting about in inch of its blade into the mare's hip, close to the termination of the spine.
Glad to see you so soon.
He reached it, at a point where the chapparal impinged upon the prairie, and there reined up under the shade of a mezquit tree.
"That's my own belief.
Commonly it took him three to accomplish this distance; but on this occasion he was in an unusual state of excitement, and he made speed to correspond.
With this complimentary leave-taking the hunter strode out of head-quarters, and made his way back to the place where he had left his old mare.
Leaving the old mare to ruminate upon this eccentric proceeding, he advanced a pace or two, and dropped down upon his knees.
I can go so far as to hinder any open violation of the law; but I cannot go against the law itself."
The rest will be all right."
Don't ask me who.
And as to the power, I have that, too, in a certain sense.
Have you made any discovery in this queer affair?
On reaching the outskirts of Poindexter's plantation, he left the low lands of the Leona bottom, and spurred his old mare 'gainst the steep slope ascending to the upper plain.
On the present occasion there was no necessity for such excessive speed; and the Fort was reached after fifteen minutes' sharp trotting.
Even if the judge of the Supreme Court should require him to be delivered up inside that time, I can make objections that will delay his being taken from the guard-house.
For what?"
It was the former he intended to reach--which he did in a ride of less than a quarter of an hour.
Looked upon by the officers as a sort of privileged character, he had the entree at all times, and could go in without countersign, or any of the other formalities usually demanded from a stranger.
"Afore the trial kims on."
It was now nearly due west, and at right angles to the different trails going towards the Rio Grande.
CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO.
From your quick return, I can almost say you have.
The old hunter had no difficulty in obtaining an interview with the military chief of Fort Inge.
"Who?"
When the Scottish Covenanters obtained that end for which they so earnestly contended, the establishment of Presbyterian discipline in their own country, they were not satisfied, but indulged still in an ardent passion for propagating, by all methods, that mode of religion in the neighboring kingdoms.
Should the king, they said, be able by force of arms to prevail over the parliament of England, and reestablish his authority in that powerful kingdom, he will undoubtedly retract all those concessions which, with so many circumstances of violence and indignity, the Scots have extorted from him.
The general assembly of the church met at the same time with the convention; and exercising an authority almost absolute over the whole civil power, made every political consideration yield to their theological zeal and prejudices.
And is not the court full of Papists, prelates, malignants; all of them zealous enemies to our religious model, and resolute to sacrifice their lives for their idolatrous establishments?
In the English parliament there remained some members who, though they had been induced, either by private ambition or by zeal for civil liberty, to concur with the majority, still retained an attachment to the hierarchy, and to the ancient modes of worship.
And being determined that the sword should carry conviction to all refractory minds, they prepared themselves, with great vigilance and activity, for their military enterprises.
The parliament, therefore, having first subscribed it themselves, ordered it to be received by all who lived under their authority.
Does not the parliament consist of those very men who have ever opposed all war with Scotland, who have punished the authors of our oppressions, who have obtained us the redress of every grievance, and who, with many honorable expressions, have conferred on us an ample reward for our brotherly assistance?
The army had little ammunition, scarcely exceeding forty barrels of gunpowder; not even shoes or clothes; and for want of food, the soldiers had been obliged to eat their own horses.
Parsons, Temple, Loftus, and Meredith, who favored the opposite party, had been removed; and Charles had supplied their place by others better affected to his service.
But in the present danger which threatened their cause, all scruples were laid aside; and the covenant, by whose means alone they could expect to obtain so considerable a reenforcement as the accession of the Scottish nation, was received without opposition.
These troops, so long as they were allowed to remain, were useful, by diverting the force of the Irish rebels, and protecting in the north the small remnants of the British planters.
They even intercepted some small succors sent thither by the king.
The Irish, in their wild rage against the British planters, had laid waste the whole kingdom, and were themselves totally unfit, from their habitual sloth and ignorance, to raise any convenience of human life.
Not to mention our own necessary security can we better express our gratitude to Heaven for that pure light with which we are, above all nations, so eminently distinguished, than by conveying the same divine knowledge to our unhappy neighbors, who are wading through a sea of blood in order to attain it?
During the course of six months, no supplies had come from England, except the fourth part of one small vessel's lading.
The justices and council of Ireland had been engaged, chiefly by the interest and authority of Ormond, to fall into an entire dependence on the king.
But notwithstanding these successes, even the most common necessaries of life were wanting to the victorious armies.
They had entered, indeed, into a contract with the Scots, for sending over an army of ten thousand men into Ireland; and in order to engage that nation in this undertaking, besides giving a promise of pay, they agreed to put Caricfergus into their hands, and to invest their general with an authority quite independent of the English government.
By continuing their violent persecution, and still more violent menaces against priests and Papists, they confirmed the Irish Catholics in their rebellion, and cut off all hopes of indulgence and toleration.
Dublin, to save itself from starving, had been obliged to send the greater part of its inhabitants to England.
In this negotiation, the man chiefly trusted was Vane, who, in eloquence, address, capacity, as well as in art and dissimulation, was not surpassed by any one even during that age, so famous for active talents.
But except this contract with the Scottish nation, all the other measures of the parliament either were hitherto absolutely insignificant, or tended rather to the prejudice of the Protestant cause in Ireland.
A truce with the rebels, he thought, would enable his subjects in Ireland to provide for their own support, and would procure him the assistance of the army against the English parliament.
Hamilton, and his brother the earl of Laneric, who had been sent into Scotland in order to oppose, these measures, wanted either authority or sincerity; and passively yielded to the torrent.
The subscribers of the covenant vowed also to preserve the reformed religion established in the church of Scotland; but, by the artifice of Vane, no declaration more explicit was made with regard to England and Ireland, than that these kingdoms should be reformed according to the word of God and the example of the purest churches.
The commissioners were also empowered to press the king on the article of religion, and to recommend to him the Scottish model of ecclesiastic worship and discipline.
Under color of providing for national peace, endangered by the neighborhood of English armies, was a convention called; an assembly which though it meets with less solemnity, has the same authority as a parliament in raising money and levying forces.
The English parliament was at that time fallen into great distress by the progress of the royal arms; and they gladly sent to Edinburgh commissioners, with ample powers to treat of a nearer union and confederacy with the Scottish nation.
By means of a hundred thousand pounds, which they received from England; by the hopes of good pay and warm quarters; not to mention men's favorable disposition towards the cause; they soon completed their levies.
The governor of Gloucester was one Massey, a soldier of fortune, who, before he engaged with the parliament, had offered his service to the king; and as he was free from the fumes of enthusiasm, by which most of the officers on that side were intoxicated, he would lend an ear, it was presumed, to proposals for accommodation.
Waller exclaimed loudly against that general, for allowing Wilmot to pass him, and proceed without any interruption to the succor of the distressed infantry at the Devizes. But Essex, finding that his army fell continually to decay after the siege of Reading, was resolved to remain upon the defensive; and the weakness of the king, and his want of all military stores, had also restrained the activity of the royal army.
That an enterprise correspondent to men's expectations might be undertaken, the prince resolved to lay siege to Bristol, the second town for riches and greatness in the kingdom. Nathaniel Fiennes, son of Lord Say he himself, as well as his father, a great parliamentary leader was governor, and commanded a garrison of two thousand five hundred foot, and two regiments, one of horse, another of dragoons.
Sir Bevil Granville, the most beloved man of that country, Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir Nicholas Slanning, Arundel, and Trevannion undertook as their own charges to raise an army for the king; and their great interest in Cornwall soon enabled them to effect their purpose.
But though the king was naturally the gainer by such a method of conducting war, and it was by favor of law that the train, bands were raised in Cornwall, it appeared that those maxims were now prejudicial to the royal party.
Ruthven, with a few broken troops, fled to Saltash; and when that town was taken, he escaped with some difficulty, and almost alone, into Plymouth.
Waller was so confident of taking this body of infantry, now abandoned by the horse, that he wrote to the parliament that their work was done, and that by the next post he would inform them of the number and quality of the prisoners.
This important victory, following so quick after many other successes, struck great dismay into the parliament, and gave an alarm to their principal army, commanded by Essex.
Somerset, and Devon, and make an entire conquest of Cornwall.
This defect, which they concealed from the soldiers, they resolved to supply by their valor. They agreed to advance without firing till they should reach the top of the hill, and could be on equal ground with the enemy.
The alarm being given, every one mounted on horseback, in order to pursue the prince, to recover the prisoners, and to repair the disgrace which the army had sustained.
Among the rest Hambden, who had a regiment of infantry that lay at a distance, joined the horse as a volunteer; and overtaking the royalists on Chalgrave field, entered into the thickest of the battle.
Having joined the camp at Bristol, and sent Prince Maurice with a detachment into Devonshire, he deliberated how to employ the remaining forces in an enterprise of moment.
After this success, the attention both of king and parliament was turned towards the west, as to a very important scene of action.
Stamford being encamped on the top of a high hill near Stratum, they attacked him in four divisions, at five in the morning, having lain all night under arms.
Five hundred excellent soldiers perished.
In order to prove the sincerity of his conversion, he informed Prince Rupert of the loose disposition of the enemy's quarters, and exhorted him to form some attempt upon them.
Despair, joined to the natural gallantry of these troops, commanded by the prime gentry of the county, made them resolve by one vigorous effort, to overcome all these disadvantages.
The king, freed from this enemy, sent his army westward under Prince Rupert; and, by their conjunction with the Cornish troops, a formidable force, for numbers as well as reputation and valor, was composed.
After a sharp action, he was totally routed, and flying with a few horse, escaped to Bristol.
Stamford retired, and distributed his forces into Plymouth and Exeter.
On the other hand, the parliament, having supplied Sir William Waller, in whom they much trusted, with a complete army, despatched him westwards, in order to check the progress of the royalists.
The earl of Stamford followed him at some distance With a considerable supply.
But this undertaking, by reason of the great number and force of the London militia, was thought by many to be attended with considerable difficulties.
Colonel Urrey, a Scotchman, who served in the parliamentary army, having received some disgust, came to Oxford and offered his services to the king.
The royalists next attempted to march eastwards, and to join their forces to the king's at Oxford: but Waller hung on their rear, and infested their march till they reached the Devizes.
The battle was fought on Bradoc Down; and the king's forces, though inferior in number, gave a total defeat to their enemies.
He would make it pay roundly.
He spent a month in traveling over the land and making calculations; and made up his mind that a fine vein of coal ran through the mountain about a mile from the railroad, and that the place to run in a tunnel was half way towards its summit.
Conductor Slum is one of the most gentlemanly and efficient officers on the road; but he ain't trifled with, not much.
Wasn't it enough to have offered the lady his seat, to have rescued her from an accident, perhaps from death?
"We learn that as the down noon express was leaving H---- yesterday a lady! (God save the mark) attempted to force herself into the already full palatial car.
His first step was to hire three woodsmen to accompany him.
The result of this little adventure was that Philip did not reach Ilium till daylight the next morning, when he descended sleepy and sore, from a way train, and looked about him.
It consisted of the plank platform on which he stood, a wooden house, half painted, with a dirty piazza (unroofed) in front, and a sign board hung on a slanting pole--bearing the legend, "Hotel.
But Florence was sticking on to the proprietor of the home of her ancestors.
She saw me and opened her lips.
Let me come to the 4th of August, 1913, the last day of my absolute ignorance--and, I assure you, of my perfect happiness.
At any rate, he gave a sort of gurgle and then stuttered:
She had not locked the door--for the first time of our married life.
"Oh, I say...." Those were the last words I ever heard of Mr Bagshawe's. A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to Florence's room.
No doubt he was also a very passionate lover.
She was always begging Leonora, before me, to go and see a doctor.
I could not move; I could not stir a finger.
He began by telling me that he came from Ludlow Manor, near Ledbury. The name had a slightly familiar sound, though I could not fix it in my mind.
But I am convinced that he was sick of Florence within three years of even interrupted companionship and the life that she led him....
It must have been during this visit that he knocked Mr Jimmy's teeth down his throat.
He must have had a hell of a time.
I daresay he would have faced it out; I daresay he would have thrown over Florence and taken the risk of exposure.
She proposed to tell me all, secure a divorce from me, and go with Edward and settle in California....
But, none the less, poor Edward seems to have believed in her determination to carry him off.
That would not have suited Florence.
The filthy toad... .
That was how it went.
It was like that--I saw Florence running with a face whiter than paper and her hand on the black stuff over her heart.
She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed.
He made another short visit to us in December of that year--the first year of our acquaintance.
"The last time I saw that girl she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five o'clock in the morning.
Well, he was an unmistakable man, with a military figure, rather exaggerated, with bulbous eyes that avoided your own, and a pallid complexion that suggested vices practised in secret along with an uneasy desire for making acquaintance at whatever cost....
I daresay Florence had asked him to come over for that purpose. In 1905 he was in Paris three times--once with Leonora, who wanted some frocks.
I could quite confidently say that, though we four had been about together in all sorts of places, for all that length of time, I had not, for my part, one single complaint to make of either of them.
Then he began to talk about a duty on hops, about Californian hops, about Los Angeles, where he had been.
And she could have made it pretty hot for him in ten or a dozen different ways.
She was determined to spare my feelings.
I think the time has come." So Florence, with her light step, had slipped out after them.
For Florence, if you please, gaining in time a more composed view of nature, and overcome by her habits of garrulity, arrived at a frame of mind in which she found it almost necessary to tell me all about it--nothing less than that.
LET me think where we were.
You are not to imagine that it was only at Nauheim that we met.
Leonora wanted to keep him for--what shall I say--for the good of her church, as it were, to show that Catholic women do not lose their men.
He was really going to ingratiate himself with me.
She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand.
Oh, yes, it was a difficult job for him.
Oh, yes... that conversation took place on the 4th of August, 1913.
And I added, that that was an unusual record for people who had been so much together.
I tell you, my own heart stood still; I tell you I could not move.
She stuck her hands over her face as if she wished to push her eyes out.
He was that sort of person.
And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light of the street, I saw Florence running.
She looked round that place of rush chairs, cane tables and newspapers.
She saw the man who was talking to me.
The man called Bagshawe had been reading The Times on the other side of the room, but then he moved over to me with some trifling question as a prelude to suggesting an acquaintance.
I don't know what I looked like.
I fancy he asked me something About the poll-tax on Kur-guests, and whether it could not be sneaked out of.
But there he had Leonora to deal with. And Leonora assured him that, if the minutest fragment of the real situation ever got through to my senses, she would wreak upon him the most terrible vengeance that she could think of.
"By Jove: Florry Hurlbird." He turned upon me with an oily and uneasy sound meant for a laugh.
In 1906 we spent the best part of six weeks together at Mentone, and Edward stayed with us in Paris on his way back to London.
You saw her recognize me." He was standing on his feet, looking down at me.
Americans are particular in those matters.
Besides she had got it into her head that Leonora, who was as sound as a roach, was consumptive.
I remember saying to her that, on that day, exactly nine years before, I had made their acquaintance, so that it had seemed quite appropriate and like a birthday speech to utter my little testimonial to my friend Edward.
He fencing for a topic with which he might gain my affection.
"I wish you would go with those two.
For the coming of that dear girl only added to it all.
The fact was that in Florence the poor wretch had got hold of a Tartar, compared with whom Leonora was a sucking kid.
He would not have gone; he cared for his wife too much.
And then Leonora had said to Florence with perfect calmness:
Let it go at that, for the moment.
Florence called for more and more attentions from him as the time went on.
I think the girl ought to have the appearance of being chaperoned with Edward in these places.
She rushed in at the swing doors.
I will write more about her motives later, perhaps.
"Do you know who that is?" he asked.
Florence, I remember, had said at first that she would remain with Leonora, and me, and Edward and the girl had gone off alone.
Our victory over the seven Han ships had set the country ablaze.
Incredible Treason
But we've been getting them for the past week by installing automatic re-broadcast units along the scar paths.
I tremble to think what would have happened, had the attempt been made to handle the A. E. F. this way during the First World War, instead of by that rigid military discipline and complete assumption of the individual as a mere standardized cog in the machine.
I have seen signs of the reawakening of greed, of selfishness.
That first Han ship knew the location of our plants exactly.
The sub-boss who could not command the loyalty of his followers was as quickly deposed, either by them or by his superiors, as the ancient ward leader of the 20th Century who lost control of his votes.
The Wyomings had a high morale, and had prospered under the rule of Big Boss Hart for many years.
A careful survey of the territory showed that it was only the northern sections and slopes that had been "beamed" by the first Han ship.
"But they still have no knowledge of the nature and control of ultronic activity?" I asked.
Near Bah-flo this morning a party of Eries shot one without success.
The Hans are sure to launch reprisal expeditions. If we're to save the race we must keep them away from our camps and plants.
"Just what evidence is there that anybody has been clearing information to the Hans?" I asked.
It sounds like a bit of occasional barter, rather than an out-and-out alliance.
The eternal cycle seems to be at work.
But they've been beaming those paths so hard, it looks as though they even had information of this strategy.
Most of the party was wiped out as the dis rays went into action on them.
Our reports indicate that the Eries' rockets bounced off harmlessly.
"Then it's quite clear," I ventured, "that whoever is 'clearing' us to them is doing it piecemeal.
The Sand-snipers, practically invisible in their sand-colored clothing, and half buried along the beaches, lay in wait for days, risking the play of dis beams along the route, and finally registering four hits within a week.
And in addition, they've been using code.
All this, however, is wandering afar from my story, which concerns our early battles against the Hans, and not our more modern problems of self-control.
The results were disastrous to our hereditary enemies.
My associates regard the thought with as much horror as many worthy people of the 20th Century felt in regard to any heretical suggestion that the original outline of government as laid down in the First Constitution did not apply as well to 20th Century conditions as to those of the early 19th.
But I hardly suspect the Pineys. There is little intelligence among them.
Hart brought the Camboss up from the Susquanna Works, and laid out new camp locations, scattering them farther to the south, and avoiding ground which had been seared by the Han beams and the immediate locations of the Han wrecks.
"Well," he replied, "first of all there was that raid upon us.
One of them will become public property in a few days, I think.
The Hans discontinued their service along this route, and as evidence that they were badly shaken by our success, sent no raiders down the Beaches.
They got one rep ray. The other was not strong enough to hold it up.
But owing to the centuries of desperate suffering the people had endured at the hands of the Hans, there developed a spirit of self-sacrifice and consideration for the common good that made the scheme applicable and efficient in all forms of human co-operation.
And as might be expected, we had a great deal of banter over which one of us was Camp Boss.
A dozen Sacramentos had caught the hazy outlines of its rep rays approaching them, head-on, in the twilight, like ghostly pillars reaching into the sky.
We aren't going to get any more Han ships by shooting up their repellor rays unless we use much larger rockets.
I would have been as much of a nonentity in every phase of human relationship by attempting to avoid alliances, as any man of the 20th Century would have been politically, who aligned himself with no political party.
I'm thinking of developing a permanent field force, along the lines of the regular armies of the 20th Century you told me about.
"We're in for it now.
On our return, we had a camp of our own, of course.
I have a little heresy about all this, however.
"Tony," he said, "There are two things I want to talk to you about.
He was just as much of an autocrat, and just as much dependent upon the general popularity of his actions for the ability to maintain his autocracy.
But then I did not have centuries of bitter persecution in my blood.
They are wise to us now.
The ammunition plant, and the rocket-ship plant, which had just been about to start operation at the time of the raid, were intact, as were the other important plants.
You know, a hundred and fifteen or twenty years ago there were certain of these people's ancestors who actually degraded themselves by mating with the Hans, sometimes even serving them as slaves, in the days before they brought all their service machinery to perfection.
The explosions staggered her, but did not penetrate.
This entire modern life, it appeared to me, judging from my ancient viewpoint, was organized along what I called "political" lines.
This is what the Americans called those strips of country directly under the regular ship routes of the Hans, who as a matter of precaution frequently blasted them with their dis beams to prevent the growth of foliage which might give shelter to the Americans.
The first move is to develop sectional organization by Zones.
I'm going to need your help in this.
It floated to earth, nose down, and since it was unarmed and unarmored, they had no difficulty in shooting it to pieces and massacring its crew and passengers.
Finally, we've picked up three of their messages in which they discuss, with some nervousness, the existence of our 'mysterious' ultrophone."
The forest screen above it, however, had been annihilated, and it was determined to abandon it, after removing all usable machinery and evidences of the processes that might be of interest to the Han scientists, should they return to the valley in the future.
They're holding back as much information as possible for future bartering, perhaps."
Under these modern social and economic conditions, the kind of individual freedom to which I had been accustomed in the 20th Century was impossible.
They're putting armor of great thickness in the hulls of their ships below the rep-ray machines.
There was feverish activity in the ammunition plants, and the hunting of stray Han ships became an enthusiastic sport.
Then, the Hans quite obviously have learned that we are picking up their electrophone waves, for they've gone back to their old, but extremely accurate, system of directional control.
But many of the gangs, I found, were badly organized, lacked strong hands in authority, and were rife with intrigue.
On the whole, I thought I would be wise to stay with a group which had already proved its friendliness, and in which I seemed to have prospects of advancement.
Some twenty minutes later the ship arrived.
But he did not realize this, and could not; for even the most natural and fundamental affection of the human race, that of parents for their offspring, had been so degraded and suppressed in this vicious Han civilization as to be unrecognizable.
Naturally San-Lan could not understand the nature of my pity for this poor child, nor the fact that it might have proved a weak spot in my armor.
They had succeeded in producing, by synthesis, what appeared to be living tissues, and even animals of moderately complex structure and rudimentary brains, but they could not give these creatures the full complement of life's characteristics, nor raise the brains to more than mechanical control of muscular tissues.
Perhaps had my love for her been less great, I would have succumbed.
Product of the utmost of nobility in this modern virile, rugged American race, she would have died under even worse torture than these vicious Han scientists knew how to inflict, before she would have pleaded with me this way to betray my race and her honor.
And this, I was the more ready to believe after my own recent experience.
This particular reflection of mine proved unpopular with them, for it stabbed their vanity, and neither my prestige nor the novelty of the idea was sufficient salve.
For the rest he is born today, as in ancient Greece, with a blank brain, and struggles through to his grave, with a more or less beclouded understanding, and with distinct limitations to what we used to call his "think tank."
And so they failed.
But all the while I knew subconsciously that this was not Wilma.
Had San-Lan only known it, he might have had a better chance of breaking down my resistance through another bit of femininity in his household, the little nine-year-old Princess Lu-Yan, his daughter.
After all, I reflected, man makes little progress within himself. Through succeeding generations he piles up those resources which he possesses outside of himself, the tools of his hands, and the warehouses of knowledge for his brain, whether they be parchment manuscripts, printed book, or electronorecordographs.
Instead of having me executed, he continued to shower luxuries and attentions on me, and frequently commanded my attendance upon him.
Yet through these same centuries they had been busily engaged in the extermination of "weaklings," whom, by their very persecutions, they had turned into "super men," now rising in mighty wrath to destroy them; and in reducing themselves to the depths of softening vice and flabby moral fiber.
But the idea was as new to him and the scientists of his court as Darwinism was to the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
CHAPTER VIII
So it was received with much respect.
Among these was San-Lan himself, the ruler.
Its conception embraced nothing but electrons, protons and molecules, and still was struggling desperately for some shred of evidence that thoughts, will power and consciousness of self were nothing but chemical reactions.
Most elaborately staged attempts at seduction were made upon me with drugs, with women. Hypnotism was resorted to.
The ship rose to a great height, and headed westward at such speed that the hum of the air past its smooth plates rose to a shrill, almost inaudible moan.
It was my own opinion that they never could succeed in doing so.
There were times when he seemed to sense vaguely, gropingly, wonderingly, that he might have a soul.
Did not the historians, the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome show themselves to be the same shrewd observers as those of succeeding centuries, the same masters of the logical and slaves of the illogical?
It settled down slowly into the ravine on its repeller rays until it was but a few feet above the tree tops.
This creature, his most prized possession, San-Lan with the utmost moral callousness ordered to seduce me, urging her to apply without stint and to its fullest extent, her knowledge of evil arts.
There it was stopped, and floated steadily, while a little cage was let down on a wire.
But even in the Twentieth Century we had learned that hypnotism cannot make a person violate his fundamental concepts of morality against his will, and steadfastly I steeled my will against them.
Painfully and with enforced mental readjustments, they began a philosophical search for excuses and justifications for the idea.
Viewplates were faked to picture to me the complete rout of American forces all over the continent.
Into this I was hustled and locked, whereupon the cage rose swiftly again to a hole in the bottom of the hull, into which it fitted snugly, and I stepped into the interior of a craft not unlike the one with which I had had my fateful encounter, the cage being unlocked.
At all events, it would be well to make your clerks recollect themselves. (Mr. Larkin knew that Driver's 'clerks' were his daughters.) It is not easy to meet with a young fellow that is quite honest.
incredible!
No, no; with Mark Wylder it was quite out of the question--altogether visionary and impracticable.
'DEAR LARKIN,--I hope you did the three commissions all right.
That, too, plainly refers to a former letter--not a word of the sort.
I don't think the captain would venture anything so awfully hazardous.
He unlocked the iron safe, and took out the sheaf of Wylder's letters, and conned the last one over very carefully.
Quite impossible!
'Oh, yes; and how do you do, Mr. Larcom?
LARCOM, THE BUTLER, VISITS THE ATTORNEY.
'Well, Mr. Larcom, I think you have been led into an erroneous conclusion.
There was a great deal more, but these were the passages which perplexed Larkin.
Is it Martin of the China Kilns, or Martin of the bank?
While he was buttoning his walking boots, with his foot on the chair before the fire, a tap at his study door surprised him.
'It is not a thing to be passed over,' murmured the attorney, who had come to a decision as to the first step to be taken, and he thought with a qualm of the effect of one of Wylder's confidential notes getting into Captain Lake's hands.
It was Mark Wylder's penmanship--he could swear to it.
Larcom did understand perfectly, and so this little visit ended.
It commenced thus:--
I--you know--I'm interested for all parties.'
'There has plainly been a letter lost, manifestly.
'But do sit down, Mr. Larcom--pray do,' said the attorney, who was very gracious to Larcom. 'You'll get the scrip, you know, on executing, but the shares are allotted.
Larkin continued to stare on him in silence, with his round eyes, for some seconds after.
He had called to mention the circumstance, lest Mr. Driver should be taken by surprise by official investigation. Was it possible that the letter had been sent by mistake to Brandon--to Captain Lake?
Larcom received it with grave gratitude, and sipped it, and spoke respectfully of it.
No, it was a mistake; it could not be.
The butler nodded gloomily.
It was but a marriage of convenience, with mitigations.
There was a little fair-haired child playing on the ground before the steps as I whirled by.
And I think when another such yesterday shall have arrived, where shall I be?
'Your old Friend,
These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows--my eyes wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long interval of maturity and absence, like a romantic reverie.
Where is the laggard so dull as to experience no pleasing flutter at his heart in anticipation of meeting a perfect beauty in a country house.
They were an ill-conditioned race--that is to say, every now and then there emerged a miscreant, with a pretty evident vein of madness.
An undulating landscape, with a homely farmstead here and there, and plenty of old English timber scattered grandly over it, extended mistily to my right; on the left the road is overtopped by masses of noble forest.
So Miss Dorcas must pack, and turn out whenever I die, that is, if I slip my cable first.
I could not in the least tell why.
There must have been some damnable taint in the blood of the common ancestor--a spice of the insane and the diabolical.
I want you for best man, maybe; and besides, I would like to talk to you about some things they want me to do in the settlements, and you were always a long-headed fellow: so pray don't refuse.
It was only two-and-twenty years ago, and I was then but eleven years old.
A 'statement of title' is usually a dry affair.
And now, dear Charlie, you have it all.
'MARK WYLDER.
I met poor Dominick--what an ass that chap is--but he did not know me till I introduced myself, so I must be a good deal changed.
She is a wide-awake young lady, and nothing the worse for that: I'm a bit that way myself.
It is the first ten that emerge from nothing, and commencing in a point, it is during them that consciousness, memory--all the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and astounding.
And so very little courtship has sufficed.
Do you know anything of him?
The next generation or two would amuse themselves with a lawsuit, until the old Brandon type reappeared in some bachelor brother or uncle, with a Jezebel on his left hand, and an attorney on his right, and, presto!
Don't disappoint.
In one generation, a Wylder ill-using his wife and hating his children, would cut them all off, and send the estate bounding back again to the Brandons.
I examined it carefully, and laid it down unopened.
I was romantic, like every other youngish fellow who is not a premature curmudgeon; and there was something indefinitely pleasant in the consciousness that, although a betrothed bride, the young lady still was fancy free: not a bit in love.
A retrospect of a score of years or so, at three-and-thirty, is a much vaster affair than a much longer one at fifty.
'DEAR CHARLES--Of course you have heard of my good luck, and how kind poor Dickie--from whom I never expected anything--proved at last.
You see, the old brute meant to leave her a life estate; but it does not amount to that, though it won't benefit me, for he settled that when I die it shall go to his right heirs--that will be to my son, if I ever have one.
Here is Mark Wylder's letter:--
There was nothing about him to excite the least uneasiness; on the contrary, I believe he liked me as well as he was capable of liking anybody, and it was now seven years since we had met.
Of course it was not to be thought of then; but matters are quite different, you know, now, and the viscount, who is a very sensible fellow in the main, saw it at once.
There was Sir Jonathan Brandon, for instance, who ran his own nephew through the lungs in a duel fought in a paroxysm of Cencian jealousy; and afterwards shot his coachman dead upon the box through his coach-window, and finally died in Vienna, whither he had absconded, of a pike-thrust received from a sentry in a brawl.
The whole thing seemed like yesterday; and as I write, I open my eyes and start and cry, 'can it be twenty, five-and-twenty, aye, by Jove! five-and-thirty, years since then?' How my days have flown!
He seems a clever fellow--a bit too clever, perhaps--and was too much master here, I suspect, in poor Dickie's reign.
This general liking for children and instinct of smiling on them is one source of the delightful illusions which make the remembrance of early days so like a dream of Paradise, and give us, at starting, such false notions of our value.
They had proposed it to him, and he had accepted, and when arrived at Belem he was to marry the young couple, Minha and Manoel.
Such would have been useless.
If the pilot was the material director of this immense machine--for can we not justly call it so?--another personage was its spiritual director; this was Padre Passanha, who had charge of the mission at Iquitos.
All was ready to date, the 5th of June.
The principal habitation, with its annexes--kitchen, offices, and cellars--was placed in the rear--or, let us say, stern of the craft--and formed a part reserved for the Garral family and their personal servants.
The parsonage was not enough for Padre Passanha; he ought to have a chapel.
The next morning we are up at daybreak.
Ears of corn, vases of holy water, and trays of meal make up a part of the paraphernalia of worship. I try to record some of the prayers, but am not very successful, as it is difficult to hold my interpreter to the work.
In the morning we turn to the northeast and descend from Kaibab to the back of Marble Canyon and cross it at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, and find our packers camped at Jacob's Pool, where a spring bursts from the cliff at the summit of a great hill of talus.
The mules are packed and away goes our train of lumber, rations, and camping equipage. The Indian trail is at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs.
After supper the hours till midnight are passed in rather formal talk.
It is a good site for defense.
Here at Walpi the great snake dance is performed.
CHAPTER XIII.
At night we come to the cliff, and under it, in a great cave, we find a lakelet.
At night we camp on the bank of the Colorado River, on the same spot where our boat-party had camped the year before. Leaving the party in charge of Mr. Graves and Mr. Bishop, while they are building a ferryboat, I take some Indians to explore the canyon of the Paria.
That painting, known as "The Chasm of the Colorado," is in a hall in the Senate wing of the Capitol of the United States.
Some days after we learned how they are made; they are prepared of goat's flesh, bread, and turnips, and kneaded by mastication.
So his talk is explained to us. Some must gather corn, others must go for wood, water must be brought from the distant wells, and the animals of the strangers must be cared for.
"Good-by; good-by; good-by!" At last we start.
On rare occasions a stream flows down this valley, but now sand dunes stretch across it.
We find it at the Navajo Well. As we approach in the darkness the camp fire is a cheerful sight.
Wherever it drops it in this manner a sand bank is formed.
To reach it from below, it must be climbed by niches and stairways in the rock.
After a while some one gets permanent possession of the charm and the music ceases.
They are eaten with much gusto by the party and highly praised.
A little after sunrise they come in, and we have a busy day of barter.
At night we camp at a water pocket, a pool in a great limestone rock.
Where the declivity of the stream is great the river corrades, or cuts its bottom deeper and still deeper, ever forming narrow clefts, but when the stream has cut its channel down until the declivity is greatly reduced, it can no longer carry the load of sand with which it is fed, but drops a part of it on the way.
Then we go around among the people and select the articles of pottery, stone implements, instruments and utensils made of bone, horn, shell, articles of clothing and ornament, baskets, trays, and many other things, and tell the people to bring them the next day to our rooms.
It is managed in this way: The snake is teased with the feather wand and his attention occupied by one man, while another, standing near, at a favorable moment seizes the snake just, back of the head.
All the water used in these three towns is derived from a well nearly a mile away--a deep pit sunk in the sand, over the site of a dune-buried brook.
Most of these snakes are quite harmless, but rattlesnakes abound, and they are also caught, for they play the most important role in the great snake dance.
The whole town comes to bid us good-by.
Yes.
Clearly not, he said.
True.
But shall we be right in getting rid of them?
As little can I believe the narrative of his insolence to Apollo, where he says,
So I believe.
'Without the knowledge of their parents;'
Nor should he describe Priam the kinsman of the gods as praying and beseeching,
Then persons of worth, even if only mortal men, must not be represented as overcome by laughter, and still less must such a representation of the gods be allowed.
he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship or State.
Certainly not.
Then we must have no more of them.
'O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all!'
'Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,'
If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State,
'Friend, sit still and obey my word,'
Then we shall approve such language as that of Diomede in Homer,
Reflect: our principle is that the good man will not consider death terrible to any other good man who is his comrade.
And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous men?
And instead of having any shame or self-control, he will be always whining and lamenting on slight occasions.
But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death?
And therefore he will be least likely to lament, and will bear with the greatest equanimity any misfortune of this sort which may befall him.
Assuredly not.
Impossible.
Neither must we sing to them of
'The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamenting her fate, leaving manhood and youth.'
On my views, if you like to father them on me; that we must not admit them is certain.
'the blood of deities yet flowing in their veins.'
And therefore he will not sorrow for his departed friend as though he had suffered anything terrible?
'Thou hast wronged me, O far-darter, most abominable of deities.
'Inextinguishable laughter arose among the blessed gods, when they saw Hephaestus bustling about the mansion.'
'As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of them has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.'
Or again:--
And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?
Alas! that I bore the bravest to my sorrow.'
Such then, I said, are our principles of theology--some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.
Certainly.
And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.
Undoubtedly, he said, these are not sentiments which can be approved.
What of this line,
'Alas! my misery!
And,--
And what shall we say about men?
Yes; that is our principle.
'O heavens! with my eyes verily I behold a dear friend of mine chased round and round the city, and my heart is sorrowful.'
or that other tale of how Hephaestus, because of similar goings on, cast a chain around Ares and Aphrodite?
We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared,
'Gifts persuading gods, and persuading reverend kings.'
Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses,
I grant the truth of your inference.
'(To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,) that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.'
They may very possibly afford some amusement, but they do not conduce to temperance.
Yes; and I think that our principles are right, he said.
Very true.
Most certainly, he said, if our idea of the State is ever carried out.
Again:--
Why not?
That is clearly the remaining portion of our subject.
We shall.
Undoubtedly.
That will be our duty, he said.
But if he must introduce the gods, at any rate let him not dare so completely to misrepresent the greatest of the gods, as to make him say--
On your views, we must not admit them.
'The Greeks marched breathing prowess, ...in silent awe of their leaders,'
There is a real danger, he said.
Most true, he said.
But we are not in a condition to answer this question at present, my friend.
I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.
Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their descriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.
And then, again, to make the wisest of men say that nothing in his opinion is more glorious than
Neither will we believe or acknowledge Achilles himself to have been such a lover of money that he took Agamemnon's gifts, or that when he had received payment he restored the dead body of Hector, but that without payment he was unwilling to do so.
He will not.
In the next place our youth must be temperate?
Then we shall be right in getting rid of the lamentations of famous men, and making them over to women (and not even to women who are good for anything), or to men of a baser sort, that those who are being educated by us to be the defenders of their country may scorn to do the like.
And again:--
Yes, I replied; but that surely is what ought not to be, as the argument has just proved to us; and by that proof we must abide until it is disproved by a better.
'And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.'
Loving Homer as I do, I hardly like to say that in attributing these feelings to Achilles, or in believing that they are truly attributed to him, he is guilty of downright impiety.
Mrs. Ware might be excused for the little air of motherly pride with which she gazed at her five.
The cry was heard.
"I shall do no such thing," protested Dolly, indignantly.
Our minds--our reasoning faculties, that is--are apt to be stunned or shocked when we are suddenly frightened or excited; they leave us, and go away, as it were, and it is only afterward that we pick ourselves up, and realize what we ought to have done.
She made a vain clutch at Dolly, and, with a wild scream, went down, and disappeared.
The wind blows across softly from the south shore, and brings with it scents of heath and thyme, caught from the high upland moors above the town.
Oh, how welcome was the dash of the oars close at hand, how gladly she relinquished Kitty to the strong arms that lifted her into the boat! But when the men would have helped her in too, she refused.
It is a delightful moment, and all Nantucket dwellers learn to watch for it.
"I wasn't asking you."
"You could at least be brave enough to use your common sense," said her mother.
"How will you go to work?" asked Jack.
"I will," said Dolly, and marched undauntedly off to bed.
"Why, of course there is.
"Yes, and tying a string round the right place on your leg when you've cut an artery," added Harry, eagerly.
It was that about presence of mind, you know.
Kitty had just been learning to swim, and was very proud of her new accomplishment; but she was by no means so sure of herself or so much at home in the water as Dolly, who had learned three years before, and practised continually.
"No, thank you; I'll swim!" she said.
Dolly saw it rowing toward her, and held on bravely.
"What funny things!" she cried.
"Yes, I am proud of you."
Mamma, tell me what it really means."
"Indeed, I did.
"Said what?"
I don't want to make things happen; but, if they do happen, I shall try to keep cool and have my wits about me, and perhaps I shall."
"If she had fought with Kitty, or if she had tried to swim ashore and had not called for assistance, they might easily have both been drowned.
"What is presence of mind, any way?" demanded little Dolly Ware, as she sat, surrounded by her family, watching the sunset.
This capped the climax of Dolly's contentment.
"Presence of mind sometimes means absence of body," remarked Jack, in answer to Dolly's question.
There was quite a little stir among the summer colony over the adventure, and Mrs. Ware had many compliments paid her for her child's behavior.
"I am glad and thankful that you learned it when you did, Dolly."
Many a good swimmer has lost his life under similar circumstances.
And then I seemed to know what to do."
"How far out we are!
It is extraordinary that a child of that age should keep her head, and show such coolness and decision."
"I think," said Mrs. Ware, in those gentle tones to which her children always listened, "that presence of mind means keeping cool, and having your wits about you, at critical moments.
Mr. Allen came over, and had much to say about the extraordinary presence of mind which Dolly had shown.
Mamma was proud of her; she was quite satisfied.
"Are you proud of me?" demanded Dolly.
Dolly was youngest of the family,--a thin, wiry child, tall for her years, with a brown bang lying like a thatch over a pair of bright inquisitive eyes, and a thick pig-tail braided down her back.
As they rose, she pulled her hair away with a sudden motion, and seized Kitty by the collar of her bathing-dress, behind.
We shall be drowned!
"Did you, really?"
"It wasn't remarkable at all," Dolly declared, as soon as he was gone. "It was just because you said that on the piazza that night."
"I mean to do it," said Dolly, in a firm tone.
The sunset hour is best of all the twenty-four in Nantucket.
I taught it to myself, and have said it over and over ever since,--'Keep cool; have your wits about you.' I said it in the water when Kitty was pulling me under."
"It would be lovely to be brave and do heroic things," remarked Phyllis.
The little Wares all swam like ducks; and no one thought of being nervous or apprehensive if Harry struck out boldly for the jetty, or if Erma and Phyllis were seen side by side at a point far beyond the depth of either of them, or little Dolly took a "header" into deep water off an old boat.
"I was speaking to Mamma," said Dolly, with dignity.
Dolly Ware, we shall certainly be drowned!"
"There was a story in the paper about a girl who hid the kerosene can when the new cook came, and it said she showed true presence of mind," replied Dolly.
"Why, Mamma, surely you haven't forgotten.
They were fine children, all of them,--frank, affectionate, generous, with bright minds and healthy bodies.
The bathing-beach at Nantucket is a particularly safe one, and the water through the summer months most warm and delicious.
"Be cool; have your wits about you," she said to herself.
It seemed nothing to get herself to shore, now that the responsibility of Kitty and Kitty's weight were taken from her.
It is not given to all of us to test ourselves, and discover by actual experiment just how much a mental resolution has done for us.
"I don't believe you know anything about it.
There was a general laugh.
She was very pale, but declared herself not tired at all, and she dressed and marched sturdily up the cliff, refusing all assistance.
The first thing she touched was Dolly's large pig-tail, and, grasping that tight, she sank again, dragging Dolly down with her, backward.
You don't understand a bit!
"She'll be setting the house on fire some night, to show what she can do," added Harry, teasingly.
Dolly, however, was to have the chance.
Then Dolly, striking out strongly, and pushing Kitty before her, sent one wild cry for help toward the beach.
"Yours is a very good resolution, Dolly dear, and I hope you'll keep to it."
Later, she found herself repeating, as if it were a lesson to be learned, "Presence of mind means keeping cool, and having your wits about you;" and she said it over and over every morning and evening after that, as she braided her hair.
"Keep cool; have your wits about you," rang through her ears, as, held in Kitty's desperate grasp, she was dragged down, down into the sea.
The direct object of this passion--that a name should survive in men's mouths to which no adequate idea of its original can be attached--seems a thin and fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider how little we should probably sympathise with the creatures that are to remember us.
Every experience of victory, eloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and if repeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession.
Sometimes, if his imagination is sensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he creates a poetic mythology; sometimes, when the inner life predominates, they are projected into his own forgotten past or infinite future.
Things could not be near or far, worse or better, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged somewhere in space and time.
[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit.]
When most nearly material these personages are human souls--the ideal life of particular bodies--or floating mortal reputations--echoes of those ideal lives in one another.
This ambiguity is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of the personages which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion--his idea of himself.
Or rather it is no memory, however eviscerated, that fulfils that office.
At the same time, natural growths may be called achievements only because, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience. Nature's works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke; mechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point of view of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow grows impassioned and vehement.
[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal.]
But the more successful he is in stuffing everything into his self-consciousness, the more desolate will the void become which surrounds him.
Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, as more and more things become tributary to our personal being.
It sees even nature from the point of view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal standards.
"There is society where none intrudes;" and for most men sympathy with their imaginary selves is a powerful and dominant emotion. True memory offers but a meagre and interrupted vista of past experience, yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mental discourse to bandy about; a name with a few physical and social connotations is what must represent the man to his own thinkings.
An individual's concern for the attitude society takes toward him is therefore in the first instance concern for his own practical welfare.
And so they would always have remained in crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science had come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance, arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere; for however persistent and passionate such prejudices may be, we know too well that they are woven of thin air.
In marriage and the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is riveted on temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural or corporate.
The boundaries of that province which each spirit presides over are vaguely drawn, the spirit itself being correspondingly indefinite.
Such an equilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity that produced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, it sustains in being an ideal form.
"Could you find your way back to the outlaws' camp in the forest?"
It was many weary anxious days before the messenger came back, but without the little prisoner.
"But you could never find your way," she said, sobbing.
But the Sheriff would not see him, for he took no interest in anything now, and told his servant that the man must send word what his business was.
In another month the Sheriff advanced again with a stronger force, but they were driven back more easily than the first, and the Sheriff was in despair.
The man stopped, for just then the Sheriff closed his eyes again and said something very softly, which Robin's aunt heard, and she sank upon her knees and covered her face with her hands.
"I waited a bit, and then stepped out to him, and what do you think he did?
"Because, master," said the man softly, "I was afraid you couldn't bear it, for I was a father once and my son died, and though you never knew me, I knew you, and was sorry when the news came that your little boy was killed.
"He said, master, that if you wanted the boy you must go and fetch him."
"May be, Master Sheriff," said the man drily; "but I'm not going to fly at the throat of one who did nothing but good to me.
The Sheriff was silent for a few minutes, during which he closed his eyes and his lips moved, and he looked so strange that Robin's aunt crossed the room to where he sat, and took hold of his hand, as she whispered loving words.
"Yes, Master Sheriff."
Can you bear to hear good news as well as bad?"
What is it you are keeping back?
"Just like a father should, master, and ask him for my boy like a man."
"Oh! no, Master Sheriff; they took me before Robin Hood, and he asked me what I was doing there, and whether I was not afraid to cross his forest, and I up and told him plainly that I wasn't. Then he said how was that when I must have heard what a terrible robber he was."
Then the Sheriff sprang to his feet, looking quite a different man.
But a couple of days later he had the man to whom he had given the gold pieces found, and sent him to the outlaws' camp with a letter written upon parchment, in which he ordered Robin Hood, in the King's name, to give up the little prisoner he held there contrary to the law and against his own will.
The man turned to leave the room, when the Sheriff said sharply:
"Those pieces were for the news you brought me," said the Sheriff. "Yes, take them, for you have behaved like an honest man."
And then months passed and a year had gone by, and people looked solemn and said that it seemed as if the Sheriff would never hold up his head again.
"What?" cried the Sheriff angrily.
"Speak out," he said; "you did not come to tell me only that.
'Yes,' he said, 'of course.
"You have come from the outlaws' camp?" he said with his voice trembling.
"You can go."
"Oh! yes, Master Sheriff, that I could, though they did bind a cloth over my face when they brought me away."
'Then you go to my father,' he cried, 'and tell him to tell aunt that I'm quite well, and that some day I'm coming home."
So he gathered a strong body of crossbow-men, and others with spears and swords, besides asking for the help of two gallant knights who came with their esquires mounted and in armour with their men.
"Yes, yes," cried the Sheriff, "and what did you say."
"Stop!
They tell me that Robin Hood's a noble earl who offended the King, and had to fly for his life.
He strung his bow, fitted an arrow to it before I knew where I was, and drew it to the head as if he was going to shoot me.
Why, I almost felt as if I should like to stay altogether."
"Where I ought to have gone at first," he said humbly; "into the forest to fetch my boy."
It was no beaten and wounded ruffian, but a hale and hearty fellow, who looked bright and happy, and before he could speak and tell his news the Sheriff began to question him.
Why don't you speak?"
"I could, Master Sheriff," said the man, beginning slowly to lay the gold pieces back one by one upon the table; "but I can't do evil for good."
CHAPTER VII
"But you will not be angry with me if I am wrong, Master Sheriff?"
Robin was given into his charge to protect and take safely home to his father, and when the attack was made by the outlaw's men, instead of doing anything to protect the little fellow and save him from being injured by Robin Hood's people, he thought only of himself.
The servant went out, and came back directly.
But Robin's father cared nothing for the cloth or the mules; he could only think of the bright happy little fellow whom he loved so well, and whom he wept for in secret at night when there was no one near to see.
Then he laughed, and all his people laughed too, and he said I was a merry fellow.
But they thought that he should have gathered together a number of fighting men and gone and punished Robin Hood and his outlaws for carrying off that valuable set of loads of cloth.
For one day a man came to the Sheriff's house and wanted him.
Robin's aunt when she came and tried to comfort him used to shake her head and wipe her eyes.
What I say is, he's a noble kind-hearted gentleman, and if it was my boy he had there, looking as happy as the day is long, I'd go to him without any fighting men."
"He says, sir, that he was taken prisoner by Robin Hood's men a week ago, and that he has just come from the camp under the greenwood tree, and has brought you news, master."
He threw his charge into the first bushes he came to, and galloped away, hardly stopping till he reached Nottingham town.
"That will do," said the Sheriff.
'Give him plenty to eat and drink,' he said, 'for two or three days, and then send him on his way.' Yes, Master Sheriff, that he did, and a fine jolly time I had.
"That made me think all the more, and one day I managed to follow him but among the trees to where I found him feeding one of the wild deer, which followed him about like a dog."
Young Robin's father, the Sheriff, suffered very sadly from the loss of his son and his goods, and Robin's aunt came to Nottingham and wept bitterly over the loss of the little boy she loved dearly. For David, the old servant in whose charge Robin had been placed when he was going home, had done what too many weak people do, tried to hide one fault by committing another.
"Yes, I can't take pay to lead anyone to fight against Robin Hood and his men."
Yes, he said, that sort of thing is certainly very blameable; but what are the stories which you mean?
And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?
Heaven forbid, he said.
Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes,--as when a painter paints a portrait not having the shadow of a likeness to the original.
And when you speak of music, do you include literature or not?
Very true, he said; but what are these forms of theology which you mean?
Then everything which is good, whether made by art or nature, or both, is least liable to suffer change from without?
Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men.
And what do you think of a second principle?
No.
And literature may be either true or false?
he said.
A fault which is most serious, I said; the fault of telling a lie, and, what is more, a bad lie.
For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
I should say not.
Of course.
Very true, he said.
Then it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being, as is supposed, the fairest and best that is conceivable, every God remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.
Impossible.
'Was celebrating in song her fair progeny whose days were to be long, and to know no sickness.
Very true, Adeimantus; but then, would any one, whether God or man, desire to make himself worse?
Very true.
That would be ridiculous, he said.
And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?
Then no motive can be imagined why God should lie?
Of course they are.
'God plants guilt among men when he desires utterly to destroy a house.'
It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only?
I cannot say, he replied.
And will not the bravest and wisest soul be least confused or deranged by any external influence?
And again--
True.
We cannot.
But the narrative of Hephaestus binding Here his mother, or how on another occasion Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten, and all the battles of the gods in Homer--these tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not.
I cannot answer you, he said, without more thought.
I mean that no one is willingly deceived in that which is the truest and highest part of himself, or about the truest and highest matters; there, above all, he is most afraid of a lie having possession of him.
Your thoughts, he said, are the reflection of my own.
You may find a model of the lesser in the greater, I said; for they are necessarily of the same type, and there is the same spirit in both of them.
I grant that.
'Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots,'
he said.
That will do, he said.
Yes.
Well, I said; but if we suppose a change in anything, that change must be effected either by the thing itself, or by some other thing?
Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only.
And what shall be their education?
And will he then change himself for the better and fairer, or for the worse and more unsightly?
Yes.
There is nothing more hateful to them.
But surely God and the things of God are in every way perfect?
And that which is not hurtful hurts not?
That appears to me to be most true, he said.
and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Here disguised in the likeness of a priestess asking an alms
'Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;'
Clearly, he said, that must be the case if he is changed at all.
And things which are at their best are also least liable to be altered or discomposed; for example, when healthiest and strongest, the human frame is least liable to be affected by meats and drinks, and the plant which is in the fullest vigour also suffers least from winds or the heat of the sun or any similar causes.
For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal; anything that he receives into his mind at that age is likely to become indelible and unalterable; and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.
No, indeed.
Then the superhuman and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood?
Right.
But can any of these reasons apply to God?
He cannot.
I agree with you, he replied, and am ready to give my assent to the law.
Very likely, he replied; but I do not as yet know what you would term the greater.
And that which hurts not does no evil?
You agree with me then, I said, that this is the second type or form in which we should write and speak about divine things.
Certainly.
Certainly not.
Most certainly.
True.
And therefore the cause of well-being?
Can we find a better than the traditional sort?--and this has two divisions, gymnastic for the body, and music for the soul.
Then it will be our duty to select, if we can, natures which are fitted for the task of guarding the city?
That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
Very true, he said.
Most assuredly.
I am afraid that what you say is true, he replied.
Now will the city have to fill and swell with a multitude of callings which are not required by any natural want; such as the whole tribe of hunters and actors, of whom one large class have to do with forms and colours; another will be the votaries of music--poets and their attendant train of rhapsodists, players, dancers, contractors; also makers of divers kinds of articles, including women's dresses.
But, said Glaucon, interposing, you have not given them a relish to their meal.
THE GAMBLER
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So saying, she called Nadia back to her side, and entered the Casino, where she joined the rest of our party.
"He is very shy," I said, "and susceptible.
I thought I could even detect a certain shamefacedness in the General's glance.
Polina seemed furious when I handed her only 700 gulden, for she had thought to receive from Paris, as the proceeds of the pledging of her diamonds, at least 2000 gulden, or even more.
While he is engaged with a Cardinal?" screeched the sacristan, again shrinking back in horror.
In the first place, my grandmother is very ill, and unlikely to last another couple of days.
He does possess some chateau or other.
Evidently this was not mere accident, and I felt that I must throw some light upon matters.
Of course, we began by talking on business matters.
"We must translate these roubles into thalers.
"Come what may, I MUST have money," she said.
Some day I may remind you of that saying, in order to see if you will be as good as your word.
Blanche, with her mother and her cousin, the Marquis, know very well that, as things now stand, we are ruined."
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The passers-by stopped to stare at them, for the effect was splendid--the General could not have improved upon it.
"That Marquis of yours," I said, "--is HE also familiar with your family secrets?"
Blanche.
Yet all the time I could not help wondering WHY it was so necessary for her to win something, and what new schemes could have sprung to birth in her ever-fertile brain.
Yes, often Polina must have taken me for something less than a man!"
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
"Never mind.
To think, therefore, that I should suddenly encounter him again here, in Roulettenberg!
But then the Frenchman is a marquis, and the cleverer of the two," remarked Polina imperturbably.
After listening politely, but with great reserve, to my account of myself, this sacristan asked me to wait a little.
Last night the General told me that for certain.
"Yes; absolutely."
I received from them a welcome quite different to that which I had expected.
Her tone had sounded very angry. Indeed, of late her talks with me had invariably ended on a note of temper and irritation--yes, of real temper.
Hitherto (I concluded) she had looked upon me in the same light that the old Empress did upon her servant--the Empress who hesitated not to unrobe herself before her slave, since she did not account a slave a man.
He looked at me with an air of infinite resentment.
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"Just so," I replied.
At length I returned from two weeks leave of absence to find that my patrons had arrived three days ago in Roulettenberg.
Nothing further has transpired.
It was high time that I did so.
This I said in French.
So far as I could see, the party had already gained some notoriety in the place, which had come to look upon the General as a Russian nobleman of great wealth.
Still, she had charged me with a commission--to win what I could at roulette.
"And why are you yourself so interested in them?" was her retort as she eyed me with dry grimness.
In fact, what does the Frenchman possess?
I ventured to remind the good man of my own business also; whereupon, with an expression of, if anything, increased dryness, he again asked me to wait.
Then, without waiting for an answer, she departed.
He WANTED to do so, but each time was met by me with such a fixed, disrespectful stare that he desisted in confusion.
"You KNOW he has not," retorted Polina angrily.
Well, it behoved me to divine them, and to probe them, and that as soon as possible.
Listen to me.
"What?
"Let us calculate," he went on.
"Then he has only just begun his courting?
Later, I was about to take Mischa and Nadia for a walk when a summons reached me from the staircase that I must attend the General. He began by deigning to inquire of me where I was going to take the children; and as he did so, I could see that he failed to look me in the eyes.
Then she made a movement to rise.
Interminably he discoursed on finance and Russian politics, and though, at times, the General made feints to contradict him, he did so humbly, and as though wishing not wholly to lose sight of his own dignity.
Every moment we are expecting to receive news of the end."
I was assigned a small room on the fourth floor of the hotel (for you must know that I belonged to the General's suite).
"You are too touchy about these things.
In silence I took the money.
But I took no notice of this.
Yes, this I knew well.
Polina Alexandrovna, on seeing me, inquired why I had been so long away.
That man was then a boy of ten and his family are still residing in Moscow."
Again, therefore, I put to myself the question: "Do I, or do I not love her?" and again I could return myself no answer or, rather, for the hundredth time I told myself that I detested her.
Also, he was delighted that I should sit next him at table, for he appeared to look upon me as his bosom friend.
"Nevertheless, in your place I should marry the Englishman."
"What really saved you was the fact that you proclaimed yourself a heretic and a barbarian," remarked the Frenchman with a smile.
"Is that so?" I repeated.
Upon this the sacristan shrunk back in astonishment.
The General eyed me coldly, greeted me in rather haughty fashion, and dismissed me to pay my respects to his sister.
I'm a poor black feckless sheep--childer may clem for aught I can do, unless, parson, yo'd help me?'
'I've reckoned for that.
He kept saying, 'I quite expected to have seen Mr. Thornton.
LOOKING SOUTH
"I wonder how long they'll keep me here?
Suppose you were to meet with ruffians; suppose--oh, heaven!--suppose you were to meet with--Black Donald!"
It's just impossible!
You capture Black Donald!
The beauty of the weather had tempted Old Hurricane to ride to the county seat on particular business connected with his ward herself.
"Oh, Gyp, is it possible that, instead of my capturing Black Donald, you are going to let Black Donald or somebody else catch me?" exclaimed Capitola, in mock despair, as she urged her wearied steed.
"No, my dear; at least, no one has been able to do so yet.
Capitola, left alone, amused herself with her tasks until the afternoon; then, calling a boy, she ordered him to saddle her horse and bring him around.
And no sooner had Cap been commanded, if she valued her safety, not to cross the water or climb the precipice than, as a natural consequence, she began to wonder what was in the valley behind the mountain and what might be in the woods across the river.
Mrs. Condiment taught her the mysteries of cutting and basting, back-stitching and felling, hemming and seaming.
One day a golden opportunity occurred.
"Good gracious, upon every account!
And thinking "discretion the better part of valor," she urged her horse once more into a gallop for a few hundred yards; but the jaded beast soon broke into a trot and subsided into a walk that threatened soon to come to a standstill.
"My Lord, but the major will be hopping if he finds it out!" was good Mrs. Condiment's dismayed exclamation.
"If Black Donald is a mail robber, then this little bridle-path is far enough off his beat."
Is he the Evil One himself, or the Man in the Iron Mask, or the individual that struck Billy Patterson, or--who is he?"
"Why so?" asked Cap.
Capitola at first was delighted and half incredulous at the great change in her fortunes.
Sometimes of a morning, after a very vivid dream of the alleys, cellars and gutters, ragpickers, newsboys, and beggars of New York, she would open her eyes upon her own comfortable chamber, with its glowing fire and crimson curtains, and bright mirror crowning the walnut bureau between them, she would jump up and gaze wildly around, not remembering where she was or how she came thither.
No; I see how it is.
Forever, I hope.
No, thank heaven, there will be a moon.
And, so saying, she gayly galloped along, singing as she went, following the narrow path up hill and down dale through the wintry woods.
"My dear, what do you want with your horse?
Then, gathering up her riding skirt and throwing it over the neck of her horse she plunged boldly into the stream, and, with the water splashing and foaming all around her, urged him onward till they crossed the river and climbed up the opposite bank. A bridle-path lay before her, leading from the fording place through a deep wood.
Oh, how I should like to capture Black Donald!--There's my horse; good-by!" and before Mrs. Condiment could raise another objection Capitola ran out, sprang into her saddle and was seen careering down the hill toward the river as fast as her horse could fly.
You are crazy!"
So, half in jest and half in earnest, Capitola soliloquized upon her change of fortune.
This fine old military officer whom I call uncle is the head doctor.
"You, child!
But won't there be a row though?
Catch me coming to my senses, when it's so delightful to be mad.
I hope they won't cure me; I vow I won't be cured.
It seemed to Dolly a terribly long time before any answer came, but it was in reality less than five minutes before a boat was pushed into the water.
It didn't mean anything."
It happened, about two months after the talk on the piazza, that Dolly was bathing with Kitty Allen, a small neighbor of her own age.
We shall never get back in the world!
Picking up a shell just before it bursts in a hospital tent, and throwing it out of the door, is presence of mind."
All the children who lived on the sandy bluff known as "The Cliff" were in the habit of bathing; and the daily dip taken in company was the chief event of the day, in their opinion.
"Shall I step down to Hussey's, and get a shell for you to practise on?"
DOLLY'S LESSON.
"Very proud," replied Mrs. Ware, smiling as she stroked the brown head,--"very proud, indeed."
Dolly looked from one to the other.
Dolly dived after her, only to be met by Kitty coming up to the surface again, and frantically reaching out, as drowning persons do, for something to hold by.
What makes you want to know, midget?"
She swam pluckily along, the boat keeping near, lest her strength should give out, and reached the beach just as Jack, that moment aware of the situation, was dashing into the water after her.
Kitty was too far gone to make any very serious struggle.
It was the hour when jokes were cracked and questions asked, and when Mamma, who was apt to be pretty busy during the daytime, had leisure to answer them.
"Well, it was a good lesson," said Mrs. Ware, with glistening eyes.
"Float, and I'll hold you up," she gasped.
"Saving the silver, instead of the waste-paper basket, when the house is on fire," put in Erma.
"It was really remarkable," he said.
The sun dips down, and sends a flash of glory to the zenith; and small pink clouds curl up about the rising moon, fondle her, as it were, and seem to love her.
Phyllis, the next in age, was short and fat; then came Harry, then Erma, just sixteen (named after a German great-grandmother), and, last of all, Jack, tallest and jolliest of the group, who had just "passed his preliminaries," and would enter college next year.
"Swallowing a quart of whiskey when a rattlesnake bites you," suggested Jack.
"Oh, that was only fun!
A clear sense of what she ought to do flashed across her mind.
"Should you be proud of me if I showed presence of mind?" asked Dolly, leaning her arms on her mother's lap.
"How foolish you are!
And now it was that Dolly's carefully conned lesson about presence of mind came to her aid.
The two children had swam out for quite a distance; then, as they turned to go back, Kitty suddenly realized her distance from the shore, and was seized with immediate and paralyzing terror.
It was really a hazardous moment.
She must escape from Kitty and hold her up, but not give Kitty any chance to drag her down again.
"I am aware of the fact, but I overlooked the formality, for once.
At no other time is the sea so blue and silvery, or the streaks of purple and pale green which mark the place of the sand-spits and shallows that underlie the island waters so defined, or of such charming colors.
"Isn't there any such thing, then?"
Nothing is more dangerous than to be caught and held by a person who cannot swim, or who is too much disabled by fear to use his powers.
And she kept firm grasp of her mind, and would not let the fright, of whose existence she was conscious, get possession of her.
The crushed rock, being delivered at the top, would fall down from plate to plate, constantly exposing different surfaces to the heat, until it landed completely dried in the lower portion of the tower, where it fell into conveyors which took it up to the stock-house.
As Edison had determined upon treating two hundred and fifty tons or more per hour, he decided to devise an entirely new type of great capacity, requiring a minimum of power (for elevating the material), and depending upon the force of gravity for handling it during the drying process.
These are too numerous to specify in detail, as they extended throughout the various ramifications of the plant, but the principal ones are worthy of mention, such as:
A cursory glance at these problems will reveal their import.
At the time this adjunct to the plant was required, the best dryer on the market was of a rotary type, which had a capacity of only twenty tons per hour, with the expenditure of considerable power.
"Finally, the fuel consumption is reduced, which in the case of the Eastern plants, with their relatively costly coke, is a very important consideration.
Mr. Edison attempted to make the shot, but missed it and said 'Put the balls back.' So I put them back in the same position and he missed it the second time.
The blast would dislodge thirty to thirty-five thousand tons of rock, which was scooped up by great steam-shovels and loaded on to skips carried by a line of cars on a narrow-gauge railroad running to and from the crushing mill.
For five years he had lived and worked steadily at Edison, leaving there only on Saturday night to spend Sunday at his home in Orange, and returning to the plant by an early train on Monday morning.
His nature revolted at such an immense loss of power, especially as he proposed the crushing of vast quantities of ore.
MAGNETIC ORE MILLING WORK
They served, however, to convince Edison that if he ever expected to carry out his scheme on the extensive scale planned, he could not depend upon the market to supply suitable machinery for important operations, but would be obliged to devise and build it himself.
At the former price he could have supplied the market and earned a liberal profit on his investment, but at $3.50 per ton he was left without a reasonable chance of competition.
It was found impossible to keep mechanics on account of indifferent residential accommodations afforded by the tiny village, remote from civilization, among the central mountains of New Jersey.
"In the discussion that followed he suggested several kinds of work which he had in his mind, and which might prove profitable.
They saw I was very anxious to sell it, and they would take advantage of my necessity.
This increase in output, of course, means a reduction in the cost of labor and of general expenses.
When we arrived at Dover, New Jersey, we got a New York newspaper, and I called his attention to the quotation of that day on General Electric.
In fact, over two million dollars were spent in the attempt.
It is not easy to appreciate to the full the daring exemplified in these great crushing rolls, or rather "rock-crackers," without having watched them in operation delivering their "solar-plexus" blows.
Simple though the principle appears, it was in its application to vast masses of material and in the solving of great engineering problems connected therewith that Edison's originality made itself manifest in the concentrating works that he established in New Jersey, early in the nineties.
The space between these two rolls allowed pieces of rock measuring less than fourteen inches to descend to other smaller rolls placed below.
They ought to help you, for it will help us out.
"The amount of ore disclosed by this survey was simply fabulous.
DURING the Hudson-Fulton celebration of October, 1909, Burgomaster Van Leeuwen, of Amsterdam, member of the delegation sent officially from Holland to escort the Half Moon and participate in the functions of the anniversary, paid a visit to the Edison laboratory at Orange to see the inventor, who may be regarded as pre-eminent among those of Dutch descent in this country.
We also knew the width, length, and approximate depth of every one of these deposits, which were enormous.
From a consideration of these facts, and with his usual tendency to upset traditional observances, Edison conceived the bold idea of constructing gigantic rolls which, by the force of momentum, would be capable of crushing individual rocks of vastly greater size than ever before attempted.
Thus a complete separation is effected.
I had a number of men survey a strip reaching from Lower Canada to North Carolina.
This iron-ore concentrating project had lain close to Edison's heart and ambition--indeed, it had permeated his whole being to the exclusion of almost all other investigations or inventions for a while.
The problem included handling and crushing the "run of the mine," without selection.
At the particular time this incident happened, Mrs. Edison and her family were away for the summer, and I was staying at the Glenmont home on the Orange Mountains.
"The richness of the ore and its purity of course affect the limestone consumption.
The charging of briquettes was begun with a percentage of 25 per cent., and was carried up to 100 per cent.
The only instrument we used was the special magnetic needle. We started in Lower Canada and travelled across the line of march twenty-five miles; then advanced south one thousand feet; then back across the line of march again twenty-five miles; then south another thousand feet, across again, and so on.
When I reported to Mr. Edison he said: 'That's all right.
It must be hard enough to bear transportation, and to carry the furnace burden without crumbling to pieces.
I took off the cloth, got out the balls, picked out a cue for Mr. Edison, and when we banked for the first shot I won and started the game.
In the two end pieces of a heavy iron frame were set three rolls, or cylinders--one in the centre, another below, and the other above--all three being in a vertical line.
The act of breaking and crushing would naturally decrease the tremendous momentum, but after the rock was reduced and the pieces had passed through, the belt would again come into play, and once more speed up the rolls for a repetition of their regular prize-fighter duty.
Existing machinery for this purpose had been designed on the basis of mining methods then in vogue, by which the rock was thoroughly shattered by means of high explosives and reduced to pieces of one hundred pounds or less.
His first patent on the subject was applied for and issued early in 1880.
"The furnace at which the test was made produces from one hundred to one hundred and ten tons per day when running on the ordinary mixture.
At the time he took up the matter, however, no one seems to have realized the full meaning of the tremendous problems involved.
This method of drying was original with Edison.
The rolls were well named, for with ear-splitting noise they broke up in a few seconds the great pieces of rock tossed in from the skips.
It is an absolute fact that the great electrical inventors and the men who stood behind them have had little return for their foresight and courage.
The steam-shovel did not discriminate, but picked up handily single pieces weighing five or six tons and loaded them on the skips with quantities of smaller lumps. When the skips arrived at the giant rolls, their contents were dumped automatically into a superimposed hopper.
Interesting as it might be to follow at length the numerous phases of ingenious and resourceful development that took place during those busy years, the limit of present space forbids their relation.
Go and see the president of the bank which paid the forged checks. Get him to admit the bank's liability, and then say to him that Mr. Edison does not think the bank should suffer because he happened to have a dishonest clerk in his employ.
Many attempts had been made in by-gone days to concentrate the iron in such ores by water processes, but with only a partial degree of success. The impossibility of obtaining a uniform concentrate was a most serious objection, had there not indeed been other difficulties which rendered this method commercially impracticable.
This great and notable plant, representing a very large outlay of money, brought to completion, ready for business, and embracing some of the most brilliant and remarkable of Edison's inventions and methods, must be abandoned by force of circumstances over which he had no control, and with it must die the high hopes that his progressive, conquering march to success had legitimately engendered.
These severe requirements were staggering, but Mr. Edison's courage did not falter. Although it seemed a well-nigh hopeless task, he entered upon the investigation with his usual optimism and vim.
These latter rolls were also face-lined with chilled-iron plates; but, unlike the larger ones, were positively driven, reducing the rock to pieces of about one-half-inch size, or smaller.
As this last-named operation precedes the crushing, let us first consider it as it was projected and carried on by him.
"These figures prove that the yield of the furnace is considerably increased.
These few acres alone contained sufficient ore to supply the whole United States iron trade, including exports, for seventy years."
Three days' advertisements brought in over six hundred and fifty applications, and afterward Edison had no trouble in obtaining all the first-class men he required, as settlers in the artificial Yosemite he was creating.
The agglomeration of the concentrates having been decided upon, two other considerations, not mentioned above, were of primary importance--first, to find a suitable cheap binding material; and, second, its nature must be such that very little would be necessary per ton of concentrates.
Hence the iron and steel mills east of the Alleghanies--compelled to rely on limited local deposits of Bessemer ore, and upon foreign ores which were constantly rising in value--began to sustain a serious competition with Western mills, even in Eastern markets.
Edison realized from the start that the true solution of this problem lay in the continuous treatment of the material, with the maximum employment of natural forces and the minimum of manual labor and generated power.
The non-magnetic gangue descends in a straight line to the other side of the partition.
So far as foundry iron is concerned, the experience at Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, brief as it has been, shows that a stronger and tougher metal is made."
I also secured sixteen thousand acres in which the deposit was proportionately as large.
The rolls were set face to face fourteen inches apart, in a heavy frame, and the total weight was one hundred and thirty tons, of which seventy tons were in moving parts.
To pay railroad charges on ores carrying perhaps 80 to 90 per cent. of useless material would be prohibitive.
The second item was the ingenious and varied forms of conveyor belt, devised and used by Edison at the concentrating works, and subsequently developed into a separate and extensive business by an engineer to whom he gave permission to use his plans and patterns.
Obviously, at each step the percentage of felspar and phosphorus is less and less until in the final concentrates the percentage of iron oxide is 91 to 93 per cent.
This was the plan that was subsequently put into practice in the great works at Edison, New Jersey.
His genius as an inventor is revealed in many details of the great concentrating plant....
The Edison concentrating plant has been sketched in the briefest outline with a view of affording merely a bare idea of the great work of its projector.
During the twenty-eight years that have intervened it has never come back." This incident was really the prelude to the development set forth in this chapter.
It may be stated as broadly true that Edison engineered to handle immense masses of stuff automatically, while his predecessors aimed chiefly at close separation.
To the faces of these rolls were bolted a series of heavy, chilled-iron plates containing a number of projecting knobs two inches high.
It is regarded as possible that Eastern furnaces will be able to use a smaller proportion of the costlier coke and correspondingly increase in anthracite coal, which is a cheaper fuel in that section.
Also say to him that I shall not ask them to make the amount good.' This was done; the bank admitting its liability and being much pleased with this action.
It was his opinion that it was cheaper to quarry and concentrate lean ore in a big way than to attempt to mine, under adverse circumstances, limited bodies of high-grade ore.
The screening process allowed the finest part of the crushed rock to pass on, by conveyor belts, to the magnetic separators, while the coarser particles were in like manner automatically returned to the rolls for further reduction.
The financial aspect of these enterprises is often overlooked and forgotten.
This ore could be excavated very cheaply by means of improved mining facilities, and transported at low cost to lake ports.
But, alas!
Thus, with never-failing persistence and patience, coupled with intense thought and hard work, Edison met and conquered, one by one, the complex difficulties that confronted him.
In other words, it was the kinetic energy of the rolls that crumbled up the rocks with pile-driver effect.
From 1880 to 1885, while still very busy in the development of his electric-light system, Edison found opportunity to plan crushing and separating machinery.
In the patient solving of tremendous problems he had toiled up the mountain-side of success--scaling its topmost peak and obtaining a view of the boundless prospect.
Edison's native shrewdness and knowledge of human nature was put to practical use in the busy days of plant construction.
After many months of unremitting toil and research, and the trial of thousands of experiments, the goal was reached in the completion of a successful formula for agglomerating the fine ore and pressing it into briquettes by special machinery."
Thus we advanced all the way to North Carolina, varying our cross-country march from two to twenty-five miles, according to geological formation.
The following is the record of the results:
During some of these waits Mr. Edison had seen me play billiards.
"I knew it was a commercial problem to produce high-grade Bessemer ore from these deposits, and took steps to acquire a large amount of the property.
The concentrate, in fine powdery form, was delivered in similar manner to a stock-house.
This sand was transported automatically by belt conveyors to the rear of the works to be stored and sold.
In the case of the Crane trial there was a reduction from 30 per cent. to 12 per cent. of the ore charge.
No such departure was as radical as that of the method of crushing the ore.
It is hardly necessary to devote space to the beginnings of the enterprise, although they are full of interest.
Reduced to its barest, crudest terms, the proposition of magnetic separation is simplicity itself.
Fifty were quickly built and fully described in advertising for mechanics.
I mix a little sentiment with business, and I will give you an order for one hundred thousand tons.' And he sat right down and gave me the order."
Previous to the dumping of a skip, the rolls were speeded up to a circumferential velocity of nearly a mile a minute, thus imparting to them the terrific momentum that would break up easily in a few seconds boulders weighing five or six tons each.
A brief description of this remarkable machine will probably interest the reader.
So these two lines of work were taken up by Mr. Edison with just as much enthusiasm and energy as is usual with him, the commercial failure of the concentrating plant seeming not to affect his spirits in any way.
It will have been gathered that the funds for this great experiment were furnished largely by Edison.
Mr. Edison then asked: 'If I hadn't sold any of mine, what would it be worth to-day?' and after some figuring I replied: 'Over four million dollars.' When Mr. Edison is thinking seriously over a problem he is in the habit of pulling his right eyebrow, which he did now for fifteen or twenty seconds.
In this instance it was of more than usual import and seriousness, as Edison was virtually his own "backer," putting into the company almost the whole of all the fortune his inventions had brought him.
This pressure was applied in a most ingenious manner.
The Crane trial was too short to settle the question to what extent the increase in product may be carried.
In a narrative not intended to be strictly technical, it would probably tire the reader to follow this material in detail through the numerous steps attending the magnetic separation.
When I had finished he said: 'It is too bad the money is gone, but I will tell you what to do.
This was the final process requisite for the making of a completed commercial product.
Let Mr. Mallory give an instance: "During the latter part of the panic of 1893 there came a period when we were very hard up for ready cash, due largely to the panicky conditions; and a large pay-roll had been raised with considerable difficulty.
The faith that "moves mountains" had a new opportunity.
Thus was swept away the possibility of reaping the reward so richly earned by years of incessant thought, labor, and care.
The giant rolls were belt-driven, in opposite directions, through friction clutches, although the belt was not depended upon for the actual crushing.
I also planned a great magnetic survey of the East, and I believe it remains the most comprehensive of its kind yet performed.
Hence, he believed that only the minimum of work should be done with the costly explosive; and, therefore, planned to use dynamite merely to dislodge great masses of rock, and depended upon the steam-shovel, operated by coal under the boiler, to displace, handle, and remove the rock in detail.
He reasoned that the advantages thus obtained would be fourfold: a minimum of machinery and parts; greater compactness; a saving of power; and greater economy in mining.
The problem to be solved was to market an agglomerated material so as to avoid the drawbacks of fine ore.
In many respects the attainment of these somewhat conflicting ends was the most perplexing of the problems which confronted Mr. Edison.
Furnacemen object to more than a very small proportion of fine ore in their mixtures, particularly when the ore is magnetic, not easily reduced.
The whole crushing operation of reduction from massive boulders to small pebbly pieces having been done in less time than the telling has occupied, the product was conveyed to the "Dryer," a tower nine feet square and fifty feet high, heated from below by great open furnace fires.
This batch of material goes back for another crushing, so that everything is subjected to an equality of refining.
Even the scenery is austere.
A series of three-inch holes twenty feet deep were drilled eight feet apart, about twelve feet back of the ore-bank, and into these were inserted dynamite cartridges.
I continued at his request to put the balls back in the same position for the next fifteen minutes, until he could make the shot every time--then he said: 'I don't want to play any more.'"
After making two or three shots I missed, and a long carom shot was left for Mr. Edison, the cue ball and object ball being within about twelve inches of each other, and the other ball a distance of nearly the length of the table.
These pieces were then crushed by power directly applied.
I am willing to help you.
In operation the material passed first through the upper and middle rolls, and then between the middle and lowest rolls.
Here again Edison reversed prior practice by discarding rotary screens and devising a form of tower screen, which, besides having a very large working capacity by gravity, eliminated all power except that required to elevate the material.
On leaving the giant rolls the rocks, having been reduced to pieces not larger than fourteen inches, passed into the series of "Intermediate Rolls" of similar construction and operation, by which they were still further reduced, and again passed on to three other sets of rolls of smaller dimensions.
The rocks having thus been reduced to fine powder, the mass was ready for screening on its way to the magnetic separators.
In other words, Mr. Edison was at least a quarter of a century ahead of the times in the work now to be considered.
Hence the elimination of the worthless "gangue" by concentration of the iron particles associated with it, seemed to be the only solution of the problem.
Of course I ride the army way, tight in the saddle, which is more difficult to learn.
We saw through our field glasses that as soon as they got near enough he made a quick dash for the herd, and cutting one out, had turned it so it was headed straight for us.
The first sergeant came to meet us, and went around with us.
They looked lovely when baked, and just right, and smelled so good, too!
It was an awful situation to be in, and one to terrify anybody.
They are perfectly matched--coal-black all over, except their little noses, and are quite small.
In my letters to you I will disregard army etiquette, and call the lieutenants by their rank, otherwise you would not know of whom I was writing--an officer or civilian.
You must always remember that Faye is in the infantry.
The whole place is horrible, and dismal beyond description, and just why anyone lives here I cannot understand.
The others passed on just the same, however, and if we had fallen to the floor, I presume they would have stepped over us, and otherwise been oblivious to our existence.
Many of the men like to cook, and do things for officers of their company, thereby adding to their pay, and these men are called strikers.
Faye has just been in to say that only one of my trunks can be taken on the stage with us, and of course I had to select one that has all sorts of things in it, and consequently leave my pretty dresses here, to be sent for--all but the Japanese silk which happens to be in that trunk.
With eyes to the front and hands down their sides they looked absurdly like wax figures waiting to be "wound up," and I did want so much to tell the little son of General Phillips to pinch one and make him jump.
I wanted to say more, but Faye suddenly left the room.
Before coming out, General Phillips said a few pleasant words to the men, wishing them a "Merry Christmas" for all of us. Judging from the laughing and shuffling of feet as soon as we got outside, the men were glad to be allowed to relax once more.
Mrs. Anderson was very handsome in an elegant gown of London-smoke silk.
Every woman appeared in her finest gown.
You can imagine how proud and delighted I was when asked to go with them.
The party was given for Doctor and Mrs. Anderson, who are guests of General Bourke for a few days.
Every time the ball would glance off from the thick skull. The wonderful mat of curly hair must break the force some, too.
At home we always had a large fruit cake made for the holidays, long in advance, and I thought I would have one this year as near like it as possible.
A soldier is cleaning the windows and floors, and making things tidy generally.
But they were not ill--not in the least--which proved that the cake was well baked.
The hotel is much like the houses, and appears to have been made of dirt, and a few drygoods boxes.
It is a shame that those cadets at West Point are so starved.
And there were plates with crumbs, and napkins, that told the rest of the sad tale--and there was wine and empty glasses, also.
They said he was a magnificent specimen--unusually large, and very black--what they call a blue skin--with a splendid head and beard.
I was so disappointed when I was told this, but Faye says that he is very much afraid that I will have cause, sooner or later, to think that the grade of captain is quite high enough.
AFTER months of anticipation and days of weary travel we have at last got to our army home!
I saw one test the sharp edge of a long, wicked-looking knife, and then it, also, disappeared under his blanket.
There was hatred in their eyes as they approached us in that store, and there was restrained murder in the hand that pushed Mrs. Phillips and me over.
ARMY LETTERS FROM AN OFFICER'S WIFE
Lieutenant Alden was on his horse, and facing him was an immense buffalo, standing perfectly still with chin drawn in and horns to the front, ready for battle.
As you know, Fort Lyon is fifty miles from Kit Carson, and we came all that distance in a funny looking stage coach called a "jerkey," and a good name for it, too, for at times it seesawed back and forth and then sideways, in an awful breakneck way.
When we reached the post they made a wonderful turn and took us safely to the government corral, where they stopped, just when they got ready.
KIT CARSON, COLORADO TERRITORY, October, 1871.
After a while I looked across, and there was the buffalo still standing, and both Faye and Lieutenant Alden were beckoning for me to come to them.
So, when the horses were a little rested, we started, and, after riding a mile or more, we came to a small ravine, where we found one poor buffalo, too old and emaciated to keep up with his companions, and who, therefore, had been abandoned by them, to die alone.
That young man did not know that his own swarthy face was a greenish white all the time those Indians were in the store!
One of the infantry sergeants plays the organ now, for it was quite too hard for me to sing and work those old pedals.
But I have learned to ride very well, and have a secure seat now.
We had the four little mules that are the special pets of the quartermaster, and are known throughout the garrison as the "shaved-tails," because the hair on their tails is kept closely cut down to the very tips, where it is left in a square brush of three or four inches.
One leader looked around at us and commenced to bray, but the driver was in no mood for such insolence, and jerked the poor thing almost down.
We immediately fell back a short distance and waited for the wagons, and when they came up there was great activity, I assure you.
Then three or four bugles played a little air, which it was impossible to hear because of the horrible howling and crying of dogs--such howls of misery you never heard--they made me shiver.
But instead of the smile and gracious acquiescence I had expected, there was another straightening back in the chair, and a silence that was ominous and chilling.
There are four companies here--three of infantry and one troop of cavalry.
Of course the officers were in full-dress uniform Friday night, so I know just what I am talking about, scratches and all.
This would seem absurd in the East, but I can assure you that one accordion, when played well by a German, is an orchestra in itself.
He was very tall, had a fine head, with an uncommonly long beard, and showed every indication of having been a grand specimen of his kind.
There is a little store just outside the post that is named "Post Trader's," where many useful things are kept, and we have just been there to purchase some really nice furniture that an officer left to be sold when he was retired last spring.
With the cavalry he has a classmate, and a friend, also, which will make it pleasant for both of us.
Before I was quite in the room they all stood up and began to praise the cake.
At six o'clock Faye and I, Lieutenant Baldwin, and Lieutenant Alden dined with Doctor and Mrs. Wilder.
PERHAPS it is not necessary to say that the events mentioned in the letters are not imaginary--perhaps the letters themselves tell that! They are truthful accounts of experiences that came into my own life with the Army in the far West, whether they be about Indians, desperadoes, or hunting--not one little thing has been stolen.
They seem to be simply famished for months after they graduate.
The captains seem to have the best of everything, and the lieutenants are expected to get along with smaller houses, much less pay, and much less everything else, and at the same time perform all of the disagreeable duties.
The rest of the party did not come in until several hours later; but they brought the meat and skins of four buffalo, and the head of Lieutenant Alden's, which he will send East to be mounted.
But alas!
But the very thought of pointing a pistol at anything so weak and utterly helpless was revolting in the extreme.
It so happened that there was choir practice that very evening, and that I was at the chapel an hour or so.
The music consisted of one violin with accordion accompaniment.
But we finally started, about seven o'clock, Lieutenant Baldwin and I taking the lead, and Faye and Lieutenant Alden following.
The hall was very prettily decorated with flags and accoutrements, but one missed the greens.
After the ingredients were all mixed together there seemed to be enough for a whole regiment, so we decided to make two cakes of it.
When we entered the dining hall we found the entire company standing in two lines, one down each side, every man in his best inspection uniform, and every button shining.
The day was glorious, and the atmosphere so clear, we could see miles and miles in every direction.
Lieutenant Baldwin gained steadily on the buffalo, and in a wonderfully short time both passed directly in front of us--within a hundred feet, Faye said.
PREFACE
FORT LYON, COLORADO TERRITORY, December, 1871.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
It was apparent at once that this was not a place for spooks!
Lieutenant Baldwin was close upon him then, his horse looking very small and slender by the side of the grand animal that was taking easy, swinging strides, apparently without effort and without speed, his tongue lolling at one side.
Most girls would.
We sang our Christmas music, and received many compliments.
I did this to let everyone know that we had not been forgotten by home people.
But I happen to remember that he told me not long ago that he might not get his captaincy for twenty years.
They have such a charming custom in the Army of going along the line Christmas morning and giving each other pleasant greetings and looking at the pretty things everyone has received.
As they came toward us in their imperious way, never once looking to the right or to the left, they seemed like giants, and to increase in size and numbers with every step.
Very soon after that Faye and I came on home, reaching the post about seven o'clock.
FORT LYON, COLORADO TERRITORY, October, 1871.
And Doos plays very well.
The mules must have felt the excitement in the air, for as soon as their heads were turned toward home they proceeded to run away with us.
Faye would not join in the hunt, but remained with me the entire day.
Well, when those inside had been given, or had helped themselves to, whatever they wanted, out they all marched again, quickly and silently, just as they had come in.
All flowery descriptions have been omitted, as it seemed that a simple, concise narration of events as they actually occurred, was more in keeping with the life, and that which came into it.
At least that is what they tell me.
Philip had to walk some five miles before he reached a little station, where he could wait for a train, and he had ample time for reflection. At first he was full of vengeance on the company.
He would sue it.
Go into the other car."
She would inevitably have gone down under the wheels, if Philip, who had swiftly followed her, had not caught her arm and drawn her up.
As Philip approached the hotel he saw what appeared to be a wild beast crouching on the piazza.
Philip managed to complete his toilet by the use of his pocket-handkerchief, and declining the hospitality of the landlord, implied in the remark, "You won'd dake notin'?" he went into the open air to wait for breakfast.
And when he came to this point, he began to ask himself, if he had not acted very much like a fool.
Philip looked at his torn clothes, and thought with disgust of his haste in getting into a fight with such an autocrat.
The dining room was long, low and narrow, and a narrow table extended its whole length.
"The lady can have my seat," cried Philip, springing up.
"Come, I've got no time to talk.
That seat's taken.
"You are a brute, an infernal brute, to treat a woman that way."
The lady, entirely disconcerted by such rudeness, and frightened, moved towards the door, opened it and stepped out.
But as he got cooler, that did not seem to him a project worthy of a gentleman exactly.
The conductor, red in the face and puffing from his exertion, swaggered through the car, muttering "Puppy, I'll learn him." The passengers, when he had gone, were loud in their indignation, and talked about signing a protest, but they did nothing more than talk.
He didn't regret striking the fellow--he hoped he had left a mark on him.
Conductor Slum, who is too old a bird to be caught with chaff, courteously informed her that the car was full, and when she insisted on remaining, he persuaded her to go into the car where she belonged.
The country he saw was wild but not picturesque.
"There aint any.
Still Philip's conscience told him that it was his plain duty to carry the matter into the courts, even with the certainty of defeat.
Thereupon a young sprig, from the East, blustered like a Shanghai rooster, and began to sass the conductor with his chin music. That gentleman delivered the young aspirant for a muss one of his elegant little left-handers, which so astonished him that he began to feel for his shooter.
Philip was shown into a dirty bar-room.
"We'll see," said the conductor, advancing with the brakemen.
The mountain before him might be eight hundred feet high, and was only a portion of a long unbroken range, savagely wooded, which followed the stream.
But then it occurred to him that he did not know the name of a witness he could summon, and that a personal fight against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless in the world. He then thought he would seek out that conductor, lie in wait for him at some station, and thrash him, or get thrashed himself.
"Get off this train."
It spares no effort for the comfort of the traveling public."
"Dum 'em," said he, when he had heard the story.
The passengers protested, and some of them said to each other, "That's too bad," as they always do in such cases, but none of them offered to take a hand with Philip.
Behind the hotel, and across the brawling brook, was another level-topped, wooded range exactly like it.
A corner of it touched the railroad, but the rest was pretty much an unbroken wilderness, eight or ten thousand acres of rough country, most of it such a mountain range as he saw at Ilium.
By their help he built a log hut, and established a camp on the land, and then began his explorations, mapping down his survey as he went along, noting the timber, and the lay of the land, and making superficial observations as to the prospect of coal.
He recovered himself, reached the bell rope, "Damn you, I'll learn you," stepped to the door and called a couple of brakemen, and then, as the speed slackened; roared out,
Philip marched up to him, and burst out with,
"But, sir," said the lady, appealingly, "I thought--"
He then assisted her across, found her a seat, received her bewildered thanks, and returned to his car.
"The train is going very fast, let me stand here till we stop."
"Can't help what you thought--you must go into the other car."
He was a kindly sort of man, and seemed very much interested.
Philip was recalled from the contemplation of Ilium by the rolling and growling of the gong within the hotel, the din and clamor increasing till the house was apparently unable to contain it; when it burst out of the front door and informed the world that breakfast was on the table.
And, now!
The lady attempted it, but lost her balance, in the wind and the motion of the car, and fell!
He was somewhat bruised, but he was too angry to mind that.
Suppose he had simply said to the conductor, "Sir, your conduct is brutal, I shall report you." The passengers, who saw the affair, might have joined in a report against the conductor, and he might really have accomplished something.
He confessed that neither he nor any citizen had a right to consult his own feelings or conscience in a case where a law of the land had been violated before his own eyes.
"Do you think any thing can be done, sir?"
The train was swinging along at a rapid rate, jarring from side to side; the step was a long one between the cars and there was no protecting grating.
The men seized him, wrenched him from his seat, dragged him along the aisle, tearing his clothes, thrust him from the car, and, then flung his carpet-bag, overcoat and umbrella after him. And the train went on.
Acting with his usual promptness, Philip, with the consent of Mr. Bolton, broke ground there at once, and, before snow came, had some rude buildings up, and was ready for active operations in the spring.
The conductor was still there, taking his tickets, and growling something about imposition.
The next morning the Hooverville Patriot and Clarion had this "item":--
Philip's reply was a blow, given so suddenly and planted so squarely in the conductor's face, that it sent him reeling over a fat passenger, who was looking up in mild wonder that any one should dare to dispute with a conductor, and against the side of the car.
You'll have to leave."
The conductor turned towards Philip, and coolly and deliberately surveyed him from head to foot, with contempt in every line of his face, turned his back upon him without a word, and said to the lady,
"Now you can't sit there.
Why should he have put himself in such a ridiculous position?
"Morgen!
"I shall not get off.
We learn that the company have put a new engine on the seven o'clock train, and newly upholstered the drawing-room car throughout.
P. Dusenheimer," a sawmill further down the stream, a blacksmith-shop, and a store, and three or four unpainted dwellings of the slab variety.
In the scuffle, his railway check had disappeared, and he grimly wondered, as he noticed the loss, if the company would permit him to walk over their track if they should know he hadn't a ticket.
But, after all, was that the best way?
Philip examined his ugly visage and strong crooked fore-arm, as he was waiting admittance, having pounded upon the door.
Here was he, Philip Sterling, calling himself a gentleman, in a brawl with a vulgar conductor, about a woman he had never seen before.
It was a small room, with a stove in the middle, set in a long shallow box of sand, for the benefit of the "spitters," a bar across one end--a mere counter with a sliding glass-case behind it containing a few bottles having ambitious labels, and a wash-sink in one corner.
Whereupon Mr. Slum gently raised the youth, carried him forth, and set him down just outside the car to cool off. Whether the young blood has yet made his way out of Bascom's swamp, we have not learned.
"Perhaps you'd like to make a fuss about it," sneered the conductor.
The land that Philip had come to look at was at least five miles distant from Ilium station.
It did not stir, however, and he soon found that it was only a stuffed skin.
You must go now."
When next morning, he read the humorous account in the Patriot and Clarion, he saw still more clearly what chance he would have had before the public in a fight with the railroad company.
He begged for a glass of milk, after trying that green hued compound called coffee, and made his breakfast out of that and some hard crackers which seemed to have been imported into Ilium before the introduction of the iron horse, and to have withstood a ten years siege of regular boarders, Greeks and others.
Car's full.
On the last day of the journey as the railway train Philip was on was leaving a large city, a lady timidly entered the drawing-room car, and hesitatingly took a chair that was at the moment unoccupied.
Know any Spanish, Trysdale?"
The plant was one of the species of cacti, and was provided with long, tentacular leaves that perpetually swayed with the slightest breeze with a peculiar beckoning motion.
"I will send you my answer to-morrow," she said; and he, the indulgent, confident victor, smilingly granted the delay.
During their conversation she had said:
He could not, now, for the pain of it, allow his mind to dwell upon the memory of her convincing beauty that night--the careless wave of her hair, the tenderness and virginal charm of her looks and words.
Without protest, he allowed her to twine about his brow this spurious bay of Spanish scholarship.
He let it grace his conquering head, and, among its soft convolutions, he did not feel the prick of the thorn that was to pierce him later.
Once that same look had been raised to him, and he had gauged its meaning.
With womanly swiftness she took her cue from his manner, and turned to snow and ice. Thus, and wider from this on, they had drifted apart.
These were the joints in his armor.
Now, Carruthers was an idiot.
There was no note, no message, merely a tag upon the plant bearing a barbarous foreign or botanical name.
See hundreds of 'em around Punta every day.
But they had been enough, and they had brought him to speak.
He could have sworn, and he could swear now, that unmistakable consent was in her eyes, but, coyly, she would give him no direct answer.
He allowed the imputation to pass without denial.
"No," said Trysdale, with the bitter wraith of a smile--"Is it Spanish?"
As Trysdale grimly wrenched apart the seam of his last glove, the crowning instance of his fatuous and tardily mourned egoism came vividly back to him.
Here's the name on this tag tied to it.
You look unhappy as if you yourself had been married instead of having acted merely as an accomplice.
On the table stood a singular-looking green plant in a red earthen jar.
Why have you hidden this accomplishment from me?
The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative.
Where was his fault?
Jose told all the circumstances of his mother's escape from the tower, just as she had so often described them to him.
"I am called Jose the Beast Slayer, your majesty," replied the boy as he bowed low before the throne.
The years flew by, and at last the twelve year period was nearly up. Then the king went away one day and left the servants to carry food to the princess.
Jose seized the giant's long beard and drew it around his neck so tightly that the giant fell to the floor dead.
The strong current bore him swiftly away, leaving the princess on one side of the river and her little son on the other.
"My father is dead," replied Jose, "and my mother is a princess who ran away from a tower in the forest."
The king nodded.
"I always suspected something like that," interrupted the king.
It was the tale he liked best of all.
They were careless, and gave her meat which had a bone in it.
"Go on with your story, my boy," he said.
Tears were running down the king's cheeks when at last the story was ended.
To her amazement he crossed the great river in safety and bravely escorted his mother to the other bank in spite of her tears and cries of fear.
This was because the Wise Man of the Forest had told her father that it was the best way to bring her up. One day her father went away and the servants gave her meat with a bone in it and--"
"I'd like to see him."
Here the princess was placed.
"Ah," said she when she discovered the bone in her meat.
They went to a church and the boy was baptized.
"How shall I get across?" cried the princess when she saw what had happened.
You must give her meat which has no bones in it."
The princess had gone with the duke across a great river which no one else knew how to cross.
"It was a tower in the deep forest," replied Jose.
"Tell me about this tower," he said eagerly.
At the boy's words the king started and looked at him sharply.
"Who are your parents?" asked the king.
"Don't worry, mother," replied the child.
Jose looked at him in surprise.
The king himself took charge of this, so that he might be sure that there was no meat given her which had bones in it.
"I may be a little penny chicken, but I'm not in the least afraid of giants," replied the boy boldly.
I've tried in vain to make it bigger with my fingers."
When the princess was brought home to the royal palace there was a great feast held which lasted for three days and three nights.
Now that the princess had some one to help her make the hole larger it was an easy matter to make it big enough to escape.
That very night she ran away with the duke.
"What are you doing here, little penny chicken?" asked the huge giant as he frowned down at Jose.
Then he returned for the princess, but on the way his foot slipped and he fell into the river.
She lived in a big cave in the rocks, and after all the years in the tower it seemed a wonderful home indeed. She was never tired of admiring the trees and flowers of the forest and listening to the songs of the birds.
He asked alms at the royal palace and there he was given money to buy food.
"I think she was afraid she'd be punished for running away from the tower without any door," was Jose's reply.
"Why did she never come to me?" asked the father.
"You must carry some of this to the king," said his mother when she saw it and had heard his story.
"What, a little penny chicken like you not afraid of me!" cried the giant as he picked him up roughly and set him on his neck.
The little princess had grown very tired of being shut up in the tower of the forest.
Now when the baby was two years old, the duke decided that they must take him to a hermitage to be baptized.
She used the bone to dig away the wall each side of the window and soon the little opening had grown so large that the princess could lean her head out of it and look up at lofty trees.
It had no door, and only a little window.
When the king returned from his journey he found the tower in the forest entirely empty.
There was even enough left over to pay for a gun.
JOSE THE BEAST SLAYER
Accordingly, Jose carried the money as a gift to the king.
Together they entered the house and together they explored the various rooms.
"At last I have something with which to make this little window larger.
He tried in vain to find out what had become of her, but there was no person who could tell him anything about her.
When at last her baby son was born she thought that she was the very happiest person in the whole world.
He went to the Wise Man of the Forest to learn how best to bring her up, and this is what he was told:
"Walk in, mother dear," were his words.
"It is she who told me to carry the money to the king."
"You are indeed a son to be proud of!"
"I'll come and get you."
"A little lad," replied the king's servants.
"What is your name, my lad?" asked the king kindly.
He shot plenty of game for his mother and what was left he carried to the royal palace to give to the king.
They brought home so many bags of gold that it required the entire royal army to transport it.
Now that he owned a gun there was no need of begging any more.
One day in the deep forest he entered a cave where the giant of the forest lived.
There was nobody there and there was nothing to eat. Accordingly, Jose went out begging.
Accordingly, the boy was led before the throne.
The boy thrust in his arm and opened the door as if it had been his own.
That very day a duke passed that way on a hunting expedition and saw the beautiful princess in the tower.
The king ordered a tower constructed in the deep forest.
When four days' journey had been accomplished, and while they were partaking of their breakfast in camp, an alarm of Indians was given by one of the men.
Had such a skirmish taken place, nothing beyond an absolute miracle, or change of the laws of nature, could have saved the little band.
It now remained for them to determine their future course.
To regain their commander's company was almost impracticable; at least, without a more important object to make the risk necessary, it was a foolhardy attempt.
At last the time for action arrived.
These Springs form the head waters of the south fork of the River Platte.
They all felt that they had retained their scalps by a very close shave.
The whites did not throw away a single shot; every ball struck a warrior in some vital spot.
On they came, and this time with such determination that the trappers could not withstand the assault, but were compelled to retreat.
When the wounded men had so far recovered that they could safely proceed, the whole party, now quite strong in its numerical power, as well as skill and mountaineer experience, departed for, and, in due time, arrived at the Old Park.
Carson and his companion failed entirely in their efforts to find the two men.
They resolved that come what might the attempt to regain their property and punish the Indians should be made notwithstanding their strength.
As Kit's departure with the men weakened the camp party the Indians had gathered together sufficient courage to make a bold charge for the coveted plunder.
The party had not been long at rest before their suspicions were aroused that hostile Indians were near them.
Then, with his comrades, he marched directly for the Indian camp.
It is probable that they were killed by Indians, a fate which they, at least, richly merited.
The rattlesnake rarely moves after sunset.
By these two wise provisions of the Creator the power of this otherwise terrible reptile, is so limited or restrained, that the trapper rarely gives him a thought unless he comes in direct contact.
They had heard the incessant firing and had become convinced that the fight was hotly contested and that their services were required.
There always existed such a feeling of brotherly love among the old trappers of the Rocky Mountains, that the hour of peril was never the hour for separation or desertion.
The rascals succeeded in running off all of their loose animals.
The ascent was however commenced and successfully accomplished; but, not without labor and an occasional resting-place being sought for breathing their animals.
They had succeeded in digging it up and stealing about three hundred pounds of this valuable property, belonging to the company in general, share and share alike.
The remainder immediately retreated into the fort.
The night air is generally too chilling for him.
Kit Carson, with three companions, proposed a visit to a fork of a river close by, to look for signs of beaver.
An extra guard was therefore immediately posted, when the remainder of the party lay down; but, not for sleep.
In due time, they reached the desired stream; but, the beaver signs did not appear. Finding their errand had proved entirely useless, they started to return into camp.
During this time of suspense the trappers were subjected to great suffering for the weather was intensely cold and they possessed but a scanty allowance of clothing fit for such work.
Their movements were made slowly and with great care in order not to alarm the savages.
They then threw snow-balls at them and by this means drove them away without disturbing the sleeping Indians.
A party of fifty Crow Indians made an unfriendly visit to their camp on one very dark night.
For some unaccountable reason the savages did not give chase.
The remainder, those who had lost no animals, wanted satisfaction for the trouble and hardship they had undergone while in pursuit of the thieves. Kit Carson and two others composed this latter party and thus were determined to punish the thieves, let the consequences of the attempt be ever so fatal.
On arriving at the woods, the advance of the party, to their surprise and not less to their satisfaction, discovered the smoke of their enemies' fires.
Time in learning the loss was of no great importance either to their leader or their party. Sooner or later this, as a matter of course, would be fully shown.
Kit and his comrade had been expecting and were anxiously looking for this party.
Kit and his friends had reason, therefore, to be very thankful for their safety.
After considerable deliberation, the Indians decided once more to make a sortie.
A rush was instantly made by the trappers, with rifles in hand, to save their horses. Shots were fired and one Indian fell.
He had accidentally discovered the red skin rascals as they were prowling about the camp.
It was their intention to await the return of their party; but, at the expiration of one month, they were quite happily relieved from their perilous position.
He was accompanied by fifteen men, and brought with him a complete outfit for the entire band.
On the contrary, he galloped off; seemingly, quite proud of his trophy.
They expected at every moment that their services would be needed to defend the camp.
Their first care was to secure and provide for their animals.
While on the south fork of the Platte, two of the party deserted, taking with them three of their best animals.
Although they are so numerous, it very seldom happens that either the Indian or the trapper is bitten by them.
Just outside one of the forts, the nine stolen animals were securely tied.
To them his rattlesnake-ship is a formidable personage.
The attack was skillfully planned and would undoubtedly have succeeded, but for the unexpected daring and promptitude displayed by Kit and his comrades.
Kit Carson and five of his companions commenced crawling towards the stolen horses, which, on reaching, were easily set free by cutting their halters.
Taking therefore a circuitous route, they avoided recrossing the lofty mountain peak already alluded to.
Those who survived retreated to the fort occupied by their friends, and, as soon as possible, commenced returning the fire; but without execution, as the trappers, on discharging their first volley, had well concealed themselves behind trees, from whence they were shooting only when sure of an object.
Not so however with the mere visitor of, or casual traveller over, the Western Territories.
The whole pack are sure to leave the bolder animals and make for the runaways, which they seldom fail to overtake and dispatch.
Mr. Blackwell, Mr. Gaunt's partner, arrived from the United States.
The men then crept for a long distance on their hands and knees until finally they obtained a full view of the Indians, which showed them that the savages had erected two rough forts and that they were now divided into two parties.
As was suspected, the two deserters had gone to the camp where the beaver fur was concealed and buried.
A sharp skirmish ensued in which one of the warriors was killed, when the remainder fled, leaving the property once more in the hands of its rightful owners. The men however did not come off entirely safe.
One of them received a very severe wound; which, eventually, gave him considerable difficulty; but from the effects of which he finally recovered.
But as there is an end to all things, there was an end to the dance and other festivities and the savages sought their rest.
It was very difficult to follow the trail of the Indians from the fact that many herds of buffalo had crossed and repeatedly recrossed it during the night, making the tracks very indistinct.
To make things sure as to their animals, they fastened them to stakes driven in the earth, sufficient rope being given them for grazing.
As has also been seen, they were unsuccessful.
The departure of Carson and his companions from camp was doubtless seen by the savages and afforded them a clear proof that the white men had forgotten their fears.
To insure success in spite of their weakness, they determined to conceal themselves and wait quietly until the Indians had lain down for sleep.
On their joining, the whole party resolved to make one more stand, and as soon as the Indians saw this, they wavered and finally drew off.
In the month of January, the daily routine of their lives was rather unpleasantly disturbed.
They had already surmised the reason why the Indians had thus set a trap for them.
This old camp, the reader will please bear in mind, was on the Arkansas River.
'Why--yes, dear--I felt I had to.'
How well it was that he had this home in which to receive her!
I'd rather you left me alone.'
The knock for which they were waiting!
Turning suddenly away, he stood before the fire and made a pretence of warming himself; but his sobs overmastered him.
'If you went,' he continued, huskily, 'I should be afraid myself.
'Now don't--now don't talk like that!' exclaimed her father, putting his hand on her.
John was gravely embarrassed.
I'll eat it presently; I promise you.'
She was sitting by the fire, her face resting upon her hands.
Never a word to reproach her for the unalterable; it should be as though there were no gap between the old love and its renewal in the present.
'Haven't you had yours?' he replied, half-facing her.
Clara moved her head a little, so as to regard him, but at once turned away, shrinkingly, when she met his eyes.
'Yes, my dear, it was.'
'And where did you live before you came here?'
'You've got new furniture.'
You may think how I felt, Clara, with her lyin' there, and I hadn't got as much as would pay for a coffin.
'Come here, Amy,' she said after a moment's scrutiny.
Clara held it in the light of the fire, and regarded the pencilled words closely.
Shadows from the firelight rose and fell upon the walls of the half-darkened room.
John deposited his burden on the table, then touched her shoulder gently and spoke in so soft a voice that one would not have recognised it as his.
The children were aware that an all but forgotten sister was returning to them, and that she had been very ill; they promised quietude.
For Clara used to love him, and already she had shown that his tenderness did not appeal to her in vain; during the journey she had once or twice pressed his hand in gratitude.
I've broke myself off that; but if you was to leave me--I've had hard things to go through.
'It'll do well enough.
You won't mind Mrs. Eagles; she's very good to the children.
Let you an' me stay by each other whilst we may, my girl.
One consolation alone offered itself in the course of Hewett's inquiries; Clara, if she recovered, would not have lost her eyesight.
'Do you live comfortably here, father?' she said presently.
The girl was startled to hear him sob and to see tears starting from his eyes.
Don't be afraid, my dearest.
It was Sidney Kirkwood found the money--he did!
Amy set the tea-table in order, and kept the kettle ready. . . .
'Yes.
'He's married, isn't he?
CLARA'S RETURN
His wife never disturbed him; she was a placid, ruminative woman, generally finding the details of her own weekly budget quite a sufficient occupation.
The lamp was extinguished; she had said that the firelight was enough.
Before the coroner it had been made public that the dead woman was in truth named Rudd; she who was injured refused to give any details concerning herself, and her history escaped the reporters.
'You wouldn't care to say who it was?'
He had, and at her wish produced it.
If you'd rather, we'll manage it somehow else.'
He led the muffled form into the chamber where Amy and Annie slept.
'Yes, some new things.
Then their father joined them.
'All right.
But thereupon his face darkened again, and he lost himself in troubled musing.
He went to Mrs. Eagles' room and talked there for a short time. Presently Mrs. Eagles herself came out and silently removed from the saucepan a mixture of broth and meat.
Impossible to separate the sorrow he felt for her blighted life, her broken spirit, and the solace lurking in the thought that henceforth she could not abandon him.
Harbouring no doubt of the information thus mysteriously sent him--the handwriting seemed to be that of a man, but gave no further hint as to its origin--Hewett the next day journeyed down into Lancashire, Sidney supplying him with money.
Clara?
They read the report together.
I haven't told you.
Long before there existed a 'Financial Reform Almanack,' Eagles practically represented that work in his own person.
This afternoon her pause on each landing was longer than usual, for a yellow fog, which mocked the pale glimmer of gas-jets on the staircase, made her gasp asthmatically.
You couldn't keep it a secret.
But he mustn't come whilst I'm here; you understand that, father?'
Why, what made you think that.
Here's somethin' as has been made particular.
She remained mute.
He was busy in the usual way this afternoon, as he sat on the bed, coatless, a trade journal open on his knees.
Mrs. Eagles had a shrewd eye; having glanced at Annie and Tom with a discreet smile, she turned her look towards the elder girl, who was standing full in the lamplight.
'Oh no! Do you think I'm going to burden you all the rest of my life?
'We do, Clara.
'Oh, we had a place in King's Cross Road--it wasn't much of a place, but I suppose it might a' been worse.'
She reached the door at length, and being too much exhausted to search her pocket for the latchkey, knocked for admission. Amy Hewett opened to her, and she sank on a chair in the first room, where the other two Hewett children were bending over 'home-lessons' with a studiousness not altogether natural.
'Have you told him?'
'Clara--shall you mind Amy and Annie comin' to sleep here?
Don't take so much trouble, father.
'Yes, I'll go away, dear.
I promise you nobody shan't come near.
But you'll eat just a bit?
He had to move not long ago; his lodgin's is in Red Lion Street now.'
'Get it, then--all of you.
What does it matter?
A tall figure, so wrapped and veiled that nothing but the womanly outline could be discerned, entered, supported by John Hewett.
'And that was where--?'
If you don't like this, you must tell me, and I'll get something you could fancy.'
The amazed Apaches halted and gaped.
"Some tobacco?" the eagle's captor wailed.
Geronimo dropped the still half-filled pouch of gold into the dust and forgot it.
You may enter."
"I know not from where!
Their packs bore tanned skins, fruit of the saguaro cactus, edible roots of the mescal plant, and other trade goods.
The peddler called anxiously, "Will you give me some mescal?"
His body was dirty.
"See, Senor Apache?
All these soldier police were mounted and armed, and their snapping black eyes were filled with hatred for Apaches.
He took out his pouch of gold.
And two girl children.
"This way."
Let us hope this is a good fight."
That was true.
His knife was on his belt.
"If you care not because some spoke against you, what is the trouble?
He spoke again:
The delicate vases, the bronzes, and the silks are often made in humblest homes, the work of one or two laborers with rudest tools.
Each of these shows is well advertised by the beating of drums, by the shouting of doorkeepers, by wonderful pictures on the outside to entice the passer-by, or even by an occasional brief lifting of the curtains which veil the scene from the crowd without, just long enough to afford a tantalizing glimpse of the wonders within.
The darkness is illuminated by torches, whose weird flames flare and smoke in the wind, and shine down upon the little sheds which line both sides of the road, and contain so tempting a display of cheap toys and trinkets that not only the children, but their elders, are attracted by them.
With them, trade is a warfare between buyer and seller, in which every man must take all possible advantage for himself, and it is the lookout of the other party if he is cheated.
During her stay in the store, the foreign customer, making her first visit to the place, is frequently startled by loud shouts from the whole staff of clerks and small boys,--outcries so sudden, so simultaneous, and so stentorian, that she cannot rid herself of the idea that something terrible is happening every time that they occur.
The store appears, to the foreign eye, to be simply a roofed and matted platform upon which both clerks and customers sit.
An evening walk through one of these thoroughfares was a sight to be remembered for a lifetime.
The man answers at once, "Two dollars." "Two dollars!" you answer in surprise, "it is not worth more than thirty or forty cents." "Seventy-five, then," he will respond; and thus the buyer and seller approach nearer in price, until the bargain is struck somewhere near the first price offered.
The stranger visiting any of the great Japanese cities is surprised by the lack of large stores and manufactories, and often wonders where the beautiful lacquer work and porcelains are made, and where the gay silks and crepes are woven.
Jimmu Tenno and other heroes of Japanese legend or history, each upon its lofty platform, a white elephant, and countless other subjects were represented in the festival cars sent forth by all the districts of the city to celebrate the great event.
This platform is screened from the street by dark blue cotton curtains or awnings hung from the low projecting eaves of the heavy roof.
Upon such festival occasions the shopkeeper does not put up his shutters and leave his place of business, but the open shop-fronts add much to the gay appearance of the street.
Their trade, conducted in a small way upon small means, is more of the nature of a game, in which one person is the winner and the other the loser, than a fair exchange, in which both parties obtain what they want.
There is less pomp and circumstance about the smaller stores, for all the goods are within easy reach, and the shops for household utensils and chinaware seem to have nearly the whole stock in trade piled up in front, or even in the street itself.
Each of the workers, in turn, takes an occasional holiday, for there is no day in the Japanese calendar when the shops are all closed; and even New Year's Day, the great festival of the year, finds most of the stores open.
Then slowly the great shell closed, once more the shouting crowds seized hold of the straining ropes, and the great bivalve with its fair freight was drawn slowly along through the gayly illuminated streets.
The long line of stalls ends with booths, or tents, in which shows of dancing, jugglery, educated animals, and monstrosities, natural or artificial, may be seen for the moderate admission fee of two sen.
It takes a day or two for the rejoicings to get fully under way, but by the second or third day the fun is at its height, and the streets are thronged with merrymakers.
When this is given, the work begins; the little boys are summoned, and are soon sent off to the great fire-proof warehouse, which stands with heavy doors thrown open, on the other side of the platform, away from the street.
There are no great manufactories to be seen, and the bane of so many cities, the polluting factory smoke, never rises over the cities of Japan.
And at the back are rooms, which serve for dwelling rooms, opening upon well-kept gardens.
By ten o'clock, when the crowds have dispersed and the purchasers have all gone home and gone to bed, the busy booth-keepers take down their stalls, pack up their wares, and disappear, leaving no trace of the night's gayeties to greet the morning sun.
With infinite patience, he waits while the merits of each piece are examined and discussed, and if none of his stock proves satisfactory, he is willing to come again with a new set of wares, knowing that in the end purchases will be made sufficient to cover all his trouble.
Some of the booths are devoted to dolls; others to toys of various kinds; still others to birds in cages, goldfish in globes, queer chirping insects in wicker baskets, pretty ornaments for the hair, fans, candies, and cakes of all sorts, roasted beans and peanuts, and other things too numerous to mention.
The whole work of the store is often attended to by the proprietor, assisted by his wife and family, and perhaps one or two apprentices.
Through the doorway one can see endless piles of costly stuffs stored safely away, and from these piles the boys select the required fabric, loading themselves down with them so that they can barely stagger under the weights that they carry.
You ask the price of a dwarf wistaria growing in a pot.
The supposed object of the expedition, the visit to the temple, has occupied but a small share of time and attention, and the little hands are filled with the amusing toys and trifles bought, and the little minds with the merry sights seen.
On certain days in the month, in different sections of the city, are held night festivals near temples, and many shopkeepers take the opportunity to erect temporary booths, in which they so arrange their wares as to tempt the passers-by as they go to and fro.
Very often there is a magnificent display of young trees, potted plants, and flowers, brought in from the country and ranged on both sides of the street.
The streets are gayly decorated with flags, and bright lanterns--all alike in design and color--are hung in rows from the low eaves of the houses.
Hence English and American merchants, who only see Japan from the business side, continually speak of the Japanese as dishonest, tricky, and altogether unreliable, and greatly prefer to deal with the Chinese, who have much of the business virtue that is characteristic of the English as a nation.
Many such little places are the homes of the people who keep them.
Like all things else in Japan, shopping takes plenty of time.
Here the gardeners make lively sales, as the displays are often fine in themselves, and show to a special advantage in the flaring torchlight. The eager venders, who do all they can to call the attention of the crowd to their wares, make many good bargains.
The hard, confining factory life, with its never-ceasing roar of machinery, bewildering the minds and intellects of the men who come under its deadening influences, until they become scarcely more than machines themselves, is a thing as yet almost unknown in Japan.
Dango Zaka has its own peculiar attraction, the famous chrysanthemum dolls.
She returned to her home and consulted the servants upon the matter; but though they quite agreed with her that something should be done, they had little capital to invest in the enterprises suggested by the fortune-teller.
A Japanese entertainment is hardly regarded as complete without geishas in attendance, and their dancing, music, and graceful service at supper form a charming addition to an evening of enjoyment at a tea-house.
The river is crowded with picnic parties in boats.
Many charming tales are told of old Japan, and even Western stories have found their way to these assemblies.
As the performances last all day, from ten or eleven in the forenoon until eight or nine in the evening, going to the theatre means much more than a few hours of entertainment after the day's work is over.
A roof of matting shields each group from the sun by day, and a slight sprinkling every night serves to keep the plants fresh for nearly a month, and the flowers continue their blooming during that time, as calmly as if in perfectly natural positions.
At last, the old lady went to her brother, but he only laughed at her well-meant attempts to help his family, and refused to give her money for such a purpose.
The fortune-teller hinted, moreover, that for a consideration he might be able to afford material aid in the search for the well.
In no case are the roles taken by both sexes upon one stage.
A lunch and dinner, with innumerable light edibles between, go to make up the usual bill of fare for a day at the play, and tea-houses in the neighborhood of the theatre provide the necessary meals, a room to take them in, a resting-place between the acts, and whatever tea, cakes, and other refreshments may be ordered.
The uncle's home was, however, inconveniently remote, and so the young man stayed as a visitor at his father's house for the remaining months of the year, after which he became once more a member of the household.
This was her last resort, and she clung to her forlorn hope longer than many would have done, the servants adding their arguments to her impassioned appeals, only to find out after all that the steadfast sister could not be moved, and that she would not propitiate the horse's spirit, or allow money to be used for such a purpose.
As the family could not wait two years before moving, it was decided that the change of residence should be made at once, but that the son should live with his uncle until the next year.
They are consulted on every important step by believing ones of all classes.
A few may have sacrificed themselves freely but reluctantly for those whom they love, and by their revolting slavery may be earning the means to keep their dear ones from starvation or disgrace.
If the wives of the leaders in Japan are to come from among such a class of women, something must be done, and done quickly, for the sake of the future of Japan; either to raise the standards of the men in regard to women, or to change the old system of education for girls.
She gave it up then, and sat down to await the fate of her doomed house, doubtless wondering much and sighing often over the foolish skepticism of her near relatives, and wishing that the rationalistic tendencies of the time would take a less dangerous form than the neglecting of the plainest precautions for life and health.
She retired discouraged, but, urged by the servants, she decided to make a last appeal, this time to her sister-in-law, who must surely be moved by the evil that was threatening herself and her children.
The brother himself, while not a Christian, had little belief in the old superstitions of his people; his wife was a professing Christian.
The business of hotel-keeping we have referred to in a previous chapter, and it is a well-known fact that unless a hotel-keeper has a capable wife, his business will not succeed.
The geishas unfortunately, though fair, are frail.
The supervision that the government exercises over these places is extremely rigid; the effort is made, by licensing and regulating them, to minimize the evils that must flow from them.
The Japanese dances are charmingly graceful and modest; the swaying of the body and limbs, the artistic management of the flowing draperies, the variety of themes and costumes of the different dances, all go to make an entertainment by geishas one of the pleasantest of Japanese enjoyments.
The old lady was quite sure that there was some witchcraft or art-magic at work among her dear ones, and, after consulting the servants (for she knew that she could expect no sympathy in her plans from either her brother or his wife), she betook herself to a fortune-teller to discover through his means the causes of the illness in the family.
Solemn and sad subjects are touched upon, as well as merry and bright things, and he never fails to make his audience weep or laugh, according to his theme, and well merits the applause he always receives at the end.
A man and his family were about to move from their residence to another part of the city.
We have already mentioned incidentally the theatre as one of the favorite diversions of the people; and though it has never been regarded as a very refined amusement, it has done and is doing much for the education of the lower classes in the history and spirit of former times.
Unfortunately, the class of people who patronize these places is low, and the moral tone of some of the stories is pitched accordingly; but the best of the story-tellers--those who have talent and reputation--are often invited to come to entertainments given at private houses, to amuse a large company by their eloquence or mimicry.
The fortune-teller revealed to her the fact that two occult forces were at work bringing evil upon the house.
When this time comes, the labor is redistributed, the woman frequently taking upon herself the reception of the guests and the keeping of the accounts, while the hired help waits on the tables.
Each gesture, and each modulation of the voice, is studied as carefully as are those of the actors.
A liberal education, and more freedom in early life for women, has been suggested, and is now being tried, but the problem of the geisha and her fascination is a deep one in Japan.
Taking some of the head servants with her, she went to her sister and presented the case.
And so, amid the shopping, the festivals, the amusements of the great cities, the women find their lives varied in many ways.
A long story is often continued from night to night until finished.
When thoroughly taught, they form a valuable investment, and well repay the labor spent upon them, for a popular geisha commands a good price everywhere, and has her time overcrowded with engagements.
At this information Go Inkyo Sama was much perturbed, for further aid for her afflicted family seemed to require the use of money, and of that commodity she had very little, being mainly dependent upon her brother for support.
This alone, the most ancient and classical of Japanese theatrical performances, is considered worthy of the attention of the Emperor and the nobility, and takes the place with them of the more vulgar and realistic plays which delight common people.
There are, however, occupations in the city for women, by which they may support themselves or their families.
That is your case."
H.E.K.])
She is very clever and learns quickly.
50.
57.
54.
It goes, but she gets bored too quickly.
In vain.
She is eight years old and learns everything by heart. Something may come of her for she has talent, but not if she goes on as she is doing now; she will never acquire velocity because she purposely makes her hand heavy.
It is preserved in the Court Library in Vienna.)
Thereupon I wrote four measures of a minuet and said to her: 'Now look what an ass I am; I have begun a minuet and can't finish even the first part; be good enough to finish it for me.' She thought it impossible.
That's the way to shriek."
We shall see what comes of it tomorrow."
At length she produced a little something to my joy. Then I made her finish the minuet, i.e. only the first voice.
53.
(Paris, May 14, 1778, to his father.
The pupil was the daughter of the Duke de Guines, an excellent flautist.
56.
His anger fled and he broke into a merry laugh.)
Beethoven found the same fault with Mozart's playing that Mozart here condemns.)
H.E.K.])
(Paris, June 12, 1778, to his father.
58.
Mozart obviously had in view, not the pianoforte which was just coming into use in his day, but the clavichord. This instrument was sounded by striking the strings with bits of brass placed in the farther end of the keys which were simple and direct levers.
66.
60.
(Recorded by Rochlitz as a criticism by Mozart of Italian singers in 1789.)
"Whoever can see and hear her (the daughter of Stein) play without laughing must be a stone (Stein) like her father.
68.
63.
H.E.K.])
(Vienna, April 28, 1784, to his father in Salzburg, whither the pianist Richter, whom he recommends to his father, is going on a concert trip.)
The orchestra is said to be large and good, and my principal favorites can be well performed there, that is to say choruses, and I am right glad that the Frenchmen are fond of them....Heretofore Paris has been used to the choruses of Gluck.
It is characterized by brevity and wealth of melody.)
78.
80.
Mozart replied: "Yes, I have heard of England's triumph, and, indeed, with great joy (for you know well that I am an arch-Englishman)." The little book of criticism never appeared.)
"Others know as well as you and I that tastes are continually changing, and that the changes extend even into church music; this should not be, but it accounts for the fact that true church music is now found only in the attic and almost eaten up by the worms."
Whom should it please?
75.
76.
(Mannheim, November 13, 1777, to his father.
74.
77.
Mozart was thinking of writing a French opera.)
'It doesn't hurt me in the least; bad music leaves my nerves unaffected, but I sometimes get a headache from good music.' Then I thought to myself: Yes, such a shallow-pate as you feels a pain as soon as he hears something which he can not understand."
Beecke was a conceited pianist.)
H.E.K.])
It seems that wood-wind instruments were still absent from the symphony orchestra in Salzburg.)
(Vienna, December 28, 1782, to his father.
Mozart himself was plainly of another opinion.
(Vienna, April 12, 1783, to his father, who was active as Court Chapelmaster in Salzburg, and who had been asked by his son in the same letter, when it grew a little warmer, "to look in the attic and send some of your (his) church music.")
February 28, 1778, to his father.
73.
But what would you?
What is the significance of these points of agreement?
This great conqueror lived contemporaneously with Manasseh during whose reign Assyrian influence was paramount in the kingdom of Judah.
III.
In the earliest Hebrew records there is no trace of this tradition, although it may have been known to the Aramean ancestors of the Hebrews.
At the command of the god he built a great ship fifteen stadia long and two in width.
THE TWO BIBLICAL ACCOUNTS OF THE FLOOD.
In what details do they agree?
The style is that of a legal writer--formal, exact and repetitious.
The flood from its beginning to the time when Noah disembarked continued sixty-eight days.
Of the race of mortals, however, every voice was hushed.
Seven days the waters rose, and at intervals of seven days he sent out a raven and a dove.
On the basis of the preceding comparisons some writers attempt to trace tentatively the history of the flood tradition current among the peoples of southwestern Asia.
Therefore Jehovah said, I will destroy from the face of the ground man whom I have created, for I regret that I have made mankind.
Many of its details were doubtless suggested by the annual floods and fogs which inundate that famous valley and recall the primeval chaos so vividly pictured in the corresponding Babylonian story of the creation.
Its exact origin, however, is not so certain.
For six days and nights the storm raged, but on the seventh day it subsided and the flood began to abate.
How far do the later Biblical and Babylonian accounts agree?
It was brought about by the Babylonian gods in order to destroy the city of Shurippak, situated on the banks of the Euphrates.
It may have been based on the remembrances of a great local inundation, possibly due to the subsidence of great areas of land.
Later when the Jewish exiles were carried to Babylonia, they naturally came into contact again with the Babylonian account of the flood, but in its later form, as the comparisons already instituted clearly indicate.
THE CORRESPONDING BABYLONIAN FLOOD STORIES.
When Jehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every purpose in the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually, it was a source of regret that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him to his heart.
When the third bird failed to return, he took off the cover of the ship and found that it had stranded on a mountain of Armenia.
The description of the construction of the ark in Genesis 6:14-16 is not only closely parallel to that found in the Babylonian account, but the method--the smearing of the ark within and without with bitumen--is peculiar to the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
No animals are sacrificed, for according to the priestly writer this custom was first instituted by Moses.
Disembarking, the Babylonian Noah kissed the earth and, after building an altar, offered a sacrifice to the gods.
It has the flowing, vivid, picturesque, literary style and the point of view of the prophetic teacher.
This later account is dated by this group of modern Biblical scholars about 400 B.C.
Which Biblical account does the earliest Babylonian narrative resemble most closely?
If we would attain happiness, We must first attain helpfulness.
Even in the temple at Jerusalem the Babylonians' gods, the host of heaven, were worshipped by certain of the Hebrews.
The probability is that the tradition goes back to the earliest beginnings of Babylonian history.
The mountain in the Biblical account is identified with Mount Ararat.
A detailed account then follows of the building of the ark.
HISTORY OF THE BIBLICAL FLOOD STORIES.
Its dimensions were one hundred and twenty cubits in each direction. It was built in six stories, each of which was divided into nine parts.
The description of the tempest that follows is exceedingly vivid and picturesque.
In response to Gilgamesh's question as to how he, a mortal, attained immortality the Babylonian Noah recounts the story of the flood.
A fragment of the Babylonian flood story, coming from at least as early as 2000 B.C., has recently been discovered.
All the living creatures of all kinds I loaded on it. I brought on board my family and household; Cattle of the field, beasts of the field, the craftsmen, All of them I brought on board.
And without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing with God; for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that seek after him.
In this account only two of each kind of beast and bird are taken into the ark.
At last the ship approached the mountain Nisir which lay on the northern horizon, as viewed from the Tigris-Euphrates valley.
Plentiful provisions were next carried on board and a great feast was held to commemorate the completion of the ark.
Many scholars believe, therefore, that Babylonia was the original home of the Biblical flood story.
Here the ship grounded.
In this account the number seven prevails.
After a few days he sent forth another bird, which returned with mud on its feet.
These fundamental variations and the presence of duplicate versions of the same incidents point, some writers think, to two originally distinct accounts of the flood which have been closely woven together by the final editor of the book of Genesis.
Seven of each clean beast and bird are taken into the ark to provide food for Noah and his family.
In the evening at the command of the god Shamash the rains began to descend.
Are these coincidences merely accidental or do they point possibly to a common tradition?
Rare is the man who can look back over his life and not confess, at least to himself, that the things which have made him most a man are the very things from which he tried with all his soul to escape.
The flood lasts for over a year and is universal, covering even the tops of the highest mountains.
He soon found that he had not the eye nor the hand for the work, but it happened that the teacher's father had been a soldier in the army of Frederick the Great, and as soon as Walter found this out, he plied the man with questions.
Walter came next, and, being able to answer the question, took the other boy's place, chuckling to himself. He did not hold it long.
Every Saturday in fair weather, and more frequently during the vacations, his father allowed him a holiday from the office.
His father was not at all pleased with his long absence, and asked how he had managed with so little money.
Many an old woman was led to tell the lame boy with the eager eyes the tales she had heard as a schoolgirl, and was well repaid by the boy's rapt attention.
The Boy of the Canongate: 1771-1832
He had not changed much as he grew up.
Here the young lawyer ruled supreme.
He found a man who knew that rugged country well, and for seven successive years Walter Scott made a "raid," as he called it, into that country, following each stream to its source, and studying every ruined tower or castle from foundation stone to topmost battlement.
Slipping from door to door, from one point of vantage to the next, the boys made the whole distance of the enemy's land without sight of an enemy.
"Father."
In the van of the pursuit ran a tall, fair-haired boy, who wore the bright green breeches of a tailor's clerk, who was famous for his prowess in these schoolboy battles, and who, because of his clothes, had been given the picturesque nickname of "Green Breeks."
Stories of sprites and goblins, of witches and magicians, were eagerly sought by him.
On the day the storm ceased Walter left his high stool and ponderous book early and joined his friends in solid array in their square.
For a short time he took lessons in oil painting from a German.
Walter was minstrel and prophet and historian to the boys of the Canongate by the winter fire, as he was to be later to the whole nation of Englishmen.
The Wizard was Walter Scott, and now he found the whole world as eager to hear the stories and poems he had to tell about his country as his boy friends had been years before.
Thereupon Walter presented the old woman with a pound of snuff, and as soon as Green Breeks was out of the hospital made him one of his friends.
"Yes, Walter, lad?"
Fifteen years passed and all England was reading eagerly the wonderful historical poems and romances written by a man who called himself the "Wizard of the North."
With the opening of spring Walter spent all his spare hours in his favorite pursuit, riding through the country on a search for old legends or curious tales of the neighborhood.
Green Breeks was now far in the lead of his forces, so far in the lead that he might have been cut off had not the pursued been panic-stricken.
At one time there was a certain boy who always stood at the top of Walter's class whom young Scott could not supplant, try as he would. Finally Walter noticed that whenever the master asked that boy a question the latter always fumbled with his fingers at a certain button on the lower part of his waistcoat.
Walter and a boy friend named John Irving used to take two or three books from the public library of Edinburgh, and go out into the neighboring country, to Salisbury Crags, Arthur's Seat, or to a height called Blackford Hill, from which there was a splendid view of the Lowland country.
Still no enemy appeared, and, eager for a chance to try their aim, the boys of the Square boldly left their own haunts and proceeded down the Crosscauseway in search of the foe.
Nobody who could help it was abroad, and Walter was glad when he reached the door of his father's house in George's Square and could find shelter from the cutting wind.
They sat in a circle about him, listening eagerly to story after story, forgetting everything but the boy's words, and showing their fondness and admiration for the romancer in each glance.
Wrap yourself up warm, for the night is cold."
The lawyer looked up from his writing, and smiled at the figure on the high stool.
The Scotch evening meal was simple, soon over, and then came the time to sit before the blazing logs on the great open hearth and tell stories.
Even the narrow streets of Edinburgh and the old Canongate itself became historic ground under the Wizard's spell.
Riding northward on this visit the vale of Perth first burst on his view.
Shortly after Green Breeks was in the hospital, his head bandaged, but otherwise little the worse for his mishap.
Back the way they came the boys retreated, and after them came the enemy pelting them without mercy and with good aim.
There they read the books together, Walter always a little ahead of his friend, and obliged to wait at the end of every two pages for him to catch up.
In course of time Scott was called to the bar as a lawyer, and took his place with the dozens of young men who hung about the Parliament House in Edinburgh waiting for briefs of cases to be argued.
Their banner, a flag given them by a lady of the Square, waved defiantly in Green Breeks' face.
While they waited for the enemy to come up from the side street, the boys built snow fortifications across the Square and stocked them with ammunition sufficient to stand a siege.
I only put a cocked hat on their heads, and stick a cane into their hands--to make them fit for going into company."
Although Walter spent considerable time in his father's office, he was still studying under a tutor with other boys, preparing for college.
"I'd best be going home; there's no more light here to see by."
He closed the book with a bang.
There were lots of debating clubs in the Scotch capital at that time, and Scott was a member of several.
Young Scott and his friends ran back into their square, but the enemy were close upon their heels.
Walter Scott thereupon determined to cut off that particular button, and see what would happen.
Then Walter waited with the greatest interest to see what would happen.
Over their own fortifications the boys fled and dropped behind them for safety.
In a thousand ways Walter showed his love of history and romance. Anything that was picturesque, whether it was a view or an old dirk, caught his attention at once.
Walter Scott
He was a sturdy, well-built lad, with tousled yellow hair, frank eyes with a twinkle in them, and a mouth that was large and betokened humor.
He hurried over to the fallen Green Breeks, and the boys of both armies melted silently away.
He fell stunned, and the blood poured from a cut in his head.
"Why," said Scott, with twinkling eyes, "I don't change stories.
The invaders fired one round, then turned and fled before a fierce charge.
Often in good weather the boys of George's Square would go on long excursions into the country, frequently staying away from home for several days at a time.
A boy of fifteen sat on a high stool at an old oak desk, and watched the snow falling in the street.
Walter Scott and his brothers belonged to a clan that made George's Square their headquarters, and their nearest and dearest enemies were the boys of the Crosscauseway, a poorer section of the city that lay not very far distant.
Chapter XVIII
It was not for her money that he had regarded her.
If Archie married her, Archie would be the paladin; though, indeed, in that case, no paladin would be needed.
It couldn't be done, I suppose, till after a year; and in that case she shall be married at Clavering."
"So that I may quarrel with her, which I certainly should do--or, rather, she with me.
He was, however, driven to resolve that he must go direct to Sophie, as otherwise he could find no means of doing as he had promised.
In playing cards and in betting, he was very careful, never playing high, never risking much, but hoping to turn something by the end of the year, and angry with himself if he had not done so.
If you were to die, you'd think it very odd if any fellow came up to Hermy before the season was over.
"You say things that, for folly and absurdity, are beyond belief.
"She can't eat you.
But Sir Hugh was altogether of a different opinion.
On both the occasions of Harry's calling in Mount Street, the servant had asked him to go up and see madame; but he had declined to do so, pleading that he was hurried.
Here was a prospect for Julia Brabazon--to be led to the same altar, at which she had married Lord Ongar, by Archie Clavering, twelve month's after her first husband's death, and little more than two years after her first wedding!
But Sir Hugh would admit of no delay, whereas Archie himself seemed to think that the iron was not yet quite hot enough for striking.
That girl that Harry has in tow may perhaps keep him away for some time."
There was some other club which he frequented, and Harry did not know what club.
He was not a man to be in debt, or indulge himself with present pleasures to be paid for out of the funds of future years.
Judge not, that you be not judged."
He was possessed of a worldly wisdom which kept him from that folly, and taught him to appreciate fully the value of independence.
"I tell you what, Hugh, you might as well call with me the first time."
But why keep up a house in Berkeley Square, as Lady Clavering did not use it?
And yet, from his boyhood upward, Archie had made good his footing in Berkeley Square.
He felt when there as the accustomed but repentant dram-drinker might feel, when, having resolved to abstain, he is called upon to sit with the full glass offered before his lips.
He would have bells of his own, and stables, too, and perhaps some captain of his own to ring them and look after them.
He was partly driven to this by a desire to shake off the burden of his brother.
The arrangement would make the difference of considerably more than a thousand a year to him.
"Because I shouldn't like--"
Though he had already asked his sister-in-law to Clavering, when the idea had first come up, he was glad that she had declined the visit.
He could do the work better, he thought; down at Clavering than in London.
For himself, he would take lodgings.
The present was not the moment for actually driving forth the intruder, for Archie was now up in London, especially under his brother's auspices.
Then he would be a brother of whom Sir Hugh might be proud--a brother who would pay his way, and settle his points at whist if he lost them, even to a brother.
"Delicate!" said Sir Hugh.
Lady Clavering had usually lived there during the season; or, as had latterly been the case, during only a part of the season.
He had always had a house in town--a moderate house in Berkeley Square, which belonged to him, and had belonged to his father before him.
A home, with some one to support her, is everything to her.
He had a great eye to discount, and looked closely into his bills.
Was it his fault that he had loved her, that she had been false to him, and that she had now come back and thrown herself before him?
She knows what she is about, and will understand what she has to get as well as what she is expected to give.
You'll find that by this time next year she'll be the top of the fashion; and if not engaged to you, she will be to some one else.
Let him write to her, and mention the fact, bringing it up as some little immaterial accident, and she would understand what he meant.
He feared that he would be led on to betray himself and to betray Florence--to throw himself at Julia's feet and sacrifice his honesty, in spite of all his resolutions to the contrary.
But this he abstained from doing.
Had he been now a free man--free from those chains with which he had fettered himself at Stratton--he would again have asked this woman for her love, in spite of her past treachery; but it would have been for her love, and not for her money, that he would have sought her.
"If it had been four days it need have made no difference.
And if the business on which Captain Clavering was now intent could be brought to a successful issue, the standing in the world of that young man would be very much altered.
When Archie chose to go to Clavering, the house was open to him.
It would be better, he had suggested, to postpone the work till Julia could be coaxed down to Clavering in the Autumn.
Let him but once communicate to Lady Ongar the fact of his engagement, and the danger would be over, though much, perhaps, of the misery might remain.
That was the necessity of Sir Hugh's position, and he could not avoid it unless he made it worth his while to quarrel with his brother. Archie was obedient, ringing the bell when he was told, looking after the horses, spying about, and perhaps saving as much money as he cost. But the matter was very different in Berkeley Square.
If Archie could induce Lady Ongar to marry him, he would not be called upon any longer to ring the bells and look after the stable.
"Yes, that's true, to be sure," said Archie; and on that point he went forth satisfied.
But there was Archie's room, and Sir Hugh felt this to be a hardship.
"I don't know whether there is much of delicacy in it at all."
In the matter of the breakfast, Sir Hugh had indeed, of late, got the better of him.
Of course it's peculiar.
Her coming might be very well, if she accepted Archie; but he did not want to be troubled with any renewal of his responsibility respecting her, if, as was more probable, she should reject him.
The world, he thought, had used him ill.
"She is peculiar, of course--having so much money, and that place near Guilford, all her own for her life.
Sir Hugh was a man who strained an income, that was handsome and sufficient for a country gentleman, to the very utmost, wanting to get out of it more than it could be made to give.
No, Archie; if you're afraid to go alone, you'd better give it up."
She probably might put him on the scent of her brother.
In the spring, it was broken by the authority of the two houses; but war recommenced with great appearance of disadvantage to the king's party. Stamford, having assembled a strong body of near seven thousand men, well supplied with money, provisions, and ammunition, advanced upon the royalists, who were not half his number, and were oppressed by every kind of necessity.
The parliament, alarmed at this appearance of the royalists, gave a commission to Ruthven, a Scotchman, governor of Plymouth, to march with all the forces to Dorset.
Notwithstanding these advantages, the extreme want both of money and ammunition under which the Cornish royalists labored, obliged them to enter into a convention of neutrality with the parliamentary party in Devonshire; and this neutrality held all the winter season.
On the prince's side, the assault was conducted with equal courage, and almost with equal loss, but with better success.
These troops could not legally, without their own consent, be carried out of the county; and consequently it was impossible to push into Devonshire the advantage which they had obtained.
One party, led by Lord Grandison, was indeed beaten off, and the commander himself mortally wounded: another, conducted by Colonel Bellasis, met with a like fate: but Washington, with a less party, finding a place in the curtain weaker than the rest, broke in, and quickly made room for the horse to follow.
Dislodging from Thame and Aylesbury, where he had hitherto lain, he thought proper to retreat nearer to London; and he showed to his friends his broken and disheartened forces, which a few months before he had led into the field in so flourishing a condition.
The Cornish royalists, therefore, bethought themselves of levying a force which might be more serviceable.
The fight continued with doubtful success, till word was brought to the chief officers of the Cornish, that their ammunition was spent to less than four barrels of powder.
Essex, discouraged by this event, dismayed by the total rout of Waller, was further informed, that the queen, who landed at Burlington Bay, had arrived at Oxford, and had brought from the north a reenforcement of three thousand foot and fifteen hundred horse.
By the bravery and activity of Rupert, the king's troops were brought off, and a great booty, together with two hundred prisoners, was conveyed to Oxford.
It was resolved that Hertford and Prince Maurice should proceed with the cavalry; and, having procured a reenforcement from the king, should hasten back to the relief of their friends.
But whether, in the pursuit of this violent enterprise, he was actuated by private ambition or by honest prejudices, derived from the former exorbitant powers of royalty, it belongs not to an historian of this age, scarcely even to an intimate friend, positively to determine.
The zealots took the alarm.
Next morning, Essex proceeded on his march; and though his rear was once put in some disorder by an incursion of the king's horse, he reached London in safety, and received applause for his conduct and success in the whole enterprise.
In excuse for the too free exposing of his person, which seemed unsuitable in a secretary of state, he alleged, that it became him to be more active than other men in all hazardous enterprises, lest his impatience for peace might bear the imputation of cowardice or pusillanimity.
His garrison, however, was reduced to the last extremity; and he failed not from time to time to inform the parliament that, unless speedily relieved, he should be necessitated, from the extreme want of provisions and ammunition, to open his gates to the enemy.
As full of keen satire and invective in his eloquence, as of tenderness and panegyric in his poetry, he caught the attention of his hearers, and exerted the utmost boldness in blaming those violent counsels by which the commons were governed.
These were Sir Thomas Fairfax, son of the lord of that name, and Oliver Cromwell.
About the same time, Manchester, who advanced from the eastern associated counties, having joined Cromwell and young Fairfax, obtained a considerable victory over the royalists at Horncastle; where the two officers last mentioned gained renown by their conduct and gallantry.
Essex's horse were several times broken by the king's, but his infantry maintained themselves in firm array; and, besides giving a continued fire, they presented an invincible rampart of pikes against the furious shock of Prince Rupert, and those gallant troops of gentry of which the royal cavalry was chiefly composed.
But, above all, they were intent that Essex's army, on which their whole fortune depended, should be put in a condition of marching against the king.
But by the progress of the king's arms, the defeat of Sir William Waller, the taking of Bristol, the siege of Gloucester, a cry for peace was renewed, and with more violence than ever.
It even passed by a majority among the commons, that these proposals should be transmitted to the King.
On both sides the battle was fought with desperate valor and a steady bravery.
Having associated in their cause the counties of Hertford, Essex, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincoln, and Huntingdon, they gave the earl of Manchester a commission to be general of the association, and appointed an army to be levied under his command.
The former gained a considerable advantage at Wakefield over a detachment of royalists, and took General Goring prisoner: the latter obtained a victory at Gainsborough over a party commanded by the gallant Cavendish, who perished in the action.
Waller, as soon as imprisoned, sensible of the great danger into which he had fallen, was so seized with the dread of death, that all his former spirit deserted him; and he confessed whatever he knew, without sparing his most intimate friends, without regard to the confidence reposed in him, without distinguishing between the negligence of familiar conversation and the schemes of a regular conspiracy.
Those parliamentary leaders, it must be owned, who had introduced such mighty innovations into the English constitution, and who had projected so much greater, had not engaged in an enterprise which exceeded their courage and capacity.
Before assembling the present parliament, this man, devoted to the pursuits of learning and to the society of all the polite and elegant, had enjoyed himself in every pleasure which a fine genius, a generous disposition, and an opulent fortune could afford.
Massey, resolute to make a vigorous defence, and having under his command a city and garrison ambitious of the crown of martyrdom, had hitherto maintained the siege with courage and abilities, and had much retarded the advances of the king's army.
Edward Waller, the first refiner of English versification, was a member of the lower house; a man of considerable fortune, and not more distinguished by his poetical genius than by his parliamentary talents, and by the politeness and elegance of his manners.
From the commencement of the war, his natural cheerfulness and vivacity became clouded; and even his usual attention to dress, required by his birth and station gave way to a negligence which was easily observable.
Essex dreaded a battle with the king's army, on account of its great superiority in cavalry; and he resolved to return, if possible, without running that hazard.
While the armies were engaged with the utmost ardor, night put an end to the action and left the victory undecided.
The parliament, in order to repair their broken condition, and put themselves in a posture of defence, now exerted to the utmost their power and authority.
In the north, during this summer, the great interest and popularity of the earl, now created marquis of Newcastle, had raised a considerable force for the king; and great hopes of success were entertained from that quarter.
Great vigor, from the beginning, as well as wisdom, they had displayed in all their counsels; and a furious, headstrong body, broken loose from the restraint of law, had hitherto been retained in subjection under their authority, and firmly united by zeal and passion, as by the most legal and established government.
In the beginning of this summer, a combination, formed against them in London, had obliged them to exert the plenitude of their authority.
Newcastle, having carried on the attack of Hull for some time, was beat off by a sally of the garrison, and suffered so much that he thought proper to raise the siege.
One barrel of powder was their whole stock of ammunition remaining; and their other provisions were in the same proportion.
While this affair was in agitation, and lists were making of such as they conceived to be well affected to their design, a servant of Tomkins, who had overheard their discourse, immediately carried intelligence to Pym.
They excited afresh their preachers to furious declamations against the royal cause.
He lay five days at Tewkesbury, which was his first stage after leaving Gloucester; and he feigned, by some preparations, to point towards Worcester.
With the most profound dissimulation, he counterfeited such remorse of conscience, that his execution was put off, out of mere Christian compassion, till he might recover the use of his understanding.
By continual sallies he infested them in their trenches, and gained sudden advantages over them: by disputing every inch of ground, he repressed the vigor and alacrity of their courage, elated by former successes.
There appeared, however, in opposition to him, two men on whom the event of the war finally depended, and who began about this time to be remarked for their valor and military conduct.
The militia of London especially, though utterly unacquainted with action, though drawn hut a few days before from their ordinary occupations, yet having learned all military exercises, and being animated with unconquerable zeal for the cause in which they were engaged, equalled on this occasion what could be expected from the most veteran forces.
The loss sustained on both sides in the battle of Newbury, and the advanced season, obliged the armies to retire into winter quarters.
A covenant, as a test, was taken by the lords and commons, and imposed on their army, and on all who lived within their quarters.
The upper house sent down terms of accommodation, more moderate than had hitherto been insisted on.
They were all three condemned, and the two latter executed on gibbets erected before their own doors.
A petition against peace was framed in the city, and presented by Pennington, the factious mayor.
That gentleman and his son partly from a jealousy entertained of Lord Fairfax, partly repenting of their engagements against the king, had entered into a correspondence with Newcastle, and had expressed an intention of delivering Hull into his hands.
After this victory, Newcastle, with an army of fifteen thousand men, sat down before Hull. Hotham was no longer governor of this place.
The rapid progress of the royalists threatened the parliament with immediate subjection: the factions and discontents among themselves in the city, and throughout the neighboring counties, prognosticated some dangerous division or insurrection.
The chief difficulty still remained.
"No.
In a relative measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the exception is just.
To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities, notably Paris.
The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has something of the sage in him.
Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--are they their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of rye, gay, haggard, barefooted.
Hence these obscure destinies.
He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs.
In that case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung.
The spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped with a certain piercing melancholy.
There they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs.
But let us consider the means.
People whispered with terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple.
Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not discouraged by the ancient monarchy.
The statistics give an average of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process of construction, and under the arches of the bridges.
They never venture beyond this.
CHAPTER VI--A BIT OF HISTORY
It sometimes happened that the exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who had fathers.
There they are eternally playing truant.
One of these nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms.
A little of Egypt and Bohemia in the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of the powerful.
While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior.
The idea was a good one.
Nature and humanity both appeal to you at the same time there.
Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew.
Who?
These encounters with strange children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces of the environs of Paris.
Local originalities there make their appearance.
A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession--it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys.
In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the public highway.
To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal. End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur, beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.
The campagna of Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God.
What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken family.
They can no more escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the water.
Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in that case it skimmed the streets.
The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts.
Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like Flaccus.
It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean.
Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless.
Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired to create a fleet.
A child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the galleys.
They can be seen devouring cherries among the wheat.
Such was the countersign. Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant child.
In the evening they can be heard laughing.
The hatred of instruction for the children of the people was a dogma.
Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth to those children.
The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the suburbs belong to them.
CHAPTER V--HIS FRONTIERS
Let me hope, that the pride, the insane pride of this morning, is but the reaction of your internal suffering from witnessing the results of your influence in the outrages of last night.
"Very few; for your sake, scarcely any.
"Is your sermon ended?
I am engaged elsewhere."
"Oh, pray do not disturb yourself about that.
I was extremely glad to arrive when I did.
He went straight to his room, at his mother's old house, and did not breakfast with the Rowlands.
Miss Bruce knows little, and cares less, about me; and beware how you say to the contrary!--And now for the plain fact.
"And now let me tell you, sister, that either Mr Walcot is not a man of honour, or you have misinformed him of the true state of affairs here: I suspect the latter to be the case.
He is a surgeon of the first degree of eminence.
"Yes; I am."
"I am glad you have told so few people of your entanglement.
I know she would like it, and--"
"It will, when you are gone.
I am sorry for you, if you cannot endure the presence of neighbours whose whole minds and conduct are noble and humane, and known by you to be so.
"The Hopes shall remain as long as they wish to stay, if truth can prevail against falsehood.
"What I have to say is not finished.
"Mr Walcot's.
"If not precisely true when I said it, it was sure to be so soon; which is just the same thing.
Mr Walcot is our guest till his own house can be prepared for him.
Oh, Priscilla, I am unwilling to give you up!
"You take the tone of defiance, I see, Philip.
Believe me, they are full of the spirit of forgiveness.
There was all due politeness in Enderby's way of inducing his sister to sit down, and of asking after the health of herself and her children.
He burst out a-laughing.
"They will be happy with their greatness and loveliness, sister; for it is Heaven's decree that they should.
I mean to get rid of these Hopes; and, perhaps, you may be surprised to see how soon I succeed."
You know, also, that my mother has entire confidence in him, and that it will go near to break her heart to have him dismissed for any one else.
"Ignorant and stupid as Deerbrook is about many things, Priscilla, it is not so wicked as to thank any one for waging a cowardly war against the good, for disparaging the able and accomplished, and fabricating and circulating injurious stories against people too magnanimous for the slanderer to understand."
"That is not for you to determine, happily.
Philip fixed his eyes upon her with an earnestness from which, for one moment, she shrank; but she instantly rallied, and returned him a stare which lasted till she reached the door.
I mean that it shall be true.
"You are too late, my dear sir.
I have set my heart upon your marrying, and upon your marrying Mary Bruce.
I give you peremptory warning, leaving you opportunity to retrieve yourself, to repair the mischief you have done, and to alleviate the misery which I see is coming upon you."
"Thank you.
The cool assurance with which she said this was too much for Enderby's gravity.
No; not the only comfort.
To what extent they forgive is between God and themselves.
She does not suffer from these things as she did.
"I said so, because it is true."
"I hope you will all make yourselves happy with your greatness and your beauty: for these friends of yours seem likely to have little else left to comfort themselves with."
My first duty is to take care of the health of my parent and my children; and if, by the same means, Deerbrook is provided with a medical man worthy of its confidence, all Deerbrook will thank me."
If they forgive me for anything, it shall be for my power."
It comes from internal torture--a thing as necessarily temporary as faith (the source of the other kind of strength) is durable.
If this gentleman be honourable, he will decline attending my mother, and go away more willingly than he came.
If he is an honourable man, all may turn out well.
"I do not know what you mean, Philip."
Mr Hope must have justice, and you have no one to blame but yourself that justice must be done at your expense.
Now for Mr Walcot!
Mr Walcot knows me very well.
I give you fair notice that I shall discharge my duty fully, in the painful circumstances in which you have contrived to place all your family."
You know that Hope is an able and most humane man in his profession, and that he does not steal dead bodies.
"Stop there!
I would have you look to it."
Confide this to me now, and give yourself such ease as you yet can."
"So much the worse for you, Priscilla.
We brought him with us last night; and he is to go at once into my mother's house.
"And, pray, does Rowland know of your having brought this stranger here?"
This is the meaning of what I say.
"That will hardly avail against my testimony."
I shall explain the whole of Hope's case to Mr Walcot, avoiding, if possible, all exposure of you--."
I will not have you take liberties with her name to me; and this is not the first time I have told you so.
Mr Walcot's care will be new life to us."
Now, if you have nothing more to say to me, I must go.
Not the slightest compunction has she for having caused the misery she knows of: and not a whit would she relent, if she could become aware (which she never shall) of what she made Margaret suffer.
Now that she will be in good hands, I shall feel that I have done my duty."
Margaret Ibbotson!
COMING TO AN UNDERSTANDING.
I am not afraid."
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE.
I shall speak to Mr Walcot at once, before his intention to settle here is known."
"I dare say you are?
You must now get out of the scrape in your own way."
"There is something almost sublime in audacity like this," thought he. "But it cannot last.
I have not the slightest objection.
It is of a piece with the whole of your conduct, towards Mr Hope--conduct unpardonable for its untruthfulness, and hateful for its malice."
You have power of mind to do this: the very force with which you persist in persecuting them shows that you have power for better things.
You do not know that he and his wife are not happy.
Indeed, I think I have the majority with me now, as the events of last night pretty plainly show."
I own, Priscilla, I would fain bestow on Margaret a sister whom she might respect rather than forgive."
Why will you not throw off the restraint of bad feelings, and do magnanimous justice to this family, and, having thus opened and freed your mind, glory in their goodness-- the next best thing to being as good as they?
"Do what you will, Philip.
You know the falsehood of the whole set of vulgar stories that you have put into circulation against him.
As I tell you, he arrived with me, last night."
"You will marry no one but Mary Bruce at last, you will see, whatever you may think now."
"We are all wonderfully improved, thank you, brother.
"Whose care?"
I must catch him as he comes out of church, and see what I can make of him.
This could be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.
His glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing.
Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority. Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.
And he would have done it with that sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue.
It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.
This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments, comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes, murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion.
Having made this reservation, let us pass on.
On the contrary, our souls being realities and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education.
As for the rest, he had very little skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.
His whole life hung on these two words: watchfulness and supervision.
He had introduced a straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world; he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests.
He was stoical, serious, austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics.
In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate.
He entered the police; he succeeded there.
He observed that society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung.
At forty years of age he was an inspector.
In any case, I am not his dupe."
His brow was not visible; it disappeared beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves: and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat.
His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.
Every one took him for the judge, and with good reason.
It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole district.
He did not even put a question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it. He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the world.
During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of the South.
He put an end to differences, he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies.
One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct kept him on the alert and uneasy.
It seemed as though he had for a soul the book of the natural law.
From a cupboard he pulled out one of his old shirts, which he tore in pieces.
I always thought there was some evil history back of all that."
That is why he had a very simple funeral for Fantine, and reduced it to that strictly necessary form known as the pauper's grave.
A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though she should faint.
Javert knew it, and held her in special veneration in consequence.
Perhaps that was the one.
This was Sister Simplice, who had never told a lie in her life.
But there was also another duty which bound him and impelled him imperiously in the opposite direction.
At that moment the small window in the lodge opened, a hand passed through, seized the key and the candlestick, and lighted the taper at the candle which was burning there.
We all have a mother,--the earth.
On perceiving the sister, his first movement was to retire.
There came two taps at the door.
That man was too good, too perfect, too affected. He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came across.
A man responded:--
He has escaped; we are in search of him--that Jean Valjean; you have not seen him?"
She stopped; the conclusion of her sentence would have been lacking in respect towards the beginning.
Good God!" "He has been arrested." "Arrested!"
A convict and a woman of the town.
She was thrown into the public grave.
This was impregnable, and admitted of neither objection nor restriction.
It will be a lesson to the Bonapartists!"
In the strips of linen thus prepared he wrapped the two silver candlesticks.
She read:--
"Then," resumed Javert, "you will excuse me if I persist; it is my duty; you have not seen a certain person--a man--this evening?
The paper was not folded.
I suspected as much.
No one ever found out. But an aged workman had died in the infirmary of the factory a few days before, leaving behind him nothing but his blouse.
Who was concerned, after all?
One old lady, a subscriber to the Drapeau Blanc, made the following remark, the depth of which it is impossible to fathom:--
Where had he obtained that blouse?
"I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows; I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am.
Javert entered.
He betrayed neither haste nor agitation; and while he was wrapping up the Bishop's candlesticks, he nibbled at a piece of black bread.
One last word about Fantine.
The portress raised her eyes, and stood there with gaping mouth, and a shriek which she confined to her throat.
Fantine was given back to that mother.
The sister tried to speak, but she only managed to stammer a few inarticulate sounds.
"In prison, in the city prison, while waiting to be transferred." "Until he is transferred!" "He is to be transferred!" "Where is he to be taken?" "He will be tried at the Assizes for a highway robbery which he committed long ago." "Well!
It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element, the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority.
The door opened.
She was pale; her eyes were red; the candle which she carried trembled in her hand.
Her grave resembled her bed.
He finished her thought.
The sister replied:--
It has been established by the testimony of two or three carters who met him, that he was carrying a bundle; that he was dressed in a blouse.
The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface.
In his eyes, of course, the ecclesiastical authority was the chief of all; he was religious, superficial and correct on this point as on all others. In his eyes, a priest was a mind, who never makes a mistake; a nun was a creature who never sins; they were souls walled in from this world, with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass through.
She had lied twice in succession, one after the other, without hesitation, promptly, as a person does when sacrificing herself.
It was only at the expiration of two hours that she roused herself from her revery, and exclaimed, "Hold!
"All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do you not?
But, pardon me, you cannot understand what I am saying.
"Is there a physician present?"
Then he addressed the audience:--
That was clear.
Do not, at least, condemn this man!
He traversed the crowd slowly.
It was an impression which vanished speedily, but which was irresistible at the moment.
"Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released!
"I don't see how he could do it!" grandmother kept saying.
"I don't think he was out of his head for a minute, Mrs. Burden," Fuchs declared.
Then he put on a clean shirt and clean socks, and after he was dressed he kissed her and the little one and took his gun and said he was going out to hunt rabbits.
He was deeply, even slavishly, devout.
I thought about the friends he had mourned to leave, the trombone-player, the great forest full of game,--belonging, as Antonia said, to the "nobles,"--from which she and her mother used to steal wood on moonlight nights.
Stop at the Widow Steavens's for dinner.
Grandfather came from the barn on one of our big black horses, and Jake lifted grandmother up behind him.
It had begun to grow dark when my household returned, and grandmother was so tired that she went at once to bed.
His hands is blistered where the rope run through.
"The body can't be touched until we get the coroner here from Black Hawk, and that will be a matter of several days, this weather."
I looked forward to any new crisis with delight.
Nobody could touch the body until the coroner came.
Grandfather tucked his bushy white beard inside his overcoat.
Going out through the tunnel, I gave the hens their corn, emptied the ice from their drinking-pan, and filled it with water.
After Jake and Otto had swallowed their first cup of coffee, they began to talk excitedly, disregarding grandmother's warning glances.
He was always coveting distinction, poor Marek!
Her lips were tightly compressed and she kept whispering to herself: "Oh, dear Saviour!" "Lord, Thou knowest!"
He layed over on his side and put the end of the barrel in his mouth, then he drew up one foot and felt for the trigger.
Their clothes and boots were steaming, and they both looked exhausted.
I held my tongue, but I listened with all my ears.
I heard excited voices in the kitchen--grandmother's was so shrill that I knew she must be almost beside herself.
"Maybe he did," said Jake grimly.
He turned back his shirt at the neck and rolled up his sleeves."
The quiet was delightful, and the ticking clock was the most pleasant of companions.
"Well, I can take them some victuals, anyway, and say a word of comfort to them poor little girls.
He never looked away from his beads, nor lifted his hands except to cross himself.
The oldest one was his darling, and was like a right hand to him.
Grandmother broke in excitedly: "See here, Jake Marpole, don't you go trying to add murder to suicide.
On the gray gelding, our best horse, he would try to pick his way across the country with no roads to guide him.
The horses and oxen would not go into the barn until he was frozen so hard that there was no longer any smell of blood.
Surely, his exhausted spirit, so tired of cold and crowding and the struggle with the ever-falling snow, was resting now in this quiet house.
I obeyed reluctantly.
I remembered that in the hurry and excitement of the morning nobody had thought of the chickens, and the eggs had not been gathered.
They looked very Biblical as they set off, I thought.
I felt a considerable extension of power and authority, and was anxious to acquit myself creditably.
"I'd like to think he never done it.
He must have gone right down to the barn and done it then.
When we found him, everything was decent except,"--Fuchs wrinkled his brow and hesitated,--"except what he could n't nowise foresee.
"Don't you worry about me, Mrs. Burden," he said cheerfully, as he put on a second pair of socks.
"Poor soul, poor soul!" grandmother groaned.
"I've got a good nose for directions, and I never did need much sleep.
I got "Robinson Crusoe" and tried to read, but his life on the island seemed dull compared with ours.
Old Mr. Shimerda is dead, and his family are in great distress.
"Well-a-well!" (in a soothing tone, such as you use to irritated children), and as if half to herself, "I only thought you might, you know, as you brought her home.
Presently the old man came back, crosser and gruffer than when he went away.
His wife helped Mary to rise, and placed her in a chair.
She threw it straight over Mary; but though it caused a great sob, the eyes still remained closed, and the face as pale as ashes.
"Don't bother her with thy questions," said he to his wife.
Poor thing! we must not ask aught about her, but that she needs help.
Tide will help 'em when it turns."
It's just like him to be so tender and thoughtful!"
So she kept silent, while Mrs. Sturgis (for that was the name of her hostess) talked away, and put her tea-things by, and moved about incessantly, in a manner that increased the dizziness in Mary's head. She felt as if she ought to take leave for the night and go.
HOW MARY PASSED THE NIGHT.
Mary attributed this to his finding her still there, and gathered up her strength for an effort to leave the house.
Well! he is a bright one, my old man!
I'd bet a penny it has changed sin' thou looked."
Sturgis saw it.
Both man and wife came quickly to her assistance.
And quietly, noiselessly, Mary watched the unchanging weather-cock through the night.
"No one!" answered Mary.
he's burning it!
There was a man in it as might save a life at the trial to-morrow.
Perhaps" (sinking her voice a little) "thou'rt a bad one; I almost misdoubt thee, thou'rt so pretty.
He led her to an old-fashioned house, almost as small as house could be, which had been built long ago, before all the other part of the street, and had a country-town look about it in the middle of that bustling back street.
He's sure to be back."
Mary watched the boatman leave the house, and then, turning her sorrowful eyes to the face of her hostess, she attempted feebly to rise, with the intention of going away,--where she knew not.
By-and-bye, he said (looking right into the fire, as if addressing it), "Wind's right against them!"
Her looks won her suit.
And now, where was Mary?
"I cannot sleep, thank you.
They raised her up, still insensible, and he supported her on one knee, while his wife pattered away for some cold fresh water.
"Be hanged to you and your thanks." And he shook himself, took his pipe, and went out without deigning another word; leaving his wife sorely puzzled as to the character and history of the stranger within her doors.
"Not a bit!" snarled he, as he was relieved by Mary's returning colour, and opened eyes, and wondering, sensible gaze; "not a bit! I never was such a fool afore."
But she was mistaken.
She sat on the little window-seat, her hand holding back the curtain which shaded the room from the bright moonlight without; her head resting its weariness against the corner of the window-frame; her eyes burning and stiff with the intensity of her gaze.
I'll see after the wind, hang it, and the weather-cock, too.
The captain would not let him come, but he says he'll come back in the pilot-boat." She fell to sobbing at the thought of her waning hopes, and the old woman tried to comfort her, beginning with her accustomed,
"Well, I suppose I mun.
The boatman took it very quietly, never deigning to give any explanation, but sitting down in his own particular chair, and chewing tobacco, while he looked at Mary with the most satisfied air imaginable, half triumphantly, as if she were the captive of his bow and spear, and half defyingly, as if daring her to escape.
"Bless the man!
She used quite different expressions to those she intended.
I shall catch it down stairs, I know.
She disliked speaking, her power over her words seemed so utterly gone.
She came on meekly after him, scarcely thinking in her stupor where she was going, and glad (in a dead, heavy way) that some one was deciding things for her.
For the spirits had thrown her into a burning heat, and rendered each impression received through her senses of the most painful distinctness and intensity, while her head ached in a terrible manner.
The sheets looked made out of sail-cloth, but were fresh and clean in spite of their brownness.
"All's right now, young woman?" asked the boatman, anxiously.
I'm sure, sir, I don't know rightly how to thank you," faltered Mary, softly forth.
That I never thought of that, to be sure!" exclaimed she, as he produced a square bottle of smuggled spirits, labelled "Golden Wasser," from a corner cupboard in their little room.
I know he will; so keep up your heart.
"It's not the same but another one; that's all."
Do you remember the old tavern on the Rushville road?
"You were not at the inquiry this afternoon, and may not know that just as Bela and the crowd about him turned this corner, they ran into a woman leading a small child, who stopped the whole throng in order to address him.
The sergeant was so occupied by the mystery of the man and the mystery of the house that they had passed the first gate (which the judge had unlocked without much difficulty) before he realised that there still remained something of interest for him to see and to talk about later. The two dark openings on either side, raised questions which the most unimaginative mind would feel glad to hear explained.
"Not if my watch is to be effective to-night," he smiled, and rose to depart.
They came quickly and with stern and solemn emphasis.
The judge showed small satisfaction.
The sergeant hesitated; he felt an emotion of wonder--a sense of something more nearly approaching the uncanny than was usual to his matter-of-fact mind.
"I shall miss Bela at every turn," remarked the judge, turning with a sad smile as he finally pulled the door open.
No one heard what she said; and no one could give any information as to who she was or in what direction she vanished.
They have instincts of curiosity like the rest of us.
No, or if he had been witness to something of the kind, it was for a moment only; for the eyes which had gone blank had turned his way again, and only a disconnected expression which fell from the judge's lips, showed that his mind had been wandering.
But I shall always suffer from regret that I was not in a condition to receive his last sigh.
He was led front; and, entering an old-fashioned hall dimly lighted, passed a staircase and two closed doors, both of which gave him the impression of having been shut upon a past it had pleasured no one to revive in many years.
In age it appeared to be about six--or that was the impression I received before--"
The sergeant, who had sprung to his feet at the same instant as the judge, cast a last look about him, curiosity burning in his heart and a sort of desperate desire to get all he could out of his present opportunity.
Is she a mother?"
"Enough," said he; "tread softly when you go by the sofa on which he lies.
"No.
"For a hideous and wholly unprovoked crime.
Make no move to-night.
But the shade of the lamp intervened too completely, and he had to be content to wait till the judge chose to speak, which he presently did, though not in the exact tones the Sergeant expected.
When he is buried, I may call upon you for a special to watch my room door.
We have nothing against him; the place is highly respectable.
After you hear from me again.
"Thank you, sergeant; I appreciate the favour.
That might do the business better than a dozen out."
A woman dressed in purple, leading a little child without any hat?"
She was in this room.
The judge sat quiet, but the sergeant who dared not peer too closely, noticed a sudden constriction in the fingers of the hand with which his host fingered a paper-cutter lying on the table between them.
"Has she a child?
Let me feel that all your energies are devoted to securing my privacy."
"They are human, are they not?
"The one where--"
A gesture had stopped him.
"Sergeant, I have lost a faithful servant under circumstances which have called an unfortunate attention to my house.
The sergeant declined.
The proprietor's name is Yardley.
Excuse my awkwardness."
"It would be a breach of trust which would greatly disturb me.
The library again! but how changed!
A spasm of grief or unavailing regret crossed the judge's face as his head sank back again against the high back of his chair.
"I respect your hesitation, judge.
Evening light now instead of blazing sunshine; and evening light so shaded that the corners seemed far and the many articles of furniture, cumbering the spaces between, larger for the shadows in which they stood hidden.
Perhaps she's your visitor of to-day. Hadn't I better find out?"
Only, who is to protect me against your men?"
The child did not seem to belong to her, though she held her tightly by the hand.
Many years had passed since Judge Ostrander had played the host; but he had not lost a sense of its obligations.
He waited respectfully for the judge's next words.
She was in this house.
Couldn't I have three?
"He was a very powerfully built man.
She came as far as that open space just inside the doorway.
He was a man in a thousand.
"To-morrow.
Inconsequent words, but the sergeant meant to remember them, for with their utterance, a change passed over the judge; and his manner, which had been constrained and hurried during his attempted description, became at once more natural, and therefore more courteous.
These were slow in coming, and they were unexpected when they came.
It is to be a money transaction, sergeant, and if she is found and no stir made and no talk started among the Force, I will pay all that you think it right to demand."
She wore purple; not an old woman's purple, but a soft shade which did not take from her youth.
"If two men are not enough to ensure you a quiet sleep, you shall have three or four or even more, Judge Ostrander.
I want to feel that these men of yours would no more climb my fence than they would burst into my house without a warrant."
There was something floating round her shoulders of the same colour, and on her arms were long gloves such as you see our young ladies wear.
But the arrangement of light was such as to hold in shadow all but the central portion of the room; and this central portion held nothing out of the common--nothing to explain the mysteries of the dwelling or the apprehensions of its suspicious owner.
"I cannot describe her features, for she was heavily veiled; neither can I describe her figure except to say that she is tall and slender.
I should like to have this place guarded--carefully guarded, you understand--from any and all intrusion till I can look about me and secure protection of my own.
Ere the second gate swung open and he found himself again in the street, he had built up more than one theory in explanation of this freak of parallel fences with the strip of gloom between.
I heard the order given just as I left Headquarters."
The judge's hand withdrew from the table and for an instant the room was so quiet that you could hear some far-off clock ticking out the minutes. Then Judge Ostrander rose and in a peremptory tone said:
"What do you mean by that, your honour?"
"This is an unaccustomed effort for me.
You can trust me."
No one has ever seen her face; unless it is the landlord's wife.
I can describe her, and will, if you will consent to look for her.
But it harbours a boarder, a permanent one, I believe, who has occasioned no little comment.
"Do you think you can find her with such insufficient data?
Will you fill your glass again, sergeant?"
He had not yet risen to show his visitor out.
Perhaps the man who sat there in company with the judge regretted this.
It took a sixty horse-power racing machine, going at a high rate of speed, to kill him."
For he felt absolutely sure that he would never be allowed to enter this room again.
"Let me hear her description, your honour." The judge, who had withdrawn into the shadow, considered for a moment, then said:
It was for him to shoot the bolts and lift the bars; but he went about it so clumsily and with such evident aversion to the task, that the sergeant instinctively sprang to help him.
"Two men are already detailed for the job, your honour.
But her dress I remember to the last detail, though I am not usually so observant.
The judge, grown suddenly thoughtful, rapped with his finger-tips on the table-edge.
This surprised Sergeant Doolittle and led him to attempt to read its cause in his host's countenance.
Some of the High-School girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat.
In my ingenuousness I hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls a better position in the town.
Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time.
If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with their white throats and their pink cheeks.
All foreigners were ignorant people who could n't speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father.
The country girls were considered a menace to the social order.
Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere.
If he went to the hotel to see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten.
He was daft about her, and every one knew it.
But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm.
There was not a tennis court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families.
This remedy worked, apparently.
The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out," were not.
To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves.
All had borrowed money on their land.
Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work; had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance.
One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous.
I used to glare at young Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.
Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service.
After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,--usually of like nationality,--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.
If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on "popular nights," Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression.
Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.
Others, like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had lost.
So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed, high-collared clerks and bookkeepers!
But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his father's bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings.
Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.
They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.
Later she came back to town to take the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed.
THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk.
That was before the day of High-School athletics.
The Vannis' tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on neutral ground.
What did it matter?
When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing--not to be disturbed.
Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father's bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday night.
Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied.
Several times I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him.
He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with her.
The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new.
All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue.
The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as their neighbors from other countries.
I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have.
Unless his girls could teach a country school, they sat at home in poverty.
All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.
I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters go out into service.
The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used.
The three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a place.
But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those hard-earned dollars.
I thought of how far it was to Chicago, and then to Virginia, to Baltimore,--and then the great wintry ocean.
No, he would not at once set out upon that long journey.
If he could have lived with us, this terrible thing would never have happened.
Otto reads you too many of them detective stories."
Nevertheless, after I went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly.
I watched them go past the pond and over the hill by the drifted cornfield.
"Why, mam, it was simple enough; he pulled the trigger with his big toe.
They was blown up there by gunshot, no question."
"As I understand it," Jake concluded, "it will be a matter of years to pray his soul out of Purgatory, and right now he's in torment."
I did not wish to disturb him. I went softly down to the kitchen which, tucked away so snugly underground, always seemed to me the heart and center of the house.
"Now what do you mean, Jake?" grandmother asked sharply.
He's left her alone in a hard world." She glanced distrustfully at Ambrosch, who was now eating his breakfast at the kitchen table.
The crazy boy went with them, because he did not feel the cold.
He did not say a word all morning, but sat with his rosary in his hands, praying, now silently, now aloud.
On the bench behind the stove lay a man, covered up with a blanket.
One of 'em ripped around and got away from him--bolted clean out of the stable.
That is Ambrosch, asleep on the bench.
Ambrosch, Jake said, showed more human feeling than he would have supposed him capable of; but he was chiefly concerned about getting a priest, and about his father's soul, which he believed was in a place of torment and would remain there until his family and the priest had prayed a great deal for him.
If any one did, something terrible would happen, apparently. The dead man was frozen through, "just as stiff as a dressed turkey you hang out to freeze," Jake said.
Presently grandfather came in and spoke to me: "Jimmy, we will not have prayers this morning, because we have a great deal to do.
I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered. But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish; he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.
I went over all that Antonia had ever told me about his life before he came to this country; how he used to play the fiddle at weddings and dances.
Perhaps the barn had burned; perhaps the cattle had frozen to death; perhaps a neighbor was lost in the storm.
He shaved after dinner, and washed hisself all over after the girls was done the dishes.
No wagon could be got to the Shimerdas' until a road was broken, and that would be a day's job.
"I don't believe it," I said stoutly.
She wore her black hood and was bundled up in shawls.
Ambrosch came over here in the middle of the night, and Jake and Otto went back with him.
I knew it was homesickness that had killed Mr. Shimerda, and I wondered whether his released spirit would not eventually find its way back to his own country.
"He done everything natural.
They were stabled there now, with the dead man, because there was no other place to keep them.
A lighted lantern was kept hanging over Mr. Shimerda's head.
Such vivid pictures came to me that they might have been Mr. Shimerda's memories, not yet faded out from the air in which they had haunted him.
Several times the poor boy fell asleep where he sat, wakened with a start, and began to pray again.
His coat was hung on a peg, and his boots was under the bed.
There, on the bench behind the stove, I thought and thought about Mr. Shimerda. Outside I could hear the wind singing over hundreds of miles of snow.
We're deep enough in trouble.
I believed he felt cold as much as any one else, but he liked to be thought insensible to it.
After the cat had had his milk, I could think of nothing else to do, and I sat down to get warm.
Before I opened my eyes, I seemed to know that something had happened.
After Fuchs rode away, I was left with Ambrosch.
None of these acts made it an offense to prevent conception--all of them provided punishment for anyone disseminating information concerning the prevention of conception.
The rapidity with which women are going into industry, the increasing hardship and poverty of the lower strata of society, the arousing of public conscience, have all operated to give force and volume to the demand for woman's right to control her own body that she may work out her own salvation.
Comstock has passed out of public notice.
Usually the prosecutor who presents the case against a birth-control advocate, trapped by a detective hired by the Comstock Society, has no children at all or a small family.
The first and most dramatic of the three great struggles for liberty reached its apex, as we know, in the American Revolution.
If the obscenity laws are not radically revised or repealed, few reactionaries will dare to face the public derision that will greet their attempts to use them to stay woman's progress.
It is the hand of such as have lived on earth but have not loved humanity.
They limit their families to one, two or three well-cared-for children.
The darkness that surrounded the whole field of sex was made as complete as possible.
They will do it at once unless, like men, they use the ballot for those political honors which many years of experience have taught men to be hollow.
In the birth-control movement, she has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature.
This proposed amendment should without doubt include midwives as well as nurses.
We know that the woman's own system feels the strain of these drugs and that the embryo is usually poisoned by them.
This is called the menstrual period.
If fertilization takes place, the fertilized ovule or ovum will cling to the lining of the womb and there gather its nourishment. If fertilization does not take place, the ovum passes out of the body and the uterus throws off its surplus blood supply.
CHAPTER X
It follows, therefore, that America stands at the head of all nations in the huge number of abortions."
The question that society must answer is this: Shall family limitation be achieved through birth control or abortion?
The abortionist could not continue his practice for twenty-four hours if it were not for the fact that women come desperately begging for such operations.
Family limitation will always be practiced as it is now being practiced--either by birth control or by abortion.
Try as they will they cannot escape the truth, nor hide it under the cloak of stupid hypocrisy.
Knowledge of these processes will also enable us to comprehend more thoroughly the dangers to which woman is exposed by our antiquated laws, and how much better it would be for her to employ such preventive measures as would keep her out of the hands of the abortionist, into which the laws now drive her.
If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is not altogether safe from harm.
We know that.
It occurs about once a month or every twenty-eight days.
Thus a high percentage of women in comfortable circumstances escape overbreeding by the use of contraceptives.
The one means health and happiness--a stronger, better race.
In the semen is the life-giving principle called the sperm.
There are no statistics, of course, by which we may compute the amount of suffering to mother and child from the use of such drugs, but we know that the total of physical weakness and disease must be astounding.
It is these, too, who are most often forced to resort to such operations.
The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine-minded person who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions.
Most of the women of the middle and upper classes in America seem secure in their knowledge of contraceptives as a means of birth control.
This fact brings us to the conclusion that contraceptive measures among the upper classes and the practice of abortion among the lower class, are the real means employed to regulate the number of offspring."
Shall normal, safe, effective contraceptives be employed, or shall we continue to force women to the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation?
When scientific means are employed to prevent this meeting, one is said to practice birth control.
These conditions--not the woman--outface society with this question:
When accidental conception takes place, some women of both classes resort to abortion if they can obtain the services of an abortionist.
"Our examinations," says Dr. Max Hirsch, an authority on the subject, "have informed us that the largest number of abortions (in the United States) are performed on married women.
Being given their choice by society--to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is strongest choose the abortionist.
An abortion is as important a matter as a confinement and requires as much attention as the birth of a child at its full term.
These conditions give her the choice between the surgeon's instruments and the sacrificing of what is highest and holiest in her--her aspiration to freedom, her desire to protect the children already hers.
When intercourse takes place, if no preventive is employed, the semen is deposited in the woman's vagina.
Even more drastic may be the effect upon the unborn child, for many women fill their systems with poisonous drugs during the first weeks of their pregnancy, only to decide at last, when drugs have failed, as they usually do, to bring the child to birth.
When society holds up its hands in horror at the "crime" of abortion, it forgets at whose door the first and principal responsibility for this practice rests.
This process is called fertilization, conception or impregnation.
Nevertheless, so strong is their purpose that they do obtain it and use it, correctly or incorrectly.
They are in every female at birth, and as the girl develops into womanhood, these ovules develop also.
There is the case in a nutshell.
Even such drugs as are prescribed by physicians have harmful effects, and nostrums recommended by druggists are often worse still.
The means used is known as a contraceptive.
"He who would combat abortion," says Dr. Hirsch, "and at the same time combat contraceptive measures may be likened to the person who would fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection.
First he says quite softly, "My brothers know it is not easy to be a chief." Then his voice grew.
'Let me get at my story my own way,'was the answer.
I looked after the horses when I wasn't rolling pills on top of the old spinet, while he played his fiddle and Red Jacket sang hymns. I liked it.
'The Indian looked me over whole minutes--there was a musical clock on the wall and dolls came out and hopped while the hour struck.
'"The treaty must be made on Great Britain's own terms.
"No," I says.
He didn't go naked about the seas after dark.
'"That means war again, when we was only just getting used to the peace," says Dad.
It was like a dream--meadows, trees, flowers, birds, houses, and people all different!
Down at heart all Indians reckon digging a squaw's business, and neither him nor Cornplanter, when he relieved watch, was a hard task-Master.
They had been up all night clearing for action on account of hearing guns in the fog.
When I picked up the paper to wrap his fiddle-strings in, I spelled out a piece about the yellow fever being in Philadelphia so dreadful every one was running away.
Toby wanted peace so as he could go about the Reservation buying his oils. But most of the white men wished for war, and they was angry because the President wouldn't give the sign for it.
'Go on, Brother Square-toes.'
'"Citizen--citizen!" the fellow spits in.
Where did we go?
'Yes,' said Puck, rising too.
A dark, thin-faced man in very neat brown clothes and broad-toed shoes came up, followed by Puck.
Pharaoh's eyes twinkled.
They had turned themselves out of doors while their trunks were being packed, and strolled over the Downs towards the dull evening sea.
Why are you not Gert Schwankfelder?"
'His gentlemen were waiting, so they didn't delay him-, only Cornplanter says, using his old side-name, "Big Hand, did you see us among the timber just now?"
So we went travelling. It's a kindly, softly country there, back of Philadelphia among the German towns, Lancaster way.
'I hate politics, too,' said Una, and Pharaoh laughed.
He asked them half-a-dozen times over whether the United States had enough armed ships for any shape or sort of war with any one.
Let me assure you that the treaty with Great Britain will be made though every city in the Union burn me in effigy."
The Senecas are a seemly, quiet people, and they'd had trouble enough from white men--American and English--during the wars, to keep 'em in that walk.
There's justice left in the world still.
Brother Square-Toes
I was scared, for I was fond of Toby.
'"Deal with facts, not fancies," says Big Hand.
You look out for yours."
'I remember a piece about the Lees at Warminghurst, I do:
"But I know my duty.
But I'd heard that before.
Toby took me up there, and they treated me as if I was their own blood brother.
'Says the Indian, "He is hungry, Toby.
It is gone, gone, gone with lost Atlantis (Never say I didn't give you warning). In Seventeen Ninety-three 'twas there for all to see, But it's not in Philadelphia this morning.
"Oh, General, you mistake us entirely!" they says.
'How very queer!' said Una.
'I rubbed my eyes, and fetched 'em out of the "Buck" stables.
He kept her under David Jones's hat shop in the "Buck" tavern yard, and his Indian friends kept their ponies there when they visited him.
Liberty and Independence for Ever!
'I'd have liked that!' said Dan.
He took orders for that famous Seneca Oil which he had the secret of from Red Jacket's Indians, and he slept in friends' farmhouses, but he would shut all the windows; so Red Jacket and me slept outside.
'That was his joke.
They gave me a side-name which means "Two Tongues," because, d'ye see, I talked French and English.
'"At any price?" says the man with the rook's voice.
Now look at this boy and say what you think."
'Not him!
Cordery, the coastguard, came out of the cottage, levelled his telescope at some fishing-boats, shut it with a click and walked away.
"Why can't King George's men and King Louis' men do on their uniforms and fight it out over our heads?"
Little houses and bursting big barns, fat cattle, fat women, and all as peaceful as Heaven might be if they farmed there.
I'd hate to be trailed by Indians in earnest.
"Our ships will be searched--our citizens will be pressed, but--"
He wasn't at all surprised when I told him I was young Gert Schwankfelder that was.
Philadelphia
The fat man went back to his fiddling.
A voice on the beach under the cliff began to sing:
Toby had cured me of asking questions. He stopped my fiddling if I did.
'"What!
"Himmel!" he says.
'Presently I heard guns.
'"Get off," says Toby.
'I went to pack the saddle-bags.
They always called him Big Hand, for he was a large-fisted man, and he was all of their notion of a white chief.
'Everybody laughed except him.
The French was searching American ships on pretence they was helping England, but really for to steal the goods.
My silly head was banged often enough by low branches, but they slipped through like running elk.
I know I took to their ways all over.'
When they turned round The Gap was empty behind them.
'This time tomorrow we shall be at home, thank goodness,' said Una.
It is gone, gone, gone with Thebes the Golden (Never say I didn't give you warning). In Seventeen Ninety-four 'twas a famous dancing-floor-- But it's not in Philadelphia this morning.
"The very idea of a man who deliberately chooses public life as the sphere of his activities seeking to hide behind his private life is preposterous.
"I haven't heard any yarn about him," said the Bibliomaniac.
Take that other story published in a New York newspaper that on the 10th of last August Thompson Bondifeller's yacht was seen anchored for six hours off Tom Watson's farm, two hundred miles from the sea, and that the Populist candidate, disguised as a bank president, went off with the trust magnate on a cruise from Atlanta, Georgia, to Oklahoma--you don't believe that, do you?"
If he beats his mother-in-law, and eats asparagus with the sugar-tongs, and doesn't pay his grocer, the public have a right to know it.
"It's perfectly fine," said the Idiot, "to think that we have men in the country whose characters are such that they can stand four months of such a test.
"Then you cannot complain if Uncle Sam is equally solicitous about the personal paraphernalia of the man who asks to occupy his little cottage on the Potomac," said the Idiot.
They are to me among the most exhilarating institutions of modern life.
"But what are your politics--Republican or Democratic?" asked the Lawyer.
"I think not," smiled the Bibliomaniac.
"It's preposterous on the face of it," said Mr. Bib.
"Say, Mr. Idiot," put in the Poet, at this point, "who are you going to vote for, anyhow?"
This quest for the flesh-pots of politics, so far from being diverting, is, to my notion, one of the most deplorable exhibitions of human weakness that modern civilization, so called, has produced.
"And that's why I think there's a lot of bully good fun to be had out of a political campaign.
"Oh, that's different," said the Idiot.
Politics is an emery-wheel that keeps our wits polished."
"That's the strangest argument of all," he said.
"Of course I don't," said the Bibliomaniac.
They satisfy all one's zest for warfare without the distressing shedding of blood which attends real war, and regarded from the standpoint of humor, I know of nothing that, to the eye of an ordinarily keen observer, is more provocative of good, honest, wholesome mirth."
XIV
"You think that, do you?" observed the Bibliomaniac.
The man who offers himself to the people hasn't any business to tie a string to any part of him.
"A Sammycrat," said the Idiot.
You wouldn't yourself rent a furnished residence to a man whose children were known to have built bonfires in the parlor of their last known home, would you?"
The Idiot laughed.
"That he is the owner of a brewery up in Rochester, and backs fifteen saloons and a pool-room in New York?" said the Idiot.
"I'm a Sammycrat."
For three weary months the followers of each attack the character and intelligence of the other until, if you really believed what was said of either, neither in your estimation would have a shred of reputation left.
A man's wife is his better half and his children are a good part of the remainder, and what they do or don't do becomes a matter of legitimate public concern.
"Do you mean to say that a Presidential campaign does not keep your nerve-centres in a constant state of pleasurable titillation?
I love anything that arouses the imagination of a people too much given over to the pursuit of the cold, hard dollar.
The fellow who does that, Mr. Bib, wants to lead a double life, and that is reprehensible.
You don't yourself believe that last yarn about the Prohibition candidate, do you?"
"Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot.
"Well, that's the way the thing works," said the Idiot.
It hurts no one, therefore, and provokes a great deal of innocent mirth.
"You must admit, however," said the Bibliomaniac, "that a man with an honorable name must find it unpleasant to have such outrageous stories told of him."
"Well, I don't agree with you.
That's what I find elevating in it.
Similarly with the Democratic candidate.
Is that either diverting or elevating or educational or, indeed, anything but deplorable?"
"I don't know yet.
You know well enough that he either never did what is charged against him, or at least that the story is greatly exaggerated--he may have stuck a pin into the cook, and played some boyish trick upon some of his relatives--but the story on the face of it is untrue and therefore harmless.
"Don't ask me," laughed the Idiot.
"I don't see it," said Mr. Bib.
"So it happens that when a man runs for the Presidency the persons who intrude upon his private life, as you put it, are conferring a real service upon their fellow-citizens.
"Nobody," said the Idiot; "and therefore the story doesn't hurt the man's reputation a bit, or interfere with his chances of election in the least.
If he has children, the voters are perfectly justified in asking what kind of children they are, since the voters own the White House furniture, and if the Jim Jones children wipe their feet on plush chairs, and shoot holes in the paintings with their bean-snappers and putty-blowers, Uncle Sam, as a landlord and owner of the premises, ought to be warned beforehand.
No people can progress that lacks imagination.
You may say that the lady is not running for a public office, and that, therefore, she should be protected from public scrutiny, but that is a fallacy.
"Then you approve of these stories of candidates' cousins, the prattling anecdotes of their grandchildren, these paragraphs narrating the doings of their uncles-in-law, and all that?" sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"Well, granting all that you say is true," said the Bibliomaniac, "the intrusion upon a man's private life that politics makes possible--surely you cannot condone that."
I for one am sick and tired of politics, and it will be a great relief to me when it is all over."
"Who does?"
Why, to me it is what a bag full of nuts must be to a squirrel.
I fairly gloat over these quadrennial political campaigns of ours.
"I'm for Uncle Sam every time.
"This is a fine Sunday morning in spite of the gloom into which the approaching death of the campaign should plunge us all."
"To my mind, the average political campaign is just a vulgar scrap in which men who ought to know better descend to all sorts of despicable trickery merely to gain the emoluments of office.
A couple of men are put up for the most dignified office known to the world--both are gentlemen by birth and education, men of honor, men who, you would think, would scorn baseness as they hate poison--and then what happens?
I admire all the candidates personally very much."
"A what?" cried the Idiot's fellow-boarders in unison.
"Certainly, I do," said the Idiot.
HE DEFENDS CAMPAIGN METHODS
Even old Diogenes, who spent his life looking for an honest man, would have to admit every four years that he could spot him instantly by merely coming to this country and taking his choice from among the several candidates."
"Yes, Senor; I have the papers to prove it."
No, by God!
At sight of her, Walcott's face grew livid.
"Give me that weapon!" she demanded.
He raised his hand and the revolver gleamed in the light.
"Ah!
But Mary answered she could no more leave home, and must content herself with the hope of seeing Mrs. Redmain when she came to Durnmelling.
As it is, allow me to refer you to Mr. Brett, the lawyer, whom I dare say you know."
But when a week after week passed, and he heard nothing of or from her, he became anxious, and at last lowered his pride so far as to call on Mary, under the pretense of buying something in the shop.
Almost every evening, until he left Durnmelling, Mary went to see Mr. Redmain.
He looked at her searchingly, and at last murmured a request that she would allow him to have a little conversation with her.
Mr. Brett took it for granted he had deliberately and intentionally shut out Mary, and Mewks did not attempt to deny it, protesting he believed she was boring his master.
But they never had any more talk about the things Mary loved most.
For there was little love in the attentions the Mortimers paid him; and in what other hope could Hesper have married, than that one day she would be free, with a freedom informed with power, the power of money!
"No," said Mr. Redmain; "she must stay where she is.
Old Mr. Duppa died, and a young man came to minister to his congregation who thought the baptism of the spirit of more importance than the most correct of opinions concerning even the baptizing spirit. From him Mary found she could learn, and would be much to blame if she did not learn.
Letty was diligent in business, but it never got into her heart.
But Godfrey was too proud or too agitated to sit.
His troubled look filled her with sympathy, but she could not help being glad afresh that he had escaped the snares laid for him.
When suffering, he would occasionally break into fierce and evil language, then be suddenly silent.
"Just let me see those memoranda," said Mr. Brett to Mr. Redmain, rising, and looking for the paper where he had left it the day before.
He soon found it necessary to make arrangement with a carpenter and wheelwright to work on his premises.
When Joseph heard it, he smiled, and thought he knew what it meant.
"It was of that paper I was this moment thinking," answered Mr. Redmain.
He grew a rich man, and died happy--so his friends said, and said as they saw.
Hesper sought Mary, and kissed her with some appearance of gratitude. She saw what a horrible suspicion, perhaps even accusation, she had saved her from.
Hesper was no sooner in London, than she wrote to Mary, inviting her to go and visit her.
Joseph Jasper became once more Mary's pupil.
The fool!
And, indeed, it caused no gloom.
"I thought as much!
She was now no more content with her little cottage piano, but had an instrument of quite another capacity on which to accompany the violin of the blacksmith.
I don't want money.
And something did seem to be getting into, or waking up in, him.
Mewks came, in evident anxiety.
"It is not here!" said Mr. Brett.
"You will be surprised to see me on such an errand, Miss Marston!" he said.
After a year or so, Mrs. Wardour began to take a little notice of her again; but she never asked her to Thornwick until she found herself dying.
I fancy something happened last night which she has got to tell us about."
The grin on that master's face at hearing this was not very pleasant to behold. When examined as to the missing paper, he swore by all that was holy he knew nothing about it.
From him Letty also heard what increased her desire to be worth something before she went to rejoin Tom.
She continued to be much liked, and in the shop was delightful.
Some time after, it came out that the same night on which the presence of Joseph rescued Mary from her pursuer, a man speaking with a foreign accent went to one of the surgeons in Testbridge to have his shoulder set, which he said had been dislocated by a fall.
I didn't want to drive her to despair: a dying man must mind what he is about.
The place was searched throughout, but there was no trace of her.
"But," he said to Mary, "I can't go on like this, you know, miss.
To him trade came in steadily, and before long he had to build a larger shoeing-shed.
She was nowhere to be found.
Strange rumors came abroad.
Then she narrated all that had happened the night before, from first to last, not forgetting the flame that lighted the closet as they approached the window.
For some time it remained doubtful whether this attack was not, after all, going to be the last: the doctor himself was doubtful, and, having no reason to think his death would be a great grief in the house, did not hesitate much to express his doubt.
DISAPPEARANCE.
She led the way to her parlor, closed the door, and asked him to take a seat.
There was a conspiracy in that house to ruin the character of the loveliest woman in creation!
CHAPTER LV.
That he continued to think of those things, she had one ground of hoping, namely, the kindness with which he invariably received her, and the altogether gentler manner he wore as often and as long as she saw him.
Mr. Brett next requested the presence of Miss Yolland.
I come only to ask you to tell me the real nature of the accusations brought against Miss Yolland: your name is, of course, coupled with them."
What was that?" asked Mr. Brett, facing round on her.
Lady Malice was grievously hurt at the examination she found had been going on.
"I do not yet know your errand," replied Mary; "but I may not be so much surprised as you think."
"Do not imagine," said Godfrey, stiffly, "that I believe a word of the contemptible reports in circulation.
He lived two years more, and died rather suddenly.
Before two years were over, he was what people call a flourishing man, and laying by a little money.
There was a thousand pounds there for her!
The behavior and disappearance of Sepia seemed to give her little trouble.
Whether the change was caused by something better than physical decay, who knows save him who can use even decay for redemption?
Perhaps she then remembered a certain petition in the Lord's prayer.
But will it not be rather a dreadful thing for some people if they are forgiven as they forgive?
She had other places, none of them alike.
It was a great hollow sphere, made of a substance similar to that of the mirror which Rosamond had broken, but differently compounded.
The moment she hated her, it flashed upon her with a sickening disgust that the child was not another, but her Self, her Somebody, and that she was now shut up with her for ever and ever--no more for one moment ever to be alone.
After sitting a while, she wished she had something to do, but nothing came.
She wept at last, then grew very angry, and then sullen; but nobody heeded whether she cried or laughed.
"I am Agnes," said Agnes; and the little girl said, "I am Agnes." Then Agnes thought she was mocking her, and said, "You are ugly;" and the little girl said, "You are ugly."
"You've got--"
"Why?"
"Because I don't think he's guilty.
"In my pocket!" I interrupted.
What might your output be in England per week?
"Been several people here enquiring for you.
Philip was taken aback and for the moment remained speechless.
"We'd like to know your reason, Mr. Romilly, for paying us a visit," the young man continued, "in your own words.
He feed the linen-coated porters and dismissed them as rapidly as possible.
"Ninth floor!" Philip gasped.
"Really, I can't tell any of you a thing more," she went on, turning back to them, "only this, and I am sure it ought to be interesting.
They'd have come down the harbour and held us up.
"Just seen Henshaw.
"I want to point out some of the buildings to you."
You don't need to worry about them."
Please reply.
He left the cable carefully open upon the dressing-table, and, picking up the small leather case, left the room.
The great buildings of New York, at which he had been gazing for hours, were standing, heterogeneous but magnificent, clear-cut against an azure sky.
"I will not," he promised.
Suggest you cable back the twenty thousand pounds lying our credit New York.
His fellow passengers, in unfamiliar costumes, were standing about with their eyes glued upon the distant docks.
"I'll see after them myself."
No mail yet."
CHAPTER IX
"You just step this way, sir," he invited encouragingly.
Potts."
His cousin's great wealth was a fiction.
Don't think about that for a moment.
Mr. Romilly, please wait for me," she called after him.
Then he replaced it, a little dazed.
"Those packages of yours will be all right.
He handed the key to a small boy and waved Philip away.
They neither of them moved.
Now take down these notes."
Chance has pitchforked you here, absolutely to my side, I, the one woman who could understand what you mean, who could give your Mona life.
She drew a little nearer to him.
But," he added confidentially, dropping his voice and taking them both by the arm, "I have made a cocktail down in my stateroom--it's there in the shaker waiting for us, something I can't talk about.
They were obviously of the chorus-girl type, a fact which they seemed to lack the ambition to conceal.
Been to sleep, either of you?"
She sat up in her chair with a happy little laugh.
"Not what they are looking for.
He shook his head.
Philip escaped after about an hour and made his way to where Elizabeth was reclining in her deck chair.
She seemed to have been spending the last quarter of an hour in thought.
No, don't sit down," she went on.
"I'd rather not," she admitted.
I don't envy the men who have to handle the drags."
"We will talk, if you will."
"And they are going to drag the canal," Elizabeth said thoughtfully.
Come right this way, both of you.
Philip for a moment was taken aback.
He indicated the stud farms at which Nicholas might procure horses, recommended to him a horse dealer in the town and a landowner fourteen miles out of town who had the best horses, and promised to assist him in every way.
"You are Count Ilya Rostov's son?
He received Nicholas brusquely (imagining this to be characteristically military) and questioned him with an important air, as if considering the general progress of affairs and approving and disapproving with full right to do so.
Nicholas was in such good spirits that this merely amused him.
In very few words Nicholas bought seventeen picked stallions for six thousand rubles--to serve, as he said, as samples of his remounts.
As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostov took a close and prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so casually, without any aim at self-sacrifice, and he therefore looked at what was going on in Russia without despair and without dismally racking his brains over it.
Among the men was an Italian prisoner, an officer of the French army; and Nicholas felt that the presence of that prisoner enhanced his own importance as a Russian hero.
Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being felt or even noticed.
The governor was a brisk little man, very simple and affable.
But it was not really so.
Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.
Immediately on leaving the governor's, Nicholas hired post horses and, taking his squadron quartermaster with him, drove at a gallop to the landowner, fourteen miles away, who had the stud.
Nicholas was himself rather surprised at the way he danced that evening.
Even those, fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings, who discussed Russia's position at the time involuntarily introduced into their conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or useless condemnation and anger directed against people accused of actions no one could possibly be guilty of.
It appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had.
His particularly free manner of dancing even surprised them all.
Nicholas felt this, it seemed to him that everyone regarded the Italian in the same light, and he treated him cordially though with dignity and restraint.
If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.
What for a long while specially surprised and delighted him were the women, young and healthy, without a dozen officers making up to each of them; women, too, who were pleased and flattered that a passing officer should joke with them.
Catherine Petrovna did actually play valses and the ecossaise, and dancing began in which Nicholas still further captivated the provincial society by his agility.
Among these was the governor's wife herself, who welcomed Rostov as a near relative and called him "Nicholas."
After dining and taking rather too much of the Hungarian wine, Nicholas-- having exchanged kisses with the landowner, with whom he was already on the friendliest terms--galloped back over abominable roads, in the brightest frame of mind, continually urging on the driver so as to be in time for the governor's party.
He had never danced like that in Moscow and would even have considered such a very free and easy manner improper and in bad form, but here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by something unusual, something they would have to accept as the regular thing in the capital though new to them in the provinces.
From the commander of the militia he drove to the governor.
At posting stations, at inns, and in the landowner's snuggery, maidservants had been flattered by his notice, and here too at the governor's party there were (as it seemed to Nicholas) an inexhaustible number of pretty young women, married and unmarried, impatiently awaiting his notice.
All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue-eyed, plump and pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials.
The landowner to whom Nicholas went was a bachelor, an old cavalryman, a horse fancier, a sportsman, the possessor of some century-old brandy and some old Hungarian wine, who had a snuggery where he smoked, and who owned some splendid horses.
In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable.
My wife was a great friend of your mother's.
When--free from soldiers, wagons, and the filthy traces of a camp--he saw villages with peasants and peasant women, gentlemen's country houses, fields where cattle were grazing, posthouses with stationmasters asleep in them, he rejoiced as though seeing all this for the first time.
The Italian was, as it were, a war trophy.
The tales and descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians.
When he had changed, poured water over his head, and scented himself, Nicholas arrived at the governor's rather late, but with the phrase "better late than never" on his lips.
The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in Russia the less did he realize their significance.
"We can no longer both reign together.
Nine days after the abandonment of Moscow, a messenger from Kutuzov reached Petersburg with the official announcement of that event.
The Emperor listened in silence, not looking at Michaud.
The Emperor began to breathe heavily and rapidly, his lower lip trembled, and tears instantly appeared in his fine blue eyes.
"Very sad, sire," replied Michaud, lowering his eyes with a sigh.
Michaud had only waited for this to bring out the phrase he had prepared.
He suddenly frowned, as if blaming himself for his weakness, and raising his head addressed Michaud in a firm voice:
Never!"
"Yes, sire, and Moscow is now in ashes.
"Would misfortune make my Russians lose heart?...
And the Emperor paused, with a frown.
"Have you brought me sad news, Colonel?"
"Sire!" said he, "Your Majesty is at this moment signing the glory of the nation and the salvation of Europe!"
I have learned to know him, and he will not deceive me any more...."
"You set me at ease, Colonel."
"Well, then, go back to the army," he said, drawing himself up to his full height and addressing Michaud with a gracious and majestic gesture, "and tell our brave men and all my good subjects wherever you go that when I have not a soldier left I shall put myself at the head of my beloved nobility and my good peasants and so use the last resources of my empire.
"Has the enemy entered the city?" he asked.
"How is that?" the Emperor interrupted him, frowning sternly.
He bent his head and was silent for some time.
"Conceal nothing from me, I wish to know absolutely how things are."
Did you not notice discouragement?..."
"I see, Colonel, from all that is happening, that Providence requires great sacrifices of us...
"The abandonment of Moscow."
I left it all in flames," replied Michaud in a decided tone, but glancing at the Emperor he was frightened by what he had done.
"Sire," he said, with respectful playfulness, "they are only afraid lest Your Majesty, in the goodness of your heart, should allow yourself to be persuaded to make peace.
With an inclination of the head the Emperor dismissed him.
The Emperor's mild and handsome face was flushed and his eyes gleamed with resolution and anger.
"Colonel, I always require it," replied the Emperor.
"I only wonder that the fate of Russia could have been entrusted to such a man."
"What a wonderful coincidence!
It was said that Prince Vasili and the old count had turned upon the Italian, but the latter had produced such letters from the unfortunate deceased that they had immediately let the matter drop.
Next day during the service at the palace church in honor of the Emperor's birthday, Prince Volkonski was called out of the church and received a dispatch from Prince Kutuzov.
How sorry I am!"
General events involuntarily group themselves around some particular incident.
Prince Michael Ilarionovich!
You can yourself imagine the effect this news has had on me, and your silence increases my astonishment.
It was Kutuzov's report, written from Tatarinova on the day of the battle.
On the third day after Kutuzov's report a country gentleman arrived from Moscow, and news of the surrender of Moscow to the French spread through the whole town.
This was terrible!
It was like a successfully arranged surprise.
Everyone believed the victory to have been complete, and some even spoke of Napoleon's having been captured, of his deposition, and of the choice of a new ruler for France.
It followed that there must have been a victory.
Just during the service.
That day Prince Vasili no longer boasted of his protege Kutuzov, but remained silent when the commander-in-chief was mentioned.
On receiving this dispatch the Emperor sent Prince Volkonski to Kutuzov with the following rescript:
That day everyone met with the words:
Everybody knew him, the Emperor liked him, and he was young and interesting.
"I always said he was the only man capable of defeating Napoleon."
Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was in fact fulfilled.
Sire!
Kutuzov's action decides the fate of the capital and of your empire!
It is very difficult for events to be reflected in their real strength and completeness amid the conditions of court life and far from the scene of action.
Moreover, toward evening, as if everything conspired to make Petersburg society anxious and uneasy, a terrible piece of news was added.
Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was justified, and all that morning a joyously festive mood reigned in the city.
The courtiers suffered because of the suffering the suspense occasioned the Emperor.
And at once, without leaving the church, thanks were rendered to the Creator for His help and for the victory.
I have had everything removed, and it only remains for me to weep over the fate of my fatherland.
"Fancy the Emperor's position!" said they, and instead of extolling Kutuzov as they had done the day before, they condemned him as the cause of the Emperor's anxiety.
In the Petersburg world this sad side of the affair again involuntarily centered round a single incident: Kutaysov's death.
"What did I tell about Kutuzov?" Prince Vasili now said with a prophet's pride.
Countess Helene Bezukhova had suddenly died of that terrible malady it had been so agreeable to mention.
What a position for the Emperor to be in!
I wanted to watch him all the time, which distracted me, I suppose, for once I called General Phillips "Mister!"
It so happened, too, that just that instant there was not a sound in the room, so everyone heard the blunder. General Phillips straightened back in his chair, and his little son gave a smothered giggle--for which he should have been sent to bed at once. But that was not all!
For one minute I stood still, not in the least grasping their meaning; but finally I suspected mischief, they all looked so serenely contented. So I passed on to the dining room, and there, on the table, was one of the precious cakes---at least what was left of it, the very small piece that had been so generously saved for me.
From the chapel we--that is, the company officers and their wives--went to the company barracks to see the men's dinner tables.
It was plain to be seen that the poor horse was not enjoying the meeting, for every now and then he would try to back away, or give a jump sideways.
A little ditch--they call it acequia--runs all around the post, and brings water to the trees and lawns, but water for use in the houses is brought up in wagons from the Arkansas River, and is kept in barrels.
We must have gone at least two miles farther before we saw the herd we were looking for, making fifteen or sixteen miles altogether that we had ridden.
Just think of it--a whole long lifetime--and always a Mister, too--and perhaps by that time it will be "just and fair" for the lieutenants to have everything!
We left him undisturbed, but only a few minutes later we heard the sharp report of a rifle, and at once suspected, what we learned to be a fact the next day, that one of the men with the wagons had killed him. Possibly this was the most merciful thing to do, but to me that shot meant murder.
I think Faye was the first to mention it, saying it was a "great success"; then the others said "perfectly delicious," and so on, but at the same time assuring me that a large piece had been left for me.
The Utes and Cheyennes are bitter enemies.
My horse behaved very well--just whirling around a few times--but Faye was kept busy a minute or two by his, for the poor horse was awfully frightened, and lunged and reared and snorted; but I knew that he could not unseat Faye, so I rather enjoyed it, for you know I had wanted to go back a little!
There is no high wall around it as there is at Fort Trumbull.
I wrapped them in nice white paper that had been wet with brandy, and put them carefully away--one in a stone jar, the other in a tin box--and felt that I had done a remarkably fine bit of housekeeping.
These hunts exact the very best of riding and a fast horse, for coyotes are very swift, and so are jack-rabbits, too, and one look at a greyhound will tell anyone that he can run--and about twice as fast as the big-eared foxhounds in the East.
I am to assist Mrs. Phillips in receiving New Year's day, and shall wear my pearl-colored Irish poplin.
So, about four weeks ago, I commenced.
At holiday time, however, it seems that the post trader sends to St. Louis for turkeys, celery, canned oysters, and other things.
IN many of my letters I have written about learning to ride and to shoot, and have told you, also, of having followed the greyhounds after coyotes and rabbits with Faye and Lieutenant Baldwin.
I wore my nile-green silk, which I am afraid showed off my splendid coat of tan only too well.
It has a hall with a pretty stairway, three rooms and a large shed downstairs, and two rooms and a very large hall closet on the second floor.
But I started to write you about something quite different from all this--to tell you of a really grand hunt I have been on--a splendid chase after buffalo!
There are several small stores in the half-Mexican village, where curious little things from Mexico can often be found, if one does not mind poking about underneath the trash and dirt that is everywhere.
There are no evergreen trees here, only cottonwood.
It is the custom in the regiment for the wives of the officers every Christmas to send the enlisted men of their husbands' companies large plum cakes, rich with fruit and sugar.
I forgot that the little house was fragrant with the odor of spice and fruit, and that there was a man about who was ever on the lookout for good things to eat.
Several experienced hunters tell marvelous tales of how they have stood within a few yards of a buffalo and fired shot after shot from a Springfield rifle, straight at his head, the balls producing no effect whatever, except, perhaps, a toss of the head and the flying out of a tuft of hair.
He says that I must commence riding horseback at once, and has generously offered me the use of one of his horses.
There was no possibility of his killing him without assistance, and of course the poor beast could not be abandoned in such a helpless condition, so Faye decided to go over and worry him, while Lieutenant Alden got in the fatal shot.
I am all upset!
Not one penny did they pay for the things they carried off.
Once I forgot them entirely, and everybody smiled--even the chaplain!
They are so disappointing, too--so wholly unlike Cooper's red men.
We were actually prisoners--penned in with all those savages, who were evidently in an ugly mood, with quantities of ammunition within their reach, and only two white men to protect us.
These were carried so that if it should be found necessary to secure the horses on the plains, they could be picketed out.
My teachers, Faye and Lieutenant Baldwin, have been most exacting, but that I wanted.
Well, I have seen an Indian--a number of Indians--but they were not Red Jackets, neither were they noble red men.
We have no fresh vegetables here, except potatoes, and have to depend upon canned stores in the commissary for a variety, and our meat consists entirely of beef, except now and then, when we may have a treat to buffalo or antelope.
Well, we rode twelve miles without seeing one living thing, and then we came to a little adobe ranch where we dismounted to rest a while.
I stumbled over everything in the room in my haste to get to one of the little dormer windows, but there was nothing to be seen, as it was still quite dark.
When I told Faye about it, he looked vexed and said I must never laugh at an enlisted man--that it was not dignified in the wife of an officer to do so.
But I got through the day very well, considering the very short time I have been riding--that is, really riding.
The odor of those skins, and of the Indians themselves, in that stuffy little shop, I expect to smell the rest of my life!
Finally, he recovered sufficient breath to tell me that at present, there were no good carpenters in the company.
In March of 1865, Charles Wood of Olympia sent about three pecks of hop roots to Steilacoom for my father, Jacob R. Meeker, who then lived on his claim in the Puyallup valley.
We found to our cost, however, in the course of time, that the English methods did not suit our different conditions; for while we could kill the lice, we had to use so much spraying material on the dense foliage that, in killing them, we virtually destroyed the hops.
Many of these were Indians, some of whom would come for a thousand miles down the coast from British Columbia and even the confines of Alaska; they came in the great cedar-log canoes manned with twenty paddlers or more.
All my accumulations were swept away, and I quit the business--or, rather, the business quit me.
I issued a hop circular, sending it to more than six hundred correspondents all along the coast in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and before the week was out I began to receive samples from them, and letters asking what was the matter with the hops.
These people simply could not pay, and I forgave the debt, taking no judgments against them, and I have never regretted the action.
I obtained what roots I could get that year, but not enough to plant an acre.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The business was well started by the time of my father's death in 1869, and in the fifteen years following the acreage planted to hops was increased until the crop-yield of 1882, a yield of more than seventy-one tons, gave the Puyallup valley the banner crop, as to quantity, of the United States--and, some persons asserted, of the world.
The comfort and plenty we had hoped and struggled for was attained.
I spent four winters in London dealing in the hop market.
I walked down to the yards, a quarter of a mile away, and there first saw the hop louse.
My first publication was an eighty-page pamphlet descriptive of Washington Territory, printed in 1870.
At one time I had two full trainloads between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on their way to London.
Once I had to tie up two of them to a tree for getting drunk; their friends came and stole away the prisoners--which was what I intended they should do.
Little as I had thought ever to handle an international business, still less had I thought ever to write a book.
This plague was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky to us.
Instead of being able to sell our hops at the top price of the market, we saw our product fall to the foot of the list.
None of us knew anything about the hop business, and it was entirely by accident that we engaged in it.
The last crop I raised cost me eleven cents a pound and sold for three under the hammer at sheriff's sale.
It appeared that the attack of lice was simultaneous in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, extending over a distance coastwise of more than five hundred miles, and even inland up the Skagit River, where there was an isolated yard.
Finally our annual shipments reached eleven thousand bales a year, or the equivalent in value of half a million dollars--said at that time to be the largest export hop business of any one concern in the United States.
We frequently employed more than a thousand people during harvest time.
Therefore it seems fitting to tell here the story of the beginnings of an industry that came to have great importance.
This sum was more money than had been received by any of the settlers in the Puyallup valley, except perhaps two, from the products of their farms for that year.
I had to go through the mud to the Columbia River, then out over the bar to the Pacific Ocean, and down to San Francisco.
It still stands in Pioneer Park in Puyallup.
Others of my neighbors planted them, and so did many people in Oregon, until soon there came to be a field for purchasing and shipping hops.
At that time I had advanced to my neighbors and others upon their hop crops more than a hundred thousand dollars, which was lost.
OUR youthful dream of becoming farmers was now realized in fullest measure.
One evening in 1892, as I stepped out of my office and cast my eyes toward one group of hop houses, it struck me that the hop foliage of a field near by was off color--did not look natural.
I mention this fact simply as one instance out of the many that could be given of the unexpected lines of development that life in the new land opened out to the pioneers.
The following year (1867) I planted four acres, and for twenty-six successive years thereafter we added to the area planted, until our holdings reached past the five-hundred-acre mark and our production was more than four hundred tons a year.
Then there was the seven days' journey over the Central and Union Pacific and connecting lines; this meant sitting bolt upright all the way, for there were no sleeping cars then, and no diners either.
We actually pressed the English growers so closely that more than fifteen thousand acres of hops were destroyed in that country.
My father's near neighbors obtained a barrel of hop roots from California the next year, and planted them the following spring--four acres.
Our great prosperity was not to last.
This was sold for eighty-five cents a pound, or a little more than a hundred and fifty dollars for the bale.
Finally, during the failure of the world's hop crop in the year 1882, there came to be unheard-of prices for hops, and fully one third of the crop of the Puyallup valley was sold for a dollar a pound.
This unexpected prosperity came to us through the hop-growing industry, upon which we entered with all our force.
But seeing that there were possibilities of great gain, I took pains to study hop culture, and found that by allowing our hops to mature thoroughly, curing them at a low temperature, and baling them while hot, we could produce hops that would compete with any product in the world.
I sent my second son, Fred Meeker, to London to learn the English methods of fighting the pest and to import some spraying machinery.
One of my clerks from the office said the same thing--the vines did not look natural.
FINDING AND LOSING A FORTUNE
Let's go see Auntie Bogart."
III
And--Lord knows I never thought I'd have to say this to my own wife--but if you go defending these fellows, then the same thing applies to you!
If we were fighting England, you'd call the radicals 'pro-English.' When this war is over, I suppose you'll be calling them 'red anarchists.' What an eternal art it is--such a glittery delightful art--finding hard names for our opponents!
"You won't!"
She kissed his frown, and marveled:
I don't belong here, and I'm going.
Work?
I think it's a greatness of life--a refusal to be content with even the healthiest mud."
It's work--but not my work.
He was grumbling, "The whole thing's right in line with the criticism you've always been making.
Once, when Kennicott announced at noon-dinner, "What do you know about this!
That's why I'm going to take him with me."
"What editorial did he get that from?" she wondered, as she protested, "See here, my beloved, why can't you Tories declare war honestly?
"I have a right to my life--and you're it, you're my life!
"So have I to mine!"
You can camouflage all you want to, but you know darn well that these radicals, as you call 'em, are opposed to the war, and let me tell you right here and now, and you and all these long-haired men and short-haired women can beef all you want to, but we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic.
"That's foolish." He was a serious and literal person, and rather humorless.
"That's foolish."
At most he agreed to a public theory that she was "going to take a short trip and see what the East was like in wartime."
I was not.
She had her freedom, and it was empty.
"Oh, conversation!
You haven't got enough work to do.
No, it's much more than that.
I don't belong to Gopher Prairie.
Auntie Bogart says I'm going to be a preacher.
"What?" flatly.
The churches have always done it, and the political orators--and I suppose I do it when I call Mrs. Bogart a 'Puritan' and Mr. Stowbody a 'capitalist.' But you business men are going to beat all the rest of us at it, with your simple-hearted, energetic, pompous----"
"Huh!" said Kennicott II, and went to sleep on her shoulder.
She was not timorous now.
"What's a generation?"
"You have a right to me if you can keep me.
Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedure."
You've made yourself so.
Can you?"
"I don't know.
For a month they discussed it.
I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children.
I'm going away to be quiet and think.
I was just bedraggled and unhappy.
She gives me cookies and she tells me about the Dear Lord.
CHAPTER XXXVI
I have a right to my own life."
"Of course a little thing like Hugh makes no difference!"
Let's play something else.
Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you?
Can I preach about the Dear Lord?"
As it happens, I've done that sort of thing.
He grunted.
That's the whole trouble with you!
"Cookies?
You don't oppose this organizer because you think he's seditious but because you're afraid that the farmers he is organizing will deprive you townsmen of the money you make out of mortgages and wheat and shops. Of course, since we're at war with Germany, anything that any one of us doesn't like is 'pro-German,' whether it's business competition or bad music.
"Am I pro-German if I fail to throb to Honest Jim Blausser, too?
Do you really like Mrs. Bogart?"
"And cookies?"
We're going to chuck it.
"No, I think we can save you that trouble.
I don't care!
"Yes.
"Work?
Never thought of that complication, did you, in this 'off to Bohemia, and express yourself, and free love, and live your own life' stuff!"
Sure!
"Perhaps.
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all."
I'm--I'm going!
"Yes, all the difference.
The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb.
"Well?"
"It is, O male Kennicott!"
I've got to find out what my work is----"
They knew this fellow would try to stir up trouble.
Can I be a preacher?
"I'm tired of playing train.
Is it a new kind of logic?"
Hugh complained, "Notice me, mummy!"
But the story doesn't go right.
"Will!"
All right!
They didn't give him a chance!" His laugh was stagey.
Next thing, I suppose you'll be yapping about free speech.
All I've done has been in line.
I'm damned if I'll agree to all your freak notions, but I will say I've got to depend on you.
That's what most men--and women--like you WOULD say.
HOW MUCH DO YOU PAY, Mrs. KENNICOTT?"
"Yes!
Lamb chops were as exotic as sharks' fins.
Carol was discouraged.
She walked home.
He belonged there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots.
"So I have been informed.
There were only three things which she could do: Have children; start her career of reforming; or become so definitely a part of the town that she would be fulfilled by the activities of church and study-club and bridge-parties.
"Oh, do you THINK so?" protested Mrs. Jackson Elder.
She could not find a glass-headed picture-nail in town; she did not hunt for the sort of veiling she wanted--she took what she could get; and only at Howland & Gould's was there such a luxury as canned asparagus.
It was so rich-looking to sit and drive--and so easy. Skiing and sliding were "stupid" and "old-fashioned." In fact, the village longed for the elegance of city recreations almost as much as the cities longed for village sports; and Gopher Prairie took as much pride in neglecting coasting as St. Paul--or New York--in going coasting.
"I thought they were nice, respectable people."
The good doctor was even with his word in the matter, and gave out some very sonorous discourses, without in the least stopping the round of gaieties kept up by these dissipated Katy-dids, which ran on, night after night, till the celebrated Jack Frost epidemic, which occurred somewhere about the first of September.
Excuse me, but I have been living in France, where these distinctions are wholly unknown, and I have not yet got myself in the train of fashionable ideas here."
"And shall you not ask the Locusts, and the Grasshoppers?"
"The fact is, my dear colonel," she said, "I am thinking of giving a party, and you must help me to make out the lists."
"How about the Mosquitoes!" said the colonel.
The worthy Cricket family, however, avoided Jack Frost by emigrating in time to the chimney-corner of a nice little cottage that had been built in the wood that summer.
"One can see that nothing so gross or material has ever entered into your system."
"I'm sure," said Miss Katy, "mamma says she don't know what does keep me alive; half a dewdrop and a little bit of the nicest part of a rose-leaf, I assure you, often last me for a day.
You may be sure they will every one come, and be looking about to make spiteful remarks.
"I don't know but he IS a little stout," said Miss Katy; "but so distinguished and elegant in his manners--something quite martial and breezy about him."
"Well, then, let me teach you," said Miss Katy.
Miss Katy was in the very highest possible spirits, because her gallant cousin, Colonel Katy-did, had looked in to make her a morning visit.
Let's see--the Fireflies, Butterflies, Moths. The Bees must come, I suppose."
"My dear cousin, I am afraid you must explain."
"You know we republicans go for no distinctions except those created by Nature herself, and we found our rank upon COLOUR, because that is clearly a thing that none has any hand in but our Maker.
"I'm surprised to hear the question!
"Whatever could give the old lady such a turn?" said Miss Katy.
"That is quite evident from the fairy-like delicacy of your appearance," said the colonel.
General Bumble is one of the most dashing, brilliant fellows of the day."
"Why, their COLOUR, to be sure.
"Nevertheless, dear Miss Katy, one does not like to offend the Hornets."
"I think he is shockingly corpulent," said Colonel Katy-did, not at all pleased to hear him praised; "don't you?"
They have a vast talent for music and dancing; they are very quick at learning, and would be getting to the very top of the ladder if we once allowed them to climb.
"Well, they are in great trouble; all their stores destroyed, and their father killed--cut quite in two by a hoe."
"Who?
Of what can you be thinking?"
"Oh, I dote on them!
"Now," said Miss Katy-did, drawing an azalea-leaf towards her, "let us see--whom shall we have?
"Well dear Miss Katy," said the colonel, "if you ask my candid opinion as a friend, I should say not.
"My dear, you make me the happiest of Katy-dids."
It was, in fact, a morning that Miss Katy thought must have been made on purpose for her to enjoy herself in.
"It is a pity," said the colonel; "but one must pay one's tax to society."
But their being black is a convenience; because, as long as we are green and they black, we have a superiority that can never be taken from us. Don't you see now?"
"No, one can't.
"Those horrid Mosquitoes--they are dreadfully plebeian!
"Certainly I am a pretty creature," she said to herself; and when the gallant colonel said something about being dazzled by her beauty, she only tossed her head and took it as quite a matter of course.
Poor Miss Katy, with her flimsy green satin and point-lace, was one of the first victims, and fell from the bough in company with a sad shower of last year's leaves.
But we are forgetting our list.
But then you must see the difficulty."
Little Miss Cricket perceived how the case stood, and so hopped briskly off, without giving herself even time to be offended.
"Oh yes, I see exactly," said the colonel.
Still, if you have the Butterflies, you can't leave out the Moths."
The only true colour--the only proper one--is OUR colour, to be sure.
I understand she and her family ate up a whole ermine cape last month, and it disagreed with them."
There good old Mr. and Mrs. Cricket, with sprightly Miss Keziah and her brothers and sisters, found a warm and welcome home; and when the storm howled without, and lashed the poor naked trees, the Crickets on the warm hearth would chirp out cheery welcome to papa as he came in from the snowy path, or mamma as she sat at her work-basket.
"Cheep, cheep, cheep!" little Freddy would say.
Mamma said yesterday she was sure she didn't know how our bills were to be paid; and there's my green satin with point- lace yet to come home." And Miss Katy-did shrugged her shoulders and affected to be very busy with Colonel Katy-did, in just the way that young ladies sometimes do when they wish to signify to visitors that they had better leave.
I?
There's young Mosquito, who graduated last year, has gone into literature, and is connected with some of our leading papers, and they say he carries the sharpest pen of all the writers.
Just at this moment the conference was interrupted by a visitor, Miss Keziah Cricket, who came in with her work-bag on her arm to ask a subscription for a poor family of Ants who had just had their house hoed up in clearing the garden-walks.
And so Miss Katy's ball came off, and the performers kept it up from sundown till daybreak, so that it seemed as if every leaf in the forest were alive.
"I thought she never was sick."
"For my part, I can't conceive how the Moths can live as they do," said Miss Katy, with a face of disgust.
The fact is, that a class to be looked down upon is necessary to all elegant society; and if the Crickets were not black, we could not keep them down, because, as everybody knows, they are often a great deal cleverer than we are.
"Those spiteful Hornets!
"Yes; but who decides what colour shall be the reigning colour?"
But then we are liberal;--we associate with the Moths, who are gray; with the Butterflies, who are blue-and-gold coloured; with the Grasshoppers, yellow and brown; and society would become dreadfully mixed if it were not fortunately ordered that the Crickets are black as jet.
I detest them!"
There's such an everlasting tribe of those Moths; and if you invite dull people they're always sure all to come, every one of them.
Well, I'm sure I haven't anything to give.
Don't you see?"
"Why, I could no more eat worsted and fur, as they do--"
"Yes, we must have the Fireflies," echoed the colonel.
"Old Mrs. Moth has been laid up lately with a gastric fever, and that may keep two or three of the Misses Moth at home," said the colonel.
The Fireflies, of course; everybody wants them, they are so brilliant,--a little unsteady, to be sure, but quite in the higher circles."
Now, there's a trouble.
A lovely pea-green is the precise shade on which to found aristocratic distinction.
"Worthy enough, but dreadfully humdrum," said Miss Katy.
You see?"
The dark hurry and tumult, the stress and vehemence of the battle rushed in and overwhelmed them.
He made the offer abruptly. He addressed the man in yellow, but he spoke to her.
"I never expected it so soon," he cried.
His face expressed his struggle between conflicting ideas.
Then with a start he returned to his previous preoccupation about the flying stages.
"We must capture the flying stages," he explained.
"To wake," she cried, "for this!"
Then the door would open again, messengers would enter, or a sharp bell would stab their quiet privacy, and it was like a window in a well built brightly lit house flung open suddenly to a hurricane.
He calculated swiftly. "Half an hour."
He turned his eyes to Helen Wotton again.
"The Channel!" said the man in yellow.
"What matters it now that we have Roehampton?
"But, Sire!--How can one fight?
"This monoplane--it is a chance--."
"Victory?"
Section after section of the Labour-Societies reported itself assembled, reported itself marching, and vanished from knowledge into the labyrinth of that warfare. What was happening there?
"No.
CHAPTER XXIV
"How long would that take?" asked Graham suddenly.
Metallic voices were shouting "Victory!" Yes it was "Victory!"
"What do you mean?"
"Tell me!
But here was no spectacular battle-field such as he imagined.
He tried to speak calmly, but his face was white.
A big aeroplane is a clumsy thing.
"Tell them to put it upon the guides."
It might be got upon the guides--easily.
After all--.
He motioned towards the room where Graham must wait, he insisted no other course was possible.
He was saying that the south-west wards were marching.
"It is all over," he cried.
"Those guns?" cried Graham.
WHILE THE AEROPLANES WERE COMING
It is lying crossways to the carrier.
"At any moment a crisis may arise needing your presence and decision."
At all costs we must prevent that."
Ostrog's people have collapsed."
"They still have three of the flying stages," said the old man.
"We must know where you are," he said.
He saw her face respond.
"I must do it."
The man in yellow hesitated.
"Smashed?"
"Do what?"
"Yes," he said.
If once we could get them out upon the roof spaces."
Now the door would be closed and Graham and Helen were alone together; they seemed sharply marked off then from all the unprecedented world storm that rushed together without, vividly aware of one another, only concerned with one another.
"To fight--yes.
Her eyes brimmed with tears.
Those days for which you reproached me were not altogether wasted."
"Do you mean they are found?"
You said there was a monoplane--?"
But there is no aeronaut--."
A resolute man--!"
Graham stared at him absent-mindedly.
They were both clear that he must go.
"We cannot mount them--in half an hour."
I have thought before--.
"Even now--.
"None."
"Now that we have found those guns.
"Perhaps.
Yet, not to do it--or to let some one else attempt it--."
He saw a touch of surprise in her eyes.
Do you not see?
Bursting through the curtains appeared the man in yellow, startled and dishevelled with excitement, "Victory," he cried, "victory!
The people are winning.
He spoke after a long pause.
He explained elaborately.
Helen made a step towards Graham.
It may save--London!"
Tell them now--send them my message--to put it upon the guides.
"There has been no need.
"An hour--certainly."
An hour!"
You will be killed."
There was no step back from these towering heroisms.
But now the time has come.
"If we could stop them another hour!" cried the man in yellow.
He turned suddenly to Helen.
"I am an aeronaut.
I see now why I am here!"
He stopped, he could speak no more, he swept the alternative aside by a gesture, and they stood looking at one another.
"Nothing can stop them now," said the old man.
"This is the girl who told us what Ostrog had done," he said.
"Oh! what can it matter whether I speak well or ill?" he said, and felt the light grow brighter.
He spoke gustily, in broken incomplete sentences, but with all his heart and strength, of this new faith within him.
Take no thought though I am beaten, though I am utterly overthrown.
Each of these facts seemed struggling for complete possession of his thoughts.
Many little things happened, and then he found himself with the man in yellow entering a little room where this proclamation of his was to be made.
So we hoped in the days that are past.
Through the open doorway he saw a slight girlish figure approaching.
Perhaps some power unseen and unsuspected propelled them all.
In the centre was a bright oval lit by shaded electric lights from above.
The huge ears of a phonographic mechanism gaped in a battery for his words, the black eyes of great photographic cameras awaited his beginning, beyond metal rods and coils glittered dimly, and something whirled about with a droning hum.
It does not matter if you understand. It does not matter if you seem to fail.
He died the death of a saint a few years later, amid the blessings of all the people whom he had helped.
Huddled together in damp and filthy prisons, crawling with vermin, covered with sores and ulcers, brawling, blaspheming and fighting, the galley slaves made a picture suggestive only of Hell.
Many of these earnest Christians gave their very lives for the galley slaves; for fevers, plague and contagious diseases of every kind raged in the filthy convict prisons, and many priests and lay helpers died of the infection.
The work developed quickly; confraternities of charity were soon adopted in nearly all the parishes of France and have since extended over the whole Christian world.
One day, as Vincent was about to say Mass, one of these ladies begged him to speak to the congregation in favor of a poor family whose members were sick and starving.
There was no want of charity, but it needed organization.
The de Gondis, in the meantime, had discovered the place of Vincent's retreat and had written him several letters, piteously urging him to return.
This strange new friend who went about among them, kissing their chains, sympathizing with their sufferings and attending to their lowest needs seemed to them like an Angel from Heaven; even the most hardened could not resist such treatment.
His sword, which had served him in all his duels, and to which he was very much attached, he broke in pieces on a rock.
One by one he sold his estates to find the wherewithal for Vincent's schemes of charity, and he would have stripped himself of all that he had, had not Vincent himself forbidden it.
He was, moreover, half a heretic, and Vincent had been warned to have nothing to do with him.
What he saw filled him with horror.
The next day Vincent returned to the Hotel de Gondi, where he promised to remain during the lifetime of the Countess.
The conditions of service were such that many prisoners took their own lives rather than face the torments of such an existence.
Some of them, moved by curiosity, went to see the new preacher, who, receiving them with his usual kindness and courtesy, drew a touching picture of the suffering and poverty that surrounded them and begged them to think sometimes of their less fortunate brothers and sisters.
This, Vincent at once realized, was not practical.
"These are your people, Monseigneur!" he cried; "you will have to answer for them before God." The General was aghast; it had never occurred to him to think of the condition of the men who rowed his ships, and he gladly gave Vincent a free hand to do whatever he could to relieve them.
He then turned his attention to the clergy already there.
As Vincent went about his works of charity in Paris it occurred to him to visit the dungeons where the men who had been condemned to the galleys were confined.
They were the forerunners of those "Sisters of Charity" who were in after years to carry help and comfort among the poor of every country.
Vincent was humble enough to believe that he might be in the wrong.
The first advances were met with cursing and blasphemy, but Vincent was not to be discouraged.
Who was this priest who had so suddenly come among them, so self-forgetful, so simple, so unassuming, yet whose influence was so strong with all classes?
Gradually his bad companions dropped away, until one day Chatillon suddenly awoke to the fact that this most rackety of individuals was taking life seriously--was, in fact, a changed man. The whole town was in a stir.
Calling two other priests to his assistance, Vincent set to work at once to visit the convicts in the Paris prisons; but the men were so brutalized that it was difficult to know how to win them.
His first step was to be reconciled to the Church, his second to begin to interest himself in the poor.
With his own gentle charity he performed the lowest offices for these poor wretches to whom his heart went out with such an ardent pity; he cleansed them from the vermin which infested them and dressed their neglected sores.
In spite of weak health she gave freely of her time, her energy and her money.
Chained to their oars night and day, kept in order by cruel cuts of the lash on their bare shoulders, these men lived and died on the rowers' bench without spiritual help or assistance of any kind.
It was a question that might well be asked in the light of what was yet to come.
In the meantime, through the generosity of Vincent's friends, hospitals were being built and men and women were offering themselves to help in any capacity in this work of charity.
So successful was his appeal that when he himself went a few hours later to see what could be done, he found the road thronged with people carrying food and necessaries.
Gradually they were softened and would listen while he spoke to them of the Saviour who had died to save their souls.
There would be far too much today and nothing tomorrow.
In 1652 it was recognized by Pope Urban VIII under the name of the Congregation of the Mission.
It meant self-mastery, self-renunciation, self-forgetfulness total and complete.
The old custom of giving a retreat to priests who were about to be ordained had fallen into disuse.
Vincent could hardly fail to realize how necessary it was that the superior of a new Congregation should be in residence in his own house, but he confided the little company to God and awaited the development of events.
It was stipulated, however, that he should remain, as he had already promised, in the house of the founders, a condition which seemed likely to doom the enterprise to failure.
The solution was altogether unexpected.
Human energy will only hinder it unless directed by God.
In March, 1625, the foundation was made, and Vincent de Paul was named the first superior.
"Unless the Congregation of the Mission is humble," said Vincent, "and realizes that it can accomplish nothing of any value, but that it is more apt to mar than to make, it will never be of much effect; but when it has this spirit it will be fit for the purposes of God."
Chapter 5 MISSION WORK
The mission lasted ten or fourteen days, during which the Mission Priests were to have as much personal contact with the people as possible, visiting the sick and the infirm, reconciling enemies and showing themselves as the friends of all.
The new Congregation was to consist of a few good priests who, renouncing all thought of honor and worldly advancement, were to devote their lives to preaching in the villages and small towns of France.
"Of what good is a display of rhetoric?" he would ask; "who is the better for it?
Her broken-hearted husband not only consented to Vincent's residence in the College des Bons Enfants, but shortly afterwards, leaving that world where he had shone so brilliantly, he himself became a postulant at the Oratory.
Here, in an atmosphere of prayer and recollection, those who were about to be ordained had every opportunity of realizing the greatness of the step that they were taking and of making resolutions for their future lives.
It seemed to her that there was need to multiply such missions among the country poor, and no sooner had Vincent returned to her house than she offered him a large sum of money to endow a band of priests who would devote their lives to evangelizing the peasantry on her estates.
Its growth, nevertheless, was slow; ten years after the foundation the Congregation only numbered thirty-three members; but Vincent had no desire that it should be otherwise.
Vincent was delighted, but considering himself unfit to undertake the management of such an enterprise, he proposed that it should be put into the hands of the Jesuits or the Oratorians.
For "fine sermons" Vincent had the greatest contempt; he would use his merry wit to make fun of the pompous preachers whose only thought was to impress their audience with an idea of their own eloquence.
It is by what they see of your lives that you will help them; if you yourselves are striving for perfection, God will use you to lead these gentlemen in the right way."
Yet, in spite of all that such a vocation meant of self-renunciation, year after year the Mission Priests increased in number.
The most important point of all is that we should be in touch with Our Lord in prayer."
It serves no purpose but self-advertisement."
The Congregation of the Mission Priests was to inaugurate another good work for which there was an urgent necessity in the world of Vincent's day.
Before setting out on their mission journeys they used to give the key of the house to a neighbor; but as there was nothing in it to steal, there was little cause for anxiety. In the course of their travels other priests, realizing the greatness of the work, asked to be enrolled in the little company.
An old house called the College des Bons Enfants was at that moment vacant.
Knowing Vincent's loyalty to Holy Church and his obedience to authority, she determined to have recourse to her brother-in-law, the Archbishop of Paris.
Vincent lavished the greatest care on the training of his priests. They were to be simple and frank in their relations with the poor, modest in manner, friendly and easy of access.
In every case some obstacle intervened, until the Countess was more than ever persuaded that her first instinct had been right.
Dearest to his heart of all his undertakings was the first and chief work of the Congregation--the holding of missions for the poor.
"How can we lead souls to God?
The work thrived beyond all expectation.
To meet this necessity Vincent inaugurated a kind of guild for young priests who desire to live worthy of their vocation.
To Vincent, with his high ideals of the priesthood, this was a terrible revelation.
Many to whom they had been the turning point of a lifetime, felt the need of further help and instruction from the man who had awakened all that was noblest in their natures.
"It is not by knowledge that you will do them good," Vincent often repeated, "or by the fine things you say, for they are more learned than you--they have read or heard it all before.
The only difficulty was the expense entailed, for many of the retreatants could pay nothing toward their board and lodging, and Vincent would refuse nobody.
By twos and threes he would send out his sons to their labors, bidding them travel to their destination in the cheapest possible way.
The Mission Priests were to help in this work more by example than by precept; they were to preach by humility and simplicity.
The Mission Priests did good wherever they went; everybody wanted them, and it was hard to satisfy the appeals for missions which came from all over the country.
It was not easy to belong to the "Conferences." Members were pledged to offer their lives completely to God and to renounce all self-interest. Nevertheless, they increased rapidly in number, and the Conferences were attended by all the most influential priests in Paris.
There was no longer room for hesitation; the will of God seemed plain; indeed, Vincent's love of the poor had been for some time struggling with his humility.
Two sermons were to be preached daily--simple instructions on the great truths--and those who had not yet made their First Communion were to be catechized.
How can we stem the tide of wickedness among the people?
They were to accept neither free quarters nor gifts of any kind.
The religious wars had led to laxity and carelessness; drunkenness and vice were fearfully prevalent.
So the work of the Congregation increased and multiplied until it seemed almost too much for human capacity.
And the retribution was swift.
And when it was over and Raoul had turned aside to wash his hands, she slipped on to her knees beside him.
It was an agony of dread and apprehension, of momentary waiting for some word or exclamation from the powerful Arab who was holding him, or from Saint Hubert, who was riding beside him, that would mean his death, and of momentary respites from fear and faint glimmerings of hope as the minutes dragged past and the word she was dreading did not come.
Ahmed in the full power of his strength again would be the man he had always been, implacable, cruel, merciless.
Henri and I will watch.
Agony leaped into her eyes.
"I don't know--but we must get away from here.
Diana tried to get to him, faint and stumbling, flung here and there by the fighting, struggling men, until a strong hand caught her and drew her aside.
We cannot know for some time how it will go with him.
But for the dying wretch expiating his crimes so hideously she felt no pity, he was beyond all sympathy.
For a time Ahmed Ben Hassan lay motionless, and then, as the day crept on and the early rays of the warm sun filled the tent, he moved uneasily, and began to mutter feverishly in confused Arabic and French.
Where is Diane?...
From time to time Saint Hubert spoke to her, and the quiet courage of his voice steadied her breaking nerves.
She glanced back over her shoulder at Saint Hubert, but he had gone to the open doorway to speak to Yusef, and was standing out under the awning.
Then for a moment she dropped her bright head beside the bandaged one on the pillow, but when the Vicomte came back she was kneeling where he had left her, her hands clasped over one of the Sheik's and her face hidden against the cushions.
Ahmed was his friend.
The longing to save her from misery was acute, that, and his own love, prompted by the urging of the desire within him.
She leaned over him whispering his name, and a sudden hunger came to her to touch him, to convince herself that he was not dead.
The fear of him was wiped out in the fear for him.
He dropped the dead chief back into the tumbled cushions and looked up swiftly, and at the same moment Ibraheim Omair's men made a rush.
Diane, Diane, how could I know how much you meant to me?
And yet as he looked at her with eyes filled with hopeless misery a demon of suggestion whispered within him, tempting him.
"Very well," he said quietly, "but if you are going to stay you must take off your riding-boots and put on something more comfortable than those clothes."
She took it unheeding, and, swallowing it hastily, went to the side of the divan again.
"But the ride--the jolting," she gasped.
Shall I make you love me?...
To him, all his life, a thing desired had upon possession become valueless.
I have tortured her to keep my vow, and still I want her....
He must not die.
Three times he fired and one of the negroes and two Arabs fell, but the rest hurled themselves on him, and Diana saw him surrounded.
How could I know that I should love you?...
She winced as if the hurt had been her own when Saint Hubert's gentle, dexterous fingers touched the Sheik's bruised head.
Diana looked down on the wounded man fearfully.
Grand Dieu!
While Saint Hubert, with difficulty, cleared the tent of the Sheik's men Diana stood beside the divan and looked at him.
"Two hours south of the oasis with the three broken palm trees by the well....
He knew his friend as no one else did.
And she was afraid, with a shuddering horror, of the merciless, crimson-stained hands that would touch her, of the smiling, cruel mouth that would be pressed on hers, and of the murderous light shining in his fierce eyes.
I will not spare you.
The courage that had kept her up so far had not extended to asking Saint Hubert again, and a few muttered words from Henri, to which the Vicomte had responded with only a shrug, had killed the words that were hovering on her lips.
She strained against the detaining arm, but it was one of Ahmed's men, and she gave in as a growing faintness came over her. Mistily she saw Saint Hubert clear a way to his friend's side, and then she fainted, but only for a few moments.
Her face was deadly pale, and dark lines showed below her eyes, but her hands did not shake, and her voice was low and even.
She shook her head without looking up.
I cannot see you, Diane, Diane...."
She looked at him with anguished eyes.
I must help you.
Diane, Diane, it is all black.
I will come and tell you as soon as I am finished."
For four months she has fought me.
God would not be so cruel.
Has it been long to her?
The tent is cold and dark without you....
She moved her hand and it brushed against her jacket, coming away stained and sticky, and she noticed for the first time that all one side and sleeve were soaked with blood.
But she knew that such a chance was impossible; if she ever reached the open air she would never be allowed to get more than a few steps from the tent.
But the sharp, guttural voice predominating over the other voices killed the wild hope that had sprung up in her by its utter dissimilarity to the soft low tones for which she longed.
Her only course lay in the bravado that alone kept her from collapse.
"No.
But Diana called him back.
She must convey the impression of fearlessness, though cold terror was knocking at her heart.
Her sensitive lip curled with disgust, all her innate fastidiousness in revolt.
How late she did not know.
She dashed the cup to the floor, spilling its contents, and, with an effort, tore the clinging hands from her and sent the woman crashing on to the ground, rolling against the brazier, oversetting it, and scattering brass pots and cups over the rug.
Only a little larger than the one she had left, almost as bare, but her mind took in these things uncomprehendingly, for all her attention was focussed on the central figure in the room.
All that he could do he had done, he had shielded her body with his own, it must have been over his lifeless body that they had taken her.
Her watch had been broken some months before, and she had no means of even guessing the hour, but it must be well on in the evening.
For a while she lay still, fighting against the weakness that overpowered her, and by degrees the horrible nausea passed and the agony in her head abated, leaving only a dull ache.
She closed her eyes again with a shudder. The attempted devotion of Gaston had been useless.
He represented safety, salvation, everything that made life worth living.
Her own dread--not of the death that was imminent, but lest the mercy it offered should be snatched from her.
She was lying on a pile of cushions in one corner of a small-tented apartment which was otherwise bare, except for the rug that covered the floor.
The Nubian turned on her impatiently and thrust her roughly out of his way, and, coming to Diana, put out his hand as if to grasp her arm, but she stepped back with flashing eyes and a gesture that he obeyed.
The heat aggravated a burning thirst that was parching her throat.
Now that my Wilma has been at rest these many years, I wish that I might go back to the year 1927, and take up my old life where I left it off, in the abandoned mine near Scranton.
This opinion impressed San-Lan greatly.
But these were things that not even the most skilled of the Han hypnotists and psychoanalysts could drag from me.
Nor was there any sheen of shimmering disintegrator rays surrounding it, to interfere with the sparkling sight.
But the prestige I had gained among them, and the novelty of my expressed opinion carried much weight with them.
Real as my life was, and my love for my wife, there was much about it all that was like a dream, and in the midst of my tortures by the Hans, this complex--this habit of many months--helped me to tell myself that this, too, was all a dream, that I must not succumb, for I would wake up in a moment.
But had he done so, I truly believe he would have been ready to inflict degradation, torture and even death upon her, to make me surrender the information he wanted.
I had expected him to snort his disgust, as the extreme school of evolutionists would have done in the Twentieth Century.
Yet, did not even brilliant scientists frequently exhibit the same lack of logic back in the Twentieth Century?
Hypnotic Torture
Surrender of what?
Had they done so, it might have made a difference.
And at the period of which I speak, I was less attuned than now to the modern world.
I have since thought that I was greatly aided by my newness to this age. I have never, as a matter of fact, become entirely attuned to it.
I spent two months as a prisoner in Lo-Tan.
I must have been here some ten years before I saw sufficient to warrant any belief in the stories, current in the neighborhood, about this house.
It was not Halloween.
Gradually, I began to weary with the sameness of the thing.
The first thing I noticed was that the light had decreased, greatly; so that it no longer tried my eyes.
I have one friend, a dog; yes, I would sooner have old Pepper than the rest of Creation together.
A great while seemed to pass over me, and now I could nowhere see anything.
Gradually, I found that I was being borne forward, floating across the flat waste.
Little curved towers and pinnacles, with outlines suggestive of leaping flames, predominate; while the body of the building is in the form of a circle.
The interior of this ring was black, black as the gloom of the outer night.
Gradually, as I became more accustomed to the idea, I realized that I was looking out on to a vast plain, lit with the same gloomy twilight that pervaded the room.
We keep no servants--I hate them.
Slowly, I emerged from these, and there, below me, I saw the stupendous plain that I had seen from my room in this house that stands upon the borders of the Silences.
I have heard that there is an old story, told amongst the country people, to the effect that the devil built the place.
True or not, I neither know nor care, save as it may have helped to cheapen it, ere I came.
Presently, I landed, and stood, surrounded by a great waste of loneliness.
However, that is as may be.
Still, I sat watching; while a sort of dreamy indifference seemed to steal over me; banishing altogether the fear that had begun to grip me.
Now, however, I saw that it was not so; for the candles burned with a steady flame, and showed no signs of going out, as would have been the case had the change been due to fumes in the atmosphere.
For what seemed an eternity, I moved onward.
I had been considerably startled when the lights burnt first green and then red; but had been momentarily under the impression that the change was due to some influx of noxious gas into the room.
Then, as the years passed, bringing age upon me, I became often aware of something unseen, yet unmistakably present, in the empty rooms and corridors.
Steadily it grew, filling the room with gleams of quivering green light; then they sank quickly, and changed--even as the candle flames had done--into a deep, somber crimson that strengthened, and lit up the room with a flood of awful glory.
Nowhere could I descry any signs of life; not even the ruins of some ancient habitation.
It may have been a few seconds before I was able to open them.
I comprehended, at once, that it was from this extraordinary sun that the place derived its doleful light.
I am not superstitious; but I have ceased to deny that things happen in this old house--things that I cannot explain; and, therefore, I must needs ease my mind, by writing down an account of them, to the best of my ability; though, should this, my diary, ever be read when I am gone, the readers will but shake their heads, and be the more convinced that I was mad.
In no part could I perceive its confines.
Afar to my right, within the sky, there burnt a gigantic ring of dull-red fire, from the outer edge of which were projected huge, writhing flames, darted and jagged.
For perhaps a minute, I kept my glance about the room, nervously.
The immensity of this plain scarcely can be conceived.
Down on the floor, I heard a faint, frightened whimper, and something pressed itself in between my two feet.
Yet, it was a great time before I perceived any signs of the place, toward which I was being conveyed.
It was after midnight on the morning of the twenty-first day of January.
No.
I live here alone with my old sister, who is also my housekeeper.
I felt distinctly frightened; but could think of nothing better to do than wait.
Onward, outward, I drove.
I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.
All this time I had experienced little, save a sense of lightness and cold discomfort.
Slowly, the distant redness became plainer and larger; until, as I drew nearer, it spread out into a great, somber glare--dull and tremendous. Still, I fled onward, and, presently, I had come so close, that it seemed to stretch beneath me, like a great ocean of somber red.
I have decided to start a kind of diary; it may enable me to record some of the thoughts and feelings that I cannot express to anyone; but, beyond this, I am anxious to make some record of the strange things that I have heard and seen, during many years of loneliness, in this weird old building.
The place was lit with a gloomy twilight that gave an impression of indescribable desolation.
Without warning, the flames of the two candles went low, and then shone with a ghastly green effulgence.
It is true that I had, on at least a dozen occasions, seen, vaguely, things that puzzled me, and, perhaps, had felt more than I had seen.
I am an old man.
I was unaware of any great sense of impatience; though some curiosity and a vast wonder were with me continually.
If I were telling a story for amusement's sake, I should probably place it on that night of nights; but this is a true record of my own experiences, and I would not put pen to paper to amuse anyone.
Still, when I looked more intently, I was unable to say that it was really mist; for it appeared to blend with the plain, giving it a peculiar unrealness, and conveying to the senses the idea of unsubstantiality.
For a couple of centuries, this house has had a reputation, a bad one, and, until I bought it, for more than eighty years no one had lived here; consequently, I got the old place at a ridiculously low figure.
In a little while, a cold blast struck me, and I was outside in the night, floating, like a bubble, up through the darkness.
What was going to become of me?
Presently, in a half-conscious manner, I noticed that there was a faint mistiness, ruddy in hue, lying over its surface.
"At first, I saw it, far ahead, like a long hillock on the surface of the Plain.
In a further space, I found that I was descending upon it; and, soon, I sank into a great sea of sullen, red-hued clouds.
Further off, the sun, a splash of white flame, burned vividly against the dark.
I had passed beyond the fixed stars and plunged into the huge blackness that waits beyond.
I could see little, save that it appeared to spread out interminably in all directions.
It seemed to broaden and spread out, so that the eye failed to perceive any limitations.
Everywhere I looked, I saw nothing but the same flat weariness of interminable plain.
Suddenly, I became conscious that I was no longer in the chair. Instead, I seemed to be hovering above it, and looking down at a dim something, huddled and silent.
As I moved, an icy coldness seemed to enfold me, so that I shivered.
Still, it was as I have said many years before I saw any real manifestations of the so-called supernatural.
I was sitting reading, as is often my custom, in my study. Pepper lay, sleeping, near my chair.
The light came from the end wall, and grew ever brighter until its intolerable glare caused my eyes acute pain, and involuntarily I closed them.
And there I, a fragile flake of soul dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown.
Even as the thoughts were formed, there grew against the impalpable blackness that wrapped me a faint tinge of blood.
Then, for the last time, I saw the earth--an enduring globule of radiant blue, swimming in an eternity of ether.
Where was I going?
From that strange source of light, I glanced down again to my surroundings.
Now however the atrocious darkness seemed to creep into my soul, and I became filled with fear and despair.
An indefinite period passed.
The peasantry, who inhabit the wilderness beyond, say that I am mad. That is because I will have nothing to do with them.
After a time, I looked to right and left, and saw the intolerable blackness of the night, pierced by remote gleams of fire.
Pepper, usually as brave as a lion!
Once, I glanced behind, and saw the earth, a small crescent of blue light, receding away to my left.
He, at least, understands me--and has sense enough to leave me alone when I am in my dark moods.
I did not move.
A long, cold, miserable march it was too, hurrying in the daytime and freezing in our bivouacs in the snow and woods at night.
Our deeds were no credit to anybody, though here and there we had a little fight.
Although I was quartermaster sergeant of the regiment, I was always careful that this should not keep me away from the command when enduring hard marches or when engagements were coming on.
Yet few men were injured by them.
Our destination was New Madrid, where we were to be a part of Pope's army in the siege and capture of that town.
A comrade in Company A of my regiment had been wounded a few days before and had died in the enemy's hands.
We were to stop running after Price's ubiquitous army too.
I now found his grave.
At last an end came to this dreadful guerrilla-chasing business in Missouri so far as we were concerned, anyway.
It made him, too, commander of the Eastern army.
As he fell from his horse the adjutant sprang to the ground and cried, "Who shot the officer of the day?" "I fired," exclaimed the sentinel, and he then told of his experiences of the night.
I deserved no special credit for this.
We had muzzle-loading Whitney rifles and bayonets.
He resolved to stand behind a tree the next time and fire without hailing.
This army of prisoners taken in battle was his introduction to the world.
They were not opponents from different far-off sections fighting, but near neighbors, and nothing seemed too awful or too cruel for them to do.
The bullet struck the colonel in the forehead, killing him instantly.
Our command was now hurried to the Shiloh battlefield, of course too late to be of any use.
He was killed while trying to attend to other people's business."
Many a man we left to sicken and die at some farmhouse by the roadside.
We went out of that cornfield faster than we went in.
Later Matthies was made a general, and at the close of the war died of wounds received in battle.
I was only doing my duty.
A candle burned beside him, and his cold hands closed on a pencil note that said, "Kindly bury this unfortunate officer." His breakfast waited on a table in the tent, showing how unexpected was his taking off.
Their promotions had never come about.
With a different disposition he certainly would have been a distinguished soldier.
He was one of the most military-looking men in the whole army, but friends he had none.
The sentinel who did the killing declared that Rebels had been slipping up to his post all night, and when he would hail with "Who goes there?" they would fire at him and run into the darkness.
CHAPTER II
Now they knew why.
He was, however, a splendid disciplinarian, but this was something the volunteers did not want.
We were in more danger when a fool officer one day took our brigade of infantry down through a cornfield to assault a gunboat that lay in a creek close by.
Our victory was a great one for the nation, and it put two stars on the shoulder straps of General Pope.
The Rebel commander had expected us, and had his grape shot and his hot water hose, and such things all ready for us.
As we were about to embark on boats at St. Louis we beheld in the snow and storm many steamers anchored out in the pitiless waters of the Mississippi River.
At its head stood a board with this curious inscription: "This man says he was a private in the Fifth Iowa Regiment.
The equipment and rations we carried in weight would have been a respectable load for a mule.
One morning we left the cold and snow, where we had lived and shivered in thin tents all the winter, left the thankless duty of patrolling railroads in the storm at midnight, and marched in the direction of St. Louis.
In their minds the colonel had been only a petty tyrant, and not even wholly loyal.
Yet there were many among us who believed that the colonel had been intentionally murdered. He was one of the most competent colonels in the army, but among his soldiers he was fearfully unpopular.
He was arrested, tried, and acquitted.
The sight moved me as no great battle ever did afterward.
Now for months my regiment, with others, had chased up and down, and all over that unhappy old State of Missouri, trying to capture and punish these bands of murderers.
It was a new experience to us, to have cannonballs come rolling right into our camp occasionally.
I recall finding a dead Rebel officer, lying on a table in his tent, in full uniform.
But we took part in the long, wonderful, and ridiculous siege of Corinth, under Halleck, when our great army was held back by red tape, martinets, and the fear of a lot of wooden guns that sat on top of the enemy's breastworks, while that enemy, with all his men, and with all his guns, and bag and baggage, was escaping to the south.
After his death numbers of the men of the regiment were indignant, when they found among his papers warrants and commissions intended by the governor for them, commissions that had never been delivered.
Shortly we were before New Madrid, and the siege conducted by General Pope commenced.
His body was brought into camp the next morning and lay in his tent in state.
One half of the male population of Missouri was trying to kill the other half.
Their kind of war meant ambuscades and murder.
One incident of great importance, however, happened to my regiment here. It was the death of our colonel.
Worthington was succeeded by Colonel C. L. Matthies, one of the bravest, best, and most loved commanders of our army.
It was rare that we could catch them or have a real fight.
A great volume would not contain the record of them all.
The glad news came to my regiment that we were to be transferred to the South, where the real war was.
The town was defended by strong forts and many cannon, but its speedy capture by us helped to open up the Mississippi River.
THE CACTUS
As he slowly unbuttoned his gloves, there passed through Trysdale's mind a swift, scarifying retrospect of the last few hours.
It's worth the trip. Hallo! here's an old acquaintance.
"I don't drink just now, thanks," said Trysdale.
But even that poor consolation had been wrenched from him.
And how free from either she had always been--But why--
"Yes.
Both men were in evening dress.
If--
Indeed, his conceit had crumbled; its last prop was gone.
He waited until night, but her answer did not come.
Wherever did you rake up this cactus, Trysdale?"
It seemed that in his nostrils was still the scent of the flowers that had been banked in odorous masses about the church, and in his ears the lowpitched hum of a thousand well-bred voices, the rustle of crisp garments, and, most insistently recurring, the drawling words of the minister irrevocably binding her to another.
It's a tropical concern.
Vanity and conceit?
take something to ease your conscience."
Is there anything you do not know?"
There had been no quarrel between them, nothing--
That is what Trysdale was doing, standing by a table in his bachelor apartments.
"I say, Trysdale, what the deuce is the matter with you?
She had always insisted upon placing him upon a pedestal, and he had accepted her homage with royal grandeur.
White favors like stars upon their coats shone through the gloom of the apartment.
Humbled now, he sought the answer amid the ruins of his self-conceit.
He was courteous, adamant, waiting her explanation.
For, when he saw that swift, limpid, upward look that she gave the man when he took her hand, he knew himself to be forgotten.
From this last hopeless point of view he still strove, as if it had become a habit of his mind, to reach some conjecture as to why and how he had lost her.
"Your brandy," resumed the other, coming over and joining him, "is abominable.
Their greetings were conventional, but she looked at him, breathless, wondering, eager.
"A present," said Trysdale, "from a friend.
No doubt he (Trysdale) had been guilty (he sometimes did such things) of airing at the club some old, canting Castilian proverb dug from the hotchpotch at the back of dictionaries. Carruthers, who was one of his incontinent admirers, was the very man to have magnified this exhibition of doubtful erudition.
They call it by this name--Ventomarme.
Who had been to blame?
His large pride and hurt vanity kept him from seeking her. Two evenings later they met at a dinner.
Look at me, another accessory, come two thousand miles on a garlicky, cockroachy banana steamer all the way from South America to connive at the sacrifice--please to observe how lightly my guilt rests upon my shoulders.
He had told himself that her paleness was from thoughts of another than the man to whom she was about to give herself.
The scene was the night when he had asked her to come up on his pedestal with him and share his greatness.
If you marry, I wish you a happy life.
'You are the only one affected?'
Suppose we had married, and after that lost the money!'
When he raised his head Marian saw that he looked older, and she noticed--or fancied she did--that there was some unfamiliar peculiarity about his eyes.
He walked about and ejaculated splenetic phrases on the subject of his ill-luck.
'But of course your interests will be properly looked after.
'I am obliged to you for coming,' he began with distant formality. 'Since I saw you last I have learnt something which makes a change in my position and prospects, and it is necessary to speak on the subject.
'This won't make any difference to you--in the end, my darling,' the mother ventured to say at length, alluding for the first time to the effect of the catastrophe on Marian's immediate prospects.
'There's something I must tell you.
Sit down, Marian.
'I know you didn't, Jasper.
'I am prepared to do that, father.'
What I wish to say is, that it will be better if from to-day you consider yourself as working for your own subsistence.
But it is right that you should understand what my prospects are.
It's so bitterly cold.
'I have to go out, mother, so we won't speak of it.'
He had never satisfied her heart's desire of infinite love; she never spoke with him but she was oppressed with the suspicion that his love was not as great as hers, and, worse still, that he did not wholly comprehend the self-surrender which she strove to make plain in every word.
'Well, well; it isn't a matter of much moment.
The girls were appalled.
It will at least be eight guineas.
'No.
Now that Jasper's love might be endangered, it behoved her to use any arts which nature prompted.
I'm not the fellow to be beaten.
He again lost himself in anxious reverie.
That thought which at times gives trouble to all women of strong emotions was working in her: had she been too demonstrative, and made her love too cheap?
Come here and forgive me.'
We are forgetting all about it.'
'Oh, but how coldly you speak, Jasper!'
With the dissipation of the fog rain had set in; its splashing upon the muddy pavement was audible.
'Well, I shouldn't be surprised if that were found necessary,' replied her brother caustically.
Marian withdrew.
Jasper gave no answer, but kicked a footstool savagely out of his way and paced the room.
If the blackguards pay ten shillings in the pound you will get two thousand five hundred out of them, and that's something.
'You don't say that seriously, Jasper?'
Throughout the day Marian kept her room.
If the disease prove irremediable, I must prepare myself for the worst.
'What else can you expect?'
'To bed?
'Not to-night.
'I only wanted to make myself indispensable to them, and at the end of this year I shall feel pretty sure of that.
'I am content for you to think so,' she said.
'None.
Marian took a place beside her.
For the first time Jasper saw her cheeks colour deeply, and it was with anything but pleasure.
At times she lay in silent anguish; frequently her tears broke forth, and she sobbed until weariness overcame her.
He did not immediately move.
She could not breathe a word which might be interpreted as fear lest the change of her circumstances should make a change in his feeling. Yet that was in her mind.
'First of all, what about my letter to your father?
'Of what?'
At seven, Marian went out.
'We are here, and here we must stay,' was the final expression of his mood.
'Come, Marian!
Even whilst he spoke his eyes wandered absently.
I am quite well again.'
But you make me think that--'
Maud glanced at her sister, but Dora was preoccupied.
A girl like you.
'Oh, I shall transfer myself to a better paper presently.
'Of course not,' was the reply, in a tone of self-persuasion.
The experiment is worth a try I'm certain.
'Your father has asked to see you when you come down,' Mrs Yule whispered.
'There is something far worse than that, Jasper.'
Then I must come to you.'
Her heart ached because, in her great misery, he had not fondled her, and intoxicated her senses with loving words.
Finding herself weaker than she had thought, she stopped an empty cab that presently passed her, and so drove to the Milvains' lodgings.
And nodding a good-night he left them.
'What does he wish you to do, dear?'
And so, for once, he was not wholly satisfied with her, and at their parting he wondered what subtle change had affected her manner to him.
'Did you make that considerate remark to Marian?' asked Maud.
'No; I quite understand that.'
CHAPTER XXX.
She did not approach, but only because the painful thought he had excited kept her to that spot.
'And shall we have to go back to our old lodgings again?' inquired Maud.
'A lesson against being over-hasty,' he muttered, again kicking the footstool.
But what I have in mind is this.
Jasper was at home, and working.
'Work and wait, I suppose.'
'How can I make you feel how much I love you?' she murmured.
'Your father can hardly be sorry,' said Jasper.
Jasper stood rather stiffly, and threw his head back.
Marian entered the study.
He bit the ends of his moustache, and his eyes glared at the impalpable thwarting force that to imagination seemed to fill the air about him.
'Will you let me be what help to you I can?'
It was as necessary to him as to her to have a respite before the graver discussion began.
I prefer not to speak of it.'
The question made her wince.
And I was thinking more of--'
WAITING ON DESTINY
At five her mother brought tea.
'Perhaps he was.
The girl listened in an attitude of despair.
'Not a bit of it.
It wouldn't be good for you.'
When did the letter come?'
'Oh, you can't, dear!
And why shouldn't I go on writing for myself--for us?
"Finally Mr. Rabbit had made the round of all his friends and neighbors, and he once more reached his tumble-down house.
"Ask Grandfather Frog; he knows," replied Old Mr. Toad, and started on about his business.
Old King Bear put on his blackest coat.
"'That's right, Mr. Skunk!
"'If you want the rest of us to help you, you'd better get things started yourself,' said old Mr. Skunk, carefully combing out his big, plumy tail.
Oh, dear!
"Now Mr. Woodchuck was a worker and very, very neat.
He would ask all his neighbors to help him, and perhaps then he could get his house and garden in order by the time Old Mother Nature arrived.
She was greatly pleased with all she saw as she went along, until she came to the home of Mr. Rabbit.
It was all weeds and brambles.
Happy Jack Squirrel sat with his hands folded across his white waistcoat.
The fact is, Old Mother Nature was like all the rest of Mr. Rabbit's neighbors--she just couldn't help loving happy-go-lucky Mr. Rabbit in spite of all his faults.
Happy Jack noticed it.
"Now when old Mr. Rabbit heard that Old Mother Nature was coming, his heart sank way, way down, for he knew just how angry she would be when she saw his house, his garden and his shabby suit.
Peter was sitting up very straight, but his hands dropped right down in front.
It was all because he was so dreadfully curious about other people's business, just as Peter Rabbit is now.
"Instead of hurrying home and getting to work himself, Mr. Rabbit stopped a while after each call and sat with his arms folded, watching the one he was calling on work.
"That gave Mr. Rabbit an idea.
And this is how it happens that Grandfather Frog told this story to the little meadow and forest people gathered around him on the bank of the Smiling Pool.
"Now Mr. Rabbit was lazy.
"Now Old Mother Nature likes to take people by surprise, and it happened that she chose this very day to make her promised visit.
The very sight of work scared old Mr. Rabbit.
He is very fond of sitting with his hands folded that way. A little way from him sat Peter Rabbit.
"Why not?" asked Happy Jack.
WHY PETER RABBIT CANNOT FOLD HIS HANDS
It will be a lot easier to work when all my friends are here to help,' So he sighed once more and folded his arms, instead of beginning work as he should have done.
But as she watched him sitting there, dreaming in the warm sunshine, her anger began to melt away.
So Mr. Rabbit called on Mr. Skunk and Mr. Coon and Mr. Mink and Mr. Squirrel and Mr. Chipmunk, and all the rest of his neighbors, telling them of his trouble and asking them to help.
"'Oh, dear!
"He can't, and none of his family can," said a gruff voice.
You see, he was so busy minding other people's business that he didn't have time to attend to his own. So his brown and gray coat always was rumpled and tumbled and dirty. His house was a tumble-down affair in which no one but Mr. Rabbit would ever have thought of living, and his garden--oh, dear me, such a garden you never did see!
"I really believe he can't fold his hands," said Happy Jack to himself, but speaking aloud.
He brought up some clean yellow sand from deep down in the ground and sprinkled it smoothly over his doorstep.
He meant to have his home looking just as fine as he could make it.
It was very comfortable.
Then everybody began to fix up their homes and make them as neat and nice as they knew how--everybody but Mr. Rabbit.
Then, peering through the tangle of brambles, she spied old Mr. Rabbit sitting on his broken-down doorstep with his arms folded and fast asleep.
"You mean you can't!" jeered Happy Jack.
"'Mercy me!' exclaimed Old Mother Nature, throwing up her hands as she saw the tumble-down house almost hidden by the brambles and weeds. 'Can it be possible that any one really lives here?'
It seemed that he was just born to be curious and so, of course, to get into trouble.
But then, Jerry Muskrat is a funny fellow.
Peter looked over at Johnny Chuck and winked.
"He means himself and his family," he whispered with a chuckle.
When Peter kicked it it flew out into the air and landed with a great splash in the Smiling Pool, close beside the big green lily-pad on which Grandfather Frog was sitting.
Then some of the animals began to spend most of their time on the land.
"That's so," replied Peter.
"I don't see what he has his house in the water for, anyway.
"It does seem a funny place," he admitted.
Peter nudged Johnny Chuck.
Now Old Mother Nature had been keeping a sharp watch, as she always does, and when she found that they were foolish enough to like the land best, she did all that she could to make things comfortable for them.
None of his friends on land had such a big, fine house, and Mr. Muskrat was very proud of it.
Grandfather Frog didn't answer.
"I have a mind not to, just to get even with you," said Grandfather Frog, settling himself comfortably, "but I believe I will, to show you that there are some folks who can take a joke without losing their temper."
Johnny Chuck scratched his head thoughtfully.
Yes, Sir, most of the animals lived in the water, as sensible animals do to-day."
Funny place to build a house, isn't it?"
Grandfather Frog saw them coming, and he guessed right away that they were coming for a story.
Peter looked at Grandfather Frog sharply.
Johnny tried again, and still no reply.
So presently he climbed back on to his big green lily-pad, blinking his great, goggly eyes and looking just a wee bit foolish.
What do you mean by frightening an old fellow like me this way?"
Peter nodded.
Grandfather Frog folded his hands across his white and yellow waistcoat and half closed his eyes, as if looking way, way back into the past.
Of course he didn't see it coming, and of course it gave him a great start.
"I do believe you are right, Johnny Chuck, and if you are, there must be a story about it, and if there is a story, Grandfather Frog will be sure to know it.
Let's go ask him why Jerry Muskrat builds his house in the water."
"Chug-a-rum!" he began.
"Goody!" cried Peter and Johnny Chuck together, sitting down side by side on the very edge of the bank.
"So from that day to this, the Muskrats have built their houses in the water, and have been among the most industrious, contented, and happy of all the animals.
Now just at that place on the bank was growing a toadstool.
At first they only laughed, but after a while they found that quite often there were times when it would be very nice to be at home in the water as they once had been.
"Chug-a-rum!" exclaimed Grandfather Frog and dived head first into the water.
He wasn't so sure that that was a real nap.
"Mr. Muskrat hesitated.
"Just trying to get even with you for trying to fool us into thinking that you were asleep when you were wide awake," replied Peter.
"Probably he is taking a nap in that big house of his," said Johnny Chuck, "and if he is we'll have to sit here until he wakes up, or else go back home and visit him some other time."
"A long, long time ago, when the world was young, there was very little dry land, and most of the animals lived in the water.
Now toadstools, as you all know, are not very well fastened at the roots, and this one was no different from the rest.
"After a time," continued Grandfather Frog, "there began to be more land and still more.
"It certainly does seem a funny place.
It seemed to him that there was just the least little hint of a smile in the corners of Grandfather Frog's big mouth.
"Oh, Grandfather Frog, do tell us why it is that Jerry Muskrat builds his house in the water.
So Johnny Chuck sat down where he was, which was right where Grandfather Frog could see him by lifting one eyelid just the teeniest bit, and Peter hopped along the bank until he was right behind Grandfather Frog.
He grinned to himself and pretended to go to sleep.
Then he turned around, and with one of his long hind-feet, he kicked the toadstool with all his might.
But with all his pride he never forgot that it was a reward for trying to be content with his surroundings and making the best of them.
"You sit here a minute," he whispered in Johnny Chuck's ear.
At first Grandfather Frog was angry, very angry indeed.
"Good morning, Grandfather Frog," said Johnny Chuck.
Please do!"
Gia-Gia, Manchu Tao-Tai, Goodwood Ming, Marland Myth, and others.
EARS--Small and V-shaped, nicely feathered, set wide apart and high on the head and carried slightly forward.
TAIL--Carried in a tight curl over the back. It should be profusely feathered so as to give the appearance of a beautiful "plume" on the animal's back.
The following is the official standard issued by the Club:--
Daddy Jap.
The Japanese Spaniel is constitutionally delicate, requiring considerable care in feeding.
STOP--Deep. EARS--Heart-shaped; not set too high; leather never long enough to come below the muzzle; not carried erect, but rather drooping, long feather.
Finely minced rabbit, or fish are better.
The colouring other than white was usually about the long-fringed ears and the crown of the head, with a line of white running from the point of the snub black nose between the eyes as far as the occiput.
Lord John and another naval officer, a cousin of the late Duchess of Richmond's, each secured two dogs; the fifth was taken by General Dunne, who presented it to Queen Victoria.
NOSE--Black, broad, very short and flat.
SIZE--Being a toy dog the smaller the better, provided type and points are not sacrificed.
NOSE--Very short in the muzzle part.
It is fairly certain that they are indigenous to the Far East, whence we have derived so many of our small snub-nosed, large-eyed, and long-haired pets.
The Oriental peoples have always bred their lap dogs to small size, convenient for carrying in the sleeve.
Black masks, and spectacles round the eyes, with lines to the ears, are desirable.
The "sleeve dog" and the "chin dog" are common and appropriate appellations in the East.
LEGS--The bones of the legs should be small, giving them a slender appearance, and they should be well feathered.
TAIL--Curled and carried well up on loins; long, profuse straight feather.
For puppies newly weaned it is well to limit the supply of milk foods and to avoid red meat.
The term red includes all shades, sable, brindle, lemon or orange, but the brighter and clearer the red the better.
The white should be clear white, and the colour, whether black or red, should be evenly distributed in patches over the body, cheeks, and ears.
An important point is the coat.
This blaze up the face was commonly said to resemble the body of a butterfly, whose closed wings were represented by the dog's expansive ears.
The white and black colouring is now the most frequent.
It should be absolutely free from wave or curl, and not lie too flat, but have a tendency to stand out, especially at the neck, so as to give a thick mane or ruff, which with profuse feathering on thighs and tail gives a very showy appearance.
The following is the scale of points as issued by the Pekinese Club:--
As their breed-name implies, these tiny black and white, long-haired lap dogs are reputed to be natives of the land of the chrysanthemum. The Japanese, who have treasured them for centuries, have the belief that they are not less ancient than the dogs of Malta.
MUZZLE--Very short and broad; not underhung nor pointed; wrinkled.
The dogs were, and are to this day, jealously guarded under the supervision of the Chief Eunuch of the Court, and few have ever found their way into the outer world.
The Japanese Spaniel was certainly known in England half a century ago, and probably much earlier.
It would not be fitting to close an article on Pekinese without bearing testimony to their extraordinarily attractive characteristics. They are intensely affectionate and faithful, and have something almost cat-like in their domesticity.
In every case a black muzzle is indispensable, also black points to the ears, with trousers, tail and feathering a somewhat lighter shade than the body.
LEGS--Short; fore-legs heavy, bowed out at elbows; hind-legs lighter, but firm and well shaped.
Their colours were not invariably white and black.
They display far more character than the so-called "toy dog" usually does, and for this reason it is all-important that pains should be taken to preserve the true type, in a recognition of the fact that quality is more essential than quantity.
CHAPTER XLV
A frequent--almost a daily--change of diet is to be recommended, and manufactured foods are to be avoided.
FEET--Flat, not round; should stand well up on toes, not on ankles.
The legs are by preference slender and much feathered, the feet large and well separated.
COAT--Profuse, long, straight, rather silky.
HEIGHT AT SHOULDER--About ten inches.
The Duchess of Richmond occasionally gave away a dog to intimate friends, such as the Dowager Lady Wharncliffe, Lady Dorothy Nevill, and others, but in those days the Pekinese was practically an unknown quantity, and it can therefore be more readily understood what interest was aroused about eleven years ago by the appearance of a small dog, similar in size, colour, and general type to those so carefully cherished at Goodwood.
Is it therefore to be wondered at that confusion exists as to what is the true type?
Rice usually agrees well; fresh fish, sheep's head, tongue, chicken livers, milk or batter puddings are also suitable; and occasionally give oatmeal porridge, alternated with a little scraped raw meat as an especial favour.
'Can you promise to keep a little love for me all that time?' he asked with a constrained smile.
Could you do anything that would sell? With very moderate success in fiction you might make three times as much as you ever will by magazine pot-boilers.
Mrs Yule sat down, and watched the girl raise the cup to her mouth with trembling hand.
He tried to smile.
'And you have been fretting over it all day.
She spoke with shaken voice, her eyes fixed upon his face.
'Oh, no doubt.'
I have to rely upon my own efforts. What's the time?
Wouldn't somebody help him?'
'You would have been no worse off than plenty of literary men,' said Dora.
Marian's look was fixed upon him, and he became conscious of it.
'You know the reason, dear.
You can help me to think of subjects.'
'You know me too well to fear.'
She was on the point of confessing that she had swooned, but something restrained her.
Surely that is extreme behaviour.'
It could be smelt and tasted.
'A girl like me?'
'How the deuce comes this about?' he exclaimed.
'Much.
'Well now, we are quite sure of each other.
We have talked about it.'
'So father says.
If I do that, I shall have a right to the money, I think.
'I thought you seemed a little doubtful.'
'Father has been telling me something, Marian,' said Mrs Yule after a long silence.
But how do you stand?
I only meant--'
'He has seen an oculist?--a really good doctor?'
'There's not much help to be expected in this world,' answered the girl.
'I understand.
But I am going out in an hour or two.'
Jasper gave a whistle of consternation, and looked vacantly from the paper to Marian's countenance.
'What shall we do, Jasper?'
'I suppose she's wretched?' said Dora.
'No, indeed.'
He'll get worse and worse, until there has been an operation; and perhaps he'll never be able to use his eyes properly again.'
'Perhaps not.
'You are right.
'Why didn't Marian come to speak a word?' said Dora, when her brother entered the girls' sitting-room about ten o'clock.
'Your father has been behaving brutally,' he said, holding her hands and gazing anxiously at her.
'Why no, of course not.'
You understand?
The existence of such a fear meant, of course, that she did not entirely trust him, and viewed his character as something less than noble.
'You feel much better now, don't you?'
A fog-veiled sky added its weight to crush her spirit; at the hour when she usually rose it was still all but as dark as midnight.
He talked of going to the workhouse, and things like that.
'And how did he speak to you?'
'That isn't exactly the question.
'Is there no remedy for cataract in its early stages?' asked Marian.
I have reached a point where I cannot endure this any longer. I am not condemning the Church.
I have not been walking in His steps.
But I feel as you do.
In order to follow it I shall be obliged to resign from Nazareth Avenue Church."
Where has the suffering come in?
My wife is fully in accord with me.
It was no ordinary action they were deciding.
There had sprung up in them at the same time a longing that amounted to a passion, to get nearer the great physical poverty and spiritual destitution of the mighty city that throbbed around them.
"What is your plan?"
But I have at last decided on my course.
The sin and misery of this great city have beaten like waves against the stone walls of my church and of this house in which I live, and I have hardly heeded them, the walls have been so thick.
But I cannot say that I have suffered any for Jesus.
I believe in her mission and have no desire to destroy. Least of all, in the step I am about to take do I desire to be charged with abandoning the Christian fellowship.
So was Dr. Bruce from the same cause.
I am not forsaking the Church.
That was what they had promised.
"We were very good friends," added Felicia.
"Yes, and you also.
It was a small but well equipped carpenter's shop.
I'm able to earn my own living now."
"We have met before," said Felicia looking at Clyde frankly.
"How?
Love is older than I am, and wiser."
"Aye, Aye!
It was almost like the old pang over Camilla.
"Yes, 'back in the world,' dear Bishop.
"Miss Sterling, Mr. Stephen Clyde," said the Bishop.
I learned the trade, hoping some time to be of use, I am night clerk at one of the hotels.
That Sunday morning when you took the pledge at Nazareth Avenue Church, I took it with the others."
Shall I not follow it?"
You're right.
"Those things!" said Felicia with a show of indignation.
Making those things?"
Felicia's face glowed for an instant.
"It is a long story, Miss Sterling.
"You poor Bishop!
"Felicia!" exclaimed the Bishop.
I am.
"I am very glad to see you."
There were two windows in the front, very clean, and that was remarkable to begin with.
"Why, don't you know?
The Bishop one afternoon came out of the Settlement and walked around the block, intending to go on a visit to one of his new friends in the district.
Then she looked her companion in the eyes frankly and answered: "Truly and truly, nothing more."
It belonged to God.
You see, I thought I would get settled first and work out something, and then come with some real thing to offer.
I begin to see what your plan is. You can be of infinite help to us.
A very good thing for me.
"You are?" the Bishop said a little incredulously.
"Well, dear Bishop," said Felicia, who had always called him so, "I knew how overwhelmed you were with your work.
"That is my gospel.
Although, to speak truth for him, he had no desire to go back to it.
I am an expert and I have a plan I want you to admire and develop.
"Did you?" said Felicia slowly.
"I am glad."
It was good.
The flush of pleasure mounted to the young carpenter's forehead.
"Are you?"
This is the Bishop.
"Hold up your hands, and be quick about it!" said the man with the pistol.
These are the only clean windows in the block."
The Bishop says I ought to be very grateful.
How is it that you're working here?"
My father lost his money and I was obliged to go to work.
I am very happy now.
"Yes." Felicia hesitated.
Those who went with him in making the promise breathed into the church the very breath of divine life, and are continuing that life-giving work at this present time.
He looked up as the two entered, and took off his cap.
But you must come to the Settlement.
"You have had a great deal of trouble since--since--then," he said, and then he was afraid he had wounded her, or called up painful memories.
"But nothing more?" the Bishop ventured to ask.
Two kinds of geese frequent the Falklands.
It is asserted that in Sweden, which any one would have thought a more favourable climate, the rabbit cannot live out of doors.
Their little inclination is the most remarkable circumstance in these "streams of stones." On the hill-sides I have seen them sloping at an angle of ten degrees with the horizon; but in some of the level, broad-bottomed valleys, the inclination is only just sufficient to be clearly perceived.
In some places, a continuous stream of these fragments followed up the course of a valley, and even extended to the very crest of the hill.
The quartz rock must have been quite pasty when it underwent such remarkable flexures without being shattered into fragments.
From the great number of cows which have been killed, there is a large proportion of bulls.
In the deep and retired channels of Tierra del Fuego, the snow-white gander, invariably accompanied by his darker consort, and standing close by each other on some distant rocky point, is a common feature in the landscape.
Another day, having placed myself between a penguin (Aptenodytes demersa) and the water, I was much amused by watching its habits.
In many parts of the island the bottoms of the valleys are covered in an extraordinary manner by myriads of great loose angular fragments of the quartz rock, forming "streams of stones." These have been mentioned with surprise by every voyager since the time of Pernety.
Of the latter I now possess a specimen, and it is marked about the head differently from the French specific description.
It is not possible to ascertain their thickness, but the water of small streamlets can be heard trickling through the stones many feet below the surface.
The Gauchos whom I asked, though asserting this to be the case, were unable to account for it, except from the strong attachment which horses have to any locality to which they are accustomed.
These clumsy, loggerheaded ducks make such a noise and splashing, that the effect is exceedingly curious.
The geological structure of these islands is in most respects simple. The lower country consists of clay-slate and sandstone, containing fossils, very closely related to, but not identical with, those found in the Silurian formations of Europe; the hills are formed of white granular quartz rock.
A couple of herons, fishing at the edge of the bog, bend their necks and make off with hoarse, shrill trumpetings; and a herd of splashing heifers, scenting the approach of a beast of prey, begin to growl and snort.
The wound that the old giant pike had received was not a dangerous one. True, there were two rows of deep cuts made by a pair of thick, round-toothed jaws in the flesh on one side of her back; but they healed like so many others that she had had in her time.
Once more there is a pause in the fighting.
She is trying to get hold of his leg or body, and therefore twists round with him so that he flaps like a loose piece of strap on an axle; but she is not sufficiently supple to reach him.
Up and down, the two well-matched opponents dive incessantly.
The harrier was sitting on her newly-hatched young, and the pair of crows were feeding theirs for the last time; it was the time of the owls--and the nightingales.
Only a few moments before, all the sloping banks of the bog had been held by the sun; it shone upon the flowers of the wild chervil and upon a narrow strip of orange gravel that had been scraped out of one of the banks.
But the otter only keeps a firmer hold.
Nature had endowed it with a peculiarly active power of assimilation, which was probably necessary if it was to keep warm in the cold water; it needed daily its own weight in fish, and therefore had to be incessantly changing its hunting-ground.
Pike, which it used especially to catch in the bogs, were somewhat dry, it is true, but after all, one could not have salmon and trout every day!
In her mad rush down, Grim has come near these, and instinctively seeks shelter beneath them.
Grim soon sees that this pace is wearing out her strength, and pauses for a moment.
For a moment the flower stands out perfect, large and round at the end of its slender, black stalk, and then the illusion is shattered: from a toadstool the poppy has turned into a moon!
Grim has now to content herself with sending her opponent a cold, dull, fishy glance, and let the Nipper continue its journey down into her draw-bag.
It sniffs long and continuously, as it stretches its round, shaggy neck out over the ridge.
Black mud was stirred up in whirlpools; seething bubbles came to the surface and burst.
He had once been caught by the tip of one claw in an otter-trap.
Suddenly he feels one of his feet seized.
A monster crayfish, that has become so stiff with age that it can scarcely manage to strike a proper blow with its tail, has made for itself, in fear of Grim, a reliable place of refuge in the hole.
The water began to sparkle with strong, bright colours, and patches of yellow, scarlet, and blue floated about, shot with brilliant flakes of emerald and purple, which gave darkened reflections of the birch-tops.
She quickly regains her balance, however, frees her body from the pressure, and sets off, with sudden twists, and leaps from the bottom to the surface, turning so suddenly that the fish-snatcher's body swings out and hangs down in the water.
The trap was heavy, and had dragged him under water; and he had only escaped at the last moment. With the grasp on his leg, his lungs begin to warn him, his throat contracts, and his eyes seem on the point of bursting.
XIII: A FIGHT WITH AN OTTER
She rolls round, unable to use her fins.
A large otter with low-set ears cautiously raises its head above the strip of gravel.
As she does so, she feels as if an eel were winding its pliant body round her chest.
With all possible speed he slips out from among the roots, and is already rising; and as he approaches the surface and finds the blessed light beating more and more strongly upon the mud about his eyes, he hastens his flight, until, with an eager sniff, he reaches the surface.
Whenever Grim goes to the surface, a puffing and growling is heard.
But now it was gone.
The otter, with a newly-caught fish in its mouth, had been on its way out to a little island, intending to have its meal under a sallow, when it was suddenly attacked and robbed of its prey.
At full speed she runs her long body into the network and sticks fast, rapidly twisting her tail-screw both ahead and astern.
Her back, however, was tender for days after, and she found it a little difficult to leap.
The instant it has taken hold--a little behind the neck--Grim darts into deep water with her assailant.
The otter came to the bog every two or three months, when it was tired of hunting fish in the lake.
He takes care, however, in turning, not to let any of his legs hang in front of the pike's mouth; he is too well acquainted with the teeth of the fresh-water shark!
The grasp tightens, so that his whole leg aches; he tries to draw in his foot, but it is held immovable.
Up!
Above the distant banks on the other side of the bog, the first glow of the full moon peeps out.
The otter felt quite sure that it was only by good fortune that it had not been annihilated by its great, dangerous rival.
Silent and weary, the cuckoo came from the meadow-land to the bog, where the twilight enveloped it and hid it on its branch.
An old snag sticks up in the water, and, in turning, the otter's body is dashed against it.
Then the otter comes right up out of the earth, with body and tail and four legs, and shuffles down the slope.
It caught a glimpse of the indistinct outline of a great fish, and exasperated at such audacity, determined to go in chase of the robber.
He is used to these desperate rallies, which always become fiercer and more violent as the quarry is on the point of giving in.
For a long time it has patiently followed the battle through its feelers, and hoped that some morsel would fall to its hungry stomach; now, with gratitude to Providence, it closes its great claw upon the warm-blooded fisher.
Once Grim is lucky.
It would have been all over with the brown beast if the old crayfish, on its way down from the surface, where it had at last let go its hold, had not dropped like a stone straight into Grim's mouth.
Suddenly the nightingale up in the thicket becomes silent, stops in the middle of its highest trill, and begins to snarl.
It was timid and suspicious, but a great glutton.
At last she has met with an opponent who puts her judgment, her ingenuity, and her endurance to the extreme test.
But he makes tremendous exertions, whipping his tail in under the peat-bank, while with his hind paws he seeks for support in clefts and cracks.
Like a monster toadstool, it grows up out of the horizon, sending up a cloud of purple into the air.
Now Grim's strength returns once more.
He has let go of Grim, and now makes his escape from the hole with so sudden a jerk that the old crayfish accompanies him; but the dread of water, which no living being that breathes with lungs can quite overcome, has taken possession of the otter.
With or without his prey!
The otter treads water now on the right, now on the left side of her, and tries, by utilizing the roots as steps, to lift her up with him. But in vain; he cannot even stir the huge fish!
After having labouriously shuffled over a piece of land, and reached the largest of the big pools, it allowed itself to glide noiselessly from its slip--a path trodden in the grass--into its true element.
Down on the bottom, sticking out from the bank, are the roots of the willow-bushes on the edge.
With a powerful stroke of her tail, she disappears with lightning rapidity from the surface, and goes to the bottom with her rider, whose merry-go-round jaunt makes his head swim.
Her back aches, her flexor muscles hurt.
They lie fighting on the surface--a golden-streaked, slimy, scaly fish twisted into a knot with a dark, hairy, furred body!
A wild chase was going on in the depths, and where it passed the rushes bowed their sheaves and the flags their fans.
Up!
Grim is close behind him, and as the otter lands, there is a loud splash.
An attempt to get beneath Grim, in order to seize her round the gills or by the belly, was unsuccessful; at the decisive moment Grim had turned aside, so that the otter had to set its teeth where it could. And it needed a well-placed grip to hold such a giant fish.
The otter hastily gasps for breath, and tightens his hold with his fore-claws; but when they are on their way down to the depths, and air-bubbles, like silver beads, roll through the water behind him, he has only to hold on and let himself go.
The otter backs, extends his fore and hind legs far out from his body, and spreads his web, so as to offer as much resistance as possible.
A rover's blood flowed in its veins.
It was thus in his later years that his fishing rod had become the old man's joy and companion.
Now they arrive, and the alarm in the swarm of bleak below spreads with magical swiftness to the upper layers, where the bewildered little creatures make off at full speed.
The weather to-day, from a fisherman's point of view, is the worst possible.
All at once the van slips away from the rest, and the latter have to exert themselves to catch up, twisting and turning their tails, and unfurling the stiff sail of their dorsal fin.
But Father Neptune clasps him rapturously in his wet embrace, and sets the fish around his boat leaping and playing.
Each makes itself as long and thin as it can, so as to show as little as possible, and disappear, as it were, in the water.
Far off a flock of wild ducks rising raise some little, gentle waves, that look so blue, so blue!
Season after season he made his weekly journey from town by rail, and then drove out to the lake.
Foremost of the company, with a dark-golden, high-backed leader at their head, swim a couple of hundred of the finest perch.
The thought of these monks was to show how Christianity had triumphed over heathenism.
Imitators were numerous.
And the next day he was still there.
Other monks said that Simeon had gone to pay his respects to a fair lady, and in wrath God had caught him and placed him on high.
If he fell, it was damnation for his soul--all were agreed as to this.
And that he might live absolutely beyond reproach, always in public view, free from temptation, and free from the tongue of scandal, he decided to live in the world, and still not be of it.
As the sun arose he stood up, just for a few moments, and held out his arms in greeting, blessing and in prayer.
But man's body and mind accommodate themselves to almost any condition.
At such times, those who stood near shared in his prayers, and went away blessed and refreshed.
When the nights were cold and dark, Simeon sat there with bowed head, and drew the folds of his single garment, a black robe, over his face.
The environment was circumscribed, but there were outlook, sunshine, ventilation--three good things.
When sunrise came, there sat the monk, his face between his knees, the folds of his black robe drawn over his head.
There was no respite nor rest from the hard surface of the rock, and aching muscles could find no change from the cramped and perilous position.
Simeon never spoke, for words are folly, and to the calls of saint or sinner he made no reply.
Any recklessness in movement, and he would have slipped from his perilous position and been dashed to death upon the stones beneath.
Memory died in him, the hurts became callouses, the world-pain died out of his heart, and to cling became a habit.
As the traveler journeys through Southern Italy, Sicily and certain parts of what was Ancient Greece, he will see broken arches, parts of viaducts, and now and again a beautiful column pointing to the sky. All about is the desert, or solitary pastures, and only this white milestone marking the path of the centuries and telling in its own silent, solemn and impressive way of a day that is dead.
The order was shouted up to him in a Bishop's voice--he must let down his rope, draw up a ladder, and descend.
Probably not.
Did Simeon hear the bells and say, "Soon it will be my turn"?
All his former companions grew aweary, and one by one died, and the monastery bells tolled their requiem as they were laid to rest.
The food he ate was minimum in quantity; sensation ceased, and the dry, hot winds reduced bodily tissue to a dessicated something called a saint--loved, feared and reverenced for his fortitude.
The people watched in whispered silence.
Simeon kept no track of the days, having no engagements to meet, nor offices to perform, beyond the prayers at morn, midday and night.
But he did not rise and lift his hands in prayer.
"He has always been there," the people said, and crossed themselves hurriedly.
The capstone was a little less than three feet square, so Simeon could not lie down.
His correspondence never got in a heap.
But one evening when the young monk came with his basket, no line was dropped down from above.
Well, his companions at the monastery, a mile away, said he was carried there in the night by a miraculous power; that he went to sleep in his stone cell and awoke on the pillar.
He was not pressed for time.
About then the Bishops in assembly asked, "Is Simeon sincere?" To test the matter of Simeon's pride, he was ordered to come down from his retreat.
He waited and then called aloud, but all in vain.
And so he lived on and on and on--he lived on the top of that pillar, never once descending for thirty years.
Did he suffer?
How did Simeon get to the top of the column?
During those first weeks he must have suffered terribly and horribly.
The rainy season came on.
His senses had flown, for what good were they!
No frivolous dame of tarnished fame sought to share with him his perilous perch.
Language was lost in disuse.
So much attention did the abnegation of Simeon attract that various other pillars, marking the ruins of art and greatness gone, in that vicinity, were crowned with pious monks.
All day he sat there, motionless.
Once each day, as darkness gathered, a monk came with a basket containing a bottle of goat's milk and a little loaf of black bread, and Simeon dropped down a rope and drew up the basket.
To this end he climbed to the top of a marble column, sixty feet high, and there on the capstone he began to live a life beyond reproach.
He lived in a perpetual attitude of adoration.
The probabilities are, however, Terese, as viewed by an unbeliever, that he shot a line over the column with a bow and arrow and then drew up a rope ladder and ascended with ease.
Would he arise at sundown and pray, and with outstretched hands bless the assembled pilgrims?
Some prophesied he would be blown off, but the morning light revealed his form, naked from the waist up, standing with hands outstretched to greet the rising sun.
The church has aureoled and sainted the men and women who have fought the Cosmic Urge.
Simeon was then twenty-four years old.
However, in the morning the simple people of the scattered village saw the man on the column.
Simeon lifted his hands in adoration and thankfulness and renewed his lease.
He slept sitting, with his head bowed between his knees, and, indeed, in this posture he passed most of his time.
This pillar, which had once graced the portal of a pagan temple, again became a place of pious pilgrimage, and people flocked to Simeon's rock, so that they might be near when he stretched out his black, bony hands to the East, and the spirit of Almighty God, for a space, hovered close around.
One thing at least, Simeon was free from economic responsibilities, free from social cares and intrusion.
Bores with sad stories of unappreciated lives and fond hopes unrealized, never broke in upon his peace.
The days passed, with the scorching heat of the midday sun, and the cool winds of the night.
All day he stayed there.
Three times during the day did he thus stretch his cramped limbs, and pray with his face to the East.
Still Simeon kept his place.
The people on a slow schedule, ten minutes late, never irritated his temper.
My elder brothers soon became experts.
I believe I was accustomed to all the precarious Indian conveyances, and, as a boy, I enjoyed the dog-travaux ride as much as any.
I once passed through one of these hard springs when we had nothing to eat for several days.
I was a little over four years old at the time of the "Sioux massacre" in Minnesota.
We had plenty of buffalo robes and the snow kept us warm, but we found it heavy. After a time, it became packed and hollowed out around our bodies, so that we were as comfortable as one can be under those circumstances.
Our meals were eaten hastily, and sometimes in the saddle.
The next day the storm ceased, and we discovered a large herd of buffaloes almost upon us.
In our flight, we little folks were strapped in the saddles or held in front of an older person, and in the long night marches to get away from the soldiers, we suffered from loss of sleep and insufficient food.
You would n't care for them.
If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.
I was wondering whether that particular rocky strip of New England coast about which he had so often told me was Cleric's patria. Before I had got far with my reading I was disturbed by a knock.
I did n't know whether you'd be glad to see me." She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which. "You seem the same, though,--except you're a young man, now, of course.
Tony talks about him like he was president of the railroad.
It seemed to me wonderful that she should have got on so well in the world.
"I think I'd better go home and look after Antonia," I said.
"We can talk when you come to see me.
I live in Lincoln now, too, Jim.
She's housekeeper.
She works for Mrs. Gardener at the hotel now.
I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.
When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than before.
She told me her business was going well, and she had saved a little money.
She was so quietly conventionalized by city clothes that I might have passed her on the street without seeing her.
Do you think I've changed?"
I'm in business for myself. I have a dressmaking shop in the Raleigh Block, out on O Street.
She won't hear a word against him.
"Come and see me sometimes when you're lonesome.
The old woman downstairs did n't want to let me come up very much.
I propped my book open and stared listlessly at the page of the Georgics where to-morrow's lesson began.
You've hardly told me anything yet."
I led her toward Cleric's chair, the only comfortable one I had, questioning her confusedly.
I caught a faint odor of violet sachet.
I wanted to see your room so I could write Tony all about it, but I must tell her how I left you right here with your books.
She was already at home in my place, had slipped quietly into it, as she did into everything.
In a moment I watched her fade down the dusky stairway.
"It's a good thing the Harlings are friendly with her again.
It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative--gave a favorable interpretation to everything.
She's so sort of innocent."
Her black suit fitted her figure smoothly, and a black lace hat, with pale-blue forget-me-nots, sat demurely on her yellow hair.
I've made a real good start."
I said I did n't like Larry, and never would.
There had been a warm thaw all day, with mushy yards and little streams of dark water gurgling cheerfully into the streets out of old snow-banks.
"Would you like to?
We are for reasons that, after perusing this manuscript, you may be able to guess, going away again this time to Central Asia where, if anywhere upon this earth, wisdom is to be found, and we anticipate that our sojourn there will be a long one.
At first I was inclined to believe that this history of a woman on whom, clothed in the majesty of her almost endless years, the shadow of Eternity itself lay like the dark wing of Night, was some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning.
I cannot say, however, that young Vincey showed much aversion to feminine society on this occasion.
Presently, however, a stoutish lady, whose name I do not remember, came along the pavement, accompanied by a pretty fair-haired girl, and these two Mr. Vincey, who clearly knew them well, at once joined, walking off in their company.
In addition his face was almost without flaw--a good face as well as a beautiful one, and when he lifted his hat, which he did just then to a passing lady, I saw that his head was covered with little golden curls growing close to the scalp.
To be brief and come to my business.
I heard afterwards that he was popularly supposed to be as much afraid of a woman as most people are of a mad dog, which accounted for his precipitate retreat.
We give you complete freedom, and as a reward you will, we believe, have the credit of presenting to the world the most wonderful history, as distinguished from romance, that its records can show.
Indeed I remember laughing, and remarking to my friend at the time that he was not the sort of man whom it would be desirable to introduce to the lady one was going to marry, since it was exceedingly probable that the acquaintance would end in a transfer of her affections.
To begin with, he was shortish, rather bow-legged, very deep chested, and with unusually long arms.
I know Vincey; I'll introduce you," and he did, and for some minutes we stood chatting--about the Zulu people, I think, for I had just returned from the Cape at the time.
"And now what am I to say further?
Indeed, I have never seen either of them from that hour to this, and do not think it probable that I shall.
To me the story seems to bear the stamp of truth upon its face.
I give it him, with the exception of a very few alterations, made with the object of concealing the identity of the actors from the general public, exactly as it came to me.
"My dear Sir,--You will be surprised, considering the very slight nature of our acquaintance, to get a letter from me.
We entrust the sherd, the scarab, and the parchments to your keeping, till such time as we demand them back again.
Of the history itself the reader must judge.
He appeared to be about forty years of age, and was I think as ugly as his companion was handsome.
I really do not know beyond once more repeating that everything is described in the accompanying manuscript exactly as it happened.
I take it that this book is partly true, and partly an effort of the imagination.
P.S.--There is on consideration one circumstance that, after a reperusal of this history, struck me with so much force that I cannot resist calling the attention of the reader to it.
Geoffrey and Jordan, to meet it.
He is not even, at any rate to my view, particularly interesting.
"Will you undertake the task?
I remember being rather amused because of the change in the expression of the elder man, whose name I discovered was Holly, when he saw the ladies advancing.
And so I may as well say at once that I am not the narrator but only the editor of this extraordinary history, and then go on to tell how it found its way into my hands.
Nor should we alter our determination were it not for a circumstance which has recently arisen.
They call him 'Charon.'" I looked, and found the older man quite as interesting in his way as the glorified specimen of humanity at his side.
He had dark hair and small eyes, and the hair grew right down on his forehead, and his whiskers grew right up to his hair, so that there was uncommonly little of his countenance to be seen. Altogether he reminded me forcibly of a gorilla, and yet there was something very pleasing and genial about the man's eye.
But as I went on I abandoned that idea also.
He was very tall, very broad, and had a look of power and a grace of bearing that seemed as native to him as it is to a wild stag.
Well, that is all I have to say.
--L. H. H."
Then I thought that it might be a bold attempt to portray the possible results of practical immortality, informing the substance of a mortal who yet drew her strength from Earth, and in whose human bosom passions yet rose and fell and beat as in the undying world around her the winds and the tides rise and fall and beat unceasingly.
That same evening my visit came to an end, and this was the last I saw or heard of "Charon" and "the Greek god" for many a long day.
Read the manuscript (which I have copied out fairly for your benefit), and let me know.
How did she first come to the Caves of Kor, and what was her real religion?
Under these altered conditions it has become a question whether we are justified in withholding from the world an account of a phenomenon which we believe to be of unparalleled interest, merely because our private life is involved, or because we are afraid of ridicule and doubt being cast upon our statements.
One of these gentlemen was I think, without exception, the handsomest young fellow I have ever seen.
Can it be that extremes meet, and that the very excess and splendour of her mind led her by means of some strange physical reaction to worship at the shrine of matter?
In giving to the world the record of what, looked at as an adventure only, is I suppose one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men, I feel it incumbent on me to explain what my exact connection with it is.
"P.S.--Of course, if any profit results from the sale of the writing should you care to undertake its publication, you can do what you like with it, but if there is a loss I will leave instructions with my lawyers, Messrs.
"Good gracious!" I said to my friend, with whom I was walking, "why, that fellow looks like a statue of Apollo come to life.
Indeed, I think I had better begin by reminding you that we once met, now some five years ago, when I and my ward Leo Vincey were introduced to you in the street at Cambridge.
He suddenly stopped short in his talk, cast a reproachful look at his companion, and, with an abrupt nod to myself, turned and marched off alone across the street.
Was that ancient Kallikrates nothing but a splendid animal loved for his hereditary Greek beauty?
I remember saying that I should like to know him.
We never ascertained, and now, alas! we never shall, at least not yet.
Possibly we shall not return.
They call him 'the Greek god'; but look at the other one, he's Vincey's (that's the god's name) guardian, and supposed to be full of every kind of information.
However this may be, it has given me an idea.
Who was she?
Its explanation I must leave to others, and with this slight preface, which circumstances make necessary, I introduce the world to Ayesha and the Caves of Kor.--The Editor.
These and many other questions arise in my mind, but what is the good of asking them now?
I have recently read with much interest a book of yours describing a Central African adventure.
INTRODUCTION
Henri was pouring out coffee when she came back, and Saint Hubert turned to her with a cup in his outstretched hand.
He looked down longingly on the pale face lying against his arm, and his features contracted at the sight of the cruel marks marring the whiteness of her delicate throat.
He had need of all his calm, and he gripped himself resolutely.
The weakness that had sent her trembling into his arms the day before had been the fear of danger to the man she loved, but in the face of actual need the courage that was so much a part of her nature did not fail her.
Saint Hubert glanced up hastily as Diana came to his side.
She bent lower over the unconscious man; his lips were parted slightly, and the usual sternness of his mouth was relaxed.
She looked at the long limbs lying now so still, so terribly, suggestively still, and her lips trembled again, but her pain-filled eyes were dry.
"Diane, you have been through enough," he said gently.
Give me what I want willingly and I will be kind to you, but fight me, and by Allah! you shall pay the cost!...
Allah! how long the day has been....
He sent Henri away and sat down beside the divan to watch with a feeling of weariness that was not bodily.
"It's no good telling me to go away, because I won't.
Grant me time to get to her....
She even had to admit to herself a certain sensation of relief after she had bathed her aching head and throat, and substituted a thin, silk wrap for the torn, stained riding-suit.
"I can't go.
I couldn't sleep."
Would he live?
And hour after hour with weary hopelessness the tired voice went on--"Diane, Diane...."
And beside him, with his face buried in his hands, Raoul de Saint Hubert thanked God fervently that he had saved Diana the added torture of listening to the revelations of the past four months.
She suffered horribly.
Try and get some sleep for a few hours.
The first words were in Arabic, then the slow, soft voice lapsed into French, pure as the Vicomte's own.
Who was he that he should judge him?
I will call you if there is any change, my word of honour."
He carried her into the bedroom, hesitating beside the couch before he put her down.
As they passed the scene of the ambuscade he told her of Gaston.
Then he trembled, and a great fear of himself came over him.
The pleasure of pursuit faded with ownership.
The clasp of his arms around her seemed suddenly a profanation, and he laid her down very gently on the low couch, drawing the thin coverlet over her, and went back slowly to the other room.
Diana had a glimpse of rows of unusually silent men grouped beside the tent, but all her mind was concentrated on the long, limp figure that was being carefully lifted down from the sweating horse.
Last night she only spoke to him, and when he went I cursed her till I saw the terror in her eyes.
It was a revelation of the real man with the thin layer of civilisation stripped from him, leaving only the primitive savage drunk with the lust of blood.
The noise outside the tent was growing louder as the fighting rolled back in its direction, and once or twice a bullet ripped through the hangings.
She could not cry, only her throat ached and throbbed perpetually.
Lie still, you little fool, it is useless to struggle.
For a few moments she looked at him, then drowsily her eyes closed and her head fell forward on the cushions, and with a half-sad smile of satisfaction Saint Hubert gathered her up into his arms.
They carried him into the tent and laid him on the divan, beside which Henri had already put out all the implements that his master would need.
What did it matter about her?
I can help you.
Saint Hubert put his hand on her shoulder.
His strength was abnormal, and for some minutes the struggling mass of men strained and heaved about him.
The camp of Ibraheim Omair had been wiped out, but Ahmed Ben Hassan's men looked only at the unconscious figure of their leader.
I need more appliances than I have with me, and we are too few to stay and risk a possible attack if there are others of Ibraheim Omair's men in the neighbourhood."
Saint Hubert did not press it.
I shall go mad if you don't let me do something.
She had seen him in cruel, even savage moods, but nothing that had ever approached the look of horrible pleasure that was on his face now.
"It has got to be risked," replied Saint Hubert abruptly.
How the jackals are howling....
You cannot get away, I shall not let you go....
"Go and rest while I do what I can for Ahmed.
The dawn was breaking when they reached the camp.
She slid down on to the rug where she had knelt before.
Without a word he thrust her behind the divan and turned to meet them.
She looked up fiercely.
"Please take it.
He could at least be honest with himself, he could own the truth.
He coveted what was not his, and masked his envy with a hypocrisy that now appeared contemptible.
"Diane, you are torturing yourself unnecessarily.
Her chance was slight, if any.
Why does it give me no pleasure to have broken her at last?
See!
I wanted to kill Raoul when he would not come with me, but for that I would have gone back to her....
You can do no good by staying here.
Diana was on her feet, swaying giddily, powerless to help him, cold with dread.
He was soaked in blood that had burst through the temporary bandages, and his whole body bore evidence of the terrible struggle that had gone before the blow that had felled him.
He would never have the torturing happiness of holding her in his arms again, would never again clasp her against the heart that was crying out for her with the same mad passion that had swept over him yesterday.
Saint Hubert's own longing, his passionate, Gallic temperament, were driving him as they had driven him the day before.
Diane, Diane, how beautiful you are!... What devil makes me hate Raoul after twenty years?
Only a few hours before he had come to her in all the magnificence of his strength.
He made no more remonstrances, but set about his work quickly.
My hands are quite steady." She held them out as she spoke, and Saint Hubert gave in without opposition.
By degrees one fact began to be impressed upon me.
I suppose, at the outside, our innings had lasted half an hour.
Mr. Barker shared with Mr. Benyon the honour of being first man in. The Latchmere captain, as a captain, had become quite as much a figurehead as I had.
"I don't think that's a bad little smack to start with," he observed. "I like your kind of bowling, mister.
It was about the second thousand.
The sixth, however, which he also produced from the same wondrous store contained in his breeches pocket, he contented himself with what he called "snicking."
No performance of "W.
They ran four, and then they ran two more, and still the ball was not thrown in.
As Mr. Barker was running the thirteenth run, instead of going to his wicket he dropped his bat--the bat which he had never had a chance to utilise--and bolted off the field as though Satan was behind him.
Since Mr. Benyon professed such affection for the style of bowling which I favoured, I sent him down another sample.
I've another in my pocket you can have."
But the ball was at last thrown in--when the pair had run eleven.
We sat there, moping in a crowd, I among the rest, when Mr. Benyon, bustling up, reminded me of my duties as a captain.
I hurried up.
He turned again to me.
But I had not the heart to stop him.
"I do like your kind of bowling, mister," he observed when, as usual, he sent my first ball out of sight.
Forty-one runs off his first over was a result calculated to take the conceit out of the average bowler.
"Now then, turn out.
Hawthorn and Mr. Hedges were not only doing their best to trample on each other's toes, but each was seeking for a place of security behind the other's back.
His bearing was indicative of extreme depression. I think he had learned that to take, off-hand, the first substitute who offered, was, now and then, unwise.
It was kind of him to say so; though, to my thinking, his remark did not convey a compliment.
And not only spectators but cricketers had disappeared.
He treated it as he had done the first--he drove it, with terrific force, right above my head.
My second ball was a colourable imitation of my first, only this time it was wide to leg.
Mr. Benyon called out to him, but Mr. Barker neither stopped nor stayed. It seemed that the match was going to resolve itself into a game of single wicket.
I know that I bowled until I felt that I should either have to stop or drop.
In course of time this had dwindled to half a dozen stragglers.
He and Mr. Barker began to run.
"That's what I call a pretty snick," he said.
Don't I tell you that soon I'll have to go?"
So far as I could see, Mr. Hawthorn, Mr. Hedges, Mr. Sapsworth, and I were the only members of the Storwell team left on the ground.
And in the same pocket from which the other two had come.
The Latchmere men went slouching towards the tent; some of them, I noticed, instead of going in stole towards the rear.
He drew one out and threw it up to me.
We looked at each other.
Neither of them made the slightest attempt to return the ball.
If my eyes did not deceive me, there was not a member of the Latchmere team left on the ground.
If Mr. Barker did no hitting, he did some running.
And for each ball that disappeared Mr. Benyon produced another from his breeches pocket.
I gave him an overhand full pitch which would have made a decent catch for point, if point had been close in, which he wasn't. However, in any case Mr. Benyon would have saved him the trouble.
I do not think that our field was arranged on scientific principles; I may certainly claim that I had nothing to do with its arrangement.
I suppose that's a boundary." He called to the scorer--if there was one, which I doubt--"Put down Tom Benyon six!"
I was rapidly approaching the condition in which Alice must have been in Wonderland--prepared for anything.
Those remarkable garments fitted him like eel-skins.
I could scarcely believe my eyes.
It laid me on the ground.
"Never mind about the ball.
I obeyed without a murmur.
"Put down Tom Benyon another six!" he cried.
"Run it out!" cried Mr. Benyon.
"Hurry up, Bill Hedges!"
"I've got another in my pocket."
What was more, some of our own team took courage, and leg-bail.
Then a ball or two later on, "I call that a tidy smack." The "smack" in question had driven the ball, for anything I know to the contrary, a distance of some five miles or so.
The opposite wicket was deserted.
Mr. Hedges did not hurry up; he never could have hurried up, even if his manner of "fielding" the ball had not wholly deprived him of his wind.
G.'s" ever came within many miles of it.
He seemed to have a partiality for swiping.
"Mr. Trentham, I--I can't bowl," whispered Mr. Sapsworth to me as we moved across the turf.
I'm first man in; soon I'll have to go, and I haven't had a smack at a cricket-ball these twenty years!"
When he sent my fifth ball out of sight I wished that his love for swiping had been less, or my bowling of another kind.
He produced a second ball from the same pocket from which the first had come.
The "snick" in question was a tremendous drive to deep mid-off.
"A swipe does warm me so.
There is a suspicion floating through my mind that at one or two points--two, or more--men were placed unusually close together. For instance, at deep mid-off--very deep mid-off--Mr.
And the balls he lost!
Mr. Benyon was making a record in tall scoring.
Originally there had been quite a crowd assembled.
And the diabolical ingenuity with which he managed, at the close of every over, to change his end!
"Hurry up, sir!
"Started from where?" said a gentleman standing by Mrs. Evelyn.
"But hasn't she any help in taking care of the garden?" said Constance.
Lucas won't be here and now the weather is so fine I want to make haste with the hay."
Are they fresh picked?"
It was beyond everything.
"Well, mamma!--" said Constance with great equanimity,--"Mr.
"Did you see him?" said Mrs. Evelyn.
He smiled a little as he complied with the young lady's invitation, but the expression of ecstasy did not come.
"Where do you get them?" said Mrs. Evelyn.
I am very sorry for them."
"I don't know,--" said Constance, intent upon her basket,--"I feel a friend's distress for Mr. Thorn--it's all your doing, mamma,--you won't be able to look him in the face when we have Fleda next fall--I am sure I shall not want to look at his!
I didn't dare go any further."
"You may set your mind at rest on that subject, mamma," said Constance, still using her chop-sticks with great complacency;--"it's my opinion that the farmer is not in existence who is blessed with such a conjugal futurity.
The gentleman turned his horse and galloped back to Montepoole.
"He doos not," said Philetus;--"he doosn't keep to hum for a long spell."
Philetus must make haste back, for you know Mr. Douglass wants him to help in the barn meadow.
"The destruction of the peace of the whole family of Thorns--shouldn't sleep sound in my bed if I were she with such a reflection.
"No--we'll keep that for dinner.
"How?--" said Philetus.
"So she says."
This second voice was hardly raised, but it came from so much nearer that the words could be distinctly heard.
"Yes," said Mrs. Evelyn in an indulgent tone,--"he was very attentive to her last winter when she was with us, but she went away before anything was decided.
"Are Mr. Rossitur's circumstances so much reduced?" he said, drawing nearer to Mrs. Evelyn.
"She's too lovely for anything!" said Constance.
"And so she acts," said Constance.
"And this has been her life ever since Mr. Rossitur lost his property?"
Rossitur failed and lost everything--bankrupt--a year or two after they came home."
He is a charming young man and would make her very happy."
Are they for sale?"
"Who doos?
The manner still more than the matter of this speech was beyond the withstanding of any good-natured muscles, though the gentleman's smile was a grave one and quickly lost in gravity.
"Young man!" called out the landlady's reproving voice, "won't you never recollect to bring that basket round the back way?"
"Mr. Rossitur's!" said Mrs. Evelyn;--"does he send them here?"
"Just afore I started."
"She doos," said Philetus.
Chapter XXX.
She is a very good girl! but she might have been made something much better than a farmer's wife."
"I can hardly say that," he replied.
"But where is Mr. Hugh?"
Another figure presently appeared at the hall-door and called out,
"Didn't you introduce your favourite Mr. Olmney to Miss Ringgan last summer?
I dare say they are for Mr. Sweet."
"Entirely,--sacrificed!--" said Mrs. Evelyn, with a compassionately resigned air;--"education, advantages and everything given up; and set down here where she has seen nobody from year's end to year's end but the country people about--very good people--but not the kind of people she ought to have been brought up among."
"I am confident he would be here at this moment," said Constance, "if he wasn't in London."
"I wish you had heard her yesterday.
"But what is 'all mamma's doing,' Constance?" inquired her sister.
"And his niece takes care of his farm in the meantime?"
"Her and me was a picking 'em afore sunrise."
I don't think he has forgotten her."
It was the very next morning that several ladies and gentlemen were gathered on the piazza of the hotel at Montepoole, to brace minds or appetites with the sweet mountain air while waiting for breakfast.
"I shouldn't think anybody could forget her," said Edith.
"Whose are they?
"Mamma!" exclaimed Constance looking up.
"He's to hum."
"I had such a pleasure formerly.
The sun was not much more than two hours high the next morning when a rider was slowly approaching Mr. Rossitur's house from the bridge, walking his horse like a man who wished to look well at all he was passing.
"Mr.
Tempest.
Sweet must send for them if he wants them.
He bowed and handed the young lady in; but Constance declared that though he sat beside her and took care of her at breakfast he had on one of his intangible fits which drove her to the last extreme of impatience, and captivation.
"And happy, mamma--Fleda don't look miserable--she seems perfectly happy and contented!"
"Nice!" said Edith.
"Do you know her?" asked both the Miss Evelyns again.
He paused behind a clump of locusts and rose-acacias in the corner of the courtyard as a figure bonneted and gloved came out of the house and began to be busy among the rose-bushes.
"I am very glad of it!
"Constance!" said Mrs. Evelyn from the piazza,--"don't take that!
"He's to the mill."
"They are all broken to pieces," said Mrs. Evelyn, as Mr. Carleton's eye went back to her for his answer;--"Mr.
"Oh mamma!" said the eldest Miss Evelyn in a deprecatory tone,--"you shouldn't talk so--it isn't right--I am sure she is very nice--nicer now than anybody else I know; and clever too."
"But what have I done, my child?" said Mrs. Evelyn.
That night the father and mother had a great deal to talk about.
To be sure it's the law; but mayhap they may get more law than they like some day themselves."
He got hold of the broom at her end and pulled along with her.
"He'll be fit to drive himself before long," said his father, proudly. "The old horse is a-teaching of him."
One of them lifted him down, and from that time he was a greater favourite than before.
I won't vouch for what the old horse was thinking, for it is very difficult to find out what any old horse is thinking.
Diamond's father gave the ladies a ticket with his name and address printed on it; and then Mrs. Coleman took out her purse, saying:
I didn't know you had got a cab."
But Jack fetched it again, and Diamond began once more, and did not leave off until he had done the whole business fairly well, if not in a first-rate, experienced fashion.
And if ever there was a boy who had a chance of being a prodigy at cab-driving, Diamond was that boy, for the strife came to be who should have him out with him on the box.
He jumped on his box before she could say another word, and with a parting salute drove off, leaving them on the pavement, with the maid holding the door for them.
"Poor things!" said the mother.
A sudden noise got up, and Diamond looked round to see what was the matter.
Only he had been to the back of the north wind since--there could be no doubt of that; for when he woke every morning, he always knew that he had been there again.
"It's changed times for both of us, Joseph, and it's not very often we can have a cab even; but you see my daughter is still very poorly, and she can't bear the motion of the omnibuses.
"Well, he must come and see us, now you've found us out.
But to think we should have fallen upon you, of all the cabmen in London!
As it was very hot, Diamond's father got down to have a glass of beer himself, and give another to the old waterman.
"How do you do, Diamond?"
Diamond's father turned instantly, for he was the foremost in the rank, and followed the girl.
For one thing he never got frightened, and consequently was never in too great a hurry.
His mother, however, was a little shy of the company for him, and besides she could not always spare him.
"Really, Diamond, a body would need to mind what they say to you."
"I couldn't let them behave so to a poor girl--could I, father?" he said.
When they reached the house, Diamond's father got down and rang the bell.
"Though, to be sure," said Diamond's father--with what truth I cannot say, but he believed what he said--"some ladies is very hard, and keeps you to the bare sixpence a mile, when every one knows that ain't enough to keep a family and a cab upon.
He did not know in the least what they meant, but there was something in the very sound of them, and in the tone of voice in which they were said, which Diamond felt to be ugly.
The girl thanked Diamond, and began sweeping as if nothing had happened, while his father led him away.
His father had intended going on the stand at King's Cross that morning, and had turned into Gray's Inn Lane to drive there, when they found the way blocked up, and upon inquiry were informed that a stack of chimneys had been blown down in the night, and had fallen across the road.
"No, thank you, ma'am," said Joseph.
It was a long time now since Diamond had seen North Wind, or even thought much about her.
And he laid himself down at full length on old Diamond's back.
DIAMOND GOES ON
He left Diamond on the box.
Some rough young imps had picked a quarrel with her, and were now hauling at her broom to get it away from her.
Diamond's father turned, and made for Charing Cross.
Diamond was off his box in a moment, and running to the help of the girl.
"Oh dear!" said Diamond when he had done, "I'm so tired!"
After a stray job or two by the way, they drew up in the row upon the stand between Cockspur Street and Pall Mall.
Of course there was the man always on the box-seat beside him, but before long there was seldom the least occasion to take the reins from out of his hands.
CHAPTER XVII.
When they reached the curbstone--who should it be waiting for the cab but Mrs. and Miss Coleman!
"Who would have thought it?" said Mrs. Coleman.
Indeed we meant to walk a bit first before we took a cab, but just at the corner, for as hot as the sun was, a cold wind came down the street, and I saw that Miss Coleman must not face it.
When that was done he asked for a dressing-comb, and combed his mane thoroughly.
"Why, you've got both Diamonds with you," said Miss Coleman.
They did not look at the cabman, however.
With the help of old Tom, the waterman, he was soon washed into decency, and his father set him on the box again, perfectly satisfied with the account he gave of the cause of his being in a fray.
"It's a lucky day which I see you once more upon it."
The ladies both stared for a moment, and then exclaimed together:
"And what's your fare, Joseph?"
"Why?" said Diamond.
He sat on his withers, and reaching forward as he ate his hay, he curried and he brushed, first at one side of his neck, and then at the other.
"Certainly not, Diamond," said his father, quite pleased, for Diamond's father was a gentleman.
"It was your own old horse as took you; and me you paid long ago."
Where do you live?"
All the time the old horse went on eating his hay, and, but with an occasional whisk of his tail when Diamond tickled or scratched him, took no notice of the proceeding. But that was all a pretence, for he knew very well who it was that was perched on his back, and rubbing away at him with the comb and the brush.
"Yes, ma'am; yes, miss," answered he, again touching his hat, with all the respect he could possibly put into the action.
Diamond lifted his cap, and answered politely.
When they talked to him nicely he had always a good answer, sometimes a smart one, ready, and that helped much to make them change their minds about him.
He had to look twice, however, before he could be sure that that was his boy in the middle of the tumult.
"Why, Joseph! can it be you?"
At first, because his face was so quiet and sweet, with a smile always either awake or asleep in his eyes, and because he never heeded their ugly words and rough jokes, they said he wasn't all there, meaning that he was half an idiot, whereas he was a great deal more there than they had the sense to see.
cab!"
Some may think it was not the best place in the world for him to be brought up in; but it must have been, for there he was.
What has that to do with it?"
One day, which was neither washing-day, nor cleaning-day nor marketing-day, nor Saturday, nor Monday--upon which consequently Diamond could be spared from the baby--his father took him on his own cab.
At first, he heard a good many rough and bad words; but he did not like them, and so they did him little harm.
He never took any notice of them, and his face shone pure and good in the middle of them, like a primrose in a hailstorm.
"Is it a great disgrace to be poor?" asked Diamond, because of the tone in which his mother had spoken.
And as he thought and thought, he recalled another thing that had happened that morning, which, although it seemed a mere accident, might have something to do with what had happened since.
Also his father liked to have him himself when he could; so that he was more desired than enjoyed among the cabmen.
No, thank Heaven! she's not come to that."
But presently his father came back, and missing Diamond, looked about.
Then he sat on his croup, and did his back and sides; then he turned around like a monkey, and attacked his hind-quarters, and combed his tail.
There was a crossing near the cab-stand, where a girl was sweeping.
The next afternoon at four o'clock he went to the palace of the king of Naples.
Then he asked: "Does any one know whether or not the king of Naples has a daughter?"
"That will be splendid!" cried the princess.
The years passed by and he did not marry, so one day his father called him before him and said:
"Some one is in trouble outside, mother," said the daughter.
The old woman gladly consented, and the prince dressed himself as a peddler.
He stared hard at the princess.
He told her of the quest which had led him there, and she admired all the patience and diligence he had shown in finding out her existence. When he asked her to marry him at once, she readily consented.
"You'll have to go to Naples to obtain this information," advised the king.
It looked like an interesting diversion to talk with the old woman.
"I'm ready, beloved," were her words.
"Are you the daughter of the king of Naples?" questioned the old woman.
There was no person to be found who knew anything about it.
"No, mother," she insisted.
"Come again to-morrow at this hour."
"Let me go in your place!"
"Yes," said the princess.
"May I come some day to sell you pretty things?" asked the old woman.
"No," answered the son.
"I do not know."
Then he sorrowfully returned to his waiting ship.
The two women opened their door and crept out in the darkness.
"Do you know that the king of Naples has a daughter?" asked the father.
"What do you wish, good mother?" she asked.
"Perhaps the pirates have come and by this cry are trying to lure us out," answered her mother cautiously.
The prince would not set a price.
In the stillness of the night they heard a cry.
They lifted her tenderly and carried her home.
"That is good advice," replied the prince.
"I will wed no one except the daughter of the king of Naples."
It was a difficult, stormy voyage, but finally they arrived safely.
"Where is your boat?" asked the princess after they had ridden together for some time without speaking.
There were often pirate ships which stopped there.
"A very beautiful daughter, too!"
"Does my lady know with whom she is going away?" he asked.
The prince she had recognized the very moment she had seen him.
All this sounded very romantic to the daughter of the king of Naples. She had never dreamed that a thing like this would ever happen.
The princess was so surprised that she turned pale.
The old woman hastened to the royal palace.
"I thought you were a pretty little maid," he said, "when I first saw you, but now I've changed my mind about you."
The prince replied:
She came straight up to him.
"It is a bit awkward to lose my horse.
"Of course, I've seen him only twice," she told herself in an effort to gain assurance.
"A peddler was to come to-day at four o'clock with pretty things for me to buy."
"I made an appointment to see the princess to-morrow.
She blushed.
"I am," replied the princess.
"Well done, good mother!" cried the prince, again thrusting his hand into his purse.
Then he spoke in a voice which shook.
I am going to the palace at four o'clock to sell pretty things to her."
We found her upon these very rocks.
"She is no king's daughter!" she cried.
"I thank you."
"I'm sure this is a girl's cry."
"The king of Naples has a daughter!" she cried.
The old woman thanked him.
The king agreed that it was quite impossible for the babe to escape death, but he could not forget the strange voice which had said:
'Tis fate--'tis fate--'tis fate."
"I refuse to wed any maid born in this poor hut," he said.
This time the king plotted her death by drowning.
MARIA-OF-THE-FOREST
"Here in this hut is born to-night The maiden of your fate: You can't escape your lot, young king; Your fate for you will wait.
The sailors rescued it and opened it with interest.
Her own mother has abandoned her.
The king ordered him again to steal her.
He carried her away into the deep forest, but he did not have the heart to put an innocent babe to death. He left her in a hollow tree, wrapped up in the bright red sash he wore.
They, of course, did not wish to return to the hut of the charcoal burner, and at length they found their way out of the deep forest.
"At what time?" asked the king.
The page, however, was suspicious when he heard her name.
He reported his suspicions to the king.
The king turned over on his pillow and tried to sleep, but the strange voice kept ringing in his ears.
He and his favorite page became separated from the rest of the party and soon they realized that they were lost. As night approached they found the rude hut of a charcoal burner and begged for permission to pass the night there.
It made Maria's dark eyes look even brighter than before.
"I'll do the deed myself."
'Tis fate--'tis fate--'tis fate."
"Here in this hut is born to-night The maiden of your fate: You can't escape your lot, young king; Your fate for you will wait.
My good wife will be a mother to her," he said.
"Take me to the baby," he said.
The cry continued, however, and it sounded very near, almost under the woodcutter's feet.
"Here in this hut is born to-night The maiden of your fate: You can't escape your lot, young king; Your fate for you will wait.
Now it happened that very day that a woodcutter was working in the forest.
"It was just midnight," replied the charcoal burner.
They were received most hospitably.
He rose early.
I went to Mrs. Halifax, and helped her to describe the prospect to the inquisitive boys; finally coaxing the refractory Guy up the winding road, where, just as if it had been yesterday, stood my old friends, my four Lombardy poplars, three together and one apart.
"How can you talk so!
Has it not, my little daughter? Who brought her these violets?"
The lad lifted up those soft grey eyes, and then I remembered what his sister had said of Lord Ravenel's enthusiastic admiration of Mr. Halifax.
Sometimes they differed on minor points, and talked their differences lovingly out; but on any great question she had always this safe trust in him--that if one were right and the other wrong, the erring one was much more likely to be herself than John.
If my landlord will not do it, I will; and add a steam-engine, too."
They have in them the instinct to rise; and as surely as water regains its own level, so do they, from however low a source, ascend to theirs.
It would have gone harder, but for one whom John now began to call his "friend;" at least, one who invariably called Mr. Halifax so--our neighbour, Sir Ralph Oldtower.
It was the season she enjoyed most--the time of the singing of birds, and the springing of delicate-scented flowers. I myself never loved the beech-wood better than did our Muriel.
If you had heard those poor people whom I sent away tonight!
It ceased to be a pleasure to walk in the green hollow, between the two grassy hills, which heretofore Muriel and I had liked even better than the Flat.
But first I must speak to my people--I shall have to shorten wages for a time."
"I would not--except for my poor people."
"Do what, John?
Again Ursula asked if nothing could be done.
If it must be done--better done at once, before winter sets in.
I would not like to have it said, in contradistinction to the old saying, 'See how these Christians FIGHT!'"
He was setting up that wonderful novelty--a steam-engine.
The troubles must be borne; why not bear them with as good heart as possible?
For, as I have said, Ursula was not a woman to be led blindfold, even by her husband.
But it must be;--nothing venture--nothing have.
Have a new set of Luddites coming to burn my mill, and break my machinery? That is what Lord Luxmore wants.
He hardly felt Muriel's tiny creeping hands.
"More than I like to think of.
The water-power being so greatly lessened, I must either stop the mills, or work them by steam."
How can you speak so lightly?"
"Why, indeed?" he said, in a low, fond tone.
It was the softest, mildest voice--the voice of one long used to oppression; and the young man whom Ursula had supposed to be a Catholic appeared from behind the loom.
The youth crossed himself, then started and looked round, in terror of observers.
What was to be borne--she bore: what was to be done--she did; but she rarely made any "fuss" about either her doings or her sufferings.
Don't cling so fast; father will be back soon--and isn't this a sweet sunny place for a little maid to be lazy in?"
"Yes, I know."
Do you notice, Phineas?"
"What does 'ruin' mean?
"To-morrow."
She said, 'she hoped you would not ruin yourself, like Mr. Miller of Glasgow!' I said I was not afraid."
"He--do you mean your father?"
"Yes--that's it--it can be nothing else!
"I am sick of it.
He was oppressed with business cares; daily, hourly vexations.
Will it cost much?"
"Then you think John is right?"
Chiefly, because, as the earl had said, his lordship possessed an "excellent memory." The Kingswell election had worked its results in a hundred small ways, wherein the heavy hand of the landlord could be laid upon the tenant.
In his empty mill, standing beside one of its silenced looms, we found the master.
"I do not know you, sir.
But I see what it is--I have seen it coming a whole year.
He looked exceedingly surprised.
Is it not so, Uncle Phineas?" continued her father, hastily, for I was watching them.
"How often has Lady Oldtower been here, Ursula?"
Good-bye, my little daughter.
If it is an unlawful act, why not go to law?"
"But I and mine are heretics, you know!"
"What a comfort! the day-light is lengthening.
"Well, love--you know what has happened?"
There never was but one in it I cared for, or who cared for me--and now--Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis."
And the little maid in her quiet way was very fond of him; delighting in his company when her father was not by.
"She called first, you remember, after our trouble with the children; she has been twice since, I think.
I have often watched her and your children. But you don't remember me."
John said this in much excitement.
"But gently, I hope?--you are so very outspoken, love.
"That is because she is a little girl, necessarily less strong than the lads are.
"Phineas, you forget my principle--only mine, however; I do not force it upon any one else--my firm principle, that I will never go to law. Never!
"I wish I were."
So the ignorant, simple mill people, when they came for their easy Saturday's wages, only stood and gaped at the mass of iron, and the curiously-shaped brickwork, and wondered what on earth "the master" was about?
I tried to urge that such an act was improbable; in fact, against the law.
At first, Mrs. Halifax had looked grave--most women would, especially wives and mothers, in those days when every innovation was regarded with horror, and improvement and ruin were held synonymous.
But it was pleasant to hear her thus answer.
But I may have some little trouble with my people here.
"But what about people who haven't natural gumption, Aunt Jimsie?"
She knew he was studying very hard, aiming at High Honors and the Cooper Prize, and he took little part in the social doings of Redmond.
That boy ought to sleep with a rubber band around his head to train his ears not to stick out.
Well, that justifies higher education in my opinion.
"But I mistrust you haven't any too much sense yet.
She meant to carry them, of course, but her eyes wandered to another box on her table.
If I should fail in it what would Jo say?"
If they live to be a hundred they really don't know anything more than when they were born.
"No, I won't, young woman.
It's a matter I was always dubious about before."
One energetic twist and it gave way.
She slipped her hand inside her collar and caught at the gold chain.
"This is what I would once have called an epoch in my life," said Anne, as she took Roy's violets out of their box and gazed at them thoughtfully.
Summing up, I think that is what Redmond has given me."
The Arts graduates gave a graduation dance that night.
In the darkness she felt her face burning.
"He didn't know about the graduation dance.
I've studied and mulled over notebooks until I'm incapable of forming an opinion of anything.
Chapter XXXVII
"Judging from what you all, say" remarked Aunt Jamesina, "the sum and substance is that you can learn--if you've got natural gumption enough--in four years at college what it would take about twenty years of living to teach you.
It's not to be expected, of course.
"Oh, yes.
Perhaps it was a good paper and perhaps it was bad enough to make Homer turn over in his grave.
The wonderful day had come and Roy's violets had no place in it.
It was I who suggested it to him and he took my advice, but he never forgave me for it."
"You don't act as if you were by times," said Aunt Jamesina severely.
"We've learned the truth of what Professor Woodleigh told us last Philomathic," said Phil.
Her hands were trembling and her eyes were smarting.
When Anne dressed for it she tossed aside the pearl beads she usually wore and took from her trunk the small box that had come to Green Gables on Christmas day. In it was a thread-like gold chain with a tiny pink enamel heart as a pendant.
So there is no need of defining it."
It was of one strange, unaccountable pang that spoiled this long-expected day for her and left in it a certain faint but enduring flavor of bitterness.
"I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night," groaned Phil.
How thankful little Phil will be when all this examinating is over."
She and Phil walked to Redmond together.
Anne's own winter had been quite gay socially. She had seen a good deal of the Gardners; she and Dorothy were very intimate; college circles expected the announcement of her engagement to Roy any day.
How did you get on in Greek today?"
Then came Convocation.
"It's easy for you to be serene.
I'm not--and when I think of that horrible paper tomorrow I quail.
"Moody Spurgeon MacPherson called here tonight after you left," said Aunt Jamesina, who had sat up to keep the fire on.
"Words aren't made--they grow," said Anne.
When you've learned to laugh at the things that should be laughed at, and not to laugh at those that shouldn't, you've got wisdom and understanding."
But those of us who have some gumption should duly thank the Lord for it."
Priscilla took Honors in Classics, and Phil in Mathematics. Stella obtained a good all-round showing.
It's their misfortune not their fault, poor souls.
She could not have told why she did it.
"Oh, Aunt Jimsie, haven't we been pretty good girls, take us by and large, these three winters you've mothered us?" pleaded Phil.
"If you live long enough both wishes will come true," said Anne calmly.
Did you hear anything of it?"
"I think," said Anne slowly, "that I really have learned to look upon each little hindrance as a jest and each great one as the foreshadowing of victory.
"I think it's true," said Phil lightly.
Yet just before she left Patty's Place for Convocation she flung Roy's violets aside and put Gilbert's lilies-of-the-valley in their place.
"Have you learned anything at Redmond except dead languages and geometry and such trash?" queried Aunt Jamesina.
"I don't know.
"Will you please define what gumption is, Aunt Jimsie?" asked Phil.
What was it?
"I love them," said Dorothy.
She felt oddly like crying.
How glorious!
Never tell me that Friday isn't unlucky."
"At your house," the stranger replied; "it looks for all the world like a big shoe!"
But the old woman continued to look after them, as well as she was able, until Sarah, her third daughter, also died, and three more children were sent to their grandmother to be brought up.
When the grandmother returned she asked,
She lived in a peculiar little house, that looked something like this picture.
"There are so many children," she said one day to the baker-man, "that I often really do n't know what to do!"
But she kept her promise, and made them eat their broth without any bread; for, indeed, there was no bread to give them.
Altogether, the baker-man was terribly frightened; and when all the sixteen small Indians rushed from the bushes and flourished their tomahawks, he took to his heels and ran down the hill as fast as he could go!
This misfortune ruined all the old woman's dreams of quiet; but the next day the children arrived--three boys and two girls--and she made the best of it and gave them the beds her own daughters had once occupied, and her own cot as well; and she made a bed for herself on the parlor sofa.
The only peace she ever got was when they were all safely tucked in their little cots and were sound asleep; for then, at least, she was free from worry and had a chance to gather her scattered wits.
"Why, yes.
"Never mind," said the woman; "it may be a shoe, but it is full of babies, and that makes it differ from most other shoes."
The house presented a very queer appearance now, but she did not mind that so long as the babies were comfortable.
It was not like most of the houses you see, but the old woman had it built herself, and liked it, and so it did not matter to her how odd it was.
The youngsters were like all other children, and got into mischief once in awhile; but the old woman had much experience with children and managed to keep them in order very well, while they quickly learned to obey her, and generally did as they were bid.
And the woman, after that, lived all alone, and said to herself, "I have done my duty to the world, and now shall rest quietly for the balance of my life.
"I shall not have to build again," she said; "and that is one satisfaction.
The old woman, having taken the other twelve, could not well refuse to adopt these little orphans also.
But scarcely had she succeeded in getting them settled in their new home when Margaret, another of her daughters, died, and sent four more children to her mother to be taken care of.
So she hired a carpenter and built what is called a "lean-to" at the right of her cottage, making it just big enough to accommodate the four new members of her family.
And then the girls grew up and married, and found homes of their own, so that all the children were in time well provided for.
"You are sixteen very naughty children!" exclaimed the old woman; "and for punishment you must eat your broth without any bread, and afterwards each one shall have a sound whipping and be sent to bed."
They took care not to play any more tricks on the baker-man, and as they grew older they were naturally much better behaved.
But the old woman did not complain at this; her time was too much taken up with the babies for her to miss the grass and the flowers.
The children looked at one another in surprise, for they had forgotten all about the bread.
It cost so much money to clothe them that she decided to dress them all alike, so that they looked like the children of a regular orphan asylum.
"Where is the bread for your supper?"
She sent for the carpenter again, and had him build another addition to her house, as the picture shows.
Before many years the boys were old enough to work for the neighboring farmers, and that made the woman's family a good deal smaller.
Once more she sent for the carpenter, and bade him build a third addition to the house; and when it was completed she added four more cots to the dozen that were already in use.
Then a flight of arrows came from the bushes, and although they were blunt and could do him no harm they rattled all over his body; and one hit his nose, and another his chin, while several stuck fast in the loaves of bread.
They cried some, of course, but they knew very well they deserved the punishment, and it was not long before all of them were sound asleep.
The old woman scarcely knew where to keep this new flock that had come to her fold, for the house was already full; but she thought the matter over and finally decided she must build an addition to her house.
But it was a good and wholesome diet, and the children thrived and grew fat upon it.
And then one of them confessed, and told her the whole story of how they had frightened the baker-man for saying he would send them to the poor-house.
And now, to make the matter worse, her fourth daughter, who had been named Abigail, suddenly took sick and died, and she also had four small children that must be cared for in some way.
The baker-man came every day to the shoe-house, and brought two great baskets of bread in his arms for the children to eat with their milk and their broth.
Then she put three new cots in the new part for the babies to sleep in, and when they arrived they were just as cozy and comfortable as peas in a pod.
And some were naughty and had to be whipped; and some were dirty and had to be washed; and some were good and had to be kissed. It was "Gran'ma, do this!" and "Gran'ma, do that!" from morning to night, so that the poor grandmother was nearly distracted.
The older Babylonian account is found in the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, which comes from the library of Asshurbanipal.
Into this he took not only his family and provisions, but quadrupeds and birds of all kinds. When the flood began to recede, he sent out a bird, which quickly returned.
The few literary inscriptions which come from this period, those found in the mound at Gezer, are written in the Assyrian script and contain the names of Assyrian officials.
Then,
The story as told is not merely an illustration of the truth that righteousness brings its just reward, but of the profounder principle that it is the morally fit who survive.
It is, therefore, one of the most suggestive and interesting of the writings of the early Israelites.
To him are given the promises which God was eager to realize in the life of humanity.
Otherwise their term of power is short.
Hence in accord with the just laws of the universe their destruction was unavoidable, and it came even as effect follows cause.
It may perhaps have been true in the days of Machiavelli that cruelty and treachery would aid the unscrupulous petty despot of Italy to secure and at times to maintain his dukedom; but certainly in modern days, when in all civilized countries permanently prosperous government is based ultimately upon the will of the people, the successful ruler can no longer be treacherous and cruel.
In the poetic fancy of the ancient East even the resplendent rainbow, which proclaimed the return of the sun after the storm, was truly interpreted as evidence of God's fatherly love and care for his children.
This was because they had grasped universal principles.
The destruction of mankind came not as the fiat of an arbitrary Deity, but because of the purpose which God had before him in the work of creation, and because that purpose was good.
Or, even there, would the adage, "There must be honor among thieves," hold, when it came to permanent organization?
On the other hand, these ancient teachers taught with inimitable skill that God would not destroy that which was worthy of preservation.
With all the weakness of human nature found in every society, the growing success of the rule of the people throughout the world proves that fundamentally men and women are honest and true.
Moreover, the doctrine of evolution, dependent upon this principle, has exerted so great an influence upon the process of investigation and thinking in all fields of activity that the resulting change in method has amounted to a revolution.
What illustrations can you cite?
This principle, since that day, has been thoroughly worked out in practically all the important fields of both the plant and animal world.
Is it possible that the prophetic and priestly historians found these stories on the lips of the people and sought in this heroic way to divest them of their polytheistic form and, in certain respects, immoral implications?
Is there geological evidence that the earth, during human history, has been completely inundated?
Men by their sins and wilful failure to observe his benign laws were thwarting that purpose.
Even among our so-called "spoils" politicians and corrupt bosses, who hold their positions by playing upon the selfishness of their followers and the ignorance and apathy of the public, there must be rigid faithfulness to promises, and, at any rate, the appearance of promoting the public welfare.
In this respect the two variant Biblical narratives are in perfect agreement.
The fittest morally?
Did these different methods under the special circumstances result in the survival of the fittest?
Was it necessary?
What were the effects of the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake upon these cities?
How do you explain the striking points of similarity between the flood stories of peoples far removed from each other?
Pick out the leading statesmen of the last half century in England, Germany and Italy. Do they not all stand for unselfish, patriotic purpose in their actions, and in character for individual honor and integrity?
The same is true in our social intercourse.
How do circumstances affect the kind of act that will be successful?
To what extent is the modern progress in sanitation due to natural calamities?
Business success in the long run, is so strongly based upon mutual confidence and trust, that, especially in these later days of credit organization, the dishonest man or even the tricky man cannot prosper long.
For the sake of making an important sale they were often inclined to misrepresent his goods.
The principle is applied not only in the field of biology, but also in the realm of astronomy, where we study the evolution of worlds, and in psychology, history, social science, where we speak of the development of human traits and of the growth of economic, political and social institutions.
What do you mean by a calamity?
(1) Flood Stories among Primitive Peoples.
A sales manager of a prominent institution said lately that the chief difficulty that he had with his men was to make them always tell the truth.
If we look back through the history of modern times, we shall find that the statesmen who rank high among the successful rulers of their countries are men of unselfish patriotism, and almost invariably men of personal uprightness and morality, and usually of deep religious feeling.
Is it not evidence of superlative teaching skill to use that which is familiar and, therefore, of interest to those taught, in order to inculcate the deeper moral and religious truths of life?
Brilliancy of intellect, however important in many fields of activity, counts for relatively little in home and social life, if not accompanied by graciousness of manner, kindness of heart, uprightness of character.
Would the same act tend equally to preserve the government in both countries?
But, whatever your answer, society fortunately is not made up of hypocrites or rascals of any kind.
Was such an act right?
It may sometimes seem that the brilliant rascal succeeds, that the unscrupulous business man becomes rich, and that the hypocrite prospers through his hypocrisy.
What calamities?
It is interesting and illuminating to note how the ancient Hebrew prophets in their religious teaching forecast the discoveries and scientific methods of our day.
In both of the versions Noah in a very true sense represents the beginning of a new creation: he is the traditional father of a better race.
Almost universally, if a mooted question touching morals can be put simply and squarely before the people, they will see and choose the right.
AIM OF THE BIBLICAL WRITERS IN RECOUNTING THE FLOOD STORY.
During the Chinese revolution of 1912 in Peking and Nanking, looting leaders of mobs and plundering soldiers when captured were promptly decapitated without trial.
In the light of these profound religious teachings may any one reasonably question the right of these stories to a place in the Bible?
Generally common human nature is for the right.
CHAPTER XX
It labored specially to bring about the dissolution of the old party organizations and the formation of a new one, based upon the general policy of resisting the extension of slavery.
In the new Congress there were in the House, as nearly as the classification could be made, about 108 anti-Nebraska members, nearly 40 Know-Nothings, and about 75 Democrats; the remaining members were undecided.
It may be said with truth that the year 1854 formed one continuous and solid political campaign from January to November, rising in interest and earnestness from first to last, and engaging in the discussion more fully than had ever occurred in previous American history all the constituent elements of our population.
But the refusal of the Whigs in many States to surrender their name and organization, and more especially the abrupt appearance of the Know-Nothings on the field of parties, retarded the general coalition between the Whigs and the Free-soilers which so many influences favored.
Despite objurgation and contempt, it had become since 1840 a constant and growing factor in politics.
It happened that this was a year for electing Congressmen.
When, in the opening of the anti-Nebraska contest, the Free-soil leaders undertook the formation of a new party to supersede the old, they had, because of their generally democratic antecedents, with great unanimity proposed that it be called the "Republican" party, thus reviving the distinctive appellation by which the followers of Jefferson were known in the early days of the republic.
The influence of this result upon parties, old and new, is perhaps best illustrated in the organization of the Thirty-fourth Congress, chosen at these elections during the year 1854, which witnessed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
But as yet the new party was merely inchoate, its elements distrustful, jealous, and discordant; the feuds and battles of a quarter of a century were not easily forgotten or buried.
But public opinion in that part of the Union was fearfully tyrannical and intolerant; and opposition dared only to manifest itself to Democratic party organization--not to these Democratic party measures.
This small party of antislavery veterans, over 158,000 voters in the aggregate, and distributed in detachments of from 3000 to 30,000 in twelve of the free States, now came to the front, and with its newspapers and speakers trained in the discussion of the subject, and its committees and affiliations already in action and correspondence, bore the brunt of the fight against the repeal.
If the agreement of a generation could be thus annulled in a breath, was there any safety even in the Constitution itself?
The alarm of the nation on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was serious and startling.
Douglas, seizing only too gladly the pretext to use denunciation instead of argument, replied in his opening speech, in turn stigmatizing them as "abolition confederates"
The real and effective gain, therefore, was the more or less thorough alliance of the Whig party and the Free-soil party of the Northern States: wherever that was successful it gave immediate and available majorities to the opposition, which made their influence felt even in the very opening of the popular contest following the Congressional repeal.
On the other hand, the great mass of Northern Whigs promptly opposed the repeal, and formed the bulk of the opposition, nevertheless losing perhaps as many pro-slavery Whigs as they gained antislavery Democrats.
As it turned out, a great variety of party names were retained or adopted in the Congressional and State campaigns of 1854, the designation of "anti- Nebraska" being perhaps the most common, and certainly for the moment the most serviceable, since denunciation of the Nebraska bill was the one all-pervading bond of sympathy and agreement among men who differed very widely on almost all other political topics.
Perhaps for the first time in our modern politics, the pulpit vied with the press, and the Church with the campaign club, in the work of debate and propagandism.
Thus confronted, the Nebraska and anti-Nebraska factions, or, more philosophically speaking, the pro-slavery and antislavery sentiment of the several American States, battled for political supremacy with a zeal and determination only manifested on occasions of deep and vital concern to the welfare of the republic.
The Whigs of the South were therefore driven precipitately to division.
This affiliation, however, was confined exclusively to the free States.
The Nebraska bill did not pass till the end of May, and the political excitement was at once transferred from Washington to every district of the whole country.
Connecticut followed in her footsteps early in April. Long before November it was evident that the political revolution among the people of the North was thorough, and that election day was anxiously awaited merely to record the popular verdict already decided.
The Whig party, however, having carried two slave States for Scott in 1852, and holding a strong minority in the remainder, was not so unanimous.
Considering the fact that Jefferson had originated the policy of slavery restriction in his draft of the ordinance of 1784, the name became singularly appropriate, and wherever the Free-soilers succeeded in forming a coalition it was adopted without question.
The measure once passed, and the Compromise repealed, the first natural impulse was to combine, organize, and agitate for its restoration.
Those of extreme pro-slavery views, like Dixon, of Kentucky,--who, when he introduced his amendment, declared, "Upon the question of slavery I know no Whiggery and no Democracy,"--went boldly and at once over into the Democratic camp, while those who retained their traditional party name and flag were sundered from their ancient allies in the Northern States by the impossibility of taking up the latter's antislavery war-cry.
This was the ready-made, common ground of cooperation.
For the present, party disintegration was slow; men were reluctant to abandon their old-time principles and associations.
But they, on the other hand, persisted all the more earnestly in justifying their interference in moral questions wherever they appeared, and were clearly sustained by the public opinion of the North.
Since, however, the repeal had shaken but not obliterated old party lines, this effort succeeded only in favorable localities.
If there were demagogues here and there among them, seeking merely to create a balance of power for bargain and sale, they were unimportant in number, and only of local influence, and soon became deserters. There was no mistaking the earnestness of the body of this faction.
"assembled in secret conclave"
THE DRIFT OF POLITICS
Operating in entire secrecy, the country was startled by the sudden appearance in one locality after another, on election day, of a potent and unsuspected political power, which in many instances pushed both the old organizations not only to disastrous but even to ridiculous defeat.
A few fanatical men, who had made it the vehicle of violent expressions, had kept it under the ban of popular prejudice.
However languidly certain elements of American society may perform what they deem the drudgery of politics, they do not shrink from it when they hear warning of real danger.
Each Congress, in ordinary course, meets for the first time about one year after its members are elected by the people, and the influence of politics during the interim needs always to be taken into account.
Seven Southern Representatives and two Southern Senators had voted against the Nebraska bill, and many individual voters condemned it as an act of bad faith--as the abandonment of the accepted "finality," and as the provocation of a dangerous antislavery reaction.
All ranks and occupations therefore joined with a new energy in the contest it provoked. Particularly was the religious sentiment of the North profoundly moved by the moral question involved.
Men were for or against the bill--every other political subject was left in abeyance.
The boasted finality was a broken reed; the life-boat of compromise a hopeless wreck.
The united efforts of Douglas and the Administration held the body of the Northern Democrats to his fatal policy, though protests and defections became alarmingly frequent.
[Illustration: HISTORICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1854 SHOWING THE VARIOUS ACCESSIONS OF TERRITORY ETC.
The gradual disruption of parties, and the new and radical attitudes assumed by men of independent thought, gave ample occasion to indulge in such epithets as "apostates," "renegades," and "traitors." Unusual acrimony grew out of the zeal of the Church and its ministers.
The very inception of the struggle had provoked bitter words.
Now, combining wisdom with opportunity, it became conciliatory, and, abating something of its abstractions, made itself the exponent of a demand for a present and practical reform--a simple return to the ancient faith and landmarks.
While the measure was yet under discussion in the House in March, New Hampshire led off by an election completely obliterating the eighty-nine Democratic majority in her Legislature.
Thus caught in a trap the Italian horse were completely annihilated, and so, before the heavy infantry of the two armies met each other, not a Roman cavalry soldier remained alive and unwounded on the field.
Varro wished to march against the enemy without delay, while Emilius was adverse to risking an engagement in a country which, being level and open, was favourable to the action of Hannibal's superior cavalry.
He thus not only obtained possession of his enemy's supplies, but interposed between the Romans and the low lying district of Southern Apulia, where alone, at, this early season of the year, the corn was fully ripe.
This had been skillfully chosen.
When within a few paces of him he gave a sudden spring and flung himself upon him, burying his knife between his shoulders.
Accordingly at the next crossroad they came to Nessus turned down and concealed himself a few paces away, while Malchus, without pausing, walked straight on.
On the sixth day after leaving Carthage the ship entered the port of Corinth.
It was agreed that the former had better continue his work as usual until the evening, and then ask for his discharge on the plea that he had received a message requiring his presence in his native village, for it was thought that suspicion might be excited were he to leave suddenly without drawing his pay, and possibly a search might be instituted in the city to discover his whereabouts.
"Quick, my lord," he exclaimed, "now is the time."
The following was the disposition of his troops.
She sees unmoved the heroic efforts which Hannibal and his army are making to save her, and she will not stretch out a hand to aid him.
They had absolute confidence in their general, and were willing to undertake the most tremendous labours and to engage in the most arduous conflicts to please him, knowing that he, on his part, was unwearied in promoting their comfort and well being at all other times.
I trust that never again shall I set foot within its walls.
You would, I am convinced, throw away your life for no good purpose, while your presence and your mysterious escape from prison would be made the pretense for a fresh series of persecutions of our partisans.
A minute or two later Malchus issued out and quietly followed it.
The Roman army was as before watching him at a short distance off.
On the following day Varro, whose turn it was to command, marched towards the hostile camp.
Unable to open out, to fight, or to fly, with no quarter asked or given, the Romans and their Latin allies fell before the swords of their enemies, till, of the seventy thousand infantry which had advanced to the fight, forty thousand had fallen on the field.
These resisted with great obstinacy.
I will come down and see him; his visits, were they known, would excite suspicion.
Then followed a slaughter unequalled in the records of history.
He stopped at the junction of the roads and stood for a few seconds in hesitation, then he followed Malchus.
I think it would be in the highest degree dangerous were we, as you propose, to introduce you suddenly to the senate as Hannibal's ambassador to them, and leave you to plead his cause.
He brought the elephant suddenly to a standstill.
The latter were instantly overthrown, and were driven from the field with great slaughter.
Thus, upon the march, they were unembarrassed by the necessity of taking a great baggage train with them, and, when halted, their general could keep his army together in readiness to strike a blow whenever an opportunity offered; while Hannibal, on the other hand, was forced to scatter a considerable portion of the army in search of provisions.
"I say nothing to dissuade you, Malchus," the old man replied, "such are the natural sentiments of your age; and methinks, were my own time to come over again, I too would choose such a life in preference to an existence in the polluted atmosphere of ungrateful Carthage.
Nessus and the Arab at once returned to the citadel.
He wheeled round both his flanks, and the Africans, who had hitherto not struck a blow, now fell in perfect order upon the flanks of the Roman mass, while Hasdrubal with his victorious cavalry charged down like a torrent upon their rear.
While the Carthaginian heavy horse were thus defeating the Roman cavalry, the Numidians maneuvered near the greatly superior cavalry of the Italian allies, and kept them occupied until the heavy horse, after destroying the Roman cavalry, swept round behind their infantry and fell upon the rear of the Italian horse, while the Numidians charged them fiercely in front.
A nation which can place a mere handful of its own citizens in the line of battle voluntarily dooms herself to destruction."
CHAPTER XVIII: CANNAE
The river, whose general course was east and west, made a loop, and across this Hannibal had drawn up his army with both wings resting upon the river.
"I think we are followed, my lord," he said, "one of Hanno's spies in Manon's household is no doubt seeking to discover who are the Arabs who have paid his master a visit.
The latter became less and less frequent, until, at a distance of two miles from the foot of the citadel, the mahout, on looking round, perceived no one in sight.
But he was unquestionably an able man, and possessed some great qualities.
The Roman cavalry, numbering two thousand four hundred men, was on his right wing, and was thus opposed to Hannibal's heavy cavalry, eight thousand strong.
If the man behind us be honest he will go straight on; if he be a spy, he will hesitate and stop at the corner to decide which of us he shall follow; then I shall know what to do."
She lives contentedly under the constant tyranny of Hanno's rule, satisfied to be wealthy, luxurious, and slothful, to carry on her trade, to keep her riches, caring nothing for the manly virtues, indifferent to valour, preparing herself slowly and surely to fall an easy prey to Rome.
I have done with her; and if I do not fall in the battlefield I will, when the war is over, seek a refuge among the Gauls, where, if the life is rough, it is at least free and independent, where courage and manliness and honour count for much, and where the enervating influence of wealth is as yet unknown.
"Such is, in my opinion, the only possible mode of proceeding.
The annual elections at Rome had just taken place, and Terentius Varro and Emilius Paulus had been chosen consuls.
The Romans possessed the great advantage over him of having magazines in their rear constantly replenished by their allies, and move where they might, they were sure of obtaining subsistence without difficulty.
While this contest was going on, Hannibal advanced his centre so as to form a salient angle projecting in front of his line.
And now, will you stop here with me, or will you return to the place where you are staying?
The senate therefore, having largely reinforced the army, ordered the consuls to advance and give battle.
Hannibal, seeing that the Romans would not fight, detached his Numidian cavalry across the river to cut off the Roman foraging parties and to surround and harass their smaller camp on that side of the river.
Once or twice he made as if he would go ashore, and the captain at last abated his demands to a reasonable sum.
Malchus had escaped from the citadel without the possibility of a suspicion arising that he had issued from its gates, and in his Arab garb he could now traverse the streets unsuspected.
After bidding farewell to the old noble, Malchus returned to the house of the Arab and prepared for his departure.
They served willingly and cheerfully.
The cries of the people at the approach of the elephant preceded its course, and all took refuge in gardens or houses.
This was the moment for which Hannibal had waited.
Malchus threw off the sack, climbed out of the howdah, and slipped down by the elephant's tail, the usual plan for dismounting when an elephant is on its feet.
Some threw themselves on their faces, others got over the parapet and hung by their hands until he had passed, while some squeezed themselves against the wall; but the elephant passed on without doing harm to any.
Nessus coolly wiped his knife upon the garments of the spy, and then proceeded at a rapid pace until he overtook Malchus.
"To ask Carthage to make these sacrifices in her present mood is hopeless; we must await an opportunity.
The scheme had been entirely successful.
To move now would be to ensure a rejection of our demands, to bring fresh persecutions upon us, and so to weaken us that we should be powerless to turn to good account the opportunity which the news of another great victory would afford.
Bid him on his return watch closely to see that he is not followed, and tell him to go by devious windings and to mix in the thickest crowds in order to throw any one who may be following off his track before he rejoins you.
From first to last, through the long war, there was neither grumbling, nor discontent, nor insubordination among the troops.
The next day passed quietly, but on the following morning Hannibal quitted his camp and formed his army in order of battle to tempt the Romans to attack; but Emilius, sensible that the ground was against him, would not move, but contented himself with further strengthening his camps.
Malchus at once sought the tent of the general, whose surprise at seeing him enter was great, for he had not expected that he would return until the spring.
The principes, who formed the second line of the Roman infantry, came forward and joined the spearmen, and even the triarii pressed forward and joined in the fight.
Fighting with extreme obstinacy the Carthaginian centre was forced gradually back until they were again in a line with the Africans on their flanks.
Here is a bag of gold; you will need it to reward those who have assisted in your escape."
Thus the Romans could not outflank him, and the effect of their vastly superior numbers in infantry would to some extent be neutralized.
Let your follower come nightly to me for instructions; let him enter the gate and remain in the garden near it.
The praetor Marcellus, who had slain a Gaulish king with his own hand in the last Gaulish war, was at Ostia with a legion.
He and his friends will doubtless work quietly to prepare the public mind, and I trust that ere very long some decisive victory will give them the opportunity for exciting a great demonstration on our behalf."
Hannibal attacked the Roman advanced guard with his cavalry and light infantry, but Varro had supported his cavalry not only by his light troops, but by a strong body of his heavy armed infantry, and after an engagement, which lasted for several hours, he repulsed the Carthaginians with considerable loss.
As the elephant tore down the road to the town many were the narrow escapes that, as they thought, those coming up had of being crushed or thrown into the air by the angry beast.
Emilius commanded the Roman right, Varro the left.
Suddenly Nessus stopped and listened, and then resumed his walk.
"Whether it comes in my time or not," Malchus said, "I will be no sharer in the fate of Carthage.
All the troops in both camps were forced to surrender on the following morning, and thus only fifteen thousand scattered fugitives escaped of the eighty-seven thousand two hundred infantry and cavalry under the command of the Roman consuls.
Hannibal saw the opportunity, and when spring was passing into summer broke up his camp and marched straight to Cannae, where the vast magazines of the Romans at once fell into his hands.
He asked rather a high price for putting them ashore in a boat as they wished, and Malchus haggled over the sum for a considerable time, as a readiness to pay an exorbitant price might have given rise to doubts in the captain's mind as to the quality of his passengers.
Varro placed his infantry in close and heavy order, so as to reduce their front to that of the Carthaginians.
The Africans formed the two wings.
We are ready, of course, to pay extra for the trouble."
A minute later Nessus saw a dark figure come stealthily along.
By thus doing he obtained a position which he could the better hold with his inferior forces, while the Romans, deeming that he intended to attack their camp on that side of the river, would be likely to move their whole army across and to give battle.
Come again and see me before you leave.
This in fact Varro proceeded to do.
Nessus issued from his hiding place, and, with steps as silent and stealthy as those of a tiger tracking his prey, followed the man.
The Spaniards and Gauls occupied the centre of the line of infantry.
On reaching the foot of the descent the mahout guided the animal to the left, and, avoiding the busy streets of the town, directed its course towards the more quiet roads of the opulent quarter of Megara.
"The sooner the better," Malchus said bitterly, "for Carthage with its hideous tyranny, its foul corruption, its forgetfulness of its glory, its honour, and even its safety, is utterly hateful to me.
When we get to the next turning do you walk on and I will turn down the road.
As the spring advanced the great magazines which Hannibal had brought with him became nearly exhausted, and no provisions could be obtained from the surrounding country, which had been completely ruined by the long presence of the two armies.
In the course of the day he had provided himself with the garments of a trader, the character which he was now about to assume.
"In the meantime you must, for a short time, remain in concealment, while I arrange for a ship to carry you back to Italy."
The next morning Emilius, who was in command, detached a third of his force across the river, and encamped them there for the purpose of supporting the Roman foraging parties on that side and of interrupting those of the Carthaginians.
Varro belonged to the popular party, and is described by the historians of the period as a coarse and brutal demagogue, the son of a butcher, and having himself been a butcher.
"Hanno's faction is all powerful at present," he said, "and were Hannibal himself here I doubt whether his voice could stir the senate into taking action such as is needed.
I and my friends will prepare the way, will set our agents to work among the people, and when the news of another victory arrives and the people's hopes are aroused and excited, we will strike while the iron is hot, and call upon them to make one great effort to bring the struggle to a conclusion and to finish with Rome forever.
There's nothing to be afraid of, just yet, whatever there may be later on.
He won't shift that chair in a hurry."
"He's been investigating--so he says," answered Elphick.
"Come up to the cottage.
Myerst suddenly laughed.
March!"
Mark that, my fine fellows!"
That's my notion."
"Look out, Breton!
He kept Myerst covered while Spargo made play with the rope.
And Spargo twisted his head round to his companion.
Elphick began to move in his corner.
"Don't alarm yourself.
That may account for a good many things.
Myerst has another cheque in his hand.
And--I must trouble you to put up your hands.
Spargo thought awhile, pacing up and down the river bank.
And Spargo noiselessly followed his directions and slightly parting the branches which concealed him looked in through the uncurtained glass.
"I wish," he said at last, "I wish we could get in there and overhear what's going on.
Myerst made one hurried movement of his right hand towards his hip, but a sudden growl from Breton made him shift it just as quickly above his head, whither the left followed it.
He dropped his revolver into his pocket and turned to the two old men.
If things turn out as I think they will, Myerst, when he's got what he wants, will be off.
Cardlestone began to whimper; Elphick nodded his head.
Be ready!--when he gets that second cheque I guess he'll be off."
"It's Myerst--the Safe Deposit man. Myerst!"
"What notion?"
"Well," answered Breton.
Spargo, almost irritable from desire to get at close grips with the objects of his long journey, shook off Breton's hand with a growl of resentment.
Into it, now!
And they heard Myerst's voice, threatening, commanding in tone.
See if he's got a weapon of any sort on him, Spargo--that's the important thing."
Spargo took a step towards the cottage: Breton pulled him back.
The three walked into the cottage.
"Who is he?"
"That's a useful thing to have, Spargo," he remarked.
"Now, what's to be done?"
THE WHIP HAND
Arrived at the door, Breton posted himself in the porch, motioning to Spargo to creep in behind the bushes and to look through the window.
"The police must come," answered Breton firmly.
"And--it's a lie?" asked Breton.
"Well?" said Spargo.
We can leave that matter--we've plenty of time.
"Guardian," continued Breton, "don't be frightened!
Spargo began to search the prisoner's pockets.
But that's impossible--I know that cottage.
Then Marjorie's bright face appeared at the door, and, "May I come in?" she asked.
"Suppose, this morning," she said, "you just help Dora unpack, and make her thoroughly at home in the house and garden; then this afternoon perhaps your father will take you for a walk, and show Dora the house where Mrs. Ewing lived, and any other interesting places.
When Mrs. Merrithew saw him nodding, she rang, and the nurse--who, like Debby, was a family institution--came in and carried him off in her stalwart arms, to his little white bed.
Mr. Merrithew had, as Jackie said, "the splendidest way of splaining things," and found something of interest to relate about almost every street of the little city.
While she sat and looked about in admiration, the door was pushed gently open, and a plump maltese kitten came in, gazed at her doubtfully a moment, and then climbed on her lap.
That would do for to-day, wouldn't it?
Just now they seemed especially funny, because he was almost falling asleep while he talked.
They went through the beautiful cathedral, and he told them how it had been built through the earnest efforts of the well-known and venerated Bishop Medley, who was afterward Metropolitan of Canada.
Dora's dark brown eyes looked gravely into Marjorie's blue ones.
"That's the way with mother," Marjorie said to Dora after breakfast. "She never ends things up.
"Now, Susan, my very favourite song!"
When Dora was ready, she sat down in the little armchair that stood near a table piled with books, and looked about her contentedly.
And then Susan sang, in her soft, crooning voice "The maple-leaf, the maple-leaf, the maple-leaf for ever!"
She clasped the slender hand with her own plump fingers, and shook it heartily.
Let us be friends."
It was one of Dora's ambitions, kept secret hitherto, but now confided to Marjorie, to write stories "something like Mrs. Ewing's."
Marjorie laughed, as she patted the little bunch of blue-gray fur in Dora's lap.
I think life would be very dull without meals."
Dora's eyes opened wide with astonishment.
The journey from Montreal had been long and lonely, the parting from her parents hard, and the thought of meeting the unknown relatives had weighed upon her mind and helped to make her unusually subdued.
At the breakfast-table the next morning there was a merry discussion as to what should be done first to amuse Dora.
So, in girlish romance and sudden resolution, the little maids sealed a compact which was never broken, and began a friendship which lasted and grew in beauty and strength all through their lives.
There were other things, too, to see, and many anecdotes to hear, so that it was a somewhat tired, though happy and hungry party which trudged home just in time for tea.
Then, day after to-morrow we could have the picnic; and for the next week I have a magnificent idea, but I want to talk it over with your father," and she nodded and smiled at that gentleman in a way which made him almost as curious as the children.
There was an air of solid comfort and cosiness about this house that rested her.
As usual, it was "mother" who offered the most feasible plan.
These philosophical remarks rather astonished Dora, who was not yet accustomed to the contrast between Jack's sage reflections and his tender years.
Mrs. Merrithew took the little newcomer to her room, had her trunks settled conveniently, and then left her to prepare for the late tea which was waiting for them all.
CHAPTER II.
They saw, too, the picturesque cottage in which a certain quaint old lady had attained to the ripe age of a hundred and six years,--a record of which Fredericton was justly proud.
And such a tea, suited to hearty outdoor appetites born of the good Canadian air!
"Kitty has made friends with me already, and I think that must be a good omen."
These willows she had often sketched, and Dora carried away a spray of the pale gray-green leaves, in memory of her favourite story-writer.
The walk that afternoon was one which Dora always remembered.
Mr. Merrithew said "Let us go shooting bears," but even Jackie did not second this astounding proposition.
But you,--ah, yes!
This was approved of, but postponed for a day or two to allow for preparations and invitations.
You are like my father, and besides, we are cousins, and that makes us understand each other.
This room--which her aunt had told her was just opposite Marjorie's--was all furnished in the softest shades of brown and blue, her favourite colours.
She seemed to be taking the proposition very seriously.
"I knew it as soon as I looked at you."
Just over the side of the bed was a book-shelf, quite empty, waiting for her favourite books.
Jackie, who had invited her to sit beside him and beamed at her approvingly over his porridge and cream, suggested a walk to his favourite candy-store and the purchase of some sticks of "pure chocolate." Marjorie proposed a picnic at Old Government House.
"Oh, please do," Dora cried.
Then they both laughed, and Marjorie, obeying one of her sudden impulses, threw her arms around Dora's neck and gave her a cousinly hug. "You and I will be friends, too," she said.
It cut the skin, raised great welts, and the warm blood trickled down my back.
"HILLSBORO', April 10, 1838.
In this connection I desire to state that Rev.
My words seemed to exasperate him.
Tell Aunt Bella that I was very much obliged to her for her present; I have been so particular with it that I have only worn it once.
Oh God!
The child of which he was the father was the only child that I ever brought into the world.
The years passed slowly, and I continued to serve them, and at the same time grew into strong, healthy womanhood.
"Go away," he gruffly answered, "do not bother me."
I would not be put off thus.
No, I could not sleep, for I was suffering mental as well as bodily torture.
These revolting scenes created a great sensation at the time, were the talk of the town and neighborhood, and I flatter myself that the actions of those who had conspired against me were not viewed in a light to reflect much credit upon them.
The salary was small, and we still had to practise the closest economy.
I really believe you and all the family have forgotten me, if not I certainly should have heard from some of you since you left Boyton, if it was only a line; nevertheless I love you all very dearly, and shall, although I may never see you again, nor do I ever expect to.
Give my love to all the family, both white and black. I was very much obliged to you for the presents you sent me last summer, though it is quite late in the day to be thanking for them.
I have often wished that I lived where I knew I never could see you, for then I would not have my hopes raised, and to be disappointed in this manner; however, it is said that a bad beginning makes a good ending, but I hardly expect to see that happy day at this place.
My distress even touched her cold, jealous heart.
Then he picked up a rawhide, and began to ply it freely over my shoulders.
We struggled, and he struck me many savage blows.
I drew myself up proudly, firmly, and said: "No, Mr. Bingham, I shall not take down my dress before you.
He seized a rope, caught me roughly, and tried to tie me.
The act made it exactly as great an offense to give such information as to exhibit the sort of pictures and writings at which the legislation was ostensibly aimed.
CHAPTER XV
This act made it a crime to use the mails to convey contraceptives or information concerning contraceptives.
Like many laws upon our statute books, these are being persistently and intelligently violated.
It is most important because it is to purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely free.
In that year, however, the General Assembly of New York passed an act which specifically included the subject of contraceptives.
It is only a question of how long it will take women to make up their minds to this result.
Laws are seldom exactly what they seem, rarely what their advocates claim for them.
In 1873, however, a new section, said to have been drafted by Comstock himself, was substituted for the one enacted in 1872, and that section is essentially the substance of the present law.
They break the first law of nature, which is that of self preservation.
His body has been entombed but the evil that he did lives after him.
Those who believe in strictly legal measures, as well as those who believe both in legal measures and in open defiance of these brutal and unjust laws, are demanding amendments to the obscenity statutes, which shall remove information concerning contraceptives from its present classification among things filthy and obscene.
Shall we go on indefinitely driving the now healthy mother of two children into the hands of the abortionist, where she goes in preference to constant ill health, overwork and the witnessing of dying and starving babies?
This hand of the past reaches up into the present to smother the rising flame of modern ideals, to reforge our chains when we have broken them, to arrest progress.
Woman, bent upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in ignorance to preserve her purity.
The family of the judge who passes upon the case is likely to be smaller still.
Meanwhile, the provisions regarding contraceptives had been dropped from the amended New York State law of 1872.
At the call of those who fear progress and freedom, it rises from the gloom of forgotten things to oppress the living.
It does exist, however, and was specifically declared by the New York State Court of Appeals, as we shall see when we consider that court's opinion in the Sanger case, farther on in the book.
It had for its object the right to hold such political beliefs as one might choose, and to act in accordance with those beliefs.
LEGISLATING WOMAN'S MORALS
It is the dead hand that holds imprisoned within the obscenity laws all direct information concerning birth control.
The French have a saying concerning "mort main"--the dead hand.
Each year this hand reaches out to compel the birth of hundreds of thousands of infants who must die before they are twelve months old.
It is the dead hand that thus compels millions of American women to remain in the bondage of maternity.
The words "It is the law" sums it all up for these officials when they pass sentence in court.
Man has not protected woman in matters most vital to her--but she is awaking and will sooner or later realize this and assert herself.
Millions of them know nothing of reliable contraceptives. When women of the impoverished strata of society do not break these laws against contraceptives, they violate those laws of their inner beings which tell them not to bring children into the world to live in want, disease and general misery.
This will be no easy undertaking; it is usually much easier to enact statutes than to revise them.
On March 23, they fell in with a score or two of red-men who had been off to war and brought home but one scalp, and they had a chance to see a war-dance.
Law-rence soon tired of this place, and longed for a change of scene. They had to ride out by the first dawn of day, for by the time the sun was half an hour high it was as hot as at mid-day.
At sea he kept a log-book, took notes of the course of the winds, and if the days were fair or foul, and learned all he could of the ways of a ship and how to sail one.
So they gave up the scheme, and George was sent back to school.
Here they camped, and at the meal that was spread there was not a knife nor a fork to eat with but such as the guests had brought with them.
The red-men cleared a large space, and built a fire in the midst of it, round which they all sat.
He spoke to George a-bout it, and the boy was wild with joy.
YOUTH.
He wrote down what was done from day to day, and by these notes we learn that he had quite a rough time of it, and yet found much that was to his taste.
CHAPTER II.
This wise friend lent George good books which he took with him to the woods and read with great care, and in this way stored his mind with rich thoughts.
A Dutch-man, named Van-Bra-am, was one of these men, and he claimed to know a great deal of the art of war.
Law-rence did not gain in health, and ere his wife could join him he wrote her that he would start for home--"to his grave." He reached Mount Ver-non in time to die 'neath his own roof, and with kind friends at his bed-side.
In fact he did not know their size or shape, but he had heard that men had sought out some of the best spots, and had built homes there, and laid out farms for which they paid no rent, and he thought it quite time to put a stop to such things.
But he had the best of care, and at the end of three weeks was so well that he could go out of doors.
Red-men, half breeds, and wood-men thronged the place, where they were sure they would get a good meal.
They had been but two weeks in Bar-ba-does when George fell ill with small-pox, and this for a time put an end to all their sports.
These neat ways, formed in his youth, were kept up through all his life, and what seems strange is that day-books, and such books as you will find in great use now-a-days were not known at that time.
Late in the day of March 26, they came to a place where dwelt a man named Hedge, who was in the pay of King George as justice of the peace.
On the night of the first of A-pril the wind blew and the rain fell. The straw on which they lay took fire, and George was saved by one of the men, who woke him when it was in a blaze.
The men crossed in birch-bark boats, and rode all the next day in a rain storm to a place two-score miles from where they had set out that morn.
The rest soon joined him, and did just as he did. By this time the band made it-self heard, and I shall have to tell you what a fine band it was.
They made up their minds to stay there for a day or two; went to see the Warm Springs, and at night camped out in the field.
He had steeds of fine breed, and hounds of keen scent, for he was fond of the chase, and the woods and hills were full of game.
One of the men then made a grand speech in which he told them how they were to dance.
When he had done, the one who could dance the best sprang up as if he had just been roused from sleep, and ran and jumped round the ring in a queer kind of way.
He lived on a knoll, in a small house not more than twelve feet square.
There was a pot half full of water with a piece of deer-skin stretched tight on the top, and a gourd with some shot in it, and a piece of horse's tail tied to it to make it look fine.
This rough kind of life, though he did not know it, was to fit him for the toils and ills of war, of which he may have dreamt in those days, as he still kept up his love for war-like things.
One night, writes George, when they had been hard at work all day, they came to the house where they were to be fed and lodged.
But as the time drew near, her heart, which had been so strong and brave and full of pride, gave way and she felt that she could not part with her dear boy.
He was fond of his home, and felt as much pride in Nel-lie and John Parke Cus-tis as if they had been his own boy and girl.
They were five sweet years to him; full of peace, and rest, and joy.
The band met with closed doors.
They had come to this land to be free, and free they would be.
For these last he had to give size and height, name, and age, of those who were to wear them.
They would do with-out tea and such things, and dress as well as they could in clothes made out of home-made goods.
Some times he would go out with his gun and shoot wild-ducks, great flocks of which might be found on the streams close at hand.
They had a large force of slaves, and made great feasts for their friends.
He told them that he thought there was but one thing to do.
The cares of home and state made such calls on his time and thoughts, that he could not be said to live quite at his ease, and he left his mark--a high one--on all that he did.
In New York, the Act--in clear print--was borne through the streets on a pole, on top of which was a death's head.
But what he said was of great weight as it came from a wise brain and a true heart.
This barge was rowed by six black men in check shirts and black vel-vet caps.
But he died in the year 1781, at the age of 28.
But he made it known that he felt it to be his right as their king to tax them as he chose, and this hurt the pride of those who wished to make their own laws, and be in bonds to no one.
The house stood on a knoll, and near it were wild woods and deep dells, haunts of the fox and the deer, and bright streams where fish could be found at all times.
George Fair-fax--who had been his friend from boy-hood--had gone to Eng-land to live, and Bel-voir took fire one night and was burnt to the ground.
It was of no use to plead with the king.
The trade was large, and in this way the king could add much to his wealth.
His chief sport was the chase, and, at the right time of the year, he would go out two or three times a week, with dogs and horns and trained steeds, in search of the sly fox who would lead him and his friends a fine run.
He was then 31 years old.
This was known as the Stamp Act.
In this way he found out just how much work four men could do in the course of a day--and take their ease.
The king next said that goods bought from Eng-land must bear the king's stamp, for which a sum was to be paid more than the cost of the goods.
At night they took the form down, put it in a coach, and bore it back to Bow-ling Green, where the whole thing--coach and all--was burnt right in range of the guns of the fort where the King's troops were.
He put spurs to his horse, dashed through bush and brake, and soon came up to the rogue who had just time to jump in his boat and push from shore.
(Signed) "G.
This frank and manly letter, although written with the reserve necessarily belonging to a communication from an officer to his military superiors, expressing dissatisfaction with orders, fully vindicates Major Anderson from all suspicion of complicity or sympathy with the bad faith of the Government which he was serving.
"We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in this war, which I see is to be thus commenced. That God will still avert it, and cause us to resort to pacific means to maintain our rights, is my ardent prayer!
"Thanking you for the fair, manly, and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me,
The letter in which his views were expressed has been carefully suppressed in the partisan narratives of that period and wellnigh lost sight of, although it does the highest honor to his patriotism and integrity.
But the most striking protest against the coercive measures finally adopted was that of Major Anderson himself.
We may regret it.
I am preparing, by the side of my barbette guns, protection for our men from the shells which will be almost continually bursting over or in our work.
"Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee will, for a reasonable time, await your answer.
I proclaim boldly the policy of those with whom I act.
(Signed) "L.
The General-in-Chief of the United States Army, also, it is well known, urgently advised the evacuation of the forts.
He knew that their continued occupation was virtually a declaration of war.
I trust that this matter will be at once put in a correct light, as a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such would be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country.
The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down.
"If you will state the time at which you will evacuate Fort Sumter, and agree that in the mean time you will not use your guns against us, unless ours shall be employed against Fort Sumter, we will abstain from opening fire upon you.
"If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force, you will at once demand its evacuation, and, if this is refused, proceed, in such a manner as you may determine, to reduce it.
Whoever permanently holds Pensacola and Florida is entitled to the possession of Fort Pickens.
If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.
You are thus to avoid the effusion of blood.
(Signed) "G.
These facts became known to the Confederate Government, and it was obvious that no time was to be lost in preparing for, and if possible anticipating the impending assault.
All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command, together with company arms and property, and all private property, to any post in the United States which you may elect.
In the Senate of the United States, which continued in executive session for several weeks after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, it was the subject of discussion.
"Your obedient servant,
Not so with Moultrie, Johnson, Castle Pinckney, and Sumter, in Charleston Harbor; not so with Pulaski, on the Savannah River; not so with Morgan and other forts in Alabama; not so with those other forts that were intended to guard the entrance of a particular harbor for local defense....
"L.
"I am ordered by the Government of the Confederate States to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter.
You are therefore requested to communicate to them an open answer.
"We certainly can not justify the holding of forts there, much less the recapturing of those which have been taken, unless we intend to reduce those States themselves into subjection.
"L.
I take it for granted, no man will deny the proposition, that whoever permanently holds Charleston and South Carolina is entitled to the possession of Fort Sumter.
"The reasons are special for twelve o'clock.
Whoever holds the States in whose limits those forts are placed is entitled to the forts themselves, unless there is something peculiar in the location of some particular fort that makes it important for us to hold it for the general defense of the whole country, its commerce and interests, instead of being useful only for the defense of a particular city or locality.
"An authorized messenger from President Lincoln just informed Governor Pickens and myself that provisions will be sent to Fort Sumter peaceably, or otherwise by force.
My aides, Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee, are authorized to make such demand of you.
Inasmuch as it was known to the Confederate commander that the "controlling instructions" were already issued, and that the "additional supplies" were momentarily expected; inasmuch, also, as any attempt to introduce the supplies would compel the opening of fire upon the vessels bearing them under the flag of the United States--thereby releasing Major Anderson from his pledge--it is evident that his conditions could not be accepted.
(Signed) "L.
The course pursued by the Government of the United States with regard to the forts had not passed without earnest remonstrance from the most intelligent and patriotic of its own friends during the period of the events which constitute the subject of the preceding chapter.
"But the Confederate States can no longer delay assuming actual possession of a fortification commanding the entrance of one of their harbors, and necessary to its defense and security.
CHAPTER XII.
"Sir: The Government of the Confederate States has hitherto forborne from any hostile demonstration against Fort Sumter, in the hope that the Government of the United States, with a view to the amicable adjustment of all questions between the two Governments, and to avert the calamities of war, would voluntarily evacuate it.
(Signed) "L.
"L.
It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox.
"I am, Colonel, very respectfully,
Even with his boat at our walls, the loss of life (as I think I mentioned to Mr. Fox) in unloading her will more than pay for the good to be accomplished by the expedition, which keeps us, if I can maintain possession of this work, out of position, surrounded by strong works which must be carried to make this fort of the least value to the United States Government.
"I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
(Signed) "G.
"We have not oil enough to keep a light in the lantern for one night.
Answer.
Kit then joined his second trapping expedition.
To return the animals to their owners was an impossibility; Mr. Young, therefore, selected as many of the best horses as he needed for himself and men, and game being very scarce, killed two and dried most of the meat for future use, turning the remainder loose.
It was during the month of April, 1830, that Mr. Young's party again reached the town of Taos.
Fair and legitimate means were therefore laid aside, and a foul policy adopted.
Scattered over various parts of the dominion of Old Mexico are these Peublos, or Indian villages, called so because they are inhabited by Indians who bear that name.
In September, Mr. Young, having accomplished all that he had intended, informed his men that he was going to New Mexico.
The stock of beaver was therefore placed under the care of Mr. McKnight. Young and his men then renewed their march, and in due time arrived safely at Santa Fe.
Having finished here, they left for the Arkansas, remaining there while their captain went to Taos to dispose of their stock of furs and to make such purchases of necessaries as the men required.
From their own accounts, they passed a short time gloriously.
Young Kit, at this period of his life, imitated the example set by his elders, for he wished to be considered by them as an equal and a friend.
The next day the party, most of them sufficiently ashamed of their drunken debauch, commenced with vigor the homeward march.
Such conduct so terrified the Mexicans that they took sudden and precipitous leave.
The buffalo existed about there in great abundance; and, early in the winter, they had taken the precaution to kill and prepare a large supply of this kind of game, while it was in good condition.
As their names imply, they are fair natural examples of the manufactured parks of civilization.
A person unaccustomed to it may possibly look upon it as no very difficult task.
The market price was twelve dollars the pound. The proceeds, therefore, of the entire trip were nearly twenty-four thousand dollars.
The holes which had many years before been made by the miners--but who they were is unknown--formed a safe hiding-place for their skins.
For this purpose they started, and, after ten days of steady travel, found his party.
The ruse which Mr. Young found absolutely necessary to employ, in order to blind the Mexican authorities, succeeded so well, that when the fur arrived at Santa Fe, every one considered the trappers had made a very good trade.
In April of 1831, they recommenced trapping, shaping their course for Bear River.
The deserted mines of New Mexico show incontrovertible signs of having been successfully and extensively worked, at some remote period, for various kinds of metals.
During the winter the trappers had many very pleasant times, for they had little work beyond the task of making themselves comfortable. The snow fell to a great depth, which proved rather hard for their animals.
The amount of beaver thus brought in amounted to two thousand pounds.
By dint of cutting down cottonwood trees and gathering the bark and branches for fodder, they managed to prevent them from dying of starvation.
Here they left the river and proceeded to the copper mines, where they found Mr. Robert McKnight engaged in trading with the neighboring Indian tribes. These mines were not then, and ever since have not been, worked.
These are the true descendants of the ancient Aztecs, who were once the subjects of the Montezumas.
At the time the Indians entered the camp, Carson, with only a few of the party, occupied it; the rest were out visiting their traps, which it was their general custom to set whenever they arrived at a suitable stream.
Former experience in a similar matter of official duty had taught those Mexicans that the American trappers were men of a peculiarly resolute nature.
Gaunt returned after an absence of two months; when, trapping operations were resumed on the Arkansas River, which they trapped until it froze over.
These hardy trappers, like reliable old salts, proved to be as true to the bowl as they had been to their steel; for, most of the party, in a very brief space of time, were penniless and ready to be fitted out for another expedition.
On the same evening, after the men had wrapped themselves up in their blankets and laid down for a sleep, and while enjoying their slumbers, a noise reached their ears which sounded very much like distant thunder; but a close application of the sense of hearing showed plainly that an enemy was near at hand.
Here they were joined by a band of their own party, who had left Taos some days in advance of the main body, and for whom they were then hunting.
An unfortunate affair here happened to them.
They have proved a knotty historical problem to many an investigating mind; for their authentic history has fallen, and probably will ever remain in oblivion.
They are usually a quiet and industrious race, and are most devout in their religious worship, according to the principles, forms, and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church.
This rule, and doubtless some fearfulness on the part of the Indians, saved the lives of the entire band.
They have not failed to inherit the superstition of their forefathers.
They would soon have fallen a complete prey to their enemies, had not a most singular circumstance put the Mexicans to flight.
The entire herd fell into the possession of the trappers.
This is the principal stream that empties into GREAT SALT LAKE.
On the ninth day, they once more stood on the banks of the Colorado River.
As a general rule, no matter what the profit or urgent necessity which chance offers, these Indians will not hazard a contest when, to a certainty, they must expect their own killed will equal the number of scalps which they can obtain.
The business of trapping for beaver is no child's play.
In a few moments, the whites found themselves masters of the field, and also of the property.
He was, at that time, well acquainted by experience with the Rocky Mountains, and has, since then, gained an enviable fame as an Indian Agent.
He, however, passed through this terrible ordeal, which most frequently ruins its votary, and eventually came out brighter, clearer and more noble for the conscience-polish which he received.
The rascals professed the greatest friendship for the trappers, but their actions not fully measuring their words, the white men looked to Carson for advice.
Such either became wild mustangs or fell again into the clutches of the Indians.
Hence they journeyed to Jackson's Hole, which is a fork of the Great Columbia River.
Seeing that they would inevitably lose several of their braves if they made any hostile demonstration, they chose the discreet part of best policy, and departed.
The company then renewed their trapping, and continued it up the Gila to a point opposite the copper mines of New Mexico.
Kit and his companions were graciously received by Gaunt; and, with him they trapped the streams in the vicinity of the New Park and the plains of Laramie to the South fork of the Platte.
They continued nine days almost upon their former track, when outward bound.
Like as Jack, when he returns from his battles with old ocean, having a pocket well lined with hard earnings, fails not to plunge into excess, with the determination to make up for the pleasure lost by years of toil, the brave mountaineers courted merrymaking.
He found present among the warriors one who could speak the Spanish language.
Here they disbanded, having completed their enterprise.
From here they worked on until they reached the Green River.
The scenes of pleasure lasted until the fall of 1830.
A single trial is usually sufficient to satisfy the uninitiated on this point; for, the beaver, above all other wild animals of America is endowed with an extraordinary amount of instinct.
Springing up, with rifle in hand--for generally in the mountains a man's gun rests in the same blanket with himself on all sleeping occasions--they sallied forth to reconnoitre, and discovered a few warriors driving along a band of at least two hundred horses.
In some things nature has lavished upon them charms and beauties which no human skill can imitate.
He had discovered that beneath their articles of dress their weapons were very carefully concealed; and from this circumstance it became quite clearly apparent the Indians intended to massacre the entire party. Here Carson's boldness proved, as it had before, and did many a time afterwards, the safety of himself and friends or associates.
The homeward route was through most of the country over which they had previously traveled.
Kit Carson and four of his companions determined to join him.
Here they purchased licenses to trade with the Indians who live about the copper mines.
He contracted no bad habits, but learned the usefulness and happiness of resisting temptation, and became so well schooled that he was able, by the caution and advice of wisdom founded on experience, to prevent many a promising and skillful hand from grasping ruin in the same vortex.
These mines, and those which exist nearer to the large towns, will some day render New Mexico a profitable and rich field for the learned antiquary.
One of the trappers, named James Higgins, without any provocation and without any excuse, except that he was intoxicated, shot a man named James Lawrence, inflicting a slight wound.
Not having forgotten their former troubles with these people, they determined to pay them off in their own coin by depriving them of the herd.
A night of sleep soon set the brains of Young's trappers once more to rights.
After making a short stay at this point they started for the Salmon River.
About dark, Young, by urging his half-drunken men into a forced march, succeeded in overtaking Carson.
This is the image of charity.
EIGHTH CHARACTERISTIC
In reality what are they doing?
It fights antipathy and natural aversions so that they may never appear, and seeks even the company of those who might be the object of them.
Alas! how many times are the sick and the old made to consider themselves as an inconvenient burden, or like a useless piece of furniture!
Surrounded as we are by so many different minds, characters, and interests, how can we live in peace for a single day if we are not condescending, accommodating, yielding, self-denying, ready to renounce even a good project, and to take no notice of those faults and shortcomings which are beyond our power or duty to correct?
CHARITY is generous; it does everything it can.
Several offend in giving because they do so with a bad grace; others in refusing do not offend because they know how to temper their refusal by sweetness of manner.
This charity will have no small weight in the balance of Him Who weighs merit so exactly.
Would to God that this touching and edifying charity replaced the low and rampant vice of jealousy!
XIII
When even it can do little, it wishes to be able to do more.
If, unfortunately, you open yours, the storm will become furious, and no one can tell what the damage may be." If we have been guilty in this respect, let us humble ourselves before God.
Did our Divine Lord work less efficaciously for the Church when He hung on the Cross than when He preached?
RELIGIOUS who have the family spirit wish to know everything which concerns the well-being of the different houses.
But religion is not an abstract matter; it is made up of individuals reciprocally bound together in and for each other.
TENTH CHARACTERISTIC
Close yours, and the storm ceases.
We would willingly have others perfect, and yet we mend not our own defects.
It does not assume the office of reprehending or warning through a motive of bitter zeal.
Religious must ever feel that they can bless, love, and thank religion as a good mother.
"WE do not remember often enough our dear dead, our departed brethren," says St. Francis de Sales, "and the proof of it is that we speak so little of them.
It never asks for exceptions or privileges for fear of exciting jealousy.
Your mouth and his are open doors.
SEVENTH CHARACTERISTIC
ELEVENTH CHARACTERISTIC
He adds that the humility and patience of the disciple was a lesson for the master.
St. Gregory praises another religious, who, having been struck several times with a stool by his abbot, attributed it not to the passion of the abbot, but to his own fault.
BE edified at the sight of your brethren's virtues, and edify them by your own.
In all these cases charity comes to the aid by consoling the one, procuring little gratifications for the other, and helping another.
TWELFTH CHARACTERISTIC
XIV
It seeks to find in oneself the faults it notices in others, and perhaps greater ones, and tries to correct them.
Charity gives no occasion to others to suffer, but suffers all patiently, not once, but all through life, every day and almost every hour.
WE must pardon and do good for evil, as God has pardoned us and rendered good for evil in Jesus Christ.
SIXTH CHARACTERISTIC
Charity, by uniting its good wishes and interest to the deeds of others, becomes associated at the same time in the merit.
These little acts of charity count for little here below, and they are rather exacted than admired.
The large liberty of others displeases us, and yet we do not wish to be denied anything we ask for.
We would have others strictly corrected, but are not fond of being corrected ourselves.
XVII
In order to keep ourselves and others in a state of moderation, we must remember that all persons have some fad, mania, or fixed ideas which they permit no one to gainsay.
When in a room between two open doors through which a violent wind rushes and throws things in disorder, if you close one door the violence of the wind is checked and order is restored.
Can there be anything more agreeable to God, more useful to the Church, or more meritorious, than to foster thus amongst the well-beloved children of God peace, joy, love of vocation, together with union amongst themselves and with their superiors?
"Does the hunter," says St. John Chrysostom, "who finds splendid game blame those who beat the brushwood before him?
XII
In communities distinguished for fraternal charity and the family spirit the conversation frequently turns on the dead.
To be borne with, we must bear with others; to be loved, we must love; to be helped, we must help; to be joyful ourselves, we must make others so.
There is an art of giving as well as of refusing.
We try to change the discourse as if it were hurtful.
XVI
Charity receives fraternally all guests and new-comers, and makes us treat them as we would wish to be treated under similar circumstances. It also causes us to lavish testimonies of affection on those who are setting out, and warns us to be very careful of saying or doing anything that may in the least degree offend even the most susceptible.
This spontaneity of virtues exercises on all the members a constant and sublime ministry of mutual edification and reciprocal sanctification.
One religious, seemingly in pain, seeks comfort; another desires some book, instrument, etc.; a third bends under a burden; while a fourth is afflicted.
St. John Chrysostom says: "When anyone loads you with injuries, close your mouth, because if you open it you will only cause a tempest.
CHARITY lavishes care on the sick and infirm, on the old, on guests and new-comers.
One talks of their virtues, another of their services, a third quotes some of their sayings, while a fourth adds some other edifying fact; and who is the religious that will not on such occasions breathe a silent prayer to God and apply some indulgence or other satisfactory work for the happy repose of their souls?
TELL-TALES, nasty names, cold answers, lies, mockery, harsh words, etc., are all contrary to charity.
It expands pent-up souls by consolations or advice; it dissipates prejudices which tend to weaken the spirit of obedience; it is, in fine, a sort of instinct which embraces all those things suggested by zeal and devotion.
It would be a strange thing to find religious uselessly giving themselves to ardent desires of works of charity abroad, such as nursing in a hospital or carrying the Gospel into uncivilized lands, and at the same time in their own house and among their own brethren showing coldness, indifference, and want of condescension.
Charity also prays for those who want help most, and who are often known to God alone--those whose constancy is wavering, those who are led by violent temptations to the edge of the precipice.
FIFTH CHARACTERISTIC
Or does the traveller who finds a purse of gold on the road neglect to pick it up because others who preceded him took no notice of it?"
So it is when you are attacked by anyone with a bad tongue.
Charity pays honour to the aged in every respect, coincides with their sentiments, consults them, forestalls their desires, and attempts not to reform in them what cannot be reformed.
Cassian makes mention of a religious who, having received a box on the ear from his abbot in presence of more than two hundred brethren, made no complaint, nor even changed colour.
It never lets slip an opportunity of comforting, helping, and taking the most painful part, after the example of its Divine Model, Who came to serve, not to be served.
An unamiable man he was, but one whose heir would probably not quarrel with him--if only he would die soon enough.
"Archie, you are a fool," said Sir Hugh; and Archie could see, by his brother's brow, that Hugh was angry.
He went about the town very wretchedly, looking for the Count, and regarding himself as a man specially marked out for sorrow by the cruel hand of misfortune.
He had not yet succeeded in catching the Count, though he had twice asked for him in Mount Street and twice at the club in Pall Mall. It appeared that the Count never went to Mount Street, and was very rarely seen at the club.
You have this great advantage over every one, except him, that you can go to her at once without doing anything out of the way.
"It won't be delicate, will it?"
He was wretched at this time--ill-satisfied with himself and others--and was no fitting companion for Cecilia Burton.
But there had been another reason why Harry had not gone to Bolton Street, though he had not acknowledged it to himself.
I'm not afraid!"
The world still looked askance at Lady Ongar, and Hugh did not wish to take up the armor of a paladin in her favor.
"She has only been a widow, you know, four months," said Archie, pleading for delay.
Lady Ongar, in the meantime, was expecting him, and was waxing angry and becoming bitter toward him because he came not.
The expulsion, therefore, was not to take place till Archie should have made his attempt upon Lady Ongar.
He had professed to himself that his reason for not going there was the non-performance of the commission which Lady Ongar had given him with reference to Count Pateroff.
He searched for cheap shops; and some men began to say of him that he had found a cheap establishment for such wines as he did not drink himself!
Though he swore to himself that he would not touch the dram, he would not dash down the full glass that was held to his lips.
If you wait till lots of fellows are buzzing around her you won't have a chance.
The world had been very cruel to him, and he could not go to Onslow Crescent, and behave there prettily, hearing the praises of Florence with all the ardor of a discreet lover.
'Don't let that young person go,' cried Miss Arbe, who had now finished the labours of her theatrical presidency, 'till I have heard her play and sing.
Miss Arbe, however, came not; a note arrived in her stead, stating that she had been so exceedingly fatigued the preceding day, in giving so many directions, that she begged they would let somebody read her part, and rehearse without her; and she hoped that she should find them more advanced when she joined them on Monday.
She could not refuse, but her compliance was without any sort of exertion, from a desire to avoid, not promote similar calls for exhibition.
Ireton, who had hitherto appeared decided not to take any notice of her, now exclaimed, with a laugh, 'I will tell you what her name is, Miss Bydel; 'tis L.S.'
Elinor remarked to Harleigh, how inadequate were her talents to such a character.
Elinor, when she had formed a wish, never listened to an objection. 'What an old fashioned style you prose in!' she cried; 'who could believe you came so lately from France?
The stranger answered that she should gladly be useful in any way that could be proposed.
'I find Ma'am, you are lately come from abroad,' said Mr Scope, a gentleman self-dubbed a deep politician, and who, in the most sententious manner, uttered the most trivial observations: 'I have no very high notion, I own, of the morals of those foreigners at this period.
I have ample business upon my hands, between my companions of the buskin, and this pragmatical old aunt; for Harleigh himself refused to act against her approbation, till I threatened to make over Lord Townly to Sir Lyell Sycamore, a smart beau at Brighthelmstone, that all the mammas and aunts are afraid of.
It preserved her not, nevertheless, from a volley of questions, with which she was instantly assailed from various quarters.
'In the first place, tell me, if you please, what's your name?'
Two days afterwards, Elinor came to summon her to the drawing-room.
The stranger stood still.
Harleigh, however, comprehending the relief which any occupation for the eyes and hands might afford her, presented it to her himself.
A man's wife and daughters belong to any man who has a taste to them, as I am informed.
Pray who were your masters?'
Elinor herself, now, would only call the stranger Miss Ellis, a name which, she said, she verily believed that Miss Bydel, with all her stupidity, had hit upon, and which therefore, henceforth, should be adopted.
The stranger dropt her eyes, but Miss Bydel, not comprehending that Ireton meant two initial letters, said.
Elinor, now, being ready, cut short all further investigation by beginning the rehearsal.
The book, therefore, was brought to her, with writing implements, and she dedicated herself so diligently to copying, that the following morning, when Miss Arbe was expected, the part was prepared.
She opened it, and found ten bank notes, of ten pounds each.
Nothing is very strict.
I could manage matters no other way.'
She went down stairs, and, returning almost immediately, cried, 'Aunt Maple is quite contented.
She was surprised, soon afterwards, by the sight of Selina. 'I would not let Mr Ireton hinder me from coming to you this once,' she cried, 'do what he could; for we are all in such a fidget, that there's only you, I really believe, can help us.
Every one else, absorbed in his part and himself, in the hope of being best, or the shame of being worst; in the fear of being out, or the confusion of not understanding what next was to be done, was regardless of all else but his own fancied reputation of the hour.
If she is so clever, as you describe her, she shall perform between the acts.'
However, I'll get you a licence from Aunt Maple in a minute.'
I should like to know that.'
The stranger declared her utter inability to comply with such a request.
The Incognita coloured at this abrupt demand, but remained silent.
The stranger was now summoned not only as prompter, but to read the part of Lady Townly.
Personal remonstrances were vain, and the stranger was forced down stairs to the theatrical group.
But example has no more force without sympathy, than precept had without opinion!
Selina, tittering, would have cleared up the mistake; but Ireton, laughing yet more heartily, made her a sign to let it pass.
During the first scenes, the voice of the Incognita was hardly audible. The constraint of her forced attendance, and the insurmountable awkwardness of her situation, made all exertion difficult, and her tones were so languid, and her pronunciation was so inarticulate, that Elinor began seriously to believe that she must still have recourse to Mr Creek.
'Nay,' said Miss Bydel, 'your name, at least, can be no such great secret, for you must be called something or other.'
Harleigh, however, as the play proceeded, and the inaccuracy of the performers demanded greater aid, found the patience of his judgment recompensed, and its appreciation of her talents just.
She requested to have the book of the play; but Elinor, engaged in arranging the entrances and exits, did not heed her.
While the Incognita hesitated, Miss Bydel, a collateral and uneducated successor to a large and unexpected fortune, said, 'Pray, first of all, young woman, what took you over to foreign parts?
Her voice, from seeming feeble and monotonous, became clear and penetrating: it was varied, with the nicest discrimination, for the expression of every character, changing its modulation from tones of softest sensibility, to those of archest humour; and from reasoning severity, to those of uncultured rusticity.
'But I should like to know,' cried Gooch, the young farmer, 'whether it be true, of a reality, that they've got such numbers and numbers, and millions and millions of red-coats there, all made into generals, in the twinkling, as one may say, of an eye?'
CHAPTER IX
And then poor aunty was fain, herself, to request Harleigh to take the part.
He knew instantly, although he had never heard it before, that this was the death cry of a man.
CHAPTER 23
Chris and Amos were shoved along with their friends, Chris hiking up his breeches to cover the coil of the magic rope around his waist; the leathern bag hanging in plain sight about his neck.
He paused again, but there was not a stir from his audience.
From under their dirty headkerchiefs or straggly unkempt hair, the men who knew no other life but the sea, no happiness or danger unconnected with it, never took their eyes from their captain.
Therefore, feeling as I do for my ship and my men, I cannot bring myself to read the holy words over this man who had no charity in his heart."
The deep water, with a white base of coral sand, flashed in emerald, turquoise, or sapphire blue.
The scream came a second time, terrified and despairing, and out over the water following it came a low, scattered rumble.
He wondered too if he could row over in time, or if he would be blown up with the ship.
Hot as he was, Chris felt himself go cold at the sound.
The work was not yet finished, but most of the crew were sleeping during the hot hours, while a handful had volunteered to complete the job.
As Chris came up to them, Captain Blizzard was speaking, a Bible in his hand.
We harbored a viper, men, who meant to destroy our ship and cargo and leave us to who knows what fate?
Zachary Heigh, the Captain, and Mr. Finney were not to be found.
He put these thoughts from his mind until the time came, and decided to tackle what was most pressing.
Chris started up and joined the men gathered solemnly about the grave, and as he searched among them, knew a great sense of relief and joy when he saw, standing at the grave head, the Captain and Mr. Finney.
He paused, and Chris, looking up, saw that the Captain's gaze was fixed on Zachary Heigh.
That side of the ship that could be seen from the sea through the narrow channel entrance had been completely covered with green.
Dressing was rapid, for Chris, like the rest of the sailors in the tropic heat, wore only his breeches.
Cheerful as a sand flea at the prospect of going ashore, Ned had come from his rest with a small company of the sailors to ask permission of the Captain if they might leave the ship.
It would be only a few minutes more before up he would jump once more to pace the deck or lean at the ship's rail.
By the strength of the sun and the heat that seeped even through the boards of the ship, Chris judged that the morning was well advanced.
Running up to the bridge he was startled at first, at coming on deck, at the sudden green shade everywhere.
When Chris awoke he saw that Amos had already stolen out of the cabin, for his hammock was rolled up and put away.
How could he change himself to a fish or other shape, unobserved?
Chris watched the fat short man and the tall lean one go, resolution and anger still evident even in the set of their shoulders.
It is not proper that he should be left without even a token of respect." He gestured with his plump hand to the Bible.
Before the words could leave his mouth, he was interrupted by the appearance of red-faced Ned Cilley.
But Chris, watching the disappearing backs of the Captain and first mate, was thinking what a curious and fortunate thing it was that the bales had fallen on Zachary just at the right time, and when there was not a ripple on the cove.
The boy had his hands on the scorching wood of a dinghy, his muscles tensed to thrust it into the waters of the cove, when out over the still harbor, jangling in the heat, came a prolonged and piercing scream.
Chris must have dozed, for when he came to himself the light had changed, and men were carrying a shapeless bundle wrapped in canvas to a grave dug in the sand.
Chris knew the voice of the sailor was right, and was on the point of jumping into one of the dinghies, where they lay pulled up on the beach.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life--"
A babble of voices broke out, and one by one the boats were hastily launched, heading back to the ship, leaving Chris shaking and unnerved on the sand.
It was a little later that Chris remembered Amos having taken his arm and led him into the shade, and of how sick he was--the heat and the scream, the fear, and a sense of having failed in warning the Captain, combining to churn his insides into a queasy place that violently rejected his pleasant breakfast of so short a time before.
Over the water as brawny backs bent to the oars the words came floating back:
"Someone's dead for sartin sure--"
Dr. Bruce spoke at last: "Edward, I do not need to say that you have expressed my feelings also.
They were both laboring under a repressed excitement.
He humbly confessed that the appeal he had made met with an unexpected response from men and women who, like Felicia, were hungry for something in their lives that the conventional type of church membership and fellowship had failed to give them.
He was exultant.
THREE months had gone by since the Sunday morning when Dr. Bruce came into his pulpit with the message of the new discipleship.
Dr. Bruce was very pale.
The Bishop's face grew in glory now every day.
I have had a beautiful house to live in, the most expensive food, clothing and physical pleasures.
And I know that to do that I must sever my immediate connection with Nazareth Avenue Church.
"Calvin, this is a terrible city in which we live!
"You know what I have come in this evening for?" the Bishop was saying after the friends had been talking some time about the results of the pledge with the Nazareth Avenue people.
Rather, I have followed the conventional soft habits of my position and have lived in the society of the rich, refined, aristocratic members of my congregations.
And I have been unable to silence the question of late: 'What have I suffered for the sake of Christ?' Paul was told what great things he must suffer for the sake of his Lord.
"Edward," Dr. Bruce spoke abruptly, "I have not yet been able to satisfy myself, either, in obeying my promise.
Dr. Bruce turned and walked up to his friend.
In this action I judge no other minister and pass no criticism on others' discipleship.
And in this particular case it was the nearest approach to anything that would satisfy the hunger of these two men to suffer for Christ.
They were three months of great excitement in Nazareth Avenue Church. Never before had Rev. Calvin Bruce realized how deep the feeling of his members flowed.
That verse in Peter constantly haunts me: 'Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that ye should follow His steps.' I have lived in luxury.
My life has been one of comparative luxury.
The Bishop had risen now and walked over to the window.
I have been able to go abroad at least a dozen times, and have enjoyed for years the beautiful companionship of art and letters and music and all the rest, of the very best.
Its misery, its sin, its selfishness, appall my heart.
Where has my suffering come in?
I have been in a similar position for years.
But Dr. Bruce was not yet satisfied for himself.
Again that sudden silence fell over those two men.
Dr. Bruce looked over at the Bishop and shook his head.
I love her.
Do you know, Calvin," he turned abruptly toward his friend, "I have been tempted of late to lash myself with a scourge. If I had lived in Martin Luther's time I should have bared my back to a self-inflicted torture."
I do not see any other way for myself to suffer for His sake as I feel that I ought to suffer."
I cannot endure this any longer.
He talked of the great Saskatchewan, of Peace River, and the delta of the Mackenzie, of the winter journeys beyond Great Bear Lake into the Land of the Little Sticks, and the half-mythical lake of Yamba Tooh.
It is my life.
And she remained there, trembling, in suspense, glancing at him quickly, in birdlike, pleading glances, as though praying him to be kind.
Two or three times in the night we boiled tea.
I no longer care." He felt the pressure of her hand.
A roaring fire in the fireplace could not prevent the ink from freezing on the pen.
In the amazement and consternation of this thought she found time to offer up a little prayer: "Dear God, make him kind to me."
He fell suddenly sombre, biting in reflection at his lip.
Once more the fascination of the man grew big, overwhelmed her. She felt her heart flutter, her consciousness swim, her old terror returning.
She thinks I am a brute--how she sobbed, as though her little heart had broken.
You are brave and used to travel.
This went on for five months."
"Like a rat in a trap!" he jeered at himself.
I'll call for help on the love of man, since I cannot on the love of woman.
But the strange power of the man held her close, so she realized that for the moment at least she would do as he desired.
Bribery is useless!
At night we had no other shelter than our blankets, and we could not keep a fire because the spruce burned too fast and threw too many coals.
The fates are drawing around you close.
Ned Trent stared after her a minute from beneath scowling brows.
Then it had been few words, now it was a little common song.
She glanced timidly up at her companion's face.
Thus he spoke, as one who says common things.
Her calm broke.
"That means a kiss!"
"But not mine," said he.
Virginia went with this man passively--to an appointment which, but an hour ago, she had promised herself she would not keep.
Force is useless!
They leaned against the old bronze guns, facing the river.
Won't you tell me about it?"
What wonderful eyes she has.
I have been to the uttermost ends of the North, even up beyond the Hills of Silence."
He spoke of life with the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives, where the snow falls in midsummer.
I want to go where no man has set foot before me; I want to stand alone under the sky; I want to show myself that nothing is too big for me--no difficulty, no hardship--nothing!"
"I know you are unhappy," replied Virginia, gently.
He did not reply.
She exclaimed, in astonishment, "Are you not of the Company?"
"Ah, I am tired--tired with it all!" he cried, in a voice strangely unhappy.
"Because I love it.
I have journeyed far.
I had to do it.
What I could get no other way I might get from this little girl. She is only a child.
His brows were knit in reflection.
"My name is Ned Trent," he told her, "and I am from Quebec.
He turned to her again, his eyes glowing into hers.
Here at least are forests so that you can keep warm.
I believe I could touch her pity--ah, Ned Trent, Ned Trent, can you ever forget her frightened, white face begging you to be kind?" He paced back and forth between the two bronze guns with long, straight strides, like a panther in a cage.
I'll try it.
All at once this post of Conjuror's House, a month in the wilderness as it was, seemed very small and tame and civilized for the simple reason that Death did not always compass it about.
And then, in his gay, half-mocking, yet musical voice he touched lightly on vast and distant things.
"Are you just a little sorry for me?" he asked.
One thing she could not conceive--the indomitable spirit of the men.
He smiled bitterly.
Craft is useless!
"No--yes--why not?" he said, at length.
"Like a rat in a trap, Ned Trent!
It is better that she should think me a brute than that I should be always haunted by those pleading eyes." The door of the distant church house opened and closed.
He let her go without protest, almost without thought, it seemed.
He said little of himself, but as he went on in short, curt sentences the picture grew more distinct, and to Virginia the man became more and more prominent in it.
"But yesterday I played the game with all my old spirit; to-day the zest is gone!
He stamped his moccasined foot impatiently.
"Her aid is mine for the asking--but she makes it impossible to ask!
"Then why do you stay in this dreadful North?" she asked.
We had to thaw our moccasins each morning by thrusting them inside our shirts.
After a moment she looked up in surprise.
"Sorry for a weakness you do not understand? You must think me a fool."
"I am truly sorry for that."
"Listen," said he.
"Ah, a star shoots!" he exclaimed, gayly.
He took no notice after that, so the act seemed less like a caress than a matter of course.
Well, it was the only way to destroy her interest in me.
You need just one little thing, and you cannot get it.
"I know you will come out of it safely," said she; "I feel it.
"Oh!" she cried, in insulted anger.
Still laughing, he attempted to draw her to him.
When he came to himself, Mary was binding up his arm.
When they came to the suburbs, she sent him home, and went straight to Mr. Brett with Mr. Redmain's message.
He half stopped, and, turning from the path, took to the common.
But my father was just the same, and he was a stronger man than I'm like to be, I fancy."
The fellow had stabbed him.
There was no moon, and the stars were hidden by thick clouds.
"No, no; you must not attempt it.
The first part of her journey lay along a narrow lane, with a small ditch, a rising bank, and a hedge on each side.
The consequence was that she fell--but safe in the smith's arms.
How lonely and shelterless the common looked!
"You've stopped it--ain't you, miss?"
Mary left the house, and saw no one on her way.
"But what made you think of coming here?"
Joseph!"
The same moment the clouds thinned about the moon, and a pale light came filtering through upon the common in front of her.
But really, miss, you oughtn't to be out like this after dark.
About the middle of the lane was a farmyard, and a little way farther a cottage.
He started, threw his bow from him, tucked his violin under his arm, and bounded to meet her.
Any time you want to go anywhere, don't forget as you've got enemies about, and just send for me.
She cast one look over her shoulder, saw something turn a corner in the lane, and sped on again.
Joseph seized him by the wrist, saw something glitter in his other hand, and turned sick.
CHAPTER LIII.
She called out, "Joseph!
From no source could they come save the bow and violin of Joseph Jasper!
It's mine--bought and paid for."
Part of this conversation, and a good deal more, passed on their way to Testbridge, whither, as soon as Joseph seemed all right, Mary, who had forgotten her hunger and faintness, insisted on setting out at once.
"Then I'll be after the fellow."
The hut came in sight.
She must walk all the way to Testbridge.
The night was very dark.
The man gave a cry, staggered, recovered himself, and ran.
She had been greatly alarmed--and the more that she had not light enough to get the edges of the wound properly together.
With but little need of the help Mary yet gave him, Joseph got up, and led her to what was now a respectable little smithy, with forge and bellows and anvil and bucket.
But it was better, she said to herself, that he should lie there untended, than be waited on by unloving hands.
That would be as much as to say you would do the will of God when the devil would let you.
But she ran on again.
Where could he be?
She dared not stop to listen.
That cottage used to be a mere hovel, without door or window!
She had not gone far when the moon rose, and from behind the clouds diminished the darkness a little.
But I don't understand it at all!
The explanation afforded Mary more pleasure than she cared to show.
Her voice faltered.
"I understand you, Joseph," answered Mary, "for I know you would not have me leave doing what I can for the poor man up there, because of a little danger in the way."
As she drew near the common, she heard the steps more plainly, still soft and swift, and almost wished she had sought refuge in the cottage she had just passed--only it bore no very good character in the neighborhood. When she reached the spot where the paths united, feeling a little at home, she stopped to listen.
You won't have long to wait till I come.
In the mean time the moon had been growing out of the clouds, clearer and clearer.
You must lie still awhile.
It can't be you live in it?"
Joseph would have followed again, but fell, and for a minute or two lost consciousness.
Soon after passing the gate of the farmyard, she thought she heard steps behind her, seemingly soft and swift, and naturally felt a little apprehension; but her thoughts flew to the one hiding-place for thoughts and hearts and lives, and she felt no terror. At the same time something moved her to quicken her pace.
She would have run, but there was no place of refuge now nearer than the corner of the turnpike-road, and she knew her breath would fail her long before that.
In her turn she questioned Joseph, and learned that, as soon as he knew she was going to settle at Testbridge, he started off to find if possible a place in the neighborhood humble enough to be within his reach, and near enough for the hope of seeing her sometimes, and having what help she might please to give him.
Absorbed in his music, he did not see her.
She was so rejoiced to know that he must be somewhere near, that, for very delight of unsecured safety, she held her peace, and had almost stopped.
A FRIEND IN NEED.
But immediately, thereupon, was poured forth on the dim air such a stream of pearly sounds as if all the necklaces of some heavenly choir of woman-angels were broken, and the beads came pelting down in a cataract of hurtless hail.
She felt weak, but the fresh air was reviving.
Jasper handed his violin to Mary, and darted after him.
"I think so."
With indignation, as if it were a snake that had bit him, the blacksmith flung from him the hand he held.
He undertook to be at Durnmelling at the time appointed, and to let nothing prevent him from seeing his new client.
"It is no such wonder as you think," said Mary; "you have lost a good deal of blood."
"Anyhow, miss," he said, "you'll never come from there alone in the dark again!"
"I must not take you from your work, you know, Joseph."
"Let's go into the smithy--house I won't presume to call it," said Joseph, "though it has a lean-to for the smith--and I'll tell you everything about it.
Was that music she heard?
There's too many vagabonds about."
But to the mother's suggestions as to possible changes in the future, the daughter never responded: she had no thought of plans in common with her.
Mary began her story with the incident of her having been pursued by some one, and rescued by the blacksmith, whom she told her listeners she had known in London.
What have you learnt?"
"Fits!" he exclaimed, with a triumphant gesticulation, "Dog-goned if it don't!"
You know that it must come on according to the usual process in the Criminal Court.
I shall undertake to do that."
You speak quite truly about that, Mr Stump.
"Three days!
You know it already.
But there is a party, who are crying out for vengeance; and he may be ruled by them."
"Thought you'd like to know," he finished.
I was sleepy, and--the point is, what did I say?" she demanded.
Never mind how I happen to know; it is true; they are not planning to invade us at all!
Didn't she?"
"What!"
In return, I assure you that whatever I do will be as truly in the interests of the people as what you have done."
I take it"--evenly--"that you hope to accomplish something--big?"
If anything happens to me now, Miss Mona will naturally think of you; for she knows I have come here!"
You were temporarily possessed." He paused again.
Thanks for the exemption.
Fort!" sharply.
He seemed a trifle ashamed, however, of his old lightheartedness; so much so that Mona warned him not to tamper too much with his disposition.
The girl's manner had changed again.
"Mr.
"Are you sure of this, Mona?"
Fort bowed.
"Clearly, I should tell him myself.
Finally the conversation made an opening for him to say, "I asked your mother, Mona, what she thought of me as a prospective son-in-law."
Fort dropped his seriousness for an instant.
"On second thoughts, however, you can't afford to be other than considerate.
"It's only fair to say that I've given him an ultimatum, too." She hinted at what she had told the chairman.
"I think--I rather think I like you too well to marry you.
There was a determined, purposeful ring about it which was altogether unlike his usual reckless tones.
But he didn't.
Like Powart?" suddenly.
What I learned gives me a great advantage over Powart; that's all I can say.
Fort looked as though he would, with an ounce more provocation, take her in his arms and say something to get quick results.
After that it is up to me!"
Good luck"--another yawn--"and good--"
"I like it too well, boy."
Then his boldness returned.
"I beg your pardon?" she inquired, vastly confused.
"Then you can tell me.
He did it by telephone.
"I have the honor to inform you," said Fort, coming straight to the point, "that Miss Mona has seen fit to encourage my suit.
I thought it only right that you should know."
Next instant he had thrown off his seriousness, and for the remainder of the flight was his former jovial self.
"Mona, you told me something which could have come only through a supernatural agency.
"It is not impossible.
"Powart's declaration of war on Alma is a frame-up!
"You are considerate," he stated with the faintest trace of sarcasm. "Let me call your attention to the fact that, because of the position which recent events have forced upon me, it is quite within my power to dispose of your opposition"--significantly.
"I do not!" Then gathering her poise again, "What did I say?"
"Come again any time you like."
"Quite so!
They proceeded to a near-by park, where a game of aerial punt-ball was already in progress.
You're too well satisfied with yourself.
It was night in Mona's part of the world, and Billie had come upon the girl just as she was preparing for bed.
Are the men entirely content with their treatment?"
XIII
However, he spoke with his usual coolness and certainty.
He trumped up this affair in order to make himself dictator!"
Mona gave him a glance or two, and Billie could see a startling change come over him.
"I said nothing about--you."
She was still bewildered.
"I see," pretty soberly, for him.
"I was just about to retire.
I am sure of it, from your manner.
"Hope I didn't rouse you out of bed."
For the first time Powart laughed.
But Fort was content for a while to merely watch Mona, who was driving.
"Mr.
"This makes everything very different!" he declared; and even his voice was altered.
Which Fort did, the very next day.
A few minutes later Billie, through Mona, knew that Fort was reporting progress.
THE REBEL
I have heard of such things before.
The athlete was astounded.
And now that I've done it--do you love me well enough to marry me, Mona?"
Billie took great interest in the darting play of the little flylike machines, the action of the mechanical catapults, and the ease with which the twelve-inch ball was usually caught in the baskets on the machines' prows.
"You said--"
I think myself extremely fortunate in having secured him. The chief reason, however, of my inviting him here was, that my poor mother might be properly taken care of.
I shall deny the engagement everywhere."
"Of course.
You lie under their forgiveness, whether you will or not.
"You are very good: but I know what I am about, and I shall proceed in my own way.
It is not true that she would like it--no more true than many other things that you have said: and if you were to repeat it till night, it would make no sort of impression upon me.
"Thank you: but you are quite mistaken.
As for what I mean to do--it is this.
He knocked at their door when breakfast was finished, and sent to request Mrs Rowland's presence in the drawing-room.
It satisfied me as to the necessity of getting rid of these people; and it proved to Mr Walcot, as I observed to him at the time, how much he was wanted here.
Do but try--"
A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school.
Have you heard the Taoist tale of the Taming of the Harp?
At last came Peiwoh, the prince of harpists.
Another common mistake is that of confusing art with archaeology.
The forest swayed like an ardent swain deep lost in thought.
Several of his pupils submitted plays for his approval, but only one of the pieces appealed to him.
We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen.
At once he is and is not.
The name of the artist is more important to them than the quality of the work.
It reared its head to talk to the stars; its roots struck deep into the earth, mingling their bronzed coils with those of the silver dragon that slept beneath.
He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue.
In condemning it we but condemn ourselves.
Rarely was the object exposed to view, and then only to the initiated.
I left the harp to choose its theme, and knew not truly whether the harp had been Peiwoh or Peiwoh were the harp."
In art vanity is equally fatal to sympathetic feeling, whether on the part of the artist or the public.
It is autumn; in the desert night, sharp like a sword gleams the moon upon the frosted grass.
We classify too much and enjoy too little.
At the magic touch of the beautiful the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call.
As a Chinese critic complained many centuries ago, "People criticise a picture by their ear." It is this lack of genuine appreciation that is responsible for the pseudo-classic horrors that to-day greet us wherever we turn.
The art of to-day is that which really belongs to us: it is our own reflection.
Mind speaks to mind.
The mere fact that they have passed unscathed through centuries of criticism and come down to us still covered with glory commands our respect.
Hark! a tiger roars,--the valley answers again.
The master calls forth notes we know not of. Memories long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognise, stand forth in new glory.
Beside this utter carelessness of life, the guilt of the Flower-Master becomes insignificant.
The wretch, she may be passing fair.
The only flower known to have wings is the butterfly; all others stand helpless before the destroyer.
The tea-master deems his duty ended with the selection of the flowers, and leaves them to tell their own story.
We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him.
Again, if you go into a noon-tea on some irritatingly hot summer day, you may discover in the darkened coolness of the tokonoma a single lily in a hanging vase; dripping with dew, it seems to smile at the foolishness of life.
One of the guests has recorded that he felt in the whole composition the breath of waning autumn.
We shall recount but one more.
Thus Sekishiu ordained that white plum blossoms should not be made use of when snow lay in the garden. "Noisy" flowers were relentlessly banished from the tea-room.
He would burn you with red-hot coals to stop your bleeding, and thrust wires into you to assist your circulation.
Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,--why not as welcome Death as Life?
We have worshipped with the lily, we have meditated with the lotus, we have charged in battle array with the rose and the chrysanthemum.
What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement!
We have worshipped Death, the relentless goddess of mercy, under many different names.
They are not cowards, like men.
He would claim the rights of a doctor and you would instinctively hate him, for you know a doctor always seeks to prolong the troubles of his victims.
We dare not die without them.
Would you not have preferred to have been killed at once when you were first captured?
The fame of his convulvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he expressed a desire to see them, in consequence of which Rikiu invited him to a morning tea at his house.
It frightens one to conceive of a world bereft of their presence.
Here we are apt to see only the flower stems, heads as it were, without body, stuck promiscuously into a vase.
Tell me, will this be kindness?
Why were the flowers born so beautiful and yet so hapless?
They are but counterparts one of the other,--The Night and Day of Brahma.
It was the shadow of the All-devouring that the Gheburs greeted in the fire.
How could we live without them?
Flowers
He would call himself a Master of Flowers.
From our ashes springs the phoenix of celestial hope, out of the freedom comes a higher realisation of manhood.
In the West the display of flowers seems to be a part of the pageantry of wealth,--the fancy of a moment.
To-morrow a ruthless hand will close around your throats.
The man of the pot is far more humane than he of the scissors.
Let us be less luxurious but more magnificent.
He, at least, respects the economy of nature, selects his victims with careful foresight, and after death does honour to their remains.
He would cut, bend, and twist you into those impossible positions which he thinks it proper that you should assume.
However, let us not be too sentimental.
We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them.
Flower stories are endless.
In Japan, one of the most popular of the No-dances, the Hachinoki, composed during the Ashikaga period, is based upon the story of an impoverished knight, who, on a freezing night, in lack of fuel for a fire, cuts his cherished plants in order to entertain a wandering friar.
Why not destroy flowers if thereby we can evolve new forms ennobling the world idea?
What solace do they not bring to the bedside of the sick, what a light of bliss to the darkness of weary spirits?
The mystic fire consumes our weakness, the sacred sword cleaves the bondage of desire.
Insects can sting, and even the meekest of beasts will fight when brought to bay. The birds whose plumage is sought to deck some bonnet can fly from its pursuer, the furred animal whose coat you covet for your own may hide at your approach.
We have even attempted to speak in the language of flowers.
"Never again shall this cup, polluted by the lips of misfortune, be used by man." He speaks, and breaks the vessel into fragments.
These were matters not to be lightly ignored, for until one has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty. Thus the tea-master strove to be something more than the artist,--art itself.
Great as has been the influence of the tea-masters in the field of art, it is as nothing compared to that which they have exerted on the conduct of life.
They have given emphasis to our natural love of simplicity, and shown us the beauty of humility.
The last moments of the great tea-masters were as full of exquisite refinement as had been their lives.
Many of our delicate dishes, as well as our way of serving food, are their inventions.
Taking advantage of the coldness which had for some time existed between the Taiko and Rikiu, the enemies of the latter accused him of being implicated in a conspiracy to poison the despot.
In religion the Future is behind us.
But the friendship of a despot is ever a dangerous honour.
Seeking always to be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were ever prepared to enter the unknown. The "Last Tea of Rikiu" will stand forth forever as the acme of tragic grandeur.
One only, the nearest and dearest, is requested to remain and witness the end.
Soon the host enters the room.
One of the greatest schools of painting owes its origin to the tea-master Honnami-Koyetsu, famed also as a lacquer artist and potter.
Rikiu then removes his tea-gown and carefully folds it upon the mat, thereby disclosing the immaculate white death robe which it had hitherto concealed.
VII. Tea-Masters
They have instructed us in the proper spirit in which to approach flowers.
The Seven Kilns of Enshiu are well known to all students of Japanese pottery.
It was whispered to Hideyoshi that the fatal potion was to be administered to him with a cup of the green beverage prepared by the tea-master.
Many of our textile fabrics bear the names of tea-masters who conceived their color or design.
On the day destined for his self-immolation, Rikiu invited his chief disciples to a last tea-ceremony.
Rikiu loved to quote an old poem which says: "To those who long only for flowers, fain would I show the full-blown spring which abides in the toiling buds of snow-covered hills."
The whole Korin school, as it is generally designated, is an expression of Teaism. In the broad lines of this school we seem to find the vitality of nature herself.
The cut and color of the dress, the poise of the body, and the manner of walking could all be made expressions of artistic personality.
Long had been the friendship between Rikiu and the Taiko-Hideyoshi, and high the estimation in which the great warrior held the tea-master.
Tenderly he gazes on the shining blade of the fatal dagger, and in exquisite verse thus addresses it:
We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon.
I had a feeling that, once I had begun to play for Polina, I should wreck my own fortunes.
For one thing, the crowd oppressed me.
Again I staked the whole sum, and again the red turned up.
Also, I wonder if any one has EVER approached a gaming-table without falling an immediate prey to superstition?
In the same way, I saw our General once approach the table in a stolid, important manner.
In his opinion, such conduct would greatly compromise him--especially if I were to lose much.
How, for instance, is it worse than trade?
"Why not?" she asked excitedly.
Herein, as said, I draw sharp distinctions.
"Of course I have no RIGHT to order your actions, but you yourself will agree that..." As usual, he did not finish his sentence.
It was an unpleasant sensation, and I tried hard to banish it.
However, to me personally the scene DID seem to be worth undisguised contemplation--more especially in view of the fact that I had come there not only to look at, but also to number myself sincerely and wholeheartedly with, the mob.
However ridiculous it may seem to you that I was expecting to win at roulette, I look upon the generally accepted opinion concerning the folly and the grossness of hoping to win at gambling as a thing even more absurd.
"Well, absurd though it be, I place great hopes on your playing of roulette," she remarked musingly; "wherefore, you ought to play as my partner and on equal shares; wherefore, of course, you will do as I wish."
True, out of a hundred persons, only one can win; yet what business is that of yours or of mine?
At first the proceedings were pure Greek to me.
Those journalists are not paid for doing so: they write thus merely out of a spirit of disinterested complaisance.
I had lost!
I could only divine and distinguish that stakes were hazarded on numbers, on "odd" or "even," and on colours.
Another standard altogether has directed my life....
At first glance the scene irritated me.
Slowly he took out his money bags, and slowly extracted 300 francs in gold, which he staked on the black, and won.
Clutching my 400 gulden, I placed 200 of them on twelve figures, to see what would come of it.
In fact, it almost upset my balance, and I entered the gaming rooms with an angry feeling at my heart.
I began by pulling out fifty gulden, and staking them on "even." The wheel spun and stopped at 13.
As to the question whether stakes and winnings are, in themselves, immoral is another question altogether, and I wish to express no opinion upon it.
As for the crowd itself--well, it consisted mostly of Frenchmen.
I said very seriously, "Yes," and then added: "Possibly my certainty about winning may seem to you ridiculous; yet, pray leave me in peace."
At the same time, to stare fixedly about one is unbecoming; for that, again, is ungentlemanly, seeing that no spectacle is worth an open stare--are no spectacles in the world which merit from a gentleman too pronounced an inspection.
As for my secret moral views, I had no room for them amongst my actual, practical opinions.
Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which had been organised specially for a gentleman's diversion.
For the time being I want you, so I must keep you."
NOW are you satisfied?"
I answered this question with another one.
Also, he is in love with you.--"
Here it is now, if you care to see it,"--and I pulled out the document, and exhibited the Roman visa.
Never in my life had I known a more retiring man, for he was shy to the pitch of imbecility, yet well aware of the fact (for he was no fool).
"Yes, he is in love with me," she replied.
To me it seems at least doubtful that he possesses anything at all."
Something had seemed to strike my brain when she told me to go and play roulette.
"Yes?
"Yes, I believe that you WILL come in for a good deal," I said with some assurance.
When returning home with the children before luncheon, I met a cavalcade of our party riding to view some ruins.
"Yes, looking for it.
"It may be so."
"I suppose you would like to take them to the Casino to play roulette? Well, excuse my speaking so plainly, but I know how addicted you are to gambling.
In pompous language, however, which jumbled one sentence into another, and at length grew disconnected, he gave me to understand that I was to lead the children altogether away from the Casino, and out into the park. Finally his anger exploded, and he added sharply:
"It amuses me to see you grow angry," she continued.
Indeed, on one occasion (this happened in Switzerland, when I was asleep in the train) I had spoken aloud to her, and set all my fellow-travellers laughing.
It was clear that from SOMEWHERE money had been acquired.
I thought you ought to know that."
Polina was not at all pleased at my questions; I could see that she was doing her best to irritate me with the brusquerie of her answers.
"I have no money for gambling," I quietly replied.
Why, when they settle here they dare not utter even a word--they are ready even to deny the fact that they are Russians!
We had this from Timothy Petrovitch himself, and he is a reliable person.
"Nevertheless the incident was as I say," I replied.
How he had come to make the General's acquaintance I do not know, but, apparently, he was much struck with Polina.
By
I hate you because I have allowed you to go to such lengths, and I also hate you and still more--because you are so necessary to me.
"Oh, no, there is no doubt about it.
This made me very angry.
"Looking for it?"
Polina giggled.
Take these 700 florins, and go and play roulette with them.
"A very respected ex-captain told me the story, and I myself could see the scar left on his cheek."
The rest will be safe in my hands."
"To spit into it?" the General inquired with grave disapproval in his tone, and a stare, of astonishment, while the Frenchman looked at me unbelievingly.
"That has nothing to do with it.
The tire bore this simple inscription: "Rebecca Winters, aged 50 years." The hoofs of stock tramped the sunken grave and trod it into dust, but the arch of the tire remained to defy the strength of thoughtless hands that would have removed it.
They resolved to build one, opened the subscription at once, and appointed a committee to carry the work forward.
As we journeyed on down the Platte, we passed thrifty ranches and thriving little towns.
One of the old barracks, three hundred feet long, was in good preservation in 1906, being utilized by the owner, Joseph Wilde, for a store, post office, hotel, and residence.
This occurred prior to 1830.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
All along the way was a spirit of good cheer and hearty welcome.
He crawled to these Bluffs and there famished.
About twenty miles from Scott's Bluff stands old Chimney Rock.
Here the Laramie River and the Platte meet.
Tradition says: "A trapper named Scott, while returning to the States, was robbed and stripped by the Indians.
Yes, the ox has passed, for in all Nebraska I was unable to find even one yoke.
"Thirty dollars."
The fact gradually became apparent that the loss of that fine ox was almost irreparable.
"What is this cow worth to you?"
I finally unyoked, gave him a quart of lard, a gill of vinegar, and a handful of sugar, but all to no purpose, for he soon fell down and in two hours was dead."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
But one cow would not go at all!
Dave and Dandy made good team-mates.
And yet, am I sure that at some points I did not abuse him?
I finally stopped, put him on the off side, gave him the long end of the yoke, and tied his head back with the halter strap to the chain; but to no purpose, for he pulled by the head very heavily.
A BIT OF BAD LUCK
"Keep your clothes on," said Mr. Bloom.
Henry was lank and soporific, and not inclined to rush his business.
"I haven't got time to dicker--name your price."
"Doubtless," said the Colonel, "we shall be able to secure comfortable accommodations at some modest hotel at reasonable rates.
"Go to the devil," said Mr. Bloom, still pensive.
"Shut that door," said Mr. Bloom to the lawyer.
If I have been deceived again, still we may glean health and content, if not worldly profit.
"It's worth eight hundred," said Henry, too much dazed to ask more than its value.
Did you happen to squeeze in on the ground floor in any of the gilt-edged grafts, Colonel?"
It seemed (from the conversation of the Blaylocks) that the Springs was decadent.
Skyland!--a lovely name."
Needless to say J. Pinkney was no product of Georgia soil.
Cotton mills, factories, and manufacturing plants would rise up as the green corn after a shower.
They seemed to speak in familiar terms to the responsive spirit of Lorella.
"Oh, come now, J. P.," said the captain.
Of all the great things promised, the scenery alone came to fulfilment.
"You know I was just fooling. I'll put you off at Cold Branch, if you say so."
Mrs. Blaylock turned a glance of speaking tenderness upon the Colonel, fingered for a moment the silvery curl that drooped upon her bosom, then looked again toward the mountains.
Pinkney Bloom) returned to each a deed, duly placed on record, to the best lot, at the price, on hand that day.
Mr. Bloom strayed thoughtfully back to the captain, and stood meditating.
The description was so pleasing, the future of the town set forth in such convincing arguments, and its increasing prosperity portrayed in such an attractive style that I decided to take advantage of the opportunity it offered.
Every second the answer comes--"Here, here, here." Listen to thine own heartbeats, O weary seeker after external miracles.
That was the only five-hundred-dollar lot that went.
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Bloom, in his heartiest prospectus voice, "things have been whizzing around Okochee.
"Make it out to Peyton Blaylock," said Mr. Bloom.
My dear, can you recall those verses entitled 'He Giveth the Increase,' that you composed for the choir of our church in Holly Springs?"
"The mountains ever call to their children," murmured Mrs. Blaylock.
Capital decided not to invest.
"That's great stuff, ma'am," said J. Pinkney Bloom, enthusiastically, when the poetess had concluded.
"You old fat rascal!" he chuckled, with a wink.
And then Skyland would know J. Pinkney Bloom no more.
I carefully selected a lot in the centre of the business district, although its price was the highest in the schedule--five hundred dollars--and made the purchase at once."
The naphtha launch of the millionaire would spit among the romantic coves; the verdured hills would take formal shapes of terrace, lawn, and park.
"See how the foliage drinks the sunlight from the hollows and dells."
Fourteen thousand horsepower would this dam furnish.
Then he tore off his coat and vest, and began to unbutton his shirt.
"It seems to ring the bell, all right.
The sunsets gilded the dreamy draws and coves with a minting that should charm away heart-burning.
It's a job for you."
The work of the Skyland Real Estate Company was finished.
"Mac," said J. Pinkney suddenly, "I want you to stop at Cold Branch. There's a landing there that they made to use sometimes when the river was up."
I might give you a hunch as to whether you can make the game go or not."
"Get there," said Mr. Bloom.
Girls wore silk waists embroidered with anchors in blue and pink.
A third of the population had moved away.
"The other passengers get off there, too," said Mr. Bloom.
"There's a good many swindles connected with these booms," he said presently.
"What if this Skyland should turn out to be one--that is, suppose business should be sort of dull there, and no special sale for books?"
"Mac, you're a fool," said J. Pinkney Bloom, coldly.
I hate to mention these things, but--"
"Let me bring a glass, ma'am.
Far up the lake--eighteen miles above the town--the eye of this cheerful camp-follower of booms had spied out a graft.
Finally they entered the village of Cold Branch. Warmly both the Colonel and his wife praised it for its homelike and peaceful beauty.
I was raised in the pine hills myself."
"It's a fine rhyme, just the same," declared Mr. Bloom.
That is one portent reason for the change we are making.
"Now," he continued, when Mr. Cooly had responded with alacrity, "is there a bookstore in town?"
Our trunks are in Okochee, to be forwarded when we shall have made permanent arrangements."
These things came about through a fatal resemblance of the river Cooloosa to the Hudson, as set forth and expounded by a Northern tourist.
Henry Williams was behind his counter.
You come along, Colonel--there's a little table we can bring, too.
Streets and avenues were surveyed; parks designed; corners of central squares reserved for the "proposed" opera house, board of trade, lyceum, market, public schools, and "Exposition Hall." The price of lots ranged from five to five hundred dollars.
There was a little business there to be settled--the postmaster was to be paid off for his light but lonely services, and the "inhabitants" had to be furnished with another month's homely rations, as per agreement.
The trousers of the young men widened at the bottom, and their hands were proudly calloused by the oft-plied oar. Fishermen were under the spell of a deep and tolerant joy.
The rest ranged from ten dollars to two hundred.
Captain MacFarland released the wheel long enough to give his leg a roguish slap.
That was Cold Branch--no boom town, but the slow growth of many years.
Mrs. Blaylock, blushing like a girl, shook her curl and gave the Colonel an arch, reproving tap.
Cold Branch had nothing in common with the frisky ambition of Okochee with its impertinent lake.
"Get it recorded, and take it down and give it to him.
I'll ask Mac."
He has such a talent for financiering and markets and investments and those kind of things.
It must be nice, though--quite nice."
The journey, though delightful in the extreme, slightly fatigues me." Colonel Blaylock again visited the depths of his prolific coat, and produced a tightly corked, rough, black bottle. Mr. Bloom was on his feet in an instant.
He came out of that flushed and capable region known as the "North." He called himself a "promoter"; his enemies had spoken of him as a "grafter"; Okochee took a middle course, and held him to be no better nor no worse than a "Yank."
"No, sir," said Colonel Blaylock, pausing to arrange the queen's wrap. "I did not invest in Okochee.
And anon he ransacked him; and then he said unto Sir Galahad: I shall heal him of his wound, by the grace of God, within the term of seven weeks.
For the way on the right hand betokeneth the highway of our Lord Jesu Christ, and the way of a good true good liver.
CHAPTER XV.
Then was Sir Galahad glad, and unarmed him, and said he would abide there three days.
And therefore is it called the Maidens' Castle, for they have devoured many maidens.
And when they saw Galahad they cried: Knight, keep thee, for we assure thee nothing but death.
And there she brought him an horn of ivory, bounden with gold richly, and said: Sir, blow this horn which will be heard two mile about this castle.
Then came to him a gentlewoman and said: These knights be fled, but they will come again this night, and here to begin again their evil custom.
And there met Sir Galahad an old man clothed in religious clothing, and said: Sir, have here the keys of this castle.
CHAPTER XIV.
And then he turned again unto Sir Melias, and there he alighted and dressed him softly on his horse to-fore him, for the truncheon of his spear was in his body; and Sir Galahad stert up behind him, and held him in his arms, and so brought him to the abbey, and there unarmed him and brought him to his chamber.
And when Sir Melias heard him speak: Sir, he said, for God's love let me not die in this forest, but bear me unto the abbey here beside, that I may be confessed and have my rights.
And the other way betokeneth the way of sinners and of misbelievers.
I will well, said Galahad.
And when he had received Him he said unto Sir Galahad: Sir, let death come when it pleaseth him.
And then he took the crown and went his way; and Sir Melias lay still and had no power to stir.
And then he fled, and Sir Galahad pursued fast after him.
And then by great force they held all the knights of this castle against their will under their obeissance, and in great service and truage, robbing and pilling the poor common people of all that they had.
Sir Galahad answered: Sir knight, come on your peril.
Then Sir Galahad drew out his sword, and set upon them so hard that it was marvel to see it, and so through great force he made them to forsake the field; and Galahad chased them till they entered into the castle, and so passed through the castle at another gate.
By this were the knights of the country come, and then he made them do homage and fealty to the king's daughter, and set them in great ease of heart.
When Sir Galahad had blown the horn he set him down upon a bed.
And at the last it happened him to depart from a place or a castle the which was named Abblasoure; and he had heard no mass, the which he was wont ever to hear or ever he departed out of any castle or place, and kept that for a custom.
Fair sir, said Galahad, I come for to destroy the wicked custom of this castle.
Then Galahad put forth his spear and smote the foremost to the earth, that near he brake his neck.
Sir Melias beheld this adventure, and thought it marvellous, but he had no hunger, but of the crown of gold he took much keep; and therewith he stooped down and took it up, and rode his way with it.
And where thou tookest the crown of gold thou sinnest in covetise and in theft: all this were no knightly deeds.
With that came out another knight out of the leaves, and brake a spear upon Galahad or ever he might turn him.
So it happened on a day the duke's daughter said: Ye have done unto me great wrong to slay mine own father, and my brother, and thus to hold our lands: not for then, she said, ye shall not hold this castle for many years, for by one knight ye shall be overcome.
I suppose well, said Sir Galahad, and took his armour and his horse, and commended them unto God.
Then either dressed to other, and came together as fast as their horses might run, and Galahad smote him so that his spear went through his shoulder, and smote him down off his horse, and in the falling Galahad's spear brake.
And then he said: Ah Melias, who hath wounded you? therefore it had been better to have ridden the other way.
And then he came into a fair meadow, and there was a fair lodge of boughs.
And this Galahad, the holy knight, the which fought with the two knights, the two knights signify the two deadly sins which were wholly in this knight Melias; and they might not withstand you, for ye are without deadly sin.
Why, said Galahad, will ye all have ado with me at once?
And therewithal the other smote him on his shield great strokes, so that their spears brake.
Sir Melias said: My lord Galahad, as soon as I may ride I shall seek you. God send you health, said Galahad, and so took his horse and departed, and rode many journeys forward and backward, as adventure would lead him.
Also there were cloths covered upon the earth, and many delicious meats set thereon.
Why should I not pass the water? said Galahad.
Then looked Sir Galahad on his arms that nothing failed him, and then he put his shield afore him; and anon there met him seven fair maidens, the which said unto him: Sir knight, ye ride here in a great folly, for ye have the water to pass over.
Well, said the seven knights, sithen ye say so, there shall never lady nor knight pass this castle but they shall abide maugre their heads, or die therefore, till that knight be come by whom we shall lose this castle.
And pride is head of all deadly sins, that caused this knight to depart from Galahad.
With that Sir Galahad heard in the leaves cry on high: Knight, keep thee from me.
Sir, said a good man, for his sin he was thus wounded; and I marvel, said the good man, how ye durst take upon you so rich a thing as the high order of knighthood without clean confession, and that was the cause ye were bitterly wounded.
And when the devil saw your pride and presumption, for to take you in the quest of the Sangreal, that made you to be overthrown, for it may not be enchieved but by virtuous living. Also, the writing on the cross was a signification of heavenly deeds, and of knightly deeds in God's works, and no knightly deeds in worldly works.
Then Sir Galahad opened the gates, and saw so much people in the streets that he might not number them, and all said: Sir, ye be welcome, for long have we abiden here our deliverance.
Then Sir Melias blessed him and said: Fair lord of heaven, help and save thy new-made knight.
Sir, said Galahad, wit you well I shall not turn again.
And then they let their horses run as fast as they might, so that the other knight smote Sir Melias through hauberk and through the left side, that he fell to the earth nigh dead.
What will ye that I shall do? said Galahad. Sir, said the gentlewoman, that ye send after all the knights hither that hold their lands of this castle, and make them to swear for to use the customs that were used heretofore of old time.
In the meanwhile by fortune there came Sir Galahad and found him there in peril of death.
And then they took the maiden and the treasure of the castle.
Therefore, I counsel you, sir knight, to turn again.
And therewith he drew out the truncheon of the spear out of his body: and then he swooned.
Then Galahad drew out his sword and smote off the left arm of him, so that it fell to the earth.
Then the squire entered into the castle.
Now, said Galahad, is she here for whom this castle was lost? Nay sir, said the priest, she was dead within these three nights after that she was thus enforced; and sithen have they kept her younger sister, which endureth great pains with mo other ladies.
So rode he away from them and met with a squire that said: Knight, those knights in the castle defy you, and defenden you ye go no further till that they wit what ye would.
Then he said he was turned unto helping, God be thanked.
I was sent by the queen for to seek you, and so I have sought you nigh this two year, and yonder is Sir Ector de Maris, your brother abideth me on the other side of the yonder water.
And when he was unarmed he stood upon his feet, for he was bruised in the back with a spear; yet so as Sir Galleron might, he armed Sir Tristram.
By my head, said Tristram, as for one battle thou shalt not seek it no longer.
Alas, said Sir Percivale, what have I done?
Now for God's sake, said Sir Percivale, forgive me mine offences that I have here done.
That is truth, said Sir Tristram, I understand thy valiantness well.
CHAPTER XIV.
For God defend, said Sir Tristram, that through my default thou shouldst longer live thus a Saracen, for yonder is a knight that ye, Sir Palomides, have hurt and smitten down.
CHAPTER XI.
And so those knights had good cheer of the King Brandegore.
And therewithal the king spake no more. But all Sir Launcelot's kin knew for whom he went out of his mind.
Then Sir Tristram repented him that he was not armed, and then he hoved still.
And as for her, I dare say she is peerless above all other ladies, and also I proffered her never no dishonour; and by her I have gotten the most part of my worship.
My lord, Sir Launcelot, said Dame Elaine, at this same feast of Pentecost shall your son and mine, Galahad, be made knight, for he is fully now fifteen winter old.
Alas, said Sir Tristram, that caused some debate betwixt him and Queen Guenever.
Sir, said the king, ye may well take him with you, but he is over tender of age.
And then will we all ride together unto the court of Arthur, that we be there at the high feast.
And for this cause, said Palomides: mine offence to you is not so great but that we may be friends.
And then there were great feasts made and great joy; and many great lords and ladies, when they heard that Sir Launcelot was come to the court again, they made great joy.
And as they thus rode, by adventure they came to the house of Brandegore, and there Sir Bors was well known, for he had gotten a child upon the king's daughter fifteen year to-fore, and his name was Helin le Blank.
Ye say well, said Sir Palomides; now, I require you, tell me a question that I shall say to you.
And Sir Tristram returned again unto Joyous Gard, and Sir Palomides followed the Questing Beast.
O Jesu, said King Arthur, I marvel for what cause ye, Sir Launcelot, went out of your mind.
So when Sir Bors should depart there was made great sorrow for the departing of Helin le Blank, and great weeping was there made.
And so therewithal departed and dissevered all the knights of the Round Table.
And when Sir Launcelot was come among them, the king and all the knights made great joy of him.
CHAPTER XII.
See how Sir Tristram hunteth, and hawketh, and cowereth within a castle with his lady, and forsaketh your worship.
But Sir Bors and Sir Lionel departed, and within a while they came to Camelot, where was King Arthur.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER IX.
As for that I may choose, said Sir Tristram, either to ride or to abide.
But I thought you were staying late with Mrs. Sturt."
"You mustn't mind Dorothea," the widow said.
"He!
"I hope not, mamma.
"A most important step, and one that requires the most exact circumspection,--especially on the part of the young woman.
It was thus that Mrs. Prime read her recantation, which was repeated on that evening to Rachel with some little softening touches.
But the girl feels herself to be exalted for those few weeks as a conqueror, and to be carried along in an ovation of which that bucolic victim, tied round with blue ribbons on to his horns, is the chief grace and ornament.
She longed for hours of absolute quiet, in which she might make herself sure that her malady had also passed away, and that the soreness which remained came only from the memory of former pain.
"But, my dear, they don't mean to be uncharitable.
"What! the young man that was dismissed from Mr. Tappitt's?"
What makes me so angry is that she should think everybody is a fool except herself.
When she first heard of Mr. Rowan--"
She has behaved best through it all,--next to you, mamma."
But she could not help it.
"Indeed it will; the greatest pleasure."
"But you don't think he is dangerous now, mamma?"
Could it be that things were so fixed that there was no room for further disappointment?
"No, mother, I didn't think that.
"Do you mean that he is engaged to marry Rachel?"
Mamma has already looked at a villa near Torquay, which will suit us delightfully."
She did not imagine it to be wicked according to the world's ordinary wickedness;--but she feared that it was wicked according to that tone of morals to which she was desirous of tying her mother down as a bond slave.
All this time Rachel had not spoken a word, nor had her sister uttered anything expressive of congratulation or good wishes.
Only I don't think he'll ever do away with cider in Devonshire, because of the apple trees.
"So we were,--and really I didn't think we had been so long.
I think there must have been a gleam of triumph in her face as she put her hand with such confidence well round her lover's arm.
"It seems to me, Dorothea," she said, "that you are mistaken there.
Rachel was still standing in the middle of the room when she heard her lover thus described; but she would not condescend to plead in answer to such a charge.
In answer to this Luke protested that he had not thought of Rachel when he was making that speech, and tried to explain that all that was "soft sawder" as he called it, for the election.
I think he has dismissed Mr. Tappitt."
"No; I don't say that.
She had been scalded so cruelly that she still feared the hot water.
I hope you may have known Mr. Rowan long enough to justify your confidence in him."
She means well through it all, and is as affectionate as any other woman."
"I suppose she won't set herself against it; will she?"
Rachel, as she followed her mother out from the farmyard gate, had not a word to say.
can't you understand?
Above an hour had passed after the interruption mentioned at the end of the last chapter before Mrs. Ray and Rachel crossed back from the farm-house to the cottage, and when they went they went alone.
It was ill said of her,--very ill said, and so she was herself aware as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
"But it would be well that you should learn, because I'm sure you will be glad to think as well of your brother-in-law as possible."
"No; it can't make any difference.
The colour came to her cheeks, and she threw up her head with a gesture of angry pride, but at the moment she said nothing.
Everybody seems to speak well of him now."
I don't know how to be thankful enough when I think how things have turned out;--but when I first heard of him I thought he was dangerous too."
I do not know that anybody ever doubted its prettiness."
She could not do so as yet, but she would make the struggle.
I ain't a bit obliged to Mr. Comfort, though I mean to forgive him because of Mrs. Cornbury.
"Well, mother, I have nothing to say against him,--not a word.
There was no moment that she had ever passed with him that had not to be recalled.
Though Rachel spoke no triumph, there was a triumph in her eye, which prevented almost the possibility of such yielding on the part of Dorothea.
Who taught her?"
Think how she has been troubled herself about this affair of Mr. Prong's."
"If this matter is settled, Rachel--"
"Amen!" said Mrs. Ray, solemnly.
"Yes, Dorothea.
"That's quite true, my dear," said Mrs. Ray.
"Miss Pucker, and Mr. Prong, and that set."
I think we may say that it is all settled now;--mayn't we, Rachel?
They try to do good.
"At any rate I liked him very much; didn't I, Rachel?--from the first moment I set eyes on him.
And a fine comely fellow he is, as a woman's eye would wish to rest on."
"Will you tell her or shall I?" said Mrs. Ray, pausing for a moment at the cottage gate.
"And isn't it nice too?
Though she would permit no such foreshadowings as those at which her mother had hinted, she had committed herself to forebodings against this young man, to such extent that she could not wheel her thoughts round and suddenly think well of him.
She felt all but sure that some tidings of Luke Rowan had been brought in Mrs. Sturt's budget of news, and she had never been able to think well of Luke Rowan since the evening on which she had seen him standing with Rachel in the churchyard.
MRS. PRIME READS HER RECANTATION.
"Pretty," she said; "yes, it is pretty.
She had not even suspected that the lover had been over there in person.
I shall think her very ill-natured if she does. But it can't make any real difference now, you know."
And you can't expect her to turn round all in a minute.
I love Rachel dearly, though I fear she does not think so, and anything I have said, I have said in love, not in anger."
And I never did after he drank tea here that night; only Mr. Comfort told me it wouldn't be safe not to see how things went a little before you,--you understand, dearest?"
Mrs. Prime was still reading the serious book; but I am bound to say that her mind had not been wholly intent upon it during the long absence of her mother and sister.
"If it is settled I hope that it may be for your lasting happiness and eternal welfare."
Dear girl!
"I intended to reason.
The being finished speaking and fixed his looks upon me in the expectation of a reply.
"I do refuse it," I replied; "and no torture shall ever extort a consent from me.
You will return and again seek their kindness, and you will meet with their detestation; your evil passions will be renewed, and you will then have a companion to aid you in the task of destruction.
His words had a strange effect upon me.
Night was far advanced when I came to the halfway resting-place and seated myself beside the fountain.
I tried to stifle these sensations; I thought that as I could not sympathize with him, I had no right to withhold from him the small portion of happiness which was yet in my power to bestow.
I have answered you; you may torture me, but I will never consent."
And slowly, slowly as a flush of blood, a red flame trembled in the wire.
The forest disposes of its own victims.
Let us bring a new light to men!"
Therefore it cannot be destroyed by the whim of one."
But they looked upon us, and suddenly we were afraid.
And the road seemed not to be flat before us, but as if it were leaping up to meet us, and we waited for the earth to rise and strike us in the face.
We looked upon them and we pleaded:
"A Street Sweeper!
Only the glass box in our arms is like a living heart that gives us strength.
"You fools!
You are right.
We turned and we looked at them for the last time, and a rage, such as [-it-] is not fit for humans to know, choked our voice in our throat.
Then we knew suddenly that we were lying on a soft earth and that we had stopped.
Let us [-all-] work together, and harness this power, and make it ease the toil of men.
Take it, and let us be one of you, the humblest among you.
We crawled to it, we fell upon it, our face in our arms, and we lay still.
But terror struck the men of the Council.
"No," we answered.
It mattered not where we went.
And we have heard of the corruption to be found in solitude.
"It must be destroyed!"
We looked upon them and we laughed and said:
This gave us no fear either.
We know these things, but we do not care.
It is not to be believed!
"Our brothers!
Let us throw away our candles and our torches.
We give it to you."
These great and wise of the earth did not know what to think of us, and they looked upon us with wonder and curiosity, as if we were a miracle.
We are tired.
Our glass box lay beside us.
Nor for any small Council.
No men stopped us, for there were none about [-from-] the Palace of Corrective Detention, and the others knew nothing.
For their eyes were still, and small, and evil.
But we ran.
"We give you the key to the earth!
We had not thought of coming here, but our legs had carried our wisdom, and our legs had brought us to the Uncharted Forest against our will.
Whatever days are left to us, we shall spend them alone.
We do not care.
"Our brothers!" we said.
"Fear nothing, our brothers.
What will you do with the light?"
They moved to the table and the others followed.
All the heads of the Council turned to us as we entered.
So we walked on, our box in our arms, our heart empty.
"We give you the power of the sky!" we cried.
We spoke of it, and of our long quest, and of our tunnel, and of our escape from the Palace of Corrective Detention.
No such crime has ever been committed, and it is not for us to judge.
We fell, but we never let the box fall from our hands.
Why wonder about this?
"This thing," they said, "must be destroyed."
We saw nothing as we entered, save the sky in the great windows, blue and glowing.
It is true that our tunic was torn and stained with brown stains which had been blood.
"Who are you, our brother?
You thrice-damned fools!"
And all the others cried as one:
We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth.
We knew not where we were going.
And we stood still, our eyes upon the wire.
Then the wire glowed.
Still they would not move.
I had thought it to be the blind man's trumpet, so to speak, summoning his crew to the assault, but I now found that it was a signal from the hillside towards the hamlet, and from its effect upon the buccaneers, a signal to warn them of approaching danger.
Squalling was the word for it; Pew's anger rose so high at these objections till at last, his passion completely taking the upper hand, he struck at them right and left in his blindness and his stick sounded heavily on more than one.
"You have your hands on thousands, you fools, and you hang a leg!
MY curiosity, in a sense, was stronger than my fear, for I could not remain where I was, but crept back to the bank again, whence, sheltering my head behind a bush of broom, I might command the road before our door.
"To be sure, boy; quite right," said he.
"Twice!
Four or five of them obeyed at once, two remaining on the road with the formidable beggar.
Some news of the lugger in Kitt's Hole had found its way to Supervisor Dance and set him forth that night in our direction, and to that circumstance my mother and I owed our preservation from death.
Scatter and look for them, dogs!
And, now I come to think of it, I might as well ride round there myself and report to him or squire.
"And that," said he, "is just about as good as nothing.
I'm to be a poor, crawling beggar, sponging for rum, when I might be rolling in a coach!
But the pause was brief, for the blind man again issued his commands.
"There's Dirk again," said one.
Then there followed a great to-do through all our old inn, heavy feet pounding to and fro, furniture thrown over, doors kicked in, until the very rocks re-echoed and the men came out again, one after another, on the road and declared that we were nowhere to be found.
Oh, shiver my soul," he cried, "if I had eyes!"
Master Pew's dead, when all's done; not that I regret it, but he's dead, you see, and people will make it out against an officer of his Majesty's revenue, if make it out they can.
Pew was dead, stone dead.
"The money's there."
"Hang it, Pew, we've got the doubloons!" grumbled one.
Mr. Dance stood there, as he said, "like a fish out of water," and all he could do was to dispatch a man to B---- to warn the cutter.
Just then the noise of horses topped the rise, and four or five riders came in sight in the moonlight and swept at full gallop down the slope.
"They might have hid the blessed thing," said another.
Almost at the same time a pistol-shot, flash and report, came from the hedge side.
I wish I had put his eyes out!" cried the blind man, Pew.
They were pulling up, at any rate, horrified at the accident; and I soon saw what they were.
They must be close by; they can't be far; you have your hands on it.
There wasn't one of you dared face Bill, and I did it--a blind man!
In the meantime the supervisor rode on, as fast as he could, to Kitt's Hole; but his men had to dismount and grope down the dingle, leading, and sometimes supporting, their horses, and in continual fear of ambushes; so it was no great matter for surprise that when they got down to the Hole the lugger was already under way, though still close in.
As soon as I was mounted, holding on to Dogger's belt, the supervisor gave the word, and the party struck out at a bouncing trot on the road to Dr. Livesey's house.
More money, I suppose?"
Now, I'll tell you, Hawkins, if you like, I'll take you along."
"It's these people of the inn--it's that boy.
He hailed her.
"Pew," he cried, "they've been before us.
If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit you would catch them still."
"No, sir; not money, I think," replied I. "In fact, sir, I believe I have the thing in my breast pocket; and to tell you the truth, I should like to get it put in safety."
But he was on his feet again in a second and made another dash, now utterly bewildered, right under the nearest of the coming horses.
At this Pew saw his error, turned with a scream, and ran straight for the ditch, into which he rolled.
And that was plainly the last signal of danger, for the buccaneers turned at once and ran, separating in every direction, one seaward along the cove, one slant across the hill, and so on, so that in half a minute not a sign of them remained but Pew.
"I thought perhaps Dr. Livesey--" I began.
This quarrel was the saving of us, for while it was still raging, another sound came from the top of the hill on the side of the hamlet--the tramp of horses galloping.
Him they had deserted, whether in sheer panic or out of revenge for his ill words and blows I know not; but there he remained behind, tapping up and down the road in a frenzy, and groping and calling for his comrades.
One, tailing out behind the rest, was a lad that had gone from the hamlet to Dr. Livesey's; the rest were revenue officers, whom he had met by the way, and with whom he had had the intelligence to return at once.
Only," he added, "I'm glad I trod on Master Pew's corns," for by this time he had heard my story.
"Sure enough, they left their glim here," said the fellow from the window.
"Take the Georges, Pew, and don't stand here squalling."
"Budge, you skulk!" cried Pew.
I could hear their feet rattling up our old stairs, so that the house must have shook with it.
"I'll take it, if you like."
We'll have to budge, mates."
But the blind man swore at them again for their delay.
"Flint's fist, I mean," he cried.
Mr. Dance could make nothing of the scene.
At that another fellow, probably him who had remained below to search the captain's body, came to the door of the inn.
"Dogger," said Mr. Dance, "you have a good horse; take up this lad behind you."
Soon after, the lugger doubled the point and disappeared.
They've got off clean, and there's an end.
This appeal seemed to produce some effect, for two of the fellows began to look here and there among the lumber, but half-heartedly, I thought, and with half an eye to their own danger all the time, while the rest stood irresolute on the road.
"Search him, some of you shirking lubbers, and the rest of you aloft and get the chest," he cried.
A voice replied, telling him to keep out of the moonlight or he would get some lead in him, and at the same time a bullet whistled close by his arm.
You'd be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know it's here, and you stand there skulking.
And I'm to lose my chance for you!
He fell on his side, then gently collapsed upon his face and moved no more.
"Perfectly right," he interrupted very cheerily, "perfectly right--a gentleman and a magistrate.
"Down with the door!" he cried.
"They got the money, you say?
The next moment his voice showed me that I was right.
"In, in, in!" he shouted, and cursed them for their delay.
Three men ran together, hand in hand; and I made out, even through the mist, that the middle man of this trio was the blind beggar.
Down went Pew with a cry that rang high into the night; and the four hoofs trampled and spurned him and passed by.
Promptly afterwards, fresh sounds of astonishment arose; the window of the captain's room was thrown open with a slam and a jingle of broken glass, and a man leaned out into the moonlight, head and shoulders, and addressed the blind beggar on the road below him.
"Aye, aye, sir!" answered two or three; and a rush was made upon the Admiral Benbow, the lantern-bearer following; and then I could see them pause, and hear speeches passed in a lower key, as if they were surprised to find the door open.
"Here, you below there, is it on Bill?" cried the blind man again.
I thanked him heartily for the offer, and we walked back to the hamlet where the horses were.
"Is it there?" roared Pew.
"We don't see it here nohow," returned the man.
There was a pause, then a cry of surprise, and then a voice shouting from the house, "Bill's dead."
Black be its fall!
My heart sank. "That!" I cried.
And the woman, whose voice had risen to a kind of eldritch sing-song, turned with a skip, and was gone.
"That is the house of Shaws!" she cried.
In those days folk still believed in witches and trembled at a curse; and this one, falling so pat, like a wayside omen, to arrest me ere I carried out my purpose, took the pith out of my legs.
What kind of a great house was this, that all the parish should start and stare to be asked the way to it? or what sort of a gentleman, that his ill-fame should be thus current on the wayside?
"Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down.
See here!" she cried again--"I spit upon the ground, and crack my thumb at it!
"What for?"
"What?" say I; "not Mr. Ebenezer?"
"Hoot, hoot, hoot," said the barber, "nae kind of a man, nae kind of a man at all;" and began to ask me very shrewdly what my business was; but I was more than a match for him at that, and he went on to his next customer no wiser than he came.
"A what?" cried the voice, sharply.
"I have come here with a letter," I said, "to Mr. Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws.
"Are ye daft?
"I will do no such thing," I cried.
Is he here?"
"Folk?" cried he.
Country folk went by from the fields as I sat there on the side of the ditch, but I lacked the spirit to give them a good-e'en.
Presently it brought me to stone uprights, with an unroofed lodge beside them, and coats of arms upon the top.
The more I looked, the pleasanter that country-side appeared; being all set with hawthorn bushes full of flowers; the fields dotted with sheep; a fine flight of rooks in the sky; and every sign of a kind soil and climate; and yet the barrack in the midst of it went sore against my fancy.
Help me up, boys."
Now, Myerst, my man, sit down in that chair--it's the heaviest the place affords.
It seems to me that Mr. Spargo and I came just in time.
Now, Mr. Myerst, right about face!
For anything we know Myerst may be armed."
"You damned young bully!" he exclaimed.
"Good-morning, Mr. Myerst," said Breton with cold and ironic politeness.
"Look here, Spargo," he continued.
All the knots to be double, Spargo, and behind him."
"We are glad to meet you so unexpectedly.
Breton turned on the captive with a look of contempt.
Then----"
Myerst obeyed this peremptory order with more curses.
He's coming."
Spargo--may I trouble you to see what Mr. Myerst carries in his pockets?
Now, guardian, what was this fellow after?"
And--and he says he's the fullest evidence against Cardlestone--and against me as an accessory after the fact."
Breton drew back into the angle of the porch; Spargo quitted his protecting bush and took the other angle.
Give them both a stiff dose: they've broken up.
"We've got to discuss this.
"Steady, Spargo, steady!" he said.
The interior into which he looked was rough and comfortless in the extreme.
"Don't be afraid of hurting him, Spargo," he said.
"Must the police come?" he said.
Now it'll come in handy.
"They're going through a quantity of papers. The two old gentlemen look very ill and very miserable.
A moment later Spargo whispered again.
The door opened.
"Come--tell me the truth now."
Breton laughed softly.
He's here for no good.
Tie Myerst up--hand and foot--to that chair.
But--he's so clever that--that----"
Quick!"
All right.
"Tie him well and strong.
"I don't know why you should have thought of him," said Breton. "But--he's there."
Old Elphick lifted his head and shook it; he was plainly on the verge of tears; as for Cardlestone, it was evident that his nerve was completely gone.
Now we must have the police here." He sat down at the table and drew the writing materials to him.
"Spargo," he said, "I'm pretty sure you'll find whisky in there.
Come on, Spargo; it's beginning to get light already."
He turned to old Elphick.
Spargo spliced his man to the chair in a fashion that would have done credit to a sailor.
"And how on earth can I waste time guessing?" he exclaimed.
Breton laughed softly.
"Myerst!" he almost shouted.
Breton, too, considered matters.
Cardlestone, white and shaking, was lying back in his chair; Elphick, scarcely less alarmed, had risen, and was coming forward with trembling limbs.
Look here!"
And don't you be frightened, either, Mr. Cardlestone.
And there was an open cheque, signed by Cardlestone for ten thousand pounds, and another, with Elphick's name at the foot, also open, for half that amount.
Not for papers or documents--just now.
I'd better tell you what they're doing."
Spargo started as if something had bitten him.
"Blackmail!
Spargo, you see that coil of rope there.
"Excellent!" said Breton, laughing again.
Cardlestone's face was in the shadow; Myerst had his back to the window; old Elphick bending over the table was laboriously writing with shaking fingers.
Breton smiled grimly and nodded.
"Wait a moment," said Breton, soothingly.
"A lie!" answered Elphick.
You can report to me, and when Myerst comes out I'll cover him.
"Myerst!
"We'll see about that later," answered Breton.
"Yes, yes!" he muttered.
"I thought as much, Mr. Myerst," he said.
And he forthwith drew out and exhibited a revolver, while Myerst, finding his tongue, cursed them both, heartily and with profusion.
At the table in the middle of the floor the three men sat.
Breton kept his eye on his captive; Spargo gave a glance at the two old men.
Now, guardian," he continued, when Spargo had carried out this order, "what was he after? Shall I suggest it?
We'll deal with Mr. Myerst here first.
What hold has he on you?"
"I'm going to write a note to the superintendent of police at Hawes--there's a farm half a mile from here where I can get a man to ride down to Hawes with the note.
"I daresay you're right," he said.
Together, he and Spargo made their way to the front of the cottage.
Go through them carefully.
"Must----"
"Elphick," he said, "is writing a cheque.
"Spargo, let's see what he has on him."
The only thing we can do is this--we must catch Myerst unawares.
"Wait!" he said.
Old Cardlestone began to whimper afresh; Elphick turned a troubled face on his ward.
And Breton pointed Spargo to an old corner cupboard.
"Sure he's got nothing else on him that's dangerous, Spargo?
He--he got money--papers--from us.
That was it--blackmail.
"Go ahead with your wire, Spargo, while I write this note."
Was it--blackmail?"
Good Lord!--why did I never think of him?
"Myerst is in possession of whatever secret they have, and he's followed them down here to blackmail them.
"Pray, shall you invite the Crickets?" said Colonel Katy-did.
The Katy-dids and the Mosquitoes, and the Locusts, and a full orchestra of Crickets made the air perfectly vibrate, insomuch that old Parson Too-Whit, who was preaching a Thursday evening lecture to a very small audience, announced to his hearers that he should certainly write a discourse against dancing for the next weekly occasion.
The Locusts, of course,--a very old and distinguished family; and the Grasshoppers are pretty well, and ought to be asked. But we must draw a line somewhere,--and the Crickets! why, it's shocking even to think of!"
"That's it, is it?
MISS KATY-DID AND MISS CRICKET
"Well, if you invite the Bumble-Bees, you must have the Hornets."
It won't do to offend him."
"Well, then, there are the Bumble-Bees."
I don't like to hear of such disagreeable things; it affects my nerves terribly.
"Well, then, and the Butterflies and the Moths.
"Now that Keziah Cricket, who just came in here, is quite a musician, and her old father plays the violin beautifully;--by the way, we might engage him for our orchestra."
"Mamma, who is it says 'cheep'?"
It was a fine morning, too, which goes for as much among the Katy-dids as among men and women.
Miss Katy-did sat on the branch of a flowering azalea, in her best suit of fine green and silver, with wings of point-lace from Mother Nature's finest web.
"Certainly.
Invite the Crickets?
From this spring the place came to be known as "Rock Spring Farm."
"Tom Lincoln was a carpenter, and a good one for those days, when a cabin was built mainly with the ax, and not a nail or a bolt or hinge in it, only leathers and pins to the doors, and no glass, except in watches and spectacles and bottles.
Thomas Lincoln took his bride to live in a little log cabin in a Kentucky settlement--not a village or hardly a hamlet--called Elizabethtown.
My parents being dead, and my memory not serving, I know no means of identifying the precise locality. It was on Nolen Creek.
She had a full forehead, a sharp, angular face and a sad expression.
The logs were removed to Chicago, for the World's Columbian Exposition, in 1893, and the cabin was reconstructed and exhibited there and elsewhere in the United States.
"While you pin me down to facts, I will say that I saw Nancy Hanks Lincoln at her wedding, a fresh-looking girl, I should say over twenty. Tom was a respectable mechanic and could choose, and she was treated with respect.
Nancy let me hold him purty soon.
Thomas was very fond of shooting and as he was a fine marksman he could provide game for the table, and other things which are considered luxuries to-day, such as furs and skins needed for the primitive wearing apparel of the pioneers.
When little Abe was four years old his father and mother moved from Rock Spring Farm to a better place on Knob Creek, a few miles to the northeast of the farm where he was born.
CHAPTER II
It was a barren spot and the cabin on it was a rude and primitive sort of home for a carpenter and joiner to occupy.
The chief attraction of the so-called farm was a fine spring of water bubbling up in the shade of a small grove.
The Hankses was some smarter'n the Lincolns.
Our table was of the puncheons cut from solid logs, and the next day they were the floor of the new cabin."
Dennis Hanks, a cousin of Nancy, lived near the Lincolns in the early days of their married life, and gave Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson this description of their early life together:
Ever wear a wet buckskin glove?
"Abe never give Nancy no trouble after he could walk excep' to keep him in clothes.
The materials were taken back to their original site, and a fine marble structure now encloses the precious relics of the birthplace of "the first American," as Lowell calls Lincoln in his great "Commemoration Ode."
Cousin Dennis Hanks gives the following quaint description of "Nancy's boy baby," as reported by Mrs. Eleanor Atkinson in her little book on "Lincoln's Boyhood."
It is stated that Nancy Hanks taught Thomas Lincoln to write his own name.
Babies wasn't as common as blackberries in the woods o' Kaintucky.
"I was born February 12, 1809, in then Hardin County, Kentucky, at a point within the now county of Larue, a mile or a mile and a half from where Hodgen's mill now is.
"Jesse Head, the good Methodist minister that married them, was also a carpenter or cabinet maker by trade, and as he was then a neighbor, they were good friends.
After his nomination to the presidency, Mr. Lincoln gave to Mr. Hicks, a portrait painter, this memorandum of his birth:
But that rude hut became the home of "the greatest American."
Yet her disposition was generally cheerful.
They killed off the varmints an' made it safe fur other fellers to go into the woods with an ax.
For her backwoods advantages she was considered well educated.
Evidently Elizabethtown failed to furnish Thomas Lincoln a living wage from carpentering, for he moved with his young wife and his baby girl to a farm on Nolen Creek, fourteen miles away.
If he told us what he was laughin' at, half the time we couldn't see no joke.
"But he was mighty good comp'ny, solemn as a papoose, but interested in everything.
There was a wide fireplace in the big chimney which was built outside.
Thomas was twenty-eight and Nancy twenty-three when their wedding day came. Christopher Columbus Graham, when almost one hundred years old, gave the following description of the marriage feast of the Lincoln bride and groom:
"Looks didn't count them days, nohow.
There was so little carpentering or cabinet making to do that he could make a better living by farming or hunting.
"Pore?
The exact spot was identified after his death, and the house was found standing many years later.
It contained but a single room, with only one window and one door.
A daughter was born to the young couple at Elizabethtown, whom they named Sarah.
"NANCY'S BOY BABY"
Abe never was much fur looks.
"You bet I was tickled to death.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER AND MOTHER
He evidently thought this place would be less lonesome for his wife, while he was away hunting and carpentering, than the lonely farm he had purchased in Hardin County, about fourteen miles away.
Folks often ask me if Abe was a good lookin' baby.
While Thomas Lincoln was living with a farmer and doing odd jobs of carpentering, he met Nancy Hanks, a tall, slender woman, with dark skin, dark brown hair and small, deep-set gray eyes.
"When Nancy married Tom he was workin' in a carpenter shop.
I was hunting roots for my medicine and just went to the wedding to get a good supper and got it.
Thar was sca'cely any money in that kentry.
"I was at the infare, too, given by John H. Parrott, her guardian, and only girls with money had guardians appointed by the court.
She read well and could write, too.
I ricollect how Tom joked about Abe's long legs when he was toddlin' round the cabin.
Abraham Lincoln was born to poverty and privation, but he was never a pauper.
There was no answer.
Why?"
He was too late--thanks to Captain Strawn.
"Beg pardon, sir, but I did not close the trophy room windows because I thought you might be using the room again....
The detective's first glance took in stately armchairs of the Cromwell period, thick, mellow-toned rugs, and, in the living room beyond, splendid examples of Jacobean furniture.
"Sure.
"Sure!"
His approach must have been expected and observed, for it was the master of the house who opened the great, iron-studded doors and invited the detective into the broad main hall, at the end of which, down three steps, lay the immense living room.
This crowd here--and I have Miles' word for it--ain't any too glad to see him, and shows it.
"A horrible thing to happen in a man's home, Dundee," Miles was saying, his plump, rosy face blighted with horror.
She is prostrated from the shock."
Dundee cut him short by marching toward the door which was again closed. He entered so noiselessly that Captain Strawn, Dr. Price and the fingerprint expert, Carraway, did not hear him.
He lay on his side, his left cheek against the floor, the fingers of his left hand still clutching the powder-burned bosom of his soft shirt, now stiff with dried blood, a pool of which had formed and then half congealed upon the rug.
"How long has he been dead, doctor?" Dundee asked quietly.
"Sprague's hat?" he asked, pointing to a brightly banded straw which lay upon the top of the cabinet.
"He may have lived an hour or more--unconscious, of course. For the indications are that he did not die instantly, but staggered a few steps, clutching at the wound.
A pale-faced, bald-headed butler had materialized while his master was speaking.
Miles--had brought the anagrams in from the porch and left them on a table in the living room, as our guests were getting ready to leave.
"I see," Dundee interrupted.
The left leg was drawn upward so that the knee almost touched the bullet-pierced stomach.
It was not a large room--twelve by fourteen feet, possibly--but it looked even smaller, crowded as it was with the long ping-pong table, bags of golf clubs, fishing tackle, tennis racquets, skis and sleds.
It's on this floor, I understand."
He says he waited there until half past ten, then went on back to town, sore'n a boiled owl."
Any objections to that theory, boy?"
Not until he had taken in the general aspect of the room did Dundee look at the thing over which Captain Strawn and the coroner were bending--the body of Dexter Sprague.
Of modified Tudor architecture, its deep red, mellowed bricks had achieved in three decades almost the same aged dignity and impressiveness as characterized the three-century-old mansion in England which Silas Hackett's architect had used as an inspiration.
"Yes?"
"Why, that the--the body wasn't discovered sooner," Miles explained.
Just point it out.
"Just a few--one in particular," Dundee said.
The driver says he was called about 9:15, told to come immediately, and to wait for Sprague at the foot of the hill, on the main road.
But Dundee was not allowed to finish his sentence, for Strawn was summoned to the telephone, by Whitson.
Dundee crossed the room, stepping over the dead man's stick--a swank affair of dark, polished wood, with a heavy knob of carved onyx, which lay about a foot beyond the reach of the curled fingers of the stiff right hand.
Dundee nodded, frowning, and Strawn began eagerly:
Flora--Mrs.
"What do you mean?" Dundee asked.
"I was, except Sprague, of course, and I had no idea he'd gone there. Drake wanted to play anagrams, and before the bridge game started, I went to the trophy room to get the box," Miles explained.
Once before--on Sunday, the day after Nita Selim's murder, when he had come to interview Lydia Carr and had secured the alibi which had eliminated Dexter Sprague as a suspect--Dundee had driven his car up this hill between the tall yew hedges.
This is the way I figure it out: Sprague has good reason to be afraid he's next on the program.
"Yes, I know," Dundee interrupted.
A pair of curved, nickel-plated catches in the center of the inch-wide metal band on the bottom of the coppernet curtain showed how the screen was raised or lowered.
The one visible eye was half open, but on the sallow, thin face, which had been strikingly handsome in an obvious sort of way, was a peace and dignity which Dundee had never seen upon Sprague's face when the man was alive.
Not much of a drop at that.
The sash of leaded panes was raised as high as it would go, and beneath it was a screen of the roller-curtain type, raised about six inches from the window sill.
But again Captain Strawn looked uncomfortable.
Of course, nobody knew Sprague was in here, and since his hat and stick was both missing from the hall closet, they took it for granted he'd beat it....
Collins--the lad I sent to check up on the taxi companies--says he's located the driver that answered Sprague's call last night.
"That's funny....
By the way, where is Mrs. Miles now?"
"Hello, boy!" Dr. Price greeted him placidly.
He phones for a taxi to go back to his hotel--about 9:15, that was, Miles says--but decides to walk down the hill to meet it.
He's nervous.
"I turned off the light when I left, and there was no light burning in there this morning when Celia, the parlor maid, went there to put the anagram box back in the cabinet, and found the body....
"In bed.
Their slender, grayish needles are from eight to twelve inches long, and inclined to droop, contrasting with the rigid, dark-colored trunk and branches.
Full-grown specimens are from forty to fifty feet in height and from two to three feet in diameter.
The different species are arranged in zones and sections, which brings the forest as a whole within the comprehension of every observer.
They are the priests of pines and seem ever to be addressing the surrounding forest.
The cedar of Lebanon, said Sir Joseph Hooker, occurs upon one of the moraines of an ancient glacier.
The sugar from which the common name is derived is, I think, the best of sweets.
The curious little Pinus attenuata is found at an elevation of from 1500 to 3000 feet, growing in close groves and belts.
The cones are about four inches long and covered with a sort of varnish and gum, rendering them impervious to moisture.
No observer can fail to notice the admirable adaptation of this curious pine to the fire-swept regions where alone it is found.
The Forest Trees in General
It appears, therefore, that the Sierra forests indicate the extent and positions of ancient moraines as well as they do belts of climate.
Branches also soon become fruitful.
The cones are from five to eight inches long and about as large in thickness; rich chocolate-brown in color and protected by strong, down-curving nooks which terminate the scales.
It is exceedingly slender and graceful, although trees that chance to stand alone send out very long, curved branches, making a striking contrast to the ordinary grove form.
The Sugar Pine, King Of Pine Trees
Toward the head of this magnificent column long branches sweep gracefully outward and downward, sometimes forming a palm-like crown, but far more impressive than any palm crown I ever beheld.
The average size of the tree is about thirty or forty feet in height and twelve to fourteen inches in diameter.
The cones are about fifteen to eighteen inches long, and three in diameter; green, shaded with dark purple on their sunward sides.
Indians are fond of it, but on account of its laxative properties only small quantities may be eaten.
The foliage is of the same peculiar gray-green color as that of the nut pine, and is worn about as loosely, so that the body of the tree is scarcely obscured by it.
All the forests of the Sierra are growing upon moraines, but moraines vanish like the glaciers that make them.
Of all the world's eighty or ninety species of pine trees, the Sugar Pine (Pinus Lambertiana) is king, surpassing all others, not merely in size but in lordly beauty and majesty.
The wood is deliciously fragrant, fine in grain and texture and creamy yellow, as if formed of condensed sunbeams.
After advancing fifteen or twenty miles towards Yosemite and making an ascent of from two to three thousand feet you reach the lower margin of the main pine belt, composed of great sugar pine, yellow pine, incense cedar and sequoia.
It exudes from the heart-wood where wounds have been made by forest fires or the ax, and forms irregular, crisp, candy-like kernels of considerable size, something like clusters of resin beads. When fresh it is white, but because most of the wounds on which it is found have been made by fire the sap is stained and the hardened sugar becomes brown.
It is remarkable for its loose, airy, wide-branching habit and thin gray foliage.
Nevertheless the little Douglas Squirrel can open them.
The trunk usually divides into three or four main branches about fifteen or twenty feet from the ground that, after bearing away from one another, shoot straight up and form separate summits.
One will have no difficulty in knowing the Nut Pine (Pinus Sabiniana), for it is the first conifer met in ascending the Range from the west, springing up here and there among Douglas oaks and thickets of ceanothus and manzanita; its extreme upper limit being about 4000 feet above the sea, its lower about from 500 to 800 feet.
Monday's child is fair of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace; Wednesday's child is merry and glad, Thursday's child is sorry and sad; Friday's child is loving and giving; Saturday's child must work for its living; While the child that is born on the Sabbath day Is blithe and bonny and good and gay.
To Tell the Age of Horses.
A wayside flower growing only by the path of duty.
The one absolutely unselfish friend a man may have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is the dog.
To reach the moon at this rate it would take about one second.
It flies away from him when he may need it most.
A "will-o'-the-wisp" which eludes us even when we grasp it.
The people who are prone to fall on their knees and do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our head.
He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince.
Cygni is the nearest star to us in this part of the sky.
"Gentlemen of the jury, A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and in sickness.
They are, in idea, the same as the more familiar lines:
APPALLING DEPTHS OF SPACE. Distances that Stun the Mind and Baffle Comprehension.
MEMORY RHYMES.
At the speed of an electric current, 180,000 miles per second, a message to be sent from a point on the earth's surface would go seven times around the earth in one second.
Monday for health, Tuesday for wealth, Wednesday best of all, Thursday for crosses, Friday for losses, Saturday no luck at all.
May--sings all the day; June--changes his tune; July--prepares to fly; August--go he must.
Mizar, the middle star in the tail of the Great Bear, is forty times as heavy as the sun.
The ever-retreating summit on the hill of our ambition.
A treasure which we search for far and wide, though oft-times it is lying at our feet.
If we were to escape from the earth into space, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and eventually the sun would become invisible.
To go a step further, if in 1066 the result of the Norman Conquest had been wired to some of these stars, the message would still be on its way.
In eight minutes a message would get to the sun, and allowing for a couple of minutes' delay, one could send a message to the sun and get an answer all within twenty minutes.
The money that a man has he may lose.
Two middle "nippers" you behold Before the colt is two weeks old, Before eight weeks will two more come; Eight months the "corners" cut the gum. The outside grooves will disappear From middle two in just one year. In two years, from the second pair; In three, the corners, too, are bare.
The Months.
SENATOR VEST'S EULOGY ON THE DOG.
To the naked eye there are five or six thousand of these heavenly bodies visible.
Short Grammar.
HAPPINESS DEFINED.
To tell the age of any horse, Inspect the lower jaw, of course; The six front teeth the tale will tell, And every doubt and fear dispel.
The bull's-eye on the target at which all the human race are shooting.
A swarm of bees in May Is worth a load of hay; A swarm of bees in June Is worth a silver spoon; A swarm of bees in July Is not worth a fly.
Rules for Riding.
"Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy.
The interest we receive from capital invested in good works.
If, when Wellington won the battle of Waterloo, in 1815, the news had been telegraphed off immediately, there are some stars so remote that it would not yet have reached them.
The only thing a man continues to search for after he has found it.
The lines refer to the days of the week as birthdays.
There isn't any pleasure in the world like this," she added, a little impulsively, "the pleasure of letting your thoughts run out to meet some one else's, some one who understands.
His evil moments for that afternoon were over.
Let us leave off dreaming for a little time and give ourselves up to technicalities.
Oh!
"But the whole thing is tingling in my brain," he protested.
"Hilda and I are dying for a cocktail, Mr. Romilly."
He turned slowly away.
"Bob Millet," he repeated thoughtfully.
Yes, the whole thing was reasonable."
"Of course!
Have you brought the paper and pencil you spoke of?
She smiled at him tolerantly.
They drank two cocktails and found themselves unfortunately devoid of cigarettes, a misfortune which it became his privilege to remedy.
He was in the library, standing in front of those many sheets of typewritten messages, passing them all over, heedless of what their message might be, until he came to the last and most insignificant. Four lines, almost overlapped by another sheet--
"So I am missing," he remarked, almost in his ordinary tone.
No, we'll leave them there. Perhaps, after dinner, we might walk for a little time."
She turned and looked at him, standing up now, the wind blowing her skirts, her eyes glowing, her lips a little parted.
Nothing has since been heard of him or his movements, and arrangements have been made to drag the canal at a certain point.
We could find a corner by ourselves."
An unopened book lay by her side.
STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF A LONDON ART TEACHER
Elizabeth, as though by accident, had dropped her veil.
They worked until the first gong for dinner rang.
"Chance," she declared, "is a wonderful thing.
"Don't!" she interrupted.
Fancy reading of my own disappearance within a few days of its taking place, in the middle of the Atlantic!"
He was back again on the deck, walking quite steadily yet seeing little. He made his way to the smoking room, asked almost indifferently for a brandy and soda, and drained it to the last drop.
"Couldn't we go into the library?
Philip Romilly, a teacher of art in a London school, visited Detton Magna on Friday afternoon and apparently started for a walk along the canal bank, towards dusk.
SUICIDE FEARED
"I never knew time to pass so quickly.
"You know what I mean.
Don't think I am vain," she went on.
CHAPTER VII
Good old Bob!
He looked away from her.
"Take off my rugs and help me up.
I simply know.
Listen.
She shook her head.
Take this pencil and paper.
He saw the whole ghastly business, the police on the canal banks, watching the slow progress of the men with their drags bringing to the surface all the miserable refuse of the turgid waters, the dripping black mud, perhaps at last....
I've given Lawton one, and he's following me about like a dog.
What can they hope to find there in his place?"
"A difficult business," he assured her.
You know Bob, don't you?"
"My brain is too full.
Bring your chair a little nearer--so.
All his new-found buoyancy of spirits had suddenly left him.
"Isn't it wonderful!" she exclaimed.
"You do not believe, then, that they will find anything--interesting?"
"I am all right," she cried, brightly; "look after papa, first; then we will attend to this creature."
I will take it from him; the viper dare not sting me!"
"Not a step farther, or you are a dead man!"
"How about the past year?
"Supposing we come at once to the point of dissolving our partnership; it cannot be done any too quickly for me. May I inquire on what terms you propose to settle?"
You surely cannot love him!"
"Here is one, papa, to whom we owe much.
With the revolver still levelled at Walcott, Kate slowly advanced towards him.
"Don't be rash or foolish; let the law take its course."
"Mr. Walcott, there is no use dallying or beating about the bush; I want this partnership terminated at once.
You will not kill him?" she breathed rather than whispered.
As Kate and her strange companion parted, the former inquired, "Why did you ask me not to shoot him?
"No, no, Senor, a little turn of the wrist, so slight you would not see, would cause death.
As Walcott listened, the sneer on his face deepened.
Montague stared at him.
"Why, I thought you would like to meet him," said Oliver; "he is an interesting chap."
"He is an old friend of mine," said Gamble; "he told me all about it.
"Where did you meet him?" asked Montague.
And the public went wild, and they made him resign--just imagine it!"
"That man," exclaimed the other.
"Too bad, too bad," he repeated.
I want to see the world a bit before I get too old."
He gave her a good time this evening, and I wager she'll like him before he gets through. He's really a good-natured chap; the chief trouble with him is that he gets confidential."
They're stunning girls, I tell you--I'd like you to meet them, Mr. Montague."
"Are you in business there?"
Mr. Gamble relapsed into thought again.
"But his wife and his daughters!" exclaimed the other.
"Oh, stuff!" said Oliver.
"It's the easiest graft that's going," said Oliver.
I've been fighting the Trust, and last year they bought me out, and now I'm seeing the world."
"Why a trust company particularly?" asked the other.
Tell Alice to take my word for him."
You should hear his story!"
"No," said Montague, but he knew to what the other referred.
"Good evening.
"Made my pile, so to speak, and got out.
His face was round like a full moon, and out of it looked two little eyes like those of a pig.
"Oliver, you don't mean it," he said.
"I hope so," said Montague.
"He seems a very decent fellow."
Why not?"
"Mr. Gamble comes from Pittsburg," interposed Oliver.
He spoke for himself, however,--he had important work to do, and must be excused.
"Oh, that's not it--the family stays in Pittsburg.
"I've got four daughters--all in college.
But it proved not very difficult to talk with the gentleman from Pittsburg.
"No doubt," said the other.
If you're buying pictures, there's an end to it--you get your walls covered sooner or later.
"Poor chap--it really was hard luck, you know.
"He might just as well own it," was the reply.
It wasn't his fault.
"Why, you are talking nonsense!" exclaimed Oliver; "he knows the best people--"
"Leave that to him."
He has been living in Brooklyn this winter.
"They're a lively crowd, the Steel fellows," laughed the other. "They want to make Davidson resign, too, but he'll fight them.
He knows all the navy people."
"I have talked to them sometimes, but it don't do any good.
"Is there nothing we can do about it?"
Alice seems to be quite taken with that young chap, Curtiss."
"It's too bad," said the other, earnestly.
There was a moment's pause.
"They say he's making barrels of money," said Oliver; then he added, longingly, "My God, I wish I had a trust company to play with!"
"By the way," Oliver remarked after a moment, "the Prentices have asked Alice up to Newport.
"Who is it?" inquired Montague.
"No, no, they live in Pittsburg," was the answer.
"Yes, do," said Mr. Gamble, cordially.
"That fellow in Society!"
He won't hurt Alice.
"Glad to see you again."
The nations and boundaries of to-day do no more than mark claims to exemptions, privileges, and corners in the market--claims valid enough to those whose minds and souls are turned towards the past, but absurdities to those who look to the future as the end and justification of our present stresses.
These are all deliberate and justifiable suggestions, and they all aim to sacrifice minor differences in order to link like to like in greater matters, and so secure, if not physical predominance in the world, at least an effective defensive strength for their racial, moral, customary, or linguistic differences against the aggressions of other possible coalescences.
Upon this matter M. Bloch should be read.
We may cherish animosities, we may declare imperishable distances, we may plot and counter-plot, make war and "fight to a finish;" the net tightens for all that.
Against all these old isolations, these obsolescent particularisms, the forces of mechanical and scientific development fight, and fight irresistibly; and upon the general recognition of this conflict, upon the intelligence and courage with which its inflexible conditions are negotiated, depends very largely the amount of bloodshed and avoidable misery the coming years will hold.
And the difficulties in the way of the pan-Slavic dream are far graver.
Its realization is enormously hampered by the division of its languages, and the fact that in the Bohemian language, in Polish and in Russian, there exist distinct literatures, almost equally splendid in achievement, but equally insufficient in quantity and range to establish a claim to replace all other Slavonic dialects.
THE LARGER SYNTHESIS
Moreover, before Germany can unify to the East she must fight the Russian, and to unify to the West she must fight the French and perhaps the English, and she may have to fight a combination of these powers.
So much for the Pan-Slavic synthesis.
Already the need of some synthesis at least ampler than existing national organizations is so apparent in the world, that at least five spacious movements of coalescence exist to-day; there is the movement called Anglo-Saxonism, the allied but finally very different movement of British Imperialism, the Pan-Germanic movement, Pan-Slavism, and the conception of a great union of the "Latin" peoples.
A great number of fine and capable persons must be failing to develop, failing to tell, under the shadow of this too prepotent monarchy.
The claim to political liberty amounts, as a rule, to no more than the claim of a man to live in a parish without observing sanitary precautions or paying rates because he had an excellent great-grandfather.
We have seen that the essential process arising out of the growth of science and mechanism, and more particularly out of the still developing new facilities of locomotion and communication science has afforded, is the deliquescence of the social organizations of the past, and the synthesis of ampler and still ampler and more complicated and still more complicated social unities.
She will fight for Switzerland or Luxembourg, or the mouth of the Rhine.
The greater the social organism the more complex and varied its parts, the more intricate and varied the interplay of culture and breed and character within it.
That, after all, is the vital question, and not whether her policy is wise or foolish, or her commercial development inflated or sound.
Europe will have her Irelands as well as her Scotlands, her Irelands of unforgettable wrongs, kicking, squalling, bawling most desolatingly, for nothing that any one can understand. There will be great scope for the shareholding dilettanti, great opportunities for literary quacks, in "national" movements, language leagues, picturesque plotting, and the invention of such "national" costumes as the world has never seen.
She will fight with the gravity of remembered humiliations, with the whole awakened Slav-race at the back of her antagonist, and very probably with the support of the English-speaking peoples.
Under the outrageous treatment of the white peoples an idea of unifying the "Yellow" peoples is pretty certain to become audibly and visibly operative before many years.
She will be an Ireland without emigration, a place for famines.
The intellectual development of the Germans is defined to a very large extent by a court-directed officialdom.
Perhaps my heart was weaker than the hearts of most men, and I suffered more than they would have done in my place; that is all." The countess stopped for a moment, as if gasping for breath.
"Do you know where I am leading you?" said the countess, without replying to the question.
"My present happiness equals my past misery," said the count.
"Yes; Malta."
"You have no sister--no son--no father?"
"Take some," she said.
I thought she loved me well enough to wait for me, and even to remain faithful to my memory.
"Oh, mother," he exclaimed, "such a misfortune has happened!"
The count became pale as death, the blood rushed to his heart, and then again rising, dyed his cheeks with crimson; his eyes swam like those of a man suddenly dazzled.
"I never returned to the country where she lived."
"Take this peach, then," she said.
The count looked at Mercedes as if to interrogate her, but she continued to walk on in silence, and he refrained from speaking.
What has happened?" asked the countess, as though awakening from a sleep to the realities of life; "did you say a misfortune?
Ah, count, he esteems you so highly, tell him that he has spoken amiss." And she took two or three steps forward. Monte Cristo watched her with an air so thoughtful, and so full of affectionate admiration, that she turned back and grasped his hand; at the same time she seized that of her son, and joined them together.
Mercedes drew near, and plucked the fruit.
"Ah, indeed?"
"She is a slave whom I bought at Constantinople, madame, the daughter of a prince.
Albert at this moment ran in.
"Are you not married?" asked the countess.
"Her,--yes."
"Never?"
Indeed, I should expect misfortunes."
"Well?"
A long silence followed; the peach, like the grapes, fell to the ground.
Monte Cristo remained as unmoved as if the reproach had not been addressed to him.
"I, married?" exclaimed Monte Cristo, shuddering; "who could have told you so?"
"To Malta?"
"We are friends; are we not?" she asked.
"I have no one."
"Albert, Albert," said Madame de Morcerf, in a tone of mild reproof, "what are you saying?
"Never."
This is the history of most men who have passed twenty years of age.
"And your present happiness, has it softened your heart?"
"But," said the countess, breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on Monte Cristo, whose arm she convulsively pressed with both hands, "we are friends, are we not?"
"She is, then, now at Malta?"
"But you," he said, "with that light dress, and without anything to cover you but that gauze scarf, perhaps you feel cold?"
The countess placed herself before Monte Cristo, still holding in her hand a portion of the perfumed grapes.
"Thank you," she said.
"No, madame," replied Monte Cristo; "but you see I make no resistance."
"What?
"I hate them?
"Doubtless," replied the count, "since no one hears me complain."
They re-entered the drawing-room, which Valentine and Madame de Villefort had just quitted.
"I think so."
"On the contrary," replied the count, "did you not hear her declare that we were friends?"
"Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes," replied Monte Cristo, as if the subject had not been mentioned before. The countess dashed the grapes into the nearest thicket, with a gesture of despair.
They reached the building, ornamented with magnificent fruits, which ripen at the beginning of July in the artificial temperature which takes the place of the sun, so frequently absent in our climate.
"Do not my mother and you agree?" asked Albert, astonished.
Bread and Salt.
And they walked on again.
"Pray excuse me, madame," replied Monte Cristo, "but I never eat Muscatel grapes."
"I do."
"Oh, madame, I do not presume to call myself your friend, but at all times I am your most respectful servant." The countess left with an indescribable pang in her heart, and before she had taken ten steps the count saw her raise her handkerchief to her eyes.
"Why not?"
THE LETTER OF INTRODUCTION.
She rose to her feet with modest dignity, and silently held out her hand in token that my repentance was accepted.
"Have you some other employment in prospect?" I asked.
I am not to be engaged for more"--her voice sunk lower and lower, so that I could barely hear the next words--"for more than three months, certain."
I suppressed all appearance of surprise as well as I could, and took up the pen again.
I want to go much further away.
I am a miserable wretch who has tried to commit a great sin--I have tried to destroy myself.
"Don't mortify me by refusing to take my letter."
"You know nothing of me.
"For God's sake, ask me no more questions to-night!"
"I will take your letter," she answered, quietly.
"You will give me time for atonement?" I pleaded.
In an instant more it was over.
The next moment, to my astonishment, this changeable creature changed again.
We stood together by the table; we looked at each other in a momentary silence.
It matters little; I don't deserve them.
I lost all power of restraint; I caught her in my arms; I whispered, "I love you!" I kissed her passionately.
Now, if you would prefer it."
Will anybody find excuses for me?
How dare you touch me!" she said. "Take your letter back, sir; I refuse to receive it; I will never speak to you again.
You don't know what you have done.
I am quick at my needle, and I understand cutting out.
I said nothing; my eyes confessed my admiration; the writing materials lay untouched before me on the table.
I left her, pale and sad, with my letter in her hand.
"Would you please say," she went on, "that I am only to be taken on trial, at first?
"Oh, sir, I will indeed be worthy of the confidence that you have shown in me!" Her eyes moistened; her variable color came and went; her dress heaved softly over the lovely outline of her bosom.
She stood, leaning one hand on the table, confused and irresolute, her firm and supple figure falling into an attitude of unsought grace which it was literally a luxury to look at.
Her charming features brightened with pleasure.
The dressmaker to whom I had alluded had been my mother's maid in f ormer years, and had been established in business with money lent by my late step-father, Mr. Germaine.
She composed herself after a while.
Oh!" she cried, throwing herself in despair on a sofa that stood near her, "shall I ever recover my self-respect? shall I ever forgive myself for what I have done to-night?"
"In the mean time," I added, "I have the most perfect confidence in you; and I beg as a favor that you will let me put it to the proof.
She led the way into a sort of parlor behind the "bar," placed writing materials on the table, looked at my companion as only one woman can look at another under certain circumstances, and left us by ourselves.
I LOOKED at the house.
She thanked me warmly, and hesitated, looking up the street and down the street in evident embarrassment what to say next.
"Make your goodness to me complete," I said.
Leave me now, please.
"Have I any right," she asked, sadly, "to accept what you offer me?"
"You will not lose all confidence in me?
What are your plans?
I think I should do better in London; at some respectable milliner's, if I could be properly recommended.
I don't believe the man lives who could have resisted her at that moment.
It was not in human nature--perhaps I ought to say it was not in the nature of a man who was in my situation--to refrain from showing some curiosity, on being asked to supplement a letter of recommendation by such a postscript as this.
I handed her the open letter to read.
It was an inn, of no great size, but of respectable appearance.
"Do you propose staying in Edinburgh?" I asked.
Without stopping to think, I took it.
She blushed delightfully; she cast one tenderly grateful look at me, which I remembered but too well for many and many an after-day.
The way to reassure and console her lay plainly enough before me, if I chose to take it.
CHAPTER XI.
What would the landlady think if she saw her lodger enter the house at night in company with a stranger, and that stranger a gentleman?
"Would you mind adding a postscript, sir?"
You ought to know it.
Some forgotten consideration seemed to have occurred to her.
"How can I thank you?" she murmured, softly.
"I can give you exactly the recommendation you want," I said, "whenever you like.
Or I could keep accounts, if--if anybody would trust me."
Those rare persons who have been in love, and who have not completely forgotten it yet, may perhaps find excuses for me.
"To-morrow?"
"Thank you for writing it.
An unworthy doubt of her--the mean offspring of jealousy--found its way into my mind.
I can introduce you to a dressmaker in London who is at the head of a large establishment, and I will do it before I leave you to-night."
She stopped, and looked at me doubtingly, as if she felt far from sure, poor soul, of winning my confidence to begin with.
I implored her pardon; I assured her of my repentance and regret in words which did really come from my heart.
She shrunk back in alarm.
Her head sunk on her bosom; her delicate lips trembled a little; she said no more.
Good-night."
For a moment she lay helpless and trembling on my breast; for a moment her fragrant lips softly returned the kiss.
The violence of her agitation more than distressed me--I was really alarmed by it.
If I was to be of any use to her that night, the time had come to speak of other subjects than the subject of dreams.
Her face clouded again--she saw my proposal in a new light.
"I will write to you," she said.
I took up the letter of recommendation from the floor.
She abruptly broke it.
She lifted her noble head.
I used both their names without scruple; and I wrote my recommendation in terms which the best of living women and the ablest of existing dressmakers could never have hoped to merit.
My lips had barely touched hers, when she started to her feet and snatched up my hat from the chair on which I had placed it.
"Be seated, Mr. Germaine, I beg of you." He turned to the open door, and called up the stairs, in a loud and confident voice:
"Yes."
Do you really care nothing for me?
In her interests, the wise thing and the merciful thing to do was to conciliate the fellow before I left the house.
And an end there shall be.
Pray walk in."
"Only at that impracticable distance, mamma; but I introduced his name afterwards in my usual happy manner and I found that Miss Ringgan's cheeks were by no means indifferent to it.
"What does she have to do with it?" said Mrs. Evelyn.
"From Mr. Rossitur's down to Queechy."
They don't look like it.
I look forward to heart-rending scenes,--with a very disturbed state of mind."
does he leave it all to his cousin?"
"Fleda!--"
Thin, Barby."
No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.
"Mr. Carleton,--if you will just imagine we are in China, and introduct a pair of familiar chop-sticks into this basket, I shall be repaid for the loss of a strawberry by the expression of ecstasy which will immediately spread itself over your features.
He'll be too savage for anything."
"Well, Barby--"
"She's a very clever girl," said Mrs. Evelyn dismissing the subject.
"Mr. Skillcorn wants to know if you're going to fix the flowers for him to carry?"
And receiving a gratuity which he accepted without demonstration of any kind whatever, the basket-bearer at length released moved off.
Mr. Carleton, did your ears receive a faint announcement of ham and eggs which went quite through and through mine just now?"
"Well, will you have the samp for breakfast?"
"And does she send that too?"
Thorn!" said Mr. Carleton.
He has gone down hill sadly since his misfortunes.
"All that basketful!"
It's Miss Fliddy Ringgan."
My taste leads me to prefer the simplicity of primitive arrangements this morning."
I think Fleda's strong pastoral tastes are likely to develope themselves in a new direction."
You are aware that, though warm, the weather here has some exciting property, some excess or other of a peculiar gas in the atmosphere, prejudicial to certain temperaments.
You have interested me much by what you say of the boy's progress.
I have a few who come when I want them, and go in like manner.
Imagine his delight as each day opened new stores of knowledge to him, surrounded as he was by all that could encourage zeal and reward research.
Her house at Florence is uninhabited, the furniture is sold off; but no one seems even to guess whither she has betaken herself.
The fast and loose of that pleasant city are, as I hear, actually houseless since her departure.
He has left three cards upon me, each duly returned; but I am resolved that our inter-change of courtesies shall proceed no farther.
Lord Selby, whom you may remember in the Blues formerly, dined here yesterday, and mentioned a communication he had received from his lawyer with regard to some property entail, which, if Glencore should leave no heir male, devolved upon him.
How is it that you know nothing of Glencore,--can he not be traced?
CHAPTER XXII.
Meanwhile really great events are preparing in the East of Europe,--not that I am going to inflict them upon you, nor ask you to listen to speculations which even those in authority turn a deaf ear to.
The King has most kindly placed a little villa at Ischia at my disposal; but I do not mean to avail myself of the politeness.
The young men who figure at embassies and missions are all "cognate numbers." They each of them know who and what the other is, whence he came, and so on.
Now, our poor boy could not stand this ordeal, nor would it be fair he should be exposed to it.
There is really little peculiar to observe.
It is only nature makes the blunder of giving the sharpest swords the weakest scabbards.
The Duke of San Giustino has also offered me his palace at Baia; but I don't fancy leaving this just now, where there is a doctor, a certain Luigi Buffeloni, who really seems to have hit off my case.
Poor lad, there is something very sad in his case.
You say that the boy has no idea of money or its value.
They tell me "what is going on," far better and more truthfully than paid employees, and they cannot trace my intentions through my inquiries, and hasten off to retail them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As to my Lady, I can give you no information whatever.
I don't perceive that there is more levity than elsewhere.
I have also taken to smoke the leaves of the nux vomica, steeped in arrack, and think it agrees with me.
I am still a sufferer; the old pains rather aggravated than relieved by this climate.
Let him "moon away," as you call it, my dear Harcourt.
And now as to his future.
The difference is, perhaps, that there is less shame about it, since it is under the protection of the Church.
If you really press the question of his coming to me, I will not refuse, seeing that I can take my own time to consider what steps subsequently should be adopted.
I wish you would ask Brodie, or any of our best men, whether they have met with this affection; what class it affects, and what course it usually takes? My Italian doctor implies that it is the passing malady of men highly excitable, and largely endowed with mental gifts.
Should it ever reach you, you will perceive how unjustly you have charged me with neglecting your wishes.
You need not have taken such trouble about accounts and expenditure; of course, whatever you have done I perfectly approve of.
The man is eminently remarkable,--with his opportunities, miraculous.
I should have no objection whatever to having him attached to my Legation here, and perhaps no great difficulty in effecting his appointment; but there is a serious obstacle in his position.
British Legation, Naples.
I have got so accustomed to their stimulating power that I never write without one or two on my forehead.
Whose Magnesia is it that contains essence of Bark?
There is a wonderful sameness over the world just now, preluding, I have very little doubt, some great outburst of nationality from all the countries of Europe,--just as periods of Puritanism succeed intervals of gross licentiousness.
Of my colleagues I see as little as possible, though, when we do meet, I feel an unbounded affection for them.
Besides this, it was never Glencore's wish, but the very opposite to it, that he should be brought prominently forward in life.
He calls it arterial arthriticis,--a kind of inflammatory action of one coat of the arterial system; his notion is highly ingenious, and wonderfully borne out by the symptoms.
A moonstruck, romantic youth at a German University.
Is it not painting the lily?
He may, or may not, be correct in this.
why, my dear friend, there is not a matter between this country and our own that rises above the capacity of a Colonel of Dragoons.
Tripley's or Chipley's, I think.
What a pity the weapon cannot be worn naked!
Finally, one of them took his trade-box, which represented three years’ toil, and dropped it into a canoe alongside.
It all depends on how it is uttered.
Sing-sing is a song.
This fella tree belong apple.’
“Before long time altogether no place he stop.
Savvee or catchee are practically the only words which have been introduced straight from pigeon English.
God big fella marster belong white man, him fella He make ’m altogether.
Bêche de mer was purely fortuitous, but it was fortuitous in the deterministic way.
What is the thing you are after?
He too much fright.
My word!
I wanted two or three pairs of the large clam-shells (measuring three feet across), but I did not want the meat inside.
Walk about is a quaint phrase.
“PETER.”
I like him 6 tin biscuit, 4 bag rice, 24 tin bullamacow.
God’s wrath, when He sent the Flood, was merely a case of being cross along mankind.
God say: ‘What name?
The white men were all seamen, and so capsize and sing out were introduced into the lingo.
What do you mean by this outrageous conduct?
The potentate was on deck.
My instruction to the natives finally ripened into the following “You fella bring me fella big fella clam—kai-kai he no stop, he walk about.
“So Adam Eve these two fella go along scrub.
One fella tree he tambo (taboo) along you altogether.
He possessed a trade-box full of calico, beads, porpoise-teeth, and tobacco.
Harry, the schooner captain, started to write the letter, but was stopped by Peter at the end of the second sentence.
Another confiscated the strings of beads from around his neck.
And God He sing out, ‘Adam!’ And Adam he speak, ‘You call ’m me?’ God He speak, ‘Me call ’m you too much.’ Adam he speak, ‘Me sleep strong fella too much.’ And God He speak, ‘You been eat ’m this fella apple.’ Adam he speak, ‘No, me no been eat ’m.’ God He speak.
He call him this fella Mary, Eve.
When they finish eat ’m, my word, they fright like hell, and they go hide along scrub.
On his head was a top-hat.
Of course, pickaninny has happened along, but some of its uses are delicious.
God big fella marster belong white man, He scratch ’m head belong Him.
To sing out is to cry loudly, to call out, or merely to speak.
Him fella Adam all the same sick; he no savvee kai-kai; he walk about all the time.
What name?
“And God He come walk about along garden, and He sing out, ‘Adam!’ Adam he no speak.
Me no savvee what name this fella Adam he want.’
It may mean: What is your business?
Everything is related.
My word, as an exclamation with a thousand significances, could have arrived from nowhere else than Old England.
He name belong him.
“Then why in Jericho do you let him take the box?” the captain demanded indignantly. Quoth the recruit, “Me speak along him, say bokkis he stop, that fella he cross along me”—which was the recruit’s way of saying that the other man would murder him.
“That fella belong you?” the captain asked the recruit, referring to the thief.
One would not tell a Melanesian cook to empty the dish-water, but he would tell him to capsize it.
You fella bring me fella small fella clam—kai-kai he stop.”
Too much, by the way, does not indicate anything excessive.
He hereby wants £12.” (At this point Peter began dictation).
You are well acquainted with the ancient enmity of the Florentines against you, which is not occasioned by any injuries you have done them, or by fear on their part, but by our weakness and their own ambition; for the one gives them hope of being able to oppress us, and the other incites them to attempt it.
The Florentines used the weightiest arguments they could adopt to prevent the count from quitting the service of the League, a course he was himself reluctant to follow, but his desire to conclude the marriage so embarrassed him, that any trivial accident would have been sufficient to determine his course, as indeed shortly happened.
There still remained another difficulty, which, depending on circumstances beyond the reach of their influence, created more doubts and uneasiness than the former; the count would not consent to pass the Po, and the Venetians refused to accept him on any other condition.
CHAPTER III
It was soon known in Florence that the duke was preparing to send forces into Tuscany.
To induce the Venetians to retain the count in the command, Cosmo de' Medici went to Venice, hoping his influence would prevail with them, and discussed the subject at great length before the senate, pointing out the condition of the Italian states, the disposition of their armies, and the great preponderance possessed by the duke.
The count, finding himself unable to sustain the attack, offered them to the Florentines, who declined them; but the pope having returned to Florence, they interceded with him in the count's behalf.
He concluded by saying, that if the count and the duke were to unite their forces, they (the Venetians) might return to the sea, and the Florentines would have to fight for their liberty.
Claiming them as his daughter's portion, he refused to give them up to the pope, who demanded them as property held of the church, and who, upon his refusal, sent the patriarch with forces to take possession of them.
The prospect of this connection had great influence with the count, for, as the duke had no sons, it gave him hope of becoming sovereign of Milan.
The duke, influenced by his inveterate hostility against the Florentines, his new obligation to the Lucchese, and, above all, by his desire to prevent so great an acquisition from falling into the hands of his ancient enemies, determined either to send a strong force into Tuscany, or vigorously to assail the Venetians, so as to compel the Florentines to give up their enterprise and go to their relief.
Then, entering the Lucchese territory, they besieged Camaiore, the inhabitants of which, although faithful to their rulers, being influenced more by immediate danger than by attachment to their distant friends, surrendered.
We have often been deprived of every hope, except in God and the casualties which time might produce, and both have proved our friends.
She stopped, walked on sedately, changed from the girl Carol into Mrs. Dr. Kennicott.
Bjornstam could do anything with his hands--solder a pan, weld an automobile spring, soothe a frightened filly, tinker a clock, carve a Gloucester schooner which magically went into a bottle.
Carol stepped into a sirocco of furnace heat.
"It's infuriating to have to pay attention to what people think.
Snug in her furs she trotted up-town.
Some one giggled.
To the village doctor's wife it was taboo.
In tam o'shanter and tweed skirt Carol felt herself a college junior going out to play hockey.
Mrs. Dave Dyer snapped, "Honest?
Storm sheds were erected at every door. In every block the householders, Sam Clark, the wealthy Mr. Dawson, all save asthmatic Ezra Stowbody who extravagantly hired a boy, were seen perilously staggering up ladders, carrying storm windows and screwing them to second-story jambs.
I know positively that Mrs. Clark, after swearing that she wouldn't weaken and encourage them in their outrageous demands, went and paid five-fifty--think of it! practically a dollar a day for unskilled work and, of course, her food and room and a chance to do her own washing right in with the rest of the wash.
Carol herself stirred Main Street by a loose coat of nutria.
Their eyes were hostile.
She talked.
They scooted down a long hill on a bob-sled, they upset and got snow down their necks they shrieked that they would do it again immediately--and they did not do it again at all.
A maid has one of the hardest jobs on earth.
The olives need not be stuffed.
They all laughed artificially, and Carol obediently "talked libraries."
Become an authentic part of the town?
But here I'm spied on.
Her "reforms," her impulses toward beauty in raw Main Street, they had become indistinct.
The children's parents either laughed at him or hated him.
She had been embarrassed by Kennicott's frankness, but she agreed with him that in the insane condition of civilization, which made the rearing of citizens more costly and perilous than any other crime, it was inadvisable to have children till he had made more money.
Now, for a week, he was commissioner general of Gopher Prairie.
Carol was angry.
Only----I can't!
Boooooo!
Through late November and all December it snowed daily; the thermometer was at zero and might drop to twenty below, or thirty.
She could not have outside employment.
She wanted to whoop, her legs ached to run.
Only by such fussing as the Widow Bogart's could she make it fill her time.
While Kennicott put up his windows Carol danced inside the bedrooms and begged him not to swallow the screws, which he held in his mouth like an extraordinary set of external false teeth.
Mrs. B. J. Gougerling, wife of the banker, stated in a shocked manner, "Any place from three-fifty to five-fifty a week!
"How much do the maids get here?" Carol ventured.
What angry passions--and what an idiotic discussion!
Children, yes, she wanted them, but----She was not quite ready.
Harry Haydock did figure-eights, and Carol was certain that she had found the perfect life.
The lesser sort appeared in yellow and black dogskin coats, but Kennicott was lordly in a long raccoon ulster and a new seal cap.
"I don't care!
She badgered another group into going skiing.
She was poisoned with doubt, as she drooped up to bed.
Winter garments surpassed even personal gossip as the topic at parties. It was good form to ask, "Put on your heavies yet?" There were as many distinctions in wraps as in motor cars.
He stooped to examine the furnace flues; he straightened, glanced down at her, and hemmed, "Got to fix your furnace, no matter what else I do."
They're watching me.
They were hacks.
Was that merely his usual manner?
We have two thousand more books than Wakamin."
They were off, riding hard.
Thus she chanced to discover that she had nothing to do.
But she would set them going now.
Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.
III
Next day, through her shopping, her mind sat back and observed.
Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland & Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.
Carol Kennicott, you're probably right, but you're too much ahead of the times.
The frames of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were marked with engraved rings of growth.
He was the one democrat in town.
In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the country.
Do you call it honest to hold us up for every cent of pay they can get?
She tried to get back into the current.
He rushed from house to house till after bedtime--ten o'clock.
She reflected that she did not know whether the people liked her.
Carol was retorting, "But a maid does it for strangers, and all she gets out of it is the pay----"
How much do you pay?" insisted half a dozen.
GOPHER PRAIRIE was digging in for the winter.
Isn't the country lovely!
But he was courtly to Carol.
A thaw which stripped the snow from the sidewalks; a ringing iron night when the lakes could be heard booming; a clear roistering morning.
He was the only person besides the repairman at Sam Clark's who understood plumbing.
Juanita Haydock rattled, "They're ungrateful, all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is simply becoming awful.
The boys wore shoe-packs, blue flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson, lemon yellow, and foxy brown.
She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student "Yippee!"
That night she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours; and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land.
She began to think with unpleasant lucidity.
I've had some experience, in St. Paul."
"You feel so?
Along the railroad the sections of snow fence, which had been stacked all summer in romantic wooden tents occupied by roving small boys, were set up to prevent drifts from covering the track.
So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness.
I'm a lazy thing.
They gasped.
When her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of life.
They were already playing. Despite her flabby resolves she had not yet learned bridge.
Juanita, quit looking so belligerent.
She had to nag them.
The cuts of beef were not cuts.
She was sorry----Perhaps he had made all the mystery of love a mechanical cautiousness but----She fled from the thought with a dubious, "Some day."
If there's any more pecking, I'll take charge of the hen roost myself!"
Across the street, at another window, the curtain had secretively moved.
Then the town exploded.
What is this, a card party or a hen fight? Carol, you stop admiring yourself as the Joan of Arc of the hired girls, or I'll spank you.
He called both Lyman Cass the miller and the Finn homesteader from Lost Lake by their first names. He was known as "The Red Swede," and considered slightly insane.
Stop it!
She twittered, "You're perfectly right.
The men smiled--but did they like her?
She was a woman with a working brain and no work.
Icicles from burst water-pipes hung along the skirt of his brown dog-skin overcoat; his plush cap, which he never took off in the house, was a pulp of ice and coal-dust; his red hands were cracked to rawness; he chewed the stub of a cigar.
Old Grannis dropped his hands upon either arm of his chair, and, leaning forward a little, looked at her blankly.
The minutes passed; side by side, and separated by only a couple of inches of board, the two old people sat there together, while the afternoon grew darker.
"But I never take sugar in my tea."
She had done this--she who could not pass him on the stairs without a qualm. What to do she did not know.
Old Grannis leant his face in his hands.
I used to hear you when I was making tea."
"Didn't you sit close to the partition on your side?" he insisted.
She had often dreamed of this, but had always put it off to some far-distant day.
Her room was the picture of calmness and order.
The transaction had been concluded.
It was an enormity.
"I didn't know it was you at first.
They stood at length in a little Elysium of their own creating.
It was evening; not quite time to light the lamps.
At last it had come--come when he had least expected it.
"I thought you were binding your books to-night," said Miss Baker, suddenly, "and you looked tired.
"Oh, won't you--won't you please--"
That morning the bookselling firm where he had bought his pamphlets had taken his little binding apparatus from him to use as a model.
The evening was closing down tranquilly.
What she had done seemed to her indecorous beyond expression.
The next moment she had been all trepidation.
Yet here she was, IN HIS ROOM, and they were talking together, and little by little her embarrassment was wearing away.
For thirty years his eyes had not been wet, but tonight he felt as if he were young again.
It was to come gradually, little by little, instead of, as now, abruptly and with no preparation. That she should permit herself the indiscretion of actually intruding herself into his room had never so much as occurred to her.
He was almost certain that the little dressmaker loved him, and the thought gave him boldness.
He did not speak.
Then Old Grannis put his arm about her, and kissed her faded cheek, that flushed to pink upon the instant.
There was nothing for him to do.
It hardly seemed possible to Miss Baker that she was actually talking to Old Grannis, that the two were really chatting together, face to face, and without the dreadful embarrassment that used to overwhelm them both when they met on the stairs.
"I was making some tea," she said, "and I thought you would like to have a cup."
Never in his life had he been so happy.
Not only did an inexplicable regret stir within him, but a certain great tenderness came upon him. The tears that swam in his faded blue eyes were not altogether those of unhappiness.
His table, with its pile of pamphlets, was in a far corner of the room, and, from time to time, stirred with an uncertain trouble, he turned his head and looked at it sadly, reflecting that he would never use it again.
He could not tell whether he was profoundly sad or deeply happy; but he was not ashamed of the tears that brought the smart to his eyes and the ache to his throat.
I could even fancy that I could hear your dress brushing against the wall-paper close beside me.
"I--I--I've forgotten the sugar."
"Yes, yes, I always heard you when you were making tea," returned the old Englishman; "I heard the tea things.
"Oh, I didn't mean--I didn't mean--I didn't know it would seem like this.
One day, about a fortnight after the coroner's inquest had been held, and when the excitement of the terrible affair was calming down and Polk Street beginning to resume its monotonous routine, Old Grannis sat in his clean, well-kept little room, in his cushioned armchair, his hands lying idly upon his knees.
"Oh, I shouldn't.
She had found courage enough to explain her intrusion.
The retired dressmaker's courage had carried her thus far; now it deserted her as abruptly as it had come.
He came toward her and took the tray from her hands, and, turning back into the room with it, made as if to set it upon his table. But the piles of his pamphlets were in the way.
Old Grannis still kept silence, still bending forward, with wide eyes, his hands gripping the arms of his chair.
CHAPTER 17
Why, you don't know--you have no idea--all these years--living so close to you, I--I--" he paused suddenly.
You will--you must think ill of me." She stood in the hall.
Miss Baker paused, looking at him over her shoulder, her eyes very wide open, blinking through her tears, for all the world like a frightened child.
I'll go." She turned about.
"Think ILL of you?" cried Old Grannis, "think ILL of you?
"And, yes--yes--I did too," she answered.
They would drift apart now, and she would no longer make herself a cup of tea and "keep company" with him when she knew that he would never again sit before his table binding uncut pamphlets.
Already she was trembling so that half the tea was spilled.
"And didn't you sit close to the partition on your side?
"Let me--I'll take the tray from you," cried Old Grannis, coming forward.
"No--no," returned the old Englishman.
"Wait, I'll help you," she said.
Oh," he cried, with a sudden sharp breath, "oh, you ARE kind.
I hadn't dreamed--I couldn't believe you would be so good, so kind to me.
Old Grannis's occupation was gone.
A tremulous joy came upon him.
"It was unlady-like.
I only meant to be kind and bring you some tea; and now it seems SO improper.
She felt that she could not hold the tray out another instant.
The day lapsed slowly into twilight, and the two old people sat there in the gray evening, quietly, quietly, their hands in each other's hands, "keeping company," but now with nothing to separate them.
Old Grannis had drawn his chair close to the wall--so close, in fact, that he could hear Miss Baker's grenadine brushing against the other side of the thin partition, at his very elbow, while she rocked gently back and forth, a cup of tea in her hands.
I--" she caught her breath--"improper"--she managed to exclaim, "unlady-like--you can never think well of me--I'll go.
After that they spoke but little.
The absence of his accustomed work seemed to leave something out of his life.
His hands lay idly in his lap.
She held it toward him.
The geraniums blooming in the starch boxes in the window, the aged goldfish occasionally turning his iridescent flank to catch a sudden glow of the setting sun.
Old Grannis shyly put out his hand and took hers as it lay upon her lap.
But you weren't binding books."
It seemed to her that he was wanting her, that she ought to go to him.
He could no longer fancy himself so near to her.
I've been so lonely to-night--and last night too--all this year--all my life," he suddenly cried.
"No, no," returned Old Grannis, drawing up a chair and sitting down. "No, I--the fact is, I've sold my apparatus; a firm of booksellers has bought the rights of it."
"I used to make tea just at that time and sit there for a whole hour."
She was quiet, she was peaceful.
He did not hear the timid rapping on his door, and it was not until the door itself opened that he looked up quickly and saw the little retired dressmaker standing on the threshold, carrying a cup of tea on a tiny Japanese tray.
"Thanks, thanks," murmured Old Grannis, setting down the tray.
Both of his hands were occupied with the tray; he could not make a place for it on the table. He stood for a moment uncertain, his embarrassment returning.
It did not appear to him that he could be the same to Miss Baker now; their little habits were disarranged, their customs broken up.
"No--I don't know--perhaps--sometimes.
She came into the room, up to the table, and moved the pamphlets to one side.
After all these years they were together; they understood each other.
"I thought you always did about four o'clock.
Old Grannis had received his check.
With the brusque resolve and intrepidity that sometimes seizes upon very timid people--the courage of the coward greater than all others--she had presented herself at the old Englishman's half-open door, and, when he had not heeded her knock, had pushed it open, and at last, after all these years, stood upon the threshold of his room.
19.
14.
13.
10.
Real succession in swift motions without sense of succession.
Duration, time, and eternity, are, not without reason, thought to have something very abstruse in their nature.
Very slow motions unperceived.
5.
To understand TIME and ETERNITY aright, we ought with attention to consider what idea it is we have of DURATION, and how we came by it.
Proof.
'Before all time,' and 'When time shall be no more.'
Nature and origin of the idea of Duration.
15.
3.
17.
Hence I leave it to others to judge, whether it be not probable that our ideas do, whilst we are awake, succeed one another in our minds at certain distances; not much unlike the images in the inside of a lantern, turned round by the heat of a candle.
1.
11.
This consideration of duration, as set out by certain periods and marked by certain measures or epochs, is that, I think, which most properly we call TIME.
12.
In slow motions.
The Revolutions of the Sun and Moon, the properest Measures of Time for mankind.
But if Adam and Eve, (when they were alone in the world,) instead of their ordinary night's sleep, had passed the whole twenty-four hours in one continued sleep, the duration of that twenty-four hours had been irrecoverably lost to them, and been for ever left out of their account of time.
Very swift motions unperceived.
The Idea of Duration applicable to Things whilst we sleep.
9.
18.
6.
8.
7.
6.
Their Parts inseparable.
1.
Just so is it in duration.
Expansion not bounded by Matter.
Finite or any magnitude holds not any proportion to infinite.
IDEAS OF DURATION AND EXPANSION, CONSIDERED TOGETHER.
7.
8.
5.
Time to Duration is as Place to Expansion.
12.
CHAPTER XV.
9.
They belong to all finite beings.
10.
26.
31.
Eternity.
30.
But not by their Motion, but periodical Appearances.
Time not the Measure of Motion
Our Measure of Time applicable to Duration before Time.
No two Parts of Duration can be certainly known to be equal.
24.
These yet, by their presumed and apparent equality, serve as well to reckon time by (though not to measure the parts of duration exactly) as if they could be proved to be exactly equal.
25.
23.
29.
20.
28.
27.
If the poles are long they will act as springs, especially when the wood used is of a kind which has considerable elasticity.
The rest of the band made off as empty-handed as they came, with one exception.
With this object in view they traveled towards some timber which was near by.
This animal seldom fails to frighten the remainder, when away they all go with long ropes and picket pins dangling after them.
There are many of these charming little brooks which, emptying into, form this river. To the general traveler, however, they present one great drawback as eligible camping sites.
They succeeded in stealing nine of their loose animals, with which they escaped unperceived.
Suspecting their design, Gaunt sent Kit Carson and another man in pursuit of the fugitives, who had one day the start.
However, they succeeded in passing the night without further molestation.
They did not dare to venture out far from their fortifications; but, this was no great trial to them, as game existed in great plenty and came very near their fortifications.
Fears for the safety of their companions arose accordingly.
Both sides had now, seemingly, had enough of fighting, and hostilities soon after entirely ceased, the savages marching back and leaving the whites masters of the field. Several of the trappers were slightly, but none dangerously, wounded. The Indians had paid dearly, in numbers killed, for their rascality. Finding the coast clear, Carson and his men set out and soon rejoined their comrades on the Arkansas River.
This must inevitably happen if, after the rider has fired, among the score or so of passing bullets, one of them, perchance, took a peculiar fancy for a vital organ of his horse.
Experience had taught them that the longest way round was, in this case, the quickest way home.
Such seldom escape without broken legs or severe contusions, which are often incurable.
They were also made quite happy in obtaining the articles of outfit which would render their wild life more agreeable and easy.
One brave had succeeded in capturing and mounting a horse before the white men could reach him.
It speaks more than would volumes of mere praise, concerning their character for true manhood.
Everything however passed as usual during the night; and, with the morning, all suspicion was laid aside.
In consequence, the whole party was obliged to halt and again go into camp, having accomplished but a very short remove from their savage foes.
Therefore, giving spurs to their horses they pushed on with vigor to know the worst.
In the day time they are a noble enemy, always warning their antagonist of their hostile intentions by springing their rattles, thus giving a person warning of his danger.
Having obtained a position close enough to observe the strength of their enemies, they stopped to reconnoitre.
This instance affords a fair example how the minority could easily rule the majority when the minority held to the side of danger.
As soon as Carson and his comrades had got out of the reach of the Indians they began to recall the suspicions concerning signs of Indians which their faithful dog had aroused.
This sight did not tend to allay the wrath of the trappers.
Their banks are usually pretty thickly lined with rattlesnakes.
As soon as the occupants of the fort heard the noise they sprang to their feet, and thus became fair marks for the unerring rifles of the trappers.
They disputed, however, every inch of ground over which they trod, as they fell back from one tree to another, continually making their bullets tell with terrible effect on their foes.
Shortly after this arrival, four men from the trapping party came into camp and brought the news as to the whereabouts of Gaunt and his men.
[Footnote 4: These stampedes are a source of great profit to the Indians of the Plains.
Instead of bravely stopping and fighting off the wolves, they run.
Such are invariably led into the haunts of the thieves, who easily secure them. Young horses and mules are easily frightened; and, in the havoc which generally ensues, oftentimes great injury is done to the runaways themselves.
The more peaceful party, seeing this earnestness, could not do otherwise than lend their aid in the fight and cheerfully did so.
It was now nearly daybreak; and as the savages discovered the weakness of the attacking party, they resolved to charge, feeling sure of success.
The trappers did not return a shot.
Kit and his comrade, therefore, determined to remain where they were, in the old camp; and, to this end, immediately arranged everything so that they could make a successful defence in case they should be attacked by the savages.
Having been watching the camp during the night and finding the white men fully on the alert and carefully guarding against any surprise, they had quietly waited until suspicion of their proximity had been entirely laid aside.
There is nothing they so much dread as being left on foot with an empty gun and no time to load, when perhaps a single shot might change defeat into victory; sure captivity into freedom, or a dead companion into a laughing, jolly and lovable help-mate, ready for setting a trap or to engage in the next bloody skirmish.
The sight of a stampede on a grand scale requires steady nerves to witness without tremor; and, woe to the footman who cannot get out of the way when the frightened animals come along.
When a camp is made which is nearly in range they turn their trained animals loose, who at once fly across the plain, penetrating and passing through the camp of their victims.
Kit and his companions in the mean time, in order to reach their destination, found it necessary, unless they should take a long and circuitous route, to cross one of those lofty peaks for which the Rocky Mountains are so famous.
The country was so infested with hostile Indians that it made their position, thus alone, very precarious.
A dance was in progress in honor of the robbery so recently perpetrated, which proved conclusively, that they were without even a suspicion of danger.
Kit Carson, who had from the first acted as captain, ordered three men to take the recovered animals back to where they had secured their saddle horses.
The bullets from the rifles of the Indians flew about their ears thick and fast, for a heavy fire was opened upon them, as they passed, and incessantly kept up until they were out of their reach.
It would not have been according to their custom.
Having traveled forty miles, their horses, which were very poor in flesh, became fatigued, causing them to think of making a halt.
At other times, the limbs of the running horses get entangled in the ropes, when they are suddenly thrown.
They had been informed that these animals were numerous in this particular stream.
The experience of the day, however, had admonished them to be on their guard against surprise.
All of the picketed animals will endeavor to follow, and usually succeed in following, the trained horses.
Kit Carson, with twelve of his companions, immediately saddled their horses and started in pursuit.
The second was to prepare their arms.
Such, most frequently, is the fate of stampeded horses which have been bred in the States, not being trained by a prairie-life experience to take care of themselves.
As they were riding carelessly homeward, beguiling the time with anecdote and remark upon their future prospects, the scenery around them, with an occasional sight at some kind of game, what should appear ahead of them but four Indian warriors, remarkably well mounted, painted and decked with feathers, showing, conclusively, that they were out upon the war-path.
A faithful dog belonging to the camp kept up a furious barking, much more lustily than when wolves annoyed him.
While one slept, the other stood on guard.
As soon as it would do for them to move, they started, eager for the strife.
The Camanches are particularly expert and daring in this kind of robbery.
The whole band were now unanimous in favor of the attack.
Mr. Fitzpatrick, a trapper well known and respected by the mountaineers, had charge of the party.
The trappers comprehended instantly that the warriors had been to the Mexican settlements in Sonora on a thieving expedition, and that the horses had changed hands with only one party to the bargain.
There are two of these natural Parks in the Rocky Mountains.
They saluted the thieves with a volley from their rifles, which, with the bullet-whizzing about their heads and bodies, so astonished them, that they seemed almost immediately to forget their stolen property, and to think only of a precipitous flight.
At the first supply of water, they went into camp.
While encamped on this stream, a band of five hundred Indians made their appearance and entered the camp.
The treacherous Mexicans, however, continued annoying the commander of the trappers by gratuitously offering the men all the liquor they desired.
The opportunity to instill a lesson on the savage marauders was too good to be lost.
The party then went into Winter Quarters.
This band had been formed for the purpose of trapping the principal streams of the Rocky Mountains.
The whole party, as now organized, remained where they were throughout the winter of 1830 and 1831, employed in killing only the amount of game necessary for their sustenance.
The more probable hypothesis, however, is that the Indians themselves, many centuries in the past, were versed to some extent in the art of mining, and carried on the business in these mines; but from indolence or, to them, uselessness of the metals, the work was abandoned, and their descendants failed to obtain the knowledge which their ancestors possessed.
"To be witness of your deed," he answered.
The bird was so large that all the princes, and the princess in the midst of them, could easily find place on his back, and he began to fly upwards.
And all at once there shot down from heaven to the depth of the abyss a ray of sunshine, on which descended a gigantic bird, with rainbow wings, a bright sparkling crest, and peacock's eyes all over his body, a golden tail, and silvery breast.
But the princess knelt down and prayed:
"Must I go back without my poor brothers?"
The king was coming back victorious over his enemies, and on his way home had first heard of the sudden disappearance of his children and of the queen, and how his palace was tenanted only by a basilisk with a death-dealing glance.
There was once a king, who had lost his wife.
"What are your commands, princess?" asked the bird.
And the old man told her what else to do, blessed her, and disappeared.
But her glance was so deadly, that it killed every one she looked at; so that all the people in the palace were soon dead, including her own son, whom she slew by merely looking at him.
"How can I ever thank you enough!
The eagles were about to turn and fly, when all at once they perceived their sister.
"Hence! ye enchanted princes!
"Stop, princess!" he said; "You can proceed no further, for you are not yet parted by death from your own world."
She at once began to sprinkle them with her tears from the lachrymatory; and in one moment the twelve eagles were changed back into the twelve princes, and joyfully embraced their sister.
I never ate anything so good before."
In utter desperation she cut off a piece of her flesh, and gave it to him.
"But what am I to do?" she asked.
"Then climb upon my back, and whenever I look round, give me some bread to eat."
The princess and her brothers resumed their journey, this time towards the sunrise, and at last arrived in their own country, where they met their father, returning from the wars.
Not having received his usual meal the bird became sensibly weaker, and looked round once more.
The queen looked out of the window, to see in what direction they would fly, when she saw right under the window an old man, with a beard as white as snow.
But before long he found out that he had made a great mistake.
The princess was just going to break off some to give him, when a sudden violent gust of wind from the bottom of the abyss snatched the loaf from her hand, and sent it whistling downwards.
She whispered some magical words.
"Bird of heavenly pity here, By each labour, prayer and tear, Come in thine unvanquished power, Come and aid us in this hour!"
"Princess, what were those two delicious morsels you gave me last?
you must fulfil your penance on earth, till I come for you myself."
"I will, but you must know, princess, that before I can reach the top of this precipice with you on my back, three days and nights must pass; and I must have food on the way, or my strength will fail me, and I shall fall down with you to the bottom, and we shall all perish."
Having eaten this the bird recovered strength, and flew upwards faster than before; but after an hour or two he looked round once more.
"What are you here for, old man?" she asked.
"Your brothers," said Death, "fly here every day in the guise of eagles. They want to reach the other side of this door, which leads into the other world; for they hate the one they live in; nevertheless they, and you also, must remain there, until your time be come.
They came round her, and caressed her hands lovingly with their beaks.
He flew higher and higher, and whenever he looked round at her, she gave him bits of the loaf, and he flew on, and upwards.
The eagles dashed themselves against the iron portal, beating their wings upon it, and imploring Death to open it to them.
But remembering what the mysterious old man had said she took courage, and began to pray and weep, till she had filled the little bottle with her tears.
"I have an ever-growing loaf, which will suffice both for you and ourselves," replied the princess.
The basilisk ran off in fright; trying to hide herself underground.
They had a family of thirteen--twelve gallant sons, and one daughter, who was exquisitely beautiful.
The princess looked around her, and wept bitterly.
But Death only threatened them with his scythe, saying:
One day, when the king was far away, at war against his enemies, the queen went into her stepchildren's apartments, and pronounced some magical words--on which every one of the twelve princes flew away in the shape of an eagle, and the princess was changed into a dove.
The old man gave her an ever-growing loaf, and said:
"Carry us from this threshold of eternity to our own world."
"Then you saw it?"
They gathered up the remains of the basilisk, and burnt them in a great fire in the courtyard, afterwards scattering the ashes to the four winds.
So she cut off another piece of her flesh; the bird seized it greedily, and flew on so fast that in a few minutes he reached the ground at the top of the precipice.
And when it is full...."
So they went on steadily for two nights and days; but upon the third day, when they were hoping in a short time to view the summit of the precipice, and to land upon the borders of this world, the bird looked round as usual for a piece of the loaf.
Meanwhile the princess, who had been changed into a dove, flew after her brothers the eagles, but not being able to overtake them, she rested under a wayside cross, and began cooing mournfully.
Soon she heard the sound of wings over her head, and saw twelve eagles flying.
For twelve years after his wife's death the king grieved very much; he used to go daily to her tomb, and there weep, and pray, and give away alms to the poor.
"I saw it."
"What are you grieving for, pretty dove?" asked an old man, with a snow-white beard, who just then came by.
The basilisk saw herself reflected in this mirror, and her own glance slew her immediately.
The old man disappeared in a blaze of sunshine; and the queen, as she stood there, dumb with terror, was changed into a basilisk.
I am grieving also for myself.
The bird breathed upon her wounds; and the flesh at once healed over, and grew again as before.
And this once populous and happy royal residence quickly became an uninhabited ruin, which no one dared approach, for fear of the basilisk lurking in its underground vaults.
Go towards the sunset, and weep your tears into this little bottle.
The princess trembled with fear; she had nothing more to give him, and she felt that he was becoming exhausted.
Therefore every day I must compel them to go back, which they can do, because they are eagles.
He thought never to marry again; for he had promised his dying wife never to give her children a stepmother.
But how are you going to get back yourself?--look there!"
So saying he stroked the little dove, and she at once regained her natural shape.
It was wet with tears.
"Unseemly anger on my lady's part, and rebellion on Carry's, forming, as usual, its chief features."
William, how could I reconcile it to my conscience not to help?" she continued.
We've the materials with which to do it.
What a chance!
"How did you stand that fighting yesterday afternoon, George?" Dick asked of Warner.
Here was a full half day for the Army of the Potomac, enough in which to destroy a divided portion of the Army of Northern Virginia.
And yet there had been no guilt in either.
"And I believe they can't," said Dick.
Why should they be allowed to ride about so calmly? His heart fairly ached for the attack.
"Ah," murmured Dick, "the little church of Shiloh!"
"Correct," said Warner, who was in an uncommonly fine humor.
There is a church, too, on the upper part of the peninsula, a little church belonging to an order called the Dunkards."
Dick and his two young comrades had no fault to find with their quarters.
Yet the Northern advance was slow.
With Jackson tied up before Harper's Ferry, Lee's defeat is sure, unless he retreats across the Potomac, and that would be equivalent to a defeat.
If they must rest they would rest well.
But they did not hide the view of the armies, arrayed for battle, and with only a narrow river between.
Brigade after brigade in blue came up and sat down before the Antietam.
It was another good omen.
It's another good omen.
But we've got to push and push hard."
"The Confederate riflemen will certainly be on watch on the other side of the stream."
"It's only eight miles from the gap," said Pennington, who had been making inquiries, "and as we have come three miles it must be only five miles away."
What a day!
He saw through the powerful glasses the walls of the little village of Sharpsburg, and to the north a roof which he believed was that of the Dunkard Church, of which Shepard spoke.
"That's so, my lad, so we can!
Despite the delay, Dick and his comrades, thrilled at the great and terrible panorama spread before them.
"What is it, Mr. Shepard?" asked Colonel Winchester.
"But don't get shot," cautioned Colonel Winchester.
We're bound to achieve a great victory, colonel."
By George, we're driving their skirmishers before us!
The colonel raised his glasses and took a long look in front.
A horseman galloped toward them.
"Why don't we hurry!" he exclaimed.
But he isn't going to cross without a battle, that's sure. The rebels are flushed with victory, they think they have the greatest leaders ever born and they believe, despite the disparity of numbers, that they can beat us."
"Do you know anything about the Antietam, colonel?" asked Dick.
There was no attack.
The open air agreed with me, and as no bullet sought me out I felt benefited.
What a day!
"Oh, that lost day!
Dick, through his own glasses saw Confederate officers watching them also.
But Colonel Winchester raged again and again in vain.
Dick saw a line of trees which he surmised marked the course of the Antietam, and he saw small detachments of cavalry which he knew were watching the advance of the Army of the Potomac. Their purpose convinced him that Lee had not retreated across the Potomac, but that he would fight and surely lose.
Dick promised and the three went forward very carefully among some bushes.
Here, Johnson, blow your best on that trumpet.
He shuddered even now when he recalled it.
Beyond the peninsula he caught glimpses of the broad Potomac.
And so we will!
If he said anything at all he would have to say it in a guarded manner and to his best friends.
Heavenly aromas arose.
"If some rebel cannoneer doesn't shoot it off in the coming battle.
The Confederates, after the fierce fighting of the day before, had abandoned both gaps, and the way at last lay clear before the Army of the Potomac.
They were led on by curiosity and they did not believe that they would be in any great danger.
Jackson might come, but it would only be with a part of his force, that which marched the swiftest, and the victory of the Army of the Potomac would be all the grander.
Good Heavens, why don't we push on?"
The regiment in its swift advance now came nearer to the Antietam, the narrow but deep creek between its high banks.
Great armies drawn up for battle were a spectacle that no boy could ever view calmly, and his heart beat so hard that it caused him actual physical pain.
I want our regiment to be the first to reach the Antietam."
Dick, too, felt a sinking of the heart, but despair was not written on his face as it was on that of his colonel.
They don't seem to make any stand at all!"
A more comfortable summer home for a night could not be asked. And there was plenty of food, too.
But his eyes came back from the church and rested on the country around Sharpsburg.
"It's a narrow stream, but deep, and crossed by several stone bridges. It will be hard to force a crossing here, but further up it can be done with ease since we outnumber Lee so much that we can overlap him by far. I have my information from Shepard, and he makes no mistakes.
Dick looked back, and he saw once more that vast billowing cloud of dust made by the marching army.
"My God!
He tried to imagine that this was Lee and that Longstreet, and that one of the Hills, and the one who wore a gorgeous uniform must surely be Stuart.
McClellan said that fifty thousand men were there, and that Jackson was coming with fifty thousand more, but Shepard, who always knew, said that they did not number more than twenty thousand.
Dick and his comrades ate and drank, and then lay down in the grove.
Dick now believed that so many good omens could not fail.
The Army of the Potomac never lacked it.
"What do you mean by that?"
Jackson, even with his vanguard, could not arrive before night, and the main force certainly could not come from Harper's Ferry before the morrow.
The glasses carried far.
My God!" cried the colonel.
I didn't get away from that hospital too soon.
The whole country would have been heavy with forest had it not been for the tramp of war.
But in front he saw only quiet and peace, save for a few distant horsemen who seemed to be riding at random.
Again he was thankful.
What a chance!
Now and then they heard the booming of guns, and just before dark there had been a short artillery duel across the Antietam, but now the night was quiet, save for the murmur and movement of a great army.
Through the darkness came the sound of many voices and the clank of moving wheels.
"I hope and believe so.
A man who had a bad name and paid no heed to the laws that were made, was wont to make his way to the grounds near Mount Ver-non and shoot just what game he chose.
Nel-lie was a frail child, and did not gain in strength, though she had the best of care.
He knew, too, just the kind of work each one was fit for, and which he could do the best.
Large tracts of wood-land were laid waste; homes were burnt, and those who dwelt in them robbed and slain; and so sly and shrewd were the red-skins that it was some time ere the white men could put a stop to their deeds of blood.
They are all thrown down."
Each man wore a grave face.
His crops were of the best, and he sought to cheat no one.
They had not the means to pay this tax.
But the scheme did not work well.
"All is lost!" they cried.
Wild fear seized Brad-dock's men, who fired and took no aim.
Brad-dock looked on him with a gaze of scorn, and spoke to him in a way that roused the ire of Cap-tain Jack.
He was in all parts of the field, a fine mark for the guns of the foe, and yet not a shot struck him to do him harm.
This, of course, was more than he could bear, so he left the ar-my at once, and with a sad heart.
The corpse was borne twixt these two rows of men with the sword and sash on the top of the box in which he lay, and in the rear of it the men of rank marched two and two.
All the rules and forms of camp-life were kept up.
They must push on at once.
When the corpse was put in the ground, the guard fired their guns three times, and then all the troops marched back to camp.
Gold was placed in the Gov-er-nor's hands to use as he pleased.
Wild war-whoops and fierce yells rent the air.
One of the head men who died while in camp, was borne to the grave in this style: A guard marched in front of the corpse, the cap-tain of it in the rear. Each man held his gun up-side down, as a sign that the dead would war no more, and the drums beat the dead march.
In the day time the red-men and their squaws, rigged up in their plumes and war paint, hung round Brad-dock's camp, and gazed spell-bound at the troops as they went through their drills.
He rode in a fine turn-out that he had bought of Gov-er-nor Sharpe, which he soon found out was not meant for use on rough roads.
It would need gold to buy these things, as well as to pay for fresh troops.
They told Brad-dock they would meet him on his march, but they did not keep their word.
The plan was to ford the stream near the camp, march on the west bank of the stream for five miles or so, and then cross to the east side and push on to the fort.
They were fond of the chase, and were well-armed with knives and guns, and looked quite like a tribe of red-skins as they came out of the wood.
Half-King was dead, and White Thun-der reigned in his stead.
Now and then one of the red-men would dart out of the woods with a wild yell to scalp a red-coat who had been shot down.
Our men were full of joy, and thought the war would soon be at an end.
The march was a hard one for man and beast.
When some of them took to the trees, Brad-dock stormed at them, and called them hard names, and struck them with the flat of his sword.
Cap-tain Jack stepped in front of his band and said that he and his men were used to rough work, and knew how to deal with the red-men, and would be glad to join the force.
He told his men what had been said, and the whole band turned their backs on the camp, and went through the woods to their old haunts where they were known and prized at their true worth.
While at this place Cap-tain Jack, and his brave band of hunts-men came in-to camp.
Those in the front rank were killed by those in the rear.
Four small shots went through his coat.
"Brad-dock is killed!"
But this act did not bring the men back to their guns.
But this state of things did not last long, and strife rose twixt the red and white men, and some of the red-skins left the camp.
By that time he could move, but not with-out much pain, for he was still quite weak.
It was his wish to join the troops in time for the great blow, and while yet too weak to mount his horse, he set off with his guards in a close cart, and reached Brad-dock's camp on the eighth of Ju-ly.
At one o'clock the whole force had crossed the ford north of the fort, and were on their way up the bank, when they were met by a fierce and sharp fire from foes they could not see.
At last a shot struck him in the right arm and went in-to his lungs. He fell from his horse, and was borne from the field.
But he was a proud man, and when he made up his mind to do a thing he would do it at all risks.
Our force was spread out in-to ten bands, of 100 men each.
Through this fault he missed the fame he hoped to win, lost his life, and found a grave in a strange land.
With them were White Thun-der, who had charge of the "speech-belts," and Sil-ver Heels, who was swift of foot.
He thought that this would make the troops look up to him, and would add much to his fame.
When near the grave the guard formed two lines that stood face to face, let their guns rest on the ground, and leaned their heads on the butts.
Brad-dock met them in a stiff sort of way.
Brad-dock was on the field the whole day, and did his best to turn the tide.
The red-men had a camp to them-selves, where they would sing, and dance, and howl and yell for half the night.
Death swept through the ranks of the red-coats. The men at the guns were seized with fright.
The troops took fright at once, and most of them fled.
The fight raged on.
But he had fought with dukes, and men of high rank, and was fond of show, and liked to put on a great deal of style.
Then it was not so nice!
For instance, whenever a train of dogs had been travelling for a long time, almost perishing with the heat and their heavy loads, a glimpse of water would cause them to forget all their responsibilities.
The second winter after the massacre, my father and my two older brothers, with several others, were betrayed by a half-breed at Winnipeg to the United States authorities.
They are children of Nature, and occasionally she whips them with the lashes of experience, yet they are forgetful and careless.
It seemed almost like a living creature to me, this new vehicle with four legs, and the more so when we got out of axle-grease and the wheels went along squealing like pigs!
However cold the weather might be, the inmate of the fur-lined sack was usually very comfortable--at least I used to think so.
This was my first experience with a civilized vehicle.
Some of them, in spite of the screams of the women, would swim with their burdens into the cooling stream, and I was thus, on more than one occasion, made to partake of an unwilling bath.
Only a few of them were recovered, and our journeys after this misfortune were effected mostly by means of the dog-travaux.
We were forced to cross in buffalo-skin boats--as round as tubs!
In savage life, the early spring is the most trying time and almost all the famines occurred at this period of the year.
Even a good modern boat is not safe upon its uncertain current.
I was passive in the whole matter.
I did not object, for I had a very pleasant game of peek-a-boo with the little girl, until we came to a big snow-drift, where the poor beast was stuck fast and began to lie down.
Now we were compelled to trespass upon the country of hostile tribes and were harassed by them almost daily and nightly.
The raids made upon our people by other tribes were frequent, and we had to be constantly on the watch.
EARLY HARDSHIPS
It was not an easy matter to keep them right side up, with their helpless freight of little children and such goods as we possessed.
Another fire was quickly made, which saved our lives.
In the general turmoil, we took flight into British Columbia, and the journey is still vividly remembered by all our family.
A yoke of oxen and a lumber-wagon were taken from some white farmer and brought home for our conveyance.
I was now an exile as well as motherless; yet I was not unhappy.
When game was to be had and the sun shone, they easily forgot the bitter experiences of the winter before. Little preparation was made for the future.
The people carried it with them in bags formed of tripe or the dried pericardium of animals.
Now the Missouri is considered one of the most treacherous rivers in the world.
We were surrounded.
I was sure they stepped on the wheel, so I cautiously placed my moccasined foot upon it.
The summer after the "Minnesota massacre," General Sibley pursued our people across this river.
Soon after this, we came into a region where buffaloes were plenty, and hunger and scarcity were forgotten.
As I was then living with my uncle in another part of the country, I became separated from them for ten years.
I well remember the six small birds which constituted the breakfast for six families one morning; and then we had no dinner or supper to follow!
Here and there, a family lay down in the snow, selecting a place where it was not likely to drift much.
In times of famine, the adults often denied themselves in order to make the food last as long as possible for the children, who were not able to bear hunger as well as the old.
As a people, they can live without food much longer than any other nation.
I remember at one time a night attack was made upon our camp and all our ponies stampeded.
Some of these were towed by two or three women or men swimming in the water and some by ponies.
We dug our way out, shot some of the buffaloes, made a fire and enjoyed a good dinner.
One of the earliest recollections of my adventurous childhood is the ride I had on a pony's side.
There were times of plenty and times of scarcity, and we had several narrow escapes from death.
One of the most thrilling experiences of the following winter was a blizzard, which overtook us in our wanderings.
Both ponies and large dogs were used as beasts of burden, and they carried in this way the smaller children as well as the baggage.
Food is free--lodging free--everything free!
Only the strictest vigilance saved us.
During the summer, when Nature is at her best, and provides abundantly for the savage, it seems to me that no life is happier than his!
A little girl cousin of mine was put in a bag and suspended from the horn of an Indian saddle; but her weight must be balanced or the saddle would not remain on the animal's back.
Water was not always to be found.
For a day and a night we lay under the snow.
If this were not so, I believe there would have been tribes of cannibals among them.
The Indians are a patient and a clannish people; their love for one another is stronger than that of any civilized people I know.
Much of their suffering might have been prevented by a little calculation.
This mode of travelling for children was possible only in the summer, and as the dogs were sometimes unreliable, the little ones were exposed to a certain amount of danger.
It was a prairie fire.
This was the convenient and primitive way in which some mothers packed their children for winter journeys.
I cried out all possible reproaches on the white man's team and concluded that a dog-travaux was good enough for me.
I was really rejoiced that we were moving away from the people who made the wagon that had almost ended my life, and it did not occur to me that I alone was to blame.
Accordingly, I was put into another sack and made to keep the saddle and the girl in position!
I could not be persuaded to ride in that wagon again and was glad when we finally left it beside the Missouri river.
Such was the Indians' wild life!
Alas, before I could realize what had happened, I was under the wheels, and had it not been for the neighbor immediately behind us, I might have been run over by the next team as well.
The travaux consisted of a set of rawhide strips securely lashed to the tent-poles, which were harnessed to the sides of the animal as if he stood between shafts, while the free ends were allowed to drag on the ground.
Uncle stuck a long pole beside us to tell us when the storm was over.
The Washechu (white men) were coming in great numbers with their big guns, and while most of our men were fighting them to gain time, the women and the old men made and equipped the temporary boats, braced with ribs of willow.
White people have been known to kill and eat their companions in preference to starving; but Indians--never!
Our wanderings from place to place afforded us many pleasant experiences and quite as many hardships and misfortunes.
At last, I mustered up courage enough to join them in this sport.
Sometimes a strip of bass-wood bark, four feet long and about six inches wide, was used with considerable skill.
His swollen face was sad and ashamed as he sat on a fallen log and watched the dance.
One of his older companions shouted:
The top that holds out the longest is the winner.
I once had a grizzly bear for a pet, and so far as he and I were concerned, our relations were charming and very close.
This was usually impracticable in actual life, because the object was almost always in motion, while the hunter himself was often upon the back of a pony at full gallop.
Of the first grade the leading features are long locks and smiles; of the second frogged coats and frowns.
Theirs was the affectation of respectability;--if indeed there be an affectation so honorable.
The gamblers, of whom I descried not a few, were still more easily recognisable.
These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with white cravats and waistcoats, broad solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters.--They had all slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen-holding, had an odd habit of standing off on end.
By and bye he passed into a cross street, which, although densely filled with people, was not quite so much thronged as the main one he had quitted.
Hurriedly putting on an overcoat, and seizing my hat and cane, I made my way into the street, and pushed through the crowd in the direction which I had seen him take; for he had already disappeared. With some little difficulty I at length came within sight of him, approached, and followed him closely, yet cautiously, so as not to attract his attention.
"How wild a history," I said to myself, "is written within that bosom!" Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view--to know more of him.
It was now fully night-fall, and a thick humid fog hung over the city, soon ending in a settled and heavy rain.
They seem to prey upon the public in two battalions--that of the dandies and that of the military men.
For half an hour the old man held his way with difficulty along the great thoroughfare; and I here walked close at his elbow through fear of losing sight of him.
Still all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip.
I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated.
By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly-growing grass.
I had now a good opportunity of examining his person.
Yet, as we proceeded, the sounds of human life revived by sure degrees, and at length large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro. The spirits of the old man again flickered up, as a lamp which is near its death hour.
Here a change in his demeanor became evident.
Long and swiftly he fled, while I followed him in the wildest amazement, resolute not to abandon a scrutiny in which I now felt an interest all-absorbing.
He was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble.
At no moment did he see that I watched him.
I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend.
He refuses to be alone.
A second turn brought us into a square, brilliantly lighted, and overflowing with life.
Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation.
All was dark yet splendid--as that ebony to which has been likened the style of Tertullian.
The rain fell fast; the air grew cool; and the people were retiring to their homes.
It was the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime.
He urged his way steadily and perseveringly.
Once more he strode onward with elastic tread.
Fare you well, my pretty sister.
"It is not the Lord Chancellor's fault, Judith.
"But they seem determined to bear it bravely," he answered, in a hearty tone.
Why does the Queen let there be a Lord Chancellor?"
I must assume my share of the burden."
"Annabel said the truth--that I do think of going out as daily governess," she replied, bending over a carnation to hide the blush which rose to her cheeks, a very rival to the blushing flower.
"But Lady Augusta is so indulgent to her children!" interrupted Constance.
"Think of papa! think of his strait!
"You are three-quarters of an hour behind your time."
"College boys!" cried his lordship, winking and blinking, as other less majestic mortals do when awakened suddenly out of their morning sleep.
Did you see this mischief done?"
He only administers the law."
"How could you doubt me?
"William, I must do my duty.
"A sneak! a coward!
"Boys, understand me.
"Is Mr. Yorke there?"
He was of an excellent family, and she supposed he disliked the step she was about to take--deemed it would be derogatory to his future wife.
What could you be thinking of, child?"
Gaunt entered, and the rest trooped in after him.
"Now, Constance, that we have a moment alone, what is this about you?" began Mr. Yorke, as they stood together in the garden.
"If I do go."
"The temptation, as you call it, must be for a later consideration.
"Gone into school!" repeated Gaunt, haughtily, resenting the familiarity, as well as the information.
What would be your course if I forbade it?"
He looked at her with an expression she did not understand, and shook his head.
"I called there yesterday, and interrupted a 'scene' between Lady Augusta and Miss Caroline," he said.
"A daily governess, I think you said?"
"But you looked so grave and were so silent."
Shall I ascertain particulars for you, Constance; touching salary and other matters?"
"If you please.
"You did not answer my question," said Mr. Yorke.
"Thankful!"
The rosy hue stole over her face again, and a sweet smile to her lips: "Oh, William, if you will only sanction it!
"You say you did not see the surplice damaged?"
The head-master's gone into school, and is waiting for you; marking you all late, of course."
There will be no holiday to-day.
"That's enough," said Gaunt.
The master has called the seniors to his aid, and I order you to speak.
"But that was not the act of the whole school, sir.
"Come, Miss Channing."
A pretty senior you must be, if you do."
"We don't declare things upon suspicion, do we, Mr. Gaunt?" appealed Charles.
She turned away to hide her face from Mr. Yorke. He followed and obtained forcible view of it.
"Suppose it should turn out to have been a senior, Mr. Gaunt?" spoke Bywater.
Before seven o'clock, the whole school, choristers and king's scholars, assembled in the cloisters.
He had changed his dress, and had a pair of new white gloves in his hand.
"The fault lies in the boy, not in the master," interrupted Gaunt.
My compliments to the head-master, and I beg he will grant the boys a holiday."
"What do you mean?"
"I would not spare you," he struck in, filling up her pause.
"Not by myself," she whispered, lifting for a moment her large blue eyes.
"Gone entirely, Judith.
It is a great blow to their prospects."
"But, so long as that one does not confess, the whole school must bear it," returned the master, looking round on the assembly.
Roberts did as he was bid--he also had been to Helstonleigh before with his master--and delivered the card and message to Gaunt.
If you go there you will witness them occasionally, and I assure you they are not edifying.
"You may think--I speak now to the guilty boy, and let him take these words to himself--that you were quite alone when you did it; that no eye was watching.
There was a stress on the word "to-night," and Hamish marked it.
Gone for good."
"Not proud," she softly said.
Why will you not answer me?
She could not continue.
"For good!" groaned Judith; "I should say for ill.
"Some one said so; and that he was afraid to tell."
"But it seems to be my duty," she urged from between her pale and parted lips.
But, Oh, William, if you gave me up--"
"Oh, ah, I recollect," cried his lordship--for it was not the first time he had been to Helstonleigh.
As ye will, said Palomides, so it shall be.
It befell upon a day Sir Ector and Sir Percivale came to Sir Launcelot and asked him what he would do, and whether he would go with them unto King Arthur or not.
And here within this mile is the Suffragan of Carlisle that shall give you the sacrament of baptism.
And when Sir Launcelot should depart Dame Elaine made great sorrow.
Then they took their horses and Sir Galleron rode with them.
Sir, said Sir Ector, I am your brother, and ye are the man in the world that I love most; and if I understood that it were your disworship, ye may understand I would never counsel you thereto; but King Arthur and all his knights, and in especial Queen Guenever, made such dole and sorrow that it was marvel to hear and see.
Thereof am I glad, said Sir Tristram, and now shall ye and I make us ready, for both ye and I will be at the feast.
Sir, said the hurt knight, ye shall have it with a good will; but ye must beware, for I warn you that knight is wight.
But there shall no man nor child ride with me, but myself.
It is soon forgiven, said Sir Launcelot.
Sir knight, said Sir Tristram, I require you tell me your right name.
So God me help, said Sir Tristram, either he shall slay me or I him but that he shall be christened or ever we depart in-sunder. My lord Sir Tristram, said Sir Galleron, your renown and worship is well known through many realms, and God save you this day from shenship and shame.
And when Sir Bors saw that child it liked him passing well.
And then soon after they departed, riding toward Camelot, where King Arthur and Queen Guenever was, and for the most part all the knights of the Round Table.
THEN they departed, and within five days' journey they came to Camelot, that is called in English, Winchester.
When Sir Percivale saw him do so he marvelled what he meant.
As for that, said Sir Bors, I will have him with me, and bring him to the house of most worship of the world.
Then shall he be a man good enough, said Sir Launcelot.
As for that, said Dame Elaine, I doubt not he shall prove the best man of his kin except one.
Then Sir Tristram unarmed Galleron, the which was a noble knight, and had done many deeds of arms, and he was a large knight of flesh and bone.
Now will we turn to our matter of Sir Launcelot.
Nay, said Sir Launcelot, that may not be by no mean, for I was so entreated at the court that I cast me never to come there more.
What shall be said among all knights?
Now take your horse, said Sir Tristram, and as ye say so it shall be, and all thine evil will God forgive it you, and I do.
Sir, he said, my name is Sir Galleron of Galway, and knight of the Table Round.
Then Palomides stood still and beheld his sword with a sorrowful heart. How now, said Sir Tristram unto Palomides, now have I thee at advantage as thou haddest me this day; but it shall never be said in no court, nor among good knights, that Sir Tristram shall slay any knight that is weaponless; and therefore take thou thy sword, and let us make an end of this battle.
And ever as Sir Ector and Sir Percivale told these tales of Sir Launcelot, Queen Guenever wept as she should have died. Then the queen made great cheer.
And so the king and all the court were glad that Sir Palomides was christened.
But here is no rehersal of the third book.
NOW leave we Sir Launcelot in the Joyous Isle with the Lady Dame Elaine, and Sir Percivale and Sir Ector playing with them, and turn we to Sir Bors de Ganis and Sir Lionel, that had sought Sir Launcelot nigh by the space of two year, and never could they hear of him.
Also what shall queens and ladies say of me? It is pity that I have my life, that I will hold so noble a knight as ye are from his worship.
Holy father, said Sir Launcelot, I marvel of the voice that said to me marvellous words, as ye have heard to-forehand.
THEN Sir Launcelot wept with heavy cheer, and said: Now I know well ye say me sooth.
And when he was nigh the cross he there abode still.
Then he returned and came to his horse and did off his saddle and bridle, and let him pasture, and unlaced his helm, and ungirt his sword, and laid him down to sleep upon his shield to-fore the cross.
And then He went without the town, and found in midst of the way a fig tree, the which was right fair and well garnished of leaves, but fruit had it none.
Truly, said Sir Launcelot, that were me full loath to discover.
Right as they thus stood talking there came in riding Sir Gareth.
I will well, said Sir Launcelot, for I have neither helm, nor horse, nor sword.
THEN anon Sir Launcelot waked, and set him up, and bethought him what he had seen there, and whether it were dreams or not.
Let us spere some tidings, said Percivale, at yonder recluse.
This jousts was done to-fore the hermitage where a recluse dwelled.
And when she saw Sir Galahad ride, she said: God be with thee, best knight of the world.
Then Our Lord cursed the tree that bare no fruit; that betokeneth the fig tree unto Jerusalem, that had leaves and no fruit.
CHAPTER XVII.
And then Sir Launcelot promised him he nold, by the faith of his body.
And then they made joy either of other.
Then the good man asked him what he was.
For Sir Galahad himself alone beat them all seven the day to-fore, but his living is such he shall slay no man lightly. Also I may say you the Castle of Maidens betokeneth the good souls that were in prison afore the Incarnation of Jesu Christ.
As for that, said the good man, I shall help you or to-morn at even of an horse, and all that longed unto you.
And when he was clean armed he took Sir Launcelot's horse, for he was better than his; and so departed they from the cross.
Ah certes, said she, all aloud that Launcelot and Percivale might hear it: An yonder two knights had known thee as well as I do they would not have encountered with thee.
And then Launcelot kneeled down and cried on Our Lord mercy for his wicked works.
And they two rode four days without finding of any adventure, and at the fifth day they departed. And everych held as fell them by adventure.
Then the sick knight dressed him up and kissed the cross; anon his squire brought him his arms, and asked his lord how he did.
So when mass was done Launcelot called him, and prayed him for charity for to hear his life.
And then he told there that good man all his life.
With a good will, said the good man.
CHAPTER XIX.
For when I sought worldly adventures for worldly desires, I ever enchieved them and had the better in every place, and never was I discomfit in no quarrel, were it right or wrong.
Then he departed from the cross on foot into a forest; and so by prime he came to an high hill, and found an hermitage and a hermit therein which was going unto mass.
And then they took the way under the castle, and there they lost the way that Sir Galahad rode, and there everych of them departed from other; and Sir Gawaine rode till he came to an hermitage, and there he found the good man saying his evensong of Our Lady; and there Sir Gawaine asked harbour for charity, and the good man granted it him gladly.
Then Sir Launcelot said: I pray you counsel me.
Certes, said he, I thank God right well, through the holy vessel I am healed.
And either promised other of the three knights not to depart while they were in that quest, but if fortune caused it.
And within he found a fair altar, full richly arrayed with cloth of clean silk, and there stood a fair clean candlestick, which bare six great candles, and the candlestick was of silver.
Sir, said he, for ye be wicked and sinful, and he is full blessed.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XVIII.
So thus he sorrowed till it was day, and heard the fowls sing: then somewhat he was comforted.
For then he deemed never to have had worship more.
But when Sir Launcelot missed his horse and his harness then he wist well God was displeased with him.
And when Sir Launcelot heard this he was passing heavy and wist not what to do, and so departed sore weeping, and cursed the time that he was born.
I dare right well say, said the squire, that he dwelleth in some deadly sin whereof he was never confessed.
When Sir Percivale came to the recluse she knew him well enough, and Sir Launcelot both.
And when Sir Launcelot saw this light he had great will for to enter into the chapel, but he could find no place where he might enter; then was he passing heavy and dismayed.
Certes, said Sir Launcelot, all that you have said is true, and from henceforward I cast me, by the grace of God, never to be so wicked as I have been, but as to follow knighthood and to do feats of arms.
It befell that Our Lord on Palm Sunday preached in Jerusalem, and there He found in the people that all hardness was harboured in them, and there He found in all the town not one that would harbour him.
Right so Sir Launcelot, his father, dressed his spear and brake it upon Sir Galahad, and Galahad smote him so again that he smote down horse and man.
Sir, said the good man, hide none old sin from me.
But Sir Launcelot rode overthwart and endlong in a wild forest, and held no path but as wild adventure led him.
And then they turned again with heavy cheer.
So when Sir Galahad was departed from the Castle of Maidens he rode till he came to a waste forest, and there he met with Sir Launcelot and Sir Percivale, but they knew him not, for he was new disguised.
For this fourteen year I never discovered one thing that I have used, and that may I now wite my shame and my disadventure.
For certes had ye not been so wicked as ye are, never had the seven brethren been slain by you and your two fellows.
Well, said the good man, and then he held his peace.
Now shall I shew thee why thou art more naked and barer than the fig tree.
Right so heard he a voice that said: Sir Launcelot, more harder than is the stone, and more bitter than is the wood, and more naked and barer than is the leaf of the fig tree; therefore go thou from hence, and withdraw thee from this holy place.
Then perceived they both that he was Galahad; and up they gat on their horses, and rode fast after him, but in a while he was out of their sight.
With that Sir Launcelot saw the candlestick with the six tapers come before the cross, and he saw nobody that brought it.
And by adventure he met with Sir Aglovale and Sir Griflet, two knights of the Table Round.
And then he called himself a very wretch, and most unhappy of all knights; and there he said: My sin and my wickedness have brought me unto great dishonour.
"The name of the old man was De Lacey.
Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family endured such unheard-of oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus reduced to poverty and ruin, became a traitor to good feeling and honour and had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of money to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance.
Felix had procured passports in the name of his father, sister, and himself.
The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced.
The Turk, amazed and delighted, endeavoured to kindle the zeal of his deliverer by promises of reward and wealth.
"He did not succeed.
He had previously communicated his plan to the former, who aided the deceit by quitting his house, under the pretence of a journey and concealed himself, with his daughter, in an obscure part of Paris.
His plans were facilitated by the news which arrived from Paris.
She hesitated some time, but at length she formed her determination.
"The day for the execution of the Turk was fixed, but on the night previous to it he quitted his prison and before morning was distant many leagues from Paris.
The plot of Felix was quickly discovered, and De Lacey and Agatha were thrown into prison.
Safie nursed her with the most devoted affection, but the poor girl died, and the Arabian was left alone, unacquainted with the language of the country and utterly ignorant of the customs of the world.
This idea was torture to him.
He was tried and condemned to death.
This lady died, but her lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at the prospect of again returning to Asia and being immured within the walls of a harem, allowed only to occupy herself with infantile amusements, ill-suited to the temper of her soul, now accustomed to grand ideas and a noble emulation for virtue.
The generous nature of Safie was outraged by this command; she attempted to expostulate with her father, but he left her angrily, reiterating his tyrannical mandate.
He made, at that moment, a solemn vow to deliver him and then looked around for the means.
She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad.
The injustice of his sentence was very flagrant; all Paris was indignant; and it was judged that his religion and wealth rather than the crime alleged against him had been the cause of his condemnation.
"Such were the events that preyed on the heart of Felix and rendered him, when I first saw him, the most miserable of his family.
They remained confined for five months before the trial took place, the result of which deprived them of their fortune and condemned them to a perpetual exile from their native country.
He revolved a thousand plans by which he should be enabled to prolong the deceit until it might be no longer necessary, and secretly to take his daughter with him when he departed.
"Safie related that her mother was a Christian Arab, seized and made a slave by the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of Safie, who married her.
He could have endured poverty, and while this distress had been the meed of his virtue, he gloried in it; but the ingratitude of the Turk and the loss of his beloved Safie were misfortunes more bitter and irreparable.
Felix visited the grate at night and made known to the prisoner his intentions in his favour.
Before I depart I will give them to you; they will prove the truth of my tale; but at present, as the sun is already far declined, I shall only have time to repeat the substance of them to you.
"Felix had accidentally been present at the trial; his horror and indignation were uncontrollable when he heard the decision of the court.
The prospect of marrying a Christian and remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society was enchanting to her.
"She arrived in safety at a town about twenty leagues from the cottage of De Lacey, when her attendant fell dangerously ill.
The news reached Felix and roused him from his dream of pleasure.
Even in my own heart I could give no expression to my sensations--they weighed on me with a mountain's weight and their excess destroyed my agony beneath them. Thus I returned home, and entering the house, presented myself to the family.
I will revenge my injuries; if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred.
My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy!
I felt as if I were placed under a ban--as if I had no right to claim their sympathies--as if never more might I enjoy companionship with them.
I wept bitterly, and clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, "Oh!
I was moved.
The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.
Turning to him, therefore, I said,
Saying this, he suddenly quitted me, fearful, perhaps, of any change in my sentiments.
"You are in the wrong," replied the fiend; "and instead of threatening, I am content to reason with you.
Shall I respect man when he condemns me?
He saw my change of feeling and continued,
"I swear," he cried, "by the sun, and by the blue sky of heaven, and by the fire of love that burns my heart, that if you grant my prayer, while they exist you shall never behold me again.
Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world.
"I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe forever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile."
The stars shone at intervals as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground; it was a scene of wonderful solemnity and stirred strange thoughts within me.
"You swear," I said, "to be harmless; but have you not already shown a degree of malice that should reasonably make me distrust you?
My haggard and wild appearance awoke intense alarm, but I answered no question, scarcely did I speak.
Oh!
Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.
Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!"
If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion; the love of another will destroy the cause of my crimes, and I shall become a thing of whose existence everyone will be ignorant.
After a long pause of reflection I concluded that the justice due both to him and my fellow creatures demanded of me that I should comply with his request.
"How inconstant are your feelings!
I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.
A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed himself and proceeded--
May not even this be a feint that will increase your triumph by affording a wider scope for your revenge?"
Yet even thus I loved them to adoration; and to save them, I resolved to dedicate myself to my most abhorred task.
Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?
"How is this?
I shuddered when I thought of the possible consequences of my consent, but I felt that there was some justice in his argument. His tale and the feelings he now expressed proved him to be a creature of fine sensations, and did I not as his maker owe him all the portion of happiness that it was in my power to bestow?
He continued,
My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit!
But I now indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realized.
"If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again; I will go to the vast wilds of South America.
This may not be; cease to argue the point, for I cannot consent."
How can you, who long for the love and sympathy of man, persevere in this exile?
I saw him descend the mountain with greater speed than the flight of an eagle, and quickly lost among the undulations of the sea of ice.
But I was bewildered, perplexed, and unable to arrange my ideas sufficiently to understand the full extent of his proposition.
I had certainly never supposed that he could by any possibility have such a thing as a cricket-ball in one of the pockets.
I suppose a more unpromising set of fieldsmen never yet took their places in the field.
Send your men into the field.
He had.
And the balls which he produced!
Now he had on a bright red flannel shirt--his tastes in costume seemed a trifle lurid--the sleeves of which were turned up above the elbows.
"Never mind about the ball," he said.
We turned out.
Mr. Sapsworth and I bowled over after over.
CHAPTER III.
To enable him to bat with more advantage, Mr. Benyon had removed his waistcoat, which matched his trousers and his coat.
His bat he held straight down in front of him, the blade swinging gently in the air.
We can't stop here all day.
He drove it over the hedge, and over the trees, and up to the skies, and out of sight.
Quite unnecessarily he allowed that this was so.
Time went on.
But Mr. Benyon intervened.
Mr. Benyon ran thirteen for a hit to leg.
I've got another ball which you can have."
He stood bolt upright, his legs together, his feet drawn heel to heel; not at all in the fashion of a modern cricketer, who seeks to guard his wickets with his legs.
I was alone in the field.
AND BATS.
To long-leg Mr. Benyon sent it flying.
A little later, looking round the field, I found that Mr. Hawthorn had disappeared, and that Mr. Hedges, stuck in a hedge, was struggling gallantly to reach safety on the other side.
Mr. Benyon urged the fielders on.
That over!
"It's no good wasting time looking for that ball.
What he had done with it I cannot say; possibly it had vanished, with his other garments, into air.
My fourth ball he treated to a swipe to square-leg.
He made Mr. Barker run them too--it was the proverbial last straw.
The next ball I fielded.
I felt for Mr. Sapsworth.
"I do like your kind of bowling, mister," Mr. Benyon would constantly remark.
I've got one in my pocket you can have."
One part of his address gave us a certain gratification--that part in which he stated that he soon would have to go.
He never had a chance to make a stroke, but his partner took care to make him run an incredibly large odd number as a wind up to every over.
He and I had agreed that we should start the bowling.
"Now, Bob Sapsworth, you take the bowling one end, and let your captain take the other.
If I had had an equal admiration for his kind of batting we should have been quits, but I had not; at least not then.
Crack--smack--whack went the balls out of sight in all directions.
He put his hand into his trousers' pocket.
I only wished that I had been so fortunate as to have led the van.
"I do like a ball which I can get a smack at," he remarked as he produced a fourth ball from the same pocket of his tightly-fitting trousers which had contained the other three.
It was stopped, quite involuntarily, by Mr. Hawthorn and Mr. Hedges.
He had.
He had--the third.
I confess that I felt no more inclined to act up to the letter of our agreement than he did.
And the reflection involuntarily crossed my mind--what fools we were to stay!
The bat lay on the ground. And Mr. Benyon had gone!
It was this--that the number of spectators was growing smaller by degrees and beautifully less.
"It does warm me so to swipe."
But I was discovering, with Horatio, that there were more things in heaven and earth than had been contained in my philosophy.
But since I had suffered it was only fair that he should suffer too.
I caught one of them--the lad Fenning--in the act of scrambling through the hedge.
Captain, you take first over."
His pose was almost as peculiar as his costume.
I felt that these things must be happening to me in a dream.
He produced it--always from the same pocket.
Mr. Benyon did not seem to be distressed by the exertion in the least; Mr. Barker emphatically did.
The perspiration was running off from us in streams--I had never had such a "sweater" before!
I've been looking for you for some time.
So when he did come, I was a bit huffy.
"It's not loud enough for me.
That did put my back up.
I do not speak to strangers as a rule.
He being a married man, and with a comfortable home, he will be glad to see us.'
Oh, dear me, you never saw nothing like the mess that I was in!
So I said, 'Well, Willyum, have you forgotten it's my day out?
Just now you was saying as how your brother would be glad to see us.
"You must know that Willyum is that near about money that I never saw nothing like him; not that it's a bad thing in a man, though it may be carried too far and I must say I do think Willyum do carry it too far. He has never given me nothing which he didn't want me to pay for, not even half a pint of beer.
I like a band as I can hear."
To me there's always the smell of the meat about a butcher. But it's as you're made.
This was done.
The bird stopped singing at once, and all the other birds stopped too.
"Madam," said the dervish, "they are far more beautiful than any description, but you seem ignorant of all the difficulties that stand in your way, or you would hardly have undertaken such an adventure. Give it up, I pray you, and return home, and do not ask me to help you to a cruel death."
Then they rode away, followed by the knights and gentlemen, who begged to be permitted to escort them.
The first thing the princess did on arriving at the mountain was to stop her ears with cotton, and then, making up her mind which was the best way to go, she began her ascent.
"Why, what are you doing here?" she cried.
Take it, and, as you go down the mountain, scatter a little of the water it contains over every black stone and you will soon find your two brothers."
"Who is this imbecile?" cried some, "stop him at once." "Kill him," shrieked others, "Help! robbers!
Then it came to a sudden halt, and the prince at once got down and flung the bridle on his horse's neck.
"What danger can there be?"
"We have been asleep," they said.
"And suppose," answered the dervish, "that your enemies are invisible, how then?"
"But why not?" inquired the prince.
At every black stone she stopped and sprinkled it with water, and as the water touched it the stone instantly became a man.
"No, I have not forgotten," replied the bird, "but what you ask is very difficult.
Princess Parizade took the pitcher, and, carrying with her besides the cage the twig and the flask, returned down the mountain side.
"The very greatest danger," answered the dervish.
Although confined in a cage, I was content with my lot, but if I must become a slave, I could not wish for a nobler mistress than one who has shown so much constancy, and from this moment I swear to serve you faithfully. Some day you will put me to the proof, for I know who you are better than you do yourself.
"Good dervish," answered the princess, "I have heard such glowing descriptions of these three things, that I cannot rest till I possess them."
Still, we must hope for better luck."
"Holy father," answered the princess, "I come from far, and I should be in despair if I turned back without having attained my object.
Look round and see if there is one left.
It is possible that you may succeed, but all the same, the risk is great."
But may I ask the purpose of your question?"
"My lord," he said at last, "I do know the road for which you ask, but your kindness and the friendship I have conceived for you make me loth to point it out."
She then returned to the cage, and said: "Bird, there is still something else, where shall I find the Singing Tree?"
On each side you will see vast heaps of big black stones, and will hear a multitude of insulting voices, but pay no heed to them, and, above all, beware of ever turning your head. If you do, you will instantly become a black stone like the rest.
For those stones are in reality men like yourself, who have been on the same quest, and have failed, as I fear that you may fail also.
But what dangers can there be in the adventure which courage and a good sword cannot meet?"
When the Princess Parizade held in her hands the three wonders promised her by the old woman, she said to the bird: "All that is not enough. It was owing to you that my brothers became black stones.
I did my best to turn them also from their purpose, but it was of no use. Not one of them would listen to my words, and not one of them came back.
"Other men, as brave as you, have ridden down this road, and have put me that question.
"That, holy dervish," replied Prince Perviz, "was my elder brother, who is now dead, though how he died I cannot say."
At the sight of the bird, the princess hastened her steps, and without vexing herself at the noise which by this time had grown deafening, she walked straight up to the cage, and seizing it, she said: "Now, my bird, I have got you, and I shall take good care that you do not escape." As she spoke she took the cotton from her ears, for it was needed no longer.
But I was impatient to arrive at the termination of my journey.
In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea to listen to the waves as they roared and dashed at my feet.
Thus situated, employed in the most detestable occupation, immersed in a solitude where nothing could for an instant call my attention from the actual scene in which I was engaged, my spirits became unequal; I grew restless and nervous.
Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains.
For an instant I dared to shake off my chains and look around me with a free and lofty spirit, but the iron had eaten into my flesh, and I sank again, trembling and hopeless, into my miserable self.
In the mean time I worked on, and my labour was already considerably advanced.
I could now almost fancy myself among the Swiss mountains.
I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was to me like the torture of single drops of water continually falling on the head.
But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be--a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.
I tried to conceal this as much as possible, that I might not debar him from the pleasures natural to one who was entering on a new scene of life, undisturbed by any care or bitter recollection.
He mentioned the beauties of his native country and asked us if those were not sufficient allurements to induce us to prolong our journey as far north as Perth, where he resided.
For a moment my soul was elevated from its debasing and miserable fears to contemplate the divine ideas of liberty and self sacrifice of which these sights were the monuments and the remembrancers.
Sometimes I sat with my eyes fixed on the ground, fearing to raise them lest they should encounter the object which I so much dreaded to behold.
In this manner I distributed my occupations when I first arrived, but as I proceeded in my labour, it became every day more horrible and irksome to me.
Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost contrived to cheat me into happiness.
"Do you," said I, "enjoy yourself, and let this be our rendezvous.
I waited for my letters with feverish impatience; if they were delayed I was miserable and overcome by a thousand fears; and when they arrived and I saw the superscription of Elizabeth or my father, I hardly dared to read and ascertain my fate.
From thence we proceeded to Oxford.
In Britain only could he further the execution of his plan.
From Derby, still journeying northwards, we passed two months in Cumberland and Westmorland.
We quitted London on the 27th of March and remained a few days at Windsor, rambling in its beautiful forest.
I feared to wander from the sight of my fellow creatures lest when alone he should come to claim his companion.
If this journey had taken place during my days of study and happiness, it would have afforded me inexpressible pleasure.
We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month.
I often refused to accompany him, alleging another engagement, that I might remain alone.
Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from the mainland, which was about five miles distant.
It was here that Charles I. had collected his forces.
This was a new scene to us mountaineers; the majestic oaks, the quantity of game, and the herds of stately deer were all novelties to us.
It was a monotonous yet ever-changing scene.
But a blight had come over my existence, and I only visited these people for the sake of the information they might give me on the subject in which my interest was so terribly profound.
London was our present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in this wonderful and celebrated city.
It was, indeed, a filthy process in which I was engaged.
Every moment I feared to meet my persecutor.
I was formed for peaceful happiness.
The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps.
Clerval did not like it so well as Oxford, for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him.
Sometimes I thought that the fiend followed me and might expedite my remissness by murdering my companion. When these thoughts possessed me, I would not quit Henry for a moment, but followed him as his shadow, to protect him from the fancied rage of his destroyer.
But busy, uninteresting, joyous faces brought back despair to my heart.
I enjoyed this scene, and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future.
He might remain in Switzerland and wreak his vengeance on my relatives.
The thatch had fallen in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges.
I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape.
Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of Scotland and finish my work in solitude.
During my first experiment, a kind of enthusiastic frenzy had blinded me to the horror of my employment; my mind was intently fixed on the consummation of my labour, and my eyes were shut to the horror of my proceedings.
Company was irksome to me; when alone, I could fill my mind with the sights of heaven and earth; the voice of Henry soothed me, and I could thus cheat myself into a transitory peace.
Sometimes I could not prevail on myself to enter my laboratory for several days, and at other times I toiled day and night in order to complete my work.
He entreated me to write often.
As it was, I lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and clothes which I gave, so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men.
The latter name made me tremble when pronounced by Henry, and I hastened to quit Matlock, with which that terrible scene was thus associated.
We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February.
The difference of manners which he observed was to him an inexhaustible source of instruction and amusement.
Chapter 19
I had now neglected my promise for some time, and I feared the effects of the daemon's disappointment.
The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare.
We left Oxford with regret and proceeded to Matlock, which was our next place of rest.
In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July.
We had scarcely visited the various lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland and conceived an affection for some of the inhabitants when the period of our appointment with our Scotch friend approached, and we left them to travel on.
I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession, an incident which would doubtless have occasioned some surprise had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty.
I felt as if I had committed some great crime, the consciousness of which haunted me.
His design was to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade.
I do break my promise; never will I create another like yourself, equal in deformity and wickedness."
I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the light of the moon the daemon at the casement.
"I do not know," said the man, "what the custom of the English may be, but it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains." While this strange dialogue continued, I perceived the crowd rapidly increase.
I might be driven into the wide Atlantic and feel all the tortures of starvation or be swallowed up in the immeasurable waters that roared and buffeted around me.
Their faces expressed a mixture of curiosity and anger, which annoyed and in some degree alarmed me.
Thus situated, my only resource was to drive before the wind.
Several hours passed, and I remained near my window gazing on the sea; it was almost motionless, for the winds were hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon.
He besought me, therefore, to leave my solitary isle and to meet him at Perth, that we might proceed southwards together.
I confess that I felt a few sensations of terror.
Begone!
The prospect did not move me to fear; yet when I thought of my beloved Elizabeth, of her tears and endless sorrow, when she should find her lover so barbarously snatched from her, tears, the first I had shed for many months, streamed from my eyes, and I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter struggle.
I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged.
In a few minutes after, I heard the creaking of my door, as if some one endeavoured to open it softly.
I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding-night."
I inquired the way to the inn, but no one replied.
Chapter 20
I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery.
I then moved forward, and a murmuring sound arose from the crowd as they followed and surrounded me, when an ill-looking man approaching tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Come, sir, you must follow me to Mr. Kirwin's to give an account of yourself."
You may hate, but beware!
All was again silent, but his words rang in my ears.
A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called to one another.
I felt as if I was about the commission of a dreadful crime and avoided with shuddering anxiety any encounter with my fellow creatures.
"Begone!
I burned with rage to pursue the murderer of my peace and precipitate him into the ocean.
Remember that I have power; you believe yourself miserable, but I can make you so wretched that the light of day will be hateful to you.
I would have seized him, but he eluded me and quitted the house with precipitation.
"Devil, cease; and do not poison the air with these sounds of malice. I have declared my resolution to you, and I am no coward to bend beneath words.
Clouds hid the moon, everything was obscure, and I heard only the sound of the boat as its keel cut through the waves; the murmur lulled me, and in a short time I slept soundly.
I paused to collect myself and then entered the chamber.
As I was occupied in fixing the boat and arranging the sails, several people crowded towards the spot.
But these gave place to a heavy swell; I felt sick and hardly able to hold the rudder, when suddenly I saw a line of high land towards the south.
As I turned the promontory I perceived a small neat town and a good harbour, which I entered, my heart bounding with joy at my unexpected escape.
But I had suffered him to depart, and he had directed his course towards the mainland.
I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness.
"Surely it is not the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably."
Between two and three in the morning the moon rose; and I then, putting my basket aboard a little skiff, sailed out about four miles from the shore.
"Why do you answer me so roughly?" I replied.
As I looked on him, his countenance expressed the utmost extent of malice and treachery.
I walked about the isle like a restless spectre, separated from all it loved and miserable in the separation.
I had already been out many hours and felt the torment of a burning thirst, a prelude to my other sufferings.
Yet, before I departed, there was a task to perform, on which I shuddered to reflect; I must pack up my chemical instruments, and for that purpose I must enter the room which had been the scene of my odious work, and I must handle those utensils the sight of which was sickening to me.
I constructed another sail with a part of my dress and eagerly steered my course towards the land. It had a wild and rocky appearance, but as I approached nearer I easily perceived the traces of cultivation.
I walked up and down my room hastily and perturbed, while my imagination conjured up a thousand images to torment and sting me.
This letter in a degree recalled me to life, and I determined to quit my island at the expiration of two days.
I had been awake the whole of the preceding night, my nerves were agitated, and my eyes inflamed by watching and misery.
In that hour I should die and at once satisfy and extinguish his malice.
This answer startled me, but I presently recovered myself.
And then I thought again of his words--"I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING-NIGHT." That, then, was the period fixed for the fulfilment of my destiny.
I had no compass with me and was so slenderly acquainted with the geography of this part of the world that the sun was of little benefit to me.
They seemed much surprised at my appearance, but instead of offering me any assistance, whispered together with gestures that at any other time might have produced in me a slight sensation of alarm.
Had I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations?
Fortunately I had money with me.
The monster saw my determination in my face and gnashed his teeth in the impotence of anger.
Leave me; I am inexorable."
As it was, I merely remarked that they spoke English, and I therefore addressed them in that language.
You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!"
You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains--revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!
I shuddered to think who might be the next victim sacrificed to his insatiate revenge.
The sky became clouded, but the air was pure, although chilled by the northeast breeze that was then rising.
A ghastly grin wrinkled his lips as he gazed on me, where I sat fulfilling the task which he had allotted to me.
In a few moments I saw him in his boat, which shot across the waters with an arrowy swiftness and was soon lost amidst the waves.
I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to my house.
"It is well.
I desired that I might pass my life on that barren rock, wearily, it is true, but uninterrupted by any sudden shock of misery.
The night passed away, and the sun rose from the ocean; my feelings became calmer, if it may be called calmness when the violence of rage sinks into the depths of despair.
Some hours passed thus; but by degrees, as the sun declined towards the horizon, the wind died away into a gentle breeze and the sea became free from breakers.
Why had I not followed him and closed with him in mortal strife?
I sat one evening in my laboratory; the sun had set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for the night or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it.
I saw vessels near the shore and found myself suddenly transported back to the neighbourhood of civilized man.
I started forward and exclaimed, "Villain!
Why am I to give an account of myself?
"Slave, I before reasoned with you, but you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension.
I had resolved in my own mind that to create another like the fiend I had first made would be an act of the basest and most atrocious selfishness, and I banished from my mind every thought that could lead to a different conclusion.
The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness, and with a howl of devilish despair and revenge, withdrew.
I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man!
Presently I heard the sound of footsteps along the passage; the door opened, and the wretch whom I dreaded appeared.
"Who is Mr. Kirwin?
But it refreshed me and filled me with such agreeable sensations that I resolved to prolong my stay on the water, and fixing the rudder in a direct position, stretched myself at the bottom of the boat.
He was a-horseback behaving as if the place belonged to him--and commanding all and sundry to fight the British.
I wish He hadn't."
I used to play the fiddle between 'em, sitting on the capstan.
'Sometimes I think it did,' Pharaoh went on.
'Oh, but it is, though,' said Una quickly.
"My brother shall be there.
'"At any price," says he, word by word.
IF--
His wife she walked me into the back-yard without a word, and she washed me and she cut my hair to the edge of a basin, and she put me to bed, and oh! how I slept--how I slept in that little room behind the oven looking on the flower garden!
"I think this is the hand of Providence!
"I'll be slipping off now before your Revenue cutter comes.
The tide was dead low under the chalk cliffs, and the little wrinkled waves grieved along the sands up the coast to Newhaven and down the coast to long, grey Brighton, whose smoke trailed out across the Channel.
He did--for a while.
'Admettin' that's true,' he said, 'my gipsy blood must be wore pretty thin, for I've made and kept a worldly fortune.'
My brother, lend me a spare pony.
I'll tell you, but don't blame me if you're no wiser.
Cornplanter used to meet him at Epply's--the great dancing-place in the city before District Marshal William Nichols bought it.
'My legs was pretty tottly, but I made shift to go on deck, which it was like a fair.
'Half-way to Newhaven,'said Dan.
'Who was he?' said Puck.
We never said much to each other, but we fiddled together, and music's as good as talking to them that understand.'
'"But think of public opinion," another one starts up.
'And what came out of it in the long run?'
'One Hundred and Eighteen, Second Street--the famous Seneca Oil man, that lived half of every year among the Indians.
Being a boy, it seemed to me it had lasted for ever, and was going on for ever.
'Ah!' said Puck, squatted by the windlass.
That Shoreham smack's thinking of her supper.' The children looked across the darkening Channel.
Boy, go down to the bakery and tell them you are young Gert Schwankfelder that was.
'I like Toby,' said Una.
From Williams Ferry, across the Shanedore, over the Blue Mountains, through Ashby's Gap, and so south-east by south from there, till we found the President at the back of his own plantations.
'"My brother," he says to the Indian.
One hot evening late in August, Toby was reading the newspaper on the stoop and Red Jacket was smoking under a peach tree and I was fiddling.
'I'm sorry; but there's all sorts of tobacconists,' Pharaoh replied. 'How far out, now, would you call that smack with the patch on her foresail?' He pointed to the fishing-boats.
'"Surely," says he.
'"Then what about the Declaration of Independence?" says one.
She was an Aurette, of course.
There's nothing to hurt except snakes--and they slip away quick enough if you thrash in the bushes.'
"What's those?"
We had evening hymn-singing every night after they'd blown their pipe-smoke to the quarters of heaven.
Toby used to read the Aurora newspaper.
By the time we'd fished up the kegs the fog came down so thick Dad judged it risky for me to row 'em ashore, even though we could hear the ponies stamping on the beach.
As soon as the dancing clock struck midnight that Sunday--I was lying under the spinet--I heard Toby's fiddle.
'"I don't know," I said.
"What note is this?" drawing his bow across.
'"If that's your trouble," says old Pierre, "you go straight ashore. None'll hinder you.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
You'd have been astonished what those two fine old chiefs knew of the ins and outs of such matters.
'I expect they've packed our trunks by now,' said Dan. 'This time tomorrow we'll be home.'
I hadn't time to call or think.
They lived on a Reservation by themselves away off by their lake.
Then come more, which I reckoned was Captain Giddens in the Revenue cutter.
"Gentlemen," he says--slow he spoke, but his voice carried far--"I have to think of our country.
'Did Toby die of yellow fever?'Una asked.
'No, in the tobacco trade.'
The women wore long-eared caps and handkerchiefs.
The crew was standing by their guns up above.
'The edges are the sorrowful parts.'
The Coastguard cottages are a little farther on, and an old ship's figurehead of a Turk in a turban stared at them over the wall.
'Apothecary Tobias Hirte,' Pharaoh replied.
'I'd no fault to find with those days.
He's something to listen to.
They walked to The Gap, where the cliff is only a few feet high.
One of the gentlemen said to me, "Is that a genuine cap o' Liberty you're wearing?" 'Twas Aunt Cecile's red one, and pretty near wore out.
Red Jacket said the mark of my bare feet in the dust was just like an Indian's and my style of walking was similar.
Red Jacket was there saddling his, and when I'd packed the saddle-bags we three rode up Race Street to the Ferry by starlight.
We walked into a dirty little room full of flutes and fiddles and a fat man fiddling by the window, in a smell of cheese and medicines fit to knock you down.
'Then where did you live?' said Una.
We must have peace with England."
I kicked back on our gunwale as it went under and slipped through that port into the French ship--me and my fiddle.'
So I bring him."
His gentlemen put this very clear to Big Hand.
Christians always feed the hungry.
And so we jogged 'into dozy little Lebanon by the Blue Mountains, where Toby had a cottage and a garden of all fruits.
He knew Toby.
"And have all the country down upon me for destroying hand-labour?
Three months of little renunciations--three months of the old narrow way of living, as at Norton Bury--and the poor people at Enderley might have full wages, whether or no there was full work.
For, at Longfield, already we began to make a natural almanack and chronological table.
"I--you cannot mean it?
I am going down to the mill."
"You will not betray me?
"Yes--I did think of one plan--but--"
"Ah! never fear; you will make your fortune yet, in spite of Lord Luxmore."
We have had such a severe winter.
"Who is that, watching our mills?" said Mrs. Halifax, hastily.
You say nothing signifies, if we are only good.
He has left me these six months alone at Luxmore."
You are a good man, Mr. Halifax, and you spoke warmly for us.
"No--not that name, Mrs. Halifax.
"Do that, then.
He said, "She made him good"--our child of peace.
He walked rapidly down the meadows, and went into his mill.
"I am surprised to see you here, Lord Ravenel."
"Our wishes come as a cross to us sometimes," he said, rather bitterly. "It is the only thing I can do.
"Is that any reason why I should not do good to his son--that is, if I could?
"Oh, you could--you could."
I would have renounced it long ago.
Then he came towards us, narrowly watching the stream.
Yet, in truth, there was some reason for the young man's fears; since, even in those days, Catholics were hunted down both by law and by public opinion, as virulently as Protestant nonconformists.
Every night--at least after Miss March went away--he usually found me sitting there.
John was much occupied now.
Who?"
"Who's there?"
She said no more; but put the children to bed; then came downstairs with her bonnet on.
How came you to enter my mill?"
It was sweet, though half-melancholy, to see Enderley again; to climb the steep meadows and narrow mule-paths, up which he used to help me so kindly.
The child shrank back with an involuntary "Oh, no."
"But my plan will set all to rights.
She used continually to tell us this was the happiest spring she had ever had in her life.
Every one of the children has suffered," said the mother, in a cheerful tone, as she poured out a cup of cream for her daughter, to whom was now given, by common consent, all the richest and rarest of the house.
"I followed Mrs. Halifax.
"What is the matter with the stream?
Very often Muriel and I followed him, and spent whole mornings in the mill meadows.
"I have seen it gradually lowering--these two hours.
"Poor people!" he added, "how can I blame them?
Not many weeks after, we removed in a body to Enderley.
I shall not go--I told her so."
So henceforward "Brother Anselmo" was almost domesticated at Rose Cottage.
"Is it absolutely necessary we should go?" said the mother, who had a strong home-clinging, and already began to hold tiny Longfield as the apple of her eye.
"Now, Uncle Phineas, go you home with Muriel.
I told her all I had seen of the person.
It had sunk more and more--the muddy bottom was showing plainly.
He turned to me and smiled.
"It is easier to make the world trust one, when one is trusted by one's own household."
Tell my wife what has occurred--say, I will come to tea as soon as I can.
After Lord Luxmore has done you all this evil?"
"Lord Luxmore." He spoke in the smothered tones of violent passion. "Lord Luxmore has turned out of its course the stream that works my mill."
"No, my sweet--not angry--only very, very miserable!"
"Muriel will be quite strong when the warm weather comes.
"I think so, unless you will consent to let me go alone to Enderley."
He almost ground his teeth as he saw the sun shining on the far white wing of Luxmore Hall.
Just at this time, her father saw somewhat less of her than usual.
We could do it easily, by living in a plainer way; by giving up one or two trifles.
"Dost remember, lad?" at which appellation Guy widely stared.
Tell me--I will keep your secret--are you a Catholic too?"
"Husband, don't let us speak of Lord Luxmore."
She might have thought so too, had she not believed in her husband.
"What, with those troubles at the mills?
Little we thought he should ever own it, or that John would be pointing it out to his own boys, lecturing them on "undershot," and "overshot," as he used to lecture me.
"Come, and welcome."
I have thought of a scheme.
We were very happy at Enderley.
"Never mind, dear father.
Hell is beneath them in the water!
The splash of the waves on the surface lifts the gluttons up and down, while the ground-swell rocks the satiated to rest.
In front and behind, the valley winds on between the hill-sides until it widens out and finally loses itself in the barren, sandy desert.
Then he opens his wallet, takes out the bottle containing clear liquid, and takes a nip.
The July sun is shining hotly, and sends its beams deep down into the water.
They go together in a large company, like soldiers in an army, rows of them above, beside, and behind one another.
Their shining breast was whiter than a swan's, and their plump sides gleamed and sparkled like ice under a wintry moon.
It is cleft incessantly from bottom to surface, bubbles rise and whirlpools are formed, and a long strip of lake foams and spurts.
It likes to cool its long legs, as it flies, by trailing them along the surface of the water.
In it was an elderly man.
The whirligigs are after it, but it easily avoids them.
Suddenly he awakes with a start.
They rise like flying-fish out of the water with a flash, and once more disappear with a splash into the water.
Noses are pushed up, and little thimble-like mouths open; the water streams in, and with it the food.
They tumble over one another and try in their bewilderment which can leap highest and farthest.
Then a mouth opens, shoots out a pair of concertina-like lips, and changes into a funnel; and the poor little fish disappear into a chasm, like threads into a vacuum cleaner.
The lively little freshwater herring as yet suspect no danger; they are in constant motion, occupied in snapping up the fallen, half-drowned insects.
The swarm of bleak scatters in wild panic.
Above the spot a cloud of terns is circling.
It covers the area of a market-place, and makes the water alive for fathoms down.
It is as well to have bayonets fixed in case of the sudden appearance of a pike.
Poor little bleak! they were so pretty to look at.
A boat lay anchored a few hundred yards off.
Then comes a sudden surprise: a fish pops up its mouth, and closes its scissor-jaws with a snap on the insect's legs, and it disappears in the centre of a rocking series of rings.
With their uppermost layer only a couple of inches below the surface of the water they hasten on.
He was lying now at the bottom of the boat, dreaming.
It is not like a single large animal darting forward with rapidly twisting tail, and leaving a wake and waves behind it; but a general effervescence that makes the depths gleam with millions of scales.
The lake is perfectly calm, its green-black surface smooth and shining, and full of drifting summer clouds.
He is now lying outstretched in midday drowsiness, enjoying the great peace that rests on the lake.
All order among the assailants instantly ceases, and each member thinks only of its own mouth, and cares for nothing but getting it filled.
The angler, who is a big, sturdy man with large, black-rimmed spectacles upon his voluminous nose, is in his customary fishing-dress--an old straw hat with an elastic under the chin, his coat off, and no collar, on his legs a pair of thick, yellowish brown moleskin trousers, his feet in a pair of felt shoes, lined with straw.
When a man is no longer in his prime, he should beware of paying ardent court to Dame Diana.
At last he can do no more, and drops exhausted on to a thwart.
But now the fierce horde becomes still fiercer.
The reeds are reflected in it and look double their height, and the trees mirror their branches there, seeming twice as leafy; and a red house with a white flagstaff on one of the banks becomes quite a little submarine palace.
An eager interchange from bottom to surface goes on; for when the upper layer is satiated, it likes to enjoy its feeling of well-being in peace, until voracity once more makes them all rivals.
The birds hold them at all sorts of angles in their beak, and fly away with them, shrieking and screaming, pursued by their fellows.
An emerald green colour extended from the back right over the head and nose; and the rims of their eyes when they blinked could sparkle and shine like the gem itself.
He had been out since early morning, and had a delightful day.
Gleam after gleam flashes up as the little shining fish, uncertain of their way, twist and turn about.
They go suddenly and headlong from the surface to the depths, spinning out from their compact mass a long, living thread.
Sometimes they make a catch, sometimes miss their aim, but have the good fortune to take a fish that inadvertently appears close by; indeed the bleak often leap straight into the birds' open beak.
When they descend in crowds from their flight into the air, they grow stiff with terror on finding themselves face to face with great, amber eyes that seem starting out of their sockets to go greedily hunting on their own account.
The certainty of booty fills them all.
Just as they twist and turn in the horizontal plane, so do they in the vertical.
The lake slumbers.
He gets four lines clear, and has enough to do in throwing them out and pulling them in.
He takes up his anchor, and rows up until he hears the smack, smack of the greedy perch all round him, and knows he is in the middle of the whirlpool of fish.
Borne on a gentle breeze, a large crane-fly comes sailing out of the wood.
They kill and devour--and it will be still worse when the rear-guard comes up.
But what did that matter?
There is a bottle-green hue above the deep water, and a lilac shade in the shallows; but over the sandy bottom the colour is drab.
In his youth his gun had been his best friend; but the chase demands much of legs and muscles and heart.
After them comes the great mass of the horde, big, heavily-laden craft, their round backs and swelling bellies testifying to their success in their toil for material needs.
It is in one of the valleys in the submarine mountainous region that this shoal of thousands of bleak lies.
Not a single bite.
They fly low with half-extended legs and drooping wings, ready to dart down.
An angler this.
Suddenly, at the end of the neighbouring valley, the water seethes and foams.
This he is accustomed to do every time he catches a fish of any importance.
The rear-guard overtakes the fugitives and cuts off their retreat; and smack after smack is heard after their charge.
For the present the whole flock keeps to the bottom, darting along with dorsal fin erect, the stiff spines bristling menacingly.
It is well known that it takes three generations to make a gentleman; but it would take three times as many to create, out of a race that ever since the morning of time had lived out of doors, a generation that did not care to handle either gun or rod.
In her suite--it is useless to deny it--the old man is seldom looked upon with favour: he has had his day.
There is a splash when they rise, and a splash when they again reach the surface of the water; making a sound like the falling of torrents of rain.
Then all turn at once, changing from the long, narrow marching column into compact formation.
Like yellow flashes of water-lightning the perch dart into the shoal of little fish, and like grain among a flock of chickens, masses of bleak disappear into their mouths.
Sheaves of silvery-gleaming rays flicker far out in their wake.
They lead, and with frolicsome eagerness push past one another, so as to be the first to arrive.
The yellow devils not only menace them from the side; they come upon them from all directions.
He was a regular visitor to the lake.
The perch have quickened their pace; involuntarily the speed is increased; they already scent their prey.
A fresh signal, inaudible, imperceptible to all but themselves, and once more, in a trice, the narrow, smoothly-gliding hunting-column is reformed.
His ancestors' love of a free, out-of-door life had entered into his blood.
Now they are in the valley where it lies.
He hears a rushing sound like that of the paddles of a distant steamer striking and tearing the water; he sees the terns flocking, and the surface of the water broken again and again by bleak leaping high into the air.
There must be nothing now to check their speed; fair-weather sailing is over, and the privateering expedition has begun.
Even the sharp-eyed heron, which had dropped down unnoticed about a dozen yards off, and was now noiselessly, with slow, cautious steps, wading nearer and nearer, took her at the first glance for a stick.
Here two large tiger-beetles were fighting with a poor water-bug.
The young pike watched attentively the flight of the black leech.
Air-bubbles, too, were set free, and ascended quickly with a rotary motion.
From various attacking positions its beak darts down into the water, but often without result, and it has to go farther afield; then at last it captures a little eel.
It was not long before she had forgotten her recent peril, and once more became filled with the cruel passion of the hunter.
Then it glides down.
----Meanwhile, the keen-eyed heron, wading up to its breast in the water, comes softly and silently trawling through the ditch.
The entire monster measured scarcely a finger's length.
There was a fearful crush of fish in the channel, and much elbowing with fins and twisting of tails.
The gulls once gone, the heron applies itself with redoubled zeal to its business.
Sedately it goes about its business, stalking along with slow, measured steps.
The silvery flash of small fish twinkled around her, and myriads of tiny shining crustaceans whisked about so close to her nose that at any moment she could have snapped them up by the score into her voracious mouth.
Her reddish-brown colour with the tiger-like transverse stripes made an excellent disguise.
It must have been almost a pleasure to find oneself so neatly despatched!
Then she was seized, something hard and sharp and strong held her fast, and she passed head foremost down into a warm, narrow channel.
It was within an ace of being made captive for ever, but at last succeeded in making its escape and pushing off, with two of its tormentors after it.
Out on the lake lay a boat in which a man sat fishing.
The eel twists, and refuses to be swallowed; so the bird has to reduce its liveliness by rolling up and down in its sharp-edged beak.
There was never any peace around her.
An irritating little flock of gulls may go on thus for a long time; and when at last, screaming and mocking, they take their departure, they have spoilt many a chance and wasted many precious minutes of the big, silent, patient fisher's time.
Sea-crows and terns scream around it, and from time to time three or four of them unite in harrying their great rival.
Grim was among the fortunate ones.
This was a very favourite lurking-place; she could lie there with her back right up against the under surface of the leaf, and her snout on the very border of its shadow, ready to strike.
Just as the heron has brought its beak close to the surface of the water, ready to seize its prey, the gulls dash upon it from behind.
Clear running water filled the ditch, but the bottom was dull black, powdery mud.
With a hiss it curves its neck and turns the foil upwards, snapping and biting at its tormentors.
It was tired now, and had just stretched itself out for a moment's rest, when the supposed pieces of stick upon which it lay seized it, and voracious heads with sharp jaws attacked its flesh.
Grim only once moved her tail.
It sees there is something suspicious about it, but thinks it is mistaken, and is about to take another step forward. When only half-way, it pauses with its foot in the air; and the next moment the blow falls.
Experience told the bird it was a fisherman, but here the bird was wrong.
The young pike peered upwards, and saw in the shelter of a tuft of rushes a collection of black, boat-shaped whirligigs, showing like dots against the shining surface.
It was especially things that moved that had a magic attraction for Grim.
The heron, coming up behind her, cautiously bends its neck over the drifting piece of reed.
This time, too, fortune is disposed to favour the young pike.
A little later the stream gathered furious pace and carried her with it; she saw light and felt space round her; she was able to move her fins.
It lay inches deep, layer upon layer of one tiny particle upon another, and so loose and light that a thick, opaque, smoke-like column ascended at the slightest touch.
It puts forth its greatest speed, making in a straight line for the shore.
Out of one of these Grim had come.
A little later it begins its soft little sawing song, which blends so well with the perpetual, monotonous whispering of the reeds.
Flash follows flash, each bigger and brighter than the other.
It is successful.
The very next day, however, little fish had begun to gather about those tufts; one day more, and there were swarms of them.
She possessed a remarkable power of placing herself, and knew how to choose her position so as to disappear, as it were, in the water.
But in the daytime, she lay peacefully drowsing.
'Then why did he keep her in Davy Jones's locker?' Dan asked.
Besides, I wasn't exactly dressed for it.'
He says if coastguards were done away with, smuggling would start up at once.'
I must have looked a sore scrattel.
They wouldn't say whether that was right or wrong; they only wanted Big Hand to turn it over in his mind.
I came at it by degrees, after I was adopted into the tribe.
He was open-handed with his compliments, but he would lay his guns himself.
"The feeling in Philadelphia alone is at fever heat."
Hearing what the price was I was going to have some too, but the Indian asked me in English if I was hungry.
It was almost the end of their visit to the seaside.
No gentleman!
'"Pick up the pills!
'"You should have said that first," said Toby.
Pharaoh stood up as though he had finished.
We're sailing next week."
'"Calomel," I says.
They're all gone mad on these coasts--French and American together.
Him and his long-hilted umberell was as well known as the stage-coaches.
'Then he'll meet the Newhaven coastguard and turn back.
'Why it's what you--what we--it's the Sachems' way of sprinkling the sacred corn-meal in front of--oh! it's a piece of Indian compliment really, and it signifies that you are a very big chief.
"This boy is good."
Of a sudden Toby drops his Aurora.
The Indian never moved an eyelid.
'Look! it's later than I thought.
And there's a smell of wild grape-vine growing in damp hollows which you drop into, after long rides in the heat, which is beyond compare for sweetness.
We Lees mostly marry Aurettes.
I always helped drink any healths that was proposed--specially Citizen Danton's who'd cut off King Louis' head.
"I brought the boy to be fed, not hit."
But his dark beady-brown eyes still twinkled merrily in his lean face, and the children felt that they did not suit the straight, plain, snuffy-brown coat, brown knee-breeches, and broad-brimmed hat.
If you ask any questions you shall hear from me."
"Now I shall play my fiddle and you shall sing your hymn, brother.
Pick up the pills!" the fat man screeches.
I carried Toby's fiddle, and he played pretty much as he chose all against the organ and the singing.
It's seven fathom under her--clean sand.
'Aren't you English?' said Dan.
'"Good!" says Red Jacket, looking at the sun.
I'm fond o' fiddling.
'But it's best,' he went on suddenly, 'after the first frosts.
'"Me too, I wish that," says Uncle Aurette.
I rolled on to a pile of dunnage in the dark and I went to sleep.
The newspaper said men was burning Guy Fawkes images of General Washington and yelling after him in the streets of Philadelphia.
Feet scrabbled on the flinty path.
The frigate was crowded with fine gentlemen and ladies pouring in and out.
A man told me he was a real Red Indian called Red Jacket, and I followed him into an alley-way off Race Street by Second Street, where there was a fiddle playing.
'A scant mile,' said Puck after a quick look.
'I hate the sea!'
If you're off to Philadelphia in the morning, You mustn't take my stories for a guide. There's little left indeed of the city you will read of, And all the folk I write about have died. Now few will understand if you mention Talleyrand, Or remember what his cunning and his skill did. And the cabmen at the wharf do not know Count Zinnendorf, Nor the Church in Philadelphia he builded.
They shouted, "Down with England!"--"Down with Washington!"--"Hurrah for France and the Republic!" I couldn't make sense of it.
'He held up one of his big hands.
'"Good," he says at last.
'The others all assembled round Big Hand then, and, in their way, they said pretty much what Genet had said.
'"You like pills--eh?" says Toby.
'D'you mean you were dressed like an Indian?'Dan demanded.
I wanted to get out from that crunch of swords and petticoats and sit in a field.
When I found Toby didn't die the minute he reached town, why, boylike, I took him off my mind and went with my Indians again.
Pharaoh looked a little abashed.
Bompard, he liked it.
'No, nor yet was it what you might call swearing.
'"Good, then," says Toby.
'There was never a Lee to Warminghurst That wasn't a gipsy last and first.
'"At any price?" the actor-like chap keeps on croaking.
"You taught me to look behind trees when we were both young." And with that he cantered off.
"Oh yes!" I says, "straight from France." "I'll give you a shilling for it," he says, and with that money in my hand and my fiddle under my arm I squeezed past the entry-port and went ashore.
"I, at least, am a Republican!"
He looked me over all the while they did it.
'"I am an oldish man, too fond of my own comforts," he says.
BROTHER SQUARE-TOES
"I will go to the Church which is in Philadelphia.
They all was the fashion in the city.
"You've missed it all.
'Didn't anybody see you come in?' said Dan.
'"Right," he says.
You like to fiddle?" he says.
There is no arithmetical equality, but a proportional equality.
But of this immense quantity of products and ideas, that which each one has to produce and acquire for himself is but an atom in the sun.
If he is good for nothing, put him in the hospital.
Settle that, and you settle the whole question.
From this several inferences may be drawn.
If, in order to reward talent, I take from one to give to another, in unjustly stripping the first, I do not esteem his talent as I ought; if, in society, I award more to myself than to my associate, we are not really associated.
To avoid this injustice, the worth of the persons should be estimated, and the spoils divided accordingly. Suppose that the worth of Achilles is double that of Ajax: the former's share is eight, the latter four.
WILL IT BE COMMUNISM?
I demand justice; it is not my business to execute the sentence.
That is the law of despotism; the right of slavery.
Now, if kings are images of God, and executors of his will, they cannot receive love, wealth, obedience, and glory from us, unless they consent to labor and associate with us--produce as much as they consume, reason with their subjects, and do wonderful things.
Friendship is the daughter of equality. O my friends! may I live in your midst without emulation, and without glory; let equality bring us together, and fate assign us our places. May I die without knowing to whom among you I owe the most esteem!
Before talking of the science itself, it is necessary to ascertain its object, and discover its method and principle.
The task of the true publicist, in the age in which we live, is to close the mouths of quacks and charlatans, and to teach the public to demand demonstrations, instead of being contented with symbols and programmes.
If it should be argued--in order to prolong for a few years an illegitimate privilege--that it is not enough to demonstrate equality, that it is necessary also to organize it, and above all to establish it peacefully, I might reply: The welfare of the oppressed is of more importance than official composure.
Between man and beast there is no society, though there may be affection.
No animal, when free and healthy, expects or requires the aid of his neighbor; who, in his turn, is equally independent.
God can be regarded as just, equitable, and good, only to another God.
The science of society--like all human sciences--will be for ever incomplete.
Of the science itself, I confess that I know nothing more than its principle; and I know of no one at present who can boast of having penetrated deeper.
Property, acting by exclusion and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the life-principle and definitive cause of all revolutions.
Religious wars, and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination of races, have been only accidental disturbances, soon repaired by the mathematical progression of the life of nations.
Hercules destroying the monsters and punishing brigands for the safety of Greece, Orpheus teaching the rough and wild Pelasgians,--neither of them putting a price upon their services,--there we see the noblest creations of poetry, the loftiest expression of justice and virtue.
That is why the force which oppresses while protecting is execrable; why the silly ignorance which views with the same eye the marvels of art, and the products of the rudest industry, excites unutterable contempt; why proud mediocrity, which glories in saying, "I have paid you--I owe you nothing," is especially odious.
I have proved the right of the poor; I have shown the usurpation of the rich.
Well! of this charter and this code not one article shall be left standing upon another! The time has come for the wise to choose their course, and prepare for reconstruction.
Man loves the animals as THINGS,--as SENTIENT THINGS, if you will,--but not as PERSONS.
Right and duty--the due reward of talent and labor--the outbursts of love and enthusiasm,--all are regulated in advance by an invariable standard; all depend upon number and balance. Equality of conditions is the law of society, and universal solidarity is the ratification of this law.
In the strong, it becomes the pleasure of generosity; among equals, frank and cordial friendship; in the weak, the pleasure of admiration and gratitude.
I hate to see a thing half done; and it will be believed without any assurance of mine, that, having dared to raise my hand against the Holy Ark, I shall not rest contented with the removal of the cover.
Now, this feeling is unknown among the beasts, who love and cling to each other, and show their preferences, but who cannot conceive of esteem, and who are incapable of generosity, admiration, or politeness.
Benevolence degenerates into tyranny, and admiration into servility.
In demonstrating the principle of equality, I have laid the foundation of the social structure I have done more.
This product--the third and last degree of human sociability--is determined by our complex mode of association; in which inequality, or rather the divergence of faculties, and the speciality of functions--tending of themselves to isolate laborers--demand a more active sociability.
The fields of benevolence and love extend far beyond; and when economy has adjusted its balance, the mind begins to benefit by its own justice, and the heart expands in the boundlessness of its affection.
This feeling does not spring from intelligence, which calculates, computes, and balances, but does not love; which sees, but does not feel.
The mysteries of the sanctuary of iniquity must be unveiled, the tables of the old alliance broken, and all the objects of the ancient faith thrown in a heap to the swine.
We are all born poets, mathematicians, philosophers, artists, artisans, or farmers, but we are not born equally endowed; and between one man and another in society, or between one faculty and another in the same individual, there is an infinite difference.
Man must live in one of two states: either in society, or out of it. In society, conditions are necessarily equal, except in the degree of esteem and consideration which each one may receive.
In no case wrong him, or impose upon him laws.
If God should come down to earth, and dwell among us, we could not love him unless he became like us; nor give him any thing unless he produced something; nor listen to him unless he proved us mistaken; nor worship him unless he manifested his power.
But equality delights my heart.
What matters it that Achilles has a strength of four, while that of Ajax is only two? The latter may always answer that he is free; that if Achilles has a strength of four, five could kill him; finally, that in doing personal service he incurs as great a risk as Achilles.
Figures are the providence of history.
Justice is sociability as manifested in the division of material things, susceptible of weight and measure; equite is justice accompanied by admiration and esteem,--things which cannot be measured.
Man is associated with man by the same instinct which associates animal with animal; but man is associated differently from the animal, and it is this difference in association which constitutes the difference in morality.
WHEN PROPERTY IS ABOLISHED, WHAT WILL BE THE FORM OF SOCIETY!
Guided by them, they owe them nothing; they honor them, however, and lavish upon them praise and approbation.
For my part, I have sworn fidelity to my work of demolition, and I will not cease to pursue the truth through the ruins and rubbish.
For the rest, I do not think that a single one of my readers accuses me of knowing how to destroy, but of not knowing how to construct.
Thus, jurisprudence, political economy, and psychology agree in admitting the law of equality.
The depth and variety of the questions which it embraces are infinite.
Every discovery and act in society is necessary to him.
The slave-owner, who controls his slaves, may give a double allowance of brandy to him who does double work.
If Achilles and Ajax, instead of being associated, are themselves in the service of Agamemnon who pays them, there is no objection to Aristotle's method.
Finally, as regards donations, wills, and inheritance, society, careful both of the personal affections and its own rights, must never permit love and partiality to destroy justice.
1.
The right to labor, and the principle of equal distribution of wealth, cannot give way to the anxieties of power.
The social sentiment then takes on a new character, which varies with different persons.
An evil, when known, should be condemned and destroyed.
Society, among the animals, is SIMPLE; with man it is COMPLEX.
I have given an example of the true method of solving political and legislative problems.
If he is unable to fight, let him be cook, purveyor, or butler.
Gratitude fills people with adoration and enthusiasm.
It is not so with societies of animals.
These three degrees of sociability support and imply each other.
If the two persons were equal, their respective shares would be arithmetically equal: Achilles would have six, Ajax six.
But, since a destroyed error necessarily implies a counter-truth, I will not finish this treatise without solving the first problem of political science,--that which receives the attention of all minds.
Restitution should not be delayed. Justice, justice! recognition of right! reinstatement of the proletaire!--when these results are accomplished, then, judges and consuls, you may attend to your police, and provide a government for the Republic!
Here my task should end.
Man continually exchanges with man ideas and feelings, products and services.
It is the just distribution of social sympathy and universal love.
Undoubtedly there are other elements in human progress; but in the multitude of hidden causes which agitate nations, there is none more powerful or constant, none less obscure, than the periodical explosions of the proletariat against property.
A certain philological society decided linguistic questions by a plurality of votes.
To that fact history bears perpetual testimony, and the course of events reveals it to us.
The ground must be cleared of the prejudices which encumber it.
To the eyes of the economist, the revolutions of empires seem now like the reduction of algebraical quantities, which are inter-deducible; now like the discovery of unknown quantities, induced by the inevitable influence of time.
Associated animals live side by side without any intellectual intercourse or intimate communication,--all doing the same things, having nothing to learn or to remember; they see, feel, and come in contact with each other, but never penetrate each other.
This difference of degree in the same faculties, this predominance of talent in certain directions, is, we have said, the very foundation of our society.
A code has been written,--the pride of a conqueror, and the summary of ancient wisdom.
Society advances from equation to equation.
Still more; if, as some pretend, kings are public functionaries, the love which is due them is measured by their personal amiability; our obligation to obey them, by the wisdom of their commands; and their civil list, by the total social production divided by the number of citizens.
The legislator cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for upholding a glaring iniquity.
Such is the mission of the nineteenth century.
The joys of self-sacrifice are ineffable.
Friendship is precious to the hearts of the children of men.
Many people cry, "Come to me, and I will teach you the truth!" These people mistake for the truth their cherished opinion and ardent conviction, which is usually any thing but the truth.
No: and if he saw fit to shear as much wool from a lamb six months old, as from a ram of two years; or, if he required as much work from a young dog as from an old one,--they would say, not that he was unjust, but that he was foolish.
Equality of conditions is a natural law upon which public economy and jurisprudence are based.
On the contrary, it is the duty of the civil and administrative power to reconstruct itself on the basis of political equality.
The downfall and death of societies are due to the power of accumulation possessed by property.
By the same principle, inequality of wages cannot be admitted by law on the ground of inequality of talents; because the just distribution of wealth is the function of economy,--not of enthusiasm.
For a moment none of the professor's companions spoke.
Aside from being caught in a drenching storm and one or two minor accidents, nothing else of moment marked the remainder of the river journey, and at the end of the third day the canoes pulled to shore and a night camp was made.
CHAPTER XII
Then get a club and come on.
But we shall take whatever antiquities we find."
I do not think this lot will come back.
"But where are the mules we are to use in traveling to-morrow?" asked the professor of Jacinto.
"You have mentioned buried cities.
The canoes were not on the river bank.
"Not quite.
The Indians seemed glad to leave the "place of the bats," as they called the camp site.
"Huh!" grunted Jacinto, and then he called to the paddlers to increase their strokes.
Tom took quick aim and pulled the trigger.
We shall march there in the morning.
"How much longer does your water trip take, Professor?"
"Yes.
"Nonsense!"
Look out!" and he held up his hands instinctively to shield his face.
"Oshtoo!
Big bats.
I stuck my head out just now and I felt that same sort of shadow I felt this evening when we were down near the river."
"You don't say so!
"The alligators aren't much worse," asserted Jacinto with a visible shiver.
Then Tom noticed something queer.
"And a man, too?" asked Ned.
Out of the tents rushed the young men to find Professor Bumper and Mr. Damon before them.
"What is it?
Toward the close of the third day's travel there was a cry from one of the rear boats, and an alarm of a man having fallen overboard was given.
"I didn't hear any one call us," remarked Ned.
"You're not going out there, are you?" asked Ned.
Though they might if they got the chance," was the answer of the Spanish guide.
After that--well, we shall trust to luck for what we shall find."
Tom's plan seemed to be a good one.
Though if a sufficient number of these bats attacked a man at the same time, he would have small chance to escape alive.
His lamp and Ned's had small hooks on them, so they could be carried in the upper coat pocket, showing a gleam of light and leaving the hands free for use.
The blood-sucking bats were comparatively few, and the migratory sort fewer still.
Large blocks of stone lay there, overgrown with moss of every color; the fresh spring bubbled forth, and made a strange gurgling sound.
It was so thick, and the foliage so dense, that it was quite fatiguing to proceed.
However, he said that the sound proceeded from a very large owl, in a hollow tree; a sort of learned owl, that continually knocked its head against the branches.
This he had done, and was now going on in wooden shoes and in his humble dress, for the bell sounded with so deep a tone, and with such strange power, that proceed he must.
How magnificent was the sight from this height!
The ugly apes sat upon the trees, and grinned.
Woodroof and anemonies grew almost too high; blooming convolvuluses and blackberry-bushes hung in long garlands from tree to tree, where the nightingale sang and the sunbeams were playing: it was very beautiful, but it was no place for girls to go; their clothes would get so torn.
The sea--the great, the glorious sea, that dashed its long waves against the coast--was stretched out before him.
A long time passed, and people said to each other--"I wonder if there is a church out in the wood?
Around the nicest green meads, where the deer were playing in the grass, grew magnificent oaks and beeches; and if the bark of one of the trees was cracked, there grass and long creeping plants grew in the crevices.
The clergyman had spoken so touchingly, the children who were confirmed had been greatly moved; it was an eventful day for them; from children they become all at once grown-up-persons; it was as if their infant souls were now to fly all at once into persons with more understanding.
He thought the bell sounded from the depths of these still lakes; but then he remarked again that the tone proceeded not from there, but farther off, from out the depths of the forest.
THE BELL
But whether the sound came from his head or from the hollow tree, that no one could say with certainty.
So now he got the place of "Universal Bell-ringer," and wrote yearly a short treatise "On the Owl"; but everybody was just as wise as before.
He had followed his own path, and had reached the spot just as soon as the son of the king had done.
He is the son of a king!"
The king of the country was also observant of it, and vowed that he who could discover whence the sounds proceeded, should have the title of "Universal Bell-ringer," even if it were not really a bell.
"This must be looked to." So he remained, and let the others go on without him.
And there were large calm lakes there too, in which white swans were swimming, and beat the air with their wings.
It was still in the woods, so very still; and he fell on his knees, sung his evening hymn, and said: "I cannot find what I seek; the sun is going down, and night is coming--the dark, dark night.
It was as if the tones came from a church in the still forest; people looked thitherward, and felt their minds attuned most solemnly.
The confectioner of the town came out, and set up his booth there; and soon after came another confectioner, who hung a bell over his stand, as a sign or ornament, but it had no clapper, and it was tarred over to preserve it from the rain.
And yonder, where sea and sky meet, stood the sun, like a large shining altar, all melted together in the most glowing colors.
But the poor child that had been confirmed was quite ashamed; he looked at his wooden shoes, pulled at the short sleeves of his jacket, and said that he was afraid he could not walk so fast; besides, he thought that the bell must be looked for to the right; for that was the place where all sorts of beautiful things were to be found.
Was it that which people had heard?
The sun now set: the atmosphere glowed like fire.
I will climb up yonder rock."
They all immediately felt a wish to go thither; all except three.
Both knew each other: the boy was that one among the children who could not come because he had to go home and return his jacket and boots to the innkeeper's son.
It was the day of confirmation.
The King's Son often stood still and listened.
In reality the bell does not exist; it is only a fancy that people have taken into their heads!"
But two of the youngest soon grew tired, and both returned to town; two little girls sat down, and twined garlands, so they did not go either; and when the others reached the willow-tree, where the confectioner was, they said, "Now we are there!
"That surely cannot be the bell," said one of the children, lying down and listening.
But on he went, without being disheartened, deeper and deeper into the wood, where the most wonderful flowers were growing.
"Shall we thrash him?
They afterwards came to a little house, made of branches and the bark of trees; a large wild apple-tree bent over it, as if it would shower down all its blessings on the roof, where roses were blooming.
At the same moment the bell sounded deep in the wood, so clear and solemnly that five or six determined to penetrate somewhat further.
Those persons who were walking outside the town, where the houses were farther apart, with gardens or little fields between them, could see the evening sky still better, and heard the sound of the bell much more distinctly.
A rustling was heard in the bushes, and a little boy stood before the King's Son, a boy in wooden shoes, and with so short a jacket that one could see what long wrists he had.
This principle must be borne in mind in all our marked exercises.
9.
No one can say that one interpretation is right and the other wrong.
I ab-so-lute-ly refuse to grant your demand.
What is the effect of a lack of emphasis?
It must come from within, outward.
3.
"New stars and suns" are hardly as emphatic as the word "larger." Why?
The kind of force that we want applied to the emphatic word is not entirely physical.
1.
6.
We are interested in new ideas and new facts.
What is the effect on the emphasis?
Read the selections on pages 30 and 48, emphasizing every word.
If you have been talking on a low pitch, jump to a high one on the emphatic word.
The ideal speaker makes his big words stand out like mountain peaks; his unimportant words are submerged like stream-beds.
Do not emphasize the same idea over and over again unless you desire to lay extra stress on it; Senator Thurston desired to put the maximum amount of emphasis on "force" in his speech on page 50.
What relation does this have to the use of the voice?
These lines, then, would read like this:
As we have noted elsewhere, public speaking is very much like conversation enlarged.
In like manner, "soil," "grain," "tools," are also emphatic.
It is there that monotony caused by lack of emphasis is so painfully apparent.
10.
"Destiny is not a matter of chance.
Let us not confound loudness with emphasis.
Why?
You do not dwell on these small words in your everyday conversation, because you are not a conversational bore.
"New" is emphatic because it introduces a new idea.
Obviously, the author has contrasted these ideas purposely, so that they might be more emphatic, and here we see that contrast is one of the very first devices to gain emphasis.
The average speaker will deliver the foregoing line on destiny with about the same amount of emphasis on each word.
CHAPTER III
Apply the correct method of everyday speech to the platform.
Patrick Henry's notable climax could be delivered in that manner very effectively: "Give--me--liberty--or--give--me--death." The italicized part of the following might also be delivered with this every-word emphasis.
In this chapter, however, we are considering only one form of emphasis: that of applying force to the important word and subordinating the unimportant words.
Why?
Are there any others you would emphasize?
"But," said Mr. Dana, "if you see a man bite a dog, hurry back to the office and write the story." Of course that is news; that is unusual.
He looked at her in angry astonishment.
Do not forget: this is one of the main methods that you must continually employ in getting your effects.
The speaker that fires his force and emphasis at random into a sentence will not get results.
His emphasis was both correct and powerful.
In the following passage, would you make any changes in the author's markings for emphasis?
Read again, changing emphasis slightly.
It is the one word that positively defines the quality of the subject being discussed, and the author of those lines desired to bring it out emphatically, as he has shown by contrasting it with another idea.
Notice how the meaning changes by merely putting the emphasis on different words in the following sentence.
Note how force is emphasized repeatedly.
Which words should be emphasized, which subordinated, in a sentence?
7.
If you have been talking on a high pitch, take a low one on your emphatic ideas. Read the chapters on "Inflection," "Feeling," "Pause," "Change of Pitch," "Change of Tempo." Each of these will explain in detail how to get emphasis through the use of a certain principle.
When you pick up the evening paper you can tell at a glance which are the important news articles.
Read the selections on pages 50, 51, 52, 53 and 54, devoting special attention to emphasizing the important words or phrases and subordinating the unimportant ones.
Because we expect an astronomer to discover heavenly bodies rather than cooking recipes.
Mark the passage for emphasis and bring it with you to class.
Not every word is of special importance--therefore only certain words demand emphasis.
Now and then this principle should be applied to an emphatic sentence by stressing each word.
One speaker will put one interpretation on a speech, another speaker will use different emphasis to bring out a different interpretation.
The words, "Republic needs" in the next sentence, are emphatic; they introduce a new and important idea.
Where?
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.
In the following selection, "larger" is emphatic, for it is the new idea.
Note the following, printed in the same type as given here.
The other words were hurried over and thus given no comparative importance at all.
Of course, there are many ways of delivering it; this is only one of several good interpretations that might be chosen.
Size of type is his device to show emphasis in bold relief. He brings out sometimes even in red headlines the striking news of the day.
8.
If he wearies their attention with trifles they will have neither vivacity nor desire left when he reaches words of Wall-Street and skyscraper importance.
What would you think of a guide who agreed to show New York to a stranger and then took up his time by visiting Chinese laundries and boot-blacking "parlors" on the side streets?
Read some sentence repeatedly, emphasizing a different word each time, and show how the meaning is changed, as is done on page 22.
The gun that scatters too much does not bag the birds.
Speak it aloud and see.
5.
His big thoughts stand like huge oaks; his ideas of no especial value are merely like the grass around the tree.
When a great battle is reported in the papers, they do not keep emphasizing the same facts over and over again.
If you have been going fast, go very slow on the emphatic word.
It is a good device for exciting special attention, and it furnishes a pleasing variety.
As a public speaker you can assist this emphasis of contrast with your voice.
"Did you expect me to give you a chance to destroy me and poison Jacqueline's mind?
To yell is not a sign of earnestness, intelligence, or feeling.
Can you suggest any improvement?
Here your own intelligence must guide--and greatly to your profit.
Note the emphasis and subordination in some conversation or speech you have heard.
They try to get new information, or a "new slant." The news that takes an important place in the morning edition will be relegated to a small space in the late afternoon edition.
Last night a speaker said: "The curse of this country is not a lack of education.
Otherwise, it is justified."
Describe one method of destroying monotony of thought-presentation.
If a boy declined to ride, there would be shouts of derision.
On the occasion of my first experience in this mode of warfare, there were two other little boys who were also novices.
In the winter we coasted much.
Among them were throwing wands and snow-arrows.
Aside from this, he was master of his time.
But I hardly know whether he made more enemies for me or I for him.
It was really a battle, in which each one chose his opponent.
There were young foxes, bears, wolves, raccoons, fawns, buffalo calves and birds of all kinds, tamed by various boys.
At noon the boys were usually gathered by some pleasant sheet of water, and as soon as the ponies were watered, they were allowed to graze for an hour or two, while the boys stripped for their noonday sports.
"I can't run; but I will challenge you to fifty paces."
Our games were feats with the bow and arrow, foot and pony races, wrestling, swimming and imitation of the customs and habits of our fathers.
My friend, Little Wound (as I will call him, for I do not remember his name), being quite small, was unable to reach the nest until it had been well trampled upon and broken and the insects had made a counter charge with such vigor as to repulse and scatter our numbers in every direction.
The top must spin all the way through.
"I, the brave Little Wound, to-day kill the only fierce enemy!"
As it was the custom of our people, when they killed or wounded an enemy on the battle-field, to announce the act in a loud voice, we did the same.
After the onslaught upon the nest was ended, we usually followed it by a pretended scalp dance.
We had sham fights with mud balls and willow wands; we played lacrosse, made war upon bees, shot winter arrows (which were used only in that season), and coasted upon the ribs of animals and buffalo robes.
Our sports were molded by the life and customs of our people; indeed, we practiced only what we expected to do when grown.
Each whips his top until it hums; then one takes the lead and the rest follow in a sort of obstacle race.
The rule was that if a boy sat down, he was let alone, but as long as he remained standing within the field, he was open to an attack.
However, he evidently did not want to retreat without any honors; so he bravely jumped upon the nest and yelled:
No one struck with the hand, but all manner of tripping with legs and feet and butting with the knees was allowed.
The spinning of tops was one of the all-absorbing winter sports.
Before it fell to the ground a volley from the bows of the participants followed.
A boy might say to some other whom he considered his equal:
We played games with these tops--two to fifty boys at one time.
As we left our teepees in the morning, we were never sure that our scalps would not dangle from a pole in the afternoon!
A former hero, when beaten, would often explain his defeat by saying: "I drank too much water."
When we had no ponies, we often had swimming matches of our own, and sometimes made rafts with which we crossed lakes and rivers.
Last of all came the swimming.
But it seemed that the bees were always on the alert and never entirely surprised, for they always raised quite as many scalps as did their bold assailants!
There was another game with arrows that was characterized by gambling, and was generally confined to the men.
It was a common thing to "duck" a young or timid boy or to carry him into deep water to struggle as best he might.
Therefore, it was the off-hand shot that the Indian boy sought to master.
The handle was a stick about a foot long and sometimes we whittled the stick to make it spoon-shaped at one end.
Dive into the water!" for there was a lake near by.
Yet we observed that the fawns skipped and played happily while the gray wolves might be peeping forth from behind the hills, ready to tear them limb from limb.
We whipped them with a long thong of buckskin.
The older boys had put us on this uncertain bark and pushed us out into the swift current of the river.
He had but very little work to do during the period of his boyhood.
All the speedy ponies were picked out and riders chosen.
There were bars of snow over which we must pilot our top in the spoon end of our whip; then again we would toss it in the air on to another open spot of ice or smooth snow-crust from twenty to fifty paces away.
I never knew how we managed to prevent a shipwreck on that voyage and to reach the shore.
He was considered not to be in existence--he had been killed by our enemies, the Bee tribe.
One of our most curious sports was a war upon the nests of wild bees. We imagined ourselves about to make an attack upon the Ojibways or some tribal foe.
Poor little fellow!
We had many curious wild pets.
GAMES AND SPORTS
Boys of all ages were paired for a "spin," and the little red men cheered on their favorites with spirit.
Scarcely were the last words uttered when he screamed as if stabbed to the heart.
We stood on one end and held the other, using the slippery inside of the bark for the outside, and thus coasting down long hills with remarkable speed.
We loved to play in the water.
Altogether it was an exhausting pastime--fully equal to the American game of football, and only the young athlete could really enjoy it.
We made our tops heart-shaped of wood, horn or bone.
It is true that our savage life was a precarious one, and full of dreadful catastrophes; however, this never prevented us from enjoying our sports to the fullest extent.
I remember a perilous ride with a companion on an unmanageable log, when we were both less than seven years old.
When there were fifty or a hundred players on each side, the battle became warm; but anything to arouse the bravery of Indian boys seemed to them a good and wholesome diversion.
"Dive into the water!
The Indian boy was a prince of the wilderness.
It may seem odd, but wrestling was done by a great many boys at once--from ten to any number on a side.
His principal occupation was the practice of a few simple arts in warfare and the chase.
When we had reassembled and were indulging in our mimic dance, Little Wound was not allowed to dance.
We had some quiet plays which we alternated with the more severe and warlike ones.
A little urchin would hang to his pony's long tail, while the latter, with only his head above water, glided sportively along.
Each player was quick to note the direction and speed of the leading arrow and he tried to send his own at the same speed and at an equal height, so that when it fell it would be closer to the first than any of the others.
My pets were different at different times, but I particularly remember one.
This advice he obeyed.
As soon as this was ended, the pony races followed.
It was his habit to treat every boy unmercifully who injured me.
It was considered out of place to shoot by first sighting the object aimed at.
It was an uncertain life, to be sure.
He can only lose, not gain, by that mixed intercourse with the world.
It is wonderfully little consequence what any one does with his intellect till he be three or four and twenty.
I feel it greatly; and though the season is midsummer, I am obliged to dress entirely in a light costume of buckskin, and take Marsalla baths, which refresh me, at least for the while.
His tastes, I infer, lie in the direction which, in a worldly sense, are least profitable; but, after all, Harcourt, every one has brains enough, and to spare, for any career.
I go out very little; my notion is, that the Diplomatist, like the ancient Augur, must not suffer himself to be vulgarized by contact.
I tried to find out the whereabouts and the amount of this heritage; but, with the admirable indifference that characterizes him, he did not know or care.
It is very kind of you to think of my health.
I trust I have omitted nothing in reply to your last despatch, except it be to say that I look for you here about September, or earlier, if as convenient to you; you will, of course, write to me, however, meanwhile.
Important questions!
I do, perhaps, as well as I should like anywhere.
I have ordered the Sicilian wine for your friend; I have obtained the Royal leave for you to shoot in Calabria; and I assure you it is rather a rare incident in my life to have forgotten nothing required of me!
There is both good and evil in this.
Horace Upton.
Indeed, I half suspect that the soil might be left quietly to rear weeds till that time; and as to dreaminess, it signifies nothing if there be a strong "physique." With a weak frame, imagination will play the tyrant, and never cease till it dominates over all the other faculties; but where there is strength and activity, there is no fear of this.
I am, as I have the right to be, on the sick list, and it is as well my rest should remain undisturbed.
SOME TRAITS OF LIFE
It was the night Lady Glencore received; and, as usual, the street was crowded with equipages, which somehow seemed to have got into inextricable confusion,--some endeavoring to turn back, while others pressed forward,--the court of the palace being closely packed with carriages which the thronged street held in fast blockade.
He, however, effected this much: he kept the memory of her who had gone, alive by daily calumnies.
You know as well as I, Princess, that social credit is as great a bubble as commercial; we should all of us be bankrupts if our books were seen.
Hang me, but good houses and good cooks are growing too scarce to make one credulous of the ills that can be said of their owners."
The Palazzo della Torre was for a fortnight the resort of the curious and the idle.
Many declared that they had come to the determination to discredit the story.
"Here I am, all impatience.
The next day Florence sat in committee over the lost Countess.
"The charming Countess, you remember, ran away with a countryman of mine, young Glencore, of the 8th Hussars; I used to know his father intimately."
Naturalists tell us that several varieties of insect existence we rashly set down as mere annoyances, have their peculiar spheres of usefulness and good; and, doubtless, these same loungers contribute in some mysterious manner to the welfare of that state which they only seem to burden.
Various were the sentiments expressed by the different speakers,--some sorrowfully deploring the disaster; others more eagerly inveighing against the infamy of the man who had proclaimed it.
"I wish we were certain of another bad reputation to replace her," grunted out Scaresby; "they are the only kind of people who give good dinners, and never ask for returns."
I said, you need n't believe it.
As the apartments which faced the street were not ever used for these receptions, the dark unlighted windows suggested no remark; but they who had entered the courtyard were struck by the gloomy aspect of the vast building: not only that the entrance and the stairs were in darkness, but the whole suite of rooms, usually brilliant as the day, were now in deep gloom.
From every carriage window heads were protruded, wondering at this strange spectacle; and eager inquiries passed on every side for an explanation.
Never was there a society less ungenerously prudish, and yet there were cases--this, one of them--which transgressed all conventional rule. Like a crime which no statute had ever contemplated, it stood out self-accused and self-condemned.
They discussed and debated the question all day; but while they hesitated over the reprieve, the prisoner was beyond the law.
Not one, however, sincerely professed that he disbelieved it.
To the former he gave vent to all his sarcasm and bitterness; they liked it just because they would n't condescend to it themselves.
Still, the revulsion, from habits of deference and respect, to disparagement, and even sarcasm, is a sorry evidence of human kindness; and the threshold, over which for years we had only passed as guests, might well suggest sadder thoughts as we tread it to behold desolation.
"That's exactly what I was recommending to the Mar-quesa Guesteni.
The next morning large bills of sale, posted over the walls, declared that all the furniture and decorations-were to be sold.
They all agreed it was a great hardship,--a terrible calamity; but still, if true, what could be done?
"And I, the small park phaeton," cried another.
"All is very briefly related, then," said he.
Witnesses were heard and evidence taken as to her case.
It forgets not only all it owes to others,--gratitude, honor, and esteem,--but even the closer obligations it has contracted with itself.
"I suppose that must suffer also.
"I must really have those large Sevres jars," said one.
"I hope she has not taken Horace with her; he was the best cook in Italy.
The despotism of beauty is not a very mild sway, after all; and perhaps the Countess had exercised her rule right royally.
Are they not invariably devouring and destroying some vermin a little smaller than themselves, and making thus a healthier atmosphere for their betters?
"She'll not see you.
At length the space slowly began to thin.
The gate of the palace, locked and barred all day, refused entrance to every one; at night, it opened to admit the exit of a travelling-carriage.
They are often well born, almost always well mannered, invariably well dressed.
They do not, at first blush, appear to discharge any very great or necessary function in life; but we must by no means, from that, infer their inutility.
The explanation of "sudden illness" was rapidly disseminated, but as rapidly contradicted, and the reply given by the porter to all demands quickly repeated from mouth to mouth, "Her Ladyship will not receive."
Scaresby was, however, too busy in recounting his news to others to perceive the signals the old Princess held out; and it was only as her chasseur, six feet three of green and gold, bent down to give her Highness's message, that the Major hurried off, in all the importance of a momentary scandal, to the side of her carriage.
"Never mind his father."
"I'll tell you, then.
"I don't believe a word of it,--I'll never believe it," cried the Princess.
Why, how do we go anywhere, nowadays, except by 'not believing' the evil stories that are told of our entertainers."
A few might, perhaps, have been merciful, but they were overborne by numbers.
What is it, Scaresby?
"What is to be done?" exclaimed the Princess, sorrowfully.
It may seem small-minded and narrow to stigmatize such conduct as this. Some may say that for the ordinary courtesies of society no pledges of friendship are required, no real gratitude incurred.
Lady Glencore's beauty and her vast fortune were now counts in the indictment against her, and many a jealous rival was not sorry at this hour of humiliation.
He came over here and fell in love with the girl, and they ran off together; but they forgot to get married, Princess.
She, a Countess, of a family second to none in all Italy; her father a Grand d'Espagne.
"You can't mean that her fortune is in peril?"
The gay world, for so it likes to be called, has no greater element of enjoyment amongst all its high gifts than its precious power of forgetting.
Splendid hock she had,--I wonder is there much of it left?"
"Just what you suggested a few moments ago,--don't believe it.
But that youth was the son of Marcellus, the general of cavalry, who, in the first campaign of the Gallic war, had deserted the standard of the Caesar and the republic.
Without appearing to indulge his personal resentment, Julian might easily confound the crime of the son and of the father; but he was reconciled by the distress of Marcellus, and the liberality of the emperor endeavored to heal the wound which had been inflicted by the hand of justice.
From the palace they proceeded to the senate.
As soon as he was informed of their approach, he leaped from his throne, eagerly advanced to meet them, and compelled the blushing magistrates to receive the demonstrations of his affected humility.
The monarch, after making some inquiry into the rank and character of his rival, despatched the informer with a present of a pair of purple slippers, to complete the magnificence of his Imperial habit.
The office, or rather the name, of consul, was cherished by a prince who contemplated with reverence the ruins of the republic; and the same behavior which had been assumed by the prudence of Augustus was adopted by Julian from choice and inclination.
On the calends of January, at break of day, the new consuls, Mamertinus and Nevitta, hastened to the palace to salute the emperor.
The climate, the soil, the commerce, and the industry of the North were all unfavorable to the growth of a servile population.
Finding it relatively easy to secure negroes in Africa, they crowded the Southern ports with their vessels.
All such protests were without avail.
The Americans protested vigorously but ineffectually against this practice. Indeed, they exaggerated its evils, for many of the "criminals" were only mild offenders against unduly harsh and cruel laws.
Other transported offenders were "political criminals"; that is, persons who criticized or opposed the government.
A free citizen of Pennsylvania who indulged in horse racing and gambling was let off with a fine; a white servant guilty of the same unlawful conduct was whipped at the post and fined as well.
The story of this traffic in white servants is one of the most striking things in the history of labor.
South Carolina, in 1760, absolutely prohibited importation; but the measure was killed by the British crown.
When this form of bondage was first introduced into Virginia in 1619, it was looked upon as a temporary necessity to be discarded with the increase of the white population.
For the present it is an unsolved problem just how many of the colonists were able to bear the cost of their own transfer to the New World.
The great barrier in the way of the poor who wanted to go to America was the cost of the sea voyage.
THE PROCESS OF COLONIZATION
Many of the victims of the practice were young children, for the traffic in them was highly profitable.
In South Carolina they formed almost two-thirds of the population.
The negro population grew by leaps and bounds, until on the eve of the Revolution it amounted to more than half a million.
This effort was futile, for the royal governor promptly vetoed it.
The English Royal African Company sent to America annually between 1713 and 1743 from five to ten thousand slaves.
As late as 1772, Virginia, not daunted by a century of rebuffs, sent to George III a petition in this vein: "The importation of slaves into the colonies from the coast of Africa hath long been considered as a trade of great inhumanity and under its present encouragement, we have too much reason to fear, will endanger the very existence of Your Majesty's American dominions....
For thousands, on the contrary, bondage proved to be a real avenue to freedom and prosperity.
What proportion of the colonists were able to finance their voyage across the sea is a matter of pure conjecture. Undoubtedly a very considerable number could do so, for we can trace the family fortunes of many early settlers.
In Pennsylvania, it was not uncommon to find a master with fifty bond servants on his estate.
Northern ships carried slaves to the Southern colonies and the produce of the plantations to Europe.
In 1650, thirty years after the introduction of slavery, there were only three hundred Africans in Virginia.
In five states--Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia--the slaves nearly equalled or actually exceeded the whites in number.
Deeply impressed with these sentiments, we most humbly beseech Your Majesty to remove all those restraints on Your Majesty's governors of this colony which inhibit their assenting to such laws as might check so very pernicious a commerce."
They did not belong to the classes from which emigration is usually supplied, for they all had a stake in the country they left behind." Though it would be interesting to know how accurate this statement is or how applicable to the other colonies, no study has as yet been made to gratify that interest.
Loose indentures and harsh laws put them at the mercy of their masters." It would not be unfair to add that such was their lot in all other colonies.
In the proprietary colonies the proportion of bond servants was very high.
In this gruesome business there lurked many tragedies, and very few romances.
It involved the use of capital to pay for their passage, to sustain them on the voyage, and to start them on the way of production.
Under this stern economic necessity, Puritans, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and all were alike laid.
Parents were separated from their children and husbands from their wives.
A bondman could not marry without his master's consent; nor engage in trade; nor refuse work assigned to him.
Bondmen differed from the serfs of the feudal age in that they were not bound to the soil but to the master. They likewise differed from the negro slaves in that their servitude had a time limit.
All the way down the coast from Massachusetts to Georgia were to be found in the fields, kitchens, and workshops, men, women, and children serving out terms of bondage generally ranging from five to seven years.
For an attempt to escape or indeed for any infraction of the law, the term of service was extended. The condition of white bondmen in Virginia, according to Lodge, "was little better than that of slaves.
Only by a slow process did chattel slavery take firm root and become recognized as the leading source of the labor supply.
The great increase in later years was due in no small measure to the inordinate zeal for profits that seized slave traders both in Old and in New England.
Hundreds of skilled artisans--carpenters, smiths, and weavers--utterly disappeared as if swallowed up by death.
The ship owners of New England were not far behind their English brethren in pushing this extraordinary traffic.
This system was called indentured servitude.
To overcome this difficulty a plan was worked out whereby shipowners and other persons of means furnished the passage money to immigrants in return for their promise, or bond, to work for a term of years to repay the sum advanced.
To the North, the proportion of slaves steadily diminished although chattel servitude was on the same legal footing as in the South.
In one case a young man who was forcibly carried over the sea lived to make his way back to England and establish his claim to a peerage.
When their weary years of servitude were over, if they survived, they might obtain land of their own or settle as free mechanics in the towns.
From time to time similar bills were passed, only to meet with royal disapproval.
Still they were subject to many special disabilities.
"If the Northern states will consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase in slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers," said John Rutledge, of South Carolina, in the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States.
Moreover it does not appear that those planters who first bought negroes at the auction block intended to establish a system of permanent bondage.
It is probable that the number of bond servants exceeded the original twenty thousand Puritans, the yeomen, the Virginia gentlemen, and the Huguenots combined.
Still, slavery, though sectional, was a part of the national system of economy.
Henry Cabot Lodge is authority for the statement that "the settlers of New England were drawn from the country gentlemen, small farmers, and yeomanry of the mother country....
Hence the gates of the proprietary colonies were flung wide open. Every inducement was offered to immigrants in the form of cheap land, and special efforts were made to increase the population by importing servants.
This class included now Irish who revolted against British rule in Ireland; now Cavaliers who championed the king against the Puritan revolutionists; Puritans, in turn, dispatched after the monarchy was restored; and Scotch and English subjects in general who joined in political uprisings against the king.
This minister, to whom Julian communicated, without reserve, his most careless levities, and his most serious counsels, received an extraordinary commission to restore, in its pristine beauty, the temple of Jerusalem; and the diligence of Alypius required and obtained the strenuous support of the governor of Palestine.
They fixed, by unquestionable tradition, the scene of each memorable event.
To make the Visigoths their enemies, he advised that the accustomed stipend allowed to this people should be withheld; and as he thought these enemies would not be sufficient alone to disturb the empire, he contrived that the Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, and Alans (a northern people in search of new habitations), should assail the Roman provinces.
To suffer the overthrow of such an extensive empire, established by the blood of so many brave and virtuous men, showed no less folly in the princes themselves than infidelity in their ministers; for not one irruption alone, but many, contributed to its ruin; and these barbarians exhibited much ability and perseverance in accomplishing their object.
He, a short time previously, in order to possess the entire monarchy, had murdered his brother Bleda; and having thus become very powerful, Andaric, king of the Zepidi, and Velamir, king of the Ostrogoths, became subject to him.
After this victory, Alaric died, and his successor, Astolphus, having married Placidia, sister of the emperors, agreed with them to go to the relief of Gaul and Spain, which provinces had been assailed by the Vandals, Burgundians, Alans, and Franks, from the causes before mentioned.
On the death of Theodosius, his sons Arcadius and Honorius, succeeded to the empire, but not to the talents and fortune of their father; and the times became changed with the princes.
To these disorders it must be added, that the emperor, seeing himself attacked on so many sides, to lessen the number of his enemies, began to treat first with the Vandals, then with the Franks; a course which diminished his own power, and increased that of the barbarians.
Thus the Vandals ruled Africa; the Alans and Visigoths, Spain; while the Franks and Burgundians not only took Gaul, but each gave their name to the part they occupied; hence one is called France, the other Burgundy.
Irruption of Northern people upon the Roman territories--Visigoths--Barbarians called in by Stilicho--Vandals in Africa--Franks and Burgundians give their names to France and Burgundy--The Huns--Angles give the name to England--Attila, king of the Huns, in Italy--Genseric takes Rome--The Lombards.
At this time Theodosius, son of Arcadius, succeeded to the empire; and, bestowing little attention on the affairs of the west, caused those who had taken possession to think of securing their acquisitions.
Tempted by the hope of booty, he came immediately, and finding Rome abandoned, plundered the city during fourteen days.
The emperor Theodosius conquered them with great glory; and, being wholly reduced to his power, they no longer selected a sovereign of their own, but, satisfied with the terms which he granted them, lived and fought under his ensigns, and authority.
Attila having left Italy, Valentinian, emperor of the west, thought of restoring the country; and, that he might be more ready to defend it against the barbarians, abandoned Rome, and removed the seat of government to Ravenna.
Each of these, after the death of Theodosius, determined not to be governors merely, but to assume sovereign dominion over their respective provinces.
Attila, having entered Italy, laid siege to Aquileia, where he remained without any obstacle for two years, wasting the country round, and dispersing the inhabitants.
He also ravaged many other places in Italy, and then, loaded with wealth, withdrew to Africa.
These migrating masses destroyed the Roman empire by the facilities for settlement which the country offered when the emperors abandoned Rome, the ancient seat of their dominion, and fixed their residence at Constantinople; for by this step they exposed the western empire to the rapine of both their ministers and their enemies, the remoteness of their position preventing them either from seeing or providing for its necessities.
This, as will be related in its place, caused the origin of Venice.
The Romans, having returned to their city, and Maximus being dead, elected Avitus, a Roman, as his successor.
'You mistrust me?' he cried, looking black.
Earls' daughters do it now.
'What do you mean by this eavesdropping?' she asked.
'I have never been to one,' Elsie put in.
Mind, I'm a person who always expects to have my own way.
The Rhine leads you on to the Danube, the Danube to the Black Sea, the Black Sea to Asia; and so, by way of India, China, and Japan, you reach the Pacific and San Francisco; whence one returns quite easily by New York and the White Star Liners.
It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall.
'If mystery means fog, it challenges the world,' I interposed.
It had a leather outer covering; within was a strong steel box, with stout bands of metal to bind it.
'Tis an honest calling.
You must dismount at once, miladi, and take the train just opposite.'
'You doubt my honour?
It was clean and comfortable; but the Cantankerous Old Lady made the porter mop the floor, and fidgeted and worried till we slid out of the station.
'These rogues have deceived us.
'But I have Lady Georgina's orders to stick to this case; and till Lady Georgina returns I stick to it.'
I did not quail.
The Count helped us to carry our nineteen hand-packages and four rugs on board; but I noticed that, fascinated as she was with him, Lady Georgina resisted his ingenious efforts to gain possession of her precious jewel-case as she descended the gangway.
I gripped it hard with both hands.
Genii swarm there.
I felt sure he was wrong, and I ventured to say so.
'You were in Vienna then!' the Cantankerous Old Lady mused back.
The Count looked profoundly surprised and delighted.
'You've caught a Tartar.'
But mind, don't let it out of your hands on any account.
'That's nothing.
She wanted no references.
Let one but float my way, and, hi, presto, I seize it.
Now let us roll up our sleeves again and hurry on with the dado.'
'Merely this,' I replied, bridling up and crushing her.
'I am a Girton girl, an officer's daughter, no more a good woman than most others of my class; and I have nothing in particular to do for the moment.
'The girl has spirit,' she remarked, in an encouraging tone, as if she were discussing some absent person.
I paused and reflected.
And if it comes to blows, I'm bigger and younger and stronger than she is.'
'We all knew that long ago.'
Did madame desire to have the window open?
And if anybody attempts to get in, be sure you stand in front of the door as they mount to prevent them.'
I felt the foreign gentleman took an instinctive dislike to me.
But he waved me aside, with one lordly hand.
She burst out laughing again.
'Tis a foreign trick I picked up in Switzerland.
As they passed their lips moved.
'What are girls coming to, I wonder?
'I hate the lingo.
Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already--very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages.
At last, catching my eye, she thought better of it, and burst out laughing.
The very copperplate was noisy.
No mosquitoes, no passports, no--goodness gracious, child, don't let that odious man bang about my hat-box!
The never-to-be-forgotten music of the Fatherland's-speech has on my infant ear from the first-beginning impressed itself.'
Well, well, we can settle this little matter between us.
'My dear,' she murmured, 'my name is the one thing on earth I'm really ashamed of.
'Yes, and have my jewel-case stolen!
'Of course you will teach,' said Elsie Petheridge, when I explained my affairs to her.
She smiled at my audacity.
'That would spoil all.
I had never seen my stepfather.
We passed on to terms.
The quails in aspic and the sparkling hock had evidently opened their hearts to one another.
With singular magnanimity, I refrained from saying, 'I told you so.'
Happily for my nerves, a good lurch to leeward put a stop for a while to the course of her thoughts on the present distresses.
I laughed against my will at her ill-tempered sallies; they were too funny not to amuse, in spite of their vitriol.
At any rate, when we were comfortably seated in our own compartment once more, and he stood on the footboard just about to enter, of a sudden he made an unexpected dash back, and flung himself wildly into a Paris carriage.
Nature did not cut me out for a high-school teacher.
I cut out half her clothes for her; her own ideas were almost entirely limited to differential calculus.
They just go to the priest and confess, you know, and wipe it all out, and start fresh again on a career of crime next morning.
Those horrid Belgians had no right to stick their deck-chairs just in front of her.
But your face had impressed itself on my sub-conscious self!' (I did not learn till later that the esoteric doctrine of the sub-conscious self was Lady Georgina's favourite hobby.) 'The moment chance led me to this carriage this morning, I said to myself, "That face, those features: so vivid, so striking: I have seen them somewhere.
But I think I can take care of myself.
'I hope you won't allow them to stick in any horrid foreigners!
Nor even, if it comes to that, as a passing expedient.
I flushed up in turn.
I snatch at the first offer, the first hint of an opening.'
'Lady Georgina Fawley, 49 Fortescue Crescent, W.'
I submit myself to fate; or, if you prefer it, I leave my future in the hands of Providence.
She had a fixed habit, I believe, of sticking fast to that jewel-case; for she was too overpowered by the Count's urbanity, I feel sure, to suspect for a moment his honesty of purpose.
Have you no immortal soul, porter, that you crush other people's property as if it was blackbeetles?
It's the one tongue on earth that even a pretty girl's lips fail to render attractive.
I laid down the paste-brush and mused.
As I walked off, well pleased, Lady Georgina's friend ran after me quickly.
'Not to my knowledge,' I answered, gravely.
But as I quite agree with you as to the atrocity of such conduct, I have suppressed the Georgina.
But you needn't look so shocked.
They are like those sums in algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to get help from other women about, and then, all of a sudden, X works itself out into perfectly good sense.
He only said politely, "And I am delighted that the trousseau is perfectly satisfactory to you, madame."
That was an awful shock, and I hope I didn't show it as I murmured "Perfectly, thank you."
I couldn't stand that.
Don't you want to tell me what a little girl like you did in a big city, and--and read me part of that Paris letter I saw the postman give Jane this afternoon?"
Miss Clinton!
"Delightful indeed!
First I went to see Madam Courtier for corsets.
But that didn't matter!
Not me!
I felt queer all the afternoon as I packed those trunks for the five o'clock train.
And I bought things!
I was tempted to say, "Why not my heart?" I was glad she didn't know how good that heart did feel under my blouse when the boy brought that basket of fish from Judge Wade's fishing expedition Saturday.
The judge is like that.
I have firmly determined not to blush any more at the thought of that gorgeous man--at least outwardly.
Men are very strange people.
Jane understands everything I say to her.
I was just planning a gorgeous dinner-party I want to have for her when you came so suddenly.
I was glad she was sitting beside him and couldn't see. Some women like to make other women unhappy, but I think it is best for you to keep them blissfully unconscious until you get what you want. Anyhow, I like that girl all over, and I can't see that her neck is so absolutely impossibly flowery.
I've put it away on the top shelf of a cupboard, for it is a torment to look at it.
Candle-light, pretty women's frocks, black coat sleeves, cut glass and flowers are good ingredients for a joy-drink, and why not?
But this torture book found that out about me, and stopped it the very first thing on page three.
The subject of the conduct of widows is a serious one.
I sat down at the long table by the window and slowly prepared to enjoy myself.
I can hardly stand thinking about how he looked even now.
"I am so tired of that apple-toast combination now that I forget it if I can." As I handed him the first slice of drippy lusciousness, I turned my head away.
I was thinking about things.
I won't let myself even think "perfect flower" and "scarlet runner." If I do, I get warm and happy all over.
There is one exercise here on page twenty that I hate worst of all.
I was glad myself.
My heart beat so it shook the lace on my breast, like a breeze from heaven, as he took the high note and then let it go on the last few words.
Jane has buried husbands.
"Help!
"Supper," I sniffed, as I spread the jam on those lovely, lovely slices of bread and thick butter that I had fixed for my own self.
She doesn't know it yet; but I do.
"Nobody taught it to me.
I'm not sore, why should you be?
He never stopped coming to see me occasionally, and Mr. Carter liked him.
Hereafter I'll get up at the time directed on page three, or maybe earlier.
But that was before my martyrdom to this book had begun.
He don't know no good songs like 'Black-eyed Susan' or 'Little Boy Blue.' I go to sleep quick 'cause he makes me feel tired with his slow tune what's only good for frogs and things.
Anyhow, it made me take a resolve.
"That was a lovely song you sang about 'Molly darling,' Billy," I said. "Where did you hear it?"
"Good gracious, Molly, don't knock the town down like that!
I want ten hours to sleep and twelve if I get a good tired start.
Let my kinship protect me!" exclaimed Tom in alarm, and he pretended to move an inch away from me.
I get up now!
It was the dearest old-fashioned tune ever written, and Billy sang the words as distinctly as if he had been a boy chorister doing a difficult recitative.
Lift me up, and I can put him in the waterglass on your table." He held up one muddy hand to me, and promptly I lifted him up into my arms.
"Jane," I said, looking past her head, "my health is not very good, and you can bring my breakfast to me in bed after this." Poor Mr. Carter always wanted breakfast on the stroke of seven.
Then we both laughed and began to plan what Tom called a conflagration.
I had just lifted it high in the air when out of the lilac-scented dark of the garden came a laugh.
Miss Clinton was delightfully gracious about the dinner--I almost called it the debut dinner--and the expression on the judge's face when he accepted!
"Who taught it to you, sugar-sweet?" I persisted as I poured water in on the frog under his direction.
Again I had that sensation of being against something warm and great and good, and I don't know how I controlled it enough not to--to--
"He's just a week younger, Mrs. Johnson, and I wouldn't tie him for worlds, even if I married him," I said meekly.
"Thank you, I will, all of it, and the bread and butter, too," he answered, in that detestable friendly tone of voice, as he drew himself up and sat in the window.
Well, I must go home now to see that Sally cooks up a few of Mr. Johnson's crotchets for supper." And she began to hurry away.
I'm hungry, hungry to death, and now you've spoiled it all!
The command is to sleep as little as possible to keep the nerves in a good condition--"eight hours at the most, and seven would be better." What earthly good would a seven-hour nap do me?
Aren't you happy with me?"
To see me stagger out of my perfectly nice bed at six o'clock every morning now would wring the sternest heart with compassion and admiration at my faithfulness--to whom?
That, Mrs. Johnson just couldn't stand, and she came across the street immediately and called me back to the gate.
After breakfast, I went into the kitchen to speak to Jane.
Do you think we could arrange it for Tuesday evening?"
The spoon crashed on the table, and I turned and crashed into words.
"You are cruel, cruel, John Moore, and I hate you worse than I ever did before, if that is possible.
I'll never forget my first real party.
Forget--" He didn't finish his sentence, and I'm glad.
His curses had eaten into her heart, and she had fled from him to stifle the coward instinct that urged her to confess her love and beg his mercy.
If he only came in time! Hours had passed since the ambuscade had surprised them.
But instead of his body or the dry hot sand her fingers had expected to encounter they closed over soft cushions, and with the shock she sat up with a jerk, her eyes staring wide, but, sick and faint, she fell back again, her arm flung across her face, shielding the light that pierced like daggers through her throbbing eye-balls.
In those last moments all inequality of rank had been swept away in their common peril--they had been only a white man and a white woman together in their extremity.
The thought of its condition made her hesitate for a moment, but only for a moment.
And the indifference of the night had been maintained when he had left her at dawn, his persistent silence pointing the continuance of his displeasure.
He would come!
He would not let anything happen to her.
It had been early afternoon then.
Then before the valet could effect his supreme devotion had come the hail of bullets, and he had fallen against her, the blood that poured from his wounds saturating her linen coat, and rolled over across her feet.
A lump came into her throat as she thought of Gaston.
Gaston was in all probability dead, but she was alive, and she must husband her strength for her own needs. She forced the threatening emotion down, and, with an effort, controlled the violent shivering in her limbs, and sat up slowly, looking at the Arab woman, who, hearing her move, turned to gaze at her.
She ripped it off with a shudder and flung it from her, rubbing the red smear from her hands with a kind of horror.
What beyond the woman's expression made her think so she did not know, but she was sure of it.
He might discard her at his own pleasure, but no one would take her from him with impunity.
She walked slowly to the curtain and nodded to the Nubian to draw it aside, and slower still she passed into the other room.
And long after she knew from his even breathing that he was asleep she had lain wide-eyed beside him, grasping at what happiness she could, living for the moment as she had schooled herself to live, trying to be content with just the fact of his nearness.
She stood rigid, one foot beating nervously into the soft rug.
Now the lighted lamp told her it was night.
She longed to scream and make a dash for the opening that she guessed was behind her, and to take her chance in the darkness outside.
Her heart was pounding, but she had herself under control.
He picked up the last remaining embers that had scattered on the rug, rubbing the smouldering patches till they were extinguished, and then turned to leave the room.
He would come!
The Nubian listened with white teeth flashing in a broad grin, and shook his head in response to some request urged with denunciatory fist.
The reversal of the role he played in her life brought a quivering smile to her lips.
Bring me water!" she said again, more imperiously than before.
Her position was an appalling one, but hope was strong within her.
She remembered fragmentary incidents of what had gone before the oblivion from which she had just emerged.
Every instinct was rebelling against the calm she forced upon herself.
For the advent of the man who a few weeks before she had loathed for his brutal abduction of herself she now prayed with the desperation of despair.
She lay still, pressing closely down amongst the cushions, and clenching the sleeve of her jacket between her teeth to stifle the groan that rose to her lips.
He had proved his faithfulness, sacrificing his life for his master's play-thing.
"Water!
Slowly and painfully, through waves of deadly nausea and with the surging of deep waters in her ears, Diana struggled back to consciousness.
The woman was strong, but Diana was stronger, younger and more active.
She moved her arm slightly from before her eyes so that she could see, and looked cautiously from under thick lashes, screened by the sleeve of her coat.
Recollection was dulled in bodily pain, and, at first, thought was merged in physical suffering.
Not coffee.
His heavy face lit up with a gleam of malicious satisfaction as Diana came towards him, his loose mouth broadened in a wicked smile.
Diana hated the sweet, thick stuff, but it would do until she could get the water she wanted, and she put out her hand to take the little cup. But her eyes met the other's fixed on her, and something in their malignant stare made her pause.
He pointed to the coffee that the woman had recommenced to make, her back turned to them, but Diana stamped her foot.
In the opposite corner of the tent an Arab woman crouched over a little brazier, and the smell of native coffee was heavy in the air.
If it could only be prolonged until Ahmed reached her.
Before she realised what was happening the woman thrust a strong arm round her and forced the cup to her lips.
She did not credit him with so much acumen.
By now the absence of herself and Gaston and their escort would be discovered.
She went a step forward, her head high, and looked him straight in the face.
That confirmed Diana's suspicions and rage lent her additional strength.
She picked up one of the clean coffee-cups that had rolled to her feet, rinsed it several times, and then drank.
But her courage had risen with a bound; the fact that she was physically stronger than the woman who had been put to guard her, and also that she had gained her point with the burly negro, had a great moral effect on her, further restoring her confidence in herself.
She crossed the tent to the side of the Arab woman.
The hold she was exercising over herself was tremendous, her body was rigid with the effort, and her hands deep down in her pockets clenched till the nails bit into the palms.
Ibraheim Omair!
Diana's muscles relaxed and she sat back easily on the cushions, the little passage of wills had restored her confidence in herself.
Diana repeated the request in Arabic, one of the few sentences she knew without stumbling.
The curtain slid aside again, and the same huge negro she had seen before entered. He came towards her, and her breath hissed in suddenly between her set teeth, but before he reached her the Arab woman intercepted him, blocking his way, and with wild eyes and passionate gestures poured out a stream of low, frenzied words.
Instantly Diana realised that there was no help or compassion to be expected from her.
Of that she had no doubt.
He would know her peril and he would come to her.
Her woman's intuition had sensed the jealousy that had actuated him during the unhappy days since Saint Hubert had come.
The agony in her head was excruciating, and her limbs felt cramped and bruised.
In spite of being tepid it relieved the dry, suffocating feeling in her throat and refreshed her.
Her eyes were still shut; a leaden weight seemed fixed on them, and the effort to open them was beyond her strength.
And the feeling gave a necessary spur to the courage that was fast coming back to her.
The voices in the next room continued, until Diana almost prayed for the moment she was waiting for would come; suspense was worse than the ordeal for which she was nerving herself, It came at last.
He had come first!
And, in answer to her cries, a curtain at the side of the tent, that Diana had not noticed, slid aside and a gigantic Nubian came in. With outstretched hand shaking with rage, pointing at Diana, she burst into voluble abuse, punctuating every few words with the shrieks that had brought the negro.
The water was warm and slightly brackish, but she needed it too much to mind.
An inconsistent jealousy that had been unprovoked and unjustified, but for which she had suffered. She had known last night, when she winced under his sarcastic tongue, and later, when Saint Hubert had left them and his temper had suddenly boiled over, that she was paying for the unaccustomed strain that he was putting on his own feelings.
Although he had changed so strangely in the last few days, though the wonderful gentleness of the last two months had merged again into indifference and cruelty, still she never doubted.
She put the cup aside impatiently.
Only her hands twitched, her long fingers curling and uncurling spasmodically, and she buried them deep in her breeches' pockets to hide them.
HOW IRELAND BECAME THE MOST LEARNED COUNTRY IN EUROPE.
Cork), and Derry.
Then the little handbell tinkled for some particular lecture, and the special students for this hurried to their places, and seated themselves as best they could--on chair, stool, form, stone, or bank, and opened their books.
And the pleasing feature of this arrangement is, that it is not attended with any sense of humiliation or loss of self-respect.
During study and lecture hours these same young men, having put by aprons and napkins, and donned their ordinary dress, are received and treated on terms of perfect equality by those they have served, who take on no airs, and do not pose as superiors, but mix with them in free and kindly intercourse as fellow-students and comrades.
The great Irish colleges were, in fact, universities in the full sense of the word, that is to say, schools which taught the whole circle of knowledge: they were, indeed, in a great measure the models on which our present universities were formed.
Before going farther it is well to remark that these schools also continued, and increased and multiplied as time went on.
I suppose those who are accustomed to the grand universities and colleges of the present day, with their palatial buildings, would feel inclined to laugh at the simple, rough-and-ready methods and appliances of the old Irish colleges.
In old pagan times, long before the arrival of St. Patrick, there were schools in Ireland taught by druids.
From Germany, France, Italy, Egypt, came priests and laymen, princes, chiefs, and peasant students--all eagerly seeking to drink from the fountain of Irish learning.
To notice all the monastic schools of old that attained eminence would demand more space than can be afforded here.
And when at last Christianity came, and was spreading rapidly over the land, those old schools were still held on; but they were no longer taught by druids, and they were no longer pagan, for teachers and scholars were now all Christians.
But most of even the poorest did their best to pay something; and in this respect it is interesting to compare the usages of those long past times with some features of the college life of our own days.
These lay schools, being now within the Christian communion, were not abolished or discouraged in any way by St. Patrick or his successors.
There were no comfortable study rooms, well furnished with desks, seats, and rostrums: no spacious lecture halls.
Where there were large numbers great care was taken that there should be no confusion or disorder.
It was no wonder that the people of Great Britain and the Continent, when they met such scholars, all from Ireland, came to the conclusion that the schools which educated them were the best to be found anywhere.
But our business here is mainly with the early monastic schools, which became so celebrated all over Europe.
These were what are called monastic or ecclesiastical schools, for they were mostly taught by monks; while the older schools, being taught by laymen, were called lay schools.
John Scotus Erigena ('John the Irish-born Scot') of the ninth century taught in Paris; he was the greatest Greek scholar of his time, and was equally eminent in Theology.
In these last the professional men were educated.
In Clonard there were 3,000, all residing in and around the college; and Bangor founded by St. Comgall, and Clonfert founded by St. Brendan the Navigator, had each as many.
Accordingly, students came from all parts of the known world, to place themselves under the masters of these schools.
They continued on, and were to be found in every part of Ireland for fourteen centuries after St. Patrick's arrival, down to a period within our own memory; but of course greatly changed as time went on.
CHAPTER VI.
For this they receive food and some small payment, which renders them independent of charity.
The greatest number of the students lived in houses built by themselves, or by hired workmen--some, mere huts, each for a single person; some, large houses, for several: and all around the central college buildings there were whole streets of these houses, often forming a good-sized town.
In fact, they perform most of the work expected from ordinary servants.
The Fer-leginn was always some distinguished man--of course a great scholar.
At study time the students went just where they pleased, and accommodated themselves as best they could.
But even in much greater numbers than these came students from Great Britain.
These same books, too, were a motley collection--some large, some small, some fresh from the scribe, some tattered and brown with age: but all most carefully covered and preserved; for they were very expensive.
The greater part of the work, indeed, was carried on in the open air when the weather at all permitted.
And they were equally eminent in sacred learning--Theology, Divinity, and the Holy Scriptures.
All this was anticipated in Ireland more than a thousand years ago; for a similar custom existed in some of the old Irish colleges.
Then the master went over the text, translating and explaining it, and whenever he thought it necessary questioned his pupils, to draw them out. After this he had to stand the cross-fire of the students' questions, who asked him to explain all sorts of difficulties: for this was one of the college regulations.
They held their ground successfully--as the lay schools did--during the evil days of later ages, when determined attempts were made, under the penal laws, to suppress them; and at the present day they are working all over the country quite as vigorously as in days of yore.
Besides these, at least twenty-five others, all eminent, are specially mentioned in our old books.
And in this rugged and difficult fashion they mastered the language.
In lay schools was taught what might be called the native learning--the learning that had grown up in the country in the course of ages.
In some of the present American universities there is an excellent custom which enables very poor students to support themselves and pay their college fees.
In science the Irish scholars were famous for their knowledge of Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music, Geography, and so forth.
Many of the monastic colleges had very large numbers of students.
These men, and scores of others that we cannot find space for here, spread the fame of their native country everywhere.
The Latin and Greek languages and literatures were studied and taught with success.
I was myself educated in some of those lay schools; and I remember with pleasure several of my old teachers: rough and unpolished men most of them, but excellent, solid scholars, and full of enthusiasm for learning--enthusiasm which they communicated to their pupils.
But the famine of 1847 broke up those schools, and in a very few years they nearly all disappeared.
All those who had the means paid their way in everything.
He was generally a monk, but sometimes a layman; for those good monks selected the best man they could find, whether priest or layman.
There were no grammars, no dictionaries, no simple introductory lesson books, such as we have now.
They were simply let alone, to teach their own secular learning just as they pleased.
The students were of all classes--rich and poor--from the sons of kings and chiefs down to the sons of farmers, tradesmen, and labourers; young laymen for general education, as well as ecclesiastical students for the priesthood.
The schools proved their mettle by the scholars they educated and sent forth: scholars who astonished all Europe in their day.
They wait on their richer comrades, bring up the dishes, etc., from the kitchen for meals, and lay the tables: and when the meal is over, they remove everything, wash up dishes and plates, and put them all by in their proper places.
In the seven kingdoms of England--the Heptarchy--the Anglo-Saxons were the ruling race, rude and stubborn, and greatly attached to their gloomy northern pagan gods.
CHAPTER VII.
Then arose an extraordinary zeal for spreading religion and learning in foreign lands; and hundreds of devoted and determined missionaries left our shores.
Europe was too small for their missionary enterprise.
They spoke a strange language among themselves, used Latin to those who understood it, and made use of an interpreter when preaching, until they had learned the language of the place.
He also directed that all the scholars should be provided with food and suitable habitations: it was in fact a great free boarding-school, founded and maintained at the expense of the king.
It was enough that the candidate for an appointment came from Ireland: he needed no other recommendation.
They were confident, cheerful, and self-helpful, faced privation with indifference, caring nothing for luxuries; and when other provisions failed them, they gathered wild fruit, trapped animals, and fished, with great dexterity and with any sort of next-to-hand rude appliances.
Each had a long stout walking-stick: and slung from the shoulder a leathern bottle for water, and a wallet containing his greatest treasure--a book or two and some relics.
The Irish "passion for pilgrimage and preaching" never died out: it is a characteristic of the race.
Among these students the most distinguished was St. Dunstan, who, according to all his biographers, received his education, both Scriptural and secular, from Irish masters there.
The long hair behind flowed down on the back: and the eyelids were painted or stained black.
We are told by English writers that "they were skilled in every department of learning sacred and profane"; and that under them were educated many young English nobles, sent to Glastonbury with that object.
They were to be found everywhere through Europe, even as far as Iceland and the Faroe and Shetland Islands.
He founded the monastery of Lindisfarne, which afterwards became so illustrious.
But these stout-hearted pilgrims were prepared for all this, and looking only to the service of their Master, never flinched.
On this point we have the decisive testimony of an eminent French writer of the ninth century, Eric of Auxerre, who himself witnessed what he records.
Indeed the two functions were generally combined; for it was quite common to find a man a successful missionary, while at the same time acting as professor in a college, or as head of some great seminary for general education.
Most of them were persons in good position, who might have lived in plenty and comfort at home.
Once on the Continent, they had to make their way, poor and friendless, through people whose language they did not understand, and who were in many places ten times more rude and dangerous in those ages than the inhabitants of these islands: and we know as a matter of history, that many were killed on the way.
There was ample field for their noble ambition.
The revival of learning on the Continent was indeed due in no small degree to those Irish missionaries.
They were somewhat rough in outward appearance: but beneath all that they had solid sense and much learning.
They travelled on foot towards their destination in small companies, generally of thirteen.
Wherever they went they made pilgrimages to holy places--places sanctified by memories of early saints--and whenever they found it practicable they were sure to make their way to Rome, to visit the shrines of the apostles, and obtain the blessing of the Pope.
Now at this very time King Charles was using his best efforts to restore learning, by opening schools throughout his dominions, but found it hard to procure a sufficient supply of qualified teachers.
Irish professors and teachers were in those times held in such estimation that they were employed in most of the schools and colleges of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.
Having kept them for some time on a visit in his palace, he finally opened a great school in some part of France--probably Paris--for the education of boys of all ranks of society, not only for the sons of the highest nobles, but also for those of the middle and low classes, at the head of which he placed Clement.
Aidan was an Irishman who entered the monastery of Iona, from which he was sent to preach to the Northumbrians on the invitation of their good king, Oswald.
Many were to be found in Egypt; and as early as the seventh century, three learned Irish monks found their way to Carthage, where they laboured for a long time and with great success.
To begin with the Irish missionary work in Great Britain.
In Glastonbury especially, they taught with great success.
These men, on their first appearance on the Continent, caused much surprise, they were so startlingly different from those preachers the people had been accustomed to.
He was its first abbot; and for thirty years it was governed by him and by two other Irish abbots, Finan and Colman, in succession.
Strange rumours regarding them went round, and at length came to the ears of King Charles; on which he sent for the brothers, and had them brought to his presence.
Their simple ways, their unmistakable piety, and their intense earnestness in the cause of religion caught the people everywhere, so that they made converts in crowds.
Irishmen were equally active in spreading secular knowledge.
Towards the end of the sixth century the great body of the Irish were Christians, so that the holy men of Ireland were able to turn their attention to the conversion of other people.
Whole crowds of ardent and learned Irishmen travelled on the Continent in the sixth, seventh, and succeeding centuries, spreading Christianity and secular knowledge everywhere among the people.
Observing how the merchants exhibited and drew attention to their wares, they acted in a similar fashion to force themselves into notice like the others.
For these were the Dark Ages, when the civilisation and learning bequeathed by old Greece and Rome had been almost wiped out of existence by the barbarous northern hordes who overran Europe; and Christianity had not yet time to spread its softening influence among them.
In a letter written by him to Charles the Bald, king of France, he says:--"What shall I say of Ireland, who, despising the dangers of the deep, is migrating with almost her whole train of philosophers to our coasts?" And other foreign evidences of a like kind might be brought forward.
This they repeated as they went from place to place, so that the people wondered very much; and some thought them to be nothing more than persons half crazed.
As for the numerous Continental schools and colleges in which Irishmen figured either as principals or professors, it would be impossible, with our limited space, to notice them here.
And as he perceived that these brothers were evidently men of real learning, and of a superior cast in every way, he joyfully accepted their proposals.
But though such an idea was mentioned among astronomers, it was not regarded with any special favour, and was considered merely as one among a number of hypotheses which could be suggested as fairly probable.
Lastly he proceeded to examine where this planet was, and what its orbit must be to produce the observed disturbances.
Bessel made preparations for trying what he could do at it in 1840, but he was prevented by fatal illness.
But in England this was not known.
These old observations of Flamsteed and those of Le Monnier, combined with those made after Herschel's discovery, were very useful in determining an exact orbit for the new planet, and its motion was considered thoroughly known.
Others surmised the presence of some foreign and unknown body, some comet, or some still more distant planet perhaps, whose gravitative attraction for Uranus was the cause of the whole difficulty--some perturbations, in fact, which had not been taken into account because of our ignorance of the existence of the body which caused them.
So there the matter dropped.
Could it be an outer planet?
We approach to-night perhaps the greatest, certainly the most conspicuous, triumphs of the theory of gravitation.
Was it likely that a young and unknown man should have successfully solved so extremely difficult a problem?
Mainly, the difference lies, first, in the grounds on which the prediction is based; second, on the difficulty of the investigation whereby it is accomplished; third, in the completeness and the accuracy with which it can be verified.
A later stage still occurs when the theory has been actually and completely verified by agreement with observation.
Some cause was evidently at work on this distant planet, causing it to disagree with its motion as calculated according to the law of gravitation.
But the inverse problem: Given the perturbations, to find the planet which causes them--such a problem had never yet been attacked, and by only a few had its possibility been conceived.
ANCIENT OBSERVATIONS (casually made, as of a star).
So striking a coincidence seemed sufficient to justify a Herschelian "sweep" for a week or two.
This discrepancy is quite distinct, but still it is very small, and had two objects been in the heavens at once, the actual Uranus and the theoretical Uranus, no unaided eye could possibly have distinguished them or detected that they were other than a single star.
Its movements have been felt trembling along the far-reaching line of our analysis with a certainty hardly inferior to ocular demonstration."
When seen in a large telescope it would still only look like a star, and it would require considerable labour and watching to sift it out from the other stars surrounding it.
It is perfectly right not to attach much importance to unelaborated guesses.
This great man was likewise engaged in improving his theory and in considering how best the optical search could be conducted.
THE DISCOVERY OF NEPTUNE
In 1781, Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.
It must, therefore, be some planet outside the orbit of Uranus, and in all probability, according to Bode's empirical law, at nearly double the distance from the sun that Uranus is.
Was it due to the presence of a resisting medium?
In January, 1843, he graduated as Senior Wrangler, and shortly afterwards he set to work.
Meanwhile, and quite independently, something of the same sort was going on in France.
For a time Uranus seemed to travel regularly and as expected, in the orbit which had been calculated for it; but early in the present century it began to be slightly refractory, and by 1820 its actual place showed quite a distinct discrepancy from its position as calculated with the aid of the old observations.
The questions were not difficult. They concerned the error of the radius vector.
It was due to some steady continuous cause--for instance, some unknown planet.
Thousands of years ago, Thales, and others whose very names we have forgotten, could predict eclipses with some certainty, though with only rough accuracy.
All these he examined and dismissed for various reasons one after the other.
We have seen, for instance (coming to later times), how a gap between Mars and Jupiter caused a missing planet to be suspected and looked for, and to be found in a hundred pieces.
We have seen, also, how the abnormal proper-motion of Sirius suggested to Bessel the existence of an unseen companion.
Some thought that the exact law of gravitation did not apply to so distant a body.
Dr. Bremiker had not, indeed, completed his great work--a chart of the whole zodiac down to stars of the tenth magnitude--but portions of it were completed, and the special region where the new planet was expected happened to be among the portions already just done.
It was about time to begin to look for it.
It was at first thought that this discrepancy must be due to inaccuracies in the older observations, and they were accordingly rejected, and tables prepared for the planet based on the newer and more accurate observations only.
LECTURE XV
Nevertheless one was in existence: it had just been completed in that country of enlightened method and industry--Germany.
It was altogether unlikely. Still, he would test him: he would ask for further explanations concerning some of the perturbations which he himself had specially noticed, and see if Mr. Adams could explain these also by his hypothesis.
Or was it due to a collision with some comet?
Prediction is no novelty in science; and in astronomy least of all is it a novelty.
Mr. Adams's communication was pigeon-holed, and remained in seclusion for eight or nine months.
It was seen once by Bradley also.
He next examined the various hypotheses that had been suggested to account for them:--Was it a failure in the law of gravitation?
If observatories were conducted on these unsystematic and spasmodic principles, they would not be the calm, accurate, satisfactory places they are.
This was, after all, the real tug of war.
If a wrong entry were discovered, it might of course have been due to some clerical error, though that is hardly probable considering the care taken over these things, or it might have been some tailless comet or other, or it might have been the newly found planet.
Something was evidently the matter with the planet.
I do not suppose that Mr. Adams himself could feel all that confidence in his attempted prediction.
Could this planet be inside the orbit of Uranus?
As it was, he missed it altogether.
Meanwhile, Mr. Adams wrote to the Astronomer-Royal several additional communications, making improvements in his theory, and giving what he considered nearer and nearer approximations for the place of the planet. He also now answered quite satisfactorily, but too late, the question about the radius vector sent to him months before.
He first considered whether the discrepancies could be due to errors in the tables or errors in the old observations.
If he failed--well, there was an end of it.
But a sweep for so distant a planet would be no easy matter.
Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that in June, 1846, he published his last paper, and in it announced to the world his theoretical position for the planet.
MODERN OBSERVATIONS.
He did not answer Professor Airy's letter.
If he could, there might be something in his theory.
We know that Uranus had been seen twenty times, and thought to be a star, before its true nature was by Herschel discovered; and Uranus is only about half as far away as Neptune is.
So the Astronomer-Royal thought on reading Leverrier's paper.
But he had no such map.
This part of the work he published in November, 1845.
He thus, without giving an excessive time to the business, accumulated a host of observations, which he intended afterwards to reduce and sift at his leisure.
A brilliant young mathematician, born in Normandy in 1811, had accepted the post of Astronomical Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, then recently founded by Napoleon.
So many unknown quantities: its mass, its distance, its excentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position at any time--nothing known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, some thousand million miles away from it.
And many other phenomena were capable of prediction by accumulated experience.
No, for then it would perturb Saturn and Jupiter also, and they were not perturbed by it.
His first published papers directed attention to his wonderful powers; and the official head of astronomy in France, the famous Arago, suggested to him the unexplained perturbations of Uranus as a worthy object for his fresh and well-armed vigour.
The ordinary problem of perturbation is difficult enough: Given a disturbing planet in such and such a position, to find the perturbations it produces.
If only he had reduced and compared his observations, he would have anticipated Herschel by twelve years.
He introduced several fresh terms into these perturbations, but none of them of sufficient magnitude to do more than slightly lessen the unexplained perturbations.
At once he set to work in a thorough and systematic way.
Altogether it had been seen twenty times.
He restored our liberty; it is reasonable to expect he will defend it.
The pope was thus satisfied, and the Florentines having so far completed the building of their cathedral church of Santa Reparata, which had been commenced long ago, as to enable them to perform divine service in it, requested his holiness to consecrate it.
You know, that without the aid of some powerful ally we are incapable of self-defense, and that none can render us this service more powerfully or faithfully than the duke.
As before observed, Niccolo Fortebraccio was dead.
Cosmo returned without having effected any part of his object.
He had married a daughter of the Count di Poppi, who, at the decease of his son-in-law, held the Borgo San Sepolcro, and other fortresses of that district, and while Niccolo lived, governed them in his name.
But who is so simple as to be surprised at it? for were it in our power, we should do just the same to them, or even worse.
To the Venetians, on the other hand, they averred that this private letter was sufficiently binding, and therefore they ought to be content; for if they could save the count from breaking with his father-in-law, it was well to do so, and that it could be of no advantage either to themselves or the Venetians to publish it without some manifest necessity.
Difficulties arising, the patriarch attacked the Casentino, took Prato Vecchio, and Romena, and offered them also to the Florentines, who refused them likewise, unless the pope would consent they should restore them to the count, to which, after much hesitation, he acceded, on condition that the Florentines should prevail with the Count di Poppi to restore the Borgo to him.
A five-horse power engine ran the pumps when it was in order, and on two occasions proved capable of furnishing juice for the search-light.
Later, I met Colonel Woodruff, and learned that he had been similarly afflicted.
When one young man returned home to continue at college, it was reported that I was a regular Wolf Larsen, and that my whole crew had deserted because I had beaten it to a pulp.
At sea, Thursday, March 19, 1908.
When I discharged an incompetent captain, they said I had beaten him to a pulp.
Ulava, Friday, March 13, 1908.
The Australian specialists agreed that the malady was non-parasitic, and that, therefore, it must be nervous.
Still further, I reasoned that in my own climate of California I had always maintained a stable nervous equilibrium.
At sea, Tuesday, March 17, 1908.
A last word: the test of the voyage.
At sea, Monday, March 16, 1908.
As it was, partly built, she cost four times what she ought to have cost.
To save themselves, the newspapers could not tell the truth about her.
Down in the uttermost South Sea isle this myth obtained, and I paid accordingly.
Mate fever.
Turned back from Sikiana.
No case like it had ever been reported.
Mate and skipper down with fever.
FOOTNOTES
The only hope the doctors had held out to me was a spontaneous cure, and such a cure was mine.
Heavy squalls during the night.
Caught under full sail in tropic squalls, she buried her rail and deck many times, but stubbornly refused to turn turtle.
Big sea.
At sea, Wednesday, March 18, 1908.
But there is a better witness, the one woman who made it from beginning to end.
She steered easily, and she could run day and night, without steering, close-by, full-and-by, and with the wind abeam.
Set course for Sikiana at 4 P.M.
Then I knew.
Mate fever.
It extended from my hands to my feet so that at times I was as helpless as a child.
In passing, I may mention that among the other afflictions that jointly compelled the abandonment of the voyage, was one that is variously called the healthy man’s disease, European Leprosy, and Biblical Leprosy. Unlike True Leprosy, nothing is known of this mysterious malady.
At sea, Friday, March 20, 1908.
Himself an Army surgeon, seventeen Army surgeons sat on his case in the Philippines, and, like the Australian specialists, confessed themselves beaten.
He was about 14 days sick.
There were six feet of head-room below, and she was crown-decked and flush-decked.
Six months overdue in the building, I sailed the shell of her to Hawaii to be finished, the engine lashed to the bottom, building materials lashed on deck.
Then came anarchy.
At sea, Saturday, March 21, 1908.
Wind broke off.
It comes, they know not how.
Mate down with fever.
At daybreak found that the boy Bagua had died during the night, on dysentery.
It did not mend, and it was impossible for me to continue the voyage.
Ulava, Saturday, March 14, 1908.
She was ketch-rigged, carrying flying-jib, jib, fore-staysail, main-sail, mizzen, and spinnaker.
Too thick to see anything.
No doctor has ever claimed a cure for a case of it, though spontaneous cures are recorded.
So back I came.
Ulava, Thursday, March 12, 1908.
Blowing a gale all the time.
It is, they know not what. It goes, they know not why.
These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three state-rooms for these four persons.
At the end of this period, however, the gale had freshened into a hurricane, and our after--sail split into ribbons, bringing us so much in the trough of the water that we shipped several prodigious seas, one immediately after the other.
By the mother who bore you--for the love of Heaven--by your hope of salvation, I implore you to put back for the box!"
My old inquisitiveness now returned.
Stay--hold him--seize him!--he is about to spring overboard!
At length we pulled away.
"Mr. Wyatt, you are mad.
Wyatt's three rooms were in the after-cabin, which was separated from the main one by a slight sliding door, never locked even at night.
There were the two sisters, the bride, and the artist--the latter in one of his customary fits of moody misanthropy.
There was no servant--that was a settled point.
I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter.
We lingered awhile sadly upon our oars, with our eyes riveted upon the spot.
I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary state-room.
At sundown, the gale had sensibly diminished in violence, and as the sea went down with it, we still entertained faint hopes of saving ourselves in the boats.
There was another circumstance, too, which interested me much. During the two wakeful nights in question, and immediately after the disappearance of Mrs. Wyatt into the extra state-room, I was attracted by certain singular cautious, subdued noises in that of her husband. After listening to them for some time, with thoughtful attention, I at length succeeded perfectly in translating their import.
He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm. To these qualities he united the warmest and truest heart which ever beat in a human bosom.
One thing, however, annoyed me not a little.
The young husband was frantic with grief--but circumstances imperatively forbade the deferring his voyage to New York. It was necessary to take to her mother the corpse of his adored wife, and, on the other hand, the universal prejudice which would prevent his doing so openly was well known.
My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery.
She was dressed, however, in exquisite taste--and then I had no doubt that she had captivated my friend's heart by the more enduring graces of the intellect and soul.
This side up. To be handled with care."
Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses?
He had been with me a fellow-student at C-- University, where we were very much together.
The box in question was, as I say, oblong.
I looked, therefore, for the extra baggage.
I called assistance, and, with much difficulty, we brought him to himself.
In conclusion, he fell flat and heavily upon the deck. When I ran to uplift him, to all appearance he was dead.
His wife was, indeed, as she had been represented, a most lovely, and most accomplished woman.
Wyatt's conduct I did not so much regard.
He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort.
Scarcely had we recovered our senses, before the foretopsail went into shreds, when we got up a storm stay--sail and with this did pretty well for some hours, the ship heading the sea much more steadily than before.
He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful!
They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any person on board.
"Did you observe, captain, how suddenly they sank?
My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament.
"He had married," he said, "for love, and for love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love." When I thought of these expressions, on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled.
I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile.
I must except, however, Wyatt and his sisters, who behaved stiffly, and, I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party.
I did not receive the expected message from the captain for nearly a week.
I found that we were to have a great many passengers, including a more than usual number of ladies.
The passengers were, consequently, in high spirits and disposed to be social.
There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will.
It was the first time I had ever known Wyatt to keep from me any of his artistical secrets; but here he evidently intended to steal a march upon me, and smuggle a fine picture to New York, under my very nose; expecting me to know nothing of the matter.
We lowered it without difficulty, although it was only by a miracle that we prevented it from swamping as it touched the water.
That they were virtually separated was clear.
The box did not go into the extra state-room.
For an hour or more, we tried in vain to get rid of it, on account of the prodigious rolling of the ship; and, before we had succeeded, the carpenter came aft and announced four feet of water in the hold.
I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance.
As we were almost constantly on a wind, and the breeze was not a little stiff, the ship heeled to leeward very considerably; and whenever her starboard side was to leeward, the sliding door between the cabins slid open, and so remained, nobody taking the trouble to get up and shut it.
We landed, in fine, more dead than alive, after four days of intense distress, upon the beach opposite Roanoke Island.
The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her "a good-hearted thing, rather indifferent looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar." The great wonder was, how Wyatt had been entrapped into such a match.
It was no business of mine, to be sure, but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve the enigma.
I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend, in Chambers Street, New York.
I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any person on board.
He had opened his oblong box, in order to feast his eyes on the pictorial treasure within.
His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated.
It came at length, however, and I immediately went on board.
On the list were several of my acquaintances, and among other names, I was rejoiced to see that of Mr. Cornelius Wyatt, a young artist, for whom I entertained feelings of warm friendship.
The gale still held on, however, and we saw no signs of its abating. The rigging was found to be ill-fitted, and greatly strained; and on the third day of the blow, about five in the afternoon, our mizzen-mast, in a heavy lurch to windward, went by the board.
The state-rooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one above the other.
For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse.
The captain, for a moment, seemed touched by the earnest appeal of the artist, but he regained his stern composure, and merely said:
Adelaide Curtis, Albany, New York.
"We must talk of these things at some more appropriate time."
After incredible labor we succeeded, at length, in getting the longboat over the side without material accident, and into this we crowded the whole of the crew and most of the passengers.
On the morning of the fourteenth of June (the day in which I first visited the ship), the lady suddenly sickened and died.
Our conversation turned, naturally, upon the disaster, and especially upon the sad fate of poor Wyatt.
The truth is, I could not help regarding Mrs. Wyatt as a decidedly plain-looking woman.
All was now confusion and despair--but an effort was made to lighten the ship by throwing overboard as much of her cargo as could be reached, and by cutting away the two masts that remained.
He did not even introduce me to his wife--this courtesy devolving, per force, upon his sister Marian--a very sweet and intelligent girl, who, in a few hurried words, made us acquainted.
He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit--in fact he was morose--but in him I was prepared for eccentricity.
Then he grew very red--then hideously pale--then, as if highly amused with what I had insinuated, he began a loud and boisterous laugh, which, to my astonishment, he kept up, with gradually increasing vigor, for ten minutes or more.
Fourteen passengers, with the captain, remained on board, resolving to trust their fortunes to the jolly-boat at the stern.
This point, therefore, I considered as sufficiently settled.
About a month after the loss of the "Independence," I happened to meet Captain Hardy in Broadway.
I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box--just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification.
"The salt!" I ejaculated.
Every thing was made snug, alow and aloft; and as the wind steadily freshened, we lay to, at length, under spanker and foretopsail, both double-reefed.
Mrs. Wyatt had been closely veiled; and when she raised her veil, in acknowledging my bow, I confess that I was very profoundly astonished.
Had it taken place only once a year, it would have been a grievance.
Ours are all apple-tarts.
These were the ladies whom Emma found herself very frequently able to collect; and happy was she, for her father's sake, in the power; though, as far as she was herself concerned, it was no remedy for the absence of Mrs. Weston.
I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else; but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see--one of our small eggs will not hurt you.
It would be an interesting, and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.
"A bad thing!
"I have not a fault to find with her person," he replied.
"Be satisfied," said he, "I will not raise any outcry.
"Not at all," cried he; "I am much obliged to you for it.
"Thank you.
Hartfield will only put her out of conceit with all the other places she belongs to.
It has been so many years my province to give advice, that you cannot be surprized, Mr. Knightley, at this little remains of office."
I think her the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have.
CHAPTER V
Emma must do Harriet good: and by supplying her with a new object of interest, Harriet may be said to do Emma good.
She will grow just refined enough to be uncomfortable with those among whom birth and circumstances have placed her home.
"Perhaps you think I am come on purpose to quarrel with you, knowing Weston to be out, and that you must still fight your own battle."
I do not pretend to Emma's genius for foretelling and guessing.
There is an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma.
I am much mistaken if Emma's doctrines give any strength of mind, or tend at all to make a girl adapt herself rationally to the varieties of her situation in life.--They only give a little polish."
Mrs. Weston, I am not to be talked out of my dislike of Harriet Smith, or my dread of its doing them both harm."
I have been seeing their intimacy with the greatest pleasure.
I only name possibilities.
There were wishes at Randalls respecting Emma's destiny, but it was not desirable to have them suspected; and the quiet transition which Mr. Knightley soon afterwards made to "What does Weston think of the weather; shall we have rain?" convinced her that he had nothing more to say or surmise about Hartfield.
"I do not know what your opinion may be, Mrs. Weston," said Mr. Knightley, "of this great intimacy between Emma and Harriet Smith, but I think it a bad thing."
She was always quick and assured: Isabella slow and diffident.
Can you imagine any thing nearer perfect beauty than Emma altogether--face and figure?"
"I think they will neither of them do the other any good."
"Oh! you would rather talk of her person than her mind, would you?
"But I," he soon added, "who have had no such charm thrown over my senses, must still see, hear, and remember.
No, Mr. Knightley, do not foretell vexation from that quarter."
We will not despair, however.
"Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through--and very good lists they were--very well chosen, and very neatly arranged--sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule.
The list she drew up when only fourteen--I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now.
Very well; I shall not attempt to deny Emma's being pretty."
"I either depend more upon Emma's good sense than you do, or am more anxious for her present comfort; for I cannot lament the acquaintance. How well she looked last night!"
Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family.
Mr. Knightley, I shall not allow you to be a fair judge in this case.
You are so much used to live alone, that you do not know the value of a companion; and, perhaps no man can be a good judge of the comfort a woman feels in the society of one of her own sex, after being used to it all her life.
But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma.
We were speaking of it only yesterday, and agreeing how fortunate it was for Emma, that there should be such a girl in Highbury for her to associate with.
"And I, Mr. Knightley, am equally stout in my confidence of its not doing them any harm.
Isabella does not seem more my sister; has never excited a greater interest; perhaps hardly so great.
"Pretty! say beautiful rather.
How very differently we feel!--Not think they will do each other any good!
"Mr. Weston would undoubtedly support me, if he were here, for he thinks exactly as I do on the subject.
I am sure of having their opinions with me."
At ten years old, she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen.
"Very well; I will not plague you any more.
How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?
I wonder what will become of her!"
Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing.--You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished.--You know you could not."
She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.
Pray excuse me; but supposing any little inconvenience may be apprehended from the intimacy, it cannot be expected that Emma, accountable to nobody but her father, who perfectly approves the acquaintance, should put an end to it, so long as it is a source of pleasure to herself.
Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?
And ever since she was twelve, Emma has been mistress of the house and of you all.
"I think her all you describe.
"Not I, indeed.
I can imagine your objection to Harriet Smith.
"Why, to own the truth, I am afraid you are rather thrown away, and that with every disposition to bear, there will be nothing to be borne.
She inherits her mother's talents, and must have been under subjection to her."
Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way.
Mr. Knightley, is not she?"
"I know that you all love her really too well to be unjust or unkind; but excuse me, Mr. Knightley, if I take the liberty (I consider myself, you know, as having somewhat of the privilege of speech that Emma's mother might have had) the liberty of hinting that I do not think any possible good can arise from Harriet Smith's intimacy being made a matter of much discussion among you.
Emma shall be an angel, and I will keep my spleen to myself till Christmas brings John and Isabella. John loves Emma with a reasonable and therefore not a blind affection, and Isabella always thinks as he does; except when he is not quite frightened enough about the children.
I will keep my ill-humour to myself.
"I do not know what I could imagine, but I confess that I have seldom seen a face or figure more pleasing to me than hers.
But I am a partial old friend."
But on the other hand, as Emma wants to see her better informed, it will be an inducement to her to read more herself.
"She always declares she will never marry, which, of course, means just nothing at all.
"You surprize me!
I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good.
In her mother she lost the only person able to cope with her.
She knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing.
But you were preparing yourself to be an excellent wife all the time you were at Hartfield.
But there is nobody hereabouts to attach her; and she goes so seldom from home."
There will be very little merit in making a good wife to such a man as Mr. Weston."
But I have no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for.
She is not the superior young woman which Emma's friend ought to be.
Weston may grow cross from the wantonness of comfort, or his son may plague him."
I do not recommend matrimony at present to Emma, though I mean no slight to the state, I assure you."
I love to look at her; and I will add this praise, that I do not think her personally vain.
It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object.
It is very good advice, and it shall have a better fate than your advice has often found; for it shall be attended to."
I hope, with all my heart, the young man may be a Weston in merit, and a Churchill in fortune.--But Harriet Smith--I have not half done about Harriet Smith.
"It is all right--Miss--Ma'am, I mean.
I spoke to Mrs. Tod yesterday.
But now, at mention of the steam-engine, she looked up and smiled.
He bore up bravely against it; but hard was the struggle between might and right, oppression and staunch resistance.
Or are you too tired?
I had not meant it as a question, or even a doubt.
Better as it was; better a thousand times.
I hoped you were.
In her delight, she so absolutely forgot herself as to address the mother as Miss March; at which long-unspoken name Ursula started, her colour went and came, and her eyes turned restlessly towards the church hard by.
For, all winter, John had found out how many cares come with an attained wish.
Mr. Halifax smiled at such a possibility.
"Heartily welcome, Lord--"
He spoke--as we rarely heard John speak: as worldly cares and worldly injustice cause even the best of men to speak sometimes.
She will be ready to take us all in.
We paused half-way up on a low wall, where I had many a time rested, watching the sunset over Nunneley Hill--watching for John to come home.
"No, indeed."
"It matters not--he is away.
John and Ursula were too anxious to notice it.
"Lady Oldtower asked me about it to-day.
The chief bond between her and Lord Ravenel--or "Anselmo," as he would have us call him--was music.
He is determined to ruin me!"
The boy--no, he was a young man now, but scarcely looked more than a boy--assented silently, as if afraid to utter the name.
At last John said:
He could not now; he had his little daughter in his arms.
You shall go as soon as ever the larch-wood is green."
"When the may was out"--"When Guy found the first robin's nest"--"When the field was all cowslips"--and so on.
But oh, my poor people at Enderley!"
"I will pray for you.
She must not alarm herself."
But you are sure you will not betray me?"
Then in our quiet valley there would be no want, no murmurings, and, above all, no blaming of the master.
He was rather odd looking, being invariably muffled up in a large cloak and a foreign sort of hat.
Boys, shall you like going to Enderley?
But no one ever was to her like her father.
"No, Lord Luxmore shall not ruin me!
I think--though John rarely betrayed it--he had strongly this presentiment of future power, which may often be noticed in men who have carved out their own fortunes.
"Only I, Mr. Halifax--don't be angry with me."
"Yes, John.
Set up your steam-engine."
He was very much dejected--Ursula touched his arm before he even saw her.
Again that sigh--quite ghostly in the darkness.
"Have you offended him?" asked Ursula, who had cast kindly looks on the thin face, which perhaps reminded her of another--now for ever banished from our sight, and his also.
Only outside things, you know. Why need we care for outside things?"
Mrs. Halifax hesitated; said something about "east winds."
His lips moved in a paroxysm of prayer--helpless, parrot-learnt, Latin prayer; yet, being in earnest, it seemed to do him good.
"What do you intend doing?
He taught her to play on the organ, in the empty church close by.
"So we have said for a great many to-morrows, but it is always put off. What do you think, mother--is the little maid strong enough?"
All who kept out of the pale of the national church were denounced as schismatics, deists, atheists--it was all one.
"Nothing of the kind--I must look after it.
"Would not your coming here displease him?" said John, always tenacious of trenching a hair's breadth upon any lawful authority.
They used to find shelter at Luxmore."
Is anybody making father angry?"
"Enderley is just the same, Phineas. Twelve years have made no change--except in us." And he looked fondly at his wife, who stood a little way off, holding firmly on the wall, in a hazardous group, her three boys.
Only let me come and see you--you and your children."
Muriel brightened up before she had been there many days.
He snatched her up, and buried his head in her soft, childish bosom. She kissed him and patted his hair.
"I think every one has," said John, looking round on his apple-cheeked boys; it must have been a sharp eye that detected any decrease of health, or increase of suffering, there.
"Of course I do."
They cannot last--let Lord Luxmore do what he will.
No, the mother never did.
"Not against the law of the great against the little.
And when she had put all her little ones to bed--we, wondering where the mother was, went out towards the little churchyard, and found her quietly sitting there.
Here I heard--or fancied I heard--out of the black shadow behind the loom, a heavy sigh.
But never mind."
And father is always good."
She shook her head.
He used to turn away, almost in pain, from her smile, as she would listen to all he said, then steal off to the harpsichord, and begin that soft, dreamy music, which the children called "talking to angels."
She was racing up the steps, flaming with anger and shame.
Instructions had come to him from General Marlanx, and he could not set them aside at will.
CHAPTER XXII
"There is time enough for that, my dear.
"Oh, you--you miserable wretch!" she cried, hoarse with anger and despair.
You love him, I know, and there is but one way to save him.
What right had you to take that man into your room, a place sacred in the palace of Graustark?
"Don't worry about me, Yetive.
Something dreadful told her that Count Marlanx was on the balcony and at her window, notwithstanding the rain pour.
Ten minutes later Beverly was hearing everything from the lips of the princess, and Marlanx was cursing his way toward the barracks, vengeance in his heart.
How dare you say such a thing to me?" she fiercely cried.
"And pretending to believe this of me, you still ask me to be your wife.
Think well over it.
She has told me everything and I believe her.
Marlanx won't do anything until he hears from me.
What will she say when she learns who was hostess to a common guardsman at the midnight hour?
He's just an ordinary person--like--like--well, like I am.
She shall know what manner of beast you are."
I cannot let you off so easily.
"Would it interest you to know that I saw everything that passed on the balcony last night?
Yetive sat back and marvelled at the manner in which this blithe young American cast out the "blue devils."
My vindication will come, however.
What had he seen or heard?
You see, for a long, long time, I fancied he might be a prince, but he isn't at all.
"One moment, please.
You may depose me, but you cannot ask me to neglect my duty to Graustark.
One word from me, you are disgraced and Baldos dies.
Say the word and he goes free to the hills; decline and his life is not worth a breath of air."
I know I oughtn't to, but what is there to do when one can't help it?
What have you to say to me?"
"I have asked her to be my wife, your highness."
"You disgusting old fool," she hissed, turning upon him as she pulled the big brass knocker on the door.
"Bah!
I come to make terms with you.
"It is sufficiently private here, Count Marlanx.
I have tried to save him for Miss Calhoun's sake--" But her hand was pointing to the door.
Quinnox handed him an envelope, telling him that it was from the princess and that he was to repair at once to the castle, Baldos glanced at the handwriting, and his face lit up proudly.
Baldos could not ride with her again until Marlanx withdrew the order which now obtained, Beverly swallowed her pride and resentment diplomatically, smiled her sweetest upon the distressed colonel, and marched defiantly back to the castle.
She wondered if the windows were locked.
Nightfall brought General Marlanx in from the camps outside the gates.
Her plea that he might once more be assigned to old-time duties found the colonel regretfully obdurate.
Once more she stopped to listen.
I came to have a talk with you--in private," he said meaningly.
You need not look so horrified.
She was almost in tears, impotent with shame and fear.
"I love to go to sleep with the rain pattering outside like that.
"I mean that I saw everything that occurred."
She promptly answered that she did not want to see him and would not.
The fear became oppressive, maddening.
"Now, now,--don't be so high and mighty, dear.
Turning up the light at her dressing-table, she sat down in a state of sudden collapse.
Her first act after breakfasting alone in her room was to seek out Colonel Quinnox, commander of the castle guard.
She shrank back with a great dread in her heart.
"I thought the troops were massing this morning," she said coldly.
Goodness, it's raining cats and dogs!"
Consumed by the fear that the window might open slowly at any moment, she reached forth and clutched the weapon.
The next she was at the windows and the slats were closed with a rattle like a volley of firearms.
Between sobs and feminine maledictions she poured the whole story, in all its ugliness, into the ears of the princess.
Then scorn and indignation rushed in to fill the place of astonishment.
For the present I have only to say that you shall be relieved of the command of my army.
The troubles of the morning seemed to fade away under the warmth of her humor.
"Into my room?" she gasped.
He has gone too far."
He can make it very unpleasant for Baldos, but he shall pay dearly for this insult to you.
I saw him come from your window, and I saw all that passed between you in the balcony.
For hours she shivered and waited for the window to open, dozing away time and again only to come back to wakefulness with a start.
Her better judgment told her that she could be nothing to this debonair knight of the road, yet her heart stubbornly resisted all the arguments that her reason put forth.
He was drawing the net with his own hands, he was spying with his own eyes.
What will the princess say when she hears of last night's merry escapade?
This note says that I am to disregard any command you may give until further notice."
Only he doesn't look so ordinary.
Isn't he handsome, Yetive?
Vagabond though he was, he had conquered where princes had failed.
"My wife?" he said harshly.
Still, it gave her an immense amount of satisfaction to slam the windows loudly, as if in pure defiance.
This is childish.
"Good God!" gasped Beverly, crushed by the brutality of it all.
Your honor and his life!
I shall go to the princess myself.
You are not the wife of Baldos," he added significantly.
"I would sooner die.
"You have threatened her, Count Marlanx."
She wrote joyously, telling that she had received just what I had asked for, and in every detail as I had prayed.
Were I to attempt to write the history of the months that followed, a long chapter would be required; but my testimony along this line is surely sufficient.
Causes of Failure in Prayer
TO HIS PRAISE!
Tears stood in her eyes as my daughter gave the letter back, saying: "Mother, we don't trust God half enough!"
I'll ask them to give it to you."
"There is nothing too great for his power, And nothing too small for his love!"
The day came when this child and myself took possession of our new home.
1.
We decided on the latter course.
"They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness."
I am now writing these closing words in our God-given home, built on this beautiful site, one of the most lovely spots to be found in China. So from this quiet mountain retreat, a monument of what God can give in answer to prayer, this little book of Prayer Testimonies is sent forth.
1.
3.
As the past has been reviewed, and God's wonderful faithfulness recalled, there has come a great sense of regret that I have not trusted God more, and asked more of him, both for my family and the Chinese. Yes, it is truly wonderful!
The request was a complicated one, including several definite details.
Conditions of Prevailing Prayer
Praise his name!
When he heard we had failed to get a site, he said:
And before we reached the station the assurance had come that we would get a place.
My boy did not know of this prayer.
On going there to get a site for our home, though we looked for more than a week, we could find no place.
He had begun making arrangements for this step, when he had a fall from his horse, which caused him to be invalided home to Canada, where he was kept till the close of the war.
Months later a call came for volunteers, to fill the great gaps made at the time of the first use of gas.
Only two ways seemed open to us.
That is, so that I could stand up before an audience and not bring discredit to my Master.
Just before they were to leave he was again sent for from Headquarters, and told he was to go to the Canadian Base in France as adjutant.
It was my first experience of trusting quite alone for money.
Soon all were joining in the chase after the bird, which flew or hopped in front or just above, and sometimes on the ground almost within reach.
But I was kept back from doing so; and though I had a week or more of severe testing, peace of mind and the assurance that God would supply my need, came at length.
The incidents related impressed me deeply.
Not for a moment did I think there was anything in the purse till my brother said: "You foolish girl, why don't you open it?" I opened the purse, and found it contained a check for fifty dollars!
The time came when two diverse paths lay before me--one to England, as an artist; one to China, as a missionary.
EARLY LESSONS IN THE LIFE OF FAITH
In "China's Spiritual Needs and Claims" the writer told many instances of God's gracious provision in answer to prayer.
Circumstances made a definite decision most difficult.
This incident has ever remained peculiarly precious; for it seemed to us a seal of God upon the new life opening before us.
It was as if God spoke the words directly to me.
This unexpected and timely draft proved to be a bonus, which did not occur again.
The thought came--if you cannot trust God for this, when Hudson Taylor could trust for so much more, are you worthy to be a missionary?
But, as I remembered Dr. Corbett's testimony, and my own clear call, I felt that to go back would be to go against my own conscience.
The experience of thirty years has confirmed this belief.
Again and again he tried to do so, but failed hopelessly each time.
Thinking my darling was gone, I hastened for a light, for it was dark; but on examining the child's face I found that he had sunk into a deep, sound, natural sleep, which lasted most of the night. The following day he was practically well of the dysentery.
They found themselves at last left alone, their lives spared, but everything gone.
We had heard of missionaries in India, China, and elsewhere, who had worked for many years without gaining converts; but we did not believe that this was God's will for us.
Money and goods were returned, and from that time the violent opposition of the people ceased.
His coming at such an opportune moment filled the hearts of their heathen enemies with fear.
After several days' fight for the child's life came the realization, one evening, that the angel of death was at hand.
III
The people did not know what he could do, and moreover they were afraid to trust themselves into his hands.
So what could I do?
The first was Wang Feng-ao, who came with us into Honan as Mr. Goforth's personal teacher.
And as I lay there ill and weak, the temptation came to yield.
During our fourth year in China, when we were spending the hot season at the coast, our little son, eighteen months old, was taken very ill with dysentery.
Space permits the mention of but two of these earliest converts.
Some hours later he returned, his face beaming with joy.
For many years his business had been that of a public story-teller; but when Mr. Goforth came across him he was reduced to an utter wreck through opium smoking. He accepted the Gospel, but for a long time seemed too weak to break off the opium habit.
I therefore determined to do as Dr. Corbett had done--leave myself in the Lord's hands--whether for life or for death. This happened more than twenty years ago, and since then I have had very little trouble from that dread disease.
I decided to investigate, but first I lifted my head to fill my lungs with the pure, invigorating night air of the mountains.
My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon.
I looked first at my lifeless clay there upon the floor of the cave and then down at myself in utter bewilderment; for there I lay clothed, and yet here I stood but naked as at the minute of my birth.
I remember that I hoped they would make short work of me as I did not particularly relish the thought of the innumerable things they might do to me if the spirit prompted them.
There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.
As I stood thus meditating, I turned my gaze from the landscape to the heavens where the myriad stars formed a gorgeous and fitting canopy for the wonders of the earthly scene.
Unable longer to resist the temptation to escape this horrible place I leaped quickly through the opening into the starlight of a clear Arizona night.
The sound which had frightened them was not repeated, but it had been sufficient as it was to start me speculating on the possible horror which lurked in the shadows at my back.
My carbine was in its boot, strapped to my saddle, and as my horse had wandered off I was left without means of defense.
And then another savage face appeared, and a third and fourth and fifth, craning their necks over the shoulders of their fellows whom they could not pass upon the narrow ledge.
Their wild cries echoed in the canyon for a short time, and then all was still once more.
Several times I thought I heard faint sounds behind me as of somebody moving cautiously, but eventually even these ceased, and I was left to the contemplation of my position without interruption.
CHAPTER II
My breath was coming in quick, short gasps, cold sweat stood out from every pore of my body, and the ancient experiment of pinching revealed the fact that I was anything other than a wraith.
It was then, for the first time, that I noticed a slight vapor filling the cave.
There also came to my nostrils a faintly pungent odor, and I could only assume that I had been overcome by some poisonous gas, but why I should retain my mental faculties and yet be unable to move I could not fathom.
My first thought was, is this then death!
The fellow, instead of approaching, merely stood and stared; his eyes bulging and his jaw dropped.
And then something gave, there was a momentary feeling of nausea, a sharp click as of the snapping of a steel wire, and I stood with my back against the wall of the cave facing my unknown foe.
So frantic were their efforts to escape from the unseen thing behind me that one of the braves was hurled headlong from the cliff to the rocks below.
As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination--it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment.
I lay facing the opening of the cave and where I could see the short stretch of trail which lay between the cave and the turn of the cliff around which the trail led.
My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space.
But I could not well believe this, as I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs from the exertion of my efforts to release myself from the anaesthesis which had held me.
I was now thoroughly awake, but as unable to move a muscle as though turned to stone.
The crisp, fresh mountain air outside the cave acted as an immediate tonic and I felt new life and new courage coursing through me.
THE ESCAPE OF THE DEAD
Have I indeed passed over forever into that other life!
I attempted to spring to my feet but was horrified to discover that my muscles refused to respond to my will.
As I did so I saw stretching far below me the beautiful vista of rocky gorge, and level, cacti-studded flat, wrought by the moonlight into a miracle of soft splendor and wondrous enchantment.
I reasoned with myself that I had lain helpless for many hours within the cave, yet nothing had molested me, and my better judgment, when permitted the direction of clear and logical reasoning, convinced me that the noises I had heard must have resulted from purely natural and harmless causes; probably the conformation of the cave was such that a slight breeze had caused the sounds I heard.
To be held paralyzed, with one's back toward some horrible and unknown danger from the very sound of which the ferocious Apache warriors turn in wild stampede, as a flock of sheep would madly flee from a pack of wolves, seems to me the last word in fearsome predicaments for a man who had ever been used to fighting for his life with all the energy of a powerful physique.
Fear is a relative term and so I can only measure my feelings at that time by what I had experienced in previous positions of danger and by those that I have passed through since; but I can say without shame that if the sensations I endured during the next few minutes were fear, then may God help the coward, for cowardice is of a surety its own punishment.
Each face was the picture of awe and fear, but for what reason I did not know, nor did I learn until ten years later.
As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron.
That there were still other braves behind those who regarded me was apparent from the fact that the leaders passed back whispered word to those behind them.
As I came back to myself I glanced at Sola, who had witnessed this encounter and I was surprised to note a strange expression upon her usually expressionless countenance.
These he presented to me with a few unintelligible words, and a bearing at once respectful and menacing.
In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.
That it denoted jealousy I could not say, and yet, judging all things by mundane standards as I still did, I felt it safer to affect indifference in the matter until I learned more surely Sola's attitude toward the object of my solicitude.
But where to go, and how, was as much of a puzzle to me as the age-old search for the spring of eternal life has been to earthly men since the beginning of time.
After they had retired for the night it was customary for the adults to carry on a desultory conversation for a short time before lapsing into sleep, and now that I could understand their language I was always a keen listener, although I never proffered any remarks myself.
"She has never harmed us, nor would she should we have fallen into her hands.
"When," asked one of the women, "will we enjoy the death throes of the red one? or does Lorquas Ptomel, Jed, intend holding her for ransom?"
This wild outbreak on the part of Sola so greatly surprised and shocked the other women, that, after a few words of general reprimand, they all lapsed into silence and were soon asleep.
"I see nothing wrong with my expression of interest in this red woman," retorted Sola.
They make the powder, the cartridges, the firearms; in fact everything of value is produced by the females.
They live at peace with all their fellows, except when duty calls upon them to make war, while we are at peace with none; forever warring among our own kind as well as upon the red men, and even in our own communities the individuals fight amongst themselves.
Later, Sola, with the aid of several of the other women, remodeled the trappings to fit my lesser proportions, and after they completed the work I went about garbed in all the panoply of war.
I LEARN THE LANGUAGE
I was not yet proficient with all the weapons, but my great familiarity with similar earthly weapons made me an unusually apt pupil, and I progressed in a very satisfactory manner.
The two ladies went near to pat the horse, and then they noticed Diamond on the box.
Professor Bumper announced that he would see to it that the man's family did not want, and this seemed to give general satisfaction, especially to a brother who was with the party.
Tom and Ned kicked outside the bat the former had killed in their tent, and then both went back to their cots.
"Nor I. Wonder if we're the only lazy birds." He looked from the tent in time to see Mr. Damon and the professor emerging.
The explosive electric bullet went true to its mark, and the great animal turned over in a death struggle.
Their bites, too, may be poisonous for all I know."
"We go two more days in the canoes," the guide answered, "and then we shall find the mules waiting for us at a place called Hidjio.
And he's warning us to be careful.
The journey up the river was not very eventful.
If there's a fight I want to be in it, bats or anything else.
"Well, we're on our way once more," remarked Tom as again they were in the canoes being paddled up the river.
"I suppose that is so."
No use to go there at night when all is dark."
"Gone back?"
"If it's a vampire it'll----"
There was a wild scream of agony and then a dark arm shot up above the red foam.
"What has happened, Ned?"
"Well a man has hands with which to use weapons, but a helpless quadruped has not.
"Bless my time-table!" cried Mr. Damon.
We've only got started.
"That isn't a shadow.
Here, you have a light like mine.
"Yes.
Mingled with them were calls of Jacinto, partly in Spanish, partly in the Indian tongue and partly in English.
After breakfast, while the Indians were making ready the canoes, Professor Bumper, who, in a previous visit to Central America, had become interested in the subject, made a brief examination of some of the dead bats.
"This," and he pointed to the nose-leaves, "is the sucking apparatus.
I've had enough of bats--and mosquitoes," he added, as he slapped at his face and neck.
The two men had clubs and were striking about in the half darkness, for now the Indians had set several fires aglow. And in the gleams, constantly growing brighter as more fuel was piled on, the young inventor and his chum saw a weird sight.
The accident cast a little damper over the party, and there was a feeling of gloom among the Indians.
"What's the row?"
We have killed too many of them," and he looked about on the ground where many of the uncanny creatures were still twitching in the death struggle.
"Bless my skin!
"Bless my speedometer!" cried Mr. Damon, "If those beasts or birds--whatever they are--come back I'll go and hide in the river and take my chances with the alligators!"
At that instant Tom flashed a pocket electric lamp he had taken from beneath his pillow and in the gleam of it he and Ned saw fluttering about the tent some dark, shadow-like form, at the sight of which Tom's chum cried:
Finally the scientist said:
"They may--there is no telling."
I guess we're a bit soft, Ned, though we had hard enough work in that tunnel-digging."
"Look out!" yelled Ned.
"Hello!" cried Tom, awakening the next morning to find the sun streaming into his tent.
"I don't know, but Jacinto is yelling something about vampires!"
"In the next village.
The Indians made camp as usual, the goods being brought from the canoes and piled up near the tents.
What does it mean?
"We must have overslept, Ned.
"Shadow!" yelled Tom, unconsciously adding to the din that seemed to pervade every part of the camp.
There was not an Indian in sight, and no evidence of Jacinto.
But the increasing lights, and the attacks made by the Indians and the white travelers turned the tide of battle, and, with silent flappings of their soft, velvety wings, the bats flew back to the jungle whence they had emerged.
"These vampire bats sometimes depopulate a whole village."
The bat makes an opening in the skin with its sharp teeth and proceeds to extract the blood.
It's substance. It's a monster bat, and here goes for a strike at it!"
Great bats they were, and a dangerous species, if Jacinto was to be believed.
"An alligator is after him!" yelled Ned.
"It's all in the day's work.
"This is a true blood-sucking bat," went on the professor.
Then the villagers come back.
Tom fired bullet after bullet from his wonderful rifle into the spot, but though he killed some of the alligators this did not save the man's life.
That's the shadow!
"It won't do anything to me!" shouted Tom, as he struck the creature, knocking it into the corner of the tent with a thud that told it must be completely stunned, if not killed.
"We are safe--for the present!" exclaimed Jacinto with a sigh of relief.
"I rather think they've gone back," was the professor's dry comment.
From then on we travel by land until--well until you get to the place where you are going.
If this is a sample of the wilds of Honduras, give me the tameness of Shopton."
Then night settled down.
A FALSE FRIEND
"It is a raid by vampire bats!" was all Tom and Ned could distinguish. "We shall have to light fires to keep them away, if we can succeed. Every one grab up a club and strike hard!"
"I am leaving that part to you."
His body was not seen again, though search was made for it.
I hope not!
What has becomes of our friend Jacinto?"
Oshtoo!"
"Do you think they will come back?" asked Tom.
"That was some night!
"Oh, I have a map, showing where I want to begin some excavations," was the answer.
"I hardly know," and Professor Bumper looked to Jacinto to answer.
Have you thought what may be in them--great heathen temples, idols, perhaps?"
Tom turned in time to see the poor fellow's struggles, and at the same time there was a swirl in the water and a black object shot forward.
The king danced with her.
The king was angry.
This is what it said:
He called her to him and examined it carefully.
"What can I do about it?" asked the page, yawning.
'Tis fate--'tis fate--'tis fate."
"You must steal this babe this very day and put it to death," said the king sternly.
By this time she weighs about eighteen pounds, and measures the length of a grown man's leg from hip to heel; her dorsal fin measures more than two hand-breadths, and it would take a large hand to span her back.
A marked fish, one of his oldest, perhaps his biggest!
He seizes the rod and lifts it.
Then the terns snap them up, and put them down their little red throats.
He notes the smallest movement of his captive.
She blinks her cunning eyes, and their blue-black pupils become large and round.
She sleeps and lets all her nerves and muscles rest; only her gills and fins keep working mechanically.
The boat quivered, and the angler started and let the main-sail down, while the black wind from the frayed clouds raged under the heavens.
It is still in full vigour, and there are many water-plants and stalks in the way.
Will he be able to draw it from the deep water with his fine, fragile line?
The fight and nervous excitement recommence--the quick, exciting contest between man and fish.
Towards evening the sky becomes overcast and the troubled water looks thick and muddy.
No one sees the accident, and his heavy waders drag him quickly down.
They gleam, they sparkle, they flash; and great, heavy, September clouds drift over the lake.
The storm has cleared her blood; she needs food and exercise, and is biting madly.
It reminds the fisherman of a heron he once shot at, and which sent out a shower of such half-dead little fish.
It was so natural for Grim to be once more splashing freely in the lake; it was so natural for her to be feeding on roach again.
All at once, Grim leaps out of the water high into the air, so that her golden, black-streaked body, with the panther-like spots and the trickling water-drops, casts a gleam over the lake.
He has anchored off his favourite bank, a narrow reef which, in the shelter of the wood, runs far out into the lake.
Day after day she stays thus, without feeling hunger, or any desire for action.
His big body is perspiring with his exertions, and he has to stand with his legs wide apart and his feet firmly fixed whenever the mighty fish gives one of its sudden jerks.
At such times the angler may try to tempt her with spoon or other artificial bait, or with live fish, but she will not touch them!
She feels indisposed and ill, and remains motionless in her watery lair.
The angler chooses to let it go in the hope of picking it up on the other side.
Alas, it is another of those prickly fish, she notices at once, one of those confounded tit-bits that are only to be looked at, but which neither teeth nor throat are ever glad to deal with; and she opens her mouth and chokes and spits.
They want to hide because they feel weak; they do not want to go down into deep water to Oa.
But when the weather calms down and the waves once more grow less, she comes to life again, and is then well and rested.
And then, among the rocks of the reef, the line breaks; the angler's body drifts in among the reeds.
One tempting little decoy-fish after another may whisk past her nose, but both palate and stomach easily withstand the temptations that are placed before her surfeited eyes.
A little later a whirlpool appears on the seething water, and he catches a glimpse of a dorsal fin with the hinder point missing.
The line is running out at full speed. He carefully checks it, making the resistance stronger and stronger, so as to prevent the fish from breaking the line with a sudden jerk.
She loves peace and quiet, and feels very irritable under the influence of others.
They are good Samaritans to all the half-dead bait he from time to time throws overboard.
She darts hither and thither, turning and twisting.
She should have learned a lesson from her adventure in the air with the man, but the qualifications were lacking.
It was hard work getting out to it!
The reel shrieks and hums as if a giant grasshopper sat chirping in it.
Involuntarily the angler's attention is attracted to them.
She has room for more fish, mountains of fish!
She was in water, and with a stroke of her tail she made for the bottom.
With a jerk of her body she comes nearer, and is now right in the whirlpool of bleak and perch.
Colours dance before her eyes as the gullet opens and closes, trying to draw in the perch's head.
The angry waves stir up carrion from the bottom, or carry it out from bridge and bank.
Her eyes gleam, and her thin lips quiver with insatiable desire.
No throwing this one back again!
Who knows, some day perhaps a young one might drop out!
Now her flecked sides and black back make a distinct stripe in the water.
And to think that Heaven should at last reward him for his magnanimity! For the mark on the dorsal fin showed distinctly that this fish had been in his hands before.
What a haul!
He saw the pike throw up her head, and was glad to find her still as lively as ever.
Impossible!
She tries again.
She scowled at them, but although her stomach was empty, she felt no desire to eat.
There goes a bleak right before her nose!
She quickly takes a better hold, even letting her prehensile teeth come into play, and the long board-like tongue warp in co-operation; but no matter what she does, or how wide she opens her mouth, her efforts are in vain: the high-backed one refuses to move beyond a certain point.
The queer fish with two tails attracts her.
A pike that has gorged itself on a giant perch!
She cannot get sufficient water over her gills, and what does filter into her mouth in spite of the gag, is needed by the gag itself.
She dares not venture up to the surface.
He is still in the pike's throat, and cannot get away, for he has his twelve stiffest dorsal spines bored into his enemy's palate; and the more he worries and works with his dangerous opponent, the deeper and more firmly do the spines fix themselves.
Just as the pike's attack is at its height, the Rasper suddenly raises his twelve-spined dorsal fin.
It is impossible for her to bear this suffocation any longer; she must have air; and in ungovernable rage she begins to lash out with her tail.
Life was once more coursing through her veins.
She would be all right there--for the present!
A cunning expression comes into Oa's little eyes.
She must wait patiently until her perquisites descend.
For the third time she was as it were in the heron's throat!
Like a huge eel she wriggles up to the surface, where she lies in wait, slowly drifting with the current.
The torture in the spiked barrel is over.
She can feel it breathing inside her mouth; incessantly, with every indication of excitement, its gill-covers open and close, and take the lion's share of the water.
The spines begin to hurt her, and her mouthful on the whole to incommode her.
Thus the combat continues.
She also hears the splashing of the bird, and shouts and strange thumps on the boat-planks; and she keeps her blue-black pupils fixed expectantly upon the great dark shadow up there.
Oh!
It is corpse-weather today.
Snap!
So there is nothing to be done, but give it up!
Snap!
And it WAS right, John!
"Look, John!" said Caleb, exultingly, "look here!
Very close!
"Look at him!
I have ever since believed she did, and now I am sure she did."
"This is worse than all."
"Edward!
And here's the Bride!
"Mr.
"No; keep there, please, John!
"Mr.
"Is it over?" cried Dot.
Oh! here she is!
You had no suspicion of me; neither had--had she," pointing to Dot, "until I whispered in her ear at that fireside, and she so nearly betrayed me."
"You must know that when I left here a boy," said Edward, "I was in love, and my love was returned.
All honour to the little creature for her transports!
It would be small comfort, but it would be some, I thought, and on I came.
But what is this?
You understand me; that's enough.
But I knew mine, and I had a passion for her."
"If my boy in the Golden South Americas was alive----!" said Caleb, trembling.
And now you hear them stopping at the garden-gate!
Hark! how the Cricket joins the music with its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp; and how the kettle hums!
Staunch Cricket on the Hearth!
Not quite yet.
"Oh!
It will strike soon.
"I heard as much last night.
"Not meaning it, my child," said Caleb.
"He is an old man, worn with care and work.
Poor child!
The toy merchant gazed at him in astonishment.
Poor Dot!
All left out of sight!
Last night she saw him, in the interview we witnessed. It was wrong.
"The better for us both," returned the Carrier.
Ah!
"And you'll remember what I have said?"
"She made a show of it," said Tackleton.
"I knew it!" cried Bertha, proudly.
"Those presents that I took such care of; that came almost at my wish, and were so dearly welcome to me," she said, trembling; "where did they come from?
The toy merchant gazed at him without winking.
He is a spare, dejected, thoughtful, grey-haired man.
I have a confession to make to you, my darling!"
She turned her wonder-stricken face towards him, and repeated "Cruel!"
"You'll say so presently.
"I told her you would not be there, mum," whispered Caleb.
She leaves me without blame, and she will live so I am sure.
Dot saw she knew already, and was silent.
"It is a poor place, Bertha; very poor and bare indeed.
"I am a plain, rough man," pursued the Carrier "with very little to recommend me.
"A confession, father?"
"Very much as if you meant it."
Her afflicted father hung his head, and offered no reply but in his penitence and sorrow.
Hear me kindly!
Hah!"
Did you send them?"
"Father!" said Bertha, hesitating.
You've a quick ear, Bertha.
"No."
"Mary!" said Bertha.
She had entered shortly after Tackleton, and had remained there.
"Bertha, my dear!" said Caleb.
As if his child should comfort him, Bertha."
"Good-bye.
Caleb managed to articulate, "My Bertha!"
"I often thought that though I wasn't good enough for her, I should make her a kind husband, and perhaps know her value better than another; and in this way I reconciled it to myself, and came to think it might be possible that we should be married.
I give you joy!"
"No hand can make the clock which will strike again for me the hours that are gone," replied the Carrier with a faint smile.
Never.
If, yesterday, I'd have struck that man down at a blow, who dared to breathe a word against her, to-day I'd set my foot upon his face, if he was my brother!"
"It's enough to dead and bury the Baby, so it is if you please."
She never looked at Tackleton, but fixed her eyes upon her husband.
Mary, look across the room to where we were just now--to where my father is--my father, so compassionate and loving to me--and tell me what you see."
She will.
Are they wheels?"
"Oh, quite!"
But, Bertha, I have seen him many times before, and striving hard in many ways, for one great sacred object.
Good-bye!
"She made such a show of it, that, to tell you the truth, it was the origin of my misgivings."
Now, it's over!"
This was tapped, and served regularly to all hands, which was much preferable to spirits, as it gave them strength without intoxication.
Six months had been spent in preparations for this fete, at which an emperor and twenty-five kings assisted and attended in person with all their body-guards, standards, and standard-bearers, were present.
The alternative was dreadful, as famine presented them on the one hand, and shipwreck on the other.
They have a governor of their own nation, but pay large tribute to the Dutch.
Some dead bodies floating down the canal struck our boat, which had a very disagreeable effect on the minds of our brave fellows, whose nerves were reduced to a very weak state from sickness.
They have even contrived to carry canals to the top of a mountain.
The exclusive trade of sandlewood was valuable and convenient to the Dutch; but, from the vast extent of territory lately acquired in India, we have plenty of that commodity without going to the Dutch market.
Immediately on our coming to anchor, we were agreeably surprised to find our tender here which we had so long given up for lost.
He went passenger in the ship with us to Batavia.
That domestic strife serves likewise amply to supply the slave trade from the prisoners of both parties.
The town is regular and beautiful, and the houses are built in a style of architecture, which has given loose to the most sportive fancy.
In many places of the coast of South Wales, they found very good coal; a circumstance that was not before known.
But should the piquet be negligent in their duty, and suffer the main body to be surprised, the delinquents are severely punished.
Our seven-barrelled pieces made great havoc amongst them.
I could dwell with pleasure for an age in praise of this honest Dutchman; it is the tribute of a grateful heart, and his due.
Close to the Dutch town is a Chinese town and temple.
We met nothing particular in passing the island of Sumatra, but experienced great death and sickness in going through the Straits of Sunda; and after a tedious passage, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope.
They drew bills on the British government, and were supplied with every necessary they stood in need of.
This is the third time he has had an opportunity of extending his hospitality to shipwrecked Englishmen.
The Governor, Mynheer Vanion, relates a circumstance that happened to him while hunting.
The Dutch seamen were struck with horror, and went below; and the ship was preserved from destruction by the manly exertion of our English tars, whose souls seemed to catch redoubled ardour from the tempest's rage.
One of the petty princes, in settling his account with a merchant of this place, was some dollars short of cash.
They had been supplied with a quadrant, a compass, a chart, and some small arms and ammunition, from a Dutch ship that lay there; and the expedition was conducted by the Governor's fisherman, whose time of transportation was expired.
Our men were now beginning to regain their strength; and Captain Dadleberg of the Rembang Indiaman was making every possible dispatch with his ship to carry us to Batavia.
In crossing a shallow part of the river, his black boy was snapped up by an alligator; but the Governor immediately dismounted, rescued the boy out of his mouth, and slew him.
As he was preceded by music, and colours flying, every one turned out to see him. Amongst the rest was a captive king in chains, who was employed blowing the bellows to our armourer, whilst he was forging bolts and fetters for our prisoners and convicts.
On the 6th of October, we embarked on board the Rembang Dutch Indiaman, taking with us the prisoners and convicts.
The first toast after dinner was the dead king's health.
In our passage from this to the Cape, before we left Java, one of the convicts had jumped over board in the night, and swam to the Dutch arsenal at Honroost.
They dragged along the coast of New South Wales; and as often as the hostile nature of the savage natives would permit, hauled their boat up at night, and slept on shore.
The boors, or country-farmers, are a species of the human race, so gigantic and superior to the rest of mankind, in point of size and constitution, that they may be called nondescripts.
The compass of my work will not allow me to be particular; but I must instance one among many others.
On the 26th, saw the island of Java; and on the 30th, anchored at Samarang.
At stated periods it makes a noise exactly like a cuckoo clock.
The Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, and all the Europeans were invited.
"I expect you to visit a woman who has only to say the word and to be your daughter-in-law," I interposed.
I knew my power over her, and used it (as any man in my place would have used it) without scruple.
She looked at me, and spoke to me with a severity which was rare indeed in my experience of her.
"If you loved me as faithfully as I love you," I said, "you would understand why I am here.
Shall we say the day after to-morrow?"
Go, I implore you, before Van Brandt comes back.
"Never.
I closed the door and seated myself by her side.
"He asked me who you were, last night on our way home.
"His letter tells me," I said, "that he is Mr. Van Brandt."
"Let me think."
No words can tell how the name jarred on me, spoken by his lips. For the first time for years past my mind went back to Mary Dermody and Greenwater Broad.
He came back and said, 'Mr.
She suddenly approached me, and fixed her eyes in eager scrutiny on my face.
"Is it possible that you expect me to visit a woman, who, by her own confession--"
"A slice of mutton, you know, and a bottle of good wine.
Instead of answering her question, I drew her nearer to me--I returned to the forbidden subject of my love.
"Write down the name and address," she said resignedly.
"There must be an end to this.
Her hand closed on mine, a low sigh fluttered on her lips.
"I am going to ask your pity for a man whose whole heart is yours, whose whole life is bound up in you."
Should I love you as I love you, if you were really unworthy of me?"
"What do you say to a quiet little dinner here?" he asked.
"My dear sir, how good this is of you!
I positively refused to leave her.
They only heightened her color; they only added a new rapture to the luxury of looking at her.
"Will you write it?"
She struggled to free her hand; I still held it.
"I am sure she would if I asked her."
"I am sorry not to be able to accept your invitation," I said, as we walked together to the door.
"Why not?
"Look at me," I pleaded, "and tell me the truth.
I must beg you and Mrs. Van Brandt to excuse me."
"Never!" she answered, crouching low at my feet.
What similarity was perceivable in the sooty London lodging-house to remind me of the bailiff's flower-scented cottage by the shores of the lake?
His eyes twinkled cunningly.
She considered with herself once more.
He had his hat on.
"Must I remind you, for the first time in your life, of what is due to your mother?" she asked.
"You cannot possibly have received my letter, or you have not read it?"
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
Mary and you partners--eh?
"Do you mean, George, that you have offered her marriage?"
The next moment I heard the rustling of Mrs. Van Brandt's dress on the stairs.
"I was thinking of you at the opera last night.
Do you know who that man is who has just left the house?
"I can't tell you--I daren't tell you."
"Surely I am not asking what is unworthy of you, if I ask that?"
"There must be some mistake," she said.
"I am going to try if I can recover my place in your estimation," I said.
I drew closer to her.
"To-morrow, at this time."
She looked at me wildly, with a cry of terror.
I am speaking in earnest."
Had she any open brutality to dread from Van Brandt as soon as my back was turned?
I made no reply.
"Perhaps you will give me another chance?"
When he mentioned the "old friend" and the "rubber of whist," her face expressed the strongest emotions of shame and disgust. The next moment (when she had heard him fix the date of the dinner for "the day after to-morrow") her features became composed again, as if a sudden sense of relief had come to her.
I told her the truth as honestly as I have told it here.
"Yes."
Asking myself these questions, I accepted my invitation, and left the house with a heavy heart.
Have you never once thought of me in all the time that has passed since we last met?"
Kiss me for the last time."
She sat down by the table, and, leaning her arms on it, covered her face with her hands.
I love you!"
Good morning."
"Are men all alike?" I heard her say.
"She has said No, because there is some obstacle in her way.
"And Van Brandt's letter--you have read that too?"
The color deepened in my mother's face.
She had roused my jealousy.
Mrs. Van Brandt is at home. Mrs. Van Brandt will be delighted.
"Love you!" she repeated.
She started to her feet, and looked round her incredulously, as if doubting whether she had rightly heard and rightly interpreted my last words.
MRS. VAN BRANDT AT HOME.
I rose and took my hat to quiet her.
I spoke as recklessly to her as she had spoken to me.
As I lifted my hand to ring the house bell, the door was opened from within, and no less a person than Mr. Van Brandt himself stood before me.
My answers seemed not only to have distressed, but to have perplexed her.
The bare suspicion of it made my blood boil.
She tried to get up and leave me.
I told him I knew nothing of your position in the world.
The serious nature of the emergency had its effect.
"Have you a mother living?" she asked.
"Do you know what made him invite you to this house?"
The prize at the top of a greasy pole which is continually slipping from one's grasp.
The birthright of contentment.
Let it be supposed that messages were sent off to the different heavenly bodies.
"The stars," though appearing small to us because of their immense distance, are in reality great and shining suns.
Birthdays.
The Cuckoo.
The goal erected for the human race, which few reach, being too heavily handicapped.
Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name, may become traitors to their faith.
A bright and beautiful butterfly, which many chase but few can take.
Keep up your head and your heart, Your hands and your heels keep down, Press your knees close to your horse's side, And your elbows close to your own.
Oscar, I shall behold him! People had just emerged from Ossian; elegance was Scandinavian and Caledonian; the pure English style was only to prevail later, and the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the battle of Waterloo.
She alone, of all the four, was not called "thou" by a single one of them.
A smoky tap-room presented itself; they entered, and the remainder of their confidential colloquy was lost in shadow.
No one knew more than that.
An amour for him; passion for her.
Who can say?
Being thus ironical and bald, he was the leader.
Such loves are always accompanied by such friendships.
But in proportion as his youth disappeared, gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly. He was dilapidated but still in flower.
The streets of the Latin quarter, filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of their dream.
His youth, which was packing up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order, bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire.
The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends.
In short, the eclogue took place.
"I am your mother." Then the old woman opened the sideboard, and ate and drank, had a mattress which she owned brought in, and installed herself.
She had never borne any other name.
The result had been Favourite.
Is it possible that irony is derived from it?
These young men were insignificant; every one has seen such faces; four specimens of humanity taken at random; neither good nor bad, neither wise nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor fools; handsome, with that charming April which is called twenty years.
She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands. As for Zephine, she had conquered Fameuil by her roguish and caressing little way of saying "Yes, sir."
His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked by a watering in one eye.
They are overwhelmed with splendor of all that is immaculate and inaccessible.
These badly guarded souls listen.
She met her father from time to time, and he bowed to her.
Iron is an English word.
Why Fantine?
Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the stones which are thrown at them.
Favourite, Dahlia, Zephine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women, perfumed and radiant, still a little like working-women, and not yet entirely divorced from their needles; somewhat disturbed by intrigues, but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil, and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall in woman.
Not to conceal anything, the three first were more experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.
Burn for him the perfumes of Araby! exclaimed romance.
We will confine ourselves to saying that the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.
She had never known father or mother.
This human creature had entered life in just this way.
This cross and pious old mother never spoke to Favourite, remained hours without uttering a word, breakfasted, dined, and supped for four, and went down to the porter's quarters for company, where she spoke ill of her daughter.
The result of these shades was a dazzling pleasure party which took place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four young girls.
He had had a piece rejected at the Vaudeville.
It was he who possessed the wit.
Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly preserved.
Solomon would reply that love forms a part of wisdom.
Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the unknown.
Her father was an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart, who went out to give lessons in spite of his age.
This professor, when he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident.
At the age of ten, Fantine quitted the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood.
Tholomyes was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on Mount Sainte-Genevieve.
CHAPTER II--A DOUBLE QUARTETTE
She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.
She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal name; the Church no longer existed.
One morning an old woman with the air of a devotee, had entered her apartments, and had said to her, "You do not know me, Mamemoiselle?" "No."
Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side.
We have promised them solemnly that we would.
They were four Oscars; for, at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist.
Thereupon, Tholomyes lowered his voice and articulated something so mirthful, that a vast and enthusiastic grin broke out upon the four mouths simultaneously, and Blachevelle exclaimed, "That is an idea."
Oscar advances.
At the epoch of her birth the Directory still existed.
At fifteen she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful, and remained pure as long as she could.
Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular households, Favourite, Zephine, and Dahlia were philosophical young women, while Fantine was a good girl.
She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,--for the heart, also, has its hunger,--she loved.
How could she make such nails work?
She was called little Fantine.
Knowing the price we must pay, the sacrifice we must make, the burdens we must carry, the assaults we must endure--knowing full well the cost--yet we enlist, and we enlist for the war.
12.
The same principle applies to speech.
It would be a boon to speech-making if speakers would conserve the attention of their audiences in the same way and emphasize only the words representing the important ideas.
--C.S.
What is emphasis?
To make a word emphatic, deliver it differently from the manner in which the words surrounding it are delivered.
Why?
To some extent you do, in ordinary speech; but do you in public discourse?
Were they well made?
The parenthetical expressions would really not be needed to supplement the emphatic words.
A Fifth Avenue bus would attract attention up at Minisink Ford, New York, while one of the ox teams that frequently pass there would attract attention on Fifth Avenue.
Strongly emphasizing a single word has a tendency to suggest its antithesis.
When is it permissible to emphasize every single word in a sentence?
What is the effect?
This principle has a very important bearing in determining your emphasis.
11.
White, naturally, for that is the opposite of black.
Nature in her wealth gives us endless variety; man with his limitations is often monotonous.
He must spend the most of his life in labor and be content with the staples of the food-market.
This will give you some idea of the displeasing, jarring effect monotony has on the ear.
Monotony is poverty, whether in speech or in life.
Read aloud some speech without paying particular attention to its meaning or force.
Strike the same note on the piano over and over again.
The carpenter has special implements with which to construct the several parts of a building.
Strive to increase the variety of your speech as the business man labors to augment his wealth.
Be natural--but improve your natural gifts until you have approached the ideal, for we must strive after idealized nature, in fruit, tree, and speech.
It is maddening.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES.
Our English has changed with the years so that many words now connote more than they did originally.
Describe some of the effects of monotony in both cases.
In like manner the speaker has certain instruments and tools at his command by which he builds his argument, plays on the feelings, and guides the beliefs of his audience.
The power of variety lies in its pleasure-giving quality.
The monotonous speaker not only drones along in the same volume and pitch of tone but uses always the same emphasis, the same speed, the same thoughts--or dispenses with thought altogether.
They are the very foundations of successful speaking.
CHAPTER II
What difference do you notice in its rendition?
The little strawberry up in the arctics with a few tiny seeds and an acid tang is a natural berry, but it is not to be compared with the improved variety that we enjoy here.
THE SIN OF MONOTONY
To be natural may be to be monotonous.
If a speaker uses only a few of his powers, it points very plainly to the fact that the rest of his powers are not developed.
The complete knowledge of these principles and the ability to apply them will give you great variety in your powers of expression.
To give you a conception of these instruments, and practical help in learning to use them, are the purposes of the immediately following chapters.
Now repeat it after you have thoroughly assimilated its matter and spirit.
What are the causes of monotony?
They are ignorant of laws that make for efficiency in speaking.
3.
We multiply our powers of speech by increasing our tools.
Monotony reveals our limitations.
Many speakers still use ox-cart methods in their speech instead of employing automobile or overland-express methods.
One day Ennui was born from Uniformity.
Get back to nature in your methods of speech-making.
Lay a marble on the table and do nothing eighteen hours of the day but change that marble from one point to another and back again, and you will go insane if you continue long enough.
The laws that enable us to operate an automobile, produce moving-pictures, or music on the Victrola, would have worked just as well then as they do today.
If you wish to teach or influence men, you must please them, first or last.
1.
5.
The technical principles that we lay down in the following chapters are not arbitrary creations of our own.
7.
If the Victrola in the adjoining apartment grinds out just three selections over and over again, it is pretty safe to assume that your neighbor has no other records.
6.
Cite some instances in nature.
They are all founded on the practices that good speakers and actors adopt--either naturally and unconsciously or under instruction--in getting their effects.
In its effect on its victim, monotony is actually deadly--it will drive the bloom from the cheek and the lustre from the eye as quickly as sin, and often leads to viciousness.
The dictionary defines "monotonous" as being synonymous with "wearisome." That is putting it mildly.
We obviate monotony in dress by replenishing our wardrobes.
It was ignorance of law that for ages deprived humanity of our modern conveniences.
We cannot impress too thoroughly upon you the necessity for a real working mastery of these principles.
To tell you that your speech is monotonous may mean very little to you, so let us look at the nature--and the curse--of monotony in other spheres of life, then we shall appreciate more fully how it will blight an otherwise good speech.
Why is monotony one of the worst as well as one of the most common faults of speakers?
We avoid monotony in speech by multiplying our powers of speech.
Avoid it as you would shun a deadly dull bore. The "idle rich" can have half-a-dozen homes, command all the varieties of foods gathered from the four corners of the earth, and sail for Africa or Alaska at their pleasure; but the poverty-stricken man must walk or take a street car--he does not have the choice of yacht, auto, or special train.
Forget all else, but not this.
The worst punishment that human ingenuity has ever been able to invent is extreme monotony--solitary confinement.
Monotony, the cardinal and most common sin of the public speaker, is not a transgression--it is rather a sin of omission, for it consists in living up to the confession of the Prayer Book: "We have left undone those things we ought to have done."
Why did not the Children of Israel whirl through the desert in limousines, and why did not Noah have moving-picture entertainments and talking machines on the Ark?
It is useless to warn the student that he must be natural.
So let it be understood that public speaking is not a matter of mastering a few dead rules; the most important law of public speech is the necessity for truth, force, feeling, and life.
When you have mastered the mechanics of speech outlined in the next few chapters you will no longer be troubled with monotony.
"Get your principles right," said Napoleon, "and the rest is a matter of detail."
The organist has certain keys and stops which he manipulates to produce his harmonies and effects.
It is useless to shoe a dead horse, and all the sound principles in Christendom will never make a live speech out of a dead one.
The dwarfed oak on the rocky hillside is natural, but a poor thing compared with the beautiful tree found in the rich, moist bottom lands.
So this thing that shortens life, and is used as the most cruel of punishments in our prisons, is the thing that will destroy all the life and force of a speech.
Cite instances in man's daily life.
They saw in America a population of over two million people, subjects of the king, like themselves, living free from rent and taxes on their own land and paying nothing whatever to the expenses of the country.
John Parker, who commanded them, ordered the drums to beat and the alarm-guns to be fired, and his men drew up in two ranks across the road.
"The time will come, sir," one of the gentlemen said, "when you will have reason to regret the line which you have now taken."
At home the burdens of the people were extremely heavy.
Their first step was to strengthen the naval force on the American coast and by additional vigilance to put some sort of check on the wholesale smuggling which prevailed.
The horses were soon brought round, and Captain Wilson and his son mounted and rode off at full speed.
She would, too, be living among her friends and would meet with many of the same convictions and opinions as her husband's, whereas in Concord the whole population would be hostile.
You are not afraid of being left alone, Mary?" he said, turning to his wife. "There is no chance of any disturbance here.
At the sight of this fire the militia and armed countrymen advanced down the hill toward the bridge.
In destroying the stores by fire the court-house took flames.
The success of England, in her struggle with France for the supremacy of North America had cost her a great deal of money.
Mr. Welch's farm was the only one along the lake that had escaped, and the loss the Indians had sustained in attacking it had been so heavy that they were not likely to make an expedition in that quarter, where the chances of booty were so small and the certainty of a desperate resistance so great.
This step caused extreme discontent among the trading classes of America, and these set to work vigorously to stir up a strong feeling of disaffection against England.
It was December when Harold returned home to his parents, and for the next three months the lull before the storm continued.
"Let us get out of the line of fire."
The farming operations had gone on regularly, but the men always worked with their rifles ready to their hand.
The news was brought by a wandering hunter that a quarrel had arisen between the Shawnees and the Iroquois, and that the latter had recalled their braves from the frontier to defend their own villages in case of hostilities breaking out between them and the rival tribe.
Many American writers have declared that previous to that battle there was no desire for independence on the part of the colonists, but this is emphatically contradicted by the language used at the meetings and in the newspapers which have come down to us.
Upon the day after Harold's return two gentlemen called upon Captain Wilson and asked him to sign the agreement which a number of colonists had entered into to resist the mother country to the last. This Captain Wilson positively refused to do.
The stamp-tax would in no way have affected the poorer classes in the colonies.
The British, hearing the drums and the alarm-guns, loaded, and the advance company came on at the double.
I have pointed out to him that as he was born here he can without dishonor remain neutral in the struggle.
At every village the bells were ringing, the people were assembling in the streets, all carrying arms, while numbers were flocking in from the farmhouses around.
There are, of course, among them a large number of men--among them, gentlemen, I place you--who conscientiously believe that they are justified in doing nothing whatever for the land which gave them or their ancestors birth; who would enjoy all the great natural wealth of this vast country without contributing toward the expense of the troops to whom it is due that they enjoy peace and tranquility.
But I consider that it has done nothing whatever to justify the attitude of the colonists.
In England neither the spirit nor the strength of the colonists was understood.
"Yes, if you like, my boy.
When the deputation had departed Harold, who had been a wondering listener to the conversation, asked his father to explain to him the exact position in which matters stood.
Meetings were everywhere held, at which the strongest and most treasonable language was uttered, and such violent threats were used against the persons employed as stamp-collectors that these, in fear of their lives, resigned their posts.
There was no occasion for Harold to wait for news from home, for his father had, before starting, definitely fixed the day for his return, and when that time approached Harold started on his eastward journey, in order to be at home about the date of their arrival.
The disaffected of Massachusetts had collected a large quantity of military stores at Concord.
"May I go with you, father?"
As they approached the town the militia retreated from it.
The Congress drilled, armed, and organized; the English brought over fresh troops and prepared for the struggle.
Some of the colonists paid their quota, others refused to do so, and this being the case, it appears to me that England is perfectly justified in laying on a tax.
Such, gentlemen, are not my sentiments.
I do not say that the whole of the demands of England are justifiable.
The revenue officers were prevented, sometimes by force, from carrying out their duties.
Such was the beginning of the war of independence.
"No, sir," Captain Wilson said haughtily.
The Indians had made several attacks upon settlements at other points of the frontier, but they had not repeated their incursion in the neighborhood of the lake.
The colonists pay nothing for their land; they pay nothing toward the expenses of the government of the mother country; and it appears to me to be perfectly just that people here, free as they are from all the burdens that bear so heavily on those at home, should at least bear the expense of the army stationed here.
The stamp-tax remained uncollected and was treated by the colonists as if it were not in existence.
The colonists were furious at the imposition of this tax.
Captain Wilson and his household were startled from sleep by the sudden ringing of the alarm-bells, and a negro servant, Pompey, who had been for many years in their service, was sent down into the town, which lay a quarter of a mile from the house, to find out what was the news.
Men could not bring themselves to believe that these would fight rather than submit, still less that if they did fight it would be successfully.
It is true that even had England at this point abandoned altogether her determination to raise taxes in America the result would probably have been the same.
As it was, Parliament agreed to let the stamp-tax drop, and in its place established some import duties on goods entering the American ports.
The soldiers of England have fought for you against French and Indians and are still stationed here to protect you.
The colonists, however, were determined that they would submit to no taxation whatever.
"The die is cast," he said to his wife as she met him at the door. "The war has begun, and I fear it can have but one termination.
Pompey, saddle two horses at once.
Major Pitcairne was at their head and shouted to the militia to lay down their arms.
Our house lies beyond the town, and whatever takes place will be in Concord.
The expense of the army and navy was great, and the ministry, in striving to lighten the burdens of the people, turned their eyes to the colonies.
"Nothing, my boy.
Down wid de redcoats!
Once or twice Captain Wilson was stopped and asked where he was going.
New York refused to send members to the Congress, and in many other provinces the adhesion given to the disaffected movement was but lukewarm.
The alarm had evidently been given all along the line.
Harold remained for four months longer with his cousin.
To this I have agreed.
Just as Captain Wilson rode in a messenger ran up with the news that the head of the British column was close at hand.
From an eminence at some distance from the line of retreat Captain Wilson and his son watched sorrowfully the attack upon the British troops.
Other matters occurred which rendered the renewal of the attack improbable.
The whole of the States now began to prepare for war.
He returned in half an hour.
France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands all monopolize the trade of their colonies; all, far more than does England, regard their colonies as sources of revenue.
The English tried to pull up the planks, but the Americans ran forward rapidly.
But when the thing should have been once done, when she should once have owned that Rachel was not wrong, then gradually she could bring herself round to the utterance of some kindly expression.
"Yes, just so; of course we know that.
There was no word of his that had not to be re-weighed.
After that Rachel insisted upon going, and the mother and daughter returned across the green, leaving Luke at the farm-house, ready to take his departure as soon as Mrs. Ray and Rachel should have safely reached their home.
She knew nothing against him; but she had then made up her mind that he was pernicious, and she could not bring herself to own that she had been wrong in that opinion.
Why should anybody be more dangerous to me than to anybody else?"
"You had better tell her, mamma."
She could almost believe that he had been specially made and destined for her behoof.
But to this both Martha and Cherry objected.
"Beauty is but skin deep," said Mrs. Prime, with no little indignation in her tone, that a thing so vile as personal comeliness should have been mentioned by her mother on such an occasion.
The farmer had come in and had joked his joke, and Mrs. Sturt had clacked over them as though they were a brood of chickens of her own hatching; and Mrs. Ray had smiled and cried, and sobbed and laughed till she had become almost hysterical. Then she had jumped up from her seat, saying, "Oh, dear, what will Dorothea think has become of us?"
"No, my dear; of course I don't.
"I know," she said; "I know.
Then with half-frightened, muffled steps they entered their own house, and joined Mrs. Prime in the sitting-room.
"We have heard of your engagement," said Martha, "and we congratulate you.
"I hope it will," said Rachel.
And if it will give Rachel any pleasure,--though I don't suppose it will, the least in the world; but if it would, she may know that I think she has done wisely to accept him."
They were away talking about love and pleasure, and those heart-throbbings in which her sister had so unfortunately been allowed to indulge.
A man's triumph is for the most part over when he is once allowed to take his place at the family table, as a right, next to his betrothed.
It was still the voice of a raven!
As for her living, I don't know what will be best about that, because Luke says that of course you'll come and live with us."
Girls do triumph in their lovers,--in their acknowledged and permitted lovers, as young men triumph in their loves which are not acknowledged or perhaps permitted.
But if people are to drink beer it stands to reason that good beer will be better than bad."
"I mean that you mustn't mind her seeming to be so hard.
The whole affair had now been managed so suddenly, and the action had been so quick, that she had hardly found a moment for thought.
"Mother, there can have been nothing of the kind.
"You won't be living together in the same house after a bit," said Mrs. Ray, thinking, with some sadness, that those little evening festivities of buttered toast and thick cream were over for her now,--"but I do hope you will be friends."
Mrs. Ray spoke.
And a very excellent young man he is,--and as for being well off, a great deal better than what a child of mine could have expected.
She has only to put out her hand the least little bit in the world, and I will go the rest of the way.
But it was not possible.
Now he was there on purpose to take her with him, and she went forth with him, leaning lovingly on his arm, while yet close under her sister's eyes.
"Mr. Rowan, my dear.
"Call him Luke, mamma."
In Rachel's presence she could not have first made this recantation.
She would have been quite willing to see her sister married, but the lover should have been dingy, black-coated, lugubrious, having about him some true essence of the tears of the valley of tribulation. Alas, her sister's taste was quite of another kind!
"And I hope they will be happy together for very many years.
If it were not wicked, why should not she have been allowed to share it?
But the words were too apposite to the event, and the sentiment too much in accordance with Mrs. Sturt's chivalric views to allow of her admitting the truth of any such assurance as this.
She had taken a side against Luke Rowan, and could not restrain herself from ill-natured words.
"Yes; and they are the people who talk most of Christian charity!"
"It is settled,--I think," said Rachel.
But why need she sleep now that every thought was a new pleasure?
Only it will be so uncomfortable."
But, Dorothea, there was some one else over there besides Mrs. Sturt, and he kept us."
What he?" said Mrs. Prime.
She had been loud and defiant in her denunciation when she had first suspected Rachel of having a lover. Since that she had undergone some troubles of her own by which the tone of her remonstrances had been necessarily moderated; but even now she could not forgive her sister such a lover as Luke Rowan.
"Of course we will, mamma.
"I don't know much about it," said Mrs. Prime; "I only know that they've quarrelled."
I had no idea of its meaning, but made up a little story out of it, with myself as the heroine.
The last verse began with the lines,--
"He is alive!
ALMOST the first decided taste in my life was the love of hymns. Committing them to memory was as natural to me as breathing.
It began with the words--
I followed my mother about with the hymn-book ("Watts' and Select"), reading or repeating them to her, while she was busy with her baking or ironing, and she was always a willing listener.
"Love divine, all love excelling; Joy of heaven, to earth come down."
Jesus said He would come back again, and would always be with those who loved Him.
There is something at the heart of a true song or hymn which keeps the heart young that listens.
He wanted me to be good, and I could be, I would be, for his sake.
But it did read--
THE HYMN-BOOK.
The New Testament, then, did really mean what it said!
I tried long afterward, thinking that it was my duty, to build up a wall of difficult doctrines over my spring blossoms, as if they needed protection.
I did not, I think, change my resolution because there were so many, but because, little as I was, I discovered that there were hymns and hymns.
III.
away, our fears!"
He loves me!
Finding it so easy, I thought I would begin at the beginning, and learn the whole.
I thought that they really knew better.
I earned the book when I was about four years old.
When I repeated,--
I did not know that this last line was bad grammar, but thought that the sin in question was something pretty, that looked "like a mountain rose." Mountains I had never seen; they were a glorious dream to me. And a rose that grew on a mountain must surely be prettier than any of our red wild roses on the hill, sweet as they were.
"Awake, our souls!
"Joy to the world! the Lord is come!"
Yet God Can satisfy that need some other way, Though hunger still remain.
When twelve years he scarce had seen, I lost him, but so found as well I saw He could not lose himself, but went about His Father's business.
That fast To virtue I impute not, or count part Of what I suffer here.
Our eyes beheld Messiah certainly now come, so long Expected of our fathers; we have heard His words, his wisdom full of grace and truth. 'Now, now, for sure, deliverance is at hand; The kingdom shall to Israel be restored:' Thus we rejoiced, but soon our joy is turned Into perplexity and new amaze. For whither is he gone?
Some great intent Conceals him.
To honour?
what accident Hath rapt him from us?
But these haunts Delight not all.
But now, Full grown to man, acknowledged, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in public shewn, Son owned from Heaven by his Father's voice, I looked for some great change.
Four times ten days I have passed Wandering this woody maze, and human food Nor tasted, nor had appetite.
It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure.
"It's your belief," Marcher returned.
There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension.
It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it. There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really covered the others.
She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached the door.
"Something new.
Marcher thought.
She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might have been a lily too--only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under some clear glass bell.
Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification.
I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great many of them I've at different times named to you, but there were others I couldn't name."
"What I mean isn't what I've always meant. It's different."
Well, he wished it were; and the consummation depended for him clearly more and more on his friend.
It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect.
"I see--if I don't suffer!"
Was it--or rather wasn't it--that if for so long she had been watching with him the answer to their question must have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her occupation was verily gone?
She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring--though he stared in fact but the harder--turned off and regained her chair.
The perfection of household care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands and with nothing more to do.
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back strangely pale.
I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else.
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes something stranger yet--though even of this he was to take the full measure but afterwards--and the note of it already trembled.
Your answer was that I couldn't, that I wouldn't, and I don't pretend I have.
"You know something I don't. You've shown me that before."
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong.
"Why what you mean--what you've always meant."
It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high flicker of their prime.
These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment, exceedingly, and she spoke with firmness.
You've been right."
She again shook her head.
"Well, what's better than that?
But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now how it must have been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst.
"You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of something you were afraid I should find out.
It isn't a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing.
"Assuredly--if you mean, as I do, something that includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable."
"Never!"
"You see what?"
You've had your experience.
"Then something's to come?"
She was "out of it," to Marcher's vision; her work was over; she communicated with him as across some gulf or from some island of rest that she had already reached, and it made him feel strangely abandoned.
"Oh no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort.
Isn't that what you sufficiently express," she asked, "in calling it the worst?"
Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say.
This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant.
It isn't a question now of choosing." At last he came out with it.
The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him.
I feel your beliefs are right.
You leave me to my fate."
"It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken.
"It's something new?"
"Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light.
"Too, too dreadful--some of them."
I feel," he explained, "as if I had lost my power to conceive such things." And he wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded.
"Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer."
"They were too, too dreadful?"
This," he went on, "is why I appeal to you.
"I'm with you--don't you see?--still." And as to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair--a movement she seldom risked in these days--and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness.
It was a point he had never since ventured to press, vaguely fearing as he did that it might become a difference, perhaps a disagreement, between them.
It had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently. "Oh yes, I've repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn't quite make up my mind.
But the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of youth.
After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came prodigiously out of her very face.
She hung back from it a little.
He had to admit, however, what she said.
It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.
"Do you consider that we went far?"
It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude.
"Rather!
"I haven't forsaken you."
"It's spent."
"But you're quite right. We've had together great imaginations, often great fears; but some of them have been unspoken."
It's not what you think.
It hushed him a moment.
It was almost a smothered groan.
"What then has happened?"
He shook his head.
"Including each other?" She still smiled.
"'Now'--?"
He had been standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement. She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited.
This afternoon I thought I saw another way.
"Why did you come here, then?
He began to talk, half-humorously, and little by little, as he went on, she forgot her fears, even her feeling of strangeness, and fell completely under the spell of his power.
He pulled her shawl about her, masterfully yet with gentleness, and then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, he drew her to him until she rested against his shoulder.
"Are you?
Angry, mortified, outraged, she fought herself free and leaped to her feet.
You are a Factor's daughter; you know what that means." He dropped his head.
Now she will despise me and forget me.
She burst into the violent sobbing of a child, and turned and ran hurriedly to the factory.
Before her eyes slowly spread, like a panorama, the whole extent of the great North, with its fierce, hardy men, its dreadful journeys by canoe and sledge, its frozen barrens, its mighty forests, its solemn charm.
Her inmost soul was stirred, just as before.
"I am no man's man but my own," he answered, simply.
There was no telling what this amazing crook might do now.
"Look out for him--there he goes for the window."
Swiftly and silently as he vanished, he could not have been half way to the door before the thief urged Phelan:
"There is not, nor play neither," snapped Phelan.
CHAPTER XXXII.
He had been on the point of bursting through the window and somehow scrambling aloft to the rescue of that helpless being who was being ground and wrenched and pounded by that porcine monster, when the monster suddenly rose to view again with a dumb-bell in each hand.
"It's a trick to get you out of the house," said Gladwin with his eyes on the big man, who was calmly smiling and who had fully made up his mind on a magnificent game of bluff.
"Quick--go after that man--he's a thief!"
"Oh, so you've resigned from the force?"
"Easy, son--easy.
He was too much for him. That a thief and impostor could possess such superhuman nerve had never occurred to his untutored mind.
The lone watcher swallowed a savage oath.
I'm an hour overdue at the station."
He summoned a laugh and jerked out:
But a glance at that young man meant volumes and there was no limit to his spontaneous resources.
I don't like to have little boys talk to me like that," and turning to the doorway behind him he beckoned.
"You mean the women," he said, ignoring Gladwin and addressing the thief.
"What the blazes kind of a joke is this?" blurted Phelan, looking from one to the other in utter bewilderment.
I'll give you one chance--get away from here as quickly as you can."
"I tell you he's lying to you," Gladwin cut in frantically, seeing that Phelan was falling under the spell of the big man's superb bluff, and at the same time remembering Helen and pressing the button in the wall to warn her that the time had come for her to flee.
"Now be careful, officer, or you'll get yourself into a lot of trouble."
"Never mind the young lady," Gladwin flung back at him.
"You'll find it's not so funny yourself," cut in the real Gladwin. Then to Phelan, "Arrest this man, Phelan."
One lightning glance at the thickness of the patrolman's neck and the general contour of his rubicund countenance had translated to him the sort of man he had to deal with.
He had been on his way.
The man's hair-trigger mind had thought this out before Phelan was half way round the table.
Then suddenly the huge man stooped and held up in plain view a dangling wrestling dummy.
"There's no time to bother with him," he went on, and reaching out he caught Travers Gladwin by the shoulder and whirled him half way across the room.
"Do you mean it?" asked the astonished Phelan, sizing up the thief as the highest example of aristocratic elegance he had ever seen in the flesh.
The obedient Watkins sidled in and stopped with head averted from Gladwin, who started with surprise at seeing him.
"Here, quick!"
There was no passion in the stodgy movements of the great paddy arms.
Phelan took one look at the young man's face and muttered as he obeyed.
"I remember--when the little Japanaze called me oft me beat, he said there was women crooks here, too."
Watkins dropped the trunk and at a signal from his companion was gone.
Stepping forward and making sure there could be no mistake, Gladwin turned to the thief and exclaimed:
"Why he's got his pals hidden all over the house."
Again he had been the victim of delusion and had wasted heroic emotions on a stuffed dummy that served merely as an inanimate instrument in a course of anti-fat calisthenics.
Phelan tried to run four ways at once.
"You bet your life I won't," Phelan answered, though he was already bluffed.
"Then they've all escaped," said the thief, easily, thrusting his hands in his pockets to help out his appearance of imperturbability.
"Yes," retorted Gladwin, "and let me tell you that this little excursion of yours has gone far enough.
"It was only on her account that I let you go as far as this.
In his seething gray matter there stirred the remembrance that Bateato had told him that women were robbing the house.
Even so far away as he was Phelan could see that the man puffed and blew and that his vigor was slowly waning.
"You'll find it's no joke, officer," said the bogus Gladwin sharply--"not if he gets away."
"Don't bother with him, Watkins," snarled the big fellow, as he noted his companion's complexion run through three shades of yellow.
"Where's the young lady?"
"Stop that man," cried the thief, pointing to Watkins, "he's trying to get out of here with a trunkful of pictures."
"Stop Phelan!" cried Gladwin, who had begun to see through the pantomime.
IN WHICH BLUFF IS TRUMPS.
The big fellow curled one corner of his lip in a contemptuous smile, then glanced about him quickly and asked:
"He's lying to you, Phelan," persisted Gladwin, though with less vehemence, a great feeling of relief having visited him in the belief that Helen had made her escape.
"They're both thieves!"
Instead of which--he ground his teeth, went to the little panel door and shouted Phelan's name.
"I said a band of thieves," insisted the thief.
Now get out and keep away from that young lady--and drop my name."
"You can have the whole place searched just as soon as you've got this man where he can't get away.
"How do you think it is going to look," he said, impressively, "if I prove that you've tried to help a band of thieves rob this house?"
He had come close enough for that astute individual to make out that he wore the same uniform young Gladwin had been masquerading in and he made capital of this on the instant.
This is what I get for not sending this man to jail where he belonged."
There's work for you right in this house."
His anger was white hot.
"You'll square yourself with the captain all right if you just do what I tell you," said Gladwin eagerly, helping him on with his coat and pushing him toward the window recess.
Having disposed of the girl for the moment, Travers Gladwin decided it was time to call Michael Phelan to his assistance.
"Here's your uniform; I've had enough of it," replied Gladwin, throwing him the coat and cap, "and get into it quick.
The thief had started in that direction, but his purpose was not escape.
He had almost counted on the thief taking one craven look at his constabulary disguise and then leaping through the window--fleeing like a wolf in the night--he, Travers Gladwin, remaining a veritable hero of romance to sooth and console Helen and gently break the news to her that she had been the dupe of an unscrupulous criminal.
"Phelan!" he gasped out.
"This must be a hell of a joke."
The young man spun half a dozen times as he reeled across the carpet and he had to use both hands to stop himself against a big onyx table. As he pulled himself up standing he saw that Watkins had lifted the trunk on his shoulders and was headed for the hallway.
He was a perfect dub to have let the situation reach such a stage of complexity, though the one thought uppermost in his mind was to save Helen from public ridicule and contempt.
The idea had flashed upon him that Helen might be concealed there.
"You let one go out, Phelan, and there were two others beside this one."
He had come from San Antonio, Texas.
Bob Ollinger answered: "Don't worry, Pat, we will watch him like a goat."
Of course Geiss stampeded.
Charlie Wall told the writer that he could have killed him with his pistol, but that he wanted to see him escape.
The "Kid's" furniture consisted of a pair of steel hand-cuffs, steel shackles for his legs, a stool, and a cot.
When the pony was brought back the "Kid" gave Geiss his rifle to hold, while he mounted.
When the pony stood on the street, ready for the last act, the "Kid" went down the back stairs, stepping over the dead body of Bell, and started to mount.
Many other men in the crowd felt the same way, no doubt.
He was reading a newspaper.
In order to get out of this room one had to pass through a hall into another room, where a back stairs led down to the rear yard.
Being encumbered with the weight of two pistols, two belts full of ammunition, and the rifle, the "Kid" was thrown to the ground, when the pony began bucking, before he had got into the saddle.
Now Bell ran out of the door and received a bullet from his own pistol.
Then he hobbled to the open window facing the hotel.
When the smoke of battle cleared away, four Tularosa Mexicans lay dead on the ground and Charlie Wall had two bullet wounds in his body, though they were not dangerous wounds.
At meal times they accompanied either Bob Ollinger or J. W. Bell, to the Ellis Hotel across the main street, which ran east and west through town.
This time he was convicted, and sentenced to hang on the 13th day of May, 1881, in the Court House yard in Lincoln.
Now the "Kid" faced the crowd across the street, holding the rifle ready for action.
With the gun in his hand, and looking towards the "Kid," he said: "There are eighteen buckshot in each barrel, and I reckon the man who gets them will feel it."
Bell threw up both hands to shield his head from another blow.
Now, to prevent being mobbed by the angry citizens of Tularosa, which was just over the line in Dona Ana County, Wall and his helpers made a run, on horseback, for Lincoln, to surrender to Sheriff Pat Garrett.
Then the chain holding his feet close together was filed in two.
On the morning of April 28th, 1881, Sheriff Garrett prepared to leave for White Oaks, thirty-five miles north, to have a scaffold made to hang the "Kid" on.
Now Ollinger put the gun back in the armory, locking the door, putting the key in his pocket.
Now "Billy the Kid" hobbled back to the armory and buckled around his waist two belts of cartridges and two Colt's pistols.
He walked the balance of the way.
He flew out of the gate towards the Ellis Hotel.
Then taking a Winchester rifle in his hand, he hobbled back to the shot gun, which he picked up.
The body of Bell tumbled down the back stairs, falling on the jailer, a German by the name of Geiss, who was sitting at the foot of the stairs.
A large band of Tularosa Mexicans appeared on the scene one morning, to prevent young Wall from using water for his thirsty alfalfa.
According to the story "Billy the Kid" told Mrs. Charlie Bowdre, and other friends, after his escape, he had been starving himself so that he could slip his left hand out of the steel cuff.
Charlie Wall and the four Mexicans stopped on the sidewalk, while Ollinger continued to run towards the court house.
The guards thought he had lost his appetite from worry over his approaching death.
On hearing the shot, Bob Ollinger and the five armed prisoners, got up from the supper table and ran to the street.
Geiss was hailed again and told to saddle up Billy Burt's, the Deputy County Clerk's, black pony and bring him out on the street.
In the latter part of February, 1881, "Billy the Kid" was taken to Mesilla to be tried for the murder of Roberts at Blazer's saw mill.
There were two windows in it, one on the east side and the other on the north, fronting the main street.
When his legs were free, the "Kid" danced a jig on the little front porch, where many people, who had run out to the sidewalk across the street, on hearing the shots, were witnesses to this free show, which couldn't be beat for money.
In the latter part of April, Cowboy Charlie Wall had four Mexicans helping him irrigate an alfalfa field, above the Mexican village of Tularosa, on Tularosa river.
Judge Bristol presided over the District Court, and assigned Ira E. Leonard to defend the "Kid." He was acquitted for the murder of Roberts.
Of course this cowardly act left a scar on "Billy the Kid's" heart, which only death could heal.
The Sheriff allowed them to wear their pistols and to sleep in the old jail.
After killing Bell, the "Kid" broke in the door to the armory and secured Ollinger's shot-gun.
"BILLY THE KID" IS SENTENCED TO HANG.
Then Garrett left for White Oaks.
This black pony had formerly belonged to the "Kid."
Bell was left to guard the "Kid."
Garrett remarked to the two guards: "Say, boys, you must keep a close watch on the 'Kid,' as he has only a few more days to live, and might make a break for liberty."
The room selected for the "Kid's" home was large, and in the northeast corner of the building, upstairs.
CHAPTER IX.
J. W. Bell sat on a chair, facing the "Kid," several paces away.
As Lincoln had no suitable jail, an upstairs room in the large adobe Court House was selected as the "Kid's" last home on earth--as the officers supposed, but fate decided otherwise.
About five o'clock in the evening, Bob Ollinger took Charlie Wall and the other four armed prisoners to the Ellis Hotel, across the street, for supper.
He and the "Kid" were bitter enemies on account of having killed warm friends of each other during the bloody Lincoln County war.
He said, in a voice loud enough to be heard by Wall and the other prisoners across the street: "Yes, he has killed me, too!"
These words were hardly out of the guard's mouth when the "Kid" fired a charge of buckshot into his heart.
One room was assigned as the Sheriff's private office.
With a smile, "Billy the Kid" remarked: "You may be the one to get them yourself."
Then the "Kid" jerked Bell's pistol out of its scabbard.
He held a grudge against the "Kid" for the killing of his friend, Jimmie Carlyle, otherwise there was no enmity between them.
When directly under the window, the "Kid" stuck his head out, saying: "Hello, Bob!"
HE KILLS HIS TWO GUARDS AND MAKES GOOD HIS ESCAPE.
The rifle being handed back to him when he was securely seated in the saddle, then he dug the pony in the sides with his heels, and galloped west.
Then she turned to me.
I took my cue at once, and acted for the best on my own responsibility.
'I hope not,' I said devoutly.
Or nurse her on the boat when I want to give my undivided attention to my own misfortunes.
It was my stepfather's death that drove me to it.
I have it. Vienna, a carriage with footmen in red livery, a noble presence, a crowd of wits--poets, artists, politicians--pressing eagerly round the landau." That was my mental picture as I sat and confronted you: I understand it all now; this is Lady Georgina Fawley!'
So have I. Appalling, I assure you.
Then perhaps she would like this valise for a footstool?
And what will you do, my dear, when you get there?'
'We must surely have met.
'What an unusually intelligent girl!' she broke in.
I know how sweet you are; but the last thing I want is to add to your burdens.
'You could get a temporary maid,' her friend suggested, in a lull of the tornado.
I never heard of any Lois in my life before, except Timothy's grandmother.
I go where glory or a modest competence waits me.
'How on earth did you guess?
And poor Tom Cayley!
One jostles possibilities.
No, I will not let you take this, Lois; this is my jewel-box--it contains all that remains of the Fawley family jewels.
'She has an awful temper.'
Hold it so, on your knee; and, for Heaven's sake, don't part with it.'
'I haven't the faintest idea,' I answered, continuing to paste.
Then she turned to her companion.
'Will you really go?
I shrugged my shoulders.
Your dear little face would be quite enough to scare away a timid adventure.' She knew what I meant.
'So is mine, Georgina Lois.
'You will come, Lois?' Lady Georgina asked.
And cutting out a blouse by differential calculus is weary, uphill work for a high-school teacher.
'Pardon me,' I answered, in German. 'What I say, that I mean.
But as we landed at Ostend I had accidentally overheard a low whispered conversation when he passed a shabby-looking man, who had travelled in a second-class carriage from London. 'That succeeds?' the shabby-looking man had muttered under his breath in French, as the haughty nobleman with the waxed moustache brushed by him.
I nodded my thanks, and strolled back to Elsie's.
'As a milliner's girl; why not?
'Growing old is a foolish habit of the stupid and the vacant.
In either place, I have only two hands and one head to help me.'
This was a delightful idea.
Pokers don't agree with me.
Oh, certainly, with pleasure; the day was so sultry.
I don't object to going to Schlangenbad.
I saw he meant to go on with his dangerous little game.
By this time my suspicions of the Count were profound.
He murmured some indignant remark below his breath, and walked off.
'Where?
Then he returned to us, all fuming.
A gleam of intuition flashed across me, 'You don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that you're called Georgina?'
From the first I had doubted him; he was so blandly plausible.
The Cantankerous Old Lady regarded me once more from head to foot.
The Cantankerous Old Lady gripped my arm hard.
'I haven't a notion,' I answered; 'that's where the fun comes in.
Don't let those dreadful porters touch my cloaks.
'Here, my dear,' she said, handing it to me, 'you'd better take care of it.
Especially as he chose the precise moment when my allowance was due, and bequeathed me nothing but his consolidated liabilities.
'Whatever your great country attempts--were it only a fog--it achieves consummately.'
Thenceforward to Dover, they talked together with ceaseless animation. The Cantankerous Old Lady was capital company.
How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens--the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace!
'Would you like some lunch, Lady Georgina?' I asked, in my chilliest voice.
The old lady laughed aloud.
I couldn't go on eating your hard-earned bread and doing nothing.
So you're poor Tom Cayley's daughter, are you?
Mind that cloak!
I positively decline to appear at Schlangenbad without a diamond to my back.
'His daughter,' I answered, flushing.
It was clever of you to catch at the suggestion of this arrangement.
'Excuse me,' I said, in my suavest voice, 'but I think I see a way out of your difficulty.'
He had played for it, and carried his point.
Now, there the difficulty comes in.
I put my foot down there.
What is the good of being penniless--with the trifling exception of twopence--unless you are prepared to accept your position in the spirit of a masked ball at Covent Garden?'
Get out at once! Bring my bag and the rugs!
She had a tang in her tongue, and in the course of ninety minutes she had flayed alive the greater part of London society, with keen wit and sprightliness.
'As a milliner's girl?' Elsie asked, with a face of red horror.
The Count jumped in, jumped about, arranged our parcels, jumped out again.
'Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you take me for?
'Indeed, miladi, your admirable husband was one of the very first to exert his influence in my favour at Vienna.
It is kind of you to give me this warning.
You go to Cambridge, and get examined till the heart and life have been examined out of you; then you say to yourselves at the end of it all, "Let me see; what am I good for now?
I remember; he died, poor fellow; he was a good soldier--and his'--I felt she was going to say 'his fool of a widow,' but a glance from me quelled her; 'his widow went and married that good-looking scapegrace, Jack Watts-Morgan.
That's just like you dear good schoolmistresses!
He spoke to a porter; then he rushed back excitedly.
Well, my good woman, what do you want to suggest to me?'
Dare I ask your name, monsieur?'
VANISHED.
XXVI.
XXIII.
When, duller than our dulness, The busy darling lay, So busy was she, finishing, So leisurely were we!
Taken from men this morning, Carried by men to-day, Met by the gods with banners Who marshalled her away.
But most like chaos, -- stopless, cool, -- Without a chance or spar, Or even a report of land To justify despair.
You asked the company to tea, Acquaintance, just a few, And chatted close with this grand thing That don't remember you?
Never the treasures in her nest The cautious grave exposes, Building where schoolboy dare not look And sportsman is not bold.
THE FORGOTTEN GRAVE.
Morns like these we parted; Noons like these she rose, Fluttering first, then firmer, To her fair repose.
As by the dead we love to sit, Become so wondrous dear, As for the lost we grapple, Though all the rest are here, --
XXI.
XXXI.
GONE.
Great streets of silence led away To neighborhoods of pause; Here was no notice, no dissent, No universe, no laws.
But called the others clear, And passed their curtains by. Sweet morning, when I over-sleep, Knock, recollect, for me!
There was a little figure plump For every little knoll, Busy needles, and spools of thread, And trudging feet from school.
GOING.
XIX.
Now, when I read, I read not, For interrupting tears Obliterate the etchings Too costly for repairs.
Our panting ankle barely gained When night devoured the road; But we stood whispering in the house, And all we said was "Saved"!
I think just how my lips will weigh With shapeless, quivering prayer That you, so late, consider me, The sparrow of your care.
Playmates, and holidays, and nuts, And visions vast and small. Strange that the feet so precious charged Should reach so small a goal!
XXXIX.
XXIX.
When everything that ticked has stopped, And space stares, all around, Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns, Repeal the beating ground.
XVIII.
The smallest "robe" will fit me, And just a bit of "crown;" For you know we do not mind our dress When we are going home.
At least to pray is left, is left. O Jesus! in the air I know not which thy chamber is, -- I 'm knocking everywhere.
On such a dawn, or such a dawn, Would anybody sigh That such a little figure Too sound asleep did lie
Her final summer was it, And yet we guessed it not; If tenderer industriousness Pervaded her, we thought
EPITAPH.
And so, until delirious borne I con that thing, -- "forgiven," -- Till with long fright and longer trust I drop my heart, unshriven!
MEMORIALS.
The general rose decays; But this, in lady's drawer, Makes summer when the lady lies In ceaseless rosemary.
A throe upon the features A hurry in the breath, An ecstasy of parting Denominated "Death," --
Surrender is a sort unknown On this superior soil; Defeat, an outgrown anguish, Remembered as the mile
Better than larger values, However true their show; This timid life of evidence Keeps pleading, "I don't know."
And yet it tasted like them all; The figures I have seen Set orderly, for burial, Reminded me of mine,
In broken mathematics We estimate our prize, Vast, in its fading ratio, To our penurious eyes!
Surely after you are what is called "dead" you will be willing that the poor ghosts you have left behind should be cheered and pleased by your verses, will you not?
The coming of the first robin was a jubilee beyond crowning of monarch or birthday of pope; the first red leaf hurrying through "the altered air," an epoch.
And while, as one critic has said, she may exhibit toward God "an Emersonian self-possession," it was because she looked upon all life with a candor as unprejudiced as it is rare.
She was not an invalid, and she lived in seclusion from no love-disappointment.
The eagerness with which the first volume of Emily Dickinson's poems has been read shows very clearly that all our alleged modern artificiality does not prevent a prompt appreciation of the qualities of directness and simplicity in approaching the greatest themes,--life and love and death.
Emily Dickinson appears to have written her first poems in the winter of 1862.
You ought to be.
MABEL LOOMIS TODD.
In Emily Dickinson's exacting hands, the especial, intrinsic fitness of a particular order of words might not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music.
The handwriting was at first somewhat like the delicate, running Italian hand of our elder gentlewomen; but as she advanced in breadth of thought, it grew bolder and more abrupt, until in her latest years each letter stood distinct and separate from its fellows.
AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS, August, 1891.
Her life was the normal blossoming of a nature introspective to a high degree, whose best thought could not exist in pretence.
Although Emily Dickinson had been in the habit of sending occasional poems to friends and correspondents, the full extent of her writing was by no means imagined by them.
The effect of a page of her more recent manuscript is exceedingly quaint and strong.
Although there is nowhere a date, the handwriting makes it possible to arrange the poems with general chronologic accuracy.
HELEN JACKSON.
And in the copies which she sent to friends, sometimes one form, sometimes another, is found to have been used.
She touches these themes sometimes lightly, sometimes almost humorously, more often with weird and peculiar power; but she is never by any chance frivolous or trivial.
Lines are always daringly constructed, and the "thought-rhyme" appears frequently,--appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing.
She had tried society and the world, and found them lacking.
While many of them bear evidence of having been thrown off at white heat, still more had received thoughtful revision.
There is the frequent addition of rather perplexing foot-notes, affording large choice of words and phrases.
My nosegays are for captives; Dim, long-expectant eyes, Fingers denied the plucking, Patient till paradise,
The "portfolios" were found, shortly after Emily Dickinson's death, by her sister and only surviving housemate.
As a rule, the verses were without titles; but "A Country Burial," "A Thunder-Storm," "The Humming-Bird," and a few others were named by their author, frequently at the end,--sometimes only in the accompanying note, if sent to a friend.
That "irresistible needle-touch," as one of her best critics has called it, piercing at once the very core of a thought, has found a response as wide and sympathetic as it has been unexpected even to those who knew best her compelling power.
Storm, wind, the wild March sky, sunsets and dawns; the birds and bees, butterflies and flowers of her garden, with a few trusted human friends, were sufficient companionship.
Emily Dickinson scrutinized everything with clear-eyed frankness. Every subject was proper ground for legitimate study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond.
If such a thing should happen as that I should outlive you, I wish you would make me your literary legatee and executor.
In most of her poems, particularly the later ones, everything by way of punctuation was discarded, except numerous dashes; and all important words began with capitals.
In her own look, however, was doubt.
"Oh far--!"
"That's enough for me.
She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief.
I'm only afraid of ignorance to-day--I'm not afraid of knowledge." And then as for a while she said nothing: "What makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you're out of it. You've done.
Yet he waited for her answer.
"Well, you don't say--?"
I thought of dreadful things, between which it was difficult to choose; and so must you have done."
"Oh, oh!" May Bartram sounded over what she couldn't hide.
The door isn't shut. The door's open," said May Bartram.
But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly.
Therefore if, having this one, you give me no more light on it, you abandon me."
It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately shone with it--it glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in her expression.
"I mean the thing I've never said."
"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.
Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him.
The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became articulate.
He couldn't pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed--as capable even yet of helping him.
She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread.
"Because you've given me signs to the contrary.
She had spoken as if some difference had been made within the moment.
"You can't hide it."
He wanted the knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own august weight.
His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything fitted.
"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed.
"What we're speaking of, remember, is only my idea."
It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures.
But she chose.
"That's it. It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a man like another."
You help me to pass for a man like another.
He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation.
He laughed as he saw what she meant.
The breath of his good faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how long at least his companion had.
"It hasn't been a question for me.
"By going on as you are."
That was what women had where they were interested; they made out things, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out for themselves.
It's my intimacy with you that's in question."
Not, that is, just for me and my secret."
Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular that she had given herself so to his case.
It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
He had been far from holding it a failure--long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success.
"I see," Marcher returned.
He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could "know," after all, any better than he did.
She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways.
How shall I ever repay you?"
When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock.
"And you mean that makes you all right?"
When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch.
"I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not living for you.
If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him.
If you've had your woman I've had," she said, "my man."
This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to him--it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer.
These reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity; yet, make them as he might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more disconcerted.
It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their depths.
Is that it?"
It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure.
And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped.
She had no source of knowledge he hadn't equally--except of course that she might have finer nerves.
She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough.
It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for another of his surprises.
He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that.
"Yes, but since, as you say, I'm only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you?
"I don't know why it shouldn't make me--humanly, which is what we're speaking of--as right as it makes you."
May Bartram smiled.
A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended.
It had come up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was bad--too bad to tell him.
This conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared.
Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside.
"How kind, how beautiful, you are to me!
He felt in these days what, oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing her by some catastrophe--some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally new.
It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her trouble, to put that question to her; but it had immediately sounded for him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry for her.
If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her having had some--what should he think?--mystical irresistible light, this would make the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoption of his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life.
He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax.
"'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that you're living for something.
It lapsed for him with a strange steady sweep, and the oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only positive surprise his career, if career it could be called, had yet offered him.
He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely.
These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss.
The tears of the good Amelia flowed copiously.
Look at me; is it possible you do not know me?"
"Considering the circumstances," she said, "you showed great indulgence towards me, and it never entered my mind to nourish the least resentment towards you.
She looked around.
Oh, how did you get here--here in so lonely a place at this hour of the night, so far from your home?"
Looking up she saw the beautiful face and figure of a woman, dressed in a long flowing robe.
Oh, if we had only taken more precaution, if we had placed more confidence in an old servant who had always shown unimpeachable honesty and faithfulness, perhaps thou hadst still been living with us!"
"Dear Mary," said she, "we have done you great injustice.
The next day the labourers at the farm were busy taking in the hay from a large meadow just beyond the forest.
"It is too late," said her husband, "to send Mary away now.
I had grateful thoughts of all your kindness, and my only sorrow was that you and your dear parents should regard me as ungrateful enough to be guilty of stealing your ring.
When that day comes, assure the Countess and Count and Amelia that my heart was full of respect and love and gratitude towards them till my last breath.' These, my dear Countess, were his last words."
May His name be praised!"
Frightened and trembling, Mary was about to fly.
Now I have no one.
Mary was distressed at these words, and begged the Countess not to talk of forgiveness.
Mary made no further attempt to defend herself against the unjust accusation.
She wished before leaving the neighbourhood to visit her father's grave once more.
You have been ill rewarded for the pleasure which you gave me with the basket of flowers, but at last your innocence has been made known.
The soft evening breeze murmured among the branches, making the rose trees planted on her father's grave tremble.
The country people round about their home used to beg flowers from her for the purpose of decorating the graves of their friends.
God has heard your fervent prayers, and I have come to help you.
It was towards the close of the day when Mary set out with her little bundle under her arm, and began to climb up the mountain, following the narrow road to the woods.
Here she poured out her soul in fervent prayer to God.
However, they consoled her as well as they could, and gave her a little money to assist her on her journey.
CHAPTER XIV.
As the inscription had been effaced by time, it was left there to be used as a seat.
We are ready to make amends as far as it lies in our power.
I had in you a good father and protector and faithful friend.
"Go, good girl," said they to her, "and may God take care of you."
Forgive us, dear Mary."
When Mary was returning from her work in the evening with a rake on her shoulder and a pitcher in her hand, along with the other servants, this passionate woman came out of the kitchen and met her with a torrent of abuse, and ordered her to give up the linen immediately.
Taking from a cupboard the beautiful basket which had been the first cause of all her unhappiness, she filled it with choice flowers of all colours, artistically interspersed with fresh green leaves, and carried it to Erlenbrunn before the hour of divine service, and laid it on her father's tomb, watering it at the same time with tears that could not be repressed.
Begone as soon as possible.
Mary sat down on the stone near the wall shaded by the thick foliage of a tree which covered her with its dark branches.
She had no fear that any one would dare to steal either the basket or the flowers.
"Believe me, good Countess," said Mary, "my father was far from feeling the least resentment towards you.
When the moon shone into the prison which confined me you were then alive; when I was driven from the home which I loved so much you were left me.
A STRANGE MEETING.
"Come, Mary," said she, "and sit down here with me on the stone.
He prayed for you daily, as he was accustomed to do when he lived at Eichbourg, and at the hour of his death he blessed you all.
Let her but remain this one night."
You are now happy, and beyond the reach of grief.
The months sped on, and now the anniversary of her father's birthday arrived.
Poor, forsaken, suspected of crime, I am alone in the world, a stranger, not knowing where to lay my head. The only little corner that remained to me on the earth I am driven from, and now I shall no longer have the consolation of coming here to weep by your grave!" At these words the tears rushed forth afresh.
Against the wall, near her father's tomb, was a gravestone, very old and covered with moss.
It is evident death does not mean to rid me of them for some time."
"Thief," she cried coarsely, "do you think I am ignorant of the theft of the ring, and what difficulty you had to escape the executioner's sword?
My great desire was that you might one day be convinced of my innocence, and God has granted this desire.
Let her sup with us, as she has worked all day in the great heat.
Suddenly she heard a sweet voice calling her familiarly by her name, "Mary, Mary!"
It had always been a pleasure to Mary to give her flowers for this purpose, and she now determined to decorate her father's tomb in the same manner.
The Countess raised Mary gently from the ground, pressed her to her heart, and kissed her tenderly.
Many of the country people who saw her offering were moved to tears, and, blessing the old gardener's pious daughter, they prayed for her prosperity.
When she had put the little bundle under her arm, thanked the servants of Pine Farm for their kindness to her and protested once more her innocence, she asked permission to take leave of her friends, the old farmer and his wife.
Until then it had always been to Mary a day of great joy, but this time, when the day dawned, she was bathed in tears.
"Alas," said she, "I dare not at this hour beg a lodging for the night. Indeed, if I tell why I was turned out of doors, no one perhaps will consent to receive me."
The farmer's wife had a large piece of fine linen spread out on the grass a few steps from the house, and in the evening this was found to have disappeared.
When she came out of the forest the village clock struck seven, and before she arrived at the graveyard it was nearly dark; but she was not afraid, and went up to her father's grave, where she sat down and gave way to a burst of grief.
The late hour of night and the solitude of the graveyard and her loneliness made Mary start with fear.
Can you ever forgive my parents and me?
Previously she had had the pleasure and excitement of preparing something which she knew would please her father, but now, alas, this delightful occupation was rendered useless!
Mary left the basket on the grave, and went back to the misery of Pine Farm.
There is no room in my house for creatures like you."
The moon was shining brightly upon her face, and with an exclamation of surprise, Mary cried out, "Is it you, the Countess Amelia?
CHAPTER XIII.
It is perhaps the last time I shall ever be here.
"Oh, my father," cried Mary, "would that you were still here, that I might pour my trouble into your ears!
Let me at least ornament your grave with them."
He paused momentarily, and broke into vague exhortations, and then a rush of speech came upon him.
He walked into the centre of the light, and his shadow drew together black and sharp to a little blot at his feet.
I give it to you, and myself I give to you.
Aeroplanes at Madrid!
I knew you would say these things...."
He found the light of his present exaltation reflected in the face of the girl.
He addressed himself to the unseen multitudes who stared upon him through those grotesque black eyes.
At first he spoke slowly.
She came in very quietly, and stood still, as if she did not want to interrupt Graham's eloquence....
"Ready!"
While he was still hesitating there came an agitated messenger with news that the foremost aeroplanes were passing over Madrid.
How is it with the common lives?
There is no faith but faith--faith which is courage...."
Even as he stood, awkward, hesitating, with an indiscreet apology for his inability trembling on his lips, came the noise of many people crying out, the running to and fro of feet.
"You have helped me," he said lamely--"helped me very much....
"For a moment," he said, "I must wait.
His eloquence limped no longer.
CHAPTER XXIII
He stopped to gather words.
But his doubts and questionings fled before her presence.
All your lives, it may be, you must fight.
For that we did not work, and that has come.
"Wait," cried someone, and a door opened.
"Great cities, vast powers, a collective greatness beyond our dreams.
His heart leapt.
The men in yellow, and men whom he fancied were called Ward Leaders, were either propelling him forward or following him obediently; it was hard to tell.
To all of you.
Abruptly it was perfectly clear to him that this revolt against Ostrog was premature, foredoomed to failure, the impulse of passionate inadequacy against inevitable things.
As it has ever been--sorrow and labour, lives cramped and unfulfilled, lives tempted by power, tempted by wealth, and gone to waste and folly.
It was Helen Wotton.
He turned back to her.
And at last he made an end to speaking.
Graham turned, and the watching lights waned.
How is it with man after two hundred years?
There is no promise, there is no security--nothing to go upon but Faith.
That was sufficient.
Strange to say, the anger of the Raturans was not assuaged by the rebuff which they received at that time.
And they were right.
"No--not so; sing thus," he said, giving the right notes.
As he drew near he was observed by both parties to stop abruptly in his career, and wrench out of the ground a stake that had been meant for the corner-post of a newly-begun hut.
Away!"
When you get there, yell, shriek--like-- like--you know how!
Those who could not get inside sat on the ground outside, and, as the hut was open in front, the gathering soon increased.
"She is caught and carried away--with her mother."
The assembling of these children for their lesson brought powerfully to Zeppa's mind, one day, the meetings of the Ratinga people for worship, and the appropriateness of beginning with prayer occurred to him. Accordingly, that morning, just as he was about to commence the hymns, he clasped his hands, raised his eyes, and briefly asked God's blessing on the work.
As you did last time!
He could not well have hit upon a more unfortunate phrase.
When Wapoota saw his deliverer, he ran to him, panting, and said--
Leaving the aged men and boys to protect the women and children, those dark-skinned warriors marched away to battle--not with the flaunting banners and martial music of civilised man, but with the profound silence and the stealthy tread of the savage.
Profound astonishment kept the little ones quiet, and before they had time to recover the prayer was over.
His surprise on hearing that the village had been attacked was great and his anxiety considerable.
Fear not to be captured.
At the unexpected outcry in the rear the Raturans halted, and held a hasty council of war.
But Zeppa had heard enough.
The pupil took it up at once, and thus the singing lessons were fairly begun.
The horrified intruder heard the terminal yell, and saw the maniac bound over the fire towards him, but he saw and heard no more, for his limbs became suddenly endued with something like electric vitality.
The savage warriors pursued, and several were taken, among them Lippy and her mother, who were promptly despatched to the rear.
Zeppa was unarmed.
In a short time he had the satisfaction of hearing Lippy attempt, of her own accord, to sing one of the hymns that had taken her fancy.
On the way up, Wapoota, who felt somewhat timorous about the visit, had made up his mind as to the best mode of address with which to approach his friend.
Your death is nothing.
Gradually they grew bolder, and joined in the exercise.
Zeppa looked up with a frown, as if annoyed at the intrusion.
The natives regarded his person as in some measure sacred, and would have deemed it not only dangerous but insolent to go up among the rocky heights when the madman was known to be there.
"While we waste time here," said the leading chief, "the mountain dogs will get ready for us.
A kick facilitated Wapoota's flight, and the two chiefs returned at speed to rouse the sleeping camp.
Forward!"
As on former occasions of conquest, the Mountain-men pursued the flying host into their swamps, but they did not, as in former times, return to slay the aged and carry the women and children into captivity.
When Wapoota went over the precipice and disappeared, Zeppa halted and stood erect, gazing with a questioning aspect at the sky, and drawing his hand slowly across his brows with that wearied and puzzled aspect which had become characteristic.
He took her on his knee, and told her, in her own tongue, to try it again.
Such a night as is apt to fill the guilty conscience with unresting fears, as though it felt the near approach of that avenging sword which sooner or later it must meet.
Meanwhile, at the first alarm, the women and children of the village had been sent off to the mountains for safety.
Poor Zeppa! till that day, since his mental break-down, the idea of singing had never once occurred to him, and this reception of his first attempt to teach disconcerted him.
Before reaching him, however, his attention was arrested by a cry from some one in the midst of the enemy in front.
He was thoroughly roused.
"My son!
But he got no further.
They ran away from him in terror.
Not knowing the Gospel method of blotting out the latter, their one resource lay in obliterating the former.
The race was a long one, but neither the madman nor his friend flagged until they overtook the party.
Zeppa took pleasure in helping them, and at last permitted as many as could crowd into his hut to do so.
Whirling it like a feather round his head, the maniac rushed on.
Wapoota performed his part nobly--and without being captured, for he did not agree with Ongoloo as to the unimportance of his own death!
Although he had refused to go out to war with his entertainers, he felt no disposition to stand idly by when they were attacked.
"Let us go back and fight them," said one.
The women scattered and fled.
He had decided that, although he was not particularly youthful, the language and manner of a respectful son to a revered father would best befit the occasion.
One night, while he was thus absent, the men of Ratura delivered the attack which they had long meditated.
He renewed his efforts, but changed his plan.
Accordingly, she began in a sweet, tiny little voice, and her teacher gazed at her with intense pleasure depicted on his handsome face until she reached the note where she had formerly gone wrong.
When, therefore, he thought it time to close, he simply rose up and took himself off, leaving his congregation to disperse when and how it pleased!
This was briefly explained to Zeppa by Wapoota, who had chanced to encounter the party when returning from his yelling mission, if we may so express it.
Turning his face towards the village he sped over the ground at a pace that soon brought him in sight of the combatants, who seemed to be swaying to and fro--now here, now there--as the tide of battle flowed and victory leaned sometimes to one side sometimes to the other.
"Come with me--this way--Lippy is here!"
It was sufficiently soft to prevent death.
Though the work in hand was the same, the means to the end were different; we will therefore describe them.
But the monks had hitherto been a species of secular priests, who lived after the manner of the present canons or prebendaries, and were both intermingled, in some degree, with the world, and endeavored to render themselves useful to it.
As the austerity affected by the monks made them particularly violent on this occasion, Edwy entertained a strong prepossession against them; and seemed, on that account, determined not to second their project of expelling the seculars from all the convents, and of possessing themselves of those rich establishments.
The progress of the monks, which was become considerable, was somewhat retarded by the death of Edred, their partisan, who expired after a reign of nine years.
That amiable princess being cured of her wounds, and having even obliterated the scars with which Odo had hoped to deface her beauty, returned into England, and was flying to the embraces of the king, whom she still regarded as her husband; when she fell into the hands of a party whom the primate had sent to intercept her.
From the introduction of Christianity among the Saxons, there had been monasteries in England; and these establishments had extremely multiplied by the donations of the princes and nobles, whose superstition, derived from their ignorance and precarious life, and increased by remorses for the crimes into which they were so frequently betrayed, knew no other expedient for appeasing the Deity, than a profuse liberality towards the ecclesiastics.
He left children; but as they were infants, his nephew Edwy, son of Edmund, was placed on the throne.
The obedience of the Danes lasted no longer than the present terror. Provoked at the devastations of Edred, and even reduced by necessity to subsist on plunder, they broke into a new rebellion, and were again subdued; but the king, now instructed by experience, took greater precautions against their future revolt.
He fixed English garrisons in their most considerable towns, and placed over them an English governor, who might watch all their motions, and suppress any insurrection on its first appearance.
EDWY
Supported by the character obtained in his retreat, Dunstan appeared again in the world; and gained such an ascendent over Edred who had succeeded to the crown, as made him not only the director of that prince's conscience, but his counsellor in the most momentous affairs of government.
The people were thrown into agitation; and few instances occur of more violent dissensions, excited by the most material differences in religion; or rather by the most frivolous; since it is a just remark, that the more affinity there is between theological parties, the greater commonly is their animosity.
The minds of men were already well prepared for this innovation.
The monks knew how to avail themselves of all these popular topics, and to set off their own character to the best advantage.
Dunstan was born of noble parents in the west of England; and being educated under his uncle Aldhelm, then archbishop of Canterbury, had betaken himself to the ecclesiastical life, and had acquired some character in the court of Edmund.
He roused himself, however, and promptly communicated by writing with Shrewsbury and Orford. Montague and Vernon came down to Tunbridge Wells, and conferred fully with him.
The peculiarity of the Batavian polity threw some difficulties in his way; but every difficulty gelded to his authority and to the dexterous management of Heinsius.
As to the blanks in the English powers, William had attended to his Chancellor's suggestion, and had inserted the names of Sir Joseph Williamson, minister at the Hague, a born Englishman, and of Portland, a naturalised Englishman.
And would not the English and Dutch think themselves most fortunate if, after many bloody and costly campaigns, the French King could be compelled to sign a treaty, the same, word for word, with that which he was ready uncompelled to sign now?
The partition planned at Loo was therefore the very opposite of the partition of Poland.
It has been said to have been unjust that three states should have combined to divide a fourth state without its own consent; and, in recent times, the partition of the Spanish monarchy which was meditated in 1698 has been compared to the greatest political crime which stains the history of modern Europe, the partition of Poland.
But they had been reassured by the thought that their Sovereign thoroughly understood this department of politics, that he had fully considered all these things, that he had neglected no precaution, and that the concessions which he had made to France were the smallest which could have averted the calamities impending over Christendom.
If that opinion should be favourable, not a day must be lost.
They had their fears that Lewis might be playing false.
But they would have perceived that by resisting they were much more likely to lose the Indies than to preserve Guipuscoa.
It has often been maintained that she would have gained more by permanently annexing to herself Guipuscoa, Naples and Sicily than by sending the Duke of Anjou or the Duke of Berry to reign at the Escurial. On this point, however, if on any point, respect is due to the opinion of William.
But Somers gently hinted that it would be proper to fill those blanks with the names of persons who were English by naturalisation, if not by birth, and who would therefore be responsible to Parliament.
The truth is that they were so, and were well known to be so both by William and by Lewis.
But a glance at the map ought to have been sufficient to undeceive those who imagined that the great antagonist of the House of Bourbon could be so weak as to lay the liberties of Europe at the feet of that house.
If the whole Spanish monarchy should pass to the House of Bourbon, it was highly probable that in a few years England would cease to be great and free, and that Holland would be a mere province of France.
Whether those terms were or were not too favourable to France is quite another question.
Was it not certain that the contest would be long and terrible?
It was, the Chancellor wrote, their duty to tell His Majesty that the recent elections had indicated the public feeling in a manner which had not been expected, but which could not be mistaken.
A French army sent to them by land would have to force its way through the passes of the Alps, through Piedmont, through Tuscany, and through the Pontifical States, in opposition probably to great German armies.
He had no fleet; and it was therefore impossible for him even to attempt to possess himself of Castile, of Arragon, of Sicily, of the Indies, in opposition to the united navies of the three greatest maritime powers in the world.
One wound the partition would undoubtedly have inflicted, a wound on the Castilian pride.
The Emperor might have complained and threatened; but he must have submitted; for what could he do?
Guipuscoa, though a small, was doubtless a valuable province, and was in a military point of view highly important.
It was an assemblage of distinct bodies, none of which had any strong sympathy with the rest, and some of which had a positive antipathy for each other.
I had feared to question Sola relative to the beautiful captive, as I could not but recall the strange expression I had noted upon her face after my first encounter with the prisoner.
On the night following the prisoner's visit to the audience chamber the conversation finally fell upon this subject, and I was all ears on the instant.
They make the laws as they are needed; a new law for each emergency.
CHAPTER IX
"She is very small and very beautiful; I had hoped that they would hold her for ransom."
"It is sad, Sola, that you were not born a million years ago," snapped Sarkoja, "when all the hollows of the land were filled with water, and the peoples were as soft as the stuff they sailed upon.
"What will be the manner of her going out?" inquired Sola.
In time of actual warfare they form a part of the reserves, and when the necessity arises fight with even greater intelligence and ferocity than the men.
I decided that at the first opportunity I would take Sola into my confidence and openly ask her to aid me, and with this resolution strong upon me I turned among my silks and furs and slept the dreamless and refreshing sleep of Mars.
They are unfettered by precedent in the administration of justice.
In our day we have progressed to a point where such sentiments mark weakness and atavism.
From then on Sola instructed me in the mysteries of the various weapons, and with the Martian young I spent several hours each day practicing upon the plaza.
Sarkoja, one of the older women who shared our domicile, had been present at the audience as one of the captive's guards, and it was toward her the question turned.
As I reached the doorway of our building a strange surprise awaited me. A warrior approached bearing the arms, ornaments, and full accouterments of his kind.
It is only the men of her kind who war upon us, and I have ever thought that their attitude toward us is but the reflection of ours toward them.
The cavalcade was returning to the plaza, the homeward march having been given up for that day; nor, in fact, was it recommenced for more than a week, owing to the fear of a return attack by the air craft.
Much depressed, and, to me, unaccountably so, I slowly descended to the street.
Not a sign of life was manifest upon her as she drifted slowly with the light breeze in a southeasterly direction.
As a faint spurt of flame rose from the point where the missile struck he swung over the side and was quickly upon the ground.
Instantly the warriors ceased firing, for it was quite apparent that the vessel was entirely helpless, and, far from being in a position to inflict harm upon us, she could not even control herself sufficiently to escape.
I could see them examining the dead sailors, evidently for signs of life, and presently a party of them appeared from below dragging a little figure among them.
Whether they had discovered us or simply were looking at the deserted city I could not say, but in any event they received a rude reception, for suddenly and without warning the green Martian warriors fired a terrific volley from the windows of the buildings facing the little valley across which the great ships were so peacefully advancing.
I realized I had not answered her signal, and ignorant as I was of Martian customs, I intuitively felt that she had made an appeal for succor and protection which my unfortunate ignorance had prevented me from answering.
Slowly she swung from her course, circling back toward us in an erratic and pitiful manner.
After making her fast, they swarmed the sides and searched the vessel from stem to stern.
A FAIR CAPTIVE FROM THE SKY
Her skin was of a light reddish copper color, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone with a strangely enhancing effect.
As she neared the city the warriors rushed out upon the plain to meet her, but it was evident that she still was too high for them to hope to reach her decks.
This operation concluded, they hastily clambered over her sides, sliding down the guy ropes to the ground.
Several of the craft were limping perceptibly, and seemed but barely under the control of their depleted crews.
Just a moment we gazed upon each other, and then the look of hope and renewed courage which had glorified her face as she discovered me, faded into one of utter dejection, mingled with loathing and contempt.
As though trained for years in this particular evolution, the green Martians melted like mist into the spacious doorways of the nearby buildings, until, in less than three minutes, the entire cavalcade of chariots, mastodons and mounted warriors was nowhere to be seen.
This operation required several hours, during which time a number of the chariots were requisitioned to transport the loot, which consisted in arms, ammunition, silks, furs, jewels, strangely carved stone vessels, and a quantity of solid foods and liquids, including many casks of water, the first I had seen since my advent upon Mars.
Close at my heel, in his now accustomed place, followed Woola, the hound, and as I emerged upon the street Sola rushed up to me as though I had been the object of some search on her part.
From my vantage point in the window I could see the bodies of her crew strewn about, although I could not make out what manner of creatures they might be.
One by one, however, the ships managed to dip below the crests of the outlying hills until only one barely moving craft was in sight.
Sola and I had entered a building upon the front of the city, in fact, the same one in which I had had my encounter with the apes, and, wishing to see what had caused the sudden retreat, I mounted to an upper floor and peered from the window out over the valley and the hills beyond; and there I saw the cause of their sudden scurrying to cover.
She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.
The third day after the incubator ceremony we set forth toward home, but scarcely had the head of the procession debouched into the open ground before the city than orders were given for an immediate and hasty return.
The sight was awe-inspiring in the extreme as one contemplated this mighty floating funeral pyre, drifting unguided and unmanned through the lonely wastes of the Martian heavens; a derelict of death and destruction, typifying the life story of these strange and ferocious creatures into whose unfriendly hands fate had carried it.
I could see figures crowding the forward decks and upper works of the air craft.
The creature was considerably less than half as tall as the green Martian warriors, and from my balcony I could see that it walked erect upon two legs and surmised that it was some new and strange Martian monstrosity with which I had not as yet become acquainted.
Following it came another, and another, and another, until twenty of them, swinging low above the ground, sailed slowly and majestically toward us.
Scarcely had he alighted than the guy ropes were simultaneously released, and the great warship, lightened by the removal of the loot, soared majestically into the air, her decks and upper works a mass of roaring flames.
She did not see me at first, but just as she was disappearing through the portal of the building which was to be her prison she turned, and her eyes met mine.
Lorquas Ptomel was too astute an old warrior to be caught upon the open plains with a caravan of chariots and children, and so we remained at the deserted city until the danger seemed passed.
The fire from the vessels was most ineffectual, owing, as I afterward learned, to the unexpected suddenness of the first volley, which caught the ship's crews entirely unprepared and the sighting apparatus of the guns unprotected from the deadly aim of our warriors.
CHAPTER VIII
The last warrior to leave the deck turned and threw something back upon the vessel, waiting an instant to note the outcome of his act.
A huge craft, long, low, and gray-painted, swung slowly over the crest of the nearest hill.
As the craft neared the building, and just before she struck, the Martian warriors swarmed upon her from the windows, and with their great spears eased the shock of the collision, and in a few moments they had thrown out grappling hooks and the big boat was being hauled to ground by their fellows below.
Twenty minutes after the first volley the great fleet swung trailing off in the direction from which it had first appeared.
The buccaneers now bestirred themselves to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work.
But for Laudonniere, he said, their fortunes would all be made.
They took a small Spanish vessel off the coast of Cuba, but were soon compelled by famine to put into Havana and give themselves up.
The exchange proved most disastrous. These pirates joined with others whom they had won over, stole Laudonniere's two pinnaces, and set forth on a plundering excursion to the West Indies.
Embarking in her, they next fell in with a caravel, which also they captured.
Among these was the ringleader Fourneaux, and also the pilot Trenchant, who, eager to return to Fort Caroline, whence he had been forcibly taken, succeeded during the night in bringing the vessel to the coast of Florida.
"Say what you like," said one of them, after hearing the counsel for the defence; "but if Laudonniere does not hang us all, I will never call him an honest man."
Gathered in knots, they nursed each other's wrath, and inveighed against the commandant.
"Comrades," said one of the condemned, appealing to the soldiers, "will you stand by and see us butchered?"
They chose the latter course, and bore away for the St. John's.
A court-martial was called near Fort Caroline, and all were found guilty.
"These," retorted Laudonniere, "are no comrades of mutineers and rebels."
Discomfited, woebegone, and drunk, they were landed under a guard.
She made a desperate fight, but was taken at last, and with her a rich booty.
Forcing an entrance, they wounded a gentleman who opposed them, and crowded around the sick man's bed.
Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party.
As the wine mounted to their heads, in the mirth of drink and desperation, they enacted their own trial.
The young nobles, of whom there were many, were volunteers, who had paid their own expenses in expectation of a golden harvest, and they chafed in impatience and disgust.
Hence it happened that at daybreak three armed vessels fell upon them, retook the prize, and captured or killed all the pirates but twenty-six, who, cutting the moorings of their brigantine, fled out to sea.
A severe illness again seized Laudonniere, and confined him to his bed. Improving their advantage, the malcontents gained over nearly all the best soldiers in the fort.
At the request of his followers, however, he commuted the sentence to shooting.
The colony was wofully depleted; but the bad blood had been drawn off, and thenceforth all internal danger was at an end.
When he returned, about the tenth of November, Laudonniere persuaded him to carry home seven or eight of the malcontent soldiers.
Laudonniere refused, but assured them that, as soon as the defences of the fort should be completed, a search should be begun in earnest for the Appalachian gold mine, and that meanwhile two small vessels then building on the river should be sent along the coast to barter for provisions with the Indians.
In the little world of Fort Caroline, a miniature France, cliques and parties, conspiracy and sedition, were fast stirring into life. Hopes had been dashed, and wild expectations had come to naught.
It was late in the night.
The adventurers had found, not conquest and gold, but a dull exile in a petty fort by a hot and sickly river, with hard labor, bad fare, prospective famine, and nothing to break the weary sameness but some passing canoe or floating alligator.
He found an ally in a gentleman named Genre, one of Laudonniere's confidants, who, while still professing fast adherence to his interests, is charged by him with plotting against his life.
They set sail on the eighth of December, taunting those who remained, calling them greenhorns, and threatening condign punishment if, on their triumphant return, they should be refused free entrance to the fort.
The ringleader was one Fourneaux, a man of good birth, but whom Le Moyne calls an avaricious hypocrite.
They next devised a scheme to blow him up by hiding a keg of gunpowder under his bed; but here, too, they failed.
They were no sooner gone than the unfortunate Laudonniere was gladdened in his solitude by the approach of his fast friends Ottigny and Arlac, who conveyed him to the fort and reinstated him.
Here, to make their peace with the authorities, they told all they knew of the position and purposes of their countrymen at Fort Caroline, and thus was forged the thunderbolt soon to be hurled against the wretched little colony.
Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved: first, a rich booty; secondly, the punishment of idolatry; thirdly, vengeance on the arch-enemies of their party and their faith.
The sick commandant, imprisoned in the ship with one attendant, at first refused; but receiving a message from the mutineers, that, if he did not comply, they would come on board and cut his throat, he at length yielded.
The entire command was reorganized, and new officers appointed.
Laudonniere sent to reconnoitre. The stranger lay anchored at the mouth of the river.
The malcontents took the opportunity to send home charges against Laudonniere of peculation, favoritism, and tyranny.
On this, Genre made advances to the apothecary, urging him to put arsenic into his medicine; but the apothecary shrugged his shoulders.
Fourneaux, armed with steel cap and cuirass, held his arquebuse to Laudonniere's throat, and demanded leave to go on a cruise among the Spanish islands.
A file of men, a rattling volley, and the debt of justice was paid.
Closed?
It was an ecstasy of joy!
He passed his hand over it: no bolt, no lock!
He again heard footsteps, but this time they were slower, more heavy.
Amid the horrible confusion of the rabbi's thoughts, the idea darted through his brain: "Can I be already dead that they did not see me?" A hideous impression roused him from his lethargy: in looking at the wall against which his face was pressed, he imagined he beheld two fierce eyes watching him!
Hope in the Light, and rest."
He began to crawl toward the chance of escape.
Just opposite to him the two inquisitors paused under the light of the lamp--doubtless owing to some accident due to the course of their argument.
With tears in his eyes at the thought of this resolute soul rejecting salvation, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d'Espila, approaching the shuddering rabbi, addressed him as follows:
Yet, yonder, at the far end of that passage there might be a doorway of escape!
Fearing an increase of tortures if he were captured, he thought of returning to his dungeon.
Once in the mountains and he was safe!
He lowered his eyes--and remained motionless, gasping for breath, dazed, with fixed eyes, fairly driveling with terror.
Placed in the last row, you will have time to invoke God and offer to Him this baptism of fire, which is of the Holy Spirit.
Oh, to escape!
If in the presence of such obstinacy I was forced to permit, with deep regret, the use of great severity, my task of fraternal correction has its limits.
They were conversing in low tones, and seemed to be discussing some important subject, for they were gesticulating vehemently.
The white and black forms of two inquisitors appeared, emerging from the obscurity beyond.
We must hope so. There are examples.
This ceremony over, the captive was left, solitary and bewildered, in the darkness.
One, while listening to his companion, gazed at the rabbi! And, beneath the look--whose absence of expression the hapless man did not at first notice--he fancied he again felt the burning pincers scorch his flesh, he was to be once more a living wound.
"My son, rejoice: your trials here below are about to end.
Proud of a filiation dating back thousands of years, proud of his ancestors--for all Jews worthy of the name are vain of their blood--he descended Talmudically from Othoniel and consequently from Ipsiboa, the wife of the last judge of Israel, a circumstance which had sustained his courage amid incessant torture.
Yes, it was really a corridor, but endless in length.
A latch!
He passed swiftly by, holding in his clenched hand an instrument of torture--a frightful figure--and vanished.
He would journey all night through the lemon groves, whose fragrance reached him.
"HALLELUIA!" murmured the rabbi in a transport of gratitude as, standing on the threshold, he beheld the scene before him.
Well, it was over, no doubt.
Marvelous!
He must hasten toward that goal which he fancied (absurdly, no doubt) to be deliverance, toward the darkness from which he was now barely thirty paces distant.
Every nerve in the miserable fugitive's body thrilled with hope.
Stretching himself flat he crept to the threshold.
By the aid of a sort of luminous dusk he distinguished at first a semicircle of walls indented by winding stairs; and opposite to him, at the top of five or six stone steps, a sort of black portal, opening into an immense corridor, whose first arches only were visible from below.
The dark-robed priest pressed the hapless Jew to his heart with so fervent an outburst of love, that the edges of the monochal haircloth rubbed the Dominican's breast.
He was in the clasp of the Grand Inquisitor himself, the venerable Pedro Arbuez d'Espila, who gazed at him with tearful eyes, like a good shepherd who had found his stray lamb.
He pressed forward faster on his knees, his hands, at full length, dragging himself painfully along, and soon entered the dark portion of this terrible corridor.
By an extraordinary accident the familiar who closed it had turned the huge key an instant before it struck the stone casing, so that the rusty bolt not having entered the hole, the door again rolled on its hinges.
What a terrible silence!
You are the fig tree which, having failed so many times to bear fruit, at last withered, but God alone can judge your soul.
He started up, the latch yielded to the pressure of his thumb: the door silently swung open before him.
And to thank once more the God who had bestowed this mercy upon him, he extended his arms, raising his eyes toward Heaven.
Forward!
Suddenly the poor wretch felt a gust of cold air on the hands resting upon the flags; it came from under the little door to which the two walls led.
Yet, no! No.
Fainting, breathless, with fluttering eyelids, he shivered at the touch of the monk's floating robe.
It revealed the neighboring fields, stretching toward the sierras, whose sinuous blue lines were relieved against the horizon.
Then, very gently and cautiously, slipping one finger into the crevice, he drew the door toward him.
Then he fancied he saw the shadow of his arms approach him--fancied that he felt these shadowy arms inclose, embrace him--and that he was pressed tenderly to some one's breast.
Without hesitating, he ventured on the flags, keeping close under the loopholes, trying to make himself part of the blackness of the long walls.
The rabbi ventured to glance outside.
So sleep in peace to-night.
"Come along then," said Miss Berengaria, hastening out of the room; "the sooner this is over the better.
Michael stopped him.
"The whole thing was a plant.
"I won't die," he moaned, sinking back.
Now I am."
"Let us understand one another clearly.
I hope, however, she will reappear to claim her legacy."
The whole deception was cleverly carried out.
"They all know by this time," said Miss Berengaria, calmly.
One thing at a time.
Bernard will probably tell you himself.
"Yes!
"Why did you not stop him?"
Durham guessed this and touched her hand.
I am glad he has decided to make this will."
Durham looked hard at the young scoundrel who was such a worthy instrument of Beryl's.
"I know I did.
Let us be just."
"I don't want Bernard arrested."
"Yes," said Durham, producing the document.
"You are Bernard's."
"I can't say.
"Yes," said Miss Berengaria, climbing the stairs with a briskness surprising in a woman of her years, "something will happen.
With nursing you may get better."
Jerry had no right to be hanging round the garden when Bernard arrived, much less to write and tell you that he was here."
To assist you to arrest him?"
"Have you got it?" he asked.
"I hope not.
"Yes!
"Indeed, Mr. Durham; and why to Mrs. Gilroy?"
Miss Plantagenet--as I knew she would,--denied that he was there; but afterwards, when I threatened to bring the police on to the scene, she gave way and let me see Bernard."
As for Miss Berengaria, that indomitable old lady never turned a hair.
His death is only a question of days.
"And being friends with Bernard," went on Beryl, "he is sorry that we quarrelled.
"I have them with me," said Julius, bringing out a sealed letter.
"I don't approve of having boys with long tongues in my house.
"Why did you not tell me?" asked Julius, sharply.
Durham shrugged his shoulders.
"Bernard is supposed to be dead."
"And if he tries anything of that sort on," thought Durham, "I'll have him arrested at once for the first murder.
"And how confoundedly clever.
I shall stay here.
For the sake of appearances Durham went on making objections.
He walked on the other side of the street, and before I could cross over, which was difficult on account of the traffic, Bernard disappeared.
"Bernard answered it for you.
However, Durham, true to his appointment, arrived at the station the next day and had the will in his pocket.
I could help him back to life with careful nursing, and I wish to do so, since I think there is good in the rascal.
Then Durham put the will into an envelope and prepared to go down.
You will get well."
But Beryl, having had the will made, will--kill him.
But Jerry told the servants as well as Mr. Beryl."
It was on the tip of Durham's tongue to say that no doubt Jerry had been placed as a spy at the Bower, but he suppressed this remark.
I believe Beryl himself killed Simon--the old--no, he is dead.
What's to be done next?"
Durham was perplexed, and wondered what Julius was driving at, and how much he knew.
"Indeed?" said Durham, with a qualm, for he fancied Julius might have learned of Gore's whereabouts.
Colonel Quinnox was pleasant, but he could give Beverly no promise of leniency in regard to Baldos.
This phase of his villainy had not occurred to her.
But if he does ask me I'll just keep putting him off.
Down in her rebellious, insulted heart she was concocting all sorts of plans for revenge.
There could be but one answer, and the very thought of it almost suffocated her.
He understood that she was under certain obligations to Miss Calhoun and he wanted to be perfectly sure of his position before taking a step which now seemed imperative.
Answer me, Miss Calhoun."
She prepared for bed with frantic haste.
"Now, I reckon I'm safe," she murmured a moment later, again getting into bed.
She fled swiftly, pausing at the window to lower the friendly but forgotten umbrella.
At this juncture Baldos entered the room.
I know how to take care of myself.
She was like a bird trying to avoid the charmed eye of the serpent.
"You must not do anything foolish, Beverly," she cautioned, "Your parents would never forgive me if I allowed you to marry or even to fall in love with any Tom, Dick or Harry over here.
I shan't give him a chance.
"It has been a pretty game of love for you and the excellent Baldos.
A PROPOSAL
"Now let's talk about the war.
"Stop!
"She has exposed herself to you?
"Have a care, sir," said Quinnox stiffly.
She was wondering how much he had seen and heard at midnight.
I'm afraid I have done wrong.
"Nevertheless, sir, he goes to the castle first.
Marlanx, of all men! Why was he in the park at this hour of the night?
"An involuntary observer, believe me--and a jealous one.
For a long time she stared at her face in the mirror.
"Remember, I can prove what I have said.
He proceeded, with irate coolness, to ask how far she believed herself bound to protect the person of Baldos, the guard.
It's worth it to you.
"Oh, no.
Then she shrank back in the bed, her eyes fixed upon the black space across the room.
Colonel Quinnox was reading an official note from the princess when Marlanx strode angrily into the room.
"You may depend upon me to protect you from Marlanx.
"Oh, what a fool you've been," she half sobbed, shrinking from the mirror as if it were an accuser.
The next morning she confessed to herself that her fears had been silly.
Beware what you do.
"Miss Calhoun tells me that you have made certain proposals to her, Count Marlanx," said Yetive coldly, her eyes upon his hawkish face.
She was not thinking of her position, but of his.
I'll telegraph for my brother Dan to come over here and punch his head to pieces."
Involuntarily she peered over the rail for a glimpse of Baldos.
Marlanx cited instances in which Baldos had been seen talking to a strange old man inside the grounds, and professed to have proof that he had gone so far as to steal away by night to meet men beyond the city walls.
It is for you to say whether she is to know or not.
Would to heaven my father were here, he would shoot you as he would a dog!
What I saw last night shocked me beyond expression."
Then she jumped into bed.
She was white with passion, cold with terror.
Vague fears began to take possession of her.
"He seems to think he can get wives as easily as he gets rid of them, I observe.
Stop, sir!
I've done it before, you know.
"The devil!
As for Baldos, you are at liberty to prefer the charges.
The tread of a man impelled her to glance below once more before fleeing to her room.
Love's eyes are keen.
There is no need to discuss the matter further.
Take it back--take back every word of that lie!"
Come, my fair lady, give me your promise, it's a good bargain for both."
He had sufficient proof to warrant his arrest and execution; there were documents, and there was positive knowledge that he had conferred with strangers from time to time, even within the walls of the castle grounds.
"Bah!
I would not have told what I saw last night."
For a full minute it seemed to her that her heart would stop beating.
"Well, you shouldn't have looked," she retorted, tossing her chin; and the red feather in her hat bobbed angrily.
I believe my own eyes.
You can bind me to silence.
But in spite of the rain she could not go to sleep.
Beverly kissed her rapturously.
I wish now that I had not humored you in your plan to bring him to the castle.
What occurred in your chamber I can only--"
"It is of the princess you speak."
Wouldn't that have surprised old Marlanx?" Beverly gave a merry laugh.
Without a moment's hesitation he appealed for an audience with the princess, and it was granted.
It is no wonder that you look terrified.
He was there, she knew it.
You have lost the right to be called a man.
"I must have my answer to-night, or you know what will happen," he snarled, but he felt in his heart that he had lost through his eagerness.
Beverly drew back in horror and bewilderment.
Maybe he won't.
In fact, I'm sure he won't.
Before long she was confessing timidly, then boldly, that she loved Baldos better than anything in all the world.
Full of these bitter-sweet thoughts she came to the castle doors before she saw who was waiting for her upon the great verandah.
Once she was inside, however, it did not seem so amusing.
"You miserable coward!
It resulted in the discovery of one of the greatest mathematicians, perhaps the greatest, that Germany has ever produced--Gauss.
Its distance from the sun as determined by Gauss was 2.767 times the earth's distance.
LECTURE XIII
Piazzi called it Ceres, after the tutelary goddess of Sicily.
Up to the time of Herschel, astronomical interest centred on the solar system.
The main interest of these bodies to us lies in the question, What is their history?
Gauss by this time had become so practised in the difficult computations that he worked out the complete orbit of Vesta within ten hours of receiving the observational data from Olbers.
The difficulty as it turned out was most fortunate.
But they have nothing of the kind; their orbits are scattered within a certain broad zone--a zone everywhere as broad as the earth's distance from the sun, 92,000,000 miles--with no sort of law indicating an origin of this kind.
Since then there seems no end to them; numbers have been discovered in America, where Professors Peters and Watson have made a specialty of them, and have themselves found something like a hundred.
Vesta is the largest--its area being about the same as that of Central Europe, without Russia or Spain--and the smallest known is about twenty miles in diameter, or with a surface about the size of Kent.
No thoroughly satisfactory law is known at the present day.
Olbers at once surmised that these two planets were fragments of a larger one, and kept an eager look out for other fragments.
Olbers, while searching for Ceres, had carefully mapped the part of the heavens where it was expected; and in March, 1802, he saw in this place a star he had not previously noticed.
Can they have been once a single planet broken up? or are they rather an abortive attempt at a planet never yet formed into one?
Devices have been invented, such as artfully distributed irregularities calculated to act as satellites and maintain stability; but none of these things really work. Nor will it do to imagine the rings fluid; they too would destroy each other.
In the course of his scrutiny, on the 1st of January, 1801, he noticed a small star which next evening appeared to have shifted.
So much so, that towards the end of last century an enthusiastic German, von Zach, after some search himself for the expected planet, arranged a committee of observing astronomers, or, as he termed it, a body of astronomical detective police, to begin a systematic search for this missing subject of the sun.
The waves thus formed absorb the effect of the mutual perturbations, and prevent an accumulation which would be dangerous to the persistence of the whole.
Mathematical astronomers tried to calculate a possible orbit for the body from the observations of Piazzi, but the observed places were so desperately few and close together.
Imagine a shell travelling in an elliptic orbit round the earth to suddenly explode: the centre of gravity of all its fragments would continue moving along precisely the same path as had been traversed by the centre of the shell before explosion, and would complete its orbit quite undisturbed.
He had invented but not published several powerful mathematical methods (one of them now known as "the method of least squares"), and he applied them to Piazzi's observations.
The whole of them together do not nearly equal the earth in bulk.
There are several distinct constituent rings in the entire Saturnian zone, and each perturbs the other, with the result that they ripple and pulse in concord.
Saturn's ring is, in fact, a very concentrated zone of minor asteroids, and there is every reason to conclude that the origin of the solar asteroids cannot be very unlike the origin of the Saturnian ones.
Since that time it has been divided, and a great part of our attention has been given to the more distant celestial bodies.
His letters did not reach their destination till the end of March. Directly Bode opened his letter he jumped to the conclusion that this must be the missing planet.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE ASTEROIDS
No more asteroids were discovered till 1845, but there are now several hundreds known.
It was undoubtedly the missing planet.
The only effect of gravitational perturbation and of collisions is gradually to broaden out the whole ring, enlarging its outer and diminishing its inner diameter.
The mechanical behaviour of a system of rings, on different hypotheses as to their constitution, has been worked out with consummate skill by Clerk Maxwell; who finds that the only possible constitution for Saturn's assemblage of rings is a multitude of discrete particles each pursuing its independent orbit.
He watched it anxiously for successive evenings, and by the 24th of January he was quite sure he had got hold of some moving body, not a star: probably, he thought, a comet.
And yet, if the nebular hypothesis or anything like it be true, there must be some law to be discovered hereafter, though it may be a very complicated one.
But it is easy to show from the theory of gravitation, that a solid ring could not possibly be stable, but would before long get precipitated excentrically upon the body of the planet.
It would not be likely to be out again before September, and by that time it would be hopelessly lost again, and have just as much to be rediscovered as if it had never been seen.
Meanwhile, however, quite independently of these arrangements in Germany, and entirely unknown to this committee, a quiet astronomer in Sicily, Piazzi, was engaged in making a catalogue of the stars.
Sir George Airy, one of the adjudicators (recently Astronomer-Royal), characterized it as "one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I have ever seen."
He continued to observe till the 11th of February, when he was attacked by illness and compelled to cease.
numbers which very fairly represent the distances of the then known planets from the sun in the order specified.
In two years another was seen, in the course of charting the region of the heavens traversed by Ceres and Pallas.
The gap between Mars and Jupiter, which had often been noticed, and which Kepler filled with a hypothetical planet too small to see, comes into great prominence by this law of Bode.
NOTES TO LECTURE XIII
Their diameters range from 500 to 20 miles.
All the calculations gave different results, and none were of the slightest use.
Ceres was discovered on the 1st of January, 1801, by Piazzi; Pallas in March, 1802, by Olbers; Juno in 1804, by Harding; and Vesta in 1807, by Olbers.
It was like having to determine a curve from three points close together.
In two hours he detected its motion, and in a month he sent his observations to Gauss, who returned as answer the calculated orbit.
It is far more probable that they never constituted one body at all, but are the remains of a cloudy ring thrown off by the solar system in shrinking past that point: a small ring after the immense effort which produced Jupiter and his satellites: a ring which has aggregated into a multitude of little lumps instead of a few big ones.
But unfortunately he was unable to verify the guess, for the object, whatever it was, had now got too near the sun to be seen.
It was first knowingly seen by Galle, of Berlin, on the 23rd of September, 1846.
This was called Pallas.
He was then a young man of twenty-five, eking out a living by tuition.
Vesta is bigger than any of the others, being five hundred miles in diameter, and shines like a star of the sixth magnitude.
It is probable that the asteroids were at one time not rigid, and hence it is difficult to say what may have happened to them; but there is not the least reason to believe that their present arrangement is derivable in any way from an explosion, and it is certain that an enormous time must have elapsed since such an event if it ever occurred.
If the zone of asteroids had a common point through which they all successively passed, they could be unhesitatingly asserted to be the remains of an exploded planet.
His attention was directed to a certain region in Taurus by an error in a previous catalogue, which contained a star really non-existent.
In 1845 another was found, however, in Germany, and a few weeks later two others by Mr. Hind in England.
In 1800 the preliminaries were settled: the heavens near the zodiac were divided into twenty-four regions, each of which was intrusted to one observer to be swept.
His paper constituted what is called "The Adams Prize Essay" for 1856.
He was thus able to calculate an orbit, and to predict a place where, by the end of the year, the planet should be visible.
The rude coincidences were, however, accidental, and he failed to discover any true law.
For many weary years Olbers kept up a patient and unremitting search for more of these small bodies, or fragments of the large planet as he thought them; but his patience went unrewarded, and he died in 1840 without seeing or knowing of any more.
Those who have read the third lecture in Part I. will remember the speculation in which Kepler indulged respecting the arrangements of the planets, the order in which they succeeded one another in space, and the law of their respective distances from the sun; and his fanciful guess about the five regular solids inscribed and circumscribed about their orbits.
It was very small, only of the eighth magnitude; and he wrote to two astronomers (one of them Bode himself) saying what he had observed.
An empirical relation is, however, known: it was suggested by Tatius, and published by Bode, of Berlin, in 1772.
It must be admitted, however, that the fragments of our supposed shell might in the course of ages, if left to themselves, mutually perturb each other into a different arrangement of orbits from that with which they began.
The nebular hypothesis lends itself readily to both.
It was smaller than either, and was called Juno.
Neptune's distance, however, turns out to be more nearly 30 times the earth's distance than 38.8.
Very soon, a more surprising discovery followed.
In 1807 the persevering search of Olbers resulted in the discovery of another, with a very oblique orbit, which Gauss named Vesta.
If only he had had a map of the heavens containing telescopic stars down to the tenth magnitude, and if he had compared his observations with this map as they were made, the process would have been easy, and the discovery quick.
"The past year has given to us the new [minor] planet Astraea; it has done more--it has given us the probable prospect of another. We see it as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain.
But by 1830 it became apparent that it would not accurately obey even these.
The wretched man thus actually saw the planet twice--on August 4th and August 12th, 1846--without knowing it.
Then it's all right."
"You may say that!" the Professor heartily rejoined.
You see I left off at a comma, and it's so awkward not knowing how the sentence finishes! Besides, you've got to go through Dogland first, and I'm always a little nervous about dogs.
But I must go back now.
"Well, so am I!" said Bruno.
"Would it be afraid of catching cold?" said Bruno.
"The nights are very damp!"
Bruno took a very small book out of the bookcase, opened it, and shook it in imitation of the Professor.
"But what can I do?"
"And there were a apple-pudding--and Uggug ate it all--and I got nuffin but a crust!
Sylvie asked in an awestruck whisper.
"And couldn't he find his-self again?" said Bruno.
"I could show it you in a minute, only the chalk's a little blunt."
"Come along, dear children!" And we all went out into the garden together.
"You'll cut your finger off, if you hold the knife so!"
We can go out with you."
"And he lets Uggug take away all my toys!
This will have a double advantage.
"What shall we shout?" said Sylvie.
The Professor put the request, very humbly and courteously.
"He must have had a very curious life," said Sylvie.
Help to look for him!
"He isn't here," he said.
The children returned, slowly and thoughtfully, to report his answer. "Isn't he wise?"
"Of course she may!" cried Bruno.
"Suppose it was a cow!
"What would be drownded?"
"The Vice-Warden might hear you.
"A little piece of a dead crow," was Bruno's mournful reply.
"Not always," Bruno said thoughtfully.
"If it got very damp," Sylvie suggested, "it might stick to something, you know."
The Other Professor gasped.
Bruno sat up and dried his eyes.
A MUSICAL GARDENER.
"It might come just when you wanted to be happy!"
"I should have shooked him out, if he'd been in there!"
Here the Professor interfered, as the Other Professor was evidently too much puzzled to go on with his diagram.
"Who is it?"
"True, dear child!" the Professor thankfully replied, as he replaced the coins in his pocket.
"He thought he saw a Garden-Door That opened with a key: He looked again, and found it was A Double Rule of Three: 'And all its mystery,' he said, 'Is clear as day to me!'"
Not for one-and-sixpence!"
Bruno looked puzzled.
But it'll be quite easy to come, as soon as I've completed my new invention--for carrying one's-self, you know.
"You were asking--"
The children were on their feet in a moment.
"It's like this," said the Other Professor, hastily drawing a long line upon the black board, and marking the letters 'A,' 'B,' at the two ends, and 'C' in the middle: "let me explain it to you.
"Well, no, my child.
"Then who are you talking to?" he said.
"You're as busy as the day is short!"
"It does very well on a diagram," said the Other Professor.
"He means rook-pie," Sylvie explained.
"But don't you always want to be happy, Bruno?"
"In digging things out of the ground which you probably do now and then," the Professor began in a loud voice; "in making things into heaps--which no doubt you often do; and in kicking things about with one heel--which you seem never to leave off doing; have you ever happened to notice another Professor something like me, but different?"
"There ain't such a thing!"
"Do come with us!" Sylvie entreated with tears in her eyes.
"Not for us," said Sylvie: "but I'm sure he would for you.
"Where shall we look?" said Sylvie.
"You appear to be talking to somebody--that isn't here," the Professor said, turning round to the children.
"Once before," said the Professor: "he once lost himself in a wood--"
"It's lighter to hold," said the Gardener.
The Other Professor brightened up in a moment.
"Lets try shouting," said the Professor.
"His Imperial Fatness had only one shot at it; and he went in just here!"
"We asked him to let us through the garden-door," said Sylvie: "but he wouldn't: but perhaps he would for you!"
The Gardener looked puzzled, and let us go out; but, as he locked the door behind us, we heard him singing thoughtfully to himself,
The Professor cautiously produced a couple of shillings.
"We will try a less exciting topic," the Professor mildly remarked to the children.
The Professor shook his head.
The Professor gently clapped his hands.
Never having considered the question in this light, I suggested that they had better ask the Professor; and they ran off in a moment to appeal to their old friend.
Quick!
I shall then question him about the Other Professor.
"I'll come this minute!" said the Professor.
"Take care!" Sylvie anxiously exclaimed, as he began, rather clumsily, to point it.
"Children!
"Has he ever been lost before?" Sylvie enquired, turning up a corner of the hearth-rug, and peeping under it.
Bruno thoughtfully added.
"Then it would take ever so much longer, of course.
"Only be quick about it!" And he began trotting round and round the room, lifting up the chairs, and shaking them.
"My dears," he said after a minute, "the day is the same length as anything that is the same length as it." And he resumed his never-ending task of polishing.
"A thick stick in one's hand makes people respectful," he was saying to himself.
"That made me fairly wild it really did.
"So there we sat, neither of us saying nothing, till I began to feel a little damp, because I had my thin things on, and it was beginning to come down heavy.
But I was not to be crushed; there was something about the shape of her that which suggested sociability.
I am particular about my vittles, and I never eat no scraps, and, still less, things what have been sat down upon.' 'Well,' he said, 'it's a pity it should be wasted, I'll eat it myself.' Which he did, and me standing in the rain there looking on.
No, I said, I should not.
I may have some money somewhere, unbeknown to myself, so I will look and see; though I must say I do think it hard that all the expenses should be borne by me!'
"What do you think of the band?"
Oh dear!
It struck me that the tale, as she told it, contained elements of tragedy.
"Possibly," I suggested, "that is in a measure owing to the nature of their occupation."
So I says, 'Willyum, whatever is the matter now? Your conduct do seem to me to be of the most extraordinary character.'
I am going.' So I goes.
So he said, 'What do you say to Battersea Park?' So I said, 'I say nothing.
It's getting on, and I'm likewise getting wet'--which I was.
"That may be, but still there is a limit, and when a man is always drinking, I think it's time for him to stop."
And he grabs hold of Willyum by the collar, and he says, 'Hang me if I don't wipe down the street with you!' And he shouts out, ''Enrietta, here's Brother Willyum.
Sometimes there's never no knowing who they are."
"My young man, his name is Willyum Evans, is a baker, and him and me have been walking out together four years come next month.
She turned, she looked me up and down, then she looked straight in front of her again.
I thought so too, but she went on:
I felt that I was getting on--so I went on.
Do not let us spoil our day's pleasure by no disagreeable observations.
'I thank you.
"That is my misfortune, rather than my fault."
oh dear!
'No,' I said.
I have a sister who likes butchers.
So I said to him, 'Willyum, it's my day out, Tuesday.
He held it out to me.
"It's a fine evening."
So I pulls up.
I thought you was going to take me somewhere.' He said, 'So I am.' So I said, 'Where are you going to take me to?
"I don't know nothing at all about that.
I had been seated in the next chair to hers for at least two minutes. I felt that it was time to introduce myself.
"Well, I didn't know what to do, not liking to have no quarrel with him in the street, so off we starts for his brother's.
"I never said a word to him, but I walks right out of the park.
'We are both of us having a day out,' he said, 'and don't let no bad tempers spoil our pleasure.
Now, Matilda, don't you let him start hitting me.' And he jumps behind me, so as to get into the shadow, as it were.
The worst of bakers is, they're such a thirsty lot."
'Mr. Evans,' I said, short and sharp, 'I wish you a good day.
"Bakers," she observed, "is what I like.
CHAPTER I.
But the admission did not crush them: quite the other way.
And one day a deputation of the inhabitants called on me at my lodgings to ask if I would lead the local cricket club to, say, victory.
I decided to crush the deputation before the thing went farther.
"That's nothing," Mr. Sapsworth cried.
The deputation smiled.
I was not in the 'Varsity team, nor near it; but I played in the Freshman's match, and provided myself with spectacles.
I have some idea of cricket--not much, perhaps, but I certainly have some.
When they first asked me to play I thought they were mad. Storwell-on-Sea is a village on the south coast--I beg pardon; I believe it is called by the inhabitants a town.
But as I never repeated it--or anything like it--they left me, very wisely, out of the eleven.
It was altogether too preposterous.
I was nearly in the school team once.
The chief spokesman was the local barber; his name was Sapsworth.
That was when I carried my bat for forty-five.
"To-morrow," was the startling reply.
I was speechless.
A SUBSTITUTE.
I AM APPOINTED CAPTAIN.
I must own that my performance was a surprise to everyone--and to myself among the rest.
He would certainly have turned the scale at sixteen stone.
I hinted so much to the deputation.
"When is the match to be?" I asked.
The end of it was that I agreed to play.
It opened the floodgates of their eloquence.
As I have said, my first impression was that they were mad; either that, or else that they were "playing it off" on the unprotected stranger.
I felt that, to cricketers who intended to play Mr. Hedges, any objections which I might urge would appear quite trivial.
Latchmere.
No man knows to what a depth of folly he can sink until he tries.
THE STORY OF MY LAST CRICKET-MATCH.
It is a pretty place, and not unknown--in the locality.
I glanced at Mr. Hedges, thus frankly referred to.
What should she do?
"Howdye, little girl!" And the cat had got her tongue.
"Go home, I tell ye--Uncle Judd's shot.
"No, no, NO!
"No--no!"
"Dad!" she said.
"Well, see you again.
"I've heard."
"All right, Sam."
"Well, you better be," said Budd sharply.
"Sure!
"But I ain't."
"Don't you worry, Jack."
Hale choked.
"Look here, Jack, you're seein' things wrong.
"Where you goin'?"
There was more.
Well, had he given her a chance?
"I'm not worried."
That was what Budd said.
"No, but one's comin'--Dave."
"Mate," he was saying, "it's because I thinks gold dust of you--gold dust, and you may lay to that!
I WAS so pleased at having given the slip to Long John that I began to enjoy myself and look around me with some interest on the strange land that I was in.
By the sound they must have been talking earnestly, and almost fiercely; but no distinct word came to my hearing.
The sun beat full upon them.
As sure as God sees me, I'd sooner lose my hand.
He stood where he was, resting lightly on his crutch, watching his companion like a snake about to spring.
Another voice answered, and then the first voice, which I now recognized to be Silver's, once more took up the story and ran on for a long while in a stream, only now and again interrupted by the other.
And at this point Tom flashed out like a hero.
It was all over, I thought.
You've killed Alan, have you?
I could tell the direction of the speakers pretty exactly, not only by the sound of their voices but by the behaviour of the few birds that still hung in alarm above the heads of the intruders.
As I did so, I could hear hails coming and going between the old buccaneer and his comrades, and this sound of danger lent me wings.
Tom had leaped at the sound, like a horse at the spur, but Silver had not winked an eye.
The First Blow
Silver, agile as a monkey even without leg or crutch, was on the top of him next moment and had twice buried his knife up to the hilt in that defenceless body.
Silver had thrown his hat beside him on the ground, and his great, smooth, blond face, all shining with heat, was lifted to the other man's in a kind of appeal.
Then I came to a long thicket of these oaklike trees--live, or evergreen, oaks, I heard afterwards they should be called--which grew low along the sand like brambles, the boughs curiously twisted, the foliage compact, like thatch.
Would not my absence itself be an evidence to them of my alarm, and therefore of my fatal knowledge?
I do not know what it rightly is to faint, but I do know that for the next little while the whole world swam away from before me in a whirling mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spy-glass hilltop, going round and round and topsy-turvy before my eyes, and all manner of bells ringing and distant voices shouting in my ear.
"Silver," said the other man--and I observed he was not only red in the face, but spoke as hoarse as a crow, and his voice shook too, like a taut rope--"Silver," says he, "you're old, and you're honest, or has the name for it; and you've money too, which lots of poor sailors hasn't; and you're brave, or I'm mistook.
Crawling on all fours, I made steadily but slowly towards them, till at last, raising my head to an aperture among the leaves, I could see clear down into a little green dell beside the marsh, and closely set about with trees, where Long John Silver and another of the crew stood face to face in conversation.
Here and there were flowering plants, unknown to me; here and there I saw snakes, and one raised his head from a ledge of rock and hissed at me with a noise not unlike the spinning of a top.
"John!" said the sailor, stretching out his hand.
I turned hither and thither among the trees.
Whether he were injured much or little, none could ever tell.
"Hands off, if you like, John Silver," said the other.
The marsh was steaming in the strong sun, and the outline of the Spy-glass trembled through the haze.
And as for you, John Silver, long you've been a mate of mine, but you're mate of mine no more.
And will you tell me you'll let yourself be led away with that kind of a mess of swabs?
And then all of a sudden he was interrupted by a noise.
The thicket stretched down from the top of one of the sandy knolls, spreading and growing taller as it went, until it reached the margin of the broad, reedy fen, through which the nearest of the little rivers soaked its way into the anchorage.
The isle was uninhabited; my shipmates I had left behind, and nothing lived in front of me but dumb brutes and fowls.
But in heaven's name, tell me, what was that?"
"That?" returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pin-point in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. "That?
"It's a black conscience that can make you feared of me.
The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.
If I hadn't took to you like pitch, do you think I'd have been here a-warning of you?
But now John put his hand into his pocket, brought out a whistle, and blew upon it several modulated blasts that rang far across the heated air.
I had crossed a marshy tract full of willows, bulrushes, and odd, outlandish, swampy trees; and I had now come out upon the skirts of an open piece of undulating, sandy country, about a mile long, dotted with a few pines and a great number of contorted trees, not unlike the oak in growth, but pale in the foliage, like willows.
They had already slain two of the honest people; after Tom and Alan, might not I come next?
If I die like a dog, I'll die in my dooty.
Mingled with these were a few scattered pines, some fifty, some nearer seventy, feet high.
From my place of ambush, I could hear him pant aloud as he struck the blows.
I might be discovered.
Kill me too, if you can.
And now I began to feel that I was neglecting my business, that since I had been so foolhardy as to come ashore with these desperadoes, the least I could do was to overhear them at their councils, and that my plain and obvious duty was to draw as close as I could manage, under the favourable ambush of the crouching trees.
At last the speakers seemed to have paused and perhaps to have sat down, for not only did they cease to draw any nearer, but the birds themselves began to grow more quiet and to settle again to their places in the swamp.
And here a fresh alarm brought me to a standstill with a thumping heart.
This put me in a great fear, and I crawled under cover of the nearest live-oak and squatted there, hearkening, as silent as a mouse.
But he had no time given him to recover.
The air too smelt more freshly than down beside the marsh.
Instantly I began to extricate myself and crawl back again, with what speed and silence I could manage, to the more open portion of the wood.
Little did I suppose that he was a deadly enemy and that the noise was the famous rattle.
And with that, this brave fellow turned his back directly on the cook and set off walking for the beach.
More men would be coming.
"Alan!" he cried.
But I defies you."
Indeed, could anyone be more entirely lost than I?
Not you!
On the far side of the open stood one of the hills, with two quaint, craggy peaks shining vividly in the sun.
Nor was I deceived, for soon I heard the very distant and low tones of a human voice, which, as I continued to give ear, grew steadily louder and nearer.
'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously.
'But I'm not used to it!' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone.
Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing.
CHAPTER V. Advice from a Caterpillar
'Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.
'Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.
'Explain yourself!'
The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
'That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.
'Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; 'but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'
'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
'And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a little of the right-hand bit to try the effect: the next moment she felt a violent blow underneath her chin: it had struck her foot!
The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to herself.
Ugh, Serpent!'
This sounded promising, certainly: Alice turned and came back again.
'I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar.
'It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.
And truly any one would be surprised at Judas upon this occasion.
Nay, his rage was grown so extravagant, that his barbarity proceeded to the degree of impiety; for when he had ordered eight hundred to be hung upon crosses in the midst of the city, he had the throats of their wives and children cut before their eyes; and these executions he saw as he was drinking and lying down with his concubines.
And now the king's wife loosed the king's brethren, and made Alexander king, who appeared both elder in age, and more moderate in his temper than the rest; who, when he came to the government, slew one of his brethren, as affecting to govern himself; but had the other of them in great esteem, as loving a quiet life, without meddling with public affairs.
In which battle Demetrius was the conqueror, although Alexander's mercenaries showed the greatest exploits, both in soul and body.
Yet did the upshot of this battle prove different from what was expected, as to both of them; for neither did those that invited Demetrius to come to them continue firm to him, though he was conqueror; and six thousand Jews, out of pity to the change of Alexander's condition, when he was fled to the mountains, came over to him.
How long shall I myself spend my blood drop by drop? let them take it all at once; and let their ghosts no longer be disappointed by a few parcels of my bowels offered to them." As soon as he had said these words, he presently died, when he had reigned no longer than a year.
What Actions Were Done By Alexander Janneus, Who Reigned Twenty-Seven Years.
About this time it was that the people of Damascus, out of their hatred to Ptolemy, the son of Menhens, invited Aretas [to take the government], and made him king of Celesyria.
He also proceeded to that degree of barbarity as to cause her to be pined to death in prison.
3.
3.
But vengeance circumvented him in the affair of his brother Antigonus, whom he loved, and whom he made his partner in the kingdom; for he slew him by the means of the calumnies which ill men about the palace contrived against him.
8.
But since neither the Jews would leave off their rage, nor the Greeks prove unfaithful, they came to an engagement, and to a close fight with their weapons.
But still he was not able to exclude Antiochus, for he burnt the towers, and filled up the trenches, and marched on with his army.
CHAPTER 4.
5.
Hereupon Aristobulus repented of the great crime he had been guilty of, and this gave occasion to the increase of his distemper.
Upon which so deep a surprise seized on the people, that eight thousand of his opposers fled away the very next night, out of all Judea, whose flight was only terminated by Alexander's death; so at last, though not till late, and with great difficulty, he, by such actions, procured quiet to his kingdom, and left off fighting any more.
Whereupon Theodopus marched against him, and took what belonged to himself as well as the king's baggage, and slew ten thousand of the Jews.
However, Alexander recovered this blow, and turned his force towards the maritime parts, and took Raphia and Gaza, with Anthedon also, which was afterwards called Agrippias by king Herod.
However, when he fought with Obodas, king of the Arabians, who had laid an ambush for him near Golan, and a plot against him, he lost his entire army, which was crowded together in a deep valley, and broken to pieces by the multitude of camels.
He also put his mother in bonds, for her contesting the government with him; for John had left her to be the governess of public affairs.
For after the death of their father, the elder of them, Aristobulus, changed the government into a kingdom, and was the first that put a diadem upon his head, four hundred seventy and one years and three months after our people came down into this country, when they were set free from the Babylonian slavery.
But this mutability and irregularity of his conduct made them hate him still more.
1.
And when he had made his escape to Jerusalem, he provoked the multitude, which hated him before, to make an insurrection against him, and this on account of the greatness of the calamity that he was under.
6.
However, he was then too hard for them; and, in the several battles that were fought on both sides, he slew not fewer than fifty thousand of the Jews in the interval of six years.
Now, before they joined battle, the kings made proclamation, and endeavored to draw off each other's soldiers, and make them revolt; while Demetrius hoped to induce Alexander's mercenaries to leave him, and Alexander hoped to induce the Jews that were with Demetrius to leave him.
He was of the sect of the Essens, and had never failed or deceived men in his predictions before.
CHAPTER 3.
And when he asked them why they so hated him, and what he should do in order to appease them, they said, by killing himself; for that it would be then all they could do to be reconciled to him, who had done such tragical things to them, even when he was dead.
1.
7.
However, the rest of the [Jewish] multitude did not lay aside their quarrels with him, when the [foreign] auxiliaries were gone; but they had a perpetual war with Alexander, until he had slain the greatest part of them, and driven the rest into the city Berneselis; and when he had demolished that city, he carried the captives to Jerusalem.
O thou most impudent body!
Yet could not Demetrius bear this turn of affairs; but supposing that Alexander was already become a match for him again, and that all the nation would [at length] run to him, he left the country, and went his way.
This man also made an expedition against Judea, and beat Alexander in battle; but afterwards retired by mutual agreement.
So they returned back to Samaria, and shut the multitude again within the wall; and when they had taken the city, they demolished it, and made slaves of its inhabitants.
CHAPTER 1.
So Antiochus went to Jerusalem, and staid there but a few days, for he wanted provisions, and so he went his way.
8.
He then took Bethsura, which was a small city; but at a place called Bethzacharis, where the passage was narrow, Judas met him with his army.
Now he that governed the elephant was but a private man; and had he proved to be Antiochus, Eleazar had performed nothing more by this bold stroke than that it might appear he chose to die, when he had the bare hope of thereby doing a glorious action; nay, this disappointment proved an omen to his brother [Judas] how the entire battle would end.
4.
When Jonathan, who was Judas's brother, succeeded him, he behaved himself with great circumspection in other respects, with relation to his own people; and he corroborated his authority by preserving his friendship with the Romans.
CHAPTER 2.
He also built another altar, and began to offer the sacrifices; and when the city had already received its sacred constitution again, Antiochus died; whose son Antiochus succeeded him in the kingdom, and in his hatred to the Jews also.
2.
He also laid a great many men in ambush in many places of the mountains, and was superior in all his attacks upon them; and when he had been conqueror after so glorious a manner, he was made high priest, and also freed the Jews from the dominion of the Macedonians, after one hundred and seventy years of the empire [of Seleucus].
The king being thereto disposed beforehand, complied with them, and came upon the Jews with a great army, and took their city by force, and slew a great multitude of those that favored Ptolemy, and sent out his soldiers to plunder them without mercy.
He also got the garrison under, and demolished the citadel.
6.
"Colonel," cried Dick, "it is I, Richard Mason, whom you left behind!"
The yellow torrent of the Rappahannock was now his only sure guide and he stuck to it.
They galloped into Warrenton where the people, red hot as usual for the South, crowded around them cheering and laughing and many of the women crying with joy.
He had the river on his right, and it now became an unfailing guide.
But despite the storm and his sufferings, he drew courage from nature itself.
Both armies were flooded that night, but they could find some measure of protection.
He was resolved to get back to the army with the news that a heavy Southern force was across the Rappahannock. Others might get there first with the fact, but one never knew.
Then came a mighty crash and a great blaze of lightning seemed to cleave the sky straight down the center.
What a night!
"A mile or two back I passed a line of Southern horsemen, just as wet and bedraggled as ours."
The lightning and thunder made Dick jump, and for a few moments he was blinded by the electric glare.
He was able to keep his cartridges dry in his pouch, but that was all.
But the storm was upon them before they could reach their horses.
But he had lost everything.
To the scouts and skirmishers and to Dick, wandering through the forest, nature was an unmitigated foe.
While a portion of the Southern army was across it must be a minor portion, and certainly the major part could not span such a flood and attack.
He stumbled on.
Dick noticed that his face was pallid in the uncertain shadows, and he understood the agony of spirit that the brave man must suffer when he saw that they had been outflanked by their enemy.
He clapped his hand to the left side of his head, and felt there a big bump and a sharp ache. His weapons were still in his belt and he knew that his injuries were not serious, but he heard nothing save the drive and roar of the wind and rain.
He became conscious after a while of a growing weakness, but he had recalled all the powers of his will and it was triumphant over his body. He trudged on on feet that were unconscious of sensation, and his face as if the flesh were paralyzed no longer felt the beat of the rain.
He had not realized that he was walking on his spirit and courage and that his strength was gone, so powerful had been the buffets of the wind and rain.
What did you see?"
He meant to keep close to the banks of the Rappahannock, and if he persisted he would surely come in time to Pope's army.
"It is, sir, and I not only look like a wreck but I feel like one.
His wet, cold clothes flapped around him and he shivered to the bone.
The last star was gone and the somber clouds covered the whole heavens.
"You have!
But his will made the effort, and recalling his mission he struggled on again.
The Union and its fate, gigantic as they were, slipped away from his mind, and it took an effort of the will to bring them back.
Sergeant Whitley, moving forward a little, touched the colonel on the arm.
But I must not repose there yet; I had still my task before me.
Mr. Huxtable came with us.
The sun was setting behind me: suddenly a shadow eclipsed my own upon the red loam across the open grave.
In vain I wiped them hurriedly and looked again.
One of them brought me a bunch, then stared, and was afraid to offer them.
"And my mother, too," I answered, "whose coffin I see coming."
That moment a white figure appeared between the yew-trees by the porch.
I heard, with some surprise, his allusion to the Great Being, whom he was not wont to recognise; but I made him no reply.
Nature told me that it was my duty to go, and duty or not, I could not stay away.
And yet I loved your mother, Clara; I loved her very truly."
We arrived at Vaughan St. Mary late in the afternoon of the second day. The whole of the journey was to me a long and tearful dream.
Without a start, and dreamily (as I did all things now), I turned to see whence it came.
So I waited, with heavy composure, till she should be brought, who so often had walked there with me.
In a moment the old feeling was at my heart, and my wits were all awake.
Defiance, and pride, and savage delight in misery, were entirely gone; and depression had taken the place of dejection.
Thrusting aside the letter, I followed into the Church, and stood behind the old font where I had been baptized; a dark and gloomy nook, fit for such an entrance.
The poor old pensioner had been true to her promise, and man's last garden was blooming like his first flower-bed.
I can see it, but it never will know me again; I may die beside it, and it cannot weep.
It was the aged minister leading my mother the last path of all. The book was in his hand, and his form was tall and stately, and his step so slow, that the white hair fell unruffled, while the grand words on his lips called majesty into his gaze.
Death now seemed to me the usual and proper condition of things, and I felt it an impertinence that I should still be alive.
Dear mother's simple funeral took me once more to my native place.
The last last look of all on earth--they must have carried me away.
He had never before been further from home than Exeter; and his single visit to that city had formed the landmark of his life.
CHAPTER II.
I observed that he was paler than when I had seen him last, and the rigid look was wavering on his face, like steel reflected by water.
Moreover the kind act cheered and led me through despondency, like the hand and face of God.
But difficulties, sore to encounter at such a time, would have met me on every side.
I am not come to offer you condolence, which you would despise; nor do I mean to be present when you would account the sight of me an insult.
I neither rose nor spoke, but turned and watched him.
Although I find a sad pleasure in lingering over these times, with such a history still impending, I cannot afford the indulgence.
My mind (if any I had) seemed to have undergone some change.
At length she was coming for good and all, and a space was left for me.
This he said with such emotion, that a new thought broke upon me.
He never tried to comfort me as the others did.
Caring little what people might say or think, I could not stay at a distance.
"Very well," he resumed, with the ancient chill hardening over his features; "so then let it be.
He lifted his hat to me.
She who had carried me there was carried past it now, and the pall waved in the damp cold air, and all the world seemed stone and mould.
Alone I sat by my father's grave, with my mother's ready before my feet. They had cast the mould on the other side, so as not to move my father's coverlet.
He took his hat off, and the perspiration stood upon his forehead.
Quick as the thought, he asked, "Would you know who killed your father?"
Betwixt suspense and terror, and the wildness of grief, I was obliged to lean on the headstone for support, and a giddiness came over me.
The bell was tolling faster, and the shadows growing longer, and the children who had been playing at hide-and-seek, where soon themselves shall be sought in vain, had flitted away from sight, perhaps scared at my presence, perhaps gone home to tea, to enjoy the funeral afterwards. The evening wind had ceased from troubling the yews, and the short-lived songs of the birds were done.
So far away now, so hopelessly far away!
Mr. Vaughan was gone; but on the grass at my feet lay a folded letter.
Some one from time to time gave out the words of a verse and then it was sung to a simple impressive tune. That ancient hymn, which has drowned so many sobs, I did not hear, but felt it.
The ignorant man knew better.
Within a yard of me stood Mr. Edgar Vaughan.
There it lies indeed, I can touch it, kiss it, and embrace it; but oh how small a part of mother! and even that part is not mine.
I seized it quickly, and broke the seal.
"You see, there are steps that come, and steps that go back."
"Bravo!--bravo!" cried Fred again, and coming suddenly towards us and, planting himself in front of Monsieur Robert Darzac, he said to him:
"What makes me think that?--Why these footprints, which I expected to find!" he cried, pointing to the sharply outlined imprint of a neat boot.
"I shall beat the great Fred, clever as he is; I shall beat them all!"
It might be supposed that the murderer was working for the other."
"There is not.
You, already, have your idea about the murderer, Monsieur Fred.
Do you know whether there is one at the chateau?"
A few minutes later we reached the lake.
Fred, imperturbable, interrupted him:
"Ah!
His eyes, bulging with terror, avoided us, while his right hand, with a spasmodic movement, twitched at the beard that covered his honest, gentle, and now despairing face.
As I appeared vexed, my young friend took me by the arm and admitted that he had not meant that for me; he thought more of me than that.
The man didn't have wings; he walked; but he walked on the gravel which left no impression of his tread.
"If we had a bicycle here, we might demonstrate the correctness of the young man's reasoning, Monsieur Robert Darzac.
"Besides," he added, "at five o'clock Monsieur Stangerson went into the room to fetch his daughter's hat."
My eyes followed his gaze; they were fixed on Monsieur Robert Darzac, who was looking anxiously at the impression left by his feet side by side with the elegant footmarks.
He, also, appeared to be deeply concerned.
"I have expected to find these footmarks from the very beginning.
I could not but observe that Monsieur Darzac was deeply moved; and I suspected that Rouletabille's confident assertion was not pleasing to him.
"There is something--a something, Monsieur Frederic Larsan, much graver than the misuse of logic the disposition of mind in some detectives which makes them, in perfect good faith, twist logic to the necessities of their preconceived ideas.
"Aha!" he said, rising.
The great Fred spoke quite seriously.
The great Fred may have seen us approaching, but we probably interested him very little, for he took hardly any notice of us and continued to be stirring with his cane something which we could not see.
I am waiting for the arrival of my chief before offering any explanation to the examining magistrate."
Monsieur Darzac shook his head and said he was sure of the chambermaid's fidelity, and that she was a thoroughly honest and devoted servant.
Suddenly he stopped.
"The bicycle explains the disappearance of the murderer's big foot-prints," I said.
What do you say, Monsieur Darzac?"
"Then there were two?"
So don't say a thing is possible, when it could not be otherwise.
Shrugging his shoulders, he bowed to us and moved quickly away, hitting the stones on his path with his stout cane.
"The man allowed the blood to flow into his hand and handkerchief, and dried his hand on the wall.
Having said this, he asked me for the paper pattern of the footprint which he had given me to take care of, and applied it to a very clear footmark behind the thicket.
"Monsieur Fred, these neat footprints seem to have been made since the discovery of the crime."
"The murderer, with his rough boots, mounted a bicycle.
"You will never know if it does not turn out to be the truth.
The man continued his flight to Paris."
We were passing by the thicket, of which the young reporter had spoken to us a minute before.
"And the man had a bicycle!" cried the reporter.
The reporter looked gravely at Fred, who looked gravely at him.
"I shall beat him!" he cried.
From his pocket-book he took a piece of white paper as I had seen him do before, and with his scissors, cut out the shape of the neat bootmarks that were on the ground.
"And what is your hypothesis?"
However, I could not refrain from uttering an exclamation.
If there had been a man on the bicycle, the wheels would have sunk deeply into the soil.
"No!" replied Monsieur Darzac.
There are no two ways of reasoning in this affair.
"Really--you are an extraordinary fellow--for your age!" replied the detective in a tone not wholly free from irony.
"If I did not reason as I do in regard to this gravel," he went on, "I should have to assume a balloon!--My dear fellow, the science of the aerostation of dirigible balloons is not yet developed enough for me to consider it and suppose that a murderer would drop from the clouds!
I begged of him not to be angry; but he was too much irritated to listen to me and declared, ironically, that he admired the prudent doubt with which certain people approached the most simple problems, risking nothing by saying "that is so, or 'that is not so." Their intelligence would have produced about the same result if nature had forgotten to furnish their brain-pan with a little grey matter.
CHAPTER IX.
There must be some important marks there."
You are right, when you say that Mademoiselle Stangerson fired her revolver, but you are wrong when you say that she wounded the murderer in the hand."
Frederic Larsan silently contemplated the young reporter who pretended to be as wise as himself.
And he danced a double shuffle.
The three of us went back towards the pavilion.
"After all it is very possible," I said.
It was an act which would necessarily draw the attention of those who had left it open."
His accomplice, the wearer of the neat boots, had come to wait for him on the edge of the lake with the bicycle.
Here, after looking at the marks of the bicycle, which followed, going and coming, the neat footprints, I thought I might intervene.
We thought he was about to faint.
Then he fitted the new paper pattern with the one he had previously made--the two were exactly alike.
"Yes, this afternoon.
"You'd make a wonderful detective--if you had a little more method--if you didn't follow your instincts and that bump on your forehead.
"What makes you think that?" I asked, "since these footmarks are not continued on the path?"
"That path is as you see, topped with gravel," he said; "the man must have passed along it going to the pavilion, since no traces of his steps have been found on the soft ground.
"See!"--and he called to Frederic Larsan.
"Very good!--Very good!" cried Frederic Larsan.
You have seen the stain on the wall, but I have only seen the handkerchief."
The fact of the presence of the chambermaid--who had come to clean up The Yellow Room--in the laboratory, when Monsieur Stangerson and his daughter returned from their walk, at half-past one, permits us to affirm that at half-past one the murderer was not in the chamber under the bed, unless he was in collusion with the chambermaid.
He is going to summon, before the magistrate, in the laboratory, all those who have played any part in this tragedy.
These are not the footmarks of the murderer!"
No, no; there was but one man there, the murderer on foot."
See, just in front of the little path leading to the lake, that was his nearest way to get out."
Experience had taught us some valuable things; among others, how to take care of ourselves, how to avoid and defeat sharks and sharpers, and how to conduct our own business for our own profit and without other people's help.
"If it ain't asking what I ought not to ask, Mr. Angelo, how did you come to be so friendless and in such trouble when you were little?
Here a prodigious slam-banging broke out below, and everybody rushed down to see.
Again she was besieged by eager questioners, and again she swam in sunset seas of glory.
It was a pleasant life.
General conversation followed, and the twins drifted about from group to group, talking easily and fluently and winning approval, compelling admiration and achieving favor from all.
The villagers were astonished and enchanted with the magnificence of their performance, and could not bear to have them stop.
The young strangers were kept long at the piano.
But what they wouldn't consent to do, we had to do without the formality of consent.
"Good morning, Brother Higgins--Count Luigi Capello, Mr. Higgins" --handshake, followed by a devouring stare and "I'm glad to see ye," on the part of Higgins, and a courteous inclination of the head and a pleasant "Most happy!" on the part of Count Luigi.
We traveled everywhere--years and years--picking up smatterings of strange tongues, familiarizing ourselves with strange sights and strange customs, accumulating an education of a wide and varied and curious sort.
When we escaped from that slavery at twelve years of age, we were in some respects men.
We went to Venice--to London, Paris, Russia, India, China, Japan--"
Rowena was in the clouds, she walked on air; this was to be the greatest day, the most romantic episode in the colorless history of that dull country town.
A few tried to rise to the emergency, and got out an awkward "My lord," or "Your lordship," or something of that sort, but the great majority were overwhelmed by the unaccustomed word and its dim and awful associations with gilded courts and stately ceremony and anointed kingship, so they only fumbled through the handshake and passed on, speechless.
"Good mornin', Roweny"--handshake.
The twins took a position near the door, the widow stood at Luigi's side, Rowena stood beside Angelo, and the march-past and the introductions began.
When the forenoon was nearly gone, she recognized with a pang that this most splendid episode of her life was almost over, that nothing could prolong it, that nothing quite its equal could ever fall to her fortune again.
His estates were confiscated, his personal property seized, and there we were, in Germany, strangers, friendless, and in fact paupers.
But don't, if you do."
None of these visitors was at ease, but, being honest people, they didn't pretend to be.
Do you mind telling?
"Good mornin', Sister Cooper"--handshake.
Napoleon and all his kind stood accounted for--and justified.
When she went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between the clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to wait for the morning, and, waiting, grieve.
Dat's de plan."
For one moment her petrified gaze fixed itself there.
But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now, for she had begun to think.
So Tom argued with himself that it was an immense advantaged for Roxy to have a master who was pleased with her, as this planter manifestly was.
Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he responded uncomfortably, but as well as he could.
He said:
She was trying to invent a saving plan.
White folks ain't partic'lar.
These intimacies quickly became horrible to him, and within the hour he began to try to get up courage enough to tell her so, and require that they be discontinued or very considerably modified.
Tom was dazed.
It had been imagined that she "would not know," and would think she was traveling upstream.
Why, she had been steamboating for years.
"It's lovely of you, Mammy--it's just--"
And she tried to comfort him, but that was not possible.
CHAPTER 16 -- Sold Down the River
He did not want to commit this treachery, but luck threw the man in his way, and this saved him the necessity of going up-country to hunt up a purchaser, with the added risk of having to answer a lot of questions, whereas this planter was so pleased with Roxy that he asked next to none at all.
It made him wince, secretly--for she was a "nigger." That he was one himself was far from reconciling him to that despised race.
Finally she started up, and said she had found a way out.
Tom's hopes began to rise, and his spirits along with them.
I had a sufficiently hard time with that tale, because it changed itself from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it--a most embarrassing circumstance.
AUTHOR'S NOTE TO "THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS"
Originally the story was called THOSE EXTRAORDINARY TWINS.
Still the story was unsatisfactory.
I hunted about and found them--found them stranded, idle, forgotten, and permanently useless.
There was a radical defect somewhere, and I must search it out and cure it.
It grieved me to do it, for after associating with her so much I had come to kind of like her after a fashion, notwithstanding she was such an ass and said such stupid, irritating things and was so nauseatingly sentimental.
It took me months to make that discovery.
I didn't know what to do with her.
I carried the manuscript back and forth across the Atlantic two or three times, and read it and studied over it on shipboard; and at last I saw where the difficulty lay.
I had no further trouble.
It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it, because I changed the subject right away to something else.
So at the top of Chapter XVII I put a "Calendar" remark concerning July the Fourth, and began the chapter with this statistic:
I meant to make it very short.
I thought and thought and studied and studied; but I arrived at nothing.
I finally saw plainly that there was really no way but one--I must simply give her the grand bounce.
Also I took the twins apart and made two separate men of them.
No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale.
Among them came a stranger named Pudd'nhead Wilson, and a woman named Roxana; and presently the doings of these two pushed up into prominence a young fellow named Tom Driscoll, whose proper place was away in the obscure background.
Much the same thing happened with PUDD'NHEAD WILSON.
I pulled one of the stories out by the roots, and left the other--a kind of literary Caesarean operation.
I must."
They had been too proud of Paul ... their only son and such a clever fellow ... and this was their punishment!
"It's in your blood ... your bad blood, girl."
"Aunt Annice sent it to me," answered Joscelyn, casting a quick glance at the book on the table.
He bought a ticket apologetically and sneaked in to his seat.
She lifted her head proudly.
I have done no wrong ... it is not doing wrong to develop the one gift I have.
I must go ...
"You are cruel and unjust, Grandfather.
Joscelyn rebelled, but she did nothing secretly ... that was not her nature.
She thought her husband was right, albeit she might in her own heart deplore the necessity of such a decree.
She took the shine off the other play-actors all right.
From that day Josie was watched and distrusted.
"No," was the stern reply.
"This is all I have to say.
The girl was never allowed to visit her Aunt Annice, although frequently invited.
A moment before she had been a woman, splendid, unafraid; now she was again the schoolgirl, too confused and shamed to speak.
You are unjust, Grandfather.
At the end of that time Elinor Morgan, the mother of an hour, died; three months later Paul Morgan was killed in a railroad collision. After the funeral Cyrus Morgan brought home to his wife their son's little daughter, Joscelyn Morgan.
Every smile was a caress, every gurgle of attempted speech a song.
She clung to Deborah and wept at parting, but Cyrus did not even say goodbye to her.
Joscelyn went but she left consternation behind her.
I told her I wished to do so. I am going."
Mother, we'll have trouble with that girl yet."
Play-acting hadn't spoiled her--couldn't spoil her.
Pauline was a quiet, docile maiden, industrious and commonplace--just such a girl as they had vainly striven to make of Joscelyn, to whom Pauline had always been held up as a model.
Let's go and dissipate for a week--what say?"
The old couple crept through the kitchen and across the hall to the open parlour door as if they were stalking a thief.
Where did you get that play?"
"What company has Josie got?" she wondered, as she opened the hall door and paused for a moment on the threshold to listen.
Go to your play-acting aunt if you want to.
"Yes, you must," said Cyrus cruelly.
He got the scissors and cut it out carefully.
"Oh, Josie, Josie," said her grandmother in a scared voice.
"My mother was a sweet, true, good woman.
"Wrong!
They talked the matter over bitterly at the kitchen hearth that night.
She spoke, moved, posed, gesticulated, with an inborn genius shining through every motion and tone like an illuminating lamp.
Cyrus Morgan cleared his throat and said, "It was great, Mother, great.
I heard her.
Wasn't our girl Josie splendid?"
"Josie, what are you doing?"
"I know you despise the profession of an actress," the girl went on with heightened colour.
It's your mother's blood coming out in you, girl, in spite of all our care!
But the love came ... it had to.
Joscelyn had disgraced them; could that be forgiven?
It's the only thing I can do ... and I am going to do it.
Their Girl Josie
He had married an actress!
They could not be brought to see it in any other light.
Don't take it away."
"Cyrus, Josie is play-acting in the room ... laughing and reciting and going on.
Deborah obeyed.
The curtain went up and Cyrus rubbed his eyes.
"Grandfather, this letter is from my aunt.
"Go to your room, girl, and take off that rig.
The wind pursued the little bush, And drove away the leaves November left; then clambered up And fretted in the eaves.
He never misses a degree; Obedient to her eye, He comes just so far toward the town, Just so far goes away.
Wild nights!
THE LOVERS.
Futile the winds To a heart in port, -- Done with the compass, Done with the chart.
AT HOME.
POSSESSION.
Nor tie to earths to come, Nor action new, Except through this extent, The realm of you.
Your riches taught me poverty. Myself a millionnaire In little wealths, -- as girls could boast, -- Till broad as Buenos Ayre,
The moon is distant from the sea, And yet with amber hands She leads him, docile as a boy, Along appointed sands.
VII.
"GOING to him!
I have no life but this, To lead it here; Nor any death, but lest Dispelled from there;
VIII.
THE LOST JEWEL.
To feel if blinds be fast, And closer to the fire Her little rocking-chair to draw, And shiver for the poor,
Yet not too far to come at call, And do the little toils That make the circuit of the rest, And deal occasional smiles To lives that stoop to notice mine And kindly ask it in, -- Whose invitation, knew you not For whom I must decline?
Then, glancing narrow at the wall, And narrow at the floor, For firm conviction of a mouse Not exorcised before,
The rose did caper on her cheek, Her bodice rose and fell, Her pretty speech, like drunken men, Did stagger pitiful.
CHOICE.
Peruse how infinite I am To -- no one that you know! And sigh for lack of heaven, -- but not The heaven the creeds bestow.
Depreciate the vision; But, till the merchant buy, Still fable, in the isles of spice, The subtle cargoes lie.
LOVE.
When that which is and that which was Apart, intrinsic, stand, And this brief tragedy of flesh Is shifted like a sand;
When figures show their royal front And mists are carved away, -- Behold the atom I preferred To all the lists of clay!
III.
XIII.
The wealth might disappoint, Myself a poorer prove Than this great purchaser suspect, The daily own of Love
XV.
"Tell him it was n't a practised writer, You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled; You could hear the bodice tug, behind you, As if it held but the might of a child; You almost pitied it, you, it worked so. Tell him -- No, you may quibble there, For it would split his heart to know it, And then you and I were silenter.
You drifted your dominions A different Peru; And I esteemed all poverty, For life's estate with you.
Of all the souls that stand create I have elected one. When sense from spirit files away, And subterfuge is done;
XVI.
And then I go the furthest off To counteract a knock; Then draw my little letter forth And softly pick its lock.
A charm invests a face Imperfectly beheld, -- The lady dare not lift her veil For fear it be dispelled.
The night was wide, and furnished scant With but a single star, That often as a cloud it met Blew out itself for fear.
XIV.
At least, it solaces to know That there exists a gold, Although I prove it just in time Its distance to behold!
Wild nights!
So much that, did I meet the queen, Her glory I should know: But this must be a different wealth, To miss it beggars so.
Her fingers fumbled at her work, -- Her needle would not go; What ailed so smart a little maid It puzzled me to know,
I woke and chid my honest fingers, -- The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own.
THE CONTRACT.
Till opposite I spied a cheek That bore another rose; Just opposite, another speech That like the drunkard goes;
He put the belt around my life, -- I heard the buckle snap, And turned away, imperial, My lifetime folding up Deliberate, as a duke would do A kingdom's title-deed, -- Henceforth a dedicated sort, A member of the cloud.
I gave myself to him, And took himself for pay. The solemn contract of a life Was ratified this way.
No squirrel went abroad; A dog's belated feet Like intermittent plush were heard Adown the empty street.
Step lightly on this narrow spot! The broadest land that grows Is not so ample as the breast These emerald seams enclose.
I think just how my shape will rise When I shall be forgiven, Till hair and eyes and timid head Are out of sight, in heaven.
SAVED!
The date, and manner of the shame; And then the pious form That "God have mercy" on the soul The jury voted him.
But she and Death, acquainted, Meet tranquilly as friends, Salute and pass without a hint -- And there the matter ends.
Be its mattress straight, Be its pillow round; Let no sunrise' yellow noise Interrupt this ground.
So quiet, oh, how quiet! That nobody might know But that the little figure Rocked softer, to and fro?
PRECEDENCE.
It was not frost, for on my flesh I felt siroccos crawl, -- Nor fire, for just my marble feet Could keep a chancel cool.
XXIV.
A COUNTRY BURIAL.
Past bows and invitations, Past interview, and vow, Past what ourselves can estimate, -- That makes the quick of woe!
XXXVIII.
My heart would wish it broke before, Since breaking then, since breaking then, Were useless as next morning's sun, Where midnight frosts had lain!
Step lofty; for this name is told As far as cannon dwell, Or flag subsist, or fame export Her deathless syllable.
VII.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting External ghost, Than an interior confronting That whiter host.
I looked at sunrise once, And then I looked at them, And wishfulness in me arose For circumstance the same.
The thimble weighed too heavy, The stitches stopped themselves, And then 't was put among the dust Upon the closet shelves.
Death sets a thing significant The eye had hurried by, Except a perished creature Entreat us tenderly
A book I have, a friend gave, Whose pencil, here and there, Had notched the place that pleased him, -- At rest his fingers are.
XXVIII.
Most primitive peoples defined it as failure to perform certain ceremonial acts, or to bring tribute to the gods.
One god, Ormuzd, was the embodiment of light and goodness. The other, Ahriman, represented darkness and evil.
Is the act necessarily wrong in itself?
The Hebrew word for sin (which means to miss the mark placed before each individual) vividly and aptly describes the real nature of sin.
They traced all sin to the direct influence of Ahriman and the evil spirits that attended him.
What was the real nature of her act?
STUDY II
III.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eye, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with her and he did eat.
Do they thereby commit a sin?
Are they thereby excused?
The temptation came from within rather than from without, and the responsibility of not choosing the best rested with the individual.
How far did her experience reflect common human experience?
The serpent's words represent the natural inclinations that were struggling in the mind of the woman against her sense of duty. Note that in the story the temptation did not come to man through his appetite or his curiosity or his esthetic sense but through his wife whom God had given him.
MAN'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR HIS ACTS.
The Hebrew people were the first to define right and wrong in terms of personal life and service.
At the top, however, he looked at me.
He shut me up in a large case and ordered his executioner to carry me into a desert place, to cut off my head, and then to abandon my body to the birds of prey.
"My cousin," he exclaimed, "I do not know how to thank you for your kindness.
However, we passed through the smoke into a large chamber, which at first seemed quite empty.
"No matter," he replied, "go back by the path that you came."
It was sunset, and I paused for a little to look about me, and to decide which way to turn my steps.
My persecutor, however, did not stop here.
"My dear nephew," he said, "your story gives me some hope.
Suddenly the prince said to me, "Cousin, we have no time to lose; be so kind as to conduct this lady to a certain spot, where you will find a dome-like tomb, newly built.
This horrible sight turned me faint, but, to my surprise, my uncle did not show so much surprise as anger.
"I am satisfied," replied Zobeida; "you can go when you like."
"I don't understand."
Farewell."
"Very well," said the genius, drawing his sword, "take this, and cut off his head."
I managed to jump off without any injury, and looked about to see if I was pursued.
I soon cleared away the earth, and pulling up the door, found a staircase, which I hastily made up my mind to go down, carrying my hatchet with me by way of protection.
"If you do, it will be the ruin of both of us," said she; "I know genii much better than you." But the wine I had drunk had confused my brain; I gave one kick to the talisman, and it fell into a thousand pieces.
"A pain in my heart," she replied hastily, "obliged me to seek the aid of this little bottle.
While I was thus indulging my grief my host entered, and said, "There is an old man downstairs who has brought your hatchet and slippers, which he picked up on the road, and now restores to you, as he found out from one of your comrades where you lived.
"I never saw them before," she answered, "and you came in such a hurry that you may have picked them up on the road without knowing it." To this the genius only replied by insults and blows.
But the look of gratitude she gave me shook my courage, and I flung the sabre to the earth.
"Madam," said the young man, addressing Zobeida, "if you wish to know how I lost my right eye, I shall have to tell you the story of my whole life."
"O genius!" I cried, "as you wish to spare my life, be generous, and spare it altogether.
The tailor listened with attention, but his reply, instead of giving me consolation, only increased my trouble.
Feeling faint, I slipped and fell against the talisman, which broke.
"I am a genius," he said, "the son of the daughter of Eblis, prince of the genii.
I was hacking at the root of a tree, when I beheld an iron ring fastened to a trapdoor of the same metal.
I was taught first to read and write, and then to learn the Koran, which is the basis of our holy religion, and the better to understand it, I read with my tutors the ablest commentators on its teaching, and committed to memory all the traditions respecting the Prophet, which have been gathered from the mouth of those who were his friends.
However, as was my duty, I took with me ten camels, laden with rich presents for the Sultan.
"A man, madam," I replied; "I have nothing to do with genii."
"What you ask is impossible," she answered; "but stay here with me instead, and we can be happy, and all you will have to do is to betake yourself to the forest every tenth day, when I am expecting my master the genius.
"Princess!" I cried, "what is happening?"
She lifted up her eyes slowly, and looked sadly at me.
The genius, however, paid no attention to my prayers, but said sternly, "That is the way in which a genius treats the woman who has betrayed him.
When he touched the ground, he rapped it with his foot; it opened, and we found ourselves in the enchanted palace, in the presence of the beautiful princess of the Ebony Isle. But how different she looked from what she was when I had last seen her, for she was lying stretched on the ground covered with blood, and weeping bitterly.
This counsel was very distasteful to me, but I thought I could not do otherwise than adopt it.
To save her all the trouble possible, I hastened towards her, and bowed low.
When I reached the bottom I discovered that I was in a huge palace, as brilliantly lighted as any palace above ground that I had ever seen, with a long gallery supported by pillars of jasper, ornamented with capitals of gold.
"Beware," he said, "of telling any one what you have told me, for the prince who governs the kingdom is your father's greatest enemy, and he will be rejoiced to find you in his power."
For a long while I did nothing but weep, and would not suffer the genius to come near me; but time teaches us submission, and I have now got accustomed to his presence, and if clothes and jewels could content me, I have them in plenty.
"How should I, when I never saw her before?"
Luckily my wound was only a slight one, and after binding it up as well as I could, I walked on for the rest of the day, till I reached a cave at the foot of a mountain, where I passed the night in peace, making my supper off some fruits I had gathered on the way.
The palace opened and the genius appeared, who, turning angrily to the princess, asked indignantly,
So the next morning I set out with a company of poor wood-cutters, to whom the tailor had introduced me.
Down this gallery a lady came to meet me, of such beauty that I forgot everything else, and thought only of her.
"You are an impudent liar!" cried the genius.
"Cut her head off," then, "if she is a stranger to you, and I shall believe you are speaking the truth, and will set you at liberty."
I also learnt history, and was instructed in poetry, versification, geography, chronology, and in all the outdoor exercises in which every prince should excel.
Awful though you think him, he shall feel the weight of my arm, and I herewith take a solemn vow to stamp out the whole race."
But I was too late.
You must endeavour to train the girls to something better than they have been trained to yet, Constance."
Mr. Yorke followed and stood before her.
"How did I bring it on myself?"
Constance thought it a negative shake, and her hopes fell again.
If he has a spark of manly honour in him, he'll speak up now."
"What has the school done, sir?" respectfully asked Gaunt.
Mr. Yorke was silent.
Gaunt paused.
The least they feared was, that the town had taken fire.
"You will sanction the measure then?" she rejoined, her countenance lighting up.
Constance took it for granted that he was displeased.
Constance spoke hesitatingly.
The consequence of which was, the school tore through the streets in triumph, shouting "Holiday!" in tones to be heard a mile off, and bringing people in white garments, from their beds to the windows.
"Oh, William, William, do not be displeased with me! do not forbid it!
The children have told you the tidings.
"If he doesn't know, he suspects," persisted Hurst.
"Nay, but I did not mean to carry it so far as to cause you real grief, my dearest," he said, in a changed tone.
Will you confess now?--he who did it?"
It was probably the act of only one."
"Constance!" interrupted a voice at this juncture.
"What if I forbid it?"
Prayers."
"Let that carnation alone, Constance; give your attention to me.
"Constance, that is no answer."
"We have been up to the judges, as usual, for holiday, sir," replied Gaunt, in a tone of deprecation.
Probably the same doubt had made one of the "disadvantages" hinted at by Mr. Yorke.
"Your memory must be conveniently short," chafed the master.
I shall not love my wife the less, because she has had the courage to turn her talents to account.
"I did not; upon my word of honour."
The servant met them at the door, and grinned dreadfully at the crowd.
"Have you forgotten the inked surplice?"
"Holiday!" interrupted the master.
At this unexpected reply, the boys slunk away to the college schoolroom, their buoyant spirits sunk down to dust and ashes--figuratively speaking.
"Why, I just mean that, sir," was the reply, upon which Gaunt felt uncommonly inclined to knock him down.
"Was that what you were about to say, Constance?"
"He saw it done!"
"Is she?" exclaimed Constance.
"True.
"I may suspect one; Hurst may suspect another; Bywater said he suspected two; the whole school may be suspicious, one of another. Where's the use of that?"
"I promised, you know, Constance.
"Forgive me, William," she softly pleaded.
Judith, with a pettish movement, returned to her kitchen; and at that moment Hamish came downstairs.
"Are you going out to-night, Hamish?"
It appears to be a plain duty thrown in my path."
"Who says he did?" quickly asked Tom Channing.
What if I do forbid it?"
They could not understand it; they had not the most distant idea what their offence could have been.
"Oh, do not, do not!
"Holiday!" he repeated, with emphasis, as if disbelieving his own ears.
"You may be proud to have such children, Mrs. Channing."
Gaunt lifted his finger, and made a sign to Charles to approach.
"Perniciously indulgent, generally; and when the effects break out in insolence and disobedience, then there ensues a scene.
I shall go about it then with the lightest heart!"
I saw you doubted me at the first, when Annabel spoke of it in the study.
"Papa could not spare me to go out altogether; Annabel could not spare me either; and--"
Mr. Yorke smiled.
"By yourself, Constance?"
Strive to see it in the right light."
"Do you consider that the school deserves it?
"Won't you catch it, gentlemen!
It's the holiday they are asking for."
"Have you fully made up your mind?" he at length asked.
Lady Augusta is looking out for a daily governess."
"Though you brought it on yourself," he added, laughing, as he bent his face down.
When he gets found out, he had better not come within reach of the seniors; I warn him of that: they might not leave him a head on his shoulders, or a tooth in his mouth."
"He is here, mamma," replied Constance, walking forward to Mrs. Channing, Mr. Yorke attending her.
"No, I did not!" fearlessly replied little Channing.
"Isn't it a stunning shame?" cried hot Tom Channing.
They had a niece once, though.
I'm nobody.
But I have now, and it has led me to Him.
She must help Constance, but Constance was not easily helped.
"No--no, I haven't anybody in the world.
"I am not going back to Taunton.
Her Own People
"I must know, I must ask you.
Isn't it good?"
If you like, I'll give you the address of the family I boarded with."
There is nobody to care anything about me, whether I live or die."
"No.
"Rank heresy!
You seem so reserved and--and, as if you didn't want to be asked about yourself."
It's the truth, and it hurts me, but I can't help it.
He was handsome and smooth-tongued, but he was a scamp.
"Heartsease Farm," said Mrs. Hewitt promptly.
Constance gave a disagreeable little laugh.
Miss Channing was the oldest teacher on the staff, and taught the fifth grade.
She ran away with a worthless fellow--I forget his name, if I ever knew it.
"Have you any particular place in view?
I struggled against it at first, but it has been too much for me.
There, I've shocked you in good earnest now.
"I haven't any," said Constance wearily.
Father never would talk of her.
I keep it just as she left it, not a thing is changed.
"God cares, Constance."
"Yes, but listen to me, dear.
Good night dearie, and I hope you'll have pleasant dreams."
She died soon after and it just broke their hearts.
"I know it.
She was short and stout and jolly; nothing, not even the iciest reserve, ever daunted Miss Channing.
They brought her up and they just worshipped her.
"Haven't they any children?" asked Constance indifferently.
Her interest was in the place, not in the people.
"Oh, yes, there is One," said Miss Channing gently.
"Oh," cried Constance excitedly.
"It's worse than heresy," said Miss Channing briskly.
"We haven't been strict enough with the girl, Mother," said Cyrus angrily.
My mother was an actress and a good woman.
It was Cyrus who spoke, advancing into the room like a stern, hard impersonation of judgment.
So I mean to be."
Cyrus and Deborah were nothing if not thorough.
She had all her mother's gifts, deepened by her inheritance of Morgan intensity and sincerity ... much, too, of the Morgan firmness of will. When Joscelyn Morgan was twenty-two she was famous over two continents.
But I guess she can hold her own.
Wasn't she Paul's daughter! And all this applause was for her--for Josie.
You can choose your own way and walk in it."
But I don't want you to be angry with me.
"My blood isn't bad," cried Joscelyn proudly.
"I ain't going to be harsh.
Please give me my book."
Did you hear how she defied me?
I wish that you could understand what...."
Yet they loved her and were proud of her.
"I have not been doing anything wrong, Grandfather."
"Hark!" he exclaimed.
"Is that all?"
"That's business," said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his methodical manners; "and if business is to be done, I had better do it."
Only one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
O, see!
He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm.
"Did you ask me for my name?"
They were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there.
The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his work.
So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain.
In the midst of the action he went astray, and, with another deep sigh, fell to work at his shoemaking.
"I can't say that I mean to.
He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.
In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear.
"You are not the gaoler's daughter?"
"Whose voice was that?"
"What did you say?"
"You are still hard at work, I see?"
And so, under a short grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great grove of stars.
I-I learnt it here.
He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.
They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr. Lorry closing the little procession.
But, as there were not only carriage and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed, for the day was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away to do it.
When he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up.
So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work.
But not for long.
"I forget what it was you asked me.
He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent.
It can't be.
"Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?"
See what the prisoner is.
Look at him.
"More than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France. Say, shall I hire a carriage and post-horses?"
A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour.
"Monsieur Manette"; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge's arm; "do you remember nothing of this man?
"Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?" asked Defarge, motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.
It is in the present mode.
It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the salutation, as if it were at a distance:
Kiss me, kiss me!
On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his daughter's hand and clasped his head again.
Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.
Finally, with a deep long sigh, he took the shoe up, and resumed his work.
"I must bear it, if you let it in." (Laying the palest shadow of a stress upon the second word.)
Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there.
His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.
It died out, as everything but his shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and tried to secure it in his breast; but he still looked at her, and gloomily shook his head.
So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground.
"What did you say?"
"I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since."
Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a frightful suddenness.
He turned her full to the light, and looked at her.
"O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother was, and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history.
He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it. But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently, though slowly.
I asked leave to--"
She stood, like a spirit, beside him, and he bent over his work.
"Then be so kind," urged Miss Manette, "as to leave us here.
Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.
The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the questioner.
She quickly brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew so well.
He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes.
As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to become conscious that it was in hers too.
With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she laid his ruined head there.
The task of recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.
The darkness deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed through the chinks in the wall.
"But WHAT DID you see?
"I will not have it; I will not do it!
I will tell everything!
"Yes!
"But I will go first!" said the shadow.
His brother-in-law said nothing, but made a most eloquent grimace as he turned his face towards his soup-plate.
At home, in his own life, his daily companions were Cradell and Amelia Roper, Mrs. Lupex and Mrs. Roper.
Then Eames took heart of grace and had his laughter out.
The moon was clear and bright, and the pavement in the shining light seemed to be as clean as a lady's hand.
"I seldom take anything after dinner, except a little negus."
"I should think not," said the earl.
I hated him the first moment I saw him; but that's no reason she should hate him.
I didn't mean it."
As to myself, if I thought she'd ever have me--"
"What sort of a Christian has he been?"
"Highty tighty," said the earl.
But the earl knew what was going on.
"I don't think I ever did."
"Did you ever ask her to have you?" said the earl.
The colonel turned his head round, and looked at the young man with surprise.
Lord bless you, I knew your father as well as I ever knew any man; and to tell the truth, I believe I helped to ruin him. He held land of me, you know, and there can't be any doubt that he did ruin himself.
I could not help telling her then."
"Then there's been some excuse for my holding my tongue," said the earl.
I think I may boast that I never yet went back from my word."
You come down and spend your Christmas with me at Guestwick."
I never felt angry with her, but I could have eaten him." As he spoke he looked as though he would have made some such attempt had Crosbie been present.
If you are made of dirt, like that fellow Crosbie, you'll be found out at last, no doubt.
Once or twice he tried a word with the colonel, for the colonel sat with his eyes open looking at the fire.
When Eames went into the sitting-room, the colonel was there alone, and had to take upon himself the trouble of introducing himself.
I think it must have been my pocket-handkerchief."
And if we are to be Christians, I suppose we ought to be Christians."
"But I'd go through fire and water for her, my lord.
"Come, Johnny, fill your glass." He had already got into the way of calling his young friend Johnny, having found that Mrs. Eames generally spoke of her son by that name.
"You see he's Bernard Dale's father, and the question is, whether Bernard shouldn't punish the fellow for what he has done.
Pawkins then took his lordship's orders about the wine and retired.
"It isn't like what it was thirty years ago, but then everything of that sort has got worse and worse."
"Look at that fellow," he said to Eames, pointing to the prize bullock.
"So he ought, my lord.
"I daresay it was," said Johnny;--"or perhaps the flies."
"By-the-by, Dale, what do you think of that fellow Crosbie?"
"I'm afraid not.
"That's true enough; and if I was Bernard, I should be very apt to forget my Bible lessons about meekness."
Tell him that if he'll put a little stick under the pot to make it boil, I'll put a bigger one.
No doubt the butchers of the next half-century will have learned much better, and the Guestwick beast, could it be embalmed and then produced, would excite only ridicule at the agricultural ignorance of the present age; but Lord De Guest took the praise that was offered to him, and found himself in a seventh heaven of delight.
"But it seems to me, my dear fellow, that you ought to be very much obliged to Crosbie;--that is to say, if you've a mind to--"
My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.
Johnny remained silent for a moment or two before he answered.
Don't talk to me about swells.
"The waiter didn't seem to think much of it when he brought it."
"And then a clerk in the Income-tax Office!
"It's looking after the bull that does it," said Eames.
Eames had joined his patron at the show after his office hours, looking on upon the living beef by gaslight.
"I don't pretend to know much about girls," said Lord De Guest; "but I should think it would be so.
"Well, I believe so.
"Do you know, my lord, I should think it the most Christian thing in the world to pitch into him; I should, indeed.
After that nothing more was said till the earl came down.
It's my belief that all this will about kill her.
I knew her years before he had ever seen her, and have loved her a great deal better than he will ever love any one.
Come away.
"I couldn't say a word to her now."
"I don't suppose there's any harm in it."
As he went through the little scene, John Eames felt that he was every inch an earl.
And how far would he be justified in taking the earl at his word?
Good-night, my dear boy, good-night.
"By George, I don't see it," said the earl.
"She knows it now," said Johnny; "I went to say good-by to her the other day,--when I thought she was going to be married.
Then for twenty minutes he slept soundly, and at the end of that he woke himself with one of his own snorts. "By George!" he said, jumping up and standing on the rug, "we'll have some coffee;" and after that he did not sleep any more.
They can't get it now, you know."
Don't you see?"
I am not a bit obliged to him.
I've been listening all the time."
Somebody ought to do it.
"By George! you're right, Master Johnny.
"De Guest," said the colonel, "I think I'll go upstairs; I always have a little arrowroot in my own room."
"I'm glad you've found something to amuse you, for it has seemed to me that you and Dale haven't had much to say to each other.
Lady Julia sent you a message, though I forgot all about it till now.
But then I don't think you are made of dirt."
My sister and Crofts may tell me what they like, but when a man's out in the open air for eight or nine hours every day, it doesn't much matter where he goes to sleep after that.
He was got by Lambkin, you know."
"Girls don't care much for that."
"It's very ridiculous, I know," said Johnny, "and of course she would never have accepted me."
"I'll ring the bell for a candle," said the host.
Was not that an exceedingly singular thing?
This party made off immediately, and, after undergoing much suffering, finally arrived, in safety, at Ocracoke Inlet, on the third day after the wreck.
I observed that his name was carded upon three state-rooms; and, upon again referring to the list of passengers, I found that he had engaged passage for himself, wife, and two sisters--his own.
In this state-room the pseudo-wife, slept, of course, every night.
Wyatt's party arrived in about ten minutes after myself.
The next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health.
To add to our dilemma, we found the pumps choked and nearly useless.
I pitied him from the bottom of my heart--but could not, for that reason, quite forgive his incommunicativeness in the matter of the "Last Supper." For this I resolved to have my revenge.
At eight P. M., the clouds broke away to windward, and we had the advantage of a full moon--a piece of good fortune which served wonderfully to cheer our drooping spirits.
Wealth was the general solution--but this I knew to be no solution at all; for Wyatt had told me that she neither brought him a dollar nor had any expectations from any source whatever.
Well, during two nights (not consecutive) while I lay awake, I clearly saw Mrs. W., about eleven o'clock upon each night, steal cautiously from the state-room of Mr. W., and enter the extra room, where she remained until daybreak, when she was called by her husband and went back.
They had separate apartments--no doubt in contemplation of a more permanent divorce; and here, after all I thought was the mystery of the extra state-room.
If not positively ugly, she was not, I think, very far from it.
In this trim we rode safely enough for forty-eight hours--the ship proving herself an excellent sea-boat in many respects, and shipping no water of any consequence.
After this there was a dead stillness, and I heard nothing more, upon either occasion, until nearly daybreak; unless, perhaps, I may mention a low sobbing, or murmuring sound, so very much suppressed as to be nearly inaudible--if, indeed, the whole of this latter noise were not rather produced by my own imagination.
We saw at a glance that the doom of the unfortunate artist was sealed.
"They sank as a matter of course," replied the captain, "and that like a shot.
Immediately upon its arrival we made sail, and in a short time were safely over the bar and standing out to sea.
The silence remained unbroken for an hour.
The artist had engaged passage for himself, wife, two sisters and a servant.
"Mrs. W. was a little indisposed, and would decline coming on board until to-morrow, at the hour of sailing."
Now, I was aware that Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, of Albany, was the artist's wife's mother,--but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself.
We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June), weather permitting; and on the fourteenth, I went on board to arrange some matters in my state-room.
Wyatt's two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were.
But my berth was in such a position, that when my own state-room door was open, as well as the sliding door in question (and my own door was always open on account of the heat,) I could see into the after-cabin quite distinctly, and just at that portion of it, too, where were situated the state-rooms of Mr. Wyatt.
I say "amused"--and scarcely know how to explain myself.
While we gazed in the extremity of astonishment, he passed, rapidly, several turns of a three-inch rope, first around the box and then around his body.
There--I knew it--he is over!"
On the day in which I visited the ship (the fourteenth), Wyatt and party were also to visit it--so the captain informed me--and I waited on board an hour longer than I had designed, in hope of being presented to the bride, but then an apology came.
There was nothing in this, however, to make him sob. I repeat, therefore, that it must have been simply a freak of my own fancy, distempered by good Captain Hardy's green tea.
"Oh, extra baggage, to be sure," I now said to myself--"something he wishes not to be put in the hold--something to be kept under his own eye--ah, I have it--a painting or so--and this is what he has been bargaining about with Nicolino, the Italian Jew." This idea satisfied me, and I dismissed my curiosity for the nonce.
It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth; I observed it attentively, and like to be precise.
What else could I think?
On the lid were painted the words--"Mrs.
Mrs. Wyatt herself was far more agreeable.
One day he came upon deck, and, taking his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward.
At length we bled him and put him to bed.
They were sounds occasioned by the artist in prying open the oblong box, by means of a chisel and mallet--the latter being apparently muffled, or deadened, by some soft woollen or cotton substance in which its head was enveloped.
We remained here a week, were not ill-treated by the wreckers, and at length obtained a passage to New York.
Several circumstances occurred immediately after this fit of Wyatt which contributed to heighten the curiosity with which I was already possessed.
She said very few words, and passed at once into her state-room with Mr. W.
Its weight will be but a trifle--it is nothing--mere nothing.
This we at last accomplished--but we were still unable to do any thing at the pumps; and, in the meantime, the leak gained on us very fast.
I chuckled excessively when I thought of my acumen.
It contained, when afloat, the captain and his wife, Mr. Wyatt and party, a Mexican officer, wife, four children, and myself, with a negro valet.
Poor fellow!--as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth.
That is to say, she was chatty; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea.
Upon reviving he spoke incoherently for some time.
We had no room, of course, for any thing except a few positively necessary instruments, some provisions, and the clothes upon our backs. No one had thought of even attempting to save any thing more.
Sit down, I say, or you will swamp the boat.
What must have been the astonishment of all, then, when having proceeded a few fathoms from the ship, Mr. Wyatt stood up in the stern-sheets, and coolly demanded of Captain Hardy that the boat should be put back for the purpose of taking in his oblong box!
We were, in a measure, prepared for it, however, as the weather had been holding out threats for some time.
But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night.
In another instant both body and box were in the sea--disappearing suddenly, at once and forever.
It was deposited in Wyatt's own; and there, too, it remained, occupying very nearly the whole of the floor--no doubt to the exceeding discomfort of the artist and his wife;--this the more especially as the tar or paint with which it was lettered in sprawling capitals, emitted a strong, disagreeable, and, to my fancy, a peculiarly disgusting odor.
Finally, I hazarded a remark.
In the daytime she performed, to the best of her ability, the part of her mistress--whose person, it had been carefully ascertained, was unknown to any of the passengers on board.
"Sit down, Mr. Wyatt," replied the captain, somewhat sternly, "you will capsize us if you do not sit quite still.
At first he stared at me as if he found it impossible to comprehend the witticism of my remark; but as its point seemed slowly to make its way into his brain, his eyes, in the same proportion, seemed protruding from their sockets.
For the first three or four days we had fine weather, although the wind was dead ahead; having chopped round to the northward, immediately upon our losing sight of the coast.
I cannot listen to you.
"The box!" vociferated Mr. Wyatt, still standing--"the box, I say! Captain Hardy, you cannot, you will not refuse me.
I confess that I entertained some feeble hope of his final deliverance, when I saw him lash himself to the box, and commit himself to the sea."
The ship was crowded with passengers, and every thing was in the bustle attendant upon making sail.
She became much affected by it, and cried out, "Please release me a little; I have something to tell the Prince."
Perhaps you would like to play at Go again, like last night, for a change;" but she was more than ever shy.
"Why are you so shy?" he exclaimed; "be a little more cheerful--people may think it strange," said he, and stayed with her a long time trying to soothe her; but to no effect--she still continued silent and shy.
She had sometimes dreams, after weary thinking, between slumber and waking, in which she seemed to fly to some beautiful girl, apparently Lady Aoi, and to engage in bitter contention and struggle with her.
When he said good-by to her, there was a strange and unusual look in her eyes.
Let us here notice that the young daughter of Udaijin, after she saw Genji, was longing to see him again.
The inmates of the house, who did not know what was the reason, were anxious about her, thinking she was indisposed.
There were several carriages along the roads on whose occupants his glance was cast; that of Lady Aoi, however, was the most striking, and as he passed by the attendants saluted him courteously, which act Genji acknowledged.
"How much the soul departed, still May love to linger round this couch, My own heart tells me, even I Reluctant am to leave it now."
I feel extremely disturbed.
"You speak thus," said Genji, as if he was addressing the spirit, "but you do not tell me who you are.
It was on one of these occasions that a soft shower of rain was falling.
On this, Genji was still more perplexed and anxious, and put a stop to the colloquy.
Genji still felt lonely.
He approached, and after having a little conversation, said, "I have many things to say to you, but now I must have a little rest," and returned to his own quarters.
In due course the corpse was taken to the cemetery of Toribeno.
But they soon asserted themselves as facts, for here they were!--nothing to see but a cold blue light, and nothing to do but see it.
So beware of yourself.
That you are ashamed of yourself now is no sign that the cause for such shame has ceased.
It was all the same to the cold unmoving twilight that rounded her.
But it was so lonely that she would have been glad to play with a serpent, and put out her hand to touch her.
But she knew nothing of that, and the same one dreary day seemed ever brooding over her.
She touched nothing.
"What business has she beside me!"
She knew that if she set her down she would never run after her like the princess, at least not before the evil thing was already upon her.
She stood for a while, perfectly calm, then sat down.
She would actually nod her head to herself in complacent pride that she had stood out against them.
At length she cried aloud; but there was no answer.
The child, also, put out her hand--but in the direction away from Agnes. And that was well, for if she had touched Agnes it would have killed her.
She would see whether she could not walk out of the strange luminous dusk that surrounded her.
The fearlessness of Agnes was only ignorance: she did not know what it was to be hurt; she had never read a single story of giant, or ogress or wolf; and her mother had never carried out one of her threats of punishment.
She walked very fast, and got home to her cottage very soon after the princess had gone from it.
Her own choice was going to be carried a good deal farther for her than she would have knowingly carried it for herself.
Some have no fear, because they have no knowledge of the danger: there is nothing fine in that.
Nothing was overhead, nothing under foot, nothing on either hand, but the same pale, faint, bluish glimmer.
Nothing such, however, was in the wise woman's plan for the curing of her.
She turned sick at herself, and would gladly have been put out of existence, but for three days the odious companionship went on.
Oh, how slowly the hours went by!
Like a squirrel in his cage she but kept placing another spot of the cunningly suspended sphere under her feet, and she would have been still only at its lowest point after walking for ages.
And, indeed, it was but this: she had cared only for Somebody, and now she was going to have only Somebody.
It grew dreary and drearier--in her, that is: outside there was no change.
On and on went the dreary hours--or did they go at all?--"no change, no pause, no hope;"--on and on till she FELT she was forgotten, and then she grew strangely still and fell asleep.
A little longer, and it grew wearisome.
Agnes, on the contrary, seldom changed her mood, but kept that of calm assured self-satisfaction.
It had neither door, nor window, nor any opening to break its perfect roundness.
Then Agnes lost her temper, and put out her hands to seize the little girl; but lo! the little girl was gone, and she found herself tugging at her own hair.
In her agony of despair, sleep descended, and she slept.
And now Agnes hated her with her whole heart.
By the third day, Agnes was not merely sick but ashamed of the life she had hitherto led, was despicable in her own eyes, and astonished that she had never seen the truth concerning herself before.
What sort of a place it was she could not tell.
When she had eaten it, she called her to her, and said very solemnly,--
The wise woman carried Agnes into a dark room, there undressed her, took from her hand her knitting-needles, and put her, naked as she was born, into the hollow sphere.
On and on she went, never halting, never letting the light look in, or Agnes look out.
She had not, indeed, advanced a single step; for, in whatever direction she tried to go, the sphere turned round and round, answering her feet accordingly.
Father nor mother had ever by wise punishment helped her to gain a victory over herself, and do what she did not like or choose; and their folly in reasoning with one unreasonable had fixed her in her conceit.
Some are too stupid to be afraid: there is nothing fine in that.
In new circumstances, especially after you have done well for a while, you will be in danger of thinking just as much of yourself as before.
She was the color of pale earth, with a pinched nose, and a mere slit in her face for a mouth.
When first she came to herself, she thought the horrors of the preceding day had been all a dream of the night.
All at once, the creature began to smile, but with such an odious, self-satisfied expression, that Agnes felt ashamed of seeing her.
I am going from home, and leave you in charge of the house.
But she did not set Agnes down either in the cottage or in the great hall.
"How ugly she is!" thought Agnes.
Another night came, and another still, during both of which the wise woman nursed and fed her.
On and on she carried her without a word.
VII.
Some who are not easily frightened would yet turn their backs and run, the moment they were frightened: such never had more courage than fear.
She lost all notion of time.
When she woke, there was the little girl, heedless, ugly, miserable, staring at her own toes.
She could see nothing but a faint cold bluish light all about her.
Plainly she was the mere puppet of her moods, and more than that, any cunning nurse who knew her well enough could call or send away those moods almost as she pleased, like a showman pulling strings behind a show.
Then Agnes said, "Who are you?" And the little girl said, "Who are you?"
All at once, on the third day, she was aware that a naked child was seated beside her.
Walk she found she could, well enough, but walk out she could not.
But the man who will do his work in spite of his fear is a man of true courage.
But she found her teeth in her own arm, and the little girl was gone--only to return again; and each time she came back she was tenfold uglier than before.
The place she had chosen for Agnes was a strange one--such a one as is to be found nowhere else in the wide world.
The moment she was asleep, the wise woman came, lifted her out, and laid her in her bosom; fed her with a wonderful milk, which she received without knowing it; nursed her all the night long, and, just ere she woke, laid her back in the blue sphere again.
When she had lain thus for a while, the wise woman carried her into her cottage, and washed her in the little well; then dressed her in clean garments, and gave her bread and milk.
Whether it be a good thing or a bad not to be afraid depends on what the fearlessness is founded upon.
But there was something about the child that made her shudder.
Agnes was furious now, and flew at her to bite her.
The next morning she woke in the arms of the wise woman; the horror had vanished from her sight, and two heavenly eyes were gazing upon her. She wept and clung to her, and the more she clung, the more tenderly did the great strong arms close around her.
"Agnes, you must not imagine you are cured.
She could not feel that any thing supported her, and yet she did not sink.
On and on she went, keeping as much in a straight line as she might, but after walking until she was thoroughly tired, she found herself no nearer out of her prison than before.
If she had been told that she had been there twenty years, she would have believed it--or twenty minutes--it would have been all the same: except for weariness, time was for her no more.
I'll fire a gun half an hour before sundown."
A turn ashore'll hurt nobody--the boats are still in the water; you can take the gigs, and as many as please may go ashore for the afternoon.
Well, if I speak back, pikes will be going in two shakes; if I don't, Silver will see there's something under that, and the game's up.
The bottom was clean sand.
Had he been on deck, he could no longer so much as have pretended not to understand the situation.
Anderson was in command of my boat, and instead of keeping the crew in order, he grumbled as loud as the worst.
I volunteered for one of the boats, where I had, of course, no business.
It was so decided; loaded pistols were served out to all the sure men; Hunter, Joyce, and Redruth were taken into our confidence and received the news with less surprise and a better spirit than we had looked for, and then the captain went on deck and addressed the crew.
Of all the gloomy features of that gloomy afternoon, this obvious anxiety on the part of Long John appeared the worst.
13
The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hilltops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there.
I believe the silly fellows must have thought they would break their shins over treasure as soon as they were landed, for they all came out of their sulks in a moment and gave a cheer that started the echo in a faraway hill and sent the birds once more flying and squalling round the anchorage.
We held a council in the cabin.
From the ship we could see nothing of the house or stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas.
We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third of a mile from each shore, the mainland on one side and Skeleton Island on the other.
It was as plain as day. Silver was the captain, and a mighty rebellious crew he had of it.
And it was not only we of the cabin party who perceived the danger.
The booms were tearing at the blocks, the rudder was banging to and fro, and the whole ship creaking, groaning, and jumping like a manufactory.
At last, however, the party was made up.
Mutiny, it was plain, hung over us like a thunder-cloud.
The crews raced for the beach, but the boat I was in, having some start and being at once the lighter and the better manned, shot far ahead of her consort, and the bow had struck among the shore-side trees and I had caught a branch and swung myself out and plunged into the nearest thicket while Silver and the rest were still a hundred yards behind.
He whipped out of sight in a moment, leaving Silver to arrange the party, and I fancy it was as well he did so.
If they none of them go, well then, we hold the cabin, and God defend the right.
But you may suppose I paid no heed; jumping, ducking, and breaking through, I ran straight before my nose till I could run no longer.
The HISPANIOLA was rolling scuppers under in the ocean swell.
Or rather, I suppose the truth was this, that all hands were disaffected by the example of the ringleaders--only some more, some less; and a few, being good fellows in the main, could neither be led nor driven any further.
In a jiffy I had slipped over the side and curled up in the fore-sheets of the nearest boat, and almost at the same moment she shoved off.
Long John was hard at work going from group to group, spending himself in good advice, and as for example no man could have shown a better.
They lay about the deck growling together in talk.
"Silver, sir," returned the captain; "he's as anxious as you and I to smother things up.
This is a tiff; he'd soon talk 'em out of it if he had the chance, and what I propose to do is to give him the chance. Let's allow the men an afternoon ashore.
There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside.
Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to save our lives.
The captain was too bright to be in the way.
I get a rough answer, do I not?
"I don't know about treasure," he said, "but I'll stake my wig there's fever here."
The slightest order was received with a black look and grudgingly and carelessly obeyed.
Although the breeze had now utterly ceased, we had made a great deal of way during the night and were now lying becalmed about half a mile to the south-east of the low eastern coast. Grey-coloured woods covered a large part of the surface.
Six fellows were to stay on board, and the remaining thirteen, including Silver, began to embark.
"And who is that?" asked the squire.
You see, sir, here it is.
It occurred to me at once to go ashore.
If the conduct of the men had been alarming in the boat, it became truly threatening when they had come aboard.
If six men were left by Silver, it was plain our party could not take and fight the ship; and since only six were left, it was equally plain that the cabin party had no present need of my assistance.
If they all go, why we'll fight the ship.
"My lads," said he, "we've had a hot day and are all tired and out of sorts.
THE appearance of the island when I came on deck next morning was altogether changed.
I thought this was a very bad sign, for up to that day the men had gone briskly and willingly about their business; but the very sight of the island had relaxed the cords of discipline.
The plunge of our anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods, but in less than a minute they were down again and all was once more silent.
It is one thing to be idle and skulk and quite another to take a ship and murder a number of innocent men.
He fairly outstripped himself in willingness and civility; he was all smiles to everyone.
The heat was sweltering, and the men grumbled fiercely over their work.
A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage--a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks.
Now, we've only one man to rely on."
The honest hands--and I was soon to see it proved that there were such on board--must have been very stupid fellows.
"Well," he said with an oath, "it's not forever."
No one took notice of me, only the bow oar saying, "Is that you, Jim? Keep your head down." But Silver, from the other boat, looked sharply over and called out to know if that were me; and from that moment I began to regret what I had done.
Good-bye to the HISPANIOLA; good-bye to the squire, the doctor, and the captain!
As soon as I was clear of the thicket, I ran as I never ran before, scarce minding the direction of my flight, so long as it led me from the murderers; and as I ran, fear grew and grew upon me until it turned into a kind of frenzy.
All this while, as I say, I was still running, and without taking any notice, I had drawn near to the foot of the little hill with the two peaks and had got into a part of the island where the live-oaks grew more widely apart and seemed more like forest trees in their bearing and dimensions.
14
I judged at once that some of my shipmates must be drawing near along the borders of the fen.
Would not the first of them who saw me wring my neck like a snipe's?
His hands flew up, he gave a sort of gasp, and fell.
Far away out in the marsh there arose, all of a sudden, a sound like the cry of anger, then another on the back of it; and then one horrid, long-drawn scream.
All at once there began to go a sort of bustle among the bulrushes; a wild duck flew up with a quack, another followed, and soon over the whole surface of the marsh a great cloud of birds hung screaming and circling in the air.
When the gun fired, how should I dare to go down to the boats among those fiends, still smoking from their crime?
There was nothing left for me but death by starvation or death by the hands of the mutineers.
I had found one of the honest hands--well, here, at that same moment, came news of another.
I could not tell, of course, the meaning of the signal, but it instantly awoke my fears.
If I turn agin my dooty--"
I now felt for the first time the joy of exploration.
Like enough, to judge from the sound, his back was broken on the spot.
"Then rest his soul for a true seaman!
But he was not destined to go far. With a cry John seized the branch of a tree, whipped the crutch out of his armpit, and sent that uncouth missile hurtling through the air. It struck poor Tom, point foremost, and with stunning violence, right between the shoulders in the middle of his back.
"Hands off!" cried Silver, leaping back a yard, as it seemed to me, with the speed and security of a trained gymnast.
When I came again to myself the monster had pulled himself together, his crutch under his arm, his hat upon his head.
"Oh, John, how late you are!" said Amelia, slipping out from the back parlour as he let himself in with his latch-key.
Could it be true that he, even now, was in a position to go boldly to the Squire of Allington, and tell him what were his views with reference to Lily?
"And you never told her--that you were in love with her, I mean, and all that kind of thing."
You may take my word for this, too,--my sister hates Crosbie quite as much as you do.
"He's a queer sort of fellow;--very well in his way, but he never does anything.
"It's always cold in London," said the colonel.
"Say nothing,--not a word more to me.
"Never mind my-lording me, but do as I tell you.
There are some things for which a man ought to be beaten black and blue."
He is the most abominable rascal that ever I met in my life.
If he'd gone on to this day he wouldn't have been any wiser."
"I know what you mean, my lord.
"Shall I write to old Buffle, and ask it as a favour?"
"That won't be comfortable.
"It's very odd," exclaimed the earl, "but do you know, that bull has been as quiet since that day,--as quiet as--as anything.
The man who means honestly is the best swell I know.
"I'm not so sure of that," he said, mournfully, as though grieving at the thought that there was no chance of currying favour with Lily by thrashing her late lover.
See and come with me if you can.
"Lambkin," said Johnny, who had not as yet been able to learn much about the Guestwick stock.
When, at half-past nine o'clock, the colonel retired from the room, the earl, as the door was closed, threw up his hands, and uttered the one word "negus!"
But I'll see to-morrow, and then I'll let you know.
She wants to thank you herself for what you did in the field."
As for me, I'm a year older than he is, but I wouldn't mind going up and down from Guestwick every day."
"No, I suppose not," said Eames, sadly.
The bull that we had the trouble with.
"Oh, yes, I know them."
If any fellow wanted now to curry favour with the young lady, what an opportunity he'd have."
"He ought to have every bone in his skin broken," said the earl.
I wish I was Lily Dale's brother." Then he sat down again, remembering that he was speaking in the presence of Lily's uncle, and of the father of Bernard Dale, who might be supposed to occupy the place of Lily's brother.
"I hope not."
"Oh dear, no; I wonder what Pawkins says about him.
"Yes, Lambkin.
The difference was very great, and yet he found it quite as easy to talk to the earl as to Mrs. Lupex.
It wasn't right to hang men for stealing sheep."
I knew your father at Guestwick, a great many years ago;" then he turned his face back towards the fire and sighed.
"But, perhaps, you never met the colonel."
To sit still, with his hands closed over each other on his lap, was work enough for Colonel Dale during his after-dinner hours.
"Say it to the squire, then.
By-the-by, you touched him up about that poor girl."
what difference does it make to you?"
It's such a poor thing."
Colonel Dale was much like his brother in face, but was taller, even thinner, and apparently older.
I think she'd 'pitch into him,' as you call it, herself, if she knew how.
He knew no more about a beast when he'd done, than--than--than that waiter.
"I never drink port," said the colonel.
"So he ought," said Eames, getting up from his chair in his eagerness, and speaking in a tone somewhat louder than was perhaps becoming in the presence of his seniors.
Pawkins's port wine may, perhaps, have had something to do with the resolution.
Go to him, and tell him what you mean,--holding your head up like a man.
"If I thought so," said Eames, "I'd find him out to-morrow."
I dine out to-morrow, but you can call and let me know at about six."
"And so do I. You can come down, I suppose, with me the day after to-morrow?"
"Exactly.
"I don't wonder a bit at her accepting a fellow like that.
"It's got very cold this afternoon," said Johnny, trying to make conversation.
"You've been asleep," said the colonel.
When I heard that she had accepted him, I had half a mind to cut my own throat,--or else his."
Eames then left the room without another word, and walked out into the cold air of Jermyn Street.
And then he made up his mind, in a wild sort of way, to tell all the truth to his friend.
"I have been filling my glass all the time," said Eames, taking the decanter again in his hand as he spoke.
Then there was another pause, during which Johnny looked very sheepish.
But tell everything to the uncle, and then to the mother.
"You come down with me," continued the earl, "and you'll find we'll make it all straight.
"Mr. Eames, I believe?
But he was answered with monosyllables, and it was evident to him that the colonel did not wish to talk.
"Think of him?" said the colonel.
"The other fellow was only a clerk in another office."
"So that he shouldn't do them again?"
He was a swell, and girls like that kind of thing.
"Flies!" said the earl, angrily.
"I don't know much about being in love with her," said Johnny, turning very red as he spoke.
You might say it isn't Christian to hang a man."
He was never so happy as when surrounded by butchers, graziers, and salesmen who were able to appreciate the work of his life, and who regarded him as a model nobleman.
"I remember when old Pawkins had as good a glass of port as I've got at home,--or nearly.
"That's all nonsense, my lord."
But his brother-in-law would not help him in his efforts; and even Eames was not bright in rendering him assistance.
And, above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself.
You come down to Guestwick for the Christmas, and then go over to Allington and tell them all plainly what you mean."
The house door opened and closed again.
"You force me to tell you the truth," she went on.
I have tried vainly to make her explain herself.
Mr. Van Brandt came in.
Put down your hat, Mr. Germaine. No ceremony!"
She sat down again, and turned her face away from me.
"Take your hat," she said.
"Do you think she would come and see me?"
You present the best of all replies to my letter in presenting yourself.
His wife is not dead, as you may suppose; she is living, and I know her to be living.
Only our three selves, and one old friend of mine to make up four.
That farewell kiss, that sudden composure when the day of the dinner was fixed, weighed on my spirits.
I am living under that man's protection, Mr. Germaine.
As the sound caught my ear, the old times and the old faces vanished again from my thoughts as completely as if they had never existed.
Her reproaches passed by me unheeded.
She stood before me.
I saw in his face that he had some vile motive of his own for trying to take us by surprise, and that the result of the experiment had disappointed him.
He was too cunning to believe me; he went out to the public-house and looked at a directory.
"Yes."
At the same moment the door of the room opened suddenly and softly.
I took leave of her as I spoke.
She made a last effort to repel me, and yielded even as she made it.
"There is one thing you haven't told me yet," she said, with a faint, forced smile.
"You are very good," I answered.
Go, if you love me and pity me."
"You love me!" I whispered.
"You have been forced into your present position: there are circumstances which excuse you, and which you are purposely keeping back from me. Nothing will convince me that you are a base woman.
She raised herself on her knees; the tears suddenly filled her eyes.
I wrote to you that I was beneath your notice, and you have obliged me to tell you why.
My duller sense of hearing had discovered nothing.
"You will never come here again.
I was beside myself.
She removed her hands from her face when she felt me near her.
"You are not going yet?" he said, speaking to me with his eye on Mrs. Van Brandt.
She threw her arms round my neck, and held me to her with all her strength.
What did the change mean? "To-morrow" was the day she had appointed for seeing my mother.
"Don't frighten me," she said.
She reflected for a moment.
Leave him at once and forever. Leave him, and come with me to a future that is worthy of you--your future as my wife."
But the subject dropped.
"Mary"!
We had evidently met just as he was going out.
I spoke as I felt--fervently, passionately.
Degraded as I am, unworthy as I am--knowing as I do that nothing can ever come of it--I love you!
Did she really believe, when I had heard what passed at the interview, that I should never enter the house again, and never attempt to see her more? And was this the secret of her composure when she heard the date of the dinner appointed for "the day after to-morrow"?
"Let him come back!
"When?"
"I don't believe you have voluntarily degraded yourself," I said.
"My whole heart goes out to you in spite of myself.
What obstacle is there?"
I took her hand.
She was indeed in earnest--vehemently in earnest.
He is not a man for a poor devil like me to offend; I mean to make a friend of him, and I expect you to make a friend of him too.' He sat down and wrote to you.
"I have a business appointment," he said, "which it is impossible to put off.
"Is this honorable?
Can you tell why?"
Pray excuse me.
"Mary! come down directly."
I knew her Christian name at last, and knew it through Van Brandt.
Is this worthy of you?
She answered with a sudden self-abandonment; she recklessly cast herself loose from the restraints which had held her up to this time.
She turned deadly pale when she shook hands with me at parting.
Where have you been?"
"I have received it, and I have read it."
"Oh, don't tempt me!" she murmured.
He threw open the door of a room on the ground-floor.
She tried to change the subject.
She looked at me with a cold and steady surprise.
My mother looked at me in blank dismay.
"Is it as serious as that, George?"
Before I could speak again, she suddenly faced me, and struck her open hand on the table with a passionate resolution which I now saw in her for the first time.
There was no choice but to answer her.
She had followed us to the door, keeping behind Van Brandt while he was speaking to me.
"Stop!" she cried.
"Kiss me," she whispered.
"He has come back."
"I will tell your mother what the obstacle is," she said, thoughtfully.
"I think of you perpetually," she said.
"Did the fine weather tempt you, my dear?" She paused, and looked at me more closely. "George!" she exclaimed, "what has happened to you?
"And she has said No?"
"You have gone out earlier than usual to-day," she said.
She drew me to her gently.
Oh, sir, I have accustomed myself to look up to you as a high-minded man.
You allow me to be entrapped into receiving you, and you accept as your accomplice Mr. Van Brandt!
"Mr. Germaine!" she exclaimed, starting back, as if the bare sight of me repelled her.
XVI.
VOID.
XII.
XXXVI.
Wait till the majesty of Death Invests so mean a brow! Almost a powdered footman Might dare to touch it now!
VIII.
XXV.
To ponder little workmanships In crayon or in wool, With "This was last her fingers did," Industrious until
Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led. Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.
By clocks 't was morning, and for night The bells at distance called; But epoch had no basis here, For period exhaled.
I mind me that of anguish sent, Some drifts were moved away Before my simple bosom broke, -- And why not this, if they?
As if my life were shaven And fitted to a frame, And could not breathe without a key; And 't was like midnight, some,
I will not name it in the street, For shops would stare, that I, So shy, so very ignorant, Should have the face to die.
All these did conquer; but the ones Who overcame most times Wear nothing commoner than snow, No ornament but palms.
A triumph when temptation's bribe Is slowly handed back, One eye upon the heaven renounced And one upon the rack.
A further force of life Developed from within, -- When Death lit all the shortness up, And made the hurry plain.
AT LENGTH.
Wait till in everlasting robes This democrat is dressed, Then prate about "preferment" And "station" and the rest!
On such a night, or such a night, Would anybody care If such a little figure Slipped quiet from its chair,
For chanticleer to wake it, -- Or stirring house below, Or giddy bird in orchard, Or early task to do?
XXXV.
The hillsides must not know it, Where I have rambled so, Nor tell the loving forests The day that I shall go,
Let down the bars, O Death! The tired flocks come in Whose bleating ceases to repeat, Whose wandering is done.
One little maid from playmates, One little mind from school, -- There must be guests in Eden; All the rooms are full.
THE JOURNEY.
XXXIV.
Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed, Should startle most; Assassin, hid in our apartment, Be horror's least.
Never did she lisp it, And 't was not for me; She was mute from transport, I, from agony!
She died, -- this was the way she died; And when her breath was done, Took up her simple wardrobe And started for the sun.
There is a shame of nobleness Confronting sudden pelf, -- A finer shame of ecstasy Convicted of itself.
Till the evening, nearing, One the shutters drew -- Quick! a sharper rustling! And this linnet flew!
A death-blow is a life-blow to some Who, till they died, did not alive become; Who, had they lived, had died, but when They died, vitality begun.
-- How dim it sounds! And yet it will be done As sure as flocks go home at night Unto the shepherd's arm!
XV.
Of tribulation these are they Denoted by the white; The spangled gowns, a lesser rank Of victors designate.
I made my soul familiar With her extremity, That at the last it should not be A novel agony,
What inn is this Where for the night Peculiar traveller comes? Who is the landlord? Where the maids? Behold, what curious rooms! No ruddy fires on the hearth, No brimming tankards flow. Necromancer, landlord, Who are these below?
Her little figure at the gate The angels must have spied, Since I could never find her Upon the mortal side.
We wondered at our blindness, -- When nothing was to see But her Carrara guide-post, -- At our stupidity,
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place.
Thou stirrest earthquake in the South, And maelstrom in the sea; Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Hast thou no arm for me?
XIV.
FOLLOWING.
TILL THE END.
The only ghost I ever saw Was dressed in mechlin, -- so; He wore no sandal on his foot, And stepped like flakes of snow. His gait was soundless, like the bird, But rapid, like the roe; His fashions quaint, mosaic, Or, haply, mistletoe.
Their costume, of a Sunday, Some manner of the hair, -- A prank nobody knew but them, Lost, in the sepulchre.
Weeds triumphant ranged, Strangers strolled and spelled At the lone orthography Of the elder dead.
Around this quiet courtier Obsequious angels wait! Full royal is his retinue, Full purple is his state!
I went to heaven, -- 'T was a small town, Lit with a ruby, Lathed with down. Stiller than the fields At the full dew, Beautiful as pictures No man drew. People like the moth, Of mechlin, frames, Duties of gossamer, And eider names. Almost contented I could be 'Mong such unique Society.
It was not death, for I stood up, And all the dead lie down; It was not night, for all the bells Put out their tongues, for noon.
REQUIEM.
So choosing but a gown And taking but a prayer, The only raiment I should need, I struggled, and was there.
They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, Like petals from a rose, When suddenly across the June A wind with fingers goes.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop, The stones achase, Than, moonless, one's own self encounter In lonesome place.
After a hundred years Nobody knows the place, -- Agony, that enacted there, Motionless as peace.
III.
Nor lisp it at the table, Nor heedless by the way Hint that within the riddle One will walk to-day!
XXXIII.
Beguiling thus the wonder, The wondrous nearer drew; Hands bustled at the moorings -- The crowd respectful grew. Ascended from our vision To countenances new! A difference, a daisy, Is all the rest I knew!
I read my sentence steadily, Reviewed it with my eyes, To see that I made no mistake In its extremest clause, --
If I should disappoint the eyes That hunted, hunted so, to see, And could not bear to shut until They "noticed" me -- they noticed me;
I had no cause to be awake, My best was gone to sleep, And morn a new politeness took, And failed to wake them up,
The house of supposition, The glimmering frontier That skirts the acres of perhaps, To me shows insecure.
I noticed people disappeared, When but a little child, -- Supposed they visited remote, Or settled regions wild.
THE BATTLE-FIELD.
I lived on dread; to those who know The stimulus there is In danger, other impetus Is numb and vital-less.
I have not told my garden yet, Lest that should conquer me; I have not quite the strength now To break it to the bee.
Some, too fragile for winter winds, The thoughtful grave encloses, -- Tenderly tucking them in from frost Before their feet are cold.
XIII.
Then his difficulties with her began for she would go out, but as he had his housework to do, he could not allow it.
"Oh, Silvia, are you not wilful and cunning?
He knew that any living creature in a hamper, even if it be only an old fowl, always draws attention; there would be several loafers most likely who would notice that he had a fox with him, and even if he left the hamper in the cart the dogs at the inn would be sure to sniff out her scent.
To what lengths he went then in that drunken humour I shall not offend my readers by relating, but shall only say that he was so drunk and sottish that he had a very imperfect recollection of what had passed when he woke the next morning.
"What are you doing here, Mrs. Cork?" he asked her.
He had made a bargain and he would stick to it, and so he let her be, though sorely against his will.
May she not have thought it easier to change him thus than ever to change herself back into being a woman?
The long and the short of it is that by drinking he drowned all his sorrow; and then would be a beast too like his wife, though she was one through no fault of her own, and could not help it.
So it was time after time (for the old woman was used to having her own way) until Mrs. Cork would, I think, have tried punishing her if she had not been afraid of Mrs. Tebrick's rows of white teeth, which she often showed her, then laughing afterwards, as if to say it was only play.
For he saw that vanity had kept her mouth shut if she had won over her mistress to better ways, and her love for her would have grown by getting her own way with her.
The next morning they locked up the house and they departed, having first secured Mrs. Tebrick in a large wicker hamper where she would be tolerably comfortable.
She would do it.
Just when they got home and were going into the porch they came face to face with an old woman.
I see you glory in being so, but I shall not reproach you but shall stick to my side of the bargain, and you must stick to yours."
"Poor thing.
Mr. Tebrick stopped short in consternation and looked about for his vixen, but she had run forward without any shyness to greet her.
Not content with tearing off the dresses that were fitted on her, one day Silvia slipped upstairs to her wardrobe and tore down all her old dresses and made havoc with them, not sparing her wedding dress either, but tearing and ripping them all up so that there was hardly a shred or rag left big enough to dress a doll in.
There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night the next morning will show the other side to his nature.
She grew steadily wilder and after a few days so intractable with her that Mr. Tebrick again took her under his complete control.
He had long grown a nuisance to his friends as an exorbitant sponge upon them, and the world was well rid of him.
Being in this mood the truth is he welcomed her.
A hundred times this poor gentleman bit his lip, drew down his torvous brows, and stamped his foot, and cursed himself bitterly, or called his lady bitch.
Thereafter he only brought them things which she could better enjoy, that is sugar, grapes, raisins, and butcher's meat.
"By Gad! we two have been strangely brought together!"
For with them she was pleased enough, but only delighting to bite at them, and flip them about with her paws, and never considering for a moment whether they were diamonds or clubs, or hearts, or spades or whether the card was an ace or not.
Mr. Tebrick went in and found that his visitor was waiting for him.
I quite understand--in the circumstances." Then the cleric shook him by the hand, got into his carriage and drove away.
Very soon she led her cubs into the earth, the dog-fox had vanished and Mr. Tebrick was again alone.
"Not an affectionate disposition," then to his coachman: "No, that's all right.
Esther was of a dark complexion, a true brunette and very sturdy; Angelica the brightest red and the most exactly like her mother; while Selwyn was the smallest cub, of a very prying, inquisitive and cunning temper, but delicate and undersized.
Canon Fox had been alarmed by the letter, had not answered it, and thought that it was always better to let things be, and never to refer to anything unpleasant.
He did not wait longer but went home.
After her in his affections came Selwyn, whom he soon saw was the most intelligent of the whole litter.
But clever as he was, little Selwyn could never understand it, and if his mother remembered anything about watches it was a subject which she never attempted to explain to her children.
It was the same too with the cards.
I see her every day now."
Now the secret was out and Mr. Tebrick could see his rival before him.
Here was the real father of his godchildren, who could be certain of their taking after him, and leading over again his wild and rakish life.
"At any rate," he said to himself, "there will be no scandal." He was relieved also because Mr. Tebrick had said nothing about going abroad to disseminate the Gospel.
His eccentricities would never be noticed at Stokoe.
"I have called really to ask about my niece."
The Rev.
"No--I never see anyone if I can avoid it.
On the next visit it was the same thing.
One day Mr. Tebrick left the earth as usual and ran down the slope to the road, when he was surprised to find a carriage waiting before his house and a coachman walking about near his gate.
Mr. Tebrick was silent for some time and then said:
All that night he was in this mood, and in agony, as if he had broken in the crown of a tooth and bitten on the nerve.
Where does she live?"
"Indeed.
"No.
Sorel was a clumsy little beast of a cheery and indeed puppyish disposition; Kasper was fierce, the largest of the five, even in his play he would always bite, and gave his godfather many a sharp nip as time went on.
You are the first person I have spoken to for months."
Besides that, Mr. Tebrick had said he was happy.
At last he must have dropped asleep, for he woke suddenly with all his senses alert, and opening his eyes found a full-grown fox within six feet of him sitting on its haunches like a dog and watching his face with curiosity.
I have heard she is not living with you any longer."
Mr. Tebrick saw instantly that it was not Silvia.
But though his Silvia was affectionate and amiable enough to let him put the stereoscope over her muzzle, yet she would not look through it, but kept turning her head to lick his hand, and it was plain to him that now she had quite forgotten the use of the instrument.
And has he not reason for his pride?
She is a fox."
It was the same dark beast with a large white tag to his brush.
So it was evident that she had forgotten the nature of cards too.
He was not, however, above playing tricks on the others, and one day when Mr. Tebrick was by, he made believe that there was a mouse in a hole some little way off.
"We would both of us give our lives for theirs," he said to himself as he reasoned upon it, "we both of us are happy chiefly in their company. What pride this fellow must feel to have such a wife, and such children taking after him.
For half the year he is hunted, everywhere dogs pursue him, men lay traps for him or menace him. He owes nothing to another."
I ought to tell you that she has changed her shape.
"True happiness," he said to himself, "is to be found in bestowing love; there is no such happiness as that of the mother for her babe, unless I have attained it in mine for my vixen and her children."
Thus Mr. Tebrick had a whole family now to occupy him, and, indeed, came to love them with very much of a father's love and partiality.
"Quite right, too, my dear fellow.
One day he tried taking with him the stereoscope and a pack of cards.
He could see that Silvia had been hunting with her cubs, and also that she had forgotten that he would come that morning, for she started when she saw him, and though she carelessly licked his hand, he could see that her thoughts were not with him.
After some conversation on indifferent topics Canon Fox said to him:
You have the tickets, I trust?
'Well, I wish you well out of it.'
I come, you see, of a military family.'
Elsie stared at me, more aghast and more puzzled than ever.
I began to feel like a globe-trotter already; the Cantankerous Old Lady was the thin end of the wedge--the first rung of the ladder!
'An admirable inspiration,' the Count murmured.
Dear little Elsie was in transports of surprise when I related my adventure.
I shall stroll out this morning, as soon as I've "cleaned myself," and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers. Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets.
I understood him to mean that he had prospered in his attempt to impose on Lady Georgina.
To my great amazement, I found the Cantankerous Old Lady and the egregious Count comfortably seated there.
The shabby-looking passenger was pacing up and down the platform outside in a badly-made dust-coat.
Omnibuses traverse it from end to end--even, I am told, to Islington and Putney; within, folk sit face to face who never saw one another before in their lives, and who may never see one another again, or, on the contrary, may pass the rest of their days together.'
I met the Cantankerous Old Lady at Charing Cross, by appointment, and proceeded to take charge of her luggage and tickets.
When?
Why not start for Schlangenbad with the Cantankerous Old Lady?
What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the faintest conception.
The working classes were driving trade out of the country, and the consequence was, we couldn't build a boat which didn't reek like an oil-shop.
She fidgeted and worried the whole way over.
I proceeded to put my foot on it.
The Cantankerous Old Lady flared up.
'But if you don't teach,' Elsie went on, gazing at me with those wondering big blue eyes of hers, 'whatever will you do, Brownie?' Her horizon was bounded by the scholastic circle.
I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron.
What gaiety!
'Ha!
The Count, however, was still unsatisfied.
'Monsieur is attached to the Embassy in London?' Lady Georgina inquired, growing affable.
'Thank you.
In her hurry, at last, she let the Count take possession of her jewel-case. I rather fancy that as he passed one window he handed it in to the shabby-looking passenger; but I am not certain.
He meant her to ask him.
'But what could I do, my dear?
'That succeeds admirably,' the Count had answered, in the same soft undertone.
'I was before my time, that was all; at present, even a curate's wife may blamelessly bicycle.'
So there was the end of it.'
'My opinion to a T! You are really an exceptionally sensible young woman.
But, anyhow, I shall have got there.'
You have to change there.
He gazed at me with fixed eyes.
'Lois, my child, don't stare'--she had covenanted from the first to call me Lois, as my father's daughter, and I confess I preferred it to being Miss Cayley'd.
'I think you knew my husband, Sir Evelyn Fawley, and my father, Lord Kynaston.'
I owed him nothing, except my poverty.
And yet, after all, there isn't much harm in you.'
'Fellow-feeling,' I answered.
If I recall him!
What's your name, young woman?'
I tell you, just at present, I am not contemplating it.'
'Do I look like a woman who cares about a reference?
However, he did not desist even so.
What will you do to find one?'
'That's the point.
I couldn't swallow a poker if I tried for weeks.
She grew purple in the face with indignation and astonishment, that a casual outsider should venture to address her; so much so, indeed, that for a second I almost regretted my well-meant interposition.
But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Passage beckoned my seafaring ancestors--the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon.
You take my fancy; that's the point!
I don't think she noticed it, but automatically once more she waved him aside.
It's hard enough nowadays to keep body and skirt together.
'But, Brownie, you'll want to be getting your own things ready. Remember, you're off to Germany on Monday.'
I had not told Lady Georgina of his vain attempt to take possession of her jewel-case; and the bare fact of my silence made him increasingly suspicious of me.
'What have I got to get ready?' I asked.
'Yes, they were delightful days in Vienna,' she said, simpering; 'I was young then, Count; I enjoyed life with a zest.'
'Oh, Brownie, you might starve!'
You don't understand the language.
My parents chose to inflict upon me the most odious label that human ingenuity ever devised for a Christian soul; and I've not had courage enough to burst out and change it.'
I saw my chance.
I couldn't teach' (teaching, like mauve, is the refuge of the incompetent); 'and I don't, if possible, want to sell bonnets.'
He was a charming man; you read his masterly paper on the Central Problem of the Dual Empire?'
I accept the chance as a cheap opportunity of attaining Schlangenbad.'
Did the baggages pretend they considered themselves ladies?
It had taken us twenty minutes to arrange our protocols.
It was a very rough passage.
The yellow-faced old lady put up her long-handled tortoise-shell eyeglasses and inspected me all over again.
On the day when I found myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the world.
Hurry up, Lois; hurry up! the train is just starting!'
You speak Greek, of course; but how about German?'
'It is as I said,' he exclaimed, flinging open the door.
No, no; I am going out, simply in search of adventure.
It ought to be made penal to send innocent girls into the world so burdened.'
Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and plenty of high spirits.
Thanks, Count; will you kindly take charge of my umbrellas?
'Put on my hat and walk out,' I answered.
Don't forget the sandwich-tin!
He bowed and smiled.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CANTANKEROUS OLD LADY
"I can't say.
At the foot of this stair she stopped.
Durham smiled inwardly as he read this document.
"We have come about the will."
"You go up with Mr. Durham, aunt."
Durham, for the sake of keeping up the deception, had to shake hands, although he loathed himself for doing so.
I daresay he will disappear.
He had always suspected that Julius was in some way connected with the crime, although he had not thought him personally guilty.
I am not a vindictive man.
This poor foresworn wretch upstairs will die."
"What will you do then?"
Of course, if the real Bernard were dead this will might stand.
"I hope he has left Alice something."
"You are sure, then, that Bernard committed the crime?"
Julius, however, in a most benevolent way spoke to the boy--"I hope you are giving your good mistress satisfaction?"
I wish Julius Beryl to commit himself beyond recall."
"Miss Plantagenet, will you please call up your maid to witness it?"
"Yes," he said at length, throwing down his pen and taking up a position on the hearth-rug.
But the letter prepared the minds of both ladies for the execution of the will.
"I am not your legal adviser," said Durham, quickly.
"And yourself?"
"Well," she added sharply, "are we to go upstairs and witness this will?"
Yes," added she, nodding, "there will be a repetition of the crime.
It was difficult to know why Beryl should pay a visit to an avowed enemy.
"No.
He would have liked to examine him then and there touching his luring of Bernard to Crimea Square, but the present moment was not propitious, so he passed on.
"Yes, you would be," said Miss Berengaria ironically, and she might have been rash enough to say more, but that Durham intervened.
"Oh yes, sir.
It was exactly the kind of will Julius wanted. Michael was simply his instrument, and Durham shrewdly suspected that from some knowledge of the forged check Beryl had obtained this extraordinary influence.
The young man lying in bed was very weak.
"Beryl will now murder this poor reptile, and take all the money to himself."
"So poor Bernard is going to make his will," she said briskly.
Michael raised himself on his elbow.
"Dr. Payne assures me he cannot live.
"I daresay you are," said the old dame, "to see Bernard hanged."
Mind you"--Julius wagged his finger again--"I really believe he killed Sir Simon, but as he is dying, why, I shall do nothing.
"I wish him to die in peace."
But you, Miss Plantagenet, and----"
"We kept the matter from them as long as possible; and with Alice I waited on Bernard myself.
It was a very pretty comedy, but Durham was not to be taken in.
He looked haggard and anxious, and started up when the door opened.
"No," said Durham, returning to his seat.
However, Durham kept his temper under, and pretended to believe that Julius was speaking in all good faith.
The rest of the estate, real and personal, went to Julius Beryl.
I am the executor."
"Mark," he said, using the name Bernard usually called the lawyer by, "don't you think I am looking better?"
He wondered if Julius really believed the man at the Bower to be Bernard Gore, or if he was trying to learn what he--Durham--thought himself.
In it Durham told the whole of Beryl's scheme to get possession of the property.
Michael's face assumed an expression of terror.
But Julius soon explained the reason for his call.
"Then Mrs. Gilroy," said Durham, pretending ignorance.
"I hope none of the servants know that Bernard is here?"
"If Gore wishes to make a will, I suppose I am the man to draw it up.
Julius shook his head.
He thought it would be best to give the man rope enough to hang himself.
A clue came with the next words.
The Winchester regiment was moved far to the north, where its officers hopefully believed that the first attack would be made.
The Winchester regiment went into camp in a pleasant grove at the northern end of the Union line.
Dick asked permission for his two comrades and himself to go down near the river and obtained it.
In fact his horse, after pulling the reins from his hands and fleeing from the Confederate fire, had been retaken by a member of his own regiment and returned to him.
But Dick said nothing to anybody of his duel with Harry Kenton.
Nothing can ever pay us back for the losing of it!"
Wonderful! wonderful! You'll soon have a great head on you, Frank."
Dick was mounted again.
"First rate.
"Why, colonel!" he exclaimed, "we can beat them anyhow!"
It was Shepard again, dustier than ever, his face pale from weariness.
They had dry grass, warm air and the open sky.
It was childish of me to talk as I did.
"Your mathematical power grows every day, Frank.
The storm was of uncommon fury.
"That's surely true, sir."
It was impossible to judge of pace under such circumstances.
Colonel Winchester recognized the voice, but the light was so dim that he did not recognize him from whom it came.
He had never seen one fiercer, and knowing that he had little to dread from the Southerners while it raged he knew also that he must make his way on foot, and as best he could, to his own people.
Despite himself Dick shrank again.
The whole troop set up a shout as Dick came forward, taking off his dripping cap.
Just behind came three youths, and Dick's heart fairly leaped when he saw the last of the three.
Dick looked at them attentively.
"It's so, sergeant," said Colonel Winchester.
Stuart shook his plumed head until his long golden hair flew about his neck.
Colonel Winchester suppressed a groan.
CHAPTER IV.
The river swished high against its banks and once or twice, when he caught dim glimpses of it through the trees, he saw a yellow torrent bearing much brushwood upon its bosom.
He wondered why the rain and wind did not die down.
But they must be few who dare to ride in such a storm."
The army might be ten miles further on or it might be only two.
The storm and time allied were now fighting for Pope.
It would be hard to tell blue and gray apart on such a night."
Then he shot into a creek, swollen by the flood, and went over his head.
His belt had broken in his struggles, and pistols, small sword and ammunition were gone.
"No," said Warner, who alone heard him, "but we're scared half to death.
"So it is," said Sergeant Whitley, keener of eye than the others.
Looking forth from the bushes he saw another line of horsemen, but now they were going in the direction of Pope's army.
News, where a Northern force could not have obtained a word, was poured out for the South.
They were wrapped in cloaks, but cloaks and uniforms alike were sodden.
He could not mistake the figure, and a turning of the head caused him to catch a faint glimpse of the face.
We've seen enough anyway and we'd better get back as fast as we can."
His way lay in another direction. What they wished he did not wish, and while they fought for the triumph of the South it was his business to endure and struggle on that he might do his own little part for the Union.
He came up, gasping, struck out and reached the further shore.
Listen to that thunder again, won't you!"
"All the clouds that we saw a little further back," he said, "have gathered together, an' the storm is about to bust.
When a drought breaks up I wish it wouldn't break up with such a terrible fuss.
Deep and sullen thunder began to mutter on the southwestern horizon.
Dick heard Warner on his right, and he followed the sound of his voice.
Not many men can be abroad at such a time.
But nothing could stop the boy.
"One could make such a mistake, but in this case it was not possible. I saw my own cousin, Harry Kenton, riding with them.
I recognized them perfectly."
The cottages were prepared for the higher officers, but the men stacked arms in the open ground all about.
He was compelled to stop a while and take refuge behind a big oak.
The close, dense heat was swept away, and the first blasts of the rain were as cold as ice.
The first bolt had struck a tree which had fallen within thirty feet of them, but the second left this bit of the woods unscathed.
Your horse must have broken loose in the storm. But here, you look as if you were nearly dead!
He grasped at weeds and bushes, but they slipped through his hands.
But what a night!
He stood a while behind the trunk of a great tree, trying to shelter himself a little from the rain, and listened.
"Might they not have been our own men?
He divined at once that his comrades, wholly unaware of his fall, when no one could either see or hear it, had gone on without missing him. They might also mount their horses and gallop away wholly ignorant that he was not among them.
Dick recognized these figures.
"Then that settles it.
"Are any of you hurt?"
He had very little idea of his progress.
A mile or two further and in the swish of the storm he heard hoofbeats again.
Jump up behind me!"
Dick made an effort, but his strength failed and he slipped back to the ground.
Earlier in the day Stuart, full of enterprise, and almost insensible to fatigue, had crossed the Rappahannock much higher up and at the head of a formidable body of his horsemen, unseen by scouts and spies, was riding around the Union right.
Shapeless as he might appear on his horse that was Colonel Winchester, and there were the broad shoulders of Sergeant Whitley and the figures of the others.
All were gone, including his own mount, and he had no doubt that the horse had broken or slipped the bridle in the darkness and followed the others.
There was no calling of voices and no beat of footsteps.
Dick was so sodden and cold and wretched that he was tempted to call out to them--the sight of Harry was like a light in the darkness--but the temptation was gone in an instant.
It was like Jackson and Stuart to drop from the clouds this way and to tell them, although the land had been occupied by the enemy, that their brave soldiers would come in time.
It's lucky we found you."
Then he laughed at the idea.
The rain did not abate.
Although he was a little dazed, Dick had a good idea of direction and he plunged through the mud which was now growing deep toward the little ravine in which they had hitched their horses.
"'What's the matter, Mr. Muskrat?' she asked.
That seems funny to me.
"He's asleep," said Johnny, looking dreadfully disappointed, "and I guess we'd better not disturb him, for he might wake up cross, and of course we wouldn't get a story if he did."
Some could swim as long as they could keep their heads above water, but as soon as they put their heads under water they were likely to drown.
Peter Rabbit suddenly brightened up.
Then he would crawl under the piece of bark and get it on his back.
"'I believe,' said Mr. Fisher, talking out loud to himself, 'that I'll have a look around the Smiling Pool and see if I can catch that slow-moving Turtle who lives there.
"But presently Mr. Turtle discovered that the big people were eating the little people whenever they could catch them, and that he wasn't safe a minute when on shore, and not always safe in the water," continued Grandfather Frog.
Spotty was still there when Peter returned a long time after, and he didn't look as if he had moved.
Peter stared very hard.
You see, it seemed to Peter as if Grandfather Frog had read his very thoughts.
At first he was annoyed and started to shake it off.
"He had two or three very narrow escapes, and these set him to thinking.
You've kept me waiting a long time, Peter Rabbit.
Now Peter knew that there must be a good story about Spotty and his house, and you know Peter dearly loves a good story.
Then he began to laugh, for it came to him that what Spotty had said was true.
Thereafter, when he wanted to go on land, he would first make sure that no one was watching.
"Of course Mr. Turtle heard just what he said, and he blessed the piece of bark which had hidden him from Mr. Fisher's sight.
"Of course I know you live in the Smiling Pool, but where is your house?
At last he reached the Smiling Pool and slipped into the water, leaving the piece of bark on the bank.
"I mean, where is your house?" returned Peter.
"'By doing as you always have done, attending wholly to your own affairs,' replied Old Mother Nature.
"I wonder how it happens that he does it," thought he.
A sudden thought struck Peter.
With that Spotty disappeared.
So at the very first opportunity the next day, he hurried over to the Smiling Pool to ask Grandfather Frog about it.
All he has got to do is to go inside his house and stay there until the danger is past!
"I--I didn't know you were waiting.
Then she touched the skin of his stomach and turned that into hard shell.
"Never mind how I knew.
He was very quiet and bashful, was Mr. Turtle, and he never meddled with any one's business, because he believed that the best way of keeping out of trouble was to attend strictly to his own affairs.
I never thought of that before. Why, that is the handiest thing I ever heard of."
I believe he'll make me a good dinner.'
As usual, Grandfather Frog was sitting on his big green lily-pad.
I don't like to be kept waiting.
"That's a great idea!
No sooner did Peter pop his head above the edge of the bank of the Smiling Pool than Grandfather Frog exclaimed:
He looked at the piece of bark under which Mr. Turtle was hiding, but all he saw was the bark, because, you know, Mr. Turtle had drawn himself wholly under.
The great-great-ever-so-great grandfather of Spotty the Turtle lived then, and unlike Spotty, whom you know, he had no house.
For a long time he lay very still.
"'Oh, Mother Nature, how can I ever thank you?' he cried.
He had sat that way for the longest time without once moving.
Truly I didn't," stammered Peter. "If I had, I would have been here long ago.
That is to say, his head and legs and tail disappeared.
The piece of bark was uncomfortable and scratched his back, 'I wish,' said he, talking to himself, for he didn't know that any one else was near, 'I wish that I had a house of my own that I could carry on my back all the time and be perfectly safe when I was inside of it.'
He hadn't said a word to any one about Spotty, so how could Grandfather Frog know what he had come for?
'Now draw in your head and your legs and your tail,' said she.
One day she came up behind him just as he sat down to rest.
And of course you know that that reason is because of something that happened a long time ago, way back in the days when the world was young.
If you please, how did you know that I was coming and what I was coming for?"
He doesn't have to run away at all!
He didn't need any other house than just that hard, spotted shell, inside of which he was now so cosily tucked away.
Is it in the bank or down under water?"
"No wonder he is so slow.
Peter wondered if he meant him, for you know Peter is a great gossip. But he didn't say anything, because he didn't know just what to say, and in a minute Grandfather Frog began the story Peter so much wanted.
"Mr. Turtle did as he was told to do, and there he was in the very best and safest kind of a house, perfectly hidden from all his enemies!
Wherever he went he carried the piece of bark so as to have it handy to hide under.
"Of course it is," replied Spotty, putting nothing but his head out, "You will always find me at home whenever you call, Peter, and that is more than you can say of most other people."
There was a twinkle in his eyes, though Peter didn't see it.
If he had had, he would have been saved a great deal of trouble and worry. For a long time everybody lived at peace with everybody else.
"Now all this time Old Mother Nature had been watching Mr. Turtle, and it pleased her to see that he was smart enough to think of such a clever way of fooling his enemies.
So he learned to swim with only his head out of water, and sometimes with only the end of his nose out of water.
WHY SPOTTY THE TURTLE CARRIES HIS HOUSE WITH HIM
I know a great deal that I don't tell, which is more than some folks can say," replied Grandfather Frog.
"I always take it with me wherever I go; I find it much the handiest way."
All the way to his own home in the dear Old Briar-patch, Peter thought about Spotty and how queer it was that he should carry his house around with him.
Then came the trying time, of which you already know, when those who lived on the Green Meadows and in the Green Forest had the very hardest kind of work to find enough to eat, and were hungry most of the time.
The only thing he could do was to keep out of sight as much as possible.
He had nothing to worry about on that score.
Almost everything to-day is the result of things that happened in those long-ago days.
Peter Rabbit had seen him when he went by on his way to the Laughing Brook and the Green Forest to look for some one to pass the time of day with.
"It is just wherever I happen to be.
If you wanted to know about Spotty the Turtle, why didn't you come earlier?" All the time there was a twinkle in the big, goggly eyes of Grandfather Frog.
Spotty slowly turned his head and looked up at Peter.
Still, when he is in a hurry to get away from an enemy, it must be very awkward to have to carry his house on his back.
"Hi, Spotty!" he shouted.
"'You shall have,' said Old Mother Nature, and reaching out, she touched his back and turned the skin into hard shell.
It was Mr. Fisher, and he was very hungry and fierce.
XV
His house was with him, and now he had simply retired inside.
Where else should I live?" he replied.
Just now it is right here," said Spotty.
Everybody who lives in the Smiling Pool knows that it is the best place in the world, anyway."
When he did go on, he took the greatest care not to shake off that piece of bark, for he didn't know but that any minute he might want to hide under it again.
For a long time he had had a great deal of respect for Grandfather Frog, who, as you know, is very old and very wise, but now Peter felt almost afraid of him.
So she began to study how she could help Mr. Turtle.
That's a great idea!" shouted Peter.
Now Mr. Turtle, living in the Smiling Pool, had plenty to eat.
Grandfather Frog winked at Jerry Muskrat, who was listening, and Jerry nodded his head.
Peter was so surprised that he couldn't find his tongue.
He was too slow and awkward to run or to fight.
No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; golden sunlight; heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells.
Whoop! Hallo here!'
Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I'll give you half-a-crown!'
He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the tank.
'Do you know the poulterer's in the next street but one, at the corner?' Scrooge inquired.
The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and, walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile.
'I haven't missed it.
It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.
'Mr. Scrooge?'
He knows me,' said Scrooge, with his hand already on the dining-room lock.
He was on his stool in a jiffy, driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.
'He shan't know who sends it.
'Yes, I think you are.
'It's hanging there now,' replied the boy.
A merry Christmas to you, sir!'
As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.
He had never dreamed that any walk--that anything--could give him so much happiness.
His hat was off before he opened the door; his comforter too.
'Is it?' said Scrooge.
I have come to dinner.
Oh, he was early there!
And it was clear he meant to do it.
Hallo! Whoop!
'EH?' returned the boy with all his might of wonder.
Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
I'll show you upstairs, if you please.'
And he did it; yes, he did!
'I scarcely ever looked at it before.
And therefore,' he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the tank again--'and therefore I am about to raise your salary!'
He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing there, perfectly winded.
A merry Christmas to everybody!
There's the window where I saw the wandering Spirits!
Clash, clash, hammer; ding, dong, bell!
'Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,' said Scrooge. 'You must have a cab.'
Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised for this!
In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew's house.
Allow me to ask your pardon.
He turned it gently, and sidled his face in round the door.
He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world.
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
'Thankee.
'Yes,' said Scrooge. 'That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you.
'Fred!' said Scrooge.
He dressed himself 'all in his best,' and at last got out into the streets.
He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows said, 'Good-morning, sir!
A great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.
If he could only be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late!
Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head.
It's a wonderful knocker!--Here's the turkey.
Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clash, clash!
'No, no,' said Scrooge. 'I am in earnest.
The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one; but write it he did, somehow, and went downstairs to open the street-door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man.
He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.
'There's the door by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered!
They can do anything they like. Of course they can.
'Why, bless my soul!' cried Fred, 'who's that?'
I'm quite a baby.
I hope you succeeded yesterday.
His own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.
'An intelligent boy!' said Scrooge.
A merry Christmas to you!' And Scrooge said often afterwards that, of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.
What an honest expression it has in its face!
Whoop!
'A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year!
'Nice girl! Very.'
'I don't know what day of the month it is,' said Scrooge. 'I don't know how long I have been among the Spirits.
He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.
Will you do me that favour?'
Step this way, sir, if you please.'
Of course they can.
He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half as fast.
'I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer.
'The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.
He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.
Go and buy it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it. Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling.
Make up the fires and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!'
A quarter past.
'Walk-ER!' exclaimed the boy.
'Where is he, my love?' said Scrooge.
'I should hope I did,' replied the lad.
Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!'
Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don't dance while you are at it.
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call.
'If you please,' said Scrooge.
'I'll go in here, my dear.'
'My dear sir,' said the other, shaking hands with him, 'I don't know what to say to such munifi----'
The Spirits have done it all in one night.
'They are not torn down,' cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms, 'They are not torn down, rings and all.
I thank you fifty times.
'It's only once a year, sir,' pleaded Bob, appearing from the tank.
Afterwards he got worse, and became quite my shadow.
He has his vanities as well as Miss Thorpe, and the chief difference is, that, having a stronger head, they have not yet injured himself.
You know I have a pretty good spirit of my own.
I hope you spend your time pleasantly, but am afraid you never think of me.
I see that she has had designs on Captain Tilney, which have not succeeded; but I do not understand what Captain Tilney has been about all this time.
When she had finished it--"So much for Isabella," she cried, "and for all our intimacy!
"But we must first suppose Isabella to have had a heart to lose--consequently to have been a very different creature; and, in that case, she would have met with very different treatment."
CHAPTER 27
I believe if I could see you I should not mind the rest, for you are dearer to me than anybody can conceive.
I knew their spite: at one time they could not be civil to me, but now they are all friendship; but I am not such a fool as to be taken in by them.
"Write to James on her behalf!
She was ashamed of Isabella, and ashamed of having ever loved her.
Your kind offices will set all right: he is the only man I ever did or could love, and I trust you will convince him of it. The spring fashions are partly down; and the hats the most frightful you can imagine.
Bath, April
Since you went away, I have had no pleasure in it--the dust is beyond anything; and everybody one cares for is gone.
"Well, then, I must say that I do not like him at all.
She must think me an idiot, or she could not have written so; but perhaps this has served to make her character better known to me than mine is to her.
Thank God, we leave this vile place tomorrow.
She is a vain coquette, and her tricks have not answered.
Frederick could not be unpardonably guilty, while Henry made himself so agreeable.
Lose no time, my dearest, sweetest Catherine, in writing to him and to me, Who ever am, etc.
He went into the pump-room afterwards; but I would not have followed him for all the world.
I would write to him myself, but have mislaid his direction; and, as I hinted above, am afraid he took something in my conduct amiss.
Why should he pay her such attentions as to make her quarrel with my brother, and then fly off himself?"
Such a contrast between him and your brother!
"It is very right that you should stand by your brother."
The last two days he was always by the side of Charlotte Davis: I pitied his taste, but took no notice of him.
I rejoice to say that the young man whom, of all others, I particularly abhor, has left Bath.
Though it has turned out so well for us, I do not like him at all.
"There is but one thing that I cannot understand.
Henry bowed his assent.
"It will soon be as if you never had," said Henry.
Pray write to me soon, and direct to my own home.
But your mind is warped by an innate principle of general integrity, and therefore not accessible to the cool reasonings of family partiality, or a desire of revenge."
We happened to sit by the Mitchells, and they pretended to be quite surprised to see me out.
Many girls might have been taken in, for never were such attentions; but I knew the fickle sex too well.
The last time we met was in Bath Street, and I turned directly into a shop that he might not speak to me; I would not even look at him.
I really am quite ashamed of my idleness; but in this horrid place one can find time for nothing.
The next morning brought the following very unexpected letter from Isabella:
Such a strain of shallow artifice could not impose even upon Catherine. Its inconsistencies, contradictions, and falsehood struck her from the very first.
He went away to his regiment two days ago, and I trust I shall never be plagued with him again.
Catherine was complimented out of further bitterness.
I have had my pen in my hand to begin a letter to you almost every day since you left Bath, but have always been prevented by some silly trifler or other.
"Then you do not suppose he ever really cared about her?"
"I am persuaded that he never did."
She resolved on not answering Isabella's letter, and tried to think no more of it.
On Henry's arrival from Woodston, she made known to him and Eleanor their brother's safety, congratulating them with sincerity on it, and reading aloud the most material passages of her letter with strong indignation.
He is the greatest coxcomb I ever saw, and amazingly disagreeable.
My dearest Catherine, I received your two kind letters with the greatest delight, and have a thousand apologies to make for not answering them sooner.
"And only made believe to do so for mischief's sake?"
I wear nothing but purple now: I know I look hideous in it, but no matter--it is your dear brother's favourite colour.
As it happens, there is no great harm done, because I do not think Isabella has any heart to lose.
If the effect of his behaviour does not justify him with you, we had better not seek after the cause."
I do not believe she had ever any regard either for James or for me, and I wish I had never known her."
No, James should never hear Isabella's name mentioned by her again."
I see what she has been about.
"I have very little to say for Frederick's motives, such as I believe them to have been.
But, suppose he had made her very much in love with him?"
Her professions of attachment were now as disgusting as her excuses were empty, and her demands impudent.
I will not say all that I could of the family you are with, because I would not be ungenerous, or set you against those you esteem; but it is very difficult to know whom to trust, and young men never know their minds two days together.
I feel one of my old 'thrills' at the mere thought."
"Friendship IS very beautiful," smiled Mrs. Allan, "but some day . . ."
They walked home together.
"I shall try.
I think it is desecration to call that friendship.
and both knew the way to that happy land.
That is what humiliates me."
But you could see rock people of your own.
Life would be a sorry business without them.
"How are your rock people coming on?
Grandmothers are better, next to mothers.
Paul's voice quivered and his lip trembled.
"Isn't it splendid to be that kind, teacher?"
"Father's not very easy to get acquainted with," Paul had said once.
"Nonsense, dear, he deserved it.
The knowledge of that land's geography . . .
It is better to possess it, living in a garret, than to be the inhabitant of palaces without it.
"I'm going there, too . . .
"Marilla's eyes will never be much better than they are now, although we are so thankful to think that they will not get worse.
"No, indeed, I wouldn't . . . that's just the way I feel.
"Yes. . . .
I expect she spoiled me.
Father understood pretty well, but still I couldn't talk much to him about mother, because it made him feel so bad.
She takes it right out as soon as she tucks me up because she says I mustn't be a coward. I'm NOT scared, but I'd RATHER have the light.
"Do you think you will ever get to college?"
"He may have deserved it, but that is not the point.
It's very exciting to have a birthday, isn't it?
There goes Gilbert Blythe on his wheel . . . home for his vacation too, I suppose.
He is really full of wickedness, I think."
"No; but I think she suspects.
XV
"I never got really acquainted with him until after my little mother died. But he's splendid when you do get to know him.
Nobody else understands so well . . . not even grandma, although she's so good to me.
You'd never think it to look at me, would you?
Then she paused abruptly.
Paul shook his head gravely.
"The Boolooroo's afraid of me."
"I'll be quiet," promised the boy.
"Oh, very well," replied Jimfred; "this is a queer freak for our Boolooroo to indulge in, but he is always doing something absurd.
"I've come for the shoes," said the boy.
"You're safer in the palace than anywhere else," said the Majordomo, "for there is no way you can escape from the island, and here the servants and soldiers dare not injure you for fear of the Boolooroo."
"Well, I'm going to try the experiment," declared the Boolooroo.
"They needn't worry 'bout that," replied Trot; "the Snubnoses hate me worse than the people do."
It was Jimfred Jinksjones, the double of the Fredjim Jonesjinks they had talked with in the servants' hall, and he bowed low before the Majordomo.
He placed the key in the lock and the bolt turned with a sharp click. Button-Bright did not hesitate.
"No; I must surely manage to get my umbrella first," said Button-Bright.
But their present position was a very serious one and even Cap'n Bill dared not advise Button-Bright to give up the desperate attempt.
The boy nodded.
"What are you doing here at this hour?" he demanded.
"Now follow me and I will take you to your rooms."
"Has anyone ever come out of that Arch alive?" he asked.
"No, your Majesty; I do not," was the reply.
Do you understand?"
There's a Blue Wolf in the Treasure Chamber!" exclaimed Trot.
He placed Trot and her six pets--which followed her wherever she went--in one room, and Cap'n Bill in another, and took Button-Bright away with him to show the boy the way to the King's bedchamber.
"I am to take your place," said Button-Bright.
Also his wife, the Queen, had made him angry by begging for gold to buy ribbons with.
"No; it won't be easy," Button-Bright admitted.
"All right," answered the guard.
The King looked at him with a sneer.
He passed the long-necked guard again, finding the man half asleep, and then made his way to the Treasure Chamber.
"Or a necktie mixer," added Cap'n Bill.
But the umbrella, in his hands, proved just as common as any other umbrella might.
The Majordomo found the Boolooroo in a bad temper.
"Yes; I know."
When they came to the King's apartments there was another guard before the door, this time a long-necked soldier with a terrible scowl.
Cap'n Bill won't have anything to do, for I've ordered Tiggle to mix the nectar."
But the sleepy guard before the King's apartments was cross and surly.
"Thank 'e, friend Sizzle," said Cap'n Bill.
I really hope they'll come out of the Great Blue Grotto alive!"
"You must be very careful not to anger the Boolooroo, or he may do you a mischief.
He did not approve the way the strangers were being treated and thought it was wicked and cruel to try to destroy them.
This threat frightened the long-necked guard, who did not know what orders the Boolooroo had given his Royal Bootblue.
What are you doing here?" he roared, as he saw Button-Bright.
"Do it quick, then," urged Trot, "for I can't stand those snubnoses much longer."
He opened it and closed it, and turned it this way and that, commanding it to do all sorts of things; but of course the Magic Umbrella would obey no one but a member of the family that rightfully owned it.
"Hi, there!
He was afraid, to be sure, and his heart was beating fast with the excitement of the moment, but he knew he must regain the Magic Umbrella if he would save his comrades and himself from destruction, for without it they could never return to the Earth.
"I'm returning his Majesty's shoes," said Button-Bright.
It will go hard with this little short-necked creature if he doesn't polish the shoes properly."
The boy had taken off his own shoes after he passed the guard and now he tiptoed carefully into the room, set down the royal shoes very gently and then crept to the chair where his Majesty's clothes were piled.
"You're the first person I ever knew that could scare our Boolooroo."
"You'll do more than that, or I'll have you patched!" roared the angry Boolooroo.
Make the Whiteskins tell you, so that I can use it for my own amusement."
While he polished the shoes he told his plans to Cap'n Bill and Trot, and asked them to be ready to fly with him as soon as he returned with the Magic Umbrella.
He had marked the place well, so he couldn't miss it when he wanted to find it again.
"Go back and wait till morning," commanded the guard.
During his absence the prisoners had been talking together very earnestly.
"Why can't I?"
"I'm sorry for him," muttered Jimfred.
"Yes," said Button-Bright.
"My people seem to dislike strangers," said the Majordomo, thoughtfully, "and that surprises me because you are the first strangers they have ever seen.
The Spider arrives hurriedly, snatches the giddy-pate and disjoints his shanks, which she empties of their contents, the best part of the insect.
But where?
On the other hand, under normal conditions, I have often come across nests without any mineral casing.
And yet, like the others, the builder of this slovenly edifice must have her own principles of beauty and accuracy.
She drinks, she sips, she sucks.
With a few threads and some small leaves joined together, the Crab Spider builds, above her lofty nest, a rudimentary watch-tower where she stays permanently, greatly emaciated, flattened into a sort of wrinkled shell through the emptying of her ovaries and the total absence of food.
The grains of sand are stuck together with a cement of silk; and the whole resists the pressure of the fingers.
If the aggressor persist and seek to raise the trap-door, the recluse pushes the bolt, that is to say, plants her claws into certain holes on the opposite side to the hinge, props herself against the wall and holds the door firmly.
Perhaps so.
Lastly come the less-visited expanses, which consequently have a thinner carpet.
Thus supplied with the wherewithal to breathe, she awaits the coming of the game and keeps herself cool meanwhile.
Now is the moment to inspect the webs.
When patiently entreated, the least of creatures adds its note to the harmonies of life.
No, I shall not be able to judge of the artist's capacity by these rags and tatters.
The sheet-net and the labyrinth that surmounts it are objects visible from afar, owing to their whiteness and the height whereat they are placed.
Locusts' legs often dangle, emptied of their succulent contents, on the edges of the web, from the meat-hooks of the butcher's shop.
It needs the eyes of faith to see in these ruins the equivalent of the edifices built inside my cages.
As it is, the prettily-latticed mouth of the crater makes us suspect this; the nest, the mother's usual masterpiece, will prove it to the full.
The threads are not sticky; they act only by their confused multitude.
It is a large pocket, of a splendid dead-white, isolated on every side by radiating pillars which keep it motionless in the centre of the tapestry.
The meal is taken outside the guard-room, on the threshold, never indoors.
The different webs which I inspect to study the food in the larder show me, among other joints, various Flies and small Butterflies and carcasses of almost-untouched Locusts, all deprived of their hind-legs, or at least of one.
To sum up, when working in the natural state, the Labyrinth Spider builds around the eggs, between two sheets of satin, a wall composed of a great deal of sand and a little silk.
She is grey, modestly adorned on the thorax with two black ribbons and on the abdomen with two stripes in which white specks alternate with brown.
So far, there is no departure from current usage.
I learn the secret at last.
To satisfy this lavish expenditure, she must incessantly, by means of feeding, fill her silk-glands as and when she empties them by spinning.
To stop the Ichneumon's probe and the teeth of the other ravagers, the best thing that occurred to her was this hoarding which combines the hardness of flint with the softness of muslin.
We have here nothing similar to the lime-threads used by the Garden Spiders.
One of these leaves, larger than the others, roofs it in and serves as a scaffolding for the whole of the ceiling.
The watching of the nest and the easy acquisition of provender would go hand in hand.
The Lycosa surrounds the mouth of her shaft with a simple parapet, a mere collection of tiny pebbles, sticks and silk; the others fix a movable door to theirs, a round shutter with a hinge, a groove and a set of bolts.
At length, when October ends, she clutches her offspring's nursery and dies withered.
Now this palace of silk, when all is said, is nothing more than a guard- house.
This is where I resort, as the isolation and kindliness of the supports lend themselves to proceedings which might not be tolerated by the unfriendly hedge.
By this method of investigation, far from the labyrinth-trap, I become the owner of as many nests as are needed to satisfy my curiosity.
This means of defence seems to be pretty frequent among Spiders.
There are other Ichneumon-flies, moreover, addicted to robbing Spiders' nests; a basket of fresh eggs is their offspring's regular food.
The expedition promises to be fruitful.
CHAPTER XV: THE LABYRINTH SPIDER
Were it not better, then, to lodge the eggs in the immediate neighbourhood of the present home and to continue her hunting with the excellent snare at her disposal?
When attacked from the front, the fugitive runs down and slips through the postern-gate at the bottom.
Give it our sustained attention and we shall discover in it merits which our former ignorance prevented us from seeing.
Throw a small Locust into the rigging.
This increasing abstemiousness, a sign of decrepitude, slackens and at last stops the work of the spinnerets.
After all, sand abounded: the pans in which the wire-gauze covers stood were full of it.
Harpies will not fail to come running at this signal, showing up against the green; guided by the position of the web, they will assuredly find the precious purse; and a strange grub, feasting on a hundred new-laid eggs, will ruin the establishment.
Place sand under her legs and the spinstress will knead concrete; refuse her that sand, or put it out of her reach, and the Spider will remain a simple silk-worker, always ready, however, to turn mason under favourable conditions.
We will now retrace our steps a little.
In the case of the Labyrinth Spider, the protection of the brood is complicated by another condition.
If we did not see the silky remnants of the two vestibules projecting and feel a certain resistance when separating the parts of the bundle, we might take the thing for a casual accumulation, the work of the rain and the wind.
They are clumsy bundles of dead leaves, roughly drawn together with silk threads. Under this rude covering is a pouch of fine texture containing the egg- casket, all in very bad condition, because of the inevitable tears incurred in its extrication from the brushwood.
I do not know these enemies, not having sufficient materials at my disposal for a register of the parasites; but, from indications gathered elsewhere, I suspect them.
She therefore requires a dwelling with a hunting-box close to the eggs watched over.
In this way, I fill my cages with subjects that have not been demoralized by contusions.
To disturb her would be barbarous.
For four or five weeks longer, the mother never ceases her leisurely inspection-rounds, happy at hearing the new-born Spiders swarming in the wallet.
Mornings are spent in fruitless searches.
The structure of the nest is not without a certain similarity to that of the home occupied during the hunting-season.
The points selected are, by preference, the low brambles dragging along the ground, keeping their dense verdure during the winter and crammed with dead leaves from the oaks hard by.
The insect, in its buildings, has its own architectural rules, rules as unchangeable as anatomical peculiarities.
In a couple of hours, I am the owner of some nests.
Here is one spreading its sheet over a large cluster of rock-roses; it is the size of a handkerchief.
And this mere shred, hardly more than a skin that persists in living without eating, stoutly defends her egg-sack, shows fight at the approach of any tramp.
At the bottom of the passage dipping into the brushwood, we might expect to find a secret cabin, a wadded cell where the Spider would take refuge in her hours of leisure.
The central portion is a cone-shaped gulf, a funnel whose neck, narrowing by degrees, dives perpendicularly into the leafy thicket to a depth of eight or nine inches.
Accurate in structure and neat in silk-work though they be, the nests of the caged captives do not tell us everything; we must go back to what happens in the fields, with their complicated conditions.
The same fears have inspired the same protective methods.
Each species, in this way, possesses a primary architectural model which is followed as a whole, in spite of altered conditions.
The concrete of our buildings is obtained by the simultaneous manipulation of gravel and mortar.
She has still a few long months to live and she needs nourishment.
The mother walks gravely to and fro under the arches of her cloisters, she stops first here, then there; she makes a lengthy auscultation of the egg-wallet; she listens to all that happens inside the satin wrapper.
They wrap their eggs in a mineral shell held together with silk.
The opportunity fled and has never returned.
Whoso will can take possession of the house.
No sooner do we tear this final covering than the frightened little ones run away and scatter with an agility that is singular at this cold and torpid season.
Accompanied as it is by the Thrushes' symphony, this alone is worth getting up for.
We might discover an interesting subject of research in the type adopted by each species when the work is accomplished without hindrances.
She always did like him, I thought, before that other fellow came down here among us."
"It will take years,--not months," said Mrs. Dale.
It was but the other day that one of them had been thrown rudely to the ground through the treachery of a lover, but yet none of them feared treachery from this lover.
"And she will lose all her youth."
But there are positions which cannot be reached, though there be no physical or material objection in the way.
There was no great occasion now, and no wonderment.
She has got on your old checked apron, and when he came in she was rolling up the fire-irons in brown paper.
It would be a healing of wounds most desirable and salutary; an arrangement advantageous to them all; a destiny for Lily most devoutly to be desired,--if only it were possible.
"I don't think it will make much difference," said Bell.
"Oh, my darling, forgive me," said the mother, suddenly remembering that the use of the old proverb at the present moment had been almost cruel.
"I wish she could.
I have been so tired of waiting and looking out for you.
I had better tell him the whole truth, and go or stay, as he may wish.
I did not mean to tell you; but it is as well that you should have the means of judging.
It sounds so ugly, being married from lodgings; doesn't it, mamma?"
"That would be hardly possible," said Mrs. Dale.
If the heart were always malleable and the feelings could be controlled, who would permit himself to be tormented by any of the reverses which affection meets?
What am I to do at Guestwick Manor?
"I do not know what I ought to say to you for your kindness."
Those who offend us are generally punished for the offence they give; but we so frequently miss the satisfaction of knowing that we are avenged!
Death would create no sorrow; ingratitude would lose its sting; and the betrayal of love would do no injury beyond that which it might entail upon worldly circumstances.
In the first month or two they were to live in lodgings, and their goods were to be stored in some friendly warehouse.
But they'll remain there for ever if we don't go in.
Then they had tea, and after tea Dr. Crofts got on his horse and rode back to Guestwick.
But Bell was not seated next to her lover.
Perhaps I had better tell you all.
On that day they dined early at the Small House, as they had been in the habit of doing since the packing had commenced.
I'm very fond of money earned.
Then I will decline it or not, according to what passes between me and him.
Perhaps he's helping her to pack the things. Don't you think we might go in; or would it be ill-natured?"
She had been in no wise ashamed of her love, and had shown it constantly by some little caressing motion of her hand, leaning on his arm, looking into his face, as though she were continually desirous of some palpable assurance of his presence.
There's one thing certain,--he can't kiss her hand."
"Lily, don't be in too great a hurry to say anything.
"James is joking," said Bell.
But that is just what we want her to do.
Mrs. Dale got up to leave him, but she could not go without saying some word of gratitude for all that he had attempted to do for them.
"I don't remember the austerity," said Mrs. Dale.
The older and more solid things,--articles of household stuff that stand the wear of half a century,--had been in the Small House when they came to it.
"That is very generous; and I am delighted to hear it,--for John's sake."
"Mrs. Dale," said the doctor, "Bell has consented that it shall be so, if you will consent."
But, with God's help, there shall be no slip here, and she shall be happy.
He is private secretary now to their head man. And, Mary, so that she, Lily, should not be empty-handed if this marriage can be arranged, I have undertaken to settle a hundred a year on her,--on her and her children, if she will accept him.
If, also, he could have perceived and understood the light in which an alliance with the De Courcy family was now regarded by Crosbie, I think that he would have received some consolation from that consideration.
"She will never get a better lover."
She explained also, that the business of moving was in hand, and that, therefore, she could not herself accept the invitation.
It is arranged, apparently, that the injurer shall be punished, but that the person injured shall not gratify his desire for vengeance.
She loves him yet as dearly as she ever loved him."
After that she left him, and returned home.
Then the squire muttered certain words below his breath,--ejaculations against Crosbie, which were hardly voluntary; but even as involuntary ejaculations were very improper.
"At any rate I will not think evil," Mrs. Dale answered, giving him her hand.
"She has always liked him--as a friend."
"Leave it with me," he said; "that is, if you do not object."
"I'll tell you the plain truth at once, Mary.
Mrs. Dale sat silent, thinking over it all.
I don't suppose she was ever in such a mess before.
"Oh, mamma, don't be a goose!
"It is not possible for her," said Mrs. Dale.
But they were all very happy, and were sure that there was safety in their happiness.
Under such circumstances would it not be well that Bell's marriage should be so arranged that the lodging question might not be in any degree complicated by her necessities?
"But he's in there certainly, unless he has gone out through the window, or up the chimney."
"Ah! then he will do well."
"What made you leave them?"
"I will take the note," said the squire, "and will let you know to-morrow.
He's been nearly an hour.
"I fear it is not possible.
I don't see the good of going.
"How do you do, doctor?" said Mrs. Dale, striving to use her accustomed voice, and to look as though there were nothing of special importance in his visit.
I don't think it quite manly even to think about it; and I'm sure it isn't womanly."
"But it's all settled now," said Lily, "and I'm downright happy.
We shall live alone together, you and I; but she will be so close to us!
"Mamma," said Bell, jumping up, "you must not call him doctor any more."
Lord De Guest has taken him by the hand, and wishes him to marry.
"Six months," pleaded the squire.
What might have been the state of her hands I will not pretend to say; but I do not believe that her lover had found anything amiss with them.
Mrs. Dale firmly believed that if her daughter could be made to accept John Eames as her second lover in a year or two all would be well. Crosbie would then be forgotten or thought of without regret, and Lily would become the mistress of a happy home.
But it is done, and we cannot now go back.
And wasn't it hard to bear that you should have scolded me with such pertinacious austerity, and that I wasn't to say a word in answer!"
"They do in America."
Then, without closing her letter, she took it up to the squire in order that it might be decided whether it would or would not suit his views.
The room is strewed about with crockery, and Bell is such a figure!
"He met me here, in the passage, and spoke to me ever so seriously. 'Come in,' I said, 'and see Bell packing the pokers and tongs.' 'I will go in,' he said, 'but don't come with me.' He was ever so serious, and I'm sure he had been thinking of it all the way along."
I shall go over myself with it, and see the earl.
Mrs. Dale heard them, and was not offended either by their impropriety or their warmth.
She felt half-ashamed of what she was doing, almost acknowledging to herself that she should have borne with his sternness in return for the benefits he had done to her daughters. Had she not feared their reproaches she would, even now, have given way.
"It's just the sort of thing for primitive people to do, like you and Bell.
So they talked about chairs and tables, carpets and kitchens, in a most unromantic, homely, useful manner! A considerable portion of the furniture in the house they were now about to leave belonged to the squire,--or to the house rather, as they were in the habit of saying.
It is the view which the mind takes of a thing which creates the sorrow that arises from it.
Why should she not spend a week in the same house with an honest young man whom we all like."
In that note she had told Lady Julia, with many protestations of gratitude, that Lily was unable to go out so soon after her illness, and that she herself was obliged to stay with Lily.
She well knew what he meant by the curing of difficulties. He had intended to signify that had they lived together for a week at Guestwick the idea of flitting from Allington might possibly have been abandoned.
Who has stolen my golden Key?" And then there followed shouts of soldiers and guards and servants and the rapid pattering of feet was heard throughout the palace.
"I don't know.
They were all astonished to hear the bird talk--and in poetry, too--but Cap'n Bill told Trot that some parrots he had known had possessed a pretty fair gift of language, and he added that this blue one seemed an unusually bright bird.
It was the voice of the Boolooroo, crying: "My Key--my Key!
"Quick!" cried the boy; "we must escape from here at once or we will be caught and patched."
"We must make for the open country and hide in the Fog Bank, or in the Arch of Phinis," replied the boy.
Rhymes come from your head, but real po'try from your heart, an' whether the blue parrot has a heart or not he's sure got a head."
Of course he could not find it, as it was not there.
"No more do I, mate," he answered.
I can't find it.
Come, let's get away at once!"
They'd tear us to pieces, if they could."
"Don't like that place, Cap'n," whispered Trot.
"Where are you, Trot? As like as not I've been forgot!"
The Blueskins fell back, horrified at the mad act of the strangers.
"I think I'd rather take a chance on the Fog Bank," said Button-Bright.
"Gee!
The terrible teeth came together and buried themselves in the pillow, and then Mr. Wolf found he could not pull them out again--because his mouth was stuffed full.
"That's the end of those short-necked Yellowskins," said one, shaking his head.
"Don't--don't!
"Follow me," said the frog.
"If you don't mind, we'd like to pass on," said Button-Bright.
When at last they came up to him he made a second jump--out of sight, as before--and when they attempted to follow they found a huge lizard lying across the path.
"Ding-dong!" cried the parrot;
"Oh; beg parding, I'm sure!" exclaimed Cap'n Bill backing away.
Did you ever taste a parsnip?"
"Why not?" returned Cap'n Bill.
He turned around, made a mighty leap and disappeared in the gray mist.
"Had we better go to the other side?" asked Button-Bright, anxiously.
It's only about six jumps."
"Can't you dry up?" asked Cap'n Bill.
The frog chuckled and leaped again.
Cap'n Bill thought it must be a giant alligator, at first, it was so big; but he looked at them sleepily and did not seem at all dangerous.
But I hope to grow, in time.
"We don't know that, sir," said the boy.
"Right you are, mate," he replied, and although he shook a bit with fear, the old man at once began to climb to the frog's back.
"Probably not," said the crab.
THROUGH THE FOG BANK
Then off it went again, its tremendous leap carrying it far into the fog.
"It isn't that," said Trot.
"Oh, I'm glad to hear that!" cried Button-Bright.
cried the parrot.
Soon they had left the creature far behind.
"Then climb over me--or go around--I don't care which," murmured the lizard.
"I'm just a common frog; and a little wee tiny frog, too.
I'm sort o' drippy myself."
"When it's a case of life 'n' death, clo's don't count for much.
"All aboard! let 'er go! Jump the best jump that you know."
"How can we jog To a frog in a fog?"
It was rather moist in the Fog Bank.
Suddenly Cap'n Bill tripped and would have fallen flat had not Trot and Button-Bright held him up.
"Floods and gushes fill our path-- This is not my day for a bath! Shut it off, or fear my wrath."
"Brooks and creeks, How it leaks!"
"We're in a hurry, if it's the same to you, sir," said Cap'n Bill, politely.
"We can't say till we get there, mate," answered the sailor in a cheerful voice.
"Look out!" cried the parrot, sharply; and they all halted to find a monstrous frog obstructing their path.
They're rheumatic, it's so moist here."
Drop them by the large spoonful into hot lard, and fry them till a very light brown color.
Wash and strain the berries, which should be perfectly ripe.
When lukewarm, put in the beaten whites of a couple of eggs, and put it on the fire.
Put your sugar into the preserving kettle, turn in the quantity of cold water that you think will be sufficient to cover the fruit that is to be preserved in it.
The bag should not be squeezed while the syrup is passing through it, or it will not be clear.
Procure nice, high vine blackberries, that are perfectly ripe--the low vine blackberries will not answer for syrup, as they do not possess the medicinal properties of the high vine blackberries.
Make a batter of a quart of milk, a quart of flour, eight eggs--grate in the rind of two lemons, and the juice and apples.
Boil the whole together twenty minutes, then strain it through a flannel bag.
As soon as it boils, take it from the fire, and skim it till clear--then put it on the fire, and let it boil till it becomes a thick syrup--strain it for use.
When cool, bottle, cork, and seal it tight, and keep it in a cool place.
This, mixed with cold water, in the proportion of a wine glass of syrup to two-thirds of a tumbler of water, is an excellent remedy for the dysentery, and similar complaints.
Bottle, cork, and seal it tight.
Beat the whites of eggs to a froth, allowing one white of an egg to three pounds of sugar--mix the whites of the eggs with the sugar and water, set it on a slow fire, and let the sugar dissolve, then stir the whole up well together, and set it where it will boil.
Pare tart, mellow apples--take out the cores with a small knife, and fill the holes with sugar.
300.
Squeeze out the juice of fresh oranges, and strain it.
Serve them up with liquid pudding sauce.
Boil the whole together fifteen minutes--strain it, and when cool, add to each pint of syrup a wine glass of French brandy. Bottle, cork, and seal it--keep it in a cool place.
Make good pie crust--roll it out about two-thirds of an inch thick, cut it into pieces just large enough to enclose one apple.
This is an excellent remedy for a tight cough.
Drop the batter by the spoonful into hot lard, taking care to have a slice of apple in each fritter.
Stir a quart of milk gradually into a quart of flour--put in a tea-spoonful of salt, and seven beaten eggs.
They are the lightest fried in a great deal of fat, but less greasy if fried in just fat enough to keep them from sticking to the frying pan.
As soon as it boils up well, take it from the fire, let it remain for a minute, then take off the scum--set it back on the fire, and let it boil a minute, then take it off, and skim it again.
To a pint of the juice, put a pound and a half of sugar--set it on a moderate fire--when the sugar has dissolved, put in the peel of the oranges, and set the syrup where it will boil slowly for six or eight minutes--then strain it, till clear, through a flannel bag.
To a pint of juice, put a pint of molasses.
Pare thin the rind of fresh lemons, squeeze out the juice, and to a pint of it, when strained, put a pound and three-quarters of sugar, and the rind of the lemons.
Mix eight pounds of light sugar-house or New-Orleans molasses, eight pounds of water, one pound of powdered charcoal.
Lay the apples on them, and close the crust tight over them--tie them up in small pieces of thick cloth, that has been well floured--put the dumplings in a pot of boiling water, and boil them an hour without any intermission--if allowed to stop boiling, they will be heavy.
It is also a very pleasant summer beverage.
This operation repeat till the syrup is clear--put in the fruit when the syrup is cold.
Serve them up with pudding sauce, or butter and sugar.
In that book, when a man wanted to follow Jesus, he followed; Jesus accepted him; and that was all there was to it, with Kate.
I'm going to church as often as I can after this, and I'm going to help with the work of running it."
"Air to breathe and food to sustain are presupposed.
She would join in whatever effort the church was making to hold and increase its membership among the young people, and to raise funds to keep up the organization.
You'll just put it through, as you do things out here.
"Been to the cemetery?" he asked.
"Why didn't you tell me you wanted to go, and let me get out the car?"
I'm hungry for a baby all of my own."
Kate studied the picture.
You may have that many," she said.
"Maybe that would be better," he said.
They had come to deep grooves in loose gravel, then the cut in the embankment, then they could see the wrecked car standing on the engine and lying against a big tree, near the water, while two men and a woman were carrying a limp form across the meadow toward the house.
"Uncle Robert always has been a church member.
So they welcomed her, and praised the beauty and sweetness of the baby until Kate went out into the sunshine, her face glowing.
"Of course, Mother," said Adam.
CHAPTER XXVI
Man LEARNS to fight in self-defense, and to acquire what he covets.
We see material evidence in increase that man is not defeated in his desire to reproduce himself; we have advanced to something better than tom-toms and pow-wows for music and dance; these desires are fulfilled before us, now tell me why the very strongest of all, the most deeply rooted, the belief in after life, should come to nothing.
That I know."
Kate sat staring down the road.
It never occurred to Kate that she had done an unprecedented thing.
Kate knelt up and taking her flowers, she moved them lower, and silently helped Robert place those he had brought.
She stood looking down a long time; finally she picked up a fine specimen of each of the roses and slowly dropped them on her father's grave.
Kate gathered her sister's feet in her arms and hid her face beside them. The neighbours silently began taking away things that had been used, while Mrs. Howe chose her whitest sheet, and laid it on a chair near Robert.
Two days later they laid Nancy Ellen beside her mother.
Good-bye!"
She sat on the porch a few minutes talking to Little Poll, then she went inside to answer the phone.
Robert said nothing.
Kate nodded and dropped into a chair.
I only thought I'd like to have been with you and Little Poll."
I saw her body stand erect, long enough for me to reach her, and pick her up, after its passing.
You bore those things like a stoic.
"And what IS the soul, and HOW can it bridge the vortex lying between us and other worlds, that man never can, because of the lack of air to breathe, and support him?"
"Too much!" said Kate.
"I didn't think of Milly.
Rush him!"
"I don't know," said Robert; "and in spite of the fact that I do know what a man CANNOT do, I still believe in the immortality of the soul."
I had Robert telegraph them to hold her until we could get there.
As their car stopped, Kate kissed the baby mechanically, handed her to Adam, and ran into the house where she dragged a couch to the middle of the first room she entered, found a pillow, and brought a bucket of water and a towel from the kitchen.
"Why didn't you let me go with you?"
I need exercise to keep me in condition.
Kate arose with the benediction, picked up the baby, and started down the aisle among the people she had known all her life.
She merely went on with life, as she always had lived it, to the best of her ability when she was so numbed with grief she scarcely knew what she was doing.
She was shocked speechless.
She would be friendlier, and have more patience with the neighbours.
I don't know what it is that I am to do, but I suppose they will give me my work soon."
Kate called Dr. Gray's office.
This belief is as much a PART of any man, ever born in any location, as his hands and his feet. Whether he believes his soul enters a cat and works back to man again after long transmigration, or goes to a Happy Hunting Ground as our Indians, makes no difference with the fact that he enters this world with belief in after life of some kind.
Every Sabbath, and often during the week, her feet carried her to the cemetery, where she sat in the deep grass and looked at those three long mounds and tried to understand life; deeper still, to fathom death.
Usually it's sickness, and sorrow, and losing their friends that bring people to the consolations of the church.
She had done as her heart dictated. She did not know that she put the minister into a most uncomfortable position, when he followed her request to baptize her and the child. She had never thought of probations, and examinations, and catechisms. She had read the Bible, as was the custom, every morning before her school.
The thing that holds me, and fascinates me, and that I have such a time being sure of, is 'where.'"
"I just saw a car that looked like hers slip in the fresh sand at the river levee, and it went down, and two or three times over."
I can't imagine a Bates joining church."
Kate slipped her arm around Nancy Ellen as they walked to the gate.
"I shouldn't think of questioning it, Kate," said Robert.
"There!
Had the old woman come the day before it is likely enough that Mr. Tebrick would have sent her packing.
On this, Mr. Tebrick, who had let the old woman have most of her management to see what she could make of her, took her back under his own control.
But now that she had failed she bore her mistress a grudge for not being won over, or at the best was become indifferent to the business, so that she might very readily blab.
It is a shame to let her run about like a dog.
But whatever she looks like, you should trust her the same as ever.
He talked the thing over with Mrs. Cork, and they decided upon it out of hand.
He could trust her with the secret."
Then he recognised the intruder, it was his wife's old nurse.
Indeed I could never have got to the bottom of this history if I had believed one tenth part of what I was told, there was so much of it that was either manifestly false and absurd, or else contradictory to the ascertained facts.
So I've come back to look after her, as I have done all her life, sir," and she stooped down and took Mrs. Tebrick by the paw.
Then she ran hither and thither a stark naked vixen, and without giving a glance to her poor husband who stood silently now upon the bank, with despair and terror settled in his mind.
But by good luck they walked above four miles across country and saw nobody.
To be sure there was little Polly, Mrs. Cork's granddaughter, but either Mr. Tebrick forgot her altogether, or else reckoned her as a mere baby and not to be thought of as a danger.
Since he had sent away his servants and the gardener, giving out a story of having received bad news and his wife going away to London where he would join her, their probably going out of England and so on, he knew well enough that there would be a great deal of talk in the neighbourhood.
For the same reason, that is because he would stick to his side of the bargain, he did not require her to sit up at table, but gave her her breakfast on a dish in the corner, where to tell the truth she on her side ate it all up with great daintiness and propriety.
We know her husband was always trying to bring her back to be a woman, or at any rate to get her to act like one, may she not have been hoping to get him to be like a beast himself or to act like one?
Mr. Tebrick drove with the hamper beside him on the front seat, and spoke to her gently very often.
At first he tried coaxing her and wheedling, gave her cards to play patience and so on, but finding nothing would distract her from going out, his temper began to rise, and he told her plainly that she must wait his pleasure and that he had as much natural obstinacy as she had. But to all that he said she paid no heed whatever but only scratched the harder.
It is a shame, and your own wife too.
And as he had now stayed on, contrary to what he had said, there would be further rumour.
Presently she turned on herself and began tearing off her clothes, and at last by biting got off her little jacket and taking it in her mouth stuffed it into a hole in the ice where he could not get it.
But though at first she submitted passively, Mrs. Tebrick only waited for her Nanny's back to be turned to tear up her pretty piece of handiwork into shreds, and then ran gaily about waving her brush with only a few ribands still hanging from her neck.
All the way his wife kept running on ahead of him, and then back to him to lick his hand and so on, and appeared delighted at taking exercise.
Then he opened the basket and let his wife out.
And it is possible, too, that there may have been another cause as well, and that is jealousy.
Then he got up and dressed but continued very melancholy for the whole of the morning.
Nor did it mean imparting his secret to others, for there was only Mrs. Cork's son, a widower, who being out at work all day would be easily outwitted, the more so as he was stone deaf and of a slow and saturnine disposition.
Directly he had finished speaking she came to him joyously, began fawning on him and prancing round him so that in spite of his vexation with her, and being cold, he could not help stroking her.
Mrs. Cork answered him in these words:
They couldn't live like that, a gentleman must have somebody to look after him.
He built a big fire when he came back to the house and took a glass or two of spirits also, to warm himself up, for he was chilled to the very bone.
It was thirty miles away from Stokoe, which in the country means as far as Timbuctoo does to us in London.
He took down his precious hamper, unharnessed his two horses, covered them with rugs and gave them their corn.
After lunch he took her out, and she never so much as offered to go near the ducks, but running before him led him on to take her a longer walk.
He got up to catch her then and finding himself unsteady on his legs, he went down on to all fours.
She made no pretence now of enjoying the first snowdrops or the view from the terrace.
So not to take any chances he drew up at the side of the road and rested there, though it was freezing hard and a north-east wind howling.
When Mrs. Cork saw the house she exclaimed again and again: "The place was a pigstye.
Being in this mood you may imagine it hurt him to see his wife running about naked, but he reflected it would be a bad reformation that began with breaking faith.
Hearing this story of myself diverted me at the time, but I fully believe it has served me in good stead since.
They drove on again and then the snow began to come down and that in earnest, so that he began to be afraid they would never cover the ground.
This he consented to do very much to her joy and delight.
The first morning Mrs. Cork made her a new jacket, cutting down the sleeves of a blue silk one of Mrs. Tebrick's and trimming it with swan's down, and directly she had altered it, put it on her mistress, and fetching a mirror would have her admire the fit of it.
If we consider that she had been brought up strictly by her when she was a child, and was now again in her power, and that her old nurse could never be satisfied with her now whatever she did, but would always think her wicked to be a fox at all, there seems good reason for her dislike.
I couldn't sleep thinking of her.
Mr. Tebrick took this to mean that she was glad at making this journey and rejoiced equally with her.
At last he reflected how she had just stripped herself and how in the morning she struggled against being dressed, and he thought perhaps he was too strict with her and if he let her have her own way they could manage to be happy somehow together even if she did eat off the floor.
"Silvia, come now, be good, you shan't wear any more clothes if you don't want to, and you needn't sit at table neither, I promise.
For it set me on my guard as perhaps nothing else would have done, against accepting for true all floating rumour and village gossip, so that now I am by second nature a true sceptic and scarcely believe anything unless the evidence for it is conclusive.
So he called out to her then:
Thus with Mr. Tebrick, for as he had been beastly, merry and a very dare-devil the night before, so on his awakening was he ashamed, melancholic and a true penitent before his Creator.
Luckily they were all swimming when she got there (for a stream running into the pond on the far side it was not frozen there).
Indeed at one time nothing but holding her by the scruff prevented her from getting away from him, but at last he achieved his object and she was washed, brushed, scented and dressed, although to be sure this left him better pleased than her, for she regarded her silk jacket with disfavour.
You shall do as you like in that, but you must give up one thing, and that is you must stay with me and not go out alone, for that is dangerous.
It is therefore only the bare bones of the story which you will find written here, for I have rejected all the flowery embroideries which would be entertaining reading enough, I daresay, for some, but if there be any doubt of the truth of a thing it is poor sort of entertainment to read about in my opinion.
If we think that she had had a success of this kind only the night before, when he got drunk, can we not conclude that this was indeed the case, and then we have another good reason why the poor lady should hate to see her old nurse?
If any dog came on you he would kill you."
As for Mrs. Cork, she sat motionless on the back seat of the dogcart well wrapped up, eating her sandwiches, but would not speak a word.
No--there was only one thing for her now--the ducks, and she was off to them before he could stop her.
I saw her, sir, before I left, and I've had no peace of mind.
His vixen was tired by then, as well as he, and they slept together, he in the bed and she under it, very contentedly.
Mr. Tebrick unlocked the door and they went in.
She was quite beside herself with joy, running hither and thither, bouncing up on him, looking about her and even rolling over on the ground.
For the moment all Mr. Tebrick could do was to keep her from going into Stokoe to the village, where she would meet all her old cronies and where there were certain to be any number of inquiries about what was going on at Rylands and so on.
It is certain that whatever hopes Mr. Tebrick had of Mrs. Cork affecting his wife for the better were disappointed.
He took her through the fields by the most unfrequented ways, being much alarmed lest they should be seen by anyone.
She let him stay there most of the afternoon till he was chilled through and through and worn out with watching her.
In the afternoon he took her out for her airing in the garden.
But just after nightfall they got in, and he was content to leave unharnessing the horses and baiting them to Simon, Mrs. Cork's son.
But we may conclude that Mrs. Tebrick was as sorry to see her old Nanny as her husband was glad.
Such, however, is not the case.
To-day this edition is only valuable on account of its comparative rarity.
PREFACE.
"A gentleman and a nobleman could not have done such crimes."
"Yes, colonel."
"Those thousand francs, colonel--"
"Precisely.
But the fire was hot, and the captain's eyes were heavy.
I will open it!
The Count of Chateau Noir is a hard man, even at the best time he was a hard man. But of late he has been terrible.
The walls were so thick that each room was cut off from its neighbour.
"Why detain me, colonel?
It was a difficult house to search.
"You know the place?"
Captain Baumgarten rasped out a German oath.
My son was also face to face with death, and he prayed, also.
They have already been provided for.
"Three and a kilometre, colonel."
"You lie!" cried the colonel, angrily.
Colonel von Gramm rang the bell.
His arms were folded across his arching chest, and his mouth was set in a fixed smile.
He heaped every outrage upon my lad, because the spirit of the Chateau Noirs would not stoop to turn away his wrath by a feigned submission.
Ah! what then?"
Gold might be more successful.
Will you not venture upon a second and more savoury supper?"
"Pray do not trouble yourself to look for your weapons," he said, as the Prussian cast a swift glance at the empty chair in which they had been laid.
In the Eastern provinces, and before that in Bohemia, he had learned the art of quartering himself upon the enemy.
But, unluckily, the prisoners were moved next day across the Rhine into Ettlingen. They were not equally fortunate there.
Captain Baumgarten was an old campaigner.
I have much to talk to you about."
"Drink!" said he.
The German writhed and struggled.
"A guide has been provided.
The colonel bent his stiff back and ran his forefinger over the map which lay upon the table.
It is likely enough that about daybreak our bird may return to the nest."
It was shaped like an L, with a low arched door in front, and lines of small windows like the open ports of a man-of-war.
The three peasants seized the other end, and looked to the count for his orders.
Come round and open the door, or we will show you no mercy when we come in."
It was a cold December night when Captain Baumgarten marched out of Les Andelys with his twenty Poseners, and took the main road to the north west.
"It is evident to me that you do not know the count.
Some were to watch the east, and some the west.
I want to tell you all that he told me.
Let a guard go about with him, sergeant, and let him feel the end of a bayonet if he plays us any tricks."
There was no response.
Come!
"You say that you know who did these crimes?" asked the Prussian colonel, eyeing with loathing the blue-bloused, rat-faced creature before him.
You may kill me, but you cannot make me tell you that which I do not know."
He commanded in the little Norman town of Les Andelys, and his outposts stretched amid the hamlets and farmhouses of the district round.
That swarming cavalry, those countless footmen, the masterful guns--they had tried and tried to make head against them.
Two miles out he turned suddenly down a narrow, deeply rutted track, and made swiftly for his man.
"I will take my supper up here in the dining-hall.
At the top they halted and reconnoitred.
The man's answers were only too likely to be true.
The sergeant thrust his needle-gun through the glass, and the man sprang to his feet with a shriek.
"You must know, then, that my boy was in the artillery--a fine young fellow, Captain Baumgarten, and the pride of his mother.
Up above, in an attic, they found Marie, the elderly wife of the butler; but the owner kept no other servants, and of his own presence there was no trace.
The unfortunate soldier was dragged from his chair to where a noosed rope had been flung over one of the huge oaken rafters which spanned the room.
"Very good, captain.
It was brought by a brother officer who was at his side throughout, and who escaped while my lad died.
Black and bitter were the thoughts of Frenchmen when they saw this weal of dishonour slashed across the fair face of their country.
While the butler brought his supper he occupied himself in making his preparations for a comfortable night.
Eustace was taken upon the 5th to a village called Lauterburg, where he met with kindness from the German officer in command. This good colonel had the hungry lad to supper, offered him the best he had, opened a bottle of good wine, as I have tried to do for you, and gave him a cigar from his own case.
It is this way, colonel.
"You will proceed to Chateau Noir to-night, captain," said he.
"And yourself, captain?"
The count blew a double call upon his whistle, and three hard-faced peasants entered the room.
The prisoners were broken up into parties, and sent back into Germany by different routes.
I am grateful from my heart for this kindness shown to my boy.
Thin stairs, which only one man could ascend at a time, connected lines of tortuous corridors.
His cheeks were wrinkled like a last year's apple, but his sweep of shoulder, and bony, corded hands, told of a strength which was unsapped by age.
The house is surrounded, and you cannot escape.
"It is true, sir.
"Eustace was taken at Weissenburg on the 4th of August.
In battalions their invaders were not to be beaten, but man to man, or ten to ten, they were their equals.
"Doing what?"
A large force will attract attention.
It was his son's death, you know. His son was under Douay, and he was taken, and then in escaping from Germany he met his death.
What I tell you is the truth, and I am not afraid that you should test it.
"Frequently."
Well, then, you will allow me to tell you a story while you drink your wine.
"These must represent my Uhlans," said he.
Brave as he was, there was something in this man's manner which made his skin creep with apprehension.
By the way, you look a little comical yourself at the present moment, captain, and your colonel would certainly say that you had been getting into mischief.
You will call me if there is any alarm. What can you give me for supper--you?"
"I am in your power, you monster!" he cried; "I can endure your brutalities, but not your hypocrisy."
The peasants were incorruptible.
Into your hands, Captain Baumgarten, I return these ten gold pieces, since I cannot learn the name of the lender.
He is out, sir."
A single light gleamed in one of the lower windows.
There, beside the table, and almost within arm's length of him, was standing a huge man, silent, motionless, with no sign of life save his fierce-glinting eyes.
The officer who guarded them was a ruffian and a villain, Captain Baumgarten.
Thus, unchronicled amid the battles and the sieges, there broke out another war, a war of individuals, with foul murder upon the one side and brutal reprisal on the other.
The peasant shrugged his shoulders.
Your life for a lie!"
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
Lady Russell, indeed, had scarcely any influence with Elizabeth, and seemed to love her, rather because she would love her, than because Elizabeth deserved it.
And with regard to Anne's dislike of Bath, she considered it as a prejudice and mistake arising, first, from the circumstance of her having been three years at school there, after her mother's death; and secondly, from her happening to be not in perfectly good spirits the only winter which she had afterwards spent there with herself.
It was a much safer place for a gentleman in his predicament: he might there be important at comparatively little expense.
She consulted, and in a degree was influenced by her in marking out the scheme of retrenchment which was at last submitted to Sir Walter.
Sir Walter had at first thought more of London; but Mr Shepherd felt that he could not be trusted in London, and had been skilful enough to dissuade him from it, and make Bath preferred.
A larger society would improve them.
They must retrench; that did not admit of a doubt.
She considered it as an act of indispensable duty to clear away the claims of creditors with all the expedition which the most comprehensive retrenchments could secure, and saw no dignity in anything short of it.
We must be serious and decided; for after all, the person who has contracted debts must pay them; and though a great deal is due to the feelings of the gentleman, and the head of a house, like your father, there is still more due to the character of an honest man."
But she was very anxious to have it done with the least possible pain to him and Elizabeth.
It would be too much to expect Sir Walter to descend into a small house in his own neighbourhood.
"Since the idea had been started in the very quarter which ought to dictate, he had no scruple," he said, "in confessing his judgement to be entirely on that side.
To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman!
A small house in their own neighbourhood, where they might still have Lady Russell's society, still be near Mary, and still have the pleasure of sometimes seeing the lawns and groves of Kellynch, was the object of her ambition.
This, however, was a profound secret, not to be breathed beyond their own circle.
In any other place Sir Walter might judge for himself; and would be looked up to, as regulating the modes of life in whatever way he might choose to model his household."
She wanted her to be more known.
She wanted more vigorous measures, a more complete reformation, a quicker release from debt, a much higher tone of indifference for everything but justice and equity.
All Anne's wishes had been for the latter.
Mr Shepherd had once mentioned the word "advertise," but never dared approach it again.
She was a benevolent, charitable, good woman, and capable of strong attachments, most correct in her conduct, strict in her notions of decorum, and with manners that were held a standard of good-breeding.
Lady Russell's had no success at all: could not be put up with, were not to be borne.
Her spirits were not high.
Chapter 2
There had been three alternatives, London, Bath, or another house in the country.
Kellynch Hall was to be let.
Her knowledge of her father and Elizabeth inclined her to think that the sacrifice of one pair of horses would be hardly less painful than of both, and so on, through the whole list of Lady Russell's too gentle reductions.
What will he be doing, in fact, but what very many of our first families have done, or ought to do?
She drew up plans of economy, she made exact calculations, and she did what nobody else thought of doing: she consulted Anne, who never seemed considered by the others as having any interest in the question.
No, he would sooner quit Kellynch Hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms."
Lady Russell was fond of Bath, in short, and disposed to think it must suit them all; and as to her young friend's health, by passing all the warm months with her at Kellynch Lodge, every danger would be avoided; and it was in fact, a change which must do both health and spirits good.
He was not only to quit his home, but to see it in the hands of others; a trial of fortitude, which stronger heads than Sir Walter's have found too much.
It did not appear to him that Sir Walter could materially alter his style of living in a house which had such a character of hospitality and ancient dignity to support.
"If we can persuade your father to all this," said Lady Russell, looking over her paper, "much may be done.
Sir Walter would quit Kellynch Hall; and after a very few days more of doubt and indecision, the great question of whither he should go was settled, and the first outline of this important change made out.
Elizabeth had been lately forming an intimacy, which she wished to see interrupted. It was with the daughter of Mr Shepherd, who had returned, after an unprosperous marriage, to her father's house, with the additional burden of two children.
How Anne's more rigid requisitions might have been taken is of little consequence.
She had never received from her more than outward attention, nothing beyond the observances of complaisance; had never succeeded in any point which she wanted to carry, against previous inclination.
"What! every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table--contractions and restrictions every where!
Herself the widow of only a knight, she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due; and Sir Walter, independent of his claims as an old acquaintance, an attentive neighbour, an obliging landlord, the husband of her very dear friend, the father of Anne and her sisters, was, as being Sir Walter, in her apprehension, entitled to a great deal of compassion and consideration under his present difficulties.
The undesirableness of any other house in the same neighbourhood for Sir Walter was certainly much strengthened by one part, and a very material part of the scheme, which had been happily engrafted on the beginning.
This was the principle on which Anne wanted her father to be proceeding, his friends to be urging him.
"Quit Kellynch Hall." The hint was immediately taken up by Mr Shepherd, whose interest was involved in the reality of Sir Walter's retrenching, and who was perfectly persuaded that nothing would be done without a change of abode.
She disliked Bath, and did not think it agreed with her; and Bath was to be her home.
Lady Russell was most anxiously zealous on the subject, and gave it much serious consideration.
She wanted it to be prescribed, and felt as a duty.
CHAPTER III
The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself.
Such another small basin of thin gruel as his own was all that he could, with thorough self-approbation, recommend; though he might constrain himself, while the ladies were comfortably clearing the nicer things, to say:
And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will.
She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness.
The friends from whom she had just parted, though very good sort of people, must be doing her harm.
Somebody had placed her, several years back, at Mrs. Goddard's school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour-boarder.
After these came a second set; among the most come-at-able of whom were Mrs. and Miss Bates, and Mrs. Goddard, three ladies almost always at the service of an invitation from Hartfield, and who were fetched and carried home so often, that Mr. Woodhouse thought it no hardship for either James or the horses.
I do not think it could disagree with you."
As she sat one morning, looking forward to exactly such a close of the present day, a note was brought from Mrs. Goddard, requesting, in most respectful terms, to be allowed to bring Miss Smith with her; a most welcome request: for Miss Smith was a girl of seventeen, whom Emma knew very well by sight, and had long felt an interest in, on account of her beauty.
Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody.
"Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs.
Emma allowed her father to talk--but supplied her visitors in a much more satisfactory style, and on the present evening had particular pleasure in sending them away happy.
Fortunately for him, Highbury, including Randalls in the same parish, and Donwell Abbey in the parish adjoining, the seat of Mr. Knightley, comprehended many such.
It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couple now walked after her to church.
This was all that was generally known of her history. She had no visible friends but what had been acquired at Highbury, and was now just returned from a long visit in the country to some young ladies who had been at school there with her.
She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quicksighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing.
She was a very pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired.
Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body.
Upon such occasions poor Mr. Woodhouses feelings were in sad warfare. He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth, but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see any thing put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visitors to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.
Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible.
Those soft blue eyes, and all those natural graces, should not be wasted on the inferior society of Highbury and its connexions.
She lived with her single daughter in a very small way, and was considered with all the regard and respect which a harmless old lady, under such untoward circumstances, can excite.
I do not advise the custard.
She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited Mr. Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.
He had not much intercourse with any families beyond that circle; his horror of late hours, and large dinner-parties, made him unfit for any acquaintance but such as would visit him on his own terms.
The acquaintance she had already formed were unworthy of her.
It was her own universal good-will and contented temper which worked such wonders.
A very gracious invitation was returned, and the evening no longer dreaded by the fair mistress of the mansion.
Real, long-standing regard brought the Westons and Mr. Knightley; and by Mr. Elton, a young man living alone without liking it, the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of Mr. Woodhouse's drawing-room, and the smiles of his lovely daughter, was in no danger of being thrown away.
Her daughter enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married. Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect.
The happiness of Miss Smith was quite equal to her intentions.
She was a plain, motherly kind of woman, who had worked hard in her youth, and now thought herself entitled to the occasional holiday of a tea-visit; and having formerly owed much to Mr. Woodhouse's kindness, felt his particular claim on her to leave her neat parlour, hung round with fancy-work, whenever she could, and win or lose a few sixpences by his fireside.
Mrs. Goddard's school was in high repute--and very deservedly; for Highbury was reckoned a particularly healthy spot: she had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own hands.
She was delighted to see her father look comfortable, and very much pleased with herself for contriving things so well; but the quiet prosings of three such women made her feel that every evening so spent was indeed one of the long evenings she had fearfully anticipated.
Mrs. Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille.
Not unfrequently, through Emma's persuasion, he had some of the chosen and the best to dine with him: but evening parties were what he preferred; and, unless he fancied himself at any time unequal to company, there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card-table for him.
She was short, plump, and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness, and, before the end of the evening, Emma was as much pleased with her manners as her person, and quite determined to continue the acquaintance.
I don't know what you will think of me.
Helplessly, and with a little quaver in her voice, she repeated obstinately:
The tears were running down her cheeks, and she had no free hand to dry them.
Then with the tea-tray still held straight before her, the little dressmaker exclaimed tearfully:
I--I--I'm SO ashamed!
He felt his awkwardness leaving him.
I--I--you have--have made me very happy."
It was five o'clock, the time when she was accustomed to make her cup of tea and "keep company" with him on her side of the partition.
He had never loved before, and there was still a part of him that was only twenty years of age.
He had sold his happiness for money; he had bartered all his tardy romance for some miserable banknotes.
He had not foreseen that it would be like this.
It was large enough, to be sure, but when all was over, he returned to his room and sat there sad and unoccupied, looking at the pattern in the carpet and counting the heads of the tacks in the zinc guard that was fastened to the wall behind his little stove.
"Stop," exclaimed the old Englishman, rising to his feet.
It seemed to him as if the beating of his heart was choking him.
I used to pass the whole evening that way."
Oh, yes," she exclaimed, with a little gasp, "Oh, yes, I often did."
I thought you looked tired when I last saw you, and a cup of tea, you know, it--that--that does you so much good when you're tired.
Her cheeks became scarlet; her funny little false curls trembled with her agitation.
What was that on the back of his hand?
"Don't go, don't go.
"Now--now--now I will go back," she exclaimed, hurriedly.
"Stop," cried Old Grannis, finding his voice at last.
"I was making some tea, and I thought you would like to have a cup."
"No, no," exclaimed Miss Baker, ready to sob.
"But it's rather cold, and I've spilled it--almost all of it."
Didn't you sit close to the partition?"
It seemed to her the most natural thing in the world to make a steaming cup of tea and carry it in to Old Grannis next door.
A vast regret welled up within him.
"I'll drink it from the saucer." Old Grannis had drawn up his armchair for her.
"I was making some tea, and I thought you would like to have a cup of tea." Her agitation betrayed itself in the repetition of the word.
It had come at last.
One moment she had been sitting quietly on her side of the partition, stirring her cup of tea with one of her Gorham spoons.
But he made a dash and did it.
Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started!
Merry Christmas!'
I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob!
THE END OF IT
Glorious!
'Not a farthing less.
Hallo!'
They were looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see that everything is right.
'What's to-day, my fine fellow?' said Scrooge.
It was very kind of you.
'Don't say anything, please,' retorted Scrooge. 'Come and see me.
How are you!
'A merry Christmas, Bob!' said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back.
'He's in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress.
'You are!' repeated Scrooge.
Bless you!'
'Thankee,' said Scrooge. 'I am much obliged to you.
'What a delightful boy!' said Scrooge. 'It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!'
'Go and buy it.'
'My dear sir,' said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands, 'how do you do?
'I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's,' whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh.
He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure.
I don't care.
He passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and knock.
It's twice the size of Tiny Tim.
No Bob.
He was at home in five minutes.
'It shall not be repeated.
Hallo!
That was the thing he had set his heart upon.
I don't know anything.
Do you know whether they've sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there?--Not the little prize turkey: the big one?'
I know they will!'
But he was early at the office next morning.
'Hallo!' returned the boy.
Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done it on any account.
His hands were busy with his garments all this time: turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.
'Now, I'll tell you what, my friend,' said Scrooge.
It's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
'I will!' cried the old gentleman.
'I shall love it as long as I live!' cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand.
But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total-Abstinence Principle ever afterwards; and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.
The boy was off like a shot.
'I don't know what to do!' cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath, and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. 'I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy, I am as giddy as a drunken man.
Yes! and the bedpost was his own.
Oh, glorious, glorious!
'A remarkable boy!
Never mind.
O Jacob Marley!
A happy New Year to all the world!
'It's Christmas Day!' said Scrooge to himself.
He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard.
'There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!' cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
May that be truly said of us, and all of us!
Will you come and see me?'
The clock struck nine.
But she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only said, in a low voice, "I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near us, do not speak, do not move!"
"Your papers, travellers!" "See here then, Monsieur the Officer," said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart, "these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head.
His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on the questioner when they had sought the ground.
"What did you say?"
If you will lock the door to secure us from interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back, as quiet as you leave him.
She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a child.
Thank God for us, thank God!"
Take it, monsieur."
Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench beside him.
"I am not a shoemaker by trade?
I suppose so.
There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:
Look at me.
Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse.
Is he fit for the journey?" asked Mr. Lorry.
After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice replied, "Yes--I am working." This time, a pair of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.
They tried speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for the time to tamper with him no more.
He had taken it up, and was stooping to work again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress.
The two spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a motion of her hand.
You remember coming up here?"
When was it!
"She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned out--she had a fear of my going, though I had none--and when I was brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve.
By degrees, in the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:
He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe.
Good gentlemen, thank God!
"I hope you care to be recalled to life?"
"Who are you?"
Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door.
"Have you recognised him, monsieur?" asked Defarge in a whisper.
The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.
It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago.
But I cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here.
"Adieu!" from Defarge.
So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.
The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that angle for the time.
He raised them, and saw her face.
It was so very long ago."
"What did you say?"
Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.
He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his hands the whole time.
She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on which he sat.
What did you say?"
There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the figure that could have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped over his labour.
"And the maker's name?" said Defarge.
You see how composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me now.
"One Hundred and Five, North Tower."
As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr. Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him.
That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his prison to that house, was apparent to them.
She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife, though they had.
Hush!
No, no.
It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument in his hand, for his shoemaker's knife.
"Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?"
After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it.
But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if she had repeated it.
"What is this?"
She was--and He was--before the slow years of the North Tower--ages ago.
"I said, couldn't you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur's information?"
Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the lamp he carried, on the shoemaker's bench (there was nothing else in the garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and assisted him to his feet.
He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy, worn out.
"But, consider.
Advancing his hand by little and little, he took it up and looked at it.
"If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I have come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it!
"Remember?
His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy.
The dream work is peculiarly adept at representing two contradictory conceptions by means of the same mixed image.
There is evidence of a third factor, which deserves careful consideration.
I will not pursue the further result of the thought.
It seemed to me that this view had something in it, because the unfortunate youth afterwards mutilated his genital organs.
In the latter case they appear obscure, intricate, incoherent.
Small wonder, says the dream thought, if this person is grateful to me for this--this love is not cost-free.
Its mode of action thus consists in so cooerdinating the parts of the dream that these coalesce to a coherent whole, to a dream composition.
If we keep closely to the definition that dream work denotes the transference of dream thoughts to dream content, we are compelled to say that the dream work is not creative; it develops no fancies of its own, it judges nothing, decides nothing.
As this explanation is in entire disagreement with the view that the dream owes its origin to dissociated, uncritical cerebral activity, I will emphasize my view by an example:
The first dream thoughts which are unravelled by analysis frequently strike one by their unusual wording.
He complains very bitterly of this at a dinner-party, but his respect for Goethe has not diminished through this personal experience.
First of all came the little episode from the time of my courting, of which I have already spoken; the pressure of a hand under the table gave rise in the dream to the "under the table," which I had subsequently to find a place for in my recollection.
A trait, after the manner of the find in the Lido, forces itself upon me here.
When there is nothing in common between the dream thoughts, the dream work takes the trouble to create a something, in order to make a common presentation feasible in the dream.
The first person in the dream-thoughts behind the ego was my friend who had been so scandalously treated.
The derogatory reception of my friend's work had made a deep impression upon me.
The motives for this part of the dream work are easily gauged.
3.
Her husband tells her, Elise L---- and her fiance had intended coming, but could only get some cheap seats, three for one florin fifty kreuzers, and these they would not take.
The dream work proceeds like Francis Galton with his family photographs.
It is, perhaps, not superfluous to support these assertions by examples:
Whence came the one florin fifty kreuzers?
In my judgment, it contained a fundamental biological discovery which only now, several years later, commences to find favor among the professors.
Goethe died in 1832.
The different elements are put one on top of the other; what is common to the composite picture stands out clearly, the opposing details cancel each other.
The causal connection between two ideas is either left without presentation, or replaced by two different long portions of dreams one after the other.
When the dream appears openly absurd, when it contains an obvious paradox in its content, it is so of purpose.
For instance, I once dreamt about a kind of swimming-bath where the bathers suddenly separated in all directions; at one place on the edge a person stood bending towards one of the bathers as if to drag him out.
He examined it from top to bottom, though scarcely able to distinguish its outlines in the surrounding darkness.
Exhausted by suffering and hunger, trembling with pain, he pressed onward.
Yet "his blindness was as dense as his hide," and he had refused to abjure his faith.
He inhaled the delicious air; the breeze revived him, his lungs expanded!
With these words, having signed to his companions to unchain the prisoner, the prior tenderly embraced him.
Perhaps Infinite Mercy will shine upon you at the last moment!
He could doubt no longer.
This prisoner was no other than Rabbi Aser Abarbanel, a Jew of Arragon, who--accused of usury and pitiless scorn for the poor--had been daily subjected to torture for more than a year.
The suspense which the rabbi had endured seemed to have suspended the functions of life, and he lay nearly an hour unable to move.
Horror!
The door had opened into the gardens, above which arched a starlit sky, into spring, liberty, life!
He pressed himself into a niche and, half lifeless with terror, waited.
He advanced slowly, dragging himself along on his breast, forcing back the cry of pain when some raw wound sent a keen pang through his whole body.
A miracle had happened.
Yonder lay freedom!
But when they came to make the experiment, they were disappointed of their hope; for the miners could make but small progress, and that with difficulty also; insomuch that their provisions, though they distributed them by measure, began to fail them.
Now, so far as had been digged of old, they went onward along it without disturbance; but where they met with solid earth, they dug a mine under ground, and this in hopes that they should be able to proceed so far as to rise from under ground in a safe place, and by that means escape.
And now Simon, thinking he might be able to astonish and elude the Romans, put on a white frock, and buttoned upon him a purple cloak, and appeared out of the ground in the place where the temple had formerly been.
You dress better than I."
Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders lying about everywhere.
Still, I don't deny I'm afeared some things didn't go well with He and his." Creedle nodded in a direction which signified where the Melburys lived.
The timber-merchant turned indignantly to Mrs. Melbury.
"Do you know, Robert," he said, "that she's been accustomed to servants and everything superfine these many years?
Ancient days, when there was battles and famines and hang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday.
I didn't know you had such glasses in the house.
Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, "Tell her fortune, indeed!
"I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there!"
"What can a man of that sort find to interest him in Hintock?
How, then, could she stand our ways?"
After supper there was a dance, the bandsmen from Great Hintock having arrived some time before.
But 'tis well to think the day IS done, when 'tis done."
"Do you think it went off well, Creedle?" he asked.
"Well, yes.
Not but what that snail might as well have come upon anybody else's plate as hers."
"Only a sprinkle on my face.
"What snail?"
"Oh no.
"She may go, oh! She may go, oh! She may go to the d---- for me!"
As for her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph-like creatures in muslin, in the music-room of a large house, most of whom were now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regarded place and character.
'Tis astonishing how little we see of him."
"Well, yes--but--" replied Giles.
"The doctor is not abed yet," said Mrs. Melbury.
"Oh yes, yes; pretty much.
Grace had been away from home so long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the movement.
The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his were not enjoying themselves.
At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family being the earliest to leave, the two card-players still pursuing their game doggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles's mahogany table with chalk scratches.
You can't teach her anything new.
Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite liked to see Grace present.
A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with the abandoned cards.
She must bear these little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his face something which said "I ought to have foreseen this."
"He wasn't alive, I suppose?" said Giles, with a shudder on Grace's account.
It was nothing."
"For us old folk it didn't matter; but for Grace--Giles should have known better!"
"'Tis how I do it when they baint here, maister," mildly expostulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.
The three walked home, the distance being short and the night clear.
She's been too far among the wise ones to be astonished at anything she can hear among us folks in Hintock."
Her fortune has been told by men of science--what do you call 'em?
Not that I should call'n maister by rights, for his father growed up side by side with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been our nourishing."
Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just cleared out, the subject of their discourse was walking from room to room surveying the general displacement of furniture with no ecstatic feeling; rather the reverse, indeed.
When they were opposite an opening through which, by day, the doctor's house could be seen, they observed a light in one of his rooms, although it was now about two o'clock.
Every now and then the comparatively few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the back of the room:
At this moment the two exclusive, chalk-mark men, having at last really finished their play, could be heard coming along in the rear, vociferously singing a song to march-time, and keeping vigorous step to the same in far-reaching strides--
"Well, Robert, you must be tired.
There, he's calling for more plates.
Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink, and put her handkerchief to her face.
Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman told her tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she declared.
At last he entered the bakehouse, and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the embers, also lost in contemplation.
And the drink did; that I steadfastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels.
"But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have been!"
Not but that Giles has worked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection to-day. 'Giles,' says I, though he's maister.
I can't get such coats.
CHAPTER X.
Miss Melbury blushed.
"Kiss it and make it well," gallantly observed Mr. Bawtree.
"It is natural enough," he replied.
He had done it, in dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty.
I seed the world at that time somewhat, certainly, and many ways of strange dashing life.
"Oh no," she said.
"Good heavens! what did you do that for, Creedle?" said Giles, sternly, and jumping up.
"One would think that, as he seems to have nothing to do about here by day, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night.
"The victuals did; that I know.
A splash followed.
I don't expect he'll stay here long."
"Hard study, no doubt," said her husband.
I don't care who the man is, snails and caterpillars always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing way."
"I s'pose the time when you learned all these knowing things, Mr. Creedle, was when you was in the militia?"
"Well, Giles is a very good fellow," said Mr. Melbury, as they struck down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in which the stars seemed set.
He could not get over the initial failures in his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere glimmers drowned in their own grease.
The timber-merchant said, quickly, "Oh, it is nothing!
What handsome glasses those are!
Then Giles felt that all was over.
"Oh yes--'tis all over!" murmured Giles to himself, shaking his head over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than ever.
"Well, 'twas his native home, come to that; and where else could we expect him to be?
"I s'pose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr. Creedle?"
A passerby heard his cries and asked what had happened.
So the Wolf spoke very humbly to the Dog, complimenting him on his fine appearance.
Why did you not keep it in the house where you could easily get it when you had to buy things?"
"Hardly anything," answered the House Dog.
"Chase people who carry canes, bark at beggars, and fawn on the people of the house.
There was once a Wolf who got very little to eat because the Dogs of the village were so wide awake and watchful.
Then he picked up a stone and threw it, breaking the Goat's horn.
THE GOATHERD AND THE GOAT
A Wolf, lurking near the Shepherd's hut, saw the Shepherd and his family feasting on a roasted lamb.
"Perhaps you see the mark of the collar to which my chain is fastened."
But what's the difference?" replied the Dog.
"What! nothing!"
"What must I do?" asked the Wolf.
In return you will get tidbits of every kind, chicken bones, choice bits of meat, sugar, cake, and much more beside, not to speak of kind words and caresses."
A Goat strayed away from the flock, tempted by a patch of clover. The Goatherd tried to call it back, but in vain.
"Aha!" he muttered.
The Wolf had such a beautiful vision of his coming happiness that he almost wept.
THE MISER
A Miser had buried his gold in a secret place in his garden. Every day he went to the spot, dug up the treasure and counted it piece by piece to make sure it was all there.
I couldn't think of spending any of it."
He groaned and cried and tore his hair.
The stranger picked up a large stone and threw it into the hole.
I don't care a rap for your feasts and I wouldn't take all the tender young lambs in the world at that price." And away ran the Wolf to the woods.
"But please tell me."
It would not obey him.
"My gold!
One night this Wolf happened to fall in with a fine fat House Dog who had wandered a little too far from home.
"Your gold!
"Don't you go wherever you please?"
"If that is the case," he said, "cover up that stone.
Why did you put it there?
O my gold!" cried the Miser, wildly, "someone has robbed me!"
"Why, I never touched the gold.
When the Miser discovered his loss, he was overcome with grief and despair.
"All the difference in the world!
A chain!" cried the Wolf.
He was really nothing but skin and bones, and it made him very downhearted to think of it.
"Not always!
THE WOLF AND THE HOUSE DOG
"Nothing at all," replied the Dog.
It is worth just as much to you as the treasure you lost!"
"What is that on your neck?"
"Do not tell the master," he begged the Goat.
"What!
Why, you have to fight hard for every bite you get.
So she called a handmaid that was with her in her apartment by way of service, and said to her, "Go to Ardashir, son of the Great King, and fear not.
The like of thee should not rise to the like of me, for I am the least of servants' slaves.
Send for the midwives and let them examine her before thee.
Then the King threw his arms about Ardashir's neck and entreated him with all worship and honour, bidding his chief eunuchs bear him to the bath.
Where is the young man, the son of yonder magnanimous King?" And quoth the Wazir, "O mighty King, thou didst command him be put to death." When the King heard this, he was clean distraught and cried out from his heart's core and in-most of head, saying, "Woe to you!
Meanwhile, news of the multitude of her lover's troops came to Hayat al-Nufus, who was still jailed by her sire's commandment, till they knew what he should order respecting her, whether pardon and release or death and burning; and she looked down from the terrace-roof of the palace and, turning towards the mountains, saw even these covered with armed men.
When she beheld all those warriors and knew that they were the army of Ardashir's father, she feared lest he should be diverted from her by his sire and forget her and depart from her, whereupon her father would slay her.
The merchant uncovered her face, whereupon the place was illumined by her beauty and her seven tresses hung down to her anklets like horses' tails.
He rose up standing and received him with honour; but the Minister made haste to fall at his feet and kissing them cried, "Pardon, O King of the Age!
They spread the marriage-feasts and banquets and lastly Ardashir went in unto the Princess and found her a jewel which had been hidden, an union pearl unthridden and a filly that none but he had ridden, so he notified this to his sire.
So, if he send to her to consult her, let her make no opposition; for I will not return to my country without her." Then the handmaid returned to Hayat al-Nufus; and, kissing her hands, delivered to her the message, which when she heard, she wept for very joy and returned thanks to Almighty Allah.
After this he returned to his capital and Ardashir and his company fared on, till they reached Shiraz, where they celebrated the marriage- festivities anew.
When he came out, he cast over his shoulders a costly robe and crowned him with a coronet of jewels; he also girt him with a girdle of silk, purfled with red gold and set with pearls and gems, and mounted him on one of his noblest mares, with selle and trappings of gold inlaid with pearls and jewels.
She carried with her all her waiting-women and eunuchs, as well as the nurse, who had returned, after her flight, and resumed her office.
And they abode in all comfort and solace and joyance of life, till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and Severer of societies; the Depopulator of palaces and the Garnerer of graveyards.
And all who had seen him selling stuffs in the linendrapers' bazar marvelled how his soul could have consented thereto, considering the nobility of his spirit and the loftiness of his dignity; but it was his love and inclination to the King's daughter that to this had constrained him.
And men also relate the tale of
She had Nature kohl'd eyes, heavy hips and thighs and waist of slenderest guise, her sight healed all maladies and quenched the fire of sighs, for she was even as the poet cries,
When it was the Seven Hundred and Thirty-seventh Night,
Then he went in to the Princess and embraced her; and she kissed his hands and they wept in the standing-place of parting.
She continued, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that the bondmaid sent by Hayat al-Nufus made her way to Ardashir and delivered him her lady's message, which when he heard, he wept with sore weeping and said to her, "Know that Hayat al-Nufus is my mistress and that I am her slave and the captive of her love.
Such was her case; but as regards Ardashir, he was alone with his father that night and the Great King questioned him of his case, whereupon he told him all that had befallen him, first and last.
When it was the Seven Hundred and Thirty-eighth Night,
"Miss Stevens! and what does she know about it?
"Miss Stevens is the very last person I would have you take for your model; the less you resemble her in dress, manners, or anything else, the better.
"Yes, indeed, papa," she said, "I should be glad if I could be just like Miss Rose, she is always kind and gentle to everybody; even the servants, whom Miss Stevens orders about so crossly."
"May I run to her door and ask if she is?--and if she isn't, may I wait for her out here on the veranda?"
"I don't know, daughter; I have not asked her yet.
"She? who, daughter?"
You could never guess who has the rooms just opposite ours; on the other side of the hall."
You must behave in a lady-like manner whether she does or not.
"My new mamma!" exclaimed Elsie, with unfeigned astonishment, dropping the scissors with which she had been cutting paper dolls for some of the little ones.
"Do you think you shall like your new mamma, Elsie?" asked one of them in a careless tone, as she tied on an apron she had just been making for her doll, and turned it around to see how it fitted.
"Perhaps; but don't set your heart too much on it, for she may not be quite so willing to take such a troublesome charge as Miss Stevens seems to be," he said, returning to his playful tone.
I think I never before saw so cross a look on my little girl's face," he said, peering at her over the top of his newspaper.
He looked a good deal provoked as she went on with her story; then very grave indeed.
But shall I tell her that it will add to your happiness if she will be your mamma?"
Elsie looked troubled and anxious.
His tones were full of deep feeling, and as he spoke he drew her closer and closer to him and kissed her tenderly again and again.
"What is too bad, daughter?
"Yes, sir; and that I will call her mamma, and obey her and love her dearly.
I am sure it was very good of him, and I will try to like Miss Stevens for that.
A large party of equestrians were setting out from the hotel that evening soon after tea, and Elsie, in company with several other little girls, went out upon the veranda to watch them mount and ride away.
"No, brother," said Rose, smiling, "you don't wish any such thing; on the contrary, you would be the very first to fly to the rescue if you saw her in danger of drowning."
I shall have to read him a serious lecture on the subject.
"Come here, and tell me what it is all about."
Elsie looked at him for a moment with a bewildered expression; then suddenly comprehending, her face lighted up.
"Miss Stevens does say such hateful things, papa!"
Then hiding her face on his breast, she lay there for several minutes perfectly silent and still.
It is a busy, talking world.
"Yes, papa."
"Yes, darling, I know she does," he answered soothingly.
I doubt if you would have been angry had it been Miss Rose," he added, a little mischievously.
She was absent but a few moments from the parlor, where she had left her father, but when she returned to it he was not there.
"When Miss Rose is ready to go with us."
"Then, papa, will I have to call her mamma? and do you think my own mamma would like it?"
Mr. Dinsmore looked excessively annoyed, and Edward "pshawed, and wished her at the bottom of the sea."
"You are too young to understand why," he said in the same grave tone, and then relapsed into silence; sitting there for some time stroking her hair in an absent way, with his eyes on the carpet.
"Why, papa, I thought we were going to have such a nice time, and she just spoiled it all."
"Why, Elsie, daughter, what is the matter?" he asked in a tone of surprise and concern, as he caught sight of her flushed and agitated face.
"Oh, papa, you know Miss Rose would never have done such a thing!" exclaimed the little girl warmly.
It isn't my way."
I acknowledge that I do not find Miss Stevens the most agreeable company in the world, but I must treat her politely, and show her a little attention sometimes; both because she is a lady and because her father once saved my father's life; for which I owe a debt of gratitude to him and his children."
my"--but Elsie checked herself and shut her teeth hard to keep down the emotion that was swelling in her breast.
"Then why did you not mention her name, instead of speaking of her as she?
"I knew she was in the house, because I saw her name in the hotel book last night when I went to register ours."
I think she will hardly annoy you when you are close at my side; and that is pretty much all the time, isn't it?"
"Miss Stevens?"
She was going to decline it on the plea that the path was too narrow for three, but something in his look made her change her mind and accept; and they moved on, while Elsie, almost ready to cry with vexation, fell behind with Edward Allison for an escort.
"How everybody talks about you, papa; last evening I was out on the veranda, and I heard John and Miss Stevens' maid, Phillis, talking together.
"Oh, yes, papa, do take me home," she answered eagerly.
I am afraid my little daughter is growing censorious," he said, with a very grave look as he drew her to his side.
"I am glad you are pleased with it, daughter," returned Mr. Dinsmore, opening the morning paper, which John had just brought up.
"What can you mean, Annie?
I would consult your happiness before my own, for it lies very near my heart, my precious one.
"Yes, indeed, but you are though," asserted Annie positively; "for I heard my mother say so only yesterday; and it must be so, for she Miss Stevens told it herself."
If you wish to copy any one let it be Miss Allison, for she is a perfect lady in every respect."
"I don't think the silly nonsense of the servants need trouble you.
That does not sound respectful in a child of your age, and I wish my little girl always to be respectful to those older than herself. I thought I heard you the other day mention some gentleman's name without the prefix of Mr., and I intended to reprove you for it at the time.
"Come here and sit on my knee; I want to talk to you.
"I think you always remember the command to be courteous, papa," she said, looking affectionately into his face.
"I was wondering all the time how you could be so very polite to Miss Stevens; for I was quite sure you would rather not have had her along.
It was now early in the morning, Elsie and her papa were in his room, which was in the second story and opened upon a veranda, shaded by tall trees, and overlooking a large grassy yard at the side of the building.
And you must remember too, dear, that the Bible bids us be courteous, and teaches us to treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated."
John is a sad fellow, I know; he courts all the pretty colored girls wherever he goes.
"No, my dear, it wouldn't do," he replied with a grave shake of the head.
Beyond were green fields, woods, and hills.
"Now tell me what it was all about."
Dinsmore and Elsie, Rose and Edward Allison--were occupying very comfortable quarters in a large hotel at one of our fashionable watering-places.
This, and the covert sneers with which she often addressed Miss Allison had not escaped Mr. Dinsmore's notice, and it frequently cost him quite an effort to treat Miss Stevens with the respectful politeness which he considered due to her sex and to the daughter of his father's old friend.
"No, daughter, don't do that.
A bedroom for each, and a private parlor for the joint use of the party, had been secured in advance, and late the night before they had arrived and taken possession.
And then, what right had she to take your arm without being asked?" and Elsie's face flushed with indignation.
It's just too bad!"
"I hope not, daughter.
"Indeed, Miss Stevens, I don't want them!
"Who?
"I have been thinking," he said, in a half hesitating way, "that though it would not do to invite Miss Rose to spend the winter with us, it might do very nicely to ask her to come and live at the Oaks."
"What, papa?" she asked, and she wondered to see how the color had spread over his face, and how bright his eyes looked.
"It was when they were both quite young men," said Mr. Dinsmore, "before either of them was married: they were skating together and your grandfather broke through the ice, and would have been drowned, but for the courage and presence of mind of Mr. Stevens, who saved him only by very great exertion, and at the risk of his own life."
Let us start to-morrow, papa; can't we?"
"I will try not to do it any more, papa," she replied, the tears springing to her eyes; "but you don't know how very annoying Miss Stevens is.
"Ah!
"Why, papa?" she asked with a look of keen disappointment.
Miss Stevens' presence proved scarcely less annoying to Elsie than the child had anticipated.
I don't want anything but what papa chooses to buy for me of his own accord.
Don't do it again."
"But Miss Rose loves me, papa; I am sure she does," she said, flushing, and the tears starting to her eyes.
It does not sound at all like my usually gentle sweet-tempered little girl."
You know I don't care for Phillis or John; but that isn't all." And then she repeated what had passed between Annie and herself.
"I don't like them to talk so, papa!
"Your mamma loves us both too well not to be pleased with anything that would add to our happiness," he replied gently.
"Why, papa, surely you know I mean Miss Stevens!"
Elsie looked very much pleased.
He doesn't think of it; we can't expect gentlemen to notice such little matters; you ought to have a mamma to attend to such things for you.
And who could tell but some of them might break from their covert and sweep like a shadow across the heath?
Seeing the face of the wise woman bending over her, she threw her arms around her neck and held up her mouth to be kissed.
But the wind howled on, and the rain kept pouring down the chimney, and every now and then the lightning burst out, and the thunder rushed after it, as if the great lumbering sound could ever think to catch up with the swift light!
"Please, old woman, I did not mean to knock so loud."
Then the princess knocked again, this time with her knuckles, and the voice came again, saying,
And the kiss of the wise woman was like the rose-gardens of Damascus.
Then in her terror the princess grew angry, and saying to herself, "She must be somewhere in the place, else who was there to open the door to me?" began to shout and yell, and call the wise woman all the bad names she had been in the habit of throwing at her nurses.
The princess answered,
But, to her surprise, she came only to another back, for no door was to be seen. She tried the farther end, but still no door.
"What do you want?" said the voice.
Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in the one case, the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy.
It was a single bare little room, with a white deal table, and a few old wooden chairs, a fire of fir-wood on the hearth, the smoke of which smelt sweet, and a patch of thick-growing heath in one corner.
And what with the sufferings and terrors she had left outside, the new kind of tears she had shed, the love she had begun to feel for her parents, and the trust she had begun to place in the wise woman, it seemed to her as if her soul had grown larger of a sudden, and she had left the days of her childishness and naughtiness far behind her.
And the princess answered,
"Who is there?"
Hardly had the possibility arisen in her mind, before she was on her feet: if the woman was any thing short of an ogress, her cottage must be better than that horrible loneliness, with nothing in all the world but a stare; and even an ogress had at least the shape and look of a human being.
The hopelessness grew at length so unendurable that she woke with a start.
For a moment she feared the old woman would be offended, but the next, there came a voice, saying,
A cottage without a door!--she rushed at it in a rage and kicked at the wall with her feet.
Strange, was it not, that she should have been so long with the wise woman, and yet know NOTHING about that cottage?
"Rosamond."
She did not know that not a single evil creature dared set foot on that heath, or that, if one should do so, it would that instant wither up and cease.
But the princess soon ventured to knock a third time.
Indeed, it was not once nor twice that for a moment she was fully persuaded she saw a great beast coming leaping and bounding through the moonlight to have her all to himself.
The princess thought she knew the worst of the moon, and she knew nothing at all about the cottage, therefore she would stay with the moon.
People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed!
Then the door opened, and the princess entered.
She looked all around, but saw nothing of the wise woman.
Then nobody could deny that there, all round about the heath, like a ring of darkness, lay the gloomy fir-wood, and the princess knew what it was full of, and every now and then she thought she heard the howling of its wolves and hyenas.
The only shadow of a hope she had was, that she might by slow degrees grow thinner and thinner, until at last she wore away to nothing at all; only alas! she could not detect the least sign that she had yet begun to grow thinner.
To this there came no reply.
It was no use stopping to look about her, for what had she to do but forever look about her as she went on and on and on--never seeing any thing, and never expecting to see any thing!
But again she bethought herself--that, if she could not do all she was told, she could, at least, do a part of it: if she could not knock at the door, she could at least knock--say on the wall, for there was nothing else to knock upon--and perhaps the old woman would hear her, and lift her in by some window.
"Oh, please, let me in!" said the princess.
And now the question was between the moon and the cottage.
In this, however, she would have been quite right, if she had only imagined enough--namely, that the wise woman was watching OVER her from the little window.
On the contrary, she thought she had a perfect right to be angry, for was she not most desperately ill used--and a princess too?
But being in a bad temper always makes people stupid, and presently she struck her forehead such a blow against something--she thought herself it felt like the old woman's cloak--that she fell back--not on the floor, though, but on the patch of heather, which felt as soft and pleasant as any bed in the palace.
The wise woman, too, she felt sure, although her cottage looked asleep, was watching her at some little window.
Thereupon, she rose at once to her feet, and picking up a stone, began to knock on the wall with it.
"Who is there?"
First of all, the soft wind blowing gently through the dry stalks of the heather and its thousands of little bells raised a sweet rustling, which the princess took for the hissing of serpents, for you know she had been naughty for so long that she could not in a great many things tell the good from the bad.
Suddenly, however, she remembered how her screaming had brought the horde of wolves and hyenas about her in the forest, and, ceasing at once, lay still, gazing yet again at the moon.
But the old woman--as the princess called her, not knowing that her real name was the Wise Woman--had told her that she must knock at the door: how was she to do that when there was no door?
She must have passed it as she ran--but no--neither in gable nor in side was any to be found.
Once, long ago, he had been a roly-poly pepper-and-salt kitten; he had a home in those days, and a name, "Gipsy," which he abundantly justified.
It was a desirable fishbone, large, with a considerable portion of the fish's tail still attached to it.
In appearance he did not lack distinction of an ominous sort; the slow, rhythmic, perfectly controlled mechanism of his tail, as he impressively walked abroad, was incomparably sinister.
The hum of the carpenter shop ceased, and Sam Williams appeared in the stable doorway.
No; Gipsy was not the pet for a little girl.
He stared insanely.
Onward they sped, and Duke was encouraged by the sight and sound of these reinforcements to increase his own outrageous clamours and to press home his attack.
Indeed, Duke was not in a position to think the matter over quietly.
He climbed upon the summit of the mountain, and pained himself grievously to bring his journey to an end.
This squire had set his heart upon the daughter of the King, and many a time spoke in her ear, praying her to give him again the love he had bestowed upon her.
Such virtue had this medicine, directly it were drunken.
When the maiden saw her lover's piteous plight, she deemed that he had swooned by reason of his pain.
However mighty they were of body, at the last they failed upon the mountain, and fell with their burthen to the ground.
For many saving herbs have been found there since that day by the simple folk of that country, which from the magic philtre derived all their virtue.
On the third day they sealed them fast in a goodly coffin of marble, and by the counsel of all men, laid them softly to rest on that mountain where they died.
The town yet endures, with its towers and houses, to bear witness to the truth; moreover the country thereabouts is known to us all as the Valley of Pistres.
I have kindred in Salerno, of rich estate.
The varlet took the maiden in his arms, but first he gave her the flask with the precious brewage to carry, since for pride he might not endure to drink therefrom, save at utmost peril.
After his speech had returned to him, he was passing heavy, and lamented their doleful case, and thus did all his people with him.
Then they departed from them, and left them together, alone.
So then, that none should carry off his child, he caused it to be proclaimed, both far and near, by script and trumpet, that he alone should wed the maid, who would bear her in his arms, to the pinnacle of the great and perilous mountain, and that without rest or stay.
Three days they kept the bodies of these two fair children from earth, with uncovered face.
This he might not do.
Thus, for a while, was none so bold as to seek the high Princess.
Therefore he appointed a certain day for this judgment.
But he would neither hear, nor give credence to her words.
She kissed his eyes and mouth, and falling upon his body, took him in her arms, and pressed him closely to her breast.
VII
For more than thirty years my aunt has studied there the art of medicine, and knows the secret gift of every root and herb. If you hasten to her, bearing letters from me, and show her your adventure, certainly she will find counsel and cure.
When the dame had read these letters with him, line by line, she charged him to lodge with her awhile, till she might do according to his wish.
He reeled and fell, nor could he rise again, for the heart had burst within his breast.
When this news was noised about the country, many came upon the quest.
This thing was very grievous to them, but the damoiseau thought within himself that it were good to bear the pains he knew, rather than to seek out others that might prove sharper still.
So by her sorceries, and for the love of her maid, she brewed such a potion that no man, however wearied and outworn, but by drinking this philtre, would not be refreshed in heart and blood and bones.
The King was no wise wrath at his presumption.
She bewailed his evil lot, with many shrill cries, and flung the useless flacket far away.
Moreover he caused letters to be written to his vassals and his friends--passing none by--bidding them to see the end of this adventure.
But when two thirds of the course was won, the grasshopper would have tripped him off his feet.
Yet in the end, altogether distraught by love, this prudent varlet sought his friend, and showed her his case, saying that he urgently required of her that she would flee with him, for no longer could he endure the weariness of his days.
Doubt not that she will discover some cunning simple, that will strengthen your body, as well as comfort your heart.
But strive as they would they might not enforce themselves more than they were able.
She kneeled hastily at his side, and put the enchanted brewage to his lips, but he could neither drink nor speak, for he was dead, as I have told you.
Now on the appointed day this young dansellon came very early to the appointed place, bringing the flacket with him.
THE LAY OF THE TWO LOVERS
When the great company were fully met together, the King led forth his daughter before them; and all might see that she was arrayed in nothing but her smock.
The squire set forth at a great pace, and climbed briskly till he was halfway up the mount. Because of the joy he had in clasping his burthen, he gave no thought to the potion.
So with a little company of men, mounted on swift palfreys, and most privy to his mind, he arrived at Salerno.
He will deem you but a stripling, and set forth the terms of his bargain, that to him alone shall I be given who knows how to climb the perilous mountain, without pause or rest, bearing his lady between his arms."
Now the squire made no long stay at his lodging, but as soon as he might, went to the damsel's kindred to open out his mind.
Then return to this realm with your potion, and ask me at my father's hand.
He smiled rather at his folly, for how should one so young and slender succeed in a business wherein so many mighty men had failed.
The story of their love was bruited so abroad, that the Bretons made a song in their own tongue, and named this song the Lay of the Two Lovers.
Once upon a time there lived in Normandy two lovers, who were passing fond, and were brought by Love to Death.
And from every region round about men came to learn the issue of this thing.
This King had one fair daughter, a damsel sweet of face and gracious of manner, very near to her father's heart, since he had lost his Queen.
He was a welcome guest at the Court, and the King talked with him very willingly.
Ever was it fast day and fleshless day with her, so that by any means she might lighten the burthen that her friend must carry in his arms.
Now in this country lived a squire, son to a certain count of that realm, seemly of semblance and courteous, and right desirous to win that prize, which was so coveted of all.
He repaired straightway to the Court, and, seeking out the King, required of him his fair daughter in marriage, promising, for his part, that were she given him, he would bear her in his arms to the summit of the mount.
Since this adventure of the Two Children this hill is known as the Mountain of the Two Lovers, and their story being bruited abroad, the Breton folk have made a Lay thereof, even as I have rehearsed before you.
But for her part the fair maiden did all that she was able to bring her love to a good end.
Hearken well.
A mighty anguish filled his bosom.
So seeing him brave and courteous, she esteemed him for the gifts which gained him the favour of the King, and they loved together in their youth.
Father, ought I to tell him?"
"Very well, listen, father....
Come in, Oliver, but softly."
Well, at least, this is what I dreamt.
"Why, her light is burning.
"Yes."
"Hush!" he said.
Her face seemed to fall away in a kind of emotion, half cunning, half fear.
I am a Catholic--?"
Father---"
"Who is that?"
"Oh! thank God!
"Father, I must not keep you; but tell me this--Who is this man?"
What do you know of Felsenburgh? You have been dreaming."
When will you bring me Holy Communion?"
She babbled out a question at him.
"The door is shut, father?
III
Well, he was here at last, dishevelled, hatless and exhausted, looking up at the dark windows.
"I don't know, father.
He hesitated.
"Tell me, are you very ill?"
Yes; this was genuine enough.
Nearer, father."
"Felsenburgh?"
You are a priest, father?"
"You have been dreaming.
"That they are pig-headed?
This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh: and the verdict was in accordance.
It is clear that Peters is out of the running now.'
This decided it: Peters was to go, I stay.
The recovery of Peters was not so steady as I had expected.
Meantime, Clark came each day.
'Oh, highly recommended people of my own.'
I am not bound to desire to go to the North Pole, am I?'
'Don't be frightened: I think he will recover.'
'Mysterious thing,' said Clark to me, when we were alone.
I said to myself: 'I must surely be mad!'
These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke.
Whims are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine.
The second week passed, and only ten days remained before the start of the expedition.
'The man who first plants his foot on the North Pole will certainly be ennobled.
I hesitated, I hesitated.
I slept till 11 A.M., and then hurried over again to Peters.
'Let me alone, the whole of you,' answered Peters: 'I ain't a child.'
I didn't know whether I was to inject anything to-night.
He has taken some more atropine.'
But now, suddenly, her mind seemed wholly possessed, my mention of Clark's visit apparently setting her well a-burn with the Pole-fever.
'What on earth is the matter?' he said to me.
'I am very happy in my warm Eden with my Clodagh.
She stopped, she stopped.
There I sat, and heard him: and most strangely have those words of his peroration planted themselves in my brain, when, rising to a passion of prophecy, he shouted: 'And as in the one case, transgression was followed by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, I warn the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering sky, and thundery weather.'
'Well, how is everything?'
As she opened the syringe-box, she remarked with a pout:
Peters, a touchy fellow, at once dictated a letter of protest to Clark; and Clark sent Peters' letter to me, marked with a big note of interrogation in blue pencil.
'Poisoned,' I answered.
Her back was turned upon us, and she was a long time.
But I could no more help it than I could fly.
The first--and chief--is that tempest of words which I heard at Kensington from that big-mouthed Mackay on the Sunday night.
She got from me that afternoon the history of all the Polar expeditions of late years, how far they reached, by what aids, and why they failed.
By noon the next day, his fine vitality, which so fitted him for an Arctic expedition, had re-asserted itself.
He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.
As she rose, laughing at something said by Wilson, the drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it.
But now she could talk of nothing else.
My beloved put her forefinger to her lips, whispering:
I am come to stay with him, till--the last....'
Clark--ha! ha!
'Well, perhaps you had better give us another quarter,' he answered: 'there's still some trouble in the tummy off and on.'
I became angry at once.
He died shortly before 1 A.M.
I have still a nausea to write about it!
I had been hearing Mackay's wild comparison of the Pole with the tree of Eden, and that no doubt was the reason why such a start convulsed me: for my listless eyes had chanced to rest upon some words.
I don't know.
Yet I asked myself repeatedly: Did she not know of it?
'Your friend has been naughty, Mr. Wilson,' she said again with that same pout: 'he has been taking more atropine.'
I did not start, Clodagh!
This conversation occurred in the dining-room of Peters' house: and as we passed through the door, I saw Clodagh gliding down the passage outside--rapidly--away from us.
'I now formally invite you to join the expedition,' said Clark: 'do you consent?'
'Why did you start when I said that?' she asked, reading now at random.
'Ah,' Clodagh said, 'I was waiting for you, Adam.
The house of Dr. Peter Peters was three doors from mine, on the opposite side of the street.
For the pains I prescribed some quarter-grain tablets of sulphate of morphia, and went away.
Now she touched my hair with a lofty playfulness that soothed me: but even then I looked upon the rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was really very sick.
'My dearest Clodagh!'
He was cheerful, but with a fevered pulse, and still the stomach-pains.
Then she laughed dryly a little--a dry, mad laugh.
'Is that certain?'
Her voice dropped:
'The woman gave me of the tree, and I did eat....'
They say...'
I formally stated that he took atropine--had been originally poisoned by atropine: but we saw that his present symptoms were not atropine symptoms, but, it almost seemed, of some other vegetable poison, which we could not precisely name.
It was a mere flea-bite.
'But why?
Peters was now in an arm-chair.
She was, in my opinion, the most superb of creatures, Clodagh--that haughty neck which seemed always scorning something just behind her left shoulder.
He is bringing Mr. Wilson for the evening.' (Wilson was going as electrician of the expedition.)
And I want you to get into the habit at once of letting me have my little way----'
He says that if anything happened to Peters, I should be the first man he would run to.
'Don't let me think little of you!' she answered pettishly.
I shrugged.
Lucrezia Borgia in her own age may have been heroic: but Lucrezia in this late century!
I say nothing of the many millions...
It was then that I said to Clodagh:
'What do you think, Peters?' I said: 'any more pains?'
I was standing; Peters in his arm-chair, smoking.
We were silent, she and I; I standing, looking at her, she drawing the thumb across the leaf-edges, and beginning again, contemplatively.
'A quarter-grain, then, Clodagh, 'I said.
I shrugged again.
This is a case that I dislike.
Who told you, Clodagh, that Peters takes atropine?'
The print was very large, and a shaded lamp cast a light upon it.
'Well, if that means consent,' he said, 'let me remind you that you have only eight days, and all the world to do in them.'
'Marriage indeed!
Well, perhaps I know.
It kicked him toward the rope slightly, but most of the energy was wasted in setting him into a wilder spin.
They hit the ground, bounced twice, and turned over.
It added spin to his vertical axis, but the rope came into view within arm's reach.
This time he threw the bottle away from it.
The thin haze of Mars' atmosphere came rushing up, while the blast lashed out.
Her voice shook almost hysterically.
"Dan?" she repeated.
The ship was retreating from him already hundreds of yards away.
It would pass within ten feet--and might as well have been ten miles for all the good it would do him.
Regret confirm diagnosis.
She dropped her eyes, then raised them to meet his defiantly.
It shook his confidence.
He grunted and reached for the handle that would release the outer lock. "Better get back inside if you don't want to blow out with me."
It could have been worse.
He threw back his helmet just as Chris Ryan jerked hers off.
Maybe there's a cure.
Then she sighed.
It was sheer stupidity, since nothing could have been more merciful than to lose this reality.
"I suppose I can understand why you hate me, Dan."
But it was too short.
It saved fuel to turn without power, and he wasn't sure he could have turned accurately by blasting.
"Hurry up with that.
But the will to be himself was stronger than logic.
Now his spin brought him around to face it, and he saw it was parallelling his course.
"I'm not just scared and selfish.
But it wasn't hard to do what I've done.
"If you'll open the lock again, I'll leave.
He found that the fuel tanks were nearly full, but that still didn't leave much margin.
The flare bloomed, and he yanked down on the little lever.
Every film he had seen on space seemed to form a mad jumble in his mind, but he seized on the first idea he could remember.
It meant someone was trying to save him.
He jockeyed the ship around by trial and error, studying the manual that was lying prominently on the control panel.
"You've got me beat then," he said.
"I can't prove my motives.
I can see a lot of things."
I'm too mixed up.
He was spinning slowly, so that stars ahead of him seemed to crawl across his view.
She pointed to the message, underlining words with her finger.
She'd played her trump, and it took the round.
Repeat topsecret. Martian fever incubates fourteen years, believed highly fatal.
Mars was a shrunken pill far away.
But now he had to waste fuel and ruin his orbit again.
"Let's see.
According to the booklet, the ship was simple to operate.
He blinked, trying to spot the rope.
His lungs gave up suddenly, collapsing and then sucking in greedily. Clean air rushed in, letting his head clear.
He aimed the hissing bottle, fumbling for the manual valve.
She held out a copy of a space radiogram, addressed to Mrs. D. E. Everts, and signed by one of the best doctors on the Lobby Board of Directors.
He turned his head to stare.
They were halfway to the village when a dozen tractors came racing up and Jake piled out of the lead one to drag the two in with him.
He'd come from the villages to save you.
He estimated the course.
It almost worked.
If you don't care about me, you might consider the people dying of the plague who need you!"
But he'd thought the species extinct.
The outer seal snapped open and the spaceman heaved.
Inside, Chris was waiting, carrying an official automatic.
"The only thing that will get this into orbit with the station is faith.
The red light blinked.
Dr. Feldman, you have my apologies.
"Come ahead," Feldman invited.
There was no gravity; the two men handed him up easily to the one in the airlock while the inner seal began to close.
There were periods when fear clogged his throat and left him gasping with the need to scream and beat his cell walls.
Everts' eyes widened briefly.
It was ridiculous, impossible, and yet there was a curious relief at the formality of it.
Chris went out, and other guards came in to free him.
The bug could not grow in Earth-normal tissue.
They were trying to focus all fear and resentment on him.
A red light went on.
Doc studied the man.
There was a long wait, as if the procedure were being checked with some authority, but finally he received a surly acknowledgement. "Steward.
He set the electron microscope up on that and plugged it in.
A gong sounded, and a red light warned him that acceleration was due.
Probably they would.
He managed to find space for it and came to attention.
The red light blinked and stayed on.
It was like something from a play, too unreal to affect his life.
There was also a young pilot, looking nervous and unhappy.
Doc felt carefully at the base of the Captain's skull; the swelling was there.
The steward brought his food in a thoroughly chastened manner.
Once the steward had cleared away the dishes, Doc went to work.
Apparently there was another man who placed his patients above anything else, though he was probably meticulous about obeying all actual rules.
He reached for the helmet, but the man shook his head, pointing to the oxygen gauge.
Doc had saved one bracky weed.
I'm loaded with every drop of fuel she'll hold and it still isn't enough."
Feldman shook his head.
"Nothing that I've found, Captain.
Doc wondered about the physician.
A hiss of oxygen reached him and the suit ballooned out.
The spaceman used it in tying the sack of possessions firmly to Doc's suit.
It was Everts' turn to shake his head.
But my wife is greatly worried about this plague.
But Everts wasn't the sort to dicker even for his life.
Doc could see that there was even some fuel remaining when they slipped into the tube at the orbital station.
Everts nodded to the man holding the helmet.
"When did she have Selznik's migraine?" he asked.
He asked a few questions, but there could be no doubt.
The pilot stared at her doubtfully and finally turned back to his controls, still muttering.
His voice was apologetic when he began.
But I said:
'Atropine.'
Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the fragile glass containing the injection.
She moved from the window, sat in a rocking-chair, and turned the leaves of a book, without reading.
Do that once more, and I swear I have nothing further to do with you!'
'Then do so.'
I don't like the outer Cold.'
With lightning swiftness I remembered an under-look of mistrust which I had once seen on his face.
I have half a mind to throw it to the devil.'
'Yes, I think--that is, if he leaves off taking the drug, Wilson.'
Sometimes she frightened me.
Women are no longer admired for doing such things.'
'Peters,' I cried, 'you know you have no right to be doing things like that without consulting me!
And this second thing I remember: that on reaching home, I walked into my disordered library (for I had had to hunt out some books), where I met my housekeeper in the act of rearranging things.
Not a word I said to her that day about Clark's invitation.
'That Peter takes atropine.'
What made you think that I started?
He has had an absurd dream...'
'I easily might, however.
She was at this date no longer young, being by five years my senior, as also, by five years, the senior of her nephew, born from the marriage of her sister with Peters of Taunton.
I was giving him three quarter-grains of morphia a day. That Friday night, at 11 P.M., I visited him, and found Clodagh there, talking to him.
She came closer to my ear, saying:
But don't look dumbfoundered in that absurd fashion: I have no intention of poisoning him in order to see you a multimillionaire, and a Peer of the Realm....'
'Our patient has been naughty!
At the end of that second week, Wilson, the electrician, was one evening sitting by Peter's bedside when I entered.
He will be here presently.
He was then leaning on an elbow, talking to Wilson, and except his pallor, and strong stomach-pains, there was now hardly a trace of his late approach to death.
'Clodagh, your presence at the bed-side here somehow does not please me. It is so unnecessary.'
'I might--I--doubt it.
I did not start!
My eyes were fastened on her face: it was full of reassurance, of free innocence.
She had apparently lifted an old Bible by the front cover to fling it on the table, for as I threw myself into a chair my eye fell upon the open print near the beginning.
Oh, my good Lord! let us change this talk....'
And in all that chaotic hurry of preparation, three other things only, but those with clear distinctness now, I remember.
She said presently in her cold, rapid way:
On that day of Clark's visit to me I had not been seated five minutes with Clodagh, when I said:
'Ha! ha!
However that was, about midnight, to my great surprise, Peters opened his eyes, and smiled.
There is our marriage....'
'Good Heavens!'
'Unnecessary certainly,' she replied: 'but I always had a genius for nursing, and a passion for watching the battles of the body.
At the end of the first week he was still prostrate.
'And you, too--go home, go home, Clodagh!'
A word was on my mouth to say, but I said nothing.
Now, David Wilson and I never greatly loved each other, and that very day he brought about a painful situation as between Peters and me, by telling Peters that I had taken his place in the expedition.
Toward one that night, his footman ran to knock me up with the news that Peters was very ill.
Is it Yes or No?'
But there are many in an expedition.
'I don't know that I have any special ambition that way,' I rejoined.
In these days of "the corruption of the upper classes," and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn't every innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the tide?
I saw her sharp-cut, florid face in profile, steadily bent and smelling.
'I heard the news early.
'Why should you, Clodagh?
'Good God! what with?'
I went home with a pretty heavy heart.
I only wish that I was a man!'
Only I remember the inquest, and how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself with atropine.
An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters' sleeve, and, kneeling there, injected his fore-arm.
'Who are the two nurses?'
One could retch up the heart...
I felt that I needed it.'
I hurried to his bed-side, and knew by the first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils that he was poisoned with atropine.
'Dr.
We looked at each other some time--eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but mine dropped before Clodagh's.
The patient lay in a semi-coma broken by passionate vomitings, and his condition puzzled us all.
Here I experienced a singular ghostly awe and timorousness, lest she should sink with me, or something: but striking matches, I saw an ordinary cabin, with some fungoids, skulls, bones and rags, but not one cohering skeleton.
There is an impression on my mind that it was a purple land of pure porphyry; there is some faint memory, or dream, of hearing a long-drawn booming of waves upon its crags: I do not know whence I have them.
I must at once, I think, have been conscious that here was the cause of the destruction of mankind; that it still surrounded its own neighbourhood with poisonous fumes; and that I was approaching it.
I follow the direction of his gaze to eastward!
I ate voraciously, with sweat, as usual, pouring down my eager brow, using knife or spoon in the right hand, but never the Western fork, licking the plates clean in the Mohammedan manner, and drinking pretty freely.
As I rose, I fell flat: and what I did thereafter I did in a state of existence whose acts, to the waking mind, appear unreal as dream.
In the second starboard berth was a small table, and on the floor a thick round ink-pot, whose continual rolling on its side made me look down; and there I saw a flat square book with black covers, which curved half-open of itself, for it had been wet and stained.
it seems unholy travail, monstrous birth!
It is affrighting, it is intolerable! the eyes can hardly bear to watch, the ears to hear!
And I was so pleased with these people, that I took on board with the gig one of their little tree-canoes: which was my foolishness: for gig and canoe were only three nights later washed from the decks into the middle of the sea.
I think that I remember retching with desperate jerks of the travailing intestines; also that I was on my face as I moved the regulator in the engine-room: but any recollection of going down the stairs, or of coming up again, I have not.
But in this search I received a check, my God, which chilled me to the marrow, and set me flying from these places.
I was therefore very tired when I went down, lit the central chain-lever lamp and my own two, washed and dressed in my bedroom, and sat to dinner in the dining-hall corner.
They had in many cases some reddish discoloration, which may have been the traces of betel-nut stains: for betel-nuts abound there.
The faint moonlight shewed an ample tract of deck, invisible in most parts under rolled beds of putrid seaweed, and no bodies, and nothing but a concave, large esplanade of seaweed.
Finally, by dint of throwing, I got the rope-loop round a mast-stump, drew myself up, and made fast the boat, my left hand cut by some cursed shell: and all for what?
Happily, the wheel was tied, the rudder hard to port, and as the ship moved, she must, therefore, have turned; and I must have been back to untie the wheel in good time, for when my senses came, I was lying there, my head against the under gimbal, one foot on a spoke of the wheel, no land in sight, and morning breaking.
At the moment when that sublime emergence ceases, or seems to cease, the grand thought that smites me is this: "I, Albert Tissu, am immortalised: my name shall never perish from among men!" I rush down, I write it.
the imperiousness of a whim.
I must have somehow crawled, or dragged myself forward.
There is a great deal of running about on the decks--they are descending.
I went from one to the other without any system whatever, searching for the ideal resting-place, and often thinking that I had found it: but only wearying of it at the thought that there was a yet deeper and dreamier in the world.
And laughing a little, in a slightly bantering tone, his hands in his pockets, Rouletabille fixed his cunning eyes on the great Fred.
After a moment he said:
"That's where the murderer came from to get into the pavilion."
"Yes," said my young friend; "I have an idea."
He was, no doubt, the not very amiable landlord of this charming dwelling-place.
He carried a fowling-piece slung at his back.
How do you like the cider?--It's a little tart, but I like it."
"I've no more cider; I served the last bottles to these gentlemen."
Mother Angenoux was still standing, leaning on her stick, the cat at her feet.
I had made my friend understand by a sign that we should do better not to insist; but, being determined to enter the inn, he slipped by the man on the doorstep and was in the common room.
Meantime the man had pushed open a little side door and called to somebody to bring him half a dozen eggs and a piece of beefsteak.
Mother Angenoux planted herself in front of the forest-keeper and struck the floor with her stick.
With the skill of an acrobat, he got into the lodge by an upper window which had been left open, and returned ten minutes later.
"Don't you know him?
"Quite well, thank you."
"I don't know who you are who tell me 'We shall have to eat red meat--now'; but if it will interest you to know it--that man is the murderer!"
"Too often.
He's an upstart who must once have had a fortune of his own; and he forgives nobody because, in order to live, he has been compelled to become a servant.
"We shall see that, later," he replied.
Why, the concierges of the chateau would turn their eyes away from a picture of him!"
On the mantelpiece was arrayed the innkeeper's collection of figured earthenware pots and stone jugs.
They make us think of the Road, of those days when highwaymen rode.
As the Green Man entered, Daddy Mathieu had started violently; but visibly mastering himself he said:
I crossed myself when I heard that, as if I had heard the devil."
The landlord let us do our own cooking and set our table near one of the windows.
"Come on," he said, "it is very comfortable here."
"Yet they've been arrested?"
Take yourself off."
"Not even yours."
I looked at the keeper when he put the last question, and I am much mistaken if I did not detect an evil smile on his lips.
We saw no more of Daddy Mathieu that day, and absolute silence reigned in the inn when we left it, after placing five francs on the table in payment for our feast.
There was no one to care for me but the Bete du bon Dieu!"
"Now we'll grill our steak.
"Of the murder of poor Mademoiselle Stangerson?--A good girl much loved everywhere in the country.
"I don't know anything about it," she said.
There was no need for me to draw Rouletabille's attention; he had already left our omelette and had joined the landlord at the window.
She disappeared.
"I'm not afraid of the police--I'm not afraid of anyone!" replied the man.
"What does that prove?--But I don't want to mix myself up in other people's affairs."
The innkeeper said to her roughly:
The beast looked at us and gave so hopeless a miau that I shuddered.
"You don't think, then, that the keeper knows anything of it?" I asked.
He wore eye-glasses and appeared to be about five and forty years of age.
As we expressed a hope that he would be good enough to furnish us with a breakfast, he assured us that he had no provisions, regarding us, as he said this, with a look that was unmistakably suspicious.
"Are you sure of that?"
The innkeeper looked at him sideways and said gruffly:
"We have no chicken--not even a wretched rabbit," said the landlord.
The room was a tolerably large one, furnished with two heavy tables, some stools, a counter decorated with rows of bottles of syrup and alcohol.
We were about to take the road leading to the chateau, when a considerable stir at the park gate attracted our attention.
When we were close to him, he deigned to see us and asked us, in a tone anything but engaging, whether we wanted anything.
"He has done well not to come in here to-day!" he hissed.
"Yes, they are, as true as my name's Mathieu, monsieur.
The landlord hates him.
He is not an acquaintance to make.--Well, he is Monsieur Stangerson's forest-keeper."
He held out a packet to the old woman, who took it eagerly and went out by the door, closely followed by her cat.
I saw at once that the Donjon Inn was at least two centuries old--perhaps older.
The Donjon Inn was of no imposing appearance; but I like these buildings with their rafters blackened with age and the smoke of their hearths--these inns of the coaching-days, crumbling erections that will soon exist in the memory only.
He said only, "Ah!"--a word which, in his mouth, signified many things.
He'll not let a poor creature eat a morsel of bread on the grass his grass!"
And she entered, followed by a cat, larger than any I had ever believed could exist.
A coloured advertisement lauded the many merits of a new vermouth.
The Green Man quietly refilled his pipe, lit it, bowed to us, and went out.
"I know," said my friend slowly; "I know--We shall have to eat red meat--now."
CHAPTER X. "We Shall Have to Eat Red Meat--Now"
They belong to the bygone days, they are linked with history.
"The concierges of the chateau are honest people, then?"
But I've made him understand that his face doesn't please me, and, for a month past, he hasn't been here.
"Does he often come here?"
The Green Man quickly rose and hurried to the door by the side of the fireplace; but it was opened by the landlord who appeared, and said to the keeper:
There are no two cats in the world that cry like that.
"Did she not leave you?"
"Yes, Monsieur keeper.
Then all the better for you.
Rouletabille at once set off on a three mile walk round Professor Stangerson's estate.
"But shall I tell you something?
"And the Dedbroke-Hickses?" asked Henriette.
"What on earth--" I began, but she shut me off with an imperious gesture.
"Do be careful.
"He holds the divorce record I believe," said I. "He's been married to four social leaders already, hasn't he?"
I'm just going to get her, that's all."
The Gasters of course belong at the top by patent right.
By Jove! she's that easy with men that even I tremble with anxiety whenever she comes into the house."
Full of sympathy as I had always been with the projects of Mrs. Van Raffles, and never in the least objecting on moral grounds to any of her schemes of acquisition, I could not but think that this time she proposed to go too far.
"I call that genius of a pretty high order.
"That's just it," said I.
The Friday before Norah's arrival Henriette requested me to get her a rusty nail, a piece of gravel from the drive, two hair-pins, and a steel nut from the automobile.
You propose to steal this woman.
"How do you account for them?"
"No--her cook," said Henriette.
I turned sulkily away.
If anything of the kind ever happens again she shall go.'"
"Mrs. Innitt, though--I envy her," said Henriette; "that is, in a way. She has no conversation at all, but her little dinners are the swellest things of the season.
"'I don't understand it at all, Mrs. Van Raffles,' she said with a sheepish smile.
Her discharge was unrighteous; Mrs. Innitt was no lady; the butler was in a conspiracy to ruin her--and all that; indeed, her mood was most receptive to the furtherance of Henriette's plans.
The Duke of Snarleyow got it and the climax was capped. Mrs. Innitt burst into a flood of tears and--well, to-morrow, Bunny, Norah leaves.
She was much mortified of course and apologized profusely.
They're happy."
"It's worse than murder, for it is prohibited twice in the decalogue, while murder is only mentioned once."
Second, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's maid-servant.
"Even as Mrs. Innitt spoke I conveyed a luscious morsel of filet mignon with mushrooms to my mouth and nearly broke my tooth on a piece of gravel that went with it, and Norah was doomed, for although we all laughed heartily, the thing had come to be such a joke, it was plain from the expression of Mrs. Innitt's countenance that she was very, very angry.
"Well--I don't envy them in the least," said Henriette.
"Several," said Henriette, unfastening her glove.
She turns hash into a confection and liver and bacon into a delicacy.
My dear boy, you'll be down with brain-fever if you don't watch out."
A woman with a cook like Norah Sullivan could rule an empire."
"It is curious, Bunny," said Henriette the other morning after an unusually late breakfast, "to observe by what qualities certain of these Newport families have arrived, as the saying is.
"It is not only a mean crime, but a dangerous one to boot.
How many times does that make?" I asked.
"Well, don't waste them here, Bunny," laughed Henriette.
"I've robbed churches and I've made way with fresh-air funds, and I've helped you in many another legitimate scheme, but in this, Mrs. Van Raffles, you'll have to go it alone."
"Do as I tell you," she commanded.
"Mrs. Innitt has discharged Norah, though I begged her not to," she fairly sang.
"But I'm willing to tell you just one thing, Bunny"--here her eyes began to twinkle joyously--"I'm going to Mrs. Innitt's to dinner to-morrow night--so look out for Norah by Monday."
"What!" cried Henrietta "What, pray, does the decalogue say about cooks, I'd like to know?"
"Oh yes," said Henriette.
"Simplicity itself," said I. "He is dressed by his tailors and she by her dressmaker; and as for food, they take home a suit-case full of it from every house-party they attend.
But how do you suppose the Oliver-Sloshingtons ever got in here?"
"Oh, don't you be afraid, Bunny," she answered.
I wouldn't pity them if I were you.
Mrs. Innitt would never forgive you, and society at large--"
"You are free to better your condition, Bunny," she said.
'After all it is the little surprises that give zest to life.'"
"Well, I draw the line at stealing a cook," said I, coldly.
How would you like it if Mrs. Gaster stole me away from you?"
"What, Mrs. Innitt?" I asked.
"Society at large would dine with me instead of with Mrs. Innitt, that's all," said Henriette.
"You are not in on this venture." And then apparently she relented.
"First, thou shalt not steal.
This was too much for the watchful Mrs. Innitt, self-poised though she always is, and despite my remonstrances she excused herself from the table for a moment, and I judge from the flushed appearance of her cheeks when she returned five minutes later that somebody had had the riot act read to her somewhere.
"It's ruined I am unless somebody'll be good to me and give me a riference, which Mrs. Innitt, bad cess to her, won't do, at all, at all," she wailed, and then I left her.
A new treasure was added to the stores of our loot, but somehow or other I have never been happy over the successful issue of the enterprise.
"Well, he got into the swim with each marriage--so he's got a four-ply grip," said I.
With this Henriette retired and the next morning on her way to early church I waylaid Norah.
"But how do they live?--they haven't a cent to their names," said Henriette.
All went well until the fish, when one of the two hair-pins turned up in the pompano to the supreme disgust of my hostess, who was now beginning to look worried. Hair-pin number two made its debut in my timbale.
There never were such pancakes, such purees, such made dishes as that woman gets up.
"You know how I feel on that subject," said I. "This business of going into another person's house as a guest and inducing their servants to leave is an infraction of the laws of hospitality.
"And you didn't have to use the automobile nut?" I asked, deeply impressed with the woman's ingenuity.
Having invented American society, or at least the machine that at present controls it, they are entitled to all the royalties it brings in.
It's her cook, that's what does it.
"But I am not going to rob Mrs. Innitt, as I told you once before.
The Rockerbilts got there all of a sudden by the sheer lavishness of their entertainment and their ability to give bonds to keep it up.
An epigram from you?
She called that night, and two days later was installed in the Van Raffles's kitchen.
'Cook's perfectly sober.
If she lost her cook she'd be Mrs. Outofit.
"To begin with, there was a rusty nail in my clam cocktail, and it nearly choked me to death. I tried hard to keep Mrs. Innitt from seeing what had happened, but she is watchful if not brainy, and all my efforts went for naught.
Never more than ten people at a time and everything cooked to a turn."
Henriette's answer was a puzzling smile.
"You'd better think twice on that proposition, Henriette," I advised with a gloomy shake of the head.
Anybody'd know you were the son of a clergyman! Well, let me tell you, I sha'n't steal the woman, and I sha'n't covet her.
"I won out, Bunny--I won out!" she cried.
"On what grounds?"
"Exactly; and with car-fare and sandwiches, and the champagne supplied free by the importers, for the advertisement, it cost them exactly twelve dollars and was set down as the jolliest affair of the season," said I.
"Neither you nor my dear old friend Raffles ever gave me credit for any brains.
I stood aghast.
"Bunny!" cried Henriette, with a silvery ripple of laughter.
"Only the Duke and Duchess of Snarleyow and--mercy!
"In reply to your note of Wednesday evening," said Henriette.
She was not kept long in waiting, for ten minutes later the automobile, with Henriette in it, came thundering up the drive.
"It certainly looks like it," said Mrs. Shadd.
This conjecture turned out to be the true one, but the farmer's wife was not to be turned from her conviction.
The full moon was shining through the trees, illumining with a silver light the roses on the grave and the basket of flowers.
"Not even one hour," cried his wife passionately; and her husband, seeing that advice would only irritate her more, remained silent.
The old man did not wait for a second invitation; he stepped inside the caravan, and the child closed the door.
How dismal the fair looked then!
'You must excuse my intruding, ma'am,' said the old man, with a polite bow; 'but I'm so fond of little folks, and I've brought this little girl of yours a picture, if she will accept it from me.'
The old man laughed a hearty laugh at the children's talk, and rapped again at the caravan door.
Then the small head turned round, and seemed to be telling what it had seen to some one within, and asking leave to admit the visitor; for a minute afterwards the door was opened, and the owner of the pretty face stood before the old man.
But there were no lights now; there was nothing to cast a halo round the dirty, weather-stained tents and the dingy caravans.
He wants to find you, and take you up in His arms, and carry you home; and He won't mind the wounds it has cost Him, if you'll only let Him do it.
There was not room for much furniture in the small caravan; a tiny stove, the chimney of which went through the wooden roof, a few pans, a shelf containing cups and saucers, and two boxes which served as seats, completely filled it.
She had the same beautiful eyes and sunny hair, though her face was thin and wasted.
The woman did not speak; a fit of coughing came on, and the old man stood looking at her with a very pitying expression.
'Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost.
'We get into lodgings for a little time in the winter; and then we let ourselves out to some of the small town theatres; but all the rest of the year we're going from feast to feast and from fair to fair--no rest nor comfort, not a bit!'
It was a very small place; there was hardly room for him to stand.
But she found her mother's face buried in the pillow, on which large tears were falling.
Rosalie had seated herself on one of the boxes close to her mother's bed.
From this she took two pins, and fastened the picture on the wooden wall, so that her mother could see it as she was lying in bed.
poor thing!' said the old man; and then a choking sensation appeared to have seized him, for he cleared his throat vigorously many times, but seemed unable to say more.
'Don't you wish you was her?' said one of the little boys to the other.
After crossing an almost impassable place, he climbed the steps leading to one of the caravans and knocked at the door.
It was the picture of a shepherd, with a very kind and compassionate face, who was bearing home in his bosom a lost lamb.
'It's a very pretty picture, isn't it, mammie dear?'
What's the matter, mammie dear?' her mother only wept the more.
But no answer came from the bed.
In the distance were some of the shepherd's friends, who were coming to meet him, and underneath the picture were these words, printed in large letters--
She was the child's mother, the old man felt sure.
Yet he did not seem to mind it; his face was full of love and full of joy as he looked at the lamb.
He had forgotten his sorrow in his joy that the lamb was saved.
A little old man, with a rosy, good-tempered face, was making his way across the sea of mud which divided the shows from each other.
How mercilessly it fell on the Fair-field that Sunday afternoon!
But the shepherd seemed to have suffered more than the lamb, for he was wounded in many places, and his blood was falling in large drops on the ground.
At the end of the caravan was a narrow bed something like a berth on board ship, and on it a woman was lying who was evidently very ill.
'Are you always on the move, ma'am?' asked the old man.
'It's a weary time I have of it--a weary time.'
CHAPTER I
And when the little girl sat down by her side, and tried to comfort her by stroking her hand very gently, and saying, 'Mammie dear, mammie dear, don't cry!
The lamb's fleece was torn in several places, and there were marks of blood on its back, as if it had been roughly used by some cruel beast in a recent struggle.
The little girl read the words aloud in a clear, distinct voice; and her mother gazed at the picture with tears in her eyes.
He went carefully down the steps of the caravan, and Rosalie stood at the window, watching him picking his way to the other shows, to which he was carrying the same message of peace.
'No; he doesn't see it,' repeated the woman; 'he thinks I ought to get up and act in the play, just as usual.
She was very poorly dressed, and she shivered as the damp, cold air rushed in through the open door.
'Good afternoon, my little dear,' said the old man.
Her hair, which was of a rich auburn colour, was hanging down to her waist, and her eyes were the most beautiful the old man thought he had ever seen.
'Rap again, sir, rap again; there's a little lass in there; she went in a bit since.'
She looked out from between the muslin curtains until he had quite disappeared to a distant part of the field, and then she turned to her mother and said eagerly--
The child had climbed on one of the boxes, and brought down a square red pincushion from the shelf which ran round the top of the caravan.
Rosalie thought her mother was asleep, and crept on tiptoe to her side, fearful of waking her.
By degrees her mother grew calmer, the sobs became less frequent, and, to the little girl's joy, she fell asleep.
'That's my father,' said the little girl.
'Good-day, ma'am,' said the old man; 'I shall, maybe, never see you again; but I would like the Good Shepherd to say those words of you.'
'It does look pretty there,' said the little girl; 'mammie, you can look at it nicely now.'
He was evidently no idler in the fair; he had come into it that Sunday afternoon for a definite purpose, and he did not intend to leave it until it was accomplished.
It was a very pretty little face, so pretty that the old man sighed to himself when he saw it.
'You must be tired of moving about, ma'am,' said the old man compassionately.
'Those are sweet words, ain't they?' said the old man.
A flush of pleasure came into the child's face as he brought out of his pocket his promised gift.
Rain, rain, rain!
This time a face appeared between the muslin curtains and peered cautiously out.
It was a curious door; the upper part of it, being used as a window, was filled with glass, behind which you could see two small muslin curtains, tied up with pink ribbon.
And the first thing her mother heard when she awoke from sleep was Rosalie's voice saying softly--
She was a little girl about twelve years of age, very slender and delicate in appearance.
'All the summer-time,' said the woman.
There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.'
'Yes, very ill,' gasped the woman bitterly; 'every one can see that but Augustus!'
There was only just room for the old man to stand, and the fire was so near him that he was in danger of being scorched.
Rosalie sat beside her without moving, lest she should awake her, and kept gazing at her picture till she knew every line of it.
'"Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep which was lost.
Never had such a shattering uproar, all vocal, broken out upon a peaceful afternoon.
Duke opened one drowsy eye.
If he had been able to do that, he would have said to himself: "We have here an animal of most peculiar and unattractive appearance, though, upon examination, it seems to be only a cat stealing a fishbone. Nevertheless, as the thief is large beyond all my recollection of cats and has an unpleasant stare, I will leave this spot at once."
Surrounded by the comforts of middle-class respectability, and profoundly oppressed, even in his youth, by the Puritan ideals of the household, he sometimes experienced a sense of suffocation.
It was Gipsy's war-cry, and, at the sound of it, Duke became a frothing maniac.
Sunshine fell sweetly upon porch and backyard; yonder was the familiar stable, and from its interior came the busy hum of a carpenter shop, established that morning by Duke's young master, in association with Samuel Williams and Herman.
This stately and dangerous walk of his, his long, vibrant whiskers, his scars, his yellow eye, so ice-cold, so fire-hot, haughty as the eye of Satan, gave him the deadly air of a mousquetaire duellist.
His extraordinary size, his daring, and his utter lack of sympathy soon made him the leader--and, at the same time, the terror--of all the loose-lived cats in a wide neighbourhood.
He was given to musing but not to avoidable action, and he seemed habitually to hope for something which he was pretty sure would not happen.
He made a stirring picture, however brief, as he left the solid porch behind him and sailed upward on an ascending curve into the sunlit air.
There, without an instant's pause, he gathered his fur-sheathed muscles, concentrated himself into one big steel spring, and launched himself superbly into space.
This cat was, for a cat, needlessly tall, powerful, independent, and masculine.
But he was ill-advised.
In that case, it was a leap calculated and executed with precision, for as the boys clamoured their pleased astonishment, Gipsy descended accurately into the orifice and passed majestically from public view, with the fishbone still in his mouth and his haughty head still high.
But it was the treacherous left that did the work.
This faithful sentinel, on guard even while Duke slept, signalled that alarums and excursions by parties unknown were taking place, and suggested that attention might well be paid.
He contracted no friendships and had no confidants.
Thus, being asleep in a nook behind the metal refuse-can, when the strange cat ventured to ascend the steps of the porch, his appearance was so unwarlike that the cat felt encouraged to extend its field of reconnaissance--for the cook had been careless, and the backbone of a three-pound whitefish lay at the foot of the refuse-can.
They rushed upon him from two directions, cutting off the steps of the porch.
His feet were already in motion toward the battlefield, with Penrod and Herman hurrying in his wake.
"My gorry!" he shouted.
Out from one side of his head, and mingling with his whiskers, projected the long, spiked spine of the big fish: down from the other side of that ferocious head dangled the fish's tail, and from above the remarkable effect thus produced shot the intolerable glare of two yellow eyes.
C'mon!"
This time it was the right arm of the semaphore that dipped--and Duke's honest nose was but too conscious of what happened in consequence.
He went forth in a May twilight, carrying the evening beefsteak with him, and joined the underworld.
He made a convulsive frontal attack upon the hobgoblin--and the massacre began.
Such was not his purpose, however, for, having attained his greatest possible altitude, he partially sat down and elevated his right arm after the manner of a semaphore.
Gipsy had seized the fishbone by the middle.
His head was proudly up; he was the incarnation of menacing power and of self-confidence.
In the very instant of his first eye's opening, the other eye and his mouth behaved similarly, the latter loosing upon the quiet air one shriek of mental agony before the little dog scrambled to his feet and gave further employment to his voice in a frenzy of profanity.
Even in his sleep, this gave him an air of wistfulness.
This semaphore arm remained rigid for a second, threatening; then it vibrated with inconceivable rapidity, feinting.
Therefore, on small accounts he decided to leave the field to his enemies and to carry the fishbone elsewhere.
It was about a foot from Duke's nose, and the little dog's dreams began to be troubled by his olfactory nerve.
Here was a strange experience--the horrific vision in the midst of things so accustomed.
To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece--the bone seemed a living part of it.
He had little fear for himself, because he was inclined to think that, unhampered, he could whip anything on earth; still, things seemed to be growing rather warm and he saw nothing to prevent his leaving.
Seemingly this left gave Duke three lightning little pats upon the right ear, but the change in his voice indicated that these were no love-taps.
On a fair Saturday afternoon in November Penrod's little old dog Duke returned to the ways of his youth and had trouble with a strange cat on the back porch.
He was precocious in dissipation.
He took two giant leaps. The first landed him upon the edge of the porch.
Long before his adolescence, his lack of domesticity was ominous, and he had formed bad companionships.
On the contrary, Duke was so electrified by his horrid awakening that he completely lost his presence of mind.
This indiscretion, so uncharacteristic, was due to the agitation of a surprised moment, for Duke's experience had inclined him to a peaceful pessimism, and he had no ambition for hazardous undertakings of any sort.
Meanwhile, he grew so rangy, and developed such length and power of leg and such traits of character, that the father of the little girl who owned him was almost convincing when he declared that the young cat was half broncho and half Malay pirate--though, in the light of Gipsy's later career, this seems bitterly unfair to even the lowest orders of bronchos and Malay pirates.
Such, in brief, was the terrifying creature which now elongated its neck, and, over the top step of the porch, bent a calculating scrutiny upon the wistful and slumberous Duke.
What that eye beheld was monstrous.
Gipsy possessed a vocabulary for cat-swearing certainly second to none out of Italy, and probably equal to the best there, while Duke remembered and uttered things he had not thought of for years.
It is possible that the white-fish's spinal column and flopping tail had interfered with his vision, and in launching himself he may have mistaken the dark, round opening of the cistern for its dark, round cover.
The scrutiny was searching but not prolonged.
The rosy hearthstone and sheltered rug were too circumspect for him.
Undaunted, the formidable cat raked Duke's nose again, somewhat more lingeringly, and prepared to depart with his fishbone.
"Duke's havin' a fight with the biggest cat you ever saw in your life!
The German officer shook his head.
"And you will place four men in ambush at the front and at the back.
He was tired and hungry after his long tramp, so he threw his sword, his helmet, and his revolver-belt down upon a chair, and fell to eagerly upon his supper.
"I used to work there."
"The Count of Chateau Noir."
Drink, sir, and be happy!
"My boy was disfigured by the blow, and this villain made his appearance the object of his jeers.
Captain Baumgarten sat still in his chair.
There are cold joints below.
The count had picked up the claret bottle and held it to the light.
I will open it!" He rushed from the room with his paper still crumpled up in his hand. An instant later, with a groaning of old locks and a rasping of bars, the low door swung open, and the Prussians poured into the stone-flagged passage.
"You have been, if you will allow me to say so, a little indiscreet to make yourself so much at home in a house every wall of which is honeycombed with secret passages.
"I do not know."
In that case, with twenty men--"
Hiding by day and travelling by night, they had got as far into France as Remilly, and were within a mile--a single mile, captain--of crossing the German lines when a patrol of Uhlans came right upon them.
I can tell you no more."
"Let them have their suppers in the kitchen.
Do what he might, he could not shake off his invisible enemies.
The moon had shone out between two rain-clouds, and threw the old house into silver and shadow.
On the other hand, you must not risk being cut off."
"Where?"
The fire was already burning up, crackling merrily, and sending spurts of blue, pungent smoke into the room.
"For God's sake, don't shoot!
"Well, we are surrounded by spies, and our only chance is to pounce upon him before he knows that we are on the way.
The captain whispered his orders to his men.
"I might march north, colonel, as if to join General Goeben.
Then the colonel would go forth in his wrath, and farmsteadings would blaze and villages tremble; but next morning there was still that same dismal tale to be told.
They had fought and they had been overborne.
At half-past eleven their guide stopped at a place where two high pillars, crowned with some heraldic stonework, flanked a huge iron gate.
It was a sight which gave a zest to his comfortable quarters, and to the cold fowl and the bottle of wine which the butler had brought up for him.
I regret to see that your eye is bleeding so.
Let me see, I had got as far as the young Bavarian at Carlsruhe.
Will you permit me to bind it with my silk handkerchief?"
It is about my son, my only child, Eustace, who was taken and died in escaping.
Above was a dark roof, breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it.
To continue, however, my boy's youth and his destitution--for his pockets were empty--moved the pity of a kind-hearted major, and he advanced him ten Napoleons from his own pocket without security of any kind.
"As guide?
"It is Count Eustace of Chateau Noir."
Colonel von Gramm, of the 24th Posen Infantry, had suffered severely during this new development.
It was a small room into which they looked, very meanly furnished. An elderly man, in the dress of a menial, was reading a tattered paper by the light of a guttering candle.
The captain walked first with Moser, a veteran sergeant, beside him.
Ah! it was hard, was it not, when they had come so far and were so near to safety?"
When at last, blinded and half-senseless, he staggered to his feet, it was only to be hurled back again into the great oaken chair.
Behind them the twenty infantrymen plodded along through the darkness with their faces sunk to the rain, and their boots squeaking in the soft, wet clay. They knew where they were going, and why, and the thought upheld them, for they were bitter at the loss of their comrades.
"My master!
No, it is no use your cocking your pistol, sir.
That night upon my son answering fiercely back to some taunt of his, he struck him in the eye, like this!"
"Is he often out at this hour?"
"How many men shall I take, colonel?"
It was what he might have expected.
You will arrest the count and bring him back. If there is an attempt at rescue, shoot him at once."
We must improve upon this."
Get back into the chair, you dog!
He and the sergeant stole on tiptoe to the lighted window.
Suffice it that to disguise themselves they had to take the clothes of two peasants, whom they waylaid in a wood.
The sergeant's wrist was fastened to that of the French peasant, and it had been whispered in his ear that in case of an ambush the first bullet fired would be through his head.
Many a German trooper saw the sea for the first time when he rode his horse girth-deep into the waves at Dieppe.
Above the fireplace were rows of heraldic shields with the blazonings of the family and of its alliances, the fatal saltire cross breaking out on each of them.
He sobbed in his impotent anger and shame.
"I am Captain Baumgarten of, the 24th Posen Regiment."
His chin sank slowly upon his chest, and the ten candles gleamed upon the broad, white scalp.
"You will understand me when I say that it is a bitter thing to be helpless in the hands of an insolent and remorseless enemy.
He leaned back in his wooden chair with his feet upon a box, while a bottle of white wine stood with a half-filled tumbler upon a stool beside him.
It is a curious little story, and I think that I can promise you that you will never forget it.
The colonel could trust him where a more dashing officer might be in danger.
It was long, however, before Captain Baumgarten had satisfied himself upon the point.
But the count?
"Yes, captain."
"Give this man food and detain him," said he to the sergeant.
I do not know how many he has killed, but it is he who cut the cross upon the foreheads, for it is the badge of his house."
"There is nothing in my house which is not at your disposal.
Captain Baumgarten stamped with his feet, tore down curtains, and struck with the pommel of his sword.
The murdered sentries had each had a saltire cross slashed across their brows, as by a hunting-knife.
"Before daybreak."
You have but to say the word.
"Send Captain Baumgarten to me at once," said he.
"I cannot tell.
"And the others, captain?"
Two sides were oak-panelled and two were hung with faded tapestry, across which huntsmen and dogs and stags were still dimly streaming.
THE LORD OF CHATEAU NOIR
I am ashamed to look you in the face, Captain Baumgarten.
The Prussian commander waved him away.
The officer, pale, but firm, folded his arms and stared defiantly at the man who tortured him.
I hope to see you with your prisoner to-morrow morning."
It was true.
"Well, to continue my story--at the end of a fortnight my son and his friend escaped.
"You have no cause to trouble about your men.
It was the count's only child, and indeed we all think that it has driven him mad.
Some were to creep to the front door, some to the back.
"The colonel, as I say, was good to my boy.
I regret extremely that you will not permit me to use such slight skill in surgery as I possess.
The wall in which it had been the opening had crumbled away, but the great gate still towered above the brambles and weeds which had overgrown its base.
He sat within a small circle of brilliant light which gleamed upon his silver shoulder-straps, and threw out his terra-cotta face, his heavy eyebrows, and his yellow moustache.
That reminds me, captain, that you are not quite situated upon a bed of roses yourself, are you now?
"Please don't tease me so.
"Don't use that word again.
"No, sir, I won't," Elsie answered with a blush.
Then the little girl brought a stool, and seating herself in the old posture with her head in her nurse's lap, she drew her mother's miniature from her bosom, and fixing her eyes lovingly upon it, said, as she had done hundreds of times before: "Now, mammy, please tell me about my dear, dear mamma."
"Dear papa," she whispered, "would it make you happy? and do you think mamma knows, and that she would like it?"
"And it just spoils all our pleasure."
He always buys my dresses himself and says how they are to be made.
Couldn't you persuade your papa to buy some for you?"
He was quite silent for a moment after she had done.
"Ah! well, dear," he said in a soothing tone; "we won't talk any more about it.
Then she would press all sorts of dainties upon the little girl in such a way that it was next to impossible to decline them, and occasionally even went so far as to suggest improvements, or rather alterations, in her dress, which she said was entirely too plain.
"Oh, papa, don't!" she said, turning away her face.
"Dear papa, you won't be angry if I ask another question?'"'
"Ah, now I have my own little girl again," he said, drawing her to his knee and returning her caresses with interest: "But there, I hear Miss Rose's step in the hall.
"Oh, papa, it's that hateful Miss Stevens; I can't bear her!" she cried, throwing herself upon his breast, and bursting into a fit of passionate weeping.
You wear so little jewelry, and your father could afford to cover you with it if he chose.
"Did he, papa?
At last she spoke, and he bent down to catch the words.
"Elsie!"
"No, Miss Stevens, I think it never was," he replied, offering the other arm to Rose.
"I hope she will, papa," she said; "I think she might be very glad to come and live with you; and in such a beautiful home, too."
"You forget that we ought not to speak of other people's faults."
Miss Rose, too, was gone, she found upon further search, and though she had not much difficulty in conjecturing why she had thus, for the first time, been left behind, she could not help feeling rather lonely and desolate.
She felt no disposition to renew the afternoon's conversation with Annie Hart, so she went quietly upstairs to their private parlor and sat down to amuse herself with a book until Chloe came in from eating her supper.
She obeyed, hanging her head and blushing.
"I think I have some reason to be cross, papa," she said; "I thought we were going to have such a delightful time here, and now it is all spoiled.
But before there was time for anything more to be said Miss Stevens had returned, and walking straight up to Mr. Dinsmore, she put her arm through his, saying with a little laugh, and what was meant for a very arch expression, "You see I don't stand upon ceremony with old friends, Mr. Dinsmore.
She tried to keep out of the lady's way, but it was quite impossible.
A pair of gold bracelets, like mine for instance, would be very pretty, and look charming on your lovely white arms: those pearl ones you wear sometimes are very handsome--any one could tell that they are the real thing--but you ought to have gold ones too, with clasps set with diamonds.
"She isn't! it's false!
I can never forgive myself for all I have made you suffer, and when you were restored to me almost from the grave, I made a vow to do all in my power to make your future life bright and happy."
I can't bear to have them say such things about you!" she exclaimed indignantly.
I have heard ladies say they would not marry a man who had a child."
Mr. Dinsmore said nothing for a moment; but thinking tears would prove the best relief to her overwrought feelings, contented himself with simply stroking her hair in a soothing way, and once or twice pressing his lips gently to her forehead.
They--Mr.
"But, papa," she added the next moment, "Miss Stevens does that constantly."
"I am only afraid she loves you better than she does me."
"You ought to have more flounces on your skirts, my dear," she remarked one day.
Run to mammy and have your hat put on."
"Would you like it, dearest?" he asked; "or would you prefer to go on living just as we have been, you and I together?
"But you know you will have to leave Miss Rose."
"Thank you, ma'am, I daresay you mean to be very kind," replied Elsie, trying not to look annoyed, "but I don't want a mamma, since my own dear mother has gone to heaven; papa is enough for me, and I like the way he dresses me.
"I think I shall enjoy the fortnight we are to spend here, papa; it seems such a very pleasant place," Elsie remarked, in a tone of great satisfaction.
"Skirt flounced to the waist are so very pretty and dressy, and you would look sweetly in them, but I notice you don't wear them at all.
Do ask your papa to let you get a new dress and have it made so; I am sure he would consent, for any one can see that he is very fond of you.
"Do you think she will come, papa?" she asked anxiously.
He was silent again for a little; then said kindly, "I think I had better take you away from these troublesome talkers.
"That makes no difference, my daughter," he said gravely.
A few days after this, Elsie was playing on the veranda, with several other little girls.
The dressmaker wanted to put more flounces on, but papa didn't want them and neither did I. He says he doesn't like to see little girls loaded with finery, and that my clothes shall be of the best material and nicely made, but neat and simple."
"Oh, yes; I know your dress is not cheap; I didn't mean that at all: it is quite expensive enough, and some of your white dresses are beautifully worked; but I would like a little more ornament.
"I wish we were there now.
Elsie was out again in a moment, just as the gentlemen had joined Rose, who excited their surprise and disgust by a repetition of Miss Stevens' speech to her.
I have been near telling her several times that I did wish she would let me alone."
But won't you tell me about it?"
At last he said, "Elsie!" in a soft, low tone that quite made the little girl start and look up into his face; for she, too, had been in a deep reverie.
Elsie went in to get her hat, and Miss Stevens came towards Rose, saying, "I think I heard you say you were going to walk; and I believe, if you don't forbid me, I shall do myself the pleasure of accompanying you.
"What, my dear?"
Oh, papa, ask her very soon, won't you?"
"What is my little girl thinking of?" he asked at length.
Edward tried to entertain his young companion, but was too much provoked at the turn things had taken to make himself very agreeable to any one; and altogether it was quite an uncomfortable walk: no one seeming to enjoy it but Miss Stevens, who laughed and talked incessantly; addressing nearly all her conversation to Mr. Dinsmore, he answering her with studied politeness, but nothing more.
"Why, papa; did you know she was here?"
I will be ready in one moment." And before Rose could recover from her astonishment sufficiently to reply she had disappeared through the hall door.
"And thus deprive my little girl of her rights," he said, softly kissing the glowing cheek.
Then drawing her closer to him, he said tenderly, "My poor little girl, I am sorry you should be so annoyed; but you know it is not true, daughter, and why need you care what other people think and say?"
We must expect annoyances in this world, my child; and must try to bear them with patience, remembering that God sends the little trials as well as the great, and that He has commanded us to 'let patience have her perfect work.' I fear it is a lack of the spirit of forgiveness that makes it so difficult for us to bear these trifling vexations with equanimity.
Indeed, my daughter, I cannot ask her to come to us unless you will promise to do so, and to love and obey, her just as you do me.
Elsie made no reply, but dropping scissors, paper, and everything, sprang up and ran swiftly along the veranda, through the hall, upstairs, and without pausing to take breath, rushed into her father's room, where he sat quietly reading.
"Ah! but everyone does not appreciate my society as highly as you do," he replied, laughing and pinching her cheek; "and besides, you forget about the troublesome little girl.
He laid his finger upon her lips.
CHAPTER I.
"Papa," said Elsie, gazing longingly upon them, as she stood by the open window, "can't we take a walk?"
"What, papa?" she asked, blushing again, for his tone was reproving.
Ah! if you were my child, I would dress you sweetly, you dear little thing!"
"If Miss Allison consents to take a mother's place to you, I am sure your own mamma, if she could speak to you, would tell you she deserved to have the title; and it would hurt us both very much if you refused to give it.
"No, darling; ask as many as you wish."
--ROWE.
"Was it not too provoking, papa?" exclaimed Elsie, as she followed him into his room on their return from their walk.
Phillis?" asked Mr. Dinsmore, looking excessively amused.
"You feel better now, dearest, do you not?" he asked presently, as she raised her head to wipe away her tears.
She skipped away, but was back again almost immediately.
But it is very kind of you to be so concerned for Phillis."
Miss Stevens had, from the first, conceived a great antipathy to Rose, whom she considered a dangerous rival, and generally avoided, excepting when Mr. Dinsmore was with her; but she always interrupted a tete-a-tete between them when it was in her power to do so without being guilty of very great rudeness.
"Well, dear, and what of it all?" he asked, soothingly.
Her father laughed a little.
what has she to do with my papa's affairs?" asked Elsie indignantly, the color rushing over face, neck, and arms.
"Papa, what do you think?
I am not going to have any new mamma."
"Yes."
What do you say to going home?"
"I won't, papa," she murmured, blushing and hanging her head.
I have just been waiting for pleasant company.
If he has orders to come at all hazards, my words will not stop him; if it is left to his discretion, possibly he may pause before he brings on so dire a calamity."
There were throughout the country a large number of gentlemen, like Captain Wilson, wholly opposed to the general feeling.
I grant that it would have been far better had the colonists taxed themselves to pay the extra amount, instead of the mother country taxing them; but this they would not do.
So far but few acts of violence had taken place.
The English government, in its desire for peace, abandoned all the duties with the exception of that on tea; but even this concession was not sufficient to satisfy the colonists.
Half an hour later Colonel Smith, having performed the duty that he was sent to do, resumed the homeward march with the whole of his troops.
It was but the spark in the powder.
They were, it is true, forced to trade with England, but this obligation was set wholly at naught.
The Americans assert that it was the English; the English say that as they advanced several shots were fired at them from behind a stone wall and from some of the adjoining houses, which wounded one man and hit Major Pitcairne's horse in two places.
"I am an Englishman," he said, "and my sympathies are wholly with my country.
"Sir," he said to the goldfish, "I am here.
"It is now time for you to try, and this is as good a change as any."
Then as nothing happened, with a voice like a whip Mr. Wicker said: "Start at once!"
He hurried, memorizing as he closed the book, and hoisted it once more to its high shelf.
"Never fear, Christopher.
What shall I do first?"
Dusk came two hours before its time; thunder snarled in the sky.
The shop was black except for the paler crescent of the bow window giving onto the street.
Sniff the smoke and drink the liquid that remains," he said.
With difficulty, standing on tiptoe, Chris lifted it down, and placing it on the floor, turned over page after page.
Under his eyes the wooden folds of cloth became rich silk, embroidery gleamed in its reality upon the coat, and oh! the face!
"Oh, sir!
As he went on, concentrating on becoming a goldfish in the bowl on the table, he became aware of a humming sensation in his head.
The feet of the boy twitched and shifted in their pointed shoes.
They played this new and unique form of hide-and-seek, each one taking a new shape, turn by turn, as a challenge to the other's powers of imagination and detection.
From that time, Chris became increasingly proficient, and as his ability grew he began to find magic a wonderful game, which he and Mr. Wicker played together.
"How you have improved, my boy!" he exclaimed.
He heard the magician going up the spiral staircase to his room above, and after changing himself to a mouse to slip under the door and see that the room was really empty, Chris resumed his proper shape and opened the doors of the cupboard at the far end of the room.
"Better come back now.
There were the words, and there the charm. Certain elements were to be mixed and poured at the proper time.
Mr. Wicker though interested and attentive, gave Chris the impression that what he had been told was not new to him.
Remember Incantation Seventy-three, Book One."
If you get stuck I can help you.
Outside, the rain poured down as if over some skyward dam.
If he was to be a magician, could he make this boy come to life?
The afternoon, rainy before, increased in storm.
This afternoon, a rainy one, he had tired of changing himself into and out of objects.
The prospect excited him wildly, for he had no companion with whom to laugh and share jokes.
It was as if the stiffness melted.
So there was nothing left to do but to work as fast and as well as he could.
And as they turned, the light and the dark hands holding firm, the firelight was streaming from the distant door and Mr. Wicker waited.
Mr. Wicker shook his head with a smile.
Without interest at first, Chris stared at the little Negro boy, so gaily dressed in full red trousers, gilded jacket and white turban. The figure's shoes, carved in some Eastern style, had curved up-pointing toes.
You know enough to start, and I feel reasonably sure that you will be quite able to change back again.
Soon Chris could turn himself into a limited number of things, for even Mr. Wicker's magic had a limit: a singing bird in a cage, a part of the pattern in the brocaded curtains, or a section of the design in the Indian rug.
"Suppose I change and can't change back?"
This grew until it seemed that all his body was filled with the strange new vibration, tingling from his feet to the crown of his head.
Chris, his cheeks hot from excitement and the fire, tiptoed out just as Mr. Wicker's step creaked on the topmost tread of the spiral stair.
The words came out, interrupted by peals and cracks of thunder.
Chris stared at the fishbowl, empty now.
On its top shelf was Book Three, a book a foot thick and bound in heavy brass studded with semi-precious stones in the form of signs and symbols.
Seventy-four, Book One: The Return."
For in the blackness lit only by the lightning and its own eerie glow, the wood was changing as he watched.
All at once, at the imminent prospect of really changing himself into some other form, Chris became frightened and his hands grew cold.
Do you really think I know how?" he cried, gazing up into the face of his master.
His head swam and he felt faint and a little sick, but he persisted through the final words.
He went straight to the bowl and addressed the fish.
Come now," he said, putting out his hand to touch Chris's shoulder in a reassuring way, "here you go.
With infinite caution Chris closed the door silently behind him, and running lightly forward, reached the figure of the Negro boy.
"This will seem to smoke.
Then all at once the idea came to Chris.
For Chris was now as accepted a member of the household as Mr. Wicker himself, and had it not been for the robust guffaws of Ned Cilley, and the ministrations of the now devoted Becky, Chris's days would have been tedious indeed.
The wooden grin loosened, the large eyes turned, the hand holding the hard bouquet of carved flowers moved, and let the bouquet fall.
CHAPTER 10
A peculiar feeling, but as you come to do it more often and more quickly, the change will come more rapidly and in time you will be scarcely aware of the sensations at all." He looked at his pupil with pride.
"Gee!
That is change enough from a carved wooden figure.
"Go and feel of it, Christopher," Mr. Wicker urged.
"This is the best yet--except for Amos.
CHAPTER 11
In her mind she was greatly troubled over the fate of the bold visitor of the night before.
What's the use worrying?"
The early hour was responsible for the bright solitude which marked the place.
But a swift messenger from the castle reached the guard-room ahead of him.
A throb of thankfulness assailed her heart.
He was now ready to seize the guard, but would not do so until he had conferred with his sovereign.
He shall have a fair trial, rest assured."
You will allow me to say, general, that you have behaved in a most outrageous manner in approaching my guest with such foul proposals.
"I regret to say that I have but this instant received a message from her highness, commanding me to send him to the castle," said Quinnox, with a smile.
Take me and all that I can give you in his stead, and the world never shall know the truth.
"Bring this fellow Baldos to me, Colonel Quinnox," he said, without greeting.
Oh, dear, I'm so sorry he has to walk all night In this rain. Poor fellow!
Her wide scope of vengeance even contemplated the destruction of Graustark if her end could be obtained in no other way.
I was going back to Washington soon, Yetive, but I'll stay on now and see this thing to the end.
You have lost Baldos.
Your secret is safe with me.
"Good-bye, Count Marlanx."
It is more important than--"
Marlanx fell back amazed and stunned.
You have deceived those who love you best and trust you most.
I've had his word for it.
It rests with you," he cried eagerly, following her to the door.
And to think that I have spared him from death to have it come to this!
Whereupon the hot-headed girl from Dixie suspended hostilities and became a very demure young woman.
"Good morning," he said, extending his hand, which she did not see.
She saw the red of shame and embarrassment mount to her cheeks and then she covered her eyes with her hands.
It was beyond the power of woman to keep from laughing.
"I don't think he has any proof against Baldos," said Beverly, thinking only of the guardsman.
Then she closed the blinds, shutting out the night completely.
Beverly was trembling like a leaf.
Baldos was a spy in the employ of Dawsbergen.
"I cannot prevent General Marlanx from preferring serious charges against Baldos, dear.
It's useless to deny it.
"Don't you mass, too?"
Chief among them was the terrible overthrow of the Iron Count.
"Your highness, hear me," implored Marlanx, white to the roots of his hair.
I have never wronged you--"
"What do you mean?"
There would be an awful row at home if I married him.
She stopped with a sharp exclamation of surprise.
"I can but stand condemned, then, your highness, without a hearing.
Don't you try to stop me!
The man who makes war on women is not fit to serve one.
"What a cur you are!
"He cannot come in half an hour," she cried quickly.
"Count Marlanx," she said, with entrancing dimples, "will you report to me at nine to-morrow morning?"
His eyes for the moment held her spellbound.
She was disturbed by his threat to reprimand Baldos.
"You mean inside the city walls?" asked Yetive.
"Didn't he give you a talking to?"
"If anything happens, then, I am to be blamed for it," she cried in deep distress.
"But he will have me shot, your highness," said he gladly.
CHAPTER XIV
"Is it possible?
"The recompense of a sweet smile, a tender blush and the unguarded thanks of a pretty woman.
Baldos stood at the window in an attitude of alert attention.
Count Marlanx is not at all in sympathy with him, you are aware.
"He will do nothing of the kind.
"Yes, your highness?"
Tell me; I want to know."
"Report to me in half an hour.
Beverly, quite happy in her complete victory, enjoyed a nap of profound sweetness and then was ready for her walk with the princess.
The royal victoria was driven to the fortress, conveying the supposed princess and the Countess Dagmar to the home of Count Marlanx.
His marked preference for the American girl did not escape attention.
We are going out, too.
"That settles it," she said rigidly.
"Yes, your highness, it certainly is interesting," he said, as he fell back into position beside Haddan.
"It came from Rome; it has a history which I shall try to tell you some day, and which makes it almost invaluable.
"You may expect to be summoned then, so hold yourself in readiness.
Struck by a sudden impulse, Beverly called Baldos to the side of the vehicle.
He went in an official capacity, it is true, but he was privileged to study the secrets of our defense with alarming freedom.
"It is altogether contrary to custom, and--" but Beverly put her hand over the critical lips and smiled like a guilty child.
Yesterday he visited the fortress.
"But you will break it, I am sure," she asserted confidently.
I am acting on the presumption that he is wholly innocent of any desire to betray us."
The count provided a light luncheon in his quarters after the ladies had gone over the fortress.
My afternoon is to be a dull one, unless you permit me to watch the tennis game," he said.
He was drawing the hand to his lips when a shadow darkened the French window, and a saber rattled warningly.
Beverly drew her arm away spasmodically and took a step toward the window.
"--but he is in a position to give the most valuable information to an enemy.
"I am happy to have pleased your highness," he said steadily.
"Oh, isn't it lucky you kept it?" she cried.
She and I have promised to play tennis with the princess at three o'clock." The count's glare of disappointment lasted but a moment. The diplomacy of egotism came to his relief, and he held back the gift for another day, but not for another woman.
"He needn't open the door for us, at all.
He's getting awfully strict!"
"We know the way to Fairyland--where Father's gone--quite well," said Sylvie: "if only the Gardener would let us out."
"Why not try the large one?
It would hurt him to be divided."
Bruno sat down on the floor and began crying.
"Why the bumble-bee, of course!" said Bruno.
"That saves two shillings!" And he took the children's hands, that they might all go out together when the door was opened.
"And if you only pinched him?" queried Sylvie.
"I shall address him, first of all," the Professor explained as we went along, "with a few playful remarks on the weather.
"He thought he saw an Albatross That fluttered round the lamp: He looked again, and found it was A Penny-Postage-Stamp. 'You'd best be getting home,' he said: 'The nights are very damp!'"
"It would be drownded," Bruno pronounced confidently.
"The smaller animal ought to go to bed at once," he said with an air of authority.
"But look here, Professor dear!" whispered Sylvie.
The Professor looked anxiously in my direction, and seemed to look through and through me without seeing me.
You see, whatever fatigue one incurs by carrying, one saves by being carried!
"It's all true, Professor dear!
And now it's open, we are going out by Rule--the Rule of Three."
"I never talks to nobody when he isn't here!" he replied.
"I'm sorry you don't like lessons," I said.
"Nobody else could have thought of the reason, so quick.
"He is indeed," said I. But the Professor took no notice of my remark. He had put on a beautiful cap with a long tassel, and was selecting one of the Other Professor's walking-sticks, from a stand in the corner of the room.
On our way, we passed the target, at which Uggug had been made to shoot during the Ambassador's visit.
Good-bye, Sir!" he added to my intense surprise, giving my hand an affectionate squeeze.
"That's what makes the song so interesting."
"Mister Sir, isn't the day as short as it's long?
In fact, I doubt if the man himself would ever feel it, at all.
By this time we had come up to the Gardener, who was standing on one leg, as usual, and busily employed in watering a bed of flowers with an empty watering-can.
"It hasn't got no water in it!" Bruno explained to him, pulling his sleeve to attract his attention.
Do come and ask him, Professor dear!"
But the children still kept fast hold of his hands.
"Perhaps I'll come after you, some day soon.
"See!" said the Professor, pointing out a hole in the middle of the bull's-eye.
That would be awkward, I admitted, taking it quite as a matter of course that he had so suddenly caught sight of me.
"He is so cruel!" he sobbed.
"The action of the nerves," he began eagerly, "is curiously slow in some people.
CHAPTER 12.
"Anywhere!" shouted the excited Professor.
"I shall now return," said the Professor, when we had walked a few yards: "you see, it's impossible to read here, for all my books are in the house."
This remark woke up Bruno, suddenly and completely.
His grandchildren might."
"A lot of water in it makes one's arms ache." And he went on with his work, singing softly to himself,
I mean, isn't it the same length?"
Wouldn't it be dreadful for the other things!"
"Isn't he kind, Mister Sir?"
He's got lost again!"
"I wouldn't like to be the grandchild of a pinched grandfather, would you, Mister Sir?" Bruno whispered.
"I don't want to be divided," he said decisively.
"Because he can't go at twice," said the Other Professor.
"Why at once?" said the Professor.
"When I said it would hurt him, I was merely referring to the action of the nerves--"
"I wouldn't mind letting you out," said the Gardener.
"That'll do it!" the Gardener shouted, as he hurled the watering-can across the flower-bed, and produced a handful of keys--one large one, and a number of small ones.
"On second thoughts, don't shout," the Professor replied.
This reminded the poor children of all the troubles, about which they had come to their old friend.
"Won't he open the door for you?" said the Professor.
"Well, what's the difference?" Bruno asked.
"Sometimes, when I's too happy, I wants to be a little miserable.
The Professor left off polishing his spectacles to consider.
Bruno carefully examined the hole.
"Why didn't he shout? He'd be sure to hear his-self, 'cause he couldn't be far off, oo know."
"And the two bits would sink down in the sea!"
Then it occurred to him that there might have been something misleading in his so pointedly seeking her, and he felt a momentary constraint.
She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground.
"Then you might naturally feel yourself justified in telling her that you don't think I'm the right person for Effie." He uttered a sound of protest, but she disregarded it.
Then she held out her hand.
She shook her head with a faint smile.
Only--just what did it signify?
"But it's barely ten minutes past.
"I'm afraid there's not much time; we must be back at lessons at half-past nine."
Darrow stood still in the path.
"You'll tell me about that, then--won't you?"
Owen, like Sophy Viner, had the kind of face which seems less the stage on which emotions move than the very stuff they work in.
"With all my heart!
There was in them an undefinable appeal, whether for help or forbearance he could not tell.
"I mean, in seeming not to trust you.
Let's at least walk a little way toward the river."
The essential cheapness of the whole affair--as far as his share in it was concerned--came home to him with humiliating distinctness.
"And that's what you're trying to tell me now?"
Presently he was struck by the fact that Owen Leath and the girl were silent also; and this gave a new turn to his thoughts.
"Yes," he admitted, "we're great friends."
'You are old,' said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak-- Pray how did you manage to do it?'
'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,' Said his father; 'don't give yourself airs! Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.
'Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar.
There's no pleasing them!'
Here was another puzzling question; and as Alice could not think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in a VERY unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.
'I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice; 'I can't remember things as I used--and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!'
'Come, my head's free at last!' said Alice in a tone of delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found: all she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay far below her.
'Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.
'I've something important to say!'
'I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was beginning to see its meaning.
However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.
'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, 'I kept all my limbs very supple By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box-- Allow me to sell you a couple?'
'What size do you want to be?' it asked.
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
'I can see you're trying to invent something!'
Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks!'
She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking rapidly; so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit.
'Serpent, I say again!' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, 'I've tried every way, and nothing seems to suit them!'
'I'm NOT a serpent!' said Alice indignantly.
'Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied; 'only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.'
'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son, 'I feared it might injure the brain; But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again.'
'Well!
Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
'Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly; 'some of the words have got altered.'
'Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you wouldn't mind,' said Alice: 'three inches is such a wretched height to be.'
'No,' said the Caterpillar.
This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of adding, 'You're looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough; and what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a serpent?'
Alice crouched down among the trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and untwist it.
In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself.
'I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've tried hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her; 'but those serpents!
How puzzling all these changes are!
'As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the Pigeon; 'but I must be on the look-out for serpents night and day!
And oh, my poor hands, how is it I can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the distant green leaves.
'It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.
After a while she remembered that she still held the pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
'A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone of the deepest contempt.
'I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
'Why?' said the Caterpillar.
'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before, And have grown most uncommonly fat; Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door-- Pray, what is the reason of that?'
'You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
Alice folded her hands, and began:--
'Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, 'So you think you're changed, do you?'
'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life.'
I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another!
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly.
No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it.
'Well, be off, then!' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it settled down again into its nest.
Alice said nothing: she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.
'What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. 'And where HAVE my shoulders got to?
'Serpent!' screamed the Pigeon.
'I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; 'but if they do, why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'
'And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, 'and just as I was thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come wriggling down from the sky!
'You are old,' said the youth, 'one would hardly suppose That your eye was as steady as ever; Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose-- What made you so awfully clever?'
As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction, like a serpent.
'You are old, Father William,' the young man said, 'And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head-- Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I--I hardly know, sir, just at present--at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said Alice.
Then it got down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely remarking as it went, 'One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.'
Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it; and as it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question.
WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon.
'Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar.
Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was hardly room to open her mouth; but she did it at last, and managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.
Which brought them back again to the beginning of the conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's making such VERY short remarks, and she drew herself up and said, very gravely, 'I think, you ought to tell me who YOU are, first.'
'I--I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.
This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again.
'Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had asked it aloud; and in another moment it was out of sight.
'Let me alone!'
'Who are YOU?'
'Come back!' the Caterpillar called after her.
It was so long since she had been anything near the right size, that it felt quite strange at first; but she got used to it in a few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual.
'Come, there's half my plan done now!
'I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very truthful child; 'but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.'
However, I've got back to my right size: the next thing is, to get into that beautiful garden--how IS that to be done, I wonder?' As she said this, she came suddenly upon an open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.
'One side of WHAT?
She had just succeeded in curving it down into a graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a hurry: a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating her violently with its wings.
'But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. 'I'm a--I'm a--'
"I don't know.
The ship drifted closer, but to one side.
We've sprung a leak and the pressure's dropping."
He wasn't the real pilot.
"Heard about it from the broadcasts and figured you might land around here.
When they were near turnover point, he began cranking the little gyroscope to swing the ship.
The computer seemed to work as it should.
He followed her.
And you've decided your precious Lobby won't save you?"
In the end, he compromised, leaving a small margin for a bad landing that would require a second attempt, but with less practice than he wanted.
"Oh." Her voice was low.
They've started research too late and they'll be under so much pressure that the real brains won't have a chance.
A little ship was less than three hundred yards away.
It would soon pass him completely.
He inhaled deeply and yanked the oxygen tank free.
"I'm on your side now."
"I can't see how such a reformed young noblewoman calmly walked over and stole a life raft.
He stared, then reached out to touch the lump there.
It would miss him by a good hundred feet, but it was probably the best the amateur pilot could do.
He switched to Mars-normal when he was a liaison agent and never changed back.
The ship was a mess when Feldman freed himself from the elastic straps of the seat.
No cure, research beginning immediately.
It might work out here where there was room to maneuver and nothing to hit.
"Thank God.
"It's up to you, Dan," she told him, and there was all the sincerity in the world in her blue eyes.
She turned her back, pulling a thin blouse down from her neck.
He turned to the flare computer and back to what he could see through the quartz viewport.
The speed was within acceptable limits.
Can't you save him?"
It was probably a deliberate clue to give him hope, to assure him the villages were still trying.
Feldman was out of his suit and at the control panel.
"And your motive--your real motive?" he insisted.
"I don't hate you.
Jake caught his look and nodded.
Saving you wasn't in my orders."
He threw her her spacesuit and one of the emergency bottles of oxygen from the rack.
I can see that now.
"Mrs. Everts rates a topsecret break?" Doc commented dryly.
"She's the daughter of Elmers of Space Lobby!" Chris answered.
Then there was a long wait before a third try was made.
You didn't have to spy out knowledge from me.
Dan, are we all going to have to die?
He recognized it as a life raft.
I've been trying all along to get it to your Research division."
He'd forgotten that the inflated suit held enough oxygen for several minutes.
The rope shot out, well thrown.
He gave up trying to see the ground and was forced to trust the machinery designed for amateur pilots.
Chris had shrieked as they hit, but she was unbuckling herself now.
It was self-leveling in an atmosphere, and automatic flare computers were supposed to make it possible for an amateur to judge the rate of descent near the surface.
And I heard his whole confession.
When I'm convinced I'm safe with you, I may tell you about it."
There wasn't that much free money in the villages.
He had located Jake's village through the little telescope when he finally reached for the main blast control.
"I came along to see you killed, as you know very well.
It works in culture bottles, but it may fail in person.
I just used it, hoping I could reach you."
They had no aspirators, however, and they couldn't cover much territory in the spacesuits they would have to use.
I can't see how your brilliant mind concocted this whole scheme in almost no time. And to be honest, I can't even see why Medical Lobby decided to save me at the last minute and sent you to do the job.
Topsecret.
Tomorrow maybe, but not now.
"I liked the air out there better," he told her bitterly.
Dan, I almost gave up!"
"Come off it, Chris!"
You'll just have to believe me.
I was with Captain Everts when he was found, so I discovered how to get into the raft.
His body struck the edge of the airlock and a hand jerked him inside. The outer seal was slammed shut and locked, and there was a hiss of air entering.
She sighed and dropped onto a little seat.
Dad caught it, too, and it must be close to the time for him.
"It was all true." Anger began to grow in her eyes.
It was within five feet now.
An automatic seal on the suit cut off the connection.
Finally he reached for the control, hoping he'd figured his landing orbit reasonably well by simple logic.
He flailed his arms and beat his legs together, senselessly trying to force himself closer, while trying to guess who could have taken the chance.
She swore at him, then began ripping off the spacesuit.
He had to reach the wastelands away from any of the shuttle ports.
Again blue spurts came, but this time matters were even worse.
And bit by bit, he forced the fear and horror away from him until he could examine his situation.
That shuttle pilot was found in a routine check, stowed away on the life raft.
Penalty violation topsecret, death all concerned.
It picked up too much speed at too great an angle.
There was no way to practice maneuvering without actually doing so.
It looked reassuring--and was probably written with that in mind.
Something flashed a hot blue, and the little ship leaped forward. Whoever was handling it knew nothing about piloting.
"All right," he said grudgingly.
He was gaining some proficiency, however, he felt.
As always her story had a convincing element she shouldn't have known. The pilot's farewell, addressing him as Dr. Feldman, had been too low for her to hear, but it was something that fitted her story.
He began counting on his fingers.
He couldn't hold on long enough to tie the rope....
A spacesuited figure suddenly appeared in the tiny airlock, holding a coil of rope.
The whole scheme was his.
He smoothed it out in the following hours as he watched the markings on Mars.
He shrugged.
"Spill your story."
There was a manual lever, which Chris must have used before.
Then something blinked to one side.
The topsecret stuff looks bad for research.
He grasped it, just as his lungs seemed about to burst.
Shut up and let me see if I can figure out how to land this thing."
But trying to make a landing was going to be different.
Nor was it many days afterward that his brother John had a plot laid against him by Antiochus's party, and was slain by them.
From The Taking Of Jerusalem By Antiochus Epiphanes, To The Death Of Herod The Great.
And when a great many of his men were slain, Judas took the rest with him, and fled to the toparchy of Gophna.
Now, after the king was departed, Judas was not idle; for as many of his own nation came to him, so did he gather those that had escaped out of the battle together, and gave battle again to Antiochus's generals at a village called Adasa; and being too hard for his enemies in the battle, and killing a great number of them, he was at last himself slain also.
He was certainly a very happy man, and afforded no occasion to have any complaint made of fortune on his account.
As Also Concerning The Actions Of The Maccabees, Matthias And Judas; And Concerning The Death Of Judas.
3.
He also spoiled the temple, and put a stop to the constant practice of offering a daily sacrifice of expiation for three years and six months.
He also proceeded as far as Samaria, where is now the city Sebaste, which was built by Herod the king, and encompassed it all round with a wall, and set his sons, Aristobulus and Antigonus, over the siege; who pushed it on so hard, that a famine so far prevailed within the city, that they were forced to eat what never was esteemed food.
He died, leaving five sons behind him.
So he came to the government by this his success, and became the prince of his own people by their own free consent, and then died, leaving the government to Judas, his eldest son.
3.
He also made a league with Antiochus the son.
6.
How The City Jerusalem Was Taken, And The Temple Pillaged [By Antiochus Epiphanes].
And as they had still great success in their undertakings, they did not suffer their zeal to cool, but marched with an army as far as Scythopolis, and made an incursion upon it, and laid waste all the country that lay within Mount Carmel.
Moreover, he was the first of the Jews that had money enough, and began to hire foreign auxiliaries also.
So this Antiochus got together fifty thousand footmen, and five thousand horsemen, and fourscore elephants, and marched through Judea into the mountainous parts.
He it was who alone had three of the most desirable things in the world,--the government of his nation, and the high priesthood, and the gift of prophecy.
5.
1.
He also sent his sons with a band of strong men against Antiochus, while he took part of the army himself with him, and fell upon him from another quarter.
So John lived the rest of his life very happily, and administered the government after a most extraordinary manner, and this for thirty-three entire years together.
Now John's case was this: When he considered the courage of his mother, and heard her entreaty, he set about his attacks; but when he saw her beaten, and torn to pieces with the stripes, he grew feeble, and was entirely overcome by his affections.
He left indeed a garrison behind him, such as he thought sufficient to keep the place, but drew the rest of his army off, to take their winter-quarters in Syria.
However, Simon managed the public affairs after a courageous manner, and took Gazara, and Joppa, and Jamnia, which were cities in his neighborhood.
But then these successes of John and of his sons made them be envied, and occasioned a sedition in the country; and many there were who got together, and would not be at rest till they brake out into open war, in which war they were beaten.
5.
However, neither was Aristobulus wanting to himself in this case, as relying on the bribes that Scaurus had received: he was also there himself, and adorned himself after a manner the most agreeable to royalty that he was able.
Now Alexander left the kingdom to Alexandra his wife, and depended upon it that the Jews would now very readily submit to her, because she had been very averse to such cruelty as he had treated them with, and had opposed his violation of their laws, and had thereby got the good-will of the people.
He also promised him money, and that he would deliver up both himself and the city into his disposal, and thereby mitigated the anger of Pompey.
But she retained the younger, Aristobulus, with her as a private person, by reason of the warmth of his temper.
So Pompey pitched his camp in that place one night, and then hasted away the next morning to Jerusalem; but Aristobulus was so affrighted at his approach, that he came and met him by way of supplication.
But Alexandra died before she could punish Aristobulus for his disinheriting his brother, after she had reigned nine years.
It was, as I have already said, of old called the Citadel; but afterwards got the name of Antonia, when Antony was [lord of the East], just as the other cities, Sebaste and Agrippias, had their names changed, and these given them from Sebastus and Agrippa.
CHAPTER 5.
5.
But when Alexandra sent out her army to Damascus, under pretense that Ptolemy was always oppressing that city, she got possession of it; nor did it make any considerable resistance.
In the mean time, Alexandra fell sick, and Aristobulus, her younger son, took hold of this opportunity, with his domestics, of which he had a great many, who were all of them his friends, on account of the warmth of their youth, and got possession of all the fortresses.
At Last Pompey Is Made The Arbitrator Of The Dispute Between The Brothers.
CHAPTER 6.
She was a sagacious woman in the management of great affairs, and intent always upon gathering soldiers together; so that she increased the army the one half, and procured a great body of foreign troops, till her own nation became not only very powerful at home, but terrible also to foreign potentates, while she governed other people, and the Pharisees governed her.
6.
And when he came down, it was to prevail with Pompey to allow him the government entirely; and when he went up to the citadel, it was that he might not appear to debase himself too low.
Nor was he mistaken as to his expectations; for this woman kept the dominion, by the opinion that the people had of her piety; for she chiefly studied the ancient customs of her country, and cast those men out of the government that offended against their holy laws.
Now his inclination was to try his fortune in a battle, since he was called in such an imperious manner, rather than to comply with that call.
3.
And when his brother invited him again [to plead his cause], he came down and spake about the justice of it, and then went away without any hinderance from Pompey; so he was between hope and fear.
Now she was so superstitious as to comply with their desires, and accordingly they slew whom they pleased themselves.
1.
However, Pompey commanded him to give up his fortified places, and forced him to write to every one of their governors to yield them up; they having had this charge given them, to obey no letters but what were of his own hand-writing.
And now the Pharisees joined themselves to her, to assist her in the government.
3.
But when he had passed by Pella and Scythopolis, and was come to Corea, where you enter into the country of Judea, when you go up to it through the Mediterranean parts, he heard that Aristobulus was fled to Alexandrium, which is a strong hold fortified with the utmost magnificence, and situated upon a high mountain; and he sent to him, and commanded him to come down.
Alexandra Reigns Nine Years, During Which Time The Pharisees Were The Real Rulers Of The Nation.
You'll be careful?"
I think it's a fine stand for a man to take."
Kate was at the little garage they had built, and had the door open.
"Kate?" cried a sharp voice.
She sang, she laughed, she was unspeakably happy.
She stopped several times to examine the shrubs and bushes closely, to wish for rain for the flowers.
Again she had followed an impulse, without thinking of any one besides herself. Usually she could talk, but in that instant she had nothing to say. Then a carriage drew into the line of her vision, stopped at York's gate, and Mr. York alighted and swung to the ground a slim girlish figure and then helped his wife.
"I was wild for that little darling at once.
They all reproduce themselves, they all make something intended for music, they all express a feeling in their hearts by the exercise we call dance, they all believe in the after life of the soul.
Slowly she walked home and as she reached the veranda, Adam took the baby.
Kate went slowly up the walk.
He called her attention to the road.
I'll phone Robert, and come as soon as I can get there."
"I never heard any one else say these things, but I think them, and they are provable.
She had some very black ones.
She could have wailed, and lamented, and relinquished all she had gained, but she did not.
I don't mind the walk.
I saw the life go from her and go on, and on.
"I don't think it is," said Robert.
I used to say I'd rather die than come back here to live, but lately it has been growing so attractive, I've been here about half my time, and wished I were the other half."
Robert looked at her eager face.
Kate wanted to tell him of her final visit with Nancy Ellen, but she could not at that time. Robert's aged mother came to him, and said she could remain as long as he wanted her, so that was a comfort to Kate, who took time to pity him, even in her blackest hour.
"Yes," said Kate, recognizing a neighbour, living a few miles down the road.
Kate looked up to see Robert coming across the churchyard with his arms full of greenhouse roses.
He learns to covet by seeing stronger men, in better locations, surpass his achievements, so if he is strong enough he goes and robs them by force.
Kate glanced at the sun and shook her head.
Nancy Ellen looked at Kate and smiled peculiarly.
"O God!" said Kate.
She stood in full evening light, I looked straight in her face, and Robert, you know I'm no creature of fancies and delusions, I tell you I SAW HER SOUL PASS.
He seemed too stunned to think.
"Was she sick?
"They just came," said Nancy Ellen rather breathlessly.
Good-bye and good luck to you, and remember me to Robert."
She WAS drunk, drunken with joy. She had a picture of the most beautiful little baby girl.
Kate suddenly drew Nancy Ellen to her and kissed her a long, hard kiss on the lips.
"How would you go about proving it, Kate?" he asked.
"Yes," said Kate again.
One day after she had arranged the fall roses she had grown, and some roadside asters she had gathered in passing, she sat in deep thought, when a car stopped on the road.
Oh, my God, have mercy!"
They were to start to Chicago after her to-night.
Nancy Ellen stood intently studying the picture she held in her hand. Then she looked at Kate, smiling with misty eyes: "I think, Kate, I'm very close, if I am not really where you are this minute," she said. Then she started her car; but she looked back, waving and smiling until the car swerved so that Kate called after her: "Do drive carefully, Nancy Ellen!"
Baby knows Milly; she will be good for her and for you.
"It's my biggest self-evident fact," said Kate, conclusively.
"She's charming!" she said.
Polly had a clear case of uric poison, while I'd stake my life Nancy Ellen was gloating over the picture she carried when she ran into that loose sand.
KATE turned and placing the baby on the front seat, she knelt and put her arms around the little thing, but her lips only repeated the words: "Praise the Lord for this precious baby!" Her heart was filled with high resolve.
At least he is willing.
Finally he asked: "Still hunting the 'why,' Kate?"
They all knew how she could work, and what she could give if she chose; while that she had stood at the altar and been baptized, meant that something not customary with the Bates family was taking place in her heart.
"Look at those tracks," he said.
As he started his car he glanced back.
Then they began trying to face the problem of life without her.
"I can stay half an hour longer.
Then she sat where she had been, and looked at him.
"But you would want to wait a little and join with Milly, wouldn't you?" she asked.
"Oh, yes," said Kate.
She would make heroic effort to help him to clean, unashamed manhood.
"I must go now. Shall I take you home?"
THAT is provable."
"We just loved doing it, didn't we, Little Poll?
Kate looked at him speculatively.
He learns the desire for the chase in food hunting; I think four are plenty to start with."
Kate, you are making this place look fine.
THE WINGED VICTORY
She and her mother had agreed that there was "something." Now Kate tried as never before to understand what, and where, and why, that "something" was.
"Oh, I don't know," said Kate.
She would rear the baby with such care.
She carried photographs of several small children, one of them a girl so like Little Poll that she might have been the original of the picture.
She told him what she had heard, ran to get the baby, and met him at the gate.
We're going to start on the evening train and if her blood seems good, and her ancestors respectable, and she looks like that picture, we're going to bring her back with us. Oh, Kate, I can scarcely wait to get my fingers on her.
The middle of the week Nancy Ellen came flying up the walk on winged feet, herself.
In each of their cases I am satisfied as to 'why,' as well as about Father.
Why should the others be real, and that a dream?"
She was a very substantial woman, but for the remainder of that day she felt that she was moving with winged feet.
Adam and Milly are going to come in soon, I'm almost sure.
She would be a better sister to all her family.
She might have been drunk, from them."
You know where her things are, and how to feed her.
On every side strong hands stretched out to greet and welcome her.
He carried a big bunch of deep red for her mother, white for Polly, and a large sheaf of warm pink for Nancy Ellen.
She would be more careful with Adam.
"You bet they'll give you work soon, and enough," said Nancy Ellen, laughing.
"That's too far to walk and carry this great big woman," he said, snuggling his face in the baby's neck, while she patted his cheeks and pulled his hair.
Don't you dare let them change any way I do.
Kate sat looking straight before her until time to help with the evening work, and prepare supper, then she arose.
"If there is any such thing in science as a self-evident fact, that is one.
"If that is joining church, it's the easiest thing in the world," said Kate.
"Did Nancy Ellen just leave your house?" came a breathless query.
Kate, you make me think of the 'Winged Victory,' this afternoon. If I get this darling little girl, will she make me big, and splendid, and fine, like you?"
Robert glanced upward and asked: "Isn't there room enough up there, Kate?"
He was debating what tie would go with which waistcoat.
There were symptoms of a stampede.
Never . . .
The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.
After all, he said, it is the spirit of the thing that counts.
REGINALD'S CHOIR TREAT
A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks."
Following the etiquette of dramatic authors on first nights, he remained discreetly in the background while the procession, with extreme diffidence and the goat, wound its way lugubriously towards the village.
"Life is full of its disappointments," observed the Duchess, "and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.
Reginald had left the selection of a feeding-ground to her womanly intuition, but he chose the wine himself, knowing that womanly intuition stops short at claret.
"And so silly.
By miles of frozen ocean, I was going to say. He explores ice-floes and studies the movements of herrings, and has written a most interesting book on the home-life of the Esquimaux; but naturally he has very little home-life of his own."
And the youngest, who was intended for the American marriage market, has developed political tendencies, and writes pamphlets about the housing of the poor.
I know if I were served up at a cannibal feast I should be dreadfully annoyed if anyone found fault with me for not being tender enough, or having been kept too long."
"Someone has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.
But that, my dear Reginald, becomes more difficult as one grows older."
Such a sweet woman"--
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
"On the whole, I think they get the best of two very desirable worlds.
"Oh, nothing of that sort.
"Mrs. Spelvexit?
"Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me," said Reginald: "they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like--and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.
Quite a charming woman; separated from her husband"--
In the minds of those who come after us we may be remembered for qualities and successes which we quite left out of the reckoning."
Those people with her are the Whimples, very old acquaintances of mine; they're always having trouble, poor things."
And nowadays there are always the Johannesbourgeois, who bring a Cape-to-Cairo atmosphere with them--what may be called the Rand Manner, I suppose."
"Their eldest son was such a disappointment to them; they wanted him to be a linguist, and spent no end of money on having him taught to speak--oh, dozens of languages!--and then he became a Trappist monk.
"There are different ways of taking disappointment.
That's what I call being vindictive."
"After all," said the Duchess, "the disillusions of life may depend on our way of assessing it.
They say some people went through the siege of Paris without knowing that France and Germany were at war; but the Beauwhistle aunt is credited with having passed the whole winter in Paris under the impression that the Humberts were a kind of bicycle . . .
Tell me, who is the woman with the old lace at the table on our left?
She collects postage-stamps. Such a resource.
How frightfully embarrassing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait you had last known at Prince's!
"My idea about the lecture," resumed the Duchess hurriedly, "is to inquire whether promiscuous Continental travel doesn't tend to weaken the moral fibre of the social conscience.
"Trouble is not one of those fancies you can take up and drop at any moment; it's like a grouse-moor or the opium-habit--once you start it you've got to keep it up."
"I don't know that you have known me long enough for that."
"A most variable climate," said the Duchess; "and how unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather at a time when coal was so dear! So distressing for the poor."
You see that type of Briton very much in hotels abroad.
A woman will cheerfully choose husbands for her less attractive friends, or take sides in a political controversy without the least knowledge of the issues involved--but no woman ever cheerfully chose a claret.
"A scandal, my dear Reginald, is as much to be avoided at Monaco or any of those places as at Exeter, let us say."
"I think it's more generally practised than you imagine.
There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the mediaeval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.
"The people with what I call Tauchnitz morals," observed Reginald.
"Scandal, my dear Irene--I may call you Irene, mayn't I?"
In these days of the over-education of women she's quite refreshing.
I suppose it's unlucky to bring peacock's feathers into a house; anyway, there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess's eye when I took my departure.
I breakfasted upstairs myself.
There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady.
I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they seldom have more than a superficial acquaintance with their guests, and so often just when they do get to know you a bit better, they leave off knowing you altogether.
I gathered afterwards that the meal was tinged with a very unchristian spirit.
Still, that's better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.
England must wake up, as the Duke of Devonshire said the other day; wasn't it?
I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept the door shut, and the idea didn't seem to have struck her before; at least, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.
And they tried to rag me in the smoking-room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it.
She eventually finds her way to India and gets married, and comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to imagine that an indifferent prawn curry is for ever an effective substitute for all that we have been taught to believe is luncheon.
Dr. Crofts is there, of course.
"And why should he not be serious?"
"Who's there?
Would it not be well that she should learn to like him?
With what a pretty speech had Crosbie been greeted!
"There is but little doubt of that," said Mrs. Dale.
"Oh, no, of course he ought to be serious; but are you not glad, mamma?
"Must I not?
This was the last suggestion made by Dr. Crofts, induced no doubt by the great encouragement he had received.
I am so glad.
Bell still wore the checked apron as described by her sister.
I expect him to do everything for us, and not to call a moment of his time his own."
The proceeding, considering the nature of it,--that a young lady, acknowledged to be of great beauty and known to be of good birth, had on the occasion been asked and given in marriage,--was carried on after a somewhat humdrum fashion, and in a manner that must be called commonplace.
"Bell was always a fanatic in praise of poverty," said Mrs. Dale.
"Oh dear, no!"
"Mamma," she said, pointing to the drawing-room door, and speaking almost in a whisper, "you must not go in there; come into the parlour."
How great had been the occasion, forcing Lily almost to lose herself in wonderment at what had occurred!
"I was not joking at all," said the doctor.
Lily for the time had been raised to a pinnacle,--a pinnacle which might be dangerous, but which was, at any rate, lofty.
No one, unless it was Crofts, felt very triumphant.
"Let her go out and visit the lady patients," said Lily.
Has any one undoctored him?"
"I have just come down from the Great House."
He has promised to settle on him an income which will make him comfortable for life."
It is too soon."
That other man was a villain. This man is honest.
"We shall not be rich--" began the doctor.
MRS. DALE IS THANKFUL FOR A GOOD THING.
The earl has behaved so kindly that every possible consideration is due to him.
"I shall always call you Dame Commonplace when you're married," said Lily.
"I hate even to talk about it.
In these days of the cold early spring, the way from the lawn into the house, through the drawing-room window, was not as yet open, and it was necessary to go round by the kitchen-garden on to the road, and thence in by the front door; or else to pass through the back door, and into the house by the kitchen.
I wish she could.
In truth the squire, as he spoke, was half-ashamed of the warmth of what he said.
Then Mrs. Dale did open the door, giving some little premonitory notice with the handle, so that the couple inside might be warned of approaching footsteps.
"Nor yet Lily's silence," said Bell.
I wish Lily would have gone."
"And will you go to Guestwick yourself?" asked Mrs. Dale.
"It only wants three weeks;--and with the house in such a condition!"
Bell was as sure of her lot in life as though she were already being taken home to her modest house in Guestwick.
"There are reasons why she would not wish it."
"Yes, mamma, there is," said Lily, putting her hand inside her mother's arm, "that's true enough."
All the same, Bell, I do wish you could have been married from this house."
This latter mode of entrance Mrs. Dale now adopted; and as she made her way into the hall Lily came upon her, with very silent steps, out from the parlour, and arrested her progress.
But her other daughter, she said, would be very happy to accompany her uncle to Guestwick Manor.
"Oh, I know," said the squire: "I understand it.
And after dinner Mrs. Dale went through the gardens, up to the other house, with a written note in her hand.
There was a smile upon Lily's face as she lifted up her finger as if in caution, and no one looking at her would have supposed that she was herself in trouble.
"I understand," said Lily, going up to the doctor, and giving him her cheek to kiss, "he is to be my brother, and I mean to claim him as such from this moment.
But the heart is not malleable; nor will the feelings admit of such control.
I never felt more satisfaction,--never, Bell!"
"As if I hadn't known it all along!
"But who is there?" she repeated.
"He's there!"
"I hate to be rich," said Bell.
Where's Bell?" and Mrs. Dale went into the parlour as she was bidden.
"Who is he?"
It was not so at all with Bell.
"It's you are the goose, Lily."
How it had been felt by all concerned that the fortunes of the Small House were in the ascendant,--felt, indeed, with some trepidation, but still with much inward triumph.
I did think that if we had all been there it might have cured some difficulties."
I do not think it would have made her unhappy if some sudden need had required that Crofts should go to India and back before they were married.
"But you can understand," she said, "that she cannot bring herself to go there." The squire struck the table with his fist, and repeated his ejaculations.
"No; you may not."
I wonder how he is managing, for there is nothing on earth to sit upon but the old lump of a carpet.
"The truth is," said Mrs. Dale, "she could not go there to meet John Eames."
Now you know it all.
I wish she could." As he repeated the words over and over again, there was an eagerness in his voice that filled Mrs. Dale's heart with tenderness towards him.
As her mother was about to go into a new residence, it might be as well that that residence should be fitted to the wants of two persons instead of three.
Every word that the squire said was true.
You may be mistaken, you know; and there's many a slip between the cup and the lip."
"Now may I talk about him?" said Lily, as soon as the door was closed behind his back.
"Oh, mamma, you understand," said Bell.
"And they have promoted him at his office."
"Lily, my darling; my poor, ill-used darling."
"He used to talk to me about going to the lakes." And then there was another pause, during which Bell observed that her mother's face became clouded with anxiety.
"There are circumstances in which what we call Christianity seems to me to be hardly possible."
"He must take his chance," said Bell, thinking within her own mind that that chance would be a very bad one.
"Don't scrutinize my foot too closely, Lily."
What a word that is!
I believe, too, that she is older than he is.
Bell for a moment turned her face away, and beat with her foot against the ground.
As for Charles the First, he was about the best man in history."
The personages are always in their tantrums, and go on as though they were mad.
When half-past eleven came, she was seated in a large easy chair over the drawing-room fire, with a little table by her side, on which a novel was lying.
Only I wish you'd beat me and thump me when I'm such a fool, instead of pitying me.
"Over!
They have all the governing in their hands, and get very little money for doing it."
"I won't be regarded as ill-used; not as specially ill-used.
"Jane shall fetch it, if you really want it," said Mrs. Dale.
"Of course he must take his chance.
It brought with it a hard, bitter frost,--a black, biting frost,--such a frost as breaks the water-pipes, and binds the ground to the hardness of granite. Lily, queen as she was, had not yet been allowed to go back to her own chamber, but occupied the larger bed in her mother's room, her mother sleeping on a smaller one.
"No, mamma, I won't be that." And she struggled grievously to get the better of the hysterical attack which had overpowered her.
I think I'll read Pilgrim's Progress again."
I should never have done for that kind of thing; should I?"
She was transgressing the acknowledged rule of the house in saying any word that could be construed as being inimical to Crosbie or his bride.
"Yes, of course; I forgot.
"Did I, my pet?"
"Lady Alexandrina Crosbie," said Bell, shuddering.
I feel such an interest about her.
I suppose people do learn to like them.
Her anger was more difficult of restraint than was even her mother's,--and now, not restraining it, but wishing to hide it, she gave it vent in this way.
And I'll try to get on with this stuff in the meantime." Then again she sat with her eyes fixed upon the pages of the book.
"But I must put it off till I can get it down from the other house."
She made that effort of which her mother had spoken, but she made it altogether in vain.
But her feeling on the matter was too strong, and she could not restrain herself.
"Why should their hearts be cold?
Well,--I'll get up now." And then she took her first step out into the cold world beyond her bed.
Oh, mamma, that is a terrible thing to say.
I'm a fine sort of teacher, am I not?
I should so like to see her.
"It will be a great comfort to be nearer Dr. Crofts; won't it, Bell?"
He was very foolish to fall in love with me.
"Bell shall get it, when she goes up in the afternoon; will you, Bell?
CHAPTER XLIV.
But the squire felt that he could not discuss the subject with her, seeing that he had been specially informed by Mrs. Dale that his interference would not be permitted; and then he was perhaps aware that if he did discuss the subject with Bell, he would not gain much by such discussion.
Come here, Bell, and let me teach you Christianity.
"I should call it jolly," said Lily, "if I could get up and go out. Do you remember lecturing me about talking slang the day that he first came?"
"I wish I could learn it from some one," said Bell.
"I do," said Bell.
I wonder whether it was so settled on purpose, because of the day.
"We must all take our chance.
"But I can hardly think that he can act as he has done without being punished."
"Mamma," she said at last, "it is over now, I'm sure."
"I fear their hearts will be cold also," said Mrs. Dale.
Isn't it odd, Bell, that it should take place on Valentine's day?
"But then so many readers are fools," said Lily.
"Yes; I see.
"The cold is what you would call awful."
"He will be a wretched man.
"I don't think it would have been so difficult if I had not been ill."
It means anger against him, because he discovered before it was too late that he would not be happy,--that is, that he and I would not be happy together if we were married."
I know what your foot means when it goes in that way; and you shan't do it.
"Do you?
Give my love to Lily.
It's a great mistake being soft to people when they make fools of themselves.
He gets no fortune with her, and she will expect everything that fortune can give.
But this was not sufficient for Lily.
I never can understand it, but I rather think that makes it nicer."
"But I believe I'll have Pilgrim's Progress.
"And so you are,--my own dear, dearest, honest Bell,--and the fairest lady that I know.
She ought not to have said so.
Don't you hear me say that I know it's not possible?
I hope God will bless them, and I pray that they may be happy." As she spoke these words, there was an unwonted solemnity in her tone which startled Mrs. Dale and Bell.
It isn't merely having a title.
A thing like that is over, and then all the world cannot put it back again.
The day was named soon enough, and the tidings came down to Allington.
"And now, Lily, will it not be well that you should turn your mind away from the subject, and endeavour to think of other things?"
It's only half-past ten yet."
"Worse luck for the country."
It was as I have said, and if so, you shouldn't hate him because he did the only thing which he honestly could do when he found out his mistake."
"Bell," she said, stopping her other speech suddenly, "at what o'clock do people get married in London?"
"I don't want him to be wretched," said Bell.
I wonder what those grand people are really like."
"Yes, but I am.
And so was I very foolish to let him love me, at a moment's notice,--without a thought as it were.
"Of course it would not, my darling."
"I hate books I can't understand," said Bell.
"I think I do wish for it."
Don't you remember that he told us that Mr. Palliser is about the grandest grandee of them all.
"The country seems to do pretty well.
He always used to say that he had been so long among people of that sort, that it would be very difficult for him to divide himself off from them.
"But I won't think of it any more," continued Lily; "I will fix my mind to something." And then she got up from her chair.
But the matter was going on, and he knew it.
The squire was very sad about it,--very sad indeed.
"I should.
Somebody said, that whatever is, is right, and I declare I believe it."
But you're a radical, Bell.
"Ah, that's because you're a radical.
"There's a beautiful fire," said Bell.
"I think I do," said she.
My belief is, you wouldn't be a lady if you could help it."
Look at Lady Julia."
With Bell during these visits he never alluded to the matter.
This was specially ungrateful, because Bell had recommended the book.
Mamma, I want you to wish for their happiness."
In the evening the first volume of the French Revolution had been procured, and Lily stuck to her reading with laudable perseverance; till at eight her mother insisted on her going to bed, queen as she was.
Let me see: I was told to read Carlyle's History of the French Revolution, and I think I'll begin now."
"And I'm going to be well again now, immediately.
"You don't think she's Mrs. Crosbie yet, then?"
She did not lift her eyes.
He caught her by her bushy hair as she turned to fly.
And he sprang forward as he laughed.
She pinched Eric's arm with all her strength.
Eric liked it as well as though it had been a new game.
She dodged.
Her face was sparkling with delight and she had utterly forgotten herself in the dance.
Her dress was a purple slip just to her knees, with a big rent in the skirt.
He sprang again.
Helma made a girdle of brakes for herself, and a dandelion wreath for her hair.
THE JUNE MOON
Late that afternoon Helma and Ivra and Eric gathered ferns and flowers to deck themselves for the evening.
He had never been to a dance before, and just at first he did not think there would be much fun in it.
"And all come--come when the moon rises."
When the great moon hung just above them, and shadows were few and far between, the Tree Mother came walking through the Forest, quieter and more beautiful than the moon.
He was alone, lying beneath a silver birch, his head among the star flowers.
And that was strange, for when he first spied her he did not like her at all.
When he woke it was summer dawn.
The dances were just whirling and skipping and jumping, each dancer by himself, but all in a circle.
Eric crowned himself with bloodroot and contrived grass sandals for his feet.
Eric sprang for her.
She picked him up in her arms, and the minute his head touched her shoulder he was sound asleep, the music at last hushed in his head.
So at last he slipped out of the circle, and stumbling with weariness and sleepiness went to Tree Mother.
But Eric did not let his surprise delay him.
The Forest teemed with new playmates for him and Ivra.
Instead of Wild Thyme and the sunny field, he was looking at the sea.
Wild Thyme jumped back into the dance and the Tree Mother stood alone. But although she stood as still as a moonbeam under the tree, she made Eric think of dancing more than all the others put together.
But she was quicker than he.
Goody!
Hide-and-go-seek was still the favorite game.
No girl, even a fairy, likes to have her hair pulled.
And she was plotting no ill.
But he cried, "I spy!
"You'll play with us, won't you?" Eric asked.
So Wild Thyme was angry.
You're It!" just the same.
But Eric, after all, was only an Earth Child, and his legs got very tired in spite of the music and the moonlight.
She wove a dear little cap of star flowers for Ivra, and a chain of them for her neck.
"But there's nobody there," they said.
"No, look!" He pointed with his finger.
NORA'S GRANDCHILDREN
"This boy, grandma," began the red-headed girl.
Eric had never tasted hot ginger cookies before, and when Nora gave him one, a big round one all for his own, he almost danced with delight.
"Nora's grandchildren, of course.
Ahead of him were two stalls, with a horse in one.
But Eric did not follow.
"But she is queer.
But Eric was lost in wonder.
But just now it was jolly and cozy here in the barn, and these Earth Children were good fun.
So don't say anything about it to your father when he comes home to-night.
"Her name is 'Ivra.' But of course you can't play with her.
So Nora put down her knitting, and taking the cat on her lap, a great sleepy white fellow who had been purring by the stove, she began to tell them stories.
"Why didn't you come, too?" she said
Eric did not follow.
They don't think I'm real.
The three children ran across the barn to a ladder and scrambled up and disappeared through a trap door at the top.
Of course she's there!" Eric was impatient.
Then Eric remembered all that Ivra had told him.
Then they lay up in the hay where there was a little window, looking far out across the meadows.
"Come on," she called.
Before Eric had closed his mouth on his amazement, "Whoop!" and down came another boy.
But she's queer just the same, and she can't fool us."
How good they smelled!
It would make him cross."
They thought I was a funny boy."
The little red-headed girl put her hand on his arm.
"That is my playmate out there," he said.
Finally he had to strain his eyes to see it at all.
It was a big sliding door, and now stood open on a crack just large enough for a child to slip through.
He did not like the Snow Witches.
But when they got there they found all the little houses deserted: not a Forest Child was to be found.
Nora's grandchildren are awfully good fun.
"If you do,--better not.
"Oh, it was too cold.
One afternoon Eric and Ivra started out for the Forest Children's moss village to play with them.
But Eric was most interested in the empty stall, for it was from there the laughter seemed to come.
The children laughed at the top of their voices.
"Yes, play with them all you like!
This boy was red-haired, freckle-faced and snub-nosed, and he looked jollier than the other two put together, if that were possible, for his red hair curled in saucy, tight little ringlets, and his mouth was wide with smiles.
Whoop!" cried Eric, and dropped, landing among them.
She sees us." He waved.
We love her, and she's a fine grandmother, I can tell you.
Eric went in.
These were Earth Children, with shadows in their eyes.
They must have gone into some other part of the forest to play.
It is mentioned in Exodus; so it must have been created soon after the foundations of the world; and despite the thunder of ecclesiastics and the mailed hand of kings and conquerors, it has endured even to this day.
People discreetly dropped their eyes before my proud gaze, and into their hearts I know I forced the query, What manner of man can this mortal be?
In people's eyes the cabbage question no longer brooded.
The sweat of months was upon it, toil had defaced it, and it was not a creation such as would appeal to the aesthetic mind; but it was plethoric.
I am sure it was.
In the watches of the night, we may assure ourselves that there is no such dignity; but jostling with our fellows in the white light of day, we find that it does exist, and that we ourselves measure ourselves by the dollars we happen to possess.
He is a bloodsucker and a vampire.
They are again enshrined, as bright and polished as of yore, and my destiny is once more in their keeping.
I would go back and wreck the establishment.
I refused to answer the question.
Money was very good, I thought, and for the time was content.
I was superior to convention, and the very garb which otherwise would have damned me tended toward my elevation.
The inexorable pendulum had swung the counter direction, and there was upon me an urgent need.
I communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery.
Nor is it unfair to presume that the accounts of this most remarkable business will not be closed until the Trumps of Doom are sounded and all things brought to final balance.
They had no concern with me, nor I with them. I knew it; I felt it.
Wherefore it was in fear and trembling, and with great modesty of spirit, that I entered the Presence.
My foot-gear was of walrus hide, cunningly blended with seal gut. The remainder of my dress was as primal and uncouth.
But there rushed upon me the words of Erasmus, "When I get some money I shall buy me some Greek books, and afterwards some clothes," and a great shame wrapped me around.
Perhaps the blame may be shouldered upon Shylock, Fagin, and their ilk; but I had conceived an entirely different type of individual.
My brain was clear and refreshed.
But, luckily for my soul's welfare, I reflected and was saved. By the clearer vision vouchsafed me, I beheld Erasmus, fire-flashing, heaven-born, while I--I was merely a clay-born, a son of earth.
And there was a spring to my body, an elasticity of step as I covered the pavement.
Olympus must have roared at my coming. The world, knowing me not, could judge me by my clothes alone.
Never had they appeared so insignificant and paltry as then, when he sniffed over them with the air of one disdainfully doing a disagreeable task.
Oh no, not for long.
I purchased a host of things from the tradespeople, and bought me such pleasures and diversions as befitted one who had long been denied.
It was a very foolish thing to do.
I remember once absenting myself from civilization for weary months. When I returned, it was to a strange city in another country.
Without the bitter one may not know the sweet.
It is said, "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of victuals, usury of anything that is lent upon usury"; but he evidently was not my brother, for he demanded seventy per cent.
And a dignity entered into me, and my neck was stiffened, my head poised.
He is only a clay-born; so he bends his neck.
At last I came hard by the place, and peering stealthily to the right and left that none who knew might behold me, I entered hurriedly, in the manner of one committing an abomination. 'Fore God!
And I did these things, not that I was an egotist, not that I was impervious to the critical glances of my fellows, but because of a certain hogskin belt, plethoric and sweat-bewrinkled, which buckled next the skin above the hips.
But I refused to be so judged.
Moreover, he was possessed of a formula whereby to extract juice from a flattened lemon, and he would do business with me.
And he permits these things, and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave. Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he is working with ropes of sand.
I was possessed of the arrogance of a Roman governor.
But before fancy could father the act, I recollected myself and all which had passed.
At last I knew what it was to be born to the purple, and I took my seat in the hotel carriage as though it were my chariot about to proceed with me to the imperial palace.
While my heels thrust the cabbage-man beyond the horizon, my toes were drawing me, faltering, like a timid old beggar, into a roaring spate of humanity--men, women, and children without end.
My nerves were tingling and I was a-pulse with the times.
But alack-a-day!
There was naught in those certificates to be ashamed of.
The hogskin belt was flat as famine, nor did it longer gird my loins.
Why?
So I avoided their looks, shrinking close to the kerbstone and by furtive glances directing my progress.
I gathered together certain certificates of goods and chattels, pointed my heel towards him and his cabbages, and journeyed townward.
For a giddy moment I had forgotten this, and tottered.
My heart gave a great leap.
I was glad to be quit of it.
I do not know, save that in such way did my fathers before me.
At the best, if he work hard, and cherish himself exceedingly, he may duplicate any or all previous performances of his kind; he may even do some of them better; but there he stops, the composite hand of his whole ancestry bearing heavily upon him.
Then I waxed rebellious.
This man--why, he was clean to look at, his eyes were blue, with the tired look of scholarly lucubrations, and his skin had the normal pallor of sedentary existence.
Within me coursed an unwonted sap, and I felt as though I were about to burst out into leaves and buds and green things.
Law and order upheld him, while I titubated, cabbageless, on the ragged edge.
Strive as he will, he cannot escape it--unless he be a genius, one of those rare creations to whom alone is granted the privilege of doing entirely new and original things in entirely new and original ways.
I shrank back.
Faugh!
How good the outside air was!
Oh, it's absurd, I grant, but had that belt not been so circumstanced, and so situated, I should have shrunk away into side streets and back alleys, walking humbly and avoiding all gregarious humans except those who were likewise abroad without belts.
A fur cap, soiled and singed by many camp-fires, half sheltered the shaggy tendrils of my uncut hair.
But the common clay-born man, possessing only talents, may do only what has been done before him.
And as he stood there drearily, he became reproach incarnate.
I was a sight to give merriment to gods and men.
I put my signature to certain indentures, received my pottage, and fled from his presence.
He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune. He transmutes tears into treasure, and from nakedness and hunger garbs himself in clean linen and develops the round of his belly.
I moved through wind-swept groves of limber backs; across sunny glades, lighted by the beaming rays from a thousand obsequious eyes; and when I tired of this, basked on the greensward of popular approval.
Nor was it refused.
From my window I could descry, at no great distance, a very ordinary mortal of a man, working industriously among his cabbages.
People looked upon me scornfully, pitifully, reproachfully. (I can swear they did.) In every eye I read the question, Man, where are your cabbages?
And, because of these things I did, I demanded homage.
Why?
To confess that I was shocked were to do my feelings an injustice.
Here was hope!
My feet were uncertain and heavy, and my soul became as a meal sack, limp with emptiness and tied in the middle.
The mightiest and absurdest sleep-walker on the planet!
"'Tis only fools speak evil of the clay-- The very stars are made of clay like mine."
Chained in the circle of his own imaginings, man is only too keen to forget his origin and to shame that flesh of his that bleeds like all flesh and that is good to eat.
The prize-fighting apes and tigers will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club and scratch and slash.
"Ah, but we do not stand for the commercial life," object the refined, scholarly, and professional men.
But intrude not violently upon man, leave him alone in his somnambulism, and he kicks out from under his feet the ladder of life up which he has climbed, constitutes himself the centre of the universe, dreams sordidly about his own particular god, and maunders metaphysically about his own blessed immortality.
They do not stand for the commercial life, but neither do they stand against it with all their strength.
He will chatter about things refined and spiritual and godlike like himself, and he and the men who herd with him will calmly adulterate the commodities they put upon the market and which annually kill tens of thousands of babies and young children.
He prates about it, and writes to the papers about it, and worries the legislators about it.
True, he lives in a real world, breathes real air, eats real food, and sleeps under real blankets, in order to keep real cold away.
With tremendous exercise of craft, deceit, and guile, he devotes his life godlike to this purpose.
In the course of his life godlike he ignores the flesh--until he gets to table.
A present of coal stock by a mine operator to a railroad official is not a claw rip to the bowels of a rival mine operator.
Tell a plains Indian that he has failed to steal horses from the neighbouring tribe, or tell a man living in bourgeois society that he has failed to pay his bills at the neighbouring grocer's, and the results are the same. Each, plains Indian and bourgeois, is smeared with a slightly different veneer, that is all.
Man has to-day no concept that is too wide and deep and abstract for the mind of Plato or Aristotle to grasp.
This is not a brief for the prize-fighter.
They possess several magic phrases, which are like the incantations of a voodoo doctor driving devils away.
They mean the same things, but they sound different.
Give to Plato or Aristotle the same fund of knowledge that man to-day has access to, and Plato and Aristotle would reason as profoundly as the man of to-day and would achieve very similar conclusions.
He wrote a letter to the Princess Momo-zono (peach-gardens).
Thus the modest and virtuous Lady Aoi passed away forever.
Presently she became very calm, and people thought that she was a little relieved.
She became even terrified at these dreams; but yet they took place very often.
He entered the little room, saying, "Are you not quite well?
He felt for the wounded lady, and hastened to see her; but she, under some pretext, refused to see him.
These sad tidings soon reached the Court, and created great distress and confusion: even the arrangements for appointments and promotion were disturbed.
It caused her great suffering, and seemed not to be of a casual nature, but a permanent hostile influence.
Even supposing you quit this present world, there is another where we shall meet, and where I shall see you once more cheerful, and there will be a time when your mother and father will also join you."
To return to the Lady of Rokjio.
The ex-Emperor still felt some anxiety about the Heir-apparent, and appointed Genji as his guardian, as he had not yet a suitable person for that office.
In due course the procession passed, and the exciting scene of the day was over.
I think you had better go. Take these girls with you."
It is no rare occurrence that one's disembodied spirit, after death, should wander about; but even that is not a very agreeable idea.
This inclination was perceived by her relations.
Soon after this, the lady was safely delivered of a child.
Up to this time nothing about Violet had been publicly known, and Genji thought it was time to inform her father about his daughter; but he considered he had better have the ceremony of Mogi first performed, and ordered preparations to be made with that object.
The lady was lying on her couch, dressed in a pure white garment, with her long tresses unfastened.
She thought that she never wished any evil to her; but, when she reflected, there were several times when she began to think that a wounded spirit, such as her own, might have some influence of the kind.
Numerous mourners and priests of different churches crowded to the spot, while representatives of the ex-Emperor, Princess Wistaria, and the Heir-apparent also were present.
Now, in the mansion of Sadaijin every performance of requiem was celebrated.
"Ah! no. I only come here to solicit you to give me a little rest.
This became stronger when she was told that the sufferings of the Lady Aoi were owing to some living spirit.
She was the favorite child of her mother as well as of her father, and the ceremonies for the day of consecration were arranged with especial splendor.
In his letter he stated that she might have a little sympathy with him in his sorrow, and he also sent with it the following:--
At the same time, the jealous spirit still vexed her, and now more vigorous exorcising was employed.
This was soon responded to by Genji:--
The day thus looked forward to at last arrived.
As Sadaijin was turning over these papers a withered flower, which seems to have marked some particular occasion, dropped from amongst them.
Meanwhile the approach of the procession was announced, and only this calmed her a little.
How much more, then, must it be disagreeable to have the repute that one's living spirit was inflicting pain upon another!"
As the occasion was expected to be magnificent, every class of the people showed great eagerness to witness the scene, and a great number of stands were erected all along the road.
I never thought of coming here in such a way; but it seems the spirit of one whose thoughts are much disconcerted wanders away unknown even to itself.
Return we now to Genji.
Genji was leaning out of a window, his cheek resting on his hand; and, looking out upon the half-fading shrubberies, was humming--
HOLLYHOCK
The curtain was dropped, and the mother of the lady left the room, as she thought her daughter might prefer to speak to him in private.
The Emperor has at last abdicated his throne, as he has long intended, in favor of the Heir-apparent, and the only child of the Princess Wistaria is made Heir-apparent to the new Emperor.
About noon Genji came.
Violet turned her glance a little aside.
Sadaijin also went to Court, as well as his sons, who had some expectation of promotion, and there were few people left in the mansion.
She was apparently shy, which only increased her beauty.
He admired her, too.
At this time he confined himself more than usual to his own house, and for companionship he was constantly with Violet, who was now approaching womanhood.
He called Koremitz before him and said, "To-day is not a very opportune day; I would rather have them to-morrow evening.
Being pressed in this way, she hastily made up her mind, and went with a train of carriages.
Genji was also directed by special order to take part in the ceremony.
The quarrels about the carriage naturally came to the ears of Genji.
There was, indeed, nothing serious between Genji and this princess; yet, as far as correspondence was concerned, they now and then exchanged letters, so she did not object to receiving this communication.
In due course, the confinement of Lady Aoi approached.
These thoughts still preyed upon her mind, and made her listless and depressed.
He tried to soothe her, and said, "Pray don't trouble yourself too much about matters.
She felt for him much, and an answer was returned, in which she expressed her sympathy at his bereavement.
"Even in ordinary matters," she thought, "it is too common a practice, to say nothing of the good done by people, but to exaggerate the bad; and so, in such cases, if it should be rumored that mine was that living spirit which tormented Lady Aoi, how trying it would be to me!
They came in all haste, wiping off the perspiration from their faces as they journeyed; and, from the Emperor and Royal princes down to the ordinary nobles, all took an interest in the ceremony of Ub-yashinai (first feeding), and the more so as the child was a boy.
Her attendants, however, suggested to her that she ought to go.
Some days passed, and the day of autumn appointments arrived.
Your illness, I think, will soon pass away.
He went to the western wing to visit the young Violet.
Messengers of inquiry came one after another to the mansion, so numerous that it was almost impossible to return them all answers. We need not add how greatly affected were all her relations.
CHAPTER IX
He approached her, and taking her hand, said: "What sad affliction you cause us!" She then lifted her heavy eyelids, and gazed on Genji for some minutes.
He had some affectionate conversation with him, remained till evening, and then proceeded to his mansion at Nijio.
Among these papers he saw one on which the words "Old pillows and old quilts" were written, and close to these the following:--
The number of persons who take a share in the procession on this occasion is defined by regulations; yet the selection of this number was most carefully made from the most fashionable of the nobles of the time, and their dresses and saddles were all chosen of beautiful appearance.
It was in the evening of that day that Lady Aoi was suddenly attacked by a spasm, and before the news of this could be carried to the Court, she died.
"It is a great pity," they said, "not to see it; people come from a long distance to see it." Her mother also said, "You seem better to-day.
The room was the same as before, and everything was unchanged; but his only daughter, the pride of his old days, was no more, and his son-in-law had gone too.
As the death took place from a malign spiritual influence, she was left untouched during two or three days, in the hope that she might revive; but no change took place, and now all hope was abandoned.
All were habited in new winter apparel, and looked fresh and blooming.
The lady so maltreated was of course extremely indignant, and she would fain have gone home without seeing the spectacle, but there was no passage for retiring.
Everything will come right.
It seems that her father was not quite averse to this liking, and he told his eldest daughter, the reigning Emperor's mother, that Genji was recently bereaved of his good consort, and that he should not feel discontented if his daughter were to take the place of Lady Aoi; but this the royal mother did not approve.
As it happened late in the evening there was no time to send for the head of the monastery, or any other distinguished priest.
The ex-Emperor now lived in a private palace with this Princess in a less royal style; and the Niogo of Kokiden, to whom was given the honorary title of ex-Empress, resided in the Imperial Palace with the Emperor, her son, and took up a conspicuous position.
The ceremony of burial was performed with all solemnity and pathos.
"That cloudy shrine we view on high, Where my lost love may dwell unseen, Looks gloomy now to this sad eye That looks with tears on what has been."
He went to the ex-Emperor, to whom he still seemed thin and careworn.
This change in the reigning Emperor, and the gradual advancement of Genji's position, gave the latter greater responsibility, and he had to restrain his wandering.
Some imagined this to be the effect of fearful jealousy of some one who was intimately known to Genji and who had most influence over him; but the spirit gave no information to this effect.
"We're going to slide on the brook below the cornfield."
"Did they laugh at me?"
And all the time Eric had only to turn his head to see Ivra walking out there around in the field, looking at the farm house, waiting for him. But gradually, as the stories went on the little figure out there grew more and more to look like just a blue shadow on the snow, paler and paler.
He overtook her a long way in, walking rapidly.
The window was draped with cobwebs and dusty with the dust of years.
So Eric ran to the door.
Nora was there knitting by a table, two big pans of cookies just out of the oven cooling in front of her.
"Well, he saw It while we were looking out of the barn window!
Of course you see her!"
But father says it's nothing to mind.
We've seen it before too,--a kind of a shadow on the snow.
"Yes," said the jolliest of the boys.
By and by they played tag, just plain tag, and Eric liked that best of all.
That was dreadful for her.
Then Eric began to think that Ivra was not very happy.
For a minute she was lost in a cloud of blown snow, and then there she was dancing in their circle back and forth across the pasture, and then away, away, away!
But they are awfully jolly.
And she tells the best stories.
"Over there by the white birch.
Come up.
"There's no one by the white birch.
Then they played hide-and-go-seek in the hay country, and after that Blind Man's Buff in the barn below.
Eric laughed.
He looked even jollier than the girl.
He perched on the edge of the table and ate that one and many another before he was done.
She's a fairy.
"Take her some cookies," said Nora, filling his pockets.
She had not said so, but he had guessed it from her face when she told him.
"They must be done by now."
He could not find the catch.
And it was like spring coming into winter.
"Yes, take some cookies to the fairy.
"And so won't you tell us some stories about it now.
She was a little girl about his own age, freckle-faced, snub-nosed and red-haired.
"Don't say 'It,'" said Nora.
"His name is Eric," interrupted Nora, handing him another cookie.
She must have heard their shouts and laughter.
He pointed her out to the other children.
"But it doesn't make you cross," laughed the jolliest boy.
Yes.
Look!
And just as Ivra and the Witches drifted out of sight, he thought he heard the Forest Children laughing.
Eric followed.
Down in the pasture by the house half a dozen Snow Witches were dancing in a circle, now near, now far, all over the pasture, and sometimes right up to the farm-house windows.
She sat up, saw Eric and stared.
She had the jolliest, the nicest face in the world.
"Oh, yes," said the jolliest boy.
She was half fairy. People could see her if they looked hard enough.
"Let's go in and get some cookies from her," said the other boy.
So up they hopped, and without another look towards the shadow out on the snow by the white birch, jumped down the hole, and ran out of the barn into the kitchen.
Nora laughed with them, and so after a minute Eric joined in.
"Quick, help me open the window."
"Let's open the window and call to her to come up.
Back and forth across the great room they raced,--up the ladder, over the hay, through the hole into the stable, round and round, in and out, up and down until they were too tired and hot for any more.
We're having sport."
She'll tell us stories."
He found the hole in the stable ceiling and looked down.
But they were not apt to believe their own eyes when they had looked.
"To have me for a playmate?"
"Look out down there!
Ivra clapped her hands and bounded forward.
This was a boy.
You play with them and when you tell me about it afterwards I'll pretend I was there playing too."
Grown-ups will laugh at you."
CHAPTER XIII
He stood to watch.
"Eric,--who are you?"
He liked them,--oh, so much!
She was saying, "No, never, never, never, in a thousand days and years will I ever be happy here.
They must keep happy and wait."
That is why they did not know her at first, that and her very strange clothes.
Oh, how these heels bother!"
There's to be strawberry ice to-day,--and goose to begin with of course.
Soon she stopped and wiped her face on her sleeve.
So there!"
Did you expect them to do any thing else but bother?
Then came a young man in a stiff, funny hat, carrying a cane, beating up the snow flowers with it as he passed the flower beds.
Eric and the Wind Creatures followed.
And behind them walked--Helma, with her gaze on the ground.
And almost before the end the little story teller had fallen asleep with her head tipped back against the Tree Man's chest.
For a minute she looked steadily at them without believing, and then it was as though her pale face suddenly burst into song.
"Your place is where you were born-in a fine house and wearing clothes like other people.
But Ivra did not stop to wonder.
Come, cheer up.
Eric and the Wind Children sat cross-legged and waited.
But afterwards another Government bethought itself of that valuable asset.
There were strange rumours of the English doctor.
There was for him in that affair a malignancy of perverted justice which, by means of a moral shock, attacked his vigorous physique.
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick."
He was old, ugly, learned--and a little "loco"--mad, if not a bit of a sorcerer, as the common people suspected him of being.
There were knick-knacks on little tables, mirrors let into the wall above marble consoles, square spaces of carpet under the two groups of armchairs, each presided over by a deep sofa; smaller rugs scattered all over the floor of red tiles; three windows from the ceiling down to the ground, opening on a balcony, and flanked by the perpendicular folds of the dark hangings.
She was good-natured, and her despondency was genuine.
He was versed in the ways of Governments.
It would have been useless.
"No; it's no go.
Only Mrs. Gould could keep his unbelief in men's motives within due bounds; but even to her (on an occasion not connected with Nostromo, and in a tone which for him was gentle), even to her, he had said once, "Really, it is most unreasonable to demand that a man should think of other people so much better than he is able to think of himself."
Then giving up the empty cup into his young friend's hand, extended with a smile, he continued to expatiate upon the patriotic nature of the San Tome mine for the simple pleasure of talking fluently, it seemed, while his reclining body jerked backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair of the sort exported from the United States.
Indeed, the intention of this affair, though no doubt deeply meditated in the closet, lay open on the surface of the document presented urgently for his signature.
His grandfather had fought in the cause of independence under Bolivar, in that famous English legion which on the battlefield of Carabobo had been saluted by the great Liberator as Saviours of his country.
His close-cropped head was perfectly white; his eyes coalblack.
He had struck her imagination from the first by his unsentimentalism, by that very quietude of mind which she had erected in her thought for a sign of perfect competency in the business of living.
Clearly he was one of those invaluable subordinates whom to possess is a legitimate cause of boasting.
But man is a desperately conservative creature, and the extravagant novelty of this outrage upon his purse distressed his sensibilities.
The other Carlos, turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed pavement--Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier reining in his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his marble arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat.
He did not like tea; and, usually, rocking his American chair, his neat little shiny boots crossed on the foot-rest, he would talk on and on with a sort of complacent virtuosity wonderful in a man of his age, while he held the cup in his hands for a long time.
His experience had taught him that, however short the plunder might fall of their legitimate expectations, no gang in possession of the Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext.
Had it not been for the immaculate cleanliness of his apparel he might have been taken for one of those shiftless Europeans that are a moral eyesore to the respectability of a foreign colony in almost every exotic part of the world.
Mrs. Gould, raising her eyes to her husband's thin, red and tan face, could not detect the slightest quiver of a feature at what he must have heard said of his patriotism.
She kept her old Spanish house (one of the finest specimens in Sulaco) open for the dispensation of the small graces of existence.
Mr. Gould, senior, defended himself from this fatal favour with many arguments and entreaties, but without success.
It is a failing common to mankind, whose views are tinged by prejudices.
Even Mr. Gould's letters to his fourteen-year-old boy Charles, then away in England for his education, came at last to talk of practically nothing but the mine.
She was always sorry for homesick people.
Ah! zut!
At his worst people feared the open scornfulness of his tongue.
Charles, very quiet and twisting his long moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all.
Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with this primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw.
His position in Costaguana was no worse than before.
Then it became forgotten.
He presented this tribute very seriously indeed; it was no trifle for a man of his habits.
It was no longer an abandoned mine; it was a wild, inaccessible, and rocky gorge of the Sierra, where vestiges of charred timber, some heaps of smashed bricks, and a few shapeless pieces of rusty iron could have been found under the matted mass of thorny creepers covering the ground.
The doctor, with his habit of sceptical, bitter speech, had no other means of showing his profound respect for the character of the woman who was known in the country as the English Senora.
The loftiness dwarfed the mixture of heavy, straight-backed Spanish chairs of brown wood with leathern seats, and European furniture, low, and cushioned all over, like squat little monsters gorged to bursting with steel springs and horsehair.
Mr. Gould knew that very well, and, armed with resignation, had waited for better times.
His accent had never been English; but there was something so indelible in all these ancestral Goulds--liberators, explorers, coffee planters, merchants, revolutionists--of Costaguana, that he, the only representative of the third generation in a continent possessing its own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English even on horseback.
At that time Nostromo had been already long enough in the country to raise to the highest pitch Captain Mitchell's opinion of the extraordinary value of his discovery.
"No go," she had said with a cavalier, husky intonation which was natural to her, and using turns of expression more suitable to a child of parents unknown than to the orphaned daughter of a general officer.
She would have protested that she had done nothing for them, with a low laugh and a surprised widening of her grey eyes, had anybody told her how convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow-line above Sulaco.
The friend of Mr. Gould, charged with the delicate mission, used to say afterwards that she was the only honest person closely or remotely connected with the Government he had ever met.
Basilio, in a livery of white linen and a red sash, had squatted for a moment behind his heels to unstrap the heavy, blunt spurs in the patio; and then the Senor Administrator would go up the staircase into the gallery.
And Mrs. Gould had hastened to drop the subject.
Now, after reaching his exalted position, that politician had proclaimed his intention to repay evil with good to Senor Gould--the poor man.
Rows of plants in pots, ranged on the balustrade between the pilasters of the arches, screened the corredor with their leaves and flowers from the quadrangle below, whose paved space is the true hearthstone of a South American house, where the quiet hours of domestic life are marked by the shifting of light and shadow on the flagstones.
She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.
In the early days of her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country as seriously as the incidental atrocity of methods deserved.
He groaned over the injustice, the persecution, the outrage of that mine; he occupied whole pages in the exposition of the fatal consequences attaching to the possession of that mine from every point of view, with every dismal inference, with words of horror at the apparently eternal character of that curse.
It was an ordinary Costaguana Government--the fourth in six years--but it judged of its opportunities sanely.
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name; but neither did the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured beast with a white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his English coat.
It was rediscovered after the War of Independence.
Don Jose chose to come over at tea-time because the English rite at Dona Emilia's house reminded him of the time he lived in London as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James.
"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few words made her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation.
She saw in them a comedy of naive pretences, but hardly anything genuine except her own appalled indignation.
His hair had turned grey, his hairless, seamed face was of a brick-dust colour; the large check pattern of his flannel shirt and his old stained Panama hat were an established defiance to the conventionalities of Sulaco.
The Finance Minister could have formed no conception of the profound subtlety of his revenge.
And, in fact, since that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains, and mostly from a worrying inability to think of anything else.
She had a great confidence in her husband; it had always been very great.
Perhaps he had just dismounted on his return from the mine; he was English enough to disregard the hottest hours of the day.
"It will end by killing me," he used to affirm many times a day.
Perhaps the mere fact of being born in the country did make a difference.
Mr. Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.
He became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read in light literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders.
Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall, with a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn hair, and a thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a new arrival from over the sea.
Don Jose Avellanos, their neighbour across the street, a statesman, a poet, a man of culture, who had represented his country at several European Courts (and had suffered untold indignities as a state prisoner in the time of the tyrant Guzman Bento), used to declare in Dona Emilia's drawing-room that Carlos had all the English qualities of character with a truly patriotic heart.
Marta, in a soft and implacable voice, and with such malicious glances that Mr. Gould's best friends advised him earnestly to attempt no bribery to get the matter dropped.
He was bitterly taciturn when at his best.
Mr. Gould, the father, had one fault in his sagacious and honourable character: he attached too much importance to form.
But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to work, she would have found an explanation.
Not that Dr. Monygham was a prodigal either of laughter or of words.
"Of course, it was such a surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here.
Only then he would say--
He implored his son never to return to Costaguana, never to claim any part of his inheritance there, because it was tainted by the infamous Concession; never to touch it, never to approach it, to forget that America existed, and pursue a mercantile career in Europe.
The ceiling of the largest drawing-room of the Casa Gould extended its white level far above his head.
On seeing Charles Gould step into the sala he would nod provisionally and go on to the end of the oratorial period.
Mrs. Gould felt that, too, perfectly.
Thus, at least, the priests explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that streamed in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the ugly box of bricks before the great altar.
The little white jacket was in reality a concession to Mrs. Gould's humanizing influence.
Everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque and murderous bands that played their game of governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman Bento.
His mind preserved its steady poise as if sheltered in the passionless stability of private and public decencies at home in Europe.
Years ago, in the time of Guzman Bento, he had been mixed up, it was whispered, in a conspiracy which was betrayed and, as people expressed it, drowned in blood.
Civilization (which is part of the circle of his imaginings) has spread a veneer over the surface of the soft-shelled animal known as man.
He has a piece of cloth which he calls a napkin, with which he wipes from his lips, and from the hair on his lips, the greasy juices of the meat.
And there's the rub.
They are the foul blows of the spirit that have never been disbarred, as the foul blows of the prize-ring have been disbarred. (Would it not be preferable for a man to strike one full on the mouth with his fist than for him to tell a lie about one, or malign those that are nearest and dearest?)
It is well enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn of cowardly apes and tigers to live.
The raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in the crust of the earth.
Yet in the world of the somnambulists, where soar the sublimated spirits, there are no classes, and foul blows are continually struck and never disallowed.
A Wall Street raid is not a fang slash.
It requires a slightly different stick to scrape it off.
But the good, kind people who don't do anything won't believe this, and the assertion will make them angry--for a moment.
As he succeeds, his somnambulism grows profound.
The raw animals beneath are identical.
The man who walks in his sleep says it is not a club.
In a prize-fight men are classed.
Dummy boards of directors and fake accountings are not foul blows of the fist under the belt.
He reads only the newspapers and magazines that tell him what he wants to be told, listens only to the biologists who tell him that he is the finest product of the struggle for existence, and herds only with his own kind, where, like the monkey-folk, they teeter up and down and tell one another how great they are.
The world of somnambulism, whose exalted and sensitive citizens are outraged by the knockouts of the prize-ring, and who annually not merely knock out, but kill, thousands of babies and children by means of child labour and adulterated food.
Far better to have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest prize-fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer.
The phrases that the good, kind people repeat to themselves and to one another sound like "abstinence," "temperance," "thrift," "virtue." Sometimes they say them backward, when they sound like "prodigality," "drunkenness," "wastefulness," and "immorality." They do not really know the meaning of these phrases, but they think they do, and that is all that is necessary for somnambulists.
They paint pictures for the commercial men, write books for them, sing songs for them, act plays for them, and dose them with various drugs when their bodies have grown gross or dyspeptic from overeating and lack of exercise.
The flesh-and-blood body of man has not changed in the last several thousand years.
The world of graft!
This is the dictum of the man who walks in his sleep.
They gather together and solemnly and gloatingly make and repeat certain noises that sound like "discretion," "acumen," "initiative," "enterprise." These noises are especially gratifying when they are made backward.
And in either case, forward or backward, the spirit of the dream is not disturbed.
Prize-fighting is terrible.
It is not necessary to call him a liar to touch his vanity.
The result of this admixture of the real and the unreal is confusion thrice confounded.
The man who walks in his sleep ignores the flesh and all its wonderful play of muscle, joint, and nerve.
And the funniest thing about it is that this arch-deceiver believes all that they tell him.
They develop classical economists who announce that the only possible way for men and women to get food and shelter is by the existing method.
He is fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters bruising each other with their fists; and at the same time, because it will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year mangles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of working-men, women, and children.
As he persuades himself against the latter till it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands undisguised, a brute like any other brute.
Only they are not called foul blows.
The world of claw and fang and fist and club has passed away--so say the somnambulists.
To them it will be inexplicable that this man, with his health and his millions, could not go on living as his class lived, keeping regular hours at desk and stock exchange, driving close contracts, underbidding his competitors, and exulting in the business disasters of his fellows.
And so now we have hit upon the idea of shutting up the beggars in such special buildings, so that they may not roam about the streets and stir up our consciences."
And you must know that when a man complains about everything, and cries out and groans--he is not worth more than two kopeks, he is not worthy of pity, and will be of no use to you if you do help him."
It was strange--why did they live?
Why is that?
A five-kopek piece--that is your God!
He is not constructive.
In the vile companions who purvey to his baser appetites he finds no charm.
"Work is not everything to a man," he says; "it is not true that justification lies in work . . .
He is neither to be enticed nor cajoled. The cry of his nature is for light.
"Foma Gordyeeff" is a big book--not only is the breadth of Russia in it, but the expanse of life.
He does not drink because liquor tastes good in his mouth.
But Foma will have none of it.
"Why do you brag?" Foma, bursts out upon him.
But my idea is that everybody ought, without fail, to know solidly what he is living for.
He knows life, why and how it should be lived.
You have disseminated filth and stifling exhalations by your deeds.
And so, wondering, pondering, perplexed, amazed, whirling through the mad whirlpool of life, dancing the dance of death, groping for the nameless, indefinite something, the magic formula, the essence, the intrinsic fact, the flash of light through the murk and dark--the rational sanction for existence, in short--Foma Gordyeeff goes down to madness and death.
And, like all his brother Russians, ardent, passionate protest impregnates his work.
But Foma can only be destructive.
He becomes the living interrogation of life.
Why should men fetch and carry for him?
For all--to the last little tear-drop!"
All they did was to perform their dirty, arduous toil, eat poorly; they were miserably clad, addicted to drunkenness.
It is not a pretty book, but it is a masterful interrogation of life--not of life universal, but of life particular, the social life of to-day.
What is there underneath?
She might have been a power for good in his life, she might have shed light into it and lifted him up to safety and honour and understanding.
But it is a less tedious realism than that of Tolstoy or Turgenev.
No story is told, nothing is finished.
But you have expelled your conscience!"
It is without significance!
Your daughter--what is she?
From that clenched fist of his, light and airy romances, pretty and sweet and beguiling, do not flow, but realities--yes, big and brutal and repulsive, but real.
He must have light.
There is a purpose to it.
He raises the cry of the miserable and the despised, and in a masterly arraignment of commercialism, protests against social conditions, against the grinding of the faces of the poor and weak, and the self-pollution of the rich and strong, in their mad lust for place and power.
Come, now, you're clever, you know everything--tell me, why do you live?
be slaves to him and his money?
What satisfaction was it to them to live on the earth?
"His thoughts embraced all those petty people who toiled at hard labour.
No; life means something in itself. . . .
And in burning revolt he goes seeking the meaning of life.
But no story is told, nothing is finished, some one will object.
Have you any conscience?
Yet it was not finished, was not decisive. She left him to go with the son of a rich vodka-maker.
All of us must consider why we are living, by God, we must!
It is all utterly despicable and sordid, but thither his quest leads him and he follows the quest.
You shall perish--you shall be called to account for all!
Yet she went away next day, and he never saw her again.
Not once, but, in all probability, a thousand times, we have given Him over to be crucified, but still we cannot banish Him from our lives so long as His poor brethren sing His name in the streets and remind us of Him.
"You have not constructed life--you have made a cesspool!
One was sixty years old, but he still toiled side by side with young men.
Now comes Mayakin, speaking softly and without satire:
For Gorky, the Bitter One, is essentially a Russian in his grasp on the facts of life and in his treatment.
It was pregnant with possibilities.
Is it possible that a man is born to toil, accumulate money, build a house, beget children, and--die?
And how will all the people who give their orders justify themselves?
Stunned by this puddle of life, unable to make sense of it, Foma questions, and questions vainly, whether of Sofya Medynsky in her drawing-room of beauty, or in the foulest depths of the first chance courtesan's heart.
There is no sense in our life--there is no sense at all.
What is the meaning of that which is underneath?
Do you remember God?
So fearful is its portrayal of social disease, so ruthless its stripping of the painted charms from vice, that its tendency cannot but be strongly for good.
But men have so ordered their lives that it is utterly impossible for them to act in accordance with Christ's teaching, and Jesus Christ has become entirely superfluous to us.
"Nevertheless it is, perhaps, as well not to make too free with a young lady's name.
During that terrible conflict between him and his slumber, in which the drowsy god fairly vanquished him for some twenty minutes, his conscience was always accusing him of treating his guests badly.
Eames saw it, and could hardly refrain from laughing.
"You don't mean to say that you're in love with Miss Lily Dale?"
"I daresay," said Johnny, who looked very hard, but could not see.
And then the earl winked back at Eames.
Come, we'll go into the drawing-room."
He got on very well with Lady Julia, who gave herself no airs, and made herself very civil.
"I hope you don't think me ungrateful," said Bernard.
He sat down, and in some general terms expressed his good-will towards all the Eames family.
"As you know, Dale, I'm a very bad hand at talking, and therefore I won't beat about the bush in what I've got to say at present.
Dear young child, I would do anything to comfort her!
Of course he did not wish to retract.
But he felt afraid of the squire,--that the squire would despise him and snub him, and that the earl would perceive that he had made a mistake when he saw how his client was scorned and snubbed.
"Not ten minutes.
It was pretty to see the way in which the three conspired together, planning and plotting with an eagerness that was beautifully green and fresh.
"Certainly, certainly."
I have nothing more to say about it, however;--not about that.
And when he walked with the earl after church to the gate over which the noble peer had climbed in his agony, and inspected the hedge through which he had thrown himself, he was quite at home with his little jokes, bantering his august companion as to the mode of his somersault.
Lord De Guest still felt that he had not succeeded.
Of course the men there would talk about her, and all such talking was an injury to her.
But if you did as I would have you, your life would not be idle." In this he was alluding to Bernard's proposed marriage, but as to that nothing further could be said in Bell's presence.
"The last time she was there, the boy let the lamp blow out as she was going home, and she lost her way.
He always was Huffle Scuffle; a noisy, pretentious, empty-headed fellow.
"Ah! that's the '20," said the squire, tasting it.
Bell understood it all, and sat quite silent, with demure countenance;--perhaps even with something of sternness in her face.
That was his style of life, and he expected no more from it than he got.
"Yes,--especially to meet young Eames.
If you should marry--" And then he stopped himself, feeling that he could not go on in Bell's presence.
"But it's too late now, De Guest."
I shall go down to Torquay in February.
But Johnny had already begun to feel at the Manor that, after all, people are not so very different in their ways of life as they are supposed to be.
But--" So the evening wore itself away; and when the squire was left alone at half-past nine, he did not feel that the day had passed badly with him.
By what mirth should the beards be made to wag on that Christmas Day?
And coming from him, that ought to be taken as a good sign.
The truth was, she was angry because Mr. Boyce didn't go with her."
Eames did not attempt to keep him, but went away feeling that the whole matter was being arranged for him in a very wonderful way.
She valued him more highly after that scene than she did before.
He had said of himself that he was never able to speak quickly in matters of moment; but he would more correctly have described his own character had he declared that he could not think of them quickly.
"I was lucky enough to get it early, and it hasn't been moved for thirty years.
He is to think of it, and let me see him again. You hold your head up, Johnny, and remember that you shan't want a friend on your side.
"That's nonsense," said Mrs. Dale.
I hope that you and I may see them happy together, and that you too may thank me for having assisted in making them so.
I'll ask Dale to come over to dinner on Tuesday; and if he'll come, I'll explain the whole matter to him myself.
"Of course you know much better than I do," he would say.
"I should not have thought that Lord De Guest was the man to show so much gratitude for so slight a favour," said the squire.
"However, I'm going to dine there to-morrow."
Lily, who was sitting next to Mrs. Dale, put her hand out secretly and got hold of her mother's, thereby indicating that she did not intend to occupy the cell offered to her by her uncle; or to look to him as the companion of her monastic seclusion.
"THE TIME WILL COME."
There was no attempt at concealment, and the question was asked in Johnny's presence.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
And if Mr. Boyce had gone home with her, she would have grumbled because he walked too fast."
Nothing happened to her, or in her presence, that did not in some way connect itself with her misery.
He's a man of business, and he'll understand. If he won't come, why then you must go over to Allington, and find him, if you can, on the Tuesday morning; or I'll go to him myself, which will be better.
At last came the hour of dinner on Tuesday, or at least the hour at which the squire had been asked to show himself at the Manor House. Eames, as by agreement with his patron, did not come down so as to show himself till after the interview.
"Isn't it big enough?
But now, she would feel herself injured and hurt if he ever made his way into her presence under circumstances as they existed.
Lily bore her cross bravely and well; but not the less did it weigh heavily upon her at every turn because she had the strength to walk as though she did not bear it.
"It comes to that, for you have to be writing while you munch it."
Do you know that that young man was in love with her long before Crosbie ever saw her?"
"I would always keep a cell for you, my darling, if I did," said the squire, regarding her with that painful, special tenderness.
Faint heart never won fair lady."
It mustn't be too late!
That child is not to lose her whole life because a villain has played her false. Of course she'll suffer.
"That would be your own fault.
You mustn't keep me now, as I am ever so much too late."
"I shouldn't have ventured to meddle in the matter had I not intended to put myself in such a position with reference to him as would justify me in asking the question." And the peer as he spoke drew himself up to his full height.
He did feel himself to be rather out of his place in the Manor pew on the Sunday, conceiving that all the congregation was looking at him; but he got over this on Christmas Day, and sat quite comfortably in his soft corner during the sermon, almost going to sleep.
"If such a match can be made, it shall not be a bad marriage for your niece in a pecuniary point of view.
I've taken a great fancy to him myself."
But the less we say about that the better.
He was my nephew's friend, and I am not going to say that my nephew was in fault.
Do you hear that, Bell?
"I've something I want to say to you."
In answer to this Lady Julia merely shook her head.
"I'll give him some port wine that ought to soften his heart," said the earl, "and then we'll see how he is in the evening."
"Half a moment," said the squire.
The earl, as he entered, was standing in the middle of the room, and his round rosy face was a picture of good-humour.
"Only think of Johnny Eames being at Guestwick Manor!" said Bell, as they were going home.
"Yes; she went in after church," said Bell.
But if she did, I'm sure she would grumble because it wasn't double the amount.
Her brother had told her the whole story, and she felt as anxious as he did to provide Lily with another husband in place of that horrible man Crosbie.
But, Dale, the time will come; the time will come;--the time always does come."
If Bernard could have owned the truth, he would have acknowledged that he had not gone up to London, because he did not yet know how to treat Crosbie when he should meet him.
"Wouldn't she have this house?" said the squire, angrily.
"I have even offered to settle the property on him if he will leave the service."
"There must be some reason for it." Then Lily felt the soreness come upon her again, and spoke no further upon the subject.
"Why not?" said the squire.
"Mrs. Hearn is dining at the vicarage, I suppose?" asked the squire.
"I think it would be wise.
"Huffle Scuffle!
"Don't you remember, mamma," said Bell, "that he helped his lordship in his trouble with the bull?"
"It'll come to him soon enough," said the squire.
"And is Bernard going?"
"I want him to give up his profession altogether," said the squire, speaking firmly and slowly.
"You'll be squire of Allington for the next twenty years," said Mrs. Dale.
"I don't pretend to know anything about it.
"But, nevertheless, she ought to know better than to speak disparagingly of me to my servants.
People so mixed do not talk together their inward home thoughts.
The afternoon of that day did not pass away brightly.
It was very long and very dull that Christmas evening, making Bernard feel strongly that he would be very foolish to give up his profession, and tie himself down to a life at Allington.
As it was, the earl was disappointed; but had he been able to read the squire's mind, his disappointment would have been less strong.
"Well, he did not say much.
"Dear me!
"Dipped in ink!" said the squire.
I like to give it to a man who knows it, as you do, at the first glance.
The story of their lives had been so far the same; each had loved, and each had been disappointed, and then each had remained single through life.
As long as the servants were in the room the dinner went on much as other dinners. At such times a certain amount of hypocrisy must always be practised in closely domestic circles.
"I have not thought about it."
"How do you do, sir?" said Johnny, walking up to him in a wild sort of manner,--going through a premeditated lesson, but doing it without any presence of mind.
"I saw her go with Mrs. Boyce."
I must be up in London, you know, in a fortnight, for good." Then they were all silent again for a few minutes.
But for her,--you and her mother will look forward to see her married some day."
There's promotion for Master Johnny!"
"She ought to be very much obliged to you," said the squire.
"And what did he say?" asked Lady Julia, as soon as the squire was gone.
"It would be better, I think, for both of us that he should do so."
I don't approve of monarchs abdicating in favour of young people."
"He was with Lord De Guest at Pawkins's."
"At Guestwick Manor!" said Mrs. Dale.
"But, my dear Dale, I must mention it at the present moment.
When the door was tiled, and when the servants were gone, how could they be merry together?
"Dale, I know you drink port," said the earl when Lady Julia left them.
"I don't think uncle Christopher would look at all well like Charles the Fifth," said Lily.
"There are matters as to which I never find myself able to speak quickly, and this certainly seems to be one of them.
Lady Julia's manners were certainly not quite those of Mrs. Roper; but she made the tea very much in the way in which it was made at Burton Crescent, and Eames found that he could eat his egg, at any rate on the second morning, without any tremor in his hand, in spite of the coronet on the silver egg-cup.
So is champagne, or ginger-beer, or lollipops,--for those who like them.
"Indeed I'm not," said Bernard.
"Haven't seen him these thirty years; but I did know him."
But when close friends are together, a little conscious reticence is practised till the door is tiled.
"No, I do not; but I think you unmindful.
"He is an uncommonly good-looking young fellow; straight made, broad in the chest, with a good, honest eye, and a young man's proper courage.
"I should rather think it is," said the earl.
And I hope that something may be done to comfort her.
That's exactly nine minutes to each; and as for lunch, we only have a biscuit dipped in ink."
"What;--John Eames!"
"Then I'll tell you what; I've been thinking of it.
Lady Julia, who had been present at their discussions, had agreed to receive the squire; and then a servant was to ask him to step into the earl's own room.
"Well, then, whether you do or not, I'll give him something," said the earl.
But I wish,--I only say that I wish,--she had first known what are this young man's feelings towards her."
"She hardly speaks to me now. When she paid her rent the other day to Jolliffe, she said she hoped it would do me much good; as though she thought me a brute for taking it."
"I don't suppose he ever heard my name as yet," said Johnny.
Then he declared to himself that there was no longer any possibility of retractation for him.
"If you mean that I cannot constrain him, I know that well enough. As regards money, I have offered to do for him quite as much as any father would feel called upon to do for an only son."
I want to interest you in this fellow's favour; and in doing so, I mean to be very open with you. I suppose you'll give her something?"
I shall have pleasure in giving to him; but I shall have more pleasure if she can share what I give."
"And she wouldn't take it," said Mrs. Dale.
He did not look to find things very pleasant, and, if not happy, he was, at any rate, contented.
Mr. Dale knew well enough that he was being treated well, and that the effort being made was intended with kindness to those belonging to him; but it was not in his nature to be demonstrative and quick at expressions of gratitude.
But it was not in Johnny's nature to do so, and therefore it was that the earl liked him.
He must be at his office by twelve on Wednesday, and could manage to do that by an early train from Guestwick.
"I don't think she would.
I should be very wrong to do so.
"But I want you to think about it.
A month passes and, about the middle of September, the little ones hatch, but without leaving their tabernacle, where they are to spend the winter packed in soft wadding.
Food is the means whereby she keeps the inexhaustible factory going.
It carries an authentic certificate of its origin, for the mother invariably occupies it.
To look for her by rummaging in the brushwood often leads to nothing, so swift is her flight; besides, a blind search entails a great risk of maiming her.
She has done all that maternal devotion can do; the special providence of tiny animals will do the rest.
I chance upon a web which, though deserted, is not yet dilapidated, proving that it has been but lately quitted. Instead of hunting in the brushwood whereon it rests, let us inspect the neighbourhood, to a distance of a few paces.
Nothing but empty shells was left inside the central keg; the germs were completely exterminated.
The walls never seem thick enough; the Spider is always working at them.
She also refuses to do so when, for reasons which I have not fathomed, the site chosen is some way up in the tuft of rosemary.
The front-entrance broadens into a gallery; the back-entrance tapers into a funnel-neck.
The animal knows its trade thoroughly, but it does not know and will never know aught else, being incapable of originality.
Its material is rather stout; my pincers, pulling at it, do not tear it without difficulty.
Every night she goes to it, walks over it, inspecting her snares, extending her domain and increasing it with new threads.
Toiling in the midst of a dense thicket, among a tangle of dead leaves and twigs, she may well produce a very inaccurate piece of work; but compel her to labour when free from all impediment: she will then--I am convinced of it beforehand--apply her talents without constraint and show herself an adept in the building of graceful nests.
Her cloister of vaulted passages enables her to proceed to any point of the star-shaped pouch containing the eggs. Indefatigable in her rounds, she stops here and there; she fondly feels the satin, listens to the secrets of the wallet.
The Epeira has her treacherous limed net; the Spider of the bushes has her no less treacherous labyrinth.
Such an appetite astonishes me, after I have seen the Crab Spider, that no less ardent watcher, refuse the Bees whom I give her and allow herself to die of inanition.
The work is done with the silk constantly hanging from the spinnerets and constantly extracted as the animal moves about.
Although it lasts long, the meal is eaten in perfect safety.
These are not capricious mouthfuls, serving to beguile the boredom of the watch for a brief while; they are substantial repasts, which require several sittings.
The Banded Epeira, trusting to the strength of her stuff, fixes her nest in the sight of all, hangs it on the brushwood, taking no precautions whatever to hide it.
Those materials have to be right under her legs; otherwise the Spider does without and continues her work just the same.
Very few neglect this precaution; each, in her own manner, conceals the eggs she lays.
The cabin is open at either end.
Then virtual regularity is translated into actual chaos; order degenerates into disorder.
Other species, living in the open under stones, work in the same way.
Half an hour's heat; and the magic jewels disappear with the dew.
They are readily accepted, provided they be tender and not too large.
At times of scorching heat, hers must be a regular sybaritic abode, such as eccentric man has sometimes ventured to build under water, with mighty blocks of stone and marble.
It is just possible for the casual pedestrian to catch his legs in the silky carpets; but giddy-pates who come here for a walk must be very rare.
In vain I ransack the bushes that carry the webs: I never find aught that realizes my hopes.
When this first point is drained, she passes on to others, to the second haunch in particular, until the prey becomes an empty hulk without losing its outline.
For a closer examination, let us use the dilapidated nests which we brought from the fields.
By way of provision, Locusts, every day.
The neck of the funnel, being more often walked upon than the rest of the dwelling, is therefore provided with a thicker upholstery.
If we continue to unshell the kernel, we find, below this mineral layer, a last silken tunic that forms a globe around the brood.
When laying-time is at hand, the Spider changes her residence; she abandons her web in excellent condition; she does not return to it.
The Spider is of another opinion; and I suspect the reason.
The experiment works perfectly.
She recruits herself with a Locust at longer intervals; she sometimes scorns those whom I myself entangle in her trap.
Moreover, she does not lose her appetite and is always prepared to bleed a Locust.
When spring comes, the youngsters will emerge from their snug habitation, disperse all over the neighbourhood by the expedient of the floating thread and weave their first attempts at a labyrinth on the tufts of thyme.
What is wanted is a trap capable of securing the game that hops or flies.
We inspect the stunted rosemaries along the edge of a path sheltered by a rocky, wooded slope; we lift the branches that spread over the ground.
As for the opening in front, which is wider, this is, beyond a doubt, a victualling-door.
Another, the Argyroneta, or Water Spider, builds herself an elegant silken diving-bell, in which she stores air.
Whoso comes to look at the bright thing too closely dies the victim of his curiosity.
From the first bite, the Locust becomes a lifeless thing; the Spider's poison has settled him.
Apart from its pillars, the egg-pocket is an inverted conoid, reminding us of the work of the Silky Epeira.
The Labyrinth Spider is better treated.
We soon discover high silk buildings, betrayed at a distance by the glittering threads which the dawn has converted into dewy rosaries.
These pillars are about ten in number and are slender in the middle, expanding at one end into a conical capital and at the other into a base of the same shape.
The method of the work explains these differences.
Beyond it are the slopes of the crater, which are also much-frequented regions.
The attack is not without danger.
It is an oval of exquisite white muslin, a diaphanous abode wherein the mother must make a long stay to watch over the brood.
What is common is not necessarily unimportant.
I see the Spider, at intervals, standing here on the look-out for the Locust, whom she consumes outside, taking care not to soil the spotless sanctuary with corpses.
Look above the web.
The Locust is demoralized rather than tied up; it is merely bits of broken thread that he is trailing from his legs. The bold assailant does not mind.
Even so does the Narbonne Lycosa struggle when we try to take away her pill.
There are hesitations, retrogressions, perpendicular falls at the end of a thread, ascents that bring the hanging Spider up again. In short much ado for a poor result.
She clings to the silken floor, she frustrates my attacks, which I am bound to moderate lest I should injure her.
In order to discover if the Thomisus is capable of a similar error, I gathered some broken pieces of silk-worm's cocoon into a closed cone, turning the fragments so as to bring the smoother and more delicate inner surface outside.
When I propose to dislodge her in view of certain experiments, I find some difficulty in doing so.
The comparison is correct down to the dazzling light itself.
She persists in living for five or six weeks, despite her shattered health, so as to give a last helping hand and open the door for her family.
The balloon has to split automatically and to scatter the youngsters and their flossy mattress all mixed up together.
As the technical name tells the reader nothing, how shall he be informed? I see but one means, which is to invite him to the May festivals, in the waste-lands of the South.
What a glorious send- off!
The Spider with the Crab-like figure does not know how to manufacture nets for catching game.
What infinitely tiny Midges does she capture before possessing the strength to stab her Bee?
The Crested Lark crumbles the mule-droppings in the road and thus picks up his food, the oaten grain which he would never find by soaring in the sky, his throat swollen with song.
All are moving upwards, all are climbing some support, as can be perceived by the nimble motion of their legs.
In vain, the Bee protests and darts her sting at random; the assailant does not let go.
When July comes, the little ones emerge.
Novice fingers, which shrink from touching any other Spider, allow themselves to be enticed by these attractions; they do not fear to handle the beauteous Thomisus, so gentle in appearance.
There is a slight breeze outside.
The change, for Darrow, was less definable; but, perhaps for that reason, it struck him as more sharply significant.
Darrow's first idea was that Owen, if he suspected that the conversation was not the result of an accidental encounter, might wonder at his step-mother's suitor being engaged, at such an hour, in private talk with her little girl's governess.
"I'm not thinking of the stage. I've had another offer: that's all."
"Then I'm to understand--definitely--that you DO renew your offer?" she asked
"I understand perfectly that you should like it here--for a time." His glance strayed down the gold-roofed windings ahead of them.
XVII
Her smile flickered up.
It's come over me again as we talked that, at heart, I've always KNOWN I could..."
But supposing that failed, and you saw I was determined to stay?
The girl, coming forward at his approach, returned his greeting almost gaily.
The fear that beset him was of another kind, and had a profounder source.
"I've told her exactly nothing," he replied.
Darrow was struck, and vaguely troubled, by the change in her look and tone.
For the first time he saw in her again the sidelong grace that had charmed his eyes in Paris; but he saw it now as in a painted picture.
But he had a fixed purpose ahead and could only push on to it.
"I shouldn't feel justified in telling her, behind your back, if I thought you unsuited for the place; but I should certainly feel justified," he rejoined after a pause, "in telling YOU if I thought the place unsuited to you."
Her face instantly sharpened to distrust.
"Oh, no, not more!"
You wouldn't: you'd hate it.
He had gathered that Effie's lessons were preceded by an early scamper in the park, and conjecturing that her governess might be with her he betook himself the next morning to the terrace, whence he wandered on to the gardens and the walks beyond.
"She told me you were friends--great friends"
"And not that you've ever seen me since?"
"What--exactly--DO you seem to see me permanently given up to?
His first step must be to obtain from Miss Viner the chance of another and calmer talk; and he resolved to seek it at the earliest hour.
You're too various, too gifted, too personal, to tie yourself down, at your age, to the dismal drudgery of teaching."
Darrow felt the blood in his cheek.
I want to hear more about you--about your plans and prospects.
The relief was hardly less great.
Her colour rose in a bright wave, and her eyes clung to his for a swift instant of reminder and appeal.
"And is THAT what you've told Mrs. Leath?"
She waited for a moment before answering: "I suppose I'm less restless than I used to be."
"And what--exactly--do you mean by 'nothing'?
Effie sprang past them, and Darrow took up the girl's challenge.
She smiled, she bore a part in the talk, her eyes dwelt on Darrow's with their usual deep reliance; but beneath the surface of her serenity his tense perceptions detected a hidden stir.
The bare truth, indeed, was that he had hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or since, and that he was ashamed to base his judgement of her on his meagre memory of their adventure.
"Oh, I beg your pardon!
"It's extremely friendly of you--I DO believe you mean it as a friend--but I don't quite understand why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather desperately, adrift."
"Shall we sit down a minute?" he asked, as Effie trotted off.
"It's delightful: you couldn't be better placed.
Darrow felt his blood rise at the thrust.
Perhaps no one less familiar with her face than Darrow would have discerned the tension of the smile she transferred from himself to Owen Leath, or have remarked that her eyes had hardened from misty grey to a shining darkness.
He uttered a protesting exclamation, and his flush reflected itself in the girl's cheek.
This discrepancy, which at the time had seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be its most galling complication.
"It's certainly natural that you should be less restless here than at Mrs. Murrett's; yet somehow I don't seem to see you permanently given up to forming the young."
You know you warned me rather emphatically against the theatre." She threw off the statement without impatience, as though they were discussing together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently interested.
Darrow considered his reply.
THEN you might think it your duty to tell Mrs. Leath."
The atmosphere was still and pale.
She walked on for a few yards, and then paused again and confronted him. "I've been odious to you--and not quite honest," she broke out suddenly.
She rushed the question out at him as if she expected to trip him up over it.
It had been his first business to convince the girl that their secret was safe with him; but it was far from easy to square this with the equally urgent obligation of safe-guarding Anna's responsibility toward her child. Darrow was not much afraid of accidental disclosures.
I didn't mean to ask you that." She halted, and again cast a rapid glance behind and ahead of her.
"I've told her, simply, that I'd seen you once or twice at Mrs. Murrett's."
Darrow, through the rapid flight of the shadows, could not seize on any specific indication of feeling: he merely perceived that the young man was unaccountably surprised at finding him with Miss Viner, and that the extent of his surprise might cover all manner of implications.
The stillness was presently broken by joyful barks, and Darrow, tracking the sound, overtook Effie flying down one of the long alleys at the head of her pack.
And you'll give me a chance to talk things over with you?"
On the score of that one, at least, his mind, if not easy, was relieved.
Both he and Sophy Viner had too much at stake not to be on their guard.
To ease it he made an abrupt dash at the truth.
But the plain fact was that he hadn't spent a penny on it; which was no doubt the reason of the prodigious score it had since been rolling up.
"I don't say you'd LIKE to do it.
"I had to live," she said in an off-hand tone.
If you'll only let me----"
He would have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had staked something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to show.
For the same space of time the past surged up in him confusedly; then a veil dropped between them.
"A long time--yes."
This obscured, if it narrowed, the field of conjecture; and Darrow's gropings threw him back on the conclusion that he was probably reading too much significance into the moods of a lad he hardly knew, and who had been described to him as subject to sudden changes of humour.
She stopped short and faced him "And you think I may let you now?"
"Oh, you'll hear about it soon...I must catch Effie now and drag her back to the blackboard."
"If I did, it was because you so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start."
The night brought no aid to the solving of this problem; but it gave him, at any rate, the clear conviction that no time was to be lost.
She took a few hesitating steps and then paused again.
Owen was still in the same state of moody abstraction as when Darrow had left him at the piano; and even Anna's face, to her friend's vigilant eye, revealed not, perhaps, a personal preoccupation, but a vague sense of impending disturbance.
He was sufficiently self-possessed to tell himself that it was doubtless due to causes with which he was not directly concerned.
But this, again, was negatived by the fact that, during the afternoon's shooting, young Leath had been in a mood of almost extravagant expansiveness, and that, from the moment of his late return to the house till just before dinner, there had been, to Darrow's certain knowledge, no possibility of a private talk between himself and his step-mother.
The girl looked away from him.
"If you like," she said in a low voice, with one of her quick fluctuations of colour; but instead of taking the way he proposed she turned toward a narrow path which branched off obliquely through the trees.
It's true enough that I want to help you; but the wish isn't due to...to any past kindness on your part, but simply to my own interest in you.
"Not quite honest?" he repeated, caught in a fresh wave of wonder.
"I hope, at any rate, you'll listen to my reasons.
There's been time, on both sides, to think them over since----"
She laid the case before him with a cold lucidity.
Four seconds ... three ... two....
"Thank you, Dr. Feldman."
There would be exactly one hour's supply of oxygen when he was thrown out and it still lacked five minutes of the deadline.
He wondered if they would really throw it out into space with him.
I have orders to burn out your cabin when you leave.
"I'm sorry, Dr. Feldman.
He was muttering under his breath as the guards locked Doc's legs to a seat and left.
He pushed a button on the call board over the table and asked for the steward.
He accepted a chair.
It was better than wasting his time in dread.
Doc dropped his bracky weed and felt the helmet snap down.
A little wouldn't hurt him, though there was no proper nourishment in it.
He cut off the switch and glanced at the clock on the wall.
The landing space was too small for one of the station shuttles, but a little Northport-Southport shuttle was parked there after what must have been a difficult set-down.
Captain Everts speaking.
There were less than eleven hours left to him.
"All right," Chris ordered.
"So long, Dr. Feldman," the pilot called softly as they led him out. Then the guards shoved him through the airlock into the station.
They could afford it, Doc decided.
Doc tore up his notes bitterly.
The spacesuited man climbed into it and began strapping down so that the rush of air would not sweep him outward when the other seal was released.
One of them, dressed in a spacesuit, held out another suit to him.
Doc inhaled deeply.
He wouldn't cost them much, considering the distance he was going.
He paced his cabin slowly, reading out the hours while his eyes lingered on the little bottle of cultures.
"This is a personal matter which I perhaps have no right to bring up.
For a moment, as the smell of real steak reached him, Doc regretted the fact that his metabolism had been switched.
A sharp click interrupted him.
I have a clue, but I'm still working on it.
Then he shrugged.
Until you reach your destination, you are my passenger and entitled to every consideration of any other passenger except freedom of movement through the ship.
It seemed a shame that good equipment should be wasted along with his life.
Chris had never been afraid to do what she felt she should.
He was alone in space, gliding away from the ship, with oxygen hissing softly through the valve and ticking away his life.
He squeezed some of the gravy and bits of meat into one of his bottles, sticking to his purpose; then he fell to on the rest.
"Better change your metabolism back to Earth-normal, Captain Everts," he said, and his voice was so normal that he hardly recognized it.
The man bowed faintly.
There was no law against listening to a pariah, at least.
"How's the chance of getting some food?"
Three men entered the room.
"Bring me two complete dinners--one Earth-normal and one Mars-normal."
I wasn't counting on three for the trip," the pilot protested.
Perhaps if I could leave a few notes for your physician--"
The guards tested Doc's manacles and forced him into the shuttle.
Everts stepped forward and flipped a lighter.
He'd heard of such men.
"You've got your orders, and so have I. Up ship!"
"Both of you must have it, Captain, though it won't mature for another year.
"I tell you we're overweight with you.
There were also times when it didn't seem to matter, and when his only thoughts were for the villages and the plague.
I'm sorry."
He grinned wryly.
I am always available for legitimate complaints."
"I've already eaten, thank you."
He'd looked forward to the trip to the airport as a way of judging public reaction.
Doc forced his hands to steadiness with foolish pride and began climbing into the suit.
"Okay, Feldman.
"Captain Everts," the speaker said.
The spaceman's face swung around in surprise.
The ship physician believes Mrs. Everts may have the plague, but isn't sure of the symptoms.
The seemingly unappealing Mars-normal ragout suited his current tastes better, after all.
He roamed the cabin until he found a little collapsible table.
The shuttle lifted sluggishly, but there was no great difficulty.
There was neither friendliness nor hostility in his glance.
They brought him the papers, where he was painted as a monster beside whom Jack the Ripper and Albrecht Delier were gentle amateurs.
He might even be able to leave some notes behind.
Now he raised it to his lips, fumbling for a light.
But apparently the Lobby had no desire to test that. The guards led him up to the roof of the jail, where a rocket was waiting.
"That's enough, Steward.
He finished with his bottles, put them into the incubator, and piled into his bunk, swallowing one of the tablets of morphetal the ship furnished.
Acceleration had ended, and a simple breakfast was waiting when he awoke.
He was still not finished when steps echoed down the hall, but he was reasonably sure of his results.
His words were courteous as Doc motioned toward the tray of breakfast.
But thank you." He got to his feet and left as quietly and erectly as he had entered.
But after a few bites, it was queerly unsatisfactory.
We went through it together, shortly after having our metabolism switched during the food shortage of '88."
"Up ship!"
Then he caught himself.
There was still ten seconds to go, according to the big chronometer that had been installed in the lock.
"That's your problem," Chris told him firmly.
He flipped the switch while reaching for the coffee.
Execution
"You're on first-class."
There was half an hour left when he began opening the little bottles and making his films.
Maybe it was working. There were screaming crowds outside the jail, and the noise of their hatred was strong enough to carry through even the atmosphere of Mars. But there were also signs that the Lobby was worried, as if afraid that some attempt might still be made to rescue him.
Air exploded outwards, and Doc went with it.
The man caught Doc and held him against the outer seal.
But it had pierced the pericardium, as best Feldman could guess, and it could be fatal at any moment.
They celebrated that, with a little party of some four hundred people and reporters at Ryan's lodge in Canada.
The man was moaning and scared, and he was bleeding profusely.
An obscure scientist in one of the laboratories run by the Medical Lobby found a cure before the first waves of the epidemic hit America. Rutherford Ryan, then head of the Lobby, made sure that Medical Lobby got all the credit.
Feldman operated with a pocketknife sterilized in a bottle of expensive Scotch and only anodyne tablets in place of anesthesia.
In a way, they got it.
They were married in April and his office was ready in May, complete with a staff of eighty.
It was an accident that grew up so fast it never even knew it wasn't a real part of the government.
There had always been pressure groups, but now they developed into a third arm of the government.
Lobby
They were sitting in a nearby car while Feldman enjoyed the scenery, Chris made further plans, and Harnett gathered material.
Baxter groaned again and started to bleed more profusely.
So, when the Colonel died, in the year I was leaving college, I did not think it necessary to go into mourning for him.
But Lady Georgina cried, 'Nonsense, child!
You terrified us so.
Never marry a man, my dear, with a double-barrelled name and no visible means of subsistence; above all, if he's generally known by a nickname.
Then she scanned me up and down, as if I were a girl in a mantle shop, and she contemplated buying either me or the mantle.
She clung to it like grim death, even in the chops of the Channel. Fortunately I am a good sailor, and when Lady Georgina's sallow cheeks began to grow pale, I was steady enough to supply her with her shawl and her smelling-bottle.
'Monsieur has been good enough to accept a place in our carriage,' she observed, as I entered.
As for the Count, he was charmed.
'Like a native,' I answered, with cheerful promptitude.
Lady Georgina was now in her finest vein of spleen: her acid wit grew sharper and more caustic each moment.
I adore originality.
I glanced at her card.
He talked well himself, too, and between them I almost forgot the time till we arrived at Dover.
'Upon my word, Amelia, I rather like the look of her.
The only country in the world fit to live in is England.
I thought the Cantankerous Old Lady, who was a shrewd person in her way, must surely see through this obvious patter; but I had under-estimated the average human capacity for swallowing flattery.
They will try to force them on you unless you insist.
You might stop with me for ever.'
For frank hideousness, commend me to the noble dowager.
The fun lies in the search, the uncertainty, the toss-up of it.
My first impression was that the Cantankerous Old Lady would go off in a fit of apoplexy.
Not a reputation in Europe had a rag left to cover it as we steamed in beneath the huge iron roof of the main central junction.
I looked at her, aghast.
I came here to help you.
Fortunately, the only other occupant of the compartment was a most urbane and obliging Continental gentleman--I say Continental, because I couldn't quite make out whether he was French, German, or Austrian--who was anxious in every way to meet Lady Georgina's wishes.
'I have had my moments,' Lady Georgina murmured, with her head on one side.
'What! you are then Lady Georgina Fawley!' he cried, striking an attitude.
So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best hat, and popped out by myself into Kensington Gardens.
Foreigners have no consciences.
I was a bomb-shell in your midst in those days; why, you yourself were almost afraid at first to speak to me.'
No?
To make up for it, he talked much, and with animation, to Lady Georgina. They ferreted out friends in common, and were as much surprised at it as people always are at that inevitable experience.
But the children of the lower classes never learnt their catechism nowadays; they were too much occupied with literatoor, jography, and free-'and drawrin'.
'So I suspect,' I answered.
So I accepted my plight as an amusing experience, affording full scope for the congenial exercise of courage and ingenuity.
They were quite satisfactory.
'But, how?' she asked.
Instead of dismissing his fulsome nonsense with a contemptuous smile, Lady Georgina perked herself up with a conscious air of coquetry, and asked for more.
I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the straits in which I found myself--a girl of twenty-one, alone in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her.
He married my dear mother when I was a girl at school in Switzerland; and he proceeded to spend her little fortune, left at her sole disposal by my father's will, in paying his gambling debts.
When Lady Georgina and the Count returned, they were like old friends together.
Of course, I had not the slightest intention of taking a lady's-maid's place for a permanency.
The Count handed her out; he was all high courtly politeness.
'And I might starve in London.
'Don't jabber it to me, child,' she cried.
'You will drop that basket!
I have quick intuitions.
'I will not contradict your wildest misstatement,' I answered, smiling.
'No, thank you,' I answered, for I had an idea.
'Lois Cayley.'
You were right, after all, mademoiselle!
I croak with difficulty.
I felt sure it would be useless to warn her, so completely had the Count succeeded in gulling her; but I took my own steps.
I had a lovely harangue all pat in my head, in much the same strain, on the infinite possibilities of entertaining angels unawares, in cabs, on the Underground, in the aerated bread shops; but Elsie's widening eyes of horror pulled me up short like a hansom in Piccadilly when the inexorable upturned hand of the policeman checks it.
She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple; she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a complexion to match.
'Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?'
Lois Cayley, you say; any relation of a madcap Captain Cayley whom I used once to know, in the Forty-second Highlanders?'
By Monday I had papered and furnished the rooms, and was ready to start on my voyage of exploration.
But I mean to see where fate will lead me.'
Oh, that placid old gentleman in the episcopal gaiters was their father, was he?
But whenever she travelled, I fancy, she clung to her case as if her life depended upon it; it contained the whole of her valuable diamonds.
Both trains were just starting.
There's my name and address; I start on Monday.'
'I was at school in Canton Berne; it is a mother tongue to me.'
You yourself make faces over it.
I would convoy you over, as companion, or lady-help, or anything else you choose to call it; I would remain with you there for a week, till you could arrange with your Gretchen, presumably unsophisticated; and then I would leave you.
Now, mind you notice how much the luggage weighs in English pounds, and make the man at the office give you a note of it to check those horrid Belgian porters.
We got into our first-class carriage.
'I may go with you?' Elsie pleaded.
'You see, you had a bicycle,' Elsie put in, smoothing the half-papered wall; 'and in those days, of course, ladies didn't bicycle.
Oh my, how fussy she was!
I could see the foreign gentleman was delighted at this turn.
I kissed her fluffy forehead.
Between ourselves, I am a bit of a rebel.'
'Ah yes, madame, I recollect him well in Vienna.
This is Kent that we traverse; ah, the garden of England!
'Pardon me, mademoiselle,' he said, coldly; 'you do not understand these lines as well as I do.
They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation.
I examined the jewel-case closely.
'Well, I declare,' she murmured.
'You are, Brownie,' she answered, pausing in her papering, with her sleeves rolled up--they called me 'Brownie,' partly because of my dark complexion, but partly because they could never understand me.
'Well, you'll do, I think,' she said, catching my arm.
Even then I doubt if he realizes what a good one it was on--everybody.
She arose from the table and handed me a daintily scented missive addressed to Mrs. Shadd, and I faithfully executed her errand.
In spite of my stupidity I rather thought I could divine the cause too.
See?"
"You can read it for yourself.
"I have come to ask you what--"
To be second in doing a thing of that kind is worse than never doing it at all."
"Mrs. Van Raffles went to New York Wednesday evening," said I, "and has not yet returned.
"Not a bit, the naughty boy!" cried Mrs. Shadd.
This I handed to Bunderby and he made off.
An hour later Bunderby appeared at the back door and handed me a note addressed to my mistress, which I immediately delivered.
Henriette was visibly angry the other morning when I took to her the early mail and she discovered that Mrs. Van Varick Shadd had got ahead of her in the matter of Jockobinski, the monkey virtuoso.
"He's a whole orchestra in himself," said Tommy enthusiastically, "and is the only living creature that I know of who can tackle a whole symphony without the aid of a hired man."
"That's it, Mrs. Van Raffles, as certainly as we stand here.
"I did receive a very peculiar note from you saying that you would gladly do as I wished," said Mrs. Shadd, beginning herself to look less angry and more puzzled.
Everything was running smoothly, and, although Henriette had not yet arrived, I felt easy and secure of mind until nearing five-thirty o'clock when Mrs. Shadd herself drove up to the front-door.
"And attend to all the details--your very words, my dear Pauline," said Henriette, with an admirably timed break in her voice.
"Who wrote that letter, Henriette?" I asked late in the evening when the last guest had gone.
"Who do you suppose, Bunny, my boy?" she asked with a grin.
What else could I do after that?"
"Well, anyhow, dear, you have started me thinking, and maybe we'll have Jockobinski at Bolivar Lodge yet," she murmured.
Mrs. Shadd's musicale will be given here.
"Is Bunderby waiting?" asked Henriette as she read the note.
"Bunny, do you know that at times, in spite of your supreme stupidity, you are a source of positive inspiration to me?" she said, looking at me, fondly, I ventured to think.
"Not too late with Mrs. Shadd's cards out and the whole thing published in the papers?"
Henriette turned to me.
"Well--it's a very mysterious affair," said Mrs. Shadd, rising, "and I--oh, well, my dear woman, I--I can't blame you--indeed, after all you have done I ought to be--and really am--very much obliged to you. Only--"
I confessed to having read something about such an incident in high society.
Wednesday night came, and, consumed by curiosity to learn just how the matter stood, I attempted to sound Henriette on the subject.
"Not too late?" echoed Henriette.
Every member of the smart set in the ten-o'clock mail received a little engraved card stating that owing to sudden illness in the Shadd family the Shadd musicale for that evening would be held at Bolivar Lodge instead of in the Onyx House ballroom.
Innocence on a monument could have appeared no freer of guile than Henriette at that moment.
And so it was agreed, and Henriette successfully landed Mrs. Shadd's musicale.
Henriette was a perfect picture of despair.
Incidentally, Jockobinski was very affable and the function went off well.
Henriette was silent for a moment, and then her face lit up with one of her most charming smiles.
"I?" said Mrs. Shadd, showing more surprise than was compatible with her high social position.
If we did we'd be the laughing-stock of all Newport.
"You will have the music-room prepared at once, Bunny.
At any rate, a great sensation was sprung on Newport on Friday morning.
You have all the supper--not a sandwich has come to my house--and I presume all of Mr. Jockobinski's instruments as well have come here."
Just take this note over to Mrs. Shadd this evening and leave it--mind you, don't wait for an answer but just leave it, that's all."
"No," said I.
"You've guessed right," said Henriette.
"All, madame," said I, briefly.
"Whom did you have at dinner Wednesday night, dear?" asked Henriette.
"Splendid!" said Henriette, with enthusiasm.
It closed with the line, "you must know, my dear Pauline, that there isn't anything I wouldn't do for you, come weal or come woe."
"Never!" said Mrs. Shadd, rising and kissing Henriette good-bye.
"The musicale, indeed!
Not that I care particularly about the music end of it, but because there is nothing that gives a woman so assured a social position as being the hostess of an animal of his particular kind.
What it said was that she would be only too happy to oblige Mrs. Shadd, and was very sorry indeed to hear that her son had been injured in an automobile accident while running into Boston from Bar Harbor.
"Yes, Bunderby did carry a note to you from me on Wednesday," said Mrs. Shadd.
"It's never too late for a woman of your resources to do anything she has a mind to do," said I. "It seems to me that a person who could swipe a Carnegie library the way you did should have little difficulty in lifting a musicale.
I wonder if he could have done it!"
Where could it have come from?"
"I don't suppose we can do anything now," said Mrs. Shadd, ruefully.
Henriette made off at once for Providence by motor-car, and got the midnight train out of Boston for the city where, from what I learned afterwards, she must have put in a strenuous day on Thursday.
"I don't understand it.
The cards have gone to everybody.
"Surely, you got my note saying that I would let Jockobinski play here to-night instead of--"
"It isn't too late, is it?" I queried.
"It's too late.
"That's the best way out of it.
"That is precisely what I have come to find out," said Mrs. Shadd.
"I supposed it came from Onyx House," said Henriette simply, glancing at the envelope.
About half-past seven o'clock it was--Wednesday."
"I want to have him first, of course, or not at all.
better.
"It wouldn't be unlike him, would it?"
"Bunderby?"
Won't you wait?"
Perhaps hid in the dull residuum of my poor but honest gray matter lies the seed of real genius that will sprout the loveliest blossoms of achievement."
Heaven knows I was willing to pay for it if I had to abscond with a national bank to get the money."
Friday afternoon Jockobinski's private and particular piano arrived at the Lodge and was set up promptly in the music-room, and later when the caterers arrived with the supper for the four hundred odd guests bidden to the feast all was in readiness for them.
I must say I did not envy Henriette the meeting that was in prospect, for it was quite evident that Mrs. Shadd was mad all through.
"My son is not ill, Mrs. Van Raffles," said Mrs. Shadd, coldly.
I am expecting her every minute, madame.
"I had quite set my heart on having Jockobinski here.
On my return Henriette was dressed for travel.
"But--"
"Not ill?" cried Henriette, interrupting her.
I tried as I let her in to give her a hint of what awaited her, but Mrs. Shadd forestalled me, only however to be forestalled herself.
She demanded rather than asked to see my mistress, with a hauteur born of the arctic snow.
"Shut up, Bunny," she returned, abruptly.
Of course Mrs. Shadd is doing this to retain her grip, but it irritates me more than I can say to have her get it just the same.
Behind the soft, milky opalescence of the wall glimmers the egg- tabernacle, with its form vaguely suggesting the star of some order of knighthood.
Her attentive watch does not make her overlook her meals.
There is nothing better for playing upon the folly of the passer-by, but also nothing more dangerous to the safety of the family.
One of the Locusts whereof I renew the supply at intervals in the cages is caught in the cords of the great entrance-hall.
When she feels her ovaries ripen, she shifts her quarters; she goes off at night to explore the neighbourhood and seek a less dangerous refuge.
But I must abandon the idea.
What a forest of ropes!
The bite is a lingering one: once the Spider has planted her fangs, she does not let go.
If I shake the net at any point with a straw, she quickly runs up to enquire what is happening. Will this vigilance frighten off the Ichneumon and other lovers of omelettes?
No inference is permissible in either direction.
The crater-shaped web is not of the same structure throughout.
The Labyrinth Spider has simply taught us that instinct possesses resources which are employed or left latent according to the conditions of the moment.
The Spider of the brushwood, on the contrary, endowed with greater maternal devotion, has, like the Crab Spider, to mount guard over hers until they hatch.
Opportunity, as we know, is fleeting.
This part has been strengthened by the nightly rounds of inspection.
Let us put everything into a glass-tube to study the hatching.
What is this?
The latitude of the workshop has enabled the spinstress to follow the inspiration of her instinct without serious obstacles; and the result is a masterpiece of symmetry and elegance, if we allow for a few angularities demanded by the suspension-points.
Feeling its retreat cut off, it readily darts into the paper bag held out to it; if necessary, it can be stimulated with a bit of straw.
Each group builds according to the same set of principles, conforming to the laws of a very elementary system of aesthetics; but often circumstances beyond the architect's control--the space at her disposal, the unevenness of the site, the nature of the material and other accidental causes--interfere with the worker's plans and disturb the structure.
They lend me their good eyes and supple limbs.
Then how comes it that, of the five mothers reared in my cages, not one has had recourse to the clay rampart?
In my cages, the sand is too far off.
In front of the bell-shaped mouth is a tangle of threads wherein the passers-by are caught.
When laying-time comes, the mother forsakes her dwelling, her crater into which her falling victims dropped, her labyrinth in which the flight of the Midges was cut short; she leaves intact the apparatus that enabled her to live at her ease. Thoughtful of her natural duties, she goes to found another establishment at a distance.
She does not run up the shrouds of the mast-work to seize the desperate prisoner; she waits until his bonds of threads, twisted backwards and forwards, make him fall on the web.
These incomplete nests were placed at some height from the ground, in the thick of the brushwood; the others, on the contrary, those supplied with a coating of sand, lay on the ground.
There is not a twig but supplies a contact-point.
If I possessed documents derived from personal observation, I should like to speak of these ingenious workers; I would gladly add a few unpublished facts to their life-history.
Let us examine our find and look more closely into its shapelessness. Here is the large room, the maternal cabin, which rips as the coating of leaves is removed; here are the circular galleries of the guard-room; here are the central chamber and its pillars, all in a fabric of immaculate white.
But, when the nest touches the ground, the clay rampart is never missing.
They do not by a long way come up to my idea of the maternal talent.
The Water Spider is not found in my district.
The Spider, spying on the threshold of her abyss, lets him have his way.
The dirt from the damp ground has not penetrated to this dwelling protected by its wrapper of dead leaves.
Fastened to the creeping branch, the unsightly bundle lies on the sand heaped up by the rains.
At the entrance to the tube, in the gloom of that murderous alley, sits the Spider, who looks at us and betrays no great excitement at our presence.
As laying-time approaches, towards the middle of August, I instal half-a- dozen Labyrinth Spiders in large wire-gauze cages, each standing in an earthen pan filled with sand.
If practicable, squeeze the bottom of the tuft, containing the neck of the funnel, with both hands.
Like any other, the Labyrinth Spider dreads the scoundrelly advent of the pickwallet; she provides for it and, to shield herself against it as far as possible, chooses a hiding-place outside her dwelling, far removed from the tell-tale web.
Rosemary- tufts, which gain in thickness what they lose in height on the unfostering rock, suit her particularly.
Several times a week, in July, I go to study my Spiders on the spot, at an early hour, before the sun beats fiercely on one's neck.
The Spider never ceases working at her carpet, which represents her investigation-platform.
But, though this danger be averted, others will come when the mother is no longer there.
After laying her eggs, so far from becoming thin, she preserves an excellent appearance and a round belly.
Now open the habitation of the offspring.
Oak-leaves, roughly joined by a few threads, wrap it all round.
In my urchin-days, days free from prejudices in regard to what one ate, I, like many others, was able to appreciate that dainty.
The rigging-builder, therefore, to whom we have just thrown a Locust attacks the prey at the lower end of a thigh.
Unable to obtain a steady foothold on that shaky support, he flounders about; and the more he struggles the more he entangles his shackles.
Entwined on every side, surrounded and surmounted, the bush disappears from view, veiled in white muslin.
In the open country and especially in hilly places laid bare by the wood-man's axe, the favourite sites are tufts of bracken, rock-rose, lavender, everlasting and rosemary cropped close by the teeth of the flocks.
The surface of the crater is not exactly a snare.
At the tip of the belly, two small, mobile appendages form a sort of tail, a rather curious feature in a Spider.
It is hardly more than a shapeless scaffolding, run up anyhow.
Let us eschew violence, which is but seldom successful, and resort to craft.
To obtain it, the Spider would have to leave the top of the dome, where the nest is being built on its trellis-work support; she would have to come down some nine inches.
It is well to know this arrangement of the home, if you wish to capture the Spider without hurting her.
If these contain a low, thick cluster, the nest is there, hidden from the eye.
A splendid spectacle indeed is that of our Spider's labyrinth, heavy with the tears of the night and lit up by the first rays of the sun.
In the vast majority of instances, the eggs, once lodged in a favourable spot, are abandoned to themselves, left to the chances of good or ill fortune.
Can this other mother have so great a need as that to eat?
He falls; the other comes and flings herself upon her prostrate prey.
The worker refuses to take this trouble, which, if repeated in the case of each grain, would make the action of the spinnerets too irksome.
As yet, what I have seen of her work is but an unsightly bundle.
It is the equivalent, on a very small scale, of the larger legs of the Crayfish.
Remember the magnificent oval guard-room, running into a vestibule at either end; the egg-chamber slung in the centre and isolated on every side by half a score of pillars; the front-hall expanding into a wide mouth and surmounted by a network of taut threads forming a trap.
The Labyrinth Spider knows nothing of the diversions of the table; she flings the drained remnants out of her web, without chewing them.
Some of them are celebrities of long-standing renown, who are mentioned in all the books.
She does not make up her mind to die until the little ones are gone.
The operation would be impossible if, after cementing each grain of sand, it were necessary to stop the work of the spinnerets and go to a distance to fetch further stony elements.
The mother continues to watch and spin, lessening her activity from day to day.
There are long ropes and short ropes, upright and slanting, straight and bent, taut and slack, all criss-cross and a-tangle, to the height of three feet or so in inextricable disorder.
A sprig of thyme, planted in the centre, will furnish supports for the structure, together with the trellis-work of the top and sides.
The bite is usually given at the lower end of a haunch: not that this place is more vulnerable than any other thin-skinned part, but probably because it has a better flavour.
Let us make up for it with trivial things of frequent encounter, a condition favourable to consecutive study.
Yes, certainly she has; and for an imperative reason.
Put aside that idea, says the satin wall, which itself is perfectly clean inside.
Count Marlanx's home was in the southeast corner of the enclosure, near the gates.
The candlestick is yours, Miss Calhoun,--if you will repay me for my sacrifice by accepting it without reservation."
A German nobleman offered me a small fortune if I would part with it."
That same afternoon Baldos, blissfully ignorant of the stir he had created in certain circles, rode out for the first time as a member of the Castle Guard.
"There are three vital points of weakness, your highness.
Slowly Beverly Calhoun set the candlestick down upon the table her eyes meeting his with steady disdain.
The shadow of a smile crossed the face of the guard.
He took the wager, knowing that he, in his ignorance, could not win from the blithe young expert in petticoats.
She considered for a moment and then, in a spirit of enthusiasm, accepted the proposition.
She hungered for a few minutes of the old-time freedom with him.
It struck him as preposterous that the entire population of Edelweiss could be in the game to deceive him.
"You are evading the question, sir.
"I could overthrow it after half an hour's bombardment, your highness," he answered, without thinking.
An officer has just informed me that Baldos missed not a detail in regard to the armament, or the location of vital spots in the construction of the fortress."
Half an hour later an orderly was riding to the fort with instructions to return at once with Miss Calhoun's candlestick.
"What a rare old jester you are, Count Marlanx," she said without a smile.
"I have an appointment," he said slowly, but with understanding.
"For his own sake, your highness, and Miss Calhoun, I suggest that no opportunity should be given him to communicate with the outside world.
A civilian or an equal might have run him through for it, your highness." A flush rose to his cheeks and his lips quivered ever so slightly.
Don't be angry, Beverly," the princess said gently.
"My ears are excellent," said Marlanx stiffly.
It would not surprise me to find that this stranger has learned everything there is to know about the fort." His listeners were silent.
Servants came in to clear the tables, but the count harshly ordered them to wait until the guests had departed.
They were strolling leisurely about the beautiful grounds, safe in the shade of the trees from the heat of the July sun, when Baron Dangloss approached.
The princess had flatly refused to accompany them on the visit to the fortress because of Baldos.
A VISIT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
What she taught him of tennis on the royal courts, in the presence of an amused audience, was as nothing to what he learned of strategy as it can be practiced by a whimsical girl.
"It was impossible for me not to see the defects in your fort."
She even went so far as to whisper in Beverly's ear that he did not remember her face, and probably would not recognize Yetive as one of the eavesdroppers.
"You are not to report to him at nine tomorrow."
The count's eyes followed the graceful curves of her white forearm with an eagerness that was annoying.
"I want to give you a lesson in--in lawn tennis."
"He is impertinent, insolent, your highness.
I mean about the weak spots."
It is on record that they were "love" sets, which goes to prove that Beverly took no chances.
"I am not saying that he would betray us--"
The following morning Count Marlanx reported at nine o'clock with much better grace than he had suspected himself capable of exercising.
Then he offered to wager the brass candlestick against her bracelet.
Beverly thought him extremely silly and sentimental, much preferring him in the character of the harsh, implacable martinet.
"Yes, with your guard.
"Well, he said things that a soldier must endure.
"It grieves me to have you hurry away.
"You didn't have him beaten?" cried Beverly, stopping short.
Count Marlanx welcomed his visitors with a graciousness that awoke wonder in the minds of his staff.
And, Baldos--"
He and Haddan were detailed by Colonel Quinnox to act as private escort to Miss Calhoun until otherwise ordered.
"You have no quarrel with us, Miss Calhoun," said Dangloss.
"Wait a minute, Baldos.
"You--you haven't told anyone of this, have you?" she cried, white-faced and anxious.
Now, go!" commanded the count.
During the remainder of the ride he caught himself time after time gazing reflectively at the back of her proud little head, possessed of an almost uncontrollable desire to touch the soft brown hair.
"I think it is a wise precaution.
Baldos was mildly surprised and puzzled by the homage paid the young American girl.
"No, but I imagine it would have been preferable.
While the general was explaining one of the new gun-carriages to the countess, Beverly walked deliberately over to where Baldos was standing.
"It has to do with Baldos, I'll take oath," said Beverly, with conviction.
To his credit, the count was game.
"And it would be just like someone, too," agreed Beverly, her thoughts, with the others', going toward none but one man "high in power."
He was patrolling the narrow piazza which fronted the house.
"I fancy Baldos's must be even better, for he heard me," said Beverly, herself once more.
Later on, when the victoria was well away from the fort, Dagmar took her companion to task for holding in public friendly discourse with a member of the guard, whoever he might be.
Later in the day she called Baldos to her side as they were riding in the castle avenue.
"No one but your highness.
"No, no!" protested Beverly.
"He coached me in ethics."
After all, she coveted the candlestick.
"Yes, your highness, and as far as possible from the fortress."
"The Countess Dagmar, cousin to her highness.
Are there so many weak points?" she went on, catching her breath.
"I brought him to Edelweiss, and I believe in him."
Toward the close of the rather trying luncheon she was almost unable to control the impulse to rush out and compel him to relax that imposing, machine-like stride.
"The glad hour has come when I can part with it for a recompense far greater than the baron's gold."
Almost before he knew it she had won exemption for Baldos, that being the stake for the first set of singles.
The new guard could not help hearing the sarcastic remark.
"It is for his own sake, you see.
"Have you studied all this out?"
"Neither am I one of you," said Beverly stoutly.
"Now, don't scold," she pleaded, and the countess could go no further.
"Good heavens!" gasped poor Beverly.
"He meant to alarm your highness."
If Haddan thought himself wiser than Baldos in knowing that their charge was not the princess, he was very much mistaken; if he enjoyed the trick that was being played on his fellow guardsman, his enjoyment was as nothing as compared to the pleasure Baldos was deriving from the situation.
For some time her mind had been struggling with what the count had said about "the lesson." It grew upon her that her friend had been bullied and humiliated, perhaps in the presence of spectators.
"I was saving it for an occasion, your highness," he said, his steely eyes glittering.
She'll have all manner of grandees for her godfathers and godmothers.
I suppose she is a sort of Juno of a woman,--very tall and handsome.
"I understand, Bell.
"But your foot must bear scrutiny, and your eyes, and your voice.
VALENTINE'S DAY AT ALLINGTON.
"All the books have got to be so stupid!
Mamma, do you know where they're going for the honeymoon?"
I cannot understand it.
"Oh, at all manner of hours,--any time before twelve.
It seems natural to me to think about him, and I don't suppose it can be very wrong.
Dr. Crofts was already in treaty on their behalf for a small furnished house at Guestwick.
He used to tell me of that.
Lily was to be told the day on which Crosbie was to be married. It had come to the knowledge of them all that the marriage was to take place in February.
I believe it was that that did it." And she pushed the book away from her.
"I don't think there's any difference.
"They can usually direct them as they will, if they make the effort."
For them it was a very difficult matter on which to speak in her hearing.
I don't.
And I did not quite mean that."
Her visits were made with the pretence of taking to him information as to Lily's health; but there was perhaps at the bottom of them a feeling that, as the family intended to leave the Small House at the end of March, it would be well to let the squire know that there was no enmity in their hearts against him.
"No, my dear."
Nothing more had been said about their moving,--nothing, that is, from them to him.
When Hopkins spoke to him on the subject, he sharply desired that faithful gardener to hold his tongue, giving it to be understood that such things were not to be made matter of talk by the Allington dependants till they had been officially announced.
He was not cold-hearted, at any rate.
"What is over, my dear?"
"Of course you do; of course we all hope it.
Do you know what I should really like, only of course it's not possible;--to be godmother to his first child."
Mrs. Dale was silent for a minute or two before she answered this, but then she did answer it.
"I'd sooner be an honest woman."
I don't think she could interpret a single image, but she has a hazy, misty idea of the truth.
Well; he's got another--valen--tine--now." So much she said with articulate voice, and then she broke down, bursting out into convulsive sobs, and crying in her mother's arms as though she would break her heart.
Mrs. Dale and Bell would willingly have avoided the subject, but Lily would not have it avoided.
"You must be very careful in wrapping yourself as you go downstairs," said Bell, who stood by the tray on which she had brought up the toast and tea.
That's why she likes it,--because it's too beautiful to be understood; and that's why I like Pilgrim's Progress." After which Bell offered to get the book in question.
She would begin by doing so almost in a drolling strain, alluding to herself as a forlorn damsel in a play-book; and then she would go on to speak of his interests as a matter which was still of great moment to her.
This was not known to the Dales till the twelfth, and they would willingly have spared the knowledge then, had it been possible to spare it.
A man is not cold-hearted, because he does not know himself.
"I don't believe a bit, you know, that the king was such a bad man as that," she said.
"There had been a very old friendship, Bell; you must remember that. But I was speaking of his conduct to me, and not of his conduct to--" And then she remembered that that other lady might at this very moment possess the name which she had once been so proud to think that she would bear herself.
I think I'll get up now, Bell; only it's so frightfully cold that I'm afraid."
I was so proud of having him, that I gave myself up to him all at once, without giving him a chance of thinking of it.
But it was not so, and on that evening Lily was told.
"What; become engaged again within a week!"
"No, not now," said Lily.
I'll see her to-morrow or the next day.
"I declare, Bell," she said, "it's the greatest rubbish I ever attempted to read."
I never will believe that kings are so much worse than other people.
"But I can't, mamma.
"I don't know," said Bell.
I'm not going up to London to ask her.
Why should their hearts be cold?"
"I also will hope so," said Mrs. Dale.
After all, think how much work they do.
"I'm sometimes inclined to think, that whatever is, is wrong."
But we will not talk about it."
The morning of the fourteenth came upon them at the Small House, as comes the morning of those special days which have been long considered, and which are to be long remembered.
It was Crosbie who had told her to read the book, as both Bell and Mrs. Dale were well aware.
"But you mustn't let your foot go astray in that way; you mustn't, indeed.
"And yet they get something out of their reading.
"I shouldn't be at all surprised if it's over."
During these days, Bell used to see her uncle daily.
"But I can't make the effort.
"I'll tell you what, mamma,--you may have some comfort in this: that when to-day's gone by, I shan't make a fuss about any other day."
She had not opened her book that morning, and had been sitting for some time perfectly silent, with her eyes closed, and her watch in her hand.
It is so easy to say that; but people can't choose their own thoughts."
"Oh, she's not a grand person.
And as the time drew nearer,--Lily becoming stronger the while, and less subject to medical authority,--the marriage of Crosbie and Alexandrina was spoken of much more frequently at the Small House. It was not a subject which Mrs. Dale or Bell would have chosen for conversation; but Lily would refer to it.
Mrs. Crump is always poring over the Revelations, and nearly knows them by heart.
There, Bell; there's your stupid book, and I won't have any more of it.
"Mamma," she said, "how cold they'll be!" Her mother had announced to her the fact of the black frost, and these were the first words she spoke.
In a week or two it was done.
On the fourteenth of February, Crosbie was to be made a happy man.
But in the course of such talking she would too often break down, showing by some sad word or melancholy tone how great was the burden on her heart.
"When your foot goes in that way it is a very unchristian foot, and you ought to keep it still.
"And why not?
She must know the day.
I'm sure she has not got a pug-nose like me.
She was the chief sinner, in that she had refused to marry her cousin, and had declined even to listen to rational counsel upon the matter.
If I were a man, Bell, you are just the girl that I should worship."
I wonder what coloured hair she has.
Their conversation, therefore, generally fell upon Crosbie, and the tone in which he was mentioned in the Great House was very different from that assumed in Lily's presence.
"I'll go on with this, as you say it's so grand.
"Because if we are ill, he won't have such a terrible distance to come."
They will be fashionable, and will be married late."
When you have had so deep an interest in a person, you can't drop him all of a sudden." Then there was again silence, and after a while Lily took up her novel.
And yet her heart was not broken, and she was still strong in that resolve which she had made, that her grief should not overpower her.
After this little scene she said no further word about Crosbie and his bride on that day, but turned the conversation towards the prospect of their new house at Guestwick.
But I am your darling, your own darling.
"I like a book to be clear as running water, so that the whole meaning may be seen at once."
Who could expect that such an engagement should be lasting?"
She's well rid of him; I'm sure of that;--though I suppose it would not do to tell her so."
Seeing her look so thin and wrinkled, I imagine that I can please her by bringing her a provision of Bees, as I was wont to do.
The work of laying is finished by the end of May, after which, lying flat on the ceiling of her nest, the mother never leaves her guard-room, either by night or day.
The Bee appears, seeking no quarrel, intent upon plunder.
I see it drifting away, showing, like a spot of light, against the dark foliage of the near cypresses, some forty feet distant.
I do not see the ropes manufactured and sent floating at the mercy of the air; but I guess their presence.
Their persecutrix knows of this affluence.
The tiny animal soars in space and shines, lit up by the sun.
I put the bunch laden with beasties on a small table, in the shade, before the open window.
All of them pass through the wire gauze and form a group on the summit of the brushwood, where they swiftly weave a spacious lounge of criss-cross threads.
Greatly emaciated by the laying of her eggs and by her expenditure of silk, she lives only for the protection of her nest.
Perhaps so.
But the throng has finished its preparations; the hour has come to disperse in swarms.
She fastens to her spinnerets and dangles, by way of a bag of eggs, a ball of cork polished with my file, a paper pellet, a little ball of thread.
Like the Crab, the Thomisus walks sideways; she also has forelegs stronger than her hind-legs.
After performing this duty, she gently lets herself die, hugging her nest and turning into a shrivelled relic.
The rest of her story escapes me.
When removed from her home and placed on the artificial wallet, the mother Thomisus obstinately refused to settle there.
Lastly, a few threads, stretched like a thin curtain, form a canopy above the nest and, with the curved tips of the leaves, frame a sort of alcove wherein the mother takes up her abode.
After a few minutes of heat and light, the scene assumes a very different aspect. The emigrants run to the top of the twigs, bustle about actively.
The Lycosa surpasses her in maternal blindness.
The only thing wanting to complete the resemblance is the front pair of stone gauntlets, raised in the attitude of self-defence.
Well, what can this gem among Spiders do?
How difficult it is to name animals rationally!
There are fine ladies among them who adorn their legs with a number of pink bracelets and their back with carmine arabesques.
Herself a lover of high places, the Thomisus selects as the site of her nest one of the upper twigs of the rock-rose, her regular hunting-ground, a twig withered by the heat and possessing a few dead leaves, which curl into a little cottage.
When all is said, the scientific term is composed of a misconception and a worthless epithet.
She does not fasten her Bee, who, dying suddenly of a bite in the neck, offers no resistance to her consumer.
My attempt was unsuccessful.
Provided that she have satin under her feet, she does not notice her mistake; she watches over another's nest with the same vigilance which she might show in watching over her own.
When the eggs are laid, the mouth of the receptacle is hermetically closed with a lid of the same white silk.
Besides, the bite in the neck is paralysing, because the cervical nerve- centres are affected.
The murderess now sucks the victim's blood at her ease and, when she has done, scornfully flings the drained corpse aside.
Here they remain, pretty quietly, for a day or two; then foot-bridges begin to be flung from one object to the next.
She uses her fists against my weapon.
Should some vagrant pass near by, she hurries from her watch-tower, lifts a limb and puts the intruder to flight.
If I tease her with a straw, she parries with big gestures, like those of a prize-fighter.
She is waiting for her children to emerge; the dying creature is still of use to them.
We have to descend; the stomach's inexorable claims demand it.
She lives exclusively upon maternal devotion, a commendable but unsubstantial fare.
Sooner or later, nearer or farther, the fall comes.
Nearly all Spiders have a voluminous belly, a silk-warehouse where, in some cases, the rigging of the net, in others, the swan's-down of the nest is manufactured.
What is the withered thing waiting for, before expiring?
CHAPTER VIII: THE CRAB SPIDER
Then, at a certain height, individual movement ceases.
The thug has struck her blow; she is draining the blood of the departed.
Others follow, some higher, some lower, hither and thither.
After all, this cutter of Bees' throats is a pretty, a very pretty creature, despite her unwieldy paunch fashioned like a squat pyramid and embossed on the base, on either side, with a pimple shaped like a camel's hump.
She posts herself in her watch-house, under the rosy screen of a petal.
Those hallowed words, maternal love, were out of place here: it is an impetuous, an almost mechanical impulse, wherein real affection plays no part whatever.
She is no sooner attracted outside than she stubbornly returns to her post.
As matters continue to drag, it occurs to me, at eleven o'clock, to take the bundle of brushwood swarming with the little Spiders, all eager to be off, and place it on the window-sill, in the glare of the sun.
The Bee, hitherto her favourite dish, tempts her no longer.
The comparison is not inappropriate as regards many Spiders who tie their prey with a thread to subdue it and consume it at their ease; but it just happens that the Thomisus is at variance with her label.
Three or four Spiders start at a time, each going her own way in directions independent of her neighbours'.
This glorious efflorescence goes on for five or six weeks.
She hides herself once more, ready to bleed a second gleaner should the occasion offer.
Who contrived this window, which was not there at first?
In the first place, she makes a nest worthy of its architect.
What an entrance into the world!
The floating cable has snapped and the creature has gone off, borne on its parachute.
The Thomisus' wallet, sheathed in leaves over the greater part of its surface, never bursts; nor does the lid rise, so carefully is it sealed down.
There is none to come to their assistance; and they have not the strength to free themselves unaided.
The fabric is too thick and tough to have yielded to the twitches of the feeble little prisoners.
Gravity, tempered by the parachute, is kind to her.
The Thomisus, in particular, the subject of this chapter, is passionately addicted to the pursuit of the Domestic Bee.
Without springs or snares, she lies in ambush, among the flowers, and awaits the arrival of the quarry, which she kills by administering a scientific stab in the neck.
Let us not be too extravagant with our praise, however; the imitation of the bag was a very clumsy one.
Moreover, the road is visible behind the climber, it is of double thickness, thanks to an added thread.
While she is filling her baskets and distending her crop, the Thomisus, that bandit lurking under cover of the flowers, issues from her hiding-place, creeps round behind the bustling insect, steals up close and, with a sudden rush, nabs her in the nape of the neck.
When moved from her nest to another of the same kind, she settles upon it and never stirs from it, even though the different arrangement of the leafy fence be such as to warn her that she is not really at home.
A narrow pale-green ribbon sometimes edges the right and left of the breast.
What has happened?
Softly it sways, then suddenly takes flight.
What will posterity do in face of the rising tide of a barbarous vocabulary which, under the pretence of progress, stifles real knowledge? It will relegate the whole business to the quagmire of oblivion.
The skin, more pleasing to the eye than any satin, is milk-white in some, in others lemon-yellow.
The fact that the Bee-huntress carries a heavy paunch is no reason to refer to this as a distinctive characteristic.
She tests the flowers with her tongue; she selects a spot that will yield a good return.
These hateful discords amid the general harmony perplex the thinker, all the more as we shall see the cruel vampire become a model of devotion where her family is concerned.
There'd be a leak, with all the guides and others here, and we can't afford that.
Lobbies grew up.
It took a world-wide plague to turn the tide.
Baxter had been Feldman's closest friend in the Lobby.
The old Farm Lobby was unbeatable.
He scored second in Medical Ethics only to Christina Ryan.
Ryan made a deal with Space Lobby, and the two effectively ran the world.
Then quantity of treatment paid, rather than quality.
It was then that Baxter shot himself.
The man who read of nothing beyond sex crimes could vote on the great political issues of the world.
His mind was wrapped up in a whirl of the past--his past and that of the whole planet.
And she was probably genuinely shocked.
He'd reached for a probe without thinking.
It was a safe world now.
They'd have to drive Baxter back in the car, which would almost certainly result in his death.
There was also a photographer and writer, but they hadn't been introduced by name.
Feldman's father had stuck by the rule but had questioned it.
The plague began in old China; anything could start there, with more than a billion people huddled in one area and a few madmen planning to conquer the world.
Idealism!
That kind of talk didn't get far.
The man on subsidy or public dole could vote to demand more.
But the men who followed the framers of the new plan were a different sort, without the knowledge of practical limits.
Competence no longer mattered so much.
Somehow, he got his hand on a gun, though only guides were supposed to touch them, managed to overcome its safety devices, and then pulled the trigger with the gun pointed the wrong way.
The Lobby lost, but didn't know it--because the lowered standards of competence in the profession lowered the caliber of men running the political aspects of that profession as exemplified by the Lobby.
The last of the great lobbies was Space, probably.
He hired a guide and went hunting, eighty miles beyond the last outpost of civilization.
He'd come along to handle press relations and had gotten romantic about the countryside, never having been out of a city before.
It also tried to prevent government control of treatment and payment, feeling that it couldn't trust the people to know where to stop.
Feldman learned not to question in medical school.
It had been a good attempt, too.
He went through internship without a sign of trouble. Chris humored him in his desire to spend three years of practice in a poor section loaded with disease, and her father approved; such selfless dedication was the perfect image projection for a future son-in-law.
People wanted to hear about rights, not about duties.
But that could be justified; it was the only safe kind of surgery and the only way to make sure there was no unsupervised experimentation, such as that which supposedly caused the plague.
The men who drew the Constitution had been pretty practical dreamers. They came to their task after a bitter war and a worse period of wild chaos, and they had learned where idealism stopped and idiocy began. They set up a republic with all the elements of democracy that they considered safe.
They made the laws when it came to food and crops.
He had never figured why she singled him out for her attentions, but he gloried in both those attentions and the results.
But they had no phone in the lodge where the guide lived and no way to summon an ambulance.
A man belonged to his Lobby, just as a serf had belonged to his feudal landlord.
There was still a president and a congress, as there had been a Senate under the Roman Caesars.
So Space Lobby took over completely in its own field.
There had been a medical lobby long before, but it had been a conservative group, mostly concerned with protecting medical autonomy and ethics.
Chris, Feldman and Harnett from Public Relations had accompanied him on the trip.
"You touch him, Dan, and I'll spread it in every one of our media.
They worked out a system of subcontracts that spread the profits so wide that hardly a company of any size in the country wasn't getting a share. Thus a lot of patriotic, noble voters got their pay from companies in the lobby block and could be panicked by the lobby at the first mention of recession.
Chris added her own threats.
He never bothered later to see how the men he'd elected had handled the jobs he had given them.
It wiped out two billion people, depopulated Africa and most of Asia, and wrecked Europe, leaving only America comparatively safe to take over.
Chris knocked his hand aside.
The real government had become a kind of oligarchy, as it always did after too much false democracy ruined the ideals of real and practical self-rule.
Feldman reached Baxter first.
Only a miracle had saved him from instant death.
The privileges their ancestors had earned in blood and care became automatic rights.
But the people wanted their troubles handled free--which meant by government spending, since that could be added to the national debt, and thus didn't seem to cost anything.
The publicity releases had gone out, and the Public Relations Lobby that handled news and education was paid to begin the greatest build-up any young genius ever had.
It developed enough pressure to get whatever appropriations it wanted, even over Presidential veto.
But Baxter lived.
She was right, of course.
The failing airplane industry became the space combine overnight, and nobody kept track of how big it was, except a few sharp operators.
The space effort was turned over to the aircraft industry, which had never been able to manage itself successfully except under the stimulus of war or a threat of war.
In return, he agreed to follow that period by becoming an administrator.
But touch that wound and I'll crucify you."
The big farmers shaped the laws they wanted.
It also made for better fees.
He became a great man by listing his unthought, hungry desire for someone to take care of him without responsibility.
It created the only space experts, which meant that the men placed in government agencies to regulate it came from its own ranks.
Throughout history, some men had sought the ideal, and most had called it freedom.
She couldn't let it go now.
So he went out and voted for the man who promised him most, or who looked most like what his limited dreams felt to be a father image or son image or hero image.
In fact, he was assured that voting alone was enough to make him a fine and noble citizen.
The other lobbies learned a lot from Space.
No ability was needed for his vote.
They convinced the little farmers it was for the good of all, and they made the story stick well enough to swing the farm vote.
He couldn't operate outside a hospital.
Organized special interests stepped in where the mob had failed.
But its history was a long series of retreats.
They got the vote extended to everyone.
It fought what it called socialized medicine.
Maybe progress had been halted at about the level of 1980, but so long as the citizens didn't break the rules of their lobbies, they had very little to worry about.
For that, for security and the right not to think, most people were willing to leave well enough alone.
I like you--you have color.
A doctor's doctor, as they put it.
It developed during a period of chaos when another country called Russia got the first hunk of metal above the atmosphere and when the representatives who had been picked for everything but their grasp of science and government went into panic over a myth of national prestige.
When Feldman seemed uncertain, Harnett had given his warning in a low but vehement voice.
The rule was now an absolute ethic of medicine.
The bullet had struck a rib, been deflected and robbed of some of its energy, and had barely reached the heart.
Only fools expected absolute freedom, but wise men dreamed up many systems of relative freedom, including democracy. They had tried that in America, as the last fling of the dream.
There wasn't much equipment.
Someone had to look, of course, and someone did.
He became automatically a rising young man, the favorite of the daughter of the Lobby president.
He got the bullet out and sewed up the wound with a bit of surgical thread he'd been using to tie up a torn good-luck emblem.
By the time the world recovered, America ran it and the Medical Lobby was untouchable.
Feldman had set his legs the problem of heading for the great spaceport and escape from Earth, and he let them take him without further guidance.
She'd spent years making him the outlet for all her ambitions, denied because women were still only second-rate members of Medical Lobby.
I'll have to.
None of the smaller lobbies could buck them, and neither could the government.
Some rules seemed harsh, of course, such as the law that all operations had to be performed in Lobby hospitals.
Chris swore harshly and beat her fists against the bole of a tree.
It was to be a gala weekend.
Practical men tried to explain that there were no such rights--that each generation had to pay for its rights with responsibility.
'I told you it was hopeless to meddle with him.
'He'd swear at me if he weren't.
Good-night.'
He's not pleased.'
I can't make it out.
He went out of the room.
'How in the world did you find it all out?' said Dick, at last.
'You shouldn't go off your head if you want to keep secrets, Dickie.
'Yes, but--don't you hate me?'
Then his dark hour came and he was alone with himself and his desires to get what help he could from the darkness.
Don't cry.
'Isn't--isn't there anything I could do for you, then?
'Won't you have it, then?
Wait a moment, dear.
Get up and tramp.' Torpenhow was perfectly satisfied.
They walked up and down as of custom, Torpenhow's hand on Dick's shoulder, and Dick buried in his own thoughts.
'Don't ask me too much.
'Very well.
Dick's shoulders straightened again, for the words lashed like a whip.
'Well?'
'Who is asking you to do anything, Maisie?
For Dick was reserved more searching torment.
'I know--the row in the Southern Soudan.
'I think not, dear.
I did indeed,' she protested.
All the men believe the war's a certainty.'
He heard the little hysterical gulp and took it for tribute.
'You don't know how I hate myself.
There she is.
'I do despise myself--indeed I do.
I must think this out quietly.'
But I can't.
The correspondents poured in from theatre, dinner, and music-hall to Torpenhow's room that they might discuss their plan of campaign in the event of military operations becoming a certainty.
It isn't my fault.
He was savagely angry against Torpenhow, who had brought upon him this humiliation and troubled his miserable peace.
Maisie watched him, and the fear went out of her heart, to be followed by a very bitter shame.
'I?
Oh, I'm so miserable.'
'You've tried to be an angel very successfully.'
He stumbled forward and put his arm round her, and her head fell on his shoulder.
What sort of a passage did you have coming over?'
You can keep her for me, and if ever you're poor you can sell her.
'I'm back.
I don't blame you.
I'll stay here in England to do it, if you like.
She turned and ran, choking and blinded, down the staircases that were empty of life to take refuge in a cab and go to her house across the Parks.
Oh, Dickie, I'm so sorry.'
I'm so sorry.
Oh, Dickie, you wouldn't ask me--would you?' wailed Maisie.
We shall be half screwed before the morning.
"Yes, that I can understand," the landlord said; "but you will find it no easy work travelling, at present; when every bridge and ford across the rivers is watched by armed men, and all who pass are questioned, sharply, as to their business."
"This is better than walking, by a long way," Philip said.
The other two looked like fresh countrymen, and wore the low caps in use by the peasantry on their heads, carrying steel caps slung by cords from their shoulder.
"These are busy times.
"I think it would be a good plan," his brother replied; and the other two also assented.
We would rather fight in a company of our own people than with strangers."
Shall I say a bottle of wine each, and some bread, and a couple of dozen eggs, which I will get boiled hard for you?"
I trust to see you back here again, before long."
"It would not do to try to cross, at this time of night.
You enter the river close by the trees, and then keep straight for the pile of stones, which is some fifty yards higher up, for the ford crosses the river at an angle."
"We are out of practice, and my feet are tender from the tramp from the coast.
The landlord presently returned.
So there is no more wolf hunting for me; but even if I had my right hand back again, I should not care for any more such rough sport as that."
The country was flat, and it was too late to think of concealment.
"How many ride out with you?" the man who had lost his hand asked.
We will retire beyond the village, and wait until morning."
Philip glanced round.
The town has voted the funds, and we march to join D'Escars tomorrow.
Here, calling for some bread and common wine, they sat down in a corner, and listened to the talk of the men who were drinking there.
They were afoot again, at daylight.
They did not approach the town but, keeping behind it, came down upon the road running along the shore, three miles beyond it; and walked along it until about ten o'clock, by which time all were thoroughly tired with their unaccustomed exercise.
"It is better to lose an hour, than to have trouble here."
"Yes, there are two or three places where it can be crossed, when the water is low; and as there has been no rain, for some weeks past, you will be able to cross now, easily enough.
Philip congratulated himself that he was sitting with his back to the speaker, for he remembered the incident well, and it was his arm that had struck the blow.
I was about to question him, when you broke in.
All four had swords stuck into their leathern belts.
I had begun to fear, from what we heard of the watch they are keeping at the bridges, that we should have found it a very difficult matter crossing the rivers.
They passed through a few small villages, but no place of any importance until, late in the afternoon, they approached Blaye, after a long day's tramp.
They were downstairs by six, had a meal of bread and spiced wine; and soon after seven there was a rumble of carts outside, and two of them stopped at the cabaret.
We were in the Constable's troop; and though, as far as I know, we were all pretty stout men-at-arms, and were four to one against them at least, we had little to boast of when the fight was over.
We have got thirty soldiers quartered in the village now, though what they are doing here is more than I can imagine.
Three of the casks of wine were taken down, and carried into the house.
We shall be glad when they are gone; for they are a rough lot, and their leader gives himself as many airs as if he had conquered the place.
You must remember that these people are not the ignorant scum of our towns, but that among them are a large number of our best and wisest heads.
What time do you think your cousin will be in?"
"We have not been working there, sir.
His visor had been up; but as his face was shaded by the helmet and cheek pieces, and the man could have obtained but a passing glance at him, he felt sure, on reflection, that he would not be recognized.
"My comrade and I served under De Brissac, when we were mere lads, and we have a fancy to try the old trade again; and our young cousins also want to try their metal."
"Yes, but why should it be?
"Very well then," the landlord said; "my cousin will be here in the morning, for he is going to leave two or three barrels of last year's vintage with me.
"Yes, we have a long tramp before us, so we thought we had better perform part of it before breakfast."
One would think that the Queen of Navarre had got a big Huguenot army together, and was marching north."
Chapter 10: The Queen Of Navarre.
"Your best plan would have been to have gone by boat to Bordeaux. There has been a strong wind from the west, for the last three days, and it would save you many a mile of weary tramping."
"Here is a crown," he said.
Two men were sitting beside it, and several others lay round.
I mean no offence, but business is business, you know."
It is not for us innkeepers to grumble, but peace and quiet are all we want, about here.
We come from near there."
The troop consisted of some twenty men, two gentlemen riding at their head; and as they came up, they checked their horses.
"You are a Gascon, by your tongue?"
That will be as good as any other way, and save much trouble.
As they approached the bridge, however, they saw a fire burning in the centre of the road.
"We must hope they will not interfere with us."
"The Queen of Navarre has no troops and, even if a few hundreds of Huguenots joined her, what could she do?
"Well, I will have one more stoup of wine, and then I will be off, for we march at daybreak."
Well, I agree to the bargain. The warehouse is not very far from the wharf, but the men there charge an extortionate price."
They say they hadn't fifty men with them.
An hour later, the party arrived at the ford and crossed it without difficulty, the water being little above their waists.
I shall fight no less staunchly, when fighting has to be done, because I am convinced that it is all wrong.
"There is a cousin of mine, a farmer, who is starting in the morning, and has chartered a boat to carry his produce.
"At any rate, I got a mark of the wolves' teeth, which has put a stop to my hunting, as you see," and he held out his arm.
The sail was at once hoisted and, as the west wind was still blowing strongly, Blaye was soon left behind.
"A hundred.
"It is better to work hard for two hours, than to walk for two days.
They were rowed ashore in the little boat the craft carried, and landed among some sand hills; among which they at once struck off, and walked briskly for a mile inland, so as to avoid any questionings, from persons they might meet, as to where they had come from.
Anyhow they are not Huguenot lords, but look what they say they are; but whether men-at-arms, or peasants, they concern us not.
I look to the pope as the head of my religion on earth, but why should I treat as a mortal enemy a man who does not recognize the pope's authority?"
This type usually does a thing quickly or not at all.
A tendency to over-excitement and the consequent running down of his batteries is a physical pitfall often fatal to this type.
He may not like the position.
This is due, as we have said before, to physiological causes.
The most extraordinary things from the most extraordinary places are especial preferences with him.
The Lure of Spontaneity
No Vain Regrets
Colorful, vivid words and phrases come easily to the tongue of this type for he sees the unusual, the fascinating, in everything.
The thing we have called intuition, they maintain, is not due to irregular or supernatural causes but to our own normal natural mental processes.
The next time you find such a person note how his eyes flash, how his color comes and goes and the many indescribable gradations of voice which make him the center of things.
The Thoracic is also exceedingly fond of dancing.
He has fewer complexes than any other type because he does not inhibit as much.
They stand between him and success many times.
The Adventurers
People He Dislikes
Domestic Weakness
Since any one can make a thing interesting to others if he is really interested in it himself, the Thoracic makes others see and feel what he describes. He is therefore known as the most charming conversationalist.
So, naturally, he enjoys the same from others and considers those less expressive than himself stiff, formal or dull.
When only well to do this type will be found to have carried out furnishings and decorations with the taste worthy of much larger purses. When merely well to do he wears the very best clothes he can possibly afford, and often a good deal better.
Your quickness, if called into counsel, will enable you to see from what instincts your mistakes habitually arise and the direction in which most of them have pointed.
Such a person is seldom dull.
You should begin today to analyze your most common errors in judgment that you may guard against their recurrence.
Reading
Source of "Hunches"
Everybody is Interesting
In everything save acrobatics and oratory he holds the platform laurels.
Past experiences are to him as so many lemons out of which he has taken all the juice.
He recovers from every mood more quickly and more completely than other types.
Likes Dash
"Glad one moment and sad the next" is the way the ticker would read if it could make a record of the inner feelings of the average Thoracic. These feelings often come and go without his having the least notion of what causes them.
These are the certain methods for winning him in social intercourse.
A Thoracic seldom has any kind of chronic ailment.
Give him esthetic surroundings, encourage him to talk, and respond to what he says.
The natural and normal vanity of the Thoracic stands him in hand here more than in almost any other place in life.
A Sense of Humor
Social Liabilities
He is as responsive as a radio wire.
Entertainment He Prefers
His Pet Aversions
Should Aim At
Really Forgets Disagreements
These people are always largely or purely Thoracic.
He is so alive in every nerve, so keyed-up and has such intense capacity for enjoyment of many things simultaneously that he demands more than other types.
Charming Conversationalist
Strong Points
Even your dearest friends are seldom given a peep into the actual You.
The Thoracic is seldom poor.
The Thoracic is always saying or doing something and can't understand why other people are so unresponsive.
The World Entertained by Them
When He is in Moderate Circumstances
An attentive waiter who ministers to every movement and anticipates every wish is also a favorite with the Thoracic when out for dinner.
"A constant stream of talk" must have been first said in describing this type.
His "Human Interest"
An appearance of flightiness and his tendency to hop from one subject to another, stand in the way of the Thoracic's promotion many times.
Likes All Music
How to Deal with This Type Socially
Detective stories are often in high favor with him also.
Those who differ too widely in type never understand each other.
We all like answers.
He tries always to put up a good showing.
He soon grows tired of a thing regardless of how much he liked it to begin with.
"Off like a shot" is a term often applied to the Thoracic.
His tastes are more extravagant than those of other types.
Tires of Sameness
Seeing the funny side of everything is a capacity which comes more naturally to this type than to others.
We are all interested in the little comings and goings of our friends.
The Thoracic is the most fastidious of all the types.
So it is with individuals.
What was it fell last night from the evil moon?
And from all hills there re-echoed: 'All is empty, all is alike, all hath been!'
Keys did I carry, the rustiest of all keys; and I knew how to open with them the most creaking of all gates.
Thus do I mean to make amends for bad dreams!
That it may not smother in this sorrowfulness!
Brightness of midnight was ever around me; lonesomeness cowered beside her; and as a third, death-rattle stillness, the worst of my female friends.
"Thy life itself interpreteth unto us this dream, O Zarathustra!
"Well! this hath just its time; but see to it, my disciples, that we have a good repast; and without delay!
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Hear, I pray you, the dream that I dreamed, my friends, and help me to divine its meaning!
Then did a roaring wind tear the folds apart: whistling, whizzing, and piercing, it threw unto me a black coffin.
Alpa!
Alas, how shall I preserve my light through it!
And when the long twilight cometh and the mortal weariness, even then wilt thou not disappear from our firmament, thou advocate of life!
But mine own crying awoke me:--and I came to myself.--
Alpa! cried I, who carrieth his ashes unto the mountain?
But not a finger's-breadth was it yet open:
Sorrowfully did he go about and wearily; and he became like unto those of whom the soothsayer had spoken.--
Like a bitterly angry croaking ran the sound through the long corridors when the leaves of the gate opened: ungraciously did this bird cry, unwillingly was it awakened.
All our fountains have dried up, even the sea hath receded.
The odour of dust-covered eternities did I breathe: sultry and dust-covered lay my soul.
Like one returning from long foreign sojourn did he look on his disciples, and examined their features; but still he knew them not.
In vain was all our labour, poison hath our wine become, the evil eye hath singed yellow our fields and hearts.
The best turned weary of their works.
Fearfully was I terrified thereby: it prostrated me.
"-And I saw a great sadness come over mankind.
When, however, they raised him, and set him upon his feet, behold, all on a sudden his eye changed; he understood everything that had happened, stroked his beard, and said with a strong voice:
'Alas! where is there still a sea in which one could be drowned?' so soundeth our plaint--across shallow swamps.
Thus did time pass with me, and slip by, if time there still was: what do I know thereof!
Night-watchman and grave-guardian had I become, aloft, in the lone mountain-fortress of Death.
Art thou not thyself the coffin full of many-hued malices and angel-caricatures of life?
THE SOOTHSAYER.
Alpa! who carrieth his ashes unto the mountain?
But the disciple whom he loved most arose quickly, seized Zarathustra's hand, and said:
Verily, even for dying have we become too weary; now do we keep awake and live on--in sepulchres."
Thus did Zarathustra relate his dream, and then was silent: for as yet he knew not the interpretation thereof.
But more frightful even, and more heart-strangling was it, when it again became silent and still all around, and I alone sat in that malignant silence.
Zarathustra, however, sat upright on his couch, with an absent look.
Thrice did there peal peals at the gate like thunders, thrice did the vaults resound and howl again: then did I go to the gate.
A doctrine appeared, a faith ran beside it: 'All is empty, all is alike, all hath been!'
And who could have aired his soul there!
The soothsayer, however, shall eat and drink at my side: and verily, I will yet show him a sea in which he can drown himself!"--
But at last there happened that which awoke me.
All life had I renounced, so I dreamed.
Oh, how fine, how splendid!"
Ho, Vesenya!
In ten minutes the table was ready and a napkin spread on it.
A poor little fellow," Denisov repeated.
Petya clenched his teeth and looked around, throwing back his head and flourishing his arms.
"It's capital for us here, but what of him?
I bought ten pounds.
"Yes, he's a poor little fellow," said Denisov, who evidently saw nothing shameful in this reminder.
"What would it be to you?...
Do you want something to eat?
I have several like it," said Petya, blushing.
On the table were vodka, a flask of rum, white bread, roast mutton, and salt.
Petya, having left his people after their departure from Moscow, joined his regiment and was soon taken as orderly by a general commanding a large guerrilla detachment.
He slipped in between the officers, came close to Denisov, and said:
I'll be sure to send it to you.
"May I call in that boy who was taken prisoner and give him something to eat?...
He has splendid things.
Will it seem odd if I ask?" Petya thought.
I am used to something sweet.
"Voulez-vous manger?
Vincent!" Petya cried, stopping outside the door.
"It's all right my staying a day with you?" And not waiting for a reply he answered his own question: "You see I was told to find out--well, I am finding out....
I don't want a reward...
Have him fetched."
"Only, please let me command something, so that I may really command..." Petya went on.
Petya took off his wet clothes, gave them to be dried, and at once began helping the officers to fix up the dinner table.
The Bertrams are undoubtedly some of the first people in this country.
But tell me all about it!
His still refusing to tell her what he had gone for was but the promotion of gaiety; a day before it might have irritated, but now it was a pleasant joke--suspected only of concealing something planned as a pleasant surprise to herself.
"Oh no! you cannot.
But you are quite right; you could not have chosen better.
To have seen you grow like the Admiral in word or deed, look or gesture, would have broken my heart."
I know now to whom it must relate, and am in no hurry for the rest.
There was even pleasure with the surprise.
What could more delightfully prove that the warmth of her heart was equal to its gentleness?
Nothing could be more impossible than to answer such a question, though nothing could be more agreeable than to have it asked.
I am sure of an excellent tenant at half a word.
"Well, well, I am satisfied.
"I care neither what they say nor what they feel.
That is pleasant!
"Lucky, lucky girl!" cried Mary, as soon as she could speak; "what a match for her!
The surprise was now complete; for, in spite of whatever his consciousness might suggest, a suspicion of his having any such views had never entered his sister's imagination; and she looked so truly the astonishment she felt, that he was obliged to repeat what he had said, and more fully and more solemnly.
There is not a better girl in the world, and you do not want for fortune; and as to her connexions, they are more than good.
Mary was in a state of mind to rejoice in a connexion with the Bertram family, and to be not displeased with her brother's marrying a little beneath him.
Will it astonish you?
The delight of all the family, indeed!
CHAPTER XXX
"Sitting with them an hour and a half!" exclaimed Mary.
But this he stoutly denied.
"Ha!" cried Mary; "settle in Northamptonshire!
"You will divide your year between London and Northamptonshire?"
Were you even less pleasing--supposing her not to love you already (of which, however, I can have little doubt)--you would be safe.
"For--for very little more than opportunity.
When did you begin to think seriously about her?"
I will make her very happy, Mary; happier than she has ever yet been herself, or ever seen anybody else.
I shall let Everingham, and rent a place in this neighbourhood; perhaps Stanwix Lodge.
You will both find your good in it."
Your wicked project upon her peace turns out a clever thought indeed.
I am quite determined, Mary.
You chose to consult the Admiral before you made up your mind."
I must have them love one another."
My dearest Henry, the advantage to you of getting away from the Admiral before your manners are hurt by the contagion of his, before you have contracted any of his foolish opinions, or learned to sit over your dinner as if it were the best blessing of life!
Exactly what you deserve.
"When Fanny is known to him," continued Henry, "he will doat on her. She is exactly the woman to do away every prejudice of such a man as the Admiral, for she he would describe, if indeed he has now delicacy of language enough to embody his own ideas.
"It was bad, very bad in me against such a creature; but I did not know her then; and she shall have no reason to lament the hour that first put it into my head.
"You must give us more than half your time," said he.
Mary had only to be grateful and give general assurances; but she was now very fully purposed to be the guest of neither brother nor sister many months longer.
The impossibility of not doing everything in the world to make Fanny Price happy, or of ceasing to love Fanny Price, was of course the groundwork of his eloquent answer.
I shall let a seven years' lease of Everingham.
What are your plans?
"Nay, Henry, not by all; not forgotten by all; not friendless or forgotten.
No, Mary, you are quite mistaken.
"Edmund!
You have not discovered my business yet."
Well might his sister, believing as she really did that his opinion of Fanny Price was scarcely beyond her merits, rejoice in her prospects.
Few fathers would have let me have my own way half so much.
Talk to me for ever.
And they will now see their cousin treated as she ought to be, and I wish they may be heartily ashamed of their own abominable neglect and unkindness.
What could be more encouraging to a man who had her love in view?
He had often seen it tried.
Her cousin Edmund never forgets her."
Then, her understanding was beyond every suspicion, quick and clear; and her manners were the mirror of her own modest and elegant mind.
My mind is entirely made up.
Fanny Price! wonderful, quite wonderful!
"Yes."
It quite delights me.
But go on, go on.
But till it is absolutely settled--settled beyond all interference, he shall know nothing of the matter.
Then we shall be all together."
But this was only the beginning of her surprise.
To see her with her brother!
"I cannot admit Mrs. Grant to have an equal claim with Fanny and myself, for we shall both have a right in you.
Fanny will be so truly your sister!"
They will be angry," he added, after a moment's silence, and in a cooler tone; "Mrs. Rushworth will be very angry.
You must not prejudice Fanny against him.
Mrs. Norris often talks of her luck; what will she say now?
"You know that monseigneur will keep them away as long as possible, that he may enjoy more solitude and liberty.
Strange contrast!
David's taste was too refined to allow him to boast of his happiness before the time when he should marry Cecily, which was to be when she had turned her sixteenth year.
What shall I tell you more?
"Really, this attack seems providential.
The black comforted her, and instantly went to Mr. Willis to request her hand in marriage."
We easily got access to the sleeping-room of the planter, which was lighted on the inside by a small glass lamp.
Will they have soon completed their respective missions?"
"Horrible, but by no means astonishing.
Mr. Willis was desperately enraged, and, telling him he was a contumacious slave, threatened him with the chain.
'You have to-night defied God to carry off your two victims before their death, and he has taken them,' said monseigneur.
The colonist said to him, with cruel irony, 'Well, doctor, how goes it?
The desperate condition of the man was quite deserved by him."
And had not this adventure any consequences?"
And when he is fully decorated, screwed in, uniformed, gold-laced, plumed, etc., etc., it is impossible to see a more glorious, self-satisfied, proud, handsome--animal."
"Judge of the man by this one trait.
"Well, what followed?"
"The man was mad as well as brutal."
So now, my dear Murphy, farewell till the evening."
He entreated,--supplicated, and his master lost his temper.
"It could not.
'God?' replied the planter, bursting into a loud fit of laughter, 'tell him, then,--tell God to come and snatch you from my power!
"They say he tried to kill his wife."
God will judge between us.' We then retreated, leaving Mr. Willis stupefied, motionless, and believing himself under the influence of a dream.
At the end of some months a terrible typhus fever broke out in the plantation.
David talked of his love,--love so long and tenderly shared, and the planter shrugged his shoulders; David urged, but it was all in vain.
These men torture their slaves, and yet do not take any precaution against them, but sleep with doors and windows open.
"Such conduct was dictated alike by revenge and jealousy.
This dungeon was situated, as well as the house, on the seashore.
Out of thirty negroes dangerously affected by this fatal disease, only two perished.
Well, he returned to Florida, and, truth to tell, was used by Mr. Willis with consideration and kindness, eating at his table, sleeping under his roof.
Afterwards a deep and mutual love repaid him the debt of gratitude.
"In my life I never saw so distressing a spectacle.
"True, but it is his very good looks that prevent him from having the appearance of a man of refined and acute intellect."
"All this is as assailable and as justifiable as the punishment of the Schoolmaster, my worthy squire.
"The malady made fearful strides.
David, blushing to humiliate himself further, spake in a firm tone of his services and disinterestedness,--that he had been contented with a very slender salary.
"He did.
"We were utterly disgusted.
I defy him!' Then Willis, overcome by fury and intoxication, shook his fist to heaven, and said, in blasphemous language, 'Yes, I defy God to carry off my slaves before they are dead!'"
He proposed to construct a raft strong enough to carry the passengers, and a sufficient quantity of provisions, to the coast of New Zealand.
John replied that the voyage was impossible with such an unmanageable craft.
Twenty miles would be nothing in any other country than New Zealand.
Midwinter, of whom you will next expect me to say something, is improving rapidly.
I doubt, however, if you will find it leading to much on this occasion.
"High Street, December 20th.
Of course I stayed at Our Hotel in Covent Garden.
Only one thing that I can remember.
I had the agent's second son (the young chap you nicknamed Mustapha, when he made that dreadful mess about the Turkish Securities) to dine with me on Sunday.
As the claim had never been admitted, even our stiff-necked brother practitioner consented for once to do as he was asked.
The moment his clothes are cleaned again he falls back into his favorite delusion, and struts about before the church gates, in the character of a bridegroom, waiting for Miss Gwilt.
"Mr.
As for the matter of the sermon, I may describe it as a narrative of Mrs. Oldershaw's experience among dilapidated women, profusely illustrated in the pious and penitential style.
And there, on a platform at the further end, holding forth to the audience, was--not a man, as I had expected--but a Woman, and that woman, MOTHER OLDERSHAW!
You never listened to anything more eloquent in your life.
"You ask me for a good budget of news, and especially for more information about that mysterious business at the Sanitarium.
Nobody but Mr. Midwinter and Mr. Armadale (who insisted on going with him) followed her to the grave; and nothing has been inscribed on the tombstone but the initial letter of her Christian name and the date of her death.
I have also reason to suspect that Mr. Armadale, out of regard for him, followed his lead, and that the verdict at the inquest (attaching no blame to anybody) proceeded, like many other verdicts of the same kind, from an entirely superficial investigation of the circumstances.
The medical men are of opinion that the poor lady is sinking at last.
"To turn now to pleasanter subjects than Sanitariums, I may tell you that Miss Neelie is as good as well again, and is, in my humble opinion, prettier than ever.
"MY DEAR AUGUSTUS--Your letter reached me yesterday.
If you see a particularly handsome snuff-box in Paris, remember--though your father scorns Testimonials--he doesn't object to receive a present from his son.
He is perfectly harmless, and perfectly happy.
As long as I heard her she was never once at a loss for a word anywhere.
"You ask if there is reason to suppose that the doctor comes out of the matter with hands which are really as clean as they look?
'Public amusement?
To this I can now add that something did certainly happen to Mr. Midwinter, which deprived him of consciousness; and that the doctor, who appears to have been mixed up in the matter, carried things with a high hand, and insisted on taking his own course in his own Sanitarium.
The point was not touched at the inquest, for the simple reason that the inquest only concerned itself with the circumstances attending her death.
We must get the poor wretch taken care of somewhere for the rest of the little time he has to live.
I left Mustapha to hear the end of it.
My idea is that Mr. Midwinter had a motive of his own for not coming forward with the evidence that he might have given.
Why, it's Sunday evening!' says I. 'All right, sir,' says Mustapha.
There is no kind of doubt that he has really lost all the little reason he ever had.
So, after all the harm she has done, she rests at last; and so the two men whom she has injured have forgiven her.
There is not much prospect of it at present.
"Have I anything more to tell you before I leave off?
"Good-by, for the present, my dear boy.
She is buried in the great cemetery, near the place where she died.
"You will wonder how I came to be in London.
I shall think less of oratory as a human accomplishment, for the rest of my days, after that Sunday evening.
I have already told you how they were entrapped into the house, and how they passed the night there.
'Let's go to a public amusement, Mr. Pedgift,' says he.
She is staying in London under the care of a female relative; and Mr. Armadale satisfies her of the fact of his existence (in case she should forget it) regularly every day.
We passed through two doors into a long room, crammed with people.
"The key to the whole mystery is to be found, I firmly believe, in that wretched woman's attempt to personate the character of Mr. Armadale's widow when the news of his death appeared in the papers.
"That wretched old Bashwood has confirmed the fears I told you I had about him when he was brought back here from London.
You seem to be making the most of your youth (as you call it) with a vengeance.
And who would ever have believed that the mischief that woman's beauty has done could have reached as far in the downward direction as our superannuated old clerk?
On referring to your letter, I find you have raised one other point, which may be worth a moment's notice.
It may be a question of weeks or a question of months, they can say no more.
A little incident happened in the evening which may be worth recording, as it connected itself with a certain old lady who was not 'at home' when you and Mr. Armadale blundered on that house in Pimlico in the bygone time.
But he spoke of himself and his future with a courage and hopefulness which men of twice his years (if he has suffered as I suspect him to have suffered) might have envied.
I made the most of my youth when I was your age; and, wonderful to relate, I haven't forgotten it yet!
After causing some anxiety at first to the medical men (who declared that he was suffering from a serious nervous shock, produced by circumstances about which their patient's obstinate silence kept them quite in the dark), he has rallied, as only men of his sensitive temperament (to quote the doctors again) can rally.
"We went to a street at the West End, and found it blocked up with carriages.
Who would ever have thought of a man at his age falling in love?
She is greatly altered--quiet and gentle, and anxiously affectionate with her husband and her child.
If it hadn't been Sunday night, I should have thought we were going to the opera.
"Is there more to say on this subject before we leave it?
"A.
I went up, with a return ticket (from Saturday to Monday), about that matter in dispute at our agent's.
"Yours affectionately,
He only sees that she has gone back to the likeness of her better self when he first married her; and he sits for hours by her bedside now, and tells her about his wonderful clock.
Mustapha patronized one plate, and I the other.
We had a tough fight; but, curiously enough, a point occurred to me just as I got up to go; and I went back to my chair, and settled the question in no time.
He and Mr. Armadale are together in a quiet lodging.
Well! enjoy your holiday.
But in her case this happy change is, it seems, a sign of approaching dissolution, from the medical point of view.
His face showed signs of wear and tear, very sad to see in so young a man.
"And, for God's sake, don't torment me any longer!"
I can tell you, Mr. Armadale, it dwells on mine!
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Pedgift," said Allan, returning to his seat, and trying to look composedly at the lawyer through the intervening image of Neelie which the lawyer had called up.
Do you decline too?' Miss Neelie's answer was a remarkably sensible one for a girl of her age.
She had previously known, as everybody had known in the house, that some unacknowledged proceedings of yours in London had led to Miss Gwilt's voluntary withdrawal from her situation.
It's not at all wonderful that a woman, conscious of having her own mercenary designs on you, should attribute similar designs to a young lady who happens to be your near neighbor.
Allan, who had been once more restlessly pacing the room, stopped, and returned to his chair.
You too are no girl. Courage! between us we shall manage.
Fortune is a strange wench, Mr. Rodney. Who would think of finding her lodged on an iceberg?
The Frenchman snored, and I sat considering him.
Full of thoughts concerning them I stepped into the cabin, and, going to the cook-room, found Tassard still heavily sleeping.
I had met with nothing but wearing apparel, and some pieces of money, and a few watches in the forecastle. He knit his brows with a fierce suspicious gleam in his eyes.
In fact, at this moment I could tell you more about Chili and Peru than England and France."
He produced a pipe of the Dutch pattern, with a bowl carved into a death's head, and great enough to hold a cake of tobacco.
in the run?
You make me, as you make yourself, a rich man; the world opens before me anew, and very brilliantly--to be sure, I am obliged."
"No, not further aft."
Every sea is as good as a pickaxe.
"But you have searched the vessel?" he cried.
They prove stubborn though; our graces are not always relished.
"Ha!" he cried, "I doubt if this time you will come off so easily.
His countenance cleared.
"My berth is the third," said he.
We are two.
what but this?"
How long is it since you sailed from England?"
He grinned.
I told him.
He flourished his pipe, and 'twas like the flight of Death through the gloomy fire-tinctured air.
"There is the body of the captain," said I.
But I had no notion that so great a wind raged till I gained the deck and heard the prodigious bellowing of it above the rocks.
I answered, No; how was I to know it?
What, then, was the treasure in the run, if indeed it were there?
My business is to relate what befell me; if I do my share honestly the candid reader will not, I believe, quarrel with me for not being able to explain everything as I go along.
"Let them sleep," said he.
You have good men in Hawke and Anson; but Jonquiere and St. George, hey?
"Yes, my friend, I am much obliged," said he with vivacity.
He eyed me steadfastly whilst he smoked, as if critically taking stock of me, and presently said, "The devil hath an odd way of ordering matters.
"I was afraid that some one had been beforehand with us.
I was about to go below again, when my eye was taken by the two figures lying upon the deck.
I stifled the amazement his words excited, and said coldly, "You must have met with some rich ships."
The impression he had made upon me was not agreeable.
But I held my peace, which I suppose he put down to good manners, for he changed the subject by asking if I was married.
"Find what, Mr. Tassard?" said I.
When he returned he had on a hairy cap, with large covers for the ears, and a big flap behind that fell to below his collar, and was almost as long as his hair.
He had been as good as dead for nearly fifty years, yet he brought with him into life exactly the same qualities he had carried with him in his exit.
I knew the name of Jonquiere as an admiral who had fought us in 1748 or thereabouts; of the others I had never heard.
"What do you propose?" said he, looking at me oddly.
No, no! we gather such flowers as we want off the high seas, and wear them till the perfume palls.
We know the name of our own sovereign and what wages sailors are getting; that's about it, sir.
What would follow, think you?
"I have searched, as you call it--that is, I have crawled through the hold as far as the powder-room."
"You are modest, Mr. ----"
How was it conceivable he should believe he had lain lifeless for eight-and-forty years?
"Paul Rodney," said I, seeing he stopped for my name.
"And what is the news?" said he, taking a pannikin of wine from the oven and sipping it.
All that concerned me lay in the hollow in which the schooner was frozen; but so far as the slopes were concerned I could see nothing to render me uneasy.
After all it was ridiculous that I should feel mortified because he supposed me crazy in the matter of dates.
He had spoken of chests of silver--where was the treasure?
"Why, that we should carry them to the fire and rub them, and bring them to if we can."
"Bah!" he interrupted, with a violent flourish of the hand.
He started.
Hark! there are those crackling noises I used to hear before I fell into a stupor.
In all----" he paused to enter into a calculation, moving his lips briskly as he whispered to himself--"between ninety and one hundred thousand pounds of your English money."
"You scared me!" said he, fetching a deep breath.
No! we shall look for it presently, and we shall find it."
"Why?"
To live is the true business of life.
It was blowing a whole gale of wind from the north-west.
He wanted but a couple of muskets and an umbrella to closely resemble Robinson Crusoe, as he is made to figure in most of the cuts I have seen.
Now that I had a companion should I be able to escape from this horrid situation?
"Something after twelve by the captain's watch," said I, pulling it out and looking at it.
He loved blood even better than money.
"We sailed last month a year from the Thames for Callao."
"But 'tis guesswork time."
But it is not conceivable.
He nodded.
Neither Sylvia nor her mother was in advance of their age.
'Yes,' said Bell; 'but it's a long time ago; when we was courting.'
We sailed on, and we sailed on, for more days nor I could count.
At length she settled that it could not be settled until she saw Molly again; so, by a strong gulping effort, she resolutely determined to think no more about him, only about the marvels he had told.
That were cold, a can tell the'!
He was pleased with his purchase, and had had some drink to celebrate his bargain.
'But what a mercy no man stayed in her,' said Bell.
With daylight came wakening and little homely every-day wonders.
Daniel was just a little annoyed at the admiration which his own wife and daughter were bestowing on the specksioneer's wonderful stories, and he said--
It may seem curious to trace up the popular standard of truth to taxation; but I do not think the idea would be so very far-fetched.
She wore the high-crowned linen cap of that day, surmounting her lovely masses of golden brown hair, rather than concealing them, and tied firm to her head by a broad blue ribbon.
Half a glance into the gray darkness outside made her suddenly timid, and she drew back behind the door as she opened it wide to admit her father and Kinraid.
She moved about with pretty household briskness, attending to all her father's wants.
But now he said, in reply to Daniel Robson, that he would step in another night before long and hear some more of the old man's yarns.
Both listened with admiration to the ingenious devices, and acted as well as spoken lies, that were talked about as fine and spirited things.
The cheerful click of the knitting-needles made a pleasant home-sound; and in the occasional snatches of slumber that overcame her mother, Sylvia could hear the long-rushing boom of the waves, down below the rocks, for the Haytersbank gulley allowed the sullen roar to come up so far inland.
All night long Sylvia dreamed of burning volcanoes springing out of icy southern seas.
And the same, though in smaller measure, was the consequence of many other taxes.
'Cold!' said her father, 'what do ye stay-at-homes know about cold, a should like to know?
When she had argued herself into certainty on one side, she suddenly wheeled about, and was just of the opposite opinion.
Curious to see who it could be, with a lively instinctive advance towards any event which might break the monotony she had begun to find somewhat dull, she sprang up to open the door.
There was no question of the morality of the affair; one of the greatest signs of the real progress we have made since those times seems to be that our daily concerns of buying and selling, eating and drinking, whatsoever we do, are more tested by the real practical standard of our religion than they were in the days of our grandfathers.
How well it was, thought the young girl, that she had doffed her bed-gown and linsey-woolsey petticoat, her working-dress, and made herself smart in her stuff gown, when she sate down to work with her mother.
Daniel Robson came in bright and boisterous.
'And some eggs are very pretty, you know' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of a compliment.
'Would you tell me, please,' said Alice 'what that means?'
'I'm not offended,' said Humpty Dumpty.
'That's what you call a History of England, that is. Now, take a good look at me!
'The face is what one goes by, generally,' Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
How old did you say you were?'
My heart went hop, my heart went thump; I filled the kettle at the pump.
'An uncomfortable sort of age.
Alice was silent.
Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful.
'And then "MOME RATHS"?' said Alice. 'I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of trouble.'
Then some one came to me and said, "The little fishes are in bed."
'I like birthday presents best,' she said at last.
'Of course you don't--till I tell you.
Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance--or the mouth at the top--that would be SOME help.'
I told them once, I told them twice: They would not listen to advice.
'Why, because there's nobody with me!' cried Humpty Dumpty.
And he was very proud and stiff; He said "I'd go and wake them, if--"
'It's in a book.'
'Too proud?' the other inquired.
I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'Don't stand there chattering to yourself like that,' Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, 'but tell me your name and your business.'
To "GIMBLE" is to make holes like a gimlet.'
'And what does "OUTGRABE" mean?'
But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes and said 'Wait till you've tried.'
With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.'
I took a corkscrew from the shelf: I went to wake them up myself.
'That seems to be done right--' he began.
'It wouldn't look nice,' Alice objected.
The little fishes of the sea, They sent an answer back to me.
I'm afraid it would come off!'
'But I had some poetry repeated to me, much easier than that, by--Tweedledee, I think it was.'
'You're holding it upside down!' Alice interrupted.
'And what's the "GYRE" and to "GIMBLE"?'
'In summer, when the days are long, Perhaps you'll understand the song: In autumn, when the leaves are brown, Take pen and ink, and write it down.'
However, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself.
'I'm afraid I can't quite remember it,' Alice said very politely.
only I don't sing it,' he added, as an explanation.
'You never said a word like it!'
'They'd pick me up again in a minute, THEY would!
I took a kettle large and new, Fit for the deed I had to do.
'Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.'
It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face.
'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'
The little fishes' answer was "We cannot do it, Sir, because--"'
Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to HER; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree--so she stood and softly repeated to herself:--
'It is a--MOST--PROVOKING--thing,' he said at last, 'when a person doesn't know a cravat from a belt!'
'In that case we start fresh,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'and it's my turn to choose a subject--' ('He talks about it just as if it was a game!' thought Alice.) 'So here's a question for you.
'If I'd meant that, I'd have said it,' said Humpty Dumpty.
CHAPTER VI.
'The piece I'm going to repeat,' he went on without noticing her remark, 'was written entirely for your amusement.'
'Thank you very much,' said Alice.
It's a present from the White King and Queen.
This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a VERY strong hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay.
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
They may write such things in a BOOK,' Humpty Dumpty said in a calmer tone.
'Well, "TOVES" are something like badgers--they're something like lizards--and they're something like corkscrews.'
'Seven years and six months!' Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully.
With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.'
'And how many birthdays have you?'
'My NAME is Alice, but--'
So she got up, and held out her hand.
She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.
'And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.
'They must be very curious looking creatures.'
'I mean,' she said, 'that one can't help growing older.'
I said to him, I said it plain, "Then you must wake them up again."
When he DID speak again, it was in a deep growl.
'A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course.'
'And a long way beyond it on each side,' Alice added.
'Let's hear it,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'I can explain all the poems that were ever invented--and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.'
'I'm afraid I don't quite understand,' said Alice.
'Three hundred and sixty-five,' said Alice.
'It gets easier further on,' Humpty Dumpty replied.
Humpty Dumpty
'Exactly so.
'That last line is much too long for the poetry,' she added, almost out loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her.
'I will, if I can remember it so long,' said Alice.
Humpty Dumpty was sitting with his legs crossed, like a Turk, on the top of a high wall--such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance--and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure after all.
'You've been listening at doors--and behind trees--and down chimneys--or you couldn't have known it!'
'Why do you sit out here all alone?' said Alice, not wishing to begin an argument.
'One.'
Ask another.'
She watched him a little anxiously as she took it.
'Oh!' said Alice.
"How can you?
"AS GOOD AS A PLAY"
How the blood must run down.
"She can't come to you.
The Boy-leaning-against-a-greyhound spoke again, and sighed:
I am full of matches, but I don't marry.
"Keep out of disagreeable company," said the bronze Monk-reading-a-book.
"I know," said the Cat-made-of-worsted.
"That lasts longer than beauty.
The Audience paid no attention, but took up the Boy-leaning-against-a-greyhound.
"Happy!"
"I have private reasons."
"You've got a hinge in your back," said he, "they open you in the middle; your head flies back.
"Ah!" sighed the Boy-leaning-against-a-greyhound.
"Ah!" said she; "but--"
He went to the mantel-piece and took up the China-girl-rising-out-of-a-pen-wiper.
They were all facing front, and it looked as if they had come out of the wall behind, and were on their little stage facing the audience.
Come, a glass case is nothing to it.
I never saw true ones on her."
The Cat-made-of-worsted grinned to himself.
"No matter."
And she is solid behind."
It's all pen-wiper."
I never saw them."
There was quite a row of them on the mantel-piece.
"Why?"
"Come.
"Why, she has legs after all," said he.
I read a book by candle.
"I am of Parian, you know, and there is no one else here of Parian except yourself."
"Yes, and the greyhound," said he eagerly.
Fifty years old, too!
"Go away," said the Parian girl, angrily.
I am never idle."
"They're false.
"A match!
"I haven't.
"And she has no hinge in her back," grinned the Cat-made-of-worsted. "Come, neighbors, let us congratulate them.
"Ha!" said the Cat-made-of-worsted.
It must end happily."
Neighbor Monk, you're hollow.
"I saw her behind.
"He belongs to me.
"Do you?" said he eagerly.
"I am under a glass case," spoke up the Cat-made-of-worsted.
Still they were happy.
"She can't!" said the Cat-made-of-worsted.
"You're all hateful.
"I never bend," said the bronze Monk-reading-a-book.
That would indeed be a match!"
"Marry!" muttered the bronze Monk-reading-a-book.
I know it.
"Never mind the Cat," said the Boy-leaning-against-a-greyhound.
"Shocking!" said she.
"You shall not say a word.
"Do you?
I know it.
I won't have you."
And then you're full of brimstone matches.
"If, now, you were under a glass case."
"No," said the Parian girl, "I don't like that."
I'm fifty years old.
"That is not congratulation; that is advice," said the Cat-made-of-worsted.
Then I love you.
She hasn't got any legs.
"What?"
You begin."
"Do I care?" said he.
I spoke from the pit of my stomach for the rest of the journey, but I felt completely extinguished, and dreadfully young.
'You don't remember me, I am afraid,' said I.
The expression of her face, as they both looked towards me, I felt to be very touching.
This was addressed to the waiter, who had been very attentive to our recognition, at a distance, and now came forward deferentially.
All this time, Mr. Wickfield had his glance upon her as she sat by his own daughter's side.
In the meanwhile, you must try to look at it from a new point of view, and not as a schoolboy.'
'Why, you have always been in earnest!' said Agnes, laughing again.
Annie, show me that letter again.'
'Yes,' she said.
'His hand trembles, his speech is not plain, and his eyes look wild.
'My God!' he suddenly exclaimed.
I shall go down into Suffolk afterwards.'
But I remarked two things: first, that though Annie soon recovered her composure, and was quite herself, there was a blank between her and Mr. Wickfield which separated them wholly from each other; secondly, that Mr. Wickfield seemed to dislike the intimacy between her and Agnes, and to watch it with uneasiness.
I did think, once, of Mr. Dick's going with you; but, on second thoughts, I shall keep him to take care of me.'
You might drag him at the heels of four wild horses first.'
'By Uriah,' said Agnes.
'And the Punches,' said William.
Mr. Wickfield said not one word, though the old lady looked to him as if for his commentary on this intelligence; but sat severely silent, with his eyes fixed on the ground.
'Oh, I know you are not!' said I, 'because if you had been you would have told me.
'Shooting, sir?' said the coachman.
'You have said so, any time these ten years, Doctor,' Mr. Wickfield answered.
'That ain't a sort of man to see sitting behind a coach-box, is it though?' said William in my ear, as he handled the reins.
'It's little Copperfield!'
'Where does he sleep?
'Suffolk's my county.'
Holloa, you sir!'
'It is not fancy,' said Agnes, shaking her head.
I have been adopted by an aunt down in that part of the country, and have just finished my education there.
You know what I mean,' said Steerforth.
I was got up in a special great-coat and shawl, expressly to do honour to that distinguished eminence; had glorified myself upon it a good deal; and had felt that I was a credit to the coach.
'Yes; and the sense of being unfit for it, or of not having understood it, or of having shown his condition in spite of himself, seems to make him so uneasy, that next day he is worse, and next day worse, and so he becomes jaded and haggard.
'My dear sir, he's all sorts of things.'
I have always considered this as the first fall I had in life.
'Trot, I tell you what, my dear,' said my aunt, one morning in the Christmas season when I left school: 'as this knotty point is still unsettled, and as we must not make a mistake in our decision if we can help it, I think we had better take a little breathing-time.
Everyone who knows you, consults with you, and is guided by you, Agnes.'
As to his liver,' said the Old Soldier resignedly, 'that, of course, he gave up altogether, when he first went out!'
"The remembrance of old times, my dearest Annie"--and so forth--it's not there.
It was in vain to take refuge in gruffness of speech.
Just what you used to be, now I look at you!
'I hope I shall be worthy of YOU, aunt.
'Not now, mama,' she pleaded in a low tone.
Oh!--"I am sorry to inform you that my health is suffering severely, and that I fear I may be reduced to the necessity of returning home for a time, as the only hope of restoration." That's pretty plain, poor fellow!
Next you, sir.'
'Pleasantly, I hope, aunt?' said I.
A fine firm fellow, with a will of your own.
'Where have you put my friend, Mr. Copperfield?' said Steerforth.
You are so good, and so sweet-tempered.
What's his number?
The daisy of the field, at sunrise, is not fresher than you are.
"You may not be surprised to hear, Annie,"--no, to be sure, knowing that he never was really strong; what did I say just now?--"that I have undergone so much in this distant place, as to have decided to leave it at all hazards; on sick leave, if I can; on total resignation, if that is not to be obtained.
'With determination.
'Ain't I what?' said the gentleman behind.
'Well, sir,' said the waiter, with an apologetic air.
The Doctor was very fond of music.
'Yes,' I said, with some importance.
He soon came back to say that there were none (at which I was much surprised) and began to lay the cloth for my dinner in a box by the fire.
I intimated that I hoped I should be what she described.
'I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there,' said William.
'Ain't you?' said the waiter.
Copperfield is at present in forty-four, sir.'
'Bred them Suffolk Punches by wholesale?'
There are worse tasks than that, in my calling.'
The letter was reluctantly produced; and as I handed it to the old lady, I saw how the unwilling hand from which I took it, trembled.
'There is a post come in from India, I observe,' he said, after a short silence.
It haunted me when I got home.
'Steerforth! won't you speak to me?'
The reverence that I had for his grey head, was mingled with commiseration for his faith in those who were treacherous to him, and with resentment against those who injured him.
With resolution,' said my aunt, shaking her cap at me, and clenching her hand.
I told him, as majestically as I could, that I wasn't in the humour for a fowl.
As Mr. Wickfield glanced towards her, sitting at the tea table by Agnes, she seemed to me to avoid his look with such unwonted hesitation and timidity, that his attention became fixed upon her, as if something were suggested to his thoughts.
It was curious and interesting, nevertheless, to be sitting up there behind four horses: well educated, well dressed, and with plenty of money in my pocket; and to look out for the places where I had slept on my weary journey.
We can give Mr. Copperfield seventy-two, sir, if it would be preferred.
But Annie's letter is plainer still.
A distrust of myself, which has often beset me in life on small occasions, when it would have been better away, was assuredly not stopped in its growth by this little incident outside the Canterbury coach.
Annie, thus addressed, made no reply.
'Well, if you don't mind, sir,' said William, 'I think it would be more correct.'
His active imagination had thought out many improvements on the cars he had previously constructed; and he had also secured capital with which to carry out his ideas.
Gigantic work-shops were built, and a water supply brought from Lake Michigan, miles away.
He at first became identified with the work of raising and placing new foundations under several large buildings of that city.
The subject of this sketch we consider one of the greatest of philanthropists.
No visible form of government, save Mr. Pullman, and yet this is a city of nearly eight thousand people.
No property is sold, but if a party desires to live there he applies to the Superintendent, and a lease is given, which can be cancelled by either party at ten days' notice.
A very large force of men were put to work draining; gas-pipes were laid; streets were laid out and graded, and an architect employed to draw the plans for the building of a whole city at once.
GEORGE M. PULLMAN.
The people are not muddled with drink; they are promptly paid; their 'personal' rights are not interfered with, save in respect to the selling of liquor; they are contented and happy.
These establishments, of necessity, could not come under his immediate supervision he, therefore, conceived the idea of concentrating his business into one vast establishment, and gathered about him a force of skilled workmen.
He claims to have done this as a business policy, and disclaims all honor as a philanthropist.
Nothing but liquor is forbidden.
He knew that on the completion of such a road, travelers would appreciate a car in which they could enjoy the comforts of home for the entire tedious trip.
None but liquor dealers or men who desire to keep low groggeries are excluded.
Fitting up a shop on the Chicago and Alton road, he constructed two coaches, at the then fabulous cost of $18,000 each.
To say that his hopes were fully realized, would be inadequate.
The buildings are not mushroom affairs, but substantial brick edifices which give this place an appearance which will compare favorably with any city.
George M. Pullman, however, cared but little about their opinion.
Branches were started at Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and various places in Europe.
The Union and Pacific was then exciting much attention.
Mr. Pullman has been largely identified with the Metropolitan Railway and the Eagleton Wire Works in New York city.
But we cannot now think of any one who is more clearly identified with the great effort which is going on for the benefit of mankind.
He is a modest man, and for this reason disclaimed all desire to be known as a benefactor.
A man can squander his time, can gamble, possibly, but he cannot obtain drink; the result is, there are no policemen.
The management of the various western roads looked upon such enterprise as visionary.
They furnished him with two old coaches, with which to experiment.
He looked upon Chicago and its locality as the coming center of population in the United States; but a site in that city would be far too expensive, if indeed one could have been found sufficient for his purpose.
A bank was opened, a library, containing thousands of volumes, was provided; all these things were brought about by Mr. Pullman.
But the name of Pullman is destined to long remain a synonym of philanthropy.
So popular did they become, that his shops at Chicago could not begin to fill the demands made upon it for his parlor, dining, and sleeping cars.
His father was a mechanic of some note, but died before George was of age, leaving him to help support his mother and younger brothers.
Every honest tradesman can come to Pullman.
George M. Pullman had a perceptive mind--so have all truly successful men.
About twelve to fifteen miles from Chicago was a swamp: it was considered worthless, but it was as easy for this natural mechanic to conceive the idea of draining this tract of land, as it was to conceive methods to raise buildings.
He built a fine hotel, and erected a beautiful church, placing a rich toned organ in it, which alone cost $3,500.
He wants to have the whole company with him!"
Woe to the body that became jammed here!
And her external equipment corresponded to her internal.
That helps; the fish becomes manageable, its strength vanishes.
It opened up far past the eyes!
She peers about continually, peevishly, and evilly.
Only one thing troubles her; she can never decide which fish out of the swarming multitude she will take.
Down through it lay great rolls of swallowing-muscles, studded with grasping protuberances.
It was only in May, when they lay in bundles among the rushes, amorously flicking their tails, that she had her fill of them, taking as many as a score in the day.
At that moment she sees another little roach shining.
Not until the last "water-cow" is straight in front of her does she reveal herself; and the water flashes and bubbles as Grim twists and turns in her efforts to come up with her prey.
Reeds and rushes swing and sway as they stop for a moment to rub themselves against them.
Just then there is a movement in one of the clumps of weed.
They come from deep down at the bottom, and shine with mud and slime and water-moss.
The roach is good enough!
Her embarrassment at her failure almost disappeared, and she involuntarily stiffened as she stood.
The moon had risen, and shed her silvery light around his oars.
It resembled the drawn-up mouth of a sack.
As they pass through the open water, between the masses of vegetation, where the sun suddenly shines upon their amber scales, Grim hastily conceals herself in the forest of weed.
The same comedy was gone through, the same incomprehensible strength in a puny roach, and the same work to get the refractory fish into her power.
Now only patience, a little more time to wait; for this time she would make sure of her fish!
Years went by; and Grim grew into a splendid fish.
"Oh! so he daren't!
They were small and pointed, and sloped backwards, so that they served as barbs.
They dipped down rhythmically, and came up with the silver dripping from them.
This one she swallowed too, but once more she had to spit out something sharp and prickly that hung to her upper lip on the opposite side.
The flank attack, however, does not come altogether as a surprise to the "cow"; it has been prepared for it in this narrow passage, and therefore kept close to the bottom.
Yes, she was adorned in all her splendour.
What luck!
Several of them are covered with cuts and wounds on the back and sides, and it is evident they have already made acquaintance with a pike's mouth.
As a stone bores its way into the ground, so does it plunge into the mud, stirring up the water, and digging itself in, so that Grim gets only mud and grains of sand between her teeth.
They were the barbs of the triple hook that she took for thorns!
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
And that, since he has been engaged upon these Adventures, he has received, from private quarters far beyond the reach of suspicion or distrust, accounts of atrocities, in the perpetration of which upon neglected or repudiated children, these schools have been the main instruments, very far exceeding any that appear in these pages."
I recollect he was a jovial, ruddy, broad-faced man; that we got acquainted directly; and that we talked on all kinds of subjects, except the school, which he showed a great anxiety to avoid.
If Nicholas be not always found to be blameless or agreeable, he is not always intended to appear so.
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF NICHOLAS NICKLEBY,
This story was begun, within a few months after the publication of the completed "Pickwick Papers." There were, then, a good many cheap Yorkshire schools in existence.
"Was there any large school near?" I asked him, in reference to the letter.
"To turn to a more pleasant subject, it may be right to say, that there ARE two characters in this book which are drawn from life.
In reference to these gentry, I may here quote a few words from the original preface to this book.
We hear sometimes of an action for damages against the unqualified medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to heal it.
Where imposture, ignorance, and brutal cupidity, are the stock in trade of a small body of men, and one is described by these characteristics, all his fellows will recognise something belonging to themselves, and each will have a misgiving that the portrait is his own.
I never saw him afterwards, but I sometimes imagine that I descry a faint reflection of him in John Browdie.
It was after dinner; and he needed little persuasion to sit down by the fire in a warm corner, and take his share of the wine that was on the table.
The impression made upon me, however made, never left me.
I was always curious about Yorkshire schools--fell, long afterwards and at sundry times, into the way of hearing more about them--at last, having an audience, resolved to write about them.
Traders in the avarice, indifference, or imbecility of parents, and the helplessness of children; ignorant, sordid, brutal men, to whom few considerate persons would have entrusted the board and lodging of a horse or a dog; they formed the worthy cornerstone of a structure, which, for absurdity and a magnificent high-minded LAISSEZ-ALLER neglect, has rarely been exceeded in the world.
"The Author's object in calling public attention to the system would be very imperfectly fulfilled, if he did not state now, in his own person, emphatically and earnestly, that Mr. Squeers and his school are faint and feeble pictures of an existing reality, purposely subdued and kept down lest they should be deemed impossible.
The Brothers are now dead.
If I were to attempt to sum up the thousands of letters, from all sorts of people in all sorts of latitudes and climates, which this unlucky paragraph brought down upon me, I should get into an arithmetical difficulty from which I could not easily extricate myself.
But, what of the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been deformed for ever by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them!
by Charles Dickens
"It has afforded the Author great amusement and satisfaction, during the progress of this work, to learn, from country friends and from a variety of ludicrous statements concerning himself in provincial newspapers, that more than one Yorkshire schoolmaster lays claim to being the original of Mr. Squeers.
"While the Author cannot but feel the full force of the compliment thus conveyed to him, he ventures to suggest that these contentions may arise from the fact, that Mr. Squeers is the representative of a class, and not of an individual.
One other quotation from the same Preface may serve to introduce a fact that my readers may think curious.
I make mention of the race, as of the Yorkshire schoolmasters, in the past tense.
For more information, or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.
There is only one other point, on which I would desire to offer a remark.
This is a LibriVox recording.
Though it has not yet finally disappeared, it is dwindling daily.
I went to several places in that part of the country where I understood the schools to be most plentifully sprinkled, and had no occasion to deliver a letter until I came to a certain town which shall be nameless. The person to whom it was addressed, was not at home; but he came down at night, through the snow, to the inn where I was staying.
This comprises all I need say on the subject; except that if I had seen occasion, I had resolved to reprint a few of these details of legal proceedings, from certain old newspapers.
There are very few now.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
To set this point at rest, for once and for ever, we hasten to undeceive them, and stride to its commencement.
A painter who has gazed too long upon some glaring colour, refreshes his dazzled sight by looking upon a darker and more sombre tint; but everything that met Mr Nickleby's gaze wore so black and gloomy a hue, that he would have been beyond description refreshed by the very reverse of the contrast.
Not an article of my old furniture, but will be sold to strangers!'
Would he be what he is, if he hadn't speculated?'
I WILL speculate, my dear.'
'Why not?' asked Mrs Nickleby.
As for Nicholas, he lived a single man on the patrimonial estate until he grew tired of living alone, and then he took to wife the daughter of a neighbouring gentleman with a dower of one thousand pounds.
This fact is interesting, as illustrating the secret connection and sympathy which always exist between great minds.
The run of luck went against Mr Nickleby.
'And it is very sinful to rebel against them,' whispered the clergyman.
There are people enough in the world, Heaven knows! and even in London (where Mr Nickleby dwelt in those days) but few complaints prevail, of the population being scanty.
'Speculate with it,' said Mrs Nickleby.
Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.
Mr Nickleby's income, at the period of his marriage, fluctuated between sixty and eighty pounds PER ANNUM.
'Because, my dear, if we SHOULD lose it,' rejoined Mr Nickleby, who was a slow and time-taking speaker, 'if we SHOULD lose it, we shall no longer be able to live, my dear.'
'Very good, my dear.
It is extraordinary how long a man may look among the crowd without discovering the face of a friend, but it is no less true.
Introduces all the Rest
With a portion of this property Mr Godfrey Nickleby purchased a small farm, near Dawlish in Devonshire, whither he retired with his wife and two children, to live upon the best interest he could get for the rest of his money, and the little produce he could raise from his land.
Speculation is a round game; the players see little or nothing of their cards at first starting; gains MAY be great--and so may losses.
'That's true,' replied Mr Nickleby.
Though Master Ralph Nickleby was not at that time aware of it, the class of gentlemen before alluded to, proceed on just the same principle in all their transactions.
'There's Nicholas,' pursued the lady, 'quite a young man--it's time he was in the way of doing something for himself; and Kate too, poor girl, without a penny in the world.
'Fiddle,' said Mrs Nickleby.
CHAPTER 1
The last reflection hurt him so much, that he took at once to his bed; apparently resolved to keep that, at all events.
'The very house I live in,' sighed the poor gentleman, 'may be taken from me tomorrow.
'I am not altogether sure of that, my dear,' said Mr Nickleby.
On examination, however, they turned out to be strictly correct.
Mr Nickleby shook his head, and motioning them all out of the room, embraced his wife and children, and having pressed them by turns to his languidly beating heart, sunk exhausted on his pillow.
'You mustn't let yourself be cast down, sir,' said the nurse.
Think of your brother!
Yes.
'Cheer up, sir!' said the apothecary.
'Such things happen every day,' remarked the lawyer.
A little to one side, with the light full on the face, the witness was seated, bearing the scrutiny of three pairs of eyes--the Judge first, and behind him, those of the Chief Detective and the Commissary of Police.
It is no doubt very distressing to you. Yet, you know?"
"I missed it last night," went on the Countess, slightly confused.
"It was where--where--"
"There, there, madame," said the Judge, reassuring her as he would a little child.
The question was blandly put, but the Judge's incredulity verged upon actual insolence.
Indeed, I have no choice," replied the Countess, bravely resigned.
"In Rome.
And her name, age, place of birth?"
"Well, among your acquaintances--he would probably have made himself known to you?"
So we must find her for you--"
Yet you, a wretched sleeper, with only a thin plank of wood between you and the affray, hear nothing, absolutely nothing.
"Pardon me, that he certainly was not," interrupted the Countess.
How can you explain--how can you reconcile that?"
You may be certain of that.
"That depends upon what you mean by 'pretty.' Some people might think so, in her own class."
"Yes, I saw him, I believe, at Modane with the rest when we dined."
That explains his strange, unjustifiable conduct just now--"
"Now this man, this poor man, had you noticed him at all?
She is not far off, I dare say. When we want her we shall be able to lay hands on her, I do not doubt, madame may rest assured."
"Whom do you mean?
She was there, out of a place.
"I want to know a little more about her, if you please."
"And then kept it?"
"Easily: I had taken a soporific.
But during the journey. Did you speak to him, or he to you?"
"Perchance you sent her on to your hotel to warn your friends that you were detained?
"She was tall, above the middle height, at least; slight, good figure, black hair and eyes."
"And the maid had removed it?"
Anyhow, set a watch for her and come back here."
"Ah, madame, what indeed?
"Who were they?
I heard of her at an agency and registry office, when I was looking for a maid a month or two ago."
I mean in 7 and 8?"
"She cannot be found.
"Oh, yes, I hope so.
You had never met him previously in Rome, where you resided?"
"Of course it is mine.
He never spoke to you, nor you to him?"
"They will refer principally to your maid."
"I have no wish to withhold the information," she replied, now turning pale, possibly at the imputation conveyed.
The Countess's lip quivered, and she was a prey to sudden emotion as she answered in a low voice:
They came and sat with me occasionally; sometimes one, sometimes the other."
"I presume, if he was among your friends--"
"Have you known them long?"
I kept a good deal in my compartment during the journey."
"So I presume; she must have taken it out of the bag in the first instance."
"During the day?"
"No, madame, not in your berth."
Have it copied and circulate it at once.
"No, before."
Now next door to your compartment--do you know who was next door?
And she must be held to strict account for it, must justify it, give her reasons.
"After you had taken your dose of chloral?"
"Pardon me, we shall not tell you--not just now."
Now, last night, did you hear anything strange in the car, more particularly in the adjoining compartment?"
"Well, she has gone away somewhere.
He dined at Modane.
"Well recommended?"
"Sir Charles Collingham and his brother.
I am obliged to keep something, sulphonal or chloral, by me, on purpose."
"I was not always alone," said the Countess, hesitatingly, and with a slight flush.
Another little trap which failed.
"Strongly.
"Of course, during the day." Her eyes flashed, as though the question was another offence.
"Then she has not been long in your service?"
"And he did not do so?
"Indeed no, I sleep badly, as a rule."
It would not be likely.
We hoped you might have been able to enlighten us."
"I am not at all anxious, really," the Countess said, quickly, and the remark told against her.
"Who else?"
"I suppose so."
"Pray take no trouble in the matter.
"And where, madame, did you obtain your maid?"
I do not allow my maid to wear colours."
"No, indeed.
"Impossible! it cannot be.
I cannot understand it.
"Why should I?"
"No; as I tell you, she came to me in December last."
"How could I? I knew of no trouble when I saw her last."
Will you tell us what was her height, figure, colour of eyes, hair, general appearance?"
It may be worth nothing, still there is the chance.
You are not a good sleeper, I believe, madame?"
"Oh, indeed?
Where did you get it?
The General knew you, took an interest in you.
"I cannot, monsieur, not in the least."
"Yes?"
"How was she dressed?"
The night passed, the next day also; but nobody came to fetch the Shoes.
Immediately 'the inner man' of each individual would be displayed before him, like a game of cards, in which he unerringly might read what the future of every person presented was to be.
I am certainly very ill."
He has a home, a wife, and children, who weep with him over his sorrows, who rejoice with him when he is glad.
The Shoes, as is the case with anybody who does what he has to do properly, could only attend to one thing at a time.
But God's warm sun streamed through the open window; lovely roses nodded from the wooden flower-boxes on the roof, and two sky-blue birds sang rejoicingly, while the sick mother implored God's richest blessings on her pious daughter.
To it the space between the heavenly bodies is not greater than the distance between the homes of our friends in town is for us, even if they live a short way from each other; such an electric shock in the heart, however, costs us the use of the body here below; unless, like the watchman of East Street, we happen to have on the Shoes of Fortune.
That's, of course, not true: but 'twould be pretty enough if it were so.
"Would to Heaven I had got my head through!" said he, involuntarily; and instantly through it slipped, easily and without pain, notwithstanding it was pretty large and thick.
Alas!" he sighed quite sorrowful, and gazed at the chirping birds that hopped contentedly from branch to branch, "they are much better off than I! To fly must be a heavenly art; and happy do I prize that creature in which it is innate. Yes!
And so there he lay on the uppermost bank in the vapor-bath; but with all his clothes on, in his boots and galoshes, while the hot drops fell scalding from the ceiling on his face.
"A certain person had an aunt, who boasted of particular skill in fortune-telling with cards, and who was constantly being stormed by persons that wanted to have a peep into futurity.
So far all went on well.
I shall speak about it at the first opportunity.
What wooden scaffolding is that which they have set up there?" cried he involuntarily, as he looked at East Gate, which, in those days, was at the end of East Street.
I know I am a clever fellow; and that is all I care about.
The part of the body most difficult to manage on such occasions was, no doubt, the head; here, as is so often the case in the world, long-headed people get through best.
So then the watchman was again watchman.
But he was mistaken.
The messenger of Fortune had only executed a few unimportant commissions, such as saving a new bonnet from a shower of rain, etc.; but what she had yet to perform was something quite unusual.
But really it is terrible what an effect that one glass of punch must have had on me!"
"No; he will be very unhappy, and will assuredly bless the moment when he feels that he has freed himself from the fatal shoes."
They considered the moon alone to be inhabited: they imagined it was the real heart of the universe or planetary system, on which the genuine Cosmopolites, or citizens of the world, dwelt.
Such verses as these people write when they are in love!
The same day he was discharged from the hospital as perfectly cured; but the Shoes meanwhile remained behind.
"There is the lieutenant, now, who might go quietly to bed if he chose, where no doubt he could stretch himself at his ease; but does he do it?
And if one then marks down one's thoughts, poetry is produced.
"There falls another star," said he: "but what does it matter; there are always enough left.
I know not what to do.
The poet shook his head, the copying-clerk did the same.
In the same moment the watchman was again watchman.
Oft asked I for this boon. The child grew up to womanhood full soon. She is so pretty, clever, and so kind Oh, did she know what's hidden in my mind-- A tale of old.
So he put them on quickly, stuck his papers in his pocket, and took besides a few under his arm, intending to look them through at home to make the necessary notes.
But that the end of it, like the Rhine, was very insignificant, proved, in his opinion, the author's want of invention; he was without genius, etc.
Some one will make a mistake for certain and take the wrong ones--he will be a happy man."
But it must be far, far away!
"That is very old!" said the Councillor, whom this piece of antiquity began to make considerably more cheerful.
He seated himself once more and nodded: the dream continued to haunt him, for he still had the shoes on his feet.
That is the highest aim of all my wishes!
It was an old, dilapidated, mouldering dovecot.
Two fairies were they; the younger, it is true, was not Dame Fortune herself, but one of the waiting-maids of her handmaidens who carry about the lesser good things that she distributes; the other looked extremely gloomy--it was Care.
He begged permission of the worthy audience, and set his spectacles on his nose.
Now that would be a very pretty joke, if the spirit when it came back and looked for the body in East Street, were not to find one.
Now just listen to what happened to the watchman.
"Heaven help me!" cried he.
O heavens!
All would be splendidly decked out, and we should hear, 'Walk in, gentlemen, pray walk in; here you will find all you please to want.' Ah!
"I either behold a fata morgana, or I am regularly tipsy," whimpered out the Councillor.
What Happened to the Councillor
If only to-morrow on awaking, I could again call all to mind so vividly!
Every inhabitant of Copenhagen knows, from personal inspection, how the entrance to Frederick's Hospital looks; but as it is possible that others, who are not Copenhagen people, may also read this little work, we will beforehand give a short description of it.
"Why, there is a pair of galoshes, as sure as I'm alive!" said the watchman, awaking from a gentle slumber.
He saw clearly that it was his irrevocable destiny to remain a prisoner till dawn, or, perhaps, even late in the morning; then the smith must be fetched to file away the bars; but all that would not be done so quickly as he could think about it.
Come, let us be men.
He then imagined he had got into a needle-case full of pointed needles of every size.
"It is really unpardonable that there are no lamps here; and it is as dirty as if one had to wade through a morass."
It must be here on this very spot; yet there is not the slightest idea of resemblance, to such a degree has everything changed this night!
Your reading in the ancients is, sine dubio, of vast extent?"
He got the Galoshes, and he was soon below in a little duodecimo garden, where between two immense walls a plumtree and an apple-tree were standing.
"Rather speak of something at which one may laugh heartily.
"Oh," exclaimed the clerical gentleman smiling, "there is much wit in them; besides they are read at court.
And why, I should like to know, are the police never to be wrong?
There, on the floor lay the galoshes, which the watchman had forgotten; he never dreamed for a moment that they were those of Fortune; and they promised to do him good service in the wet; so he put them on.
She always had a few twigs or green shoots in water--let the winter rage without as it might.
After all, that was a very unpleasant, disagreeable dream that haunted me!
What the botanist tells us after a number of imperfect lectures, the flower proclaimed in a minute.
At all events here are some people up and stirring.
At last he was forced to rest a little.
How dirty it is here!" sighed the Councillor. "As to a pavement, I can find no traces of one, and all the lamps, it seems, have gone to sleep."
While the conversation turned on this subject, and was only for a moment interrupted by the arrival of a journal that contained nothing worth reading, we will just step out into the antechamber, where cloaks, mackintoshes, sticks, umbrellas, and shoes, were deposited.
They poured out the liquor, and made the most friendly gesticulations; while a cold perspiration trickled down the back of the poor Councillor.
It is a great fault to have no taste for what is witty or amusing--come, let us be men."
"Have I lain here in the street and dreamed? Yes; 'tis East Street!
"That's what it is, no doubt," said he.
But when the spring, with a gentle stirring motion, announced her arrival, a new and busy life arose; with songs and hurrahs the ice was sawn asunder, the ships were fresh tarred and rigged, that they might sail away to distant lands.
"They belong no doubt to the lieutenant who lives over the way.
The Watchman's Adventure
Two maidens approached.
While expressing his wish, the charm of the shoes, which he had put on, began to work; the watchman entered into the being and nature of the lieutenant.
"This is certainly the heart of an old maid," thought he.
"Great Heaven!
The violets exhaled their sweet breath, whilst I pressed against the windowpanes covered with fantastic frost-work the copper coin I had heated on the stove, and so made peep-holes. What splendid vistas were then opened to my view!
It was noon; and the weather, that had threatened rain, began to clear up, while gaily dressed holiday folks filled the streets.
"O warm spicy land of my birth," sang the Canary bird; "I will sing of thy dark-green bowers, of the calm bays where the pendent boughs kiss the surface of the water; I will sing of the rejoicing of all my brothers and sisters where the cactus grows in wanton luxuriance."
Be that as it may, it did comprehend it; for in our souls there germinate far greater powers than we poor mortals, despite all our cleverness, have any notion of.
"Be happy!" said he.
"I don't like roaming."
"Life is earnest.
"I am not quite sure," she coughed.
"They're false," said the Cat-made-of-worsted.
Marry me, and live under a glass case."
BY HORACE E. SCUDDER
She's hollow. She's stuffed with lamp-lighters.
Folly!"
But before he could speak, the Audience got up.
We could roam; oh, we could roam!"
"Happy!" said the Cat-made-of-worsted.
"The Trimmings" at Dinner
Business Liabilities
Beautiful Voice
He carries out his desire for attention here as in everything else and what he buys will serve that end directly or indirectly.
The stolid, indifferent or cold are people the Thoracic comes very near disliking.
He is the most easily excited of all types but also the most easily calmed.
Should Avoid
The Thoracic feels everything keenly.
So he steers clear of them.
Emotional Liabilities
They never belong predominately to the fourth type.
Get his name on the dotted line NOW, or don't expect it.
It gives him another promise of "newness."
The Forgiving Man
Everything in his organism tends to suddenness and not to sameness.
The Incessant Talker
Eliminating Non-Essentials
Physical Liabilities
The Alimentive manages the world but the Thoracic entertains it.
He makes many friends by his obvious openness and his capacity for seeing the interesting details which others overlook.
Uncommon works of art are usually found in the homes of this type.
He lives for thrills and novel reactions and usually spares no pains or money to get them.
Every kind of music is enjoyed by the pure Thoracic because he experiences so many moods.
Sensitive to His Surroundings
He anticipates those of the future as so many more to be utilized in the same way.
But it is a significant fact that almost every humorist of note has had this type as the first or second element in his makeup.
Easily Excited
"Never two minutes the same" fitly describes this type.
Domestic Strength
This type does not purpose to be outwitted by life.
Called "Intuitive"
On the Spur of the Moment
He wrings the utmost out of each experience so quickly and so completely that he is forever on the lookout for new worlds to conquer.
That he is a "good mixer" and has the magnetism to interest and attract others are his most valuable business traits.
Favorite Sports
The impression that he gets this knowledge or suspicion from the outside is due, the scientists say, to the fact that his thinking has proceeded at such lightning-like speed that he was unable to watch the wheels go round.
But the world is not made up of mind readers.
Naturally Confidential
Quick temper, his inflammable nature and appearances of vanity are his greatest social liabilities.
This is due to the psychological fact that nothing is truly humorous save what is slightly "out of plumb."
Fashion and "Flare"
Too great excitability, irresponsibility and supersensitiveness, are the weakest points of this type.
Lights and Shadows
Emotional Assets
His Fastidious Habits
Most of us are much more interesting than the world suspects.
The Thoracic finds it hard to maintain a grudge because he gets over it just as he gets over everything else.
Wealth to the Thoracic means unlimited opportunity for achieving the unusual in everything.
He enjoys, as does every type, certain kinds of movies, but he constitutes no such percentage of the movie-going audience as some other types.
Books and stories that are romantic, adventurous, and different are the favorites of this type.
Physical Assets
The Human Fireworks
How to Deal with this Type in Business
Has Color Sense
Business Assets
He is an actual curiosity to the quiet, inexpressive people who never can fathom how he manages to talk so frankly and so fast.
To them Charles was no longer a penniless exile.
Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, died, it is said, of laughter at the people's wild delight--a truly Rabelaisian end.
Even had there been no pretenders to carry on the cult, the Stuarts would still have passed into history as much loved by the people.
Poor child!
Her frankness and honest manner pleased him.
Charles did not lose sight of her.
Nevertheless, no sooner had he been expelled, and been succeeded by a Dutchman gnawing asparagus and reeking of cheeses, than there was already a Stuart legend.
They called her "Madam Carwell," and they seemed to have an instinct that she was no mere plaything of his idle hours, but was like some strange exotic serpent, whose poison might in the end sting the honor of England.
Catharine was dark, petite, and by no means beautiful; yet she had a very sweet expression and a heart of utter innocence.
There was something about her grace and innocence that touched the dissolute monarch, who was by no means without a heart.
But it is significant of the deep strain of romance which the six Stuarts who reigned in England have implanted in the English heart.
She would pay Charles a million pounds in gold and cede to England two valuable ports.
He was handsome, as a man, fully equaling the French princess who became his wife.
She even spoke with kindness to his favorites and made him feel that she studied his happiness alone.
Portugal was then very far from being a petty state. It had wealth at home and rich colonies abroad, while its flag was seen on every sea.
Because of her efforts Chelsea Hospital was founded.
Charles knew that for the present all was lost.
For Englishmen at heart are not only monarchists, but they are lovers of good cheer and merrymaking and all sorts of mirth.
But, as Charles had hoped, the change was coming.
In a way it was precisely this sort of preference that made Charles so popular among the people.
Hard-working, useful kings have been Henry VII., the Georges, William IV., and especially the last Edward.
She was stage-struck, and endeavored to get even a minor part in a play; but Betterton, the famous actor, thrust her aside when she ventured to apply to him.
She had been wholly convent-bred.
Indeed, had Charles been always at his best he would have had a very different name in history.
In 1648, however, when he was eighteen years of age, he gathered a fleet of eighteen ships and cruised along the English coast, taking prizes, which he carried to the Dutch ports.
She spoke in a broad Cockney dialect.
When the great Civil War broke out he had joined his father's army.
One might classify the kings of England in many ways.
There are not many such examples, and therefore this one is worth remembering.
As a child, even, he had shown himself to be no faint-hearted creature.
And therefore his court, even in exile, was a court of gallantry and ease.
The old Jacobite ballads still have power to thrill.
Charles at this time was not handsome, like his father.
Of course, to-day this cult of the Stuarts is nothing but a fad.
It was a school for murderers and robbers and prostitutes; and every night when the torches flared it vomited forth its deadly spawn.
Of anecdotes concerning her there are many, but not often has their real import been detected.
The queen regent, being at odds with Spain, and wishing to secure an ally against that power, made overtures to Charles, asking him whether a match might not be made between him and the Princess Catharine of Braganza.
It must be confessed that in his attachments to English women Charles showed little care for rank or station.
Prayers are said for her at English shrines, and toasts are drunk to her in rare old wine.
It was not merely her daughter's hand that she offered, but a splendid dowry.
Some monarchs, such as Edward II. and the womanish Henry VI., have been contemptible.
Lucy Walters and Catherine Peg were very illiterate creatures.
He hastened to Scotland, skilfully escaping an English force, and was proclaimed as king and crowned at Scone, in 1651.
Charles spoke sternly to her until she burst into tears, and then he petted her and told her that her duty as a queen compelled her to submit to many things which a lady in private life need not endure.
It was a too gracious preparation for a very graceless husband.
All that external circumstances could do to push her down into the mire was done; yet she was not pushed down, but emerged as one of those rare souls who have in their natures an uncontaminated spring of goodness and honesty.
No one could have cared greatly for the first James, but Charles I. was indeed a kingly personage when viewed afar.
Lord Buckhurst, therefore, paid the bill, while Mistress Nell jeered at the other two, saying that this was the most poverty-stricken party that she had ever met.
Nell Gwyn was much with Charles; and after his tempestuous scenes with Barbara Villiers, and the feeling of dishonor which the Duchess of Portsmouth made him experience, the girl's good English bluntness was a pleasure far more rare than sentiment.
She was with her protector of the time, Lord Buckhurst, who, of course, recognized his majesty.
He never said anything that was foolish, and he very seldom did anything that was wise; yet his easy manners and gracious ways endeared him to those who met him.
It may be suggested that the Stuarts are still loved by many Englishmen because they were unfortunate; yet this is hardly true, after all.
When the Protestant mobs sought to drive her out of England he showed his courage and manliness by standing by her and refusing to allow her to be molested.
Her gentleness affected him so that he always spoke to her with courtesy and real friendship.
There was the king once more; and England, breaking through its long period of Puritanism, laughed and danced with more vivacity than ever the French had shown.
Cromwell's death roused all England to a frenzy of king-worship.
The court became more and more a seat of reckless revelry.
Perhaps it is the very final test of popularity that a ruler should have a nickname known to every one.
He had no personal vices.
He could be in every sense a king.
The fanciful story of her birthplace is most surely quite unfounded.
The red blood should become the rich red burgundy; the sound of trumpets and kettledrums should give way to the melody of lutes and viols.
Many hardships they underwent while Cromwell ruled with his iron hand; and when that iron hand was relaxed in death, and poor, feeble Richard Cromwell slunk away to his country-seat, what wonder is it that young Charles came back to England and caracoled through the streets of London with a smile for every one and a happy laugh upon his lips?
As a child he had borne hardship and privation and had seen the red blood flow upon the battlefield.
Though he governed England very badly, he never governed it so badly as to lose his popularity.
"You can very easily satisfy them," said Nell Gwyn.
There is a pitiful little episode in the marriage of Charles with his Portuguese bride, Catharine of Braganza.
For a time he treated her with great respect, and she was happy.
The treasury might be nearly bankrupt; the navy might be routed by the Dutch; the king himself might be too much given to dissipation; but his people forgave him all, because everybody knew that Charles would clap an honest citizen on the back and joke with all who came to see him feed the swans in Regent's Park.
But if you look for something more than ordinary popularity--something that belongs to sentiment and makes men willing to become martyrs for a royal cause--we must find these among the Stuart kings.
She saw enough of Charles, and she liked him well enough, to wish that he might do his duty by his people; and she alone had the boldness to speak out what she thought.
KING CHARLES II.
No man relied upon his word, yet men loved him.
No one ever expects to see a Stuart on the English throne.
Oughtred, the famous mathematician, died of joy when the royal emblems were restored.
The match was not yet made, but by 1659 it had been arranged.
The Spaniards were furious, for Charles's cause began to appear successful.
The second James was not popular at all.
The epigram of Rochester, written at the king's own request, was singularly true of Charles.
It must be said that in everything that was external, except her beauty, she fell short of a fastidious taste.
He showed courage and address in covering the flight of his beaten soldiers; but he soon afterward went to France, remaining there and in the Netherlands for eight years as a pensioner of Louis XIV.
Within this dreadful place children were kidnapped and trained to various forms of vice.
The first of them, King James, an absurd creature, speaking broad Scotch, timid, foolishly fond of favorites, and having none of the dignity of a monarch, lived out a lengthy reign.
AND NELL GWYN
It met with disaster at Edgehill, and was finally shattered by the crushing defeat of Naseby, which afterward inspired Macaulay's most stirring ballad.
The Roundhead, General Monk, and his soldiers proclaimed Charles King of England and escorted him to London in splendid state.
After a long and poignant struggle with her own emotions the little Portuguese yielded to the wishes of her lord.
What wonder is it that the cannon in the Tower thundered a loud welcome, and that all over England, at one season or another, maypoles rose and Christmas fires blazed?
His complexion was swarthy, his figure by no means imposing, though always graceful. When he chose he could bear himself with all the dignity of a monarch. He had a singularly pleasant manner, and a word from him could win over the harshest opponent.
Parliament voted seventy thousand pounds for a memorial to Charles's father, but the irresponsible king spent the whole sum on the women who surrounded him.
But it was then that Cromwell put forth his supreme military genius and with his Ironsides crushed the royal troops at Worcester.
He was a king who before long would take possession of his kingdom.
His easy, democratic manner, coupled with the grace and prestige of royalty, made friends for him all over England.
First of all, he had been smitten by the bold ways of one Lucy Walters. Her impudence amused the exiled monarch.
The Pope refused to lend him money, and the King of France would not increase his pension, but there were many who foresaw that Charles would not long remain in exile; and so they gave him what he wanted and waited until he could give them what they would ask for in their turn.
John was undoubtedly the most unpopular.
Her late majesty used to say that when she heard these tunes she became for the moment a Jacobite; just as the Empress Eugenie at the height of her power used pertly to remark that she herself was the only Legitimist left in France.
Presently the whole party went out to a neighboring coffee-house, where they drank and ate together.
She was intensely ignorant even for that time.
Paul adored her, and the companionship between them was beautiful to see.
It doesn't seem a day since I came home that spring evening with the Mayflowers.
But when she had to walk home alone from prayer meetings and A.V.I.S. pow-wows, while Diana and Fred, and many other gay couples, loitered along the dusky, starlit country roads, there was a queer, lonely ache in her heart which she could not explain away.
She knew he wrote to Diana occasionally, but she would not inquire about him; and Diana, supposing that Anne heard from him, volunteered no information.
"You don't think I talk with a Yankee accent, do you, Miss Shirley, ma'am?" she demanded anxiously.
I don't want no Yankee accent.
"I am just as much Gilbert's friend as ever I was, Miss Lavendar."
She is changed."
"Didn't you find your Rock People?" asked Anne.
Never were there two more thoroughly "kindred spirits."
You know, teacher.
You must pay the penalty of growing-up, Paul.
When I was little I couldn't see from one end of the summer to the other.
They said I did at home, but I thought likely they just wanted to aggravate me.
Paul shook his chestnut curls sorrowfully.
"Nora was there--but Nora is not the same, teacher.
"Miss Lavendar" had not changed, except to grow even sweeter and prettier.
"You two talk as much foolishness as ever you did," said old Mrs. Irving, half-indulgently, half-reprovingly.
"Because you were made and meant for each other, Anne--that is why.
Have you quarrelled?"
Paul spent his first fortnight with his grandmother Irving in Avonlea. Anne was there to meet him when he came, and found him wild with eagerness to get to the shore--Nora and the Golden Lady and the Twin Sailors would be there.
She had never heard of Tallyrand and did not understand epigrams.
They like only children for playfellows.
Miss Lavendar shook her head.
Not that I've a word to say against the Yankees, Miss Shirley, ma'am. They're real civilized.
"What a nice play-time this has been," said Anne.
Life was very pleasant in Avonlea that summer, although Anne, amid all her vacation joys, was haunted by a sense of "something gone which should be there." She would not admit, even in her inmost reflections, that this was caused by Gilbert's absence.
Echo Lodge was the scene of gaieties once more, and the echoes over the river were kept busy mimicking the laughter that rang in the old garden behind the spruces.
But I call her 'Mother Lavendar' and I love her next best to father.
"I'm very, very sorry."
Chapter XXIII
Island every time."
"Oh, Paul, it is you who are changed," said Anne.
It stretched before me like an unending season.
He could hardly wait to eat his supper.
Charlotta the Fourth had blossomed out into young ladyhood.
I am afraid the Twin Sailors will never again come to you in the pearly, enchanted boat with the sail of moonshine; and the Golden Lady will play no more for you on her golden harp.
"We are getting very, very wise, and it is such a pity.
I'm going to be impertinent and ask what.
Could he not see Nora's elfin face peering around the point, watching for him wistfully?
Even Nora will not meet you much longer.
Apart from this, Anne enjoyed her summer.
He and Anne had delightful rambles to wood and field and shore.
Paul Cannot Find the Rock People
"But it isn't--it is given us to exchange our thoughts," said Mrs. Irving seriously.
"You have grown too old for the Rock People.
"I don't notice it, Charlotta."
Priscilla came for a merry visit in June; and, when she had gone, Mr. and Mrs. Irving, Paul and Charlotta the Fourth came "home" for July and August.
"I'm real glad of that.
You must leave fairyland behind you."
Gilbert did not even write to her, as she thought he might have done.
"No; it's only that Gilbert wants more than friendship and I can't give him more."
And it's only a fortnight more till I go back to Kingsport, and Redmond and Patty's Place.
"I feel like a giant refreshed.
Now, ''tis a handbreadth, 'tis a tale.'"
You needn't toss that young head of yours.
Poor Anne could only blush horribly and murmur, "not very lately," which was taken by all, Mrs. Blythe included, to be merely a maidenly evasion.
I feel as if I had two homes--one at Green Gables and one at Patty's Place.
"Perfectly sure."
His face and eyes were as beautiful as ever, and his fancy was still like a prism, separating everything that fell upon it into rainbows.
Patty's Place is the dearest spot, Miss Lavendar.
He is made.
Her astonishment and confusion increased; and though still not knowing how to suppose him serious, she could hardly stand.
She would hardly join even when William was the subject, for his commission came all from the right hand too, and there was pain in the connexion.
"Good heaven!
He had previously made her the happiest of human beings, and now he had insulted--she knew not what to say, how to class, or how to regard it.
It was all beyond belief!
certainly," cried Fanny, rising in haste, the haste of embarrassment and of wanting to get away--"I will write directly."
She had quite convinced herself of this before Sir Thomas and Mr. Crawford joined them.
She had burst away from him, and at that moment Sir Thomas was heard speaking to a servant in his way towards the room they were in.
She was almost at the door, and not chusing by any means to take so much trouble in vain, she still went on, after a civil reception, a short sentence about being waited for, and a "Let Sir Thomas know" to the servant.
She would think of it for ever and forget all the rest.
Mr. Crawford was not only in the room--he was soon close to her.
I have seen too much of Mr. Crawford not to understand his manners; if he understood me as well, he would, I dare say, behave differently.
Pray write to her, if it be only a line."
He was delighted with him.
I must go away.
This is a sort of talking which is very unpleasant to me.
While her hand was trembling under these letters, her eye running from one to the other, and her heart swelling with emotion, Crawford thus continued, with unfeigned eagerness, to express his interest in the event--
My uncle, who is the very best man in the world, has exerted himself, as I knew he would, after seeing your brother.
Did Admiral Crawford apply?
He had a note to deliver from his sister.
His last journey to London had been undertaken with no other view than that of introducing her brother in Hill Street, and prevailing on the Admiral to exert whatever interest he might have for getting him on.
To see the expression of her eyes, the change of her complexion, the progress of her feelings, their doubt, confusion, and felicity, was enough.
The rest of your note I know means nothing; but I am so unequal to anything of the sort, that I hope you will excuse my begging you to take no farther notice.
Here are the letters which announce it, this moment come to hand.
Fanny thought she had never known a day of greater agitation, both of pain and pleasure; but happily the pleasure was not of a sort to die with the day; for every day would restore the knowledge of William's advancement, whereas the pain, she hoped, would return no more.
"This is all nonsense.
I beg you would not.
I beg your pardon, but I am bewildered.
Everything natural, probable, reasonable, was against it; all their habits and ways of thinking, and all her own demerits.
Compared with you, who has a right to be happy?
"Very true, sister, as you say.
I do not know what I write, but it would be a great favour of you never to mention the subject again.
It was so; he had said it.
Do not hurry yourself, I entreat."
Fanny could not speak, but he did not want her to speak.
At last--it seemed an at last to Fanny's nervousness, though not remarkably late--he began to talk of going away; but the comfort of the sound was impaired by his turning to her the next moment, and saying, "Have you nothing to send to Mary?
She opened her note immediately, glad to have anything to do, and happy, as she read it, to feel that the fidgetings of her aunt Norris, who was also to dine there, screened her a little from view.
"Oh yes!
"Upon my word, he must have gone off with his pockets well lined, and at no expense for his journey to London either!"
Mrs. Norris seemed as much delighted with the saving it would be to Sir Thomas as with any part of it.
I have not lost a moment, however. The post was late this morning, but there has not been since a moment's delay.
But, poor things! they cannot help it; and you know it makes very little difference to Sir Thomas.
There was wretchedness in the idea of its being serious; there was perplexity and agitation every way.
The conclusion was scarcely intelligible from increasing fright, for she found that Mr. Crawford, under pretence of receiving the note, was coming towards her.
But she still tried to believe it no more than what he might often have expressed towards her cousins and fifty other women.
She tried to get the better of it; tried very hard, as the dinner hour approached, to feel and appear as usual; but it was quite impossible for her not to look most shy and uncomfortable when their visitor entered the room.
She could not have supposed it in the power of any concurrence of circumstances to give her so many painful sensations on the first day of hearing of William's promotion.
While her heart was still bounding with joy and gratitude on William's behalf, she could not be severely resentful of anything that injured only herself; and after having twice drawn back her hand, and twice attempted in vain to turn away from him, she got up, and said only, with much agitation, "Don't, Mr. Crawford, pray don't!
how very, very kind!
This was a most unwelcome hearing, for though he might think nothing of what had passed, it would be quite distressing to her to see him again so soon.
They little think how much it comes to, or what their parents, or their uncles and aunts, pay for them in the course of the year.
Nothing could be more unnatural in either.
"Oh!
The difficulty was in maintaining the conviction quite so absolutely after Mr. Crawford was in the room; for once or twice a look seemed forced on her which she did not know how to class among the common meaning; in any other man, at least, she would have said that it meant something very earnest, very pointed.
Your brother is a lieutenant.
Fanny, meanwhile, speaking only when she could not help it, was very earnestly trying to understand what Mr. and Miss Crawford were at.
She would not have him be serious, and yet what could excuse the use of such words and offers, if they meant but to trifle?
How was it?
"I am very much obliged to you, my dear Miss Crawford, for your kind congratulations, as far as they relate to my dearest William.
I can hear no more of this.
"I will not talk of my own happiness," said he, "great as it is, for I think only of yours.
Knowing as I do what your feelings as a sister are, I could hardly have borne that any one in the house should share with you in the first knowledge of the news I now bring.
Your kindness to William makes me more obliged to you than words can express; but I do not want, I cannot bear, I must not listen to such--No, no, don't think of me.
CHAPTER XXXI
I cannot bear it." But he was still talking on, describing his affection, soliciting a return, and, finally, in words so plain as to bear but one meaning even to her, offering himself, hand, fortune, everything, to her acceptance.
No answer to her note?
She fancied he was trying for it the whole evening at intervals, whenever Sir Thomas was out of the room, or at all engaged with Mrs. Norris, and she carefully refused him every opportunity.
"You cannot think I mean to hurry you," said he, in an undervoice, perceiving the amazing trepidation with which she made up the note, "you cannot think I have any such object.
Fanny was ashamed of her own doubts.
But such were his habits that he could do nothing without a mixture of evil.
"That he should alter his course for us is in itself matter for wonder; but that he should take a risk on our behalf--that he should venture into Jamaica waters....
For if unlike you I do not always say precisely what I think, at least I say precisely what I wish to convey. To be ungrateful may be human; but to display it is childish."
In that amazement he left her, and went in quest of Blood.
"I perceived that you were testing it," said his lordship.
Lord Julian stood a moment, watching the tall figure as it moved away towards the taffrail.
Pitt hesitated.
Why?
There was a pause.
"Why?"
"Oh, no offence.
And on that he proceeded to explain himself and his mission.
"What was the lady's name?"
He took his face in his hands and found a chill moisture on his brow.
She recovered.
Only the conviction that already she was for ever lost to him, by introducing a certain desperate recklessness into his soul had supplied the final impulse to drive him upon his rover's course.
His service under de Ruyter wasn't wasted on him.
Lord Julian ignored the obvious sarcasm.
Cahusac was Levasseur's lieutenant, until he died."
Else he might have concluded that if in a moment in which by delivering her from captivity he deserved her gratitude, yet she expressed herself in bitterness, it must be because that bitterness was anterior to the gratitude and deep-seated.
Her slender fingers drummed the table.
She nodded.
It is news to me that ingratitude is a fault only to be found in the young and the foolish."
It amazes me, as I have said."
His voice sank again.
"I wonder why you hate him so," he said softly.
"You are probably aware that he delivered us," said he.
"For speaking to him as you did."
But he was still intrigued.
Her voice was scornful.
A cabin had been placed at the disposal of each, to which their scanty remaining belongings and Miss Bishop's woman had been duly transferred.
A great man, Miss Bishop.
Miss Bishop nodded in silence, and Jeremy Pitt turned to depart, relieved that the catechism was ended.
He fetched a heavy sigh.
She had gone off with this fellow Levasseur, and... and Peter delivered her out of his dirty clutches.
He did not perceive the problem thus presented; therefore he could not probe it.
"You might put it that way."
My uncle is a hard, unforgiving man.
Thief and pirate she had branded him.
He was abashed.
But not even that cloak could they cast upon their foulness.
"I am wondering precisely why."
She should be justified.
And we land-lubbers were not the only ones he tricked by his manoeuvre.
He was a black-hearted scoundrel, and deserved what Peter gave him."
"Did he?" Her manner was frigid.
He wondered what precisely might have been her earlier relations with Captain Blood, and was conscious of a certain uneasiness which urged him now to probe the matter.
"Who killed him?"
But ye'll understand, perhaps.
I don't regard the fellow at all."
"Mr. Pitt," she asked, "were you not one of those who escaped from Barbados with Captain Blood?"
She had been moved to it by hearing of the course he had taken.
She was very white, and she kept her eyes upon her folded hands.
he asked the stars.
That he should ever meet her again had not entered his calculations, had found no place in his dreams.
It argues either extreme youth or extreme foolishness." His lordship, you see, belonged to my Lord Sunderland's school of philosophy.
I hope your lordship's grievance is sounder than your views of life.
She appeared to be very thoughtful.
Just within the doorway of the alley leading to the cabin, he ran into Miss Bishop.
We've gone about, and if this wind holds ye'll soon be home again, mistress."
"Your lordship is evidently aggrieved with me.
"Do you?
Yet there's nothing to be done with him."
"I beg your pardon, Miss Bishop.
Pitt's eyebrows went up; still he answered.
Who made me thief and pirate?"
"But no offence between us, Captain Blood!"
Thief and pirate!
He checked suddenly at the very height of his passion.
"I usually call things by their names."
His lordship marvelled at her memory of these names.
"Nothing--as I perceive.
And... and yet Captain Blood has not married her?"
"Indeed, ye may say so," Pitt agreed.
And the extremes of love and hate were to-night so confused in the soul of Captain Blood that in their fusion they made up a monstrous passion.
The lady had been monstrously uncivil to the Captain.
"Hate him?
"I...
Lord Julian stood still.
"I see.
Nothing!
"First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are.
And also the Abbe Morio.
They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours."
"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted by this reception.
"Two such charming children.
That is how I explain it to myself.
"Oh, don't speak to me of Austria.
She is betraying us!
This famous Prussian neutrality is just a trap.
But how do you do?
Prince Vasili did not reply, though, with the quickness of memory and perception befitting a man of the world, he indicated by a movement of the head that he was considering this information.
"Lavater would have said I lack the bump of paternity."
"I can't help it," said the prince.
"And the fete at the English ambassador's?
"Don't joke; I mean to have a serious talk with you.
They say she is amazingly beautiful."
"I am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my children are the bane of my life.
"What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold, listless tone.
The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude.
We alone must avenge the blood of the just one....
It can't be helped!"
That is the one thing I have faith in!
He is an aide-de-camp of Kutuzov's and will be here tonight."
If you were not a father there would be nothing I could reproach you with," said Anna Pavlovna, looking up pensively.
Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness.
"Now about your family.
"What would you have me do?" he said at last.
"And why are children born to such men as you?
And really you appreciate them less than anyone, and so you don't deserve to have them."
"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.
Do you know I am dissatisfied with your younger son?
She is a relation of yours, Princess Mary Bolkonskaya."
He is one of the genuine emigres, the good ones.
But when truth conquered, theology established itself just as firmly on the new foundation.
By refuting these new laws the former view of history might have been retained; but without refuting them it would seem impossible to continue studying historic events as the results of man's free will.
To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical philosophy, it seemed that if they admitted that truth it would destroy faith in God, in the creation of the firmament, and in the miracle of Joshua the son of Nun.
On the one hand there is fear and regret for the loss of the whole edifice constructed through the ages, on the other is the passion for destruction.
The struggle between the old views and the new was long and stubbornly fought out in physical philosophy.
In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle provokes passion and stifles truth.
To the defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to Voltaire for example, it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed religion, and he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon against religion.
And yet the former history continues to be studied side by side with the laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology, and geology, which directly contradict its assumptions.
But even after the discovery of the law of Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still studied for a long time.
In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth, in history it is the independence of personality--free will.
From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the mere recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth that moves sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients.
So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of the law of inevitability today use that law as a weapon against religion, though the law of inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus in astronomy, far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation on which the institutions of state and church are erected.
Such has been, and continues to be, my experience.
Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book.
However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs.
And that sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model.
Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer.
Even a jury would have penetration enough to discover that.
So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand.
That is manifestly absurd.
For surely it is NOT clearness--it necessarily can't be clearness.
Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me.
Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out.
I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German.
That is from THE OLD MAMSELLE'S SECRET, by Mrs. Marlitt.
In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine.
Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:
If he had known what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also have known that it would break any collector to buy it.
Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that?
But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey.
Harris and I had been hard at work on our German during several weeks at that time, and although we had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great difficulty and annoyance, for three of our teachers had died in the mean time.
I spoke entirely in that language.
A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.
Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.
What need they?
Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring; Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string; Hence with denial vain and coy excuse: So may some gentle Muse With lucky words favour my destined urn: And as he passes, turn And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
66.
So strength first made a way; Then beauty flow'd, then wisdom, honour, pleasure: When almost all was out, God made a stay, Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure, Rest in the bottom lay.
J. SHIRLEY.
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? He who of those delights can judge, and spare To interpose them oft, is not unwise.
THE LAST CONQUEROR.
THE TOMBS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
Happy those early days, when I Shined in my Angel-infancy! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walk'd above A mile or two from my first Love,
Who envies none that chance doth raise Or vice; Who never understood How deepest wounds are given by praise; Nor rules of state, but rules of good:
69.
THE GIFTS OF GOD.
CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE.
That murmur, soon replies; God doth not need Either man's work, or His own gifts: who best Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best: His state
WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY.
73.
When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
B. JONSON
71.
70.
TO MR.
76.
H. VAUGHAN.
67.
G. HERBERT.
THE NOBLE NATURE.
Is kingly; thousands at His bidding speed And post o'er land and ocean without rest:-- They also serve who only stand and wait.
THE RETREAT.
From the hard season gaining?
He can requite thee; for he knows the charms That call fame on such gentle acts as these. And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas, Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms.
LAWRENCE.
How happy is he born and taught That serveth not another's will; Whose armour is his honest thought And simple truth his utmost skill!
68.
J. MILTON.
Who God doth late and early pray More of His grace than gifts to lend; And entertains the harmless day With a well-chosen book or friend;
J. MILTON.
74.
Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness: Let him be rich and weary, that at least, If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss him to my breast.
Victorious men of earth, no more Proclaim how wide your empires are; Though you bind-in every shore And your triumphs reach as far As night and day, Yet you, proud monarchs, must obey And mingle with forgotten ashes, when Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.
ON HIS BLINDNESS.
DEATH THE LEVELLER.
J. SHIRLEY.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice
J. MILTON.
75.
The glories of our blood and state Are shadows, not substantial things; There is no armour against fate; Death lays his icy hand on kings: Sceptre and Crown Must tumble down, And in the dust be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
The air was vocal with a thousand songs; all was bright and clear, cheerful and golden.
A wild and beautiful event had happened since last he quitted those ancient walls.
He falls into a reverie; the passionate past is acted again before him; in his glittering eye and the rapid play of his features may be traced the tumult of his soul.
Nor was there indeed magic withal, in the sweet spell that now bound him, to preserve him, from this black invasion.
The world that surrounds him is not the world of working man: it is fairy land.
His resolution was taken in an instant.
"Two terrible failures!
"Touch it again," said the child.
"What! mind it?" cried Rosamond, almost indignantly.
Come, my child; I will help you all I can, for now I CAN help you."
"Did you never see me before, Rosamond?" she asked.
"How is it that you make them grow?"
"If I had not forgiven you, I would never have taken the trouble to punish you.
"Won't you give me a little flower, please, you beautiful child?"
They are nobody's when they are dead."
They get stronger and stronger.
"They may trample me under their feet if they like.
Rosamond looked at the flower.
"I love you for talking so of my Peggy.
"How could you love such an ugly, ill-tempered, rude, hateful little wretch?"
My clumsy body would hurt him," said Rosamond.
The trees were grand, and full of the loveliest birds, of all glowing gleaming and radiant colors, which, unlike the brilliant birds we know in our world, sang deliciously, every one according to his color.
"But you told me, a minute ago, not to touch them."
"Would you like to ride my pony?" repeated the child, with a heavenly smile in her eyes.
Flowers ought never to be plucked except to give away.
The princess was furious.
"You darling beauty!" cried Rosamond, sobbing.
"No; I have none."
"I am very glad there is such a you and such a pony, and that such a you has got such a pony," said Rosamond, still looking on the ground. "But I do wish the flowers would not die when I touch them.
"You must set out for your father's palace immediately," said the lady.
But the flower had been quicker than she: there it grew, fast fixed in the earth, and, she thought, looked at her roguishly. Something evil moved in her, and she plucked it.
"That is the only way to get rid of your weary, shadowy self, and find your strong, true self.
"Perhaps I could, now you ask me," answered the wise woman.
What is to be done?"
Then her mind collapsed to the thought--had the pony grown too?
But while she lay half-stunned, her eyes fell on a little flower just under them.
"But where is the wise woman?" asked Rosamond, looking all about.
"Did my pony hurt you?" she said.
"You are mocking me!" cried the princess.
"Yes, indeed, I did."
"And it was you all the time?" she cried in delight, and kneeled before her, burying her face in her garments.
"They can't be mine, if I'm not to touch them."
"I don't care," she said.
She turned to the wise woman and said:
"Here," said the lady.
Neither on the high trees, nor on the few shrubs that grew here and there amongst them, were there any blossoms; and in the grass that grew everywhere there was not a single flower to be seen.
Let me see."
"But you don't kill them."
What could it mean?
"But I can't rest till I try again."
"I wish you would let me throw one away."
"You don't mind it, then?" repeated the child.
The trees were not at all crowded, but their leaves were so thick, and their boughs spread so far, that it was only here and there a sunbeam could get straight through.
All the gentle creatures of a forest were there, but no creatures that killed, not even a weasel to kill the rabbits, or a beetle to eat the snails out of their striped shells.
All the time she never smiled, except with her eyes, which were as full as they could hold of the laughter of the spirit--a laughter which in this world is never heard, only sets the eyes alight with a liquid shining.
And as Rosamond looked, the child began, like the flower, to grow larger.
But to her amazement she found, instead of a flower thrown away to wither, one fast rooted and quite at home.
"I am so sorry!"
The flower trembled, but neither shrank nor withered.
Peggy!"
"Look at me," said the child.
"Oh, that's where the flowers come from!" said the princess to herself, the moment she saw them, hardly knowing what she meant.
A silvery flower, something like a snow-drop, grew just within her reach.
"Then you can't throw one away, if you haven't got one."
"Ah, well!" said Rosamond again to herself, "where all the birds and butterflies are living flowers, we can do without the other sort."
Rosamond was utterly enchanted, and stood gazing without word or movement until she could endure no more delight.
He is a good pony, though a little playful sometimes.
She led her once more into the great hall, and there showed her the picture of her father's capital, and his palace with the brazen gates.
Peggy!
The child slipped down and came and kneeled over her.
You do not know, you cannot yet think, how living and true they are.--Now you must go."
It was like a primrose trying to express doubt instead of confidence.
She glanced round. There was no pony, no grass, no flowers, no bright-birded forest--but the cottage of the wise woman--and before her, on the hearth of it, the goddess-child, the only thing unchanged.
She was in a forest, a place half wild, half tended.
What she might have done, or rather tried to do, had not Peggy's tail struck her down with such force that for a moment she could not rise, I cannot tell.
Try now--only do not pluck it.
She left it, and went to another; but it also was fast in the soil, and growing comfortably in the warm grass.
One after another she tried, until at length she was satisfied that it was the same with every flower the little girl threw from her lap.
"Yes, he hurt me," answered the princess, "but not more than I deserved, for I took liberties with him, and he did not like it."
It was withered already.
"I saw, through it all, what you were going to be," said the wise woman, kissing her.
don't!" cried the child.
"It always is me, all the time," said the wise woman, smiling.
It seemed to put her half in mind of something, and she felt as if shame were coming.
The princess understood, and a flush of shame rose to her forehead.
"I don't pull them; I throw them away.
Now, however, you will seek me.
It looked much further off now than when it seemed a picture, but the sun was not yet up, and she had the whole of a summer day before her.
If I had not loved you, do you think I would have carried you away in my cloak?"
"There is your home," she said.
"Go to it."
"And say, what do you think?
He told me how he did it, but the secret is too good to give away.
The poison apparently acts on the respiratory centres rather than directly on the heart.
I'm going to die!'
They all vomited just before they died."
I tried to get a Mexican to experiment on, but couldn't.
I believe he produced these gaudy effects with the lighted end of his cigar.
All these dogs seemed to die from inability to breathe.
So he manufactured five, all with faked labels on, showing that each species was taken at different altitudes.
I fired him, all right.
I squandered five dollars of my hard-earned wealth in sending for a bottle.
Through this he squirts the poison by the aid of the temporal muscle, which he contracts as he strikes.
By the aid of some forked sticks and bagging we succeeded in fastening the snake so that he could not move.
"My, how he carried on!
"Then I tried dogs.
"Baker proposed that we should see how much faith Miguel had in his own antidote.
"The boys begged him to apply his antidote, asking him what was the matter and why he appeared to be so frightened, but all the answer they could get was, 'Don't touch me.
He got weaker and weaker.
Another one lived several hours, and made a hard struggle.
Both were dressed for the occasion, and I tell you they were sights!
"Let the contest be fair and square on both sides," said Smith, the chairman of the Phoenix committee.
May the best man win!
"Our young man," wrote the Prescott leader, "is doing very well, and I hope great things from him.
He is nervous, of course, this being his first appearance in an affair of this kind.
Our population is made up a great deal, as you know, largely of miners and ranchers, and they are inclined to bet recklessly.
Most of the boys feel inclined to wager a little on the success of our representative, but he himself does not feel very confident of the result.
Some one who is a sure winner, and can punch the stuffing out of this amateur duck from Prescott.
There will be a party of at least one hundred of us go down with him, and I hope you will have front seats reserved for us.
DEAR SIR: I am glad to hear that there is considerable interest taken in the forthcoming match.
There was a great crowd packed into the ring of the Phoenix Athletic Association on the evening of the contest.
Upon my return I found quite a strong feeling in favor of having the young gunsmith represent us, but, after my conversation with you, could not for a moment countenance any such proceedings on our part."
Besides a buttonhole bouquet and high collar, he sported an eye-glass, and smoked a cigarette while in the presence of his opponent.
[Considerable applause.]
A man down to get up inside of ten seconds or be counted out. No hitting in the clinches.
"Let each club send its best man, who is strictly an amateur, of course, and a member of the club, in good standing, and let the best man win."
The men will fight with 3-oz. gloves, Marquis of Queensbury rules, three minutes to each round, with a minute's rest between.
There is a great interest taken here in the match, and I warn you our man is getting himself in the very best condition possible.
The Prescott drug clerk was still more gorgeous.
Several members of the committee hastened to interfere, and put a stop to all further danger of trouble by hurrying the principals off to their dressing-rooms to prepare for the contest.
Waving his hand towards the Prescott pugilist, he said:
Let's take something."
"What I want," said the letter, "is the best man you can get.
Things went along merrily, letters were exchanged between the chairman of the two committees reporting as to the progress of their representatives.
I was very nervous and could not help fearing that in the night I might walk in my sleep or roll to the mouth of the cave and tumble out.
It stood out in the sunlight bright and shining, even after the canyon had become quite dark.
"There was no use hoping for help from any one, for the place was rarely visited, and it might be weeks before any person would discover that I was there.
I had too big a job to get it."
The first thing I did when I got down was to run as fast as I could to the river and drink as much water as I dared, then I lay down in the water and enjoyed it.
It reached him safely, but while he was untying it I carelessly dropped the end of the string.
"Probably not," I answered.
The first thing I did was to take a stout piece of twine from my pocket and fasten the end of the ladder to a piece of rock.
"I was mighty anxious to explore the big caves, so off we went to the place, and I tell you the old ruin they call 'Montezuma's Castle' is a dandy, and don't you forget it.
"Antonio?"
"If, to call them yours, you must kill them, then they are not yours, and never, never can be yours.
"When you are ready to try again, we shall see."
"Go, then," said the wise woman.
It stared up in her face like the living thing it was, and she could not take her eyes off its face.
"I never saw any thing half so lovely."
I live them."
"Oh, you dear!" said the little girl.
Rosamond's bad temper soon gave way: the beauty and sweetness of the child had overcome it; and, anxious to make friends with her, she drew near, and said:
"I will try to remember," said the princess, holding her cloak, and looking up in her face.
"Don't!
And that me you could not have seen a little while ago.--But, my darling child," she went on, lifting her up and clasping her to her bosom, "you must not think, because you have seen me once, that therefore you are capable of seeing me at all times.
What a wretched, coarse, ill-bred creature I must be!
"Touch it again," said the child.
Rosamond gazed motionless.
"I am very tired of myself," said the princess.
"Dear princess!" said the little girl, "the flowers will not always wither at your touch.
"Have you got any in your lap?
As she spoke, she stroked the little girl's bare feet, which were by her, half buried in the soft moss, and as she ended she laid her cheek on them and kissed them.
I am tired and sick of myself--a creature at whose touch the flowers wither!"
Every time you feel you want me, that is a sign I am wanting you.
When they were all gone, she stood a moment, and then, in a kind of chanting cry, called, two or three times, "Peggy!
"My flowers cannot live in your hands."
"No, never," answered the princess.
How did you become so sweet?"
"I am not mocking you," said the child, looking her full in the face, with reproach in her large blue eyes.
Yet again she led her to the same door, and seemed to the princess to send her yet again alone into the room.
On came the winged pony.
Rosamond's love for animals broke into a perfect passion of delight at the vision.
"In my lap."
"Where do you get them?"
"My poor child!" she said.
No; there are many things in you yet that must be changed before that can be.
She had forgotten all her past life up to the time when she first saw the child: her beauty had made her forget, and yet she was now on the very borders of hating her.
"Couldn't you help me?" said Rosamond piteously.
And Rosamond, looking again, saw the wise woman, folded as usual in her long dark cloak.
And the more the harder!
The princess gave a sigh.
They were nowhere.
Touch it gently."
I am made horrid, and I shall be horrid, and I hate myself, and yet I can't help being myself!"
She watched then until she saw her throw one, and instantly bounded to the spot.
Rosamond stood gazing after him in miserable disappointment.
"I will not tell you exactly.
Neither could she get her eyes to leave the white face: its eyes fascinated and fixed hers; and there she lay leaning over the boat and staring at the death she had made.
Her little white rabbit came to meet her in a lumping canter as if his back were going to tumble over his head.
The moment she saw the consequences of her deed she was filled with horrible dismay.
But a voice crying, "Ally!
XII.
A princess is able to do what is right even should she unhappily be in a mood that would make another unable to do it.
Its mood will come upon you, and you will have to deal with it."
"Perhaps you will understand me better if I say it just comes to this, that you must NOT DO what is wrong, however much you are inclined to do it, and you must DO what is right, however much you are disinclined to do it."
She rose and took her by the hand.
"Need I say any thing?" said the wise woman, stroking her hair.
It may be a trial to some, but for me I am sure it is not worth mentioning.' And then, before you know, it will be upon you, and you will fail utterly and shamefully."
"The wise woman has done me so much good already!
The wise woman kissed her and stroked her hair, set her down by the fire, and gave her a bowl of bread and milk.
"Only don't let me be frightened."
"Is that something terrible?" asked the princess, turning white.
She tried hard to reach down to him through the water, but it was far deeper than it looked, and she could not.
One great danger is that perhaps you will think you are in it before it has really begun, and say to yourself, 'Oh! this is really nothing to me.
"I have yet to learn that it is my part to take orders from a servant," said the princess with temper and dignity.
"Nobody can be a real princess--do not imagine you have yet been any thing more than a mock one--until she is a princess over herself, that is, until, when she finds herself unwilling to do the thing that is right, she makes herself do it.
Nay, more; her might goes farther than she could send it, for if she act so, the evil mood will wither and die, and leave her loving and clean.--Do you understand me, dear Rosamond?"
She was in a beautiful garden, full of blossoming trees and the loveliest roses and lilies.
The next moment she removed it from her face, and Rosamond beheld--not her nurse, but the wise woman--standing on her own hearth, while she herself stood by the door leading from the cottage into the hall.
"I will be very, very careful," said the princess.
"I am not sure," said the princess, humbly.
"Your queen-mamma, princess, cannot see you now," said her nurse.
"The trial will be harder."
"You shall not be frightened, except it be your own doing.
The princess found herself in her old nursery.
Of these she opened one, pushed the princess gently in, and closed it behind her.
I do not think I shall fail this time."
"No, no," cried the princess.
The princess expected to find herself again in the nursery, but in the wise woman's house no one ever has the same trial twice.
"I beg your pardon, princess," returned her nurse, politely; "but it is my duty to tell you that your queen-mamma is at this moment engaged. She is alone with her most intimate friend, the Princess of the Frozen Regions."
"First trial a failure," said the wise woman quietly.
"Rosamond, if you would be a blessed creature instead of a mere wretch, you must submit to be tried."
Then he caught up the little boat-hook, and pushed away from the shore: there was a great white flower floating a few yards off, and that was the little fellow's goal. But, alas! no sooner had Rosamond caught sight of it, huge and glowing as a harvest moon, than she felt a great desire to have it herself.
Suddenly she saw before her, in the dusk of the thick wood, a group of some dozen wolves and hyenas, standing all together right in her way, with their green eyes fixed upon her staring.
"I am going, then, to put you in one of the mood-chambers of which I have many in the house.
They fled howling, as if she had struck them with fire.
It did not hurt her much, for he was a very little fellow, but it was wet and slimy.
Then the lady caught sight of the dead thing at the bottom of the water, and rushed in, and, plunging down, struggled and groped until she reached it.
She tumbled rather than rushed at him, seized him in her arms, tore him from his frightened grasp, and flung him into the water.
"I understand that," said the princess.
The morning after that night of howling winds was dull and blustery, with frequent gusts of rain.
What do I care for fashion?' cried the Wykehamist. 'Fashion means other people's whims and fancies.
A wet day will give us time to get up our charades, and for Blanche to thump at her waltzes.
'Brian used to come.'
They had been picnicking all the summer, and it was felt that the zest of novelty would be wanting to that form of entertainment; so it was decided in family counsel that a friendly dinner at home, with a little impromptu dancing, and perhaps a charade or two afterwards, would be an agreeable substitute for the usual outdoor feast.
'Not a little bit,' said Reginald.
'I only wish Dr. Rylance were not coming,' said Blanche, stopping to pant and wipe her crimson countenance, when her two baskets were nearly full. 'He'll impart his own peculiar starchiness to the whole business.'
It was only the tail of a storm which had been blowing furiously in Scotland and the north of England, and no one as yet knew the extent of its destructive force.
'How lucky we didn't go in for a picnic!' said Horatio, as the slanting drops lashed the windows at breakfast time.
'Poor fellow!' sighed Bessie, who was so sentimental that she could but suppose her favourite cousin a martyr to blighted love.
Travellers by sea must expect bad weather; it's an important factor in the sum of their risk, and their minds are prepared for the contingency; but when one has planned a picnic party on the downs a wet day throws out all one's calculations.'
Bessie's birthday had come round again--that date so fatal to Ida Palliser--and there was much cheerfulness at The Knoll in honour of the occasion.
He was rich; in every way his own master.
She was frank, straightforward, intelligent to a high degree, and with that eager thirst for knowledge which is generally accompanied by a profound humility.
There was no impediment to his happiness, provided always that Ida Palliser loved him; and he believed that she did love him.
There could be no other meaning.
More boxes of peaches and grapes had been sent over from Wimperfield in the absence of Sir Vernon and his brother, who were still in Scotland.
'Brian will be the hero of this evening's festivity, just as Brian Walford was of the last.
'Think of the poor creatures at sea!' murmured kind-hearted Mrs. Wendover, as a sharp gust shook the casement nearest to her.
He watched Ida narrowly during the first month of their acquaintance, expecting to find the serpent-trail somewhere; but no trace of the evil one had appeared.
People who are led by fashion have no ideas of their own.
He was content to wait for his opportunity.
'The reason Brian doesn't come to Kingthorpe is, that he has other fish to fry elsewhere. As if anybody would come to Kingthorpe who wasn't obliged!'
'Hang fashion!
His kindred were kindly, simple-minded people, who would give gracious welcome to any virtuous woman whom he might choose for his wife.
The slanderer's malice was obvious; but the slander might have some element of truth.
Not if I know it.'
Blanche undertook to play as many waltzes as might be required of her, and also took upon herself the arrangement and decoration of the dessert, which was to be something gorgeous.
'Say what you like, I believe Brian Walford was deeply in love with Ida, and that he has never been here since that time, because he can't bear to see her, knowing she doesn't care for him.'
AFTER A STORM COMES A CALM.
The rain came and went in fitful showers, the wind blustered a little, and then died away in sobs, while the young Wendovers spent their morning noisily and excitedly, in laborious industries of the most frivolous kind, the end and aim of which was to make a gorgeous display in the evening.
And now summer was waning, though it was summer still.
Brian, Mr. Jardine Dr. and Miss Rylance, Aunt Betsy, and Ida Palliser were to be the only guests; but these with the family made a good sized party.
Be sure you give us the Blue Danube.'
But there was no such setting of caps.
And now he had found that pearl above price, the one woman predestinate to be adored by him.
For a long time Ida treated Mr. Wendover of the Abbey with the perfect frankness of friendship.
'Yes, when he was young and verdant; and I daresay my father used to tip him.
Then, as his love grew, showing itself by every delicate and unobtrusive token, there came a change, and a subtle one, in her conduct; and the lover told himself with triumphant heart that he was beloved.
She found delight in all the simplest things, in rustic scenery, in hill and down and wood, in dogs and horses, and birds and flowers, music and books.
Before luncheon the wind was at rest, and the gardens were smiling in the sunlight under the hot blue sky of summer, and after luncheon the Wendover girls and boys were rushing all over the garden cutting flowers.
'The Blue Danube is out,' said Blanche, tossing up her pointed chin.
A girl who could be happy in such a life as Ida Palliser lived at Kingthorpe must be in a manner independent of fortune; her pleasures were not those that cost money.
He was no coxcomb, ready to believe every woman in love with him.
Bessie's anniversary was heralded somewhat inauspiciously by a tremendous gale which swept across the Hampshire Downs, after doing no small mischief in the Channel, and wrecking a good many fine old oaks and beeches in the New Forest.
He could see in her no base worship of wealth for its own sake, no craving for splendour or fashionable pleasures.
Fathers and mothers are sore clogs upon the fiery wheel of love.
This year the event was not to be signalised by a picnic.
'It may rain and blow as hard as it likes between now and six o'clock, for all we need care.
'That's skittles!' exclaimed the youthful sceptic, using a favourite expression of his father's to express incredulity.
'Out of fashion.'
If she be not fair to me, what the deuce care I how fair she be?
Don't you remember how nice he looked?' said Blanche, as they went back to the house loaded with roses, heliotrope, geranium, and ferns.
He was happily placed in life for a lover, since a lover should always be an orphan.
This sense of security had made him less eager to declare himself.
While Ida Palliser was thus planning her escape from that earthly paradise where she was dangerously happy, Brian Wendover was thinking of her and dreaming of her, and building the whole fabric of his life on a happy future to be shared with her, cherishing the sweet certainty that she loved him, and that he had only to say the word which was to unite them for ever.
He had been in somewise impressed by what Urania had told him about Ida.
Out of time?'
"No, no--distinctly no."
"No, monsieur."
The Judge, when these particulars had been given, looked over his shoulder towards the detective, but said nothing.
"For my nerves.
"I had friends in the car."
I certainly should not keep her."
"Here is the more detailed description of the lady's maid, and in writing.
Meanwhile, the Judge had continued his questioning.
I have a toothache.
She would not dare to leave me here like this, all alone."
"That is odd.
"I never saw him, the occupant of that compartment, except on that one occasion.
But we will pass on.
You asked for her, we sent for her, and--"
Give it to the station-master, and to the agents of police round about here.
We know, beyond all question, from the appearance of the body,--the corpse,--that there was a fight, an encounter.
The murdered man?"
Not in my berth?"
"A light sleeper would certainly be awakened.
He called Galipaud to him, saying sharply:
"You need not say.
"Alone?
"Nor see him?"
Can you form any idea?
"Very well, very well.
The trap was neatly contrived, but she was not deceived.
"And with you, what was her character?"
To fetch them, perhaps, to you in your trouble?"
"No, I cannot give it up.
Was that the only occasion on which you saw him?
"Ah! exactly so.
Most certainly she is not here."
"Ah!" said the Countess, quickly and in a troubled voice, yet she bore the gaze of the three officials without flinching.
If we was to put in another night this way we'd have to knock off for a week to let our hands get well—couldn't touch a case-knife with them sooner."
Said we'd got to post Jim first.
So he done it.
Can't you think of no way?"
We'll send you some things by them."
AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the lightning-rod, and shut ourselves up in the lean-to, and got out our pile of fox-fire, and went to work.
These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,--this would be mortal to civilization were it to last.
The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan.
Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon.
Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on.
There were three thousand five hundred of them.
All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor.
They formed a front a quarter of a league in extent.
It traversed the battle like a prodigy.
Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle?
Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained.
They listened to the rise of this flood of men.
Because of God.
They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent here and there.
Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an obstacle, to the guide Lacoste.
We answer No. Why?
Something parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.
Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm, mute, motionless.
A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses like the scales on the hydra.
The enormous squadrons were set in motion.
Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head.
Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions.
Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the nineteenth century.
The ill will of events had declared itself long before.
There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an earthquake.
It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest of the table-land.
It was a terrible moment.
The guide had answered No.
It was time that this vast man should fall.
The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group.
Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.
Other fatalities were destined to arise.
No.
When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.
They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses of beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long sabre-swords.
Because of Blucher?
Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,--these are formidable pleaders.
These narrations seemed to belong to another age.
Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a polyp.
We might almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that sign of a peasant's head.
CHAPTER IX--THE UNEXPECTED
This began the loss of the battle.
This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.
Because of Wellington?
It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and had but one soul.
Then a formidable spectacle was seen.
It was too cold.
When an Esquimaux sits down to dinner he is quite thin, and by the time he has finished, he is so corpulent you would hardly recognize him.
"It rather sickens me, and makes me loathe the sight of a seal.
"Is it for the oil or skin that they are mostly hunted?"
"I declare, Mr. Clawbonny, you make me feel hungry with talking so much about eating," exclaimed Bell.
"Well, there will be no difficulty then in producing an electric light, and that will cost nothing, and be far brighter."
AN EXCURSION TO THE NORTH OF VICTORIA BAY
"There is no doubt," replied Altamont, "of its utility; but how would you contrive to make it?"
They started very early in the morning, each armed with a double-barrelled gun and plenty of powder and shot, a hatchet, and a snow knife.
"Things are best as they are, then, Mr. Clawbonny."
"I mean to have an electric light."
But, stop, I do believe we are going to have the chance of a dinner off one, for I am much mistaken if that's not something alive lying on those lumps of ice yonder!"
Milk diet is their staple food, with eggs, and bread made of the bark of the birch-tree; a little salmon occasionally, but never meat; and still they are fine hardy fellows."
There is plenty of material.
His instinct can dispense with star and compass.
"No, seal oil would not give nearly sufficient light.
The bear had instantly caught sight of the supposed seal, for he gathered himself up, preparing to make a spring as the animal came nearer, apparently seeking to return to his native element, and unaware of the enemy's proximity.
The tinder was fetched, and held beneath the lens so as to catch the rays in full power.
"Well," said Hatteras, "we must just appease our hunger with the raw meat, and set off again as soon as we can, to try to discover the ship."
"This is a glad day for us," he said, "and we have no fear of wanting food all the rest of our journey.
Then he went into the hut again, and shook the blanket he had slept in all night, but his search was still unsuccessful.
He had gone a good way round, so as to come on the bear by surprise, and every movement was so perfect an imitation of a seal, that even the Doctor would have been deceived if he had not known it was Hatteras.
I am here, fortunately."
Hatteras never moved, but waited, knife in hand.
"Mr.
"Hurrah!
"Is it possible?" said Johnson.
The bear was still there, but moving restlessly about, as if he felt the approach of danger.
"Yes, only I should like fresh water ice, it is harder and more transparent than the other."
Bravo!" shouted Johnson and the Doctor, but Hatteras was as cool and unexcited as possible, and stood with folded arms gazing at his prostrate foe.
"It has always been in your keeping," said the Doctor.
"It is, indeed!" said Clawbonny.
Instead of the wide smooth plain of ice that had hitherto stretched before them, overturned icebergs and broken hummocks covered the horizon; while the frequent blocks of fresh-water ice showed that some coast was near.
"Well, Mr. Clawbonny, you are here to keep things straight anyhow, and that is a blessing."
"I hope Altamont will remember he owes his life to us?"
The exciting business of the morning had made Johnson neglect his accustomed duty of replenishing the stove.
"Less than four degrees!" repeated Altamont, with a sigh; "yes, my ship went further than any other has ever ventured."
"I fancy that is fresh water, from the dark look of it, and the green tinge."
"You know, Doctor," said Hatteras, as they returned to the hut, "the polar bears subsist almost entirely on seals.
"We want a lens; well, let us make one."
"Hang it!
"What are you dreaming about?" asked Hatteras.
The Doctor tried to blow the embers into a flame, but finding he could not even get a red spark, he went out to the sledge to fetch tinder, and get the steel from Johnson.
"An idea has just occurred to me."
"There it is to your hand, if I am not much mistaken," said Johnson, pointing to a hummock close by.
"Forward!
"With a piece of ice."
"Yes, but there is more chance of success than in trying any other plan, so I mean to risk it.
"We have not even an instrument, some glass that we might take the lens out of, and use like a burning glass."
"Yes," replied the Doctor, glancing uneasily at the two captains.
What a feast this meal was to the poor starving men may be imagined. The Doctor, however, counselled moderation in eating, and set the example himself.
"Yes!" replied Clawbonny, speaking to himself, absorbed in his own reflections.
He only said--
He felt in the other pockets, but it was not there.
"Heaven forfend! for it might involve the most serious consequences, Johnson."
"It is my turn now," said Johnson.
He began by chopping it into rough shape with the hatchet; then he operated upon it more carefully with his knife, making as smooth a surface as possible, and finished the polishing process with his fingers, rubbing away until he had obtained as transparent a lens as if it had been made of magnificent crystal.
In a few seconds it took fire, to Johnson's rapturous delight.
Still we must not forget we have further to go yet, and I think the sooner we start the better."
The sun was shining brilliantly enough for the Doctor's experiment.
"My lens does well enough at present; but it needs the sun, and there are plenty of days when he does not make his appearance here, within less than four degrees of the pole."
Bruin went to work with extreme prudence, though his eyes glared with greedy desire to clutch the coveted prey, for he had probably been fasting a month, if not two.
"Well, I have not got it now!" exclaimed Johnson, turning pale.
Do you think that would do?"
They'll lie in wait for them beside the crevasses for whole days, ready to strangle them the moment their heads appear above the surface.
"How?" asked Johnson.
"And you haven't it either, captain?"
"Never fear! but be sure you don't show yourselves till I fire."
CHAPTER V.
"But didn't Altamont say that he had been caught among the ice, and dragged there irresistibly?"
"Will it succeed?
"What?
The stove was soon roaring, and it was not many minutes before the savoury odour of broiled bear-steaks roused Bell from his torpor.
The Doctor could not say anything, for he would have done the same himself, so he followed Hatteras silently to the sledge, taking with him a couple of hatchets for his own and Johnson's use.
"An idea come into your head, Doctor," exclaimed Johnson; "then we are saved!"
THE SEAL AND THE BEAR.
'Morleena was a fine baby,' remarked Mr Kenwigs; as if this were rather an attack, by implication, upon the family.
'Why, ma'am,' said Mr Kenwigs, 'it's not exactly for me to say what they may be, or what they may not be.
Mr Lumbey shook his head with great solemnity, as though to imply that he supposed she must have been rather a dazzler.
He has no expectations, no property to come into.
'Ugh! you unnatural monster.'
'I've met him,' said the married lady, with a glance towards Dr Lumbey.
'And I have been,' added Nicholas, 'already in town for some days, without having had an opportunity of doing so.'
'Ah!
'Why, I do declare,' said Mr Kenwigs, standing opposite the door so as to get the earliest glimpse of the visitor, as he came upstairs, 'it's Mr Johnson!
And, therefore, Mr Kenwigs tied up the silent knocker on the premises in a white kid glove.
'Be silent yourself, you wretch.
Have you no regard for your baby?'
Good gracious, such a woman!'
'Take 'em away, take 'em away to the Fondling!'
'Oh yes, and what she's been a undergoing of, only this day,' cried a great many voices.
In the midst of this general hubbub, Dr Lumbey sat in the first-floor front, as before related, nursing the deposed baby, and talking to Mr Kenwigs.
'He desired me to give his kindest love,' said Nicholas.
'I'm not quite certain neither,' said Mr Kenwigs, arranging his shirt-collar, and walking slowly upstairs, 'whether, as it's a boy, I won't have it in the papers.'
The first floor, the second floor, and the third floor, had each a bell of its own.
Message from the country!' said Mr Kenwigs, ruminating; 'that's curious.
You'll have a fine family in time, sir.'
'It's the finest boy I ever saw in all my life,' said the doctor.
At this juncture, proclamation was made by another married lady, that the baby had begun to eat like anything; whereupon the two married ladies, already mentioned, rushed tumultuously into the bedroom to behold him in the act.
'The fact is,' resumed Nicholas, 'that before I left the country, where I have been for some time past, I undertook to deliver a message to you.'
'You are very good,' said Nicholas.
'The message relates to family matters,' said Nicholas, hesitating.
'It's very trying, and very hard to bear, we know,' said one of the married ladies; 'but think of your dear darling wife.'
'Pooh! pooh!' said the doctor.
'Does SHE look like the mother of six?'
'And a very pretty little fortune,' said the married lady.
That you should have met her in the country!
'It's no matter, sir,' said Mr Kenwigs. 'I dare say it's none the worse for keeping cold.
Mrs Kenwigs will be glad to hear from her.
'What I always say; what I always did say!
'But only see what it is now,' urged the married lady.
'Miss Petowker,' suggested Nicholas.
Showing how Mr Kenwigs underwent violent Agitation, and how Mrs Kenwigs was as well as could be expected
'They're not altogether dependent upon good fortune, neither,' said Mr Kenwigs, taking his second daughter on his knee; 'they have expectations.'
'Nonsense! not half enough.'
'Let him die!
'The message is from him,' said Nicholas.
'Silence, woman!' said Mr Kenwigs, fiercely.
'Ah! it won't bear thinking of, indeed,' cried the matrons generally; 'but it'll all come home to him, never fear.'
Mr Kenwigs looked a little curious too, but quite comfortable and unsuspecting.
'There's a good man, do.'
We want no babies here,' said Mr Kenwigs recklessly.
How do you find yourself, sir?'
It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.
Having executed this task with great nicety, Mr Kenwigs pulled the door to, after him, and just stepped across the road to try the effect from the opposite side of the street.
'His kindest love,' resumed Nicholas; 'and to say that he had no time to write, but that he was married to Miss Petowker.'
With these awful remarks, Mr Kenwigs sat himself down in a chair, and defied the nurse, who made the best of her way into the adjoining room, and returned with a stream of matrons: declaring that Mr Kenwigs had spoken blasphemy against his family, and must be raving mad.
'Well, Mr Kenwigs,' said Dr Lumbey, 'this makes six.
'There!' rejoined the married lady.
'Talk of fairies!' cried Mr Kenwigs 'I never see anybody so light to be alive, never.
Mr Kenwigs looked darkly upon the ladies, as if he would prefer its all coming home to HIM, as there was nothing to be got by it; but he said nothing, and resting his head upon his hand, subsided into a kind of doze.
But, Nicholas and the doctor--who had been passive at first, doubting very much whether Mr Kenwigs could be in earnest--interfering to explain the immediate cause of his condition, the indignation of the matrons was changed to pity, and they implored him, with much feeling, to go quietly to bed.
'I never saw such a baby.'
The position at Fairfax Court-House, though it would answer very well as a point from which to advance, was quite unfavorable for defense; and when I so remarked, the opinion seemed to be that to which the generals had previously arrived.
These nine regiments should form two brigades.
"Jefferson Davis."
To my surprise and disappointment, the effective strength was stated to be but little greater than when it fought the battle of the 21st of the preceding July.
"General J. E. Johnston.
About four months afterward a paper was prepared to make a record of the conversation; the fact was concealed from me, whereas, both for accuracy and frankness, it should have been submitted to me, even if there had been nothing due to our official relations.
"The movement of Banks will require your attention.
Letters from the camp, complaining of inequality and harshness in the treatment of the men, have already dulled the enthusiasm which filled our ranks with men who by birth, fortune, education, and social position were the equals of any officer in the land.
I will not dwell on the lost opportunity afforded along the line of northern Virginia, but must call your attention to the present condition of affairs and probable action of the enemy, if not driven from his purpose to advance on the Fredericksburg route....
It was generous and confiding to surrender entirely to the Confederacy the appointment of generals, and it is the more incumbent on me to carry out as well as may be the spirit of the volunteer system."
Brigadier-General Clark was sent to remove a growing dissatisfaction, but, though the State had nine regiments there, he (Clark) was put in command of a post and depot of supplies.
Mississippi troops were scattered as if the State were unknown.
Many of the privates are men of high social position, of scholarship and fortune.
Your remark indicates a different opinion....
The voice of Henry called to her from the ground; the spirits of Washington and Jefferson moved among her people.
About the 1st of October, at the request of General Johnston, I went to his headquarters, at Fairfax Court-House, for the purpose of conference.
For this, among other reasons, I will mention but one: the commission of a brigadier expires upon the breaking up of his brigade (see the law for their appointment).
On several occasions these were called out to resist an attack.
Though these unjust criticisms weakened the power of the Government to meet its present and provide for its future necessities, I bore them in silence, lest to vindicate myself should injure the public service by turning the public censure to the generals on whom the hopes of the country rested.
The spirit of our military law is manifested in the fact that the State organization was limited to the regiment.
The capital of the State and of the Confederacy, Richmond, was the objective point, and on this the march of three columns concentrated.
I will now proceed to notice the allegation that I was responsible for inaction by the Army of the Potomac, in the latter part of 1861 and in the early part of 1862.
That motive no longer exists; and, to justify the faith of those who, without a defense continued to uphold my hands, I propose to set forth the facts by correspondence and otherwise.
We never have had anything near to twenty thousand men, and have now but little over one fourth of that number....
It has been shown that the Southern States, by their representatives in the two Houses of Congress, consistently endeavored even to the last day, when they were by their constituents permitted to remain in the halls of Federal legislation, to maintain the Constitution, and preserve the Union which the States had by their independent action ordained and established.
In the mean time, frequent complaints came to me from the army, of unjust discrimination, the law being executed in regard to the troops of some States but not of others, and of serious discontent arising therefrom.
The experience of war soon taught our people the absurdity of such ideas, and before its close probably none would have uttered them.
To assign generals to command the troops of their own State.
They will be stimulated to extraordinary effort when so organized, in that the fame of their State will be in their keeping, and that each will feel that his immediate commander will desire to exalt rather than diminish his services.
They were combined into brigades and divisions as pressing exigencies required.
Naturally there followed another rumor, that the inaction of the victorious army, to which reenforcements continued to be sent, was due to the policy of the President; and he also was held responsible, and with more apparent justice, for the failure to organize the troops of the several States, as the law contemplated, into brigades and divisions composed of the soldiers of each.
From the beginning to the close of the war, we mainly relied for the defense of the capital on its aged citizens, boys too young for service, and the civil employees of the executive departments.
When they pleaded for peace, the United States Government deceptively delayed to answer, while making ready for war.
My correspondence of anterior date might have shown that I was fully aware of it, and my suggestions in the interview certainly did not look as if it was necessary to impress me with the advantage of action.
I have made and am making inquiries as to the practicability of getting a corps of negroes for laborers to aid in the construction of an intrenched line in rear of your present position.
"... General Lee has gone to western Virginia, and I hope may be able to strike a decisive blow in that quarter, or, failing in that, will be able to organize and post our troops so as to check the enemy, after which he will return to this place.
If a large force should be landed on the Potomac below General Holmes, with the view to turn or to attack him, the value of the position between Dumfries and Fredericksburg will be so great that I wish you to give to that line your personal inspection.
To my inquiry as to what force would be required for the contemplated advance into Maryland, the lowest estimate made by any of them was about twice the number there present for duty.
Those arms he expected to receive, barring the dangers of the sea, and of the enemy, which obstacles alone prevented the "positive assurance that they would be received at all."
"General J. E. Johnston:
Your attention has been heretofore called to the law in relation to the organization of brigades and divisions--orders were long since given to bring the practice and the law into conformity.
Above that, all was subject to the discretion of the Confederate authorities, save the pregnant intimation in relation to the distribution of generals among the several States.
It has been shown that she was threatened from the east, from the north, and from the west.
Recently reports have been asked for from the commanders of separate armies as to the composition of their respective brigades and divisions.
I have not overlooked the objections to each, but the advantages are believed to outweigh the disadvantages of that arrangement.
Louisiana had regiments enough to form a brigade, but no brigadier in either corps; all of the regiments were sent to that corps commanded by a Louisiana general. Georgia has regiments now organized into two brigades; she has on duty with that army two brigadiers, but one of them serves with other troops.
Therefore I break the chain of events to insert here some remarks in regard to it.
At the end of it all the examiner put on his hat, and called the president, Mr. William R. Longley, into the private office.
That leaves our cash quite short at present.
"What would you have done if they'd socked it to you?" was the answer Longley made.
He was doomed to become a leading citizen.
It goes down on the narrow-gauge to-night.
"I'll try to get that money for you to-night--I mean to-morrow, Bill."
"Well, I suppose it means be jumped on with both of Uncle Sam's feet."
It was near the edge of the little town, and few citizens were in the neighbourhood at that hour. Merwin wore two six-shooters in a belt, and a slouch hat.
"I'll try to raise the money for you on time," said Merwin, interested in his plaiting.
They were at the door of Merwin's house.
And then he offered a tiny loophole of escape.
He can call the blood out of my veins and it'll come.
Let's go back, Tom."
The cattleman was caught in a stampede of dollars.
"Any brands in the round-up you didn't like the looks of?"
I will pass through Chaparosa on my way back.
He looked at the chaparral banker through his double-magnifying glasses in amazement.
"You see," said Longley, easily explaining the thing away, "Tom heard of 2000 head of two-year-olds down near Rocky Ford on the Rio Grande that could be had for $8 a head.
With a gun in each hand Merwin raised himself from behind a clump of chaparral and started for the engine.
You know I know it's all right, but the thing /is/ against the banking laws.
Then came the boom in cattle, and Fortune, stepping gingerly among the cactus thorns, came and emptied her cornucopia at the doorstep of the ranch.
"I'll bet--"
Something like half a million dollars he had, with an income steadily increasing.
So, out of the chaparral came Long Bill Longley from the Bar Circle Branch on the Frio--a wife-driven man--to taste the urban joys of success.
"All right, Tom," said Longley quietly.
This examiner, Mr. J. Edgar Todd, proved to be a thorough one.
Time hung heavily on his hands.
But it was a very sober Paul who came back from the shore in the twilight.
"The Twin Sailors and the Golden Lady never came at all," he said.
But give me old P.E.
Paul was thirteen now and very tall for his years.
"I," cried the steward with a strange expression.
"His excellency did not charge me to purchase this house.
"These are but indifferent marbles in this ante-chamber," said Monte Cristo.
The carriage stopped at the left side of the portico, two men presented themselves at the carriage-window; the one was Ali, who, smiling with an expression of the most sincere joy, seemed amply repaid by a mere look from Monte Cristo.
"Yes, count."
He was a simple-looking lawyer's clerk, elevated to the extraordinary dignity of a provincial scrivener.
"Good; what o'clock is it?"
"Your excellency, it is done already.
"Monsieur Bertuccio," said the count, "did you never tell me that you had travelled in France?"
"Yes, count," returned the notary.
"Well, take your hat and gloves," returned Monte Cristo.
"Well, then, it is but fair that you should be paid for your loss of time and trouble," said the count; and he made a gesture of polite dismissal.
"Very well; and where is this house that I purchase?" asked the count carelessly, addressing himself half to Bertuccio, half to the notary. The steward made a gesture that signified, "I do not know." The notary looked at the count with astonishment.
As the steward had said, the notary awaited him in the small salon.
"You know the environs of Paris, then?"
The other bowed respectfully, and offered his arm to assist the count in descending.
"And your fee?"
The notary left the room backwards, and bowing down to the ground; it was the first time he had ever met a similar client.
"And the cards I ordered to be engraved as soon as you knew the number of the house?"
"The count does not know?"
"See this gentleman out," said the count to Bertuccio.
"It is more--it is magnificent."
"Your excellency's carriage is at the door," said he.
I have arrived from Cadiz this morning.
"In some parts of France--yes, excellency."
If his excellency will recollect--if he will think"--
"Am I to accompany you, your excellency?" cried Bertuccio.
"And you are quite right," said the notary, who feared to lose his fee. "It is a charming place, well supplied with spring-water and fine trees; a comfortable habitation, although abandoned for a long time, without reckoning the furniture, which, although old, is yet valuable, now that old things are so much sought after.
"Here it is."
"No, excellency, no," returned the steward, with a sort of nervous trembling, which Monte Cristo, a connoisseur in all emotions, rightly attributed to great disquietude.
"But," observed the honest notary, "the count is, I think, mistaken; it is only fifty thousand francs, everything included."
"Very well;" and Monte Cristo made a sign with his hand to the notary, which said, "I have no further need of you; you may go."
"You are the notary empowered to sell the country house that I wish to purchase, monsieur?" asked Monte Cristo.
"Have you brought it?"
"I trust all this will soon be taken away." Bertuccio bowed.
"Well, what is there surprising in that?
"Is the deed of sale ready?"
I read the advertisement in one of the papers, and was tempted by the false title, 'a country house.'"
"And now," demanded the count, "are all the forms complied with?"
"How should I know?
I have never before been at Paris, and it is the first time I have ever even set my foot in France."
Chapter 42.
And the steward followed the notary out of the room.
"It is unfortunate," returned he, "that you have never visited the environs, for I wish to see my new property this evening, and had you gone with me, you could have given me some useful information."
Monsieur Bertuccio.
"What!" said he, "does not the count know where the house he purchases is situated?"
"Have you the keys?"
However, in an hour I shall know all.
"To be sure," returned Monte Cristo; "it is very convenient, then?"
"So near as that?" said the Count; "but that is not in the country.
Meanwhile the count had arrived at his house; it had taken him six minutes to perform the distance, but these six minutes were sufficient to induce twenty young men who knew the price of the equipage they had been unable to purchase themselves, to put their horses in a gallop in order to see the rich foreigner who could afford to give 20,000 francs apiece for his horses.
Scarcely was the count alone, when he drew from his pocket a book closed with a lock, and opened it with a key which he wore round his neck, and which never left him.
"Yes, certainly."
"Oh, no," returned Monte Cristo negligently; "since I have this, I will keep it."
I suppose the count has the tastes of the day?"
Bertuccio!" cried he, striking a light hammer with a pliant handle on a small gong. "Bertuccio!" The steward appeared at the door.
"Is included in this sum."
As a baby she had always been exemplary, eating heartily and sleeping soundly.
I will not hear about Julia!" for she was always held up as a pattern of excellence.
THE PINK OF PERFECTION
It was well meant, of course, but probably the angels who had the matter in charge were new, young, inexperienced angels, with vague ideas of human nature and inexact knowledge of God's intentions; because a child that has no capability of doing the wrong thing will hardly be able to manage a right one; not one of the big sort, anyway.
That was the only trouble with Allan Carey's little daughter Julia, aged thirteen; she was, and always had been, the pink of perfection.
She had smooth fair hair, pale blue eyes, thin lips, and a somewhat too plump shape for her years.
She was always tidy and wore her clothes well, laying enormous stress upon their material and style, this trait in her character having been added under the fostering influence of the wealthy and fashionable Gladys Ferguson.
If Nancy had a new dress at Christmas, Kathleen had a new hat in the spring.
We can't set the table till these curses are removed.
Kathleen, open the linen trunk while we're gone.
"Still, he's a likable, agreeable sort of boy."
Gilbert! Kathleen!
Suddenly they heard their names called in a tragic whisper!
That's right!--jump, you little pint o' cider!" Bill said, holding out his arms to Peter.
"You see he's in two pieces?"
It was a very early season, the roads were free from mud, the trees were budding, and the young grass showed green on all the sunny slopes.
Nancy!
"I never heard of anything so kind and neighborly!" cried Mrs. Carey gratefully.
When you've got the linen out, take a marble urn in each hand and trail them along to where we are.
We little thought we should find such friends here, did we?"
Gilbert, open the box of eatables, please; and, Nancy, unlock the trunk that has the bed linen in it.
"Yes, what?"
"I thought it gobbled and snuffled a good deal when we last met!"
"Why, Gilly dear, I shall want your advice every hour!
Peter-bird!"
He and Colonel Wheeler were speedily lifting things from the carryall, while the Careys walked up the pathway together, thrilling with the excitement of the moment.
"Come along, you evil, uncanny thing!" she said.
"Hide the body in the corner, Gilly," said Nancy; "and say, Gilly--"
I guess there won't be no supper here for you to-night."
Perfect and entire, without a flaw, they stood there, confronting Nancy.
They stood rooted to the floor, gazing at the Curse of the House of Carey as if their eyes must deceive them.
From this point on, the flitting went easily and smoothly enough, and the transportation of the Carey family itself to Greentown, on a mild budding day in April, was nothing compared to the heavy labor that had preceded it.
There was a crash!
Close the barn door carefully behind you!--Am I understood?"
THE SERVICE ON THE THRESHOLD
She took the last step upward, and standing in the doorway, trembling, said softly as she turned the key, "Come home, children!
Peter, carrying many small things too valuable to trust to others, jumped, as suggested, and gave his new friend an unexpected shower of bumps from hard substances concealed about his person.
No human being, however self-contained, could have withstood the shock of that surprise; coming as it did so swiftly, so unexpectedly, and with such awful inappropriateness.
He hoped for trade, and he was a good sort anyway.
Let mother step over the sill first and call us into the Yellow House!
It was more beautiful even than they had remembered it; and more commodious, and more delightfully situated.
And though no wonder you're fond of Fred, who is so jolly and such good company, you must have noticed how selfish he is!"
He had accepted an invitation to visit a school friend at Easter, saying to his mother magisterially: "I didn't suppose you'd want me round the house when you were getting things to rights; men are always in the way; so I told Fred Bascom I'd go home with him."
You are so wonderful with tools that you'll be worth all the rest of us put together!"
They found the stairs to the barn chamber, and lifted You Dirty Boy up step by step with slow, painful effort.
"It is like them to be the first to greet us!" exclaimed Mrs. Carey, with an attempt at a smile, but there was not a sound from Kathleen or Nancy.
"Oh, well, if you need me so much as that I'll go along, of course," said Gilbert, "but Fred said his mother and sisters always did this kind of thing by themselves."
Quick!
"Yes."
Is it you who keeps the village store?"
She's brought Julia!
"That's me!" said Bill.
Nancy breathed hard, flushed, and caught her mother's hand.
"I thought we should have to go somewhere else to sleep.
"Home with Fred!
Nancy's and Kitty's arms encircled their mother's waist.
They flocked in, all their laughter hushed by the new tone in her voice.
Did you drop anything?
I should not like to offend her or hurt her feelings, but I think we'll keep You Dirty Boy and the mantel ornaments in the attic for the present, or the barn chamber.
What do you say?"
Colonel Wheeler and Mr. Harmon had departed, so a shout of agreement went up from the young Careys.
Nancy approached You Dirty Boy with a bloodthirsty glare in her eye.
And who will know about the planting,--for we are only 'women folks'; and who will do all the hammering and carpenter work?
Nancy and Gilbert confronted each other.
Bill Harmon stood in the front doorway, smiling.
Little did he know, as he carelessly stood there at the wagon wheel, that he was destined to bestow upon that small boy offerings from his stock for years to come.
There, on the centre of the table stood You Dirty Boy rearing his crested head in triumph, and round him like the gate posts of a mausoleum stood the four black and white marble funeral urns.
"No; and I don't remember at all what I saw in him the last five of them, for I found out everything needful the first time he came to visit us!" returned Mrs. Carey quietly.
Gilbert, don't, dear!
Gilbert with sudden instinct took off his hat, and Peter, looking at his elder brother wonderingly, did the same.
"You are, Gilly! understood, and gloried in, and reverenced.
They all followed him as he threw open the door, Nancy well in the front, as I fear was generally the case.
You can track us by a line of my tears!"
"'By themselves,' in Fred's family," remarked Mrs. Carey, "means a butler, footman, and plenty of money for help of every sort.
We have an oil stove, tea and coffee, tinned meats, bread and fruit; what we need most is butter, eggs, milk, and flour.
Now they crossed the river below the station and drove through East Beulah, over a road unknown to any of them but Gilbert, who was the hero and instructor of the party.
The dazzling smile with which Peter greeted this supposed tribute converted Bill Harmon at once into a victim and slave.
When the Careys had first seen their future home they had entered the village from the west, the Yellow House being the last one on the elm-shaded street, and quite on the outskirts of Beulah itself.
On the fifteenth day of the eleventh month of the child's third year, be the child boy or girl, its hair is allowed to grow. (Up to this time the whole head has been shaven: now three patches are allowed to grow, one on each side and one at the back of the head.) On this occasion also a sponsor is selected.
In modern times the child is dressed up in beautiful clothes; but to put a cap on its head, thinking to make much of it, when, on the contrary, it is hurtful to the child, should be avoided.
It is also customary to beg some matron, who has herself had an easy confinement, for the girdle which she wore during her pregnancy; and this lady is called the girdle-mother.
But a man may rob another of his life, or a lady of her honor, and shall pay no penalty!
'I thought you had come from the Princess.
I take my child, run to the throne, and on my knees ask for justice, and the King refuses me.
'Mr. Esmond will find other--other friends.
I always hated that fellow Mohun.
It may be, in years hence, when--when our knees and our tears and our contrition have changed our sinful hearts, sir, and wrought our pardon, we may meet again--but not now.
He brought misery into my house.
I would wager 'twas a woman."
"I would as lief," he said, "have pleaded guilty to the murder, and have suffered for it like any other felon, as have to endure the torture to which my mistress subjects me."
My lord might have been here but for that; my home might be happy; my poor boy have a father.
"'Are you come from HIM?' asked the lady (so Mr. Steele went on) rising up with a great severity and stateliness.
But these young gentlemen went off to the garden; I could see them from the window tilting at each other with poles in a mimic tournament (grief touches the young but lightly, and I remember that I beat a drum at the coffin of my own father).
That day, my Lord--my Lord Murderer--(I will never name him)--was let loose, a woman was executed at Tyburn for stealing in a shop.
After what has passed, I could not bear to see him.
Our rooms were the three in the gate over Newgate--on the second story looking up Newgate Street towards Cheapside and Paul's Church.
"'Do I blame him to you, sir?' asked the widow.
Dick came up and kissed Esmond on both cheeks, imparting a strong perfume of burnt sack along with his caress to the young man.
"Here the fair Beatrix entered from the river, with her cheeks flushing with health, and looking only the more lovely and fresh for the mourning habiliments which she wore.
It was what you gentlemen call gallantry came into my home, and drove my husband on to the cruel sword that killed him.
You should not speak the word to a Christian woman, sir, a poor widowed mother of orphans, whose home was happy until the world came into it--the wicked godless world, that takes the blood of the innocent, and lets the guilty go free.'
I protest I should have known thee anywhere.
"'Twas a quarrel about play--on my word, about play," Harry said.
It was the softest hand that struck him, the gentlest and most compassionate nature that persecuted him.
I think I never saw such a beautiful violet as that of her eyes, Harry.
"As the afflicted lady spoke in this strain, sir," Mr. Steele continued, "it seemed as if indignation moved her, even more than grief. 'Compensation!' she went on passionately, her cheeks and eyes kindling; 'what compensation does your world give the widow for her husband, and the children for the murderer of their father?
"And I think I spoke well, my poor boy," says Mr. Steele; "for who would not speak well in such a cause, and before so beautiful a judge?
CHAPTER II.
"'Beatrix, this is Mr. Steele, gentleman-usher to the Prince's Highness. When does your new comedy appear, Mr. Steele?' I hope thou wilt be out of prison for the first night, Harry."
Whilst I live in it, after the horrid horrid deed which has passed, Castlewood must never be a home to him--never.
Conscience! what conscience has he, who can enter the house of a friend, whisper falsehood and insult to a woman that never harmed him, and stab the kind heart that trusted him?
I saw Mr. Esmond in his prison, and bade him farewell.
I COME TO THE END OF MY CAPTIVITY, BUT NOT OF MY TROUBLE.
The wretch who did the deed has not even a punishment.
This was at some little town, I forget what, where we happened to change horses near midnight.
Those poor women again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of weariness, to be returning from labor--do you mean to say that they are washerwomen and char-women?
They cannot deny--they do not deny--that for this night they are our sisters: gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate servant, for twelve hours to come--we on the outside have the honor to be their brothers.
As regarded the enemy, this 23d Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three hundred and fifty strong, paralyzed a French column, six thousand strong, then ascending the hill, and fixed the gaze of the whole French army.
For this night, wherefore should she not sleep in peace?
The victory has healed him, and says--Be thou whole!
Had I the heart to break up her dreams?
For the very few words that I had time for speaking, I governed myself accordingly.
I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay mangled together.
On the London side of Barnet, to which we draw near within a few minutes after nine, observe that private carriage which is approaching us.
No.
Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the northern suburbs, we begin to enter upon our natural pace of ten miles an hour.
Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken; they are nothing of the kind.
In what regiment?
To see the paper, however, at all, interpreted as it was by our ensigns of triumph, explained everything; and, if the guard were right in thinking the lady to have received it with a gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she had suffered some deep personal affliction in connection with this Spanish war.
The flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) upon the heads of our horses; the fine effect of such a showery and ghostly illumination falling upon flowers and glittering laurels, whilst all around the massy darkness seemed to invest us with walls of impenetrable blackness, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting.
As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted.
This sublime regiment, which an Englishman should never mention without raising his hat to their memory, had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military annals.
That same night, and hardly three hours later, occurred the reverse case.
In the broad light of the summer evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at the point of setting, we are seen from every story of every house.
I told her the main outline of the battle.
What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated.
I assure you they stand in a higher rank; for this one night they feel themselves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer to no humbler title.
The sight of my newspaper it was that had drawn her attention upon myself.
I said to myself, to-morrow, or the next day, she will hear the worst.
But, if I told her not of the bloody price that had been paid, there was no reason for suppressing the contributions from her son's regiment to the service and glory of the day.
He was a trooper in the 23d Dragoons.
Oh! yes: her only son was there.
The weather being so warm, the glasses are all down; and one may read, as on the stage of a theatre, everything that goes on within the carriage.
By the sudden start and raising of the hands, on first discovering our laurelled equipage--by the sudden movement and appeal to the elder lady from both of them--and by the heightened color on their animated countenances, we can almost hear them saying--"See, see!
I showed her not the funeral banners under which the noble regiment was sleeping.
Three miles beyond Barnet, we see approaching us another private carriage, nearly repeating the circumstances of the former case.
Look at their laurels.
But I told her how these dear children of England, privates and officers, had leaped their horses over all obstacles as gaily as hunters to the morning's chase.
My heart sank within me as she made that answer.
The ladies move to us, in return, with a winning graciousness of gesture: all smile on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand, and that nothing short of a grand national sympathy could so instantaneously prompt.
What lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these ingenuous girls!
"Jimmy carry um all 'long right way; put um on Jimmy's back!" cried my black companion; and this seeming to be no bad way of carrying the wounded man in such a time of emergency, Jimmy stooped down, exasperating me the while by grinning, as if it was good fun, till the sufferer from our mistake was placed upon his back, when he exclaimed:
"My dear boy," he cried, with his voice trembling, "what I have suffered on your account!
"What did he want to look like a savage for?" grumbled Jack.
The doctor motioned us to keep away, and we all went to the mouth of the cave, to sit down and talk over the night's adventure, the conversation changing at times to a discussion of our friend's mental affection.
At the same time I tried to find where Jack Penny was hiding, but he was out of sight.
"No!" I exclaimed, delighted at this turn in our affairs.
"This is very unfortunate!
Clear de bush!"
"We have not so many friends that we could afford to kill them."
"What shall I do?" I said to myself as I realised in a small way what must be the feelings of a general who finds that the battle is going against him.
I'm always doing something.
"I must call to Jack Penny."
"Oh, you meant what you did for the best!" said the doctor, laying his hand on Jack Penny's shoulder.
"Jimmy carry lot o' men like that way!"
Hist, he is coming to!"
"I'm afraid not," I said hastily.
To my astonishment he went on talking quite calmly, and without any of the dazed look and the strange habit of forgetting his own tongue to continue in that of the people among whom he had been a prisoner for so long.
What! close here?"
"Yes; and one of them was approaching it just now when Jack Penny shot him down."
"Here, take it away!" said Jack Penny bitterly.
"My dear boy," he cried, "I was afraid that you would think this of me. But there, thank Heaven you are safe! and though we have not rescued your father we know enough to make success certain."
"Help us!
"Lot much heavy-heavy!
By degrees his eyelids dropped, were raised again, and then fell, and he seemed to glide into a heavy sleep.
"No!"
"I thought he was a savage coming to kill us.
"Who was going to know that any one dressed up--no, I mean dressed down--like that was an Englishman?"
I had taken his hand to lead him to the clump of bushes where the poor wretch lay, and on parting the boughs and twigs we both started back in horror.
"A bullet wound--not a dangerous one at all."
I say, you don't think I ran away and deserted you?"
But already he was busy, feeling the folly of wasting words, and down upon his knees, to place the head of our friend, the prisoner of the savages, in a more comfortable position before beginning to examine him for his wound.
"The shock of the wound has affected his head beneficially, it seems," the doctor said at last.
"Poor fellow; yes!" he said softly, and in so kindly a way that I crept closer and took his hand.
"My boy, what have you done?" cried the doctor, as I stood speechless there by his side.
"I think he will do now. Two inches lower, Master Penny, and he would have been a dead man."
We were crouching close, but the wounded man was moaning, and his companions might at any moment hear him and then discovery must follow; while if, on the other hand, we did not resist, all hope of rescuing my poor father would be gone.
We waited for some minutes crouched there among the bushes listening to the coming of those who forced their way through the trees, while moment by moment the morning light grew clearer, the small birds twittered, and the parrots screamed.
We hastily drew the boughs aside, and Jimmy steadily descended the steep slope, entered the rivulet, crossed, and then stopped for a moment beneath the overhanging boughs before climbing to the cabin.
I thought you were a prisoner."
"There, keep your piece, Penny; we may want its help.
yes, of course you can!
We laid the sufferer on one of the beds of twigs that the savages had made for us, and here the doctor set himself to work to more securely bandage his patient's shoulder; Jack Penny looking on, resting upon his gun, and wearing a countenance full of misery.
I exchanged glances with the doctor, who signed to me to be silent.
The sounds came nearer, and it was now so light that as we watched we could see the bushes moving, and it seemed to me that more of this horrible bloodshed must ensue.
Then, seizing the boughs, he balanced the wounded man carefully, and drew himself steadily up step by step, exhibiting wonderful strength of muscle, till he had climbed to the entrance of the cave, where he bent down and crawled in on hands and knees, waiting till his burden was removed from his back, and then getting up once more to look round smiling.
"Whether it will last I cannot say."
Where?
Twice two sheep heavy.
You shall help us to get Mr Carstairs away!"
"Jimmy helped me to escape.
"Am I much hurt?" he said, in a low calm voice.
"I won't fire it off again."
"It was an unfortunate mistake, Penny; you must be more careful if you mean to handle a gun."
"I was very nearly making the same mistake," I said, out of compassion for Jack Penny--he seemed so much distressed.
"Is Carstairs there?" cried the familiar voice of the doctor, and as with beating heart I sprang up, he came staggering wearily towards me through the clinging bushes.
"It was a very hard one--very hard!" the wounded man continued, and then he stopped short, looking straight before him at the forest, seen through the opening of the cave.
Jimmy! help me carry him to the cave."
"Then I'm glad you did not fire!" he said.
"There!" said the doctor when he had finished.
I think I heard you tell my father your name was Harry Blunt."
There is no occasion for fear.
Then long detours, that would have been difficult through the thick bush in daylight, but at night were almost impossible, had to be made.
Ronald, with Kreta and two of his men, now crept down to the very edge of the bushes at a spot where they could command a view of the entrance to the hut.
Ronald shot down two men who sprang at the horse's bridle, and he heard Mary Armstrong's pistol on the other side.
I will get off in a moment, Mary; the horse has an assegai in his quarters, and I must get it out."
"I flatter myself that my get up is very good," Ronald laughed.
"Have you heard from my father?
A hand had grasped each tightly by the throat, another hand seized the hair, and, with a sharp jerk, pulled the head on one side, breaking the neck in a moment--a common mode among the Kaffirs of putting any one to death.
"It will be getting light soon.
"I have had some difficulty in keeping up the colour.
They had been obliged to make many detours to avoid kraals, and to surmount the precipices that often barred their way.
But I would rather, if you don't mind, that you should call me by my own name now we are together.
Your ride four, five minutes."
"My feet are aching dreadfully.
The Fingoes were evidently of the same opinion, for as they approached it Kreta stopped to speak to Ronald.
"It is time we were going."
"He is hurt, Miss Armstrong, but I have every hope that he will recover. Now you must be strong, for we must be miles from here before morning. Can you walk?"
Press it down a little, and put some more in.
After going through what we have we may think ourselves well off indeed that we have escaped with such a scratch as this between us."
"I think I can sit a horse now," Ronald said, trying to rise.
"It is only a flesh wound, Miss Armstrong.
"That would be refreshing," the girl said.
Safest plan for us to go through first, not go along paths, but through bush; then for you to gallop straight through; even if they close to path, you get past before they time to stop you.
They were not out of danger yet, for parties of Kaffirs might be met with at any time until they arrived within musket shot of King Williamstown.
It was not the pain that stopped me, but simply because I didn't feel as if I could lift my foot from the ground.
"It seems to have been an awful dream.
"I think," Ronald said to her, "that if you were to bathe your face and hands it would refresh you.
Johnson, hand your horse over to Miss Armstrong, and do you, Williams, ride over with her to the hospital.
Are you hurt, Ronald?
Here a native refilled the gourds, and Mary Armstrong felt better after a drink of water.
There is a rock here just at the edge of the stream, I am sure your feet must be sore and blistered.
Are you hit?"
"Two women watch," he said, "others all quiet.
The troopers had chased the Kaffirs back to the bush, and, led by the Fingo, were now coming up at a gallop to the spot where Ronald and Mary Armstrong were standing by the horse.
Listening at the opening they could hear distant shouts.
One of the Fingoes had taken his station at the entrance, having moved one of the stones the chief had placed there, so that he could sit with his head out of the opening.
These were answered from many points, some of them comparatively close.
"Ah, it is you, sergeant," Lieutenant Daniels exclaimed, for it was a portion of Ronald's own troop that had ridden up.
It was a mad business, but you have partly succeeded, I am glad to see," and he lifted his cap to Mary Armstrong.
Kreta came in last, carefully examining the bush before he did so, to see that no twig was broken or disarranged.
"Excuse me for not recognising you, Miss Armstrong; but, in fact----"
"The spear only glanced along on the ribs.
Do you think they will trace us at all, chief?"
I think you stopped at her father's house one day when we were out on the Kabousie."
"I will do that, Ronald; I have been perfectly happy since you took me out of the hut, and have not seemed to feel any fear of being recaptured, for I felt that if they overtook us I could always escape so.
"I am Sergeant Blunt, Miss Armstrong.
Sitting beside her, Ronald told her what had been done from the time when his party arrived and beat off the natives attacking the waggons.
"I am sure you never got into a scrape," the girl said, looking up into Ronald's face.
I think I must wait for a bit."
"I don't think much harm is done," he said; "a fortnight in the stable and he will be all right again."
"I was as good a shot as my father."
They started, therefore, refreshed and strong.
I think you get through safe if go fast."
"All the fresher and better for the wash," she said; "but I really don't think I could walk very far, my feet are very much blistered.
"Take me down, too, please; I feel giddy now it is all over."
Ronald gave his consent, though reluctantly, but he felt it was right that the Fingo, who was risking his life for his sake, should carry out his plans in his own way.
"We found two or three others," the chief said, "but this best."
"Yes," the girl said, "if I put one foot on yours I could certainly hold on.
"Oh yes, I can walk any distance," the girl said.
We keep over to left, and then when we get just through the bush we fire our guns.
Once out of the bush, the party hurried down the grassy slope, and then kept on a mile further. The chief now gave a loud call.
The native pushed one of the bushes aside, and showed a sort of cave formed by a great slab of rock that had fallen over the others.
In a few minutes Mary Armstrong joined Ronald.
He now put the blanket over her head and lifted her in his arms.
How is he?"
Then the Kaffirs very much surprised and all run that way, and you ride straight through."
He managed as he entered to place two or three rocks over the entrance.
I will go and ask Kreta what he is going to do, and by the time I come back perhaps you had better get your shoes on again, and be ready for a start.
Nolan said he had been badly wounded, but the surgeon told me he thought he might get round.
She wanted to stop, but I sent her on, so that we could bandage you comfortably."
Good thing that."
"Perhaps, sir," Ronald said, faintly, "you will let one of the troop ride on with Miss Armstrong at once.
Now let us join the others.
He had drawn his sword before setting off at a gallop.
"Miss Armstrong has ridden on to the hospital to see her father.
"To think that you have done all this for me."
"Are you comfortable?" he asked.
Kreta listened to the reports of each of his men, and they held a short consultation.
"It's a terrible wound to look at."
It was very pleasant to Ronald Mervyn to feel Mary Armstrong in his arms, and to know, as he did, how safe and confident she felt there; but he did not press her more closely than was necessary to enable her to retain her seat, or permit himself to speak in a softer or tenderer tone than usual.
Now please tell me all that has happened, and how you came to be here."
"Quarter of an hour," the chief said; "must go slow.
As the day went on the spirits of the Fingoes rose, and in low tones they expressed their delight at having outwitted the Kaffirs.
Mary Armstrong had kept on well with the rest; her feet were extremely painful, but she was now strong and hopeful, and no word of complaint escaped her.
Now, by this time Boots was one of the family and did not cry at night. Besides Boots was told of the mouse in the corner and how he had eaten Jeanette's wax, so she promised to sleep with one eye open.
As she watched the little mouse crawling towards the hole scarcely able to move, Raggedy Ann could not keep the tears from her shoe-button eyes.
"Are you a Mamma mouse?" Uncle Clem asked.
She had lovely golden brown curls of real hair.
"We will plug up the hole with something, so he will not come out again!"
So, Raggedy Ann said to the tiny little mouse, "You should have known better than to come here when Boots is with us.
I have three little baby mice at home down in the barn.
The dolls hunted around and brought rags and pieces of paper and pushed them into the mouse's doorway.
Please let her go!"
Later in the day Marcella came bouncing into the nursery with a surprise for the dolls.
She laid her ears back and scratched Raggedy Ann with her claws.
It could be combed and braided, or curled or fluffed without tangling, and Raggedy Ann was very proud when Jeanette came to live with the dolls.
"Yes!" the little mouse squeaked, "and if the kitten will let me go I will run right home to my children and never return again!"
It was Boots.
Boots slept in the nursery that night and was lonely for her Mamma, for it was the first time she had been away from home.
"If you do not let the Mamma mouse go, Boots, I shall not play with you again!" said Raggedy Ann.
"Daddy will take Jeanette down-town with him and have her fixed up as good as new," said Mamma, so Jeanette was wrapped in soft tissue paper and taken away.
Raggedy Ann and all the dolls then went to bed and Raggedy had just dozed off to sleep when she felt something jump upon her bed.
Boots jumped after the mouse, and hit against the toy piano and made the keys tinkle so loudly it awakened the dolls.
Not to have Raggedy play with them would have been sad, indeed.
"Come, see!"
My! how the mouse was squeaking!
She had a new coating of wax on her face and she was as beautiful as ever.
Raggedy Ann smiled happily to herself, for Boots had curled up on top of Raggedy Ann and was purring herself to sleep.
He put his nose in the door and looked around.
"And what was my surprise to find three tiny little kittens in an old basket, 'way back in a dark corner!"
"Mistress took Raggedy Ann and went somewhere!" all the dolls answered in chorus.
"We will tell Raggedy when she comes in!" said the French doll, and then Fido went out to play with a neighbor dog.
"Is it a secret?" asked the penny dolls.
"How lovely!" said all the dolls in chorus.
In fact, Marcella had almost worn out Raggedy Ann's right hand teaching it to her.
"Secret nothing," replied Fido, "It's kittens!"
Raggedy Ann knows, for she is stuffed with nice clean white cotton and is very wise!"
So that is how the three little kittens came to live in the nursery.
We are always very friendly, you know." Fido continued.
I tell you I hurried out of there!"
All the dolls, with Raggedy Ann in the lead, crawled through the hole and ran to the basket.
Marcella had come early in the morning and dressed all the dolls and placed them about the nursery.
Mamma Cat went trailing along, arching her back and purring with pride as she rubbed against all the chairs and doors.
Marcella finally decided upon three names; Prince Charming for the white kitty, Cinderella for the Maltese and Princess Golden for the kitty with the yellow stripes.
When Fido and Mamma Cat had circled the barn two or three times Fido managed to find the hole and escape to the yard; then Mamma Cat came over to the basket and saw all the dolls.
This they did easily, for the window was open and it was but a short jump to the ground.
When the door closed, the tin soldier winked at the Dutch-boy doll and handed the imitation turkey to the penny dolls.
Raggedy Ann was the only doll who had ever taken lessons, and she could play Peter-Peter-Pumpkin-Eater with one hand.
The dolls all laughed at this joke.
Raggedy Ann did not sleep a wink, for she shared her bed with Fido and he kept her awake whispering to her.
"Oh, my, no!" exclaimed Mamma Cat.
Then Fido pushed the door open and came into the nursery wagging his tail.
When Mamma Cat caught up with Fido he would yelp.
"Do, Mamma Cat!
At this all the dolls laughed, for Uncle Clem could not begin to play any tune.
"Have you told the folks up at the house about your dear little kittens?" Raggedy Ann asked.
RAGGEDY ANN AND THE KITTENS
So after a great deal of persuasion, Mamma Cat finally consented. Raggedy Ann took two of the kittens and carried them to the house while Mamma Cat carried the other.
"You must trust Fido, Mamma Cat!" said Raggedy Ann, "because he loves you and anyone who loves you can be trusted!"
Then they told Raggedy Ann all about the kittens.
"Go get them, Fido, and bring them up so we can see them!" said the tin soldier.
The French dolly had been given a seat upon the doll sofa and Uncle Clem had been placed at the piano.
"Not me!" said Fido, "If I had a suit of tin clothes on like you have I might do it, but you know cats can scratch very hard if they want to!"
"Where's Raggedy Ann?" Fido asked, when he had satisfied himself that there was no food.
Raggedy Ann jumped from her bed and ran over to Fido's basket; he wasn't there.
They found Fido out near the barn watching a hole.
In the morning when Marcella came to the nursery, the first thing she saw was the three little kittens.
"Have some nice turkey?" he asked.
"Cats love mice, too, and I wish the mice trusted us more!"
The little teapot and other doll dishes were empty, but Marcella had told them to enjoy their dinner while she was away.
"She would know what to do about it!"
"Let's take them right up to the nursery!" said Raggedy Ann, "And Mistress can find them there in the morning!"
"I waited around the barn until Mamma Cat went up to the house and then I slipped into the barn again, for I knew there must be something inside or she would not have jumped at me that way!
Some of the dolls had been put in the little red chairs around the little doll table.
"How lovely!" cried all the dolls, "Really live kittens?"
"I've found something I must tell Raggedy Ann about!" said Fido, as he scratched his ear.
And Mamma Cat found out that Fido was a very good friend, too.
Mamma and Daddy said the kittens could stay in the nursery and belong to Marcella, so Marcella took them back to Fido's basket while she hunted names for them out of a fairy tale book.
Quick as a wink, all the dolls took the same positions in which they had been placed by Marcella, for they did not wish really truly people to know that they could move about.
Raggedy Ann had been away all day.
"Really live kittens!" replied Fido, "Three little tiny ones, out in the barn!"
So when Raggedy Ann had been returned to the nursery the dolls could hardly wait until Marcella had put on their nighties and left them for the night.
But it was only Fido.
He walked over to the table and sniffed, in hopes Marcella had given the dolls real food and that some would still be left.
The judge he felt kind of sore.
I never see such a son.
When I'd read about a half a minute, he fetched the book a whack with his hand and knocked it across the house.
Judge Thatcher's got it.
He took up a little blue and yaller picture of some cows and a boy, and says:
And when it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says:
And when they come to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could navigate it.
You mark them words—don't forget I said them.
The judge's wife she kissed it.
As for his clothes—just rags, that was all.
I noticed the window was up; so he had clumb in by the shed.
"Looky here—mind how you talk to me; I'm a-standing about all I can stand now—so don't gimme no sass.
"It's a lie.
You git me that money to-morrow—I want it."
His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines.
The judge said he could hug him for them words; so he cried, and his wife she cried again; pap said he'd been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said he believed it.
"What's this?"
The old man said that what a man wanted that was down was sympathy, and the judge said it was so; so they cried again.
He kept a-looking me all over.
I set the candle down.
I borrowed three dollars from Judge Thatcher, and pap took it and got drunk, and went a-blowing around and cussing and whooping and carrying on; and he kept it up all over town, with a tin pan, till most midnight; then they jailed him, and next day they had him before court, and jailed him again for a week.
"Nobody never told her."
It's a clean hand now; shake it—don't be afeard."
Hey?—how's that?"
I'll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I'll tan you good. First you know you'll get religion, too.
I won't have it.
I took up a book and begun something about General Washington and the wars.
So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried.
I want it."
"It's so.
"The widow.
"Well, I'll learn her how to meddle.
He says:
"Starchy clothes—very.
"I hain't got no money, I tell you.
I ain't the man to stand it—you hear? Say, lemme hear you read."
So Judge Thatcher and the widow had to quit on the business.
I'll take you down a peg before I get done with you.
That's why I come.
And looky here—you drop that school, you hear?
I used to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much.
Then the old man he signed a pledge—made his mark.
You think you're better'n your father, now, don't you, because he can't?
"It don't make no difference what you want it for—you just shell it out."
She told me."
I can't; and here you're a-swelling yourself up like this.
I had shut the door to.
I'll ask him; and I'll make him pungle, too, or I'll know the reason why.
I want it."
That pleased the old man till he couldn't rest.
It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers.
He set there a-mumbling and a-growling a minute, and then he says:
Your mother couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died.
Say, how much you got in your pocket?
He tore it up, and says:
"I'll give you something better—I'll give you a cowhide."
A bed; and bedclothes; and a look'n'-glass; and a piece of carpet on the floor—and your own father got to sleep with the hogs in the tanyard.
Now looky here; you stop that putting on frills.
Then I turned around and there he was.
You can do it.
"It's something they give me for learning my lessons good."
"All right.
Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut'n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?"
His hat was laying on the floor—an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.
He was most fifty, and he looked it.
"They lie—that's how."
I never see such a son."
The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something like that.
You're educated, too, they say—can read and write.
Tom says:
It's best.
I said Jim might wake up and come.
CHAPTER II.
"Stuff! stealing cattle and such things ain't robbery; it's burglary," says Tom Sawyer. "We ain't burglars.
That'll answer.
Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn't a noticed that there was a hole.
Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder.
My nose begun to itch.
"So, so," drawled that capable youngster.
"What's the word, Ed?" gasped Merwin.
He was held thus, like a child, until the engine had taken water, and until the train had moved, with accelerating speed, out of sight.
Those cattle are worth $15 on the hoof in Kansas City.
It's been called, and the man that called it is a man I've laid on the same blanket with in cow-camps and ranger-camps for ten years.
Long Bill was a graduate of the camp and trail.
We're just making a shipment of $15,000 to Myer Brothers in Rockdell, to buy cotton with.
But I've got a cattle deal on that's sure to bring me in more than that much profit within a few days."
We've got to raise them spondulicks somehow.
At nine o'clock that night Tom Merwin stepped cautiously out of the small frame house in which he lived.
He struggled for a time like a mustang in his first corral, and then he hung up his quirt and spurs.
They walked away together, side by side.
Here he became a captive, bound to the chariot of social existence.
"The bank checks up all right, Mr. Longley," said Todd; "and I find your loans in very good shape--with one exception.
"There was a bank examiner," said Longley, "nosing around our place to-day, and he bucked a sight about that note of yours.
In the little frontier city of Chaparosa, Longley built a costly residence.
But he did not.
He succeeded in making the banker understand that he stood upon the border of a catastrophe.
They might have ridden in golden chariots had their tastes so inclined.
But when he had bought a watch with precious stones set in the case so large that they hurt his ribs, and a California saddle with silver nails and Angora skin /suaderos/, and ordered everybody up to the bar for whisky--what else was there for him to spend money for?
You are carrying one very bad bit of paper--one that is so bad that I have been thinking that you surely do not realise the serious position it places you in.
"Of course, you don't know Tom Merwin," said Longley, almost genially. "Yes, I know about that loan.
We've got twelve hours yet, Bill, before this spy jumps onto you.
"I owe that much money on a call loan.
"It's the only tune he knows," shouted Merwin, as he ran.
In ten minutes the night train for Rockdell pulled up at the tank, having come from Chaparosa.
He talked pointedly and effectively to Longley for three minutes.
There was a heavy knee pressing against his back, and an iron hand grasping each of his wrists.
"Now, for God's sake don't say no," said Merwin.
A report of the matter to the Comptroller of the Currency--which I am bound to make--would, I am sure, result in the matter being turned over to the Department of Justice for action.
The bank examiner was shocked.
Now, what'll you do, Bill, if they sock it to you?"
Mr. Todd's dyspepsia seemed to grow suddenly worse.
"You called your loan, and I tried to answer you.
Oh, yes, I know the Government doesn't think so.
It was, perhaps, his duty to step out to the telegraph office and wire the situation to the Comptroller.
He can call anything I've got.
His hands were clasped behind his head, and he turned a little to look the examiner in the face.
It seemed to him that he had more money than was decent.
Thus you have doubly violated the national banking laws, and have laid yourself open to criminal prosecution by the Government.
He's got to have the money.
In the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does it become extinct.
"I am going to Hilldale's to-night," he told Longley, "to examine a bank there.
I'm not free in making loans.
In those days the cattlemen were the anointed.
"No doubt of it," assented Cooper, urbanely, "but I've a partner, you know.
Somehow, I've always found that when a man's word is good it's the best security there is.
"Tom," said Longley, leaning against the table, "you heard anything from Ed yet?"
Maybe we can--Great Sam Houston!
A CALL LOAN
He organised the First National Bank of Chaparosa, and was elected its president.
"Or what, Bill?" asked Merwin, as Longley hesitated.
"Well, how do you find things?" asked Longley, in his slow, deep tones.
Merwin broke into a run, and Longley kept with him, hearing only a rather pleasing whistle somewhere in the night rendering the lugubrious air of "The Cowboy's Lament."
He's in a devil of a--Well, he needs the money, and I've got to get it for him. You know my word's good, Cooper."
"'Twas the only chance I saw," said Merwin presently.
And even if you had the best security in your hands, Merwin, we couldn't accommodate you in less than a week.
Merwin threw down his whip and went to the only other bank in town, a private one, run by Cooper & Craig.
When he comes Tom'll pay that note."
With that the examiner bowed and departed.
"Just got in on the 9:30. Sold the bunch for fifteen, straight.
Sorry we can't arrange it for you."
Cooper began to cough.
I refer to a call loan of $10,000 made to Thomas Merwin.
One day a dyspeptic man, wearing double-magnifying glasses, inserted an official-looking card between the bars of the cashier's window of the First National Bank.
The examiner was surprised to see a smile creep about the rugged mouth of the banker, and a kindly twinkle in his light-blue eyes.
If he saw the seriousness of the affair, it did not show in his countenance.
Now, I'm short of cash myself just now, or I'd let you have the money to take it up with.
If this loan has been cleared out of the way by that time it will not be mentioned in my report.
Bill Longley was leaning his lengthy, slowly moving frame back in his swivel chair.
Five minutes later the bank force was dancing at the beck and call of a national bank examiner.
do you hear that?"
Not so circumscribed in expedient for the reduction of surplus wealth were those lairds of the lariat who had womenfolk to their name.
If not--I will have to do my duty."
His face revealed his character.
He wore a white cassock, which had been patched and darned in numberless places, but which was a marvel of cleanliness, and which hung about his tall, attenuated body like the sails of a disabled vessel.
Planting herself in the centre of the room, one hand upon her hip, and gesticulating wildly with the other, she exclaimed, pointing to her master:
The dilapidated, thatched hovels had given place to pretty and comfortable white cottages with green blinds, and a vine hanging gracefully over the door.
Mechanically, he turned to Bibiaine, but the old servant had taken flight.
"That is to say there was one, Monsieur le Marquis."
The walls were whitewashed; a dozen chairs composed the entire furniture; upon the table, laid with monastic simplicity, were only tin dishes.
The old housekeeper, who suddenly reappeared, explained her master's response.
"Do you hear that, Marquis?" he exclaimed.
"Blessed Jesus!" exclaimed the old housekeeper, in evident despair. "What am I to do?
The duke understood his host's astonishment.
"When they know----"
But "the good cause," as he styled it, having triumphed anew, he hastened to France.
Rumor had told the truth.
I, who have nothing!
Still the marriage was not a happy one.
If he would listen to my advice, he would make use of the twelve hundred thousand soldiers which our friends have placed at his disposal, to bring his subjects to a sense of their duty.
"Monsieur has not yet returned from church," she said, in response to the duke's inquiry; "but if the gentlemen wish to wait, it will not be long before he comes, for the poor, dear man has not breakfasted yet."
By what immense efforts of will, at the cost of what torture, had he made himself what he was?
It was thus that the abbe, with rare sagacity, read the character of his guests.
The carriage standing before the door had announced the presence of a visitor; but he had expected to find one of his parishioners.
"Nonsense!
CHAPTER III
One could form some idea of the terrible restraint to which he had subjected himself by looking at his eyes, which occasionally emitted the lightnings of an impassioned soul.
"It is a great honor for me," he replied, in a more than reserved tone, "to receive a visit from the former master of this place."
Knowing the condition of the country, and the state of public opinion, the cure endeavored to convince the obstinate man of his mistake; but upon this subject the duke would not permit contradiction, or even raillery; and he was fast losing his temper, when Bibiaine appeared at the parlor door.
She paused to listen, and they heard a step in the passage.
"The King has been poorly advised," he said, in conclusion.
But he was his superior in education and in intellect.
So while he played with his knife and fork, pretending to eat, he was really occupied in watching his guests, and in studying them with all the penetration of a priest, which, by the way, is generally far superior to that of a physician or of a magistrate.
If he shared his father's prejudices, he had not adopted them without weighing them carefully.
"Do not accuse your neighbor hastily," interrupted the cure; "no one has stolen it from us.
Was this a comedy that had been prepared for their benefit?
He thought, and nothing could be more sadly absurd, that a mere act of authority would suffice to suppress forever all the events of the Revolution and of the empire.
Alas!
What the father might do in a moment of excitement, the son was capable of doing in cold blood.
Evidently not, since their arrival had not been expected.
The old rascal, his wife, and his children, all possessed powerful voices; and it was not strange that the duke believed the whole village was welcoming him.
Someone has certainly stolen it, for the coop is securely closed!"
Tall, angular, and solemn, he was as cold and impassive as the stones of his church.
"I recognize it!"
This was either the abode of an ambitious man or a saint.
"Will these gentlemen take any refreshments?" inquired Bibiaine.
Lacheneur judged the character of his former master correctly, when he resisted the entreaties of his daughter.
He was known as the Abbe Midon.
"The chicken has disappeared.
But the priest, whose character had been so plainly revealed by this quarrel with his domestic, was not a man to their taste.
Bertrande was here this morning to ask alms in the name of her sick daughter.
If some, who had seen Louis XVII. at the helm in 1814, assured the duke that France had changed in many respects since 1789, he responded with a shrug of the shoulders:
Monsieur, what shall I do?" she clamored.
"Blessed Virgin!
"Upon my word," replied Martial, "I must confess that the drive has whetted my appetite amazingly."
Soon the priest re-entered the apartment.
If he had given no sign of life during the empire, it was because he had not been compelled to submit to the humiliations and suffering which so many of the emigrants were obliged to endure in their exile.
As soon as we assert ourselves, all these rascals, whose rebellion alarms you, will quietly sink out of sight."
The chosen companion of the dissipated and licentious Count d'Artois was not likely to prove a very good husband.
It was the order to go and obtain this repast from the village inn which had drawn from Bibiaine so many exclamations of wonder and dismay in the passage.
Abbe Midon was not hungry, though it was two o'clock, and he had eaten nothing since the previous evening.
She seemed overwhelmed with despair.
The storms of his youth, the dissipation of his riper years, the great excesses of every kind in which he had indulged, had not impaired his iron constitution in the least.
As the carriage passed the public square in front of the church, Martial observed the groups of peasants who were still talking there.
Soon the changes became more striking.
"Ah!" she exclaimed, "here is Monsieur le Cure now!"
"Unfortunately," he continued, "you will not find here the comforts to which you are accustomed, and I fear----"
But the listeners could not distinguish a word.
His duties, then, had seldom permitted him to leave the court.
And he took no pains to conceal the fact; convinced that he had only performed his duty.
At the sight of the two strangers seated in his drawing-room, he manifested some slight surprise.
Fortunately, the old housekeeper interrupted this recital.
It was not long before he noticed others.
Such was really his opinion.
Though but little given to sentiment, he was really affected by the sight of the country in which he was born--where he had played as a child, and of which he had heard nothing since the death of his aunt.
Taking refuge in London after the defeat of the army of Conde, he had been so fortunate as to please the only daughter of Lord Holland, one of the richest peers in England, and he had married her.
This explanation changed Bibiaine's consternation to fury.
He considered that he had honestly and loyally gained the rank of general which the Emperor of all the Russias had bestowed upon him.
This was clean, poor, and bare.
Yet they did not exchange a word; they listened.
He had not returned to France during the first Restoration; but his absence had been involuntary.
He possessed all the graces and all the vices of a courtier.
She possessed a fortune of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling, more than six million francs.
That is to say--yes--I have an old hen left in the coop.
Ibsen is generally the vitriolic foe of pageant.
Here is the mother, who is only referred to in Ibsen.
He simply breaks up the marriage right there.
These methods are obscured by the commercialized dramas, but they are behind them all.
The stage audience is a unit of three hundred or a thousand.
The book under the table is one word, the dog behind the chair is another, the window curtain flying in the breeze is another.
She does not always have the chance to act the woman written in her face, the tart, thinking, handsome creature that Ibsen prefers.
Whistler fought that battle in England.
Nigel Debrullier looks the buttoned-up Pastor Manders, even to caricature.
It would be well for the beginning student to find some way to see the first two of these three, or some other attempts to revamp the classic, for instance Mrs. Fiske's painstaking reproduction of Vanity Fair, bearing in mind the list of differences which this chapter now furnishes.
The supreme photoplay will give us things that have been but half expressed in all other mediums allied to it.
Since then the film has been furiously denounced by the literati.
They are models in the sense that the young Ellen Terry was the inspiration for Watts' Sir Galahad.
They should not be elaborate toll-gates of plot, to be laboriously lifted and lowered while the horses stop, mid-career.
The standard photoplays have their exits and entrances across the imaginary footlight line, even in the most stirring mob and battle scenes.
The good citizens who can most easily grasp the distinction should be there to perpetuate the higher welfare of these institutions side by side.
The world is welcome, and generally present when the man or his son go forth to see the elephant and hear the owl.
This is not the only possible sort, but the self-imposed limitation in certain films might give them a charm akin to that of the Songs without Words.
Edgar Poe said there was no such thing as a long poem.
Along with it might be classed Mrs. Fiske's decorative moving picture Tess, in which there is every determination to convey the original Mrs. Fiske illusion without her voice and breathing presence.
By alternating the picture of a man and the check he is forging, we have his soliloquy.
Here is the elder Alving, who disappears before the original play starts.
Its nearest analogy in literature is, perhaps, the short story, or the lyric poem.
There is not a situation but would go to pieces if one personality were altered.
It reminded one of Maurice Hewlett's novel The Queen's Quair. Evidently all the actors were fused by some noble managerial mood.
In the beginning of the first act there is much moving about and extra talk on the part of the actors, to hold the crowd while it is settling down, and enable the late-comer to be in his seat before the vital part of the story starts.
Yet they often see the film through twice.
It lasts as long as would the spoken performance, and wherever there is a dialogue we must imagine said conversation if we can.
But in order to be real photoplays the stage dramas must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down.
The father's previous sins have been acted out.
Always an orotund man, he has the Chautauqua manner indeed in this exigency.
Not only was the tense, fidgety, over-American Mary Fuller transformed into a being who was a poppy and a tiger-lily and a snow-queen and a rose, but she and her company, including Marc Macdermott, radiated the old Scotch patriotism.
If they disapprove, there is grumbling under their breath, but no hissing.
An artistic photoplay is not the result of a military efficiency system.
They manifest their favorable verdict by sending some other member of the family to "see the picture." If the people so delegated are likewise satisfied, they may ask the man at the door if he is going to bring it back.
The boy plucks a rose: the girl accepts it.
When the stories begin, it is Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby we want, and the Charles Dickens atmosphere.
The photoplay is as far from the stage on the one hand as it is from the novel on the other.
The final death of young Alving is depicted with an approximation of Ibsen's mood.
Her setting in the great French Museum is enough.
She is thought by many to be another statue of Victory.
He is painting the order that is to make him famous: the King's portrait.
The stage out-of-door scene is at best artificial and little and is generally at rest, or its movement is tainted with artificiality.
What is adapted to complete expression in one art generally secures but half expression in another.
The high-school girls can do a moderate amount of giggling without breaking the spell.
But Ibsen can scarcely exist without an atmosphere of secrecy for his human volcanoes to burst through in the end.
While the room empties of people he writhes on the floor.
Is this photoplay physician such a one?
The stage-production depends most largely upon the power of the actors, the movie show upon the genius of the producer.
But the thing is reiterated in tableau-symbol.
This visible clutch of heredity is the nearest equivalent that is offered for the whispered refrain: "Ghosts," in the original masterpiece.
In the motion picture art gallery, on the other hand, the audience is around two hundred, and these are not a unit, and the only crime is to obstruct the line of vision.
It is indeed a tintype of the consumptive heroine, with every group entire, and taken at full length.
One new crisis has an Ibsen irony and psychic tension.
There is no denying that many stage managers who have taken up photoplays are struggling with the Shakespearian French and Norwegian traditions in the new medium.
The stage in its greatest power deals with pity for some one especially unfortunate, with whom we grow well acquainted; with some private revenge against some particular despoiler; traces the beginning and culmination of joy based on the gratification of some preference, or love for some person, whose charm is all his own.
Though Peer Gynt has its spectacular side, Ibsen generally comes in through the ear alone.
We may some day evolve scenarios that will require nothing more than a title thrown upon the screen at the beginning, they come to the eye so perfectly.
Such remnants of pantomimic dialogue as remain in the main chase of the photoplay film are but guide-posts in the race toward the goal.
A team cannot pick itself, or it surely would.
Take, for instance, the perpetual quarrel between the artists and the half-educated about literary painting.
And third, the Ibsen precedent from Norway, now so firmly established it is classic.
The drama is concerned with the slow, inevitable approaches to these intensities.
The people left in the scene are pygmies compared with each disappearing cyclops. Likewise, when the actor enters again, his mechanical importance is overwhelming.
So the twenty great Ibsen situations in the stage production are gone.
Sentences should be used to show changes of time and place and a few such elementary matters before the episode is fully started.
It is bad for the motion pictures because it obscures the producer.
Therefore, for his first entrance the motion picture star does not require the preparations that are made on the stage.
He must be read aloud. He stands for the spoken word, for the iron power of life that may be concentrated in a phrase like the "All or nothing" of Brand.
But he takes the wedding party into the pastor's study and there blazes at the bride and groom the long-suppressed truth that they are brother and sister.
But let us consider the details of the matter.
Provincial hypocrisy is not implied.
It should be advertised "The Iniquities of the Fathers, an American drama of Eugenics, in a Palatial Setting."
The newcomers do not, as in Vaudeville, make themselves part of a jocular army.
But a photoplay of Ghosts came to our town.
But the old-line managers, taking up photoplays, begin by making curious miniatures of stage presentations. They try to have most things as before.
It was a theatrical sin when the old-fashioned stage actor was rendered unimportant by his scenery.
Henry Walthall as Alving, afterward as his son, shows the men much as Ibsen outlines their characters.
To him Hindu and Arabic are both foreign languages, therefore just alike.
The audience and building are indeed showy.
His father entered into Wilkins Micawber.
Consider the devices whereby the stage actor holds the audience as he goes out at the side and back.
And four able actors have the task of telling the audience by facial expression only, that they have been struck by moral lightning.
They are both paint and models.
The elect cannot teach the public what the drama is till they show them precisely what the photoplay is and is not.
The photoplays of the future will be written from the foundations for the films.
It is not the same distinction, but a kindred one.
But to review: its first substitute is the excitement of speed-mania stretched on the framework of an obvious plot.
The star-system is bad for the stage because the minor parts are smothered and the situations distorted to give the favorite an orbit.
He has tact.
By alternating scenes rapidly, flash after flash: cottage, field, mountain-top, field, mountain-top, cottage, we have a conversation between three places rather than three persons.
He sighs, gestures, howls, and strides. With what studious preparation he ripens his quietness, if he goes out that way.
But no, that could not be.
What other answers she gave I cannot say, but I am pretty sure that they did not learn much from her.
"What do you want?" he roared out from afar, and they froze as they heard.
"No, indeed," said she, "I shall never forget;" and as soon as she was at home the White Bear turned round and went back again.
"Good-evening," said the man.
She never saw him, however, for he always came after she had put out her light, and went away before daylight appeared.
Come in, you girl there!" he cried.
If you had but held out for the space of one year I should have been free.
So she did this, and journeyed to the South Wind, neither was she very long on the way.
There were such rejoicings when she went in to her parents that it seemed as if they would never come to an end.
Outside it an aged woman was sitting, playing with a golden apple.
So she did kiss him; but while she was doing it she let three drops of hot tallow fall upon his shirt, and he awoke.
When you have got there you must just strike the horse beneath the left ear and bid it go home again; but you may take the golden apple with you."
"No, that I am not," said she.
Down below there was such a storm!
It had pillows of silk, and curtains of silk fringed with gold, and everything that was in the room was of gold or silver, but when she had lain down and put out the light a man came and lay down beside her, and behold it was the White Bear, who cast off the form of a beast during the night.
They were all pretty, but the prettiest of all was the youngest daughter, who was so beautiful that there were no bounds to her beauty.
She rang the bell, and scarcely had she touched it before she found herself in a chamber where a bed stood ready made for her, which was as pretty as anyone could wish to sleep in.
She said no, and would not hear of it; so the man went out again, and settled with the White Bear that he should come again next Thursday evening, and get her answer.
So that evening, when the Princess came once more with her sleeping-drink, he pretended to drink, but threw it away behind him, for he suspected that it was a sleeping-drink.
All was well with her too, she said; and she had everything that she could want.
In the daytime she sat down once more beneath the windows of the castle, and began to card with her golden carding-comb; and then all happened as it had happened before.
Now they had everything that they wanted, and everything was as good as it could be.
You will be a long time in getting to it, if ever you get to it at all; but you shall have the loan of my horse, and then you can ride on it to an old woman who is a neighbor of mine: perhaps she can tell you about him.
The girl asked her if she knew the way to the Prince who lived with his stepmother in the castle which lay east of the sun and west of the moon, and who was to marry a princess with a nose which was three ells long.
"Art thou afraid?" said the North Wind.
She wept and lamented, but all in vain, for go he must.
So when she had rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and wept till she was weary, she set out on her way, and thus she walked for many and many a long day, until at last she came to a great mountain.
But when she went up to the Prince's room he was again asleep, and, let her call him, or shake him, or weep as she would, he still slept on, and she could not put any life in him.
There is a beggar-girl sitting outside the window, and I'll be bound that she can wash better than any of you!
But in the afternoon, after they had dined at midday, all happened just as the White Bear had said.
Next Thursday evening the White Bear came to fetch her.
"Yes, you may do that," said he; "but there is no way thither.
So she came in.
"Yes," said the North Wind, "I know where it is.
"Get there I must," said she; "and if there is any way of going I will; and I have no fear, no matter how fast you go."
You may say what you please," said the Princess.
You shall have a bit of one of my candles, which you can take away with you hidden in your breast.
"If it cannot be bought either for gold or money, what will buy it?
So the other trolls had to come and wash, but, the more they did, the blacker and uglier grew the shirt, until at length it was as black as if it had been up the chimney.
When they had gone a great part of the way, the White Bear said: "Are you afraid?"
If you like, however, I will go with you to my brother, the North Wind; he is the oldest and strongest of all of us, and if he does not know where it is no one in the whole world will be able to tell you.
So once--it was late on a Thursday evening in autumn, and wild weather outside, terribly dark, and raining so heavily and blowing so hard that the walls of the cottage shook again--they were all sitting together by the fireside, each of them busy with something or other, when suddenly some one rapped three times against the window-pane.
When she awoke in the morning both the Prince and the castle were gone, and she was lying on a small green patch in the midst of a dark, thick wood.
Little enough had she to take away with her.
"Oh!" cried the mother, in horror, "you are very likely sleeping with a troll!
EAST OF THE SUN AND WEST OF THE MOON
"How much do you want for that gold apple of yours, girl?" said she, opening the window.
"Keep tight hold of my fur, and then there is no danger," said he.
"It can't be bought either for gold or money," answered the girl.
Her mother wanted to talk with her alone in her own chamber.
The girl said what she had said on each of the former occasions--that it was not for sale either for gold or for money, but if she could get leave to go to the Prince who lived there, and be with him during the night, she should have it.
"Can you wash this shirt clean?" he cried.
I will say that I want to see what my bride can do, and bid her wash the shirt which has the three drops of tallow on it.
Then the White Bear asked what it was that she wanted, and she told him that it was so dull there in the mountain, and that she had to go about all alone, and that in her parents' house at home there were all her brothers and sisters, and it was because she could not go to them that she was so sorrowful.
But I will teach you a way to see him.
They all asked her how she was getting on where she was.
She seated herself on his back with her bundle, and thus they departed.
"Oh!
"I have no fear," said she; and it was true.
If she cannot do that, she is not worth having."
However, if you really are anxious to go there, and are not afraid to go with me, I will take you on my back, and try if I can blow you there."
Then the man persuaded her, and talked so much to her about the wealth that they would have, and what a good thing it would be for herself, that at last she made up her mind to go, and washed and mended all her rags, made herself as smart as she could, and held herself in readiness to set out.
"How do you happen to know about him?" inquired the old woman; "maybe you are she who ought to have had him." "Yes, indeed, I am," she said.
You may sit upon my back, and then I will carry you there." So she seated herself on his back, and off he went from his house in great haste, and they were not long on the way.
Truly the man would have had no objection to be rich, but he thought to himself: "I must first ask my daughter about this," so he went in and told them that there was a great white bear outside who had faithfully promised to make them all rich if he might but have the youngest daughter.
I don't know," she said; "but I will try." And no sooner had she taken the shirt and dipped it in the water than it was white as driven snow, and even whiter than that.
It blew down woods and houses, and when they were above the sea the ships were wrecked by hundreds.
It lies east of the sun and west of the moon, and never would you find your way there."
So the girl seated herself on the horse, and rode for a long, long way, and at last she came to the mountain, where an aged woman was sitting outside with a gold carding-comb.
The Princess asked her what she wanted for it, and she replied that it was not for sale, either for gold or money, but that if she could get leave to go to the Prince, and be with him during the night, she should have it.
Then she asked him if she could not go with him.
"Yes," said the Princess, "I will gladly consent to that."
The White Bear gave her a silver bell, and told her that when she needed anything she had but to ring this bell, and what she wanted would appear.
But she remembered what the White Bear had said, and would on no account go. "What we have to say can be said at any time," she answered.
But somehow or other her mother at last persuaded her, and she was forced to tell the whole story.
I have a step-mother who has bewitched me so that I am a white bear by day and a man by night; but now all is at an end between you and me, and I must leave you, and go to her.
So after she had eaten, and night was drawing near, she grew sleepy after her journey, and thought she would like to go to bed.
The man went out to see what could be the matter, and when he got out there stood a great big white bear.
So she opened the window, and asked what she would take for it.
"Yes, Mary," was Henry's concluding assurance.
I could name three people now, who would give me my own terms and thank me."
"That's right; and in London, of course, a house of your own: no longer with the Admiral.
Her affections were evidently strong.
The Admiral hated marriage, and thought it never pardonable in a young man of independent fortune.
Yes, Mary, my Fanny will feel a difference indeed: a daily, hourly difference, in the behaviour of every being who approaches her; and it will be the completion of my happiness to know that I am the doer of it, that I am the person to give the consequence so justly her due. Now she is dependent, helpless, friendless, neglected, forgotten."
When she had spoken it, she recollected herself, and wished it unsaid; but there was no need of confusion; for her brother saw her only as the supposed inmate of Mansfield parsonage, and replied but to invite her in the kindest manner to his own house, and to claim the best right in her.
True, I believe he is, generally speaking, kind to her, and so is Sir Thomas in his way; but it is the way of a rich, superior, long-worded, arbitrary uncle.
Tell me more.
This was your business!
The gentleness, modesty, and sweetness of her character were warmly expatiated on; that sweetness which makes so essential a part of every woman's worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent.
Nor was this all.
They will now see what sort of woman it is that can attach me, that can attach a man of sense. I wish the discovery may do them any good.
What an amazing match for her!
Mary, she is not like her cousins; but I think I shall not ask in vain."
"How the pleasing plague had stolen on him" he could not say; and before he had expressed the same sentiment with a little variation of words three times over, his sister eagerly interrupted him with, "Ah, my dear Henry, and this is what took you to London!
Her temper he had good reason to depend on and to praise.
"My dearest Henry," cried Mary, stopping short, and smiling in his face, "how glad I am to see you so much in love!
The gentleness and gratitude of her disposition would secure her all your own immediately.
But what will Mrs. Rushworth and Julia say?"
You will have a sweet little wife; all gratitude and devotion.
No: you must be aware that I am quite determined to marry Fanny Price."
As soon as her eagerness could rest in silence, he was as happy to tell as she could be to listen; and a conversation followed almost as deeply interesting to her as to himself, though he had in fact nothing to relate but his own sensations, nothing to dwell on but Fanny's charms. Fanny's beauty of face and figure, Fanny's graces of manner and goodness of heart, were the exhaustless theme.
He knew his uncle too well to consult him on any matrimonial scheme.
Was there one of the family, excepting Edmund, who had not in some way or other continually exercised her patience and forbearance?
The Admiral has his faults, but he is a very good man, and has been more than a father to me.
"Yes, Mary," said he, drawing her arm within his, and walking along the sweep as if not knowing where he was: "I could not get away sooner; Fanny looked so lovely!
I will not take her from Northamptonshire.
Does she know her own happiness?"
The conviction of his determination once admitted, it was not unwelcome.
"No."
"Well, well, we do not think quite alike here.
He was inexcusable, incomprehensible!
When she did understand it, however, and found herself expected to believe that she had created sensations which his heart had never known before, and that everything he had done for William was to be placed to the account of his excessive and unequalled attachment to her, she was exceedingly distressed, and for some moments unable to speak.
Henry was most happy to make it more intelligible, by beginning at an earlier stage, and explaining very particularly what he had done.
I have almost grudged myself my own prior knowledge of what you ought to have known before all the world.
It was no time for farther assurances or entreaty, though to part with her at a moment when her modesty alone seemed, to his sanguine and preassured mind, to stand in the way of the happiness he sought, was a cruel necessity.
This had been his business.
I have the infinite satisfaction of congratulating you on your brother's promotion.
Henry, overjoyed to have her go, bowed and watched her off, and without losing another moment, turned instantly to Fanny, and, taking out some letters, said, with a most animated look, "I must acknowledge myself infinitely obliged to any creature who gives me such an opportunity of seeing you alone: I have been wishing it more than you can have any idea.
I know it is all nothing."
She was more silent than ever.
She thought Lady Bertram sat longer than ever, and began to be in despair of ever getting away; but at last they were in the drawing-room, and she was able to think as she would, while her aunts finished the subject of William's appointment in their own style.
He pressed for an answer.
He was after her immediately.
Fanny could not look at him, but there was no consciousness of past folly in his voice.
I am stupefied."
Everything might be possible rather than serious attachment, or serious approbation of it toward her.
The note was held out, and must be taken; and as she instantly and with averted eyes walked towards the fireplace, where sat the others, he had nothing to do but to go in good earnest.
She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.
My uncle ought to know it as soon as possible." But this could not be suffered. The opportunity was too fair, and his feelings too impatient.
She took the letters as he gave them.
"No, no, no!" she cried, hiding her face.
I would not allow myself yesterday to say how delighted, or to repeat half that the Admiral said in his praise.
But William was a lieutenant.
Mr. Crawford would certainly never address her so again: he must have seen how unwelcome it was to her; and in that case, how gratefully she could esteem him for his friendship to William!
Sloop Thrush being made out was spreading general joy through a wide circle of great people.
I think I will have two shawls, Fanny."
"It is amazing," said she, "how much young people cost their friends, what with bringing them up and putting them out in the world!
Do not distress me.
She went accordingly to the table, where she was in the habit of writing for her aunt, and prepared her materials without knowing what in the world to say.
"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Norris, reddening.
She will be disappointed if she receives nothing from you.
The two ladies were together in the breakfast-room, and, fortunately for him, Lady Bertram was on the very point of quitting it as he entered.
With thanks for the honour of your note, I remain, dear Miss Crawford, etc., etc."
Go on, my dear Fanny, and without fear; there can be no difficulties worth naming.
You will, perhaps, like to see them."
Oh, Mr. Crawford, we are infinitely obliged to you!
Dearest, dearest William!" She jumped up and moved in haste towards the door, crying out, "I will go to my uncle.
Mrs. Norris, being not at all inclined to question its sufficiency, began to take the matter in another point.
She thought he was wishing to speak to her unheard by the rest.
I have read your book with infinite satisfaction.
"Mr. B., I have got a grand humbug in my head, which I shall put in practice within a year, and it shall double the sale of my pencils. Don't ask me what it is, but within one year you shall see it for yourself, and you shall acknowledge Monsieur Mangin knows something of human nature.
He drove a pair of bay horses, attached to an open carriage with two seats, the back one always occupied by his valet.
What mean this costume of by-gone centuries--this golden chariot--these richly caparisoned steeds?
First, attract the public by din and tinsel, by brilliant sky-rockets and Bengola lights, then give them as much as possible for their money."
One of the most original, unique, and successful humbugs of the present day was the late Monsieur Mangin, the blacklead pencil maker of Paris. Few persons who have visited the French capital within the last ten or twelve years can have failed to have seen him, and once seen he was not to be forgotten.
Who are my defamers?
I am an honest man.
Yes, gentlemen, I am a charlatan--a mountebank; it is my profession, not from choice, but from necessity.
He always sold a good article, and no person who purchased from him had cause to complain."
Then he would drop down in his carriage for a few minutes and wipe the perspiration from his face, while his servant played another overture on the organ. This gave his purchasers a chance to withdraw, and afforded a good opportunity for a fresh audience to congregate.
His overcoat was laid aside, and he donned in its stead a costly velvet tunic with gold fringes.
When he had carried this kind of by-play as far as he thought the audience would bear it, he raised his hand, and his servant understanding the sign, stopped the organ.
He was shrewd, and possessed a thorough knowledge of the world.
"Thank you for your compliment, Mr. B., but I have not forgotten your Buffalo-hunt, your Mermaid, nor your Woolly Horse.
They endeavor to attract notice as mountebanks, and then foist upon the public worthless trash, and hope thus to succeed.
The patronizing air with which he made this speech, slapping me at the same time familiarly upon the back, showed him in his true character of egotist.
At last the prelude ended, and the comedy commenced.
A mutual friend introduced me.
Envious swindlers!
I dine at the best cafes, drink the best wine, live on the best of everything, while my defamers get poor and lank, as they deserve to be.
This bit of coquetry produced the desired effect in whetting the appetite of the multitude, who were impatiently waiting to hear him speak.
Both are intended as advertisements of something genuine, and both answer the purpose."
"Aha! you never saw better pencils.
His sharp, intelligent eye scrutinized the throng which was pressing around his carriage, until it rested apparently upon some particular individual, when he gave a start; then, with a dark, angry expression, as if the sight was repulsive, he abruptly dropped the visor of his helmet and thus covered his face from the gaze of the anxious crowd.
And this assertion was indeed true.
You are captivated by din and glitter, and therein lies my strength.
They added that he had left two hundred thousand francs, which he had given in his will to charitable objects.
My idea is magnifique, but it is one grand secret."
within four months after I bade him adieu, the Paris newspapers announced his sudden death.
"There, do you see what wonderful pencils these are?
You seem to wonder and ask yourselves who is this modern Quixote.
Then would follow a repetition of his previous sales, and in this way he would continue for hours.
You, gentlemen, created that necessity!
Fools, to think that any man can succeed by systematically and persistently cheating the public.
"You are very happy," I replied, "in your manner of attracting the public.
Did you ever behold a more striking likeness?"
Gentlemen, I will condescend to answer your queries.
"Ah!" said he, "Monsieur Barnum, I am delighted to see you.
His habits were good; he was charitable.
He then leisurely commenced a change of costume. His round hat was displaced by a magnificent burnished helmet, mounted with rich plumes of various brilliant colors.
On Sundays, his favorite locality was the Place de la Bourse.
The Parisians really loved him, and were proud of his genius.
I imitated Punch and his bells, and now I have two hundred depots in Paris.
Knaves, for desiring the public's money without giving them an equivalent.
But I had not long to mourn on that account; for after Monsieur Mangin had been for six months--as they say of John Brown--"mouldering in his grave" judge of the astonishment and delight of all Paris at his reappearance in his native city in precisely the same costume and carriage as formerly, and heralded by the same servant and organ that had always attended him.
It has been published here in numerous editions.
It now turned out that Monsieur Mangin had lived in the most rigid seclusion for half a year, and that the extensively-circulated announcements of his sudden death had been made by himself, merely as an "advertising dodge" to bring him still more into notice, and give the public something to talk about.
Then the great charlatan stood upon his feet.
It is a long jump from Moses, the author of the first work on Geography, to Peter Simple.
Beneath the ocean busy insects are building the foundations of new continents and, under the earth, Fiery Demons are ready at all times to burst forth and help to destroy the old ones.
No wonder the globe is giddy!
Francis Bacon called it a Bubble; Shakespeare, an Oyster; Rossetti, a Midge; and W. S. Gilbert addresses it familiarly as a Ball--
All we ask, Gentle Reader, is that when we stray too far you will favour us with a gentle reminder.
Her waist measurement is no less than twenty-five thousand miles.
The Geographer's task is endless.
It really begins to look as if this Planet would never be finished.
Today we are preparing to put up the "standing room only" notice.
The Sea with its white teeth bites the edges of the continents into new shapes, as a child bites the edges of a biscuit.
Would it not be interesting to speculate upon that Critic's reception of the freshly made World?
THE GIDDY GLOBE
Let us imagine, however, that concealed in the cargo of Hypothetic Nebula destined for the construction of the Terrestrial Globe was a Protoplasmic Stowaway that sprang to being in the shape of a Critic just as the work of Creation was finished.
DEAR READER:
CHAPTER I
The comicality of the Ape family might have provoked a reluctant smile, but much more likely a lecture on the impropriety of descending to caricature in a serious work.
We have tried every known remedy but we fear it is incurable.
In another thousand years, for aught we know, the earth may be going round dark and tenantless and bearing the sign "To Let." What does it matter to us?
After thousands and thousands of years, it is no nearer completion than it was in the beginning.
A LONG JUMP
WHY IS THE GLOBE?
CHAPTER III
THE CREATION
The Giddy Globe is really quite large, not to say obese.
But these people belong to a privileged class that is encouraged (even paid) to distort the language, and they must not be taken too literally.
At best, our Critic would have pronounced the freshly made World the work of a beginner, conceding perhaps that he "showed promise" and "might go far," and if he wished to be very impressive indeed, he would pretend that he had penetrated the veil of Anonymity and hint darkly that he detected evident traces of a Feminine Touch!
In that, however, our Critic would only have been anticipating, for is there not at this very moment on the press a Suffrage edition (for women only) of the Rubaiyat, in which one verse is amended to read thus--
PREFACE
The glaciers file away the mountains into valleys and plains.
In the first chapter of his geography, Moses tells us there were only two people in the world.
We have a confession to make--it would be useless to attempt concealment--we have the Digression habit.
We may be sure that he would have found many things not to his liking; technical defects such as the treatment of grass and foliage in green instead of the proper purple; the tinting of the sky which any landscape painter will tell you would be more decorative done in turquoise green than cobalt blue.
The Planet he endeavours to portray is perpetually changing its appearance.
"Certainly."
"The postscript is explicit."
"In the street."
In the meanwhile Franz was considering the singular shudder that had passed over the Count of Monte Cristo at the moment when he had been, in some sort, forced to give his hand to Albert.
The young man had found Signor Pastrini looking very much alarmed, and this had only made him the more anxious to read Albert's letter; and so he went instantly towards the waxlight, and unfolded it.
As he came near the hotel, Franz saw a man in the middle of the street.
"Yes, hither."
"Shall we see you again to give us any information?" inquired the countess.
"Yes.
"Would you like to see a camp of bandits in repose?" he inquired.
Then that person is a most amiable person." Albert looked around and perceived Franz.
"Come," said the count, smiling with his own peculiar smile, "not so bad for a man who is to be shot at seven o'clock to-morrow morning." Vampa looked at Albert with a kind of admiration; he was not insensible to such a proof of courage.
"If my society would not be disagreeable."
"Nothing has happened to him, I hope," said the count frowningly.
"I think that if you would take the trouble of reflecting, you could find a way of simplifying the negotiation," said Franz.
"'Luigi Vampa.'"
"He went away directly he saw me enter the ball-room to find you."
"A person to whom I can refuse nothing has come to demand you."
"No, your excellency."
"No."
"What is that?"
The passageway sloped in a gentle descent, enlarging as they proceeded; still Franz and the count were compelled to advance in a stooping posture, and were scarcely able to proceed abreast of one another.
"A friend!" responded Peppino; and, advancing alone towards the sentry, he said a few words to him in a low tone; and then he, like the first, saluted the nocturnal visitors, making a sign that they might proceed.
The man was wrapped up in a large cloak.
On the staircase he met Signor Pastrini. "Well?" said the landlord.
"I did, indeed.
"It seems that your memory is equally short in everything, Vampa," said the count, "and that not only do you forget people's faces, but also the conditions you make with them."
"Then it is to your excellency that this letter is addressed."
"Well--what?" responded Franz.
You may conclude your interrupted galop, so that you will owe no ill-will to Signor Luigi, who has, indeed, throughout this whole affair acted like a gentleman."
"Well, then, the Frenchman took off his mask; Teresa, with the chief's consent, did the same.
"What influence can I possibly have over a bandit?"
At the door they found the carriage.
"What!" exclaimed Franz, "the peasant girl who snatched his mocoletto from him"--
"Have you the money he demands?"
"Well, then, a happy and merry life to you.
"And Beppo led him outside the walls?" said the count.
"I do not know."
Peppino placed himself beside Ali, and they set off at a rapid pace.
"Really?
Luigi Vampa.
"Judge for yourself," replied he.
"Yes."
"Have you not just rendered him a service that can never be forgotten?"
"Be it so.
"For what purpose?"
It would be very kind of you."
A lamp, placed at the base of a pillar, lighted up with its pale and flickering flame the singular scene which presented itself to the eyes of the two visitors concealed in the shadow.
"Ah, your pardon," said Albert, turning round; "will you allow me, captain?" And he lighted his cigar at Vampa's torch.
He was, therefore, about to return to the Palazzo Bracciano without loss of time, when suddenly a luminous idea crossed his mind.
"Yes.
"Gentlemen," added the chief, turning towards the young men, "perhaps the offer may not appear very tempting to you; but if you should ever feel inclined to pay me a second visit, wherever I may be, you shall be welcome." Franz and Albert bowed.
At eleven o'clock Albert had not come back.
"To tell you that you are free, your excellency."
"Good!" returned Peppino.
"What think you of that?" inquired Franz.
"None, sir," replied the bandit, "you are as free as air."
Franz and the count descended these, and found themselves in a mortuary chamber.
"You should not have allowed him to go," said the duke to Franz; "you, who know Rome better than he does."
"I informed them at the hotel that I had the honor of passing the night here, duke," said Franz, "and desired them to come and inform me of his return."
"Then ring at his door, if you please, and request him to be so kind as to give me an audience." Signor Pastrini did as he was desired, and returning five minutes after, he said,--"The count awaits your excellency." Franz went along the corridor, and a servant introduced him to the count.
"Well, well!" said he.
"No, not I," replied Franz, "but our neighbor, the Count of Monte Cristo."
The duke was not mistaken; when he saw Franz, the servant came up to him.
"No matter; I know it." The count knit his brows, and remained silent an instant.
He had no doubt that it was the messenger from Albert.
"I am."
"Any money?"
Franz and the count advanced, and the bandit saluted them.
"If by six in the morning the four thousand piastres are not in my hands, by seven o'clock the Count Albert will have ceased to live."
Are you still resolved to accompany me?"
"Yes, I have seen him," he replied, "and he has handed this letter to me.
"Read that," he said.
"And I can't think why I should have been so--so wild.
"I mean, I'm not a Blaisdell at all," she finished hastily.
"Forget it!" Mr. Smith turned on his heel and marched up and down the room again.
Mellicent, with implicit faith that the hundred thousand is coming wants to wear her best frocks every day. And, as if she were not already quite excited enough, young Pennock has very obviously begun to sit up and take notice."
"You like to get all tired out, I suppose."
"I'd have you say it DOES matter, and I'd have you insist on having your rights, every time."
"But I soon found--that it didn't make me or anybody else--any happier, and that it didn't help things at all.
You see--all my life I've just HAD to learn to say 'It doesn't matter,' when there were so many things I wanted to do, and couldn't.
It matters that--"
There was a moment's silence.
And now, please, PLEASE say you'll forget all this--what I've been saying.
"For--ME?"
I wasn't thinking of myself.
"But, good Heavens, how could you keep from tearing 'round and throwing things?"
"I forgot.
This money'll bring them happiness all right, of course,--particularly to some of them.
But--" again she threw out her hands.
It's YOU who don't know what you are saying!"
To Mr. Smith, one day, she freed her mind--and Miss Maggie so seldom freed her mind that Mr. Smith was not a little surprised.
"I get rested--afterward."
"At all events, he's taking notice."
She hesitated; then she sighed.
"Well, he's evidently caught the glitter of the gold from afar," smiled Miss Maggie.
Miss Maggie Duff, however, was not so well pleased.
She's just excited now, as any young girl would be; and I'm afraid she's taking a little wicked pleasure in--not seeing him."
But she doesn't--care?"
Miss Maggie laughed a little.
"Mr.
Certainly the present state of affairs is almost unbearable."
Would I have stepped into Mother Blaisdell's shoes and kept the house?
"Haven't I!" she retorted.
I--I smashed a bowl once, and two cups." She laughed shamefacedly, and met his eyes now.
"But--I wish you were coming in on the deal." His kindly eyes were gazing straight into her face now.
Hattie is already house-hunting, on the sly, and she's bought Bessie an expensive watch and a string of gold beads.
Miss Maggie seemed to be thinking.
"You don't want to be deaf, do you?
"Doesn't see him, APPARENTLY.
That's why I do wish that lawyer would come, if he's coming."
"Oh, well--it doesn't matter--if you don't."
"My rights, indeed!"
Then again she gave the impatient gesture. "But even the gossip and the questioning aren't the worst.
"If I've heard that word once, I've heard it a hundred times in the last week.
Would I have come back again and again, when my beloved books were calling, calling, always calling?
"And--Miss Mellicent?" There was a note of anxiety in Mr. Smith's voice.
"Sometimes.
Well, you needn't be." Mr. Smith, on his feet, was trying to work off his agitation by tramping up and down the small room.
"Nonsense!
With a sudden businesslike air of determination Miss Maggie faced him.
"Nothing.
She gave an impatient gesture.
"I couldn't--all the time.
So I tried--to do the other way.
"Humph!
"Yes, I suspected that." Mr. Smith was still sitting erect, still speaking with grim terseness.
He caught the twinkle in her eyes and threw up his Hands despairingly.
I am so--ashamed!"
"Not a bit," she smiled.
War, death, sin, evil--the world is full of them, and they do matter."
"Confound that man!"
Jane, on the other hand, insists that Mr. Fulton will come back and claim the money, so she's running her house now on the principle that she's LOST a hundred thousand dollars, and so must economize in every possible way.
I can imagine it," chuckled Mr. Smith.
"You don't think it brings happiness, then?"
"I'm a Duff, not a Blaisdell--except when they want--" She bit her lip. A confused red suffused her face.
"Don't you see?
But she comes and tells me his every last move (and he's making quite a number of them just now!), so I think she does see--a little."
I don't approve of it at all."
She shook her head.
"You don't mean he is trying to come back--so soon!" disbelieved Mr. Smith.
Sometimes I wish I might never hear it again."
"Just what is the matter with that doctrine, please, and what do you mean?" she smiled.
It's the family themselves.
"That 'It-doesn't-matter' doctrine of yours.
"They do matter, indeed." Miss Maggie was speaking very gravely now. "They matter--woefully.
You do live there, don't you?
"But I am ashamed," moaned Miss Maggie, her face still averted.
"But, pray, what would you have me say?" she smiled.
"Money, money, money!" Miss Maggie threw out both her hands with a gesture of repulsion.
We all want money.
Flora, poor soul, went into a restaurant the other day and ordered roast turkey, and now she's worrying for fear the money won't come and justify her extravagance.
I went back, however, and gathered up the other relics, intending to take some of them down with me and then come back for the rest if I could not manage them all the first time.
"After being out some two weeks we found ourselves near what is called 'Montezuma's Castle,' up by the Verde.
"In my outfit I had two large tents, nine by fourteen, and the poles of these tents, it seemed to me, would answer very well for ladders if I connected them by pieces of rope.
The bones are not crumbly enough, and the rags which the real mummies are done up in are pretty difficult to imitate.
For a few minutes it shone a fiery red and then the light was gone like a huge torch which flickers and goes out.
It had light-colored horns curved over at the tips like a chamois and striped legs and eyes that stuck out like an antelope.
The only way to get up is by ladders or ropes, and it is mighty hard to get there even then.
At last the rope was done and tied together with various knots.
It was not necessary to make the steps very near together, and by cutting notches in the poles and tying pieces of rope across I succeeded in making two very good ladders, one fourteen feet long, with the two top poles--one from each tent; and two small ladders, each about seven feet.
"Well, then, you know something about what they sound like, and know they can give Eastern frogs cards and spades and beat them easy.
MONTEZUMA'S CASTLE.
It looked very clear and refreshing.
I went down pretty slow, sparing the rope as much as I could by supporting part of my weight by digging my toes into every little crack and crevice I could find, but I got there at last, and when I did, I sat down on the ledge and cried like a baby.
He had heard about the ibex and wanted a pair.
It was getting late, and the sun had long since sunk out of sight.
"No," said the curiosity dealer, "that mummy is not for sale.
My whole thoughts were concentrated on the one desire--something to drink!
The curiosity dealer carefully closed and locked the case, and then meditatively rolled a cigarette.
"Tell me about it," I asked.
Above the mountains there was one tall peak which I could see up the canyon.
I tied the end of the rope to the hatchet handle and threw the other end down, and was mighty glad to see that it reached within four or five feet of the middle ledge.
I suffered so with the heat and thirst, that the hope of escape alone kept me from going mad.
Here my first ladder was put up.
I had a customer who wanted a rattlesnake with a very big rattle, and I fixed up a snake for him on this trip and sent it to him afterwards.
Two small ledges above this, some three feet apart, and a wider ledge four feet higher, allowed me to climb up, without the use of ladders, to another ledge.
The castle is built on a ledge high up on the side of a mountain which hangs over at the top.
I think I sent him some that pleased him; anyhow he paid for them all right.
"But to get back to my story.
"I'll be hanged if I know," answered the collector.
"Did you ever hear the frogs in Arizona?"
I had a special order from a chap in New York for three hundred snakes--he wanted some big rattlers.
I do not think I really slept at all, but lay in a half-dazed condition until it was light enough for me to see things in the canyon below.
"But there are fellows in these mountains who say that there really are such animals, and if he wanted to have an ibex, and had to have an ibex, I might as well get him an ibex as anybody else, even if I had to make one.
Then I felt easier.
I had a large pocket-knife and a hatchet, and no sooner had the thought suggested itself than I commenced to undress.
Besides these there was a very interesting bit of stone carving.
"As the sun sank lower and lower the darkness crept gradually up until only the very top was left a shining point.
I had absolutely nothing, not even a string, to aid me in getting down.
"However, my Mexican, Antonio, held the ladder, and by very careful work I succeeded in reaching the mouth of the cave and crawling in.
I was getting more thirsty all the time, and, at last, I hated to go to the mouth of the cave, hot as it was inside, because the sight of the water nearly drove me mad.
I amused myself by occasionally taking a shot at Antonio.
"Well," continued the curiosity dealer, "I knew nothing could be done until morning, so I lay down and tried to sleep.
I glued a lot of rattles together, and by taking off the buttons it was pretty hard to see where they were joined. This rattle was more than a foot long.
I responded in the affirmative.
"What is an ibex?" I asked.
"Then I began to think over how I was going to get down.
My first and only thought was to pay Antonio for his treachery.
I thought and pondered, trying to think of some possible way to get down!
I reloaded, having plenty of cartridges in my belt, and began shooting at him again.
"Well, that is the story.
"There was another Eastern chap wanted an ibex, which he said was found up in these mountains.
"Well, it was this way: you see I was out after snakes and other natural history specimens.
It seemed a year before I reached the ledge.
By nature she was very reserved, and had no desire for companionship; but her mental abilities were by no means small, and she was well able to make various observations, and profit by their lessons.
He was dragging something heavy, and could not bring the oar forward; and then he pulled the head of a pike up above the water.
A hollow in the middle enabled it, as it were, to project in canopies that hung down over her eyes, which thus acquired an expression even more cruel and scowling.
Her peaceful youth, in which she had only had the heron and the crayfish and her own kind to fight with, had long since passed, and henceforth she was to see more and more of the angler's implements.
No one else should now get a bite; she would be alone in clearing the waters of food.
The little fish gambol unwittingly close to her mouth.
She hunted large and small, and lorded it over the inhabitants of the lake as far as she possibly could.
Her upturned eyes look still higher, and see the gleam of their white-scaled bellies.
She becomes so angry that she feels the blood burning in the back of her neck, and with a sudden vigorous effort, she gives the roach a violent tug.
Their drooping fins and heavy, wriggling flight had fixed themselves clearly in her mind's eye.
It was only released as mince-meat.
They were more than half an inch in length, rounded and blunt, and resembled the teeth of a rake.
In one moment the rushy margin is empty.
The wonderful, dark colours of the shallows drew a broad stripe along her great back. About the forehead and along the back of the neck, the water-grasses had laid a ground-wash of their own deep green; and her sides were veiled by the flickering streaks of the reed-beds.
Their fat bellies with the lobster-red fins, and their large, cod-like mouths, give an impression of simpleness.
Yes, she knew, of course, how it would be!
A number of roach are thronging about a clump of rushes, examining leaves and stalks just as long-tailed tits search tree-tops and bark; they are inside it and outside it, sucking up the water-snails and insects.
Right before her nose he darts like an arrow after the fugitive, but hesitates at the very moment of striking, stops, and sniffs.
The terns are diving down after small fish, and along the rush-bordered banks the rising sun is treading the water.
Grim stops with a jerk.
It was a long time before Grim managed to wear away the two triple hooks from the corners of her mouth, and in the meantime she swam about with the rusty things like an extra set of monster eye-teeth sticking out of her mouth.
Only the shifting shadow-lines that the reeds cast over her body indicate that she is moving forward.
But it was many a day before she came to understand that it was they especially who wanted to harm her.
If she were high in the water, and the bird suddenly rushed down towards her, she darted to one side and hastened out of the way.
They follow close in one another's wake, and lie on the surface, letting the sunlight play upon their golden scales.
The back of her neck swelled up like that of a bull, for here the muscles lay over the cranium in large, thick curves, until down by the neck, they gave place each to its branchial cleft, which was as large as a barn door.
The pliant water-plants, with their long stalks, accommodate themselves to the current, hanging westwards for an hour, only to turn just as unresistingly the opposite way the next.
She had often wondered at them!
Grim's territory lay half-way between these.
The body of one of them is still bloody, and threads of flesh and torn scales make it look quite woolly as it moves through the water.
Her purpose strengthens, her powers are doubled, but she is able to restrain herself: the moment has not yet come.
It irritated him beyond endurance, and for a long time he felt ashamed of himself.
Long before they came near her, she was distinctly aware of their approach.
Among the floating forests of green feather-foil go big, broad-scaled bream.
The cheeks stood perpendicularly on each side of the forehead, and enclosed the cranium as between walls; it was as though she had had a dent on both sides of her head.
She grows angry.
Nor was she deficient in memory, as she distinctly showed every spring when going to spawn; she always found her way up the brook to the wide fen.
One evening the old angler was rowing home late from his fishing-ground.
And Grim has to move on to fresh hunting-grounds.
It was different when the boat came slowly gliding along; then she only moved so as not to be run down.
But the throat that swallowed the victim was by far the most horrible contrivance.
She would still take with confident voracity large roach and small; but she very reluctantly took a halting, languid fish like those that had pricked her so horribly that morning.
She is triumphant.
They continued far down the throat, and even came forward over the tongue.
Suddenly a little scarlet roach-eye discovers her black back, which up to the present had looked just like part of the bottom, and they fly away from her in a panic of terror.
Another accident which only sharpened her appetite and made her ungovernably fierce; and just then a little roach swam past.
They whisk along with much movement and many strokes of the tail.
It is just as languid as the previous one, and makes the same tempting impression. Instantly she makes a dash at it.
Suddenly he noticed that one of them struck something, and the shock passed through the oar up into his arm.
True, it was a man-roach that she had bitten into, but she had fortunately broken the line, and now went off with a long trace dragging after her.
Generally, it only stood ajar; but to look into it when it opened wide was like looking into a barrel studded with nails.
The desire for food, which she had possessed from her earliest days, and which had lain like a germ in the very heart of her nature, was given free play by means of the terrible weapons that Nature had placed at her disposal.
And what a mouth!
There is just a movement of the extreme tip of the tail.
She had discovered that, like the grebe, they carried their young on their back; and, like all the other fish in the lake, she supposed them to be a part of the unrest up on the surface.
As the years passed she developed into a powerful ruler, and increasingly felt herself to be the divinely-favoured inmate of the lake.
Well, she managed it at last; at last she had her mouthful.
An accident that may happen even to the best of us!
She scarcely moves her ventral fins, and breathes very gently.
Grim had been fortunate in her misadventure.
Grim is abroad, pushing herself forward like a shadow along the bottom. Her cunning crocodile eyes are turned up so that they project from her head.
From this time onwards, her voracity knew no bounds.
Now she is ready to spring.
The upper jaw was provided with a far more terrible armature.
She gained some experience from this incident; henceforward, she regarded solitary, sickly-looking roach with keen suspicion.
Grim started.
One morning early, a breeze is ruffling the surface of the lake, and winding, white-foamed currents are eating their way out among black shallows.
From the resistance it had offered he felt quite convinced that the pike he had lost was at least worth a bronze medal.
I wish she would invite father to live with her permanently.
He talked to her beautifully and sanely, and sent her away actually uplifted.
They brought up three rifles, and each man took the lead of a camp of Indians, and passed the afternoon in a bottle shooting contest, with a prize for the winning camp.
But how on earth can you ever tell?
Dear Enemy:
We've got whooping cough, and you can hear us whoop when you get off the train two miles away.
All it now lacks is a coat of paint and some doorknobs.
Dear Dr. MacRae:
He keeps along his even, unemotional way without paying the slightest attention to anything or anybody.
But Sandy rose to the occasion like a gentleman.
Be just as impolite as you choose.
And this Pleasantville asylum is an architectural model.
The longer I live, the surer I am that character is the only thing that counts.
We don't know how we got it--just one of the pleasures of institution life.
What you think and how you behave are really matters of extreme indifference to me.
They make her nervous.
I couldn't help being in a feminine twitter all the time the firing was going on for fear somebody would shoot somebody else.
It was sad, tragic--and true!
"If it is I don't want to go.
You were never jealous, or mean, like some of them were.
Chapter XIV
I know you understand.
Just beyond the Gillis homestead was the church, with the old graveyard beside it.
The moon rose in the silvery sky, empearling the clouds around her. Below, the pond shimmered in its hazy radiance.
I'm a church member.
You HAVE helped me already.
She had taken the pins out--they made her head ache, she said.
That good night in the garden was for all time.
"I must go now, Ruby.
The evening had changed something for her.
I couldn't say this to any one but you.
I mean to live to be a hundred years old, like Mr. Thomas Blewett of White Sands.
"Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstanding, I think," said Anne.
It was this that made Anne's visits hard for her.
Church is awful dull.
But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and purity of outline never seen before--doing what life and love and great sorrow and deep womanhood joys might have done for Ruby.
I couldn't get away from it then.
It isn't quite finished--the needle is sticking in it just where her poor little fingers put it the last time she laid it down, the afternoon before she died."
Mrs. Lynde grumbled about Anne's frequent visits, and declared she would catch consumption; even Marilla was dubious.
"Yes, I suppose so," said Diana uncomfortably.
Heaven could not be what Ruby had been used to.
For a few moments she could not speak.
"Ruby would have liked you to have it.
"I can't help it," said Ruby pitifully.
Could she say anything?
It's getting late--and you shouldn't be out in the damp."
"I know.
She said she'd have spoken years ago, only she thought I wouldn't.
Good night, Anne."
The moonlight shone on the white stones, bringing them out in clear-cut relief against the dark trees behind.
All the hindrances and perplexities will be taken away, and we shall see clearly.
She could not tell comforting falsehoods; and all that Ruby said was so horribly true.
It CAN'T be.
"Dear Ruby, I know."
What had once been silly or amusing was gruesome, now; it was death peering through a wilful mask of life.
Anne pressed her hand in an agony of sympathy--silent sympathy, which perhaps helped Ruby more than broken, imperfect words could have done; for presently she grew calmer and her sobs ceased.
"It's so very sad and dreadful," said Anne in a low tone.
It had been a warm, smoky summer afternoon.
"Oh, Anne," protested Diana, with a rather shocked smile.
"Everybody knows it," said Ruby bitterly.
"Ruby is the first of our schoolmates to go.
I've wanted to all summer--every time you came. I wanted to talk it over with you--but I COULDN'T.
"I want you to have this," she sobbed.
We've never spoken to each other since.
"Why should you be afraid, Ruby?" asked Anne quietly.
She had so spent many evenings that summer, although she often wondered what good it did any one, and sometimes went home deciding that she could not go again.
When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different--something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her.
And I'd rather have you than any one else.
"How strange the graveyard looks by moonlight!" said Ruby suddenly. "How ghostly!" she shuddered.
"But you won't be frightened any more, Ruby, will you?
"Yes, I know," answered Anne in a low tone.
"Yes, very soon.
You and Diana and all the rest will be going about, full of life--and I'll be there--in the old graveyard--dead!"
"Do you think we'll never laugh in heaven?"
The world was in a splendor of out-flowering.
In the daytime, when people were around me and everything was cheerful, it wasn't so hard to keep from thinking of it.
Heaven must be very beautiful, of course, the Bible says so--but, Anne, IT WON'T BE WHAT I'VE BEEN USED TO."
It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby.
Anything like that seems silly NOW.
She seemed wrapped in a reverie in which Diana felt lonesomely that she had neither lot nor part.
The next night the A.V.I.S. gave a farewell party to Jane Andrews before her departure for the West.
Anyway, I don't mean to go for ever so long.
The woodways were pranked with shadows and the fields with the purple of the asters.
I'm AFRAID to die."
"Ruby doesn't seem to realize her condition in the least.
Don't be afraid, Ruby."
He says he's lived so long 'cause he always smoked tobacco and it killed all the germs.
She WAS leaving everything she cared for.
"You know it's so, don't you?" said Ruby insistently.
And if there's anything I can do to help you I'll be so glad."
When every scrap of porridge was cleared out of the mighty bowl, Kester yawned, and wishing good-night, withdrew to his loft over the cow-house.
'Sit thee down, lad.
The only change seemed to be that now they faced the brilliant northern lights flashing up the sky, and that either this appearance or some of the whaling narrations of Kinraid had stirred up Daniel Robson's recollections of a sea ditty, which he kept singing to himself in a low, unmusical voice, the burden of which was, 'for I loves the tossin' say!' Bell met them at the door.
With the next night Hepburn came; and Kinraid did not.
He rose up out of true sailor's gallantry, as she shyly approached and stood by her father's side, scarcely daring to lift her great soft eyes, to have one fair gaze at his face.
He could read, or he could understand what was read aloud to him; reading was no pleasure, but listening was.
"Abednego," all down a page?
After a few words to her mother, Philip produced the candles he had promised, and some books and a quill or two.
'My fingers is stiff,' pleaded Sylvia, holding up her little hand and shaking it.
This was giving Daniel one of his greatest pleasures; for though he could read pretty well, yet the double effort of reading and understanding what he read was almost too much for him.
He was tired, and so was Lassie, and so, too, was Kester, who, lifting his heavy legs one after the other, and smoothing down his hair, followed his master into the house-place, and seating himself on a bench at the farther end of the dresser, patiently awaited the supper of porridge and milk which he shared with his master.
'Thou'lt see, thou'lt see!
'Well, well!' said Daniel, rising to take leave, with unusual prudence as to the amount of his drink.
'It's a fine thing, tho', is learning.
'Well, and here ye are at home again! and Philip has been, Sylvie, to give thee thy ciphering lesson; and he stayed awhile, thinking thou'd be coming back.'
Bell considered.
I shall be main glad to see thee; if thou'lt come.
'Sylvia thought it would take a deal of candlelight, and was for making it into a reason not to learn.
The attitude was changed, but not a word was spoken.
'Yes!' said Sylvia, her colour heightening.
'He'll come again to-morrow night, he says.
Philip read in a high-pitched and unnatural tone of voice, which deprived the words of their reality; for even familiar expressions can become unfamiliar and convey no ideas, if the utterance is forced or affected.
Sylvia danced round to her mother, bent her head back, and kissed her face, and then said defyingly to Philip,--
'Don't lay your head down on your left arm, you'll ne'er see to write straight.'
The night was very still, though now and then crisp sounds in the distant air sounded very near in the silence.
There came a breathing-time after this last event.
She might have gone on but that she caught Kinraid's eyes looking at her with kindly admiration.
But at this moment her father came in from a distant expedition on the moors with Kester to look after the sheep he had pasturing there before the winter set fairly in.
'Only just to get out one of t' damask napkins.'
'I'll come, sir, and be thankful.
Sylvia took her sewing and sat at the little round table by her mother, sharing the light of the scanty dip-candle.
It had a more comfortable aspect by night than by day.
Sylvia, come here, an let's show thee to this young fellow!'
And he had his reward; for in a very short time, Sylvia stood before him with her book in her hand, prepared to say her spelling.
Philip began to grow angry at such determined dumbness.
Sylvia, appearing to listen to Molly's confidences, was hearkening in reality to all this conversation between her father and the specksioneer; and at this invitation she became especially attentive.
'The best napkins, as my mother span?'
For up in the north there is an idea that the ice stored in the first frost will melt, and the meat cured then taint; the first frost is good for nothing but to be thrown away, as they express it.
But Sylvia's quick sense caught up the manner in which Mrs. Corney would apply the way in which her mother's housewifery had been exalted, and stepping forwards out of the shadow, she said,--
'Yes, very,' was her reply.
She stopped speaking, and Mrs. Corney took up the word--
Kinraid replied,--
Hepburn smiled.
CHAPTER VIII
'What for do yo' want my keys?' asked Bell.
Then he arranged her in the right position.
Come along; come, Lassie!' (this last to his dog).
And Sylvia did not need another word.
He's a rare talker.
Molly Corney followed her to the door, and when they were fairly outside, she held Sylvia back for an instant to say,--
Somehow, Sylvia felt as if this repeated promise of reminding Kinraid of his promise to come and see her father took away part of the pleasure she had anticipated from his visit.
Sylvia carried the basket, and looked like little Red Riding Hood.
This was not complimentary, perhaps.
Besides, he had a true John Bullish interest in the war, without very well knowing what the English were fighting for.
All this was addressed to Daniel, to whom she knew that none but masculine company would be acceptable.
But Daniel went on to say that he did not mind if he stepped over with the sausages himself, when it was too late to do anything else.
But thou must take care, and mind the nights he says he'll come, for it's a long way to come for nought.'
No one spoke. Every one was absorbed in what they were doing.
What Philip was doing was, gazing at Sylvia--learning her face off by heart.
'Shall I go take it off, and put on my shawl?' asked Sylvia, a little dolefully.
Abednego!"'
Then Philip pulled out the weekly York paper, and began to read the latest accounts of the war then raging.
'Let us take a turn at spelling, then,' said Philip.
Sylvia sate quite still, unenlivened by this prospect.
Perhaps it was not very flattering to notice Sylvia's great joy when her lessons were over, sadly shortened as they were by Philip's desire not to be too hard upon her.
Abednego!
A fortnight had passed over and winter was advancing with rapid strides.
For Daniel could praise his wife's powers in her absence, though he did not often express himself in an appreciative manner when she was by to hear.
Down she came in a twinkling, dressed in her new red cloak and hood, her face peeping out of the folds of the latter, bright and blushing.
I will not repeat it; it was mere butchery, with features of diabolic cruelty; but what affected me more violently than the horrors of the narrative was his cool and easy recital of his own and the deeds of his companions.
"Let us save the schooner, if possible; there will be more than one watch for your pocket, more than one doubloon for your purse.
"A wife!" cried he; "what should a man of my calling do with a wife?
Where do you sleep?"
"And further aft?"
"What time is it, sir?"
Meanwhile, to dinner!
"That must come.
"Last year!
"Yes, modest, Mr. Paul Rodney.
"Yes," said I.
Now bring those others up there to life, and you make us five.
"Any fool can die.
Better the blackness of death than the blackness of life."
He'd quench his thirst before an engagement with gunpowder mixed in brandy.
"I wish to smoke, and will fetch my pipe."
If Nero did not again fire Rome he would be equal to crimes as great, and desire nothing better than the opportunity for them.
Yesterday you were one, and I can understand your despair.
That watch is yours, sir; and you mean it shall be yours."
This theory may be disputed, but it matters not.
"My memory is good"--he counted afresh on his fingers--"ten cases in all.
"We did well," he answered.
The declivities were gradual, and there was little fear of even a violent convulsion throwing the ice upon us. The danger lay below, under the keel; if the ice split, then down would drop the ship and stave herself, or if she escaped that peril she must be so wedged as to render the least further pressure of the ice against her sides destructive.
Of all desperate villains I never met the like of Barros.
I wonder where the rest of me can be."
After a careful search they found the body lying upon the ground at the foot of a shrimp-salad tree.
To be sure, he could wiggle his ears a bit, and wink his eyes; but that was the extent of his powers.
Away at the eastern end of the Valley was a rough plain, composed entirely of loaf sugar covered with boulders of rock candy which were piled up in great masses reaching nearly to the foot of the mountains, containing many caves and recesses.
I am Prince Zingle, eldest son of the Monarch of Mo, and, since I have been blown into your country through an accident, I certainly deserve kind treatment at your hands."
His first attempt was to break the iron bars; but soon he found they were too big and strong.
But some of our college professors can doubtless tell, and even if they can't they will give it some scientific name that will satisfy the people just as well."
Then the prisoner gave way to despair, and threw himself on the floor of the cage, weeping bitterly.
I am a prince of the royal blood, and unless you treat me respectfully I shall have my father, the King, march his army on you and destroy your whole country."
"We're going to capture this remarkable beast for the royal menagerie, and unless you stand out of the way he may show fight and bite some one."
THE LAND OF THE CIVILIZED MONKEYS
There happened to be a strong south wind blowing and, fearing the kite might get away from him, Zingle tied the string around his waist.
"Sweet!" grunted a man-monkey standing beside her, "he's the ugliest looking brute I ever saw!
Then he began to climb down to the ground, but on reaching the lower branches he was arrested by a most curious sight.
"The professors say we evolved from some primitive creature of this sort."
"So this is the strange animal," said one of the new-comers, putting on his spectacles and looking sharply at the captive; "do you recognize the species, Professor?"
"Stand back, all of you!" shouted one of the soldiers.
The Prince and the King soon changed their clothes, and then there was much rejoicing throughout the land.
By consulting Smith's History of Prince Zingle you will notice that from boyhood he had a great passion for flying kites, and unlike other boys, he always undertook to make each kite larger than the last one. Therefore his kites grew in size, and became larger and larger, until at length the Prince made one twice as tall as himself.
But one of our text-books mentions an obscure animal called Homo Peculiaris, and I have no doubt this is one of that family.
The other aged monkey also regarded the Prince critically before he answered:
"We've got him; he can't bite now."
All the lady-monkeys screamed at this, and the men-monkeys exclaimed:
Then one of them approached the Prince and punched him with a stick, saying, "Stand up!"
At the end of about two weeks a happy relief came to Zingle, for then a baby hippopotamus was captured and brought to the Royal Zoo, and after this the monkeys left the Prince's cage and crowded around that of the new arrival.
Suddenly he heard a great shout from the direction of the cage where the baby hippopotamus was confined, and, rising to his feet, the Prince walked to the bars and attempted to look out and discover what was causing the excitement.
"I do not know.
"What an ugly disposition the beast has!"
I wonder where on earth the creature came from?"
Gold spectacles rested on his nose, and he pointed toward the Prince with a gold-headed cane. By his side was a little girl-monkey, dressed in pink skirts and a blue bonnet; and when she saw Zingle she clung to the old monkey's hand and seemed frightened.
"We will capture the brute and put him in the Zoo," said one of the soldier-monkeys.
At once it filled and mounted to the sky, lifting Zingle from the tree and carrying him with perfect ease.
By this time a large crowd of monkeys had surrounded the tree, some being barefooted boy-monkeys, and some lady-monkeys dressed in silken gowns and gorgeous raiment of the latest mode, and others men-monkeys of all sorts and conditions.
Finding himself at liberty, the Prince lost no time in running to the tree where he had left his kite.
So they led poor Zingle away to where the Royal Zoological Gardens were located, and there they put him into a big cage with iron bars, the door being fastened with two great padlocks.
Zingle did not understand the words, but he resented being prodded with the stick, so he sprang up and rushed on the soldier, kicking the stick from his hands, his own arms being bound by the rope.
"Oh, grandpapa!" she cried; "take me back to mamma; I'm afraid the strange beast will bite me."
That was the last our Prince ever saw of the strange country of the monkeys, for the wind carried his kite straight back to the Valley of Mo.
The children-monkeys began to throw peanuts between the bars of the cage, and Zingle, who had now become very hungry, picked them up and ate them.
He could not understand a word of the monkey language, and therefore had no idea what they were talking about; but he judged from their actions that the monkeys were not friendly.
"Could I but escape and find my way back to my father's valley," he moaned, wearily, "I should be willing to fly small kites forever afterward."
Then the soldier-monkey pulled hard on the rope, and Prince Zingle fell out of the tree to the ground.
Quickly he climbed up the trunk and branches until he had gained the limb where the string of his kite was still fastened.
Zingle had a good start, however, and soon reached the tree.
"It may be one of those beings from whom our race is descended," said another onlooker.
When they brought a long and stout rope, and prepared to throw one end of it over his head, in order to capture him, he became angry and called out to them:
It flew beautifully at first, but pulled so hard the Prince could scarcely hold it.
Up and up he soared, and the kite followed the wind and carried him over many countries until the strength died out of the air, when the kite slowly settled toward the earth and landed the Prince in the top of a tall tree.
"What kind of animal is it?" asked the other.
"See here," suddenly demanded Prince Zingle, standing up and shaking the bars of his cage, "are you going to give me anything to eat?
"Isn't he sweet!" said a lady-monkey who held a green parasol over her head and wore a purple veil on her face.
I must now tell you of a very strange adventure that befell Prince Zingle, which, had it not turned out exactly as it did, might have resulted in making him a captive for life in a remarkable country.
At first the monkeys all pressed backward, as if frightened, but their soldiers cried out:
When it was finished he was very proud of this great kite, and took it out to a level place to see how well it would fly, being accompanied by many of the people of Mo, who took considerable interest in the Prince's amusement.
Then he shook the door with all his strength; but the big padlocks held firm, and could not be broken.
There were dandified monkeys and sober-looking business monkeys, as well as several who appeared to be politicians and officials of high degree.
So they moved back to a safe distance, and the soldier-monkey prepared to throw a rope.
The monkeys threw several cocoanuts into the cage, but the prisoner did not know what kind of fruit these were; so, after several attempts to bite the hard shell, he decided they were not good to eat.
Experience is said to be an excellent teacher, although a very cruel one.
Just then a big monkey, wearing a blue coat with brass buttons and swinging a short club in his hand, strutted up to them and said:
Often he begged them to let him go, but the monkeys gruffly commanded him to "stop his jabbering," and poked him with long sticks having sharp points; so that the Prince's life became one of great misery.
Scarcely has any hair on him at all, and no tail, and very little chin.
Not knowing what he said, none of the monkeys paid any attention to this question.
He jabbers away almost as if he could talk!"
"Hear him bark!
All this time Prince Zingle remained clinging to the branches of the tree.
"Heaven forbid!" cried a dandy-monkey, whose collar was so high that it kept tipping his hat over his eyes.
I shall write an article on the creature and claim he is a Homo, and without doubt the paper will create quite a stir in the scientific world."
"He barks louder," said the soldier.
Of course the first thing Zingle asked for was something to eat, and before long he was sitting at a table heaped with all sorts of good things, plucked fresh from the trees.
"Look out for him; he may be dangerous." The next moment he threw the rope and caught poor Zingle around his arms and body, so that he was helpless.
The monkeys screamed and rushed in every direction, but the other soldier came behind the Prince and knocked him down with the butt of his gun.
He realized at once that if his head would pass between the bars, his body could be made to do so, likewise. So he struggled bravely, and at last succeeded in squeezing his body between the bars and leaping safely to the ground.
Finding himself thus deserted, Prince Zingle began to seek a means of escape from his confinement.
"Stop--I command you!
"Stop!" cried Zingle, again; "do you take me for a thief, that you try to bind me?
He now untied the string from his waist and fastened it to a branch of the tree, as he did not wish to lose the kite after all his bother in making it.
"If I thought such a creature as that was one of my forefathers, I should commit suicide at once."
What is the meaning of this strange conduct?
At last two solemn-looking monkeys with gray hair, and wearing long black coats and white neckties, came up to the cage, where they were greeted with much respect by the other monkeys.
Thereupon the monarch and several of his courtiers rushed out and found Prince Zingle swimming ashore; and the King was so delighted at seeing his lost son again that he clasped him joyfully in his arms.
Or do you expect me to live on peanuts forever?"
Indeed, there is a possibility that he may turn out to be the missing link."
"Don't be afraid, little one.
The beast can't hurt you while I'm around!" And then he tipped his cap over his left ear and shook his club at the Prince, as if he did not know what fear meant.
The next moment he regretted this act, for his best ermine robe was smeared its whole length with custard, and would need considerable cleaning before it would be fit to wear again.
"We've subdued him at last," remarked the soldier who had been kicked. "But he's a very fierce animal, and I shall take him to the Zoo and lock him in one of the strongest cages."
Zingle had been sitting on the floor of his cage and wondering what was to become of him in this strange country of monkeys, and now, to show his authority, one of the keepers took a long stick and began to poke the Prince to make him stand up.
Standing on the ground, and gazing up at him, were a dozen monkeys, all very neatly dressed and all evidently filled with surprise at the Prince's sudden appearance in the tree.
At last, when the string was all let out, there came a sudden gust of wind, and in an instant poor Zingle was drawn into the air as easily as an ordinary kite draws its tail.
She was aboard his ship, in his power, and he desired her.
To thrust himself deliberately between those two, at point-blank range, and so turn the tables on them!
A faint colour stirred in her cheeks.
He added after a moment: "So does the display of ingratitude."
"So I heard," she admitted in a small voice.
He'll end on a yardarm for all his luck.
I am grateful to you, Lord Julian, for your kindly intentions.
His lordship stared at her again.
He has no bitterer enemy in the world!
Miss Bishop sat bemused, her brows knit, her brooding glance seeming to study the fine Spanish point that edged the tablecloth.
"Your Cahusac told you no more than the truth, it seems."
It did not occur to him, being no psychologist, nor learned in the tortuous workings of the feminine mind, that the fact that she should bestow upon him those epithets in the very moment and circumstance of their meeting was in itself curious.
That Spanish Admiral never guessed the intent until it was too late and Blood held him in check.
I was convicted for what I did, neither more nor less.
Miss Bishop was moved to sarcasm.
Stab me!
I doubt if the Royal Navy can show his equal.
True, your uncle commands it...."
Thief and pirate!
To be sold into slavery!
And he had observed all the odd particulars of the meeting of Captain Blood and Miss Bishop, and the curious change that meeting had wrought in each.
What are those who have no charity?
"That's mighty condescending of you!"
He uttered a little laugh of weariness and contempt.
I shouldn't boast of it.
The name evoked a ridiculous memory.
His lordship permitted himself the slightest gesture of impatience.
She had no charity for him, no mercy.
It's his intention to put you both ashore on the coast of Jamaica, as near Port Royal as we dare venture.
"If you would do me the honour to listen, you would not misapprehend me.
His lordship was not disturbed.
Then he half-closed his large, pale eyes, and tilted his head a little.
For this he must wait until Pitt and Wolverstone should have withdrawn.
She was very calm and self-contained; but his lordship observed that she was unusually pale, though considering what she had that day undergone this afforded no matter for wonder.
"He's worth regarding.
He paused in the doorway to impart a piece of information.
He followed her, his mind too full of Captain Blood to be concerned just then with her movements.
I am so.
If it were, I could forgive them.
"How?" she asked him with a sudden startled interest.
His lordship laughed softly.
They were, he conceived, irrevocably and for ever parted.
"Until who died?"
I am disconsolate.
"And living as you have done in these savage places of the world, you can hardly fail to be aware of what is known even in England: that this fellow Blood strictly confines himself to making war upon the Spaniards.
Yet, in spite of this, in spite even of the persuasion that to her this reflection that was his torment could bring no regrets, he had kept the thought of her ever before him in all those wild years of filibustering.
You'll find it in the records.
Having exhausted them, he decided to seek additional information from Miss Bishop.
I don't think I understand." Her brows were knit.
Let him now justify her.
Meanwhile, Lord Julian, who knew the feminine part of humanity rather better than Captain Blood, was engaged in solving the curious problem that had so completely escaped the buccaneer.
A sob broke from him to end that ribald burst of mirth.
Miss Bishop raised her eyes, and looked at him.
"I wasn't aware that he knew of our presence aboard the Milagrosa."
That he should have conducted his filibustering with hands as clean as were possible to a man engaged in such undertakings had also not occurred to her as a charitable thought with which to mitigate her judgment of a man she had once esteemed.
How would not that laughter swell if he added that this girl had that day informed him that she did not number thieves and pirates among her acquaintance.
"Oh, and why, if you please?"
What, then, was she?
Not so, however, reasoned Captain Blood. Indeed, that night he reasoned not at all.
"But there!
"Prudence?"
She had shown him clearly to which world he belonged.
At last his lordship broke the silence.
He checked suddenly, and shivered.
I explain myself, I think, and God knows, it is not my custom.
Then letting his arms fall helplessly to his sides in dejection, he departed.
"It's what you deserve."
But, at least, study generosity.
Pitt answered readily.
Sombre-eyed she sat, staring into vacancy.
But there was no explosion.
"How?
"I didn't say so, ma'am." There was a tartness in his tone evoked by the tartness she had used.
Oh, no; there was no mistake.
He saw the sudden scarlet flame upon her cheeks, the heavy frown that descended upon her brow.
But that's always been his way."
And the quixotic fool is running into danger at the present moment on our behalf."
I grow hot for nothing at all.
Didn't he come to our rescue?"
She tried to remember it all; but Mr. Chalmers had been very kind and had told her not to fret. He would help her when the time came.
He said he found the new snow glaring.
A sudden question from Mellicent seemed to freeze the smile on his lips.
"Like?
By the time the Blaisdells found themselves able to pay attention to Hillerton, or to anything outside their own astounding personal affairs, they became suddenly aware of the attention Hillerton was paying to THEM.
"Indeed!
As he passed the lawyer, however, Mellicent thought she heard him mutter, "You rascal!" But afterwards she concluded she must have been mistaken, for the two men appeared to become at once the best of friends.
Give yourself no uneasiness." To be sure, one day, the big fat man, not Mr. Chalmers, did snap out: "No, madam; only the Lord Almighty can guarantee a government bond--the whole country may be blown to atoms by a volcano to-morrow morning!"
"Mr. Norton, please, what was Mr. Stanley G. Fulton like?" she begged.
During the stay of Mr. Norton in Hillerton, and for some days afterward, the Blaisdells were too absorbed in the mere details of acquiring and temporarily investing their wealth to pay attention to anything else.
The grocery store, the residence of Frank Blaisdell, and Miss Flora's humble cottage might be found at nearly any daylight hour with from one to a dozen curious-eyed gazers on the sidewalk before them.
"But you look so funny, Mr. Smith," said Benny, the first time he saw him.
"It is yours," bowed the lawyer.
SANTA CLAUS ARRIVES
In Hillerton the Blaisdells accepted this notoriety with characteristic variation.
This time it was the lawyer who was smiling straight into Mr. Smith's eyes.
The lawyer lifted his head suddenly.
An offer of marriage from a Western ranchman and another from a Vermont farmer (both entire strangers) did not tend to lessen her perturbation of mind.
How are you, Mr.--Smith?" The lawyer smiled and held out his hand, but there was an odd constraint in his manner. "So you're a Blaisdell, too, are you?"
He's doing a Blaisdell book."
"Why, I didn't hardly know you!"
And it's true.
Mellicent was very sure, therefore, that she must have been mistaken in thinking she had heard Mr. Smith utter so remarkable an exclamation as he left the room that first day.
She spent whole days joyfully figuring percentages, and was awakened from her happy absorption only by the unpleasant realization that her husband was not in sympathy with her ideas at all.
When he came upright his face was very red.
She told Flora that she ought to thank her stars that SHE had the money herself in her own name, to do just as she pleased with, without any old-fogy men bossing her.
"Oh, well, that doesn't matter, does it?" And Mr. Smith gave an odd little chuckle as he turned away.
He's just boarding here, while he writes his book.
She was not so pleased later, when Mr. Norton and the bankers told her what she COULD get--with safety; and she was very angry because they finally appealed to her husband and she was obliged to content herself with a paltry five or six per cent, when there were such lovely mining stocks and oil wells everywhere that would pay so much more.
"This is Mr. Smith, Mr. Norton," murmured Mrs. Jane Blaisdell to the keen-eyed man, who, also, for no apparent reason, had grown very red. "Mr. Smith's a Blaisdell, too,--distant, you know.
"There, I told you so!
Benny, at first welcoming everything with the enthusiasm he would accord to a circus, soon sniffed his disdain, as at a show that had gone stale.
She yielded to the shocked protestations of the others, however, and finally consented that her husband should invest a large part of it in the bonds he so wanted, leaving a generous sum in the bank in her own name.
Meanwhile, he had rented her a nice tin box (that pulled out like a drawer) in the safety-deposit vault under the bank, where she could keep her bonds and all the other papers--such a lot of them!--that Mr. Chalmers told her she must keep very carefully.
There seems to be really nothing more that can be learned about the extraordinary Stanley G. Fulton-Blaisdell affair.
Frank, at the grocery store, rather welcomed questioners--so long as there was a hope of turning them into customers; but his wife and Mellicent showed almost as much terror of them as did Miss Flora herself.
She was startled, terribly startled; but she saw at once, of course, that it must be just his way of joking, for of course there wasn't any volcano big enough to blow up the whole United States; and, anyway, she did not think it was nice of him, and it was almost like swearing, to say "the Lord Almighty" in that tone of voice.
He had been heard to remark, indeed, that he had no use for reporters.
Mrs. Jane had never before known very much about interest, and she was fascinated with its delightful possibilities.
Mr. Smith, for some reason, seemed to be highly amused.
"Yes, what was he like?" coaxed Mr. Smith again.
There are those, however, who, remembering the multi-millionaire's well-known eccentricities, are suspecting him of living in quiet retirement somewhere, laughing in his sleeve at the tempest in the teapot that he has created; and that long before the two years are up, he will be back on Chicago's streets, debonair and smiling as ever.
"Oh, Mr. Smith, it's the lawyer--he's come.
"Didn't you, Benny?" asked Mr. Smith, with suddenly a beaming countenance.
She never liked that fat man again.
I said I was very sure he would not come back and claim this money that is to be paid over to your husband and his brother and sister.
Mr. Smith, these days, was keeping rather closely to his work, especially when reporters were in evidence.
But he did not smile for long.
It was not long after this that Mr. Smith found a tall, gray-haired man, with keen gray eyes, talking with Mrs. Jane Blaisdell and Mellicent in the front room over the grocery store.
There were other things, too, that they had told her--too many for her to remember--something about interest, and things called coupons that must be cut off the bonds at certain times.
"But not near enough to come in on the money, of course," explained Mrs. Jane.
You see if he don't!
Mrs. Jane, when she understood the matter, was for investing every cent of theirs where it would draw the largest interest possible.
He did not look at the tall, gray-haired man again as he advanced into the room.
She had had a savings-bank book, to be sure, but she not been able to put anything in the bank for a long time, and she had been worrying a good deal lately for fear she would have to draw some out, business had been so dull. But she would not have to do that now, of course, with all this money that had come to her.
I knew something was wrong.
Certainly he fought shy of those investigating the Fulton-Blaisdell legacy.
Mrs. Hattie said that, for her part, she should like to leave their share all in the bank: then she'd have it to spend whenever she wanted it.
And now he'll come back and claim the money.
"Of course, we've seen his pictures," broke in Mellicent, "but those don't tell us anything.
Was he nice and jolly, or was he stiff and haughty?
Mr. Norton remained in town several days, and frequently she saw him and Mr. Smith chatting pleasantly together, or starting off apparently for a walk.
Speculation as to whether the multi-millionaire was really dead was prevalent everywhere, and a search for some clue to his reported South American exploring expedition was undertaken in several quarters. Various rumors concerning the expedition appeared immediately, but none of them seemed to have any really solid foundation.
Interviews with the great law firm having the handling of Mr. Fulton's affairs were printed, but even here little could be learned save the mere fact of the letter of instructions, upon which they had acted according to directions, and the other fact that there still remained one more packet--understood to be the last will and testament--to be opened in two years' time if Mr. Fulton remained unheard from.
It IS true!"
"Then you think he's--dead?"
CHAPTER XI
"Give yourself no uneasiness on that score, madam," the lawyer assured her gravely.
This, it is understood, is the final disposition of his estate; and if he is really dead, such will doubtless prove to be the case.
And YOU KNEW HIM.
"I think I can safely guarantee he will not do that."
Mr. Smith gave a real gasp this time, and Mrs. Jane Blaisdell ejaculated:--
It was so comforting always to see them smile, and hear them say: "Perfectly, my dear Miss Flora, perfectly!
It seemed very wonderful!
She was assured that the bonds were just as good as money, anyway, as they were the kind that were readily convertible into cash.
Oh, just an ordinary man, you know,--somewhat conceited, of course." (A queer little half-gasp came from Mr. Smith, but the lawyer was not looking at Mr. Smith.) "Eccentric--you've heard that, probably. And he HAS done crazy things, and no mistake.
What was he like?"
Even Bessie, excited and interested as she was, failed to respond with quite the enthusiasm that her mother showed. Mrs. Hattie saw every reporter, talked freely of "dear Cousin Stanley" and his wonderful generosity, and explained that she would go into mourning, of course, if she knew he was really dead.
Miss Flora had never had a check-book before, but she tried very hard to learn how to use it, and to show herself not too stupid.
He said that the money was his, not hers, and that, for once in his life, he was going to have his way.
Sage, Vermont Sage and Vermont State
Two New York Staters are called and named separately, Coon and Herkimer County.
So I said to hell with that and the next time I saw George Crowley I told him the story and George said, "We don't use synthetic flavor, alfalfa or anything like that."
Grand snack, grand midnight supper, grand anything.
This was imperative because the imported German cheese didn't stand up during the long sea trip and Emil's customers, mostly members of the famous Liederkranz singing society, didn't feel like singing without it.
Proof of our ability to manufacture Cheddar of our own lies in the fact that by 1790 we were exporting it back to England.
Its rind is darker from the growth of mold and this shade is sometimes painted on more ordinary Cheddars to make them look like Coon, which always brings a 10 percent premium above the general run.
Besides Longhorn, in Wisconsin there are a dozen regional competitors ranging from White Twin Cheddar, to which no annatto coloring has been added, through Green Bay cheese to Wisconsin Redskin and Martha Washington Aged, proudly set forth by P.H.
Yet this is an excellent, Blue cheese in its own right.
This snappy-sweet pot is specially suited to a beer party and stein songs. It is also the affinity-spread with rye and pumpernickel, and may be served in small sandwiches or on crackers, celery and such, to make appetizing tidbits for cocktails, tea, or cider.
He makes a limited amount for my Vermont Country Store.
It is a pioneer American product with almost a century and a half of service since Lewis M. Norton conceived it in 1808 in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This is a species of cream cheese made by adding sage leaves and greening to the milk.
Although the Roquefort process of France is followed and the cheese is inoculated in the same way by mold from bread, it can never equal the genuine imported, marked with its red-sheep brand, because the milk used in Minnesota Blue is cow's milk, and the caves are sandstone instead of limestone.
Schnitzelbank Pot
Liederkranz
Apple pie without cheese Is like a kiss without a squeeze.
The first American Cheddar was made soon after 1620 around Plymouth by Pilgrim fathers who brought along not only cheese from the homeland but a live cow to continue the supply.
Its distinguishing features are a mottled green color and a sage flavor.
We received from savant Vrest Orton another letter, together with some Vermont store cheese and some crackers.
Add this to the extract of rennet and stir into the milk as much as your taste may deem sufficient.
A very good receipt for it is given thus: Bruise the tops of fresh young red sage leaves with an equal quantity of spinach leaves and squeeze out the juice.
"Why?"
On this hangs a tale.
Another deserved distinction is that of being sandwiched in between two foreign immortals in the following recipe:
The English called our imitation Yankee, or American, Cheddar, while here at home it was popularly known as yellow or store cheese from its prominent position in every country store; also apple-pie cheese because of its affinity for the all-American dessert.
If green corn leaves (unavailable in England) or other substances are used for coloring, the amounts will vary accordingly.
Herkimer still equals its several distinguished competitors, Coon, Colorado Blackie, California Jack, Pineapple, Sage, Vermont Colby and Wisconsin Longhorn.
Once you've potted your own, you'll find it gives the same thrill as garnishing your own Liptauer.
Brick
This mellow-sharp mix is the sort of ideal the factory processors shoot at with their olive-pimiento abominations.
"Well, because it's cheaper than that synthetic stuff."
Monterey Jack is a stirred curd Cheddar without any annatto coloring. It is sweeter than most and milder when young, but it gets sharper with age and more expensive because of storage costs.
This piny oil, thujone, is diluted with water, 250 parts to one, and either added to the milk or sprayed over the curds, one-eighth ounce for 500 quarts of milk.
Most Cheddars are named after their states.
My taste buds come to full flower with the Sage.
Perhaps his inspiration came from cone-shaped Cheshire in old England, also called Pineapple cheese, combined with the hanging up of Provolones in Italy that leaves the looser pattern of the four sustaining strings.
Yet Brick is no more distinguished than either of the hundred percent Americans, and in our opinion is less worth bragging about.
An even green mottling is thus easily secured without additional labor.
"It was the sharpest on the tree," replied the Prince.
The Prince's left leg, lying a short distance away, heard his whistle, and, recognizing the variations, at once ran up to the head.
So the Prince rushed forward and made a powerful stroke at its neck; but the blow fell short, and cut off, instead, one of the Gigaboo's ten legs.
One of the people, being in the neighborhood, came on the monster and witnessed its terrible deeds; whereupon he ran in great terror to tell the King that the Gigaboo was on them and ready to destroy the entire valley.
"If I can but manage to cut off that horrible head with my sword," thought he, "the beast will surely die."
When they heard this joyful news they gave their Prince three cheers, and loved him better than ever for his bravery.
The Prince, having lost both arms, and his head as well, now abandoned the fight and turned to run, knowing it would be folly to resist the monster further.
Then all that remained was for the Prince to place his head on his shoulders, and there he was--as good as new!
But one day the Gigaboo became so big and strong that in turning around it broke down the walls of the cavern, and finding itself at liberty, the monster walked out into the lovely Valley of Mo to see how much evil it could do.
At length Prince Jollikin, who had been watching the monster earnestly, stepped forward and offered to fight the Gigaboo alone.
Then the right arm stuck the left arm in its place, after which the left arm picked up the right arm and placed it also where it belonged.
At times the good people were obliged to leave their games and sports to defend themselves against a foe or some threatened disaster.
But there was one danger they never suspected, which at last came upon them very suddenly.
Just then, hearing the sound of his voice, the right leg ran up to the head.
The first thing the Gigaboo came to was a large orchard of preserved apricots, and after eating a great quantity of the preserves it wilfully cut off the trees with its sharp claws and utterly ruined them.
The beast had recovered from its fright, and, tempted by its former success, again ventured forth.
When Prince Jollikin's head stopped rolling, he opened his eyes and looked about him, but could see no one; for the people and the Gigaboo had now gone.
But when they saw the Gigaboo they were afraid, and stood gazing at it in alarm, without knowing what to do or how to attack it.
"Where is my body?" asked the Prince.
He picked up his sword, and was feeling himself all over to see if he was put together right, when he chanced to look up and saw the Gigaboo again coming toward him.
Why the Gigaboo should have done this I can not tell; but scientists say these creatures are by nature destructive, and love to ruin everything they come across.
"Pick up my head and place it on top of my legs," continued the Prince; "then, with my eyes and your feet, we can hunt around until we find the rest of me."
But the Gigaboo gave chase, and so swiftly did its nine legs carry it that soon it overtook the Prince and nipped off both his legs.
At any rate, our trees must be saved, so I will do the best I can."
Although Prince Jollikin was glad to be the hero of his nation, and enjoyed the triumph of having been able to conquer his ferocious enemy, he did not escape some inconvenience.
Having vanquished his enemy, Prince Jollikin climbed down from the tree and went to tell the people that the Gigaboo was dead.
In one of the great hollows formed by the rock candy lived a monstrous Gigaboo, completely shut in by the walls of its cavern.
Quick as lightning the monster put out a claw and nipped the Prince's arm which held the sword, cutting it from its body.
Its eyes were remarkably bright and glittering, one being red in color, another green, and the others yellow, blue, black, purple and crimson.
The Gigaboo walked on ten short but thick legs, and in front of its body were two long arms, tipped with claws like those of a lobster. So sharp and strong were these claws that the creature could pinch a tree in two easily.
Then the Gigaboo rolled over on its back and died, for wild and ferocious beasts may be killed in Mo as well as in other parts of the world.
"Well," said the Prince, "here is a part of me, at any rate.
For fear you may not know what a Gigaboo is I shall describe this one. Its body was round, like that of a turtle, and on its back was a thick shell.
The Gigaboo, now very angry, at once nipped off the Prince's left arm with one of its claws, and his head with the other.
After a few minutes, because he had a cheerful disposition and wished to keep himself amused, he began to whistle a popular song; and then, becoming interested in the tune, he whistled it over again with variations.
But Prince Jollikin did not intend to be cut to pieces a second time. He quickly climbed a tree and hid himself among the branches.
Obeying this command, the legs took the head and started off; and perhaps you can imagine how funny the Prince's head looked perched on his legs, with neither body nor arms.
"Who among us can hope to conquer this great beast?" asked the King, in dismay.
The arms now took the head from the legs and put the legs on the body where they belonged.
"If I fail to kill the monster, at least it can not kill me, although it may cause me some annoyance.
Now you must remember, when you read what follows, that no inhabitant of the Valley of Mo can ever be killed by anything.
It had been growing and growing for so many years that it had attained an enormous size.
The arm fell on the ground and the head rolled down a little hill behind some bonbon bushes.
"Is your sword sharp?" asked his father, the King, anxiously.
The King was so pleased that he presented his son with a tin badge, set with diamonds, on the back of which was engraved the picture of a Gigaboo.
"In a matter of this kind," said he, "one man is as good as a dozen.
The people seldom came here, as there was nothing to tempt them, the rock candy being very hard and difficult to walk on.
So you will all stand back while I see where the beast can best be attacked."
Presently the Gigaboo came to the tree and reached its head up to eat a cranberry tart.
But nothing more could be done without the arms; so they next searched for those, and, having discovered them, the legs kicked them to where the body lay.
And what's more—if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp."
All the boys did.
"How you talk, Huck Finn.
"Why," said he, "a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson.
They belong to whoever rubs the lamp or the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says.
You don't seem to know anything, somehow—perfect saphead."
So I was uncomfortable again. I judged the old man would turn up again by and by, though I wished he wouldn't.
By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool.
She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it.
But there warn't no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn't no camels nor no elephants. It warn't anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that.
Sometimes the widow would take me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make a body's mouth water; but maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and knock it all down again.
This was including Miss Watson, as I took it.
Tom Sawyer called the hogs "ingots," and he called the turnips and stuff "julery," and we would go to the cave and powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed and marked.
They took him and buried him on the bank.
Pap he hadn't been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable for me; I didn't want to see him no more.
It warn't any good to me without hooks.
"How you going to get them?"
We used to hop out of the woods and go charging down on hog-drivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market, but we never hived any of them.
He said we must slick up our swords and guns, and get ready.
They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church."
"What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church?
He said it was all done by enchantment.
"I don't know.
I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work.
I said, why couldn't we see them, then?
But I warn't comfortable long, because I happened to think of something.
He said if I warn't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking.
I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks.
He studied a while, and then he says:
I was going to follow around, but I stooped down to look at the tracks first.
Miss Watson's nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it.
I want you to take it; I want to give it to you—the six thousand and all."
I was getting sort of used to the widow's ways, too, and they warn't so raspy on me.
Here's a dollar for you.
He couldn't seem to make it out.
"Well, I'm puzzled.
He says:
That's the correct idea."
I says, go on.
I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
Dey's two angels hoverin' roun' 'bout him.
There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to keep off the devil.
He said:
"No, sir," I says; "is there some for me?"
It was very curious, somehow.
Is something the matter?"
You'll take it—won't you?"
Quite a fortune for you.
She said she warn't ashamed of me.
(I reckoned I wouldn't say nothing about the dollar I got from the judge.) I said it was pretty bad money, but maybe the hair-ball would take it, because maybe it wouldn't know the difference.
I was up in a second and shinning down the hill.
I was at Judge Thatcher's as quick as I could get there.
Living in a house and sleeping in a bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold weather I used to slide out and sleep in the woods sometimes, and so that was a rest to me.
"Why, my boy, you are all out of breath.
The widow said I was coming along slow but sure, and doing very satisfactory.
There was an inch of new snow on the ground, and I seen somebody's tracks.
One morning I happened to turn over the salt-cellar at breakfast. I reached for some of it as quick as I could to throw over my left shoulder and keep off the bad luck, but Miss Watson was in ahead of me, and crossed me off.
I couldn't make it out.
I think I see.
You had better let me invest it along with your six thousand, because if you take it you'll spend it."
This time he said the hair-ball was all right.
Then he wrote something on a paper and read it over, and says:
So I went to him that night and told him pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow.
They had come up from the quarry and stood around the stile a while, and then went on around the garden fence.
I looked over my shoulder every now and then, but I didn't see nobody.
Did you come for your interest?"
He says:
Now you sign it."
He looked surprised.
At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it. Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got next day done me good and cheered me up.
Jim put the quarter under the hair-ball, and got down and listened again.
So I signed it, and left.
Jim got out his hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the floor.
He says:
He said sometimes it wouldn't talk without money.
"No, sir," I says, "I don't want to spend it.
Jim smelt it and bit it and rubbed it, and said he would manage so the hair-ball would think it was good.
"Why, what can you mean, my boy?"
I went down to the front garden and clumb over the stile where you go through the high board fence.
We went there at the usual hour; and round the study fireside found the Doctor, and his young wife, and her mother.
You ought to know better.'
The innocent beauty of her face was not as innocent to me as it had been; I mistrusted the natural grace and charm of her manner; and when I looked at Agnes by her side, and thought how good and true Agnes was, suspicions arose within me that it was an ill-assorted friendship.
'Mama!' said Mrs. Strong.
I brushed away the tears that my utmost resolution had not been able to keep back, and I made a clumsy laugh of it, and we sat down together, side by side.
I am surprised.
'My dear, you absolutely are, on some subjects, one of the most ridiculous persons in the world,' returned her mother, 'and perhaps the most unnatural to the claims of your own family.
Young gentlemen likes poultry in general: have a fowl!'
Do not be alarmed by what I say, Agnes, but in this state I saw him, only the other evening, lay down his head upon his desk, and shed tears like a child.'
And here, in the very first stage, I was supplanted by a shabby man with a squint, who had no other merit than smelling like a livery-stables, and being able to walk across me, more like a fly than a human being, while the horses were at a canter!
I try in vain to recall how I felt about it, and what its circumstances were; but it is not momentous in my recollection.
That's what your father and mother might both have been, Heaven knows, and been the better for it.'
While he was so engaged, he asked me what I would take with it; and on my replying 'Half a pint of sherry,'thought it a favourable opportunity, I am afraid, to extract that measure of wine from the stale leavings at the bottoms of several small decanters.
Steerforth laughed heartily.
'No.
For these reasons I was sorry to go; but for other reasons, unsubstantial enough, I was glad.
'Is he indeed?' said Mr. Dick.
Suppose you were to go down into the old part of the country again, for instance, and see that--that out-of-the-way woman with the savagest of names,' said my aunt, rubbing her nose, for she could never thoroughly forgive Peggotty for being so called.
My dear Doctor, it was his spirit, not his constitution, that he ventured on so boldly.
It appeared to me that he never thought of being observed by anyone; but was so intent upon her, and upon his own thoughts in connexion with her, as to be quite absorbed.
The separation has not made the impression on me, that other separations have.
'Well,' said my aunt, 'that's lucky, for I should like it too.
I LOOK ABOUT ME, AND MAKE A DISCOVERY
Agnes was very glad to see me, and told me that the house had not been like itself since I had left it.
'He is very like David!' said Mr. Dick.
My dear sir,' returned Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head and her fan, 'you little know my poor Jack Maldon when you ask that question. Say?
'But I shall confide in you, just the same, Agnes.
'He's as like her, Dick,' said my aunt, emphatically, 'he's as like her, as she was that afternoon before she began to fret--bless my heart, he's as like her, as he can look at me out of his two eyes!'
But, in the then condition of my mind, where the play was still running high, his former protection of me appeared so deserving of my gratitude, and my old love for him overflowed my breast so freshly and spontaneously, that I went up to him at once, with a fast-beating heart, and said:
'And I said' added Mr. Wickfield gravely, 'abroad.
'Tell me what it is,' she said, in a low voice.
We went to the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, then a mouldy sort of establishment in a close neighbourhood.
It closed in an incident which I well remember.
'Young gentlemen generally has been overdosed with taters.'
Someone of a nobler character, and more worthy altogether than anyone I have ever seen here, must rise up, before I give my consent.
'I knew you immediately,' I said; 'but you are more easily remembered.'
After which she gently chid her daughter Annie, for not being more demonstrative when such kindnesses were showered, for her sake, on her old playfellow; and entertained us with some particulars concerning other deserving members of her family, whom it was desirable to set on their deserving legs.
He looked strong, but he wasn't.
It being now pretty late, we took our candles and went upstairs, where we parted with friendly heartiness at his door, and where I found my new room a great improvement on my old one, it not being at all musty, and having an immense four-post bedstead in it, which was quite a little landed estate.
But Agnes, now suddenly lifting up her eyes to mine, and speaking in a different manner, said:
The Doctor, who made as much of my going away as if I were going to China, received me as an honoured guest; and called for a log of wood to be thrown on the fire, that he might see the face of his old pupil reddening in the blaze.
Whenever I fall into trouble, or fall in love, I shall always tell you, if you'll let me--even when I come to fall in love in earnest.'
But I recollect being conscious of his company without having noticed his coming in--and my still sitting, musing, over the coffee-room fire.
Responsibility!' said the Old Soldier.
Being then in a pleasant frame of mind (from which I infer that poisoning is not always disagreeable in some stages of the process), I resolved to go to the play.
It's because you are like no one else.
Did you ever breed any Suffolk Punches yourself, sir?'
'I came here by the Canterbury coach, today.
CHAPTER 19.
'I shall have nothing to think of then,' said the Doctor, with a smile, 'but my Dictionary; and this other contract-bargain--Annie.'
In a word, I was at liberty to do what I would, for three weeks or a month; and no other conditions were imposed upon my freedom than the before-mentioned thinking and looking about me, and a pledge to write three times a week and faithfully report myself.
I said myself, abroad or at home.'
Not he.
You have such a gentle nature, and you are always right.'
At parting, my aunt gave me some good advice, and a good many kisses; and said that as her object was that I should look about me, and should think a little, she would recommend me to stay a few days in London, if I liked it, either on my way down into Suffolk, or in coming back.
They're wittles and drink to me--lodging, wife, and children--reading, writing, and Arithmetic--snuff, tobacker, and sleep.'
'Say?
Not altered in the least!'
'Why, here,' said Mrs. Markleham, taking a letter from the chimney-piece above the Doctor's head, 'the dear fellow says to the Doctor himself--where is it?
'And I am rejoiced to see you, too!' he said, shaking my hands heartily. 'Why, Copperfield, old boy, don't be overpowered!' And yet he was glad, too, I thought, to see how the delight I had in meeting him affected me.
We were to drink tea at the Doctor's.
But, in the absence of any such miraculous provision, my desire was to apply myself to some pursuit that would not lie too heavily upon her purse; and to do my duty in it, whatever it might be.
I seemed to have left the Doctor's roof with a dark cloud lowering on it.
My mother lives a little way out of town; and the roads being in a beastly condition, and our house tedious enough, I remained here tonight instead of going on.
I am ready.
In pursuance of my aunt's kind scheme, I was shortly afterwards fitted out with a handsome purse of money, and a portmanteau, and tenderly dismissed upon my expedition.
My aunt received this proposal so very ungraciously, that he never ventured on a second; but ever afterwards confined himself to looking watchfully at her for her suggestions, and rattling his money.
But if the dear fellow can't live there, he can't live there.
'Your sister, Betsey Trotwood,' said my aunt, 'would have been as natural and rational a girl as ever breathed.
I turned directly, came back, and looked again.
I grasped him by both hands, and could not let them go.
The main object on my mind, I remember, when we got fairly on the road, was to appear as old as possible to the coachman, and to speak extremely gruff.
She was so happy in it herself, however, and the other was so happy too, that they made the evening fly away as if it were but an hour.
'Now let us see,' said Mrs. Markleham, putting her glass to her eye, 'where the passage is.
But morning brought with it my parting from the old house, which Agnes had filled with her influence; and that occupied my mind sufficiently. I should be there again soon, no doubt; I might sleep again--perhaps often--in my old room; but the days of my inhabiting there were gone, and the old time was past.
The French once ventured ashore; but a war-whoop and a shower of arrows sent them back to their boats.
Yet private enterprise was not quite benumbed.
Among others appeared two chiefs, gorgeously arrayed in painted deer-skins,--kings, as Verrazzano calls them, with attendant gentlemen; while a party of squaws in a canoe, kept by their jealous lords at a safe distance from the caravel, figure in the narrative as the queen and her maids.
Next they kindled a great fire,--doubtless to roast and devour him before the eyes of his comrades, gazing in horror from their boat.
The Breton captain turned a deaf ear to their dissuasions; on which, failing to touch his reason, they appealed to his fears.
In October, 1534, Cartier received from Chabot another commission, and, in spite of secret but bitter opposition from jealous traders of St. Malo, he prepared for a second voyage.
Three days later they set sail.
Eager for glory and for plunder, a swarm of restless nobles followed their knight-errant King, the would-be paladin, who, misshapen in body and fantastic in mind, had yet the power to raise a storm which the lapse of generations could not quell.
Among the earliest and most eminent on its list stands the name of Jacques Cartier.
Yet he esteemed arts and letters, and, still more, coveted the eclat which they could give.
Cartier called it the Bay of St. Lawrence,--a name afterwards extended to the entire gulf, and to the great river above.
The gift of a few strings of beads completed their delight and redoubled their agility; and, from the distance of a mile, their shrill songs of jubilation still reached the ears of the receding Frenchmen.
Some doubt has of late been cast on the reality of this voyage of Verrazzano, and evidence, mainly negative in kind, has been adduced to prove the story of it a fabrication; but the difficulties of incredulity appear greater than those of belief, and no ordinary degree of scepticism is required to reject the evidence that the narrative is essentially true.
He would fain have his share of the prize; and Verrazzano, with four ships, was despatched to seek out a passage westward to the rich kingdom of Cathay.
A French writer, however, advances a more ambitious claim.
Henceforth few traces remain of the fortunes of Verrazzano.
But the time was inauspicious.
To leave this cloudland of tradition, and approach the confines of recorded history.
Aid, however, was at hand; for Donnacona and his tribesmen, rushing pell-mell from the adjacent woods, raised the swooning masqueraders, and, with shrill clamors, bore them in their arms within the sheltering thickets.
Two islands, north of Newfoundland, were given over to the fiends from whom they derived their name, the Isles of Demons.
Here they stayed fifteen days, most courteously received by the inhabitants.
To ascend this great river, and tempt the hazards of its intricate navigation with no better pilots than the two young Indians kidnapped the year before, was a venture of no light risk.
The voyagers took counsel together, turned their prows eastward, and bore away for France, carrying thither, as a sample of the natural products of the New World, two young Indians, lured into their clutches by an act of villanous treachery.
The surf ran high, and the crew could not land; but an adventurous young sailor jumped overboard and swam shoreward with a gift of beads and trinkets for the Indians, who stood watching him. His heart failed as he drew near; he flung his gift among them, turned, and struck out for the boat.
It only remained to requite this kindness, and an opportunity soon occurred; for, coasting the shores of Virginia or Maryland, a party went on shore and found an old woman, a young girl, and several children, hiding with great terror in the grass.
He has been called a pirate, and he was such in the same sense in which Drake, Hawkins, and other valiant sea-rovers of his own and later times, merited the name; that is to say, he would plunder and kill a Spaniard on the high seas without waiting for a declaration of war.
The scattered ships escaped the danger, and, reuniting at the Straits of Belle Isle, steered westward along the coast of Labrador, till they reached a small bay opposite the island of Anticosti.
In him Chabot found a fit agent of his design, if, indeed, its suggestion is not due to the Breton navigator.
Their only intercourse was in the way of trade. From the brink of the rocks which overhung the sea the Indians would let down a cord to the boat below, demand fish-hooks, knives, and steel, in barter for their furs, and, their bargain made, salute the voyagers with unseemly gestures of derision and scorn.
Mingled with such views of interest and ambition was another motive scarcely less potent.
As yet, all was a nameless barbarism, and a cluster of wigwams held the site of the rock-built city of Quebec.
On the contrary, they carefully warmed him, and were trying to dry his clothes, when, recovering from his bewilderment, he betrayed a strong desire to escape to his friends; whereupon, "with great love, clapping him fast about, with many embracings," they led him to the shore, and stood watching till he had reached the boat.
Its name was Stadacone, and it owned the sway of the royal Donnacona.
The light which was beginning to pierce the feudal darkness gathered its rays around his throne.
Verrazzano's next resting-place was the Bay of New York.
Perhaps some plundering straggler from the fishing-banks, some manstealer like the Portuguese Cortereal, or some kidnapper of children and ravisher of squaws like themselves, had warned the denizens of the woods to beware of the worshippers of Christ.
The Indian wardrobe had been taxed to its utmost to do the strangers honor,--copper bracelets, lynx-skins, raccoon-skins, and faces bedaubed with gaudy colors.
But a Spanish writer affirms that, in 1527, he was hanged at Puerto del Pico as a pirate, and this assertion is fully confirmed by authentic documents recently brought to light.
Having, by various blandishments, gained their confidence, they carried off one of the children as a curiosity, and, since the girl was comely, would fain have taken her also, but desisted by reason of her continual screaming.
The Normans, offspring of an ancestry of conquerors,--the Bretons, that stubborn, hardy, unchanging race, who, among Druid monuments changeless as themselves, still cling with Celtic obstinacy to the thoughts and habits of the past,--the Basques, that primeval people, older than history,--all frequented from a very early date the cod-banks of Newfoundland.
Presently he sent a boat ashore.
The inhabitants, who had fled at first, soon came down to the strand in wonder and admiration, pointing out a landing-place, and making gestures of friendship.
For himself, he was earnest to return, plant a colony, and bring the heathen tribes within the pale of the Church.
Again they spread their sails, and on the fifth of May bade farewell to the primitive hospitalities of Newport, steered along the rugged coasts of New England, and surveyed, ill pleased, the surf-beaten rocks, the pine-tree and the fir, the shadows and the gloom of mighty forests.
What became of the other two does not appear.
Under Charles the Eighth and his successor, war and intrigue ruled the day; and in the whirl of Italian politics there was no leisure to think of a new world.
Here, for a full half-hour, the French could hear them haranguing in solemn conclave.
He had not found a passage to Cathay, but he had explored the American coast from the thirty-fourth degree to the fiftieth, and at various points had penetrated several leagues into the country.
The vitality of the kingdom was wasted in Italian wars.
Neither is it clear why, after a preliminary cruise against the Spaniards, he pursued his voyage with one vessel alone, a caravel called the "Dauphine." With her he made for Madeira, and, on the seventeenth of January, 1524, set sail from a barren islet in its neighborhood, and bore away for the unknown world.
On the eighth of July, he wrote from Dieppe to the King the earliest description known to exist of the shores of the United States.
The surf dashed him back, flinging him with violence on the beach among the recipients of his bounty, who seized him by the arms and legs, and, while he called lustily for aid, answered him with outcries designed to allay his terrors.
The hamlet of Stadacone, with its king, Donnacona, and its naked lords and princes, was not the metropolis of this forest state, since a town far greater--so the Indians averred--stood by the brink of the river, many days' journey above.
Milan and Naples offered a more tempting prize than the wilds of Baccalaos.
A mighty promontory, rugged and bare, thrust its scarped front into the surging current.
On the sixteenth of May, 1535, officers and sailors assembled in the cathedral of St. Malo, where, after confession and mass, they received the parting blessing of the bishop.
But what most engaged the eyes of the white men were the fancied signs of mineral wealth in the neighboring hills.
Part 2
The heresy of Luther was convulsing Germany, and the deeper heresy of Calvin infecting France.
Pinzon went to Spain, became known to Columbus, told him the discovery, and joined him on his voyage of 1492.
Ramusio affirms, that, on another voyage, he was killed and eaten by savages, in sight of his followers; and a late writer hazards the conjecture that this voyage, if made at all, was made in the service of Henry the Eighth of England.
Among artists, philosophers, and men of letters enrolled in his service stands the humbler name of a Florentine navigator, John Verrazzano.
While French fishermen plied their trade along these gloomy coasts, the French government spent it's energies on a different field.
Rowing up in his boat through the Narrows, under the steep heights of Staten Island, he saw the harbor within dotted with canoes of the feathered natives, coming from the shore to welcome him.
Here, clothed in the majesty of solitude, breathing the stern poetry of the wilderness, rose the cliffs now rich with heroic memories, where the fiery Count Frontenac cast defiance at his foes, where Wolfe, Montcalm, and Montgomery fell.
A passage to India could be found, and a new France built up beyond the Atlantic.
On this dim verge of the known world there were other perils than those of the waves.
But autumnal storms were gathering.
But skill or fortune prevailed; and, on the first of September, the voyagers reached in safety the gorge of the gloomy Saguenay, with its towering cliffs and sullen depth of waters.
They replied, that the god Coudonagny had sent to warn the French against all attempts to ascend the great river, since, should they persist, snows, tempests, and drifting ice would requite their rashness with inevitable ruin.
The spirit of discovery was awakened.
From this time forth, the Newfoundland fishery was never abandoned. French, English, Spanish, and Portuguese made resort to the Banks, always jealous, often quarrelling, but still drawing up treasure from those exhaustless mines, and bearing home bountiful provision against the season of Lent.
An old map pictures their occupants at length,--devils rampant, with wings, horns, and tail.
1488-1543.
The fickle-minded King, always ardent at the outset of an enterprise and always flagging before its close, divided, moreover, between the smiles of his mistresses and the assaults of his enemies, might probably have dismissed the New World from his thoughts.
Devout Catholics, kindling with redoubled zeal, would fain requite the Church for her losses in the Old World by winning to her fold the infidels of the New.
Here man and nature alike were savage and repellent.
Great was the joy that hailed his arrival, and great were the hopes of emolument and wealth from the new-found shores.
The voyage was a mere reconnoissance.
On board his ship was one Pinzon, whose conduct became so mutinous that, on his return to Dieppe, Cousin made complaint to the magistracy, who thereupon dismissed the offender from the maritime service of the town.
There is no spell, in the stage sense, to break.
Of course the only way to be Ibsen is to be so precisely.
Instead of that, it wanders on through paraphrases of scraps of the play, sometimes literal, then quite alien, on to the alleged motion picture punch, when the Doctor is the god from the machine.
He brings to one's mind the tearful book, much loved in childhood, Parted at the Altar, or Why Was it Thus?
But the novice is always stubborn.
The soundest actors, photographers, and producers will be those who emphasize the points wherein the photoplay is unique.
The book illustration may be said to come in through the ear, by reading the title aloud in imagination.
They made the picture a memorial.
Later they take on the moving picture technique in a superficial way, but they, and the host of talented actors in the prime of life and Broadway success, retain the dramatic state of mind.
Pastor Manders is saying the ceremony.
It appears but the once, and has no chance to become a part of the accepted hieroglyphics of the piece, as it should be, to realize its full power.
There every acquaintance appears and speaks upon the stage, so entirely in character, and with the same tone of voice, that none of us, when awake, were able to imitate it.
Both men stared at him in astonishment.
For many a year have I not felt as at this moment."
"No, I am going to Christianshafen, to Little Market Street."
This the lieutenant felt most poignantly, and this was the reason he leant his head against the window, and sighed so deeply.
The bathing attendant, on his side, uttered a loud cry of astonishment when he beheld in the bath, a man completely dressed.
"I am a Bachelor in Theologia," answered the gentleman with a stiff reverence.
"Well!
Yes, then I was a little wild boy, who did not go to school very regularly.
"I don't understand your Bornholmish dialect," said he at last, angrily, and turning his back upon them.
Close by stood a boy who dashed his stick into a wet ditch.
"Come, let us be men!" said he, involuntarily imitating the chatter of the Parrot, and at the same moment he was again a copying-clerk; but he was sitting in the middle of the table.
They were telling each other, with a confidential interchange of ideas, where they had been during the day.
"Oh, were I rich!
You have genius; but clear-sighted, calm discretion does not take such lofty flights, and utter such high natural tones. For this they have covered you over--they never do the like to me; for I cost more.
"Noisy creature!
Oh!
And behold! to the Shoes of Fortune this was the cue; the whole man shrunk together and a most uncommon journey through the hearts of the front row of spectators, now began.
"I mean those new fangled novels, twisting and writhing themselves in the dust of commonplace, which also expect to find a reading public."
He found, however, a little side-door open, and through this he went, and stepped into our New Market of the present time.
Every evening he goes to a party, where his nice supper costs him nothing: would to Heaven I could but change with him!
"By your leave!" said the Councillor to the Hostess, who came bustling towards him.
No, but they can cry.
Astonished at what he saw, the Councillor asked what was the meaning of all this mummery, and who that man was.
Wonderful, very wonderful!--And this--what have I here?
Oh, he is a hundred times happier than I!"
The watchman's spirit understood the language of the inhabitants of the moon pretty well.
It is extremely interesting, although the whole is a mere fable.
He looked for the house, but it had vanished.
Never had his age, with which, however, he was always grumbling, seemed so miserable as on this evening.
While he thought of this and of the whole metamorphosis he had undergone, he smiled and said, "I sleep and dream; but it is wonderful how one can dream so naturally, and know besides so exactly that it is but a dream.
I missed my good old mother and the dear little ones; who almost tear me to pieces for sheer love."
"Yes; but it is a chain, friend, which ensures you the blessed bread of existence," answered the poet.
Where did I get all this rubbish?
His first feeling was of anger; his next that his temper fell to zero.
Those persons who were sitting nearest him and heard his speech, stared at him in wonderment; and one of them rose, took off his hat respectfully, and said with a serious countenance, "You are no doubt a very learned man, Monsieur."
The Councillor supported his head on his hand, drew a long breath, and thought over all the wondrous things he saw around him.
The Councillor thought she did not understand Danish, and therefore repeated his wish in German.
"I have not read that novel," said the Councillor; "it must be quite a new one, that Heiberg has published lately."
The frightened Canary fluttered about in his cage; the Parrot flapped his wings, and cried, "Come, let us be men!"
He now hit upon a half-open door, through a chink of which a faint light shone.
I wish to Heaven I could walk in and take a trip right through the hearts of those present!"
Instinctively the Clerk obeyed; with a few strokes of his wings he was out of the cage; but at the same moment the door, which was only ajar, and which led to the next room, began to creak, and supple and creeping came the large tomcat into the room, and began to pursue him.
"These police-reports will soon stem the torrent of my ideas, and effectually hinder any rebellious overflowing of the time-worn banks of official duties"; he said to himself consolingly, while his eye ran over the first page.
The woman examined him with eyes of astonishment, and shook her head; she then addressed him in German.
"Ah!
Fly, my friend; fly away.
It was a coarse wood-cut, representing a splendid meteor "as seen in the town of Cologne," which was to be read below in bright letters.
The principal person in the procession was a priest.
Laughing is an infallible sign of the highest degree of mental development.
"So you are going away again!" said the clerk.
I fancied that I was the lieutenant over there: and yet the thing was not very much to my taste after all.
"Oh! those were uncouth birds," answered the Parrot.
His thoughts were so elastic, his heart so tender; and involuntarily he picked one of the nearest flowers.
To reach up to the bell was what he did not like; to cry aloud for help would have availed him little; besides, how ashamed would he have been to be found caught in a trap, like an outwitted fox!
It must be the summer air that affects me with feelings almost as disquieting as they are refreshing."
In the greatest perplexity, he now came out of the last heart in the row; he was unable to put his thoughts in order, and fancied that his too lively imagination had run away with him.
I really cannot squeeze myself through!"
"Gracious Heaven!" said he.
First came a dozen drummers, who understood pretty well how to handle their instruments; then came halberdiers, and some armed with cross-bows.
If I could but once take a leap up there, my body might stay here on the steps for what I care."
"What's to be the end of this!
Reflecting on the matter, and without looking right or left, the Councillor went through East Street and across the Habro-Platz.
"Oh, were I rich!
oh, poor me! As Thou dost know, who all men's hearts canst see.
He walked in.
We will, therefore, not listen to what was spoken, and on no condition run in the possibility of telling tales out of school; but we will rather proceed, like good quiet citizens, to East Street, and observe what happened meanwhile to the body of the watchman.
That's a happy fellow!
I am well fed, and get friendly treatment.
The first heart through which he came, was that of a middle-aged lady, but he instantly fancied himself in the room of the "Institution for the cure of the crooked and deformed," where casts of mis-shapen limbs are displayed in naked reality on the wall.
"They had no education, and talked of whatever came into their head.
It was late; Councillor Knap, deeply occupied with the times of King Hans, intended to go home, and malicious Fate managed matters so that his feet, instead of finding their way to his own galoshes, slipped into those of Fortune.
There, too, I saw many splendidly-dressed paroquets, that told the drollest stories, and the wildest fairy tales without end."
"But what's this?"
He stood in the handsomely furnished apartment, and held between his fingers a small sheet of rose-colored paper, on which some verses were written--written indeed by the officer himself; for who has not, at least once in his life, had a lyrical moment?
Some wretched hovels for the Dutch sailors, resembling great boxes, and after which the place was named, lay about in confused disorder on the opposite bank.
Mr. Polly uttered not a syllable in reply, but swung to and fro with dignified condescension; while a pretty canary, as yellow as gold, that had lately been brought from his sunny fragrant home, began to sing aloud.
He now wanted to pull his over-hasty head back again, but he could not. For his neck there was room enough, but for nothing more.
"That is the happiest thing in the world!
It certainly could not be the Bishop; even though he was considered the most absent man in the whole kingdom, and people told the drollest anecdotes about him.
"I will put them here by the door.
"You need feel no care for the coming morrow: when you are old, you receive a pension."
"It is really disgraceful what a state this place is in," muttered he to himself.
Here sat two female figures, a young and an old one.
The pitch-black clouds poured down their contents in still heavier torrents; not a creature was to be seen in the streets.
'Yes; to-day;--or this evening at least.
'O yes; I know what you mean.'
'The best thing will be,' said he, 'to make a clean breast of it at once.
Indeed, every comfort and luxury had been showered upon his head to compensate him for his lost bride.
Everything went as well as could have been anticipated.
'O, yes;--of course,' he said. 'It's all right.
But at last Michel Voss got upon his legs, his wife giving him various twitches on the sleeve as he did so.
George did return to Colmar that evening, being in all matters of business a man accurate and resolute; but he did not go till he had been thoroughly scolded for his misconduct by Marie Bromar. 'It was your fault,' said Marie.
But I must settle something first.
Michel Voss overdid his part a little by too much talking, but his wife restored the balance by her prudence.
'It shall be if you say so,' answered George; 'but I can't say that I see it.'
Madame Voss, who was close to her husband, pulled him by the sleeve.
She dreaded greatly any symptoms of that courage which follows the flying of corks.
At any rate it was better so than being alone and moody and despised of all people.
Both the old ladies immediately put their handkerchiefs to their eyes.
But the play when acted after this fashion had in it something of pleasing excitement, and he felt assured that he was exhibiting dignity in very adverse circumstances.
To be depressed by the weight of the ill-usage which he had borne was a part of the play which he had to act.
When the speeches were finished the men made themselves happy with their cigars and wine till Madame Voss declared that she was already half-dead with the cold and damp, and then they all returned to the inn in excellent spirits.
George told them how strong the French party was at Colmar, and explained that the Germans had not a leg to stand upon as far as general opinion went.
CHAPTER XXI.
'Your fault from beginning to end.'
He stood upon his legs among the rocks, and with a graceful movement of his arm, waved the glass above his head.
It was pretty to see the mingled grace and shame with which the little ceremony was performed.
But Michel was too bold to attend either to whisperings or pullings of the sleeve, and went on with his speech.
'Not to-day, George.'
'Well;--and what now?' asked the father.
You all know why I came here,--and you all know how I'm going back.' At this moment his voice faltered a little, and he almost sobbed.
George, fill our friend Urmand's glass; not so quickly, George, not so quickly; you give him nothing but the froth.
After the banquet was over Marie expressed herself so much touched as almost to incur the jealousy of her more fortunate lover.
'And now,' said George, as soon as the diligence had started out of the yard.
Madame Voss remained immovable.
Upon the whole the rejected lover liked it.
At two they would eat their dinner--with all their shawls and greatcoats around them--then smoke their cigars, and come back when they found it impossible to drag out the day any longer.
On the next morning the sun was bright, and the air was as warm as it ever is in October.
'I must be off to Colmar next.'
Michel himself was very hilarious.
The drive, unfortunately, would not consume much more than half an hour.
He would know now how to get away from Granpere without having to plan a surreptitious escape.
On the next morning nobody except Marie herself was very early.
I suppose it was a mistake; but it has been rather trying to me.
The day, perhaps, might not have been selected for an out-of-doors party had there been no special reason for such an arrangement; but seeing how strong a reason existed, even Madame Voss acknowledged that the morning was favourable. While those pipes of peace were being smoked over night, Marie had been preparing the hampers.
When supper was done, the father, son, and the discarded lover smoked their pipes together amicably in the billiard room. There was not a word said then by either of them in connection with Marie Bromar.
'You know what I mean, father.'
Marie blushed and turned away her face on to her uncle's shoulder.
May you always be a happy and successful man!' So saying, Michel Voss drained his own tumbler.
Everybody was up to see him off, and Marie herself gave him his cup of coffee at parting.
He turned round with his back to the table and his face to the stove, and said nothing.
'And at any rate, it is no disgrace to be well off.'
He soon walked through into the little sitting-room, and his step-mother followed him.
'Why then have you come here now?'
So he changed his mind, and went into the inn.
'He is a most industrious young man, who thoroughly understands his business.
'I shall see you at supper, shall I not, George, when Uncle will be with us?
None of the family were then about the place, and he could, therefore, go into the stable and ask a question or two of the man who came to meet him.
We shall be very busy at the hotel before long.'
'Very likely not.'
His mind was full of painful thoughts as he went, and as the little animal ran quickly down the mountain road into the valley in which Granpere lies, he almost wished that his feet were not so fleet.
She had often wondered what sign he would make when he should hear of her engagement.
He entered the house almost dreading to see her whom he was seeking. In what way should he first express his wrath?
Why should he go to his father?
She thought for some quarter of an hour what she had better do, and then she determined to go down to him at once.
'Does that mean to say that you are not to be here for my marriage?' This she said with her sweetest smile, making all the effort in her power to give a gracious tone to her voice.
When she had resolved, she waited yet another minute or two, and then she went down-stairs.
He admitted that it was so.
I suppose you can give me a bed.'
What was he to say when he got to Granpere, and to whom was he to say it?
The sooner the first meeting was over the better.
It was better, she knew, to plunge at the subject at once.
'I shall not be here then.'
'I know very well,' said he, 'that my father cares more for Marie than he does for me.'
That is the reason why I have come.
He knew how strong she could be, and how steadfast.
'George,' she said, 'you will displease your father very much if you say anything unkind about Marie.'
She would go down to him and treat him exactly as she might have done, had there never been any special love between them.
How should he show her the wreck which by her inconstancy she had made of his happiness?
He started all alone, early in the morning, and reached Granpere about twelve o'clock.
And you will tell us of the new doings at the hotel.
Why had such an upstart as that, a puny, miserable creature, come between him and the only thing that he had ever seen in the guise of a woman that could touch his heart?
The man declared that Adrian was the luckiest fellow in the world in finding such a wife, but his enthusiasm rose to the highest pitch when he spoke of Marie's luck in finding such a husband.
After that he had left her, and for a year had sent no token.
'I am so glad that you have come.'
Good-bye for the present, George.' Then she was gone before he had spoken another word.
'Because I want to see my father.' Then he remembered how false was this excuse; and remembered also how soon its falseness would appear.
'I do not blame him for it.
His father, the man told him, had gone up early to the wood-cutting, and would not probably return till the afternoon. Madame Voss was no doubt inside, as was also Marie Bromar.
Uncle Michel will be so delighted to find you.
CHAPTER XI.
His journey to Granpere should not be made for nothing.
She lives in the house with him, while I live elsewhere.
And he feared her.
Most braces, you must have observed, Miss Cayley----'
If Harold were rich--well and good, I could never marry him.
I confess I took this ill.
I went on with my typewriting, unmoved.
Higginson has told me about her. He says her bare appearance would suffice to condemn her--a bold, fast, shameless, brazen-faced creature.
'And you will marry Harold?'
And I give and bequeath the like sum of Five Hundred Pounds--did I say, free of legacy duty?
Mr. Ashurst was astute, and therefore obsequious.
'And your terms?' he inquired, in a honey-tongued voice.
'My acquaintance with braces is limited, not to say abstract,' I interposed, smiling.
'I have investigated that point, and find it perfectly regular.
They're so awfully different!'
Anyhow, I've decided.
'This work can wait.
I trembled all over.
The hussy, it seems, was certainly clever.
'But, my dear Miss Cayley----'
The Urbane Old Gentleman did not confine himself entirely, after the first few days, to Stock Exchange literature.
Lady Georgina was clever, and therefore acrimonious.
I should like to be your uncle.'
Your medical attendant sends you there; as a patient and an invalid, you can revel with a clear conscience.
Neither customers nor clients seemed in any particular hurry to disturb our leisure.
An eminent statistician has calculated that five hundred and thirty duly qualified young women are now standing four-square in a solid phalanx in the streets of London, all agog to teach the higher mathematics to anyone who wants them at a moment's notice.
'That being so, Miss Cayley, we can easily understand that the existing commercial prosperity of England depends upon the promises made to Abraham.'
'Brownie, how on earth did you guess it?
I see you understand.
'The name you want is--Lois Cayley!'
He leaned back in his chair and folded his fat hands in undisguised satisfaction.
He seemed satisfied.
'Not at all; look here.' And he drew a small book out of Elsie's portmanteau.
He 'presumed to ask' my Christian name the second day, and remembered my father--'a man of excellent principles.' But he didn't care for Elsie to work for him. Fortunately for her, other work dropped in, once we had found a client, or else, poor girl, she would have felt sadly slighted.
I rose and took his hand in my own spontaneously.
Middies are Midland Ordinary.
Let us be categorical.
Ordered to Florence.
Money?
The revolution of the planets.'
Excuse my asking it, but how many words can you do a minute?'
He has given me satisfaction, and he deserves to be rewarded.'
Elsie rose to it like an angel.
He bowed to us each separately as if we had been duchesses.
'Thank you,' I murmured, bending low over my machine.'
One's cantankerous; the other's only pernicketty. It's one tune, after all, in two different keys.'
'Mr.
The Urbane Old Gentleman eyed me with a sudden tenderness in his glance. 'Young men are lucky,' he said, slowly, after a short pause; '--and-- Higginson is an idiot.
Indeed, I half guessed who he was already.
I put the point to him fairly and squarely, without circumlocution; we were going to start an English typewriting office in Florence; what was the ordinary way for people to become possessed of a typewriting machine, without the odious and mercenary preliminary of paying for it?
Elsie's face looked her doubts.
'Elsie,' I said, 'you are deficient in Faith--which is one of the leading Christian graces.
We handed him our printed tariff.
You heard of him, I suppose, from Georgina.
You must not put it, Mr. Ashurst.
He gazed at me, and twirled his fat thumbs.
And, suppose he did, what then?
Miss Petheridge, forward!'
'No, no,' I answered, firmly. 'That will not do either, please.
'Is he here?'
"I want you to draw up my will for me."
He glanced at his notes and began a letter.
But if you slander me, I will.
You write shorthand, don't you?'
'In the original?'
It will ask it quick enough without your suggesting it.
You can follow on the machine?'
'You will kindly take down notes from my dictation,' he said, fussing with his papers; 'and afterwards, I will ask you to be so good as to copy it all out fair on your typewriter for signature.'
Abel Woodward's esteemed productions protruding from my pocket.
A lady of your intelligence must gather at once that it is----?' He paused and gazed at me.
'Well, I have been sent for the will,' he broke out, curtly.
'On the contrary,' I answered, smiling a polite smile.
From that day forth, the Urbane Old Gentleman was a daily visitor.
After a time he spoke.
'I impressed upon Georgina that she must not mention to you that I was coming.
'You don't quite like this, I'm afraid,' he said, breaking off short.
But we sat in our office and bit our thumbs all day; the thousands stopped at home.
Or should I say your assistant?
He looked relieved.
'Don't trouble your sweet little head about that.
'I shall remember it,' I answered, smiling.
'Even so, Fraeulein.
Resigns post.
I fear I intrude upon you.'
He took an hour at a time at first; but after a few days, the hour lengthened out (apologetically) to an entire morning.
Well, money is a secondary matter.
'Only forty per cent for Ephraim!' I murmured, half below my breath. 'Why, Judah is said to batten upon sixty.'
You are Mr. Marmaduke Ashurst.
We will set up the Florentine School of Stenography and Typewriting.
She began to think she would never live to see such happiness.
After many consultations and conversations, the count at last devised means to tranquillize her.
She tried to get Nicholas back and wished to go herself to join Petya, or to get him an appointment somewhere in Petersburg, but neither of these proved possible.
Above all, they were gay because there was a war near Moscow, there would be fighting at the town gates, arms were being given out, everybody was escaping--going away somewhere, and in general something extraordinary was happening, and that is always exciting, especially to the young.
Though Petya would remain in the service, this transfer would give the countess the consolation of seeing at least one of her sons under her wing, and she hoped to arrange matters for her Petya so as not to let him go again, but always get him appointed to places where he could not possibly take part in a battle.
Some said that no one was to be allowed to leave the city, others on the contrary said that all the icons had been taken out of the churches and everybody was to be ordered to leave.
After Petya had joined Obolenski's regiment of Cossacks and left for Belaya Tserkov where that regiment was forming, the countess was seized with terror.
The count and countess turned to her when they had any orders to give.
The countess did not sleep at night, or when she did fall asleep dreamed that she saw her sons lying dead.
She was also happy because she had someone to adore her: the adoration of others was a lubricant the wheels of her machine needed to make them run freely-- and Petya adored her.
The nearer the time came for Petya to return, the more uneasy grew the countess.
The head of the family, Count Ilya Rostov, continually drove about the city collecting the current rumors from all sides and gave superficial and hasty orders at home about the preparations for their departure.
I want no one but Petya," she thought.
Sonya felt that this was true: that the only possibility of retrieving the Rostovs' affairs was by Nicholas marrying a rich woman, and that the princess was a good match.
They laughed and were gay not because there was any reason to laugh, but because gaiety and mirth were in their hearts and so everything that happened was a cause for gaiety and laughter to them.
From the twenty-eighth till the thirty-first all Moscow was in a bustle and commotion.
On the twenty-eighth of August he arrived.
The presence of Sonya, of her beloved Natasha, or even of her husband irritated her.
At the end of August the Rostovs received another letter from Nicholas.
It was felt that everything would suddenly break up and change, but up to the first of September nothing had done so.
Every day thousands of men wounded at Borodino were brought in by the Dorogomilov gate and taken to various parts of Moscow, and thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions out by the other gates.
But all this was only talk; in reality (though the Council of Fili, at which it was decided to abandon Moscow, had not yet been held) both those who went away and those who remained behind felt, though they did not show it, that Moscow would certainly be abandoned, and that they ought to get away as quickly as possible and save their belongings.
Knowing that one son was out of danger she became the more anxious about Petya.
But of late Sonya had been particularly sad and silent.
The countess watched the things being packed, was dissatisfied with everything, was constantly in pursuit of Petya who was always running away from her, and was jealous of Natasha with whom he spent all his time.
"I was never pleased at Bolkonski's engagement to Natasha," said the countess, "but I always wanted Nicholas to marry the princess, and had a presentiment that it would happen.
What a good thing it would be!"
He wrote from the province of Voronezh where he had been sent to procure remounts, but that letter did not set the countess at ease.
Nicholas' letter in which he mentioned Princess Mary had elicited, in her presence, joyous comments from the countess, who saw an intervention of Providence in this meeting of the princess and Nicholas.
During the three days preceding the occupation of Moscow the whole Rostov family was absorbed in various activities.
He got Petya transferred from Obolenski's regiment to Bezukhov's, which was in training near Moscow.
It was very bitter for her.
"What do I want with them?
Some talked about the Moscow militia which, preceded by the clergy, would go to the Three Hills; others whispered that Augustin had been forbidden to leave, that traitors had been seized, that the peasants were rioting and robbing people on their way from Moscow, and so on.
Natasha was gay because she had been sad too long and now nothing reminded her of the cause of her sadness, and because she was feeling well.
Sonya alone directed the practical side of matters by getting things packed.
But despite her grief, or perhaps just because of it, she took on herself all the difficult work of directing the storing and packing of their things and was busy for whole days.
Almost all day long the house resounded with their running feet, their cries, and their spontaneous laughter.
In spite of Rostopchin's broadsheets, or because of them or independently of them, the strangest and most contradictory rumors were current in the town.
'I thought it looked a little queer.
'Did you think I didn't know the answer to THAT?
'I see you don't,' said Alice.
'Yes, all his horses and all his men,' Humpty Dumpty went on.
'I beg your pardon?' Alice said with a puzzled air.
Alice didn't want to begin another argument, so she said nothing.
'How many days are there in a year?'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
It's always the same.
'That wall is so VERY narrow!'
'Of course I don't think so!
'In spring, when woods are getting green, I'll try and tell you what I mean.'
And a "BOROGOVE" is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round--something like a live mop.'
'Good-bye.'
Evidently Humpty Dumpty was very angry, though he said nothing for a minute or two.
'To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him.
'To send all his horses and all his men,' Alice interrupted, rather unwisely.
'It's a stupid enough name!' Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. 'What does it mean?'
There was a long pause.
'That's enough to begin with,' Humpty Dumpty interrupted: 'there are plenty of hard words there.
And when I found the door was shut, I tried to turn the handle, but--'
'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased.
And when I found the door was locked, I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked.
'Certainly,' said Alice.
'Some people,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, 'have no more sense than a baby!'
'Good-bye, till we meet again!' she said as cheerfully as she could.
'That's all,' said Humpty Dumpty.
'Of course it is.
'I never ask advice about growing,' Alice said indignantly.
Alice couldn't help smiling as she took out her memorandum-book, and worked the sum for him:
'In winter, when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight--
'It's VERY provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, 'to be called an egg--VERY!'
'It's a cravat, child, and a beautiful one, as you say.
There now!'
'To "GYRE" is to go round and round like a gyroscope.
There's glory for you!'
'You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,' said Alice. 'Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?'
'They are that,' said Humpty Dumpty: 'also they make their nests under sun-dials--also they live on cheese.'
'If you can SEE whether I'm singing or not, you've sharper eyes than most.' Humpty Dumpty remarked severely.
'Now I declare that's too bad!' Humpty Dumpty cried, breaking into a sudden passion.
Alice made a short calculation, and said 'Seven years and six months.'
This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:
'What tremendously easy riddles you ask!' Humpty Dumpty growled out.
'Is that all?' Alice timidly asked.
No one can imitate you."
"I shall now be obliged to ask the hair-comb.
I offer you my hand."
"You are certainly a girdle," said the collar; "that is to say an inside girdle.
"Yes, of course! you may be sure of that," said the hair-comb.
But the garter was so bashful, so modest, and thought it was a strange question to answer.
"Where do you live?" asked the collar.
"Oh!" said the collar.
The collar was a little jagged at the edge, and so came the long scissors to cut off the jagged part.
They all had much to say, but the collar the most; for he was a real boaster.
"Yes!
It is the most graceful performance I have ever seen.
A long time passed away, then the collar came into the rag chest at the paper mill; there was a large company of rags, the fine by themselves, and the coarse by themselves, just as it should be.
THE FALSE COLLAR
"I will thank you not to speak to me," said the garter.
"I think I have not given the least occasion for it."
"Rag!" said the box-iron.
"Don't come so near me, I beg of you!" said the garter.
"You deserve to be a baroness," said the collar.
It is true, I was always a fine starched-up gentleman!
I begin to unfold myself.
I see well that you are both for use and ornament, my dear young lady."
You will burn a hole in me.
"Dear lady!" said the collar.
And it became so, all the rags were turned into white paper; but the collar came to be just this very piece of white paper we here see, and on which the story is printed; and that was because it boasted so terribly afterwards of what had never happened to it.
"That I shall not tell you!" said the garter.
When one is as handsome as you," said the collar, "that is occasion enough."
It is surprising how well you preserve your teeth, Miss," said the collar.
"I know it," said the scissors.
Oh!
"All that I have is a fine gentleman, a boot-jack, and a hair-comb.
It was starched, hung over the back of a chair in the sunshine, and was then laid on the ironing-blanket; then came the warm box-iron.
How well you can stretch your legs out!
"You look so much like those men-folks."
"You are certainly the first opera dancer.
"I have had such an immense number of sweethearts!" said the collar. "I could not be in peace!
I am quite changed.
I feel quite hot.
Now there was no other to court, and so he despised it.
"Nay!" said the collar.
Mr Kenwigs appeared to revive.
Having seen him sound asleep, and heard him snore most satisfactorily, and having further presided over the distribution of the toys, to the perfect contentment of all the little Kenwigses, Nicholas took his leave.
CHAPTER 36
Satisfied that nothing could possibly look better in its way, Mr Kenwigs then stepped back again, and calling through the keyhole to Morleena to open the door, vanished into the house, and was seen no longer.
'The attention,' said Mr Kenwigs, looking around with a plaintive air, 'the attention that I've shown to that man!
I don't know anybody in the country.'
'Villain, ass, traitor!'
'Yes,' said Nicholas, 'Mr Lillyvick is there.'
'My children, my defrauded, swindled infants!' cried Mr Kenwigs, pulling so hard, in his vehemence, at the flaxen tail of his second daughter, that he lifted her up on tiptoe, and kept her, for some seconds, in that attitude.
'More shame for you,' retorted the nurse.
'I shouldn't wonder at all,' replied the doctor.
'No time like the present, sir,' said Mr Kenwigs.
Your great-uncle, Lillyvick, my dears!' interposed Mr Kenwigs, condescendingly explaining it to the children.
The matrons dropped off one by one, with the exception of six or eight particular friends, who had determined to stop all night; the lights in the houses gradually disappeared; the last bulletin was issued that Mrs Kenwigs was as well as could be expected; and the whole family were left to their repose.
'No!' returned Mr Kenwigs.
Yes.
'The sitiwation of Mrs Kenwigs, sir, is no obstacle to a little conversation between you and me, I hope?'
'Drat the man!' cried the nurse, looking angrily around.
'And very good ones too, I believe, haven't they?' asked the married lady.
'You consider him a fine boy, do you, sir?' returned Mr Kenwigs.
But knockers may be muffled for other purposes than those of mere utilitarianism, as, in the present instance, was clearly shown.
Henrietta Petowker, eh?
Perhaps more, but certainly that.'
And Mr Lumbey went on nursing the baby with a thoughtful look.
'I made mention of no names, and I wish to make mention of no names,' said Mr Kenwigs, with a portentous look.
Having delivered his sentiments in this form of words, Mr Kenwigs arranged his second daughter's flaxen tail, and bade her be a good girl and mind what her sister, Morleena, said.
'They were all fine babies,' said Mr Lumbey.
He was a stout bluff-looking gentleman, with no shirt-collar to speak of, and a beard that had been growing since yesterday morning; for Dr Lumbey was popular, and the neighbourhood was prolific; and there had been no less than three other knockers muffled, one after the other within the last forty-eight hours.
'She will be a treasure to the man she marries, sir,' said Mr Kenwigs, half aside; 'I think she'll marry above her station, Mr Lumbey.'
'Quite ridiculous,' cried the doctor.
There are certain polite forms and ceremonies which must be observed in civilised life, or mankind relapse into their original barbarism.
Mrs Kenwigs was a lady of some pretensions to gentility; Mrs Kenwigs was confined.
Nicholas hemmed once or twice, and seemed to have some difficulty in proceeding.
'Oh, indeed!' said Mr Lumbey, the doctor.
Indeed, the excitement extended itself over the whole street, and groups of ladies might be seen standing at the doors, (some in the interesting condition in which Mrs Kenwigs had last appeared in public,) relating their experiences of similar occurrences.
Hearing this mention of their old friend's name, the four Miss Kenwigses gathered round Nicholas, open eyed and mouthed, to hear more.
Whether he was considering under what head he could best charge the nursing in the bill, was best known to himself.
'Very much obliged to him, I'm sure.
'The presents that have been made to him,' said Mr Kenwigs, reverting to his calamity, 'the pipes, the snuff-boxes--a pair of india-rubber goloshes, that cost six-and-six--'
'At Portsmouth, Henrietta Petowker is,' observed Mr Kenwigs.
'All friends here.'
'What does he mean by making that noise here?'
Mr Kenwigs started from his seat with a petrified stare, caught his second daughter by her flaxen tail, and covered his face with his pocket-handkerchief.
Well!'
'So she does,' assented Mr Lumbey. 'A great deal more.'
'I think six is almost enough, sir,' returned Mr Kenwigs.
'I ought to make a hundred apologies to you for calling at such a season,' said Nicholas, 'but I was not aware of it until I had rung the bell, and my time is so fully occupied now, that I feared it might be some days before I could possibly come again.'
'Yes! there is a likeness,' said Mr Kenwigs, after some reflection.
Morleena fell, all stiff and rigid, into the baby's chair, as she had seen her mother fall when she fainted away, and the two remaining little Kenwigses shrieked in affright.
'There are some relations of Mrs Kenwigs's,' said Mr Kenwigs, taking a pinch of snuff from the doctor's box, and then sneezing very hard, for he wasn't used to it, 'that might leave their hundred pound apiece to ten people, and yet not go begging when they had done it.'
That was very kind of him; so like him too!
'That girl grows more like her mother every day,' said Mr Lumbey, suddenly stricken with an enthusiastic admiration of Morleena.
'It's a fine boy, Mr Kenwigs,' said Mr Lumbey, the doctor.
The doctor shook his head.
He knew that his niece was in a delicate state, and had, no doubt, sent word that they were to forward full particulars.
Private and confidential; relating to Family Matters.
I know who you mean,' observed the married lady, nodding her head.
'She looks a deal more like her own daughter,' said the married lady.
'And what no man with a family ought to do,' added the neighbours.
Indeed, to do these gentlemen justice, many of them are to this day in the frequent habit of adopting it, with eminent success.
'Well, then, my love, I wish you would keep your foolish fancy to yourself, and not wake up MY foolish fancy to keep it company,' retorted Mrs Nickleby.
'They wouldn't be, if some people had their way,' muttered Newman.
They went into the city, turning down by the river side; and, after a long and very slow drive, the streets being crowded at that hour with vehicles of every kind, stopped in front of a large old dingy house in Thames Street: the door and windows of which were so bespattered with mud, that it would have appeared to have been uninhabited for years.
Newman was very, very far from having the appearance of a gouty subject, and so Kate could not help thinking; but the conference was cut short by Mrs Nickleby's insisting on having the door shut, lest Mr Noggs should take cold, and further persisting in sending the servant girl for a coach, for fear he should bring on another attack of his disorder.
'I don't know how that may have been,' returned Mrs Nickleby: 'but I know she had a very red face, so your argument goes for nothing.'
'Oh! that's not a general rule by any means,' observed Mrs Nickleby; 'for I remember, as well as if it was only yesterday, employing one that I was particularly recommended to, to make me a scarlet cloak at the time when scarlet cloaks were fashionable, and she had a very red face--a very red face, indeed.'
If I were superstitious, I should be almost inclined to believe that some dreadful crime had been perpetrated within these old walls, and that the place had never prospered since.
If her mother's consolations could have restored her to a pleasanter and more enviable state of mind, there were abundance of them to produce the effect.
'I'll get one,' replied Newman.
'I shall be sorry--truly sorry to leave you, my kind friend,' said Kate, on whom the good feeling of the poor miniature painter had made a deep impression.
Old, and gloomy, and black, in truth it was, and sullen and dark were the rooms, once so bustling with life and enterprise.
'I am sure we are very much obliged to him,' observed Mrs Nickleby.
Nobody can prevent that.'
'From Mr Ralph Nickleby,' said Newman, announcing his errand, when he got upstairs, with all possible brevity.
Her uncle's was not a manner likely to dispel any doubts or apprehensions she might have formed, in the outset, neither was the glimpse she had had of Madame Mantalini's establishment by any means encouraging.
An empty dog-kennel, some bones of animals, fragments of iron hoops, and staves of old casks, lay strewn about, but no life was stirring there.
'I shall see you very often, and come and hear how you get on; and if, in all London, or all the wide world besides, there is no other heart that takes an interest in your welfare, there will be one little lonely woman that prays for it night and day.'
However, as she very logically remarked, there must have been SOME young person in that way of business who had made a fortune without having anything to begin with, and that being taken for granted, why should not Kate do the same?
It was a picture of cold, silent decay.
'I am afraid it is an unhealthy occupation,' said Miss La Creevy.
'We need detain you no longer, I think,' said Kate.
'Well, my dear,' said Mrs Nickleby, trying to be pleased, 'now isn't this thoughtful and considerate of your uncle?
'Not help it!'
'Oh yes, I understand you, Mr Noggs,' said Mrs Nickleby.
Happy Mrs Nickleby!
'Is there nothing I can do?' asked Newman.
To both conditions, Newman was compelled to yield.
Newman appeared not to hear these remarks, but preceded them to a couple of rooms on the first floor, which some kind of attempt had been made to render habitable.
'I can't suffer you to think of such a thing,' said Mrs Nickleby.
'Our thoughts are free, of course.
Newman darted a meaning glance at Kate, and replied with a strong emphasis on the last word of his answer, that Mr Ralph Nickleby was well, and sent his LOVE.
It was with many gloomy forebodings and misgivings, therefore, that she looked forward, with a heavy heart, to the opening of her new career.
A project had but to be new, and it came home to her mind, brightly varnished and gilded as a glittering toy.
In one, were a few chairs, a table, an old hearth-rug, and some faded baize; and a fire was ready laid in the grate.
'I recollect getting three young milliners to sit to me, when I first began to paint, and I remember that they were all very pale and sickly.'
I think of a great many things.
Newman Noggs, bowing to the young lady more like a gentleman than the miserable wretch he seemed, placed his hand upon his breast, and, pausing for a moment, with the air of a man who struggles to speak but is uncertain what to say, quitted the room.
By the time Kate reached home, the good lady had called to mind two authentic cases of milliners who had been possessed of considerable property, though whether they had acquired it all in business, or had had a capital to start with, or had been lucky and married to advantage, she could not exactly remember.
'No; I thought of it as I came along; but didn't get one, thinking you mightn't be ready.
There was a wharf behind, opening on the Thames.
How frowning and how dark it looks!'
Newman Noggs inducts Mrs and Miss Nickleby into their New Dwelling in the City
'Nothing, thank you,' rejoined Miss Nickleby.
Miss Nickleby's reflections, as she wended her way homewards, were of that desponding nature which the occurrences of the morning had been sufficiently calculated to awaken.
'We shall be ready directly,' said Kate. 'We have not much to carry, but I fear we must have a coach.'
'Excuse my curiosity,' she said, 'but did I not see you in the coachyard, on the morning my brother went away to Yorkshire?'
In the other stood an old tent bedstead, and a few scanty articles of chamber furniture.
Newman cast a wistful glance on Mrs Nickleby and said 'No,' most unblushingly.
'Indeed you shall not trouble yourself,' said Mrs Nickleby.
'This house depresses and chills one,' said Kate, 'and seems as if some blight had fallen on it.
'Very kind, indeed,' replied Kate, looking round.
'Perhaps she drank,' suggested Miss La Creevy.
In this manner, and with like powerful reasoning, did the worthy matron meet every little objection that presented itself to the new scheme of the morning.
The door of this deserted mansion Newman opened with a key which he took out of his hat--in which, by-the-bye, in consequence of the dilapidated state of his pockets, he deposited everything, and would most likely have carried his money if he had had any--and the coach being discharged, he led the way into the interior of the mansion.
'Well, no more they would, Mr Noggs, and that's very true,' rejoined Mrs Nickleby. 'Some people to be sure are such--how's your master?'
'Perhaps, my dear, Mr Noggs would like to drink our healths,' said Mrs Nickleby, fumbling in her reticule for some small coin.
'You can't help it,' said Newman.
'You shall not shake me off, for all that,' replied Miss La Creevy, with as much sprightliness as she could assume.
CHAPTER 11
'Lord, my dear,' replied Mrs Nickleby, 'don't talk in that way, or you'll frighten me to death.'
'Very,' said Newman. 'I'll tell him so.'
'No!' exclaimed Kate, 'I should have said so anywhere.'
I've had the gout.'
Unless I thought of everything--' This was Mrs Nickleby's usual commencement of a general lamentation, running through a dozen or so of complicated sentences addressed to nobody in particular, and into which she now launched until her breath was exhausted.
Why, we should not have had anything but the bed we bought yesterday, to lie down upon, if it hadn't been for his thoughtfulness!'
Everybody's thoughts are their own, clearly.'
'I will,' said Newman.
Would I have seen other girls love and marry and go to homes of their own, while I--Oh, what am I saying, what am I saying?" she choked, covering her eyes with the back of her hand, and turning her face away.
Miss Maggie laughed.
"Most of us would."
That's exactly it!" Mr. Smith was sitting energetically erect. "You're not a Blaisdell--except when they want something of you!"
Would I have swept and baked and washed and ironed, day in and day out, to make a home for father and for Jim and Frank and Flora?
Their enigmatic answers to questions, and their expressive shrugs and smiles, however, were almost as exciting as the rumors themselves; and the Blaisdells became at once a veritable storm center of surmises and gossip--a state of affairs not at all unpleasing to some of them, Mrs. Harriet in particular.
Between Hattie's pulling one way and Jane the other, I feel like a bone between two quarrelsome puppies.
"Please, if you can, forget what I said.
Indeed, I NEVER--broke out like that--before.
Held by Mrs. Jane's insistence that they weren't sure yet that the thing was true, the family steadfastly refused to give out any definite information.
"The young rascal!
Indeed, Mr. Smith I am very much ashamed."
I like to have them--I mean, I like to do what I can for them," she corrected hastily, laughing in spite of herself.
"Miss Maggie," exclaimed Mr. Smith, with a concern all out of proportion to his supposed interest in the matter, "you don't mean to say you DON'T think this money is going to bring them happiness!"
You can imagine it!"
But that isn't all.
It was just something that you said--about my rights, I think.
"Oh, no!
"Why, Miss Maggie, I didn't suppose you HAD any nerves," bantered the man.
Well, you'd have to be, to escape hearing that word."
"I think not--really.
"No, I know you didn't, but I did," flared the man.
It's neither one thing nor another.
"I mean that things DO matter, and that we merely shut our eyes to the real facts in the case when we say that they don't.
"I didn't mean that.
She was leaning forward in her chair, her lips trembling, her eyes a smouldering flame.
"Miss Maggie, it's a downright shame--the way they impose on you sometimes."
Of course you don't.
"I wish," she began, "I do wish that if that Chicago lawyer is coming, he'd come, and get done with it!
But Miss Maggie was laughing merrily.
"I don't have to--imagine it," murmured the man.
CHAPTER X
We have to have money, too; but I don't think it's--everything in the world, by any means."
"I do, too.
"And it doesn't matter, anyway, of course," he gibed.
WHAT DOES IT MATTER?
"Most of--er--us would be willing to take the risk."
"'Doctrine'?"
Even the eager Harriet yielded to Jane on this point, acknowledging that it WOULD be mortifying, of course, if they SHOULD talk, and nothing came of it.
"Oh, Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith, you don't know what you are saying!"
"That you are not included in the bequest, I mean."
But there are other things--"
Sometimes not."
Besides, as I've told you before, there is no earthly reason why I should have been included. It's the delay, I mean, for the Blaisdells--for the whole town, for that matter.
"You are incorrigible!"
"And what if I had?" she retaliated sharply.
I tell you it's very pernicious--very!
"What man?"
"What do you mean?"
There was no answer.
"I reckon he'll be here before long," murmured Mr. Smith, with an elaborately casual air.
"What if I had insisted on my rights, all the way up?" she quivered. "Would I have come home that first time from college?
"I suppose so.
I never say 'It doesn't matter' to war, or death, or sin, or evil.
Stanley G. Fulton, if you must know, for not giving you any of that money."
Before Mr. Norton could answer, a heavy step down the hall heralded Mr. Frank Blaisdell's advance, and in the ensuing confusion of his arrival, Mr. Smith slipped away.
Mellicent turned to him eagerly.
There is nothing now to do but to await the opening of the second mysterious packet two years hence.
"But Mr. Smith says we've probably got to pay a tax on it," thrust in Mrs. Jane, in a worried voice.
After that she always talked to Mr. Chalmers, or to the other man with a wart on his nose.
Dead or alive, he has no further power over that money now."
"Oh I see.
The lawyer came to a still more unhappy pause.
"Well--" began Mr. Smith, a joyful light of recognition in his eyes. Then suddenly he stooped and picked up something from the floor.
Miss Flora was, indeed, quite breathless most of the time, these days. She tried very hard to give the kind gentlemen who were helping her no trouble, and she showed herself eager always to take their advice.
He read the newspaper accounts, though, most attentively, particularly the ones from Chicago that Mr. Norton kindly sent him sometimes.
Jane was pleased to this extent, and asked if it were possible that she could get such a splendid rate as one hundred per cent.
"Why--er--"
No wonder, indeed, that Miss Flora was quite breathless with it all.
She had not figured on that!
Do tell us," urged Mr. Smith with a bland smile, as he seated himself.
The whole town was agog.
It was at about this time, too, that Mr. Smith began to complain of his eyes and to wear smoked glasses.
So won't you tell us what he was like, please, while we're waiting for father to come up?
And if we've gone and spent any Of it--" A gesture of despair finished her sentence.
But Flora only shivered and said "Mercy me!" and that, for her part, she wished she didn't have to say what to do with it.
Mr. Smith did not show this paragraph to the Blaisdells.
How interesting!
"I did not say that, madam.
"But your Excellency . . ."
She vaguely wondered who the others were, who were also calmly waiting for the Scarlet Pimpernel, while death lurked behind every boulder of the cliffs.
Only for a moment, though; the next she had cowered, like some animal doubled up within itself.
Marguerite had not lost a single one of Chauvelin's words of command. Her every nerve was strained to completely grasp the situation first, then to make a final appeal to those wits which had so often been called the sharpest in Europe, and which alone might be of service now.
"Here, you . . .
"Will your horse and cart be safe alone, here, do you think?" he asked roughly.
"I said, do you hear me?"
You shall stay here, do you hear?
"We cannot let her loose, that's certain," he muttered to himself.
Marguerite had guessed rather than recognized her.
There seems no doubt that, if he gets scared, he will either make a bolt of it, or shriek his head off."
No doubt on the right, somewhere close ahead, was the footpath that led to the edge of the cliff and to the hut.
She felt neither soreness nor weariness; indomitable will to reach her husband in spite of adverse Fate, and of a cunning enemy, killed all sense of bodily pain within her, and rendered her instincts doubly acute.
"There is no question of 'but' or of any argument," said Chauvelin, in a tone that made the timid old man tremble from head to foot.
If an Englishman is there with those traitors, a man who is tall above the average, or who stoops as if he would disguise his height, then give a sharp, quick whistle as a signal to your comrades.
You shall lead us.
Do you understand?"
She lay in the shadow of a great boulder; Chauvelin could not see her features, but he passed his thin, white fingers over her face.
"You, who have crept up to the hut, will try to peep inside.
"Very good.
Do you understand?"
"If, when I return, I do not find you here, I most solemnly assure you that, wherever you may try to hide yourself, I can find you, and that punishment swift, sure and terrible, will sooner or later overtake you. Do you hear me?"
But she did not know if her shrieks would reach the ears of the doomed men. Her effort might be premature, and she would never be allowed to make another.
Suddenly, as she gazed, she saw at some little distance on her left, and about midway down the cliffs, a rough wooden construction, through the wall of which a tiny red light glimmered like a beacon.
Perhaps they do," he added drily.
Suddenly, those same keen instincts within her made her pause in her mad haste, and cower still further within the shadow of the hedge.
Her feet were sore.
When, suddenly, a crevice, or stone, or slippery bit of rock, threw her violently to the ground.
She would see her husband, tell him all, and, if he was ready to forgive the crime, which she had committed in her blind ignorance, she would yet have the happiness of dying by his side.
"Hold your confounded tongue.
The Jew had remained on the road, with his cart and nag.
Her senses were leaving her; half choked with the tight grip round her mouth, she had no strength to move or to utter the faintest sound.
There was the edge of the cliff, and some way below was the hut, where presently, her husband would meet his death.
"Well, you lazy, lumbering old coward," said Chauvelin at last, "you had better shuffle along behind us.
"So it please your Honour . . ."
They had come to their destination.
"A woman!" he whispered, "by all the saints in the calendar."
Do you understand?"
"It does not please me to hear your voice, but it does please me to give you certain orders, which you will find it wise to obey."
Certainly the situation was desperate enough; a tiny band of unsuspecting men, quietly awaiting the arrival of their rescuer, who was equally unconscious of the trap laid for them all.
She had abandoned all hope of saving him: she saw him gradually hemmed in on all sides, and, in despair, she gazed round her into the darkness, and wondered whence he would presently come, to fall into the death-trap which his relentless enemy had prepared for him.
On she pressed, forgetting the deadly foe on her track, running, stumbling, foot-sore, half-dazed, but still on . . .
There was a little pause, then Chauvelin continued,--
The sight of the schooner seemed to infuse into the poor, wearied woman the superhuman strength of despair.
"I wonder now . . ."
She feared to lose her way, or she would have rushed forward and found that wooden hut, and perhaps been in time to warn the fugitives and their brave deliverer yet.
Aaron, Moses, Abraham, or whatever your confounded name may be," he said to the old man, who had quietly stood beside his lean nag, as far away from the soldiers as possible.
"But what am I to do with the brute?"
"But your Honour--" protested the Jew pitiably.
Her knees shook under her, from sheer bodily fatigue.
"Then get along as noiselessly as possible, and I will follow you."
"Benjamin Rosenbaum, so it please your Honour," he replied humbly.
But now she realised that other steps, quicker than her own, were already close at her heels.
"Quick!" said Chauvelin, impatiently, "we have already wasted much valuable time."
"Will you send him back to Calais, citoyen?"
"Now listen very attentively, all of you," continued Chauvelin, impressively, and addressing the soldiers collectively, "for after this we may not be able to exchange another word, so remember every syllable I utter, as if your very lives depended on your memory.
It was the DAY DREAM, Percy's favourite yacht, and all her crew of British sailors: her white sails, glistening in the moonlight, seemed to convey a message to Marguerite of joy and hope, which yet she feared could never be.
I have made use of similar illusions in the contests you have had with my followers.
Thialfi was of all men the swiftest of foot.
After the repast Utgard-Loki led them to the gate of the city, and on parting asked Thor how he thought his journey had turned out, and whether he had met with any men stronger than himself.
He bore Thor's wallet, containing their provisions.
Thor, rising up, called on his companions to seek with him a place of safety.
I felt some moss from the branches fall on my head.
In the first course Hugi so much out-stripped his competitor that he turned back and met him not far from the starting place.
The cat is large, but Thor is little in comparison to our men."
"I see no one here," said Utgard-Loki, looking at the men sitting on the benches, "who would not think it beneath him to wrestle with thee; let somebody, however, call hither that old crone, my nurse Elli, and let Thor wrestle with her if he will.
Skrymir soon fell asleep and began to snore strongly; but when Thor tried to open the wallet, he found the giant had tied it up so tight he could not untie a single knot.
The tale is shortly told.
"We have a very trifling game here," answered Utgard-Loki, "in which we exercise none but children.
Thor put his hand under the cat's belly and did his utmost to raise him from the floor, but the cat, bending his back, had, notwithstanding all Thor's efforts, only one of his feet lifted up, seeing which Thor made no further attempt.
Thor and his companions proceeded on their way, and towards noon descried a city standing in the middle of a plain.
Going further, they came before the king, Utgard-Loki, whom they saluted with great respect.
Thor told him that he could not deny but that he had brought great shame on himself.
She has thrown to the ground many a man not less strong than this Thor is."
Thor answered that he would try a drinking-match with any one.
Utgard-Loki then asked what feat the young man who accompanied Thor could perform.
Utgard-Loki ordered a table to be set for them, on which there was no lack of victuals or drink.
What!
You must take the road that leads eastward, mine lies northward, so we must part here."
The cupbearer having presented it to Thor, Utgard-Loki said, "Whoever is a good drinker will empty that horn at a single draught, though most men make two of it, but the most puny drinker can do it in three."
But what has become of my glove?" Thor then perceived that what they had taken overnight for a hall was the giant's glove, and the chamber where his two companions had sought refuge was the thumb.
Utgard-Loki then told them to desist, adding that Thor had now no occasion to ask any one else in the hall to wrestle with him, and it was also getting late; so he showed Thor and his companions to their seats, and they passed the night there in good cheer.
The more Thor tightened his hold on the crone the firmer she stood.
Me thinks it is time for us to get up and dress ourselves; but you have not now a long way before you to the city called Utgard.
The king observed that skill in running was something to boast of, but if the youth would win the match he must display great agility.
Thialfi answered that he would run a race with any one who might be matched against him.
A little before daybreak he perceived that Skrymir was again fast asleep, and again grasping his mallet, he dashed it with such violence that it forced its way into the giant's skull up to the handle.
I have heard you whispering to one another that I am not a man of small dimensions; but if you come to Utgard you will see there many men much taller than I. Wherefore, I advise you, when you come there, not to make too much of yourselves, for the followers of Utgard-- Loki will not brook the boasting of such little fellows as you are.
Here they lay down to sleep, but towards midnight were alarmed by an earthquake which shook the whole edifice.
How fares it with thee, Thor?" But Thor went away hastily, saying that he had just then awoke, and that as it was only midnight, there was still time for sleep.
He, however, resolved that if he had an opportunity of striking a third blow, it should settle all matters between them.
Are there any birds perched on this tree?
A toothless old woman then entered the hall, and was told by Utgard-Loki to take hold of Thor.
Skrymir, awakening, cried out, "What's the matter?
At last Thor became wroth, and grasping his mallet with both hands he struck a furious blow on the giant's head.
Art thou awake, Thor?
Skrymir then told them he would lie down to sleep.
All the company therefore adjudged that Loki was vanquished.
"This trial has turned out," said Utgard-Loki, "just as I imagined it would.
As he finished speaking, a large gray cat sprang on the hall floor.
So they travelled the whole day, and at dusk Skrymir chose a place for them to pass the night in under a large oak tree.
At length after a very violent struggle Thor began to lose his footing, and was finally brought down upon one knee.
But Skrymir sat up, and stroking his cheek said, "An acorn fell on my head.
"The feat that I know," said Loki, "is to eat quicker than any one else, and in this I am ready to give a proof against any one here who may choose to compete with me."
"And day by day more holy grew Each spot where he had trod, Till after-poets only knew Their first-born brother was a god."
Antigone forms the subject of two fine tragedies of the Grecian poet Sophocles.
Perhaps you have heard of the fame of Dejanira, the fairest of maidens, whom a host of suitors strove to win.
The condition imposed by the Fates had been met, and the decree was irrevocable.
During his long absence, and when it was doubtful whether he still lived, and highly improbable that he would ever return, Penelope was importuned by numerous suitors, from whom there seemed no refuge but in choosing one of them for her husband.
I, on the other hand, said to the father of the maiden, 'Behold me, the king of the waters that flow through your land.
ANTIGONE
He tried to throw me, now attacking my head, now my body.
Alcestis recovered, and was restored to her husband.
That Nyseian isle, Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham, Whom Gentiles Ammon call, and Libyan Jove, Hid Amalthea and her florid son, Young Bacchus, from his stepdame Rhea's eye."
These were the Cyclopes, who have their workshop under Mount Aetna, from which the smoke and flames of their furnaces are constantly issuing.
She pledged herself to make her choice among the suitors when the robe was finished.
This led to the celebrated expedition of the "Seven against Thebes," which furnished ample materials for the epic and tragic poets of Greece.
My bulk was my protection, and he assailed me in vain. For a time we stopped, then returned to the conflict.
There is another account of the origin of the Cornucopia.
"Alas!
Ulysses gave Penelope her choice, to stay or go with him.
I have a strong propensity in me to begin this chapter very nonsensically, and I will not balk my fancy.--Accordingly I set off thus:
There are others again, who will draw a man's character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations;--but this often gives a very incorrect outline,--unless, indeed, you take a sketch of his repletions too; and by correcting one drawing from the other, compound one good figure out of them both.
I should have no objection to this method, but that I think it must smell too strong of the lamp,--and be render'd still more operose, by forcing you to have an eye to the rest of his Non-naturals.--Why the most natural actions of a man's life should be called his Non-naturals,--is another question.
This is precisely my situation.
Of the qualities and conditions of Panurge.
Madam, God give you all that your noble heart desireth!
He had another full of little cups, wherewith he played very artificially, for he had his fingers made to his hand, like those of Minerva or Arachne, and had heretofore cried treacle.
Others, again, ran about the streets, and he would run after them.
Panurge was of a middle stature, not too high nor too low, and had somewhat an aquiline nose, made like the handle of a razor.
Chapter 2.XVI.
No, no, madam, said he, I do but tune my tail to the plain song of the music which you make with your nose.
Nay, St. Anthony's fire kiss it for us!
In another, he had a good deal of needles and thread, wherewith he did a thousand little devilish pranks.
Another he had all full of euphorbium, very finely pulverized.
Very often, also, upon the women's French hoods would he stick in the hind part somewhat made in the shape of a man's member.
For, according to the Legists, agitation and continual motion is cause of attraction.
In another he had a picklock, a pelican, a crampiron, a crook, and some other iron tools, wherewith there was no door nor coffer which he would not pick open.
To such as were in the stripping vein he would very civilly come to offer his attendance, and cover them with his cloak, like a courteous and very gracious man.
In another, he had a squib furnished with tinder, matches, stones to strike fire, and all other tackling necessary for it.
Why would you have the shame taken off you?
"That I cannot tell.
"I think sometimes, if I could but see Jesus for one moment--"
Ask him to forgive you and make you clean and set things right for you.
"Yes.
It seems a sneaking kind of thing: she has got none of it.
"Where would be the good?
"Ah, Leopold!" said the curate, "think, if my coming to you comforts you, what would it be to have him who made you always with you!"
On the contrary, the man who is honestly ashamed has begun to be clean."
"I don't know.
My sister makes excuses for me, but the moment I begin to listen to them I only feel the more horrid."
Again I say, let us keep our shame and be made clean!
THE CURATE'S COUNSEL.
"Is it not rather to have that in you, a part, or all but a part of your being, that makes you capable of doing it?
"Yes, indeed, sir," he answered, earnestly.
How was he to understand or prize the idea, who had his spiritual nature so all undeveloped?
"I don't know.
When he looked again he was gone.
"I have said nothing of that kind to you."
I would fall down on my face and hold his feet lest he should go away from me."
That fear left me next, and now it is the thing itself that is always haunting me. I often wish they would come and take me, and deliver me from myself.
Don't you?" said Leopold with an amazed, half-frightened look.
Then after that danger seemed past, I was afraid of the life to come.
"How do you feel when you think that you may yet be found out?" he asked.
All I can do for you now is only to be near you, and talk to you, and pray to God for you, that so together we may wait for what light may come.--Does anything ever look to you as if it would make you feel better?"
If you had resisted and conquered, you would have been clean from it; and now, if you repent and God comes to you, you will yet be clean.
"Emmeline is not in the dark grave."
"YOU would like to see him then, would you?"
Why should you not be ashamed?
I have come to see--at least I think I have--that except a man has God dwelling in him, he may be, or may become, capable of any crime within the compass of human nature."
Not seeing yet what he had to say, but knowing that scintillation the smallest is light, the curate let the talk take its natural course, and said the next thing that came to him.
"I do believe you," said the curate, and a silence followed.
"But what good would that do to Emmeline?
How was such a poor passionate creature to take that for a comfort?
He could destroy what I have done."
And I do think, if we could find him, then we should find help.
"What would you say to him if you saw him?"
"Where is she, then?" he said with a ghastly look.
"Then the comfort you get from me does you no harm, at least.
I would, indeed, Mr. Wingfold.
Is it not to have done the deed that is the defilement?"
"I don't know anything about God," said Leopold.
It makes me feel it worse than ever to see you sitting there, a clean, strong, innocent man, and think what I might have been."
The curate rose.
Do not waste time in asking yourself how he can do it: that is for him to understand, not you--until it is done.
He would try another way.
"Oh, yes, indeed I do!"
It would be a comfort to have it all known, and never need to start again.
Let us keep our shame, and be made clean from the filth!"
They returned from whence they came, said he; they did no more but change their master.
And for this I had a fair decree, but it cost me dear.
Then began the poor rogues to gape like old mules, and I caused to be provided for them a banquet, with drink of the best, and store of spiceries, to put the old women in rut and heat of lust.
I have more than the king, and if thou wilt join thyself with me, we will do the devil together.
To be short, they occupied all, like good souls; only, to those that were horribly ugly and ill-favoured, I caused their head to be put within a bag, to hide their face.
It was worth to me above six thousand florins, in English coin six hundred pounds.
For in giving them the first farthing, said he, I put it in with such sleight of hand and so dexterously that it appeared to be a threepence; thus with one hand I took threepence, ninepence, or sixpence at the least, and with the other as much, and so through all the churches where we have been.
By this means, to one I gave a hundred florins, to another six score, to another three hundred, according to that they were infamous, detestable, and abominable.
And to what end? said I. My friend, said he, thou hast no pastime at all in this world.
Unto which he answered me that he had taken it out of the basins of the pardons.
For my part, I gained no more of them, but he at all the boxes kissed the relics, and gave at everyone.
"But what can have become of her?"
She had lived with good families, French and English."
and when was that?"
You may as well tell us, madame, we should certainly find out."
I must have been asleep."
"Well, now, Madame la Comtesse, as to her description.
"I do not think it was either strange or unjustifiable," interrupted the Countess, hotly.
It must have been very dull for you," said the Judge, pleasantly.
"Exactly.
"No, not that I am aware of.
"I think 9 was the number of my berth."
I always do, on a journey.
"But where?"
Anything I know I will tell you." She spoke now with perfect self-possession.
It is laudanum."
The Countess all but jumped from her chair in her surprise--surprise that seemed too spontaneous to be feigned.
"Of course.
And now, another small matter.
"Then you would be easily disturbed.
"But if I might ask--why this interest?"
"Pretty?"
"And these friends were--?"
"Indeed I hardly think she is worth keeping after this barefaced desertion."
"And why did you want this?
She is not in the station."
The Countess, with a quick gesture, put out her hand to take it.
"Nothing."
At least I did not recognize him as a friend."
It was he who introduced his brother."
"I will tell you frankly.
"In plain dark serge, bonnet of black straw and brown ribbons.
"It was.
"I was asleep.
I have an idea--only an idea--that this woman has not gone far.
But he would have time to go over them at his leisure, while the work of interrogation was undertaken by the Judge.
She Says we may come over every night and play with her and Thorny."
I guess the letter I brought was a recommend from the Squire."
But I can't bear to see these poor fellows;" and Ben brooded over the fine etching of the dead and dying horses on a battle-field, one past all further pain, the other helpless, but lifting his head from his dead master to neigh a farewell to the comrades who go galloping away in a cloud of dust.
Poor Sancho could only whine and lick away the tears that wet the half-hidden face, questioning the new friend meantime with eyes so full of dumb love and sympathy and sorrow that they seemed almost human. Wiping away her own tears, Miss Celia stooped to pat the white head, and to stroke the black one lying so near it that the dog's breast was the boy's pillow.
"No, no; I'd rather tramp and starve.
Squire sent you a letter; and I'm having such a jolly time, I never thought of it."
She knows how to make folks feel good, don't she?" and Ben gratefully surveyed the Arab chief, now his own, though the best of all the collection.
"There, now, I've forgotten something, too!
"She's like the good fairies in the books, and has all sorts of nice, pretty things in her house," said Betty, enjoying a last hug of the fascinating doll whose lids would shut so that it was a pleasure to Sing, "Bye, sweet baby, bye," with no staring eyes to Spoil the illusion.
Remind me, Thorny."
She is so nicely asleep, it is a pity to wake her.
"Mother must have some of the party; so you shall take her these, Bab, and Betty may carry Baby home for the night.
How long she played Miss Celia never minded; but, when she stole out to see if Ben had gone, she found that other friends, even kinder than herself, had taken the boy into their gentle keeping.
"No; I brought the book, but in the hurry of my tea-party forgot to unpack it.
Throwing himself down beside his dog, Ben clung about the curly neck, sobbing bitterly,--
"Thank you, ma'am, that's a tip-top book, 'specially the pictures.
"Oh, Sanch, he's never coming back again; never, never any more!"
I'll hunt it up to-night.
"Went further on, I s'pose.
Presently the sobbing ceased, and Ben whispered, without looking up,--
Oh, ma'am, he isn't dead?" cried Ben, with a cry that made her heart ache, and Sancho leap up with a bark.
Something in Miss Celia's voice, as she said the last two words with her hand on Ben's shoulder, made him look up quickly and turn red with pleasure, wondering what the Squire had written about him.
"Don't lie on that cold stone, Ben; come here and let me try to comfort you," she said, stooping to wipe away the great drops that kept rolling down the brown cheek half hidden in her dress.
So kind, so very kind was she to them all, that when, after an hour of merry play, she took her brother in to bed, the three who remained fell to praising her enthusiastically as they put things to rights before taking leave.
Yes, he said he might go as far as California, and if he did he'd send for me.
"My poor little boy, I wish I could say no."
Tell mother he will come by-and-by."
"Ben, dear, I've something to tell you," she began, slowly; and the boy waited with a happy face, for no one had called him so since 'Melia died.
He wants me to teach him to ride when he's on his pins again, and Miss Celia says I may.
Seems as if I could see his mane blow in the wind, and hear him whinny to that small feller trotting down to see if he can't get over and be sociable.
"Didn't he send for me?
"Will you go, Ben?" asked Miss Celia, hoping to distract his mind from his grief by speaking of other things.
There was no need of any more words, no need of tears or kind arms around him.
Sancho felt that he must follow suit; and gravely put his paw upon her knee, with a low whine, as if he said, "Count me in, and let me help to pay my master's debt if I can."
Mr. Smithers offered to take the boy back and "do well by him," averring that the father wished his son to remain where he left him, and follow the profession to which he was trained.
"He has gone further away than that, to a lovelier country than California, I hope." And Miss Celia's eyes turned to the deep sky, where early stars were shining.
"What heaps she knows!
daddy! if I'd only seen you jest once more!"
"You can't, you didn't know him!
She would like it, and Thorny's saddle will be here next week," said Miss Celia, pleased to see that the boy appreciated the fine pictures, and felt such hearty sympathy with the noble animals whom she dearly loved herself.
"You may take a turn round my field on Lita any day.
Oh, I say, is this the book you told about, where the horses talked?" asked Ben, suddenly recollecting the speech he had puzzled over ever since he heard it.
I'd like to go there; it's a real splendid place, they say."
No one did look; no one saw how pitifully her eyes rested on Ben's happy face when the letters were put away, and no one minded the new gentleness in her manner as she came back, to the table.
Don't send me back!
"Tell me all about it; I'll be good."
"And I'm going to be her boy, and stay here all the time.
I'd rather ride bareback.
More than Teacher, I do believe; and she doesn't mind how many questions we ask.
"I guess I could,--but you don't mean it?
Oh, daddy!
Where's he gone?
He knew he was an orphan now, and turned instinctively to the old friend who loved him best.
"The Squire has heard about your father, and this is the letter Mr. Smithers sends."
I like folks that will tell me things," added Bab, whose inquisitive mind was always hungry.
"Not yet; I've several things to settle with my new man.
"Won't we have splendid times?
'Bring up the warm water instantly--instantly!' said Mr. Bob Sawyer, with desperate sternness.
You've seen this gentleman before, I think?' Mr. Pickwick shook hands with Mr. Benjamin Allen, and his friends followed his example.
A profound silence immediately ensued; and Mr. Bob Sawyer was observed to turn pale.
It was plain to see, as Mr. Bob Sawyer remarked in a style of Eastern allegory on a subsequent occasion, that she was 'getting the steam up.'
'It's a very unfortunate thing,' said the prim man.
'You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,' said the voice of Mr. Raddle, which appeared to proceed from beneath some distant bed-clothes.
'Bless my heart,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'what a dreadful thing!
It was at the end of the chorus to the first verse, that Mr. Pickwick held up his hand in a listening attitude, and said, as soon as silence was restored--
'Because you'll stick it up over your chimney-piece, and delude your visitors into the false belief that a gentleman has been to see you, Sir,' replied Mr. Gunter.
To this Mr. Gunter replied that, upon the whole, he rather preferred Mr. Noddy to his own brother; on hearing which admission, Mr. Noddy magnanimously rose from his seat, and proffered his hand to Mr. Gunter.
Child's eldest sister bought a necklace--common necklace, made of large black wooden beads.
'That's the most extraordinary case I ever heard of,' said Mr. Pickwick, with an emphatic blow on the table.
You may command me, Bob.'
'I didn't want it particular before to-day; leastways, as it has to go to my landlord directly, it was as well for you to keep it as me.
An astonishing number of men always ARE getting disappointed there.
"Well, don't do it again," said the father.
'Hush!
'By the bye, Bob,' said Hopkins, with a scarcely perceptible glance at Mr. Pickwick's attentive face, 'we had a curious accident last night.
'Nothing at all,' replied Mr. Bob Sawyer.
Yes, it is. Come up, Jack; come up.'
Go on.'
"If you don't mind what I say, my boy," said the father, "you'll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig's whisper." He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before.
'Very singular things occur in our profession, I can assure you, Sir,' said Hopkins.
'It's my landlady,' said Bob Sawyer, looking round him with great dismay.
'No.
'Why not, Sir?' inquired Mr. Noddy.
They are very violent people, the people of the house.'
She had bustled up to the apartment of the unlucky Bob Sawyer, so bent upon going into a passion, that, in all probability, payment would have rather disappointed her than otherwise. She was in excellent order for a little relaxation of the kind, having just exchanged a few introductory compliments with Mr. R. in the front kitchen.
However, there was plenty of porter in a tin can; and the cheese went a great way, for it was very strong.
'I am sorry you have forgotten it,' said Mr. Bob Sawyer, glancing eagerly at the door, as he thought he heard the noise of glasses jingling; 'very sorry.'
His Majesty's revenues are seldom collected in this happy valley; the rents are dubious; and the water communication is very frequently cut off.
She might at least have waited till to-morrow.'
'I think I hear it now,' said Mr. Pickwick. 'Have the goodness to open the door.'
'I should be very sorry, Sawyer,' said Mr. Noddy, 'to create any unpleasantness at any friend's table, and much less at yours, Sawyer--very; but I must take this opportunity of informing Mr. Gunter that he is no gentleman.'
Rather a good accident brought into the casualty ward.'
'Oh, admirably,' said Mr. Benjamin Allen.
'What do you mean by this, Mr. Sawyer?' replied the voice, with great shrillness and rapidity of utterance.
Mr. Ben Allen, who was dismally depressed with spirits and agitation, accompanied them as far as London Bridge, and in the course of the walk confided to Mr. Winkle, as an especially eligible person to intrust the secret to, that he was resolved to cut the throat of any gentleman, except Mr. Bob Sawyer, who should aspire to the affections of his sister Arabella.
'Yes, of course you did!
Walk in.
'How are you?' said the discomfited student.
It is a very ill wind that blows nobody any good.
'Yes, Mrs. Raddle.'
'No, don't,' said Ben Allen.
Child's parents were poor people who lived in a court.
'My good soul,' interposed Mr. Benjamin Allen soothingly.
'It's hardly to be borne,' said the prim man, looking round.
Never mind; I dare say I shall manage to recollect it, in the course of half an hour or so.'
The surprise depicted on the countenances of his guests imparted new courage to the host.
After supper, another jug of punch was put upon the table, together with a paper of cigars, and a couple of bottles of spirits.
'Is it, Bob?'
The chief features in the still life of the street are green shutters, lodging-bills, brass door-plates, and bell-handles; the principal specimens of animated nature, the pot-boy, the muffin youth, and the baked-potato man.
He's in the hospital now,' said Jack Hopkins, 'and he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they're obliged to muffle him in a watchman's coat, for fear he should wake the patients.'
There must be a splendid operation, though, to-morrow--magnificent sight if Slasher does it.'
'Why, bless my heart!' said Mr. Benjamin Allen.
'You're late, Jack?' said Mr. Benjamin Allen.
'What was that, sir?' inquired Mr. Pickwick.
'My dear ma'am,' remonstrated Mr. Pickwick, looking up.
'Why, of course I did,' replied Mr. Benjamin Allen.
They had scarcely taken their seats when there was another double knock.
Notwithstanding the highly satisfactory nature of all these arrangements, there was a cloud on the countenance of Mr. Bob Sawyer, as he sat by the fireside.
'Please, Mister Sawyer, Missis Raddle wants to speak to you.'
'Dear me!' said Mr. Pickwick, astonished.
The prim man arrived at this point just as the glasses came back, when Mr. Bob Sawyer, who had been absorbed in attention during the whole time, said he should very much like to hear the end of it, for, so far as it went, it was, without exception, the very best story he had ever heard.
'Sir, a friend of mine shall wait on you in the morning,' said Mr. Noddy.
'I fear I must,' said Bob, with heroic firmness.
Come, here goes!'
'I thought you were making too much noise.'
John Jardine was courting me openly in the presence of his mother and any one who happened to be around.
I shall keep discreetly in the house, even going at once to bed.
"Indeed, no!" said Nancy Ellen.
"Are you surprised to see me?"
I'll have to go back to school in the same old sailor."
What's the difference how he writes?
"But I must teach to the earn money for my outfit.
"I was wondering about that," he replied.
Go on and read his letter."
"It made small difference then; it makes none at all now.
"I hope soon to be able to offer you such a room and home as you should have," he said.
Where does that dainty and wonderful little mother come in?
"I don't know how we came to be so different.
He got it fighting for his mother from boyhood.
"It's very clean and nice."
I was satisfied with it, and he would have been.
The writing would have been a discredit to a ten-year-old schoolboy. Nancy Ellen threw the letter back on the floor; with a stiffly extended finger, she poked it into the position in which she thought she had found it, and slowly stepped back.
You bet I am going to make things hum, so I can offer you anything you want."
You're right!
I intended to marry him.
"What about my heart and my pride?
"Just for half a cent I'd ask you to read this," she said.
I shall marry him quietly, here, or at Adam's, or before a Justice of the Peace, if neither of you wants me.
"You Goose!" cried the exasperated Nancy Ellen.
She glanced at the stamping and addresses and smiled again: "So it proves," she said.
I would have married him gladly, and I would have been to him all a good wife is to any man; then in a few seconds I turned squarely against him, and lost my respect for him.
"Neither have I," said Kate.
I'd love to have you here."
Good-night! Pleasant dreams!"
Now you've got it, there you sit like a mummy and let your mind be so filled with this idiotic drivel that you're not ever reading John Jardine's letter that is to tell you what both of us are crazy to know."
"But how could you have?" she asked in surprise.
Both of them saw the boy turn in at the gate Friday morning.
Kate threw out both hands, palms down.
Mrs. Holt was not at home, but the house was standing open.
"A thousand times over," he said.
"Three things," said Kate, slowly putting on her long silk gloves. "First, I'm going to telegraph John Jardine that I never shall see him again, if I can possibly avoid it.
Why not have a simple ceremony somewhere at once, and go away until school begins, and forget him, having a good time by ourselves?
Don't be so hurried!
I should do at once any way he suggested to get such a fine-looking man and that much money.
Kate found her room cleaned, shining, and filled with flowers.
"That is the very first line of John Jardine's writing I have ever seen," she said.
Look at that!"
It's too bad!
"Yes, I got it just before I started," said Kate.
"YOU ARE PROVING TO ME, AND ADMITTING TO YOURSELF, THAT YOU NEVER LOVED THAT MAN AT ALL.
George Holt was watching her with eyes lynx-sharp, but Kate never saw it.
He returned her gaze steadily, smiling gravely.
"I had your letter this morning," she said.
She insists that he never paid the slightest attention to a girl before, and he says the same, so there can't be any hidden ugly feature to mar my joy.
As for wealth, who cares?
Kate walked swiftly, finished two of the errands she set out to do, then her feet carried her three miles from Hartley on the Walden road, before she knew where she was, so she proceeded to the village.
It had to end Friday, if John were coming Saturday night.
"Well, if that's what he means by a 'deluge,'" said Kate, "he'll find the flood coming his way.
"And even at that," said Nancy Ellen, "he hasn't just come out right square and said 'Kate, will you marry me?' as I understand it."
She noticed that everything was as she had left it in the spring, with many fresher improvements, made, no doubt, to please her.
As most men do, when things begin to come their way, he lived for making money alone.
"But I didn't know I was saying good-bye," explained Kate.
When she finished, she glanced at Nancy Ellen while slowly folding the sheets.
Kate winced.
She pointed to the letter: "I read that," she said.
"Oh, Kate, you are such a fine teacher!
Robert must go after her every Friday evening, and we'll keep her until Monday, and do all we can to cheer her; and this very day he must find out all there is to know about that George Holt.
I haven't yet heard him talk freely, give an opinion, or discuss a question," said Nancy Ellen.
"I haven't opened my office yet.
"Thank you," said Kate.
"That we do!" agreed Kate.
"It will come to-morrow, surely."
She threw the envelope in Nancy Ellen's lap.
"No," he answered.
Teach him!
"I think there WAS 'a little touch of asperity,' as Agatha would say, in that," said Nancy Ellen, "but Kate has a good heart.
CHAPTER XII
But thank you and Robert, and come after me as often as you can, as a mercy to me.
"Come on, Robert, let's go stand under the maple tree and let her see whether she can see us."
"I suppose he transacts so much business he scarcely ever puts pen to paper.
"You do beat the band!" she cried.
At last she roused herself and again looked at him.
"Now we've made her angry," said Robert.
Come on, Kate, let's do it!
She drew forth the sheet and sat an instant with it in her fingers, watching the expression of Nancy Ellen's face, while she read the most restrained yet impassioned plea that a man of George Holt's nature and opportunities could devise to make to a woman after having spent several months in the construction of it.
Each saw that he carried more than one letter.
"I am not interested in analyzing exactly what I felt for him," said Kate.
It took money to do what he had to do.
He can't pick me up, and carry me away, and dress me, and marry me, as if I were a pauper."
"Kate, what are you going to do?" demanded Nancy Ellen.
"After last year, we figured you might come the last of this week or the first of next, so we got your room ready Monday."
"You've watched for two days and been provoked because that letter didn't come.
"All I want to know about your trouble is whether there is anything a man of my size and strength can do to help you."
"You haven't opened an office yet?" she asked for the sake of saying something, and because a practical thing would naturally suggest itself to her.
"We know a secret!"
At the first hint that she would consider his proposal George Holt drew her to him and talked volumes of impassioned love to her.
He knew she would freeze and starve if he didn't take care of her; he HAD to do it.
A rising young professional man is not to be sneered at, at least until he makes his start and proves what he can do.
"You did very well to educate yourself as you have, with no help at all," she said.
What did his mother mean?"
"It may have been lost or delayed," said Nancy Ellen.
She flamed with sudden irritation.
"I'll just keep them awhile and if she doesn't ask about them, the next time she comes, I'll burn them.
"I can prove it by what you say.
"That was a very fine letter," said Kate.
It only remains, therefore, to notice the other points indicated above:
With a sufficient force, the enemy may be prevented from leaving his boats, should he be able to cross the river.
The frequent reenforcements which had been sent to that army in nowise prepared me for such an announcement.
In distributing the regiments of the several States it would, I think, be better to place the regiments for the war in the same brigade of the State, and assign to those brigades the brigadiers whose services could least easily be dispensed with.
Their pride furnishes the motive for good conduct, and, if wounded, is turned from an instrument of good to one of great power for evil...."
I have noticed the improbabilities and inconsistencies of the paper, and, without remark, I submit to honorable men the concealment from me in which it was prepared, whereby they may judge of the chances for such co-intelligence as needs must exist between the Executive and the commanders of armies to insure attainable success.
Two rules have been applied in the projected reorganization of the Army of the Potomac:
"1.
So far as, in doing this, blame shall be transferred from me to others, it will be the incident, not the design, as it would be most gratifying to me only to notice for praise each and all who wore the gray.
I have been able in writing to you to speak freely, and you have no past associations to disturb the judgment to be passed upon the views presented.
As in 1776, reluctantly she bowed to the necessity of separation from the Crown, so in 1861 the ordinance of secession was adopted.
After my return to the capital, the importance of the subject weighed so heavily upon me as to lead to correspondence with the generals, which will be best understood by the following extracts from my letters to them--which are here appended:
To all the proofs heretofore offered I confidently refer for the establishment of the fact that whatever of bloodshed, of devastation, or shock to republican government has resulted from the war, is to be charged to the Northern States.
As far as practicable, to keep regiments from the same State together; 2.
Virginia, whose history, from the beginning of the Revolution of 1776, had been a long course of sacrifices for the benefit of her sister States, and for the preservation of the Union she had mainly contributed to establish, clung to it with the devotion of a mother.
The Union was the voluntary junction of free and independent States; to subjugate any of them was to destroy constituent parts, and necessarily, therefore, must be the destruction of the Union itself.
Already I have been much pressed on both subjects, and have answered by promising that the generals would give due attention, and, I hoped, make satisfactory changes.
In another part of the paper it is stated that there were hope and expectation that, before the end of the winter, arms would be introduced into the country, and that then we could successfully invade that of the enemy; but this supply of arms, however abundant, could not furnish "seasoned soldiers," and the two propositions are therefore inconsistent.
The question for consideration was, What course should be adopted for the future action of the army? and the preliminary inquiry by me was as to the number of the troops there assembled.
On the north, the most formidable army of the enemy was assembled; to oppose it we had the comparatively small Army of the Potomac.
It has been shown how they endeavored to effect the change with strict regard to the principles controlling a dissolution of partnership, and how earnestly they desired to remain in friendly relations to the Northern States, and how all their overtures were rejected.
On the 26th of May General Johnston's attention was again called to the organization of the ten Mississippi regiments into two brigades, and was reminded that the proposition had been made to him in the previous autumn, with an expression of my confidence that the regiments would be more effective in battle if thus associated.
It was, as stated, with deep regret and bitter disappointment that I found, notwithstanding our diligent efforts to reenforce this army before and after the battle of Manassas, that its strength had but little increased, and that the arms of absentees and discharged men were represented by only twenty-five hundred on hand.
It does not agree in some respects with my memory of what occurred, and is not consistent with itself.
The simple fact was, the country had gone to war without counting the cost.
First, the organization of the army.
"Jefferson Davis."
The authority to organize regiments into brigades and the latter into divisions is by law conferred only on the President; and I must be able to assume responsibility of the action taken by whomsoever acts for me in that regard.
The fiction of my having prevented the pursuit of the enemy after the victory of Manassas was exploded after it had acquired an authoritative and semi-official form in the manner and for the reasons heretofore set forth.
In one part of the paper it is stated that the reenforcements asked for were to be "seasoned soldiers," such as were there present, and who were said to be in the "finest fighting condition." This, if such a proposition had been made, would have exposed its absurdity, as well as the loophole it offered for escape, by subsequently asserting that the troops furnished were not up to the proposed standard.
Thus would the spirit and intent of the law be complied with, disagreeable complaint be spared me, and more of content be assured under the trials to which you look forward. It is needless to specify further.
Since the date of your glorious victory the enemy have grown weaker in numbers, and far weaker in the character of their troops, so that I had felt it remained with us to decide whether another battle should soon be fought or not.
Having exhausted all other means, she took the last resort, and, if for this she was selected as the first object of assault, "methinks the punishment exceedeth the offense."
I can not suppose that General Johnston could have noticed the statement that his request for conference had set forth the object of it to be to discuss the question of reenforcement.
It was not necessary that I should learn in that interview the evil of inactivity.
When at that time and place I met General Johnston for conference, he called in the two generals next in rank to himself, Beauregard and G. W. Smith.
"General J. E. Johnston.
You pointed me to the fact that you had observed that rule in the case of the Louisiana and Carolina troops, and you will not fail to perceive that others find in the fact a reason for the like disposal of them.
The reasons formerly offered have one after another disappeared, and I hope you will, as you can, proceed to organize your troops as heretofore instructed, and that the returns will relieve us of the uncertainty now felt as to the number and relations of the troops, and the commands of the officers having brigades and divisions....
"Jefferson Davis".
Your remarks about the moral effect of repressing the hope of the volunteers for an advance are in accordance with the painful impression made on me when, in our council, it was revealed to me that the Army of the Potomac had been reduced to about one half the legalized strength, and that the arms to restore the numbers were not in depot.
"You have again been deceived as to the forces here.
The most distinguished of our citizens were not the slowest to learn the lesson, and perhaps no army ever more thoroughly knew it than did that which Lee led into Pennsylvania, and none ever had a leader who in his own conduct better illustrated the lesson.
A marked characteristic of the Southern people was individuality, and time was needful to teach them that the terrible machine, a disciplined army, must be made of men who had surrendered their freedom of will.
"I am, as ever, your friend,
The large resources and full preparation of the United States Government enabled it to girt Virginia as with a wall of fire.
There was but one course consistent with her stainless reputation and often-declared tenets, as to the liberties of her people, which she could have adopted.
"Very truly, your friend,
In the hour of sickness, and the tedium of waiting for spring, men from the same region will best console and relieve each other.
Our largest army in 1861 was that of the Potomac.
"My Dear General:...
On the east, the advance of the enemy was on several occasions feasible, when we consider the number of his forces at and about Fortress Monroe, in comparison with the small means retained for the defense of the capital.
Both brigades should be put in the division commanded by General Van Dorn, of Mississippi.
By reference to the law, you will see that, in surrendering the sole power to appoint general officers, it was nevertheless designed, as far as should be found consistent, to keep up the State relation of troops and generals.
After the explosion of the fallacy that I had prevented the pursuit of the enemy from Manassas in July, 1861, my assailants have sought to cover their exposure by a change of time and place, locating their story at Fairfax Court-House, and dating it in the autumn of 1861.
Troops, as rapidly as they could be raised and armed, were sent forward for that purpose.
"... I have thought often upon the questions of reorganization which were submitted to you, and it has seemed to me that, whether in view of disease, or the disappointment and suffering of a winter cantonment on a line of defense, or of a battle to be fought in and near your position, it was desirable to combine the troops, by a new distribution, with as little delay as practicable.
The effect of the battery and of the expedition, it was hoped, would be important in relieving our friends and securing recruits from those who wished to join us.
To the calm judgment of mankind is submitted the question, Who was responsible for the war between the States?
Twenty years after the event, I learned of this secret report, by one party, without notice having been given to the other, of a conversation said to have lasted two hours.
It only remained for me to answer that I had not power to furnish such a number of troops; and, unless the militia bearing their private arms should be relied on, we could not possibly fulfill such a requisition until after the receipt of the small-arms which we had early and constantly striven to procure from abroad, and had for some time expected.
Brigadiers Clark and (as a native of Mississippi) Whiting should be placed in command of them, and the regiments for the war put in the army man's brigade.
This being regarded as the line on which the greatest danger was apprehended, our efforts were mostly directed toward giving it the requisite strength.
"Your remarks on the want of efficient staff-officers are realized in all their force, and I hope, among the elements which constitute a staff-officer for volunteers, you have duly estimated the qualities of forbearance and urbanity.
Then, there, and everywhere, our difficulty was the want of arms and munitions of war.
After I had written the foregoing, and all the succeeding chapters on kindred subjects, a friend, in October, 1880, furnished me with a copy of a paper relating to the conference at Fairfax Court-House, which seems to require notice at my hands.
The duty to obey the law was imperative, and neither the Executive nor the officers of the army had any right to question its propriety.
But in the mean time I hoped that something could be done by detachments from the army to effect objects less difficult than an advance against his main force, and particularly indicated the lower part of Maryland, where a small force was said to be ravaging the country and oppressing our friends.
The spirit of the law, then, indicates that brigades should be larger than customary, the general being charged with the care, the direction, the preservation of the men, rather than the internal police."
I have been much harassed, and the public interest has certainly suffered, by the delay to place the regiments of some of the States in brigades together, it being deemed that unjust discrimination was made against them, and also by the popular error which has existed as to the number of brigadiers to which appointments could be specially urged on the grounds of residence.
If the volunteers continue their complaints that they are commanded by strangers and do not get justice, and that they are kept in camp to die when reported for hospital by the surgeon, we shall soon feel a reaction in the matter of volunteering.
The hope and the wish of the people of the South were that the disagreeable necessity of separation would be peacefully met, and be followed by such commercial regulations as would least disturb the prosperity and future intercourse of the separated States.
How have you progressed in the solution of the problem I left--the organization of the troops with reference to the States, and term of service?
"They must have leaked out before, dear Raggedy!" cried all the other dolls.
My!
"But I do believe my arms will never work without squeaking, they feel so rusted," he added.
"I can easily do that!" cried the tin soldier, as he raised his gun.
"They were all left sitting in their places around the room!
"This is funny!" cried Mistress.
"I think it would be a good plan to elect Raggedy Ann as our leader on this expedition!" said the Indian doll.
It's JAM!
"No!" said Raggedy Ann.
After thinking quite hard for a moment, Raggedy Ann jumped up and said: "I have it!" And she caught up the Jumping Jack and held him up to the door; then Jack slid up his stick and unlocked the door.
The tin soldier fell from the shelf three times and bent one of his tin legs, but he scrambled right back up again.
"There must be a way to get inside," said Raggedy Ann.
I do believe you are covered with jam!" and Mistress tasted Raggedy Ann's hand.
And when the front gate clicked and the dollies knew they were alone in the house, they all scrambled to their feet.
"Please do not let him shoot!"
But none of the dollies was tall enough to open the door and, although they pushed and pulled with all their might, the door remained tightly closed.
"Oh, Raggedy Ann!" cried the French dolly.
And there they sat and never even so much as wiggled a finger, until their mistress had left the room.
So Raggedy Ann, very proud indeed to have the confidence and love of all the other dollies, said that she would be very glad to be their leader.
Finally Raggedy Ann drew away from the others and sat down on the floor.
"It feels as if my head were ripped."
She picked up all the sticky dolls and putting them in a basket she carried them out under the apple tree in the garden.
Shame on you, Raggedy Ann!
Such a scramble!
"Raggedy says there must be a way to get inside!" cried all the dolls.
"This is the place!" cried Raggedy Ann, and sure enough, all the dollies smelled something which they knew must be very good to eat.
A jar of raspberry jam was overturned and the dollies ate of this until their faces were all purple.
All the dolls lay as still as mice for a few minutes, then Raggedy Ann raised up on her cotton-stuffed elbows and said: "I have been thinking!"
The other dollies followed, racing about the house until they came to the pantry door.
"Yes!
"It's not a very neat job, for I got some puckers in it!" she said.
"I can't seem to think clearly to-day," said Raggedy Ann.
RAGGEDY ANN LEARNS A LESSON
"Sh!" said all the other dollies, "Raggedy has been thinking!"
Let's all go in search of something to eat!" cried all the other dollies.
So let us all remember and try never again to do anything which might cause those who love us any unhappiness!"
The Indian doll found some corn bread and dipping it in the molasses he sat down for a good feast.
"Then you lead the way, Raggedy Ann!" cried the French dolly.
When she came back she had on an apron and her sleeves were rolled up.
"Now I can think quite clearly."
"Now Raggedy can think quite clearly!" cried all the dolls.
"Let's all go in search of something to eat!"
The dolls piled over one another in their desire to be the first at the goodies.
At this the French doll ran to Raggedy Ann and took off her bonnet. "Yes, there is a rip in your head, Raggedy!" she said and pulled a pin from her skirt and pinned up Raggedy's head.
"Now that I can think so clearly," said Raggedy Ann, "I think the door must be locked and to get in we must unlock it!"
One day the dolls were left all to themselves.
The dollies were talking and pulling and pushing and every once in a while one would fall over and the others would step on her in their efforts to open the door.
You've been in the pantry and all the others, too!" and with this the dolls' mistress dropped Raggedy Ann on the floor and left the room.
"Yes," said Raggedy Ann, "I have been thinking; our mistress gave us the nice dinner out under the trees to teach us a lesson.
Then they were placed in their beds and Mistress kissed each one good night and tiptoed from the room.
Their little mistress had placed them all around the room and told them to be nice children while she was away.
"We must think of a quieter way!"
Just then the wind twisted the little Dutch doll and loosened his clothes-pin, so that he fell to the grass below with a sawdusty bump and as he rolled over he said, "Mamma!" in a squeaky voice.
When the other dollies discovered Raggedy Ann sitting there, running her rag hands through her yarn hair, they knew she was thinking.
They had lemonade with grape jelly in it, which made it a beautiful lavender color, and little "Baby-teeny-weeny-cookies" with powdered sugar on them.
Just as their mistress came into the room the dolls dropped in whatever positions they happened to be in.
"When Mistress had me out playing with her this morning," said Raggedy Ann, "she carried me by a door near the back of the house and I smelled something which smelled as if it would taste delicious!"
"Let us all remember," chimed all the other dollies.
"Yes!
They swarmed upon the pantry shelves and in their eagerness spilled a pitcher of cream which ran all over the French dolly's dress.
Then the soldier dolly turned his head and solemnly winked at Raggedy Ann.
"Oh that is ever so much better!" cried Raggedy Ann.
"Why Raggedy Ann, you are all sticky!
Then the dollies all pushed and the door swung open.
After setting the table she took all the dolls from the line and placed them about the table.
"Follow me!" she cried as her wobbly legs carried her across the floor at a lively pace.
Have you had a nice time?"
But don't mind a little thing like that, Raggedy Ann," replied the penny doll.
It was rather stuffy in there, but I did not mind it; in fact I believe I must have fallen asleep, for when I awakened I saw the Stranger Friend's hand reaching into the grip.
"Well, first of all, when Freddy was covered with the sand, he enjoyed it immensely.
"I have two little girls," he told Marcella.
He took Marcella upon his knee and ran his fingers through her curls as he talked to Daddy and Mamma, so, of course, Raggedy Ann liked him from the beginning.
The Roller Fairies carried Freddy up to the surface and tossed him up to the Spray Fairies who carried him to the Wind Fairies."
And what do you think!
They were playing that Freddy was in bathing and that he wanted to be covered with the clean white sand, just as the other bathers did.
"How did this happen?" she asked as she picked up the doll.
The dolls all sat upon the floor around Raggedy Ann, the tin soldier with his arm over her shoulder.
So the Indian ran and brought a bottle of glue.
What a chatter there was in the nursery the first night after Raggedy Ann returned.
I could tell you by that!"
"No--I am far from well," sighed he; "and yet I drank only one glass of punch; but I cannot suppose it--it was, too, really very wrong to give us punch and hot salmon for supper.
As to ourselves, we all know the speed produced by the employment of steam; we have experienced it either on railroads, or in boats when crossing the sea; but such a flight is like the travelling of a sloth in comparison with the velocity with which light moves.
Have I written the tragedy?
He had hardly uttered these hasty words when the skirts and sleeves of his coat folded themselves together into wings; the clothes became feathers, and the galoshes claws.
What is come to me!
The Councillor stood still, and watched a most strange procession pass by.
"If my mistress and all her friends can laugh at what I say, so may you too, I should think.
But now the rest of the body was to be got through!
The Councillor imagined it was the cholera that was meant, which people made so much fuss about; and the discourse passed off satisfactorily enough.
He had on the Shoes; for as yet no lawful owner had appeared to claim them; and besides it was so very dirty out-of-doors, they were just the thing for him, he thought.
The following day, early in the morning, while the Clerk was still in bed, someone knocked at his door.
OH, WERE I RICH!
Today, methinks, is a most delicious day for a poet.
They took hold of the worthy man; who, hearing on every side that he was intoxicated, did not in the least doubt the truth of this certainly not very polite assertion; but on the contrary, implored the ladies and gentlemen present to procure him a hackney-coach: they, however, imagined he was talking Russian.
The gift of laughing was given to man alone.
How happy should I be!"
Alas, poor me! Have pity Thou, who all men's pains dost see."
"Oh no," answered the Councillor, "I can only join in conversation on this topic and on that, as indeed one must do according to the demands of the world at present."
It is really pitiable, particularly when one gets into the hands of a little blackguard, perfect in all sorts of cruelty to animals: all I should like to know is, how the story will end."
It is, no doubt, cold enough in your woods, but there at least is the breath of liberty; therefore fly away.
But little Denmark must take care what it is about, and not run counter to the moon; that great realm, that might in an ill-humor bestir itself, and dash down a hail-storm in our faces, or force the Baltic to overflow the sides of its gigantic basin.
The good old soul!
Some one must have slipped it slyly into my pocket for a joke.
"I must do something in time: under such circumstances a Russian bath might do me good.
A Moment of Head Importance--An Evening's "Dramatic Readings"--A Most Strange Journey
Alas!" sighed he, "I know one in which all is stately; but there sits already a spruce young shopman, which is the only thing that's amiss in the whole shop.
Presently black night overshadowed our enthusiast, who had so entirely missed his part of copying-clerk at a police-office; some vast object seemed to be thrown over him.
Well pleased the little magician hastened away to prove the powers of the spectacles in the theatre; no place seeming to him more fitted for such a trial.
Nature seems anew to celebrate her awakening into life.
With other topics he was not so fortunate; every moment brought about some new confusion, and threatened to become a perfect Babel; for the worthy Bachelor was really too ignorant, and the simplest observations of the Councillor sounded to him too daring and phantastical.
"Oh, were I rich in calm and peace of mind, My grief you then would not here written find! O thou, to whom I do my heart devote, Oh read this page of glad days now remote, A dark, dark tale, which I tonight devote! Dark is the future now.
"Only just tell me where the bridge is," said he.
So much, then, for the introduction.
"True," said the clerk, shrugging his shoulders; "and yet you are the better off.
On the floor, in the middle of the room, sat, like a Dalai-Lama, the insignificant "Self" of the person, quite confounded at his own greatness.
A few persons in the costume of the time of King Hans passed quickly by him.
"Oh yes, I've read something, to be sure," replied the Councillor.
About politics they had a good deal to say.
"It is the light which adorns me," said the flower.
What has taken possession of the Bishop?" sighed the Councillor, shaking his head.
One of the young men, whose head, in a physical sense only, might be said to be of the thickest, had the watch that evening.
"One must have more than the eye of a shoemaker to know one pair from the other," said he, soliloquizing; and putting, at the same time, the galoshes in search of an owner, beside his own in the corner.
He felt in his pocket for the papers.
"That was a dreadful snowstorm"; and he sighed again, and was silent.
In short, he was travelling.
He perched upon the table.
But where were the hackney-coaches? Not one was to be seen.
You are of a poetical nature, as it is called--I, on the contrary, possess profound knowledge and inexhaustible wit.
But you must not think that the affair is over now; it grows much worse.
Alas, poor me! Have pity, Thou, who all man's wants dost see.
This is too bad!
But when the watchman gave no reply, the merry roysterer, who was now returning home from a noisy drinking bout, took it into his head to try what a tweak of the nose would do, on which the supposed sleeper lost his balance, the body lay motionless, stretched out on the pavement: the man was dead.
The whole story is nothing but silly, stupid nonsense!"
Never have I thought or felt like this before!
The Shoes of Fortune had placed him in the most dreadful situation; and, unfortunately, it never occurred to him to wish himself free.
"That was an unpleasant dream," said he; "but 'twas droll enough altogether.
Probably a translation of the celebrated Moon hoax, written by Richard A. Locke, and originally published in New York.
I can scarcely bear myself any longer.
Even such a little garden as this was considered in the metropolis of Copenhagen as a great luxury.
But I have remained here--must always remain here, sitting at my desk in the office, and patiently see other people fetch their passports to go abroad.
He now crept on hands and feet through a butcher's shop; at least on every side, and above and below, there was nought but flesh.
I am a copying-clerk at the police-office; and you know you cannot insult any belonging to the constabulary force without a chastisement.
"How did I get up here--and so buried in sleep, too?
In reality, such remembrances are rather unpleasant: every sin, every evil thought, may, like a clock with alarm or chimes, be repeated at pleasure; then the question is if we can trust ourselves to give an account of every unbecoming word in our heart and on our lips.
There is too a letter to me; a crumpled letter and the seal broken."
Here one of the sorrows of life, in which there is real poetry, gave itself vent; not that barren grief which the poet may only hint at, but never depict in its detail--misery and want: that animal necessity, in short, to snatch at least at a fallen leaf of the bread-fruit tree, if not at the fruit itself.
"Good Heavens!
Meanwhile he was haunted by the idea--he should like to possess such a pair of spectacles himself; then, perhaps, by using them circumspectly, one would be able to look into people's hearts, which, he thought, would be far more interesting than merely to see what was to happen next year; for that we should all know in proper time, but the other never.
"Oh, is that the author's name?" said the Councillor.
And yet it is undeniably my own handwriting.
It flies nineteen million times faster than the best race-horse; and yet electricity is quicker still.
He found himself on one of the many circumjacent mountain-ridges with which we are acquainted by means of Dr. Madler's "Map of the Moon." Within, down it sunk perpendicularly into a caldron, about a Danish mile in depth; while below lay a town, whose appearance we can, in some measure, realize to ourselves by beating the white of an egg in a glass of water.
Everyday necessity is the stagnant pool of life--no lovely picture reflects itself therein.
Suddenly was heard the sound of drums and fifes; the bright blaze of a fire shot up from time to time, and its ruddy gleams seemed to contend with the bluish light of the torches.
The beginning of the poem he praised with great generosity: he even found the idea original and effective.
Come, let us be men!"
I would behold magnificent Switzerland; I would travel to Italy, and--"
I should like to go out a little."
It was the heart of a young military man; a man, as people said, of talent and feeling.
'Tis a bitter crust, alas! at which I am condemned to gnaw!"
The neighboring house had a something familiar about it; a window stood open; he flew in; it was his own room.
I should not much mind examining the little glimmering things somewhat nearer, especially the moon; for that would not slip so easily through a man's fingers.
I shall go wild!
A falling star shone in the dark firmament.
Well, there he stood.
And I agree to discontinue even this harmless superintendence of her actions, if there isn't good reasons shown for continuing it, to your entire satisfaction, in a week's time.
"With all my heart, sir!
She got neither the one nor the other.
"Miss Milroy!" he repeated.
Mrs. Milroy declared she was too ill to enter on the subject, and she has remained too ill to enter on it ever since.
Having fired that shot pointblank at his client, the wise lawyer waited a little to let it take its effect before he said any more.
"By giving me your authority, sir, to protect her from Miss Gwilt."
"Certainly, Mr. Armadale.
The question was a formidable one to answer.
"Why did you leave her a moment in doubt about it?"
She has been left in the dark from that time to this, not knowing how she might have been misrepresented by Miss Gwilt, or what falsehoods you might have been led to believe of her.
"What other person?" inquired Allan.
Shall I mention the name in confidence?
He stops her.
Miss Neelie, by her own confession (and quite naturally, I think), was excessively indignant.
Well, sir, this morning I went to the cottage.
"Can't I have time to consider?" asked Allan, driven to the last helpless expedient of taking refuge in delay.
'You needn't go, my dear, I have nothing to say to Mr. Pedgift,' says this old military idiot, and turns my way, and tries to look me down again.
She said, 'Your mother has declined to allow me to take leave of her.
"Do you really mean that, Mr. Armadale?
'Just a word,' says I. Miss Neelie, like the sensible girl she is, gets up to leave the room; and what does her ridiculous father do?
Miss Neelie appears to have felt the imputation fastened on her, in connection with you, far more sensitively than she felt the threat.
"Because I am a lawyer, Mr. Armadale," rejoined Pedgift Senior, dryly. "Even in moments of sentiment, under convenient trees, with a pretty girl on my arm, I can't entirely divest myself of my professional caution.
Excuse my asking; but you can very materially help Miss Neelie, if you choose!"
You can do nothing to quiet her anxiety which I have not done already.
As soon as Miss Neelie had recovered herself, she went upstairs to speak to Mrs. Milroy.
"Did she seem relieved?" asked Allan.
Or perhaps you would prefer alarming Miss Neelie by telling her in plain words that we both think her in danger? Or, suppose you send me to Miss Gwilt, with instructions to inform her that she has done her pupil a cruel injustice?
Miss Neelie applied next to her father.
"I mentioned that a point had occurred to me, sir," remarked Pedgift Senior.
"Only tell me how!"
As that aspiration escaped the client's lips, the lawyer got gayly into his gig.
"You don't know, Mr. Pedgift, what reason I have--"
Miss Milroy."
"I paid a visit, in your interests, sir, at the cottage this morning," proceeded Pedgift Senior.
"Is this serious?" he asked.
Major Milroy has been expressing his opinion of you pretty freely; and I thought it highly desirable to give him a caution.
"If I only had Midwinter back again!"
"If it was only the end of the week!" he thought, longingly.
"Would you like to hear what it is, Mr. Armadale?"
I wish to caution you to suspend your opinion of my client, or, if you won't do that, to be careful how you express it in public.
It's always the way with those quiet addle-headed men: when they do once wake up, there's no reasoning with their obstinacy, and no quieting their violence.
If you are at all anxious on your side to know why I am now betraying her confidence, I beg to inform you that her confidence related to no less a person than the lady who favored you with a call just now--Miss Gwilt."
I set things right in due course of time.
"If you please," said Allan.
"In plain words, Mr. Armadale, I want to keep Miss Gwilt's proceedings privately under view, as long as she stops in this neighborhood.
It struck me just now at the door, Mr. Armadale, that what you are not willing to do for your own security, you might be willing to do for the security of another person."
At my age and in my profession, I don't profess to have any extraordinary softness of heart.
Before I left Miss Milroy, I told her, in the plainest terms, no such idea had ever entered your head."
She found some little difficulty in answering it, for the reply involved her in a narrative of the parting interview between her governess and herself.
PEDGIFT'S POSTSCRIPT.
"Is there no other way of protecting Miss Milroy but the way you have mentioned?" he asked, uneasily.
Gently, sir, gently!
You know my opinion of Miss Gwilt; and you know what Miss Gwilt herself has done this very evening to justify that opinion even in your eyes.
"Do as you like!" exclaimed Allan, in despair.
I haven't quite done yet.
"Do you think the major would listen to you, sir, if you spoke to him?" asked Pedgift Senior, sarcastically.
Allan's face clouded, and he shifted uneasily from side to side of his chair.
"A young lady who is a near neighbor of yours, sir.
I attach considerable importance--if nothing else can be done--to having Miss Gwilt privately looked after, as long as she stops at Thorpe Ambrose.
But don't forget, while you are considering, that Miss Milroy is in the habit of walking out alone in your park, innocent of all apprehension of danger, and that Miss Gwilt is perfectly free to take any advantage of that circumstance that Miss Gwilt pleases."
But I do think, Mr. Armadale, that Miss Neelie's position deserves our sympathy."
Keep your temper.
"Well, sir, I left the cottage," resumed Pedgift Senior.
Allan started, and changed color.
Popular prejudice may deny it, but the profession of the law is a practically Christian profession in one respect at least.
"Your son is hard enough to deal with, Mr. Pedgift," he said, "and you are harder than your son."
I hope not, Mr. Pedgift; I sincerely hope not."
"I'll do anything to help her!" cried Allan, impulsively.
"I'll do anything," he reiterated earnestly--"anything in the world to help her!"
This is the point.
"You shall hear what happened there, and judge for yourself.
And she now inferred, from the language addressed to her, that she was actually believed by Miss Gwilt to have set those proceedings on foot, to advance herself, and to injure her governess, in your estimation.
"You did," said Allan.
"How?" asked Allan.
The major stopped her the moment your name passed her lips: he declared he would never hear you mentioned again by any member of his family.
My head is so confused, I've lost my reckoning.'
'So shall I, even if I have to wear a pair of shoes like Chinese junks. I've tramped up and down the deck so much, I shall be barefooted if we don't arrive soon,' laughed Mary, the daughter, showing two shabby little boots as she glanced up at the companion of these tramps, remembering gratefully how pleasant he had made them.
The boat soon reached him as he floated out from the wreck, and Emil sprung into the sea to rescue him, for he was wounded and senseless.
A sail appeared, and for a time a frenzy of joy prevailed, to be turned to bitterest disappointment when it passed by, too far away to see the signals waved to them or hear the frantic cries for help that rang across the sea.
I must remember it, and do my duty to the end. Steer straight, old boy; and if you can't come into port, go down with all sail set.'
'Don't think there are any small enough in China,' answered Emil, with a sailor's ready gallantry, privately resolving to hunt up the handsomest shoes he could find the moment he landed.
This accident made it necessary for the young man to take command, and he at once ordered the men to pull for their lives, as an explosion might occur at any moment.
'Thanksgiving Day, man!
This shamed the others, and for another day an ominous peace reigned in that little world of suffering and suspense.
And we'll give you a regular New England dinner, if you'll eat it,' answered the surgeon heartily.
He was instantly borne away, to be half killed by kindness, and being fed, clothed, and comforted, was left to rest.
'The scarlet strand!
'Give me freshening breeze, my boys, A white and swelling sail, A ship that cuts the dashing waves, And weathers every gale. What life is like a sailor's life, So free, so bold, so brave? His home the ocean's wide expanse, A coral bed his grave.'
That in which the women were lingered near, for the brave captain would be the last to leave his ship.
We shall miss it very much when we get ashore,' said Mary, in a persuasive tone which would have won melody from a shark, if such a thing were possible.
All night it fell, all night the castaways revelled in the saving shower, and took heart again, like dying plants revived by heaven's dew.
Half mad with thirst, they drank greedily and by morning one was in a stupor, from which he never woke; the other so crazed by the strong stimulant, that when Emil tried to control him, he leaped overboard and was lost.
The Brenda was scudding along with all sail set to catch the rising wind, and everyone on board was rejoicing, for the long voyage was drawing towards an end.
Soon the poor Brenda was a floating furnace, and the order to 'Take to the boats!' came for all.
No one saw the end, however, for the gale soon swept the watchers far away and separated them, some never to meet again till the sea gives up its dead.
This lazy life is bad for young people, though it suits an old body like me well enough in calm weather.
But Emil was too spent to do anything, except lie still and give thanks, more fervently and gratefully than ever before, for the blessed gift of life, which was the sweeter for a sense of duty faithfully performed.
'Don't frighten the women,' was Captain Hardy's first order; then both be stirred themselves to discover how strong the treacherous enemy was, and to rout it if possible.
The sailors ceased rowing and sat grimly waiting, openly reproaching their leader for not following their advice, others demanding more food, all waxing dangerous as privation and pain brought out the animal instincts lurking in them.
A sudden shout startled him from that brief rest, and a drop on his forehead told him that the blessed rain had come at last, bringing salvation with it; for thirst is harder to bear than hunger, heat, or cold.
'Please sing, Mr Hoffmann, it's so pleasant to have music at this time.
'I don't know what you would have done for exercise, dear, if Mr Hoffmann had not made you walk every day.
The Brenda's cargo was a very combustible one, and in spite of the streams of water poured into the hold it was soon evident that the ship was doomed.
The savoury odour of the soup, carried by to the cabin for the ladies, reminded him that he was starving, and a sudden stagger betrayed his weakness.
It was soon over; and then all were safely aboard the good Urania, homeward bound.
So he clutched his courage with both hands, kept up a manly front, and spoke so cheerily of their good chances, that all instinctively turned to him for guidance and support.
He saw them all, heard the familiar voices, felt the grip of welcoming hands, and seemed to say to himself: 'Well, they shall not be ashamed of me if I never see them any more.'
To this hope all clung, and wiled away the weary hours, watching the horizon and cheering one another with prophecies of speedy rescue.
It was not the physical hardship that daunted him, though want and weakness tortured him; it was his dreadful powerlessness to conquer the cruel fate that seemed hanging over them.
So now he gladly tuned his pipe, and leaning on the taffrail near the girl, watched the brown locks blowing in the wind as he sang her favourite song:
The boat whose fortunes we must follow was alone when dawn came up, showing these survivors all the dangers of their situation.
The men did their part readily now, but Emil knew that if starvation and despair made brutes of them, his task might be a terrible one.
One cry broke from all those eager throats, and rang across the sea, as every man waved hat or handkerchief and the women stretched imploring hands towards this great white angel of deliverance coming down upon them as if the fresh wind filled every sail to help her on.
Emil saw his friends in tender hands, his men among their mates, and told the story of the wreck before he thought of himself.
Second mate Hoffmann was very brave and helpful, though his unexpected responsibility weighed heavily on his shoulders; for the captain's state seemed desperate, the poor wife's grief wrung his heart, and the blind confidence of the young girl in his power to save them made him feel that no sign of doubt or fear must lessen it.
As he sat there with his head in his hands, bowed down by the first great trial of his young life, the starless sky overhead, the restless sea beneath, and all around him suffering, for which he had no help, a soft sound broke the silence, and he listened like one in a dream.
It was a sweet old hymn often sung at Plumfield; and as he listened, all the happy past came back so clearly that Emil forgot the bitter present, and was at home again.
He was gone a few minutes, and when he came up, half stifled with smoke, he was as white as a very brown man could be, but calm and cool as he went to report to the captain.
He always said that was the proudest moment of his life, as he stood there holding Mary in his arms; for the brave girl, who had kept up so long, broke down then, and clung to him half fainting; while her mother busied herself about the invalid, who seemed to feel the joyful stir, and gave an order, as if again on the deck of his lost ship.
Another trial came to them that left all more despairing than before.
Welcomed by cries of joy, all lifted up their parched lips, held out their hands, and spread their garments to catch the great drops that soon came pouring down to cool the sick man's fever, quench the agony of thirst, and bring refreshment to every weary body in the boat.
The fourth day came and the supply of food and water was nearly gone. Emil proposed to keep it for the sick man and the women, but two of the men rebelled, demanding their share.
Their only hope was in meeting a ship, although the gale, which had raged all night, had blown them out of their course.
Sept. 23rd.--Our guests arrived about three weeks ago.
His mother frequently asks us over, that she may have the pleasure of her dear Walter's company; and this time she had invited us to a dinner-party, and got together as many of the country gentry as were within reach to meet us.
But she has a way of tormenting him, in which I am a fellow-sufferer, or might be, if I chose to regard myself as such.
But there is room for improvement still. He is not always cheerful, nor always contented, and she often complains of his ill-humour, which, however, of all persons, she ought to be the last to accuse him of, as he never displays it against her, except for such conduct as would provoke a saint.
It is obviously, therefore, my interest to disappoint them both, as far as I am concerned, by preserving a cheerful, undisturbed serenity throughout; and, accordingly, I endeavour to show the fullest confidence in my husband, and the greatest indifference to the arts of my attractive guest.
I don't like Mrs. Hargrave; she is a hard, pretentious, worldly-minded woman.
CHAPTER XXVI
She knows her power, and she uses it too; but well knowing that to wheedle and coax is safer than to command, she judiciously tempers her despotism with flattery and blandishments enough to make him deem himself a favoured and a happy man.
He either has not the sense or the power to follow my example, though he does try to conceal his uneasiness as well as he can; but still, it will appear in his face, and his ill-humour will peep out at intervals, though not in the expression of open resentment--they never go far enough for that.
The entertainment was very well got up; but I could not help thinking about the cost of it all the time.
He adores her still, and would go to the world's end to please her.
But I confess I do feel jealous at times, most painfully, bitterly so; when she sings and plays to him, and he hangs over the instrument, and dwells upon her voice with no affected interest; for then I know he is really delighted, and I have no power to awaken similar fervour.
I have never reproached the former but once, and that was for laughing at Lord Lowborough's depressed and anxious countenance one evening, when they had both been particularly provoking; and then, indeed, I said a good deal on the subject, and rebuked him sternly enough; but he only laughed, and said,--'You can feel for him, Helen, can't you?'
I can amuse and please him with my simple songs, but not delight him thus.
'Why, Helen, you are as jealous as he is!' cried he, laughing still more; and I found it impossible to convince him of his mistake.
So, from that time, I have carefully refrained from any notice of the subject whatever, and left Lord Lowborough to take care of himself.
28th.--Yesterday, we all went to the Grove, Mr. Hargrave's much-neglected home.
This is a harsh judgment to form of 'dear, noble-minded, generous-hearted Walter,' but I fear it is too just.
Poor Milicent, I fear, has already fallen a sacrifice to the manoeuvrings of this mistaken mother, who congratulates herself on having so satisfactorily discharged her maternal duty, and hopes to do as well for Esther.
Lord and Lady Lowborough have now been married above eight months; and I will do the lady the credit to say that her husband is quite an altered man; his looks, his spirits, and his temper, are all perceptibly changed for the better since I last saw him.
For since good and bad, and likewise reward and punishment, are contraries, it necessarily follows that, corresponding to all that we see accrue as reward of the good, there is some penalty attached as punishment of evil.
And though in such sore straits, The pity of the god Who bears the mystic rod Had power the chieftain brave From her fell arts to save; His comrades, unrestrained, The fatal goblet drained. All now with low-bent head, Like swine, on acorns fed; Man's speech and form were reft, No human feature left; But steadfast still, the mind, Unaltered, unresigned, The monstrous change bewailed.
'Family likenesses exist, you know--often with complete divergence of tastes and character.'
Scotch rails might shortly be quiet-- I always understood they were based upon sleepers; but if South-Eastern stiffened, advantage should certainly be taken of their stiffening.
Now, I can't let you endanger your precious health by returning to town and Miss Latimer this winter.
Lady Georgina Fawley sent you here.'
That's worse than the other way.
She depends upon me to come back at the beginning of term.
So I declined his offer.
This syndicate, besides fulfilling the prophecies, will pay forty per cent on every penny embarked in it.'
I am but a drawing-room Socialist.
'I have no prejudice against trade, Brownie,' she observed emphatically; 'but I do draw the line at salt fish.'
Clients will flock in; and we tide over the winter.
I walked across to Mrs. Evelegh's desk, and began writing a letter.
I imagine it was at least as good as most other cases in similar matters: at any rate, it pleased the old gentleman vastly.
'Strangers see these things most,' I said, airing the stock platitudes.
'A little, dear; only ninety words a minute.'
He was engaged on a Work--he spoke of it always with bated breath, and a capital letter was implied in his intonation; the Work was one on the Interpretation of Prophecy.
'There are worse disappointments in store for them in life-- Which is a fine old crusted platitude worthy of Aunt Susan.
'Is a typewritten form legal?' I ventured to inquire.
But I descry another opening.
'Bertha,' he said, after a pause, 'is Brighton A's--to be strictly correct, London, Brighton, and South Coast First Preference Debentures.
'Some mistake!' I cried, warmly.
However, reflecting that my fairy godmother's name was really Enterprise, I recalled Mr. Cyrus W. Hitchcock's advice, and advertised.
Abel Woodward and Co., exporters of preserved provisions, St John, Newfoundland.
'In that case, we might even expect seventy,' he put in with a gasp of anticipation.
But you haven't my name.'
'It matters not, Fraeulein.
It was none of my business to believe or disbelieve: I was paid to get up a case, and I got one up to the best of my ability.
I could gather from his dress and his diamond pin that he was wealthy.
I waved my hand with careless grace towards Elsie--as if these things happened to us daily.
Then please add it to James Walsh's clause.
He made up his mind, and entered the office.
No?
The winter comes, when no man can bicycle, especially in Switzerland.
It concerns Property.
'That's hard,' he went on, slowly.
Markets, it seemed, were glutted.
I am truly grateful to you for your good opinion.
'Georgina's principles are not mine.
This cover protects the point.
He stared at me with a sort of suspicion.
'What shall we live upon?' Elsie suggested, piteously.
His subject-matter bewildered me. It was all about India Bills, and telegraphic transfers, and selling cotton short, and holding tight to Egyptian Unified.
'So I think,' he answered.
Perhaps my bewilderment showed itself upon my face, for at last he looked queerly at me.
My dear young lady, what a wonderful person you are!
'Intuition, most likely.'
'There shall be none,' I answered.
He was annoyingly dilatory.
It strikes me as superfluous.
Perhaps you read Greek, then?'
"Run through the apertures uselessly in transit," I think I said last.
He smiled, but held his peace.
'But this is astronomy,' I burst out.
Mr. Ashurst, encouraged by so much assent, went on to unfold his System of Interpretation, which was of a strictly commercial or company-promoting character.
'Still--the middies,' I went on: 'they will perhaps take care that these poor girls are not ill-treated.'
What then is our obvious destiny?
Quite so!--very well, then; yes, we are both at your service.'
'Certainly?'
My first idea was to travel by the Brenner route through the Tyrol; but a queer little episode which met us at the outset on the Austrian frontier put a check to this plan.
How on earth did you recognise me?'
'It may be superficial.
But, there, my dear; the people who manufacture them are a set of born fools, and what can you expect from an imbecile?' Mr. Ashurst was Lady Georgina, veneered with a thin layer of ingratiating urbanity.
At least, I had not been called upon to disinherit Harold.
'At least, I think so.
I require a quick worker.
'Higginson?' I inquired.
You must have observed, Miss Cayley--with your usual perspicacity--that most sugar-sifters allow the sugar to fall through them on to the table prematurely.'
'Quite right.
He swallowed it like an infant.
I suppose even art-critics may be classed as cultivated.
But most braces, you may not be aware, slip down unpleasantly on the shoulder-blade, and so lead to an awkward habit of hitching them up by the sleeve-hole of the waistcoat at frequent intervals.
If you are going to start the Florentine School of Stenography and Typewriting, you may as well start it on a proper basis.
Again, "the chief things of the ancient mountains, and the precious things of the everlasting hills." What does that mean?
Why, I endeavoured to interest Rothschild and induce him to join me in my Palestine Development Syndicate, and, will you believe it, the man refused point blank.
How could one dream of trusting the judgment of a flunkey about a lady?
Then he informed me that he wished me to hunt up certain facts in Herodotus "and elsewhere" confirmatory of his view that the English were the descendants of the Ten Tribes.
It seemed to be all about buying Bertha and selling Clara--a cold-blooded proceeding which almost suggested slave-dealing.
His face was smooth; it tended towards portliness.
Again, in pursuance of my general plan of going round the world, I must get forward to Italy.
He was convinced that the British nation represented the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel--and in particular Ephraim--a matter on which, as a mere lay-woman, I would not presume either to agree with him or to differ from him.
I gathered he was giving instructions to his agent: could he have business relations with Cuba, I wondered.
'And she will get somebody, dear,' I answered, calmly.
He leaned back, clasped his hands, and regarded me fixedly.
They have no heads, those people.
The old gentleman bowed again.
Certainly.'
"If I am to make a meal for a cannibal, I should prefer being cooked."
Say the word, and we are ready to obey."
She had only a few days to live.
The captain, whose duty would have kept him on board to the last, had been the first to quit the ship.
The raft will bring us to the shore," said Glenarvan.
"By all means let us have the facts, Paganel," said Glenarvan.
Even the Maori mythology has a legend of a god who ate another god; and with such a precedent, who could resist eating his neighbor?
"For," said he, "cannibalism was long prevalent among the ancestors of the most civilized people, and especially (if the Major will not think me personal) among the Scotch."
"Cannibals!" exclaimed Robert, "cannibals?"
But here the case is different.
There are even 'man-eating seasons,' as there are in civilized countries hunting seasons.
Then having attended to her spiritual wants, he bethought himself of her bodily needs, and offered her some European delicacies.
It was evident that raising the MACQUARIE was out of the question, and no less evident that she must be abandoned.
"Why?"
"Then those wretches who abandoned us--"
The lungs are satisfied with a provision of vegetable and farinaceous food.
CHAPTER V CANNIBALS
The savages began by eating human flesh to appease the demands of an appetite rarely satiated; subsequently the priests regulated and satisfied the monstrous custom.
Paganel was right.
"What is that to me!" exclaimed the Major, earnestly.
Cannibalism has become a fixed fact in New Zealand, as it is in the Fijis and in Torres Strait. Superstition is no doubt partly to blame, but cannibalism is certainly owing to the fact that there are moments when game is scarce and hunger great.
But in any case what have we to fear?
"The savages," said Paganel.
"Yes, if necessary," answered John; "but we should have had to sail by day and anchor at night."
"Well, my Lord, so much the better.
"The conclusion of all," said John Mangles, "is that we must not fall into their hands.
"Why not animal flesh?" asked Glenarvan.
I repeat, anything is better than to venture into this treacherous country."
"They are dainty," said the Major.
"Anything is better, in my judgment," said John Mangles, "than braving certain destruction on a stranded vessel."
A Portuguese missionary was one day visiting an old Brazilian woman who was very ill.
As to white men's flesh, they do not like it so well, because the whites eat salt with their food, which gives a peculiar flavor, not to the taste of connoisseurs."
Before the arrival of a chance vessel on the scene, the MACQUARIE would have broken up.
I was the first to persuade you to cross America and Australia.
Besides, in the eyes of the Maories, nothing is more natural than to eat one another.
You cannot suspect me of faint-heartedness.
"The savages!" repeated Glenarvan.
"Don't frighten yourself, my boy," said Glenarvan; "our friend Paganel exaggerates."
"The first is narrated in the chronicles of the Jesuit Society in Brazil.
The missionaries often questioned them about cannibalism. They asked them why they devoured their brothers; to which the chiefs made answer that fish eat fish, dogs eat men, men eat dogs, and dogs eat one another.
"Really," said McNabbs.
"Well, then," said Glenarvan, "according to your mode of reasoning, Paganel, cannibalism will not cease in New Zealand until her pastures teem with sheep and oxen."
No! it was hunger."
"My friend," replied Paganel, "I do not call in question our courage nor the bravery of our friends.
They have spared us some trying scenes."
There could be no doubt about it.
"What is to be done?" asked Glenarvan.
"Evidently, my dear Lord; and even then it will take years to wean them from Maori flesh, which they prefer to all others; for the children will still have a relish for what their fathers so highly appreciated. According to them it tastes like pork, with even more flavor.
Waiting on board for succor that might never come, would have been imprudence and folly.
For my part, I very much dislike the idea of being eaten!
The Jesuit inculcated the truths of religion, which the dying woman accepted, without objection.
The New Zealanders are a powerful race, who are rebelling against English rule, who fight the invaders, and often beat them, and who always eat them!"
"What! do you think another twenty miles after crossing the Pampas and Australia, can have any terrors for us, hardened as we are to fatigue?"
John was anxious to reach the land before this inevitable consummation.
Surely, two resolute and well-armed Europeans need not give a thought to an attack by a handful of miserable beings."
"Because then I should be sure of not being eaten alive!"
"Yes, Major," replied Paganel.
Robert had chosen to stay with them.
Quadrupeds, and even birds, are rare on these inhospitable shores, so that the Maories have always eaten human flesh.
"Very good.
The brave boy listened with all his ears, ready to be of use, and willing to enlist in any perilous adventure.
What was a meal, was raised to the dignity of a ceremony, that is all.
Then they heard him whisper, "My sister!
Major," said Paganel; "but suppose they cooked you alive?"
The Major, Paganel, Robert, Wilson, Mulrady, Olbinett himself, applauded Glenarvan's speech, and ranged themselves on the deck, ready to execute their captain's orders.
"Hunger!" repeated Paganel; "but, above all, the necessity of the carnivorous appetite of replacing the bodily waste, by the azote contained in animal tissues.
WILL HALLEY and his crew, taking advantage of the darkness of night and the sleep of the passengers, had fled with the only boat.
bah!"
Lady Helena."
Let us hope that one day Christianity will abolish all these monstrous customs."
"Can we not avoid them by keeping to the shore?
"In this case there are no miserable beings to contend with.
Paganel shook his head.
"No doubt," said Glenarvan; "besides we have a captain of our own, and courageous, if unskillful sailors, your companions, John.
But while he acknowledged all this, Paganel maintained, not without a show of reason, that sensuality, and especially hunger, was the first cause of cannibalism among the New Zealanders, and not only among the Polynesian races, but also among the savages of Europe.
What was the matter with which I was warned not to interfere?
Even as the picture of her lovely, pale face presented itself to my mind, the cab was held up by a temporary block in the traffic--and my imagination played me a strange trick.
Without a moment's hesitation I hurled my grip over the top and clambered up the bars!
What did it mean?
When the train left Northampton I found myself alone, and I should only weary you were I to attempt to recount the troubled conjectures that bore me company to Birmingham.
Since none of them were known to the police, it was no insoluble mystery, I admit; but nevertheless it was singular that the careful watching of the ports had yielded no result.
Then I realized to the full that with four miles of lonely England before me there hung above my head a mysterious threat--a vague menace.
At Northampton, to my indescribable relief (frankly, I was as nervous in those days as a woman), the Oriental traveller stepped out on to the platform.
And as I went something hummed through the darkness beside my head, some projectile, some venomous thing that missed its mark by a bare inch!
Sinking exhausted on the steps, I looked toward the gates--but they showed only dimly in the dense shadows of the trees.
Then I dropped and ran for the house--shouting, though all but winded--"Hilton!
Earl Dexter was dead.
I craned from the window, searching the platform right and left. But there was no sign of him.
I could feel his gaze.
His eyes, too, were nearer to real black than any human eyes I had ever seen before--excepting the awful eyes of Hassan of Aleppo.
When the invitation came from my old friend Hilton to spend a week "roughing it" with him in Warwickshire I accepted with alacrity. If ever a man needed a holiday I was that man.
Nervous breakdown threatened me at any moment; the ghastly experience at the Gate House together with Carneta's grief-stricken face when I had parted from her were obsessing memories which I sought in vain to shake off.
A shrill whistle--minor, eerie, in rising cadence--sounded on the dead silence with piercing clearness!
The night swallowed him up.
So much had the slipper of Mohammed done for me: I went in hourly dread of murderous attack!
A brief wire had contained the welcome invitation, and up to the time when I had received it I had been unaware that Hilton was back in England.
Open the door!"
The month had been dry and tropically hot, and my footsteps rang crisply upon the hard ground.
The train reached New Street at nine, with the result that having gulped a badly needed brandy and soda in the buffet, I grabbed my bag, raced across--and just missed the connection!
But, suddenly looking up, I met the eyes of this man who occupied the corner seat facing me.
The sight was unnerving.
The travellers, however, were immediately lost to sight in the rear, and I was left to conjecture whether this had been a not uncommon form of optical delusion or whether I had seen a ghost.
Taking up my grip, as though I had noticed nothing of an alarming nature, I pursued my way up the slope, leaving a trail of tobacco smoke in my wake; and having my revolver secreted up my right coat-sleeve.
None of the windows were illuminated.
Another taxi ran close alongside, almost at the moment that the press of vehicles moved on again.
Nothing--no one!
There were six gray patches creeping up the slope toward me!
Having dispatched my telegram, I boarded the 6:55.
The quest of the Prophet's slipper was ended; in all probability that blood-stained relic was already Eastward bound.
I looked intently into the black eyes.
Having reclosed the door, he turned and leaned in through the open window.
My travelling companion watched me; of that I was certain.
There was no living thing in sight, the road was empty as far as the eye could see.
Breathing heavily, I crammed my extinguished briar into my pocket--re-charged the empty chamber of the revolver--and started to run again toward a light that showed over the treetops to my left.
No doubt, I concluded, I had been tricked by a chance resemblance.
But I supported it with my left hand; my right was in my coat pocket--and it rested upon my Smith and Wesson!
Some object came humming through the air, and I ducked wildly.
The coppice now remained to be negotiated, and then, if the station-master's directions were not at fault, "Uplands" should be visible beyond.
What it was I could not even conjecture; but it had the appearance of a vague gray patch, moving--not along the road, but through the undergrowth--in my direction.
I thought I should have the compartment to myself, and so deep in reverie was I that the train was actually clear of the platforms ere I learned that I had a companion.
A shower of gravel told of another misdirected projectile.
Then I saw a second patch--a third--a fourth!
Could it be--
He must have joined me at the moment that the train started.
Could it be that some of them had not yet left the country?
What were these things that approached, silently, stealthily--like snakes in the grass?
I picked up a magazine, pretending to read.
Overhanging trees concealed the house, and the light, though high up under the eaves, was no longer visible.
Six!
Six whistles--seemingly from all around me--replied!
I pulled up short, turned, and looked back toward the trees.
It was, to that hour, a mystery how his group of trained assassins--the Hashishin--had quitted England.
The solitary official, who but waited my departure to lock up the station, was the last representative of civilization I could hope to encounter until the gates of "Uplands" should be opened to me!
I dropped flat in the portico as something struck the metal knob of the door and rebounded over me.
Hassan of Aleppo, its awful guardian, had triumphed and had escaped retribution.
A pattering like naked feet sounded on the road, and, without pausing in my headlong career, I sent a random shot into the blackness.
Hilton!
This person was olive-skinned, clean-shaven, fine featured, and perfectly groomed.
I had contemplated catching the 2:45 from Euston, but by the time I had got my work into something like order, I decided that the 6:55 would be more suitable and decided to dine on the train.
Altogether, there was something of a rush and hustle attendant upon getting away, and when at last I found myself in the cab, bound for Euston, I sat back with a long-drawn sigh.
"Evidently you are not concerned, Mr. Cavanagh," he said.
None of them, by any stretch of the imagination, could have been set down for that of Dexter, The Stetson Man.
Trusting to Providence to guide me, I plunged down the lane that turned to the left, and, almost exhausted, saw the gates before me--saw the sweep of the drive, and the moonlight, gleaming on the windows!
For a second my eye rested upon it.
But he made no move and no word passed between us. This was the situation when the train slowed into Northampton.
I opened my eyes.
I lay upon a long low settee, in a fairly large room which was furnished as I had anticipated in an absolutely Oriental fashion.
The two windows were so screened as to have lost, from the interior point of view, all resemblance to European windows, and the whole structure of the room had been altered in conformity, bearing out my idea that the place had been prepared for Fu-Manchu's reception some time before his actual return.
The idea of physical attack upon this incredible being seemed childish--inadequate.
I do not think the most frenzied outburst on his part, the most fiendish threats, could have produced such effect upon me as those cold and carefully calculated words, spoken in that unique voice which rang about the room sibilantly.
FU-MANCHU'S LABORATORY
I doubt if, East or West, a duplicate of that singular apartment could be found.
I counted myself lost, and in view of the doctor's words, studied the progress of the experiment with frightful interest.
The end in which I lay, was, as I have said, typical of an Eastern house, and a large, ornate lantern hung from the ceiling almost directly above me.
Never in my experience have I known such force to dwell in the glance of any human eye as dwelt in that of this uncanny being.
Now, the atmosphere surrounding me was Eastern, but not of the East that I knew; rather it was Far Eastern.
To this speech no reply was possible, and I attempted none.
The further end of the room was occupied by tall cases, some of them containing books, but the majority filled with scientific paraphernalia; rows of flasks and jars, frames of test-tubes, retorts, scales, and other objects of the laboratory.
He wore a plain yellow robe, and, with his pointed chin resting upon his bosom, he looked down at me, revealing a great expanse of the marvelous brow with its sparse, neutral-colored hair.
"You are interested in my poor Cynocephalyte?" he said; and his eyes were filmed like the eyes of one afflicted with cataract.
Not the slightest emotion had he exhibited thus far, but had chatted with me as any other scientist might chat with a friend who casually visits his laboratory.
Fog, snow, rain, slush, drizzle, cold--such weather! such weather!
I don't know how we are going to do our washing this week.
But Santa Claus is undoubtedly coming this time.
I have thirty collectors in the family.
Wednesday.
Saturday.
But, anyway, you'll take my advice, even though I'm no longer an official head?
At your insistence, we have sedulously fostered the Santa Claus myth, but it doesn't meet with much credence.
Dearest Judy:
Mercy!
I acknowledge now, upon sober reflection, that we were wise to postpone extensive building operations until next summer.
Men are so good at talking!
The new women are most helpful, and only the nice men came.
What on earth is the matter with you, Sandy?
Dear Judy:
He began at the case nearest the door, which contains thirty-seven volumes of Pansy's works.
If you expect a cheerful letter from me the day, don't read this.
I could use a pint of them!
He needs something to occupy every waking moment out of banking hours.
Big sister Sadie Kate has to see that little sister Gladiola always has her hair neatly combed and her stockings pulled up and knows her lessons and gets a touch of petting and her share of candy--very pleasant for Gladiola, but especially developing for Sadie Kate.
Evening.
SALLIE McBRIDE.
I am happy to announce that the Hon.
The two building details we did accomplish are very promising.
But it didn't kill her; it only made her sick.
The life of man is a wintry road.
It seems that the "rich city feller" whose estate he has been managing no longer needs his services; and Sterry has graciously consented to return to us and let the children have gardens if they wish.
But what on earth to do with the man?
The trustees' meeting last week went beautifully.
Cy Wykoff is visiting his married daughter in Scranton.
But I know that I can't keep twenty-four Indians tied to my apron strings, and I never could find in the whole wide world three nicer men to take an interest in them.
We were planning to keep the Christmas tree a secret, but fully fifty children have been boosted up to the carriage house window to take a peep at it, and I am afraid the news has spread among the remaining fifty.
I'm afraid I'm slandering him.
December 14.
And speaking of Sterry, he paid us a social call a few days ago, in quite a chastened frame of mind.
We have not been quite certain for three days past whether we could keep him from suicide.
SALLIE.
Last Saturday those two desirable friends of Percy's spent the whole afternoon playing with my boys.
I'm dividing my chicks into big and little sisters and brothers, each big one to have a little one to love and help and fight for.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Since you have taken to travel, every day about post time an eager group gathers at the gate, waiting to snatch any letters of foreign design, and by the time the letters reach me they are almost in shreds through the tenacity of rival snatchers.
Friday.
And he came back, and said he would choke her if she ever tried that on him again; so she guessed he must still care something for her.
The pipes are frozen.
But he didn't want to remove himself.
The chicks are making presents for one another, and something like a thousand secrets have been whispered in my ear.
When they had finished, I warmed them up with cookies and hot chocolate, and I really think the men enjoyed it as much as the boys; they undoubtedly enjoyed it more than I did.
But if I'm to be an authority, I must live up to the title.
Just think of all that healthy, exuberant volunteer service going to waste under the asylum's nose!
But there is no counting on a Scotchman.
Tuesday.
But at least, compared with Sterry, Turnfelt is a scholard!
The kitchen fire went with her.
I think the truth is that he is feeling so miserable over his wrecked engagement that he is afraid to be alone.
Really, I have felt terribly bad about it, and have wanted to apologize, but your manner has not been inviting of confidence.
It isn't that I have any excuse or explanation to offer; I haven't.
I asked the doctor, out of politeness, to play the chief role at our Christmas tree; and being certain ahead of time that he was going to refuse, I had already engaged Percy as an understudy.
Snow last night.
"Why didn't he ever come before?" was Sadie Kate's skeptical question.
Also I am going to start among our older children a limited form of self-government such as we had in college.
And goodness knows we're glad enough to keep him!
I kindly, but convincingly, declined his offer.
I suppose the neighborhood is full of plenty more of it, and I am going to make it my business to dig it out.
Most spirits appear to need it in this world.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
You used to be a tolerably nice man--in spots, but these last three or four months you have only been nice to other people, never to me.
PLEASE pepper your letters with stamps, inside and out.
A woman had come to deliver her sister's child--sister in a sanatorium for tuberculosis; we to keep the child until the mother is cured, though I fear, from what I hear, that will never be.
I didn't mean to annoy you by my attentions.
I must leave you now to write an interesting letter to my politician in Washington, and it's hard work.
I do so want to contrive a little individual petting for my babies.
Isn't it wonderful to have got these apathetic little things so enthusiastic?
Five of my children are ready to be shoved, but I can't bring myself to do it.
Babies--at least boy babies--grow into voters.
My children are getting to be almost like real children. B dormitory started a pillow fight last night of its own accord; and though it was very wearing to our scant supply of linen, I stood by and beamed, and even tossed a pillow myself.
However shall we finish all our plans in a week?
They seem to have no residue of small talk, and are never able to dismiss a crisis in order to discuss the weather.
The farmer's cottage will finally be ready for occupancy next week.
All this quite casually while she stirred her tea.
Of course I was disappointed, because it meant that I won't be the center of the ripping-up, and I do so love to be the center of ripping-ups!
My caller has left me needing it.
Good-by,
Sunday.
Then he smashed the furniture something awful.
The Pendletons knew that long ago, or they wouldn't have sent me up here.
The boys have spent the morning in the woods, gathering evergreens and drawing them home on sleds; and twenty girls are spending the afternoon in the laundry, winding wreaths for the windows.
I tried to think of something to say, but it was a social exigency that left me dumb.
The girl in Detroit,--I knew she was a heartless little minx,--without so much as going through the formality of sending back his ring, has gone and married herself to a man and a couple of automobiles and a yacht.
There is something awfully certain about a man like him.
When he first came, I made him free of the library.
I expect to be home in twenty-two months or thereabouts.
We are out from home twenty-three months, and in hope to be home in fifteen months.
I wish you would write me an answer as soon as possible.
I have wrote you a letter before, but have received no answer from you, and was very anxious to see you.
But he did not appear, and at length she believed him really gone.
He went to the Tombs and inquired into his case, but could not believe what Peter told him respecting his mother and family.
In the trial hour, she remained firm in her resolution.
I hope you all will forgive me for all that I have done. 'Your son, PETER VAN WAGENER.'
There has happened very bad news to tell you, that Peter Jackson is dead.
'I take this opportunity to write to you and inform you that I am well, and in hopes for to find you the same.
The curiosity of this man was awakened by the culprit's bearing his own name.
But as she could see no improvement in Peter, as a last resort, she resolved to leave him, for a time, unassisted, to bear the penalty of his conduct, and see what effect that would have on him.
But, alas! this pride and pleasure were shortly dissipated, as distressing facts relative to him came one by one to her astonished ear.
If not, inquire to Mr. Pierce Whiting's.
She went, giving no credence to his story till she found herself in the presence of Mr. Williams, and heard him saying to her, 'I am very glad I have assisted your son; he stood in great need of sympathy and assistance; but I could not think he had such a mother here, although he assured me he had.'
The Peter Jackson that used to live at Laterett's; he died on board the ship Done, of Nantucket, Captain Miller, in the latitude 15 53, and longitude 148 30 W. I have no more to say at present, but write as soon as possible.
We have had bad luck, but in hopes to have better.
I want to know what sort of a time is at home.
Isabella's heart gave her no peace till the time of sailing, when Peter sent Mr. Williams and another messenger whom she knew, to tell her he had sailed.
Yet I did the best I then knew, when with them.
I would like to know how my sisters are.
He died within two days' sail of Otaheite, one of the Society Islands.
MY DEAR AND BELOVED MOTHER:
I should like if my sisters are well, and all the people round the neighborhood.
I am sorry for to say, that I have been punished once severely, by shoving my head in the fire for other folks.
Peter again fell into the hands of the police, and sent for his mother, as usual; but she went not to his relief.
She listened incredulously, as to an idle tale.
They also procured him an excellent place as a coachman.
His mother, beginning to feel that the city was no place for him, urged his going to sea, and would have shipped him on board a man-of-war; but Peter was not disposed to consent to that proposition, while the city and its pleasures were accessible to him.
I am got on board the same unlucky ship Done, of Nantucket.
We had very bad luck when we first came out, but since we have had very good; so I am in hopes to do well yet; but if I do n't do well, you need not expect me home these five years.
I should like to know how Sophia, and Betsey, and Hannah, come on.
But for a month afterwards, she looked to see him emerging from some by-place in the city, and appearing before her; so afraid was she that he was still unfaithful, and doing wrong.
I have not much to say; but tell me if you have been up home since I left or not.
Still he continued to abuse his privileges, and to involve himself in repeated difficulties, from which his mother as often extricated him.
I have seen Samuel Laterett. Beware!
'Oh,' she says, 'how little did I know myself of the best way to instruct and counsel them!
Yet he redeemed him, and Peter promised to leave New York in a vessel that was to sail in the course of a week.
In his extremity, he sent for Peter Williams, a respectable colored barber, whose name he had been wearing, and who sometimes helped young culprits out of their troubles, and sent them from city dangers, by shipping them on board of whaling vessels.
Notice-when this you see, remember me, and place me in your mind.
I have seen more of the world than ever I expected, and if I ever should return home safe, I will tell you all my troubles and hardships.
I have had very hard luck, but are in hopes to have better in time to come.
Her son Peter was, at the time of which we are speaking, just at that age when no lad should be subjected to the temptations of such a place, unprotected as he was, save by the feeble arm of a mother, herself a servant there.
Two years passed before Isabella knew what character Peter was establishing for himself among his low and worthless comrades-passing under the assumed name of Peter Williams; and she began to feel a parent's pride in the promising appearance of her only son.
'Your only son, 'PETER VAN WAGENER.'
So now I am going to put an end to my writing, at present.
He left in the summer of 1839, and his friends heard nothing further from him till his mother received the following letter, dated 'October 17 1840';-
'MY DEAR MOTHER:
NEW TRIALS.
Does my cousins live in New York yet?
I hope to see you in a short time.
'DEAR MOTHER:
Have you got my letter?
He went to see his mother, and informed her of what had happened to him.
'I take the opportunity to write to you and inform you that I am well and in good health, and in hopes to find you in the same.
I am your only son, that is so far from your home, in the wide briny ocean.
As will be readily believed, he was soon drawn into a circle of associates who did not improve either his habits or his morals.
He asked her to go with him and see for herself.
She thanks the Lord for sparing her that giant sorrow, as all his wrong doings never ranked higher, in the eye of the law, than misdemeanors.
So pray write as quick as you can, and tell me how all the people is about the neighborhood.
A friend of Isabella's, a lady, who was much pleased with the good humor, ingenuity, and open confessions of Peter, when driven into a corner, and who, she said, 'was so smart, he ought to have an education, if any one ought,'-paid ten dollars, as tuition fee, for him to attend a navigation school.
So write as quick as you can, won't you?
This is the fifth letter that I have wrote to you, and have received no answer, and it makes me very uneasy.
Isabella now became a prey to distressing fears, dreading lest the next day or hour come fraught with the report of some dreadful crime, committed or abetted by her son.
These were the heart-wasting trials of watching over her children, scattered, and imminently exposed to the temptations of the adversary, with few, if any, fixed principles to sustain them.
Another, containing the last intelligence she has had from her son, reads as follows, and was dated 'Sept. 19, 1841':-
'Your only son, 'PETER VAN WAGENER.'
These delusive hopes were never to be realized, and a new set of trials was gradually to open before her.
Mother, I hope you do not forget me, your dear and only son.
When within forty yards of the hut, he touched Ronald and whispered to him to remain there.
These were dropped in among some rocks.
The revulsion of feeling at hearing her own tongue was so great that she was not capable of speaking, and she would have fallen had she not been clasped in the arms of the person who addressed her.
I am sure I could go on walking now.
"We are safe now, Mary; that is a troop of our corps.
She made an effort to rise as the horse came up.
I don't suppose we shall go far, but no doubt he will find some sort of hiding-place." Kreta, in fact, was just giving instructions to his men.
"Thank God, we have got you out, Miss Armstrong."
I think it is just beginning to get light, for I can make out the outlines of the trunks of the trees, which is more than I could do before.
Ah, that is the very thing; good men," he broke off, as Kreta and the Fingoes brought up a litter which they had been busy in constructing.
Please call me Mary, and I will call you Harry.
"Oh, yes, yes," the girl sobbed.
"Why not?" she asked in surprise.
"It could not be better, Kreta, even if it had been made on purpose.
Kreta bring girl to you.
Now, lads, lift him on to the litter."
Then, should we not be fighting the battles in the Union, by resisting even the organization of the Administration in a constitutional mode, and thus, at the very start, disable an Administration which was likely to encroach on our rights and to violate the Constitution of the country?
It can only be done by adopting a policy of peace.
Men speak of revolution; and when they say revolution they mean blood.
It is the constitutional House.
This Federal Government was instituted mainly as a common agent for foreign purposes, for free trade among the States, and for common defense. Representative liberty will remain in the States after they are separated.
I wrote to Vicksburg for information, and my friends could not learn that such a man had ever been there; but, if he had been there, no violence certainly had been offered to him.
How?
It can only be done by returning to the point from which we started, and saying, "This is a Government of fraternity, a Government of consent, and it shall not be administered in a departure from those principles."
False reports have led you to suppose there was in our section hostility to you with manifestations which did not exist.
I consider a dual legislative department would be to bring into antagonism the representatives of two different countries, to war perpetually, and thus to continue, not union, but the irrepressible conflict.
The Senator from Tennessee, to whom I must refer again--and I do so because he is a Southern Senator--taking the most hostile ground against us, refers to the State of Tennessee, and points to the time when that State may do those things which he has declared it an absurdity for any State to perform.
The result was, collision; and out of that collision came the separation of the colonies from the mother-country.
The man was nothing, save as he was the representative of opinions, of a policy, of purposes, of power, to inflict upon us those wrongs to which freemen never tamely submit.
I had supposed it was possible, avoiding argument and not citing authority, to have made to you a brief address.
Will you sit with sublime indifference and allow events to shape themselves?
It is treason to the principle of community independence.
Is there wisdom, is there patriotism in the land?
I will not attempt, in the language of the Senator, to handcuff the President.
We have just cause of complaint; but we are for remaining in the Union, and fighting the battle like men."
I will read a single paragraph from his speech, showing what his language is, in order that I may not, by any possibility, produce an impression upon others which his language does not justify.
To gather taxes in the Southern ports, the army and navy must be sent to perform the functions of magistrates.
They meant that it was a right; and force could only be invoked when that right was wrongfully denied.
He says, however, and this softens it a little:
Mr. Johnson: I had not quite done; but if the Senator is satisfied--
All will feel the deprivation of that high pride and power which belong to the flag now representing the greatest republic, if not the greatest Government, upon the face of the globe.
It comes into office handcuffed, powerless to do harm.
It may be a source of gratification to some gentlemen that their friend is elected; but no individual had the power to produce the existing state of things.
So much for that.
To argue that the man who follows the mandate of his State, resuming her sovereign jurisdiction and power, is disloyal to his allegiance to the United States, which allegiance he only owed through his State, is such a confusion of ideas as does not belong to an ordinary comprehension of our Government.
Shall we render it peaceful, with a view to the chance that, when hunger shall brighten the intellects of men, and the teachings of hard experience shall have tamed them, they may come back, in the spirit of our fathers, to the task of reconstruction?
"We do not think, though, that we have just cause for going out of the Union now.
The time is near at hand when the places which have known us as colleagues laboring together can know us in that relation no more for ever.
I have heard, with some surprise, for it seemed to me idle, the repetition of the assertion heretofore made, that the cause of the separation was the election of Mr. Lincoln.
Our fathers meant nothing of the sort.
Mr. Johnson, of Tennessee: When my speech is taken altogether, I think my meaning can be very easily understood.
No longer can you say the responsibility is upon the Executive.
The President has not even the power to draw his salary--his twenty-five thousand dollars per annum--unless we appropriate it.
I do not understand what the Senator means.
If so, the blood of the Revolution was shed in vain; no great principles were established; for force was the law of nature before the battles of the Revolution were fought.
I understand how men fight when they assume attitudes of hostility; but I do not understand how men, remaining connected together in a bond as brethren, sworn to mutual aid and protection, still propose to fight each other.
Mr. Davis: I receive the answer from the Senator, and I think I comprehend now that he is not going to use any force, but it is a sort of fighting that is to be done by votes and words; and I think, therefore, the President need not bring artillery and order out the militia to suppress them.
Lord North asserted the right to collect the revenue, and insisted on collecting it by force.
There is a strange similarity in the position of affairs at the present day to that which the colonies occupied.
I have heard the proposition from others; but I have not understood it.
The injury to the Southern States will be mainly to their foreign commerce.
The Constitution of the United States was formed for domestic tranquillity; and how, then, are we to fight in the Union?
We have a right here; and because you come forward and violate the ordinances of this House, I do not intend to go out; and, if you persist in the violation of the ordinances of the House, we intend to eject you from the building and retain the possession ourselves."
I meant that we should remain here under the Constitution of the United States and contend for all its guarantees; and by preserving the Constitution and all its guarantees we would preserve the Union.
Nay, more; its light has been thrown on foreign lands, and its regenerative power will outlive, perhaps, the Government as a sign for which it was set.
But God, who knows the hearts of men, will judge between you and us, at whose door lies the responsibility.
If I must have revolution, I say let it be a revolution such as our fathers made when they were denied their natural rights.
But you have chosen to take the policy of clinging to words [the Chicago platform], in disregard of passing events, and have hastened them onward.
We take an oath of office to maintain the Constitution of the United States.
It is true, as shown by the history of all revolutions, that they are most precipitated and intensified by obstinacy and vacillation.
I see, then--if gentlemen insist on using the word "revolution" in the sense of a resort to force--a very great difference between their opinion and that of Mr. Madison.
If so, easy must be the solution of this question.
There will be injury--injury to all; differing in degree, differing in manner.
Day by day you have become more and more exasperated.
The earth, the air, and the sea became brilliant; and from the foam of ages rose the constellation which was set in the political firmament, as a sign of unity and confederation and community independence, coexistent with confederate strength.
That constellation has served to bless our people.
Men will see the efforts made, here and elsewhere; that we have been silent when words would not avail, and have curbed an impatient temper, and hoped that conciliatory counsels might do that which could not be effected by harsh means.
It is not my policy.
In the name of common sense, I ask how are we to fight in the Union?
I think it was a mere figure of speech.
I have striven to avert the catastrophe which now impends over the country, unsuccessfully; and I regret it.
I call the Senator's attention to them:
How?
The incoming Administration has not even the power to appoint a postmaster whose salary exceeds one thousand dollars a year, without consultation with and the acquiescence of the Senate of the United States.
I leave the case in your hands.
We have waited long; we have come to the conclusion that you mean to do nothing. In the Committee of Thirteen, where the resolutions of the Senator from Kentucky [Mr.
Our State governments have charge of nearly all the relations of person and property.
The same thing is being attempted to-day.
"I am much mistaken if he does not suspect the projects of Hatteras."
"This is a serious business, Doctor."
"Who knows?
"I think I see what you are after, but it is dangerous."
These Americans, Johnson, are bold, daring fellows.
Bring your hatchet, Johnson."
"It is time we started," said Hatteras, abruptly.
But the American made only evasive replies, and Clawbonny whispered in old Johnson's ear--
On entering the hut, each man with a load on his back, Clawbonny was struck with the coldness that pervaded the atmosphere.
"Hatteras never says a word to this American, and I must say the man has not shown himself very grateful.
I am going to dress myself in the seal's skin, and creep along the ice.
"It is a good thing the bear is killed, but if we leave him out here much longer, he will get as hard as a stone, and we shall be able to do nothing with him."
"No, and it is a great pity, for the sun's rays are quite strong enough just now to light our tinder."
"You are right.
Why not?
"I think nothing about it, but his ship is certainly on the road to the North Pole."
In a quarter of an hour or so the seal made his appearance on the ice.
"You are right," said Johnson.
"Why not?
I must try and steal a march on my adversary."
"He said so, but I fancied there was a peculiar smile on his lips while he spoke."
"Then you think that Altamont--"
that's the question."
"Do you think his own were similar?"
"I hope I may manage it, Johnson."
A good-sized piece was soon cut off, about a foot in diameter, and the Doctor set to work.
The dogs were speedily harnessed to the sledge, and the march resumed.
The Doctor soon joined the old boatswain behind the hummock, and told him what they had been doing.
"Yes, that might do at a pinch!
"Look again, Johnson," he said.
Hatteras looked at him, but no word of reproach escaped his lips.
We might try."
He danced about like an idiot, almost beside himself with joy, and shouted, "Hurrah! hurrah!" while Clawbonny hurried back into the hut and rekindled the fire.
He went back to his companions and said--
On going up to the stove he found the fire black out.
"Courage, Hatteras!" said the Doctor, handing him the weapon, which he had carefully loaded meanwhile.
Next day, after a hearty breakfast off the bear's paws, the little party continued their route; but the road became toilsome and fatiguing.
It measured nearly nine feet long, and four round, and the great tusks in his jaws were three inches long.
"Not I!" replied Hatteras.
"But do we not owe ours to him now?
"Quite, Johnson."
"Two men we've got that need looking after."
"Are you sure, Doctor, you haven't the steel?"
The old sailor put his hand into his pocket, but was surprised to find the steel missing.
Come, don't let us lose time.
On cutting the carcase open, Johnson found nothing but water in the stomach.
The beast had evidently had no food for a long time, yet it was very fat, and weighed fifteen hundred pounds.
"I hope we'll find something there to make a fire with," said the Doctor, smiling.
Forward!" shouted the Doctor, hurrying towards Hatteras, for the bear had reared on his hind legs, and was striking the air with one paw and tearing up the snow to stanch his wound with the other.
As they went along, the Doctor tried to get out of Altamont the real motive that had brought him so far north.
The journey proceeded without any fresh incident, but on the Saturday morning the travellers found themselves in a region of quite an altered character.
The boatswain hurried to the only remaining place he could think of, the hummock where he had stood to watch the bear.
Everything was frozen--birds, quadrupeds, amphibia disappeared as if by magic; seal-holes reclosed, and the ice once more became hard as granite.
They employed the rest of the day in repairing the house, which had suffered greatly by the explosion.
"But do you mean to say," asked Altamont, "that you might have anticipated the sudden change?"
He thinks he has my destiny in his hands, and knows all my projects.
Hatteras made no reply.
The hunters never went far from Fort Providence, for game was so plentiful that it seemed waiting their guns, and the whole bay presented an animated appearance.
"In two ways.
"An immense one, if we are to believe horticulturists, who call them the patron saints of the frost."
The Doctor drew the attention of his companions to the fact, that almost all these animals were beginning to lose their white winter dress, and would soon put on summer attire, while nature was already providing mosses, and poppies, and saxifragas, and short grass for their sustenance.
The sun's pale disc became deeper in colour, and remained longer above the horizon.
"Tell me, now, would you like to find yourself only a few miles from the pole and not be able to get to it?"
"Of course," replied the American.
The thaw, meanwhile, was making rapid progress.
Do you look on me as a true-hearted Englishman like yourself, anxious for his country's glory?"
"You will join us, I suppose, Altamont," he said.
Other tokens of spring's approach were manifest of equal significance, the birds were returning in flocks, and the air resounded with their deafening cries.
"And suppose the man won't allow his ship to be cut up?"
I ought to have put my seed under the protection of Saint Paucratius and the other two saints, whose fete days fall this month."
He just had the pleasure of seeing tiny little green leaves begin to sprout, when the cold returned in full force.
"You hear, Bell," said the Doctor, eagerly.
"Yes, for I know you have never been actuated by self-interest. But what are you driving at?"
Hatteras could not bring himself to consent, but said--
The ice began to crack here and there, and jets of salt water were thrown up, like fountains in an English park.
"He would never consent to that, Hatteras; and, moreover, to leave a man in that way, and not know whether we might find him safe when we came back, would be worse than imprudent: it would be inhuman. Altamont will come with us; he must come.
"No," continued Clawbonny; "the real truth is, it is not the sloop you care about: it is the man."
He told him everything.
"Well, I tell you what I think.
He never said nothing.
At last I says:
He flung it down, and says:
At last he says:
In the morning we went out to the woodpile and chopped up the brass candlestick into handy sizes, and Tom put them and the pewter spoon in his pocket.
Then we whirled in with the pick and shovel, and in about two hours and a half the job was done.
"Yes," I says, "but I reckon it ain't regular.
I scratched around amongst the old tools, and got a pickaxe and give it to him, and he took it and went to work, and never said a word.
Jim he never let on but what it was only just a piece of rock or something like that that's always getting into bread, you know; but after that he never bit into nothing but what he jabbed his fork into it in three or four places first.
And he said it would make us all celebrated that had a hand in it.
Tom jerked the door open and flung out a slab of Jim's meat, and the dogs went for it, and in two seconds he was out himself and back again and shut the door, and I knowed he'd fixed the other door too. Then he went to work on the nigger, coaxing him and petting him, and asking him if he'd been imagining he saw something again.
He only just looked scornful, and said something about nobody ever heard of such an idiotic idea, and then he went to studying.
He raised up, and blinked his eyes around, and says:
Then we went to the nigger cabins, and while I got Nat's notice off, Tom shoved a piece of candlestick into the middle of a corn-pone that was in Jim's pan, and we went along with Nat to see how it would work, and it just worked noble; when Jim bit into it it most mashed all his teeth out; and there warn't ever anything could a worked better.
Then he says:
What you reckon I better do?
"Will you do it, honey?—will you?
By and by he said he had ciphered out two or three ways, but there warn't no need to decide on any of them yet.
Next day Tom stole a pewter spoon and a brass candlestick in the house, for to make some pens for Jim out of, and six tallow candles; and I hung around the nigger cabins and laid for a chance, and stole three tin plates.
When I got up stairs I looked out at the window and see Tom doing his level best with the lightning-rod, but he couldn't come it, his hands was so sore.
"I'll tell you.
I didn't know just what to do—but then I thought.
We crept in under Jim's bed and into the cabin, and pawed around and found the candle and lit it, and stood over Jim awhile, and found him looking hearty and healthy, and then we woke him up gentle and gradual.
"Well, then, I'll have to make it myself."
Tom said so himself.
"All right, I'll do it, seeing it's you, and you've been good to us and showed us the runaway nigger.
If we was prisoners it would, because then we'd have as many years as we wanted, and no hurry; and we wouldn't get but a few minutes to dig, every day, while they was changing watches, and so our hands wouldn't get blistered, and we could keep it up right along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the way it ought to be done.
That night we went down the lightning-rod a little after ten, and took one of the candles along, and listened under the window-hole, and heard Jim snoring; so we pitched it in, and it didn't wake him.
He had his own by him, but I handed him mine.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
So Tom was satisfied.
But you got to be mighty careful.
He said that in that way it could be strung out to as much as eighty year, and would be the best time on record.
"Now, the thing to study out is, how to get the things to Jim."
He was always just that particular.
By jings, we forgot to fasten that lean-to door!
Tom was in high spirits.
"Take them in through the hole," I says, "when we get it done."
And told him how to keep a journal on the shirt with his blood, and all that.
Full of principle.
Gimme a case-knife."
And whilst we was a-standing there in the dimmish light, here comes a couple of the hounds bulging in from under Jim's bed; and they kept on piling in till there was eleven of them, and there warn't hardly room in there to get your breath.
It's because they're hungry; that's the reason.
Tom says:
Jim had plenty corn-cob pipes and tobacco; so we had a right down good sociable time; then we crawled out through the hole, and so home to bed, with hands that looked like they'd been chawed.
Come up the stairs, and let on it's a lightning-rod."
"Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?"
We cleared everything out of the way, about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log.
I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind; it's one of the most jackass ideas I ever struck;" but he never paid no attention to me; went right on.
He loves "anticipations"--advancing a single note or a few notes of the harmony and then filling in the sustained tone or tones with what was at first lacking.
"Grandfather wedded my grandmother dear, So grandfather then was a bridegroom, I fear,"
All through them one seems to hear a deep-sounding tone.
The title of another work which ranks among his finest productions, the "Kreisleriana," also requires explanation.
Think of it, since my last letter to you I have another entire book of new things ready.
I intend to call them 'Kreisleriana,' and in them you and a thought of you play the chief role, and I shall dedicate them to you.
This symbolism must be borne in mind in listening to "The Papillons."
In fact, the elder Schumann discouraged Robert's musical aspirations; and as a result, instead of receiving early in life a systematic musical training, his education was along other lines.
Asch was the birthplace of Ernestine von Fricken, one of Schumann's early loves.
His meeting with the celebrated pianoforte teacher, Frederick Wieck, the Leschetitzki of his day, determined Schumann to enter upon a musical career.
Some boatmen rescued him from drowning, but he had to be taken to an asylum near Bonn, where he died in July, 1856.
These "Fantasie Pieces" and the aptly named "Novelettes" seem destined always to retain their popularity.
Concerning the work as a whole he wrote to Clara while in the throes of composition: "This music now in me, and always such beautiful melodies!
Thoughts of His Clara.
But if Schumann's compositions are wanting in superficially attractive brightness, they more than make up for it in their profounder characteristics.
William Mason went to Leipzig in 1849.
In Schumann's music the sensitive listener will find a curious blending of poet, bourgeois, and philosopher.
His father was a book publisher and was in hopes that the son would show literary aptitude.
Poet, Bourgeois, and Philosopher.
His pieces, besides intrinsic musical worth, have a distinct meaning, usually indicated by the titles he gives them.
Surely "Kreisleriana" are Schumanniana.
and the whole ends in a merry uproar.
Robert Schumann was born at Zwickau in June, 1810.
This he derived from a book by E. T. A. Hoffmann, who sometimes is spoken of as the German Poe, although he lacks the exquisite art of the American author--in fact, is a Poe bound up in much heavy German philosophy and turgid introspection.
It was largely through Madame Schumann's public playing of her husband's works that they won their way.
It will be found beautiful in itself; but it also is easy to discover that the titles and explanations which are calculated to place the hearer in certain receptive moods vastly add to his enjoyment.
Unfortunately, through the use of this contrivance he strained the tendons of one hand and his dream of a virtuoso's career vanished.
Yes, they belong to you as to no one else, and how sweetly you will smile when you find yourself in them!
SCHUMANN, THE "INTIMATE"
My music seems to me so wonderfully interwoven, in spite of all its simplicity, and speaking right from the heart.
"Through every tone there passes, To him who deigns to list, In varied earthly dreaming, A tone of gentleness."
And these titles themselves often are suggested by the works of authors whom he admired, or hark back to certain fanciful figures like harlequins and columbines.
But the best of them, including, of course, the admirable "A Minor Concerto," long will retain their hold on the modern pianist's repertoire.
"Carnaval" and "Kreisleriana."
Having finished with his Chopin group, the pianist is apt to follow it with his Schumann selections, and we meet with another original musical genius.
Schumann made valuable contributions to so-called program music.
He studied law at Leipzig in 1828 and in Heidelberg in 1829, and was thus what is rare among musicians--a composer with an academic education.
The car is fastened to the centre cord, and the whole attached to the balloon in such a manner that it may be readily and quickly detached, either by cutting a string, or pulling a trigger.
It has not yet been proved that the principle was wrong, but the defect lay in the weakness of the materials employed in the formation of the Parachute.
After attaining an altitude of nearly two miles, Mr. Hampton proceeded to cut the rope that held him attached to the balloon.
When the re-action took place, the balloon had lost its buoyancy, and fell, rather than descended, to the ground.
One of the stays of the machine having given way, his danger was increased.
It is made of silk or cotton.
Mr. Hampton remembered that a bag of ballast was fastened beneath the car, he stooped over and upset the sand, he also noted by his watch the time he occupied in descending.
As he was permitted to display his Parachute in the manner he intended to use it, the idea suddenly flashed across his mind that, he could carry out his long-nursed wishes.
On the 29th July, 1837, Mr. Cocking ascended in his new Parachute, attached to the Great Nassau Balloon.
He started from an enclosure near North Audley Street, and descended after having been seven or eight minutes in the air.
His idea was that it might be made a sort of fire-escape.
Consequently, in the East, where the Umbrella has been from the earliest ages in familiar use, it appears to have been occasionally employed by vaulters, to enable them to jump safely from great heights.
So steady and slow was the descent that the Parachute appeared to be stationary.
He never spoke, but died almost immediately afterwards.
Immediately the Parachute was cut away, the balloon ascended with frightful velocity, owing to the ascending power it necessarily gained by being freed from a weight of nearly 500 pounds; and had it not been that its occupants applied their mouths to the air-bags previously provided, they must have been suffocated by the escaping gas.
He suddenly cut the rope which kept him down, and went off, to the astonishment of the spectators: the last cheering sound that reached him being--"He will be killed to a dead certainty!"
Her Parachute had a large orifice in the top, in order to check the oscillation, and this appears to have been tolerably successful.
The next person who tried this dangerous experiment was his niece, Eliza Garnerin, who descended several times in safety.
The machine is thus kept expanded during descent.
The aeronauts themselves were for some time in a state of imminent peril.
This he suffered to fall from a great height, and it reached the ground in safety.
Father Loubere, in his curious account of Siam, relates, that a person famous in that country for his dexterity, used to divert the King and Court by the extraordinary leaps he took, having two Umbrellas with long slender handles, fastened to his girdle.
The Parachute commonly in use is nothing more or less than a huge Umbrella, presenting a surface of sufficient dimension to experience from the air a resistance equal to the weight of descent, in moving through the fluid at a velocity not exceeding that of the shock which a person can sustain without danger or injury.
In 1290 they were all banished from the kingdom and their property seized by the crown.
He must do something to support his family, or he will become disliked.--AUTHOR.]
The nobles were forgiven afterwards by the king, who now turned his attention to the victorious Scots.
Young Edward was not much of a monarch.
She formed the acquaintance of Roger Mortimer, who consented to act as her paramour.
During a successful campaign against these people Edward fell sick, and died in 1307.
He left orders for the Scottish war to be continued till that restless and courageous people were subdued.
Baliol was succeeded by the brave William Wallace, who won a great battle at Stirling, but was afterwards defeated entirely at Falkirk, and in 1305 was executed in London by request.
Shortly afterwards all the Jews in England were imprisoned.
The Spencers now returned, and the queen began to cut up strangely and create talk.
This seizure of real estate turned the attention of the Jews to the use of diamonds as an investment.
Edward fled to Wales, but in 1326 was requested to come home and remain in jail there, instead of causing a scandal by staying away and spending his money in Wales.
The critic, too, should not be forgotten in a work of this kind.
But the Scotch called to their aid Robert Bruce, the grandson of Baliol's competitor, and he was solemnly crowned at the Abbey of Scone.
The English, numbering one hundred thousand, at Bannockburn fought against thirty thousand Scots.
For four hundred years the Jews were not permitted to return to England.
And still the Jews are not yet considered as among the redeemed.
Turning sick at the gory sight, he buried his face in his handkerchief and expired.
Between ourselves" (and her face assumed its melancholy expression), "he was mentioned at Her Majesty's and you were pitied...."
"My daughter is coming for me to take me there."
As she named the Empress, Anna Pavlovna's face suddenly assumed an expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious patroness.
Had you heard?"
"What has been decided?
Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one.
Do you know that profound thinker?
What answer did Novosiltsev get?
Do you know that since your daughter came out everyone has been enraptured by her?
"You are staying the whole evening, I hope?"
"I shall be delighted to meet them," said the prince.
And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised the maid of honor's hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and fro as he lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction.
The prince answered nothing, but she looked at him significantly, awaiting a reply.
CHAPTER I
"I thought today's fete had been canceled.
She is rich and of good family and that's all I want."
And she smiled her ecstatic smile.
Our gracious sovereign recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it.
He is the well-known Prince Bolkonski who had to retire from the army under the late Emperor, and was nicknamed 'the King of Prussia.' He is very clever but eccentric, and a bore.
"Listen, dear Annette," said the prince, suddenly taking Anna Pavlovna's hand and for some reason drawing it downwards.
Is this princess of yours rich?"
He has been received by the Emperor.
She has refused to evacuate Malta.
Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte is invincible, and that all Europe is powerless before him....
"Can one be well while suffering morally?
She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity.
He will save Europe!"
I see I have frightened you--sit down and tell me all the news."
She has a brother; I think you know him, he married Lise Meinen lately.
The prince was silent and looked indifferent.
Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part.
She wanted to find, and still seeks, some secret motive in our actions.
"I often think," she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer to the prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that political and social topics were ended and the time had come for intimate conversation--"I often think how unfairly sometimes the joys of life are distributed.
"Arrange that affair for me and I shall always be your most devoted slave-slafe with an f, as a village elder of mine writes in his reports.
"In a moment.
He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a gesture.
I must put in an appearance there," said the prince.
"You know I did all a father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools.
You are so eloquent.
I don't speak of Anatole, your youngest.
In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pavlovna burst out:
"If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10--Annette Scherer."
None.
The English have not understood and cannot understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who wants nothing for himself, but only desires the good of mankind.
The poor girl is very unhappy.
You know everything."
He frowned.
Anna Pavlovna meditated.
He lives in the country.
Russia alone must save Europe.
If the child be a girl, a weaning mother performs this ceremony, and suitable presents must be offered on either side.
A small table is prepared.
The ceremony is as follows:--The child is brought out and given to the weaning father or sponsor.
A feast should be prepared, according to the means of the family.
When the child is taken out of the warm water, its body must be dried with a kerchief of fine cotton, unhemmed.
ON THE BIRTH AND BEARING OF CHILDREN
The ceremony of drinking wine is the same as that gone through at the weaning.
This ceremony is only performed once.
There is no difference in the rest of the ceremony.
When this ceremony is over, the child is handed back to its guardian, and three wine-cups are produced on a tray.
The dyer is presented with wine and condiments when the girdle is entrusted to him.
Any time after the youth has reached the age of fifteen, according to the cleverness and ability which he shows, a lucky day is chosen for this most important ceremony, after which the boy takes his place amongst full-grown men.
The locks should be well wrapped up in paper and kept in the house until the man's death, to serve as a reminder of the favours which a man receives from his father and mother in his childhood; when he dies, it should be placed in his coffin and buried with him.
He takes it on his left knee.
The borrowed girdle is tied on with that given by the husband, and the girdle-mother at this time gives and receives a present.
By degrees the hair is allowed to grow, the crown alone being shaved, and a forelock left.
This was called the "half cutting." The poorer classes have a habit of shortening the sleeves before this period; but that is contrary to all rule, and is an evil custom.
The husband produces it from the left sleeve of his dress; and the wife receives it in the right sleeve of her dress, and girds it on for the first time.
Still, these latter persons, if they wish to go through the ceremony in its entirety, may do so without impropriety.
The sponsor drinks three cups, and presents the cup to the child.
The drinking is repeated, and the weaning father receives a present from the child.
The child receives from the sponsor a dress of ceremony, on which are embroidered storks and tortoises (emblems of longevity--the stork is said to live a thousand years, the tortoise ten thousand), fir-trees (which, being evergreen, and not changing their colour, are emblematic of an unchangingly virtuous heart), and bamboos (emblematic of an upright and straight mind).
The ceremony of cutting off the forelock used in old days to include the ceremony of putting on the noble's cap; but as this has gone out of fashion, there is no need to treat of it.
If the child be a boy, it is fed by a gentleman of the family; if a girl, by a lady.
The sponsor then, without letting the young man see what he is doing, places the lock which has been cut into the pocket of his left sleeve, and, leaving the room, gives it to the young man's guardians, who wrap it in paper and offer it up at the shrine of the family gods. But this is wrong.
The wine-drinking is gone through as above.
Gentlemen of the Samurai or military class cut off the whole of the forelock.
In the fifth month of a woman's pregnancy, a very lucky day is selected for the ceremony of putting on a girdle, which is of white and red silk, folded, and eight feet in length.
These, however, are not the first clothes which it wears.
I thought you would like to see what a wonderful rose it is.
We children had wriggled under the fence, and were climbing the apple trees by that time, and we wanted to be brought up there that very minute.
She is Uncle Allan's only child.
Then when father died last year we had to find a cheap and quiet place to live, and I remembered the Yellow House in Beulah and told mother my idea.
Mother says she feels as if he had pasted laughter and good nature on all the walls as he papered them.
Mother would wish to be remembered to Mrs. Hamilton, but she will never know I am writing to you.
Her hair is very long, and the wave in it is natural. The little boy is Peter.
BILL HARMON.
"Plant something!" I said, and father thought it was a good idea and took a little crimson rambler rose bush from the box.
We all of us look back to that day as the happiest one that we can remember.
HAMILTON,--I am Nancy, the oldest of the Carey children, who live in your house.
Admiral Southwick, who is in China, calls us Mother Carey's chickens. They are stormy petrels, and are supposed to go out over the seas and show good birds the way home.
I enclose you a little picture cut from the wall paper we want to put on the front hall, hoping you will like it.
I'll look out for your interest and see they don't do nothing outlandish.
When you open the front door (and we hope you will, sometime, and walk right in!) how lovely it will be to look into yellow hayfields!
There was a piece in a Portland paper about a Counsul somewhere being fired because he set in his shirt-sleeves durin office hours.
The big boy is Gilbert.
It is only a snap shot, but you can see how beautiful she is.
Gilbert says we are putting another grand piano leg on the walls, but we are not, for we are doing all our own cooking and dishwashing and saving the money that a cook would cost, to do lovely things for the Yellow House.
Thank you, dearest Mr. Hamilton, for letting us live in it.
The old paper is hanging in shreds and some of the plaster is loose, but Mr. Popham will make it all right.
We know you have five, older than we are, but if there are any the right size for me to send my love to, please do it.
NANCY CAREY.
They will not lay out much at first as they are short of cash but if ever good luck comes along they will fit up the house like a pallis and your granchildren will reep the proffit.
Uncle Allan has nervous prostration and all of mother's money.
Mother says just think of buying so much joy and color for twenty cents a double roll; and we children think we shall never get tired of sitting on the stairs in cold weather and making believe it is haying time.
Please look carefully at the lady sitting in the chair, for it is our mother.
DEAR MR.
Yours affectionately,
P.S. We've been having a spell of turrible hot wether in Beulah. How is it with you?
We think it is very reasonable, and do not wonder you don't like to spend anything on repairs or improvements for us, as you have to pay taxes and insurance.
The rent is sixty dollars a year, as I suppose Bill Harmon told you when he sent you mother's check for fifteen dollars for the first quarter.
I haven't told anybody that I am writing this, but I wanted you to know everything about us, as you are our landlord.
Father asked us what we could do for the place that had been so hospitable to us, and I remembered a box of plants in the carryall, that we had bought at a wayside nursery, for the flower beds in Charlestown.
We could be so happy if Cousin Ann wouldn't always say we are spending money on another person's house and such a silly performance never came to any good.
Lemuel Hamilton.
He stopped and took the picture and sent us one, explaining that every one admired it.
P.S.
The second picture is of me tying up the crimson rambler.
You see there are four of us children, which with mother makes five, and now there is Julia, which makes six.
We hope you will have a good deal over for your own use out of our rent, as we shouldn't like to feel under obligation.
He can't go to college now, as father intended, and he is very sad and depressed; but mother says he has a splendid chance to show what father's son can do without any help but his own industry and pluck.
She said we should look so idle if somebody didn't do something, but she never really hems; and Kathleen is leaning over mother's shoulder. We all wanted to lean over mother's shoulder, but Kitty got there first.
Letter from Miss Nancy Carey to the Hon.
I am the tallest girl, with the curly hair. Julia is sitting down in front, hemming.
I happened to be wearing my yellow muslin, and I am sending you the one the gentleman colored, because it is the beautiful crimson of the rose against the yellow house that makes people admire it so.
Don't you love the white horse in the haycart, and the jolly party picnicking under the tree?
BILL.
XVI
It is June, and Beulah is so beautiful you feel like eating it with sugar and cream!
THE POST BAG
Cousin Ann has made us a splendid present of enough money to bring the water from the well into the kitchen sink and to put a large stove like a furnace into the cellar.
But somehow his spells could not have worked properly that day, as the bear chief did not know that Redmouth had gone with his master, or he would have been more careful.
Now, as was plain by his being able to change the shape of the two brothers, the bear chief knew a good deal of magic, and he was quite aware that the little boy was following the trail, and he sent a very small but clever bear servant to wait for him in the bushes and to try to tempt him into the mountain.
Not knowing quite what to make of it all, the boy continued on the trail, and went down the right-hand fork till he came to the clump of bushes where the bears used to hide.
It was just an accident.'
'Ah! here is food at last!' thought he; but how was he to kill the bear, who was so much bigger than himself?
He wandered about for many days, till he reached a place where food was very scarce, and for a whole week he went without any.
'What a useless creature you are!' cried he.
It took him a long time, for there were a great many of them, but at last he had them all in his hand.
'How DID you get under that rock?' asked they, making a ring round him; but they had to repeat their question several times before the wolverine would answer, for he, like many other persons, found it hard to confess that he had brought his troubles on himself.
However, the mouse was used to it and only answered: 'I think you had better stay here till it is done, and if there is any alteration needed I can make it.' So the wolverine sat down on a heap of dry ferns, and picking up the apple, he finished it without even asking the mouse's leave.
And the wolverine laughed and said: 'Oh, that will do just as well'; and began to run down the side of the mountain.
At last the coat was ready, and the wolverine put it on.
When the wolverine, who was very particular about his clothes, came to put it on, he grew very angry.
'Why did you not leave me alone?' asked the rock.
So the lightning disappeared into the cloud for a moment to gather up fresh strength, and then came rushing down, right upon the rock, which it sent flying in all directions, and took the wolverine's coat so neatly that, though it was torn into tiny shreds, the wolverine himself was quite unharmed.
'You are no good at all,' cried the wolverine crossly, for it was suffering great pain, 'and if you cannot get me free, I shall see what my friends the lightning and thunder can do.' And he called loudly to the lightning to come and help him as quickly as possible.
'Well, I was dull, and wanted someone to play with me,' he said at last, in sulky voice, 'and I challenged the rock to catch me.
'I will call my brothers,' answered the wolverine.
'That was rather clumsy of you,' said he, standing up naked in his flesh.
'Do you expect me to go about in such a coat as that?
'I'll go to my sister the frog,' he thought to himself, 'and she will sew them together for me'; and he set off at once for the swamp in which his sister lived.
But you WOULD have it, and I certainly sha'n't move now till I am forced to.'
But just look at the way she has done it!
But the faster the wolverine ran, the faster the rock rolled, and by-and-by the little creature began to get very tired, and was sorry he had not left the rock to itself.
'I tore my coat this morning,' he began, when he had found her sitting at the door of her house eating an apple.
'I did not want to move--I hate moving.
Why it bulges all down the back, as if I had a hump, and it is so tight across the chest that I expect it to burst every time I breathe.
'It was all in little bits, and I took it to our sister the frog to ask her to sew it for me.
He was growing desperate, when he suddenly came upon a bear that was lying asleep.
Helga had so much to think about, that the ride home appeared very short.
'This is my house, and is to be yours,' said Habogi, as he jumped down and held out his arms to lift Helga from the horse.
In three days he will bring you back here, with your parents and sisters, and any guests you may invite, in your company.
And, taking her arm, he led her up the steps.
Helga felt as if it would take her all her life to see everything properly, and it only seemed a second since she had entered the house, when Habogi came up to her.
But when she got inside, she stood quite bewildered at the beauty of all around her.
There were carpets everywhere, thick and soft, and of deep rich colours; and the cushions were of silk, and made you sleepy even to look at them; and curious little figures in china were scattered about.
And after they had given her some supper they begged her to tell them all she had done.
The girl's heart sank a little, as she thought that the man who possessed such wonderful sheep, and cows, and horses, might have built himself a prettier place to live in; but she did not say so.
None of her friends owned such things, not even the miller, who was the richest man she knew.
By that time the feast will be ready.'
One of the Punjabis had already travelled three nights and was weary and fatigued.
There were no bunks in this carriage whereon passengers could lie with any degree of safety or comfort.
To this compartment there was a closet falsely so called.
Among the many suggestions that can be made for dealing with the evil here described, I would respectfully include this: let the people in high places, the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief, the Rajas, Maharajas, the Imperial Councillors and others, who generally travel in superior classes, without previous warning, go through the experiences now and then of third class travelling.
On reaching the station I found that the ghari-wala would not take me unless I paid the fare he wanted.
The compartment itself was evil looking.
At the Imperial Capital a certain third class booking-office is a Black-Hole fit only to be destroyed.
The rush of passengers could not be stayed. The fighters among us found the task almost beyond them.
I simply told him he would have to pull me out of the ghari or call the policeman.
What I have described is not exceptional but normal.
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The result was that every time you walked on the floor or rather cut your way through the passengers seated on the floor, you waded through dirt.
Disinfecting powder, ashes, or disinfecting fluids are unknown.
On Indian trains alone passengers smoke with impunity in all carriages irrespective of the presence of the fair sex and irrespective of the protest of non-smokers.
A defiant Memon merchant protested against this packing of passengers like sardines.
The guards or other railway servants came in only to push in more passengers.
They are permitted to throw the leavings of their food and spit where they like, sit how they like and smoke everywhere.
These three men were bound for Ludhiana and had still more nights of travel in store for them.
Having resorted to third class travelling, among other reasons, for the purpose of studying the conditions under which this class of passengers travel, I have naturally made as critical observations as I could.
Does the third class passenger get one-fifth, even one-tenth, of the comforts of his first class fellow?
The existence of the awful war cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the removal of this gigantic evil.
The closet was also not cleaned during the journey and there was no water in the water tank.
Some lay on the floor in the midst of dirt and some had to keep standing.
The carriage was packed already and but for a friend's intervention I could not have been able to secure even a seat.
Compare the lot of the first class passengers with that of the third class.
Any other result is impossible where passengers always leave some dirt where they go and take more on leaving.
Not during the whole of the journey was the compartment once swept or cleaned.
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After reaching Raichur the pressure became unbearable.
I have fairly covered the majority of railway systems during this period.
Many of them used choice expressions as to the quality but were satisfied to state that they were helpless in the matter; they had to take things as they came.
The guard insulted him and referred him to the management at the terminus.
The army of flies buzzing about them warns you against their use.
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The merchants related the bribes they had to give to procure comfort.
He does not want to complain even though to go to these places may be to court death.
These could only have seating accommodation.
There were two nights to be passed in this train before reaching Madras.
These were previously sampled by millions of flies. I asked some of the passengers who went in for these dainties to give their opinion.
But a third-class traveller is dumb and helpless.
A free fight was, at one time, avoided only by the intervention of some of the older passengers who did not want to add to the discomfort by an exhibition of temper.
This compartment was constructed to carry 9 passengers but it had constantly 12 in it.
The closets attached to these places defy description.
I can vouch for the appearance, but I cite the testimony of the passengers as to the taste.
Over one quarter of that time I have passed on the Indian trains travelling third class by choice.
In vain did he say that this was his fifth night on the train.
They squat on dirty floors and eat dirty food.
One could understand an entire stoppage of passenger traffic in a crisis like this, but never a continuation or accentuation of insanitation and conditions that must undermine health and morality.
On the way passengers got for tea tannin water with filthy sugar and a whitish looking liquid mis-called milk which gave this water a muddy appearance.
THIRD CLASS IN INDIAN RAILWAYS
I have travelled up north as far as Lahore, down south up to Tranquebar, and from Karachi to Calcutta.
I have now been in India for over two years and a half after my return from South Africa.
There were three stalwart Punjabi Mahomedans, two refined Tamilians and two Mahomedan merchants who joined us later.
Dirt was lying thick upon the wood work and I do not know that it had ever seen soap or water.
It was labelled to carry 22 passengers.
Is it any wonder that plague has become endemic in India?
It is a known fact that the third class traffic pays for the ever-increasing luxuries of first and second class travelling.
It was designed as a European closet but could hardly be used as such.
Now and then I have entered into correspondence with the management of the different railways about the defects that have come under my notice.
Surely a third class passenger is entitled at least to the bare necessities of life.
My admission was certainly beyond the authorised number.
The return journey was performed in no better manner.
There were during this night as many as 35 passengers in the carriage during the greater part of it.
But he could not stretch himself.
I have not the power adequately to describe them without committing a breach of the laws of decent speech.
The compartment had an exceptional assortment of passengers.
In neglecting the third class passengers, opportunity of giving a splendid education to millions in orderliness, sanitation, decent composite life and cultivation of simple and clean tastes is being lost. Instead of receiving an object lesson in these matters third class passengers have their sense of decency and cleanliness blunted during their travelling experience.
Refreshments sold to the passengers were dirty-looking, handed by dirtier hands, coming out of filthy receptacles and weighed in equally unattractive scales.
Stepping forward again to the front of his carriage where all the gaping crowd could catch every word, he exclaimed:
Thus far he had not spoken a word.
About seven years ago, I met him in one of the principal restaurants in the Palais Royale.
The grotesque appearance of these individuals, and the music, soon drew together an admiring crowd.
His death caused many an honest sigh, and his absence seemed to cast a gloom over several of his favorite halting-places.
Punch and his bells would attract crowds, but my good pencils attracted nobody.
Although good-natured and social to a degree, he was really one of the most self-conceited men I ever met.
I see you have the right idea of things.
His pencils were everywhere acknowledged to be superior to any other.
The servant then struck up a tune on the richly-toned organ which always formed a part of Mangin's outfit.
He never cheated anybody.
"Gentlemen, you look astonished!
You know I could never maintain my reputation if I sold poor pencils.
I remarked that I had often seen him in public, and bought his pencils.
They paused at the entrance to each kloof through which they had to pass, and the Fingoes went cautiously ahead searching through the bushes.
Several times, although all the human beings were asleep, the scout returned, saying that they could not pass through the kraal, for the dogs had scented him and growled fiercely, and would set up such a barking when the party passed as to bring all the village out to see what was the matter.
We will soon get you comfortably into hospital.
"Don't move, sergeant, or you will set your wound off bleeding again.
"Good place," he said, looking round as he joined the others.
For a long time female figures came in and out, and it was not until long past midnight that they saw the last female figure disappear inside and the skin drawn across the entrance.
"I think so too, Kreta.
"Yes, of course," the lieutenant said, alighting.
"How long shall we give them, Kreta?"
"You can go in now," Kreta said.
Lay the lint in the gash. That's right.
Ronald would have carried her himself, but he felt that it would be worse than useless to attempt to do so.
I will see that no one catches the bridle on that side; do you attend to the right.
If we get out of this I shall be Sergeant Blunt again, but I should like you to call me Ronald now."
The whole thing did not occupy a moment, and as the women disappeared from her sight, two natives rose to their feet and looked round.
"How do you feel now?" he asked.
I hope it won't come to that, still there's never any saying, and we shall have one or two nasty places to pass through on our way down.
"Will you shoot me if you find that we cannot get past?"
"If we should come across any of these scoundrels, Mary," he said, presently, "do you take the reins.
Mary reluctantly allowed herself to be lifted into the saddle, and rode off with the trooper.
Presently he heard six shots fired in rapid succession.
Some brandy and water was poured between Ronald's lips, and he soon opened his eyes.
"Here are some mealies and some cold meat.
I suppose he was leaning forward in the saddle when the spear touched him.
"I have got a bit of a scratch on the back, but it's nothing serious.
"No, I am not touched.
You better not go.
The darkness beneath the trees was dense, and it was some time before Ronald could make out even the outline of the figures before him.
It seemed to Ronald fully two hours, although it was less than one, before Kreta again touched him.
I am got up in native fashion.
You can trust yourself with me, you know."
So astonished were they at seeing a white man within a few yards of them that for a moment they did not think of using their weapons, and Ronald dashed through them, scattering them to right and left.
Where the succour was to come from, or how, she could not imagine; but it was evident, at least, that some white man was here, and was working for her.
They had started about eight in the evening, and it was, as they knew from the stars, fully three o'clock in the morning when they emerged from the forest.
Ronald nodded.
Kreta walk more quietly than white man.
"I am hungry myself," Ronald said "I was too anxious yesterday to do justice to my food."
There was no shirt underneath, for he had not waited to put one on when he mounted.
I don't see why they should be so bad; we have only gone about twenty-four miles each day, and I always considered that I could walk twenty miles without difficulty."
I have heard nothing about him since I heard from Sergeant Blunt that you had all got safely away after that attack."
CHAPTER XIII.
No doubt, if you had been in good spirits, and with a pleasant party, you could have walked fifty miles in two days, although that is certainly a long distance for a woman; but depressed and almost despairing, as you were, it told upon you generally, and doubtless you rather dragged your feet along than walked."
"Please wait a moment; I will not be above two minutes," Ronald said; "but I really cannot ride into Williamstown like this."
"In an hour Kreta will go see," the chief said; "but better give two hours for all to be fast asleep."
"I feel very much better now," the girl said when she had finished.
"One of my men has found a place that will do well," he said.
Kreta stood thoughtfully for a minute or two.
She was carried a short distance, then she heard her bearer say in English: "Come along; I take her a bit further.
"I never expected to see you again, for we heard the day before yesterday from the officer who came in with the ammunition waggons that you had gone off to try to rescue three ladies who had been carried off by the Kaffirs.
Once or twice he fancied he saw a dark shadow on the ground close to the hut, but he was not sure, and was still gazing intently when there was a touch on his shoulder, and, looking round, he saw the chief beside him.
Mountains very big, much bush; never find here."
"I am not Scotch, nor so far as I know is there any Scotch blood in my veins, but the name has been in the family a good many years; how it got there I do not know."
Another fell from a bullet from her pistol, and then he was through them.
"The wretches killed the other two the day they carried them off.
After going on for upwards of three hours, the chief stopped.
"That is all right, then.
They stopped by a little stream, running down the valley.
It was answered faintly from the distance; in five minutes the sound of a horse's hoofs were heard, and in a short time the Fingo who had been left in charge of it, galloped up with Ronald's horse.
I think that best way."
On the way there, if I could have got hold of an assegai I should have stabbed myself."
"How long will you be getting through, Kreta?"
Each time that this had to be done, Kreta lifted Mary Armstrong and carried her, and she had now become so exhausted that she was unable even to protest.
"You are bleeding dreadfully," the girl exclaimed, as she caught sight of his back.
You stop here quiet.
Do you think you can sit steady without my holding you firmly?"
"I don't want to think about it," the girl said, with a shudder.
The Fingoes ran at a pace that kept the horse at a sharp trot.
"He will understand it, my dear young lady, and you can see him in the hospital directly you get there."
Perhaps make great quarrel between Macomo and Sandilli.
It was not until he heard their call on the other side that Ronald galloped after them.
The troopers had heard from their comrades, on the return of the escort, that the sergeant had, before starting, got himself up as a native; and they were not therefore surprised, as they otherwise would have been, at his black skin.
Kreta ordered one of his men to rejoin his companions, and with the other advanced towards the village.
Give a little time longer, to make sure that all are asleep, then we go on."
Before approaching a kraal a halt was always made, and one of the Fingoes went on ahead to see if the fires were out and all natives inside their huts.
I will give you one of my pistols; then I can hold you with my right arm, for the horse may plunge if a spear strikes him.
"Partly, sir," Ronald said.
She knew that the natives constantly sit up talking and feasting until daylight is close at hand; and as they had extra motives for vigilance, she was sure that they would keep awake.
"I am not surprised at that, Miss Armstrong.
Suddenly, so suddenly that she scarcely knew what had happened, the two women disappeared from her sight.
"Perhaps it is a bad cut," Ronald smiled, "but a cut is of no consequence one way or the other.
Mary Armstrong was sitting on the ground, for she was now so utterly exhausted she could no longer keep her feet, and had, since they left the bush, been supported and half carried by Ronald and Kreta.
"Of course I can," she replied.
"They no overtake," the chief said, confidently.
"Thank God you didn't," said Ronald, earnestly, "though I could not have blamed you."
Noise spoil everything, get all of us killed."
The spell of the love-juice was on her, and to her the clown seemed the most beautiful and delightful creature on all the earth.
Then when this is done, all will be well with them."
"Your whole fairy kingdom buys not that boy from me.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
The juice of that little purple flower laid on the eyes of those who sleep will make them, when they wake, to love the first thing they see.
"Well, go your ways," said Oberon.
So the four mortal lovers went back to Athens and were married; and the fairy King and Queen live happily together in that very wood at this very day.
But before she started, she told her friend, Helena, what she was going to do.
While Puck was gone, Demetrius passed through the glade followed by poor Helena, and still she told him how she loved him and reminded him of all his promises, and still he told her that he did not and could not love her, and that his promises were nothing.
And before he released her from the enchantment, he persuaded her to give him the little Indian boy he so much desired to have.
Then drop this other herb on Lysander's eyes.
As for Hermia and Lysander, they were as loving a couple as you could meet in a day's march, even through a fairy wood.
The Duke gave her four days to think about it, and, at the end of that time, if she still refused to marry Demetrius, she would have to die.
You must overhang the night with drooping fog, and lead them so astray, that one will never find the other.
"I'd rather have a handful or two of good dried peas," said the clown. "But please don't let any of your people disturb me; I am going to sleep."
The end of it was that Helena and Hermia began to quarrel, and Demetrius and Lysander went off to fight.
"Feed him with apricots and dewberries, purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries. Steal honey-bags for him from the bumble-bees, and with the wings of painted butterflies fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes."
So she went to him, and betrayed her friend's secret.
Demetrius thought of no one but Helena, and Helena had never had any thought of anyone but Demetrius.
Come, fairies, let us leave him.
This clown had met with Puck, who had clapped an ass's head on his shoulders so that it looked as if it grew there. Directly Titania woke and saw this dreadful monster, she said, "What angel is this?
So, instead of keeping one happy Court and dancing all night through in the moonlight as is fairies' use, the King with his attendants wandered through one part of the wood, while the Queen with hers kept state in another.
Are you as wise as you are beautiful?"
"Do not desire to go out of the wood," said Titania.
"Would you like anything to eat?" said the fairy Queen.
They never met without saying disagreeable things to each other, and scolded each other so dreadfully that all their little fairy followers, for fear, would creep into acorn cups and hide them there.
Meanwhile Oberon found Titania asleep on a bank where grew wild thyme, oxlips, and violets, and woodbine, musk-roses and eglantine.
"What thou seest when thou wake, Do it for thy true love take."
Puck was the spirit of mischief.
Oberon was very sorry to see his kind scheme to help these lovers turn out so badly.
"Ready," said Mustardseed.
Now, it happened that when Titania woke the first thing she saw was a stupid clown, one of a party of players who had come out into the wood to rehearse their play.
"Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania," said the King.
"You spoil everything with your quarreling.
So he said to Puck--
"Only just help Cobweb to scratch. I must go to the barber's, for methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face."
"Kill me," said the clown, "the red bumble-bee on the top of the thistle yonder, and bring me the honey-bag.
Oberon was sorry for poor Helena, and when Puck returned with the flower, he bade him follow Demetrius and put some of the juice on his eyes, so that he might love Helena when he woke and looked on her, as much as she loved him.
And so when Oberon came along he found his beautiful Queen lavishing kisses and endearments on a clown with a donkey's head.
Hermia's father was so angry with her for refusing to do as he wished, that he actually brought her before the Duke of Athens to ask that she might be killed, if she still refused to obey him.
"Shall some of my fairies fetch you new nuts from the squirrel's house?" asked the Queen.
He did not care much about the Queen's affection, but he was very proud of having fairies to wait on him.
"But I'll be even with you before you leave this wood."
So Puck went and did as he was told, and when the two had fallen asleep without meeting each other, Puck poured the juice on Lysander's eyes, and said:--
I will put some of the juice of that flower on my Titania's eyes, and when she wakes she will love the first thing she sees, were it lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, or meddling monkey, or a busy ape."
Oberon took off the ass's head from the clown, and left him to finish his sleep with his own silly head lying on the thyme and violets.
Now, in Athens, where they lived, there was a wicked law, by which any girl who refused to marry according to her father's wishes, might be put to death.
Hermia and Lysander were lovers; but Hermia's father wished her to marry another man, named Demetrius.
And she and her train rode off down the moonbeams.
Oberon and Titania loved each other more than ever.
"Give me that little Indian boy, and I will again be your humble servant and suitor."
"These two young men are going to fight.
"It rests with you to make up the quarrel," said the King.
She knew that if she told Demetrius that Hermia was going, as she was, to the wood outside Athens, he would follow her, "and I can follow him, and at least I shall see him," she said to herself.
"Oh, I want nothing," said the clown.
"Where's Peaseblossom?" asked the clown with the ass's head.
So she called four fairies, whose names were Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed.
"You must attend this gentleman," said the Queen.
Now this wood where Lysander was to meet Hermia, and where the other two had decided to follow them, was full of fairies, as most woods are, if one only had the eyes to see them, and in this wood on this night were the King and Queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania.
"What! jealous, Oberon?" answered the Queen.
Now fairies are very wise people, but now and then they can be quite as foolish as mortal folk.
Oberon wanted the child to follow him and be one of his fairy knights; but the Queen would not give him up.
"If I am wise enough to find my way out of this wood, that's enough for me," said the foolish clown.
"Ready," said Peaseblossom.
That will give him his old sight and his old love.
I am not friends with him now."
"Now," said Oberon to this little sprite, "fetch me the flower called Love-in-idleness.
"I love you," she went on. "Come with me, and I will give you fairies to attend on you."
Then Oberon called his favorite fairy, Puck.
Oberon stooped over her and laid the juice on her eyes, saying:--
When they are tired out, they will fall asleep.
On this night, in a mossy moonlit glade, the King and Queen of the fairies met.
Oberon and Titania, who might have been as happy as the days were long, had thrown away all their joy in a foolish quarrel.
Then he took pity on her, and threw some juice of the disenchanting flower on her pretty eyes; and then in a moment she saw plainly the donkey-headed clown she had been loving, and knew how foolish she had been.
Come, fairies."
When Hermia woke she found Lysander gone, and wandered about the wood trying to find him.
First, because, if the soul has a natural knowledge of all things, it seems impossible for the soul so far to forget the existence of such knowledge as not to know itself to be possessed thereof: for no man forgets what he knows naturally; that, for instance, the whole is larger than the part, and such like.
Objection 1: It would seem that the soul understands all things through innate species.
But the sensible species which are in the senses, and by which we sense, are caused by the sensible object which exists actually outside the soul.
The Platonists however were of a contrary opinion.
Therefore it does not know corporeal things through itself.
Whether the Soul Understands Corporeal Things Through Its Essence?
But if it be said that our soul needs the senses in order to understand, through being in some way awakened by them to the consideration of those things, the intelligible species of which it receives from the separate principles: even this seems an insufficient explanation.
Wherefore there is no comparison between sense and intellect.
Secondly, because if it were necessary for the thing known to exist materially in the knower, there would be no reason why things which have a material existence outside the soul should be devoid of knowledge; why, for instance, if by fire the soul knows fire, that fire also which is outside the soul should not have knowledge of fire.
And this in two ways.
And because they observed that all bodies are mobile, and considered them to be ever in a state of flux, they were of opinion that we can have no certain knowledge of the true nature of things.
Therefore the soul knows bodies through its essence, which it employs for the formation of such images, and from which it forms them.
Wherefore we must say that the cognitive soul is in potentiality both to the images which are the principles of sensing, and to those which are the principles of understanding.
Therefore the intelligible species, by which the soul understands, are caused by some separate forms.
Whether the Intelligible Species Are Derived by the Soul from Certain Separate Forms?
Therefore by no means can it, through the intellect, know bodies, which are sensible.
But the soul can by no means, through the senses, understand spiritual things, which are intelligible.
But this is a separate intellect.
We must conclude, therefore, that material things known must needs exist in the knower, not materially, but immaterially.
Now we observe that man sometimes is only a potential knower, both as to sense and as to intellect.
Consequently the reason of the union of the soul with the body still remains to be sought.
To the formation of such images the soul gives part of its substance, just as a subject is given in order to be informed by some form.
First, because in the material principle of which they spoke, the various results do not exist save in potentiality.
First, because, since those species are immaterial and immovable, knowledge of movement and matter would be excluded from science (which knowledge is proper to natural science), and likewise all demonstration through moving and material causes.
If, therefore, the intellect does not know bodies, it follows that there is no science of bodies; and thus perishes natural science, which treats of mobile bodies.
It is therefore clear from the foregoing, that if there be an intellect which knows all things by its essence, then its essence must needs have all things in itself immaterially; thus the early philosophers held that the essence of the soul, that it may know all things, must be actually composed of the principles of all material things.
Therefore the intellect which abstracts the species not only from matter, but also from the individuating conditions of matter, has more perfect knowledge than the senses, which receive the form of the thing known, without matter indeed, but subject to material conditions.
For it was universally admitted that "like is known by like." But they thought that the form of the thing known is in the knower in the same mode as in the thing known.
And so the soul understands corporeal things through innate species.
But primary matter was created by God under the forms to which it has potentiality.
The reason of this is, because the act of knowledge extends to things outside the knower: for we know things even that are external to us.
Now by matter the form of a thing is determined to some one thing.
Therefore what in itself and in its essence is understood in act, is the cause that the intellectual soul actually understands.
Therefore the soul understands corporeal things through innate species.
Therefore the intelligible species, by which we actually understand, are caused by some separate substances.
But if the soul by its very nature had an inborn aptitude for receiving intelligible species through the influence of only certain separate principles, and were not to receive them from the senses, it would not need the body in order to understand: wherefore to no purpose would it be united to the body.
Lastly, Empedocles, who held the existence of our four material elements and two principles of movement, said that the soul was composed of these. Consequently, since they held that things exist in the soul materially, they maintained that all the soul's knowledge is material, thus failing to discern intellect from sense.
But all bodies are mobile and changeable. Therefore the soul cannot know bodies through the intellect.
Therefore the soul cannot know bodies through the intellect.
But since that which has a form actually, is sometimes unable to act according to that form on account of some hindrance, as a light thing may be hindered from moving upwards; for this reason did Plato hold that naturally man's intellect is filled with all intelligible species, but that, by being united to the body, it is hindered from the realization of its act.
Therefore the intelligible species, by which our intellect understands, are caused by some things actually intelligible, existing outside the soul.
Especially does the body seem necessary to the intellectual soul, for the latter's proper operation which is to understand: since as to its being the soul does not depend on the body.
But there is no necessity for this.
For he says that the soul "keeps something"--namely, not informed with such image--"which is able freely to judge of the species of these images": and that this is the "mind" or "intellect." And he says that the part which is informed with these images--namely, the imagination--is "common to us and beasts."
Objection 1: It would seem that the soul understands corporeal things through its essence.
In this way the soul makes such images from itself; not that the soul or some part of the soul be turned into this or that image; but just as we say that a body is made into something colored because of its being informed with color.
Therefore much more is the intellectual soul created by God under intelligible species.
In the same way the angelic intellect is perfected by intelligible species, in accordance with its nature; whereas the human intellect is in potentiality to such species.
For Plato, having observed that the intellectual soul has an immaterial nature, and an immaterial mode of knowledge, held that the forms of things known subsist immaterially.
If, therefore, our intellect, previously in potentiality, afterwards actually understands, this must needs be caused by some intellect which is always in act.
Objection 1: It would seem that the soul does not know bodies through the intellect.
And this is proved to be false especially from the fact that if a man be wanting in a sense, he cannot have any knowledge of the sensibles corresponding to that sense.
Therefore the intelligible forms of our intellect are derived from some separate substances.
And thus a man born blind could have knowledge of colors; which is clearly untrue.
Now that which in its essence is actually understood is a form existing without matter.
Therefore the soul can know corporeal creatures through its essence.
For it cannot be said that the intellectual soul is united to the body for the sake of the body: for neither is form for the sake of matter, nor is the mover for the sake of the moved, but rather the reverse.
That this is the sense, is clear from what follows.
But this seems to be unreasonable.
We must therefore conclude that the soul does not know corporeal things through innate species.
Wherefore it is clear that knowledge is in inverse ratio of materiality.
Therefore all corporeal creatures exist in a more excellent way in the soul than in themselves.
Whether the Soul Knows Bodies Through the Intellect?
Objection 1: It would seem that the intelligible species are derived by the soul from some separate forms.
And he is reduced from such potentiality to act--through the action of sensible objects on his senses, to the act of sensation--by instruction or discovery, to the act of understanding.
Now this may be shown to be false for two reasons.
For even in sensible things it is to be observed that the form is otherwise in one sensible than in another: for instance, whiteness may be of great intensity in one, and of a less intensity in another: in one we find whiteness with sweetness, in another without sweetness.
Now participation of an idea takes place by some image of the idea in the participator, just as a model is participated by a copy.
Therefore we have some knowledge of things even before we acquire knowledge; which would not be the case unless we had innate species.
So also the intellect, according to its own mode, receives under conditions of immateriality and immobility, the species of material and mobile bodies: for the received is in the receiver according to the mode of the receiver.
We must conclude, therefore, that through the intellect the soul knows bodies by a knowledge which is immaterial, universal, and necessary.
But in this opinion no sufficient reason can be assigned for the soul being united to the body.
For whatever is such by participation is caused by what is such essentially; for instance, that which is on fire is reduced to fire as the cause thereof.
Consequently he does not hold that the soul has innate knowledge, as Plato, who held that the participated ideas remain immovably in the soul.
Now this is proper to God, that His Essence comprise all things immaterially as effects pre-exist virtually in their cause. God alone, therefore, understands all things through His Essence: but neither the human soul nor the angels can do so.
But this opinion will not hold.
But such are not bodies.
Whether the Soul Understands All Things Through Innate Species?
For the intellect knows bodies by understanding them, not indeed through bodies, nor through material and corporeal species; but through immaterial and intelligible species, which can be in the soul by their own essence.
On the other hand, the intellect does not receive substantial being through the intelligible species; and therefore there is no comparison.
We must therefore conclude that the intelligible species, by which our soul understands, are not derived from separate forms.
But these can be nothing else than forms separate from matter.
The hunters set off in the direction of Cape Washington, and the hard snow so favoured their march, that in three hours they had gone fifteen miles, Duk jumping and barking beside them all the way.
"Not so much as you imagine, my friend.
"No, not that either, for gas would not be strong enough; and, worse still, it would waste our combustibles."
Clambering up the steep, rocky wall, against which the Doctor's House leaned, he succeeded, though with considerable difficulty, in reaching the top, which he found terminated abruptly in a sort of truncated cone.
A new project struck the Doctor's mind, which was soon matured and ripe for execution.
"No doubt of it; and yet an Esquimaux meal may well astonish us. In Sir John Ross's narrative, he states his surprise at the appetites of his guides.
I believe Mr. Clawbonny can do anything," exclaimed Johnson.
"That's soon told," replied Clawbonny.
"Fifteen pounds!" said Bell.
From this elevation there was an extensive view over a vast tract of country, which was all disordered and convulsed as if it had undergone some volcanic commotion.
He tells us that two of them--just two mind--devoured a quarter of a buffalo in one morning.
Haven't you a galvanic battery on board your ship?"
"I think it is," replied the Doctor.
"This voracity must be peculiar to the inhabitants of cold countries," said Altamont.
As soon as it grew dark the experiment was made, and proved a complete success.
After all, cooking has a good deal to do with it, and I'll bet you something I could dress you cutlets you would not turn up your nose at, unless for their black appearance."
Clawbonny was right, it was a walrus of huge dimensions, disporting himself not more than two hundred yards away.
Come on faster." The light became stronger the nearer they approached, and soon they were walking in a bright luminous track, leaving their long shadows behind them on the spotless snow.
"Oh, I'm prepared for everything after the mercury bullet, and the ice lens, and Fort Providence.
The Hudson's Bay Company always reckoned on this account 8 lbs. of meat to each man a day, or 12 lbs. of fish, or 2 lbs. of pemmican."
"I have been struck by the same fact; but I think it arises not only from the necessity of full diet, but from the extreme difficulty sometimes in procuring it.
The walrus rolled over, but speedily got up again, and tried to make his escape, but Altamont fell upon him with his hatchet, and cut off his dorsal fins.
"I have got an idea," he said; "I think of constructing a lighthouse on the top of that cone above our heads."
"In the Arctic regions people must eat enormously: it is not only one of the conditions of strength, but of existence.
"It is a walrus!" exclaimed the Doctor.
"Happily," said the Doctor.
"Do you think it is, Mr. Clawbonny?" said Bell.
The hunters separated, going in different directions, so as to surround the animal and cut off all retreat.
The sea was still entirely frozen over, but it was evident from the open breathing holes in the ice, that the seals had been quite recently on the surface.
CHAPTER VIII.
"Come," said the Doctor, "let us be off, for it is getting late.
He lost no time in going back to the snow house, and consulting over it with his companions.
"By all means.
The conducting wires were properly adjusted within it, and the pile with which they communicated fixed up in the sitting-room, where the warmth of the stove would protect it from the action of the frost.
"An electric light?"
But once frighten them and they all vanish as if by enchantment, and never return to the spot again.
It would be a double advantage.
Johnson could not help clapping his hands, half beside himself with delight.
"My good Bell, you mean to say to please yourself, but your voracity would never equal the Green-landers', for they devour from ten to fifteen pounds of meat a day."
It was a fine animal, measuring more than fifteen feet in length, and would have been worth a good deal for the oil; but the hunters contented themselves with cutting off the most savoury parts, and left the rest to the ravens, which had just begun to make their appearance.
"Well," replied Altamont; "I'm at a loss to see how you--"
"Yes, a lighthouse.
"Not I!" said Altamont.
Next morning Clawbonny was out by dawn of day.
It would be a beacon to guide us in distant excursions, and also serve to illumine our plateau in the long dreary winter months."
In an hour we can raise a pillar of ice ten feet high, and that is quite enough.
Just let us keep close behind him."
"Come, Clawbonny, tell us what your light is to be, then," said Altamont.
"Every man has his own fashion of dining," remarked the philosophical American.
But then we must remember that one meal sometimes has to last a whole day."
With seal oil?"
They crept along cautiously behind the hummocks, and managed to get within a few paces of him unperceived, when they fired simultaneously.
The moon had not yet risen, but the sky was serene and cloudless, and already glittering with stars--magnificent stars.
"One must be a little of everything, you know," was Clawbonny's modest reply.
"Arctic stomachs," replied the Doctor, "are prodigious; they can expand at will, and, I may add, contract at will; so that they can endure starvation quite as well as abundance.
"With one of the lanterns out of the Porpoise."
Night was drawing on, and it was time to think of returning to Fort Providence.
An intense brilliant light streamed from the lantern and illumined the entire plateau and the plains beneath.
The thought of food is always uppermost in the mind, and naturally finds mention in the narrative."
An Indian who guzzles like that can't do a whit better day's work than an Englishman, who has his pound of beef and pint of beer."
"Invigorating regimen, certainly!" said Bell.
"Well, if eating is such an imperative necessity in these latitudes, it quite accounts for all the journals of Arctic travellers being so full of eating and drinking."
"A lighthouse!" they all exclaimed.
"There's our lighthouse!" exclaimed the Doctor.
"Yes, why not?
"All right; but how will you feed your lamp?
"We'll set you to work on it," said Bell, "and I'll eat as much as you like to please you."
"Faugh!" exclaimed Bell, "what disgusting brutes!"
"Are you going to try to make gas out of our coal then?"
"I'm certain of it!
"What stomachs!"
"Yes."
The stars will guide us."
"First-rate?" said Johnson; "let us set to work at once."
Sea and land, as far as it was possible to distinguish one from the other, were covered with a sheet of ice.
Let us go the shortest road, however, and get quickly home without losing our way.
I don't mind; but I say it's a fool way, anyhow.
We are highwaymen.
But Tom give him five cents to keep quiet, and said we would all go home and meet next week, and rob somebody and kill some people.
Then Tom said he hadn't got candles enough, and he would slip in the kitchen and get some more.
How can they get loose when there's a guard over them, ready to shoot them down if they move a peg?"
Pretty soon Jim says:
If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.
"I don't know.
"Oh, certainly.
Why couldn't you said that before?
Everybody said:
No, sir, we'll just go on and ransom them in the regular way."
When we was ten foot off Tom whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun.
WE went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow's garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our heads.
As soon as Tom was back we cut along the path, around the garden fence, and by and by fetched up on the steep top of the hill the other side of the house.
That's all right.
We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes.
And nobody that didn't belong to the band could use that mark, and if he did he must be sued; and if he done it again he must be killed.
"Oh, she'll do.
Kill the women?
"Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.
Then Ben Rogers says:
But I said no; he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I warn't in.
Miss Watson's big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him.
No; nobody ever saw anything in the books like that.
Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and I made my mark on the paper.
They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn't be fair and square for the others.
I was itching in eleven different places now.
"How you talk, Ben Rogers.
But I dasn't scratch.
We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up.
It swore every boy to stick to the band, and never tell any of the secrets; and if anybody done anything to any boy in the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family must do it, and he mustn't eat and he mustn't sleep till he had killed them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band.
Little Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when they waked him up he was scared, and cried, and said he wanted to go home to his ma, and didn't want to be a robber any more.
I reckoned I couldn't stand it more'n a minute longer, but I set my teeth hard and got ready to try.
"But who are we going to rob?—houses, or cattle, or—"
"Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood."
"Must we always kill the people?"
Niggers is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, "Hm!
Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it in.
Why can't a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they get here?"
"Say, who is you?
He leaned his back up against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched one of mine.
We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on, and kill the people and take their watches and money."
"Yes, he's got a father, but you can't never find him these days.
Then it begun to itch on the inside. Next I got to itching underneath.
Everybody was willing.
"A guard!
Ben Rogers said he couldn't get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted to begin next Sunday; but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it on Sunday, and that settled the thing.
"Well, I don't know.
Say, do we kill the women, too?"
Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
Niggers would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any nigger in that country.
I think that's foolishness.
What's that?"
Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands and knees.
We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped.
This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes; but it seemed a sight longer than that.
"Now," says Ben Rogers, "what's the line of business of this Gang?"
"All right.
Then he says:
Now, what do you reckon it is?"
Not by a good deal.
He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening.
There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I dasn't scratch it; and then my ear begun to itch; and next my back, right between my shoulders.
He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly.
But that's what they do.
Well, nobody could think of anything to do—everybody was stumped, and set still.
I went and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was "spiritual gifts." This was too many for me, but she told me what she meant—I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.
I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different.
Why can't the widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stole?
I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on his back, but on his face.
I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it.
But it warn't so.
"Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring.
They said he was floating on his back in the water.
We played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned.
"Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling, and everything they're told to do they up and do it. They don't think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it—or any other man."
Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it.
WELL, I got a good going-over in the morning from old Miss Watson on account of my clothes; but the widow she didn't scold, but only cleaned off the grease and clay, and looked so sorry that I thought I would behave awhile if I could.
"Yes!
When they had squeezed Raggedy Ann almost out of shape and she had smoothed out her yarn hair, patted her apron out and felt her shoe-button eyes to see if they were still there, she said, "Well, what have you been doing?
"When he was completely uncovered, the Tide Fairies swam with Freddy 'way out to the Undertow Fairies.
"The stranger friend showed me to another man and to the girls who took off my clothes, cut my seams and took out my cotton.
"Tell us of yourself!
Marcella was having a tea party up in the nursery when Daddy called to her, so she left the dollies sitting around the tiny table and ran down stairs carrying Raggedy Ann with her.
"Raggedy Ann went up in the air on the tail of a kite one day and fell and was lost, so now I am very careful with her!"
Mama, Daddy and a strange man were talking in the living room and Daddy introduced Marcella to the stranger.
Then they laid me on a table and marked all around my outside edges with a pencil on clean white cloth, and then the girls re-stuffed me and dressed me.
"By feeling your candy heart!
"And shoe-button eyes?" the dolls all asked.
But, my!
"But it turned out all right after all, for do you know what happened to Freddy?"
RAGGEDY ANN'S NEW SISTERS
Tell me all the news!"
"Tell us about yourself, Raggedy dear, we have missed you so much!"
"I would tell you from the others by your dress, Raggedy Ann," said the French doll, "Your dress is fifty years old!
"I fell off the table and lit upon the tin soldier last night when we were playing.
"I was so interested in looking out of the window I did not pay any attention to what they said, for we were on a train and the scenery was just flying by!
"But all of my sister dolls have smiles just like mine!" replied Raggedy Ann.
"Your SISTERS!" the dolls all exclaimed in astonishment, "What do you mean, Raggedy?"
"Would you let me take Raggedy Ann for a few days?" asked the new friend.
And before I left the big clean white room there where hundreds of rag dolls so like me you would not have been able to tell us apart."
Then he lifted me from the grip and danced me upon his knee.
"Where's the hand?" Raggedy asked.
"I shall not tell a thing until your hand is mended!" Raggedy Ann said.
Will you let her go with me, Marcella?"
'What do you think of her?' he asked to three other men sitting nearby.
"In my pocket," the penny doll answered.
She liked the stranger friend, but she did not wish to lose Raggedy Ann.
Tell us where you have been and what you have done, Raggedy!" all the dolls cried.
All the dolls were so anxious to hug Raggedy Ann they could scarcely wait until Marcella had left them alone.
And so the week dragged by....
Marcella was silent.
They found my lovely candy heart had not melted at all as I thought.
"Yes, shoe-button eyes!" Raggedy Ann replied.
"Freddy must have enjoyed it and your little girls must have been very glad to get Freddy back again!" said Marcella.
"Well, first when I left," said Raggedy Ann, "I was placed in the Stranger Friend's grip.
The stranger was a large man with kindly eyes and a cheery smile, as pleasant as Raggedy Ann's.
"How?" asked Raggedy Ann with a laugh.
If the doll has a candy heart then it is you, Raggedy Ann!"
But Raggedy Ann just then noticed that one of the penny dolls had a hand missing.
"It was too bad they forgot Freddy," said Marcella.
"We miss her happy painted smile and her cheery ways!" they said.
"I stayed in the clean big light room for two or three days and nights and watched my Sisters grow from pieces of cloth into rag dolls just like myself!"
The Tide Fairies were uncovering Freddy!
"I mean," said Raggedy Ann, "that the Stranger Friend had borrowed me from Marcella so that he could have patterns made from me.
"Hundreds and hundreds of them, all named Raggedy Ann," replied Raggedy.
When Raggedy Ann took her arms from around Boots, the kitten was very angry.
"I did not know!" squeaked the little mouse, "This is the first time I have ever been here!"
Then Raggedy Ann knew she had been forgiven for rescuing the Mamma mouse and she smiled herself to sleep and dreamed happily of tomorrow.
They ran over to where Boots sat growling with the tiny mouse in her mouth.
One day Jeanette came home.
"This must be the place!" said Raggedy Ann.
Marcella introduced the kitten to all the dolls.
She felt a warm little pink tongue caress her rag cheek.
"Let her go, Boots!" the dolls all cried, "She has three little baby mice at home!
RAGGEDY ANN AND THE MOUSE
Even though her bed was right on top of Raggedy Ann, she could not sleep.
Finally as Boots started to spring after the little mouse again, Raggedy Ann threw her rag arms around the kitten's neck.
The dolls drew to one side, where Raggedy Ann and Uncle Clem whispered together.
Then she would jump at her and over and over they would roll, their heads hitting the floor bumpity-bump.
"I was visiting the mice inside the walls and wandered out here to pick up cake crumbs!
"Run, Mamma mouse!" Raggedy Ann cried, as Boots whirled her over and over.
Late that night when Boots was the only one awake, out popped a tiny mouse from the hole.
While the dolls were talking, Marcella ran down-stairs with Jeanette and told Daddy and Mamma, who came up-stairs with Marcella and hunted around until they discovered the mouse's doorway.
When Marcella was not in the nursery, Raggedy Ann wrestled with Boots and they would roll over and over upon the floor, Boots with her front feet around Raggedy Ann's neck and kicking with her hind feet.
"Here is the hole he came from!" cried Uncle Clem from the other end of the nursery.
All the dolls ran to where Uncle Clem was, down on his hands and knees.
"I thought I heard nibbling last night," one of the penny dolls said. "You know I begged for an extra piece of pie last evening, when Mistress had me at the table and it kept me awake!"
Even then Mamma mouse was out in the barn with her children, warning them to beware of kittens and cats.
Finally Boots felt ashamed of herself and went over and lay down by the hole in the wall in hopes the mouse would return, but the mouse never returned.
"If I catch the culprit, I will--well, I don't know what I will do with him!" said the tin soldier, who could be very fierce at times, although he was seldom cross.
"Aren't you the little mouse who nibbled Jeanette's wax face?" Raggedy Ann asked.
"Her name is Boots, because she has four little white feet!" said Marcella.
"Oh, why couldn't it have chewed on me?" Raggedy Ann asked herself when she saw Marcella's sorrowful face, for Raggedy Ann was never selfish.
It was a dear fuzzy little kitten.
And while they whispered Boots would let the little Mamma mouse run a piece, then she would catch it again and box it about between her paws.
Jeanette was a new wax doll, and like Henny, the Dutch doll, she could say "Mamma" when anyone tipped her backward or forward.
Why don't you go out in the barn and live where you will not destroy anything of value?"
Thus shall I will it!"
A physician?
And in truth this immense ear was perched on a small thin stalk--the stalk, however, was a man!
A good one?
Foolishly delivereth itself also the imprisoned Will.
But why doth Zarathustra speak otherwise unto his pupils--than unto himself?"--
"Penalty," so calleth itself revenge.
And when mine eye fleeth from the present to the bygone, it findeth ever the same: fragments and limbs and fearful chances--but no men!
But now learn this likewise: the Will itself is still a prisoner.
The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius.
An emancipator?
A person putting a glass to his eyes, could even recognise further a small envious countenance, and also that a bloated soullet dangled at the stalk.
With terror in his eyes did he gaze on his disciples; his glances pierced as with arrows their thoughts and arrear-thoughts.
--But at this point in his discourse it chanced that Zarathustra suddenly paused, and looked like a person in the greatest alarm.
Or an evil one?
Or a healed one?
"But why doth Zarathustra speak otherwise unto us than unto his disciples?"
And because in the willer himself there is suffering, because he cannot will backwards--thus was Willing itself, and all life, claimed--to be penalty!
Alas, unrollable is the stone, 'It was': eternal must also be all penalties!" Thus did madness preach.
But after a brief space he again laughed, and said soothedly:
A harvest?
"Behold, Zarathustra!
Is he a poet?
And why should not Zarathustra also learn from the people, when the people learn from Zarathustra?
To redeem what is past, and to transform every "It was" into "Thus would I have it!"--that only do I call redemption!
With hunchbacks one may well speak in a hunchbacked way!"
He, however, who maketh the lame man run, inflicteth upon him the greatest injury; for hardly can he run, when his vices run away with him--so do the people teach concerning cripples.
A conqueror?
This is the terrible thing to mine eye, that I find man broken up, and scattered about, as on a battle- and butcher-ground.
Willing emancipateth: what doth Willing itself devise in order to get free from its tribulation and mock at its prison?
And it is all my poetisation and aspiration to compose and collect into unity what is fragment and riddle and fearful chance.
Until the creating Will saith thereto: "But thus do I will it!
"Can there be deliverance when there is eternal justice?
Ah, a fool becometh every prisoner!
And when one giveth the blind man eyes, then doth he see too many bad things on the earth: so that he curseth him who healed him.
"Morally are things ordered according to justice and penalty.
The hunchback, however, had listened to the conversation and had covered his face during the time; but when he heard Zarathustra laugh, he looked up with curiosity, and said slowly:
Here hast thou now a fine selection, and verily, an opportunity with more than one forelock!
And when I came out of my solitude, and for the first time passed over this bridge, then I could not trust mine eyes, but looked again and again, and said at last: "That is an ear!
Unless the Will should at last deliver itself, and Willing become non-Willing--:" but ye know, my brethren, this fabulous song of madness!
I walk amongst men as the fragments of the future: that future which I contemplate.
Something higher than all reconciliation must the Will will which is the Will to Power--: but how doth that take place?
Away from those fabulous songs did I lead you when I taught you: "The Will is a creator."
Zarathustra, however, answered thus unto him who so spake: When one taketh his hump from the hunchback, then doth one take from him his spirit--so do the people teach.
"It is difficult to live amongst men, because silence is so difficult-- especially for a babbler."--
"It was": thus is the Will's teeth-gnashing and lonesomest tribulation called.
Is he a promiser?
Zarathustra answered: "What is there to be wondered at!
Willing emancipateth: but what is that called which still putteth the emancipator in chains?
When Zarathustra went one day over the great bridge, then did the cripples and beggars surround him, and a hunchback spake thus unto him:
"No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone by the penalty! This, this is what is eternal in the 'existence' of penalty, that existence also must be eternally recurring deed and guilt!
And then did cloud after cloud roll over the spirit, until at last madness preached: "Everything perisheth, therefore everything deserveth to perish!"
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Verily, a great folly dwelleth in our Will; and it became a curse unto all humanity, that this folly acquired spirit!
And how could I endure to be a man, if man were not also the composer, and riddle-reader, and redeemer of chance!
This, yea, this alone is REVENGE itself: the Will's antipathy to time, and its "It was."
Or a fulfiller?
What shall he be called by us?" And like me, did ye give yourselves questions for answers.
"And this itself is justice, the law of time--that he must devour his children:" thus did madness preach.
"Very good," said the hunchback; "and with pupils one may well tell tales out of school.
Not backward can the Will will; that it cannot break time and time's desire--that is the Will's lonesomest tribulation.
Or a ploughshare?
But did it ever speak thus?
Will--so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught you, my friends!
The present and the bygone upon earth--ah! my friends--that is MY most unbearable trouble; and I should not know how to live, if I were not a seer of what is to come.
THE SPIRIT OF REVENGE: my friends, that hath hitherto been man's best contemplation; and where there was suffering, it was claimed there was always penalty.
REDEMPTION.
And who hath taught it reconciliation with time, and something higher than all reconciliation?
With a lying word it feigneth a good conscience.
An ear as big as a man!" I looked still more attentively--and actually there did move under the ear something that was pitiably small and poor and slim.
He who is sunk in ignorance and stupidity lives like a dull ass.
But it was agreed that those who are happy are gods.
As, then, righteousness itself is the reward of the righteous, so wickedness itself is the punishment of the unrighteous.
'Thou seest, then, in what foulness unrighteous deeds are sunk, with what splendour righteousness shines.
Confessed A wolf, this, sore distressed When he would weep, doth howl; And, strangely tame, these prowl The Indian tiger's mates.
SONG III.
Thou didst learn a little since that whatever is is one, and that unity itself is good. Accordingly, by this way of reckoning, whatever falls away from goodness ceases to be; whence it comes to pass that the bad cease to be what they were, while only the outward aspect is still left to show they have been men.
Wherefore, by their perversion to badness, they have lost their true human nature.
A bold and restless spirit, ever wrangling in law-courts, is like some yelping cur.
'See, also, from the opposite standpoint--the standpoint of the good--what a penalty attends upon the wicked.
Absolute good, then, is offered as the common prize, as it were, of all human actions.
So it comes to pass that he who by forsaking righteousness ceases to be a man cannot pass into a Godlike condition, but actually turns into a brute beast.'
And this being so, the wise man cannot doubt that punishment is inseparable from the bad.
So, then, the prize of the good is one which no time may impair, no man's power lessen, no man's unrighteousness tarnish; 'tis very Godship.
For remember the corollary which I chiefly insisted on a little while back, and reason thus: Since absolute good is happiness, 'tis clear that all the good must be happy for the very reason that they are good.
Verily, other men's unrighteousness cannot pluck from righteous souls their proper glory.
And what a prize, the fairest and grandest of all!
Lastly, since every prize is desired because it is believed to be good, who can account him who possesses good to be without reward?
Whereby it is manifest that goodness never lacks its reward, nor crime its punishment.
'I must go after them.' And he went and found them in the stable.
The old woman struck her hands together: 'Ah, to think of it! if that were to be, what should I do?' and she sat down by her daughter, and they both wrung their hands and let their tears flow.
'Something strange must have occurred,' exclaimed the old farmer on the moor, who by this time was not only hungry, but cross.
'You speak truth,' they answered, 'nor you either?'
The next morning he got up with the sun, and said to the old man and to the old woman and to his wife:
'I do not know you.'
'No, it is not you,' answered she, so he went away and slept in the wood.
When she went into the stables, she suddenly saw the heavy pack-saddle of the speckled mare just over her head, and she jumped and said to herself:
They worked hard for many hours, and at length grew hungry, so the young woman was sent home to bring them food, and also to give the horses their dinner.
As the bride was nowhere in the kitchen or the dairy, the old woman went into the stable, where she found her daughter weeping bitterly.
'Thou art sick!'
The girl was willing and the father was willing, and very soon they were married and went to live at the farm.
'Now rise, and be quick,' called the wife, and the man jumped out of bed in a great hurry, and began to look about him.
And the naked man stood alone at the head of the coffin.
Once upon a time there dwelt in the land of Erin a young man who was seeking a wife, and of all the maidens round about none pleased him as well as the only daughter of a farmer.
Now the others out on the moor grew hungrier and hungrier.
'Am I?' asked he.
Very soon a man came out of the wood and spoke to him.
'Do you know me?'
'Oh, am I?' asked he.
'Well, but it didn't fall,' replied the young man, and he went off to the kitchen to get some supper, leaving them to cry as long as they liked.
So on a fine day the girl and her husband, and the father and his wife all went out upon the moor.
'Yes, thou art,' she answered; 'take off thy clothes and lie down.'
'When thy wife came home,' answered the farmer, 'she saw the pack-saddle over her head, and she thought how dreadful it would be if it were to fall and kill her.'
'Not I,' answered the naked man.
'Thou art dead.'
'Oh!' replied his wife, 'when our daughter came home, did she not see the pack-saddle over her head, and she thought how dreadful it would be if it were to fall and kill her.'
As soon as the first husband came home his wife said to him:
'Ah, to think of it!' exclaimed he, striking his hands together, and he sat down beside them and wept too.
'The men of the town are so silly that we can make them believe anything we please,' said they.
'But why are you naked?' asked the first man.
When the third man arrived his wife gave him his supper, and after that he went to bed, just as usual.
'Am I naked?
But at the sound of his voice the two men were so terrified that they ran straight home, and the man in the coffin got up and followed them, and it was his wife that gained the gold ring, as he had been sillier than the other two.
'Oh, am I not?' asked he.
'What is the matter?' asked he.
So he did, and when he was in his bed his wife went to him and said:
'You are not my husband!'
'When I came in and saw the pack-saddle over my head, I thought how dreadful it would be if it fell and killed me,' and she cried louder than before.
'They are,' said she, 'and make haste lest the burying be ended before you get there.'
By and bye the season came when they must cut the peats and pile them up to dry, so that they might have fires in the winter.
'Thou art,' said she; 'shut thine eyes and stir neither hand nor foot.'
The women looked at each other.
'Time enough,' said she, and he lay still till he heard the funeral passing the window.
And dead he felt sure he was.
The next morning a boy knocked at the door, bidding him attend the burial of the man who was dead, and he was just going to get up when his wife stopped him.
'I do not,' replied he, 'but is it a good place to live in?'
Soon the second man came home, and his wife said to him:
'Are they?' said he.
'Suppose that pack-saddle were to fall and kill me, how dreadful it would be!' and she sat down just under the pack-saddle she was so much afraid of, and began to cry.
'What is the matter?' asked he.
A very satisfactory Sage cheese is made at the New York State College of Agriculture by simply dropping green coloring, made from the leaves of corn and spinach, upon the curd, after milling.
All this has inspired enthusiasts to liken it to Emmentaler.
We guessed its fate, however, from a note on the flyleaf of the only tome available: "This is an excellent cheese, full cream and medium sharp, and a unique set of books in which Volume II suggests Bacon's: 'Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.'"
Sprinkle well with cayenne and put into a pot to mellow for a few days, or much longer.
Sage cheese is another modified form of the Cheddar variety.
Some years ago I couldn't get enough sage cheese (we never can) so I asked a Wisconsin cheesemaker if he would make some.
Now there are only two left--not counting any that make process.
The genuine Vermont Sage arrived.
American Cheddars
You cut a top slice off the cheese, just as you would off the fruit, and there was a rose-colored, fine-tasting, mellow-hard cheese to spoon out with a special silver cheese spoon or scoop.
Tillamook
These crackers are not sweet, not salt, and as such make a good base for anything--swell with clam chowder, also with toasted cheese....
It's made the same way it was back in 1870, by the old-time Colby method which makes a cheese which is not so dry as Cheddar and also has holes in it, something like Swiss.
Pineapple cheese is named after its shape rather than its flavor, although there are rumors that some pineapple flavor is noticeable near the oiled rind.
It was called Cheddar after the English original named for the village of Cheddar near Bristol.
Tillamook goes by its own name with no mention of Oregon.
This is a proud new American product, proving that although Papa Cheddar was born in England his American kinfolk have developed independent and valuable characters all on their own.
Did you know that during the last part of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth, Vermont was the leading cheesemaking state in the Union?
Mildly resinous like that Near East one packed in pine, suggesting the well-saged dressing of a turkey.
When this is set on the draining table a couple of bricks are also laid on the cooked curd for pressure.
About Civil War time, John Jossi, a dairyman of Dodge County, Wisconsin, came up with this novelty, a rennet cheese made of whole cow's milk.
We eat several million pounds a year and 95 percent of that comes from Wisconsin, with a trickle from New York.
When I was a lad, every town in Vermont had one or more cheese factories.
It is called Blackie from the black-waxed rind and it resembles Vermont State cheese, although it is flatter.
Instead of sage leaves, or tea prepared from them, at present the cheese is flavored with oil of Dalmatian wild sage because it has the sharpest flavor.
No native American cheese has been so widely ballyhooed, and so deservedly, as Liederkranz, which translates "Wreath of Song."
Pineapple
Although the established Cheddar ages are three, fresh, medium-cured, and cured or aged, commercially they are divided into two and described as mild and sharp.
Some prefer, however, to mix the curds at the time of milling, as a more distinct color is secured.
Pineapple, Monterey Jack and Sage are seldom listed as Cheddars at all, although they are basically that.
Minnesota Blue
A Yankee named Silvanus Ferris, "the most successful dairyman of Herkimer County," in the first decades of the 1800's teamed up with Robert Nesbit, "the old Quaker Cheese Buyer." They bought from farmers in the region and sold in New York City.
Native Americans
Later when Ferris arrived in a more optimistic mood, offering a slightly better price, the seller, unaware they were partners, and ignorant of the market price, snapped up the offer.
The proper bright-orange, oiled and shellacked surface is more apt to be a sickly lemon.
A round mouthful of luscious mellowness, with a bouquet--a snapping reminder to the nose.
Then it was called Jack for short, and only now takes its full name after sixty years of popularity on the West Coast. Because it is little known in the East and has to be shipped so far, it commands the top Cheddar price.
Old-Fashioned Vermont State Store Cheese
They were called "old," such as Old Herkimer, Old Wisconsin Longhorn, and Old California Jack.
Wisconsin Longhorn
Originally six pounds, the Pineapple has shrunk to nearly six ounces.
Put the mix into an enameled pan, for anything with a metal surface will turn the cheese black in cooking.
Brick is the one and only cheese for which the whole world gives America credit.
It is this double use of bricks, for shaping and for pressing, that has led to the confusion about which came first in originating the name.
The first Cheddar factory was founded by Jesse Williams in Rome, New York, just over a century ago and, with Herkimer County Cheddar already widely known, this established "New York" as the preferred "store-boughten" cheese.
To help guarantee a market for all this excellent apple-pie cheese, the Wisconsin State Legislature made a law about it, recognizing the truth of Eugene Field's jingle:
A classic dish is crackers, broken up in a bowl of cold milk, with a hunk of Vermont cheese like this on the side.
"Then what do you use, George?" I inquired.
Yet, putting all of these thirty-seven states together, they produce only about half as much as Wisconsin alone.
Herkimer County Cheese
It's still in force:
The standard method for making American Cheddar was established in Herkimer County, New York, in 1841 and has been rigidly maintained down to this day.
One-half ounce of flavoring is usually sufficient for a hundred pounds of curd and can be secured from dairy supply houses.
Coon Cheese
Jack was first known as Monterey cheese from the California county where it originated.
At the time of removing the whey the green and white curds are mixed.
Stir in the cream and keep stirring until you have a smooth, creamy sauce.
A modern cheese authority reported on the current (1953) method:
It soon became as internationally known as tabasco from Texas or Parisian Camembert which it slightly resembles.
So far as I know, there is only one factory making it and that is my friend, George Crowley's.
The curd is then salted and pressed into the regular Cheddar shapes and sizes.
Similar sharp-trade tactics put too much green cheese on the market, so those honestly aged from a minimum of eight months up to two years fetched higher prices.
Like the trinity of cheeses that make it, the mixture is eaten best at room temperature, when its flavor is fullest.
There's a slight burned savor recalling smoked cheese, although not related in any way.
The most popular are named for their states: Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, New York, Ohio, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Even when the Pineapple was eaten down to the rind the shell served as a dunking bowl to fill with some salubrious cold Fondue or salad.
If kept in the refrigerator, it should be taken out a couple of hours before serving. Since it is a natural cheese mixture, which has gone through no process or doping with preservative, it will not keep more than two weeks.
But when it did, alas, it was more like Limburger than Camembert, and since good domestic Limburger was then a dime a pound, obviously it wouldn't pay off.
The crackers are the old-time store cracker--every Vermonter used to buy a big barrel once a year to set in the buttery and eat.
Colorado Blackie Cheese
Strain through sieve or cheesecloth, and mix in the olives and pimiento thoroughly.
Its texture is elastic but not rubbery, its taste sweetish, and it is full of little round holes or eyes.
Between meals the silver top was put on the silver holder and the oiled and shellacked rind kept the cheese moist.
It seems to be extinct now, and perhaps that is all to the good, for it never meant to be anything more than another Camembert, of which we have plenty of imitation.
It is, of course, a natural aged cheese, no processing, no fussing, no fooling with it.
Sage flavoring extract is sprayed over the curd by an atomizer.
The story of Sage cheese, or green cheese as it was called originally, shows the several phases most cheeses have gone through, from their simple, honest beginnings to commercialization, and sometimes back to the real thing.
Sage cheese is one of the really indigenous and best native Vermont products.
The usual method of manufacture is as follows: One-third of the total amount of milk is placed in a vat by itself and colored green by the addition of eight to twelve ounces of commercial sage color to each 1,000 pounds of milk.
It is the fine old-time full cream cheese, flavored with real sage.
Runners-up are Liederkranz, which rivals say is too close to Limburger, and Pineapple, which is only a Cheddar under its crisscrossed, painted and flavored rind.
There in 1845 he built a factory and made a deserved fortune out of his decorative ingenuity with what before had been plain, unromantic yellow or store cheese.
Jack, California Jack and Monterey Jack
This flavor does not penetrate through to the Cheddar center.
The formed "bricks" of cheese are rubbed with salt for three days and they ripen slowly, taking up to two months.
Process isn't cheese!
After milling, the sage extract flavoring is sprayed over the curd with an atomizer.
A subtly different American Cheddar is putting Colorado on our cheese map.
Herkimer leads the whole breed by being flaky, brittle, sharp and nutty, with a crumb that will crumble, and a soft, mouth-watering pale orange color when it is properly aged.
He walked silently along the garden path towards the stile, and he quickened his pace a little, so that Mrs. Adair had to walk fast to keep up with him. That quickening of the pace was a sort of answer, but Mrs. Adair was not deterred by it.
At the beginning I was contented, I suppose.
But as long as it's advisable," he answered.
One could not help learning that.
He was older, no doubt, than you, but he was kind.
"I spoke brutally, didn't I?" she said.
"We shall come back, no doubt," said Durrance, reassuringly.
But these months here have been the worst."
There were you and she in the room talking together in the darkness; there was I alone upon the terrace.
"I succeeded," continued Mrs. Adair.
The last scene of pretence had been acted out, the months of tension and surveillance had come to an end, and both were thankful for their release.
Within the drawing-room at The Pool, Durrance said good-bye to Ethne.
He contented himself with saying quietly:--
She did not appeal for pity, she was not even excusing herself; she was just telling her story quietly and gently.
I am glad to know, very glad.
"Yours, too, I hope," Mrs. Adair answered, and she exclaimed: "How could I go on keeping silence?
"It does not prevent Ethne from shrinking from her friend," cried Mrs. Adair.
There are women, heaps of them, no doubt, to whom the management of a big house, the season in London, the ordinary round of visits, are sufficient.
Mrs. Adair stood by that stile for a long while after he had gone.
Well, when I thought over my life, one of those little streets always came into my mind.
I am sorry."
She recognised the futility of all that she had said, of her boastings of courage, of her detractions of Ethne.
"But I tried to keep you; with all my wits I tried.
She stood, as it were, outside of herself, and saw that her speech was madness; yet she went on with it.
"I thought you ought to know."
"You will write from Wiesbaden?
I suppose it was meant not to tell me anything."
I was the merest girl.
We shall all be scattered.
It is a trite reflection, but the personal application of it is apt to take away the breath.
You would not have blamed her, if she had frankly admitted it; you would have remained her friend.
Of the violence which she had used before there was no longer any trace.
Ethne came out with him on to the terrace, where Mrs. Adair stood at the top of the flight of steps.
Her madness had taken hold of her.
The sort of street whence any crazy religious charlatan who can promise a little colour to their grey lives can get as many votaries as he wants.
"I am very sorry," said Durrance.
He was kindness itself, and he cared for me.
No match-maker in the world ever worked so hard to bring two people together as I did to bring together Ethne and Mr. Feversham, and I succeeded."
She had shot her bolt and hit no one but herself and the man for whom she cared.
But to-morrow he himself would be gone from the Salcombe estuary, and Ethne would be on her way to the Irish Channel and Donegal.
The statement came upon Durrance with a shock.
"I met you, and met you again.
"After all, I knew him.
But you see--Ethne came, too, and you turned to her.
"And then you came," she continued.
I had a house in town and another here.
The knowledge rankled within her, and his simple "no" stung her beyond bearing.
"You told me that I had succeeded one morning in the Row.
You were away three years.
"The house will seem very empty after you are all gone," she said; and she turned at Durrance's side and walked down with him into the garden.
I accepted what she said blindly, ignorantly.
Here was the origin of the whole sad business.
You came back.
You went away upon your duties and you returned; and I learnt now, not that there was ever so much more, but just what that ever so much more was. But it was still, of course, denied to me.
Why did you tell me of Captain Willoughby's coming?
"I took care you should not suspect," said Mrs. Adair.
Shall I tell you why?
He leaned back against the stile and could have laughed.
She, however, lagged, and when she spoke it was in a despondent voice.
"That tells me nothing at all.
I knew nothing, and I was married to a man of whom I knew nothing.
That reflection showed Mrs. Adair yet more clearly the folly of her outcry.
It might be a very long time before she saw him again, and all that long time she must remain tortured with doubts.
But she had not the courage."
You can see what ups and downs have fallen to me.
My husband was dead, but Ethne was free.
You, with your hundred thousand things to do, cannot conceive how oppressively dull my life was.
I thought that I should be quite content to have you for a friend, to watch your progress, and to feel pride in it.
"I told you the truth brutally on purpose.
Mrs. Adair looked about her garden.
Durrance did not answer her, and she resented his silence.
"I want to speak to Colonel Durrance before he goes."
I got to know that there was something more to be won out of existence than mere dulness; at least, that there was something more for others, though not for me.
It sounded pitiful and weak, even in her ears; but they had reached the stile, and Durrance had turned towards her.
The case is common enough, no doubt, but its frequency does not make it easier of endurance."
'That is to say, our joint plans for him.
With character, Trot--with strength of character that is not to be influenced, except on good reason, by anybody, or by anything. That's what I want you to be.
All this time, her daughter Annie never once spoke, or lifted up her eyes.
I was the means of sending him abroad.
I have not been in town half-a-dozen hours, and those I have been dozing and grumbling away at the play.'
'Mr.
He now asked what Mr. Jack Maldon had actually written in reference to himself, and to whom he had written?
'There's cattle!
'Yes, William,' I said, condescendingly (I knew him); 'I am going to London.
It's my responsibility.'
His only hope of restoration!
It was Covent Garden Theatre that I chose; and there, from the back of a centre box, I saw Julius Caesar and the new Pantomime.
Agnes laughed again, and shook her head.
'And he's like David, too,' said my aunt, decisively.
How do YOU come to be here, Steerforth?'
'Everyone who knows me, spoils me, I believe,' she answered, smiling.
'Indeed!' 'Poor dear Jack!' said Mrs. Markleham, shaking her head.
In going towards the door, I passed the person who had come in, and saw him plainly.
'Is Suffolk your county, sir?' asked William.
But for very shame, and the fear that it might displease him, I could have held him round the neck and cried.
They were taking leave of each other, and Agnes was going to embrace her and kiss her, when Mr. Wickfield stepped between them, as if by accident, and drew Agnes quickly away.
'And do it at once.' The waiter immediately withdrew to make the exchange.
'Besides,' said my aunt, 'there's the Memorial--'
My aunt and I had held many grave deliberations on the calling to which I should be devoted.
That will be enough for me.'
'I think--shall I be quite plain, Agnes, liking him so much?'
"Doctor," of course.
I had abundant occupation for my thoughts, in every conspicuous landmark on the road.
'Well now,' said the waiter, in a tone of confidence, 'what would you like for dinner?
I must have shown as much, now, in my face; for her eyes were in a moment cast down, and I saw tears in them.
When I booked my place at the coach office I had had 'Box Seat' written against the entry, and had given the book-keeper half-a-crown.
'Now I have found it.
He knew as well as I did that it was just as likely, at that time of year, I was going down there whaling; but I felt complimented, too.
He never made a suggestion but once; and on that occasion (I don't know what put it in his head), he suddenly proposed that I should be 'a Brazier'.
'I don't know,' I said, pretending to be undecided, 'whether I shall take a shot or not.' 'Birds is got wery shy, I'm told,' said William.
The gentleman spoken of was a gentleman with a very unpromising squint, and a prominent chin, who had a tall white hat on with a narrow flat brim, and whose close-fitting drab trousers seemed to button all the way up outside his legs from his boots to his hips.
'Yes, I am on an expedition of duty.
Have you observed any gradual alteration in Papa?'
'By the by! and letters from Mr. Jack Maldon!' said the Doctor.
I can never grow out of that.
Mr. Dick had regularly assisted at our councils, with a meditative and sage demeanour.
I know that my juvenile experiences went for little or nothing then; and that life was more like a great fairy story, which I was just about to begin to read, than anything else.
I suppose the opening prospect confused me.
Dear me, Annie, how illegibly your cousin Maldon writes, and how stupid I am!
Her hand passed softly before my lips while I was yet speaking, and in a moment she had met her father at the door of the room, and was hanging on his shoulder.
'I should think so,' said the gentleman.
I had been very happy there, I had a great attachment for the Doctor, and I was eminent and distinguished in that little world.
My dear Steerforth, I am so overjoyed to see you!'
'And to take care,' said Mr. Wickfield, 'that you're not imposed on, eh? As you certainly would be, in any contract you should make for yourself. Well!
'Except well?' said Mr. Wickfield.
I can substitute some other plans.
'Come!
He laughed as he ran his hand through the clustering curls of his hair, and said gaily:
'That trying climate!--like living, they tell me, on a sand-heap, underneath a burning-glass!
'Trotwood, there is something that I want to ask you, and that I may not have another opportunity of asking for a long time, perhaps--something I would ask, I think, of no one else.
Though that's not saying much; for there's no head in my right hand, and no heart.
But it's natural and rational that you should like it.
'I never, never, never was so glad!
You're a devilish amiable-looking fellow, Copperfield.
I was so filled with the play, and with the past--for it was, in a manner, like a shining transparency, through which I saw my earlier life moving along--that I don't know when the figure of a handsome well-formed young man dressed with a tasteful easy negligence which I have reason to remember very well, became a real presence to me.
'You are going through, sir?' said the coachman.
We never should have heard of the letter at all, I believe, unless I had asked for it myself. Do you call that confidence, my love, towards Doctor Strong?
It's not fair to abuse my confidence,' I answered, reddening at the recollection of my blue enslaver.
'Oh! that was as a child, or a schoolboy,' said I, laughing in my turn, not without being a little shame-faced. 'Times are altering now, and I suppose I shall be in a terrible state of earnestness one day or other. My wonder is, that you are not in earnest yourself, by this time, Agnes.'
'I am sure I am not like myself when I am away,' said I. 'I seem to want my right hand, when I miss you.
"The amiable old Proctor"--who's he?
Agnes sang with great sweetness and expression, and so did Mrs. Strong.
I am doubtful whether I was at heart glad or sorry, when my school-days drew to an end, and the time came for my leaving Doctor Strong's.
Long after the subject was dismissed, and other topics occupied us, he remained so; seldom raising his eyes, unless to rest them for a moment, with a thoughtful frown, upon the Doctor, or his wife, or both.
I assented to this proposal, in default of being able to suggest anything else.
'Well, well, ma'am,' said the Doctor cheerfully, 'I am not bigoted to my plans, and I can overturn them myself.
'Ill!' replied the Old Soldier.
And then it will go in, you know--and then--' said Mr. Dick, after checking himself, and pausing a long time, 'there'll be a pretty kettle of fish!'
'I think he does himself no good by the habit that has increased upon him since I first came here.
Steerforth, very much amused at my having been put into forty-four, laughed again, and clapped me on the shoulder again, and invited me to breakfast with him next morning at ten o'clock--an invitation I was only too proud and happy to accept.
"You have eaten with him, You have drunk, too, with him; And yet you have not thought of us; Still you may pass the night here."
"Cluck!" said the animals, and as that meant they were satisfied, the Old Man said to the Maiden: "Here is abundance, and to spare; go now into the kitchen and cook some supper for us."
The Old Man replied as before:
The girl told the Old Man her adventures, and begged for a night's lodging.
Then the Maiden asked: "Shall we not also take our rest?"
"Pretty Hen, pretty Cock, And pretty brindled Cow, What have you to say to that?"
She slept quietly till midnight, and at that hour there began such a tumult in the house that it awakened her.
On the hearth lay three animals--a hen, a cock, and a brindled cow.
When the animals were thus fed, the Maiden sat down at table with the Old Man and ate what was left for her. In a short while the Hen and Cock began to fold their wings over their heads, and the brindled Cow blinked with both eyes.
The Old Man asked the animals a third time in the same words:
So when the sun was risen to the center of the heavens, the Maiden set out on her way, carrying a jug of soup.
Soon after that all was quiet, but the Maiden took no harm, and went quietly off again to sleep.
She found herself lying in a large chamber, with everything around belonging to regal pomp.
"Pretty Hen, and pretty Cock, And pretty brindled Cow, What have you to say to that?"
Thereupon the Old Man said: "Step down yon stair, and you will come to a room containing two beds, shake them up and cover them with white sheets, and then I will come and lie down to sleep myself."
"Pretty Hen, pretty Cock, And pretty brindled Cow, What have you to say to that?"
The Maiden thought it was all a dream; but presently in came three servants dressed in rich liveries, who asked her what were her commands.
The Man said:
The girl found plenty of everything in the kitchen, and cooked a good meal, but thought nothing about the animals.
When, however the bright light of the morning sun awoke her, what a sight met her eyes!
When he had thus spoken the girl and he arose, and the Prince told his three servants to fetch to the palace the Father and Mother of the Maiden, that they might witness her marriage.
At length, when it became quite dark, she also perceived the lighted cottage, and entering it, begged very politely to be allowed to pass the night there.
"But where are my two Sisters?" she asked.
When she had finished she carried a full dish into the room, and, sitting down opposite the Old Man, ate till she had satisfied her hunger.
The Maiden stepped down the stair, and as soon as she had shaken up the beds and covered them afresh, she laid herself down in one bed, without waiting for the Old Man.
Late in the evening the Woodcutter arrived at home, and scolded his Wife because she had let him hunger all day long.
So the poor girl wandered about in the forest till it was quite dark, and then she also arrived at the Old Man's hut, was invited in, and begged food and a night's lodging. The Man of the white beard asked his animals again:
As soon as she was gone to sleep the Old Man came, and, after looking at her and shaking his head as before, dropped her into the cellar below.
But by and by, when the girl went out with her basket on her arm, the wood pigeons had eaten up all the beans, and she knew not which way to turn.
"You have eaten with him, You have drunk, too, with him; And yet you have not thought of us; Still you may pass the night here!"
Thereupon the Maiden stepped up to the fire, near which they lay, and fondled the pretty Hen and Cock, smoothing their plumage down with her hands, while she stroked the Cow between her horns.
The girl then lay down in the other bed, first saying her prayers before she went to sleep.
"You have eaten with us, You have drunk, too, with us, You have thought of us kindly, too; And we wish you a good night's rest."
And the enchantment was not to end until a maiden should come so kind-hearted that she should behave as well to my animals as she did to me; and such a one you have been; and, therefore, this last midnight we were saved through you, and the old wooden hut has again become my royal palace."
When she had done she said: "I am very tired; where is my bed, where I shall lie down and sleep?" The animals replied:
So the Maiden went down the stairs, and shook up the feather beds and laid on clean sheets, and when they were ready the Old Man came and lay down in one, with his white beard stretching down to his feet.
"I will take a bag of peas," he said; "they are larger than corn seed, and the girl will therefore see them better and not lose my track." At noonday, accordingly, the girl set out with her father's dinner; but the peas had all disappeared, for the wood birds had picked them all up as they had on the day before, and not one was left.
"Pretty Hen, pretty Cock, And pretty brindled Cow, What have you to say to that?"
THERE was once a poor Woodcutter who lived with his Wife and three Daughters in a little hut on the edge of a large forest.
Meanwhile the third morning arrived, and the Woodcutter told his Wife to send their youngest child with his dinner: "For," said he, "she is always obedient and good; she will keep in the right path and not run about like those idle hussies, her sisters!"
"People must dwell there," she thought, "who will keep me during the night"; and she walked toward the light.
We certainly so find them collected and published, and it may be well to give one or two of them literally, by way of example:
They had occasion often to support the authority of fabulous accounts, and to detract from that of historical narratives, which sort the Greeks call "Propositions," "Refutations" and "Corroboration," until by a gradual process they have exhausted these topics, and arrive at the gist of the argument.
But the same mode of teaching was not adopted by all, nor, indeed, did individuals always confine themselves to the same system, but each varied his plan of teaching according to circumstances.
Nor did they omit, on occasion, to resort to translations from the Greek, and to expatiate in the praise, or to launch their censures on the faults, of illustrious men.
"You patronize," he said, "a master of the schools for the sake of his buffoonery, and make a rhetorician one of your pot-companions; allowing him to cut his jokes on any one he pleased; a witty man, no doubt, but it was an easy matter to say smart things of such as you and your companions.
Having bargained with them for the haul, whatever it might turn out to be, for a certain sum, they paid down the money.
They also dealt with matters connected with every-day life, pointing out such as are useful and necessary, and such as are hurtful and needless.
They waited a long time while the nets were being drawn, and when at last they were dragged on shore, there was no fish in them, but some gold sewn up in a basket.
They proceed to Rome; the affair becomes the subject of judicial inquiry; it is alleged that the boy was entitled to his freedom, because his master had voluntarily treated him as free."
Formerly, they called these by a Greek term, syntaxeis, but of late "controversies;" but they may be either fictitious cases, or those which come under trial in the courts.
The buyers claim the haul as theirs, the fishermen assert that it belongs to them."
Our ancestors have ordained what instruction it is fitting their children should receive, and what schools they should attend.
It was, therefore, the custom to state them precisely, with details of the names of places.
Wherefore it appears to be our duty that we should notify our judgment both to those who keep such schools, and those who are in the practice of frequenting them, that they meet our disapprobation."
Many speeches of orators were also published.
But listen, Conscript Fathers, while I tell you what reward was given to this rhetorician, and let the wounds of the republic be laid bare to view.
Hear this, and learn from the extravagance of the grant, how little wisdom is displayed in your acts."
For they were accustomed, in stating their argument with the utmost clearness, to use figures and apologies, to put cases, as circumstances required, and to relate facts, sometimes briefly and succinctly, and, at other times, more at large and with greater feeling.
These novelties, contrary to the customs and instructions of our ancestors, we neither approve, nor do they appear to us good.
Was he old or young?
He was not the man to renounce an illusion for such a trifle.
"Besides," added Martial, gayly, "we have been vastly amused by Bibiaine's anxieties, we already know that there is a chicken in the coop----"
Twelve hundred thousand bayonets have far more eloquence than the articles of a charter."
Any miserable peasant who meets him can make him believe anything he wishes. Any great falsehood brings tears to his eyes, and then they can do what they like with him.
On the contrary, he had received, in exchange for the wealth of which he had been deprived by the revolution, a princely fortune.
"Let us go in," the duke said to his son.
"Ah, ha!" murmured the duke, "this is an improvement!"
Give me time to wring its neck, to pick it, and clean it----"
Had the much-lamented chicken constituted the dinner the rations would have been "short."
"Enough," said the priest, sternly, "enough." Then, knowing by experience that his voice had not the power to check her flood of reproaches, he took her by the arm and led her out into the passage.
This he did, by relating the events which he had just witnessed in Paris, and by insisting that His Majesty, Louis XVIII., had been welcomed with enthusiasm and transports of affection.
"On the same evening that she gave me the eighty thousand francs intended for the purchase of the estate."
What proof can you furnish that she gave you this sum?"
"That is very well, so far as the principal is concerned," said he.
You are rich now, I suppose."
But the father and the daughter both refused the proffered civility with a motion of the head.
"Lovely!" he murmured, in English; "beautiful as an angel!"
"Mademoiselle Lacheneur has no need of an advocate!" a harsh voice interrupted.
"Who is this person, Abbe?" demanded the duke, lightly.
He tried to reply, but he could not.
"The income I have used for my own living expenses, and in educating my children; but most of it has been expended in improving the estate, which today yields an income twice as large as in former years."
He drew from his pocket a roll of papers, and throwing them upon the table: "Here are your titles," he said, addressing the duke in a tone full of implacable hatred.
CHAPTER IV.
Our family has shown great goodness to you and yours.
Why?
"Ah! she gave you ten thousand francs?
Where is this?"
"You have done your duty," she replied; "it is those who have not done it, who are to be pitied!"
Lacheneur shrugged his shoulders with an air of resignation.
By what right?
She had no opportunity to say more.
I shall never set foot in Sairmeuse again. Penniless I entered it, penniless I will leave it!"
The former ploughboy was of humble origin, but his heart and his character had developed with his fortunes; he understood his own worth.
This claim, thus advanced and at such a moment, was so outrageous, that Martial, disgusted, made a sign to his father, which the latter did not see.
"I understand--you advise me to be conciliatory.
Much as he was disliked, and even detested, by his neighbors, everyone respected him.
hi, there!
"Ah! indeed!"
She was so beautiful that Martial regarded her with wonder.
They surveyed each other for a moment; each expecting, perhaps, an insult from the other.
The wretched man was ghastly pale, great drops of perspiration stood out upon his temples, his restless, haggard eyes revealed his distress of mind.
And it was to prove your gratitude, probably, that you made haste to purchase our estate!"
"Perfect!
Martial, the precocious diplomat, could not repress a smile on hearing this response, which he had foreseen.
"Ah, well!
"Lacheneur--Monsieur Lacheneur----"
But she had said enough; her father felt that he was avenged.
Bibiaine retired, and the priest's uneasiness increased.
At this threat, Maurice shrugged his shoulders, and said:
And when?"
"I possess nothing.
Perhaps they felt a presentiment that they were to be champions of two different principles, as well as rivals.
And here was a man who treated him with undisguised scorn.
But the cure hoping to recall the extortioner to something like a sense of shame, exclaimed:
This name Lacheneur awakened no recollection in the mind of the duke.
friend, my worthy fellow!"
Lacheneur stood motionless and speechless.
He rose and offered the visitors chairs.
A delightful comedy.
Marie-Anne stepped quickly forward.
"The possessions of a priest are not of this world, Monsieur," said the cure, coldly.
"I remember you now.
"Keep the legacy that your aunt gave me, I wish nothing of yours.
"You had better not desire it."
Indignant at the outrage, he made a movement as if to retire.
But the duke thought this grand act of honesty and of generosity the most simple and natural thing in the world.
As she sprang forward her beautiful dark hair escaped from its confinement, the rich blood crimsoned her cheeks, her dark eyes flashed brilliantly, and sorrow, anger, horror at the humiliation, imparted a sublime expression to her face.
Such sentiments are purely Jacobin.
Anyone not belonging to that class of spoiled fools which surround a throne would have been deeply touched.
Martial came running after them, anxious for another chance of seeing this young girl whose beauty had made such an impression upon him.
Instinctively, they felt that they were to be enemies; and the bitterest animosity spoke in the glances they exchanged.
He knew that an abyss separated the dream from the reality.
Zounds! our interests are the same.
"That is to say, for twenty years, Monsieur Lacheneur has played the part of lord of the manor.
But the duke bounded from his chair.
These revenues, well invested, should have amounted to a very considerable amount.
Martial, remembering his father, yielded.
"Well!"
He quitted the room with head proudly erect, and when they were outside, he said but one word to his daughter:
I will be your advocate with my father--"
If he opened his lips it would only be to pour forth a torrent of menaces, insults, and invectives.
But my labor was in vain.
"In sanity's name what is it--what is it?"
As I leaped back to the window and uplifted this primitive weapon, a second shot sounded from below, and more fierce snarling, coughing, and guttural mutterings assailed my ears from beyond the pane.
Footsteps came racing up the stairs.
Lifting the heavy blade, I brought it down with all my strength upon the nearer of those hairy arms where it crossed the window-ledge, severing muscle, tendon and bone as easily as a knife might cut cheese....
CHAPTER XVI.
A candle, with matches, stood upon a table hard by, and, my fingers far from steady, I set about obtaining a light.
"Have you got it, Smith?" I demanded hoarsely.
Without the slightest heralding sound--a black silhouette crept up against the pane... the silhouette of a small, malformed head, a dog-like head, deep-set in square shoulders.
It seemed to project from the black silhouette outside the pane, to be thrust forward--and forward--and forward... that small hand with the outstretched fingers.
Heavens!
Mastering my repugnance, I seized the hideous piece of bleeding anatomy and strove to release it.
There was a great stirring all about me.
"Merciful God!" I cried.
I think I failed to realize this for some time.
His face was nearly black, and his eyes projected from their sockets horribly.
The stillness was intense.
Never have I felt such muscles, such tendons, as those beneath the hirsute skin!
The questing hands had reached his throat!
Burke was making the most frightful sounds and quite obviously was being asphyxiated before my eyes!
THE QUESTING HANDS
Higher it arose--that wicked head--against the window, then crouched down on the sill and became less sharply defined as the creature stooped to the opening below.
"That's Burke's cousin with the lantern," whispered Smith in my ear; "don't tell him yet."
Of all the pictures which remain in my memory, some of them dark enough, I can find none more horrible than that which now confronted me in the dim candle-light.
There were figures moving at the end of a long alleyway between the glass houses, and one, carrying a lantern, stooped over something which lay upon the ground.
Behind me the door burst open and Nayland Smith stumbled into the room.
There was every probability that another attempt would be made to-night.
Twice the thing at the window coughed; there was an incessant, lash-like cracking, then some shouted words which I was unable to make out; and finally the staccato report of a pistol.
"Smith!" I cried from the window; "Smith, for mercy's sake where are you?"
"Smith!" I cried, "Smith!
He had refused, for some reason, to discuss the matter that evening, and now, enacting the part allotted him by Nayland Smith, he feigned sleep consistently, although at intervals he would whisper to me his doubts and fears.
"Come downstairs," replied Smith quietly, "and see for yourself." He turned his head aside from the bed.
By reason of the moon's position, no light entered the room, but my eyes, from long watching, were grown familiar with the darkness, and I could see Burke quite clearly as he lay in the bed between my post and the window.
Choking down an urgent dread that I had of touching the thing which reached through the window to kill the sleeper, I sprang across the room and grasped the rigid, hairy forearms.
A shriek--a shriek neither human nor animal, but gruesomely compounded of both--followed... and merged into a choking cough.
He lay quite flat, face downward; but the back of his head was a shapeless blood-dotted mass, and a heavy stock-whip, the butt end ghastly because of the blood and hair which clung to it, lay beside him.
I took a knife from my pocket, and, tendon by tendon, cut away that uncanny grip from Burke's throat...
What information had Burke to sell?
With a second piercing shriek, louder than that recently uttered by Burke, wailing through the night from somewhere below, I turned desperately to the man on the bed, who now was become significantly silent.
Already cramped by my journey in the market-cart, I found it difficult to remain very long in any one position.
"Quick, sir--quick!" screamed Burke, starting up from the pillow.
Very unsteadily I followed him down the stairs and through the rambling old house out into the stone-paved courtyard.
I started back appalled as Smith caught my arm.
Burke was dead!
There was a faint sound of sniffing.
I nodded, and we hurried up to join the group.
This was a sharp and heavy axe, which Nayland Smith, when I had met him in Covent Garden, had brought with him, to the great amazement of Weymouth and myself.
Within my view, from the corner of the room where I sat in deepest shadow, through the partly opened window (it was screwed, like our own) were rows of glass-houses gleaming in the moonlight, and, beyond them, orderly ranks of flower-beds extending into a blue haze of distance.
I seemed to be back again in those days of the troubled past when first Nayland Smith and I had come to grips with the servants of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
Any one who has been forced by circumstance to undertake such a vigil as this will be familiar with the marked changes (corresponding with phases of the earth's movement) which take place in the atmosphere, at midnight, at two o'clock, and again at four o'clock.
Judging from the stark horror which I experienced, myself, I doubted, now, if Burke could sustain the role allotted him.
It defied all my efforts; in death it was as implacable as in life.
Snarling like that of a wild beast came from the creature with the hairy arms, together with renewed coughing.
"God!" he said, and started back in the doorway.
Desisting in my vain endeavor to pit my strength against that of the nameless thing, I sprang back across the room and took up the weapon which had been left in my charge earlier in the night, but which I had been unable to believe it would be necessary to employ.
I found myself looking down at one of those thick-set Burmans whom I always associated with Fu-Manchu's activities.
Then:
Help! help! for God's sake!"
Despite the confusion of my mind I became aware of sounds outside and below me.
Burke lay crosswise on the bed, his head thrown back and sagging; one rigid hand he held in the air, and with the other grasped the hairy forearm which I had severed with the ax; for, in a death-grip, the dead fingers were still fastened, vise-like, at his throat.
I realized two things: the first, that in my terror at the suddenness of the attack I had omitted to act as pre-arranged: the second, that I had discredited the strength of the visitant, whilst Smith had foreseen it.
Malignant eyes peered intently in.
This accomplished, I stood the candle upon the little chest-of-drawers and returned to Burke's side.
According to Burke, constant attempts had been made to achieve Fu-Manchu's purpose, and had only been frustrated by his (Burke's) wakefulness.
Now, as I paused to light my pipe--a never-failing friend in loneliness--I perceived something move in the shadows of a neighbouring bush.
On and on I ran--flying from an unknown, but, as a warning instinct told me, deadly peril--ran as a man runs pursued by devils.
Painfully conversant with the uncanny weapons employed by the Hashishin, I knew now, beyond any possibility of doubt, that death was behind me.
There is nothing more deceptive than a straight road up a hill; and half an hour's steady tramping but saw me approaching the trees.
Do not interfere with those that are!"
Crack! Crack!
It was a long way behind--so far that, had the moon been less bright, I could never have discerned it.
Certainly, I had not seen him enter.
Successfully resisting a temptation to glance behind, I entered the cover of the coppice, and, now invisible to any one who might be dogging me, stood and looked back upon the moon-bright road.
The road bent sharply to the left then forked.
They were caressing, smiling eyes, and looked boldly into mine.
I had so far resolutely endeavoured to keep my mind away from the idea of surveillance.
Taking, therefore, what I had designed to be a final glance back down the hillside, I was preparing to resume my way when I saw something--something that arrested me.
As I got astride, from the blackness of the lane came the ominous hum, and my hat went spinning away across the lawn!--the black cloud veiled the moon and complete darkness fell.
"Be warned.
The crack of the Smith and Wesson reassured me.
Might I not, by my mere presence in that place, unwittingly be interfering now?
They were locked!
At any rate, as I passed in between the big pillars, "The gateway of the North," I scrutinized, and closely, the numerous hurrying figures about me.
Crack!
SIX GRAY PATCHES
Moreover, beyond the fact that his house, "Uplands," was near H--, for which I was instructed to change at New Street Station, Birmingham, I had little idea of its location. But he added "Wire train and will meet at H--"; so that I had no uneasiness on that score.
I'll go, Dick.
'Nonsense.
He was conscious that he could not bear himself as a man if the strain continued much longer.
He turned a scarred formless muddle of paint towards Maisie, and the eyes strained as though they would catch her wonder and surprise.
'She's framed in black.
'Indeed, I can't.
But it was the worn-out eyes that Maisie feared.
What do you think of her?'
'Haven't signed any contracts yet.
I'll send it over to your house if you will.'
Still the sobbing continued.
'It's all I had and I've lost it,' he said, as soon as the misery permitted clear thinking.
But for Dick's sake--whatever this mad blankness might mean--she must make no sign.
'I wanted to come.
Is this a black frame that I have my hand on?
It would be kindest not to see me any more, please. I don't want to seem rude, but--don't you think--perhaps you had almost better go now.'
Perhaps I could come and see you sometimes.'
Seven other devils----'
I?'
'Hush, dear, hush!
She drew herself out of his arms at last and waited, trembling and most unhappy.
Oh yes--thank you.
I'm only a man.'
Her Dick had gone blind and left in his place some one that she could hardly recognise till he spoke.
You're quite right, and you've nothing to reproach yourself with--you never had.
It is not good to realise that you have failed in the hour of trial or flinched before the mere possibility of making sacrifices.
When you're better you shall go away and get something to eat.
I meant it for you ever since this little trouble began.
And now you've come and seen, and I'm--immensely grateful.
'I don't deserve anything else.
What a brute Torp was to bring you over.'
What's the matter?'
Are you feeling any better?'
Maisie had never feared her companion before.
'I hate you?
He was conscious that Maisie was catching her breath, but was as unprepared as herself for the torrent of emotion that followed.
You're only a little upset by the journey, and I don't suppose you've had any breakfast.
'Well?' said Dick, his face steadily turned away.
I surprised their councils the other day, and it made me unhappy.
My God!
She was immensely and unfeignedly sorry for him--more sorry than she had ever been for any one in her life, but not sorry enough to deny his words.
She had dropped into a chair and was sobbing with her face hidden in her hands.
He could not realise at first that Maisie, whom he had ordered to go had left him without a word of farewell.
'And meditate?
'Are you better now?' he said.
I've got something to give you first.
You observe a good time if ever a man did.'
One thing and one thing only could she do for him.
Well, do you attend the function to-night?
I told you how it would be.
She's worth a few hundreds at any state of the market.' He groped among his canvases.
So he isn't near enough to come in--on the money."
The lawyers were bland and courteous, but they really had nothing to say, they declared, beyond the already published facts.
"Do you know how much we'll HAVE to pay? And isn't there any way we can save doing that?"
The town paper had contained an elaborate account of the bequest and the remarkable circumstances attending it; and Hillerton became the Mecca of wandering automobiles for miles around. Big metropolitan dailies got wind of the affair, recognized the magic name of Stanley G. Fulton, and sent reporters post-haste to Hillerton.
It appeared to be omniscient and omnipotent, and yet was neither seen nor heard.
Such a marriage he regarded as no marriage at all, but as a shame and a disgrace.
The girl is young, and we would not have her wed grey hairs, neither would we deprive her of all choice.
He was still sitting with his elbows upon his knees, considering how he should broach the matter to his daughter when a soft hand was laid upon his, and looking up, he saw her standing beside him.
JOHN FERRIER TALKS WITH THE PROPHET.
What say you to that?"
His heart leapt to his mouth, for this was none other than the great Brigham Young himself.
"His voice rang through the house.
Stangerson has a son, and Drebber has a son, and either of them would gladly welcome your daughter to their house.
"When he comes, he will advise us for the best.
John Ferrier's heart was sore within him when he thought of the young man's return, and of the impending loss of his adopted child.
Its invisibility, and the mystery which was attached to it, made this organization doubly terrible.
But it is for you that I am frightened, dear.
One hears--one hears such dreadful stories about those who oppose the Prophet: something terrible always happens to them."
Not the Inquisition of Seville, nor the German Vehm-gericht, nor the Secret Societies of Italy, were ever able to put a more formidable machinery in motion than that which cast a cloud over the State of Utah.
"Leave Utah!"
"But they won't let us leave," his daughter objected.
Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness.
He was passing through the door, when he turned, with flushed face and flashing eyes.
"It were better for you, John Ferrier," he thundered, "that you and she were now lying blanched skeletons upon the Sierra Blanco, than that you should put your weak wills against the orders of the Holy Four!"
"You will give us time," he said at last.
Have I not----?"
He's a likely lad, and he's a Christian, which is more than these folk here, in spite o' all their praying and preaching.
"We'll fix it up somehow or another.
I don't care about knuckling under to any man, as these folk do to their darned prophet.
You don't find your fancy kind o' lessening for this chap, do you?"
"That's about the size of it."
Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders--women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror.
"Have I not given to the common fund?
Yes, a dangerous matter--so dangerous that even the most saintly dared only whisper their religious opinions with bated breath, lest something which fell from their lips might be misconstrued, and bring down a swift retribution upon them.
I'm a free-born American, and it's all new to me.
"She shall have a month to choose," said Young, rising from his seat. "At the end of that time she shall give her answer."
The latter, however, received his salutations coldly, and followed him with a stern face into the sitting-room.
"Wait till Jefferson comes, and we'll soon manage that.
"And how have I neglected it?" asked Ferrier, throwing out his hands in expostulation.
"Call them in, that I may greet them."
His wife and his children awaited him at home, but no father ever returned to tell them how he had fared at the hands of his secret judges.
Fuller knowledge of the organization which produced such terrible results served to increase rather than to lessen the horror which it inspired in the minds of men.
With a threatening gesture of his hand, he turned from the door, and Ferrier heard his heavy step scrunching along the shingly path.
Oh, father, father, what shall we do?"
Is not this so?"
"Upon this one point your whole faith shall be tested--so it has been decided in the Sacred Council of Four.
Whatever he might think of the Mormon doctrines, upon that one point he was inflexible.
"Where are your wives?" asked Young, looking round him.
"It is so," answered John Ferrier.
"It is of that daughter that I would speak to you," said the leader of the Mormons.
"There are stories of her which I would fain disbelieve--stories that she is sealed to some Gentile.
"Brother Ferrier," he said, taking a seat, and eyeing the farmer keenly from under his light-coloured eyelashes, "the true believers have been good friends to you.
John Ferrier groaned internally.
THREE weeks had passed since Jefferson Hope and his comrades had departed from Salt Lake City.
We picked you up when you were starving in the desert, we shared our food with you, led you safe to the Chosen Valley, gave you a goodly share of land, and allowed you to wax rich under our protection.
"But we haven't opposed him yet," her father answered.
The names of the participators in the deeds of blood and violence done under the name of religion were kept profoundly secret. The very friend to whom you communicated your misgivings as to the Prophet and his mission, might be one of those who would come forth at night with fire and sword to exact a terrible reparation.
CHAPTER III.
Ferrier remained silent for some little time with his brows knitted.
"No; of course not.
None knew who belonged to this ruthless society.
Guess I'm too old to learn.
He had to seal his mouth on the subject, however, for to express an unorthodox opinion was a dangerous matter in those days in the Land of the Saints.
"It will be time to look out for squalls when we do.
Strange rumours began to be bandied about--rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen.
One glance at her pale, frightened face showed him that she had heard what had passed.
"She has grown to be the flower of Utah, and has found favour in the eyes of many who are high in the land."
If he comes browsing about this farm, he might chance to run up against a charge of buckshot travelling in the opposite direction."
Yet her bright and happy face reconciled him to the arrangement more than any argument could have done.
"It is true that I have not married," Ferrier answered.
Have I not attended at the Temple?
"My daughter is very young--she is scarce of an age to marry."
"I could not help it," she said, in answer to his look.
In the meantime, don't you fret yourself, my dearie, and don't get your eyes swelled up, else he'll be walking into me when he sees you.
John Ferrier made no answer, but he played nervously with his riding-whip.
I shouldn't care to hear you say you did.
The victims of persecution had now turned persecutors on their own account, and persecutors of the most terrible description.
He had always determined, deep down in his resolute heart, that nothing would ever induce him to allow his daughter to wed a Mormon.
"But the farm?"
A rash word or a hasty act was followed by annihilation, and yet none knew what the nature might be of this terrible power which was suspended over them.
"Not a thing," said Kate, "in the direction of slaying a gay deceiver, if that's what you mean.
We had six, long, lovely weeks of daily association at the lake, I've seen his home, and his inventions, and as much of his business as is visible to the eye of a woman who doesn't know a tinker about business.
She began to resent the length of time he was waiting.
"But I don't love you," said Kate.
I was watching for you about this time, and I just happened to be at the station in Hartley last Saturday when you got off the train with your fine gentleman, so I stayed over with some friends of mine, and I saw you several times Sunday.
You will break his heart," pleaded Nancy Ellen.
"Great God!" she said amazedly.
When she came to the letters, she hesitated.
"I had given no man the slightest encouragement, I was perfectly free.
Think I can respect that, or ask my children to respect it?
I shall teach my school this winter as I agreed to.
"Neither did you love him," retorted George Holt.
"As for THIS, I never was so AFRAID in all my life.
Then the torrent broke.
He is thoughtful, quick, kind, a self-made business man.
"Take this chair, Kate," said Nancy Ellen.
Kate arose and walked to the window, turning her back to Nancy Ellen, who sat staring at her, while she read John Jardine's letter.
I saw that I'd practically no chance with you at all; but I made up my mind I'd stick until I saw you marry him, so I wrote just as I would if I hadn't known there was another man in existence."
"Why don't you ask me what's the matter?"
Nancy Ellen would understand and sympathize; of course Kate told her all there was to tell.
"There isn't the least danger of my trying to marry you to him," he said, "because I am going to marry you myself at the very first opportunity.
But I'd get out of teaching this winter if I could.
And by the luck of the very Devil, there comes that school-proof thing in the same mail, from that abominable George Holt, and Kate reads it FIRST.
I can't believe it!
In half an hour a truckman came for her trunk, so Nancy Ellen made everything Kate had missed into a bundle to send with it.
"Well, what do I care?" said Kate.
That it would be a humiliation to me all my after life, I wouldn't think about until the humiliation began, and then I'd have no way to protect myself.
He got the money.
He sat down close beside her and leaned toward her.
"I expected him back in a week, and that I would then arrange to marry him.
"She would say 'infinitesimal.' But all the same he kissed her."
Take more time to think.
"You're RIGHT about it," said Nancy Ellen.
"Do you know what you are doing?" cried George Holt, roughly, losing self-control with hope.
Wednesday Kate noticed Nancy Ellen watching for the boy Robert had promised to send with the mail as soon as it was distributed, because she was, herself.
George Holt suddenly arose and went to Kate.
"I haven't had a breath of time," he said in candid disclaimer.
Finally she shifted her position to rest herself, opened her eyes, and looked at him without a word.
"He means providing another teacher for Walden, taking you to Chicago shopping for a wonderful trousseau, marrying you in his Lake Shore palace, no doubt."
"If he has no more respect for me than to write me such an insult as that, why should I have the respect for him to protect him in it?
She did not open her eyes when she heard a step and her name called. She knew without taking the trouble to look that George had come home, found her luggage in her room, and was hunting for her.
"Hush!" cautioned Nancy Ellen.
I shall marry him in the clothes I buy with what I earn.
"There he has me guessing.
"Didn't figure that it was any of my business in the first place," he said, "and I have a pretty fair idea, in the second."
"All right, go ahead," said Kate.
She closed her eyes, leaned against a big tree, and slow, cold and hot shudders alternated in shaking her frame.
"Why are you weeping?" she asked casually.
"Don't you care," laughed Nancy Ellen.
After a page as she turned the second sheet Nancy Ellen glanced at Kate, and saw that she had not opened the creased page in her hands.
"Big and strong as we are, but--"
"Do you see anything about it to ENCOURAGE me to go farther?"
It was like him to wait until the last minute, and then depend on money to carry him through.
"He is giving me a long time to think things over," Kate said to Nancy Ellen when there was no letter in the afternoon mail Thursday.
"Anyway, that's the way this is going to be done."
At the hotel, on boats, on the trains, anywhere we went, he pushed straight for the most conspicuous place, the most desirable thing, the most expensive.
You were flattered, and tempted with position and riches, but your heart was not his, or you would be mighty SURE of it, don't you forget that!"
Nancy Ellen was on her feet and nearer to the door; she stepped to it, and took the letters, giving them a hasty glance as she handed them to Kate.
All was going 'merry as a marriage bell,' and then this morning came my Waterloo, in the same post with your letter."
Neither did you love him, but you were going to marry him, and use all his wonderful power of position and wealth, and trust to association to BRING love.
"Thank you," said Kate.
As she stepped out to them, she found them laughing mysteriously.
Look at what he is and what he does!
"Would Agatha use such a common word as 'little'?" asked Robert.
Third, I'm going to start out and walk miles, I don't know or care where; but in the end, I'm going to Walden to clean the schoolhouse and get ready for my winter term of school."
I almost prayed sometimes that in some way he would strike ONE SINGLE THING that he couldn't make come his way with money; but he never did. No.
"It was," said Kate.
That was the agreement we made then."
She heard him come closer and knew when he seated himself that he was watching her, but she did not care enough even to move.
"Oh, Kate, how can you!" cried Nancy Ellen.
She read:
"It is a very fine, deep, sincere love that I am offering you," said George Holt.
Twice Thursday, Kate hoped in vain that the suspense would be over.
I haven't an idea what he has in his mind yet, but he's going to write me about it this week, and if I agree to whatever it is, he is coming Sunday; then he has threatened me with a 'deluge,' whatever he means by that."
"I guess she didn't want them," she said.
"Of course we could make it all right, as to a living," said Kate.
TWO LETTERS
Why not now?
The day was fine, a snappy tinge of autumn in the air, her head and heart were full.
He'll strike the first thing he can't do with money.
Say good-bye to Robert for me."
When she mentioned her farewell of Sunday night, a queer smile swept over his face and instantly disappeared.
She handed Nancy Ellen the letter and slowly ripped open the flap of the heavy white envelope.
Kate did not need even a hint to start her talking in the morning.
"What does the man mean?
"While I'm about it, I'll see what the 'clod-hopper' has to say, and then I shall be free to give my whole attention to the 'gentleman.'"
She read them slowly and deliberately, sometimes turning back a page and going over a part of it again.
I meant to be a good wife to him and a good daughter to his mother, and I could have done much good in the world and extracted untold pleasure from the money he would have put in my power to handle.
"If she didn't step up and kiss him, never again shall I trust my eyes!" said the doctor.
You can see THAT sticking out all over him.
The worst thing about him is a kind of hard-headed self-assurance.
You can try that with me.
He begged, he pleaded, he reasoned.
"He's very silent, thinking out more inventions, maybe.
"She's provoked now; if she hears that, she'll never forgive us."
He gave her no chance to say anything; he said all there was to say himself; he urged that Jardine would come, and she should not be there.
She had never seen him looking so well.
Publish it in the paper if you want to."
He soon found he could.
Then he began performing miracles with it.
Every morning she went with the child to the garden where the wild beasts were kept, and washed herself there in a clear stream.
Then the huntsman promised to procure as much game for him as he could possibly use at the royal table.
On this the huntsman asked the king if he would like to see the dog in his true shape, and wished him back into the form of the cook, in the which he stood immediately, with his white apron, and his knife by his side.
Then he mounted up and looked inside, and cried: 'Beloved mother, Lady Queen, are you still alive, or are you dead?' She answered: 'I have just eaten, and am still satisfied,' for she thought the angels were there.
Hardly had he formed the wish than the marshal began, and said: 'Your majesty, we live joyously here, but how is the queen living in the tower?
But God sent two angels from heaven in the shape of white doves, which flew to her twice a day, and carried her food until the seven years were over.
The thought occurred to him, however, that the king's son might some day wish to be with his father, and thus bring him into great peril.
And the king sent two waiting-maids and two attendants into the tower, to fetch the queen and bring her to the royal table.
It happened once when the child was a little older, that it was lying in her arms and she fell asleep.
The king said yes, if he was skilful and could get game for him, he should come to him, but that deer had never taken up their quarters in any part of the district or country.
Then came the old cook, who knew that the child had the power of wishing, and stole it away, and he took a hen, and cut it in pieces, and dropped some of its blood on the queen's apron and on her dress.
When the king saw him he fell into a passion, and ordered him to be cast into the deepest dungeon.
The aged king ordered the cook to be torn in four pieces, but grief consumed the king's own heart, and he soon died.
The two played together, and loved each other with all their hearts, and the old cook went out hunting like a nobleman.
Whilst he was sitting there, he thought of his dearest mother, and wished that one of the king's principal servants would begin to speak of her, and would ask how it was faring with the queen in the tower, and if she were alive still, or had perished.
What if the fiend should come in woman's garments with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side?
In both you emerge from mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly control, and are borne onward to another mystery.
Or, to vary the metaphor, you find yourself for a single instant wide awake in that realm of illusions whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery with a perception of their strangeness such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed. The distant sound of a church-clock is borne faintly on the wind.
It is too late.
Yet look at that one glorious star!
You stand in the sunny rain of a summer shower, and wander among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood, and look upward at the brightest of all rainbows overarching the unbroken sheet of snow on the American side of Niagara.
Its beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed with a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an outline.
The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay.
Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen among the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay.
But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open.
In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music and revelry, above may cause us to forget their existence and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide.
Do you remember any act of enormous folly at which you would blush even in the remotest cavern of the earth?
By a desperate effort you start upright, breaking from a sort of conscious sleep and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends were anywhere but in your haunted mind.
If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this.
At the same moment the slumbering embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates the whole outer room and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, but cannot quite dispel its obscurity.
Pass, wretched band!
Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness with dust among her golden hair and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach: she was your fondest hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now.
Soon the flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image remains an instant in your mind's eye when darkness has swallowed the reality.
Your eye searches for whatever may remind you of the living world.
That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.
Throughout the chamber there is the same obscurity as before, but not the same gloom within your breast.
You sink down in a flowery spot on the borders of sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts rise before you in pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a pervading gladsomeness and beauty.
What if he should stand at your bed's foot in the likeness of a corpse with a bloody stain upon the shroud?
What if Remorse should assume the features of an injured friend?
Sufficient without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavy sinking of the spirits, this wintry gloom about the heart, this indistinct horror of the mind blending itself with the darkness of the chamber.
Then recognize your shame.
A funeral train comes gliding by your bed in which passion and feeling assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim spectres to the eye.
It is the knell of a temporary death.
Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train.
So calm, perhaps, will be the final change--so undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to its eternal home.
Her influence is over you, though she have no existence but in that momentary image.
What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber!
With eager minuteness you take note of the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat and the fallen glove.
There will be time enough to trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to breakfast.
You may almost distinguish the figures on the clock that has just told the hour.
Oh that he would fall asleep and let mortals live on without growing older!
The wheeling of gorgeous squadrons that glitter in the sun is succeeded by the merriment of children round the door of a schoolhouse beneath the glimmering shadow of old trees at the corner of a rustic lane.
By unclosing your eyes so suddenly you seem to have surprised the personages of your dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broad glance at them before they can flit into obscurity.
Now, being irrevocably awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain, and observe that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frost-work, and that each pane presents something like a frozen dream.
It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth such as you now feel again.
You have found an intermediate space where the business of life does not intrude, where the passing moment lingers and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to take breath.
O Lord, who holdest alike the hearts of nations and of men in Thy powerful hand; raise up allies to the sacred cause of right; arouse the French nation from the apathy in which its rulers retain it, that it go forth again to fight for the liberties of the world.
These habits of restraint recur in political society, and are singularly favorable both to the tranquillity of the people and to the durability of the institutions it has established.
The greatest part of British America was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy; they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.
In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life.
Religion Considered As A Political Institution, Which Powerfully Contributes To The Maintenance Of The Democratic Republic Amongst The Americans
Each sect adores the Deity in its own peculiar manner, but all the sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.
These men do not act from an exclusive consideration of the promises of a future life; eternity is only one motive of their devotion to the cause; and if you converse with these missionaries of Christian civilization, you will be surprised to find how much value they set upon the goods of this world, and that you meet with a politician where you expected to find a priest.
Amongst the Anglo-Americans, there are some who profess the doctrines of Christianity from a sincere belief in them, and others who do the same because they are afraid to be suspected of unbelief.
Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief.
The third is to be met with in the constitution of the judicial power. I have shown in what manner the courts of justice serve to repress the excesses of democracy, and how they check and direct the impulses of the majority without stopping its activity.
Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.
They will tell you that "all the American republics are collectively involved with each other; if the republics of the West were to fall into anarchy, or to be mastered by a despot, the republican institutions which now flourish upon the shores of the Atlantic Ocean would be in great peril.
In the Catholic Church, the religious community is composed of only two elements, the priest and the people.
Before it can perpetrate innovation, certain primal and immutable principles are laid down, and the boldest conceptions of human device are subjected to certain forms which retard and stop their completion.
I have previously remarked that the manners of the people may be considered as one of the general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States is attributable.
The first is that Federal form of Government which the Americans have adopted, and which enables the Union to combine the power of a great empire with the security of a small State.
Amen."
In the United States, if a political character attacks a sect, this may not prevent even the partisans of that very sect from supporting him; but if he attacks all the sects together, everyone abandons him, and he remains alone.
I comprise, therefore, under this term the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people.
There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is so much respected as in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated.
There his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; and as he finds that an orderly life is the surest path to happiness, he accustoms himself without difficulty to moderate his opinions as well as his tastes.
Three circumstances seem to me to contribute most powerfully to the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States.
My intention is not to draw a picture of American manners, but simply to point out such features of them as are favorable to the maintenance of political institutions.
Whilst the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that love of order which he afterwards carries with him into public affairs.
This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society.
I have just shown what the direct influence of religion upon politics is in the United States, but its indirect influence appears to me to be still more considerable, and it never instructs the Americans more fully in the art of being free than when it says nothing of freedom.
The sects which exist in the United States are innumerable.
I have known of societies formed by the Americans to send out ministers of the Gospel into the new Western States to found schools and churches there, lest religion should be suffered to die away in those remote settlements, and the rising States be less fitted to enjoy free institutions than the people from which they emanated.
Thus whilst the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.
"Almighty God! the God of Armies!
Hitherto no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim, that everything is permissible with a view to the interests of society; an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all the tyrants of future ages.
Christian morality common to all sects--Influence of religion upon the manners of the Americans--Respect for the marriage tie--In what manner religion confines the imagination of the Americans within certain limits, and checks the passion of innovation--Opinion of the Americans on the political utility of religion--Their exertions to extend and secure its predominance.
The second consists in those municipal institutions which limit the despotism of the majority, and at the same time impart a taste for freedom and a knowledge of the art of being free to the people.
Three principal causes of the maintenance of the democratic republic--Federal Constitutions--Municipal institutions--Judicial power.
Thus religious zeal is perpetually stimulated in the United States by the duties of patriotism.
I met with wealthy New Englanders who abandoned the country in which they were born in order to lay the foundations of Christianity and of freedom on the banks of the Missouri, or in the prairies of Illinois.
If the human mind be left to follow its own bent, it will regulate the temporal and spiritual institutions of society upon one uniform principle; and man will endeavor, if I may use the expression, to harmonize the state in which he lives upon earth with the state which he believes to await him in heaven.
North America peopled by men who professed a democratic and republican Christianity--Arrival of the Catholics--For what reason the Catholics form the most democratic and the most republican class at the present time.
I happened to be staying in one of the largest towns in the Union, when I was invited to attend a public meeting which had been called for the purpose of assisting the Poles, and of sending them supplies of arms and money.
When they return from their expedition, we shall hear what they have to say.
Influence Of The Laws Upon The Maintenance Of The Democratic Republic In The United States
Catholicism is like an absolute monarchy; if the sovereign be removed, all the other classes of society are more equal than they are in republics.
In the United States the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people.
Thou, who didst create Man in the likeness of the same image, let not tyranny mar Thy work, and establish inequality upon the earth.
The whole meeting responded "Amen!" with devotion.
Almighty God, hear our supplications this day.
Moreover, almost all the sects of the United States are comprised within the great unity of Christianity, and Christian morality is everywhere the same.
At other times Catholics have taken the side of aristocracy from a spirit of religion.
They all differ in respect to the worship which is due from man to his Creator, but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man.
This religious influence has sometimes been used to secure the interests of that political state of things to which he belonged.
These two causes induce them, unconsciously, to adopt political doctrines, which they would perhaps support with less zeal if they were rich and preponderant.
It has not unfrequently occurred that the Catholic priest has left the service of the altar to mix with the governing powers of society, and to take his place amongst the civil gradations of men.
It may be asserted that in the United States no religious doctrine displays the slightest hostility to democratic and republican institutions.
Indirect Influence Of Religious Opinions Upon Political Society In The United States
Thus the human mind is never left to wander across a boundless field; and, whatever may be its pretensions, it is checked from time to time by barriers which it cannot surmount.
I found two or three thousand persons collected in a vast hall which had been prepared to receive them.
The imagination of the Americans, even in its greatest flights, is circumspect and undecided; its impulses are checked, and its works unfinished.
I do not question that the great austerity of manners which is observable in the United States, arises, in the first instance, from religious faith.
I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.
In a short time a priest in his ecclesiastical robes advanced to the front of the hustings: the spectators rose, and stood uncovered, whilst he spoke in the following terms:--
Influence Of Manners Upon The Maintenance Of The Democratic Republic In The United States
To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home, is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires.
They keep aloof from parties and from public affairs. In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion, but it directs the manners of the community, and by regulating domestic life it regulates the State.
The judge refused to admit his evidence, on the ground that the witness had destroyed beforehand all the confidence of the Court in what he was about to say.
When these men attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions to the prejudice of their interests.
I here used the word manners with the meaning which the ancients attached to the word mores, for I apply it not only to manners in their proper sense of what constitutes the character of social intercourse, but I extend it to the various notions and opinions current among men, and to the mass of those ideas which constitute their character of mind.
Every religion is to be found in juxtaposition to a political opinion which is connected with it by affinity.
If the mind of the Americans were free from all trammels, they would very shortly become the most daring innovators and the most implacable disputants in the world.
Chapter XVII: Principal Causes Maintaining The Democratic Republic--Part II
We're not going to turn you out-of-doors to-night.
But, although it was neat and clean, it did not seem quite the thing to put a girl there somehow.
"Yes, I suppose so," said Matthew reluctantly.
"Well now, she's a real nice little thing, Marilla.
When Marilla came up for the light various skimpy articles of raiment scattered most untidily over the floor and a certain tempestuous appearance of the bed were the only indications of any presence save her own.
Marilla Cuthbert is Surprised
"Very well, then, Anne spelled with an E, can you tell us how this mistake came to be made?
"Will you please call me Cordelia?" she said eagerly.
"Matthew Cuthbert, who's that?" she ejaculated.
"What difference does it make how it's spelled?" asked Marilla with another rusty smile as she picked up the teapot.
If I hadn't seen the White Way of Delight and the Lake of Shining Waters it wouldn't be so hard."
Oh, this is the most TRAGICAL thing that ever happened to me!"
Marilla set the candle on a three-legged, three-cornered table and turned down the bedclothes.
I don't like children who have so much to say.
"No.
Above it hung a little six-by-eight mirror.
"Weren't you?
During this dialogue the child had remained silent, her eyes roving from one to the other, all the animation fading out of her face.
When Marilla had gone Anne looked around her wistfully.
I hate skimpy night-dresses.
I saw that at once.
It's kind of a pity to send her back when she's so set on staying here."
Burst into tears she did.
"You don't want me!" she cried.
"Well now, it's just as you say, of course, Marilla," said Matthew rising and putting his pipe away.
"I'm going to bed."
Midway between table and bed was the window, with an icy white muslin frill over it, and opposite it was the wash-stand.
"This is what comes of sending word instead of going ourselves.
This girl will have to be sent back to the asylum."
"There wasn't any boy," said Matthew wretchedly.
Matthew came back presently and they sat down to supper.
"Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish," she said wrathfully.
Finally Marilla stepped lamely into the breach.
And the matron said she thought I would do.
"Well, don't cry any more.
"I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say," responded Marilla.
I might have expected it.
"Oh, yes, there was an abundance of them.
"Where is the boy?"
To bed went Matthew.
She did not really make any headway at all.
"You SUPPOSE so!
"Well, undress as quick as you can and go to bed.
I do hope you won't be offended because I can't eat.
Have tea ready when I come back."
Don't you know it?"
"No, I didn't."
If Cordelia isn't your name, what is?"
"Well now, she's a real interesting little thing," persisted Matthew. "You should have heard her talk coming from the station."
"I don't know what on earth you mean.
Sitting down on a chair by the table, flinging her arms out upon it, and burying her face in them, she proceeded to cry stormily.
Marilla came briskly forward as Matthew opened the door.
"We sent word to Mrs. Spencer to bring a boy."
"No boy!
I don't want an orphan girl and if I did she isn't the style I'd pick out. There's something I don't understand about her.
Richard Spencer's folks have twisted that message somehow.
We sent word to Mrs. Spencer to bring us a boy. Were there no boys at the asylum?"
Lily is only five years old and she is very beautiful and had nut-brown hair.
Marilla had been wondering where Anne should be put to bed.
They're fearfully skimpy.
"Did Mrs. Spencer bring anybody over besides you?" continued Marilla when Matthew had gone out.
I'm going to burst into tears!"
"Anne is a real good plain sensible name.
But Anne could not eat.
"You're not eating anything," said Marilla sharply, eying her as if it were a serious shortcoming.
"Unromantic fiddlesticks!" said the unsympathetic Marilla.
"Well, now, no, I suppose not--not exactly," stammered Matthew, uncomfortably driven into a corner for his precise meaning.
And I had to bring her home.
"Yes, there IS need!"
"I'm not suffering for company," said Marilla shortly.
It's such a perfectly elegant name."
"Matthew Cuthbert, you don't mean to say you think we ought to keep her!"
I can see as plain as plain that you want to keep her."
Marilla's astonishment could not have been greater if Matthew had expressed a predilection for standing on his head.
It LOOKS so much nicer.
One of us will have to drive over and see Mrs. Spencer tomorrow, that's certain.
I might have known it was all too beautiful to last.
"We might be some good to her," said Matthew suddenly and unexpectedly.
"Good night," she said, a little awkwardly, but not unkindly.
No, she's got to be despatched straight-way back to where she came from."
I couldn't sleep all last night for joy.
Oh," she added reproachfully, turning to Matthew, "why didn't you tell me at the station that you didn't want me and leave me there?
A girl would be of no use to us.
Nobody ever did want me.
Well, did you ever try to IMAGINE you were in the depths of despair?"
I might have known nobody really did want me.
Is that your name?"
She deliberately picked up Anne's clothes, placed them neatly on a prim yellow chair, and then, taking up the candle, went over to the bed.
Matthew was smoking--a sure sign of perturbation of mind.
I asked the station-master.
But one can dream just as well in them as in lovely trailing ones, with frills around the neck, that's one consolation."
"She brought Lily Jones for herself.
His hands were fastened behind his back and he was tied to a tree.
The men moved first to the blacksmith shop, where several supplied themselves with axes, heavy crow-bars and sledges.
"We do."
He seemed to take hold of the throne of grace and, with a faith strengthened and renewed, drew inspiration for his desperate resolve from the only living fountain.
No light was visible from any window, and it seemed a deserted hamlet.
The fugitives reached the forest before the sheriff and Mr. Parris could get an armed party in pursuit.
He groped his way along in the darkness.
He was weak and faint, and his hands trembled.
If you love your mother, you should give the full strength of body and mind to her rescue."
At a word of command from Oracus the others deployed as flankers and guards.
The only hope of liberating her, of saving her life, is by cool, deliberate and well matured plans."
"I have no fear of George Waters, galley slave.
Come!
He would be desperate; but that desperation would have coolness and premeditation about it.
Charles Stevens passed an anxious day.
"Yes."
Everything was done in perfect order.
Earnestness without excitement was evinced.
Solitude offered him its charms.
There was no undue haste, or nervous excitement.
Everybody running into the street was asking:
"Fly! all of you!
The interview was long, and just what such an interview could be, full of grief and despair.
Meanwhile, if you expect to aid us, you will have to take some refreshments, food and drink, and get some sleep.
Mr. Henry Waters thrust the heavy iron bar he carried under the iron gate, and tore it off its hinges.
Fly for your lives!" cried Henry Waters, who, now that his work was done, flung aside his iron bar and sledge.
If I live, I will yet drag you to justice for the murder of my brother."
The red men now numbered eighty, and by the afternoon the entire party was moving toward Salem.
They are only disguised, and are not a dozen.
"Tell me all about it.
Mr. Henry Waters caused a couple of guns to be fired in the air in order to intimidate their pursuers.
He spent the day in wandering through the woods, forgetting to take any nourishment, for he had brought no food with him, and, in fact, he had not thought to eat since the arrest of his mother and Cora.
Oracus and Henry Waters joined him in the work of liberation, until all were freed.
"I see that many more Indians are in camp than were here yesterday."
"Why not?
"Do you know they are in prison?"
Kneeling, he prayed as he had never prayed before.
"We have faithful friends, who inform us of everything."
"Free! free!" cried the excited Charles.
He found himself making hurried explanations, while a savage was broiling venison steaks before the fire for him.
He ran to the sheriff and cried:
"I am calm for my daughter's sake.
Oh, Heaven, give me light!
"What will they do with him?" Charles asked.
The other white man was the brother of Mr. Waters, and Charles, bewildered, overjoyed, yet faint and weak, was half led and half carried to the camp.
At this moment some one lighted a torch within the jail.
"What are you going to do with him?" Charles asked.
"No, as God is my judge, my hand shall never be raised even to defend this miserable life.
Charles tried to hope.
He was not hungry; but his strength was giving way, and he realized that he had been foolish not to provide himself with food.
"We will do him no hurt unless we are forced to," said Mr. Waters.
"We have heard it all," said Mr. Waters, calmly.
He tried to see a ray of sunlight; but the effort only revealed the swaying forms of those hung on Witches' Hill.
The forest inspires man with reverence and love for God.
"Cora!
"No," answered Mr. George Waters; "not while a prisoner remains to suffer the wrath of prejudice."
The jail was reached.
Charles Stevens had always loved the dark old woods, and never had they seemed so friendly as on this occasion, when they screened him from the frowns of man.
The long, low wall of stone, with gates of iron, loomed up like some sullen monster before the determined men.
This required several moments of time, and the confusion and uproar which they were compelled to make was rousing the town.
"They are rescuing the prisoners," shouted Mr. Parris, wildly.
For her, I slew the other, and only for her will my arm ever be raised against my fellow man."
It was late in the night when the party entered Salem.
Charles Stevens bowed his head in his hands and reflected long and earnestly on the course to pursue.
Think what you will do."
Those dusky sons of the forest were not often desirable sights; but Charles was as anxious to see the feathers and painted faces of these heathens, as if they were brothers.
No more blood will be on my hands, unless it be in defence of her.
"For the present I am."
It was three days before the interview was granted.
I will go with you."
He went away weeping.
"They number hundreds, and the Indians are with them."
To all he appealed for help, for Charles was determined to move heaven and earth or rescue his mother and Cora; but he did not depend on those distant relatives and friends so much as the dusky friends in the forest.
"No one is justified in slaying a prisoner, and I shall never do it.
Now collect your faculties and act on your coolest judgment.
"Your mother and Cora Waters have both been cried out upon as witches, warrants were issued, and they were arrested.
They all sat on the steps waiting for the carriage. At last it drove up.
There was something in Cousin Helen's face and manner, which made the children at home with her at once.
Run away, all of you, and don't come near this door again till the clock strikes four.
Only there was a sort of mixture of Sunday-school book in their idea of her, for Cousin Helen was very, very good.
Clover privately thought that Cousin Helen must be a witch; and Papa, when he came home at noon, said almost the same thing.
"Do you see them often?"
"Oh yes--prettier, I think.
But that evening, after the younger children were gone to bed, and Katy and Clover were sitting in the Blue-room, a lamentable howling was heard from the nursery.
But this one ended so well, that I didn't think of anybody's being frightened."
Let the bedstead alone, Katy, you'll push it into the wall.
Katy never forgot how kind Cousin Helen was on this occasion.
As she passed, she was struck with a bright idea.
So after a good many years, he did, and now he and his wife live next door to Cousin Helen, and are her dearest friends.
"What a queer noise!" she exclaimed, suddenly stopping.
To-morrow we will have a nice talk."
"What have you been doing to them, Helen?" he inquired, as he opened the door, and saw the merry circle on the carpet.
So they told stories.
"When they come, I shall just cut them in two with my sword which Papa gave me.
"I'll keep it as long as I live and breathe."
They were to do this and that, and not to do the other.
Do you hear, chicks?
All the little ones stood at the gate, to wave their pocket-handkerchiefs as the carriage drove away.
"How is Alex?" asked Dr. Carr, at length.
She had brown hair, which didn't curl, a brown skin, and bright eyes, which danced when she laughed or spoke.
Next day came the sad parting.
Cecy wasn't a cousin, but she and the Carr children were in the habit of sharing their aunts and uncles, and relations generally, as they did their other good things.
Go right down stairs, both of you, and don't come up this way again till after tea.
It's just like a night-gown in a book."
"Oh, gracious! is that you?" replied Aunt Izzie, who looked very hot and flurried.
"What do you suppose she looks like?" went on Clover.
"Your Cousin Helen is coming to visit us," said Miss Izzie, curtly, and disappeared into the Blue-room.
Such a merry morning as they had!
Behold! there were John and Dorry, very red in the face from flattening their noses against the key-hole, in a vain attempt to see if Cousin Helen were up and ready to receive company.
"Why, Elsie, darling, what's the matter?
Nobody was forgotten.
Cold chicken, and raspberries and cream, and tea in a pretty pink-and-white china cup.
It fell to the ground with a crash.
I guess that was your doing--wasn't it?"
"It must be awful to be sick," soliloquized Katy, after Papa was gone.
The sofa had been wheeled round with its back to the light.
The tray was placed safely on a little table beside the bed, and Katy sat watching Cousin Helen eat her supper with a warm, loving feeling at her heart.
Cousin Helen laughed again.
"So it is," said Dr. Carr, drawing her on to his knee.
And when one has the back-ache, and the head-ache, and the all-over ache," she added, smiling, "there isn't much danger of growing vain because of a ruffle more or less on one's night-gown, or a bit of bright ribbon."
"Now, children, it's no use for you to stand there asking questions; I haven't got time to answer them.
She saw the wistful look in Elsie's face at once, and took special pains to be sweet and tender to her.
"Why, Katy?
What makes you want to know?"
"Cousin Helen's perfectly lovely," she told Clover.
The time seemed very long till the next afternoon, when Cousin Helen was expected.
Cousin Helen had sharp eyes.
When the last evening came, and they went up after tea to the Blue-room, Cousin Helen was opening a box which had just come by Express.
Don't cry so!"
When it was quite out of sight, Katy rushed off to "weep a little weep," all by herself.
It was no use, after this, for Aunt Izzie to make rules about going into the Blue-room.
"Oh! why didn't she?" cried Katy.
vacation's begun.
Next came a pretty purple pocket-book for Clover.
And then, of course, she reads the Bible a great deal.
When Aunt Izzie let her go up, Cousin Helen was lying on the sofa all dressed for the day in a fresh blue muslin, with blue ribbons, and cunning bronze slippers with rosettes on the toes.
"I can't exactly tell--only Cousin Helen looked so;--and you kissed her;--and I thought perhaps it was something interesting."
"So this is Katy?
Tables and chairs were standing about; and a cot-bed, which seemed to be taking a walk all by itself, had stopped short at the head of the stairs, and barred the way.
"She lives in a real lovely place in the country, and there's a pond there; and Tom (that's my cousin) says he'll teach me to row.
She always says 'Don't,' and they haven't got any yard to their house, or anything. I wouldn't change."
"Just tell us what's going to happen, and we will," cried the children.
"Oh, do let me take up the tray," cried Katy at the tea-table, as she watched Aunt Izzie getting ready Cousin Helen's supper.
Aunt Izzie, who was in a great excitement, gave the children many orders about their behavior.
"What a beauty!" cried Katy, as she lifted the graceful white cup swung on a gilt stand.
"Beside, I don't think any of the rest of the girls have half such good times as we.
They all laughed, Phil loudest of all.
I want to see them so much!"
Then they stopped short, for lo! the upper hall was all in confusion.
Dear me--if only Aunt Izzie was Cousin Helen, how easy it would be!
"Yes, there is, I tell you," declared Phil, holding her tight.
"Cousin Helen will be worn out.
A hundred times hitherto hath spirit as well as virtue flown away and blundered.
Then Zarathustra told them that he now wanted to go alone; for he was fond of going alone.
Still fight we step by step with the giant Chance, and over all mankind hath hitherto ruled nonsense, the lack-of-sense.
Uncommon is the highest virtue, and unprofiting, beaming is it, and soft of lustre: a bestowing virtue is the highest virtue.
Thus goeth the body through history, a becomer and fighter.
Verily, I advise you: depart from me, and guard yourselves against Zarathustra!
Another selfishness is there, an all-too-poor and hungry kind, which would always steal--the selfishness of the sick, the sickly selfishness.
Perhaps he hath deceived you.
So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.
At such time will the down-goer bless himself, that he should be an over-goer; and the sun of his knowledge will be at noontide.
When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue.
And better still: be ashamed of him!
Upward soareth our sense: thus is it a simile of our body, a simile of an elevation.
Ah, there hath always been so much flown-away virtue!
Therefore shall ye be creators!
Alas! in our body dwelleth still all this delusion and blundering: body and will hath it there become.
Elevated is then your body, and raised up; with its delight, enraptureth it the spirit; so that it becometh creator, and valuer, and lover, and everything's benefactor.
Verily, a place of healing shall the earth become!
Upward goeth our course from genera on to super-genera.
Ye constrain all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love.
Only as image of the highest virtue came gold to the highest value. Goldlike, beameth the glance of the bestower.
Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing love and your knowledge be devoted to be the meaning of the earth!
Intelligently doth the body purify itself; attempting with intelligence it exalteth itself; to the discerners all impulses sanctify themselves; to the exalted the soul becometh joyful.
When ye are willers of one will, and when that change of every need is needful to you: there is the origin of your virtue.
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.
Similes, are all names of good and evil; they do not speak out, they only hint.
Give heed, my brethren, to every hour when your spirit would speak in similes: there is the origin of your virtue.
Insatiably striveth your soul for treasures and jewels, because your virtue is insatiable in desiring to bestow.
Thus came they to a crossroad.
Its fights' and victories' herald, its companion and echo.
But a horror to us is the degenerating sense, which saith: "All for myself."
Lead, like me, the flown-away virtue back to the earth--yea, back to body and life: that it may give to the earth its meaning, a human meaning!
Sickness speaketh in such craving, and invisible degeneration; of a sickly body, speaketh the larcenous craving of this selfishness.
Tell me, pray: how came gold to the highest value?
Is it not DEGENERATION?--And we always suspect degeneration when the bestowing soul is lacking.
Verily, with other eyes, my brethren, shall I then seek my lost ones; with another love shall I then love you.
Here paused Zarathustra awhile, and looked lovingly on his disciples. Then he continued to speak thus--and his voice had changed:
At last he spake thus--and his voice had changed:
Verily, a new good and evil is it!
But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers!
Thus spake Zarathustra.
From the future come winds with stealthy pinions, and to fine ears good tidings are proclaimed.
I now go alone, my disciples!
Thus do I pray and conjure you.
Let it not fly away from the earthly and beat against eternal walls with its wings!
And once again shall ye have become friends unto me, and children of one hope: then will I be with you for the third time, to celebrate the great noontide with you.
And it is the great noontide, when man is in the middle of his course between animal and Superman, and celebrateth his advance to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the advance to a new morning.
Dangerous is it to be an heir.
And already is a new odour diffused around it, a salvation-bringing odour--and a new hope!
THE BESTOWING VIRTUE.
Not only the rationality of millenniums--also their madness, breaketh out in us.
One requiteth a teacher badly if one remain merely a scholar.
Zarathustra rejoiced on account of the staff, and supported himself thereon; then spake he thus to his disciples:
A fool who seeketh knowledge from them!
Verily, I divine you well, my disciples: ye strive like me for the bestowing virtue.
Ye lonesome ones of to-day, ye seceding ones, ye shall one day be a people: out of you who have chosen yourselves, shall a chosen people arise:--and out of it the Superman.
Tell me, my brother, what do we think bad, and worst of all?
3.
And the spirit--what is it to the body?
1.
A thousand paths are there which have never yet been trodden; a thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life.
His disciples, however, presented him at his departure with a staff, on the golden handle of which a serpent twined round the sun.
So will I have it.
When Zarathustra had taken leave of the town to which his heart was attached, the name of which is "The Pied Cow," there followed him many people who called themselves his disciples, and kept him company.
Awake and hearken, ye lonesome ones!
When Zarathustra had spoken these words, he paused, like one who had not said his last word; and long did he balance the staff doubtfully in his hand.
Let it be his best cure to see with his eyes him who maketh himself whole.
Verily, a new deep murmuring, and the voice of a new fountain!
"DEAD ARE ALL THE GODS: NOW DO WE DESIRE THE SUPERMAN TO LIVE."--Let this be our final will at the great noontide!--
Such similes of elevations are the names of the virtues.
Verily, an appropriator of all values must such bestowing love become; but healthy and holy, call I this selfishness.--
And why will ye not pluck at my wreath?
Yea, an attempt hath man been.
Now do I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when ye have all denied me, will I return unto you.
Unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man's world.
Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!
Those would be the appropriate storms and agitators of the trees of life!
Ah! ye preach patience with what is earthly?
Now be ye friends the heirs of my goal; to you throw I the golden ball.
That your dying may not be a reproach to man and the earth, my friends: that do I solicit from the honey of your soul.
Therefore the augmentative power of the soul is not distinct from the generative power.
The modes of living are distinguished according to the degrees of living things.
But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces.
Now, the sight, which is without natural immutation either in its organ or in its object, is the most spiritual, the most perfect, and the most universal of all the senses.
Therefore there must be in the living thing a power that prepares this semen; and this is the generative power.
For sense can know accidents.
Therefore the common sensibles do not move the senses first and of their own nature, but by reason of the sensible quality; as the surface by reason of color.
But the organs of smelling and hearing are not affected in their respective operations by any natural immutation unless indirectly.
Furthermore, for the apprehension of intentions which are not received through the senses, the "estimative" power is appointed: and for the preservation thereof, the "memorative" power, which is a storehouse of such-like intentions.
But the sense of touch grasps several contraries; such as hot or cold, damp or dry, and suchlike.
Therefore the power by which in other animals is called the natural estimative, in man is called the "cogitative," which by some sort of collation discovers these intentions.
But the generative power is that whereby a living thing exists.
Wherefore the discerning judgment must be assigned to the common sense; to which, as to a common term, all apprehensions of the senses must be referred: and by which, again, all the intentions of the senses are perceived; as when someone sees that he sees.
But there is a difference as to the above intentions: for other animals perceive these intentions only by some natural instinct, while man perceives them by means of coalition of ideas.
(1) The powers of the soul considered generally;
Therefore the appetitive power should not be made a special genus of the powers of the soul.
There are others which besides this have locomotive powers, as perfect animals, which require many things for their life, and consequently movement to seek necessaries of life from a distance.
Otherwise, if a natural immutation alone sufficed for the sense's action, all natural bodies would feel when they undergo alteration.
And to be cognizant of the natures of sensible qualities does not pertain to the senses, but to the intellect.
The reason of this diversity lies in the various souls being distinguished accordingly as the operation of the soul transcends the operation of the corporeal nature in various ways; for the whole corporeal nature is subject to the soul, and is related to it as its matter and instrument.
Now, since whatever operates must in some way be united to the object about which it operates, it follows of necessity that this something extrinsic, which is the object of the soul's operation, must be related to the soul in a twofold manner.
Therefore there are only three genera of powers in the soul, and not five.
Thus the first two objections are hereby solved.
Now to receive and retain are, in corporeal things, reduced to diverse principles; for moist things are apt to receive, but retain with difficulty, while it is the reverse with dry things. Wherefore, since the sensitive power is the act of a corporeal organ, it follows that the power which receives the species of sensible things must be distinct from the power which preserves them.
For sense is immuted differently by a large and by a small surface: since whiteness itself is said to be great or small, and therefore it is divided according to its proper subject.
Now, for the operation of the senses, a spiritual immutation is required, whereby an intention of the sensible form is effected in the sensile organ.
Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described--namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative.
And the very formality of the past, which memory observes, is to be reckoned among these intentions.
For these are called "natural" forces.
"growth."
Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself.
Of these, three are called souls, and four are called modes of living.
In this way there are two kinds of powers--namely, the "sensitive" in regard to the less common object--the sensible body; and the "intellectual," in regard to the most common object--universal being.
For in the soul there is a power the object of which is only the body that is united to that soul; the powers of this genus are called "vegetative" for the vegetative power acts only on the body to which the soul is united.
Animals, therefore, need to perceive such intentions, which the exterior sense does not perceive.
Now desire is common to each power of the soul.
OF THE SPECIFIC POWERS OF THE SOUL (In Four Articles)
But there are many kinds of accidents.
Therefore the generative force should not be classed as a power of the soul.
Now quantity is the proximate subject of the qualities that cause alteration, as surface is of color.
There are some living things in which there exists only vegetative power, as the plants.
Whence it is clear that sight desires naturally a visible object for the purpose of its act only--namely, for the purpose of seeing; but the animal by the appetitive power desires the thing seen, not merely for the purpose of seeing it, but also for other purposes.
Therefore there is no interior power between the sense and intellect, besides the imagination.
But the "animal appetite" results from the form apprehended; this sort of appetite requires a special power of the soul--mere apprehension does not suffice.
QUESTION 78
Now, in four ways is a thing said to live.
Whereas spiritual immutation takes place by the form of the immuter being received, according to a spiritual mode of existence, into the thing immuted, as the form of color is received into the pupil which does not thereby become colored.
Wherefore it is evident that the latter two genera of the soul's powers have an operation in regard not merely to that which is united to them, but also to something extrinsic.
And there are some living things which with these have intellectual power--namely, men.
But the body by the same force gives species and quantity; much more, therefore, does the soul.
Therefore it is not a single sense but several.
The theologian, however, has only to inquire specifically concerning the intellectual and appetitive powers, in which the virtues reside.
And some distinct principle is necessary for this; since the perception of sensible forms comes by an immutation caused by the sensible, which is not the case with the perception of those intentions.
Therefore for this there is no need to assign an interior power, called the common sense.
If any of these actions cannot be reduced to the same one principle, they must be assigned to diverse powers; since a power of the soul is nothing else than the proximate principle of the soul's operation.
And there is yet another genus in the powers of the soul, which genus regards a still more universal object--namely, not only the sensible body, but all being in universal.
Therefore, as powers are distinguished by their objects, it seems that the senses are multiplied according to the number of the kinds of accidents.
It is not distinct from touch in general, but only from the species of touch distributed in the body.
First, inasmuch as this something extrinsic has a natural aptitude to be united to the soul, and to be by its likeness in the soul.
Again we must observe that if an animal were moved by pleasing and disagreeable things only as affecting the sense, there would be no need to suppose that an animal has a power besides the apprehension of those forms which the senses perceive, and in which the animal takes pleasure, or from which it shrinks with horror.
But generation is common to all things that can be generated and corrupted, whether living or not living.
There is another genus in the powers of the soul, which genus regards a more universal object--namely, every sensible body, not only the body to which the soul is united.
For this cannot be done by the proper sense, which only knows the form of the sensible by which it is immuted, in which immutation the action of sight is completed, and from immutation follows another in the common sense which perceives the act of vision.
Under the first head there are four points of inquiry:
For the powers of the soul are called its parts.
(3) The exterior senses;
But for the retention and preservation of these forms, the "phantasy" or "imagination" is appointed; which are the same, for phantasy or imagination is as it were a storehouse of forms received through the senses.
Otherwise, since animal motion and action follow apprehension, an animal would not be moved to seek something absent: the contrary of which we may observe specially in perfect animals, which are moved by progression, for they are moved towards something apprehended and absent.
For this reason it must have a power in the soul, whereby it is brought to its appropriate size.
In this way the imagination and the memory are called passions of the "first sensitive."
Whether the Five Exterior Senses Are Properly Distinguished?
He was used to quick operations, however, and he had only a moment of bright blankness before replying:
They care only for their pleasure, for what they believe to be the right of the stronger. The stronger?
"Well, sympathy is just sympathy--that's all I can say.
He talked some time to Olive about Mount Desert, told her that in his letters he had described the company at the different hotels.
"Mr. Burrage listens even better than he talks," his companion declared. "We have the habit of attention at lectures, you know.
Perhaps I ought to pay more attention to Mr. Burrage; I don't want him to think we are not so cordial as they are in New York."
His friends knew that in spite of his delicacy and his prattle he was what they called a live man; his appearance was perfectly reconcilable with a large degree of literary enterprise.
The age seemed to her relaxed and demoralised, and I believe she looked to the influx of the great feminine element to make it feel and speak more sharply.
She asked him, with a certain lofty coldness--he didn't make her shy, now, a bit--whether he took a great interest in the improvement of the position of women.
"It will seem to come right down from--well, wherever it does come from."
Your star is above you.
To be lectured by you would be an advantage indeed.
There's a little hole right there in the porch; it seems as if Doctor Tarrant couldn't remember to go for the man to fix it.
If you read a lady's letter you knew pretty well in advance what you would find.
It takes in Miss Verena and it takes in all others--except the lady-correspondents," the young man added, with a jocosity which, as he perceived even at the moment, was lost on Verena's friend.
"Do as you please, my dear," said Olive, almost inaudibly.
They certainly made lovely correspondents; they picked up something bright before you could turn round; there wasn't much you could keep away from them; you had to be lively if you wanted to get there first.
"I can see you don't want it," said Verena, wondering.
"I hope it isn't me.
Selah had reappeared by this time; his lofty, contemplative person was framed by the doorway.
"I can't tell what you like," Verena said, still looking into Olive's eyes.
He knew that was a charge that people brought against newspaper-men--that they were rather apt to cross the line.
Come out with me!" Olive spoke almost with fierceness.
We are sunk in ignorance and prejudice."
Verena, don't fail me--don't fail me!" Olive spoke low, with a kind of passion.
"You can't, of course you can't.
He regarded the mission of mankind upon earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams; everything to him was very much the same, he had no sense of proportion or quality; but the newest thing was what came nearest exciting in his mind the sentiment of respect.
They were treating her as a show, as a social resource, and the two young men from the College were laughing at her shamelessly.
How can I fail?"
"You have no idea how much the way you say that increases my desire to hear you speak."
Olive had got herself out of the little parlour with a sort of blind, defiant dash; she had taken no perceptible leave of the rest of the company.
I can't stand a sleigh myself; it makes me sick."
"Fail you?
"I don't know what I should do.
It isn't often we have anything so fresh; it makes me feel as if I wanted to join in.
"Yes, I am hard; perhaps I am cruel; but we must be hard if we wish to triumph.
He supposed she would be glad to hear that--he knew she was so interested in woman's having a free field.
To my parents?"
Since then he had ascended other steps of the same ladder; he was the most brilliant young interviewer on the Boston press.
For this ingenuous son of his age all distinction between the person and the artist had ceased to exist; the writer was personal, the person food for newsboys, and everything and every one were every one's business.
I suppose you'll think we go a good deal by what you say in this house.
When the two young men from the College pressed their petition, she asked, with a laugh that surprised them, whether they wished to "mock and muddle" her.
"Yes, if we will give up everything.
He only worried because he thought those who were no doubt nearer to Miss Verena than he could hope to be were not sufficiently alive.
Mr. Pardon was not conceited more, at least, than is proper when youth and success go hand in hand, and it was natural he should not know in what spirit Miss Chancellor listened to him.
"Oh, there is nothing I wouldn't do for the ladies; just give me a chance and you'll see."
That was rather awful, even if it represented the fate one would like.
This young lady's worst apprehensions were now justified by Mrs. Tarrant's crying to her that she must not go, as Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie were trying to persuade Verena to give them a little specimen of inspirational speaking, and she was sure her daughter would comply in a moment if Miss Chancellor would just tell her to compose herself.
Mr. Burrage and Mr. Gracie said they would invite her on the spot, in the name of the University; and Matthias Pardon reflected (and asserted) with glee that this would be the newest thing yet.
Tarrant creaked along, in pursuit, to assist Miss Chancellor; the others drew Verena into the house.
Of course, they were naturally more chatty, and that was the style of literature that seemed to take most to-day; only they didn't write much but what ladies would want to read.
Mr. Pardon, as Olive observed, was a little out of this combination; but he was not a person to allow himself to droop.
Olive was silent a moment.
Matthias had a mean opinion of Tarrant, thought him quite second-rate, a votary of played-out causes.
Now, what he tried for was that you shouldn't have the least idea; he always tried to have something that would make you jump.
"Your mission is not to exhibit yourself as a pastime for individuals, but to touch the heart of communities, of nations."
"Dear madam, I'm sure Miss Tarrant will touch my heart!" Mr. Burrage objected, gallantly.
He remarked, however, that a correspondent suffered a good deal to-day from the competition of the "lady-writers"; the sort of article they produced was sometimes more acceptable to the papers.
"Want to try a little inspiration?" he inquired, looking round on the circle with an encouraging inflexion.
I have no desire to draw attention to my own poor gifts."
"Ah, I beseech you, give us the whole programme--don't omit any leading feature!" Mr. Burrage was heard to plead.
He was not more successful when he went on: "It takes in even you, Miss Chancellor!"
"Yes, I am.
"Never to listen to one of them, never to be bribed----"
"I am not angry--I am anxious.
There was a want of bold action; he didn't see what they were waiting for.
I have asked you before--are you prepared to give up?"
Such chances were agitating; moreover, she didn't like, on any occasion, to be so prominent.
She had charm, and there was a great demand for that nowadays in connexion with new ideas.
He was not discouraged by this retort, but glided gracefully off to the question of Mount Desert; conversation on some subject or other being evidently a necessity of his nature.
There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver--a sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of ice.
"You don't mean to say you ain't going to be supported?" Mrs. Tarrant exclaimed, with dismay.
"To whom do you mean, Olive?
This was her hostess's response to Miss Chancellor's very summary farewell, uttered as the three ladies proceeded together to the door of the house.
"No, all our wretched sisters--all our hopes and purposes--all that we think Sacred and worth living for!"
Mr. Gracie seemed inclined to make the sturdiest protest.
I am so afraid I shall lose you.
Sometimes they excited remorse, and sometimes triumph; in the latter case she felt that she could not have been so justly vindictive in cold blood.
On her telling him that she never followed anything of that sort, he undertook a defence of the serial system, which she presently reminded him that she had not attacked.
"You would stay if you liked it, wouldn't you?"
"I want you to address audiences that are worth addressing--to convince people who are serious and sincere." Olive herself, as she spoke, heard the great shake in her voice.
This declaration appeared to be addressed to Miss Chancellor.
But she didn't wish to marry him, all the same, and after he had gone she reflected that, once she came to think of it, she didn't want to marry any one.
"Yes, I am dreadful; I know it.
Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant didn't see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should want to take hold himself.
But everything that had been said was benighted and vulgar; the place seemed thick with the very atmosphere out of which she wished to lift Verena.
I am not so sure!"
He thought there was too much hanging back; he wanted to see her in a front seat; he wanted to see her name in the biggest kind of bills and her portrait in the windows of the stores.
Verena, diverted a moment from her communion with her friend, considered Mr. Burrage with a smile.
"You seem to have started a kind of lecture out here," Mr. Pardon said. "You ladies had better look out, or you'll freeze together!"
First I catch one thing and then another; it seems as if I couldn't take it all in.
"He has ordered two gibbets of the executioner of Paris," answered Gourville.
"A sentence?" said the superintendent, with a shudder and pallor he could not conceal.
"And I ask nothing, oh!
That is all."
What has he done?"
"Thanks for the preference!
"How?"
"Sentence of death."
"Yes, there will be supper."
Two minutes after, the Abbe Fouquet appeared in the doorway, with profound reverence.
"Yes, that is true," murmured the minister; "the scaffold may be prepared, but the king has not signed; Gourville, the king will not sign."
What have you to do with a hundred men?--answer."
"You are right, Gourville."
A man was cheapening a fowl."
"No, but he would have your purse.
"Here is a copy of the sentence which the king is to sign to-day, if he has not already signed it."
Prove that, if you please."
"I shall soon know," said Gourville.
"Two of your best friends."
I assure you it does, monseigneur," replied Gourville.
"Because he repents of living in bad company," said Gourville, "and prefers you to all his bandits."
Fouquet colored.
A frightful scandal! you understand; a scandal which forces a brother to hide his face."
"Next?"
"Monseigneur, at this moment, orders, doors, bolts, locks, and walls I could have broken, forced and overthrown!"
"He knows you are rich."
Upon which they drew in front of the cook's shop, with a hedge of the curious round them, and five hundred as curious at the windows."
"Gourville will open it for you.
Ah!"
The minister reflected for a minute.
"Monseigneur, do not be angry."
"Gourville!"
"Explain yourself."
The fowl was not fat.
"And would ruin me."
"Patience, monseigneur; for you do not know what Colbert is--study him quickly; it is with this dark financier as it is with meteors, which the eye never sees completely before their disastrous invasion; when we feel them we are dead."
He made his way through the press, saying to the joker: 'Mille barbes!
"And you veiled it?" said the superintendent.
"I speak like a man who is in a hurry, monsieur."
"It is disgusting, but so it is.
"But the cabaret is still open?"
"Worn out! worn out!"
I have bought it."
"The natural interest of money," said Raoul,--"five per cent."
Pardieu!
"Well, after having torn the silver lace from the uniforms of his Swiss, because lace is too expensive, he will dismount his musketeers, because oats and hay of a horse cost five sols a day."
"The cornet is there to take my place."
I?" replied D'Artagnan, in a careless tone; "I am settled--I had some family property."
"Of what consequence is it to me?
"I said so, because, in fact, it is my house.
"I!
I cannot conceive how men, Christians, can make such speculation.
"Your father, eh!
Good-day to you," replied the ex-musketeer; whilst Raoul eagerly pressed the hand of his old friend.
"Be quick, then; leave your horse, or make them give me one."
"Well, then, every time anybody is broken on the wheel or hung, quartered, or burnt, these two windows let for twenty pistoles."
There was a remains of military regularity and punctuality preserved in the grocer's household.
"And then?"
"Successful with the ladies, then?--Oh! my little Aramis!
"And where do you lodge, then?"
"Do you play a little?"
"Never."
"That is true."
Your dragoons interrupted my calculations.
"Oh! the king means no harm," replied the young man.
"Your father brings you up rather strictly?" said he.
"Five hundred livres for a garret?
The poverty of D'Artagnan was proverbial.
"On the contrary, the look-out over the water is pleasant.
Look, that is my house."
"It is disgusting, is it not?" said D'Artagnan.
why, that is royal!"
"Mistaken--no!
"Oh, yes, I know Athos is just; but close, perhaps?"
I am no longer a musketeer, am I? Let them be on horseback, let them be on foot, let them carry a larding-pin, a spit, a sword, or nothing--what is it to me?"
A Gascon, he exceeded in ill-luck all the gasconnades of France and Navarre; Raoul had a hundred times heard Job and D'Artagnan named together, as the twins Romulus and Remus.
"Is very ill; it is even reported he is dead."
He paused in the hall and despatched a servant to bring his brother to him.
But this younger brother, this half ward of theirs, was an unruly member.
When did it disappear?"
It is n't as bad as it might be, and you must n't show a gloomy face to-night."
But her companion talked on with such innocent composure that she believed herself mistaken as to the reason for his momentary confusion.
Someone cried gayly across the table to her: "Oh, Miss Claire, you will not dare to talk with such little awe to our friend when he comes back with his ribbons and his medals.
Some of these thoughts were in the minds of the brother and sister now.
Something in the woman's face, in her expression perhaps, supplied a palpable lack in the man.
They made a fine picture as they sat together to-night.
There was a strong glow in Francis Oakley's face, and his laugh was frequent and ringing.
"Yes, a man is always doing something, even if only waiting; but waiting is such unheroic business."
While she listened to him, her face glowed and her eyes shone with a light that every man could not bring into them.
One seeing them could hardly help thinking on the instant that they were made for each other.
He had done this.
Francis's promise had never come to entire fulfilment.
Had the speech had a hidden meaning for her?
Francis laughed and flushed hotly.
The thought struck a chill through her gaiety.
Why, we shall all have to bow to you, Frank!"
"Hear!" cried the ladies.
He's doing something all the while."
He was a handsome man, tall, slender, and graceful.
"I have just discovered a considerable loss," was the reply in a grieved voice.
They did not believe that it was a bad life or a dissipated one, but from the little that they had seen of it when they were in Paris, it was at least a bit too free and unconventional for their traditions.
Despite the joy which his presence gave his brother and sister-in-law, most of his time was spent abroad, where he could find just the atmosphere that suited his delicate, artistic nature.
At last he was going to apply himself steadily and try to be less the dilettante.
No praise could be higher than this, and to-night she had no need to exert herself to maintain this reputation.
Maurice Oakley was not a man of sudden or violent enthusiasms. Conservatism was the quality that had been the foundation of his fortunes at a time when the disruption of the country had involved most of the men of his region in ruin.
It was true that Francis Oakley was only a half-brother to Maurice, the son of a second and not too fortunate marriage, but there was no halving of the love which the elder man had given to him from childhood up.
Claire was looking at her companion.
He was always trembling on the verge of a great success without quite plunging into it.
"All time is short to look back upon.
A FAREWELL DINNER
Maurice found him standing weakly against the railing of the stairs. Something in his air impressed his brother strangely.
As Maurice and his wife followed him with their gaze, the same thought was in their minds, and it had not just come to them, Why could not Francis marry Claire Lessing and settle in America, instead of going back ever and again to that life in the Latin Quarter?
Had he meant the approval of the women, or was it one woman that he cared for?
In a few minutes his gaiety had apparently returned.
There was not a shade more of warmth or self-consciousness in his manner towards her than there had been fifteen years before.
His wife shared with her husband this feeling for her brother-in-law, and with him played the role of parent, which had otherwise been denied her.
The men lingered over their cigars.
The guests heard the dinner announced with surprise,--an unusual thing, except in this house.
"What is it, Francis?" he questioned, hurrying to him.
The younger man pulled himself together, and re-entered the room with his brother.
It is the looking forward to it that counts.
She was the sort of woman who, if ever he came to a great moral crisis in his life, would be able to save him if she were near.
The strength of her mouth and chin helped the weakness of his.
She could never tell.
He was talking animatedly to the girl, having changed the general trend of the conversation to a manner and tone directed more particularly to her.
Was that the reason that he was so anxious to get back to Paris?
And yet he was going away from her, giving up the pearl that he had only to put out his hand to take.
I will wait for you there," he said, and walked sadly away.
Come, let 's go back to our guests.
In fact, there was less, for there had been a time, when he was six and Claire three, that Francis, with a boldness that the lover of maturer years tries vainly to attain, had announced to Claire that he was going to marry her.
Don't look so cut up about it, Frank, old man.
"I went to my bureau to-night for something and found the money gone; then I remembered that when I opened it two days ago I must have left the key in the lock, as I found it to-night."
Had she indeed hit upon the real point?
"That is the part that usually falls to a woman's lot.
That 's the highest art of war."
When they rejoined the ladies, even their quick eyes could detect in his demeanour no trace of the annoying thing that had occurred.
"A good bit of generalship, that, Frank," an old military man broke in. "Esterton opened the breach and you at once galloped in.
What more could they ask?
"What?
She did not want to be suspicious, but what was the cause of that tell-tale flush?
For Francis was a great favourite both with men and women.
The wine was old and the stories new.
He read on with increasing interest.
Let him have time to drink the sweetness of that all in.
The spot where the fragments of the bust had been found was only a few hundred yards away.
"We have a long way to go yet," said he.
Then suddenly, about five minutes later, there came a most horrible yell--the most dreadful sound, Mr. Holmes, that ever I heard.
"Oh, no, Mr. Holmes--nothing very particular."
"It was at the shop of Morse Hudson, who has a place for the sale of pictures and statues in the Kennington Road.
You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day.
The development for which my friend had asked came in a quicker and an infinitely more tragic form than he could have imagined.
And now I'll be too late with a murder done on my own doorstep."
"Then tell me about it."
I ran back for a light and there was the poor fellow, a great gash in his throat and the whole place swimming in blood.
"What would you do then?"
"Exactly.
That's what I said.
"Don't know--may be anything.
"Anything remarkable on hand?" he asked.
I listened, but they were not repeated, and I concluded that they came from outside.
So, although, as you say, there are many hundreds of statues in London, it is very probable that these three were the only ones in that district. Therefore, a local fanatic would begin with them.
It was broken into fragments.
The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement.
"That's no business of mine," said he.
But I suspect it is the sequel of the story of the statues.
A horn-handled clasp knife was lying in a pool of blood beside him.
For example, in Dr. Barnicot's hall, where a sound might arouse the family, the bust was taken outside before being broken, whereas in the surgery, where there was less danger of an alarm, it was smashed where it stood.
"Yes, but there is another empty house farther up the street which he must have passed before he came to this one.
Then I seized the poker and went downstairs.
"They are singular, not to say grotesque," said Holmes.
Stepping out into the dark, I nearly fell over a dead man, who was lying there.
I should be glad, Lestrade, if you could make it convenient to meet us at Baker Street at six o'clock this evening.
It lay scattered, in splintered shards, upon the grass.
Lestrade took out his official notebook and refreshed his memory from its pages.
Holmes sat up again.
I must just take one look round." He examined the carpet and the window.
It had been smashed to atoms where it stood. In neither case were there any signs which could give us a clue as to the criminal or lunatic who had done the mischief.
Footsteps enough, anyhow! Well, well, there's Lestrade at the front window, and we shall soon know all about it."
"You seemed interested last night, Mr. Holmes, so I thought perhaps you would be glad to be present now that the affair has taken a very much graver turn."
I was sitting in my den, which is at the back of the top of the house, about three o'clock, when I was convinced that I heard some sounds downstairs.
"The fellow had either very long legs or was a most active man," said he.
If I had come in here as a journalist, I should have interviewed myself and had two columns in every evening paper.
"By Jove! that's true," said the detective.
He was introduced to us as the owner of the house--Mr.
Will you come?"
On the other hand, although it is trivial, it is undoubtedly queer, and I know that you have a taste for all that is out of the common.
"They were taken from the same mould."
Holmes whistled.
"You don't seriously believe that?"
You wouldn't think there was anyone living at this time of day who had such a hatred of Napoleon the First that he would break any image of him that he could see."
He lay on his back, his knees drawn up, and his mouth horribly open.
Whether it was the weapon which did the deed, or whether it belonged to the dead man, I do not know.
"It was an empty house, and so he knew that he would not be disturbed in the garden."
"What is it, then?" I asked.
Horace Harker, of the Central Press Syndicate.
"And yet--and yet--well, we have some suggestive facts to act upon.
Well, Mr. Holmes, what are we to do with that fact?"
"Madness, anyhow.
"Such a fact must tell against the theory that the man who breaks them is influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon.
Holmes sank back in his chair.
"He could see what he was doing here, and he could not there.
I would only observe that there is a certain method in the gentleman's eccentric proceedings.
He read it aloud:
"Well, Mr. Holmes, there is no use denying that there IS something on my mind.
"You shall see the body at the mortuary, but we have made nothing of it up to now.
But I am sure that it will interest Mr. Horace Harker and the subscribers of the Central Press Syndicate. Now, Watson, I think that we shall find that we have a long and rather complex day's work before us.
"That won't do, my dear Watson," said Holmes, shaking his head, "for no amount of IDEE FIXE would enable your interesting monomaniac to find out where these busts were situated."
We can compare notes afterwards, and each will supplement the other."
That was his reason."
Getting back was comparatively simple.
"Come instantly, 131 Pitt Street, Kensington.
"Well, how do YOU explain it?"
There should be no difficulty about that.
Why any burglar should take such a thing passes my understanding, for it was only a plaster cast and of no real value whatever.
Now, Mr. Holmes, you have got the facts."
"There are no limits to the possibilities of monomania," I answered. "There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'IDEE FIXE,' which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way.
The disconsolate journalist had seated himself at a writing-table.
"I could tell you roughly by the pay-list," the manager answered.
The other fellow is probably an Italian also, and a member of the Mafia.
A reference to his books showed that hundreds of casts had been taken from a marble copy of Devine's head of Napoleon, but that the three which had been sent to Morse Hudson a year or so before had been half of a batch of six, the other three being sent to Harding Brothers, of Kensington.
He had just completed his examination when the hall lights flew up, the door opened, and the owner of the house, a jovial, rotund figure in shirt and trousers, presented himself.
Only by breaking them could he see.
"Is a very simple one.
In an instant Beppo, a skilful workman, made a small hole in the wet plaster, dropped in the pearl, and with a few touches covered over the aperture once more.
Well, after the murder I calculated that Beppo would probably hurry rather than delay his movements.
You will remember, Lestrade, the sensation caused by the disappearance of this valuable jewel and the vain efforts of the London police to recover it.
Finally, he picked up his hunting-crop and struck Napoleon a sharp blow on the top of the head.
Yes, I do, though.
It proved, however, that our vigil was not to be so long as Holmes had led us to fear, and it ended in a very sudden and singular fashion.
I can't say for certain, because it all depends--well, it all depends upon a factor which is completely outside our control.
How many had I?
"We have had a very busy day, and not entirely a wasted one," my friend explained.
"It is satisfactory to know that there can be no difference of opinion upon this case, since Mr. Lestrade, one of the most experienced members of the official force, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the well known consulting expert, have each come to the conclusion that the grotesque series of incidents, which have ended in so tragic a fashion, arise from lunacy rather than from deliberate crime.
His name, it appeared, was Beppo, second name unknown.
He had himself picked up the loaded hunting-crop, which was his favourite weapon.
"Splendid!"
Who did I get the statues from?
I shall go down with Hill to the Italian Quarter, find the man whose photograph we have got, and arrest him on the charge of murder.
Suspicion fell upon the maid of the Princess, who was an Italian, and it was proved that she had a brother in London, but we failed to trace any connection between them.
"Yes, sir; and you, no doubt, are Mr. Sherlock Holmes?
Why, it's Beppo.
It is of no consequence to us which is the correct solution.
Hence, I believe, his kind invitation to me to tax your patience for a few moments upon a consideration of co-operation from a moral standpoint.
And the Government will make their promotion conditional, not upon the number of societies they have registered, but the moral success of the existing institutions.
Whatever he does, naturally attracts me and predisposes me to think that there must be something good in it and the handling of it must be fairly difficult. Mr. Ewbank very kindly placed at my disposal some literature too on the subject.
Every registrar who will nurse back to life this important and graceful industry will earn the gratitude of India.
Mr. Ewbank opened fire on a man who had put himself forward and who wore not a particularly innocent countenance.
The deadly coil has made possible the devastating spectacle in Europe, which we are helplessly looking on.
The banks do not pry into his moral character: they are satisfied that he meets his overdrafts and promissory notes punctually.
They co-operate to use a common thrashing floor.
It has as yet suffered no loss and is able to restrict its loss to a minimum by limiting the loan to a particular figure.
Let us be sure of our ideal.
Mr. Hodge is a co-operative enthusiast and probably considers that the result which he sees flowing from his efforts are due to the working of co-operation.
The Church manufactured the men and the banks manufactured the money to give the men a start in life....
And we, the middlemen, being volunteers, obtain the privilege of entering into the lives of these families, I hope, for their and our betterment.
The registrars will, in that event, ensure the moral growth of existing societies before multiplying them.
He sometimes serves his clients in many ways and even comes to their rescue in the hour of their distress.
Recent rains had made matters worse.
The Ashram supplies them at their door with the yarn they need; its volunteers take delivery of the cloth woven, paying them cash at the market rate. The Ashram merely loses interest on the loan advanced for the yarn.
So far there can only be perfect agreement with Sir Daniel, for that 'without character there is no co-operation' is a sound maxim.
The mightiest Mahajan must, if he represent an evil force, bend before co-operation, conceived as an essentially moral movement.
It was perhaps never so true as it is today that, as in law so in war, the longest purse finally wins.
I would venture, therefore, to warn enthusiasts in co-operation against entertaining false hopes.
The Church disciplined the nation in the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom and in the parish schools of the Church the children learned that the chief end of man's life was to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.
It is, at best, a humble attempt to place at the disposal of the nation a home where men and women may have scope for free and unfettered development of character, in keeping with the national genius, and, if its controllers do not take care, the discipline that is the foundation of character may frustrate the very end in view.
We, therefore, can have no warrant for charging interest.
The only claim I have on your indulgence is that some months ago I attended with Mr. Ewbank a meeting of mill-hands to whom he wanted to explain the principles of co-operation.
I would like the audience to note its purely moral character from start to finish.
Co-operation is not a new device.
My knowledge of the technicality of co-operation is next to nothing.
Doubts have been expressed as to the success of co-operation because of the tightness of the Mahajan's hold on the ryots.
In spite of my caution I consider the little institution I am conducting in Ahmedabad as the finest thing in the world.
Owing to the suspicious looks of the man who was first spoken to, I naturally pressed home the moralities of co-operation.
After he had engaged him and the other people about him in Gujrati conversation, he wanted me to speak to the people.
I have witnessed the ruin of many a home through the system, and it has made no difference whether the credit was labelled co-operative or otherwise.
My observation is so limited that I dare not draw any conclusions from it, but I respectfully enquire whether it is not possible to make a serious effort to draw out the good in the Mahajan and help him or induce him to throw out the evil in him. May he not be induced to join the army of co-operation, or has experience proved that he is past praying for?
Critics tell me that it represents a soulless soul-force and that its severe discipline has made it merely mechanical.
It is necessary that a movement which is fraught with so much good to India should not degenerate into one for merely advancing cheap loans.
The experiment I am conducting shows that there is a vast field for work in this direction. No well-wisher of India, no patriot dare look upon the impending destruction of the hand-loom weaver with equanimity.
With Sir Daniel Hamilton it has become a religion.
Five families that had left off the calling have reverted to it and they are doing a prosperous business.
The chawl in which they were living was as filthy as it well could be.
I, who was able to watch the efforts, had no hesitation in inferring that the personal equation counted for success in the one and failure in the other instance.
We shall ever fail to realise it, but we should never cease to strive for it.
On the other hand, there is quiet work in the same direction being done by Mr. Hodge, a missionary whose efforts are leaving their impress on those who come in contact with him.
And I must frankly confess that, had it not been for Mr. Ewbank's great zeal for the cause he has made his own, I should have shirked the task.
We cannot lift them without being lifted ourselves.
A word perhaps about the Mahajan will not be out of place.
I will not weary the audience with any statement on the first two parts of the experiment.
It alone gives me sufficient inspiration.
This last relationship has not yet been developed, but we hope, at an early date, to take in hand the education too of these families and not rest satisfied till we have touched them at every point.
I do not share the fears.
The use of the loan is pre-determined.
I have gone through Mr. Ewbank's ten main points which are like the Commandments, and I have gone through the twelve points of Mr. Collins of Behar, which remind me of the law of the Twelve Tables.
I have ventured to dilate upon the small experiment to illustrate what I mean by co-operation to present it to others for imitation.
The loss of interest, therefore, on the transaction is negligible.
There are so-called agricultural banks in Champaran. They were to me disappointing efforts, if they were meant to be demonstrations of the success of co-operation.
We are able to command a ready sale for the cloth received.
I have found them co-operate to protect their cattle to the extent of their devoting the best land for the grazing of their cattle. And they have been found co-operating against a particular rapacious Mahajan.
I was able to enter upon it only six months ago.
Men were trained to believe in God and in themselves, and on the trustworthy character so created the Scottish banking system was built." Sir Daniel then shows that it was possible to build up the marvellous Scottish banking system only on the character so built.
After twenty years' experience of hundreds of men, who had dealings with banks in South Africa, the opinion I had so often heard expressed has become firmly rooted in me, that the greater the rascal the greater the credit he enjoys with his banks.
Whole families that were breaking to pieces are put together again.
The third may be allowed a few sentences as it has a direct bearing upon the subject before us.
This is not too ambitious a dream.
Mark his peroration: "Credit, which is only Trust and Faith, is becoming more and more the money power of the world, and in the parchment bullet into which is impressed the faith which removes mountains, India will find victory and peace." Here there is evident confusion of thought.
My brother, Devadhar, has made the subject his own.
God willing, it will be a reality some day.
The credit which is becoming the money power of the world has little moral basis and is not a synonym for Trust or Faith, which are purely moral qualities.
But the wisdom of the Estate or philanthropists demands that they should help on the onward path, men struggling to be good.
The weavers could not be saddled with it.
As Dr. Mann has stated, this industry used to supply the peasant with an additional source of livelihood and an insurance against famine.
I fancy that Mr. Ewbank rather liked the manner in which I handled the subject.
The credit system has encircled this beautiful globe of ours like a serpent's coil, and if we do not mind, it bids fair to crush us out of breath.
But he would have us go much further.
I beg publicly to express my gratitude to Government for helping me in my humble effort to improve the lot of the weaver.
I suppose both--the critics and I--are wrong.
I asked him the reason of this, and found that he was fully possessed with the notion that Fins are wizards, and especially have power over winds and storms.
The same man cut his throat in his berth, and everybody said he was possessed.
Monday, Nov. 19th.
There is more kindness shown by the officers to the crew, and by the crew to one another.
Some had heard him say that he repented never having learned to swim, and that he knew that he should meet his death by drowning.
This was a black day in our calendar.
Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea.
You think, 'cause you been to college, you know better than anybody.
There is more quietness and seriousness.
As I still doubted, he said he would leave it to John, who was the oldest seaman aboard, and would know, if anybody did.
I tell you what, I been plaguy civil to that man all the voyage."
A man dies on shore; his body remains with his friends, and "the mourners go about the streets;" but when a man falls overboard at sea and is lost, there is a suddenness in the event, and a difficulty in realizing it, which give to it an air of awful mystery.
You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.
"What kind of a German?" said the cook.
He was going aloft to fit a strap round the main top-mast-head, for ringtail halyards, and had the strap and block, a coil of halyards and a marline-spike about his neck.
His cruise is up soon!
Then, too, at sea--to use a homely but expressive phrase--you miss a man so much.
As is usual after a death, many stories were told about George.
He had heard of ships, too, beating up the gulf of Finland against a head wind, and having a ship heave in sight astern, overhaul and pass them, with as fair a wind as could blow, and all studding-sails out, and find she was from Finland.
I tried to reason with him about it, but he had the best of all arguments, that from experience, at hand, and was not to be moved.
A man dies on shore--you follow his body to the grave, and a stone marks the spot.
"I'm plaguy glad o' dat," said the cook.
John, to be sure, was the oldest, and at the same time the most ignorant, man in the ship; but I consented to have him called.
A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb.
Sailors have an unwillingness to wear a dead man's clothes during the same voyage, and they seldom do so unless they are in absolute want.
The oath and the loud laugh are gone. The officers are more watchful, and the crew go more carefully aloft. The lost man is seldom mentioned, or is dismissed with a sailor's rude eulogy--"Well, poor George is gone!
You are often prepared for the event.
"He belongs to Bremen," said I.
The Fin held out for a day and a half, when he could not stand it any longer, and did something or other which brought the wind round again, and they let him up.
"I say! you know what countryman 'e carpenter be?"
From this he went on to other superstitions, the Flying Dutchman, etc., and talked rather mysteriously, having something evidently on his mind.
There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap.
"I was mighty 'fraid he was a Fin.
Not a word was spoken, and we saw no one on deck but the man at the wheel.
In a short time she appeared, standing out from Santa Rosa Island, under the lee of which she had been hove to, all night.
There are no umbrellas, and no sheds to go under, at sea.
Owing to our precautions, we were not taken aback, but ran before the wind with square yards.
"Nye's off too," said the captain to the mate; and looking astern, we could just see the little hermaphrodite brig under sail standing after us.
When the watch came up, we wore ship, and stood on the other tack, in towards land.
"Let go aft!" Instantly all was gone, and we were under weigh.
The chain is then passed through the hawse-hole and round the windlass, and bitted, the slip-rope taken round outside and brought into the stern port, and she is safe in her old berth.
Waking up about midnight, I found a man who had just come down from his watch, striking a light.
Captain Wilson was remarkable, among the sailors on the coast, for his skill in doing this; and our captain never let go a second anchor during all the time that I was with him.
While we were standing about on deck, we saw the little brig drifting by us, hove to under her fore topsail double reefed; and she glided by like a phantom.
The sun came up bright, and we set royals, skysails, and studding-sails, and were under fair way for Santa Barbara.
"Lay aloft and loose the topsails!" shouted the captain, as soon as the first man showed himself.
They had a good deal of baggage, which we put into the bows of the boat, and then two of us took the senora in our arms, and waded with her through the water, and put her down safely in the stern.
I also found that we were to sail the same night.
The little Loriotte was astern of us, nearly out of sight; but we saw nothing of the Ayacucho.
It was a beautiful sight. She was like a bird which had been frightened and had spread her wings in flight.
He afterwards said that we sailed well enough with the wind free, but that give him a taut bowline, and he would beat us, if we had all the canvas of the Royal George.
"All ready forward?" asked the captain.
We hauled up the trysail and courses, squared the after yards, and waited for the change, which came in a few minutes, with a vengeance, from the north-west, the opposite point of the compass.
This night, after sundown, it looked black at the southward and eastward, and we were told to keep a bright look-out.
With the change of wind came a change of weather, and in two hours the wind moderated into the light steady breeze, which blows down the coast the greater part of the year, and, from its regularity, might be called a trade-wind.
At sun-down we went ashore again, and found the Loriotte's boat waiting on the beach.
The best ornamentation for an entrance-door is simple panelling, with bold architectural mouldings and as little decorative detail as possible.
The necessary ornament should be contributed by the design of locks, hinges and handles.
For the latter reason, bronze and iron are more fitting than brass or steel.
Marble, stone, scagliola, or painted stucco are for this reason the best materials.
The decoration of the entrance necessarily depends on the nature of the house and its situation.
The French architect always provides an antechamber for this purpose.
This arrangement has the merit of keeping the house warm and of affording a shelter to the servants who, during an entertainment, are usually compelled to wait outside.
If wood is used, it should be painted, as dust and dirt soon soil it, and unless its finish be water-proof it will require continual varnishing.
ENTRANCE AND VESTIBULE
The outer door, which separates the hall or vestibule from the street, should clearly proclaim itself an effectual barrier.
The decoration should at once produce the impression of being weather-proof.
Who does not know the charm and value of this?
When an announcement is made, let them inform themselves respectfully of the name of the person, and pronounce it while holding open for them the door of your room.
Never suffer them to remain seated while answering distinguished persons who ask for you.
Servants treated with suitable regard, are attentive, zealous and grateful, and consequently every thing is done with propriety and affection.
Married persons who, in society, place themselves continually near one another, and who converse and dance together, do not escape the ridicule to which their feelings blind them.
A marriage surrounded by numberless difficulties and dangers appeared impossible to Polidori, and he frankly told Seyton the reasons why the Grand Duke would never submit to such a union.
She made a sign to one of the ladies in waiting to come to her, and from her she learned that everybody was remarking that the figure of Miss Sarah Seyton of Halsbury was less slender, less delicate in its proportions than usual.
Sarah rose.
He had three ways before him,--to inform the Grand Duke of the matrimonial project, to open Rodolph's eyes as to the manoeuvres of Tom and Sarah, to lend himself to the marriage.
We will relate hereafter the results of this discovery, which led to great and terrible events.
After much consideration, therefore, he resolved on serving Sarah, but with a certain qualification, which we will presently refer to.
The doctor resolved (for reasons of his own) to undertake the management of all.
Sarah was of a noble and ancient house, and such a union was not without precedent.
Sarah promised to keep Seyton fully informed, day by day, of the progress of events, so important to both of them; and, that they might correspond more surely and secretly, they agreed upon a cipher, of which Polidori also held the key.
This exalted flight of ambition stupefied the doctor, who had never imagined that Sarah's imagination soared so high.
At this juncture, Seyton was charged by the Grand Duke with an errand to visit several breeding studs in Austria.
He found a priest,--witnesses; and the union (all the formalities of which were carefully scrutinised and verified by Seyton) was secretly celebrated during a temporary absence of the Grand Duke at a conference of the German Diet.
The storm would blow over, and the future sovereign of Gerolstein would become the more bound to Polidori, in proportion as the doctor had undergone greater dangers in his service.
One of Sarah's letters to her brother was abstracted by Polidori, the channel of their mutual communications; for what purpose we shall see hereafter.
The young prince promised to be cautious, and conceal his love.
To all these objections Sarah replied, unmoved:
These reasons, strong enough in themselves, did not soothe Rodolph's anxieties.
He could never be happy; the distance that separated them was too wide!
I hardly know you again."
She protested, with hypocritical tears streaming from her eyes, that she could no longer support the constraint in which she lived; a constraint rendered the more insupportable by her pregnancy.
Violently excited by constraint, and the skilful management of Sarah, who pretended to feel still more than he did the insurmountable obstacles which honour and duty placed between them and their liberty, in a few days more the young prince would have betrayed himself.
What was to happen did happen.
Many of the ladies present looked at her with an astonished air, and whispered to their neighbours.
"My dear child, how very ill you have dressed yourself to-day,--you, whose shape may be spanned by ten fingers.
"My dear Sarah, come here."
He will endure what he cannot prevent."
"Instead of signing"--
Valentine!
Oh, it would be a sacrilege.
"I will go to you, and we will fly; but from this moment until then, let us not tempt providence, let us not see each other.
I dread this marriage, Maximilian, as much as you."
Why should I obtain you by violence, if our love is mutual?
Tell me, Valentine for it is that I came to know."
"On yourself, then, unhappy man; on yourself?"
Oh, heaven forbid!
Marilla had done her work thoroughly and it had been necessary to shingle the hair as closely as possible. The result was not becoming, to state the case as mildly as may be.
Dyed your hair!
Marilla, walking home one late April evening from an Aid meeting, realized that the winter was over and gone with the thrill of delight that spring never fails to bring to the oldest and saddest as well as to the youngest and merriest.
"But I didn't mean to dye it green, Marilla," protested Anne dejectedly. "If I was wicked I meant to be wicked to some purpose.
"No.
And oh, how Josie Pye will laugh!
People have pretty well forgotten my other mistakes--the liniment cake and setting Diana drunk and flying into a temper with Mrs. Lynde.
"Yes, it's green," moaned Anne.
Besides, I meant to be extra good in other ways to make up for it."
But am I talking too much, Marilla?
It makes you feel very virtuous when you forgive people, doesn't it?
"My head is better now.
I've been expecting something queer for some time.
Anne had slid to the floor in despairing obedience.
I mean to devote all my energies to being good after this and I shall never try to be beautiful again.
She had told Anne to be sure and have tea ready at five o'clock, but now she must hurry to take off her second-best dress and prepare the meal herself against Matthew's return from plowing.
They will think I am not respectable.
"Well now, I dunno," said Matthew, who, being patient and wise and, above all, hungry, had deemed it best to let Marilla talk her wrath out unhindered, having learned by experience that she got through with whatever work was on hand much quicker if not delayed by untimely argument.
But there is nothing comforting in having your hair cut off because you've dyed it a dreadful color, is there?
The spring was abroad in the land and Marilla's sober, middle-aged step was lighter and swifter because of its deep, primal gladness.
"Who said?
I think the peddler had a very kind heart, for he said that, seeing it was me, he'd sell it for fifty cents and that was just giving it away.
Anne's lips quivered, but she realized the bitter truth of Marilla's remarks.
But there!
"I can never live this down.
"The peddler that was here this afternoon.
"Oh, Marilla, what shall I do?" questioned Anne in tears.
Marilla washed and put away the dishes grimly.
It certainly had a very strange appearance.
The girls in books lose their hair in fevers or sell it to get money for some good deed, and I'm sure I wouldn't mind losing my hair in some such fashion half so much.
I suppose the first thing is to give your hair a good washing and see if that will do any good."
Marilla was not given to subjective analysis of her thoughts and feelings.
I wouldn't have dyed it green."
"I'll never, never look at myself again until my hair grows," she exclaimed passionately.
Diana alone of outsiders knew the fatal secret, but she promised solemnly never to tell, and it may be stated here and now that she kept her word.
I'll have to see a doctor about them.
I counted the cost, Marilla.
What have you done?
She may be bright and sweet enough, but her head is full of nonsense and there's never any knowing what shape it'll break out in next.
Then she suddenly righted the glass.
"I little know how you got into this fix, but I mean to find out," said Marilla.
Then all at once I saw the bottle of hair dye.
I'm in the depths of despair and I don't care who gets head in class or writes the best composition or sings in the Sunday-school choir any more.
It seems such a tragic thing."
But I hadn't then and I believed every word he said IMPLICITLY."
Get right up this minute and tell me.
I remembered what you told me, and I went out, carefully shut the door, and looked at his things on the step. Besides, he wasn't an Italian--he was a German Jew.
Matthew had come in and was waiting patiently for his tea in his corner.
Her eyes dwelt affectionately on Green Gables, peering through its network of trees and reflecting the sunlight back from its windows in several little coruscations of glory.
But the price of the bottle was seventy-five cents and I had only fifty cents left out of my chicken money.
"Yes, I knew it was a little wicked," admitted Anne.
"Yes, I will, too.
I used up the whole bottle, and oh, Marilla, when I saw the dreadful color it turned my hair I repented of being wicked, I can tell you.
He said it would turn my hair a beautiful raven black--he positively assured me that it would.
Goodness knows what's to be done.
But now I know it's ten times worse to have green hair.
"She's gadding off somewhere with Diana, writing stories or practicing dialogues or some such tomfoolery, and never thinking once about the time or her duties.
Accordingly, Marilla lifted her candle and looked scrutinizingly at Anne's hair, flowing in heavy masses down her back.
"I thought nothing could be as bad as red hair.
I wanted to buy something from him to help him in such a worthy object.
"Are you sick then?" demanded Marilla anxiously, going over to the bed.
"She's not here when I told her to stay," retorted Marilla.
"It's no use, Anne.
This minute, I say.
Anne's got plenty of faults, goodness knows, and far be it from me to deny it.
I expect something will happen to my nose next."
I just swept her one scornful look and then I forgave her.
Why, it's GREEN!"
"Come right down to the kitchen--it's too cold up here--and tell me just what you've done.
Diana says when my hair begins to grow to tie a black velvet ribbon around my head with a bow at one side.
Don't call her untrustworthy until you're sure she has disobeyed you.
In a trice I saw myself with beautiful raven-black hair and the temptation was irresistible.
Lighting it, she turned around to see Anne herself lying on the bed, face downward among the pillows.
Does it hurt your head?"
"Well," said Marilla sarcastically, "if I'd decided it was worth while to dye my hair I'd have dyed it a decent color at least.
You haven't got into any scrape for over two months, and I was sure another one was due.
Green it might be called, if it were any earthly color--a queer, dull, bronzy green, with streaks here and there of the original red to heighten the ghastly effect.
Marilla, I CANNOT face Josie Pye.
I never thought I was vain about my hair, of all things, but now I know I was, in spite of its being red, because it was so long and thick and curly.
But I didn't.
Anne's unhappiness continued for a week.
My career is closed.
Who are you talking about?"
Then, wanting a candle to light her way down the cellar, she went up to the east gable for the one that generally stood on Anne's table.
"Oh, I didn't let him in the house.
"I reckon she'll find it hard to explain THAT to my satisfaction.
Oh, Marilla, 'what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.' That is poetry, but it is true.
It was terrible bad this afternoon, though. These headaches of mine are getting worse and worse.
All read it: white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American, old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after tea, Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day!
What has made the change?
There are papers in New York that long ago came to perfection of shamelessness, and there is no more power in venom and mud and slime to pollute them.
If an individual makes a false statement, one or twenty persons may be damaged; but a newspaper of large circulation that wilfully makes a misstatement in one day tells fifty thousand falsehoods.
It is wonderful how quick the fingers of the printer-boy fly, but the fingers of sin and pollution can set up fifty thousand types in an instant.
You see, therefore, that, in the plain words to be written, I have no grudges to gratify against the newspaper press.
But few religious newspapers in this country are self-supporting.
In addition to the home manufacture of iniquitous sheets, the mail-bags of other cities come in gorged with abominations.
This stuff cannot be handled without pollution.
How many treatises on constitutional law, or political economy, or works of science?
God, after a while, will hold up these reeking, stenchful, accursed sheets, upon which they spread out their guilt, and the whole universe will cry out for their damnation.
It is book, pulpit, platform, forum, all in one.
LEPROUS NEWSPAPERS.
We preach three or four times a week; they every morning or evening of the year.
In many of our city newspapers, professing no more than secular information, there have appeared during the past ten years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God's government among the nations.
I thank you, in the name of Christianity and civilization, for the enlightenment of ignorance, the overthrow of iniquity, and the words you have uttered in the cause of God and your country.
They forget that Christianity is the only hope for the world, and that, but for its enlightenment, they would now be like the Hottentots, living in mud hovels, or like the Chinese, eating rats.
So with bad newspapers that fly along the track of death without pausing a moment, yet scooping up into themselves the pollution of society, and in the awful rush making the earth tremble.
No.
There is enough meat in such a carcass of reputation to gorge all the carrion-crows of an iniquitous printing-press.
In one column of a paper we see a grand ethical discussion, and in another the droppings of most accursed nastiness.
In our pulpits we preach to a few hundreds or thousands of people; the newspaper addresses an audience of twenty thousand, fifty thousand, or two hundred thousand.
In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations of the earth,--"Lazarus, come forth!" And to the retreating surges of darkness,--"Let there be light!"
But we are all aware that there is a class of men in towns and cities who send forth a baleful influence from their editorial pens.
New York scoops up from the sewers of other cities, and adds to its own newspaper filth.
There are to-day connected with the editorial and reportorial corps of newspaper establishments men of the highest culture and most unimpeachable morality, who are living on the most limited stipends, martyrs to the work to which they feel themselves called.
Many of the lords could not read the deeds of their own estates.
Whence, then, this intelligence--this capacity to talk about all themes, secular and religious--this acquaintance with science and art--this power to appreciate the beautiful and grand?
How many elaborate poems or books of travel?
Though the melted gold be poured upon your naked, blistered, and consuming soul--get money!
The supply of bad newspapers in New York does not meet the insatiable appetite of our people for refuse, and garbage, and moral swill.
The bad newspaper stops not at any political outrage.
The bad newspaper stops not at publishing the most damaging and unclean story.
Get money!
Though in the game thou dost stake thy soul, and lose it forever--get money!
Now it is the Mayor, then the Governor, now the Secretary of State, and then the President, until the air is so full of misrepresentation that truth is hidden from the view, as beautiful landscapes by the clouds of summer insects blown up from the marshes.
It was printed for the purpose of giving military and commercial information to the Venetians.
They put upon the back of the Church all the inconsistencies of hypocrites--as though a banker were responsible for all the counterfeits upon his institution!
Many of them go, unrested and unappreciated, their cheeks blanched and their eyes half quenched with midnight work, toward premature graves, to have the "proof-sheet" of their life corrected by Divine mercy, glad at last to escape the perpetual annoyances of a fault-finding public, and the restless, impatient cry for "more copy."
Take this audience, or any other promiscuous assemblage, and how many histories have they read?
The newspaper is the great educator of the nineteenth century.
Brilliant advice to a young man just entering business!
With what exhilaration it puts in capitals, that fill one-fourth of a column, the defalcation of some agent of a benevolent society!
One of the proprietors of a great paper in this country gave his advice to a young man then about to start a paper: "If you want to succeed," said he, "make your paper trashy, intensely trashy,--make it all trash!"
How much of Boyle, or De Tocqueville, Xenophon, or Herodotus, or Percival?
There are hundreds of men to-day penniless, who were, during the war, hurled from their affluent positions by incorrect accounts of battles that shook the money-market, and the gold gamblers, with their hoofs, trampled these honest men into the mire.
Its editors would, if they dared, blow up the Capitol of the nation if they could only successfully carry off the frieze of one of the corridors.
Hear it!
It seems as if he held in his hand a hose with which, while all the harpies of sin were working at the pumps, he splashed the waters of death upon the best interests of society.
And there is not an interest--religious, literary, commercial, scientific, agricultural, or mechanical--that is not within its grasp.
It will do you good when it begins to eat like a canker!
And many a window was hoisted at the hour of midnight as the boy shouted: "Extra!
"Nations are to be born in a day." Will this great inrush come from personal presence of missionary or philanthropist?
See the work of bad newspapers in the false tidings they bring!
There is a paper published in Boston of outrageous character, and yet there are seven thousand copies of that paper coming weekly to New York for circulation.
Professional men are accustomed to complain of injustice done them, but I take the censure I have sometimes received and place it on one side the scales, and the excessive praise, and place it on the other side, and they balance, and so I consider I have had simple justice.
And to-night, lying on the tables of this city, or laid away on the shelf, or in the trunk, for more private perusal, are papers the mere mention of the names of which would send a blush to the cheek, and make the decent and Christian world cry out: "God save the city!"
But we need not go abroad.
The immoral newspaper stops not at the unclean advertisement.
All our churches, and schools, and colleges, and asylums, and art-galleries feel the quaking of the printing-press.
If he cannot do it in any other way, he can by means of an anonymous communication.
The bad newspaper hesitates not to assault Christianity and its disciples.
While you sleep in the midnight hours, their pens fly, and their brains ache in preparing the morning intelligence.
Their columns are not long and broad enough to record the tragedies of their horrible undoing of immortal men and women.
O ye reckless souls! get money--though morality dies, and society is dishonored, and God defied, and the doom of the destroyed opens before you--get money!
The institution of newspapers arose in Italy.
There are enough falsehoods told at any one of our autumnal elections to make the "Father of Lies" disown his monstrous progeny.
The vast majority of citizens do not read books.
No, sir!
Not many!
In Venice the first newspaper was published, and monthly, during the time that Venice was warring against Solyman the Second in Dalmatia.
At that moment we passed by the back of the chateau.
"If we can't hear we may at least try to see," said Rouletabille.
In crossing the park, he said to me:
"Recent?" insisted Rouletabille.
"Have you a key, or do you wish me to give you this one."
Frederic Larsan, no more than myself, could retain his gravity.
Frederic Larsan waited for us.
"Hush!
"Because they were arrested half an hour ago."
Frederic Larsan shrugged his shoulders.
Larsan hurried off in the direction of the chateau, the imposing pile of which could be perceived a few hundred yards away.
His reputation was world-wide, and the police of London, and even of America, often called him in to their aid when their own national inspectors and detectives found themselves at the end of their wits and resources.
The orders are strict."
There was nothing about him of the vulgar policeman.
I have a key and will lock the gate."
"Because there were no accomplices!" said Rouletabille.
His strange profession had brought him into contact with so many crimes and villanies that it would have been remarkable if his nature had not been a little hardened.
CHAPTER V. In Which Joseph Rouletabille Makes a Remark to Monsieur Robert Darzac Which Produces Its Little Effect
"Monsieur Fred," said Rouletabille, raising his hat and showing the profound respect, based on admiration, which the young reporter felt for the celebrated detective, "can you tell me whether Monsieur Robert Darzac is at the chateau at this moment?
"I shall get admission."
"Not I!--I haven't had them arrested.
Here is one of his friends, of the Paris Bar, who desires to speak with him."
"I shall gain admission, if you let me see Monsieur Robert Darzac.
The words had no sooner left the lips of Rouletabille than I saw Robert Darzac quail.
I noticed that he was frightfully pale, and that his face was lined as if from the effects of some terrible suffering.
I addressed a few words to Monsieur Darzac, but he made no answer.
The cab was already at the park gate and Robert Darzac was begging Frederic Larsan to open it for him, explaining that he was pressed for time to catch the next train leaving Epinay for Paris.
He might be about fifty years of age.
At that time, before Rouletabille had given proof of his unique talent, Larsan was reputed as the most skilful unraveller of the most mysterious and complicated crimes.
"I doubt it.
You know we are old friends.
I closely scrutinised him.
The face of Rouletabille at the moment was really funny to look at.
Rouletabille had brought me to a standstill by a gesture.
He did not add "or it will be my death"; but I felt that the phrase trembled on his pale lips.
Rouletabille rushed after him, and I followed.
"She will be saved perhaps.
Larsan turned his head at the sound of a vehicle which had come from the chateau and reached the gate behind him.
Frederic Larsan is at work!
Meanwhile, standing on the other side of the gate, he calmly put the key in his pocket.
The sceptical tone of his conversation was that of a man who had been taught by experience.
"May I leave you?" he asked of Robert Darzac.
"The concierges will be able to inform us no doubt?" said Rouletabille, pointing to the lodge the door and windows of which were close shut.
"The concierges will not be able to give you any information, Monsieur Rouletabille."
"Arrested!" cried Rouletabille; "then they are the murderers!"
Robert Darzac, with knit brow, was beginning to show impatience.
Then he gave utterance to a sentence which was utterly meaningless to me.
Then he recognised me.
"Ah!" said Frederic Larsan, "if you want to speak with Monsieur Robert Darzac, he is here."
It showed such an irresistible desire to cross the threshold beyond which some prodigious mystery had occurred; it appealed with so much eloquence, not only of the mouth and eyes, but with all its features, that I could not refrain from bursting into laughter.
Do that for me.
"Come!--come in!" he stammered.
I presented Rouletabille as a good friend of mine, but, as soon as he learnt that the young man was a journalist, he looked at me very reproachfully, excused himself, under the necessity of having to reach Epinay in twenty minutes, bowed, and whipped up his horse.
Pale as he was, he became paler.
"When you can't arrest the real murderer," he said with an air of supreme irony, "you can always indulge in the luxury of discovering accomplices."
I had never before seen him, but I knew him well by reputation.
She must be saved!"
Don't let us disturb him!"
Rouletabille had a great admiration for the celebrated detective.
"I have not seen him."
His forehead was prominent, his chin and cheeks clean shaven.
Frederic Larsan interrupted:
But Rouletabille had seized the bridle and, to my utter astonishment, stopped the carriage with a vigorous hand.
In the first place, I am pretty sure that they have not had anything to do with the affair, and then because--"
"Yes," he said.
"Let us go, monsieur."
Rouletabille and I had been walking for several minutes, by the side of a long wall bounding the vast property of Monsieur Stangerson and had already come within sight of the entrance gate, when our attention was drawn to an individual who, half bent to the ground, seemed to be so completely absorbed in what he was doing as not to have seen us coming towards him.
"Thank you.
His upper lip, without moustache, was finely chiselled.
"Did you have them arrested, Monsieur Fred?"
"The presbytery has lost nothing of its charm, nor the garden its brightness."
He was of middle height and well built, with a general bearing elegant and gentlemanly.
"Because of nothing," said Larsan, shaking his head.
"You are in a hurry, Monsieur; but I must speak with you.
Then, suddenly, and with a sort of fury, he repeated:
"Because of what?" asked Rouletabille eagerly.
He pushed open the park gate, reclosed and locked it, raised his head and, through the bars, perceived us.
The leaves of the hollyhocks hung like half-closed umbrellas, the sap almost simmered in the stems, and foliage with a smooth surface glared like metallic mirrors.
Planning a dozen hasty schemes for at once preserving him and Eustacia from this mode of life, she throbbingly followed the way, and saw him enter his own door.
Here she sat for twenty minutes or more ere she could summon resolution to go down to the door, her courage being lowered to zero by her physical lassitude.
He appeared of a russet hue, not more distinguishable from the scene around him than the green caterpillar from the leaf it feeds on.
She followed the figure indicated.
To any other person than a mother it might have seemed a little humiliating that she, the elder of the two women, should be the first to make advances.
And now, at the moment of rising, she saw a second man approaching the gate.
Being a woman not disinclined to philosophize she sometimes sat down under her umbrella to rest and to watch their happiness, for a certain hopefulness as to the result of her visit gave ease to her mind, and between important thoughts left it free to dwell on any infinitesimal matter which caught her eyes.
The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect.
Retracing her steps, she came again to an open level, where she perceived at a distance a man at work.
On the present heated afternoon, when no perceptible wind was blowing, the trees kept up a perpetual moan which one could hardly believe to be caused by the air.
There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if beds, rugs, and carpets were unendurable.
He's going to the same place, ma'am."
Occasionally she came to a spot where independent worlds of ephemerons were passing their time in mad carousal, some in the air, some on the hot ground and vegetation, some in the tepid and stringy water of a nearly dried pool.
Suddenly she was attracted to his individuality by observing peculiarities in his walk.
Some were blasted and split as if by lightning, black stains as from fire marking their sides, while the ground at their feet was strewn with dead fir-needles and heaps of cones blown down in the gales of past years.
But Mrs. Yeobright had well considered all that, and she only thought how best to make her visit appear to Eustacia not abject but wise.
It was about eleven o'clock on this day that Mrs. Yeobright started across the heath towards her son's house, to do her best in getting reconciled with him and Eustacia, in conformity with her words to the reddleman.
She looked at the sky overhead, and saw that the sapphirine hue of the zenith in spring and early summer had been replaced by a metallic violet.
Not a bough in the nine trees which composed the group but was splintered, lopped, and distorted by the fierce weather that there held them at its mercy whenever it prevailed.
He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.
It was a gait she had seen somewhere before; and the gait revealed the man to her, as the gait of Ahimaaz in the distant plain made him known to the watchman of the king.
She came down the hill to the gate, and looked into the hot garden.
She went towards him and inquired the way.
A small apple tree, of the sort called Ratheripe, grew just inside the gate, the only one which throve in the garden, by reason of the lightness of the soil; and among the fallen apples on the ground beneath were wasps rolling drunk with the juice, or creeping about the little caves in each fruit which they had eaten out before stupefied by its sweetness.
The trees beneath which she sat were singularly battered, rude, and wild, and for a few minutes Mrs. Yeobright dismissed thoughts of her own storm-broken and exhausted state to contemplate theirs.
"Well, if you follow him you can make no mistake.
5--The Journey across the Heath
On reaching this place Mrs. Yeobright felt distressingly agitated, weary, and unwell.
Mrs. Yeobright strained her eyes, and at last said that she did perceive him.
She tried one ascending path and another, and found that they led her astray.
The place was called the Devil's Bellows, and it was only necessary to come there on a March or November night to discover the forcible reasons for that name.
From her elevated position the exhausted woman could perceive the roof of the house below, and the garden and the whole enclosure of the little domicile.
So she went on, the air around her pulsating silently, and oppressing the earth with lassitude.
His manner was peculiar, hesitating, and not that of a person come on business or by invitation.
When she became conscious of externals it was dusk.
There, that's because he went to school early, such as the school was."
"I say, Sam," observed Humphrey when the old man was gone, "she and Clym Yeobright would make a very pretty pigeon-pair--hey?
'Tis news to me."
"Yes; but how he's coming from Budmouth I don't know."
"I lived seven years under water on account of it in my boyhood--in that damned surgery of the Triumph, seeing men brought down to the cockpit with their legs and arms blown to Jericho....And so the young man has settled in Paris.
BOOK TWO -- THE ARRIVAL
The air was still, and while she lingered a moment here alone sounds of voices in conversation came to her ears directly down the chimney.
Such sudden alternations from mental vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly.
The words of Sam and Humphrey on the harmony between the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect of the invading Bard's prelude in the Castle of Indolence, at which myriads of imprisoned shapes arose where had previously appeared the stillness of a void.
It only does harm.
"'Tis a good thing for the feller," said Humphrey.
In the course of many days and weeks sunrise had advanced its quarters from northeast to southeast, sunset had receded from northwest to southwest; but Egdon had hardly heeded the change.
It was like a man coming from heaven.
That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia with visions enough to fill the whole blank afternoon.
"They would, Humphrey.
"Yes.
But here, away from comparisons, shut in by the stable hills, among which mere walking had the novelty of pageantry, and where any man could imagine himself to be Adam without the least difficulty, they attracted the attention of every bird within eyeshot, every reptile not yet asleep, and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching from hillocks at a safe distance.
If they wouldn't I'll be dazed!
Involved in these imaginings she knew nothing of time.
"I can well mind when he left home," said Sam.
The performance was that of bringing together and building into a stack the furze faggots which Humphrey had been cutting for the captain's use during the foregoing fine days.
Her health is suffering from it, I hear, for she will bide entirely indoors.
Well, I should like to see the chap terrible much after so many years.
The stack was at the end of the dwelling, and the men engaged in building it were Humphrey and Sam, the old man looking on.
Eustacia went upstairs, thinking that she would take a walk at this her usual time; and she determined that her walk should be in the direction of Blooms-End, the birthplace of young Yeobright and the present home of his mother.
"That lad ought never to have left home.
Manager to a diamond merchant, or some such thing, is he not?"
Eustacia was indoors in the dining-room, which was really more like a kitchen, having a stone floor and a gaping chimney-corner.
A young and clever man was coming into that lonely heath from, of all contrasting places in the world, Paris.
"Yes, you may make away with a deal of money and be neither drunkard nor glutton."
"You have?
Poor maid, her heart has ached enough about it.
"That's a bad trouble about his cousin Thomasin.
My father was a sailor, so was I, and so should my son have been if I had had one."
She entered the recess, and, listening, looked up the old irregular shaft, with its cavernous hollows, where the smoke blundered about on its way to the square bit of sky at the top, from which the daylight struck down with a pallid glare upon the tatters of soot draping the flue as seaweed drapes a rocky fissure.
More singular still, the heathmen had instinctively coupled her and this man together in their minds as a pair born for each other.
Her grandfather joined in the conversation.
My poor mother used to tell me about that business.
Be dazed if I should like a relation of mine to have been made such a fool of by a man.
The door was no sooner opened than all doubt on the subject was removed.
I can't,' replied the girl; 'Missis Raddle raked out the kitchen fire afore she went to bed, and locked up the kittle.'
Another knock at the door announced a large-headed young man in a black wig, who brought with him a scorbutic youth in a long stock.
Did you make that remark to me, sir?'
'Well, Mr. Sawyer,' said Mrs. Raddle, planting herself firmly on a purple cauliflower in the Kidderminster carpet, 'and what's that to me, Sir?'
'That's her malevolence--that's her malevolence,' returned Mr. Bob Sawyer vehemently.
Pray don't disturb yourself about such a trifle,' said Mr. Pickwick, observing the conflict of Bob Sawyer's passions, as depicted in his countenance, 'cold water will do very well.'
'No, I should rather say he wouldn't.
As this announcement seemed the prelude to a recommencement of the dispute, there was another interference on the part of the company; and a vast quantity of talking and clamouring ensued, in the course of which Mr. Noddy gradually allowed his feelings to overpower him, and professed that he had ever entertained a devoted personal attachment towards Mr. Gunter.
'Anything new?'
'Dear me,' said the prim man in the cloth boots, 'it is a very extraordinary circumstance.'
'Did you apply that name to me, I ask of you, sir?' interrupted Mrs. Raddle, with intense fierceness, throwing the door wide open.
A heavy footstep was heard upon the stairs, and Jack Hopkins presented himself.
'Yes, of course you did,' said Mrs. Raddle, backing gradually to the door, and raising her voice to its loudest pitch, for the special behoof of Mr. Raddle in the kitchen.
'But who do you call a woman?
'Certainly not,' replied Bob Sawyer.
'My landlady is subject to some slight attacks of mental derangement,' remarked Bob Sawyer, with a ghastly smile; 'I fear I must give her warning.'
Mr. Bob Sawyer had himself purchased the spirits at a wine vaults in High Street, and had returned home preceding the bearer thereof, to preclude the possibility of their delivery at the wrong house.
'I request that you'll favour me with your card, Sir,' said Mr. Noddy.
When the last 'natural' had been declared, and the profit and loss account of fish and sixpences adjusted, to the satisfaction of all parties, Mr. Bob Sawyer rang for supper, and the visitors squeezed themselves into corners while it was getting ready.
'I should like to see you do it, Sir,' said Mr. Noddy.
"Don't do that, my boy," said the father.
'You can't have no warm water,' replied Betsy.
The preparations for the reception of visitors appeared to be completed.
'What I say, Sir,' replied Mr. Gunter.
I thought I heard somebody calling from upstairs.'
There was a short silence, and then the noise began again, worse than ever.
He enlarged at some length and with great minuteness upon divers collateral circumstances, distantly connected with the anecdote in hand, but for the life of him he couldn't recollect at that precise moment what the anecdote was, although he had been in the habit of telling the story with great applause for the last ten years.
Mr. Sawyer!' screamed a voice from the two-pair landing.
'Don't mention it, don't mention it,' said Bob Sawyer. 'I'm rather confined for room here, but you must put up with all that, when you come to see a young bachelor.
'I'll do nothing of the kind, Sir,' replied Mr. Gunter.
it was not so easily got ready as some people may imagine.
'Very good, Sir,' responded Mrs. Raddle, with lofty politeness.
The population is migratory, usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, and generally by night.
'No warm water!' exclaimed Mr. Bob Sawyer.
I don't think I let these apartments to you, Sir.'
'And I should be very sorry, Sawyer, to create any disturbance in the street in which you reside,' said Mr. Gunter, 'but I'm afraid I shall be under the necessity of alarming the neighbours by throwing the person who has just spoken, out o' window.'
'Do you mean that the patient is in a fair way to recover?' inquired Mr. Pickwick. 'No,' replied Mr. Hopkins carelessly.
'Well, Noddy,' replied Mr. Bob Sawyer.
'No, nothing particular.
'Mr. Sawyer!
'Only a man fallen out of a four pair of stairs' window; but it's a very fair case indeed.'
'Get along with you, old wretch!' replied Mrs. Raddle, hastily withdrawing the nightcap.
ha, ha!' Mr. Hopkins appeared highly gratified with his own pleasantry, and continued--'No, the way was this.
'Ashamed of themselves!' said Mrs. Raddle. 'Why don't you go down and knock 'em every one downstairs?
'I hope that's Jack Hopkins!' said Mr. Bob Sawyer. 'Hush.
Do you--'
'Yes,' said the girl, 'first floor.
So upon the whole, perhaps, the supper was quite as good as such matters usually are.
'Been detained at Bartholomew's,' replied Hopkins.
You promised me this afternoon, Mr. Sawyer, and every gentleman as has ever lived here, has kept his word, Sir, as of course anybody as calls himself a gentleman does.' Mrs. Raddle tossed her head, bit her lips, rubbed her hands harder, and looked at the wall more steadily than ever.
I beg your pardon.
'I am very sorry, Mrs. Raddle,' said Bob Sawyer, with all imaginable humility, 'but the fact is, that I have been disappointed in the City to-day.'--Extraordinary place that City.
I beg your pardon, Sir.
'It'll be a deuced unpleasant thing if she takes it into her head to let out, when those fellows are here, won't it?' said Mr. Ben Allen at length.
Mr. Bob Sawyer looked expressively at his friend, and bade the tapper come in; whereupon a dirty, slipshod girl in black cotton stockings, who might have passed for the neglected daughter of a superannuated dustman in very reduced circumstances, thrust in her head, and said--
'I'll pay her what I owe her, and give her warning to-morrow morning.' Poor fellow!
'Sawyer,' said the scorbutic youth, in a loud voice.
The majority of the inhabitants either direct their energies to the letting of furnished apartments, or devote themselves to the healthful and invigorating pursuit of mangling.
Mr. Snodgrass, who entered last, secured the street door, after several ineffectual efforts, by putting up the chain; and the friends stumbled upstairs, where they were received by Mr. Bob Sawyer, who had been afraid to go down, lest he should be waylaid by Mrs. Raddle.
'Only a quarter, and a month or so,' replied Mr. Bob Sawyer.
This was all Mrs. Raddle wanted.
'DO you mean to turn them wretches out, or not, Mr. Sawyer?'
'Oh, that's nothing,' said Jack Hopkins.
Mr. Bob Sawyer embellished one side of the fire, in his first-floor front, early on the evening for which he had invited Mr. Pickwick, and Mr. Ben Allen the other.
'I beg your parding, young man,' demanded Mrs. Raddle, in a louder and more imperative tone.
'Sir, I'm very much obliged to you for the caution, and I'll leave particular directions with the servant to lock up the spoons,' replied Mr. Gunter.
'Swallowed what, Sir?' interrupted Mr. Pickwick. 'A necklace,' replied Jack Hopkins. 'Not all at once, you know, that would be too much--you couldn't swallow that, if the child did--eh, Mr. Pickwick?
'Do you suppose, Mr. Sawyer,' said Mrs. Raddle, elevating her voice for the information of the neighbours--'do you suppose that I'm a-going day after day to let a fellar occupy my lodgings as never thinks of paying his rent, nor even the very money laid out for the fresh butter and lump sugar that's bought for his breakfast, and the very milk that's took in, at the street door?
Clover ran to see what was the matter.
"She met with a dreadful accident," continued Dr. Carr.
She was delighted with the flowers, which Katy presented rather shyly.
Cousin Helen was not at all like "Lucy," in Mrs. Sherwood's story.
"Please let Katy bring it up!" pleaded Cousin Helen, in her pleasant voice, "I am sure she will be careful this time.
Behold--there was Phil, sitting up in bed, and crying for help.
"It was just like something in a book," to be in the same house with the heroine of a love-story so sad and sweet.
"Mightn't I stay just till the dinner-bell rings?"
"Oh, isn't it lovely to think there won't be any school to-morrow?
The nurse fetched a pillow, and when she was made comfortable, Dr. Carr called to the little ones.
She caught at the door to save herself; the door flew open; and Katy, with the tray, cream, raspberries, rose and all, descended in a confused heap upon the carpet.
So Papa put Cousin Helen on the hall sofa.
Dorry, at last, announced that he wished Cousin Helen would just stay at home.
Katy and Clover were quite distressed at this opinion.
Dorry had a box of dominoes, and John a solitaire board.
It seemed to her, as it does to almost all young people, that there is nothing in the world so easy as to die, the moment things go wrong!
Vacations are just splendid!" and she gave her bag another toss.
"Well," she said, "I'll tell you what I think, Katy.
She didn't fold her hands, and she didn't look patient, but absolutely glad and merry.
Why, what a splendid tall Katy it is!
I'll study, and keep my things in order, and be ever so kind to the little ones.
"Oh, how lovely! how lovely!" she cried.
Even Cecy was remembered.
There was a cushion with a pretty fluted cover, that Katy had never seen before, and several other things were scattered about, which gave the room quite a different air. All the house was neat, but somehow Aunt Izzie's rooms never were pretty.
She is a lovely little creature: having her so much with me is one of my greatest treats.
All Katy's dreams about the "saintly invalid" seemed to take wings and fly away.
Or as if some character out of a book, Robinson Crusoe, say, or "Amy Herbert," had driven up with a trunk and announced the intention of spending a week.
I don't think it is possible for an invalid to be too particular.
Cousin Helen hadn't much appetite, though she declared everything was delicious.
"I ain't afraid of robbers," he declared, strutting up and down.
"If you do, it'll be the first time you ever kept anything for a week without breaking it," remarked Aunt Izzie.
"All the other girls' Papas do."
"He's too busy," replied Clover.
"It's a warning against robber stories.
What a troublesome child you are!
What are you going to do, Katy?"
Such a nice supper!
She was almost too pleased to speak.
But why do you look so puzzled, Katy?
But that is a compliment so great, that I dare not appropriate it."
Does it seem queer that a vase should travel about in a trunk?"
So they went out doors to play till tea-time.
Then she began to arrange the flowers, touching each separate one gently, and as if she loved it.
Then she grew slowly better, and the doctors told her that she might live a good many years, but that she would have to lie on her sofa always, and be helpless, and a cripple.
Mrs. Fiske is so particular.
"Isn't it splendid to have vacation come?" said one of the bigger girls. "What are you all going to do?
Cousin Helen's were the best of all.
Oh dear, how quiet we shall have to be!
And please pour a little water into it first."
This preference made Katy jealous.
We're going to the seaside."
Even Philly, who had backed away with his hands behind him, after staring hard for a minute or two, came up with a sort of rush to get his share of kissing.
Ellen Robbins says she'd give a million of dollars for such nice brothers and sisters as ours to play with.
So Katy, proud of the commission, took the tray and carried it carefully across the hall.
Good-night!
Katy and Clover had "played Cousin Helen" so long, that now they were frightened as well as glad at the idea of seeing the real one.
Her dress wasn't a "frilled wrapper," but a sort of loose travelling thing of pretty gray stuff, with a rose-colored bow, and bracelets, and a round hat trimmed with a gray feather.
I think we are scarcely ever so grateful to people as when they help us to get back our own self-esteem.
"Do you suppose she will want us to say hymns to her all the time?" asked Clover.
Cousin Helen was white and tired, but her eyes and smile were as bright as ever.
Her nose turned up the least bit in the world.
The play that afternoon was much interrupted, for every few minutes somebody had to run in and see if it wasn't four o'clock.
"Almost every day.
And Cousin Helen begged her not to interfere.
"Do set me down somewhere, uncle.
By and by, Papa carried Cousin Helen up stairs.
They were so glad that it was vacation!
This was news indeed.
That was all; but something in the tone made Katy curious.
Katy went down stairs very happy.
"Oh, how lovely!" she said; "I must put them in water right away.
But the rest knew that this was because Cousin Helen was ill.
They did come once.
The instant the hour came, all six children galloped up stairs.
Shoo! shoo!"
"Isn't it wicked to care about clothes when you're sick?" questioned Cecy.
"Something, surely," said Durrance.
"In two days' time you will be at Wiesbaden and Ethne at Glenalla.
At that simple utterance the madness of Mrs. Adair went from her.
It was my mother's doing, and no doubt she thought that she was acting for the very best.
While I--I will tell you the truth--I am glad. When the news first came from Wadi Halfa that you were blind, I was glad; when I saw you in Hill Street, I was glad; ever since, I have been glad--quite glad.
There was indeed something to be said on her behalf.
It would have been a good deal.
"I am not afraid.
The flowers were gone, and the sunlight; clouds stretched across the sky overhead, the green of the grass underfoot was dull, the stream ran grey in the gap between the trees, and the leaves from the branches were blown russet and yellow about the lawns.
"No."
"Yes.
She saw that his face lost something of its sternness.
The world had gone rather hardly with her.
Besides, he was close upon the stile which separated the garden of The Pool from the fields.
If she had only kept silence, she would have had a very true and constant friend for her neighbour, and that would have been something.
Her words might be true or not, they could achieve nothing.
Both things are true. The knowledge that he did care for me was the one link, if you understand.
He descended the steps with Mrs. Adair, and left Ethne standing upon the terrace.
She became conscious of her degradation, and she fell to excuses.
I wanted to hurt you.
How glad I was!
However, in spite of that I felt happier.
Don't you understand?"
"I was married almost straight from school.
From what small beginnings it had grown!
They were not happy years for me.
"Have I no reason to distrust you?
Because I saw that she shrank.
I think, too, he cared for you."
"I never suspected.
"I am a bad woman, I suppose.
"But Mr. Adair?" said Durrance.
"Ethne wrote to you at Wadi Halfa out of pity," she went on, "that was all.
But you will not say--you will not say." She struck her hands together with a gesture of despair, but Durrance had no words for her.
And what's friendship worth?" she asked scornfully.
"You are not just to Ethne."
At once--oh, at once!
CHAPTER XXIII
To Durrance it seemed that in all his experience nothing so horrible had ever occurred as this outburst by the woman who was Ethne's friend, nothing so unforeseen.
It was quite intelligible to him why she had betrayed Ethne's secret that night upon the terrace, and he could not but be gentle with her.
Ethne refused you, but you went blind and she claimed you.
She was securing for me a position of a kind, and comfort and release from any danger of poverty.
"You distrust me?" she said defiantly, and with a note of anger in her voice.
Durrance knew that there was another explanation of Ethne's hesitations and timidities.
"I told you the truth as brutally as I could.
Soon, please!"
"Will you tell me?" he said gently.
Durrance answered her quite gently:--
"She shrinks from you.
Why did you interfere?"
"Very well," said Ethne.
You did not notice it, I am sure.
Perhaps there is something to be said for me."
I did as she told me and married dutifully the man whom she chose.
He was able to realise what she had suffered, since he was suffering in much the same way himself.
The next moment you took all my gladness from me by telling me you were starting for the Soudan.
She went on to the end.
Again Durrance said "No," and the monosyllable exasperated her out of all prudence, and all at once she found herself speaking incoherently the things which she had thought.
She realised that distinctly.
Overhead a drift of smoke, and every little green thing down to the plants in the window dirty and black.
Rows of small houses, side by side, with nothing to relieve them of their ugly regularity, each with the self-same windows, the self-same door, the self-same door-step.
But, after all, you told me, and you were Ethne's friend."
"I am very sorry, Mrs. Adair," he repeated lamely.
I am not afraid."
But after all, I have not had the happiest of lives.
ADAIR MAKES HER APOLOGY
Once across that stile, he would be free of Mrs. Adair.
Do you know the little back streets in a manufacturing town?
"Then we will say good-bye here," she added to Durrance.
"Good-bye," she said, and Durrance climbed over the stile and crossed the fields to his house.
"I do not think I would have minded so much," she continued, "if Ethne had really cared for you; but she never cared more than as a friend cares, just a mere friend.
Mrs. Adair was quite right, he thought.
"I married, as I say, knowing nothing of the important things.
MRS.
It was not worth while to argue against Mrs. Adair's slanders.
Durrance was always in the room with Ethne, never upon the terrace with Mrs. Adair.
Margaret poured out the tea in silence, trying to think of something agreeable to say; but her thoughts made answer something like Daniel O'Rourke, when the man-in-the-moon asked him to get off his reaping-hook.
'Mr.
He were not one to bear.'
'Oh, father, father!' said Mary, throwing herself upon his arm,--'not to-night!
Higgins nodded to her as a sign of greeting; and she softly adjusted her working materials on the table, and prepared to listen.
'But the masters have nothing to do with your religion.
Not he!'
I just say, where's the proof?
It was some time before he spoke again, but he kept his hold on her arm.
Any night but to-night.
Margaret's countenance fell.
His eyes were dry and fierce; studying the reality of her death; bringing himself to understand that her place should know her no more.
He was there by them as she would have spoken more.
So take your tea, ma'am, in comfort, and trust to me.'
'She is dead,' replied Margaret.
'Yesterday.
That afternoon she walked swiftly to the Higgins's house.
BROWNING.
Then Margaret was glad that she had come.
Margaret felt that he acknowledged her power.
'When did you write to Frederick, Margaret?
Still his daughter and Margaret did not move.
'Come with me,' she said.
'Yes.
'Well!
The noise appeared to rouse him.
Mr. Hale treated all his fellow-creatures alike: it never entered into his head to make any difference because of their rank.
Not this generation maybe, but their fathers. Their fathers ground our fathers to the very dust; ground us to powder! Parson!
She thought that if she could only get him to their own house, it was so great a step gained that she would trust to the chapter of accidents for the next.
'Oh, Margaret, I'm so afraid of his coming!
It's a necessity now, according to me.
'Not at work, sure enough,' said he, with a short, grim laugh.
Mr. Hale took hold of her sweet pleading face in both his hands, and kissed her forehead.
'What do I care for thee?' Margaret took her hand, and held it softly in hers.
He looked up at her defyingly.
If he should be recognised! If he should be taken!
All beautiful scriptures came into her mind.
And we'll keep him snug, depend upon it.
In the drawing-room.
Margaret was silent.
And it is so little!
'Goodbye, ou'd wench!
'Poor fellow!' echoed Mrs. Hale.
She had not spoken before, nor had he heard her rise.
I keep falling asleep and dreaming that he is caught and being tried.'
'You don't seem to have much respect for him; nor gained much good from having him in.'
Mr. Higgins, I trust, whatever else you have given up, you believe'--(Mr.
I'll go and make him as comfortable as I can, and do you attend to your mother.
'I always dislike that doing things in such a hurry,' said Mrs. Hale.
I should like to read you some remarks in a book I have.' He got up and went to his book-shelves.
I should not believe in God if I did not believe that.
I like him for it.'
'I am sorry, papa.
Oh, you should have heard her speak of the life to come--the life hidden with God, that she is now gone to.'
But to Margaret he only said, 'If your mother goes to sleep, be sure you come directly.'
The face, often so weary with pain, so restless with troublous thoughts, had now the faint soft smile of eternal rest upon it.
Where have you been all day--not at work?'
She and he stood by the corpse.
Margaret went into her mother's room.
It's very hard upon a man that he can't go to the only comfort left.'
'Man!
His eyes were swollen and bloodshot, and he seemed to have forgotten that any one was by; he scowled at the watchers when he saw them.
Only, if you can come in and make a third in the study, I shall be glad.'
Their lives is pretty much open to me.
Margaret was glad when, her filial duties gently and carefully performed, she could go down into the study.
The striking of the flag was conceded.
They held that it was the business of the Republic to attend to its own affairs and to leave Louis to pursue his aggressive policy at the expense of other countries, so long as he left them alone.
The weeks he spent in England had been utilised by the prince to good purpose.
His fleet was greatly inferior in numbers to the combined Anglo-French fleet under Prince Rupert and D'Estrees.
All attempts, however, to pass the water-line and enter Holland met with failure; and, as the summer drew to its close, the advance of Imperial and Spanish forces began to render the position of the French precarious.
But William was thoroughly practical.
The three provinces were re-admitted into the Union, but with shorn privileges; and William was elected stadholder by each of them with largely increased powers.
This was not a difficult task.
As this, however, could only mean a renewal of the war with France, the proposal met with strong opposition in many quarters, and especially in Amsterdam.
The French, fearing that their communications might be cut, withdrew from the Dutch frontier; and at the same time the Muenster-Cologne forces hastily evacuated the eastern provinces.
His coolness and courage in moments of peril and difficulty never deserted him, and, though a strict disciplinarian, he always retained the confidence and affection of his soldiers.
Very rarely could a born leader of men have been more unamiable or less anxious to win popular applause, but his whole demeanour inspired confidence and, ignoring the many difficulties and oppositions which thwarted him, he steadfastly bided his time and opportunity.
In setting about this task William was confronted with almost insuperable difficulties.
The interest of the Hollanders and especially of the Amsterdammers was absorbed in the peaceful pursuits of commerce.
The cumbrous and complicated system of government enabled him thus to do much to thwart the prince and to throw obstacles in his way.
He was preoccupied with other things, and the age of Mary--she was only twelve--rendered it easy for him to postpone his final decision.
But both England and Brandenburg were in secret collusion with France, and the emperor would not move owing to the Turkish menace.
This brilliant stroke had great results.
Nevertheless the enterprise shown by the young general had the double effect of heartening his own troops and of undermining the overweening confidence of the enemy.
It declared the stadholdership hereditary in the male-line, and its example was followed by Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overyssel, while the States-General in their turn made the captain-and admiral-generalship of the Union hereditary offices.
William was the son of the eldest daughter of Charles I, and to him the eyes of a large party in England were turning.
He persuaded Charles to promise his support by land and sea to the Netherlands in case the terms of peace offered by the allies were rejected by the French.
The ideal which William III had set before him was the exact reverse of this; and, unfortunately for his own country, throughout his life he often subordinated its particular interests to the wider European interests which occupied his attention.
The English Parliament, and still more the English people, had throughout been averse from fighting on the side of the French against the Dutch.
Fuchs was a skilled diplomatist, and by his mediation an understanding was arrived at between the stadholder and his opponents in Amsterdam.
In February of this year, however, Charles II after a period of personal rule was through lack of resources compelled to summon parliament.
So strong was the feeling that he had been compelled to resign his post of Lord-High-Admiral.
Sweden also offered assistance.
William seized his opportunity in September to capture Naarden before Luxemburg could advance to its relief.
The new King of England was not merely a strong but a bigoted Roman Catholic.
The English Parliament and the States alike had no trust in King Charles, nor was the English match at first popular in Holland. A strong opposition arose against the prince's war policy.
The Amsterdam regents even went so far as to enter into secret negotiations with D'Avaux; and they were supported by Henry Casimir, who was always ready to thwart his cousin's policy.
A treaty between the States and Great Britain giving effect to this promise was actually signed on January 29, 1678.
All these raids were more or less failures, since in each case William had to retreat without effecting anything of importance.
From the very first William had kept steadily in view a scheme of forming a great coalition to curb the ambitious designs of Louis XIV; and for effecting this object an alliance between England and the United Provinces was essential.
To him far more appropriately than to his great-grandfather might the name of William the Silent have been given.
The terms differed little from those of Breda, except that the Republic undertook to pay a war indemnity of 2,000,000 fl. within three years.
He sent his trusted councillor, Paul Fuchs, in May, 1685, to offer to his nephew, the Prince of Orange, his friendly co-operation in the formation of a powerful coalition against France.
On the contrary, he continued to enjoy his favour. Corruption was scarcely less rife in Holland, though no one practised it quite on the same scale as Odijk in Zeeland.
William was checkmated and at first, in his anger, inclined to follow his father's example and crush the opposition of Amsterdam by force.
On August 10, just before time for resuming hostilities had been reached, they tactfully conceded this point and promised immediate evacuation, if the treaty were at once concluded.
In these circumstances everything was favourable to an understanding; and peace was concluded at Westminster on February 19,1674.
Van Beverningh and his colleagues accordingly, acting on their instructions, affixed their signatures just before midnight.
It lasted ten years, but it was only an armed truce.
He was never a great strategist, but he now conducted a retreat which extracted admiration from his opponents.
He kept himself well informed of the intrigues of the court and of the state of public opinion by secret agents, and entered into clandestine correspondence with prominent statesmen.
The prince was opposed to any harshness of treatment, and his will prevailed.
The nomination, or the choice out of a certain number of nominees, of the members of the Town-Corporations, of the Courts of Justice and of the delegates to the States-General, was granted to him.
But the design of William was still incomplete.
They had, during this period, paid no taxes, and had no representation in the States-General. Holland was in favour of reducing them to the status of Generality-lands until they had paid their arrears.
Surinam remained in Dutch hands.
New York, which had been retaken by a squadron under Cornelis Evertsen, August, 1673, was given back to the English crown.
"What wants your excellency of me?" inquired the man, retreating a step or two, as if to keep on his guard.
"The messenger did not say."
Chapter 37.
The Frenchman threw her a bouquet; Teresa returned it--all this with the consent of the chief, who was in the carriage."
"Well," said the count, turning towards Franz, "it seems to me that this is a very likely story.
Franz and the count went downstairs, accompanied by Peppino.
There was no time to lose.
"Yes," replied Franz, "here I am," and he, in his turn, left the caves. They advanced to the plain.
I had such a delightful dream.
What do you say to it?"
"You can speak before me," said Franz; "I am a friend of the count's."
In the midst of this chamber were four stones, which had formerly served as an altar, as was evident from the cross which still surmounted them.
The count went out first, then Albert. Franz paused for a moment.
It is urgent that I should have this money without delay.
"Are you not alone?" asked Vampa with uneasiness.
"Oh, pray be assured of that." Franz took his hat and went away in haste.
Franz read it twice before he could comprehend what it contained.
"Never?
P.S.--I now believe in Italian banditti.
"Ground arms," exclaimed the chief, with an imperative sign of the hand, while with the other he took off his hat respectfully; then, turning to the singular personage who had caused this scene, he said, "Your pardon, your excellency, but I was so far from expecting the honor of a visit, that I did not really recognize you."
I do not say more, relying on you as you may rely on me.
They then perceived two men conversing in the obscurity.
So, then, they have paid my ransom?"
But Peppino, instead of answering, threw himself on his knees, seized the count's hand, and covered it with kisses.
"I do."
"Is there any answer?" inquired Franz, taking the letter from him.
"Come with me, then.
"Well, are you coming?" asked Albert.
"Exceedingly," replied Franz.
"Well, then, come along."
"Come up-stairs with me, and I will give it to you."
"What," said he, "is it you, my dear Franz, whose devotion and friendship are thus displayed?"
"Excellency, the Frenchman's carriage passed several times the one in which was Teresa."
"My dear fellow," replied Albert, with perfect ease of mind, "remember, for the future, Napoleon's maxim, 'Never awaken me but for bad news;' if you had let me sleep on, I should have finished my galop, and have been grateful to you all my life.
As to Franz, he had no letter of credit, as he lived at Florence, and had only come to Rome to pass seven or eight days; he had brought but a hundred louis, and of these he had not more than fifty left.
He ordered the carriage, therefore, for eleven o'clock, desiring Signor Pastrini to inform him the moment that Albert returned to the hotel.
I am enormously anxious to finish my night at the Duke of Bracciano's." They found the carriage where they had left it.
"Well, here is an opportunity made to your hand, and it would be difficult to contrive a better.
Come, gentlemen, come."
"Your excellency will know when you have read the letter."
"Who can tell?
"Exactly so; a carriage was waiting at the end of the Via Macello.
The count rang, and a footman appeared.
I will summon him hither."
Three arcades were before them, and the middle one was used as a door.
It was thus worded:--
"No, excellency; and never shall I forget it," returned Peppino, with an accent of profound gratitude.
Down one of the corridors, whose extent it was impossible to determine, rays of light were visible.
"No, my dear Vampa," replied the count; "besides, you compensate for your mistakes in so gentlemanly a way, that one almost feels obliged to you for having committed them."
"It is useless.
At the same time, four of the band, who were concealed on the banks of the Almo, surrounded the carriage. The Frenchman made some resistance, and nearly strangled Beppo; but he could not resist five armed men, and was forced to yield.
Their return was quite an event, but as they entered together, all uneasiness on Albert's account ceased instantly.
"Not at all."
"And why?"
"I waited for him until this hour," replied Franz.
He then took Peppino aside, gave him an order in a low voice, and Peppino went away, taking with him a torch, brought with them in the carriage.
A short time before they reached the Baths of Caracalla the carriage stopped, Peppino opened the door, and the count and Franz alighted.
At the other end, silent, scarcely visible, and like a shadow, was a sentinel, who was walking up and down before a grotto, which was only distinguishable because in that spot the darkness seemed more dense than elsewhere.
Franz gave him Albert's letter.
"That is of no consequence; I always have one ready, day and night."
"What is the prisoner doing?" inquired Vampa of the sentinel.
"Be prudent, in any event," said the countess.
Come, your excellency," the count added, turning to Franz, "here is Luigi Vampa, who will himself express to you his deep regret at the mistake he has committed." Franz approached, the chief advancing several steps to meet him.
"Is he armed?"
"I will hasten," replied Franz.
"Well," said the count, turning towards Franz, "I told you there was some mistake in this."
"Yes."
"Why did you not tell me all this--you?" inquired the brigand chief, turning towards his men, who all retreated before his look.
In his whole life, perhaps, Franz had never before experienced so sudden an impression, so rapid a transition from gayety to sadness, as in this moment.
"Oh," said he, "is it you, captain?
"Then he has not returned?" said the duke.
"Welcome among us, your excellency," he said to him; "you heard what the count just said, and also my reply; let me add that I would not for the four thousand piastres at which I had fixed your friend's ransom, that this had happened."
"Why the devil do you rouse me at this hour?"
Where is the man who brought the letter?"
Elevenson
An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.
The scripture story of the head of John the Baptist on a charger shows that pagan myths have somewhat sophisticated sacred history.
The seat of misgovernment.
The plaintiff.
Giacomo Smith
Sir James Merivale
Clio's function was to preside over history--which she did with great dignity, many of the prominent citizens of Athens occupying seats on the platform, the meetings being addressed by Messrs.
K.Q.
Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious persons wish to obtain.
A body of men who meet to repeal laws.
CREMONA, n.
Anita M. Bobe
The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth--two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.
Thomas M. and Mary Frazer
To seek another's disapproval of a course already decided on.
The tribute that we pay to achievements that resembles, but do not equal, our own.
Quincy Giles
A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.
Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting another.
A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.
One who in a perilous emergency thinks with his legs.
No, indeed!
There are two instruments that are worse than a clarionet--two clarionets.
G.J.
One of a tribe of savages dwelling beyond the Financial Straits and dreaded for their desolating incursions.
A small crustacean very much resembling the lobster, but less indigestible.
A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin of wickedness; and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of awful examples.
A politician of the seas.
G.J.
One of the nine Muses.
A young axe, known among Indians as a Thomashawk.
They have apparently been compelled to give up the custom and account of the foulness of the brooks.
The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs, capacities and conditions of the congregation.
Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach.
Desire and expectation rolled into one.
Faith, I wish 'twere known, Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide, Wherein he blundered and how much he lied.
A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.
The humorist of the medical profession.
Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown 'Tis nine-tenths lying.
He's A Christian philosopher.
HASH, x.
Many believe that the bear hibernates during the whole winter and subsists by mechanically sucking its paws.
G.J.
Gorton Swope
Sotus Ecobius discovered in Central Asia a whole nation of people who hibernate.
John Lukkus
A capitation tax, or poll-tax.
A peculiarly sharp and specially applied sense of the earth's overpopulation.
Death's baby-carriage.
An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin.
So The tax-collectors in a row Appeared before the throne to pray Their master to devise some way To swell the revenue.
The slaying of one human being by another.
A broad-gauge gossip.
Fogarty Weffing
"So great," Said they, "are the demands of state A tithe of all that we collect Will scarcely meet them.
Marley Wottel
A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.
An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.
"But you said before beginning that it was blunt and couldn't cut me!"
Well, next, our cut one is as if you were sowing your corn--so." Bathsheba saw a sort of rainbow, upside down in the air, and Troy's arm was still again.
Three, as if you were reaping--so.
Yet go she must.
He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it blow so strongly that it stops the breath. He drew near and said, "I must be leaving you."
"I'll be sure not to!" she said invincibly.
So much as a preliminary.
She shuddered.
The circumstance had been the gentle dip of Troy's mouth downwards upon her own.
Never since the broadsword became the national weapon had there been more dexterity shown in its management than by the hands of Sergeant Troy, and never had he been in such splendid temper for the performance as now in the evening sunshine among the ferns with Bathsheba.
Now I'll be more interesting, and let you see some loose play--giving all the cuts and points, infantry and cavalry, quicker than lightning, and as promiscuously--with just enough rule to regulate instinct and yet not to fetter it.
That minute's interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought.
Mind you don't flinch, whatever you do."
Next, cuts, points and guards altogether." Troy duly exhibited them.
My sword never errs." And Troy returned the weapon to the scabbard.
"No edge!
"O no--only stand as still as a statue.
Infantry cuts and guards are more interesting than ours, to my mind; but they are not so swashing.
"I don't think I am afraid.
All was as quick as electricity.
"Bravely borne!" said Troy.
Four, as if you were threshing--in that way.
She saw the point glisten towards her bosom, and seemingly enter it.
"I have not touched you," said Troy, quietly.
Now: still!"
She hurriedly interrupted: "I'd rather not; though I don't mind your twos and fours; but your ones and threes are terrible!"
This sword will shave like a razor.
Because if you are I can't perform.
"I have been within an inch of my life, and didn't know it!"
The caterpillar was spitted upon its point.
"Then there's pursuing practice, in this way." He gave the movements as before.
"I must leave you now," said Troy, softly.
I am afraid of you--indeed I am!" she cried.
"Why, it is magic!" said Bathsheba, amazed.
The sword passed behind you.
"There, those are the stereotyped forms.
It disappeared on the other side.
It appeared that a caterpillar had come from the fern and chosen the front of her bodice as his resting place.
Now!"
"Now," said Troy, producing the sword, which, as he raised it into the sunlight, gleamed a sort of greeting, like a living thing, "first, we have four right and four left cuts; four right and four left thrusts.
"Wait: I'll do it for you."
Bathsheba, overcome by a hundred tumultuous feelings resulting from the scene, abstractedly sat down on a tuft of heather.
He touched the palm of his hand with the blade, and then, lifting it, showed her a thin shaving of scarf-skin dangling therefrom.
Standing in the centre, the sky overhead was met by a circular horizon of fern: this grew nearly to the bottom of the slope and then abruptly ceased.
Whatever have you done!"
"You have been perfectly safe, nevertheless.
"You didn't flinch a shade's thickness. Wonderful in a woman!"
He drew nearer still.
"Cruel, cruel, 'tis of you!"
"Have you run me through?--no, you have not!
Look here."
Next, his movements lapsed slower, and she could see them individually.
The pit was a saucer-shaped concave, naturally formed, with a top diameter of about thirty feet, and shallow enough to allow the sunshine to reach their heads.
Bathsheba's adventurous spirit was beginning to find some grains of relish in these highly novel proceedings.
He pointed to about a yard in front of him.
"That outer loose lock of hair wants tidying," he said, before she had moved or spoken.
The thrusts are these: one, two, three, four, right; one, two, three, four, left." He repeated them.
She was now literally trembling and panting at this her temerity in such an errant undertaking; her breath came and went quickly, and her eyes shone with an infrequent light.
The middle within the belt of verdure was floored with a thick flossy carpet of moss and grass intermingled, so yielding that the foot was half-buried within it.
An arc of silver shone on her right side: the sword had descended. The lock dropped to the ground.
"Quite sure."
"That was to get you to stand still, and so make sure of your safety. The risk of injuring you through your moving was too great not to force me to tell you a fib to escape it."
I'll let you off the ones and threes.
Bathsheba closed her eyes in the full persuasion that she was killed at last.
"Oh no--dexterity.
"Now just to learn whether you have pluck enough to let me do what I wish, I'll give you a preliminary test."
She felt powerless to withstand or deny him.
"How murderous and bloodthirsty!"
"It was because I didn't expect it.
She reached the verge of a pit in the middle of the ferns. Troy stood in the bottom, looking up towards her.
She saw him stoop to the grass, pick up the winding lock which he had severed from her manifold tresses, twist it round his fingers, unfasten a button in the breast of his coat, and carefully put it inside.
"I won't touch you at all--not even your hair.
It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream--here a stream of tears.
The infantry have two most diabolical upward cuts, which we are too humane to use. Like this--three, four."
"More precisely speaking, you have been within half an inch of being pared alive two hundred and ninety-five times."
The warder wrote down the name.
The good-natured fellow told Nekhludoff the whole story of his life, and was going to question him in turn, when their attention was aroused by a student and a veiled lady, who drove up in a trap, with rubber tyres, drawn by a large thoroughbred horse.
When the mass is over, you'll be admitted."
The crowd laughed approvingly.
By the side of the old woman was a young man in a peasant's coat, who listened, shaking his head, to a boy very like himself.
The student was holding a large bundle.
But, no! Must needs shout, as if he were a general."
Nekhludoff remained in this room for about five minutes, feeling strangely depressed, conscious of how powerless he was, and at variance with all the world.
This was apparently the first time she saw the greyheaded man on the other side in prison clothes, and with his head shaved.
"The service is going on.
"What's that for?" he thought, his mind involuntarily connecting the subject of the picture with liberation and not with imprisonment.
"Now, then, where are you going?" shouted the sentinel with the gun.
This was the doorkeeper of a bank; he had come to see his brother, who was arrested for forgery.
"I myself am here for the first time," said Nekhludoff, "and don't know; but I think you had better ask this man," and he pointed to the warder with the gold cords and the book, sitting on the right.
The birch trees in the gardens looked as if they were strewn with green fluff, the wild cherry and the poplars unrolled their long, balmy buds, and in shops and dwelling-houses the double window-frames were being removed and the windows cleaned.
Nekhludoff also went up, and named Katerina Maslova.
When Nekhludoff found that he would have to speak in similar conditions, a feeling of indignation against those who were able to make and enforce these conditions arose in him; he was surprised that, placed in such a dreadful position, no one seemed offended at this outrage on human feelings.
The huge brick building, the prison proper, was just in front, and the visitors were not allowed to come up to it.
The soldiers, the inspector, the prisoners themselves, acted as if acknowledging all this to be necessary.
Next to him a woman, with a good woollen shawl on her shoulders, sat on the floor holding a baby in her lap and crying bitterly.
The wire nets were stretched 7 feet apart, and soldiers were walking up and down the space between them.
Nekhludoff stepped aside from the waiting crowd.
Policemen, with yellow cords to their uniforms and carrying pistols, were on duty, looking out for some disorder which might distract the ennui that oppressed them.
A sentinel was pacing up and down in front of it, and shouted at any one who tried to pass him.
Next to Nekhludoff stood a clean-shaven, stout, and red-cheeked man, holding a bundle, apparently containing under-garments.
Another warder stood inside the building and also counted the visitors as they entered a second door, touching each one with his hand, so that when they went away again not one visitor should be able to remain inside the prison and not one prisoner might get out.
The visitors came up to him, and named the persons they wanted to see, and he put the names down.
At the door there stood a warder who counted the visitors as they came in, saying aloud, 16, 17, and so on.
As soon as Nekhludoff opened the door of this room, he was struck by the deafening roar of a hundred voices shouting at once, the reason of which he did not at once understand.
On both sides were faces pressed close to the nets, faces of wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, children, trying to see each other's features and to say what was necessary in such a way as to be understood.
On the further side of the nets were the prisoners, on the nearer, the visitors.
It was impossible to understand what was being said and what were the relations between the different people.
At the gate of the wooden buildings, to the right, opposite the sentinel, sat a warder on a bench, dressed in uniform, with gold cords, a notebook in his hands.
"And you hold your row," answered the tramp, not in the least abashed by the sentinel's words, and turned back.
A man in tattered clothes, crumpled hat, with bare feet and red stripes all over his face, detached himself from the crowd, and turned towards the prison.
The warder, without looking at whom he was touching, slapped Nekhludoff on the back, and Nekhludoff felt hurt by the touch of the warder's hand; but, remembering what he had come about, he felt ashamed of feeling dissatisfied and taking offence.
It was also difficult to talk; one had to scream in order to be heard.
Letting the hurrying visitors pass before him, he was the last to get into the interviewing-room.
The two halves of the room, the windows of which were opposite the door he had come in by, were separated, not by one, but by two nets reaching from the floor to the ceiling.
He was seized with a curious moral sensation like seasickness.
And the people, dressed in their Sunday best, were passing on their way to their different parish churches.
His fiancee wished it (this lady was his fiancee), and her parents had advised them to take some rolls to the prisoners.
Between them was a double row of nets and a space of 7 feet wide, so that they could not hand anything to one another, and any one whose sight was not very good could not even distinguish the face on the other side.
On the paths of the boulevards and on the newly-revived grass, children and dogs ran about, playing, and the nurses sat merrily chattering on the benches.
He went on, slowly letting the hurrying visitors pass before, and experiencing a mingled feeling of horror at the evil-doers locked up in this building, compassion for those who, like Katusha and the boy they tried the day before, must be here though guiltless, and shyness and tender emotion at the thought of the interview before him.
The isvostchik did not drive Nekhludoff up to the prison itself, but to the last turning that led to the prison.
As they were speaking, the large iron door with a window in it opened, and an officer in uniform, followed by another warder, stepped out. The warder with the notebook proclaimed that the admittance of visitors would now commence.
In this room, which was called the meeting-room, Nekhludoff was startled by the sight of a large picture of the Crucifixion.
Beyond her was the doorkeeper, who had spoken to Nekhludoff outside; he was shouting with all his might to a greyhaired convict on the other side.
He came up to Nekhludoff, and asked if and how he could give the rolls he had brought in alms to the prisoners.
But when he came nearer to the people, he saw that they were all pressing against a net that divided the room in two, like flies settling on sugar, and he understood what it meant.
But as each one tried to be heard by the one he was talking to, and his neighbour tried to do the same, they did their best to drown each other's voices' and that was the cause of the din and shouting which struck Nekhludoff when he first came in.
The king's son remained there a short while longer, and he thought of his mother, and wondered if she were still alive.
When the king saw the blood on her apron, he believed this, fell into such a passion that he ordered a high tower to be built, in which neither sun nor moon could be seen and had his wife put into it, and walled up.
Here she was to stay for seven years without meat or drink, and die of hunger.
Having despatched this letter and another to his mother, Ferdinand repaired to the tower to communicate to Glastonbury the necessity of his immediate departure for London, but he also assured that good old man of his brief visit to that city.
It is of another voice that he now muses; it is the memory of another's glance that touches his eager heart.
He recognises upon it her magical initials, worked in her own fine dark hair.
He drives his mother from his thoughts.
CHAPTER I.
He who loves lives in an ecstatic trance.
But the night that brought dreams to Ferdinand Armine brought him not visions more marvellous and magical than his waking life.
Panting and wild he lies upon the beach, and the gem that he clutches is the sole idea that engrosses his existence.
Something must be done; Miss Grandison might arrive this very day.
For him, the regrets of the past and the chances of the future are alike lost in the ravishing and absorbing present.
He is not of the same order as the labouring myriads on which he seems to tread.
He wrote to Katherine that he would instantly fly to her, only that he daily expected his attendance would be required in town, on military business of urgent importance to their happiness.
For a lover that has but just secured the object of his long and tumultuous hopes is as a diver who has just plucked a jewel from the bed of some rare sea.
Nay, even a feeling of embarrassment and pain is associated with the recollection of that fond and elegant being, whom he had recognised once as the model of all feminine perfection, and who had been to him so gentle and so devoted.
It was deep in the night before he again beheld the towers and turrets of his castle, and the ivy-covered fragment of the old Place seemed to sleep in peace under its protecting influence.
Whatever may be the harsher course of his career, however the cold world may cast its dark shadows upon his future path, he may yet consider himself thrice blessed to whom this graceful destiny has fallen, and amid the storms and troubles of after-life may look back to these hours, fair as the dawn, beautiful as the twilight, with solace and satisfaction.
Is he indeed so happy; is it not all a dream?
They are to him but a swarm of humble-minded and humble-mannered insects.
A doubt crosses his brow.
All that is bright and rare is but invented and devised to adorn and please her.
And what would be its influence upon them?
The invalid had not amended; their movements were still uncertain.
For him, the human species is represented by a single individual, and of her he makes an idol.
Business, however, rises with the sun.
The morning burst as beautiful as such love.
Katherine, 'his own Kate,' expressed even a faint fond wish that he would return.
BOOK III.
There was no longer a contest between poverty and pride, between the maintenance or destruction of his ancient house, between his old engagement and his present passion; that was past.
This might, this must, necessarily delay their meeting.
W. WORDSWORTH.
LORD BYRON.
She was a phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
W. WORDSWORTH.
THE LOST LOVE.
I travell'd among unknown men In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee.
A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seem'd a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.
W. WORDSWORTH.
LORD BYRON.
W. WORDSWORTH.
"The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound Shall pass into her face.
A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! --Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow But tell of days in goodness spent,-- A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent.
Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherish'd turn'd her wheel Beside an English fire.
But now her looks are coy and cold, To mine they ne'er reply, And yet I cease not to behold The love-light in her eye: Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.
"And vital feelings of delight Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live Here in this happy dell."
P.B. SHELLEY.
P.B. SHELLEY.
LINES TO AN INDIAN AIR.
"She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And her's shall be the breathing balm, And her's the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things.
THE EDUCATION OF NATURE.
H. COLERIDGE.
She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meets in her aspect and her eyes, Thus mellow'd to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove; A maid whom there were none to praise, And very few to love.
What is Pearl Barley?
CORN, BARLEY, PEARL BARLEY, OATS, RYE, POTATOES, TEA, COFFEE, AND CHOCOLATE.
Where was Corn first used?
Who were the Sicilians?
Inhabitants of Sicily, the largest island of the Mediterranean Sea, now a part of Italy, and separated from the mainland by the Strait of Messina.
Oatmeal also forms a wholesome drink for invalids, by steeping it in boiling water.
The leaves of an evergreen shrub, a native of China and Japan, in which countries alone it is extensively cultivated for use.
The inhabitants of Crete, an island of the Archipelago.
Barley freed from the husk by a mill.
How do they make it into a drink?
It is uncertain.
What are Oats?
By boiling it with water or milk.
Potatoes grew wild in Peru, a country of South America; whence they were transplanted to other parts of the American continent, and afterwards to Europe.
Describe the Cacao-nut Tree.
Of what form is the fruit?
What is Tea?
It is extremely fertile, producing great quantities of corn.
The corn of Syria has always been very superior, and by many classed above that of Egypt.
The honor of introducing this useful vegetable into England is divided between Sir Francis Drake, in 1580, and Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1586, some ascribing it to the former, and others to the latter.
They are then removed with a kind of shovel resembling a fan, and poured on mats, whence they are taken in small quantities, and rolled in the palm of the hand always in one direction, until they cool and retain the curl.
What is next done?
From the accounts in the Bible, we find that its culture engaged a large share of the attention of the ancient Hebrews.
Two or three times, the furnace each time being made less hot.
The tea-plant was at one time introduced into South Carolina, where its culture appears to have been attended with but little success.
CHAPTER II.
It is also cultivated in Persia, the East Indies, Liberia on the coast of Africa, the West Indies, Brazil and other parts of South America, as well as in most tropical climates.
Who were the Athenians?
It is somewhat like a cucumber, about three inches round, and of a yellowish red color.
Its use gradually extended to other cities, and to those on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
The berry of the coffee-tree, a native of Arabia.
It may yet become a staple production of some portions of the United States.
What is Corn?
In Egypt, a country of Africa.
Who was the original discoverer of Coffee, for the drink of man?
A kind of cake or paste, made of the kernel of the cacao-nut.
The root, which, when roasted or boiled, affords a wholesome and agreeable meal.
What part of the plant is eaten?
Describe the Clove Tree.
The form of the Cochineal is oval; it is about the size of a small pea, and has six legs armed with claws, and a trunk by which it sucks its nourishment.
Of Asia, the Indies, Africa, Arabia, the Islands of the Southern Pacific, and the hottest parts of America.
How is the Cinnamon Tree cultivated?
The cinnamon tree, in its wild state, is said to be propagated by means of a kind of pigeons, that feed on its fruit; in carrying which to their nests, the seeds fall out, and, dropping in various places, take root, spring up, and become trees.
Of what form is the tree which bears those large nuts, called Cocoa nuts?
Where is the Tree found?
Which part did they use?
The greatest quantities are brought from Catalonia, in Spain.
From what countries is the Cochineal brought?
Yes, especially that of the oak; but the best oak bark is used in tanning.
No, it is an insect.
What is its habitation?
What are the uses of this Tree?
How is the bark procured?
Camphor is extracted from the root.
What is Cochineal?
The tree sends up numerous shoots the third or fourth year after it has been planted; these shoots are planted out, when nearly an inch in thickness.
It is also used in the manufacture of life preservers and cork jackets.
By spreading a cloth under the plant, and shaking it with poles, till the insects quit it and fly about, which they cannot do many minutes, but soon tumble down dead into the cloth; where they are left till quite dry.
Do they leave their canoes in the water on their return from a voyage?
The exterior part of trees, which serves them as a skin or covering.
Cork is employed in various ways, but especially for stopping vessels containing liquids, and, on account of its buoyancy in water, in the construction of life boats.
Is it a plant?
It is used in cabinet-making, for boxes, and other articles.
Of what use is Bark?
COCOA, TODDY, CHERRIES, BARK, CORK, COCHINEAL, CLOVES, CINNAMON, AND CASSIA.
From what country was the Cherry Tree first brought?
The clove when it first begins to appear is white, then green, and at last hard and red; when dried, it turns yellow, and then dark brown.
It is a large handsome tree of the myrtle kind; its leaves resemble those of the laurel.
A drug used by the dyers, for dyeing crimsons and scarlets; and for making carmine, a brilliant red used in painting, and several of the arts.
In Spain, Italy, France, and many other countries.
Were not books once made of Bark?
The Cork Tree attains to a very great age.
It is tall and straight, without branches, and generally about thirty or forty feet high; at the top are twelve leaves, ten feet long, and half a foot broad; above the leaves, grows a large excrescence in the form of a cabbage, excellent to eat, but taking it off kills the tree. The cocoa is a species of Palm.
Three times a year, the nuts being about the size of a man's head, and of an oval form.
Does it not undergo some change during the year?
A renowned Roman general.
With paddles, or oars; they seldom carry sails, and the loading is laid in the bottom.
Is not the Indian liquor called Toddy, produced from the Cocoa Tree?
They made coffins of it, lined with a resinous composition, which preserved the bodies of the dead uncorrupted.
The Clove is the hottest, and most acrid of aromatic substances; one of our most wholesome spices, and of great use in medicine; it also yields an abundance of oil, which is much used by perfumers, and in medicine.
From the West Indies, Jamaica, Mexico, and other parts of America.
How do the savages guide them?
CHAPTER IV.
It is now found in most of the East Indian Islands.
What is Bark?
Are not the savages very dexterous in the management of them?
What is Cinnamon?
How often does this tree produce nuts?
To what particular use did the Egyptians put it?
Bark is useful for many things: of the bark of willows and linden trees, ropes are sometimes made.
These are the Cochineals.
What is the meaning of A.D.?
It breeds in a fruit resembling a pear; the plant which bears it is about five or six feet high; at the top of the fruit grows a red flower, which when full blown, falls upon it; the fruit then appears full of little red insects, having very small wings.
What is Cork?
The dried flower-buds of the Clove Tree, anciently a native of the Moluccas; but afterwards transplanted by the Dutch (who traded in them,) to other islands, particularly that of Ternate.
Each year the bark of a tree divides, and distributes itself two contrary ways, the outer part gives towards the skin, till it becomes skin itself, and at length falls off; the inner part is added to the wood.
Yes, between the leaves and the top arise several shoots about the thickness of a man's arm, which, when cut, distil a white, sweet, and agreeable liquor; while this liquor exudes, the tree yields no fruit; but when the shoots are allowed to grow, it puts out a large cluster or branch, on which the cocoa nuts hang, to the number of ten or twelve.
What else is obtained from this tree?
He took one step forward and raised the empty revolver to strike.
The warden's right hand was raised above the desk top, and the revolver in it clicked warningly.
"Better send some of your men up to investigate."
"Then I shall take him," was the reply.
I may add that no bribe was offered to you because your integrity was beyond question."
A CALL ON THE WARDEN
I, personally, cut the police alarm outside the building.
"The very men on whom you most depended have been bought, and even if they were within sound of your voice now they wouldn't respond.
"And that wire was cut, too," the stranger explained.
The warden came to his feet with white face, and nails biting into the palms of his hands.
The stranger replaced the receiver on the hook, stripped off his black mask, dropped it on the floor beside the motionless warden, and went out.
He was rather tall and slender, and a sinister black mask hid his face from the quickly raised eyes of the warden.
One of your assistants who has been here for years unloaded the revolver in the desk there, and less than an hour ago cut the prison alarm wire.
"I have come to demand his release."
The warden was first to speak.
"Oh, that isn't loaded," said the masked man quietly.
Suddenly he was seized by a violent, maddening rage.
"You have a prisoner here, Pietro Petrozinni," was the reply, in a pleasant voice.
"Well, what is it?"
"These are four inner guards and the outer guard.
"How did you pass the outside guard?"
"He was bribed," was the ready response.
So you see!"
Once he glanced up at the clock--it was five minutes of eleven--and then he went on with his reading.
They have all been bought--the turnkeys at five thousand dollars each, and the outer guard at seven thousand.
I want your prisoner, Signor Petrozinni--you will release him at once! That's all!"
Here and there in the grim corridors a guard dozed in the glare of an electric light; and in the office, too, a desk light glimmered where the warden sat at his desk, poring over a report.
"It has been made impossible for you to give an alarm," the stranger went on.
His tone was a perfectly normal one.
"Sit down?" bellowed the warden.
He still sat motionless, with his eyes fixed on the black mask.
The masked man moved slightly to one side and his clenched fist caught the warden on the point of the chin.
"He is a man who can command a vast fortune--and Senor Alvarez is at the point of death.
The intruder noted both gestures, and, unarmed himself, stood silent.
Now, if you'll sit down, please!"
But she said she'd set up for him a while anyway, and keep a light burning so he could see it.
And you won't go?
I shot out and went for the doctor's house, but they told me he'd gone away in the night some time or other, and warn't back yet.
And after a minute, he says:
I was just to that pass I didn't have no reasoning faculties no more.
Why, they'd steal the very—why, goodness sakes, you can guess what kind of a fluster I was in by the time midnight come last night.
"No you won't," she says.
And when she was going away she looked down in my eyes so steady and gentle, and says:
"Well, it does beat—"
"The Phelpses, down yonder."
He says:
So she had to be satisfied.
"Your aunt's been mighty uneasy."
So he lit up his lantern, and got his saddle-bags, and we started.
"Laws alive, I never—"
I struck an idea pretty soon.
I says:
But when he sees the canoe he didn't like the look of her—said she was big enough for one, but didn't look pretty safe for two.
"So help me, I wouldn't a be—"
I reckoned she'd let me go now, and as a generl thing she would; but I s'pose there was so many strange things going on she was just in a sweat about every little thing that warn't yard-stick straight; so she says, very decided:
"Who's that?
"No!—is that so?
So he says:
And when we stepped on to the raft I says:
They've broke for the river!
Man the sweeps—man the sweeps!"
"Hurry!
Then he give us a piece of his mind, but it didn't do no good.
You been up to something you no business to, and I lay I'll find out what it is before I'M done with you."
"You been down cellar?"
"Right at your elbow; if you reach out your arm you can touch him. He's dressed, and everything's ready.
So in they come, but couldn't see us in the dark, and most trod on us whilst we was hustling to get under the bed.
He's got the brain-fever as shore as you're born, and they're oozing out!"
"Where's the butter?"
And after we'd thought a minute, I says:
So here they come, full tilt.
"What you been doing down there?"
We was in the path to the mill; and when they got pretty close on to us we dodged into the bush and let them go by, and then dropped in behind them.
Why, Huck, if it was to do over again, I bet I could fetch two hundred!
We was all glad as we could be, but Tom was the gladdest of all because he had a bullet in the calf of his leg.
"Well, then, what possessed you to go down there this time of night?"
And then mosey right down the lightning-rod and come along.
But we got under all right, and out through the hole, swift but soft—Jim first, me next, and Tom last, which was according to Tom's orders.
Boys, we done it elegant!—'deed we did.
But me and Jim was consulting—and thinking.
Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor, in painting, on invention of new colors, or new modes of using them.
We may have one Van Eyck, who will be known as the introducer of a new style once in ten centuries, but he himself will trace his invention to some accidental bye-play or pursuit; and the use of that invention will depend altogether on the popular necessities or instincts of the period. Originality depends on nothing of the kind.
There seems to me to be a wonderful misunderstanding among the majority of architects at the present day as to the very nature and meaning of Originality, and of all wherein it consists.
I do not say that he will not take liberties with his materials, or with his rules: I do not say that strange changes will not sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his fancies, in both.
The panel mouldings are by his hand; he would have disdained to leave even them to a common workman; but do you think he found any difficulty in them, or thought there was any credit in them?
We are unanimous, I think.
Will you then tell me precisely where the separation exists between one and the other?
Do you think Orcagna, any more than Pisano, if his spirit could rise in the midst of us at this moment, would tell us that he had trusted his fame to the foliation, or had put his soul's pride into the panelling?
Consider how much intellect was needed in the architect, and how much observance of nature before he could give the expression to these various figures--cast these multitudinous draperies--design these rich and quaint fragments of tombs and altars--weave with perfect animation the entangled branches of the forest.
Where, then, is your difference?
But it is not merely this privilege of being imperfect which belongs to architectural sculpture.
Accepting this definition, I am compelled to reply, that it is in effect nothing more than an amplification of my first one--that whatever is easy you call architecture, whatever is difficult you call sculpture.
Not so; he would tell you that his spirit was in the stooping figures that stand round the couch of the dying Virgin.
It has a true privilege of imagination, far excelling all that can be granted to the more finished work, which, for the sake of distinction, I will call,--and I don't think we can have a much better term--"furniture sculpture;" sculpture, that is, which can be moved from place to furnish rooms.
Again.
You draw the profile according to your taste, and you order your mason to cut it.
You surely must remember moments of your lives in which, under some strong excitement of feeling, all the details of visible objects presented themselves with a strange intensity and insistance, whether you would or no; urging themselves upon the mind, and thrust upon the eye, with a force of fascination which you could not refuse.
So that when once he begins to observe your doings, he will ask nothing better from you, nothing kinder from you, than that you would meet this imaginative temper of his half way;--that you would farther touch the sense of terror, or satisfy the expectation of things strange, which have been prompted by the mystery or the majesty of the surrounding scene.
The ornaments that we are obliged to leave to the pleasure of the workman, or the superintendence of some other designer, we consider sculptural, especially if they are more or less extraneous and incrusted--not an essential part of the building.
And I suspect you don't quite like your architecture so "pure" as this.
But, on the other hand, do not shrink from the task as if the refined art of perfect sculpture were always required from you.
If you wish to copy them, and to copy them always, of course I leave you at once to your authorities, and your imaginations to their repose.
I want to put it in your way, and you to find your way to it.
We will begin at the very beginning.
And thus, your leaving forms more or less undefined, or carrying out your fancies, however extravagant, in grotesqueness of shadow or shape, will be for the most part in accordance with the temper of the observer; and he is likely, therefore, much more willingly to use his fancy to help your meanings, than his judgment to detect your faults.
We want a few mouldings, you will say--just a few. Those who want mouldings, hold up their hands.
In this, perhaps, you will say; that whatever ornaments we can direct ourselves, and get accurately cut to order, we consider architectural.
No, they could not; but that is merely because we have made architecture so dull that they cannot take any interest in it, and, therefore, do not care to add to their higher knowledge the poor and common knowledge of principles of building.
Not so.
But you will answer me, all this is not architecture at all--it is sculpture.
He has been impressed by the cathedral wall as it loomed over the low streets, before he looks up to the carving of its porch--and his love of mystery has been touched by the silence and the shadows of the cloister, before he can set himself to decipher the bosses on its vaulting.
You are essentially, and should always be, the same body of men, admitting only such difference in operation as there is between the work of a painter at different times, who sometimes labours on a small picture, and sometimes on the frescoes of a palace gallery.
The last is much more difficult to do than the first; but degrees of difficulty constitute no specific difference, and you will not accept it, surely, as a definition of the difference between architecture and sculpture, that "architecture is doing anything that is easy, and sculpture anything that is difficult."
Now, to a certain extent, the senses get into this state whenever the imagination is strongly excited.
Yet I suppose none of you would think yourselves particularly ingenious architects if you had designed nothing more than this; nay, I will even let you improve it into any grand proportion you choose, and add to it as many windows as you choose; the only thing I insist upon in our specimen of pure architecture is, that there shall be no mouldings nor ornaments upon it.
Would you advise him, if he asked your advice, to give up his wood-blocks and take to canvas?
But if you wish to design them yourselves, how do you do it?
For instance: you all know the pulpit of Niccolo Pisano, in the baptistry at Pisa.
Will, you, then, design the profiles of these mouldings yourselves, or will you copy them?
Nay, but perhaps you answer again, our sculptors at present do not design cathedrals, and could not.
Don't laugh; you must not laugh, that's very improper of you, this is classical architecture.
Or, lastly, do you think the man who designed the procession on the portal of Amiens was the subordinate workman?
Things trivial at other times assume a dignity or significance which we cannot explain; but which is only the more attractive because inexplicable: and the powers of attention, quickened by the feverish excitement, fasten and feed upon the minutest circumstances of detail, and remotest traces of intention.
I have taken it out of the essay on that subject in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica."
John Leech does not sketch so well as Leonardo da Vinci; but do you think that the public could easily spare him; or that he is wrong in bringing out his talent in the way in which it is most effective?
For observe, to that sculpture the spectator is usually brought in a tranquil or prosaic state of mind; he sees it associated rather with what is sumptuous than sublime, and under circumstances which address themselves more to his comfort than his curiosity.
Not that mere distance will give animation to the work, if it has none in itself; but if it has life at all, the distance will make that life more perceptible and powerful by softening the defects of execution.
Entirely, admirably, unsurpassably right, under the conditions.
For indeed, though here and there something may be gained by looking at inferior men, there is always more to be gained by looking at the best; and there is not time, with all the looking of human life, to exhaust even one great painter's instruction.
If you copied the tree as a model, you would be going very wrong indeed.
But he slouched his cap low down over his brow as he went out into the street, and looked neither to the right nor to the left, while he tramped along by Margaret's side; he feared being upset by the words, still more the looks, of sympathising neighbours.
And I'm glad Miss Margaret wrote off straight, without shilly-shallying.
I don't expect to convince you in a day,--not in one conversation; but let us know each other, and speak freely to each other about these things, and the truth will prevail.
Perhaps not at all.
'No!' replied Margaret, standing still with the utmost patience, now she found herself perceived.
Dixon's words quieted her for the time.
So he and Margaret walked in silence.
Mrs. Hale did trust in Dixon more than in Margaret.
There had been a pause of an instant on the steep crooked stair, when she first saw him; but now she tried to steal past his abstracted gaze, and to leave him in the solemn circle of his household misery.
He is very quiet--he is not tipsy at all.
'But I almost wish you had not written. Would it be too late to stop him if you wrote again, Margaret?'
She met Dixon on the landing.
'Come now, ma'am,' said Dixon, with a kind of cheerful authority, 'you know seeing Master Frederick is just the very thing of all others you're longing for.
'Yesterday, mamma.'
Oh, help me!
While he followed the house-servant along the passage, and through the kitchen, stepping cautiously on every dark mark in the pattern of the oil-cloth, in order to conceal his dirty foot-prints, Margaret ran upstairs.
'But, Margaret, to bring a drunken man home--and your mother so ill!'
I took it myself'
So they questioned and listened.
Slowly, slowly Margaret turned away from the bed.
'No,' said Margaret, softening with his softened manner.
Margaret went in half breathless with the hurried story she had to tell.
'And he need not go out, except in the dusk, poor fellow!'
It's save as save can.
'Thornton!
He stood uncertain, with dogged irresolution upon his face.
Mr. Hale blew his nose, and got up to snuff the candles in order to conceal his emotion.
And the letter went?'
So far, so good.
Higgins,' instead of the curt 'Nicholas' or 'Higgins,' to which the 'drunken infidel weaver' had been accustomed. But Nicholas was neither an habitual drunkard nor a thorough infidel.
'You forget!' said Margaret.
'All men must die,' said he at last, with a strange sort of gravity, which first suggested to Margaret the idea that he had been drinking--not enough to intoxicate himself, but enough to make his thoughts bewildered.
Nay, Higgins, I don't care one straw for your anger.
They passed quickly through the house-place, upstairs, and into the quiet presence of the dead.
He sullenly rose up.
'At least you shall have some comfortable food, which I'm sure you need.'
He placed a chair for Nicholas stood up till he, at Mr. Hale's request, took a seat; and called him, invariably, 'Mr.
Mr. Hale looked at her dismayed.
No answer.
He shook his head, glancing sideways up at Margaret as he did so.
Margaret smiled into her eyes to re-assure her.
'They'll be clever if they come in past me!' said Dixon, showing her teeth at the bare idea.
As he got near the street in which he knew she lived, he looked down at his clothes, his hands, and shoes.
Margaret laid her hand on his arm.
He tore his hair, he beat his head against the hard wood, then he lay exhausted and stupid.
Hale's voice dropped low in reverence)--'you believe in Him.'
For she had been sickly, dying so long, that he had persuaded himself she would not die; that she would 'pull through.'
Margaret was perplexed; his drinking tea with her father, who would be totally unprepared for his visitor--her mother so ill--seemed utterly out of the question; and yet if she drew back now, it would be worse than ever--sure to drive him to the gin-shop.
But her calm face, fixed on his, patient and trustful, compelled him to answer.
You will not go?'
He turned round and caught her hand.
Mary was looking out for her, with a half-distrustful face.
'Oh dear! a drunken infidel weaver!' said Mr. Hale to himself, in dismay.
Resting his hand upon the house-table, Nicholas Higgins stood in the midst of the floor; his great eyes startled open by the news he had heard, as he came along the court, from many busy tongues.
Margaret started to her feet,--for she thought, by the working of his face, he was going into convulsions.
'Oh, yes--thank you.' But as Mr. Hale was leaving the room, she ran after him:
And that was death!
If he should be executed, after all these years that he has kept away and lived in safety!
Nicholas Higgins suddenly stood straight, stiff up.
Margaret touched his arm very softly.
Where shall I go?
We do not reason--we believe; and so do you.
He looked up at her, as if on' the point of dogged resistance to her wish for information.
He stooped down and fondly kissed his daughter; covered up her face, and turned to follow Margaret.
They went down stairs without a word.
'A hundred,' she answered, confronting him.
'If I did as I like, though,' he went on, 'I should say, Unless he marries Miss Lois Cayley (who is a deal too good for him) the estate shall revert to Kynaston's eldest son, a confounded jackass.
Your boxes contain revolutionary literature.'
I breathed again.
I took the book in my hands and read the title, 'Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies.'
'My dear,' he said, 'that's not the point.
Could I wish him to be rich?
He withdrew his gloves with great deliberation, and sat down in it with an apologetic glance.
'I am glad to observe that you understand my character.
'She was,' I answered, deliberately.
Rise superior to it.
'Could you spare me an hour this morning?' he asked, still fingering his hat nervously with his puffy hand.
But you will forgive me, I am sure, my dear young lady: I ought not to discuss such painted Jezebels before you.
'Not at all,' I answered.
Five Hundred Pounds, free of legacy duty, to Thomas Webster Jones, of Wheeler Street, Soho, for his admirable invention of a pair of braces which will not slip down on the wearer's shoulders after half an hour's use.
And, of course, one knows that profound differences of intellect and moral feeling often occur within the limits of a single family.'
He leant forward, with real earnestness.
I was the soul of business.
I remembered 'Marmy's a fool,' and held my tongue judiciously.
It ran like a prospectus.
'I do not resemble her, I hope,' he persisted, with a look which I could almost describe as wistful.
He sat down by slow degrees, edging himself about till he was thoroughly comfortable.
Well, Higginson knows this young person's name; my sister wrote to me about her disgraceful conduct when she first went to Schlangenbad.
He took out his notes and a packet of letters, which he sorted slowly.
Yes, I know.
We'll buy a couple of typewriters.'
'They have no higher feelings. Though, mind you, there will be dividends too; mark my words, there will be dividends.
Elsie in league with Nihilists?
It seems to me--well--unchivalrous.'
I am drawing up my will, and if you will allow me to say so, I cannot admit that anyone has a claim to influence me in the disposition of my Property.'
Mere City men don't.
He laid down his hat and gloves again, so as to regard me more undistracted.
My hat?
He made no attempt at an excuse.
Could this mean that he was going to draw up a will, disinheriting Harold Tillington?
'Provided always that the said Harold Ashurst Tillington does not marry Lois Cayley; in which case I will and desire that the said estate shall pass to----whom shall I put in, Mr. Ashurst?'
'For ...
By dint of listening, I began to like him.
I will not sully your pen--I mean, your typewriter--by asking you to transcribe it.'
'Quite right,' he answered, approvingly.
He looked at me with such fatherly regard that it pricked my heart ever to have poked fun at his Interpretation of Prophecy on Stock Exchange principles.
I will only add that when Mr. Ashurst left, I copied the will out neatly, without erasures.
If you say nothing more against me to your employer, I will not disclose to him what I know about you.
'Shorthand?' I asked, sharply, for I wished to imitate official habits.
'A family likeness, perhaps,' I put in.
Let us give them a clear berth, these Kaiserly-Kingly blockheads!' So we registered our luggage right back to Lucerne, and cycled over the Gotthard.
'I have noticed it,' I answered, trembling with anxiety.
Your medical attendant considerately orders you at the same time to Florence.
They have no soul above shekels.
Ashurst,' I said, 'you may interpret prophecy as long as ever you like, but you are a dear kind old gentleman.
Elsie a conspirator?
Now, observe how beautifully all these events work in together!
The answer came back with commendable promptitude.
'Miss Petheridge undertakes the shorthand department,' I said, with decision.
'Your combined generosity and commercial instinct does you credit,' I answered.
I temporised.
Sun-and-star circling.
Georgina has no judgment.
Georgina is prejudiced.
The distinguished authors fail to stream in upon us as one imagined with manuscripts to copy.'
To my surprise, it was Higginson--in his guise as courier.
'They'll get over it,' I answered, grimly.
I assented, without committing myself.
'But perhaps you are engaged.
Therefore, what is the use of my stopping on here after October?
But, if Harold were poor-- I must keep my promise.
'A few surface unlikenesses only just mask an underlying identity.
I think I flushed crimson.
Excuse my change of plan. I will content myself with dictation.
She sighed her relief.
"Provided always the said Harold Ashurst Tillington consents to marry"-- I think that sounds better!'
'A most perspicacious young lady!' he interjected, well pleased.
We will now continue.
You seem to know everybody, and everything.
'Our enterprise is yet young.
The moment had arrived for Elsie to be firm.
DEAR MISS,--Your spirit of enterprise is really remarkable!
Dante and Petrarch appear to be dead.
An adventuress, it seems; an adventuress; quite a shocking creature.
You are a young lady of principle.' And he fidgeted more than ever.
'I know it,' I answered.
'Political reasons?' I exclaimed, nonplussed.
His guilelessness was beyond words.
'That's it,' he replied, lighting up.
'Yes, shorthand.
I say it deliberately--an idiot!
I saw he took my remark as a compliment.
His father frowned with natural distrust.
"Is it as well done as the one you tried to pass off on Brady?"
That belongs to my past life, the consequences of which I have not yet escaped, but I feel bound to state that you will not be the loser by this material proof of confidence in me, as I shall soon be in a position to repay all my debts, among which this will necessarily stand foremost."
I think I know what that something is.
Mr. Sutherland, who had turned over the document as his son approached, breathed more easily.
The look which Mr. Sutherland gave him was more inquiring than sympathetic.
I wish to get it away on that train."
"Nine hundred and fifty," answered the son.
But listen, Sutherland. Something has happened to you.
I want it so much that I ask you to make me a check for that amount to-night, conscious though I am that you have every right to deny me this request, and that my debt to you already passes the bound of presumption on my part and indulgence on yours.
"Father," he began without preamble or excuse, "I am in serious and immediate need of nine hundred and fifty dollars.
The flash, which had not yet subsided from the young man's face, ebbed slowly away as he encountered his father's eye.
"I will give it to you," said his father, and drew out his check-book. But he did not hasten to open it; his eyes still rested on his son.
Frederick took a step forward and laid his hand on his father's arm.
"It goes into other hands."
His energy--the energy of despair, no doubt seemed to make an impression on the other.
"Nine hundred and fifty?" inquired the father.
"If you oblige me."
"If this represents money, I am satisfied, and I begin to think it does.
The step on the walk had mounted to the front door.
"Father, I have my whole future in which to thank you," cried Frederick, seizing the check his father held out to him and making rapidly for the door.
The clock over the mantel had told off five of the precious moments.
"Yet you will run that risk?"
"The paper is good," answered Frederick, drawing him swiftly out of the house.
Wattles shrugged his shoulders.
"You have a right to distrust me, but you are on the wrong track, Wattles.
What I did once, I can never do again; and I hope I may live to prove myself a changed man.
"I mean to work," he murmured.
Frederick did not answer.
"Has Miss Page---"
"Now," murmured the young man.
"There is a train leaving soon.
"I will give it to you; but I should like to know what for."
"Your need has become strangely imperative," proceeded the other.
Then he rallied and eying Wattles firmly, said:
"It has my father's signature upon it."
What do you mean by that?"
"And you need this money for a start?" said he.
"You might as well proclaim yourself a forger outright, as to force your father to declare this to be his signature," he observed.
He was a magnificent-looking man and towered in that old colonial hall like a youthful giant.
To save yourself from being thought guilty of a big crime you are willing to incur suspicion of a small one.
Frederick bowed; he seemed to be losing the faculty of speech.
XIII
Taking up his pen, he dipped it in the ink. Frederick watched him with constantly whitening cheek.
"I wish you would confide in me," said he.
The hands of the clock pointed to a quarter to ten.
Wattles gave it a look, then slowly shook his head at Frederick.
As for that check, I will soon prove its value in your eyes.
"Why do you say you will soon be in a position to repay me?
I cannot tell you why I want it or for what.
"I mean to make a man of myself as soon as possible."
"Yes."
It's a wise move, my boy, but look out! No tricks with me or my friendship may not hold.
"Your father's signature?"
"I know it," said Frederick.
The hands of the clock were moving on.
In each face a sense of the humor of the situation fought with the consciousness of its dangers.
As soon as Montresor saw the little Duchess by the fire, he threw up his hands in relief.
As he came to the spot where Julie Le Breton stood, that lady made a sudden, impetuous movement towards him.
Montresor went up to her.
"I wished to see the Duchess--"
"Much obliged to you, Jacob.
This will cost me dear," said Lady Henry, her white lips twitching.
I have devoted myself to you and your interests, and you have trampled upon and tortured me.
Chairs were drawn up.
"There is really no need for any conversation between us, Miss Le Breton," said the familiar voice.
Perhaps to-morrow you will allow me a few last words?"
He sighed, and then quickly threw off his depression.
"Try not to give way.
The hour is late, and I am--as you see--indisposed.
"But they overdo everything.
Handsome, white-haired dreamer that he was, he had been looking into the fire, half--smiling, more occupied, in truth, with his own thoughts than with his companions.
The room you stand in"--she glanced significantly at the lights and the chairs--"gives you the lie.
Mr. Delafield, don't you think that would be best?...
Next week she will be scolding us all with double energy. Meanwhile, may we sit down, mademoiselle?
Julie felt herself physically wavering under the lash of these sentences.
Julie followed her.
"We have been dining with royalty." said Montresor.
"By all means," said that young man, after perhaps a moment's hesitation, and throwing off his coat.
"I beg your pardon," she said, hurriedly.
"Well, to tell the truth, I was," I admitted.
"Well," he said, with a smile, when I had told him their name, and explained the various circumstances, "I shrewdly suspect you've been tricked.
It was a puzzling paragraph, but I had already ceased to be astonished at any action on the part of these men, for the more I thought over their secrets, the more complicated they always appeared.
When, however, I called a week later and gave the usual four tugs at the bell, my summons remained unanswered.
I remained to supper, after which Prascovie threw a shawl about her shoulders and walked with me to the gate.
"Do they know his name?" she asked eagerly.
Bending down, I passed my hands rapidly over it.
If you publish the paragraph, I will see she does not get hold of a copy of the paper."
You will not object to wait, will you?"
I confess the communication puzzled me, for I knew no one living at the address, and the handwriting was unfamiliar.
"Does she know?"
Then I turned away, and the gate was locked behind me.
At the inquest duly held I attended and gave evidence.
I suppose I ought to introduce myself," she said, laughing.
She struck a vesta and lit hers quite naturally.
Step this way, sir, if you please," she exclaimed, when she had examined the letter by the feeble light shed by a neighbouring street lamp.
And he laughed heartily, enjoying a joke that I confess I was unable to appreciate.
A glance sufficed to ascertain that he was beyond human aid, and after a moment's hesitation, I started off in search of a constable.
He had grey eyes, fair hair and beard, and from his dress I judged that he belonged to the upper class. The heavy overcoat he wore was unbuttoned, and a silk muffler was wrapped lightly around his throat.
I told her, and an exclamation of relief involuntarily escaped her. This did not strike me as peculiar at the time, but I recollected the incident afterwards, and was much puzzled at its significance.
The inquest was held to-day.
This did not surprise me, for I sometimes received mysterious unsigned notes from my friends the refugees when they desired to see me.
With some little difficulty I found the house.
It stood back from the road, concealed behind a high wall.
"I have to thank you for coming here to-night, sir; but the matter about which I desired to see you is one of urgency.
"What do you mean?
All the light had left her face, and with her chin resting upon her breast she gazed down in thoughtful silence upon the rosettes on her little morocco slippers.
"Ah, I forgot!
The thoroughfare was very inadequately lit; indeed, so dark was it that I was unable to distinguish the nature of the obstacle.
We smoked several cigarettes, and, after remaining an hour, I bade her adieu and departed, half bewitched by her grace and beauty.
Important."
Then our conversation turned upon other topics.
"No, no," he exclaimed quickly.
Promise to keep the matter strictly secret.
In a few moments the door opened, and a very pretty young Russian lady of about twenty-three years of age came forward to meet me.
The words, written in a fine educated hand,--evidently a woman's,--were: "Come to Springfield Lodge, St. Margaret's Road, Regent's Park, to-night at nine.
"You see, we are strangers."
In a moment, however, she had recovered herself, and sank into an armchair in a grave, dejected attitude.
Prascovie rose quickly and introduced him.
To this the man addressed replied in a cheery tone, the front door slammed, and my host returned into the room.
I was not long in finding one, and we returned to where the body lay. Other assistance was quickly forthcoming, and, a doctor residing in the neighbourhood having made an examination and pronounced life extinct, the remains were conveyed to the mortuary.
I tore the envelope open and read its contents.
"Were you surprised at my curt note?" she asked suddenly, blowing a cloud of smoke from her pursed-up lips.
I noticed her face wore an expression of intense anxiety and that the colour had fled from her cheeks.
"I'm aware of that," he replied, smiling mysteriously.
Owing to the lateness of the hour and the quietness of the neighbourhood, there was no crowd of curious onlookers, nor was there anything to create horror, for no marks of violence could be discovered on the body.
"Poor fellow!" she sighed sympathetically.
Even if an unwelcome visitor had called, I could see no reason why such a strange effect should be produced.
"Good-evening," she said, smiling.
For a moment she sat in an attentive attitude.
Nevertheless, I resolved to obey the summons.
A few moments later I distinguished the voice of the servant answering her master, and after some further conversation a man exclaimed--
He was dead!
In her brown hair was a handsome crescent of diamonds, and her evening dress of soft black net disclosed her white chest and arms.
"My father will be here in a few minutes.
"You've not been very long over your business," she remarked, glancing at me with a smile.
"You are not one of Us, otherwise I could tell you the reason."
"If it is in my power, I shall be most happy," I replied.
Of course, I was compelled to refuse to satisfy her curiosity, and at my request she returned to the instrument and commenced another song.
The thoroughfare was very quiet and eminently respectable.
I know no one by the name of Souvaroff.
I have heard from Grigorovitch and others how you have assisted us in London and in Petersburg, and I thought it probable you would render me a small personal service."
I told her my name, and showed her the note I had received.
Your daughter was here, alive and well, a few moments ago!"
"Died?" I repeated, in surprise.
"Don't tell her.
The night was bright and frosty, and there was no sound save the echo of my own footsteps.
It was a rude awakening.
'Provided always----' he went on, in the same voice.
'Don't you see?
He looked at me and paused.
I have said as much to him.'
I affected an air of confidence--for I had sunk capital in the concern (that's business-like--sunk capital!). 'Oh, we're a new firm,' I assented, carelessly.
Its verbiage wearied me.
What?
We reposed on our laurels--in vain.
I admit all that.
He would telegraph particulars on Monday morning.
'I am the typewriting from dictation.
I don't recollect it at this moment, but Higginson, no doubt, will be able to supply the deficiency.
'I am an automaton--nothing more.
'And you were sent for the jewel-case,' I retorted.
We have a fair sum in hand to the credit of the firm; we can pick up some more, I suppose, in Florence.'
I nodded.
I was glad she had something to do; the sense of dependence weighed heavily upon her.
They see nothing above percentages.'
'It would seem to follow.'
There was a fussiness about his manner which seemed strangely familiar to me.
'Never,' I answered; 'while he is rich.
It occurred to me that Mr. Hitchcock, who was a man of business, might be able to help a woman of business in this delicate matter.
Elsie saved the situation by bursting in abruptly.
A very proper spirit!'
It is a typewriter's function to transcribe the words a client dictates as if they were absolutely meaningless to her.'
The ancient mountains are clearly the Rockies; can the everlasting hills be anything but the Himalayas?
He was a punctilious millionaire.
'Not at all,' I answered.
Pardon my reminding you that you are here in your capacity as my amanuensis.
I regret to be obliged to confess it, but cleverness, I fear, is the only thing in the world my excellent sister cares for.
But the likeness in my case, I must admit, escapes me.'
Clara is Glasgow and South-Western Deferred Stock.
'You are a most remarkable young lady,' he said, in a very slow voice.
But, perhaps in this suggestion I am not sufficiently high-toned.--Respectfully, CYRUS W. HITCHCOCK.
'Our fellow-creatures, as usual,' I answered, with prompt callousness. 'I object to these base utilitarian considerations being imported into the discussion of a serious question.
Only, if I may venture to say so, there should be no erasures.'
Unlike Lady Georgina, who was tart and crisp, Mr. Marmaduke Ashurst was devout and decorous; where she said 'pack of fools,' he talked with unction of 'the mental deficiencies of our poorer brethren.' But his religious opinions and his stockbroking had got strangely mixed up at the wash somehow.
'How?'
'Mr.
'Not at all,' I answered, consulting an imaginary engagement list.
I go to Florence; you go with me.'
'Elsie,' I cried, clapping my hand to my head, 'you are not practical.
It was a curious communication.
I made up my mind at once.
Oh, how true!
'Oh, dear, yes.'
He has come back to me, I am glad to say.
'If I may venture to ask them.'
'That is true.
He regarded me once more with the same astonished glance.
'You dog me!'
We exist, to supply it.
I reflected.
'A real benefactor, Miss Cayley; a real benefactor to the link-wearing classes; for he has sensibly diminished the average annual output of profane swearing.'
'No; will you?
'I will be even with you yet,' he snapped out.
The Urbane Old Gentleman began with immense deliberation, as befits a man of principle when Property is at stake.
He looked as if he had just landed from the Eighteenth Century.
All philosophies and all religions agree that money is mere dross, filthy lucre.
Yes, thank you.
At the end of the hour, the Urbane Old Gentleman rose urbanely.
The old gentleman, after a moment's hesitation, lifted the latch of the door somewhat nervously.
He leant forward with his fat hands on his ample knees.
'Now, you are a thinker of exceptional penetration,' he broke out.
Very good.
Say boldly, "I write shorthand." Leave the world to ask, "How fast?"
'As fast as you choose to dictate to me.'
When he left Five Hundred Pounds to his faithful servant Frederic Higginson, courier, I was tempted to interpose; but I refrained in time, and I was glad of it afterwards.
My heart stood divided two ways within me.
I gazed at her in despair.
'There is no use in denying the truth.
'There's one good thing about Florence, Elsie,' I said, just to keep up her courage.
I wondered what was coming.
'I rejoice to hear it.
But Elsie couldn't bear him. She hated the fat crease at the back of his neck, she told me.
'Can I do anything for you?' I inquired, in the smartest tone of business. (I observe that politeness is not professional.)
Argal, it would be unnatural to pay for a typewriter.
'It is rare to find so much love for an abstract study side by side with such conspicuous financial ability.'
As soon as he was gone, Elsie turned to me.
The Urbane Old Gentleman looked about him for a seat.
We will hire a room in Florence (on tick, of course), and begin operations.
But I trembled in my shoes.
My mission in life is to correct that want in your spiritual nature.
In point of fact," he dropped his voice to a whisper.
I did not wish to ruin his prospects.'
Mr. Tillington did ask me to be his wife, and I refused him.'
"An inheritance?"
Day by day, hour by hour,--take note of my words,--I will predict what he will do.
"Yes, a king who amuses himself, it is true, but who has had a sword in his hand, and can appreciate useful men.
"My dear Monsieur d'Artagnan!"
"No, I did not know that."
"Can you quit your detachment?"
"Athos!
"Indeed!"
"Who?
"I was not mistaken!" cried Raoul, turning his horse towards him.
"Exactly so.
"And Henry III. had always the stomach-ache?"
"Pardieu!"
"Yes; don't you like this quarter?"
That, my dear friend, costs even more than play.
yes, your father is a brave man, a Caesar, it is true--but a man without perception."
"What, do you come from Vincennes?" said he.
"A royal hand, Monsieur d'Artagnan."
That is either a false name or a real name; if true, he is a canon; if false, he is some unknown; but of what consequence is it to me?
"Yes, monsieur."
The cardinal being dead, he will fret; very well, that is the least silly thing he will do, particularly if he does not shed a tear."
"And next?"
"Oh! do not say that."
"This is the whole history.
"Well, never want, my boy!
"Indeed!"
Planchet was out, but the dinner was ready.
"Ah!" said Raoul.
he always pays in advance.
I know something of the Spaniards of the house of Austria."
"Most willingly, Monsieur d'Artagnan."
"Yes, monsieur le chevalier."
"Then you are rich?"
"I prefer coming back on foot with you."
"Thank you!
Do you know anything of history, Raoul?"
D'Artagnan returned to the subject of Raoul's future.
"Yes."
"Receive my sincere congratulation."
"So much the worse! so much the worse! for a new king always seeks to get good men in his employment."
"Do you know, then, that Francis II. had always the earache?"
She is a Spaniard, you see,--this queen of ours; and she has, for mother-in-law, Madame Anne of Austria.
"Yes, indeed."
Listen, Raoul.
D'Artagnan caught Raoul's look of astonishment.
"I?
"And a good one, too."
Not a man, not a tag, not a horse's hoof escaped his inspection.
"Pardieu! you are right.
Why, it is not habitable."
It is true you have, fortunately, other protectors."
"And the cardinal?"
In what can an intendant, that is to say my subordinate, my clerk, give me umbrage or injure me, even if he is Monsieur Colbert?"
"But--"
"This: that Monsieur Colbert hates you."
Hates me! why all the world hates me, he, of course, as others do."
"Really?" said the marquise, in a melancholy tone.
"And obtained his end; look at that."
"Do you mean to say he has the presumption to pass from intendant to superintendent?"
"Yes," murmured la marquise.
Devotion is but a virtue, love is a passion."
"Ah, then, you do not love me?
"Yes."
And I, to keep you waiting!"
"She was my convent friend."
"What! for me, of my love!
"Certainly."
Colbert, little Colbert."
"Exactly."
When there, he touched another spring, which opened, not a board, but a block of the wall, and he went out by that opening, leaving the door to shut of itself.
"Yes, yes."
The strokes continued.
Poor woman, she vastly deceives herself."
"You are mistaken--without hope it is true, but not without return."
Colbert,' she added, 'came to me two hours ago, to inform me he was appointed intendant.'"
"So, Colbert, in your opinion, is in a fair way of bargaining for my place of superintendent.
Nothing distinguished that one from the others.
Is this the way you always treat the poor creatures you desert?"
I ask but this: let me be remembered in coming ages, and add those years to my fame which you have reft from my life.
But Pomona was also regarded as presiding over other fruits, and as such is invoked by Thomson:
The servants opened the door and found him dead, and with exclamations of pity raised him and carried him home to his mother, for his father was not living.
Why will you not take a lesson from the tree and the vine, and consent to unite yourself with some one?
But NOW he cares nothing for fruits nor flowers, nor anything else, but only yourself.
She took care, too, that her favorites should not suffer from drought, and led streams of water by them, that the thirsty roots might drink.
One day he came in the guise of an old woman, her gray hair surmounted with a cap, and a staff in her hand.
"But," said she, "if the tree stood alone, and had no vine clinging to it, it would have nothing to attract or offer us but its useless leaves.
O how often, in the disguise of a reaper, did he bring her corn in a basket, and looked the very image of a reaper!
Now he bore a pruning-hook, and personated a vine-dresser; and again, with a ladder on his shoulder, he seemed as if he was going to gather apples.
The Fauns and Satyrs would have given all they possessed to win her, and so would old Sylvanus, who looks young for his years, and Pan, who wears a garland of pine leaves around his head.
I die; stony heart, rejoice!
It appeared to her like the sun bursting through a cloud. He would have renewed his entreaties, but there was no need; his arguments and the sight of his true form prevailed, and the Nymph no longer resisted, but owned a mutual flame.
Sometimes he trudged along as a discharged soldier, and again he bore a fishing-rod, as if going to fish.
"It does you credit, my dear," she said, and kissed her, not exactly with an old woman's kiss.
Yet, O ye gods, who look down on mortal woes, observe my fate!
Endeavoring to step back, she found she could not move her feet; trying to turn away her face, she tried in vain; and by degrees all her limbs became stony like her heart.
But Vertumnus loved her best of all; yet he sped no better than the rest.
She received the dead body of her son, and folded the cold form to her bosom, while she poured forth the sad words which bereaved mothers utter.
Pomona was the especial patroness of the Apple-orchard, and as such she was invoked by Phillips, the author of a poem on Cider, in blank verse.
She was not without fear of the country people, and kept her orchard locked, and allowed not men to enter.
Opposite was an elm entwined with a vine loaded with swelling grapes.
Sometimes he committed his vows to written tablets, and often hung at her door garlands which he had moistened with his tears.
She was deafer than the surges which rise in the November gale; harder than steel from the German forges, or a rock that still clings to its native cliff. She mocked and laughed at him, adding cruel words to her ungentle treatment, and gave not the slightest gleam of hope.
"Bear me, Pomona, to thy citron groves, To where the lemon and the piercing lime, With the deep orange, glowing through the green, Their lighter glories blend.
Her right hand bore for its weapon not a javelin, but a pruning-knife.
When Vertumnus had spoken thus, he dropped the disguise of an old woman, and stood before her in his proper person, as a comely youth.
And then he tried to win her domestics to his side.
He stretched himself on her threshold, and uttered his complaints to the cruel bolts and bars.
He struggled long with his passion, but when he found he could not subdue it, he came a suppliant to her mansion.
As he fell he struck against the gate, and the sound was as the sound of a groan.
I will come myself, and you shall see me die, and feast your eyes on the spectacle.
Now think of these things, my dear, and lay aside your scorn and your delays, and accept a lover.
She praised the tree and its associated vine, equally.
But if you are prudent and want to make a good alliance, and will let an old woman advise you,--who loves you better than you have any idea of,--dismiss all the rest and accept Vertumnus, on my recommendation.
Nor is he like too many of the lovers nowadays, who love any one they happen to see; he loves you, and you only.
In this way he gained admission to her again and again, and fed his passion with the sight of her.
Thomson in the "Seasons" alludes to him:
Nor will I leave it to rumor to tell you of my death.
She entered the garden and admired the fruit.
Sing songs of joy, and bind your forehead with laurel,--you have conquered!
The mournful funeral passed through the town, and the pale corpse was borne on a bier to the place of the funeral pile.
First he told his passion to her nurse, and begged her as she loved her foster-child to favor his suit.
The Hamadryads were Wood-nymphs.
To prove this, let me tell you a story, which is well known in Cyprus to be a fact; and I hope it will have the effect to make you more merciful.
This at least I can do to gratify you and force you to praise me; and thus shall I prove that the love of you left me but with life.
So may neither the vernal frosts blight your young fruits, nor furious winds scatter your blossoms!"
He is not a wandering deity, but belongs to these mountains.
That you may not doubt the fact, the statue still remains, and stands in the temple of Venus at Salamis, in the exact form of the lady.
This occupation was her pursuit, her passion; and she was free from that which Venus inspires.
"Phillips, Pomona's bard, the second thou Who nobly durst, in rhyme-unfettered verse, With British freedom, sing the British song."
Sometimes he would have an ox-goad in his hand, and you would have said he had just unyoked his weary oxen.
Take pity on him, and fancy him speaking now with my mouth.
Enjoy your triumph!
Thus he said, and, turning his pale face and weeping eyes towards her mansion, he fastened a rope to the gatepost, on which he had often hung garlands, and putting his head into the noose, he murmured, 'This garland at least will please you, cruel girl!' and falling hung suspended with his neck broken.
With a hay band tied round him, one would think he had just come from turning over the grass.
And equally the vine, if it were not twined round the elm, would lie prostrate on the ground.
Even while you spurn them, they court you,--rural deities and others of every kind that frequent these mountains.
I wish you would. Helen herself had not more numerous suitors, nor Penelope, the wife of shrewd Ulysses.
If I may ne'er behold again That form and face so dear to me, Nor hear thy voice, still would I fain Preserve, for aye, their memory.
The air was simple, sweet, and sad.
'Are you sure it is nothing to me?' he returned; 'can you swear that you were not thinking of me while you wept?' This was unendurable.
That voice, the magic of whose tone Can wake an echo in my breast, Creating feelings that, alone, Can make my tranced spirit blest.
I was exerting myself to sing and play for the amusement, and at the request, of my aunt and Milicent, before the gentlemen came into the drawing-room (Miss Wilmot never likes to waste her musical efforts on ladies' ears alone).
That means yes.
'But you don't, Helen--say you love me, and I'll go.'
Twenty Second: Night.--What have I done? and what will be the end of it? I cannot calmly reflect upon it; I cannot sleep.
If it is true that you told him you could not accept his offer without our consent--'
Come! the piano's vacant.'
So let me implore you not to condemn me to eternal wretchedness: if you favour my cause, I am safe; for Mr. Maxwell, I am certain, can refuse you nothing.'
Don't be too severe upon me.
'Then you must plead for me, Helen,' said he, and at length withdrew.
'You're excessively impertinent, Mr. Huntingdon!'
Farewell to thee! but not farewell To all my fondest thoughts of thee: Within my heart they still shall dwell; And they shall cheer and comfort me.
'You had better retire to your room, Helen,' said my aunt, gravely.
The time and the manner of his asking her appeared like a gratuitous insult to me; and I could have wept with pure vexation.
'But meantime,' pleaded he, 'let me commend my cause to your most indulgent--'
'It is a subject that demands mature and serious deliberation.
'Now, Miss Wilmot, won't you give us some music to-night?' said he.
Tears rose unbidden to my eyes, and I buried my face in the sofa-pillow that they might flow unseen while I listened.
CHAPTER XIX
So tell me, Helen.'
'I will, this instant,--if you'll only say you love me.'
'Go then!' I cried; but, fearing he would obey too well, and never come again, I hastily added--'Or say what you have to say, and have done with it!'
At present, you had better return to the drawing-room.'
'My dear, I am not angry,' she replied: 'I am surprised.
'Indeed, sir--'
Milicent had asked for a little Scotch song, and I was just in the middle of it when they entered. The first thing Mr. Huntingdon did was to walk up to Annabella.
It was, for I had quitted it immediately upon hearing his petition.
He wore sandals and leggings of red morocco leather.
Those of Greece and Rome are not so bloodthirsty, and yet Mars gives as many victories to the Roman arms as Moloch does to ours."
Silent and taciturn, scarce a word was to be heard among them as they stood awaiting the orders to embark; they were there unwillingly, and their hearts were far away in the distant desert, but none the less would they be willing to fight when the time came.
"Why, cousin Malchus," he said, "though it is but a year since I was in Carthage, I should scarce have known you, so much have you grown.
A small space was still kept clear on the wharf by whose side the admiral's ship was lying, and here was gathered a throng of the aristocracy of the city to see the last of their sons and relatives of the guard.
Some idea of the richness of these mines may be formed by the fact that one mine, which Hannibal had inherited from his father, brought in to him a revenue of nearly a thousand pounds a day; and this was but one of his various sources of wealth.
"The barbarian tribes would cease to revolt, knowing that success would be hopeless.
"I have brought a recruit," Giscon said, "one whom all of you know by repute if not personally; it is Malchus, the son of General Hamilcar.
They looked up in surprise as Giscon entered followed by his companion.
The work of embarkation at once commenced.
The council thus opened was continued for three hours.
I have eight men sworn into my section among the weavers, and need but two more to complete it.
His morals were irreproachable.
As Giscon was the leading spirit of the band his recommendation was taken as amply sufficient.
Knocking in a particular way it was opened at once and closed behind them.
A large mantle of purple embroidered with gold hung from his shoulders.
We have not yet settled whether it will be better to separate when this is done, content with the first blow against our tyrants, or to prepare beforehand for a popular rising, to place ourselves at the head of the populace, and to make a clean sweep of the judges and the leaders of Hanno's party."
"These agents of ours, you see, Malchus, are not for the most part animated by any feeling of pure patriotism, it is their own wrongs and not the injuries of Carthage which they would avenge.
Thus the hill, which was of considerable extent, rugged and precipitous, was isolated, and could only be attacked by sea.
"No," Malchus said with a shudder.
His nose was long and straight, forming, with the forehead, a perfect profile.
As to the desperate work on which they were to be engaged--for it was whispered that Hannibal had in preparation some mighty enterprise--it troubled them not at all, nor the thought that many of them might never look on Carthage again.
Short as was the time which had elapsed since the foundation of that city, its aspect was already imposing and extensive.
Among those now in council opinions were nearly equally divided.
And now that this business is arranged we can go on with our talk; but first let us have some wine, for all this talking is thirsty work at best."
But this will not always be so.
And as we should be strong at home we should be respected abroad, and might view without apprehension the rising power of Rome. There is plenty of room for both of us.
These were principally Libyan footmen.
The houses of Hanno and thirty of his party will be attacked, and the tyrants slain before any alarm can be given.
I cannot believe, Giscon, that the gods are so cruel.
The young men discussed it earnestly, indeed, but in the same spirit in which they would have agreed over a disputed question as to the respective merits of two horses.
Malchus has told me that an old fisherman, who took a lead in stirring up his fellows to declare for Hannibal, has been decoyed away from his home and murdered; his body has been found floating in the lake, strangled.
When he ate it would be sitting on horseback, or as he walked about seeing to the needs of the soldiers.
The arrangements for the comfort of the troops at sea were simple and primitive.
Here, on wide flat stones, they cooked their meals, whiled away the day by games of chance, and slept at night on skins or thick rugs.
After all who wished to speak on the subject had given their opinions, they proceeded to details; each gave a statement of the number of men enrolled in his section, with a few words as to the disposition of each. Almost without an exception each of these men was animated with a sense of private wrong.
He was one who, even at first sight, won all hearts by his lofty and noble expression, by the kindness and sincerity which his face expressed.
The offensive arms were a sword, a lance, and a bow with arrows.
But we must take them as we find them; one cannot expect any deep feeling of patriotism on the part of the masses, who, it must be owned, have no very great reason to feel any lively interest in the glories of the republic.
On a bold hill at the head of the harbour stood the town.
Even Giscon, generally grave and gloomy, was as light hearted as the rest.
All were stated to be ready to give their lives for vengeance.
You cannot begin too early to accustom yourself to war."
CHAPTER V: THE CONSPIRACY
On the crest, rising from an ornament enriched with pearls, was a large plume of feathers, sometimes red and sometimes white.
Fortunately for Malchus, a few days later orders were given for the instant embarkation of a portion of the reinforcements destined for Hannibal.
He loves his country and hates her tyrants.
"Then there was the slaughter of a score of captives taken in war.
The sea, the ships, the mighty city, the gathered crowd, all excited their astonishment, and their white teeth glistened as they chatted incessantly with a very babel of laughter and noise.
Tell them, for example, that though I fear not for myself, I thought that, being the son of Hamilcar, I had no right to involve his name and family in such an enterprise, unless by his orders."
Why should the gods of Phoenicia and Carthage alone demand blood?
He conceived and carried it out from his own resources, without interference and almost without any assistance from Carthage.
The affairs of state, the government of the country, the making of the laws, must be solely in the hands of those fitted for the task--of the men who, by education, by birth, by position, by study and by leisure have prepared their minds for such a charge.
It was a war waged by a single man against a mighty power, and as such there is, with the exception of the case of Wallenstein, nothing to resemble it in the history of the world.
The face of the shield was ornamented with subjects taken from the history of Carthage in relief.
In the midst of the greatest trials and dangers he preserved his cheerfulness, and had ever an encouraging word for his soldiers.
A large quantity of shipping already lay there, for the trade of Carthagena with the mother city and with the ports of Spain, Africa, and the East already rivaled that of Carthage.
When we have succeeded in ridding Carthage of her tyrants we must next do all we can so to raise the condition of the common people that they may feel that they too have a common interest in the fate of our country.
The whole space below was occupied by cargo or horses.
It was to them that the soldiers looked for their pay, as well as for promotion and rewards for valour, and they were able, therefore, to carry out the plans which their genius suggested untrammelled by orders from Carthage.
No good fortune can be expected to attend our efforts unless we have the help of the gods."
In their hearts perhaps some of them, like Malchus, were thinking sadly of the partings they had just gone through with those they loved, but no signs of such thoughts were apparent in their faces or conversation.
Vast as were the expenses of these establishments, the revenues of Iberia were amply sufficient not only to defray all the cost of occupation, but to transmit large sums to Carthage.
But it was only on special occasions that Hannibal was thus magnificently clad.
They would say that Malchus would never have joined in such a plot had he not known that it had the approval of his father, and that he was in fact but the representative of his family in the design for overthrowing the constitution of the republic.
I can guarantee that he will do nothing imprudent, but can be trusted as one of ourselves.
You have my oath that I will say nought of anything that I have heard.
He seldom touched wine.
As he spoke he drew aside some heavy curtains and entered a large room. Some ten or twelve young men were assembled there.
Then they crossed and cruised along until they arrived at Carthagena.
The sooner we strike the better.
"I don't think I am a coward, Giscon, but these terrible rites frighten me.
"Thank you, my adored Valentine, thank you; that is enough.
I have but one promise and but one heart to give; that promise is pledged to you, that heart is also yours.
Valentine trembled convulsively; she loosened her hold of the gate, her arms fell by her side, and two large tears rolled down her cheeks.
"It is not for me to say."
If we were surprised, if it were known that we met thus, we should have no further resource."
"I will tell you all," said Valentine; "from you I have nothing to conceal.
"We will wait, then," said Morrel.
As soon as we are married, he shall come and live with us, instead of one child, he shall have two.
Oh, if you refuse my advice"--
"Yes."
"I know him."
"Maximilian!" said Valentine, "Maximilian, come back, I entreat you!" He drew near with his sweet smile, and but for his paleness one might have thought him in his usual happy mood.
"No," said Maximilian, "you shall not leave him.
The sentence is passed, and, in a few hours, will be executed; it must be so, and I will not endeavor to prevent it.
"Poor Maximilian!" murmured Valentine.
The young man stood before her, sorrowful and resolute.
And remember my life depends on your answer.
"Truly," murmured Valentine, "who on this earth cares for me, if he does not?
But to grieve my father--to disturb my grandmother's last moments--never!"
Morrel went also to the notary, who confirmed the news that the contract was to be signed that evening.
"I must know what you mean to do!" said she.
"Do you seriously ask my advice, Valentine?"
"Valentine, the time has arrived when you must answer me.
Morrel listened to catch the last sound of her dress brushing the branches, and of her footstep on the gravel, then raised his eyes with an ineffable smile of thankfulness to heaven for being permitted to be thus loved, and then also disappeared. The young man returned home and waited all the evening and all the next day without getting any message.
"I am the only guilty person, am I not?" said Maximilian.
I imitate neither Manfred nor Anthony; but without words, protestations, or vows, my life has entwined itself with yours; you leave me, and you are right in doing so,--I repeat it, you are right; but in losing you, I lose my life.
My sister is happily married; her husband is only my brother-in-law, that is, a man whom the ties of social life alone attach to me; no one then longer needs my useless life.
Monte Cristo was more affectionate than ever,--indeed, his manner was so kind that several times Morrel was on the point of telling him all.
On him, on him, always on him! Yes, you are right, Maximilian, I will follow you.
"You are wrong; you must advise me what to do."
How ought she really to be supremely loved!
What would you do, tell me, if your sister listened to such a proposition?"
"On whom, then!--on me?"
"Thanks, thanks, dear love, adieu!"
The young man read Valentine's letter twenty times in the course of the day.
How great is the power of a woman who has made so courageous a resolution!
"Oh, fear not," said Maximilian, stopping at a short distance, "I do not intend to render another man responsible for the rigorous fate reserved for me.
It was to this effect:--
P.S.--My poor grandmother gets worse and worse; yesterday her fever amounted to delirium; to-day her delirium is almost madness.
Heaven is as inflexible as man, and the signature of the contract is fixed for this evening at nine o'clock.
I swear to make you my lawful wife before my lips even shall have approached your forehead."
She becomes at once a queen and a wife, and it is impossible to thank and love her sufficiently.
"Valentine," said he, "dear Valentine, you must not speak thus--rather let me die.
I think only that I have known you not a whole year.
Impossible!" Morrel started.
"No, on my honor," said Maximilian; "but that will not affect you.
No, no; I shall need all my strength to struggle with myself and support my grief in secret, as you say.
What do you intend doing?" Valentine held down her head; she was overwhelmed.
"Then you have my promise, Maximilian."
"You are right, Valentine; but how shall I ascertain?"
What?
"I was at the house of Monte Cristo an hour since," said Morrel; "we were speaking, he of the sorrow your family had experienced, and I of your grief, when a carriage rolled into the court-yard.
Not merely were his own subjects beginning to long for him and to pray in secret for the king, but continental monarchs who maintained spies in England began to know of this.
Many of them were fortunate enough.
If we consider those monarchs who have in some curious way touched the popular fancy without reference to their virtues we must go back to Richard of the Lion Heart, who saw but little of England, yet was the best essentially English king, and to Henry V., gallant soldier and conqueror of France.
Of all the women who surrounded Charles there was only one who cared anything for him or for England.
England had not been called "Merry England" for nothing; and Cromwell's tyranny was likely to be far more resented than the heavy hand of one who was born a king. So Charles at Paris and Liege, though he had little money at the time, managed to maintain a royal court, such as it was.
Here there came out another side of his nature.
Of course, a child so very young could be of no value as a leader, though his presence might prove an inspiration.
The royal girl came to him fresh from the cloisters of her convent.
"Dismiss your women and attend to the proper business of a king."
Now, as it were, he allowed a certain sensuous, pleasure-loving ease to envelop him.
She knew nothing of the world.
She never again reproached him.
Charles was then only a child of twelve, and so his followers did wisely in hurrying him out of England, through the Scilly isles and Jersey to his mother's place of exile.
When it came time to pay the reckoning the king found that he had no money, nor had his friend.
A very wise woman--the Queen Regent of Portugal--was the first to act on this information.
She was a quaint and rather piteous little figure, she who was destined to be the wife of the Merry Monarch.
She had lived the life of the Coal Yard, and, like Zola's Nana, she could never remember the time when she had known the meaning of chastity.
He took money from the King of France to make war against the Dutch, who had befriended him.
One day she found him lolling in an arm-chair and complaining that the people were not satisfied.
She became the mother of the Duke of Lenox, and she was feared and hated by the English more than any other of his mistresses.
She was not particularly beautiful, and when she spoke as others did she was rather tiresome; but her pertness and the inexperience of the king when he went into exile made her seem attractive.
Here was the earliest home of Eleanor Gwyn, and out of this den of iniquity she came at night to sell oranges at the entrance to the theaters.
His severest counselor, Lord Clarendon, sent him a remonstrance.
A year or two before, she had never dreamed that life contained such things as these; but now it seemed to contain nothing else.
The impetuous yet far-seeing Henry II., with the other two great warriors, Edward I. and Edward III., and William of Orange, did most for the foundation and development of England's constitutional law.
When the head of Charles rolled from the velvet-covered block his son showed himself to be no loiterer or lover of an easy life.
Many monarchs have had just a few popular traits, and these have stood out brilliantly against the darkness of the background.
He knew that time would fight for him far more surely than infantry and horse.
Hermia and Helena compare notes and wonder at the perversity of their respective lovers.
Theseus replies:
He says:
Puck, the mischievous Robin Goodfellow, who is ever playing pranks among his fairy tribe and human lovers, enters the forest scene and addresses one of the fairies thus:
Theseus:
One evening while seated at the Falcon Tavern, in company with the Earl of Southampton, Essex, Florio, Bacon, Cecil, Warwick, Burbage, Drayton and Jonson, William read the main points of the play, which was lauded to the skies by all present.
Pyramus and Thisby commit suicide, for disappointment in love, in the climax scene, and waking again Bottom wishes to know if the Duke wants any more of the burlesque play.
Pyramus appeals to the moon thus:
And Theseus says:
Puck returns with the flower containing the juice that will make wanton women and licentious men return to their just lovers.
Puck, the funny tattler, tells of the jealousy of King Oberon, because Titania has adopted a lovely boy:
Lysander pleaded his own case for the heart of Hermia, and sighing, says:
Theseus and his train wander through the woods in preparation for the grand hunt and find Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia and Helena still asleep under the magic influence of Puck.
Oberon finds his queen sleeping and squeezes some of the love juice on her eyelids, saying:
Puck replies:
Egeus, a wealthy Athenian complains to Duke Theseus that his daughter Hermia will not consent to marry Demetrius, but disobedient, insists on wedding with Lysander.
The characters Pyramus and Thisbe were played by Peele and Crosse.
The infatuated Helena follows Demetrius into the dark forest, and though he tells her that he does not and cannot love her, she says:
Bottom says:
Oberon relents and releases his Fairy Queen from her dream of infatuation with Bottom disguised as an ass, and says:
Hermia still sighing for Lysander says:
A number of rude workingmen of Athens propose to give an impromptu play in the Duke's palace in honor of his wedding.
Puck replies:
Tributes to the powerful, though undeserved, are received with spontaneous applause, while just praise for the poor receive no echo from the jealous throng.
Titania awakes and exclaims:
The story of Palamon and Arcite by Chaucer, and the love of Athenian Theseus for the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta, as told by Plutarch, gave William his first idea of composing a play where the acts of fairies and human beings would assimilate in their loves and jealousies.
Theseus speaking of the strange conduct of lovers, delivers this great bit of philosophy:
Puck finds the lovers asleep, and says to Lysander:
Oberon:
Hermia says:
As the play proceeds Hippolyta remarks:
Puck leading, says:
I have seen fool women and fool men act just that way, and the more they were spurned, the more they clung to their infatuation.
Hippolyta:
After the departure of Queen Titania and her fairy train, King Oberon calls in Puck to aid in punishing her imagined infidelity.
The lovers are reconciled to their natural choice, and Theseus decides against the father:
Unanimous cheers rang through Windsor forest at the conclusion of this mystic play, and Queen Elizabeth called up Theseus (William), Hippolyta, Oberon, Titania and Puck, presenting to each a five-carat solitaire diamond--a slight token of Her Majesty's appreciation of dramatic genius.
Oberon orders:
Oberon grasping the herb says:
Egeus:
Bottom wakes and tells his theatrical partners:
Then mischievous little Puck flies to the front, makes his final bow and speech, concluding the play of "Midsummer Night's Dream":
Helena soliloquizes regarding the inconsistency of Demetrius since he saw Hermia:
Theseus reasons with Hermia thus:
The forest scene is filled with fairies, led by Puck, Oberon and Titania, all fantastically dressed, rehearsing and singing in their mystic revels.
Pyramus and Thisby are the prince and princess, who die for love.
The play of Pyramus and Thisby is then introduced to the palace audience, when Bottom and his Athenian mechanics amuse Theseus and Hippolyta with their crude, rustic conception of love-making.
Oberon continues:
Puck finds Bottom in the woods, rehearsing the play for the marriage of Theseus, and translates the weaver into an ass, with a desire for love.
Oberon accuses Titania with being in love with Theseus and assisting him in the ravishment of antique beauties.
It is a burlesque on all plays, and being so very crude and bad, is good by contrast!
She hears him sing, and opening her eyes, says:
This sentiment was cheered heartily by the great forest audience, and "Queen Bess" led the applause!
Fairy says:
He says:
Titania enters with her fairy train and orders them to sing her to sleep, and be gone.
Burbage, the manager of the Globe, suggested to Essex and Southampton that it would be a grand idea to have the "Dream" enacted in the park and woods of Windsor!
Essex and Southampton were, unfortunately, absent in Ireland putting down a rebellion.
Titania speaks:
Titania:
She replies:
And Helena says:
Theseus wonders how the lovers came to the wood, and says to the father of Hermia:
Candles, torches, chimes, lanterns and stationary fire balloons were interspersed through the royal domain in brilliant profusion.
Then all the fairies, joining hands at the command of Oberon, dance and sing:
The amphitheater grove in front of Windsor Castle, overlooking the Thames, was the place selected for the exhibition of the "Dream." Natural circular terraces for the spectators.
The night was calm, bright and warm, while the young moon and twinkling stars, shining over Windsor, lent a celestial radiance to the scene, where lovers and fairies mingled in the meshes of affection.
The Persian, Egyptian, Grecian and Roman gods commingled with the heroes and heroines of mankind and committed unheard of crimes with impunity, the most outrageous villain seeming to be honored as the greatest god!
Poor, toadying humanity!
Everything had been prepared in the way of natural and artificial scenery by the direction of William, while the Queen sat on a sylvan throne, embowered in vines and roses, surrounded by all her courtiers, ladies and lords, in grand, golden array.
Oberon and Titania meet and quarrel, just as natural as if they belonged to earthly passion people.
Then suddenly, dismayed lest he had said too much, Petya stopped and blushed.
Vesenya!-- Vesenny!" laughing voices were heard calling to one another in the darkness.
"Please keep it.
"Well, never mind!" and immediately, blushing and looking anxiously at the officers to see if they appeared ironical, he said:
His name is Vincent Bosse.
There were many things Petya wanted to say to the drummer boy, but did not dare to.
Before they had ridden to the outskirts of the forest Petya had considered he must carry out his instructions strictly and return at once.
The officer admired it.
But I want..."
"Let me kiss you, dear old fellow!
But having caught himself saying too much about the flints, he was now afraid to speak out.
It was already growing dusk when Denisov, Petya, and the esaul rode up to the watchhouse.
And he handed him his clasp knife.
I bought them very cheap.
Please take as many as you want, or all if you like...."
Sitting at table with the officers and tearing the fat savory mutton with his hands, down which the grease trickled, Petya was in an ecstatic childish state of love for all men, and consequently of confidence that others loved him in the same way.
In both these adaptations the reference to spring (vesna) matched the impression made by the young lad.
When the boy had entered the hut, Petya sat down at a distance from him, considering it beneath his dignity to pay attention to him.
Only do let me into the very... into the chief...
"Come in, come in!" he repeated in a gentle whisper.
"Call him in.
Vincent, the boy's name, had already been changed by the Cossacks into Vesenny (vernal) and into Vesenya by the peasants and soldiers.
Perhaps..."
And he's very honest, that's the chief thing.
"Yes, yes, call him.
"We gave him something to eat a while ago.
"Oh, what can I do for him?" he thought, and opening the door he let the boy pass in first.
"Heavens!
"I have some raisins, fine ones; you know, seedless ones.
I have brought some with me, here they are"--and he showed a bag--"a hundred flints.
I was quite forgetting!" he suddenly cried.
And he was always in a hurry to get where he was not.
"Have some, gentlemen, have some!"
In the twilight saddled horses could be seen, and Cossacks and hussars who had rigged up rough shelters in the glade and were kindling glowing fires in a hollow of the forest where the French could not see the smoke.
But he fingered the money in his pocket and wondered whether it would seem ridiculous to give some to the drummer boy.
"I'll call him," said Petya.
He tried to remember whether he had not done anything else that was foolish.
I await the worthier one; I am not worthy even to succumb by it."
When, however, Zarathustra had spoken these words, the violence of his pain, and a sense of the nearness of his departure from his friends came over him, so that he wept aloud; and no one knew how to console him.
Why do I not give it?
I lay, however, on the ground, and the sweat flowed from my limbs.
Then was there again spoken unto me without voice: "What matter about their mockery!
Yesterday towards evening there spake unto me MY STILLEST HOUR: that is the name of my terrible mistress.
"I will not."
And I cried in terror at this whispering, and the blood left my face: but I was silent.
The hour-hand moved on, the timepiece of my life drew breath--never did I hear such stillness around me, so that my heart was terrified.
And thus did they speak unto me: Thou forgottest the path before, now dost thou also forget how to walk!"
Alas, how that laughing lacerated my bowels and cut into my heart!
I should have something more to say unto you!
Then was there again spoken unto me without voice: "What matter about thyself?
Exempt me only from this!
To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground giveth way under him, and the dream beginneth.
Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world.
Is this true?
And I answered: "What hath not the skin of my humility endured!
And thus did it happen--for everything must I tell you, that your heart may not harden against the suddenly departing one!
And I answered: "They mocked me when I found and walked in mine own path; and certainly did my feet then tremble.
I should have something more to give unto you!
I went, indeed, unto men, but not yet have I attained unto them."
Thou art one who hast unlearned to obey: now shalt thou command!
Then was there spoken unto me without voice: "THOU KNOWEST IT, ZARATHUSTRA?"--
And I considered a long while, and trembled.
At the foot of my height do I dwell: how high are my summits, no one hath yet told me.
And I answered: "I lack the lion's voice for all commanding."
This do I speak unto you in parable.
At last, however, did I say what I had said at first.
And I answered: "I am ashamed."
But well do I know my valleys."
Yesterday at the stillest hour did the ground give way under me: the dream began.
Then was there again spoken unto me without voice: "What matter about thyself, Zarathustra!
"And for that purpose," continued Altamont, "we had better build a little ship out of the remains of the Porpoise.
"No, my friend, I don't; it is a last blow from the cold.
Ice was the only remedy he employed, administered in small pieces, and in twenty-four hours Bell was himself again.
They shot partridges, ptarmigans, and snow ortolans, which are delicious eating.
Both theories are plausible enough, but the fact remains whichever we accept, and I ought to have remembered it."
The Doctor lost no time in clearing about an acre of ground, in which he sowed the seeds of anti-scorbutic plants.
May it not be to find the North-West Passage?
That is the fact."
"It is this American I detest; I hate him with a thorough English hatred.
Several navigators have mentioned the fact, and the Doctor's own experience confirmed it.
Hatteras still said nothing, but buried his head in his hands.
"Yes, Doctor, yes," replied the captain.
"I do."
"Besides," continued the Doctor, "look at the question in its moral aspect.
For about a fortnight hunting was the principal occupation.
"Absurd!
But with these inoffensive animals came back their natural enemies. Foxes and wolves arrived in search of their prey, and dismal howls broke the silence of the short night.
AN ARCTIC SPRING.
"Most certainly I do," replied the captain, earnestly; "my best, indeed my only friend."
Fate has thrown him in my path."
Hatteras looked fixedly at his rival, but said nothing.
Has he ever avowed his object in coming so far north?
They cleared away the blocks piled up by the animals, and filled up the rents in the walls, working with might and main, enlivened by the many songs of old Johnson.
"You desire to reach the North Pole," the Doctor went on; "and I understand and share your ambition, but to achieve your object you must employ the right means."
You will never get out of my head that this man is not the leader of some expedition sent out by the American government."
Thick vapour rose from the snow, giving promise of the speedy disappearance of these immense masses.
There was an abundant supply of fresh meat to be had.
What influence can they possibly have on the temperature?"
This comparative heat lasted several days.
"Do you think we shall have a long spell of this weather, Mr. Clawbonny?" asked Johnson.
This was violent quinsy, but, under the Doctor's skilful treatment, it was soon cured.
You see these are his dominions, and he won't be driven out without making some resistance."
"We must know how far New America extends."
CHAPTER XIV.
"Well, Hatteras, suppose it is so, does it follow that this expedition is to search for the North Pole?
"And how is it explained?"
I'll undertake the asking," said Clawbonny.
But we need not disclose our projects; let us tell him nothing, but simply build a sloop for the ostensible purpose of making a survey of the coast."
The prisoners were free, and their joy found vent in the noisiest demonstrations.
"Well, and have I not sacrificed everything for it?"
"And for what reason?"
He kept his word, for that very same night, at supper, he managed to turn the conversation towards the subject of making excursions during summer for hydrographical purposes.
Pray tell me what they have to do with it?
Didn't we see the man in his true colours when we were giving names to the different coasts?
Arctic wolves closely resemble dogs, and their barking would deceive the most practised ears; even the canine race themselves have been deceived by it.
"He must be told in the end, for we can't leave him here alone."
The Doctor was right, for the cold lasted till the end of the month, and put an end to all their hunting expeditions.
The change was most striking; it occurred on the 18th of May, during the night.
The coast on which we find ourselves at present may terminate abruptly; we have no proof that it stretches right away to the pole; indeed, if your present information prove correct, we ought to come to an open sea during the summer months.
"In that case, you must take the law in your own hands, and build a vessel in spite of him."
The old monotonous life in-doors recommenced, and was unmarked by any incident except a serious illness which suddenly attacked Bell.
"Yes; but I ought to have waited, and not have wasted my seed like an ignoramus; and all the more as I could, if necessary, have made them sprout by the kitchen stoves."
Here is an Englishman who sacrifices his fortune, and even his life, to win fresh glory for his country, but because the boat which bears him across an unknown ocean, or touches the new shore, happens to be made of the planks of an American vessel--a cast-away wreck of no use to anyone--will that lessen the honour of the discovery?
"He can defend himself pretty well," said Bell, rubbing his face.
Can't he stay here in Fort Providence?"
The Doctor hardly knew how to begin, as Hatteras had declared so vehemently that he would never consent to use a morsel of American wood; yet it was high time he were brought to reason, as June was at hand, the only season for distant expeditions, and they could not start without a ship.
"I wish to goodness he would refuse, then!"
"And if I give you a piece of advice without your asking, will you consider my motive is perfectly disinterested?"
"Because generally there is a periodical frost in the month of May, and it is coldest from the 11th to the 13th.
During this compulsory leisure, Clawbonny determined to have a talk with the captain on an important subject--the building of a sloop out of the planks of the Porpoise.
Well, supposing we reach this Arctic Ocean and find it free from ice and easy to navigate, what shall we do if we have no ship?"
"To save you!"
"Hatteras, let us discuss the question calmly, and examine the case on all sides.
The night was scarcely longer than three hours.
"To ruin me.
"Why not?
He thought over it a long while, and at last drew the captain aside, and said in the kindest, gentlest way--
"He must be asked before he can refuse.
A few days later, the rain fell in torrents.
A new world lay beneath that melting snow.
The Doctor was rather disappointed at having all his work to do again, but Hatteras bore the grievance most unphilosophically, as it interfered with all his plans of speedy departure.
"Well, let him always remain so."
Some say that a larger number of asteroids come between the earth and the sun at this time of year, and others that the mere melting of the snow necessarily absorbs a large amount of heat, and accounts for the low temperature.
Hatteras was still silent.
It is the best possible use we can make of her."
Hatteras looked surprised, but simply said--
"Of course, and without being a wizard.
1--Tidings of the Comer
His father's occupation would have suited him best, and the boy should have followed on.
"Yes, sir, that's it.
They showed upon the dusky scene that they bordered as distinctly as white lace on velvet. Behind the white palings was a little garden; behind the garden an old, irregular, thatched house, facing the heath, and commanding a full view of the valley.
They were activities which, beside those of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared as the ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of the flesh of somnolence.
To look at the palings before the Yeobrights' house had the dignity of a necessary performance. Strange that such a piece of idling should have seemed an important errand.
"You may think what you choose.
We have enough berries now, I think, and we had better take them home.
Thomasin lowered her face to the apples again.
By the time we have decked the house with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think of starting to meet him."
Well, it is a silly job, and I am partly to blame."
The earnestness with which Thomasin spoke prevented further objections. Her aunt simply said, "Very well.
"Yes, he will, when he knows it was because I wished to spare him, and that I did not expect him home so soon.
It was now nearly four o'clock, and the sunlight was leaving the vales.
I wish all good women were as good as I!" she added vehemently.
He used to like them almost as well as ribstones."
When the west grew red the two relatives came again from the house and plunged into the heath in a different direction from the first, towards a point in the distant highway along which the expected man was to return.
Thomasin stepped up into a fork of one of the bushes, as she had done under happier circumstances on many similar occasions, and with a small chopper that they had brought she began to lop off the heavily berried boughs.
"Now a few russets, Tamsin.
Thomasin came down when the apples were collected, and together they went through the white palings to the heath beyond.
Her lips were quivering, and tears so crowded themselves into her eyes that she could hardly distinguish apples from fern as she continued industriously searching to hide her weakness.
His closeness to me is the very thing that will hinder the tale from reaching him early.
"I am afraid--" began Mrs. Yeobright.
'Tis absurd!
Before picking them out she stopped a moment.
I think he may do it, now that he knows--something I told him.
"If he could have been dear to you in another way," said Mrs. Yeobright from the ladder, "this might have been a happy meeting."
Thomasin was perforce content.
And you must not let me stand in the way of your Christmas party.
"To thoroughly fill the air with the past misfortune, so that other girls may take warning and keep clear of it."
"I have given my word to.
"What a class to belong to!
"I am a warning to others, just as thieves and drunkards and gamblers are," she said in a low voice.
"That he was standing in the way of another lover of yours."
I have never implied to you by word or deed that I have grown to think otherwise of him, and I never will.
He must soon know what has happened.
If he finds out that I am not worthy to be his cousin, let him.
Thomasin turned and rolled aside the fern from another nook, where more mellow fruit greeted her with its ripe smell.
He has an unfortunate manner, and doesn't try to make people like him if they don't wish to do it of their own accord."
The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon in packing away stores of all kinds.
We must get some berries, or Clym will never believe in our preparations."
He should by rights have been told at the time that the wedding was going to be.
"Will you walk with me to meet him this evening?"
"Well, wait till he repeats his offer.
"How do you mean?"
It is the only way out of a false position, and a very galling one."
The air is full of the story, I know; but gossips will not dare to speak of it to him for the first few days.
"Strangers don't see you as I do," said Mrs. Yeobright; "they judge from false report.
Why don't people judge me by my acts? Now, look at me as I kneel here, picking up these apples--do I look like a lost woman?...
"How quickly a rash thing can be done!" replied the girl.
And I shall marry him."
"Tell him nothing.
He will never forgive you for your secrecy."
All that afternoon the expected arrival of the subject of Eustacia's ruminations created a bustle of preparation at Blooms-End.
But, since he loved me once, we will not pain him by telling him my trouble too soon.
The open hills were airy and clear, and the remote atmosphere appeared, as it often appears on a fine winter day, in distinct planes of illumination independently toned, the rays which lit the nearer tracts of landscape streaming visibly across those further off; a stratum of ensaffroned light was imposed on a stratum of deep blue, and behind these lay still remoter scenes wrapped in frigid grey.
"Now, I put it to you: would you at this present moment agree to be his wife if that had not happened to entangle you with him?"
"Of course I shall not.
But what is the use of it?
They reached the place where the hollies grew, which was in a conical pit, so that the tops of the trees were not much above the general level of the ground.
At the time that Eustacia was listening to the rick-makers' conversation on Clym's return, Thomasin was climbing into a loft over her aunt's fuelhouse, where the store-apples were kept, to search out the best and largest of them for the coming holiday-time.
There is nobody on the heath this afternoon, and you need not fear being stared at.
"Yes, you have."
"Yes," said her aunt, with some warmth.
"Don't be alarmed; it was my duty.
If I am not made safe from sneers in a week or two I will tell him myself."
"What did you tell him?"
Putting it off would only make matters worse."
Thomasin looked into the tree and appeared much disturbed.
Yet why, Aunt, does everybody keep on making me think that I do, by the way they behave towards me?
Do I really belong to them?
"I should like to.
I don't for a moment dispute that it is the most proper thing for you to marry him.
"Aunt," said Thomasin, with round eyes, "what DO you mean?"
Thomasin turned and regarded her aunt from the tree.
"Dr Grantly is here, sir," greeted his ears before the door was well open, "and Mrs Grantly.
"Furniture!" ejaculated the other, with a most powerful sneer.
Mrs Grantly suggested that, as the action was abandoned, the costs would not be heavy.
"Yes, my dear," said the warden.
They have a sitting-room above, and are waiting up for you."
The warden endeavoured to appear unconcerned, as he said, "Oh, indeed! I'll go upstairs at once;" but he failed signally.
"Come," said he, "promise Susan to give up this idea of resigning the wardenship."
The lady was really moved beyond her usual calm composure.
Why did you take such a step without giving us notice, after what had passed at the palace?"
She had an idea that her papa might be bullied if she were away: she wasn't tired at all, or at least she said so.
He made no distinct answer to the archdeacon's last proposition, for his mind was chiefly engaged on thinking how he could escape to bed.
"Well, at any rate, I've done it now.
"Then, Mr Harding, there is nothing before you but ruin," said the archdeacon, now moved beyond all endurance.
"Think of Eleanor, papa," said Mrs Grantly.
"Why," at last he said,--and angels might have blushed at the rebuke expressed in his tone and emphasis,--"Why did you go off from Barchester so suddenly?
Mr Harding could not say that he had.
"I'm sure Sir Abraham must have advised you to consult your friends."
"And you will not do this rash thing?"
And he gave his daughter a kiss, and shook hands with the doctor, and again tried to look unconcerned.
The archdeacon was pacing the room, expressing, by certain nods of his head, his opinion of the utter fatuity of his father-in-law.
Mr Harding made no answer, but slowly proceeded to light his candle.
He couldn't explain it in the only way which would have satisfied me, and so I resigned the wardenship."
A hot tear stood in each of the warden's eyes as he looked round upon his married daughter.
"Your father is like a child. Eight hundred pounds a year!--eight hundred and eighty with the house,--with nothing to do.
"Such absurdity is enough to provoke Job," said the archdeacon, marching quickly up and down the room.
"God, that feeds the young ravens, will take care of me also," said Mr Harding, with a smile, as though afraid of giving offence by making his reference to scripture too solemn.
"But I shall resign," said the warden, very, very meekly.
"At any rate, you'll promise me to take no further step without consultation," said the archdeacon.
Why should one sister who was so rich predict poverty for another?
"Then your threat of resignation amounts to nothing, and we are just where we were before."
THE WARDEN IS VERY OBSTINATE
I'm sure Sir Abraham did not advise any such step."
I went a trifle further than that myself; I actually rose up, as it were, and tried to get out of it.
Seeing that my lady took an interest in the out-of-door work, and the farms, and such like, I took an interest in them too--with all the more reason that I was a small farmer's seventh son myself.
After five years of misunderstandings on the stairs, it pleased an all-wise Providence to relieve us of each other by taking my wife.
We were six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.
To-day I was all for continuing to be farm-bailiff; to-morrow, on the authority of ROBINSON CRUSOE, I should be all the other way.
The woman I fixed my eye on, was the woman who kept house for me at my cottage.
As for me, I went on with my business as bailiff year after year up to Christmas 1847, when there came a change in my life.
And what did Selina say?
All quite comfortable, and all through ROBINSON CRUSOE!
Not for nothing!
Well, there I was in clover, you will say.
"I have been turning Selina Goby over in my mind," I said, "and I think, my lady, it will be cheaper to marry her than to keep her."
Before I had occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight), as follows: "To-day we love, what to-morrow we hate." I saw my way clear directly.
I am asked to tell the story of the Diamond and, instead of that, I have been telling the story of my own self.
If they do, I can feel for them.
That is married life, according to my experience of it.
Here is an example to the contrary.
Selina, being my wife, couldn't charge for her board, and would have to give me her services for nothing.
I have omitted to state that I went with the bride to the bride's husband's house and lands down here.
There I lived till Miss Julia married the late Sir John Verinder.
I spoke of my lady a line or two back.
I was left with my little girl Penelope, and with no other child.
Take myself to-morrow while in to-morrow's humour, and the thing was done.
I had another reason, likewise, entirely of my own discovering.
Consequently, if we begin with my lady, we are pretty sure of beginning far enough back.
My lady had discovered that I was getting old before I had discovered it myself, and she had come to my cottage to wheedle me (if I may use such an expression) into giving up my hard out-of-door work as bailiff, and taking my ease for the rest of my days as steward in the house.
We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple.
Her name was Selina Goby.
She says what I have done so far isn't in the least what I was wanted to do.
I have written to very poor purpose of my lady, if you require to be told that my little Penelope was taken care of, under my good mistress's own eye, and was sent to school and taught, and made a sharp girl, and promoted, when old enough, to be Miss Rachel's own maid.
I smoked a pipe and took a turn at ROBINSON CRUSOE.
Now the Diamond could never have been in our house, where it was lost, if it had not been made a present of to my lady's daughter; and my lady's daughter would never have been in existence to have the present, if it had not been for my lady who (with pain and travail) produced her into the world.
The dispute between us ended, after that, in my wiping my eyes, like an old fool, with my new woollen waistcoat, and saying I would think about it.
I agree with the late William Cobbett about picking a wife.
On that day, my lady invited herself to a cup of tea alone with me in my cottage.
If you know anything of the fashionable world, you have heard tell of the three beautiful Miss Herncastles.
In the meantime, I will go on with my story.
Let it be a warning to some of you, and an encouragement to others.
Of course she said, Yes.
Understanding nothing myself but that I was free to put it next to Selina, I went and put it accordingly.
My lady got me put under the bailiff, and I did my best, and gave satisfaction, and got promotion accordingly.
After that it was all over with me, of course.
And that, let me tell you, when you have got such a job as mine in hand, is a real comfort at starting.
Pension him liberally, and let Gabriel Betteredge have his place." On the Tuesday as it might be, Sir John says, "My lady, the bailiff is pensioned liberally; and Gabriel Betteredge has got his place." You hear more than enough of married people living together miserably.
Compensation to the woman when the man gets out of it, is one of the laws of England.
Selina, being a single woman, made me pay so much a week for her board and services.
Some years later, on the Monday as it might be, my lady says, "Sir John, your bailiff is a stupid old man.
In the meantime, here is another false start, and more waste of good writing-paper. What's to be done now?
Placed in a position of trust and honour, with a little cottage of my own to live in, with my rounds on the estate to occupy me in the morning, and my accounts in the afternoon, and my pipe and my ROBINSON CRUSOE in the evening--what more could I possibly want to make me happy?
I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?
Curious, and quite beyond me to account for.
That was the point of view I looked at it from.
"Sir John," she says, "I can't do without Gabriel Betteredge." "My lady," says Sir John, "I can't do without him, either." That was his way with her--and that was how I went into his service.
But my mistress knew the weak side of me; she put it as a favour to herself.
My daughter Penelope has just looked over my shoulder to see what I have done so far.
As my time drew nearer, and there got to be talk of my having a new coat for the ceremony, my mind began to misgive me.
CHAPTER II
I made as good a fight of it against the indignity of taking my ease as I could.
But she points out one objection.
She went home very happy.
"I wonder you should think so, for you never asked me."
Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours."
What would not I give to see him!
Isabella smiled incredulously and talked the rest of the evening to James.
I thought you and I were to dance together."
We soon found out that our tastes were exactly alike in preferring the country to every other place; really, our opinions were so exactly the same, it was quite ridiculous!
"Henry!" she replied with a smile.
"Oh, horrid!
"Yes, quite--more so, indeed."
John is just walked off, but he will be back in a moment."
"You cannot think," added Catherine after a moment's silence, "how surprised I was to see him again.
Oh!
Taken in that light certainly, their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view.
What chap have you there?" Catherine satisfied his curiosity.
He came only to engage lodgings for us."
I cannot look upon them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to them."
My mother says he is the most delightful young man in the world; she saw him this morning, you know; you must introduce him to me.
"Well, other people must judge for themselves, and those who go to London may think nothing of Bath.
One thing, however, I must observe.
"Not very."
"To be sure not.
That gentleman knows your name, and you have a right to know his.
"Bath, compared with London, has little variety, and so everybody finds out every year.
"What is the meaning of this?
You will allow all this?"
"Yes, I am.
Alas, alas!"
"How well your brother dances!" was an artless exclamation of Catherine's towards the close of their conversation, which at once surprised and amused her companion.
I declare positively it is quite shocking.
"Perhaps we--Yes, I think we certainly shall."
Do you find Bath as agreeable as when I had the honour of making the inquiry before?"
That, I suppose, was the difference of duties which struck you, as rendering the conditions incapable of comparison."
"And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing.
I shall never be in want of something to talk of again to Mrs. Allen, or anybody else.
"Yes, sometimes; but he has rid out this morning with my father."
There was not a single point in which we differed; I would not have had you by for the world; you are such a sly thing, I am sure you would have made some droll remark or other about it."
You would have told us that we seemed born for each other, or some nonsense of that kind, which would have distressed me beyond conception; my cheeks would have been as red as your roses; I would not have had you by for the world."
"What a picture of intellectual poverty!
Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
The cotillions were over, the country-dancing beginning, and she saw nothing of the Tilneys.
However, when you sink into this abyss again, you will have more to say.
Here is a friend of mine, Sam Fletcher, has got one to sell that would suit anybody.
"--That you think they cannot be compared together."
I really am quite wild with impatience.
Do you think her pretty?"
They were always engaged in some sentimental discussion or lively dispute, but their sentiment was conveyed in such whispering voices, and their vivacity attended with so much laughter, that though Catherine's supporting opinion was not unfrequently called for by one or the other, she was never able to give any, from not having heard a word of the subject.
She had never taken a country walk since her arrival in Bath.
Soon after their reaching the bottom of the set, Catherine perceived herself to be earnestly regarded by a gentleman who stood among the lookers-on, immediately behind her partner.
This disposition on your side is rather alarming.
Fletcher and I mean to get a house in Leicestershire, against the next season.
"Then I am quite at a loss.
James, who was now in constant attendance, maintained a similar position, and separating themselves from the rest of their party, they walked in that manner for some time, till Catherine began to doubt the happiness of a situation which, confining her entirely to her friend and brother, gave her very little share in the notice of either.
"Do not be frightened, my dear Catherine," whispered Isabella, "but I am really going to dance with your brother again.
To escape, and, as she believed, so narrowly escape John Thorpe, and to be asked, so immediately on his joining her, asked by Mr. Tilney, as if he had sought her on purpose!--it did not appear to her that life could supply any greater felicity.
"Oh, heavens! My beloved Catherine, have I got you at last?" was her address on Catherine's entering the box and sitting by her.
"Yes, an acquaintance of Mrs. Hughes."
It is General Tilney, my father."
"Do I?"
"No, indeed, I never thought of that."
"Yes, he does dance very well."
"But they are such very different things!"
"Heyday, Miss Morland!" said he.
People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour."
You ought to be tired at the end of six weeks."
Catherine's answer was only "Oh!"--but it was an "Oh!" expressing everything needful: attention to his words, and perfect reliance on their truth.
Miss Tilney, to whom all the commonly frequented environs were familiar, spoke of them in terms which made her all eagerness to know them too; and on her openly fearing that she might find nobody to go with her, it was proposed by the brother and sister that they should join in a walk, some morning or other.
She cannot be justified in it.
But I really had been engaged the whole day to Mr. Thorpe." Miss Tilney could only bow.
He has no business to withdraw the attention of my partner from me.
She was brought up on the theory that a woman's only legitimate profession is homemaking.
Please also note that the artist has given Jervis his full due in the matter of legs.
My little band tumbled in toward ten o'clock, excitedly babbling a mess of statistics about reciprocating compound engines and watertight bulkheads, devil-fish and sky-scrapers and birds of paradise.
And she, on her side, was awfully unresponsive and irritating,--she realized it fully,--she got to the point where she wouldn't laugh at his jokes.
She would spend a day getting closets and bureau drawers in order, and in five minutes he would stir them into chaos.
The house smelt like a hospital.
The three figures on the bridge are you and Jervis and the baby.
"When did you last see Judy Abbott?" was Helen's first question.
Was she long enough to reach from the carriage house to the Indian camp?
But I am marrying him for no reason in the world except affection.
It wasn't really a marriage; it was a mistake.
Dear Judy:
By the time I had removed my own extra covers and plumped up my pillow and settled comfortably, I thought of those fourteen bundled-up babies in the fresh-air nursery.
He waved me aside in the middle of a sentence, and growlingly asked Miss Snaith if she couldn't economize a little on carbolic acid.
I don't know any one who has covered so much ground in such a short space of time.
and
Owing to the loss of my blue pencil, our flag has had to adopt the Italian colors.
After seeing you off, I turned back to New York with an awful wander-thirst gnawing at my vitals.
Helen was in love with him.
Write me every detail about your house, and send some photographs, so I can see you in it.
She's not spectacular, but steady and dependable. Will you ever forget the way she took hold of that senior pageant committee and whipped it into shape after Mildred had made such a mess of it?
I see marriage as a man must, a good, sensible workaday institution; but awfully curbing to one's liberty. Somehow, after you're married forever, life has lost its feeling of adventure.
You know I am developing a funny old characteristic; I am getting to hate change.
I go about planning and planning their baby futures, feeling that I'm constructing the nation.
Nothing in my four trips to Europe ever thrilled me like the queer sights and tastes and smells of those three warm weeks seven years ago.
I had hoped those two intelligent spinsters would see their way to keeping him forever, but they want to travel, and they feel he's too consuming of their liberty.
Do you remember in college, when you and I used to plan our favorite futures, how we were forever turning our faces southward?
And aren't you glad now that I made you wait about buying a Panama hat till you reached Kingston?
And it IS a tremendous experience, the nearness to humanity that an asylum brings. I am learning so many new things every day that when each Saturday night comes I look back on the Sallie of last Saturday night, amazed at her ignorance.
I do wish I could manage breaks in the routine oftener.
Dinner in the dining-car.
The pathetic part of the whole business is that both she and Henry were admirably fitted to make some one else happy.
I'm not particularly ambitious.
"None better."
She is reading manuscript for a publishing house.
I must tell you that Punch is back with us again, entirely renovated as to manners.
I am pained to note that you carry your daughter by the back of her neck, as if she were a kitten.
Everything looked propitious.
We've just had one of those miserable deceiving nights--cold and frosty when you go to bed, and warm and lifeless when you wake in the dark, smothered under a mountain of blankets.
It struck me that Helen looked a trifle bleak, and I suddenly remembered all that gossip that Marty Keene told us last summer; so I hastily changed the conversation to a perfectly safe subject like orphans.
I seem to have a very wandering pen.
Perhaps that is why I hear the South calling.
After all, as poor Marie says, the chief thing is to be pretty.
He would leave his clothes about for her to pick up, and his towels in a messy heap on the bathroom floor, and he never scrubbed out the tub.
Neither his position nor his money ever tempted me in the least.
You remember little Maybelle Fuller, don't you--the chorus girl's daughter whom our doctor doesn't like?
The railroad made nothing on that party, and all the tables around stopped eating to stare.
"Never saw a happier marriage."
When I got home last week, after my dash to New York, I made a brief speech to the children.
In all the seven generations of their sojourn in America they have never had anything like this to record in the family Bible.
Your Jamaica letter is here, and I'm glad to learn that Judy, Junior, enjoys traveling.
Have a good time, and don't forget the John Grier Home
My ferry slid right under the nose of your steamer, and I could see you and Jervis plainly leaning on the rail.
And ever since, I've panted to get back.
They inquired with great particularity how much it was costing, and when they heard that it was the same, no matter how much you ate, they drew deep breaths and settled quietly and steadily to the task of not allowing their host to be cheated.
And now to think it has really come true, and you are there, coasting around those tropical isles!
Since her graduation she has been married, has had a baby and lost him, divorced her husband, quarreled with her family, and come to the city to earn her own living.
Maybelle's eyelashes won the day.
How are you?" and gone on.
We have placed her out. I tried to make the woman take Hattie Heaphy instead,--the quiet little one who stole the communion cup,--but no, indeed!
Saturday morning.
I always liked Helen.
But you should have seen that man's behavior when I tried to thank him.
I began thinking about Helen Brooks, and I planned her whole life over again.
If she had been a man, he would have said: "Glad to see you.
Back in New York, I took myself to a department store to accomplish a few trifles in the way of shopping.
But as they began to get acquainted, they didn't like the same books or jokes or people or amusements.
Were there any guns aboard, and if a privateer should attack her, could she hold her own?
I don't like the prospect of having my life disrupted.
Dear Judy:
When she finished college, she was naturally eager to start on her career, and Henry presented himself.
I am looking for a family to adopt him.
Their so-called night nurse sleeps like a top the whole night through. (Her name is next on the list to be expunged.) So I roused myself again, and made a little blanket removing tour, and by the time I had finished I was forever awake.
How many tons of coal did she burn a day?
The fear grips my heart and wrings it dry.
There aren't any romantic possibilities waiting to surprise you around each corner.
Isn't it funny how much keener your mind is when you are lying awake in the dark?
They just simply didn't match each other; and when two people don't match, all the ceremonies in the world can't marry them.
Isn't it dreadful how blind this sex business can make people?
They weren't friends.
SALLIE.
When I stop to think about it, I can hardly bring myself to swallow our unexciting meals; I wish to be dining on curries and tamales and mangos.
Poor Helen appears to have made an awful mess of her life.
How would she do here as a successor to me?
December 2.
You can imagine the outraged feelings of her Victorian family.
I don't know why her miserable story has taken such a hold over me.
Her family scanned him closely, and found him perfect in every respect--good family, good morals, good financial position, good looking.
We are running along here very much as usual without anything exciting to chronicle.
December 11.
A visit made by William to London convinced him that nothing was at present to be hoped for from that quarter.
At the same time strong family influence was brought to bear upon Henry Casimir of Friesland, and a reconciliation between the two stadholders was effected.
On the morning of August 14 D'Estrades came personally to bring the news to Luxemburg; and the French marshal was on the point of forwarding the message to the Dutch camp, when he heard that Orange was advancing with his army to attack him, and he felt that honour compelled him to accept the challenge.
The States and the Spanish Government were both anxious to avoid this; and the Prince of Orange, who steadily opposed the treaty, returned towards the end of July to his camp to watch the siege of Mons and prevent its falling into the hands of the enemy.
The stadholder before the end of the year entirely freed the country from its invaders.
Charles II himself, though he had not the smallest sympathy with his nephew's political views, was as kindly disposed to him as his selfish and unprincipled nature would allow, and he even went so far as to encourage in 1674 an alliance between him and his cousin Mary, the elder daughter of the Duke of York.
It now came quickly, for the year 1685 was marked by two events--the accession of James II to the throne of England, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes--which were to have far-reaching consequences.
The prince was keenly alive to the political advantages of his position.
The curious thing is, that William was so intent on his larger projects that he was content to use the powers he had without making any serious attempt, as he might have done, to make the machine of government more workable by reforms in the direction of centralisation.
Holland itself, in gratitude for its deliverance, had become enthusiastically Orangist.
At the same time (July 26) King Charles, who had been working through Sir William Temple for the conclusion of peace, now declared that, unless the treaty was signed before August 11, he would assist the allies to enforce it.
Nor was this all.
He then took a bolder step.
He always insisted that he was accredited to the States-General and not to the Prince of Orange, and carried on correspondence and intrigues with the party in Amsterdam opposed to the stadholder's anti-French policy.
A hard frost in December enabled Luxemburg to penetrate into Holland, but a rapid thaw compelled a hasty withdrawal.
As a matter of fact, the voice of these provinces was his voice; and, as he likewise controlled the Estates in Zeeland, he could always count upon a majority vote in the States-General in support of his foreign policy.
He was accused of wishing to continue the war from motives of personal ambition and the desire of military glory.
But William had at that time no inclination for marriage.
There was general alarm; and, with the help of Waldeck, William was able to secure the support of a number of the small German states in the Rhenish circle, most of them always ready to hire out their armed forces for a subsidy.
Charles II, with the help of French money, had been carrying on the war in opposition to the wishes of his subjects, who saw their fleets but feebly supported by their French allies, their trade seriously injured, and but little chance of gaining any advantageous return for the heavy cost.
They fell into the trap laid for them, for the treaty between France and Spain was not yet signed, and it was the intention of the French to make further pretexts for delay in the hope that Mons meanwhile would fall. The report of the conclusion of peace reached the stadholder in his camp on August 13, but unofficially.
The country outside the water-line had been cruelly devastated by the invaders, and then impoverished by having for a year and a half to maintain the armies of occupation.
France was isolated and opposed now by a strong coalition, the Republic having secured the help of Austria, Spain, Brandenburg and Denmark.
The treaty was signed on September 17, 1678.
The presence in their midst of the Huguenot refugees had the effect of influencing public opinion powerfully in the States in favour of their stadholder's warlike policy.
Once more a Prince of Orange had saved the Dutch Republic in its extremity.
The effect of this was to place almost supreme power in his hands.
Orange at once referred the matter to the Council of State, and himself proposed that 16,000 should be sent.
The position of the three provinces, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overyssel, which had been overrun by the French at the opening of hostilities and held by them ever since, had to be re-settled.
Spain was utterly exhausted and feeble.
The campaign of the summer of 1674 thus opened under favouring circumstances, but nothing of importance occurred until August 11, when William at the head of an allied force of some 70,000 men encountered Conde at Seneff in Hainault.
Events were to force his hand.
The work of building up afresh a coalition to withstand the ever-growing menace of the formidable French power could scarcely have been more unpromising than it now appeared.
The cause of Protestantism was one with which the Princes of Orange had identified themselves; but none of his ancestors was so keen an upholder of that cause as was William III.
The Dutch people generally had suffered terribly in the late invasions and were heartily sick of war.
The commercial classes had been hard hit by the French invasion, and they were now suffering heavy losses at sea through the Dunkirk privateers led by the daring Jean Bart.
His first care was the restoration of the well-nigh ruined land.
He was well aware that there was in England a very strong and widespread opposition to the succession of James Duke of York, who made no secret of his devoted attachment to the Roman Catholic faith.
William indeed cared little about the domestic politics of the Republic, except in so far as they affected his diplomatic activities; and in this domain he knew how to employ able and devoted men.
His faith in himself was never shaken, and his patience in awaiting the favourable moment was inexhaustible.
The results, however, did not answer William's expectations.
William exposed his life freely, and though the result was nominally a drawn battle, he achieved his purpose.
William thus found himself, before the year 1685 came to an end, able to pursue his policy without serious let or hindrance.
No more conclusive proof of the inflexible resolve of William III can be found than the patience he now exhibited.
The battle was fought out with great obstinacy and there were heavy losses on both sides.
It no sooner met than it showed its strong sympathy with the Netherlands; and the king speedily saw that he could no longer pursue a policy opposed to the wishes of his people.
But, though these conditions were accepted, the French raised various pretexts to delay the signature of the treaty, hoping that meanwhile Mons, which was closely beleaguered by Luxemburg, might fall into their hands, and thus become an asset which they could exchange for some other possession.
He possessed however, which William II had not, the support of a majority in the Estates of Holland. He used this with effect.
The first step was to conclude peace.
Prosperity was just beginning to revive, and a remembrance of past experiences filled the hearts of many with dread at the thought of the French armies once more invading their land.
Never did De Ruyter exhibit higher qualities of leadership than in the naval campaign of 1673.
Spain to surrender an important slice of southern Flanders, but to be left in possession of a belt of fortresses to cover their Netherland possessions against further French attack.
As we left the room, we heard his pen travelling shrilly over the foolscap.
I am going round now to see it.
It occurred only last night.
Until then I should like to keep this photograph, found in the dead man's pocket.
This was clearly what the burglar had done, so I went round and opened the door.
Here it is."
There was no name on his clothing, and nothing in his pockets save an apple, some string, a shilling map of London, and a photograph.
Holmes looked keenly at him.
"It's the Napoleon bust business again," said Lestrade.
It has been found in the front garden of an empty house in Campden House Road.
Holmes sat down and listened.
"Now that I come to think of it, Dr. Barnicot's bust was broken not far from his red lamp.
That is one point.
"To murder.
I picked it up cheap from Harding Brothers, two doors from the High Street Station.
Nothing less will hold the London message-boy.
It had been carried out and had been dashed savagely against the garden wall, under which its splintered fragments were discovered."
It's like my luck!
It was no very unusual thing for Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, to look in upon us of an evening, and his visits were welcome to Sherlock Holmes, for they enabled him to keep in touch with all that was going on at the police headquarters.
When we have found who he is and who his associates are, we should have a good start in learning what he was doing in Pitt Street last night, and who it was who met him and killed him on the doorstep of Mr. Horace Harker.
Well, I was the only journalist in the stand, and my journal the only one that had no account of it, for I was too shaken to write it.
"Well, who was the murdered man?" asked Holmes.
"Don't I? Well, perhaps I don't.
It will be useful for his article."
Holmes picked up several of them and examined them carefully.
And a queer madness, too.
On this particular evening, Lestrade had spoken of the weather and the newspapers.
I sat frozen with horror for a minute or two.
Mr. Harker, will you tell these gentlemen exactly what has occurred?"
He hardly knew what he was doing."
Are you coming with us to see the remains of your bust, Mr. Harker?"
In half an hour we had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life.
As it is, I am giving away valuable copy by telling my story over and over to a string of different people, and I can make no use of it myself.
"He was rattled and bustled by meeting this other fellow.
Some little time ago he purchased from Morse Hudson two duplicate plaster casts of the famous head of Napoleon by the French sculptor, Devine.
Lestrade laughed.
The possession of this trifling bust was worth more, in the eyes of this strange criminal, than a human life.
It represented an alert, sharp-featured simian man, with thick eyebrows and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face, like the muzzle of a baboon.
He is poorly dressed, and yet does not appear to be a labourer.
"Well, that's likely enough.
This is more interesting.
So it was to-day.
But then, when the man commits burglary in order to break images which are not his own, that brings it away from the doctor and on to the policeman."
"I must try and make something of it," said he, "though I have no doubt that the first editions of the evening papers are out already with full details.
"By George!
"I thought it would please you.
You remember when the stand fell at Doncaster?
Holmes pointed to the street lamp above our heads.
"It all seems to centre round that bust of Napoleon which I bought for this very room about four months ago.
"If you are going back to Pitt Street, you might see Mr. Horace Harker. Tell him for me that I have quite made up my mind, and that it is certain that a dangerous homicidal lunatic, with Napoleonic delusions, was in his house last night.
The plaster cast was not worth more than a few shillings, and the whole affair appeared to be too childish for any particular investigation.
Let me hear the details."
There's coffee on the table, Watson, and I have a cab at the door."
Holmes rubbed his hands.
"May I ask whether the two busts smashed in Dr. Barnicot's rooms were the exact duplicates of the one which was destroyed in Morse Hudson's shop?"
"Burglary!
I shall see him in my dreams.
"Well, I thought as you do," said Lestrade.
"The most practical way of getting at it, in my opinion, is to identify the dead man.
"This is certainly very novel," said he.
It will ring in my ears as long as I live.
"Certainly.
Holmes shrugged his shoulders.
And yet it is such an absurd business, that I hesitated to bother you about it.
He is a tall man, sunburned, very powerful, not more than thirty.
Then there is the singular fact that he did not break it in the house, or immediately outside the house, if to break it was his sole object."
In return for the news which Lestrade would bring, Holmes was always ready to listen with attention to the details of any case upon which the detective was engaged, and was able occasionally, without any active interference, to give some hint or suggestion drawn from his own vast knowledge and experience.
The assistant had left the front shop for an instant, when he heard a crash, and hurrying in he found a plaster bust of Napoleon, which stood with several other works of art upon the counter, lying shivered into fragments.
Holmes smiled.
The top steps swilled down and the other ones dry.
When I entered this room I found the window wide open, and I at once observed that the bust was gone from the mantelpiece.
What do you think, Dr. Watson?"
Lestrade stared.
Lestrade looked about him.
"We had news of it just before you came.
But I have not got to the end yet.
A great deal of my journalistic work is done at night, and I often write until the early morning.
He rushed out into the road, but, although several passers-by declared that they had noticed a man run out of the shop, he could neither see anyone nor could he find any means of identifying the rascal.
Don't you think so?"
What steps do you propose to take now, Lestrade?"
Why did he not break it there, since it is evident that every yard that he carried it increased the risk of someone meeting him?"
But, in my opinion, it comes more in Dr. Watson's line than ours."
"Oh, you must not let me influence you in any way.
"I give it up," said Lestrade.
It seemed to be one of those senseless acts of Hooliganism which occur from time to time, and it was reported to the constable on the beat as such.
I was convinced, from his intent face and his purposeful manner, that at last he was upon a clue.
The official received us with a very grave face and showed us into a sitting-room, where an exceedingly unkempt and agitated elderly man, clad in a flannel dressing-gown, was pacing up and down.
The man in the dressing-gown turned upon us with a most melancholy face.
One of these he placed in his hall in the house at Kennington Road, and the other on the mantelpiece of the surgery at Lower Brixton.
"To remember it--to docket it.
"With an area beneath, it was no mean feat to reach that window ledge and open that window.
But I wish to call your attention very particularly to the position of this house, in the garden of which the bust was destroyed."
In that case our friend the image-breaker has begun operations in another quarter of London.
"In Kennington Road, and within a few hundred yards of Morse Hudson's shop, there lives a well-known medical practitioner, named Dr. Barnicot, who has one of the largest practices upon the south side of the Thames. His residence and principal consulting-room is at Kennington Road, but he has a branch surgery and dispensary at Lower Brixton Road, two miles away.
"I don't attempt to do so.
"Disease?" said I.
"Very good," said Lestrade.
"What has it turned to, then?"
We will ask our host if there is any place where the river can be forded, without going too far up.
"Soldiers!" Philip said.
Jacques repeated the usual tale.
If I say a word to him, I have no doubt he would give the four of you a passage, for a crown."
If we do not do your work, you can keep that to pay the hire of the men to carry your barrels."
"That is dangerous doctrine, Louis."
I suppose, by your looks, you are going to take service with some lord or other?"
The only danger is from bodies of horse watching the road."
Several men came up to offer their services, as soon as the boat was alongside; and these, when they saw that the owner of the wines had brought men with them, who would transport the wine to the warehouses, indulged in some rough jeers before moving away.
I am from the city, and know most of those in and round it."
They passed through the gates, half an hour before they were closed, and entered a small cabaret.
They killed a man who resented their rough usage, two days ago.
The sun had just risen when Maitre Bertram, accompanied by four men in the attire of peasants, went down to the port.
The country was sparsely populated.
They must have seen, for some time, that they were making for the one place where they would be safe; unless indeed they were making down for Navarre.
Several ships lay by the wharves.
The fact that you made for shore, to land passengers, would be sufficient to show that those passengers were of some importance.
As they were as anxious as the farmer that no time should be lost, they worked hard, and in a quarter of an hour all was on board.
"Whom have you been serving at Bordeaux?
It was in the fight round Conde.
Our story has been good enough, thus far.
It was close to the marketplace, and there she would, as soon as the market opened in the morning, dispose of them; and by nine o'clock they would be on board again.
He waited, however, a quarter of a mile from the gates, and the two men then rejoined him.
It seems to me they are making a great fuss about nothing."
Two of them wore steel caps, and had the appearance of discharged soldiers.
As he spoke, the heads and shoulders of a body of horsemen were seen, as they rode up from a dip the road made into a hollow, half a mile away.
They were laden principally with barrels of wine; but in one the farmer's wife was sitting, surrounded by baskets of eggs, fowls, and ducks, and several casks of butter.
Philip cast a warning glance at his companions, for he felt so inclined to retort, himself, that he feared they might give way to a similar impulse.
Let us be riding forward."
If you are too hotly chased to escape, after landing them, you had best also disembark; and make your way back by land, as best you can, leaving them to do what they will with the boat.
Maybe, while we are questioning them, a party of those we are in search of may be traversing some other road.
"That is fair enough," the farmer said, pocketing the coin.
They presently came upon a wide road.
"You are travelling early," the landlord said.
"You are smart fellows," he said, "and nimble.
"I left my right hand on the field of battle.
"Then we shall have trouble," one exclaimed.
It was all about the movements of troops, and the scraps of news that had come in from all quarters.
"We will go quietly on," he said.
We would rather enlist under our own lord than under a stranger."
"Well, well, every man to his liking," the landlord said; "but for my part, I can't think what Frenchmen want to fly at each others' throats for.
An exclamation of surprise broke from his hearers.
There is one four miles higher up.
"There will be no difficulty about that.
As his duties were now over, he came across to them.
"Half our difficulties will be over, when we get to Bordeaux.
"I will make you up a basket for your journey.
What can the Catholic lords have been about, that they managed to let them slip through their hands in that way?
Do you know of any fords?"
I have had my sail, and I am going to pay for it by my share of the work."
"I do not want to lose the craft, which has done me good service in her time, and is a handy little coaster; but I would rather lose it, than that you should fall into the hands of the Bordeaux boats and get into trouble.
The store was nearer than Philip had expected to find it.
He is not one to waste time; besides, every minute is of importance for, with this wind, he may well hope to arrive at Bordeaux in time to get his cargo discharged by nightfall."
The frequenters of the cabaret presently dropped off.
"Now, good luck to you, Master Philip.
"I thought your tongue had a smack of Gascon in it."
"I expect they are watching both ways," another said.
"It must be owned," another of the group said, "that these wolves bite hard.
"That would waste nearly a day, and time is too precious for that. We will go straight on in the morning.
"I will hand it over to you, as earnest.
It is a long chase to catch a pack of wolves, scattered all over the country; but one can make short work of them all, when you get them penned up in an inclosure."
The Catholic clergy of the United States has never attempted to oppose this political tendency, but it seeks rather to justify its results.
If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be true, the case of society is not the same.
Save the Poles, we beseech Thee, in the name of Thy well-beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who died upon the cross for the salvation of men.
But there are others who look forward to the republican form of government as a tranquil and lasting state, towards which modern society is daily impelled by the ideas and manners of the time, and who sincerely desire to prepare men to be free.
But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace.
Nevertheless they constitute the most republican and the most democratic class of citizens which exists in the United States; and although this fact may surprise the observer at first, the causes by which it is occasioned may easily be discovered upon reflection.
This sect contributed powerfully to the establishment of a democracy and a republic, and from the earliest settlement of the emigrants politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved.
The priest alone rises above the rank of his flock, and all below him are equal.
A Poor and Innocent Negro made to Suffer
He had lived like an ox, working without inspiration or reward, and he came forth like an ox from his stall.
He sent a picture of the Oakley home and of the cottage where the servant and his family had been so happy.
It would not surrender, but it capitulated, and Berry Hamilton was pardoned.
He was to go to the capital of the State.
From the moment that the master of the house had fallen to the floor in impotent fear and madness there had been no peace within his doors.
He no longer looked to receive kindness from his fellows, and he blinked at it as he blinked at the unwonted brightness of the sun.
People may Know!"
Berry had forgotten Fannie, and for the first time his heart thrilled within him at the thought of seeing her again.
But it had power and keenness and energy.
He sat down to put his discovery on paper before he attempted anything else, although the impulse to celebrate was very strong within him.
If this particular man had had, he would have kept still, and everything would have gone on smooth and quiet.
But these changed to shrieks and cries and curses, and she was forced to throw open the doors so long closed and call in help.
A 'Universe' Reporter To the Rescue!
The dignity of the State was threatened.
"You know you are to go New York with me?"
The lines about his mouth where the smiles used to gather had changed and grown stern with the hopelessness of years.
He marvelled at the word that was brought to him now, and he could not understand the strange cordiality of the young white man who met him at the warden's office.
He seized upon it.
Then Skaggs received a telegram that made him leap for joy.
The old Southern city was described, and the opinions of its residents in regard to the case given.
It was enough for him that he had it.
Once in New York, he found that people wished to see him, some fools, some philanthropists, and a great many reporters.
The Whole Thing to Be Aired that the
A corporation, he argued, had no soul, and therefore no conscience.
He had long ago lost hope that justice would ever be done to him.
At first his wife had tried to control him alone, and had humoured the wild babblings with which he woke from his swoon.
His lips drooped pathetically, and hard treatment had given his eyes a lowering look.
Great Expose by the 'Universe'!
He was to beard the Governor in his den, and he, with the force of a great paper behind him, was to demand for the people the release of an innocent man.
"This is a very happy occasion, Mr. Hamilton," said Skaggs, shaking his hand heartily.
for a Rich Man's Crime!
"This is good stuff," he said at the last page.
His erstwhile quick wits were dulled and imbruted.
He said only, "You want to see your wife, of course?"
It never lost an opportunity to crow, and if one was not forthcoming, it made one.
Mr. Skaggs had no qualms of conscience about the manner in which he had come by the damaging evidence against Maurice Oakley.
Instead of that, a distinguished family is brought to shame, and for what?
Then there would be another write-up and much glory for him and more shekels.
Other papers took it up and asked why this man should be despoiled of his liberty any longer?
Five years of prison life had made a different man of him.
All the higher part of him he had left behind, dropping it off day after day through the wearisome years.
He was to do it.
It was there--clear, interesting, and strong.
Old Horace was inanely eloquent for an hour over his pet theory.
In an hour after he had received his telegram he was on his way to the Southern capital.
How much less, then, should so small a part of a great corporation as himself be expected to have them?
What had this slim, glib young man to do with him? What had any white man to do with him after what he had suffered at their hands?
It was vivid, interesting, dramatic.
Berry did not answer.
Berry heard the news with surprise and a half-bitter joy.
Skaggs surpassed himself.
Meanwhile in the house of Maurice Oakley there were sad times.
When the editor first got hold of it he said "Huh!" over the opening lines,--a few short sentences that instantly pricked the attention awake.
And when it was replied that the man had been convicted, and that the wheels of justice could not be stopped or turned back by the letter of a romantic artist or the ravings of a madman, there was a mighty outcry against the farce of justice that had been played out in this man's case.
To give a nigger a few more years of freedom when, likely as not, he don't want it; and Berry Hamilton's life in prison has proved nearer the ideal reached by slavery than anything he has found since emancipation.
The trial was reviewed; the evidence again brought up and examined.
Berry took the address and inquired his way timidly, hesitatingly, but with a swelling heart, to the door of the flat where Fannie lived.
Skaggs could n't tell him, in this the first hour of his freedom.
But there were some in the town who thought differently about the matter, and it was their opinions and murmurings that backed up Skaggs and made it easier for him when at the capital he came into contact with the official red tape.
There was a strong pen-picture of the man, Oakley, grown haggard and morose from carrying his guilty secret, of his confusion when confronted with the supposed knowledge of it.
It was very so.
He told his story well, with an eye to every one of its salient points. He sent an alleged picture of Berry Hamilton as he had appeared at the time of his arrest.
With headlines that took half a page, and with cuts authentic and otherwise, the tale was told, and the people of New York were greeted next morning with the announcement of--
Colonel Saunders was distinctly hurt to think that his confidence had been imposed on, and that he had been instrumental in bringing shame upon a Southern name.
One could see it all as if every phase of it were being enacted before one's eyes.
He had his story.
The neighbours and her old friends went to her assistance, and what the reporter's story had not done, the ravings of the man accomplished; for, with a show of matchless cunning, he continually clutched at his breast, laughed, and babbled his secret openly.
He has told you the responsibility now rests with Congress; and I close as I began, by invoking you to meet that responsibility, bravely to act the patriot's part.
In one case, I well remember when the Senator from Vermont [Mr.
Great Britain denied the right in the case of the colonies, and therefore our revolution for independence was bloody.
Now, it does appear that he will go that far; and he goes a little further than anybody, I believe, who has spoken in vindication of the right, for he says:
If our Government should fail, it will not be from the defect of the system, though each planet was set to revolve in an orbit of its own, each moving by its own impulse, yet being all attracted by the affections and interests which countervailed each other; there was no inherent tendency to disruption.
If you will not have it thus--if in the pride of power, if in contempt of reason, and reliance upon force, you say we shall not go, but shall remain as subjects to you--then, gentlemen of the North, a war is to be inaugurated the like of which men have not seen.
I would that it still remained to consider what we might calmly have considered on the first Monday in December--how this could be avoided; but events have rolled past that point.
You would not make propositions when they would have been effective.
I waive the question of duality, considering that a dual Executive would be the institution of a King Log.
I do not regard the failure of our constitutional Union, as very many do, to be the failure of self-government--to be conclusive in all future time of the unfitness of man to govern himself.
And still will you hesitate; still will you do nothing?
I will not attempt to destroy the Administration by refusing any officers to administer its functions.
It was the purpose, the end, it was the declaration by himself and his friends, which constitute the necessity of providing new safeguards for ourselves.
Now, sir, we are confusing language very much.
Destruction upon both sides; subjugation upon neither; a treaty of peace leaving both torn and bleeding; the wail of the widow and the cry of the orphan substituted for those peaceful notes of domestic happiness that now prevail throughout the land; and then you will agree that each is to pursue his separate course as best he may. This is to be the end of war.
Senators, I have spoken longer than I desired.
It was thought useless to argue a question which now belongs to the past.
It is our House.
It is the old case over again.
It is this clause:
If he chooses to answer my question, I am willing to hear him, for I do not understand how we are to fight in the Union.
He has notified you that he can do nothing; and you therefore know he will do nothing.
Why did I make that statement?
For the few days which I may remain, I am willing to labor in order that that catastrophe shall be as little as possible destructive to public peace and prosperity.
Call it by what name you will, he understood ours to be a Government of the people.
In the most elaborate examples of this condition, each of these secondary doorways has an arch heading, a cross lintel, and a triangular filling or tympanum of its own, all subordinated to the main arch above.
Fillings of doors.
FILLING OF APERTURE.
And this inconvenience is so much perceived by the eye, that a door valve with a pointed head is always a disagreeable object.
It may sometimes happen that when tall windows are placed very close to each other for the sake of more light, the masonry between them may stand in need, or at least be the better of, some additional support.
However high the window, it is almost impossible that it should require more than two cross bars.
But the same indulgence is not to be shown to the affectations which succeeded the developed forms.
CHAPTER XVII.
It was an endeavor to introduce more grace into its lines, and more change into its combinations; and the aesthetic results are so beautiful, that for some time after the right road had been left, the aberration was more to be admired than regretted.
Nor do I think that you can, on the whole, better the arrangement, unless, perhaps, by adding buttresses to some of the bars, as is done in the cathedral at Gloucester; these buttresses having the double advantage of darkening the window when seen from within, and suggesting, when it is seen from without, the idea of its being divided by two stout party walls, with a heavy thrust against the glass.
When windows are large, and to be filled with glass, the sheet of glass, however constructed, whether of large panes or small fragments, requires the support of bars of some kind, either of wood, metal, or stone.
Whatever its form, if we merely let the ends of the bars into the voussoirs of its heading, the least settlement of the masonry would distort the arch, or push up some of its voussoirs, or break the window bars, or push them aside.
Of these the first arose, by the most delicate and natural transitions, out of the perfect school.
Cross bars of stone are, therefore, to be introduced at necessary intervals, not to divide the glass, but to support the upright stone bars.
Capital them; throw small arches across between the smaller bars, large arches over them between the larger bars, one comprehensive arch over the whole, or else a horizontal lintel, if the window have a flat head; and we have a complete system of mutual support, independent of the aperture head, and yet assisting to sustain it, if need be.
Now, in determining the form of the aperture, we supposed the jamb of the door to be of the utmost height required for entrance.
As thus.
It is thus securely sustained by their massy bulk, and leaves their symmetry and shade undisturbed.
But even when so placed, they cannot be trusted to support themselves beyond a certain height, but will need cross bars to steady them.
It becomes, therefore, a matter of true necessity so to arrange the doorway as to admit of its being fitted with rectangular valves.
The next question will be the direction of the bars.
It does not at all follow that this group of forms owes its origin to any such course of reasoning as that which has now led us to it.
But we know how to do this already: our window bars are nothing but small shafts.
The window-bars must, therefore, be of stone, and of stone only.
But this may still not be enough, and the window may need three bars. Now the greatest stress is always on the centre of the window.
The extra height of the arch is unnecessary as an opening, the arch being required for its strength only, not for its elevation.
This school has, however, at least the merit of ingenuity.
The glass is always to be divided longitudinally as far as possible, and the upright bars which divide it supported at proper intervals.
Nor indeed are we to look upon them as in all points superior to the more ancient examples.
These arrangements have formed the noblest buildings in the world.
FORM OF APERTURE.
Window apertures are mainly of two kinds; those for outlook, and those for inlet of light, many being for both purposes, and either purpose, or both, combined in military architecture with those of offence and defence.
Further, and finally.
But when entrance and egress are constant, or required by crowds, certain further modifications must take place.
If admissible anywhere, it is for the sake of variety at the top of the building, as the flat parallelogram sometimes not ungracefully in Italian Renaissance.
1.
But in most cases, whether high or low, a door may be assumed to be considerably lower than the apartments or buildings into which it gives admission, and therefore to have some height of wall above it, whose weight must be carried by the heading of the door.
We shall examine these in succession.
It, and all elongated forms, are still more objectionable placed horizontally, because this is the weakest position they can structurally have; that is to say, less light is admitted, with greater loss of strength to the building, than by any other form.
The form of the aperture: and first of doors.
On the horizontal section the aperture will expand internally, a somewhat larger number of rays being thus reflected from the jambs; and the aperture being thus the smallest possible outside, this is the favorite military form of inlet window, always found in magnificent development in the thick walls of mediaeval castles and convents.
3.
Inlet windows.
But a less proportion of width than this has always a meagre, inhospitable, and ungainly look except in military architecture, where the narrowness of the entrance is necessary, and its height adds to its grandeur, as between the entrance towers of our British castles.
Outlook apertures.
For these no general outline is determinable by the necessities or inconveniences of outlooking, except only that the bottom or sill of the windows, at whatever height, should be horizontal, for the convenience of leaning on it, or standing on it if the window be to the ground.
The best windows for outlook are, of course, oriels and bow windows, but these are not to be considered under the head of apertures merely; they are either balconies roofed and glazed, and to be considered under the head of external appliances, or they are each a story of an external semi-tower, having true aperture windows on each side of it.
Among these is a temple in the form of a roofless stage, in honour of the thousand-handed Kwannon.
Iyeyasu, seeing that the Abbot was no ordinary man, stopped and asked his name, and entered the temple to rest himself.
Of the many fair scenes of Yedo, none is better worth visiting than the temple of Zojoji, one of the two great burial-places of the Shoguns; indeed, if you wish to see the most beautiful spots of any Oriental city, ask for the cemeteries: the homes of the dead are ever the loveliest places.
Still they are very handsome, and in the days of its magnificence the Temple of Uyeno was one of the finest.
The temples in Yedo are not to be compared in point of beauty with those in and about Peking; what is marble there is wood here.
The shrines are of exceeding beauty, lying on one side of a splendid avenue of Scotch firs, which border a broad, well-kept gravel walk. Passing through a small gateway of rare design, we come into a large stone courtyard, lined with a long array of colossal stone lanterns, the gift of the vassals of the departed Prince.
Passing on one side of the shrine, we come to another court, plainer than the last, and at the back of the little temple inside it is a flight of stone steps, at the top of which, protected by a bronze door, stands a simple monumental urn of bronze on a stone pedestal.
It is very difficult to do justice to their beauty in words.
The smooth-spoken monk soon found such favour with Iyeyasu, that he chose Zojoji to be his family temple; and seeing that its grounds were narrow and inconveniently near the castle, he caused it to be removed to its present site.
To him this temple is dedicated.
Under this is the grave itself; and it has always struck me that there is no small amount of poetical feeling in this simple ending to so much magnificence; the sermon may have been preached by design, or it may have been by accident, but the lesson is there.
Inside this enclosure stands a shrine, before the closed door of which a priest on one side, and a retainer of the house of Tokugawa on the other, sit mounting guard, mute and immovable as though they themselves were part of the carved ornaments.
Inside this is a third court, partly covered like a cloister, the approach to which is a doorway of even greater beauty and richness than the last; the ceiling is gilt, and painted with arabesques and with heavenly angels playing on musical instruments, and the panels of the walls are sculptured in high relief with admirable representations of birds and flowers, life-size, life-like, all being coloured to imitate nature.
His retreat having been discovered, he was seized and brought bound to Kamakura, the chief town of the house of Gen.
Nor were the privileges of the temple confined to barren honours, for it was endowed with lands of the value of five thousand kokus of rice yearly.
There is little difference between the three shrines, all of which are decorated in the same manner.
A colossal bronze Buddha, twenty-two feet high, set up some two hundred years ago, and a stone lantern, twenty feet high, and twelve feet round at the top, are greatly admired by the Japanese.
At these the visitor is warned by a notice to take off his boots, a request which Englishmen, with characteristic disregard of the feelings of others, usually neglect to comply with.
NOTE.
There are only three such lanterns in the empire; the other two being at Nanzenji--a temple in Kiyoto, and Atsura, a shrine in the province of Owari.
The gift of tongues which they exercised was intended by Almighty God to edify and enlighten the spectators, and to give Divine sanction to the Apostolic ministry.
In violation of the practice of all antiquity it mutilates the rite by omitting the sacred unction.
You were anointed on the forehead, that you might be delivered from the shame which the first transgressor always experienced, and that you might contemplate the glory of God with an unveiled countenance....
Hence the successors of the Apostles in the nineteenth century have precisely the same authority and obligation to confirm as they have to preach, to baptize or to ordain.
The grace which the Apostolic disciples received was for their personal sanctification.
But after it had taken root in the hearts of the people and spread its branches over the earth it was left to the ordinary agencies of Providence.
THE SACRAMENT OF CONFIRMATION.
If, then, there be not now a testimony to the presence of the Holy Spirit by means of these miracles, whence is it proved that he has received the Holy Spirit?
It retains the shadow without the substance.
And see well that you regard it not as mere ointment; for, as the bread of the Eucharist, after the invocation of the Holy Ghost, is no longer mere bread but the body of Christ, so likewise this holy ointment is no longer common ointment after the invocation, but the gift of Christ and of the Holy Ghost, being rendered efficient by His Divinity.
Chapter XX.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem compares the sacred Chrism in Confirmation to the Eucharist: "You were anointed with oil, being made sharers and partners of Christ.
Confirmation is a Sacrament in which, through the imposition of the Bishop's hands, unction and prayer, baptized persons receive the Holy Ghost, that they may steadfastly profess their faith and lead upright lives.
It may be asked: Why do not these gifts accompany now the imposition of hands?
Those who were confirmed by the Apostles usually gave evidence of the grace which they received by prophecy, the gift of tongues and the manifestation of other miraculous powers.
But, in opposition to the uniform teaching of the Catholic, as well as of all the Oriental churches, both orthodox and schismatic, it declares Confirmation to be a mere rite and not a Sacrament.
I answer: Because they are no longer needed.
St. Augustine writes also on the same subject: "In the first days (of the Church) the Holy Ghost came down on believers, and they spoke in tongues which they had not learned....
Frequent mention is made of this Sacrament in the Holy Scripture.
The Oriental schismatic churches recognize Confirmation as a Sacrament, and administer the rite as we do, by the imposition of hands and the application of chrism.
"Remember," he says, "that you have received the spiritual seal, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and piety, the spirit of holy fear.
This fact is an eloquent vindication of the Apostolic antiquity of Confirmation, and is an ample refutation of those who would ascribe to it a more recent origin.
Now, some of these churches have been separated from the Catholic Church since the fourth and fifth centuries.
Following in the footsteps of the Apostles we find the Fathers of the Church, from the earliest age, recognizing Confirmation as a Divine and sacramental institution and proclaiming its salutary effects.
It cannot be asserted that the laying on of hands and the graces which followed from it, as recorded in the Acts, were not intended to be continued after the Apostles' times, for there is no warrant for such an assumption.
22) expressly applies the text to the seal of Confirmation.
Do you ask where it is written?
We will change the subject, if you please.
I said nothing to Samuel.
I was savage with myself, for feeling uneasy in myself the moment she had spoken them--but so it was.
The afternoon wore on, and my lady and Miss Rachel came back.
Rosanna has fallen in love with Mr. Franklin Blake at first sight!"
I would have given something to have waited at table that day.
After leaving Mr. Franklin and me at the Shivering Sand, Rosanna, it appeared, had returned to the house in a very unaccountable state of mind.
I could speak to Mr. Franklin's astonishment as genuine, when he saw how the girl stared at him. Penelope could speak to the girl's inquisitiveness as genuine, when she asked questions about Mr. Franklin.
The night was still and close, and the moon was at the full in the heavens.
As the house stood, the terrace side was the dark side; but the broad moonlight showed fair on the gravel walk that ran along the next side to the terrace.
Having got over my difficulties with the ladies, I found more difficulties waiting for me when I went back to my own room.
From the shrubbery, they could easily make their way, over our fence into the road.
Had they heard anything of each other?
Picking the object up, I discovered it was a small bottle, containing a thick sweet-smelling liquor, as black as ink.
"I never knew you cruel before, father," she said, very gently, and went out.
Being old and sly, I forbore to call out; but being also, unfortunately, old and heavy, my feet betrayed me on the gravel.
In came Penelope--with the natural sweetness of women--to kiss and make it up again; and--with the natural curiosity of women--to ask another question.
Needless to say how astonished they were, when they heard that Mr. Franklin Blake had arrived, and had gone off again on horseback. Needless also to say, that THEY asked awkward questions directly, and that the "foreign politics" and the "falling asleep in the sun" wouldn't serve a second time over with THEM.
He had not met with the Indians, either going or returning.
Impossible again!
She had turned (if Penelope was to be believed) all the colours of the rainbow.
To my great disappointment (and no doubt to yours also), nothing had happened.
My girl's words fell upon me like a splash of cold water.
You have heard of beautiful young ladies falling in love at first sight, and have thought it natural enough.
I took his hot water up to his room myself, expecting to hear, after this extraordinary delay, that something had happened.
She had been surprised again, crying and looking at her deformed shoulder in the glass.
She had been surprised, smiling, and scribbling Mr. Franklin's name inside her workbox.
But, in my position in the household, waiting at dinner (except on high family festivals) was letting down my dignity in the eyes of the other servants--a thing which my lady considered me quite prone enough to do already, without seeking occasions for it.
I laughed till the tears rolled down my cheeks.
"Father!" says Penelope, quite seriously, "there's only one explanation of it.
Had she and Mr. Franklin known anything of each other before to-day?
Looking this way, after looking up at the sky, I saw the shadow of a person in the moonlight thrown forward from behind the corner of the house.
The evening came, and the dressing-bell for dinner rang, before Mr. Franklin returned from Frizinghall.
Under present circumstances, the one thing to be done was to clap the extinguisher upon Penelope's curiosity on the spot.
Later still, I went to Mr. Franklin in the smoking-room, with the soda-water and brandy, and found that Miss Rachel had put the Diamond clean out of his head.
Try that sort of answer when your wife or your daughter next worries you with an awkward question at an awkward time, and depend on the natural sweetness of women for kissing and making it up again at the next opportunity.
Before I could steal suddenly round the corner, as I had proposed, I heard lighter feet than mine--and more than one pair of them as I thought--retreating in a hurry.
CHAPTER VII
If I had been forty years younger, I might have had a chance of catching them before they got clear of our premises. As it was, I went back to set a-going a younger pair of legs than mine. Without disturbing anybody, Samuel and I got a couple of guns, and went all round the house and through the shrubbery.
Towards midnight, I went round the house to lock up, accompanied by my second in command (Samuel, the footman), as usual.
Quite impossible!
The archdeacon gave a sigh that would have moved a man-of-war.
"The attorney-general named ten for my meeting; to be sure ten is late, but what could I do, you know? Great men will have their own way."
"Of course," continued the other, "such a declaration as that you made to Sir Abraham means nothing.
"I will sell my furniture," said the warden.
Chapter XVIII
How do you mean to pay the monstrous expenses of this action?"
Some such idea as this was on his mind, but he gave no utterance to it.
"Good heavens!
To this proposition also Mr Harding was obliged to assent.
"And the precentorship," said the father-in-law.
Mr Harding was now standing on the rug, moving uneasily from one foot to the other.
"I shall certainly resign this wardenship."
Bold has been compelled to abandon his action, and all you have to do is to remain quiet at the hospital." Mr Harding still made no reply, but looked meekly into his son-in-law's face.
"Isn't it?" asked the warden, innocently.
"It goes with the wardenship," said the son-in-law.
The archdeacon took another turn, and again ejaculated, "Good heavens!" this time in a very low whisper, but still audible.
The very place for him.
"One cannot have the attorney-general up at twelve o'clock at night for nothing;--but of course your father has not thought of this."
But Susan didn't want to go till her husband went.
The warden looked at his daughter, thinking probably at the moment that if Eleanor were contented with him, he need not so much regard his other child, and said, "I am sure Susan will not ask me to break my word, or to do what I know to be wrong."
If he chooses to ruin his child I cannot help it;" and he stood still at the fire-place, and looked at himself in a dingy mirror which stood on the chimney-piece.
Susan, my dear, what can I say to him?"
"My dear warden," said he, "this is all nonsense. Eighty pounds or a hundred and sixty makes very little difference. You can't live on it,--you can't ruin Eleanor's prospects for ever. In point of fact, you can't resign; the bishop wouldn't accept it; the whole thing is settled.
"It can never be rash to do right," said he.
And to throw that up because some scoundrel writes an article in a newspaper! Well;--I have done my duty.
There was something in the tone of the man's voice which seemed to indicate that even he looked upon the warden as a runaway schoolboy, just recaptured by his guardian, and that he pitied the culprit, though he could not but be horrified at the crime.
Mr Harding was prepared to argue this point, and began to do so, but Dr Grantly stopped him.
Then he thought of the pelican feeding its young with blood from its own breast, but he gave no utterance to that either; and then of Eleanor waiting for him at home, waiting to congratulate him on the end of all his trouble.
"If the ravens persisted in refusing the food prepared for them, they wouldn't be fed." A clergyman generally dislikes to be met in argument by any scriptural quotation; he feels as affronted as a doctor does, when recommended by an old woman to take some favourite dose, or as a lawyer when an unprofessional man attempts to put him down by a quibble.
"Not at all," said the archdeacon, catching a ray of hope.
Mr Harding could not deny this.
"What will Sir Abraham think of it?
"Resigned it!" said the archdeacon, in a solemn voice, sad and low, but yet sufficiently audible,--a sort of whisper that Macready would have envied, and the galleries have applauded with a couple of rounds. "Resigned it!
"I am sure he disadvised you from it," continued the reverend cross-examiner.
What I now want to do is to prevent any inconvenient tittle-tattle,--any more newspaper articles."
Good heavens!" And the dignitary of the church sank back horrified into a horsehair arm-chair.
Mr Harding signified that he had.
"And to prevent that," continued the other, "we mustn't let any talk of resignation get abroad."
The archdeacon thought he knew his father-in-law, but he was mistaken; he thought that he had already talked over a vacillating man to resign his promise.
What are you to live on?"
"I think I'll go to bed," said the warden, taking up a side candle.
Come, warden, promise me this.
The whole affair, you see, is already settled, and that with very little trouble or expense.
"You must be very tired, Susan," said he: "wouldn't you like to go to bed?"
"I do think of her," said her father.
"I shall have the living of Crabtree," modestly suggested the warden.
"Eighty pounds a year!" sneered the archdeacon.
The warden hung his head, and made no reply: he could not condescend to say that he had not intended to give his son-in-law the slip; and as he had not the courage to avow it, he said nothing.
"That's what I want, too," said the warden.
He was there, however, very distinctly there; and something in his attitude seemed to say that he was there with a complex intention.
She gave it up, but she still thought of it--thought of it while she strolled again under the great oaks whose shadows were long upon the acres of turf.
The rest of his property, which was to be withdrawn from the bank, was disposed of in various bequests, several of them to those cousins in Vermont to whom his father had already been so bountiful.
It will have cost you your life?
She heard no knock, but at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow grey she started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a summons.
"I'd sooner have been shot than let another man say those things to me; but he was different; he seemed to me to have the right.
"It would give me great pleasure; I have such a friendly recollection of them."
It was not that his face was sad, for that was another matter; but it was strangely inexpressive.
"I'm so glad to find you've not gone."
Don't think it's necessary to defend him.
It was fortunate she had so good a formula; otherwise she might have been greatly in want of one.
During much of the time Isabel was conscious of Mr. Goodwood's gaze; he looked at her somewhat harder than he usually looked in public, while the others had fixed their eyes upon the churchyard turf.
"How can you help me?" she asked in a low tone, as if she were taking what he had said seriously enough to make the enquiry in confidence.
Three days after this a considerable number of people found time, at the height of the London "season," to take a morning train down to a quiet station in Berkshire and spend half an hour in a small grey church which stood within an easy walk.
I congratulated him, and he accepted it."
She instantly rose, and as soon as Goodwood saw he was seen he started forward.
"Perhaps I'm not right in saying that just now; of course you're not thinking of visiting.
What would you think of me if I should stand still and see you go back to your reward?
They only said "This is rather awkward, you know, and I depend upon you to help me." He was very grave, very proper and, for the first time since Isabel had known him, greeted her without a smile.
With her his parting was equally brief; and in a moment the two ladies saw him move with long steps across the lawn.
"Yes, I came very suddenly."
Say it will"--and he flared almost into anger: "give me one word of truth!
She gazed straight before her; he, with a hand on each knee, leaned forward, looking deeply into her face.
The theory I have just mentioned was plausible enough, but it brought her little rest, and if you had seen her pacing about you would have said she had a bad conscience.
He was a good man, a fine man, one of the best; he told me how the case stands for you.
I know he's an old friend of yours, and as I was told you were not in the house I brought him out to see for himself."
Now I know--to-day I know.
Isabel thought of all this.
He said nothing at first; she only felt him close to her--beside her on the bench and pressingly turned to her.
She wouldn't sit down on it now--she felt rather afraid of it.
When I know such a horror as that, how can I keep myself from wishing to save you?
"I came here to-day for a purpose.
"Are you mad?" she cried.
Then there were a number of small legacies.
I have said that she was restless and unable to occupy herself; and whether or no, if you had seen her there, you would have admired the justice of the former epithet, you would at least have allowed that at this moment she was the image of a victim of idleness.
Then I was quite in the dark.
"Take care you don't miss your train," she said.
This evening, however, was fine, and at first it struck her as a happy thought to have come out.
The two nurses were at the foot between them.
But she never let him see that she saw him; she thought of him only to wonder that he was still in England.
"I can't be surer than he; but he seems sure.
"Dear Aunt Lydia," Isabel murmured.
"I suppose not; but I hope it's for some weeks.
It contains a great many rare and valuable books, and as she can't carry it about the world in her trunk he recommends her to sell it at auction. She will sell it of course at Christie's, and with the proceeds she'll set up a newspaper.
It's too late to play a part; didn't you leave all that behind you in Rome?
He said: 'Do everything you can for her; do everything she'll let you.'"
The effect of this agitation was a sudden sense of being very tired, under the influence of which she overcame her scruples and sank into the rustic seat.
He left her no money; of course she had no need of money.
On that occasion she had simply started.
So I've been waiting and walking about.
She turned on him as if he had struck her.
Apparently he thought you didn't like him, for he hasn't left you a penny.
Even in his days of distress he had always begun with a smile. He looked extremely selfconscious.
You're perfectly alone; you don't know where to turn.
Isabel suddenly got up.
But there was something in his face that she wished not to see.
Outside Ralph's door she stopped a moment, listening, but she seemed to hear only the hush that filled it.
He had told her everything, had consulted her about everything.
But she closed her eyes; she believed that as the night wore on she should hear a knock at her door.
"Ah," said Isabel, "I give it up!"--while her aunt returned to the house and to those avocations which the visitor had interrupted.
Are you really alone?
There was a penetrating chill in the image, and she drew back into the deepest shade of Gardencourt.
She looked at her interlocutor a moment, and the result of her observation was that--as had happened before--she felt sorry for him.
She knew she must decide, but she decided nothing; her coming itself had not been a decision.
She had lain down without undressing, it being her belief that Ralph would not outlast the night.
She lived from day to day, postponing, closing her eyes, trying not to think.
"You had no business to talk about me!"
Isabel thought of her husband as little as might be; but now that she was at a distance, beyond its spell, she thought with a kind of spiritual shudder of Rome.
"I didn't mean to," he answered, "but if I did a little, no matter. I came from London a while ago by the train, but I couldn't come here directly.
She stared a moment; she saw his white face--his kind eyes; then she saw there was nothing.
But I meant what would hardly be a visit.
The money produced by the sale was to constitute an endowment for a hospital for poor persons suffering from the malady of which he died; and of this portion of the will Lord Warburton was appointed executor.
She only stood before it, and while she stood the past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which persons of sensibility are visited at odd hours.
Will that be a service to literature?"
The most valuable of the collection goes to Lord Warburton.
The nurse looked at her very hard too, and no one said a word; but Isabel only looked at what she had come to see.
This consisted in the reflexion that, after all, such things happened to other people and not to herself.
You can't deceive me any more; for God's sake be honest with a man who's so honest with you.
He explained everything; he guessed my sentiments.
She had a new sensation; he had never produced it before; it was a feeling of danger.
As the lawn at Gardencourt was a vast expanse this took some time; during which she observed that, as he walked beside his hostess, Lord Warburton kept his hands rather stiffly behind him and his eyes upon the ground.
If he was conscious of personal reasons it was very fortunate that he had the cover of the former motive; he could make the most of that.
She had a husband in a foreign city, counting the hours of her absence; in such a case one needed an excellent motive. He was not one of the best husbands, but that didn't alter the case. Certain obligations were involved in the very fact of marriage, and were quite independent of the quantity of enjoyment extracted from it.
'I wish you would go!' I replied.
And again he caught me in his arms, and smothered me with kisses.
Perhaps a half-suppressed sob had caught his ear, and caused him to look round--heaven forbid!
'You must, and shall tell me,' was added, more vehemently, and the speaker threw himself on his knees beside me on the rug, and forcibly possessed himself of my hand; but I hastily caught it away, and replied,--'It is nothing to you, Mr. Huntingdon.'
'Pardon me, sir,' said she, with dignity--'The company are inquiring for you in the other room.' And she turned to me.
But in saying this she looked back at Lord Lowborough, who was standing a little behind, leaning against the back of a chair, an attentive listener, too, experiencing, to judge by his countenance, much the same feelings of mingled pleasure and sadness as I did.
But to return.
But his confusion was only for a moment.
'Well, I would lay down life--'
'But which?' said he--'for I shall only say it if you really were thinking of me.
'Another time, sir, we will talk of this--and I should have felt disposed to judge more favourably of your pretensions, if you too had chosen another time and place, and let me add--another manner for your declaration.'
'Ah, true!
'It is true,' interrupted I.
'They won't refuse me, if you don't.'
'Why, you see, Mrs. Maxwell,' he began--
In a softer tone, she repeated her recommendation to retire, and, gently kissing my forehead, bade me good-night, and put her candle in my hand; and I went; but my brain worked so, I could not think of sleeping.
I now forgave him from my heart his reckless slight of me, and I felt ashamed at my pettish resentment of such a trifle--ashamed too of those bitter envious pangs that gnawed my inmost heart, in spite of all this admiration and delight.
'Not at all--too pertinent, you mean.
'Don't be angry, aunt,' said I.
'You know I do,' I answered.
'I would spend it, then--devote my life--and all its powers to the promotion and preservation--'
When it ceased, I longed for nothing so much as to be out of the room. The sofa was not far from the door, but I did not dare to raise my head, for I knew Mr. Huntingdon was standing near me, and I knew by the sound of his voice, as he spoke in answer to some remark of Lord Lowborough's, that his face was turned towards me.
I made an effort to rise, but he was kneeling on my dress.
I trusted it was only a servant, and did not stir.
And who can tell but Heaven, at last, May answer all my thousand prayers, And bid the future pay the past With joy for anguish, smiles for tears.
But with a violent effort, I checked all further signs of weakness, dried my tears, and, when I thought he had turned away again, rose, and instantly left the apartment, taking refuge in my favourite resort, the library.
'Then how could you permit--?'
'We will talk of this to-morrow, sir,' said my aunt, coldly.
The door was closed again--but I was not alone; a hand gently touched my shoulder, and a voice said, softly,--'Helen, what is the matter?'
Silence again?
'I couldn't help it, aunt,' I cried, bursting into tears.
I could not answer at the moment.
No wonder he should hunger and thirst to hear her sing.
I know she is an angel, and I am a presumptuous dog to dream of possessing such a treasure; but, nevertheless, I would sooner die than relinquish her in favour of the best man that ever went to heaven--and as for her happiness, I would sacrifice my body and soul--'
Rallying in an instant, with the most enviable assurance, he began,--'I beg ten thousand pardons, Mrs. Maxwell!
I suppose it is with sleeping and eating so little, and thinking so much, and being so continually out of humour.
'Body and soul, Mr. Huntingdon--sacrifice your soul?'
'Tell me,' continued he--'I want to know,--because if you were, I have something to say to you,--and if not, I'll go.'
'No, no!' I exclaimed, struggling to free myself from him--'you must ask my uncle and aunt.'
'Do now!
'You would not be required to lay it down.'
And now, with my nerves already excited and half unstrung, I could not hear those words so sweetly warbled forth without some symptoms of emotion I was not able to suppress.
That laughing eye, whose sunny beam My memory would not cherish less;-- And oh, that smile!
So you won't tell me?--Well, I'll spare your woman's pride, and, construing your silence into "Yes," I'll take it for granted that I was the subject of your thoughts, and the cause of your affliction--'
'No indulgence for you, Mr. Huntingdon, must come between me and the consideration of my niece's happiness.'
'I'm not so sure of that--my aunt dislikes you.'
I must have recourse to my diary again; I will commit it to paper to-night, and see what I shall think of it to-morrow.
At that moment my aunt opened wide the door, and stood before us, candle in hand, in shocked and horrified amazement, gazing alternately at Mr. Huntingdon and me--for we had both started up, and now stood wide enough asunder.
I went down to dinner resolving to be cheerful and well-conducted, and kept my resolution very creditably, considering how my head ached and how internally wretched I felt.
'If you deny it, I won't tell you my secret,' threatened he; and I did not interrupt him again, or even attempt to repulse him: though he had taken my hand once more, and half embraced me with his other arm, I was scarcely conscious of it at the time.
The king rejoiced greatly at these tidings, and he sent for his councillors, to whom he told the whole story from the beginning. And he caused Elphin to be brought out of prison, and he chided him because of his boast.
In the meantime his wife and Taliesin remained joyful at Elphin's dwelling.
And Gwyddno had an only son named Elphin, the most hapless of youths, and the most needy.
TALIESIN
And afterwards she sat down to supper again, and Rhun with her.
And this lord did so gladly. But they ceased not from their folly any more than before. Whereupon he sent to them a second time, and a third, desiring them to go forth from the hall.
"I have been formed a comely person; Although I am but little, I am highly gifted; Into a dark leathern bag I was thrown, And on a boundless sea I was sent adrift. From seas and from mountains God brings wealth to the fortunate man."
In this guise Taliesin caused his mistress to put the maiden to sit at the board in her room at supper; and he made her to seem as her mistress, and the mistress to seem as the maid.
By the advice of his council, his father had granted him the drawing of the weir that year, to see if good luck would ever befall him, and to give him something wherewith to begin the world.
And Taliesin showed his mistress how that Elphin was in prison because of them; but he bade her be glad, for that he would go to Maelgan's court to free his master.
"Elphin, the son of Gwyddno, Is in the land of Artro, Secured by thirteen locks, For praising his instructor. Therefore I, Taliesin, Chief of the bards of the west, Will loosen Elphin Out of a golden fetter."
Then came Elphin to the house of Gwyddno, his father, and Taliesin with him.
Elphin gave his haul to his wife, and she nursed him tenderly and lovingly.
While Rhun went in haste towards Elphin's dwelling, being fully minded to bring disgrace upon his wife, Taliesin told his mistress how that the king had placed his master in durance in prison, and how that Rhun was coming in haste to strive to bring disgrace upon her.
And he sung thus:
Then Taliesin sang:
Then he sang to them a riddle:
CHAPTER XIII
This was the first poem that Taliesin ever sung, being to console Elphin in his grief for that the produce of the weir was lost, and what was worse, that all the world would consider that it was through his fault and ill-luck.
Then Elphin asked him what he was, whether man or spirit.
At the last the king ordered one of his squires to give a blow to the chief of them, named Heinin Vardd; and the squire took a broom and struck him on the head, so that he fell back in his seat.
As soon as Taliesin entered the hall he placed himself in a quiet corner, near the place where the bards and the minstrels were wont to come, in doing their service and duty to the king, as is the custom at the high festivals, when the bounty is proclaimed.
After that Taliesin brought Elphin's wife before them, and showed that she had not one finger wanting.
The king was mightily wroth with Elphin for so stoutly withstanding him, respecting the goodness of his wife; wherefore he ordered him to his prison a second time, saying that he should not be loosed thence until he had proved the truth of his boast, as well concerning the wisdom of his bard as the virtues of his wife.
Then Rhun began jesting with the maid, who still kept the semblance of her mistress.
"Three times have I been born, I know by meditation; All the sciences of the world are collected in my breast, For I know what has been, and what hereafter will occur."
Wherefore he commanded one of his lords, who served at the board, to go to them and desire them to collect their wits, and to consider where they stood, and what it was fitting for them to do.
And he answered the king in verse:
Gwyddno Garanhir was sovereign of Gwaelod, a territory bordering on the sea.
Wherefore he caused his mistress to array one of the maids of her kitchen in her apparel; which the noble lady gladly did, and she loaded her hands with the best rings that she and her husband possessed.
Who had more skilful or wiser bards than Maelgan?
Who had fairer or swifter horses or greyhounds?
"Primary chief bard am I to Elphin, And my native country is the region of the summer stars; I have been in Asia with Noah in the ark, I have seen the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, I was in India when Rome was built, I have now come here to the remnant of Troia."
And presently the boy made a Consolation, and praise to Elphin; and the Consolation was as you may here see:
"A bard," said Elphin.
And he made his horse amble gently, that before had been trotting, and he carried him as softly as if he had been sitting in the easiest chair in the world.
And he lifted the bag in his arms, and, lamenting his bad luck, placed the boy sorrowfully behind him.
The third is, truly, that the hand whence this finger came was kneading rye dough within three days before the finger was cut therefrom, and I can assure your highness that my wife has never kneaded rye dough since my wife she has been."
And this was on the twenty-ninth of April.
For the Independent Journal.
The great extent of the country is a further security.
To the People of the State of New York:
If it should be a slight commotion in a small part of a State, the militia of the residue would be adequate to its suppression; and the national presumption is that they would be ready to do their duty.
We have already experienced its utility against the attacks of a foreign power.
The Same Subject Continued (The Idea of Restraining the Legislative Authority in Regard to the Common Defense Considered)
An insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually endangers all government.
The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.
They can readily communicate with each other in the different States, and unite their common forces for the protection of their common liberty.
Regard to the public peace, if not to the rights of the Union, would engage the citizens to whom the contagion had not communicated itself to oppose the insurgents; and if the general government should be found in practice conducive to the prosperity and felicity of the people, it were irrational to believe that they would be disinclined to its support.
HAMILTON
If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state.
But in a confederacy the people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate. Power being almost always the rival of power, the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government.
It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.
The obstacles to usurpation and the facilities of resistance increase with the increased extent of the state, provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.
Projects of usurpation cannot be masked under pretenses so likely to escape the penetration of select bodies of men, as of the people at large.
THAT there may happen cases in which the national government may be necessitated to resort to force, cannot be denied.
The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate.
For a long time to come, it will not be possible to maintain a large army; and as the means of doing this increase, the population and natural strength of the community will proportionably increase.
If, on the contrary, the insurrection should pervade a whole State, or a principal part of it, the employment of a different kind of force might become unavoidable.
We should recollect that the extent of the military force must, at all events, be regulated by the resources of the country.
Wednesday, December 26, 1787
Would not each of them be exposed to the same casualties; and when these happened, be obliged to have recourse to the same expedients for upholding its authority which are objected to in a government for all the States?
Let us pursue this examination in another light.
The usurpers, clothed with the forms of legal authority, can too often crush the opposition in embryo.
Who would not prefer that possibility to the unceasing agitations and frequent revolutions which are the continual scourges of petty republics?
I shall never see her after it.
'Ah,--your father will miss you so much!
But if it cannot be, it is very good of you to come now.
It could not, as he thought, be hurled effectually without his father's knowledge; but he need not tell his father the errand on which he had come.
His first words must, if possible, be spoken to her alone; and yet alone he could hardly hope to find her.
And what would be his own feelings?
She too remembered well, with absolute accuracy, those warm, delicious, heavenly words of love which had passed between them.
It is no use talking about it, words won't mend it.'
George arose from his seat at once, and then came a look of pain across his face. Marie saw it at once, and almost loved him the more because he suffered.
As he took one of the horses belonging to the inn and drove himself, it seemed to be certain that he would not stay long.
Then the man commenced an elaborate account of the betrothals.
What had he to say to his father about the marriage that could not be better said down at the house?
I have heard people say that there is no one comes to Granpere who can buy better than he can.'
In the mean time, information of George's arrival had been taken upstairs to Marie.
'No,' said he.
And though Colmar and Basle are very near, it will not be the same as in the dear old home;--will it, George?' There was a touch about her voice as she called him by his name, that nearly killed him.
'I must go now,' she said presently.
'It is a disgrace to think more about that than anything else.
George told the man that he would go up to the wood-cutting after his father; but before he was out of the court he changed his mind and slowly entered the house.
He went through into the kitchen before he met any one, and there he found Madame Voss with the cook and Peter.
'That is not so, George.'
'I am so glad to see you, George,' she said.
Were she to remain away from him till they should be brought together at the supper-table, there would almost be a necessity for her to explain her conduct.
'Yes,' he said, 'I thought it best just to run over.
'O, yes, there are beds enough.' After that there was some pause, and Madame Voss hardly knew how to treat her step-son.
As she entered her aunt's room George Voss was sitting before the stove, while Madame Voss was in her accustomed chair, and Peter was preparing the table for his young master's dinner.
'I will congratulate her certainly,' said George.
'I know too well what it is that I have done.'
You have repented, have you not, Alaric?'
Alaric, for the first time for the fortnight, took the little fellow into his arms and kissed him.
'Never mind; let him be impatient-you shall not go away without blessing your boy; come up, Alaric.' And she took him by the hand and led him like a child into the nursery.
Charley was with them on the last evening, and completed their despair by telling them that their attorney had resolved to make no further efforts at a compromise.
He did not answer her, but he turned to the table and broke the bread, and put his lips to the cup.
'But, dearest, you will be faint if you do not eat; think what you have to go through; remember how many eyes will be on you to-day.'
'God bless you, my bairn,' said he, 'and grant that all this may never be visited against you, here or hereafter!'
That day for which Gertrude had prayed her mother's assistance came all too soon.
How the agent looked and spoke and felt may be imagined; for the agent had made large advances, and had no other security; but Undy had borne such looks and speeches before, and merely said that it was very odd--extremely odd; he had been greatly deceived by Mr. Piles.
'Never mind,' said she; 'we will win through it yet--we will yet be happy together, far, far away from here--remember that--let that support you through all.
But at last all composition was refused.
But remember, all is not over, whatever they may do.
Overture after overture was made to the lawyer employed by Mrs. Val's party.
Alaric rose from his chair and made a faint attempt to smile. 'Well, Gertrude,' said he, 'it has come at last.'
The adverse attorney declared, first, that he was not able to accept any money payment short of the full amount with interest, and then he averred, that as criminal proceedings had been taken they could not now be stayed.
'No, not that, Alaric; I would not have that.
And then she gave him food as she would give it to a child, and he with a child's obedience ate and drank what was put before him.
They were, as the broker had said, ticklish stock; so ticklish that no one would have them at any price.
'Where is the nurse?
'It will be matter.
Mr. Piles also said it was very odd; but he did not appear to be nearly so much annoyed as the agent from Tillietudlem; and it was whispered that, queer as things now looked, Messrs.
And that day was not long in coming; indeed, it came with terrible alacrity; much too quickly for Gertrude, much too quickly for Norman; and much too quickly for Alaric's lawyer.
Do you take yours; never mind me.'
When Undy, together with his agent from Tillietudlem, went into the market about the same time to dispose of theirs, they were equally unsuccessful.
They had become at last aware that the trial must go on.
'To me you are, now as ever; but, Alaric, I do so fear that you will want strength, physical strength, you know, to go through all this.
To me at least you are the same noble Alaric that you ever were.'
He who had been so energetic, so full of life, so ready for all emergencies, so clever at devices, so able to manage not only for himself but for his friends, he was, as it were, paralysed and unmanned.
'Don't turn from me, dearest Alaric; do not turn from me now at our last moments.
'Gertrude, Gertrude--that I should have brought you to this!'
He shuddered violently as she spoke, and motioned to her with his hand not to go on with what she was saying.
my love, my best, my own, my only love!'
Blocks, Piles, and Cofferdam, had not made a bad thing of the bridge.
But, Alaric,' she went on, 'do not droop now, love--will you?'
Whether or no Alaric's night attack had anything to do with this, whether Undy had been the means of instigating this rigid adherence to justice, we are not prepared to say.
His lawyer was to call for him on the morning of the trial, and Mrs. Woodward was to be at the house soon after he had left it. He had not yet seen her since the inquiry had commenced, and it was very plain that he did not wish to do so.
The learned gentleman had the good taste not to come in, and so the servant told them that Mr. Gitemthruet was there.
He sat from morning to night looking at the empty fire-grate, and hardly ventured to speak of the ordeal that he had to undergo.
She poured out his tea for him, put bread upon his plate, and then sat down close beside him, endeavouring to persuade him to eat.
'See you!' said she, starting back, but still holding him and looking up earnestly into his face.
As he did so, every now and again a single tear forced itself beneath his eyelid and trickled down his face, and in some degree Gertrude was comforted.
It was the first that had come to his assistance since this sorrow had come upon him.
To Alaric only did the time pass slowly, for he found himself utterly without employment.
He had hardly finished his enforced breakfast when the cab and the lawyer came to the door.
'It will be but little matter,' said he.
'I cannot brazen it out,' said he.
'I think so, I hope so,' said Alaric, with his eyes upon the ground.
My darling, darling husband, rouse yourself,' and she knelt before his knees and prayed to him; 'for my sake do it; eat and drink that you may have the power of a man when all the world is looking at you.
'Noble!' said he, with all the self-scorn which he so truly felt.
If God forgives us our sins, surely we should so carry ourselves that men may not be ashamed to do so.'
'Say that your master will be with him in a minute,' said Gertrude, quite coolly; and then the room door was again closed, and the husband and wife had now to say adieu.
'Come, Alaric, won't you eat your breakfast?' said she.
He sat in the seat prepared for him, but, instead of eating, he thrust his hands after his accustomed manner into his pockets and sat glowering at the teacups.
'No; breakfast!
He turned away his head, for a tear was in his eye.
'The man will be impatient.'
She rushed into his embrace, and throwing her arms around him, buried her face upon his breast.
And, Alaric, wherever you are I will be close to you, remember that.
And so Alaric and his wife sat down to breakfast on that last morning.
'Alaric, Alaric, my husband!
THE LAST BREAKFAST
'I cannot say much now, Gertrude, but I know how good you are; you will come and see me, if they will let you, won't you?'
It would then be a rough equivalent of the Ibsen irony in a contrary medium.
The support does not need to warm the spectators to the problem, then talk them into surrender.
He can be acted in essentials from end to end with one table and four chairs in any parlor.
The boy is taken with the dreaded intermittent pains in the back of his head.
And the other is effective with no title at all.
This parallel development should come, if for no other reason, because the two arts are still roughly classed together by the public.
The Venus of Milo, that comes directly to the soul through the silence, requires no quotation from Keats to explain her, though Keats is the equivalent in verse.
A hairy arm with clutching demon claws comes thrusting in toward the back of his neck.
There is no doctor on the stage in the original Ghosts.
They stand in a row, facing the people, endeavoring to make the crisis of an alleged Ibsen play out of a crashing melodrama.
If the film suggests what some of the neighbors have been doing, they can regale each other with the richest sewing society report.
The boy's consequent struggle with the malady has been traced step by step, so the play should end here.
The successful motion picture expresses itself through mechanical devices that are being evolved every hour.
There is certainly no such thing as a long moving picture masterpiece.
The stage-interior is large.
On the other hand, the motion picture, though often appearing to deal with these things, as a matter of fact uses substitutes, many of which have been listed.
Upon those many new bits of machinery are founded novel methods of combination in another field of logic, not dramatic logic, but tableau logic.
It was the life and death of Mary Queen of Scots.
The people in the motion picture audience total about two hundred, any time, but they come in groups of two or three at no specified hour.
While the leading actor is entitled to his glory, as are all the actors, their mannerisms should not overshadow the latest inspirations of the creator of the films.
And his wife and daughter are helpless, conventional, upper-class rabbits.
There are two moments of dramatic life set among many of delicious pictorial quality: when Tess baptizes her child, and when she smooths its little grave with a wavering hand.
We do not know that her name is Venus.
We are glad to find them in the Dickens biographies.
The stage has its exits and entrances at the side and back.
Or it deals with delicate informal anecdote as the short story does, or fairy legerdemain, or patriotic banners, or great surging mobs of the proletariat, or big scenic outlooks, or miraculous beings made visible.
When they have had enough, they stroll home.
But in the stage-version the dramatic poignancy begins with the going up of the curtain, and lasts till it descends.
This hand should also be reiterated as a refrain, three times at least, before this tableau, each time more dreadful and threatening.
The waves dash, but not dashingly, the water flows, but not flowingly.
They can hear and gauge their own voices. They have the same ears as their listeners.
The humor of the prospect was the sort too deep for tears.
The Splendor Photoplays are the great outlet for their type of imagination.
But though I did go again and again, never did I see them act with the same deliberation and distinction, and I laid the difference to a change in the state of mind of the producer.
Much space is occupied by the floor and the overhead portions of the stage setting.
CHAPTER XII
At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain "This the magnificent moving picture cannot achieve." Likewise after every successful film described in this book could be inscribed "This the trenchant Ibsen cannot do."
The old-fashioned stage producer, feeling he is getting nowhere, but still helpless, puts the climax of some puzzling lip-debate, often the climax of the whole film, as a sentence on the screen.
Together we went to the services.
There is an explosive power about the mildest motion picture exit, be the actor skilful or the reverse.
If he appears later, he is glared at.
But the only ways to suggest such feelings in silence, do not convey them in full to the audience, but merely narrate them. Wherever in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay we have no quiet gestures that will do trenchant work.
When the veteran stage-producer as a beginning photoplay producer tries to give us a dialogue in the motion pictures, he makes it so dull no one follows.
He writhes in deadly fear.
That is the moving picture kind of cheering.
The actors have not the least notion of their appearance.
The climax of a motion picture scene cannot be one word or fifty words.
The audience is appalled for him.
Even baseball players must have managers.
It is not Ibsen.
If this were all, it would have been one more moving picture failure to put through a tragic scene.
The motion-picture interior is small.
He is looking sideways in terror.
It is not a factory-made staple article, but the product of the creative force of one soul, the flowering of a spirit that has the habit of perpetually renewing itself.
And only pictures of the Sahara are without magnificent motion.
The boy and his half-sister are in their wedding-clothes in the big church.
And it should last but three reels, that is, an hour.
They do not remind one of the saucy originals.
The typical stage performance is from two hours and a half upward.
Moving objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.
In the new plot all is open as the day.
But there is a physician in the Doll's House, a scientific, quietly moving oracle, crisp, Spartan, sophisticated.
Once I saw Mary Fuller in a classic.
The scenario writer who will study to the bottom of the matter in Whistler's Gentle Art of Making Enemies will be equipped to welcome the distinction between the old-fashioned stage, where the word rules, and the photoplay, where splendor and ritual are all.
And this rule may apply to the stage.
The motion picture out-of-door scene is as big as the universe.
He tried to beat it into the head of John Bull that a painting is one thing, a mere illustration for a story another thing.
But the crawling, bootlicking carpenter, Jacob Engstrand, is changed into a respectable, guileless man with an income.
It is a principle of criticism, the world over, that the distinctions between the arts must be clearly marked, even by those who afterwards mix those arts.
Mary Alden as Mrs. Alving shows in her intelligent and sensitive countenance that she has a conception of that character.
The prime example of complete failure is Sarah Bernhardt's Camille.
Up past the point of the clutching hand this film is the prime example for study for the person who would know once for all the differences between the photoplays and the stage dramas.
Also the words in the motion picture are not things whose force the actor can gauge.
But by comparison to motion picture performers, stage-actors are their own managers, for they have an approximate notion of how they look in the eye of the audience, which is but the human eye.
Let us discuss for illustration the Ibsen tradition.
But these people are not perpetually thrust upon us as Mr. and Mrs. Dickens.
Here are two, sadly tampered with: Engstrand and his daughter.
Floyd Dell's discriminating assault upon it is quoted in Current Opinion, October, 1915, and Margaret Anderson prints a denunciation of it in a recent number of The Little Review.
The original Ibsen drama is the result of mixing up five particular characters through three acts.
To people who know her well it is a surprisingly good tintype of our beloved friend, for the family album. The relentless Thomas Hardy is nowhere to be found.
Second, the English style, ripened from the miracle play and the Shakespearian stage.
Strictly as individuals they judge the panorama.
Once this principle is grasped there is every reason why the same people who have interested themselves in the advanced experimental drama should take hold of the super-photoplay.
It might be compared to watching Camille from the top gallery through smoked glass, with one's ears stopped with cotton.
But the motion picture actor is but the mood of the mob or the landscape or the department store behind him, reduced to a single hieroglyphic.
He does not tell the guests why.
The performers and the dumb objects are on equal terms in his paint-buckets.
The stage is dependent upon three lines of tradition: first, that of Greece and Rome that came down through the French.
In the new contraption, the moving picture, the hero or villain in exit strides past the nose of the camera, growing much bigger than a human being, marching toward us as though he would step on our heads, disappearing when largest.
And the further it gets from Euripides, Ibsen, Shakespeare, or Moliere--the more it becomes like a mural painting from which flashes of lightning come--the more it realizes its genius. Men like Gordon Craig and Granville Barker are almost wasting their genius on the theatre.
The movie show generally lasts five reels, that is, an hour and forty minutes.
People can climb over each other's knees to get in or out.
"It's waking up under the sun's caresses! It's going to relive its daily existence!
CHAPTER 18
When Captain Nemo spoke in this way, he was transfigured, and he filled me with extraordinary excitement.
We were in the presence of a ship whose severed shrouds still hung from their clasps.
Ned Land was not mistaken.
He didn't seem to notice my presence and began a series of astronomical observations.
As the captain was finishing his sentence, I said to myself: "The pole!
During this crossing, the sea continually lavished us with the most marvelous sights.
Doesn't it have the actual gift of life?
"Yes," the Canadian replied, "a disabled craft that's sinking straight down!"
They numbered in the millions.
These various exhibits from the sea were immediately lowered down the hatch in the direction of the storage lockers, some to be eaten fresh, others to be preserved.
In the broad electric daylight, an enormous black mass, quite motionless, hung suspended in the midst of the waters.
"See!" he went on.
Among other specimens from these waterways, our nets brought up some peacock-tailed flabellarian coral, polyps flattened into stylish shapes and unique to this part of the ocean.
"It's something that master should see."
I was marveling at this magnificent ocean view when Captain Nemo appeared.
I stood up, went, leaned on my elbows before the window, and I saw it.
By then we had fared 4,860 leagues from our starting point.
Captain Nemo finished his sentence with a vehement gesture. Then, addressing me directly, as if to drive away an ugly thought:
I saw him only at rare intervals.
As for the average depth of this part of the Pacific, I'll inform you that it's a mere 4,000 meters."
Is this brazen individual claiming he'll take us even to that location?"
The nets were hauled on board.
"Well, professor," Captain Nemo replied, "we'll show you better than that, I hope.
Four Thousand Leagues Under the Pacific
"Look at this ocean, professor!
No hellos or good mornings for this gent!
I followed him and went back to the main lounge. The propeller was instantly set in motion, and the log gave our speed as twenty miles per hour.
And in truth, the ocean was deserted.
No.
This said, Captain Nemo headed to the hatch and disappeared down the ladder.
"Could you quote them to me, so I can double-check them as the need arises?"
Let me help you a little."
"They do better still; they are hanging them," murmured Fouquet, in a sinister voice, which sounded like a funeral knell in that rich gallery, splendid with pictures, flowers, velvet, and gold.
"The mean, pitiful fellow!" said another.
"The king, my dear Pelisson, himself signed the order for the execution."
"Entirely," replied Fouquet.
His brow, upon which his little court read, as upon that of a god, all the movements of his soul, and thence drew rules of conduct,--his brow, upon which affairs of state never impressed a wrinkle, was this evening paler than usual, and more than one friendly eye remarked that pallor.
Upon the arrival of the superintendent, a murmur of joy and affection was heard; Fouquet, full of affability, good humor, and munificence, was beloved by his poets, his artists, and his men of business.
"The hypocrite!" said a third.
"There must be no disorder," said Pelisson.
"Then there is a remedy," said Sorel.
"Ask of him who kills them," replied Fouquet.
"Monseigneur," said Pelisson, "you must speak to his majesty."
"To die!" repeated Pelisson; "what, the men I saw six days ago, full of health, gayety, and the spirit of the future!
"Yes,--count."
"To die!" exclaimed the whole assembly, arrested, in spite of themselves, in the comedy they were playing, by that terrible word.
La Fontaine seized upon him, and recited his verses.
"All?" said Fouquet.
Fifty persons were waiting for the superintendent.
Pelisson then approached the superintendent, and said: "Something troubles monseigneur?"
"And I," said Pelisson, "will be the bearer of the words."
"The miser!" said one.
A prolonged cry from the gardens attracted the superintendent to enjoy the spectacle.
Ah! the fireworks are producing a magical effect." At this moment a shower of sparks fell rustling among the branches of the neighboring trees.
Pelisson exchanged a meaning look with Fouquet.
"I," said the abbe, "will carry the money."
"Of what are these gentlemen dying, then?" asked an officer.
The Gallery of Saint-Mande.
"Who kills them?
"Silence!" said Fouquet, "somebody is coming.
"Why not?" replied Fouquet; "if true, as it is said to be, that the king has made him his intendant?" Scarcely had Fouquet uttered these words, with a marked intention, than an explosion broke forth among the guests.
Involuntarily every one stopped; the abbe quitted his window; the first fuses of the fireworks began to mount above the trees.
The Abbe Fouquet walked alone.
The superintendent counted; there were eight persons. Pelisson and Gourville walked arm in arm, as if conversing upon vague and frivolous subjects.
The musicians then supped, and the promenades in the gallery and the gardens commenced, beneath a spring sky, mild and flower-scented.
"Words and money," said Fouquet, "five hundred thousand livres to the governor of the conciergerie that is sufficient; nevertheless, it shall be a million, if necessary."
Colbert has caused to be arrested, tried and will execute my two friends; what does it become me to do?"
L'Abbe Fouquet perceived that the poet, absent-minded, as usual, was about to follow the two talkers; and he interposed.
He led the way thither, conducting by the hand a lady, the queen, by his preference, of the evening.
"Messieurs," said he, "let no one of you raise his head as he walks, or appear to pay attention to me; continue walking, we are alone, listen to me."
"Which of you will take charge of the transaction?"
Chapter LVII.
"No remedy.
There his friends were assembled in full chat.
"Recover yourselves, messieurs," said Fouquet, "for perhaps we are watched--I said: to die!"
"Impossible," said Gourville, "unless we could corrupt the jailers."
A tempest of laughter and jokes ensued, which was only checked by a serious and even sad gesture from Pelisson.
Sorel and two officers imitated them, and in an opposite direction.
The abbe obeyed.
"This night the prisoners might be allowed to escape."
The cortege resumed its march.
A distant murmur, which became more distinct by degrees, stopped this reflection, and drew his attention another way.
"Mordioux!" exclaimed D'Artagnan, "this begins to look serious."
All at once, to cries of "Vive Colbert!" those men, of whom D'Artagnan never lost sight, fell upon the escort, which in vain endeavored to stand against them.
The people hesitated, not knowing which they ought to fall upon, the archers or the aggressors.
The two condemned are again in the hands of the archers.
The populace had come to witness an execution, and here was an opportunity offered them of performing one themselves.
This cry became the charging word for the musketeers, who, guided by it, joined D'Artagnan.
What the devil is he doing here?"
"That's well!
The condemned appeared upon the Place.
The confusion became then so great that D'Artagnan could no longer distinguish anything.
Are you drunk or mad, my masters?"
"To the death! to the death!" cried fifty thousand voices.
"Take that, then!" said Menneville, firing his pistol almost within an arm's length.
Then, from this chaos, suddenly surged something like a visible intention, like a will pronounced.
But those two men were hundred-armed giants; the swords flew about in their hands like the burning glaive of the archangel.
"To the fire! to the fire with the thieves!
From time to time a fresh report, or a distant rumor, made the heads oscillate and thousands of eyes flash.
"What! burn the poor devils who are only condemned to be hung?
The forward violet thus did I chide: Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, If not from my love's breath?
XXXVI
XXXIX
XXXV
XXXI
XXXVIII
XXXIII
XXXVII
"Good Heavens!" sighed he.
To sit at one's ease and poetise--that is a pleasure; everybody has something agreeable to say to you, and you are always your own master.
"Spare us your elegiac tones," said the Parrot giggling.
Some one of the worthy burghers now spoke of the dreadful pestilence that had raged in the country a few years back, meaning that of 1484.
From the roof inside the carriage, umbrellas, walking-sticks, hats, and sundry other articles were depending, and hindered the view, which was particularly imposing.
The Clerk felt a mortal fright, and flew through the window, far away over the houses and streets.
How was he to twist himself through!
One wore a cap of two staring colors, denoting the class of persons to which she belonged.
The copying-clerk turned round and spoke awhile with the man about the reports and legal documents in question; but when he had finished, and his eye fell again on the Shoes, he was unable to say whether those to the left or those to the right belonged to him.
What change--what magnificence!
The moon was not yet very high; it was besides rather foggy, so that in the darkness all objects seemed mingled in chaotic confusion.
In the hurry they have forgotten to shut your cage, and the upper window is open.
She lived behind the Exchange.
"No," answered the theologian of the time of King Hans: "that book is not written by a Heiberg, but was imprinted by Godfrey von Gehmen."
Can a dog, or a horse laugh?
The matter of which it was built was just as soft, and formed similar towers, and domes, and pillars, transparent and rocking in the thin air; while above his head our earth was rolling like a large fiery ball.
She always attends to her own serious business herself, as then she is sure of having it done properly.
"Such a pair of shoes must be very warm and comfortable," said he; "the leather is so soft and supple." They fitted his feet as though they had been made for him.
This, in connection with his costume, strengthened the good woman in the belief that he was a foreigner.
The question now was, if he could squeeze himself through the grating, for he had never tried before.
"'Tales of Every-day Life?'" said our Bachelor inquiringly.
All we hear or say in a dream that is fair and beautiful is like the gold of the subterranean spirits; it is rich and splendid when it is given us, but viewed by daylight we find only withered leaves.
He did so; but just as he was going, the others remarked what he was about; they laid hold of him by the legs; and now, happily for him, off fell his fatal shoes--and with them the charm was at an end.
"To travel! to travel!" exclaimed he, overcome by most painful and passionate remembrances.
Unfortunately the pleasure lasted but a moment.
Farewell!"
"What's the hour, watchman?" asked a passer-by.
These shoes possess the property of instantly transporting him who has them on to the place or the period in which he most wishes to be; every wish, as regards time or place, or state of being, will be immediately fulfilled, and so at last man will be happy, here below."
He turned round anew, firmly convinced that he was seriously ill.
III.
They had a language too; but surely nobody can expect that the soul of the watchman should understand it.
He observed it perfectly, and laughed in his heart.
"Does your honor want to cross the ferry to the Holme?" asked they.
'INTRIGUE ON THE RAMPARTS; or THE DAY OF REPENTANCE: vaudeville with new songs to the most favorite airs.' The deuce!
When we die--so at least says the student, for whom my wife does the washing--we shall fly about as light as a feather from one such a star to the other.
"It's a strange race, those poets!" said the clerk, who was very fond of soliloquizing.
So the copying-clerk came to Copenhagen as guest, or rather as prisoner in a family living in Gother Street.
But suddenly it occurred to him that he might stoop down under the table, and then creep unobserved out of the door.
This was an excellent opportunity to have said something clever.
They lie close to the door."
How well can she recall persons to our mind, of whom we have not thought for years; when suddenly they step forth "every inch a man," resembling the real personages, even to the finest features, and become the heroes or heroines of our world of dreams.
"Stupid nonsense!" said the other angrily.
But no man in his senses ever thinks of printing them.
The air is so unusually clear, the clouds sail on so buoyantly, and from the green herbage a fragrance is exhaled that fills me with delight.
"A little trip to Fredericksburg would do me no great harm," thought he; "for I, poor beast of burden that I am, have so much to annoy me, that I don't know what a good appetite is.
He perceived immediately a quantity of beings who were certainly what we call "men"; yet they looked different to us.
"How strange they look!
Two minutes later, he was sitting in a hackney-coach and driving to Frederickshafen.
Behold--there are certain things in the world to which one ought never to give utterance except with the greatest caution; but doubly careful must one be when we have the Shoes of Fortune on our feet.
Yonder in the canal lay the ships frozen up, and deserted by their whole crews, with a screaming crow for the sole occupant.
Then at last would the agonizing restlessness be allayed, which destroys my existence!
Thus caparisoned the good man walked out of the well-lighted rooms into East Street.
With the snake-like writhings of an idea he glided into another female heart; but this seemed to him like a large holy fane.
The extensive building is separated from the street by a pretty high railing, the thick iron bars of which are so far apart, that in all seriousness, it is said, some very thin fellow had of a night occasionally squeezed himself through to go and pay his little visits in the town.
In the evening "Dramatic Readings" were to be given at the little theatre in King Street.
He gazed at the street formerly so well known to him, and now so strange in appearance, and looked at the houses more attentively: most of them were of wood, slightly put together; and many had a thatched roof.
It was the heart of a most respectable rich man, whose name is certain to be found in the Directory.
Will you be quiet!" screamed the lady of the house, covering the cage with an embroidered white pocket handkerchief.
Hereupon he wandered into a boudoir formed entirely of mirrors, like the one in Castle Rosenburg; but here the glasses magnified to an astonishing degree.
"I'll take a hackney-coach!" thought he.
Ha! ha!
Each one kept to his own opinion, and so they separated.
"I should like some day, just for a trial, to take such nature upon me, and be a poet myself; I am very sure I should make no such miserable verses as the others.
He was unable to find the bridge: there was no railway either.
"Chirp, chirp!" sighed he.
"God bless me!
The worthy man was inclined to ring and deliver them at the house, for there was still a light in the window; but he did not like disturbing the other people in their beds, and so very considerately he left the matter alone.
"Yes, he is our first printer," replied the clerical gentleman hastily.
But the transition from a commonplace nature to one that is richly endowed, demands always a more or less breakneck leap over a certain abyss which yawns threateningly below; and thus must the sudden change with the clerk strike the reader.
The other, however, retained sufficient presence of mind to whisper to him, "'Tis a bet, and I have won it!" But the first thing he did as soon as he got home, was to have a large blister put on his chest and back to draw out his madness.
"I must tell you," said she, "that to-day is my birthday; and in honor of it, a pair of walking-shoes or galoshes has been entrusted to me, which I am to carry to mankind.
The meaning of this councillorship query remained, of course, a riddle to her, yet she handed him the paper without replying.
That he was ill, she comprehended directly; so she brought him a pitcher of water, which tasted certainly pretty strong of the sea, although it had been fetched from the well.
What strange things men--no, what strange things Selenites sometimes take into their heads!
"That's the Bishop of Zealand," was the answer.
"It is really dreadful," groaned he with increasing anxiety; "I cannot recognise East Street again; there is not a single decent shop from one end to the other!
The good folks come probably from a masquerade!"
He was now in the heart of the wife of this worthy gentleman.
"Lend me your Galoshes," said he; "it is so wet in the garden, though the sun is shining most invitingly.
The drops of water splashed up to the green leafy roof, and the clerk thought of the million of ephemera which in a single drop were thrown up to a height, that was as great doubtless for their size, as for us if we were to be hurled above the clouds.
Death is an electric shock which our heart receives; the freed soul soars upwards on the wings of electricity.
Where the deuce can the house be?
Such was their conversation.
No, friend, you should but try what it is to sit from one year's end to the other occupied with and judging the most trivial matters."
So off he went in the direction of East Street, and had nearly got to the end of it when the moon shone forth.
The proper authorities were informed of the circumstance, people talked a good deal about it, and in the morning the body was carried to the hospital.
I called an escort and we galloped five miles to a hilltop overlooking the sea.
an earthquake? a pestilence?
The vast castle loomed black upon the hilltop, not a spark visible about it.
I didn't laugh--I am always thankful for that--but the strain ruptured every cartilage in me, and for weeks afterward I could hear my bones clack when I walked.
Had there been an invasion?
CHAPTER XLI
As I was devouring the child with last kisses, it brisked up and jabbered out its vocabulary! --the first time in more than two weeks, and it made fools of us for joy.
Then we looked the same startled thought into each other's eyes at the same moment; more than two weeks gone, and that ship not back yet!
But I didn't know it, all the same.
The darling mispronunciations of childhood!--dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.
I asked no questions; I didn't need to ask any.
I was a New Englander, and in my opinion this sort of partnership would compromise her, sooner or later.
Verily, much had been happening.
She couldn't see how, but I cut argument short and we had a wedding.
The parting--ah, yes, that was hard.
This was not true.
You know that yourself, if you've watched your child through the Valley of the Shadow and seen it come back to life and sweep night out of the earth with one all-illuminating smile that you could cover with your hand.
I must go--at once.
Well, how good it was to be able to carry that gracious memory away with me!
It was Sunday; yet at Canterbury the streets were empty; strangest of all, there was not even a priest in sight, and no stroke of a bell fell upon my ear.
I couldn't understand it.
I found no life stirring in the somber streets. I groped my way with a heavy heart.
We couldn't bear to allow anybody to help in this service, so we two stood watch-and-watch, day in and day out.
She never found out her mistake. The first time she heard that form of salute used at the telephone she was surprised, and not pleased; but I told her I had given order for it: that henceforth and forever the telephone must always be invoked with that reverent formality, in perpetual honor and remembrance of my lost friend and her small namesake.
Of course, I meant to take the train for Camelot.
THE INTERDICT
A miserable journey.
Grateful?
"Yes, I know, sweetheart--how dear and good it is of you, too! But I want to hear these lips of yours, which are also mine, utter it first--then its music will be perfect."
Had the nation been swept out of existence?
Then our reward came: the center of the universe turned the corner and began to mend.
There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.
Now thou'lt kiss me, as knowing the name I have given the child."
We could imagine no explanation that would begin to explain.
There were ships in the harbor, at Dover, but they were naked as to sails, and there was no sign of life about them.
I approached England the next morning, with the wide highway of salt water all to myself.
She was a flawless wife and mother; and yet I had married her for no other particular reasons, except that by the customs of chivalry she was my property until some knight should win her from me in the field.
I went swiftly back, saying not a word to anybody.
Train!
But it answered.
A desolate silence everywhere.
But guessing was profitless.
What is the best of that sort, as compared with the friendship of man and wife, where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same?
I moved on.
Where was my great commerce that so lately had made these glistening expanses populous and beautiful with its white-winged flocks?
Not a sail, from verge to verge, not a smoke-bank--just a dead and empty solitude, in place of all that brisk and breezy life.
Vanished, every one!
The mournfulness of death was everywhere.
People talk about beautiful friendships between two persons of the same sex.
Within the twelvemonth I became her worshiper; and ours was the dearest and perfectest comradeship that ever was.
I arrived far in the night.
She had hunted Britain over for me; had found me at the hanging-bout outside of London, and had straightway resumed her old place at my side in the placidest way and as of right.
The Church had struck; the thing for me to do was to get into a disguise, and go warily.
I hadn't an idea in the world; but it would have been cruel to confess it and spoil her pretty game; so I never let on, but said:
Why, we were back in this world in one instant!
In my dreams, along at first, I still wandered thirteen centuries away, and my unsatisfied spirit went calling and harking all up and down the unreplying vacancies of a vanished world.
"HELLO-CENTRAL!"
I borrowed the king's navy--a "ship" no bigger than a steam launch--and was soon ready.
Now I knew!
It was the INTERDICT!
I told Sandy this ghastly news.
Pleased to the marrow, she murmured:
Now I understood the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England.
Invasion? Invasion is a triviality to it.
SLOW TORTURE
Sandy was not enough; not enough for me, anyway.
She never had any ideas, any more than a fog has.
I had made a pipe a while back, and also some pretty fair tobacco; not the real thing, but what some of the Indians use: the inside bark of the willow, dried. These comforts had been in the helmet, and now I had them again, but no matches.
About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into the glare--it was along there somewhere, a couple of hours or so after sun-up--it wasn't as pleasant as it had been.
And yet the result was just nothing but wind.
Then she emptied the conveniences out of it and fetched it full of water, and I drank and then stood up, and she poured the rest down inside the armor.
And so now, the thought of its being there, so handy and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the worse and the harder to bear.
CHAPTER XII
This was quite noticeable.
Straight off, we were in the country.
First it is one place; then another; then some more; and it goes on spreading and spreading, and at last the territory is all occupied, and nobody can imagine what you feel like, nor how unpleasant it is.
You see, the sun was beating down and warming up the iron more and more all the time.
Her clack was going all day, and you would think something would surely happen to her works, by and by; but no, they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for words.
But you can't cork that kind; they would die.
Well, when you are hot, that way, every little thing irritates you.
The first ten or fifteen times I wanted my handkerchief I didn't seem to care; I got along, and said never mind, it isn't any matter, and dropped it out of my mind.
She continued to fetch and pour until I was well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.
And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.
Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in rivers, there comes a time when you--when you--well, when you itch.
She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city.
You couldn't think, where Sandy was.
I am not better than others.
It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn.
She was a perfect blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw, talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber; but just as good as she could be.
Things which I didn't mind at all, at first, I began to mind now--and more and more, too, all the time.
It seems like a little thing, on paper, but it was not a little thing at all; it was the most real kind of misery.
It was good to have a rest--and peace.
I wanted to think that out; and moreover I wanted to think out some way to reform this evil and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion die out; but thinking was out of the question in the circumstances.
One cannot think how refreshing it was.
It was beginning to get hot.
We had a very long pull, after that, without any shade.
That hadn't occurred to me when I put it there; and in fact I didn't know it.
But nothing is quite perfect in this life, at any time.
Waiting, in silence, would have been agreeable enough, for I was full of matter for reflection, and wanted to give it a chance to work.
An armed novice cannot mount his horse without help and plenty of it.
"And you're not tired, I hope."
I think she was very much pleased."
But I put them into good hands, and they brought high prices.
He thanked the gentlemen for the honor they had done him.
"Have you any wish, father--that I can fulfil, when----"
His hands moved uneasily, as if he wanted them to remove some obstruction that weighed upon him.
"Get away with you--go!" said Tulliver, angrily.
The father turned his eyes on Maggie with a still more eager look, while she, with a bursting heart, sank on her knees, to be closer to the dear, time-worn face which had been present with her through long years, as the sign of her deepest love and hardest trial.
"You have been drinking, I suppose," said Wakem, really believing that this was the meaning of Tulliver's flushed face and sparkling eyes.
But Maggie became conscious that as she was slackening her hold her father was beginning to grasp her and lean on her.
But it was not to Wakem that he spoke.
No--no doctor.
He was watching for them with an expression of pain on his brow, but with sharpened, anxious consciousness in his eyes.
That was nothing but fair.
"Tom, forgive me--let us always love each other"; and they clung and wept together.
"My boy, you must get up this minute; I've sent for the doctor, and your father wants you and Maggie to come to him."
Not one of the three felt any particular alarm about Mr. Tulliver's health; the symptoms did not recall his former dangerous attack, and it seemed only a necessary consequence that his violent passion and effort of strength, after many hours of unusual excitement, should have made him feel ill.
Tom was dejected by the thought that his exemplary effort must always be baffled by the wrong-doing of others; Maggie was living through, over and over again, the agony of the moment in which she had rushed to throw herself on her father's arm, with a vague, shuddering foreboding of wretched scenes to come.
"I shall tell you what I think of you first.
"No, I've not been drinking," said Tulliver; "I want no drinking to help me make up my mind as I'll serve no longer under a scoundrel."
At length the words forced their way.
"Ride my horse home with me," said Wakem to Luke.
Perhaps Wakem was gone out of town to-day on purpose to avoid seeing or hearing anything of an honorable action which might well cause him some unpleasant twinges.
Suddenly, Wakem felt, something had arrested Mr. Tulliver's arm; for the flogging ceased, and the grasp on his own arm was relaxed.
I don't forgive him.
After the painful news had been told, he sat in silence; he had not spirit or inclination to tell his mother and sister anything about the dinner; they hardly cared to ask it. Apparently the mingled thread in the web of their life was so curiously twisted together that there could be no joy without a sorrow coming close upon it.
He did not choose any back street to-day, but rode slowly, with uplifted head and free glances, along the principal street all the way to the bridge.
Chapter VII
The morning light was growing clearer for them, and they could see the heaviness gathering in his face, and the dulness in his eyes.
Then, seeing that Wakem had ridden off, and that no further violence was possible, she slackened her hold and burst into hysteric sobs, while poor Mrs. Tulliver stood by in silence, quivering with fear.
I can't love a raskill----"
"By the Tofton Ferry, not through the town."
"Let me pass, you ignorant brute, or I'll ride over you."
"Father, come in!" said Maggie, imploringly.
Then he turned toward the miller and said, with white rage, "You'll suffer for this, sir.
A Day of Reckoning
"I feel ill--faintish," he said.
He looked away from them all when he had said this, and lay silent for some minutes, while they stood watching him, not daring to move.
For an hour or more the chest heaved, the loud, hard breathing continued, getting gradually slower, as the cold dews gathered on the brow.
Mr. Tulliver was an essentially sober man,--able to take his glass and not averse to it, but never exceeding the bounds of moderation.
"Help me on to that low horse," said Wakem to Luke, "then I shall perhaps manage; though--confound it--I think this arm is sprained."
"Is he worse, mother?"
But at last he looked toward Tom and said,--
It's my head, that's all.
But not of death.
"You must take care of her, Tom--don't you fret, my wench--there'll come somebody as'll love you and take your part--and you must be good to her, my lad.
The party broke up in very sober fashion at five o'clock.
He seemed to be too faint and suffering to hear her; but presently, when she said to Maggie, "Go and seek for somebody to fetch the doctor," he looked up at her with full comprehension, and said, "Doctor?
Help me to bed."
You're too big a raskill to get hanged--you're----"
Tom and Maggie went downstairs together into the room where their father's place was empty.
Simmering in this way, Mr. Tulliver approached the yardgates of Dorlcote Mill, near enough to see a well-known figure coming out of them on a fine black horse.
He had naturally an active Hotspur temperament, which did not crave liquid fire to set it aglow; his impetuosity was usually equal to an exciting occasion without any such reinforcements; and his desire for the brandy-and-water implied that the too sudden joy had fallen with a dangerous shock on a frame depressed by four years of gloom and unaccustomed hard fare.
Kiss me, Maggie.--Come, Bessy.--You'll manage to pay for a brick grave, Tom, so as your mother and me can lie together."
He walked in slowly, propped by his wife and daughter and tottered into his arm-chair.
The almost purple flush had given way to paleness, and his hand was cold.
"Very well! you may leave my premises to-morrow, then; hold your insolent tongue and let me pass." (Tulliver was backing his horse across the road to hem Wakem in.)
I never wanted anything but what was fair."
"Yes, father."
In half an hour after his father had lain down Tom came home.
The father and son clasped hands and looked at each other an instant. Then Tom said, trying to speak firmly,--
"But, father, dear father," said Maggie, an unspeakable anxiety predominating over her grief, "you forgive him--you forgive every one now?"
Mr. Tulliver, spurring his horse and raising his whip, made a rush forward; and Wakem's horse, rearing and staggering backward, threw his rider from the saddle and sent him sideways on the ground.
What's forgiving to do?
Your daughter is a witness that you've assaulted me."
But now Tom could only spend the evening in gloomy expectation of the unpleasant consequences that must follow on this mad outbreak of his father's long-smothered hate.
They met about fifty yards from the gates, between the great chestnuts and elms and the high bank.
But the streak of irritation and hostile triumph seemed to melt for a little while into purer fatherly pride and pleasure, when, Tom's health having been proposed, and uncle Deane having taken occasion to say a few words of eulogy on his general character and conduct, Tom himself got up and made the single speech of his life.
Their eyes turned to the same spot, and Maggie spoke,--
Why did he not happen to meet Wakem?
Sad ending to the day that had risen on them all like a beginning of better times!
He was glad that he had been able to help his father in proving his integrity and regaining his honest name; and, for his own part, he hoped he should never undo that work and disgrace that name.
It could hardly have been briefer.
Rest would probably cure him.
Soon they merged into mere mutterings; the eyes had ceased to discern; and then came the final silence.
Help was come now; Luke and his wife were there, and Mr. Turnbull had arrived, too late for everything but to say, "This is death."
At last there was total stillness, and poor Tulliver's dimly lighted soul had forever ceased to be vexed with the painful riddle of this world.
But mingled seed must bear a mingled crop.
Susannah, the cook, Jonathan, Obadiah, and corporal Trim, formed a circle about the fire; and as soon as the scullion had shut the kitchen door,--the corporal begun.
Or whether the corporal began to be suspicious, he had got into the doctor's quarters, and was talking more like the chaplain than himself--
Trim took his hat off the ground,--put it upon his head,--and then went on with his oration upon death, in manner and form following.
Stay--I have a small account to settle with the reader before Trim can go on with his harangue.--It shall be done in two minutes.
--What is the finest face that ever man looked at!--I could hear Trim talk so for ever, cried Susannah,--what is it! (Susannah laid her hand upon Trim's shoulder)--but corruption?--Susannah took it off.
Jack's down! well,--'tis worth a regiment of horse to him.--No--'tis Dick.
My uncle Toby had scarce turned the corner of his yew hedge, which separated his kitchen-garden from his bowling-green, when he perceived the corporal had begun the attack without him.--
The Montero-cap was scarlet, of a superfine Spanish cloth, dyed in grain, and mounted all round with fur, except about four inches in the front, which was faced with a light blue, slightly embroidered,--and seemed to have been the property of a Portuguese quarter-master, not of foot, but of horse, as the word denotes.
The Montero-cap I shall describe by and bye.--The Turkish tobacco-pipes had nothing particular in them, they were fitted up and ornamented as usual, with flexible tubes of Morocco leather and gold wire, and mounted at their ends, the one of them with ivory,--the other with black ebony, tipp'd with silver.
as sure as a gun.--
As this was the most memorable attack in the whole war,--the most gallant and obstinate on both sides,--and I must add the most bloody too, for it cost the allies themselves that morning above eleven hundred men,--my uncle Toby prepared himself for it with a more than ordinary solemnity.
The corporal had slipped out about ten minutes before my uncle Toby, in order to fix his apparatus, and just give the enemy a shot or two before my uncle Toby came.
The completion was no further off, than the very next morning; which was that of the storm of the counterscarp betwixt the Lower Deule, to the right, and the gate St. Andrew,--and on the left, between St. Magdalen's and the river.
A Montero-cap and two Turkish tobacco-pipes.
--'Twas his gift in the present case.
I'll be bound, said the corporal, speaking to himself, to give away my Montero-cap to the first beggar who comes to the door, if I do not manage this matter to his honour's satisfaction.
Let me stop and give you a picture of the corporal's apparatus; and of the corporal himself in the height of his attack, just as it struck my uncle Toby, as he turned towards the sentry-box, where the corporal was at work,--for in nature there is not such another,--nor can any combination of all that is grotesque and whimsical in her works produce its equal.
The corporal--
No matter for that, Eugenius; I would give the shirt off my back to be burnt into tinder, were it only to satisfy one feverish enquirer, how many sparks at one good stroke, a good flint and steel could strike into the tail of it.--Think ye not that in striking these in,--he might, per-adventure, strike something out?
The corporal sat up the best part of the night, in bringing his to perfection; and having made a sufficient proof of his cannon, with charging them to the top with tobacco,--he went with contentment to bed.
--Tread lightly on his ashes, ye men of genius,--for he was your kinsman:
Leave we my mother--(truest of all the Poco-curante's of her sex!)--careless about it, as about every thing else in the world which concerned her;--that is,--indifferent whether it was done this way or that,--provided it was but done at all.--
When the town, with its works, was finished, my uncle Toby and the corporal began to run their first parallel--not at random, or any how--but from the same points and distances the allies had begun to run theirs; and regulating their approaches and attacks, by the accounts my uncle Toby received from the daily papers,--they went on, during the whole siege, step by step with the allies.
We are now going to enter upon a new scene of events.--
Leave we Slop likewise to the full profits of all my dishonours.--
The other was, not to have the houses run up together, as the corporal proposed, but to have every house independent, to hook on, or off, so as to form into the plan of whatever town they pleased.
--The sentry-box was in case of rain.
Let us leave, if possible, myself:--But 'tis impossible,--I must go along with you to the end of the work.
--Surely never did any Town act so many parts, since Sodom and Gomorrah, as my uncle Toby's town did.
My uncle Toby came down, as the reader has been informed, with plans along with him, of almost every fortified town in Italy and Flanders; so let the duke of Marlborough, or the allies, have set down before what town they pleased, my uncle Toby was prepared for them.
In the second year, in which my uncle Toby took Liege and Ruremond, he thought he might afford the expence of four handsome draw-bridges; of two of which I have given an exact description in the former part of my work.
--Leave we then the breeches in the taylor's hands, with my father standing over him with his cane, reading him as he sat at work a lecture upon the latus clavus, and pointing to the precise part of the waistband, where he was determined to have it sewed on.--
Earth!
--But let us go on.
Leave we poor Le Fever to recover, and get home from Marseilles as he can.--And last of all,--because the hardest of all--
All these were painted white three times over the ensuing spring, which enabled my uncle Toby to take the field with great splendour.
The first year's campaign was carried on from beginning to end, in the plain and simple method I've related.
"Yes," choked Mrs. Kendall, hurriedly.
"Gee whiz, Mag, ain't you lucky?
Then, with a resigned air, he thrust both hands into his trousers pockets.
Mrs. Kendall had given full instructions as to trains, and had sent the money for the six tickets.
The girls had two rooms opening out of each other, and in each room were two dainty white beds.
"Gone--the bag?" chorused five shrill voices.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," murmured Mrs. Kendall.
Here the matter of choosing was only settled amicably at last by a rigid system of "counting out" by "Eeny, meany, miny, mo"; and even this was not accomplished without much shouting and laughter, and not a few angry words.
She had hesitated a little, it is true, over Mike Whalen, the father.
The drive through the elm-bordered streets with everywhere flowers, vine-covered houses, and velvety lawns--it was all quite unbelievable.
"So suppose we don't take any of the Whalens this time--just devote ourselves to Patty and the twins."
Patty had said:
To Tom, Peter, Mary, Patty, Arabella, and Clarabella, it was all so wonderful that they fairly pinched themselves to make sure they were awake.
Tanks.
Margaret sighed with relief.
"We didn't need nothin' else, anyhow," piped up Arabella, "for all our things is span clean.
The next moment she shuddered and unconsciously drew Margaret close to her side.
"Yes, yes, of course, certainly," agreed Mrs. Kendall, faintly, as she turned and led the way to the big four-seated carryall waiting for them. "Then we'll go home right away."
She had also asked Miss Murdock to place the children in care of the conductor, saying that she would meet them herself at the Houghtonsville station.
The matter of choosing beds in the wide, airy chambers was a momentous one.
Margaret and her mother had not long to wait.
"She told me that the little girl was lame.
Margaret, however, was still intent on "divvying up," and Mrs. Kendall could not look into her daughter's clear blue eyes, and explain why Patty, Arabella, Clarabella, and the Whalens might not be the most desirable guests in the world.
Margaret was distressed.
To this, however, Margaret refused to give her consent.
"And this is Mary Whalen, and Peter," she went on, as Mrs. Kendall clasped in turn two limp hands belonging to a white-faced girl and a frightened boy.
His face was a fiery red, and the freckles shone luridly through the glow.
"Miss Murdock says as how her food don't 'similate.
Tom advanced.
Certainly not!
Mrs. Kendall never thought of that speech afterward without a shudder. She even dreamed once of this all-powerful Tom--he stood over her with clinched fists and flashing eyes, demanding that she "divvy up" to the last cent.
Promptly in return had come Miss Murdock's letter telling of the children's delighted acceptance of the invitation; and almost immediately had followed Patty's elaborately flourished scrawl:
Tom Whalen, in spite of the conductor's restraining hand, was on the platform before the wheels had ceased to turn.
She agreed, however, after considerable discussion, to take only Tom, Mary, and Peter of the Whalen family, leaving the rest of the children and Mrs. Whalen to keep old Mike Whalen company.
There was a moment's pause.
"No, certainly we couldn't leave Mr. Whalen behind alone," Mrs. Kendall had returned with dry lips.
A letter from Margaret had gone to Patty, and one from Mrs. Kendall to Miss Murdock, the city missionary who had been so good to Margaret. Houghtonsville was on a main line to New York, and but a few hours' ride from the city.
"Yes, she is kind o' peaked," volunteered Patty.
Tom did know how to behave, after all.
"The age!
It was, indeed, "lucky stars," as little Maggie soon found out.
"And how old are you now?" Margaret would laughingly ask each day, just to hear the prompt response:
That is well and good; but, Margaret, don't, for heaven's sake, let your heart run away with your head when it comes to the business part of it!"
"Business!--with babies nine years old!"
"No, of course you don't," replied Margaret; "and no wonder.
There were the large baskets of fruit and vegetables, and the boxes of beautiful flowers.
Even Margaret's time--that, too, was given to Patty.
"Very well, I will go," sighed Margaret, rising wearily to her feet. "But I can't forget it.
I want to fix it up."
"Well?" Margaret's eyes were still puzzled.
It makes me jest sick; an' that's why I can't bear ter hear her say it."
"But you could refuse to take them."
"But you do now.
Frank Spencer moistened his lips, which had grown unaccountably dry.
Come, please don't let us talk of this thing any more to-night.
"There must be something that can be done.
Still he was silent.
"Margaret, I beg of you to believe me when I say that you do not understand the matter at all.
You are tired and overwrought, and I don't think you realize yourself what you are asking."
You see I've found another of my friends.
Then she shook her head.
I regret this sort of thing as much as you do.
With a sudden movement he leaned forward and covered the slim fingers with his own warm-clasping hand.
He learned it to her."
It's Sam.
She paused expectantly, but he did not speak.
"How do you go to work to get men and things to put houses into livable shape?...
Of the many deficiencies in my execution of this intention, I am but too conscious; whether I have been in any degree successful, must be left to the impartial decision of such of the Public as may honour this work with their perusal.
Various causes, irrespective of any demerits of the work itself, forbid me to anticipate for this translation any extensive popularity.
"Dactylics call'st thou them?
Least of all can any other metre do full justice to the spirit and freedom of the various speeches, in which the old warriors give utterance, without disguise or restraint, to all their strong and genuine emotions.
EDWARD EARL OF DERBY.
D.
My thanks, therefore, are due to those critics, who, either publicly or privately, have called my attention to passages in which the sense of the Author has been either incorrectly or imperfectly rendered.
NOTE TO THE FIFTH EDITION.
PREFACE.
RENDERED INTO ENGLISH BLANK VERSE. BY
He reached his first station on time, dismounted, and mounted a fresh pony which was standing ready, and started on the second relay.
It was an average of two hundred miles a day, or between eight and nine miles an hour for every hour of the twenty-four for ten days, including all stops and all delays.
His chance came with an opportunity to join a group of men who will be read about as long as there is any history of the United States.
He said it was down by the stream.
Here again, as many times before and after, the boy's instinctive knowledge and immediate perception of anything, no matter how small, that was unusual or unnatural on the plains saved his life.
He pointed backward.
At this time the Pony Express had to be stopped for some time on account of the number of Indians who were lying in wait all along the trails to capture the riders, and so the boy was once more out of a job.
But always alert, always on the watch for every opportunity, in a situation that, young as he was, he had been in many times before, he kept a keen eye on the man while appearing to submit.
It was an exciting time when the first pony was ready and saddled at the offices of Russell, Majors & Waddell, in St. Joseph.
Bill knew that somewhere in the vicinity the highwayman had a horse.
There he was safe, because the other three were not mounted.
Sometimes in order to keep up the schedule the men were obliged to cover twenty-five miles in an hour on flat country, in order to make up for slower going in the hills.
So in the twenty pounds there were hundreds of letters.
The longest division was two hundred and fifty miles.
Then he began his return trip of forty-five miles.
They supposed him to be an advance scout in search of themselves, and for a few moments there was a quick play of wit against wit.
It was not long, however, before he made application for another job on the Pony Express.
It turned out that the men were a group of prairie ruffians.
The boy wanted to go.
Those two thousand miles of waste land consumed a month or more when transportation was by means of bull trains.
One day, however, having made the run out of seventy-six miles, he found, when he arrived at his last station, that the man who was supposed to carry the bag to the next station, a distance of eighty-five miles, had been wounded by Indians.
But the average was a distance of forty-five miles; that is, the man who rode one of these divisions of the two thousand miles, rode fifteen miles on one pony, fifteen miles on the second, and fifteen miles on the third.
He must be as alert and as good a frontiersman in the knowledge of Indian warfare as he was a good horseman.
Without any other object than the natural instinct to find the reason for everything that presented itself, he quietly dismounted, followed the trail, and found the five horses.
And now it became a ride for life.
Always keeping a keen watch, he suddenly saw above the top of a pile of rocks something that he knew was not put there by nature.
It was a little speck of color, and long before any average human being would have seen it at all he knew that it was a feather in the headdress of an Indian in war paint.
There was nothing to do but pull up and await events.
He said he would, volunteering, with the keenness of men whose lives are always at stake, to leave his gun with them.
That journey, where the mail bags were thrown across the ponies and carried by a number of riders, took ten days to do the two thousand miles.
They asked where his horse was.
Their idea was that a man should mount a swift pony, well tried for his endurance before starting; that this man should ride fifteen miles straight out into the desert, and that at the end of the fifteen miles there should be a station, a house with a couple of men in it, who would have another pony ready.
That made one continuous route of three hundred and twenty-two miles out and back without stopping.
He then calmly walked back to the station at Horseshoe and told of the adventure.
Unbinding his legs, Bill forced him to mount his own horse, and then strapped him on.
The only thing to do was to ride on as quietly as possible and try to make the ford.
But endurance was not the only quality the rider must have.
It was some time before the boy had any incident other than the ordinary episodes of the long ride.
In that time he rode twenty-one ponies and made the longest trip ever made by a Pony Express rider.
He did not stop or turn.
In order to get as much mail within the twenty pounds as possible letters were written on tissue paper.
Sometimes the country was open and moderately easy for riding.
He found him a few rods away, and when he got back his opponent had come to.
Mounting his pony, Cody then dashed down the ravine.
Out sprang two warriors, and a party of Indians appeared from a little distance further away.
As soon as he had the mail he mounted a fresh pony and rode back over the same thirty-five miles.
However, the time came.
A large crowd gathered long before the appointed time for starting, and when the pony was brought forth he was greeted with cheers.
Some of these stations were in settlements, some were in towns, but most of them were on the bleak prairies or in the hills of the Rocky Mountains.
They received about one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, which was very high pay.
But the others were firing now, and so Cody fell forward across his horse and was lucky enough to make the other side of the stream.
In fact, nothing can be more opposed than the state of society, the modes of thinking, the standards of reference on all points of morality, manners, and even politics and religion, in such a new manufacturing place as Keighley in the north, and any stately, sleepy, picturesque cathedral town in the south.
Right before the traveller on this road rises Haworth village; he can see it for two miles before he arrives, for it is situated on the side of a pretty steep hill, with a back-ground of dun and purple moors, rising and sweeping away yet higher than the church, which is built at the very summit of the long narrow street.
The air is dim and lightless with the smoke from all these habitations and places of business.
It appears to have been built about a hundred years ago, and to consist of four rooms on each story; the two windows on the right (as the visitor stands with his back to the church, ready to enter in at the front door) belonging to Mr. Bronte's study, the two on the left to the family sitting-room.
The pews are of black oak, with high divisions; and the names of those to whom they belong are painted in white letters on the doors.
Yet the aspect of Keighley promises well for future stateliness, if not picturesqueness.
Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce.
The inhabitants refer inquirers concerning the date to the following inscription on a stone in the church tower:--
It is evident to the stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture.
But the voices of the people are hard, and their tones discordant, promising little of the musical taste that distinguishes the district, and which has already furnished a Carrodus to the musical world.
The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass.
ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS, A.B., AND DAUGHTER OF THE REV.
CHAPTER I
P. BRONTE, A.B., MINISTER OF HAWORTH. HER SOUL DEPARTED TO THE SAVIOUR, SEPT. 15TH, 1821, IN THE 39TH YEAR OF HER AGE.
The parsonage stands at right angles to the road, facing down upon the church; so that, in fact, parsonage, church, and belfried school-house, form three sides of an irregular oblong, of which the fourth is open to the fields and moors that lie beyond.
The town of Keighley never quite melts into country on the road to Haworth, although the houses become more sparse as the traveller journeys upwards to the grey round hills that seem to bound his journey in a westerly direction.
The distance is about four miles; and, as I have said, what with villas, great worsted factories, rows of workmen's houses, with here and there an old-fashioned farmhouse and out-buildings, it can hardly be called "country" any part of the way.
The old stone houses are high compared to the width of the street, which makes an abrupt turn before reaching the more level ground at the head of the village, so that the steep aspect of the place, in one part, is almost like that of a wall.
HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF MARIA BRONTE, WIFE OF THE REV.
The house is of grey stone, two stories high, heavily roofed with flags, in order to resist the winds that might strip off a lighter covering.
The number of inhabitants and the importance of Keighley have been very greatly increased during the last twenty years, owing to the rapidly extended market for worsted manufactures, a branch of industry that mainly employs the factory population of this part of Yorkshire, which has Bradford for its centre and metropolis.
After the record of Anne's death, there is room for no other.
The chapel or church claims greater antiquity than any other in that part of the kingdom; but there is no appearance of this in the external aspect of the present edifice, unless it be in the two eastern windows, which remain unmodernized, and in the lower part of the steeple.
P. BRONTE, INCUMBENT.
44.
For two miles the road passes over tolerably level ground, distant hills on the left, a "beck" flowing through meadows on the right, and furnishing water power, at certain points, to the factories built on its banks.
The area of this oblong is filled up by a crowded churchyard, and a small garden or court in front of the clergyman's house.
In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is there of any dwellings of the professional middle- class, such as abound in our old cathedral towns.
Such glimpses into the interior as a passer-by obtains, reveal a rough abundance of the means of living, and diligent and active habits in the women.
Grey stone abounds; and the rows of houses built of it have a kind of solid grandeur connected with their uniform and enduring lines.
Inside, the character of the pillars shows that they were constructed before the reign of Henry VII.
On another tablet, below the first, the following record has been added to that mournful list:--
The flag-stones with which it is paved are placed end-ways, in order to give a better hold to the horses' feet; and, even with this help, they seem to be in constant danger of slipping backwards.
P. BRONTE, A.B. SHE DIED, AGED 27 YEARS, MAY 28TH, 1849, AND WAS BURIED AT THE OLD CHURCH, SCARBORO.'
The door-steps are spotless; the small old-fashioned window-panes glitter like looking- glass.
"Now every antiquary knows that the formula of prayer 'bono statu' always refers to the living.
The interior of the church is commonplace; it is neither old enough nor modern enough to compel notice.
Inside and outside of that house cleanliness goes up into its essence, purity.
'I think it a very excellent plan,' interrupted Mrs. Graham, with imperturbable gravity.
Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree.
I have been accustomed to make him swallow a little wine or weak spirits-and-water, by way of medicine, when he was sick, and, in fact, I have done what I could to make him hate them.'
Everybody laughed, except the young widow and her son.
In a minute he was kneeling on the carpet, with his arms round Sancho's neck, and, in a minute or two more, the little fellow was seated on my knee, surveying with eager interest the various specimens of horses, cattle, pigs, and model farms portrayed in the volume before me.
'Well, Mrs. Graham,' said my mother, wiping the tears of merriment from her bright blue eyes--'well, you surprise me!
'I perfectly agree with you, Mrs. Markham; but nothing can be further from my principles and practice than such criminal weakness as that.'
'Certainly not.'
My mother attempted to appease her by an explanation; but she seemed to think enough had been said on the subject, and abruptly turned the conversation.
'But you have a servant,' said Rose; 'could you not leave him with her?'
Markham here thinks his powers of conviction at least equal to Mr. Millward's.
If I hear not him, neither should I be convinced though one rose from the dead, he would tell you.
'You may have as many words as you please,--only I can't stay to hear them.'
A little encouragement, however, induced him to come forward.
Mrs. Markham!'
Arthur, especially shrank from the ruby nectar as if in terror and disgust, and was ready to cry when urged to take it.
CHAPTER III
Now, however, the cause of that omission was explained, though not entirely to the satisfaction of Rose.
But I'll get Mr. Millward to talk to you about it:--he'll tell you the consequences;--he'll set it before you as plain as the day;--and tell you what you ought to do, and all about it;--and, I don't doubt, he'll be able to convince you in a minute.'
'Mrs.
Is it that you think she has no virtue?'
One by one, sooner or later, all the rest of us must follow."
"I'll try.
I wouldn't say it, or even think it.
But in the night, when I couldn't sleep--it was so dreadful, Anne.
"Ruby Gillis was a great girl to laugh," said Davy suddenly.
It had sounded funny then--she remembered how she and Priscilla had laughed over it. But it did not seem in the least humorous now, coming from Ruby's pale, trembling lips.
"Yes, dear."
But tonight Anne did not feel this so keenly.
But Em and I made up the old quarrel yesterday.
I believe we'll just go on living, a good deal as we live here--and be OURSELVES just the same--only it will be easier to be good and to--follow the highest.
"Well, why not, Diana?" asked Anne seriously.
You know it's rather dreadful to laugh in church."
I don't think it can be so very different from life here as most people seem to think.
She did not want to talk of that.
Oh, Anne, it's hard."
"Yes, I think she will," said Anne.
"But I suppose there's always some one to finish it."
Nothing seems quite so dreadful now.
"I hope it ain't," said Davy emphatically.
The idle valleys were full of hazes.
But she was always gay, always hopeful, always chattering and whispering of her beaux, and their rivalries and despairs.
You know I always loved babies, Anne.
"I want to live," she said, in a trembling voice.
Life held a different meaning, a deeper purpose. On the surface it would go on just the same; but the deeps had been stirred.
I want to go on living HERE.
"Every time you go to see Ruby you come home looking tired out," she said.
I haven't had my life.
I want to know."
I always liked you best of all the girls I went to school with.
And I never spoke to her because I was sure she wouldn't speak to me.
The Summons
"Just one more week and we go back to Redmond," said Anne.
Good for you!"
I loved my poor little story, and I wrote it out of the best that was in me. And it is SACRILEGE to have it degraded to the level of a baking powder advertisement.
So spake Anne loftily, little dreaming of the valley of humiliation awaiting her.
"Oh, I KNEW it would win the prize--I was sure of it.
"Diana--Barry!"
She was happy at the thought of returning to work, classes and Redmond friends. Pleasing visions were also being woven around Patty's Place.
"Of course I couldn't be anything but pleased over your unselfish wish to give me pleasure," she said slowly.
"THE ROLLINGS RELIABLE
Miss Anne Shirley,
She said it wasn't addressed in your writing, but I thought maybe it was you."
"DEAR MADAM: We have much pleasure in informing you that your charming story 'Averil's Atonement' has won the prize of twenty-five dollars offered in our recent competition.
It would be almost as bad as Judson Parker's patent medicine fence."
Avonlea, P.E.
What do you think a mother would feel like if she found her child tattooed over with a baking powder advertisement?
"I'd like to see myself," said Diana scornfully.
But alas, the final week of that pleasant vacation was spoiled for Anne, by one of those impish happenings which are like a dream turned upside down.
Well, I just stated that she used the Rollings Reliable in it, and that was why it turned out so well; and then, in the last paragraph, where PERCEVAL clasps AVERIL in his arms and says, 'Sweetheart, the beautiful coming years will bring us the fulfilment of our home of dreams,' I added, 'in which we will never use any baking powder except Rollings Reliable.'"
"I thought YOU would understand.
"But you know--I'm so amazed--I can't realize it--and I don't understand.
I expected to find you radiant over winning Rollings Reliable prize.
The surprise was there, beyond doubt--but where was the delight?
Diana was not the most discerning of mortals, but just at this moment it struck her that Anne was not looking exactly overjoyed.
There wasn't a word in my story about--about--" Anne choked a little over the word--"baking powder."
A Dream Turned Upside Down
"Well, no offense meant.
WHAT is wrong?"
Green Gables,
"Yours very truly,
I should have gone straight home from the post office for we have company.
That very evening Diana popped into the porch gable, bright-eyed and rosy cheeked, carrying a letter.
"Been writing any more stories lately?" inquired Mr. Harrison genially one evening when Anne was taking tea with him and Mrs. Harrison.
Gilbert arrived at dusk, brimming over with congratulations, for he had called at Orchard Slope and heard the news.
"Why, Anne, what is the matter?
So you must take the check."
We enclose the check herewith.
"Oh, Anne, here's a letter for you.
Chapter XV
The honor of being a friend of the prizewinner is enough for me.
"Indeed, no! I saw the prize offer, but I'd never dream of competing for it.
"No," answered Anne, rather crisply.
"I feel as if I were disgraced forever.
I was at the office, so I thought I'd bring it along.
Diana clapped her hands.
I feel just the same.
"Yes, I did," said Diana gleefully, perching herself on the bed.
"And you've won the twenty-five dollars," continued Diana jubilantly. "Why, I heard Priscilla say once that the Canadian Woman only pays five dollars for a story!"
Well, I must go.
Island.
Do open it quick.
"I can't take it--it's yours by right, Diana.
I don't see that there's anything low or unworthy about that, or anything ridiculous either.
Isn't it funny?
To return: I saw you off, and took the ferry back to New York with a horribly empty feeling.
I waved frantically, but you never blinked an eyelash.
"Has she a nice husband?"
I inclose a sketch in colored chalk of your steamer, which he has just completed.
It is not often that I pass a NUIT BLANCHE; but when I do, I settle world problems.
It isn't that I like him any the less, but I am getting to like orphans the more.
At last he arrived in Rome, where the Pope had just died, and there was great doubt among the cardinals as to whom they should appoint as his successor.
The youth wandered on, and after some time came to a fortress where he begged for a night's lodging.
I will send you into another town, to another master.' The youth was taken thither, and stayed a year with this master likewise.
After some time he took it in his head that he would travel to Rome.
He listened to them, and when he became aware of what they were saying, he grew very thoughtful and sad.
Then said the father: 'Hark you, my son, try as I will I can get nothing into your head.
When he came back the father again asked: 'My son, what have you learnt?' He answered: 'Father, I have learnt what the birds say.' Then the father fell into a rage and said: 'Oh, you lost man, you have spent the precious time and learnt nothing; are you not ashamed to appear before my eyes?
Next morning, to the astonishment of everyone, he came out again safe and unharmed, and said to the lord of the castle: 'The dogs have revealed to me, in their own language, why they dwell there, and bring evil on the land.
They at length agreed that the person should be chosen as pope who should be distinguished by some divine and miraculous token.
He was undecided, and knew not if he were worthy of this, but the doves counselled him to do it, and at length he said yes.
He went down again, and as he knew what he had to do, he did it thoroughly, and brought a chest full of gold out with him.
THE THREE LANGUAGES
On the way he passed by a marsh, in which a number of frogs were sitting croaking.
You must go from hence, I will give you into the care of a celebrated master, who shall see what he can do with you.' The youth was sent into a strange town, and remained a whole year with the master.
An aged count once lived in Switzerland, who had an only son, but he was stupid, and could learn nothing.
When he went inside, the dogs did not bark at him, but wagged their tails quite amicably around him, ate what he set before them, and did not hurt one hair of his head.
At the end of this time, he came home again, and his father asked: 'Now, my son, what have you learnt?' 'Father, I have learnt what the dogs say when they bark.' 'Lord have mercy on us!' cried the father; 'is that all you have learnt?
The ecclesiastics recognized therein the token from above, and asked him on the spot if he would be pope.
The howling of the wild dogs was henceforth heard no more; they had disappeared, and the country was freed from the trouble.
This transference of the electorate, it should be mentioned, the Emperor Charles afterwards confirmed by letters patent in 1350, notwithstanding the contestation of Voldemar and his partisans.
The history of this adventurer is rendered more than usually interesting from the fact that several authors have taken up cudgels on his behalf, and vehemently assert that he was truly the man he asserted himself to be.
According to the popular account, the pseudo Voldemar was ultimately overthrown, condemned to death, and burnt as an impostor; whilst the veritable Marquis is stated to have died in 1322, either at a place called Korekei, or at Stendell.
In order to afford a fair idea of this pretender's claims, it will be necessary in the first place to recount the story of his appearance as detailed by the authors favouring the theory of his being an impostor, and then to produce the evidence offered by those of the opposite party on his behalf.
Almost all the towns and cities acknowledged his authority, and promised obedience to his rule.
After a reign of about three years, Voldemar, following the example of so many of his contemporaries, determined upon making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Having settled all his temporal affairs, and left his brother, John the Fourth, in possession of his electorate, he started upon his pilgrimage, attended only by two men.
Twenty-four days after Voldemar's departure his brother John died suddenly, not without suspicion that he had been poisoned.
Thus runs the commonly accredited story; but summing up later and equally reliable records, the favourers of the idea that it was really the Elector himself who reappeared put the case thus.
He had, they add, dwelt for a number of years in Saxony, where he had been well instructed as to the former life and family connections of the deceased Elector, as well as put in the way of counterfeiting on his person the various marks by which he might deceive the world.
Not only authors' ink, but, unfortunately, a great quantity of human blood was wasted in the dispute, and that, too, without the world being any the wiser.
The Archbishop of Magdeburg, Primate of Germany, a man totally uninterested either way, and known for his probity, would not, they say, have recognised and have given his testimony on behalf of the claimant unless satisfied as to his identity; nor, they further remark, would the Emperor Charles and so many other princes have exposed their lives and caused the effusion of so much human blood for an impostor.
A.D. 1345-54.
Thus runs the story as told by the advocates for the imposture theory; presently it will be seen what can be said on the other side; whilst now it will be as well to hear what happened upon the appearance of the claimant.
The facts, as they are recounted by historians, stand thus:
This was A.D. 1320.
Deserted by his foreign allies, he was forced to fly, and eventually was assassinated.
The wretched man, collecting his strength, exclaimed, "I am your Czar, the son of Ivan Vassilievitch!" when his agony was terminated by a shot from an arquebuss.
According to the testimony of these persons he had a knife in his hand.
One afternoon of May 1591, the child was playing with four other boys in the palace courtyard, his governess, nurse, and another female servant being close by.
This was in the summer of 1603, when Demetrius, if living, would have been about twenty-two--an age apparently corresponding with that of the claimant to his name. Visitors arrived who quickly recognized their resuscitated prince; warts which the late Emperor's son had had on the forehead, and under the right eye, were discovered, whilst one arm being longer than another was a still surer sign.
Ivan the Terrible of Russia, having murdered his eldest son, left the crown to the next, Feodore, a prince so feeble in body and mind that the government of the country had to be committed to the care of his brother-in-law, Boris.
Suspicion of foul play was at once aroused, and some known emissaries of Boris being discovered in the neighbourhood, they fell victims to the fury of the populace.
He appears to have been an able and forbearing man, but he outraged the nobles by pointing out their educational deficiencies, and the Greek priesthood by a careless or irreverent demeanour towards their Church.
Shuiski, the leader of the revolution, was raised to the throne, but finding the memory of his predecessor still cherished by many, he sought to eradicate the feeling by proving him an impostor.
He respectfully conducted the Czarina to a carriage, walking bare-headed by its side. In the capital he treated her with every attention, visited her daily, and provided her with a competent revenue to maintain her royal dignity.
The Poles, ready for mischief, espoused his cause; George, the Palatine of Sandomir, gave him his daughter in marriage, and the Pope of Rome, upon his secret confession of the Catholic faith, sanctioned his pretensions.
The Dowager Czarina forsook the convent in which she had so long been immured to behold the man claiming to be her son.
His reign, however, was short.
A civil war broke out, but it was some time before a suitable claimant could be discovered.
THE FALSE DEMETRIUS OF RUSSIA.
The Regent instituted an inquiry, and the result was a verdict that the boy had died from a wound accidentally inflicted upon himself.
This time a substituted corpse could not be produced.
The figs sent from abroad are dried by the heat of the sun, or in furnaces for the purpose.
In what manner does Pepper grow, and what part of the shrub is used?
From several islands of the Archipelago, particularly Zante and Cephalonia; and from the Isthmus of Corinth, in Greece.
It also yields an oil of great fragrance.
Yes, it is usually planted in moist soils, and near rivers, where the ground can be overflowed after it is come up.
The islands of the Archipelago yield an inferior sort in great abundance.
What is Millet, and in what countries does it grow?
The ginger sold in the shops here is dried, which is done by placing the roots in the heat of the sun or in ovens, after being dug out of the ground.
Pepper is the fruit of this shrub, and grows in bunches or clusters, at first green; as it ripens it becomes reddish, until having been exposed for some time to the heat of the sun, (or probably gathered before perfectly ripe,) it becomes black, as in the condition we have it.
When is the time to gather the spice?
What is Cayenne Pepper?
When are they gathered, and how are they dried?
Sometimes they are only buried in the ground.
Do they grow on bushes like our Currants?
What is Rice?
In the United States, a large quantity of sugar is prepared from the sap of the Sugar Maple Tree.
No, on vines like other grapes, except that the leaves are somewhat thicker, and the grapes much smaller: they have no pips, and are of a deep red, or rather black color.
Sugar purified and crystallized.
A soft, luscious fruit, the produce of the fig-tree.
The dried fruit of a plant called bird pepper, a native of both Indies.
The act of conveying goods for sale from one country to another.
What is the appearance of the Nutmeg?
It is brought over in flakes of a yellow color, smooth and net-like, as you see it in the shops.
In this country they are sometimes planted in a warm situation in gardens, but, being difficult to ripen, they do not arrive at perfection.
It is used both in food and medicine, as the nutmeg, and also yields an oil.
A delicate aromatic fruit or spice, brought from the East Indies.
About the month of September, not long after the blossoms are fallen, the berries are gathered by the hand; one laborer on the tree, employed in gathering the small branches, will give employment to three below (who are generally women and children) in picking the berries.
What is Pimento or Allspice?
All vegetables contain more or less sugar, but the plant in which it most abounds is the sugar-cane.
The root of a plant cultivated in the East and West Indies, and in America; it is a native of South-eastern Asia and the adjoining islands.
It forms a pleasant addition to flavor food; it also yields an agreeable essential oil, and is accounted the best and mildest of common spices.
Yes, it is separated from the shell of the nutmeg, and dried in the sun.
In any of these situations, they swell and burst their skins, from which, when dry, they are carefully separated by rubbing between the hands, or fanning.
The clear liquor is then drawn off, and what remains is formed into grains by being passed through metal dishes, with numerous small holes; it is next dried by the action of heat, and in this state it is exported.
Grapes prepared by drying them in the sun, or by the heat of an oven. Raisins of Damascus, so called from the capital city of Syria, near which they are cultivated, are very large, flat, and wrinkled on the surface; soft and juicy inside, and nearly an inch long.
What is Sugar?
This makes them shrink and wrinkle: after this they are cut from the branches which supported them, but left on the vine for three or four days, separated on sticks, in an upright position, to dry at leisure. Different modes, however, are adopted, according to the quality of the grape.
Whence are they brought?
The white pepper is merely the black deprived of its outside skin.
A useful and nutritious grain, cultivated in immense quantities in India, China, and most eastern countries; in the West Indies, Central America, and the United States; and in southern Europe.
The pith, which is even eatable in its natural state, is taken from the trunk of the tree, and thrown into a vessel placed over a horse-hair sieve; water is then thrown over the mass, and the finer parts of the pith pass through the sieve; the liquor thus obtained is left to settle.
The Sago Palm also produces sugar.
How is it prepared?
The nutmeg tree greatly resembles our pear tree, and produces a kind of nut, which bears the same name as the tree.
Why is it called Allspice?
The product of a creeping shrub, growing in several parts of the East Indies, Asia, and America.
What is Sago?
What is the White Pepper?
The Chinese water their rice-fields by means of movable mills, placed as occasion requires, upon any part of the banks of a river; the water is raised in buckets to a proper height, and afterwards conveyed in channels to the destined places.
The commonest kinds are dried in hot ovens, but the best way is that in which the grapes are cut when fully ripe, and dried by the heat of the sun, on a floor of hard earth or stone.
In what manner are they dried?
What is Ginger?
The nutmeg is much used in our food, and is of excellent virtue as a medicine.
For this purpose the finest red berries are selected, and put in baskets to steep, either in running water, or in pits dug for the purpose, near the banks of rivers.
Does it not require a great deal of moisture?
For what is Millet used?
What is Pepper?
The dried unripe berry or fruit of a tree growing in great abundance in Jamaica, particularly on the northern side of that island, on hilly spots, near the coast; it is also a native of both Indies.
Its form is round, and its smell agreeable.
What do you mean by Exportation?
The Indians eat the root when green as a salad, chopping it small with other herbs; they also make a candy of it with sugar.
What is Sugar Candy?
A kind of small raisins or dried grapes.
It is in great request amongst the Germans for puddings; for which it is sometimes used amongst us.
Is the Sugar Cane the only vegetable that produces Sugar?
The best figs are brought from Turkey, but they are also imported from Italy, Spain, and the southern part of France.
Is the Mace used as a spice?
The shell is the third cover, which is hard, thin, and blackish; under this is a greenish film of no use; and in the last you find the nutmeg, which is the kernel of the fruit.
There are two sorts, the black and the white.
What are Nutmegs?
Great quantities are annually imported.
Where does it grow?
How often is this operation repeated?
By carefully gathering the leaves, one by one, while they are yet small, young, and juicy.
It contains from ten to forty seeds, each covered with a little rind, of a violet color; when this is stripped off, the kernel, of which they make the chocolate, is visible.
What are the uses of Rye?
Oats are also eaten by the inhabitants of many countries, after being ground into meal and made into oat cakes.
It resembles the cherry tree, and grows to the height of fifteen or sixteen feet.
The tea is then placed in the store-houses, or packed in chests, and sent to most of the countries in Europe and America.
They now constitute a principal article of food in most of the countries of Europe and America; in Ireland, they have long furnished nearly four-fifths of the entire food of the people.
What is Chocolate?
Inhabitants of Athens, the capital city of Greece.
In tropical regions, where it is largely cultivated.
What is generally meant by Corn?
The Dutch in 1610; it was introduced into England in 1650
The cacao-nut tree bears leaves, flowers, and fruit, all the year through.
What is Coffee?
Of what country is the Potato a native?
The coffee-tree is an evergreen, and makes a beautiful appearance at all times of the year, but especially when in flower, and when the berries are red, which is usually during the winter.
How is it prepared for use?
How is it prepared?
Corn signifies a race of plants which produce grain in an ear or head, fit for bread, the food of man; or the grain or seed of the plant, separated from the ear.
What produces the difference between Green and Bohea, or Black?
Describe the appearance of the Tea-tree.
For what is Barley generally used?
What nation first introduced it into Europe?
Who were the Cretans?
"Bestir yourself!
"Mother! mother! where are you?" cried Charles.
He plunged into the creek, waded across and started through the woods toward the light.
"Release him when we leave the village."
"Come!
Others followed.
"I trust you will not be forced," said Charles Stevens.
"Your conduct is foolish.
Ten dusky sons of the forest were seated about the camp fire, while two men in the garb of civilization were roving about.
Then with chisel and hammer he went from one to another and cut the iron bands which bound them.
He would not act hurriedly.
Another white man was in camp.
"They are the braves of Oracus, and will follow where he leads."
Mr. Waters!" and dashed toward the camp.
The prisoners were almost driven to madness by the sudden appearance of the savage and civilized liberators.
He was cunning and might devise some plan of escape, and Charles was not long in resolving what to do.
"Could I but find the Waters brothers, I would have two friends and allies to aid me.
"How can you be so calm, knowing all as you do?"
He did not return home.
Give me light!"
"Don't you think you should be careful how you threaten him, seeing he has you at his mercy."
"No; you can do her no good by an act of rashness!" John Nurse answered.
His eyes were searching the forests for dusky forms, which he hoped to meet.
Evening came, and he sank down on the mossy banks of a stream and took a few draughts of water to revive him.
"So I pray; yet we must protect ourselves and those whom we would rescue."
What has gone amiss?"
It gave way with a crash, and fell into the hall way.
At dusk they were but five miles from the village.
Everybody was bewildered.
He found them occupying loathsome cells, each chained to the wall.
They followed them to the brook, and fired a volley at them, but in vain.
The houses were dark and silent.
He had been seized by a sentry; but Mr. Waters and Oracus hastened to him, and he was released.
"What has happened?
Charles could not intimidate the bold Virginian.
"I will be the instrument of vengeance."
The Indians' moccasined feet made scarcely any noise upon the ground, as they moved forward.
He crawled from tree to tree, from log to bush, until he was near enough to see the features of the men.
"We were concerting plans when you came; but you must have food."
He had to call several times before the frightened woman could answer. Then from out the darkness there came a feeble response.
"I scarcely have."
"Explain to your warriors that, under no circumstances, are they to shed blood," said Mr. George Waters.
Do you not see they are taking your prisoners away?"
He knew that before answers could come to his letters, he would be dead, or would have succeeded in his efforts.
At the home of his kind friend, he wrote to relatives at New Plymouth, Boston, New York, Virginia and the Carolinias.
During the day, a dozen more Indians came in.
"You are in the power of Mr. Waters."
At the same instant they struck it with their sledges.
"Mr. Waters!
I live but for my child, and when she is gone, I care not how soon I am called.
"Nonsense!
Charles Stevens, like all true Christians, in this dark hour went to God for aid.
He took a hand of each and started to run from the jail down the street.
"Mr. Waters, do you know that your own daughter is one of the accused?"
"What! do you know they have been cried out upon?" asked Charles.
Even if he summoned Oracus and all his braves, would they be strong enough to break down that door of iron, or cut the chains asunder! Charles, in his desperation, resolved to rescue the beloved ones or die in the effort.
Do the man no harm."
"Are they friends?"
"We know all," said Mr. George Waters.
I will sit here and listen to it all," said Charles, when he discovered that he could not break away from his friends.
Next moment, a pair of dusky hands seized Mr. Parris, and he was hurried away to the rear.
"Mr. Martin, you have forgotten that the word of God says, 'Vengeance is mine and I will repay, saith the Lord,'" put in Charles.
The terrified jailer tumbled out of his bed, only to find himself seized and held by a pair of painted sons of the forest.
"Where is Cora's father?" he asked himself.
"Yes."
"No."
The unfortunate inmates, not knowing the object of this terrible attack, set up a howl which was heard above the thunder crashes.
Even if he should be killed in an abortive attempt, however, he hoped that his relatives would resume the warfare for the prisoners.
"I have no deputies," answered the sheriff.
He was furious, and no threat of punishment could move him.
They had strict orders to harm no one; but, should they find any attempting to approach them, they were to seize and hold such persons.
I will lead you!" cried the eager preacher, allowing his zeal to overcome his discretion.
Charles felt some misgivings at first on discovering men of his own color in the camp.
The prisoner was Joel Martin.
Mother!" whispered Charles, "this way!"
Here a halt was called, and, after a short consultation, Oracus detailed five of his braves to guard Mr. Martin, and with the others moved on over the hills and through the woods toward Salem.
But neither sight nor taste can discern white from sweet: because what discerns between two things must know both.
For a thing is desired as it exists in its own nature, whereas in the apprehensive power it exists not according to its own nature, but according to its likeness.
But the inanimate body is generated from determinate matter by an extrinsic agent; therefore it receives at once its nature and its quantity, according to the condition of the matter.
Others have ascribed it to the various natures of the sensible qualities, according as such quality belongs to a simple body or results from complexity.
But the common sensibles are all reducible to quantity.
Such common genus is, however, unnamed, just as the proximate genus of hot and cold is unnamed.
Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul.
But the generative power has its effect, not in one and the same body but in another; for a thing cannot generate itself.
But taste is a kind of touch.
Therefore, in order to restore the humidity thus lost, the nutritive power is required, whereby the food is changed into the substance of the body.
A sign of which we have in the fact that the principle of memory in animals is found in some such intention, for instance, that something is harmful or otherwise.
Whether the Interior Senses Are Suitably Distinguished?
Therefore an animal through the sensitive soul must not only receive the species of sensible things, when it is actually affected by them, but it must also retain and preserve them.
But the proper and exterior senses suffice for us to judge of sensible things; for each sense judges of its proper object.
The nutritive and the augmentative have their effect where they exist, since the body itself united to the soul grows and is preserved by the augmentative and nutritive powers which exist in one and the same soul.
Since, therefore, magnitude and shape are further from color than sound is, it seems that there is much more need for another sensitive power than can grasp magnitude or shape than for that which grasps color or sound.
For the proper sensibles first, and of their very nature, affect the senses; since they are qualities that cause alteration.
By others it has been assigned to the medium, which is either in conjunction or extrinsic and is either water or air, or such like.
We must, however, observe a difference among these powers.
Therefore it should not be classed as a distinct sense of touch.
Therefore they are not distinct powers, but the same, yet more perfect than in other animals.
There are others in which with the vegetative there exists also the sensitive, but not the locomotive power; such as immovable animals, as shellfish.
But only three parts of the soul are commonly assigned--namely, the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul.
The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality.
Wherefore it is also called the "particular reason," to which medical men assign a certain particular organ, namely, the middle part of the head: for it compares individual intentions, just as the intellectual reason compares universal intentions.
Whether the Parts of the Vegetative Soul Are Fittingly Described As the Nutritive, Augmentative, and Generative?
For touch involves a natural, and not only a spiritual, immutation in its organ, by reason of the quality which is its proper object.
Yet they are not accidental sensibles, for they produce a certain variety in the immutation of the senses.
For the common is not divided against the proper. Therefore the common sense should not be numbered among the interior sensitive powers, in addition to the proper exterior senses.
Therefore memory and imagination should not be assigned as powers distinct from the senses.
In like manner does the estimative power, though in a less perfect manner.
Now this motive power is not only in the appetite and sense as commanding the movement, but also in the parts of the body, to make them obey the appetite of the soul which moves them.
Now we must observe that for the life of a perfect animal, the animal should apprehend a thing not only at the actual time of sensation, but also when it is absent.
In the same way nature provided various mediums for the various senses, according to the convenience of the acts of the powers.
Whether There Are to Be Distinguished Five Genera of Powers in the Soul?
Objection 1: It would seem that there are not to be distinguished five genera of powers in the soul--namely, vegetative, sensitive, appetitive, locomotive, and intellectual.
Secondly, forasmuch as the soul itself has an inclination and tendency to the something extrinsic.
Hence it is that the three other senses are not exercised through a medium united to them, to obviate any natural immutation in their organ; as happens as regards these two senses.
For the powers are not for the organs, but the organs for the powers; wherefore there are not various powers for the reason that there are various organs; on the contrary, for this has nature provided a variety of organs, that they might be adapted to various powers.
Now, we must observe that as to sensible forms there is no difference between man and other animals; for they are similarly immuted by the extrinsic sensible.
Therefore there are more than five senses.
We next treat of the powers of the soul specifically.
Objection 1: It would seem inaccurate to distinguish five exterior senses.
But the object of the soul's operation may be considered in a triple order.
But if touch is one sense only, on account of the common formality of its object: we must say that taste is distinguished from touch by reason of a different formality of immutation.
Objection 1: It would seem that the interior senses are not suitably distinguished.
As to size and number, it is clear that they are species of quantity.
I shall try to bring to your parlor-tables the periodicals that are worthy of the Christian fireside, and try to pitch into the gutter of scorn and contempt those newspapers that are not fit for the hand of your child or the vision of your wife.
"Books," you say.
You may think it a bold thing thus to arraign an unprincipled printing-press, but I know there are those reading this who will take my counsel; and, in the discharge of my duty to God and man, I defy all the hostilities of earth and hell!
And I put young men and women and Christian parents and guardians on the look-out.
When the time comes for that grand demonstration I think the press in all the earth will make the announcement, and give the call to the nations.
I find no difficulty in accounting for the world's advance.
The reason urged is--the country cannot stand so much religion!
The French nation understood fully how to appreciate this power.
Representatives of the secular and religious press!
It will solace the pillow of death, and soothe the pangs of an agonized eternity!
We must, therefore, import corrupt weeklies published elsewhere, that make our newspaper stands groan under the burden.
There is no force compared with it.
A bad newspaper scruples not at any slander.
What to him is commercial integrity, or professional reputation, or woman's honor, or home's sanctity?
Oh! you cannot by all your religion, in one column, atone for one of your abominations in another!
If they are right, they are gloriously right; if they are wrong, they are awfully wrong.
Christian men and philanthropists!
I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced, and God glorified.
The most abandoned man of the city may go to the bad newspaper and get a slander inserted about the best man.
But in the United States the newspaper has come to unlimited sway.
Away with it from parlor, and shop, and store!
I will not mention the name, lest some of you should go right away and get it.
The most polluted plays that ever oozed from the poisonous pen of leprous dramatist have won their deathful power through the medium of newspapers; the evil is stupendous!
What would you think of a wretch who, during a great storm, while the ship was being tossed to and fro on the angry waves, should climb up into the light-house and blow out the light?
Facility for obtaining loans at fair rates will not make immoral men moral.
The ryots co-operate to drum out monkeys or birds that destroy their crops.
This will mean tracing the course of every pie lent to the members.
Mahavira and Buddha were soldiers, and so was Tolstoy.
They frantically waved their hats, ceased firing, and greeted their erstwhile enemies as comrades.
And so the South African passive resisters in their thousands were ready to die rather than sell their honour for a little personal ease.
He is no follower of Mahavira, the apostle of Jainism, or of Buddha or of the Vedas, who being afraid to die, takes flight before any danger, real or imaginary, all the while wishing that somebody else would remove the danger by destroying the person causing it.
Gift of life is the greatest of all gifts; a man who gives it in reality, disarms all hostility.
He is the true soldier who knows how to die and stand his ground in the midst of a hail of bullets.
There seems to be no historical warrant for the belief that an exaggerated practice of Ahimsa synchronises with our becoming bereft of manly virtues.
Let us be joint sharers with these teachers, and this land of ours will once more be the abode of gods.
In its negative form it means not injuring any living being whether by body or mind.
All these are actuated by hatred, cowardice and fear.
And none who is himself subject to fear can bestow that gift.
I owe much to the living company of the deceased philosopher, Rajachand Kavi, who was a Jain by birth.
This active Ahimsa necessarily includes truth and fearlessness.
The tyrant, in the first instance, will have to walk to his victim over the dead body of her defender; in the second, he has but to overpower the defender; for it is assumed that the cannon of propriety in the second instance will be satisfied when the defender has fought to the extent of his physical valour.
It, therefore, does not prevent me from withdrawing from his presence a child whom he, we shall imagine, is about to strike.
I have derived much religious benefit from Jain religious works as I have from scriptures of the other great faiths of the world.
We can never overdo it.
If we are unmanly today, we are so, not because we do not know how to strike, but because we fear to die.
This statement does not cover suffering caused to the wrong-doer by natural acts of mine which do not proceed from ill-will.
They showed this by helping the Government whenever it needed their help.
Yet the Moorish valour, readiness to die, conquered the gunners.
He has paved the way for an honourable understanding.
But a soldier, who needs the protection of even a stick, is to that extent so much the less a soldier.
Our Shastras seem to teach that a man who really practises Ahimsa in its fulness has the world at his feet; he so affects his surroundings that even the snakes and other venomous reptiles do him no harm.
Only theirs was the courage of desperation.
We have, that is to say, been swayed by the spirit of irreligion rather than of religion.
Only they saw deeper and truer into their profession, and found the secret of a true, happy, honourable and godly life.
It may not, therefore, hurt the person of any wrong-doer, or bear any ill-will to him and so cause him mental suffering.
A helpless girl in the hands of a follower of Ahimsa finds better and surer protection than in the hands of one who is prepared to defend her only to the point to which his weapons would carry him.
The practice of Ahimsa calls forth the greatest courage.
I do not know how far the charge of unmanliness can be made good against the Jains.
Here the love of the cow or the country is a vague thing intended to satisfy one's vanity, or soothe a stinging conscience.
I hold no brief for them.
I must apply the same rules to the wrong-doer who is my enemy or a stranger to me, as I would to my wrong-doing father or son.
He must, therefore, be himself fearless.
Thus, though my views on Ahimsa are a result of my study of most of the faiths of the world, they are now no longer dependent upon the authority of these works.
This takes us far on the road to Ahimsa.
In its positive form, Ahimsa means the largest love, the greatest charity.
By birth I am a Vaishnavite, and was taught Ahimsa in my childhood.
Ambarisha's was due to love.
It is the most soldierly of a soldier's virtues. General Gordon has been represented in a famous statue as bearing only a stick.
Just at present we are not doing it at all.
They are a part of my life, and, if I suddenly discovered that the religious books read by me bore a different interpretation from the one I had learnt to give them, I should still hold to the view of Ahimsa as I am about to set forth here.
They bore no ill-will to it.
Such a one was Ambarisha, who stood his ground without lifting a finger though Duryasa did his worst. The Moors who were being pounded by the French gunners and who rushed to the guns' mouths with 'Allah' on their lips, showed much the same type of courage.
This is said to have been the experience of St. Francis of Assisi.
A man cannot then practice Ahimsa and be a coward at the same time.
That supreme effort had exhausted him.
In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a low voice said to him:
He turned out his pocket, all soaked with ooze, and spread out on the banquette of the vault one louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and five or six large sous.
He rose again.
The encounter took place between Jean Valjean veiled and Thenardier unmasked.
Was it possible?
While handling Marius' coat, Thenardier, with the skill of a pickpocket, and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip which he concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel of stuff might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man and the assassin.
You have paid, now clear out."
While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean's silence, he endeavored to force him to talk.
Let's go shares.
"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."
Phew! you don't smell good."
Chance had unsealed the grating through which he had entered, but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were barred. He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.
You have done well."
And, forgetting his motto: "half shares," he took all.
The bolt slipped back and the gate swung open.
Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no longer felt Marius' weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran rather than walked.
It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault, which gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed in as the vault grew lower.
Thenardier took him for an assassin.
The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in the iron staple.
You didn't kill that man without looking to see what he had in his pockets.
But still you must get out of this."
And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key, he added:
It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening.
He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall.
I'll open the door for you."
Verily, a goal had Zarathustra; he threw his ball.
But to the fighter equally hateful as to the victor, is your grinning death which stealeth nigh like a thief,--and yet cometh as master.
Not yet have people learned to inaugurate the finest festivals.
Believe it, my brethren!
It is cowardice that holdeth them fast to their branches.
To many men life is a failure; a poison-worm gnaweth at their heart. Then let them see to it that their dying is all the more a success.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
Thus should one learn to die; and there should be no festival at which such a dying one doth not consecrate the oaths of the living!
And whoever wanteth to have fame, must take leave of honour betimes, and practise the difficult art of--going at the right time.
Many a one, also, waxeth too old for his truths and triumphs; a toothless mouth hath no longer the right to every truth.
Would that he might never be born!--Thus do I advise the superfluous ones.
He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age!
Free for death, and free in death; a holy Naysayer, when there is no longer time for Yea: thus understandeth he about death and life.
But I hear only slow death preached, and patience with all that is "earthly."
But in man there is more of the child than in the youth, and less of melancholy: better understandeth he about life and death.
Die at the right time: so teacheth Zarathustra.
Best of all, do I see you, my friends, throw the golden ball!
His death, dieth the consummating one triumphantly, surrounded by hoping and promising ones.
To be sure, he who never liveth at the right time, how could he ever die at the right time?
Far too many live, and far too long hang they on their branches.
Verily, not the rope-makers will I resemble: they lengthen out their cord, and thereby go ever backward.
And so tarry I still a little while on the earth--pardon me for it!
Every one regardeth dying as a great matter: but as yet death is not a festival.
But even the superfluous ones make much ado about their death, and even the hollowest nut wanteth to be cracked.
Many die too late, and some die too early.
The consummating death I show unto you, which becometh a stimulus and promise to the living.
Immaturely loveth the youth, and immaturely also hateth he man and earth.
Would that a storm came and shook all this rottenness and worm-eatenness from the tree!
And out of reverence for the goal and the heir, he will hang up no more withered wreaths in the sanctuary of life.
But he was still immature.
1.
Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth--and laughter also!
Thus to die is best; the next best, however, is to die in battle, and sacrifice a great soul.
XXI. VOLUNTARY DEATH.
One must discontinue being feasted upon when one tasteth best: that is known by those who want to be long loved.
Noble enough was he to disavow!
Thus will I die myself, that ye friends may love the earth more for my sake; and earth will I again become, to have rest in her that bore me.
Would that there came preachers of SPEEDY death!
Many never become sweet; they rot even in the summer.
And some are hoary in youth, but the late young keep long young.
Sour apples are there, no doubt, whose lot is to wait until the last day of autumn: and at the same time they become ripe, yellow, and shrivelled.
Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early.
Did ye ever know this?
And would ye hear this likewise?
Easy is it to throw in a stone: if it should sink to the bottom, however, tell me, who will bring it out again?
And there came an adder and bit him in the neck, so that Zarathustra screamed with pain.
And if the punishment be not also a right and an honour to the transgressor, I do not like your punishing.
And rather be angry than abash any one!
Hideous to behold is he on whom injustice presseth alone.
THE BITE OF THE ADDER.
XIX.
To him who seeketh to be just from the heart, even the lie becometh philanthropy.
Devise me, then, the love which not only beareth all punishment, but also all guilt!
Only, one must be rich enough to do so.
And should a great injustice befall you, then do quickly five small ones besides.
Finally, my brethren, guard against doing wrong to any anchorite.
Let this be enough for me: I give unto every one mine own.
If ye have done so, however, well then, kill him also!--
How could an anchorite forget!
How could he requite!
Nobler is it to own oneself in the wrong than to establish one's right, especially if one be in the right.
One day had Zarathustra fallen asleep under a fig-tree, owing to the heat, with his arms over his face.
"But take thy poison back!
How can I give every one his own!
Thou hast awakened me in time; my journey is yet long." "Thy journey is short," said the adder sadly; "my poison is fatal." Zarathustra smiled.
Tell me: where find we justice, which is love with seeing eyes?
Guard against injuring the anchorite!
When he had taken his arm from his face he looked at the serpent; and then did it recognise the eyes of Zarathustra, wriggled awkwardly, and tried to get away.
A small revenge is humaner than no revenge at all.
Rather curse a little also!
And when ye are cursed, it pleaseth me not that ye should then desire to bless.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
When Zarathustra once told this to his disciples they asked him: "And what, O Zarathustra, is the moral of thy story?" And Zarathustra answered them thus:
But how could I be just from the heart!
Shared injustice is half justice.
"When did ever a dragon die of a serpent's poison?"--said he.
The destroyer of morality, the good and just call me: my story is immoral.
Like a deep well is an anchorite.
And he who can bear it, shall take the injustice upon himself!
Devise me, then, the justice which acquitteth every one except the judge!
Thus all was made plain and straight again.
"Where's Cobweb?" "Ready," said Cobweb.
There Titania always slept a part of the night, wrapped in the enameled skin of a snake.
Neither noticed my astonishment.
Larsan neglected nothing in any case on which he was engaged.
The three of us seated ourselves at a table.
I have always seen you walking with your hands in your pockets!"
"It is a present," replied the detective.
Almost immediately the door opened and Frederic Larsan made his appearance, brandishing his famous cane.
It was easy to see that the scene had strongly impressed Rouletabille in favour of Monsieur Robert Darzac; while, to Larsan, it showed nothing but consummate hypocrisy, acted with finished art by Mademoiselle Stangerson's fiance.
I soon lost sight of him amid the branches, and then followed a deep silence.
We were only able to catch these words, which reached us distinctly: "My poor Robert!"--Rouletabille whispered in my ear:
I listened, and presently from above me these words reached my ears:
Monsieur Cassette had not sold another such cane during the last two years.
"Read the mark there, in tiny letters: Cassette, 6a, Opera."
Rouletabille had mounted alone, and had returned with another.
The sobs had ceased.
Do you know how he came to find Daddy Jacques's boots?--Near the spot where we noticed the traces of the neat boots and the disappearance of the rough ones, there was a square hole, freshly made in the moist ground, where a stone had evidently been removed.
"Ah,--Monsieur Fred!" he said, "when did you begin to use a walking-stick?
We approached until we had reached the side of a door that was situated just under the window. Rouletabille, in a low tone, made me understand, that this was the window of Mademoiselle Stangerson's chamber.
I explained that to myself by the fact that they must have been witnesses of some tender and despairing scene between Mademoiselle Stangerson, lying in her bed, and Monsieur Darzac on his knees by her pillow.
"I found it!" he said laughingly.
All which was a proof, in my eyes, that the murderer had sought to turn suspicion on to the old servant.
"You were given a French cane in London!"
"Frederic is really very clever and has not belied his reputation.
"Ah, yes, I remember--you have just come from London.
Rouletabille had dropped into silence.
Fred's cane is new. It is quite clear that it's the same cane.
"I left it near the tree."
Night had come.
And, making a sign to me to deaden the sound of my steps, he led me across the path to the trunk of a tall beech tree, the white bole of which was visible in the darkness.
It was Frederic Larsan.
Where did he find that cane?"
Evidently that was what Rouletabille thought, for, enjoining me to remain hidden, he clasped the trunk with his vigorous arms and climbed up.
It is going to be a terrible matter; for I tell you he is working on wrong lines, and I--I, must fight him with nothing!"
Like you, I think that he found it somewhere near Monsieur Robert Darzac.
"A man unmistakably answering to the description of Monsieur Robert Darzac--same height, slightly stooping, putty-coloured overcoat, bowler hat--purchased a cane similar to the one in which we are interested, on the evening of the crime, about eight o'clock.
We were now out of the park.
He left us, saying he would rejoin us presently.
This tree grew exactly in front of the window in which we were so much interested, its lower branches being on a level with the first floor of the chateau.
"Yes,--Cassette, 6a, Opera.
Rouletabille, after examining it minutely, returned it to Larsan, with a bantering expression on his face, saying:
"After you!"
That evening, on reaching Paris, I saw Monsieur Cassette, dealer in walking-sticks and umbrellas, and wrote to my friend:
The sounds which had attracted our attention ceased, then were renewed for a moment, and then we heard stifled sobs.
He seems to take great care of it--it never leaves him. One would think he was afraid it might fall into the hands of strangers. I never saw it before to-day.
When Rouletabille had seen me into the train, he said:
I then learned that the youth was one of Larsan's assistants and had been charged by him to watch the going and coming of travellers at the station of Epinay-sur-Orge.
He looked about him.
"Yes terrible!--terrible!
CHAPTER XII.
"No, it was given to me in London."
Frederic Larsan's Cane
On the sign he rose, paid for his drink, bowed, and went out.
The detective had already occupied the post of observation when my young friend had thought to reach it alone.
That escaped me; but my mind was turned in another direction by the large number of false indications of his track which the murderer left, and by the measure of the black foot-marks corresponding with that of Daddy Jacques's boots, which I had established without his suspecting it, on the floor of The Yellow Room.
Up to that point, Larsan and I are in accord; but no further.
As I had to wait twenty minutes for the train at Epinay, we entered a wine shop.
A window on the first floor was partly open.
Where did he find it?
A feeble light came from it as well as some sounds which drew our attention.
It was a large yellow bamboo with a crutch handle and ornamented with a gold ring.
I was surprised at the profoundly grave accent with which my young friend pronounced the last words.
As we reached the park gate, Larsan stopped us.
I guessed that each had drawn different conclusions from what they had seen.
"After you, pray!"
"Frederic Larsan arrived at the Glandier before me; he began his inquiry before me; he has had time to find out things about which I know nothing.
"Possibly," said Fred, imperturbably.
I turned my eyes again on Rouletabille.
What was my astonishment to see on the slippery column of the tree two human forms appear and quietly slip down to the ground.
"Cannot English people buy canes in Paris?"
"It is quite a new one, which I have never seen him use before.
Fred passed the cane to Rouletabille.
Rely on me; you shall have word tomorrow morning."
In front of me, the open window remained lighted, and I saw no shadow move across it.
His thoughts were certainly still occupied with Frederic Larsan's new cane. I had proof of that when, as we came near to Epinay, he said:
Somebody was overhead, speaking,--exchanging courtesies.
"How can I thank you enough?" she said, when he had finished.
"Quite comfortable," she said, a little shyly, and then they started. The light was just beginning to break in the east as they rode out from the clump of trees.
I would rather die a thousand times than fall into the hands of the Kaffirs again."
This was followed by an outburst of yells and cries in front, and he set spurs to his horse and dashed forward at a gallop.
"I almost wish it was dark again," the girl said, with a little laugh; "in the dark you seem to me the Sergeant Blunt who came just in time to save us that day the farm was attacked; but now I can see you I cannot recognise you at all; even your eyes look quite different in that black skin."
"It's not a scratch at all," the girl said, indignantly; "it's a very deep bad cut."
"Can you use a pistol?"
Me tell you what we do.
"We are going out to find some good place to hide away in to-day," he said.
In about an hour Ronald, who had been half lying on the ground with his head on his hands, looked round and found that the chief had stolen away.
A moment later and they were out of the kloof, and riding at full speed across the open.
I could twist one of my hands in the horse's mane."
One of the natives put his finger upon his lips to indicate the necessity of silence, and beckoned for her to rise and come to him.
But others sprang from the bushes.
Mary Armstrong lay awake, with every faculty upon the stretch.
Then he came up to Ronald.
He pushed aside the hanging and went out.
"Your father, Miss Armstrong!
No wonder you did not know me.
They were now on the pathway leading down to the kraal.
Though unencumbered, he had the greatest difficulty in making his way through the bushes, which scratched and tore his flesh terribly; but the chief seemed to be possessed of the eyes of a bat, and glided through them, scarcely moving a twig as he passed.
It's lucky it glanced up instead of going through him."
We must hide her now.
"Stoop down, Mary," he said, pressing her forward on the horse's neck and bending down over her.
"I begin to hope that we shall get through now," Ronald said, after emerging from one of these kloofs; "we have only one more bad place to pass, but, of course, the danger is greatest there, as from that the Kaffirs will probably be watching against any advance of the troops from the town."
"Then it looks worse than it is," he laughed.
He unstrapped his valise, took the jack-boots that were hanging from the saddle, and moved away in the darkness.
She listened intently to every sound, with her eyes wide open, staring at the two women, who were cooking mealies in the fire, and keeping up a low, murmured talk.
Looking over his shoulder he saw that the Kaffirs gave up pursuit after following for a hundred yards.
"In the morning they search all about the woods.
It's lucky I was stooping so much.
"It makes all the difference how you walk, Miss Armstrong.
"But they might overtake you, Kreta."
If they hear the horse's hoofs coming from behind they will suppose it is a mounted messenger from the hills. Anyhow, I think that a dash for it is our best chance."
"He was in the waggon, sir," Ronald explained; "he was hurt in the fight with the Kaffirs, and Mr. Nolan brought him back in the waggons."
I am sure that you will be all the better for eating something."
I will use my pistol in my left hand.
The chief now told his follower to replace the stone and join the others, and ordered all to be silent.
"There are no more of them."
Each day before starting we have gone to our fires and got fresh charcoal and mixed it with some grease we brought with us and rubbed it in afresh."
THE RESCUE.
How did you come here?
This is Miss Armstrong.
Some day I will tell you about it; but I cannot now."
Williamstown only one hour's walk; run less than half hour. They no catch us."
Kreta uttered an expression of approval.
"Put your hand into the left holster of my saddle," the lieutenant said. "You will find two or three bandages and some lint there; they are things that come in handy for this work.
"Good thing the Kaffirs have that thought, not search so much here. Search in Sandilli's country.
There; I think he will do now; but there's no doubt it is a nasty wound.
"Hold tight, Mary," he said, as he relaxed his hold of her and cut down a native who was springing upon him from the bushes.
I thought I felt you start."
Two or three of the Fingoes had by this time returned, and in a few minutes all had gathered at the spot.
The fires were burning low now, although many of the Kaffirs were sitting round them; but there was still light enough for him, looking intently, to see a figure moving along.
Now turn him over, and give me my flask from the holster."
"Will you promise me one thing, Ronald?" she asked.
One of the Fingoes now took the lead; the others followed.
"We run fast and get good start.
Her surprise at feeling that the arms that encircled her were bare, roused her.
Mary Armstrong shuddered as she listened to the talk, but when they had gone on Kreta said:
"Why, what is it, sergeant?" the lieutenant asked, catching him by the arm, for he saw that he was on the point of falling.
"Partly, I suppose, because a good many of us get into scrapes before we enlist, and don't care for our friends to be able to trace us."
Half an hour after they had entered the cave he turned round and spoke to the chief.
"Now take his jacket and shirt off," the lieutenant said, "it's a nasty rip that he has got.
Cannot get further until to-morrow night."
We each brought a week's supply with us when we left the waggons.
"She can walk at present, chief," Ronald said, "let us go forward at once."
"The Kaffirs are hunting," Kreta said.
Light came in in several places between the rocks on which the upper slab rested.
When the Fingoes had been gone about ten minutes, Ronald, assured that the Kaffirs would be gathered at the far side of the kloof, went forward at a walk.
"I know I can, you saved my life once before.
"Who are you, sir?" she asked, trembling.
It was lucky indeed your fellow found it."
She had not even a hope that they would sleep.
"Ronald," the girl said, "that sounds Scottish."
We will have Sergeant Blunt in the hospital half an hour after you get there, Miss Armstrong."
Mary followed close behind him.
It took them many hours of patient work before they arrived at the edge of the forest on the last swell of the Amatolas.
"You go down with me to the hut, but not quite close.
You must have gone through a terrible time, and I heartily congratulate Sergeant Blunt on the success of his gallant attempt to rescue you."
Then there was a stop, and she was placed on her feet; the blanket was removed from her head, and a moment later a dark figure seized her hand.
"It seems very unkind to leave him," the girl said, "after all he has done for me."
When she did so he wrapped her in a dark blanket and led her to the door.
No footsteps had been heard in their neighbourhood for some time, and they felt sure that the search had been abandoned in that quarter. Towards sunset all ate a hearty meal, and as soon as it became dark the stones at the entrance were removed and the party crept out.
And, oh, can you tell me any news about my father?"
It was indeed of ample size to contain the party, and was some four feet in height.
"But how could you chop off a curl of my hair with a sword that has no edge?"
She took up her position as directed, facing Troy.
They have seven cuts and three thrusts.
It may safely be asserted with respect to the closeness of his cuts, that had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been almost a mould of Bathsheba's figure.
"There it is, look," said the sergeant, holding his sword before her eyes.
She waited one minute--two minutes--thought of Troy's disappointment at her non-fulfilment of a promised engagement, till she again ran along the field, clambered over the bank, and followed the original direction.
"One, two--"
"Very well.
Oh, you have spoilt my hair!"
"Cut two, as if you were hedging--so.
However, feeling just as usual, she opened them again.
"I heard you rustling through the fern before I saw you," he said, coming up and giving her his hand to help her down the slope.
The hissing of the sword had ceased, and he stopped entirely.
"And I'll venture to take and keep this in remembrance of you."
I am only going to kill that caterpillar settling on you.
The third item of consciousness was that of seeing the same sword, perfectly clean and free from blood held vertically in Troy's hand (in the position technically called "recover swords").
"It was mere sleight of hand.
"Only once more."
Then the same on the left.
She felt like one who has sinned a great sin.
The force went warily round to the foot of the mountains on the east, so as to cut off the retreat of this tribe, and then surrounded them as they lay encamped in the vale; their camels, and indeed all their possessions worth taking, were carried off by the soldiery, and moreover the then Sheik, together with every tenth man of the tribe, was brought out and shot.
The poor beasts had a hard struggle for their lives in that swift stream; and I thought that one of the horses would have been drowned, for he was too weak to gain a footing on the western bank, and the stream bore him down.
Before dark all had passed the river except this one horse and old Shereef.
He could not understand the debate, which indeed was carried on at a distance too great to be easily heard, even if the language had been familiar; but he was always on the alert, and now and then conferring with men who had straggled out of the assembly.
Inflated skins were fastened to their loins, and thus supported, they were tugged across by Arabs swimming on either side of them.
At length the raft entered upon the difficult part of its course; the whirling stream seized and twisted it about, and then bore it rapidly downwards; the swimmers, flagged and seemed to be beaten in the struggle.
I thought, however, that the pleasantest toys to play with during this interval were my pistols, and now and then, when I listlessly visited my loaded barrels with the swivel ramrods, or drew a sweet, musical click from my English firelocks, it seemed to me that I exercised a slight and gentle influence on the debate.
The Arabs now went to work in right earnest to effect the passage of the river.
I was so languid from want of food, that I had scarcely animation enough to feel as deeply interested as you would suppose in the result of the discussion.
Twelve of the Arabs now stripped, and tied inflated skins to their loins; six of the men went down into the river, got in front of the little raft, and pulled it off a few feet from the bank.
The tented Arabs are looked upon as very bad Mahometans.
When at last he reached the bank the people told him that by his baptism in Jordan he had surely become a mere Christian.
The horses and mules were thrown into the water and forced to swim over.
Mysseri (not interpreting in Arabic) had no duty to perform, and he seemed to be faint and listless as myself.
They were made most savagely happy by the tobacco with which I supplied them, and they soon determined that the whole night should be one smoking festival. The poor fellows had only a cracked bowl, without any tube at all, but this morsel of a pipe they handed round from one to the other, allowing to each a fixed number of whiffs.
The old men, with their long grey grisly beards, stood shouting and cheering, praying and commanding.
I never interfered with my worthy dragoman upon these occasions, because from my entire ignorance of the Arabic I should have been quite unable to exercise any real control over his words, and it would have been silly to break the stream of his eloquence to no purpose.
In that way they passed the whole night.
I can’t give a correct report of the debate, for it was held in a barbarous dialect of the Arabic unknown to my dragoman.
I took my seat upon the top of the cargo, and the raft thus laden passed the river in the same way, and with the same struggle as before.
The other six then dashed into the stream with loud shouts and swam along after the raft, pushing it from behind.
The fellows all gathered together in circle, at a little distance from my party, and there disputed with great vehemence and fury for nearly two hours.
The skins, however, not being perfectly air-tight, had lost a great part of their buoyancy, so that I, as well as the luggage that passed on this last voyage, got wet in the waters of Jordan. The raft could not be trusted for another trip, and the rest of my party passed the river in a different and (for them) much safer way.
The little raft with its weighty cargo was then gently lifted into the water, and I had the satisfaction to see that it floated well.
Upon leaving the encampment a sort of ceremony was performed, for the purpose, it seemed, of ensuring, if possible, a happy result for the undertaking. There was an uplifting of arms, and a repeating of words that sounded like formulæ, but there were no prostrations, and I did not understand that the ceremony was of a religious character.
During the discussion I remained lying in front of my baggage, which had all been taken from the pack-saddles and placed upon the ground.
Off went the craft in capital style at first, for the stream was easy on the eastern side; but I saw that the tug was to come, for the main torrent swept round in a bend near the western bank of the river.
I lay that night on the banks of the river, and at a little distance from me the Arabs kindled a fire, round which they sat in a circle.
It was a strange sight to see this solemn old Mussulman, with his shaven head and his sacred beard, sprawling and puffing upon the surface of the water.
After some discussion the Arabs agreed, as I thought, to conduct me to a ford, and we moved on towards the river, followed by seventeen of the most able-bodied of the tribe, under the guidance of several grey-bearded elders, and Sheik Ali Djoubran at the head of the whole detachment.
The council now broke up, and most of the men rushed madly towards me, and overwhelmed me with vehement gratulations; they caressed my boots with much affection, and my hands were severely kissed.
I recollect I sincerely felt at the time that the arguments in favour of robbing me must have been almost unanswerable, and I gave great credit to the speakers on my side for the ingenuity and sophistry which they must have shown in maintaining the fight so well.
On this a portion of my baggage was placed, and was firmly tied to it by the cords used on my pack-saddles.
At last, however, he swam back to the side from which he had come.
The next morning old Shereef was brought across.
In this way they constructed a raft not more than about four or five feet square, but rendered buoyant by the inflated skins which supported it.
Poor Shereef!—the holy man!
A few weeks before Ibrahim had craftily sent a body of troops across the Jordan.
Thanks to Ibrahim Pasha’s terrible visitation the men of the tribe were wholly unarmed, and my advantage in this respect might have counterbalanced in some measure the superiority of numbers.
Shereef looked perfectly resigned to any fate.
As for the horn-work (high! ho!
I need not tell the reader, if he keeps a Hobby-Horse,--that a man's Hobby-Horse is as tender a part as he has about him; and that these unprovoked strokes at my uncle Toby's could not be unfelt by him.--No:--as I said above, my uncle Toby did feel them, and very sensibly too.
I would not, brother Toby, continued my father,--I declare I would not have my head so full of curtins and horn-works.--That I dare say you would not, quoth Dr. Slop, interrupting him, and laughing most immoderately at his pun.
He has so,--replied my uncle Toby.--I knew it, said my father, though, for the soul of me, I cannot see what kind of connection there can be betwixt Dr. Slop's sudden coming, and a discourse upon fortification;--yet I fear'd it.--Talk of what we will, brother,--or let the occasion be never so foreign or unfit for the subject,--you are sure to bring it in.
I could not give the reader this stroke in my uncle Toby's picture, by the instrument with which I drew the other parts of it,--that taking in no more than the mere Hobby-Horsical likeness:--this is a part of his moral character.
This is to serve for parents and governors instead of a whole volume upon the subject.
How many deformed princes, kings, emperors, could I reckon up, philosophers, orators?
The more violent thy torture is, the less it will continue: and though it be severe and hideous for the time, comfort thyself as martyrs do, with honour and immortality.
Bilibaldus Pirkimerus, senator to Charles the Fifth, ruled all Germany, lying most part of his days sick of the gout upon his bed.
Particular discontents and grievances, are either of body, mind, or fortune, which as they wound the soul of man, produce this melancholy, and many great inconveniences, by that antidote of good counsel and persuasion may be eased or expelled.
Some philosophers and divines have evirated themselves, and put out their eyes voluntarily, the better to contemplate.
Deformities and imperfections of our bodies, as lameness, crookedness, deafness, blindness, be they innate or accidental, torture many men: yet this may comfort them, that those imperfections of the body do not a whit blemish the soul, or hinder the operations of it, but rather help and much increase it.
"Like tall Orion stalking o'er the flood: When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulder scarce the topmost billow laves."
Sickness is the mother of modesty, putteth us in mind of our mortality; and when we are in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, she pulleth us by the ear, and maketh us know ourselves.
In the mean time, let it take its course, thy mind is not any way disabled.
Thou art lame of body, deformed to the eye, yet this hinders not but that thou mayst be a good, a wise, upright, honest man.
Thus it came about that, not for the first time in his life, Philip Hadden discarded the somewhat spasmodic prickings of conscience and listened to that evil whispering at his ear.
Then the shadows and mist-wreaths hid it, and she was gone.
Ill would it have gone with the white man if Nahoon had caught him.
On the ground close beside him lay his rifle, where one of the soldiers had placed it, and about a dozen yards away Maputa's pony was grazing.
At least this was the plan of his companions; but, as we know, Hadden had another programme, whereon after one last appearance two of the party would play no part.
Hadden, who brought up the rear, noticed that the girl seemed to be under the spell of an imminent apprehension, for from time to time she clasped her lover's arm, and looking up into his face, addressed him with vehemence, almost with passion.
THE DOOM POOL
Fortune showed itself strangely favourable to the plans of Nahoon and Nanea.
"You wicked villain," he gasped, whereat the chief smiled in a sickly fashion, and turned away.
"Then I will explain while you rest," said the captain.
As it chanced, and as he had hoped would be the case, the animal was a trained shooting horse, and stood still.
Hadden waited a second to get the sight fair on his broad back, then just as the soldiers appeared above the rise he pressed the trigger.
Nanea heard them also, and turning, looked the traitor in the eyes; she said nothing, she only looked, but he could never forget that look.
Yes, there was time; at any rate he would risk it.
Now Maputa saw his purpose and with a yell of terror turned to fly.
"No need to lead me, soldier," he said, shaking himself loose, "who am old and ready to die." Then he kissed his daughter at his side, wrung Nahoon by the hand, and turning from Hadden with a gesture of contempt walked out upon the platform that joined the two thorn trunks.
Here, holding to a bough of one of the thorn trees, she turned and addressed Hadden, saying:--
The white man for his part was filled with a fiery indignation against Maputa.
"I do not understand," stammered Umgona.
Then crying:--
So the soldiers went, doubting nothing.
As the Doom Pool is near, your deaths will be easy."
For my sake you forgot your honour, and I am repaid.
Hadden glanced around him, and saw his opportunity.
With these soldiers, seated on his pony, for he was too fat to walk, waited the Chief Maputa.
Would you know why he has betrayed us?
Hadden planted his feet firmly on the ground and drawing a deep breath, he cocked the rifle and covered the advancing chief.
Hadden was a brave man after his fashion, but his heart quailed as he gazed into that abyss.
If Nahoon stood between him and the flower, so much the worse for Nahoon, and if it should wither in his grasp, so much the worse for the flower; it could always be thrown away.
Curiously enough, the sight touched Hadden, and once or twice he was shaken by so sharp a pang of remorse at the thought of his share in this tragedy, that he cast about in his mind seeking a means to unravel the web of death which he himself had woven.
"You, White Man?" replied the soldier unconcernedly.
One of the Zulu captain's perplexities was as to how he should lull the suspicions and evade the vigilance of his own companions, who together with himself had been detailed by the king to assist Hadden in his hunting and to guard against his escape.
He glanced over his shoulder; Maputa was still running, and alone.
Under pretence that they required a change of veldt, the rest of his cattle he sent away in charge of a Basuto herd who knew nothing of their plans, telling him to keep them by the Crocodile Drift, as there the grass was good and sweet.
"Cast him over before he can work more mischief," said a voice.
Lifting him as though he had been an infant, he hurled him over the edge of the cliff to find his death on the rocks of the Pool of Doom.
"Are you going to throw me in there?" he asked of the Zulu captain in a thick voice.
The watchers bent their heads forward to look.
By now the party had halted near the two thorn trees that hung over the waters of the pool.
Here they proposed to lie hid that day and through the night; then, having first collected the cattle which had preceded them, to cross the river at the break of dawn and escape into Natal.
Because he sought my favour, and I refused him, and this is the vengeance that he takes--a white man's vengeance."
Next came Nahoon, armed with a broad assegai, but naked except for his moocha and necklet of baboon's teeth, and with him Nanea in her white bead-bordered mantle.
With a swift movement, he seized the Martini and five seconds later he was on the back of the pony, heading for the Crocodile Drift at a gallop.
"Come on, Wizard," said the captain, grasping Umgona by the arm, "and let us see how you can swim."
"What is the meaning of this, O King's soldiers?" asked Umgona in a quavering voice.
It is true that we were escaping from the king, and therefore by the law we must die; but it was Black Heart here who made the plot, and he who has betrayed us.
They saw her rush headlong down the face of the fall to strike the water fifty feet below.
Hadden, who by this time was a hundred yards away, heard him clearly, and a rage filled his heart.
"Who dives first," asked the captain of the Chief Maputa.
Bind him hand and foot, and bear him tenderly to where he can be cared for.
In other respects, indeed, it had not carried him far, for in the past he had not desired much, and he had won little; but this particular flower was to his hand, and he would pluck it.
You----" and he stopped, for mental agony had done its work, and suddenly Nahoon went mad before his eyes.
Surely I thought that these evil-doers were giving us too little trouble, and thus it has proved."
It was their plan to travel by night, reaching the broken country near the Crocodile Drift on the following morning.
"That was a brave one," said the captain with admiration.
"No, our orders are to take you to the king, but what he will do with you I do not know. There is to be war between your people and ours, so perhaps he means to pound you into medicine for the use of the witch-doctors, or to peg you over an ant-heap as a warning to other white men."
All preparations being completed, on the third day the party started, heading straight for Ulundi.
Then Maputa chanced to see, and waddled after him to the top of the rise, screaming:--
That is all.
Here he stood for a moment looking at the setting sun, then suddenly, and without a sound, he hurled himself into the abyss below and vanished.
"Can you spring too, girl, or must we throw you?"
The Black One was angry, and despatched us to catch you and make an end of you.
It was I who tempted you from your duty.
Come on now, quietly, and let us finish the matter.
It was no easy task, and it took time.
Nahoon heard the words, and sprang straight at the throat of Hadden; but he did not reach it, for the soldiers pulled him down.
Their path now lay not far from the Pool of Doom, which, indeed, was close to Umgona's kraal, and the forest that was called Home of the Dead, but out of sight of these.
"Black Heart! your turn, Black Heart the traitor!" he rushed at Hadden, his eyes rolling and foam flying from his lips, as he passed striking the chief Maputa from his horse with a backward blow of his hand.
Does the Black One live in the south?
I spoke him softly and said 'yes,' and then like a loyal man I reported to the king."
Moreover, it was a law of Hadden's existence never to deny himself of anything that he desired if it lay within his power to take it--a law which had led him always deeper into sin.
"Indeed.
"The white thief, he has stolen my horse, and the gun too, the gun that he promised to give me."
A scene, wild, weird and terrible burst upon their view.
At a word of command from Oracus his warriors formed a hollow square about the escaping fugitives, and moved off as rapidly as they could.
Charles struggled to his feet and gazed like one to whom life has suddenly been restored.
And so with the third, until he finished his thirty-five miles and threw the bag to the next man, who was waiting.
The trail was the same as that used by the freight bull trains.
There were no signs, however, of an attacking party, and, coming up to the shanty, he found one of the men whom he had shot dying there alone.
Darkness came on before he reached the spot, and as by this time the young man had acquired the habit of absolutely observing everything at all times about him, he soon discovered the fresh tracks of horses.
THE PONY EXPRESS RIDER
They hid their horses in a clump of trees and went to a cabin near the ford to wait for his arrival.
He turned out to be a famous character of the plains named "California Joe," and on seeing the young boy he immediately asked him if he were not Bill Cody.
The boy, as they reached the horse, carelessly said that he had shot some game and would pick it up, in the meantime asking the men to lead his horse on ahead.
The bull-train stations were of course used, but it was necessary to increase the number of stations.
These men--now on the Southern side--heard of his journey and laid in ambush by a stream in a gulch where it was necessary for him to cross on account of the ford.
Then, too, his fame as a plainsman was well known, and it reached military headquarters long before he himself arrived.
The horseman was to ride up to this shanty, jump to the ground with his bag of letters, immediately jump on the fresh pony, and rush along another fifteen miles to a similar station.
Bill turned the corner of some rocks and, dismounting, gave the pony a slap and sent him tearing down the ravine, while he himself hid in the bushes and watched the whole party tear by in the pursuit of the riderless horse.
In a moment the whole party were after him.
This run was from Red Buttes to a place called Three Crossings, and the distance was seventy-six miles.
When the scout returned with answers to the dispatches he became very wary as he approached the ford.
Young Cody knew enough to know that the man had what was called the "drop" on him.
It required in the men the hardest kind of physique and endurance, in the ponies surefootedness as well as swiftness.
At the end of a few months the work proved too severe for him to continue, and he was laid off as supernumerary--that is, a man who could be called on to ride in any emergency.
Yet he gave up his ambition for his mother. Bill promised his mother that he would never go to war as long as she was alive, but that as he must do something to earn money, he had to go to work at once.
On one of these trips he came upon a group of horses tied near a stream, and hearing voices in a dugout cave near by, he went to investigate.
They asked him where he came from.
He became a supernumerary again, and as there were days in which he had nothing to do, he was in the habit of going out hunting, selling the skins of the animals he shot.
Cody could do nothing but sit quietly on his pony.
It was a white man--a desperado of the plains.
The bullet went where the rider should have been, but it missed by the swerve which he had caused the pony to make.
Sometimes it was up rocky gulches or through forests where the riding was hard.
That allayed suspicion for the moment, but they even went so far as to send two of their number with him.
The mail pouches were waterproof, and once locked at St. Joseph, Missouri, they were not opened until they were delivered in Sacramento, California, two thousand miles away.
Cody said he would, and started away at breakneck pace.
There was no time for thought, and Bill immediately reached for his revolver, but upon seeing him the man dropped his rifle and came forward.
But that gave the promoters of the scheme their choice among the best men of the frontier.
He kept on at his furious pace until he was within rifle shot.
Close upon time the man appeared.
Thus the boy did seventy miles every day for three months.
At the time when the Civil War broke out Cody was too young to enlist.
He went immediately to their home, and arrived in time to see his mother before she died.
He went to Fort Laramie and looked up a man named Slade, who was agent of the line there.
Still he spurred the horse on, turned again and shot another.
And within an hour he was ready again for the rider coming from the direction of San Francisco.
Their work only lasted a few years, but it was so extraordinary, so exciting, so near to the ideal of a life of adventure, that it stands out more important than many an era in this country's history which had greater results and extended over a longer time.
He watched his opportunity, and luckily for him those Indians had no rifles.
Such experiences as this followed one after another, until in 1863, with the Civil War in full progress, Cody, then seventeen years old, received word that his mother was dying.
It was a natural contingency for a young man brought up as he had been brought up.
Some of the divisions were longer than others.
Through most of the whole route there was constant danger of a "hold up" either from Indians or from outlaws, who knew that the bag frequently contained money.
Whatever money was carried was in paper, and one Eastern newspaper printed a special edition on tissue paper for use only on this famous Pony Express.
It was evident that there were five men near by watching for him.
As he approached the end of the valley, which narrowed into a point, he saw that some of the Indians on the slopes were riding down to cut off his track.
The outlaw was careless enough to approach the pony from the front, and as he got within reach the young horseman by a trick that he had used many times before made the pony rear so suddenly that his fore foot struck the man in the head and knocked him senseless.
Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men.
She conquered her fears, and spoke:
"Thou must dwell no longer with this man," said Hester, slowly and firmly.
It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne.
Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.
"And surely thou workest good among them!
She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom.
"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me!
If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again.
"I do forgive you, Hester," replied the minister at length, with a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger.
But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live!
I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret.
Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died.
Even thus much of truth would save me!
With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around him, and pressed his head against her bosom, little caring though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter.
We felt it so!
Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people's eyes.
Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success.
They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs.
But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment.
"You have deeply and sorely repented.
Will he continue, then, to keep our secret?
After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne's.
And yet they lingered.
What sayest thou?" cried he.
"Who speaks?" answered the minister.
At length she succeeded.
We said so to each other.
And Satan laughs at it!"
"More misery, Hester!--Only the more misery!" answered the clergyman with a bitter smile.
It may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had stolen out from among his thoughts.
It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path: neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea.
Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than malevolent.
Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?
He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion."
By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being.
What will now be the course of his revenge?"
"It cannot be!" answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon to realise a dream.
He sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.
"Thou shall not go alone!" answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all was spoken!
Then I consented to a deception.
There is good to be done!
She now read his heart more accurately.
"Hester!" cried he, "here is a new horror!
There is happiness to be enjoyed!
For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration.
Hast thou forgotten it?"
Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years' cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for what I am!
"As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in it.
He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.
Exchange this false life of thine for a true one.
Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom!
"Even so." she answered.
"I am powerless to go.
Up, and away!"
They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.
"Oh, Hester!" cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, "thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him!
How dreary looked the forest-track that led backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow mockery of his good name!
He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach.
"Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!" replied the minister, with a sad smile.
"None--nothing but despair!" he answered.
"In such life as has been mine these seven years past!
The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment.
Deeper it goes, and deeper into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man's tread.
"There is a strange secrecy in his nature," replied Hester, thoughtfully; "and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his revenge.
Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses.
"Thou shalt forgive me!" cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him.
"You wrong yourself in this," said Hester gently.
THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their hearts.
And wherefore should it not bring you peace?"
He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter.
"It were far worse than death!" replied the minister.
Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to interpose what she came to say.
Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.
Of penitence, there has been none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat.
Resolve for me!"
Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face.
I would rather be lectured by you than the vicar, because I should have less remorse in telling you, at the end of the discourse, that I preserve my own opinion precisely the same as at the beginning--as would be the case, I am persuaded, with regard to either logician.'
'Just as I thought,' said I to myself: 'the lady's temper is none of the mildest, notwithstanding her sweet, pale face and lofty brow, where thought and suffering seem equally to have stamped their impress.'
'I beg your pardon, Mrs. Graham--but you get on too fast.
'You are very complimentary to us all,' I observed.
'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation;--and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith.
'I do know something of him--but you must excuse me this time; for the evenings, now, are dark and damp, and Arthur, I fear, is too delicate to risk exposure to their influence with impunity.
'Well! you ladies must always have the last word, I suppose,' said I, observing her rise, and begin to take leave of my mother.
We must defer the enjoyment of your hospitality till the return of longer days and warmer nights.'
Markham, I beg you will not say such things, in his presence, at least.
'Is he so mischievous?' asked my mother, considerably shocked.
'Never mind, Arthur,' said his mamma; 'Mrs.
It was little Arthur, irresistibly attracted by my dog Sancho, that was lying at my feet.
'She has her own occupations to attend to; and besides, she is too old to run after a child, and he is too mercurial to be tied to an elderly woman.'
'But by such means,' said I, 'you will never render him virtuous.--What is it that constitutes virtue, Mrs. Graham?
Only think what a man you will make of him, if you persist in--'
In a little while, however, I was sensible that some one was approaching me, with a light, but slow and hesitating tread.
He had already left his new companion, and been standing for some time beside his mother's knee, looking up into her face, and listening in silent wonder to her incomprehensible discourse.
'Granted;--but would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?'
'But, my dear, I call that doting,' said my plain-spoken parent.
Because you are clever in some things and well informed, you may fancy yourself equal to the task; but indeed you are not; and if you persist in the attempt, believe me you will bitterly repent it when the mischief is done.'
'But you left him to come to church.'
'Yes, but the surest means will be to endeavour to fortify him against temptation, not to remove it out of his way.'
'You should try to suppress such foolish fondness, as well to save your son from ruin as yourself from ridicule.'
'No, mamma,' said the child; 'let me look at these pictures first; and then I'll come, and tell you all about them.'
I wish I could render the incentives to every other equally innoxious in his case.'
'Thank you, I never go to parties.'
'Ruin!
'Assuredly not.'
I trust my son will never be ashamed to love his mother!' said Mrs. Graham, with a serious energy that startled the company.
'No; that is the way: you hear just as much of an argument as you please; and the rest may be spoken to the wind.'
'Yes; it is spoiling the child.
CHAPTER V
'A few more touches in the foreground will finish it, I should think.
The tiny features and large blue eyes, smiling through a shock of light brown curls, shaken over the forehead as it bent above its treasure, bore sufficient resemblance to those of the young gentleman before me to proclaim it a portrait of Arthur Graham in his early infancy.
She straightway began to talk to him on indifferent matters, while I amused myself with looking at the pictures.
'You have almost completed your painting,' said I, approaching to observe it more closely, and surveying it with a greater degree of admiration and delight than I cared to express.
It was the portrait of a gentleman in the full prime of youthful manhood--handsome enough, and not badly executed; but if done by the same hand as the others, it was evidently some years before; for there was far more careful minuteness of detail, and less of that freshness of colouring and freedom of handling that delighted and surprised me in them.
'In what direction does it lie?'
Is it true?--and is it within walking distance?'
'No; I cannot afford to paint for my own amusement.'
'I don't know what to make of her at all,' whispered Rose.
I carelessly turned to the window, and stood looking out upon the desolate garden, leaving her to talk to Rose for a minute or two; and then, telling my sister it was time to go, shook hands with the little gentleman, coolly bowed to the lady, and moved towards the door.
'I must make you welcome to my studio,' said Mrs. Graham; 'there is no fire in the sitting-room to-day, and it is rather too cold to show you into a place with an empty grate.'
The child looked at her in grave surprise.
'Mamma sends all her pictures to London,' said Arthur; 'and somebody sells them for her there, and sends us the money.'
Nevertheless, I surveyed it with considerable interest.
There was one in an obscure corner that I had not before observed.
And disengaging a couple of chairs from the artistical lumber that usurped them, she bid us be seated, and resumed her place beside the easel--not facing it exactly, but now and then glancing at the picture upon it while she conversed, and giving it an occasional touch with her brush, as if she found it impossible to wean her attention entirely from her occupation to fix it upon her guests.
But why have you called it Fernley Manor, Cumberland, instead of Wildfell Hall, --shire?' I asked, alluding to the name she had traced in small characters at the bottom of the canvas.
'Only some one come about the pictures,' said she, in apology for her abrupt departure: 'I told him to wait.'
I shall not think about going till next spring; and then, perhaps, I may trouble you.
Leaning against the wall were several sketches in various stages of progression, and a few finished paintings--mostly of landscapes and figures.
I had not had the portrait in my hands two minutes before the fair artist returned.
Rose and I looked at each other.
But, having bid adieu to Rose, Mrs. Graham presented her hand to me, saying, with a soft voice, and by no means a disagreeable smile,--'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, Mr. Markham.
I have been told that you have a fine view of the sea somewhere in the neighbourhood.
'It's mamma's friend,' said Arthur.
But immediately I was sensible of having committed an act of impertinence in so doing; for she coloured and hesitated; but after a moment's pause, with a kind of desperate frankness, she replied:--
don't tell me now: I shall forget every word of your directions before I require them.
"Then knock away with a will, lads!" exclaimed the skipper.
This occupied the two mates until breakfast was ready, when we all sat down to the meal in most exuberant spirits.
He and Winter were both working under the influence of powerful excitement, so it was not long before they had cleared away the sand sufficiently to enable them to lay hold of and drag forth an ingot, black and discoloured almost as rusty iron, but heavy enough to prove most satisfactorily that it was not that metal.
As soon as her speed was sufficiently reduced, Bob let go his anchor, and we had the satisfaction of seeing that she floated lightly and on a perfectly even keel.
I will pass over in silence the rapturous meeting which ensued, for the feelings of all were of too deep and sacred a character for so inexperienced a pen as mine to deal with.
Nature appeared in fact to have arrayed herself in gala attire, in honour of the occasion.
The next day saw us hard at work again, and, not to dwell too long upon matters which may be passed over briefly, in three days we had the box of gems, and as much gold as we considered we could take.
A few more strokes of Winter's shovel laid bare a small patch of damp discoloured planking, a further proof, if we needed one, of the truth of the story.
Having made the tour of the island both outside and inside the reef, and admired its many beauties, we at length sat down to our meal in high spirits, and with appetites which enabled us to do the most ample justice to Ella's bounteous provision, which, it now appeared, had been in progress the whole of the previous day, in anticipation of some such arrangement as that which she had proposed.
I then drove the stick I held in my hand deep into the sandy beach, exclaiming, "Here lies the buried treasure-ship, if there be any truth in the story."
At length Winter's shovel struck upon something hard, and he announced the fact with a joyous shout.
We sprang to our feet as one man, infinitely more excited even than Ella was, and walked up to the tree and carefully examined the mark.
"Here, you two niggers, jump into this here canoe and paddle me down to the cutter as quick as you knows how.
Little now remains to be told.
I here had an opportunity of acquainting the proper authorities with all the circumstances connected with the destruction of the pirate-brig, and of the crew being imprisoned on the island, and I afterwards learned that a cruiser had been despatched to the spot, and that the entire band were captured, tried, condemned upon a mass of evidence, which was soon collected against them, and hanged.
All the ships, without exception, were dressed with flags, and there was a long article in one of the local papers headed, "Thrilling Romance of the Sea," in which the story of Ella's rescue from the wreck told with great effect.
I found out Ella's relations, and communicated the fact of her rescue from the wreck, and of her having become my wife; but I said nothing respecting our immense wealth, merely stating that I was possessed of a comfortable independency, as I wished to ascertain whether they were willing to receive her as a relative, on her own and her mother's account.
Their number had impressed itself upon her, and, endeavouring to remember what it was she had heard or dreamed connected with seven cocoa-nut trees, the story of the treasure had suddenly flashed across her mind.
Of the nature of this mark, too, there could be no possible doubt.
The schooner clove the water smoothly and easily as she drove astern when once fairly afloat, and held her way long enough to shoot far beyond her consorts at anchor in the bay.
This feeling of excitement still continued to animate us; but, strangely enough, Ella seemed the least able of the party to control it, and it appeared to have the effect of agitating her nerves considerably. Moreover, she seemed to be singularly pre-occupied over something, answering remarks at random--sometimes when she was not addressed at all--and then flushing up and apologising confusedly.
Suffice it to say that we all enjoyed on that evening one of those short seasons of perfect, unalloyed happiness which are occasionally permitted even here on earth.
By the time that we had done what we wanted, the gale was over, and we lost no time in making a fresh start.
We also decided upon certain rendezvous in case of being compelled, by bad weather, to part company at any particular part of the voyage.
"Here it is," again exclaimed Ella, darting to a tree which stood on the edge of the clump, and again pointing out a mark very similar to the first.
Here we again filled up provisions and water, and once more despatched letters home.
Winter, like the honest fellow that he was, immediately married the girl who had consented to share his uncertain fortune as a seaman: and the two blacks attached themselves, as a matter of course, to my father's establishment.
When we had all taken our stations--
We were fortunate again in crossing the line, getting a little slant of wind, which carried us handsomely across the usually calm belt which so tries the patience of the homeward-bound seaman at that spot; and after a remarkably fine passage of thirty-nine days from Table Bay, we found ourselves at anchor in Funchal Roads.
"Somewhat like these that we are sitting under at this moment?" interrupted Ella excitedly.
I am so happy, dearest, for I do not think I could have endured that."
We soon got into the south-east trades, and, as they happened to be blowing strong, we made the best of them, and did not attempt to stop at Saint Helena.
"Is everybody ready?" inquired my father.
I have not heard it mentioned once for--oh! ever so long."
And upon this resolution had been based her plot for the picnic.
The two men worked with a will, and soon stood in a good-sized hole, about three feet deep, whilst the rest of us looked on at their labours with the keenest interest.
I was delighted to observe that both my father and Winter keenly enjoyed this short cruise outside.
Every preparation had been completed the day before, all of us having worked like galley-slaves to achieve this result, as soon as it became apparent that launching on this day might be possible.
"There you are, my lad: now fire away as hard as you like.
Bob was still digging away as hard as ever. Presently he ceased digging, and began shovelling the loose sand off a piece of the deck or something else which he had got down to.
I had noticed an unusual flutter in the dear little girl's manner more than once during the morning, as well as considerable imperfectly repressed excitement; but I had said nothing to her about it, attributing it to that which had produced so much excitement of feeling among the rest of us, namely, the important event of the launch.
When this topic seemed pretty well exhausted, Ella remarked nervously, "It seems then, Harry, that you have quite given up the idea of making any further search for the treasure-island.
This accomplished, it was found that we had been so fortunate as to hit, at the first trial, upon the hole through which the Spaniard had penetrated to the innermost recesses of the ship.
When we had admired the schooner to our hearts' content, my father wished to know whether any one had any proposal to make as to the manner in which the remainder of the day should be spent.
Bob soon returned with a couple of shovels, and, springing ashore from the canoe, he handed one to Winter, and began at once to ply the other most vigorously himself, exclaiming as he did so:
Apollo was indignant at the destruction of his son, and wreaked his vengeance on the innocent workmen who had made the thunderbolt.
'My hand will answer better than my tongue,' said he.
Ulysses and Penelope had not enjoyed their union more than a year when it was interrupted by the events which called Ulysses to the Trojan war.
--Francklin's Sophocles.
Finally, the lands formerly subject to overflow, but now redeemed, became very fertile, and this is meant by the horn of plenty.
He urged in his behalf his descent from Jove and his labors by which he had exceeded the exactions of Juno, his stepmother.
Unmoved by the dissuading counsel of an affectionate but timid sister, and unable to procure assistance, she determined to brave the hazard, and to bury the body with her own hands.
She was detected in the act, and Creon gave orders that she should be buried alive, as having deliberately set at naught the solemn edict of the city.
Theseus asked him the cause of his grief, and how he lost his horn.
"Men called him but a shiftless youth, In whom no good they saw, And yet unwittingly, in truth, They made his careless words their law.
Placing a ladder against the wall he mounted, but Jupiter, offended at his impious language, struck him with a thunderbolt.
Milton alludes to the story of Alcestis in his Sonnet "on his deceased wife:"
Then Alcestis, with a generous self- devotion, proffered herself as the substitute.
O my dearest father, Beneath the earth now in deep darkness hid, Worn as thou wert with age, to me thou still Wast dear, and shalt be ever."
I curled my body in a coil and hissed at him with my forked tongue. He smiled scornfully at this, and said, 'It was the labor of my infancy to conquer snakes.' So saying he clasped my neck with his hands.
Just at this time Hercules arrived at the palace of Admetus, and found all the inmates in great distress for the impending loss of the devoted wife and beloved mistress.
One of her arts of delay was engaging in the preparation of a robe for the funeral canopy of Laertes, her husband's father.
Having finished his story, he added, "But why should I tell of other persons' transformations when I myself am an instance of the possession of this power?
He grasped my neck with his arm, and dragging my head down to the ground, overthrew me on the sand.
The first year fell to the lot of Eteocles, who, when his time expired, refused to surrender the kingdom to his brother. Polynices fled to Adrastus, king of Argos, who gave him his daughter in marriage, and aided him with an army to enforce his claim to the kingdom.
But Admetus fell ill, and being near to death, Apollo prevailed on the Fates to spare him on condition that some one would consent to die in his stead. Admetus, in his joy at this reprieve, thought little of the ransom, and perhaps remembering the declarations of attachment which he had often heard from his courtiers and dependents fancied that it would be easy to find a substitute.
We each kept our position, determined not to yield, foot to foot, I bending over him, clenching his hand in mine, with my forehead almost touching his.
The following is the lamentation of Antigone over OEdipus, when death has at last relieved him from his sufferings:
They explain this fight of Achelous with Hercules by saying Achelous was a river that in seasons of rain overflowed its banks.
But it was not so. Brave warriors, who would willingly have perilled their lives for their prince, shrunk from the thought of dying for him on the bed of sickness; and old servants who had experienced his bounty and that of his house from their childhood up, were not willing to lay down the scanty remnant of their days to show their gratitude.
The heroic youth, learning the response, threw away his life in the first encounter.
Vanquished in this form, I tried what alone remained to me and assumed the form of a bull.
"Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint."
The siege continued long, with various success.
He makes that event the first introduction of poetry to men.
Her brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, had agreed to share the kingdom between them, and reign alternately year by year.
Hercules, to whom no labor was too arduous, resolved to attempt her rescue.
CHAPTER XXIII
Antigone, his daughter, alone shared his wanderings and remained with him till he died, and then returned to Thebes.
Early in the contest Eteocles consulted the soothsayer Tiresias as to the issue.
The armies then renewed the fight, and at last the invaders were forced to yield, and fled, leaving their dead unburied.
"Finding that I was no match for him in the warrior's art, I resorted to others and glided away in the form of a serpent.
This task Admetus performed by the assistance of his divine herdsman, and was made happy in the possession of Alcestis.
When his obsequies were celebrated, Evadne cast herself on his funeral pile and perished.
Ulysses, king of Ithaca, sought her in marriage, and won her, over all competitors.
I am no stranger from a foreign shore, but belong to the country, a part of your realm.
They cannot in the course of nature live much longer, and who can feel like them the call to rescue the life they gave from an untimely end?" But the parents, distressed though they were at the thought of losing him, shrunk from the call.
This collar or necklace was a present which Vulcan had given to Harmonia on her marriage with Cadmus, and Polynices had taken it with him on his flight from Thebes.
I struggled to get my arms at liberty, panting and reeking with perspiration.
She was the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, who with all their descendants were the victims of an unrelenting fate, dooming them to destruction. OEdipus in his madness had torn out his eyes, and was driven forth from his kingdom Thebes, dreaded and abandoned by all men, as an object of divine vengeance.
Thrice Hercules tried to throw me off, and the fourth time he succeeded, brought me to the ground, and himself upon my back.
Icarius urged her no further, but when she was gone erected a statue to Modesty on the spot where they parted.
Plenty adopted my horn and made it her own, and called it 'Cornucopia.'"
He went and lay in wait at the door of the chamber of the dying queen, and when Death came for his prey, he seized him and forced him to resign his victim.
PENELOPE
Sometimes I become a serpent, and sometimes a bull, with horns on my head.
I threw off my green vesture and presented myself for the struggle.
Penelope made no reply, but dropped her veil over her face.
The goddess in her wrath deprived him of his sight, but afterwards relenting gave him in compensation the knowledge of future events.
His ruthless hand rent my horn from my head.
They fought and fell by each other's hands.
I was almost choked, and struggled to get my neck out of his grasp.
At this Pluto took alarm, and prevailed on Jupiter to launch a thunderbolt at Aesculapius.
To which question the river-god replied as follows: "Who likes to tell of his defeats?
Jupiter at his birth was committed by his mother Rhea to the care of the daughters of Melisseus, a Cretan king.
She was the daughter of Icarius, a Spartan prince.
The name of Amalthea is also given by some writers to the mother of Bacchus.
Nor was this enough.
Mrs. Jameson, in her "Characteristics of Women," has compared her character with that of Cordelia, in Shakspeare's "King Lear." The perusal of her remarks cannot fail to gratify our readers.
Tilney did not appear.
Their joy on this meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years.
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Her eldest daughter had great personal beauty, and the younger ones, by pretending to be as handsome as their sister, imitating her air, and dressing in the same style, did very well.
CHAPTER 4
Catherine then ran directly upstairs, and watched Miss Thorpe's progress down the street from the drawing-room window; admired the graceful spirit of her walk, the fashionable air of her figure and dress; and felt grateful, as well she might, for the chance which had procured her such a friend.
"My dear Mrs. Allen, I long to introduce them; they will be so delighted to see you: the tallest is Isabella, my eldest; is not she a fine young woman?
Mrs. Thorpe was a widow, and not a very rich one; she was a good-humoured, well-meaning woman, and a very indulgent mother.
With more than usual eagerness did Catherine hasten to the pump-room the next day, secure within herself of seeing Mr. Tilney there before the morning were over, and ready to meet him with a smile; but no smile was demanded--Mr.
Catherine was delighted with this extension of her Bath acquaintance, and almost forgot Mr. Tilney while she talked to Miss Thorpe.
She entered the rooms on Thursday evening with feelings very different from what had attended her thither the Monday before.
Have I not reason to fear that if the gentleman who spoke to you just now were to return, or if any other gentleman were to address you, there would be nothing to restrain you from conversing with him as long as you chose?"
At twelve o'clock, they were to call for her in Pulteney Street; and "Remember--twelve o'clock," was her parting speech to her new friend.
Her partner now drew near, and said, "That gentleman would have put me out of patience, had he stayed with you half a minute longer.
Does he want a horse?
How do you like my gown?
Am I never to be acquainted with him?
Oh!
One day in the country is exactly like another."
"He must have thought it very odd to hear me say I was engaged the other evening, when he saw me sitting down.
I asked you as soon as I came into the room, and I was just going to ask you again, but when I turned round, you were gone!
Yes.
But not one of these grave reflections troubled the tranquillity of Catherine.
What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became her chief concern.
But certainly there is much more sameness in a country life than in a Bath life.
"I do not believe there is much difference."
The morning had answered all her hopes, and the evening of the following day was now the object of expectation, the future good.
Every young lady may feel for my heroine in this critical moment, for every young lady has at some time or other known the same agitation.
I have always lived there, and always been very happy.
"No, indeed I should not."
"I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again soon," said Catherine.
Mr. Tilney was very much amused.
I walk about here, and so I do there; but here I see a variety of people in every street, and there I can only go and call on Mrs. Allen."
"No," said Catherine, "he is not here; I cannot see him anywhere."
I would give any money for a real good hunter.
"Oh, yes you would indeed; I know you better than you know yourself.
With real interest and strong admiration did her eye now follow the general, as he moved through the crowd, and "How handsome a family they are!" was her secret remark.
Of her other, her older, her more established friend, Isabella, of whose fidelity and worth she had enjoyed a fortnight's experience, she scarcely saw anything during the evening.
My sweetest Catherine, how have you been this long age?
Make haste, my dear creature, and come to us.
"Only go and call on Mrs. Allen!" he repeated.
Do you know, I get so immoderately sick of Bath; your brother and I were agreeing this morning that, though it is vastly well to be here for a few weeks, we would not live here for millions.
"He never comes to the pump-room, I suppose?"
But I need not ask you, for you look delightfully.
I really believe I shall always be talking of Bath, when I am at home again--I do like it so very much.
Thorpe is such a very particular friend of my brother's, that if he talks to me, I must talk to him again; but there are hardly three young men in the room besides him that I have any acquaintance with."
A good figure of a man; well put together.
Was not the young lady he danced with on Monday a Miss Smith?"
Catherine had neither time nor inclination to answer.
"Oh, no; they will never think of me, after such a description as that."
People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together.
"And so I am at home--only I do not find so much of it.
I think it does not look amiss; the sleeves were entirely my own thought.
"Oh!
A famous clever animal for the road--only forty guineas.
I have three now, the best that ever were backed.
You will be able to talk of Bath, and of all that you did here."
I would not take eight hundred guineas for them.
"Mr.
"I dare say she was very glad to dance.
This is a cursed shabby trick!
"By heavens, if they do not, I will kick them out of the room for blockheads.
Look about, for heaven's sake!
"That is a good one, by Jove!
"More so!
"Indeed you do me injustice; I would not have made so improper a remark upon any account; and besides, I am sure it would never have entered my head."
"And is that to be my only security?
Catherine's resolution of endeavouring to meet Miss Tilney again continued in full force the next morning; and till the usual moment of going to the pump-room, she felt some alarm from the dread of a second prevention.
In chatting with Miss Tilney before the evening concluded, a new source of felicity arose to her.
"Shall you be at the cotillion ball tomorrow?"
Confused by his notice, and blushing from the fear of its being excited by something wrong in her appearance, she turned away her head.
And Katy, I want just such another rose on the napkin.
"Not all the time," replied Katy, "because you know she'll get tired, and have to take naps in the afternoons.
"There, you've cracked your slate," said Clover.
You all look as natural as possible--just as if I had seen you before."
I'm very glad she could come here for once.
"There's robbers under the bed," he sobbed; "ever so many robbers."
Then a cunning little locket on a bit of velvet ribbon, which Cousin Helen tied round Elsie's neck.
Oh, there's Aunt Izzie!
All but Philly.
"Poor little fellow!" said Cousin Helen, when Clover, having pacified Phil, came back to report.
Cousin Helen laughed heartily.
Alex tries to think that she looks a little as I used to.
For Phil there appeared a book--"The History of the Robber Cat."
Then he helped out a nice-looking young woman, who, Aunt Izzie told them, was Cousin Helen's nurse, and then, very carefully, lifted Cousin Helen in his arms and brought her in.
Luckless speed!
And little Helen comes every day, you know, for her lessons."
"I heard one.
Her present was "The Book of Golden Deeds," with all sorts of stories about boys and girls who had done brave and good things.
"Something like 'Lucy,' in Mrs. Sherwood, I guess, with blue eyes, and curls, and a long, straight nose.
"Alex felt dreadfully when he heard this.
"Cousin Helen wants to see you," he said.
"Let them come as much as they like.
She broke the engagement, and told him that some day she hoped he would love somebody else well enough to marry her.
Katy opened the door.
You'll see!"
Poor Katy.
"I think we'll tell stories this time," said Cousin Helen.
"I'm going to make my aunt a visit," said Alice Blair.
"I told Ma that she had on bracelets, and Ma said she feared your cousin was a worldly person," retorted Cecy, primming up her lips.
"Do let her!" said Cousin Helen, so Papa said "Yes."
First came a vase exactly like her own, which Katy had admired so much.
For to the imaginations of the children, Cousin Helen was as interesting and unreal as anybody in the Fairy Tales: Cinderella, or Blue-Beard, or dear Red Riding-Hood herself.
Why, Katy dear, you are a born nurse Now kiss me.
She couldn't bear to share her cousin with anybody.
"I mean to ask Cousin Helen to-morrow," said Katy.
Still, Katy's first feeling was one of disappointment.
It was just what she wanted, for she had lost her porte-monnaie.
"Papa," she said, after dinner, "who is Alex, that you and Cousin Helen were talking about?"
It stands on a little table beside me at home, and I fancied that the Water Cure would seem more home-like if I had it with me there, so I brought it along.
There was one of them about a robber, which sent delightful chills creeping down all their backs.
Sounds of beating and dusting came from the spare room.
It seemed as strange as if Queen Victoria, gold crown and all, had invited herself to tea.
Pretty things are no more 'worldly' than ugly ones, except when they spoil us by making us vain, or careless of the comfort of other people.
Aunt Izzie, vacation's begun!"
Papa was on the box.
He motioned the children to stand back.
Philly said he was sure she hadn't any legs, because she never went away from home, and lay on a sofa all the time.
Alex is the name of somebody who, long ago, when Cousin Helen was well and strong, she loved, and expected to marry."
Little Elsie clung with a passionate love to this new friend.
She might as well have ordered flies to keep away from a sugar-bowl.
All the children wanted to go too, but he told them she was tired, and must rest.
This conversation with Papa made Cousin Helen doubly interesting in Katy's eyes.
Katy could see that she was very tired.
Though I don't think John's taste in bouquets is very good."
"For a long time they thought she would die.
Katy screamed with delight as it was placed in her hands:
Katy and Clover ran down stairs in great excitement, and after consulting a little, retired to the Loft to talk it over in peace and quiet.
"There's a piece of my hair in it," she said.
But the more she watched Cousin Helen the more she seemed to like her, and to feel as if she were nicer than the imaginary person which she and Clover had invented.
She set down the tray, and picking out a rose, laid it on the napkin besides the saucer of crimson raspberries.
I wonder how long she's going to stay?"
"We have only three or four days to be together," she said.
Katy rebelled against this order a good deal, but she consoled herself by going into the garden and picking the prettiest flowers she could find, to give to Cousin Helen the moment she should see her.
The broken dishes were piled up and the carpet made clean again, while Aunt Izzie prepared another tray just as nice as the first.
There was a bowl of flowers on the table.
"Quite well now," replied Cousin Helen, with one of her brightest looks. "He was run down and tired in the Spring, and we were a little anxious about him, but Emma persuaded him to take a fortnight's vacation, and he came back all right."
"Nor I," said Katy, cheering up at these words of wisdom.
It won't hurt me a bit."
And sickness is such a disagreeable thing in itself, that unless sick people take great pains, they soon grow to be eyesores to themselves and everybody about them.
Cousin Helen coming!
Five o'clock came.
If it hadn't been, they would have been forced to go to school without seeing Cousin Helen, for she didn't wake till late. They grew so impatient of the delay, and went up stairs so often to listen at the door, and see if she were moving, that Aunt Izzie finally had to order them off.
"Is it yours, Cousin Helen?"
So they came in, followed, before long, by Clover and Elsie.
He wanted to marry Cousin Helen just the same, and be her nurse, and take care of her always; but she would not consent.
"No," said Dr. Carr, "it doesn't, because Cousin Helen is half an angel already, and loves other people better than herself.
"Well, this is a pretty piece of business!" ejaculated Marilla.
"CALL you Cordelia?
Take off your hat.
"Oh, she can talk fast enough.
You've no need to be ashamed of it."
I'll come back in a few minutes for the candle.
"I suppose you have a nightgown?" she questioned.
She brought HER.
When I was young I used to imagine it was Geraldine, but I like Cordelia better now.
"I should say not.
"Well, she didn't.
Marilla went slowly down to the kitchen and proceeded to wash the supper dishes.
But there MUST have been a boy," insisted Marilla.
But Mrs. Spencer said DISTINCTLY that you wanted a girl about eleven years old.
She couldn't be left there, no matter where the mistake had come in."
"I'm going out to put the mare in, Marilla.
"I can't.
Dropping her precious carpet-bag she sprang forward a step and clasped her hands.
"Matthew Cuthbert, I believe that child has bewitched you!
It's nothing in her favour, either.
The child raised her head quickly, revealing a tear-stained face and trembling lips.
It's very uncomfortable feeling indeed.
"There was only HER."
The matron of the asylum made them for me.
You don't know how delighted I was.
There is never enough to go around in an asylum, so things are always skimpy--at least in a poor asylum like ours.
"You don't want me because I'm not a boy!
The child hesitated for a moment.
"I suppose--we could hardly be expected to keep her."
Oh, what shall I do?
"Well, well, there's no need to cry so about it."
I've always imagined that my name was Cordelia--at least, I always have of late years.
"What on earth does she mean?" demanded Marilla, staring at Matthew.
We want a boy to help Matthew on the farm.
Even Josie Pye came to see me.
Mrs. Allan has been to see me fourteen times.
Nevertheless, she managed to take several steps before the catastrophe came.
But, Marilla, I might have broken my neck.
"I'd have stayed on good firm ground and let them dare away.
But Josie Pye, if deficient in some qualities that make for popularity, had at least a natural and inborn gift, duly cultivated, for walking board fences.
Mercy me, the child has gone and fainted!"
Matthew, hastily summoned from the harvest field, was straightway dispatched for the doctor, who in due time came, to discover that the injury was more serious than they had supposed.
That night, when Marilla went up to the east gable, where a white-faced girl was lying, a plaintive voice greeted her from the bed.
"I don't think it's such a very wonderful thing to walk a little, low, board fence," she said.
He could get over that if he'd take a little trouble.
Even my imagination has its limits, for I can't imagine THAT.
And the Friday afternoons they don't have recitations Miss Stacy takes them all to the woods for a 'field' day and they study ferns and flowers and birds.
"Just the girls in our class."
My honor is at stake," said Anne solemnly.
"Everybody has been so good and kind, Marilla," sighed Anne happily, on the day when she could first limp across the floor.
Now, to "walk" board fences requires more skill and steadiness of head and heel than one might suppose who has never tried it.
I was walking the ridgepole and I fell off.
But I think it must be splendid and I believe I shall find that Miss Stacy is a kindred spirit."
"It was your own fault," said Marilla, twitching down the blind and lighting a lamp.
Isn't that something to be proud of, Marilla?
A week after the tea at the manse Diana Barry gave a party.
Josie descended from her perch, flushed with victory, and darted a defiant glance at Anne.
And I'm sure I couldn't hop so far on one foot when Jane couldn't even hop around the garden."
But she was not solely dependent on it.
It does seem so strange to think of Superintendent Bell ever being a boy.
But oh, I shall be so glad when I can go to school for I've heard such exciting things about the new teacher.
"What's the matter?
If I am killed you are to have my pearl bead ring."
All the fifth-class girls said, "Oh!" partly in excitement, partly in dismay.
Then Josie Pye dared Jane Andrews to hop on her left leg around the garden without stopping once or putting her right foot to the ground; which Jane Andrews gamely tried to do, but gave out at the third corner and had to confess herself defeated.
You find out how many friends you have.
"Don't be very frightened, Marilla.
Now, it's so easy to imagine Mrs. Allan as a little girl.
This presently took the form of "daring."
"You'll fall off and be killed.
"I knew a girl in Marysville who could walk the ridgepole of a roof."
"Oh, Diana, please find your father and ask him to take me home.
"I must do it.
Diana says she has the loveliest fair curly hair and such fascinating eyes.
Here now, try and eat some supper."
Such absurdity!" said Marilla.
Marilla was out in the orchard picking a panful of summer apples when she saw Mr. Barry coming over the log bridge and up the slope, with Mrs. Barry beside him and a whole procession of little girls trailing after him.
I won't be able to go around for six or seven weeks and I'll miss the new lady teacher.
She never tells you it's your own fault and she hopes you'll be a better girl on account of it.
"Then I dare you to do it," said Josie defiantly.
Diana has been a faithful friend.
I haven't.
And they have physical culture exercises every morning and evening.
"Small and select," Anne assured Marilla.
YOU couldn't, anyhow."
"Where?" sobbed Carrie Sloane.
"Couldn't I?" cried Anne rashly.
"I don't believe it," said Josie flatly.
She had fainted dead away.
Mrs. Lynde always told me that when she came to see me; and she said it in a kind of way that made me feel she might hope I'd be a better girl but didn't really believe I would.
She would have crowed over me all my life.
"I don't believe anybody could walk a ridgepole.
They looked impatiently over the people's heads, standing on tip-toe at every step.
Around the gibbets, and particularly at the entrances to the arcade of Saint-Jean, moved a noisy mass, a busy mass; daring faces, resolute demeanors were to be seen here and there, mingled with silly faces and indifferent demeanors; signals were exchanged, hands given and taken.
The entire crowd now joined as if in one cry; all the cries united formed one immense howl.
"Passage!
At length cries for mercy and of despair resound; that is, the farewell of the vanquished.
Vive Colbert!"
D'Artagnan approaches them, seeing them pale and sinking: "Console yourselves, poor men," said he, "you will not undergo the frightful torture with which these wretches threatened you.
"The condemned are arrived," said D'Artagnan.
Those who dragged them shouted, "Vive Colbert!"
"Monsieur d'Artagnan," cried the latter; "give way, give way!"
"No one passes here," said D'Artagnan.
Then commenced, amidst a frightful tumult, as frightful a confusion.
Vive Colbert!"
During this time the archers, recovering from the panic they had undergone, charge the aggressors in the rear, and regular as mill strokes, overturn or knock down all that opposed them.
Terror even has its attractions.
The head of the father, and the arm of Porthos.
But it was not the musketeers and guards that drew the attention of D'Artagnan.
"Passage!
Vive Colbert!
He wiped his brow, streaming with sweat, and his sword, streaming with blood.
that is infamous!"
From the window, that commanded a view of the whole Place, D'Artagnan saw, with interior satisfaction, that such of the musketeers and guards as found themselves involved in the crowd, were able, with blows of their fists and the hilts of theirs swords, to keep room.
The archers are dragging the culprits to the gibbets.
The king has condemned you to be hung: you shall only be hung.
This cry, shouted with an ensemble, obtained enthusiastic success.
D'Artagnan remarked this. "Mordioux!" cried he, "they are in a great hurry to get a sight of the gibbet!" Raoul drew back, without, however, having the power to leave the window.
And, while Raoul turned away his eyes in compassion, he pointed to the musketeers the gibbets laden with their melancholy fruit.
From this moment the affair did not occupy much time.
Chapter LXII.
This murmur was occasioned by the arrival of the culprits; a strong picket of archers preceded them, and appeared at the angle of the arcade.
One of the men who remained near the chimney approached the window, a firebrand in his hand.
Thou art a brave fellow, mordioux!
"In what?" asked they of D'Artagnan; "was it not a thing agreed upon?"
Now and then there were great movements.
They wanted to burn the condemned, and his house was to serve as a funeral pile.
At a glance D'Artagnan saw there was nothing to be feared from the fire, and sprang to the window.
The people of a bold and resolute mien, whom D'Artagnan had observed, by dint of pressing, pushing, and lifting themselves up, had succeeded in almost touching the hedge of archers.
The two men looked at each other with an air of astonishment.
"Not at all; thank you."
passage!" cried the companions of Menneville, at first terrified, but soon recovering, when they found they had only to do with two men.
"Burn them! burn them!" repeated the crowd.
passage!" cried he, pistol in hand.
Raoul, first disengaged, tore the burning wainscoting down, and threw it flaming into the chamber.
Raoul was on the ground as soon as he, both sword in hand.
mousquetaires!" shouted he, with the voice of a giant, with one of those voices which dominate over cannon, the sea, the tempest.
That man was organizing troops and giving orders.
Go on, hang them, and it will be over."
Both were dressed in black; they appeared pale, but firm.
The fire-keepers turned round on hearing the great cry, and asked what was going on.
He even remarked that they had succeeded, by that esprit de corps which doubles the strength of the soldier, in getting together in one group to the amount of about fifty men; and that, with the exception of a dozen stragglers whom he still saw rolling here and there, the nucleus was complete, and within reach of his voice.
This time there was something more than cries of expectation or cries of joy, there were cries of pain.
D'Artagnan saw Raoul was becoming pale, and he slapped him roughly on the shoulder.
no halter! to the fire! to the fire! burn the thieves! burn the extortioners!"
In a second the boards began to crackle, and the flames arose sparkling to the ceiling.
They pierce with its point, strike with the flat, cut with the edge; every stroke brings down a man.
What stopped the people was, that those who cried "Vive Colbert!" began to cry, at the same time, "No halter!
D'Artagnan remembered the old cry, always so effective from his mouth: "A moi!
"That's well," replied they, again replenishing the fire. D'Artagnan looked at them with much uneasiness; it was evident that these men who were making such a fire for no apparent purpose had some strange intentions.
"Yes, monsieur."
It can only be said of animals that are decidedly cowardly, and are so called, that they will be brave only when they have to defend themselves.
Monsieur Colbert, don't reckon upon that."
"Not exactly.
"We had three of our men crushed to death, monsieur!"
"Ah! indeed," said Colbert, expanding.
"Yes, monsieur; the same."
D'Artagnan's eyes flashed.
"Oh! yes, monsieur."
"Certainly, monsieur; only these real people beat us."
When he arrived at the residence of the new favorite, the court was full of archers and police, who came to congratulate him, or to excuse themselves, according to whether he should choose to praise or blame.
That officer took Colbert on one side, in spite of his resistance and the contradiction of his bushy eyebrows.
With the manners of the present time she is liable to become so dusty and crumpled.
Many of them are gentlewomen born; several of them are noble.
Half an hour later she learned from her maid that Madame Catherine had arrived in a cab and had departed again with the signorina.
And she went on without a murmur, without faltering or glancing back.
He presently returned with the announcement that the Signora Contessa begged them not to wait--she would come home in a cab!
As the Countess Gemini was not acquainted with the ancient monuments Isabel occasionally offered to introduce her to these interesting relics and to give their afternoon drive an antiquarian aim.
She will have her books and her drawing, she will have her piano.
"I laugh very seldom.
It doesn't matter; don't trouble yourself about it.
I didn't believe you would enter into it.
"What other nobleman?"
I shall be very quiet and think a great deal."
It's magnificent."
This bustling, pushing rabble that calls itself society--one should take her out of it occasionally.
Now you had better go away."
It was in this manner that she had hitherto examined the Coliseum, to the infinite regret of her niece, who--with all the respect that she owed her--could not see why she should not descend from the vehicle and enter the building.
"I've heard nothing of it."
She could not understand his purpose, no--not wholly; but she understood it better than he supposed or desired, inasmuch as she was convinced that the whole proceeding was an elaborate mystification, addressed to herself and destined to act upon her imagination.
I couldn't stop for the sale; I couldn't have seen them going off; I think it would have killed me.
He says the world, always the world, is very bad for a young girl.
He has made me believe in true love; I never did before!
He had removed his hat and was bowing and smiling; he had evidently introduced himself, while the Countess's expressive back displayed to Isabel's eye a gracious inclination.
She could only dimly perceive that he had more traditions than she supposed. It had become her habit to be so careful as to what she said to him that, strange as it may appear, she hesitated, for several minutes after he had come in, to allude to his daughter's sudden departure: she spoke of it only after they were seated at table.
Her voice was strange, and her eyes, widely opened, had an excited, frightened look.
"Oh no, thank you, I'm not tired."
When he had assured himself that she was unaccompanied he drew near, remarking that though she would not answer his letters she would perhaps not wholly close her ears to his spoken eloquence.
The convent is a great institution; we can't do without it; it corresponds to an essential need in families, in society.
"I have the money instead--fifty thousand dollars.
And then there was a silence; the Countess was a long time coming.
I like to think of her there, in the old garden, under the arcade, among those tranquil virtuous women.
"You must really go away," she said quickly.
"I'm going to the convent."
She turned and perceived that her two companions had returned from their excursion.
This might be; but it evidently made him feel more so to make the announcement in rather a loud voice, balancing himself a little complacently on his toes and looking all round the Coliseum as if it were filled with an audience. Suddenly Isabel saw him change colour; there was more of an audience than he had suspected.
The Countess, who professed to think her sister-in-law a prodigy of learning, never made an objection, and gazed at masses of Roman brickwork as patiently as if they had been mounds of modern drapery.
"Why are you going to the convent?"
"It will be the last--for some time."
"You're not going away!" Isabel exclaimed.
I should tell you I have kept my enamels.
Here and there wandered a peasant or a tourist, looking up at the far sky-line where, in the clear stillness, a multitude of swallows kept circling and plunging.
"I didn't mean to laugh," said Isabel.
Only she must think of it in the right way."
Isabel looked at him a moment.
"Do you mean that without my bibelots I'm nothing?
Will Mr. Osmond think me rich enough now?"
I went to Paris and made my arrangements.
Rosier slowly got up, putting his watch into his waistcoat-pocket. "You're laughing at some one, but this time I don't think it's at me."
Pansy had known the convent in her childhood and had found a happy home there; she was fond of the good sisters, who were very fond of her, and there was therefore for the moment no definite hardship in her lot.
But they hadn't seen HER!"
"She has no influence with her brother."
Why, don't you say at once that you want to get her out of my way?
And then he added eagerly, like a man who in the midst of his misery is seized by a happy thought: "Is that lady the Countess Gemini?
I shall find all those ladies who used to be so kind to me, and I shall see the little girls who are being educated.
"To the convent?"
You must go and see her, you know; but not too often.
That's what they told me in Paris; oh they were very frank about it.
"Oh never mind!" Pansy answered in the tone of eager apology.
"When was this decided?" she asked.
It's a school of good manners; it's a school of repose.
Pansy drew nearer, till she was near enough to put her arms round Isabel and rest her head on her shoulder.
"And I'm also very fond of Mother Catherine.
"I shall miss Pansy very much."
Of course you've made up your mind that with those convictions I'm dreadful company for Pansy."
Rosier gave her a sharp look.
"My dear friend, you deserve to succeed," said Isabel very kindly.
But she had forbidden herself ever to ask Osmond a question.
That's why I had not spoken of it.
"The sale took place three days ago, and they've telegraphed me the result.
Convents are very quiet, very convenient, very salutary.
The three ladies went into the Coliseum together, but Isabel left her companions to wander over the place.
There shone out of each of them a little melancholy ray--a spark of timid passion which touched Isabel to the heart.
"I feel very safe!" Rosier declared without moving.
And then he went on: "The Catholics are very wise after all.
"I know what happened here while I was away," he went on; "What does Mr. Osmond expect after she has refused Lord Warburton?"
"Yes, I showed her everything.
His tone, however, was that of a man not so much offering an explanation as putting a thing into words--almost into pictures--to see, himself, how it would look.
He had the air of a man who knows he has been the talk of Paris for a week and is full half a head taller in consequence, but who also has a painful suspicion that in spite of this increase of stature one or two persons still have the perversity to think him diminutive.
Isabel gave an extreme attention to this little sketch; she found it indeed intensely interesting.
Happily the dangers of a conflict were averted.
This step was the signal for a general explosion.
At the same time vigorous preparation was made for a conflict.
Some refractory regiments Monk ventured to disband.
Thus far the statesmen by whose advice Richard acted had been successful.
If it were fit that the state should be regulated by the soldiers, those soldiers who upheld the English ascendency on the north of the Tweed were as well entitled to a voice as those who garrisoned the Tower of London.
During a short time the dissimulation or irresolution of Monk kept all parties in a state of painful suspense.
At length he broke silence, and declared for a free Parliament.
Among these feeble copies of a great original the most conspicuous was Lambert.
The fleet sailed up the Thames, and declared against the tyranny of the soldiers.
The result of the elections was such as might have been expected from the temper of the nation.
They employed every art to soothe and to divide the discontented warriors.
It had sprung from military violence.
In the mean time Monk was advancing towards London.
The bells of all England rang joyously: the gutters ran with ale; and, night after night, the sky five miles round London was reddened by innumerable bonfires.
One hour of their beloved Oliver might even now restore the glory which had departed.
When he landed, the cliffs of Dover were covered by thousands of gazers, among whom scarcely one could be found who was not weeping with delight.
But there was no concert among them.
He was proclaimed with pomp never before known. A gallant fleet convoyed him from Holland to the coast of Kent.
During thirteen years the civil power had, in every conflict, been compelled to yield to the military power.
Betrayed, disunited, and left without any chief in whom they could confide, they were yet to be dreaded.
Discord and defection had left them no confidence in their chiefs or in each other.
But the Rump was universally detested and despised.
It was probable that Charles the Second would take warning by the fate of Charles the First.
Among the Commons there was a strong opposition, consisting partly of avowed Republicans, and partly of concealed Royalists: but a large and steady majority appeared to be favourable to the plan of reviving the old civil constitution under a new dynasty.
The banished family had committed great faults; but it had dearly expiated those faults, and had undergone a long, and, it might be hoped, a salutary training in the school of adversity.
Almost all the parts of the government were now constituted as they had been constituted at the commencement of the civil war.
Lambert escaped from his confinement, and called his comrades to arms.
It may well be doubted whether Richard could have triumphed over that coalition, even if he had inherited his father's clear judgment and iron courage.
Both the events in which it originated, and the effects which it had produced, prejudiced men against it.
The officers who had the principal influence among the troops stationed near London were not his friends. They were men distinguished by valour and conduct in the field, but destitute of the wisdom and civil courage which had been conspicuous in their deceased leader.
They saw with bitter indignation that the close of their long domination was approaching, and that a life of inglorious toil and penury was before them.
His hands were unstained by civil blood. The Cavaliers themselves allowed him to be an honest, good-natured gentleman.
One choice only was left, the Stuarts or the army.
Some Presbyterians had, indeed, been disposed to such an alliance even before the death of Charles the First: but it was not till after the fall of Richard Cromwell that the whole party became eager for the restoration of the royal house.
The young man had made no enemy.
The Presbyterians formed the majority.
The people everywhere refused to pay taxes.
It had been fruitful of nothing but disputes.
The soldiers were in a gloomy and savage mood.
Both Houses instantly invited the King to return to his country.
They had no head.
It seemed that the Independents were to be subjected to the Presbyterians, and that the men of the sword were to be subjected to the men of the gown.
The army of Scotland, now quartered in London, was kept in good humour by bribes, praises, and promises.
The soldiers, no longer under the control of one commanding mind, separated into factions.
On the very day before Monk reached London, there was a fight in the Strand between the cavalry and the infantry.
Of this class Fleetwood was the representative.
The Lords repaired to the hall, from which they had, during more than eleven years, been excluded by force.
He had never even borne arms.
The journey to London was a continued triumph.
The Independent leaders no longer dared to show their faces in the streets, and were scarcely safe within their own dwellings.
It was intolerable that certain regiments should, merely because they happened to be quartered near Westminster, take on themselves to make and unmake several governments in the course of half a year.
As soon as his declaration was known, the whole nation was wild with delight.
He had never led them to victory.
The new Parliament, which, having been called without the royal writ, is more accurately described as a Convention, met at Westminster.
It was probably not till he had been some days in the capital that he had made up his mind.
It is certain that simplicity and meekness like his were not the qualities which the conjuncture required.
The fleet was heartily with the nation.
The good understanding which existed between him and his Parliament hastened the crisis.
But there was in the state a power more than sufficient to deal with Protector and Parliament together.
If the Presbyterians obstinately stood aloof from the Royalists, the state was lost; and men might well doubt whether, by the combined exertions of Presbyterians and Royalists, it could be saved.
They hated the title of King. They hated the name of Stuart.
There was no longer any reasonable hope that the old constitution could be reestablished under a new dynasty.
He seems to have been impelled to attack the new rulers of the Commonwealth less by the hope that, if he overthrew them, he should become great, than by the fear that, if he submitted to them, he should not even be secure.
The whole array of the City of London was under arms.
On Blackheath the army was drawn up to welcome the sovereign.
As often as the truncheon was transferred from one feeble hand to another, the nation would be pillaged for the purpose of bestowing a fresh donative on the troops.
What were at this time his plans, and whether he had any plan, may well be doubted.
Richard was solemnly recognised as first magistrate.
During five months, the administration of Richard Cromwell went on so tranquilly and regularly that all Europe believed him to be firmly established on the chair of state.
It was at the same time expressly declared that there should be no first magistrate, and no House of Lords.
His great object, apparently, was to keep himself, as long as possible, free to choose between several lines of action.
Some of them were honest, but fanatical, Independents and Republicans.
Others were impatient to be what Oliver had been.
The army of Scotland had done good service to the Commonwealth, and was in the highest state of efficiency.
The flame of civil war was actually rekindled; but by prompt and vigorous exertion it was trodden out before it had time to spread.
He was used by the army as an instrument for the purpose of dissolving the Parliament, and was then contemptuously thrown aside.
After they had been left together for a few minutes they came out, and threw themselves into one another's arms, in the full view of the enormous multitude which had assembled.
Amid the many contradictory reports, one main fact was positively proclaimed--that was, the young prince was alive, and preparing to contend for the throne of his ancestors.
The Regent left this boy to the care of his mother, the Dowager Czarina, under whose charge he attained to the age of ten.
Shuiski then pretended to have discovered the body of young Demetrius in the ruins of Uglitch, and his clerical friends contrived a miracle for the occasion.
At last a Lithuanian Jew was selected by the insurgents, who, aided by the Poles, advanced into Russia at the head of a large army.
A.D. 1603-1606.
The body of the murdered man, after lying exposed for some days, was unceremoniously buried without the walls, then disinterred and burnt, the ashes collected, and, to make sure of no further resuscitation, mixed with gunpowder and fired off from a cannon.
A few moments after the murder of her son at Uglitch, she was on the spot and recognized the body; and yet, after having maintained for fourteen years her belief in his death, she came forward and recognized him in the successful adventurer, at the exact instant that recantation was worth any price.
Unfortunately, both the physician and the faithful guardian being dead, the tale had to be received for what it was worth; nevertheless, the unknown produced a Russian seal, bearing the name and arms of the Czarevitch, and a valuable jewelled cross.
A feasible story was invented to account for the escape of the intended victim of the late massacre; and to confirm the nation in the belief of his identity with their late Czar, Marina, the widowed Czarina, publicly acknowledged him as her own Demetrius, lived with him as his consort, and had a child by him.
He broke his leg in the fall, and fainted.
When the body was brought to Moscow, they recognized the corpse as that of the real prince, and affirmed that by heavenly providence it had been preserved in its then condition--it being found quite uncorrupt, and the glow of life not even faded from the cheek.
Ivan's widow had recognized her son, and the new monarch was master of the situation.
Demetrius went to meet her in regal state, and their first interview took place in a magnificent tent, specially prepared for the interesting ceremony.
This latter error was his ruin.
But a still more formidable test was to be undergone.
Demetrius now set to work to govern with humanity and justice; both qualities quite unsuited to Russian tastes, who soon grew as tired of their new Czar as they had been of his predecessors.
The deportment and acquirements of the young pretender were suited to his birth, not the least of them being his good horsemanship and skill in fencing.
For a moment he disappeared, and the next instant was discovered dying, with a large wound in his throat; he died without uttering a word.
The Dowager Czarina, ever complacent, gave him a written declaration that the deposed Czar was not her son; but the nation placed little reliance upon her testimony now.
Pray be kind, and aid me if you can!' 'Do you know where it is to be found?' asked the dwarf.
Then they all three rode on together, and on their way home came to a country that was laid waste by war and a dreadful famine, so that it was feared all must die for want.
He walked on; and as he walked through beautiful gardens he came to a delightful shady spot in which stood a couch; and he thought to himself, as he felt tired, that he would rest himself for a while, and gaze on the lovely scenes around him.
Around it he saw several knights sitting in a trance; then he pulled off their rings and put them on his own fingers.
So he set out, and the dwarf met him too at the same spot in the valley, among the mountains, and said, 'Prince, whither so fast?' And the prince said, 'I am going in search of the Water of Life, because my father is ill, and like to die: can you help me?
Next year one of us will take away your beautiful princess, if you do not take care.
Just as he was going out of the iron door it struck twelve, and the door fell so quickly upon him that it snapped off a piece of his heel.
You have had the trouble and we shall have the reward.
But when he came to the gate, the guards, who had seen the road he took, said to him, he could not be what he said he was, and must go about his business.
They told him that their father was very ill, and that they were afraid nothing could save him.
'I know what would,' said the little old man; 'it is the Water of Life.
In the same manner he befriended two other countries through which they passed on their way.
You had better say nothing about this to our father, for he does not believe a word you say; and if you tell tales, you shall lose your life into the bargain: but be quiet, and we will let you off.'
But when he came to the gate the guards said he was not the true prince, and that he too must go away about his business; and away he went.
The second prince set out soon afterwards on the same errand; and when he came to the golden road, and his horse had set one foot upon it, he stopped to look at it, and thought it very beautiful, and said to himself, 'What a pity it is that anything should tread here!' Then he too turned aside and rode on the left side of it.
When they came to their journey's end, the youngest son brought his cup to the sick king, that he might drink and be healed.
Further on he came to a room where a beautiful young lady sat upon a couch; and she welcomed him joyfully, and said, if he would set her free from the spell that bound her, the kingdom should be his, if he would come back in a year and marry her.
So he laid himself down, and sleep fell upon him unawares, so that he did not wake up till the clock was striking a quarter to twelve.
Long before you or I were born, there reigned, in a country a great way off, a king who had three sons.
'No,' said the prince, 'I do not.
So he journeyed on, thinking of her all the way, and rode so quickly that he did not even see what the road was made of, but went with his horse straight over it; and as he came to the gate it flew open, and the princess welcomed him with joy, and said he was her deliverer, and should now be her husband and lord of the kingdom.
Then he told him everything; how his brothers had cheated and robbed him, and yet that he had borne all those wrongs for the love of his father.
Some time after, three grand embassies came to the old king's court, with rich gifts of gold and precious stones for his youngest son; now all these were sent from the three kings to whom he had lent his sword and loaf of bread, in order to rid them of their enemy and feed their people.
Then the prince thanked his little friend with the scarlet cloak for his friendly aid, and took the wand and the bread, and went travelling on and on, over sea and over land, till he came to his journey's end, and found everything to be as the dwarf had told him.
He next tried to get off his horse and make his way on foot, but again the laugh rang in his ears, and he found himself unable to move a step, and thus he was forced to abide spellbound.
Then they waited till he was fast asleep, and poured the Water of Life out of the cup, and took it for themselves, giving him bitter sea-water instead.
'No,' said the king.
This king once fell very ill--so ill that nobody thought he could live.
Then she told him that the well that held the Water of Life was in the palace gardens; and bade him make haste, and draw what he wanted before the clock struck twelve.
His sons were very much grieved at their father's sickness; and as they were walking together very mournfully in the garden of the palace, a little old man met them and asked what was the matter.
But the dwarf put the same spell upon him as he put on his elder brother, and he, too, was at last obliged to take up his abode in the heart of the mountains.
Then he sprang from the couch dreadfully frightened, ran to the well, filled a cup that was standing by him full of water, and hastened to get away in time.
You should have allowed me to sleep.
"It is useless; he would not come up."
"Yes, your excellency; he has this moment returned."
By heavens, if I thought one of you knew that the young gentleman was the friend of his excellency, I would blow his brains out with my own hand!"
"Oh," said the countess to Franz, "go with all speed--poor young man! Perhaps some accident has happened to him."
"Yes--your friend at least hopes so."
"And don't you know where he is?"
The count came towards him.
"It was he who drove, disguised as the coachman," replied Peppino.
They came to an opening behind a clump of bushes and in the midst of a pile of rocks, by which a man could scarcely pass.
"And who is the man?"
Five corridors diverged like the rays of a star, and the walls, dug into niches, which were arranged one above the other in the shape of coffins, showed that they were at last in the catacombs.
"Order out the carriage," he said, "and remove the pistols which are in the holsters.
Franz and the count got into the carriage.
"And now, your excellency," added he, "allow me to repeat my apologies, and I hope you will not entertain any resentment at what has occurred."
Have you a carriage?"
"And if I went to seek Vampa, would you accompany me?"
A man was seated with his elbow leaning on the column, and was reading with his back turned to the arcades, through the openings of which the new-comers contemplated him.
I am a very capricious being, and I should tell you that sometimes when I rise, or after my dinner, or in the middle of the night, I resolve on starting for some particular point, and away I go."
"Your excellency," said Peppino, addressing the count, "if you will follow me, the opening of the catacombs is close at hand."
"What are you going to do?" inquired the count.
The sudden extinction of the moccoletti, the darkness which had replaced the light, and the silence which had succeeded the turmoil, had left in Franz's mind a certain depression which was not free from uneasiness.
"Well, then, how am I free?"
And Albert, followed by Franz and the count, descended the staircase, crossed the square chamber, where stood all the bandits, hat in hand. "Peppino," said the brigand chief, "give me the torch."
"What conditions have I forgotten, your excellency?" inquired the bandit, with the air of a man who, having committed an error, is anxious to repair it.
"The chief's mistress?"
Your friend,
The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian.
"Go on, then," replied the count.
"Ah," asked the countess, "who is out in the streets of Rome at this hour, unless it be to go to a ball?"
"In ten minutes," said the count to his companion, "we shall be there."
"Half-past twelve," he said.
"I prefer waiting here," said the messenger, with a smile.
Franz dressed himself, and went out, telling his host that he was going to pass the night at the Duke of Bracciano's.
"Oh, decidedly, sir.
True, he might in such a case rely on the kindness of Signor Torlonia.
"I should say no."
"Yes," replied the count, going to the door, and returning.
"Did you see the postscript?"
"No, not precisely; however, I think it was something very like a rendezvous."
"Well, well," said the count, "who told you that?"
"I was never in them; but I have often resolved to visit them."
Franz entered the hotel.
It was written and signed by Albert.
Below these lines were written, in a strange hand, the following in Italian:--
"And where is the messenger?"
"Well?" said the count.
Behind the sentinel was a staircase with twenty steps.
The count read it.
Dinner was waiting, but as Albert had told him that he should not return so soon, Franz sat down without him.
"Come hither?"
The count took out his watch.
"How so?" returned the count, with surprise.
"Is it absolutely necessary, then, to send the money to Luigi Vampa?" asked the young man, looking fixedly in his turn at the count.
"You might as well have tried to stop number three of the barberi, who gained the prize in the race to-day," replied Franz; "and then moreover, what could happen to him?"
"You are decidedly right, and we may reach the Palazzo by two o'clock. Signor Luigi," continued Albert, "is there any formality to fulfil before I take leave of your excellency?"
"Have you not saved Peppino's life?"
"Your excellency lodges at Pastrini's hotel?"
"He awaits the answer?"
"Are we alone?"
"Your excellency's name"--
"And how have I broken that treaty, your excellency?"
Peppino passed, lighted his torch, and turned to see if they came after him.
"Half-past one only?" said he.
You need not awaken the coachman; Ali will drive." In a very short time the noise of wheels was heard, and the carriage stopped at the door.
"More determined than ever."
Then, by the gleam of a lamp, similar to that which lighted the columbarium, Albert was to be seen wrapped up in a cloak which one of the bandits had lent him, lying in a corner in profound slumber.
Franz and Albert had brought to Rome letters of introduction to them, and their first question on his arrival was to inquire the whereabouts of his travelling companion.
"But," said Franz, looking round him uneasily, "where is the Viscount?--I do not see him."
"I must learn where we are going.
"And I thank you; have what you will;" and he made a sign to Franz to take what he pleased.
"Was a lad of fifteen," replied Peppino.
"I think, on the contrary, that it is a charming night," replied the countess, "and those who are here will complain of but one thing--its too rapid flight."
CHAPTER X
We had on oil-cloth suits and south-wester caps, and had nothing to do but to stand bolt upright and let it pour down upon us.
When we came up again, which was at four in the morning, it was very dark, and there was not much wind, but it was raining as I thought I had never seen it rain before.
As soon as she was well off from the wind, we filled away the head yards, braced all up sharp, set the foresail and trysail, and left our anchorage well astern, giving the point a good berth.
During this interval I took a look below.
Before night it began to rain; and we had five days of rainy, stormy weather, under close sail all the time, and were blown several hundred miles off the coast.
Any vessel does well which gets by it without a gale, especially in the winter season.
The top-gallant-sail below me was soon clewed up, which relieved the mast, and in a short time I got my sail furled, and went below; but I lost overboard a new tarpaulin hat, which troubled me more than anything else.
The Mexican flag was flying from the little square Presidio, and the drums and trumpets of the soldiers, who were out on parade, sounded over the water, and gave great life to the scene.
In fact, as I afterwards discovered, Point Conception may be made the dividing line between two different faces of the country.
As we drew in, and ran down the shore, we could distinguish well the face of the country, and found it better wooded than that to the southward of Point Conception.
I had seen it done once or twice at sea, and an old sailor, whose favor I had taken some pains to gain, had taught me carefully everything which was necessary to be done, and in its proper order, and advised me to take the first opportunity when we were in port, and try it.
The wind had hauled ahead during the squall, and we were standing directly in for the point.
In the midst of this, we discovered that our fore topmast was sprung, (which no doubt happened in the squall,) and were obliged to send down the fore top-gallant-mast and carry as little sail as possible forward.
As you go to the northward of the point, the country becomes more wooded, has a richer appearance, and is better supplied with water.
We were going along with studding-sails set on both sides, when, as we came round the point, we had to haul our wind, and take in the lee studding-sails.
Then it was "haul down," and "clew up," royals, flying-jib, and studding-sails, all at once.
We worked for about half an hour with might and main; and in an hour from the time the squall struck us, from having all our flying kites abroad, we came down to double-reefed top-sails and the storm-sails.
There was what the sailors call a "mess"--everything let go, nothing hauled in, and everything flying.
I also connected with our arrival here another circumstance which more nearly concerns myself; viz, my first act of what the sailors will allow to be seamanship--sending down a royal-yard.
CHAPTER XI
Here we could lie safe from the south-easters.
Such are the trifles which produce quarrels on shipboard.
This day was Christmas, but it brought us no holiday.
You've mistaken your man.
We were getting tired of one another, and were in an irritable state, both forward and aft.
We now began to feel like sailors, which we never fully did when we were in the steerage.
The Pacific well deserves its name, for except in the southern part, at Cape Horn, and in the western parts, near the China and Indian oceans, it has few storms, and is never either extremely hot or cold.
In the midst of our painting, on
Our fresh provisions were, of course, gone, and the captain had stopped our rice, so that we had nothing but salt beef and salt pork throughout the week, with the exception of a very small duff on Sunday.
But to return to the state of the crew.
As we saw neither land nor sail from the time of leaving Juan Fernandez until our arrival in California, nothing of interest occurred except our own doing on board.
We caught the south-east trades, and run before them for nearly three weeks, without so much as altering a sail or bracing a yard.
We continued sailing along in the beautiful temperate climate of the Pacific.
You hear sailor's talk, learn their ways, their peculiarities of feeling as well as speaking and acting; and moreover pick up a great deal of curious and useful information in seamanship, ship's customs, foreign countries, etc., from their long yarns and equally long disputes.
CHAPTER VIII
This would never answer.
This is an important operation, and is usually done about once in six months in vessels upon a long voyage.
In this manner I tarred down all the head-stays, but found the rigging about the jib-booms, martingale, and spritsail yard, upon which I was afterwards put, the hardest.
There he "sings aloft 'twixt heaven and earth," and if the rope slips, breaks, or is let go, or if the bowline slips, he falls overboard or breaks his neck.
Upon our coming into the forecastle, there was some difficulty about the uniting of the allowances of bread, by which we thought we were to lose a few pounds. This set us into a ferment.
Friday, Dec. 19th, we crossed the equator for the second time.
Every encroachment upon the time allowed for rest, appeared unnecessary.
We painted her, both inside and out, from the truck to the water's edge.
Everything was set up taut, the lower rigging rattled down, or rather rattled up, (according to the modern fashion,) an abundance of spun-yarn and seizing-stuff made, and finally, the whole standing-rigging, fore and aft, was tarred down.
We immediately changed our course due east, and sailed in that direction for a number of days.
In the mean time we were employed in working upon the rigging.
This must be done, of course, on a smooth day, when the vessel does not roll much.
This provoked us, and we began to give word for word.
The captain took advantage of this fine weather to get the vessel in order for coming upon the coast.
Between the tropics there is a slight haziness, like a thin gauze, drawn over the sun, which, without obstructing or obscuring the light, tempers the heat which comes down with perpendicular fierceness in the Atlantic and Indian tropics.
I'll haze you!
In fact, we had been too long from port.
This work, too, is done by the crew, and every sailor who has been long voyages is a little of a painter, in addition to his other accomplishments.
I remember very well being over the side painting in this way, one fine afternoon, our vessel going quietly along at the rate of four or five knots, and a pilot-fish, the sure precursor of the shark, swimming alongside of us.
Thursday, Dec. 25th.
We were driven back discomforted.
Those little children--just think of it--twelve years old, and working in the mills!"
The man made a troubled gesture.
His clasp on the outstretched hand loosened until Margaret, as if in answer to the stern determination of his face, drew her hand away and raised her head until her eyes met his unfalteringly.
"In the mills--at twelve years old!"
The golf links and the tennis court were deserted.
I was shocked and distressed.
For a moment Patty stared silently.
You are carrying the whole world on those two frail shoulders of yours."
"But what--perhaps I don't quite understand," he murmured.
Margaret shuddered.
"Of course you may," cried the man, trying to make his voice so cordial that there should be visible in his manner no trace of his real dismay at her request.
You would deprive some of the families of two-thirds of their means of support if you took away what the children earn.
Those people are poor.
The man's gaze drifted from her face to the arm, the slender wrist and the tapering fingers so clearly outlined in all their fairness against the dark mahogany, and so plainly all unfitted for strife or struggle.
Then he turned sharply.
"They've lied to you.
There must be some way out of it.
"No one--in the way you mean.
"Oh, but I don't mind a bit," returned Margaret, brightly.
"But, my dear Margaret, I did not put them there.
That night she once more followed her guardian into the little den off the library.
"No, no, it's not the whole world at all," protested the girl.
"She can work then--in the mills."
Indeed I do.
Others found it out, too; but to some of these it was not "lucky" stars.
I'll explain.
"Thank you; then I'll meet them there and tell them just what I want done."
I will see."
Margaret always chuckled over this retort and never tired of hearing it, until one day Patty sharply interfered.
In fact there seemed to be almost nothing throughout the whole week that was not "for Patty, you know."
But my hands are tied.
I am simply a part of a great machine--a gigantic system, and I must run my mills as other men do.
Surely you must see that.
"But, my dear Margaret," he remonstrated, "surely it isn't necessary that you yourself should be subjected to such annoyance.
"Lucky Stars," as the child insisted upon calling her, and Maggie were firm friends.
"What is it?"
Margaret did not answer at once.
Do you mean that they let mere children, twelve years old, work in those mills?"
She had seated herself near the desk, and her left hand and arm rested along the edge of its smooth flat top.
"They don't wait till they's twelve.
"Who, then, has been talking to you?"
CHAPTER XXV
And she did see.
"He likes it.
They aren't even twelve, some of them.
The man sprang to his feet and walked twice the length of the room; then he turned about and faced the scornful eyes of the girl by the desk.
"Don't--please don't!
The music room, too, was silent, and the piano was closed.
He only turned his head so that she could not see his eyes.
"By all means," he rejoined hastily.
There was a dazed silence; then Frank Spencer recovered his wits and his voice.
Their parents did it."
She's down in one of the mill cottages, and it leaks and is in bad shape generally.
Unconsciously the man straightened himself.
"It breaks my heart to see you like this.
"Why should I?" he shrugged.
"You are right--I did not know," she said faintly.
"Yes.
"It's only a wee small part of it--and such a defenseless little part, too. It's the children down at the mills."
Why, Patty!" exclaimed Margaret.
I don't suppose I did word it in a very businesslike manner," she added laughingly, in response to Frank Spencer's amazed ejaculation.
Her head drooped forward a little.
"It shall be attended to at once. Just give me your directions and I will send the men around there right away."
It's the little girl, Patty, with whom I lived three years in New York.
I can attend to all that is necessary."
"Oh, then you haven't seen him," murmured her guardian; and there was a curious intonation of relief in his voice.
"When I don't know what it means!
"He was a devoted servant, Dr. Petrie, but the lower influences in his genealogy, sometimes conquered.
A faint perfume hung in the air about me; I do not mean that of any essence or of any incense, but rather the smell which is suffused by Oriental furniture, by Oriental draperies; the indefinable but unmistakable perfume of the East.
Then he got out of hand; and at last he was so ungrateful toward those who had educated him, that, in one of those paroxysms of his, he attacked and killed a most faithful Burman, one of my oldest followers."
The left arm had been severed above the elbow.
Thus, in the heavy silence of that room, a silence only broken by the regular bubbling from the test tube, I found my attention straying from the table to the other objects surrounding it; and at one of them my gaze stopped and remained chained with horror.
Fu-Manchu returned to his experiment.
These things I perceived at a glance: then the filmy eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu were raised from the book, turned in my direction, and all else was forgotten.
At a large and very finely carved table sat Dr. Fu-Manchu, a yellow and faded volume open before him, and some dark red fluid, almost like blood, bubbling in a test-tube which he held over the flame of a Bunsen-burner.
I kneel at the feet of my silver Buddha.
Quite unemotionally he spoke, then turned again to his book, his test-tube and retort, in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable.
A huge glass retort (the bulb was fully two feet in diameter), fitted with a Liebig's Condenser, rested in a metal frame, and within the bulb, floating in an oily substance, was a fungus some six inches high, shaped like a toadstool, but of a brilliant and venomous orange color.
But, following that first instant of stupefaction, I forced myself to advance upon him.
It was a glass jar, some five feet in height and filled with viscous fluid of a light amber color.
Fu-Manchu, finding his experiment to be proceeding favorably, lifted his eyes to me again.
The enormously long nail of his right index finger rested upon the opened page of the book to which he seemed constantly to refer, dividing his attention between the volume, the contents of the test-tube, and the progress of a second experiment, or possibly a part of the same, which was taking place upon another corner of the littered table.
Perhaps I do not make myself very clear, but to me there was a mysterious significance in that perfumed atmosphere.
This awakening was accompanied by none of those hazy doubts respecting previous events and present surroundings which are the usual symptoms of revival from sudden unconsciousness; even before I opened my eyes, before I had more than a partial command of my senses, I knew that, with my wrists handcuffed behind me, I lay in a room which was also occupied by Dr. Fu-Manchu.
A dull, crushing blow descended on the top of my skull, and I became oblivious of all things.
I trust, Dr. Petrie, that you suffer no inconvenience?"
The horror of the thing was playing havoc with my own composure, however.
In its tones, in the glance of the green eyes, in the very pose of the gaunt, high-shouldered body, there was power--force.
"I regret," came the sibilant voice, "that unpleasant measures were necessary, but hesitation would have been fatal.
Upon the gleaming deck, blackly outlined against a wondrous sky, stood a man who wore a blue greatcoat over his pyjamas, and whose unstockinged feet were thrust into red slippers.
"God knows who they were.
"MY SHADOW LIES UPON YOU"
"Is there no means of learning," I said, "from whence this message emanated?"
There is always a certain physical panic attendant upon such awakening in the still of night, especially in novel surroundings.
But there was the drumming on the door again, and the urgent appeal:
"Have you got it?" demanded my companion as we entered the room.
The operator stood up and unclasped the receivers from his ears.
I turned to Platts.
Platts shook his head, perplexedly.
"The message is from Dr. Fu-Manchu!"
There, high above the sleeping ship's company, with the carpet of the blue Mediterranean stretched indefinitely about us, we three stood looking at one another.
"Then it may come from Messina."
But, had I not seen with my own eyes the bloody streak across his forehead as the shot fired by Karamaneh entered his high skull, had I not known, so certainly as it is given to man to know, that the giant intellect was no more, the mighty will impotent, I should have replied:
Both my companions started as violently as I, whereby I knew that the mystery of the wireless message had not been without its effect upon their minds also.
"My patient has had severe nerve trouble," I explained, "and has developed somnambulistic tendencies."
"It's still coming through," replied the other without moving, "but in the same jerky fashion.
It was Platts, the Marconi operator.
At the table sat Platts' assistant with the Marconi attachment upon his head--an apparatus which always set me thinking of the electric chair.
Through the open porthole the moonlight streamed into my room, and save for a remote and soothing throb, inseparable from the progress of a great steamship, nothing else disturbed the stillness; I might have floated lonely upon the bosom of the Mediterranean.
"They gave no code word," he said.
Ahead, on the port bow, an angry flambeau burned redly beneath the peaceful vault of the heavens.
Every time I get it, it seems to have gone back to the beginning--just Dr. Petrie--Dr.
There was a soft thudding on my cabin door, and a voice, low and urgent, was crying my name.
But whereas they paused in doubt, I leaped from the room and almost threw myself down the ladder.
"I fear there's mischief afoot, Petrie," he said.
"This message," I began...
Stepping in turn to the table, I leaned over between the two and read these words as the operator wrote them down:
Anticipating the question which trembled upon the lips of several of those about me:
I no longer feared to awake to find a knife at my throat, no longer dreaded the darkness as a foe.
A stewardess came running from the far end of the alleyway, and I found time to wonder at my own speed; for, starting from the distant Marconi deck, yet I had been the first to arrive upon the scene.
"Dr. Petrie!
Platts shook his head.
The sea was as calm as a great lake.
My reflections were rudely terminated and my sinister thoughts given new stimulus, by a loud though muffled cry which reached me from somewhere in the ship, below.
"I cannot make it out," admitted Platts, running his fingers through disheveled hair, "but I thought it better to arouse you.
"Lost it again!" he muttered.
A fear that something was amiss, that some aftermath, some wraith of the dread Chinaman, was yet to come to disturb our premature peace, began to haunt me.
I turned without a word, slipped into my dressing-gown, and with Platts passed aft along the deserted deck.
I suppose I did not awake very readily.
He began to listen again for the elusive message.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Platts stepped forward and bent over the message which the other was writing.
Following the nervous vigilance of the past six months, my tired nerves, in the enjoyment of this relaxation, were rapidly recuperating.
"It doesn't come from Messina," replied the man at the table, beginning to write rapidly.
Dr. Petrie!"
"Look!"--and he pointed to the table; "according to the Marconi chart, there's a Messagerie boat due west between us and Marseilles, and the homeward-bound P. & O. which we passed this morning must be getting on that way also, by now.
Have you any sort of idea, Dr. Petrie, respecting the identity of the sender?"
But again the pencil was traveling over the paper:--lies upon you all... end of message.
"That's the mystery," he declared.
Then, ere the new sense of security came to reassure me, the old sense of impending harm set my heart leaping nervously.
It's a strange business and a strange message.
"Where is it being sent from?" I asked.
Now, I sat up abruptly, clutching at the rail of my berth and listening.
Petrie."
Stacey carefully closed the door.
I drew a quick breath and gripped Platts' shoulder harshly.
Although I could perceive no connection betwixt the strange message and the cry in the night, intuitively I linked them, intuitively I knew that my fears had been well-grounded; that the shadow of Fu-Manchu still lay upon us.
Dr. Petrie--my shadow...
Platts nodded absently in the direction of the weird flames.
His assistant began fingering the instrument with irritation.
"Stromboli," he said; "we shall be nearly through the Straits by breakfast-time."
Stacey, the ship's doctor, was quartered at no great distance from the spot, and he now joined the group.
I threw open the door.
"Kitchens?--of course--complete ones."
Will the marquis honor me by a few moments' private conversation?"
Now, excuse the indiscretion, marquis, but have you any landed property?"
"The deuce you say!" replied the marquis, "let us lose no time, then!"
"To whom?"
"Say to the Comte de Salvieux that I would like to see him."
Then the first pangs of an unending torture seized upon his heart.
"You will find them both here, and can make your farewells in person."
"Yes, let us go to the library, please." The marquis took his arm, and they left the salon.
"But, at least, tell me where he is, that I may know whether he is alive or dead," said she.
Villefort knew not when he should return, and Renee, far from pleading for Dantes, hated the man whose crime separated her from her lover.
Old Dantes was dying with anxiety to know what had become of Edmond.
"An affair of the greatest importance, that demands my immediate presence in Paris.
At his door he perceived a figure in the shadow that seemed to wait for him.
The man he sacrificed to his ambition, that innocent victim immolated on the altar of his father's faults, appeared to him pale and threatening, leading his affianced bride by the hand, and bringing with him remorse, not such as the ancients figured, furious and terrible, but that slow and consuming agony whose pangs are intensified from hour to hour up to the very moment of death.
"Be as quick as possible, I must be on the road in a quarter of an hour."
I will call Salvieux and make him write the letter."
"I have not quitted you since yesterday," returned Fernand sorrowfully.
The marquis rang, a servant entered.
"Tell your coachman to stop at the door."
"You wish to speak to me alone?" said the marquis.
"Now, then, go," said the marquis.
"So serious that I must take leave of you for a few days; so," added he, turning to Renee, "judge for yourself if it be not important."
"All my fortune is in the funds; seven or eight hundred thousand francs."
"You have a broker, have you not?"
"You will present my excuses to the marquise and Mademoiselle Renee, whom I leave on such a day with great regret."
The Evening of the Betrothal.
"A thousand thanks--and now for the letter."
She passed the night thus.
He started when he saw Renee, for he fancied she was again about to plead for Dantes.
"I dare not write to his majesty."
And, sitting down, he wrote a letter to his broker, ordering him to sell out at the market price.
As he thus reflected, he felt the sensation we have described, and which had hitherto been unknown to him, arise in his bosom, and fill him with vague apprehensions.
"Yes."
"But how can I sell out here?"
Then he had a moment's hesitation.
I want a letter that will enable me to reach the king's presence without all the formalities of demanding an audience; that would occasion a loss of precious time."
The hapless Dantes was doomed.
But he did not succeed, and became too intoxicated to fetch any more drink, and yet not so intoxicated as to forget what had happened.
But remorse is not thus banished; like Virgil's wounded hero, he carried the arrow in his wound, and, arrived at the salon, Villefort uttered a sigh that was almost a sob, and sank into a chair.
The keeper would leave me in the background, and take all the glory to himself.
Chapter 9.
"Then give me a letter to him, and tell him to sell out without an instant's delay, perhaps even now I shall arrive too late."
"To the king."
"Then sell out--sell out, marquis, or you will lose it all."
"Speak out."
And desirous of putting an end to the interview, he pushed by her, and closed the door, as if to exclude the pain he felt.
"Has the Corsican ogre broken loose?" cried a third.
"I shall be gone only a few moments."
"To the king?"
"Doubtless; but there is no occasion to divide the honors of my discovery with him.
"In that case go and get ready.
"Well," asked he, as soon as they were by themselves, "tell me what it is?"
Her beauty and high bearing surprised him, and when she inquired what had become of her lover, it seemed to him that she was the judge, and he the accused.
I tell you, marquis, my fortune is made if I only reach the Tuileries the first, for the king will not forget the service I do him."
"Yes."
He went to bed at his usual hour, and slept in peace.
"You are going to leave us?" cried Renee, unable to hide her emotion at this unexpected announcement.
"Well, Decapitator, Guardian of the State, Royalist, Brutus, what is the matter?" said one.
"That, madame, is an official secret; but if you have any commissions for Paris, a friend of mine is going there to-night, and will with pleasure undertake them." The guests looked at each other.
"Are we threatened with a fresh Reign of Terror?" asked another.
"We are forbidden to shed your blood."
Danglars resembled a timid animal excited in the chase; first it flies, then despairs, and at last, by the very force of desperation, sometimes succeeds in eluding its pursuers.
When daylight dawned he saw that he was near a stream; he was thirsty, and dragged himself towards it.
Three days passed thus, during which his prayers were frequent, if not heartfelt.
He who for so long a time had forgotten God, began to think that miracles were possible--that the accursed cavern might be discovered by the officers of the Papal States, who would release him; that then he would have 50,000 remaining, which would be sufficient to save him from starvation; and finally he prayed that this sum might be preserved to him, and as he prayed he wept.
"But this is all I have left in the world," he said, "out of an immense fortune.
"I do not think so."
But he had no sooner eaten than he felt thirsty; he had forgotten that.
Keep the 50,000 francs you have left--I give them to you.
"Are you not a Christian?" he said, falling on his knees.
His feeble eyes endeavored to distinguish objects, and behind the bandit he saw a man enveloped in a cloak, half lost in the shadow of a stone column.
Be more economical."
"Rise," said the count, "your life is safe; the same good fortune has not happened to your accomplices--one is mad, the other dead.
"I have already told you that we do not sell at retail."
If you deprive me of that, take away my life also."
You will excite your blood, and that would produce an appetite it would require a million a day to satisfy.
He remained there all night, not knowing where he was.
"By him we obey."
Who could these men be?
"Of what must I repent?" stammered Danglars.
"Do you wish to assassinate a man who, in the eyes of heaven, is a brother?
"Come, my friend," said Danglars, seeing that he made no impression on Peppino, "you will not refuse me a glass of wine?"
Pay and eat."
"Here," he said, "here is a draft at sight."
Danglars shuddered.
"Your excellency has given me a louis on account."
"Certainly; and your excellency now owes me 4,999 louis." Danglars opened his enormous eyes on hearing this gigantic joke.
He awoke. To a Parisian accustomed to silken curtains, walls hung with velvet drapery, and the soft perfume of burning wood, the white smoke of which diffuses itself in graceful curves around the room, the appearance of the whitewashed cell which greeted his eyes on awakening seemed like the continuation of some disagreeable dream.
"Does your excellency happen to be hungry?"
"Come, come, this is very droll--very amusing--I allow; but, as I am very hungry, pray allow me to eat.
"What, still keeping up this silly jest?
You do not know with whom you have to deal!" Peppino made a sign, and the youth hastily removed the fowl.
"Stay a moment, your excellency," said Peppino, rising; "you still owe me something."
Near the pan he also placed a pretty little basket of Villetri grapes and a flask of Orvieto.
Peppino picked up the louis, and Danglars again prepared to carve the fowl.
"Oh, nothing easier; you have an account open with Messrs.
You mentioned a fowl, I think?"
Give your orders, and we will execute them."
Thomson & French, Via dei Banchi, Rome; give me a draft for 4,998 louis on these gentlemen, and our banker shall take it." Danglars thought it as well to comply with a good grace, so he took the pen, ink, and paper Peppino offered him, wrote the draft, and signed it.
"I shall get them all in time."
Hallo, there, some bread!" he called.
It signifies nothing whether you eat much or little--whether you have ten dishes or one--it is always the same price."
"Well, a fowl, fish, game,--it signifies little, so that I eat."
"I said they would skin me," thought Danglars; but resolving to resist the extortion, he said, "Come, how much do I owe you for this fowl?"
It was, indeed, Peppino who was preparing to mount guard as comfortably as possible by seating himself opposite to the door, and placing between his legs an earthen pan, containing chick-pease stewed with bacon.
"A louis on account for a fowl?"
The bandage fell from his eyes, and he understood the joke, which he did not think quite so stupid as he had done just before.
Then he added aloud, "Yes, sir, I am hungry--very hungry."
Danglars threw himself upon his goat-skin, and Peppino, reclosing the door, again began eating his pease and bacon. Though Danglars could not see Peppino, the noise of his teeth allowed no doubt as to his occupation.
During all this time a sentinel, who had been relieved at eight o'clock, had been watching his door.
"And here is your fowl." Danglars sighed while he carved the fowl; it appeared very thin for the price it had cost.
To eat--do you hear?"
"Oh, as for that," said Danglars, angry at this prolongation of the jest,--"as for that you won't get them at all.
Let me see what time it is." Danglars' watch, one of Breguet's repeaters, which he had carefully wound up on the previous night, struck half past five.
Never mind, I'll fix that all right.
Danglars' feelings were hurt, and not wishing to put himself under obligations to the brute, the banker threw himself down again on his goat-skin and did not breathe another word.
"We have a fixed price for all our provisions.
"What?
He again arose and went to the door.
"Here, your excellency," said Peppino, taking the fowl from the young bandit and placing it on the worm-eaten table, which with the stool and the goat-skin bed formed the entire furniture of the cell.
"Oh, dear, no, your excellency, unless you intend to commit suicide.
"Do you suppose I carry 100,000 francs in my pocket?"
Peppino pretended not to hear him, and without even turning his head continued to eat slowly. Danglars' stomach felt so empty, that it seemed as if it would be impossible ever to fill it again; still he had patience for another half-hour, which appeared to him like a century.
Very well.
The last alternative seemed the most prudent, so he waited until twelve o'clock.
He was certainly eating, and noisily too, like an ill-bred man.
"Have you kitchens here?"
"No," he cried, "they have not wounded, but perhaps they have robbed me!" and he thrust his hands into his pockets.
The youth brought a small loaf.
"Excellent!"
"Come," he said to himself, "let me try if he will be more tractable than the other;" and he tapped gently at the door.
Go to the devil!
"Now look here, I want something to eat!
"Nay, your excellency, it is you who should tell us what you want.
Luigi Vampa's Bill of Fare.
"Come, you understand me."
You had better tell me at once that you intend starving me to death."
"Here, excellency," said Peppino, offering him a little blunt knife and a boxwood fork.
Peppino was decidedly an epicure.
"Then open the door directly." Peppino obeyed.
Danglars watched these preparations and his mouth watered.
One hundred thousand francs for a loaf?"
He borrowed this from "Don Quixote," the only book he had ever read, but which he still slightly remembered.
As I was saying last night, they intend me to be ransomed. Hallo, here is my watch!
Stay, here is another louis for you."
"Faugh!" he exclaimed, retreating to the farther corner of his cell.
"Yes, a fowl." Peppino, turning around, shouted, "A fowl for his excellency!" His voice yet echoed in the archway when a handsome, graceful, and half-naked young man appeared, bearing a fowl in a silver dish on his head, without the assistance of his hands.
"And what am I to pay with, brute?" said Danglars, enraged.
"One hundred thousand francs," repeated Peppino.
"As your excellency pleases.
"Are you hungry?"
"And cooks?"
"Come," he said, "if I pay you the 100,000 francs, will you be satisfied, and allow me to eat at my ease?"
"Your excellency has 5,050,000 francs in your pocket; that will be fifty fowls at 100,000 francs apiece, and half a fowl for the 50,000."
"Certainly," said Peppino.
"Come, sir, do not keep me starving here any longer, but tell me what they want."
"A piece of dry bread, since the fowls are beyond all price in this accursed place."
"Bread?
Danglars took the knife in one hand and the fork in the other, and was about to cut up the fowl. "Pardon me, excellency," said Peppino, placing his hand on the banker's shoulder; "people pay here before they eat.
They might not be satisfied, and"--
Danglars suddenly felt a strong inclination to see the person who kept watch over him.
"What would your excellency like to eat?"
My dear fellow, it is perfectly ridiculous--stupid!
"But how can I pay them?"
The meeting now broke up.
The city is full of spies, and doubtless the movements of all known to be hostile to Hanno and his party are watched, therefore we thought it best to meet here.
You can well make some excuse to your comrades.
Maybe each section can undertake three if our plans are well laid, and each chooses for attack three living near each other.
So that they eat and drink sufficiently, and can earn their living, it matters not very greatly to them whether Carthage is great and glorious, or humbled and defeated.
This was the reason that Hamilcar, Hasdrubal, and Hannibal were able to maintain themselves in spite of the intrigues of their enemies in the capital.
In the centre was a conical, sharply pointed boss.
At last the day for embarkation arrived, and the troops defiled through the temple of Moloch, where sacrifices were offered up for the success of the enterprise.
For us, Africa and Spain; for her all the rest of Europe and as much of Asia as she cares to take.
At night he slept among them, lying on a lion skin without covering.
The beauty of the Carthaginian race was proverbial, but even among them he was remarkable.
His head was bare.
The sons of the man just murdered should form a nucleus.
Half of these were stored away in the hold of the general's ship, the rest in another vessel.
No decision was arrived at, for this could only be decided upon at a special meeting, at which all the members of the society would be present.
Then turning, he went among the young men of the guard, to all of whom he was personally known, greeting them with a cordiality and kindness which greatly gratified them.
Their armies were their own rather than those of the country.
Each man shifted for himself.
Here, in buildings whose magnitude surprised the newcomers, acquainted as they were with the buildings of Carthage, were stored the treasures, the baggage, the ammunition of war, and the provisions of the army.
Not less light hearted were the chosen band of young nobles grouped by the general's ship.
These consisted of his shield, of Galatian manufacture.
Another thirty at least should be slain before the town is fairly aroused.
But here we are."
In battle he wore a helmet of bronze closely fitting the head, behind which projected a curved metal plate covering his neck.
As they entered a slave took Malchus' horse without a word and fastened it to a ring in the wall, where four or five other horses were standing.
"We dare not meet secretly, you know.
"I would you had spoken so before, Malchus; had I known that you were a scorner of the gods I would not have asked you to join in our enterprise.
We could look without jealousy at each other's greatness, each secure in his own strength and power.
This is the nineteenth in the course of a week.
The fleet hugged the coast, anchoring at night, until the northern shores stood out clear and well defined as Spain stretched down towards Africa.
These acts are spreading terror among the working classes, and unless they are put a stop to we can no longer expect assistance from them.
We have caused it to be whispered as a secret in the neighbourhood, that the house has been taken as a place where we can gamble free from the presence of our elders.
Strange as must have been the scene to them, there was no wonder expressed in the keen glances which they shot around them from underneath their dark eyebrows.
The town was built in a sort of amphitheatre facing the sea, and was surrounded by a strong fortification two miles and a half in circumference, so that even should an assailant cross the lagoon, which in summer was nearly dry, he would have before him an almost impregnable defence to carry.
The whole contour of the face was noble in the extreme.
"Failure ought to be impossible.
His arms were borne behind him by an esquire.
I say it is impossible that the gods who rule the world can have pleasure in the screams of dying infants or the groans of slaughtered men."
It lay at the head of a gulf facing south, about a mile in depth and nearly double that width.
He never gave way to anger.
I see you have entered the cavalry.
But it was not to the splendour of his appearance that Hannibal owed the enthusiasm by which he was regarded by his troops.
Through this a wide channel had been dug.
Yes, there may be a grand future before Carthage yet."
His patience under trials and difficulties of all sorts was illimitable.
When a man's word is good enough to make him beggar himself in order to discharge a wager, he can be trusted to keep his word in a matter which concerns the lives of a score of his fellows.
They well knew how often the treasury of Carthage was empty owing to the extravagance and dishonesty of her rulers, and how impossible it would be to obtain thence the supplies required for the army.
Giscon spoke in an ordinary matter-of-fact tone, as if he were discussing the arrangements of a party of pleasure; but Malchus could scarcely repress a movement of anxiety as he heard this proposal for the wholesale destruction of the leading men of Carthage.
"Now to business.
Tall, swarthy figures these, lissome and agile, with every muscle standing out clear through the brown skin.
Throughout the war her ships lay idle in her harbour.
Various as were the nationalities of the troops who followed him, constrained as most of them had been to enter the service of Carthage, so great was their love and admiration for their commander that they were ready to suffer all hardships, to dare all dangers for his sake.
The soldiers fell into military order, and stood motionless.
You know there is a grand function today to propitiate Moloch and to pray for victory for our arms."
Hamilcar was to proceed in command of them, and, busied with his preparation for the start, Malchus thought little more of the conspiracy which was brewing.
The one party urged that, did they take steps to prepare the populace for a rising, a rumour would be sure to meet the ears of their opponents and they would be on their guard; whereas, if they scattered quickly after each section had slain two of their tyrants, the operation might be repeated until all the influential men of Hanno's faction had been removed.
"I am neither a condemner nor a spurner," Malchus said indignantly; "I say only that I believe you worship them wrongfully, that you do them injustice.
Very different was the demeanour of the men of the different nationalities.
This hill rose from a wide lagoon, which communicated on one side with the sea, and was on the other separated from it only by a strip of land, four hundred yards wide.
His hair, of a golden brown, was worn long, and encircled by a golden band.
His head was well placed on his shoulders; his carriage was upright and commanding; his forehead lofty; his eye, though soft and gentle at ordinary times, was said to be terrible in time of battle.
Thirty large merchant ships were hired to convey the troops, who numbered six thousand.
The parting was a brief one, for the wind was fair, and the general anxious to be well out of the bay before nightfall.
It had been the aim of the great Hamilcar, and of Hasdrubal after him, to render the army of Spain as far as possible independent of the mother country.
It was early in March, but the nights were not cold.
The Libyans were stern and silent, they were part of the contingent which their state was bound to furnish to Carthage, and went unwillingly, cursing in their hearts the power which tore them from their homes to fight in a war in which they had neither concern nor interest.
A great crowd of the populace had assembled to view the embarkation.
Therefore the signal was hoisted. Numbers of slaves seized the hawsers of the ships and towed them along through the narrow passage which connected the docks with the sea.
Giscon placed his hand to his ears as if to shut out such blasphemy, and hurried away, while Malchus, mounting his horse, rode out slowly and thoughtfully to his father's villa.
Therefore they established immense workshops, where arms, munitions of war, machines for sieges, and everything required for the use of the army were fabricated.
Their black faces were alive with merriment and wonder--everything was new and extraordinary to them.
Some had lost near relatives, executed for some trifling offence by the tribunals, some had been ruined by the extortion of the tax gatherers.
Did it fail, and were he found to be among the conspirators, Hanno and his associates would be sure to seize the fact as a pretext for assailing Hamilcar.
"It all came about very simply.
I am enormously obliged.
To-morrow I will write to you to propose another meeting--should my health allow."
She was deathly pale, and her fierce eyes blazed upon the scene before her.
You and Evelyn Crowborough have meddled a good deal too much in them already.
"You ought to be in bed."
"You know that I am your friend and servant," he said, in a queer, muffled voice.
"These Englishwomen overdo their jewels," he thought, with distaste.
You should have thought of the consequences of this before you embarked upon it.
"So I perceive," said Lady Henry, putting her aside.
"At our age, the smallest break in the old habit--"
"Good Heavens!" said Montresor, springing to his feet.
Let me at least call Dixon."
"Another time, if you please," she said, with a most cutting calm.
"Gentlemen"--she turned to the rest of the company, who stood stupefied--"I fear I cannot ask you to remain with me longer.
"Captain Warkworth arrived first; that was a mere chance."
"As I said before, it is late.
He threw Julie a look of anxious appeal as he went out.
She moved heavily on her sticks.
You had been good enough, I see, to rearrange my room--to give my servants your orders."
The Duchess, remembering, shrank back, and spoke no more, till Jacob looked round upon her with a friendly smile which set her tongue free again.
The Duchess was not your first visitor."
As you see"--she pointed to the sticks which supported her--"I have no hands to-night.
On the threshold of the room stood an old lady, leaning heavily on two sticks.
Lord Lackington quietly said, "Good-night, Lady Henry," and, without offering to shake hands, walked past her.
With your leave, I will pursue it when I am better able to profit by it.
"I beg your pardon. Good-night."
"Lady Henry might be disturbed."
Yet here he sat, relaxed, courteous, kind, trusting his companions simply, as it was his instinct to trust all women.
His face took a puzzled expression.
She looked at him uncertainly, as though appealing to him, as a relation of Lady Henry's, to take the lead.
Montresor again approached her.
"I think not.
Within the bright, fire-lit room the social comedy was being played at its best; but here surely was Tragedy--or Fate.
With perfect tact Julie guided the conversation, so that all difficulties, whether for the French official or the English statesman, were avoided with a skill that no one realized till each separate rock was safely passed.
"You promised I should be."
Julie stood aside to let her pass.
Lord Lackington woke up.
"But I am sure she would like me to give you her message and to tell you how she is.
He was one of the intimates of the Commander-in-Chief.
"Of course.
"How very agreeable this is!
Lady Henry smiled in contempt.
The General gave her a grave and friendly attention.
She scarcely heard what Lady Henry was saying to Jacob Delafield.
Julie looked round her, startled.
It distresses me to hear you. Well, now we part."
Julie, with a cry, ran forward, but Lady Henry fiercely motioned her aside.
"Listen!"
Strange words were on her lips, a strange expression in her eyes.
"You will kill yourself.
But before she or he could speak again, the door of the library was thrown open.
I regret they should have stayed talking so long."
But she did not see it; her troubled gaze was fixed on Lady Henry.
"Dear Lady Henry--"
The Frenchman's eyes were round with astonishment.
"Do you know, I think we ought to clear out.
Don't contradict.
But we thought you were too ill to come down!"
Is it a party?
"But if there were, I am not to-night, as you see, in a condition to say it.
She had forgotten to impose any curb upon the voices round her.
Julie Le Breton came forward.
Who was she?
"You will do nothing of the kind," said Lady Henry, indomitable, though tortured by weakness and rheumatism.
Good-night.
In English she was a link, a social conjunction; she eased all difficulties, she pieced all threads.
"You hardly show your usual ability by these remarks.
"P---- has been writing to her, the little minx.
Suddenly there was a voice in her ear.
"Don't touch me!
Good-night. Good-night.
"Courage!" he said, bending over her.
"Don't deceive yourself," he said, quickly, in a low voice; "this is the end.
What did it mean?
There is no way out of it.
But Dr. Meredith did not laugh.
As Dr. Meredith left the room, Julie lifted her eyes.
Lord Lackington hesitated.
She saw Jacob Delafield, who put his finger to his lip.
"We want some relaxation."
And I won't try to imagine it away, either.
But I'm bringing her up, not you."
At the end of the week Marilla said decidedly:
Here I am saying the very thing I was so riled with Rachel Lynde for saying at the Aid today.
"Please cut it off at once, Marilla, and have it over.
He spoke so feelingly about them that it touched my heart.
I know what it feels like to have your word doubted.
He had a big box full of very interesting things and he told me he was working hard to make enough money to bring his wife and children out from Germany.
I bought the dye from him."
This is such an unromantic affliction.
"Dyed it!
And I've been repenting ever since."
With a dismal sigh she went for the scissors.
Oh, Marilla, you little know how utterly wretched I am."
That is fast dye if ever there was any.
The peddler had certainly spoken the truth when he declared that the dye wouldn't wash off, however his veracity might be impeached in other respects.
You can't go out with it looking like that."
Of course it's better to be good.
How could I doubt his word, Marilla?
Oh, I feel that my heart is broken.
"But I thought it was worth while to be a little wicked to get rid of red hair.
Never in all her life had Marilla seen anything so grotesque as Anne's hair at that moment.
But I'm bringing her up and not Rachel Lynde, who'd pick faults in the Angel Gabriel himself if he lived in Avonlea.
I must say, with all her faults, I never found her disobedient or untrustworthy before and I'm real sorry to find her so now."
I will call it a snood--that sounds so romantic.
So I bought it, and as soon as he had gone I came up here and applied it with an old hairbrush as the directions said.
"Perhaps you're judging her too hasty, Marilla.
But they'll never forget this.
I know it is, but it's sometimes so hard to believe a thing even when you know it.
I'm going to weep all the time you're cutting it off, if it won't interfere.
I have proof now--green hair is proof enough for anybody.
I don't believe in encouraging them to come around at all."
As for your chatter, I don't know that I mind it--I've got so used to it."
Consequently, when Marilla entered her kitchen and found the fire black out, with no sign of Anne anywhere, she felt justly disappointed and irritated.
Please, Marilla, go away and don't look at me."
She's just got to be pulled up short and sudden on this sort of thing.
She says she thinks it will be very becoming.
Just the same, Anne has no business to leave the house like this when I told her she was to stay home this afternoon and look after things.
Accordingly, Anne washed her hair, scrubbing it vigorously with soap and water, but for all the difference it made she might as well have been scouring its original red.
I was real glad when Mrs. Allan spoke up for Anne, for if she hadn't I know I'd have said something too sharp to Rachel before everybody.
But please, Marilla, go away and don't look at me.
Just as soon as she grows out of one freak she takes up with another.
It's hard to be told you look like a scarecrow and I wanted to say something back.
There now, what is it?"
"Mercy on us," said astonished Marilla, "have you been asleep, Anne?"
I rewrote it five times and I look upon it as my masterpiece.
"I can manage to write about the woods, but the one we're to hand in Monday is terrible.
"I shouldn't say there was a great deal" was Marilla's encouraging answer.
They're so white and still, as if they were asleep and dreaming pretty dreams."
It really is a great comfort to me.
All her affection for Geraldine turned to bitter hate and she vowed that she should never marry Bertram.
"It would be if you'd only cultivate it," said Anne cheeringly.
"She told me so herself--that is, she said she was a dreadful mischief when she was a girl and was always getting into scrapes.
Is it very wicked of me, Marilla, to feel encouraged when I hear that other people have been bad and mischievous?
She puts too much lovemaking into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little.
That is one of the advantages of being thirteen.
Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse."
You may have noticed that.
You've been thirteen for a month, so I suppose it doesn't seem such a novelty to you as it does to me.
None of the Sloanes would have any dealings with the Bells, because the Bells had declared that the Sloanes had too much to do in the program, and the Sloanes had retorted that the Bells were not capable of doing the little they had to do properly.
I really think the woods are just as lovely in winter as in summer.
As for Cordelia, she went insane with remorse and was shut up in a lunatic asylum.
I can tell you I took a lot of trouble with that speech.
I do really try to make it my object but I forget so often when I'm having fun.
He saved her life when her horse ran away with her in a carriage, and she fainted in his arms and he carried her home three miles; because, you understand, the carriage was all smashed up.
I'm sure that must have a wholesome effect.
I'm trying to be as much like Mrs. Allan as I possibly can, for I think she's perfect. Mr. Allan thinks so too.
It was limited to Diana and Anne at first, but soon it was extended to include Jane Andrews and Ruby Gillis and one or two others who felt that their imaginations needed cultivating.
There are just a few things it's proper to talk about on Sundays and that is one of them.
The Story Club Is Formed
It was an unusually mild winter, with so little snow that Anne and Diana could go to school nearly every day by way of the Birch Path.
That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died.
I mostly always have to tell them what to write about, but that isn't hard for I've millions of ideas."
"Well, what became of Cordelia and Geraldine?" asked Diana, who was beginning to feel rather interested in their fate.
I suppose you have your composition all done?"
I wish my imagination was as good as yours."
"I insist upon that.
I won't say what I was going to because it was extremely uncharitable.
I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent.
Do you think there is any prospect of it, Marilla?"
Mrs. Lynde says there is no danger of my ever being one, but you can never tell.
I had such an interesting talk with Mrs. Allan about besetting sins last Sunday afternoon.
"I'm sure Mrs. Allan was never such a silly, forgetful little girl as you are."
"It's easy for you because you have an imagination," retorted Diana, "but what would you do if you had been born without one?
Then Bertram DeVere came to their native village and fell in love with the fair Geraldine.
With the exception of these trifling frictions, work in Miss Stacy's little kingdom went on with regularity and smoothness.
Geraldine was a queenly blonde with hair like spun gold and velvety purple eyes."
Then I read it to Matthew and he said it was fine.
She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them.
"You had five dollars and ten cents left.
I judged they had got to the foot, and was giving it up.
I was ever so glad to see Jim.
I couldn't, somehow, for thinking.
"Why, how long you been on the island, Jim?"
"So you lost the ten dollars."
When she'd got pretty well along down towards me, I put out my pipe and went to where I fished out the bread, and laid down behind a log on the bank in a little open place.
Well, I couldn't stay up there forever; so at last I got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on the lookout all the time.
Well, I was dozing off again when I thinks I hears a deep sound of "boom!" away up the river.
The same if you shook the table-cloth after sundown.
"How do you come to be here, Jim, and how'd you get here?"
No difference—just the same thing. But the next day I went exploring around down through the island.
But by and by along comes another one, and this time I won.
I put ten dollars in a cow.
"Blamed if I would, Jim."
"Why, live stock—cattle, you know.
So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing—that is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.
So, says I, I'll keep a lookout, and if any of them's floating around after me I'll give them a show.
About this time I mighty near stepped on a good-sized snake, and it went sliding off through the grass and flowers, and I after it, trying to get a shot at it.
I knowed I was all right now.
Then when we had got pretty well stuffed, we laid off and lazied.
"Since the night I got killed."
I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick woods.
He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire.
And Jim said you mustn't count the things you are going to cook for dinner, because that would bring bad luck.
Oh, yes, you got a gun.
I sat down there on a log, and looked out through the leaves.
He said it was a sign when young chickens flew that way, and so he reckoned it was the same way when young birds done it.
It most give me the fan-tods.
And every time I waked up I thought somebody had me by the neck.
Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast.
"Jim!"
I got a good place amongst the leaves, and set there on a log, munching the bread and watching the ferry-boat, and very well satisfied.
And there was the ferryboat full of people floating along down.
He said he knowed most everything.
He said his father laid mighty sick once, and some of them catched a bird, and his old granny said his father would die, and he did.
I was boss of it; it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all about it; but mainly I wanted to put in the time.
I hopped up, and went and looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying on the water a long ways up—about abreast the ferry.
"It's good daylight.
A big double loaf come along, and I most got it with a long stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out further.
"Strawberries and such truck," I says.
"Have you got hairy arms and a hairy breast, Jim?"
"Yes—indeedy."
I didn't wait, but shoved out and paddled away easy.
He says:
I clipped along, and all of a sudden I bounded right on to the ashes of a camp fire that was still smoking.
But they didn't yet a while.
Did you hear 'em shooting the cannon?"
I could hear the booming now and then, further and further off, and by and by, after an hour, I didn't hear it no more. The island was three mile long.
"But mind, you said you wouldn' tell—you know you said you wouldn' tell, Huck."
I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and done it.
"Is that what you live on?"
Did you speculate any more?"
Some young birds come along, flying a yard or two at a time and lighting.
"Oh, yes.
It was "baker's bread"—what the quality eat; none of your low-down corn-pone.
Then I says:
Then I says:
They all crowded up and leaned over the rails, nearly in my face, and kept still, watching with all their might.
The ferryboat was floating with the current, and I allowed I'd have a chance to see who was aboard when she come along, because she would come in close, where the bread did.
Then I told him the whole thing, and he said it was smart.
But by and by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away through the trees.
Where the log forked I could peep through.
"What did you speculate in, Jim?"
I didn't hope so.
"Well, I b'lieve you, Huck.
I lit a pipe and had a good long smoke, and went on watching.
I bet I was glad to see him.
Then he drops down on his knees, and puts his hands together and says:
They turned around the foot of the island and started up the channel on the Missouri side, under steam, and booming once in a while as they went.
And then something struck me.
He said Tom Sawyer couldn't get up no better plan than what I had.
Why didn't you get mud-turkles?"
"Boom!" I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferryboat's side.
"I've just thought of a plan, Diana.
Besides, I was comparing it with my own nose and that's vanity.
The winter weeks slipped by.
They were buried in the one grave and their funeral was most imposing, Diana.
But then, alas, shadows began to darken over their path.
I asked Ruby Gillis if she knew anything about how men proposed because I thought she'd likely be an authority on the subject, having so many sisters married.
But I'm glad Miss Barry liked them.
Mr. Allan says so.
"I'm positively certain, Diana, that life can never be quite the same again as it was in those olden days," she said mournfully, as if referring to a period of at least fifty years back.
"I never saw anybody with purple eyes," said Diana dubiously.
That is the kind of critic I like.
Mine is Rosamond Montmorency.
I feel just now that I may grow up to be sensible yet.
Ruby told me she was hid in the hall pantry when Malcolm Andres proposed to her sister Susan.
"Each girl has to read her story out loud and then we talk it over.
Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life.
"Just think, Diana, I'm thirteen years old today," remarked Anne in an awed voice.
All the good people are rewarded and all the bad ones are suitably punished.
No boys were allowed in it--although Ruby Gillis opined that their admission would make it more exciting--and each member had to produce one story a week.
Only we must take the right way.
It's called 'The Jealous Rival; or In Death Not Divided.' I read it to Marilla and she said it was stuff and nonsense.
But she pretended to be Geraldine's friend the same as ever.
It's so much more romantic to end a story up with a funeral than a wedding.
I'm striving very hard to overcome it and now that I'm really thirteen perhaps I'll get on better."
Mrs. Allan says we should never make uncharitable speeches; but they do slip out so often before you think, don't they?
At first, as she told Diana, she did not really think she could.
I like it better when people cry.
I hope I shall be a little like Mrs. Allan when I grow up.
Now, I wouldn't have felt that way.
I wanted something out of the common.
Mrs. Lynde says she always feels shocked when she hears of anyone ever having been naughty, no matter how small they were.
It's a sad, sweet story.
I suppose that is why Marilla disapproves of them. Marilla is such a sensible woman.
On Anne's birthday they were tripping lightly down it, keeping eyes and ears alert amid all their chatter, for Miss Stacy had told them that they must soon write a composition on "A Winter's Walk in the Woods," and it behooved them to be observant.
"Ruby Gillis thinks of nothing but beaus," said Anne disdainfully. "She's actually delighted when anyone writes her name up in a take-notice for all she pretends to be so mad.
Mrs. Lynde says he just worships the ground she treads on and she doesn't really think it right for a minister to set his affections so much on a mortal being.
But then, Diana, even ministers are human and have their besetting sins just like everybody else.
Jane's stories are extremely sensible. Then Diana puts too many murders into hers.
"Ruby Gillis says she means to have a beau as soon as she's fifteen," said Diana.
Geraldine accepted him in a speech a page long.
So we copied out four of our very best and sent them.
"I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet," scoffed Marilla.
The idea of Miss Stacy telling us to write a story out of our own heads!"
You've taken half an hour longer than you should with all your chattering.
It's about two beautiful maidens called Cordelia Montmorency and Geraldine Seymour who lived in the same village and were devotedly attached to each other.
I found it rather hard to imagine the proposal because I had no experience to go by.
Finally, Charlie Sloane fought Moody Spurgeon MacPherson, because Moody Spurgeon had said that Anne Shirley put on airs about her recitations, and Moody Spurgeon was "licked"; consequently Moody Spurgeon's sister, Ella May, would not "speak" to Anne Shirley all the rest of the winter.
The moral is the great thing.
I just cried like a child while I was writing it.
Junior Avonlea found it hard to settle down to humdrum existence again.
But I'm afraid that is an uncharitable speech.
I thought that was a poetical retribution for her crime."
Could she go back to the former quiet pleasures of those faraway days before the concert?
Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts.
"If I had Alice Bell's crooked nose," said Anne decidedly, "I wouldn't--but there!
That's something to remember for our woods composition.
"Perhaps after a while I'll get used to it, but I'm afraid concerts spoil people for everyday life.
But perhaps that is only because I'm tired.
It makes life seem so much more interesting. In two more years I'll be really grown up.
Only they laughed in the wrong places.
Oh, Diana, look, there's a rabbit.
I simply couldn't sleep last night for ever so long.
You know so much more than you did when you were only twelve."
My besetting sin is imagining too much and forgetting my duties.
It shows our club is doing some good in the world.
Ruby Gillis is rather sentimental.
Geraldine had an alabaster brow too.
I felt so encouraged when I heard that.
I simply can't talk about Josie Pye without making an uncharitable speech, so I never mention her at all.
I'll help you along until you can do them by yourself.
Mrs. Lynde says it is.
Mrs. Allan says that ought to be our object in everything.
All the girls do pretty well.
"I can scarcely realize that I'm in my teens.
Eventually, however, Avonlea school slipped back into its old groove and took up its old interests.
Jane never puts any because she says it makes her feel so silly when she had to read it out loud.
Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and her Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories.
This was how the story club came into existence.
"I wrote it last Monday evening.
"Why, it's as easy as wink," said Anne.
We are going to keep them all sacredly and have them to read to our descendants.
Cordelia was secretly in love with Bertram herself and when Geraldine told her about the engagement she was simply furious, especially when she saw the necklace and the diamond ring.
Josie Pye and Julia Bell did not "speak" for three months, because Josie Pye had told Bessie Wright that Julia Bell's bow when she got up to recite made her think of a chicken jerking its head, and Bessie told Julia.
I'm afraid I think too much about my nose ever since I heard that compliment about it long ago.
To be sure, the concert left traces.
We each write under a nom-de-plume.
To Anne in particular things seemed fearfully flat, stale, and unprofitable after the goblet of excitement she had been sipping for weeks.
"How perfectly lovely!" sighed Diana, who belonged to Matthew's school of critics.
Bertram gave her a diamond ring and a ruby necklace and told her they would go to Europe for a wedding tour, for he was immensely wealthy.
Ellen is always so good, that I did not think so much of her kindness, but nobody knows----"
If you were to go farther north, you would find still more snow and ice, the same I saw you looking at yesterday.
"What is snow?"
"Because Barbadoes lies nearer to the sun than England, and is much warmer, even in winter; therefore the rain-drops never pass through that region of cold air which freezes them in northern climates.
If you take this pretty light substance into your warm hand, it will melt and become a rain-drop again."
Oh, you understand natural history much better than we do."
But, my dear Ellen, pray lend Matilda your tippet, for she looks as much frozen as the snow; she must take great care of herself in this cold climate."
This distressed them all; but they rejoiced to see their parents enter the room, persuaded that they would be able to comfort her better, and Ellen instantly besought their attention to the subject by relating as much of the foregoing conversation as was necessary.
"Besides," said Charles, "you have seen monkeys and parrots, and many other creatures, in their own country, and many curious fish on your voyage.
Consider, you have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, seen groves of orange-trees and spices grow, and the whole process of sugar-making.
"Never despair; though you have many battles with yourself, yet never relinquish the hope of final conquest, and be assured you will find every victory easier than the last.
It was now near Christmas, and Mrs. Harewood was inquiring for a boarding-school where she could place Miss Hanson.
"It snows," said Ellen, calmly; "I recollect my papa told us you had never seen it snow."
"But why did I never see this in Barbadoes?"
"Have I indeed?" said the now-humbled girl.
You know the inside of a ship as well as a house, and we never saw any thing better than a sloop, or sailed any where but on the Thames."
And then Charles, who is so full of fun and nonsense, and who I always thought could not abide me, he spoke to me as if he was sorry for me, and made it out that we were both ignorant alike; and when I remembered how I had looked at them, and behaved to them, I felt as if my heart would break.
His compassion was moved; he apprehended that the cold, which he felt himself to be severe, had made her ill, and he inquired what was the matter with her, in a tone of real commiseration.
"No, you will be one of affection and esteem."
She knew that, in schools, two faults seldom fail to be cured: these are impertinence, or insolence, and affectation--one rendering a person disagreeable, the other ridiculous; and every member in the community of which a school consists, is ready to assist the ruler in punishing the one, and laughing at the other.
Ellen threw the pinafore she was going to put on over the neck of the shuddering Matilda, and then ran nimbly before them towards the globe, on which Edmund was going to lecture, neither of them looking in Matilda's face; but Charles, who just then happened to enter, perceived that silent tears were coursing each other down her cheek.
I will lend you a little book, where you will see a description of a palace of ice, and of whole mountains of snow, called Glaciers; and, if you please, I will show you that part of the globe, or earth, in which those effects begin to take place.
Matilda felt the tears suffuse her own eyes, as the kind heart of her late faithful slave thus gave vent to its natural and devout emotions; and she gave her hand to Zebby, who kissed it twenty times.
"And then I shall not be an object of pity, sir?"
When they were gone, and the little girl had somewhat recovered, Mr. Harewood whispered her--"Did you mean to say, my dear, that my children were so clever, or so proud, or so what?"
Mr. Harewood left Matilda quieted, but deeply impressed by what he had said.
She would have preferred to keep her at home, and have a governess, who might attend to the instructions necessary both for her and Ellen; but the bad temper and insolent airs of Matilda had prevented this, as Mrs. Harewood could not bear the idea of subjecting an amiable young person, whom she designed for that situation, to be tormented with such a girl.
At the end of the week, Zebby came home, according to appointment; and having paid her respects to her excellent lady, she ran up stairs, and entered the apartment where the two young ladies were getting the tasks assigned them by Mrs. Harewood.
When Matilda first beheld her she had a great inclination to embrace her, for her heart bounded towards the only creature she had been acquainted with from her cradle; but she suddenly checked herself, and pretended to continue her reading; but Ellen spoke to her kindly, though she told her that she was so situated, as not to be able to chat at present.
"I am so--so very ignorant," said Matilda, sobbing.
Matilda wept still more while the children thus tried to comfort her.
"Look, mamma! what pretty little feet they have," cried Ellen; "I am sure Charles was a good boy to think about shoes for them--was it not very kind of him, Matilda? because you know little boys seldom love little babies so much as girls do."
Matilda left the room, but returned almost immediately.
"But," said Matilda, with a mixture of eagerness and hesitation, "then there will be no change for me, and I wish to give the same as Ellen; don't I want change, ma'am?
I--I believe I do."
"I have only one shilling in the world," said Ellen, laying it on the table.
The spontaneous effusion of joy, uttered by this daughter of nature, affected all the party, and the joyful bustle had not subsided when Mr. Harewood entered.
"Oh dear, ma'am," replied Matilda, "you have read all the thoughts of my heart, (at least all but one,) and if you think it right, and Ellen will not think me proud, I will indeed be very glad if you will accept a crown for my subscription."
Sally, with tears of joy, thanked her young benefactress; her words were few, but they were those of respect and thankfulness, and showed she was deeply sensible of the benefit she experienced.
Mrs. Harewood, feeling for her evident embarrassment, sent the poor woman down stairs to take some refreshment, and then laid a three-shilling piece, as her own share of the contribution, besides Charles's subscription on the table.
there is my eighteen-penny piece for shoes, mamma--shoes, and hats too, if we can raise money enough."
Matilda answered "yes," mechanically, for her mind was abstracted, and affected by the remembrance this scene was calculated to inspire.
Scarcely had Matilda given this proof of consideration and amiable feeling, when Sally and Zebby rushed into the room together, followed by Betty, who was truly grateful for the kindness thus bestowed on her sister.
Matilda stopped a moment, as if she thought her confession had perhaps infringed on her duty; but recollecting that all her past sorrow had been laid to the proper account, which was her own bad temper and pride, she again proceeded in it.
"Thank you, thank you, dear Mrs. Harewood! oh, you are my English mother, and I love you much more than any other person in the world, except my Barbadoes mamma."
She was a very decent woman, the widow of a soldier, who died before his poor children were born; she now endeavoured to maintain herself and them by taking in washing, together with the pay of the parish, which, although small, she received very thankfully, and managed very carefully.
"I did not speak to her myself--I commissioned Zebby to do it, for I knew it would give her quite as much pleasure as the poor woman herself could receive; and surely she has a right to receive every good I can bestow, as a slight atonement for the pain I have so very frequently given her."
I think your proposal is a very good one; and whilst I am collecting the money, pray step down stairs, and tell Betty to bring up the little innocents--we shall all be glad to see them."
The children eagerly crowded round their mother's chair, to hear what the good news was, which promised to benefit Sally, and make Matilda happy.
On being informed of the cause, he gave his full assent, and produced the money necessary for the purchase of the mangle.
Charles flew out of the room, and in less than a minute returned with the mother, carrying a babe in each arm.
One day, when Edmund and Charles had been at home about a week, the latter ran eagerly into the sitting-parlour, crying out--"Oh, mamma! there is Betty's sister down stairs, with the poor little twins in her arms, which were born just when Matilda came; they have short frocks now, but I perceive they have no shoes: suppose we young ones subscribe, and buy them some, poor things!
To her command "Come in!" a footman presents himself, silver waiter in hand, on which is a card.
Of the prurient trash there is a plenteous supply, furnished by scribblers of both sexes, who ought to know better, and doubtless do; but knowing also how difficult it is to make their lucubrations interesting within the legitimate lines of literary art, and how easy out of them, thus transgress the moralities.
"Why, George; where else could they go rowing!
Not from any rivalry with, or jealousy of, the baronet's son: they revolve in different orbits, with no danger of collision.
She knows our luncheon hour, and should have been back by this.
As he is bounding off, she calls after--"Don't you be staying too, else you shan't have a pick.
"But why can't they?" asked Shenstone, impatiently interrupting.
Very early, indeed--just after taking breakfast.
As for the girls, if they're not back in time they'll have to go without.
Shenstone has not tarried to hear either question or answer.
"Yes; no doubt they would like it very much."
Only to think of being thus interrupted on the eve of such an interesting climax, which seemed about to seal the fate of the farmer's daughter.
"Here are clothes for you," he observed airily, seeming well satisfied with the success of his mission.
I'll reveal my shame, that I may not have to blame myself or you hereafter."
"To be ready if force is required," thought Mitya, "and perhaps for some other reason, too."
"I never knew it.
Mitya told him how he had got the sleeve stained with blood looking after Grigory, and had turned it inside when he was washing his hands at Perhotin's.
He was asked to go back to the "other room." Mitya went in, scowling with anger, and trying to avoid looking at any one.
Call your witnesses!"
Who was he? I'm racking my brains and can't think who.
He felt cold.
No one knew but Smerdyakov, only Smerdyakov, and no one else....
Is that really necessary?" Mitya's eyes flashed.
He couldn't have seen it ...
Something utterly unexpected and amazing to Mitya followed.
You can keep your own socks and underclothes."
"That is, what blood? ... and why is the cuff turned in?"
He didn't even tell me where it was!
The hundred-rouble notes were screwed up in little rolls and sewed in the piping."
"Yes," Mitya jerked out.
Have you asked him where it was?
"You must take off your shirt, too.
"Well, am I to stay naked like this?" he added savagely.
Try to enter into our position ..."
He pulled off his shirt, himself.
I'll take it off ..."
"Yes, that one ... on your middle finger, with the little veins in it, what stone is that?" Mitya persisted, like a peevish child.
They impressed upon him that his clothes, being stained with blood, must be "included with the other material evidence," and that they "had not even the right to let him have them now ... taking into consideration the possible outcome of the case." Mitya at last understood this.
"It's impossible!"
"And believe me, Dmitri Fyodorovitch," put in Nikolay Parfenovitch, in a voice of almost pathetic delight, "that every sincere and complete confession on your part at this moment may, later on, have an immense influence in your favor, and may, indeed, moreover--"
No, that's not like Dmitri Karamazov, that he couldn't do, and if I were guilty, I swear I shouldn't have waited for your coming, or for the sunrise as I meant at first, but should have killed myself before this, without waiting for the dawn!
"Mr. Kalganov has kindly provided these for this unusual emergency, as well as a clean shirt.
"We've done what we could in your interest, Dmitri Fyodorovitch," Nikolay Parfenovitch went on, "but having received from you such an uncompromising refusal to explain to us the source from which you obtained the money found upon you, we are, at the present moment--"
"I will tell you my secret.
"Yes, that can't be helped for the time.... Kindly sit down here for a while.
Nikolay Parfenovitch, moreover, in the presence of the peasant witnesses, passed his fingers along the collar, the cuffs, and all the seams of the coat and trousers, obviously looking for something--money, of course.
But we didn't find the money in it.
I've never seen it.
"What, am I to stay naked?" he shouted.
"Do you recognize this object?"
I will not conceal from you that Grigory himself confidently affirms and bears witness that you must have run from that door, though, of course, he did not see you do so with his own eyes, since he only noticed you first some distance away in the garden, running towards the fence."
That's all that's left for you," he said, clenching his teeth and addressing the prosecutor.
It was a long time before they could persuade him.
He sat down on the same chair as before.
"I ask you for the second time--need I take off my shirt or not?" he said, still more sharply and irritably.
"Confound his sorrow!
No one else knew where the old man hid the envelope.
But they succeeded somehow in quieting him down.
From pride and contempt he submitted without a word.
"Well, now we must proceed to the examination of witnesses," observed Nikolay Parfenovitch, as though in reply to Mitya's question.
"You remember Gridyenko, the copying-clerk," observed the secretary.
that's the chief point....
"But you're again forgetting the circumstance," the prosecutor observed, still speaking with the same restraint, though with a note of triumph, "that there was no need to give the signal if the door already stood open when you were there, while you were in the garden...."
"That's a smoky topaz," said Nikolay Parfenovitch, smiling.
What does Smerdyakov say?
Luckily he had them all in his trunk.
The disgrace of it!
"He's come to look at me dressed up," thought Mitya.
Nikolay Parfenovitch laid upon the table a large and thick official envelope, on which three seals still remained intact.
The secretary, for instance, who was also behind the curtain, fussing about and listening, called Nikolay Parfenovitch's attention to the cap, which they were also fingering.
I'll say no more.
"You must understand that, and arrest him at once....
"Don't trouble yourself.
For some seconds Mitya stood as though thunderstruck.
But it's his doing, his doing; there's no doubt about it, he murdered him, that's as clear as daylight now," Mitya exclaimed more and more frantically, repeating himself incoherently, and growing more and more exasperated and excited.
"He's simply raving, from loss of blood, from the wound.
But the coat turned out to be really tight in the shoulders.
The Prosecutor Catches Mitya
Feeling intolerably ashamed made him, at once and intentionally, rougher.
It was just a chance guess that it was under the pillow.
"Nonsense!" he yelled, in a sudden frenzy, "it's a barefaced lie.
"What is the stone in your ring?" Mitya interrupted suddenly, as though awakening from a reverie.
"Very well!" he exclaimed suddenly.
This is the first time I've looked at it.
He would not turn to Nikolay Parfenovitch, as though he disdained to speak to him.
He was the only one who knew where the old man kept it hidden, I didn't know ..." Mitya was completely breathless.
He adheres to it.
"It's false, false!
And perhaps it wasn't under the pillow at all....
"Well, must I take off my shirt, too?" he asked sharply, but Nikolay Parfenovitch did not answer.
"Yes, but he noticed the open door, not when he came to after his injuries, but before that, as soon as he went into the garden from the lodge."
"No, there's no need to, at present."
Several peasants accompanied the lawyers and remained on the same side of the curtain.
What was worst of all, there was something humiliating in it, and on their side something "supercilious and scornful." It was nothing to take off his coat, but he was asked to undress further, or rather not asked but "commanded," he quite understood that.
I'll see to all this."
"Of course, we see.
And I went out of my way to tell lies against myself....
"You're not joking?
"Well, what now?
"This world's--too many--honest man--puzzling----"
With some difficulty, Wakem was heaved on to Tulliver's horse.
I told you how it would be; but you men never learn to farm with any method."
If Wakem were to meet him then, Mr. Tulliver would look straight at him, and the rascal would perhaps be forsaken a little by his cool, domineering impudence.
He did not move his eyes to look at her, but he said,--
Mrs. Tulliver stood at the foot of the bed, frightened and trembling, looking worn and aged from disturbed rest.
Maggie and Tom threw on their clothes hastily in the chill gray light, and reached their father's room almost at the same moment.
His voice had become thicker; but he wanted to say more, and moved his lips again and again, struggling in vain to speak.
This world's been too many for me, my lad, but you've done what you could to make things a bit even.
"Are you quite sure that's the sum, father?" said Tom.
"Get it me, then; get it me.
They all looked up with surprise when they heard the well-known foot.
"Only a hundred and ninety-three pound," said Mr. Tulliver.
"Father," said Tom, when they had finished tea, "do you know exactly how much money there is in the tin box?"
But she carried away the tray and came back immediately.
Mr. Tulliver counted out the money, setting it in order on the table, and then said, glancing sharply at Tom:
Chapter VI
The Hard-Won Triumph
Tom was silent a little while before he went on.
My uncle Glegg and he will both be there.
The feeling of injury on her own behalf could not predominate at that moment.
A slight electric shock seemed to pass through Mr. Tulliver, and he kept his eyes fixed on Tom with a look of eager inquiry, while Maggie, unable to restrain herself, rushed to her father's side and knelt down by him.
Bob's juvenile history, so far as it had come under Mr. Tulliver's knowledge, was recalled with that sense of astonishing promise it displayed, which is observable in all reminiscences of the childhood of great men.
Tom went up to his mother and kissed her, a sign of unusual good-humor with him.
"Why, what's up now, Tom?" said his father.
"You're a bit earlier than usual."
"No, father," said Tom, speaking with energetic decision, though there was tremor discernible in his voice too, "you will live to see the debts all paid.
At last he looked up at his wife and said, in a gentle tone:
Mr. Tulliver threw himself back in his chair; his mind, which had so long been the home of nothing but bitter discontent and foreboding, suddenly filled, by the magic of joy, with visions of good fortune. But some subtle influence prevented him from foreseeing the good fortune as happening to himself.
I have three hundred and twenty pounds in the bank."
His tone implied something more than mere hopefulness or resolution.
Tulliver in his arm-chair, tired with a long ride, and ruminating with a worn look, fixed chiefly on Maggie, who was bending over her sewing while her mother was making the tea.
Mr. Tulliver naturally wanted to hear all the particulars of Tom's trading adventures, and he listened with growing excitement and delight.
"Yes," said Mrs. Tulliver, drawing out her much-reduced bunch of keys, "there's some brandy sister Deane brought me when I was ill."
Tom never lived to taste another moment so delicious as that; and Maggie couldn't help forgetting her own grievances.
The broad chest heaved, the muscles of the face gave way, and the gray-haired man burst into loud sobs.
It was long before Mr. Tulliver got to sleep that night; and the sleep, when it came, was filled with vivid dreams.
The fit of weeping gradually subsided, and he sat quiet, recovering the regularity of his breathing.
This world's been too many for me.
He looked up in Tom's face with a querulous desire for some assurance.
But you're like enough to bury me first."
I think you have perhaps made a mistake."
He paused, looking at the money with bitter despondency.
His mother's arms were round his neck as soon as the last words were uttered, and she said, half crying:
"How should I make a mistake?" said his father, sharply.
You shall pay them with your own hand."
It was well that there was this interest of narrative to keep under the vague but fierce sense of triumph over Wakem, which would otherwise have been the channel his joy would have rushed into with dangerous force.
But his father was silent; the flood of emotion hemmed in all power of speech.
"A good while ago, my uncle Glegg lent me a little money to trade with, and that has answered.
The eyes in the parlor were not turned toward the bridge just then, and the group there was sitting in unexpectant silence,--Mr.
"Don't go out of the room, mother," said Tom, as he saw her moving when his father was gone upstairs.
Her heart had leaped with the sudden conviction that Tom was going to tell their father the debts could be paid; and Tom would have let her be absent when that news was told!
Well, mother!"
I feel a bit weak."
When she had kissed him, and he had held her hand a minute, his thoughts went back to the money.
"I wish you would take the trouble to fetch the tin box down.
"You shall see it to-morrow, father," said Tom.
He looked at her, still with a puzzled expression, and said at last:
But the blessed relief of tears came.
"Just as she likes," said Tom indifferently.
The mother and Maggie sat at the other end of the table, the one in blank patience, the other in palpitating expectation.
It was advertised in the 'Messenger' on Saturday."
"What's the matter, Mr. Tulliver?" said his wife.
There was much more talk before bedtime.
Both Tom and Maggie were struck with fear lest the shock of joy might even be fatal.
There is a very pleasant light in Tom's blue-gray eyes as he glances at the house-windows; that fold in his brow never disappears, but it is not unbecoming; it seems to imply a strength of will that may possibly be without harshness, when the eyes and mouth have their gentlest expression.
"Oh, there was nothing more for me to do, so I came away.
She felt no jealousy this evening that, for the first time, she seemed to be thrown into the background in her father's mind.
"I've counted it often enough; but I can fetch it, if you won't believe me."
His firm step becomes quicker, and the corners of his mouth rebel against the compression which is meant to forbid a smile.
Even as it was, that feeling from time to time gave threats of its ultimate mastery, in sudden bursts of irrelevant exclamation.
At half-past five o'clock in the morning, when Mrs. Tulliver was already rising, he alarmed her by starting up with a sort of smothered shout, and looking round in a bewildered way at the walls of the bedroom.
"My uncle Deane has appointed the creditors to meet to-morrow at the Golden Lion, and he has ordered a dinner for them at two o'clock.
It was always an incident Mr. Tulliver liked, in his gloomy life, to fetch the tin box and count the money.
"There now! you see I was right enough."
"And isn't Maggie to go?" said Mrs. Tulliver; "because somebody must take away the things."
That was a cutting word to Maggie.
Hardly a word or look had passed between him and Maggie in all the three weeks; but his usual incommunicativeness at home prevented this from being noticeable to their parents.
The new Duma, which was elected ten days later, and for which the "Moderate" Socialists refused to vote, was almost entirely Bolshevik....
Bolshevik order.
Smolny shut off all electric lights in theatres, shops and restaurants, cut down the number of street cars, and confiscated the private stores of fire-wood held by the fuel-dealers....
First of all the city, the country, the Army must be fed.
"Will you," they asked, "promise to divide the great estates of the Cossack landlords among the working Cossacks?"
Revolutionary order.
A month later, seeing his army melt away before his eyes, Kaledin blew out his brains.
But the most formidable menace to the Soviet Government was internal and two-headed--the Kaledin movement, and the Staff at Moghilev, where General Dukhonin had assumed command.
In all this was evident the hand of the counter-revolutionists, who distributed among the regiments plans showing the location of the stores of liquor.
They will be deprived of the right of receiving food.
They did so, protesting to the last, but finally "ceding to violence."
Not to sign the act of armistice until it has been passed upon by the Council of People's Commissars.
The Cossacks deliberated for a while.
Toward the end of November occurred the "wine-pogroms" (See App.
Save the people's property from robbery, and us from violence, and we shall immediately resume work.
In eloquent proclamations, (See App.
Dukhonin answered that he could not, unless it emanated from "a Government sustained by the Army and the country."
The Allied Ambassadors received Trotzky's note with contemptuous silence, accompanied by anonymous interviews in the newspapers, full of spite and ridicule.
Because the violence exercised by the Bolsheviki against the State Bank has made it impossible for us to work.
In all quarters of the city small elective Revolutionary Tribunals were set up by the workers and soldiers to deal with petty crime....
There remained several centres of dangerous opposition, such as the "republics" of Ukraine and Finland, which were showing definitely anti-Soviet tendencies.
The Staff steadily refused to recognise the Council of People's Commissars.
No loafing!
The Commissars of Smolny began by pleading and arguing, which did not stop the growing disorder, followed by pitched battles between soldiers and Red Guards....
The Duma met defiantly, passing resolutions to the effect that it would "defend its position to the last drop of its blood," and appealing desperately to the population to save their "own elected City Government." But the population remained indifferent or hostile.
We stopped work.
The strike of Government Employees, led by the Union of Unions, collapsed, deserted by the financial and commercial interests which had been backing it.
The Council of People's Commissars considers it indispensable without delay to make a formal proposal of armistice to all the powers, both enemy and Allied.
At the centre of all this opposition was the Duma, and its militant organ, the Committee for Salvation, protesting against all the decrees of the Council of People's Commissars, voting again and again not to recognise the Soviet Government, openly cooperating with the new counter-revolutionary "Governments" set up at Moghilev....
A proclamation of the Committee to Fight against Pogroms, attached to the Petrograd Soviet.
On the 29th, the Council of People's Commissars ordered the dissolution and re-election of the Petrograd City Duma:
In this way was unearthed the conspiracy of the Petrograd Cadets, who were sending money and recruits to Kaledin....
The MILITARY REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE GIVES THESE CRIMINALS A LAST WARNING.
In charging you with the conduct of these preliminary pourparlers, the Council of People's Commissars orders you:
Still the strike of the Ministries went on, still the sabotage of the old officials, the stoppage of normal economic life.
Only in the Petrograd garrison was there still uncertainty.
The money in the State Bank is yours, the people's money, acquired by your labour, your sweat and blood.
"Why did they dare leave the Government?
EMPLOYEES OF THE STATE BANK.
The country and the Army are threatened with famine.
"Well," they asked, "does the Soviet Government intend to confiscate the estates of our great Cossack land-owners and divide them among the working Cossacks?" To this Lenin replied.
The Ukrainean Rada had taken command of all southern Russia, and was furnishing Kaledin reinforcements and supplies.
The Cossacks departed, thinking hard.
"No," answered Trotzky.
The direction of Foreign Affairs has been entrusted to me, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs....
In the end, when Bolshevism had conquered in both these countries, the defeated bourgeoisie called in the Germans to restore them to power....
(1) To dissolve the Municipal Duma; the dissolution to take effect November 30th, 1917.
On the 20th of November the Military Revolutionary Committee issued a warning:
To fight against it, the regular functioning of all services is indispensable.
The counter-revolutionary functionaries are the most dishonest criminals toward their hungry and dying brethren on the Front....
We are convinced that in case decisive measures become necessary, we shall be solidly supported by all workers, soldiers, and peasants.
The order to Dukhonin was characterised openly as an act of treason....
The same night the Council of People's Commissars telegraphed to General Dukhonin:
Hundreds of propagandists were sent to the Don.
For days there were drunken soldiers on the streets....
WHY?
No strikes!
For translation see App.
The Council of People's Commissars orders you, Citizen Commander,... to propose to the enemy military authorities immediately to cease hostilities, and enter into negotiations for peace.
Do not recognise the Government of the Bolsheviki, and struggle against it.
The first act of the People's Commissars was to DEMAND TEN MILLION RUBLES, and on November 27th THEY DEMANDED TWENTY-FIVE MILLIONS, without any indication as to where this money was to go.
As for Dukhonin, he gave no sign.
Kaledin being in possession of the coal-mines of the Don, the fuel question became urgent.
Krylenko made a speech in which he implored the soldiers not to harm Dukhonin, as he was to be taken to Petrograd and judged by the Revolutionary Tribunal.
When he had finished, suddenly Dukhonin himself appeared at the window, as if to address the throng.
We functionaries cannot take part in plundering the people's property.
(6) Those who disobey this decree, as well as those who intentionally harm or destroy the property of the Municipality, shall be immediately arrested and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunals....
The property of the principal criminals will be confiscated.
They must return and submit to the decisions of the Central Committee!"
"Only over my dead body," responded Kaledin.
Were they paid by the bourgeoisie to destroy the Revolution?
The rich classes oppose the power of the Soviets--the Government of workers, soldiers and peasants.
We shall support the working Cossacks in all their actions....
From the Ministry of Supplies, the Ministry of Finance, from the Special Supply Committee, declarations that the Military Revolutionary Committee made it impossible for the employees to work, appeals to the population to support them against Smolny....
THE STATE BANK IS CLOSED!
Form local Committees for Salvation of Country and Revolution, who will unite all democratic forces, so as to aid the All-Russian Committee for Salvation in the tasks which it has set itself....
"Not particularly."
"It was the wrong one," I said....
You begin by lying flat on the floor roped in at the waist, and with your hands (grasping the elastic cords) held straight up in the air.
"I always stoop at meals," I explained; "it helps the circulation.
"Well, how many did you do?"
Are you perfect now?"
By-and-by I went into the other room to see if I had overlooked anything.
This one, I realised, was extremely important.
"Not well.
I haven't.
And, so I crossed out the false comment and wrote the true one in its place."
When I had got very slowly halfway down, an extra piece of elastic which had got hitched somewhere came suddenly into play, and I did the rest of the journey without a stop, finishing up sharply against the towel-horse. The chart had said, "Inhale going down," and I was inhaling hard at the moment that the towel-horse and two damp towels spread themselves over my face.
My own idea."
As I limped into bed, I trod heavily upon something sharp.
There was a tin plate fastened to the top, with the word "LADIES" on it. I got up, removed it with a knife, and sat down again.
You ought----"
I would do it twelve times.
"Well," said Adela suddenly, "aren't I looking well?"
It was one pair of braces for Magog.
"Well?" said Adela a week later.
"Hush!
I undid the wrappings eagerly, took off the lid of the box, and was confronted with (apparently) six pairs of braces.
"Why didn't you try another?"
Except, of course, that each exercise was arranged for a particular object, according to what you wanted."
"I did.
"I wish I could remember which chart I sent you," said Adela, wrinkling her brow.
"Exactly.
And when I had been doing it for a week I discovered what its particular object was."
"It isn't anywhere; you buy it."
"I'll just get the idea to-night, and then start properly to-morrow.
"Why don't you want yours any more?
"But it looks so bad.
"But they are such good things," went on Adela earnestly.
"I suppose," I reflected, "there is a limit of beauty beyond which it is dangerous to go.
"No.
"Why, was it even more unsuitable than the other two?"
I shook them out of the box and saw I had made a mistake.
Oh, and don't do all the exercises to begin with; start with three or four of the easy ones."
It is a gift....
"I will.
"They really do help to make you beautiful----"
"When did you last use the Hyperion?" I asked.
She smiled and blushed.
Everything was very dusty, and I wondered when Adela had last developed herself.
The hook whizzed out, everything flew at me at once, and I remembered no more....
"--and graceful."
"Why don't you try the Hyperion?"
So I discovered yesterday.
"What?"
(2) A photograph of a lady doing it.
There was a long silence.
"Are you being simply as tactful as you can be?"
The tension becomes terrific, the strain on every part of you is immense.
After that either the thing would come off its hook, or----"
I picked it up, and I knew that I was in the presence of the Hyperion.
"Well, I'll send it to you," she said.
"And you try it for a week, and then tell me if you don't feel better.
Well, I started with No. 10.
"Of course," I said.
Adela is old enough to take a motherly interest in my figure, and young enough to look extremely pretty while doing so.
I shrieked and bent down to see what had bitten me.
"I limited myself to exercises 10, 15 and 28.
Would you promise me to use it every day if I sent you mine?"
What--officially--you do then, I cannot say....
I found on the floor a chart of exercises, and returned triumphantly with it.
I got a bullet on the liver in the campaign of '03, due to over smoking; and sometimes it hurts me a little in the cold weather.
The tension on your waist is then extreme but on your hands only moderate. Then taking a deep breath you pull your arms slowly out until they lie along the floor.
I looked at her for a long time.
"You're looking radiant," I said appreciatively; "but it may only be because you're going to marry Billy next month."
Where is it?"
"Don't improve me," I begged.
Then I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it.
"It's one of those developers with elastics and pulleys and so on. Every morning early, for half an hour before breakfast----"
You don't remember the chart that went with it?"
"It isn't as though you were actually a relation," I protested.
While I lay there, taking a deep breath before relaxing, I said to myself, "The strain will be too much for me." I was wrong.
It was in very small type, and I missed it at first."
PHYSICAL CULTURE
Some people can stand easily upon the right foot when the left is fastened to the wall ... others cannot....
"About a year ago."
Adela continued, full of her idea.
In five minutes I had screwed a hook into the bedroom wall and attached the beautifier.
There were thirty exercises altogether, and the chart gave you:
It was too much for the hook.
It was a tin plate bearing the word "LADIES."
For the first of these you strap yourself in at the waist, grasp the handles, and fall slowly backwards until your head touches the floor--all the elastic cords being then at full stretch.
(1) A detailed explanation of how to do each particular exercise;
"So much for Exercise 10," I thought, as I got up.
That's all."
"Pardon me," I said, "I cannot bear to speak of 28."
"Go on," I said freezingly.
"We've only twenty minutes.
Well, now I shall have to aim all over again." She bent slowly over her cue.
"Does either of us get anything for it?"
"That's three to you," I said stiffly, as I took my ball out of the right-hand bottom pocket.
"You have another turn."
Bother." "But you've only got to knock the red in for game."
Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of the prudent soul.
Thanks be to God they had the start of us.
Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of the admiralty: Miller, Tottenham, aged eightyfive: Welsh, June 12, at 35 Canning street, Liverpool, Isabella Helen.
says he.
And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:
I want to give the citizen the hard word about it.
Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:
--Sweat of my brow, says Joe. 'Twas the prudent member gave me the wheeze.
Did you see that bloody chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?
So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid O, as true as I'm telling you.
--It's the Russians wish to tyrannise.
--I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.
For trading without a licence, says he.
He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by a girdle of plaited straw and rushes.
Look at this, says he.
Jesus, I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out.
--Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing?
I want to see the citizen.
Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born, that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals.
Ah!
I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes.
But, begob, Joe was equal to the occasion.
And look at this blasted rag, says he.
Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney's snug, squeezed up with the laughing.
Drink that, citizen.
--Who are you laughing at?
--Cockburn.
Friends here.
A goodlooking sovereign.
And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle.
O'Bloom, the son of Rory: it is he.
An old plumber named Geraghty.
What Garry?
--Who? says I. Sure, he's out in John of God's off his head, poor man.
Are we going to win?
He was in John Henry Menton's and then he went round to Collis and Ward's and then Tom Rochford met him and sent him round to the subsheriff's for a lark.
--Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.
Ten thousand pounds.
A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated.
Deaths.
How's that, eh?
There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown.
--Not taking anything between drinks, says I.
--Not a word, says Joe.
Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody dog.
--O hell! says I.
There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar.
--I will, says he, honourable person.
And he starts reading them out:
--What's yours?
--Breen, says Alf.
The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps.
--Who? says Joe.
--Bergan, says Bob Doran, waking up.
--Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.
--For the old woman of Prince's street, says the citizen, the subsidised organ.
And he doubled up.
--Circumcised? says Joe.
--Take a what? says I.
--Three pints, Terry, says Joe.
--Yes, says Alf.
--What about paying our respects to our friend? says Joe.
Jesus, I couldn't get over that bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber.
I'm hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny out of him.
--That's all right, citizen, says Joe.
And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race.
--Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.
--Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? says I.
I was up at that meeting in the City Arms.
--Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe.
--Barney mavourneen's be it, says I. Anything strange or wonderful, Joe?
--Pass, friends, says he.
Don't be talking!
says Bob Doran.
I thought Alf would split.
---What was that, Joe? says I.
--Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.
--That the lay you're on now? says Joe.
A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.
Breen.
--Foreign wars is the cause of it.
U. p...
--Stand and deliver, says he.
Collector of bad and doubtful debts.
In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied.
--Drinking his own stuff? says Joe.
So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:
How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?
--When is long John going to hang that fellow in Mountjoy? says Joe.
U. p: up.
I'm told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a licence.
And he started laughing.
Her hands were clenched and her little body quivered with resolution; the snake-like head came to the very edge of the bed.
"Honest and true."
Just you come along in and he'll do his lookin' at me."
"If you're afraid your Dad'll find you here," said Vic, "just you run along."
He thought of the slender fellow who had rescued him and his large, gentle brown eyes, but to a child even those mild eyes might seem terrible with authority.
"No, but it's close enough," he assured her.
"Joan!" called a voice from beyond, and the soft fiber of it made Vic certain that it belonged to the rider of the black stallion.
"Come on in," pleaded Vic Gregg, "and I won't ask nothin' more about you."
She looked blankly at him.
"He'll take my arm off," he complained.
"I'll make him come," she said.
The little girl ran a step towards the door, and then stopped and shrank back against the bed.
"He's got to do what I want," she answered.
By very unpleasant degrees, Vic stretched his hand towards that growling menace.
"If it's the same to you," said Vic, rather hastily, "I'd just as soon he stayed where he is."
One more jolt like that will send him clear to--" And the voice glided into an eternity of distance.
The dog turned his blazing eyes on her and replied with a growl that shook his sides.
And come he did, step by halting step, while she hauled him, and now the snarling hoarse intakes of breath filled the room.
"Stop!" she ordered, and struck him sharply on the nose.
She was nervously twisting her hands in her dress.
He flinched forward, an inch.
Joan Disobeys
But Daddy Dan can make him do anything."
"Go on back!"
"He won't bite you one bit," declared the child.
"Who's your father?
"All right." She made up her mind instantly, her face shining with excitement.
"Daddy Dan'll know," she whispered without turning.
Her voice reached him, too, and made him think of all things musical, all things distant, like the sounds of birds falling from the sky and though he understood not a syllable, a sweet assurance of safety flooded through him.
"Giddap!" she cried.
She caught him by both jowls and tugged him forward.
"Munner says no."
Vic had seen vicious dogs in his day, seen them fighting, seen them playing, but he had never heard one of them growl like this.
White marks showed on the pudgy tan.
When he woke again, it was from a dream of fleeing through empty air swifter than the wind with a wolf-dog looming behind him out of space, but presently he found that he was lying in a bed with a stream of sunlight washing across a white coverlet.
She slipped off to the floor.
"Don't go in there, Bart!" whispered the child.
"Leave him be where he is.
A shower of golden curls tossed away from her face as she looked to him.
"Bad dog!" she repeated, and beat his neck with an impotent little fist.
She employed the moment of indecision by plucking at the hair of Bart's shoulders; he growled softly, terribly, but she paid not the slightest heed.
She canted her head to one side and considered him with fearless blue eyes.
She leaned far over, one hand buried in the ruff of Bart's neck to secure her balance, and with the other she laid hold of his right ear and drew him around facing the door once more.
He was remembering how, at the master's order, Bart had crouched at his feet in the wood, an unchained murderer hungrily waiting for an excuse to kill.
A small hand slipped up, fumbled a bit, found the thumb of Vic Gregg, and closed softly over it.
Shame kept him from utterly refusing the risk.
The child thudded her heels against the ribs of Bart again.
"Daddy Dan.
"Why, munner is--my munner."
"Let him be!" urged Vic.
"What?"
He was surprised to find his voice thin, apt to swing up to a high pitch beyond his control.
Once, twice and again, delicately as one might handle bubbles, Gregg touched that scarred forehead.
"Bart, you come here!"
"Bart, you just come here!"
I don't want him."
"He's got to come." She stamped.
The wolf-dog shuddered but would not budge an inch.
"I know," she nodded, "but Daddy will."
"Why can't you, honey?"
"What will he do, then, if you come in to see me?"
"Oh!" she cried, still with a guarded voice.
She shook a tiny forefinger at him.
"Can you pat him now?" she asked, not for an instant turning to Gregg.
"Now pat him!" she commanded.
"Naughty Bart!"
With this to steady her, she waited, facing the door.
"Come in," invited Gregg.
"He's got to come!"
After that he knew he was being dragged onto a saddle, but a wave of pain rushed up his side and numbed his brain.
"But I'll hold his nose if you're afraid." And instantly she clasped the pointed muzzle between her hands.
There was something very odd about the people of this house; and it would be a long time before he rid himself of the impression of the cold, steady eyes which had flashed up to him a moment before out of that baby face.
Once she moved a little to one side and Vic caught the glint of two eyes, red-stained, which were fixed undeviatingly upon her face.
"Come in," repeated Gregg.
He blinked and lowered his head under the blow, but though the snarling stopped his teeth flashed.
You ask a lot of things," she added, disapprovingly.
This time he showed his teeth but submitted, only twitching the ear back and forth a time or two when she relaxed her hold.
"Your mother won't care," asserted Vic.
"He'll look at me." She grew breathless at the thought, and cast a guilty glance over her shoulder.
"Will you, true?" said the child, wistfully.
"Munner says no," she repeated.
"Spanking?"
She stamped again.
"Leave him be," muttered Vic, closing his eyes.
He slept.
What he next knew was a fire of agony that wrapped his whole body and consciousness flashed back on him.
The wolf-dog cringed, and turned from the door.
"Bart!"
Mixed with Vic's alarm at the great fighting beast was a peculiar uneasiness, for there was something uncanny in the determination, the fearlessness of this infant. When she stepped away the wolf-dog stood trembling visibly but his eyes were still not upon the man he hated or feared to approach but upon the child's face.
"I want to," she sighed.
Thereafter his senses returned by fits and starts, vaguely. Once he felt a steel cable that girdled his waist and breast and held him erect, though his head flopped back and forth; once his eyes opened and above him glittered the bright field of stars towards which he drifted through space, a mind without a body; once a stab of torment wakened him enough to hear: "Easy Satan; watch them stones.
It's like the fair here, you pay when you go out.
It was daylight.
The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in their sockets.
"You knocked him over cheap," said he.
CHAPTER VII--ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS DISEMBARKING
And justice makes no inquiries.
The day was declining.
Give me my half.
The river is the true grave.
Paris.
Must he then stop there?
"Now let's settle this business.
You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."
It's carrion!
"Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made?
It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some money about him.
Thenardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly occurred to him.
Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant.
There's a heap of rubbish."
It was providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel springing from the earth in the form of Thenardier.
If he were to reach another outlet, he would find it obstructed by a plug or a grating.
I have the key."
Thenardier pointed to Marius.
He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a sight of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his tone:
A momentary pause ensued.
You've broken up that gentleman a bit; now you want to tuck him away somewhere.
The river, that great hider of folly, is what you want.
"That is true," said Jean Valjean.
How much did the stiff have in his bags?"
"You have killed that man; that's all right.
"What am I to do with a stone?"
And he began to laugh.
Jean Valjean reached the outlet.
That's no matter, as I can't see your face and as I don't know your name, you are wrong in supposing that I don't know who you are and what you want.
You have seen my key, show me your money."
But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not.
The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band.
What was to become of him? He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence the journey which he had already taken.
Not a bar stirred.
Some one has passed through the sewer. Who?
I'll get you out of your scrape. Helping a good fellow in a pinch is what suits me to a hair."
That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.
Well, what does one care for that?
The obstacle was invincible. There was no means of opening the gate.
"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate.
Thenardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted, making Jean Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger on his mouth, and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense; his inspection finished, he placed the key in the lock.
It neither grated nor squeaked.
"Apropos of that quagmire, you're a hearty animal.
Jean Valjean preserved silence.
"What is the rope for?"
Nothing so closely resembles a dream as despair.
Jean Valjean began to comprehend.
Besides, how was he to again traverse that quagmire whence he had only extricated himself as by a miracle?
"I don't know you, but I want to help you.
Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape.
I haven't dared to risk myself in it.
"Let's settle up.
Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming.
He turned his back to the grating, and fell upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated, close to Marius, who still made no movement, and with his head bent between his knees. This was the last drop of anguish.
Jean Valjean thought that other ruffians might possibly be concealed in some nook, not very far off, and that Thenardier did not care to share with them.
"Never mind!
The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel; a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries, logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been corrected.
"How are you going to manage to get out?"
Unexpected as was this encounter, this man was known to him.
They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands and quivering in the shadows.
There was one singular circumstance; Thenardier's manners were not simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease; while affecting an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time he laid his finger on his mouth, and muttered, "hush!"
He went on:
Who killed that man?
Such a find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people make use of the sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to everybody.
And after the quagmire, was there not the police patrol, which assuredly could not be twice avoided?
The grating did not stir.
Jean Valjean "remained stupid"--the expression belongs to the elder Corneille--to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was real.
He did not succeed.
Where did he get out?
He had heard no footsteps.
His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall.
"Not very much.
"Let's see," I said, "how many do I want?"
"You said----Oh, all right, I expect you know.
I'll tell you another time."
You may have fifteen start, and I'll tell you what to do."
"Only, you see, I may make a twenty at any moment."
My ball avoided the red and came swiftly back into the left-hand bottom pocket.
"Why don't you ask me to play with you?" she asked.
"Well, there isn't much on.
"Twenty-nine," replied Celia.
"So you did.
"The right-hand side of the ball, of course; that is to say, the side opposite your right-hand."
She hit it hard on the side, and both balls came into baulk.
"Now then. This is the Grey stroke, you know."
"No," I answered shortly.
She hit, and the red coursed madly about the table, coming to rest near the top right-hand pocket and close to the cushion.
I know golf.
"Take it," I said wearily, "that the ball has its back to you."
You're eighteen to my nothing."
"I can't spare you a ball, I'm afraid.
"I thought it seemed taller than the others." She took another.
"Oh!...
"Then what's the difference?"
I was showing Celia a few fancy strokes on the billiard table.
"Does it matter?"
Why, I gave you your first lesson at golf only last Thursday."
What would you like me to do?"
"Because once, when Sir Edward Grey was playing the German Ambassador--but it's rather a long story.
It's getting late."
She went, and left the red over the middle pocket.
I went to the fireplace and picked my ball out of the fender.
"How's this?
"Oh, I thought the other person always got the marks.
I know the last three times----"
Put it back and take a younger one."
Go on, there's a dear.
"You get three."
Then I let fly....
"There's ingratitude.
What do I give you for that?"
I'll play you thirty up."
I suppose I was nervous.
"This seems a nice brown one.
Good.
I held my breath....
"Because I went down by mistake."
Anyhow, I just nicked the red ball gently on the wrong side and left it hanging over the pocket.
"Ah," I said ... and I crept in.
"Well, I suppose you know the rules, but it seems funny.
"How rude of it," said Celia, and hit it on the left-hand side, and sank it.
Well, anyhow, did the German Ambassador get anything for it?"
A BILLIARD LESSON
I misjudged it, however.
I shall want all three when I get going.
"That's three to you," I said without enthusiasm.
"The right-hand side?
I looked at my watch.
It will make it more interesting for you."
Now then, you begin."
"Then I'll be less spotted."
"Well, one is more spotted than the other."
I did.
"Just touch the red on the right-hand side," I said, "and you'll go into the pocket."
"That's three to you," I said coldly.
She chalked her cue and went over to her ball.
"Well, I may make my three at any moment."
I shall hit the red hard now and see what happens to it."
Celia seemed surprised.
Do you mean my right-hand side or the ball's?"
"Too good," I said.
"Twenty-four to nothing."
With a forcing shot I could get in.
"But you said that when you got going, you wanted---- I can't argue bending down like this." She raised herself slowly.
"Why did that want a lot of chalk?" said Celia with interest.
"Something.
I found a nice place in the "D" for my ball.
Then off you go."
"That's a miscue.
"Yes.
"You never teach me anything."
"Oh!" She thought this over.
"Well ... it's another way of doing it."
"Funny how I'm doing all the scoring," said Celia meditatively.
"Was that what you meant?"
"Right-o.
"But why not?"
"What shall I do?"
"You're leading," I explained.
There was just room to creep in off the red, leaving it still over the pocket.
Oh, well," she added magnanimously, "I'm glad you've started scoring.
"Then I suppose I don't.
"Will you be spot or plain?" I said, chalking my cue.
"Twenty-one to nothing."
"Right." She leant over the table and took long and careful aim.
"But I haven't begun yet," she said.
"Why is that called the Grey stroke?" asked Celia with great interest.
"Celia, you've got the half-butt.
"Oh!
"Monsieur le Maire!" shrieked Fantine.
"Be quick about it!"
That's really capital!"
You ask me to give you three days in which to run away! You say that it is for the purpose of fetching that creature's child! Ah!
Jean Valjean took Fantine's head in both his hands, and arranged it on the pillow as a mother might have done for her child; then he tied the string of her chemise, and smoothed her hair back under her cap.
It seemed to her that the world was coming to an end.
"And now there's the other one!
"What difference does that make to me?
"See here now!
In his eyes, Jean Valjean was a sort of mysterious combatant, who was not to be laid hands upon, a wrestler in the dark whom he had had in his grasp for the last five years, without being able to throw him.
He stared intently at Fantine, and added, once more taking into his grasp Jean Valjean's cravat, shirt and collar:--
Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked slowly up to Fantine's couch.
Fantine was seized with a fit of trembling.
Javert stamped his foot.
To whom could that abject use of "thou" be addressed? To her only.
There is a thief, a brigand, a convict named Jean Valjean!
There are some touching illusions which are, perhaps, sublime realities.
"I know what you want."
Jean Valjean went on in a lower tone:--
"Monsieur," said Jean Valjean, "I should like to say a word to you in private."
What words were those?
He confined himself to saying, "Be quick about it!"
"I advise you not to disturb me at this moment."
"You have murdered that woman."
Fantine had not seen Javert since the day on which the mayor had torn her from the man.
"Let's have an end of this!" shouted Javert, in a fury; "I am not here to listen to argument.
Javert interrupted him: "Call me Mr. Inspector."
This arrest was not a beginning, but an end.
Javert replied:--
"But you alone should hear it--"
What did he say to her?
"I have a request to make of you--"
He remained thus, mute, absorbed, evidently with no further thought of anything connected with this life. Upon his face and in his attitude there was nothing but inexpressible pity.
"Monsieur Madeleine, save me!"
But the mayor was there; what had she to fear?
Did the dead woman hear them?
Jean Valjean made no attempt to disengage the hand which grasped the collar of his coat.
I will pay whatever is necessary.
Javert burst out laughing with that frightful laugh which displayed all his gums.
The unhappy woman glanced about her.
Answer me, sister; where is Cosette?
You shall accompany me if you choose."
Say it aloud!" replied Javert; "people are in the habit of talking aloud to me."
No one on earth heard them.
Then he addressed Javert, and said:--
And I have him in my grasp!
I shall not listen."
It was this glance which Fantine had felt penetrating to the very marrow of her bones two months previously.
After a few moments of this meditation he bent towards Fantine, and spoke to her in a low voice.
"Aloud!
What could this man, who was reproved, say to that woman, who was dead?
He said:--
I want my child!
Javert retreated towards the door.
When he arrived there he turned and said to Javert, in a voice that was barely audible:--
Monsieur Madeleine!
"You are making sport of me!" cried Javert.
"Come now, I did not think you such a fool!
"Grant me three days' grace! three days in which to go and fetch the child of this unhappy woman.
That's good!
Javert advanced to the middle of the room, and cried:--
Let us economize all that; the guard is below; march on instantly, or you'll get the thumb-screws!"
But we are going to change all that; it is high time!"
"There is no longer any Monsieur le Maire here!"
Jean Valjean--we shall henceforth not speak of him otherwise--had risen. He said to Fantine in the gentlest and calmest of voices:--
That's what there is!"
"I tell you to speak loud."
She beheld Javert, the police spy, seize the mayor by the collar; she saw the mayor bow his head.
She could not endure that terrible face; she felt her life quitting her; she hid her face in both hands, and shrieked in her anguish:--
"How do you feel now?" asked the Bittern, as the Kangaroo presently struggled up and squatted rather feebly on her haunches, looking about in a somewhat dazed way.
Dot held her breath, and a feeling of sickness came over her.
They were perched on a rock, and the moonlight lit all their surroundings like day.
Then Dot's busy little brain told her another thing, which made her more miserable.
They thought the Bunyip had got them this time.
In vain Dot caressed her, and called her by endearing names; she lay quite still, as if unable to hear or feel.
So Dot did as she was told, and screamed and cried like the most naughty of children; and the gasping Kangaroo told her to go on doing so.
All she heard was something like "try," or "we'll die." She could not make out what the Kangaroo said, for the crashing of the waterfall, the whistling of the wind, and the scattering of stones as they dashed forward, made such a storm of noises in her ears.
It seemed impossible that with one bound she could span that terrible place and reach the sedged morass beyond; and still more impossible that it should be done by the poor animal with heavy Dot in her pouch.
But the clouds had left the moon clear for a while, so that the Blackfellows and the dogs easily followed every movement, as they pursued the hunt on a smoother level below.
It failed to reach the throat it had aimed at, and in a moment the Kangaroo had seized the hound in a tight embrace.
Whilst all this took place, the little brown bird stood on one leg, with its head cocked on one side, watching the exhausted Kangaroo's recovery with a comic expression of curiosity and conceit.
Kangaroo!" she cried, "put me down; drop Dot anywhere, anywhere, but don't get killed yourself!"
He! he!
Dot could see its sharp wicked teeth gleaming in the moonlight.
Presently she was startled by hearing a brisk voice, "Then it was a human picaninny, after all!
In an instant Dot was out of the pouch and had her arm round the poor animal's neck, crying, as she saw blood and foam oozing from her mouth, and a strange dim look in her sad eyes.
"Where is Dot?"
But all Dot heard was a little hissing sound from the brave animal, which sounded like, "Never again!"
There they told the "Gins," in awe-struck voices, how it had been no Kangaroo they had hunted, but the "Bunyip," who had pretended to be one.
They stopped in their headlong speed, shouting together in their shrill voices, "The Bunyip! the Bunyip!" and they tumbled over one another in their hurry to get away from a place haunted, as they thought, by that wicked demon which they fear so much.
What a struggle! stones falling, twigs and grasses wrenching, the courageous Kangaroo fighting for a foothold on the very brink of the precipice.
Who's your dad?"
"Oh," she said, "it's hard to make him do things, sometimes.
"I made him come, didn't I?" she cried in triumph, and turned a tense little face towards Vic, but the instant her eyes moved the wolf-dog leaped away half the width of the room, and stood shivering, more devilish than ever.
A door at his right swung open and there in the entrance stood the wolf-dog of his vision with a five-year-old girl upon its back.
"I don't want him any closer."
"Munner?" she repeated, frowning in wonder.
"Honey," chuckled Gregg, weakly, "I'll take all the blame.
My hand was cramped from holding it, when she gave up in despair at last, and went back to the city."
I put her in a taxicab that she had waiting, and she went back to town.
The door below had closed.
If it went down there would be an ugly scandal, and Fleming would go too.
Margery was very pale, but quiet.
And I confess that I was ashamed to say I had thought precisely that.
To learn that her father had married again, that he had been the keystone in an arch of villainy that, with him gone, was now about to fall, and to associate him with so small and mean a thing as the theft of a handful of pearls--she was fairly stunned.
Fleming might kill himself or some one else.
If you knew Schwartz, you would understand."
When things began to happen here in Manchester, he took Carter to the home as a butler.
Butler went to the penitentiary for six months, on some minor count, and when he got out, after writing to Fleming and Schwartz, protesting his innocence, and asking for enough out of the fortune they had robbed him of to support his wife, he killed himself, at the White Cat."
"Schwartz!"
It was raining, you remember, and Schwartz had forgotten to take his umbrella with his name on the handle!"
You can't fight the police and the courts single-handed.
That was when I dropped my fountain pen!"
"He thought what you all thought," Wardrop said bitterly.
"What did you do with the letters she wanted?"
"I went to that room at the White Cat that night, because I was afraid not to go.
The cashier was entirely under machine control, and Butler was neglectful.
"I got about a thousand dollars for them--eleven hundred and something, I believe."
I think she was fairly stunned.
I nodded.
"I have been under surveillance every minute since that night.
"And the pearls?" Margery asked suddenly.
And then, at the last minute, I lied.
To my surprise his face did not change.
There's probably some one hanging around the gate now.
He was desperate, and I took his revolver from him."
"I do not think so.
I suppose I am a coward, but I was afraid to.
But she heard and comprehended every word Wardrop was saying.
And--I had something else."
It was too early to tell my suspicions.
"We were using every method to get money, and your father said to sacrifice them, if necessary."
"Do you think Mrs. Butler took your leather bag?" I asked.
With the memory of his huge figure and the heavy under-shot face that I had seen the night before, I could understand very well, knowing Wardrop.
"Mr. Fleming came back here when the Borough Bank threatened failure, and tried to get money enough to tide over the trouble.
Will you tell me why I should be suspected of having a hand in that, when she had been a mother to me?
"Then," I said, to bring Wardrop back to his story, "you found you had been robbed of the money, and you went in to tell Mr. Fleming.
"I intended to, but--I didn't.
He appeared to be thinking.
It doesn't tell where Aunt Jane is, or who has the hundred thousand.
A half million would have done it, but he couldn't get it.
It clears up something, but not all.
"Were you going to sell the letters?" Margery demanded, with quick scorn.
He was in Butler's position exactly, only he was guilty and Butler was innocent.
If she is dead, she can't exonerate me; if she is living, and we find her, she will tell you what I tell you--that I know nothing of the whole terrible business."
I felt like a cad; she wanted to clear her husband's memory, and I--well, Mr. Fleming was your father, Margery, I couldn't hurt you like that."
I felt worse than a thief.
I said I couldn't get them--that they were locked in the Monmouth Avenue house.
"When did you get them, Harry?"
"My father!"
His notes for half a million were there, without security, and he dared not show the canceled notes he had, with Schwartz's indorsement.
You have it, haven't you, Knox?"
He wavered for the first time in his recital.
He let too much responsibility lie with his subordinates--and then, according to the story, he couldn't do much anyhow, against Schwartz.
When I saw the blood print on the stair rail, I thought she was murdered, and I had more than I could stand.
"I came back here to Bellwood, and the first thing I learned was about Miss Jane.
You had some words, didn't you?"
It seems to be the only explanation, but I did not let it out of my hand one moment while we were talking.
He raised a little money here, and I went to Plattsburg with securities and letters.
But it does show who killed your father.
Fleming was swaying forward as I caught him.
"I kept them with me that night, and the next morning hid them in the secret closet.
"I have to go back to the night Miss Jane disappeared--and that's another thing that has driven me desperate.
What she must have seen confirmed Wardrop's words, and she leaned back in her chair, limp and unnerved.
And if you know what is good for you, Knox, you will let it go at that.
Things were not going well at the treasury; Schwartz and his crowd were making demands that were hard to supply, and behind all that, Fleming was afraid to go out alone at night.
"Two days before I left," he said.
"I am quite certain of that, Wardrop," I interposed.
It must have taken me only an instant to realize what had happened.
"Besides, I think I have got to the bottom of that mystery."
I rang the bell like a crazy man, and then Hunter came along and said to go back; Doctor Gray was at the club.
He went on more rapidly, and without looking at either of us.
The door into the built-in staircase was just closing.
Margery looked at me.
About a year ago Mr. Fleming said another attempt had been made on his life, with poison; he was very much alarmed, and I noticed a change in him from that time on.
I'm not proud of it, Margery, but it might have been worse, and it's the truth.
Margery looked at me with startled, incredulous eyes.
"Then the Borough Bank got shaky.
Once or twice, when there was an unexpected call for funds, the treasury was almost empty, and Schwartz carried things over himself.
I know I ran for a doctor, and I took the umbrella with me and left it in the vestibule of the first house I saw with a doctor's sign.
"It was a bad business," Wardrop went on wearily.
I will have to go back to before the night she--went away, back to the time Mr. Butler was the state treasurer, and your father, Margery, was his cashier.
"He accused me of stealing the money.
"Who art thou?
Know then, proud knight, that thou shalt instant perish 'neath my potent arm."
Then cease, and thus in amity return to friendship aldermanic, bungy, brown, and sober."
Nor could the riders, crickets throned sublime, escape from rage, from fury less averse than cannons murder o'er the stormy sea.
what, my sons, shall you assail your father, friend, and chief confessed?
Enchanters dire and goblins could alone this arduous task perform; to rout the knight of Mancha, foul defeat, and war, even such as ne'er was known before.
CHAPTER XXIX
She screamed, and harsh attacked my bulls confounded; lightning-like she darted, and from half the troop their eyes devouring tore.
"Detested miscreants!" roared the knight; "avaunt!
The great Mowmowsky roared amain and plunged in anguish, shunning every dart of fire-eyed fierce Grimalkin.
One of these powerful brothers had in his hand a great pole, to the extremity of which was fastened a cord of about two feet in length, and to the end of the cord was fastened a ball of iron, with spikes shooting from it like the rays of a star; with this weapon he prepared to encounter, and advancing thus he spoke:--
Astonished at so rude a salutation, the great Sphinx stopped short, and bridling up herself, drew in her head, like a snail when it touches something that it does not like: the bulls set up a horrid bellowing, the crickets sounded an alarm, and Gog and Magog advanced before the rest.
In vain he roared, and invoked fair Dulcinea del Toboso: for frogs' wild croaking seemed more loud, more sonorous than all his invocations.
And thus in battle vile the knight was overcome, and spawn all swarmed upon his glittering helmet.
"What art thou?" exclaimed Don Quixote on his potent steed.
At that same moment ten thousand frogs started from the morions of Gog and Magog, and furiously assailed the knight on every side.
When Quixote, Mancha's knight, responded firm:--
'Twas now upon the saddle once again the knight of Mancha rose, and in his hand far balancing his lance, full tilt against the troops of bulls opposing run.
Shall you, thus armed with bladders vile, attack my title, eminence, and pomp sublime?
"Gigantic monster! leader of witches, crickets, and chimeras dire!
"Audacious wight! that thus, in complete steel arrayed, doth dare to venture cross my way, to stop the great Munchausen.
Begone! cried I, with all the dignity of offended beauty, majesty, and a tragic queen.
The following ode was performed at the castle, in the most superb style, and universally admired:--
Griskish, in the year Moulikasra-
LORD BARON MUNCHAUSEN.
Fudge, fudge, fudge, resounded in all companies and in all places, from the rising until the setting of the sun; and even at night, when gentle sleep refreshed the rest of mortals, the ladies of all that country were dreaming of fudge!
The chiefs and nobility of the nation, when they met together to drink their kava, spoke of nothing but fudge.
BY THE MOST MIGHTY AND PUISSANT LORD,
Whether on account of the longing, the great curiosity, imagination, or the disposition of the people, I cannot say--but they found it infinitely to their taste; 'twas intoxication of joy, satisfaction, and applause.
"I mean," replied her Ladyship, "the enormous quantity of fudge that has been distributed under guards in all the strong places in the empire, and which is strictly forbidden to be sold or given to any of the natives under the severest penalties." "Lord!" replied he, "what in the name of wonder can it be?
"No, my dear Fragrantia," said I, tenderly taking her in my arms while she melted into tears; "never, never, will I play upon any other----!"
Thus were the affections of the people regained; and they, from hence, began to venerate, applaud, and admire my government more than ever.
To these requests, at the entreaty of my council, I made no reply, or at best but unsatisfactory answers.
"Fudge!" said he, "Fudge!
The great assembly of the states could think of nothing else. Instead of enacting laws for the regulation of the people, instead of consulting what should seem most wise, most excellent, they could think, talk, and harangue of nothing but fudge.
this Triskill of the month of
Finding how much they liked this fudge, I procured another quantity from England, much greater than the former, and cautiously bestowed it over all the kingdom.
Some time after I ordered the following proclamation to be published in the Court Gazette, and in all the other papers of the empire:--
Great and superb appears thy cap sublime, Admired and worshipp'd as the rising sun; Solemn, majestic, wise, like hoary Time, And fam'd alike for virtue, sense, and fun.
Petitions were addressed to me from all quarters, from every corporation and body of men in the whole empire.
Dated in our Castle of Gristariska
Curiosity was on the rack; they forgot to lampoon the government, so engaged were they about the fudge.
Then swell the noble strain with song, And elegance divine, While goddesses around shall throng, And all the muses nine.
This proclamation excited the most ardent curiosity all over the empire. "Do you know what this fudge is?" said Lady Mooshilgarousti to Lord Darnarlaganl.
In vain did the Speaker call to order; the more checks they got the more extravagant and inquisitive they were.
HIS EXCELLENCY THE
'Twas a fury of curiosity, one general ferment, and universal fever--nothing but fudge could allay it.
navas-kashna-vildash.
"And now, most noble Baron," said the illustrious Hilaro Frosticos, "now is the time to make this people proceed in any business that we find convenient.
We advanced at a great rate along the bridge, which was so very extensive that we could scarcely perceive the ascent, but proceeded insensibly until we arrived on the centre of the arch.
After some time, having settled the government to my satisfaction, I requested permission to resign, as a great cabal had been excited against me in England; I therefore received my letters of recall, and prepared to return to Old England.
I took care to supply them with their favourite kava and fudge, and they worked like horses.
CHAPTER XXVIII
It seemed like a rainbow in the heavens, the base of which appeared to rise in the centre of Africa, and the other extremity seemed to stoop into great Britain.
I admired the appearance of the Baltic Sea, which evidently seemed to have been introduced between those countries by the sudden splitting of the land, and that originally Sweden was united to the western coast of Denmark; in short, the whole interstice of the Gulf of Finland had no being, until these countries, by mutual consent, separated from one another.
Such were my philosophical meditations as I advanced, when I observed a man in armour with a tremendous spear or lance, and mounted upon a steed, advancing against me.
Africa seemed in general of a tawny brownish colour, burned up by the sun: Spain seemed more inclining to a yellow, on account of some fields of corn scattered over the kingdom; France appeared more inclining to a bright straw-colour, intermixed with green; and England appeared covered with the most beautiful verdure.
That is to say, "As long as this arch and bond of union shall exist, so long shall the people be happy.
"In the Italian Quarter?"
Good-bye, Lestrade.
I am a methodical man, you see, and you never know what turn events might take afterwards.
The silence of the deserted street reassured him.
He is connected with the Mafia, which, as you know, is a secret political society, enforcing its decrees by murder. Now, you see how the affair begins to clear up.
I have no doubt he is out now, but he has not dared to show his nose here.
Three--two and one are three--two of Dr. Barnicot's, and one smashed in broad daylight on my own counter.
"Well, well, we can't expect to have it all our own way, Watson," he said, at last.
Oh, I daresay by consulting our sales book we could very easily tell you.
"I have your letter here.
A moment later he was the cold and practical thinker once more.
"Oh, that was it, was it?
Yes, sir, we have several among our workpeople and cleaners.
In his right hand he carried an old-fashioned carpet-bag, which he placed upon the table.
"Certainly."
Even shaking would tell him nothing, for as the plaster was wet it was probable that the pearl would adhere to it--as, in fact, it has done.
"I think not.
"We must come back in the afternoon, if Mr. Harding will not be here until then.
Did he tell you what I paid for it?"
He could not tell which contained his treasure.
Carefully Holmes held each separate shard to the light, but in no way did it differ from any other shattered piece of plaster.
"Of course you must have been surprised, but the explanation is very simple.
Six plaster casts of Napoleon were drying in the passage.
"What luck, Mr. Holmes?"
Not a word would our captive say, but he glared at us from the shadow of his matted hair, and once, when my hand seemed within his reach, he snapped at it like a hungry wolf.
I bought it in your presence from the owner--and there it lies."
I shall be surprised if we don't get some help down there."
We supplied him with the bust some months ago.
"Well," said Lestrade, "I've seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don't know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that.
He had once been a skilful sculptor and had earned an honest living, but he had taken to evil courses and had twice already been in jail--once for a petty theft, and once, as we had already heard, for stabbing a fellow-countryman.
I was not surprised when Holmes suggested that I should take my revolver with me.
We saw it whisk past the light thrown from over the door and disappear against the black shadow of the house. There was a long pause, during which we held our breath, and then a very gentle creaking sound came to our ears.
"The main fact is that he HAD the pearl, and at that moment, when it was on his person, he was pursued by the police.
I had the note which you sent by the express messenger, and I did exactly what you told me.
His face flushed with anger, and his brows knotted over his blue Teutonic eyes.
Two columns were occupied with a highly sensational and flowery rendering of the whole incident.
"I don't think that I need intrude upon your time and patience any more." With a last word of caution that he should say nothing as to our researches, we turned our faces westward once more.
He made for the factory in which he worked, and he knew that he had only a few minutes in which to conceal this enormously valuable prize, which would otherwise be found on him when he was searched.
Turning his back upon us he laid down his burden, and the next instant there was the sound of a sharp tap, followed by a clatter and rattle.
What he sought was evidently not there, for again we saw the flash through another blind, and then through another.
When you referred in your ledger to the sale of those casts I observed that the date was June 3rd of last year. Could you give me the date when Beppo was arrested?"
He was gone two days before the bust was smashed."
There is no particular reason for keeping a watch upon that book.
Thank you, Mr. Sandeford; here is your money, and I wish you a very good evening."
Pietro is set upon his track.
He would fear that the police would read his secret, and so he hastened on before they should get ahead of him.
A drive of an hour brought us to the picture-dealer's establishment.
When at last he descended, it was with triumph in his eyes, but he said nothing to either of us as to the result of his researches.
Mr. Harding, of Harding Brothers, said that they had sold you their last copy, and he gave me your address."
He could suggest no possible cause why anyone should wish to destroy them--in fact, he laughed at the idea.
The figure broke into fragments, and Holmes bent eagerly over the shattered remains.
"We may thank our stars that it is not raining.
The cast was taken in two moulds from each side of the face, and then these two profiles of plaster of Paris were joined together to make the complete bust.
I don't think we can even venture to smoke to pass the time.
Beppo had the pearl in his possession.
The window was being opened.
A Nihilist plot--that's what I make it.
"Listen to this:
"Put the pearl in the safe, Watson," said he, "and get out the papers of the Conk-Singleton forgery case.
"You don't say so?"
He could talk English perfectly well.
Will you come with us?"
Of course, I could not say that he had not found the pearl in Harker's bust.
A four-wheeler was at the door at eleven, and in it we drove to a spot at the other side of Hammersmith Bridge.
Holmes took a paper from his pocket and laid a ten-pound note upon the table.
"Is Mr. Sherlock Holmes here?"
I was myself consulted upon the case, but I was unable to throw any light upon it.
"We have this Beppo as a common factor, both in Kennington and in Kensington, so that is worth a ten-mile drive.
Holmes's face showed his disappointment and annoyance.
It was an admirable hiding-place.
"Exactly."
I don't quite understand it all yet."
"We have an inspector who makes a specialty of Saffron Hill and the Italian Quarter.
Holmes clapped his hands approvingly.
He may have stolen it from Pietro, he may have been Pietro's confederate, he may have been the go-between of Pietro and his sister.
"This is all right, Watson," said he.
You'll find that my theory of the Mafia will work out all right.
A news-bill at the entrance announced "Kensington Outrage.
Holmes spent the evening in rummaging among the files of the old daily papers with which one of our lumber-rooms was packed.
No, I have never seen this face which you show me in the photograph.
You'll dine with us, Lestrade, and then you are welcome to the sofa until it is time for us to start.
At last he started in his chair, and his eyes brightened.
But before we could move, the man had emerged again.
The fellow was making his way into the house.
"Well?" he asked.
I brought the bust up with me, as you asked me to do.
But Beppo was condemned to a year's imprisonment, and in the meanwhile his six busts were scattered over London.
But the production of the photograph had a remarkable effect upon the manager.
I am, as you have no doubt surmised, endeavouring to trace these busts to their source, in order to find if there is not something peculiar which may account for their remarkable fate.
When finished, the busts were put on a table in the passage to dry, and afterwards stored.
Holmes propped it against the cruet-stand and read it while he ate.
If you will come with me to Chiswick to-night, Lestrade, I'll promise to go to the Italian Quarter with you to-morrow, and no harm will be done by the delay.
It was a bust of Napoleon, like the one which we had seen that morning, and it had been broken into similar fragments.
How is that, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?"
Here it is!" He opened his bag, and at last we saw placed upon our table a complete specimen of that bust which we had already seen more than once in fragments.
No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there's not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn't be glad to shake you by the hand."
We sat in silence for a moment.
Beppo did not despair, and he conducted his search with considerable ingenuity and perseverance. Through a cousin who works with Gelder, he found out the retail firms who had bought the busts.
The noise ceased, and again there was a long silence.
"Albert," repeated Danglars, shrugging his shoulders; "ah, well; he would care very little about it, I think."
But the wound remains and will reopen at the first loss."
"So much the better.
"I think I may aspire to that honor," said Danglars with a smile, which reminded Monte Cristo of the sickly moons which bad artists are so fond of daubing into their pictures of ruins.
Matrimonial Projects.
He has been travelling with a very severe tutor, and had never been to Paris before."
"Why?"
"In conjunction with the affairs of Ali Pasha?"
"I have been made a baron, so that I actually am one; he made himself a count, so that he is not one at all."
"Not at all; on the contrary, be seated; but what is the matter with you?
And by whom were they recommended to you?"
"Really?
"Yes; a little nervous, perhaps, but, upon the whole, he appeared tolerable.
"Exactly so.
"And what is your opinion?"
"Then you do not speculate?"
Why, the thing has made a tremendous noise."
"Well, and it is that"--
"Five thousand francs per month."
You look careworn; really, you alarm me.
The papers said something about it, did they not?"
You know I have made the most of my arms, though I never forgot my origin."
He then called for his horses, drove to the Chamber, and inscribed his name to speak against the budget.
"And then he was called"--
"What?"
This, with my Spanish affairs, made a pretty end to the month."
"Sixty thousand francs per year.
"What?"
I think this is about your position, is it not?"
Do you wish me to lend you some?"
"And you would have flattered him, for certainly, as you say, he has no manner.
But do you mean to say you have not heard of this?
"Why, how could you make such a mistake--such an old stager?"
"It would be very easy if you much wished it?"
"A proof of great humility or great pride," said Monte Cristo.
"Ah, indeed?" said Monte Cristo.
Does it happen to be Jacopo Manfredi?"
"Oh, I do not mean her fortune only; but tell me"--
"Why so?"
"Oh, by the house of Fenzi, one of the best in Florence."
"Do not advance it; the father will never repay it.
Imagine a man who has transacted business with me for I don't know how long, to the amount of 800,000 or 900,000 francs during the year.
"Really?"
"Certainly; your name is popular, and does honor to the title they have adorned it with; but you are too intelligent not to know that according to a prejudice, too firmly rooted to be exterminated, a nobility which dates back five centuries is worth more than one that can only reckon twenty years."
You do not know these ultramontane millionaires; they are regular misers.
He was telling me this morning that, tired of letting his property lie dormant in Italy, which is a dead nation, he wished to find a method, either in France or England, of multiplying his millions, but remember, that though I place great confidence in Busoni, I am not responsible for this."
"I do not mean to say you will lose, but, nevertheless, mind you hold to the terms of the agreement."
"A little."
No, you have not;--well, you are right, for if you indulged in such reflections, you would never risk your principal, which is to the speculator what the skin is to civilized man.
I lost a battle in Spain, I have been defeated in Trieste, but my naval army in India will have taken some galleons, and my Mexican pioneers will have discovered some mine."
I should be obliged, besides my steward, to keep a clerk and a boy.
"Yes, yes," said Danglars, laughing, "it would do her a great deal of good."
"But he is betrothed to your daughter, I believe?"
"The result, then, of six more such months as this would be to reduce the third-rate house to despair."
I know an Italian prince, rich as a gold mine, one of the noblest families in Tuscany, who, when his sons married according to his wish, gave them millions; and when they married against his consent, merely allowed them thirty crowns a month.
"Why so?"
"I have made money at the same time by speculations which have succeeded.
"And you understand heraldry?"
"I have been in ill-luck for several days," said Danglars, "and I have heard nothing but bad news."
"I think so."
"Very well; the king only owed you five thousand livres; why has more been given to you?"
"Then you suppose it was the people alone who wished to burn the condemned?"
"I!
"The sum-total!
"Then you say," resumed the deceived intendant, "that the initiative came from the people?
"I never have a thousand livres to pay," replied D'Artagnan.
"Louder than all the rest; like a madman."
"Oh! very well," continued Colbert, thoughtfully.
"No, no; a mass of people."
"And what did he do?"
"Mine, monsieur, are the correct ones."
Oh!
Colbert's brow grew dark and wrinkled.
"But, monsieur, you have an order.
I beg to offer you my compliments," said Colbert, with a vicious smile.
"Paid, by whom?"
"That may be so; but you must return this."
"Once more," said Colbert, irritated--"once more, if you had any sum to pay, would you not pay what you ought?"
"Then you must give me credit for them," replied D'Artagnan, with his imperceptible irony.
This was a matter for grave consideration.
"So, in fact, it is written," said D'Artagnan, affecting calmness.
"You then owe fifteen thousand livres to the public chest," said he, carried away by his jealous ardor.
"You must return them to my chest."
Are you mad or drunk?"
"I did not refuse, monsieur, I only begged you to wait.
And, in the same manner as you give a sword-thrust, when you are required, I, on my part, pay when an order is presented to me.
"In the same manner, as, in opposition to the king's expectation, you refused to pay me."
"Why did you not tell me, monsieur, that you came to relate me this?" said Colbert with envy; "everything is explained, and more favorably for you than for anybody else."
Present yours."
"And what for?"
Was D'Artagnan going straight to the king?
"That is quite another thing.
A kind of ambitious glory which had lighted his face was extinguished, like the light of glow-worms we crush beneath the grass.
In general, men of the sword, when they came to his office, had such a want of money, that though their feet seemed to take root in the marble, they hardly lost their patience.
"Well! what will you do, then?
"And I, monsieur, I want the king's money."
"Then, monsieur, we shall see what the king will say about it.
I repeat it, Monsieur Fouquet may be called what they please, but he is a very gentlemanly man."
"But you killed nobody yourselves?"
Colbert opened his eyes and interrogated the chief of the watch with a look--"Ah! it is very true," said the latter, "that this gentleman saved us."
"Explain yourself," said he, in a stifled voice--"if you are paid why do you show me that paper?"
"Oh! is that you, monsieur?" said Colbert.
"To what do I owe the honor of your visit, then?"
Colbert made no reply to this subtlety.
You will not take my rouleaux from me, will you?"
"You have, at least, money to receive, as you have an order?"
"Not at all, monsieur."
D'Artagnan made his appearance just as the chief of the watch was giving his report.
"Monsieur, monsieur!" cried Colbert, "this is violence!"
"Double brute!" thought D'Artagnan, "to think to play the great man and the hypocrite with me.
"What commission is this you give me, and what do you charge me to tell his majesty, monsieur?
"Triple fool!" replied Colbert, furiously shaking his hair, thick and black as a mane; "what are you telling me?
"That is true," thought D'Artagnan, "and thus are all my doubts cleared up.
"Who was he?"
"The king wants his money, monsieur."
"It is an exploit, nevertheless."
"And this was from the people, the real people?"
"In order to spare me three visits to the money-chest of the superintendent, so that I have the twenty thousand livres in my pocket in good new coin.
"Oh!" said D'Artagnan, "the king apologized for giving me so little; but he promised to make it more hereafter, when he should be rich; but I must be gone, having much to do--"
"I do not say that they are not."
"Ten times the appointment of an intendant of the finances.
"What do you mean by that?" replied D'Artagnan.
"Simply to this: the king ordered me to come to you."
"He politely counted me down the sum-total, saying, that for the king, his coffers were always full."
"Of me?" said Colbert.
"So, then, notwithstanding the expectation of the king, the superintendent paid you, did he?"
"Very willingly; here it is."
"A handful of conspirators--"
Monsieur d'Artagnan," cried Colbert, "what! are you leaving me thus?"
"And you have accepted what was not due to you."
It moved very softly.
A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into the invisibility.
He raised his eyes.
"Half shares."
He had only some small change in his fob.
Thenardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead, formed with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together, by screwing up his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight contraction of the mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is endeavoring to recognize another man.
"After all, you acted wisely.
"Now, my friend, you must leave.
However, he found no more than the thirty francs.
This inequality of conditions sufficed to assure some advantage to Jean Valjean in that mysterious duel which was on the point of beginning between the two situations and the two men.
Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move.
Neither of himself nor of Marius.
Of what was he thinking during this profound depression?
He set out on his way once more.
The police are full of cleverness.
He hesitated a little over the large sous.
The workmen, when they come to-morrow to stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned there, and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by straw, to pick up the scent and reach you.
Jean Valjean, who was chiefly concerned in keeping his back to the light, let him have his way.
We may be permitted to doubt this.
Thenardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet amicable.
Jean Valjean took the rope.
There is no one who does not occasionally accept in this mechanical way.
All was over.
Jean Valjean searched his pockets.
It was difficult to divine why.
When donning his uniform of a National Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten, dolefully absorbed as he was, to take his pocket-book.
Thenardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist of the neck.
"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside.
He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with the wall.
No lever; no prying possible.
The sewer is treacherous and tells tales of you.
Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in making some other man than himself emerge from that portal, the pure and disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin?
There was no one there except themselves.
It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled, were in the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed.
Thenardier resumed:
And then, whither was he to go?
This time it was not that terrible light; it was good, white light.
"What do you mean by that?"
What was he to do?
After a pause he added:
Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the grating.
You must be a friend."
He seemed to walk with the velvet paws of a tiger.
CHAPTER VIII--THE TORN COAT-TAIL
There he halted.
The door was plainly double-locked.
As he approached, the outlet became more and more distinctly defined.
On this occasion, however, he had been caught unprepared.
Look here."
And then, when you don't talk at all, you run no risk of talking too loud.
Thenardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat to the level of his Adam's apple, a gesture which completes the capable air of a serious man:
At the end of a month they fish up your man in the nets at Saint-Cloud.
To follow the incline would not conduct him to his goal.
Some person in that gloom?
"I'm asking you questions, but you're perfectly right not to answer. It's an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before the examining magistrate.
Thenardier continued:
Why didn't you toss the man in there?"
Thenardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.
"Listen, comrade.
What direction should he pursue?
This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes in his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach Jean Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.
Jean Valjean saw the outlet.
Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless. Exhaustion had ended in failure.
"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."
It was one of those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.
He was thinking of Cosette.
"Well, half shares then."
It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.
I twig.
This taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.
Thenardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient space for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again, gave the key a double turn in the lock and plunged back into the darkness, without making any more noise than a breath.
Thenardier resumed:
Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.
The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous brick.
After due reflection, he took them also, muttering:
Jean Valjean made no reply.
I found out Mary went to learn dress-making, and I began to be frightened for her; for it's a bad life for a girl to be out late at night in the streets, and after many an hour of weary work, they're ready to follow after any novelty that makes a little change.
"I tell you, I cannot.
If we did not drink, we could not stand the memory of what we have been, and the thought of what we are, for a day.
the aunt to Mary?
We should have done well, but alas!
I suppose it would be murder to kill her, but it would be better for her to die than to live to lead such a life as I do.
Who would then guard Mary, with her love and her innocence? Would it not be a goodly thing to serve her, although she loved him not; to be her preserving angel, through the perils of life; and she, unconscious all the while?
She shrank from the idea of addressing John Barton again; her heart sank within her, at the remembrance of his fierce repulsing action, and far fiercer words.
To whom shall the outcast prostitute tell her tale?
"But it's no matter!
Come home with me.
Can you not guess?
At first he refused to listen to that better voice; or listened only to pervert.
"You must listen to me, Jem Wilson," she said, with almost an accent of command.
"STREET WALKS."
Then she blessed him, and bade him good-night.
With heart and soul, though in few words, Jem promised that if aught earthly could keep her from falling, he would do it.
Now, the great thing was to reach home, and solitude.
He braced up his soul, and said to himself, that with God's help he would be that earthly keeper.
Still he did not relax his hold.
You must.
"He was so handsome, so kind!
CHAPTER XIV.
There was a little strife in Esther's mind for an instant, between the shame of acknowledging herself, and the additional weight to her revelation which such acknowledgment would give.
"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."
"Why, Esther!
he would take pleasure in her desolation of heart!
The door closed behind her with a ponderous clang, and in her desolation she felt as if shut out of home--from the only shelter she could meet with, houseless and pennyless as she was, on that dreary day.
He saw Jem was downcast, and fancied his rattling might cheer him; at any rate, it drowned his aunt's muttered grumblings, and in some measure concealed the blank of the evening.
"It's young Carson, old Carson's son, that your father worked for."
That night she stationed herself early near the foundry where she knew Jem worked; he stayed later than usual, being detained by some arrangements for the morrow.
"Well, there's something to do for her; I forget what; wait a minute!
I know one who will.
It seemed worse than death to reveal her condition to Mary, else she sometimes thought that this course would be the most terrible, the most efficient warning.
But it was too heavy, too grievous to be borne, and live.
During that turn he came out, and in the quiet of that street of workshops and warehouses, she directly heard his steps.
Oh, how happy I was!"--sinking her voice into a plaintive child-like manner.
It was, perhaps, no great wonder that she should prefer one so much above Jem in the external things of life.
I could not lead a virtuous life if I would. I should only disgrace you.
To whom could she speak and ask for aid?
No! he could not, said the still small voice.
You can yet save Mary.
One thought had haunted her both by night and by day, with monomaniacal incessancy; and that thought was how to save Mary (her dead sister's only child, her own little pet in the days of her innocence) from following in the same downward path to vice.
But he controlled himself to silence.
It would be better.
"Yes!
I sold my goods any how to get money to buy her food and medicine; I wrote over and over again to her father for help, but he must have changed his quarters, for I never got an answer.
I had a little girl, too.
Again she rapidly turned off, and Jem also went on his way.
Such as live like me could not bear life if they did not drink.
She broke the silence.
But many and many a day afterwards he bitterly regretted his omission of duty; his weariness of well-doing.
Esther's term of imprisonment was ended.
He turned back, but she was gone.
She dreaded addressing any of her former female acquaintance, even supposing they had sense, or spirit, or interest enough to undertake her mission.
"Don't tell me any more about yoursel," said Jem, soothingly.
And yet I never thought my poor sister was dead.
I always meant to send for her to pay me a visit when I was married; for, mark you! he promised me marriage.
You must hear it, and I must tell it; and then see after Mary, and take care she does not become like me.
A vision of her pale, sweet face, with her bright hair all bedabbled with gore, seemed to float constantly before his aching eyes.
Come home with me."
I never thought poor Mary would have taken it so to heart!
"Oh, don't abuse him; don't speak a word against him!
Mary loved another!
We have none.
I will have the relief of telling it.
That was all!
All these thoughts had passed through her mind while yet she was in prison; so when she was turned out, her purpose was clear, and she did not feel her desolation of freedom as she would otherwise have done.
Then the other nature spoke up, and bade him remember the anguish he should so prepare for Mary!
And Will, out of the very kindness of his heart, talked more and more merrily than ever.
Tell me his name!"
I know it better than if you told me in words.
"There they go round and round my bed the whole night through.
They all do.
And now the mists and the storms seemed clearing away from his path, though it still was full of stinging thorns.
You may easily imagine that a double interest was attached by her to the ways and companionships of those with whom she had been acquainted in the days which, when present, she had considered hardly-worked and monotonous, but which now in retrospection seemed so happy and unclouded.
But hers were ever open, and contained, in their soft, deathly look, such mute reproach!
You know Mary Barton, don't you?" said she, trying to collect her thoughts.
After awhile, she spoke again, and in a calmer voice.
That idea would rise uppermost in his mind, and had to be combated in all its forms of pain.
"This visit is a high solemnity.
But he left her to intercept Mrs. Munt, whose voice could be heard in the distance: to be intercepted himself by Helen.
"Here's our hostess.
"What about next Wednesday?"
"Oh come, come!" he protested pleasantly.
Lately it came in--safe as houses now."
It hangs--Margaret, we must go and see the old place some time.
"With a man so poor, every reduction must be great.
He raised his finger.
It isn't true, surely, what Mr. Wilcox says, that you want to go away early next week?"
"Very many thanks.
But it is all in the day's work.
"Thanks to your hint, he's clearing out of the Porphyrion."
I'm no fatalist.
"You're not to blame.
"But I think you told us the Porphyrion was bad, and would smash before Christmas."
"He only says 'reduced,'" corrected Margaret, seeing trouble ahead.
With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.
Once--on another occasion--she scolded him about it.
You can't.
"If he sublets, I shan't have the same control.
In the daylight the bushes were inconsiderable and the path was bright in the morning sun.
I've no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing." "It isn't frittering away the strength," she protested.
"Point me out a time when desire for equality has made them happier.
No, I couldn't well do that.
It is like this.
"By all means subscribe to charities--subscribe to them largely--but don't get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform.
You seem to assume, when a business concern is conducting a delicate negotiation, it ought to keep the public informed stage by stage.
"Because I'm an old maid," said Helen, biting her lip.
She saw that Helen's nerves were exasperated by the unlucky Bast business beyond the bounds of politeness.
"Owing to God, I suppose," flashed Helen.
"A word of advice.
"I can't think why I go on like this myself." She shook off her sister's hand and went into the house.
It did not seem so difficult.
From boyhood he had neglected them.
"Dempster!
Things may be done for which no money can compensate.
Helen quivered with indignation.
Margaret, distressed at the day's beginning, followed the Bournemouth steamer with her eyes.
"Did I?
"Don't even discuss political economy with Henry," advised her sister.
No, no.
They met in the rhododendrons of yesterday.
"You want to see the house, though?"
"Not a BAD business?"
Don't you think that's better than subletting?"
"Yes, yes, yes; safe as houses--safer."
Helen replied, "Good-morning, Mr. Wilcox."
It's part of the battle of life."
"You grab the dollars.
"We have told you about the fellow twice already," said Helen.
Only connect!
"I require no more advice."
"Henry, I won't go.
"Dempster's Bank's better."
Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings.
What's that?
"In other words, Mr. Bast need never have left it."
"--and needn't have started life elsewhere at a greatly reduced salary."
He's going into a bank in Camden Town, he says.
Point me out a time when men have been equal--"
Live in fragments no longer.
"I should enjoy that," said Margaret bravely.
"Here we all are!" she cried, and took him by one hand, retaining her sister's in the other.
Don't you bother."
"I am grieved for your clerk.
Nor was the message difficult to give.
He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said.
"But I'll say a word to her.
Morning, Schlegel.
"I don't like those men.
"PIGS' TEETH?"
With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory.
But I think Edward had no idea at all of corrupting her.
But, from that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that I much thought about anything else.
And Edward, when he realized what he was doing, curbed his tongue at once.
She just went completely out of existence, like yesterday's paper.
She wanted to say that in cool, balanced and sarcastic sentences.
It was the last straw. She ran upstairs, arranged herself decoratively upon her bed--she was a sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white cheeks, long hair, the eyelashes falling like a tiny curtain on her cheeks.
But what she didn't want me to know was the fact of her first escapade with the fellow called Jimmy.
I was in love with Nancy Rufford as I am in love with the poor child's memory, quietly and quite tenderly in my American sort of way.
It is sad, but it is so.
Because of course she was always play acting.
It was quite literally the case that his passions--for the mistress of the Grand Duke, for Mrs Basil, for little Mrs Maidan, for Florence, for whom you will--these passions were merely preliminary canters compared to his final race with death for her.
It is really death to do so--that is why so many marriages turn out unhappily.
Let me, as this is in all probability the last time I shall mention Florence's name, dwell a little upon the change that had taken place in her psychology.
He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported.
But it always comes back--the memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue.
And yet I am so near to all these people that I cannot think any of them wicked.
She had arrived at figuring out the sort of low-down Bowery tough that that fellow was.
In another mood she would desire to come to me disdainfully and to tell me that I was considerably less than a man and that what had happened was what must happen when a real male came along.
I don't know that she need have shuddered.
For that was all that I had been.
No, I didn't see any impediment on the score of age.
Leonora says that she had that flask, apparently of nitrate of amyl, but actually of prussic acid, for many years and that she was determined to use it if ever I discovered the nature of her relationship with that fellow Jimmy.
She would no doubt have made him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to his sense of humour, to his promises.
He said that that was so; and he did enough to prove it.
It was her footling old uncle's work; he ought never to have taken those two round the world together and shut himself up in his cabin for the greater part of the time.
But it has always been as a matter for study, not for remembrance.
Florence didn't matter.
But I dare say Bagshawe may have been the determining influence in her suicide.
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
Well, it was that sort of shuddering that came over Florence at the thought that she had surrendered to such a low fellow.
But she was older than her years and quieter.
For it is intolerable to live constantly with one human being who perceives one's small meannesses.
So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse him in this as in so many other things.
She wanted, that is to say, to retain my respect for as long as she lived with me.
I try at times by dwelling on some of the things that he did to push that image of him away, as you might try to push aside a large pendulum.
He wants to hear that voice applying itself to every possible proposition, to every possible topic; he wants to see those characteristic gestures against every possible background. Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion.
It is a thing, with all its accidents, that must be taken for granted, as, in a novel, or a biography, you take it for granted that the characters have their meals with some regularity.
He was such a fine fellow.
I was so deadly tired.
For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties.
It was as if his passion for her hadn't existed; as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke them, created the passion as they went along.
Anyhow, there was an end of Florence.
As I see it, at least, with regard to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman--is something in the nature of a widening of the experience.
If it had been merely a matter of Edward's relations with the girl I dare say Florence would have faced it out.
I had never thought about it until I heard Leonora state that I might now marry her.
She wanted, in one mood, to come rushing to me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully emotional, outpouring as to her passion.
I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I then had to do was a little fighting with real life, some wrestling with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine.
If Florence had discovered this secret of mine I should have found her knowledge of it so unbearable that I never could have supported all the other privations of the regime that she extracted from me.
He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth.
In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor--a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career.
And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her.
That was to show that she was like one of the great erotic women of whom history tells us.
I am bound to say that Florence never discovered this secret.
You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for me that was the end of Florence.
From that day to this I have never given her another thought; I have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh.
I dare say no man does and I was pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could make a young girl happy.
And, in speaking to her on that night, he wasn't, I am convinced, committing a baseness.
The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times.
I could spoil her as few young girls have ever been spoiled; and I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
There is no reason why it shouldn't have been; I guess it is vanity that makes most of us keep straight, if we do keep straight, in this world.
She wanted also to retain my respect.
He wants to get, as it were, behind those eyebrows with the peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world with the eyes that they overshadow.
Or perhaps she would have tried to exact from me a new respect for the greatness of her passion on the lines of all for love and the world well lost.
Well, I am not seeking to avoid discredit.
Anyhow, I am convinced that the sight of Mr Bagshawe and the thought that Mr Bagshawe--for she knew that unpleasant and toadlike personality--the thought that Mr Bagshawe would almost certainly reveal to me that he had caught her coming out of Jimmy's bedroom at five o'clock in the morning on the 4th of August, 1900--that was the determining influence in her suicide.
Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of any early passion.
I know that sort of feeling came to the surface in me the moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had seen her coming out of that fellow's bedroom.
What had I to regret? I suppose that my inner soul--my dual personality--had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper--that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold.
"Had Father Nevin trusted to my honor, I would not have run away; but he locked me in, like a monk in a cell, and that I will not bear.
I cannot stop for vengeance now; but I'll toss you into the river some day, and leave you to get out as you can."
His own reckless courage had brought him there; for in one of the many skirmishes in which he had taken part, he ventured too far away from his men, and was captured after fighting desperately to cut his way out.
I shall be near."
After that the little courier came often unperceived, carrying letters to and fro; for Yvonne sent bits of paper, and Gaston wrote his answers with his blood and a quill from Blanchette's wing.
Then kissing the bird he bade it go, watching the silver wings flash in the sunshine as it flew away, carrying joy with it and leaving hope behind.
"No one suspects me; I am safe.
I found him looking for you.
Yvonne went to sprinkling the neglected linen, wondering with mingled anxiety and girlish merriment how Gaston fared.
But quick-witted Yvonne saved him; for lifting one end of the long web of linen, she showed a hollow whence some great stone had been removed, and Gaston slipped into the green nest, over which the linen lay smoothly when replaced.
I bore my penance better than you, and did not run away.
Go to my mother; she will hide you, and I will follow soon."
The girl laughed also as she retorted, "My tutor should not have left me to play with his dogs.
In a moment a quick jerk at the thread bade him pull again.
As they went, Gaston poured out his story, and told how Yvonne was waiting for them in the wood.
The rope was made fast to an iron staple inside, the bars were torn away, and Gaston crept through the narrow opening to perch on the ledge without, while Blanchette flew down to tell Yvonne he was coming.
I never miss my aim, and we will sup royally to-night," whispered Gaston, glad to use the arms with which they had provided themselves.
But all was quiet and deserted now; so, with a boyish laugh and a daring glance at the dangerous descent, he said to the doves cooing on the roof overhead: "Here's a fine pretext for escape.
The pretty winged creature, frightened by the destruction of its home, had flown to her for refuge, and she had cherished it for its master's sake.
Hundreds of men and women were there, suffering terribly, and among them was Yvonne, brave still, but with no hope of escape; for few were saved, and then only by some lucky accident.
"I taught you to stalk the deer, and spear the boar, not to hunt your fellow-creatures, my lord.
"But you?" he cried; "I cannot leave you in peril, after all you have dared and done for me."
As babies, the two slept in one cradle; as children they played and quarrelled together; and as boy and girl they defended, comforted, and amused each other.
A fine day for the bleaching, but over warm for much travel.
Y."
Up came the stout rope, knotted here and there to add safety and strength to the hands and feet that were to climb down that frail ladder, unless some cruel fate dashed the poor boy dead upon the rocks below.
Then, springing up, he said, throwing back his wet hair and shaking his finger at her: "You dared not betray me, but you nearly drowned me, wicked girl.
"Since I may not play a man's part yet, amuse me like a boy, with the old tales your mother used to tell, when we watched the fagots blaze in the winter nights.
He will see me if I run, and where can I hide till he has past?" whispered Gaston, ashamed of his panic, yet unwilling to pay the penalty of his prank.
Come now, we'll be merry.
"Slip around and drive him this way.
A cord came up, and when that was firmly secured, a second jerk was the signal for the last and most important haul.
She longed to go with him; but her part was to watch and wait, to hope and pray, till the hour came when she, like many another woman in those days, could prove herself as brave as a man, and freely risk her life for those she loved.
One more adventure, and that a happy one, completed their joy, and turned their flight into a triumphant march.
She can tell better tales than any in this weary book, the bane of my life!"
I promised, and if he lives, it shall be done.
From one of the windows of the chateau-tower a boy's face looked out, full of eager longing,--a fine, strong face, but sullen now, with black brows, dark, restless eyes, and lips set, as if rebellious thoughts were stirring in his mind.
"I am lost if he spy me, for my father vowed I should not hunt again unless I did my task.
"Be ready; help will come.
"The brave girl! the loyal heart!
"Which is it to be?" she asked, as she passed one of the men who guarded them, a rough fellow, whose face was half hidden by a shaggy beard.
He knew that the attempt might cost him his life, but was willing to gain liberty even at that price; for imprisonment seemed worse than death to his impatient spirit.
But I forgive you, for it was well done, and I had a hard run to escape," he said, still laughing.
"Sprinkle me quickly; I am stifling in this hole," whispered an imploring voice.
"Courage, my sister; it is soon over."
"When you are flung into the river, call my name and float.
Thus, when the order came, written in the rude hand he had taught Yvonne long ago, "Pull up the thread which Blanchette will bring at midnight. Watch for a light in the bay.
As he spoke, the boy struck a volume that lay on the wide ledge, with a petulant energy that sent it fluttering down into the court-yard below. Half-ashamed and half-amused, young Gaston peeped to see if this random shot had hit any one.
The mule paused in the light shadow of the willows, to crop a mouthful of grass before climbing the hill, and the chaplain seemed glad to rest a moment, for the day was warm and the road dusty.
But he was off before a shot could be fired, and the disappointed hunters followed long and far, resolved not to go back empty-handed.
Then Gaston remembered how he used to send messages to Yvonne by this carrier-dove, and with a thrill of joy looked for the token, hardly daring to hope that any would be found.
"Go, my girl, and bring me news of our young lord.
More than once he thought it was all over; but the good rope held fast, and strength and courage nerved heart and limbs.
Like a sister of mercy she went among the poor souls crowded together in the great halls, hungry, cold, sick, and despairing, and they clung to her as if she were some strong, sweet saint who could deliver them or teach them how to die.
Then swinging himself out as if it were no new feat, he climbed boldly down through the ivy that half hid the carved flowers and figures which made a ladder for his agile feet.
"A long tale, for which I have a short and happy answer.
He is true as steel.
Her plan was perilously simple, but the only one possible; for Gaston was well guarded, and out of that lofty cell it seemed that no prisoner could escape without wings.
"Thanks, daughter!
"Brave lads! and here is your reward," answered the forester, pushing open the door and pointing to the figure of a man, with a pale face and bandaged head, lying asleep beside the fire.
No need to repeat the dreadful history of the Noyades; it is enough to say that in the confusion of the moment Yvonne found opportunity to read and destroy the little paper, which said briefly:--
They sent him a magnificent supper, and took his million.
"The master?--who is he?"
And why, when every one else was allowed to be ransomed, might he not also be? Oh, yes; certainly a speedy, violent death would be a fine means of deceiving these remorseless enemies, who appeared to pursue him with such incomprehensible vengeance.
"Well, then, let me have a bottle of the least expensive."
"Of the evil you have done," said the voice.
"As your excellency pleases," said Vampa, as he left the cell.
"Still, there have been men who suffered more than you."
"Take all, then--take all, I tell you, and kill me!"
"No."
"Where is he?"
"Your excellency knows that wine is beyond all price near Rome."
Chapter 116.
"Here."
Then rising in despair, he exclaimed, "The chief, the chief!"
Oh, my former friends, my former friends!" he murmured, and fell with his face to the ground.
"Two millions?--three?--four?
"And by whom are you forbidden?"
"Then I forgive you," said the man, dropping his cloak, and advancing to the light.
"Yes," he said, "there have been some who have suffered more than I have, but then they must have been martyrs at least."
"No."
I will give them to you on condition that you let me go."
"Ah, that is a different thing."
He struggled against his thirst till his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth; then, no longer able to resist, he called out.
"Oh, water is even more scarce than wine, your excellency,--there has been such a drought."
He had picked up every crumb that had been left from his former meals, and was beginning to eat the matting which covered the floor of his cell.
Who was the invisible chief?
"You sent for me?" he said to the prisoner.
The 5,000,000 you stole from the hospitals has been restored to them by an unknown hand.
At the end of twelve days, after having made a splendid dinner, he reckoned his accounts, and found that he had only 50,000 francs left.
"Take my last gold," muttered Danglars, holding out his pocket-book, "and let me live here; I ask no more for liberty--I only ask to live!"
What could be his intentions towards him?
"So I am of these men; but there is another over me."
What then?"
"But you say you do not wish to kill me?"
"Let me see him."
The prisoner expected that he would be at no expense that day, for like an economical man he had concealed half of his fowl and a piece of the bread in the corner of his cell.
According to the count's directions, Danglars was waited on by Vampa, who brought him the best wine and fruits of Italy; then, having conducted him to the road, and pointed to the post-chaise, left him leaning against a tree.
This is a kind of usury, banker, that I do not understand."
You may torture, torment, kill me, but you shall not have my signature again!"
"Come, come, calm yourself.
"Do you repent?" asked a deep, solemn voice, which caused Danglars' hair to stand on end.
"Most likely," replied Vampa coolly.
"Yes."
"Oh, yes; oh, yes, I do indeed repent." And he struck his breast with his emaciated fist.
And now eat and drink; I will entertain you to-night.
"Merely the 5,000,000 you have about you." Danglars felt a dreadful spasm dart through his heart.
"Suffer hunger?" said Danglars, becoming pale.
"What do you want?"
"Then who are you?"
The Pardon.
On the fifth day he dragged himself to the door of the cell.
But Peppino did not answer.
"And what is that?"
"It is possible such may be the master's intention."
"How much do you require for my ransom?"
But to die?
"Oh, yes, yes, cruelly!"
"Probably."
"You do, then, obey some one?"
"Then you must suffer hunger."
"I thought you said you were the chief?"
"And yet you will let me perish with hunger?"
"You are mistaken--I am not the Count of Monte Cristo."
He thought it would be better to transact business with his old acquaintance, so he sent for Peppino.
The next day Danglars was again hungry; certainly the air of that dungeon was very provocative of appetite.
"And did your superior order you to treat me in this way?"
"I am he whom you sold and dishonored--I am he whose betrothed you prostituted--I am he upon whom you trampled that you might raise yourself to fortune--I am he whose father you condemned to die of hunger--I am he whom you also condemned to starvation, and who yet forgives you, because he hopes to be forgiven--I am Edmond Dantes!" Danglars uttered a cry, and fell prostrate.
"Twenty-five thousand francs a bottle."
"Here I am," said Vampa, instantly appearing; "what do you want?"
"Then you suffer a great deal?"
"But my purse will be exhausted."
"Something to drink."
"The person to whom you were conducted yesterday."
From this time the prisoner resolved to suffer no longer, but to have everything he wanted.
"Why do you offer me 4,000,000 for what is worth 5,000,000?
"Are you, sir, the chief of the people who brought me here?"
"Yes, your excellency.
He struck his forehead on the ground and groaned.
On the fourth, he was no longer a man, but a living corpse.
Then a strange reaction took place; he who had just abandoned 5,000,000 endeavored to save the 50,000 francs he had left, and sooner than give them up he resolved to enter again upon a life of privation--he was deluded by the hopefulness that is a premonition of madness.
Sometimes he was delirious, and fancied he saw an old man stretched on a pallet; he, also, was dying of hunger.
Then he entreated Peppino, as he would a guardian angel, to give him food; he offered him 1,000 francs for a mouthful of bread.
The sentinel opened the door; it was a new face.
When first I came hither, the wide valley you see was a wooded glen.
Cursed be the fire in which it was forged. Like the bite of a mad dog is the stroke of this poisoned iron."
"I promise thee that willingly," said Kilhuch, "name what thou wilt."
He was nephew to Arthur, the son of his sister, and his cousin.
Then said he, "A cursed ungentle son-in-law, truly I shall ever walk the worse for his rudeness.
"It will be best," said they, "to seek Mabon the son of Modron; and he will not be found unless we first find Eidoel, the son of Aer, his kinsman."
"I will give thee my prisoner, though I had not thought to give him up to any one; and therewith shalt thou have my support and my aid."
Upon the steed was a four-cornered cloth of purple, and an apple of gold was at each corner.
"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."
Horses shall I have, and chivalry; and my lord and kinsman Arthur will obtain for me all these things.
Go with us, and we will not part until thou dost either confess that the maiden exists not in the world, or until we obtain her."
And the owl said, "If I knew I would tell you.
And Arthur called Bedwyr, who never shrank from any enterprise upon which Kay was bound.
He rode upon a grey steed with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold, and a saddle also of gold.
Arthur received him with great ceremony, and asked him to remain at the palace; but the youth replied that he came not to consume meat and drink, but to ask a boon of the king.
Evil love were this."
"A cursed ungentle son-in-law, truly," says he, "the hard iron pains me like the bite of a horse-leech.
Throughout all Wales did Arthur follow him, and one by one the young pigs were killed.
Precious gold was upon the stirrups and shoes, and the blade of grass bent not beneath them, so light was the courser's tread as he went towards the gate of King Arthur's palace.
Whenever I go against the wind my eyes will water, and peradventure my head will burn, and I shall have a giddiness every new moon.
Arthur and his hosts, and his horses, and his dogs followed hard after him.
A gold-hilted sword was on his thigh, and the blade was of gold, having inlaid upon it a cross of the hue of the lightning of heaven.
She foretold to her stepson, Kilhuch, that it was his destiny to marry a maiden named Olwen, or none other, and he, at his father's bidding, went to the court of his cousin, King Arthur, to ask as a boon the hand of the maiden.
And the voice replied, "Alas, it is Mabon, the son of Modron, who is here imprisoned!"
They did so, and he promised them an answer on the morrow.
And there grew there a second wood, and this wood is the third.
Then Arthur summoned unto him all the warriors that were in the three islands of Britain and in the three islands adjacent; and he went as far as Esgeir Oervel in Ireland where the Boar Truith was with his seven young pigs.
Nevertheless, I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was."
Then Arthur rose up, and the warriors of the Islands of Britain with him, to seek for Eidoel; and they proceeded until they came before the castle of Glivi, where Eidoel was imprisoned.
And although he was one-handed, three warriors could not shed blood faster than he on the field of battle.
And they went to meat.
The stag said, "When first I came hither, there was a plain all around me, without any trees save one oak sapling, which grew up to be an oak with an hundred branches.
But Kilhuch caught it and threw it vigorously, and wounded him through the eyeball, so that the dart came out at the back of his head.
So Olwen came, clothed in a robe of flame-coloured silk, and with a collar of ruddy gold, in which were emeralds and rubies, about her neck.
"A cursed ungentle son-in-law, truly.
Kay had this peculiarity, that his breath lasted nine nights and nine days under water, and he could exist nine nights and nine days without sleep.
Then said Kay, "Rash chieftain!
A wound from Kay's sword no physician could heal.
"Go forward.
Then they returned and told Arthur, who, summoning his warriors attacked the castle.
dost thou reproach Arthur?
Very subtle was Kay.
He is his cousin."
Hard had been their trouble before, but it was child's play to what they met in seeking the comb. Win it they did, and the Boar Truith they hunted into the deep sea, and it was never known whither he went.
"I am shaved," answered he.
My wings, are they not withered stumps?
And a race of men came and rooted it up.
Another property he had; his lance would produce a wound equal to nine opposing lances.
At length, when he would fain have crossed the Severn, and escaped into Cornwall, Mabon, the son of Modron, came up with him, and Arthur fell upon him, together with the champions of Britain.
Shortly after the birth of Kilhuch, the son of King Kilyth, his mother died.
Thereupon Kay rose up.
"Go thou upon this expedition with the chieftain." For as good a guide was he in a land which he had never seen as he was in his own.
As long as I remain alive my eyesight will be the worse.
They entered the house, and after meat she told them that the maiden Olwen came there every Saturday to wash.
Nevertheless, there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them."
This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly.
Accordingly they went up to the castle and laid their request before him.
And the dogs were let loose upon him from all sides. But he wasted the fifth part of Ireland, and then set forth through the sea to Wales.
But so far away was it that at night it seemed no nearer, and they scarcely reached it on the third day.
When it pleased him he could render himself as tall as the highest tree in the forest.
Brighter were her glances than those of a falcon; her bosom was more snowy than the breast of the white swan, her cheek redder than the reddest roses.
Cursed be the smith who forged it, and the anvil whereon it was wrought."
Then said Kilhuch, "Every one has received his boon, and I yet lack mine.
The knights again withdrew, and as they were going he took the second dart and cast it after them.
On the approach of the latter, she ran out with joy to greet them, and sought to throw her arms about their necks.
They pledged their faith that they would not harm her, and a message was sent to her.
I will depart and bear away thy honour with me."
Cursed be the hearth whereon it was heated!
For it would be useless to seek for him.
But, before they could obtain the comb, he had regained the ground with his feet, and from the moment that he reached the shore, neither dog nor man nor horse could overtake him until he came to Cornwall.
Say, knowest thou aught of Mabon?"
"She is thine, but therefore needst thou not thank me, but Arthur who hath accomplished this for thee.
Thou wilt not get Mabon, for it is not known where he is, unless thou find Eidoel, his kinsman in blood, the son of Aer.
Whoso beheld was filled with her love.
They gave to him a gold ring, which he conveyed to his wife, telling her who the visitors were.
Henceforth whenever I go up a hill, I shall have a scant in my breath and a pain in my chest."
"Though thou get this, there is yet that which thou wilt not get.
"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy."
"Art thou shaved man?" said Kilhuch.
When they came before the castle they beheld a vast flock of sheep, boundless and without end.
Thereafter the hosts of Arthur dispersed themselves each man to his own country.
But ever and awhile the boar made a stand, and many a champion of Arthur's did he slay.
Said Arthur, "Not to injure thee came I hither, but to seek for the prisoner that is with thee."
But Kay, snatching a billet out of the pile, placed the log between her two hands, and she squeezed it so that it became a twisted coil.
"It will be easy for me to compass this, although thou mayest think that it will not be easy.
'A wrong acknowledged,' as some one has said, 'becomes an obligation.'" He looked straight into the girl's eyes as he said this, and his gaze was altogether too strong for her, so the lashes fell.
For once I have found a real live man, full of manliness.
In a few moments whom did they see, coming toward them down the path, but Brandon, who had delivered his message and continued his walk.
I flatter you by giving you one hour with her to be heels over head in love.
Brandon was disinclined to return.
It is this: Whatever makes others unhappy is wrong; whatever makes the world happier is good.
When he saw whom he was about to meet, he quickly turned in another direction.
"Wait until you see her," I answered, "and you will be one of them, also.
I flush up hot, even now, when I think of it.
When the king is a Catholic I go to Mass; since, praised be the Lord, I have brains enough not to let my head interfere with the set ways of a stone wall.
I positively thank you for the rebuke.
Brandon started off and soon found a bevy of girls sitting on some benches under a spreading oak, weaving spring flowers.
"Jane is right; it was what I deserved.
But lacking those outside monitors, one must all the more cultivate the habit of constant inlooking and self-examination.
The men of the court must be poor creatures."
The priests say so much, but tell us so little. They talk about St. Peter and St. Paul, and a host of other saints and holy fathers and what-nots, but fail to tell us what we need every moment of our lives; that is, how to know the right when we see it, and how to do it; and how to know the wrong and how to avoid it.
"Jane is right," exclaimed Mary, whose temper, if short, was also short-lived, and whose kindly heart always set her right if she but gave it a little time.
I hope you are right about the possibilities for good, but you do not know. Wait until you have seen more of me."
They say Buckingham is beside himself for love of her.
Of what use is it to argue the equality of human kind to a man who honestly thinks he is better than any one else, or to one who really believes that some one else is better than he; and why dispute about the various ways of saving one's soul, when you are not even sure you have a soul to save?
"I don't know, but I think I should like it--from some persons," he replied, looking ever so innocent.
Don't put me down with them, Caskoden, if you would remain my friend."
I fear I tried to convey the impression that it was her exalted rank only which made her look unfavorably upon my passion, and suppressed the fact that she had laughed at me good humoredly, and put me off as she would have thrust a poodle from her lap.
Mary is coming! Mary!
I promised solemnly and have always kept my word, as this true, gracious woman, so full of faults and beauties, virtues and failings, has, ever since that day and moment, kept hers.
I wonder if there is really and truly any good in me, and if you have read me aright." Then looking up at him with a touch of consternation: "Or are you laughing at me?"
If we are only brave enough to confront our faults and look them in the face, ugly as they are, we shall be sure to overcome the worst of them.
But the burning!
"I am sure that I am right; you have glorious capacities for good, but alas! corresponding possibilities for evil.
You see, I had begun to make love to Jane almost before I was off my knees to Mary, and, therefore, I had not been much hurt in Mary's case.
Who is he?
The queen can wait."
Brandon was known to the queen and several of the ladies, although he had not been formally presented at an audience.
Some stubborn spirit of opposition, however, prompted him to pretend ignorance.
"The insolent wretch!" cried one.
"How do you do, Master Brandon?" said Lady Jane, holding out her plump little hand, so white and soft, and dear to me.
There is nothing in life worth having compared with it for all its pains and agonies.
Brandon, of course, had to submit when led by so sweet a captor--anybody would.
I assure you she is not used to such treatment.
Is he not?" I assented; and Brandon continued: "A man who will make such a fool of himself about a woman is woefully weak.
So I talked a great deal and found myself infinitely pleased with Brandon's conversational powers, which were rare; being no less than the capacity for saying nothing, and listening politely to an infinite deal of the same thing, in another form, from me.
One has to learn that by trying.
Was there ever so glorious a calm after such a storm?
The Lady Mary had seen him, however, and told Jane to run forward and bring him to her.
Man's love was so cheap and plentiful that it had no value in her eyes, and it looked as if she would lose the best thing in life by having too much of it.
"Is the Princess Mary a person of so little consequence about the court that she is not known to a mighty captain of the guard?"
I blush for what I did and said. Forgive me, sir, and let us start anew." At this she stepped up to Brandon and offered him her hand, which he, dropping to his knee, kissed most gallantly.
Why, man, she is the sister of the king, and is sought by kings and emperors.
This troubled me a great deal, and the best I could hope was that she held me on probation.
"Master Brandon, the princess wishes to see you." Then, maliciously: "You will suffer this time.
She had not noticed his face.
She could not help that God had seen fit to make her the fairest being on earth, and the responsibility would have to lie where it belonged--with God; Mary would have none of it.
I value you too highly to lose, and esteem you too much to torment.
In the course of my talk with Brandon I had, as I have said, told him the story of Mary, with some slight variations and coloring, or rather discoloring, to make it appear a little less to my discredit than the barefaced truth would have been.
"I fear you are right, as to the reverse, at any rate; and the worst of it is, I shall never be able to choose a man to help me, but shall sooner or later be compelled to marry the creature who will pay the greatest price."
She flushed and said with a smile that brought the dimples:
I cannot believe the fault lies at my door, and I hope for her own sake that her highness, on second thought, will realize how ungentle and unkind some one else has been." And with a sweeping courtesy he walked quickly down the path.
"As to knowing right and wrong," replied Brandon, "I think I can give you a rule which, although it may not cover the whole ground, is excellent for every-day use.
I truly wish to be good more than I desire anything else in the world.
"Oh, but you must come; perhaps she will not scold this time," and she put her hand upon his arm, and laughingly drew him along.
Her faults were rather those of education than of nature.
"Then those mythological compliments," continued Mary, "don't you dislike them?"
We are going to the queen at the marble landing.
Now tell us all you know.
I am sure, however, she is not here, for I doubt not she would have given a gentle answer to a message from the queen.
We can but try, and if we fail altogether, there is still virtue in every futile effort toward the right."
She told the princess who he was; of his terrible duel with Judson; his bravery and adventures in the wars; his generous gift to his brother and sisters, and lastly, "Sir Edwin says he is the best-read man in the court, and the bravest, truest heart in Christendom."
You see I tell you frankly that I won her, and conceal nothing, so far as Jane and I are concerned, for the purpose of holding you in suspense.
He wore his guardsman's doublet, and she knew his rank by his uniform.
Heavenly was Wendy's word.
"And you could darn our clothes, and make pockets for us.
He thought them very over-rated persons.
Isn't there?"
"I think," she said, "it is perfectly lovely the way you talk about girls; John there just despises us."
Hide!
"Wendy," he continued, in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, "Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys."
He had become frightfully cunning.
"Yes, I'm sweet, oh, I am sweet!" said Peter, forgetting his manners again.
How could she resist.
Think of mummy!
Here Michael, encouraged by his success, breathed so loudly that they were nearly detected.
"It's all right," John announced, emerging from his hiding-place.
"Is that all?"
"Look at me!"
"It was exactly as if someone were pulling my hair."
Peter gave Wendy a hand at first, but had to desist, Tink was so indignant.
You see we have no female companionship."
For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
Tinker Bell answered insolently.
They were together in the armchair by this time, and Wendy plied him with more questions.
"And, Wendy, there are mermaids."
But Liza was dense.
Besides, I wasn't crying."
To this Tink replied in these words, "You silly ass," and disappeared into the bathroom.
"Where are you going?" she cried with misgiving.
Nana knew that kind of breathing, and she tried to drag herself out of Liza's clutches.
But Wendy hesitated.
"Tink," said Peter amiably, "this lady says she wishes you were her fairy."
He had to translate.
The loveliest tinkle as of golden bells answered him.
"Yes," he said rather sharply.
Wendy, however, felt at once that she was in the presence of a tragedy.
"Let me go!" she ordered him.
"Do you really think so, Peter?"
"I wasn't crying about mothers," he said rather indignantly.
I'm captain."
Peter thimbled her, and almost immediately she screeched.
Listen to their gentle breathing."
"You just think lovely wonderful thoughts," Peter explained, "and they lift you up in the air."
In another moment she had burst into the dining-room of 27 and flung up her paws to heaven, her most expressive way of making a communication.
"With the lost boys."
In a tremble they opened the street door.
He felt for the first time that it was a shortish name.
"Of course it's awfully fascinating!" she cried. "Peter, would you teach John and Michael to fly too?"
"What's sewn?" he asked.
He was quite a practical boy.
"I'll teach you."
"How sweet!" cried Wendy.
Then Wendy saw the shadow on the floor, looking so draggled, and she was frightfully sorry for Peter.
Every one of the little angels sound asleep in bed.
"No, I'm not."
Michael was up by this time also, looking as sharp as a knife with six blades and a saw, but Peter suddenly signed silence.
"Don't have a mother," he said.
"Mermaids!" said Peter again.
O Wendy, your mother was telling you such a lovely story."
Of course she was very pleased to be asked, but she said, "Oh dear, I can't.
How exactly like a boy!
"If you like," he said indifferently, and she ran to John and Michael and shook them.
"It has come off?"
She asked where he lived.
"It's like this." She kissed him.
"You're dreadfully ignorant."
"Peter Pan."
"Oh, do come out of that jug, and tell me, do you know where they put my shadow?"
"Sometimes I do still."
"Ought to be?
Not one of them could fly an inch, though even Michael was in words of two syllables, and Peter did not know A from Z.
"Look at me!"
She even tried to make her heart go softly.
"And I know you meant to be kind," she said, relenting, "so you may give me a kiss."
"Oh," cried Wendy, "to see a mermaid!"
"How topping!" said John and Michael.
She was not alarmed to see a stranger crying on the nursery floor; she was only pleasantly interested.
Then everything was right.
"My father?" inquired Valentine, uneasily.
At the foot of the stairs, Valentine found Barrois awaiting her.
"The same as usual, my dear, my glass is there on the table--give it to me, Valentine." Valentine poured the orangeade into a glass and gave it to her grandmother with a certain degree of dread, for it was the same glass she fancied that had been touched by the spectre.
"Antoinette is very well," he said, "and Madeleine tolerably so.
Where is Valentine, sir?
It is on her account I am here; I wish to see Valentine." Villefort thought it would be terrible to reply that Valentine was at a ball; so he only said that she had gone out with her step-mother, and that she should be fetched.
"My child," exclaimed the old lady sharply, "let us hear none of the conventional objections that deter weak minds from preparing for the future.
After remaining for a short time in the parterre surrounding the house, and gathering a rose to place in her waist or hair, she turned into the dark avenue which led to the bench; then from the bench she went to the gate. As usual, Valentine strolled for a short time among her flowers, but without gathering them.
You know the calamity that has happened to us, do you not?"
"Yes," said Valentine, "he was very fond of me."
She then turned towards the avenue.
"So little was it a dream, that I stretched my hand towards the bell; but when I did so, the shade disappeared; my maid then entered with a light."
Villefort left her to the care of the women, while old Barrois ran, half-scared, to his master; for nothing frightens old people so much as when death relaxes its vigilance over them for a moment in order to strike some other old person.
I also was married at the death-bed of my mother, and certainly I have not been less happy on that account."
"And what did you do then?"
"Oh, madame," said Villefort, deeply affected, in spite of himself, "do not yield to those gloomy thoughts; you will long live with us, happy, loved, and honored, and we will make you forget"--
"Yes."
"Leave me--go!"
The poor child appeared herself to require the doctor she had recommended to her aged relative.
I wish to tell him to make my child happy; I wish to read in his eyes whether he intends to obey me;--in fact, I will know him--I will!" continued the old lady, with a fearful expression, "that I may rise from the depths of my grave to find him, if he should not fulfil his duty!"
I saw a white figure, and as if to prevent my discrediting the testimony of only one of my senses, I heard my glass removed--the same which is there now on the table."
"No," he murmured, "none of my enemies would have waited so patiently and laboriously for so long a space of time, that they might now come and crush me with this secret.
"Oh, I dare not--she forbade my sending for you; and, as you say, I am myself agitated, feverish and out of sorts.
All this was said with such exceeding rapidity, that there was something in the conversation that seemed like the beginning of delirium.
"Immediately; but, as I have told you, it was too late."
"Still?--Always!
Chapter 72.
We must be expeditious. And then I also wish to see a notary, that I may be assured that all our property returns to Valentine."
Is that what you wish for?"
It must have been delirium; she fancies, too, that she saw a phantom enter her chamber and even heard the noise it made on touching her glass."
Oh, how feverish you are; we must not send for a notary, but for a doctor."
"Go, Valentine," said Madame de Saint-Meran, "and leave me with this gentleman."
But Villefort uttered words which even he himself did not believe.
But this is not to the purpose,--our business concerns Valentine, let us leave the dead in peace."
"Never, never, never," said the marchioness.
She was thinking of the despair of Maximilian, when he should be informed that Madame de Saint-Meran, instead of being an ally, was unconsciously acting as his enemy.
but, like a phosphoric light, they rise but to mislead.
"God has supported me through all; and then, my dear marquis, he would certainly have done everything for me that I performed for him.
Villefort had secluded himself, not to study, but to reflect; and with the door locked and orders given that he should not be disturbed excepting for important business, he sat down in his arm-chair and began to ponder over the events, the remembrance of which had during the last eight days filled his mind with so many gloomy thoughts and bitter recollections.
"From an apoplectic stroke."
"A doctor?" said she, shrugging her shoulders, "I am not ill; I am thirsty--that is all."
"Oh, father, some misfortune has happened!"
the tie is even more direct, it seems to me."
"But she saw no one?"
Barrois, who wished to go to bed himself, observed that after such sad events every one stood in need of rest.
Then, instead of plunging into the mass of documents piled before him, he opened the drawer of his desk, touched a spring, and drew out a parcel of cherished memoranda, amongst which he had carefully arranged, in characters only known to himself, the names of all those who, either in his political career, in money matters, at the bar, or in his mysterious love affairs, had become his enemies.
"Yes, madame," replied Villefort, "it is not only projected but arranged."
I cannot cry; at my age they say that we have no more tears,--still I think that when one is in trouble one should have the power of weeping.
"And I tell you, sir, that you are mistaken.
"No," she replied, "it is for my poor grandmother.
"The notary!" she exclaimed, "let him come in."
"What are your grandmother's symptoms?"
You would not have me marry under such sad auspices?"
"Without that, what would become of me?"
We need not say which portion of the garden was her favorite walk.
"Tell him I will come when I leave my dear grandmamma," she replied, feeling, with true delicacy, that the person to whom she could be of the most service just then was Madame de Saint-Meran.
"Suddenly?"
"But, grandmamma"--
"A week ago," continued Madame de Saint-Meran, "we went out together in the carriage after dinner.
"This instant, sir--this instant, I beseech you!" said the old lady.
This night I have had a fearful sleep.
"Who does not love you?" Valentine smiled sadly.
"In her room with the notary."
"Well, that's what puzzles me," replied Danglars; "the news of the return of Don Carlos was brought by telegraph."
"Not the least in the world."
Oh, as I told you before, I think the old fellow is very close."
"Well, such things have been."
"That there should be a famine!"
But touching these Spanish affairs, I think that the baroness did not dream the whole of the Don Carlos matter.
"Oh, it is all my wife's fault.
"It is an unheard-of fatality.
"I am sure of it."
"Very good, very good!
"And you have heard his fortune mentioned?"
"Go on."
"Come, you do not flatter him."
"Recollect the seven fat and the seven lean kine."
Never a mistake or delay--a fellow who paid like a prince. Well, I was a million in advance with him, and now my fine Jacopo Manfredi suspends payment!"
She dreamed Don Carlos had returned to Spain; she believes in dreams.
"Ah, he has a palace?" said Danglars, laughing; "come, that is something."
"I acknowledge I would have given anything to find it out."
"How so?"
"I? oh, I would advance six millions on his signature.
Monte Cristo nodded his head in token of assent.
I have made up the loss of blood by nutrition.
"You do not mean to say that it would not be a good match?"
"I scarcely know him; I think I have seen him three times in my life; all I know relating to him is through Busoni and himself.
"Well, when I was a clerk, Morcerf was a mere fisherman."
"Well, what then?"
By the way, this is merely a simple question, when this sort of people marry their sons, do they give them any fortune?"
"But you understand that if the young man should want a few thousands more"--
I was uneasy about him."
"So that," said Monte Cristo, "you have lost nearly 1,700,000 francs this month."
"Exactly so."
"No; I am safe for a few days at least.
The first time I saw him he appeared to me like an old lieutenant who had grown mouldy under his epaulets.
I have heard that name in Greece."
Chapter 66.
"Then, why did you think of giving your daughter to him?"
"Tell me, have you ever thought that seven times 1,700,000 francs make nearly twelve millions?
"So he has; but I like mine as well."
On this conviction I allow her to speculate, she having her bank and her stockbroker; she speculated and lost.
"It is usual, certainly; but Cavalcanti is an original who does nothing like other people.
I was only speaking in reference to the second-rate fortunes we were mentioning just now."
"You are sure?"
"Because it is the air she always breathed in her youth." Monte Cristo took no notice of this ill-natured remark.
"Do you think so?"
A minute after the door by which the priest had entered reopened, and Monte Cristo appeared.
"Let us imagine seven such months," continued Monte Cristo, in the same tone.
Do you want money?
"Would you not trust the Cavalcanti?"
"Yes; only 700,000 francs out of my cash-box--nothing more!"
"Yes, I heard it spoken of, but I did not know the details, and then no one can be more ignorant than I am of the affairs in the Bourse."
"Excellent; he presented himself this morning with a bond of 40,000 francs, payable at sight, on you, signed by Busoni, and returned by you to me, with your indorsement--of course, I immediately counted him over the forty bank-notes."
"Never mind; accept my thanks for the client you have sent me.
"Give him money, if he is recommended to you, and the recommendation seems good."
"Then you really lost by that affair in Spain?"
"What a bad calculator you are!" exclaimed Danglars, calling to his assistance all his philosophy and dissimulation.
"Because you met him at my house, just after his introduction into the world, as they told me.
Monte Cristo was at home; only he was engaged with some one and begged Danglars to wait for a moment in the drawing-room.
For example, supposing it were the daughter of a banker, he might take an interest in the house of the father-in-law of his son; then again, if he disliked his choice, the major takes the key, double-locks his coffer, and Master Andrea would be obliged to live like the sons of a Parisian family, by shuffling cards or rattling the dice."
"Then you believe the papers?"
"I?--How could I speculate when I already have so much trouble in regulating my income?
"That's three to you," I said icily.
"Oh, is it like rounders?"
Still she aimed....
"This will want a lot of chalk," I said pleasantly to Celia, and gave it plenty.
"Am I winning?"
As long as you hit it on the red part."
They're both the same shape."
The white travelled slowly up the table.
"I thought it was.
"I think," I said, "I'll try and screw in off the red." (I did this once by accident and I've always wanted to do it again.) "Or perhaps," I corrected myself, as soon as the ball had left me, "I had better give a safety miss."
"Not much.
There, what's that?"
"Well, what do I do first?"
"Does it matter where I hit the red?"
I went to the table.
"Yes.
With Celia's ball nicely over the other pocket there was a chance of my twenty break.
I get one."
"A-ha!" I said.
"Somebody who had black hair," I said.
That was a week ago.
I'm sickening for something as it is."
"I haven't," I confessed.
"Now then," she said at last, "I am going to take you in hand.
I am going as Charlemagne."
"Then you really are coming?" said Queen Elizabeth.
I opened the box.
"William and Mary.
I leave it to you, partner, only don't go a black suit."
I should have----"
I should wear a brown perkin--I mean jerkin."
Anyhow, they can't prove he didn't, seeing when he lived.
Think how cool that will be."
I've practically got the costume, I'm going as Harold the Boy Earl, or Jessica's last--Hallo, there's my bus; I've got a cold, I mustn't keep it waiting.
"What!
I am going as a humming bird.
"Well," she said, "have you got your things?"
Queen Elizabeth regarded me as sternly as she might have regarded--Well, I'm not very good at history.
Anyhow, I don't think it's a very becoming figure."
"But you don't wear fancy dress simply because it's becoming."
"Don't be rough with me or I shall cry.
"Hang it," I protested, "it's something to have been measured for the wig."
Now that would be an original costume.
Or else as Winston Churchill.
Will you trust yourself entirely to me?"
You haven't----"
A yellow waistcoat, pink breeches, and--no, it's not an eider-down, it's a coat.
Yes, I thought so.
"Do you mean to say," cried Elizabeth, "that you have altered again?"
"Anyhow," I added indignantly a minute later, "I swear I'm going somehow."
Good-bye." And I fled.
"To the death, Your Majesty.
By-the-way, I suppose all these people wore pumps and white kid gloves all right?
"What as?"
"I am going," I said, "as Julius Cæsar.
"I don't know at all--something with a cold.
"I say, don't say that," I began nervously, "I've done an awful lot, really.
I've got an awful cold."
"Oh, more than that," I said quickly.
"Then you've no business to go as Julius Cæsar."
I am going as Joseph.
"Gents' large medium, I am."
A day on the sofa in a darkened room and bed at seven o'clock was my programme.
Bother, they've forgotten the strop."
And then my eye caught a great box of clothes, and I remembered that the dance was to-night.
"Well, it may not be a butcher," said Elizabeth; "it depends what they've got."
It was a week later that I met Elizabeth in Regent Street.
"Yes, I really am," I sighed.
There's no need for you to be anything historical; you might be a butcher."
"Very well then, if you don't like Henry, what about Edward I?"
Can you think of anybody for me?"
"You've done nothing," said Elizabeth, "absolutely nothing."
For a moment Elizabeth was speechless--not at all my idea of the character.
"I should never be able to pronounce that," I confessed.
And I was going to-morrow to order the clothes."
"Charlemagne in half-mourning, because Pepin the Short had just died. Something quiet in grey, with a stripe I thought.
He was practically bald.
"I forgot who you said you were going as?"
I am going--yes, that's it, I am going back to bed.
"I say, now you're trying to unsettle me.
"Have you been measured for your wig?"
Only half-mourning because he only got half the throne.
Let's see; you like it cut on the cross, I think?
"You might go as one of the Kings of England.
"Do you think I should get a lot of partners as Henry VIII?
"Don't be ridiculous.
"Then I shall certainly touch him for a cigarette," I said, as I got up to go.
"But why do you want to thrust royalty on me?
"Quite--blue is my colour.
"What about Richelieu?"
"Well, that is rather the point to settle.
"I was really going this afternoon, only--only it's early closing day. Besides, I wanted to see if my cold would get better.
Instead of curly eyes and blue hair.
Why not Henry VIII?"
DRESSING UP
"Then I'll order a costume for you and have it sent round.
Help!
Because if it didn't---- Look here, I'll be frank with you.
You should not have done it, and we out of the same convent...."
The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder.
For the trick was pretty efficiently done.
Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me the like.
You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband.
I prefer the situation as it is." Half the time Florence would ignore Leonora's remarks.
For I hate Florence.
God knows!
She would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness--treating the subject from the bright, American point of view.
And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence that is alone....
No.
Leonora, with panic growing and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every one of the public rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the lounge, the schreibzimmer, the winter garden.
For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse.
Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition for the poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs Maidan's room.
It feels just nothing at all.
It was playing it too low down.
I don't know....
It is not Hell, certainly it is not necessarily Heaven.
She figured it out to amount to that.
Good people, be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each other.
That would be the sort of way she would begin.
It was almost as if she were trying to convey to Florence, through me, that she would seriously harm my wife if Florence went to something that was an extreme.
And the immense plain is the hand of God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above it and below it.
He imagined that he had seen her come back, but he was not quite certain.
But even that could not stop Florence.
He needed, she said, tenderness beyond anything.
And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she began a search for Mrs Maidan herself--all over the hotel.
She would leave Edward to Florence and to me--and she would devote all her time to providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she could be returned to her poor young husband.
I am going straight back to Bunny...." Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.
It is not my business to think about it.
She had not the hot passions of these Europeans.
And what chance had I against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal their hands from me?
And Edward would have sentimentally assured her that there was nothing in it; that Maisie was just a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim his wife had paid out of her own pocket.
What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of M---- had been this:
They were three to one--and they made me happy.
He soon got over it.
"You may outrage me as you will; you may take all that I personally possess, but do not you care to say one single thing in view of the situation that that will set up--against the faith that makes me become the doormat for your feet."
It seemed to her to be all unspeakable.
I am as much a scoundrel as you.
Yes, I remember thinking at the time that it was almost as if Leonora were saying, through me to Florence:
Limbo.
"Yes, you would give him up.
What do they call it?
No one in the large hotel had bothered his head about the child.
What earthly chance?
I don't like to be reminded of it."
It is very terrible....
How could you buy me from my husband?
And you would go on writing to each other in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms.
You understand she had not committed suicide.
You never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted you.
"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it?
The unjust?
I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for Edward.
And Leonora would answer--for she put up with this outrage for years--Leonora, as I understand, would answer something like:
She had determined to take that child right away from that hideous place.
She should not have done it.
I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her an eternity of loneliness.
But upon an immense plain, suspended in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of them clasped close in an intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary.
She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first.
He never could bear the sight of a corpse.
"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's name again.
That was how she figured it out to herself. She really thought that....
He always called me a little rat in private, and I did not mind.
I do not mean to say that she was not quite cool about it. Leonora was always Leonora.
That was the cross that she had to take up during her long Calvary of a life....
Her heart had just stopped.
She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of district visiting.
We stayed two days at Streatley, and got our clothes washed.
We could not take our eyes off the fish after that.
It excited George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view of it.
"No," he continues thoughtfully; "I shouldn't believe it myself if anybody told it to me, but it's a fact, for all that.
I never knew anybody catch anything, up the Thames, except minnows and dead cats, but that has nothing to do, of course, with fishing!
And then he went on, and told us how it had taken him half an hour to land it, and how it had broken his rod.
In fact, at first glance, I thought it was a cod.
We had tried washing them ourselves, in the river, under George's superintendence, and it had been a failure.
When he had really caught three small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two dozen.
For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish--you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it.
After that it came out, somehow or other, that we were strangers in the neighbourhood, and that we were going away the next morning.
We went into the parlour and sat down.
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake.
It did used to knock me over a bit at first, but, lor love you! me and the missus we listens to 'em all day now.
All it says is the place is "a good station for fishing;" and, from what I have seen of the district, I am quite prepared to bear out this statement.
Good-night, gentlemen, good-night."
"Well, it's a most remarkable thing--most remarkable," answered the stolid stranger, laughing; "because, as a matter of fact, you are quite right.
There was an old fellow there, smoking a long clay pipe, and we naturally began chatting.
The river abounds in pike, roach, dace, gudgeon, and eels, just here; and you can sit and fish for them all day.
It really was a most astonishing trout.
I had been sitting there all the afternoon and had caught literally nothing--except a few dozen dace and a score of jack; and I was just about giving it up as a bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull at the line.
So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with.
All the dirt contained in the river between Reading and Henley, we collected, during that wash, and worked it into our clothes.
A sturgeon! a forty pound sturgeon!
I had not got sufficient imagination.
He lets the youngsters brag away for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he removes the pipe from his mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out against the bars:
Hang me, if I could move the rod!
Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.
Before we had washed them, they had been very, very dirty, it is true; but they were just wearable.
There is no spot in the world where you can get more fishing, or where you can fish for a longer period.
That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments--I say a thousand, but they may have only been nine hundred.
"Yes, sir," replied the genial old fellow.
We were strangers in the neighbourhood.
They said that as a poet, or a shilling shocker, or a reporter, or anything of that kind, I might be satisfactory, but that, to gain any position as a Thames angler, would require more play of fancy, more power of invention than I appeared to possess.
I reached him at last, and what do you think it was?
And, if you go for a bathe, they crowd round, and get in your way, and irritate you.
"Well, I had a haul on Tuesday evening that it's not much good my telling anybody about."
I am not a good fisherman myself.
"Oh! why's that?" they ask.
So he has to go on by himself without any encouragement.
I asked the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did not injure him, sometimes, listening to the tales that the fishermen about there told him; and he said:
Dear me, it's really a most remarkable thing."
"No," we told him.
I did not count them.
"Oh, no; not now, sir.
But the twenty-five per cent.
But fancy your guessing it like that.
"I beg your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty that we--perfect strangers in the neighbourhood--are taking, but my friend here and myself would be so much obliged if you would tell us how you caught that trout up there."
But they are not to be "had" by a bit of worm on the end of a hook, nor anything like it--not they!
They said they would consider the idea if the number were doubled, and each fish counted as twenty.
"I caught him just below the lock--leastways, what was the lock then--one Friday afternoon; and the remarkable thing about it is that I caught him with a fly.
He went in his turn, and when he was gone, the landlord came in to us. We told him the various histories we had heard about his trout, and he was immensely amused, and we all laughed very heartily.
"I hope not," said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
He comes in quietly with his hat on, appropriates the most comfortable chair, lights his pipe, and commences to puff in silence.
taken on a line, sir!
plan did not work well at all.
He said that bringing home that trout had saved him from a whacking, and that even his school-master had said it was worth the rule-of-three and practice put together.
The legal gentlemen present immediately manifested great interest in these.
"God bless me!" exclaimed Mr. Quarterpage.
"He did," agreed Breton.
"But I may as well tell you that I have a strong belief that they'll reveal a good deal that nobody dreams of, so take the greatest care of them."
Then, without waiting for further talk with any one, Spargo hurried Breton out of the cemetery.
Where, then, in heaven's name?"
Dear me--dear me!--and you really believe that Chamberlayne is actually alive, Mr. Spargo?"
THE CONTENTS OF THE COFFIN
"We are going to seal them up at once, and take them to London," replied the principal person in authority.
Mr. Quarterpage set down decanter and glass and hastened to give Breton his hand.
The coffin was packed to the brim with sawdust, tightly pressed down. The surface lay smooth, undisturbed, levelled as some hand had levelled it long years before.
But Spargo shook his head.
"With what?"
At the gate, he seized him by the arm.
Quarterpage," he said, "this young gentleman is, without doubt, John Maitland's son.
He was led away, sir, led away by Chamberlayne.
Nobody knew anything about him until he came to this town, and yet before he had been here very long he had contrived to ingratiate himself with everybody--of course, to his own advantage.
Mr. Quarterpage shook his head sadly.
He watched all that was done.
"Elphick has a queer little place where he and Cardlestone sometimes go fishing--right away up in one of the wildest parts of the Yorkshire moors.
"You don't, indeed!" said Spargo.
"For a few minutes only then, Mr. Quarterpage," said Spargo as they followed the old man into his dining-room.
I expect they've gone there.
And--possibly--you, too, would like to be up just as early."
The sound of the laughter broke the spell. The chief official present looked round him with a smile.
Nothing would satisfy him but that the two should go in; his family, he said, had just retired, but he himself was going to take a final nightcap and a cigar, and they must share it.
Mr. Quarterpage looked an enquiry over the top of a decanter which he was handling.
Come on--quick!"
Mr. Quarterpage himself came to the door, and recognized Spargo immediately.
"Done it cleverly," he remarked, looking round.
"They will be quite safe, Mr. Spargo; have no fear.
"They're down to it!" whispered Breton.
"We have to be up at daybreak.
"And yet--what is it we shall know if----"
"Then this fellow Chamberlayne must have been the man," said Spargo. "He came to Market Milcaster from the north.
He, too, laughed.
A man at the head of the coffin, a man at the foot suddenly and swiftly raised the lid: the men gathered round craned their necks with a quick movement.
And the people actively concerned went quietly to work, and those who could do nothing but watch stood around in silence.
Presently they all went and looked down into the grave.
There was something else.
And as to wishing you well--ah, I never wished anything but well to your poor father.
"If--what?"
"Here is no dead body, gentlemen.
Spargo looked at Breton, who had already given him permission to speak. "Mr.
"That I will indeed!
"You think he was unduly influenced by him?"
What'll be done with those papers?" he asked, turning to the officials.
And I'm sure you'll shake hands with him and wish him well."
"It is evident that there were good grounds for suspicion," he remarked.
He was not at all astonished to see these things.
It seems a strange, strange thing to interfere with a dead man's last resting-place--a dreadful thing."
"We shall all know whether he was buried in that grave before another six hours are over, Mr. Quarterpage," he said.
We have managed to get an order from the Home Secretary for the exhumation of Chamberlayne's body: the officials in charge of it have come down in the same train with us; we're all staying across there at the 'Dragon.' The officials have gone to make the proper arrangements with your authorities.
"You promised to tell me something--a great deal, you said--if we found that coffin empty.
"All right.
"All!
"The coffin's weighted with lead!" he remarked.
"He insists on it."
"Lift the lid off!"
"Turn it out!"
Clever!"
And this other young gentleman?"
That's all."
"Clear out all the sawdust," said some one.
JAMES CARTWRIGHT CHAMBERLAYNE Born 1852 Died 1891
The first bundle of papers opened evidently related to transactions at Market Milcaster: Spargo caught glimpses of names that were familiar to him, Mr. Quarterpage's amongst them.
It seemed to Spargo that each man grew slower and slower in his movements; he felt that he himself was getting fidgety. Then he heard a voice of authority.
"Let's see if there's anything else."
He gave a hasty glance at these and drew Breton aside.
"Chamberlayne, my dear young sir," he answered.
Why, Mr. Spargo, supposing that coffin is found empty--what then?"
"You see how these weights have been adjusted.
"Didn't Aylmore say that the real culprit at Cloudhampton was another man--his clerk or something of that sort?"
"At daybreak?" he exclaimed.
"If there is a dead man there," said Spargo.
Sawdust!
"You think my father was worked upon by this man Chamberlayne, sir?" observed Breton a few minutes later when they had all sat down round Mr. Quarterpage's hospitable hearth.
God bless me, what a night of surprises!
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
When a body's laid out in a coffin, you know, all the weight's in the end where the head and trunk rest.
"See!"
I believe I know where Elphick and Cardlestone can be found.
Spargo pulled out his watch.
At first there was nothing to do but wait, and Spargo occupied himself by reflecting that every spadeful of earth thrown out of that grave was bringing him nearer to the truth; he had an unconquerable intuition that the truth of at any rate one phase of the Marbury case was going to be revealed to them.
See if anything lies beneath the sawdust," he added, turning to the workmen.
It is empty.
"Then," answered Spargo, "then I think we shall be able to put our hands on the man who is supposed to be in it."
It's enough.
Spargo turned away as the men began to lift the coffin out of the grave.
"My dear young sir!" he exclaimed.
I firmly believe that he twisted your father round his little finger.
Across the mouth of this bay was an island, with but a narrow passage on each side, protecting it from the southern winds, and forming with it a magnificent harbour.
"Do you swear by Moloch and Astarte to be true to this society, to devote yourself to the destruction of the oppressors of Carthage, to carry out all measures which may be determined upon, even at the certain risk of your life, and to suffer yourself to be torn to pieces by the torture rather than reveal aught that passes within these walls?"
"Yes, it were better so," Giscon said after a pause; "I dare not continue the enterprise with one who condemns the gods among us; it would be to court failure.
Most of those present spoke, but, to the surprise of Malchus, there was an entire absence of that gloom and mystery with which the idea of a state conspiracy was associated in his mind.
Malchus brings up our number here to thirty, and when all the sections are filled up we shall be ready for action.
We agreed from the first that three hundred resolute men besides ourselves were required, and that each of us should raise a section of ten.
The troops lived and slept on deck.
Its material was bronze, its shape circular.
"So far I have taken no step towards carrying out your plans, and have but listened to what you said, therefore, no harm can yet have been done. Strike my name off the list, and forget that I have been with you.
Malchus gazed at him with admiration. Fortunately an accurate description of Hannibal has come down to us.
Fortunately the weather was fair.
They were present, as a matter of course, with the army of Hannibal, but his power was so great that their influence over his proceedings was but nominal.
The war which was about to break out with Rome is called the second Punic war, but it should rather be named the war of Hannibal with Rome.
All drew their daggers, and one, whom Malchus recognized with a momentary feeling of surprise as Carthalon, whom Adherbal had pointed out at the Barcine Club as one who thought only of horse racing, said:
The young men rose and formed in a circle round Malchus.
The main body, with the Numidian horse, were to follow shortly.
Presently a blast of trumpets sounded, and the babel of voices was hushed as if by magic.
Being young he will have the advantage of being less likely to be watched, and may be doubly useful.
"Blaspheme not the gods, Malchus," Giscon said gloomily; "you may be sure that the wreath of a conquering general will never be placed around your brow if you honour them not."
I saw no more, for I shut my eyes till all was over. I tell you again, Giscon, I do not believe the gods are so cruel.
This body, all composed of young men of the best families of Carthage, were to sail in the same ship which carried Hamilcar.
A band of gold surrounded the helmet; in front were five laurel leaves in steel; at the temples two leaves of the lotus of the same metal.
The expression of the mouth was kind but firm.
I see them now, standing pale and stern, with their eyes directed to the brazen image which was soon to be sprinkled with their blood, while the priests in their scarlet robes, with the sacrificial knives in hand, approached them.
So far as was known he was without a vice.
He was ready for armed insurrection against the tyrants of Carthage, but he revolted from the thought of this plan for a midnight massacre--it was not by such means that he would have achieved the regeneration of his country.
His beard was short.
These were with difficulty kept from crowding the troops and impeding their movement by a cordon of soldiers.
"If honouring them means approval of shedding the blood of infants and captives, I will renounce all hopes of obtaining victory by their aid."
His strength and skill were far superior to those of any man in his army.
"While we were wandering up and down the little stream called Knob Creek, Abe said: 'Right up there'--pointing to the east--'we saw a covey of partridges yesterday.
"He was all right very soon.
Of course, there were no regular schools in the backwoods then.
Abe was only six, but he was a thoughtful boy.
"I went first and reached the other side all right.
AN OLD MAN'S STORY OF SAVING ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S LIFE
The boy was brought up to believe in the care of the Father in Heaven over the affairs of this life.
She would have been proud to have her boy grow up to be a traveling minister or exhorter, like Peter Cartwright, "the backwoods preacher."
There was another teacher afterward at Knob Creek--a man named Caleb Hazel.
CHAPTER III
Finally we saw a foot-log, and decided to try it.
THE BOY LINCOLN'S BEST TEACHER
Tom and the children enjoyed the story of Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City the more because of her love for the story she was reading to them, as they lay on bearskin rugs before the blazing fire.
Abe used afterward to get his playmates together and preach to them in a way that sometimes frightened them and made them cry.
Nancy Hanks Lincoln "builded better than she knew." She would have been satisfied with a cabin life for her son.
No doubt young Lincoln learned more that was useful to him in after life from the wandering preachers of his day than he did of his teachers during the few months that he was permitted to go to school.
"So I got a stick--a long water sprout--and held it out to him.
When a man who "knew enough" happened to come along, especially if he had nothing else to do, he tried to teach the children of the pioneers in a poor log schoolhouse.
After my mother and I got there, Abe and I played all through the day.
It worked like a charm; the spicewood boughs not only added to the brightness of the scene but filled the whole house with the "sweet smelling savour" of a little boy's love and gratitude.
Little is known of either of these teachers except that he taught little Abe Lincoln.
Let's go over.' The stream was too wide for us to jump across.
We promised each other that we would never tell anybody about it, and never did for years.
I never told any one of it till after Lincoln was killed."
One Sunday morning my mother waked me up early, saying she was going to see Mrs. Lincoln, and that I could go along.
We had been going to school together one year; but the next year we had no school, because there were so few scholars to attend, there being only about twenty in the school the year before.
She and her husband were too religious to believe in telling their children fairy tales.
"I once saved Lincoln's life.
Austin Gollaher, grown to manhood, still living in his old log cabin near the Lincoln house in Knob Creek nearly twenty years after Lincoln's assassination, and gave the following account of an adventure he had with the little Lincoln boy:
Abraham Lincoln's parents were religious in their simple way.
Indeed, he learned faster than any of his schoolmates. Though so young, he studied very hard."
He said:
He tried to think of some way to show his gratitude to his mother for giving them so much pleasure.
He came up, grabbing with both hands, and I put the stick into his hands.
His first teacher was Zachariah Riney.
And out of her poor, humble life, that devoted woman
At Knob Creek the boy began to go to an "A B C" school.
Although Nancy Lincoln insisted on sending the children to school, when there was any, she had a large share in Abe's early education, just as she had taught his father to write his own name.
It is not likely that little Abe went to school more than a few weeks at this time, for he never had a year's schooling in his life.
Nancy's voice was low, with soft, southern tones and accents.
Abe went about half way across, when he got scared and began trembling.
She told them Bible stories and such others as she had picked up in her barren, backwoods life.
But his best teacher was his mother.
You must know that I already had that plan myself, that plan you spoke of, just now, prosecutor!
In the meantime they had to finish what they were about.
Yet I didn't spend three thousand, but fifteen hundred.
"It's strange that you should have so completely forgotten where you threw the pieces in the market-place."
"But what need had you to 'talk rot,' as you call it?"
She's innocent, you know, she was out of her mind when she cried last night 'It's all my fault!' She's done nothing, nothing!
"Without scissors, in the street?"
I insist upon that question, Dmitri Fyodorovitch."
"I should have thought you couldn't have forgotten it?"
I did it with my fingers in one minute."
"And where did you get the needle and thread?"
"In the dark?"
Why scissors?
Is that right to your thinking, is that right?"
"Who knows it?
It's my fault, not yours.
From bravado perhaps ... at having wasted so much money....
Mihail Makarovitch and Kalganov, who had been continually in and out of the room all the while the interrogation had been going on, had now both gone out again.
"Till what happened?" put in Nikolay Parfenovitch inquisitively, but Mitya did not hear it.
I did it myself."
"That would have been filthy beyond everything!
"Why?
It was an old rag.
I've been grieving over her all night as I sat with you....
I have learnt that it's not only impossible to live a scoundrel, but impossible to die a scoundrel....
"Don't write that, anyway; have some shame.
You must have them somewhere."
"That's very interesting.
Speak out plainly now.
Every day that I had that fifteen hundred sewn up round my neck, every day and every hour I said to myself, 'You're a thief! you're a thief!' Yes, that's why I've been so savage all this month, that's why I fought in the tavern, that's why I attacked my father, it was because I felt I was a thief.
"How did you get it?"
On the contrary, we'll do everything that lies in our power in that matter. Set your mind completely at rest."
"The devil knows.
I ought not to have been so ready.
"Surely you don't think me such an out and out scoundrel as that?
In despair he hid his face in his hands.
"No one helped me.
"But that would have been so infamous!" Mitya brought his fist down on the table fiercely.
Yes, I see, I see already that you don't believe me.
"That's strange.
Tell me about her, I beseech you.
I'm ready."
That's where I got that money yesterday...."
The prosecutor ceased speaking.
Enough of it!" said Mitya, losing his temper at last.
So I kept thinking every day, suppose she were to make up her mind all of a sudden, suppose she were to leave off tormenting me, and were suddenly to say to me, 'I love you, not him; take me to the other end of the world.' And I'd only forty copecks; how could I take her away, what could I do?
"I don't know whether for certain.
It's not easy to believe that it could cost you such distress to confess such a secret....
Oh, of course, I don't know how to make these fine distinctions ... but a thief is lower than a scoundrel, that's my conviction.
"May I look out of the window?" he asked Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly.
"But excuse me: where and when did you take it off your neck?
"I see you don't believe me!
The prosecutor, too, stared.
"Goodness only knows what it was.
An old piece of calico, washed a thousand times."
I see that from your eyes.
The lights had been extinguished long ago.
You cried out, just now, that Siberia would be better than confessing it ..."
I don't know where they are."
We must pass to examining the witnesses without delay.
Surely she need not be ruined with me?
Why, I'd be lost.
Did I let any one count it?"
But not from my father.
"Have mercy, gentlemen!" Mitya flung up his hands.
"I know you know her.
And it was only when I tore it off that I became a downright thief, a thief and a dishonest man for the rest of my life.
"Not at all.
Damn you, you torturers!"
But still I'm not a thief?
Do you mean absolutely no one?"
"Can you sew?"
No knowledge was needed to do that."
Has no one, absolutely no one, heard from you of that money you sewed up?
Oh, that did torture me, but not in the same way: not so much as the damned consciousness that I had torn that damned money off my breast at last and spent it, and had become a downright thief!
Because I had condemned myself to die at five o'clock this morning, here, at dawn.
You're unworthy even to know of that.
That, I must tell you, is almost impossible to believe."
"Well, you see, all bear witness to it.
"I told no one."
I suppose you still regard that security as of value?"
"In that case your landlady will remember that the thing was lost?"
"Shouldn't we have some tea first?" interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch, "I think we've deserved it!"
"I am beginning to understand you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch," the prosecutor said slowly, in a soft and almost compassionate tone.
Mitya thought of "Phoebus the golden-haired," and how he had meant to shoot himself at his first ray. "Perhaps it would be even better on a morning like this," he thought with a smile, and suddenly, flinging his hand downwards, he turned to his "torturers."
"And from whom did you ... appropriate it?"
"Damnation, what nonsense!
The next morning she found her grandmother in bed; the fever had not abated, on the contrary her eyes glistened and she appeared to be suffering from violent nervous irritability.
It was one o'clock in the morning.
Meanwhile, Barrois had returned for the first time to old Noirtier, who having heard the noise in the house, had, as we have said, sent his old servant to inquire the cause; on his return, his quick intelligent eye interrogated the messenger.
"In every respect."
Consequently, Valentine came up to Noirtier, on leaving Madame de Saint-Meran, who in the midst of her grief had at last yielded to fatigue and fallen into a feverish sleep. Within reach of her hand they placed a small table upon which stood a bottle of orangeade, her usual beverage, and a glass.
"I know what I am saying," continued the marchioness; "I must hurry you, so that, as she has no mother, she may at least have a grandmother to bless her marriage.
I will go and take a turn in the garden to recover myself." The doctor pressed Valentine's hand, and while he visited her grandmother, she descended the steps.
I shall die of it; oh, yes, I shall certainly die of it!"
"Yes; but then he could tell of what complaint the poor marquis had died."
He drew back the bolt of his door, and almost directly an old lady entered, unannounced, carrying her shawl on her arm, and her bonnet in her hand.
"Go upstairs," she said to the doctor.
Well, before dying, I wish to see my son-in-law.
Villefort rose, and ran towards his mother-in-law, for it was she.
"Does he not dislike the idea of marrying the granddaughter of a Jacobin?"
Valentine instantly ran down.
Villefort placed the arm of Madame de Saint-Meran within his own, and conducted her to his apartment.
A bright spot burned in either cheek, her respiration was short and difficult, and her pulse beat with feverish excitement.
As she advanced she fancied she heard a voice speaking her name.
Villefort drew back, and clasping his hands together, exclaimed--"Dead!--so suddenly?"
"Ah, grandmamma," murmured Valentine, pressing her lips on the burning brow, "do you wish to kill me?
"And the same love for you--eh, my dear child?"
However, among all the incoherent details given to me by the Abbe Busoni and by Lord Wilmore, by that friend and that enemy, one thing appears certain and clear in my opinion--that in no period, in no case, in no circumstance, could there have been any contact between him and me."
"We expect him every moment."
"What are you drinking, dear grandmamma?"
"The same."
It was the soul of my husband!--Well, if my husband's soul can come to me, why should not my soul reappear to guard my granddaughter?
"Yes, I wish to speak to him." Valentine durst not oppose her grandmother's wish, the cause of which she did not know, and an instant afterwards Villefort entered.
"No, my child, no," said Madame de Saint-Meran; "but I was impatiently waiting for your arrival, that I might send for your father."
"And you?"
"Oh, sir," she said; "oh, sir, what a misfortune!
"Why, what can have happened?" he exclaimed, "what has thus disturbed you?
"An apoplectic stroke?" repeated the doctor.
"My dear grandmother," interrupted Valentine, "consider decorum--the recent death.
"Doubt, if you please, but I am sure of what I say.
"Where is she?"
"Phantoms are visible to those only who ought to see them.
As soon as he arrives inform me.
"Is regarded with universal esteem."
"Yes," replied the invalid.
She soon whispered to her husband, "I think it would be better for me to retire, with your permission, for the sight of me appears still to afflict your mother-in-law." Madame de Saint-Meran heard her.
The notary, who was at the door, immediately entered.
It is true that since I left him, I seem to have lost my senses.
The doctor was a friend of the family, and at the same time one of the cleverest men of the day, and very fond of Valentine, whose birth he had witnessed.
Sometimes, as Hamlet says--
"Just as he was, his mind perfectly clear, but the same incapability of moving or speaking."
But this time the papers were a mere matter of form.
It was just in time, for Valentine's head swam, and she staggered; Madame de Villefort instantly hastened to her assistance, and aided her husband in dragging her to the carriage, saying--"What a singular event!
I am all that is left to her belonging to my poor Renee, whom you have so soon forgotten, sir."
"Of course you sent for a doctor?"
"Rest yourself, mother," he said.
Madame de Saint-Meran.
When he had run over all these names in his memory, again read and studied them, commenting meanwhile upon his lists, he shook his head.
"You approve of him?"
The dead, once buried in their graves, rise no more."
I tell you I am going to die--do you understand?
"Is it a suitable match?"
And then, falling upon the chair nearest the door, she burst into a paroxysm of sobs.
"Sir," said Madame de Saint-Meran, without using any circumlocution, and as if fearing she had no time to lose, "you wrote to me concerning the marriage of this child?"
"It is well.
The servants, standing in the doorway, not daring to approach nearer, were looking at Noirtier's old servant, who had heard the noise from his master's room, and run there also, remaining behind the others.
"Still that idea of death, madame," said Villefort.
Barrois, therefore, as we have seen, watched for Valentine, and informed her of her grandfather's wish.
"An extreme nervous excitement and a strangely agitated sleep; she fancied this morning in her sleep that her soul was hovering above her body, which she at the same time watched.
"It is singular," said the doctor; "I was not aware that Madame de Saint-Meran was subject to such hallucinations."
Russian revolutionary tactics are best...."
As we left, the workers in the pit, exhausted and running with sweat in spite of the cold, began to climb wearily out.
"It takes a good deal of courage to drive a sleigh nowadays," he went on.
That afternoon his letter of resignation was published in the newspapers:
The officers retain their swords and regulations side-arms.
For the past week the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, aided by the rank and file of the Railway Workers, had seized control of the Nicolai Railroad, and hurled trainload after trainload of sailors and Red Guards southwest....
Down the Tverskaya the shop-windows were broken, and there were shell-holes and torn-up paving stones in the street.
The Committee for Salvation, the Duma, the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary party--proudly claiming Kerensky as a member--all passionately protested that he could only be held responsible to the Constituent Assembly.
"Here in this holy place," said the student, "holiest of all Russia, we shall bury our most holy.
It was bitter cold.
The soldiers on the roof kicked with their heels and sang whining peasant songs; and in the corridor, so jammed that it was impossible to pass, violent political debates raged all night long.
The band was playing the Revolutionary Funeral March, and against the immense singing of the mass of people, standing uncovered, the paraders sang hoarsely, choked with sobs....
Dark and silent and cold were the churches; the priests had disappeared.
"It is impossible to teach the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviki anything!" he exclaimed.
I cannot bear the monstrous destruction of beauty and tradition...."
From then on until dark there was nothing but the packed train, jolting and stopping, and occasional stations where a ravenous mob swooped down on the scantily-furnished buffet and swept it clean....
Vivid little pictures he gave me.
On the top floor the manager showed us where shrapnel had shattered several windows.
The meeting-place was a theatre, in which, under the old regime, to audiences of officers and glittering ladies, amateur presentations of the latest French comedy had once taken place.
Through an irregular lane that opened and closed again the procession slowly moved toward us.
On November 15th, Lunatcharsky, Commissar of Education, broke into tears at the session of the Council of People's Commissars, and rushed from the room, crying, "I cannot stand it!
"The Brotherhood Grave," he explained.
In all the great city not a human being could be seen; but there was a faint sound of stirring, far and near, like a deep wind coming.
In the morning, hours late, we looked out upon a snowy world.
We went to the office of the Commissar, in order to arrange for our return tickets.
From him I learned many details of the bloody six-day battle which had rent Moscow in two.
"But wait!
Hotel after hotel, all full, or the proprietors still so frightened that all they could say was, "No, no, there is no room!
A bitter wind swept the Square, lifting the banners.
A throng of little boys were gathered there--street waifs who used to be newsboys.
One garrison regiment, badly demoralised by long inactivity, had been approached by both sides.
There were many wreaths of hideous artificial flowers....
That is why I am leaving the Council of People's Commissars.
The Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed, the Cathedral of the Assumption, are being bombarded.
When the train backed into the station, a mob of shabby soldiers, all carrying huge sacks of eatables, stormed the doors, smashed the windows, and poured into all the compartments, filling up the aisles and even climbing onto the roof.
Mountains of dirt and rock were piled high near the base of the wall. Climbing these we looked down into two massive pits, ten or fifteen feet deep and fifty yards long, where hundreds of soldiers and workers were digging in the light of huge fires.
We demand that Kerensky be arrested, and that he be ordered, in the name of the organisations hereinafter mentioned, to come immediately to Petrograd and present himself to the tribunal.
Already through the Iberian Gate a human river was flowing, and the vast Red Square was spotted with people, thousands of them.
No one spoke.
Distributed to all bourgeois households in Moscow by the Moscow Military Revolutionary Commitee, so as to provide a basis for the requisition of clothing for the Army and the poor workers.
The Holy Orthodox Church had withdrawn the light of its countenance from Moscow, the nest of irreverent vipers who had bombarded the Kremlin.
The treaty of peace follows:
Now, he told me, he was secretary of the Moscow Metal-Workers' Union, and a Commissar of the Military Revolutionary Committee during the fighting....
In vain he tried to argue, to explain; they would not listen.
"To-morrow we shall bury here five hundred proletarians who died for the Revolution."
Resolved, that the regiment remain neutral, and continue its present activities--which consisted in peddling rubbers and sunflower seeds!
I cannot bear this.
They shut me up in the cellar and swiped my overcoat, my money, watch and even the ring on my finger.
It is impossible to work under the pressure of thoughts which drive me mad!
Moscow
But about midnight they began to clump up the stairs, in groups of ten or twenty--big, rough men, in coarse clothes, fresh from the battle-line, where they had fought like devils for a week, seeing their comrades fall all about them.
We forced our way through the dense mass packed near the Kremlin wall, and stood upon one of the dirt-mountains.
Moscow is real Russia, Russia as it was and will be; in Moscow we would get the true feeling of the Russian people about the Revolution.
By this the Military Revolutionary Commitee requests to give a pass for the purpose of investigating the Kremlin, the representatives of the American Socialist party attached to the Socialist press, comrades Reed and Bryant. Chief of the Military Revolutionary Committee For the Secretary
I gallop, the devils shooting all around.
Many were killed, but the rest dashed backward and forward, laughing, daring each other....
We rose before sunrise, and hurried through the dark streets to Skobeliev Square.
There are thousands of victims.
Chapter X
I fully realise the gravity of this decision.
Instead of diminishing, however, the stories of destruction in Moscow continued to grow....
The Kremlin, where are now gathered the most important art treasures of Petrograd and of Moscow, is under artillery fire.
About seven o'clock in the evening we drew out of the station, an immense long train drawn by a weak little locomotive burning wood, and stumbled along slowly, with many stops.
He looked at it.
He had left the Council of People's Commissars; he had deserted his post while the battle was raging.
We could not beat him down below fifty....
"Yes, we have some very comfortable rooms, but all the windows are shot out.
The fearful struggle there has reached a pitch of bestial ferocity.
Along one side of the square the dark towers and walls of the Kremlin stood up.
In the centre of the town the snow-piled streets were quiet with the stillness of convalescence.
The station at Moscow was deserted.
A low-voiced hum of talk, underlaid with the whirring bass of a score of sewing machines, filled the place.
The Committee of Public Safety ceases to exist.
This is all I've got to wear!"
Occasionally the conductor came through, as a matter of habit, looking for tickets.
"You see me!" he cried, showing his decrepit clothing.
"They compromise from sheer habit.
'It is the most beautiful work I have ever seen,' said he, taking up a bit.
These were the queen's last words, and a few hours later she was dead. The king was so bowed down with sorrow that he would not attend even to the business of the kingdom, and at last his Prime Minister had to tell him that the people were complaining that they had nobody to right their wrongs.
It always happens that if a person's eyes are once opened they see a great deal more than they ever expected; and soon it struck the king that the members of his court had a way of disappearing one after the other without any reason.
The king had no great desire to undertake this journey, but the queen's will was stronger than his, and he was too lazy to make a fight for it. So he said nothing and set about his preparations, ordering his finest ship to be ready to carry him round the coast.
With these words the king bade them farewell and entered sadly into his ship.
But rather seek out a princess of some great kingdom, who has been used to courts all her life, and holds them at their true worth.
But when a few months had passed the king began to have doubts as to whether the minister's choice had really been a wise one, and he noticed that his children lived more and more in their palace and never came near their stepmother.
'That shows a good heart,' thought the prince; 'and when she is happy her beauty will soon come back.' And without any further delay he begged the queen to consent to their betrothal, for the marriage must take place in his own country.
Afterwards the two princes marched back to Greece.
'And I am sure that the red one will be still better, because the stuff is richer,' and with a low bow he left the room.
The news that the prince had brought home a bride had gone before them, and they were greeted with flowery arches and crowns of coloured lights. The king and queen met them on the steps of the palace, and conducted the girl to the women's house, where she would have to remain until her marriage.
She was present at all his councils, and her opinion was asked before making peace or war.
The queen was enchanted.
The prince looked at her and was rather disappointed.
The minister then conducted the mother and daughter back to the ship; the anchor was raised, the sails spread, and a fair wind was behind them.
But the vessel which carried them had not been gone many days when a thick fog came on, and the captain could see neither to the right nor to the left.
'Here,' answered the queen, bringing forward the girl, whom she had hitherto kept in the background.
So quick and clever was she that the blue dress was not only woven but embroidered, and Lineik was safe back in her tree before the prince returned.
The other thing I have to ask is, that you will never cease to watch over our children, who will soon become your greatest joy.'
'You must rouse yourself, sir,' went on the minister, 'and put aside your own sorrows for the sake of your country.'
'I have thought for some time that all was not quite straight here,' said he.
The only lie I have ever told you was about the robes, and I do not deserve death for that.'
'You do not spare me,' answered the king; 'but what you say is just, and your counsel is good.
But as the green robe must outshine the other two I will give you three days in which to finish it. After it is ready we will be married at once.'
All this Blauvor, the queen, found out by means of her black arts, and when the prince drew near the capital she put a splendid dress on her own daughter and then went to meet her guest.
The prince ordered a boat to be lowered, and went on shore to look about him, and it was not long before he noticed the two beautiful trees, quite different from any that grew in Greece. Calling one of the sailors, he bade him cut them down, and carry them on board the ship.
'Promise me two things,' she said one day to the king; 'one, that if you marry again, as indeed you must, you will not choose as your wife a woman from some small state or distant island, who knows nothing of the world, and will be taken up with thoughts of her grandeur.
They had a quick voyage, and in six days they reached the land, and at once set out for the capital, a messenger being sent on first by the minister to inform the king of what had happened.
She declared at first that she was too unworthy to accept the position offered her, and that the minister would soon repent his choice; but this only made him the more eager, and in the end he gained her consent, and prevailed on her to return with him at once to his own country.
So they collected their jewels and a few clothes and left the house without being observed by anyone.
They hurried on till they arrived at the mountain without once looking back.
'What is your name, madam?' asked he, much touched by this sad story.
The maiden was pretty enough, but not much out of the common.
When it was done she glided into her tree just as the prince came in.
So Lineik again slid out of her tree, and, to Laufer's great relief, set herself to work. When the shining green silk was ready she caught the sun's rays and the moon's beams on the point of her needle and wove them into a pattern such as no man had ever seen.
I have heard that men say, likewise, that it will be for the good of my kingdom for me to marry again, though my heart will never cease to be with my lost wife.
When his Majesty's eyes fell on the two beautiful women, clad in dresses of gold and silver, he forgot his sorrows and ordered preparations for the wedding to be made without delay.
This was done, and as the sky was now clear they put out to sea, and arrived in Greece without any more adventures.
Long, long ago, a king and queen reigned over a large and powerful country.
Now that the fog had lifted they could see as they looked back that, except just along the shore, the island was bare and deserted and not fit for men to live in; but about that nobody cared.
'But where is the Princess Lineik?' asked the prince when she had ended her tale.
Lineik then told her name and her story.
Once over the mountain keep along by the side of a little bay till you come to two trees, one green and the other red, standing in a thicket, and so far back from the road that without looking for them you would never see them.
The minister stopped and greeted the lady politely, and she replied with friendliness, asking him why he had come to such an out-of-the way place.
'She has never got over the loss of both father and mother.'
They had much to tell him, but after a while he checked their merry talk and said:
There was only a year between them, and they loved each other so much that they could do nothing apart.
In spite of the efforts of the frightened sailors the vessel was driven on the rocks, and not a man on board was saved.
That very night Prince Sigurd had a dream, in which he thought his father appeared to him in dripping clothes, and, taking the crown from his head, laid it at his son's feet, leaving the room as silently as he had entered it.
The minister left the rest of his followers on board the ship, and taking a small boat rowed himself to land, in order to look about him and to find out if the island was really as deserted as it seemed.
But I managed to escape, and hid myself here with my daughter.'
Still his heart was heavy, and he felt uneasy, though he could not have told why; and the night before he was to start he went to the children's palace to take leave of his son and daughter.
'Oh, you must not wonder at her pale face and heavy eyes,' said the queen hastily, for she saw what was passing in his mind.
And the daughter listened, and said softly to her mother: 'Are you speaking the truth now?'
In answer he told her of the object of his journey.
So an embassy was prepared, with the minister at its head, to visit the greatest courts in the world, and to choose out a suitable princess.
'And you need not be anxious about going,' she added, 'for I will rule the country while you are away as carefully as you could yourself.'
'This looks as if it had been embroidered by the fairies!
Therefore she was easily captured, and the next day was beheaded in the market-place.
She bade him welcome to her palace, and when they had finished supper she told him of the loss of her husband, and how there was no one left to govern the kingdom but herself.
At first he had not paid much attention to the fact, but merely appointed some fresh person to the vacant place.
Hide each in the trunk of one of the trees and there you will be safe from all your enemies.'
"Aye, aye," said the brave little Tailor, "there is truth in what you tell, fair lady, and I like very well the way in which you have told it."
"Tis the turn of yonder old gentleman," said the Soldier who cheated the Devil, and he pointed with the stem of his pipe to the Fisherman who unbottled the Genie that King Solomon had corked up and thrown into the sea.
That was the very thing that the magician had come to fish for.
At last the fisherman's anger boiled over.
The fisherman had never seen so much wealth in all his life before, and he stood like a man turned to stone.
Instantly goats, old man, and all were gone like a flash.
By-and-by the clock struck twelve, and then the two who sat upon the throne arose.
"Have the pay for your labor?" said the beautiful lady.
The old magician lifted the little palace out of the box and set it upon the ground.
"Every one else hath told a story, and now it is his turn."
"I wonder," said he to himself at last, "if they will give a body a bite to eat by-and-by?" for, to tell the truth, the good supper that he had come away from at home had left a sharp hunger gnawing at his insides, and he longed for something good and warm to fill the empty place.
This is not a chance to be lost, I can tell you, and my advice to you is that you go."
"Not even boo' to a goose?"
Nobody said a word to the fisherman, who stood staring about him like an owl.
"Well," said the fisherman, "I have fished, man and boy, for forty-seven years, but never did I see as unlikely a place to catch anything as this."
The good wife was in bed, snoring away for dear life; but such a noise as the fisherman made coming into the house was enough to wake the dead. Up she jumped, and there she sat, staring and winking with sleep, and with her brains as addled as a duck's egg in a thunder-storm.
She's been over every day to cheer my lonely pillow.
Anne herself answered, lifting her head.
I know I can never walk there.
At that moment Marilla had a revelation.
When a minister's wife has so many claims on her time!
I just felt that I couldn't bear Josie Pye's scorn.
It was quite true.
The girls all think she is perfectly sweet.
I expect I have sprained my ankle.
Why, even Superintendent Bell came to see me, and he's really a very fine man.
"No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious."
"But you have such strength of mind, Marilla.
"Don't you do it, Anne," entreated Diana.
"My ankle," gasped Anne.
In his arms he carried Anne, whose head lay limply against his shoulder.
"I shall walk that ridgepole, Diana, or perish in the attempt.
Josie's triumph being rather more pronounced than good taste permitted, Anne Shirley dared her to walk along the top of the board fence which bounded the garden to the east.
Oh, I am an afflicted mortal.
It isn't fair to dare anybody to do anything so dangerous."
Aren't those gulls splendid?
He was set on it; and the child seemed a nice, teachable little thing.
I should think a mother would be a better judge than a poor woman who came in to scrub, wouldn't you?
Mrs. Thomas said that they were a pair of babies and as poor as church mice.
Muslin curtains give a house such an air.
Thomas and Mrs. Hammond--good to you?" asked Marilla, looking at Anne out of the corner of her eye.
Are we going across the Lake of Shining Waters today?"
Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?
"Do you know," said Anne confidentially, "I've made up my mind to enjoy this drive.
Yes, and muslin curtains in all the windows.
Oh, look, there's one little early wild rose out!
Don't you think it must be glad to be a rose?
Pity was suddenly stirring in her heart for the child.
And isn't pink the most bewitching color in the world?
It was a pity she had to be sent back.
It's very trying to have a drunken husband, you see; and it must be very trying to have twins three times in succession, don't you think?
We're going by the shore road."
Of course, you must make it up FIRMLY.
I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.
I had to go to the asylum at Hopeton, because nobody would take me.
That left me an orphan and folks were at their wits' end, so Mrs. Thomas said, what to do with me.
Redheaded people can't wear pink, not even in imagination.
There are heaps of Americans come there for the summer.
On the left were the steep red sandstone cliffs, so near the track in places that a mare of less steadiness than the sorrel might have tried the nerves of the people behind her.
I think it must have had honeysuckle over the parlor window and lilacs in the front yard and lilies of the valley just inside the gate.
Isn't it lovely?
"Mr. and Mrs. Thomas moved away from Bolingbroke to Marysville, and I lived with them until I was eight years old.
But I feel sure they meant to be good to me."
I like babies in moderation, but twins three times in succession is TOO MUCH.
"I was eleven last March," said Anne, resigning herself to bald facts with a little sigh.
"Well, that is another hope gone.
I lived it over in happy dreams for years. But this shore is nicer than the Marysville shore.
How far is it to White Sands?"
Just you stick to bald facts. Begin at the beginning.
No wonder she had been so delighted at the prospect of a real home.
Mrs. Thomas was at HER wits' end, so she said, what to do with me.
I do wish she'd lived long enough for me to remember calling her mother.
But of course I went while I was at the asylum.
Then Mr. Thomas was killed falling under a train and his mother offered to take Mrs. Thomas and the children, but she didn't want me.
Aren't Walter and Bertha lovely names?
There is a piece in the Fifth Reader--'The Downfall of Poland'--that is just full of thrills.
"That's the White Sands Hotel.
"Not a great deal.
It was a very lonesome place.
But they had to take me and I was there four months until Mrs. Spencer came."
Marilla asked no more questions.
"Once, when I lived in Marysville, Mr. Thomas hired an express wagon and took us all to spend the day at the shore ten miles away. I enjoyed every moment of that day, even if I had to look after the children all the time.
Down at the base of the cliffs were heaps of surf-worn rocks or little sandy coves inlaid with pebbles as with ocean jewels; beyond lay the sea, shimmering and blue, and over it soared the gulls, their pinions flashing silvery in the sunlight.
It's likely her people were nice folks."
I am so fond of romantic things, and a graveyard full of buried hopes is about as romantic a thing as one can imagine isn't it?
"She's got too much to say," thought Marilla, "but she might be trained out of that.
I was born in that house.
"I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it.
"I don't see where the comforting comes in myself," said Marilla.
She divided her children among her relatives and went to the States.
"It's five miles; and as you're evidently bent on talking you might as well talk to some purpose by telling me what you know about yourself."
I'm rather glad I have one.
She died of fever when I was just three months old.
I'm just going to think about the drive.
Oh, I can just imagine myself doing it.
"Did you ever go to school?" demanded Marilla, turning the sorrel mare down the shore road.
What if she, Marilla, should indulge Matthew's unaccountable whim and let her stay?
And White Sands is a pretty name, too; but I don't like it as well as Avonlea.
I used to get so dreadfully tired carrying them about.
Her sensitive little face suddenly flushed scarlet and embarrassment sat on her brow.
They think this shore is just about right."
"Is it as nice as it sounds?
It seems to be my fate.
I'm sure they could tell us such lovely things.
Evidently she did not like talking about her experiences in a world that had not wanted her.
I love it, but I can't wear it.
She brought me up by hand.
You see, nobody wanted me even then.
Whereas we have Almanacks that are dated 4000 Centuries backwards.
I shall lay no Stress on the Antiquity of my Country; for I imagine 'tis of much greater Importance to be the happiest People, than the most antient under the Sun.
'Tis very possible, that the Soul of the deceas'd Lady may have taken its Residence in that Fowl.
He had a numerous Issue, as is very well known, and all of them were powerful Monarchs.
'Tis a strange Thing that Nobody here will advance so small a Sum upon so valuable a Commodity.
She was my constant Companion; but unhappily died upon the Road.
To boil a Fowl is, doubtless, a most shameful Outrage done to Nature.
Agreed, quotha! they all cried, in an angry Tone, How so, pray?
And you wouldn't surely run the Risque of eating up your Aunt?
I executed my Trust, in every Respect, as I ought, in the Capacity of a Collector; but I never did, nor never intended to balance my Accounts.
I think I have just Grounds for Complaint.
O Fortune!
By Virtue of their Night's Excursions, they had brought in some fresh Booty, and were busy in dividing the Spoil.
He is at this very Day not only the best Officer, but the richest I have in all my Court.
At last, being gradually overcome by the Fumes of his Liquor, he fell fast asleep.
When two Men defend themselves against a whole Gang, the Contest, doubtless, cannot last long.
He plunder'd without Mercy; but was liberal in his Benefactions.
I was appriz'd of the whole Affair, and, accordingly, order'd his whole Retinue, consisting of four inferior Officers, to be strangled before his Face, after the same Manner as was intended for my Execution.
What, said he, the King first became crazy, and then was murder'd.
If my Word may be credited, I'll raise your Fortune as I have done his.
All the Favour he could procure, in their Hurry and Tumult, was, to go away without the least Examination.
I was look'd upon as a Man of Consequence, and I procur'd this Castle by my military Atchievements.
What!
I had still left a poor, pitiful Cottage, but that I saw plunder'd and destroy'd.
No Man of my Profession ever had a handsomer, more compleat Housewife, than my Dame was; but I have been treacherously depriv'd of her.
I have since endeavour'd to get my Bread by Fishing; but the Fish, as well as all Mankind, desert me.
Never sink Man, under the Weight of your Burden.
Is there then the Man in Being more wretched than myself?
I am, doubtless, said the poor Fisherman, the most unhappy Wretch that ever liv'd!
Your greatest Uneasiness, said he, arose from the Narrowness of your Circumstances; but mine proceeds from an internal, and much deeper Cause.
CHAP. XIV.
He recollected the whole Series of his Misfortunes; commencing from that of the Eunuch and the Huntsman, to his Arrival at the Free-booter's Castle.
"What did he get?"
The first was at Harker's.
"Thank you," said Holmes.
It is the murder that we are really investigating, and I tell you that I am gathering all the threads into my hands."
You would hardly forget it, would you, sir, for I've seldom seen an uglier.
"I was very much surprised at your letter, for I could not imagine how you knew that I owned such a thing."
We locked every door on the inside and awaited developments.
He looked stealthily all round him.
"Hill knows all these gentry, and he will give a name to him.
Mr. Horace Harker is a customer of ours.
"That's all right," said Lestrade, as we parted.
Inspector Hill knew him the moment he caught sight of him.
A short walk brought us to a secluded road fringed with pleasant houses, each standing in its own grounds.
A minute later we heard steps upon the stairs, and an elderly red-faced man with grizzled side-whiskers was ushered in.
"If he was his confederate, why should he carry his photograph?" I asked.
He managed to find employment with Morse Hudson, and in that way tracked down three of them.
As we turned him over I saw a hideous, sallow face, with writhing, furious features, glaring up at us, and I knew that it was indeed the man of the photograph whom we had secured.
The matter is very important, and the farther I go with it, the more important it seems to grow.
"Well, well, you have your own methods, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and it is not for me to say a word against them, but I think I have done a better day's work than you.
I have identified the dead man."
Serve me right for engaging a man with such a face.
"Yes, sir.
Now you clearly see the sequence of events, though you see them, of course, in the inverse order to the way in which they presented themselves to me.
"The busts," cried Lestrade.
The man was so intent upon what he was doing that he never heard our steps as we stole across the grass plot. With the bound of a tiger Holmes was on his back, and an instant later Lestrade and I had him by either wrist, and the handcuffs had been fastened.
I hope, gentlemen, that you will come in and have some refreshment."
Here, in a broad thoroughfare, once the abode of wealthy City merchants, we found the sculpture works for which we searched.
"Mr. Josiah Brown, I suppose?" said Holmes.
"You will kindly sign that paper, Mr. Sandeford, in the presence of these witnesses.
No one could possibly find it.
"Well, it is very handsome of you, Mr. Holmes.
In an instant, without the least sound to warn us of his coming, the garden gate swung open, and a lithe, dark figure, as swift and active as an ape, rushed up the garden path.
In rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and, finally, maritime London, till we came to a riverside city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe.
There had been a ring at the bell.
Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke at clapping, as at the well-wrought crisis of a play.
Sure enough, when we reached Baker Street the detective was already there, and we found him pacing up and down in a fever of impatience.
We saw the sudden flash of a dark lantern inside the room.
By that time, of course, I knew for certain that it was the Borgia pearl that we were after.
It was more than a year ago now.
"Excellent, Lestrade, excellent!" he cried.
No one but an anarchist would go about breaking statues.
That was the obvious reason.
I only gave fifteen shillings for the bust, and I think you ought to know that before I take ten pounds from you.
Since Harker's bust was one in three, the chances were exactly as I told you--two to one against the pearl being inside it. There remained two busts, and it was obvious that he would go for the London one first.
Yes, we have the entries here. One to Mr. Harker you see, and one to Mr. Josiah Brown, of Laburnum Lodge, Laburnum Vale, Chiswick, and one to Mr. Sandeford, of Lower Grove Road, Reading.
As he came out into the glimmering patch of light, we saw that he carried something white under his arm.
He was a kind of Italian piece-work man, who made himself useful in the shop.
No, I don't.
I daresay they might get a peep at that sales book if they wanted to.
He made no remark, however, save that, unless we hurried, we should be late for our appointment with Lestrade.
Murder by a Madman," and the contents of the paper showed that Mr. Horace Harker had got his account into print after all.
I warned the inmates of the house, so as to avoid a second tragedy, and we went down, with the happiest results.
The wooden fence which separated the grounds from the road threw a dense black shadow upon the inner side, and here it was that we crouched.
But he was a good workman--one of the best."
"Mr. Sandeford, of Reading, I suppose?" said he.
The name of the murdered man linked the one event with the other.
Then, with the help of some Italian employee, he succeeded in finding out where the other three busts had gone.
One of them was still soft.
But I'm sure I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mr. Holmes, for the workmanlike way in which you laid hands upon him.
The afternoon was far advanced before we were able to snatch a hasty luncheon at a restaurant.
Once or twice he chuckled.
My friend bowed and smiled.
There only remained a single bust--the Reading one--and the pearl must be there.
Let us make for Mr. Morse Hudson, of the Kennington Road, and see if he can throw any light upon the problem."
When we met again next evening, Lestrade was furnished with much information concerning our prisoner.
No doubt the object of our journey was to catch him in the very act, and I could not but admire the cunning with which my friend had inserted a wrong clue in the evening paper, so as to give the fellow the idea that he could continue his scheme with impunity.
"Thank you!" said Holmes.
Probably the photograph we found in his pocket is the man himself, so that he may not knife the wrong person.
"The man lived and he got off with a year.
I don't see what that has to do with it.
"Gentlemen," he cried, "let me introduce you to the famous black pearl of the Borgias."
"No, he did not."
Outside was a considerable yard full of monumental masonry. Inside was a large room in which fifty workers were carving or moulding. The manager, a big blond German, received us civilly and gave a clear answer to all Holmes's questions.
"No, I fancy Chiswick is an address which is more likely to find him.
The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.
"We have seen both the retailers and also the wholesale manufacturers.
His look of importance showed that his day's work had not been in vain.
Then he placed his newly acquired bust in the centre of the cloth.
I can trace each of the busts now from the beginning."
Do I know that photograph?
"Ah, the rascal!" he cried.
"The busts!
But it was not our prisoner to whom Holmes was giving his attention. Squatted on the doorstep, he was engaged in most carefully examining that which the man had brought from the house.
I fancy we can attain our end in a simpler way.
That was all he could tell us.
No explanation save mental aberration can cover the facts.
Holmes had taken several notes during Mr. Harding's evidence, and I could see that he was thoroughly satisfied by the turn which affairs were taking.
He could carve a bit, and gild and frame, and do odd jobs.
When our visitor had disappeared, Sherlock Holmes's movements were such as to rivet our attention.
He dogs the fellow, he sees him enter a house, he waits outside for him, and in the scuffle he receives his own death-wound.
Well, I'm very glad to see that you have got the rascal.
"What we pay rates and taxes for I don't know, when any ruffian can come in and break one's goods.
I had not even concluded for certain that it was the pearl, but it was evident to me that he was looking for something, since he carried the bust past the other houses in order to break it in the garden which had a lamp overlooking it.
"Yes," he continued, after some turning over of pages, "he was paid last on May 20th."
Here the cabman was directed to wait.
He was a well-known ne'er-do-well among the Italian colony.
No, I don't know where he came from nor where he went to.
We're not jealous of you at Scotland Yard.
The pearl was not there.
Alarm and resentment spread through the camp.
The prevailing opinion was that England would be delivered, but not without a desperate and bloody struggle, and that the class which had so long ruled by the sword would perish by the sword.
All his tastes and habits were pacific.
In the year 1685 his fame, though splendid, was only dawning; but his genius was in the meridian.
Happily the spirit of the age on which his lot was cast, gave the right direction to his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force on the spirit of the age.
The day on which the royal sanction was, after many delays, solemnly given to this great Act, was a day of joy and hope.
Those acclamations were reechoed by the voice of the capital and of the nation; but within three weeks it became manifest that Charles had no intention of observing the compact into which he had entered.
The ecclesiastical administration was, in the meantime, principally directed by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury.
His theology was more remote than even that of the Dutch Arminians from the theology of the Calvinists.
Even the devotions of private families could not escape the vigilance of his spies.
They were resolved to place the King in such a situation that he must either conduct the administration in conformity with the wishes of his Parliament, or make outrageous attacks on the most sacred principles of the constitution.
Companies of soldiers were billeted on the people; and martial law was, in some places, substituted for the ancient jurisprudence of the realm.
He wrote and spoke, not, like his father, with the exactness of a professor, but after the fashion of intelligent and well educated gentlemen.
Just at this conjuncture James died.
It was necessary that the King should have a large military force.
The Parliament was dissolved with every mark of royal displeasure.
He accordingly hastened to make peace with his neighbours, and thenceforth gave his whole mind to British politics.
The power which these boards had possessed before the accession of Charles had been extensive and formidable, but had been small indeed when compared with that which they now usurped.
This war hastened the approach of the great constitutional crisis.
To this scheme, in his confidential correspondence, he gave the expressive name of Thorough.
On the very eve of troubles, fatal to himself and to his order, the Bishops of several extensive dioceses were able to report to him that not a single dissenter was to be found within their jurisdiction.
The Star Chamber had been remodelled, and the High Commission created, by the Tudors.
The Parliament granted an ample supply.
That instrument was a standing army.
He could not have such a force without money.
He saw that there was one instrument, and only one, by which his vast and daring projects could be carried into execution.
From March 1629 to April 1640, the Houses were not convoked.
He was by nature rash, irritable, quick to feel for his own dignity, slow to sympathise with the sufferings of others, and prone to the error, common in superstitious men, of mistaking his own peevish and malignant moods for emotions of pious zeal.
Guided chiefly by the violent spirit of the primate, and free from the control of Parliament, they displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any former age.
It would be unjust to deny that Charles had some of the qualities of a good, and even of a great prince.
Charles, however, could not venture to raise, by his own authority, taxes sufficient for carrying on war.
He had been one of the most distinguished members of the opposition, and felt towards those whom he had deserted that peculiar malignity which has, in all ages, been characteristic of apostates.
He convoked a second Parliament, and found it more intractable than the first.
Yet, obsequious as they were, they were less ready and less efficient instruments of arbitrary power than a class of courts, the memory of which is still, after the lapse of more than two centuries, held in deep abhorrence by the nation.
But there is reason to believe that he was perfidious, not only from constitution and from habit, but also on principle.
He could not legally raise money without the consent of Parliament.
Never in our history had there been an interval of eleven years between Parliament and Parliament.
Such fear did his rigour inspire that the deadly hatred of the Church, which festered in innumerable bosoms, was generally disguised under an outward show of conformity.
All these tribunals insulted and defied the authority of Westminster Hall, and daily committed excesses which the most distinguished Royalists have warmly condemned.
The tribunals afforded no protection to the subject against the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny of that period.
His taste in literature and art was excellent, his manner dignified, though not gracious, his domestic life without blemish.
The promise by which that supply had been obtained was broken.
Some of the most distinguished members were imprisoned; and one of them, Sir John Eliot, after years of suffering, died in confinement.
But his understanding was narrow; and his commerce with the world had been small.
The judges of the common law, holding their situations during the pleasure of the King, were scandalously obsequious.
He dissolved his first Parliament, and levied taxes by his own authority.
Now commenced a new era.
His choice was soon made.
"Tell me the way, and I shall find him!"
"Don't touch the flower!" said the old woman.
I am freezing to death; I shall become a lump of ice!"
"He is merciful, and you will also be so!
Where shall I find my little child?"
"Touch them not!" said Death.
So they went into Death's great greenhouse, where flowers and trees grew strangely into one another.
He is responsible for them to OUR LORD, and no one dares to pluck them up before HE gives leave."
Then he will be afraid!
"OUR LORD has helped me," said she.
She was so downcast, so afraid that it should die!
Save my child from all that misery!
"Nay, I know not," said the woman, "and you cannot see!
Take it into God's kingdom!
"I know it!" said the woman in the black clothes.
Forget my tears, forget my prayers, and all that I have done!"
There stood beautiful palm-trees, oaks, and plantains; there stood parsley and flowering thyme: every tree and every flower had its name; each of them was a human life, the human frame still lived--one in China, and another in Greenland--round about in the world.
"But do not stop me now--I may overtake him--I may find my child!"
You shall have my white hair instead, and that's always something!"
But Night stood still and mute.
Then she lay down to drink up the lake, and that was an impossibility for a human being, but the afflicted mother thought that a miracle might happen nevertheless.
Tell it me!
"Our Lord will not take him from me!"
Save the innocent!
"Do you not think that I shall save him?" said she.
But the poor mother ran out of the house and cried aloud for her child.
And who has helped you?"
"But OUR LORD can!" said she.
Rather take it away!
THE STORY OF A MOTHER
She had made the tryst herself, and never before had she failed to keep it.
And now, my lords, this action on the part of the Government....
Without a word he mounted and rode, the hoofs thudding dull on the grass.
I'm glad--I'm glad."
I've cut with the last of it, and now my face is to the stars."
The tower was pitch dark.
I like the fellow's voice, it rings the sterling metal....
Twenty years ago!
"What ails her?"
Doom Castle rose over him black, high and low, without a glimmer.
What for does heaven--or hell--send the worst of its temptations to the young and ignorant?
He caught him by the collar of his coat as if he would shake him.
what game is this?" he furiously demanded.
Forward swept the lover, all impatient fires--to find himself before Mungo Boyd!
He left behind him the castle, quite dark and looming in its nest below the sentinel hill; he turned the bay; the town revealed a light or two; a bird screamed on the ebb shore.
"Say that again, you foul-mouthed dog o' Fife, and I'll gralloch you like a deer!" cried the Chamberlain, his face tingling.
"Old whinstone!
I am going to give a ball when she comes home.
Where is she?"
The bolts of the door slid back softly; the door opened; a little figure came out.
Into the reed he poured remembrance and regret; the gathered nights of riot and folly lived and sorrowed for; the ideals cherished and surrendered; the remorseful sinner, the awakened soul.
He left the rock, and took to horse again, and home.
He rammed the flageolet impatiently into his waistcoat, threw back his cloak, and stepped out into the garden.
The past?--he wiped that off his recollection as with a sponge; now he was a new man with his feet out of the mire and a clean road all the rest of the way, with a clean sweet soul for his companion.
The night was still, except for the melancholy sound of the river running over its cascades and echoing under the two bridges; odours of decaying leaves surrounded him, and the air of the night touched him on his hot face like a benediction.
"Cut clavers and tell me what ails your mistress!"
"And how near I was to missing it!" he thought.
He had never felt happier in all his life.
He loved her to his very heart of hearts; he had, honestly, for her but the rendered passion of passion--why! what kept her?
The Chamberlain drew his cloak about him, cold with a contemptuous rebuff.
"I rapped at her door mysel' to mak' sure she did."
"What game is this?
Perhaps she had not heard him.
Well, well, my friend, you are at liberty; Lord knows, it's not a common disease among dukes!
"Canny, man, canny!" said the little servitor, releasing himself with difficulty from the grasp of this impetuous lover.
"I was to meet her to-night; does she know I'm here?"
The Chamberlain thrust at his chest and nearly threw him over.
His hands were spotless white, but he poured some water in a basin and washed them carefully, shrugging his shoulders with a momentary comprehension of how laughable must that sacrament be in the eyes of the worldly Sim MacTaggart.
His mouth parched; violent emotions wrought in him, but he recovered in a moment, and did his best to hide his sense of ignominy.
"Lucky man!
Do you know what, cousin?
That struck him suddenly with wonder, as he ceased his playing for a moment and looked through the broken trellis to see the building black below the starry sky.
You fancy Argyll an imbecile of uxoriousness.
"But for the scheming of a fool I would never have seen her.
"And what said she?"
And then we have the Chamberlain in his turret room, envious of that blissful married man, and warmed to a sympathetic glow with Olivia floating through the images that rose before him.
There's no green timber here; I'm cursed if I'm not the very ancient stuff of fiddles!"
If I had met her twenty years ago!
No one paid any heed in Castle Doom.
It's not too late, thank the Lord for that!
There ought, at least, to be a light in the window of Olivia's room.
But then women like my Jean are not common either or marriages were less fashions.
felicity; here she was at last!
"Oh, well!" said he, "it's a woman's way, Mungo."
"Faith!
"By God!" he cried.
It had been arranged at their last meeting that without the usual signal he should go to her to-night before twelve. Already his heart beat quickly; his face was warm and tingling with pleasant excitation, he felt a good man.
"As how?"
Much as Bruce would have wished to inter his dead friend's secret with his mortal remains in the tomb, it was impossible.
What do you say?' There was no answer, so I shouted, 'Are you there?' and she said, 'Yes,' faint-like. 'Don't let me hurry you,' said I, 'but if you agree straight-away I can catch Bruce at home, for I've just left him.' With that she said, 'Very well.
I could never fix up a letter in your words, you know.
"It is the probable explanation of her attitude, nevertheless."
"I must be off to the Savoy."
Do you know her history?"
The straightforward, honest sentences sounded strangely familiar at this distance of time.
She screams 'Oh!' and runs off with tears in her eyes.
Her brother says 'Oh!' and looks uncomfortable, but refuses to discuss the proposition.
Corbett listened intently to the recital and to the barrister's summary of the events that followed.
"And good luck to you, too.
"Steady, Mr. Corbett.
Would that my grasp had the power to reassure him of my heartfelt sympathy."
I'm not worrying about what happened years ago.
Sir Charles Dyke's sacrifice must not be made in vain, and the strange chain of events encircled other actors in the drama too strongly to enable the barrister to adopt the course which would otherwise have commended itself to him.
There's a kind of rock below water which holds me up every time I shoot the rapids.
A wholly unnecessary public scandal was thus avoided.
"Write to her.
I congratulate both Mrs. Hillmer and yourself."
"Not the slightest.
Mrs. Hillmer is just the sort of woman I require as a wife, and I'll marry her yet if the whole British nation says 'Oh!' loud enough to be heard and answered by the U-nited States."
"It's like this," he said, when they were settled down to details, "I want to get married."
"Having accomplished the whole thing satisfactorily."
She calls me 'Syd' as slick as butter, and I call her 'Gwen'; but there you are--if I want to go ahead a bit she pulls up and weeps.
He will get it off his chest if you give him permission, and then I can come along in a hansom and fix things.
She probably believes that a husband and wife should have no secrets from each other. Above all else, there should be no cloud between them as to bygone events.
He did not expect to see Corbett again for a couple of days.
"That's the proper sort of spirit in which to set about the business."
But he would allow no more weeping.
"Oh!"
'Then,' said I, 'I've just been telling Mr. Bruce I wanted to marry you, and that you wouldn't even discuss the proposition.
Women weep for many reasons.
With Lady Dyke's relatives his task required considerable tact.
"Good-bye, old chap," said Bruce.
Kindly oblige me with your attention for the next half-hour."
"No, and I don't want to."
"As soon as I got her in the box at the other end, I said, 'Is that you, Gwen?' 'Yes,' said she.
But switch me on the end of a wire and I know where I am."
It seemed a fitting thing that this testimony should come, as it were, from the tomb.
Mr. Sydney H. Corbett came to him with measured questionings and brooding thought stamped on his brows.
"What on earth did you say?"
Then Corbett said:
I knew a young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he took to fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty-five per cent.
And out he went, and left us alone.
He never was able to use it.
You can hang on and fish for a year, if you want to: it will be all the same.
He said he had weighed it carefully when he reached home, and it had turned the scale at thirty-four pounds.
We were still looking at it, when the local carrier, who had just stopped at the inn, came to the door of the room with a pot of beer in his hand, and he also looked at the fish.
Ha! ha!
It's what you're used to."
If ever you have an evening to spare, up the river, I should advise you to drop into one of the little village inns, and take a seat in the tap-room.
I caught him just below the bridge with a minnow.
His method is a study in itself.
We paid the bill without a murmur.
But they were sure I should never make anything of a fisherman.
It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous--almost of pedantic--veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.
No; your accomplished angler would scorn to tell a lie, that way.
He stuck to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he grew dissatisfied with it.
I thought it was another little one, and I went to jerk it up.
"When I have caught forty fish," said he, "then I will tell people that I have caught fifty, and so on.
It was nearly five years ago that I caught that trout."
It rather fascinated me, that trout; it was such a monstrous fish.
Some fishermen come here and fish for a day, and others stop and fish for a month.
It's what you're used to, you know.
Some people do.
"Eighteen pounds six ounces," said our friend, rising and taking down his coat.
And then he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who saw it; and what his wife said, when he got home, and of what Joe Buggles thought about it.
You don't see many fish that size about here now, I'm thinking.
The more we looked at it, the more we marvelled at it.
It really was a remarkably fine fish.
"Why, who told you I caught that trout!" was the surprised query.
Ha! ha!
"Because I don't expect anybody would believe me if I did," replies the old fellow calmly, and without even a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as he refills his pipe, and requests the landlord to bring him three of Scotch, cold.
They never catch them.
It is a simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some talk lately of its being made use of by the angling fraternity in general. Indeed, the Committee of the Thames Angler's Association did recommend its adoption about two years ago, but some of the older members opposed it.
She said it had not been like washing, it had been more in the nature of excavating.
Well, that is good," said the honest old fellow, laughing heartily.
You will be nearly sure to meet one or two old rod-men, sipping their toddy there, and they will tell you enough fishy stories, in half an hour, to give you indigestion for a month.
"Ah!" said the carrier, "then, of course, how should you?
Yes, you may well look surprised--I'll have another three of Scotch, landlord, please."
I'd gone out pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and when I saw that whopper on the end of my line, blest if it didn't quite take me aback. Well, you see, he weighed twenty-six pound.
There is no art, no skill, required for that sort of thing.
It seemed that he had caught it himself, years ago, when he was quite a lad; not by any art or skill, but by that unaccountable luck that appears to always wait upon a boy when he plays the wag from school, and goes out fishing on a sunny afternoon, with a bit of string tied on to the end of a tree.
The local fisherman's guide doesn't say a word about catching anything.
"Quite uncommon," I murmured; and George asked the old man how much he thought it weighed.
The washerwoman at Streatley said she felt she owed it to herself to charge us just three times the usual prices for that wash.
I did catch it.
"Ah!" said the old gentleman, following the direction of my gaze, "fine fellow that, ain't he?"
They finally rested upon a dusty old glass-case, fixed very high up above the chimney-piece, and containing a trout.
I devoted a considerable amount of attention to the subject at one time, and was getting on, as I thought, fairly well; but the old hands told me that I should never be any real good at it, and advised me to give it up.
But I will not lie any more than that, because it is sinful to lie."
"Fancy Jim Bates and Joe Muggles and Mr. Jones and old Billy Maunders all telling you that they had caught it.
And then he told us the real history of the fish.
"Good-sized trout, that," said George, turning round to him.
It shows pluck, but that is all.
The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one day was three, and you can't add twenty-five per cent. to three--at least, not in fish.
"Oh! was it you who caught it, then?" said I.
They said that I was an extremely neat thrower, and that I seemed to have plenty of gumption for the thing, and quite enough constitutional laziness.
Good-night, gentlemen, good-night."
But he had.
It was a solemn occasion, but neither a harsh nor a heavy one; there was a certain geniality in the appearance of things.
"I don't know whether you would come to Lockleigh for a day or two? You know there's always that old promise." And his lordship coloured a little as he made this suggestion, which gave his face a somewhat more familiar air.
Is that gentleman gone?
"By inducing you to trust me.
It was not apparent whether the thanks applied to her having reminded him of his train or to the more sentimental remark.
And what do you think he has done with his library? It sounds like a practical joke.
Her attitude had a singular absence of purpose; her hands, hanging at her sides, lost themselves in the folds of her black dress; her eyes gazed vaguely before her. There was nothing to recall her to the house; the two ladies, in their seclusion, dined early and had tea at an indefinite hour.
She had no inclination to sleep; she was waiting, and such waiting was wakeful.
But she saw she had been seen and that nothing was left her but to advance.
You can't turn anywhere; you know that perfectly.
It's very different. It was vain for me to speak to you then; but now I can help you."
He continued immitigably grave, either because he thought it becoming in a place over which death had just passed, or for more personal reasons.
One afternoon, in the library, about a week after the ceremony in the churchyard, she was trying to fix it for an hour; but her eyes often wandered from the book in her hand to the open window, which looked down the long avenue.
And then she added: "I wish you every happiness."
Isabel fancied he had been on the point of asking about her husband--rather confusedly--and then had checked himself.
Her errand was over; she had done what she had left her husband to do.
"Thank you extremely," she contented herself with saying; "I'm afraid I hardly know about Whitsuntide."
They produced a sort of stillness in all her being; and it was with an effort, in a moment, that she answered him.
The twilight seemed to darken round them.
She was in no humour for visitors and, if she had had a chance, would have drawn back behind one of the great trees.
"How can you pretend you're not heart-broken?
There was an interrogation in this; but Isabel let it pass.
He had been dying so long; he was so ready; everything had been so expected and prepared.
You came to England sooner than--a--than you thought?"
She quickly straightened herself, glancing about, and then saw what had become of her solitude.
From Pansy she heard nothing, but that was very simple: her father had told her not to write.
"But I have your promise--haven't I?--for some other time."
You don't know what to do--you don't know where to turn.
It seemed to say with cutting sharpness: "Here's the eminently amenable nobleman you might have married!" When Lord Warburton lifted his own eyes, however, that was not what they said.
Miss Stackpole was among the first, with honest Mr. Bantling beside her; and Caspar Goodwood, lifting his head higher than the rest--bowing it rather less.
There was indeed something really formidable in his resolution.
He had told her, the first evening she ever spent at Gardencourt, that if she should live to suffer enough she might some day see the ghost with which the old house was duly provided.
It was a good thing when you made me come away with your cousin.
How long she had sat in this position she could not have told you; but the twilight had grown thick when she became aware that she was not alone.
But she was stiff and dry-eyed; her acute white face was terrible.
There were tears in Isabel's eyes, but they were not tears that blinded.
She looked through them at the beauty of the day, the splendour of nature, the sweetness of the old English churchyard, the bowed heads of good friends.
That was of no use; it only distressed you.
Isabel wondered if not even the young lady he was to marry would be there with her mamma; but she did not express this idea.
She found she had taken for granted that after accompanying Ralph to Gardencourt he had gone away; she remembered how little it was a country that pleased him.
It was after he got home--when he saw he was dying, and when I saw it too. I understand all about it: you're afraid to go back.
It occurred to her in the midst of this that it was just so Lord Warburton had surprised her of old.
She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.
"My sisters would have been so glad to come if they had known you were still here--if they had thought you would see them," Lord Warburton went on.
"I want to speak to you," he repeated; "I've something particular to say.
That had been aimless, fruitless passion, but at present he had an idea, which she scented in all her being.
Ralph had said to Isabel that he hoped she would remain at Gardencourt, and she made no immediate motion to leave the place.
This question Isabel forbore to answer, as it exceeded the little interrogatory to which she had deemed it necessary to submit on her arrival.
CHAPTER LV
It seemed to her for an instant that he was standing there--a vague, hovering figure in the vagueness of the room.
Her aunt had evidently proposed to Lord Warburton that they should come in search of her.
The doctor was on the other side, with poor Ralph's further wrist resting in his professional fingers.
I had only to look at you at your cousin's funeral to see what's the matter with you.
But I'm not wrong now; please don't think I am," he went on with his hard, deep voice melting a moment into entreaty.
"Why not--why not, when we talked in that way?" he demanded, following her fast.
She was not afraid; she was only sure.
It was fairer than Ralph had ever been in life, and there was a strange resemblance to the face of his father, which, six years before, she had seen lying on the same pillow.
He blushed again, more than before, and he looked at his watch.
I don't know who he was, but I didn't want to come with him; I wanted to see you alone.
But I won't say another word against him; I'll speak only of you," Goodwood added quickly.
I don't want to trouble you--as I did the other day in Rome.
She said to herself that it was but common charity to stay a little with her aunt.
"Do you know what he said to me the last time I saw him--as he lay there where he died?
Thank you very much."
I've walked all over, and I was just coming to the house when I saw you here.
"He tells me he didn't know you were still here.
He took a fly that was there, and I heard him give the order to drive here.
She made known to Isabel very punctually--it was the evening her son was buried--several of Ralph's testamentary arrangements.
Do you remember what I asked you in Rome?
Was that a service to literature?
"I've never been so sane; I see the whole thing.
The weather had changed to fair; the day, one of the last of the treacherous May-time, was warm and windless, and the air had the brightness of the hawthorn and the blackbird.
"And he was dying--when a man's dying it's different." She checked the movement she had made to leave him; she was listening more than ever; it was true that he was not the same as that last time.
He left her the furniture of Gardencourt, exclusive of the pictures and books and the use of the place for a year; after which it was to be sold.
At the end of a few minutes she found herself near a rustic bench, which, a moment after she had looked at it, struck her as an object recognised.
Since her arrival at Gardencourt she had been but little out of doors, the weather being unfavourable for visiting the grounds.
For herself she was on the spot; there was nothing so good as that.
She was quite unable to read; her attention had never been so little at her command.
"I'm not here for long, you know," Isabel said with a certain eagerness.
She quitted the place and in her certainty passed through dark corridors and down a flight of oaken steps that shone in the vague light of a hall-window.
It almost seemed to her that no one had ever been so close to her as that. All this, however, took but an instant, at the end of which she had disengaged her wrist, turning her eyes upon her visitant.
But to-day I know on good authority; everything's clear to me to-day.
"But it doesn't matter!" he exclaimed, pressing her still harder, though now without touching a hem of her garment.
"Do kindly let them see you before you leave England."
He shook and trembled as before, and exclaimed: 'Oh! how cold I am.'
He found that the nun and the countryman had come back in the meantime, and they were much delighted when he placed some food before them, and showed them the two heads he had struck off with his hammer.
She told them that she was a king's daughter, who had been shut up in the castle by a mighty magician.
Just as he had finished clearing away, the door opened and the little gray man walked in, and this time he had two heads.
The Little Gray Man
When he had lost two of his heads the magic power over the two princesses had been removed, and when the blacksmith had killed the horrible dog, then he too had been set free.
To show his gratitude he begged the three companions to divide the treasure between them, which they did; but there was so much of it that it took a very long time.
[From the German.
As her companions did not come home for their mid-day meal, she ate up her own portion and put the rest in the oven to keep warm.
The three companions determined there and then to free themselves from the power of the gray dwarf, and the very next day they set to work to find him.
Then the prince claimed the nun as his bride, and they all lived happily together till they died.
When he had nearly killed her he left her lying on the floor, and hastily walked out of the house.
The door shut behind him, and the blacksmith had to give up the pursuit and return home.
Then the little man fell to with both his heads, and soon finished the last morsel.
The dwarf made short work of what was provided for him, and then, looking greedily round with his six eyes, he demanded more.
When they got close to the house they found that it was an old deserted castle, fast falling into ruins, but with some of the rooms in it still habitable.
When the countryman scolded him for this proceeding he treated him exactly as he had done the nun, and left the poor fellow more dead than alive.
When the nun saw this she was very angry, and scolded the dwarf because he had left nothing for her companions.
The little man did as he was told, and soon called out: 'Oh! how hungry I am!'
The little man resented her words, and flew into such a passion that he seized the nun, beat her, and threw her first against one wall and then against the other.
The nun answered: 'There is food in the oven, help yourself.'
The little man yelled with pain and rage, and hastily fled from the house.
But one blow from the blacksmith's hammer soon made an end of the monster, and they found themselves in a vaulted chamber full of gold and silver and precious stones.
The countryman, who was frightened out of his wits, begged him to draw near the fire and warm himself.
The nun was very sorry for him, and said at once: 'Sit down by the fire and warm yourself.'
'There is food in the oven, so you can eat,' replied the countryman.
Soon after the dwarf looked greedily round, and said: 'Oh! how hungry I am!'
They had to walk a long way, and to search for many hours, before they found the iron door through which the dwarf had disappeared; and when they had found it they had the greatest difficulty in opening it.
Nothing daunted, they all went down below at once, and found the fierce animal mounting guard over the treasure as the princesses had said.
Beside the treasure stood a young and handsome man, who advanced to meet, them, and thanked the nun, the blacksmith, and the countryman, for having freed him from the magic spell he was under.
When the blacksmith refused to give him another morsel, he flew into a terrible rage, and proceeded to treat him in the same way as he had treated his companions.
He told them that he was a king's son, who had been banished to this castle by a wicked magician, and that he had been changed into the three-headed dwarf.
Just as she was sitting down to sew, the door opened and a little gray man came in, and, standing before her, said: 'Oh! how cold I am!'
The princesses, too, were so grateful to their rescuers, that one married the blacksmith, and the other the countryman.
The phonograph now began to play a jerky jumble of sounds which proved so bewildering that after a moment Scraps stuffed her patchwork apron into the gold horn and cried: "Stop--stop!
"Goodness me; it's that music thing which the Crooked Magician scattered the Powder of Life over," said Ojo.
"I wonder if this is my breakfast?"
"Wait a minute," cried Scraps.
It's a highly classical composition."
"Oh, there you are!" she exclaimed cheerfully.
"We are traveling on important business," he declared, "and you'll excuse me if I say we can't be bothered."
"That's what we shall do, if you stay here," Ojo declared.
"You'll have to go somewhere else."
"Who cares for 'em, anyhow?
"Never!
Don't you love classical music?"
"Then turn over my record.
Then he went to the table and said:
There was no answer, so he took his basket and went out the door, the cat following him.
"Find some one who is real wicked, and stay with him till he repents.
I haven't any nerves, thank goodness, but your music makes my cotton shrink."
Then she sang:
"They're interesting.
"Everyone seems to hate me, and yet I was intended to amuse people."
"Of course not," said Ojo.
"It isn't you we hate, especially," observed the Glass Cat; "it's your dreadful music.
"It is, indeed, dreadful!" exclaimed Ojo, with a shudder.
"Run along, Vic, and bother some one else," advised Scraps.
But the phonograph continued playing the dreary tune, so Ojo seized the crank, jerked it free and threw it into the road.
"Then, listen!"
"I'm sorry; but it's true," said the boy.
At once the machine began to play and in a few minutes Ojo put his hands to his ears to shut out the sounds and the cat snarled and Scraps began to laugh.
"Wait for me!"
And still the music played.
"No," said the cat; "she's stark, staring, raving crazy, and her brains can't be pink, for they don't work properly."
Is it possible you can't appreciate rag-time?"
"What does that mean?" asked Ojo.
"Let's run!" cried Scraps, and they all started and ran down the path as fast as they could go.
"All right," said Scraps, and turned over the record.
I remember to have heard music when I first came to life, and I would like to hear it again.
"A what?" inquired Scraps.
When I lived in the same room with you I was much annoyed by your squeaky horn.
"That's all right," said Scraps.
I never saw them before, you know."
Muffled as it was, the phonograph played on.
You're supposed to like it, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?"
"Bother the brains!" cried Scraps.
"Go ahead and play something."
At first he did not know what to say to the newcomer, but a little thought decided him not to make friends.
"So it is," returned Bungle, in a grumpy tone of voice; and then, as the phonograph overtook them, the Glass Cat added sternly: "What are you doing here, anyhow?"
"That's enough."
"What you call your advanced works are your creatures, are they not--your friends?"
"Mazarin's factotum?"
"Oh!
"Well, this morning Marguerite sent for me."
"Oh! very important."
France is not to be purchased so easily as the wife of a maitre des comptes."
This time the door opened upon a handsome cabinet, sumptuously furnished, in which was seated upon cushions a lady of surpassing beauty, who at the sound of the lock sprang towards Fouquet.
"Yes, but that is not all: Marguerite is intimate, as you know, with Madame d'Eymeris and Madame Lyodot."
"Dame!" said the marquise, "that is clear enough, I think.
"I know it."
"Everybody."
I did not expect anybody to-day." And without doubt, to respond to the signal, he pulled out a gilded nail near the glass, and shook it thrice.
No angel could be more agreeable to me, or could lead me more certainly to salvation.
"Well! what do you see so terrific in that, dear marquise?
"More than others--let him."
"I did.
As it might be about five o'clock in the afternoon, the masters had dined: supper was being prepared for twenty subaltern guests.
"Upon what?"
"You astonish me, marquise; I will even say you almost frighten me.
"Yes, certainly, of her I spoke."
"You do not reflect, monsieur, apparently," replied the marquise.
"If it is to that bad news I owe your presence, marquise, welcome be even that bad news! or rather, marquise, since you allow that I am not quite indifferent to you, let me hear nothing of the bad news, but speak of yourself."
"Reproaches!
"Oh, yes, madame, I can assure you of that."
"Yes."
"Have you not yourself already had the same fear?"
"You shall know that presently; but first to something of more consequence."
"You persist in deceiving yourself, monsieur, and will never accept of me the only thing I am willing to give you--devotion."
"Speak, marquise, speak!
"Yes, she did."
"Without interrupting me?"
Unfortunately, before he can reach me, that is to say, the body of the place, he must destroy, must make a breach in the advanced works, and I am devilishly well fortified, marquise."
"Speak."
"In the first place, how did you come here?"
"Hates me?" cried Fouquet.
Besides, that is not all.
That must be the comtesse; but, no, the comtesse is gone to Rambouillet for three days.
"Fouquet!
"Do you think the king has given, without pressing motive, such a place to one you call a little cuistre?"
little Colbert is intendant; that is astonishing I confess, but is not terrible."
"Speak! speak, madame!" said he, "I listen to you."
"Exactly so."
"Do you know that Colbert is made intendant of the finances?"
The presidente, then?
Fouquet wished to clasp her in his arms, but she disengaged herself with a gesture.
"Marquise, you are pale, you tremble."
"Well, this pencil was a lead-pencil, consequently hard; so, it marked in black upon the first sheet, and in white upon the second."
I rang more than twenty times.
"Oh, as to those two, I can answer for them; they must be killed before they will cease to be mine."
"Did you not hear, then, that you were summoned?"
"Do not speak ill of poor Marguerite, Monsieur Fouquet, for she still loves you."
Fouquet!
"Bah! indeed?
"Attentively, marquise."
So you see, still, everything is to be bought, if not in one way, by another."
From time to time, only, Fouquet, absorbed by his work, raised his head to cast a furtive glance upon a clock placed before him.
Let us see!"
Is it, then, important?"
"Yes, Colbert, little Colbert."
"Oh, no; you act like a delicate man," said the marquise, smiling.
"He is ambitious."
"Yes; it is I, monsieur."
This passage was under the street itself, which separated Fouquet's house from the Park of Vincennes.
I thought little Colbert, as you said just now, had passed over that love, and left the impression upon it of a spot of ink or a stain of grease."
That is scarcely credible.
Oh! no, the presidente would not assume such grand airs; she would ring very humbly, then she would wait my good pleasure.
Then Fouquet descended about a score of steps which sank, winding, underground, and came to a long, subterranean passage, lighted by imperceptible loopholes.
Three other glasses, exactly similar to it, completed the symmetry of the apartment.
"No, unfortunately, no; but tell me, you, who during a year I have loved without return or hope--"
"Who is not, marquise."
Then Fouquet pushed a bolt which displaced a panel that walled up the entrance, and prevented everything that passed in this apartment from being either seen or heard.
"Well?"
Did you not hear me?"
"No; but by a chance which resembles a miracle, she has a duplicate of those notes."
What has happened, and who can the Ariadne be who expects me so impatiently.
"The same."
there is but one proof, and that proof I still want."
Oh! that would be to live like a happy woman!"
You'll pray for us sinners; we have sinned too much here.
He used particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very delicate and conspicuously aquiline.
What do you say?
Well, there's nothing of that sort here, no 'monks' wives,' and two hundred monks.
Thirty women, I believe.
You see, however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep thinking--from time to time, of course, not all the while.
He never resented an insult.
He practically acknowledged at the time that that was the only object of his visit.
Where would they get them?
The journey was not an expensive one, and the ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a parting present from his benefactor's family.
He behaved not exactly with more dignity but with more effrontery.
In a short time he opened a great number of new taverns in the district.
Well, to be sure you have your own two thousand.
So that's where you want to be, my gentle boy?"
You know, you spend money like a canary, two grains a week.
On the contrary he was bright and good-tempered.
And the reason this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at that time, as he thought, an extraordinary being, our celebrated elder, Zossima, to whom he became attached with all the warm first love of his ardent heart.
There are no French women there.
It makes it more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is.
He himself was far from being religious; he had probably never put a penny candle before the image of a saint.
Alyosha went to live in the house of two distant relations of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies whom he had never seen before.
Then I wonder--hooks?
There is no moral depravity, no real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the appearance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as something refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation.
Alyosha's arrival seemed to affect even his moral side, as though something had awakened in this prematurely old man which had long been dead in his soul.
It was the same at school, though he seemed to be just one of those children who are distrusted, sometimes ridiculed, and even disliked by their schoolfellows.
Grigory it was who pointed out the "crazy woman's" grave to Alyosha.
Strange impulses of sudden feeling and sudden thought are common in such types.
Every one, indeed, loved this young man wherever he went, and it was so from his earliest childhood.
More than that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception of is familiar to quite young children of our intellectual and higher classes.
It was evident that he had perhaps a hundred thousand roubles or not much less.
They were sorry and unwilling to let him go.
Many of the inhabitants of the town and district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good security.
And I will wait for you.
If they get to hear of it they'll come along.
When you've lived with the monks you'll sing a different tune.
Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak.
I have been there myself.
There are "certain" words and conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in schools.
It was very characteristic of him, indeed, that he never cared at whose expense he was living.
And it was not that he seemed to have forgotten or intentionally forgiven the affront, but simply that he did not regard it as an affront, and this completely conquered and captivated the boys.
That is how it was with him.
Three or four years after his wife's death he had gone to the south of Russia and finally turned up in Odessa, where he spent several years.
And to shelter him would be no burden, but, on the contrary, would probably be looked on as a pleasure."
"Yes, yes, only the shadows of hooks, I know, I know.
It's impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die.
They're honest.
He was more and more frequently drunk.
The Third Son, Alyosha
You were making straight for it.
This characteristic was a wild fanatical modesty and chastity.
I had a presentiment that you would end in something like this.
So that the gift of making himself loved directly and unconsciously was inherent in him, in his very nature, so to speak.
He was always one of the best in the class but was never first.
That's a dowry for you.
He used to say that it was frenzied but beautiful as he remembered.
I've always been thinking who would pray for me, and whether there's any one in the world to do it.
A year before the end of the course he suddenly announced to the ladies that he was going to see his father about a plan which had occurred to him.
In the evening of the same day he got drunk and abused the monks to Alyosha.
He seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one could surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth.
My dear boy, I'm awfully stupid about that.
First of all, I must explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not even a mystic.
And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't?
If there's no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down what justice is there in the world?
My dear boy, I feel it, you know.
Of course they could get them fast enough, they have plenty of money.
They keep the fasts.
He had one characteristic which made all his schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top want to mock at him, not from malice but because it amused them.
He could not bear to hear certain words and certain conversations about women.
That was the picture!
I have mentioned already that he looked bloated.
But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with being a "regular girl," and what's more they looked upon it with compassion as a weakness.
Yet when people, ignoring the natural causes of all that is called artificial, think that but for an unlucky chance they, too, might have enjoyed the advantages which raise other men above them, they sometimes affect not to recognise actual distinctions and abilities, or study enviously the means of annulling them.
This avidity not to miss knowledge of things notable, and to enact vicariously all singular roles, shows the need men have of distinction and the advantage they find even in conceiving it.
THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL
In realising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectly happy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being. Such forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even if conventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and their soul more complex.
The supposed "metaphysical evil" involved in finitude would then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good.
Grant that no one is positively degraded by the great man's greatness and it follows that everyone is exalted by it.
"Brother, the force of charity quiets our will, making us wish only for what we have and thirst for nothing more.
Love of uniformity would quench the thirst for new outlets, for perfect, even if alien, achievements, and this, so long as perfection had not been actually attained, would indicate a mind dead to the ideal.
A man may be a natural either by his character or by his position.
It is no loss of liberty to subordinate ourselves to a natural leader. On the contrary, we thereby seize an opportunity to exercise our freedom, availing ourselves of the best instrument obtainable to accomplish our ends.
Dante has expressed this thought with great simplicity and beauty.
Such advantages grow by the opportunities they make; and it is possible for a man launched into the world at the right moment with the right equipment to mount easily from eminence to eminence and accomplish very great things without doing more than genially follow his instincts and respond with ardour, like an Alexander or a Shakespeare, to his opportunities.
In a word, the consciousness inhabiting the brain embodies the functions of all the body's organs, and responds in a general way to all their changes of fortune, but in the state every cell has a separate brain, and the greatest citizen, by his existence, realises only his own happiness.
CHAPTER IV
It is true that the theistic cosmology might hear a different interpretation.
Variety in the world is an unmixed blessing so long as each distinct function can be exercised without hindrance to any other.
But in the state the various members have a separate sensibility, and, although their ultimate interests lie, no doubt, in co-operation and justice, their immediate instinct and passion may lead them to oppress one another perpetually.
Every man's ideal lies within the potentialities of his nature, for only by expressing his nature can ideals possess authority or attraction over him.
No pathetic note would any longer disquiet their finitude.
This the Greeks knew very well.
Hence, a latent minor strain in Aristotle's philosophy, the hopeless note of paganism, and in Dante an undertone of sorrow and sacrifice, inseparable from Christian feeling.
The deacon accordingly opened the book, after I had, as custom required, pressed my lips upon the cover.
Chroniclers and biographers have not failed to mention several prognostications given in this manner which were verified in the event.
Guibert tells a story of himself, which shows that the same practice was in vogue at the installation of an abbot.
The monk who had sought to form conjectures by this, seeing that my action had accorded, without premeditation, with his intentions, came to me a few days after, and told me what he had done, and how wondrously my first movement had coincided with his own."
The practice of consulting certain books for purposes of augury is of high antiquity.
Now the book was written, not in pages, but in columns.
"On the day of my entry into the monastery," he writes, "a monk who had studied the sacred books desired, I presume, to read my future; at the moment when he was preparing to leave with the procession to meet me, he placed designedly on the altar the book of the Gospels, intending to draw an omen from the direction taken by my eyes towards this or that chapter.
Gregory of Tours tells us what was his practice.
He purified his army during three days, and then opened the Gospels.
Whilst he observed, with curious eyes, the direction taken by my glance, my eye and spirit together turned neither above nor below, but precisely towards the verse which had been indicated before.
The bishop of Nicaea, noticing that he had lighted on the words, 'Prepared for the devil and his angels,' groaned in the depth of his heart, and putting up his hand to hide the words, turned over the leaves of the book, and disclosed the other words, 'The birds of the air come, and lodge in the branches': words which seemed far removed from the ceremony which was being celebrated.
Hearing this, they gave thanks to God, presented their offerings, and returned with joy to announce the omen to their king.
The lines they met with and which were so singularly verified afterwards, are marked with their initials in the book, which is still preserved.
Gregory relates another story akin to the subject.
The same custom was in force, as late as last century, in the cathedral of Boulogne, and the bishop, De Langle, tried in vain in 1722 to abolish it.
Should this passage prove inappropriate, he opened another book of Scripture.
He was succeeded by the Dean of Orleans, whose name is not known.
Gregory of Tours mentions a couple of instances of omens taken from Scripture.
The answer will be found in most cases to be exceedingly ambiguous.
He hesitated as to their having been legitimately constituted, and questioned their value.
"Get up now, Ummanodda, little brother, and do not mope and sulk any more.
You may deceive me again, perhaps.
Only the dark water murmured in its stony channel, and the faint night-wind rustled in the sedge.
It may be we shall never reach the Valleys.
Nod shook his head.
"I am in my second sleep, Mountain-mulgar.
Others they hauled down with Cullum ropes, and some smaller saplings they charred through with fire at the root.
He stooped lower, and called again.
What use is the stone to you now?
A little frost has cankered my bones.
"You told me false, Mulla-mulgar," she answered.
For now we must plunge into the water-cavern on our floating rafts, and all is haste and danger.
They lay merrily bobbing in a long string moored to an Ollaconda on the swift-running water.
Maybe it will carry us to where every shadow comes at last; maybe these are the waters of the Fountains of Assasimmon."
Only Nod and the Mountain-mulgar whose turn it was to keep watch were now awake.
Then the Midden floated out into the middle of the stream, and with one light hand kept herself in front of Nod, her narrow shoulders slowly twirling the while in the faintly-rosied starlight.
Nod, who believed in you, calls--your friend, the sorrowful Nod!"
And presently he fell into a cold, uneasy sleep, full of dreadful dreams and voices.
The storm had snapped and stripped off many branches from the trees. These the travellers dragged down to the water.
"Listen, listen, Midden," he said: "I will not harm you--I could not harm you, beautiful one, though you never gave me back my Wonderstone again, and I wandered forsaken till I died of hunger in the forest.
"Yes," said the Idiot.
"But he wouldn't make a fortune," suggested the Poet.
"True," said the Idiot.
"But for once I fear me we may be scorched by this Pelee of words that thou spoutest forth."
A civil motorman would be unique."
"'Crown me not with spinach, Wreathe me not with hay; Place no salad on my head When you bring the bay. Give me not the water-cresses To adorn my flowing tresses, But at e'en Crown my pockets good and strong With the green-- The green that's long.'"
Pretty fair?"
I've got some of the goods right here.
"I never heard that poem before," laughed the Poet, "though the sentiment in these commercial days is not unfamiliar."
I guess I'll apply for a job as a motorman, and make a name for myself there."
"Isn't my verse good?"
"Clad in frost are all the distant mountain-peaks, And the furnace is as hungry as a boy; While the plumber, as he gloats upon the leaks, Is the model that the painter takes for 'Joy.'
"Well, it's certainly--er--cheeky enough," said the Poet.
"Now the tinkling of the sleigh-bells tinge the air, And the coal-man is as happy as can be; While the hulking, sulking, grizzly seeks his lair, And the ice-man's soul is filled with misery.
"Now the fiddlers tune their fiddles To the lovely taradiddles Of old Wagner, Mozart, Bizet, and the rest. Now the trombone is a-tooting Out its scaley shute-the-chuteing And the oboe is hoboing with a zest.
"Now the festive frog is croaking in the mere, And the canvasback is honking in the bay, And the summer-girl is smiling full of cheer On the willieboys that chance along her way.
"That settles it," said the Idiot, rising.
"If he could prove he really was civil, the vaudeville people would pay him a thousand dollars a week and tour the country with him.
"Now the dressmakers are working-- Not a single minute shirking-- Making gowns with frills and fal-lals mighty queer, For the Autumn days are flying, And there's really no denying That the season of the opera is near."
"Something like this:
Therefore, there must be money in it, and where the money goes there the laurels are. You know what Browning Robinson, the Laureate of Wall Street, wrote in his 'Message to Posterity':
No sweet-singing robin-redbreast or soft-honking canvasback for yours truly this A.M., when a living, breathing, palpitating son of the Muses lurks near at hand.
"Of course it won't," retorted the Idiot.
"What's the proposition, Mr. Idiot?" asked the Poet.
In the second part we could do the same thing, only in greater detail, for each one of the months.
"Too modest," said the Idiot.
When lawyers can write as good poetry as real poets, it doesn't pay to be a real poet.
"I see you're on," he said.
How's that?
"Easily.
"Can a motorman make a name for himself?" asked the Doctor.
"No ambulance for mine," chortled the Idiot.
Just listen:
"All hail to thee.
"I think you read it to me once before, just after you--er--ah--rather just after Alfred Austin Biggs, of Texas--wrote it."
"Else will I call an ambulance."
I'm going in for something else.
That style of campaigning has gone out."
I know, because a cousin of mine ran for supervisor once, and he was licked out of his boots because he tried to do his kissing by proxy--said he'd give the kisses in a bunch to a committee of young ladies, who could distribute them for him.
Just as a sample, take the month of February.
"That's fair, only I don't think you'll find many candidates doing that sort of thing nowadays," said the Poet.
"What's the matter?" asked Mr. Brief.
"Well, I might consent to be a cousin to a poem of that kind.
"We could call that section 'The Seasons,' and make it the first part of the book.
Mr. Brief took a hand in the discussion at this moment.
"Oh yes," said the Idiot.
With your name on the title-page and my poems in the book I think we can make a go of it."
"I see," said the Poet.
"You ought to be cautious, as a matter of protection to your own name.
"Do I understand it?--you want me to father your poems.
"Here's one on the opening of the opera season," said the Idiot:
"I thirst for laurels," said the Idiot, "and I propose that you and I collaborate on a book of poems for early publication.
"Now the skeeter sings his carols to the dawn, And bewails the early closing of the bar That prevents the little nips he seeks each morn On the sea-shore where the fatling boarders are.
Listen to this:
"Sonnets, or French forms, or just plain snatches of song?"
We could run something like this in on February:
"You may find it even more convincing:
Thou art the bright particular bird of plumage I most hoped to see this rare and beauteous summer morning.
"'Oh, when you come to crown my brow, Bring me no bay nor sorrel; Give me no parsley wreath, but just The legal long green laurel.'"
"Do you remember that?" asked the Idiot.
That's a fair division.
"I withdraw my proposition. Let's call it off, Mr. Poet."
"Then you can have a blanket verse," he said, scribbling with his pencil on a piece of paper in front of him.
By being civil.
I've read worse and written some that are quite as bad.
"Now the man who deals in mittens and in tabs Is a-smiling broadly--aye, from ear to ear-- As he reaches out his hand and fondly grabs All the shining, golden shekels falling near.
HE MAKES A SUGGESTION TO THE POET
"What do you think of this:
We have done our duty in warning those who play with fire.
And the Cossack movement was no more....
Opposition to these measures is a crime against the People.
But the dominant worker and soldier did not believe them; it was firmly fixed in the popular mind that the employees were sabotaging, starving the Army, starving the people....
For translation see App.
On the night of November 22nd he was communicated with by telephone, and asked if he intended to obey the order.
The last days of the Duma were stormy with the bitter demands of the Municipal workers for decent living wages, and the threat of strikes....
To this end the Council of People's Commissars resolves:
The financially ambitious, however, were checked by the decree on Salaries of Government Employees, fixing the salaries of the People's Commissars--the highest--at five hundred rubles (about fifty dollars) a month....
(2) All functionaries elected or appointed by the present Duma shall remain at their posts and fulfil the duties confided to them, until their places shall be filled by representatives of the new Duma.
TO THE ATTENTION OF ALL CITIZENS.
A declaration conforming to this decision has been sent by the Commissar for Foreign Affairs to the representatives of the Allied powers at Petrograd.
By telegraph he was immediately dismissed from the post of Supreme Commander, and Krylenko appointed in his place.
The Council of People's Commissars has received an urgent telegram from the Staff of the Northern Front....
Please accept, Mr. Ambassador, the profound assurance of the esteem of the Soviet Government toward your people, who cannot but wish for peace, like all the other peoples exhausted and drained by this unexampled butchery....
Next morning Trotzky made another appeal to the troops, characterising the note of the Allied representatives as a flagrant interference in the internal affairs of Russia, and a bald attempt "to force by threats the Russian Army and the Russian people to continue the war in execution of the treaties concluded by the Tsar...."
Each hour of delay may cost the life of thousands of soldiers.
Two weeks later General Kaledin received a deputation from his troops.
Revolutionary discipline!
On the 19th the Conference to Form a New Government disbanded, and the opposition one by one slipped away to Moghilev, where, under the wing of the General Staff, they continued to form Government after Government, until the end....
All the reserves which they possess will be requisitioned.
The Military Revolutionary Committee brings this to the notice of the Petrograd garrison and the workers of Petrograd.
1.
Having settled the question of power, the Bolsheviki turned their attention to problems of practical administration.
Strict accounting and control!
The bank clerks returned to their jobs....
The Central Army Committee issued a declaration in favour of Dukhonin; and at once ten thousand troops moved upon Moghilev....
(3) All Municipal employees shall continue to fulfil their duties; those who leave the service of their own accord shall be considered discharged.
"There must be no further delay; do not let the Army die of hunger; the armies of the Northern Front have not received a crust of bread now for several days, and in two or three days they will not have any more biscuits--which are being doled out to them from reserve supplies until now never touched....
What is left?
It was the Mayor who had urged the occupation of the Kremlin; "They will never dare fire on you there," he said....
1.
Also the shops were closed, and the propertied classes stayed at home--but for other reasons.
So spoke Moscow....
Shrill, excited as if with a new game, they waited until the firing slackened, and then tried to run across the street....
We were provided with passes from Smolny, without which no one could leave the capital....
On the high walls flickered redly the light of hidden flames; voices reached us across the immense place, and the sound of picks and shovels.
The city was rising.
Devils! Devils!
He found very few except ours, and after a half-hour of futile wrangling, lifted his arms despairingly and withdrew.
Devils!
They swarmed into the pits, picked up the tools and began digging, digging, without a word....
On the side of the Soviets were the rank and file of the workers, the sailors, all the undemoralised soldiers, the landless peasants, and a few--a very few--intellectuals....
There was no sign of any damage....
Nothing that the Bolsheviki had done could compare with this fearful blasphemy in the heart of Holy Russia.
What more can happen?
There is no room!" On the main streets, where the great banking-houses and mercantile houses lay, the Bolshevik artillery had been indiscriminately effective.
"But worst of all," said Melnichansky, "we had to organise while we were fighting.
My cup is full.
Nogin spoke, and most of his listeners were plainly with him.
Petrograd, after all, in spite of being for a century the seat of Government, is still an artificial city.
For two days now the Bolsheviki had been in control of the city.
In frantic haste swung the picks and shovels, and the earth--mountains grew.
He scratched his head.
Only a few arc-lights were burning, only a few pedestrians hurried along the side-walks.
Now from the far quarters of the city the workers of the different factories were arriving, with their dead.
I am unable to endure these horrors.
From afar the vague stirring sound deepened and became louder, a steady and tremendous bass.
It was characteristic--in the general turmoil attending the conquest of the city, the chief railway station had been forgotten by the victors....
To the ears of the devout sounded the shock of guns crashing in the face of the Holy Orthodox Church, and pounding to dust the sanctuary of the Russian nation....
Kazan, Saratov, Novgorod, Vinnitza--where the streets had run with blood; Moscow, where the Bolsheviki had turned their artillery against the last strong-hold of the bourgeoisie--the Kremlin.
Scarcely had the meeting formally opened before Nogin was assailed with a tempest of jeers and angry shouts.
The poor love each other so!
Many of them were women--squat, strong proletarian women.
Imagine!
Signed,
Then the three strokes of the bell and we made a rush for the train, worming our way through the packed and noisy aisle....
The Military Revolutionary Committee, with a fierce intensity, followed up its victory:
We crossed over.
They could be seen coming through the Gate, the blare of their banners, and the dull red--like blood--of the coffins they carried.
Across the Red Square a dark knot of men came hurrying.
The White Guard gives up its arms and dissolves.
"They are bombarding the Kremlin!"
3.
And it was under the influence of these fearful reports that we decided to go there.
Life was more intense there.
5.
As we shake hands, the young man whom I pushed into the irrigating ditch, points to a similar receptacle near by and shakes his head with amusing solemnity; whether this is expressive of his sorrow that I should have pushed him in, or that he should have annoyed me to the extent of having deserved it, I cannot say; probably the latter.
His two sons and a couple of soldiers accompany me on horseback some distance up the valley.
In the morning the Pasha Khan is wonderfully agreeable, and appears anxious to atone as far as possible for the little incivility of yesterday evening, and to remove any unfavorable impressions I may perchance entertain of him on that account before I leave.
While thus partaking freely of the bread and cheese, I do not fail to notice that the others partake very sparingly, and that they seem to be rather astonished because I am not following their example.
Falconing is considered the chief out-door sport of the Persian nobility, but the average Persian is altogether too indolent for out-door sport, and the keeping of falcons is fashionable, because regarded as a sign of rank and nobility rather than for sport.
One of the unattached travellers gives me a note of introduction to Mohammed.
Arriving at the caravanserai, and finding myself thus thrown unexpectedly upon my own resources, I inquire of some bystanders where I can obtain elcmek; some of them want to know how many liras I will give for ekmek.
The firing and the shouting produce a truly magical effect upon a blood-thirsty youngster of ten or twelve summers; he becomes wildly hilarious, gamboling about the tent, and rolling over and kicking up his heels.
The first village I arrive at to-day, I again attempt the "skedaddling" dodge on them that proved so successful on one occasion yesterday; but I am foiled by a rocky "jump-off" in the road to-day.
With a view to humoring the spirit of amusement thus awakened, I likewise smile, but affect ignorance and innocence concerning the origin of the mysterious ticking, and strike a listening attitude as well as the others.
The speaker paused.
No female can benefit by what you have done!"
"Friends"--and Extra's face shone in his enthusiasm--"friends, for the first time in creation the human male germ has been dispensed with!
From the telephone came a confused murmuring, at which Van Emmon's face lighted up with delight. The murmuring had an angry sound!
I have just learned of another experiment which transcends even that of Savarona!"
"I regret to say that my treatment, despite all that I have been able to do, cannot be adapted to the female constitution.
Always the husband and wife are held down by this mutual envy, forever dragging at their heels, constantly holding them back from the lofty heights of spiritual power to which they aspire!"
"The prophets were right when they said today would witness many great things!
These elements are derivatives of the potash group, for the most part, together with phosphates which need a new classification. Their effect," impressively, "has been to postpone age indefinitely!"
This boy will never know jealousy, because he will never know love!"
"In accordance with my promise," stated a high-pitched effeminate voice, "I am going to demonstrate a juvenation method upon which I have worked for the past one hundred and twenty-two years."
Next second he began to speak into the telephone, in a voice so loud as to silence all the clamor.
"What I have done is to prevent age itself.
My experiments took this lad before he had become a man, and allowed his brain to develop, while his body stopped growing!
You are right, except you did not mention that this jealousy becomes less and less as one grows older!
It would be fatal to any but males.
THE WAR OF THE SEXES
This time there was a definite response.
The murmuring grew louder, angrier, more confused.
No matter how pure our love may be, it is always tainted with rivalry!
"Estra, I have done the thing you wish!
Using this solution, I have supplied nourishment to this lad from the hour of his birth.
"But I have corrected this.
"However, Savarona may go into the details of--"
There was no comment.
The four from the earth looked at each other in some slight uneasiness.
There was a brief pause, during which Estra hurriedly explained that the man who was making the speech was located far on the other side of the planet, in a hall like the one the four had first visited; and that he was making the demonstration before a great gathering of scientists. "Too bad you cannot see as we do," commented the Venusian.
"In short, I offer you the fountain of youth itself!"
An instant's pause; then: "First let me remind you that we have been doing all we could to elevate our spiritual selves.
We are daily trying to eliminate all that is animal, all that is gross and bemeaning in us, even to the extent of reducing the flavors of our foods to the lowest tolerable point.
At the same time they noted that Estra, his eyes tightly closed and his fists clenched in the intensity of his concentration, suddenly gave a sigh of relief.
"This is outrageous!" a loud contralto voice was raised above the rest. "You are unethical, Savarona, to announce such a thing before adapting it to both sexes!"
This lad is a hundred and twenty-two years old, mentally, and still only twelve years old, as to body!
The speaker's voice shook with excitement as he went on:
But so far, it has been a mere reprieve.
"We still have the beast within us!
Listen!
XIII
Evidently all had been as greatly impressed as the explorers.
"Savarona, and the people of Venus!
The man in the room with the four answered in a flash: "So you have, Savarona, but only for MEN!
The intellect has done what the laboratory could not do!
And despite all this, we have not been able to get rid of sex jealousy!
At the same time, the other three felt a tremendous, inexplicable thrill.
Another rest, and Estra said: "They are examining a boy who appears to be about twelve years of age."
Then the voice of the man Savarona finished, very deliberately:
"Now, my discovery will put an end to your beast, Estra!
"But I tell you that, within the past few minutes, a child has been born under circumstances which can be repeated at any time, and for any sex!"
Chapter VI.
I know that about myself now.
It's either an attempt to slander me, or the hallucination of a madman," Mitya still shouted.
He had an absurd nightmarish feeling, as though he were out of his mind.
I can hardly button it," Mitya grumbled.
Both the lawyers remembered Gridyenko's case perfectly, and so laid aside Mitya's cap, and decided that all his clothes must be more thoroughly examined later.
I didn't come from the door," gasped Mitya.
Am I to go on sitting here?"
"He treats me not as an officer but as a thief," Mitya muttered to himself.
He felt unbearably awkward.
We will tell you what to do," Nikolay Parfenovitch said, and his voice was positively peremptory, or so it seemed to Mitya.
And don't accuse us of being 'frigid, cynical, scoffing people,' who are incapable of believing in the generous impulses of your heart....
God is against me!" he exclaimed, staring before him in complete stupefaction.
Am I to be dressed up like a fool ... for your amusement?"
"Be so good as to tell Mr. Kalganov from me that I didn't ask for his clothes, and it's not my doing that they've dressed me up like a clown."
"Nonsense!
"Come, you see," the prosecutor went on with dignity, "and you can judge for yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.
"They make no bones about it," thought Mitya, "they don't keep up the most elementary politeness."
He could never, even a minute before, have conceived that any one could behave like that to him, Mitya Karamazov.
"But it's false, it's false!
He sank back helpless in his chair.
Mitya was left alone with the peasants, who stood in silence, never taking their eyes off him.
"But you, too, knew of the envelope and that it was under the pillow."
Dressed in another man's clothes he felt himself disgraced, even in the eyes of the peasants, and of Trifon Borissovitch, whose face appeared, for some reason, in the doorway, and vanished immediately.
But what was his indignation when Nikolay Parfenovitch came back with quite different clothes, brought in behind him by a peasant.
"Well, if I must--" muttered Mitya, and sitting down on the bed, he took off his socks.
That's very important as material evidence."
It's absurd!
He must have killed him while I was running away and while Grigory was unconscious, that's clear now....
Mitya stared at it with open eyes.
We will arrange something.
You especially stated that it was under the pillow, so you must have known it."
All were clothed, while he was naked, and strange to say, when he was undressed he felt somehow guilty in their presence, and was almost ready to believe himself that he was inferior to them, and that now they had a perfect right to despise him.
"But you told us yourself that the envelope was under your deceased father's pillow.
What does Smerdyakov say?
"Don't take it off ... there's no need....
"Ring?" repeated Nikolay Parfenovitch with surprise.
It can't be so!
"I consider it my duty to repeat that he is firm in his statement.
He couldn't have seen the door open because it was shut.
The prosecutor turned to Nikolay Parfenovitch and said to him impressively:
And meanwhile take off your socks."
Mitya was indescribably agitated.
"Would you like to look at it?
You can wrap yourself in a quilt from the bed, and I ...
"Precisely.
He must have fancied it when he came to.... He's raving."
I'll tell you where I got the money!...
The envelope was empty, and slit open at one end.
Mitya flushed red and flew into a rage.
They urged upon him again that he was exaggerating, that Kalganov was only a little taller, so that only the trousers might be a little too long.
He's lying!"
I mean, not sorry to lend you his clothes, but sorry about all this business," mumbled Nikolay Parfenovitch.
He does not waver.
"Don't disturb yourself.
"It's he who's murdered him!
"We are in no mood for joking," answered Nikolay Parfenovitch sternly.
All the things were shown to the witnesses.
"Would you like to look anywhere else if you're not ashamed to?"
They communicated their ideas to one another with amazing frankness.
He subsided into gloomy silence and hurriedly dressed himself.
"Excuse me," cried Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly, noticing that the right cuff of Mitya's shirt was turned in, and covered with blood, "excuse me, what's that, blood?"
"We've got it written down," confirmed Nikolay Parfenovitch.
The prosecutor watched him the whole time and only when he had ceased speaking, observed, as though it were the most ordinary thing, with the most frigid and composed air:
Mitya flew into a passion.
And what was worse, he disliked his feet. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous.
It's a nightmare!
I told you without thinking that it was under the pillow, and now you-- Oh, you know how one says the wrong thing, without meaning it.
Mitya imagined, however, that his clothes would be examined and returned to him.
"I won't have other people's clothes!" he shouted menacingly, "give me my own!"
We've cross-examined him several times."
"Confront him with it."
He's robbed him!
He gave the signal and father opened to him ... for no one but he knew the signal, and without the signal father would never have opened the door...."
No, better Siberia!
"Last summer he received the wages of the whole office, and pretended to have lost the money when he was drunk.
Mitya uttered his sudden monologue as though he were determined to be absolutely silent for the future.
"Give me my own.
Damn it!... Gentlemen, you've sullied my heart!
Damn Kalganov and his clothes, too!"
Are you going to flog me?
Mitya wrapped himself up in the quilt.
He turned pale.
"It ... it must be that envelope of my father's, the envelope that contained the three thousand roubles ... and if there's inscribed on it, allow me, 'For my little chicken' ... yes--three thousand!" he shouted, "do you see, three thousand, do you see?"
He was busily engaged with the prosecutor in examining the coat, the trousers, the waistcoat and the cap; and it was evident that they were both much interested in the scrutiny.
"No, don't take it off," cried Mitya furiously, suddenly waking up, and angry with himself.
He looked surprisingly exhausted.
One of them, thinking the cyclometer to be a watch, puts his ear down to see if he can hear it tick, and then persists in fingering it about, to the imminent danger of the tally-pin. After telling him several times not to meddle with it, and receiving overbearing gestures in reply, I deliberately throw him backward into an irrigating ditch.
The country hereabouts consists of gravelly, undulating plateaus between the mountains, and well-worn camel-paths afford some excellent wheeling.
After riding a few times along the brick-paved walk, and promising to do better in the morning.
During the summer they fare comparatively well, needing but little clothing, and they are happy and contented in the absence of actual suffering; they are perfectly satisfied with a diet of bread and fruit and cucumbers, rarely tasting meat of any kind.
The Pasha Khan makes his appearance without having taken the trouble to open the envelope.
The servant now arrives with the lighted candle, and the Pasha Kahn leads the way into his garden, where there is a wide brick-paved walk; the house occupies one side of the garden, the other three sides are inclosed by a high mud wall.
An appeal to the revolver will invariably secure my release, but one naturally gets ashamed of threatening people's lives even under the exasperating circumstances of a forcible detention.
The Sheikh and others laugh at this, but instead of chiding him for his tragical demonstration, they favor him with the same admiring glances that grown people bestow upon precocious youngsters the world over.
The valley is studded with villages, and at the second one we halt at the residence of a gentleman named Abbas Koola Khan, and partake of tea and light refreshments in his garden.
beautiful, calm autumn evenings when all nature seems hushed in peaceful slumbers; when the stars seem to first peep cautiously from the impenetrable depths of their hiding-place, and then to commence blinking benignantly and approvingly upon the world; and when the moon looks almost as though fair Luna has been especially decorating herself to embellish a scene that without her lovely presence would be incomplete.
I depart from the Koordish camp thoroughly satisfied with my experience of their hospitality, but the cerulean waist-scarf bestowed upon me by our Hungarian friend Igali, at Belgrade, no longer adds its embellishments to my personal adornments.
The servant who presents my letter of introduction fills the untutored mind of his master with wonderment concerning what the peasants have told him about the bicycle.
They are accompanied by two dogs, tawny-coated monsters, larger than the largest mastiffs, who now proceed to make things lively and interesting around myself and the bicycle.
If I am surprised, the lady herself not unnaturally evinces even greater astonishment at the apparition of a lone wheelman here on the caravan roads of Persia; of course we are mutually delighted.
Along the trail, not over a mile from camp, a large Persian caravan has been halting during the day; late in the evening loud shouting and firing of guns announces them as prepared to start on their night's journey.
It is one of those.
Consequently his warnings, although evidently sincere, fall on biased ears, and I peremptorily order him to depart.
Soon the village of Ovahjik is reached, and some peasants guide me to the residence of the Pasha Khan.
He hastily hid it away among his clothes and disappeared, as though fearful, either that the Sheikh might see it and make him return it, or that one of the chieftain's favorites might take a fancy to it and summarily appropriate it to his own use.
They bring me their guns and spears to look at and pronounce upon, and then my stalwart entertainer grows inquisitive about my revolver.
In the seclusion of their own walled premises the Persian females are evidently not so particular about concealing their features, and I obtained a glimpse of some very pretty faces; oval faces with large dreamy black eyes, and a flush of warm sunset on brownish cheeks.
Abbas Koola Khan now joins the company until we arrive at the summit of a knoll commanding an extensive view of my road ahead so they can stand and watch me when they all bid me farewell save the soldier who is to accompany me further on.
Without giving them time to reveal whether they seriously intend attacking me, or only to try intimidation, I have them nicely covered with the Smith & Wesson.
They seem to comprehend in a moment that I have them at a disadvantage, and they hurriedly retreat a short distance, executing a series of gyral antics, as though expecting me to fire at their legs.
When it is reflected that a lira is nearly five dollars, one realizes from this something of the unconscionable possibilities of the Persian commercial mind.
At the frontier an escort of Turkish zaptiehs will take the place of the Persian soldiers, and at Erzeroum the missionaries will, of course, render her every assistance to Trebizond; but it is not without feelings of anxiety for the health of a lady travelling in this rough manner unaccompanied by her natural protector, that I reflect on the discomforts she must necessarily put up with between here and Erzeroum.
" ("This; what is it?") and it is several days ere I have an opportunity of finding out exactly what they mean.
Reaching the smooth ground before any of the new-comers overtake me, I mount and speed away, followed by wild yells from a dozen Koordish throats, and chased by a dozen of their dogs.
The discomfited young man betrays nothing of the spirit of resentment upon recovering himself from the ditch, and the other son involuntarily retreats as though afraid his turn was coming next.
Near mid-day, while laboriously ascending a long but not altogether unridable ascent, I meet a couple of mounted soldiers; they obstruct my road, and proceed to deliver themselves of voluble Tabreez Turkish, by which I understand that they are the advance guard of a party in which there is a Ferenghi (the Persian term for an Occidental).
I naturally expect to be taken into the house, instead of which the Pasha Khan orders the people to show me the way to the caravanserai.
Recognizing immediately its uselessness to him under such circumstances, he then returns it without remark; whether he would have confiscated it without this timely explanation, it is difficult to say.
This scarf, they were doubtless penetrating enough to observe, formed no necessary part of my wardrobe, and a dozen times in the evening, and again in the morning, I was worried to part with it, so I finally presented it to one of them.
The distance is now reckoned by farsakhs (roughly, four miles) instead of hours; but, although the farsakh is a more tangible and comprehensive measurement than the Turkish hour, in reality it is almost as unreliable to go by.
Naturally disapproving of this arbitrary conduct, I push them roughly away.
In the morning, before departing, I am regaled with bread and rich, new cream, and when leaving the tent I pause a minute to watch the busy scene in the female department.
I show them my Turkish teskeri, upon which several of them bestow fervent kisses, and when, by means of placing several stones here and there I explained to them how in 1877, the hated Muscov occupied different Mussulman cities one after the other, and was prevented by the English from occupying their dearly beloved Stamboul itself, their admiration knows no bounds.
Presuming upon our interchange of familiarity, our six-foot-sixer then commences searching about my clothing for the watch, but being hidden away in a pantaloon fob, and minus a chain, it proves beyond his power of discovery.
The Tabreez trail is now easily followed without a guide, and with a sense of perfect freedom and unrestraint, that is destroyed by having a horseman cantering alongside one, I push ahead, finding the roads variable, and passing through several villages during the day.
Fortunately, they have no horses handy, but some of these lanky fellows can run like deer almost, and nothing but an excellent piece of road enables me to outdistance my pursuers.
Pretending acquiescence in their proposition of waiting till the arrival of their Khan, I propose mounting and riding a few yards for their own edification while waiting; in their eagerness to see they readily fall into the trap, and the next minute sees me flying down the road with a swarm of bare-legged ryots in full chase after me, yelling for me to stop.
Shortly after the evening meal, an incident occurs which causes considerable amusement.
The indoor costume of Persian women is but an inconsiderable improvement upon the costume of our ancestress in the garden of Eden, and over this they hastily don a flimsy shawl-like garment to come out and see me ride.
She seems in good spirits, however, and says that meeting me here in this extraordinary manner is the "most romantic" incident in her whole experiences of missionary life in Persia.
Some are churning butter in sheep-skin churns which are suspended from poles and jerked back and forth; others are weaving carpets, preparing curds for cheese, baking bread, and otherwise industriously employed.
Thus does one pay the penalty of being unacquainted with the domestic customs of a country when first entering upon its experiences.
A gleam of intelligence overspreads the stolid countenance of the Pasha Khan at seeing his offspring floundering about on his back in the mud and water, and he gives utterance to a chuckle of delight.
"Bacalem yole lazim, bacalem saba," I reply, for it is too dark to ride on unknown ground this evening.
I am getting a trifle uneasy at his evident covetousness of the revolver, and in this request I see my opportunity of giving him to understand that it would be a useless weapon for him to possess, by telling him I have but a few cartridges and that others are not procurable in Koordistan or neighboring countries.
It requires more material objects than sketches and photos to meet the appreciation of these semi- civilized children of the desert.
He then goes to the Sheikh, points to me, and draws his finger across his throat, intimating that he would like the privilege of cutting somebody's throat, and why not let him cut mine.
There appears to be such a total absence of all consideration for myself that I am not disposed to regard very favorably or patiently the obtrusive meddlesomeness of two younger men-whom I afterward discover to be sons of the Pasha Khan - who seem almost inclined to take the bicycle out of my charge altogether, in their excessive impatience and inordinate inquisitiveness to examine everything about it.
I am afraid, however, that with the advantage on their side, the Koordish herdsmen rarely trouble themselves about any such uncongenial task as peace-making.
At the third village after leaving the sons of the Pasha Khan, my Tartar- eyed escort, with much garrulous injunction to his successor, delivers me over to another soldier, himself returning back; this is my favorable opportunity, and soon after leaving the village I bid my valiant protector return.
Such is my first autumn evening beneath the cloudless skies of Persia.
Being chiefly interested in satisfying my appetite, however, their silent observations have no effect save to further mystify my understanding of the Persian character.
While talking with them I am somewhat taken by surprise at seeing a lady on horseback and two children in a kajaveh (mule panier) appear over the slope, accompanied by about a dozen Persians.
They gather around me and prevent my departure until he arrives.
And to have served her was something for which to be thankful.
Women had played no part in his life, until one woman had played an overmastering one; and all that his passionate adoration of Margaret Stanforth had cost, and was costing, him, gave an added charm to a nature devoid of all subtlety, simple and serene.
"Tell if the princess in the white frock was like Christina."
"No wonder this small girl looks at you with rosy spectacles," he said; "you are one of the born helpers of this world.
I have been able to do many things for her; things a friend could do.
"So I am," he replied, pillowing Baba more closely in his arms, and leaning nearer to Christina.
And with the memory, came an illuminating flash of thought.
That maternal instinct which is innately part of every good woman's nature, was largely developed in Christina, and, involuntarily, Rupert had made an appeal to that instinct.
"Your mention of Biskra brought back so many pictures of the past, and--I was looking at them instead of going on with my story."
"Oh!" she whispered softly; "oh! but that was hard."
Some people from the very beginning don't seem like strangers, do they?" she asked, with a smile.
"I wish you could have seen her," he answered her speech.
I never forget to look for what I have lost, wherever I go, and I go to many places in my car.
What makes you say you would like to help me?
If only she had trusted him more!
He nodded.
"Do please forgive me," he said.
"Your eyes are so sad," she answered frankly, when he paused for her reply; "you seem as if you were looking always for something you have lost, something which is very precious to you."
"I have her friendship.
"I may find the--person who has gone out of my ken; that is possible.
If only--there was the bitterness--if only she had not gone away out of his ken now, in this strange mysterious fashion, leaving him ignorant of her whereabouts, and of all that concerned her.
I only guess that the--rightful prince is not worthy to tie the strings of her shoes, and yet--he is all the world to her.
Do you think I need help?"
Her beauty was something beyond and above anything ordinary or everyday."
"Do you know anybody answering to the description I have just given?
I am looking for something I have lost, or perhaps--something I have never had," he added bitterly, under his breath.
Probably he has forgotten all about the stupid girl who wrote him that letter, and anyhow, he doesn't think about me at all, excepting as Baba's nurse, so it would be foolish to make a fuss."
The eyes of the two elders met, and Christina laughed confusedly.
The princess"--he started, and tried to resume a lighter tone--"was the most beautiful lady in the world, little Baba."
Have you ever seen someone like--like my princess?"
"And the poor princess?" Christina asked gently.
You would not speak of her in those terms of lukewarm praise.
"Oh!
"I don't know by what wonderful gift you discovered all that in my eyes--but it is true.
"What do you find in my eyes that makes you think I want help?"
"I am sure you do," came the prompt reply; "your eyes--" she broke off, startled by her own audacity, her glance wavering from his face to the fire.
I wanted her for my princess.
No, that isn't true either," he corrected himself hurriedly.
"Was the princess like Christina?" Baba all at once pulled herself into an upright position on his knee, and looked earnestly into his face.
But, even if I found the human being I have lost, will everything be less elusive, less hopeless than before?"
She is very fragile; she has been very ill, and now--I do not even know where she is.
I have the unspeakable honour of being her friend, but the best of her is given to someone who is not worthy.
"It could not be the same person," Rupert said with decision.
"You do help me," he said quickly; "it sounds absurd to say so, even to myself it seems absurd, because it is not my way to take anybody into my confidence.
Night had brought its own counsels, and she had determined not to disclose her identity to Mernside.
He would have laughed to scorn the bare idea that he, a strong and self-reliant man of the world, could ever lean, or need to lean, upon a slip of a girl, whose youthfulness was written in every line of her face, and of her slight form.
It was only when some chance word of his led Christina to ask him a question about Biskra, that the flow of his eloquence suddenly ceased.
"The princess I am describing--was unique.
"Some day--surely--you will find it?" she said gently, her heart aching, because of the sudden hardening of his mouth and eyes.
I am sorry," she exclaimed.
Rupert, when he chose, could talk well and interestingly; he had travelled over the greater part of the world, and in the course of his travels had used eyes and ears to good purpose.
Well! at least in the years that followed, he had been able to serve her, to help her, to ease some of the burden of her life, that burden of which he himself knew so little.
If only---- With a start he roused himself, to realise that Christina's eyes were watching him with a certain shy wonder, and remembering that he had broken off his conversation almost in the middle of a sentence, he looked at her with a smile of apology.
But--I can trust you."
"You don't know what it means to care so much for a man, that, no matter what he is, or does, he is your world, your whole world."
If--if I might understand a little better?" she added falteringly.
"And she--your friend--is it she you have lost now?" Christina questioned softly, when he paused.
"Your eyes----" he repeated after her.
"Yes, she left town suddenly, giving me no reason for going.
"Thank you for saying that," she answered.
A light flashed over Rupert's face.
But before she could speak, Baba's clear tones again made themselves heard.
The rest of us are nothing.
"I should like--to have seen her under the palm-tree," she said, wondering in her girlish heart, whether it was the beautiful princess in the white gown, who had brought the lines of pain about this man's face, and into his grey eyes; wishing, too, with girlish innocent fervour, that it might be given to her to take away some of his pain.
"I think the lady you describe, is something like a lady I once saw; at least, she was beautiful, with dark eyes and hair," the girl ended confusedly.
"It seemed hard to me," his tone was grim; "it seemed an irony of fate beyond my poor powers of comprehension, more especially when I found--no, not found--I don't know for certain even now.
"Have I? I am glad," the colour rushed into her face, "and I wish I could help more." He smiled at her again.
"YOU HAVE BEEN A FRIEND TO ME TO-DAY."
The simply spoken words set Christina's heart beating with innocent pride; her eyes looked at him gratefully.
"A stranger?" Christina echoed the words blankly, then laughed a little tremulously.
"I think it is true.
She showed no traces of her embarrassment of the previous day.
You have been a friend to me to-day."
He felt as though the ground had been cut away from under his feet, as if the very foundations of his life had been shaken. Why! to-day was the day she had herself fixed for his interview in her house with the girl of the advertisement.
and why is he rousing your ladyship's wrath?"
I had an early appointment with Mathilde."
"Where does James come in to the plan for Baba's education?" Rupert contrived to ask, his grey eyes shining, a whimsical smile playing round his mouth.
"What beaten track has he left?
"Rupert!
Your sort don't advertise for husbands and wives, but our section of society is not so faultless that we can afford to throw stones even at people who marry through a matrimonial bureau."
You see, an insane asylum is not like a prison; to make a good get-away from prison you have to have outside assistance.
"Do you think you will remember?" asked Briggerland.
"I happen to know where they are."
"Who is he?" asked Briggerland.
"As long as they keep me in this place pretending that I am mad, there is no possible chance for me."
"No, no," Mr. Briggerland hastened to assure her.
"At the first attempt, my dear, what do you think of that?" His dark face glowed with almost childish pride, and she looked at him with a half-smile.
On a morning when pale yellow sunlight brightened his dining-room, Mr. Briggerland put down his newspaper and looked across the table at his daughter.
She nodded, and looked up quickly.
"Anyway I'm glad they didn't succeed," said Jean after a while.
"Do you think he is a detective?"
"Really?" said the other easily, and then a cloud passed over his face and he shook his head.
I should have thought you would have got more material for your book in one of the big public asylums.
"The rough work!" he said indignantly.
"They are in London," he said a little hoarsely.
"He should have broken his neck," she said calmly.
Moreover, he was well aware that Norwood was the asylum to which the more dangerous of lunatics were transferred.
"You asked that before," said the doctor in surprise.
"Without fear, favour or prejudice, eh?
Mr. Briggerland breathed a little more quickly as he felt the strength of the patient's biceps.
Chapter XII
"I shall not fail you," said Mr. Briggerland hastily.
The two attendants exchanged glances with the asylum doctor and strolled off.
He may, of course, be an old police pensioner, and I have been trying to trace him from that source."
He looked at his watch.
Jean had said he might have to visit a dozen asylums before he found his opportunity and the right man, and he had succeeded at the first attempt.
Luckily they detected him before he did any mischief or he would have been in Broadmoor."
He had a club in the East End of London and his manager had telephoned that morning sending a somewhat unhappy report.
"They are safe from my vengeance," he said a little sadly.
This, of course, as you know, is a private institution.
"Certainly," murmured Mr. Briggerland.
He is not a Scotland Yard man.
I only learnt of it because the manager of the club, who gets information of this character, thought I would be interested."
"My conviction," said Dr. Thun seriously, "was due to the fact that women were sitting on the court martial, which is, of course, against all regulations."
Mr. Briggerland drew a long breath.
"I have an engagement in town, but my assistant, Dr. Carew, will conduct you over the asylum and give you all the information you require.
He was prepared to the extent of two full noggins of brandy.
A fair, bearded man, with pale blue eyes, he held out his hand impulsively to the visitor, and after a momentary hesitation, Mr. Briggerland took it and found his hand in a grip like a vice.
"No.
"If he is, he has been imported from the provinces.
"He's a doctor and a genuine homicide.
His eyes were blazing.
The visitor looked round and saw that the three men who were following were out of ear shot.
It was a curious fact that whilst her father made the most guarded references to all their exploits and clothed them with garments of euphemism, his daughter never attempted any such disguise.
6, the first cubicle on the left," he whispered, "you will not fail me?
"That is rather a sad case," said the alienist cheerfully.
"Yes," he said huskily.
Dr. Carew proved to be a young and enthusiastic alienist whose heart and soul was in his work.
"Half the difficulty is going to be to cover up your visit to the asylum, because this man is certain to mention your name, and it will not all be dismissed as the imagination of a madman.
True, his heart did not break, because it was made of infrangible material, and his disappointment was counter-balanced by a certain vague relief.
He was a sociologist--a loose title which covers a great deal of inquisitive investigation into other people's affairs.
"I fear that he and Hoggins were engaged in some nefarious plan and that in making an attempt to enter--as, of course, they had no right to enter--a block of flats in Cavendish Place, poor Talmot slipped and fell from the fourth floor window-sill, breaking his leg.
If I thought you'd fail me----" His eyes lit up again.
Nevertheless, he tossed down two long glasses of brandy before he left.
The psychologist would find in Mr. Briggerland's reticence the embryo of a once dominant rectitude, no trace of which remained in his daughter's moral equipment.
"You, my dear?
"Would you rather I went?" asked the girl.
"Aren't you ever afraid of these men escaping?" asked Mr. Briggerland.
"I suppose you are prepared to see jumpy things," he said with a smile, as he conducted Mr. Briggerland along a stone-vaulted corridor.
"I thought you would," she said quietly.
"That was where the Italians lost so heavily."
"Nobody knows anything about it, not even the--er--fortunate occupant of the flat they were evidently trying to burgle.
She nodded.
Moreover, he had published a book on the subject.
"Yes, what about him?"
Thun nodded.
"Do you remember that man Talmot, my dear?" he asked.
His car set him down before the iron gates of a squat and ugly stucco building, surrounded by high walls, and the uniformed attendant, having examined his credentials, admitted him.
Yet--he shuddered at the picture he conjured--that climb over the high wall (he had already located the ward, for he had followed the General and the attendants and had seen him safely put away), the midnight association with a madman....
"A man with his afflictions should be pretty well-known."
"I suppose now the police are making tender inquiries?"
It was a harrowing, heart-breaking, and to some extent, a disappointing experience for Mr. Briggerland.
You are prepared for that?"
Naturally, they do not wish me to get at my enemies, who I have every reason to believe are in London."
I would not allow you to have such an experience.
There was nothing in the appearance of the patient to suggest that he was in any way dangerous.
Mr. Briggerland hesitated only for a second.
Except one, they were unattended by keepers, but in the case of this one man, two stalwart uniformed men walked on either side of him.
Mr. Briggerland, it seemed, had some other object in life than the regeneration of the criminal classes.
"The doctor was the general who was responsible for the losses at Caperetto," explained Dr. Carew.
Of course not!
He made a little grimace of disgust.
Would you like to talk to Dr. Thun?"
"Oh!
Thank God, there are plenty of the right sort left," and Rupert stooped suddenly and took his cousin's two small hands into his.
Rupert smiled down into his cousin's pretty, eager face.
If you really want to find her, an advertisement in some leading paper should unearth her for you. Perhaps, too, if she was shabbily dressed, a reward might be a god-send to her."
"I don't think any girl ever had a better, dearer husband. People thought, perhaps you thought so, too, that I just married him for his money.
It all comes of the power of association.
What had happened?
Will you advertise for me?"
"I should rather like to see a woman twist you round her little finger," she said irrelevantly.
Could she have gone away?
Rupert looked silently down at her bent, bright head, a new reverence stirring within him for the little cousin.
"I don't know what I should do without you," she continued, looking at him gravely, but with no hint of coquettishness in her glance.
He told me so himself, and those were women of your class, well born and well educated.
"Certainly, I do; but, my dear boy, what do you know about nursery governesses?"
I shall have Baba taught everything by association.
"I don't know anything about them," was the reply, but Cicely's quick eyes still noted embarrassment in both voice and manner, "but I heard the other day of a girl who--who might be wanting a post."
"You have never been a mother; you don't know what a mother feels like about her only child," Cicely said with an attempt at dignity that sat quaintly upon her small person and drew an amused laugh from her cousin.
"I cannot find work, and I need a home very much."
"Probably she is quite impossible," his reflections ran on.
I believe the Prayer Book strongly urges us not to undertake it lightly or unadvisedly."
Rupert, if I had been at home, and they told me Baba was lost, I should have gone straight off my head."
I haven't a word to say against him in that capacity.
Everybody has different ideals, and it takes all sorts to make a world.
Yet, if she was ill, she would be in the house, and Elizabeth with her.
Well, we have the consolation of knowing that he refused the lot."
"I always hope that some day you will marry again," Rupert went on with brotherly frankness; "you have been alone three years now.
My pretty baby," and Cicely's face grew suddenly white and grave, whilst she shivered at the picture conjured up by her own mind.
When I asked James he could only say: 'Well, my lady, she seemed a nice respectable young person'; but heaven knows what James means by a young person.
"It's so low.
After that, I knew I would rather live in a cottage with him than in a palace with anybody else. I--don't think--I shall marry again--unless I find I am too weak and silly to manage Baba's fortune by myself."
"Cicely had a good deal of right on her side when she talked about shop girls and matrimonial advertisements.
But that her house should be barred and bolted against him was inexplicable.
She had seemed tired, it was true, but not more tired than he had often seen her, and he had no reason to suppose that she was more ill than usual.
"Seedy sort of adventurers," Rupert repeated slowly, turning, as if by chance, to survey his own reflection in the mirror over the mantelpiece; "there are adventurers and adventurers.
There are still some disinterested people left in the world.
Do, do advertise for me.
"You aren't going?" she exclaimed.
CHAPTER IV.
You know Baba's ducky way of making friends with everybody.
"A girl who might be wanting a post," Cicely exclaimed mockingly; "the person I engage for Baba, would have to be somebody much less vague than that, and she must have unimpeachable references."
"I know, dear; I know quite well," Rupert answered kindly; "and nobody could think you silly.
"I wanted you to see Baba, and there are thousands of things I meant to say to you."
"Your dressmaker?"
Surely his years of faithful devotion, of willing service, had entitled him to more consideration than this at her hands.
I should despise a girl who answered such an advertisement, but I should much more despise the man who inserted it."
"James always seemed to me a good footman."
Was that more conceivable than his theory of sudden illness?
"Yes; of course."
"You will advertise for the 'young person'?"
"Let me recommend you to study the matrimonial columns of some of the papers.
I don't know.
But go on and tell me what happened two days ago.
"Providentially, as I now consider it, I was out.
This opinion of him had been endorsed by her late husband, who had only qualified it with one limitation.
What could have happened?
I am planning a scheme of education that----"
Somebody would have answered his ringing, which had grown more and more imperative as each ring remained unanswered.
"She looked so fetching that morning, too.
"Now, you are flippant.
I came in just after she was brought back, and there she was, the little monkey, in her red cloak which she had found in the hall, where, needless to say, it ought not to have been; with no hat, and all her curls in a delicious tangle, her face so soft and pink, and her eyes shining.
"There is method in my madness, but the lane that led from James to your little finger, and the not impossible she, is so long that I can't take you back along its windings.
Then, when that goose of a Jane came back from her wanderings in the kitchen, she found the nurseries empty, and Baba nowhere to be found.
Ah! well; Margaret will help."
He further volunteered that she was rather shabbily dressed; and I can't bear to think that she went away with no thanks from me, and with no reward."
A sick fear smote at his heart.
"I do miss John so dreadfully; I do want a man to help me and advise me."
"You could advertise for the young lady.
What on earth have a woman and I got to do with James's delinquencies?"
"My dressmaker.
"A woman--me?
The blinds of the room to the right of the front door were pulled down, and his repeated ringing of the bell brought no response from within.
I can't bear to think that a girl may be in difficulties when I have more money than I know what to do with.
I have an appointment at five, and I must keep it."
He does his duties with the beautiful regularity of an automatic machine.
"I asked James why he hadn't told the 'young person' to give him her name and address, and he could only say feebly that 'it never crossed his mind.' Poor James, I don't believe he's got a mind."
But move James from his own dear little beaten track, and he is lost, hopelessly, irrevocably lost!"
"I SUPPOSE IT WAS AN HOUR."
"Don't scorn them too much.
"John never thought of anything but my happiness," was the gentle answer.
And Baba is a very fetching little being to rescue from the dangers of a fog."
"I believe it would kill me if anything really happened to Baba," she went on, more gravely; "you think I'm just a silly, frivolous thing, but--Baba is all the world to me."
He was wrong in this, because Mary was not a coquette in any sense of the word, and did absolutely nothing to attract men, except to be so beautiful, sweet and winning that they could not let her alone; for all of which surely the prince of fault-finders himself could in no way blame her.
"Leave me one friend, I pray you, Edwin.
My failure to recognize the Princess Mary grew out of my misfortune in never having been allowed to bask in the light of her countenance.
That evil which you think comes out of you, simply falls from you; your heart is all right, or I have greatly misjudged you." He was treating her almost as if she were a child.
"What you have said is the only approach to a rule for knowing and doing the right I have ever heard.
He has a wife at home, if I am right, and is old enough to be her father.
In a short time we came to a summer house near the marble boat-landing, where we found the queen and some of her ladies awaiting the rest of their party for a trip down the river, which had been planned the day before.
I am sure she held me in her light, gentle heart as a dear friend, but while her heart was filled with this mild warmth for me, mine began to burn with the flame that discolors everything, and I saw her friendliness in a very distorting light.
I knew vaguely but did not fairly realize how utterly beyond my reach in every way she was until I opened the flood-gates of my passion--as I thought it--and saw her smile, and try to check the coming laugh. Then came a look of offended dignity, followed by a quick softening glance.
We believed that these things would yet come, in spite of kingcraft and priestcraft, but wisely kept our pet theories to ourselves: that is, between ourselves.
I shall continue my search." With this, he turned to leave, and the ladies, including Jane, who was there and saw it all and told me of it, awaited the bolt they knew would come, for they saw the lightning gathering in Mary's eyes.
"I can't say that I have ever received many--none that I recall," replied Brandon, with a perfectly straight face, but with a smile trying its best to break out.
She was much kinder to me than to most men, but I did not see that it was by reason of my absolute harmlessness; and, I suppose, because I was a vain fool, I gradually began to gather hope--which goes with every vain man's love--and what is more, actually climbed to the very apex of idiocy and declared myself.
After I had gone, she asked if any one had seen the Princess Mary, and Brandon told her Lady Jane had said she was at the other side of the grounds. Thereupon her majesty asked Brandon to find the princess and to say that she was wanted.
The queen, seeing us, sent me off to bring the king.
"No need to repeat the message, Jane," cried Mary.
Mary!' from morning until night.
"It is not Master Brandon who should sue for pardon," responded the princess, "it is I who was wrong.
Do not make of yourself one of those fools who feel, or pretend to feel, I care not which, such preference for me.
Not that she liked or encouraged it; for, never having been moved herself, she held love and its sufferings in utter scorn.
I might as well fall in love with a twinkling star.
He did not turn his face toward Mary, but bowed again to Jane.
As neither his duties nor mine were onerous, we had a great deal of time on our hands, which we employed walking and riding, or sitting in our common room reading and talking.
But the winning of Jane was not so easy a matter as my vanity had prompted me to think.
With an ordinary man it takes one-sixtieth of that time; so you see I pay a compliment to your strength of mind."
Brandon wisely let the last suggestion pass unnoticed.
He acted like a man, and looked like one, too, when he defended himself.
Her attractiveness was not a matter of volition or intention on her part.
They ask us to believe so much, and insist that faith is the sum of virtue, and the lack of it the sum of sin; that to faith all things are added; but we might believe every syllable of their whole disturbing creed, and then spoil it all through blind ignorance of what is right and what is wrong."
After Jane's account of Brandon, they all started by a roundabout way for the marble landing.
If I am beautiful or not, it is as God made me, and I have nothing to do with it, and desire no credit, but if I could only be good it might be my own doing, perhaps, and I ought to have praise.
"I have ears and can hear for myself." Then turning to Brandon: "If your insolence will permit you to receive a message from so insignificant a person as the king's sister, I beg you to say to the queen that I shall be with her presently."
She then ran off with a laugh and a courtesy, and was soon lost to sight behind the shrubbery at the turning of the walk.
There is nothing on earth--but you know as much about it as I do.
Coming up to the group, Brandon took off his hat, and, with a graceful little bow that let the curls fall around his face, asked: "Have I the honor to find the Princess Mary among these ladies?"
Many of the king's friends enjoyed a considerable intimacy with the whole court without ever receiving the public stamp of recognition, socially, which goes with a formal presentation.
He could not have known her by inspiration."
He had much to learn about the power of womanhood.
And her majesty waited on a girl's curiosity.
"God forbid!" said Brandon reverently.
I shall, however, try to keep it out.
He had never seen the princess, so could not positively know her.
"Oh! you have not?
Is there?
"I have heard something of you the last day or so from Sir Edwin, but had begun to fear he was not going to give me the pleasure of knowing you.
I started with a handicap, since Jane had heard my declaration to Mary, and I had to undo all that before I could do anything else.
He seemed to know you, Jane.
I told him also about Jane; and, I grieve and blush to say, expressed a confidence in that direction I little felt.
But Jane's ears would have heard just as much had they been the pair of beautiful little shells they so much resembled.
I did not think when I spoke, and did not really mean it as it sounded.
She soon overtook him and said:
I had told Jane all I knew about Brandon, so she was prepared with full information, and gave it.
"I fear, Master Brandon, you are the most adroit flatterer of all," said Mary, shaking her head and looking up at him with a side glance, "people have deluged me with all kinds of flattery--I have the different sorts listed and labeled--but no one has ever gone to the extravagant length of calling me good.
We both laughed at this sort of talk, which was a little in advance of the time, for a noble, though an idiot, to the most of England was a noble still, God-created and to be adored.
I don't like the others at all.
Mary, who I know you will at once say was thoroughly spoiled, without turning her face toward him, replied:
Mary did not come home with us from Westminster the morning after the joustings, as we had expected, but followed some four or five days later, and Brandon had fairly settled himself at court before her arrival.
I had suffered merely a touch of the general epidemic, not the lingering, chronic disease that kills.
"Nonsense!" broke in Brandon.
They were growing rather serious, so Mary turned the conversation again into the laughing mood, and said, with a half sigh: "Oh!
Then, besides, my heart is not on my sleeve.
When I open my mouth for public utterance, the king is the best man in Christendom, and his premier peer of the realm the next best.
I warrant the pope at Rome could not run over him with impunity.
I saw him in the lists at Windsor a week ago, but the king said his name was a secret, and I could not learn it.
No man can beg a woman's love; he must command it; do not join their ranks, but let us be good friends.
But it will do no good; the bad is in me too strong; it always does itself before I can apply any rule, or even realize what is coming." And again she shook her head with a bewitching little look of trouble.
"Nothing of the sort," broke in sensible, fearless little Jane; "I think the Lady Mary was wrong.
The meeting came about sooner than I expected, and was very near a failure.
So Brandon stirred this antagonism and determined not to see her manifold perfections, which he felt sure were exaggerated; but to treat her as he would the queen--who was black and leathery enough to frighten a satyr--with all respect due to her rank, but with his own opinion of her nevertheless, safely stored away in the back of his head.
It was no time before Amos's voice came huskily up to his friend.
There, within a few yards of them and at the edge of a hard-beaten track from the main shore, lay a mass of cannon balls and shot for guns of various sizes, such as are used on men-of-war.
Chris gave a shiver as it reached him.
"I'm going to have a look at the ship through the glass," Chris whispered, and moved forward closer to the shore.
We must get a closer look at that ship!" Chris cried, putting his glass away.
In the ensuing silence the rustle of the rushes as Chris and Amos moved away was plainly to be heard.
"Give it a kick--there--it's only a stray dog," one said.
A little wine, I fancy, might revive me when we reach the ship.
The dog lay panting at the river's edge.
"We'll have to skirt the very edge," Chris said glancing about. "Barefoot would be the best.
"What's that?" one man cried out.
We'll have to dive into the rushes and hide, just in case it's Claggett Chew."
Seeing the red caps and kerchiefed heads of men above the rushes, the boys let the reeds fall back.
Then, in another moment, came the high-pitched voice of Osterbridge Hawsey.
I feel sure it will be satisfactory."
There on the left bank of Rock Creek, high rushes grew in rank profusion on the marshy land.
Scrambling down, the two boys ran along the stream until it was shallow enough to cross.
Parting the stalks, he trained the glass on Claggett Chew's ship.
This soft ground would soon go over our shoes and maybe suck them down."
They rose higher than the heads of the two boys and were too closely packed to allow for easy passage.
"Keep right against the rushes," Chris warned Amos, "and if a boat shows up coming from the wharves, we can't take any chances.
Get in those rushes quick--my clothes is mighty bright!"
Oh well, Chris thought, it's doubtless a custom of the time for all I know.
Curious, thought Chris, that all the letters of the ship's name seemed exact except the second and third.
Chris observed everything closely, and saw still other crewmen disappearing with their burdens down the hold.
Hurrying forward, Chris and Amos reached the mouth of the stream where it joined the river.
Chris and Amos were the only watchers.
The sun was setting as they came near the steps and voices.
Chris gestured Amos forward, and they went on step by step until, in a pause of the thundering dropping sound, they knew themselves to be near its origin and parted the reeds enough to see.
The water was icy, telling, as well as the turning leaves and cooler air, that fall had come and winter was on the way.
Is it not delicate?
Then something caught his eye and he examined the name along the side through the spyglass.
The cannon balls and ammunition were taken out in boats and hoisted up in nets.
I'll draw them off!
"Come along, Amos!
Stealthily, trying not to shake the rushes and so show where they might be, Chris and Amos pushed through the marsh.
Osterbridge Hawsey, wrapped in a great cloak, was admiring a bolt of muslin that he held, but Claggett Chew, his face shadowed by a hat, was holding his whip upon his knees and glowering at the water.
The two went on, making slow progress, for the river was deep at that point, with little foothold between the end of the jungle of reeds and deep water.
"That's right," Amos nodded his head vigorously.
After a while, as the boys were about to move along, a heavy dropping sound, and the shuddering of the marshy ground, made the two in hiding look at one another in concern.
Rushing and panting, they shoved their way into the dusty rushes, groping back until they could barely see the river through the stalks. And it was just in time, for barely were they hidden when they heard, carried over the water, the dip and splash of two pairs of oars and the creak of oarlocks.
Sometimes he was tempted to tell Aouda all; but he could not doubt how the young woman would receive his confidences.
Aouda retired to a waiting-room, and there she waited alone, thinking of the simple and noble generosity, the tranquil courage of Phileas Fogg.
Leave him to wander about in this desert!
Several hours passed.
Should he send another detachment to the rescue of the first?
Separate himself from the man whom he had so persistently followed step by step!
"I don't know whether you can, sir; but you ought to do so."
"Would you have me leave this poor fellow to perish--him to whom every one present owes his life?
"But the prisoners, our unfortunate fellow-travellers--"
He now saw the folly of which he had been guilty in letting Fogg go alone.
It would be prudent to continue on to Omaha, for it would be dangerous to return to the train, which the Indians might still be engaged in pillaging.
If his servant was a prisoner, ought he not to risk everything to rescue him from the Indians?
"Nobody here," returned the other, "has a right to teach me my duty."
Had they found the Indians, and were they having a conflict with them, or were they still wandering amid the mist?
But as he thought, "It is my duty," he did not hesitate.
"That's a serious thing to do, sir," returned the captain.
This it was which was whistling in the mist.
But then it will be too late!
Phileas Fogg, by this resolution, inevitably sacrificed himself; he pronounced his own doom.
But, before going, he had said to the soldiers, "My friends, I will divide five thousand dollars among you, if we save the prisoners."
"At once, madam."
The captain had only to pick his men.
Once a man approached and spoke to him, and the detective merely replied by shaking his head.
As night approached, the snow fell less plentifully, but it became intensely cold.
"Dead or prisoners; that is the uncertainty which must be solved.
From the tyres and spokes hung ragged pieces of flesh.
He was carried into the station with the other wounded passengers, to receive such attention as could be of avail.
The commander of the fort was anxious, though he tried to conceal his apprehensions.
Neither the engineer nor the stoker was dead, and, after remaining for some time in their swoon, had come to themselves.
"If you wish to go, please get in."
Should he sacrifice more men, with so few chances of saving those already sacrificed?
The detective had remained behind.
"Doubtless; but can I risk the lives of fifty men to save three?"
Neither flight of bird nor passing of beast troubled the perfect calm.
"I will go alone."
She heard and saw nothing.
Aouda, on seeing the locomotive come up, hurried out of the station, and asked the conductor, "Are you going to start?"
He had a serious decision to make.
Fix had heard this conversation.
"Ah, Mr.--Mr.
We must wait--"
Mr. Fogg, with folded arms, remained motionless.
Footsteps were easily printed on the snow!
"Will you let me go with you?" asked Fix.
As far as the eye could reach on the white plain behind, red trails were visible.
But soon, under a new sheet, every imprint would be effaced.
The delay of a single day would make him lose the steamer at New York, and his bet would be certainly lost.
I was powerful lazy and comfortable—didn't want to get up and cook breakfast.
My heart jumped up amongst my lungs.
I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them.
A little ripply, cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying the night was about done.
He bounced up and stared at me wild.
What you want to know when good luck's a-comin' for?
I was going to catch some of them, but Jim wouldn't let me.
I knowed what was the matter now.
By and by Jim says:
I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.
I rouses up, and rests on my elbow and listens; pretty soon I hears it again.
I think I could.
But in a little while I see a pale streak over the treetops, and knowed the day was coming.
Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there.
I made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my things under so the rain couldn't get at them.
I had my gun along, but I hadn't shot nothing; it was for protection; thought I would kill some game nigh home.
So the sleep didn't do me no good.
If I see a stump, I took it for a man; if I trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half, and the short half, too.
I tied up in the old place, and reckoned I would sleep in the canoe.
But you got a gun.
"Hello, Jim!" and skipped out.
By and by I was close enough to have a look, and there laid a man on the ground.
They would all come handy by and by, I judged.
I says:
So when it was good and dark I slid out from shore before moonrise and paddled over to the Illinois bank—about a quarter of a mile.
"What kind of stock?"
"Well, are you rich?"
"No, I didn't lose it all.
Jim said it was a sign it was going to rain.
"So I done it.
I catched a catfish and haggled him open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had supper.
So I set there and watched the cannon-smoke and listened to the boom.
CHAPTER VIII.
I didn't sleep much.
I slunk along another piece further, then listened again; and so on, and so on.
It was getting gray daylight now.
There was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there.
So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two, and then let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows.
Well, by this time I was most down to the foot of the island.
The moon was shining, and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I poked along well on to an hour, everything still as rocks and sound asleep.
Pretty soon he gapped and stretched himself and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss Watson's Jim!
I see the moon go off watch, and the darkness begin to blanket the river.
I talked along, but he only set there and looked at me; never said nothing.
I had heard about some of these things before, but not all of them.
When they got abreast the head of the island they quit shooting and dropped over to the Missouri shore and went home to the town.
I could see them first-rate, but they couldn't see me.
I found plenty strawberries, ripe and prime; and green summer grapes, and green razberries; and the green blackberries was just beginning to show.
All I could get to eat was berries and what was left over from breakfast.
So I took my gun and slipped off towards where I had run across that camp fire, stopping every minute or two to listen.
"Well, dey's reasons.
So I got all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight, and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an old last year's camp, and then clumb a tree.
Let's look around."
Nobody else would come a-hunting after me.
"Why, Jim?"
You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my carcass come to the top.
People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum—but that don't make no difference.
Don't you see I has?"
"Well, fust I tackled stock."
"Look sharp, now; the current sets in the closest here, and maybe he's washed ashore and got tangled amongst the brush at the water's edge.
I hadn't got far when I hear a man say:
I took out the plug and shook out the little dab of quicksilver, and set my teeth in.
I warn't lonesome now.
"Well, that's so.
By the time it was night I was pretty hungry.
Well, I felt better right off.
"What, all that time?"
By and by she come along, and she drifted in so close that they could a run out a plank and walked ashore.
I crossed over to that side and watched them.
Then he says:
He said it was death.
"What did you do with the ten cents, Jim?"
I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it.
When breakfast was ready we lolled on the grass and eat it smoking hot. Jim laid it in with all his might, for he was most about starved.
"We better camp here if we can find a good place; the horses is about beat out.
By-and-by he went and listened behind my back.
I realised suddenly that I had mistaken his meaning, and that he was simply feeling my pulses.
"This," I said to myself at the third knock, "has torn it.
The doctor came round to where I could see him again.
This time he should not be disappointed.
Can you promise me a week?"
"Yes," he said.
"Now cough."
This idea of mine was fostered by the excellent testimonial which I had written myself at the Company's bidding.
"And now," he said, after the hundredth question, "I should like to look at your chest."
Can't you hear the gentleman?" I suppose that roused it, for at the next knock he passed on to an adjacent spot....
Without a word he got out his stethoscope and began to listen to me.
However, he wouldn't let me go.
Extremely nervous, I did my celebrated imitation of a man with an irritating cough.
However, they insisted.
"I haven't a cough," I pointed out.
Trembling, I prepared for the encounter.
But it was boring for me, because I really had very little to do.
Sit down."
"I'm not bothering about this stupid insurance business now.
I got an encore.
Unfortunately he did not pursue the matter....
It is very bad form to listen behind a person's back.
"Now cross your knees."
I moistened my lips and spoke.
I bowed my head.
"I don't believe he likes my chest."
I shall devote more time to mimicry in future.
He resisted....
He said nothing.
I crossed my knees.
"For 'eving's sake do something, you fool.
He wondered if I drank much.
I did not tell him so however.
My chest may have disappointed him....
"Don't talk," he said.
It was evident that grief over-mastered him and that he was taking a silent farewell of me.
Nothing could move him from his resolve.
He was evidently determined to see my chest.
I was taking no risks.
"Now cough like this," he said.
He took my wrists in his hands and pressed them.
"Am I dying?" I asked in a broken voice.
"There is just one thing more.
I wanted him to like me.
He asked, as I had anticipated, after the health of my relations.
It went well.
The doctor began quietly enough.
"Go on."
"Yes," said the doctor.
I could have bitten him in the neck with some ease ... or I might have licked his ear.
Almost before his hand reached my knee, my foot shot out and took him fairly under the chin.
"Just breathe naturally."
Good-bye!
The man who took me down to dinner!
When I was in Shropshire last week---- What was your man's name?
I didn't know your Christian name--I didn't know you had a sister.
Yes, James.
Did you have a pleasant dinner-party last night, Jane?
Well!
As a man of honour I cannot withdraw.
Fancy!
So two lives are ruined!
A younger sister!
Mr. Bootle!
How do you do?
Such an interesting man, my dear.
But what can we do?
Jane must never know.
In short, dear Miss Prendergast, I ask you to marry me, and I will come in person for my answer.
She sighs at intervals and occasionally lays down her work and presses both hands to her heart.
Nothing.
Bootle!"
A letter for you, Miss.
We found that we agreed upon all the main principles of Art, considered as such.
A sympathetic audience will have no difficulty in guessing that she is in love.
Did you get back safely last night?
I found it was a man.
Surprised at this hurried departure, I walked to the house of Grigorovitch, about half a mile distant, and told him of my friends and their flight.
He was evidently drunk, therefore I resorted to the expedient of giving him a gentle but firm kick in the ribs, at the same time urging him to wake up.
Around the walls were hung several choice paintings, and I noticed that upon the table lay a number of pamphlets similar to those which the organisation were secretly circulating throughout the Empire of the Tzar.
"Very well," I said; "I'll do as you wish."
The moment I saw the yellow pallor of the face and look of unutterable horror in the glazing eyes, I knew the truth.
I was sitting at home, reading and smoking, in a very lazy mood, one winter's evening, when the servant girl entered and handed me a soiled, crumpled letter, which, she said, had been left by a strange-looking foreign woman.
"Now it's all over, let's talk."
"No.
After I had acknowledged the compliment, we commenced a commonplace conversation, which was interrupted by the entrance of a tall, elderly man, whose thin face, sunken cheeks, and deeply furrowed brow were indicative of heavy toil or long imprisonment.
There was nothing to serve as a clue to his identity."
"I wonder who he was."
Three years ago, while I was writing a novel which deals with Nihilism, and which brought the heavy hand of the Press Bureau at Petersburg upon me, I contrived, in order to sketch my characters from life, to obtain an introduction to the little colony of Russian revolutionists which exists in secret in a northwestern suburb of London.
Slowly I walked along the deserted road, absorbed in thought.
Any news affecting us travels rapidly. I--I have an intense desire to see what the country beyond the Urals is like."
"I am sorry I am breaking down," she said apologetically, and laughing at the same time.
It was now about four o'clock in the afternoon, and the sun, which had struggled out for half an hour, had sunk upon the hazy horizon, leaving a pale yellow streak in the grey lowering sky.
"And will they arrest Prascovie?"
He chaffed me a little, laughed heartily in his good-natured way, and soon afterwards we rejoined the guests.
Still unaware that she was the Prince's wife, Kobita obtained leave of absence and came to England.
She refused to give me her address, and all argument was useless.
"Prascovie was very fascinating, wasn't she?"
They examined the road outside, but, as it had been snowing heavily during the night, no footprints were visible.
"You're talking in enigmas."
However, my curiosity got the better of me, and I told her to admit the stranger.
I was not particularly clean, and I confess that just then I was too much engaged in making arrangements for my departure to think of anything else.
"Who told you I was going?"
"It was imperative.
"You?" I cried, when a moment later Prascovie Souvaroff entered.
"You are mistaken.
A short time ago, however, I received an anonymous present of furs, and I shrewdly suspect whence it came.
We were compelled to leave hurriedly, and as the Secret Police were watching both you and me it was unsafe for us to meet.
It was, indeed, very kind of you to have been bothered with me."
Hence it was that one day when I entered my office I received instructions to proceed without delay to Siberia, in order to inspect the general condition of the prisoners and ascertain the truth of the harrowing details.
I discovered that it was the last day of the old year.
"I'm sure I'm indebted to you, for your knowledge of Russian assists me in my work.
But this plan was not carried out quickly enough.
To-night I have risked coming to you for a most important purpose," she added, looking up into my face earnestly.
At the prison at Irkutsk father and daughter met.
The evening we spent in smoking and drinking vodka, Prascovie and I being able to carry on a private conversation by speaking English.
I--I was happy then, wasn't I?"
"Yes.
She addressed a question to the driver, which he answered.
Suddenly she moved uneasily, and awoke with a start.
The whole thing had been carefully planned, and the trusty servant, who had been instructed how to act, extracted everything from the dead man's pockets that would lead to identification.
"No.
"Ah, I remember.
"Do you think that I, a Russian, am afraid of a cold sleigh journey?" she asked earnestly, after a few moments' silence.
We were in possession of all these facts, but refrained from causing Souvaroff's arrest, because it was not a wise policy to expose to the London public that Russia had established a bureau of secret police in their midst.
"I'll tell you to go in a few minutes."
After smoking for another hour, I also sought my dirty little den.
"And what of Kobita?"
Eight months passed, during which the strange incident gradually faded from my mind.
Our lonely halting-place was, like all Siberian post-houses, built of pine logs, and little better than a large hut, devoid of any vestige of comfort, and horribly dirty.
Almost hidden under her furs, she was now sleeping soundly.
"Yes.
"Do you assert that he was murdered?"
I have heard nothing since of my unconventional travelling companion.
With heavy heart, and sorely puzzled over the mystery, I continued my lonely journey towards the mines of Yeniseisk.
What do you mean?" I inquired.
"Ah, it's all very well," he replied, laughing, as we strolled together into an ante-room that was unoccupied.
"I'm not at liberty to say," she replied.
Of course, I should not travel in this dress, but would assume the disguise of a Russian lad, in order to act as your servant and interpreter.
"No, plenty of time," I said indifferently, although I had a difficult task to keep my countenance.
Kobita arrived on the night of your visit, and was received by Prascovie's father, who stated that she had gone to call upon a friend in the vicinity, and offered to send his servant to direct him to the house in question.
"Oh! What's that?" I asked.
"To Siberia?
She decided to roll the shadow up and put it away carefully in a drawer, until a fitting opportunity came for telling her husband.
"George, Nana is a treasure."
He was determined to show who was master in that house, and when commands would not draw Nana from the kennel, he lured her out of it with honeyed words, and seizing her roughly, dragged her from the nursery.
"Stop that row, Michael.
It's that nasty, sticky, sweet kind."
Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever.
"Look here, all of you," he said entreatingly, as soon as Nana had gone into the bathroom.
"They were rather sweet, don't you think, George?"
In a horrid silence Mrs. Darling smelt the bowl.
"This tie, it will not tie." He became dangerously sarcastic.
"It was only a joke," he roared, while she comforted her boys, and Wendy hugged Nana.
"Boy."
Wendy had danced with joy, just as the real Mrs. Darling must have done.
Even then Mrs. Darling was placid.
"Father first," said Michael, who was of a suspicious nature.
"It will soon be over, father," John said cheerily, and then in rushed Wendy with the medicine in a glass.
"No, no," Mr. Darling always said, "I am responsible for it all.
And still Wendy hugged Nana.
"I have just thought of a splendid joke.
"Oh, yes."
Danger!
"Mother, don't pamper him," he called after her.
But unfortunately Mrs. Darling could not leave it hanging out at the window, it looked so like the washing and lowered the whole tone of the house.
She growled and sprang at the boy, who leapt lightly through the window.
Of course Mrs. Darling brushed him, but he began to talk again about its being a mistake to have a dog for a nurse.
"Bring in the whole world.
"Let them!" he answered recklessly.
"O George," she said, "it's your medicine!"
"The point is, that there is more in my glass than in Michael's spoon." His proud heart was nearly bursting.
"And they were ours, ours! and now they are gone."
"It was then that I rushed in like a tornado, wasn't it?" Mr. Darling would say, scorning himself; and indeed he had been like a tornado.
"If only I had not accepted that invitation to dine at 27," Mrs. Darling said.
It was securely fastened. She looked out, and the night was peppered with stars.
"My touchiness about trifles, dear master and mistress."
Again Mrs. Darling screamed, this time in distress for him, for she thought he was killed, and she ran down into the street to look for his little body, but it was not there; and she looked up, and in the black night she could see nothing but what she thought was a shooting star.
"Michael first," he said doggedly.
Strong man though he was, there is no doubt that he had behaved rather foolishly over the medicine.
They were already the only persons in the street, and all the stars were watching them.
There was a yell of rage from Michael, and "O father!" Wendy exclaimed.
"George," Mrs. Darling entreated him, "not so loud; the servants will hear you." Somehow they had got into the way of calling Liza the servants.
"In vain, in vain," he cried; "the proper place for you is the yard, and there you go to be tied up this instant."
"Well, then, take it."
"I remember!"
"Hold your tongue, John," his father rapped out.
He felt he was a strong man again.
"John," he said, shuddering, "it's most beastly stuff.
So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder.
Then he had leapt into her arms.
But I refuse to allow that dog to lord it in my nursery for an hour longer."
"Father's a cowardly custard."
"Neither am I frightened."
"Matter!" he yelled; he really yelled.
She had dressed early because Wendy so loved to see her in her evening-gown, with the necklace George had given her.
"My liking for parties, George."
"Are you sure, Wendy?"
"Well, then, you take it."
When he had tied her up in the back-yard, the wretched father went and sat in the passage, with his knuckles to his eyes.
"How wildly we romped!" says Mrs. Darling now, recalling it.
"Nana, good dog," he said, patting her, "I have put a little milk into your bowl, Nana."
"I have been as quick as I could," she panted.
Nana wagged her tail, ran to the medicine, and began lapping it.
Mrs. Darling screamed, and, as if in answer to a bell, the door opened, and Nana entered, returned from her evening out.
"Boy or girl?" asked Michael, not too hopefully.
Wendy had a splendid idea.
Then she gave Mr. Darling such a look, not an angry look: she showed him the great red tear that makes us so sorry for noble dogs, and crept into her kennel.
"No doubt, but I have an uneasy feeling at times that she looks upon the children as puppies."
"I'm not frightened."
It was dreadful the way all the three were looking at him, just as if they did not admire him.
The opportunity came a week later, on that never-to-be-forgotten Friday. Of course it was a Friday.
"Are you ready, Michael?"
"I know where it is, father," Wendy cried, always glad to be of service. "I'll bring it," and she was off before he could stop her.
"George, George," Mrs. Darling whispered, "remember what I told you about that boy."
"I wonder," Mr. Darling said thoughtfully, "I wonder." It was an opportunity, his wife felt, for telling him about the boy.
"Much good," he said bitterly, "my wearing myself to the bone trying to be funny in this house."
Wendy was quite puzzled.
Some men would have resented her being able to do it so easily, but Mr. Darling had far too fine a nature for that; he thanked her carelessly, at once forgot his rage, and in another moment was dancing round the room with Michael on his back.
"I will, sire."
"I wish your majesty to allow me assistance in the labors of the office of intendant."
Not even an opportunity of serving me?"
"Choose your colleagues."
The others, a little uneasy at the turn things had taken, went back to Paris together.
"No," said he, "no; I see the whole scheme of that man.
"You want support--you do not reckon upon me?"
"Monsieur," said the king, "what do you wish that I should give you, as a recompense for this devotedness and probity?"
"Sire, I thank you."
"What do you wish, then?"
"Because you have to deal with people stronger than ourselves, if they are warned."
It is gratifying to me to acknowledge the fraternal friendship you have evinced towards me, and to call you, more justly than ever, my brother.
"Try the farmers-general and contractors, who, during ten years, have been robbing the state."
Oh! but I cannot place all my dependence upon that man; he has a good head, but I must have an arm!" Louis, all at once, uttered a joyful cry.
In the morning, the news of the death of the cardinal was spread through the castle, and thence speedily reached the city.
"Then I shall be of no use to your majesty?"
Soon after, somebody scratched with his nail at the door of the cabinet.
"It would gain in security."
"How! nothing?
"He will crush me in a week, sire.
"To-morrow the ordonnance shall appear."
"If your majesty were not to furnish me with that opportunity, I should not the less serve you.
"On the contrary, sire, you had better, in order not to have to end with them."
"Monsieur, you shall have that correspondence, and render me an account of it."
"Sire, I desire that this office be invested with the right of reading the correspondence with England."
There he received much company, and took a degree of pleasure in remarking the hesitation of each, and the curiosity of all.
"But there is already a superintendent, sire."
"I will reflect upon it, monsieur."
"That post would lose its value."
You are spending useless millions; tell your ministers so; and rest assured that I am well informed; render me the same service, my brother, if occasion offers."
"It will be too late when reflection may be made."
"What would this chamber of justice do?"
You may go."
"Well--I do not know--the customary ones."
We shall never be at war against each other.
It is impossible for me not to be the best servant of the king."
The ministers looked at each other with surprise.
"No, sire; there is still another important affair.
"Yes, I said so."
"Sire, the superintendent of the finances is the most powerful man in the kingdom."
The king made no reply.
The following is what the English prince wrote to his royal brother:--
"Now, sire, what shall I do with respect to the finances?"
You will give me your advice when I ask it.
The cardinal is given over by his physician.
"Absolutely nothing, sire."
The valet was about to execute the order, when the king stopped him.
"You are already, since you fear to compromise yourself in serving me."
"Ah!" cried Louis, coloring, "do you think so?"
Let him be called back!" exclaimed he.
"Allow me to compose a chamber of justice."
This review completed, Louis returned to his apartments, followed by Colbert, who had not apparently warmed with one ray of personal satisfaction.
"Impossible, monsieur, for that correspondence is kept from the council; monsieur le cardinal himself carried it on."
"I only fear to be placed so that I cannot serve your majesty."
An intendant under a superintendent,--that is inferiority."
"I thought your majesty had this morning declared that there should no longer be a council?"
"I had," said he, "a lieutenant of musketeers!"
"He quitted the service for a time."
"Is that all you ask?"
After dinner, he got into his carriage, and went straight to the Louvre.
That measure does not make me uneasy, it makes me sad.
Towards evening he ordered the doors of the Louvre to be closed, with the exception of only one, which opened on the quay.
The ministers Fouquet, Lyonne, and Letellier entered la salle des seances, to hold a council. The king sent for them immediately.
"I know that."
"Is that all?"
"Why?"
"Let your majesty then have the goodness to read all the letters yourself, particularly those from England; I hold strongly to this article."
"Let him be found, and be here to-morrow the first thing in the morning."
He placed on duty at this point two hundred Swiss, who did not speak a word of French, with orders to admit all who carried packages, but no others; and by no means to allow any one to go out.
The valet de chambre bowed and went out.
"No, sire, one thing more."
That is wrong.
Don't you recollect now?"
What a strange coincidence.
"I see, I see.
Dick, my husband, where is your memory?"
It was God!"
It is really wonderful!"
"Why, Dick, dear, it's the seventh of November, your birthday, you know; surely you have not already forgotten the little present I gave you this morning, my likeness in a locket for your watch chain, a miniature done by that clever artist at Orleans, and you told me you would always wear it for my sake.
Time passed swiftly with so sweet and sympathetic a companion; our tastes were similar, both taking the greatest delight in ancient buildings and lovely scenery; the weather, too, was charming, and altogether we were as happy as two mortals can be on this earth.
A PRESENTMENT OF THE PAST.
Did you ever know of anybody whose hair was red when she was young, but got to be another color when she grew up?"
My mother's name was Bertha Shirley.
It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.
I think I would--that is, if I couldn't be a human girl.
"I was afraid it might be Mrs. Spencer's place," said Anne mournfully. "I don't want to get there.
"Isn't the sea wonderful?" said Anne, rousing from a long, wide-eyed silence.
She had twins three times.
I told Mrs. Hammond so firmly, when the last pair came.
Avonlea is a lovely name.
"No, I don't want any of your imaginings.
I went a little the last year I stayed with Mrs. Thomas.
Mrs. Thomas said I was the homeliest baby she ever saw, I was so scrawny and tiny and nothing but eyes, but that mother thought I was perfectly beautiful.
I solemnly swear to be faithful to my bosom friend, Diana Barry, as long as the sun and moon shall endure.
What on earth put you up to such a caper?
Mrs. Barry came to the kitchen door in answer to Marilla's knock.
Don't you think Diana has got very soulful eyes?
"I don't want to send you back to the asylum, I'm sure.
It was putting flowers on your hat at all, no matter what color they were, that was ridiculous.
"Oh Marilla, I'm the happiest girl on Prince Edward Island this very moment.
You are the most aggravating child!"
She reads entirely too much--" this to Marilla as the little girls went out--"and I can't prevent her, for her father aids and abets her.
"Oh yes," sighed Anne, blissfully unconscious of any sarcasm on Marilla's part.
"I don't see why it's any more ridiculous to wear flowers on your hat than on your dress," protested Anne.
I read a story once about a spring called that.
"Now, don't get into a fluster.
"Diana, you might take Anne out into the garden and show her your flowers.
Marilla was not to be drawn from the safe concrete into dubious paths of the abstract.
They're wholesomer.
Don't cry any more.
A pretty-looking object you must have been!"
Diana was sitting on the sofa, reading a book which she dropped when the callers entered.
"Oh.
Diana repeated the "oath" with a laugh fore and aft.
"Why it's dreadfully wicked to swear," she said rebukingly.
I wish I had soulful eyes.
"This is my little girl Diana," said Mrs. Barry.
"We must join hands--so," said Anne gravely.
What's the difference?"
I guess Diana'll like you well enough.
Isn't that a perfectly elegant name?
I'm glad she has the prospect of a playmate--perhaps it will take her more out-of-doors."
"Well, all I hope is you won't talk Diana to death," said Marilla.
Diana always laughed before she spoke.
"How do you do, Marilla?" she said cordially.
You'll have your work to do and it'll have to be done first."
But that would be better than being a trial to you."
"Yes, this is Anne Shirley," said Marilla.
"I never thought you'd mind.
"Well, did you find Diana a kindred spirit?" asked Marilla as they went up through the garden of Green Gables.
Then she said:
A dryad is sort of a grown-up fairy, I think."
"Oh no, not my kind of swearing.
The roses and buttercups were so sweet and pretty I thought they'd look lovely on my hat.
"How are you?"
But I believe I'm going to like you real well."
Then aside to Marilla in an audible whisper, "There wasn't anything startling in that, was there, Marilla?"
You're not going to play all the time nor most of it.
Never let me catch you at such a trick again.
I can't imagine the place without her.
Oh, it isn't wicked at all.
"Don't answer me back like that, Anne.
"There really is another.
It just means vowing and promising solemnly."
A sewing-machine agent gave it to her.
It sounds so funny in a little girl.
I'm afraid I'm going to be a dreadful trial to you.
Diana laughed.
Her face was pale and tense.
Mrs. Barry, not hearing or not comprehending, merely shook hands and said kindly:
"Will you swear to be my friend forever and ever?" demanded Anne eagerly.
It's her mother you've got to reckon with.
There are two kinds, you know."
She came home from Mrs. Lynde's and called Anne to account.
She says people talked about it something dreadful.
Prim, right-angled paths neatly bordered with clamshells, intersected it like moist red ribbons and in the beds between old-fashioned flowers ran riot.
Diana is going to teach me to sing a song called 'Nelly in the Hazel Dell.' She's going to give me a picture to put up in my room; it's a perfectly beautiful picture, she says--a lovely lady in a pale blue silk dress.
"Becoming fiddlesticks!
She couldn't get near enough to tell you to take them off till it was too late.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," said Anne, tears welling into her eyes.
"It ought to be over running water.
I'll repeat the oath first.
"Come in.
Diana Barry came home this afternoon.
"Nonsense," said Marilla, vexed at herself for having made the child cry.
All I want is that you should behave like other little girls and not make yourself ridiculous.
There, there, child, don't look so dismal.
"Oh, no, indeed, I won't," said Anne eagerly.
Diana looked shocked.
I wish I had something to give Diana.
We're going to the shore some day to gather shells.
Diana and I are going to build a playhouse in Mr. William Bell's birch grove tomorrow.
"Well, I don't mind doing that," agreed Diana, relieved.
Peter did it both slowly and quickly.
"Second to the right," said Peter, "and then straight on till morning."
"Wendy Moira Angela Darling," she replied with some satisfaction.
"I say," cried John, "why shouldn't we all go out?"
"I mean," Wendy said nicely, remembering that she was hostess, "is that what they put on the letters?"
They were all on their beds, and gallant Michael let go first.
"Surely you know what a kiss is?" she asked, aghast.
"And there are pirates."
Of course Peter had been trifling with them, for no one can fly unless the fairy dust has been blown on him.
Instead of troubling to answer him Peter flew around the room, taking the mantelpiece on the way.
"I was crying because I can't get my shadow to stick on.
His sobs woke Wendy, and she sat up in bed.
Mr. Darling would have rushed upstairs, but Mrs. Darling signed him to go softly.
None of us has any pockets."
"I daresay it will hurt a little," she warned him.
He had carried Tinker Bell part of the way, and his hand was still messy with the fairy dust.
It is the fairy language.
Of course he was on the floor already.
"Don't get any letters," he said contemptuously.
"I say, how do you do it?" asked John, rubbing his knee.
"About the prince who couldn't find the lady who wore the glass slipper."
"Wendy," he said, "how we should all respect you."
"I flewed!" he screamed while still in mid-air.
Will they reach the nursery in time?
She was wriggling her body in distress.
"They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way.
For reply Peter rose and kicked John out of bed, blankets and all; one kick.
"What fun it must be!"
"None of us has ever been tucked in at night."
Tedious talk this, but being a stay-at-home she liked it.
"But your mother gets letters?"
You see children know such a lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
All was as still as salt.
"I warn you if you bark again I shall go straight for master and missus and bring them home from the party, and then, oh, won't master whip you, just."
"Funny!" said Peter gravely.
It is humiliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities.
Tink said that the shadow was in the big box.
None of the lost boys knows any stories."
A shudder passed through Peter, and he sat on the floor and cried.
Wendy's heart went flutter with a sudden thrill.
Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.
"Why, Tink?"
Fortunately she knew at once what to do.
With tails?"
"I think it's perfectly sweet of you," she declared, "and I'll get up again," and she sat with him on the side of the bed.
"If you don't live in Kensington Gardens now--"
Chapter 2 THE SHADOW
The children wept, and Nana ran to him beseechingly, but he waved her back.
She went from bed to bed singing enchantments over them, and little Michael flung his arms round her.
Alas, he would not listen.
"So are you a cowardly custard."
"Why not both take it at the same time?"
Wendy gave the words, one, two, three, and Michael took his medicine, but Mr. Darling slipped his behind his back.
I, George Darling, did it.
"I do," she said, "I so want a third child."
Perhaps there was some excuse for him.
"My fatal gift of humour, dearest."
As he leapt at the window Nana had closed it quickly, too late to catch him, but his shadow had not had time to get out; slam went the window and snapped it off.
"I shall be sick, you know," Mr. Darling said threateningly.
Oh dear, oh dear, I shan't love you any more, Nana.
I said, 'Thank you, kind parents, for giving me bottles to make me well.'"
Mrs. Darling left the room to get a chocolate for him, and Mr. Darling thought this showed want of firmness.
"What fun!" he said doubtfully, and they did not dare expose him when Mrs. Darling and Nana returned.
Mrs. Darling quivered and went to the window.
"Certainly," said Mr. Darling.
At first he pooh-poohed the story, but he became thoughtful when she showed him the shadow.
Even Michael, already half asleep, knew that she was perturbed, and he asked, "Can anything harm us, mother, after the night-lights are lit?"
She thought of showing it to Mr. Darling, but he was totting up winter great-coats for John and Michael, with a wet towel around his head to keep his brain clear, and it seemed a shame to trouble him; besides, she knew exactly what he would say: "It all comes of having a dog for a nurse."
"I am happy to inform you, Mrs. Darling, that you are now a mother," in just such a tone as Mr. Darling himself may have used on the real occasion.
"Michael, when I was your age I took medicine without a murmur.
They go on with their recollections.
Sometimes the thing yielded to him without a contest, but there were occasions when it would have been better for the house if he had swallowed his pride and used a made-up tie.
Such a little thing for Mr. and Mrs. Darling and Nana to recall now, but not so little if that was to be Michael's last night in the nursery.
She was wearing Wendy's bracelet on her arm; she had asked for the loan of it.
She returned to the nursery, and found Nana with something in her mouth, which proved to be the boy's shadow.
"I thought you took it quite easily, father."
And the travellers knew not what to be doing.
Thumb and Thimble stripped off the few rags left of their red jackets, and worked in their skins with better comfort.
When at last day streamed in silver across the peaks, the storm had spent itself.
"Be not angry with me, little brother," she answered.
See how wildly it burns and sulks.
"Is the Mulla-mulgar ill, that he sits alone, hiding his eyes?" he said.
All again was silent.
A sprinkle of hail fell, hopping on their heads as they stood in the sunshine making ready to put off.
Nod crept forlornly to the fire, and sat there shivering.
"That is all I ask, Mulla-mulgar," she repeated softly--"that you will not forget me.
So, too, would I. Tell me a harder wish.
"The Mulla-mulgars say there can be no turning back, Nizza-neela.
He crept forward under the gigantic dragon-tree, and down the steep bank to the little creek where he had first heard the singing of the Water-midden.
Now in patience tell me how to make magic."
Tell me your wish!"
"Sing, Mulla-mulgar!" croaked a scornful sedge-bird.
"All day long have I been sitting rubbing, rubbing with my small tired thumb, but no magic has answered. It is but a common water-pebble roughened into the beasts' shapes.
They toiled on till evening, by which time four strong green rafts bobbed side by side at their mooring-ropes on the water.
He could not eat.
I think I will not give you back your stone.
It means nothing, and I am weary."
And the Water-midden drew in a little, still softly twirling.
Ghibba sat with a very solemn look on his grey scarred face.
I was angry because I was afraid.
Suddenly, as he watched, as if it were the amber or ivory beam of a lantern in the water, he saw a pale brightness ascending.
All was dense low forest, rocks and thorns, and pouring waterways.
After long palaver, Ghibba came shuffling over to him, and sat down beside him.
Only the blazing stars and the shadowy phantoms of the distant firelight moved on the water.
Then, say they, being Mulgars-of-a-race, we must float with the mountain-water into the great cavern, and trust our hearts to the fishes.
"See, Mulla-mulgar, here is your Wonderstone.
Laughing, she floated in closer yet, till her beautiful eyes were looking up into his bony and wrinkled face.
She put out her hand and touched his.
There was no way beyond the ravine.
All day it has been crickling and burning in my hair.
When they had heaped together a big pile of boughs and Samarak, Cullum and all kinds of greenery, Ghibba and Thumb bound them clumsily one by one together, letting them float out on to the water, until the raft was large and buoyant enough to bear two or three Mulgars with their bags.
He smoothed softly with his hairy fingers the golden strands floating in the ice-cold water. "Till I die, O beautiful one," he said, "I will not forget you.
"There," she said; "that will bid you remember me when you come to the end.
I fear the Wonderstone.
CHAPTER XXII
"Show me, then, my Wonderstone.
And Nod could not think what in his turn to give the Water-midden for a remembrance and a keepsake.
Tears sprang up into Nod's tired, aching eyes.
And the Water-midden looked up at him unfrightened, and saw the truth and kindness in his eyes.
The Water-midden smoothed slowly back her gold locks.
A lean fish of the changing colours of a cherry swam softly to the glimmering surface and stared at Nod.
The torrent flowed swiftly into the cavern.
But Nod did not stir, nor draw near to the fire to drink of the hot pepper-water the travellers had brewed against the cold. Thumb came at last and stooped over him.
Tishnar is angry.
No one answered.
He was a queer old Mulgar, blind of one eye, but he could stand wide awake for hours mumbling in his mouth a shaving of their blue cheese-rind.
"The Princess loves sweet music."
Only Nod sat gloomy and downcast, waiting impatiently till all should be lying fast asleep.
I am tired out for want of sleep, and long no more for Tishnar's fountains."
Then with a sudden spring he thrust his hand deep into the silken mesh of her hair and held tight.
And when he had turned his back for a moment on the fire, Nod wriggled softly away, and, hobbling off into the forest, soon reached the water-side.
But he swallowed his spittle, and was ashamed.
"I see no boat," yapped Nod scornfully.
"Tell me, Jacket-of-Loveliness," whispered Nod, "where is thy mistress that she does not answer me?"
Nod could not bear to look at them nor listen to their lisping, mournful voices.
And if but two or three sailed in together, Fortune might drown or lose many in the dark windings of the mountain-water, but one or two at least might escape.
Nod turned cold, and trembling, as if to tell this solemn Man of the Mountains that his Wonderstone was gone.
"Oh, but just a thumb-nail nearer," said Nod.
"O the lovely!" she cried, though Tink's face was still distorted with passion.
"Wendy, do come with me and tell the other boys."
Michael was ready: he wanted to see how long it took him to do a billion miles.
He showed them again.
"Such long tails."
"Perhaps I should have ironed it," Wendy said thoughtfully, but Peter, boylike, was indifferent to appearances, and he was now jumping about in the wildest glee.
Nana, who had been barking distressfully all the evening, was quiet now.
"How clever I am!" he crowed rapturously, "oh, the cleverness of me!"
John let go and met Wendy near the bathroom.
It was her silence they had heard.
"Are none of the others girls?"
"There, you suspicious brute," she said, not sorry that Nana was in disgrace.
It was quite as if she were trying to remain on the nursery floor.
She tied the unhappy dog up again, but do you think Nana ceased to bark? Bring master and missus home from the party!
This flattered Wendy immensely.
Not three figures, four!
He tried to stick it on with soap from the bathroom, but that also failed.
She was much pleased, and bowed beautifully to him from the bed.
"What's that?"
Again Tink replied, "You silly ass." Peter could not understand why, but Wendy understood, and she was just slightly disappointed when he admitted that he came to the nursery window not to see her but to listen to stories.
"Now shall I give you a thimble?"
"Yes," said cunning Peter, "but we are rather lonely.
I can't help crowing, Wendy, when I'm pleased with myself." Still she would not look up, though she was listening eagerly.
Besides, I can't fly."
"But why?"
"Pirates," cried John, seizing his Sunday hat, "let us go at once."
No, stop! Everything was wrong.
Fortunately, as we have mentioned, one of his hands was messy with it, and he blew some on each of them, with the most superb results.
He thought he had attached the shadow himself.
"I say, Peter, can you really fly?"
"They are perfectly safe, aren't they?
But he had no pity for her.
"Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars."
"I shall know when you give it to me," he replied stiffly, and not to hurt his feeling she gave him a thimble.
"What is it, Wendy?"
"That must have been Tink.
We now return to the nursery.
"What a funny address!"
"No more of it, Nana," she said sternly, pulling her out of the room.
Still, he liked them on the whole, and he told her about the beginning of fairies.
"It doesn't matter," Peter gulped.
Alas, he had already forgotten that he owed his bliss to Wendy.
Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one.
"What is your name?"
"She was here just now," he said a little impatiently.
"Mermaids!
"How perfectly awful," Wendy said.
If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.
He had his first laugh still.
"She is not very polite.
Peter had a sinking.
He let poor Tink out of the drawer, and she flew about the nursery screaming with fury.
Wendy was not listening to him.
"Yes, I do."
"Who are they?"
"I'll teach you how to jump on the wind's back, and then away we go."
"What does she say, Peter?"
"Which story was it?"
"You're so nippy at it," John said, "couldn't you do it very slowly once?"
"She says she will do that to you, Wendy, every time I give you a thimble."
"You see, I don't know any stories.
"It must be sewn on," she said, just a little patronisingly.
I never knew her so naughty before."
"Peter," she cried, clutching him, "you don't mean to tell me that there is a fairy in this room!"
But for the moment Wendy was shocked.
"Tinker Bell," he called softly, after making sure that the children were asleep, "Tink, where are you?" She was in a jug for the moment, and liking it extremely; she had never been in a jug before.
But she was exulting in his ignorance.
He did not quite mean to let go, but he did it, and immediately he was borne across the room.
"I'm so sorry," said Wendy Moira Angela.
"Well, that's Tink, that's the fairy language.
John rubbed his eyes.
"Oh dear," said the nice Wendy, "I don't mean a kiss, I mean a thimble."
He wished she had not mentioned letters.
Quick!" cried John, taking command for the only time throughout the whole adventure.
"You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
"You will be getting yourself into sore trouble.
Why do you not play more quietly?
So, gradually she faded away.
"I am a wayfarer," the woman answered feebly.
"You heard rightly, good Giles, it is all true.
They passed under the outer gate and across the bridge, which later on was covered with a double line of houses and shops, but was now a narrow structure.
The castle was attacked, and after three days' fighting, was taken.
A few days later Geoffrey Ward entered the shop of Giles Fletcher.
That night she was taken with a sort of fever, hot and cold by turns, and at times off her head.
Teach him to be honest and true.
"My father is talking of apprenticing me, Master Geoffrey," Walter said that evening.
A week after the slaying of Mortimer a band of knights and men-at-arms arrived at our castle and demanded admittance in the king's name.
Geoffrey Ward had kept his word, and had already begun to give the lad lessons in the use of arms.
The skill and strength which he had acquired in wielding the hammer, and by practice with the sword rendered him a formidable opponent with the sticks, which formed the weapons in the mimic battles, and indeed not a few were the complaints which were brought before Giles Fletcher of bruises and hurts caused by him.
In the centre, however, the ground had been cut away, and a low doorway, almost hidden by the bushes, gave access into a half subterranean hut; the roof was formed of an old boat turned bottom upwards, and this had been covered with brown turf.
At last these ceased suddenly.
During the interval he was forced to lie abed, and he was soundly rated by Master Giles for again getting into mischief.
One, which was apparently the most powerful, had driven the other off from a heap of rubbish which had been carried without the walls.
He still kept his flag aloft in his left hand.
Then he saw that the spot, although apparently a mere clump of bushes no higher than the surrounding country, was really an elevated hummock of ground. Anyone might have passed close to the bushes without suspecting that aught lay among them.
He had particularly noticed him because of the arrogant manner in which he spoke.
Scarcely knowing why he did so, Walter threw himself down among some low brushwood and watched the approaching figure.
This is the lowest and wettest part of the swamp, and would be but lightly searched, for none would suspect that there was a human habitation among these brown ditches and stagnant pools."
"Now I will tell you what we are bent on," Walter said.
The laws in those days were extremely severe, and death was the penalty of those caught plundering.
Such accidents will happen."
The defenders with shouts of triumph were rushing down when the prince urged his horse forward.
The others are too strong for them.
Let us stop till we see the end of it."
"The citizens have proved themselves sturdy fighters before now, my prince," the other said; "they are ever independent, and hold to their rights even against the king.
"Enough has been done, my young masters, and the sport is becoming a broil."
Further south, in the wild country round Westerham, where miles of heath and forest stretched away in all directions, was another noted place where the robber vagrants mustered thickly, and the Sheriff of Kent had much trouble with them.
But his followers waver.
"I thought I saw a figure a short time since," the knight said.
"You may consider it as good as done," the other replied.
It was an excellent place of concealment, as searchers might have passed within a foot of the bushes without suspecting that aught lay concealed within them.
Each party had a flag attached to a stick, and the boys were armed with clubs such as those carried by the apprentice boys.
"I am known as Walter Fletcher."
The leech poured some cordial from a vial into a small silver cup and held it to the boy's lips.
He was a tall and powerful man, and would have been handsome had not his eyes been too closely set together; his nose was narrow, and the expression of his face reminded Walter of a hawk.
Many, too, wandered over the country, sometimes in twos or threes, sometimes in large bands, robbing and often murdering travelers or attacking lonely houses.
Sometimes, when they found the country becoming too hot for them, these men would take service with some knight or noble going to the war, anxious to take with him as strong a following as might be, and not too particular as to the character of his soldiers.
But he feared to keep too close, as, although the darkness would conceal his figure, he might at any moment tread in a pool or ditch, and so betray his presence.
To his disappointment the lad could hear nothing of the conversation which was going on within the hut.
One day when he was well-nigh in the heart of the swamp of Lambeth he saw a figure making his way across.
Moreover, he could not but agree with the argument, that the promise of the Prince of Wales offered a more favourable opportunity for Walter to enter upon the career of arms and so, perhaps, someday to win his way back to rank and honours than could have been looked for.
A week later a party of knights and court gallants, riding across the fields without the walls, checked their horses to look at a struggle which was going on between two parties of boys.
The lad, however, heard or heeded them not.
In the country round London these pests were very numerous, for here, more than anywhere else, was there a chance of plunder.
There, he has knocked down the leader of the defenders as if his club had been a battle-axe.
"What is thy name, good lad?" the prince asked.
Now I will lead you back across the swamps.
His patience was rewarded.
But it was not alone with Geoffrey that Walter had an opportunity of learning the use of arms.
"It is a bad neighbourhood, lad, and worse are the people who live there.
From Southwark to Putney stretches a marshy country over which, at high tides, the river frequently flowed.
His frame and muscles developed with labour, and he was now able to swing all save the very heaviest hammers in the shop.
"Cease!" he said authoritatively.
Now, my lords, let us ride on; I crave your pardon for having so long detained you."
The swamps on the south side of the river had an especially evil reputation.
I will follow and see if I can get to the bottom of the mystery."
The two men disappeared from Walter's sight.
I would not give much for your life if you tried to find the way alone.
One would scarcely expect to see these varlets of the city playing so roughly."
You can trust me, and if the job be well done I shall take no count of the earnest money.
"No wonder the posse search these swamps in vain.
Any against whom charges could be brought home were hung without more ado, and the rest were put on board ship and sent across the sea to the army.
Putting his foot each time to the ground with the greatest caution, he moved quietly after them.
It was fine now, but the stream was running down thick and turbid, and it needed all the boys' efforts to force the wherry against it.
Here and there were wretched huts, difficult of access and affording good hiding-places for those pursued by justice, since searchers could be seen approaching a long way off, and escape could be made by paths across the swamp known only to the dwellers there, and where heavily-armed men dared not follow.
"Why didst not meet me and show me the way through, as before?"
In vain his followers attempted to come to his rescue; each time they struggled up the heap they were beaten back again by those on the crest.
"If the boat is there the matter is settled.
Sometimes these hunts were conducted in a wholesale way, and the whole posse of a county would be called out.
"How came you to witness that marriage?" inquired Bryce.
"I know some people of the name of Bewery--they may be relatives."
"Nice, sweet young lady."
"You remember him, too?" asked Bryce.
The man who had spent a very lazy day in keeping an eye on Bryce, as he visited the various public places whereat he made his researches, was also keeping an eye upon him next morning, when Bryce, breakfasting earlier than usual, prepared for a second day's labours.
Clear!--clear as noonday!
Now I'll go out by your garden and down the back of the town to the station.
"The old chap was in the Library when Ambrose Campany said that there was a clue in that Barthorpe history," he mused.
No," he went on, as Bryce thanked him and took a cigar, "I didn't know you'd finished with the doctor.
"And the man she married?--Mr.
Bryce had now got all the information he wanted, and he made the old parish clerk a small present and turned to go.
And at that hour Simpson Harker, who had breakfasted before nine, was in close consultation with his friend--that friend being none other than the local superintendent of police, who was confidentially closeted with the old man in his private house, whither Harker, by previous arrangement, had repaired as soon as his breakfast was over.
Had Bryce been able to see through walls or hear through windows, he would have been surprised to find that the Harker of this consultation was not the quiet, easy-going, gossipy old gentleman of Wrychester, but an eminently practical and business-like man of affairs.
"Governess at the vicarage," replied Claybourne.
"A young gentleman that used to come here for the fishing, now and then," answered Claybourne, pointing at the river.
"Who was he?"
"I'm off tomorrow morning--eleven o'clock," said Harker.
And he spent all that day in that search, inspecting numerous documents and registers and books, and when evening came he had a very complete acquaintance with the family nomenclature of Barthorpe, and he was prepared to bet odds against any one of the name of Braden having lived there during the past half-century.
Who indeed, laughed Bryce, but John Braden, who had just come by his death in Wrychester Paradise?
June 19th, 1891.
And his lunch done, he set off for the vicarage again, intent on getting further information, and before he reached the vicarage gates noticed, by accident, a place whereat he was more likely to get it than from the vicar--who was a youngish man.
"I come down to see him now and then--I've been here since yesterday.
He was not going to draw any attention to himself by asking questions of present-day inhabitants, whose curiosity might then be aroused; he knew better methods than that.
He turned to page 387 with a sense of sure discovery.
And there an entry caught his eye at once--and he knew that he had discovered more than he had ever hoped for.
"Famous for our trout we are here, you know, sir.
"Miss Bewery's marriage?--why, of course!"
Brake," continued Bryce.
"Do you remember this marriage?" asked Bryce, perching himself on the bench at which the shoemaker was working.
Stopping long, doctor?"
"Are you the Charles Claybourne mentioned there?" he asked, without ceremony.
The vicar, having no objection to earning the resultant fees, hastened to comply with Bryce's request, and inquired how far back he wanted to search and for what particular entry.
But the follower, knowing his man was safe for an hour, was in the bar outside eating bread and cheese and drinking ale, and Bryce's surprise was witnessed by no one.
"Your late vicar?" he said.
And--what did it all mean, and imply, and what bearing had it on Braden or Brake's death?
A name so uncommon that here--here, in this out-of-the-way Midland village!--there must be some connection with the object of his search.
He took the chair which Bryce drew forward and pulled out an old-fashioned cigar-case, offering it to his companion.
"As you say he came here for a good many times before the marriage, I suppose you'd hear something about his profession, or trade, or whatever it was?"
On the third page he saw the name Bewery.
"A banker--that was his trade, sir.
"Perhaps you will kindly lend me this book for an hour?--then, if I see anything very noteworthy in the index, I can look at the actual registers when I bring it back."
The shoemaker shook his head as if doubtful.
And as regards the other matter--keep me informed if you come on anything further.
"Do you know what Brake was?" asked Bryce.
Bruce assimilated all this information greedily--and asked for more.
"Twenty-two years since, I see."
"I'm interested in that entry," he said, tapping the open book.
"That's me, sir!" replied the old shoemaker briskly, after a glance. "Yes--right enough!"
Harker affected no surprise at all--he looked the astonishment he felt as the younger man rose and motioned him to the comfortable easy-chair which he himself had just previously taken.
Dead?"
"You know it?" inquired Bryce.
No, no, Mr. Harker!--the facts are too plain--the evidences too obvious.
And then let me know of his movement--he's certainly on the track of something, and what he does may be useful to me--I can link it up with my own work.
The old man nodded at the church across the way.
"I remember hearing it said," he remarked, "that Miss Mary had no relations.
"Who was she?" demanded Bryce.
And there he pursued his tactics of the day before and went straight to the vicarage and its vicar, with a request to be allowed to inspect the parish registers.
But Bryce was wondering all the time if his companion's story of having a friend at Barthorpe was no more than an excuse, and when he was alone in his own bedroom and reflecting more seriously he came to the conclusion that old Harker was up to some game of his own in connection with the Paradise mystery.
"Genuine stuff that, sir--I've a friend in Cuba who remembers me now and then.
I'd give a good deal to know what Harker really is doing here--and who his Barthorpe friend is."
The vicar replied that that was precisely what he had been about to suggest, and Bryce carried the book away.
And there was the name of Mark Ransford as witness.
Put your best plainclothes man on to him at once--he'll easily know him from the description I gave you--and let him shadow him wherever he goes.
"Dear me!" he exclaimed, nodding his thanks.
The two travellers sat talking until bedtime--but neither made any mention of the affair which had recently set all Wrychester agog with excitement.
Every town, said Bryce to himself, possesses public records--parish registers, burgess rolls, lists of voters; even small towns have directories which are more or less complete--he could search these for any mention or record of anybody or any family of the name of Braden.
"I saw him myself examining the book after the inquest.
Twenty-two years ago!
What was the further probability?
But John Brake who married that Mary Bewery--who was he?
They both took leave, and the King fully expected never to set eyes on them again.
He too heard the music, and told one of his men to find out whence it came.
After a time it so happened that another King, having lost his way, passed by with his servants and escort, wondering how he could find his way home, for the forest was very vast.
The Princess dressed herself all in white, and her father gave her a coach with six horses and servants in gorgeous liveries and quantities of money.
Now this King had given orders that, in the event of Jack's coming the guards were to present arms, the people to cheer, and he was to be conducted in triumph to the royal palace.
Then she asked where he had been wandering so long, and he told her how he had lost his way and might never have reached home at all but for a strange creature, half-man, half-hedgehog, which rode a cock and sat up in a tree making lovely music, and which had shown him the right way.
His father was much vexed at this news, for he thought Jack had died long ago.
So she made Jack welcome and they were betrothed to each other, and at dinner he sat next her at the royal table, and they ate and drank together.
Jack my Hedgehog mounted his cock, and driving his pigs before him into the village, he let every one kill as many as they chose, and such a hacking and hewing of pork went on as you might have heard for miles off.
'I'm minding my pigs and donkeys; but what do you want?' was the reply.
The creature won't understand a word about it, so I can just write what I choose.'
The King sent off for his physician in ordinary, who washed Jack all over with various essences and salves, so that he became white and was a remarkably handsome young man.
Jack my Hedgehog continued to herd his pigs, and they increased in number till there were so many that the forest seemed full of them.
When the King's daughter saw him she was greatly pleased, and next day the marriage ceremony was performed, and the old King bestowed his kingdom on Jack my Hedgehog.
The King said 'Yes,' and gave Jack a written promise to that effect.
Then Jack rode on in front pointing out the way, and the King reached his own country in safety.
Meantime Jack minded his asses and pigs, sat aloft in his tree, played his bagpipes, and was always merry and cheery.
Then he begged the old King to place a watch of four men just outside his bedroom door, and to desire them to make a big fire.
Then the King coaxed and entreated his daughter to go with Jack and so save both their lives.
So when Jack my Hedgehog rode up the guards charged him with their bayonets, but he put spurs to his cock, flew up over the gate right to the King's windows, let himself down on the sill, and called out that if he was not given what had been promised him, both the King and his daughter should pay for it with their lives.
And so it was, for when it struck eleven, Jack my Hedgehog went to his room, took off his skin and left it at the foot of the bed.
The King desired the servant to ask the strange creature why it sat there, and if it knew the shortest way to his kingdom.
So he made up his mind to live there no longer, and sent a message to his father telling him to have all the stables and outhouses in the village cleared, as he was going to bring such an enormous herd that all who would might kill what they chose.
She stepped into the coach, and Jack my Hedgehog with his cock and pipes took his place beside her.
When he was about to lie down in bed he would creep out of his hedgehog skin, and leave it lying at the bedside; then the men must rush in, throw the skin into the fire, and stand by till it was entirely burnt up.
Then Jack my Hedgehog rode on with his cock and bagpipes to the country of the second King to whom he had shown the way.
The servant asked Jack what he was doing up there.
The man peered about, but he could see nothing but a little creature which looked like a cock with a hedgehog sitting on it, perched up in a tree.
Now he had an only daughter who was extremely beautiful, and who, delighted at her father's return, ran to meet him, threw her arms round his neck and kissed him heartily.
When they retired to rest the Princess feared lest Jack should kiss her because of his prickles, but he told her not to be alarmed as no harm should befall her.
After some years Jack and his wife went to visit his father, but the farmer did not recognize him, and declared he had no son; he had had one, but that one was born with bristles like a hedgehog, and had gone off into the wide world.
When the King's daughter saw Jack my Hedgehog, she was a good deal startled, for he certainly was very peculiar looking; but after all she considered that she had given her word and it couldn't be helped.
The men rushed in, quickly seized the skin and threw it on the fire, and directly it was all burnt Jack was released from his enchantment and lay in his bed a man from head to foot, but quite black as though he had been severely scorched.
But matters turned out very differently from what he had expected, for when they had got a certain distance from the town Jack tore all the Princess's smart clothes off her, and pricked her all over with his bristles, saying: 'That's what you get for treachery.
But the Princess comforted him, and said she should be quite willing to go with Jack my Hedgehog whenever he came to fetch her, because of the great love she bore to her dear old father.
Then the King remembered Jack my Hedgehog, and he told his daughter how he had been obliged to give a written promise to bestow whatever he first met when he got home on an extraordinary creature which had shown him the way.
'Oh, you fools and blockheads!' cried their wives, 'how could you ever believe for a moment that a goat would do the work of a servant-maid? You have been finely deceived for once in a way.
But Simon, after wandering about the market for some time with his three friends and some others he had picked up, returned home to his house.
Once upon a time there lived a man called Simon, who was very rich, but at the same time as stingy and miserly as he could be.
Then he took Simon's pipe and blew into it with all his might, in the hopes of calling his wife back to life.
'I bought this mule on which I am riding.'
After a few hundred yards he met the second confederate, who addressed him, 'Good day, dear sir, where are you coming from?'
'I bought this mule on which you see me.'
'The one I'm sitting upon, to be sure,' replied Simon.
'But, good heavens, it's nothing but a donkey!'
Simon replied that he was most unwilling to part with the creature, as no amount of money would make up to him for its loss; still, if they were quite set on it, he would let them have the goat for fifty gold pieces.
'Where have you been?' asked the thief.
On their way there, however, a sudden noise threw them into such a panic that they dropped the sack with Simon in it and ran for their lives.
At last Simon gave way to the request and persuasive eloquence of his housekeeper, and betook himself one day to the market where he had seen a mule, which he thought would just suit him, and which he bought for seven gold pieces.
Hardly had he arrived there, than the three gentlemen who had got his mule perceived him, and coming up to him said: 'Welcome, Mr. Simon, what brings you here; are you on the look out for a bargain?'
And so the poor shepherd was drowned instead of Mr. Simon!
Hardly had Simon said these words when the three rogues appeared and fell on him to kill him.
'And what bargain did you drive there?' asked the cunning fellow.
Have you followed me?
'And did you make any good bargain yourself?'
'Is it possible that you really bought that beast for a mule?'
Of course, if you are always taking in other people, your turn to be taken in comes too, and this time you've been made to look pretty foolish.'
'Did things go pretty cheap?' asked the other.
'We must all three station ourselves at different intervals along the old man's homeward way, and must each in his turn declare that the mule he has bought is a donkey.
But he blew in vain, for the poor soul was as dead as a door-nail.
How could I ever go on living without her?' Then he seized a pipe, and when he had blown into it for some time Nina sprang up alive and well.
'I am ready,' answered Simon, 'to do what you please; there's nothing in the world I wouldn't do for you.'
'A donkey?
They were not a little astonished at this, for of course they thought it was the same goat that Simon had sent home laden with provisions.
An hour had scarcely passed when the three rogues returned to the place where they had left Simon in the sack, and without opening it, one of them seized it and threw it into the river.
At last, towards the end of the meal, having sought in vain for some cunning dodge to get the goat away from Mr. Simon, one of them said to him, 'My worthy host, you must sell your goat to us.'
What have I done?
Now there lived in the village not far from Simon's house, a peasant who had two goats, so alike in every respect that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other.
'Yes, I am,' replied Simon.
If we only stick to it you'll see the mule will soon be ours.' This proposal quite satisfied the others, and they all separated as they had agreed.
Then he took one of the goats and tied it to a post in the courtyard, and gave it some grass to eat; but he bound a cord round the neck of the other goat and led it to the market.
The same thing happened to the third rogue, so that they were now all three without wives.
'Thanks for your courtesy,' replied Simon.
When they got home they said to their wives, 'You needn't begin to cook the dinner to-morrow till we send the provisions home.'
'What do you mean?'
With these words he continued his way, and very soon met the third knave, who said to him, 'God bless you, sir; are you by any chance coming from the market?'
you have been taken in by some wretched cheats.'
Simon bought them both, paid as small a price as he could for them, and leading them home with him, he told Nina to prepare a good meal, as he was going to invite some friends to dinner.
'Get along with you--you are no better than silly donkeys without any sense; if you had only drowned me in deeper water I would have returned with three times as many sheep.'
As soon as it felt itself free, the laden goat trotted off as quickly as it could, and to this day nobody knows what became of it.
'A donkey!' repeated Simon, 'you don't mean to say so; if a single other person tells me that, I'll make him a present of the wretched animal.'
'Oh, you simpleton!' cried Nina; 'didn't you see that they were only playing you a trick?
The man spoke abruptly.
And where is the package that you two men had with you in the taxicab to-night?"
His head was drawn suddenly, violently backward, and clamped in that position; and a metal instrument, forced into his mouth, while his lips bled in their resistance, pried jaws apart and held them open.
There could be no truce, no armistice.
I bid you good-night, Mr. Dale."
Well, he was alive now, the first round was over, and so far he had won.
We can, and shall be glad to make reparation to you to the slight extent of offering you a new suit before you go."
He could not, of course, answer those questions; nor, he was doggedly conscious, would he have answered them if he could--and there was no middle course.
"I have answered you," said Jimmie Dale--and, relaxing the muscles in his arms, let them hang limply for an instant in the grip of the two men behind him.
He was apparently--the "apparently" was a mental reservation--quite alone in the room.
He dressed quickly, in what proved to be an exceedingly well-fitting suit; and finally turned tentatively to the man in the chair.
Your presence in the taxicab was only suspicious.
In an instant, with the blow, as the man staggered backward, the room was in pandemonium.
Jimmie Dale hesitated.
He had no illusions now, he laboured under no false estimate of either the ingenuity or the resources of this inhuman nest of vultures to whom murder was no more than a matter of detail.
He was on the same couch.
He had told them so--perhaps he had better tell them so again.
Now--your answer!"
The same masked figure was at the same desk.
Strange that she should come!
We do not depend upon them--we apply the test.
Some of the contents spilled and trickled upon his chin, and then a flood of it, burning, fiery, poured down his throat.
But what did it matter how many more there were!
So this was death--a hazy, nebulous thing!
There was not a sound.
Jimmie Dale scowled.
Jimmie Dale rubbed his eyes.
But it was different now.
THE INNOCENT BYSTANDER
And having applied the test, we are convinced that you have told the truth--that is all."
Sick, shaken, and weak as he was, the cool, imperturbable impudence of the man was fast growing unbearable.
His brows furrowed suddenly.
He rose from his chair brusquely.
Was there a way out?
Again the leader spoke.
No, it had been real enough; his clothes, rent and torn, and the blood upon his hands, where the skin had been scraped from his knuckles in the fight, bore evidence to that.
They had taken pains themselves to make that ominously clear, these men!
The man laughed.
He strained forward in the chair until the sweat in great beads sprang from his forehead, strained and fought and tore at his bonds in a paroxysm of madness to free himself while there still remained a little strength.
"The car is ready as soon as you are dressed," announced the other briefly.
He could not take his eyes from it--except as his eyes were drawn magnetically to that FULL glass in the hand of one of the others.
He roused up with a startled exclamation.
"If you have no objections," he said curtly, "I'll tie this over your eyes."
And then the leader spoke.
What was it the Tocsin had said--"the most powerful and pitiless organisation of criminals the world has ever known--the stake a fortune of millions--her life!" There had, indeed, been no overemphasis in the words she had used!
That was the only way out--and it was hopeless.
What was it to be like this passing?
The lips under the mask curved into a lupine smile.
Alone she had fought these fiends and outwitted them for--how long was it?
She would be more than ever alone now.
With you it was somewhat different.
It is not at all likely, of course; but we prefer to discount even so remote a possibility.
A voice seemed to float in the air near him: "For the last time--will you answer?"
"Is it worth while, will it convince you now, any more than before, to repeat that there is some mistake here?
No--not strange. He was picturing himself.
He was not so sure, after all.
He tried to rouse himself mentally, to prod his brain to action, to pit it in a fight for life against these self-confessed criminals and murderers with their mask of culture, who surrounded him now.
Decent fellow Joe when he has it but sure like that he never has it.
I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him.
Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill.
The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower.
I'm on two minds not to give that fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and ladders.
You should have seen long John's eye.
Here, Terry, give us a pony.
And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for that purpose, and thither come all herds and fatlings and firstfruits of that land for O'Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, a chieftain descended from chieftains.
--Old Troy, says I, was in the force.
--Look at him, says he.
says Joe.
His nether extremities were encased in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beast.
So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there, sure enough, was the citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop in the way of drink.
--What's your opinion of the times?
--Give us the paw!
A fresh torrent of tears burst from their lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people, touched to the inmost core, broke into heartrending sobs, not the least affected being the aged prebendary himself.
--You don't grasp my point, says Bloom.
It's only a natural phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the...
And he's gone, poor little Willy, poor little Paddy Dignam.
I heard that from the head warder that was in
A most romantic incident occurred when a handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook and genealogical tree, solicited the hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot.
He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate--short, painstaking yet withal so characteristic of the man.
And he was telling us there's two fellows waiting below to pull his heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob a skull.
--That so? says Joe.
--The noblest, the truest, says he.
Good old doggy!
--Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.
The last farewell was affecting in the extreme.
She swore to him as they mingled the salt streams of their tears that she would ever cherish his memory, that she would never forget her hero boy who went to his death with a song on his lips as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk park.
And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face.
Jesus, I had to laugh at pisser Burke taking them off chewing the fat.
She brought back to his recollection the happy days of blissful childhood together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they had indulged in the innocent pastimes of the young and, oblivious of the dreadful present, they both laughed heartily, all the spectators, including the venerable pastor, joining in the general merriment.
He's over all his troubles.
--Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe.
Nay, even the ster provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson, who presided on the sad occasion, he who had blown a considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching, could not now restrain his natural emotion.
--Good Christ! says he.
But anon they were overcome with grief and clasped their hands for the last time.
Constable MacFadden was heartily congratulated by all the F.O.T.E.I., several of whom were bleeding profusely.
--He's a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.
Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was intimated that this had given satisfaction.
Gob, he's a prudent member and no mistake.
Listen to this, will you?
Hand by the block stood the grim figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered furiously.
--Jesus, says I.
And then an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of.
Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.
All the delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which they had been called upon to witness.
Phenomenon!
--Show us, Joe, says I.
Here, says he, take them to hell out of my sight, Alf.
And, begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slidder off again.
The objects (which included several hundred ladies' and gentlemen's gold and silver watches) were promptly restored to their rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.
As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary office.
Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody mongrel.
The citizen made a grab at the letter.
--The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf.
Antitreating is about the size of it.
The signal for prayer was then promptly given by megaphone and in an instant all heads were bared, the commendatore's patriarchal sombrero, which has been in the possession of his family since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser in attendance, Dr Pippi.
In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face.
Give the paw, doggy!
And says Bob Doran, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest blackguard in Dublin when he's under the influence:
Ireland sober is Ireland free.
--Who? says I.
Having requested a quart of buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief.
The baby policeman, Constable MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending parties.
It was exactly seventeen o'clock.
The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished to that beneficent institution.
Little Alf was knocked bawways.
And round he goes to Bob Doran that was standing Alf a half one sucking up for what he could get.
Phenomenon!
What I mean is...
--That can be explained by science, says Bloom.
A torrential rain poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the bared heads of the assembled multitude which numbered at the lowest computation five hundred thousand persons.
He stated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known.
And Bob Doran starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you're there.
--What's that? says Joe.
Then he starts scraping a few bits of old biscuit out of the bottom of a Jacobs' tin he told Terry to bring.
Faith, he was.
Before departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen's to be soled only as the heels were still good.
That monster audience simply rocked with delight.
And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and she's far from the land.
In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor.
Big strong men, officers of the peace and genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary, were making frank use of their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say that there was not a dry eye in that record assemblage.
The deafening claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle.
--Bloom, says he.
But Bob Doran shouts out of him.
The children of the Male and Female Foundling Hospital who thronged the windows overlooking the scene were delighted with this unexpected addition to the day's entertainment and a word of praise is due to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their excellent idea of affording the poor fatherless and motherless children a genuinely instructive treat.
--And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe.
--God's truth, says Alf.
And Alf was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card with a black border round it.
So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there.
Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow.
Yes, Jem knew her.
And he must live on; that seemed the strangest.
As she expected, after a momentary glance at the person who thus endeavoured to detain him, he made an effort to shake it off, and pass on.
In her wild night wanderings, she had noted the haunts and habits of many a one who little thought of a watcher in the poor forsaken woman.
He looked again into her face, and seeing that indeed it was his boyhood's friend, he took her hand, and shook it with a cordiality that forgot the present in the past.
Nay, twenty efforts would have been well rewarded by her yielding.
But you can do nothing for me.
He made another struggle.
It's the only thing to keep us from suicide.
"Where have I been?
But I must not think of her," putting her hand wildly up to her forehead, "or I shall go mad; I shall."
Mary loved another!
So I went out into the street, one January night--Do you think God will punish me for that?" she asked with wild vehemence, almost amounting to insanity, and shaking Jem's arm in order to force an answer from him.
She laughed strangely.
"Yes, I mind her well!
He interrupted his earnest gaze into her face, with the exclamation--
"I might have done better with the money; I see now.
It would be worse, far worse, to have caused such woe, than it was now to bear his present heavy burden.
"Come home," he said.
Why do you torment me with questions like these?
JEM'S INTERVIEW WITH POOR ESTHER.
I am past hope.
There were the usual faces, the usual sights.
Do you hear me, Jem?"
His mother's love had taken a cross turn, because he had kept the tempting supper she had prepared for him waiting until it was nearly spoilt.
He was on the threshold of home now.
But before he could shape his heart's sympathy into words, her voice had lost its wildness, and she spoke with the quiet of despair.
The question was asked thoughtlessly, but answered with fierce earnestness.
"Sick, and in prison, and ye visited me." Shall you, or I, receive such blessing?
"Stay a minute," said he, as she was on the point of departure.
Having done the duty nearest to him (of reducing the tumult of his own heart to something like order), the second became more plain before him.
It was possible, nay, to Jem's heart, very probable, that he might only be too happy to marry her.
Come to my mother.
He would slay himself, and the lovers should love on, and the sun shine bright, and he with his burning, woeful heart would be at rest.
That I have determined on.
Decent, good people have homes.
Hers is the leper-sin, and all stand aloof dreading to be counted unclean.
What have I been doing?
And once more she was out of prison.
She laid her hand on his arm.
"My darling! my darling! even after death I may not see thee, my own sweet one!
Poor Esther's experience had led her, perhaps, too hastily to the conclusion, that Mr. Carson's intentions were evil towards Mary; at least she had given no just ground for the fears she entertained that such was the case.
If you will know all," said she, as he still seemed inclined to urge her, "I must have drink.
But it was but for an instant that she stood there doubting.
There was no bolt to the door; but by one strong effort of his right arm, a heavy chest was moved against it, and he could sit down on the side of his bed, and think.
Then uprose the guilty longing for blood!--The frenzy of jealousy!--Some one should die.
"You must listen," she said again, authoritatively, "for Mary Barton's sake."
She and my aunt Alice live together.
He entered.
It was the wooer who should die.
She was joined soon after she came out, by a man; a gentleman.
"He listened like a three-year child."
With all the glories of the garden at his hand, why did he prefer to cull the wild-rose,--Jem's own fragrant wild-rose?
The month was over;--the honeymoon to the newly-married; the exquisite convalescence to the "living mother of a living child;" the "first dark days of nothingness" to the widow and the child bereaved; the term of penance, of hard labour, and solitary confinement, to the shrinking, shivering, hopeless prisoner.
That hell of thought he would reserve for the quiet of his own room, the dead stillness of night.
"And do you think one sunk so low as I am has a home?
Yes, die, knowing the cause of his death.
"Oh! Jem, I charge you with the care of her!
"Rest that is reserved for the people of God."
But I was laid up for a long time with spitting of blood; and could do nothing.
But trembling as she was, she had provided against this by a firm and unusual grasp.
She was a lady by right of nature, Jem thought; in movement, grace, and spirit. what was birth to a Manchester manufacturer, many of whom glory, and justly too, in being the architects of their own fortunes?
Where han ye been this many a year?
Jem, too, went to the closet termed his bed-room.
I won't recall the agony of the past for nothing.
Then came three years of happiness.
For her sake he ceased.
You don't guess how kind he was.
He loathed them, and then he cursed himself because he loathed them.
I'm sure it made me worse, thinking about what might be happening to Mary.
Oh! how should he bear it?
"I may want to speak to you again.
That a long life (and he knew men did live long, even with deep, biting sorrow corroding at their hearts) must be spent without Mary; nay, with the consciousness she was another's!
Then she spoke.
Jem pictured him (and gloated on the picture), lying smitten, yet conscious; and listening to the upbraiding accusation of his murderer.
If I go without food, and without shelter, I must have my dram.
One more effort, and she might have come.
Jem muttered some words; she caught their meaning, and in a pleading voice continued,
How well, his beating heart could testify!
Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau.
Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have hurt a person whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best intentions, in pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a little brighter, she had tried to save from Edward.
Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.
That would have been enough to do the trick.
She was smiling, as if she had just scored a goal in a hockey match.
I trusted you so.
"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my proper place.
And what could they have done better, or what could they have done that could have been worse?
She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's feelings.
You paid the money for me to come here.
It is in black and white, my picture of that judgement, an etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell an etching from a photographic reproduction.
Once she said:
I never heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple.
And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan will find her young husband again, and Leonora will burn, clear and serene, a northern light and one of the archangels of God.
Leonora lifted her up--she was the merest featherweight--and laid her on the bed with her hair about her.
But, if he called me it to her, I think he does not love me any more.
It is probably the suggestion of some picture that I have seen somewhere.
I ought never to have brought her from India." And that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it.
I mean, that I must claim the liberty of a free American citizen to think what I please about your co-religionists. And I suppose that Florence must have liberty to think what she pleases and to say what politeness allows her to say."
But the cold justice of the thing demanded that she should play the part of mother to this child who had come from the same convent.
She would think they were not quite ladylike.
I think that the pair of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath.
She had to fight against that feeling, whilst she read the postscript of the letter.
"It was surely not right of you and I never wanted to be one.
It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears to me sometimes, at nights.
Just Heavens, I do not know.
She went on saying that it was her ambition to leave this world a little brighter by the passage of her brief life, and how thankfully she would leave Edward, whom she thought she had brought to a right frame of mind, if Leonora would only give him a chance.
But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning.
She was an American, a New Englander.
The just?
It was naturally too late.
You murdered her. You and I murdered her between us.
But, in the nights, with that vision of judgement before me, I know that I hold myself back.
Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her body and her face.
And Leonora would treat her like the whore she was.
And I heard Edward call me a poor little rat to the American lady.
So I suppose it is the intermediate stage.
Well, perhaps, they will find me an elevator to run....
Now, as soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes.
"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript began. The poor child was hardly literate.
How could you?
No, I feel nothing at all about that.
It is stated a little baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for bald statements.
And she had perceived at first only, on the clear, round table covered with red velvet, a letter addressed to her.
I know it, thank you."
I said to her something like:
I didn't care whether she had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't.
You see, she had two things that she wanted.
I don't mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation.
But I am unwilling to attribute my feelings at that time to anything so concrete as a shock.
I didn't want to present myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old maid.
Before he spoke, there was nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact of his life.
Certainly she never alluded to it; I dare say she never took sufficient interest in me.
It was like a father saying that he approved of a marriageable daughter...
On the same day of the year she had married me; on that 4th she had lost Edward's love, and Bagshawe had appeared like a sinister omen--like a grin on the face of Fate.
And my story was concerning itself with Florence--with Florence, who heard those words from behind the tree.
She was just glad and she went on being just glad.
But she had frequently told me that she had no vocation; it just simply wasn't there--the desire to become a nun.
And Leonora said that it was so and Leonora knew him to the bottom of his heart.
And the secret weakness of Florence--the weakness that she could not bear to have me discover, was just that early escapade with the fellow called Jimmy.
Who knows?
That, I mean, is, in spite of everything, my permanent view of him.
She would not, I mean, have minded if I had discovered that she was the mistress of Edward Ashburnham.
That of course is only conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified.
I didn't attach much importance to my superior years.
It was quite literally the case.
You see, the mainspring of her nature must have been vanity.
I am not going to be so American as to say that all true love demands some sacrifice.
A strange pang convulsed her.
I never saw it before.
I trust my servants have given you satisfaction.
"That has nothing to do with it.
Presently there was a little shifting of groups.
Only Jacob Delafield and Lady Henry were left.
Lady Henry, with great difficulty, and panting, began to pull herself up the stairs.
Julie stood stonily erect.
I shall, of course, leave you to-morrow morning."
"You will have every opportunity to-morrow," she said.
He put on his eye-glasses, looked round the room, and gently rubbed his hands.
If I had been equal to entertaining you"--she looked round upon them all--"I should not have told my butler to make my excuses.
"Oh, Aunt Flora, dear Aunt Flora!
Would you come in for a moment?
The group laughed, moved their spoons softly, and once more lowered their voices.
"We meant no harm," she said, coldly.
She gasped, trying vainly to control herself, and they both listened to the sounds above them in the dark house--the labored breath, the slow, painful step.
I thank you.
The Duchess rushed to her, and fell, of course, upon the one thing she should not have said.
"It is not worth while to prevaricate.
What an exciting, what an important evening!...
But if you haven't already asked him to dinner--I warned you last week he was coming--pray do it at once!"
Julie flushed.
"This is the first time for twenty years that I have not found her on a Wednesday evening," he said, with a sudden touch of feeling which became him.
"As far as I am concerned, Miss Le Breton will have no engagements."
Then she resumed her difficult walk.
So--when you came up to say good-night to me--you had determined on this adventure?
You will want all your fortitude."
"Duchess, where thou goest, I may go.
It must be close on midnight."
If I were to die in mounting these stairs, I would not let you help me."
"Dixon is in my room, where I bade her remain.
"I breathe again," he said, greeting her with effusion.
She felt his own tremble, and yet its grasp was firm and supporting.
Jacob hesitated, then quietly took his departure.
That lady eyed her companion with composure, though by now even the old lips were wholly blanched.
She tried to withdraw her hand, but only feebly.
Don't come near me!"
But this Frenchman challenged and excited him.
"Lady Henry!"
Ten minutes?
She could not remember that he had spoken--that he had bade her farewell.
Few men had done sterner or more daring feats in the field.
"Oh, she wouldn't let me help her.
Then Julie withdrew.
But before she could reply, a sound struck on her ear.
She looked up, startled, to see Jacob Delafield.
"So you, and this lady"--she pointed a shaking finger at Julie--"have held my reception for me.
Ah, I see--"
"Lady Henry will soon be herself again.
Montresor approached her again, in real and deep distress.
But with a great effort she walked towards the fireplace, recovered her gloves and handkerchief, which were on the mantel-piece, and then turned slowly to Lady Henry.
So did the Duchess, whimpering, her hand in Delafield's arm.
Lady Henry nodded grimly.
Let me introduce my friend, General Fergus.
You had planned it all with Hutton, who has become your tool, before you came to me.
The talk glided into a general discussion of the Egyptian position.
I think I'll stop it.
On the contrary, I have borne what no one else would have borne.
Every one came in, as it were, on tiptoe.
"He hates us like poison.
He seems to have been telling her all the secrets.
She would not like her old friends to be alarmed.
Meanwhile, Montresor was elaborately informing himself as to Lady Henry.
There is a fire in the library.
He bent towards Julie.
And, upon my word, the very thing my soul was longing for--a cup of coffee!"
The hats were removed, and the tall, stooping form of Montresor advanced.
"Nonsense!
And in five minutes Mademoiselle Le Breton was leading it as usual.
Let me hear to-morrow."
His expression--of doubt or discomfort--recalled her at once to the realities of her own situation.
Was that what she said?
But one thing--at last--she had forgotten.
She looked round her piteously.
She said she would rather die. Perhaps I have killed her.
Remember my letter.
But in French her tongue was loosened, though never beyond the point of grace, the point of delicate adjustment to the talkers round her.
You have also"--she looked at the coffee-cups--"provided my guests with refreshment.
"What was that?" she said.
"Dear Julie!" she cried, imploringly.
"Indeed!" cry both gentlemen in a breath, seeming alike vexed by the intelligence, Shenstone mechanically interrogating:
I couldn't have believed it near so late--almost luncheon time!
Is it possible?" she exclaims, looking at the ormolu dial on the mantelshelf.
"Because the thing's impossible; they've already gone rowing."
"Do you think they'll be out long?" earnestly interrogates Shenstone.
The day's so fine, I thought they might like to."
It is thus with Llangorren, whose ostensible mistress is Miss Linton, the aunt and legal guardian already alluded to.
"Why should I? What is it?"
It is Mr Shenstone who thus interrogates.
"Oh, no," he stammers out.
But Gwen's maid informs me they left the house then, and I presume they went direct to the river."
How very stupid of me to ask such a question.
Kitchen matters are not much to Miss Linton's taste, being a dame of the antique brocaded type, with pleasant memories of the past, that go back to Bath and Cheltenham; where, in their days of glory, as hers of youth, she was a belle, and did her share of dancing, with a due proportion of flirting, at the Regency balls.
Of course you'll stay, gentlemen?
I wasn't down myself--as I've told you, not feeling very well this morning.
No more is Mr Musgrave's matutinal visit out of order.
I shan't wait one minute for them."
"If you like--by all means.
"On the river?"
More like they'll be hungry, and that will bring them home.
There is nothing odd in his calling at that early hour.
"Not a word--at least not to me."
"Certainly!" answers the lady, looking surprised.
For this reason his vicarial representative can plead scores of excuses for presenting himself at "The Court." There is the school, the church choir, and clothing club, to say nought of neighbouring news, which on most mornings make him a welcome visitor to Miss Linton; and no doubt would on this, but for the glamour thrown around her by the fascinations of the dear delightful Lutestring.
Though but the curate, he is in full charge of parish duties, the rector being not only aged but an absentee--so long away from the neighbourhood as to have become almost a myth to it.
She may be expecting the usual budget of neighbourhood intelligence he daily brings her.
"Ah, indeed," returns the spinster, holding out her fingers to be touched, but, under the plea of being a little invalided, excusing herself from rising.
Instead, they hear words, not only disappointing, but perplexing.
"Surely, they won't be out all day," timidly suggests the curate; to which she makes no rejoinder, till Mr Shenstone puts it in the shape of an inquiry.
While these exciting incidents are passing upon the river, Llangorren Court is wrapped in that stately repose becoming an aristocratic residence--especially where an elderly spinster is head of the house, and there are no noisy children to go romping about.
Not that the young country gentleman has anything in common with the titled Lothario, who is habitually a dweller in cities.
Simply that he dislikes leaving Miss Linton alone--indeed, dare not.
It is fortunate for his Reverence, that before entering within the room another visitor is announced, and ushered in along with him.
I was only wondering why Miss Gwen--that is, I am a little astonished--but--perhaps you'll think it impertinent of me to ask another question?"
It even takes all her partiality for Mr Shenstone to remove its spell, and get him vouchsafed friendly reception.
What's the hour now?
"I should hope not," returns the ancient toast of Cheltenham, with aggravating indifference, for Lutestring is not quite out of her thoughts.
They have been listening, with ears all alert, for the sound of soft footsteps and rustling dresses.
This with some acerbity--possibly from the thought that the days of her legal guardianship are drawing to a close, which will make her a less important personage at Llangorren.
Mr Shenstone is satisfied with the reply; but less the curate, who neither rides nor has a horse.
You don't suppose they've brought the boat up to the fishpond!"
Punctuality is the rule of this house--always will be with me.
"Only whether--whether she--Miss Gwen, I mean--said anything about riding to-day?"
"There's no knowing, however.
He will make the tempted iniquitous as the tempter, should this seem to add interest to the tale, or promote the sale of the book.
Shame of Gwen to give us so much trouble!
But, though presiding over the establishment, it is rather in the way of ornamental figure-head; since she takes little to do with its domestic affairs, leaving them to a skilled housekeeper who carries the keys.
Miss Linton need have no fear that the impure stream will cease to flow, any more than the limpid waters of the Wye.
How time does fly, to be sure!
"But, Miss Linton; they may have returned from the river, and are now somewhere about the grounds.
He is mistaken.
"Is it likely they will, Miss Linton?"
"Nay, I am sure," continues Miss Linton, with provoking coolness, "they would have been glad to go riding with you; delighted--"
And less Shenstone himself--indeed both--as the lady proceeds.
AN INVETERATE NOVEL READER.
"Miss Linton," he says, speaking first, "I've just dropped in to ask if the young ladies would go for a ride.
"Ten minutes to one!
It has saved him from an outburst of Miss Linton's rather tart temper, which, under the circumstances, otherwise he would have caught.
Miss Wynn is accustomed to come and go, without much consulting me."
Thanks, much, Mr Shenstone."
On this particular day it is not desired.
Mr Musgrave and I won't wait for any of you. Shall we, Mr Musgrave?"
"How long since they went off--may I know, Miss Linton?"
"I beg pardon.
But he shook both his heads hard and said, "Certainly not!"
THE RAREST ANIMAL OF ALL
In that way I can talk while I am eating without being rude.
That means, there aren't any more. But long ago, when Doctor Dolittle was alive, there were some of them still left in the deepest jungles of Africa; and even then they were very, very scarce.
"Oh, yes," said the pushmi-pullyu.
People will pay any money to see him."
When the packing was finished and everything was ready to start, the monkeys gave a grand party for the Doctor, and all the animals of the jungle came.
The other head was always awake--and watching.
"You have been so kind to the animals here--and the monkeys tell me that I am the only one who will do.
They explained to him that he would not be shut up in a menagerie but would just be looked at.
And besides, only one half of him slept at a time.
"Let us see if Buffon says anything--"
We shall be poorer than ever when we get back.
"Yes, you do," said Dab-Dab, the duck.
"Oh, do be sensible!" cried Dab-Dab.
There it is--look--where the Good White Man sat and ate food with us in the Year of the Great Sickness!"
For surely he is the Greatest of Men!"
"But I keep the other mouth for eating--mostly.
My father's great-grandfather was the last of the Unicorns."
"Where would you get all the wood and the nails to make one with?--And besides, what are we going to live on?
They had no tail, but a head at each end, and sharp horns on each head.
But you must promise me that if I do not like it in the Land of the White Men you will send me back."
Then, when the party was over, the Doctor and his pets started out to go back to the seashore.
Our people have always been very polite."
But he couldn't do it.
And when they came to where the Doctor's little house of grass was, they knocked on the door.
"Yes, I'll go," said the pushmi-pullyu who saw at once, from the Doctor's face, that he was a man to be trusted.
"I notice," said the duck, "that you only talk with one of your mouths. Can't the other head talk as well?"
But he answered, "No.
"How does it make up its mind?"
"Most interesting!" murmured the Doctor; and he took a book out of the trunk which Dab-Dab was packing and began turning the pages.
They asked him if he would go with Doctor Dolittle and be put on show in the Land of the White Men.
"Don't you remember how we had to pinch and scrape to pay the butcher's bill in Puddleby?
"Excuse me, surely you are related to the Deer Family, are you not?"
And the Grand Gorilla, who had the strength of seven horses in his hairy arms, rolled a great rock up to the head of the table and said,
Even then, years ago, he was the only animal in the world with two heads.
After they had all finished eating, the Doctor got up and said,
Chee-Chee's perfectly right: take the funny-looking thing along, do!"
When the Doctor stopped speaking and sat down, all the monkeys clapped their hands a long time and said to one another, "Let it be remembered always among our people that he sat and ate with us, here, under the trees.
"But I don't want any money," said the Doctor.
"What in the world is it?" asked John Dolittle, gazing at the strange creature.
They were very shy and terribly hard to catch. The black men get most of their animals by sneaking up behind them while they are not looking.
And how are you going to get the sailor the new boat you spoke of--unless we have the money to buy it?"
And Chee-Chee very proudly took the animal inside and showed him to the Doctor.
Then for three days they tried to persuade him.
They told him that the Doctor was a very kind man but hadn't any money; and people would pay to see a two-headed animal and the Doctor would get rich and could pay for the boat he had borrowed to come to Africa in.
When he saw that it was no use trying to escape, he sat down and waited to see what they wanted.
"My friends: I am not clever at speaking long words after dinner, like some men; and I have just eaten many fruits and much honey.
Though many of the greatest huntsmen and the cleverest menagerie-keepers spent years of their lives searching through the jungles in all weathers for pushmi-pullyus, not a single one had ever been caught.
And even to this day, in the heart of the Jungle, that stone still is there.
"Yes," said the pushmi-pullyu--"to the Abyssinian Gazelles and the Asiatic Chamois--on my mother's side.
"It doesn't look to me as though it had any," said Jip, the dog.
"I was going to make him one," said the Doctor.
"It certainly would make a nice new kind of pet.
"Lord save us!" cried the duck.
"Well, perhaps there is something in what you say," murmured the Doctor.
The duck, who was packing the trunk, said, "Come in!"
But you could not do this with the pushmi-pullyu--because, no matter which way you came towards him, he was always facing you.
And they had pineapples and mangoes and honey and all sorts of good things to eat and drink.
My master was not immediately suited, but in a few days my new groom came.
"Well," said his master, "I should not like him to take cold; but I don't like the smell of this stable.
He never took all the straw away, and the smell from what lay underneath was very bad; while the strong vapors that rose made my eyes smart and inflame, and I did not feel the same appetite for my food.
He was a tall, good-looking fellow enough; but if ever there was a humbug in the shape of a groom Alfred Smirk was the man.
Now the fact was that he hardly ever did exercise me, and when the master was busy I often stood for days together without stretching my legs at all, and yet being fed just as high as if I were at hard work. This often disordered my health, and made me sometimes heavy and dull, but more often restless and feverish.
I had a loose box, and might have been very comfortable if he had not been too indolent to clean it out.
"Yes, sir, I will."
Of course, it was a great thing not to be ill-used, but then a horse wants more than that.
Do you think the drains are all right?"
He left my bit rusty, my saddle damp, and my crupper stiff.
If you will send him here to-morrow I will attend to the hoof, and I will direct your man how to apply the liniment which I will give him."
I wonder your groom has not seen to it before.
I am sometimes afraid he will stumble."
He never even gave me a meal of green food or a bran mash, which would have cooled me, for he was altogether as ignorant as he was conceited; and then, instead of exercise or change of food, I had to take horse balls and draughts; which, beside the nuisance of having them poured down my throat, used to make me feel ill and uncomfortable.
"I don't know what is the matter with this horse; he goes very fumble-footed.
31 A Humbug
"Yes, sir," said Alfred, "I have noticed the same myself, when I have exercised him."
Bryce has been ordered abroad, and wants to sublet it.
Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow.
"Surely, on Chelsea Embankment--"
It was hard-going in the roads of Mr. Wilcox's soul.
I don't feel easy--might I just bother you, Henry?"
"No, the fellow needn't."
Fine rhododendrons.
"Very much--I've heard so much about it, one way or the other.
The salary's much lower, but he hopes to manage--a branch of Dempster's Bank.
Good-morning, Helen."
Don't take up that sentimental attitude over the poor.
Is that all right?"
Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.
He had a sad moustache, but the back of his head was young."
No one's to blame."
"Is that your point?
Religion had confirmed him.
I'm sorry--if you sublet--?"
You can't deny it" (and now it was a respectful voice)--"and you can't deny that, in spite of all, the tendency of civilization has on the whole been upward."
She need trouble him with no gift of her own.
Heaven forbid!
My letter's about Howards End.
She turns the house upside down for us; she invites our special friends--she scarcely knows Frieda, and we can't leave her on her hands.
Of course not!"
I'll speak to her."
I am far from sure that I shall give him permission.
I consider it a deplorable misfortune."
Her manner was so serious that he stopped, and asked her a little sharply what she wanted.
He is very poor and his wife is an extravagant imbecile.
"Is no one to blame for anything?"
"But you can give that up now."
My aunt counts on it year after year.
The Porphyrion, according to you, was bound to say, 'I am trying all I can to get into the Tariff Ring.
"Oh, that'll be all right.
But she failed.
"I didn't say--"
She was with Helen, who had been ominously quiet since the affair was settled.
"He is such a man in theory.
That was the whole of her sermon.
He never noticed that Helen and Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations; he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the grayest conversation, the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views.
Good-morning, Mrs. Munt.
"Wednesday?
"Margaret!" her aunt called.
"Magsy!
It's pretty in its way.
"He has not done that.
"Do excuse me, but about the Porphyrion.
A man who had little money has less--that's mine."
There was no clause in the agreement.
"You said on Chelsea Embankment, surely, that it was a bad concern, so we advised this clerk to clear out.
Who is this fellow?"
In theory there should be no more damage done at Howards End; in practice there will be.
"It's enlarging the space in which you may be strong." He answered: "You're a clever little woman, but my motto's Concentrate." And this morning he concentrated with a vengeance.
Under these circumstances I do not consider 'the battle of life' a happy expression."
"You're ridiculous, Helen."
"No.
"Not a BAD--" she exclaimed, dropping his hand.
Do you mean that I'm responsible?"
He writes this morning that he's taken our advice, and now you say it's not a bad concern.
"A man who had little money," she repeated, "has less, owing to us.
God does the rest."
"Now, a word of advice."
Don't bully me."
Helen looked out at the sea.
"And you chew the bark for toothache."
"But oh, Meg, what a theory!"
My goodness me, yes."
But oh, Helen, in theory!"
"Let me explain the point to you.
"You seem to think--" He looked at his watch.
He is capable of better things.
We returned along the gallery.
That I had not had these scruples sooner was because my curiosity had quite got the better of me.
I wanted to oblige him; I did not wish him to think me a coward; I was filled with curiosity; and it was too late for me to draw back, even had I determined to do so.
When, however, the time arrived that we were to make preparations for our voyage, to buy the goods necessary to the undertaking, I found they had spent all, and had not one dirrim left of the thousand sequins I had given to each of them.
But the fairy, who immediately appeared, said, "Husband, be not surprised to see these dogs, they are your brothers." I was troubled at this declaration, and asked her by what power they were so transformed.
The genie made him the same promise as he had given the others.
Having myself by this time gained another thousand sequins, I made him a present of them.
Great prince of genies, you must know that we are three brothers, the two black dogs and myself.
The five years being now nearly expired, I am travelling in quest of her; and as I passed this way, I met this merchant, and the good old man who led the hind, and sat down by them.
I descended, opened the doors, and dug up the three thousand sequins I had formerly secreted.
I immediately shut up my shop, and taking him to a bath, gave him the best clothes I had.
"I own it is," replied the genie, "and on that account I remit the merchant the second third of the crime which he has committed against me."
Finding on examining my books, that I had doubled my stock, that is to say, that I was worth two thousand sequins, I gave him one half; "With that," said I, "brother, you may make up your loss." He joyfully accepted the present, and having repaired his fortunes, we lived together, as before.
In the mean time my two brothers, who had not managed their affairs as successfully as I had mine, envied my prosperity; and suffered their feelings to carry them so far, that they conspired against my life; and one night, when my wife and I were asleep, threw us both into the sea.
I ordered proper apparel to be made for her; and after having married her, according to form, I took her on board, and we set sail.
His elder brother and myself did all we could to divert him from his purpose, but without effect.
He joined a caravan, and departed.
Some time after, my second brother, who is the other of these two dogs, would also sell his estate.
"I did it," said she, "or at least authorised one of my sisters to do it, who at the same time sunk their ship.
I had scarcely fallen into the water, when she took me up, and carried me to an island.
The Story of the Second old Man and the Two Black Dogs.
They rejoiced to see him out of danger; and bidding him adieu, each of them proceeded on his way.
With that sum, we all became merchants.
With this view, he sold his estate, and bought goods suited to the trade intended to follow.
At the end of the year he returned in the same condition as my other brother.
You have lost the goods you had on board, but I will compensate you another way.
As to your two brothers, I have condemned them to remain five years in that shape.
I went afterwards to my shop, which I also opened; and was complimented by the merchants, my neighbours, upon my return.
With the produce we bought commodities of that country, to carry back with us for sale.
I found my wife possessed so many good qualities, that my love to her every day increased.
Our father, when he died, left each of us one thousand sequins.
When I went back to my house, I perceived there two black dogs, which came up to me in a very submissive manner: I could not divine the meaning of this circumstance, which greatly astonished me.
When we were ready to embark on our return, I met on the sea- shore a lady, handsome enough, but poorly clad.
He disposed of it, and with the money bought such goods as were suitable to the trade which he designed to follow.
Cease shooting for the present and leave the matter to the gods, but in the morning let heaven give victory to whom it will.
I will now give you convincing proofs that you may know me and be assured.
"Suitors of the illustrious queen, listen that I may speak even as I am minded.
Then the swineherd and the stockman left the cloisters together, and Ulysses followed them.
I am still strong, and not as the suitors twit me with being.
To you two, therefore, will I unfold the truth as it shall be.
"Cease your weeping, lest some one should come outside and see us, and tell those who are within.
Then going upstairs with her handmaids into her room, she mourned her dear husband till Minerva sent sweet sleep over her eyelids.
Then would one turn towards his neighbour saying, "This is some tricky old bow-fancier; either he has got one like it at home, or he wants to make one, in such workmanlike style does the old vagabond handle it."
Presently, his two servants followed him inside.
On this he put the bow down, letting it lean against the door [that led into the house] with the arrow standing against the top of the bow.
Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants.
Nevertheless there still remained Antinous and Eurymachus, who were the ringleaders among the suitors and much the foremost among them all.
Shall, then, this bow take the life of many a chief among us, merely because you cannot bend it yourself?
She went wondering back into the house, and laid her son's saying in her heart.
Then Telemachus spoke.
When he had taken aim he let fly, and his arrow pierced every one of the handle-holes of the axes from the first onwards till it had gone right through them, and into the outer courtyard.
This stranger is strong and well-built, he says moreover that he is of noble birth.
Another said, "I hope he may be no more successful in other things than he is likely to be in stringing this bow."
When he had thus spoken, he went back to the house and took the seat that he had left.
Why then should you mind if men talk as you think they will?
Come on, then, make no excuses for delay, but let us see whether you can string the bow or no. I too will make trial of it, for if I can string it and shoot through the iron, I shall not suffer my mother to quit this house with a stranger, not if I can win the prizes which my father won before me."
Then he sat down on the seat from which he had risen, and Antinous said:
I did not miss what I aimed at, and I was not long in stringing my bow.
Now, however, it is time for the Achaeans to prepare supper while there is still daylight, and then otherwise to disport themselves with song and dance which are the crowning ornaments of a banquet."
No one shall force me one way or the other, not even though I choose to make the stranger a present of the bow outright, and let him take it away with him.
When they had got outside the gates and the outer yard, Ulysses said to them quietly:
Thus did he speak, and they all of them laughed heartily, which put them in a better humour with Telemachus; so Eumaeus brought the bow on and placed it in the hands of Ulysses.
Then he said to Telemachus:
This made them all very angry, for they feared he might string the bow, Antinous therefore rebuked him fiercely saying, "Wretched creature, you have not so much as a grain of sense in your whole body; you ought to think yourself lucky in being allowed to dine unharmed among your betters, without having any smaller portion served you than we others have had, and in being allowed to hear our conversation.
This done, he went on to the pavement to make trial of the bow; thrice did he tug at it, trying with all his might to draw the string, and thrice he had to leave off, though he had hoped to string the bow and shoot through the iron.
I find that you two alone of all my servants are glad that I should do so, for I have not heard any of the others praying for my return.
You know this as well as I do; what need have I to speak in praise of my mother?
Even the man himself can have no such idea in his mind: none of you need let that disturb his feasting; it would be out of all reason."
See, here is the scar from the boar's tooth that ripped me when I was out hunting on Mt. Parnassus with the sons of Autolycus."
But, suitors, as the contest has been agreed upon, let it go forward.
Are you out of your wits?
Hard by, the stockman wept also when he saw his master's bow, but Antinous scolded them.
I will also give him sandals, and will see him sent safely wherever he wants to go."
It is for a woman whose peer is not to be found in Pylos, Argos, or Mycene, nor yet in Ithaca nor on the mainland.
The suitors were dismayed, and turned colour as they heard it; at that moment, moreover, Jove thundered loudly as a sign, and the heart of Ulysses rejoiced as he heard the omen that the son of scheming Saturn had sent him.
If they hear any groaning or uproar as of men fighting about the house, they are not to come out, but are to keep quiet and stay where they are at their work."
Euryclea did as she was told and closed the doors of the women's apartments.
I shall either be always feeble and of no prowess, or I am too young, and have not yet reached my full strength so as to be able to hold my own if any one attacks me.
Henceforth, therefore, there was war between mankind and the centaurs, but he brought it upon himself through his own drunkenness.
Melanthius lit the fire, and set a seat covered with sheep skins beside it.
I have suffered much, but at last, in the twentieth year, I am come back to my own country.
I appeal more especially to Eurymachus, and to Antinous who has just spoken with so much reason.
Penelope then spoke to him.
Your words are monstrous and intolerable; it makes me angry to listen to you.
True, you were not born to be an archer, but there are others who will soon string it."
The rest approved his words, and thereon men servants poured water over the hands of the guests, while pages filled the mixing-bowls with wine and water and handed it round after giving every man his drink-offering. Then, when they had made their offerings and had drunk each as much as he desired, Ulysses craftily said:--
As he spoke he drew his rags aside from the great scar, and when they had examined it thoroughly, they both of them wept about Ulysses, threw their arms round him, and kissed his head and shoulders, while Ulysses kissed their hands and faces in return.
For the moment, however, give me the bow that I may prove the power of my hands among you all, and see whether I still have as much strength as I used to have, or whether travel and neglect have made an end of it."
This bow is a man's matter, and mine above all others, for it is I who am master here."
If Apollo and the other gods will grant our prayer, your own boarhounds shall get you into some quiet little place, and worry you to death."
The swineherd now took up the bow and was for taking it to Ulysses, but the suitors clamoured at him from all parts of the cloisters, and one of them said, "You idiot, where are you taking the bow to?
"Your guest has not disgraced you, Telemachus.
Penelope presently reached the oak threshold of the store-room; the carpenter had planed this duly, and had drawn a line on it so as to get it quite straight; he had then set the door posts into it and hung the doors.
Today is the feast of Apollo throughout all the land; who can string a bow on such a day as this?
Say which you are disposed to do--to side with the suitors, or with Ulysses?"
What manner of men would you be to stand by Ulysses, if some god should bring him back here all of a sudden?
When he had done this, he called Euryclea apart and said to her, "Euryclea, Telemachus says you are to close the doors of the women's apartments.
Along with her came her maidens, bearing a chest that contained much iron and bronze which her husband had won as prizes.
"Great heavens!" he exclaimed, "Jove must have robbed me of my senses.
At this moment the bow was in the hands of Eurymachus, who was warming it by the fire, but even so he could not string it, and he was greatly grieved.
The two fell in with one another in Messene at the house of Ortilochus, where Ulysses was staying in order to recover a debt that was owing from the whole people; for the Messenians had carried off three hundred sheep from Ithaca, and had sailed away with them and with their shepherds.
If heaven shall deliver the suitors into my hands, I will find wives for both of you, will give you house and holding close to my own, and you shall be to me as though you were brothers and friends of Telemachus.
Then she said:
Some one of us is even now hoping and praying that he may marry Penelope, but when he has seen this bow and tried it, let him woo and make bridal offerings to some other woman, and let Penelope marry whoever makes her the best offer and whose lot it is to win her."
If some god were but to bring Ulysses back, you should see with what might and main I would fight for him."
This will disgrace us in the eyes of those who are yet unborn."
When the wine had got into his head, he went mad and did ill deeds about the house of Peirithous; this angered the heroes who were there assembled, so they rushed at him and cut off his ears and nostrils; then they dragged him through the doorway out of the house, so he went away crazed, and bore the burden of his crime, bereft of understanding.
He was trying for the fourth time, and would have strung it had not Ulysses made a sign to check him in spite of all his eagerness.
But even so I doubt not that I shall remember it in my dreams."
You others, therefore, who are stronger than I, make trial of the bow and get this contest settled."
"You country louts," said he, "silly simpletons; why should you add to the sorrows of your mistress by crying in this way?
In quest of these Ulysses took a long journey while still quite young, for his father and the other chieftains sent him on a mission to recover them.
The sun would have gone down upon their mourning if Ulysses had not checked them and said:
Let us warm the bow and grease it--we will then make trial of it again, and bring the contest to an end."
I like her all the better for it.
"Then what am I to do?"
"Not so fast, Mr. Corbett.
"Poor chap!" he said, when the sad tale had ended.
Ask her permission to learn the facts from me.
"It is time," he said, "that the misery of this episode should cease. When the chief actor in the tragedy gave his life to end the suffering, we would but ill meet his wishes by allowing it to occupy our thoughts unduly in the future."
Claude understood his motive thoroughly.
What the dickens does it all mean, I want to know?
Now, why the--"
"No, not that.
It seems to me--"
For a little while they were silent.
"To whom?" inquired Claude, wondering at the savage tone in which the announcement was made.
'Well,' said I, 'I guess you know who's talking?' 'Quite well,' said she.
"So," said Corbett at last, "Gwen thought I would make the same mistake as the poor lady, and suspect her wrongfully."
"Fire away!" he cried excitedly.
"I hope you shook hands with him as he asked you to do?"
"Then put it in the fire."
"That I'd better get quick and do it," shouted Corbett, vanishing with the utmost celerity.
This story of yours will keep until to-morrow."
"I did.
"That never struck me before."
Remember that she has been married before, with somewhat bitter experience.
"To Mrs. Hillmer."
Bruce did not hesitate a moment to comply with the wish.
To the barrister's utter amazement he returned within ten minutes.
It has served its last use."
"Yes, sir; but I can't get any forrarder.
Mrs. Hillmer is highly sensitive.
But, tell me, is there any necessity for that wonderful document to be preserved?"
But naturally she wished the man whom she could trust as a husband to be wholly cognizant of events in which already he had participated slightly."
She likes me well enough, I know.
"Well, now, that beats everything," said Corbett admiringly.
Bruce was glad of the opportunity of reading them aloud.
"She was right.
"Rang her up?"
Say, I'm off!
"Yes; she's staying at the Savoy for a few days, so I telephoned from the Windsor.
He said you probably wished me to know the whole story of Sir Charles Dyke, but felt kinder shy of telling me yourself.
Bruce needed their co-operation in getting the home office to give the requisite permission for Lady Dyke's reburial.
Mensmore's marriage with Phyllis Browne was now definitely fixed for the following autumn, so he carried his sister off with him on a hasty trip to Wyoming in company with Corbett--a journey required for the protection and development of their joint interests in that State.
I just rang her up--"
Acting on Bruce's advice her brother simply told her that everything had been settled, and that the authorities concurred with the barrister in the opinion that Lady Dyke was accidently killed.
"Don't you see you have proposed to the lady and practically been accepted?"
"But perhaps that is exactly what she does want.
The circumstance that the deceased baronet had left his estates to his wife's nephew, joined to the important position Bruce occupied as one of the trustees and joint guardian, with the boy's mother, of the young heir, smoothed over many difficulties.
Mrs. Hillmer did not even know of Sir Charles Dyke's death until weeks had passed.
You must not sail into the Savoy flying a false flag.
Without taking them fully into his confidence, he explained that Sir Charles had all along known the exact facts bearing upon her death and burial-place, but for family reasons he thought it best not to disclose his knowledge.
She would just do as you say--run away and cry."
He would have gone, but Bruce jumped after him.
"It only remains, then, for Mr. Benson to assure himself I am the person who followed him to the closet.
"Wait!" cried I, motioning back not only the doctor, but Uncle Joe and the ladies--the whole group having started forward at Hartley's words. "Let us first make sure I am the Yellow Domino who has been paraded through the parlors this evening.
"A detective!" echoed Edith, brightening like a rose in the sunshine.
"I will," she replied, with a haughty lift of her head that spoke more loudly than her blushes.
"No,--that is,--whatever they were, they were given to the man I supposed to be my brother."
Who put it there, it is for you to determine; my duty is done for to-night." And with a bow I withdrew from the group about me and crossed to the door.
How did you greet the man you had been told was your erring nephew?"
"Mr. Benson," I returned, shaking him loose as I would a feather, "this is all very well; but in your haste and surprise you have made a slight mistake.
"God defend us!" cried Uncle Joe.
"Your brother Joe," I replied, "has had nothing to do with my appearance here.
I--I am an orphan, sir, who at one blow has lost not only a dearly beloved father but, as I fear, a brother too, in whom, up to this hour, I have had every confidence.
Or are you some reckless buffoon who has presumed to step into the domino my brother left behind him, and careless of the terrible trouble that has overwhelmed this family, come here with your criminal jests to puzzle and alarm us?"
The exclamation was enough.
But I waved her back, and turned with a severe gesture toward Hartley Benson.
I understand it all now.
It was a plot well laid; but it is foiled, sir, foiled, as you will see when I have you committed to prison to-morrow."
"And you, Uncle Joe," I went on; "what were your words?
You have been set over me by my brother.
"A detective!" murmured Miss Carrie, shrinking back from the cringing form of the brother whom, but a few hours before, she had deemed every thing that was noble and kind.
"You wish to dare me, then?" he hissed, coming a step nearer.
"Yes, yes," she returned, blushing and wildly disturbed, as she had reason to be.
But I resisted for another moment while I added: "It is, then, established to your satisfaction that I am really the man who has worn the yellow domino this evening.
This mode of attack had the desired effect.
"Yes," I rejoined; "if any one doubts me, I have papers with me to establish my identity.
"Joe!" cried Edith, bounding forward.
I am a detective, sir, connected at present with the Secret Service at Washington.
Then indeed his cheek turned livid, and the eye which had hitherto preserved its steadiness sought the floor.
However, you will do me the kindness to acknowledge your belief that I am the man who stood with you behind the parlor curtains an hour ago."
"Who are you?" burst from Hartley's lips, now blanched to the color of clay.
He was caught in his own toils and saw it.
Miss Benson, will you pardon me if I presume to ask you what were the words of salutation with which you greeted me to-night?"
The result was a cry of astonishment from those to whom the face thus revealed was a strange one, and a curse deep and loud from him to whom the shock of that moment's surprise must have been nearly overwhelming.
By what means I find myself in this place, a witness of Mr. Benson's death and the repository of certain family secrets, it is not necessary for me to inform you.
But Miss Carrie's voice, rising in mingled shame and appeal, stopped me. "Don't go," said she; "not at least until you tell me where my brother Joseph is.
"I said: 'To counterfeit wrong when one is right, necessarily opens one to a misunderstanding.'"
A mingled sound of shrieks and exclamations greeted me.
I shall and will know who you are."
Let us see your face!
My business is to ferret out crime and recognize a rogue under any disguise and in the exercise of any vile or deceptive practices." And I looked him steadily in the face.
Tell me, then, if any support is left for a most unhappy girl, or whether I must give up all hopes of even my brother Joe's sympathy and protection."
"Villain!" he shrieked, losing his self-possession in a sudden burst of fury; "spy! informer!
"Oh!" she cried, in a tremble of doubt and dismay, "I do not know as I can remember; something about being glad to see you, I believe, and my hope that your plans for the evening might succeed."
If the Yellow Domino put poison into Mr. Benson's wine, then upon me must lie the burden of the consequences, for I alone have worn the disguise of this mask from the moment we met under the evergreens till now, as I think may be proved by this gentleman you call Uncle Joe, and this lady you address as Edith."
Very well, now look at me, one and all, and say if you think I am likely to be a person to destroy Mr. Benson." And with a quick gesture I threw aside my mask, and yielded the fatal yellow domino to the impatient hands of Mr. Hartley Benson.
"I shall not attempt," said I, "to repeat or ask you to repeat any conversation which may have passed between us, for you will remember it was too quickly interrupted by Mr. Benson for us to succeed in uttering more than a dozen or so words.
Did you tell him that, Mr. Benson?"
"Do you ask me?" he retorted, after a moment's pause, during which my voice echoed through the room, waking strange gleams of doubt on the faces of more than one person present.
I turned to the trembling Edith.
"Off with that toggery!
"I'm afraid there'll be a great many disappointments in store for you through life."
Oh, I do hope it will be fine next Wednesday.
Marilla always wore her amethyst brooch to church.
It was an old-fashioned oval, containing a braid of her mother's hair, surrounded by a border of very fine amethysts.
I believe I'm getting fatter, though.
And you needn't stop to discourse with sympathetic listeners on your way, either.
That was a thrilling book, Marilla.
Diana was ENRAPTURED when she heard it.
As for the picnic, of course you can go.
I'd sooner see you doing strictly as you're told.
I can't cook, as you know, Marilla, and--and--I don't mind going to a picnic without puffed sleeves so much, but I'd feel terribly humiliated if I had to go without a basket.
I couldn't, I know.
On Saturday it rained and she worked herself up into such a frantic state lest it should keep on raining until and over Wednesday that Marilla made her sew an extra patchwork square by way of steadying her nerves.
It belongs to Mr. William Bell, and right in the corner there is a little ring of white birch trees--the most romantic spot, Marilla.
A series of staccato taps on the west window brought Anne flying in from the yard, eyes shining, cheeks faintly flushed with pink, unbraided hair streaming behind her in a torrent of brightness.
And, oh, Marilla, can I go to it?"
Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond, I read about them and I tried to imagine what they would be like.
Will you let me hold the brooch for one minute, Marilla?
Oh, we have named that little round pool over in Mr. Barry's field Willowmere.
Please can I go?"
We have got our house fixed up elegantly.
"She stayed playing with Diana more than half an hour more'n I gave her leave to; and now she's perched out there on the woodpile talking to Matthew, nineteen to the dozen, when she knows perfectly well she ought to be at her work.
Matthew is such a sympathetic listener.
You know that little piece of land across the brook that runs up between our farm and Mr. Barry's.
And of course he's listening to her like a perfect ninny.
Now, get out your patchwork and have your square done before teatime."
The heroine had five lovers.
I'll bake you a basket."
"Well, it needn't prey any longer.
We keep it in the parlor and we have the fairy glass there, too.
The fairy glass is as lovely as a dream.
Diana found it out in the woods behind their chicken house.
I'd be satisfied with one, wouldn't you?
And then, of course, I had to tell Matthew about the picnic.
Diana and I have our playhouse there.
Of course, they're all broken but it's the easiest thing in the world to imagine that they are whole.
She could faint as easy as anything.
"It's time Anne was in to do her sewing," said Marilla, glancing at the clock and then out into the yellow August afternoon where everything drowsed in the heat.
As for cooking, I mean to begin giving you lessons in that some of these days.
I assure you it took me some time to think it out.
I suppose I'd live through it, but I'm certain it would be a lifelong sorrow.
Please can I go?
They are what I used to think diamonds were like.
I don't know how you can pay attention to the sermon or the prayers when you have it on.
Oh, we do have such elegant times, Marilla.
"Such a thrill as went up and down my back, Marilla!
You've got to keep your wits about you in cooking and not stop in the middle of things to let your thoughts rove all over creation.
I have never tasted ice cream. Diana tried to explain what it was like, but I guess ice cream is one of those things that are beyond imagination."
There's a piece of a plate with a spray of red and yellow ivy on it that is especially beautiful.
"Two o'clock--but isn't it splendid about the picnic, Marilla?
The Delights of Anticipation
"Why, I meant to, Marilla, as much as could be.
Don't you think I am?
"Oh, Marilla, it's a perfectly elegant brooch.
I'd love to be able to faint, wouldn't you, Marilla? It's so romantic.
CHAPTER XIII.
I thought they would be lovely glimmering purple stones.
They're going to have boats on the Lake of Shining Waters--and ice cream, as I told you.
Marilla wore her amethyst brooch to church that day as usual.
Then, just as I was dropping off to sleep, it came like an inspiration.
I stayed awake nearly a whole night before I invented it.
And Mrs. Superintendent Bell and Mrs. Rachel Lynde are going to make ice cream--think of it, Marilla--ICE CREAM!
We call it Idlewild.
But for the rest of the week she talked picnic and thought picnic and dreamed picnic.
But I'm really very healthy for all I'm so thin.
It's just one little seam after another and you never seem to be getting anywhere.
She is going to wear it to the picnic.
Mrs. Lynde says, 'Blessed are they who expect nothing for they shall not be disappointed.' But I think it would be worse to expect nothing than to be disappointed."
I think amethysts are just sweet.
A seafaring uncle had given it to her mother who in turn had bequeathed it to Marilla.
"You'll have to learn to resist the fascination of Idle-whatever-you-call-it.
"Oh, you dear good Marilla.
What time did I tell you to come in?"
It's all full of rainbows--just little young rainbows that haven't grown big yet--and Diana's mother told her it was broken off a hanging lamp they once had.
That amethyst brooch was Marilla's most treasured possession.
She was very handsome and she went through great tribulations.
And we have all our dishes on them.
It was the first time in her whole life that childish lips had voluntarily touched Marilla's face.
"There, there, never mind your kissing nonsense.
I look at my elbows every morning when I get up to see if any dimples are coming. Diana is having a new dress made with elbow sleeves.
You must come and see it, Marilla--won't you?
It's been preying on my mind ever since Diana told me."
Again that sudden sensation of startling sweetness thrilled her.
She would have thought it rather sacrilegious to leave it off--as bad as forgetting her Bible or her collection dime.
But I feel sure they meant to be good to me."
Strange that thought should come!
The man's voice was low, menacing.
That man we knew.
Did they not understand that he did not know?
"I shall not apologise to you for what has happened.
The place was a veritable maze, a lair of hellish cleverness.
He felt himself slipping away into a state of utter weakness, and his brain began to grow confused.
There was a rush from the door, and two, three, four leaping forms hurled themselves upon Jimmie Dale.
It was as though they had read his thoughts.
With a supreme effort, Jimmie Dale strove to rally his tottering senses. Did they not understand the stupendous mockery of their questions?
"I have no other answer."
There was no pain.
"Mr. Dale," he said, with cold significance, "I regret to admit that your pseudo taxicab driver was so ill-advised as to refuse to answer the SAME questions that I have put to you."
Pray God she did not finally fall into their clutches!
Then, with a shrug of his shoulders, recrossed the room, and began to remove his torn garments.
There was always the possibility that you might be one of those ubiquitous 'innocent bystanders.' Your name, your position, the improbability that you could have anything in common with--shall we say, the matter that so deeply interests us?--was all in your favour.
He shook them off--and they came again.
The glass itself was thrust abruptly between his lips.
And it was against these men that henceforth he was to match his wits!
Five to one!
That stillness, weird, unnerving, that permeated, as it were, everywhere through that mysterious house, was, if that were possible, accentuated now.
It was the only way out, because, convinced that he could answer those questions if he wanted to, these men were in deadly earnest; it was hopeless, because they were--five to one!
It was only a sign, a motion of the leader's hand--but with it, quick as a lightning flash, Jimmie Dale was in action.
CHAPTER IV
It was unloaded, of course.
"One drop!" the leader ordered curtly.
I am no more able to answer your questions than you are yourselves.
Had he?
He got up from the couch and walked shakily across the floor to the desk.
The man with the full glass bent over him, and dipped a glass rod into the liquid.
"I will repeat the questions," he said sharply.
What was the use!
"I--" He tried to speak, and found the words thick upon his tongue. "I--do not--know."
"Think well, Mr. Dale!"
Again Jimmie Dale shrugged his shoulders.
He laid the clothes upon the couch--and settled himself significantly in a chair.
When you have changed, you will be motored back to your home.
A flood of it--and it needed but THREE drops and there had been TEN in the glass!
They would certainly have their own way in the end.
"I am sure you will not refuse, Mr. Dale--since we insist.
He was back in the same room in which he had first returned to consciousness after the accident.
The room cleared instantly of all but the original five.
"Where is the woman whose ring was found on that man there in the chair?
The other stood up, and produced a heavy black silk scarf.
It was STIMULATING him!
"That you find yourself alive, Mr. Dale," he said grimly, "is no confession of weakness upon the part of those with whom you have had to deal here.
The analogy was not perfect, it was true, he had not had the months, weeks, days and hours of suspense; but it was perfect enough to bring home to him with appalling force the realisation of his position.
But it could not last.
Jimmie Dale glanced from the tall, straight, immaculately clothed figure of the speaker, from the threatening smile on the set lips that just showed under the edge of the mask, to the dead man in the chair.
He could fight until he was overpowered, that was all he could do, and the five could accomplish that.
And yet it must have been so!
"I am glad enough to get out on any conditions," he answered caustically.
To bear witness to that there is one who is not alive, as you have seen.
Three years!
It was the end, and--no!
And if there was a package of any sort in the taxicab, as you state, I never saw it."
"Do you think I left all my wits down in Suffolk?
Now what do you think of me as a flatterer?
Blessed crown! and thrice-blessed blindness--else there were fewer coronations.
Will Sommers, the fool, one day spread through court an announcement that there would be a public exhibition in the main hall of the palace that evening, when the Princess Mary would perform the somewhat alarming, but, in fact, harmless, operation of wheedling the king out of his ears.
It was on the second morning after Mary's arrival at Greenwich.
With this, her eyes, bright as overgrown dew-drops, twinkled with a mischievous little smile, as if to say: "Ah, another large handsome fellow to make a fool of himself."
"Will your ladyship say to her highness that her majesty, the queen, awaits her coming at the marble landing?"
"He ought to hold papers on the pillory," said another.
Brandon acquiesced in the wish she had made, and, after the interchange of a few words, Jane said her mistress was waiting at the other side of the grounds, and that she must go.
Brandon and I were walking in the palace park when we met Jane, and I took the opportunity to make these, my two best-loved friends, acquainted.
I have started out to tell you the history of two other persons--if I can ever come to it--but find a continual tendency on the part of my own story to intrude, for every man is a very important personage to himself.
She was too young for deliberate snare-setting--though it often begins very early in life--and made no effort to attract men.
"Your highness, you can well afford to offend when you have so sweet and gracious a talent for making amends.
"May I ask your ladyship further to say for me that if I have been guilty of any discourtesy I greatly regret it.
Quick as a flash came the answer: "I can not say of what consequence the Princess Mary is about the court; it is not my place to determine such matters.
Such was the royal maid to whose tender mercies, I now tell you frankly, my friend Brandon was soon to be turned over.
No sooner said than done.
"Why should I not be sad?
"Have I not cause to be sad?
"Or hast thou heard unpleasant words from thy father the Tsar?"
Ivan returned home, and he was not happy, and his impetuous head hung down lower than his shoulders.
After that they lived together for a long, long time, and were very, very happy.
"Hail, good youth!" said he, "what dost thou seek, and whither art thou going?"
Ivan took her by the hand and led her behind the oaken table, behind the embroidered tablecloth.
The carpet was adorned with gold and silver and with divers bright embroiderings.
My father and sovereign lord commands thee to weave him a silk carpet in a single night!"
"Fie, thou old hag! thou call'st me a good youth, but thou shouldst first feed and give me drink, and prepare me a bath, then only shouldst thou ask me questions."
The second brother discharged his arrow and it flew into the court of a merchant and remained sticking in a beautiful balcony, and on this balcony was standing a lovely young maiden soul, the merchant's daughter.
How can I show thee to people?"
Ivan returned home, and he was sad, and his impetuous head hung lower than his shoulders.
And the Tsar called them to him and said: "Let your wives, to-morrow morning, bake me soft white bread."
Then he attacked Koshchei, who struggled hard, but wriggle about as he might he had to die at last.
Or hast thou heard words unkind from thy father the Tsar?"
The guests began to eat and drink and make merry.
Then she made him lie down to sleep, and turning into the lovely maiden went forth upon her beautiful balcony, and cried with a piercing voice: "Nurseys--nurseys! assemble, set to work and weave me a silk carpet such as I was wont to sit upon at my dear father's!"
Again Ivan returned home and he was not happy, and his impetuous head hung lower than his shoulders.
The guests were all terribly frightened and rushed from their places, and knew not what to do; but Ivan said: "Fear not, 'tis only my little Froggy coming in her little basket!"
R. NESBIT BAIN
The moment you hear a rumbling, and a knocking, say: 'Hither comes my dear little Froggy in her little basket!'"
Ivan thanked the old man, and followed after the ball.
The frog had got the bread ready long ago, and it was so splendid that the like of it is neither to be imagined nor guessed at, but is only to be told of in tales.
Here is a little ball for thee, follow it whithersoever it rolls."
"Have I not cause to grieve?
He took the egg, broke it, drew out the needle and broke off its little point.
The Baba-Yaga then showed him in what place that oak grew: Ivan went thither, but did not know what to do to get at the coffer.
Ivan wept bitterly, turned to all four points of the compass and prayed to God, and went straight before his eyes.
They waved their left hands and all the guests were squirted with water; they waved their right hands and the bones flew right into the Tsar's eyes.
In the morning Ivan awoke.
The Tsar praised Ivan greatly because of his bread, and gave this command to his three sons: "Let your wives weave me a carpet in a single night."
Or hast thou heard cruel, unfriendly words from thy father the Tsar?"
Ivan, seeing the irreparable loss of the egg, burst into tears, when suddenly the pike came swimming ashore, holding the egg between its teeth.
Thou didst not make, nor shouldst thou therefore have done away with it.
If thou hadst but waited for a little, I should have been thine for ever more, but now farewell!
My father and sovereign lord has commanded me to appear before him with thee to-morrow!
The morning is wiser than the evening!"
And where didst thou pick up such a beauty?
The Tsar and his guests were astonished.
The wives of the elder brothers watched these devices, and took care to do the same.
And now the elder brides began dancing.
The loaves were adorned with various cunning devices, royal cities were modelled on the sides thereof, with moats and ditches.
Afterward, when Tsarevna began dancing with Ivan, she waved her left hand and a lake appeared; she waved her right hand and white swans were swimming in the water.
His death depends upon the point of a needle.
I also will befriend thee!"
And behold! the elder brothers appeared, to be inspected with their richly attired and splendidly adorned consorts.
The morning is wiser than the evening."
He went along the open plain, and there met him a bear.
Go alone to the Tsar and pay thy visit, and I will come after thee.
"Take her!" replied his father, "'tis thy fate to have her!"
The ball rolled a short way, and it rolled a long way, and at last it came to a miserable hut; the hut was standing on hen's legs and turning round and round.
"The judgment of God is on me," answered the conscience-stricken priest.
"Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!" said Hester, with the tears gushing into her eyes.
"I freely forgive you now.
The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview.
It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own.
The forest was obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was passing through it.
But where was his mind?
She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to another trial.
By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale were heard commencing his discourse.
Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach.
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!" cried Pearl, with a naughty smile.
If the minister's voice had not kept her there, there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy.
Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected.
Thou wearest it openly, so there need be no question about that.
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had said.
Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards.
They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide.
His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for--leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service.
"I could not be sure that it was he--so strange he looked," continued the child.
Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the warrior's haughty stride look vulgar, if not absurd.
"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook?"
First came the music.
But this minister.
Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words.
Even political power--as in the case of Increase Mather--was within the grasp of a successful priest.
The high estimation then placed upon the military character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member of the company.
She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own.
Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the weird old gentlewoman took her departure.
"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.
I know thee, Hester, for I behold the token.
But she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the military company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession.
It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon and vibrated with her mother's disquietude.
Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself.
How deeply had they known each other then!
And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness.
That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world.
The woman of the scarlet letter in the marketplace!
There was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force.
"No matter, darling!" responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a profound reverence.
Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart!"
The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring.
As the sacred edifice was too much thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of the pillory.
These, after exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness.
But truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same man.
During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold.
It was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most appropriate power.
XXII.
The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal.
This body of soldiery--which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable fame--was composed of no mercenary materials.
Wilt thou ride with me some fine night to see thy father?
Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider what was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a contiguous street.
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"
There was no feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart.
An irresistible feeling kept Hester near the spot.
Many a church member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us!
"It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale."
And was this the man?
While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight.
One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them.
He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it were, in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him!
It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession.
Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame.
And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer's eye.
These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense.
It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the minister's very peculiar voice.
Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many more.
Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body.
When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester's face--
Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long heaves and swells of sound.
She hardly knew him now!
The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both.
The sainted minister in the church!
The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical development of the new colonial magistrates.
Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble frame and carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like itself.
The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men.
But even when the minister's voice grew high and commanding--when it gushed irrepressibly upward--when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open air--still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain.
She made the sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves.
It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he kept his pace in the procession.
What was it?
He'd smash me."
The music thing turned silently away and trotted down a side path, toward a distant Munchkin village.
"If you don't shut off that music I'll smash your record," threatened Ojo.
"It's strange," replied Ojo.
Finding a toilet stand at the head of his bed he washed his face and hands and brushed his hair.
Then, rising, he took his hat and wakened the Glass Cat.
"No," said Ojo; "I think we shall keep straight ahead, for this path is the widest and best.
"This music thing interests me.
He cast another glance about the room and, speaking to the air, he said: "Whoever lives here has been kind to me, and I'm much obliged."
"What's the matter?
"I thought you were never coming out.
"Victor Columbia Edison," it answered.
"If I hadn't been thrown out I wouldn't have seen the stars, nor the big gray wolf."
"Kizzle-kazzle-kore; The wolf is at the door, There's nothing to eat but a bone without meat, And a bill from the grocery store."
"After you left, old Dr. Pipt and I had a dreadful quarrel and he threatened to smash me to pieces if I didn't keep quiet.
"It'll drive you crazy," warned the cat.
"This is very unkind treatment, I must say," whined the phonograph, in an injured tone.
Scraps danced up and down the path.
It called out, reproachfully:
Loosen up and reel out the music, Vic."
In the middle of the path sat the Patchwork Girl, playing with pebbles she had picked up.
"No, Vic," said Scraps, halting.
Now that I've found such pleasant company, I can talk and play tunes all I want to."
"You were crazy to act so badly and get thrown outdoors," remarked Bungle, as they renewed their journey.
However, the moment the crank struck the ground it bounded back to the machine again and began winding it up.
"Just the same, you'll have to go away," said Ojo.
It has been daylight a long time."
"We will passical the classical and preserve what joy we have left.
"Don't ask me," replied Scraps.
Ojo was greatly annoyed by this unwelcome addition to their party.
"The opposite of classical."
It growls and grumbles and clicks and scratches so it spoils the music, and your machinery rumbles so that the racket drowns every tune you attempt."
"I'm crazy now, according to your statement.
So I slipped out of the house while the Magician was stirring his four kettles and I've been running after you all night.
But the phonograph was right behind them and could run and play at the same time.
"How very impolite!" exclaimed the phonograph.
"That isn't my fault; it's the fault of my records.
"Come on, Bungle," said he; "we must go."
"What's rag-time?"
"Not in the least," said Scraps.
"Hold on!" shouted the phonograph.
They put big pieces of this meat into platters of wood and set it before the men.
But boys grew fast in those days for they were out of doors all the time, running, swimming, leaping on skees, and hunting in the forest.
The guests walked in laughing and talking with their big voices so that the rafters rang.
Harald is King
And some cried:
The guests stayed the next day and at night there was another feast. When the mead horns were going around, King Harald stood up and spoke:
But some men lay down on the benches and drew their cloaks over themselves.
And they all drank it.
Three or four persons ate from one platter and drank from the same big bowl of milk. They had no forks, so they ate from their fingers and threw the bones under the table among the pine branches.
Here hung the shields of the guests; for every man, when he was given his place, turned and hung his shield behind him and set his tall spear by it.
That was the place of honor.
The feast went merrily until long after midnight.
So in three months men came riding up at every hour.
And Harald's uncle called out:
At nine o'clock in the night the feast began.
"Carry out the tables."
From her shoulders hung a long train of scarlet wool embroidered in gold. White linen covered her head.
Sometimes they took knives from their belts to cut the meat.
These he sent about the hall and gave something to every man.
Still Harald sat on the step before the high seat.
In the middle of each side rose the high seat, a great carved chair on a platform.
"A health to King Harald!"
Down each side of the hall stretched long, backless benches, with room for three hundred men.
Above the hall the rafters were carved and gaily painted, so that dragons seemed to be crawling across, or eagles seemed to be swooping down.
So on each wall there was a long row of gay shields, red and green and yellow, and all shining with gold or bronze trimmings.
Brew twenty tubs of fresh ale and mead.
When the men were all in, the queen, Harald's mother, and the women who lived with her, walked in through the east door and sat upon this bench.
As she walked, her train made a pleasant rustle among the pine branches.
Harald sat on the steps before it.
"That was a brave vow."
So they did and brought in two great tubs of mead and set one at each end of the hall.
"This young king has an open hand," they said, "and deep treasure-chests."
"King Harald!"
The clean smell of this wood-smoke and of the pine branches on the floor was pleasant to the guests.
Then the queen stood up and called some of her women. They went to the mead tubs.
"Put up black and gray ones.
Across the east end of the hall was a bench.
The queen wore a trailing dress of blue velvet with long flowing sleeves.
The guests wondered at the richness of his gifts.
Perhaps another said:
All that makes big, manly boys.
Most knights would have thought of nothing but getting his armor; but so I got his bandanna, he could keep his hardware, for all of me.
I supposed it would be particularly convenient there.
We had to wait until somebody should come along.
I stood with my hand on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn it on and flood the midnight world with light at any moment.
I had systematized those, and put the service on an effective and righteous basis.
As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had been when I arrived in it, to all intents and purposes.
At one time and another we had sent out topographical expeditions to survey and map the kingdom, but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble. So we had given the thing up, for the present; it would be poor wisdom to antagonize the Church.
Ground wires were good enough, in both instances, for my wires were protected by an insulation of my own invention which was perfect. My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, and establishing connection with any considerable towns whose lights betrayed their presence, and leaving experts in charge.
My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of a kingdom at his command.
He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn't anything he couldn't turn his hand to.
I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom, and they were doing very well.
We had a gang of men on the road, working mainly by night.
He took to it like a duck; there was an editor concealed in him, sure. Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked sixth century and wrote nineteenth.
I meant to work this racket more and more, as time wore on, if nothing occurred to frighten me. One of my deepest secrets was my West Point--my military academy. I kept that most jealously out of sight; and I did the same with my naval academy which I had established at a remote seaport.
I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished. In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way--nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization.
The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government.
But I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings.
So you see I was expecting this interruption; it did not take me by surprise.
Four years rolled by--and then!
I had made changes, but they were necessarily slight, and they were not noticeable.
Well, you would never imagine it in the world.
These wires were for private service only, as yet, and must be kept private until a riper day should come.
It was a hint that I ought to be starting out to seek adventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me worthy of the honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still out grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief expeditions, and might be found any year, now.
It was fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a gigantic and unassailable fact--and to be heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck.
These nurseries of mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their obscure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their precincts without a special permit--for I was afraid of the Church.
The king had reminded me several times, of late, that the postponement I had asked for, four years before, had about run out now.
I was turning on my light one-candle-power at a time, and meant to continue to do so.
We had another large departure on hand, too.
Nobody could tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for nobody ever went intentionally to any place, but only struck it by accident in his wanderings, and then generally left it without thinking to inquire what its name was.
Both were prospering to my satisfaction.
Thus far, I had not even meddled with taxation, outside of the taxes which provided the royal revenues.
Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir Sagramor's challenge struck me.
Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands.
But as a perishable perfect man must die, and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible.
In these were gathered together the brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts--experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling.
As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled, and yet the burden was so much more equably distributed than before, that all the kingdom felt a sense of relief, and the praises of my administration were hearty and general.
Earlier it could have annoyed me, but now everything was in good hands and swimming right along.
Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did not mind it, it could not have happened at a better time.
His journalistic style was climbing, steadily; it was already up to the back settlement Alabama mark, and couldn't be told from the editorial output of that region either by matter or flavor.
No, I had been going cautiously all the while.
I will call him villein."
The drill went on, I prompting and correcting:
"Ah, your grace, that is not well done."
"Now, make believe you are in debt, and eaten up by relentless creditors; you are out of work--which is horse-shoeing, let us say--and can get none; and your wife is sick, your children are crying because they are hungry--"
"Pretty fair--pretty fair.
This is a good place for it: roots and stony ground to break up your stately gait, a region not liable to interruption, only one field and one hut in sight, and they so far away that nobody could see us from there.
It is the spirit that stoopeth the shoulders, I ween, and not the weight; for armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it.... Nay, but me no buts, offer me no objections.
Your soldierly stride, your lordly port--these will not do.
"In what lacketh it?"
There--it is better--it is the best yet; but not perfect.
But lord, it was only just words, words--they meant nothing in the world to him, I might just as well have whistled. Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe.
Ah--that is better, that is very good.
"It is even true.
Pray try to walk like this."
Yes, I've struck it.
It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that do these things.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Please walk thirty yards, so that I can get a perspective on the thing....
Proceed, please--accost the head of the house."
Look at me, please--this is what I mean....
"What, then, must one do, to prevail?"
You see, the genuine spiritlessness is wanting; that's what's the trouble.
How wonderful is truth, come it in whatsoever unexpected form it may!
The king unconsciously straightened up like a monument, and said, with frozen austerity:
You stand too straight, your looks are too high, too confident.
Eyes too high; pray don't look at the horizon, look at the ground, ten steps in front of you.
There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about "the working classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.
DRILLING THE KING
The king took careful note, and then tried an imitation.
"Not quite, not wholly right.
He was complete now with that knapsack on, and looked as little like a king as any man I had ever seen.
"Give me, then, the bag.
You must learn the trick; you must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression, insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go to pieces at the first hut we stop at.
"Let me think...
I can't seem to quite get at it.
"Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right, there is no discrepancy; but as between your clothes and your bearing, you are all wrong, there is a most noticeable discrepancy.
So I called a halt and said:
Now 'tis right."
"And there is even yet a detail that needs correcting.
The shoulders have known no ignobler burden than iron mail, and they will not stoop."
Brother, bring a seat, and thereto what cheer ye have, withal.
Please walk again, my liege.
Chin a little lower, please--there, very good.
Wait, please; you betray too much vigor, too much decision; you want more of a shamble.
He must bring nothing outside; we will go in--in among the dirt, and possibly other repulsive things,--and take the food with the household, and after the fashion of the house, and all on equal terms, except the man be of the serf class; and finally, there will be no ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf or free.
I drilled him as representing in turn all sorts of people out of luck and suffering dire privations and misfortunes.
Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.
"Nay, is that true?"
I will have the thing. Strap it upon my back."
And so on, and so on.
"It is well and truly said!
"Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the hut yonder, and the family are before us.
"Then must I try again.
"Brother!--to dirt like that?"
I will say it.
But it was an obstinate pair of shoulders; they could not seem to learn the trick of stooping with any sort of deceptive naturalness.
In fact, there isn't anything that can right the matter but practice.
"If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we were only pretending to be equals--and playing the deception pretty poorly, too."
Now, then--your head's right, speed's right, shoulders right, eyes right, chin right, gait, carriage, general style right--everything's right!
"Yes; only those above them call them so."
"I am trying to see if I can not change that face slightly and make it resemble yours.
Had he recognized me at the opera or had he not, had he shed tears for some unknown reason, what would it matter so long as I was happy?
When I returned, Smith was leaning on the table and looking at the picture with interest.
He looked at us a moment, then hastily took his leave and, as he approached the door, I saw him strike his forehead with his hand.
What was there to be censured in their sadness and in their friendship?
Even if it were possible that Smith could be in some secret of which I knew nothing, what could be the nature of that mystery?
When I discovered these signs of grief, I said to myself: "What does it mean?" Then I clasped my hands to plead with--whom?
He was absorbed in a profound reverie and was not aware of my presence; I sat down near the fire and it was not until I spoke to Brigitte that he raised his head.
She trembled and seemed surprised.
It pleased me to leave them alone before the fire and to go out on the quay to dream, leaning on the parapet and looking at the water.
He fastened it, then looked about the room at the other goods he had packed and covered with a linen cloth.
Smith came almost every day.
We went to the theater every night in order to avoid embarrassing tete-a-tetes.
I gave him an opportunity to show himself in a favorable light and forced his modesty to reveal his merit.
If I had been what I ought to have been for the last six months that we had lived together, nothing in the world, I was persuaded, could have troubled our love.
He would have refused to carry them, he said, if he knew what they contained.
When I returned to my apartments, I found him on the floor, strapping a trunk. Brigitte was at the piano we had rented by the week during our stay.
But despite all that, despite all his efforts, he was sad, and I could not obliterate strange thoughts that came to my mind.
I felt that this must be the explanation and that it was my duty to assure them that I was capable of protecting the one from all dangers, and of requiting the other for the services he had rendered.
"Here I am recovered and everything is ready."
We were looking at them, all three of us, and when Brigitte found a site that pleased her, she would stop to examine it.
She, however, told me just what I have told the reader; his life had never been other than it was at this time, poor, obscure and honest.
"You love your sister very much, do you not?" I asked.
When I had painted her portrait, she wished to try mine.
CHAPTER III
The whim seemed to please her and she set about rubbing out the two faces.
I do not know what fatal attraction led me to ask about him continually.
Why did we wait, indeed?
Smith was only an ordinary man, but he was good and devoted, his simple and modest qualities resembled the large, pure lines which the eye seized at the first glance; one became acquainted with him in a quarter of an hour, and he inspired confidence if not admiration.
"Sing, my dear, I beg of you.
I saw that they were both pale, serious, silent.
If he spoke of our liaison, it was with respect and as a man who looks upon love as a sacred bond; in fact, he was a kind friend, and he inspired me with full confidence.
I took a pencil and traced some figures on the picture.
Above them were the Alps, and the picture was crowned by three snow-capped summits.
Satisfied with his work, he still remained kneeling in the same spot; Brigitte, her hands on the keys, was looking out at the horizon.
She had known him as a child; she met him again, after long years, just as she was about to leave France; she chanced to be in an unfortunate situation, and fate decreed that he should be the instrument of adding to her sorrow.
Not over a month ago, I would have become violently jealous; but now, of what could I suspect Brigitte? Whatever the secret she was concealing from me, was she not going away with me?
I do not know.
Let me hear your sweet voice."
I had deferred our departure purposely, but now I began to regret it. Brigitte, too, at times urged me to hasten the day.
I did not know why they were thus, and I could not help repeating that there was but one cause, but one secret to learn; but that was not one of those vague, sickly suspicions, such as had formerly tormented me, but an instinct, persistent and fatal.
Whenever I attempted to persuade her to speak frankly, she assured me that the letter was the only cause of her melancholy and begged me to say nothing more about it.
But I insisted that she ought to rest at least fifteen days before undertaking a long journey.
BRIGITTE was better.
"Were you there?" asked Brigitte.
Upon examining our trunks, we found that there were still a few things needed before we could start; Smith was asked to purchase them.
I had spoken to him of the letters he had brought, and he did not appear offended, but saddened.
And yet, a deadly sense of coldness oppressed me and I could not determine what course to pursue.
When we three were together, he noticed a certain coldness and restraint which he endeavored to banish by cheerful good humor.
Then, when he arose to leave us, I accompanied him to the door and stood there; pensively listening to the sound of his footsteps on the stairs.
Smith was listening with pleasure; he was on his knees holding the buckle of the strap in his hands.
She continued her song without a word; she noticed my emotion as well as Smith's; her voice faltered.
She was playing one of those old airs, into which she put so much expression and which were so dear to us.
There, we sometimes pressed each other's hands at some fine bit of acting or beautiful strain of music, or exchanged, perhaps, a friendly glance, but going and returning we were mute, absorbed in our thoughts.
I therefore welcomed him with pleasure, although there was always a sort of awkward embarrassment in our meeting.
While we were laughing at it, the door opened and I was called away by the servant.
Seated near the fire, my eyes wandered from Smith to my mistress.
He was asked to act as intermediary between Brigitte and her relatives after our departure.
She had informed me that she wished to go away as soon as she was well enough to travel.
The valley resembled a lake of verdure and the eye followed its contour with delight.
The pretty hat would become you and can I not, if I am skilful, give that fine mountaineer some resemblance to me?"
What strange creatures we!
Then I tried in vain to guess what was passing in her heart.
Thus, little by little, he expressed what was in his heart, and I watched Brigitte listening to him.
The first thing to be done was to call on all my creditors, report myself, and say, "Have patience and I will pay thee all," and I did so, and was kindly received.
Another meeting was called, and the election took place; a poll was demanded, and my proposition carried.
About this time the Crimean war broke out.
"What luck?" said Mr, Johns when I saw him.
Mr. Johns was much pleased with it, and said, "I will send this home to my dear sister in London,". which decision pleased me very much.
A meeting was called at the Dover Castle, North Adelaide, to enlist those who took an interest in bloodshed.
I well remember on one occasion receiving orders from my colonel to take a file of men and proceed to Private Hornabrook's residence, in Kermode-street, North Adelaide, and bring him on to the parade-ground, to be dismissed from Her Majesty's service as a warning to all volunteers, for getting drunk, which poor Hornabrook was in the habit of doing.
If you want a friend let me know."
"Very little," I replied.
The Governor was there, and the poor widow had a good benefit.
He could only guess if he had seen the image of the House Beautiful, that temple known as Home.
The solemn note of the bell struck in.
If only we will look out from our windows, there are always great pictures waiting for us--pictures in pearl and opal, in liquid argent, in crimson and gold.
Have you never heard vague voices in the trees?
Regret, remorse, despair, abandonment, the hopelessness of humanity--was it the breath of these which arose and burdened heavily the note of the chronicling bell?
Life has no actuality of its own, and in material sense is only a continual change.
These are the things that live for ever.
In the shadows of evening, I seemed to see a pleasant place, well surrounded by trees and flowers, the leaves of which were stirred softly in the breath of a faint summer breeze, strong enough only to carry aloft in its hands the odor of the blooming rose.
And then the Singing Mouse, without wish of mine, caused these scenes to change into others of more quiet sort, which told not of the fields, but of the home.
"Without the shadows, too, what would be our lives?
THE BELL AND THE SHADOWS
"Thoughts and remembrances.
This picture faded slowly.
"These shadows that you see are not upon the wall," said the Singing Mouse.
It was the last night of the year, and the bell upon the church near by had made many strokes the last time it had been heard; many heavy strokes which throbbed sullenly, mournfully on the air.
These were the voices of the shadows, the people who live there.
Thoughts, thoughts and remembrances, what have we that is sweeter than these?
The chimes of joy arose.
The delights of it all came back again, and in this varied phantom chase among the keen joys of the past, I saw as plainly and exultantly as ever in my life, the panorama of the brown woods, and the gray plains, and the purple hills--saw it distinctly, with all the old vibrant joy of youth--line for line, sound for sound, shadow for shadow, joy for joy!
Have you not seen them trooping through the oak forest in the evening, through the pine forest in open day, across the prairies under the moon at night, legions of them, armies of them?
I could see the boy, sitting idle and a-dream, watching the shadows drifting across the clover fields where the big bees came.
They say they are looking upon the Future.
But still the faint music from the Past had not died away, and still the shadows waved and beckoned on the wall, strong and beautiful, and enduring, and not like the fading of a dream.
Have you not heard distant, mysterious noises in the forest, whose cause you could never learn, seek no matter how you might?
It is only the shadows that are real!"
One could only guess if he caught sight of garb or of the outline of a form among the shadows.
The presence of passing Time was at hand.
"Thoughts," said the Singing Mouse softly.
Have you never seen them march across the grass-lands in the daytime, cohort after cohort, hurrying to the call of the unseen trumpets?
"They are very much beyond the windows.
Who else should it be to whisper and sing to you and make you happy when you are there? Without these people, what would be the woods, the prairies, the waters, the sky, the world?
It is only the shadows that are real."
As I pondered upon this, there passed by many pleasant pictures upon the wall, after the way the Singing Mouse had; many pictures of days gone by, which made me think that perhaps what the Singing Mouse had said was true.
He could only guess, too, whether he heard music, faint as the breeze, faint as the incense of the flowers.
But the shadows of thought and of remembrance do not change.
It counted twelve.
The new year had come.
Where were the chimes of joy?
Have you never seen the smile upon the lips of those who have died?
But always there must be the shadows.
"Have you not seen what the shadows do?
And as the Singing Mouse waved its tiny paw I forbore reflection and looked only on the scene which now was spread before me.
I heard him murmur, "Alas! what is the Truth?"
Small as that father's dust may be, that dust still lives.
He is gone, like a fly.
My dust, when I am dead, will in turn make part of this world, one of an unknown sea of stars. Small then, as I am, I am kin to that star.
It is about me.
Does not the music of the organ ever roll, do not the voices always rise?
"Ah! yes, Singing Mouse," I said, "it was very beautiful.
To him the young man had come in anguish of heart.
But the star will still shine on.
Why, then, shall we ask exactness of faith? The true faith is nothing final, not more than are final the carved stones of the church which offers it so strenuously.
What is grief?
As if it knew my thought, the Singing Mouse said to me:
Now, among the eaves which rise opposite to my window there are many sparrows which have also made their homes.
Are not the doors always open?
In the picture I could see all this.
So I asked the sparrows, and the sun, and the gray sky why these friends wept.
Had it not been for the Singing Mouse I should not have thought these things.
But the years passed, and the panorama of beliefs swept by, and no one could tell this man what was the Truth.
"That star," thought I, "shone over the grave of some ancestor of mine; back, back in the unmirrored past, some father of some father of mine.
I could hear the peal of the organ arise like voices of the spirits, going up, up, whispering, appealing, promising, assuring.
At these things I wondered, and over them I thought for a time, but yet I did not understand all that the Singing Mouse had said.
Music is not the Truth.
Why should these weep?
I could hear voices that sang up and up, thrilling, compelling.
Soon, like a fly, I, too, shall be dead, gone, turned into dust.
Come with me."
The voice of the organ remained with me, but it might have been the roll of the waves upon the shore.
Tell me, what is the Truth?"
Yet even as I saw this look appear it changed and vanished.
"Ah," said the Singing Mouse, its voice sounding I knew not whence; "from this place can you see?"
But were not all well?"
The sense of the confinement of the building ceased.
Insensibly I seemed to see the hewn stones of the walls assume their primeval and untouched state beneath the grasses of the hills. I could feel the rafters vanishing and going back into the bodies of the oaks in which they originally grew.
Tell me, what is life, and where does it go?
"The ways of Nature are always the same, but Nature does not ask exactness of form.
But the youth bowed his head in trouble, nor was the cloud cleared upon his heart.
What has happened when one dies?
It was night.
"It may be," said the Singing Mouse slowly, "that the Truth will never be found between the covers of any book, no matter how wise.
But music is not final.
In the Temple, one needs not seek for names.
You seek the great truths in small places, and wonder that you do not find them.
I lay upon a bank of sweet-smelling grasses, and about me were the great oaks.
I was in the Temple.
"I ask you, Singing Mouse," said I, one night as we sat alone, "what is the Truth?
New faiths will rise.
When the Raja's attendants came back and saw that there were two men in the tree, they called out: "Why have you dishonoured our Raja?
We will kill you." Kara and Guja answered "Come and see who will do the killing." So they began to fight and the Raja's men fired their guns at Kara and Guja till they were tired of shooting, and had used up all their powder and shot, but they never hit them.
The wedding party came to a halt at the foot of the tree and some of them lay down to eat and the Raja got out of his palki and lay down to sleep in the shade.
Kara wanted to eat it but Guja would not let him, so Kara carried it away on his shoulder.
Presently they sat down in the shade of a banyan tree by the side of a road and along the road came a Raja's wedding procession; when Kara and Guja saw this they climbed into the tree and took the tiger's paunch up with them.
"What are you cooking?
One day a tiger spied them out as they were roasting tubers and came up to them suddenly and said.
Withdraw, and let me expiate the death of the lady that was thrown into the Tigris.
They came to the bank of the river, and the fisherman, having thrown in his net, when he drew it again, brought up a trunk close shut, and very heavy.
The caliph, moved with compassion, said to the fisherman, "Hast thou the courage to go back and cast thy net once more?
But all their endeavours were to no purpose; what pains soever they took they could not discover the murderer; so that the vizier concluded his life to be lost.
When he came before the prince, he kissed the ground seven times, and spake after this manner: "Commander of the faithful, I have brought here before your majesty this old and this young man, each of whom declares himself to be the sole murderer of the lady." The caliph asked the criminals which of them it was that so cruelly murdered the lady, and threw her into the Tigris?
"Vizier," said he, "I will take a walk round the town, to inform myself what people say, and particularly how they are pleased with my officers of justice.
The third day being arrived, an officer came to the unfortunate minister, with a summons to follow him, which the vizier obeyed. The caliph asked him for the murderer.
He ordered the officers of the police and justice to make strict search for the criminal.
It is I who murdered her, and I deserve to be punished for my offence."
When the trunk was opened, they found in it a large basket made of palm-leaves, shut up, and the covering of it sewed with red thread.
The old man replied, "Sir, I am a fisher, but one of the poorest and most miserable of the trade.
The astonishment of the caliph was great at this dreadful spectacle.
As they entered a small street, they perceived by the light of the moon, a tall man, with a white beard, who carried nets on his head, and a staff in his hand.
They passed through several places, and by several markets.
The caliph made the grand vizier pay him one hundred sequins immediately, and sent him away.
The young man assured him it was he, but the old man maintained the contrary.
When all things were ready, the criminal judge, and many officers belonging to the palace, having brought out the grand vizier with the forty Bermukkees, set each by the stake designed for him.
His surprise was instantly changed into passion, and darting an angry look at the vizier, "Thou wretch," said he, "is this your inspection into the actions of my people?
They sent their servants about, and they were not idle themselves, for they were no less concerned in this matter than the vizier.
It was not handled according to any coherent or uniform plan by the British government, which alone could speak for all the provinces at the same time.
The Pequots on the Connecticut border, sensing their doom, fell upon the tiny settlements with awful fury in 1637 only to meet with equally terrible punishment.
On the other side of the ledger must be recorded many a cruel and bloody conflict as the frontier rolled westward with deadly precision.
The presence of the enemy allays the most virulent of quarrels, temporarily at least.
From the earliest days of Jamestown on through the years, the American people were confronted by dangers from without.
It was the ambition of Louis XIV of France, rather than the labors of Jesuit missionaries and French rangers, that sounded the first note of colonial alarm.
The imperative call to common defense, the habit of sharing common burdens, the fusing force of common service--these things, induced by the necessity of resisting outside interference, act as an amalgam drawing together all elements, except, perhaps, the most discordant.
All about their tiny settlements were Indians, growing more and more hostile as the frontier advanced and as sharp conflicts over land aroused angry passions.
In 1718, the French founded New Orleans, thus taking possession of the gateway to the Mississippi as well as the St. Lawrence.
In exchange for Havana, which the British had seized during the war, Spain ceded to King George the colony of Florida.
In 1675 the whole frontier was ablaze. Nathaniel Bacon vainly attempted to stir the colonial governor to put up an adequate defense and, failing in that plea, himself headed a revolt and a successful expedition against the Indians.
Well could the historian write: "Conquests equaling in rapidity and far surpassing in magnitude those of Cortes and Pizarro had been achieved in the East." Well could the merchants of London declare that under the administration of William Pitt, the imperial genius of this world-wide conflict, commerce had been "united with and made to flourish by war."
On the continent of Europe, England subsidized Prussian arms to hold France at bay.
In 1622 Opecacano, a brother of Powhatan, the friend of the Jamestown settlers, launched a general massacre; and in 1644 he attempted a war of extermination.
A generation later, King Philip, son of Massasoit, the friend of the Pilgrims, called his tribesmen to a war of extermination which brought the strength of all New England to the field and ended in his own destruction.
"Politics," runs an old saying, "stops at the water's edge."
In India, on the banks of the Ganges, as on the banks of the St. Lawrence, British arms were triumphant.
To the north and west were the French, ambitious, energetic, imperial in temper, and prepared to contest on land and water the advance of British dominion in America.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF COLONIAL NATIONALISM
Though they were warned by George Washington, in the name of the governor of Virginia, to keep out of territory "so notoriously known to be property of the crown of Great Britain," the French showed no signs of relinquishing their pretensions.
The remainder of the Louisiana territory was transferred to Spain and French imperial ambitions on the American continent were laid to rest.
As the difficulties arose mainly on the frontiers, where the restless and pushing pioneers were making their way with gun and ax, nearly everything that happened was the result of chance rather than of calculation.
The necessity for common defense, if not equally great, was certainly always pressing.
To the south and west was the power of Spain, humiliated, it is true, by the disaster to the Armada, but still presenting an imposing front to the British empire.
From the point of view of the British empire, the results of the war were momentous.
Pennsylvania, consistently following a policy of conciliation, was likewise spared until her western vanguard came into full conflict with the allied French and Indians.
The problem was presented in different shape in different sections of America.
Georgia, by clever negotiations and treaties of alliance, managed to keep on fair terms with her belligerent Cherokees and Creeks.
But neither diplomacy nor generosity could stay the inevitable conflict as the frontier advanced, especially after the French soldiers enlisted the Indians in their imperial enterprises.
Though it has long been the practice to speak of the early settlements as founded in "a wilderness," this was not actually the case.
It was then that desultory fighting became general warfare.
"I don't know," she began with some hesitation.
"You?
Even now it was not without its effect, for her head came up with a jerk.
"'Are not you,' Bobby," sighed Margaret.
In the kitchen and the garden old Mr. and Mrs. Barrett no longer held full sway.
"Huh?" frowned Bobby.
"Then what ye cryin' 'bout? You ain't bound by no contract.
Don't you see?
Margaret shook her head.
"'Ain't' should be 'are not' always, and I never can remember."
"Bully--gee--ain't--hain't--bang-up!
"What of it!" wept Margaret.
I just can't.
Bobby whistled.
"I want to be nice and gentle like mother wants me to be.
"Yes, I know," he said soberly.
"But that ain't all," wailed Margaret, and she did not notice that at one of her words Bobby chuckled and parted his lips only to close them again with a snap.
His hands were in his pocket, and his eyes were on an ant struggling with a burden almost as large as itself.
"If I've got nice things and more of 'em than Patty has, why shouldn't she have some of mine? 'Tain't fair, somehow.
You'll get over it.
"But when they go away----"
Is that all?" laughed Bobby.
"And I never once thought of it."
Why, you live here!"
Margaret frowned doubtfully.
No wonder Five Oaks awoke to a new existence!
Margaret flushed a little and threw a questioning look into Bobby's face.
"But I ought to divvy up."
And now I don't want to divvy up, I don't want to divvy up, because I don't want them--here!"
"Well, 'are not you,' then," snapped Bobby.
"You see, mother thinks it's best.
Bobby said nothing.
"That's just it," cut in Margaret, tragically.
I try to, but it just comes before I know it.
Just bang-up!"
A look that was almost terror came to her eyes. She leaned forward and clutched the boy's arm.
Margaret covered her face with her hands and rocked herself to and fro. Bobby was silent.
I tried to stop them sayin' 'em, first," went on Margaret, feverishly, "just as I tried to make 'em act ladylike with their feet and their knives and forks; but it didn't do a mite o' good. First they laughed at me, then they got mad.
Her face changed.
"Because of them--Tom, and Patty, and the rest"
Bobby flushed red under the tan.
"Why, Bobby, you don't care 'cause they're goin' away; do you?"
For a time Margaret regarded him with troubled eyes; then she sighed:
I--I hate Mag of the Alley.
I don't want to be Mag of the Alley.
"Why--so--you--do!" she breathed.
Bobby looked dazed, and Margaret plunged headlong into her explanation.
"I don't care," he blustered, glaring at the chipmunk that eyed him from the top rail of the fence.
Then she repeated: "I want them to go!"
"It's them.
"Shucks!" rejoined Bobby, his face clearing.
"Well, I say 'ain't' an' 'bully'; don't I?" he retorted aggressively.
I s'pose 'twill be me next that'll be sent flyin'."
When he had found it he spent another hour poring over its contents.
"Don't trouble yerself," he shrugged airily.
"That's just it--I'm not a-learnin'!"
She says that they hadn't ought to be here now--with me; that it's my form'tive period, and that everything about me ought to be just right so as to form me right.
Bobby stirred uneasily, changing his position.
CHAPTER VII
"Why, Bobby, don't you see?
You're a-learnin' all the time; ain't ye?"
Tom, Peter, Mary, Patty, Arabella, and Clarabella had been at Five Oaks two weeks when one day Bobby McGinnis found Margaret crying all alone in the old summerhouse down in the garden.
Five oaks awoke to a new existence on the first morning after the arrival of its guests from New York--an existence of wild shouts, gleeful laughter, scampering feet and confusion.
"Yes," she nodded hurriedly.
"Don't I?" he growled.
"Why not?"
"Yes, I see," said Bobby, so crossly that Margaret opened her eyes in wonder.
"Yes.
As might be expected, they were not long in taking advantage of this, for within a fortnight, aided by the Prince, and provided with a passport obtained by him, they managed to escape and come to England."
Do you remember," I added, "that it is a year to-night since we first met?"
On dark nights we halted at post-houses, but when the moon shone, we continued our drive, snatching sleep as best we could.
It had a Russian stamp upon it, and bore the postmark of Kiakhta, a small town south of Irkutsk, on the border of Mongolia.
Breaking open the seals, I found a small box, from which I took a thick gold ring, set with a magnificent diamond.
As the nearest dwelling was twenty miles distant, and her overcoat and hat still remained in her room, her disappearance was all the more puzzling.
I hope I'm not late."
"Escape?
The Prince not being governor of the province in which his wife was imprisoned, a difficulty presented itself how he should obtain her release.
She lives in another province to that in which she was imprisoned. No one there knows that she is an escaped convict, and as the Prince was once attached to this Embassy, we are not likely to divulge."
"Dead.
The sitting-room was a bare, uncarpeted place, with a large brick stove in the centre, a picture of the Virgin upon the wall, a wooden table, and three or four rough chairs, while the little dens that served as sleeping apartments contained nothing beyond a chair and a straw mattress.
I stammered out a greeting, invited her to be seated, and began to question her regarding her sudden disappearance.
After an absence of six months, I again returned to London.
I asked for news of her father, but she informed me that he was in Zurich.
What could I say?
"I want you to take me to Siberia."
The hand-shaking proved fatal, for he had not walked far before he fell dead.
"You must be terribly tired," I said, recollecting that it was two days since we drove out of Tomsk, and that, owing to the lack of accommodation at the post-houses, we had been unable to rest.
Prascovie had mysteriously disappeared!
"Very well," I replied.
"Scarcely!
Turning to my friends, I explained, "That's my interpreter, Ivanovitch." Meanwhile, the object of our attention had walked across to the van to see his own trunk placed with mine.
Her head had fallen upon my shoulder; and I--well, although I tried to console myself with a cigar, I confess I was thinking of the folk at home, and had the nostalgia of England upon me.
Her disguise was so complete that, for the moment when she had greeted me, I had been deceived.
You?" I repeated in astonishment.
To my questions she replied--
"Yes--very," she replied, smiling.
We lived upon our tinned meats and biscuits, the post-houses--which are usually about twenty to thirty miles apart--supplying tea and other necessaries.
There was neither, name, address, nor date; nothing to show who was the anonymous husband.
The increased number of persons who were being sent from all parts of Russia to Siberia without trial had become a subject of much comment in England.
The journey had been most cheerless and wearisome.
"Good-evening, sir.
Anxious to solve the mystery, and reluctant to leave without her, I remained there several days.
Since leaving England, time had slipped rapidly away, until, one day, after we had left Tomsk, and were well on our way towards Yeniseisk, I chanced to take out my diary.
He returned to Petersburg as soon as his daughter had left with you, but was arrested and placed in solitary confinement in the Fortress.
"Don't mention it," I said.
Notwithstanding my limited knowledge of Russian, I managed to make the men understand that my servant was missing, and they searched the premises, but without avail.
Even Ivan Kobita, controller of the prison, was ignorant of the secret union, but it so happened that he also became enamoured of his fair captive.
"But I'm tired, and must go to my room, or I shall be fit for nothing to-morrow."
Although the journey was terribly monotonous and uncomfortable, with a biting wind, and the intense white of the snow affecting one's eyes painfully, my fair fellow-traveller uttered no word of complaint.
I shall require you no longer."
"But I feel so cramped and cold."
In the evening, while I was busy writing some letters, the servant announced that a young lady, who refused her name, desired to see me.
"He quickly discovered the ruse, and ascertained that the Prince had connived at their escape.
It was lucky for you, however, that she left you in time, otherwise you would, in all probability, have been working underground at Kara, or some other place equally delightful, by this time."
"But I'm only a woman.
"All I ask is that I may be allowed to accompany you.
I missed her companionship very much, and long before my journey ended, I had grown dull, morose, and melancholy.
I have here sufficient money to defray the cost of my journey;" and she drew from the breast of her dress a large packet of Russian bank-notes.
The mystery was solved in a most unexpected manner.
Next morning, when I had dressed, I knocked several times at Prascovie's door, but received no reply.
While there, he wrote a confession of the murder, and afterwards committed suicide."
She produced the inevitable cigarettes, and we spent the two hours between London and Queenborough in smoking and chatting.
She was in desperation when, two years ago, Kobita arrived in London--"
"Yes.
All day she would sit beside me chatting in English, laughing, smoking cigarettes, and now and then carrying on a conversation in Russian with our black-bearded, fierce-looking driver, afterwards interpreting his observations.
Subsequently I pushed it open and entered, discovering, to my surprise, that the room was empty.
Before his arrival, however, he wrote, urging her to marry him, declaring that if she refused, he would expose the Prince as aiding and abetting dangerous Nihilists.
"Explain yourself," I urged impatiently.
"I congratulate you on your lucky escape, old fellow," he exclaimed, after we had exchanged cordial greetings.
I hear you are going.
"How did you know?" I asked in amazement, for I imagined no one was aware that she had been my companion.
So deadly is it, that one drop is sufficient to produce a fatal result, and the manner in which he administered it was somewhat novel.
"Are you not happy now?" I inquired.
I asked why she was so unusually thoughtful, but she replied that it was only because she was in need of rest.
Hence his burial in a nameless grave."
"Besides, I want to turn over a new leaf completely now.
"You see, I've come to you," said Nikolay in a thick voice, never for one second taking his eyes off his brother's face.
These two men were so akin, so near each other, that the slightest gesture, the tone of voice, told both more than could be said in words.
Never had Levin been so glad when the evening was over and it was time to go to bed.
what's to be done?" he said in despair.
"Oh, she was a horrid woman!
In spite of his exaggerated stoop, and the emaciation that was so striking from his height, his movements were as rapid and abrupt as ever.
Why do you keep fidgeting, why don't you go to sleep?" his brother's voice called to him.
Yes, there were gray hairs about his temples.
She caused me all sorts of worries." But he did not say what the annoyances were.
Levin led him into his study.
Just see, feel my shirt; it's not wet, is it?"
"I work, I want to do something, but I had forgotten it must all end; I had forgotten--death."
Now what's to be done?
He wanted to weep over his dying, dearly loved brother, and he had to listen and keep on talking of how he meant to live.
As the house was damp, and only one bedroom had been kept heated, Levin put his brother to sleep in his own bedroom behind a screen.
And death, which was here in this loved brother, groaning half asleep and from habit calling without distinction on God and the devil, was not so remote as it had hitherto seemed to him.
And what was this inevitable death--he did not know, had never thought about it, and what was more, had not the power, had not the courage to think about it.
Why, what for?"
Sometimes when his breathing was painful, he said, "Oh, my God!" Sometimes when he was choking he muttered angrily, "Ah, the devil!" Levin could not sleep for a long while, hearing him. His thoughts were of the most various, but the end of all his thoughts was the same--death.
Death, the inevitable end of all, for the first time presented itself to him with irresistible force.
But he heard it indistinctly through the sound of his own footsteps, and hoped he was mistaken.
And he felt still more frightened when, kissing him, he felt with his lips the dryness of his brother's skin and saw close to him his big eyes, full of a strange light.
"Well, I'll spend a month or two with you, and then I'm off to Moscow.
I've done silly things, of course, like everyone else, but money's the last consideration; I don't regret it.
Instead of a lively, healthy visitor, some outsider who would, he hoped, cheer him up in his uncertain humor, he had to see his brother, who knew him through and through, who would call forth all the thoughts nearest his heart, would force him to show himself fully.
When he saw that smile, submissive and humble, Levin felt something clutching at his throat.
But neither of them dared to speak of it, and so whatever they said--not uttering the one thought that filled their minds--was all falsehood.
So long as there's health, and my health, thank God, is quite restored."
His brother got into bed, and whether he slept or did not sleep, tossed about like a sick man, coughed, and when he could not get his throat clear, mumbled something.
The news of the death of Parfen Denisitch made a painful impression on him.
He was a skeleton covered with skin.
"But I am alive still.
It was in himself too, he felt that.
Yes, there was strength in them.
"I have had a good sleep, I'm not in a sweat now.
He stood in the hall, jerking his long thin neck, and pulling the scarf off it, and smiled a strange and pitiful smile.
He bared his muscular arms.
Levin felt, withdrew behind the screen, and put out the candle, but for a long while he could not sleep.
Levin loved his brother, but being with him was always a torture.
And that he was not disposed to do.
Never with any outside person, never on any official visit had he been so unnatural and false as he was that evening.
"Of course he was quite old," he said, and changed the subject.
Now I'm going to arrange my life quite differently," he went on.
Do you know, Myakov has promised me a place there, and I'm going into the service.
Now I'm ever so much better," he said, rubbing his beard with his big thin hands.
His back teeth were beginning to decay.
"And now that bent, hollow chest ... and I, not knowing what will become of me, or wherefore..."
"I've been meaning to a long while, but I've been unwell all the time.
"Oh, I don't know, I'm not sleepy."
He could not say that he had cast off Marya Nikolaevna because the tea was weak, and, above all, because she would look after him, as though he were an invalid.
His brother listened, but evidently he was not interested by it.
A look of fear crossed his face, but he regained his serenity immediately.
Running halfway down the staircase, Levin caught a sound he knew, a familiar cough in the hall.
He told his brother of his plans and his doings.
And suddenly he recalled how they used to go to bed together as children, and how they only waited till Fyodor Bogdanitch was out of the room to fling pillows at each other and laugh, laugh irrepressibly, so that even their awe of Fyodor Bogdanitch could not check the effervescing, overbrimming sense of life and happiness.
Damnation!
He sat on his bed in the darkness, crouched up, hugging his knees, and holding his breath from the strain of thought, he pondered.
He was in the most affectionate and good-humored mood, just as Levin often remembered him in childhood.
"Yes, yes!" answered Levin.
And the consciousness of this unnaturalness, and the remorse he felt at it, made him even more unnatural.
But Nikolay, who lay there breathing with what was left of lungs, had had a strong, healthy body too.
Yes, it was awful, but it was so.
Just now, when Levin, under the influence of the thoughts that had come to him, and Agafea Mihalovna's hint, was in a troubled and uncertain humor, the meeting with his brother that he had to face seemed particularly difficult.
Terrible as his brother Nikolay had been before in his emaciation and sickliness, now he looked still more emaciated, still more wasted.
Chapter 31
If not today, tomorrow, if not tomorrow, in thirty years, wasn't it all the same!
The waves showed that uneasiness, like something alive, restive, expecting the whip, of waves before a storm.
Mrs. Flanders had left her sewing on the table.
The sun blazed in their faces and gilded the great blackberries trembling out from the hedge which Archer tried to strip as they passed.
Holding his bucket very carefully, Jacob then jumped deliberately and trotted away very nonchalantly at first, but faster and faster as the waves came creaming up to him and he had to swerve to avoid them, and the gulls rose in front of him and floated out and settled again a little farther on.
A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently, upon the glass.
There were her spectacles, her sewing; and a letter with the Scarborough postmark. She had not drawn the curtains either.
The bareness of Mrs. Pearce's front room was fully displayed at ten o'clock at night when a powerful oil lamp stood on the middle of the table.
Why didn't you stay with us?
The window shook, and Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it.
"Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy?
Then Ulysses said to Telemachus, "Call nurse Euryclea; I have something to say to her."
Then Ulysses searched the whole court carefully over, to see if anyone had managed to hide himself and was still living, but he found them all lying in the dust and weltering in their blood. They were like fishes which fishermen have netted out of the sea, and thrown upon the beach to lie gasping for water till the heat of the sun makes an end of them.
One hit a bearing-post of the cloister; another went against the door; while the pointed shaft of another struck the wall.
I make all my lays myself, and heaven visits me with every kind of inspiration.
You will know very well when morning comes from the streams of Oceanus, and it is time for you to be driving in your goats for the suitors to feast on."
Therefore you shall die."
"First light me a fire," replied Ulysses.
He kicked the table from him and upset the things on it, so that the bread and roasted meats were all soiled as they fell over on to the ground.
When he has fallen we need not be uneasy about the others."
He will stand where he is and shoot us down till he has killed every man among us.
Thus did he speak, and they did even as he had said; they went to the store room, which they entered before Melanthius saw them, for he was busy searching for arms in the innermost part of the room, so the two took their stand on either side of the door and waited.
She brought the fire and sulphur, as he had bidden her, and Ulysses thoroughly purified the cloisters and both the inner and outer courts. Then she went inside to call the women and tell them what had happened; whereon they came from their apartment with torches in their hands, and pressed round Ulysses to embrace him, kissing his head and shoulders and taking hold of his hands.
I saw them, but they would not listen, and now they are paying for their folly.
But Ulysses glared at them and said:
They are standing at the doors unsupported.
As for Melanthius, they took him through the cloister into the inner court.
Ulysses smiled at him and answered, "Fear not; Telemachus has saved your life, that you may know in future, and tell other people, how greatly better good deeds prosper than evil ones.
"All that you have said is true," answered Euryclea, "but let me bring you some clean clothes--a shirt and cloak.
Come outside; my father wishes to speak to you."
We will make everything good among ourselves, and pay you in full for all that we have eaten and drunk. Each one of us shall pay you a fine worth twenty oxen, and we will keep on giving you gold and bronze till your heart is softened.
Then Ulysses and his men let drive into the crowd of suitors.
You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die."
You will be sorry for it afterwards if you kill a bard who can sing both for gods and men as I can.
I never wronged any of the women in your house either in word or deed, and I tried to stop the others.
It made him feel as if he should like to weep, for he remembered every one of them.
Until we have done this no one can complain of your being enraged against us."
You shall pay for it with your head, and when we have killed you, we will take all you have, in doors or out, and bring it into hotch-pot with Ulysses' property; we will not let your sons live in your house, nor your daughters, nor shall your widow continue to live in the city of Ithaca."
On this the women came down in a body, weeping and wailing bitterly. First they carried the dead bodies out, and propped them up against one another in the gatehouse.
On this the goatherd Melanthius went by back passages to the store-room of Ulysses' house.
Ulysses ordered them about and made them do their work quickly, so they had to carry the bodies out.
"Do not wake her yet," answered Ulysses, "but tell the women who have misconducted themselves to come to me."
I make you a present of this advice to repay you for the foot which you gave Ulysses when he was begging about in his own house."
Then Jove's daughter Minerva came up to them, having assumed the voice and form of Mentor. Ulysses was glad when he saw her and said, "Mentor, lend me your help, and forget not your old comrade, nor the many good turns he has done you.
Thus they spoke, for they thought that he had killed Antinous by mistake, and did not perceive that death was hanging over the head of every one of them.
The suitors now aimed a second time, but again Minerva made their weapons for the most part without effect.
Even so were the suitors lying all huddled up one against the other.
Now, therefore, that he has met the death which was his due, spare the lives of your people.
You killed many a man in those days, and it was through your stratagem that Priam's city was taken.
Then he said:
Telemachus heard him, and at once went up to his father.
On this he aimed a deadly arrow at Antinous, who was about to take up a two-handled gold cup to drink his wine and already had it in his hands. He had no thought of death--who amongst all the revellers would think that one man, however brave, would stand alone among so many and kill him?
Let us have at him with a rush, to drive him from the pavement and doorway: we can then get through into the town, and raise such an alarm as shall soon stay his shooting."
They made a horrible groaning as their brains were being battered in, and the ground seethed with their blood.
Go, moreover, and tell Penelope to come here with her attendants, and also all the maidservants that are in the house."
"There are fifty women in the house whom we teach to do things, such as carding wool, and all kinds of household work.
When they had done this they washed their hands and feet and went back into the house, for all was now over; and Ulysses said to the dear old nurse Euryclea, "Bring me sulphur, which cleanses all pollution, and fetch fire also that I may burn it, and purify the cloisters.
One brave man could prevent any number from getting in.
They threw their spears as he bade them, but Minerva made them all of no effect.
It was not that he wanted to marry Penelope; he did not so much care about that; what he wanted was something quite different, and Jove has not vouchsafed it to him; he wanted to kill your son and to be chief man in Ithaca.
"Begin," said he, "to remove the dead, and make the women help you.
He saw the greatness of the danger, and said to Telemachus, "Some one of the women inside is helping the suitors against us, or it may be Melanthius."
"Here I am, my dear sir," said he, "stay your hand therefore, and tell your father, or he will kill me in his rage against the suitors for having wasted his substance and been so foolishly disrespectful to yourself."
As eagle-beaked, crook-taloned vultures from the mountains swoop down on the smaller birds that cower in flocks upon the ground, and kill them, for they cannot either fight or fly, and lookers on enjoy the sport--even so did Ulysses and his men fall upon the suitors and smite them on every side.
Do not keep these rags on your back any longer.
"Mentor," he cried, "do not let Ulysses beguile you into siding with him and fighting the suitors.
As he spoke he drew his keen blade of bronze, sharpened on both sides, and with a loud cry sprang towards Ulysses, but Ulysses instantly shot an arrow into his breast that caught him by the nipple and fixed itself in his liver.
I was their sacrificing priest; if you kill me, I shall die without having done anything to deserve it, and shall have got no thanks for all the good that I did."
You must fight, or fly for your lives; and fly, not a man of you shall."
Ulysses answered, "Telemachus and I will hold these suitors in check, no matter what they do; go back both of you and bind Melanthius' hands and feet behind him.
Besides, you are my age-mate."
"My friends, this man will give us no quarter.
It was all his doing.
It is not right."
This made Minerva still more furious, so she scolded Ulysses very angrily.
We have done much wrong on your lands and in your house.
The pair went into the outer court as fast as they could, and sat down by Jove's great altar, looking fearfully round, and still expecting that they would be killed.
They showed no disrespect to Telemachus, for he has only lately grown and his mother never permitted him to give orders to the female servants; but let me go upstairs and tell your wife all that has happened, for some god has been sending her to sleep."
How comes it that you are so lamentably less valiant now that you are on your own ground, face to face with the suitors in your own house?
These all bit the dust, and as the others drew back into a corner Ulysses and his men rushed forward and regained their spears by drawing them from the bodies of the dead.
Meanwhile Melanthius was again going to the store room to fetch more armour, but the swineherd saw him and said to Ulysses who was beside him, "Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, it is that scoundrel Melanthius, just as we suspected, who is going to the store room.
"Run and fetch them," answered Ulysses, "while my arrows hold out, or when I am alone they may get me away from the door."
Your own son Telemachus will tell you that I did not want to frequent your house and sing to the suitors after their meals, but they were too many and too strong for me, so they made me."
Help would come at once, and we should soon make an end of this man and his shooting."
He chose four shields, eight spears, and four brass helmets with horse-hair plumes.
This is what we will do: when we have killed these people, father and son, we will kill you too.
"Make haste," said he, "you old woman who have been set over all the other women in the house.
"I will tell you the truth, my son," answered Euryclea.
One hit the door post; another went against the door; the pointed shaft of another struck the wall; and as soon as they had avoided all the spears of the suitors Ulysses said to his own men, "My friends, I should say we too had better let drive into the middle of them, or they will crown all the harm they have done us by killing us outright."
Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction.
Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to virtue.
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By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a given activity.
Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man.
They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves.
I believe in Eternity.
I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or centuries.
This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay.
The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences.
Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach.
Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms?
A person of childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of Hellas.
Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people.
We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us.
Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself.
Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue.
Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?
We have the sufficient reason.
I cannot find any antiquity in them.
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,--must go over the whole ground.
We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual.
HISTORY.
In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay.
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.
I hold our actual knowledge very cheap.
The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
History must be this or it is nothing.
She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral.
A man shall be the Temple of Fame.
There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us,--kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe,--the roots of all things are in man.
He shall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and experiences;--his own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest.
Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are changed again.
We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder.
All its properties consist in him.
What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being?
Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.
This throws our actions into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.
Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.
No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact.
But we apply ourselves to the history of its production.
A true aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse.
Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves.
Is it otherwise in the newest romance?
Newton and Laplace need myriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas.
Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man.
Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events.
Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them.
There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause.
He should see that he can live all history in his own person.
The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent.
Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.
Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science.
Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.
Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws.
Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.
We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here.
"The custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," says Heeren in his Researches on the Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed.
All literature writes the character of the wise man.
When the gods come among men, they are not known.
The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.
The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.
What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran?
Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon.
The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory.
The travellers were glad to see the locomotive resume its place at the head of the train.
A great shadow, preceded by a wild light, slowly advanced, appearing still larger through the mist, which gave it a fantastic aspect.
Thirty volunteers!" he added, turning to the soldiers.
"I have been an idiot!" he thought, "and this man will see it.
All the passengers had got out of the train, the wheels of which were stained with blood.
"And when will another train pass here from San Francisco?"
The mystery was soon explained.
He has gone, and won't come back!
He felt a sort of insurmountable longing to abandon the game altogether.
The weather was dismal, and it was very cold. Fix sat motionless on a bench in the station; he might have been thought asleep.
The engineer, when he found himself in the desert, and the locomotive without cars, understood what had happened.
It was then a little past noon.
The conflict in his mind again began; anger and failure stifled him.
Nevertheless, he began to rebuild the fire in the furnace; the pressure again mounted, and the locomotive returned, running backwards to Fort Kearney.
Evening came, and the little band had not returned.
Fix did not have the same thoughts, and could scarcely conceal his agitation.
Fix became discouraged.
But Passepartout was not to be found, and tears coursed down Aouda's cheeks.
What course should he take?
They could now continue the journey so terribly interrupted.
Fix was slightly wounded in the arm.
Aouda was safe; and Phileas Fogg, who had been in the thickest of the fight, had not received a scratch.
Absolute silence rested on the plains.
Calling one of his lieutenants, he was on the point of ordering a reconnaissance, when gunshots were heard.
"You, sir!" cried Fix, coming up; "you go alone in pursuit of the Indians?"
Thirty were chosen, and an old sergeant placed at their head.
"To-morrow evening, madam."
The last Sioux were disappearing in the south, along the banks of Republican River.
"Dead?" asked the captain.
In case anything should happen to me--"
"I will find him, living or dead," said he quietly to Aouda.
A sudden pallor overspread the detective's face.
Aouda, despite the storm, kept coming out of the waiting-room, going to the end of the platform, and peering through the tempest of snow, as if to pierce the mist which narrowed the horizon around her, and to hear, if possible, some welcome sound.
"I will not go," said Aouda.
I shall go."
"It is impossible," responded the conductor.
He could now leave Fort Kearney station, and pursue his journey homeward in peace.
The engineer whistled, the train started, and soon disappeared, mingling its white smoke with the eddies of the densely falling snow.
"To-morrow evening!
"No! you are a brave man.
It was then seven o'clock.
Then she would return, chilled through, to issue out again after the lapse of a few moments, but always in vain.
"Very well," said Mr. Fogg, coldly.
The captain, who was really alarmed, did not know what course to take.
The commanding officer of Fort Kearney was there.
"The lives of three men are in question, sir," said Phileas Fogg.
The whole company started forward at once.
Phileas Fogg and the squad had gone southward; in the south all was still vacancy.
"I will stay," said he.
Was it a signal?
A few moments after, Mr. Fogg pressed the young woman's hand, and, having confided to her his precious carpet-bag, went off with the sergeant and his little squad.
He walked feverishly up and down the platform, but soon resumed his outward composure.
Meanwhile the passengers and some of the wounded, among them Colonel Proctor, whose injuries were serious, had taken their places in the train.
Towards two o'clock in the afternoon, while it was snowing hard, long whistles were heard approaching from the east.
What!
"Thanks, captain," said Mr. Fogg.
"Living," added Mr. Fogg, "if we do not lose a moment."
Colonel Proctor was one of the most seriously hurt; he had fought bravely, and a ball had entered his groin.
He wished to struggle on to the end.
"I cannot interrupt the trip," replied the conductor.
The station platform burned his feet, and he could not stir.
This man, whom he had just followed around the world, was permitted now to separate himself from him!
There were many wounded, but none mortally.
The locomotive, which was slowly approaching with deafening whistles, was that which, having been detached from the train, had continued its route with such terrific rapidity, carrying off the unconscious engineer and stoker.
He did not know what to do.
But if you wish to do me a favour, you will remain with Aouda.
He had sacrificed his fortune, and was now risking his life, all without hesitation, from duty, in silence.
The train had then stopped.
"No, sir, you shall not go alone," cried the captain, touched in spite of himself.
Fix remained stationary in the same place, but did not sleep.
His hesitation did not last long, however.
Where could they be?
Fogg!" cried she, clasping his hands and covering them with tears.
"Could we go on board the ship?" Chris asked, when the Captain and Mr. Finney had moved off to the far end of the wharf.
The time had come when Chris could go out beyond the confines of Mr. Wicker's gardens.
The only drawback was that Amos would not, and must not, know why Chris might be surprised at certain places.
Chris had long ago decided.
I heard he's here to buy the ballast bricks for his master's plantation on the island."
The ship, American-owned, had come from England, and Chris overheard one man say to another: "See there, the thin man.
English bricks are cheaper than those we can make ourselves.
When one part of the cargo had been assembled on the dock, an auction was held forthwith to sell it off at once to the highest bidder.
For some time Chris and Amos stood watching the men carrying out bales or kegs on their shoulders.
Why, bless me cap and buttons!
Each boy had been given meat and bread, some cakes and apples, for their midday meal, and Chris stood looking up and down the street for a moment before starting, savoring the promise of new sights and new adventure.
The men, astounded to be interrupted by a boy, and looking down to see two, each with an apple in his hands, turned around, and after a moment's scrutiny, answered.
Chris gave a shiver as the blade went in and came out and Bowie champed contentedly on his chew.
Then he gave his attention to Ned Cilley, who with a flourish was making the introductions.
That be Mr. Mason's agent.
"Go on."
I will know all."
But, let me ask you, do you know Marguerite?"
"You will know nothing, monsieur; you despise your enemy too much for that."
"Yes."
"Listen; I told you that Colbert found paper on the table."
"In the first place, is it positively true that the king has given it to him?"
"And wrote upon that paper."
D'Artagnan examined the bottle.
D'Artagnan pushed Planchet towards the window.
Monsieur d'Artagnan, the lovely sum!"
"Phew!"
Let us be men!
Creditors appear to me, by anticipation, like those devils who turn the damned upon the gridirons, and as patience is not my dominant virtue, I am always tempted to thrash those devils."
"Yes, willingly."
Debts terrify me.
"Yes; at the Pilon d'Or."
"And a man of heart, too, Athos.
"You have not been wounded, I hope?"
"Yes, yes!"
What order and what liberality!
"Oh! the lovely sum!
Call him."
Athos, on his part, was anxious to reach home and to rest a little.
"What wine is that?" asked he.
D'Artagnan took the hands of Athos in his own.
"Yes."
I was one already, having nothing.
His accounts once settled, and his recommendations made, D'Artagnan thought of nothing but returning to Paris as soon as possible.
But, of what use trying! that comes from birth, and cannot be acquired."
"Under that shed yonder, don't you see a horse?"
"When wealth comes to a man late in life or all at once, that man, in order not to change, must most likely become a miser--that is to say, not spend much more money than he had done before; or else become a prodigal, and contract so many debts as to become poor again."
"Doubtless!
On the contrary, never was my head more clear, or my heart more joyous.
"Bring the horse!" shouted D'Artagnan.
The worthy grocer could say no more; he had just perceived his partner.
Planchet did the same with the second; then D'Artagnan, all in a tremble, let out the precious bowels of the third with a knife.
You are free, you are rich, I shall purchase for you, if you like, a handsome estate in the vicinity of Cheverny or of Bracieux. On the one side you will have the finest woods in the world, which join those of Chambord; on the other, admirable marshes.
"But a propos of this cloak, dear D'Artagnan, will you allow me to offer you a little advice?"
It might have been thought he was going to swallow his tongue, so full became his throat, so red were his eyes!
"Au revoir!
"Look yonder, on the left, that small, long white house is the hotel where I lodge.
"Come!
"Where are you going, my friend?" asked Athos.
"You will not be angry?"
"If you remain in Paris, yes; for I shall stay here."
"Twenty thousand livres, and yet--"
"Good God!" thought the grocer, looking earnestly at the traveler, "he looks sad!"
Let us change."
"So be it," said he.
"Well, but shall we not meet again?"
"You are a flatterer!
"But to what bags, good heavens!"
"And I straight to my partner's."
"Don't you see your lad talking with the postilion?"
Nine o'clock was striking at Saint-Merri.
"What horse?
To the bags, Planchet, to the bags!"
"I should like to have something to drink," said the musketeer, raising his head piteously.
Planchet's helps were shutting up his shop.
"Twenty thousand livres!" murmured he.
"Oh! but what you say looks very much like a sophism, my dear philosophic friend."
Each of them given up to his personal reflections, and constructing his future after his own fashion, was, above all, anxious to abridge the distance by speed.
The principal thing is, monsieur, that your life is safe."
"Yes, dear Athos."
"Well," said he, "I see how it is.
"And if that were the case," said he, slowly, moving his head up and down, "if that were the case, what would you say, my dear friend?"
"Yes, yes, yes!"
That is a quiet amusement for old fellows like us."
It is all over, is it not?
"I shall direct my course straight to my hotel."
"Proceed."
"Well, you know the name of that lad, because he is your own.
"I do not think so.
"No, pardieu!
"Now, we are by ourselves," said he; and he spread upon the floor a large cover, and emptied the first bag into it.
They are what I wish to unite!
Before he answered, D'Artagnan took his time, and that appeared an age to the poor grocer.
"I assure you I'm in earnest....
"No one, no one, I told you so before, or you've not understood anything! Let me alone!"
It's hard to do, you know.
"Tell me, though, was that 'amulet,' as you call it, on your neck, a big thing?"
Do you understand?"
"Upon my word, I don't remember.
I might have torn a bit off my linen."
Not a downright thief, you'll admit!
What, you want to write that down, too?" he cried in dismay.
I didn't steal it from my father, but from her.
You see, it was all to do with the old man, my dead father.
Sing a hymn of triumph if you can....
Mitya got up and went to the window....
Well, what are we to do now?
"In the market-place, in the market-place!
"Where did you put it afterwards?"
Your taking the three thousand is more important than what you did with it.
Who counted the money?
That was not at all what they expected.
I told the whole town so, and the whole town said so. And here, at Mokroe, too, every one reckoned it was three thousand.
"Very well, this matter is bound to be explained, and there's plenty of time for it, but meantime, consider; we have perhaps a dozen witnesses that you yourself spread it abroad, and even shouted almost everywhere about the three thousand you'd spent here; three thousand, not fifteen hundred.
I believe I sewed it up in a cap of my landlady's."
I tore it up, and I took the notes and sewed them up in it.
"I'll stop now.
"It's not the fifteen hundred that's the disgrace, but that I put it apart from the rest of the three thousand," said Mitya firmly.
Who helped you to sew it up a month ago?"
"You can set your mind quite at rest on that score, Dmitri Fyodorovitch," the prosecutor answered at once, with evident alacrity.
It might have been supposed from his Herculean strength that one night of carousing, even accompanied by the most violent emotions, could have had little effect on him.
"I don't know where I got the rag from--somewhere, I suppose."
From the very first, even that evening at my lodging ... but enough, enough.
Gentlemen, do you know, you are torturing me!
You've taken a load off my heart....
Do you understand now?"
Why?
I should be a beast and a scoundrel, and whatever you like; but not a thief, not altogether a thief, or I should not have brought back what was left, but have kept that, too.
And the other fifteen hundred I sewed into a little bag.
"Why, that I stole it, that's what it amounts to!
I thought it made no difference whether I died a thief or a man of honor.
"You'd better show us the remains of it.
Oh, God, you horrify me by not understanding!
The lawyers were silent. A minute later he raised his head and looked at them almost vacantly.
Why, when you were here a month ago you spent three thousand, not fifteen hundred, everybody knows that."
Chapter VII.
"You mean, 'steal it'?
Mitya at first refused the glass that Nikolay Parfenovitch politely offered him, but afterwards he asked for it himself and drank it greedily.
But now I'll ask you one little question for the second time.
According to your own evidence you didn't go home."
She's a noble creature, noblest of the noble.
That must be done in your presence and therefore--"
"Where was it, exactly?"
"Last night?
Can you explain that to us?"
And now, too, when you got hold of the money you had yesterday, you gave many people to understand that you had brought three thousand with you."
"No, she won't, she didn't miss it.
Mitya gazed blankly out of the window.
"Enough, gentlemen, enough!" he decided, in an exhausted voice.
I squandered it, but I didn't steal it.
And by the way, why did you do that--why did you set apart that half, for what purpose, for what object did you do it?
Oh, gentlemen, I tell you again, with a bleeding heart, I have learnt a great deal this night.
"I dropped it there."
"Yes, of course!" cried Mitya, striking himself on the forehead; "forgive me, I'm worrying you, and am not explaining the chief point, or you'd understand in a minute, for it's just the motive of it that's the disgrace!
You see, attend to what I say.
You must be mad, prosecutor!"
"I took it off my neck, gentlemen, off this very neck ... it was here, round my neck, sewn up in a rag, and I'd had it round my neck a long time, it's a month since I put it round my neck ... to my shame and disgrace!"
"It's true, I did.
And last night I stole it finally."
Here I've torn my heart asunder before you, and you seize the opportunity and are fingering the wounds in both halves.... Oh, my God!"
But he felt that he could hardly hold his head up, and from time to time all the objects about him seemed heaving and dancing before his eyes.
Wait a bit....
"Yes.
"That's extremely important, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.
But I'll make it clearer.
That money was my own, my own, that is, stolen by me ... not mine, I mean, but stolen by me, and it was fifteen hundred roubles, and I had it on me all the time, all the time ..."
"It means nothing.
"How do you mean?" faltered Nikolay Parfenovitch, "when at five o'clock on the same day, from your own confession--"
Why, why did I degrade myself by confessing my secret to you?
Believe me, gentlemen, what has tortured me most during this night has not been the thought that I'd killed the old servant, and that I was in danger of Siberia just when my love was being rewarded, and Heaven was open to me again.
"What was it made you decide to do it yesterday?" Nikolay Parfenovitch interrupted.
Now a second, rather more favorable alternative: follow me carefully, or I may get confused again--my head's going round--and so, for the second alternative: I spend here only fifteen hundred out of the three thousand, that is, only half.
It was a wretched morning, the whole sky was overcast, and the rain streamed down in bucketfuls.
I couldn't make up my mind, I didn't dare even to tell Alyosha, my brother, about that fifteen hundred: I felt I was such a scoundrel and such a pickpocket.
He bent his head, and hid his face in his hands.
Yes, that was base.
Not for a moment!
"In the market-place I think it was.
No, it's not right--it's dishonest and cowardly, I'm a beast, with no more self-control than a beast, that's so, isn't it?
The devil knows whereabouts. What do you want to know for?"
The hour is late, and I shall be having the watch coming along to know why I keep a fire so long after the curfew.
It is often said of him that did he take less pains he would thrive more; but he handles each bow that he makes as if he loved it, and finishes and polishes each with his own hand.
The shop was open in front, a projecting penthouse sheltered it from the weather; two or three bows lay upon a wide shelf in front, and several large sheaves of arrows tied together stood by the wall.
He looks right well and sturdy, and seems to have taken no ill from his journey."
Come hither, Madge!" he shouted; and at his voice a woman came down from the upper chamber.
"There are many who do a larger business, and hold their heads higher; but Giles Fletcher is well esteemed as a good workman, whose wares can be depended upon.
The fever abated, but left her prostrate in strength.
Sir Roland refused, for he had news that many were taking up arms, but it was useless.
I don't hit harder than I can help, and if Jonah Harris would leave his head unguarded I could not help hitting it."
There was a scream of surprise and joy from his wife, and then Giles quietly withdrew downstairs again, leaving the women to cry in each other's arms.
She was a fair, gentle-looking girl some two-and-twenty years old, and it was easy enough to see now from her delicate features and soft shapely hands that she had never been accustomed to toil.
High overhead the houses extended, each story advancing beyond that below it until the occupiers of the attics could well-nigh shake hands across.
You have not taken a wife to yourself, Master Geoffrey, or you would know that women oft have fancies which wander widely from hard facts, and she says she would have him brought up as a man-at-arms, so that he may do valiant deeds, and win back some day the title and honour of his family."
During the night the wayfarer's clothes had been dried.
Madge had thrown fresh wood on the fire, which was blazing brightly now. The woman drank the steaming beverage which her host brought with him. The colour came faintly again into her cheeks.
They passed under the gateway, with its ghastly burden, and were soon in the crowded streets of London.
However, I meddle not in politics.
Therefore he doeth not so much trade as those who are less particular with their wares, for he hath to charge a high price to be able to live.
I have talked it over with my wife, and so far she and I are not of one mind.
He was slain on the same night as Mortimer, and his lands, like those of Sir Roland, have been seized by the crown.
The lights came out brightly from many of the casements, with sounds of boisterous songs and laughter.
Afterwards they repented that they had let me go, and searched far and wide for me; but I was hidden in the cottage of a woodcutter.
Roland was killed, and I was cast out with my child.
Over the gateway across the river, upon pikes, were a number of heads and human limbs.
"I hope that you will, as you were good enough to promise, talk with him about apprenticing me to your craft rather than to his.
The craftsman closed the door of communication into the inner room. "My Lady Alice," he exclaimed in a low tone, "you here, and in such a guise?"
"Canst take me and my child in for the night?"
"Hush, Giles!" the lady exclaimed; "it is I, but name no names; it were best that none knew me here."
The lady shuddered as she looked up.
But will it please you to mount the stairs, for Bertha will not forgive me if I keep you talking down here.
So saying, Giles led the way to the apartment above.
It was a bitterly cold night in the month of November, 1330.
Her brother, who but a year ago became lord of Broomecastle at the death of his father, was one of the queen's men, and it was he, I believe, who brought Sir Roland Somers to that side.
But none who have ever bought his bows have regretted the silver which they cost.
It would be a poor world indeed if one could not give a corner of one's fireside to a fellow-creature on such a night as this, especially when that fellow creature is a woman with a child.
The cloak was of rough quality, such as might have been used by a peasant woman; but the rest, though of sombre colour, were of good material and fashion.
"Was not Bertha your nurse? and to whom should you come if not to her?
So saying, he took down his flat cap from its peg on the wall and went out, while his sister at once proceeded to remove the drenched garments and to rub the cold hands of the guest until she recovered consciousness.
The child upstairs is by right heir to both estates, seeing that his uncle died unmarried.
Ever since the Duke of Kent was executed the air has been full of rumours.
They were too busy in hunting down others whom they proclaimed to be enemies of the king, as they had wrongfully said of Roland, who had but done his duty faithfully to Queen Isabella, and was assuredly no enemy of her son, although he might well be opposed to the weak and indolent king, his father.
I will fetch an armful of fresh rushes from the shed and strew them here: I will sleep in the smithy.
It is pitiful to hear her.
She knocked at the door.
"I have brought you twenty score of arrowheads, Master Giles," he said. "They have been longer in hand than is usual with me, but I have been pressed.
"Aye, that will we willingly," Giles said.
The bowyer looked round as his visitor entered the shop, and then, with a sudden exclamation, lowered the bow.
It were better, methinks, that he grew up thinking you his father and mother, for otherwise he may grow discontented with his lot; but this I leave with you, and you must speak or keep silent according as you see his disposition and mind.
It was opened by a pleasant-faced man of some thirty years old.
The tone of voice, and the addressing of himself as good fellow, at once convinced the man that the woman before him was no common wayfarer.
When the gates are open in the morning I will go; for I have a friend within the city who will, methinks, receive me."
As soon as the boy could handle a light tool Geoffrey allowed him to work, and although not able to wield the heavy sledge Walter was able to do much of the finer work.
When Geoffrey Ward returned, the woman was sitting in a settle by the fireside, dressed in a warm woolen garment belonging to his sister.
Poor little chap!
"I thank you, indeed," she said, "for your kindness.
However, when the search relaxed I borrowed the cloak of the good man's wife and set out for London, whither I have traveled on foot, believing that you and Bertha would take me in and shelter me in my great need."
She was tenderly brought up, being, as I told you last week, the only daughter of Sir Harold Broome.
Giles had caused him to be taught to read and write, accomplishments which were common among the citizens, although they were until long afterwards rare among the warlike barons.
CHAPTER I: A WAYFARER
Quick, girl," he said sharply; "she is fainting with cold and fatigue." And as he spoke he caught the woman as she was about to fall, and laid her gently on the ground.
"I had heard but vaguely of your troubles," Giles Fletcher said, "but hoped that the rumours were false.
And how goes it with the lady whom I brought to your door last week?"
When not engaged otherwise Walter would, almost every afternoon, cross London Bridge and would spend hours in the armourer's forge.
In the morning Geoffrey Ward found that his guest desired to find one Giles Fletcher, a maker of bows.
Through an open door three men could be seen in an inner workshop cutting and shaping the wood for bows.
"But sadly, Master Ward, very sadly, as I told you when I came across to thank you again in her name and my own for your kindness to her.
"What is it?" he asked.
G. A. HENTY.
They soon left the more crowded streets, and turning to the right, after ten minutes walking, the smith stopped in front of a bowyer shop near Aldgate.
Further up the road there are plenty of places where you can find such accommodation as you lack."
If the poor lady dies, as methinks is well-nigh certain, Bertha and I will bring up the boy as our own.
Geoffrey Ward laughed.
"Sister," he said; "this is a wayfarer who needs shelter for the night; she is wet and weary.
The night being fine, little knots of Hands were here and there lingering at street corners; but it was supper-time with the greater part of them, and there were but few people in the streets.
In reference to the Bank robbery, there has been a mistake made, concerning my mother.
She was so very earnest and injured, that Mr. Gradgrind, shocked by the possibility which dawned upon him, said in a gentler tone:
Sissy shuddered, and turned paler yet.
Detected as the Bully of humility, who had built his windy reputation upon lies, and in his boastfulness had put the honest truth as far away from him as if he had advanced the mean claim (there is no meaner) to tack himself on to a pedigree, he cut a most ridiculous figure.
‘He might fall ill upon the journey back,’ said Sissy, faintly offering a worn-out scrap of hope; ‘and in such a case, there are many places on the road where he might stop.’
‘Come in, ma’am, or we’ll have you dragged in!’
Day and night again, day and night again.
‘You’re not so hurried now, Rachael, and your hand is cooler.’
But I get hope and strength through you; and you believe that though appearances may rise against him, he will be proved clear?’
When they’re quite satisfied, perhaps they’ll be so good as to disperse; whether they’re satisfied or not, perhaps they’ll be so good as to disperse.
To-morrow is Saturday.
‘Leave her alone, everybody!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, with great energy. ‘Let nobody touch her.
I must get the better of this before bed-time.
‘That is a dreadful thought,’ said Sissy, turning pale.
It’s not my fault, Josiah.
‘I should think it is!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, exulting.
Not very dear, however, when you deserted him in his infancy, and left him to the brutality of a drunken grandmother.’
‘I do believe so,’ returned Sissy, ‘with my whole heart.
Her gentle hand adjusted Rachael’s shawl upon her shining black hair in the usual manner of her wearing it, and they went out.
Come out, ma’am!’ then said Mrs. Sparsit, to some one inside, ‘come out, or we’ll have you dragged out!’
This allusion to her favourite feature overpowered Mrs. Sparsit.
I have never once left trusting Stephen Blackpool!’
He seemed to feel that as long as Bounderby could make no discovery without his knowledge, he was so far safe.
Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in his pockets, walked in impatient mortification up and down at the side of the long dining-table, while the spectators greedily took in every syllable of Mrs. Pegler’s appeal, and at each succeeding syllable became more and more round-eyed.
Therefore those who expect any explanation whatever upon that branch of the subject, will be disappointed—particularly Tom Gradgrind, and he can’t know it too soon.
Several coaches were rattling before them and behind them as they approached Mr. Bounderby’s, and one of the latter drew up with such briskness as they were in the act of passing the house, that they looked round involuntarily.
She belongs to me.
‘Fetch Mr. Bounderby down!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit.
‘And I, my dear,’ said Rachel, with a tremble in her voice, ‘have known him through them all, to be, according to his quiet ways, so faithful to everything honest and good, that if he was never to be heard of more, and I was to live to be a hundred years old, I could say with my last breath, God knows my heart.
Mr. Bounderby looked more astonished than hospitable, at sight of this uninvited party in his dining-room.
‘Let us hope that to-morrow will bring something better, Rachael.
‘We all believe, up at the Lodge, Rachael, that he will be freed from suspicion, sooner or later.’
The spectacle of a matron of classical deportment, seizing an ancient woman by the throat, and hauling her into a dwelling-house, would have been under any circumstances, sufficient temptation to all true English stragglers so blest as to witness it, to force a way into that dwelling-house and see the matter out.
I can’t think who ’tis, I can’t think how or why it may be done, but I mistrust that some one has put Stephen out of the way.
Will you go?’
‘I get better, dear, if I can only walk, and breathe a little fresh. ‘Times when I can’t, I turn weak and confused.’
‘How dare you go and poke your officious nose into my family affairs?’
‘My dear Josiah!’ cried Mrs. Pegler, trembling.
‘Now, Lord forgive you, sir, for your wicked imaginations, and for your scandal against the memory of my poor mother, who died in my arms before Josiah was born.
‘Sir,’ explained that worthy woman, ‘I trust it is my good fortune to produce a person you have much desired to find.
Come in, ma’am!’ then said Mrs. Sparsit, reversing her former word of command.
Stand away, everybody!’ Here old Mrs. Pegler, muffling herself up, and shrinking from observation, whispered a word of entreaty. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, aloud.
The smoke-serpents were indifferent who was lost or found, who turned out bad or good; the melancholy mad elephants, like the Hard Fact men, abated nothing of their set routine, whatever happened.
He never visited his sister, and had only seen her once since she went home: that is to say on the night when he still stuck close to Bounderby, as already related.
All day, Rachael toiled as such people must toil, whatever their anxieties.
‘What did you let her bring you for?
‘Sir!’ exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, faintly.
If he was footsore and couldn’t walk, I sent him, in the letter he got, the money to ride, lest he should have none of his own to spare.’
To my dear boy?’
Her voice so sunk into a low and slow communing with herself, that Sissy, sitting by her side, was obliged to listen with attention.
This is a LibriVox recording.
Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not.
This human mind wrote history, and this must read it.
In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious.
The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism.
It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things.
The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers.
When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints' days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could and must be.
He cannot live without a world.
History no longer shall be a dull book.
We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form.
What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.
The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest.
The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the world.
Tantalus is but a name for you and me.
I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands,--the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact, every word.
He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all.
I will not make more account of them.
It has been said that "common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls with that which they are." And why?
There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life.
Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square,--a builded geometry.
What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule.
We have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did.
Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming.
What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events?
We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.
Luxury and elegance are not known.
Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age.
ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES
She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings.
These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day.
In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts.
And there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of all ages.
Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood?
Genius studies the causal thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters.
The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.
"What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fable agreed upon?"
Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation.
A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us.
The geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life.
I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought.
The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect.
It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical.
But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.
If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain.
I would it were; but men and women are only half human.
The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt.
So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad.
What light does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality?
The attraction of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who retain these characteristics.
There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.
So Roos "entered into the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained to him.
I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of this correspondency.
A sparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances.
What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.
Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology.
Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder.
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.
Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days.
Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius.
Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light?
‘Dear!’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind.
‘Why, what’s the matter now!’ said he.
I have never broken the condition once.
‘I am surprised, madam,’ he observed with severity, ‘that in your old age you have the face to claim Mr. Bounderby for your son, after your unnatural and inhuman treatment of him.’
‘Rachael, young woman; you know who this is?’
There was one dim unformed fear lingering about his sister’s mind, to which she never gave utterance, which surrounded the graceless and ungrateful boy with a dreadful mystery.
‘It’s a coincidence,’ exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, as she was released by the coachman.
‘If it hadn’t been mercifully brought about, that I was to have you to speak to,’ pursued Rachael, ‘times are, when I think my mind would not have kept right.
Every night, Sissy went to Rachael’s lodging, and sat with her in her small neat room.
For shame on you!
‘Do you deny, then, madam, that you left your son to—to be brought up in the gutter?’
May you repent of it, sir, and live to know better!’
Pegler glanced timidly but proudly round the walls—‘such a fine house as this.
‘Why don’t you mind your own business, ma’am?’ roared Bounderby.
‘Yes, dear.’
‘You don’t mistrust her now, Rachael?’
I’m not bound to deliver a lecture on my family affairs, I have not undertaken to do it, and I’m not a going to do it.
Where was the man, and why did he not come back?
The monotony was unbroken.
If no news comes to-morrow, let us walk in the country on Sunday morning, and strengthen you for another week.
Indeed, indeed, it is not my fault! My dear, noble, stately boy!
‘But he is in none of them.
Hereupon, no other than the mysterious old woman descended.
‘I can’t at all times keep out of my mind, mistrustings of some one.
Sparsit, ma’am?’
Although Mr. Bounderby carried it off in these terms, holding the door open for the company to depart, there was a blustering sheepishness upon him, at once extremely crestfallen and superlatively absurd.
‘My darling boy!
Some train had newly arrived in Coketown, which had put a number of vehicles in motion, and scattered a considerable bustle about the town.
The same dark possibility had presented itself in the same shapeless guise, this very day, to Sissy, when Rachael spoke of some one who would be confounded by Stephen’s return, having put him out of the way.
Stimulated by my wish to relieve your mind, sir, and connecting together such imperfect clues to the part of the country in which that person might be supposed to reside, as have been afforded by the young woman, Rachael, fortunately now present to identify, I have had the happiness to succeed, and to bring that person with me—I need not say most unwillingly on her part.
He has been sought for in all, and he’s not there.’
And I never have, except with looking at him once a year, when he has never knowed it.
I feel so certain, Rachael, that the confidence you hold in yours against all discouragement, is not like to be wrong, that I have no more doubt of him than if I had known him through as many years of trial as you have.’
‘I ask you, what do you mean by this, Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’
I mistrust that by his coming back of his own accord, and showing himself innocent before them all, some one would be confounded, who—to prevent that—has stopped him, and put him out of the way.’
As to the whelp; throughout this scene as on all other late occasions, he had stuck close to Bounderby.
‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘how I come to be favoured with the attendance of the present company, but I don’t inquire.
‘Yes; dear in his self-made prosperity, madam, I dare say.
Come into the air!’
No Stephen Blackpool.
Mr. Bounderby now appeared, accompanied by Mr. Gradgrind and the whelp, with whom he had been holding conference up-stairs.
‘It’s Mrs. Pegler,’ said Rachael.
‘Why, what do you mean by this?’ was his highly unexpected demand, in great warmth.
‘Mrs.
Rachael and Sissy, leaving Mrs. Pegler to occupy a bed at her son’s for that night, walked together to the gate of Stone Lodge and there parted. Mr. Gradgrind joined them before they had gone very far, and spoke with much interest of Stephen Blackpool; for whom he thought this signal failure of the suspicions against Mrs. Pegler was likely to work well.
They were by this time in the street where Mr. Bounderby’s house stood. The way to Sissy’s destination led them past the door, and they were going straight towards it.
‘True,’ was Sissy’s reluctant admission.
‘I misdoubt,’ said Rachael, ‘if there is as many as twenty left in all this place, who have any trust in the poor dear lad now.’
‘Josiah in the gutter!’ exclaimed Mrs. Pegler.
DAY and night again, day and night again.
Even that unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.
‘It’s a Providence!
We must live perfectly separate lives, then.
You do not understand at all--but things are so.
Lately we have been very much together, but then we have been active, full of purpose and occupation: here we shall be nothing of the kind, I can see.
I saw her under-lip push, and I turned away in haste, for I did not care whether she cried or not.
Under this castle is a sort of dungeon, not narrow, nor very dark, in which are seven stout dark-grey pillars, and an eighth, half-built into the wall; and one of them which has an iron ring, as well as the ground around it, is all worn away by some prisoner or prisoners once chained there; and in the pillar the word 'Byron' engraved.
They would have been just like Angels....!'
She asked me while eating that morning to stay here, and I said that I would see, though with misgiving: so together we went all about the house, and finding it unexpectedly spacious, I consented to stop.
I could not move from bed for some weeks, but happily did not lose my senses, and she brought me the whole pharmacopoeia from the shops, from which to choose my medicines.
We quickly found a small open portal, and went throughout the place, quite gay at the shelter, everywhere lighting candles which we found in iron sconces in the rather queer apartments: so that, as the castle is far seen from the shores of the lake, it would have appeared to one looking thence a place suddenly possessed and haunted.
Twice I was obliged to abandon engines on account of forest-tree obstructions right across the line, which, do what I might, I could not move, and these were the two bitterest incidents of the pilgrimage; and at least thirty times I changed from engine to engine, when other trains blocked.
Near us behind the curtain of tendrils was a small green cave in the rock, and at its mouth a pool two yards wide, a black and limpid water that leisurely wheeled, discharging a little rivulet from the cave: and in it I saw three owl-eyed fish, a finger long, loiter, and spur themselves, and gaze.
The motor down there I set apart for your private use: if I want another, I will get one; and to-day I will set about looking you up a boat and fishing tackle, and cut a cross on the bow of yours, so that you may know yours, and never use mine.
Down she jumped, calling out:
'Yes,' said I, 'that was all right, so far as it went.'
She came again to tell me good-night, and then went down to the train to sleep; and I put out the lantern, and stooped within the cave, and made my simple couch beside the little rivulet, and slept.
These five old room walls, and oak floor, and two oriels, became specially mine, though it was really common ground to us both, and there I would do many little things.
Once I passed through a city (Adrianople) doubly devastated, once by the hellish arson of my own hand, and once by the earthquake: and I made haste to leave that place behind me.
But to will and to do are not the same thing, and still further Westward was I driven.
I do not know why I did not stop at Verona or Brescia, or some other neighbourhood of the Italian lakes, since I was fond of water: but I had, I think, the thought in my head to return to Vauclaire in France, where I had lived, and there live: for I thought that she might like those old monks.
Do not run any risks in climbing, now, or with the motor, or in the boat ... little Leda ...'
You are nothing to me, really, nor I to you, only we live on the same earth, which is nothing at all--a mere chance.
Once, moreover, for three days, and once for four, we were overtaken by hurricanes of such vast inclemency, that no thought of travelling entered our heads, our only care being to hide our poor cowering bodies as deeply and darkly as possible.
I must have sobbed, I think; for as I spoke close at her ears, with passionately dying eyes of love, I was startled by an irregularity in her breathing; and with cautious hurry I shut the door, and quite back to the cave I stole in haste.
The feed-pump eccentric-shaft of this engine, which was very poor and flaky, suddenly gave out about five in the afternoon, and I had to stop in a hurry, and that sweet invisible mechanism which had crooned and crooned about my ears in the air, and followed me whithersoever I went, stopped too.
'That was good of them,' says she.
At first this threw me into a condition like despair, for what we were to do I did not know: but after persevering on foot for four days along the deep-rusted track, which is of that large-gauge type peculiar to Eastern Europe, I began to see that there were considerable sound stretches, and took heart.
Your own food, clothes, and everything that you want, you will procure for yourself: it is perfectly easy: the shores are crowded with mansions, castles, towns and villages; and I will do the same for myself.
Two mornings later, we came upon an engine in mid-country, with coals in it, and a stream near; I had a goat-skin of almond-oil in the bag, and found the machinery serviceable after an hour's careful inspection, having examined the boiler with a candle through the manhole, and removed the autoclaves of the heaters.
In that long voyage, and in my illness at Venice, she had become too near and dear to me, my tender love, my dear darling soul; and I said in my heart: 'I will be a decent being: I will turn out trumps.'
'Well, I had a plesentiment that something would happen, and I am so glad, for I was tired!'
We followed the lines that first day till we came to a steam train, and I found the engine fairly good, and everything necessary to move it at my hand: but the metals in such a condition of twisted, broken, vaulted, and buried confusion, due to the earthquake, that, having run some hundreds of yards to examine them, I saw that nothing could be done in that way.
'They were mere beastly monsters,' said I: 'it is nothing surprising if monsters were cruel.'
You do not understand, but that is the fact, believe me, for I know it very well, and I would not tell you false. Well, then, you will easily comprehend, that this being so, you must never on any account come near my part of the house, nor will I come near yours.
All this is very necessary: you cannot dream how much: but I know how much.
'Yes,' said I, 'they did, but--'
I remember!" said the Kangaroo, opening her eyes again and looking round.
The dog in its eagerness, and owing to the nature of the ground, misjudged the distance it had to spring.
No! they had not quite: what was the matter?
Set about it at once!" it said sharply.
In that light Dot could see the Blacks hurrying forward. Already one of the dogs had far outrun the others, and with wolfish gait and savage sounds, was pressing towards their place of observation.
Her head seemed giddy, and she could not see, but she clasped her hands together and said, "God help my Kangaroo!" and then she felt the fearful leap and rush through the air.
The little brown bird strutted with an important air to where it had a better view of Dot and her companion, and eyed them both in the same perky manner.
Gradually the breathing of the Kangaroo became less of an effort, her tongue moistened and returned to the mouth, and at last Dot saw with joy the brown eyes open, and she knew that her good friend was not going to die, but would get well again.
But before the terrified little girl could reach the big rock, the dog had made its spring upon her friend.
"But I'm sitting on grass," said Dot, now fully attentive to the bird's remarks.
Afterwards the Kangaroo told her that the little Bittern is a really tender-hearted fellow, but he has an idea that kindness in rather small creatures provokes the contempt of the big ones.
The other dogs were still some distance below, and the cries of their companion caused them to pause in fear and wonder, while the Black men could be seen advancing in the dim light, flourishing their spears and boomerangs.
So noble did Dot's Kangaroo look in that desperate moment, standing erect, waiting for her foe, and conquering her naturally frightened nature by a grand effort of courage, that it seemed impossible that either dogs or men should be so cruel as to take her life.
To the left was a steep slope of small rocks and stones, leading downwards to the hollow of sedgy land that fringed the cliffs of the chasm.
The little girl didn't understand why the Kangaroo wanted her to make a noise, and she had, in her fear and sorrow, quite forgotten their pursuers.
"You will be killed," moaned Dot.
Her panting became more and more distressing, and so did her sad moans; and flecks of foam from her straining lips fell on Dot's face and hands.
When it spoke to Dot, it did so without any attempt at being polite, and Dot thought it the strangest possible creature, because it was really very kind in helping her to save the Kangaroo's life, and yet it seemed to delight in spoiling its kindheartedness by its rudeness.
The dog yelped in pain as the Kangaroo threw it to the ground, where it lay rolling in agony and dying; for the Kangaroo had given it a terrible wound.
No one slept in the camp that night, and early next morning the whole tribe went away, being afraid to remain so near the haunt of the dreaded "Bunyip."
Yes! they had just reached the other side.
It frightened the Blackfellows directly.
"And I suppose you will tell me there is no water here, when all the time you are sitting on a spring."
And the Black gins' eyes grew wider and wider, and they made strange noises and exclamations, as they listened to the story of how the "Bunyip" had led the huntsmen to that dreadful place.
Gentle and timid as she was, and unfitted by nature to fight for her life against fierce odds, it was brave indeed of the poor Kangaroo to face her enemies, prepared to do battle for the lives of little Dot and herself.
Oh, please don't die!" cried Dot, wringing her hands, and burying her face in the fur of the poor gasping creature.
The Blacks were trying to hurry on, so as to cut off the Kangaroo's retreat at a spur of the hill, where, to get away, she would have to leave the rocks and descend towards them.
The only retreat possible was to pass down this declivity, and try to escape by the sedgy land, and this is what the Black huntsmen had expected.
This was better than trying to escape where the trees and shrubs would have prevented her making those astonishing bounds.
She staggered forward a few reeling hops, and then fell to the earth like a dead creature.
How it had torn one of the dogs to pieces, and had leaped over the precipice into Dead Man's Gully, where it had cried like a picaninny, and bellowed like a bull.
What a terrible moment!
Without the little girl in her pouch, she might get away safely; but, with her to carry, they would both probably fall victims to the fierce Blacks and their dogs.
Here the poor hunted creature took her stand, with her back close to the rock.
In front was the same wide chasm, only less wide, and beyond it, on the other side of the great yawning cleft in the earth, was a wild spread of morass country--a gloomy, terrible-looking place.
But now she turned, and could hear the Blacks urging on their dogs as they were making an attempt to skirt round the precipice, and gain the other side of the chasm.
Then the dog could no longer control its savage nature.
She stopped crying and listened, and could hear those awesome voices all around, and the echoes made them still more hobgoblinish.
Every second Dot felt sure they would fall backward and drop deep into the gully below, to be dashed to pieces on the rocks and the tree tops.
"Go on," she said, "we're safe now," so Dot made more crying, and her noises and the others would have frightened anyone who had heard them in that lonely place, with the wind storming in the trees, and the black clouds flying over the moon.
"That was rather a good jump of yours," said the Bittern, patronizingly, as if jumps for life like that of Dot's Kangaroo were made every day, and he was a judge of them!
The panting, trembling Kangaroo saw the approaching dog, also, and leaped down from the crag.
Dot clasped her cold hands together.
The brave Kangaroo, instead of trying to avoid her fierce enemy, opened her little arms, and stood erect and tall to receive the attack.
It was becoming quite clear that the poor Kangaroo was getting rapidly exhausted, owing to her having to bear Dot's weight.
She could see when they reached the grassy fringe of the precipice, where the Kangaroo was able to quicken her pace, and literally seemed to fly to their fate. Then came the last bound before the great spring.
These thoughts filled the dog with a wicked joy.
In an instant Dot did what the bird directed, and thrust her little hands into the soft grass roots and moss, out of which water pressed, as if from a sponge.
"Friend Kangaroo's in a bad way," it said; "why don't you do something, sensible, instead of messing about with its head?"
Dot knew that her Kangaroo was trying to save her at the risk of her own life.
"Ah!
Then what seemed to Dot a very terrifying thing happened; for she soon heard other cries mingle with hers.
"Kangaroo!
It longed to leap at the poor Kangaroo's throat--that pretty furry throat that Dot's arms had so often encircled lovingly, and it was impatient to fix its terrible teeth there, and hold, and hold, in a wild struggle, until the poor Kangaroo should gradually weaken from fear and exhaustion, and be choked to death.
But God did help Dot's Kangaroo; the little reeds and rushes held tightly in the earth, and the poor struggling animal, exerting all her remaining strength, gained the reedy slope safely.
"Well, booby," sneered the bird, "and under the grass is wet moss, which, if you make a hole in it, will fill with water.
She had soon made a little hole, and the most beautiful clear water welled up into it at once.
"What can I do?" whimpered Dot.
Why, I'd do it myself, in a moment, only your claws are better suited for the purpose than mine.
To the right was a deep black chasm, with a white foaming waterfall pouring into the darkness below.
how everything seems to dance up and down!" She shut her eyes, for she felt giddy.
The depths having been stirred up, mounted to the surface.
His first emotion having passed off, the President did not offer many objections.
That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.
No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.
The terrible shadow of the action which he was accomplishing caused the vague flash of the social sword to be visible in his clenched fist; happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime, vice, rebellion, perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint Michael.
Properly speaking, he did not enter.
He had come in a simple way, had made a requisition on the neighboring post for a corporal and four soldiers, had left the soldiers in the courtyard, had had Fantine's room pointed out to him by the portress, who was utterly unsuspicious, accustomed as she was to seeing armed men inquiring for the mayor.
The buckle of his leather stock was under his left ear instead of at the nape of his neck.
Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean; and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeleine.
Any one who was thoroughly acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment, would have shuddered.
Thus he remained for nearly a minute, without his presence being perceived.
The order for his arrest was accordingly despatched.
Immediately after Champmathieu had been set at liberty, the district-attorney shut himself up with the President.
Without putting the thing clearly to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil.
The deformity of triumph overspread that narrow brow.
Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air the most ordinary in the world.
Javert was just getting out of bed when the messenger handed him the order of arrest and the command to produce the prisoner.
He regained his inn just in time to set out again by the mail-wagon, in which he had engaged his place.
Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of his coat.
Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who triumphs.
Javert was in heaven at that moment.
He stood erect in the half-open door, his hat on his head and his left hand thrust into his coat, which was buttoned up to the chin.
The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all that was in his soul to appear in his countenance.
Justice must, after all, take its course.
CHAPTER III--JAVERT SATISFIED
He was cool, calm, grave, his gray hair was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted the stairs with his habitual deliberation.
This is what had taken place.
The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously venerable radiance.
There existed in his victory a remnant of defiance and of combat.
Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice,--error.
"It's incomprehensible."
"Gentlemen," he cried, "I see that I am lost!
Received With Hisses
Oh, I shall shoot myself!
"Well, we ought to make haste.
And only yesterday I made up my mind to tear my amulet off my neck, on my way from Fenya's to Perhotin.
How's that?
"But it's strange that you see such a vital difference."
Mitya's Great Secret.
That's the change out of the fifteen hundred I had yesterday."
"Give orders for the market-place to be swept to-morrow, and perhaps you'll find it," said Mitya, sneering.
He was provoked.
"Yes.
"In your landlady's cap?"
But she?
No, gentlemen, one must die honest...."
I'd have taken the money, too, oh, I should have taken it; I should have taken it, and then, for the rest of my life ... oh, God!
"Oh, how base that would have been!
"Oh, gentlemen, the purpose is the whole point!" cried Mitya.
"Certainly, that's not right, that I can quite understand, and that I don't dispute," answered the prosecutor with reserve.
Listen, I carry the money about me a whole month, I may make up my mind to give it back to-morrow, and I'm a scoundrel no longer, but I cannot make up my mind, you see, though I'm making up my mind every day, and every day spurring myself on to do it, and yet for a whole month I can't bring myself to it, you see.
"And you remember that for certain now?"
"No, not big."
No one and nobody."
"How big, for instance?"
It was an old rag, I tell you, an old rag not worth a farthing."
I took it from her."
I took it without asking, because it was a worthless rag.
"We have, so far, no grounds for interfering with the lady in whom you are so interested.
"Yes, of course."
"Gentlemen, I thank you.
But you said that it's a month since you ... obtained it?..."
I won't say any more.
"If you fold a hundred-rouble note in half, that would be the size."
"When I was going from Fenya's to Perhotin's, on the way I tore it off my neck and took out the money."
"Mad I am not, but I did speak in haste, without thinking ... of that feminine jealousy ... if there could be jealousy in this case, as you assert ... yes, perhaps there is something of the kind," said the prosecutor, smiling.
I think it was in the cap.
That's how it was, gentlemen.
"But all this, if you'll excuse my saying so, is a matter of nerves, in my opinion ... your overwrought nerves, that's what it is.
What's left of it, eight hundred roubles, is in your hands now, Nikolay Parfenovitch.
It would be material evidence in your favor.
"What was your reason for this reticence?
His face had a haggard and exhausted look, in spite of his being intensely excited.
"And let us give up all discussion of these subtleties and distinctions, and, if you will be so kind, get back to the point.
"I put it aside because I was vile, that is, because I was calculating, and to be calculating in such a case is vile ... and that vileness has been going on a whole month."
It's a joke to you.
It was torn in a minute."
Let me tell you everything, so be it.
"Why, you told every one yourself that you'd spent exactly three thousand."
The lawyers, too, looked very tired.
You can't be speaking in earnest?" he said, with indignation, looking the prosecutor straight in the face, and seeming unable to believe his ears.
Yes, I consider that I practically stole it, but, if you prefer, I 'appropriated it.' I consider I stole it.
It's absurd to ask.
"Yes, I see a vital difference!
"Why?" smiled the prosecutor irritably.
For what purpose exactly did you hide it, what did you mean to do with that fifteen hundred?
I believe I didn't tear it off anything.
It was a bit of calico....
Mitya suddenly crimsoned.
What does a man tell lies for sometimes?"
Well, I've kept that other half, that fifteen hundred, like a locket round my neck, but yesterday I undid it, and spent it.
Even admitting that it was an action in the highest degree discreditable, still, discreditable is not 'disgraceful.'...
You led me on to it, prosecutor?
"Absolutely no one.
Next day I go and take that half to her: 'Katya, take this fifteen hundred from me, I'm a low beast, and an untrustworthy scoundrel, for I've wasted half the money, and I shall waste this, too, so keep me from temptation!' Well, what of that alternative?
"Oh, don't take her name in vain!
Mitya was pale.
I knew that you were honest, straight-forward people in spite of everything.
What was your motive for making such a secret of it?
Not from my father, don't be uneasy.
Why do you imagine I'm not serious?" It was the prosecutor's turn to be surprised.
"Oh, as much as you like," the latter replied.
It was by now eight o'clock in the morning.
"Excuse me.
Perhaps it really is incomprehensible.
"That's very difficult to decide, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, what makes a man tell lies," observed the prosecutor impressively.
"But where did you get it?"
How is it you don't understand that?
Every man may be a scoundrel, and perhaps every man is a scoundrel, but not every one can be a thief, it takes an arch-scoundrel to be that.
Mihail Makarovitch, for instance, had heard it, too, so that indeed, it was scarcely a legend, but the gossip of the whole town.
"Katerina Ivanovna!" Nikolay Parfenovitch exclaimed with wonder.
I appropriate three thousand entrusted to my honor, I spend it on a spree, say I spend it all, and next morning I go to her and say, 'Katya, I've done wrong, I've squandered your three thousand,' well, is that right?
I talked rot, and every one began repeating it."
Let me tell you without interrupting.
That's nothing to do with it now!
"Where did you get the material, that is, the rag in which you sewed the money?"
To try and forget that money I had sewn up, perhaps ... yes, that was why ... damn it ... how often will you ask me that question? Well, I told a fib, and that was the end of it, once I'd said it, I didn't care to correct it.
Titian would have been polite to him, and gone on steadily with his trees. Tintoret cannot stand the ignobleness; it is unendurably repulsive and discomfiting to him.
Somebody perhaps wanted the picture in a hurry to fill a dark corner.
Titian would not have worked under them, but Tintoret was kinder and humbler; yet he may lead you wrong if you don't understand him.
How then shall we dare to waste our sight and thoughts on inferior ones, even if we could do so, which we rarely can, without danger of being led astray?
Tintoret good-naturedly did all he could--painted the figures tolerably--had five minutes left only for the trees, when the servant came.
But as it is, he is nothing more than an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature.
Nay, strictly speaking, what people call inferior painters are in general no painters.
"The Black Plague take him--and the trees, too! Shall such a fellow see me paint!" And the trees go all to pieces. This, in you, would be mere ill-breeding and ill-temper.
Thus it stands between Titian and Tintoret.
I do not speak of living men; but among those who labour no more, in this England of ours, since it first had a school, we have had only five real painters;--Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Richard Wilson, and Turner.
I once much overrated him as an expressional draughtsman, not having then studied the figure long enough to be able to detect superficial sentiment.
In Tintoret it was one of the necessary conditions of his intense sensibility; had he been capable, then, of keeping his temper, he could never have done his greatest works.
'I had frequently,' he said to me, 'pleased myself by reflecting, after I had produced what I thought a brilliant effect of light and shadow on my canvas, how greatly that effect would be heightened by the transparency which the painting on glass would be sure to produce.
The reader may, perhaps, think I have forgotten Wilkie.
But mistakes of this kind--honest, enthusiastic mistakes--are never harmful; because they are always made in a true direction,--falls forward on the road, not into the ditch beside it; and they are sure to be corrected by the next comer.
And my readers may depend upon it, that all blame which I express in this sweeping way is trustworthy.
Happily, Mason tells us the result.
REYNOLDS' DISAPPOINTMENT.
There was, perhaps, the making, in Constable, of a second or third-rate painter, if any careful discipline had developed in him the instincts which, though unparalleled for narrowness, were, as far as they went, true.
But you must quite understand Tintoret before you can be sure what his aim was, and why he was then right in doing what would not be right always.
You may imitate him with entire security that you are doing the best thing that can possibly be done for the purpose in hand.
But the blunt and dead mistakes made by too many other writers on art--the mistakes of sheer inattention, and want of sympathy--are mortal.
The entire purpose of a great thinker may be difficult to fathom, and we may be over and over again more or less mistaken in guessing at his meaning; but the real, profound, nay, quite bottomless, and unredeemable mistake, is the fool's thought--that he had no meaning.
APPENDIX III.
But in a background of Gainsborough you would find the trees unjustifiably gone to pieces.
Let the trees go to pieces, by all means; it is quite right they should; he is always right.
It may still happen that the man whose work thus partially erroneous is greater far, than others who have fewer faults. Gainsborough's and Reynolds' wrongs are more charming than almost anybody else's right.
Titian is always absolutely Right.
Artists are divided by an impassable gulf into the men who can paint, and who cannot.
No.
No description that I have ever given of anything is worth four lines of Tennyson; and in serious thought, my half-pages are generally only worth about as much as a single sentence either of his, or of Carlyle's.
In the nature of the superficial work you will find there must have been a cause for it.
I ought, perhaps, to have added in that Manchester address (only one does not like to say things that shock people) some words of warning against painters likely to mislead the student.
I bring the apparent inconsistency forward at the beginning of this Appendix, because the illustration of it will be farther useful in showing the real nature of the self-contradiction which is often alleged against me by careless readers.
For my "language," until within the last six or seven years, was loose, obscure, and more or less feeble; and still, though I have tried hard to mend it, the best I can do is inferior to much contemporary work.
They are, I well trust, as true and necessary; but they are neither so concentrated nor so well put.
I have often had to repent of over- praise of inferior men; and continually to repent of insufficient praise of great men; but of broad condemnation, never.
Not, indeed, that my work is free from mistakes; it admits many, and always must admit many, from its scattered range; but, in the long run, it will be found to enter sternly and searchingly into the nature of what it deals with, and the kind of mistake it admits is never dangerous, consisting, usually, in pressing the truth too far.
Tintoret is always relatively Right--relatively to his own aims and peculiar powers.
An ignoble person!
Take for example the quality of imperfection in drawing form.
"With the copy Jervas made of this picture he was grievously disappointed.
CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE.
There are many pictures of Tintoret in which the trees are drawn with a few curved flourishes of the brush instead of leaves.
It turned out quite the reverse.'"
APPENDIX II.
It is quite easy, for instance, to take an accidental irregularity in a piece of architecture, which less careful examination would never have detected at all, for an intentional irregularity; quite possible to misinterpret an obscure passage in a picture, which a less earnest observer would never have tried to interpret.
And the thing so commonly said about my writings, that they are rather persuasive than just; and that though my "language" may be good, I am an unsafe guide in art criticism, is, like many other popular estimates in such matters, not merely untrue, but precisely the reverse of the truth; it is truth, like reflections in water, distorted much by the shaking receptive surface, and in every particular, upside down.
Nothing can possibly be more curious, to my mind, than the great painter's expectations; or his having at all entertained the idea that the qualities of colour which are peculiar to opaque bodies could be obtained in a transparent medium; but so it is: and with the simplicity and humbleness of an entirely great man he hopes that Mr. Jervas on glass is to excel Sir Joshua on canvas.
RIGHT AND WRONG.
"Let him wait another five minutes." And this is the best foliage we can do in the time.
They're not all as good as Billy the Boy.
'You're worth a dozen dead men yet, Jim,' I said.
I could see he wouldn't live a month.
Ha! ha!
Of course he can be fined--even imprisoned for this--when he is caught in the act.
I hear him a-talkin' to the gals. He knows if anybody does.
I was real glad to see Jonathan's paddock fence and the old house we'd thought so little of lately.
I cut across the range, kept the sun on my right hand, and pushed on for Jonathan's.
But now his poor old face looked that wretched and miserable, as if he'd never smile again as long as he lived.
'Why, I thought you was all on your way to Californy by this time.
The boots were easier to take a long rough ride in than trousers, and I wanted the poncho to keep the Ballard rifle under.
I never forgot it, nor poor Maddie Barnes for thinking of it for me.
I'll take the old moke and put him in the paddock.
Whatever happened to him before he'd have a cry or a fight, and it would be over.
'No swag, 'lastic-side boots, flyaway tie, new rifle, old horse; looks a bit fishy don't it?'
I rode the sorrel hard, but I knew he was pretty tough, and I was able to pay for him if I killed him.
He was the least bit ahead of Jim, when I pulled trigger, and sent a ball into him, just under the collar-bone.
The sooner he was seen to, the better chance he'd have.
I seen you were done when you came up. I'll have the horses ready saddled up.'
While the steaks were frying--and they smelt very good, bad as I felt--I called out Master Billy and had a talk with him.
'Yes; not at him, though.
He can mostly track like a blackfellow, and tell you whether the cattle or horses which he sees the tracks of are belonging to his country or are strangers.
Jim brightened up considerably after this.
'How many men were with him?'
It wasn't long before I was in the saddle and off again.
I felt like another man after a wash, a nip, and a real good meal, with the two girls sitting close by, and chattering away as usual.
He can bring you miles shorter than any one that only follows the road.
So I took aim and waited till they were just crossing the creek into the forest.
What about Jim?'
Plenty of partners, Dick?'
He doesn't; he looks as if he'd been at a ball all night.
Suppose they come this way.'
I won't let Jim be walked off to Berrima without a flutter to save him.
'If all our friends were as true as you, Maddie,' I said, rather down-like, 'I shouldn't be here to-day.'
When I saw that, my mind was made up.
'I can't stop barneying,' I said.
He's at sea.
I believe the young imp knows something, but he won't let on to Bell and I.'
We stopped a short distance behind the brush, which had already helped us well.
He told me how he'd gone back to say good-bye to Jeanie--how the poor girl went into fits, and he couldn't leave her.
'Jim's took,' he said, and he looked curiously over at me.
We must stand up to our fight now, or throw up the sponge.
'Do you know,' says Bella, 'it half serves you right.
Heard anything?'
He'll be all right after a sleep.'
We had plenty of time by crossing a range and running a blind creek down to be near the place where the troopers must pass as they crossed the main creek.
What was a deal more curious, I saw the half-caste, Warrigal, coming up from the flat, leading a horse and carrying a pair of hobbles. Something made me look over to a particular corner where Starlight always slept when he was at the Hollow.
Herein lies the difficulty.
Some one'll come along the road soon.' He mounted the trooper's horse, and we slipped through the trees--it was getting dark now--till we came to our horses.
'My colonial oath, Dick, you're quite the gentleman--free with your money just the same as ever.
There's no two ways about it.'
Never mind, old man, I won't hit you when you're down.
'Have you a decent horse to give me?
They split and took across towards the Mountain Hut, where you all camped with the horses.
I remember him giving me a hidin' when I was a kiddy for saying something I wasn't sure of.
We took it easier then, and stopped to eat a bit of bread and meat the girls had put up for me at Jonathan's.
He's eaten nothing, and we've been travelling best part of twenty-four hours right off the reel.'
I must ride night and day till I get home.
Five shod horses.
I can let you have a stunner.'
'Only two; and they're to pass through Bargo Brush about sundown to-night, or a bit earlier.
But we was both hungry, thirsty, tired, miserable, and pretty well done and beaten, though we hadn't had time to think about it.
'Well, you wasn't very far apart,' I says, chaffing like.
'Hello, Dick, what's up?' says Jonathan.
'More fool he, Dick.
'Here they are--p'leece, and no mistake.
But, I say, you go and have a yarn with Billy the Boy--he's in the kitchen.
When I looked out there was the old man sitting on the log by the fire, smoking.
But I'll stick to you, Dick, and, what's more, I can take you a short cut to the brush, and we can wait in a gully and see the traps come up.
I don't believe Jim ever looked miserable for so long since he was born.
He didn't seem the same man without it.
But in his own line you couldn't lick him.
His horse's hand-gallop growed fainter and fainter in the distance, and then we unbound poor Jim, set his feet at liberty, and managed to dispose of the handcuffs.
'No; but Billy the Boy's just rode up.
My God!
Here's their horses' tracks right enough.
We took Billy the Boy with us until he put us on to a road that led us into the country that we knew.
The sun was pretty high when I woke.
It was money well spent, and, you mark my words, a shilling spent in grog often buys a man twenty times the worth of it in information, let alone a pound.
But within twenty or thirty miles of where he was born and bred he knows every track, every range, every hill, every creek, as well as all the short cuts and by-roads.
The senate likewise, among various other honours, decreed for him a triumphal arch of marble, with trophies, in the Appian Way, and gave the cognomen of Germanicus to him and his posterity.
I wish the poor creature was more cautious and attentive in the choice of some one, whose manners, air, and gait might be proper for his imitation:
Some even say, that he was thrown into a river, in his travelling dress.
And when they gave public spectacles, he would rise up with the rest of the spectators, and salute them both by words and gestures.
But never, with all his endeavours, could he attain to any public post in the government, or afford any hope of arriving at distinction thereafter.
He frequently assisted the magistrates in the trial of causes, as one of their assessors.
Sometimes they would put slippers upon his hands; as he lay snoring, that he might, upon awaking, rub his face with them.
Having thus established himself in power, his first object was to abolish all remembrance of the two preceding days, in which a revolution in the state had been canvassed.
We are both agreed in this, that, once for all, we ought to determine what course to take with him.
For where persons lost their suits by insisting upon more than appeared to be their due, before the judges of private causes, he granted them the indulgence of a second trial.
When he entered the theatre, they used to rise, and put off their cloaks.
For when orders were given them to march, to meet their new emperor, the eagles could not be decorated, nor the standards pulled out of the ground, whether it was by accident, or a divine interposition.
But in hearing and determining causes, he exhibited a strange inconsistency of temper, being at one time circumspect and sagacious, at another inconsiderate and rash, and sometimes frivolous, and like one out of his mind.
And though he cancelled all the acts of Caius, yet he forbad the day of his assassination, notwithstanding it was that of his own accession to the empire, to be reckoned amongst the festivals.
In this account, I suppose, some have ventured to affirm that Augustus was jealous of him, and recalled him; and because he made no haste to comply with the order, took him off by poison.
Accordingly, he passed an act of perpetual oblivion and pardon for every thing said or done during that time; and this he faithfully observed, with the exception only of putting to death a few tribunes and centurions concerned in the conspiracy against Caius, both as an example, and because he understood that they had also planned his own death.
And with regard to such as were convicted of any great delinquency, he even exceeded the punishment appointed by law, and condemned them to be exposed to wild beasts.
Nor did he desist from pursuing them, until an apparition, in the form of a barbarian woman, of more than human size, appeared to him, and, in the Latin tongue, forbad him to proceed any farther.
But with regard to his own aggrandisement, he was sparing and modest, declining the title of emperor, and refusing all excessive honours.
He asked of the consuls likewise the privilege of holding fairs upon his private estate.
Thus, my dear Livia, you have my thoughts upon the matter.
This decree was, however, repealed; Tiberius insisting to have him excused on account of his imbecility, and promising to make good his loss at his own expense.
He overthrew the enemy in several battles, and drove them far back into the depths of the desert.
He likewise often declared that he would, some time or other, if possible, restore the ancient government.
Those who falsely pretended to the freedom of Rome, he beheaded on the Esquiline.
He proposed to the merchants a sure profit, by indemnifying them against any loss that might befall them by storms at sea; and granted great privileges to those who built ships for that traffic.
He procured an act of the senate to prohibit all soldiers from attending senators at their houses, in the way of respect and compliment.
He brought to the city the cool and plentiful springs of the Claudian water, one of which is called Caeruleus, and the other Curtius and Albudinus, as likewise the river of the New Anio, in a stone canal; and distributed them into many magnificent reservoirs.
Immediately before he drew off the waters from the Fucine lake, he exhibited upon it a naval fight.
We, who are about to peril our lives, salute you;" and he replying, "Health attend you too," they all refused to fight, as if by that response he had meant to excuse them.
In appointing new priests for the several colleges, he made no appointments without being sworn.
His military organization of the equestrian order was this.
With regard to religious ceremonies, the administration of affairs both civil and military, and the condition of all orders of the people at home and abroad, some practices he corrected, others which had been laid aside he revived; and some regulations he introduced which were entirely new.
One of the knights who was charged with stabbing himself, laid his bosom bare, to show that there was not the least mark of violence upon his body.
He lost Drusus at Pompeii, when he was very young; he being choked with a pear, which in his play he tossed into the air, and caught in his mouth.
He quartered a cohort of soldiers at Puteoli, and another at Ostia, to be in readiness against any accidents from fire.
No person was found, however, to follow the example, excepting one freedman, and a centurion of the first rank, at the solemnization of whose nuptials both he and Agrippina attended.
The following incidents were remarkable in his censorship.
He paid particular attention to the care of the city, and to have it well supplied with provisions.
At last, leaping from his seat, and running along the shore of the lake with tottering steps, the result of his foul excesses, he, partly by fair words, and partly by threats, persuaded them to engage.
But he divorced them both; Paetina, upon some trifling causes of disgust; and Urgulanilla, for scandalous lewdness, and the suspicion of murder.
He often earnestly commended him to the soldiers, holding him in his arms before their ranks; and would likewise show him to the people in the theatre, setting him upon his lap, or holding him out whilst he was still very young; and was sure to receive their acclamations, and good wishes on his behalf.
He likewise granted the consular ornaments to his Ducenarian procurators.
He confiscated the estates of all freedmen who presumed to take upon themselves the equestrian rank.
When any affair of importance came before the senate, he used to sit between the two consuls upon the seats of the tribunes. He reserved to himself the power of granting license to travel out of Italy, which before had belonged to the senate.
From those who declined the senatorian dignity, he took away the equestrian.
He concluded treaties with foreign princes in the forum, with the sacrifice of a sow, and the form of words used by the heralds in former times.
Claudia, who was, in truth, the daughter of Boter his freedman, though she was born five months before his divorce, he ordered to be thrown naked at her mother's door.
Upon this, he hesitated for a time, whether he should not destroy them all with fire and sword.
Crassus Frugi was mounted upon a horse richly caparisoned, in a robe embroidered with palm leaves, because this was the second time of his obtaining that honour.
He completed some important public works, which, though not numerous, were very useful.
Translated by J. A. Giles
For it is better to drink a wholesome draught of truth from the humble vessel, than poison mixed with honey from a golden goblet.
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Here begins the apology of Nennius, the historiographer of the Britons, of the race of the Britons.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For I yield to those who are greater and more eloquent than myself, who, kindled with generous ardour, have endeavoured by Roman eloquence to smooth the jarring elements of their tongue, if they have left unshaken any pillar of history which I wished to see remain.
I shall obediently accomplish the rest to the utmost of my power.
by Nennius
For zealous efforts very often fail: but bold enthusiasm, were it in its power, would not suffer me to fail.
This is a LibriVox recording.
I pray that every reader who shall read this book, may pardon me, for having attempted, like a chattering jay, or like some weak witness, to write these things, after they had failed.
Everybody said we should have privateers paying us a visit some fine day, who would burn our houses, and send our wives and children adrift.
There were three cheers given for the Queen, and then more or less all present got the worse for liquor, and I went home full of the soldiering business.
I accordingly called there, saw the proprietor, and took the engagement at three pounds per week, and a bottle of wine to treat my friends with on Saturday nights.
I thought a great deal about my new friend, and told my wife all about his offer.
I went to the rehearsal, which was at the Old Theatre, off Currie-street, and everything passed off well.
I said that I would most willingly give my services, but being under an engagement I had to ask leave, which was granted on my agreeing to find a singer to take my place at the Assembly Rooms for that night.
Mr. Sain got in by a majority of one vote, and Lieutenant Franklin, being a friend of mine.
On the first of every month one of my duties was to go with the captain to the Treasury to receive the men's money.
"What is the salary?" I asked.
"I don't intend to stick to shoemaking myself either if I can help it," said I. We then all adjourned to the York Hotel and had a nobbler each.
The next day I employed myself in taking stock, and it proved anything but satisfactory; but it was no use to grumble at finding myself in debt, as it proved, to the tune of two hundred pounds, and with only about one to pay it, such, however, was the case.
In fact, there was to be everything to make the men comfortable.
"What is the salary?" asked I. "Thirty pounds a year to begin with, and refreshments on Sundays, and when the church is finished I will increase the salary." I accepted the offer and things went on smoothly for some time.
We are holding service in the schoolroom until we get our church built.
Thanks!" said I, "but where is it." "At the Black Horse Assembly Rooms, not far from the Black Bull, Hindley-street," said he.
"You had better call and make your own terms," he replied, "you can mention my name if you like.
On my way home shortly afterwards I met a postman named Chapman.
Rollinson did not come up to the swearing business; possibly because he objected to swearing on principle.
Now, at this time I had a companion from London, whom I will call George Rollinson.
However I did not fret much about it as it was a long way to travel to the church every week.
Such conduct didn't speak much for military discipline in those days.
It is situated at Glen Osmond, about four miles from Adelaide."
She consented, provided the boy was allowed to come home once a week and go to church, which was agreed to.
"Well," said I, "I am as honest as most men, and time will prove that." I gave Mr. Johns the nugget, it weighed an ounce, and was a very pretty specimen of pure native gold.
The natural result of such a course was that the men spent the better part of their pay in drink.
"What, are you back again?" said he, "Have you no engagement?" "No!" answered I. "I know of one," said he, "where a man like you is wanted--a fellow that can please everybody."
"I won't lose sight of you, however," said Mr. Sweetwilliam, "I do a little preaching and singing myself on Sundays."
I said I would, on condition that they made me an officer, which Rollinson said was not very likely.
I next joined the choir at St. Peter's College Church, in which Mr. Hawkesgood, a friend of mine, took great interest.
My uniform, however, was far more brilliant than my military career was destined to be.
Private Rollinson was laughing, so I called "Attention!" which brought Rollinson to stand at ease and dress up.
"Attention!" shouted I. "Private Hornabrook, I dismiss you from Her Majesty's service.
"I will tell you," said he.
My next trouble arose through the clergyman of the church where I was singing on Sundays having a dispute with a Mr. Osmond Gillies, who had given him the living, and a lawsuit was the result.
Mr. Johns had taken a shop in Rundle-street, and Mr. Sweetwilliam was engaged as his shopman.
He acted, however, afterwards as he said he would, as substitute for a man who had to go into the country.
I merely mention this as an illustration which came under my notice of one of the evils resulting from the curse of drink.
"I will," said I, and wishing him good morning, with many thanks, I departed.
"After we are sworn in, you make a proposition that William Sain is a fit and proper person to represent the company as captain.
"Thank you, my bunny," said Private Hornabrook.
Meetings were called, and it was decided to form a volunteer force, and every man was called upon to join, and, for myself, I thought the matter over seriously.
It would be good thing for me, and you too." "How is it to be done," said I.
In those old times, however, I went on progressing with shoemaking, singing, and soldiering, and, upon the whole, was making a fair living.
As a frightful example of this may be mentioned the fact that ex-Private Hornabrook mortgaged his cottage and land to Sergeant Phelps, the landlord of the Scotch Thistle, for money to spend in liquor, and was never able to redeem the property.
In order to work myself up in discipline, I employed the drillmaster to give me private instruction, in the art of self-defence and military movements; so I soon became passable; but there was one part of the drill which I could not manage, and that was the goose-step.
France joined England, and all the world seemed up in arms and eager for the fray.
Happily things are much better in this respect now, and doubtless they will go on improving as the Temperance flag waves through our streets.
It underwent the horrible outrage of rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb.
There still, perchance, and this was fearful to think of.
The unutterable which is in the desert was condensed in him.
The child was on the table-land at the extreme south point of Portland.
THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION.
This being--was it a being?
The passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space.
The south side seems to enter under the protruding slab, the north side rises over the next one; these made ascents, which the child stepped over nimbly. From time to time he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself. The night was becoming very dark.
It was an object to inspire indescribable dread.
In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away.
He walked towards this Nothing.
To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in the abyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble--there is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality.
The scabbard was riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out between the rents.
The wind was now diminishing--a sign, however, of a violent recurrence impending.
Naught, and yet total.
At the point of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb there was a line, from which hung something black and shapeless.
Death should be veiled, the grave should have its reserve.
Who can tell? Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcends human justice.
Waif of an unknown fate, he commingled with all the wild secrets of the night.
To be naught but a remainder!
There was a round thing at its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled.
This black witness was a remainder, and an awful remainder--a remainder of what?
In the great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for the child? Nothing.
There was on the eminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree.
He denounced the law of earth to the law of Heaven.
If he ever had a Me, where was the Me?
About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths.
"A strange word something like curry curry," she said.
"I must go by myself if there is no one to go with me, mustn't I? We've got to have water," and she picked up the billy and started for the spring.
"I should hope not," cried the child.
"Who was that?" he asked curiously.
He makes lightning and spoils trees and kills people.
"Not far, just ten steps in the bushes, straight ahead from cave, but not safe for little Missa go."
"Not eat people now."
"Don't you know what snow is?" she laughed.
Jean drank the sweet drink and almost smacked her lips.
"Oh, it's not at all like this," she said.
"Little Missa good," said Kadok as he sat wearily down beside her.
"Take stick, hold very tight here," and he gave her the handle of the forked stick which, to her horror, she saw held down by its neck a large snake.
"Baiame teach little Missa to be good Bush girl," he said.
"I've often seen mother dress Fergus' wounds, for he was always doing things to himself.
It's all farms and sheep and not wild like Australia.
Would they be safe even for a few hours, he wondered?
"What little Missa do?" asked the boy.
Make many fine hunt, sometimes hunt animals, sometimes hunt other Blacks.
She gathered up sticks and bits of bark and laid the fire, which Kadok carefully lighted, taking one from a box of matches which he had in his swag, and which he kept tied up in the skin of an animal to keep them from getting damp.
Think him not come again.
Kadok limped into the cave.
You not good little Missa.
"Black people very much like white people," said Kadok.
It looks like soft, white feathers and it floats down from the sky when it's very cold and covers up the ground like a white blanket.
Kadok glad, for we must stay here one, two days."
No can walk one, two days.
Very good eat, before white man comes," he hastened to add as he saw Jean's expression of terror.
This hard to hold," cried Kadok.
We be all right.
"I'll remember that," said Jean.
"It tastes like the sugar-water the American children's black mammy used to give us."
Having finished, she put fresh green wood on the fire that the smoke might keep off the mosquitos, and wrapped the rest of the meat in leaves to keep for breakfast.
"Oh, I hope he won't bring a storm," said Jean.
"Some black face white heart, some black all way through.
Say Great Baiame make.
"Little Missa not cry," said Kadok.
"Him tree-python," said Kadok, calmly.
He make evil.
He was gone only a moment or two when she felt a strange feeling as of some one looking at her, and she raised her head to see, staring through the bushes, the same savage eyes which had frightened her the day before.
I used to like her very much.
"Well, never mind, I can drink the old water and chew some hibiscus leaves."
"You go once too often.
"Kadok, tell me a story about when you were a little boy.
"Oh, I couldn't eat snake, really, I couldn't," she said, but Kadok laughed.
"He looked frightened too."
He want to smoke big pipe up in sky, strike match to light pipe, throw match down to earth, while smoke--match make lightning."
Go long early in morning before Black come back.
"Never did," said Kadok.
"Think I can go for Missa," said Kadok as he rose and tried his foot. "Not very bad."
"Think white man drop it, little Missa can have honey-water to drink." He cut a piece of the honeycomb and put it in the cup of water.
"Little Missa not go to the spring.
"What matter, little Missa?" asked Kadok as he parted the bushes and looked at her with anxious face.
"Little Missa not cry, be good Missa.
Time to eat again."
"Little Missa hurt?" he asked anxiously.
"Make very good eat for black boy, save yopolo for Missa," he said. "Think dinner time now, Missa eat meat, Kadok eat snake."
"Oh, Kadok, what's that?" exclaimed Jean, as a mournful sound came through the forest.
"No, but I was dreadfully frightened.
The yopolo was indeed done and delicious.
"Think yopolo cooked.
"Very good leaves," said Kadok.
"Don't know," said Kadok.
She had no weapon, but she grasped the dead snake by the tail and with all the strength she could muster threw it straight into the Black's face.
She was ever so black, not brown like you, Kadok, and so good and nice.
"That good," said Kadok.
"Where do you get water, Kadok?" asked Jean.
"Kadok very sorry for little Missa," he said.
"I'm not very hungry," she said, "but I want some fresh water to drink."
"Something coming.
"Blacks not have much home like white people.
Fear lent him wings and he did not stop until far from the scene of his terror.
Not be afraid.
Missa do just right thing."
Just as she was about to speak, Kadok raised his stick quickly and brought it down with great force and Jean saw something black whirl and twist at the opening of the cave.
"I didn't know just what to do, but I had to do something," she said. "What shall we do now, Kadok?"
Tell about home."
That was the reason I was not afraid, when the black man told me to come and see the gin who was sick.
"From the spring," he answered.
"But no can help.
White men call them hibiscus."
"Put leaves over hot stones, set yopolo on, all in his skin, cover him over with earth and he cook very tender," said Kadok, and she followed his receipt.
His chief hope lay in the fact that if the Black had thought her a vision, he would fear to return.
Kadok got bad hurt on foot.
We are both so thirsty," she pleaded.
She drew back into the cave and screamed again.
"Better not make damper to-night.
She was back before Kadok thought she could have found the spring, saying brightly,
"Kadok not like little Missa to run round by herself," said Kadok, but Jean said wilfully,
She is not able for this, for her light is not her own; it is second-hand from the sun himself; and her shadows therefore also are second-hand shadows, pieces cut out of the great sun-shadow, and coloured a little with the moon's yellowness.
Next I thought I saw a scarcely visible form--now like a creature on all-fours, now like a man, far off, but coming rapidly towards me across the nearest field.
It was not that I could so easily run away with four instead, but that somehow I was lifted above the ordinary level of fear by being upon her back.
She had no answer ready, but looked as if she would have struck me.
I looked hurriedly towards the door.
"I want to go to sleep again."
He stared with fright first, and then began to cry.
"It's only me, Miss Adam," I said.
"Looking after you, of course."
"You need not take the trouble.
But ere he got farther the moonlight in the loft was darkened.
This was to throw a sort of defiance to the fear; and certainly as often as I did so it abated.
He was far too sound asleep to be troubled by the rats; for sleep is an armour--yes, a castle--against many enemies.
If John Adam should come out, I don't exactly know what might happen.
My heart gave a great jump up, but I swallowed it down.
"What were you doing out yourself?" I said.
I got hold of one of his hands, and in lifting it to pull him up found a cord tied to his wrist.
"No, thank you, Miss Adam," I said.
And he began to whimper again.
Somewhat nettled with Jamie Duff's indifference to my well-meant exertions on his behalf, I followed her without even bidding him good night.
This was not so easy.
It was in the full light of the moon, which was now up a good way.
"You're comfortable enough, aren't you, Jamie Duff?"
"What's the matter, Jamie Duff?" she said in a gruff voice as she advanced along the stream of moonlight.
I have nothing to hide.
"What are you doing here at this time of the night?"
I climbed the ladder, and after several failures succeeded in finding how the door was fastened.
I retorted the question.
I gave the cord a great tug of anger, pulled out my knife, and cut it; then, hauling Jamie up, got him half-awake at last.
I was indignant: they had actually manacled him like a thief!
The sunlight and its shadows are all so strong and so real and so friendly, you seem to know all about them; they belong to your house, and they sweep all fear and dismay out of honest people's hearts.
"I should think so," she answered.
The shadows were very different too.
"I don't want to go home," said Jamie.
"Oh!" she said in a puzzled tone.
"That's very ungrateful of you, Jamie," I said, full of my own importance, "when I've come so far, and all at night too, to set you free."
For doors were seldom locked in the summer nights in that part of the country.
"No, thank you," I said.
"Would you like a drink of milk or a piece of oatcake before you go?"
"I shall be glad to go to bed."
"Oh!" said Jamie, "that's only--"
There stood the strangest figure, with the moon behind it.
"Oh, you've got Missy, have you?" she said, spying her where she stood.
"I will go home."
Or perhaps he'd like to stop and keep you company."
Having discovered this, I changed my plan, and when I felt more frightened, drew rein and went slower.
I went home at a good gallop, took off the saddle and bridle and laid them in a cart in the shed, turned Missy loose into the stable, shut the door, and ran across the field to the manse, desiring nothing but bed.
"I shall let your father know of your goings on," she said, recovering herself a little.
"I'm free enough," said Jamie.
But neither advantage did much for me.
She entered, and closed the door behind her very softly.
She gave a cry of alarm, but presently opened the door, looking pale and frightened.
"That's why you locked the door, I suppose--to keep me out."
I would not disgrace myself before Jamie.
I shall tell him myself at breakfast to-morrow morning.
Failure
When I came near the house from the back, I saw a figure entering the gate from the front.
The other end had been tied to her wrist, that if anything happened he might pull her, and then she would come to him.
I crossed the floor, knelt down by him, and tried to wake him.
It was not the Kelpie, however, but the keeper's sister, the great, grim, gaunt woman I had seen at the table at supper.
The fear began to return.
It always vanished, however, before it came close.
You had better tell him too."
"Come along, then, and let me shut the door after you."
"But, please ma'am, Ranald didn't mean any harm."
"Yes, thank you, ma'am, quite comfortable," said Jamie, who was now wide-awake.
I don't want to go before the morning."
I will not attempt to describe her appearance.
Fear is a worse thing than danger.
"Ranald Bannerman," I answered.
Before it had reached the door I had got behind the next corner, and peeping round saw that my first impression was correct: it was the Kelpie.
At length I came in sight of the keeper's farm; and just at that moment the moon peeped from behind a hill, throwing as long shadows as the setting sun, but in the other direction.
"Come along, Jamie," I said.
"Jamie is quite comfortable, I assure you; and I'll take care he's in time for school in the morning.
I could see much better, and fancied I could hear better too.
The fact is, the moon is trying to do what she cannot do.
Well, at first, the moon frightened me a little--she looked so knowing, and yet all she said round about me was so strange.
"I came to take Jamie home, but he won't go."
It must have been now about eleven o'clock.
CHAPTER XXIV
"What are you doing out of doors this time of the night?" she asked, but without quite her usual arrogance, for, although she tried to put it on, her voice trembled too much.
I stood up as bravely as I could.
It was peculiar enough, for she had just got out of bed and thrown an old shawl about her.
"Thank you, my man; but I have no money; so I can't."
Here I met my first real obstacle.
I swung this hook cautiously to the roof several times before it finally found lodgment; gently I pulled on it to strengthen its hold, but whether it would bear the weight of my body I did not know.
Can you not think of some way to save Helium from this disgrace?"
This very night I shall try to reach his quarters in the palace."
"There is usually but one man on duty there at night upon the roof."
In less than a minute I was settling safely upon the roof of our apartment beside the astonished Kantos Kan.
Quick, explain yourself, or I call the guard."
"Go to the roof of this building, Kantos Kan, and wait me there."
Presently a great city showed below me, but it was not Helium, as that alone of all Barsoomian metropolises consists in two immense circular walled cities about seventy-five miles apart and would have been easily distinguishable from the altitude at which I was flying.
Kantos Kan eyed me narrowly before he spoke.
Gradually I left my pursuers further and further behind, and I was just congratulating myself on my lucky escape, when a well-directed shot from the cruiser exploded at the prow of my little craft.
Donning my trappings and weapons I hastened to the sheds, and soon had out both my machine and Kantos Kan's.
She must have lost her mind to have assented to such an atrocious bargain.
The eaves projected nearly twenty feet from the wall to which I clung, and though I encircled the great building I could find no opening through them.
I knew it would be morning before he would be discovered, and I needed all the time that I could gain.
"How?" I asked.
"And had the choice been left to me I could not have chosen a more fitting mate for the first princess of Barsoom.
It might be barely caught upon the very outer verge of the roof, so that as my body swung out at the end of the strap it would slip off and launch me to the pavement a thousand feet below.
"How well are the machine sheds at the barracks guarded?" I asked.
The building was an enormous one, rearing its lofty head fully a thousand feet into the air.
No one has landed or come up from the building for the past hour.
"You are strongly guarded and a quadruple force patrols the sky."
You, who do not know how we of Helium love the members of our ruling house, cannot appreciate the horror with which I contemplate such an unholy alliance."
"I am an air scout, friend, and very near a dead one, for just by the merest chance I escaped falling to the avenue below," I replied.
The weapon dropped from his grasp, and my fingers choked off his attempted cry for assistance.
I gagged and bound him and then hung him over the edge of the roof as I myself had hung a few moments before.
Not until their lights were no longer discernible did I venture to flash my little lamp upon my compass, and then I found to my consternation that a fragment of the projectile had utterly destroyed my only guide, as well as my speedometer.
I therefore drew near and discovered that the possessor of the peering face was none other than Sab Than.
"Does she know it?"
It was a long climb up the face of the building, and one fraught with much danger, but there was no other way, and so I essayed the task. The fact that Barsoomian architecture is extremely ornate made the feat much simpler than I had anticipated, since I found ornamental ledges and projections which fairly formed a perfect ladder for me all the way to the eaves of the building.
"What can be done, John Carter?" he continued.
Rising again I scanned the heavens for my pursuers, and finally making out their lights far behind me, saw that they were landing, evidently in search of me.
An instant I hesitated, and then, releasing my grasp upon the supporting ornament, I swung out into space at the end of the strap. Far below me lay the brilliantly lighted streets, the hard pavements, and death.
If I can reach the roof of the barracks and get my machine I can be in Sab Than's quarters in five minutes; but how am I to escape from this building, guarded as you say it is?"
"But how came you upon the roof, man?
In this work it is required that we investigate any unusual occurrence we may witness, and a face peering from the pinnacle of the high tower of the palace was, to me, most unusual.
Clambering quickly aloft I grasped the edge of the eaves and drew myself to the surface of the roof above.
"Who are you and whence came you?" he cried.
"It is impossible!
I fell upon it by chance one day as I was passing above the palace on patrol duty.
I lost no time in explanation, but plunged immediately into a discussion of our plans for the immediate future.
If successful he was then to follow me.
How far I fell before I regained control of the plane I do not know, but I must have been very close to the ground when I started to rise again, as I plainly heard the squealing of animals below me.
As I gained my feet I was confronted by the sentry on duty, into the muzzle of whose revolver I found myself looking.
I was very curious to know what I had said or done to cause her so much perturbation a moment before and so I continued to importune her to enlighten me.
CHAPTER XIII
"Only in little ways, John Carter," she answered.
"Some day you shall know, John Carter, if we live; but I may not tell you.
"That is precisely what we do on Earth," I answered.
Dejah Thoris laughed.
"You see, Tars Tarkas, the softer sentiments have their value, even to a warrior.
I was ever a good hand with animals, and by inclination, as well as because it brought more lasting and satisfactory results, I was always kind and humane in my dealings with the lower orders.
This made her laugh again.
"Swear it, sir," cried the old man eagerly--"swear it by the Holy Trinity."
"Take these packets," he added, giving him Henry's despatches, "and guard them as you would your life.
"But you were speaking of Richmond.
What would you?"
Some delay occurred before he could obtain access to the earl.
A moment ago I might have been led on, by the murderous and traitorous impulse that prompted me, to lift my hand against the king, but I never could have injured her."
On--on he went, his frenzy increasing each moment.
"You are a madman!" cried Wolsey impatiently, "and it is a waste of time to argue with you.
The night was profoundly dark, and the whole of the glorious prospect commanded by the terrace shrouded from view.
"Saint Dunstan and Saint Christopher shield us from evil spirits!"
Amid the distractions of the court I could find little leisure for the muse."
He remained within his chamber to a late hour, and then issuing forth, proceeded to the terrace at the north of the castle, where he was challenged by a sentinel, but was suffered to pass on, on giving the watch-word.
As he uttered aloud this wild and unguarded speech, the arras screening the door was drawn aside, and gave admittance to Wolsey.
Vanity--vanity is the rock they split upon.
Better--far better--I should go.
"If such be your purpose," pursued Wolsey, after a pause, during which he intently scrutinised the knight's countenance, "I will assist you in it.
Liberate the king from the thraldom of the capricious siren who enslaves him, and you will do a service to the whole country.
His hands convulsively clutched together; his hair stood erect upon his head; a shiver ran through his frame; and he tottered back several paces.
"I never expect to see you again, sir!" groaned the old man, as he took his leave.
Plead ill health with the king in excuse of your mission to France, and retire for some months to recruit your strength and spirits at Allington."
I speak from affection and duty.
"Anne Boleyn shall be yours. Your hand upon the compact."
While thus detained, he beheld Anne Boleyn and her royal lover mount their steeds in the upper ward, and ride forth, with their attendants, on a hawking expedition.
The absent are always in danger; and few women are proof against ambition.
"I have no fear," replied Surrey.
I will take the part of vengeance off your hands."
He tried to recite a prayer, but the words died away on his lips--neither would his fingers fashion the symbol of a cross.
"Go and prepare my mails."
I tremble to say it, but you look like one possessed by the fiend.
"If I remain near her, I shall do some desperate deed.
"Right, cardinal--right.
I wish you good speed on your journey.
"His majesty bade me tell you to make your preparations quickly, Sir Thomas," said the messenger who delivered the despatches; "he cares not how soon you set forth."
Other strange and unearthly noises were heard, and amidst the din a blue phosphoric light issued from the yawning crevice in the tree, while a tall, gaunt figure, crested with an antlered helm, sprang from it.
"Our conversation has been overheard."
Speak now."
He then arose, and gave him welcome.
An adder's bite would have been less painful.
"My dear, dear master," cried old Adam, bending the knee before him, and pressing his hand to his lips; "something tells me that if I leave you now I shall never see you again.
The gloom was here profound, being increased by the dense masses of foliage beneath which he was riding.
No other sound was heard, nor living object seen.
"Do as I bid you, and if I join you not before noon to-morrow, proceed to Rochester, and there await my coming."
"Do not heed me," replied Surrey; "I am well content with what has happened.
"It could not be fancy," he said; "and yet nothing is to be found."
May you never experience from Richmond the wrong I have experienced from his father."
"I did not come to play the eavesdropper, Sir Thomas," said Wolsey; "but I have heard enough to place your life in my power.
"Ride hence to the haunted beechtree near the marsh, at the farther side of the forest, and you will find him."
He has power over the desperate."
With increased bitterness of heart, he turned from the sight, and shrouded himself beneath the gateway of the Norman Tower.
Forgive my boldness, sir.
I will have vengeance--terrible vengeance!"
Heedless of all impediments, he pressed forward--now dashing beneath overhanging boughs at the risk of his neck--now skirting the edge of a glen where a false step might have proved fatal.
I will perish on the rack sooner than accuse Anne Boleyn.
A word from you--a letter--a token--will cast her from the king, and place her on the block.
Listen to my counsel, I beseech you.
Whether the object he beheld was human or not he could not determine, but it seemed of more than mortal stature.
As soon as he was gone, Anne looked round with a smile of ineffable pride and pleasure at her attendants, but a cloud of curtains dropping over the window shrouded her from the sight of her wretched lover.
I will not obey the hateful mandate!
I have heard that there are evil beings in the forest--nay, even within the castle--who lure men to perdition by promising to accomplish their wicked desires.
The deep slumber of the woods was unbroken by any sound save that of the frenzied rider bursting through them.
"You have lost a mistress, and would regain her?"
You refuse to proceed to Paris.
In your present frame of mind I advise you not to hazard an interview with the fiend.
"If he I have seen be not indeed the fiend, he will scarcely outstrip me in the race," he cried, as his steed bore him at a furious pace up the long avenue.
The gory scaffold were better than Henry's bed."
He visited me this morning, and came to relate the particulars of a mysterious adventure that occurred to him last night."
Would I could take your place."
Nothing but blood can allay the fever that consumes me.
A lute lay beside him on the floor, and there were several astrological and alchemical implements within reach.
As the words were uttered, the door behind the arras was suddenly shut with violence.
The two clerks made a fresh bow to the throne, after which the under-clerk, again half turning his face to the Commons, said,--
He took, unfolded, and read the first of the documents on the cushion.
The under-clerk bowed lower still; then, half turning his head towards the Commons, he said,--
This terminated the royal sitting.
These were the Royal Commissioners.
The hum of conversation immediately subsided.
The Speaker of the Commons wore a robe of black satin, with large hanging sleeves, embroidered before and behind with brandenburgs of gold, and a wig smaller than that of the Lord Chancellor.
When the noise made by the trampling of feet had ceased, the Crier of the Black Rod, standing by the door, exclaimed:--
It was a law condemning to imprisonment and fine whosoever withdrew himself from the service of the trainbands.
The fifth bill forbade the admission into the hospital of any sick person who on entering did not deposit a pound sterling to pay for his funeral, in case of death.
Two doorkeepers placed before the bar a stool with three steps.
The Clerk of the Parliaments read the first bill.
They reached the bench in front of the throne, to which they bowed, took off and replaced their hats, and sat down on the bench.
The Usher of the Black Rod retired.
It was a message from the Queen, naming three commissioners to represent her in Parliament, with power to sanction the bills.
His under-clerk, who had been on his knees behind him, got up also.
The Duke of Newcastle nodded.
The Clerk read the second bill.
It was a bill passed by the Commons, charging the country with the costs of the improvements made by the Queen to her residence at Hampton Court, amounting to a million sterling.
The trainbands were a militia, recruited from the middle and lower classes, serving gratis, which in Elizabeth's reign furnished, on the approach of the Armada, one hundred and eighty-five thousand foot-soldiers and forty thousand horse.
"The faithful Commons of England."
The Usher of the Black Rod entered with his wand and announced,--
Lord Godolphin raised his hat.
The Commons, both Speaker and members, stood waiting with uncovered heads, before the peers, who were seated, with their hats on.
He was majestic, but inferior.
The Clerk continued,--
It was empty but august.
The throne, thus illuminated, shone in a kind of purple light.
The lords put on their hats.
The reading over, the Clerk bowed low to the throne.
Here the Clerk raised his voice.
The Clerk resumed,--
They were in their ordinary garb; for the most part dressed in black, and wearing swords.
"The Lords Commissioners of her Majesty."
It was the Usher of the Black Rod announcing the other half of Parliament.
They stopped at the bar.
"Thomas Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery."
"Sidney Earl Godolphin."
The Clerk bowed to Lord Pembroke.
Finally, the bill, declaring the sums already levied for the current year insufficient, concluded by decreeing a poll-tax on each subject throughout the kingdom of four shillings per head, adding that a double tax would be levied on every one who did not take the fresh oath to Government.
The first was the Lord High Treasurer of England, Godolphin; the second, the Lord President of the Council, Pembroke; the third, the Lord of the Privy Seal, Newcastle.
The Clerk bowed to Lord Godolphin.
All at once a bright light broke upon the House.
The Clerk of the Crown resumed his seat.
Amongst the members of Commons might have been remarked the Chief Justice of Chester, Joseph Jekyll; the Queen's three Serjeants-at-Law--Hooper, Powys, and Parker; James Montagu, Solicitor-General; and the Attorney-General, Simon Harcourt.
Four doorkeepers brought and placed on each side of the throne four high candelabra filled with wax-lights.
"To wit--"
"Order the Commons to the bar of the House."
The Clerk of the Parliaments arose.
Both turned their faces to the throne, and their backs to the Commons.
Then there came an interruption, which continued for some minutes.
"Oyez!"
The Clerk of the Crown arose.
Is it therefore any the less certain that the union of a fervent believer, such as my niece, with a man like yourself would be a moral disorder of which the consequences might be disastrous?
How much more worthy they were than the people who live now!"--What good company!
She paused, with a little confusion, as I thought, at the warmth of her last words.
He adopts frequently a sort of furious manner which on a sudden melts into the smile of an honest man.
More and more also he loved to make the moral discipline and the literary tastes of that favourite age prevail in his own household.
Personally, I claim to be neither one nor the other."
Our old silvan tapestries, similarly, are of that age.
And as I looked at her with surprise, and a little embarrassed, she added, "He made me live there too, in his company."
I know people often say, a man denies God when by his own conduct he has brought himself into a condition in which he may well desire that God does not exist.
You see too that all our furniture, from presses and sideboards, down to our little tables and our arm-chairs, is in the severest style of Louis the Fourteenth.
His speech and gesture are animated, and, at times, as if carried away.
Since that moment, however, a gaiety, serene and imperturbable, has been the mainstay of his happily constituted character.
"Monseigneur," I answered, after a moment's embarrassment, "you know as well as, and better than I, the condition of the world, and of our country, at this time.
Then, with resumed gravity--"It was thus that my father endeavoured, by the very aspect and arrangement of outward things, to promote in himself the imaginary presence of the epoch in which his thoughts delighted.
What pleasure they took in high things!
"My father lived in that age," she answered gravely.
"Monseigneur!" I said, "I come to you (you understand me?) as to my last resource.
"Doubtless!
And then, I am not indeed guilty: I have but wandered.
We pass over the many little dramatic intrigues and misunderstandings, with the more or less adroit interferences of the uncle, which raise and lower alternately Bernard's hopes.
I can't tell exactly which of them you may or may not have read, and so I feel a certain difficulty in speaking."
What good company!
As he becomes calm he has an imposing way of gently resettling himself in his sacerdotal dignity.
One day she took me to see the library, rich in works of the seventeenth century and in memoirs relating to that time.
"What, Monsieur?"
In common we indulged our enthusiasm for those days of faith; of the quiet life; its blissful hours of leisure well-secured; for the French language in its beauty and purity; the delicate, the noble urbanity, which was then the honour and the special mark of our country, but has ceased to be so."
"A hypocrite, Monseigneur!
That may show you that he loved his country, but he was no lover of his own age.
doubtless!
His charm, in fact, is in the union of that gay and apparently wanton nature with a genuine power of appreciating devotion in others, which becomes devotion in himself. With all the much-cherished elegance and worldly glitter of his personality, he is capable of apprehending, of understanding and being touched by the presence of great matters.
In proportion to his immense worldly strength is his capacity for the immense pity which breaks his heart.
I am not usually so very talkative.
He maintained that our excessive care for the comforts of life weakened mind as well as body.
The accomplished Bernard, with many graces of person, by his own confession, takes nothing seriously.
In truth, Bernard has merits which he ignores, at least in this first part of his journal: merits which are necessary to explain the influence he is able to exercise from the first over such a character as Mademoiselle de Courteheuse.
Believe me!--a man may love sport, his club, his worldly habits, and yet have his hours of thought, of self-recollection.
"What good company!
For myself, Monseigneur, I have consulted my conscience with an entire sincerity; and although my youth has been amiss, I am certain that my atheism proceeds from no sentiment of personal interest.
"Yes!
You would tell me forthwith, in the goodness, the compassion, which I read in your eyes; Confide to me your objections to religion, and I will try to solve them.
She was half a minute collecting her thoughts: then, speaking with an expansion of manner not habitual with her, hesitating, and blushing deeply, whenever she was about to utter a word that might seem a shade too serious for lips so youthful:--"My father," she proceeded, "died of the consequences of a wound he had received at Patay.
He burst in upon Jean with his news.
"Keeping me here," Thun went on, "is part of the plot of the Italian government.
"I don't know," she said thoughtfully.
"He's in hospital," said Mr. Briggerland.
"Suppose I came to-morrow night," he said, lowering his voice, "and helped you to get away?
No, no, I don't mind it a bit."
Mr. Briggerland nodded.
The Hoggins type is such a bungler that it was almost certain they would fail."
The people who are sent to Norwood, you know, are not the mild cases, and you will see some rather terrible sights.
"I'm sorry I shan't be able to show you round, Mr. Briggerland," he said.
Mr. Briggerland would much rather that she had undertaken the disagreeable experience which lay before him, but he dare not confess as much.
"It should not be difficult to find out all about him," said Mr. Briggerland easily.
"The possibility of their trying rather worried me.
"That's the rough work done, at any rate."
Yes, that was how they swore the officers at my court martial."
He had pointed out many "sad cases" in the same bright manner.
"My appointment at Norwood is at eleven o'clock," he said.
Thun nodded.
The girl reached for bacon from the hot plate.
What is your ward?"
"When the clock strikes twelve you may expect me."
The prisoners were quickly transferred to the other boat, and the pirate with the green sash took the oars.
One of them had just unshipped the little sail, and--not seeming to know what else to do with it--had cut it loose from the oar that served as a mast and wrapped it round and round his body, tying himself tightly with a piece of string.
"Why certainly, dearie, I adore rowing," said the False Hare sweetly.
I dare say the mice will be glad of a rest."
The False Hare smiled a sickly sort of smile.
When their boat was at last beached, they jumped out of it, turned their backs to the rest of the party, and standing as close together as they could get, gazed anxiously out over the water.
Did you wash it off--on purpose?" he added sternly.
"Dee-lightful!" the False Hare exclaimed, shuddering all over to the tips of his whiskers.
They would probably never have reached land that day if this had depended on their own efforts, but luckily the breeze was blowing them in the right direction.
"I shall be prepared to fight," said he, "though I am afraid we must make up our minds to being captured.
He was dressed in some kind of tight gray and white striped suit with a red sash tied round his waist stuck full of shiny-barreled pistols and long bright-bladed knives.
Hurrah, my fine Jack Tars!
Rudolf shipped his oars while he loosened his sword.
In a small boat which had been towed behind the catboat, a couple of pirates--big, rough-looking fellows--were sculling rapidly toward the children.
He wanted to pet them a little, so he said, but from the strained expressions on their faces and the startled squeaks they gave from time to time, it seemed as if they were hardly enjoying his attentions.
At first Rudolf thought she had said this just because it sounded well, but on turning his head he saw for himself a small boat heading toward them as fast as it could come.
We can't leave poor darling Peter to be carried off by those terrible cats."
Much against his will, Rudolf was now forced to surrender his beloved sword.
"Sail ahead!"
"Oh, 'twas nothing--nothing of any importance," answered Prowler airily.
"What is your Chief's name, Mr. Growler, dear sir?" asked Ann timidly.
As Rudolf looked at this fellow, he began to have the queerest feeling that somewhere-- somehow--under very different conditions--he had seen the Pirate Chief before!
"All right, Prowler."
Peter when he came to the surface, seized this rope and was rapidly hauled on board the pirate ship.
"Hold on a minute, Growler!
"Find anything?" asked Growler, eying him suspiciously.
Don't show any cheek--not to me or Prowler, we're the mates--and above all, not to the Chief!"
Just as all was ready for the start the cat in red cried:
At the bow stood he who was evidently the Pirate Chief.
Just like a book."
The mice turned a pale greenish color in their embarrassment and looked nervously at each other, but answered never a word.
He walked around in front of the two mice, who tried vainly not to meet his eye, looked at them long and earnestly, and said:
The last time they had noticed them was at the moment of Peter's ducking when in their excitement, the foolish creatures had hidden their faces on each other's shoulders, rolled themselves into a kind of ball, and stowed themselves under a seat.
"I say, Mr. Mouses, was you always white?"
"Excuse me, sir, we don't believe in washing," muttered one of the poor things hastily.
Then, after a few, rapid, nervous strokes at the oars, one or the other of them would pull his blade out of the water and polish it anxiously with his handkerchief, as if the important thing was to keep it dry.
Somehow I hadn't noticed that before.
They were enjoying themselves very much, in spite of this, when suddenly Ann, who had very sharp eyes, called out:
As for the two white mice, after one glance at the ship, they gave two little shrieks and hid their faces in their paws.
He was gone but a moment, and when he returned his whiskers were very shiny, and he was looking extremely jolly as he hummed a snatch of a pirate song.
It's a pirate ship!"
But, look, they are sending a boat to us now."
"How awfully jolly!
It seemed as if the white mice knew the False Hare and the value of his remarks, for they made no attempt to answer him, but only looked more and more frightened and uncomfortable.
Rudolf had kicked off his shoes and was ready to jump in after Peter, when he saw that quick as a flash, on an order from their Chief, the pirates had lowered a long rope with something bobbing at the end of it.
Will you, Mr. False Hare?"
Just at that instant he heard the sound of a struggle behind him, and turning round he saw that Peter had become terribly excited.
But this was not to be the case.
Prowler leaped into the little boat which the pirates had fastened by a tow-rope to their own, and during his search he kept his back turned to his companions.
"Hush!" she whispered.
As they drew alongside, Growler muttered in a not unfriendly whisper:
"Why so they are cats, Ann!
"I'm nine years old and I've never seen a real live pirate, and goodness knows when I ever will again--I wouldn't miss this for anything." Then, as he saw how really worried his little sister looked, he added cheerfully.
"And such nice ones," he murmured.
"Mittens! Mittens!" he screamed, and breaking loose from Ann's hold, he stood up and leaned so far over the side of the boat that he lost his balance and fell into the water.
A group of pirates was gathered at the rail, staring at the rowboat through their glasses. There was no mistake about these fellows being pirates--that was easy enough to see from their queer bright-colored clothes and the number of weapons they carried, even if the ugly black flag had not been floating over their heads.
"Look here, youngsters, here's a word of advice that may save you your skins.
His arms were folded on his breast.
One had a red sash and one a green, and each carried knives and pistols enough to set up a shop.
The children loved being on the water better than anything else, and they would have been perfectly happy now, if the False Hare had not had quite so many nice compliments to make to Rudolf on his rowing, and if the white mice had not complained so bitterly of them all for "sitting all over the boat cushions," and "wetting the nice dry oars!"
You're a pair of swell old sea-dogs, you are.
"They may sail right past without speaking to us, you know."
Did you not know, young man," he said, frowning with disapproval, "that our bricks for building houses have all come from British kilns?"
Becky Boozer's huge frame blocked it behind them as she stood in the sun to see them off.
Chris, not understanding, asked, "Ballast bricks?
Why, anyone knows that these are the bricks brought over in the hold, my lad, should there not be sufficient cargo, both to make ballast for the vessel and to sell once here.
The roundness of his face was underlined by three folds of chin, but his small piercing blue eyes had a way of suddenly opening wide that made Chris feel the man was no fool.
The colored boy's brilliant foreign costume was very noticeable, his friend thought, but when no one paid any attention, Chris decided Amos's clothes were not unfamiliar to the seafaring men among whom they were walking.
"Now boys," he roared, "this good man here is Bowie."
A ship had just come in, the sailors browned and cheerful at being once more in their home port.
With a deep sense of relief he found that he liked them all. All, perhaps, but one.
They swear by Mr. Wicker, so they do," Ned said, wagging his head with the certainty of it.
I would sooner ye were asked aboard by him."
"This here's Elbert Jones," Cilley went on, "and that one's Abner Cloud, and that one," pointed Ned, "that one's Zachary Heigh."
At the waterline, a clear light green contrasted well with the white of her sides.
Please sir, what's that?"
Finney's kind, too," Ned went on, "though he don't look it, bless me cap and boots!
"Them?
He may look too plump for his own good," Master Cilley went on, lowering his voice and bending down to be on a level with Chris and Amos, "but believe me, there's no sounder captain afloat.
Listening and looking, Chris saw bolts of silk, hardware, china, wines and liquors, needles and pins--all manner of things auctioned and sold.
"Who in the world are they?" Chris asked of Cilley as they drew near. Cilley looked scandalized at Chris's impertinence in finding them in any way droll.
Georgetown in the year 1790 might be new for Amos, but not nearly as new as it would be for Chris.
As to Elisha Finney, he's glum, I don't deny, but faithful!
A short, muscular, bowlegged man with a friendly grin, nodded his head at them and cut off a piece of black tobacco with his knife, stuffing it into his mouth, knife blade and all.
Further on, a ship being painted a dazzling white caught their eyes.
Cheer up!" Ned cried.
He constantly burbled with laughter and was in a high good humor, occasional remarks from his companion causing him now and again to chuckle with amusement.
"Blizzard and Finney, that's them," he said.
Chris looked quickly around at the faces of the men, for these, he secretly knew, were to be his companions on a long sea journey soon to start.
"Mr.
"No sir, thank you sir," Chris said, and moved away, not in the least abashed.
Master Cilley's eyes lit up as he saw his friends, and hurrying down the gangplank, shook them by the hand as warmly as if he had not seen them for a month, instead of just the night before when he had shared with them what Becky termed, "a taste, a mere spoonful" of supper.
Soon the watchers were given a better look, for the two men came down the gangplank to examine cases that had been brought to the dock for loading, and Chris and Amos were hard put to it not to laugh out loud at the comical pair.
CHAPTER 12
"Come now!
That's true of the two of them--whatever they can do for Mr. Wicker is law for Ezekial Blizzard and Elisha Finney.
It was a bright fall day when Amos and he stepped out the kitchen door.
"Ballast bricks?
What the other man could be saying that was so entertaining Chris could not imagine, for he was the opposite of the fat good-humored one.
"No, me lad," Cilley answered gravely.
The first man was so round and so short he appeared to have no legs at all.
Without a word the three men rose and went over to the table, pushing aside the china bowl filled with flowers to spread the charts flat on the table top.
The extraordinary pair came in and Chris was introduced to Captain Blizzard and Mr. Finney.
"There is one other thing.
"Look, sir!
It is for you to say."
"Mr. Wicker, sir, I have a plan!
"See"--he pointed a short forefinger at a spot on one chart--"here is the sandbar that the tide covers for but a short time, and should there be other ships crowding the river near this point, we must slip through there then or not at all."
Captain Blizzard wagged his head.
To Chris he said, "I wonder what brings them here so early?
He turned.
I therefore ask you to so contrive it that the casks be hidden in bales or boxes so that they seem to be anything but what they are." He tapped the rolled charts thoughtfully on the palm of one hand.
"Leave me these charts for yet a little while, and I shall ponder on our plans," said Mr. Wicker.
Stay with me, Christopher.
It must be a matter of some importance.
"Well, Captain, what brings you here so betimes?
Mr. Wicker had taken the river charts and rolled them up, and now turned to the Captain and first mate.
"How move the tides?" he finally asked, raising his head.
Or she was, yesterday.
"He has a task of utmost secrecy to carry out and will require your help, encouragement, and silence."
But how is it to be done?"
Mr. Wicker's face was grave but showed no surprise.
"We have nearly water enough, and quite sufficient stores.
"I shall arrange to bring him aboard somehow, and give you your sailing orders later."
He paused and glanced at Mr. Finney who nodded forlornly, his mouth drooping.
"The tide will be high at midnight, sir," he informed them.
The Captain was all smiles except for his eyes; Chris noted that his eyes did not smile at all.
May we look at the river charts again?"
"I knew some trouble was ahead," he said slowly, "but did not know what form it was to take." He paused.
"At any time, sir," the Captain at once replied.
I shall present you to the Captain."
Mr. Wicker examined the charts and nodded.
Well," and Mr. Wicker looked alertly at the two men, "what advice do you give me?"
The men are all assembled."
Captain Blizzard and Mr. Finney looked solemnly at Chris who looked as solemnly back.
"See that the water casks are taken on at once, Captain, and hidden, and make a place for Christopher, here," and at a beseeching look from Chris he added with a smile, "and Amos."
Master and pupil spread out the charts once more, and Chris pointed eagerly.
The imminent journey, so far and perhaps so perilous, seemed suddenly too much for him.
He looked eagerly up into Mr. Wicker's face and saw in it the reflection of his own excitement.
Mr. Wicker spoke first.
"Very well," he said, "so must it be," and Chris felt that his heartbeat would stifle him, it pounded so fast and thickly in his throat.
Mr. Finney, true to form, cast down his eyes, sighed, and let the corners of his wide thin lips droop almost to his chin.
"There are times, Christopher," said Mr. Wicker with his eyes snapping, "when you surprise even me.
Although," he added thoughtfully, "I think Claggett Chew guessed it.
No sooner were the Captain and Mr. Finney gone than Chris spoke up in great excitement.
The Captain fell silent and no one spoke for several minutes.
Captain Blizzard leaned his knuckles on the boards.
The Captain, with surprising briskness for so large a man, pulled some folded charts from his pocket.
Mr. Wicker leaning his chin on his folded hands was lost in thought.
All at once, looking up at the thoughtful face of his master, Chris longed to be able to stay safe at home.
"Nay sir, 'tis for orders that I came to you.
I should say he was the laziest, most conceited fellow I ever came near.
The bricklayer came and pulled up a great many bricks, but found nothing amiss; so he put down some lime and charged the master five shillings, and the smell in my box was as bad as ever.
The man took up my feet one by one and examined them; then standing up and dusting his hands one against the other, he said:
But that was not all: standing as I did on a quantity of moist straw my feet grew unhealthy and tender, and the master used to say:
The farrier ordered all the litter to be taken out of my box day by day, and the floor kept very clean.
Then I was to have bran mashes, a little green food, and not so much corn, till my feet were well again.
Alfred Smirk considered himself very handsome; he spent a great deal of time about his hair, whiskers and necktie, before a little looking-glass in the harness-room.
This is the sort of thing we find in foul stables, where the litter is never properly cleaned out.
With this treatment I soon regained my spirits; but Mr. Barry was so much disgusted at being twice deceived by his grooms that he determined to give up keeping a horse, and to hire when he wanted one.
Harris said:
He evidently meant to see this thing out.
"Nobody will ever know, on this line," we said, "what you are, or where you're going.
Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it.
Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.
Biggs's boy hailed him:
It evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine, and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it, and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace "very dry."
In another moment, the grocer's boy passed on the opposite side of the street.
I don't know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.
It was certainly rather rough on the City, but what cared we for human suffering?
And when the afternoon was nearly gone, and still there was no sign of rain, we tried to cheer ourselves up with the idea that it would come down all at once, just as the people had started for home, and were out of the reach of any shelter, and that they would thus get more drenched than ever.
George got hold of the paper, and read us out the boating fatalities, and the weather forecast, which latter prophesied "rain, cold, wet to fine" (whatever more than usually ghastly thing in weather that may be), "occasional local thunder-storms, east wind, with general depression over the Midland Counties (London and Channel).
We determined to save him, and, in this noble resolve, our own dispute was forgotten.
He came to a dead stop, a yard from our step, and, leaning up against the railings, and selecting a straw to chew, fixed us with his eye.
There is one side for 10 a.m. yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can't always get there as early as ten, you know.
"It's quarter to ten."
"Hi! ground floor o' 42's a-moving."
"Um," I replied, "lucky for you that I do.
The barometer is useless: it is as misleading as the newspaper forecast.
We went downstairs to breakfast. Montmorency had invited two other dogs to come and see him off, and they were whiling away the time by fighting on the doorstep.
I never can understand it.
You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston."
The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start from the local.
"How could I wake you, when you didn't wake me?" he retorted.
I tapped the barometer, and it jumped up and pointed to "very dry." The Boots stopped as he was passing, and said he expected it meant to-morrow.
"What!" he shrieked, jumping out of bed into the bath; "Who the thunder put this thing here?"
"Long foretold, long last; Short notice, soon past."
No cab came by, but the street boys did, and got interested in the show, apparently, and stopped.
Harris and I frowned at him.
We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started from.
It tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn't prophesy fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself.
"So I did," I answered; "why didn't you wake me?"
"Ah!" we said, as we stood looking out at them through the window, "won't they come home soaked!"
Bar. falling."
"No, no," we replied, with a knowing chuckle, "not we.
There he lay--the man who had wanted to know what time he should wake us--on his back, with his mouth wide open, and his knees stuck up.
If anything more than usually villainous in the boy-line crops up in our neighbourhood, we know that it is Biggs's latest.
"Are you all right, sir?" said the man.
"The great thing is to make a good breakfast," and he started with a couple of chops, saying that he would take these while they were hot, as the beef could wait.
Gimme the half-crown."
How can I go into the City like this?"
Biggs's boy, as I have said, came round the corner.
But they were sure it wasn't the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn't they couldn't say.
"Oh no, sir, I think it will clear up all right.
"Don't be absurd.
It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man's life--the priceless moments that will never come back to him again--being wasted in mere brutish sleep.
It was too bright and sunny on this especial morning for George's blood-curdling readings about "Bar. falling," "atmospheric disturbance, passing in an oblique line over Southern Europe," and "pressure increasing," to very much upset us: and so, finding that he could not make us wretched, and was only wasting his time, he sneaked the cigarette that I had carefully rolled up for myself, and went.
There was one hanging up in a hotel at Oxford at which I was staying last spring, and, when I got there, it was pointing to "set fair."
And when we had done that George wanted the shaving tackle.
I expect that machine must have been referring to the following spring.
To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man, who said he had seen it at number three platform.
I wonder you take the trouble to get up at all."
I fancied that maybe it was thinking of the week before last, but Boots said, No, he thought not.
There was George, throwing away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused.
We calmed them with an umbrella, and sat down to chops and cold beef.
It did look a lot, and Harris and I began to feel rather ashamed of it, though why we should be, I can't see.
So we went to the high-level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going to Kingston.
"Get up, you fat-headed chunk!" roared Harris.
Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway.
I never can make head or tail of those.
This might have wounded a more sensitive nature, but Biggs's boys are not, as a rule, touchy.
By this time, quite a small crowd had collected, and people were asking each other what was the matter.
As Harris said, in his common, vulgar way, the City would have to lump it.
The weather is a thing that is beyond me altogether.
We told him he must have been a fool not to see the bath.
Harris and I appeared to be struck by it at the same instant.
Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones.
This was right enough.
"Barons have the same rank as bishops.
In law he knows.
"Richard Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, owns Lowther in Westmorland, which has a magnificent approach, and a flight of entrance steps which seem to invite the ingress of kings.
A peer is a clerk, though he knows not how to read.
"A peer sent for by the king has the right to kill one or two deer in the royal park.
"If a plebeian strike a lord, his hand is cut off.
Ursus belonged to no gang.
The bee did not atone, by its honey-making, for its sting; a full-blown rose did not absolve the sun for yellow fever and black vomit.
"A peer may retain six aliens born, any other Englishman but four.
"A peer holds in his castle a baron's court of justice.
From a political point of view, his writing about gold, not very intelligible in itself, and now become undecipherable, was but a smear, and gave no handle to the enemy.
"A peer cannot be put to the rack, even for high treason.
His home was the forest.
"Charles, Lord Ossulston, owns Darnley in Middlesex, approached by Italian gardens.
"In a civil cause he can demand the adjournment of the case, if there be not at least one knight on the jury.
To remain anywhere long suffocated him with the sense of being tamed.
He would have realized his ideal, had he been able to put a cave on four wheels and travel in a den.
He did not feel himself much out of his element in the murmur of crowded streets, which is like enough to the bluster of trees.
"By a law of Edward the Sixth, peers have the privilege of committing manslaughter.
It is probable that in secret Ursus criticized Providence a good deal.
By nature he was a man ever in opposition.
One admires one's like.
The younger sons do not.
"The persons of peers are inviolable.
Ursus admired Homo.
He did not smile, as we have already said, but he used to laugh; sometimes, indeed frequently, a bitter laugh.
"When it pleases a peer he raises a regiment and gives it to the king; thus have done their graces the Dukes of Athol, Hamilton, and Northumberland.
eat! last a long time!
"Eighty-six tables, with five hundred dishes, are served every day in the royal palace at each meal.
"A peer cannot be assessed towards the militia.
He was implacable in that hate.
It is a law.
What he disliked in his van was its having a door and windows, and thus resembling a house.
The wolf was incapable of an abuse of confidence, and behaved in society, that is to say among men, with the discretion of a poodle.
"All judges rank below peers.
All the same, if bad-tempered officials had to be dealt with, difficulties might have arisen; so Ursus kept the honest wolf chained up as much as possible.
The eldest sons of peers take precedence of knights of the garter.
"A peer cannot be held in durance, save in the Tower of London.
"In Bedfordshire, Wrest House and Park, which is a whole district, enclosed by ditches, walls, woodlands, rivers, and hills, belongs to Henry, Marquis of Kent.
"A peer can hold only of a peer.
He was the malcontent of creation.
The solitary man is a modified savage, accepted by civilization.
Very likely the king had so much per cent. on the transaction.
The dwarf must be fashioned when young.
Hence their contradictions never perplex us.
To wander was the Comprachicos' law of existence--to appear and disappear.
The Comprachicos were poor.
What are we sketching in these few preliminary pages?
More than one picks up from the ground--we will not say from the mud--what he eats.
In this fraternity of vagabonds, those of the Mediterranean seaboard represented the East, those of the Atlantic seaboard the West.
What is barely tolerated cannot take root.
After the lapse of two centuries, it would be difficult to throw any light on this point.
In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green?
This was, it is true, for their interest; and if the king had lost confidence in them, they would have been in great danger.
We do not always disdain to use what we despise.
The Moors of Spain were coiners, the Moors of China were thieves.
Under Charles II. the salivation inseparable to the operation having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished, but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock.
It had its laws, its oaths, its formulae--it had almost its cabala.
They bought children, worked a little on the raw material, and resold them afterwards.
After a certain time it becomes irreparable.
Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means in bad odour at court.
The Comprachicos are like the "succession powder," an ancient social characteristic detail.
A rolling stone and a roving trade gather no moss.
This frightful surgery left its traces on his countenance, but not on his mind.
He did his best to crush out the vermin.
It is very fortunate that kings cannot err.
Thus much might be useful--the law closed one eye, the king opened the other.
These fashions have passed away; but not so much, perhaps, as one might imagine.
That century traded a good deal in children.
The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a Hindu word, which conveys the image of harrying a nest.
In order that a human toy should succeed, he must be taken early.
III.
The manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, and comprised various branches.
A tramp was a possible public enemy.
It was a progress the wrong way.
From time to time their leaders conferred together.
The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India.
William III. replaced James II.
This watcher, awake while all others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying a clock.
The 17th century, called the great century, was of those times.
These are audacities of monarchical terrorism.
Many Basques conversed with many Irishmen.
The queen sold these ladies to William Penn.
Nowadays, courtiers slightly modify their intonation in clucking to please their masters.
Kings made use of their art, and sent the artists to the galleys.
When one is of the court, one should not dream of the courtyard.
"Where do you live? How do you get your living?" And if he could not answer, harsh penalties awaited him.
They had their secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts.
You find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws the impress of this horrible truth, like the foot-print of a savage in a forest.
This development in a bottle continues many years.
But don't you think the trying so hard ought to count for something?
It's a good deal like geometry, I expect.
I believe I could be a model child if I were just invited out to tea every day.
And there are others, like Mrs. Lynde, that you have to try very hard to love.
But I think it will be splendid to have a lady teacher, and I really don't see how I'm going to live through the two weeks before school begins.
You can't think how I was thrilled at the mere thought.
Mrs. Allan left the letter for me at the post office.
The morning, in spite of Matthew's predictions, was fine and Anne's spirits soared to their highest. "Oh, Marilla, there is something in me today that makes me just love everybody I see," she exclaimed as she washed the breakfast dishes. "You don't know how good I feel!
I shall cherish it forever among my choicest treasures."
Isn't that a romantic name?
I feel that I have not lived in vain and I shall always feel like that even if I should never be invited to tea at a manse again.
Now?" asked Marilla, when Anne had just come in from a run to the post office.
You don't know how that encouraged me.
She had come dancing up the lane, like a wind-blown sprite, through the mellow sunshine and lazy shadows of the August evening.
Neither would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she was.
Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment.
A cool wind was blowing down over the long harvest fields from the rims of firry western hills and whistling through the poplars.
For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature.
"Have you discovered another kindred spirit?" Excitement hung around Anne like a garment, shone in her eyes, kindled in every feature.
Just look at it, Marilla. 'Miss Anne Shirley, Green Gables.' That is the first time I was ever called 'Miss.' Such a thrill as it gave me!
You know I never had tea at a manse before, and I'm not sure that I know all the rules of etiquette, although I've been studying the rules given in the Etiquette Department of the Family Herald ever since I came here.
Some people are naturally good, you know, and others are not.
"And what are your eyes popping out of your head about.
Mrs. Allan told me she was a dunce at geometry too.
"Oh, Marilla, I've had a most FASCINATING time.
Mrs. Allan is one of the naturally good people.
CHAPTER XXII.
"No, Marilla, but oh, what do you think?
Wouldn't it be nice if it could last?
The rustle of the poplar leaves about the house worried her, it sounded so like pattering raindrops, and the full, faraway roar of the gulf, to which she listened delightedly at other times, loving its strange, sonorous, haunting rhythm, now seemed like a prophecy of storm and disaster to a small maiden who particularly wanted a fine day.
When I got there Mrs. Allan met me at the door.
Not exactly a kindred spirit, you know, but still very nice.
The baby's awful fractious, and I'm clean worn out attending to him.
Please excuse me for just a moment.
Mrs. Spencer whisked away, after pulling up the blinds.
If we don't you may know that she is going to stay with us.
Marilla from afar had noted him prowling along it and guessed his motive.
I forgot to tell Flora Jane to take the buns out of the oven."
A blight seemed to have descended on her.
Let me take your hats.
Let me introduce you two ladies.
"Did you really say it?
Was she to be given into the keeping of this sharp-faced, sharp-eyed woman?
"How old are you and what's your name?" she demanded.
I did the best I could and I thought I was following your instructions.
I call it positively providential."
Mrs. Blewett, Miss Cuthbert.
Good afternoon, Mrs. Blewett.
I think I'd better take her home again and talk it over with Matthew.
"A terrible worker and driver," Mrs. Peter was said to be; and discharged servant girls told fearsome tales of her temper and stinginess, and her family of pert, quarrelsome children.
Nancy is a terrible flighty thing.
She felt a lump coming up in her throat and her eyes smarted painfully.
I've often had to scold her well for her heedlessness."
When they arrived back at Green Gables that evening Matthew met them in the lane.
"She looks exactly like a--like a gimlet."
More-over, she did not fancy Mrs. Blewett.
Here was an unexpectedly good chance to get this unwelcome orphan off her hands, and she did not even feel grateful for it.
"Marilla Cuthbert, you don't say so!" said Mrs. Spencer in distress. "Why, Robert sent word down by his daughter Nancy and she said you wanted a girl--didn't she Flora Jane?" appealing to her daughter who had come out to the steps.
"I didn't say that Matthew and I had absolutely decided that we wouldn't keep her.
But you're wiry.
"I suppose it'll have to," said Mrs. Blewett ungraciously.
No, she could not take the responsibility of doing that!
Mrs. Blewett darted her eyes over Anne from head to foot.
Marilla did not look as if she thought Providence had much to do with the matter.
Or did I only imagine that you did?"
You'll put your horse in?
The fact is, Mrs. Spencer, there's been a queer mistake somewhere, and I've come over to see where it is.
Yes, I suppose I might as well take her off your hands, Miss Cuthbert.
"I suppose so," said Mrs. Spencer thoughtfully, "but I don't think it will be necessary to send her back.
And how are you, Anne?"
First the look of despair faded out; then came a faint flush of hope; her eyes grew deep and bright as morning stars.
"I'm as well as can be expected, thank you," said Anne smilelessly.
I don't know but the wiry ones are the best after all.
"Oh, Miss Cuthbert, did you really say that perhaps you would let me stay at Green Gables?" she said, in a breathless whisper, as if speaking aloud might shatter the glorious possibility.
During Marilla's speech a sunrise had been dawning on Anne's face.
"I think you'd better learn to control that imagination of yours, Anne, if you can't distinguish between what is real and what isn't," said Marilla crossly.
"It seems there's been a mistake about this little girl, Mrs. Blewett," she said.
"She certainly did, Miss Cuthbert," corroborated Flora Jane earnestly.
But she had heard of her.
"Well, I'll go in and we'll talk the matter over," she said.
"It's too bad; but it certainly wasn't my fault, you see, Miss Cuthbert.
In fact I may say that Matthew is disposed to keep her.
You don't look as if there was much to you.
Mrs. Peter has a large family, you know, and she finds it hard to get help.
Take the armchair, Miss Cuthbert.
"It was our own fault," said Marilla resignedly.
When she smuggled the letters addressed in Gilbert's handwriting to Miss Anna Williams out of the letter packet and hid them from Anna's eyes, she felt as guilty as if she were breaking all the laws of the land at once.
He thought that I would really wait for him until he should have made enough money to come home and pay off the mortgage.
"Married!"
"I did not know you were expected."
But now it's off with the old love and on with a new one for me."
Anna had a wretched habit of being in earnest when she said flippant things.
Alma found time and ability to reflect that she had never known Gilbert was so fine-looking.
The pent-up retribution of two years descended on Alma's head in the last question of Gilbert's.
She was very calm.
She smiled wickedly at Alma before replying.
Would Gilbert overwhelm her with angry reproaches, or would he simply rise up and leave her in unutterable contempt?
Besides, to her horror and dismay, she detected in herself a strange undercurrent of relief at the thought that Gilbert could never marry Anna now!
Alma's heart was set on this marriage for two reasons.
"No, no, dear," and Anna shook her sleek black head with the air of explaining matters to an obtuse child.
Alma had the gift of expression and more brains than Exeter people had ever imagined she possessed.
She had seen his face as he passed under her window, and it was the face of a blithe man who had not heard any evil tidings.
Was she crazy?
"If you think Gilbert will feel very badly over his letter not being answered, you might answer it yourself, Alma," she said teasingly. "There it is"--she took the letter from the pocket of her ruffled apron and threw it on a chair.
But it was a harmless epistle after all; he had not yet heard of Anna's marriage.
Alma answered that letter.
"Anna, you cannot be in earnest!" exclaimed Alma.
She told it clearly and simply, for she had often pictured this scene to herself and thought out what she must say.
There was one thing she could do.
She had had no warning of his coming.
With her hand on the doorknob, she paused to wonder what she should say when he asked her why she had not told him of Anna's marriage when it occurred--why she had still continued the deception when it had no longer an end to serve.
At the door she turned and looked back, with the big black cat snuggled under her chin.
"She is married."
Had not that marriage been her dearest wish for years?
Alma cried herself to sleep many a night in her repentance, but she kept on writing to Gilbert, for all that.
Firstly, if Anna married Gilbert she would be near her all her life.
Then he turned and looked down at her quizzically.
"Can you ever forgive me, Gilbert?" she said humbly.
Yet there he was--and with him Alma's Nemesis.
Williams." She had ceased to fear being found out, and she took a strange pleasure in the correspondence for its own sake.
Anna, dark, vivid, and slender, was perched on the edge of the table, idly swinging her slippered foot at the cat's head.
She would lose his friendship anyhow, when that occurred, but meanwhile she would have the letters a little longer.
"I--do--mean--just--that," she said slowly.
In the second and largest place, she desired the marriage because Gilbert did.
"I never mean to marry Gilbert Murray.
When I parted from her that last night before I went west, I did feel very bad, and she seemed very dear to me, but it was six weeks from that before her--your--letter came, and in that time she seemed to have faded out of my thoughts.
When an Exeter girl had allowed so much to be inferred, it was understood to be equivalent to an engagement.
Alma was patient--outwardly.
"I don't understand," he said helplessly.
At first she had been quakingly afraid of discovery.
To herself she seemed like a machine, talking mechanically, while her soul stood on one side and listened.
Gilbert determined to get rid of it, and his thoughts turned to the west.
"Then," said Gilbert, laying hold of the one solid fact that loomed out of the mist of his confused understanding, "why did she keep on writing letters to me after she was married?"
Altogether, Alma feared that her condition of mind and morals must be sadly askew. Perhaps, she thought mournfully, this perversion of proper feeling was her punishment for the deception she had practised.
Anna nodded decisively, flashed a smile at Alma, picked up her cat, and went out.
She dropped into a chair by the table and flung her hands over her face, laughing and sobbing softly to herself. Gilbert rose and walked to the door, where he stood with his back to her until she regained her self-control.
Anna's Love Letters
She signed the letter "A.
You are as good as engaged to him.
"When did you come home?" she said slowly.
"I arrived only a few minutes ago.
Gilbert reflected that Alma Williams was really a very handsome girl.
She opened the door.
"I don't know that there is much to forgive," he answered.
I fell in love all over again--with the writer of those letters.
I told Gilbert he wasn't to write silly letters.
No more letters came from Gilbert for six weeks.
"You don't mean that you are not going to write to Gilbert at all--after all you promised?"
His father was an active, hale old man, quite capable of managing the farm in Gilbert's absence. Alexander MacNair had gone to the west two years previously and got work on a new railroad.
"I knew you would make a fuss, Alma, because you don't like Charlie, so we just took matters into our own hands.
Well, she would tell him the truth--that it was because she could not bear the thought of giving up writing to him.
"Anna is not here," said Alma.
Alma thought that this whim would run its course likewise and leave a repentant Anna.
There was a small mortgage on the Murray place which Mr. Murray senior had not been able to pay off.
Of course you are going to answer his letter.
As she went downstairs, the only thing that really worried her was the thought of the pain Gilbert would suffer when she told him of Anna's faithlessness.
Why then should she feel this strange gladness at the impossibility of its fulfilment?
She stood straight before him, tall and fair and pale, with the red maple light streaming in through the open door behind her, staining her light house-dress and mellowing the golden sheen of her hair.
Her face was still as pale as when she came downstairs, but a curious little spot of fiery red blossomed out where Gilbert's lips had touched it.
Alma accepted the situation with an apathy that amazed Anna.
Gilbert is safely out of the way, and now I am going to have a good time with a few other delightful men creatures in Exeter."
"What do you mean?" asked Alma anxiously.
That was why I came home.
The truth was that Alma was stunned by a thought that had come to her even while Anna was speaking.
He had always wished that Anna's eyes had not been quite so black.
I--I--didn't expect this.
The harassed look which Alma's face had worn, and which Exeter people had attributed to worry over Anna, disappeared.
It was the most tragic moment of her life, and her whole personality was strung up to meet it and withstand it.
When Gilbert's letter came she left it for a whole day before she could summon courage to open it.
"Got homesick, and just came!
But what?
The letters kept coming, and I kept on looking for them more and more all the time.
She lost her liking for company, and seldom went anywhere among her neighbours.
"I have some explanations to make too and, since we're at it, we might as well get them all over and have done with them.
"Just what I say, dear," responded Anna, with deceptive meekness. "Poor Gilbert is gone, and I don't intend to bother my head about him any longer.
"She married Charlie Moore of East Exeter, and has been living there ever since."
Alma and Anna had lived alone at the old Williams homestead ever since their mother's death four years before.
Anna's tormenting suggestion had fallen on fertile soil.
"Are you going to answer Gilbert's letter tonight, Anna?" asked Alma Williams, standing in the pantry doorway, tall, fair, and grey-eyed, with the sunset light coming down over the dark firs, through the window behind her, and making a primrose nimbus around her shapely head.
When Gilbert read that letter a fortnight later he was surprised to find that Anna was so clever.
One October day, two years after Gilbert's departure, Alma, standing at her window in the reflected glow of a red maple outside, looked down the lane and saw him striding up it!
"She never wrote to you at all.
Is there no scar?"
He seemed to believe so completely the story Harry told him, and took careful notes of it, saying he would prepare a brief of the facts and the law, and that Harry might safely leave everything to him.
Besides they've seen me on the street, and even in my father's bank."
Despite Nathan Goodbody's youth Harry was favorably impressed.
He held himself sternly aloof, as if he feared his reason might leave him if he continued to strive against those baffling eyes, who knew him and did not know that they knew him, but who looked at him as if trying to penetrate a mask when he wore no mask.
Occasionally his counsel turned to him for brief consultation, in which his part consisted generally of a nod or a shake of the head as the case might be.
Elder Craigmile sat by Milton Hibbard. In the front seats just outside the bar were the fifty jurors and back of them were the ladies who had come early, or who had been given the seats of their gentlemen friends who had come early, and whose gallantry had momentarily gotten the better of their judgment.
After Mr. Ballard's visit to the jail, he took upon himself to do what he could for the young man, out of sympathy and friendship toward both parties, and in the cause of simple justice.
While the District Attorney was addressing the jury, Milton Hibbard moved forward and took the District Attorney's seat.
Mine entered the hip here, while he was struck about here." Harry indicated the places with a touch of his finger.
Then the testimony of the other witnesses was taken, even to that of the little housemaid who had been in the family at the time, and who had seen Peter Junior wear the hat.
The young man was so interested, so alert, so confident that all would be well.
Yes.
I am also advised that he is in the employ of the complaining witness who sits beside him, and that he has received, or expects to receive, compensation from him for his services.
The stillness of the court room, like that of a church, was suddenly broken by the entrance of the judge, a tall, spare man, with gray hair and a serious outlook upon life.
They arrest me first of all for killing myself. Now that I know my cousin lives I don't seem to care what happens to me, except for--others."
And thus, in the careful scrutiny of small things, relating to the habits, life, and manner of dressing of the two young men,--matters about which nobody raised any question, and in which no one except the examiner took any interest,--more days crept by, until, at last, the main witnesses for the State were reached.
He felt as if his soul must have been in some way separated from his body, and then returned to it to find all the world gazing at the place where his soul should be without seeing that it had returned and was craving their intelligent support.
He embraced Orlando over and over again at taking leave, using such pains to seem loving and sincere, that his hypocrisy was manifest to every one but the old monarch.
Marsilius made a speech to them, in which he let them into his design, and concluded by recommending to their good will the son of his friend Gan, whom they would know by the vest he had sent him, and who was the only soul amongst the Christian they were to spare.
Marsilius now made his first movement towards the destruction of Orlando, by sending before him his vassal, King Blanchardin, with his presents of wines and other luxuries.
But Charles was infatuated.
"Within three days," cried the enchanter, loudly, "bring Rinaldo and Ricciardetto into the pass of Ronces-Valles.
"I know not," said the devil.
Marsilius was equally adroit, and watched the face of Gan while he addressed him.
Do it, and I hereby undertake to summon thee no more."
You surround him, and who receives tribute then?"
His aspect was clouded and violent.
Rinaldo, alas! the second thunderbolt of Christendom, was destined not to be there in time to meet the issue. The paladins in vain begged Orlando to be on his guard against treachery, and send for a more numerous body of men.
The temperate but courteous hero took them in good part, and distributed them as the traitor wished; and then Blanchardin, on pretence of going forward to salute Charlemagne, returned, and put himself at the head of the second army, which was the post assigned him by his liege-lord.
"I give him this vesture off my own body," said the king; "let him wear it in the battle, and have no fear.
There was nothing for several days but balls, games, and exhibitions of chivalry, the ladies throwing flowers on the heads of the French knights, and the people shouting, "France!
Besides, time pressed; the moment of the looked-for tribute was at hand, and little combinations of circumstances determine often the greatest events.
Orlando will bring but a small band with him: you, when you meet him, will have secretly your whole army at your back.
"Enter Rinaldo's horse, and bring him, whether he trust thee or not."
Gan heaved a sigh, as if he was unwillingly compelled to allow the force of what the king said; but unable to contain himself long he lifted up his face, radiant with triumphant wickedness, and exclaimed: "Every word you utter is truth; die he must, and die also must Oliver, who struck me that foul blow at court.
Marsilius, as well as Gan, was appalled at this omen; but on assembling his soothsayers they came to the conclusion that the laurel-tree turned the omen against the Emperor, the successor of the Caesars, though one of them renewed the consternation of Gan by saying that he did not understand the meaning of the tree of Judas, and intimating that perhaps the ambassador could explain it.
After the expulsion of the Saracens from France Charlemagne led his army into Spain, to punish Marsilius, the king of that country, for having sided with the African Saracens in the late war.
Gan was received with great honor by Marsilius.
A shadow had fallen on his heart, great and cheerful as it was.
Gan went away rejoicing to France.
I must find out where he is, and Ricciardetto too, and send for them with all speed."
He had also, by Gan's advice, brought heaps of wine and good cheer to be set before his victims in the first instance; "for that," said the traitor, "will render the onset the more effective, the feasters being unarmed.
"I was not attending to Gan at the time, and we fallen spirits know not the future.
"It shall be done," returned the demon.
The water was so clear and smooth it reflected every object around, and the spot was encircled with fruit-trees which quivered with the fresh air.
He had great influence over Charles, from equality of age and long intimacy; and he was not without good qualities: he was brave and sagacious, but envious, false, and treacherous.
Gan wrote to Charlemagne to say how humbly and submissively Marsilius was coming to pay the tribute into the hands of Orlando, and how handsome it would be of the Emperor to meet him half-way, and so be ready to receive him after the payment at his camp.
The enchanter, with an aspect still cloudier, bade Ashtaroth lay down that look, and made signs as if he would resort to angrier compulsion; and the devil, alarmed, loosened his tongue, and said, "You have not told me what you desire to know of Rinaldo."
The sky was suddenly overcast, there was thunder and lightning, a laurel was split in two from head to foot, and the Carob-tree under which Gan was sitting, which is said to be the species of tree on which Judas Iscariot hung himself, dropped one of its pods on his head.
One thing, however, I must not forget," added he; "my son Baldwin is sure to be with Orlando; you must take care of his life for my sake."
The king, attended by his lords, came fifteen miles out of Saragossa to meet him, and then conducted him into the city with acclamations.
"Suppose they will not trust themselves with me?" said the spirit.
I have planned everything,--I have settled everything already with their besotted master.
There was an earthquake, and Ashtaroth disappeared.
The demon looked hard at the paladin, and said nothing.
King Falseron, whose son Orlando had slain in battle, headed the first army, and King Balugante the third.
Is it treachery to punish affronts like these?
My soldiers shall be directed not to touch him."
The great heart of the Champion of the Faith was unwilling to harbor suspicion as long as he could help it.
Marsilius began by lamenting, not as to the ambassador, but as to the friend, the injuries which Charles had done him by invading his dominions, charging him with wishing to take his kingdom from him and give it to Orlando; till at length he plainly uttered his belief that if that ambitious paladin were but dead good men would get their rights.
Charles will await him at the foot of the mountains.
And yet he could not wholly repress a misgiving.
As they sat and talked, as if without restraint, Gan, without looking the king in the face, was enabled to see the expression of his countenance in the water, and governed his speech accordingly.
Orlando, however, did as his lord and sovereign desired.
"I desire to know what he has been doing, and where he is."
The new Judas had scarcely uttered these words when his exultation was interrupted by a change in the face of nature.
From situation as well as choice, Miss Mac-Ivor's society was extremely limited.
Their voices were also similar in tone, though differing in the key.
At every other period they rather toiled to procure something which they might share with the Chief, as a proof of their attachment, than expected other assistance from him save what was afforded by the rude hospitality of his castle, and the general division and subdivision of his estate among them.
That of Fergus, especially while issuing orders to his followers during their military exercise, reminded Edward of a favourite passage in the description of Emetrius:
The savings of her income, for she had a small pension from the Princess Sobieski, were dedicated, not to add to the comforts of the peasantry, for that was a word which they neither knew nor apparently wished to know, but to relieve their absolute necessities when in sickness or extreme old age.
This peculiarity she adopted in compliance with the Highland prejudices, which could not endure that a woman's head should be covered before wedlock.
Her most intimate friend had been Rose Bradwardine, to whom she was much attached; and when seen together, they would have afforded an artist two admirable subjects for the gay and the melancholy muse.
For the same reason she had urged their reconciliation, which the Chieftain the more readily agreed to as it favoured some ulterior projects of his own.
THE CHIEFTAIN'S SISTER
CHAPTER XXI
Indeed Rose was so tenderly watched by her father, and her circle of wishes was so limited, that none arose but what he was willing to gratify, and scarce any which did not come within the compass of his power. With Flora it was otherwise.
In Flora's bosom, on the contrary, the zeal of loyalty burnt pure and unmixed with any selfish feeling; she would have as soon made religion the mask of ambitious and interested views as have shrouded them under the opinions which she had been taught to think patriotism.
Her sentiments corresponded with the expression of her countenance.
Both brother and sister retained the deepest and most grateful sense of her kindness.
Flora felt the same anxiety for cherishing and extending their patriarchal sway, but it was with the generous desire of vindicating from poverty, or at least from want and foreign oppression, those whom her brother was by birth, according to the notions of the time and country, entitled to govern.
But the haughty and somewhat stern regularity of Fergus's features was beautifully softened in those of Flora.
She believed it the duty of her brother, of his clan, of every man in Britain, at whatever personal hazard, to contribute to that restoration which the partisans of the Chevalier St. George had not ceased to hope for. For this she was prepared to do all, to suffer all, to sacrifice all.
--whose voice was heard around, Loud as a trumpet with a silver sound.
They had the same antique and regular correctness of profile; the same dark eyes, eye-lashes, and eye-brows; the same clearness of complexion, excepting that Fergus's was embrowned by exercise and Flora's possessed the utmost feminine delicacy.
Her resolution was strengthened in these researches by the extreme delight which her inquiries seemed to afford those to whom she resorted for information.
Her love of her clan, an attachment which was almost hereditary in her bosom, was, like her loyalty, a more pure passion than that of her brother.
Early education had impressed upon her mind, as well as on that of the Chieftain, the most devoted attachment to the exiled family of Stuart.
Her hair was not disfigured by the art of the friseur, but fell in jetty ringlets on her neck, confined only by a circlet, richly set with diamonds.
The Highlander disappeared, but it was only for a few minutes, for he suddenly issued forth from a different part of the thicket, and, advancing boldly upon the open heath as if to invite discovery, he levelled his piece and fired at the sentinel.
No other incident marked the course of that night's journey, and at the dawn of morning they attained the banks of a rapid river.
Waverley was then mounted upon one of the horses, a change which the fatigue of the night and his recent illness rendered exceedingly acceptable.
When these sounds had died upon the silence of the night, the Highlanders began their march swiftly, yet with the most cautious silence.
On the opposite bank of the river, and partly surrounded by a winding of its stream, stood a large and massive castle, the half- ruined turrets of which were already glittering in the first rays of the sun.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
A huge iron-grated door, which formed the exterior defence of the gateway, was already thrown back to receive them; and a second, heavily constructed of oak and studded thickly with iron nails, being next opened, admitted them into the interior court-yard.
The mountaineer now resumed the arms with which he had entrusted our hero, giving him to understand that the dangers of the journey were happily surmounted.
The Highlander, after giving them a full view of his person, dived among the thickets, for his ruse de guerre had now perfectly succeeded.
He then placed himself at the head of the party, who moved up the pathway in single or Indian file, Waverley being placed nearest to their leader.
A wound in the arm proved a disagreeable interruption to the poor fellow's meteorological observations, as well as to the tune of 'Nancy Dawson,' which he was whistling.
'I am not at liberty to be so explicit upon this subject as I could wish.
He stooped down upon all fours, wrapped up in his plaid, so as to be scarce distinguishable from the heathy ground on which he moved, and advanced in this posture to reconnoitre.
He returned the fire ineffectually, and his comrades, starting up at the alarm, advanced alertly towards the spot from which the first shot had issued.
He moved with great precaution, as if to avoid giving any alarm, and halted as soon as he came to the verge of the ascent.
It was obvious that a party of soldiers were near, and upon their guard, though not sufficiently so to detect men skilful in every art of predatory warfare, like those with whom he now watched their ineffectual precautions.
Waverley had little time, or indeed disposition, for observation, and could only discern that they passed at some distance from a large building, in the windows of which a light or two yet seemed to twinkle.
A gentleman, dressed in the Highland garb and having a white cockade in his bonnet, assisted Waverley to dismount from his horse, and with much courtesy bid him welcome to the castle.
Waverley was soon sensible of the reason, for he heard at no great distance an English sentinel call out 'All's well.' The heavy sound sunk on the night-wind down the woody glen, and was answered by the echoes of its banks.
Steep banks of wood were broken by corn-fields, which this year presented an abundant harvest, already in a great measure cut down.
A NOCTURNAL ADVENTURE
After proceeding a greater way in this inconvenient manner than was at all comfortable to his knees and shins, Waverley perceived the smell of smoke, which probably had been much sooner distinguished by the more acute nasal organs of his guide.
The alarm which he excited seemed still to continue, for a dropping shot or two were heard at a great distance, which seemed to serve as an addition to the mirth of Duncan and his comrades.
He looked anxiously around for a few minutes, and then apparently took his resolution.
The governor, for so we must term him, having conducted Waverley to a half-ruinous apartment, where, however, there was a small camp-bed, and having offered him any refreshment which he desired, was then about to leave him.
A second, third, and fourth time the signal was repeated fainter and fainter, as if at a greater and greater distance.
But these hostile sounds were now far in their rear, and died away upon the breeze as they rapidly proceeded.
His portmanteau was placed on another pony, Duncan mounted a third, and they set forward at a round pace, accompanied by their escort.
A little farther on the leading Highlander snuffed the wind like a setting spaniel, and then made a signal to his party again to halt.
In a short time he returned, and dismissed his attendants excepting one; and, intimating to Waverley that he must imitate his cautious mode of proceeding, all three crept forward on hands and knees.
In an adjacent hollow they found several Highlanders, with a horse or two.
He delivered to Edward a sword and steel pistol, and, pointing up the track, laid his hand on the hilt of his own claymore, as if to make him sensible they might have occasion to use force to make good their passage.
Edward, turning his head after him, could perceive him crawling on all fours with the dexterity of an Indian, availing himself of every bush and inequality to escape observation, and never passing over the more exposed parts of his track until the sentinel's back was turned from him.
They were all asleep except the sentinel, who paced backwards and forwards with his firelock on his shoulder, which glanced red in the light of the fire as he crossed and re-crossed before it in his short walk, casting his eye frequently to that part of the heavens from which the moon, hitherto obscured by mist, seemed now about to make her appearance.
The country around was at once fertile and romantic.
Leaving his attendant with Waverley, after motioning to Edward to remain quiet, and giving his comrade directions in a brief whisper, he retreated, favoured by the irregularity of the ground, in the same direction and in the same manner as they had advanced.
When they had walked about half an hour, still along open and waste ground of the same description, they came to the stump of an ancient oak, which, from its relics, appeared to have been at one time a tree of very large size.
Waverley did so, and beheld an outpost of four or five soldiers lying by their watch-fire.
"That is no affair of yours, my lord duke!" answered the spirited voice of the queen.
Let me advise you as a friend, my lord, to tell at once, and truthfully," said the duke, toying negligently with the thumb-screws.
"That is all we want!
"There is no mercy for traitors!" she coldly said.
"Who are you, sir, and by what right do you dare to come here?"
A breathless silence followed the question--everybody seemed to hold his very breath to listen.
"And, allow me to observe, it is just probable you would not have fallen through that hole in our royal ceiling if you had kept away from it.
The duke handed him a roll of parchment, which he glanced critically over, and handed to the queen for her autograph.
"I did; but my lord, my lord, spare--"
Twice he opened his eyes to reply, and twice all sounds died away in a choking gasp.
"The earl was confessing his guilt, or about to do so.
"A lie!--a lie!" exclaimed the dwarf, furiously.
The earl grew, if possible, a more ghastly white.
For Heaven's sake, spare my life!"
"I confess!
"I confess all--everything--anything! only spare my life!"
Did you or did you not receive for the aforesaid information a large sum of money?"
"Do you hear his highness?" sharply inquired the lord high chancellor, reaching over the great seal, and giving the unhappy Earl of Gloucester a rap on the head with it, "Why do you not answer?"
Seizing this, the first opportunity, Miranda, with a glance of displeased dignity at Caliban, immediately struck in:
Sir Norman Kingsley, how long have you been above there, listening and looking on?"
"Be good enough to finish Lord Gloucester's trial; and until then I will be responsible for the safekeeping of Sir Norman Kingsley."
Pardon!" exclaimed the earl, in a husky whisper.
At his peril, let one of them touch you!"
"Perhaps you don't know me, my dear young sir--your little friend, you know, of the Golden Crown."
And what do you confess?" said the duke blandly, leaning forward, while the dwarf fell back with a yell of laughter at the success of his ruse.
"Do you confess to having told Charles, King of England, the secrets of our kingdom and this place?" said the duke, sternly rapping down the petition with a roll of parchment.
"Oh, I perfectly recognize you!
"Then, when I condescend to command, you shall obey!
"Let him come," he said, with his countenance still distorted by inward merriment; "It will do him good to see how we punish offenders here, and teach him what he is to expect himself.
CHAPTER XI.
Guards keep a sharp eye on your new prisoner.
I confess!"
His highness wound up this somewhat solemn speech, rather inconsistently, bursting out into one of his shrillest peals of laughter; and the miserable Earl of Gloucester, with a gasping, unearthly cry, fell back in the arms of the attendants.
Have mercy on me as you hope for mercy yourself!"
"After that, it shall be precisely as I please!" replied the ringing voice; while the black eyes flashed anything but loving glances upon him.
Not one hair of his head shall fall without my permission; and the first who lays hands on him until that consent is given, shall die, if I have to shoot him myself!
"It is over two hours since I met you at the bar of the Golden Crown."
"Confess your guilt, and expect no pardon from me!"
"While I am queen here, I shall be obeyed; when I am queen no longer, you may do as you please!
"Cut him down!" "Dash his brains out!" "Run him through!" "Shoot him!" were a few of the mild and pleasant insinuations that went off on every side of him, like a fierce volley of pop-guns; and a score of bright blades flashed blue and threatening on every side; while the prince broke out into another shriek of laughter, that rang high over all.
"Quite as well as I wish to," answered Sir Norman, with a cool and rather contemptuous glance in his direction.
"Do not believe the tales they tell you of me.
I confess!
"Good!
"What is to be done with this other prisoner, your highness?" inquired the duke, making a poke with his forefinger at Sir Norman.
"Confess!" once more yelled the dwarf in a terrible voice, while his still more terrible eyes flashed sparks of fire--"confess, or by all that's sacred it shall be tortured out of you.
Ladies and gentlemen, be good enough to resume your seats.
Probably you may be the name; you look fit for that, or anything else."
Now, your grace, continue the trial."
"The rumor of Queen Miranda's charms has gone forth; and I fear I must own that rumor drew me hither," responded Sir Norman, inventing a polite little work of fiction for the occasion; "and, let me add, that I came to find that rumor had under-rated instead of exaggerated her majesty's said charms."
This reference to the ceiling seemed to explain the whole mystery; and everybody looked up at the corner whence he came from, and saw the flag that had been removed.
"I will tell you, with all my heart, only spare my life!"
The bench, with the judge at their head, had followed her example, and stood staring with all their might, looking, truth to tell, as much startled by the sudden apparition as the fair sex.
The queen and the dwarf went first, and a vivid contrast they were--she so young, so beautiful, so proud, so disdainfully cold; he so ugly, so stunted, so deformed, so fiendish.
She recoiled, and drew back her very garments from his touch, as if that touch was pollution, eyeing him the while with a glance frigid and pitiless as death.
Sir Norman Kingsley," said his grace, turning, with awful impressiveness to that young person, "do you know me?"
"Pardon!
You raised that flag yourself--did you not?"
Sir Norman Kingsley, stand near, and fear not.
"Sheathe your swords, my lords, and back every man of you!
THE EXECUTION.
My lord duke, give me the death-warrant, and while her majesty signs it, I will pronounce his doom!"
"You have come, have you, after all I said?"
This is the very individual who slew the Earl of Ashley, while his companion was doing for my Lord Craven.
Your sentence is that you be taken hence, immediately, to the block, and there be beheaded, in punishment of your crime."
Is your majesty ready?"
"Sir Norman Kingsley!
"So you have come, have you?" he cried, thrusting his unlovely visage over the table, till it almost touched sir Norman's.
I am not a baby, and can walk myself."
"What under heaven has come to her now?" he thought, hastening in, wondering how she could possibly have come to grief since he left her.
Oh, I wish I were home!"
"Thank you, sir," said the faint voice, faintly; "but I would rather walk.
That that face was ugly, he did not for an instant believe, or, at least, it never would be ugly to him.
Shocks of joy, they tell me, seldom kill.
Hardly could the fisherman catch his breath from one strange thing when another happened.
"Whose turn is it next?" said Doctor Faustus, lighting a fresh pipe of tobacco.
If it was not all a dream, he was rich for life.
"Now," said the old man, "throw your leg over what you feel and hold fast."
Nothing was left for him to do but grip tightly with hands and feet and to hold fast.
"Well, that is pretty hard upon a man who likes to say his say," said the fisherman.
She waved her hand, and the chief treasurer took a bag from the chest, untied it, and emptied a cataract of gold into the fur cap.
Out they stepped, and then what do you suppose happened?
"So be it," said the beautiful lady.
Well, on they went, out from the town and across the fields and through the woods, until at last they came to a dreary, lonesome desert, where nothing was to be seen but gray rocks and weeds and thistles.
"And moreover," said the old man, "I must blindfold you as well."
"Land sakes alive!" exclaimed Dinah.
Mamma says the ocean sings a lullaby that cures all sorts of bad dreams and sleeplessness."
"It always makes me feel so small and helpless."
On the veranda Nan and Dorothy joined the others.
"I felt that way the other day.
A QUEER STAGE DRIVER
"Aunt Emily and Dorothy!" exclaimed Bert, and called back to them:
But when it came to be night and you had not arrived, I set out looking for you.
Uncle William took Mrs. Manily to her place, as she was a stranger; Bert sat between Dorothy and Nan, Mr. Bobbsey looked after Aunt Emily, and Mr. Jack Burnet, a friend of Uncle William, who had been spending the evening at the cottage, escorted Mrs. Bobbsey to her place.
"He's wonderful! He even tried to swim without any water, on the train."
On the dresser, in a cut-glass bowl, were little Nettie Prentice's lilies that Nan had carried all the way from Meadow Brook, and they were freshened up beautifully, thanks to Dorothy's thoughtfulness in giving them a cold spray in the bath tub.
"I tell you, Freddie," said Uncle William, quite seriously: "we could get an airship for him maybe; then he could really swim without water."
"You will have to put him in a bag and tie a rope to him then," Uncle William teased, "because that's the only way a duck can swim in the ocean."
"We had been waiting for you since four o'clock," replied Uncle William.
"I am sure we are all right now," Mrs. Manily assured her.
I happened to be near enough to the livery stable to hear some fellows talking about Hank's breakdown, with a big party aboard.
"But he has to swim in the ocean," insisted Freddie, "'cause we're going to train him to be a circus duck."
"But how did you know where we were?" Bert asked.
"Come right along, my boy.
Why, a little grease and a few bolts will put that rig in tip-top order." And he never made the slightest excuse for the troubles he had brought upon the Bobbseys.
There was not much chance for greetings as everybody was too anxious to get out of the old wagon.
During the dinner, Dinah helped the waitress, being perhaps a little jealous that any other maid should look after the wants of Flossie and Freddie.
"Through the looking glass!" said Bert, laughing.
"Not worth it?
"Hold on tight," replied Hank, as if the whole thing were a joke, and his wagon had the privilege of a toboggan slide.
The sun seems to rise just under this window," and she brushed aside the dainty curtains.
"Hello!
"Here comes a carriage," said Bert, as two pretty coach lights flashed through the trees.
"Oh, we did have the awfulest time," insisted Freddie.
"My!" sighed Mrs. Bobbsey, putting her arms closer about Flossie, "I hope nothing more happens."
"I think the ocean is so grand," she said.
"We were an awfully long time getting here," Nan answered, returning her cousin's caress, "but we had so many accidents."
"How did you do that?" asked Nan, in sympathy.
"Here we come!
I guess Hank don't go back on the old coach like that.
"I've been worried to death," declared Aunt Emily, as she began kissing the girls.
The moonlight made a bright path out on the ocean and Nan stood looking out, spellbound.
"We've got a lovely little pond for him, Freddie," said Dorothy. "There is a real little lake out near my donkey barn, and your duck will have a lovely time there."
"Nothing happened to your appetites, I hope," laughed Uncle William, as the dining-room doors were swung open and a table laden with good things came into sight.
She had married earlier than her sister, Mrs. Bobbsey, but kept up her good times in spite of the home cares that followed.
But Freddie took no notice of the way they tried to make fun of his duck, for he felt Downy was really wonderful, as he said, and would do some wonderful things as soon as it got a chance.
"I think I could eat," said Mrs. Bobbsey, then the mechanical piano player was started, and the party made their way to the dining room.
"Do you like it?" said Dorothy.
Bert you have put your foot right into my best hat!"
"It has a lovely view of the ocean and I chose it for you because I know you like to see pretty sights out of your window.
"It does seem much longer than a day since we started."
I went to the Junction first, and the agent there told me you had gone in Hank's stage.
"And through the air," added Nan.
"I thought my arm was broken first.
"But you don't know about Downy," argued Freddie.
"I hardly think it is worth moving," Mr. Bobbsey said, feeling somewhat indignant that a hackman should impose upon his passengers by risking their lives in such a broken-down wagon.
"Then I found out that the train was late, and we waited some more.
"Ran into a pier," returned the cousin, with unconcern.
"Oh, my!" cried Nan, "my hatbox!
"Oh, Dinah!" exclaimed Freddie, as she came in with more milk for him, "did you take Snoop out of the box and did you give Downy some water?"
"Hello there!" called someone from the carriage.
"We are delighted to have you," said Aunt Emily to Mrs. Manily, while they all made their way indoors.
Hello!" called voices from the veranda.
"Oh, Nan!" cried Dorothy, hugging her cousin as tightly as ever she could, "I thought you would never come!"
"When you are under a big wave," laughed her cousin, who had a way of being jolly.
When dinner was over, Dorothy took Nan up to her room.
It was quite a brilliant dinner party, for the Minturns were well-to-do and enjoyed their prosperity as they went along. Mrs. Minturn had been a society belle when she was married.
The waitress, too, told about the flying duck, and everybody enjoyed hearing about the pranks of Freddie's animals.
This one is breakin' down every minute."
"We always sit outside before retiring.
She was now a graceful young hostess, with a handsome husband.
I'll fix you up first," declared the uncle, giving his little nephew a good hug as he placed him on the comfortable cushions inside the big carriage.
I knew then what had happened, and sent Dorothy home,--she had been out most of the afternoon waiting--got this carryall, and here we are," and Uncle William only had to hint "hurry up" to his horses and away they went.
Oh, I can just imagine myself doing it.
"She's got too much to say," thought Marilla, "but she might be trained out of that.
It's likely her people were nice folks."
My mother's name was Bertha Shirley.
Of course, I wasn't in the Fifth Reader--I was only in the Fourth--but the big girls used to lend me theirs to read."
Marilla asked no more questions.
"Shore road sounds nice," said Anne dreamily.
"Did you ever go to school?" demanded Marilla, turning the sorrel mare down the shore road.
"Were those women--Mrs.
Redheaded people can't wear pink, not even in imagination.
"I guess it doesn't matter what a person's name is as long as he behaves himself," said Marilla, feeling herself called upon to inculcate a good and useful moral.
"I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it.
I lived it over in happy dreams for years. But this shore is nicer than the Marysville shore.
She had twins three times.
It just sounds like music.
Do you know if there is anything in being brought up by hand that ought to make people who are brought up that way better than other people?
They didn't want me at the asylum, either; they said they were over-crowded as it was.
Did you ever know of anybody whose hair was red when she was young, but got to be another color when she grew up?"
I'm so glad my parents had nice names. It would be a real disgrace to have a father named--well, say Jedediah, wouldn't it?"
I should think a mother would be a better judge than a poor woman who came in to scrub, wouldn't you?
And there's nothing rude or slangy in what she does say. She's ladylike.
Wouldn't it be nice if roses could talk?
Her sensitive little face suddenly flushed scarlet and embarrassment sat on her brow.
I used to get so dreadfully tired carrying them about.
There is a piece in the Fifth Reader--'The Downfall of Poland'--that is just full of thrills.
"Why, because it sounds so nice and romantic, just as if I were a heroine in a book, you know.
I think I would--that is, if I couldn't be a human girl.
It was a pity she had to be sent back.
I told Mrs. Hammond so firmly, when the last pair came.
I like babies in moderation, but twins three times in succession is TOO MUCH.
"I don't see where the comforting comes in myself," said Marilla.
"No, I don't know as I ever did," said Marilla mercilessly, "and I shouldn't think it likely to happen in your case either."
How far is it to White Sands?"
Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?
Avonlea is a lovely name.
CHAPTER V. Anne's History
"Is it as nice as it sounds?
Aren't Walter and Bertha lovely names?
Just you stick to bald facts. Begin at the beginning.
"Well, I don't know." Anne looked thoughtful.
The shore road was "woodsy and wild and lonesome." On the right hand, scrub firs, their spirits quite unbroken by long years of tussle with the gulf winds, grew thickly.
Pity was suddenly stirring in her heart for the child.
And White Sands is a pretty name, too; but I don't like it as well as Avonlea.
What a starved, unloved life she had had--a life of drudgery and poverty and neglect; for Marilla was shrewd enough to read between the lines of Anne's history and divine the truth.
I had to go to the asylum at Hopeton, because nobody would take me.
"No, I don't want any of your imaginings.
Of course, you must make it up FIRMLY.
She brought me up by hand.
I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.
"Do you know," said Anne confidentially, "I've made up my mind to enjoy this drive.
But of course I went while I was at the asylum.
I think it would be so sweet to say 'mother,' don't you?
She divided her children among her relatives and went to the States.
Are we going across the Lake of Shining Waters today?"
Because whenever I was naughty Mrs. Thomas would ask me how I could be such a bad girl when she had brought me up by hand--reproachful-like.
You see, nobody wanted me even then.
And when people mean to be good to you, you don't mind very much when they're not quite--always.
I've never seen that house, but I've imagined it thousands of times.
Isn't it lovely?
"Not a great deal.
I do wish she'd lived long enough for me to remember calling her mother.
Mr. Hammond worked a little sawmill up there, and Mrs. Hammond had eight children.
We're going by the shore road."
And father died four days afterwards from fever too.
"Well, that is another hope gone.
"I was eleven last March," said Anne, resigning herself to bald facts with a little sigh.
"If you'll only let me tell you what I IMAGINE about myself you'll think it ever so much more interesting."
I was born in that house.
I'm sure they could tell us such lovely things.
I'm just going to think about the drive.
I love it, but I can't wear it.
But they had to take me and I was there four months until Mrs. Spencer came."
Mrs. Thomas was at HER wits' end, so she said, what to do with me.
What if she, Marilla, should indulge Matthew's unaccountable whim and let her stay?
Mrs. Lynde says I'm full of original sin.
But oh, Marilla, it's a solemn occasion too.
I just gazed at her in awe.
Her name is Miss Muriel Stacy.
I really think I'd like to be a minister's wife when I grow up, Marilla.
"The trouble with you, Anne, is that you're thinking too much about yourself.
I love her passionately.
Mrs. Lynde came to the manse just before I left, and what do you think, Marilla?
I feel so anxious. What if I shouldn't behave properly?
She was dressed in the sweetest dress of pale-pink organdy, with dozens of frills and elbow sleeves, and she looked just like a seraph.
The trustees have hired a new teacher and it's a lady.
After tea Mrs. Allan played and sang and she got Lauretta and me to sing too. Mrs. Allan says I have a good voice and she says I must sing in the Sunday-school choir after this.
A TIPSY PARSON.
An individual immediately volunteered to go in search of him.
He would neither join a temperance society, nor omit his glass of wine when he felt inclined to take it.
At last, after the occurrence of a dinner-party given by a family of some note in the place, and at which the minister was present, and at which wine was circulated freely, a rather scandalous report got abroad, and soon went buzzing all over the village.
"Yes--think of that.
"Then," said Perkins, "if there was a drunken minister there, it must have been Mr. Manlius.
We have conversed this morning with several who were present, and all say that they observed nothing out of the way in Mr. Manlius, on the occasion of which you speak.
"I did," was the unhesitating answer.
"Indeed.
Yes--it's written in his face," returned Deacon Todd.
And, pray, upon what authority?"
But as for myself, I would cut off my right hand before I would bind myself by mere external restraint.
"That you had a drunken minister at dinner?"
He pretend to preach the gospel!
"So much for opposing temperance reforms and drinking wine.
To sign because another man, whom you think more respectable, has signed, will give you little or no strength. You must do it for yourself, and because it is right."
"Did he tell you that Mr. Manlius was intoxicated?"
"Were you present at Mr. Reeside's?"
If they think it right, it is right for them.
"But you did, I can be qualified to it."
"All I said was, that we had a tipsy parson--and so we had.
"He says he would cut off his right hand first."
"I call no names," was repeated.
On the next day, in grave council assembled were all the deacons of the church, besides sundry individuals who had come as the minister's friends or accusers.
"It was Manlius, wasn't it?" urged the other.
"You were at Mr. Reeside's last week, at a dinner-party, I believe?" said the presiding deacon.
I am temperate because intemperance is sin.
"A tipsy parson."
Sundry were the attacks, both open and secret, to which the Reverend Mr. Manlius was subjected, and many were the discussions into which he was drawn by the advocates of total abstinence.
Perkins, who had put the report in circulation, was there, at the special request of one of the deacons, who had ascertained that he had as much, or a little more to say, in the matter, than any one.
He must be suspended, and not restored until he signs the pledge."
If he signs the pledge, he's safe."
The man's eyes became instantly almost as big as saucers.
"He does more harm to the temperance cause than ten drunkards," alleged a third.
Never before, in a grave and solemn assembly of deacons, was there such a sudden and universal burst of laughter, such a holding of sides and vibration of bodies, as followed this unexpected speech. In the midst of the confusion and noise, Perkins quietly retired.
I call no names."
"You say so?
"He's a disgrace to his profession!"
"Mr. Manlius!
"A what?"
"I don't believe he'll ever do that."
"I was."
I shall go for suspending him until he signs the pledge."
"No."
"I wish to be free to choose good or evil, and to act right because it is wrong to do otherwise.
Don't you remember what you said to me?"
For men who have abused their freedom, and so far lost all rational control over themselves that they cannot resist the insane spirit of intemperance, the pledge is all important.
Perkins was much excited.
From lip to lip the scandal flew, with little less than electric quickness.
It is only fair to say, however, that such spirituous indulgences were not of frequent occurrence.
"Was that so?" asked the deacon of an individual who was at Mr. Reeside's.
My bonds are internal principles.
He has been known, ever since, in the village, much to his chagrin and scandalization, he being still a warm temperance man, as the "tipsy parson."
"A tipsy parson."
I'll prove it before a jury of a thousand, if necessary."
"Mr. Manlius was the only clergyman there," was replied.
"I don't know but that I will go with you.
Do it for yourself, and do it if you are the only man in the world who acts thus.
"I didn't say so.
"But you did tell me so."
"When?"
"People are very fond of cutting off their right hand, you know.
Mr. Manlius was drunk at Mr. Reeside's dinner-party?"
Sign it, I say, in the name of Heaven; but do not sign it because this, that, or the other temperate man has signed it, but because you feel it to be your only hope.
What wonderful thing was that?"
"He was present, I know; and drank wine, I am told, like a fish."
"Did you see Mr. Manlius intoxicated on that occasion?"
Perkins was called upon, rather unexpectedly, to answer one or two questions, immediately on the opening of the meeting, but as he was a stanch temperance man, and cordially despised the minister, he was bold to reply.
"I would no more sign a pledge not to drink brandy than I would sign a pledge not to steal," was the position he took.
Good heavens!
While others said--"Isn't it scandalous!"
It's a judgment upon him."
He did not appear in the least abashed.
"He'll turn out a drunkard," said one.
His mode of argument was very summary.
I wonder he isn't struck dead in the pulpit."
All this time, Mr. Manlius firmly maintained his ground, taking his glass of wine whenever it suited him.
As he entered the grave assembly, he looked around with great composure upon the array of solemn faces and eyes intently fixed upon him.
Monday came, and, early in the day, a committee of two deacons waited upon Mr. Manlius, and informed him of the report in circulation, and of their wish that he would appear before them on the next afternoon, to give an account of himself, as the church deemed the matter far too serious to be passed lightly over.
"No, I never said that."
The minister was evidently a good deal surprised and startled at this, but he neither denied the charge nor attempted any palliation, merely saying that he would attend, of course.
"What evidence, then, have you of the truth of your charge?
"But what a scandal to our church!" said Deacon Jones.
My word for it, this will do the business for him.
"Plain?
no! I can testify, upon oath, that he was as solemn as a judge.
"Can Mr. Burton be found?" was now asked.
"My authority is Mr. Burton, who was present."
The moment his informant had left him, Perkins started forth to communicate the astounding intelligence that Mr. Manlius had been drunk on the day before, at Mr. Reeside's dinner-party.
At the words "tipsy parson," the minister burst into a loud laugh, and so did two or three others who had been at Mr. Reeside's.
In half an hour he was produced.
I can draw no other inference."
"Why not?"
"I said we had a 'tipsy parson.'"
I do not find fault with others for signing a pledge, nor for abstaining from wine.
"Who?
Some doubted, some denied, but the majority believed the story--it was so likely to be true.
"Upon the authority of your own words."
CHAPTER IX
"Of course one looks up to one's brother," said Miss Molyneux simply.
"My brother's position?" Miss Molyneux enquired.
You're making fun of me," said Isabel seriously.
She had this pleasure a few days later, when, with Ralph and his mother, she drove over to Lockleigh.
"I'm sorry if I make that impression on you; I don't think it's a nice impression to make."
I'm quite in my aunt's hands."
"But if I were he I should wish to fight to the death: I mean for the heritage of the past.
"Doubtless not; and yet, at the same time, I don't think your uncle likes me."
The two Misses Molyneux, this nobleman's sisters, came presently to call upon her, and Isabel took a fancy to the young ladies, who appeared to her to show a most original stamp.
She was much too fond of Heathcliff.
This was especially to be remarked if any one attempted to impose upon, or domineer over, his favourite: he was painfully jealous lest a word should be spoken amiss to him; seeming to have got into his head the notion that, because he liked Heathcliff, all hated, and longed to do him an ill-turn.
After behaving as badly as possible all day, she sometimes came fondling to make it up at night.
I hoped heartily we should have peace now.
He had been active and healthy, yet his strength left him suddenly; and when he was confined to the chimney-corner he grew grievously irritable.
In the course of time Mr. Earnshaw began to fail.
'I shall bid father good-night first,' said Catherine, putting her arms round his neck, before we could hinder her.
CHAPTER V
It was a disadvantage to the lad; for the kinder among us did not wish to fret the master, so we humoured his partiality; and that humouring was rich nourishment to the child's pride and black tempers.
He told me to put on my cloak and run to Gimmerton for the doctor and the parson. I could not guess the use that either would be of, then.
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window.
"Well, she ought to go abroad," said Mrs. Ludlow.
Since his death she had seemed to see him as turning his braver side to his children and as not having managed to ignore the ugly quite so much in practice as in aspiration.
He had squandered a substantial fortune, he had been deplorably convivial, he was known to have gambled freely. A few very harsh critics went so far as to say that he had not even brought up his daughters.
"But you know you love her."
"She has offered to take her--she's dying to have Isabel go.
She was restless and even agitated; at moments she trembled a little.
Isabel delayed for some minutes to go to him; she moved about the room with a new sense of complications.
"If I were not sure you only said that for argument I should feel very badly," his wife replied.
CHAPTER IV
"Make her a big present?"
You know you've always thought Isabel rather foreign."
"I want to see her safely married--that's what I want to see," she frequently noted to her husband.
"She's just the person to go abroad."
These things now, as memory played over them, resolved themselves into a multitude of scenes and figures.
Mrs. Ludlow was the eldest of the three sisters, and was usually thought the most sensible; the classification being in general that Lilian was the practical one, Edith the beauty and Isabel the "intellectual" superior.
I don't feel grand at all."
But Isabel challenged this assertion with a good deal of seriousness. "You must not say that, Lily.
"I hope she isn't going to develop any more!"
Her father had kept it away from her--her handsome, much loved father, who always had such an aversion to it.
She has lived so much in foreign society; she told Isabel all about it.
I can't make her out.
"And you want the old lady to take her, is that it?"
"No indeed; nothing of the sort.
She had never felt equally moved to it by any other person.
What it would bring with it was as yet extremely indefinite; but Isabel was in a situation that gave a value to any change.
"Whenever I feel grand," said the girl, "it will be for a better reason."
"A chance for what?"
He was tall, strong and somewhat stiff; he was also lean and brown.
"What is it you wish her to do?" Edmund Ludlow asked.
She's evidently just the sort of person to appreciate her.
"A chance to develop."
"I know you say that for argument; you always take the opposite ground. I don't see what you've against her except that she's so original."
She had a desire to leave the past behind her and, as she said to herself, to begin afresh.
"I'm sure there's no harm," said the conciliatory Lily.
For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back.
"Don't lag, boys.
"The meat!" she exclaimed, striking the latch down.
The sea holly would grow through the eye-sockets; it would turn to powder, or some golfer, hitting his ball one fine day, would disperse a little dust--No, but not in lodgings, thought Mrs. Flanders.
How it spread over the town in the hollow!
It was hot; rather sticky and steamy.
Something snapped out of doors.
The wind blew straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they passed through the light.
Mrs. Flanders rose, slapped her coat this side and that to get the sand off, and picked up her black parasol.
He was about to roar when, lying among the black sticks and straw under the cliff, he saw a whole skull--perhaps a cow's skull, a skull, perhaps, with the teeth in it. Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he held the skull in his arms.
The lighthouse was lit.
There was Rebecca at the window.
"Throw it away, dear, do," she said, as they got into the road; but Jacob squirmed away from her; and the wind rising, she took out her bonnet-pin, looked at the sea, and stuck it in afresh.
"Good-night, Rebecca," Mrs. Flanders murmured, and Rebecca called her ma'm, though they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles.
But there, on the very top, is a hollow full of water, with a sandy bottom; with a blob of jelly stuck to the side, and some mussels.
"I thought he'd never get off--such a hurricane," she whispered to Rebecca, who was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door. The wind rushed outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burnt quietly, shaded from the cot by a book stood on edge.
"It's only the bath water running away," said Mrs. Flanders.
Here was that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her!
Archer could not sleep.
Clean, white, wind-swept, sand-rubbed, a more unpolluted piece of bone existed nowhere on the coast of Cornwall.
Naughty little boy!
"Of course it won't," said Mrs. Flanders.
There he stood.
"What has he got hold of? Put it down, Jacob!
His face composed itself.
The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it.
Their lips were pursed.
"Come along," said Betty Flanders.
Nanny!" he cried, sobbing the words out on the crest of each gasping breath.
"Took the sacrament and all."
Today all the significance of his book rose before him with special distinctness, and whole periods ranged themselves in his mind in illustration of his theories.
"Of one's soul's salvation we all know and must think before all else," she said with a sigh.
"That ought to form a brief introduction, which I thought unnecessary before." He got up to go to his writing table, and Laska, lying at his feet, got up too, stretching and looking at him as though to inquire where to go.
As if you hadn't done enough for the peasants!
Laska lay under the table; Agafea Mihalovna settled herself in her place with her stocking.
Because a just idea cannot but be fruitful.
"Oh, come, you say yourself Ivan has begun looking after the cattle better."
You ought to go to some warm springs, especially now you're ready for the journey."
After his levee, that is to say, giving directions about the labors of the next day, and seeing all the peasants who had business with him, Levin went back to his study and sat down to work.
In short, a bloodless revolution, but a revolution of the greatest magnitude, beginning in the little circle of our district, then the province, then Russia, the whole world.
Agafea Mihalovna's allusion to the very subject he had only just been thinking about, hurt and stung him.
Why, as 'tis, they're saying, 'Your master will be getting some honor from the Tsar for it.' Indeed and it is a strange thing; why need you worry about the peasants?"
After writing for a little while, Levin suddenly thought with exceptional vividness of Kitty, her refusal, and their last meeting.
An agreement had been made with the old servant, and on the road the bailiff had learned that everywhere the corn was still standing in the fields, so that his one hundred and sixty shocks that had not been carried were nothing in comparison with the losses of others.
Levin often put his views before her in all their complexity, and not uncommonly he argued with her and did not agree with her comments.
But the rains began, preventing the harvesting of the corn and potatoes left in the fields, and putting a stop to all work, even to the delivery of the wheat.
At the end of September the timber had been carted for building the cattleyard on the land that had been allotted to the association of peasants, and the butter from the cows was sold and the profits divided. In practice the system worked capitally, or, at least, so it seemed to Levin.
Yes, it's an aim worth working for. And its being me, Kostya Levin, who went to a ball in a black tie, and was refused by the Shtcherbatskaya girl, and who was intrinsically such a pitiful, worthless creature--that proves nothing; I feel sure Franklin felt just as worthless, and he too had no faith in himself, thinking of himself as a whole.
Instead of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests.
"Well, whatever you do, if he's a lazy good-for-nought, everything'll be at sixes and sevens.
"I mean that I'm acting for my own advantage.
And he too, most likely, had an Agafea Mihalovna to whom he confided his secrets."
"What's the use of being dreary?" said Agafea Mihalovna.
That means nothing.
The whole system of culture, the chief element in the condition of the people, must be completely transformed.
"I have only to go stubbornly on towards my aim, and I shall attain my end," thought Levin; "and it's something to work and take trouble for. This is not a matter of myself individually; the question of the public welfare comes into it.
It's all the better for me if the peasants do their work better."
"Come, why do you stay on at home?
"I must write that down," he thought.
Musing on such thoughts Levin reached home in the darkness.
On the 30th of September the sun came out in the morning, and hoping for fine weather, Levin began making final preparations for his journey.
The old servant to whose hut he had gone to get dry evidently approved of Levin's plan, and of his own accord proposed to enter the partnership by the purchase of cattle.
He got up and began walking about the room.
The mud was impassable along the roads; two mills were carried away, and the weather got worse and worse.
"Well, I am going away the day after tomorrow, Agafea Mihalovna; I must finish my work."
If he has a conscience, he'll work, and if not, there's no doing anything."
"There, there, your work, you say!
Levin scowled, and without answering her, he sat down again to his work, repeating to himself all that he had been thinking of the real significance of that work.
Agafea Mihalovna knew every detail of Levin's plans for his land.
But he had not time to write it down, for the head peasants had come round, and Levin went out into the hall to them.
The talks he had been having with the peasants in the further village had shown that they were beginning to get used to their new position.
But on this occasion she entirely misinterpreted what he had said.
Levin was only waiting for the delivery of his wheat to receive the money for it and go abroad.
In spite of the gloominess of nature around him, he felt peculiarly eager.
The bailiff, who had been to the merchant, had come back and brought part of the money for the wheat.
"I'm not worrying about them; I'm doing it for my own good."
"Parfen Denisitch now, for all he was no scholar, he died a death that God grant every one of us the like," she said, referring to a servant who had died recently.
The sight moved Genji's sympathy as he gazed.
The dominant idea of her father seems to be this: 'What, have I sunk to such a position!
Genji was taken to an airy room in the southern front of the building, where incense which was burning threw its sweet odors around.
He was evidently a man of great holiness.
"The dews will not so quickly pass, Nor shall depart before they see The full perfection of the grass, They loved so well in infancy."
Would that she would always strive to keep it thus.
Genji observing this movement quickly returned to the monastery, thinking as he went what a lovely girl he had seen.
"Strange, indeed, would it be if he were to discover that I am here in this privacy." They noticed a nun and a few more females with her walking in the garden, who were carrying fresh water for their offerings, and were gathering flowers. "Ah! there are ladies walking there," cried the attendants in tones of surprise.
Even those people who have no sorrow of their own often feel melancholy from the circumstances in which they are placed.
Be a good girl; come nearer!"
Will you speak to her grandmother about it?
Genji was alone.
The natives of the deep would derive no pleasure from her charms," remarked Genji, while he himself secretly desired to behold her.
Who can they be?" And some of them even descended a little distance, and peered over the enclosure, where a pretty little girl was also seen amongst them.
So the attendant went back, and presented it to the nun.
The days at this season were of long duration, and he felt it rather tiresome to pass a whole evening in sedate society, so, under the cover of the shades of the evening, he went out of the Temple, and proceeded to the pretty building enclosed by hedges.
"Did she leave any offspring?"
At this juncture a priest entered and said, "Do you know that this very day Prince Genji visited the hermit in order to be exorcised by him.
The thought troubled him that he would never be free from the sting of these recollections through his life, and that there was a world to come, too!
The day was far advanced, and the Prince prepared to leave the mountain.
Well! his widow is my sister, and since her husband's death her health has not been satisfactory, so lately she has been living here in retirement."
"Perhaps you are the one who sent for me the other day?
Successive governors often offer their addresses to her with great sincerity, but no one has ever yet been accepted.
"If," added the friend, "the disease is neglected it becomes serious; try therefore, this method of procuring relief at once, and before it is too late."
The fountain was lit up by torches, and many lamps also were lighted in the garden.
The priest laughed, and said, "A strange dream! even were you to obtain your wish it might not gratify you.
She seemed to be rather more than forty years old.
The priest related to him many interesting anecdotes, and also spoke eloquently of man's future destiny.
There was immediately beyond the winding path in which they were walking a picturesque and pretty building enclosed by hedges.
Here, too, the home of the former Governor of the Province constitutes an object of great attraction.
Genji was much interested in this conversation, and the rest of the company laughingly said, "Ah! she is a woman who is likely to become the Queen of the Blue Main.
Yet his nobility of manners was easily recognizable.
The girl advanced and stood silent before her, her face being bathed in tears.
But the Prince's wife was very jealous and severe, so she had much to suffer and put up with.
His attendants also supported this suggestion.
The sky was again hazy, and here and there melodious birds were singing among the mountain shrubs and flowers that blossomed around.
One of them went on to say: "Among such sights and at no great distance, there is the sea-coast of Akashi, in the Province of Harima, which is, I think, especially beautiful.
"To you," said the nun to the girl, "the sparrow may be dearer than I may be, who am so ill; but have I not told you often that the caging of birds is a sin?
But"--she continued, wonderingly--"how could he have known about the young grass?" And she then remained silent for a while.
"Then," said Genji, "let it not appear strange to you if I say this, but I should be very happy to become the guardian of this girl.
Her society could not afford you any pleasure; and forgive me, therefore, if I decline your request."
"What shall I do?" exclaimed Genji, "shall I visit him privately?" Eventually, taking four or five attendants, he started off early one morning for the place, which was at no great distance on the mountain.
Broken and indistinct, one might hear the melancholy sound of the sleepy intonation of prayers.
"Yes, she had a daughter, but she died about ten years ago.
"Surely you should know, sir, that there is no one here to whom such things can be presented!"
"Welcome your visit!" cried the hermit, saluting him.
At length he was told by a friend that in a certain temple on the northern mountain (Mount Kurama) there dwelt a famous ascetic, and that when the epidemic had prevailed during the previous summer, many people had recovered through his exorcisms.
His attendants, who were anxious about his disease, told him that it would be good for him to have a change from time to time.
He has assumed the tonsure, and resides there with his beautiful daughter.
"Surely, the Reverend Father would not indulge in flirtations!
Her hair was thrown back from her forehead and was cut short behind, which suited her very well.
"You say your sleeve is wet with dew, 'Tis but one night alone for you, But there's a mountain moss grows nigh, Whose leaves from dew are never dry."
They told him it was a house in which a certain priest had been living for the last two years.
In that same position your little one is now.
Her extreme youth makes me anxious, however.
They peeped at this building through the hedges.
Genji accepted the offer, thinking as he went, "I wonder what the priest has said at home about myself to those to whom I have not yet been introduced.
Allow us, then, to become friends.
The night passed away, and dawn appeared.
If, however, the spells of the holy man are of no avail to me, his reputation might suffer in consequence.
He then asked the Prince to excuse him, for it was the hour for vespers, and as he quitted the room to attend the service, said he would return as soon as it was finished.
The priest said this with a grave and even a stern expression on his countenance, which caused Genji to drop the subject.
Shionagon, who now joined them, and heard the above distich, consoled the nun with the following:--
The spot where they stood was very lofty, and numerous monasteries were visible, scattered here and there in the distance beneath.
It is true that there is one to whom my lot is linked, but I care but little for her, and indeed usually lead a solitary life."
The priest said he was going to vespers, but in reality it was later than the proper time for them.
"What can be the matter," said an attendant, and as she came near to the Prince's room she added, "Perhaps my ear was deceived," and she began to retire.
"What possible object could it serve if she were carried to the bottom of the sea?
But I fancy I have taught him a lesson at last.
"Now what about your return ticket?
He looked at me in horror.
"Do," I said briefly.
XIV.
"It's awfully nice of you, Herbert.
Well, well, he'll have to get home somehow.
"And the trap starts in half an hour."
"You can buy another ticket, and get the money back afterwards."
He had never even heard of Herbert.
It was a century very Byzantine in tone.
There was no surveillance, but a certain amount of attention.
The Comprachicos traded in children.
Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his complicity.
These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction.
This powder has been known from time immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present day.
A masterpiece in retrogression.
At least they took away all they could of it; the child had no consciousness of the mutilation to which he had been subjected.
It was, as we have said, a fellowship.
Nature is our canvas.
Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear altogether.
A child destined to be a plaything for men--such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now.
It was a sort of harlequin people, all composed of rags.
The sale of men was a simple matter.
We play with childhood.
This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic records--notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta of France, daughter of Henri IV., and wife of Charles I.
It is possible, nay probable (their chiefs remaining unknown), that the wholesale contractors in the trade were rich.
There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a mighty measure.
This facilitated confiscation; the tranfer of titles to favourites was simplified.
China is a museum of embryos.
A unity of idea, a unity of superstition, the pursuit of the same calling, make such fusions.
Thus gymnasts were made.
If we are to believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery was a monk named Avonmore--an Irish word signifying Great River.
Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion.
The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all our inventions--printing, artillery, aerostation, chloroform.
They lived among themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat of the merry-andrew.
Finally, their religions differ--the gipsies were Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.
James II. went away to die in exile, miracles were performed on his tomb, and his relics cured the Bishop of Autun of fistula--a worthy recompense of the Christian virtues of the prince.
They did not steal them.
They were of all countries.
Monsters.
The Comprachicos had a genius for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy.
At the same time they tried to make a man of the monkey.
Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment to note a peculiarity.
The Court buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey.
To laugh at.
Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page. Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons, had tea served by a baboon clad in cold brocade, which her ladyship called My Black.
They would touch up a little being with such skill that its father could not have known it.
We may imagine, with the uneasy feeling which a complicated scandal arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown in cheap.
In simple and savage times such a thing constituted an especial trade.
There was scarcely an example of their having betrayed the secrets of the king.
Man has always wished to add something to God's work.
They debased animals as well; they invented piebald horses.
They encamped here and there, but they were grave and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of theft.
English law being endowed with a strange longevity, this punishment still exists in English legislation for quarrelsome women.
The suppression of his state was completed by disfigurement.
Kings went to the Elector of Hesse as we go to the butcher to buy meat.
A retired officer was generally selected for this honourable employment.
We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette forgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream--which was, indeed, a grave breach of good manners in a lady of the court.
The Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees.
In England, under Jeffreys, after the tragical episode of Monmouth, there were many lords and gentlemen beheaded and quartered.
Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequenos, is a compound Spanish word signifying Child-buyers.
As for us, we do not confound a battue with a persecution.
We are obliged to renounce these experiments now, and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the executioner.
James II. could not be hostile to holy men who pushed their devotion to the Virgin to the extent of manufacturing eunuchs.
To disfigure is better than to kill.
Even in the kingdoms where their business supplied the courts, and, on occasions, served as an auxiliary to the royal power, they were now and then suddenly ill-treated.
In our own time we have had fighting to maintain this right.
The Comprachicos were, moreover, very discreet and very taciturn.
You are masked for ever by your own flesh--what can be more ingenious?
Who now knows the word Comprachicos, and who knows its meaning?
"For such is our pleasure."
Those who were executed left wives and daughters, widows and orphans, whom James II. gave to the queen, his wife.
It is the art of moulding a living man.
At all epochs in history one finds in the vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of venomous men exuding poison around them.
Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints dislocated in a masterly manner--you would have said they had been boned.
Hence grew an art.
We have seen why.
It abounded in varieties.
Flattering historians have concealed the sore, but have divulged the remedy, Vincent de Paul.
Her Gracious Majesty made a good business out of these ladies.
They were particularly devoted to Mary.
A suspicious appearance, that indescribable something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient reason that society should take a man by the collar.
Whatever you may think of them, they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous.
They were thus of use in a political point of view.
To the great eye of history, which sees everything collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery. Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story.
These monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalized and bestialized.
He did not know.
The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe; rather a residuum than a fellowship.
The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are at times worthy of the attention of the philosopher.
James II. tolerated the Comprachicos for the good reason that he made use of them; at least it happened that he did so more than once.
It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity--a curious variety of civilization.
Why monsters?
The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild in the latter.
They are part of old human ugliness.
That modern thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant, was alone understood.
Of burnings by sulphur and incisions by the iron he remembered nothing.
The commerce in children in the 17th century, as we have explained, was connected with a trade.
A sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and wonderful.
At times one branch was defrauded to the profit of another.
Penn's purchase is excused, or explained, by the fact that having a desert to sow with men, he needed women as farming implements.
It may be that the Truth can never be grasped, never be weighed or formulated.
The sky folded in, large but inscrutable.
The sun rose calm and passionless, but dumb.
The stars go on. Nature goes on.
Then shall man--shall I--"
As the day came on, the sounds of lamentation arose.
This, too, I could hear.
Shall one claim wisdom beyond his neighbor?
Then I knew that one who had long been sick had passed away.
Then--for I could see and hear with him--there came to that young man when he ceased to seek, the very exaltation he had longed to know.
Where has the spark of life gone?
Tell me of these things."
None the less arose the voice of lamentation and of woe.
There are many words.
I could hear the solemn and exalted peal of the organ.
What one man sees is not what another sees.
How do we reach it?
The friends of that one wept.
This grass, these trees, may hold it.
Are not the stars his also, and the trees his, to talk with him?
It seemed a picture of actual colors, and I could see it plainly.
So now I thought I began to see what I had not seen before.
The Singing Mouse again seemed to hesitate.
He has lived again in the cycle of natural forces.
I could see the rafters as I lay.
I looked upon the glorious pageant of the stars.
The organ, or the waves, spoke on. I looked up, up, into the great circle of the sky, so far, so blue, so kind in its bending over, so pitying it seemed to me, yet so high in its up-reaching.
I saw a youth who stood with one older and of austere garb.
And the sparrows, which fall to the ground, answered not.
Again there was a church or a cathedral.
One morning I lay upon my bed in the little room which I call my home.
I saw the young man cast himself face down among the cushions of a seat, and there he lay and listened to the music.
"Your vision is too narrow.
I may be lying on his grave.
"Creep home and take your place there, The sick and maimed among. God grant you find one face there, You loved when you were young."
And the mountains smiled not, neither wept, but gravely and kindly folded over, about, behind, the gray mantle of the canyon walls, and locked fast doors of adamant against all following, and swept a pitying hand of shadow, and breathed that wondrous unsyllabled voice of comfort which any mountain-goer knows.
It was not a large house, but it seemed to be a home. Home!--what is that?
It is dark.
That was the touch of the green balsam--smell it, now!
There is snow on the ground.
The mountains have no troubles; they have no commerce. The dwellers of the mountains are calm and unfretted.
There is commerce on the sea, and the people who live near it are fretful, greedy, grasping.
Something is flying through the trees, but silent as if it came out of a grave.
It is the swinging open, by some careless angel's mischance, of the door of the White City of Rest!...
And on the broad shoulders of the mountains once more was cast the burden of the young man's troubles, and once more he walked deep into the peace of the big hills.
How old, how sore a man climbed up the steep bank!
I have walked a million miles, and I'm tired.
And here were green fields in the land before us.
The Singing Mouse came out.
And, as one looked at that twinkling, comfortable light, how plainly the rest of the old song came back:
You can take your troubles to the mountains.
One must send for it to the land of the unswum sea.
That is not the moon coming up over the lake!
"When all the world is old, lad, And all the trees are brown, And all the sports are stale, lad, And all the wheels run down,
You can take your troubles to the sea; but the sea has troubles of its own, and frets.
Ay! the goodness of such strength!
It is winter now, I remember, Singing Mouse, and I am walking by the shore of the great Inland Seas.
The trees look black in contrast as you gaze up from the beach against the high bank.
There were white fields.
God bless them!
I have been walking, I know.
Away across the fields a bright and cheery light shone out from a window, and as the moon rose higher, it showed the house which held the light.
It is setting all the long white curves of ice afire.
Nay, brother, God has blessed them; blessed them with unbounded calm, with boundless strength, with unspeakable peace.
If you are Pueblo, Aztec, you can select some big mountain and pray to it, as its top shows the red sentience of the on-coming day.
Those are not ripples.
It is cold.
That is silver!
May yours be so, always.
The light in the little house went out.
Booted and spurred, into the saddle again!
And off for round the world away!
Face toward the West!
And young blood began its course anew.
Back again, now, by some impulse of the dog which hasn't had any day.
I think it was a happy home.
In the distance a dog barked.
There will be angels walking on that pathway before long!
Quaintly and sweetly and with wondrous clearness it began an old, old song I first heard long ago.
Yes, it is cold.
"There are green fields in Thrace," sighs the gladiator as he dies.
Why, here are the mountains!
There are icicles in the sky.
"Then hey! for boot and saddle, lad, And round the world away! Young blood must have its course, lad, And every dog his day!"
My legs are stiff, and my legging has frozen fast to my overshoe; I remember that.
A little higher and stronger piped the compelling melody.
And so I sit down--right here, you know--and look out over the lake--just over there, you see.
But ah! what is that out there, and what is it doing?
"When all the world is young, lad, And all the trees are green, And every goose a swan, lad, And every lass a queen.
"The governor is in bed, and asleep."
"News?
"Our supposition," the captain replied, "is this.
"Who's there?" he cried, in no very amiable tone.
"Fine quarters for trade!
"No; but do, please--do, please, let me in," supplicated the Jew.
Let me in; do, please, let me in."
He must have brought news from Europe!"
"I can wait until he awakes."
The Jew was utterly crestfallen.
The old man hung his head, abashed.
Even in his sleep Rosette's irritable nature revealed itself.
"You seem here," continued the professor, "to be very ignorant of the state of things."
He had constituted himself sick nurse, and considered his reputation at stake if he failed to set his patient on his feet again.
Without vouchsafing any reply, the captain beckoned to the old man to follow him, and leading the way to the central hall, stopped, and turning so as to look him steadily in the face, said, "Now is your opportunity.
"Nobody will pay me a proper price."
After a moment or two's reflection, he turned to Servadac and asked him whether it was not the middle of April.
"No offense, my lord, I hope," stammered out the Jew.
"Yes."
"From the Balearic Isles."
"Oh, my lord, my lord," whined Isaac, "you must have some news to tell me."
What do you want?
Didn't a stranger arrive here last night?" inquired the Jew.
He watched every movement, listened to every breath, and never failed to administer the strongest cordials upon the slightest pretext.
"By the God--"
Speak out, man?"
Tell me what you want."
A REVELATION
CHAPTER II.
"Ask him what?
All night long Ben Zoof would not leave the professor's bedside.
"But I would pay you to wake him."
"It is twelve years or more since I saw you; I hope you have improved."
The Jew looked perplexed.
"I should like to see him."
"Yes, quite true."
Surely nothing, thought the captain, will convince the old rascal now; and he moved off in disgust.
The door was unfastened, and Isaac Hakkabut, enveloped in an old overcoat, shuffled into the gallery.
"Can't be."
"Why, that perhaps the stranger had come from the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and that I might ask him--"
Hardly twenty leagues from Spain!
Joseph!"
"Who are you?"
"Ask him if he brings any tidings of Europe," Hakkabut blurted out at last.
Confound the fellow! where is he?"
"Let him in, then."
"Where's my blackboard, Joseph?"
"Quite a reformed character, sir, I assure you," said Servadac, smiling.
"I want to speak to his Excellency, the governor."
"From my little tartan yonder, I saw the yawl go out from the rock here on a journey, and I saw it come back, and it brought a stranger; and I thought--I thought--I thought--"
Ben Zoof hesitated.
I know nothing.
She looked.
It was a little golden thread running through the dark web of his present fortunes; which were growing ever gloomier and more gloomy.
I say them to myself, but they would come differently from you, remembering all the cares and trials you have had to bear.'
If you would say the old good words, it would make me feel something of the pious simplicity of my childhood.
He turned away from her, and covered his face with his hands.
He reviewed his position as a Milton manufacturer.
Still, if it fails--'
'I have had a many,' said she, sobbing, 'but none so sore as this.
'I am glad.
'How?
'Here we go up, up, up; And here we go down, down, downee!' NURSERY SONG.
But the truth was, Mr. Thornton was hard pressed.
But now had come one of those periods of bad trade, when the market falling brought down the value of all large stocks; Mr. Thornton's fell to nearly half.
What can you do?'
It was a nine days' wonder.
Success brought with it its worldly consequence of extreme admiration.
But the wind was in the east; the weather was piercing cold, as it had been for weeks; there would be no demand for light summer goods this year.
He felt it acutely in his vulnerable point--his pride in the commercial character which he had established for himself.
Is it so desperate a speculation?
I've maybe getten them into mischief already, for they kept it very close.
'Be always the same John Thornton in whatever circumstances; endeavouring to do right, and making great blunders; and then trying to be brave in setting to afresh.
I hear of her through her agent here, every now and then.
'Oh yes!' and suddenly, the wintry frost-bound look of care had left Mr. Thornton's face, as if some soft summer gale had blown all anxiety away from his mind; and though his mouth was as much compressed as before, his eyes smiled out benignly on his questioner.
Mother, I have decided!
Not for you!
I might redeem myself--I am sorely tempted--'
What were Mr. Thornton's engagements?
'Over here.'
Few came to buy, and those who did were looked at suspiciously by the sellers; for credit was insecure, and the most stable might have their fortunes affected by the sweep in the great neighbouring port among the shipping houses.
Architect of his own fortunes, he attributed this to no special merit or qualities of his own, but to the power, which he believed that commerce gave to every brave, honest, and persevering man, to raise himself to a level from which he might see and read the great game of worldly success, and honestly, by such far-sightedness, command more power and influence than in any other mode of life.
Now I am glad!'
'Not a failure.
Speak to me again in the old way, mother.
She thanked God for this, and this alone, with a fervour that swept away all rebellious feelings from her mind.
'Mother!' said he, holding her gently in his arms, 'who has sent me my lot in life, both of good and of evil?'
Other people prosper and grow rich, and hold their paltry names high and dry above shame.'
To see you cast down from your rightful place!
You would have injured no one.'
God has seen fit to be very hard on you, very.'
I have discovered new powers in my situation too late--and now all is over.
'I can't think,' said she, with gloomy defiance in her tone, 'how it comes about.
His agent had largely trusted a house in the American trade, which went down, along with several others, just at this time, like a pack of cards, the fall of one compelling other failures.
So he waited, and stood on one side with profound humility, as the news swept through the Exchange, of the enormous fortune which his brother-in-law had made by his daring speculation.
I have so worked and planned.
And he was over at Mrs. Hale's death?'
'No! but to have you other than what you are will break my heart.
'Then she'll not be for coming to Milton again, I reckon.'
She had never laid herself down to slumber any more than he.
'I know now that no man will suffer by me.
You have not told me what your trouble is; but sore trouble you have had these many days past.'
But even these admonitions did not restrain him.
You will purchase what you seek at the price of your own head."
"I accept your offer," rejoined the spirit.
Show me how to slay him!"
Around it wheeled a large white owl, distinguishable by its ghostly plumage through the gloom, like a sea-bird in a storm, and hooting bodingly as it winged its mystic flight.
I trust no such being has crossed your path."
When he recovered, Henry had bidden good-night to the object of his love, and, having nearly gained the door, turned and waved a tender valediction to her.
His fingers were compressed as if by a vice, and he felt himself dragged towards the tree, while a stifling and sulphurous vapour rose around him.
Influenced by the circular shape of the structure in which it was situated, and of which it formed a segment, the farther part of this chamber was almost lost to view, and a number of cross-beams and wooden pillars added to its sombre and mysterious appearance.
"Your errand is known to me," replied the demon.
"You shall.
At length he reached the woody height overlooking the marshy tract that formed the limit of his ride.
Ha?"
But I will not deceive you.
On your return you will find Anne Boleyn Queen of England."
His brain was on fire, and the fury of his career increased his fearful excitement.
"I do not like jesting about Herne the Hunter," remarked Surrey, "after what I myself have seen.
"Not unless it be a four-legged one from the dungeons beneath," replied Surrey.
Bid the grooms have my steed in readiness an hour before midnight."
The walls were of enormous thickness, and a narrow loophole, terminating a deep embrasure, afforded but scanty light.
"I hope your worship is not about to ride into the forest at that hour?" said Adam, trembling.
Ever and anon a rustling among the grass told him that a snake, with which description of reptile the spot abounded, was gliding away from him.
Be ruled by me, and you shall have a deep and full revenge."
He saw that one of Henry's arms encircled her waist, while the other caressed her yielding hand.
"I could see no one."
Not so his steed.
When within a few paces of the tree, its enormous rifted trunk became fully revealed to him; but no one was beside it.
"I will seek out the demon huntsman myself."
"Yes, it is better thus," he ejaculated.
"Your worship's adjuration was strangely interrupted," cried the old man, crossing himself devoutly.
I am a desperate man, but not so desperate as you suppose me.
There is a paleness in your cheek, and a fire in your eye, such as I never before observed in you, or in mortal man.
Heaving a deep sigh, he then arose, and paced the chamber with rapid strides.
Flying to the sentinel, he inquired whether any one had passed him, but the man returned an angry denial.
As he spoke, there was a slight noise in that part of the chamber which was buried in darkness.
"Him!" echoed the cardinal, in alarm and horror.
She was in my power yesterday, and without your aid, cardinal, I could have wreaked my vengeance upon her, if I had been so minded."
And what matter?
And he stepped forward with the intention of grasping the figure, but it eluded him, and, with a mocking laugh, melted into the darkness.
And the messenger retired.
"I am here.
"Of a surety not," replied the earl.
His horse, which had hitherto been all fire and impetuosity, now began to manifest symptoms of alarm, quivered in every limb, snorted, and required to be dragged along forcibly.
"If I read you aright," continued the cardinal, "you are arrived at that pitch of desperation when life itself becomes indifferent, and when but one object remains to be gained--"
At these words a sound like a peal of thunder rolled over head, accompanied by screeches of discordant laughter.
On returning to his lodgings, he summoned his attendants, and ordered them to proceed to Kingston, adding that he would join them there early the next morning.
"You desire to see Herne the Hunter," said the figure, in a deep, sepulchral tone.
"I love her still, devotedly as ever.
I applaud the king's judgment in sending you to France, and if you will be counselled by me, you will stay there long enough to forget her who now occasions you so much uneasiness."
So you refuse to obey the king's injunctions.
They paused.
Springing from his foaming and panting steed, and taking the bridle in his hand, he descended the side of the acclivity.
It was wrapped in a long black cloak, and wore a high conical cap on its head.
I am going on an expedition of some peril to-night, and do not choose to keep them about me.
"Why go into the forest?
"Trouble yourself no more, Sir Thomas.
"I was told by the stout archer, whom the king dubbed Duke of Shoreditch, that he and the Duke of Richmond ventured thither last night, and that they saw a legion of demons mounted on coal-black horses, and amongst them Mark Fytton, the butcher, who was hanged a few days ago from the Curfew Tower by the king's order, and whose body so strangely disappeared.
"I will soon see by whom," cried Adam, springing to his feet, and rushing towards the door, which opened upon a long corridor.
"You were then in her chamber, as the king suspected?" cried Wolsey, with a look of exultation.
"The Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald has plighted her troth to me."
Again a noise similar to that heard a moment before resounded from the lower part of the room.
"It was the devil, I believe!" replied the old man.
"You look very ill, Sir Thomas," said the old servant; "worse than I ever remember seeing you.
He seemed lost in gloomy thought, and soon afterwards took his leave.
"All sentiments of love and loyalty are swallowed up by jealousy and burning hate.
I will stay and defy him!"
Suddenly, however, the chamber was illumined, and he beheld Henry and Anne Boleyn enter it, preceded by a band of attendants bearing tapers. It needed not Wyat's jealousy-sharpened gaze to read, even at that distance, the king's enamoured looks, or Anne Boleyn's responsive glances.
You refuse to assist in bringing about the divorce, and prefer remaining here to brave your sovereign, and avenge yourself upon a fickle mistress.
"Tush, Adam Twisden!
After rearing and plunging violently, the affrighted animal broke its hold and darted off into the swamp, where it floundered and was lost.
"Our cases are not alike," said Surrey.
"Now that's what I like to hear you say.
"Heaven forbid!" cried Ralph with ardour.
"Do you suppose your brother's sincere?" Isabel enquired with a smile.
"Despises you?
"You judge only from the outside--you don't care," he said presently.
Yes, their eyes, which Isabel admired, were round, quiet and contented, and their figures, also of a generous roundness, were encased in sealskin jackets.
Is Mrs. Touchett going to take you abroad?"
"At the same time Warburton's very reasonable," Miss Molyneux observed.
Is there anything mysterious in a purpose entertained and executed every year, in the most public manner, by fifty thousand of my fellow-countrymen--the purpose of improving one's mind by foreign travel?"
But before they reached the others, "I shall come and see you next week," he said.
"It's very kind of you to say so; but, even if I gain, stern justice is not what I most love.
I see you're very fond of crewels."
What is there to prevent it?"
"Most assuredly.
Before luncheon she was alone with them for some time, on one side of the room, while Lord Warburton, at a distance, talked to Mrs. Touchett.
"It's the first position in this part of the county."
But for myself I shall be very glad to see you."
"His ability is known," Mildred added; "every one thinks it's immense."
I should hold it tight."
"As regards that," said Isabel, "I should find in my own nation entertainment for a lifetime.
"It's thought a very good position," said the younger sister.
"I think it's lovely to be so quiet and reasonable and satisfied.
"I mean to try and imitate them," said Isabel.
She knew it was true, but we have seen that her interest in human nature was keen, and she had a desire to draw the Misses Molyneux out.
"But, I nevertheless don't think he'd like me to keep coming to Gardencourt."
"Yes, and the other places; what are they called?"
"Don't you think it's a false position?"
"Then you'll go on judging, I suppose."
Isabel liked him--she was in the mood for liking everything; but her imagination was a good deal taxed to think of him as a source of spiritual aid.
She found the Misses Molyneux sitting in a vast drawing-room (she perceived afterwards it was one of several) in a wilderness of faded chintz; they were dressed on this occasion in black velveteen.
"Is England not good enough for you?"
I'm charmed when you say that."
"Oh, I can see that," said Isabel.
"I think one ought to be liberal," Mildred argued gently.
"You don't of necessity lose by that."
I should like to be like that."
"Let them for nothing?" Isabel demanded.
"You can't improve your mind, Miss Archer," her companion declared. "It's already a most formidable instrument.
I protest."
I won't be thought 'quaint,' to begin with; I'm not so in the least.
"The test?"
"Nothing tangible.
"I dare say you think me very irreverent," Isabel took occasion to remark.
It will never be known, the good he does."
Lord Warburton was briefly silent.
I'm pretty sure you can do whatever you want."
"I wish you to see the place properly, seriously," he said.
I want to see as many countries as I can."
"I suppose you revere your brother and are rather afraid of him."
"I won't say 'never'; I should feel very melodramatic."
"Having to give up Lockleigh?" said Miss Molyneux, finding her voice.
"I can't help it," Isabel answered.
"That in future I may see you often."
Her companions, evidently, had lost themselves.
"Do you think he would stand the test?"
I knew in another minute who had been there, and escaped.
That kept the lid on.
"Butler was not a business man.
"Did you think I stole them?" he demanded.
I went up the stairs, slowly, and I heard no shot.
You remember, Knox, the crash, when three banks, rotten to the core, went under, and it was found a large amount of state money had gone too.
Suicide without a weapon!
I took the letters out of the secret closet, before I could show it to you and Hunter, and later I put them in the leather bag I gave you, and locked it.
It was Fleming who deposited the money in the wrecked banks, knowing what would happen. When the crash came, Butler's sureties, to save themselves, confiscated every dollar he had in the world.
She sat with her fingers locked in her lap, and her eyes on Wardrop.
"Fleming moved into Butler's place as treasurer, and took Lightfoot as his cashier.
"I was engaged to marry a girl who was everything on earth to me, and--I was private secretary to the state treasurer, with the princely salary of such a position!
Margery looked at me quickly, but I shook my head.
"The things that looked black against me were bad enough, but they had nothing to do with Miss Jane.
At the door I hesitated, then opened it quietly.
"That is all I know.
If Butler could have produced the letters at the time of his trial, things would have been different."
Another handicap checked them, for while Satan ran on alone, freely, the bunched pursuers kept a continual friction back and forth.
He looked back, but it was far too late to turn, ride down the ravine to a place where the bank could be scaled, and cut across country once more.
And the stallion reared and leaped.
It was murderously high, and all things were against him, the long run, the rise of the ground going toward the fence, and the gravel from which he must take off for the jump.
They must have sensed the meaning of this maneuver at once, for hardly had he stretched out east when voices shouted out of the hills, and around and over several low knolls came forty horsemen, racing.
His head was still high, the rhythm of his lope unfaltering.
The practiced eye of the farmer watched the outlaw gather his horse under him.
To make assurance doubly sure he dropped upon one knee and made that shotgun an unstirring part and portion of himself.
The farmer hurled his best shotgun a dozen yards away and threw up his hat.
God bless ye; and good luck!"
Before them went the wolf-dog, skimming low, reached the fence, and shot over it in a graceful, high-arched curve.
The left gate!" he shouted through his cupped hands, and as the fugitive rushed through the upper gate he turned to face the posse which was already pulling up at the fence and drawing their wirecutters.
He brought Satan back to a hand canter, and so he pulled around the next curve of the gulch and saw the trap squarely in front.
Well he knew that rise in the stirrups, that leaning forward, and his heart rose in unison and went back to the blue grass of Kentucky glittering in the sun.
It could not be that men lurked there to cut him off.
The black stood with his head very high, quivering through his whole body while he eyed the fence.
Two score of men, at least, Caswell could send out, and from the heights they could surely detect the coming of Barry and plant themselves in his way.
Up!"
He had watched Black Bart before this, of course, but never with suspicion until he noted the peculiar manner in which the animal skirted here and there through the rough ground, pausing on high places, weaving back and forth across the course of his master.
His fingers refused to close upon it.
Either they waited in ambush, or else they had mistaken the route along which Barry would come, and the latter was hardly possible.
The farmer stood with his broad-brimmed straw hat pushed far back on his head looking up and down the ravine, a perfect target, and Barry's hand slipped automatically over his rifle.
He would save his fire till he literally saw the white of the enemy's eyes: until the outlaw reached the fence, No horse on the mountain-desert could top that highest strand of wire as he very well knew; and in his youth, back in Kentucky, he had ridden hunters.
But seconds counted triply now, and the halt and the time they would spend getting up impetus all told in favor of the fugitive.
For he saw a tall, strong barbed-wire fence stretching across the stream-bed, and beyond the fence were a litter of chicken-coops, iron bands from broken barrels, and a thousand other of those things which brand the typical western farm-yard; above the top of the bank to his left he caught a glimpse of the sharp roof of the house.
"Lad, d'ye see what you've got to do?"
The posse came like a whirlwind, yelling, shooting as if they hoped to attract attention, and attention they certainly won, for now Dan saw a tall middle-aged fellow, his long beard blowing over one shoulder as he ran, come down into the farm-yard with a double-barreled shotgun in his hands.
"We got to take our chances of gettin' by, that's all.
We win or lose together!"
The farmer on the inside of the fence raised his shotgun leisurely to his shoulder and took a careful aim.
Once and again he sent the fresh horses from Wago after the fugitive in a sprinting burst, but each time the black drifted farther away, and mile after mile Mark Retherton pulled his field glasses to his eyes and strained his vision to make out some sign of labor in the gait of Satan. There was no change.
"You can do it," said the master.
On they drove, straight as a bird flies for Caswell City, and Black Bart, ranging ahead among the hills, was picking the way once more.
An ambush, a volley, would end this famous ride.
The sweep of his stride brushed him past rocks and shrubs, and he literally flowed uphill and down, far different from the horses which scampered in his rear, for they pounded the earth with their efforts, grunting under the weight of fifty pound saddles and heavy riders.
He knew what it all meant.
The hills came up on them swiftly, now, and if the men of Caswell failed in their duty it meant safety for the fugitive, because two miles beyond were the willows of the marshes and the fords across the Asper River. There could only be two alternatives, since not a man showed on the hills.
He swayed forward, and Satan leaped ahead at full speed, gathering impetus, scattering the gravel on either side.
Nevertheless, there came Bart with the ill tidings, and it only remained to skirt swiftly east, round the dangerous ground, and strike the marshes first.
Then the shout of the rider: "Up!
"The left gate!
Dan Barry lifted his head and his whistling soared and pulsed and filled the air. It made Bart come back to him; it made Satan toss his head and glance at the master from the corner of his bright eye, for this was an assurance that the battle was over and the rest not far away.
He thought of the long labor on the farm and the mortgage which still ate the life of his produce every year; he thought of the narrow bowed shoulders of his wife; he thought of the meager faces of his children; and he thought first and last of ten thousand dollars reward!
The leaders reined in to keep back with the mass of the posse, and those in the rear by dint of hard spurring would rush up to the front in turn until some spirited nag challenged for the lead, so that there was a steady interplay among the fifteen.
Better prolong the run, for in the end no single horse could stand up against so many relays.
Dan knew that a great many chances may be taken against a revolver and even a rifle can be tricked, but it is suicide to flirt with a shotgun in the hands of one used to bring down doves as they sloped out of the air toward a water-hole.
Chapter XXXIII.
For Black Bart had whirled and raced straight back for Dan.
He came to a full halt.
"I can't do it, Satan," he whispered.
"Go it, lad!
Nobly, nobly the black came on, his ears pricking as he judged the great task and his head carried a little high and back as any good jumper knows his head must be carried.
The Jump
How many things went through his mind while he squinted down the gleaming barrel!
"Like a scout," thought Retherton.
"D'ye see?" whispered Barry, leaning close to Satan's ears.
He had heard of the outlaw, Barry, with his black horse and his wolf-dog--everyone in the desert had, for that matter--and even had he been ignorant the shouting of the posse which now raced down the canyon in full view would have told him all that he needed to know.
But here the Wago Mountains--not more than ragged hills, to be sure--cut across the path of the outlaw and in those hills, unless the message which waited for him at Wago had been false, should be the men of Caswell City, two score or more besides the fifteen fresh horses for the posse.
He was a type of those who do not know what it is to miss their target--probably because ammunition comes so high; and with a double load of buckshot it was literally death to come within his range.
He swung Satan around on the new course with a pressure of his knees and loosed him into a freer gallop.
No living thing could have raced from Rickett to Caswell City to warn them of his coming.
"And by God, there he comes to report!"
A wild cheer rose from the posse and came echoing about him; they had sighted their quarry.
He couldn't have no hand with Grey Molly."
Go for it, boy.
No wonder the hand which supported the barrels was steady as an iron prop.
Yet it was maddening to watch the stallion float over hill and dale with that same unbroken stride.
The hand of the rider lifted in mute acknowledgment, and as he shot past, the farmer caught a glimpse of a delicately handsome face that smiled down at him.
Well he knew the meaning of that shortening grip on the reins to give the horse the last little lift that might mean success or failure in the jump.
Thirty-five miles, or thereabouts, since they left Rickett that morning, and still the black ran smoothly, with a lilt to his gallop.
There was no need of howl or whine to give the reason of his coming; the speed of his running meant business, and Barry shortened the pace of Satan while he looked over the hills, incredulous, despairing.
Narrow chances indeed, by this time, for the brief pause had brought the posse fairly upon his heels; the farmer saw the fugitive and brought his shotgun to the ready; and Black Bart in an agony of impatience raced round and round the master.
He was shooting for his life and the happiness of five souls!
As Barry shot out onto the higher ground on the other side of the farmhouse he could see them severing the wires and the interruption of the chase would be only a matter of seconds.
That fence came exactly to the top of his head, and the top of his head was six feet and two inches from the ground.
All the dark hands of night had rifled the dead.
He was a testimony in the twilight and the waste.
He was a Sign.
Seen closely the line was that which the noise indicated, a chain--a single chain cable.
To strip one already stripped--relentless act!
By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causes appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the mournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.
Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed putrefaction.
Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from him.
That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was now visible.
Horror, which disproportions everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape.
In passing by certain places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping--a prey to dreams into the realms of which the mind enters.
It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.
For dead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit.
The illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by, was around the dead man.
There was no peace for it even in annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust, in the winter into mud.
He crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second, then a third.
This was the noise the child had heard.
A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung to it swayed gently.
There was in his mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.
He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the darkness.
He was palpable, yet vanished.
By his mere presence he increased the gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars.
Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsula is, and was ignorant even of the name of Portland.
Certainty and confidence appeared to diminish in his environs.
No one could have met this dead man without meditating.
In truth, some one was there.
Such a thing is beyond the power of language to express.
His marrow was no longer in his bones; his entrails were no longer in his body; his voice no longer in his throat. A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out and empties.
Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable. Perpetual shuddering made him terrible.
Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom?
It was swaddled like a child and long like a man.
An idea is a guide; he had no idea.
The spectre was given over to pillage.
The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deep oblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances; it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it willed.
He had had blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had been stolen.
Thence comes the inexpressible.
The line moving in the wind sounded like a chain.
Fearful to say, he seemed to be a centre in space, with something immense leaning on him.
Of nature first, and then of society.
Around him was the vastness of human desertion.
He was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremble before the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul.
The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard.
After the disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in lugubrious accord with all around him.
He knew but one thing, which is, that one can walk until one drops down.
At the extremity of each plateau the child came upon a break in the ground. The slope was sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plains of Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping each other.
He thought that some one was there, and in a few strides he was at the foot of the hillock.
All of a sudden he stopped, listened for an instant, and with an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction turned quickly and directed his steps towards an eminence of moderate height, which he dimly perceived on his right, at the point of the plain nearest the cliff.
Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis snatches.
In the invisible there are dark portals ajar.
The presence of a spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.
It was that which is no longer.
Above him floated, blended with all the vague distortions of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.
Placed there by man, he there awaited God.
It might be about seven o'clock in the evening.
The child had just heard a noise in this direction, which was the noise neither of the wind nor of the sea, nor was it the cry of animals.
December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron, rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume.
He was a shadow accruing to the night.
Twilight and moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the composition of this visible nothing.
Night was above and within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration.
His radius of sight was contracting. He now only saw a few steps before him.
There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance of men and his own vengeance.
It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory, the grave.
It was something like a great arm thrust straight out of the ground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger, supported from beneath, by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the arm, the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the sky.
When the unchangeable broods over us--when Heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent--then it is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed. When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gate behind.
For him in all creation there was absolutely no other basis to rest on but the little piece of ground where he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet.
"What!" says he, "would it, then, be a reputed cowardice to overcome them by giving ground?" urging, at the same time, the authority of Homer, who commends in AEneas the science of flight.
OF CONSTANCY
So that there is no supple motion of body, nor any movement in the handling of arms, how irregular or ungraceful soever, that we need condemn, if they serve to protect us from the blow that is made against us.
To say truth, I do not think that these evasions are performed upon the account of judgment; for how can any man living judge of high or low aim on so sudden an occasion?
To him who is not a philosopher, a fright is the same thing in the first part of it, but quite another thing in the second; for the impression of passions does not remain superficially in him, but penetrates farther, even to the very seat of reason, infecting and corrupting it, so that he judges according to his fear, and conforms his behaviour to it.
In this verse you may see the true state of the wise Stoic learnedly and plainly expressed:--
The Peripatetic sage does not exempt himself totally from perturbations of mind, but he moderates them.
And it is much more easy to believe that fortune favoured their apprehension, and that it might be as well at another time to make them face the danger, as to seek to avoid it.
Of which kind of fighting the Turks still retain something in their practice of arms; and Socrates, in Plato, laughs at Laches, who had defined fortitude to be a standing firm in the ranks against the enemy.
Those who had been concerned in the joke were now sorry they had pushed it so far; however, the anxiety his fainting away had caused them was relieved by his returning to himself.
The string of coral beads is very fine, and my husband's hunting suit does not fall short of it.
Come, senor governor, get up, and come and enjoy the victory, and divide the spoils that have been won from the foe by the might of that invincible arm."
What you must do is carry me in your arms, and lay me across or set me upright in some postern, and I'll hold it either with this lance or with my body."
All who knew her were filled with astonishment, and the duke and duchess more than any; for though they thought her a simpleton and a weak creature, they did not think her capable of crazy pranks.
Send me some strings of pearls if they are in fashion in that island.
Barricade those ladders!
"And I too," added her daughter, all in tears and covered with shame and confusion.
The letters were applauded, laughed over, relished, and admired; and then, as if to put the seal to the business, the courier arrived, bringing the one Sancho sent to Don Quixote, and this, too, was read out, and it raised some doubts as to the governor's simplicity.
Sancha my daughter, and my son, kiss your worship's hands.
Here with your stink-pots of pitch and resin, and kettles of boiling oil!
"What do I know about arms or supports?
The enemy retreats beaten!
The fountain in the plaza has run dry.
Thy wife,
For as he lay in bed on the night of the seventh day of his government, sated, not with bread and wine, but with delivering judgments and giving opinions and making laws and proclamations, just as sleep, in spite of hunger, was beginning to close his eyelids, he heard such a noise of bell-ringing and shouting that one would have fancied the whole island was going to the bottom.
He said no more, and in silence began to dress himself, while all watched him, waiting to see what the haste with which he was putting on his clothes meant.
I can tell thee, brother, when I came to hear that thou wert a governor I thought I should have dropped dead with pure joy; and thou knowest they say sudden joy kills as well as great sorrow; and as for Sanchica thy daughter, she leaked from sheer happiness.
I was not born to be a governor or protect islands or cities from the enemies that choose to attack them.
Here the enemy is thickest!
To fancy that in this life anything belonging to it will remain for ever in the same state is an idle fancy; on the contrary, in it everything seems to go in a circle, I mean round and round.
They rubbed him down, fetched him wine and unbound the shields, and he seated himself upon his bed, and with fear, agitation, and fatigue he fainted away.
One bore by way of address, Letter for my lady the Duchess So-and-so, of I don't know where; and the other To my husband Sancho Panza, governor of the island of Barataria, whom God prosper longer than me.
They helped him to rise, and as soon as he was on his feet said, "The enemy I have beaten you may nail to my forehead; I don't want to divide the spoils of the foe, I only beg and entreat some friend, if I have one, to give me a sup of wine, for I'm parched with thirst, and wipe me dry, for I'm turning to water."
My lady the duchess will tell thee the desire I have to go to the Court; consider the matter and let me know thy pleasure; I will try to do honour to thee by going in a coach.
He asked what o'clock it was; they told him it was just daybreak.
The duke said that for his part he gave her leave, and that she might speak with Senor Don Quixote as much as she liked.
OF THE TROUBLOUS END AND TERMINATION SANCHO PANZA'S GOVERNMENT CAME TO
The spring succeeds the summer, the summer the fall, the fall the autumn, the autumn the winter, and the winter the spring, and so time rolls with never-ceasing wheel. Man's life alone, swifter than time, speeds onward to its end without any hope of renewal, save it be in that other life which is endless and boundless.
"But first of all," he said, "it is requisite that this worthy duenna and unworthy damsel should place their claim for justice in the hands of Don Quixote; for otherwise nothing can be done, nor can the said challenge be brought to a lawful issue."
Evil tongues say she is with child by him, but he denies it stoutly.
"What have I to do with arming?" said Sancho.
By God I'd as soon remain in this government, or take another, even if it was offered me between two plates, as fly to heaven without wings.
The enemy is in the island in countless numbers, and we are lost unless your skill and valour come to our support."
Urged by these exhortations and reproaches the poor governor made an attempt to advance, but fell to the ground with such a crash that he fancied he had broken himself all to pieces.
The duchess withdrew to hear from the page about his adventures in Sancho's village, which he narrated at full length without leaving a single circumstance unmentioned.
The letter your highness wrote me, my lady, gave me great pleasure, for indeed I found it very welcome.
Stand aside and let me go; I have to plaster myself, for I believe every one of my ribs is crushed, thanks to the enemies that have been trampling over me to-night."
'Saint Peter is very well at Rome; I mean each of us is best following the trade he was born to.
Block the streets with feather beds!"
"I do so place it," replied the duenna.
I got thy letter, Sancho of my soul, and I promise thee and swear as a Catholic Christian that I was within two fingers' breadth of going mad I was so happy.
God be with your worships, and tell my lord the duke that 'naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain;' I mean that without a farthing I came into this government, and without a farthing I go out of it, very different from the way governors commonly leave other islands.
Dona Rodriguez, at length, turning to her master and mistress said to them, "Will your excellences be pleased to permit me to speak to this gentleman for a moment, for it is requisite I should do so in order to get successfully out of the business in which the boldness of an evil-minded clown has involved me?"
To this the majordomo said, "Senor governor, we would let your worship go with all our hearts, though it sorely grieves us to lose you, for your wit and Christian conduct naturally make us regret you; but it is well known that every governor, before he leaves the place where he has been governing, is bound first of all to render an account.
They all agreed to this, and allowed him to go, first offering to bear him company and furnish him with all he wanted for his own comfort or for the journey.
"I'd as soon turn Turk as stay any longer. Those jokes won't pass a second time.
A flash of lightning struck the gibbet, and I wish they all lit there.
Let your worship do so for the ten days you have held the government, and then you may go and the peace of God go with you."
"You spoke late," said Sancho.
Here is the news of the village; La Berrueca has married her daughter to a good-for-nothing painter, who came here to paint anything that might turn up.
Hold the breach there! Shut that gate!
Years went on, and the King felt himself growing old, and he thought it was time to decide which of his sons was to succeed him.
The country girls jumped, but were so plump that they fell heavily and broke their arms and legs.
You may imagine Dummling thanked her very warmly for the ring, and hurried off back to the palace as fast as his legs could carry him.
Then Dummling's lovely maiden sprang lightly and gracefully through the ring, and landed safely on the other side.
The two eldest went east and west, but Dummling's feather did as it did the first time, and fell to earth just by the trapdoor.
So she sent one of her little attendants hopping for her jewel casket, and, when it was come, she took out of it a ring that fairly blazed with diamonds and other jewels, and finer than the finest workmanship that could be obtained.
"The kingdom belongs to him."
So one brother went east, and another west, and poor Dummling was left to follow the third feather, which had gone no distance at all, whereat his brothers were much amused.
ONCE upon a time there lived a king who had three sons, two of whom were bright youths, but the youngest never had anything to say for himself, so he was set down by everyone as a simpleton.
But the brothers again flew into a passion at this, and said that a youth who had as little wit as Dummling could not possibly reign over the land.
As soon as the King saw Dummling's lovely jewel, he cried out:
"Little frog, so green and cold, I prithee open and behold Who it is that knocks so bold,"
Of course the King had nothing for it but to award the kingdom to his youngest son, and, of course, the elder brothers still grumbled, and made such a fuss that at last the poor King had to consent to yet another trial.
The King was astonished when the carpets were spread out before him and he saw the lovely thing Dummling had brought.
So he pulled it up once again and went down the steps.
To prove which was the best wife of the three, he decided that they should all jump through a hoop in the hall, and the one who did it most prettily was to be the winner.
"Let us buy the shawl of the first peasant woman we meet.
"Take one of my little frog attendants and set her on the carrot."
The big one bowed to him as he entered, and asked him what he sought.
So at last the brothers had to be content, and in time Dummling came to the throne and ruled wisely and well for many, many years.
"As they fly, thither shall you follow."
Dummling's feather floated and fell just as before, and again he pulled up his trapdoor and went down into the presence of the old Frog, and told her that this time he wanted the most beautiful maiden in all the world.
and the door opened, and he saw a large frog squatting in the middle of a circle of little ones.
So the King gave out that whoever should bring him the most beautiful ring should be King when he died, and he blew up the feathers as before, and bade the youths follow them.
Meanwhile, the two brothers, never thinking that Dummling was clever enough to find any sort of carpet at all, said to each other:
Then the mother Frog took a key that hung around her neck on a chain, and opened the box and drew forth the most beautiful carpet that was ever seen.
So they worried the father at last to make just one more condition; and this time he said that whoever should bring home the most beautiful woman in the world should succeed to the throne.
And now all the court was gathered together in the hall to see the contest.
That should be good enough to win us the kingdom."
"I will tell you," she said.
When the door was opened, he told the big Frog that he wanted the most beautiful ring in the world.
Immediately he heard a voice singing:
"Please," said Dummling, taking off his cap and returning the bow, "I want to know if you can help me to get the most beautiful carpet in the world."
After that Mrs. Donnelly played Miss McCloud's Reel for the children and Joe made Maria take a glass of wine.
There was a great deal of laughing and joking during the meal.
Mrs. Donnelly said "Do, please, Maria!" and so Maria had to get up and stand beside the piano.
He supposed the bag was full of good things for the little ones and said it was only right that the youngsters should enjoy themselves while they were young.
Maria thought he was a colonel-looking gentleman and she reflected how much more polite he was than the young men who simply stared straight before them.
One young lad could hardly restrain himself from applauding.
Then the mizentop was appealed to, and declared that he could see nothing; and at last the sun went down with a jerk, as though it had slipped through a slit in the sea, and the black spot, swallowed up in the gathering haze, was seen no more.
It was the fag end of the two hours' exercise graciously permitted each afternoon by His Majesty King George the Fourth to prisoners of the Crown, and the prisoners of the Crown were enjoying themselves.
And then the noise of the sentry, on the quarter-deck below him, grounding arms, turned the current of his thoughts.
She was simply a vain, middle-aged woman, and Frere took her attentions for what they were worth.
It looks to me like a cloud of smoke." And, taking the glass, he swept the horizon.
Leaping to his feet, his first impulse was to rush upon his assailant, but he saw the ready bayonet of the sentry gleam, and he checked himself with an effort, for his assailant was Mr. Maurice Frere.
On the extreme horizon, just to the left of the sinking sun, rested, or seemed to rest, a tiny black cloud.
"I can't quite make it out," says Frere, handing back the telescope.
Familiarity destroys terror, and the incurable flirt, fluttered her muslins, and played off her second-rate graces, under the noses of the grinning convicts, with as much complacency as if she had been in a Chatham ball-room.
"Thank you, Mr. Frere.
Save for the man at the wheel and the guard at the quarter-railing, he was alone on the deck.
He returned it, and, shouting with laughter, clapping her hands between each throw, the child kept up the game.
The marriage was not a happy one.
It was customary on board these floating prisons to keep each man's crime a secret from his fellows, so that if he chose, and the caprice of his gaolers allowed him, he could lead a new life in his adopted home, without being taunted with his former misdeeds.
The convicts--whose slice of fresh air was nearly eaten--turned with eagerness to watch this new source of amusement.
Indeed, if there had been nobody else near, it is not unlikely that she would have disdainfully fascinated the 'tween-decks, and made eyes at the most presentable of the convicts there.
"I don't know exactly.
Mrs. Vickers was forty-two (she owned to thirty-three), and had been a garrison-belle for eleven weary years before she married prim John Vickers.
On the forecastle, some half-dozen soldiers, in all varieties of undress, were playing at cards, smoking, or watching the fishing-lines hanging over the catheads.
The vagabond was acquitted of the murder, but condemned to death for the robbery, and London, who took some interest in the trial, considered him fortunate when his sentence was commuted to transportation for life.
Captain Vickers, of Mr. Frere's regiment, ordered for service in Van Diemen's Land, was bringing his lady on deck to get an appetite for dinner.
These horrid ladders.
Outside this cattle-pen an armed sentry stood on guard; inside, standing, sitting, or walking monotonously, within range of the shining barrels in the arm chest on the poop, were some sixty men and boys, dressed in uniform grey.
John, have you my smelling salts?
The more guilty boasted of their superiority in vice; the petty criminals swore that their guilt was blacker than it appeared.
Rufus Dawes, pale with rage and mortification, opened his mouth to justify himself, but he allowed the words to die on his lips.
So Mrs. Vickers, after a hard struggle, gave up the point and her dreams of Bath together, and followed her husband with the best grace she could muster.
These dreadful calms!"
A daughter, born two years after their marriage, was the only link that bound the ill-assorted pair.
"What is it, Mr. Best?"
As the sun sank, the relief guard came up the after hatchway, and the relieved guard prepared to superintend the descent of the convicts.
Running to her father's side, the child chattered with all the volubility of flattered self-esteem.
Still a calm, I suppose?
He had been tried for the robbery and murder of Lord Bellasis.
This semi-fashionable slip-slop, within twenty yards of the wild beasts' den, on the other side of the barricade, sounded strange; but Mr. Frere thought nothing of it.
When fairly out to sea she seemed reconciled to her fate, and employed the intervals between scolding her daughter and her maid, in fascinating the boorish young Lieutenant, Maurice Frere.
Sylvia!
Sylvia!
He knew her at once.
"Go down below, and remember what I've told you," cried Frere; and comprehending at once what had occurred, he made a mental minute of the name of the defaulting sentry.
The bright spot of colour rolling across the white deck caught his eye; stooping mechanically, he picked up the ball, and stepped forward to return it.
"Insolent blackguards!"
At the foot of the foremast, and at the quarter-deck, a strong barricade, loop-holed and furnished with doors for ingress and egress, ran across the deck from bulwark to bulwark.
Innocent laughter and childish prattle were strange to them.
Pray, Mr. Frere--oh, thank you!
The men and boys were prisoners of the Crown, and the cattle-pen was their exercise ground.
Frere, who found Mrs. Vickers's conversation a little tiresome, and had been glancing from time to time at the companion, as though in expectation of someone appearing, noticed the action.
"You lazy, skulking hound, what brings you here?
Frere leant forward and took the girl's shapely hand with an easy gesture, but she drew it away, with a flash of her black eyes.
Vickers found his wife extravagant, vain, and snappish, and she found him harsh, disenchanted, and commonplace.
"Let me see," said Frere; and he looked also.
Rufus Dawes touched his cap, saluting in half military fashion.
But, like other excellent devices, the expedient was only a nominal one, and few out of the doomed hundred and eighty were ignorant of the offence which their companions had committed.
A young man of two-and-twenty owning to no friends, and existing among them but by the fact of his criminality, he was respected and admired.
Maurice Frere, descending the poop ladder, had not witnessed this little incident; on reaching the deck, he saw only the unexplained presence of the convict uniform.
Some smiled, and nodded with interest in the varying fortunes of the game.
But in the waist a curious sight presented itself. It was as though one had built a cattle-pen there.
Moreover, her good feeling towards him was useful, for reasons which will shortly appear.
There are degrees in crime, and Rufus Dawes, the convicted felon, who had but escaped the gallows to toil for all his life in irons, was a man of mark.
What was the use?
It was not, perhaps, so pleasant as under the awning on the poop-deck, but that sacred shade was only for such great men as the captain and his officers, Surgeon Pine, Lieutenant Maurice Frere, and, most important personages of all, Captain Vickers and his wife.
CHAPTER I. THE PRISON SHIP.
Though indulged by her father, and spoiled by her mother, the natural sweetness of her disposition saved her from being disagreeable, and the effects of her education as yet only showed themselves in a thousand imperious prettinesses, which made her the darling of the ship.
The low-browed, coarse-featured ruffians grouped about the deck cast many a leer of contempt at the solitary figure, but their remarks were confined to gestures only.
In the midst of this mirth, the officer of the watch, glancing round the fast crimsoning horizon, paused abruptly, and shading his eyes with his hand, looked out intently to the westward.
The young man on the poop caught sight of the tall figure leaning against the bulwarks, and it gave him an excuse to break the monotony of his employment.
Fascination was an integral portion of Julia Vickers's nature; admiration was all she lived for: and even in a convict ship, with her husband at her elbow, she must flirt, or perish of mental inanition. There was no harm in the creature.
So far the appearance of the vessel differed in no wise from that of an ordinary transport.
Running down the ladder, cap in hand, he offered her his assistance.
"You coward!" she said.
Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair creaked.
"YOU, Willie!" she said.
He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers. He was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the bright effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his cheek to flow down into his beard.
"There!" she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed.
It seemed a long time to me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again she was out of breath.
"I left my book in the dell," she said, panting.
"I don't know what's come to her."
"That's what you ought to do.
The hidden motives of her quick ripened little mind flashed out their intuitive scheme of action.
She caught it back and reproved it.
"But, Nettie!
Indeed, over there I was, I think, even more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large I was a shy young lout.
In an instant she grasped the situation.
It was half an hour before Nettie came back.
But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn't shine.
Her dress marked the end of her transition.
We went through the green gate in the high garden wall.
"Mother!" she called in her clear young voice.
Every movement, and particularly the novel droop of her hand and arm to the unaccustomed skirts she gathered about her, and a graceful forward inclination that had come to her, called softly to my eyes.
"Puss!"
"My dear boy!
Now we were a year and three-quarters older, and she--her metamorphosis was almost complete, and I was still only at the beginning of a man's long adolescence.
In an instant she was leading me towards the gardens. I MUST be tired.
"I can do better than that," I said.
Not, I am afraid, in the terms a woman would use.
"I have come," I said--forgetting in the instant all the elaborate things I had intended to say.
Tea first, if you please!
"I declare!" and she darted out of the room.
When we were well past the shrubbery, she slackened a little in her urgency, and so we came along the slope under the beeches to the garden.
We didn't shake down into comfort even with the coming of the tea-things.
"Sit down!" said her father.
"Surprise me?"
In the meantime, I had thrown out casually that I had given up my place at Rawdon's.
"But how did you come?" she asked.
But she supposed a man thought nothing of seventeen miles.
"Give him a chair, Puss."
It is a fact that Parload had never stripped for a swim in his life; never had a simultaneous bath all over his body since his childhood.
I HAVE set myself to write the story of the Great Change, so far as it has affected my own life and the lives of one or two people closely connected with me, primarily to please myself.
DUST IN THE SHADOWS
I have described Parload's room with such particularity because it will help you to understand the key in which my earlier chapters are written, but you must not imagine that this singular equipment or the smell of the lamp engaged my attention at that time to the slightest degree.
There was a very small grate, made of cast-iron in one piece and painted buff, and a still smaller misfit of a cast-iron fender that confessed the gray stone of the hearth.
Long ago in my crude unhappy youth, I conceived the desire of writing a book.
It was perhaps eight feet by seven in area and rather higher than either of these dimensions; the ceiling was of plaster, cracked and bulging in places, gray with the soot of the lamp, and in one place discolored by a system of yellow and olive-green stains caused by the percolation of damp from above.
A chest, also singularly grained and streaked, of two large and two small drawers, held Parload's reserve of garments, and pegs on the door carried his two hats and completed this inventory of a "bed-sitting-room" as I knew it before the Change.
Lighting by electricity had then been perfected for fifteen years, but still the larger portion of the world used these lamps. All this first scene will go, in my mind at least, to that olfactory accompaniment.
Did ever such a thing happen in my life?
No fire was laid, only a few scraps of torn paper and the bowl of a broken corn-cob pipe were visible behind the bars, and in the corner and rather thrust away was an angular japanned coal-box with a damaged hinge.
Was such a mood and thought and intention ever possible to me?
But that alone, in a world where so much of vivid and increasing interest presents itself to be done, even by an old man, would not, I think, suffice to set me at this desk.
The data have gone, the buildings and places.
I took all this grimy unpleasantness as if it were the most natural and proper setting for existence imaginable. It was the world as I knew it.
The passage of years brings a man at last to retrospection; at seventy-two one's youth is far more important than it was at forty.
BOOK THE FIRST
And I think too that those who are now growing up to take our places in the great enterprise of mankind, will need many such narratives as mine for even the most partial conception of the old world of shadows that came before our day.
I find some such recapitulation of my past as this will involve, is becoming necessary to my own secure mental continuity.
This lamp, you must understand, was of some whitish translucent substance that was neither china nor glass, it had a shade of the same substance, a shade that did not protect the eyes of a reader in any measure, and it seemed admirably adapted to bring into pitiless prominence the fact that, after the lamp's trimming, dust and paraffin had been smeared over its exterior with a reckless generosity.
But I had forgotten--there was also a chair with a "squab" that apologized inadequately for the defects of its cane seat.
That was the evening smell of the room.
It is something, even amidst this present happiness, to find leisure and opportunity to take up and partially realize these old and hopeless dreams.
To scribble secretly and dream of authorship was one of my chief alleviations, and I read with a sympathetic envy every scrap I could get about the world of literature and the lives of literary people.
There were, in chief, a basin and a jug of water and a slop-pail of tin, and, further, a piece of yellow soap in a tray, a tooth-brush, a rat-tailed shaving brush, one huckaback towel, and one or two other minor articles.
Let me describe this room to you in detail.
I forgot that for the moment because I was sitting on the chair on the occasion that best begins this story.
This person had first painted the article, then, I fancy, smeared it with varnish, and then sat down to work with the combs to streak and comb the varnish into a weird imitation of the grain of some nightmare timber.
The washhandstand so made had evidently had a prolonged career of violent use, had been chipped, kicked, splintered, punched, stained, scorched, hammered, dessicated, damped, and defiled, had met indeed with almost every possible adventure except a conflagration or a scrubbing, until at last it had come to this high refuge of Parload's attic to sustain the simple requirements of Parload's personal cleanliness.
Not one in fifty of us did in the days of which I am telling you.
The uneven floor boards of this apartment were covered with scratched enamel of chocolate hue, on which a small island of frayed carpet dimly blossomed in the dust and shadows.
THE COMET
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Section 1
Prince Andrew interrupted him and cried sharply: "Yes, ask her hand again, be magnanimous, and so on?...
He was awaiting Prince Andrew's return with dread and went every day to the old prince's for news of him.
He paused at the sight of Pierre.
Some days after Anatole's departure Pierre received a note from Prince Andrew, informing him of his arrival and asking him to come to see him.
"So Monsieur Kuragin has not honored Countess Rostova with his hand?" said Prince Andrew, and he snorted several times.
Pierre took the packet.
"But is it possible that all is really ended?" asked Pierre.
Yes, that would be very noble, but I am unable to follow in that gentleman's footsteps.
This expression irritated Prince Andrew, and in a determined, ringing, and unpleasant tone he continued:
"I say, do you remember our discussion in Petersburg?" asked Pierre, "about..."
I can't."
"Here are her letters and her portrait," said he.
"Well, how are you?
"Now he is censured and accused by all who were enthusiastic about him a month ago," Prince Andrew was saying, "and by those who were unable to understand his aims.
"He says he expected it," she remarked.
So you'll give her the packet?"
She has been at death's door."
Evidently it had to be...."
But I don't know," said Pierre.
To judge a man who is in disfavor and to throw on him all the blame of other men's mistakes is very easy, but I maintain that if anything good has been accomplished in this reign it was done by him, by him alone."
Prince Andrew had arrived in the evening and Pierre came to see him next morning.
"Yes, I am well," he said in answer to Pierre's question, and smiled.
Old Prince Bolkonski heard all the rumors current in the town from Mademoiselle Bourienne and had read the note to Princess Mary in which Natasha had broken off her engagement.
If you wish to be my friend never speak to me of that... of all that!
"Well, it doesn't matter," said Prince Andrew.
He stood up and coughed.
The whole house was in a state of alarm and commotion.
Pierre now recognized in his friend a need with which he was only too familiar, to get excited and to have arguments about extraneous matters in order to stifle thoughts that were too oppressive and too intimate.
"Give this to the countess... if you see her."
She did not understand how he could ask such a question.
At dinner the talk turned on the war, the approach of which was becoming evident.
After swallowing a little she had been so frightened that she woke Sonya and told her what she had done.
He took the packet from the table and handed it to Pierre.
Prince Andrew went to one and took out a small casket, from which he drew a packet wrapped in paper.
He resolutely denied these rumors, assuring everyone that nothing had happened except that his brother-in- law had proposed to her and been refused.
"He has gone to Peters...
"If there were treason, or proofs of secret relations with Napoleon, they would have been made public," he said with warmth and haste.
"I much regret her illness," said Prince Andrew; and he smiled like his father, coldly, maliciously, and unpleasantly.
It seemed to Pierre that it was his duty to conceal the whole affair and re-establish Natasha's reputation.
"Then she is here still?" said Prince Andrew.
"She is very ill," said Pierre.
When Prince Meshcherski had left, Prince Andrew took Pierre's arm and asked him into the room that had been assigned him.
Prince Andrew, as if trying to remember whether he had something more to say, or waiting to see if Pierre would say anything, looked fixedly at him.
Princess Mary came out to meet Pierre.
"I have received a refusal from Countess Rostova and have heard reports of your brother-in-law having sought her hand, or something of that kind.
Pierre saw that Prince Andrew was going to speak of Natasha, and his broad face expressed pity and sympathy.
Pierre expected to find Prince Andrew in almost the same state as Natasha and was therefore surprised on entering the drawing room to hear him in the study talking in a loud animated voice about some intrigue going on in Petersburg.
"He left long ago.
The old prince's voice and another now and then interrupted him.
Pierre left the room and went to the old prince and Princess Mary.
"Yes," returned Prince Andrew hastily.
Princess Mary was the same as always, but beneath her sympathy for her brother, Pierre noticed her satisfaction that the engagement had been broken off.
Pierre dined at the club that day and heard on all sides gossip about the attempted abduction of Rostova.
"Both true and untrue," Pierre began; but Prince Andrew interrupted him.
"I know his pride will not let him express his feelings, but still he has taken it better, far better, than I expected.
"I do not, and never did, like Speranski personally, but I like justice!"
Well, good-by.
Is that true?"
"Forgive me for troubling you..."
He did it all silently and very quickly.
Pierre went into the study.
"He could not marry, for he was married already," said Pierre.
His face quivered and immediately assumed a vindictive expression.
"And where is your brother-in-law now, if I may ask?" he said.
"Tell Countess Rostova that she was and is perfectly free and that I wish her all that is good."
Prince Andrew laughed disagreeably, again reminding one of his father.
They waited a long time for Natasha to come to dinner that day.
She paused, feeling that she was not telling the truth.
He did not mention this to his daughter, but Natasha noticed her father's nervousness and anxiety and felt mortified by it.
"Well, the Lord have mercy on us!" said the count, half in jest, half in earnest; but Natasha noticed that her father was flurried on entering the anteroom and inquired timidly and softly whether the prince and princess were at home.
At last an old, cross looking footman came and announced to the Rostovs that the prince was not receiving, but that the princess begged them to walk up.
The princess told the count that she would be delighted, and only begged him to stay longer at Anna Semenovna's, and he departed.
God is my witness, I did not know you had honored us with a visit, and I came in such a costume only to see my daughter.
The same thought was meanwhile tormenting Princess Mary.
"What have I said and what have I done?" thought she, as soon as she was out of the room.
Think not black man.
Bring bad storm or bad luck."
It was cool and pleasant in the woods.
"If we are going to have another storm I am going to bring water from the spring while I can go out of the cave." She was getting very tired of sitting still.
It made Jean feel very queer to see him cut off a piece of the tail, roast it and eat with great enjoyment, but before night she was to look upon the snake as her greatest friend.
"I will be good, but really I can't sit still all day," she said.
And in the winter the snow is lovely."
"One thing very much scare Black is snake in the face.
"Not know," he said, frowning.
CHAPTER IX
There was only a little water left in the water-hole, and that not fresh.
"He think little Missa not real child.
Don't move!"
Missa make eat, then sleep.
"Good Missa, let go stick, snake very dead now," and she looked with a shudder at the dead body of the serpent.
"Little Missa's shoes make tracks.
"Why not?
Then it is lovely, but when the sun comes out and melts it, it's not nice. Didn't you ever see snow?"
She dropped asleep after eating and did not waken until almost time for supper, when she found that Kadok had been sleeping too.
"Missa help quick.
Kadok saw she was growing restless and tried to talk to her, afraid that she would cry.
"We had storm enough yesterday to last for awhile.
It was very tender and tasted like spring chicken.
You not mind Kadok," he grumbled.
Him smell fine," he said, sniffing the scent which came from the fire.
"What is snow?" asked Kadok.
"It is time I tried to do something for you."
"Feel better, make eat now."
"Oh, if that's the trouble I can take my shoes off," she said, laughing, as she pulled off shoes and stockings.
"Little Missa keep quiet," said Kadok, raising himself on his elbow, grasping a stick he had and peering through the bushes.
"It's very cold, and the mountains are high and beautiful and there are no snakes nor wild things.
Save meal for some day we have not meat."
"Little Missa not see cave before, not have at home.
There were provisions enough to last a day or two and she tried not to worry about things, but she wished she had something else to do.
HOUSEKEEPING IN A CAVE
"Let me tie it up for you," said Jean.
"Kadok!" she screamed, but the Black reached forth a long arm and tried to catch her.
"See what pretty leaves."
Little Missa help Kadok get well?"
Kadok not like," he said so earnestly that she said,
"Brought little Missa meat for supper.
"You see nothing happens to me," she said.
What did black man say?"
The little housekeeper enjoyed her supper thoroughly.
It was the same Black I saw yesterday."
"I hadn't anything else, so I hit him with your snake and he ran away," she said simply.
Golden child.
"I hardly know how to tell you.
I thought he would be good like Dinah and bring me right back."
"It is ever so nice, Kadok," she said.
Hirara, a man about sixty years of age, and a member of the Methodist Church.
"Would your owner be apt to pursue you?" said a member of the Committee. "I don't think he will.
William was about thirty-five years of age, neat, and pleasing in his manners.
$1,300 walked off in the person of George.
ARRIVAL FROM MARYLAND, 1857.
She was probably sixty or seventy. She fled to keep from being sold.
These four journeyed from "Egypt" together--but did not leave the same "kind protector."
He was a brother-in-law of Israel, and accompanied him on the Underground Rail Road.
Bazil might be put down at nine hundred dollars.
He was a fine specimen.
He was thirty-one years of age and of a dark chestnut color.
The appended letter, from Thomas Garrett, will serve to introduce one of the most remarkable cases that it was our privilege to report or assist:
The good spirit moved two of Bazil's brothers to escape the spring before.
For years the idea of escape had been daily cherished.
Bazil was only seventeen years of age.
When he came where the servants were working, he would snap and bite at them and if he said anything at all, it was to hurry the work on."
I also gave her a letter to thee.
A few months afterwards a brother and sister were sold south.
I write this so that thee may be prepared for them; they ought to arrive between 11 and 12 o'clock.
Though he considered Captain Cunningham, his master, a "tolerable fair man," he was not content to be robbed of his liberty and earnings.
Perhaps thee may find some fugitive that will be willing to accompany her.
She was nearly naked.
Jane did not know how old she was.
Though, as will appear presently, other causes also helped to make him hate his oppression.
With desire for thy welfare and the cause of the oppressed, I remain thy friend,
"THE MOTHER OF TWELVE CHILDREN."
So he left the portly-looking Dr. Hughes, with no feeling of indebtedness or regret.
John was a well-made yellow man, twenty-two years of age, who had counted the cost of slavery thoroughly, besides having experienced the effects of it.
He was after two uncles of mine, one time, saw them, and talked with them, but was made to run."
ESTEEMED FRIEND--WILLIAM STILL:--We have here in this place, at Comegys Munson's an old colored woman, the mother of twelve children, one half of which has been sold South.
Accordingly he resolved to "be free or die," "to kill or be killed, in trying to reach free land somewhere!"
OLD JANE DAVIS--FLED TO ESCAPE THE AUCTION-BLOCK.
Elijah Thompson had at least fifteen hundred dollars less to sport upon by this bold step on the part of Ordee.
As a slave, he would have been considered cheap at sixteen hundred dollars.
Israel was twenty-three years of age, yellow, tall, well made and intelligent.
Randolph, physically, was a superior man.
GARRETT.
Richard was about twenty-two years of age, well grown, and a very likely-looking article, of a chestnut color, with more than common intelligence for a slave.
Go back, and when you get home your wife will just have had a little boy.
Now there lived at Court an old woman who had been the prince's nurse. To her he confided all his plans, and left his wife, the princess, in her care.
With that they set out on their journey.
When he reached the stream it asked if he brought it any good news. 'When I get across I will tell you,' said he.
He hardly knew which way to go, so he wandered about for twenty days, when, suddenly, he found himself in his father's camp.
He called his Council together and condemned the servant to death.
Lucky Luck says you will never have any living creature in your waters until someone is drowned in you.'
'Gracious prince,' said the maidens, 'do ask Lucky Luck how it happens that here we are over thirty years old and no lover has come to woo us, though we are good, pretty, and very industrious.'
When he sits down to eat his dinner sit beside him and eat with him.
All of a sudden Lucky Luck began to speak and said: 'Tell me, what sort of man are you, for since you came here you have not spoken a word?'
The prince and his bride walked over the bridge, but the servant said he would ride the horses through the stream so as to water and bathe them.
'Good-morning, mother,' said the prince.
The words were hardly out of his mouth when the stream swelled and overflowed till it reached the rock up which he had climbed, and dashed so far up it that the spray flew over him.
He declared that we could not possibly get home safely unless I did as he told me.'
The prince ruled the country and never even thought of marrying.
The King of Goldtown had a lovely daughter, and the prince, who soon heard about her beauty, could not rest till he saw her.
Do you go too.
But the servant said: 'My lord, let me examine this carriage first and then you can get in if I find it is all right; otherwise we had better stay in our own.'
Everyone in the house slept, and only the faithful servant kept watch.
So the stream parted; he walked through and on to the highest part of the bank.
He bade his son act as Regent in his absence, but ordered him on no account to marry till his return.
Here he spent the night.
He longed to know how the prince had escaped, and said: 'My dear son, I do indeed rejoice to have you safely back, but I cannot imagine why the beautiful carriage and the splendid robes I sent did not please you; why you had them destroyed.'
The prince looked well at the carriage.
He remembered, however, what his father had said, and waited some time longer, till at last it was ten years since the king went out to war.
But take care, in crossing, to get as near the other side as you can before you say so, or you may be the first victim yourself.'
And close upon them followed three pigeons.
'Oh, do ask Lucky Luck,' cried the brook, 'why, though I am such a clear, bright, rapid stream I never have a fish or any other living creature in my waters.'
He walked and walked till he got beyond his own country, and he wandered through a wood for three days but did not meet a living being in it.
He waited till he came to a well, and there he split it open, and out sprang a maiden seven times lovelier than either of the others, and she too said: 'My heart's love, I am yours and you are mine; do give me a glass of water.'
The prince was much disappointed, but he never dreamed of disobeying his father, and he began to think with all his might what he could do.
Perhaps I can tell you then.' So the next morning she blew on her pipe, and lo! and behold every magpie in the world flew up.
At these words the king's heart bounded within him.
The old woman sent after it at once, and when she questioned the magpies the crippled one was the only one who knew where the three bulrushes were.
'I don't know anything myself, but wait till to-morrow.
On being questioned the old man said he knew nothing, but begged the prince to stay overnight, and the next morning the old man called all the ravens together, but they too had nothing to tell.
'Now, prince,' said the magpie, 'the three bulrushes are behind that wall.'
The coachman went for it and, in the bucket he pulled up, a pretty little duck was swimming. He looked wonderingly at it, and all of a sudden it disappeared and he found a dirty looking girl standing near him.
The prince returned before long, bringing with him his father and mother and a great train of courtiers to escort Ilonka home.
And once more Ilonka went to the king's room and spoke to him; whisper as sweetly as she might she could get no answer.
He split the second bulrush as an experiment and just the same thing happened.
out sprang a lovely girl, who said: 'My heart's love, you are mine and I am yours; do give me a glass of water.'
The queen was very angry, and scolded her well; but as she longed to have the distaff she consented, though she gave the king a sleeping draught at supper.
Still, if you will wait till to-morrow I may be able to tell you something.'
Not one was missing.
'Good evening to you, my dear son,' answered the old woman.
Then the girl went to the king's room looking seven times lovelier than ever.
Then he looked about for the three bulrushes, pulled them up and set off with them on his way home.
They soon reached the prince's country, and as he wished to bring his promised bride back in a fine coach he went on to the town to fetch one. In the field where the well was, the king's swineherds and cowherds were feeding their droves, and the prince left Ilonka (for that was her name) in their care.
Unluckily the chief swineherd had an ugly old daughter, and whilst the prince was away he dressed her up in fine clothes, and threw Ilonka into the well.
Do you know anything about them?'
The girl agreed to let her have it on the same conditions as before; but this time, also, the queen took care to give the king a sleeping draught.
But how could the prince give it her when there was no water at hand? So the lovely maiden flew away.
Speak to me but once; I am your Ilonka.' But the king was so sound asleep he neither heard nor spoke, and Ilonka left the room, sadly thinking he was ashamed to own her.
'It is lucky for you that you spoke to me or you would have met with a horrible death.
There was once a king's son who told his father that he wished to marry.
Then she asked if they knew anything about the three bulrushes, but not one of them did.
Then the prince started off with the lame magpie.
That is to say, all the magpies except one who had broken a leg and a wing.
The prince wasted no time.
It was no use staying at home, so one day he wandered out into the world to try his luck, and as he walked along he came to a little hut in which he found an old woman crouching over the fire.
How careful he was of the third bulrush!
Now some of the king's servants had taken note of the matter, and warned their master not to eat and drink anything that the queen offered him, as for two nights running she had given him a sleeping draught.
As he rode along one of the bulrushes happened to knock against something.
The queen had no idea that her doings had been discovered; and when, a few days later, she wanted the flax, and had to pay the same price for it, she felt no fears at all.
At supper that night the queen offered the king all sorts of nice things to eat and drink, but he declared he was not hungry, and went early to bed.
But he had no peace!
I see you have lived long in this world; do you know anything about the three bulrushes?'
Then they set out for home.
Speak to me, for I am your Ilonka.'
The queen repented bitterly her promise to the girl, but it was too late to recall it; for Ilonka had already entered the king's room, where he lay anxiously waiting for something, he knew not what.
The prince bade him farewell and set out.
The next day the king was married, with great rejoicings, to the fair Ilonka; and if they are not yet dead--why, they are still living.
He sprang up and embraced and kissed her, and she told him all her adventures since the moment he had left her.
He wandered so far that he crossed seven kingdoms, and at last, one evening, he came to a little house in which was an old woman.
All of a sudden he saw a lovely maiden who bent over him and said: 'My dearest love, I am yours and you are mine.
However, at last she consented on condition that she might sleep one night in the king's room.
And when he heard all that Ilonka had suffered, and how he had been deceived, he vowed he would be revenged; so he gave orders that the swineherd, his wife and daughter should all be hanged; and so they were.
Of course she was very busy all day long, but whenever she had a little spare time she sat down to spin.
But how they all stared when they saw the swineherd's ugly daughter!
It split open and, only think!
When the queen--or, rather, the swineherd's daughter--heard of this, she very much wished to have the distaff, but the girl flatly refused to give it to her.
He knew very well he had been cheated, though he could not think how.
Lovely Ilonka
She bent over the sleeper and said: 'My heart's love, I am yours and you are mine.
'Good evening, mother.
'I am seeking the three bulrushes.
My father did not let me marry till I had won the golden sword you see me wear.'
'No, no!' said the king; 'you must not be in such a hurry.
Her distaff turned of itself and her spindle span by itself and the flax wound itself off; and however much she might use there was always plenty left.
He struck the canvas a hasty violet-black dab.
Now come along both of you," and she swept round, holding Archer by one hand and fumbling for Jacob's arm with the other.
"Think of the fairies," said Betty Flanders.
Mrs. Flanders had left the lamp burning in the front room.
Jacob plunged his hand.
The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets and lay under the sheets.
Mrs. Flanders stooped over him.
There was a hurricane out at sea.
You've got nothing to change into," said Betty, pulling them along, and looking with uneasy emotion at the earth displayed so luridly, with sudden sparks of light from greenhouses in gardens, with a sort of yellow and black mutability, against this blazing sunset, this astonishing agitation and vitality of colour, which stirred Betty Flanders and made her think of responsibility and danger. She gripped Archer's hand.
Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks--so it sounded.
And Jacob is such a handful; so obstinate already.
She had forgotten the meat.
Mrs. Flanders nodded.
Rough with crinkled limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed, a small boy has to stretch his legs far apart, and indeed to feel rather heroic, before he gets to the top.
"I say, won't that steamer sink?" said Archer, opening his eyes.
A fish darts across.
The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cistern overflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipes and streaming down the windows.
He ran towards her.
On she plodded up the hill.
It was but a dark patch.
The garden went out.
"There he is!" cried Mrs. Flanders, coming round the rock and covering the whole space of the beach in a few seconds.
Now!
He was lost.
A daddy-long- legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe.
Mr. Pearce had extinguished the lamp.
She was a rock.
She was covered with the seaweed which pops when it is pressed.
Jacob stared down at them.
The waves came round her.
The fringe of yellow-brown seaweed flutters, and out pushes an opal-shelled crab--
Mrs. Flanders crossed over to the cot.
Lying on one's back one would have seen nothing but muddle and confusion--clouds turning and turning, and something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.
"I don't know," said Archer.
The fishing-boats were leaning to the water's brim.
Well, Betty Flanders, to begin with.
Now turn and shut your eyes," she murmured, "and shut your eyes."
She had her hand upon the garden gate.
"Asleep?" whispered Rebecca, looking at the cot.
Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled.
Steele frowned; but was pleased by the effect of the black--it was just THAT note which brought the rest together.
There's Titian..." and so, having found the right tint, up he looked and saw to his horror a cloud over the bay.
There were the bulrushes and the Strand magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys' boots.
"I saw your brother--I saw your brother," he said, nodding his head, as Archer lagged past him, trailing his spade, and scowling at the old gentleman in spectacles.
A pale yellow light shot across the purple sea; and shut.
Every blade of grass was bent by rain.
There on the sand not far from the lovers lay the old sheep's skull without its jaw.
It's a great experiment coming so far with young children.
There was a click in the front sitting-room.
A large black woman was sitting on the sand.
But he ducked down and picked up the sheep's jaw, which was loose.
It was too pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull suspended just so--too pale as usual.
"Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their nests.
Exasperated by the noise, yet loving children, Steele picked nervously at the dark little coils on his palette.
The voice had an extraordinary sadness.
The crab was cool and very light.
Both looked round at the cot.
Now put it down.
He was flushed; and when the heavy curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened his eyes.
"Did he take his bottle well?" Mrs. Flanders whispered, and Rebecca nodded and went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs. Flanders bent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning.
Archer lay spread out, with one arm striking across the pillow.
Swinging her bag, clutching her parasol, holding Archer's hand, and telling the story of the gunpowder explosion in which poor Mr. Curnow had lost his eye, Mrs. Flanders hurried up the steep lane, aware all the time in the depths of her mind of some buried discomfort.
Every inch was rained upon.
But the water was thick with sand, and so, scrambling down, Jacob was about to jump, holding his bucket in front of him, when he saw, stretched entirely rigid, side by side, their faces very red, an enormous man and woman.
There were her large reels of white cotton and her steel spectacles; her needle-case; her brown wool wound round an old postcard.
"What's all that water rushing in?" murmured Archer.
Shut your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under the flowers."
An enormous man and woman (it was early-closing day) were stretched motionless, with their heads on pocket-handkerchiefs, side by side, within a few feet of the sea, while two or three gulls gracefully skirted the incoming waves, and settled near their boots.
Something horrid, I know.
"The Captain's in bed long ago.
There's no man to help with the perambulator.
The wind was rising.
For the landscape needed it.
Eyelids would have been fastened down by the rain.
Drop it this moment!
"What did I ask you to remember?" she said.
"Nanny!
The crows had hardly done speaking when away they flew.
After dinner they lay down to rest.
He was very kindly received, for he was extremely good-looking and had charming manners, so he lost no time in asking for her hand and her parents gave her to him with joy.
But, listen! whoever overhears and tells what we have said will be turned to stone up to his knees.'
Here are two spades.
Next morning when he was leaving they asked where he was going and he told them his story.
'Gracious prince, I dreamt that if your Royal Highness would grant all I asked we should get home safe and sound; but if you did not we should certainly be lost.
'Because they always throw out their sweepings in the face of the sun.'
Only one faithful servant stayed with the prince and refused to part from him.
'Another question, please, before I go.
The gallows was put up in the square in front of the palace.
The prince promised to inquire, and went on his way.
The old king was furious when he found that all his arts had failed; that his son still lived and that he would have to give up the crown to him now he was married, for that was the law of the land.
He did not think it looked so unsafe as his servant said; but he had given his word and he held to it.
At last the servant said:
'Listen, oh stream!
When the lad was about eighteen years old his father had to go to fight in a war against a neighbouring country, and the king led his troops in person.
The prince made no objections, and after looking the carriage well over the servant said: 'It is as bad as it is smart'; and with that he knocked it all to pieces, and they went on in the one that they had bought.
But when he reached his twenty-fifth birthday he began to think that it might be rather nice to have a wife, and he thought so much that at last he got quite eager about it.
And the prince told him.
He will answer whatever you may ask.'
With that the pigeons flew off and three eagles took their places, and this is what they said:
The king was delighted to see his son, and had a great many questions to ask and answer; but when he heard that instead of quietly waiting for him at home the prince was starting off to seek a wife he was very angry, and said: 'You may go where you please but I will not leave any of my people with you.'
From that time it became the best fishing stream in the country-side.
At the end of the third day he came to a river near which stood a large mill.
About midnight he heard three crows, who had flown to the roof, talking together.
The prince was so delighted that he could not speak.
I must have been flowing here a hundred years and more and no one has ever yet come by.'
They got down and loaded the horses with the luggage.
When you find him begin to dig, but don't speak a word to him.
The prince had hardly arrived at home when some thieves tried to ford the stream with a fine horse they had stolen.
'Because the miller keeps everything for himself, and does not give to those who need it.'
Still, to prevent your being anxious I will promise to do as you wish.'
The town is not far off and we can easily get another carriage there, for the wheels of this one are bad and will not hold out much longer.'
'Don't make such a fuss about a dream,' said the prince; 'dreams are but clouds.
The wedding took place at once, and the feasting and rejoicings went on for a whole month.
But the servant implored the prince to have nothing to do with them, and never gave him any peace till he had obtained leave to destroy the robes.
'May Luck be with you, my son.
Why is this?'
Take three drops of blood from the child's little finger, rub them on your servant's wrists with a blade of grass and he will return to life.'
Time went by.
Lucky Luck
'I am looking for Lucky Luck,' replied the prince.
He spent the night once more at the mill and gave the miller his answer, and by-and-by he told the three sisters not to throw out all their sweepings in the face of the sun.
Then the prince climbed down, dried himself in the sun, and set out on his march home.
When he was leaving next morning the miller asked him: 'My gracious lord, where are you going all alone?'
When the prince got home he found that his wife had just got a fine little boy.
Everything in the house was beautifully clean and tidy, and a cheerful honest-looking old woman was sitting by the fire.
'Truly,' said the second crow; 'for to-morrow, when midday strikes, the bridge over the Gold Stream will break just as they are driving over it.
At the end of the month they set off for home, but as the journey was a long one they spent the first evening at an inn.
But the servant paid no heed to him, and by the time his story was done he had turned to stone from head to foot.
When they were half-way across, the stream rose so suddenly that it swept them all away.
'And you do well, for he deserves everything.
My dreams never deceive me, so I entreat you to follow my advice during the rest of the journey.'
'Then you have come to the right place, my son, for I am his mother.
When they got to the bridge the servant said: 'Let us leave the carriage here, my prince, and walk a little way.
When they put these on they will be burnt up at once. But whoever hears and repeats this will turn to stone from head to foot.'
It is now eleven o'clock.
When the old king saw this he foamed with rage, stared wildly about, flung himself on the ground and died.
After dinner he will question you, and then tell him all your troubles freely.
Then he came to a great forest and wandered about in it from morning to night and from night to morning before he got near the other end.
They journeyed over hill and dale till they came to a place called Goldtown.
Oh! how grieved the prince was to lose his faithful servant!
But he clung on tight, and after failing to reach him three times the stream returned to its proper course.
And what pained him most was the thought that he was lost through his very faithfulness, and he determined to travel all over the world and never rest till he found some means of restoring him to life.
'I have another thing to ask,' said the prince, when he had thanked him. 'In the forest near here is a fine stream but not a fish or other living creature in it.
The servant stayed on with his royal master and served him faithfully all the rest of his life; and, if neither of them is dead, he is serving him still.
Once upon a time there was a king who had an only son.
But anyone who hears and betrays what we have said will be turned to stone up to his waist.'
'Because no one has ever been drowned in the stream.
The prince promised to inquire, and went on his way.
'I am not dumb,' replied the young man, 'but I am that unhappy prince whose faithful servant has been turned to stone, and I want to know how to help him.'
When he got quite clear of the forest he walked on through a lovely valley till he reached a little house thatched with rushes, and he went in to rest for he was very tired.
The prince called to him to say no more as he had proved his innocence.
He is not at home just now, he is out digging in the vineyard.
With that she showed him the way, and the prince went and did just as she had told him.
The miller, too, began to give alms and became a very good man, and in time grew so rich that he hardly knew how much he had.
The rope was being placed round his neck, when he begged to be allowed a few last words.
'I will tell you,' answered the prince, 'if you will divide yourself so that I may walk through.'
'And why is it that a miller, who has a large mill with all the best machinery and gets plenty of corn to grind is so poor that he can hardly live from day to day?'
He did not lose a moment in pricking the baby's finger till the blood ran, and he brushed it on the wrists of the stone figure, which shuddered all over and split with a loud noise in seven parts and there was the faithful servant alive and well.
Then the prince called his courtiers about him and set off with a great retinue to seek a bride.
If he cannot help you no one on earth can.'
'Indeed, sire,' said the prince, 'I was myself much annoyed at their destruction; but my servant had begged to direct everything on the journey and I had promised him that he should do so.
He went straight to it and in the house were three girls playing a game together.
'Even if the prince and princess get safe over the bridge they will perish,' said they; 'for the king is going to send a carriage to meet them which looks as new as paint.
It seems quite a pity they should lose their lives so soon.'
Why was this?'
On my way here I lodged one night in the house of three maidens.
Mrs. Todd had taken off her warm gloves and looked the picture of content.
Yes, it suits me: I don't ask no more.
To call it a picnic would make it seem trivial.
I had been noticing with great interest the curiously French type of face which prevailed in this rustic company.
"There, they're callin' out it's time to set the tables," said Mrs. Caplin, with great excitement.
We were sorted out according to some clear design of his own, and stood as speechless as a troop to await his orders.
I've visited it time an' again, just to notice its poor blooms.
"Stim'lates," she explained scornfully.
We who were her neighbors were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming countenance.
"The stories are very interesting," I ventured to say.
It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused provision of every sort.
Poor Nathan saw somethin' had crossed me,--he had very nice feelings,--and when he asked what 'twas, I told him.
Those that aren't kin by blood are kin by marriage."
"Oh, I expect I shall meet friends today that I haven't seen in a long while," said Mrs. Blackett with deep satisfaction.
"I didn't see the bearin' of it then quite so plain.
This was so different from Mrs. Todd's usual largeness of mind that I had a moment's uneasiness; but the cloud passed quickly over her spirit, and was gone with the offender.
You can see it right in their expressions, all them Evins folks.
I sometimes think that Santin's ability has come 'way down from then.
We brought flowers from the fence-thickets of the great field; and out of the disorder of flowers and provisions suddenly appeared as orderly a scheme for the feast as the marshal had shaped for the procession.
Mrs. Todd encouraged the horse until he fairly pranced with gayety as we drove round to the front of the house on the soft turf.
Mrs. Caplin gave a heavy sigh.
I'm always glad not to have them disappointed."
My mother was there, and she thought certain 'twas me."
The reserve force of society grows more and more amazing to one's thought.
The Bowden Reunion
I wish they were sittin' with us; they're not among folks they can parley with, an' they look disappointed."
We could see now that there were different footpaths from along shore and across country.
The grove was so large that the great family looked far smaller than it had in the open field; there was a thick growth of dark pines and firs with an occasional maple or oak that gave a gleam of color like a bright window in the great roof.
There was a flashing of white gulls over the water where the fleet of boats rode the low waves together in the cove, swaying their small masts as if they kept time to our steps.
"There used to be an old story goin' about when I was a girl," said Mrs. Blackett, with much amusement.
"Here's Cousin Sarah Jane Blackett!
And, oh, look down on the bay; yes, look down on the bay!
All he thinks of, when he sees a crowd, is how to march 'em. 'Tis all very well when he don't 'tempt too much.
See what a sight o' boats, all headin' for the Bowden place cove!"
He never did act like other folks."
'Mis' Bowden, Mis' Bowden!' says she.
I already knew some of Mrs. Todd's friends and kindred, and felt like an adopted Bowden in this happy moment.
"We always have known each other."
"He's had it easy as we came along, and he can rest when we get there.
Such is the hidden fire of enthusiasm in the New England nature that, once given an outlet, it shines forth with almost volcanic light and heat.
"I be right," insisted Mrs. Todd with much amiability.
There were some who should have sat below the salt for lack of this good breeding; but they were not many.
The others are some little ways ahead, and I don't want to lose a minute."
After this there was no more time for conversation until we were seated in order at the long tables.
"I guess likely the best of 'em'll be there," answered Mrs. Todd with gentle humor, stealing a glance at me.
We ranked by fours, and even then we made a long procession.
There was a crowd about the house as if huge bees were swarming in the lilac bushes.
"No, Santin never was in the war," said Mrs. Todd with lofty indifference.
I counted three or four that were baffled by the light breeze, but before long all the Bowdens, small and great, seemed to have assembled, and we started to go up to the grove across the field.
As I looked up and down the tables there was a good cheer, a grave soberness that shone with pleasure, a humble dignity of bearing.
The sky, the sea, have watched poor humanity at its rites so long; we were no more a New England family celebrating its own existence and simple progress; we carried the tokens and inheritance of all such households from which this had descended, and were only the latest of our line.
"I've always meant to have you see this place, but I never looked for such a beautiful opportunity--weather an' occasion both made to match.
I saw the straight, soldierly little figure of a man who bore a fine resemblance to Mrs. Blackett, and who appeared to marshal us with perfect ease.
"No, we never had fits, none of us; and 'twas lucky we didn't 'way out there to Green Island.
She was not so much reminiscent now as expectant, and as alert and gay as a girl.
"See all the teams ahead of us.
I had a large bunch brought me once from Massachusetts way, so I know it.
Something made them do all these things in a finer way than most country people would have done them.
"Was he an old soldier?"
'Your baby's in a fit!' They used to tell that the whole congregation was up on its feet in a minute and right out into the aisles.
"Don't he do well?" answered Mrs. Todd with satisfaction.
We hurried on our way, beginning to feel as if we were very late, and it was a great satisfaction at last to turn out of the stony highroad into a green lane shaded with old apple-trees.
"There!" she exclaimed.
Mrs. Todd looked up at the roof of green trees, and then carefully surveyed the company.
I turned with interest to hear the worst.
Miserrimus Dexter dropped his embroidery on his lap, and laughed softly to himself, with an impish enjoyment of my poor little narrative, which set every nerve in me on edge as I looked at him.
You are his old friend--I am here to ask you to help me."
He slowly lifted one of his hands, and pointed at me with his long forefinger.
"I am still in the dark about you and your motives," he said.
There are books in the next room.
How bitterly no one knows so well as I do.
At the same time, if I now shut him out of my confidence, I should lose the reward that might yet be to come, for all that I had suffered and risked at that perilous interview.
"You suspect somebody," he said.
"So this is your interest," he said, "in clearing up the mystery of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death?"
I don't agree with my husband, or his mother, or his friends.
They don't know themselves--as Mrs. Valeria has just said!
"I see nothing to laugh at," I said, sharply.
"Are you free of each other, pretty Mrs. Valeria, by common consent of both parties?"
He began to move his chair nearer to me once more.
WITH such a man as Miserrimus Dexter, and with such a purpose as I had in view, no half-confidences were possible.
The one man is just as good as the other; just as handsome, as agreeable, as honorable, and as high in rank as the other.
I must investigate this when I have the time, and when I find myself in the humor." Having so far settled the question to his own entire satisfaction, he looked up at me again.
"Fond of him isn't strong enough to express it," I retorted.
Am I right?"
But I am his wife; and none of you love him as I love him. I alone refuse to despair; I alone refuse to listen to reason.
His whole mind was evidently still filled with the words that I had spoken to him, and still bent on discovering what those words meant.
Never mind.
"Let me go back for a moment, Mr. Dexter, to past times at Gleninch," I said.
Nothing will bring him back to me--nothing will persuade Eustace that I think him worthy to be the guide and companion of my life--but the proof of his innocence, set before the Jury which doubts it, and the public which doubts it, to this day.
In another moment he would have disappeared like a puppet in a show if I had not stopped him.
Make it up; and I will give you this pretty piece of embroidery when I have done it.
"You suspect somebody," he repeated.
"Curious!" he said to himself; "Eustace's first wife loved him too.
"I have a very powerful motive, Mr. Dexter My husband is resigned to the Scotch Verdict His mother is resigned to it.
I am only a poor, solitary, deformed wretch, with a quaint turn of mind; I mean no harm.
Make me suffer for it.
"And you believe that I can help you?"
I shall be fit for it again, if you will kindly give me a few minutes to myself.
The look he fixed on me was a look which unpleasantly suggested that I had trusted myself alone with him, and that he might end in taking advantage of it.
"Stop!" he cried, before I could answer him.
"Mrs. Eustace Macallan the Second, you must have some very powerful motive for turning your studies that way."
"Perhaps!" was all that I said in return.
Dear Mrs. Valeria!
If God spare me, Mr. Dexter, I dedicate my life to the vindication of my husband's innocence.
"Nothing to laugh at," he repeated, "in such an exhibition of human folly as you have just described?" His expression suddenly changed his face darkened and hardened very strangely.
"I am only a friendless woman," I said, "who has lost all that she loved and prized, and who is trying to win it back again."
Their verdict, you remember, was Not Proven.
In my present critical situation, no such refuge as a middle course lay before me--even if I had been inclined to take it.
I am so ashamed of myself--I feel so small and so miserable at having offended you.
"When I tell you that I refuse to submit to the opinion of the Scotch Jury, I mean exactly what my words express.
"Yes."
"Do you know where the person is?"
He paused over his work, and looked at me with a grave and stern attention which presented his face in quite a new light.
Don't be frightened at me.
He apologized to me mechanically.
"He has left me, and has gone abroad."
"Is the person within your reach?"
"Not yet."
You don't know what a difficulty I have in controlling myself.
Forgive me! indulge me! enlighten me!"
Who could say?
Injured Mrs. Valeria!
Who could fathom him?
"Because I can't help it," I answered, doggedly.
"Does that mean that Eustace has left you?"
"I do."
I'll endure anything in the way of punishment, if you will only tell me what you mean by not submitting to the Scotch Verdict." He backed his chair penitently as he made that entreaty.
I lifted my hand. He stopped the chair directly.
"I beg your pardon," he said; "I humbly beg your pardon.
"There is no anger--there is not even a misunderstanding between us.
Without the least reason for it in either case.
I must either risk the most unreserved acknowledgment of the interests that I really had at stake, or I must make the best excuse that occurred to me for abandoning my contemplated experiment at the last moment.
I penitently resolved to be more considerate toward his infirmities of mind and body during the remainder of my visit.
The tone in which he put the question was not at all to my liking.
He suddenly stretched himself over his chair: he pounced on me, with a hand on each of my shoulders; his wild eyes questioned me fiercely, frantically, within a few inches of my face.
"I can explain myself to you in no other way."
"If he persevere in his present resolution, Mr. Dexter, Eustace will never return to me."
He smiled satirically, and went on with his embroidery.
"Remove your hands, sir," I said, "and retire to your proper place."
"Without the least necessity."
"Is the quarrel so serious as that?" he asked.
Clever Mrs. Valeria, please take me by the hand, and lead me into the light.
Call up Ariel, who is as strong as a horse, and tell her to hold me.
The subject excites me, frightens me, maddens me.
He feels the stain bitterly.
Your evidence at the Trial tells me that."
Take a stick and beat me.
Far away, in the East and in the West, where his person would never be known, his name was to be regarded, and his wishes to be fulfilled, and his word pass like gold.
'And if it fails,' said she, advancing, and laying her hand on his arm, her eyes full of eager light.
She fell upon his neck, and kissed him through her tears.
Help me, as you helped me when I was a child.
Oh, John! keep up your name--try all risks for that.
It was her brother!'
'Honest men are ruined by a rogue,' said he gloomily.
Mr. Hamper would have been only too glad to have secured him as a steady and experienced partner for his son, whom he was setting up with a large capital in a neighbouring town; but the young man was half-educated as regarded information, and wholly uneducated as regarded any other responsibility than that of getting money, and brutalised both as to his pleasures and his pains.
It is hard, mother.'
The silence around her struck her at last; and she quieted herself to listen.
It would not satisfy him to avoid Higgins; he must convince himself that he was master over his own anger, by being particularly careful to allow Higgins access to him, whenever the strict rules of business, or Mr. Thornton's leisure permitted.
'But if it succeeded, they need never know.
Who is gone?
For many months, the embarrassment caused by the strike had been an obstacle in Mr. Thornton's way; and often, when his eye fell on Higgins, he could have spoken angrily to him without any present cause, just from feeling how serious was the injury that had arisen from this affair in which he was implicated.
He did not speak readily; but he went and opened the shutters, and let the ruddy light of dawn flood the room.
No orders were coming in; so he lost the interest of the capital he had locked up in machinery; indeed, it was difficult to get payment for the orders completed; yet there was the constant drain of expenses for working the business.
'Yes, I know all about him.
There was an immediate choice of situations offered to Mr. Thornton.
I may never see her again; but it is a comfort--a relief--to know that much.
How redeem it?'
Could he stand?
'No!'
She would have nothing to do with religion just then.
CHANGES AT MILTON
'Why!
'Trade is bad.'
'Mother,' he went on, seeing that she would not speak, 'I, too, have been rebellious; but I am striving to be so no longer.
Do not let us have to think that the world has too much hardened our hearts.
'I dread nothing,' replied he, drawing up his head, and holding it erect.
Such a strange, pallid look of gloom was on it, that for a moment it struck her that this look was the forerunner of death; but, as the rigidity melted out of the countenance and the natural colour returned, and she saw that he was himself once again, all worldly mortification sank to nothing before the consciousness of the great blessing that he himself by his simple existence was to her.
She shook her head.
Therefore, it is my creditors' money that I should risk.'
'Oh, John!' she said, and she lifted his face up.
'Her merchants be like princes,' said his mother, reading the text aloud, as if it were a trumpet-call to invite her boy to the struggle.
'And you dread--'
'But how do you stand?
She shook with the sobs that come so convulsively when an old person weeps.
I must give up business, but I pay all men.
He thought that no one knew of this occupation of the hours he should have spent in sleep.
No sound.
I am too old to begin again with the same heart.
But when he became conscious of this sudden, quick resentment, he resolved to curb it.
'It was her brother,' said Mr. Thornton to himself.
'Shame never touched me,' said he, in a low tone: but she went on.
That was my anxiety.'
I'm not going for to tell more.
But it is hard, mother.
I could say it for myself, John, but not for you.
'Not yet.' The face was cloudy once more.
That was the idea of merchant-life with which Mr. Thornton had started.
'There is some talk of it, as I understand, with a connection of the family.'
Don't go!
You know how difficult it is to catch names when one is introduced.
"We have three countries in Sky Island," returned the woman.
"Guess again!
But this incident had determined the Pinkies to consider our friends prisoners and to take them immediately before their Queen.
They wore rings and necklaces and bracelets and brooches of rose-gold set with pink gems, and all four of the new arrivals, both men and women, carried sharp-pointed sticks, made of rosewood, for weapons.
"Stole it!
It was paved with pink marble and between the street and the houses that lined both sides of it were gardens filled with pink flowers and pink grass lawns, which were shaded by pink trees and shrubbery.
It was the parrot that aroused them.
It was a Pink Country, indeed.
"So we ran away and passed through the Fog Bank and came here," said Button-Bright.
"No bird can talk unless inspired by witchcraft."
"We'll go peaceable," answered Cap'n Bill.
Where is it located?"
They all had short necks and legs, pink hair and eyes, rosy cheeks and pink complexions, and their faces were good-natured and jolly in expression.
"It isn't just one country, but a good many countries."
Half a mile distant was a large City, its pink tintings glistening bravely in the pink sunshine, while hundreds of pink banners floated from its numerous domes.
Then one of the women came forward and addressed the strangers.
So the procession moved along the pretty roadways to the City, which they soon reached.
Until we prove your truth and honor we must regard you as enemies of our race.
Cap'n Bill looked cross for a minute, for he did not like to be called a "gigantic monster," although he realized he was much larger than the pink people.
"The Queen of the Pinkies.
"Seems to me we've had 'bout enough of kings an' queens," remarked Cap'n Bill.
There was a strong high wall of pink marble around it and they passed through a gate made of pink metal bars and found themselves in a most delightful and picturesque town.
"No.
"And they made us slaves," said Trot.
it screamed;
"That is a country we have never heard of.
Their clothing was quite dry by this time, although much wrinkled and discolored by the penetrating fog, so at once they prepared to follow the Pinkies.
"There is some truth in what she says," remarked one of the men, thoughtfully.
"Who is Tourmaline?" inquired Trot, doubtfully, for she didn't like the idea of being "taken" to anyone.
"Your story is the strangest we have ever heard," said she; "and your presence here is still more strange and astonishing.
Cobalt began to say:
"Well, well!
"I'll rule it!"
"Nonsense!" shouted Indigo.
"Well, order 'em out," commanded Trot.
"March in and capture them, Captain!
"Now, you Blue Cap'n, who are you and your soldiers going to obey--me or the snubnosed ones?"
"It looks like it," admitted the Captain.
"Not any more," replied Trot.
"The Pinkies!" exclaimed the Captain of the Guards; "why, they're our enemies, your Short Highness."
The soldiers had partly recovered their courage and, fearful of the anger of their dreaded Boolooroo, whom the Princesses declared would punish them severely, had ventured to return to the room.
"Can't you see?"
They came rather haltingly, though, and the Captain of the Guards first put his head cautiously through the doorway to see if the coast was clear.
Cap'n Bill and I perpose runnin' this Island ourselves, after this.
While they were sitting and talking together the Captain of the Guards entered and bowed respectfully.
The Captain halted, his soldiers peering curiously over his shoulders and the Six Snubnosed Princesses looking on from behind, where they considered themselves safe.
The soldiers were secretly glad to observe this, but the Princesses were highly indignant.
"Don't worry," replied Trot.
Never mind if they do slice the Boolooroo.
Finally they returned to the great throne room of the palace, where they seated themselves on the throne and tried to think what could possibly have become of the precious umbrella.
"Don't come in!
"And, say; get all the soldiers together and tell all the people there's going to be a high time in the Blue City to-night.
But the umbrella wasn't there, either.
"So now, Queen Trot, what's next on the program?"
Don't come in!" yelled the Boolooroo in a terrified voice.
"You!" declared the Captain of the Guards, positively, for he hated the Princesses, as did all the Blueskins.
Captain Allen was a creature who had no real existence.
This Lizzie and Ernestine considered an admirable arrangement; for, as Captain Allen never came home and never wrote, he was as little of an inconvenience to his family as any gentleman can ever hope to be.
She began to worry about Mr. Adipose.
So much better for the change!
"Oh, mamma, it isn't his fault, I am sure it isn't," pleaded Lizzie.
"I have perfect confidence in him.
He would never steal anybody else's family!
See, mamma, how round and pink their faces have grown!"
Lizzie and Ernestine despised people not made of paper, who had only two or three little boys and girls.
It took a day and a half to make the journey, and the little cousins did not visit each other more than once or twice a year.
"I wouldn't advise you to depend so much on Colonel Wheeler," Lizzie's mother would sometimes say.
Adipose grew a little home-sick.
Mamma was very sorry for Lizzie.
Time went on.
Mrs. Adipose, whose name had been suggested by papa, was the fattest of all the dolls.
Papa wrote to the postmaster, and Ernestine's papa inquired at the Hingham post-office, and there was quite a stir over the lost travellers.
No, something dreadful has happened,--it's that horrid post-office!" and she wrung her hands.
"These military men are rather uncertain characters.
Mamma laughed at me, but she doesn't know you as well as I do. Nobody shall ever laugh at you again."
You won't mock me any more now!'
Soon after Big Klaus came out of the church, and taking up the sack on his shoulders it seemed to him as if it had become lighter; for the old cattle-driver was not half as heavy as Little Klaus.
'Now you had better stop that,' said Big Klaus, 'for if you say it once more I will give your horse such a crack on the head that it will drop down dead on the spot!'
'You have killed my grandmother!
What does this mean?' said Big Klaus, and he ran off at once to Little Klaus.
'Is anybody up there?' asked the farmer, catching sight of Little Klaus. 'Why are you lying there?
Isn't that true?' he asked, treading on the sack so that it squeaked.
'Yes, certainly,' said the farmer; 'but we must first have something to eat!'
And in the night as he sat there the door opened, and Big Klaus came in with his axe.
Who knows that he isn't in there still?'
'He will show himself in the shape of a sexton!'
'Here is a glass of mead from your son!'
'Put a stone in, for I am afraid I may not reach the bottom,' said Big Klaus.
On the other side of the wood was a large deep river.
'But how did you get those splendid cattle?' asked Big Klaus.
Then Little Klaus told him how he had lost his way, and begged to be allowed to spend the night there.
'But you must take the chest with you.
'Oh, you're a lucky fellow!' said Big Klaus. 'Do you think I should also get some cattle if I went to the bottom of the river?'
'I must ask my wizard,' said Little Klaus, treading on the sack and putting his ear to it.
'Oh, dear!
I sold it yesterday evening.'
'Hullo!' cried Little Klaus, running out of the door, and seizing the host by the throat.
So he went to the river, which was deep and broad, threw in the sack with the old driver, and called after it, for he thought Little Klaus was inside:
'But I can't carry you in a sack to the river; you are too heavy for me!
How frightened I was when I was in the sack!
'Ask anything you like! I will pay you down a bushelful of money on the spot.'
'He says we should not eat porridge, for he has conjured the whole oven full of roast meats and fish and cakes.'
'What does he say?'
The wooden shutters over the windows were not shut at the top, and he could just see into the room.
I feel up to it now.
The road passed by the church; the organ was sounding, and the people were singing most beautifully.
'What a very wicked man!' thought Little Klaus. 'He was going to kill me!
The farmer also gave him a wheelbarrow to carry away his money and the chest.
If it swims home to me, well and good; and if it doesn't, it's no matter.'
'Where did you get so much money from?'
The apothecary and all the people thought he must be mad, so they let him go.
I will kill him!'
Hurrah! how loudly Little Klaus cracked his whip over all the five horses! for they were indeed as good as his on this one day.
The farmer's wife and the sexton sat at the table, but there was no one else.
'Oh, yes!
'I will give you a whole bushelful of money if you will let me go!'
It was a good thing for my grandmother that she was dead already, or else he would have killed her!'
'Oh! no, no!' cried the sexton.
But as soon as someone else was going by Little Klaus forgot that he must not say it, and called out 'Gee-up, my five horses!'
There stood a large table, spread with wine and roast meat and a beautiful fish.
'Haven't I drowned you?'
You shall have the wizard for a bushel of money, but I must have full measure.'
'Well!' said Little Klaus at last, 'as you have been so good as to give me shelter to-night, I will sell him.
'Down you go!
Here are some cattle for you to begin with, and a mile farther down the road there is another herd, which I will give you as a present!'' Now I saw that the river was a great high-road for the sea-people.
'I really won't say it again!' said Little Klaus.
He had to go a long way before he came to the river, and Little Klaus was not very light.
Right in front of him was a large farm-house.
'Yes,' replied Little Klaus; 'you threw me into the river a good half-hour ago!'
Oh, it was horrid!'
But it doesn't matter.
'Yes, now I have seen him; he looked just like our sexton.
It is as heavy as if it were filled with stones!
And so he crept into the large sack, which was lying on the back of one of the oxen.
Then he flayed the skin off his horse, dried it, and put it in a sack, which he threw over his shoulder, and went into the town to sell it.
Dear Little Klaus!
'Oh, what a misfortune!' cried the host, wringing his hands.
Out of the town with him!' they shouted; and Big Klaus had to hurry off as quickly as he could, if he wanted to save his life.
Ah, what delicious cakes he saw standing there!
I shall only be tired, dragging it along; I will throw it into the river.
It was the farmer coming home.
But he must not come too near me!'
'They are sea-cattle!' said Little Klaus. 'I will tell you the whole story, and I thank you for having drowned me, because now I am on dry land and really rich!
It WAS a feast!
Will you not give her a glass of mead?
'A bushel of money for each,' said Big Klaus.
'Skins! skins!
'You shall pay for this dearly, Little Klaus!'
'If one could only get some of that!' thought Little Klaus, stretching his head towards the window.
I think so,' said Little Klaus.
'Skins! skins!
'Are you mad?' they all exclaimed.
I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the rain came down faster than ever.
For the man that prophesies us bad weather, on the contrary, we entertain only bitter and revengeful thoughts.
"Well, no, sir; I'm afraid it's settled down for the day," he replies, shaking his head.
I do think that, of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness by which we are plagued, this "weather-forecast" fraud is about the most aggravating. It "forecasts" precisely what happened yesterday or the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen to-day.
If I hadn't woke you, you'd have lain there for the whole fortnight."
We told him that he would have to go without shaving that morning, as we weren't going to unpack that bag again for him, nor for anyone like him.
By twelve o'clock, with the sun pouring into the room, the heat became quite oppressive, and we wondered when those heavy showers and occasional thunderstorms were going to begin.
"They ain't a-going to starve, are they?" said the gentleman from the boot-shop.
"Now we shan't get on the water till after twelve.
The fine weather never came that summer.
The grocer's boy came across, and took up a position on the other side of the step.
And we chuckled to think how wet they were going to get, and came back and stirred the fire, and got our books, and arranged our specimens of seaweed and cockle shells.
He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting with the slavey, instead of sprawling there, sunk in soul-clogging oblivion.
It reminded us, for the first time since our being called, of his existence.
There seemed a good deal of luggage, when we put it all together.
Then the young gentleman from the boot-shop stopped, and joined Biggs's boy; while the empty-can superintendent from "The Blue Posts" took up an independent position on the curb.
On Wednesday I went and hit it again, and the pointer went round towards "set fair," "very dry," and "much heat," until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn't go any further.
He said:
Biggs's boy was the first to come round.
It was simply pouring with rain outside, and had been all day; and I couldn't quite make matters out.
It was a terrible thought.
It will break all right enough, sir."
But who wants to be foretold the weather?
nebulous uncertainty
national shortcomings
nascent intercourse
olive grayness
needless depression
outstretching sympathies
nasal drone
nice discrimination
nameless fear
nightmare fantasy
nervous solicitude
obvious boredom
new perplexities
offensive hostility
natural sluggishness
notable circumstance
noonday splendor
odd makeshifts
naive manner
ostentatious display
oratorical display
nondescript garb
nautical venture
obstinate defiance
outward pomp
opportunely contrived
objectionably apologetic
ordinary delinquencies
noteworthy friendship
obedient compliance
nominal allegiance
nodding approval
omnipotent decree
novel signification
odious tyranny
noisy platitudes
nettled opponent
organic assimilation
outstanding feature
oriental spicery
O
obligingly expressed
noiseless reverie
obsolete phraseology
neutral eye
oscillatory movement
neighboring mists
observant eye
necessary adjuncts
noble condescension
narcotic effect
omniscient affirmation
outrageously vehement
Her hair was waved like a fan, and her eyes were red from crying.
"Let me beseech you to take it."
He was not, however, popular in that office.
I wonder why you have come here for me." So saying, he pleasingly embraced him.
When Genji heard this, he said: "I am not accustomed to receive an answer such as this through the mouth of a third person.
Have you quarrelled with the boy?" exclaimed the nun, looking at her.
Genji, meantime, walked out of the cave and looked around him with his attendants.
Genji did not, however, declare who he was, and the style of his retinue was of a very private character.
"What is his daughter like?"
The haze clung to the surface like a soft sash does round the waist, and to Genji, who had scarcely ever been out of the capital, the scenery was indescribably novel.
"Believe me, I am well disposed at your offer," said the nun; "but you may have been incorrectly informed.
"Has he again been the cause of this?
Its well arranged balconies and the gardens around it apparently betokened the good taste of its inhabitants.
"That stupid boy," said one of the attendants.
'Twas to reveal these wishes to you that I came here, and risked the chance of offending you in doing so."
I have long since quitted the affairs of this world, and have almost forgotten the secret of my exorcisms.
They advanced on their way further and further.
Genji as he heard him, felt some qualms of conscience, for he remembered that his own conduct was far from being irreproachable.
But it will be pleasant to see them once more."
I must forthwith go and see him."
He pulled the screen slightly aside, and standing near the door, he struck his fan on his hand, to summon some one.
"Sir!" replied the servant, timidly.
This at length obliged the nun to have an interview with the Prince. He then told her that he called Buddha to witness that, though his conduct may have seemed bold, it was dictated by pure and conscientious motives.
Would that I could see her morning and evening in the palace, where I can no longer see the fair loved one whom she resembles!" He now returned to the monastery, and retired to his quarters.
I cannot, indeed, point out in detail its most remarkable features, but, in general, the blue expanse of the sea is singularly charming.
When I went down there last time, I became acquainted with the history and circumstances of the family, and I found that though he may not have been well received in the Capital, yet, that here, having been formerly governor, he enjoys considerable popularity and respect.
Hereupon, he advanced to the back of the temple, and his gaze fell on the far-off Capital in the distance, which was enveloped in haze as the dusk was setting in, over the tops of the trees around.
The nun hummed, in a tone sufficiently audible to Genji,
Well, I trust, at least, that my only daughter may be successful and prosperous in her life!' He often told her, I heard, that if she survived him, and if his fond hopes for her should not be realized, it would be better for her to cast herself into the sea."
It is true that there is a little girl dependent upon myself, but she is but a child.
Genji said in reply, "I have been afflicted with constant attacks of ague for the last few weeks, and, therefore, by the advice of my friends, I came to this mountain to be exorcised.
Gazing around at these Genji once more proceeded to the temple.
"Look upon me, I pray, as a substitute for your once loved daughter.
The Hermit, however, told him that it would be better to spend the evening in the Temple, and to be further prayed for.
A slight shower fell over the surrounding country, and the mountain breezes blew cool.
They were very quiet, yet the sound of the telling of beads, which accidentally struck the lectern, was heard from time to time. The room was not far from his own.
"Without doubt," answered his companion, "the beauty of her person is unrivalled, and she is endowed with corresponding mental ability.
YOUNG VIOLET
In the western antechamber of the house was placed an image of Buddha, and here an evening service was performed.
I, too, when a mere infant, was deprived by death of my best friend--my mother--and the years and months which then rolled by were fraught with trouble to me.
The contour of the child-like forehead and of the small and graceful head was very pleasing.
After her father's death the sole care of her fell upon her widowed mother alone.
Where can the bird be gone?
Her face was rather round, and her appearance was noble.
"What is the matter?
The deer, too, which were to be seen here, added to the beauty of the picture.
"I do not see the real intent of the effusion," thought the nun. "Perhaps he thinks that she is already a woman.
Although I thank the lady for even that much, I should feel more obliged to her if she would grant me an interview, and allow me to explain to her my sincere wishes."
"Believe me, I have my own reasons for this," said Genji.
The night was moonless.
"All the circumstances of your family history are known to me," continued he.
Genji now engaged in prayer until the sun sank in the heavens.
"Whose house may that be?" inquired Genji of his attendants.
She was, however, pale and weak, her voice, also, being tremulous.
"Inuki has lost my sparrow, which I kept so carefully in the cage," replied the child.
"Yet let there be no reserve in the expression of your ideas," interrupted Genji; but, before they could talk further, the return of the priest put an end to the subject, and Genji retired to his quarters, after thanking the nun for his kind reception.
He did not, however, go to the mountainous regions of the interior, but chose the sea-coast.
I know him," said Genji.
And all this, too, after we had tamed it with so much care." She then left the room, possibly to look for the lost bird.
"Your offer is very kind," replied the priest, "but she is extremely young.
She must be, after all, a country maiden, and all that I can give credit to is this much: that her mother may be a woman of some sense, who takes great care of the girl. I am only afraid that if any future governor should be seized with an ardent desire to possess her, she would not long remain unattached."
The attendant who had given this account of the ex-governor and his daughter, was the son of the present Governor of the Province.
I saw personally the truth that 'care kills more than labor.'"
However every woman grows up under the protecting care of some one, and so I cannot say much about her, only it shall be mentioned to my sister."
Who can she be?
So Genji made up his mind to stay there, saying, "Then I shall not return home till to-morrow."
We could sympathize with each other.
"Oh, could I but live in a retreat like this priest!" As he thus thought of a retreat, he was involuntarily taken by a fancy, that how happy would he be if accompanied to such a retreat by such a girl as he had seen in the evening, and with this fancy her lovely face rose up before him.
His residence, moreover, is well appointed and of sufficient magnitude, and he performs with punctuality and devoutness his religious duties--nay, almost with more earnestness than many regular priests." Here Genji interrupted.
"She gave birth to a child at her death, which was also a girl, and about this girl the grandmother is always feeling very anxious."
At last, thinking it would be unbecoming to take no notice of it, she gave orally the following reply to the attendant to be given to Genji:--
Her mother departed this life when she only a very young girl, but she was quite sensible at the age of this one.
For this reason, it appears, that he finally selected the place which I have already alluded to for the sake of his family.
So Genji, whose mind was occupied in thought, could not slumber here.
Two maiden attendants went in and out of the room waiting upon her, and a little girl ran into the room with them.
She was about ten years old or more, and wore a white silk dress, which fitted her well and which was lined with yellow.
Genji, therefore, sent for the hermit, but he declined to come, saying that he was too old and decrepit to leave his retreat.
In this state of affairs he reflected within himself, no doubt, that his presence in the Capital could not but be disagreeable. When, therefore, his term of office expired, he determined still to remain in the province.
He seemed to be thinking of other things.
"I say, IS it well for the Black Panther so to mouth and cough, and howl and roll?
"Bagheera, why dost thou shake all over?
Even when he fought, his eyes never blazed as Bagheera's did.
"Say now that the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack once herded thee, Mysa," he called.
"I hear," Mowgli answered.
A couple of young wolves of the Pack were cantering down a path, looking for open ground in which to fight. (You will remember that the Law of the Jungle forbids fighting where the Pack can see.) Their neck-bristles were as stiff as wire, and they bayed furiously, crouching for the first grapple.
He could not resist the temptation of stealing across the reeds to Mysa and pricking him with the point of his knife.
And yet the look in his eyes was always gentle.
"Now Akela said to me many foolish things before he died, for when we die our stomachs change.
This is new Jungle to me."
Do not my eyes talk then?"
But no one took any notice of Mowgli sitting among the tall reeds humming songs without words, and looking at the soles of his hard brown feet in case of neglected thorns.
It was a perfect white night, as they call it.
He danced in the moonlight before the houses of the Man-Pack.
The Time of New Talk is near.
"Since I broke up the Council with the Red Flower--since I killed Shere Khan--none of the Pack could fling me aside.
There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells, as they drift on the heavy air, are old and used.
"As Chil the Kite used Akela," he repeated, "on the night I saved the Pack from Red Dog." He was quiet for a little, thinking of the last words of the Lone Wolf, which you, of course, remember.
"Thus do they cry," Mysa answered contemptuously, "who, having torn up the grass, know not how to eat it."
"Good hunting, Little Brother! Where is thy answer?"
Bagheera knew his master.
Softly now.
Mowgli was on his feet almost before he fell, his knife and his white teeth were bared, and at that minute he would have killed both for no reason but that they were fighting when he wished them to be quiet, although every wolf has full right under the Law to fight.
At this he shook all over with rage, and half drew his knife. Then he became very haughty, though there was no one to see him, and stalked severely down the hillside, chin up and eyebrows down.
"It must be that carelessly I have eaten poison, and my strength is going from me.
"The grass is dry," Mowgli answered, pulling up a tuft.
On such nights runs he to and fro."
"I will not die HERE," he said angrily.
"Yes," said Mowgli to himself, though in his heart he knew that he had no reason.
That is true sign I have eaten poison....
"Little Brother, are BOTH thine ears stopped?
It is only the hairless wolf of the Seeonee Pack.
"I have surely eaten poison," he said in an awe-stricken voice.
Never have I run such a spring running--hot and cold together. Up, Mowgli!"
He is weeping in the Jungle: He that was our Brother sorrows sore! Man goes to Man! (Oh, we loved him in the Jungle!) To the Man-Trail where we may not follow more.
"Indeed, yes; I hear, Man-cub." Bagheera rolled over hurriedly and sat up, the dust on his ragged black flanks. (He was just casting his winter coat.) "We be surely the Masters of the Jungle!
"He did not come upon the night when I sent him the word.
The second year after the great fight with Red Dog and the death of Akela, Mowgli must have been nearly seventeen years old.
Man goes to Man!
"I said we be beyond question the Masters of the Jungle," Bagheera repeated.
Mowgli sat with his elbows on his knees, looking out across the valley at the daylight.
Cry the challenge through the Jungle! He that was our Brother goes away. Hear, now, and judge, O ye People of the Jungle,-- Answer, who shall turn him--who shall stay?
But what do they care in the Jungle?
He said...
Go and tell them at the village at the foot of the marsh."
Mowgli watched him puff and blow with eyes that never changed.
What hunter would have crawled like a snake among the leeches, and for a muddy jest--a jackal's jest--have shamed me before my cow?
Be silent!
That was no fault of mine."
Who is so strong as Mowgli?
"I had forgotten.
"How loud he cries!" said the cow.
"I say ye do," said Mowgli, shooting out his forefinger angrily.
"When I miss the kill I am angry.
He looked older, for hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth far beyond his age.
In an Indian Jungle the seasons slide one into the other almost without division.
He lay back with his head on his arms, his eyes shut.
Mor cried the new smells, the other birds took it over, and from the rocks by the Waingunga he heard Bagheera's hoarse scream--something between the scream of an eagle and the neighing of a horse.
He ran out to the middle of the swamp, disturbing the duck as he ran, and sat down on a moss-coated tree-trunk lapped in the black water.
It roused Bagheera, for he snuffed the morning air with a deep, hollow cough, threw himself on his back, and struck with his fore-paws at the nodding leaf above.
"The mouth is hungry," said Bagheera, "but the eyes say nothing. Hunting, eating, or swimming, it is all one--like a stone in wet or dry weather." Mowgli looked at him lazily from under his long eyelashes, and, as usual, the panther's head dropped.
That is no killing-word, but my song that I make ready against the need."
All green things seemed to have made a month's growth since the morning.
But never a single one of his people asked him a question, for they were all too busy with their own affairs.
"The Jungle goes forward.
"There is no game afoot," said Mowgli.
If he had more money, or if he had some rich backers who believed in him, he might do wonders.'
I want some sporting outlet like that for my money.'
III
And then the reply, 'Yes, who is it?' in a woman's voice.
The sun had risen.
Tell me some more about your inventive friend.
Hurrying home she had settled down to talk to him at her ease.
'Have you missed me?'
She was in a fever of agony.
When the watch gave her the signal she would begin to listen.
He had rallied wonderfully at the end and was confident of recovery.
'My darling, no.'
'At eleven,' he had said.
'Yes, but oh, so tired, so old!'
Every night he rang her up and they had a long conversation; many times in the day also.
She had never seen him again alive.
Every night found her bending over the machine.
He died before the morning.
'You say that because you are kind.
Locking the door and drawing the heavy curtain, she would sit down in the far corner and begin to turn.
And so on.
'Cable?'
'Yes, cable.
All the messages were coming out all right, but backwards. Naturally the reproduction would be from the most recent to the less recent.
Good-night once more, my sweet.'
But then you never forget anything.
Nothing, as it happened, could have saved his life, but this modern device lightened his last weeks.
He had insisted on it--the dress she was to wear on his first outing.
'Good-night.'
As she listened, the tears ran down her face, but still she turned on and on.
How it all came back to her now!
I would gladly finance him.
How distinctly you speak!'
He, almost more than ever, was her standard. What he would have liked, she did; what he would have disliked, she left undone.
She had been to the empty house that day with an employee of the telephone company, and they had extracted a foot of the precious wire.
'This kind of work interests me. Could you not cable him to come over and bring the thing with him?
As she listened, the tears ran down her face, but still she turned on and on.
THE ONE LEFT
Then he spoke again: 'Ernest,' he said.
Her next neighbor on one side was a young American engineer, and in their conversation they came in time to the topic of invention and the curious aptitude for inventiveness shown by the American race.
Just to comfort me.
'It is a bad day.
'Have you missed me?'
He had fainted, she thought, and had dropped the receiver.
But I know it is.
She turned on; 'Are you there?' the familiar tones repeated.
'How are you, dear?'
Where servants abounded and there was no servant problem, as in England and on the Continent, the need for such contrivances was not acute.
'Indeed, no,' said the engineer.
'That is his trouble.
'This really exists?' she forced herself to ask.
It was an engagement she could not well refuse. It was an amusing play and she was in good spirits.
And then the endearments, the confidences, the hopes and fears, the plans for the morrow, the plans for all life.
She put the machine away and looked out of the window.
Who would have believed that the camera would ever be anything but a dream?
She rang him up between the acts and found him depressed.
She had learned now when not to listen.
But there was no sleep for her that night.
This she could neither understand nor forgive.
'I should like to help him,' she said.
And then silence,--complete, terrifying.
'Actually,' said the engineer.
One evening she dined out.
I can see so clearly, sometimes, I shall never get well--to-night I know it.'
'But when I left home the inventor was in a difficulty.
It's no use.
But how could she stop it before the end?
It was a case, said the engineer, of supply following demand; all Americans required time--and labor-saving appliances, and they obtained them.
Although dead, he swayed her utterly, and under his dominion she was equable and gentle, although broken at heart.
It was to make an engagement.
BY E. V. LUCAS
She knew just how fast to turn for others; so slowly for herself.
She had rung up without effect.
Every one has been complaining of tiredness to-day.'
But I know it is.
'Missed you!'
'Mind you don't forget.
"There, there," interrupted her mother, "aren't you growing uncharitable yourself?
"That is true," interposed the placid Edith, to whom Brenda had been talking.
"Oh, how tiresome you are!" cried the sanguine Brenda, "you are just as bad as the others, and it's quite as much your Bazaar as mine, and if it doesn't succeed, you'll be just as much to blame."
As the preparations for the Bazaar advanced it was very pleasant for Julia to find herself counted in among the band of workers.
'Indeed,' he answered, 'you surprise me.
"If I were you, Nora, I would not take anything that Frances says too seriously.
Now however slowly time appears to pass, the end of any period of waiting is sure to come, and its last days or hours generally seem to melt away.
In those last days, too, before the Easter vacation there seemed to be an unusual unity among the schoolgirls.
The latter was even known one day to offer to go out to Ruth Roberts' house to help her finish a piece of work for the Bazaar.
"Frances hardly says that, does she?" she enquired.
It is really true that Frances had ancestors who were of great service to the country, and her family has had position for a long time, and all the advantages of education.
You know that we have to advertise a little, and engage music and people to help us, and make all kinds of arrangements."
The four resolved themselves into an executive committee, adding to their number Julia, and Frances and one or two others.
"We can't make much out of things that we can't sell."
"Well," said Nora, "I don't value people for their ancestors, but for what they are themselves."
On the other hand, there were some who had not only done much more than they had promised themselves, but had collected many pretty, and even valuable articles from their friends.
"What good will that do?" enquired the practical Nora.
It was a long room with hard wood floor, intended really for dancing.
Edith, with a rather phlegmatic disposition, seldom did anything wrong.
It would seem so much more as if we were grown up.
"Why, Brenda, no one is probably going to be to blame, for the Bazaar will be a great success," interposed the peace-loving Edith.
"We can't make intimate friends of every one in the world, and we might as well have nothing to do with those who are not in our own set.
You know that Edith always had her birthday parties in that room."
"You might tell her," responded Mrs. Gostar, with a smile, "about the Virginia lady of whom I was reading the other day.
I shouldn't wonder if we should have more than $500 to give to Mrs. Rosa."
It is well to remember such things, if remembering them makes one more ambitious or more helpful to those around him.
The wilful Brenda, too, was more apt to seek her mother's advice after she had done a certain thing than to ask it in advance.
"Oh, nonsense," interposed Nora, with a smile.
"If you mean Ruth, you are entirely wrong.
"For my own part, I am never surprised or disappointed about anything, for I never expect too much beforehand.
But when this pride in his own people leads one to belittle all others whose part in making history may have been almost as important, if less conspicuous--then I would rather see a girl or a boy without family pride.
"Oh, Brenda, how unpractical you are," cried Edith, "that would have been perfectly ridiculous.
I hate these people who are always trying to push in."
I find that I can always put up with things when they come."
She is the last girl in the world likely to try to push in.
She had become accustomed to her cousin's little ways, and she realized that her "bark was worse than her bite," as Nora was in the habit of saying.
They may have names that are not so well known, and yet their ancestors may have been almost as useful in building up this country as those of Frances."
"All we have to do now is to try our very best to make it go off as well as possible."
It is true that she often had to take a sharp word from Brenda, or a cold glance from Belle, but these things did not disturb her.
If they hadn't so much money----"
Of course there were several disappointments.
In connection with this, let me tell you a story.
"Don't count your chickens too soon, Brenda," said Belle; "suppose it should rain on the day of the sale, or suppose,----"
But among your schoolmates and hers there are probably other girls of good descent, who have had advantages hardly inferior to those that Frances has enjoyed.
"Just think how long we were working without any special object.
"'I haven't finished,' returned the aunt.
Belle alone, of the Four, was unfortunate in her home surroundings.
"You can't expect that we are not to have any fun out of it ourselves, after all the trouble we've had, and I know that there is going to be plenty of money for the Rosas.
But this was evidently so unwise a plan, that she contented herself with simply broaching it to her friends.
Mrs. Blair and Mrs. Barlow were also ready to advise their daughters, although they both were a little more occupied with society than Mrs. Gostar and had less time at home.
During the last days of school preceding the Easter vacation the four did much canvassing among their friends to see whether all the articles promised were finished.
"Perhaps that is what I do think," answered Frances.
Brenda and Belle wished a small orchestra engaged to play during the evening of the Bazaar, and furnish music for dancing at the close of the sale. Edith and Nora were afraid that this would eat up too much of their profits, but Brenda was very decided in her views.
Yet that Nora had been able to influence her somewhat was proved by a slight change in Frances' demeanor towards others.
"Yes, she does, she really does--sometimes," replied Nora, "and I am sure that she feels like saying it all the time.
It is possible that he saw the little nudge, or perhaps he read the eager expression on their faces, for almost before they realized it he had placed in the hand of each of them a small volume in a white cover, and bidding them open their books he said, "Well, I must put something on that bare fly-leaf."
"Oh, no, sir," answered Edith quickly, "we couldn't."
He was very nice with her, and when she was getting out at the Canal Bridge she thanked him and bowed, and he bowed to her and raised his hat and smiled agreeably, and while she was going up along the terrace, bending her tiny head under the rain, she thought how easy it was to know a gentleman even when he has a drop taken.
She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage.
THE matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women's tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out.
She arranged in her mind all she was going to do and thought how much better it was to be independent and to have your own money in your pocket.
"Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker!"
Joe said he wasn't so bad when you knew how to take him, that he was a decent sort so long as you didn't rub him the wrong way. Mrs. Donnelly played the piano for the children and they danced and sang.
He was very nice with her.
Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book.
Soon they were all quite merry again and Mrs. Donnelly said Maria would enter a convent before the year was out because she had got the prayer-book.
Often he had wanted her to go and live with them; but she would have felt herself in the way (though Joe's wife was ever so nice with her) and she had become accustomed to the life of the laundry.
Maria did not understand why Joe laughed so much over the answer he had made but she said that the manager must have been a very overbearing person to deal with.
At last the children grew tired and sleepy and Joe asked Maria would she not sing some little song before she went, one of the old songs.
She had nursed him and Alphy too; and Joe used often say:
One got the prayer-book and the other three got the water; and when one of the next-door girls got the ring Mrs. Donnelly shook her finger at the blushing girl as much as to say: O, I know all about it!
He was so different when he took any drink.
"Thanks, Maria."
When she got outside the streets were shining with rain and she was glad of her old brown waterproof.
Here she was a long time in suiting herself and the stylish young lady behind the counter, who was evidently a little annoyed by her, asked her was it wedding-cake she wanted to buy.
They settled down before their huge mugs which the cook and the dummy filled up with hot tea, already mixed with milk and sugar in huge tin cans.
Joe was a good fellow.
She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: "Yes, my dear," and "No, my dear." She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their tubs and always succeeded in making peace.
Mrs. Donnelly bade the children be quiet and listen to Maria's song.
Maria gave the bag of cakes to the eldest boy, Alphy, to divide and Mrs. Donnelly said it was too good of her to bring such a big bag of cakes and made all the children say:
She went into her little bedroom and, remembering that the next morning was a mass morning, changed the hand of the alarm from seven to six.
Nobody could find the nutcrackers and Joe was nearly getting cross over it and asked how did they expect Maria to crack nuts without a nutcracker.
One day the matron had said to her:
In the purse were two half-crowns and some coppers.
Only she hoped that Joe wouldn't come in drunk.
She had lovely ferns and wax-plants and, whenever anyone came to visit her, she always gave the visitor one or two slips from her conservatory.
She hoped they would have a nice evening.
Then she played the prelude and said "Now, Maria!" and Maria, blushing very much began to sing in a tiny quavering voice.
In spite of its years she found it a nice tidy little body.
They insisted then on blindfolding Maria and leading her up to the table to see what she would get; and, while they were putting on the bandage, Maria laughed and laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin.
Maria agreed with him and favoured him with demure nods and hems.
So Maria let him have his way and they sat by the fire talking over old times and Maria thought she would put in a good word for Alphy.
She tried in Downes's bag and then in the pockets of her waterproof and then on the hallstand but nowhere could she find it. Then she asked all the children had any of them eaten it--by mistake, of course--but the children all said no and looked as if they did not like to eat cakes if they were to be accused of stealing.
The tram was full and she had to sit on the little stool at the end of the car, facing all the people, with her toes barely touching the floor.
"Two-and-four, please."
She sang I Dreamt that I Dwelt, and when she came to the second verse she sang again:
She got out of her tram at the Pillar and ferreted her way quickly among the crowds.
She would have five shillings clear after paying tram fare.
After the break-up at home the boys had got her that position in the Dublin by Lamplight laundry, and she liked it.
There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering.
Everyone was so fond of Maria.
But Joe said it didn't matter and made her sit down by the fire.
She bought a dozen of mixed penny cakes, and at last came out of the shop laden with a big bag.
At the thought of the failure of her little surprise and of the two and fourpence she had thrown away for nothing she nearly cried outright.
The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers.
The women would have their tea at six o'clock and she would be able to get away before seven.
Everybody had a solution for the mystery and Mrs. Donnelly said it was plain that Maria had left it behind her in the tram.
But Joe said he would not lose his temper on account of the night it was and asked his wife to open some more stout.
But Joe cried that God might strike him stone dead if ever he spoke a word to his brother again and Maria said she was sorry she had mentioned the matter.
"Mamma is mamma but Maria is my proper mother."
She went into Downes's cake-shop but the shop was so full of people that it was a long time before she could get herself attended to.
From Ballsbridge to the Pillar, twenty minutes; from the Pillar to Drumcondra, twenty minutes; and twenty minutes to buy the things.
The two next-door girls had arranged some Hallow Eve games and soon everything was merry again. Maria was delighted to see the children so merry and Joe and his wife in such good spirits.
Then the two next-door girls handed round the nuts.
And the sub-matron and two of the Board ladies had heard the compliment. And Ginger Mooney was always saying what she wouldn't do to the dummy who had charge of the irons if it wasn't for Maria.
The gentleman began to chat with her about Hallow Eve and the rainy weather.
She decided to buy some plumcake but Downes's plumcake had not enough almond icing on top of it so she went over to a shop in Henry Street.
He was a stout gentleman and he wore a brown hard hat; he had a square red face and a greyish moustache.
It was hard to know what to buy and all she could think of was cake.
When the cook told her everything was ready she went into the women's room and began to pull the big bell.
The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks.
Joe was there, having come home from business, and all the children had their Sunday dresses on.
Maria said she would rather they didn't ask her to take anything: but Joe insisted.
She moved her hand about here and there in the air and descended on one of the saucers.
Maria had never seen Joe so nice to her as he was that night, so full of pleasant talk and reminiscences.
She changed her blouse too and, as she stood before the mirror, she thought of how she used to dress for mass on Sunday morning when she was a young girl; and she looked with quaint affection at the diminutive body which she had so often adorned.
There were two big girls in from next door and games were going on.
These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea.
What a nice evening they would have, all the children singing!
Maria superintended the distribution of the barmbrack and saw that every woman got her four slices.
They would be sure to have plenty of apples and nuts.
That made Maria blush and smile at the young lady; but the young lady took it all very seriously and finally cut a thick slice of plumcake, parcelled it up and said:
Maria had cut them herself.
She said they were all very good to her.
She was sure they would but she could not help thinking what a pity it was Alphy and Joe were not speaking.
The next-door girls put some saucers on the table and then led the children up to the table, blindfold.
Somebody said something about the garden, and at last Mrs. Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play.
But wasn't Maria glad when the women had finished their tea and the cook and the dummy had begun to clear away the tea-things!
Then she took off her working skirt and her house-boots and laid her best skirt out on the bed and her tiny dress-boots beside the foot of the bed.
There was one thing she didn't like and that was the tracts on the walks; but the matron was such a nice person to deal with, so genteel.
CLAY
Then she thought what else would she buy: she wanted to buy something really nice.
Then she had her plants in the conservatory and she liked looking after them.
He told her all that went on in his office, repeating for her a smart answer which he had made to the manager.
Lizzie Fleming said Maria was sure to get the ring and, though Fleming had said that for so many Hallow Eves, Maria had to laugh and say she didn't want any ring or man either; and when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness and the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin.
They were always falling out now but when they were boys together they used to be the best of friends: but such was life.
She was very fond of that purse because Joe had brought it to her five years before when he and Alphy had gone to Belfast on a Whit-Monday trip.
She would be there before eight.
"That's all right," said the Idiot.
"Now the festive candidate Goes a-sporting through the State, And he kisses babes from Quogue to Kalamazoo; For he really wants to win Without spending any tin, And he thinks he has a chance to kiss it through."
"Back pedal there!
But you know, Mr. Idiot, even so great a masterpiece as that won't make a book," said the Poet.
To tell the truth, until I hear some of them, I can't promise to be more than an uncle to them."
"Now o'er the pavement comes a hush As pattering feet wade deep in slush That every Feb. Doth flow and ebb."
The Idiot laughed.
Result was everybody was down on him--even the young ladies."
"Now the landlord of the pastoral hotel Spends his mornings, nights, and eke his afternoons, Scheming plans to get more milk from out the well, And a hundred novel ways of cooking prunes.
"Most public men I know of would rather spend their money than kiss the babies.
"Only faintly," said the Poet.
"Anyhow, it's good sentiment, whether I wrote it or Biggs.
"I guess he was a cousin of yours, all right," laughed the Doctor; "that scheme bears the Idiot brand."
But what do you say to my proposition?"
"Nay, Sweet Gas-bags," quoth the Doctor.
"Alfred Austin Biggs, of Texas, voiced the same idea when he said:
The fruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to be monopolised or consumed in enjoyment.
If all unfortunate people could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant justification that would be for the ways of both God and man!
At the same time ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training and leisure.
Such reversion of benefit might take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and military protection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after all needful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness.
The saints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers have flourished in schools.
Finally, if the only aristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if public rewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might take the form of participation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men. Holiness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society.
For they too may grow rich, exercise financial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launch their daughters into fashionable society.
To attempt to give such things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to boast that they have been propagated.
She has imposed suffering on her creatures together with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her bounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some unsuspecting creature.
Now civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of remorse and of just indignation.
So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order to deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and clearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the other, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels.
Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehicles for nature's primeval cruelty, while the benefits it may also confer are only further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony.
It must needs be that offence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh.
The privileges the system bestows on some must involve no outrage on the rest, and must not be paid for by mutilating other lives or thwarting their natural potentialities.
It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to which the philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to the weather.
Nature may arrange her hierarchies as she chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another's life. That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the whole.
So pleasing an idea, then, as this of diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the less able are the many to follow them.
The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa's ingenious parable and the joyful humility of Dante's celestial friends, and renders both equally irrelevant to human conditions.
But when the vehicle of nature's inclemency is a heartless man, even if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect.
The ideal state and the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, but where all are happy.
In the first place nature in her slow and ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges by perpetual friction.
On the contrary, their wider diffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation more intense and successful.
Aristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save that which mechanical causes endow it with.
But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce everything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about terrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice.
Like education and religion they are degraded by popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people are able and willing to receive.
The services required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them should be made the servant's spontaneous and specific ideal.
Now the most tyrannical government, like the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium of natural forces.
Here the people neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existence of a rich and irresponsible class offers them an ideal, such as it is, in their ambitious struggles.
She has been led to punish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites for the honours they receive.
Where there is maladjustment there is no permanent physical stability.
But suffering has an added sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to live like the gods in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would have been innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painful world, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty.
This oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy and makes it truly unjust.
And he might continue by saying that a slave's life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the labours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by the conveniences which they supplied their masters with.
Its privileges are fruits of inevitable advantages.
When an ideal interest is general the share which falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious.
Therefore the ideal of society can never involve the infliction of injury on anybody for any purpose.
An approach to such an equilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the rough sifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatible alone remained.
In the second place, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsist in the ideal.
The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in which wrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection.
This argument may be recommended to apologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, and infinitely more consoling.
Great thoughts require a great mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility.
The relations of the canopy to the statue it shelters, are to be considered altogether distinctly from those of the canopy to the building which it decorates.
A recess itself has properly no decoration; but its depth gives value to the decoration which flanks, encloses, or interrupts it, and the form which interrupts it best is the roll.
They are a kind of stone lace-work, required for the ornamentation of the building, for which the statues are often little more than an excuse, and of which the physical character is, as above described, that of ghosts of departed shafts.
The Norman billet we shall not meet with in Venice; the bead constantly occurs in Byzantine, and of course in Renaissance work.
But in the late northern system the canopies are neither expressive nor protective.
We have often, in the preceding chapters, noted the fondness of the Northern builders for deep shade and hollowness in their mouldings; and in the second chapter of the "Seven Lamps," the changes are described which reduced the massive roll mouldings of the early Gothic to a series of recesses, separated by bars of light.
CHAPTER XXIV.
These ghost rolls, forming sometimes pedestals, sometimes canopies, sometimes covering the whole recess with an arch of tracery, beneath which it runs like a tunnel, are the peculiar decorations of the Flamboyant Gothic.
Finally the recess decoration by the ball flower is very definite and characteristic, found, I believe, chiefly in English work.
At other times it is a real protection to the statue, and is enlarged into a complete pinnacle, carried on proper shafts, and boldly roofed.
The shape of these recesses is at present a matter of no importance to us: it was, indeed, endlessly varied; but needlessly, for the value of a recess is in its darkness, and its darkness disguises its form.
THE ROLL AND RECESS.
"There is no comfort now, I believe, in anything.
Who ever saw him playing with his own child, or with any other?
Some one must tell him before he comes to me. Should there not be some one to tell him?
In her heart she wished that he might not come on that evening. At last, at half-past nine, she exerted herself to send away her visitor.
Mrs. Clavering went across the park alone, and soon found herself in the poor bereaved mother's room.
"Feel it papa!
Hugh?
I am sure he will do so, if it will be a comfort."
Why have they troubled you to come across again?"
"And who will tell him?
"Indeed, I knew that it was coming."
"Did you not send for me?
He will be hit hard now, and I pity him."
"Will it be better?"
So they both went and stood together over the little fellow whose short sufferings had thus been brought to an end. "My poor dear, what can I say to comfort you?" Mrs. Clavering, as she asked this, knew well that no comfort could be spoken in words; but-if she could only make the sufferer weep!
He will turn me out altogether now.
"I suppose he will turn me out of his house now," she said.
"And she was always fearing it," said Fanny.
"I do not think he would--not deeply, that is--if there were four or five of them.
"He will feel this," said the rector.
"Have you written to Julia?"
I cannot write.
"He will be sure to come now, Hermione."
Things are done kindly always at your house, because there is so much love there.
I shall wish to make her take something, and I can do it better if I ask for tea for myself.
"Who will do so?
"Yes, because you are here; because of the nearness of the houses.
They have sent another message."
Oh, Hermione, how can you speak in such a way?"
The poor mother was in a state of terrible agony, but at that time there was yet hope.
And he scolded me because there was none other but he.
This message had been already despatched when Mrs. Clavering arrived.
"I do not know.
Cannot you see how he would frown and shake his head if you were here?
Will you make her understand?" Mrs. Clavering promised that she would do this, wondering, as she did so, at the wretched, frigid immobility of the unfortunate woman before her.
Oh, Mrs. Clavering, you do not know how hard he is."
"Hannah shall be at hand to tell him." Hannah was the old housekeeper, who had been in the family when Sir Hugh was born.
"No, I think not.
But it was quite right, whether you sent or no. Of course I should come when I heard it.
"Yes, if he got your message before three o'clock."
He is so very hard. Hannah shall do it.
But there had come upon her suddenly a look of age, which nothing but such sorrow as this can produce.
If you lived far away you would not care for me.
"Of course he will come."
It is just the custom of the thing." There was something so true in this that Mrs. Clavering could make no answer to it.
"I suppose he will be here to-night?"
My darling!
I feel as though if it were to bring him back again I could not write of it.
"I will write to Julia," said Mrs. Clavering; "and I will read to you my letter."
"No; I have written to no one.
You have been very kind to me; but you are always kind.
"My poor Hermione," said Mrs. Clavering, coming up to her, and taking her by the hand.
But he will feel it now, for this child was his heir.
I will go at once.
You will write to Julia for me.
Good-night."
It is long since I knew any comfort; not since Julia went."
Anything was better than this, and therefore Mrs. Clavering asked the poor woman to take her into the room where the little body lay in its little cot.
"But I do not think he did. He never seems to think that evil will come to him."
The doctor was then at Clavering, and had recommended that a message should be sent to the father in London, begging him to come down.
How could I help it?
"He will be here soon, if he comes to-night," Lady Clavering said, "and it will be better that he should find me alone."
Good-night.
If she could induce the mother to weep for the child, even that would be better than this hard, persistent fear as to what her husband would say and do.
What is the use?
He does not like coming to the country."
Mrs. Clavering then remained with Lady Clavering for two or three hours; but just before dinner on the same day another messenger came across to say that hope was past, and that the child had gone.
Why should she care?
Who ever heard him say a soft word to his wife?
"Yes, yes.
"Ah, pigeon-holes will not do.
The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far--over the hedge, in fact.
Young ladies are too flighty."
I have documents at my back.
"Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know," said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon.
He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a clergyman of some distinction.
I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do.
It is not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong."
Dorothea felt hurt.
"You give up from some high, generous motive."
"No, no," said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; "I cannot let young ladies meddle with my documents.
"Your sister is given to self-mortification, is she not?" he continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.
I suppose you admire a man with the complexion of a cochon de lait."
In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably.
It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do.
But now, how do you arrange your documents?"
"Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there too--the poet Wordsworth, you know.
My groom shall bring Corydon for you every day, if you will only mention the time."
They want arranging, but when a question has struck me, I have written to somebody and got an answer.
"I should have thought you would enter a little into the pleasures of hunting.
We must keep the germinating grain away from the light."
This elevating thought lifted her above her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of political economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights.
"Why should I make it before the occasion came?
"Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him," said Dorothea, walking away a little.
Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.
"No" said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke's impetuous reason, and thinking of the book only.
"Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?" Celia was not without a touch of naive malice.
"I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith.
Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.
"Certainly," said good Sir James.
Every lady ought to be a perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband."
He has the same deep eye-sockets."
"Five-and-twenty guineas was monstrously dear for that little piano.
A month after her flight, she had bethought her of Amelia, and Rawdon, with a horse-laugh, had expressed a perfect willingness to see young George Osborne again.
How witty people used to be here who were morose when they got out of the door; and how courteous and friendly men who slandered and hated each other everywhere else!
I'd like to play a few more games at billiards with him.
"Why, Rawdon, it's Captain Dobbin."
Who'll bid for the gentleman on the elephant?
"Look at them with their hooked beaks," Becky said, getting into the buggy, her picture under her arm, in great glee.
It was rather late in the sale.
"I wish we could have afforded some of the plate, Rawdon," the wife continued sentimentally.
How Captain Dobbin Bought a Piano
By these attentions, that veteran rake, Rawdon Crawley, found himself converted into a very happy and submissive married man.
Ask Martingale; he was in Spain, aide-de-camp to General Blazes."
"Shall we say twenty guineas for this work of art?--fifteen, five, name your own price.
"Portrait of a gentleman on an elephant.
How cut up your pretty little friend will be; hey, Becky?"
"My relations won't cry fie upon me," Becky said, with rather a bitter laugh; and she was quite contented to wait until the old aunt should be reconciled, before she claimed her place in society.
His former haunts knew him not.
But we must not let the recollections of this good fellow cause us to diverge from the principal history.
The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites.
"Don't know.
How changed the house is, though!
All his creditors would have come rushing on him in a body, had they known that he was united to a woman without fortune.
This done, Jos went on at the boarding-house at Cheltenham pretty much as before.
My Lord Dives's remains are in the family vault: the statuaries are cutting an inscription veraciously commemorating his virtues, and the sorrows of his heir, who is disposing of his goods.
It only cost five-and-thirty then."
"He was a very kind old man, Mr. Sedley," Rebecca said; "I'm really sorry he's gone wrong."
The gentleman without the elephant is worth five pound."
As for one dozen well-manufactured silver spoons and forks at per oz., and one dozen dessert ditto ditto, there were three young stockbrokers (Messrs.
"What an artful little woman!" ejaculated Rebecca.
Come, gentlemen, don't keep me here all day."
When he came home she was alert and happy: when he went out she pressed him to go: when he stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks, superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in comfort.
he was rather dull, perhaps, but would not such wine make any conversation pleasant?
We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it: we call this pretty treachery truth.
He did not come to London, but he wrote to his mother to draw upon his agents for whatever money was wanted, so that his kind broken-spirited old parents had no present poverty to fear.
But there was an opposition here.
His name had been proclaimed as a defaulter on the Stock Exchange, and his bankruptcy and commercial extermination had followed.
Good old John Sedley was a ruined man.
CHAPTER XVII
Rawdon was denied the door by Mr. Bowls; his servants could not get a lodgment in the house at Park Lane; his letters were sent back unopened.
Old women and amateurs have invaded the upper apartments, pinching the bed-curtains, poking into the feathers, shampooing the mattresses, and clapping the wardrobe drawers to and fro.
Major Martingale never thought about asking to see the marriage licence, Captain Cinqbars was perfectly enchanted with her skill in making punch.
How much for this lot?
"They're like vultures after a battle."
Miss Crawley never stirred out--she was unwell--and Mrs. Bute remained still and never left her.
Crawley and his wife both of them augured evil from the continued presence of Mrs. Bute.
He lived comfortably on credit. He had a large capital of debts, which laid out judiciously, will carry a man along for many years, and on which certain men about town contrive to live a hundred times better than even men with ready money can do.
We see Jack Thriftless prancing in the park, or darting in his brougham down Pall Mall: we eat his dinners served on his miraculous plate.
"O stockbrokers--bankrupts--used to it, you know," Rawdon replied, cutting a fly off the horse's ear.
The marriage was not yet declared to the world, or published in the Morning Post.
His secluded wife ever smiling and cheerful, his little comfortable lodgings, snug meals, and homely evenings, had all the charms of novelty and secrecy.
Both were talking and listening too eagerly and too naturally, which was why Anna Pavlovna disapproved.
"Wait a moment, I'll get my work....
"Come over here, Helene, dear," said Anna Pavlovna to the beautiful young princess who was sitting some way off, the center of another group.
Anna Pavlovna was obviously serving him up as a treat to her guests.
The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Helene.
The latter spared him, and this magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death.
The spindles hummed steadily and ceaselessly on all sides.
Helene was so lovely that not only did she not show any trace of coquetry, but on the contrary she even appeared shy of her unquestionable and all too victorious beauty.
The Italian's face instantly changed and assumed an offensively affected, sugary expression, evidently habitual to him when conversing with women.
The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and considered a reply unnecessary.
She seemed to wish, but to be unable, to diminish its effect.
She smilingly waited.
The third group was gathered round Mortemart and Anna Pavlovna.
The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point where the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked agitated.
Another, of young people, was grouped round the beautiful Princess Helene, Prince Vasili's daughter, and the little Princess Bolkonskaya, very pretty and rosy, though rather too plump for her age.
The princess smiled.
He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure whether what he said was very witty or very stupid.
Anna Pavlovna's reception was in full swing.
Do tell us all about it, Vicomte," said Anna Pavlovna, with a pleasant feeling that there was something a la Louis XV in the sound of that sentence: "Contez nous cela, Vicomte."
She rose with the same unchanging smile with which she had first entered the room--the smile of a perfectly beautiful woman.
His eyes, nose, and mouth all seemed puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, and his arms and legs always fell into unnatural positions.
Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit employed all the old feminine arts.
It was evident that he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had found them to be so tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to them.
Good-bye!
"No, I won't promise that.
He turned to go.
"Very lovely," said Prince Andrew.
Then I shall be at rest, and then..."
Are you satisfied?"
Prince Andrew screwed up his eyes and turned away.
Moreover, he could see by her manners that she was one of those women-- mostly mothers--who, having once made up their minds, will not rest until they have gained their end, and are prepared if necessary to go on insisting day after day and hour after hour, and even to make scenes.
"No, impossible!" said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre's hand to show that there was no need to ask the question.
"Are you not ashamed to deprive us of your charming wife?"
He was a very handsome young man, of medium height, with firm, clearcut features.
All the affectation of interest she had assumed had left her kindly and tear-worn face and it now expressed only anxiety and fear.
This last consideration moved him.
"This unfortunate fete at the ambassador's deprives me of a pleasure, and obliges me to interrupt you.
"There now!...
"Very," said Pierre.
He turned away from her with a grimace that distorted his handsome face, kissed Anna Pavlovna's hand, and screwing up his eyes scanned the whole company.
But as soon as the prince had gone her face resumed its former cold, artificial expression.
"Then tomorrow you will speak to the Emperor?"
When he has been transferred to the Guards..." she faltered.
Tell me what news I may take back to my poor boy."
She knew his father to be a connection of Prince Vasili's.
But in Princess Drubetskaya's case he felt, after her second appeal, something like qualms of conscience.
Pierre gazed at her with rapturous, almost frightened, eyes as she passed him.
He wished to say something more, but at that moment Prince Vasili and his daughter got up to go and the two young men rose to let them pass.
"I will come to supper with you.
"Certainly; but about Kutuzov, I don't promise."
She had reminded him of what was quite true; he had been indebted to her father for the first steps in his career.
"Papa, we shall be late," said Princess Helene, turning her beautiful head and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood waiting by the door.
"Wait--just a word!
You hear her?"
My dear benefactor..."
His daughter, Princess Helene, passed between the chairs, lightly holding up the folds of her dress, and the smile shone still more radiantly on her beautiful face.
Prince Vasili's words frightened her, an embittered look clouded her once handsome face, but only for a moment; then she smiled again and clutched Prince Vasili's arm more tightly.
This is what I expected from you--I knew your kindness!"
Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the society of clever women."
"And Lise, your wife?"
"Papa," said his beautiful daughter in the same tone as before, "we shall be late."
I have asked Golitsyn and he has refused.
She returned to the group where the vicomte was still talking, and again pretended to listen, while waiting till it would be time to leave.
"I knew you would be here," replied Pierre.
"Andre," said his wife, addressing her husband in the same coquettish manner in which she spoke to other men, "the vicomte has been telling us such a tale about Mademoiselle George and Buonaparte!"
Prince Vasili smiled.
"I can't remain any longer in Petersburg.
Here is my hand on it.
"She will go to the country."
"You are off to the war, Prince?" said Anna Pavlovna.
Just then another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew Bolkonski, the little princess' husband.
"I knew that even though you became a member of the community you would not cease to be my friend; 'A warrior may change his metal, but not his heart,' as the saying is upon Barsoom."
"At least among civilized men."
However, since Woola accompanied them on all their excursions, and as Sola was well armed, there was comparatively little cause for fear.
"By kindness," I replied.
In the latter case it became a life and death struggle between the man and the beast.
As my arm rested for an instant upon her I felt a thrill pass through every fiber of my being such as contact with no other mortal had even produced; and it seemed to me that she had leaned slightly toward me, but of that I was not sure.
"No," she exclaimed, "it is enough that you have said it and that I have listened.
On the seventh day following the battle with the air craft we again took up the march toward Thark, all probability of another attack being deemed remote by Lorquas Ptomel.
On the evening before our departure I saw them approaching along one of the great avenues which lead into the plaza from the east.
My experience with Woola determined me to attempt the experiment of kindness in my treatment of my thoats.
The chill of the Martian night was upon us, and removing my silks I threw them across the shoulders of Dejah Thoris.
They have had me down in the pits below the buildings helping them mix their awful radium powder, and make their terrible projectiles.
And so I explained as carefully as I could the entire method of training I had adopted with my beasts, and later he had me repeat it before Lorquas Ptomel and the assembled warriors.
Following the battle with the air ships, the community remained within the city for several days, abandoning the homeward march until they could feel reasonably assured that the ships would not return; for to be caught on the open plains with a cavalcade of chariots and children was far from the desire of even so warlike a people as the green Martians.
The method was not at all complicated.
The few times I had visited her quarters she had been absent, walking upon the streets with Sola, or investigating the buildings in the near vicinity of the plaza.
"Show me how you accomplish these results," was Tars Tarkas' only rejoinder.
I could take a human life, if necessary, with far less compunction than that of a poor, unreasoning, irresponsible brute.
LOVE-MAKING ON MARS
"Nothing that can harm me outside my pride.
You know that these have to be manufactured by artificial light, as exposure to sunlight always results in an explosion.
I had warned them against venturing far from the plaza for fear of the great white apes, whose ferocity I was only too well acquainted with.
At heart they hate their horrid fates, and so wreak their poor spite on me who stand for everything they have not, and for all they most crave and never can attain.
A great warrior and yet a stumbling little child."
I had always been his favorite among the younger generation of Carters and so I hastened to comply with his demand.
When the war broke out he left us, nor did I see him again for some fifteen or sixteen years.
We all loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod.
Left alone in the study, I opened the safe and withdrew the contents of the drawer in which he had told me I would find my instructions.
They were in part peculiar indeed, but I have followed them to each last detail as faithfully as I was able.
His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative.
There were no marks of violence on the body, and with the aid of a local physician the coroner's jury quickly reached a decision of death from heart failure.
I have often heard my father caution him against his wild recklessness, but he would only laugh, and say that the tumble that killed him would be from the back of a horse yet unfoaled.
It lay, he said, stretched full length in the snow with the arms outstretched above the head toward the edge of the bluff, and when he showed me the spot it flashed upon me that it was the identical one where I had seen him on those other nights, with his arms raised in supplication to the skies.
He told us that he had been prospecting and mining in Arizona part of the time since the war; and that he had been very successful was evidenced by the unlimited amount of money with which he was supplied. As to the details of his life during these years he was very reticent, in fact he would not talk of them at all.
His horsemanship, especially after hounds, was a marvel and delight even in that country of magnificent horsemen.
He told me at this time that if anything should happen to him he wished me to take charge of his estate, and he gave me a key to a compartment in the safe which stood in his study, telling me I would find his will there and some personal instructions which he had me pledge myself to carry out with absolute fidelity.
He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world.
Captain Carter had a small but beautiful cottage, situated on a bluff overlooking the river, and during one of my last visits, in the winter of 1885, I observed he was much occupied in writing, I presume now, upon this manuscript.
His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a typical southern gentleman of the highest type.
AT THE ARIZONA CAVE
The silvered mountains in the distance, the almost stationary moon hanging in the sky, the cacti-studded valley below me were not of Mars.
It was a most grotesque and horrid tableau and I hastened out into the fresh air; glad to escape from so gruesome a place.
As I sit here tonight in my little study overlooking the Hudson, just twenty years have elapsed since I first opened my eyes upon Mars.
The sight that met my eyes as I stepped out upon a small ledge which ran before the entrance of the cave filled me with consternation.
Did the vitalizing air reach the people of that distant planet in time to save them?
The old mine, which I found untouched, has made me fabulously wealthy; but what care I for wealth!
Did the Martian reach the pump room?
I would rather lie dead beside her there than live on Earth all those millions of terrible miles from her.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Before me was a small patch of moonlit sky which showed through a ragged aperture.
It was dark when I opened my eyes again.
Behind her, depending from the roof upon rawhide thongs, and stretching entirely across the cave, was a row of human skeletons.
A new heaven and a new landscape met my gaze.
Was my Dejah Thoris alive, or did her beautiful body lie cold in death beside the tiny golden incubator in the sunken garden of the inner courtyard of the palace of Tardos Mors, the jeddak of Helium?
Even Murray did not know that the Lizard had succeeded in entering the plant, as the latter had told him that he was delayed, and that when he reached there a patrol and ambulance were already backed up in front of the building.
"I will see what can be done," replied the attorney, "although I had no instructions to defend her also."
He felt that he had enough knowledge, however, to make the conviction of Jimmy a very difficult proposition, but if he divulged the knowledge he had and explained how he came by it he could readily see that suspicion would be at once transferred from Jimmy to himself.
"You mean that your client is going to pay for my defense?
"I was released to-day," she explained.
They're hidden in my desk at the plant.
"Good," said Carl.
As the Lizard's taxi raced away the officer circled quickly and started in pursuit.
Jimmy looked at him in silence for a moment.
There is doubtless some reason for suspicion attaching to me because I was found alone with Mr. Compton's body, and the pistol with which he was shot was one that had been given to me and which I kept in my desk, but there is no earthly reason why she should be detained.
"He'll get caught sure." She could hear the staccato reports from the open exhaust of the motorcycle diminishing rapidly in the distance, indicating the speed of the pursued and the pursuer.
I wish there was some way to help him."
Five minutes later she was in a telephone-booth in a drug-store two blocks away.
"This is Little Eva."
The Lizard was thinking fast.
"No chance," thought the girl.
She did not know that he had entered Compton's office and had been first to find his dead body; in fact, no one knew that.
"Oh, hello!" said the man.
As he did so a man on a motorcycle drew up on the opposite side and peered through the window. The driver had started his motor as the newcomer approached.
Anyway, I've got both Murray's letter and the threat he enclosed.
That evening she attended a local motion-picture theater which she often frequented.
The Lizard made no reply as he started to leave the taxi.
"I understand attorneys expect to be paid."
You haven't got any love for Murray, have you?"
Jimmy laughed with the lawyer.
"I understand," he said to Jimmy, "that you have retained no attorney.
"All right," he said.
"I guess I could find him," said Carl in a low voice.
The girl knew nothing of his connection with the job.
"What is it?" asked the Lizard.
She gave a number on a side street about a half block away, where she knew it would be reasonably dark, and consequently less danger of detection.
He might even be hanged.
The theater was darkened when she entered and, a quick glance apprizing her that no one followed her in immediately, she continued on down one of the side aisles and passed through the doorway into the alley.
"Who is going to pay you?" he asked with a smile.
I'll tell him you'll be there in about an hour."
It was the Lizard.
I know from what I have heard that the prosecuting attorney intends to ask for the death penalty."
"Take them to his attorney," said the girl, and she gave him the name and address.
It was one of those small affairs, the width of a city block, with a narrow aisle running down either side and an emergency exit upon the alley at the far end of each aisle.
"Murray."
"Jimmy," replied the girl.
What's his name?"
They were Murray's letter to Bince and the enclosure.
"No," replied the Lizard; "not so you could notice it."
The Lizard grunted and entered his own cab.
She could have had absolutely nothing to do with it."
She had waited but a short time when another taxi swung in beside the road-house, turned around and backed up alongside hers.
"You will get it, won't you?" asked the girl.
The result was that within a few days Edith was released.
"I will make that one of the conditions under which I will accept your services," said Jimmy.
He sat for a long time looking at the papers in his hand, but he did not see them.
Recognizing the girl he opened the door and took a seat beside her. "Well," inquired the Lizard, "What's on your mind?"
He realized that he knew more about the Compton murder case than any one else.
My desk stands at the right of the door as you enter from the main office. Remove the right-hand lower drawer and you will find the papers lying on the little wooden partition directly underneath the drawer."
The Lizard therefore was in a quandary.
"I'll be waiting in a taxi outside," said the girl.
He's layin' pretty low."
It would mean that Murray would be immediately placed in jeopardy, and the Lizard knew Murray well enough to know that he would sacrifice his best friend to save himself, and the Lizard was by no means Murray's best friend.
He drew a folded paper from his inside pocket, which, when opened, revealed a small piece of wrapping paper within.
"I thought so," returned the Lizard.
You and I are the only friends he has.
"THE ONLY FRIENDS HE HAS."
I have been instructed by one of my clients to take your case."
"I suppose," she thought, "that they expect to open up a fund of new clues through me," but she was disturbed nevertheless, because she realized that it was going to make difficult a thing that she had been trying to find some means to accomplish ever since she had been arrested.
What I want is for you to go there to-night and get them."
"Go on to Elmhurst," she said, "and then come back to the city on the St. Charles Road."
"All right," said the Lizard; "I'll get them."
You tell him that he simply must come." She hung up the receiver and then called a taxi.
"Very well.
"I think Murray knows a lot about that job.
Do you know where he is?"
"This client of mine can well afford the expense, and anyway, my instructions are to defend you whether you want me to or not, so I guess you can't help yourself."
Three-quarters of an hour later her taxi drew up beside Mother Kruger's, but the girl did not alight.
The people from whom he rented the room were eminently respectable Jews who thought their occasional roomer what he represented himself to be, a special agent for one of the federal departments, a vocation which naturally explained the Lizard's long absences and unusual hours.
From the moment that she left the jail she was aware that she was being shadowed.
From her cab the girl saw the Lizard and the man on the motorcycle look into each other's face for a moment, then she heard the Lizard's quick admonition to his driver, "Beat it, bo!"
"I thought he knew a lot about it," said the girl.
Tell your client that I appreciate his kindness, but I cannot accept it."
"Who?" asked Edith.
"They are in the outer office which adjoins Mr. Compton's.
At length the storm abated, which was followed by a steady, brisk gale, that carried us at least forty knots an hour for six months!
It instantly reascended and flew over the sea towards Calais, but so very high that the Channel seemed to be no broader than the Thames at London Bridge.
Each reassumed its former station; and directing their course to the northward, they crossed the Gulf of Mexico, entered North America, and steered directly for the Polar regions, which gave me the finest opportunity of viewing this vast continent that can possibly be imagined.
I then flung myself into the sea, and they threw out a rope, by which I was taken on board.
In a few hours after we were more fortunate, we met again just after the monster had evacuated.
On our return we took a different route, and observed many strange objects.
I walked round the edge of the crater, which appeared to be fifty times at least as capacious as the Devil's Punch-Bowl near Petersfield, on the Portsmouth Road, but not so broad at the bottom, as in that part it resembles the contracted part of a funnel more than a punch-bowl.
The danger being over, I again turned my attention to the eagles, whom I found in a fair way of recovery, and suspecting that they were faint for want of victuals, I took one of the beef fruit, cut it into small slices, and presented them with it, which they devoured with avidity.
I suppose I fell into a trance, from which I was suddenly aroused by plunging into a large body of water illuminated by the rays of the sun!!
We found anchors, cables, boats, and barges in abundance, and a considerable number of ships, some laden and some not, which this creature had swallowed. Everything was transacted by torch-light; no sun, no moon, no planet, to make observations from.
I now found myself in paradise, considering the horrors of mind I had just been released from.
This place I would by no means recommend to the English government as a receptacle for felons, or place of punishment; it should rather be the reward of merit, nature having most bountifully bestowed her best gifts upon it.
You may laugh, gentlemen, but this was soon accomplished, as I prevented him licking his paws.
I took no notice of the seas or islands over which I passed.
I had forgot to put in any shot, and the rod had been made so hot with the powder, that the birds were completely roasted by the time I reached home.
To describe the apartment, and the couch on which I reposed, is totally impossible, therefore I will not attempt it; let it suffice to say, it exceeds the power of language to do it justice, or speak of that kind-hearted goddess in any terms equal to her merit.
I endeavoured to discover my situation, but fogs and passing clouds involved me in the thickest darkness, and what rendered the scene still more shocking was the tremendous howling of wild beasts, some of which appeared to be very near: however, I determined to keep my seat, imagining that the eagle would carry me away if any of them should make a hostile attempt.
I then cut down two of the largest that grew near me, and tying them together with one of my garters, hung them over the eagle's neck for another occasion, filling my pockets at the same time.
It was now evident that I had passed from Mount Etna through the centre of the earth to the South Seas: this, gentlemen, was a much shorter cut than going round the world, and which no man has accomplished, or ever attempted, but myself; however, the next time I perform it I will be much more particular in my observations.
But suddenly a monstrous bear began to roar behind me, with a voice like thunder.
This circumstance alarmed me exceedingly, and I began to think it was impossible for me to escape with my life; but recovering a little, I once more looked down upon the earth, when, to my inexpressible joy, I saw Margate at a little distance, and the eagle descending on the old tower whence it had carried me on the morning of the day before.
I found myself descending with an increasing rapidity, till the horror of my mind deprived me of all reflection.
As it rose with a regular ascent, my seat was perfectly easy, and I enjoyed the prospect below with inexpressible pleasure.
I could, from my infancy, swim well, and play tricks in the water.
But while my thoughts were absorbed in this pleasing reverie I was alarmed by the first eagle striking its head against a solid transparent substance, and in a moment that which I rode experienced the same fate, and both fell down seemingly dead.
The moon shining bright during the whole night, I had a fine view of all the islands in those seas.
Happily for me, however, when I was feeding them I had accidentally turned their heads towards the south-east, which course they pursued with a rapid motion.
Our first object was to learn what part of the world we were in; this we were for some time at a loss to ascertain: at last I found, from former observations, that we were in the Caspian Sea! which washes part of the country of the Calmuck Tartars.
Dutchmen generally swim well: he soon joined us, and we retreated to our ship.
Having given them plenty to eat and drink, and disposed of the remainder of my provision, I took possession of my seat as before.
After flying several times round, they both directed their course to the south-west.
I turned round, and seeing the creature just ready to devour me, having the bladder of liquor in my hands, through fear I squeezed it so hard, that it burst, and the liquor flying in the eyes of the animal, totally deprived it of sight.
Here are now but three buttons left.
The Dutch are a very rude sort of people; I related the Etna passage to the officers, exactly as I have done to you, and some of them, particularly the Captain, seemed by his grimace and half-sentence to doubt my veracity; however, as he had kindly taken me on board his vessel, and was then in the very act of administering to my necessities, I pocketed the affront.
I now in my turn began to inquire where they were bound?
I took some refreshment, and went to rest.
The eagles sat down seemingly fatigued, when the heat of the sun soon caused them both to fall asleep, nor did I long resist its fascinating power.
SUPPLEMENT
Some of them he would dash against and push out of their places; others he would burn up and consume to ashes: and others again he would split into fritters, and their fragments would instantly take a globular form, like spilled quicksilver, and become satellites to whatever other worlds they should happen to meet with in their career.
It was as large as a coach-door, and I took my seat in the centre, a kind of chair self-balanced without touching anything, like the fancied tomb of Mahomet.
The stars were as large as those worn by our first nobility, and the comet, excessively brilliant, seemed as if you had assembled all the eyes of the beautiful girls in the kingdom, and combined them, like a peacock's plumage, into the form of a comet--that is, a globe, and a bearded tail to it, diminishing gradually to a point. This beautiful constellation seemed very sportive and delightful.
In short, the whole seemed an epitome of the creation, past, present, and future; and all that passes among the stars during one thousand years was here generally performed in as many seconds.
But before I proceed on my adventures, I shall mention the rest of my attendant furniture.
It was much in the form of a tadpole!
The external of the chariot was adorned with banners, and a superb festoon of laurel that formerly shaded me on horseback.
The chariot was drawn by a team of nine bulls harnessed to it, three after three.
and, without ceasing, went, full of playful giddiness, up and down, all over the heaven on the concave surface of the nutshell.
With these skull-shoes the creatures could perform astonishing journeys, and slide upon the water, or upon the ocean, with great velocity.
In the first rank was a most tremendous bull named John Mowmowsky; the rest were called Jacks in general, but not dignified by any particular denomination.
It was never at rest, but for ever going east, west, north, or south, and paid no more respect to the different worlds than if they were so many lanterns without reflectors.
I surveyed all the beauties of the chariot with wonder and delight. "Certainly," cried I, "this is heaven in miniature!"
One time it would be at that part of the heavens under my feet, and in the next minute would be over my head.
It was a prodigious dimension, large enough to contain more stowage than the tun of Heidelberg, and globular like a hazel-nut: in fact, it seemed to be really a hazel-nut grown to a most extravagant dimension, and that a great worm of proportionable enormity had bored a hole in the shell. Through this same entrance I was ushered.
CHAPTER XXII
The wheels of the chariot consisted of upwards of ten thousand springs, formed so as to give the greater impetuosity to the vehicle, and were more complex than a dozen clocks like that of Strasburgh.
In short, I took the reins in my hand.
"Ah," said she, as I presented it to her, "there is no great variety in these polyanthuses.
"Yes," replied the lovely Fragrantia, "with all my heart; 'tis the drink of sweetness and delicacy.
To correspond with this, Colossus took Guildhall and Westminster Abbey, and turning the foundations towards the heavens, so that the roofs of the edifices were upon the ground, he strung them across with brass and steel wire from side to side, and thus, when strung, they had the appearance of most noble dulcimers.
For this purpose they extended an elephant's hide, tanned and prepared for the design, across the summit of the tower, from parapet to parapet, so that in proportion this extended elephant's hide was to the whole of the castle what the parchment is to a drum, in such a manner that the whole became one great instrument of war.
Having arrived in England once more, the greatest rejoicings were made for my return; the whole city seemed one general blaze of illumination, and the Colossus of Rhodes, hearing of my astonishing feats, came on purpose to England to congratulate me on such unparalleled achievements. But above all other rejoicings on my return, the musical oratorio and song of triumph were magnificent in the extreme.
There is a certain something in the waters that gives vigour to the whole frame, and expands every heart with rapture and benevolence.
The tear of the sympathising stranger is scattered by the wind over the hoary stones as she meditates sorrowfully on the times of old!
Such could I say, sitting upon some druidical heap or tumulus.
And when once risen up it had the appearance of a quart bottle.
Gog and Magog were ordered to take the maiden tower of Windsor, and make a tambourine or great drum of it.
They drink!
Doctor, Doctor!"
He then took the great dome of St. Paul's, raising it off the earth with as much facility as you would a decanter of claret.
Oh!
Oh, 'twas base! to be treated everywhere with politeness and hospitality, and in return invidiously to smellfungus them all over; to go to the country of Kate of Aberdeen, of Auld Robin Gray, 'midst rural innocence and sweetness, take up their plaids, and dance.
Colossus instantly, with his teeth, cracked off the superior part of the cupola, and then applying his lips to the instrument, began to sound it like a trumpet.
He had a housekeeper called Nina, a clever capable woman, and as she did her work carefully and conscientiously, her master had the greatest respect for her.
'Never mind,' replied Simon, 'I'll play them one worth two of that; for depend upon it they won't be contented with having got the donkey out of me, but they'll try by some new dodge to get something more, or I'm much mistaken.'
When the three comrades saw that Mr. Simon had got the better of them, and done them out of fifty gold pieces, they flew into such a rage that they made up their minds to kill him, and, seizing their weapons for this purpose, went to his house.
'To the market,' was the reply.
Now when Simon came by, the first rogue said to him, 'God bless you, my fine gentleman.'
'From the market,' answered Simon.
The veal is roasted, and the chickens boiled.'
They asked him how he had managed to get out of the river, to which he replied:
He ordered her to roast some veal, and to boil a pair of chickens, and gave her some herbs to make a good savoury, and told her to bake the best tart she could make.
'But how shall we manage it,' asked one of them.
The shepherd asked him why he had been left there tied up in a sack.
'You are the third person in the last two hours who has told me the same thing,' said Simon, 'but I couldn't believe it,' and dismounting from the mule he spoke: 'Keep the animal, I make you a present of it.' The rascal took the beast, thanked him kindly, and rode on to join his comrades, while Simon continued his journey on foot.
Not long after this one of them quarrelled with his wife, and in his rage he thrust his knife into her breast so that she fell dead on the ground.
The simple-minded shepherd, who believed his story implicitly, asked him, 'Do you think the king of the country would give his daughter to me?'
The three rogues, having wreaked their vengeance, set out, for home.
When the three rogues heard this, they said to him: 'Oh, dear Mr. Simon, do us the favour to tie us up in sacks and throw us into the river that we may give up our thieving ways and become the owners of flocks.'
'And what did you buy there?' continued the rogue.
'Why certainly.'
'That's all right,' said Simon.
THE BITER BIT
Now it happened that there were three merry rascals hanging about the market-place, who much preferred living on other people's goods to working for their own living.
Are you speaking seriously, or do you wish to make a fool of me?'
I am in no way to blame; perhaps my housekeeper has done you some injury of which I know nothing.' And with these words, he turned on Nina with his knife, and stuck it right into her, so that he pierced the bladder filled with blood.
As soon as they saw that Simon had bought a mule, one of them said to his two boon companions, 'My friends, this mule must be ours before we are many hours older.'
'Yes, certainly, I know he would,' answered Simon, 'if you were tied up in this sack instead of me.' Then getting out of the sack, he tied the confiding shepherd up in it instead, and at his request fastened it securely and drove the sheep on himself.
Then go, and Heaven's blessing go with you.'
Rubbish!' screamed Simon, and without another word he rode on his way.
'Little goat, bleat, Little table, away.'
'Little Three eyes, are you awake?'
The first and second times her sisters did not notice this, but when it happened continually, they remarked it and said, 'Something is the matter with Little Two-eyes, for she always leaves her food now, and she used to gobble up all that was given her.
'Little Three-eyes, are you awake?
Then again the wise woman stood before her, and said, 'Little Two-eyes, what are you crying for?' 'Have I not reason to cry?' she answered, 'the goat, which when I said the little rhyme, spread the table so beautifully, my mother has killed, and now I must suffer hunger and want again.' The wise woman said, 'Little Two-eyes, I will give you a good piece of advice.
Whoever will give me a twig of it shall have whatever she wants.' Then Little One-eye and Little Three-eyes answered that the tree belonged to them, and that they would certainly break him off a twig.
'Little goat, bleat, Little table, appear,'
'Little goat, bleat, Little table, appear,'
'Little goat, bleat, Little table, away,'
And when she had had enough, she said, as the wise woman had told her,
Then the mother said to Little One-eye, 'Climb up, my child, and break us off the fruit from the tree.' Little One-eye climbed up, but just when she was going to take hold of one of the golden apples the bough sprang out of her hands; and this happened every time, so that she could not break off a single apple, however hard she tried.
In the evening, when she went home with her goat, she found a little earthenware dish with the food that her sisters had thrown to her, but she did not touch it.
When Little Two-eyes saw this, she went out full of grief, and sat down in the meadow and wept bitter tears.
But they did not know how the tree had grown up in the night; only Little Two-eyes knew that it had sprung from the heart of the goat, for it was standing just where she had buried it in the ground.
At last the mother got impatient and climbed up herself, but she was even less successful than Little One-eye and Little Three-eyes in catching hold of the fruit, and only grasped at the empty air.
And when Little Two-eyes thought that Little Three-eyes was sound asleep, she said her rhyme,
They gave themselves a great deal of trouble, but in vain; the twigs and fruit bent back every time from their hands.
Then the envious mother cried out, 'Will you fare better than we do?
But Little Three-eyes had seen everything.
she shut her one eye and fell asleep.
a table stands before her, spread with the best food, much better than we have; and when she has had enough, she says,
and everything disappears again.
so that the two eyes of Little Three-eyes fell asleep, but the third, which was not spoken to in the little rhyme, did not fall asleep.
She went on singing,
To-day they have given me so little that I am still quite hungry.' Then the wise woman said, 'Little Two-eyes, dry your eyes, and I will tell you something so that you need never be hungry again.
you shall not have the chance to do so again!' and she fetched a knife, and killed the goat.
Only say to your goat,
Come, we will go home.' When they reached home, Little Two-eyes did not eat again, and Little Three-eyes said to the mother, 'I know now why that proud thing eats nothing.
but instead of singing as she ought to have done,
and a beautifully spread table will stand before you, with the most delicious food on it, so that you can eat as much as you want.
Then he said, 'Little Two-eyes, what shall I give you for this?' 'Ah,' answered Little Two-eyes, 'I suffer hunger and thirst, want and sorrow, from early morning till late in the evening; if you would take me with you, and free me from this, I should be happy!' Then the knight lifted Little Two-eyes on his horse, and took her home to his father's castle.
Then Little Two-eyes came to her, and woke her and said, 'Well, Little Three-eyes, have you been asleep?
"Little goat, bleat, Little table, appear,"
and ate and drank to her heart's content, and then made the table go away again, by saying,
Because I have two eyes like other people, my sisters and my mother cannot bear me; they push me out of one corner into another, and give me nothing to eat except what they leave.
Little One-eye, are you asleep?'
and in the twinkling of an eye all had vanished.
I saw it all exactly.
'Little Three-eyes, are you asleep?'
"Little goat, bleat, Little table, away,"
Then she said again,
Of course Little Three-eyes shut that eye also out of cunning, to look as if she were asleep, but it was blinking and could see everything quite well.
But when she looked up once in her grief there stood a woman beside her who asked, 'Little Two-eyes, what are you crying for?' Little Two-eyes answered, 'Have I not reason to cry?
'Little goat, bleat, Little table, away.'
and then it will vanish.' Then the wise woman went away.
and immediately the table and all that was on it disappeared again. 'That is a splendid way of housekeeping,' thought Little Two-eyes, and she was quite happy and contented.
"Little goat, bleat, Little table, appear,"
she sang, without thinking,
You watch well!
It happened one day that when they were all standing together by the tree that a young knight came riding along.
She must have found other means of getting food.' So in order to get at the truth, Little One-eye was told to go out with Little Two-eyes when she drove the goat to pasture, and to notice particularly what she got there, and whether anyone brought her food and drink.
'Little goat, bleat, Little table appear,'
She made two of my eyes go to sleep with a little rhyme, but the one in my forehead remained awake, luckily!'
'Little One-eye, are you awake?
"Little goat, bleat, Little table, away,"
It happened one day that Little Two-eyes had to go out into the fields to take care of the goat, but she was still quite hungry because her sisters had given her so little to eat.
But nearly everything worth saying has been said.
He returned the compliment with a copy of one of his books.
Another moment, and they would have been driven by another gust of wind down a short street leading to the river.
Dr. Holmes called their attention to the beautiful landscape hanging on one wall done in fine needlework by the hands of his accomplished daughter-in-law, and he told them a story or two connected with another picture in the room.
"I never shall be a book-worm," she said very good-naturedly.
It was a windy day in early January, and there was a fine glaze on the ground from a storm of the day before.
One hand was kept in constant use holding down the brim of her hat which seemed inclined to blow away.
So when Julia asked her one afternoon, if she would not like to go with her to call on Dr. Holmes, she declined with thanks, and left Julia free to invite Edith.
Could you imagine any one so cruel as to have struck a sword into it?
For a wonder Brenda did not laugh at what her mother said, nor take offence.
Both girls smiled at the expression of droll sorrow that came over the poet's face as he spoke.
Often, however, I let her write the answer, while I simply add the signature."
When she had the papers safely in her possession, Julia naturally looked around to see to whom they belonged.
"Why, you know, Brenda, Oliver Wendell Holmes?" prompted her mother, and still Brenda looked rather blank.
When both girls admitted that they could not see the scar, "That only shows," he said, "how clever the man was who made the repairs."
Before they turned from the window he made them notice the tall factory chimneys on the other side of the river which he called his thermometers, because according to the direction in which the smoke curled upwards, he was able to tell how the wind blew, and decide in what direction he should walk.
When Julia mentioned Edith's name, "Ah," he said, "that is a good old Boston name, and if I mistake not, I used to know your grandfather," and then when Edith had satisfied him on this point he turned to Julia, and in a bantering way spoke of the service she had done him that windy day.
It has always seemed to me that the writer of verse is almost in the position of a man who makes a mold for a plaster cast or something of that kind.
Poetry deals with common human emotion, and almost any one with a fair vocabulary thinks that he can express himself in verse.
Have you ever been there, Brenda?"
But--" here he paused, "he wrote his thanks on a postcard!" Again the girls laughed.
"But you don't answer them all," exclaimed Edith almost breathlessly.
I walked along until he reached his door step.
He told me to take great care of them as he had no copy.
Surely she had seen that face before!
"It depends, I suppose," said Edith shyly, "on whose work it is."
But neither of them had quite dared to ask Doctor Holmes for his.
Others are accompanied by long manuscripts on which my opinion is asked.
"Dear me!" he concluded, "this cannot interest young creatures like you; do you care for poetry?"
Somerville, Medford, Belmont, Arlington, Charlestown, Brookline, and one or two others, perhaps, besides Cambridge with its spires and chimneys.
"Brenda," said Mrs. Barlow, "I am surprised.
It was much the same view to which Julia was accustomed in her uncle's house, and yet it was looking at the river with new eyes to have the poet pointing out all the towns, seven or eight in number which he could see from that window.
I read his note at my publisher's just now, and I felt bound to carry the manuscript home.
"They make a pretty fair showing for one man, but my publishers are getting ready to bring out a complete edition of my works, and that, well that makes me realize my age." After a moment, as if reflecting, he asked quickly, "Does either of you write poetry?"
In a moment the maid had returned and asked them to follow her.
"Why, sir," she had begun to say, looking up in his face.
"Oh," said Brenda, with a stare that seemed to imply that this name did not mean much to her.
Yet during their call how many things they had to see and to remember!
"Not half as dreadful," he replied smiling, "as if they had been written by some one else.
Then suddenly she gave a start.
But where?
"Why, Dr. Holmes," replied Julia.
The owner was not far away, for just a few steps behind her was an old gentleman, not very tall, dressed all in black with a high silk hat.
When the poet pointed out the great pile of letters lying on his desk, he told them that this was about the number that he received every day.
So impressed were they by the visit that they had little to say until they reached home, where they found Mrs. Barlow a very sympathetic listener.
"And I am so very unfortunate myself," he added, "when I try to get an autograph of any consequence.
He should not send a thing to a stranger without making a copy."
"What else did he say?" her aunt had asked, with great interest.
There must be ever so many of them everywhere."
"The Chambered Nautilus," murmured Julia.
I don't see why Julia should be so excited about meeting a poet.
"Every mail," he answered, "brings me letters from strangers,--from every corner of the globe.
Though Edith may not have grasped the full force of the poet's meaning, Julia was sure that she understood him.
Under his arm he carried a book, and as he held out his hand towards her Julia had no doubt that he was the owner of the wandering manuscript.
At the head of the broad stairs they saw the poet himself standing to meet them with outstretched hand.
"No," said Brenda, shaking her head, "I did not exactly notice whom you were talking about."
"I am afraid," replied the poet, "that there is no absolute standard for verse-makers.
They all laughed at this, a proceeding which this time did not annoy Brenda.
Chapter IV.
Yet he entered the house at such a tender age that he could not have acted from design nor artfulness in winning affection.
But, do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it?
From his earliest childhood he was fond of creeping into a corner to read, and yet he was a general favorite all the while he was at school.
His former acquaintances found him looking terribly aged, although he was by no means an old man.
They provided him liberally with money and even fitted him out with new clothes and linen.
He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium.
And I'll never desert you, my angel.
That's why I let you go, because I hope for that.
And I dare say nothing will touch you there.
Awfully.
What of?
Iron hooks?
He never tried to show off among his schoolfellows.
Where do they forge them?
And I'll pay what's wanted for you there, if they ask for it. But, of course, if they don't ask, why should we worry them?
But I do not dispute that he was very strange even at that time, and had been so indeed from his cradle.
But he rarely cared to speak of this memory to any one.
Would you believe it?
The worst of it is it's awfully Russian.
It would happen that an hour after the offense he would address the offender or answer some question with as trustful and candid an expression as though nothing had happened between them.
When he was given pocket-money, which he never asked for, he was either terribly careless of it so that it was gone in a moment, or he kept it for weeks together, not knowing what to do with it.
He was dreamy, for instance, and rather solitary.
The former buffoon showed an insolent propensity for making buffoons of others.
So you want to be a monk?
And Alyosha remembered his mother's face at that minute.
I don't care for that.
What was interesting was that he would boast of it openly.
I don't mean to say that I became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life.
He used to say: "People think I make a lot of money in this schooner of mine.
But that is nothing.
From that moment, I suppose, it had to be.
Ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner.
The whole episode takes about three pages of his autobiography.
I didn't show you where the silver is hidden.
She was softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived (we were such children still!) that I was really going away for good, going very far away--even as far as Sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the darkness of the Placid Gulf.
And who's to prove the lighter wasn't sunk?
The cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least.
He actually laughed. "You fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me you will get a knife stuck in your back.
What, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the "Typhoon" volume it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.
Yet I did not see anything at first in the mere story.
As a matter of fact in 1875 or '6, when very young, in the West Indies or rather in the Gulf of Mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, I heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on the Tierra Firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution.
For myself I needed there a Man of the People as free as possible from his class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking. This is not a side snarl at conventions.
In his mingled love and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the People, their undoubted Great Man--with a private history of his own.
It is a real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must, after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion.
At any rate Dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly--if scornfully.
Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the Occidental Republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life.
She did not quite understand--but never mind.
Perhaps, perhaps, there still was in the world something to write about.
About Nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the San Tome Mine, I feel bound to say something more.
But mainly Nostromo is what he is because I received the inspiration for him in my early days from a Mediterranean sailor.
And I forgot it till twenty-six or seven years afterwards I came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop.
Like the People.
This so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for "Nostromo" came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details.
My reasons were not moral but artistic.
On the face of it this was something of a feat.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Like Nostromo!
Antonia the Aristocrat and Nostromo the Man of the People are the artisans of the New Era, the true creators of the New State; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifler.
There was also another curious point about the man.
I have no doubt of that because there could hardly have been two exploits of that peculiar kind in the same part of the world and both connected with a South American revolution.
He is a man with the weight of countless generations behind him and no parentage to boast of. . . .
Did I? So you know nothing.
Every man, woman, and child in that port is my friend.
In the course of his wanderings that American sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom I had heard in my very young days.
He does not want to raise himself above the mass.
Yet even then I hesitated, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions.
In the sailor's story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this opportunity had thrust upon him.
But it had to be done.
If anything could induce me to revisit Sulaco (I should hate to see all these changes) it would be Antonia.
Many of Nostromo's speeches I have heard first in Dominic's voice.
At length, they touched a large iron hook, firmly driven into one of the beams.
Here they lay, a grisly family, all these dear departed brothers and sisters of the ruddy clergyman who did his task so speedily when they were hidden in the ground!
But he let it go, and it closed with a loud noise.
It was a mere lumber-room now, but it yet contained an old dismantled bedstead; the one on which his son had slept; for no other had ever been there.
Shivering from head to foot, he made his way upstairs into the room where he had been last disturbed.
'It's very odd,' he whispered, 'he's hiding behind the door!
The wretch told me true.
It had a shelving roof; high in one part, and at another descending almost to the floor.
His hatred of Nicholas had been fed upon his own defeat, nourished on his interference with his schemes, fattened upon his old defiance and success.
The night has come!
He spoke no more; but, after a pause, softly groped his way out of the room, and up the echoing stairs--up to the top--to the front garret--where he closed the door behind him, and remained.
Is there no devil to help me?'
'At any hour,' replied Ralph fiercely.
He often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.
They had all turned from him and deserted him in his very first need. Even money could not buy them now; everything must come out, and everybody must know all.
How very dreary, cold, and still it was!
'In the afternoon, tell them.
As he passed here, Ralph called to mind that he had been one of a jury, long before, on the body of a man who had cut his throat; and that he was buried in this place.
They were a little knot of men, and, the window being mentioned, went out into the road to look up at it.
This feeling became so strong at last, that when he reached his own door, he could hardly make up his mind to turn the key and open it.
'Lie on!' cried the usurer, 'with your iron tongue!
They pressed forward to see; but one among them thrusting the others aside with a loud exclamation, drew a clasp-knife from his pocket, and dashing into the room, cut down the body.
When he had done that, and gone into the passage, he felt as though to shut it again would be to shut out the world.
There was no light.
Ralph makes one last Appointment--and keeps it
The weakened glare of the lights in the street below, shining through the window which had no blind or curtain to intercept it, was enough to show the character of the room, though not sufficient fully to reveal the various articles of lumber, old corded trunks and broken furniture, which were scattered about.
'That's not Mr Nickleby's voice, surely?' was the rejoinder.
But no hand was there, and it opened no more.
The dead boy's love for Nicholas, and the attachment of Nicholas to him, was insupportable agony.
And dead too.
The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand inside were striving to burst it open.
The voice made answer that the twin brothers wished to know whether the man whom he had seen that night was to be detained; and that although it was now midnight they had sent, in their anxiety to do right.
He never doubted the tale; he felt it was true; knew it as well, now, as if he had been privy to it all along.
Here they lay, cheek by jowl with life: no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed there every day, and piled high as their throats.
It seemed to lie before him.
Now it attained a height which was sheer wild lunacy.
But as he drew nearer and nearer home he forgot it again, and began to think how very dull and solitary the house would be inside.
Is there no way to rob them of further triumph, and spurn their mercy and compassion?
He avoided it hastily, and sat down as far from it as he could.
His own child, his own child!
That was the worst!
The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiously and fast, before it.
There were reasons for its increase; it had grown and strengthened gradually.
After they had stood for an instant, on the landing, eyeing each other, he who had proposed their carrying the search so far, turned the handle of the door, and, pushing it open, looked through the chink, and fell back directly.
He had made a kind of compact with himself that he would not think of what had happened until he got home. He was at home now, and suffered himself to consider it.
The rigid, upturned, marble feet too, he remembered well.
This occasioned their observing that the house was still close shut, as the housekeeper had said she had left it on the previous night, and led to a great many suggestions: which terminated in two or three of the boldest getting round to the back, and so entering by a window, while the others remained outside, in impatient expectation.
His own child!
He was a grotesque, fantastic figure, and the few bystanders laughed.
'How's this?' cried one.
'I know its meaning now,' he muttered, 'and the restless nights, the dreams, and why I have quailed of late.
Dying beside Nicholas, loving him, and looking upon him as something like an angel.
And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two--lay thick and close--corrupting in body as they had in mind--a dense and squalid crowd.
He gnashed his teeth and smote the air, and looking wildly round, with eyes which gleamed through the darkness, cried aloud:
One.
Swiftly, there glided again into his brain the figure he had raised that night.
With a wild look around, in which frenzy, hatred, and despair were horribly mingled, he shook his clenched hand at the sky above him, which was still dark and threatening, and closed the window.
Look!'
'I am trampled down and ruined.
He looked at her, and her eyes fell before his.
He paid his bill and they found a cab.
"Can't you understand that by the way people notice you?"
You don't know a soul.
Her body seemed to have become limp.
I feel suddenly gay.
"I am moody, though, and that's almost as bad.
That ought to be easy."
"There are times when I've found it difficult enough."
"Well, I drink to you, Philip.
"Only a few hours before you came, I was in hell!"
"Miss Dalstan has been very kind to me," he admitted slowly, "wonderfully kind.
You do not care whether I have any love for you or whether I loathe you now."
Drink some more wine.
"Answer my question," she insisted.
"I want you to look just for a moment as though you thought me the only person in the world--as you did once, you know."
"You're a silly old thing, you know," she declared.
"There is another woman whom I have kissed--whom I am longing to kiss now."
Her eyes were bright, her cheeks delicately pink.
A woman had entered who reminded him of Elizabeth, and his eyes had wandered away for a moment as Beatrice pledged him.
I am going to tell myself that an uncle in Australia has died and left me money, and so we are here in New York to spend it.
She raised her glass and drained it.
"Memories!" he answered harshly.
You must and you shall care, Philip, because our time has come, and I want you, please--shall I have to say it, dear?--I want you to marry me."
We've seen it together--your play--and this is New York!
Kiss me how you like.
"We generally go further up town," he admitted unthinkingly.
"No," he answered firmly, "I don't!"
Drive me home now, please."
We took exactly ten minutes over dinner!"
"Don't be a goose!" she exclaimed at last.
She pulled down her veil.
Up in the balcony an orchestra was playing light music, and a little crowd of people were all the time streaming through the doors. Beatrice settled herself down with an air of content.
Here's a card with my address on.
He can't never expect to do any good with a wife follerin' of him about.
We didn't want the old man to laugh at us, and we didn't want to do any more time in Berrima--not now, anyhow.
I handed him a note to begin with.
He emptied four chambers of his revolver at the leading trooper right away, and I fired at his horse.
I'd never thought of it before.
Good-bye.
Not that that Port Phillip woman was right to peach.
I tipped him well, and went off, telling him I was going to Wattle Flat to look at a quartz-crushing plant that was for sale.
You fellers don't think you're going on for ever and ever, keepin' the country in a state of terrorism, as the papers say.
Jim propped up the poor chap, whose life-blood was flowing red through the bullet-hole, and made him as comfortable as he could.
Then we all rode off together.
The next minute Billy the Boy raises the most awful corroboree of screams and howls, enough for a whole gang of bush-rangers, if they went in for that sort of thing.
I couldn't let them take him away to his death.
You takes after the old governor; he always paid well if you told him the truth.
As we rode along I settled upon the way I'd try and set poor Jim free. Bad off as I was myself I couldn't bear to see him chained up, and knew that he was going for years and years to a place more wicked and miserable than he'd ever heard of.
It was a long way into the night, and not far from daylight either, when we stumbled up to the cave--dead beat, horses and men both.
He didn't seem to care where they took him; and when the old horse stumbled and close upon fell down he didn't take notice.
One man was a bit in front--riding a fine horse, too.
No, Dick, it's wrong and wicked and sinful.
Here's the prisoner's horse, see how he stumbled?
He's not much good anywhere else.
Here the impudent young rascal looked in my face as bold as brass and burst out laughing.
'What's up with him, Dick?' says father, rather quick, almost as if he was fond of him, and had some natural feeling--sometimes I raly think he had--'been any shooting?'
I accounted for coming up so early by saying I'd lost my road, and that I wanted to get to Wattle Flat sharp, as another chap wished to buy the plant.
'And what am I to do all the time?' he says so pitiful like.
It'll be the death of him.
He certainly was the cheekiest young scoundrel I ever came across.
'You won't have to be so particular now, and you can come as often as Sir Ferdinand will let you.
I was gatherin' cattle, I was.
He began at once to do all he could for him.
It's as much as I dare stop at all now.'
Old Bates, who had a bit of a good grassed flat, made a pretty fair thing out of it by taking in horses at half-a-crown a week apiece.
It's wonderful how soon people rise grand notions and begin to get too big for their boots.
'See here, Billy,' I said, 'here's another pound for you, and there'll be a fiver after if you stick well to me to-day.
'Why, you look like a ghost.
By the time she got better the cottage was surrounded by police; there was no use being shot down without a chance, so he gave himself up.
And how the young villain laughed till the tears came into his eyes, while he danced about like a blackfellow.
So we thought we'd make one job of it, and get right through, if we had to sleep for a week after it.
We could make our own way from there, and so we sent off our scout, telling him to ride to the nearest township and say he'd seen a trooper lying badly wounded by the Bargo Brush roadside.
I hardly knew what to do, when all of a sudden two policemen showed up at the end of the track nearest the creek.
First thing father always did as soon as any work or fighting or talking was over was to get out his pipe and light it.
I got there early, and it's well I did.
My word!
'I must take your horse, mate,' he says; 'but you know it's only the fortune of war. A man must look after himself.
'Well, I'm glad you've lost your characters,' says Maddie.
We don't forget our friends.'
I'd made a bit of a bargain with Jonathan, who sold me a pair of riding boots, butcher's, and a big tweed poncho.
'Why, the p'leece grabbed him, of course.
What does a cross cove want with a wife?
I'm agin marrying, leastways as long as a chap's sound on his pins.
I could depend on the rifle carrying true at short ranges; but I didn't like the notion of firing at a man behind his back, like.
How was it to be done?
But it's no use giving in, Jim.
They might be here to-morrow.'
But mightn't you have come down here from the Turon on Sundays and holidays now and then, and had a yarn with us all?'
He's not like me, and he's got a young wife besides.'
The leading man was just riding up the bank, and the one that led Jim's horse was on the bit of a sand bed that the water had brought down.
It would be slow enough, but anything was better than what we'd gone through lately.
Jim was standing by, sayin' nothing, while I was taking off the saddles and bridles and letting the horses go, when all of a sudden he gives a lurch forward, and if the old man hadn't laid hold of him in his strong arms and propped him up he'd have gone down face foremost like a girl in a dead faint.
'Not they.
'My word, Dick,' he said, 'I wished for a bare-backed horse, and a deep gully, then; but it wasn't to be.
The game's up.
'Why, Dick Marston, is that you?
Why, I was expecting to come over to Ameriky myself one of these days, when all the derry was over---- Why, what's up with the boy?'
'Hold him up while I fetch out the pannikin.
It wouldn't do to have it in your hand all the time.
The next one had a led horse, on which rode poor old Jim, looking as if he was going to be hanged that day, as Billy said, though I knew well he wasn't thinking about himself.
If it went rich the news would soon spread, and a thousand men might be gathered in one spot--the bank of a small creek, the side of a steep range--within a fortnight, with ten thousand more sure to follow within a month.
Dreadful bore, isn't it? Just when we'd all rubbed off the rust of our bush life and were getting civilised.
'You were too many for them, it seems.
'"Frank Devil!" bangs out Sir Ferdinand, who'd begun to get his monkey up.
It's his peculiar form of mania, I suppose.
So he stalked the fair and furious Kate.'
But James Marston, hindered possibly by domestic ties, was captured at his cottage at Specimen Gully.
There was no great chance in the old times with only a few shepherds and stock-riders wandering through the bush, once in a way straggling over the country.
'"Know?
By him he was doubtless furnished with a warning, and the horse upon which he left his abode shortly before the arrival of Sir Ferdinand.
We laughed, and dad growled out--
FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS REWARD.
Everybody is sorry for you, old man,' he says to Jim. 'I shouldn't wonder if they'd make you a beak if you'd stayed there long enough.
George was a full black, ordinary size, twenty-four years of age, and a convert to the doctrine that he had a right to himself.
Left his father, two sisters and one brother.
He was, therefore, ranked with first-class "stock," valued at $1,500.
"He never gave me," said Ordee, "a half a dollar in his life.
Silas Long and Solomon Light.
Didn't more than half feed, said that meat and fish was too high to eat.
Three of his brothers had been sold South.
Ordee was about thirty-five years of age, gingerbread color, well made, and intelligent.
His detestation of slavery in every shape was very decided.
He was a man that didn't care anything about his servants, except to get work out of them.
For John's hire he received one hundred and fifty dollars a year.
Richard left behind his mother, step-father, two sisters, and one brother.
ARRIVAL FROM UNIONVILLE, 1857.
ISRAEL TODD, AND BAZIL ALDRIDGE.
Randolph was worth probably $1,700.
ARRIVAL FROM CAMBRIDGE, 1857.
ARRIVAL FROM WASHINGTON, D.C., etc., 1857.
Jean thought his advice good and said her prayers, sitting quietly for a time, looking through the cave door, though she could see but little, the screen of vines and bushes was so thick.
She went to the door of the hut and looked about.
Black men all eat.
She had been so interested in her work that she had not noticed how late it was getting until suddenly it seemed to be growing dark.
Kadok was at a loss to know what to do.
He did not want to take Jean into the Bush again, fearing that hard walking such as they had had the day before would make her too sick to go on, yet he was afraid to keep on the beaten track.
"It catches in the branches so that it hurts."
Missa not come out of cave till Kadok come back.
Blacks not bad, not hurt white man.
"Kadok!" she cried eagerly.
It blew so that Jean was terribly frightened and at last Kadok stopped in his quick walk and took her hand.
Think bad Blacks," and he knit his brows.
He caught the golden mass in his hand and screwed it up in bunches on either side of her head, pinning it tight with some long thorns.
Big snakes come out of holes.
He make feast and tell Blacks to eat.
"Not forget enemy.
What shall I do?" But there was nothing for her to do but wait, and she sat at the door of the cave, too frightened to cry, fearing a thousand dangers the worse because they were imaginary.
Then she sat and looked about her, calling "Kadok!" but there was no answer.
Then he tied about her head a bright handkerchief which he had worn knotted around the open neck of his shirt, and rolling up the blankets and packing up the ration bag, he shouldered his swag, gave her a hand, and they were off for the day.
Next day all black men dead, all but Kadok and his father, great Chief.
"Why do you always look around, Kadok," she asked curiously.
"Kadok help," he said briefly.
She grew tired of sitting still, and moved about the little cave, finding little to interest her, however.
IN THE BUSH
White man very bad.
She felt hungry.
Too many.
She took a long thorn and tried to use it for a comb, and after working a long time had the locks smoothed out into a fluffy mass of gold on either side her face.
Kadok gave her more roots to chew and talked kindly to her to soothe her fears.
Maybe we go on, maybe not." Jean did not want to stay alone in the cave.
Kadok not go far away.
"Kadok," said Jean, "why are you so good to me?"
THE sun was high in the heavens when Jean awoke and at first she did not know where she was.
"Why do you take me home?" she asked.
"Here we be safe till storm go over," he said, and Jean gladly crouched in the shelter, watching with frightened eyes the play of the lightning.
The wind was so fierce that they made slow progress.
"This not much storm," he said.
"Missa must hurry start now," said Kadok.
She was hungry, but Kadok gave her some roots to chew as they walked, saying, "We eat 'gain before long, must walk some now.
Obediently she followed him again, and he walked quickly, peering through the bushes as if looking for something.
"But I never did you any good," said Jean, puzzled.
Chief tell Missa McDonald they very sick here,"--putting his hand on his stomach--"She look very sorry and give them hot drink.
Then she heard a crackling of the branches near the cave and sprang to her feet joyfully, expecting to see Kadok's black face through the bushes.
"Not good for Missa.
All very bad for little Missa," and he shook his black head.
"Black boy not forget friend," he said.
CHAPTER VIII
See horse's tracks plain.
"See many worse than this.
Here black man's tracks.
Soon over and we go on.
The leaves parted and a black face peered through the bushes, fierce black eyes gazed at the child, as she stood speechless with astonishment, gazing at a perfectly strange Black.
"Very wet," said Kadok as he peered out.
They kept on till noon, however, and he drew her aside into the woods to rest and eat her dinner.
It make them very sick and all white man's pudding come up.
The storm had ceased and the rain lay in sparkling drops upon bush and leaf.
"First I must try to fix my hair," she said.
Do mean to Kadok, Kadok do mean to you, if he has to wait five, ten years.
'Fraid we have big storm," and he looked anxiously at the sky, over which heavy clouds were passing.
Not many hours far now."
"Look for little Missa.
Think very strange that Kadok and Chief only ones not die, but like Missa McDonald very well for hot drink.
He smiled when he caught sight of her.
"What you mean?" asked Kadok.
"We long way to go to-day to get to Mother."
"He has been gone a long, long time.
"Mounted police, been here," he muttered to himself.
"Missa sit here very still while Kadok go and see.
Think Missa see Mother to-morrow.
"Fine fruit, got it top of tree," he said, handing her a large purple, plum-like fruit which she ate and thought delicious.
Do Kadok good, he do good to you when he make chance."
They very sick, but they not had eat much of white man's pudding.
Other thralls ran in with large steaming kettles of meat.
And I vow that I will grind my father's foes under my heel."
Then Harald sent messengers all over that country to his kinsmen and friends.
But first he must drink his father's funeral ale.
Then a man stood up and said:
"Take down the gay tapestries that hang in the feast hall," he said to the thralls.
When the meat came, the talking stopped; for Norsemen ate only twice a day, and these men had had long rides and were hungry.
An old man, Harald's uncle, sat in the high seat on the north side.
They took the horns, when the thralls had filled them, and carried them to the men with some merry word.
Scour every dish until it shines."
The strings were some of gold and some of silver.
Then he drank the ale and sat down in the king's high seat, while all the men stood up and raised their horns and shouted:
"Tell them that no one shall go away empty-handed."
And higher up there was another row of gleaming spear-points.
They had a few dishes of silver.
King Harald opened it and took out rich gifts--capes and sword-belts and beautiful cloth and bracelets and gold cloak-pins.
They made the hall look all the brighter with their clothes of scarlet and blue and green, with their flashing golden bracelets and head-bands and sword-scabbards, with their flying hair of red or yellow.
"Take this as thanks for your good song."
The bottom of the harp rested on the floor, but the top reached as high as the skald's shoulders.
When he had finished, King Harald took a bracelet from his arm and gave it to him, saying:
She was tall and straight and strong.
She had a short apron of striped Arabian silk with gold fringe along the bottom.
An old book that tells about Harald says that then "he was the biggest of all men, the strongest, and the fairest to look upon." That about a boy ten years old!
Some came in boats. But many had ridden far through mountains, swimming rivers; for there were few roads or bridges in Norway.
"Mead loves a merry face."
"Bid them come in three months' time to drink my father's funeral ale," he said.
But the high seat on the south side was empty; for that was the king's seat.
On the next night there was another feast.
"I said that no man should go away empty-handed from drinking my father's funeral ale."
These they put before the guests at the middle of the tables; for the great people sat here near the high seats.
The women were beautiful, moving about the hall.
The brass frame shone in the light.
They, too, were tall and strong.
He laughed and kicked his heels and ran on.
And I am not afraid. But after all, this is a baby thing!
He had on coarse shoes and leather leggings.
In front of it the sea came up into the land and made a fiord.
"He rides through the sky and hurls his hammer at clouds and at mountains.
Good!
The rafters are spears.
"Ho, I am not afraid of the war flash now," cried Harald.
But Harald's clothes were gay.
It was a wild country that these two were walking over.
Harald went to the edge and looked over.
"No whitening of your cheek, Harald?
Far below was a soft, green valley.
"How little our houses look down there!" Harald said.
He threw back his cape and drew a little dagger from his belt.
Olaf watched him for a while, then he said:
"Thor broke them," Olaf said.
His hammer never misses its aim, and it always comes back to his hand and is eager to go again."
On it were strange marks, called runes, that said:
When I am eight years old I will have a sword, a sharp tooth of war."
Now this Olaf was full of stories, and Harald liked to hear them.
Around his neck was an iron collar welded together so that it could not come off.
Some big pieces had broken off and rolled down the hill.
It has five hundred doors.
Armor lies on the benches.
That makes the thunder and the lightning and cracks the hills.
All around the valley were high hills with dark pines on them.
But none may go to Valhalla except warriors that have died bravely in battle.
He was much with his tooth thrall, for the king had said to Olaf:
His feet and legs were covered with gray woolen tights.
Men who die from sickness go with women and children and cowards to Niflheim.
So they started off across the hills.
He ran in the woods and climbed the hills and waded in the creek.
"It is a wonderful city where the golden houses of the gods are in the golden grove.
Its name is Valhalla.
A band of gold held down his long, yellow hair.
The roof is thatched with shields.
Far off were the mountains.
Then he ran and sat on a rock by Olaf.
And there are skalds that sing wonderful songs that men never heard.
When it waved in the wind, a scarlet lining flashed out, and the bottom of a little scarlet jacket showed.
In the high seat sits Odin, a golden helmet on his head, a spear in his hand.
"You know that Asgard is up in the sky," Olaf said.
Some of them seemed made all of rock, with a little earth lying in spots.
A cape of gray velvet hung from his shoulders.
When they reached the top of the hill they looked back.
It was fastened over his breast with great gold buckles.
They were climbing steep, rough hills.
Great rocks hung out from them, with trees growing in their cracks.
"You are scarcely strong enough, I am afraid, dear lady," he said, kindly.
She must be somewhere in the house."
It must be a miracle!"
One was the Earl of Rochester; the other, his dark-eyed, handsome page--that strange page with the face of the lost lady!
As she set down the glass, she lifted her dark, solemn, beautiful eyes to his face with a long, searching gaze.
"You are very kind.
And by the way," she said, half starting up, "the first thing to be done is, to see about this same Prudence.
"This grand bonfire of our most worshipful Lord Mayor will be a sight worth seeing," remarked the earl.
"You have saved my life; and though you may think that a valueless trifle, not worth speaking of, I assure you I view it in a very different light," she said, with a half smile.
"There is a lamp and a tinder-box on the mantel," said the faint, sweet voice, "if you will only please to find them."
Yes.
"Yes.
"Lady, your life is invaluable; but as to our saving it, why, you would not have us throw you alive into the plague-pit, would you?"
Heavens! what an extraordinary likeness!"
"I know that lady, my lord!
"The river will do almost as well, my lord."
"That singular being!
"Leoline is only half a name."
"My friend, Sir Norman Kingsley.
Prudence had kept her word, and not gone near it; and he opened it, and helped her in.
"When all these piles are lighted, the city will be one sea of fire."
"Where now?" he asked.
It was still unfastened.
"I do not suffer at all," she said, wearily; "only I am so tired.
He recognised them both.
Why, don't you see it yourself?
She is a friend of mine, and you must give her to me!"
I am one of those."
Instead of doing as you did, you might have sent me to the pest-house, you know."
"I want to go to my own room."
He lifted the light form in his arms and bore it from the boat; but before he could proceed farther with his armful of beauty, a faint but imperious voice spoke: "Please put me down.
"And who was the other?"
"I know it struck ten as we passed St. Paul's."
"I never had, that I know of, either father or mother, or any one but Prudence.
She is afraid of the plague."
"Who is it?
I assure you I am quite equal to it, or even a more weighty burden, if necessity required."
"Stop her!
The lady was leaning wearily against the door-post, but now she came forward, and dropped exhausted into the downy pillows of a lounge.
"It is all like a dream to me.
"Ah!
Let us go there!
"What is your name?" she simply asked.
"Yes.
What is it?
how can it have happened?
"It was the Earl of Rochester who reserved you from the river; but I would have done it a moment later."
"No other! you must have had a father some time in your life; most people have," said the young gentleman, reflectively.
"To whom?" asked Ormiston, who had very little need to inquire.
"To your own house, if you wish--it is quite close at hand."
She has escaped from her friends, and I must bring her back to them."
"A slight foretaste of what most of its inhabitants will behold in another world," said the page, with a French shrug.
"Madame, you are too grateful; and I don't know as we have done anything much to deserve it."
Why was Prudence talking of me to her, I wonder?"
"An hour and a half at least, I should fancy," answered the boy, with a strong foreign accent.
The girl--she was nothing but a girl--drank it off and sat upright like one inspired with new life.
"Thank you, my man; thank you, my lord," said Ormiston, preparing to push off.
"Thank God!" she exclaimed, fervently clasping her hands.
"But oh!
I don't know her; but I have seen her often.
"Up stairs," she said, feebly.
"It would have been rather barbarous, I confess, but there are few who would risk infection for the sake of a mere stranger.
Leaning panting on his arm, he drew her gently on until they reached her door.
Oh! that dreadful, dreadful plague-pit!" she cried, covering her face with her hands.
I noticed that, though I think I must have been delirious.
"Prudence is nowhere in the house," said Ormiston, quietly; "and will not be, she says, far a month to come.
She might be his twin-sister!"
"You are almost there, dear lady--see, it is close at hand!"
"I hope you do not suffer much pain!"
How long is it till midnight?"
"Silence and solitude," said the earl, with a careless glance around, "I protest, Hubert, this night seems endless.
THE EARL'S BARGE.
It brought his thoughts back from himself and his own fortunate love, to his violently-smitten friend, Sir Norman, and his plague-stricken beloved; and he began speculating what he could possibly be about just then, or what he had discovered in the old ruin.
"A glass of wine would be of use to you, I think, and then, if you wish, I will go for a doctor."
This, it may be said, can only be applicable to those members of the community who are in humble circumstances; wealthier individuals will display tastes akin to those which belonged to them in aristocratic ages.
Nor is it adverse to regularity of morals, for good morals contribute to public tranquillity and are favorable to industry.
As soon as they have passed these bounds, their minds know not where to fix themselves, and they often rush unrestrained beyond the range of common-sense.
Although the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people, certain momentary outbreaks occur, when their souls seem suddenly to burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained, and to soar impetuously towards heaven.
When the members of an aristocratic body are thus exclusively devoted to the pursuit of physical gratifications, they commonly concentrate in that direction all the energy which they derive from their long experience of power.
I contest the proposition: in point of physical gratifications, the most opulent members of a democracy will not display tastes very different from those of the people; whether it be that, springing from the people, they really share those tastes, or that they esteem it a duty to submit to them.
He may cross and distort them--destroy them he cannot.
Some physical gratifications cannot be indulged in without crime; from such they strictly abstain.
The reproach I address to the principle of equality, is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in quest of those which are allowed.
Chapter XII: Causes Of Fanatical Enthusiasm In Some Americans
It is said that the deserts of the Thebaid were peopled by the persecutions of the emperors and the massacres of the Circus; I should rather say that it was by the luxuries of Rome and the Epicurean philosophy of Greece.
It may be supposed, from what has just been said, that the love of physical gratifications must constantly urge the Americans to irregularities in morals, disturb the peace of families, and threaten the security of society at large.
At other times the power of the monarch or the weakness of the people, without stripping the nobility of their fortune, compels them to stand aloof from the administration of affairs, and whilst the road to mighty enterprise is closed, abandons them to the inquietude of their own desires; they then fall back heavily upon themselves, and seek in the pleasures of the body oblivion of their former greatness.
In all the States of the Union, but especially in the half-peopled country of the Far West, wandering preachers may be met with who hawk about the word of God from place to place.
The taste for physical gratifications leads a democratic people into no such excesses.
I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance amongst a people solely engaged in promoting its own worldly welfare.
Such men are not satisfied with the pursuit of comfort; they require sumptuous depravity and splendid corruption.
In democratic society the sensuality of the public has taken a moderate and tranquil course, to which all are bound to conform: it is as difficult to depart from the common rule by one's vices as by one's virtues.
It is not then wonderful if, in the midst of a community whose thoughts tend earthward, a small number of individuals are to be found who turn their looks to heaven.
The love of well-being is there displayed as a tenacious, exclusive, universal passion; but its range is confined.
These are small objects, but the soul clings to them; it dwells upon them closely and day by day, till they at last shut out the rest of the world, and sometimes intervene between itself and heaven.
Whole families--old men, women, and children--cross rough passes and untrodden wilds, coming from a great distance, to join a camp-meeting, where they totally forget for several days and nights, in listening to these discourses, the cares of business and even the most urgent wants of the body.
Nor ought these facts to surprise us.
From time to time strange sects arise, which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness.
It was not man who implanted in himself the taste for what is infinite and the love of what is immortal: those lofty instincts are not the offspring of his capricious will; their steadfast foundation is fixed in human nature, and they exist in spite of his efforts.
Here and there, in the midst of American society, you meet with men, full of a fanatical and almost wild enthusiasm, which hardly exists in Europe.
The especial taste which the men of democratic ages entertain for physical enjoyments is not naturally opposed to the principles of public order; nay, it often stands in need of order that it may be gratified.
It may even be frequently combined with a species of religious morality: men wish to be as well off as they can in this world, without foregoing their chance of another.
Chapter XI: Peculiar Effects Of The Love Of Physical Gratifications In Democratic Ages
It sometimes happens that, wearied with public affairs and sated with opulence, amidst the ruin of religious belief and the decline of the State, the heart of an aristocracy may by degrees be seduced to the pursuit of sensual enjoyments only.
Religious insanity is very common in the United States.
If ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some men.
They would drift at large in the world of spirits, for fear of remaining shackled by the close bondage of the body.
But they feel imprisoned within bounds which they will apparently never be allowed to pass.
The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains be taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amidst the enjoyments of sense.
Reason herself counsels him to obey, and habit has prepared him to endure them.
In the Middle Ages the clergy spoke of nothing but a future state; they hardly cared to prove that a sincere Christian may be a happy man here below.
I never met in America with any citizen so poor as not to cast a glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich, or whose imagination did not possess itself by anticipation of those good things which fate still obstinately withheld from him.
The comforts of life are not to them the end of life, but simply a way of living; they regard them as existence itself--enjoyed, but scarcely thought of.
I do not believe that interest is the sole motive of religious men: but I believe that interest is the principal means which religions themselves employ to govern men, and I do not question that this way they strike into the multitude and become popular.
Chapter IX: That The Americans Apply The Principle Of Interest Rightly Understood To Religious Matters
In communities of this kind, the imagination of the poor is driven to seek another world; the miseries of real life inclose it around, but it escapes from their control, and flies to seek its pleasures far beyond.
Hence it is that, in the midst of physical gratifications, the members of an aristocracy often display a haughty contempt of these very enjoyments, and exhibit singular powers of endurance under the privation of them.
It is therefore necessary to ascertain whether the principle of interest rightly understood is easily compatible with religious belief.
All the revolutions which have ever shaken or destroyed aristocracies, have shown how easily men accustomed to superfluous luxuries can do without the necessaries of life; whereas men who have toiled to acquire a competency can hardly live after they have lost it.
Not but that in the United States, as elsewhere, there are a certain number of wealthy persons who, having come into their property by inheritance, possess, without exertion, an opulence they have not earned.
When riches are hereditarily fixed in families, there are a great number of men who enjoy the comforts of life without feeling an exclusive taste for those comforts.
Amongst the causes which produce these similar consequences in both hemispheres, several are so connected with my subject as to deserve notice.
I cannot but think that they deceive themselves; I respect them too much to believe them.
Something of an analogous character is more and more apparent in Europe.
Most of these wealthy persons were once poor; they have felt the sting of want; they were long a prey to adverse fortunes; and now that the victory is won, the passions which accompanied the contest have survived it: their minds are, as it were, intoxicated by the small enjoyments which they have pursued for forty years.
The Americans do not affect a brutal indifference to a future state; they affect no puerile pride in despising perils which they hope to escape from.
"To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true," says Pascal, "is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!"
The founders of almost all religions have held the same language.
On the other hand, I never perceived amongst the wealthier inhabitants of the United States that proud contempt of physical gratifications which is sometimes to be met with even in the most opulent and dissolute aristocracies.
If such a man believes in the religion which he professes, it will cost him but little to submit to the restrictions it may impose.
They never procure them without exertion, and they never indulge in them without apprehension.
Carefully to satisfy all, even the least wants of the body, and to provide the little conveniences of life, is uppermost in every mind.
But even these men are not less devotedly attached to the pleasures of material life.
Amongst a nation where aristocracy predominates in society, and keeps it stationary, the people in the end get as much accustomed to poverty as the rich to their opulence.
In America the passion for physical well-being is not always exclusive, but it is general; and if all do not feel it in the same manner, yet it is felt by all.
I have known zealous Christians who constantly forgot themselves, to work with greater ardor for the happiness of their fellow-men; and I have heard them declare that all they did was only to earn the blessings of a future state.
The track they point out to man is the same, only that the goal is more remote; instead of placing in this world the reward of the sacrifices they impose, they transport it to another.
If the principle of interest rightly understood had nothing but the present world in view, it would be very insufficient; for there are many sacrifices which can only find their recompense in another; and whatever ingenuity may be put forth to demonstrate the utility of virtue, it will never be an easy task to make that man live aright who has no thoughts of dying.
If he should have conceived any doubts as to the object of his hopes, still he will not easily allow himself to be stopped by them; and he will decide that it is wise to risk some of the advantages of this world, in order to preserve his rights to the great inheritance promised him in another.
The Americans not only follow their religion from interest, but they often place in this world the interest which makes them follow it.
If I turn my observation from the upper to the lower classes, I find analogous effects produced by opposite causes.
From them it mounts into the higher orders of society, and descends into the mass of the people.
The heart of man is not so much caught by the undisturbed possession of anything valuable as by the desire, as yet imperfectly satisfied, of possessing it, and by the incessant dread of losing it.
Christianity indeed teaches that a man must prefer his neighbor to himself, in order to gain eternal life; but Christianity also teaches that men ought to benefit their fellow-creatures for the love of God. A sublime expression!
It is not easy clearly to perceive why the principle of interest rightly understood should keep aloof from religious opinions; and it seems to me more easy to show why it should draw men to them.
They are therefore always straining to pursue or to retain gratifications so delightful, so imperfect, so fugitive.
In aristocratic communities, the wealthy, never having experienced a condition different from their own, entertain no fear of changing it; the existence of such conditions hardly occurs to them.
The philosophers who inculcate this system of morals tell men, that to be happy in this life they must watch their own passions and steadily control their excess; that lasting happiness can only be secured by renouncing a thousand transient gratifications; and that a man must perpetually triumph over himself, in order to secure his own advantage.
But the American preachers are constantly referring to the earth; and it is only with great difficulty that they can divert their attention from it.
Chapter X: Of The Taste For Physical Well-Being In America
Coleman's place; but I'll direct you when we come into the neighbourhood."
He had nothing to fear from his mother now, and made no secret of what he was about.
He left them nearly as happy as they were themselves.
DIAMOND TAKES A FARE THE WRONG WAY RIGHT
It's a long way, but you shall have the whole fare from the Docks--and something over."
It was, of course, of no use to drive Mr. Evans to Chiswick.
"Oh!
They're friends of mine.
"It's The Wilderness--Mr.
They asked him such a multitude of questions!
When a man thinks of what people will say in such a case, he may love, but his love is but a poor affair.
There was not much business doing.
"Tell Miss Coleman.
Few speculative people do know their own affairs.
By the time he reached the stable, several of the men were there. They asked him a good many questions as to his luck the day before, and he told them all they wanted to know.
But he did not really mind it.
It flashed upon Diamond who he was.
If you will take me to Charing Cross, I shall be greatly obliged to you.
So she believed him, and went to do what he told her.
I shall be much happier if you will get in. You have saved me all I had.
So he had come back a more humble man, and longing to ask Miss Coleman to forgive him.
Diamond found that by making the breeching just a little tighter than was quite comfortable for the old horse he could do very well for the present; and, thinking it better to let him have his bag in this quiet place, he sat on the box till the old horse should have eaten his dinner.
He did not find it at all pleasant, so far east and so near the river; for the roughs were in great force.
CHAPTER XXVI.
There was a cry and a running to and fro in the house, and then all was quiet again.
But he was not past being taught, and his troubles had done him no end of good, for they had made him doubt himself, and begin to think, so that he had come to see that he had been foolish as well as wicked.
But as he drove, he could not help fancying he had seen the gentleman--for Diamond knew he was a gentleman--before.
But he had no idea what ruin had fallen upon them, for he had never made himself thoroughly acquainted with the firm's affairs.
He had heard his father and mother drop some remarks concerning Mr. Evans which made him doubtful of him.
Not to mention the five precious shillings she gave him, which he could not refuse because his mother wanted them so much at home for his father.
"If you didn't mind taking me to Chiswick, I should be able to pay you when we got there.
Don't lose any time.
By this time the wind had increased almost to a hurricane, and as they had often to head it, it was no joke for either of the Diamonds.
He was just clambering up again, when the gentleman put his head out of the window and said--
But he got upon his box to arrange his thoughts before making any reply.
The moment he came to this conclusion, he changed his course from westward to northward, and went straight for Mr. Coleman's poor little house in Hoxton.
"I will take you wherever you like."
Would you mind stepping in here for a few minutes?
I don't want any money.
It's Miss Coleman he wants to see."
But when he proceeded to harness the old horse, they pushed him aside with rough kindness, called him a baby, and began to do it all for him.
"Won't you jump in, sir?" he said.
But Diamond was not in the habit of thinking only of himself.
But then there are not many people who have been to the back of the north wind.
Do all he could, however, he could not recall where or when.
Diamond obeyed, and to his delight Miss Coleman put her arms round him and kissed him, and there was payment for him!
He saw that his new friend looked weary, if not ill, and very poor.
"He don't look much like a gentleman."
"I shall be most happy."
The distance, however, was not great.
Before he got home again, he had even begun to understand that no man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful.
I'll take you where you like after I've got it mended.
I shan't be many minutes, but you can't stand in this wind."
But he was too well aware of his dignity to get inside his cab as some do.
What was Diamond to do?
Almost as soon as Mr. Evans went in, the wind began to cease, and was now still.
"Well, I am very tired.
"Now, my little man," he said, "get on while you can.
"He is, though; and I know him, and so does Miss Coleman."
I have walked from Gravesend, and had hardly a penny left to get through the tunnel."
And Diamond felt rather cold, notwithstanding his mother had herself put on his comforter and helped him with his greatcoat.
Half stupid with fatigue and want of food, Mr. Evans yielded to the boy's suggestion, and walked in at the door which the maid held with difficulty against the wind.
There are not many people who can think about beautiful things and do common work at the same time.
But as he turned to go back, some idlers, not content with chaffing him, showed a mind to the fare the young woman had given him.
"Please, sir, my harness has given away.
In the other gardens And all up the vale, From the autumn bonfires See the smoke trail!
In the darkness shapes of things, Houses, trees and hedges, Clearer grow; and sparrow's wings Beat on window ledges.
Above the hills, along the blue, Round the bright air with footing true, To please the child, to paint the rose, The gardener of the World, he goes.
I shall find him, never fear, I shall find my grenadier; But for all that's gone and come, I shall find my soldier dumb.
We, so much older, Taller and stronger, We shall look down on the Birdies no longer.
All the names I know from nurse: Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse, Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock, And the Lady Hollyhock.
Every path and every plot, Every blush of roses, Every blue forget-me-not Where the dew reposes,
Here is the sea, here is the sand, Here is simple Shepherd's Land, Here are the fairy hollyhocks, And there are Ali Baba's rocks.
When the grass is ripe like grain, When the scythe is stoned again, When the lawn is shaven clear, Then my hole shall reappear.
Soon the frail eggs they shall Chip, and upspringing Make all the April woods Merry with singing.
"Up!" they cry, "the day is come On the smiling valleys: We have beat the morning drum; Playmate, join your allies!"
In the darkness houses shine, Parents move the candles; Till on all the night divine Turns the bedroom handles.
Here in the fork The brown nest is seated; Four little blue eggs The mother keeps heated.
Here we had best on tip-toe tread, While I for safety march ahead, For this is that enchanted ground Where all who loiter slumber sound.
Tiny woods below whose boughs Shady fairies weave a house; Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme, Where the braver fairies climb!
The gardener does not love to talk. He makes me keep the gravel walk; And when he puts his tools away, He locks the door and takes the key.
Under grass alone he lies, Looking up with leaden eyes, Scarlet coat and pointed gun, To the stars and to the sun.
They shall go flying With musical speeches High overhead in the Tops of the beeches.
Birds all the sunny day Flutter and quarrel Here in the arbour-like Tent of the laurel.
His design is to kill you, therefore take care of yourself." After these words the genie disappeared.
This attempt deserves that you, the princess, and the palace, should be immediately reduced to ashes; but you are spared because this request does not come from yourself.
And before I show it all to you, tell me first what you think of this hall."
He went into that of the druggists; and entering one of the largest and best furnished shops, asked the druggist if he had a certain powder, which he named.
After a short interval, devoted to mutual explanations of all that had happened, the sultan restored Aladdin to his favour, and expressed his regret for the apparent harshness with which he had treated him.
He has strangled the true Fatima, and disguised himself in her clothes with intent to murder me." Aladdin then informed her how the genie had told him these facts, and how narrowly she and the palace had escaped destruction through his treacherous suggestion which had led to her request.
Joy and gladness succeeded to sorrow and grief.
"My dear prince, what have you done?" cried the princess, in surprise. "You have killed the holy woman!" "No, my princess," answered Aladdin with emotion, "I have not killed Fatima, but a villain, who would have assassinated me, if I had not prevented him.
Within a few years afterward, the sultan died in a good old age, and as he left no male children, the Princess Buddir al Buddoor succeeded him, and she and Aladdin reigned together many years, and left a numerous and illustrious posterity.
The princess granted his request, saying, "You may be as free here, good mother, as if you were in your own cell: I will order you a dinner, but remember I expect you as soon as you have finished your repast."
I am tormented with a violent pain in my head, and request your assistance, and hope you will not refuse me that cure which you impart to afflicted persons." So saying, he arose, but held down his head.
The counterfeit Fatima advanced toward him, with his hand all the time on a dagger concealed in his girdle under his gown; which Aladdin, observing, he snatched the weapon from his hand, pierced him to the heart with his own dagger, and then pushed him down on the floor.
"My son," said he, "be not displeased at my proceedings against you; they arose from my paternal love, and therefore you ought to forgive the excesses to which it hurried me." "Sire," replied Aladdin, "I have not the least reason to complain of your conduct, since you did nothing but what your duty required.
Immediately the palace was transported into China, and its removal was only felt by two little shocks, the one when it was lifted up, the other when it was set down, and both in a very short interval of time.
On drinking it he will instantly fall asleep, and we will obtain the lamp, whose slaves will do all our bidding, and restore us and the palace to the capital of China."
The princess obeyed to the utmost her husband's instructions.
"Princess," said the false Fatima, with great dissimulation, "forgive me the liberty I have taken; but my opinion is, if it can be of any importance, that if a roc's egg were hung up in the middle of the dome, this hall would have no parallel in the four quarters of the world, and your palace would be the wonder of the universe."
When Aladdin was out of the palace, he looked round him on all sides, and perceiving a peasant going into the country, hastened after him; and when he had overtaken him, made a proposal to him to change clothes, which the man agreed to.
In the morning he dyed his face of the same hue as hers, and arraying himself in her garb, taking her veil, the large necklace she wore round her waist, and her stick, went straight to the palace of Aladdin.
Aladdin put the money into his hand, and hastened to the palace, which he entered at once by the private door.
Having ascertained the place where the hermitage of this holy woman was, the magician went at night, and, plunging a poniard into her heart, killed this good woman.
Aladdin left the Princess Buddir al Buddoor that moment, and went up into the hall of four-and-twenty windows, where, pulling out of his bosom the lamp, which after the danger he had been exposed to be always carried about him, he rubbed it; upon which the genie immediately appeared.
In the mean time, I shall disguise myself, and beg that the private door may be opened at the first knock."
"Genie," said Aladdin, "I command thee to transport this palace instantly to the place from whence it was brought hither." The genie bowed his head in token of obedience, and disappeared.
He led the sultan into the princess's apartment.
"My good mother," said the princess, "what is a roc, and where may one get an egg?" "Princess," replied the pretended Fatima, "it is a bird of prodigious size, which inhabits the summit of Mount Caucasus; the architect who built your palace can get you one."
"Alas!" answered the princess, "I was afraid our misfortune might be owing to that lamp; and what grieves me most is, that I have been the cause of it.
Thus was Aladdin delivered from the persecution of the two brothers, who were magicians.
He had heard, too, all the persons of repute in the city talking of a woman called Fatima, who was retired from the world, and of the miracles she wrought.
"Princess," said Aladdin, interrupting her, "you have explained all by telling me we are in Africa I desire you only to tell me if you know where the old lamp now is." "The African magician carries it carefully wrapt up in his bosom," said the princess; "and this I can assure you, because he pulled it out before me, and showed it to me in triumph."
She is the admiration of the whole town, for her fasting, her austerities, and her exemplary life.
On hearing this, the princess told him how she had invited the holy Fatima to stay with her, and that she was now in the palace; and at the request of the prince, ordered her to be summoned to her at once.
Its true author is the brother of the African magician, your enemy whom you have destroyed.
One of her women told her it was a great crowd of people collected about the holy woman to be cured of diseases by the imposition of her hands.
The happy father embraced her with tears of joy; and the princess, on her side, afforded similar testimonies of her extreme pleasure.
When he came to the capital of China, he took a lodging at a khan.
"Princess," said he, "whatever resolution a poor wretched woman as I am may have made to renounce the pomp and grandeur of this world, I dare not presume to oppose the will and commands of so pious and charitable a princess."
The private door, which was just under the princess's apartment, was soon opened, and Aladdin conducted up into the chamber.
The princess, who could not believe the joyful tidings, hastened herself to the window, and seeing Aladdin, immediately opened it.
"My good mother," said the princess, "I am overjoyed to see so holy a woman as yourself, who will confer a blessing upon this palace.
Aladdin resolved at once what to do.
Except Mondays and Fridays, she never stirs out of her little cell; and on those days on which she comes into the town she does an infinite deal of good; for there is not a person who is diseased but she puts her hand on them and cures them."
You must overcome your aversion to the magician, and assume a most friendly manner toward him, and ask him to oblige you by partaking of an entertainment in your apartments.
He, as well as his brother, always carried a geomantic square instrument about him; he prepared the sand, cast the points, and drew the figures.
On looking more attentively, he was convinced beyond the power of doubt that it was his son-in-law's palace.
The princess, who had long heard of this holy woman, but had never seen her, was very desirous to have some conversation with her; which the chief officer perceiving, told her it was an easy matter to bring her to her, if she desired and commanded it; and the princess expressing her wishes, he immediately sent four slaves for the pretended holy woman.
It is impossible to express the joy of both at seeing each other, after so cruel a separation.
As soon as the crowd saw the attendants from the palace, they made way; and the magician, perceiving also that they were coming for him, advanced to meet them, overjoyed to find his plot succeed so well.
Now it so happened that shortly after Aladdin had been transported by the slave of the ring to the neighbourhood of his palace, that one of the attendants of the Princess Buddir al Buddoor, looking through the window, perceived him and instantly told her mistress.
Aladdin rose that morning by daybreak, put on one of the most magnificent habits his wardrobe afforded, and went up into the hall of twenty-four windows, from whence he perceived the sultan approaching, and received him at the foot of the great staircase, helping him to dismount.
I was foolish enough to change the old lamp for a new one, and the next morning I found myself in this unknown country, which I am told is Africa."
The magician, who really desired nothing more than to introduce himself into the palace, where it would be a much easier matter for him to execute his designs, did not long excuse himself from accepting the obliging offer which the princess made him.
When the magician had informed himself of his brother's fate, he resolved immediately to revenge his death, and at once departed for China; where, after crossing plains, rivers, mountains, deserts, and a long tract of country without delay, he arrived after incredible fatigues.
When the princess, her women, and slaves were gone out of the hall, Aladdin shut the door, and going directly to the dead body of the magician, opened his vest, took out the lamp which was carefully wrapped up, and rubbing it, the genie immediately appeared.
Some begged his blessing, others kissed his hand, and others, more reserved, only the hem of his garment; while others, suffering from disease, stooped for him to lay his hands upon them; which he did, muttering some words in form of prayer, and, in short, counterfeiting so well, that everybody took him for the holy woman.
When the pretended Fatima came, Aladdin said, "Come hither, good mother; I am glad to see you here at so fortunate a time.
This infamous magician, the basest of men, was the sole cause of my misfortune."
A man may miscarry alone as well as in company.
A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them both are dangerous things, either to resemble them because they are many or to hate many because they are unresembling to ourselves.
Solitude seems to me to wear the best favour in such as have already employed their most active and flourishing age in the world's service, after the example of Thales.
and therefore is to be called home and confined within itself: that is the true solitude, and that may be enjoyed even in populous cities and the courts of kings, though more commodiously apart.
they have only retired to take a better leap, and by a stronger motion to give a brisker charge into the crowd.
And this depends upon every one's liking and humour.
The imagination of those who seek solitude upon the account of devotion, filling their hopes and courage with certainty of divine promises in the other life, is much more rationally founded.
Moreover, for having shaken off the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal vexations of life:
You are no more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to talk to yourself.
Why therefore should we, contrary to their laws, enslave our own contentment to the power of another?
We still carry our fetters along with us.
Virtue is satisfied with herself, without discipline, without words, without effects.
'Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow.
A great deal less would serve my turn well enough.
Merchants who go to sea are in the right when they are cautious that those who embark with them in the same bottom be neither dissolute blasphemers nor vicious other ways, looking upon such society as unfortunate.
If a man do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the harder and sit the heavier, as the lading of a ship is of less encumbrance when fast and bestowed in a settled posture.
Let the people be to you one, and be you one to the whole people.
I for my part care for no other books, but either such as are pleasant and easy, to amuse me, or those that comfort and instruct me how to regulate my life and death:
Let him soothe and caress himself, and above all things be sure to govern himself with reverence to his reason and conscience to that degree as to be ashamed to make a false step in their presence:
'Tis enough for me, under fortune's favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace, and, being at my ease, to represent to myself, as far as my imagination can stretch, the ill to come; as we do at jousts and tiltings, where we counterfeit war in the greatest calm of peace.
Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of keeping ill company.
Now, as to the end that Pliny and Cicero propose to us of glory, 'tis infinitely wide of my account.
["Why do we seek climates warmed by another sun?
There are some complexions more proper for these precepts of retirement than others.
Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one's ease: but men do not always take the right way.
You do a sick man more harm than good in removing him from place to place; you fix and establish the disease by motion, as stakes sink deeper and more firmly into the earth by being moved up and down in the place where they are designed to stand.
The corrupt ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be very good.
Since God gives us leisure to order our removal, let us make ready, truss our baggage, take leave betimes of the company, and disentangle ourselves from those violent importunities that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves.
'Tis no light thing to make a sure retreat; it will be enough for us to do without mixing other enterprises.
Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself;
Our own death does not sufficiently terrify and trouble us; let us, moreover, charge ourselves with those of our wives, children, and family: our own affairs do not afford us anxiety enough; let us undertake those of our neighbours and friends, still more to break our brains and torment us:
The employment a man should choose for such a life ought neither to be a laborious nor an unpleasing one; otherwise 'tis to no purpose at all to be retired.
ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires, do not leave us because we forsake our native country:
In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand that concerns ourselves.
There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.
the contagion is very dangerous in the crowd.
We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our whole.
Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the public; 'tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must sequester and come again to himself:
Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and concentrate them in and for ourselves.
What does she so much seek as elbowroom?
they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them:
There are sterile knotty sciences, chiefly hammered out for the crowd; let such be left to them who are engaged in the world's service.
Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society?
Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself.
'Tis not that a wise man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you that he should fly the very sight of the crowd: he will endure it if need be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone.
It is a common beverage at St. Luke's.
Their eyes they can take in and out of their places when they please, and can see as well with them in their hand as in their head! and if by any accident they lose or damage one, they can borrow or purchase another, and see as clearly with it as their own.
They have but one finger upon each hand, with which they perform everything in as perfect a manner as we do who have four besides the thumb.
Their shields are made of mushrooms, and their darts (when radishes are out of season) of the tops of asparagus.
Here we saw huge figures riding upon vultures of a prodigious size, and each of them having three heads.
The stones of their grapes are exactly like hail; and I am perfectly satisfied that when a storm or high wind in the moon shakes their vines, and breaks the grapes from the stalks, the stones fall down and form our hail showers.
Thus, instead of riding upon horses, as we do in this world, the inhabitants of the moon (for we now found we were in Madam Luna) fly about on these birds.
When they grow old they do not die, but turn into air, and dissolve like smoke!
Dealers in eyes are on that account very numerous in most parts of the moon, and in this article alone all the inhabitants are whimsical: sometimes green and sometimes yellow eyes are the fashion.
All but gluttons and epicures must prefer this method to ours.
They put their bellies to the same use as we do a sack, and throw whatever they have occasion for into it, for they can shut and open it again when they please, as they do their stomachs; they are not troubled with bowels, liver, heart, or any other intestines, neither are they encumbered with clothes, nor is there any part of their bodies unseemly or indecent to exhibit.
I laid about me most nobly, drove them all out of the house, and locking the doors put the key in my pocket.
On the other side was Rousseau, with a chalice of sweet poison in his hand, and between them was their father Beelzebub!
I stooped to avoid the blow, and rushing to the tribunal seized the Speaker, who was fulminating against the Aristocrats, and taking the creature by one leg, flung him at the President.
Passing through Switzerland on my return from India, I was informed that several of the German nobility had been deprived of the honours and immunities of their French estates.
I shuddered at the sight, and with all the enthusiasm of rage, horror, and piety, rushed in among them.
On which the President, taking up a leaden inkstand, flung it at my head.
I heard of the sufferings of the amiable Marie Antoinette, and swore to avenge every look that had threatened her with insult.
I deposited their Majesties in a place of safety, and with my drawn sword advanced against my foes.
I went to the cavern of these Anthropophagi, assembled to debate, and gracefully putting the hilt of my sword to my lips--"I swear," cried I, "by the sacred cross of my sword, that if you do not instantly reinstate your king and his nobility, and your injured queen, I will cut the one half of you to pieces."
If the King remained too long at table, and was taken, it was not my fault.
I advised him not to delay, or he would certainly be taken, and setting spurs to my horse, wished them a good evening, and returned to England.
They took my advice and drove away.
At that moment I perceived a party of the National Assembly, who had rallied with the National Guards, and a vast procession of fishwomen, advancing against me.
Their cries were horrible, like the shrieks of witches and enchanters versed in magic and the black art, while the thunder growled, and storms shook the battlements, and Rousseau, Voltaire, and Beelzebub appeared, three horrible spectres; one all meagre, mere skin and bone, and cadaverous, seemed death, that hideous skeleton; it was Voltaire, and in his hand were a lyre and a dagger.
Three hundred fishwomen, with bushes dressed with ribbons in their hands, came hallooing and roaring against me like so many furies.
As to the National Guards and the rest of the Assembly, I soon put them to flight; and having made prisoners of some of them, compelled them to take down their national, and put the old royal cockade in its place.
I burst open the doors, and entered sword in hand.
By what we could learn of this CHEESE, it was considerably larger than the continent of all Europe!
About the break of day we reached the great continent of America, that part called Terra Firma, and descended on the top of a very high mountain.
This had the desired effect, and we descended very safe on a mountain of ice, which I supposed to be about three miles above the level of the sea.
I walked round it several times, meditating on the fleeting and transitory nature of all terrestrial things; on the eastern end were the remains of a lofty tower, near forty feet high, overgrown with ivy, the top apparently flat; I surveyed it on every side very minutely, thinking that if I could gain its summit I should enjoy the most delightful prospect of the circumjacent country.
My hand being soon relieved, I ran to some distance, where I saw the creature suddenly drop down and expire with the hedgehog in its throat.
When a covey of partridges is disturbed in this manner, by the button falling amongst them, they always rise from the ground in a direct line before each other.
Here seemed to be plenty of vines, with bunches of large grapes, which, upon being pressed, yielded nothing but milk.
In passing Baffin's Bay I saw several large Greenlandmen to the eastward, and many surprising mountains of ice in those seas.
I cut down the bladder as fast as I could, and saved about half a pint in the bottom of it, which I tasted, and could not distinguish it from the best mountain wine.
We left the two masts in his mouth, to prevent others being confined in the same horrid gulf of darkness and filth.
I struck it several times against the ground without effect; but while I was thus employed I heard a rustling among the shrubbery, and looking up, I saw a huge animal within three yards of me; I could make no defence, but held out both my hands, when it rushed upon me, and seized that on which the hedgehog was fixed.
I soon observed that the one I rode upon could not keep pace with the other, but inclined towards the earth, on account of my weight; its companion perceiving this, turned round and placed itself in such a position that the other could rest its head on its rump; in this manner they proceeded till noon, when I saw the rock of Gibraltar very distinctly.
Having secured a good stock of provisions, and perceiving the eagles begin to recover, I again took my seat.
It was unanimously approved.
One morning early, three or four days after my arrival, I set out from a cottage where I had slept, within six miles of the foot of the mountain, determined to explore the internal parts, if I perished in the attempt.
After this repast was over Vulcan ordered Venus to show me every indulgence which my situation required.
It instantly turned from me, ran away in a state of distraction, and soon fell over a precipice of ice into the sea, where I saw it no more.
It no sooner came down than I threw myself off, happy to find that I was once more restored to the world.
Indeed, I found myself considerably elevated by it, and seeing everything quiet, I began to search for some more, which I soon found; and having cut down two large bladders, about a gallon each, I tied them together, and hung them over the neck of the other eagle, and the two smaller ones I tied with a cord round my own waist.
Since my arrival in England I have accomplished what I had very much at heart, viz., providing for the inhabitant of the Cheese Island, whom I had brought with me.
My old friend, Sir William Chambers, who is entirely indebted to me for all his ideas of Chinese gardening, by a description of which he has gained such high reputation; I say, gentlemen, in a discourse which I had with this gentlemen, he seemed much distressed for a contrivance to light the lamps at the new buildings, Somerset House; the common mode with ladders, he observed, was both dirty and inconvenient.
Having, with great fatigue, cut open one of these eggs, we let out a young one unfeathered, considerably larger than twenty full-grown vultures.
It hovered over Margate for some time, was seen by several people, and many shots were fired at it; one ball hit the heel of my shoe, but did me no injury.
As soon as everything in his stomach was afloat, we manned a few boats, who rowed themselves and us into the world.
In these trees, which are of an amazing size, were plenty of birds' nests; amongst others was a king-fisher's of prodigious magnitude; it was at least twice the circumference of the dome of St. Paul's Church in London.
However, my arrival restored peace to the whole society, and Vulcan himself did me the honour of applying plasters to my wounds, which healed them immediately; he also placed refreshments before me, particularly nectar, and other rich wines, such as the gods and goddesses only aspire to.
When we had all taken our leave of this capacious animal, we mustered just a fleet of ninety-five ships, of all nations, who had been in this confined situation.
I had the misfortune to have him shot soon after by a blundering sportsman, who fired at him instead of a covey of partridges which he had just set.
I made it a practice during my residence there, the weather being fine, to walk out every morning.
"Our quarrels," added he, "last sometimes three or four months, and these appearances of coals or cinders in the world are what I find you mortals call eruptions." Mount Vesuvius, he assured me, was another of his shops, to which he had a passage three hundred and fifty leagues under the bed of the sea, where similar quarrels produced similar eruptions.
In attempting to rise I put my hand upon a large hedgehog, which happened to lie among the grass upon its back: it instantly closed round my hand, so that I found it impossible to shake it off.
I shall have a new set sewed on against the shooting season commences.
In a few hours I saw the Western Isles, and soon after had the inexpressible pleasure of seeing Old England.
I drank it all, and found myself greatly refreshed.
Guess, gentlemen, my astonishment, when I found myself in the company of Vulcan and his Cyclops, who had been quarrelling, for the three weeks before mentioned, about the observation of good order and due subordination, and which had occasioned such alarms for that space of time in the world above.
In those cold climates I observed that the eagles flew with greater rapidity, in order, I suppose, to keep their blood in circulation.
Upon this island of cheese grows great plenty of corn, the ears of which produce loaves of bread, ready made, of a round form like mushrooms.
One of the inhabitants of the Cheese Island, whom I had brought with me, accounted for it thus:--that the monster in whose stomach we had been so long confined had carried us here through some subterraneous passage; however, we pushed to shore, and I was the first who landed.
We discovered, in our rambles over this cheese, seventeen other rivers of milk, and ten of wine.
I should have continued here as an humble attendant upon Madam Venus, but some busy tattlers, who delight in mischief, whispered a tale in Vulcan's ear, which roused in him a fit of jealousy not to be appeased.
We stayed here but three days; the fourth after our departure a most dreadful storm arose, which in a few hours destroyed all our sails, splintered our bowsprit, and brought down our topmast; it fell directly upon the box that enclosed our compass, which, with the compass, was broken to pieces.
I now inquired where we were, and was informed, in the great Southern Ocean; this opened a discovery which removed all my doubts and difficulties.
After I had surveyed with pleasing wonder the beauties of art and nature that conspired to enrich the scene, curiosity prompted me to sound the opening in the middle, in order to ascertain its depth, as I entertained a suspicion that it might probably communicate with some unexplored subterranean cavern in the hill; but having no line I was at a loss how to proceed.
One hundred stout men were chosen upon this service.
The Papists claimed the deceased prince as their proselyte.
How was he to give to Caesar all that was Caesar's, and yet to withhold from God no part of what was God's?
None who felt thus could have watched, without deep concern and gloomy forebodings, the dispute between the King and the Parliament on the subject of the test.
From the commencement of the strife between the Stuarts and the Commons, the cause of the crown and the cause of the hierarchy had, to all appearance, been one. Charles the First was regarded by the Church as her martyr.
These things gave great uneasiness to Tory churchmen.
It might hereafter be in his power, by discreet management, to obtain from the Parliament a repeal of the acts which imposed civil disabilities on those who professed his religion. But, if he attempted to subdue the Protestant feeling of England by rude means, it was easy to see that the violent compression of so powerful and elastic a spring would be followed by as violent a recoil.
During many years the zeal of the English Tory for hereditary monarchy and his zeal for the established religion had grown up together and had strengthened each other.
Even Lewis understood enough of the state of public feeling in England to be aware that the divulging of the truth might do harm, and had, of his own accord, promised to keep the conversion of Charles strictly secret.
Middleton and Preston, who, as managers of the House of Commons, had recently learned by proof how dear the established religion was to the loyal gentry of England, were also for moderate counsels.
It had never occurred to him that the two sentiments, which seemed inseparable and even identical, might one day be found to be not only distinct but incompatible.
That the late King had been at heart a Roman Catholic had been, during some months, suspected and whispered, but not formally announced.
They had been taught, by a cruel experience, that the antipathy of the nation to their religion was not a fancy which would yield to the mandate of a prince, but a profound sentiment, the growth of five generations, diffused through all ranks and parties, and intertwined not less closely with the principles of the Tory than with the principles of the Whig.
Some men who had hitherto served him but too strenuously for their own fame and for the public welfare had begun to feel painful misgivings, and occasionally ventured to hint a small part of what they felt.
Whatever conflicts, therefore, the honest Cavalier might have had to maintain against Whigs and Roundheads he had at least been hitherto undisturbed by conflict in his own mind.
At the very beginning of the new year these statesmen and the great party which they represented had to suffer a cruel mortification.
For a time, therefore, every man was at liberty to believe what he wished.
Men who had been so long and cruelly oppressed might have been pardoned if they had eagerly seized the first opportunity of obtaining at once greatness and revenge.
There was scarcely one eminent peer attached to the old faith whose honour, whose estate, whose life had not been in jeopardy, who had not passed months in the Tower, who had not often anticipated for himself the fate of Stafford.
In his youth he had fought gallantly for Charles the First, had been rewarded after the Restoration with high honours and commands, and had quitted them when the Test Act was passed.
But neither fanaticism nor ambition, neither resentment for past wrongs nor the intoxication produced by sudden good fortune, could prevent the most eminent Roman Catholics from perceiving that the prosperity which they at length enjoyed was only temporary, and, unless wisely used, might be fatal to them.
The Tories regarded the report of his apostasy as a calumny which Papists and Whigs had, for very different reasons, a common interest in circulating.
The venerable Ormond took the same side.
But James supposed that the Primate was struck dumb by the irresistible force of reason, and eagerly challenged his Grace to produce, with the help of the whole episcopal bench, a satisfactory reply.
The Roman Catholic peers, by prematurely attempting to force their way into the Privy Council and the House of Lords, might lose their mansions and their ample estates, and might end their lives as traitors on Tower Hill, or as beggars at the porches of Italian convents.
If Charles the Second had plotted against her, he had plotted in secret.
Such silence was only the natural effect of a struggle between respect and vexation.
If James could even now be induced to reconsider his course, to let the Houses reassemble, and to comply with their wishes, all might yet be well.
He had seen the path of duty plain before him.
Two papers, in which were set forth very concisely the arguments ordinarily used by Roman Catholics in controversy with Protestants, had been found in Charles's strong box, and appeared to be in his handwriting.
The disclosure, indeed, could not be made without great scandal.
It was indeed in the power of the King, by the exercise of his prerogative of mercy, to suspend the operation of the penal laws.
The younger brother was Lord Treasurer and prime minister; and the elder, after holding the Privy Seal during some months, had been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
He read them with much emotion, and remained silent.
James now took a step which greatly disconcerted the whole Anglican party.
The power and favour of these noblemen seemed to be great indeed.
"Let me have a solid answer, and in a gentlemanlike style; and it may have the effect which you so much desire of bringing me over to your Church." The Archbishop mildly said that, in his opinion, such an answer might, without much difficulty, be written, but declined the controversy on the plea of reverence for the memory of his deceased master.
In public he had ever professed himself her grateful and devoted son, had knelt at her altars, and, in spite of his loose morals, had succeeded in persuading the great body of her adherents that he felt a sincere preference for her.
Charles had, times without number, declared himself a Protestant, and had been in the habit of receiving the Eucharist from the Bishops of the Established Church.
What situation could be more trying than that in which he would be placed, distracted between two duties equally sacred, between two affections equally ardent?
James himself distributed the whole edition among his courtiers and among the people of humbler rank who crowded round his coach.
The Whigs execrated him as a hypocrite and a renegade.
Through good and evil he was to be true to Church and King.
But on account of its settling and compacting, and waste from melting and evaporation, the average depth actually found at any time seldom exceeds ten feet in the forest regions, or fifteen feet along the slopes of the summit peaks.
In all my mountaineering I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride, and the start was so sudden and the end came so soon I had but little time to think of the danger that attends this sort of travel, though at such times one thinks fast.
In this way the volume of the upper branches of the river is nearly doubled during the day, rising and falling as regularly as the tides of the sea.
When the snow first gives way on the upper slopes of their basins, a dull rushing, rumbling sound is heard which rapidly increases and seems to draw nearer with appalling intensity of tone.
Those which descend from the brow of El Capitan are particularly fine; but most of the great Yosemite avalanches flow in regular channels like cascades and waterfalls.
In the spring, after all the avalanches are down and the snow is melting fast, then all the Yosemite streams, from their fountains to their falls, sing their grandest songs.
Then my hopes were reduced to getting up in time to see the sunset.
One fine Yosemite morning after a heavy snowfall, being eager to see as many avalanches as possible and wide views of the forest and summit peaks in their new white robes before the sunshine had time to change them, I set out early to climb by a side canyon to the top of a commanding ridge a little over three thousand feet above the Valley.
This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced.
Few Yosemite visitors ever see snow avalanches and fewer still know the exhilaration of riding on them.
The Streams In Other Seasons
Presently the white flood comes bounding into sight over bosses and sheer places, leaping from bench to bench, spreading and narrowing and throwing off clouds of whirling dust like the spray of foaming cataracts.
A Ride On An Avalanche
Most of the plants are in full flower.
Hawthorne says somewhere that steam has spiritualized travel; though unspiritual smells, smoke, etc., still attend steam travel.
Chapter 3
Elijah's flight in a chariot of fire could hardly have been more gloriously exciting.
The wallowing ascent had taken nearly all day, the descent only about a minute.
Countless rills make haste to the rivers, running and singing soon after sunrise, louder and louder with increasing volume until sundown; then they gradually fail through the frosty hours of the night.
The only place about the Valley where one may be sure to see the annual kind is on the north slope of Clouds' Rest.
Snow-Storms
Then the Merced overflows its banks, flooding the meadows, sometimes almost from wall to wall in some places, beginning to rise towards sundown just when the streams on the fountains are beginning to diminish, the difference in time of the daily rise and fall being caused by the distance the upper flood streams have to travel before reaching the Valley.
In early summer, after the flood season, the Yosemite streams are in their prime, running crystal clear, deep and full but not overflowing their banks--about as deep through the night as the day, the difference in volume so marked in spring being now too slight to be noticed.
After spending the whole day to within half an hour or so of sundown, I was still several hundred feet below the summit.
The small tributaries that do not reach back to the lasting snow fountains of the summit peaks shrink to whispering, tinkling currents.
This was a fine experience.
In tranquil, mellow autumn, when the year's work is about done and the fruits are ripe, birds and seeds out of their nests, and all the landscape is glowing like a benevolent countenance, then the streams are at their lowest ebb, with scarce a memory left of their wild spring floods.
When the avalanche swedged and came to rest I found myself on top of the crumpled pile without bruise or scar.
On account of the looseness of the snow that blocked the canyon I knew the climb would require a long time, some three or four hours as I estimated; but it proved far more difficult than I had anticipated.
On no part of the rush was I buried.
Compared with waterfalls and cascades, avalanches are short-lived, few of them lasting more than a minute or two, and the sharp, clashing sounds so common in falling water are mostly wanting; but in their low massy thundertones and purple-tinged whiteness, and in their dress, gait, gestures and general behavior, they are much alike.
Nearly all the weather is cloudless and everything is at its brightest--lake, river, garden and forest with all their life.
They are composed of heavy, compacted snow, which has been subjected to frequent alternations of freezing and thawing.
Avalanches
Huge blocks of earth-brown stone were cast into the furnace until they were in a white heat, when drop by drop red gold trickled from them into the ashes.
Then with strength and gentleness he wrought with his tools, having cast nothing into the heat but the pig-skin; with mighty blows and delicate touches he brought thickness and substance into it, until a board looked at him from the flames.
Then when this work was finished, the smith drew forth a little ship, which was carefully placed on one side.
All her lovely hair was gone!
As the rhythmic strokes fell, the women sang a song which was like the voice of a strong, steady wind.
Later, when Odin carried this spear in battle, if he shook it over his enemies they became so frightened that they all wanted to run away, but if he shook it over his friends they were so filled with courage that they could not be conquered.
Now the brother dwarfs had not by any means expected gratitude, but neither had they expected any such rudeness as this, so Sindri determined to give Loki a lesson.
A frenzied horror seized upon Loki's mind.
Again he tried to spoil the work as a fly, and bit deeply into Brok's neck, but Brok would not so much as raise his hand to rid him of the pain.
If these wretched dwarfs were going to make anything to add to Thor's strength he knew that it would be his own ruin.
Now Thor's wife was named Sib, and she was most beautiful to look upon.
Now came the last test of Sindri's cunning.
First, Loki offered to Odin the spear Gungner which was so wonderfully made that it never failed to hit the thing at which it was thrown, and it always sped back to the hand which had thrown it.
The licences should be of two kinds, namely:--one for mere utility cats, and the other for valuable cats, household pets, etc.
Poison of all sorts was to be freely used, and sponges dipped in tallow--worse torture than giving a shark a red-hot brick, or a lady's steel crinoline fastened up with hide--and wire fences, so constructed that the cat might find easy access into a garden, but no egress, and so be torn to pieces with dogs,
Laws have been framed for the good of horses, dogs, and game; nay, even the very wild birds of the field have their friends in Parliament; but the poor cat is left out in the cold.
These creatures breed at least four or five times a year; and you seldom find fewer than seven little baby-mice in each nest.
A cat's collar to be presented to the owner on payment of the fee; the collar stamped and numbered.
Putting aside, then, all sentimentality, let us look at the matter in a plain business point of view.
Birmingham has emulated the Crystal Palace, and Edinburgh rivals both; and, before very long, I hope to see every town, in the United Kingdom holding its annual show of cats.
But, there is no creature under the sun which is so systematically ill-used, and carelessly treated as pussy.
The mischief these creatures sometimes work in grass fields, and in fields of newly-sown grain, is almost incalculable.
The first to cost one shilling and threepence, the other two shillings.
But the methods proposed for their destruction were in some cases diabolical.
If horses or other cattle were treated in like manner, they would quickly deteriorate in value; but the cat, looked upon as a mere vermin-killer, is different, her presence alone, however skinny and lean, being generally enough to frighten away those pests, rats and mice.
Whole acres have been known to be destroyed in a single night.
There is no prettier ornament, I think, a shop-window can have, than an honest-looking sleek Tom tabby.
Here I shall only mention one or two.
Thus, pussy's services are poorly repaid and ungratefully received, because she is so patient and uncomplaining.
The shilling licence collar to be dark; the other of coloured material.
I shan't tell you, because you could not be expected to believe it, not being a business man, how much money I lost two years ago in one winter, by rats alone.
I tried everything, traps and poison, in vain, and was forced to fall back on pussy after all."
Oh, Japan is the land of happy children, young and old.
A festival which everybody loves is the Feast of Lanterns.
It comes on the third day of the third month.
Of course the side wins which first succeeds in gaining the flags of the other.
Everything is done to remind boys of war at this Festival of Banners.
I believe you would not object to a party like that yourself, would you?
The children watch for the great day's arrival when the flowers will be in full bloom.
The actresses have lovely gowns, and are very graceful.
A cake made of red beans lay on the middle of each tray, and around it were placed sugar maple leaves coloured red and green.
The winter season is very short in Japan, and the houses are not built to keep out the cold very well, as you must have already perceived.
Not a great number, we must admit.
It has been kept very carefully, and is now put in the place where the doll's throne stood a little while ago.
Lacquered trays were brought in and placed in front of each one.
Her mother smiled, and answered, "My dear little pearl of a Lotus Blossom, I have almost finished embroidering your new silk garment.
No embroidery for Lotus Blossom!
On this great occasion there is a dinner-party for the whole family of dolls.
When the great day arrives, Lotus Blossom's mamma makes a throne in the house.
It is played very much like the American game of "Authors," and is a great favourite with both old and young in Japan.
It shall be finished, and you shall have a new yellow crape kerchief to fold about your throat.
The throng of gaily dressed and happy people grows larger every moment.
When Toyo was a baby his father bought him a banner stand.
No wonder Lotus Blossom and Toyo wanted to save up their money.
Stop and count.
But this grand array is not all.
What do you think was served in them?
No practising on the koto!
If they are happy, of course they must show it.
Now for games!
But something better still was to come.
The time to leave comes all too soon.
After these came other cakes and sweetmeats, enough to delight the heart of every one.
How many holidays have we in a whole year?
At some of the other houses there will be a banner instead of a fish.
The tea was removed, and fresh trays, covered with dainty pink papers, were brought in.
There is actually an air of excitement in the quiet Japanese household.
The screens are moved aside, and the children behold a little stage.
The banners of great generals are hung up, and figures of soldiers are placed on the stand.
The sky was on fire with the promise of a beautiful day.
'No, no,' she said, although her face was a ghastly white, 'no, it is nothing.
There was no condensing possible; one must either each time have every conversation or stop it.
She merely installed his memory in the place of his rich personality and loved that.
She took all things as they came, since how could anything matter now that everything that mattered was over?
Sometimes he was so hopeful and bright, and again so despairing.
To other talks with other friends, and now and then with a tradesman, she had to listen; but at last came her hour.
Is he wealthy?'
Need I say that I did not come here to give you offence?"
I am an unbeliever: you are an apostle!
Such has been my experience, and that of many others; and it has been as involuntary as it is irreparable."
My father did not appreciate the dainty research of our modern luxury.
I remarked there also a curious collection of engravings of the same period. "Your father," I observed, "had a strong predilection for the age of Louis the Fourteenth."
And yet, Monseigneur, it is often at the hands of saintly priests, such as yourself, that the guilty find most indulgence.
He had a horror of disorder; and he saw it everywhere.
Do you suppose that in those hours one does not feel the frightful discomfort of an existence with no moral basis, without principles, with no outlook beyond this world?
And permit me to tell you my whole mind.
In oblique paths he finds himself ill at ease.
And yet, what can one do?
But then, need one say that that society, so regular, so choice in appearance, had, like our own, below the surface, its troubles, its disorders?
That," added the girl with a laugh,--"that is why you find your chair so hard when you come to see us."
"Monseigneur!"
What pleasure they took in high things!
How much more worthy they were than the people who live now!" I tried to calm a little this retrospective enthusiasm, so much to the prejudice of my contemporaries and of myself.
Still, with him, in the actual result, they become subordinate, as it is their tendency to do in real life, to the characters they help to form.
In spite of appearances, I am not so light a spirit as people think.
"This piquant episode of my life," he writes, "seems to me to be really deserving of study; to be worth etching off, day by day, by an observer well informed on the subject."
For instance, Jesuitism is a piece added to Catholicism.
Neither the two wings nor the two chambers are now in existence.
CHAPTER III.
On the highest bench to the right of the throne sat the two archbishops of Canterbury and York; on the middle bench three bishops, London, Durham, and Winchester, and the other bishops on the lowest bench.
The past has a synonym, the unknown.
These two courts, which are still in existence, interpreted legislation, and reconstructed it somewhat, for the art of the judge is to carve the code into jurisprudence; a task from which equity results as it best may.
The assembly of Parliament was obligatory only once in every seven years.
Shadows should dwell in ruins.
This double power has been, from time immemorial, vested in the House of Peers.
There is a meaning in all monarchical buildings.
In the middle of the space was a large covered table, heaped with bundles of papers, registers, and summonses, with magnificent inkstands of chased silver, and with high candlesticks at the four corners.
The sons of peers and the heirs to peerages assisted at the debates, standing behind the throne, between the dais and the wall.
A change in the shape of the shell changes the shape of the fish inside.
History is night.
Elizabeth most probably erred in condensing the peerage into sixty-five lords.
A large square space was left vacant between the tiers of benches placed along three sides of the chamber and the throne.
This other chamber, properly called the House of Lords, was oblong and narrow.
James II. understood this when he increased the Upper House to a hundred and eighty-eight lords; a hundred and eighty-six if we subtract from the peerages the two duchies of royal favourites, Portsmouth and Cleveland.
In demolishing the ancient palace they somewhat demolished its ancient usages.
The chamber of Venice was darker still.
Near the Crier stood the Serjeant Mace-Bearer of the Chancellor.
It is to be remarked, as a coincidence at once strange and instructive, that this square formed by the throne, the bishops, and the barons, with kneeling magistrates within it, was in form similar to the ancient parliament in France under the two first dynasties.
At night there was no other light than twelve half candelabra, fastened to the wall.
But what is history?
Strange, indeed! a description given nine hundred years before the existence of the thing described.
Amongst the bishops some were peers of high rank, such as William Talbot, Bishop of Oxford, who was head of the Protestant branch of that family.
Treat edifices as you would treat institutions.
It has increased still further since that period.
There are enough of them in all conscience in the laws.
Patch it up, nothing more.
The peers took their seats in chronological order, each according to the date of the creation of his peerage.
Place in a round room a parliament which has been hitherto held in a square room, and it will no longer be the same thing.
We have just mentioned that as judges they occupied Westminster Hall; as legislators, they had another chamber.
The less numerous, the more intense is a peerage.
Legislation was worked up and applied in the severity of the great hall of Westminster, the rafters of which were of chestnut wood, over which spiders could not spread their webs.
Winchester, termed first and sole marquis of England, as Astorga was termed sole Marquis of Spain, was absent, being a Jacobite; so that there were only five marquises, of whom the premier was Lindsay, and the junior Lothian; seventy-nine earls, of whom Derby was premier and Islay junior; nine viscounts, of whom Hereford was premier and Lonsdale junior; and sixty-two barons, of whom Abergavenny was premier and Hervey junior.
All the light in it came from four windows in deep embrasures, which received their light through the roof, and a bull's-eye, composed of six panes with curtains, over the throne.
To sit as a court and to sit as a chamber are two distinct things.
Ruined palaces accord best with institutions in rags.
It was the Chancellor who counselled the king to pardon; only rarely, though.
The number of the Lords was unlimited.
Plenty of fleurs-de-lis everywhere, and the great escutcheon of England over the four walls, above the peers, as well as above the king.
The aspect of authority was the same in France as in England.
Besides the house of peers of England, which did not assemble as a court unless convoked by the crown, two great English tribunals, inferior to the house of peers, but superior to all other jurisdiction, sat in Westminster Hall.
Publicity entails diminution of dignity.
The scene is shifted, and all is at once forgotten.
That which is no longer on the stage immediately fades into obscurity.
An old stone cannot fall without dragging down with it an old law.
At the bar stood the Usher of the Black Rod, his wand in his hand.
Near Westminster Abbey was an old Norman palace which was burnt in the time of Henry VIII.
To dilute the aristocracy is politic.
It was called the royal chair.
The great hulls of the ships were embroidered with threads of gold and silver, which had become blackened by time.
The debates of the Commons were public.
In royal ceremonies the temporal peers wore coronets on their heads, and the spiritual peers, mitres.
THE OLD HALL.
In assemblies, the more numerous the members, the fewer the heads.
Bacon and Jeffreys! both names overshadowed, though by different crimes.
This double function constitutes supreme power.
At one end of the long chamber of the Lords was the door; at the other, opposite to it, the throne.
They ranked according to their titles, and within their grade of nobility according to seniority.
Its wings were spared.
In history there is no second tier.
The whole has been rebuilt.
The Lords deliberated in secret, with closed doors.
The one was a court of justice, the other a court of mercy.
We have already said, and we must repeat, that there is no resemblance between the House of Lords of the present day and that of the past.
If you wish to preserve an old thing, human or divine, a code or a dogma, a nobility or a priesthood, never repair anything about it thoroughly, even its outside cover.
A high ceiling adorned with many-faced relievos and gilded cornices, circled over the chamber where the Lords assembled.
A certain obscurity is pleasing to those owls of supreme power.
To attempt to describe the House of Lords of other days would be to attempt to describe the unknown.
The throne was approached by three steps.
A few paces from the door, the bar, a transverse barrier, and a sort of frontier, marked the spot where the people ended and the peerage began.
To create Lords was the menace of royalty; a means of government.
On the two walls, opposite each other, were displayed in successive pictures, on a huge piece of tapestry given to the Lords by Elizabeth, the adventures of the Armada, from the time of its leaving Spain until it was wrecked on the coasts of Great Britain.
The strokes of the pickaxe on the monument produce their counter-strokes on customs and charters.
The king and all his court reproved Kay for his churlish manner, and for his having driven so splendid a youth from the court.
And then he brought it home.
She called him to her, and said:
Then she cried with a great cry of joy.
For she and her eight evil sisters laid a curse upon him.
The maiden who had opened to Perceval was that daughter, and she laughed harshly as her mother spoke.
Thus is it with all good knights and noble dames, and thus was it with our dear Lord.'
He unloosed the knight's armour and gave it to Perceval.
And there came to him a damsel, weeping, and when he craved of her to tell him why she mourned, she stayed, and looked at him as if astounded.
He lifted his hand and took the shield by its strap from the peg on which it hung, and as he did so, a great sigh arose from within the hall, as if at one time many sleepers awoke.
'This castle is named the Castle of Weeds,' replied the lady, 'and the lands about it for many miles belonged to my husband, the Earl Mador. And he was a bold and very valiant man; and he slew Maelond, the eldest son of Domna, the great witch of Glaive, and ever thereafter things were not well with him.
'Now God be praised,' said Tod, and smiled joyfully.
The green knight came and thanked Perceval for thus saving his life.
And as he stood marvelling what mighty men had builded it, he heard a strange rattling sound behind him, and, turning, he saw three men on horseback, and the sun shone from them as he had seen it shine from the first horseman.
But the lad would not have it, though he longed greatly to possess it, and the green knight took it with him.
'The stainless knight,' they said, 'shall gain from evil greater strength, and with it he may confound all evil.'
Going home, he told his mother and her servants what he had done, and they went to see, and marvelled that he could catch such fleet creatures as the wild red deer.
They had come to the court of Arthur, and had craved harbourage there, and the king of his kindness had granted it them.
'And what is it to fight?'
Yet was he also very strong of body, fleet of foot, quick of eye and hand.
Rather a life of poverty than one of shamefulness and dishonour.
I came to this land of Britain when it was full of evil men, warring fiercely together, and all in heathen darkness.
But Perceval raised him in his arms and kissed him, and gave him bread and wine from his scrip, and when the poor man was revived, Perceval asked him what his words meant.
'By'r Lady's name!' cried Sir Owen, 'what do you there, tall youth?'
'To fight is to do battle with spears or swords, so that you would slay the man that would slay you.'
Whereupon he fell from his horse lifeless.
Perceval wondered what he was, and resolved to go across the moor to the road he had seen.
'For when you left us I did not in my heart thank ye that you had saved my mother and me from death and worse.
Then did the Black Knight marvel greatly, for never had a knight, however skilled, withstood him, for either the lightning of the dragon shield had burnt him, or the stroke of his flaming sword had slain him swiftly.
He went forth into the forest some little way, and heard from the castle the singing of a joyful hymn.
Owen alighted marvelling, and went to the knight and found that he was dead, and saw the manner of his death, and marvelled the more.
The page of the chamber was serving the queen with wine in a golden goblet richly wrought, which Lancelot had taken from a knight whom he had lately slain.
While he marvelled, a faint light glowed over hauberk, helm, shield, sword and lance, and there was an exceeding sweet savour wafted through the place.
And for fear of giving her pain, he did not tell her of the knight he had slain.
Men went to their work unafraid, the corn was brightening on the hills, the cattle lowed, women sang at their work, and children played. And all blessed him as he rode.
But into the land came an evil and a pagan knight, the knight of the Dragon, and he willed that all should scorn and despise the good Christ, and should turn to the old gods of the standing stones and the oaken groves.
'He shall be a stainless knight, who shall gain from evil the greatest strength, and, if God wills, he shall beat down the evil powers in this land.'
So Perceval took the horse, and armed himself and rode forth.
As he passed through the land, he saw how it had already begun to smile again.
Then, as Perceval looked about him, he saw the dark hole of a cave in a bank beside the hollow, and suddenly therefrom issued a burst of horrible fire and smoke, and with a cry as of a fiend a black knight suddenly appeared before him on a great horse, whose eyes flashed as with fire and whose nostrils jetted hot vapours.
As the years passed, and her little son began to run, three black days came within a little of each other, for on these days messengers came with the sad news of the death of her other boys.
The foremost checked his horse beside Perceval, and said:
'I know not what a knight is,' answered Perceval.
And now I will be as one of you.'
For either he will be overthrown, and the knight will think he is truly the champion sent on behalf of the queen, whom the knight so evilly treated, and so an eternal disgrace will light on Arthur and all of us; or, if he is slain, the disgrace will be the same, and the mad young man's life will be thrown away.'
And Perceval rode ever forward.
'What matter, so it be that I live richly while I live!'
In his rage he beat Tod the dwarf such a blow, that the poor troll fell senseless to the ground; and the troll-wife he kicked, so that she was dashed among the dogs, who bit her.
And the lady thanked him with tears for saving their lives, but the girl was cold and scornful and said no word of thanks.
Thereupon Sir Owen made all haste, and rode swiftly to the meadow, armed; but when he reached the place, he found a youth in a mouldy old jerkin pulling a knight in rich armour up and down the grass.
Then Perceval saw how the boss of the Black Knight's shield was the head of a dragon, its forked tongue writhing, its teeth gnashing, and its eyes so red and fiendish that no mortal, unless by God's aid, could look on it and live.
But the buck was fierce, and would have gored him with its horns, but Perceval seized them, and after a great struggle he threw the animal, and held it down, and in his wrath he would have slain it with a sharp stick.
'They will deck me in rich robes, and I shall not pine for fair raiment, as I have pined these ten years with thee.'
Always Perceval had wondered what the little dark man did whom they called the hunter, who was always so secret, so that Perceval could never see where he went or when he returned from the forest.
She commanded Perceval never to slay any more living things, and the lad promised.
Here and there lay pieces of armour, red and rusted, as if they had been in a fierce fire; and in one place was the body of a knight freshly slain, and he was charred and black.
And well hast thou merited them, since thou unarmed hast slain so powerful a knight as this.'
And, looking back, he saw that the castle had vanished. But still above him and about him was the sound of singing, of a sweetness indescribable, as if they sang who had gained all that they desired.
They tempted him every hour and every day, telling him what earthly power, what riches and what great dominions would be his, if he would but swear fealty to the chief witch, Domna, and fight for her against King Arthur and his proud knights.
'And, mother, I will be a knight also.'
He battered on the door with the butt of his lance; and long he waited, while the cold rain drove and the wind snarled.
'By my faith, thou farmer's churl,' said Kay, 'thou art richly equipped indeed with horse and arms to have that honour.'
One day he saw a flock of his mother's goats in the forest, and near them stood two hinds.
And with this Perceval said farewell and rode off.
Anon he came to the edge of a plain, and saw a great castle in the distance.
With such force did it go, and so true was the aim, that it pierced the coif of the knight, and entered between the neck and the head, and the red knight swayed and then clattered to the ground, dead.
'What is this?' asked Perceval, and pulled the skirt of the hauberk.
And looking round, he saw how all the men that had seemed dead were now on their knees, with bent heads and folded hands as if in prayer.
And he prepared to throw his javelin-sticks.
He came one day towards the gloaming to a lonely wood in the fenlands, where the wind shivered like the breath of ghosts among the leaves, and there was not a track or trace of man or beast, and no birds piped.
Full of anger at the sight, Perceval launched one of his hard-wood javelins at the red knight.
'Methought that none might pierce through the hauberk of a knight, and I sorrow that I have slain him, not thinking what I did.'
He rode up to it, and marvelled that it was all so quiet.
Dear son, dost thou desire to ride forth into the world?'
For of that stroke came all our misery.
On the seventh day he crossed a plain, and saw far in the north where the smoke as of fires rose into the clouds, and here and there he saw the fierce red gleam of flames.
Thereupon the dragon gave so terrible a cry that the earth seemed to shake with the horror of it. And in its wrath and pain the dragon's head turned upon the Black Knight its master, and vomited forth fire so fiercely, that it scorched and burned him utterly, so that he fell from his horse dead.
Men marvelled who the strange young man could be, and many sought Tod and his wife to question them, but nowhere could they be found.
'Therefore, fair lady,' said Perceval, 'I would seek him without delay, for to essay the force of my body upon him, by the grace of God.'
'Fear not for me, mother,' she cried.
The lady looked sadly upon her as she heard her words.
'Choose thou, chieftain,' said she, 'whether I shall open unto thee without announcing thee, or whether I shall tell her that rules here that thou wishest to enter.'
I am sure her reasons would do her honor."
"Thank you, you are very good.
I have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.
In short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could always put down when he liked.
Why should he?
"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet, "because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among my tenants.
"I assure you, riding is the most healthy of exercises."
"I have little leisure for such literature just now.
"Dodo!" exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise.
"I think it would do Celia good--if she would take to it."
I began a long while ago to collect documents.
It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the inward sources; I live too much with the dead.
She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady, but Sir James had appealed to her.
"All the better.
To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth--what a work to be in any way present at, to assist in, though only as a lamp-holder!
"But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke," Sir James presently took an opportunity of saying.
Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke, "You have an excellent secretary at hand, you perceive."
I saw you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag not worthy of you.
"No, indeed, not exactly.
It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone.
It won't do.
Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr. Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.
I mean to give up riding.
"I wonder you show temper, Dorothea."
"Yes," said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, "but I have documents.
"Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?"
Mr. Casaubon said, "No."
Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was speaking, and seemed to observe her newly.
"How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!"
I knew Wilberforce in his best days.
"No, that is too hard," said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that showed strong interest.
But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution about my eyesight."
"Then that is a reason for more practice.
Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?"
No, no--see that your tenants don't sell their straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles, you know. But your fancy farming will not do--the most expensive sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds."
"It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me."
It is a good comparison: the match is perfect."
Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker.
"I made a great study of theology at one time," said Mr. Brooke, as if to explain the insight just manifested.
"Yes, I believe he has," said Dorothea, with the full voice of decision.
I took in all the new ideas at one time--human perfectibility, now.
She wondered how a man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality.
Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was listening.
Do you know Wilberforce?"
"Oh, why?" said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw. He is remarkably like the portrait of Locke.
Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual.
It has been trained for a lady.
It is not a sin to make yourself poor in performing experiments for the good of all."
"I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, uncle," said Dorothea.
She was thoroughly charming to him, but of course he theorized a little about his attachment.
Now there was something singular.
"You see how widely we differ, Sir James.
At this moment she felt angry with the perverse Sir James.
"Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily thrown."
But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do what is very agreeable," said Dorothea.
That was true in every sense, you know."
"He talks very little," said Celia
Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed, and only from high delight or anger.
I wish you would let me send over a chestnut horse for you to try.
"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of your cow-house.
Or, as I may say, Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two.
But Davy was there: he was a poet too.
"I know something of all schools.
"Celia!
"We must not inquire too curiously into motives," he interposed, in his measured way.
Why not?
I pulled up; I pulled up in time.
His manners, she thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke.
But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself.
"There is no one for him to talk to."
"I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution.
When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said--
"Exactly," said Sir James.
"It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man's face."
"I am aware of it," said Dorothea, coldly.
"Surely," said Dorothea, "it is better to spend money in finding out how men can make the most of the land which supports them all, than in keeping dogs and horses only to gallop over it.
"Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology."
"She likes giving up."
"Sir Humphry Davy?" said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying Davy's Agricultural Chemistry.
He had the spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different as possible from the blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type represented by Sir James Chettam.
The years finally produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.
In that society, they parodied the Revolution.
The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above this law, as above every other.
What a pity!
A thief is admitted there, provided he be a god.
His face was the same color as his trousers.
One is not a century with impunity.
Duchesses, the most delicate and charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the following, addressed to "the federates":--
In spite of?
He was an oracle everywhere.
Poor child!"
In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the old rock.
No, because.
CHAPTER I--AN ANCIENT SALON
A little shady.
You must put up a fight.
Then came the wearisome technicalities of the empaneling of a jury, with challenges for cause and peremptory challenges, until nearly the entire panel of fifty jurors was exhausted.
As the sheriff confided to the clerk, it was an even bet that the first twelve men drawn were safer for both sides than the twelve men who finally stood with uplifted hands and were again sworn by the clerk.
When Harry entered the court room in charge of the sheriff, he looked neither to the right nor to the left, and saw no one before him but his own counsel, who arose and extended a friendly hand, and led him to a seat beside himself within the bar.
Why did you do it?"
I will overrule your objection, and give you an exception.
Why did she know it?
"We must not neglect the smallest item that may help you, for your case needs strengthening.
The prisoner was glad to see them go.
"The court considers the question an interesting one, but the practice in the past has been against your contention.
Suppose your cousin is no longer living; you don't want to spend the rest of your life in the penitentiary because he can't be found."
In this way two days were spent, with a result that when counsel on both sides expressed themselves as satisfied with the jury, every one in the court room doubted it.
His object, like that of the court, should be simple justice.
Under the adroit lead of counsel, they told each the same story, and were excused cross-examination.
"I do not know that the Supreme Court of this State has passed upon this question.
"And both wounds were in the same place--on the same side, for instance?"
"Bring in the prisoner."
When this ceremony was completed, the judge took up the court calender and said,--
The whole situation seemed to him cruelly impossible,--a sort of insane delusion.
But any man's hat might have such a break.
On the day set for the trial the court room was packed to the doors.
If he is living, this whole trial is a farce, and if he is not, it's a tragedy."
"I don't know," he said to himself, "I don't know if this story can be made to satisfy a jury or not.
"Too bad, too bad.
Harry laughed.
As the District Attorney himself could not accept a fee or reward from private parties, so, I urge, counsel employed to assist him must be equally disinterested."
But Bertrand Ballard's prompt and straightforward answers, and his simple and courteous manner, were a full match for the able lawyer, and after two hours of effort he subsided.
"That will not help me.
Nathan Goodbody then rose, and, addressing the court with an air of confident modesty, as if he were bringing forward a point so strong as to require nothing more than the simple statement to give it weight, said:--
Harry King, who had never witnessed a trial in his life, began to grow interested in these details quite aside from his own part therein.
You say you were lamed by it--but you seem to have recovered from that.
The District Attorney represents the public interest which can never be promoted by the conviction of the innocent.
He told him as much of the case as he thought proper, and then gave him a note to the prisoner, addressing him as Harry King.
"If the court please, the defense is ready, but I have noticed, as no doubt the court has noticed, a distinguished member of this bar sitting with the District Attorney as though it were intended that he should take part in the trial of this case, and I am advised that he intends to do so.
My cousin was wounded also, but his was only a flesh wound from which he quickly recovered and of which he thought nothing.
"I see.
As he walked toward his seat, the lawyers and officers of the court rose and stood until he was seated. The clerk of the court read from a large book the journal of the court of the previous day and then handed the book to the judge to be signed.
"How could I guess there would be such an impossible development? Until I saw Miss Ballard here in this cell I thought my cousin dead. Why, my reason for coming here was to confess my crime, but they won't give me the chance.
Then Bertrand Ballard was called, and the questions put to him were more searching.
"I think it would be best to say nothing about the scars, unless forced to do so, for I walk as well now as I ever did, and that will be against me."
He watched the clerk shaking the box, wondering why he did so, until he saw the slips of paper being drawn forth one by one from the small aperture on the top, and listened while the name written on each was called aloud.
"But man!
Have you any authorities?"
Armed with this letter the young lawyer was soon in close consultation with his new client.
During all these proceedings the Elder sat looking straight before him, glancing at the prisoner only when obliged to do so, and coldly as an outsider might do.
"I'll have a little law on this case,--some point upon which we can go to the Supreme Court," and for the rest of that day and long into the night Nathan Goodbody consulted with his library.
What was there about this particular break to make it the hat of Peter Junior? Because she had made it herself.
The trial was taking more time than he had thought possible, and he saw no reason for such lengthy technicalities and the delay in calling the witnesses.
But he resisted the impulse, never turning his head, and only glancing curiously at each man as he took his seat in the jury box at the order of the judge.
Because of the little break in the straw, on the edge of the brim.
The court replied: "I shall assume the facts to be as stated by you unless the counsel on the other side dissent from such a statement. Considering the facts to be as stated, your objection raises a novel question.
Then followed the testimony of the boys--now shy lads in their teens, who had found the evidences of a struggle and possible murder so long before on the river bluff.
Both boys had identified the hat found on the bluff, and testified that the brown stain, which now appeared somewhat faintly, had been a bright red, and had looked like blood.
In anticipation of the unusual public interest the District Attorney directed the summoning of twenty-five jurors in addition to the twenty-five of the regular panel.
Did she know it for his?
"We are ready," answered the District Attorney.
"On the same side, yes; but his was lower down.
She had knocked it down one day when she was brushing up in the front hall, and when she hung it up again, she had seen the break, and knew she had done it.
Though the manner of the examiner was respectful and courteous, he still contrived to leave the impression on those in the court room that he hoped to draw out some fact that would lead to the discovery of matters more vital to the case than the mere details to which the witness testified.
Only one face never failed him, that of Bertrand Ballard, who sat where he might now and then meet his eye, and who never left the court room while the case was on.
Suppose you try to get back a little of the old limp."
"You were wounded in the hip, you say," Nathan Goodbody questioned him.
I therefore object to the appearance of Mr. Hibbard as counsel in this case, and to his taking any part in this trial.
His air was worn and weary.
Too much coincidence to suit me." He sat drumming with his fingers on his desk for a while, and then rose and turned to his books.
A vivid flame went up into the moonlight, and then a dense smoke as black as ink, which spread out wider and wider, far and near, till all below was darker than the darkest midnight.
Out of the box he took a gray powder, which he flung upon the little blaze.
The wife said nothing but one thing.
While he sat there grumbling and growling and trying to make himself comfortable and warm, there suddenly came a knock at the door.
He took out his flint and steel, and his sticks of spice-wood and his gray powder, and made a great fire and smoke just as he had done before.
"I will," said the fisherman, promptly, "take it in my hat."
He held tightly to his net, but away flew his fur cap, the golden money falling in a shower like sparks of yellow light. Down he fell and down he fell, until his head spun like a top.
He brought some sticks of spice-wood from his pouch, and then he struck a light and made a fire.
She did not argue; she did not lose her temper; she only said to everything that he said, "My advice to you is that you go."
"No."
By good-luck his house was just below, with its thatch of soft rushes.
Into the very middle of it he tumbled, and right through the thatch--bump!--into the room below.
The fisherman's wife stood gaping and staring at the strange figure, but the old man in red walked straight into the hut.
"Then God bless your pretty eyes," said the fisherman.
No, he would not go; he had said he would not, and he would not.
"Not even so much as a single feather?"
"This is the place for you to cast your nets," said the old magician; "for if we catch nothing here we catch nothing at all."
Puff! flash!
"Is this all mine?" said the fisherman.
From his pouch the old man took a little golden key, which he fitted into a key-hole in the side of the chest.
"No."
Heed well what I tell you.
If the wonderful palace had grown like a bubble, like a bubble it vanished.
Then, beckoning to the fisherman, dumb with wonder, he led the way up the great flight of marble steps to the palace door.
Where to Lay the Blame.
On they went, and on they went, until, after a great while, whatever it was that was carrying him lit upon the ground, and there the fisherman found himself standing, for that which had brought him had gone.
"No."
Speak not a single word, for if you do, misfortune will be sure to happen."
"Have what?" said the fisherman.
"I will not deny, my friend, that what you say is true, and that it is my turn," said the Fisherman.
But the fisherman's wife had listened to what the old man had said about paying for the job, and she was of a different mind from her husband. "Come," said she, "the old man promises to pay you well.
This is how it was with a man of whom I shall tell you.
Now throw your leg over what you feel and hold fast."
The fisherman unrolled his nets and cast them and dragged them, and then cast them and dragged them again, but neither time caught so much as a herring.
The chief treasurer opened it, and it was full of bags of gold money.
The magician took the crystal ball and thrust it into his bosom; but what it was the fisherman could not guess, and if you do not know I shall not tell you.
But the wife only smiled and said again, "My advice to you is that you go."
"Not I," said the fisherman, "I go out no more this night.
"Great herring and little fishes!" roared the fisherman; "it is a billy-goat!"
The earth rocked and swayed, and the poor fisherman shook and trembled with fear till his teeth clattered in his head.
The old man whipped the handkerchief off his eyes, and there the fisherman found himself on the shores of the sea, where there was nothing to be seen but water upon one side and rocks and naked sand upon the other.
The beautiful lady took the magician by the hand, and, turning to those who stood around, said, in a loud voice, "Behold him who alone is worthy to possess the jewel of jewels!
Thereupon he took from his pocket a handkerchief, and made ready to tie it about the fisherman's eyes.
Now, he had grown somewhat used to strange things by this time, so he began to think that he would like to see what sort of a creature it was upon which he was riding thus through the sky.
Then again he tied his handkerchief over the fisherman's eyes.
But the old man said never a word.
So at night there he sat by the fire, rubbing his knees and warming his shins, and waiting for supper that his wife was cooking for him, and his hunger was as sharp as vinegar, and his temper hot enough to fry fat.
"But anyhow," said he, "they might have given a body a bite to eat."
Then for the first time the beautiful lady seemed to notice the fisherman.
Keep your mouth tight shut, for if you utter so much as a single word you are a lost man.
Then suddenly the roaring and bellowing ceased, and all was as still as death, though the darkness was as thick and black as ever.
There was once upon a time a fisherman who had fished all day long and had caught not so much as a sprat.
He threw back the lid; the fisherman looked within, and there was the prettiest little palace that man's eye ever beheld, all made of mother-of-pearl and silver-frosted as white as snow.
"How will you have it?" said the beautiful lady.
"Remember," said he, "what I told you when we started upon our journey.
"There!" said the fisherman, as he gathered himself up and rubbed his shoulder, "that is what comes of following a woman's advice!"
Down fell the fisherman through the empty sky, whirling over and over and around and around like a frog.
She came half-way down the steps of the throne to welcome the magician, and when the two met they kissed one another before all those who were looking on.
There the two stood on the sea-shore, with nothing to be seen but rocks and sand and water, and the starry sky overhead.
There is something that I want you to catch for me, and if I have luck I will pay you for your fishing as never fisherman was paid before."
I have been fishing all day long until my back is nearly broken, and have caught nothing, and now I am not such a fool as to go out and leave a warm fire and a good supper at your bidding."
The old magician took off his clothes and his face--yes, his face--for all the world as though it had been a mask, and there stood as handsome and noble a young man as ever the light looked on.
"Nor will I deny that I have already a story in my mind.
The fisherman had his net over one arm and his cap of gold in the other hand; nevertheless, there he felt the same hairy thing he had felt before.
He flung his leg over it, and away he was gone through the air like a sky-rocket.
The magician put on his red clothes and his face again, making himself as hoary and as old as before.
"Well, then," said the fisherman, "I wish I'd not come."
The noblemen, in silks and satins and velvets, marched ahead, and back they went through the other apartments, until at last they came to the door.
whizz! off he shot through the air like a sky-rocket.
The good woman opened it, and there stood an old man, clad all in red from head to foot, and with a snowy beard at his chin as white as winter snow.
The fisherman grumbled and grumbled, and swore that he would not go.
"No."
Many and many a man has come to trouble--so he will say--by following his wife's advice.
The fisherman shook his head.
But time passed, and not so much as a crust of bread was brought to stay his stomach.
"It is," said the beautiful lady.
All the good folk clapped their hands, not so much because of the story itself, but because it was a woman who told it.
"Ain't I to say anything?" said the fisherman.
"Then do you go," said Miss Milner, eagerly; "and if he should ask for me, I will gladly come, you know; but if he does not ask for me, I will not--and pray don't deceive me."
As daylight showed itself--"And yet I might see him once again," said she--"I might see him within these two hours, if I pleased, for Mr. Sandford invited me."
She required no protestations of this, but readily followed her beloved adviser, whose kindness never appeared in so amiable a light as at that moment.
Sandford looked at her inquisitively, sipped his tea, and said, "He never made tea to his own liking."
"Did he send for me?" were the words she uttered as soon as she saw her.
"My Lord, while I thought my counsel might save you from the worst of misfortunes, conjugal strife, I importuned you hourly, and set forth your danger in the light it appeared to me.
"Mr. Sandford did, in his presence," returned Miss Woodley, "and you may go with the utmost decorum, or I would not tell you so."
On entering the room, through all the dead white of her present complection, she blushed to a crimson.
Miss Milner, covered with shame, sunk on the bosom of Miss Woodley.
She spread her hands over her eyes, and exclaimed, "Oh, Heavens!"
But though Miss Milner acquiesced in this opinion, yet she had not the courage to form the determination that she would go.
It was of course dismissed--and one of those great incidents of delight which Miss Milner that morning tasted, was to look out of the window, and see this very carriage drive from the door unoccupied.
When the ring was wanting, Lord Elmwood supplied it with one from his own hand, but throughout all the rest of the ceremony, appeared lost in zealous devotion to Heaven.
Lord Elmwood, after repeating to Miss Woodley his last night's farewell, now went up to Miss Milner, and taking one of her hands, again held it between his, but still without speaking--while she, unable to suppress her tears as heretofore, suffered them to fall in torrents.
Miss Milner started at the sound--so did he--but she had nearly dropped her cup and saucer; on which Sandford took them out of her hand, saying,
With voice and manners so serious, so solemn and so fervent, he performed these rites, that every idea of jest, or even of lightness, was absent from the mind of all who were present.
You have not slept there to-night."
"If you think, my dear Miss Milner," said Miss Woodley, "that a second parting from Lord Elmwood would but give you a second agony, in the name of Heaven do not see him any more--but, if you hope your mind would be easier, were you to bid each other adieu in a more direct manner than you did last night, let us go down and breakfast with him.
Yet, no sooner was it finished, than his thoughts descended to this world.
She found Lord Elmwood there in his travelling dress, standing pensively by the fire-place--and, as he did not dream of seeing her, he started when she entered, and, with an appearance of alarm, said, "Dear Miss Woodley, what's the matter?"
"I don't know where I have laid my gloves."
Daylight now no longer peeped, but stared upon them.
He embraced his bride with all the transport of the fondest, happiest bridegroom, and in raptures called her by the endearing name of "wife."
They neither of them replied, or changed their situation.
When Miss Milner retired to her bed-chamber, Miss Woodley went with her, nor would leave her the whole night--but in vain did she persuade her to rest--she absolutely refused; and declared she would never, from that hour, indulge repose.
"Then bring her hither," cried Sandford, "directly.
"I think there is danger," returned Lord Elmwood, "and therefore our second marriage must take place to-morrow."
He left them for a moment, and going to a small bookcase in one corner of the room, took out of it a book, and returning with it in his hand, said,
Miss Woodley spoke this in a negligent manner, and yet, Lord Elmwood echoed back the words with solicitude, "Has not Miss Milner been in bed the whole night?"
The few days that intervened between this and their lawful marriage, were passed in the delightful care of preparing for that happy day--yet, with all its delights inferior to the first, when every unexpected joy was doubled by the once expected sorrow.
She imagined, alas, that he looked as if he wished to ask how Miss Milner did, but would not allow himself the indulgence.
The commanding and awful manner in which he spoke this sentence, made them both turn to him in amazement, and as it were, petrified with the sensation his words had caused.
"Why do you ask!" said he.
"What is all this?" cried Sandford, going up to them in anger.
Miss Woodley was pleased at the frank manner in which he made this confession, and could not resist the strong impulse to say, "You have done just then, my Lord, like Miss Milner, for she has not been in bed the whole night."
CHAPTER XII.
"Separate this moment," cried Sandford, "or resolve to be separated only by--death."
He replied, "Very well." But though he had breakfasted, he did not attempt to move.
"You may do as you please," said Miss Woodley, "but I will.
"But still, my Lord," cried Sandford, "you are only married by your own church and conscience, not by your wife's, or by the law of the land; and let me advise you not to defer that marriage long, lest in the time you disagree, and she should refuse to become your legal spouse."
"Because," replied Sandford, "I went into your bed-chamber just now, and I found your bed made.
Miss Woodley left the room, and found Miss Milner almost in despair, lest she should hear Lord Elmwood's carriage drive off before her friend's return.
Miss Milner took a cup, but had scarce strength to hold it.
He, after consideration, gave them four days.
She raised him from her feet, and by the expression of her countenance, by the tears that bathed his hands, gave him confidence.
Lord Elmwood struck his forehead in doubt and agitation; but, still holding her hand, he cried, "I cannot part from her." Then feeling this reply as equivocal, he fell upon his knees, and cried, "Will you pardon my hesitation?
I that have lived for so many years under the same roof with him, and on the most friendly terms, and he going away, perhaps for these ten years, perhaps for ever, I should think it a disrespect not to see him to the last moment of his remaining in the house."
He then turned to Miss Milner--"Can you say the same by him?"
A servant came in, and told Lord Elmwood, "The carriage was at the door."
She replied, "Nothing, my Lord; but I could not be satisfied without seeing your Lordship once again, while I had it in my power."
"I have slept no where," returned he; "I could not sleep--and having some papers to look over, and to set off early, I thought I might as well not go to bed at all."
But though old, and a priest, I can submit to think I have been in an error; and I now firmly believe, it is for the welfare of you both, to become man and wife.
Miss Woodley promised her not to deceive her; and soon after, as they heard the servants pass about the house, and the clock had struck six, Miss Woodley went to the breakfast room.
To this the ladies objected, and Sandford was to fix their second wedding-day, as he had done their first.
Lord Elmwood gazed at him with wonder! and yet, as if enraptured by the sudden change this conduct gave to his prospects.
Will you, in possessing all my affections, bear with all my infirmities?"
I'll go before, and prepare him for your reception--you shall not surprise him--and I will let him know, it is by Mr. Sandford's invitation you are coming."
She was half inclined to mention her to him, and was debating in her mind whether she should or not, when Mr. Sandford came into the room, saying, as he entered,
"For Heaven's sake, my Lord, where did you sleep last night?"
And my dear," continued he, addressing himself to her, "act but under the dominion of those vows, to a husband of sense and virtue, like him, and you will be all that I, himself, or even Heaven can desire.
It seemed but a very short time they were at breakfast, when the carriage, that was to take Lord Elmwood away, drove to the door.
Her lips moved, but he could not hear what she said.
and will you, in marriage, show me that tender love you have not shown me yet?
"More than my life." He replied, with the most heartfelt accents.
"Perhaps you had rather have coffee?"
He turned to Sandford--then placing her by his own side, as the form of matrimony requires, gave this for a sign to Sandford that he should begin the ceremony.
She, sighed with a kind of trembling ecstasy; while Sandford, with all the dignity of his official character, delivered these words----
"Yes," replied Miss Woodley, "that I am sure she is."
My Lord, take this woman's marriage vows--you can ask no fairer promises of her reform--she can give you none half so sacred, half so binding; and I see by her looks that she will mean to keep them.
"I thank you," he returned with a sigh--the heaviest and most intelligent sigh she ever heard him condescend to give.
Never was there a more rapid change from despair to happiness--to happiness perfect and supreme--than was that, which Miss Milner and Lord Elmwood experienced in one single hour.
A day's journey from the Emerald City brought the little band of adventurers to the home of Jack Pumpkinhead, which was a house formed from the shell of an immense pumpkin.
That is why I grow such a great field of pumpkins--that I may select a new head whenever necessary."
"We hate the sun and from it run, The moon is cool and clear, So on this spot each Tottenhot Waits for it to appear.
But Jack Pumpkinhead grew a lot of things in his garden besides pumpkins, so he cooked for them a fine vegetable soup and gave Dorothy, Ojo and Toto, the only ones who found it necessary to eat, a pumpkin pie and some green cheese.
Trouble with the Tottenhots
Just now, I regret to say, my seeds are rattling a bit, so I must soon get another head."
If they were left alone, these creatures never troubled the inhabitants of the rest of Oz, but those who invaded their domains encountered many dangers from them.
I am not stuffed, you will observe; my body is good solid hickory."
Sometimes the faces I carve are better than others--more expressive and cheerful, you know--but I think they average very well."
"And we never gamble," added the Patchwork Girl.
"It's a wild country," remarked Dorothy, soberly, "and if we go there we're sure to have troubles of our own.
For beds they must use the sweet dried grasses which Jack had strewn along one side of the room, but that satisfied Dorothy and Ojo very well.
"You began it," declared Dorothy.
Dorothy handed Toto to the boy and then climbed in herself.
Though invited by the English parliament to model their government into a republican form, they resolved still to adhere to monarchy, which had ever prevailed in their country, and which, by the express terms of their covenant they had engaged to defend.
Another party inveighed against the law and its professors; and, on pretence of rendering more simple the distribution of justice, were desirous of abolishing the whole system of English jurisprudence, which seemed interwoven with monarchical government.
In order to convey a just notion of Irish affairs, it will be necessary to look backwards some years, and to relate briefly those transactions which had passed during the memorable revolutions in England.
Philip IV.
But this army, formidable from its discipline and courage, as well as its numbers, was actuated by a spirit that rendered it dangerous to the assembly which had assumed the command over it.
The parliament,--for so we must henceforth call a small and inconsiderable part of the house of commons,--having murdered their sovereign with so many appearing circumstances of solemnity and justice, and so much real violence, and even fury, began to assume more the air of a civil legal power, and to enlarge a little the narrow bottom upon which they stood.
Dundalk, where Monk commanded, was delivered up by the troops, who mutinied against their governor.
Familiar even to buffoonery with the meanest sentinel, he never lost his authority: transported to a degree of madness with religious ecstasies, he never forgot the political purposes to which they might serve.
Many disorders in England it behoved him previously to compose.
Ormond, on his arrival in Ireland, found the kingdom divided into many factions, among which either open war or secret enmity prevailed.
The English, long accustomed to a mild administration, and unacquainted with dissimulation, could not conform their speech and countenance to the present necessity, or pretend attachment to a form of government which they generally regarded with such violent abhorrence.
Though men, astonished with the successes of the army, remained in seeming tranquillity, symptoms of the greatest discontent every where appeared.
Numberless were the extravagancies which broke out among the people.
What alone gave some stability to all these unsettled humors was the great influence, both civil and military, acquired by Oliver Cromwell. This man, suited to the age in which he lived, and to that alone, was equally qualified to gain the affection and confidence of men, by what was mean, vulgar, and ridiculous in his character, as to command their obedience by what was great, daring, and enterprising.
The bands of society were every where loosened; and the irregular passions of men were encouraged by speculative principles, still more unsocial and irregular.
The dominion which England claimed over Ireland, demanded more immediately their efforts for subduing that country.
By concert, these two malecontents secretly drew forces together, and were ready to fall on Ormond, who remained in security, trusting to the pacification so lately concluded with the rebels.
But being banished, with the other royalists, to a distance from that city, and seeing every event turn out unfortunately for his royal master, and threaten him with a catastrophe still more direful, he thought proper to retire into France, where he joined the queen and the prince of Wales.
He received intelligence of their treachery, made his retreat with celerity and conduct, and sheltered his small army in Dublin and the other fortified towns, which still remained in the hands of the Protestants.
The pulpits, being chiefly filled with Presbyterians or disguised royalists, and having long been the scene of news and politics, could by no penalties be restrained from declarations unfavorable to the established government.
He even thundered out a sentence of excommunication against all who should adhere to a peace so prejudicial, as he pretended, to the Catholic religion; and the deluded Irish, terrified with his spiritual menaces, ranged themselves every where on his side, and submitted to his authority.
He summoned an assembly of the clergy at Waterford, and engaged them to declare against that pacification which the civil council had concluded with their sovereign.
Tredah, Neury, and other forts, were taken.
Dublin was threatened with a siege; and the affairs of the lieutenant appeared in so prosperous a condition, that the young king entertained thoughts of coming in person into Ireland.
There were many circumstances which strongly invited the natives of Ireland to embrace the king's party.
The pope had sent over to Ireland a nuncio, Rinuccini, an Italian; and this man, whose commission empowered him to direct the spiritual concerns of the Irish, was emboldened, by their ignorance and bigotry, to assume the chief authority in the civil government.
Meanwhile, the unfortunate king was necessitated to take shelter in the Scottish army; and being there reduced to close confinement, and secluded from all commerce with his friends, despaired that his authority, or even his liberty, would ever be restored to him.
THE COMMONWEALTH.
When the English commonwealth was brought to some tolerable settlement, men began to cast their eyes towards the neighboring island.
The maxims of that prince had always led him to give a reasonable indulgence to the Catholics throughout all his dominions; and one principal ground of that enmity which the Puritans professed against him, was this tacit toleration.
Having at last assembled an army of sixteen thousand men, he advanced upon the parliamentary garrisons.
Even those among the republicans who adopted not such extravagancies, were so intoxicated with their saintly character, that they supposed themselves possessed of peculiar privileges; and all professions, oaths, laws, and engagements, had, in a great measure, lost their influence over them.
O'Neal maintained his credit in Ulster; and having entered into a secret correspondence with the parliamentary generals, was more intent on schemes for his own personal safety, than anxious for the preservation of his country or religion.
Accustomed to indulge every chimera in politics, every frenzy in religion, the soldiers knew little of the subordination of citizens, and had only learned, from apparent necessity, some maxims of military obedience.
The new lieutenant immediately applied himself with his wonted vigilance to make preparations for his expedition.
The situation alone of Scotland and Ireland gave any immediate inquietude to the new republic.
CHAPTER LX.
The Scots in the north, enraged, as well as their other countrymen, against the usurpations of the sectarian army, professed their adherence to the king; but were still hindered by many prejudices from entering into a cordial union with his lieutenant.
The nuncio, full of arrogance, levity, and ambition, was not contented with this violation of treaty.
Prudent men likewise were sensible of the total destruction which was hanging over the nation from the English parliament, and saw no resource or safety but in giving support to the declining authority of the king.
What habits, of consequence, more blameable?
They cannot even pass each other on the road without rules.
All princes pretend a regard to the rights of other princes; and some, no doubt, without hypocrisy.
Those who live in the same family have such frequent opportunities of licence of this kind, that nothing could prevent purity of manners, were marriage allowed, among the nearest relations, or any intercourse of love between them ratified by law and custom.
I hate a drinking companion, says the Greek proverb, who never forgets. The follies of the last debauch should be buried in eternal oblivion, in order to give full scope to the follies of the next.
But nothing less than the most extreme necessity, it is confessed, can justify individuals in a breach of promise, or an invasion of the properties of others.
But here is the difference between kingdoms and individuals.
The free and social intercourse of minds must be extremely checked, where no such rules of fidelity are established.
Public utility is the cause of all these variations.
Incest, therefore, being PERNICIOUS in a superior degree, has also a superior turpitude and moral deformity annexed to it.
Constancy in friendships, attachments, and familiarities, is commendable, and is requisite to support trust and good correspondence in society.
Waggoners, coachmen, and postilions have principles, by which they give the way; and these are chiefly founded on mutual ease and convenience.
For a moment the sights and sounds of the noisy restaurant passed from her consciousness.
You know," she went on, "you were made for the things that are coming to us.
I suppose I shall have to do the same again, but to-night I haven't patience.
It was she at last who rose reluctantly to her feet.
Even their shadow cannot trouble us any longer.
"Oh, Philip," she whispered, "can't you forget that you have ever been a school-teacher, dear?
I like it.
We simply seemed to have drifted together because we were both miserable, and then, as the time passed on--well, you came to be my only solace against the wretchedness of that life."
Philip, do you know I am starving?
Don't be a sentimentalist.
Her lips sought his, in vain.
She returned to the subject, however, later on, after she had drunk another glass of wine.
You can't alter even the smallest detail of its setting.
"I can't!" he muttered.
To-morrow evening!
"Oh, don't say that, Philip!
CHAPTER XIV
"I want to go whilst the memory of it all is wonderful," she declared. "Come.
Plain speaking just then was impossible.
"I can't believe it, even now.
That was written for happy people, Philip.
You might tempt me to be brutal.
Well, you must pay, do you see, and in my way?
"You found the courage, somehow, to break away from that loathsome existence.
He pushed her away.
You can't alter the past.
You've always lived with your head partly in the clouds, and it's always been my task to pull you down to earth.
They were old men and women in wickedness before they passed their first standard.
"What you want is some one with you all the time who understands you, some one to drive back those other thoughts when they come to worry you.
Then we will talk.
"Listen," she said.
There must be some strength, some manhood about you somewhere, or you couldn't have done what you have done."
He made no movement.
Don't be foolish."
"Of course you are," he assured her.
"You couldn't loathe me, could you?" she begged.
"Sometimes I wondered--but never mind that now.
"More than you did for me?"
"Well," she went on presently, "thank heavens I have plenty of will power.
His heart sank.
"Speak them and have done with it," he told her roughly.
We are only human, and did suffer so.
"I might find a few, too."
You had more courage, even, than I, because you ran a risk I never did.
"I don't think that I am, really," he said.
You need it so badly....
I've come to take care of you.
"Absolutely," he confessed.
"Not one!
In the darkness of the cab it seemed to him that her face had grown whiter.
Tell me, am I still nice to look at?"
What has really happened, dear?
"Courage, Philip," she murmured.
You used not to be weak, Philip."
"I will not!"
"Of course you want your reward, and of course you'll have it, some day!
She waited for a moment, then she leaned back amongst the cushions.
"Your play!" she murmured, as they faced the soft night air.
Mr. Dane is going to be very disappointed when I tell him that I never saw you before in my life....
Don't you love the music?
Philip had always been so difficult, but in the end so easily led.
She strummed upon the table with her fingers.
You robbed me of the man who was bringing me to America--who would have married me some day, I suppose.
Just as inevitably as our lives come and go, so what has happened is finished with, unchangeable.
Few of the people were in evening dress, and the tone of the place was essentially democratic.
I remember nothing, absolutely nothing, which happened before this evening.
You are so nice-looking, Philip, but you'd look ten times nicer still if you'd only smile once or twice and look as though you were glad."
I want more than just that money.
She leaned across the table.
He filled his glass mechanically.
"This is like one of our fairy stories of the old days, isn't it?" she said.
She laughed and looked about her.
I am here now and we are both free.
The whole thing was a nightmare to him.
"Very much more," he answered bravely, "and in a different fashion."
He led her to a huge restaurant a few doors away, where they found a corner table.
This ought to be an immense relief to you, Philip.
She called him back a little impatiently.
But you look--oh, so sad and so far away all the time!
It is only a weak person who would spoil the present and the future, brooding.
The close of the performance left them both curiously tongue-tied.
She watched it being opened and their glasses filled.
You haven't a friend in the city."
She had unlimited confidence in herself.
He kissed her upon the cheek.
"Please don't speak of Miss Dalstan like that," he begged.
You've improved already, ever so much.
The cab had stopped before the door of her hotel.
I want to forget."
"Very likely."
People, as they passed, paid her some attention, and she was frankly curious about everybody.
Look at me for a moment like a human being, can't you?
I'd rather find hell!
'By the honour of Donald Stewart, governor of the garrison, and lieutenant-colonel in the service of his Royal Highness Prince Charles Edward.' So saying, he hastily left the apartment, as if to avoid further discussion.
Here then was fresh food for conjecture.
This was a joyful communication. What had already passed during his confinement made it evident that no personal injury was designed to him; and his romantic spirit, having recovered during his repose much of that elasticity which anxiety, resentment, disappointment, and the mixture of unpleasant feelings excited by his late adventures had for a time subjugated, was now wearied with inaction.
Spoil, his usual object, seemed in this case neglected; for not only Waverley's property was restored, but his purse, which might have tempted this professional plunderer, had been all along suffered to remain in his possession.
The only furniture, excepting a washing-tub and a wooden press, called in Scotland an ambry, sorely decayed, was a large wooden bed, planked, as is usual, all around, and opening by a sliding panel. In this recess the Highlanders deposited Waverley, after he had by signs declined any refreshment.
As he sat in the smoky hut, at some distance from the fire, around which the others were crowded, he felt a gentle pressure upon his arm.
The young Highlander was repeatedly despatched by his comrades as if to collect intelligence.
His passion for the wonderful, although it is the nature of such dispositions to be excited by that degree of danger which merely gives dignity to the feeling of the individual exposed to it, had sunk under the extraordinary and apparently insurmountable evils by which he appeared environed at Cairnvreckan.
But, since the days of our grandmother Eve, the gratification of inordinate curiosity has generally borne its penalty in disappointment.
CHAPTER XXXVII
At length, upon accurate examination, the infirm state of his wooden prison-house appeared to supply the means of gratifying his curiosity, for out of a spot which was somewhat decayed he was able to extract a nail.
Two schemes seemed practicable, yet both attended with danger and difficulty.
But his fortune had settled that he was not to be left to his option.
And why should she apparently desire concealment?
Upon the evening of the seventh day the door of the hut suddenly opened, and two Highlanders entered, whom Waverley recognised as having been a part of his original escort to this cottage.
At length, when he had returned for the third or fourth time, the whole party arose and made signs to our hero to accompany them.
His fare was, in every point of view, better than he could have conceived, for poultry, and even wine, were no strangers to his table.
Our hero now endeavoured to address them, but was only answered with 'Cha n'eil Beurl agam' i.e. 'I have no English,' being, as Waverley well knew, the constant reply of a Highlander when he either does not understand or does not choose to reply to an Englishman or Lowlander.
Fancy immediately aroused herself and turned to Flora Mac-Ivor.
WAVERLEY IS STILL IN DISTRESS
Who could it be?
She showed him a packet of papers in such a manner that the motion was remarked by no one else, put her finger for a second to her lips, and passed on, as if to assist old Janet in packing Waverley's clothes in his portmanteau.
The twilight had given place to moonshine when the party halted upon the brink of a precipitous glen, which, as partly enlightened by the moonbeams, seemed full of trees and tangled brushwood.
Old Janet appeared anxious and upon the watch; and Waverley, who had not yet recovered strength enough to attempt to take his departure in spite of the opposition of his hosts, was under the necessity of remaining patient.
Was he in the hands of her father? and if so, what was his purpose?
The other project was to endeavour to attain a Scottish seaport, and thence to take shipping for England.
His slumbers were broken and unrefreshing; strange visions passed before his eyes, and it required constant and reiterated efforts of mind to dispel them. Shivering, violent headache, and shooting pains in his limbs succeeded these symptoms; and in the morning it was evident to his Highland attendants or guard, for he knew not in which light to consider them, that Waverley was quite unfit to travel.
They conversed for a short time with the old man and his companion, and then made Waverley understand, by very significant signs, that he was to prepare to accompany them.
One was to go back to Glennaquoich and join Fergus Mac-Ivor, by whom he was sure to be kindly received; and in the present state of his mind, the rigour with which he had been treated fully absolved him, in his own eyes, from his allegiance to the existing government.
The form was not that of Flora, nor was the face visible; and, to crown his vexation, while he laboured with the nail to enlarge the hole, that he might obtain a more complete view, a slight noise betrayed his purpose, and the object of his curiosity instantly disappeared, nor, so far as he could observe, did she again revisit the cottage.
Edward had lived at Glennaquoich long enough to be aware of a distinction which he had repeatedly heard noticed, and now satisfied that he had no interest with his attendants, he glanced a disconsolate eye around the interior of the cabin.
Nor did she again seek his eye after she had satisfied herself that her manoeuvre was observed and understood. On the contrary, she shortly afterwards left the hut, and it was only as she tript out from the door, that, favoured by the obscurity, she gave Waverley a parting smile and nod of significance ere she vanished in the dark glen.
Was Alice his unknown warden, and was this maiden of the cavern the tutelar genius that watched his bed during his sickness?
The velocity, and indeed violence, with which Waverley was hurried along nearly deprived him of sensation; for the injury he had received from his fall prevented him from aiding himself so effectually as he might otherwise have done.
The question indeed occurred, whither he was to direct his course when again at his own disposal.
An old Highland sibyl, the only inhabitant of this forlorn mansion, appeared busy in the preparation of some food.
His mind wavered between these plans, and probably, if he had effected his escape in the manner he proposed, he would have been finally determined by the comparative facility by which either might have been executed.
It was now, however, once more rekindled, and with a throbbing mixture of hope, awe, and anxiety, Waverley watched the group before him, as those who were just arrived snatched a hasty meal, and the others assumed their arms and made brief preparations for their departure.
They spoke little, and that in Gaelic; and did not slacken their pace till they had run nearly two miles, when they abated their extreme rapidity, but continued still to walk very fast, relieving each other occasionally.
All this perhaps the packet might explain; but it was plain from Alice's manner that she desired he should consult it in secret.
He then mentioned the name of Vich lan Vohr, concluding that he was indebted to his friendship for his rescue from the clutches of Gifted Gilfillan, but neither did this produce any mark of recognition from his escort.
The Highlanders never presumed to eat with him, and, unless in the circumstance of watching him, treated him with great respect.
The fire was in the centre, and filled the whole wigwam with smoke, which escaped as much through the door as by means of a circular aperture in the roof.
'God bless you!
Clippurse and Hookem, or that of their worthy official brethren who had the charge of suing out the pardons of Edward Waverley and his intended father-in-law, that we can but touch upon matters more attractive.
The appearance of Waverley, embrowned by exercise and dignified by the habits of military discipline, had acquired an athletic and hardy character, which not only verified the Colonel's narration, but surprised and delighted all the inhabitants of Waverley- Honour.
We are, therefore, so far from attempting to trace the dull progress of Messrs.
The mutual epistles, for example, which were exchanged between Sir Everard and the Baron upon this occasion, though matchless specimens of eloquence in their way, must be consigned to merciless oblivion.
The Reverend Mr. Rubrick, kinsman to the proprietor of the hospitable mansion where it was solemnised, and chaplain to the Baron of Bradwardine, had the satisfaction to unite their hands; and Frank Stanley acted as bridesman, having joined Edward with that view soon after his arrival.
The earlier events are studiously dwelt upon, that you, kind reader, may be introduced to the character rather by narrative than by the duller medium of direct description; but when the story draws near its close, we hurry over the circumstances, however important, which your imagination must have forestalled, and leave you to suppose those things which it would be abusing your patience to relate at length.
Lady Emily and Colonel Talbot had proposed being present; but Lady Emily's health, when the day approached, was found inadequate to the journey.
'When he was married,' he observed,'three hundred horse of gentlemen born, besides servants, and some score or two of Highland lairds, who never got on horseback, were present on the occasion.'
The impression of horror with which Waverley left Carlisle softened by degrees into melancholy, a gradation which was accelerated by the painful yet soothing task of writing to Rose; and, while he could not suppress his own feelings of the calamity, he endeavoured to place it in a light which might grieve her without shocking her imagination.
Mr. Clippurse was therefore summoned to Waverley-Honour, under better auspices than at the commencement of our story.
All was now in a bustle to prepare for the nuptials of Edward, an event to which the good old Baronet and Mrs. Rachel looked forward as if to the renewal of their own youth.
Yet, though his first horrible sensations had sunk into melancholy, Edward had reached his native country before he could, as usual on former occasions, look round for enjoyment upon the face of nature.
Waverley's mind involuntarily turned to the Patmos of the Baron of Bradwardine, who was well pleased with Janet's fare and a few bunches of straw stowed in a cleft in the front of a sand-cliff; but he made no remarks upon a contrast which could only mortify his worthy tutor.
CHAPTER LXX
He indemnified himself, however, by the liberal allowance of desperate battles, grisly executions, and raw-head and bloody-bone stories with which he astonished the servants' hall.
Clippurse and Hookem.
The marriage took place on the appointed day.
But Mr. Clippurse came not alone; for, being now stricken in years, he had associated with him a nephew, a younger vulture (as our English Juvenal, who tells the tale of Swallow the attorney, might have called him), and they now carried on business as Messrs.
Meals cost a dollar, served on tin plates to diners standing in long rows waiting turn at the counter.
'How far?' I asked.
Fires had not yet cleared the giant hemlock forests, as they have to-day along the Cariboo Trail, and prospectors found their way through a chartless sea of windfall--hemlocks criss-crossed the height of a house with branches interlaced like wire.
I was afraid we'd lose the direction if we left the stream bed, but I could see high up the precipice where it widened out in a bench.
Old Sandy was still sleeping.
The penniless prospector knew that he was no equal for law courts and sheriffs and lawyers; so he made him a raft, got a local trader to outfit him, and plunged with his baby boy into the wilderness, where no sheriff could track him.
The regular menu at all meals was bacon, salmon, bread, and coffee.
Cataracts fell over lofty ledges in wind-blown spray.
Fate, as usual, favoured the dauntless.
Other mines were found in a less spectacular way.
I woke aching at daybreak.
I looked over the edge of the rock.
The population of Yale that winter consisted of some eight hundred people, housed in tents and log shacks roofed with canvas.
Saloons occupied every second shack at Yale and Hope; revolvers were in all belts and each man was his own sheriff; yet there was little lawlessness.
As you look, the clouds lift.
CHAPTER II
The sides converged to bottom.
At Yale was a city of tents and hungry men.
If it had a shiny yellow pebble inside only the size of a pea, the miner would stay on that bank and begin bench diggings into the dry bank.
Then he brought the boy down and sent him to school.
'About twenty-two miles.
Even for those who found no mine the search was not without reward.
A 'fool hen' or mountain grouse comes out and bobbles her head at the passing packtrain.
Streams clear as crystal came, he knew, from upper snows.
There was only the narrow footpath of the trapper and the fisherman close down to the water; and when the rocks broke off in sheer precipice, an unsteady bridge of poles and willows spanned the abyss.
Our horses were plumb played out.
I stood at the level of eight thousand feet in this region once with one of the oldest prospectors of the canyon.
Streams milky or blue or peacock green came from glaciers--ice grinding over rock.
But for one who found a mine a thousand found nothing.
Gold had also been found in cracks in the rock along the river.
Redwings and waxbills pick crumbs from every camp meal; and occasionally a bald-headed eagle utters a lonely raucous cry from solitary perch of dead branch or high rock.
I have passed up and down Fraser Canyon too often to count the times, and have canoed one wild rapid twice, but never without wondering how those first gold-seekers managed the ascent in that winter of '59.
Others breasted the mill-race of the Fraser in canoes and dugouts.
On a larger scale, when streams were directed through wooden boxes, the gold was sluiced; on a still larger scale, the process was hydraulic mining, though the same in principle.
A cloud came through a defile of the peaks heavy as a blanket.
Amid the dance-halls and saloons the miner with money becomes a sot.
Well, we found some galena "floats" in a dry gully on the other side of the valley.
If the chunk revealed only tiny yellow specks, perhaps mixed with white quartz, the miner would try to find where it rolled from and would ascend the gully, or mountain torrent, or precipice.
He had been a great hunter in his day.
There is always the wise old bell-mare leading the way.
Fortunately, the winter of '58-'59 was mild, the autumn late, the snowfall light, and the spring very early.
We had camped on a ridge to let them fatten up enough to beat it out of British Columbia for ever.
I forgot that my knees knocked from weakness and that we had not had a bite for twenty-four hours.
We had roughed it in East and West Kootenay and were working south to leave the country dead broke.
He wanted to know where that chunk rolled down from. He knocked it open with his mallet.
When a hushed whisper came through the trees, travellers looked for some waterfall.
It was safer to ascend such wild streams than to run with the current, though countless canoes and their occupants were never heard of after leaving Yale.
By September, when mountain rivers are at their lowest, every bar on the Fraser from Yale to the forks of the Thompson was occupied.
"What's the matter?" says he.
Out in the wilds he becomes a child of nature, simple and clean and elemental as the trees around him or the stars above him.
In the dance-halls he had married a cheap variety actress. When the money of his first find had been dissipated she refused to live with him, and tried to extort high alimony by claiming their two-year-old son.
The stars pale.
There are always the shanky colts who bolt to stampede where the trail widens; but even shanky-legged colts learn to keep in line in the wilds.
He wants hands and neck free for climbing.
These travellers naturally did not attempt Fraser Canyon.
The story is told of one slide seen by the guide at the head of a long pack-train. He had judged it to be ten miles away; but out from the upper valley it came coiling like a long white snake, and before he could turn, it had caught him.
River-bank is followed where possible; but where windfall or precipice drives back from the bed of the river over the mountain spurs, the pathfinder takes his bearings from countless signs.
The man's 'pardner' poured in water and rocked the cradle--cradled the sand.
In parties of twos and tens and twenties, and even as many as five hundred, the miners began moving up the river prospecting.
Sunrise steals in silence among the mountain peaks. There is none of that stir of song and vague rustling of animal life such as are heard at lower levels.
By the spring of '59 dry bench diggings had extended back fifty miles from the river.
"Matter," I yelled. "Wake up, you old son of a gun; we are millionaires!" There, sticking right out of the rock, was the ledge where "float" had been breaking and washing for hundreds of years; so you see, only eleven days from the time we were going to give up, we made our find.
The trapper carries his pack with a strap round his forehead. The miner ropes his round under his shoulders.
Heavy mists often added to the dangers.
Many a broken treasure-seeker owed his life to Tom Wright's free passage. Fortunately, there was always good fishing on the Fraser; but salt was a dollar twenty-five a pound, butter a dollar twenty-five a pound, and flour rarer than nuggets.
'Before there were any trails, how did you make your way here to hunt the mountain goat when this kind of fog caught you?' I asked.
We were high up and the fall frosts were icy, I tell you!
He was the first guide I ever employed in the mountains.
Where rivers had to be crossed, the men built rude rafts and poled themselves over, with their pack-horses swimming behind.
A whistling marmot pops up from the rocks and pierces the stillness.
I yelled at Old Sandy to wake the dead.
In a slide death was almost certain, from suffocation if not from the crush of falling trees and rocks.
You couldn't reach it from below, but you could from above, so we blazed the trees below to keep our direction and started up round the hog's back to drop to the bank under.
THE PROSPECTOR
There is always the lazy packer that has to be nipped by the horse behind him.
So all stayed who could.
At every steep ascent the pack-train halts, girths are tightened, and sly old horses blow out their sides to deceive the driver.
Then the water-lines shorten and the rocks emerge from the belts and wisps of mist; and all the sunset colours of the night before repeat themselves across the changing scene.
Those with horses had literally to cut the way with their axes over windfall, over steep banks, and round precipitous cliffs.
We were so tired we had hauled ourselves up by trees, brushwood branches, anything.
Though we were on a well-cut bridle-trail, he bade us pause, as one side of the trail had a sheer drop of four thousand feet in places.
There was no Cariboo Road then.
I went mad!
At midday, when the thaw was at its full, all the mountain torrents became vocal with the glee of disimprisoned life running a race of gladness to the sea.
That mine paid from the first load of ore sent out by pack-horses.'
There was the fresh-washed ozone fragrant with the resinous exudations of the great trees of the forest.
At the head was a perforated sheet-iron bottom like a housewife's colander.
He said dogs could have tracked them, but 'the water didn't leave no smell.' In the heart of the wilderness west of Mounts Brown and Hooker he built him a log cabin with a fireplace.
He was trembling like an aspen leaf.
We followed that "float" clear across the valley.
The sensations of the lucky one beggared description.
We found more up the bed of a raging mountain torrent; but the trouble was that the stream came over a rock sheer as the wall of a house.
Cloud-line is passed till the clouds lie underneath in grey lakes and pools.
Though the logs were twisted and warped, the dead bodies were not even bruised.
Old Sandy and I thought we would try our luck for just one day.
We had found "float" in plenty, and had followed it up ridges and over divides across three ranges of mountains.
Walter Moberly tells how, when he ascended the Fraser with Wright in the autumn of '58, the generous Yankee captain was mobbed by penniless and destitute men for return passage to the coast.
Miss Moreland stopped as if turned to stone.
But the garden was lovely, and tea being over, we all busied ourselves in rifling the flowerbeds to dress the dinner table.
Half past four.
There was a flower shop on the corner.
Take me home!
Awful sorry now I told you.
Suddenly she heard a laugh in the hall again--this time there was no mistake about it, for it was followed by several voices.
Her outstretched hands fell to her sides.
She started to her feet, and steadied herself!
The only trouble is, the Lawyer poured his villain and hero into one mould.
Miss Moreland had her misgivings on that point.
The door swung open quickly--some one entered.
Some one approached the door.
Fact is--I kept out of sight and only got stray impressions.
Take me home--"
"Where've you been?"
And, just as she was about to draw a breath of relief, convinced that, after all, she would go, the girl stopped deliberately in the shadow of a tree, and sat down on the snow-covered curbstone.
"As for me," said the Critic, "I don't believe it."
They thought her queer enough as it was.
Poor mama!
Perhaps it was a foolish distaste for the contact, combined with her frame of mind, which prevented her from noticing facts far from trifles, which came back to her afterward.
Suddenly a fear came to her that she might not be alone.
Then she went out to the side-walk again with the child.
She heard the bell ring, but before her mother could catch her in her arms as she fell, she heard the carriage door bang, and he was gone forever.
What would Jack say, when, at eleven o'clock, he ran in from his bachelor's dinner--his last--which he was giving to a few friends?
Miss Moreland, wrapped in her furs, was standing on a street corner, looking in vain for a cab, and wondering, after all, why she had ventured out.
"Now give us some shop jargon," laughed the Lawyer.
It is the commonest of all situations in a melodrama.
The folly of it all was worse.
She knew, in her own heart, that she would be glad to do no more work of that sort. Experience had made her hopeless, and she had none of the spiritual support that made women like St. Catherine of Sienna.
"All right," she admitted.
Inch by inch, she crept round the room, startled almost to fainting at each obstacle she encountered.
To sit in the dark, waiting, she knew not what, was maddening.
I went down.
"See here," he whispered, "I know you can keep a secret.
"Not a bit of it," said the Critic.
She held her breath, in a wild attempt to hear she knew not what.
There was but little furniture, one door only, two windows covered with heavy drapery, the windows bolted down, and evidently shuttered on the outside.
But Miss Moreland knew too much of official charity to be guilty of that.
She looked down.
She had found work enough to do there ever since.
For the man who plotted without, and the woman who sat like a stone within that room, the next half hour were equally horrible.
Yet she knew how foolish that was, and she stumbled back to her chair, sank into it, and calmed herself.
There seemed but one thing to do: go with the child.
All she had ever heard and found it difficult to believe, coursed through her mind.
It obliges them to be looked over in all their misery; it presumes a worthiness, or its pretence, which they resent almost as much as they do the intrusion of the visiting committee. This disinclination is as old as poverty, and is the rock ahead of all organized charity.
Miss Moreland was so consciously irritated with life that she was unusually gentle.
He did not attempt to speak.
Then everything seemed to stop, but it was only the carriage that had come to a standstill.
I don't want to tell the Doctor.
It was so provoking to have her sit down in the cold, and to so personify all that she wanted so ardently,--it was purely selfish, she knew that,--to put out of her mind.
"I know that story," she said.
In spite of myself, I expect I went white, for he exclaimed: "Darn it, I suppose I ought not to have told you.
She looked at her watch.
The child cried quietly all the way.
The Trained Nurse shrugged her shoulders.
But while her alert senses took that in, the door closed again--the man had remained inside.
"The weather is going to change," said the Doctor.
She was conscious at first of but one thing--he had not expected to find her there.
"No one asked you to," replied the Lawyer.
She knew her set well enough to know that it would cause something almost like a scandal if she were seen out alone, on foot, on the very eve of her wedding day, when all well bred brides ought to be invisible--repenting their sins, and praying for blessings on the future in theory, but in reality, fussing themselves ill over belated finery.
In fact, he forbade my going again."
Only once did she lose control of herself.
It was a cold December afternoon.
Yet--to enter a strange dark house, in an unknown part of the city!
Its exemplification was very trying to Miss Moreland at that moment, and the crouching figure was exasperating.
The easiest thing was to give her money.
"Getting to be a pet word of yours," said the Lawyer.
She did not go far, however.
While all these thoughts pursued one another through her mind she stood erect just inside the door.
I don't suppose that it was strange that the table conversation was all reminiscent.
She was in perfect darkness.
It was in front of a dark house that they finally stopped, and went up the stone steps into a hall so dark that she was obliged to take the child's dirty cold hands in hers to be sure of the way.
"Stay here," he said.
There had been a slight fall of snow, then a sudden drop in the thermometer preceded nightfall.
She really dared not move.
The crying child had been so plausible!
He started for the door.
"You do not," snapped the Lawyer.
What would her father say? He had always prophesied some disaster for her excursions into the slums.
A sudden flash illumined her ignorance, and behind it she grasped at the vague accusation her other suitor had tried to make to her unwilling ears.
An impatient ejaculation escaped her, and like an echo of it she heard a child's voice beside her.
Don't let's talk of it."
There was a battle there last night--English driven back.
There was gas, but no matches.
Force of habit."
How absurd it was of her!
At first she was not quite sure whether it were boy or girl.
In a moment all her fear was gone.
She would not do that again.
The thought of making a dash for the door came to her, but it was too late.
For a moment that fear dominated all other sensations.
Stooping over her she made sure that the little one really did know the street.
Go on down now, or they'll guess something.
I had hard work for a few minutes to throw the impression off.
Ah, that was the horror of it!
"If it isn't I don't know what you'd call it, though such of the English as I saw were in gay enough spirits, and there was not an atmosphere of defeat.
"Is there not a mail-wagon which runs to Arras?
He replied, "Have you a bit of rope and a knife?"
The inn-keeper's wife came to the stable.
"Why is their bread so bitter here?"
He replied, with an air of not having roused himself from his revery:--
"But I can surely hire a horse in the village?"
"Five leagues."
"I must be there this evening."
"There is one thing to be said about that, you see, by taking post-horses--Monsieur has his passport?"
He plunged into the night as into a gulf.
He breathed freely and to the full extent of his lungs for the first time since Javert's visit.
The stableman and the wheelwright replied in concert, with a toss of the head.
"No."
Are you in a hurry, sir?"
At the moment when the traveller, after the inward deliberation which we have just described, resolved to retrace his steps, this child returned. He was accompanied by an old woman.
"To-morrow."
The despatch box, an immense oblong coffer, was placed behind the vehicle and formed a part of it. This coffer was painted black, and the cabriolet yellow.
"Come then, I will go on horseback.
It was evident that Providence was intervening.
"A spare wheel?"
At bottom, to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to Arras.
"By taking two post-horses?"
He felt an immense joy.
"Why?"
"I say that it is a miracle that you should have travelled five leagues without you and your horse rolling into some ditch on the highway.
"The matter cannot wait until to-morrow.
The wheel of the tilbury received quite a violent shock.
"Ah! it's you, you scamp?" said he; "you shall have nothing."
As in the morning, he watched the trees, the thatched roofs, the tilled fields pass by, and the way in which the landscape, broken at every turn of the road, vanished; this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought.
"It is useless, sir.
"I will pay whatever you ask."
"What am I to do?"
"Can you repair this wheel immediately?"
That it was it who had broken the wheel of the tilbury and who was stopping him on the road. He had not yielded to this sort of first summons; he had just made every possible effort to continue the journey; he had loyally and scrupulously exhausted all means; he had been deterred neither by the season, nor fatigue, nor by the expense; he had nothing with which to reproach himself.
He had lost a great deal of time at Hesdin.
"You have not given me anything."
"Yes."
The trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the road, produced a gentle, monotonous noise.
"Yes, of course."
The man bent down once more, was silent for a moment, with his eyes fixed on the wheel; then he rose erect and said:--
"Impossible to-day.
The postman shouted to the man to stop, but the traveller paid no heed and pursued his road at full gallop.
What if you were to replace this wheel instead of repairing it?"
These simple words uttered by an old woman led by a child made the perspiration trickle down his limbs.
All this was true; but this trap, this ramshackle old vehicle, this thing, whatever it was, ran on its two wheels and could go to Arras.
Why was he going to Arras?
"That is what ailed me," he thought; "I had not breakfasted."
"You do not belong in these parts?"
It was the old woman's little boy.
These mail-wagons were two-wheeled cabriolets, upholstered inside with fawn-colored leather, hung on springs, and having but two seats, one for the postboy, the other for the traveller.
"But it is night, and I shall lose my way."
"Certainly, sir."
If I had one, I would not let it to you!"
"To-morrow will be too late."
Two new spokes and a hub must be made.
"That could be done with the spokes, not with the hub; and the felly is in a bad state, too."
sir," resumed the road-mender; "shall I give you a piece of advice?
These vehicles, which have no counterparts nowadays, had something distorted and hunchbacked about them; and when one saw them passing in the distance, and climbing up some road to the horizon, they resembled the insects which are called, I think, termites, and which, though with but little corselet, drag a great train behind them.
That it was, no doubt, a dark moment, but that he should emerge from it; that, after all, he held his destiny, however bad it might be, in his own hand; that he was master of it.
Two wheels make a pair.
"In that case, sell me a pair of wheels."
Nevertheless, he was going thither.
CHAPTER V--HINDRANCES
"Have you not a wheel that you can sell me?
"Where is Monsieur going?"
"Have you a cabriolet that you can let me have?"
You will find it barred a quarter of an hour further on; there is no way to proceed further."
"Certainly, sir."
"Yes."
Stop!" He halted the cart with a vigorous movement which contained a feverish and convulsive element resembling hope.
Monsieur will not be able to start before to-morrow morning."
It did not concern him further.
"That would require such a horse as does not exist in these parts.
"Are you going far in this condition?" said the man.
"It was a frightful old trap; it rests flat on the axle; it is an actual fact that the seats were suspended inside it by leather thongs; the rain came into it; the wheels were rusted and eaten with moisture; it would not go much further than the tilbury; a regular ramshackle old stage-wagon; the gentleman would make a great mistake if he trusted himself to it," etc., etc.
It was no longer his fault.
The fatal hand had grasped him again.
The carter was a German and did not understand him.
"Well, sell it to me, then."
"A day, and a good long one."
He took nearly four hours to go from Hesdin to Saint-Pol; four hours for five leagues.
Night had fully come.
We are on a cross-road.
When will it pass?"
the posting guide only says five leagues and a quarter."
"Why do you say, 'Ah?'"
ostensible occupation
numberless defeats
niggardly allowance
native incompetence
occult sympathy
neat refutation
opalescent sea
nocturnal scene
ominous rumors
onflaming volume
nonchalant manner
opaque mass
obtrusive neatness
N
numerical majority
oppressive emptiness
numbed stillness
nimble faculty
nefarious scheme
outlandish fashion
originally promulgated
obligatory force
occasional flights
nauseous dose
notoriously profligate
negligible quantity
nonsense rhymes
nerveless hand
normal characteristics
outspoken encouragement
ocean depth
non-committal way
noticeably begrimed
narrowing axioms
openly disseminated
naked eye
olfactory sense
obscure intimation
oblique tribute
nomadic life
I'm afraid it has been the old thing over again.
At last I reached my own box, and had some corn; and after Robert had wrapped up my knees in wet cloths, he tied up my foot in a bran poultice, to draw out the heat and cleanse it before the horse-doctor saw it in the morning, and I managed to get myself down on the straw, and slept in spite of the pain.
Robert led me on very slowly, and I limped and hobbled on as well as I could with great pain.
But for all that she begged me to go and meet him.
26 How it Ended
Sometimes the sound died away, then it grew clearer again and nearer.
Poor Susan! she looked awfully pale when she came to my house to ask if he had not come home.
"It is Reuben," he said, "and he does not stir!"
Oh Reuben, Reuben!" So she went on till after he was buried; and then, as she had no home or relations, she, with her six little children, was obliged once more to leave the pleasant home by the tall oak-trees, and go into that great gloomy Union House.
She was nearly out of her mind; she kept saying over and over again, "Oh! he was so good--so good!
I am sure he was sorry for me, for he often patted and encouraged me, talking to me in a pleasant voice.
I neighed loudly, and was overjoyed to hear an answering neigh from Ginger, and men's voices.
Look here--his hoof is cut all to pieces; he might well come down, poor fellow!
"He's dead," he said; "feel how cold his hands are."
I shall never forget that night walk; it was more than three miles.
Ned started off very slowly with his sad load, and Robert came and looked at my foot again; then he took his handkerchief and bound it closely round, and so he led me home.
They came slowly over the stones, and stopped at the dark figure that lay upon the ground.
I noticed that, because, if she had a fault, it was that she was impatient in standing.
They raised him up, but there was no life, and his hair was soaked with blood.
Nobody thought he could fall.
It was all that cursed drink; why will they sell that cursed drink?
Who would have thought the black horse would have done that?
It must have been nearly midnight when I heard at a great distance the sound of a horse's feet.
I made a step, but almost fell again.
"Why, the horse has been down and thrown him!
Just think of his riding a horse over these stones without a shoe!
They soon saw my cut knees.
Why, if he had been in his right senses he would just as soon have tried to ride him over the moon.
Odd, too, that the horse has not moved from the place."
But what must we do?
They laid him down again, and came and looked at me.
The next day after the farrier had examined my wounds, he said he hoped the joint was not injured; and if so, I should not be spoiled for work, but I should never lose the blemish.
Everybody pitied Susan.
One of the men jumped out, and stooped down over it.
Robert then attempted to lead me forward.
I believe they did the best to make a good cure, but it was a long and painful one.
The other man followed, and bent over him.
At last, tired of running about, she took a little striped leather ball from the bosom of her frock, and calling to her father, threw it up to him as he stood on the poop.
Little Miss Sylvia was privileged to go anywhere and do anything, and even convictism shut its foul mouth in her presence.
The gold and crimson, splashed all about the sky, had overflowed around it, and rendered a clear view almost impossible.
You leave this house in an hour.
He was confronted by a man of two-and-twenty, unusually tall and athletic of figure, dresses in rough seafaring clothes, and who held in his arms, protecting her, a lady of middle age.
Allied to this powerful house, the family tree of Wotton Wade grew and flourished.
This Esme was a man of dark devices.
I was rich.
To-night I send for Quaid to alter my will.
You would conceal this disgrace from the world.
Pray for me."
I have borne all the slights and insults you have heaped upon me. The shameful secret of my early love broke from me when in your rage, you threatened him.
The drinkers at the Spaniards' Inn had started to search the Heath, and had discovered a fellow in rough costume, whose person was unknown to them, hastily quitting a spot where, beside a rifled pocket-book and a blood-stained whip, lay a dying man.
As he stepped out on the path he heard voices, and presently some dozen men, one of whom held a horse, burst out upon him, and, with sudden fury, seized and flung him to the ground.
Farewell! my own mother!"
"With a woman?" asked Mr. Crofton.
Nay, mother, think of your good name."
Sir Richard, who had turned to walk away, stopped suddenly, and his great white eyebrows came together in his red face with a savage scowl. He laughed, and in that laugh his fury seemed to congeal into a cold and cruel hate.
He is just.
"It was not I!" cried Richard Devine.
"Mother, dear mother!" cried the young man, in a paroxysm of grief, "say that you did not mean those words; you said them but in anger!
I give you nothing.
His open preference for his nephew had galled to the quick his sensitive wife, who contrasted with some heart-pangs the gallant prodigality of her father with the niggardly economy of her husband.
PROLOGUE.
When he was told by thin-lipped, cool Colonel Wade that the rich shipbuilder, Sir Richard Devine, had proposed an alliance with fair-haired gentle Ellinor, he swore, with fierce knitting of his black brows, that no law of man nor Heaven should further restrain him in his selfish prodigality.
The year 1827 found him a hardened, hopeless old man of sixty, battered in health and ruined in pocket; but who, by dint of stays, hair-dye, and courage, yet faced the world with undaunted front, and dined as gaily in bailiff-haunted Belsize as he had dined at Carlton House.
"I am not worthy of your tears.
The old man continued: "I married you, Ellinor Wade, for your beauty; you married me for my fortune.
"Richard!" cried the poor mother.
With some bewildered intention of summoning aid, he left the body and made towards the town.
I wish your lordship joy with all my soul.
Let me go away; kill me; but do not shame me."
Forgive me!
Lady Devine shuddered, creeping close, as though to hide herself in the broad bosom of her son.
Forgive!
My sister's son, Maurice Frere, shall be my heir in your stead.
Listen now.
Lord Bellasis rallied his failing senses, his glazing eyes stared into his son's face with horrible eagerness; he shook his head, raised a feeble arm as though to point elsewhere, and fell back dead.
"Tush!
He was a stern father and a severe master.
That course of action was impossible now.
He wanted money, and he sold you.
"Not yet, not yet!
Horace Walpole, in one of his letters to Selwyn in 1785, mentions a fact which may stand for a page of narrative.
Your lover, my Lord Bellasis, even now, thinks to retrieve his broken fortunes by marriage.
I accept the terms you offer.
"God defend me!" cried Mr. Mogford, scanning by the pale light of the rising moon the features of the murdered man, "but it is Lord Bellasis!--oh, you bloody villain!
"A terror of I know not what coming evil overpowers me.
His servants hated, and his wife feared him.
An hour ago escape would have been easy.
Sir Richard, upon this, sent for Maurice Frere, his sister's son--the abolition of the slave trade had ruined the Bristol House of Frere--and bought for him a commission in a marching regiment, hinting darkly of special favours to come.
His only son Richard appeared to inherit his father's strong will and imperious manner.
"Spare me, sir, spare me!" said Lady Ellinor faintly.
"Spare you!
"And now waits to pay it out of his first curacy.
Three persons were the actors in it.
Hark! the clock is striking nine.
They will not meet!
Now when I learn for the first time whose son I really am, I rejoice to think that I have less to thank you for than I once believed.
In 1784, Philip, third Baron, married the celebrated beauty, Miss Povey, and had issue Armigell Esme, in whose person the family prudence seemed to have run itself out.
I am strong. I can work.
"If you didn't murder him, you robbed him," growled Mogford, "and you shall sleep at Bow Street to-night.
He became rich, and his sister (the widow of Henry de Kirkhaven, Lord of Hemfleet) marrying into the family of the Wottons, the wealth of the house was further increased by the union of her daughter Sybil with Marmaduke Wade.
The first hint that the public received of his wealth was in 1796, when Mr. Devine, one of the shipwrights to the Government, and a comparatively young man of forty-four or thereabouts, subscribed five thousand pounds to the Loyalty Loan raised to prosecute the French war.
For twenty years you have cheated and mocked me.
"You would not part me from my only son!" cried the wretched woman.
Richard Devine tossed his black hair from his brow in sudden passion of love and grief.
The world is wide.
"Take him with you to his father then."
"Hush, dearest!
To-morrow your father, your sisters, all the world, shall know the story you have told me!"
"You have always hated and reviled me. When by your violence you drove me from your house, you set spies to watch me in the life I had chosen.
At last, his mind seemed to be more relieved; but this appearing calm proceeded only from the resolution which he had taken of expiating his past offence by an open confession of the truth, and by dying a martyr to it.
But in proportion as the practice of submitting religion to private judgment was acceptable to the people, it appeared in some respects dangerous to the rights of sovereigns, and seemed to destroy that implicit obedience on which the authority of the civil magistrate is chiefly founded.
They fancied that they were exercising their judgment, while they opposed to the prejudices of ancient authority more powerful prejudices of another kind.
In short, the tide turning towards the new doctrine, those severe executions, which, in another disposition of men's minds, would have sufficed to suppress it, now served only to diffuse it the more among the people, and to inspire them with horror against the unrelenting persecutors.
HENRY VIII.
He had early declared his sentiments against Luther; and having entered the lists in those scholastic quarrels, he had received from his courtiers and theologians infinite applause for his performance.
Sir Thomas More, who succeeded Wolsey as chancellor, is at once an object deserving our compassion, and an instance of the usual progress of men's sentiments during that age.
Elizabeth Barton, of Aldington, in Kent, commonly called the "holy maid of Kent," had been subject to hysterical fits, which threw her body into unusual convulsions; and having produced an equal disorder in her mind, made her utter strange sayings, which, as she was scarcely conscious of them during the time, had soon after entirely escaped her memory.
Next Sunday he employed Dr. Corren to preach before him; who justified the king's proceedings, and gave Peyto the appellations of a rebel, a slanderer, a dog, and a traitor.
Luther also had been so imprudent as to treat in a very indecent manner his royal antagonist; and though he afterwards made the most humble submissions to Henry, and apologized for the vehemence of his former expressions, he never could efface the hatred which the king had conceived against him and his doctrines.
One Thomas Bilney, a priest, who had embraced the new doctrine, had been terrified into an abjuration; but was so haunted by remorse, that his friends dreaded some fatal effects of his despair.
Henry's ministers and courtiers were of as motley a character as his conduct; and seemed to waver, during this whole reign, between the ancient and the new religion.
The profound ignorance in which both the clergy and laity formerly lived, and their freedom from theological altercations, had produced a sincere but indolent acquiescence in received opinions; and the multitude were neither attached to them by topics of reasoning, nor by those prejudices and antipathies against opponents, which have ever a more natural and powerful influence over them.
Cromwell and Cranmer still carried the appearance of a conformity to the ancient speculative tenets; but they artfully made use of Henry's resentment to widen the breach with the see of Rome.
Though the liberty of private judgment be tendered to the disciples of the reformation, it is not in reality accepted of; and men are generally contented to acquiesce implicitly in those establishments, however new, into which their early education has thrown them.
Elated by this imaginary success, and blinded by a natural arrogance and obstinacy of temper, he had entertained the most lofty opinion of his own erudition; and he received with impatience, mixed with contempt, any contradiction to his sentiments.
Another person, still more heroic, being brought to the stake for denying the real presence, seemed almost in a transport of joy; and he tenderly embraced the fagots which were to be the instruments of his punishment, as the means of procuring him eternal rest.
They taught their penitent to declaim against the new doctrines, which she denominated heresy; against innovations in ecclesiastical government; and against the king's intended divorce from Catharine.
But besides this political jealousy, there was another reason which inspired this imperious monarch with an aversion to the reformers.
He willingly complied; and by this meekness gained the more on the sympathy of the people.
Many were brought into the bishops' courts for offences which appear trivial, but which were regarded as symbols of the party: some for teaching their children the Lord's prayer in English; others for reading the New Testament in that language, or for speaking against pilgrimages. To harbor the persecuted preachers, to neglect the fasts of the church, to declaim against the vices of the clergy, were capital offences.
Masters associated with him Dr. Bocking, a canon of Canterbury; and their design was to raise the credit of an image of the Virgin which stood in a chapel belonging to Masters, and to draw to it such pilgrimages as usually frequented the more famous images and relics.
The republican spirit which naturally took place among the reformers, increased this jealousy.
Though adorned with the gentlest manners, as well as the purest integrity, he carried to the utmost height his aversion to heterodoxy; and James Bainham, in particular, a gentleman of the Temple, experienced from him the greatest severity.
The idea of heresy still appeared detestable as well as formidable to that prince; and whilst his resentment against the see of Rome had corrected one considerable part of his early prejudices, he had made it a point of honor never to relinquish the remainder.
The very precedent of shaking so ancient and deep-founded an establishment as that of the Romish hierarchy, might, it was apprehended, prepare the way for other innovations.
Bainham, accused of favoring the new opinions, was carried to More's house; and having refused to discover his accomplices, the chancellor ordered him to be whipped in his presence, and afterwards sent him to the Tower, where he himself saw him put to the torture.
These subjects seemed proportioned to human understanding; and even the people, who felt the power of interest in their own breasts, could perceive the purpose of those numerous inventions which the interested spirit of the Roman pontiff had introduced into religion.
Nothing more forwarded the first progress of the reformers, than the offer which they made of submitting all religious doctrines to private judgment, and the summons given every one to examine the principles formerly imposed upon him.
Elston, another friar of the same house, interrupted the preacher, and told him that he was one of the lying prophets, who sought to establish by adultery the succession of the crown; but that he himself would justify all that Peyto had said.
Though the multitude were totally unqualified for this undertaking, they yet were highly pleased with it.
He went through Norfolk, teaching the people to beware of idolatry, and of trusting for their salvation either to pilgrimages, or to the cowl of St. Francis, to the prayers of the saints, or to images.
But several monks were detected in a conspiracy, which, as it might have proved more dangerous to the king, was on its discovery attended with more fatal consequences to themselves.
The silly people in the neighborhood were struck with these appearances, which they imagined to be supernatural; and Richard Masters, vicar of the parish, a designing fellow, founded on them a project, from which he hoped to acquire both profit and consideration.
Nor ought we to conclude, because Protestants in our time prove as dutiful subjects as those of any other communion, that therefore such apprehensions were altogether without any shadow of plausibility.
But when the reformers proceeded thence to dispute concerning the nature of the sacraments, the operations of grace, the terms of acceptance with the Deity, men were thrown into amazement, and were, during some time, at a loss how to choose their party.
He was soon seized, tried in the bishop's court, and condemned as a relapsed heretic; and the writ was sent down to burn him.
All these ministers, while they stood in the most irreconcilable opposition of principles to each other, were obliged to disguise their particular opinions, and to pretend an entire agreement with the sentiments of their master.
She went so far as to assert, that if he prosecuted that design, and married another, he should not be a king a month longer, and should not an hour longer enjoy the favor of the Almighty, but should die the death of a villain.
As soon, therefore, as a new opinion was advanced, supported by such an authority as to call up their attention, they felt their capacity totally unfitted for such disquisitions; and they perpetually fluctuated between the contending parties.
Fisher was indicted for denying the king's supremacy, was tried, condemned, and beheaded.
When the execution of Fisher and More was reported at Rome, especially that of the former, who was invested with the dignity of cardinal, every one discovered the most violent rage against the king; and numerous libels were published by the wits and orators of Italy, comparing him to Caligula, Nero, Domitian, and all the most unrelenting tyrants of antiquity.
Charles soon after invaded Provence in person, with an army of fifty thousand men; but met with no success.
Francis, however, was afraid lest his ally Henry, whom he likewise looked on as his friend, and who lived with him on a more cordial footing than is usual among great princes, should be displeased that this close confederacy between France and Scotland was concluded without his participation.
Recommended by so agreeable and seasonable an instance of friendship, the king of Scots paid his addresses to Magdalen, daughter of the French monarch; and this prince had no other objection to the match than what arose from the infirm state of his daughter's health, which seemed to threaten her with an approaching end.
His frankness, his sincerity, his magnificence, his generosity, were virtues which counterbalanced his violence, cruelty, and impetuosity.
The domestic peace of England seemed to be exposed to more hazard by the violent innovations in religion; and it may be affirmed that, in this dangerous conjuncture, nothing insured public tranquillity so much as the decisive authority acquired by the king, and his great ascendant over all his subjects.
The ancient enmity between these, princes broke out anew in bravadoes, and in personal insults on each other, ill becoming persons of their rank, and still less suitable to men of such unquestioned bravery.
These two monarchs also made advances to the princes of the Protestant league in Germany, ever jealous of the emperor's ambition; and Henry, besides remitting them some money, sent Fox, bishop of Hereford, as Francis did Bellay, lord of Langley, to treat with them.
But Henry was accustomed to prescribe, not to receive terms; and even while he was negotiating for peace, his usual violence often carried him to commit offences which rendered the quarrel totally incurable.
No more was wanted to found an indictment of high treason against the prisoner.
Meanwhile he exercised punishment on individuals who were obnoxious to him.
If any inquietude remained with the English court, it was solely occasioned by the state of affairs in Scotland.
What rendered Henry more indifferent to the advances made by the emperor was, both his experience of the usual duplicity and insincerity of that monarch, and the intelligence which he received of the present transactions in Europe.
He therefore despatched Pommeraye to London, in order to apologize for this measure; but Henry, with his usual openness and freedom, expressed such displeasure, that he refused even to confer with the ambassador; and Francis was apprehensive of a rupture with a prince who regulated his measures more by humor and passion than by the rules of political prudence.
This promotion of a man merely for his opposition to royal authority, roused the indignation of the king; and he resolved to make the innocent person feel the effects of his resentment.
But as the man followed his principles and sense of duty, however misguided, his constancy and integrity are not the less objects of our admiration.
The emperor thought that, as the demise of his aunt had removed all foundation of personal animosity between him and Henry, it might not now be impossible to detach him from the alliance of France, and to renew his own confederacy with England, from which he had formerly reaped so much advantage.
Not only the devotion paid to the crown was profound during that age: the personal respect inspired by Henry was considerable; and even the terrors with which he overawed every one, were not attended with any considerable degree of hatred.
The better to undeceive the multitude, the forgery of many of the prophetess's miracles was detected; and even the scandalous prostitution of her manners was laid open to the public.
The execution of this prelate was intended as a warning to More, whose compliance, on account of his great authority both abroad and at home, and his high reputation for learning and virtue, was anxiously desired by the king.
Even the stern, unrelenting mind of Henry was at first shocked with these sanguinary measures; and he went so far as to change his garb and dress; pretending sorrow for the necessity by which he was pushed to such extremities.
But James having gained the affections of the princess, and obtained her consent, the father would no longer oppose the united desires of his daughter and his friend: they were accordingly married, and soon after set sail for Scotland, where the young queen, as was foreseen, died in a little time after her arrival.
The king at last began to think the matter worthy of his attention; and having ordered Elizabeth and her accomplices to be arrested, he brought them before the star chamber, where they freely, without being put to the torture made confession of their guilt.
These theologians were now of great importance in the world; and no poet or philosopher, even in ancient Greece, where they were treated with most respect, had ever reached equal applause and admiration with those wretched composers of metaphysical polemics.
But his sole intention in that liberal concession was to gain time till he should put himself in a warlike posture, and be able to carry an invasion into Francis's dominions.
Still impelled, however, by his violent temper, and desirous of striking a terror into the whole nation, he proceeded, by making examples of Fisher and More, to consummate his lawless tyranny.
This pontiff, who while cardinal, had always favored Henry's cause, had hoped that personal animosities being buried with his predecessor, might not be impossible to form an agreement with England: and the king himself was so desirous of accommodating matters, that in a negotiation which he entered into with Francis a little before this time, he required that that monarch should conciliate a friendship between him and the court of Rome.
Not only his constancy, but even his cheerfulness, nay, his usual facetiousness, never forsook him; and he made a sacrifice of his life to his integrity, with the same indifference that he maintained in any ordinary occurrence.
He suppressed three monasteries of the Observantine friars; and finding that little clamor was excited by this act of power, he was the more encouraged to lay his rapacious hands on the remainder.
That prince also bore as great personal affection and regard to More, as his imperious mind, the sport of passions, was susceptible of towards a man who in any particular opposed his violent inclinations.
He did it with all his heart and prospered. --II.
The pent-up enthusiasm of his ambitious life burst the barriers of his inhospitable surroundings until he blossomed out into America's greatest pulpit orator.
Dickens' characters seemed to possess him, and haunt him day and night until properly portrayed in his stories.
I pursued it everywhere,--when I was dressing, when I was doing my hair; and at last I found it on the toe of a shoe that I was putting on."
The phonograph is the result of the pricking of a finger."
Even when he went to college many of his classmates stood ahead of him, who have fallen into oblivion.
"I was singing to the mouthpiece of a telephone," Mr. Edison says, "when the vibrations of the voice sent the fine steel point into my finger. That set me to thinking.
His whole adult life was spent in the work of elevating the common people by cheap, yet wholesome, publications.
"I determined to make a machine that would work accurately, and gave my assistants instructions, telling them what I had discovered.
To hear those grave and reverend signors, rich in scientific honors, patiently reiterating:
Wholly engrossed by the subject before me, I lose all sense of personal identity, of time, or of surrounding objects."
In the attempt, his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope."
The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always teaches--that there is always room for it.
Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, composed at sixteen a tract on the conic sections.
The real heaven has never been outdone by the ideal.
His only remark to the Roman soldier who entered his room while engaged in geometrical study, was, "Don't step on my circle."
Thou shalt be a great man.
The poor lad was so thirsty for books that he would borrow from booksellers who would loan them to him out of pity, read them and return them.
CHAPTER IX.
Thou art not among articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the world here.
That's the whole story.
With what earnest singleness of aim did Lincoln in the cabinet, Grant in the field, throw his whole soul into the contest of our civil war?
Neither poverty nor misfortune could keep Linnaeus from his botany.
The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle.
They did they knew not what.
Twelve poor men taken out of boats and creeks, without any help of learning, should conquer the world to the cross. --STEPHEN CARNOCK.
What made Demosthenes the greatest of all orators was that he appeared the most entirely possessed by the feelings he wished to inspire.
It is this trying to be useful and helpful that promotes us in life.
I shouted the words 'Halloo!
He had a weak memory, and disliked study.
"The primary education of the phonograph was comical in the extreme.
It is one thing to hit upon an idea, however, and another thing to carry it out to perfection.
Milton, when blind, old and poor, showed a royal cheerfulness and never "bated one jot of heart or hope, but steered right onward."
But I want a sign which one catches by a sort of masonry, that a man knows what he is about in life.
Mr. Edison's biographers say, but the statement is somewhat exaggerated:
Confucius said that "he was so eager in the pursuit of knowledge that he forgot his food;" and that, "in the joy of its attainment, he forgot his sorrows;" and that "he did not even perceive that old age was coming on."
Excited by the discovery, he ran through the streets undressed, crying, "I have found it."
"Well, I've worked hard enough for it," said Malibran when a critic expressed his admiration of her D in alt, reached by running up three octaves from low D; "I've been chasing it for a month.
"Should I die this minute," said Nelson at an important crisis, "want of frigates would be found written on my heart."
Halloo!' in return.
It is painful to me to be always on the surface of things.
If I could record the actions of the point, and send the point over the same surface afterward, I saw no reason why the thing would not talk.
There is a kind of accident that happens only to a certain kind of man.
Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep bases (ten miles deep, I am told), are not there on thy behalf!
Once, when Mr. Harvey, an accomplished mathematician, was in a bookseller's shop, he saw a poor lad of mean appearance enter and write something on a slip of paper and give it to the proprietor.
They conquered Asia and Africa and Spain on barley.
Archimedes, the greatest geometer of antiquity, was consulted by the king in regard to a gold crown suspected of being fraudulently alloyed with silver.
He shunned society and wanted to go to sea.
He built the fire, baked, washed, when his wife was ill.
"Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world," says Emerson, "is the triumph of some enthusiasm.
"I do not know how it is with others when speaking on an important question," said Henry Clay; "but on such occasions I seem to be unconscious of the external world.
The social virtues must, therefore, be allowed to have a natural beauty and amiableness, which, at first, antecedent to all precept or education, recommends them to the esteem of uninstructed mankind, and engages their affections.
In common life, we may observe, that the circumstance of utility is always appealed to; nor is it supposed, that a greater eulogy can be given to any man, than to display his usefulness to the public, and enumerate the services, which he has performed to mankind and society.
But, USEFUL?
For somebody's interest, surely.
So that nothing can be more superficial than this paradox of the sceptics; and it were well, if, in the abstruser studies of logic and metaphysics, we could as easily obviate the cavils of that sect, as in the practical and more intelligible sciences of politics and morals.
Usefulness is agreeable, and engages our approbation.
We praise, perhaps, with more alacrity, where the generous humane action contributes to our particular interest: But the topics of praise, which we insist on, are very wide of this circumstance.
It must, therefore, be the interest of those, who are served by the character or action approved of; and these we may conclude, however remote, are not totally indifferent to us.
A very small variation of the object, even where the same qualities are preserved, will destroy a sentiment.
Whose interest then?
It must please, either from considerations of self-interest, or from more generous motives and regards.
In like manner, an inanimate object may have good colour and proportions as well as a human figure.
Had nature made no such distinction, founded on the original constitution of the mind, the words, HONOURABLE and SHAMEFUL, LOVELY and ODIOUS, NOBLE and DESPICABLE, had never had place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented these terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience.
A building, whose doors and windows were exact squares, would hurt the eye by that very proportion; as ill adapted to the figure of a human creature, for whose service the fabric was intended.
But the imagination is here assisted by the presence of a striking object; and yet prevails not, except it be also aided by novelty, and the unusual appearance of the object.
WHAT IS THAT TO ME?
PART I.
And how satisfactory an apology for any disproportion or seeming deformity, if we can show the necessity of that particular construction for the use intended!
Not our own only: For our approbation frequently extends farther.
This deduction of morals from self-love, or a regard to private interest, is an obvious thought, and has not arisen wholly from the wanton sallies and sportive assaults of the sceptics.
A man, brought to the brink of a precipice, cannot look down without trembling; and the sentiment of IMAGINARY danger actuates him, in opposition to the opinion and belief of REAL safety.
But it is no just reason for rejecting any principle, confirmed by experience, that we cannot give a satisfactory account of its origin, nor are able to resolve it into other more general principles.
What wonder then, that a man, whose habits and conduct are hurtful to society, and dangerous or pernicious to every one who has an intercourse with him, should, on that account, be an object of disapprobation, and communicate to every spectator the strongest sentiment of disgust and hatred.
Where private advantage concurs with general affection for virtue, we readily perceive and avow the mixture of these distinct sentiments, which have a very different feeling and influence on the mind.
Custom soon reconciles us to heights and precipices, and wears off these false and delusive terrors.
What praise, even of an inanimate form, if the regularity and elegance of its parts destroy not its fitness for any useful purpose!
And if we would employ a little thought on the present subject, we need be at no loss to account for the influence of utility, and to deduce it from principles, the most known and avowed in human nature.
A ship appears more beautiful to an artist, or one moderately skilled in navigation, where its prow is wide and swelling beyond its poop, than if it were framed with a precise geometrical regularity, in contradiction to all the laws of mechanics.
For what?
This is a matter of fact, confirmed by daily observation.
It is not conceivable, how a REAL sentiment or passion can ever arise from a known IMAGINARY interest; especially when our REAL interest is still kept in view, and is often acknowledged to be entirely distinct from the imaginary, and even sometimes opposite to it.
But with the satisfaction the wish and therefore the pleasure cease.
According to this, the brevity of life, which is so constantly lamented, may be the best quality it possesses.
The life of every individual, if we survey it as a whole and in general, and only lay stress upon its most significant features, is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
The essential content of the famous soliloquy in "Hamlet" is briefly this: Our state is so wretched that absolute annihilation would be decidedly preferable.
Because a genuine enduring happiness is not possible, it cannot be the subject of art.
But I do not wish to anticipate the later exposition.
It is, however, so hard to attain or achieve anything; difficulties and troubles without end are opposed to every purpose, and at every step hindrances accumulate.
But the chapter would have no end, and would carry us far from the standpoint of the universal, which is essential to philosophy; and, moreover, such a description might easily be taken for a mere declamation on human misery, such as has often been given, and, as such, might be charged with one-sidedness, because it started from particular facts.
But from this it is sufficiently clear what manner of world it is.
Every event of life is regarded as the work of these beings; the intercourse with them occupies half the time of life, constantly sustains hope, and by the charm of illusion often becomes more interesting than intercourse with real beings.
As little as an external power can change or suppress this will, so little can a foreign power deliver it from the miseries which proceed from the life which is the phenomenal appearance of that will.
First, the powerful will, the strong passions (Radscha-Guna).
It is not an original gratification coming to us of itself, but must always be the satisfaction of a wish.
It appears in great historical characters; it is described in the epic and the drama.
And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
It is and remains the will of man upon which everything depends for him.
This is why the sight of a corpse makes us suddenly so serious.
What we see in poetry we find again in music; in the melodies of which we have recognised the universal expression of the inmost history of the self-conscious will, the most secret life, longing, suffering, and delight; the ebb and flow of the human heart.
Only when we have lost them do we become sensible of their value; for the want, the privation, the sorrow, is the positive, communicating itself directly to us.
It constantly promises complete satisfaction, the quenching of the thirst of will.
The motive in general stands before the will in protean forms.
Most men are pursued by want all through life, without ever being allowed to come to their senses.
In this theology goes beyond the consideration of things according to the principle of sufficient reason, and recognises the Idea of man, the unity of which is re-established out of its dispersion into innumerable individuals through the bond of generation which holds them all together.
But indirectly the most different kinds of motives obtain in this way power over the will, and bring about the most multifarious acts of will.
Here lies the profound reason of the shame connected with the process of generation. This view is mythically expressed in the dogma of Christian theology that we are all partakers in Adam's first transgression (which is clearly just the satisfaction of sexual passion), and through it are guilty of suffering and death.
It is always an exception if such a life suffers interruption from the fact that either the aesthetic demand for contemplation or the ethical demand for renunciation proceed from a knowledge which is independent of the service of the will, and directed to the nature of the world in general.
Of what nature this example may be, what form the motive may have and impart to it, is not essential; the important point here is that something is willed in general and the degree of intensity with which it is so willed.
They press forward with much earnestness, and indeed with an air of importance; thus children also pursue their play.
Therefore we can now proceed to bring out more clearly the nature of this assertion and denial itself, which was referred to and explained in a merely general way above.
Each of these is only an example, an instance, of the will which here manifests itself generally.
This we shall do by exhibiting the conduct in which alone it finds its expression, and considering it in its inner significance.
The will can only become visible in the motives, as the eye only manifests its power of seeing in the light.
From the first appearance of consciousness, a man finds himself a willing being, and as a rule, his knowledge remains in constant relation to his will.
Nature, always true and consistent, here even naive, exhibits to us openly the inner significance of the act of generation.
In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting.
I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes.
As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself.
The portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl.
And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter.
But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated.
But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me.
Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque.
The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.
Thinking earnestly upon these points, I remained, for an hour perhaps, half sitting, half reclining, with my vision riveted upon the portrait.
I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them.
But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so shutting them.
And in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well.
Long--long I read--and devoutly, devotedly I gazed.
But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead.
To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned.
And he was a passionate, and wild, and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him.
The frame was oval, richly gilded and filigreed in Moresque.
It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully.
Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception.
"She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee.
Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique.
I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea--must have prevented even its momentary entertainment.
He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover.
And when many weeks had passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp.
Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak.
It was an impulsive movement to gain time for thought--to make sure that my vision had not deceived me--to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze.
I had found the spell of the picture in an absolute life-likeliness of expression, which, at first startling, finally confounded, subdued, and appalled me.
Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person.
Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came.
It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood.
And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sate beside him.
It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to portray even his young bride.
We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments.
It lay in a remote turret of the building.
At length, satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the bed.
With deep and reverent awe I replaced the candelabrum in its former position.
The rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed-posts.
Turning to the number which designated the oval portrait, I there read the vague and quaint words which follow:
The druggist, judging Aladdin by his habit to be very poor, told him he had it, but that it was very dear; upon which Aladdin, penetrating his thoughts, pulled out his purse, and showing him some gold, asked for half a dram of the powder; which the druggist weighed and gave him, telling him the price was a piece of gold.
"What!" said the person whom he addressed, "have you never seen or heard of her?
After the princess had dined, and the false Fatima had been sent for by one of the attendants, he again waited upon her.
But now I am speaking of the palace, pray how do you like it?
Upon this the princess, rising up, said, "Come with me, I will show you what vacant apartments I have, that you may make choice of that you like best." The magician followed the princess, and of all the apartments she showed him, made choice of that which was the worst, saying that it was too good for him, and that he only accepted it to please her.
The younger brother not having received as usual his annual communication, prepared to take a horoscope and ascertain his brother's proceedings.
This wicked man," added he, uncovering his face, "is the brother of the magician who attempted our ruin.
"Holy woman," said one of the slaves, "the princess wants to see you, and has sent us for you." "The princess does me too great an honour," replied the false Fatima; "I am ready to obey her command," and at the same time followed the slaves to the palace.
By mutual agreement they communicated with each other once a year, however widely separate might be their place of residence from each other.
His magic art soon revealed to him that Aladdin was the person who had been the cause of the death of his brother.
He drank it out of compliment to the princess to the very last drop, when he fell backward lifeless on the sofa.
I shall return by noon, and will then tell you what must be done by you to insure success.
"Princess," said Aladdin, "I think I have found the means to deliver you and to regain possession of the lamp, on which all my prosperity depends; to execute this design it is necessary for me to go to the town.
On examining the planetary crystal, he found that his brother was no longer living, but had been poisoned; and by another observation, that he was in the capital of the kingdom of China; also, that the person who had poisoned him was of mean birth, though married to a princess, a sultan's daughter.
She assumed a look of pleasure on the next visit of the magician, and asked him to an entertainment, which he most willingly accepted.
He came at last to the square before Aladdin's palace.
He returned to the princess's apartment, and without mentioning a word of what had happened, sat down, and complained of a great pain which had suddenly seized his head.
There is no rule in painting or statuary more indispensible than that of balancing the figures, and placing them with the greatest exactness on their proper centre of gravity.
I only point out these phenomena, as a subject of speculation to such as are curious with regard to moral enquiries.
In ancient times, bodily strength and dexterity, being of greater USE and importance in war, was also much more esteemed and valued, than at present.
We are affected with the same sentiments, when we lie so much out of the sphere of their activity, that they cannot even be supposed to possess the power of serving us.
Where riches are the chief idol, corruption, venality, rapine prevail: arts, manufactures, commerce, agriculture flourish.
A figure, which is not justly balanced, is ugly; because it conveys the disagreeable ideas of fall, harm, and pain.
A disposition or turn of mind, which qualifies a man to rise in the world and advance his fortune, is entitled to esteem and regard, as has already been explained.
His ancestors, therefore, though dead, are respected, in some measure, on account of their riches; and consequently, without any kind of expectation.
A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous pre-possessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance.
The infirmities of old age are mortifying; because a comparison with the young may take place.
In most countries of Europe, family, that is, hereditary riches, marked with titles and symbols from the sovereign, is the chief source of distinction.
These circumstances, as they make no distinction between one man and another, are no source of pride or humility, regard or contempt.
Let us examine any hypothesis by which we can account for the regard paid to the rich and powerful; we shall find none satisfactory, but that which derives it from the enjoyment communicated to the spectator by the images of prosperity, happiness, ease, plenty, authority, and the gratification of every appetite.
[Footnote: There is something extraordinary, and seemingly unaccountable in the operation of our passions, when we consider the fortune and situation of others.
On the other hand, the misfortunes of our fellows often cause pity, which has in it a strong mixture of good-will.
The king's evil is industriously concealed, because it affects others, and is often transmitted to posterity.
This indeed is their very nature or offence: they have a direct reference to the commodities, conveniences, and pleasures of life.
They would have more success, if the common bent of our thoughts were not perpetually turned to compare ourselves with others.
[Footenote: All men are equally liable to pain and disease and sickness; and may again recover health and ease.
In England, more regard is paid to present opulence and plenty.
Each practice has its advantages and disadvantages.
Self-love, for instance, which some affect so much to consider as the source of every sentiment, is plainly insufficient for this purpose.
This sentiment of pity is nearly allied to contempt, which is a species of dislike, with a mixture of pride.
If birth and quality enter for a share, this still affords us an argument to our present purpose.
What else do we mean by saying that one is rich, the other poor?
The bill of a banker, who is broke, or gold in a desert island, would otherwise be full as valuable.
It will naturally be expected, that the beauty of the body, as is supposed by all ancient moralists, will be similar, in some respects, to that of the mind; and that every kind of esteem, which is paid to a man, will have something similar in its origin, whether it arise from his mental endowments, or from the situation of his exterior circumstances.
At the very same time, or at least in very short intervals, we may feel the passion of respect, which is a species of affection or good-will, with a mixture of humility.
But not to go so far as prisoners of war or the dead, to find instances of this disinterested regard for riches; we may only observe, with a little attention, those phenomena which occur in common life and conversation.
Very often another's advancement and prosperity produces envy, which has a strong mixture of hatred, and arises chiefly from the comparison of ourselves with the person.
It may be improper to give the character of Epaminondas, as drawn by the historian, in order to show the idea of perfect merit, which prevailed in those ages.
But his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favours of fortune.
PART II.
Where no good-will or friendship appears, it is difficult to conceive on what we can found our hope of advantage from the riches of others; though we naturally respect the rich, even before they discover any such favourable disposition towards us.
When we approach a man who is, as we say, at his ease, we are presented with the pleasing ideas of plenty, satisfaction, cleanliness, warmth; a cheerful house, elegant furniture, ready service, and whatever is desirable in meat, drink, or apparel.
It may, therefore, naturally be supposed, that the actual possession of riches and authority will have a considerable influence over these sentiments.
He may, indeed, externally pay a superior deference to the great lord above the vassal; because riches are the most convenient, being the most fixed and determinate, source of distinction.
It may not be improper, in this place, to examine the influence of bodily endowments, and of the goods of fortune, over our sentiments of regard and esteem, and to consider whether these phenomena fortify or weaken the present theory.
A man, who is himself, we shall suppose, of a competent fortune, and of no profession, being introduced to a company of strangers, naturally treats them with different degrees of respect, as he is informed of their different fortunes and conditions; though it is impossible that he can so suddenly propose, and perhaps he would not accept of, any pecuniary advantage from them.
The former prejudice, being favourable to military virtue, is more suited to monarchies. The latter, being the chief spur to industry, agrees better with a republican government.
On the contrary, when a poor man appears, the disagreeable images of want, penury, hard labour, dirty furniture, coarse or ragged clothes, nauseous meat and distasteful liquor, immediately strike our fancy.
What remains, therefore, but to conclude, that, as riches are desired for ourselves only as the means of gratifying our appetites, either at present or in some imaginary future period, they beget esteem in others merely from their having that influence.
For what is it we call a man of birth, but one who is descended from a long succession of rich and powerful ancestors, and who acquires our esteem by his connexion with persons whom we esteem?
What derision and contempt, with both sexes, attend IMPOTENCE; while the unhappy object is regarded as one deprived of so capital a pleasure in life, and at the same time, as disabled from communicating it to others. BARRENNESS in women, being also a species of INUTILITY, is a reproach, but not in the same degree: of which the reason is very obvious, according to the present theory.
Broad shoulders, a lank belly, firm joints, taper legs; all these are beautiful in our species, because signs of force and vigour.
He had himself lashed to the mast in a terrible gale on the Mediterranean when all others on board were seized with terror, and with great delight sketched the towering waves which threatened every minute to swallow the vessel.
The victories of the Arabs after Mahomet, who, in a few years, from a small and mean beginning, established a larger empire than that of Rome, is an example.
On inquiry he found this was a poor deaf boy, Kitto, who afterward became one of the most noted Biblical scholars in the world, and who wrote his first book in the poor-house.
Nothing was too menial for him to undertake to carry his purpose.
His presence was considered equal to that force in battle.
Dryden read Polybius before he was ten years old.
Said Dr. Arnold, the celebrated instructor: "I feel more and more the need of intercourse with men who take life in earnest.
CHRONICLES.
He died in poverty, but grateful people have erected a noble monument over his ashes.
It is the live coal that kindles others, not the dead.
and elaborating that point with anxious gravity, was to receive a practical demonstration of the eternal unfitness of things."
His father wanted him to fit for commercial life, but the fish haunted him day and night.
With what concentration of purpose did Washington put the whole weight of his character into the scales of our cause in the Revolution!
At a time when it was considered dangerous to society in Europe for the common people to read books and listen to lectures on any but religious subjects, Charles Knight determined to enlighten the masses by cheap literature.
The power of Phillips Brooks, at which men wondered, lay in his tremendous earnestness.
The machine would talk, but, like many young children, it had difficulty with certain sounds--in the present case with aspirants and sibilants.
Words, money, all things else are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him. --LOWELL.
Not that I wish for much of what is called religious conversation.
When I find this it opens my heart with as fresh a sympathy as when I was twenty years younger."
That is often apt to be on the surface.
'Spezia,' roared the inventor, 'Pezia' lisped the phonograph in tones of ladylike reserve, and so on through thousands of graded repetitions till the desired results were obtained.
He had come to borrow a book.
But when he was converted his whole life changed: he was full of enthusiasm, hopefulness and zeal.
He believed that a paper could be instructive and not be dull, cheap without being wicked.
There was neither brandy nor flesh needed to feed them.
DEAD IN EARNEST.
They were miserably equipped, miserably fed. They were temperance troops.
Le Brum, when a boy, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the house.
Refusing to follow the soldier to Marcellus, who had captured the city, he was killed on the spot.
Halloo!' into the mouthpiece, ran the paper back over the steel point, and heard a faint 'Halloo!
Pope wrote excellent verses at fourteen.
The mind of youth, when impelled by this original strength and enthusiasm of Nature, is keen, eager, inquisitive, intense, audacious, rapidly assimilating facts into faculties and knowledge into power, and above all teeming with that joyous fullness of creative life which radiates thoughts as inspirations, and magnetizes as well as informs."
Equally celebrated is his remark, "Give me where to stand and I will move the world."
"Columbus, my hero," exclaims Carlyle, "royalist sea-king of all!
Michael Angelo neglected school to copy drawings which he dared not carry home.
For his heart was in his work, and the heart Giveth grace unto every art. --LONGFELLOW.
"The emotions," says Whipple, "may all be included in the single word 'enthusiasm,' or that impulsive force which liberates the mental power from the ice of timidity as spring loosens the streams from the grasp of winter, and sends them forth in a rejoicing rush.
Had she done so?
"It's quite useless, ma'am," said Jason apologetically.
Money!
No argument with her--just that.
WHAT DID THIS MEAN?
"Go to bed, Jason."
"The--TELEPHONE!"
Was it into the Crime Club itself--near at hand?
He could trust Jason; Jason already knew much--more than one of those mysterious letters of the Tocsin's had passed through Jason's hands.
He dared not speak to her, or, above all, allow her to expose herself by a single inadvertent word.
He must get to the Sanctuary, become Larry the Bat--but how?
"Wait!" said Jimmie Dale tersely.
Thank God for that clever brain of hers!
"Jason!" he cried out.
He muttered in annoyance.
Keep well behind the curtains.
The light went out.
He paused for an instant to listen.
Was that why they had taken so long in coming?
"Jason," said Jimmie Dale, suddenly as cold as ice, "what did she say? Think, man!
Jimmie Dale clapped his hand firmly over the mouthpiece of the instrument.
"Jason," said Jimmie Dale, "switch off the light, and go to the front window and look out.
"Yes, sir; but"--Jason's voice, low, troubled, came through the darkness from the upper end of the room--"Master Jim, sir, I--"
"Well, sir, I couldn't rightly say.
He was racing like a madman now.
"Yes, ma'am, Mr. Dale has come in, but he has retired. . . .
How long ago, how many hours ago, had they done that!
Jimmie Dale was staring down into the black of the yard.
Good-night, Master Jim."
She knew now, as a logical conclusion, that it was dangerous to attempt to communicate with him at his home.
He dared not speak to her--and she was here now, calling him!
He forced a laugh.
"Kindly tell Mr. Dale that unless he comes to the 'phone now," a feminine voice, her voice, in well-simulated indignation, was saying, "it will be a very long day before I shall trouble myself to--"
Do you understand?
He shook his head again--a little grimly this time.
He would not be able to get back as easily as he got out!
"Yes, sir," said Jason mechanically.
"Go to bed, Jason--and not a word of this."
THEY HAD TAPPED HIS TELEPHONE.
But--he aroused himself with a start--he was wasting time!
That you told me a lady had been calling, but that I said if she called again I wasn't to be disturbed if it was the Queen of Sheba herself--that I wouldn't answer any 'phone to-night for anybody.
He removed his hand from the mouthpiece.
At the sides, or at the bottom?
She understood!
Schemes, plans, ideas came, bringing a momentary uplift--only to be discarded the next instant with a sort of bitter, desperate regret. These men were not men of mere ordinary intelligence; their cleverness, their power, the amazing scope of their organisation, all bore grim witness to the fact that they would be blinded not at all by any paltry ruse.
"Good Lord, Master Jim!" faltered Jason.
You see, as I said, Master Jim, I must have gone to sleep, but--"
Where was this Crime Club?
That was all there was to it--just that!
Those wires!
Dale had gone away for a trip"?
"In the rare temper he was in, he wouldn't come, to use his own words, ma'am, not for the Queen of Sheba herself, ma'am.
An empty cage!
A minute passed--two--three.
The servants, naturally, would have been in bed hours ago.
Jimmie Dale hung the receiver back on the hook--and with his hand flirted away a bead of moisture that had sprung to his forehead.
Even old Jason--Jimmie Dale smiled, half whimsically, half affectionately--whose paternal custom it was to sit up for his Master Jim, who, as he was fond of saying, he had dandled as a baby on his knee, had evidently given it up as a bad job on this occasion and had turned in himself.
Where were the fastenings!
Jason, however, had left the light burning here in the big reception hall.
That solved the problem!
He gained the door of his den on the first landing, a room that ran the entire length of one side of the house from front to rear, burst in, switched on the light---and stood stock-still in amazement.
He got up impulsively from his chair, and, in the blackness, began to pace the room.
What was he to do?
If he could escape from the house!
QUICK, man!"
"Yes, sir," said Jason obediently.
"I'm not sure, sir," Jason answered hesitantly.
Now, answer!"
CHAPTER VI
There was a thin, mirthless smile on Jimmie Dale's lips.
"What time is it, Jason?" Jimmie Dale asked presently.
The mains, he knew, ran into the cellar from the underground service in the street.
She knew that only peril of the gravest moment would have kept him from the 'phone--and her.
Jimmie Dale shook his head.
"Yes--hello!" he said.
Every word!"
She understood!
What did she say?
His hands, resting on the arms of the chair, closed slowly until they became tight-clenched, knotted fists.
"Watch!" Jimmie Dale answered.
And so long as he pursued the usual avocations of Jimmie Dale, he would not be interfered with--only WATCHED.
They were staring tensely into each other's face.
Or--where?
"Strange folks has got to have strange ways, for what I see."
And presently Mrs. Blackett showed me the stone-walled burying-ground that stood like a little fort on a knoll overlooking the bay, but, as she said, there were plenty of scattered Bowdens who were not laid there,--some lost at sea, and some out West, and some who died in the war; most of the home graves were those of women.
"Oh, ain't it beautiful!" said Mrs. Blackett, with all the delight of a girl.
Even the children were ready to march together, a pretty flock, and at the last moment Mrs. Blackett and a few distinguished companions, the ministers and those who were very old, came out of the house together and took their places.
XVIII.
More than one face among the Bowdens showed that only opportunity and stimulus were lacking,--a narrow set of circumstances had caged a fine able character and held it captive. One sees exactly the same types in a country gathering as in the most brilliant city company.
"Somebody observed once that you could pick out the likeness of 'most every sort of a foreigner when you looked about you in our parish," said Sister Caplin, her face brightening with sudden illumination.
Now these folks right in front; dear sakes knows the bunches o' soothing catnip an' yarrow I've had to favor old Mis' Evins with dryin'!
"There's a great many such strayaway folks, just as there is plants," continued Mrs. Todd, who was nothing if not botanical.
Yes, I do feel that when you call upon the Bowdens you may expect most families to rise up between the Landing and the far end of the Back Cove.
An elderly man who wore the look of a prosperous sea-captain put up both arms and lifted Mrs. Blackett down from the high wagon like a child, and kissed her with hearty affection.
"I was master afraid she wouldn't be here," he said, looking at Mrs. Todd with a face like a happy sunburnt schoolboy, while everybody crowded round to give their welcome.
"There's one thing certain: there's nothing takes in this whole neighborhood like anything related to the Bowdens.
I don't know's he ever saw a fine parade, or met with those that studied up such things.
I do try to remember that she's Nathan's cousin.
The great tables were edged with pretty oak-leaf trimming, which the boys and girls made.
I wouldn't have had her miss it, and there won't be a thing she'll ever regret, except to mourn because William wa'n't here."
Mrs. Caplin's tone was both zealous and impressive.
"He's a good sight better company, though dreamy, than such sordid creatur's as Mari' Harris."
"I expect you're near right," said Mrs. Caplin, a little crestfallen and apologetic.
The excitement of an unexpectedly great occasion was a subtle stimulant to her disposition, and I could see that sometimes when Mrs. Todd had seemed limited and heavily domestic, she had simply grown sluggish for lack of proper surroundings.
He was imperative enough, but with a grand military sort of courtesy, and bore himself with solemn dignity of importance.
Beyond the fields and cove a higher point of land ran out into the bay, covered with woods which must have kept away much of the northwest wind in winter.
I began to respect the Bowdens for their inheritance of good taste and skill and a certain pleasing gift of formality.
The old Bowden house stood, low-storied and broad-roofed, in its green fields as if it were a motherly brown hen waiting for the flock that came straying toward it from every direction. The first Bowden settler had made his home there, and it was still the Bowden farm; five generations of sailors and farmers and soldiers had been its children.
William'll be in early so's to pass up the street without meetin' anybody."
We possessed the instincts of a far, forgotten childhood; I found myself thinking that we ought to be carrying green branches and singing as we went. So we came to the thick shaded grove still silent, and were set in our places by the straight trees that swayed together and let sunshine through here and there like a single golden leaf that flickered down, vanishing in the cool shade.
Each heart is warm and every face shines with the ancient light. Such a day as this has transfiguring powers, and easily makes friends of those who have been cold-hearted, and gives to those who are dumb their chance to speak, and lends some beauty to the plainest face.
Mrs. Todd turned to me with a lovely look of triumph and self-forgetfulness.
'I never could like her myself,' said he.
We were just waiting for the feast to begin.
'Tis a real Sant Bowden, out of its own place."
Now there was a pleasant look of shade and shelter there for the great family meeting.
Small companies were continually coming up the long green slope from the water, and nearly all the boats had come to shore.
"Yes, you always catch yourself a-thinkin' what if they all was true, and he had the right of it," answered Mrs. Todd.
Out of the chattering crowd of noisy children, and large-waisted women whose best black dresses fell straight to the ground in generous folds, and sunburnt men who looked as serious as if it were town-meeting day, there suddenly came silence and order.
"He don't often have such a chance to show off his gifts," said Mrs. Caplin, a friend from the Landing who had joined us.
"Mother's always the queen," said Mrs. Todd.
She stood up in the high wagon to see everything, and when she sat down again she took fast hold of my hand.
Mrs. Blackett having been properly escorted to the house, Mrs. Todd received her own full share of honor, and some of the men, with a simple kindness that was the soul of chivalry, waited upon us and our baskets and led away the white horse.
I want to know if you saw mother walkin' at the head!
It was William.
William had been out since three o'clock, and had taken an extra fare of fish. I could feel that Mrs. Todd's eyes were upon us as we approached the house, and although I fell behind in the narrow path, and let William take the basket alone and precede me at some little distance the rest of the way, I could plainly hear her greet him.
I expect you might have chose a somewhat larger fish, but I'll try an' make it do.
We went from the upper edge of the field above the house into a smooth, brown path among the dark spruces.
He looked just like his mother, and I had been imagining that he was large and stout like his sister, Almira Todd; and, strange to say, my fancy had led me to picture him not far from thirty and a little loutish.
I think he was a little deaf, and he stepped along before me most businesslike and intent upon his errand.
MRS.
There is all the pleasure that one can have in gold-digging in finding one's hopes satisfied in the riches of a good hill of potatoes.
I was sure that Mrs. Blackett must be waiting impatiently to slice the potatoes into the chowder, layer after layer, with the fish.
TODD HAD taken the onion out of her basket and laid it down upon the kitchen table.
I longed to go on; but it did not seem frugal to dig any longer after my basket was full, and at last I took my hoe by the middle and lifted the basket to go back up the hill.
"He'll be hungry enough to eat his size."
I turned, startled in the silence of the wide field, and saw an elderly man, bent in the shoulders as fishermen often are, gray-headed and clean-shaven, and with a timid air.
"I've got new doughnuts, dear," said the little old lady.
I won't put him to no pain."
"Land sakes alive!
"There's Johnny Bowden come with us, you know," she reminded her mother.
Such was the innocence and simplicity of the moment that when I heard Mrs. Todd laughing behind us in the kitchen I laughed too, but William did not even blush.
At the end, near the woods, we could climb up on it and walk along to the highest point; there above the circle of pointed firs we could look down over all the island, and could see the ocean that circled this and a hundred other bits of island ground, the mainland shore and all the far horizons.
It became evident that, with William, it was the first step that cost, and that, having once joined in social interests, he was able to pursue them with more or less pleasure.
It gave a sudden sense of space, for nothing stopped the eye or hedged one in,--that sense of liberty in space and time which great prospects always give.
William
I felt somewhat disturbed and responsible, but when I joined them they were on most simple and friendly terms.
I accustomed myself to plain facts on the instant, and we said good-morning like old friends.
"Got round to comin' in, didn't you?" she inquired, with amusement. "Well, now, that's clever.
Next of all, he ordered the footman, Tom Hepworth, into his room.
I strongly advised him to seek a change of air, which I believe he did.
Thinking that she might have hidden under the couch of rest, she threw herself on the floor to try and catch only a glance of her hidden form, but was disappointed once more.
This being so, evidently delayed the housekeeper a considerable time in attending to the wants of her mistress, whose breakfast was always punctually served at nine o'clock.
The well-arranged plot pictured itself in a most vivid manner to her who in one respect, regarding the key's safety, was entirely to blame.
"Merciful Father!" exclaimed Sir John, as he finished reading the President's note, which he laid on the table.
This was so much information regarding the rascal who was the sole means of separating Sir John Dunfern and his wife.
After two days' rending agony and suspense, he received the following reply:--
"Ah!" said she, "this is the clue to her cursed craft.
"Oh, sir," cried she, drowned in tears, and uttered in broken accents the words, "Your wife has escaped--she is not in her room!"
"Believe me,
What was there left to be done, save to acquaint Sir John of the matter.
This rule was violated to the extent of about half an hour on the memorable morning of Lady Dunfern's flight.
Berks.
It is astounding to view the smallest article through a magnifying glass; how large and lustrous an atom of silver appears; how fat and fair the withered finger seems; how monstrously mighty an orange; how immeasurably great the football of youth; but these are as nought when the naked eye beholds the boulder of barred strength--a mountain of mystery.
"Chitworth College,
This must have had something to do with her escape." Then the thought of Marjory's room being still closed to view she fancied might have something also to do with the mysterious and marvellous mark of ingenious intrigue.
O'SULLIVAN,
The usual hour for arousing the inmates of Dunfern Mansion was designated by the ringing of a bell, constructed at the back part of the building, and connected by means of a wire with the room of the footman, whose duty it was to ring fully three minutes every morning at the hour of seven o'clock in winter and six in summer.
Terror seized every dependent in the mansion lest Sir John would visit his anger on each and all in like manner.
Never dreaming that this overlook on her part was so cleverly taken notice of by her who not alone committed the ruffianous act, but caused all the blame to be thrown on the party in charge.
"Very sincerely yours,
Rachel suspected this beforehand, but dare not even hint at such a thing to him, who had already enough to bear.
Had you not the hall doors locked and likewise all the others?" Replying in the affirmative, the footman shook like a poplar, knowing well that instead of having in his room during the hours of repose all the keys of the various doors which led to the outside, he allowed them to remain where they were during the day.
Moving in its direction with tray in hand, no Lady Dunfern appeared!
Depositing it upon the table, she swiftly turned to the door, and locking it from within, began to gaze around for Lady Dunfern, who sometimes breakfasted in bed.
"How on earth has this happened?" asked the horrified husband. "Had you the key?" he fiercely asked of Rachel.
Both Sir John and Rachel tottered to Marjory's door, and demanding it to be broken open, Sir John entered to be further astonished at her absence, to be sure.
You have neglected to carry out my orders, therefore you must go." So saying, the sturdy footman bowed and retired.
Speaking in terms which shewed manifest symptoms of sorrow, combined with rage and perplexity, he ordered her for ever from his service.
"Had you all those keys in your own room at night, according to my orders since Lady Dunfern was obliged to be dealt with in the manner already described?" demanded Sir John angrily.
However, this was not so, as Rachel and Tom, being longer in his service than any of the others, caused him to intrust them with the chief care of matters of importance in preference.
Heaven help me! has she fled?
Rachel, hastily executing her master's orders, and having all in readiness for her mistress, hurried to her room for the key.
Following Rachel to the room of terror he found her information too true.
Sir John breakfasted at fifteen minutes after nine, and looked both careworn and sad, intimating to Rachel his inability to sleep the previous night.
What disgrace shall this not bring upon you, my child, my all!"
On her bed she cannot have lain the previous night, which was proof positive that she was an announced accomplice.
She adds that he took all his belongings with him.--Trusting you enjoy good health.
Running to the door and frantically opening it, she ran to Marjory's room.
"D.
On this festive day the breakfast served in the servants' spacious hall was a sumptuous repast, truly, and required longer time to prepare than was customary.
"It cannot be!"
However, believing that she was still fast asleep, Rachel ceased to further call on her until after serving her ladyship's breakfast.
On Christmas morning, only a short time after Lady Dunfern's escape was effected, it rang somewhat later, arousing from sleep all the servants, with the exception of Marjory Mason, who failed entirely to put in an appearance, even when called thrice by Rachel.
Oh, what!--what shall I do?
The housekeeper, who felt sadly and very much annoyed about the affair, grasped the whole thing--first, she thought of Marjory's professed illness the evening previous, then how she tried her door before going to bed, and in this attempt to enter was unsuccessful, and that very morning there was no answer, and, finally, she was missing as well as Lady Dunfern.
CHAPTER XIII.
"You," said he, "are well aware of my present calamity, and might I ask of you how my wife and Marjory Mason effected their escape from below?
It no doubt caused Sir John a vast amount of pain to part with two such helps as Rachel Hyde and Tom Hepworth; but once he formed a resolution, nothing save death itself would break it.
The honest-hearted footman, being trapped, frankly acknowledged he had not.
Opening his large Davenport that stood close by, he extracted therefrom all the letters of the vaguish tutor, and coming to the one received lastly, found it bore the address, "Chitworth College, Hedley, Berks."
"What!" gasped Sir John.
The husband, paralysed with sorrow, instantly wrote to Doctor O'Sullivan, the President of the College, who in youthful years was his most intimate acquaintance, and whose name appeared so often in Oscar's letters, making the necessary inquiries relative to one of the teaching staff named "Oscar Otwell."
But the mystery had yet to be solved as to the action of their flight.
The deceived husband appeared greatly crushed under such a weight of sorrow, and wondering whether or not they could be found, or if Oscar Otwell, he who so often wrote to his wife during her period of imprisonment, had ought to do with her daring adventure, aided by Marjory Mason!
"I am very sorry to inform you that, owing to a grave despondency which of late troubled Oscar Otwell, one of my able and talented assistants, I was compelled, though reluctantly, to allow him either one month's leave of absence or six weeks' if he so desired, in order to recruit him somewhat.
I myself, on receipt of your note, visited his lodgings to ascertain from his landlady when he was likely to return.
The bed remained unused since she settled it the previous day.
"You," said he, "are solely to blame.
Ordering her to prepare a dainty dish for Lady Dunfern, he proceeded to read the daily paper, that had been so customary for years.
Sir John, summoning all his men, ordered them to go at once and intimate to the officers of the law the sudden flight of the miscreants, and to try and find out their whereabouts; but no trace of them was as yet nigh at hand.
And when he found out that they had so carelessly disobeyed his injunctions, they were then compelled to reap the result.
These letters of Otwell's Sir John still retained, never reaching her for whom they were intended.
Of this I am positively convinced, and through that door march, as I never wish again to set eyes on such a worthless woman." Here Rachel, who was grievously affected, passed for ever from the presence of him who dared to be questioned.
Guilt took strong hold on Rachel.
"Dear Sir John,
Oh, my son, my son!
This he sealed in an envelope, and walked to the village to post it himself.
She knew the key was always kept in a drawer in her own room, which drawer was constantly kept locked by her and the key hidden inside the little clock that ticked so gently on the mantel-piece in her room; but on second thought, she was so busily engaged during the Christmas season that actually she forgot to lock the drawer the whole week.
"Go, then," said his master "and seek employment elsewhere.
You are no longer fit to be here.
"Yes, I can," replied Miss Vrain defiantly.
Lucian could scarcely forbear smiling at Diana's candidly expressed estimate of her ally's character, but, fearful of giving offence to his companion, he speedily composed his features.
"Miss Vrain," said Lucian seriously, "if we don't give her the benefit of every doubt the jury will, should she be tried on this charge.
"Expected her!" cried Diana, thunderstruck.
"Can you prove that she was so reckless?"
Diana listened attentively, and when he concluded gave it as her opinion that Lydia had entered the first yard by the side passage and had climbed over the fence into the second, "as is clearly proved by the veil," she concluded decisively.
She wore a plainly-made green dress, with a toby frill; and a large silver cross dangled on her flat bosom.
"I do not know what further evidence you require to prove it," retorted Diana indignantly.
"We can pick the grains of wheat out of the chaff.
"Impossible!"
As a relief, let us examine your friend and hear what she has to say."
"I am not the less your friend because I combat your arguments; but in this case it is necessary to look on both sides of the question.
"She was in town on Christmas Eve; she took the stiletto from the library, and----"
You can see her at once," and Diana rose to ring the bell.
“One of the most remarkable things in the wanderings of species,” he observed, “is the sudden impulse to trek and migrate that breaks out now and again, for no apparent reason, in communities of hitherto stay-at-home animals.”
“There followed the signatures of the principal members of the party and instructions as to how and where the money was to be paid.
It contained a scrap of paper on which was written the following message:
Or anybody?’
The migration was a brief one, but it heralded an era of restlessness in the Press world which lent quite a new meaning to the phrase ‘newspaper circulation.’ Other editorial staffs were not slow to imitate the example that had been set them.
“And the contents of the paper,” said the nephew, “did they show the influence of the new style?”
Foreman compositors, advertisement clerks, and other members of the non-editorial staff, who had, of course, taken no part in the great trek, found it as impossible to get into direct communication with the editor and his satellites now that they had returned as when they had been excusably inaccessible in Central Asia.
Indeed, it began to be felt that the self-effacement of the returned pressmen was being carried to a pedantic length.
“‘You can’t see the editor nor any of the staff,’ he announced.
No one is a hero to one’s own office-boy, and he evidently considered that a quarter of a million was an unwarrantable outlay for such a doubtfully advantageous object as the repatriation of an errant newspaper staff.
“That,” said Sir Lulworth, “was the most brilliant stroke of all.
I mean the wander fever which suddenly displayed itself in the managing and editorial staffs of certain London newspapers.
So he drew the editorial and other salaries, forged what signatures were necessary, engaged new reporters, did what sub-editing he could, and made as much use as possible of the large accumulation of special articles that was held in reserve for emergencies.
Even a complimentary luncheon at the Voyagers’ Club was courteously declined.
The latter was interested in comparing and contrasting allied types of animals occurring in the North American and Old World fauna.
The Yarkand manner was not popular.”
“‘Where is the editor?’ ‘Or the foreign editor?’ ‘Or the chief leader-writer?
At the door leading to the editorial department the way was barred by a nervous but defiant office-boy.
The articles on foreign affairs were entirely his own composition.
In home affairs, social questions, and the ordinary events of the day not much change was noticeable.
In the whole suite of rooms there was no sign of human life.
“The letter had been directed to the office-boy-in-charge, who had quietly suppressed it.
Many of the wives started off immediately in pursuit of their errant husbands, and it took the Government a considerable time and much trouble to reclaim them from their fruitless quests along the banks of the Oxus, the Gobi Desert, the Orenburg steppe, and other outlandish places.
One of them, I believe, is still lost somewhere in the Tigris Valley.”
“And the boy?”
The articles on foreign affairs reverted to the wonted traditions of the paper.”
People began to talk unkindly of the effect of high altitudes and Eastern atmosphere on minds and temperaments unused to such luxuries.
“Is still in journalism.”
Quite in keeping, too, with the older and better traditions of British journalism was the manner of the home-coming; no bombast, no personal advertisement, no flamboyant interviews.
A deputation, consisting of the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, four leading financiers, and a well-known Nonconformist divine, made its way to the offices of the paper.
The boy had spoken truly; there was no one to be seen.
“In human affairs the same phenomenon is occasionally noticeable,” said Sir Lulworth; “perhaps the most striking instance of it occurred in this country while you were away in the wilds of Mexico.
“‘Entire party captured by brigand tribe on homeward journey. Quarter of million demanded as ransom, but would probably take less. Inform Government, relations, and friends.’
This was, in many respects, the most remarkable of all the Press stampedes that were experienced at this time.
“That was doing things rather thoroughly, wasn’t it?” said the nephew.
The aforetime standard of excellence was scarcely maintained, but at any rate the general lines of policy and outlook were not departed from.
It was in the realm of foreign affairs that a startling change took place.
“‘We insist on seeing the editor or some responsible person,’ said the Prime Minister, and the deputation forced its way in.
And even when enterprising and adventurous editors took themselves and their staffs further afield there were some unavoidable clashings.
Blunt, forcible, outspoken articles appeared, couched in language which nearly turned the autumn manœuvres of six important Powers into mobilisations.
Every proposition, which is not true, is there confused and unintelligible.
Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment.
The existence, therefore, of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and these arguments are founded entirely on experience.
Or if we reason concerning it, and endeavour to fix its standard, we regard a new fact, to wit, the general tastes of mankind, or some such fact, which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.
Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.
That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived.
Those who have a propensity to philosophy, will still continue their researches; because they reflect, that, besides the immediate pleasure, attending such an occupation, philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected.
No negation of a fact can involve a contradiction. The non-existence of any being, without exception, is as clear and distinct an idea as its existence.
The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, they throw themselves precipitately into the principles, to which they are inclined; nor have they any indulgence for those who entertain opposite sentiments.
We shall then find what are the proper subjects of science and enquiry.
All other enquiries of men regard only matter of fact and existence; and these are evidently incapable of demonstration.
To bring us to so salutary a determination, nothing can be more serviceable, than to be once thoroughly convinced of the force of the Pyrrhonian doubt, and of the impossibility, that anything, but the strong power of natural instinct, could free us from it.
They are, therefore, impatient till they escape from a state, which to them is so uneasy: and they think, that they could never remove themselves far enough from it, by the violence of their affirmations and obstinacy of their belief.
But they will never be tempted to go beyond common life, so long as they consider the imperfection of those faculties which they employ, their narrow reach, and their inaccurate operations.
To hesitate or balance perplexes their understanding, checks their passion, and suspends their action.
The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits.
While we cannot give a satisfactory reason, why we believe, after a thousand experiments, that a stone will fall, or fire burn; can we ever satisfy ourselves concerning any determination, which we may form, with regard to the origin of worlds, and the situation of nature, from, and to eternity?
As the component parts of quantity and number are entirely similar, their relations become intricate and involved; and nothing can be more curious, as well as useful, than to trace, by a variety of mediums, their equality or inequality, through their different appearances.
All deliberations in life regard the former; as also all disquisitions in history, chronology, geography, and astronomy.
In general, there is a degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which, in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.
This narrow limitation, indeed, of our enquiries, is, in every respect, so reasonable, that it suffices to make the slightest examination into the natural powers of the human mind and to compare them with their objects, in order to recommend it to us.
The proposition, which affirms it not to be, however false, is no less conceivable and intelligible, than that which affirms it to be.
But could such dogmatical reasoners become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations; such a reflection would naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists.
Or if there be any difficulty in these decisions, it proceeds entirely from the undeterminate meaning of words, which is corrected by juster definitions.
The case is different with the sciences, properly so called.
It seems to me, that the only objects of the abstract science or of demonstration are quantity and number, and that all attempts to extend this more perfect species of knowledge beyond these bounds are mere sophistry and illusion.
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?
The necessity for doing something was becoming imperative.
As the beast neither lowered its head nor stamped its feet Eshley ventured on another javelin exercise with another pea-stick.
“You seem to forget that it’s in my morning-room, eating my flowers,” came the raging retort.
You ‘shoo’ beautifully. Meanwhile, do you mind trying to drive that ox away?
“You seem to notice everything.
His two attempts to break away from his own tradition were signal failures: “Turtle Doves alarmed by Sparrow-hawk” and “Wolves on the Roman Campagna” came back to his studio in the guise of abominable heresies, and Eshley climbed back into grace and the public gaze with “A Shaded Nook where Drowsy Milkers Dream.”
He picked up a pea-stick and flung it with some determination against the animal’s mottled flanks.
Eshley stood very near the gate while he studied the animal’s appearance and demeanour. Adela Pingsford continued to say nothing.
Adela Pingsford said nothing, but led the way to her garden.
Theophil Eshley was an artist by profession, a cattle painter by force of environment.
Possibly I was mistaken.”
Eshley had painted a successful and acceptable picture of cattle drowsing picturesquely under walnut trees, and as he had begun, so, of necessity, he went on.
It is the garden part of it that I object to.
“How observant you are,” said Adela bitterly.
“The man is mad!” exclaimed Adela tragically.
“Where are you going?” screamed Adela.
The Royal Academy encourages orderly, methodical habits in its children.
“It’s eating a chrysanthemum,” said Eshley at last, when the silence had become unbearable.
“I paint dairy cows, certainly,” admitted Eshley, “but I cannot claim to have had any experience in rounding-up stray oxen.
Much moved at these words, Perceval knelt and prayed, and then, as the dawn filtered through the trees, he mounted his horse and began his long journey to the north.
But suddenly he swooned and fell and his consciousness went from him.
'Here, good soul,' he said, 'are horse and armour for thee.
'Lady, I think these evil witches will not hurt thee.
'It is a dress made of rings of steel,' answered Sir Owen, 'which I put on to turn the swords of those I fight.'
Yet if thou shouldst prevail, all men in this tortured land will bless thee, and I not the least.
And no evil shall be able to break in upon thy repose.
For my pity did God, whom till then I had not known, deal with me in marvellous wise.
Then slowly the vision faded from his sight.
And by his great activity and swiftness he ran the two deer down till they were spent, and then he took them and shut them up in the goat-house in the forest.
And he passed through a ford, and then he entered a land all black and desolate, with the bodies of the dead beside the way, unburied, and the houses all broken or burned.
And wherever thou seest a church, go kneel and repeat thy prayers therein; and if thou hearest an outcry, go quickly and defend the weak, the poor and the unprotected.
Always the strength of the Black Knight seemed as unwearied as that of a demon, while Perceval felt his arm weaken, as much from the great strokes he gave, as from the burning fires that darted at him from the dragon shield.
I preached the Word of Christ, I and my fellows that came with me, until the heathens rose up and would slay me.
And swiftly he ran towards the sound a long way, until he came into a clearing, and found two knights on horseback doing mighty battle.
While he was yet but a little way from the court of King Arthur, a stranger knight, tall and big, in black armour, had ridden into the hall where sat Gwenevere the queen, with a few of the younger knights and her women.
And all that time he ate nothing but wild berries, for he had not thought to bring food with him.
And at the wondrous sight his breath stayed on his lips.
'Ah, as I would have slain the buck that would have gored me,' said Perceval, nodding his head.
Ere the other could withdraw himself, Perceval thrust his sword to the hilt into the loathsome throat of the dragon.
Sometimes he thought of Angharad, how beautiful she was, and how sad it was that she had so cold a heart, and was so cruel in her words.
'Tell me, sir,' said Perceval, 'what means this?'
Then turning to the lady, he said:
'Oh, tell me, fair sir, who art thou?
Then Perceval knew that this indeed was the fight which Domna had foretold, and that if he failed in this, ruin and sorrow would be the lot of many.
As he sat looking thereat, he marvelled to see that the heart seemed to stir as if it were alive, and began to throb and move as if it beat.
I heard how you withstood them, and I scorned you and hated you and said you would yield some day.
And come thou to see me within a little while.'
And Perceval rode forward through the blackened land and found the forests burning and the fields wasted.
Chief of warriors art thou, and stainless flower of knighthood!'
And as he ended praying, the armour stirred of itself, and though it had been black before, now did the darkness fade from it, and it all became a pure white.
He grew up loving all noble things, gentle of speech and bearing, but quick to anger at evil or mean actions, merciful of weak things, and full of pity and tenderness.
Turning, he rode back between lines of silent forms bent in prayer.
'Where am I?'
So he abode in the forest that night, and when he had prayed he slept beside his good horse until it was day.
'To repent me of my evil mind,' she said.
When she fell, the light of her eyes and her sword went out, and the armour all seemed to wither away, and she was nothing but an old ugly woman in rags.
Then I repented, and would not listen to the evil women.
I think God will not long let this evil knight oppress and slay.
And he practised much with the throwing of stones and sticks, so that with a stick he could hit a small mark at a great distance, and with a sharp stone he could cut down a sapling at one blow.
Then Perceval remembered what he had heard the trolls--the people of the Underworld--say, though he had not understood their meaning.
'Such a one as I,' said the horseman, smiling good-naturedly, for it was Sir Owen, one of King Arthur's knights.
'This iron coat,' said Perceval, stopping as he spoke, 'will never come off him.'
'And shouldst thou conquer,' said the lady, 'with the fiend's death the hallowed relics which King Pellam guarded shall return to bless this land.
'Tell me, tall man, is that King Arthur yonder?'
And Angharad laughed and said:
I heard men say you were one of three stainless knights of the world that should achieve the Holy Graal, because of your great humility and purity, and that great honour and glory would be yours, because you put not your trust in your own strength.
'By my faith, sister,' said Perceval, 'I am rejoiced to hear thee.
But suddenly Tod ran among them, and commanded them to release him.
'Yes, mother, of a truth,' said Perceval. 'I shall not be happy more until I go.'
'Wherefore,' said Perceval, 'seeing that the storm beats wildly without and there is room here for many?'
Then he was aware of a sweet savour which surrounded him, and anon a gentle voice spoke out of the darkness.
She was of a sad countenance, but of a great beauty, though poorly clothed.
And ghostily, as in a silver mist, he saw above the altar the likeness of a spear, and beside it a dish or salver.
'My mother told me to seek King Arthur,' responded Perceval,' and he will give me the honour of knighthood.'
And the dwarf told him.
'Fair sir,' she said, 'my maiden hath told me who thou art, and I sorrow that one so noble as thou seemest shall essay to overcome the fiend knight of the Dragon.
And for armour he had a rough jerkin, old and moth-eaten, and for arms he had a handful of sharp-pointed sticks of hard wood.
The sister's pale face flushed.
In other places the grass and weeds grew over the hearths of desolated homes, and wild beasts made their lairs where homely folk seemed lately to have lived their simple happy lives.
Several handmaids sat beside her, sad of face and tattered of dress.
And those that would not he slew, and their folk he trampled underfoot, and their herds and fields he destroyed and desolated.
And I, fair lord, have lost my dear wife and my wee bairns, and I wonder why I fled and kept my life, remembering all I have lost.'
'Thou must put forth more than the skill thou didst learn of the witches of Glaive if thou wouldst overcome me.
But hard was it to keep his word, when he was in the forest and saw the wild things passing through the brakes.
'Away with thee,' shouted Kay, enraged.
After he had prayed at the altar in the ruined chapel of the castle, they led him to a bed in the hall, where he slept.
But if thou failest, Angharad is mine to do with as I will.'
So he went to the hut where Tod the hunter lay sick, and charged him by the love and worship he bore to the countess, that he should tell him how he could obtain fresh venison.
'It is as God may will it,' said Perceval.
With that a swarm of little angry trolls poured from the hollow hillocks with great cries, and seizing Perceval would have hurt him.
And he was so weak he could not lift his hand.
The king in the high seat stirred and sat upright, and looked at Perceval with a most sweet smile.
'It shall be so,' said the witch, 'if, when the time comes, thou art strong enough to overcome my power.
With a great shriek his mother swooned away, and the women turned him from the room and said he had slain his mother.
'But take thou this goblet to the queen, and tell the king that wherever I be, I will be his man, to slay all oppressors, to succour the weak and the wronged, and to aid him in whatever knightly enterprise he may desire my aid.
In a little while he saw a vast castle reared upon a rock in the midst of the forest.
'Nay, but thou hadst a greater glory in store for thee,' she said.
Thereupon the others shouted with laughter, and commenced to throw sticks at Perceval, or the bones left by the dogs upon the floor.
Then Perceval cried in prayer for aid, and asked that if Christ would have this land saved for His glory, strength should be given him to slay this fiendish oppressor.
'If it be thus fated,' he said, 'I will go with thee.
And the witches came to me and tempted me with riches and power, even as they were tempting you while you were with them.
Can't you get anybody to buy your stuffs?"
You had better be off."
"I." replied the quavering voice.
To the general population of the colony the arrival of the stranger was a matter of small interest.
"Isaac Hakkabut.
The orderly, however, who had listened with much amusement, was by no means disinclined for the conversation to be continued.
"Then wait where you are."
"Then to-day," said the astronomer, speaking with the greatest deliberation--"to-day we are just three millions of leagues away from Europe."
"I only meant--"
"Well, you thought--what did you think?"
"The Balearic Isles?" echoed Isaac.
"Do you recognize your quondam pupil, professor?" he asked.
"And I hope it will be to your liking, old Ezekiel!" added Ben Zoof in a voice of irony.
Fortunately, Ben Zoof appeared with a great cup, hot and strong.
"Confound it!" said Ben Zoof.
"Where from?"
The captain had overheard the tenor of the conversation, and interposed sternly, "Hakkabut! if you make the least attempt to disturb our visitor, I shall have you turned outside that door immediately."
"Isn't it so?
"Quite safe, sir," answered Ben Zoof, quickly.
What do you mean?"
And with this inhospitable rejoinder the orderly was about to return to his place at the side of his patient, when Servadac, who had been roused by the sound of voices, called out, "What's the matter, Ben Zoof?"
However reluctantly, Ben Zoof obeyed.
The Jew sidled close up to Ben Zoof, and laying his hand on his arm, said in a low and insinuating tone, "I am poor, you know; but I would give you a few reals if you would let me talk to this stranger."
"Are you satisfied, old Ezekiel?" he asked.
"The tomb of St. Louis!" he exclaimed, and his companions involuntarily followed his example, and made a reverential obeisance to the venerated monument.
Whatever it was, it was agreed that its true character must be ascertained, not only to gratify their own curiosity, but for the benefit of all future navigators.
Lieutenant Procope looked doubtful.
If we are really near land, I should be afraid to approach it in the dark."
"No, captain," interposed Lieutenant Procope; "we shall know nothing until to-morrow."
Nevertheless, it was undeniable that there was a stone building situated on the top of the rock, and that this building had much the character of an Arabian mosque.
The solemn isolation of the island tomb, the open breviary, the ritual of the ancient anniversary, all combined to apprise him of the sanctity of the spot upon which he stood.
Who can tell whether we shall not come across a human being?"
AN ISLAND TOMB
Neither Cape Negro nor Cape Serrat was to be seen.
The schooner accordingly was steered directly towards it, and in less than an hour had cast anchor within a few cables' lengths of the shore.
"No, sir; I should much rather lay to and wait till daylight.
The island had all the appearance of being deserted, nor did a cannon-shot fired from the schooner have the effect of bringing any resident to the shore.
"Is it land, do you suppose?" inquired Servadac, eagerly.
There was nothing more to explore.
All at once, his attention was arrested by a luminous speck straight ahead on the southern horizon.
CHAPTER XI.
The boat was lowered and manned by the four sailors; Servadac, Timascheff and Procope were quickly rowed ashore, and lost no time in commencing their ascent of the steep acclivity.
From the heaven above, where stars kept peeping fitfully from behind the moving clouds, his eye wandered mechanically to the waters below, where the long waves were rising and falling with the evening breeze.
"What! not bear down upon it at once?" asked the count in surprise.
Not a soul was there in charge, and the sole living occupants were a flock of wild cormorants which, startled at the entrance of the intruders, rose on wing, and took a rapid flight towards the south.
"Five fathoms and a flat bottom," was the unvaried announcement after each operation.
Cape Bon, too, the most northern promontory of Africa and the point of the continent nearest to the island of Sicily, had been included in the general devastation.
A sudden revelation dashed across Servadac's mind.
Few as those hours were, they seemed to those on board as if their end would never come.
Without removing his eye from his telescope, Servadac exclaimed: "There is a habitation on the place; I can see an erection of some kind quite distinctly.
Before the occurrence of the recent prodigy, the bottom of the Mediterranean just at this point had formed a sudden ridge across the Straits of Libya.
At a sign from the lieutenant, a sailor who was stationed at the foot of the fore-shrouds dropped the sounding-lead into the water, and in reply to Procope's inquiries, reported--"Five fathoms and a flat bottom."
Poor dear little boy."
Chapter XXII
My boy! my boy!
Mrs. Clavering was surprised to see that she had dressed herself carefully since the morning, as was her custom to do daily, even when alone; and that she was not in her bedroom, but in a small sitting room which she generally used when Sir Hugh was not at the Park.
In the meantime there was grief down at the great house of Clavering; and grief, we must suppose also, at the house in Berkeley Square, as soon as the news from his country home had reached Sir Hugh Clavering. Little Hughy, his heir, was dead.
"Or, if you wish it, Henry shall come down and remain here.
"Comfort!" said the mother.
Desolation
"Yes, I am poor; poor enough.
Lady Clavering listened with that dull, useless attention which on such occasions sorrow always gives to the prudent counsels of friendship; but she was thinking ever and always of her husband, and watching the moment of his expected return.
I would sooner be alone when he comes.
It cannot be good for you to be all alone."
When she came home we would not see her.
"No; he would, perhaps, be rough to Mr. Clavering.
Of course she will not care.
Who is there that will care for me?"
She was sitting by herself; having driven the old house keeper away from her; and there were no traces of tears then on her face, though she had wept plentifully when Mrs. Clavering had been with her in the morning.
"It was a blow I always feared," said the rector to his daughter as soon as his wife had left them.
Early one morning, Mrs. Clavering, at the rectory, received a message from Lady Clavering, begging that she would go up to the house, and, on arriving there, she found that the poor child was very ill.
Could Mrs. Clavering come over again, as Lady Clavering was in a sad way?
She kept her bright, straightforward-looking girlish eyes on me as we went; it seemed she did so all the time, but now I know, better than I did then, that every now and then she glanced over me and behind me towards the shrubbery.
He looked at me curiously as he spoke.
The door was wide open, and she walked in before me.
She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.
Whatever I wanted to explain I had no chance to do so.
I can see her pretty face now as it looked at me--her impenetrable dear face.
I judged he was disturbed in his nap.
I never heard such nonsense."
She stared at me for a moment.
"I wanted to explain--" I began.
All the while, keeping me at a distance, without even the touch of her hand.
She quickened her pace a little.
All these people were very kind to me, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes very agreeably finding expression, that I was--"clever." They all stood about me as if they were a little at a loss.
I recall with a vivid precision her queer start when she heard the rustle of my approaching feet, her surprise, her eyes almost of dismay for me.
The "dear boy" was a new note, that sounded oddly to me.
A very fine scarf--I suppose you would call it a scarf--of green gossamer, that some new wakened instinct had told her to fling about her shoulders, clung now closely to the young undulations of her body, and now streamed fluttering out for a moment in a breath of wind, and like some shy independent tentacle with a secret to impart, came into momentary contact with my arm.
But I will not make the attempt.
Section 3
The effect would be inanity.
He was short but strongly built, and his beard and mustache were the biggest things about him.
So we came to the trim array of flower-beds near the head gardener's cottage and the vistas of "glass" on our left.
When I and Nettie had been sixteen we had been just of an age and contemporaries altogether.
She had taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear skin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain quickness she got from her mother.
I was too intent to explain myself to think of what might lie in that.
"You ought to write it out for the newspapers," he used to say.
She treated me with that neat perfection of understanding a young woman has for a boy.
How's your mother?"
Fancy walking!
We talked a little stiffly--they were evidently surprised by my sudden apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain to keep the conversation going.
"Lord! what a girl it is!" said Mrs. Stuart.
"Guess who has come to see us!" she cried.
I held it open for her to pass through, for this was one of my restricted stock of stiff politenesses, and then for a second she was near touching me.
"Yes."
But our first words I may give you, because though they conveyed nothing to me at the time, afterwards they meant much.
I told her I had walked.
Puss was a youngster of fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like her mother's, are the chief traces on my memory.
Every one would be SO surprised to see me.
I could recollect, I believe, every significant word she spoke during our meeting, and most of what I said to her.
Puss was her sister.
Fancy!
"Walked!"
She laughed a queer little laugh and her color went for a moment, and then so soon as she had spoken, came back again.
When COULD I have started!
And all the while, behind her quick breathless inconsecutive talk she was thinking.
"I wanted to tell you," I said, "that I didn't mean quite . . . the things I put in my letter."
Can I recall it?
"I thought I would surprise you--"
We walked between the box edgings and beds of begonias and into the shadow of a yew hedge within twenty yards of that very pond with the gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so we came to the wistaria-smothered porch.
A year ago she had been a pretty girl's face sticking out from a little unimportant frock that was carried upon an extremely active and efficient pair of brown-stockinged legs. Now there was coming a strange new body that flowed beneath her clothes with a sinuous insistence.
At least, it seems I could, though indeed I may deceive myself.
No hopeless old age, no cringing dependence!
A rush of pain and bitterness filled her heart--pain, new-born and insistent, for her mother, her father, and herself.
Dodgson, the Raeburns' candidate, has got a great start; this young man will want all his time to catch him up.
Now she calls and asks us to luncheon in the same afternoon. Either she took too little notice of us before, or she takes too much now--don't you think so?"
Memory brought to mind in vivid sequence the figures and incidents of the afternoon, of her village round with Mary Harden.
Mrs. Boyce had certainly grown pale.
The old people should have their pensions as of right.
"No, we have no right to be proud," she repeated to herself.
The eyes of both met--the mother's full of an indomitable fire which had for once wholly swept away her satiric calm of every day; the daughter's troubled and miserable.
Yes, I hear the front door."
He had been very prompt in her service.
"I will not go to the Court with you anyway," she said, daintily sipping her tea--"in your interests as well as mine.
"Any letters?" she asked.
Three days passed.
You will make all the greater impression, my dear, for I have really forgotten how to behave. Those cards shall be properly returned, of course.
"I want friends!" said Marcella, slowly.
But the question with me has always been, Shall I accept pity?
She began to feel herself a person of larger experience than they.
And to-night, after her talk with her mother, it could not but overtake her afresh.
Even the Hardens--so Marcella gathered from her friend and admirer Mary--unworldly dreamy folk, wrapt up in good works, and in the hastening of Christ's kingdom, were on the alert and beginning to take note.
He is working like a horse, he tells me.
"You are very wet, papa," she said to him as she took his cup; "don't you think you had better go at once and change?"
"I could revive the straw-plaiting; give them better teaching and better models.
And again her keen glance disconcerted the tall handsome girl, whose power over the world about her had never extended to her mother. Marcella flushed and played with the fire.
For the rest--let no one disturb themselves till they must.
"They should have done their calling long ago.
"I couldn't help it," she said in a low hurried voice.
He was a Tory; but all the same he wished every success to this handsome, agreeable young man, whose deferential manners to him at the end of the day had come like ointment to a wound.
"And he went to his aunt--and she went to Lady Winterbourne--they were compassionate--and there are the cards.
But the common report of him made his recent manner towards her, this last action of his, the more significant.
"No; but there are some cards.
I feel as if it would kill me to live here, shut off from everybody--joining with nobody--with no friendly feelings or society.
Should she confess?
Then she was ashamed of herself and rejected the image with vehemence.
"You have got used to it, mamma!
Intelligence and enthusiasm give power, and ought to give it--power for good.
She got up and went over to him.
Dependence was the curse of the poor.
She spoke with her usual light gentleness, but he was not appeased.
Scarcely a quiver in the young form before the glass!
"A woman has always convenient limitations to plead in the way of health.
"How will mamma take it?" thought Marcella anxiously.
"Everybody is so ready to take charge of other people's lives, and look at the result!"
You take great interest in your Boyce belongings, I perceive.
"Mamma!"
He'll be back again by the end of the week.
As she undressed, it seemed to her as though she still felt the clinging hands of the Hurd children round her knees, and through them, symbolised by them, the suppliant touch of hundreds of other helpless creatures.
Then a cry of nature broke from the girl.
"Return them," said Mrs. Boyce, calmly, blowing out the flame of her silver kettle.
She must needs laugh at herself, but it made little matter.
"You--asked--Mr.
Had he not also been stopped that morning in a remote lane by Lord Winterbourne and Lord Maxwell on their way back from the meet, and had not both recognised and shaken hands with him?
"We should be so glad," said the writer, "to show you and Miss Boyce our beautiful woods while they are still at their best, in the way of autumn colour."
Why should we change our ways?
She was thinking, of course, of Mr. Raeburn.
"I see!" said Mrs. Boyce.
"Of course it is his doing--and I asked him!"
Young Wharton, on the contrary, was making way every day, and, what with securing Aldous's own seat in the next division, and helping old Dodgson in this, Lord Maxwell and his grandson had their hands full. Dick Boyce was glad of it.
"And you will never go out with me, mamma?"
You have certainly taken us all in hand, Marcella!"
He rose and stood with his back to the fire, his spare frame stiffening under his nervous determination to assert himself--to hold up his head physically and morally against those who would repress him.
"They have asked Marcella and me to lunch," she said.
"You will have to wait for your tea," she said, "the water doesn't nearly boil."
By the way, Evelyn, I came across young Wharton in the road just now."
"I asked Mr. Aldous Raeburn the other day whether everybody here was going to cut us!
Mrs. Boyce tilted the silver urn and replenished the tea-pot.
You may remember too, perhaps, that there is other blood in you--and that no Merritt has ever submitted quietly to either patronage or pity."
"Do you feel worse again?
Marcella's attention was diverted from her mother to the father's small dark head and thin face.
"Clarke does me no good--not an atom," he said, rising.
And now there were these cards.
I do not accuse anybody, and resent nothing.
A dark day was drawing to its close, and there was little light left in the hall, except in one corner where a rainy sunset gleam struck a grim contemporary portrait of Mary Tudor, bringing out the obstinate mouth and the white hand holding a jewelled glove.
Richard Boyce took his social punishment badly.
No doubt, under Socialism, there will be less scope for either, because there will be less need.
"It depends upon how it is done.
He was an impressionable imaginative man in delicate health; and the tears sometimes came into his eyes as he pictured himself restored to society--partly by his own efforts, partly, no doubt, by the charms and good looks of his wife and daughter--forgiven for their sake, and for the sake also of that store of virtue he had so laboriously accumulated since that long-past catastrophe.
I have no mind to risk what I have got."
Unfortunately, in spite of Raeburn's opinion to the contrary, no man in such a position and with such a temperament ever gets something without claiming more--and more than he can conceivably or possibly get. Startled and pleased at first by the salutation which Lord Maxwell and his companion had bestowed upon him, Richard Boyce had passed his afternoon in resenting and brooding over the cold civility of it.
He stays at Dell's farm when he comes--pretty bad accommodation, I should think.
It will be understood that I do not go out, and then someone--Miss Raeburn or Lady Winterbourne--will take up Marcella and mother her."
On the fourth Marcella returned late in the afternoon from a round of parish visits with Mary Harden.
"I wish you would inform yourself of what goes on.
Her mother had never named her own kindred to her before that she could remember.
We have done very well of late.
If all the truth were known, most men would look foolish; and the men who thanked God that they were not as other men, soonest of all.
She sat on by the fire, drinking her tea and every now and then watching her companion with a new and painful curiosity.
The rudimentary precautions to keep our imprisonment endurable he would not observe.
It was on the sixth day of our imprisonment that I peeped for the last time, and presently found myself alone.
It had found the door!
He perceived a hold on me--he threatened he would shout and bring the Martians upon us.
In the darkness I could just see the thing--like an elephant's trunk more than anything else--waving towards me and touching and examining the wall, coals, wood and ceiling.
To the inhabitants of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet----"
I opened the door of the coal cellar, and stood there in the darkness staring at the faintly lit doorway into the kitchen, and listening. Had the Martian seen me?
He lay still.
I had been dozing, but in an instant I was awake. All day and all night we sat face to face, I weary but resolute, and he weeping and complaining of his immediate hunger.
In the triangle of bright outer sunlight I saw the Martian, in its Briareus of a handling-machine, scrutinizing the curate's head.
I turned by an effort, stumbled over the curate, and stopped at the scullery door.
From certain vague memories I am inclined to think my own mind wandered at times.
And so our widened incompatibility ended at last in open conflict. For two vast days we struggled in undertones and wrestling contests. There were times when I beat and kicked him madly, times when I cajoled and persuaded him, and once I tried to bribe him with the last bottle of burgundy, for there was a rain-water pump from which I could get water.
"Shut up!" I said, rising to my feet, and in a terror lest the Martians should hear us.
I would not let him eat any more that day.
He would neither desist from his attacks on the food nor from his noisy babbling to himself.
With one last touch of humanity I turned the blade back and struck him with the butt.
He talked with his voice rising slowly, through the greater part of the eighth and ninth days--threats, entreaties, mingled with a torrent of half-sane and always frothy repentance for his vacant sham of God's service, such as made me pity him.
But neither force nor kindness availed; he was indeed beyond reason.
Slowly I began to realise the complete overthrow of his intelligence, to perceive that my sole companion in this close and sickly darkness was a man insane.
I had strange and hideous dreams whenever I slept. It sounds paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me, and kept me a sane man.
I defied him, although I felt no assurance that he might not do this thing.
It has already been too long delayed."
I traced it slowly feeling over the kitchen.
I preached acceptable folly--my God, what folly!--when I should have stood up, though I died for it, and called upon them to repent--repent! . . .
"I have been still too long," he said, in a tone that must have reached the pit, "and now I must bear my witness.
I trembled violently; I could scarcely stand upright.
The word of the Lord is upon me!"
He went headlong forward and lay stretched on the ground.
I stumbled over him and stood panting.
Before he was halfway across the kitchen I had overtaken him.
"It is just.
Woe unto this unfaithful city!
For a while I stood fascinated by that slow, fitful advance.
I was struck by a sudden thought.
"Nay," shouted the curate, at the top of his voice, standing likewise and extending his arms.
In the darkness I heard the curate drinking.
The wine press of God!"
But that day, at any rate, he did not.
In three strides he was at the door leading into the kitchen.
In the afternoon he made a feeble effort to get at the food.
I go!
I thought that its length might be insufficient to reach me.
I prayed copiously.
For a few minutes there was a tussle.
On me and mine be the punishment laid.
"Speak!
Suddenly I heard a noise without, the run and smash of slipping plaster, and the triangular aperture in the wall was darkened.
"It is just, O God!" he would say, over and over again.
I was fierce with fear.
Presently I heard it nearer--in the scullery, as I judged.
We have sinned, we have fallen short.
I went back quickly and quietly into the scullery.
We stood panting and threatening each other.
Oppressors of the poor and needy . . . !
Then the faint metallic jingle returned.
Something was moving to and fro there, very quietly; every now and then it tapped against the wall, or started on its movements with a faint metallic ringing, like the movements of keys on a split-ring. Then a heavy body--I knew too well what--was dragged across the floor of the kitchen towards the opening.
Then, with a faint, hoarse cry, I forced myself across the scullery.
Then I saw through a sort of glass plate near the edge of the body the face, as we may call it, and the large dark eyes of a Martian, peering, and then a long metallic snake of tentacle came feeling slowly through the hole.
An age of almost intolerable suspense intervened; then I heard it fumbling at the latch!
He began to raise his voice--I prayed him not to.
"For God's sake----"
On the eighth day he began to talk aloud instead of whispering, and nothing I could do would moderate his speech.
For a time that scared me; but any concession would have shortened our chance of escape beyond estimating.
In the end I planted myself between him and the food, and told him of my determination to begin a discipline.
What was it doing now?
Then he slept awhile, and began again with renewed strength, so loudly that I must needs make him desist.
I looked up and saw the lower surface of a handling-machine coming slowly across the hole.
There was poverty, sorrow; the poor were trodden in the dust, and I held my peace.
He rose to his knees, for he had been sitting in the darkness near the copper.
Instead of keeping close to me and trying to oust me from the slit, the curate had gone back into the scullery.
The Martians understood doors!
It passed, scraping faintly across the cellar door.
I divided the food in the pantry, into rations to last us ten days.
To my mind, the pamphlet would have been much better without them.
Apparently the vegetable kingdom in Mars, instead of having green for a dominant colour, is of a vivid blood-red tint.
Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, "teacher and agent of the brain." While the rest of the body dwindled, the hands would grow larger.
Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians.
Our house had collapsed backward; the front portion, even on the ground floor, had been destroyed completely; by a chance the kitchen and scullery had escaped, and stood buried now under soil and ruins, closed in by tons of earth on every side save towards the cylinder.
They called her Khoroshavka.
She broke by fits and starts into screeching laughter at what was going on in the yard.
She went about with bare feet, wearing only a dirty chemise.
She was to be tried for stealing and incendiarism.
She was serving her term of imprisonment for illicit sale of spirits.
This woman stood silent, but kept smiling with pleasure and approval at what was going on below.
The twelfth prisoner, who paid no attention to what was going on, was a very tall, stately girl, the daughter of a deacon, who had drowned her baby in a well.
what are you up to?" shouted the inspector's assistant, coming in from behind.
"What are you here for?"
"If I could but get cigarettes and take a whiff!" she said to herself, and all her thoughts centred on the one desire to smoke and drink.
Three hours later the desire to eat had passed, and she felt only weak.
I'm not going to talk to you."
At first she cried, but then quieted down and sat perfectly stunned in the prisoners' room, waiting to be led back.
Maslova was glad of the money, because it could give her the only thing she now desired.
"She has returned from the Law Courts, sir," said one of the soldiers, coming forward with his fingers lifted to his cap.
Finding that her cry was also taken as something natural and expected, and feeling incapable of altering matters, she was horror-struck and began to weep in despair, knowing that she must submit to the cruel and surprising injustice that had been done her.
At last, about five o'clock, she was allowed to go, and was led away through the back door by her escort, the Nijni man and the Tchoovash. Then, still within the entrance to the Law Courts, she gave them 50 copecks, asking them to get her two rolls and some cigarettes.
What you have deserved, that you've got.
As she was leaving the court she turned to the usher with the question whether she might give Maslova a little money.
I won't have this sort of thing."
CHAPTER XXIX.
During the first interval of her trial, when the soldiers were eating bread and hard-boiled eggs in her presence, her mouth watered and she realised she was hungry, but considered it beneath her dignity to beg of them.
"My respects to you, miss," said another, winking at her.
The usher said she might.
But she had to wait long, for the secretary, who should have given the order for her to go, forgot about the prisoners while talking and even disputing with one of the advocates about the article forbidden by the censor.
She wanted only two things now--tobacco and strong drink.
When she was brought to the gate of the prison, a hundred convicts who had arrived by rail were being led in.
But seeing the quiet, business-like faces of judges and jury, who heard this news as if it were perfectly natural and expected, she grew indignant, and proclaimed loudly to the whole Court that she was not guilty.
MASLOVA IN PRISON.
She was not allowed to smoke on the way, and, with her craving unsatisfied, she continued her way to the prison.
Come, come; don't give yourself airs," showing his teeth and his eyes glittering when she pushed him away.
"You rascal!
Maslova reached her cell only at six in the evening, tired and footsore, having, unaccustomed as she was to walking, gone 10 miles on the stony road that day.
The convicts, bearded, clean-shaven, old, young, Russians, foreigners, some with their heads shaved and rattling with the chains on their feet, filled the anteroom with dust, noise and an acid smell of perspiration.
Maslova was going to say she had been brought back from the Law Courts, but she was so tired that she did not care to speak.
The convict shrank back and jumped away.
"Well, hand her over to the chief warder.
At first she thought she had made a mistake; she could not imagine herself as a convict in Siberia, and could not believe what she heard.
The attendant was hurt by her want of confidence, and that was why he treated Maslova so brusquely.
One dark man with a moustache, the rest of his face and the back of his head clean shaved, rattling with his chains and catching her feet in them, sprang near and embraced her.
"What! don't you know your chum?
The chief warder came up, gave Maslova a slap on the shoulder, and making a sign with his head for her to follow led her into the corridor of the women's ward.
What astonished her most was that young men--or, at any rate, not old men--the same men who always looked so approvingly at her (one of them, the public prosecutor, she had seen in quite a different humour) had condemned her.
In this state Botchkova and Kartinkin found her when they were led into the same room after being sentenced.
It was then she received the unexpected sentence.
While she was sitting in the prisoners' room before the trial and during the intervals, she saw these men looking in at the open door pretending they had to pass there on some business, or enter the room and gaze on her with approval.
She did brighten up a little when Botchkova and Kartinkin were led away and an attendant brought her three roubles.
"You just take it.
"A lady--what lady?"
What have you gained?
"Sokoloff, take her in!" shouted the assistant inspector.
justified yourself, have you?
"Yes, sir."
Passing Maslova, all the convicts looked at her, and some came up to her and brushed her as they passed.
I don't bother you, do I?" she repeated this several times, and was silent again.
Maslova sat with her hands inside her sleeves, hanging her head and looking in front of her at the dirty floor without moving, only saying: "I don't bother you, so don't you bother me.
She longed for spirits so that she tasted them and felt the strength they would give her; and she greedily breathed in the air when the fumes of tobacco reached her from the door of a room that opened into the corridor.
She was crushed by the unexpectedly severe sentence and tormented by hunger.
The assistant assailed Maslova.
Botchkova began at once to scold her, and call her a "convict."
"Well!
It was the advocate's wife, who did not seem to be in the least bit troubled by her ugliness.
"Yes, I think so.
Else they'll all go off for a change of air; then you may have to wait three months before they return.
"But he spoke so badly that no one could make anything of it," Nekhludoff said, still more astonished.
And he is such an impenetrable fool that you'll scarcely be able to do anything with him."
"To the Court of Appeal, criminal department, etc., etc.
The jury in their verdict acquit her of the intent to rob, or participation in the stealing of valuables, from which it follows that they intended also to acquit her of the intent to murder, and only through a misunderstanding, which arose from the incompleteness of the president's summing up, omitted to express it in due form in their answer.
But the assistant had not reached the door before it opened and the sounds of loud, animated voices were heard; the voice of a middle-aged, sturdy merchant, with a red face and thick moustaches, and the voice of Fanarin himself.
"This sentence is the direct result of the most glaring judicial perversion and error," he continued, impressively, "and there are grounds for its revocation. Firstly, the reading of the medical report of the examination of Smelkoff's intestines was interrupted by the president at the very beginning.
"What an affected fellow!" said the advocate's wife, when he had gone out.
The Queen, his mother, called him Curlicue, because it was a name she rather liked, and it seemed to suit him.
He had crooked legs and squinting eyes, a large mouth all on one side, and a hunchback.
So come here both of you and let me crown you, and we will have the wedding at once.'
'Sunbeam, my darling--only wait for me a moment.'
To complete her generous work the Fairy presented them with the wonderful cabinet and all the treasures it contained, which were worth at least ten kingdoms.
'Then you have met with the same fate as I have,' said he.
King Grumpy was so convinced that Prince Curlicue would soon get tired of being in prison, and so consent to marry the Princess Cabbage-Stalk, that he sent ambassadors to her father proposing that she should come and be married to his son, who would make her perfectly happy.
Though he had only his dagger, he defended himself so well that he escaped without any harm, and presently the old Fairy stopped the fray and asked the Prince if he was still of the same mind.
Without in the least expecting an answer, the Prince asked it:
She was quaintly dressed in a ruff and farthingale, and a velvet hood covered her snow-white hair.
No prince equalled him in cleverness and kindness of heart, but unfortunately he was most terribly ugly.
Breathe upon the yellow side and you will become like the pretty shepherdess you so much admire, and you will have won the love of the handsome shepherd whose picture I have already seen you studying with interest.
'No, sire,' replied the Prince.
'You seem sorrowful, my son,' she said.
'Indeed, Princess,' replied Florimond, 'it is yourself, but you must have a new name, since the old one does not suit you now.
Her hair, black as ebony, was spread across the pillows, making her face look ivory white, and the Prince noticed that she was unquiet; and when he softly advanced, fearing to wake her, he could hear her sigh, and murmur to herself:
Are we pursued, think you?
Then the lady turned to Prince Curlicue, and said:
The clatter it made upon the floor attracted the Princess Cabbage-Stalk's attention.
'No, indeed; nothing should make me marry you; in fact, I don't think I shall ever love anyone,' cried the Princess.
But as soon as she was safely out she began to be rather sorry for herself.
This King Grumpy, as he was called, had one son, who was as different from his father as he could possibly be.
At this moment a huge Eagle flew into the room, holding in its talons a Golden Branch, upon which were growing what looked like clusters of cherries, only every cherry was a single glowing ruby.
This he presented to the Prince, who guessed by this time that he was in some way to break the enchantment that surrounded the sleeping lady. Taking the branch he touched her lightly with it, saying:
At this moment their conversation was interrupted by two mice, who, breathless from running, flung themselves headlong through the hole into the tree, nearly crushing the Grasshopper and the Cricket, though they got out of the way as fast as they could and stood up in a dark corner.
'One would think that I and my crutch were put in on purpose to make that slim, charming young shepherdess in the next picture look prettier by contrast.
Upon the long table twelve mice were fastened by the tail, and just in front of each one's nose, but quite beyond its reach, lay a tempting morsel of fat bacon.
The grass and briers were growing as high as if it were a hundred years since anyone had set foot there, but the Princess got through at last, though she gave herself a good many scratches by the way, and then she went into a dark, gloomy hall, where there was but one tiny hole in the wall through which the daylight could enter.
'What! can you speak?' said he.
The way was long, and lay through a thick wood, where the Princess heard strange voices calling to her from every side, but she was in such a hurry that she stopped for nothing, and at last she came to the courtyard of the Enchanter's castle.
'Get out of my sight, obstinate Prince.
And at this moment a voice in her ear said softly:
In the meantime Prince Peerless had discovered the Princess's absence, and was lamenting over it by the river's brim, when he suddenly became aware of the presence of a little old woman.
Prince Peerless hastened after her at the top of his speed, but could not get any nearer; then he called to her:
Help, help us now!'
The Prince after one glance at it turned away with a disdainful air, which greatly offended his father.
Be called Princess Sunbeam, for you are bright and charming enough to deserve the name.'
In the meantime the Princess Cabbage-Stalk had reached the palace, travelling in a litter.
'No, I will never consent to that.'
'I tell you that you shall marry her,' cried King Grumpy angrily.
'Certainly it is becoming in YOU to object to that,' said King Grumpy, 'since you are ugly enough to frighten anyone yourself.'
'How I wish,' said the Fairy, 'that I dared to tell you what is in store for you, and warn you of the traps which lie in your path, but I must not.
Quite tired out by so many new and wonderful experiences, the Princess sat down to rest at the foot of a tree, and there she fell fast asleep.
I am called Curlicue, and am an object of derision; I entreat you to make me less ridiculous.'
'How could I be pleased to marry an ugly, lame Princess?'
As he met with no hindrance, he soon reached the enchanted wood which surrounded the castle, and there he thought he saw the Princess Sunbeam gliding before him among the trees.
ONCE upon a time there was a King who was so morose and disagreeable that he was feared by all his subjects, and with good reason, as for the most trifling offences he would have their heads cut off.
The tiny door swung back, and a soft crimson light gleamed over the whole cabinet.
'Madam,' said Prince Curlicue, 'I wish to be allowed to restore your beloved Florimond to his natural form, since I cannot forget the tears you shed for him.'
But is there nothing you wish for yourself?'
Isn't a Grasshopper as good as a Cricket?' said she.
It's a pretty little revenge to keep them like that.'
'Rise, Prince,' said the Fairy, touching him with the Golden Branch. 'Be as accomplished as you are handsome, and take the name of Prince Peerless, since that is the only title which will suit you now.'
I am the Queen of the Comets, and can bring you to great honour if you will marry me.'
'I have an idea that you will soon overtake her.'
So the cats could always see the mice, but could not touch them, and the hungry mice were tormented by the sight and smell of the delicious morsels which they could never seize.
The King, who was very much annoyed to see how greatly she disliked it, took a mirror, and holding it up before the unhappy Princess, said:
'What is the matter?'
'And where may you be going, Gammer Grasshopper?'
'Oh dear, yes! as well as the way to my own house, Madam.
Immediately a soft voice said in his ear:
'Oh!
He entered without difficulty, and in the hall the terrible old Fairy met him.
The Princess asked Prince Peerless, as he knew the country better than she did, to tell her of some peasant who would give her a lodging, and he said he knew of an old woman whose cottage would be the very place for her, it was so nice and so pretty.
'I can talk because I was a Prince,' said the Cricket.
Now you may choose.'
And instantly the handsome Prince Peerless became a poor little black Cricket, whose only idea would have been to find himself a cosy cranny behind some blazing hearth, if he had not luckily remembered the Fairy Douceline's injunction to seek the Golden Branch.
She grew tall and straight and pretty, with eyes like shining stars, and a skin as white as milk.
And he fitted in the little key and turned it.
Taking a hammer he broke away a bit of the stone, and found behind it a little golden key.
They are princes and princesses who have happened to offend me.
'Alas I madam,' cried the Princess, 'is it impossible to be at once wise and beautiful?'
The Prince found that it proceeded from an immense glowing carbuncle, made into a box, which lay before him.
Prince Curlicue was delighted; he opened one after another, until at last he came to one tiny drawer which contained only an emerald key.
Knowing that the King would certainly have their heads cut off for allowing the Prince to escape, they then agreed to say that he was ill, and after making the smallest among them look as much like Prince Curlicue as possible, they put him into his bed and sent to inform the King.
'Be firm, happen what may, and seek the Golden Branch.'
The Princess lost no time in offering it the carbuncle box, which it grasped in its talons, and instantly disappeared, leaving in its place the most beautiful Prince she had ever seen, who was splendidly dressed, and wore a diamond crown.
'Princess,' she said, 'your regrets are so piteous that I have come to offer you the choice of goodness or beauty.
'That is very amiable of you, dear Prince,' said the Fairy, 'but it is reserved for another person to do that.
The roses were crimson diamonds, with emerald leaves.
Without saying a word she ran to the door, but it was covered with a thick spider's web, and when she broke it she found another, and another, and another. In fact, there was no end to them; the Princess's arms ached with tearing them down, and yet she was no nearer to getting out, and the wicked Enchanter behind her laughed maliciously.
Terrified as the Princess was, she did not hesitate to obey, and hastened to put back all the other precious things precisely as she had found them.
The walls were of turquoises, and upon a low couch lay a lovely lady, who seemed to be asleep.
It grew in the midst of a wonderful garden, all the paths of which were strewn with pearls as big as peas.
So he put back the box and locked the cabinet up again, and, having replaced the key in the crack in the wall, hastened down to the gallery.
'Well, I must say Curlicue is ugly enough, but I don't think YOU need have thought twice before consenting to marry him.'
For three days nothing happened, but at last in the night the Princess heard something flutter against her window, and drawing back her curtains she saw in the moonlight that it was an Eagle.
The Prince thought all the rooms looked strangely old-fashioned, with their antique furniture, but as there was a good library he was pleased, for he was very fond of reading, and he soon got permission to have as many books as he liked.
This Golden Branch is indeed a marvel, a single leaf from it makes one rich for ever.
How lucky we were to escape!'
After this they met every day as they guarded their flocks, and were so happy that Prince Peerless begged the Princess to marry him, so that they might never be parted again.
But his surprise was great to find that they represented the same scenes as the windows of the gallery, and what was more, that they seemed to be alive.
She picked it up, and after a moment's consideration decided that it must belong to the curious old cabinet in the corner, which had no visible keyhole.
Cannot we journey together?'
Never was there a beautiful soul in such a frightful little body, but in spite of his appearance everybody loved him.
Thereupon, in spite of the King's orders, the guards gave him an excellent supper, and when he had eaten it he again opened his book, but could see none of the wonderful pictures, which convinced him that he must have been dreaming before.
She was unexpectedly impressed.
Tell me how it is that with all your success you haven't been happy?"
Try and remember who I am and what we used to mean to one another.
We can wipe out all the memories we don't want.
"You are safe, remember--quite safe.
"You're a nice sort of person!
"Do you remember how glad I was to see you?
We must alter all that, dear.
I shall move to a different sort of hotel to-morrow.
"The ending was always what bothered me, you know."
It is the beginning of my task, too, Philip, with you--for you.
But here you are, free, with the whole world before you, and your last danger disappearing with the knowledge that I am ready to be your friend and am sensible about everything that has happened.
She was not angry, not even hurt.
"I don't think there was ever much question of our being in love with one another, was there?
But it was all so hopeless, wasn't it!
"Well, you needn't be any longer," she declared.
And as to friends," she whispered, looking up at him with a little provocative gleam in her eyes, "don't you count?
If you really want to know, I do care for her."
Listen and I'll tell you something--at the bottom of my heart I rather admire you for what you did.
You must help me choose one.
Don't you want your reward?"
She linked her arm through his, her head sank a little upon his shoulder.
She laughed at him mockingly.
I have made up my mind what I want in life and I am going to have it.
The sight of you brought it all back.
Can't you draw down that curtain?"
The horror of it was in his blood, yet he did his best to obey.
They waited until the theatre was half empty before they left their seats. Then they joined the little throng of stragglers at the end.
She set her glass down quickly.
"You want me to marry you?" he demanded--"simply marry you?
"What friends have I in England?" she retorted.
A waiter brought their first course, and she at once evinced interest in her food.
He drank glass after glass of wine and called for liqueurs. She held his fingers for a moment under the table.
He shivered.
"Remember that what you did ... well, in a way it was for my sake, wasn't it?--for love of me?
The old days are passed.
She nodded several times.
It seems bright enough here, and gay.
I can't realise anything.
To-morrow I am going to begin.
"Then you had better make up your mind," she told him firmly, "that you are going to climb up out of there, and when you're out, you're going to stay out.
They sat there until nearly three o'clock.
She laughed, not quite naturally.
She nodded appreciatively.
Raggedy Ann introduced them one by one and Raggedy Andy shook hands with each.
Raggedy Andy, will you have another cup of tea?" as if the French doll was talking.
And then Marcella answered for Raggedy Andy, "Oh, yes, thank you!
Marcella did not always drink all of the tea, often she poured a little down their mouths.
But there was really nothing strange about this fact, after all.
When Raggedy Andy was first brought to the nursery he was very quiet.
You see, her head had been cracked.
All of them had cried the night Susan (that was her name) fell off the toy box and cracked her china head.
You see how easy it is to pass over the little bumps of life if we are happy inside.
Years and years and years and years!
Raggedy Andy could patiently wait until Marcella put all the dollies to bed and left them for the night, alone in the nursery.
Marcella drank it instead.
But he did his best and saved his little Mistress a lot of work.
If Raggedy Ann had a pencil in her rag hand and Marcella guided it for her, Raggedy Ann could count up to ten--sometimes.
Some of the dolls were without arms and legs.
Marcella took the French doll's hand, and passed a cup of "tea" to Raggedy Andy, and said, "Mr.
There was Raggedy Ann, the French doll, Henny, the little Dutch doll, Uncle Clem, and a few others.
Perhaps this was just as well, for, most of the dolls were moist inside from the "tea" of the day before.
"We love Raggedy Ann because she is so kindly and happy, and we know we shall like you too, for you talk like Raggedy Ann and have the same cheery smile!"
Even Raggedy Ann, with all her wisdom, did not really know how long Raggedy Andy and she had been rag dolls.
Then all, catching hands, danced in a circle around it, laughing and shouting in their tiny doll voices.
None of the other dolls spoke all day, either.
Neither the French doll nor Raggedy Andy knew what was going on, for they were thinking real hard to themselves.
THE NURSERY DANCE
Through all this Raggedy Andy kept right on thinking his pleasant thoughts, and really did not know he had fallen from the chair.
"Now that we know each other so well, what do you say to a game, Uncle Clem?" Raggedy Andy cried, as he caught Uncle Clem and danced about the floor.
One had a cracked head.
Of course, he fell out of his chair once, and his shoe button eyes went "Click!" against the floor, but it wasn't his fault.
And so Raggedy Andy was quiet all day, and so the day finally passed.
The day might have passed very slowly had it not been for the happy memories which filled Raggedy Andy's cotton-stuffed head.
One can, you know, when one has been a rag doll as long as Raggedy Andy had.
Quite often, too, Marcella forgot to wash their faces after a "tea," and Fido would do it for them when he came into the nursery and found the dolls with sweets upon their faces.
And when the mama and daddy mice were away, I used to cuddle the tiny little baby mice!"
"Oh, indeed we shall!" the dollies all answered.
Sugar and water, if taken in small quantities, would not give the dolls colic, Marcella would tell them, but she did not know that it made their cotton, or sawdust insides, quite sticky.
Raggedy Andy was so loppy he could hardly be placed in a chair so that he would stay, and Marcella jiggled the table.
It is so delicious!"
Nor did they drink the tea when it was poured for them.
Marcella had played in the nursery all day and of course they did not speak in front of her.
Raggedy Andy did not speak all day, but he smiled pleasantly to all the other dolls.
Raggedy Andy did not speak all day.
Marcella thought they did, though, and often had them saying things which they really were not even thinking of.
For instance, when Marcella served water with sugar in it and little oyster crackers for "tea," Raggedy Andy was thinking of Raggedy Ann, and the French doll was thinking of one time when Fido was lost.
Raggedy Andy was given one of Uncle Clem's clean white nighties and shared Uncle Clem's bed.
She was a nice doll, though, and the others all liked her very much.
But he did not even fidget.
Henny, the Dutch doll, dragged the little square music box out into the center of the room and wound it up.
It was of these pleasant times Raggedy Andy was thinking all day, and this was the reason he did not notice that Marcella was speaking for him.
"No wonder you were never lonesome!" said Uncle Clem, who was very kind and loved everybody and everything.
Marcella kissed them all good night and left them to sleep until morning.
She did not stop, however, till she had lit all the eighty, but Scheih Ibrahim was not conscious of this, and when, soon after that, Noureddin proposed to have some of the lustres lit, he answered:
"Here," said Noureddin, "let us pass the night," and reclining on the sofas they soon fell asleep.
"May it please your Majesty, I had gone to the slave market to buy myself a cook.
Still personating the fisherman, the Caliph answered: "Scheih Ibrahim, whatever is in the purse I will share equally with you, but as to the slave I will keep her for myself.
Now here it must be related that when the Caliph went upstairs with the plate of fish he ordered the vizir to hasten to the palace and bring back four slaves bearing a change of raiment, who should wait outside the pavilion till the Caliph should clap his hands.
I who have four times made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and have renounced wine for ever."
In the middle of it was a vast pavilion, whose superb saloon had eighty windows, each window having a lustre, lit solely when the Caliph spent the evening there.
Besides, he has not sent an express with the patent, without which the letter is useless. Leave all to me, and I will take the consequences."
Here are two pieces of gold for the expenses."
The paintings and furniture were of astonishing beauty, and between each window was a silver arm holding a candle.
Till near midnight they continued drinking, laughing, and singing together.
For punishment I condemn you to spend the rest of the night with me in company of these worthy people.
"Commander of the Faithful," he said, "I must tell you that four or five days ago Scheih Ibrahim told me that he wished to have an assembly of the ministers of his mosque, and asked permission to hold it in the pavilion.
"And where do you go now?" asked the Caliph.
At sight of the gold, Scheih Ibrahim set off at once to execute the commission.
The king granted these requests, and the announcement caused universal grief, for the memory of Noureddin's father was still fresh in the hearts of his people.
Never having been in Bagdad before, they did not know where to seek a lodging.
"Negligent vizir, look at the pavilion, and tell me why it is lit up when I am not there."
Meanwhile I will give you an apartment in my palace, where you will be treated with all honour."
Throwing himself on me like a madman, he tore me from my horse, beat me to his heart's content, and left me in the state your Majesty sees."
Then, turning to the king, he said:
When they had finished Noureddin took thirty gold pieces (all that remained of what Sangiar had given him) and presented them to the Caliph, who, thanking him, asked as a further favour if the lady would play him one piece on the lute.
"I beg you to get us something to eat that we may make merry together." Being very avaricious, Scheih Ibrahim determined to spend only the tenth part of the money and to keep the rest to himself.
Wait here till I return."
If you do not agree to these conditions you shall have nothing."
When they reached the garden gate they found it open, to the great indignation of the Caliph.
This remonstrance only irritated him the more.
Recognising him at once in spite of his disguise, he threw himself at his feet imploring forgiveness.
The door of the pavilion being also open, he went softly upstairs, and looked in at the half-closed door of the saloon.
A troop of horsemen was seen at that moment riding at full gallop towards the square.
The gate was shut, but in front of it was an open vestibule with a sofa on either side.
"I should be sorry for that," answered the Caliph, "and I am going to take steps to prevent it.
I am determined to go in and make her play to me."
Only the door-keeper lived there, an old soldier named Scheih Ibrahim, who had strict orders to be very careful whom he admitted, and never to allow any one to sit on the sofas by the door.
When the vessel had come to an anchor they paid five gold pieces for their passage and went ashore.
There the finest fish in the Tigris were to be found, but fishing was strictly forbidden.
As soon, then, as the fair Persian had put on her veil they fled together, and had the good fortune to get out of the town without being observed.
"Giafar," replied the Caliph, "you have committed three faults--first, in giving the permission; second, in not mentioning it to me; and third, in not investigating the matter more closely.
It happened that evening that he had gone out on an errand.
"Then, if you will listen to me," said the Caliph, "you will immediately return to Balsora.
"Your majesty has no need to obey this letter.
Great was his surprise to see Scheih Ibrahim, whose sobriety he had never doubted, drinking and singing with a young man and a beautiful lady.
I authorise you."
It happened that night, however, that a fisherman had taken advantage of the gate being open to go in and cast his nets.
This is the identical slave, whom instead of bringing to your Majesty he gave to his own son.
I will give you a letter to the king, which will ensure you a good reception from him."
I granted his request, but forgot since to mention it to your Majesty."
Throwing himself on the ground at the Caliph's feet, he said: "Commander of the Faithful, your miserable slave has offended you, and craves forgiveness."
About that time the Persian, perceiving that the room was lit by only one miserable tallow candle, asked Scheih Ibrahim to light some of the beautiful candles in the silver arms.
While the king read the letter he changed colour.
The king's wrath was kindled against Noureddin.
"Never have I heard a finer voice, nor the lute better played.
"You need not touch it yourself.
While there I heard a slave being offered for 4,000 pieces.
Presently Scheih Ibrahim asked the beautiful Persian if anything were wanting to complete her enjoyment of the evening.
"What!" said the king; "is that wretch still alive?
At the mouth of the Euphrates they found a ship just about to start for Bagdad.
He became one of his most intimate courtiers, and lived long in great happiness with the fair Persian.
Then he desired the fisherman to change clothes with him, and in a few minutes the Caliph was transformed into a fisherman, even to the shoes and the turban. Taking the two fish in his hand, he returned to the vizir, who, not recognising him, would have sent him about his business.
"Come with me," said Scheih Ibrahim, "I will lodge you better, and will show you a magnificent garden belonging to me." So saying the doorkeeper led the way into the Caliph's garden, the beauties of which filled them with wonder and amazement.
The Caliph then took a sheet of paper, and wrote the following letter, at the top of which he put in very small characters this formula to show that he must be implicitly obeyed:--"In the name of the Most Merciful God.
The vizir's first question was whether Noureddin were still alive.
Then he withdrew, in spite of repeated invitations to remain.
Calling the grand-vizir, Giafar, he said to him:
While I dress myself as a citizen, go and disguise yourself, and then come with me."
"Fear nothing," said the Caliph, "only rise up and draw thy nets."
"Haroun-al-Raschid, son of Mahdi, sends this letter to Mohammed Zinebi, his cousin.
Oblige me, I beg you, by relating your history."
"Commander of the Faithful," said the vizir, "if Scheih Ibrahim recognises you he will die of fright."
Covered from head to foot with mire and streaming with blood he rose, and leaning on two of his slaves went straight to the palace, where he demanded an audience of the king, to whom he related what had taken place in these words:
Giafar rode at full speed through the square, and alighted at the steps of the palace, where the king came to greet him.
Scheih Ibrahim, still more enraged, then went out to fetch a stick.
Noureddin took out two gold pieces, and giving them to Scheih Ibrahim said,
"Wherever the hand of Allah leads me," said Noureddin.
BY MISADVENTURE
Bryce was keeping a quiet eye on Ransford.
He believed he was not mistaken--but if he was right, Ransford the next instant regained full control of himself and made no sign.
"He told me that he had only arrived at Charing Cross that very morning, having travelled from Paris during the night.
He had just seen the body of the unfortunate man and had looked carefully at the features.
And when the jury came back the stranger was at once ushered into the witness-box, and the Coroner turned to the jury and the court.
He saw at once that Ransford, however strenuously he might be fighting to keep his face under control, was most certainly agitated by the Coroner's announcement.
But here Bryce met his first check.
But his Grace knew nothing.
"He did not give us any address in London, nor in England," continued the witness.
"Third shelf from the bottom, doctor," he replied.
"I just wanted to see where the Spelbanks were buried--quite a lot of them, I see."
Bryce turned to the index at the end of his book--an index written out in various styles of handwriting.
The Coroner glanced at a marked passage in the personal column of the Times, and read it aloud:
I could have spared you the trouble of looking."
"Some of them, perhaps, with men whom your Grace only saw for a brief space of time--a few minutes, possibly.
The probabilities in this case are that the man was interested in the book because it dealt with his own town."
He was not a man of whom he had any knowledge whatever--he could not recollect ever having seen him anywhere at any time.
He turned to Campany.
And Bryce, satisfied and secretly elated, turned to hear what Mr. Alexander Chilstone had to tell.
He knew literally nothing of him--could not think of any reason at all why this Mr. John Braden should wish to see him.
It was possible that he might be able to tell something of moment--he might, after all, know something of this apparently mysterious stranger, who, for anything that Mrs. Partingley or anybody else could say to the contrary, might have had an appointment and business with him.
"The fact is, your Grace doesn't know him and knows nothing about him," observed the Coroner.
And now Archdale himself, as representing the architects who held a retaining fee in connection with the Cathedral, was called to give his opinion--and he gave it in almost the same words which Bryce had heard him use twenty-four hours previously.
And Bryce turned again to Coroner and witness.
"You'll find useful indexes at the end," he said.
That," concluded Mr. Chilstone, "is all I can tell of my own knowledge.
You don't remember ever seeing this man in that way?"
"Found what you wanted?" he asked.
"Why this," answered the librarian.
He drew nothing against this, remarking casually that he had plenty of money in his pocket for the present: he did not even take the cheque-book which was offered him, saying that he would call for it later.
The evidence given in the first stages of the inquiry was all known to Bryce, and to most people in the court, already.
But suddenly remembering that there was a question which he could ask without exciting any suspicion or surmise, he faced round again on the librarian.
And it's at Barthorpe that I should make inquiries about him."
Why should any one but a Barthorpe man, past or present, be interested in that story so far as to carry an old account of it with him?
Mr. Dellingham told how he had met the dead man in the train, journeying from London to Wrychester.
The man may have picked it up for that reason--I've bought old books myself for less."
John Braden had called at the London & Colonies Bank, of which he, Mr. Chilstone, was manager, and introducing himself as having just arrived in England from Australia, where, he said, he had been living for some years, had asked to be allowed to open an account.
"So I understood from Mitchington."
"I think the doctor was there when that book you're speaking of was found," he remarked.
"Oh, I don't know!" he replied carelessly.
"And--if I may say so--rightly.
We are very much obliged to Mr. Chilstone--and when he has been sworn he will perhaps kindly tell us what he can."
Therefore, I conclude this stranger was a Barthorpe man.
"Southeast corner of Paradise," said Campany.
"I've been fed on it, man and boy, for five-and-forty years."
He had never heard the name of John Braden in his life--so far as he remembered.
You will observe," he said, as he passed it to the Coroner, "that it has certainly been inserted by our unfortunate customer."
"The advertisement is as follows," he announced.
But Bryce had no intention of making any revelations just then--as for himself he was going to tell just as much as he pleased and no more.
Nothing whatever is known at Barthorpe--which is a very small town--of any person of that name."
"'If this meets the eye of old friend Marco, he will learn that Sticker wishes to see him again.
"Isn't there a register of burials within the Cathedral?" he inquired. "Some book in which they're put down?
"Several tombs.
He thought of what he might tell--if he told all the truth.
Simpson Harker made no remark, and Bryce remembered what Mr. Dellingham had said when the book was found.
But Bryce affected not to hear the last question; he walked over to the place which Campany had indicated, and taking down the second book carried it to an adjacent table.
"I suppose you know every spout and gargoyle!"
If he was an antiquary, there are lots of old things at Saxonsteade which he might wish to see.
"None!
I saw the book--a curious old binding and queer old copper-plates.
"I'm credited with having an unusually good memory for faces," answered the Duke.
Campany called across the room to him.
"The gentleman who has just stepped into the witness-box is Mr. Alexander Chilstone, manager of the London & Colonies Bank, in Threadneedle Street.
"Oh, yes!" replied Bryce, primed with a ready answer.
"I don't see that that follows.
I was looking in the Memorials of Wrychester the other day, and I saw some names I want to trace."
Campany lifted his quill pen and pointed to a case of big leather-bound volumes in a far corner of the room.
But," he added, drawing a newspaper from his pocket, "here is an advertisement which I noticed in this morning's Times as I came down.
And with that the middle stage of the proceedings ended--and the last one came, watched by Bryce with increasing anxiety.
"They're all brought up to the present time--from four hundred years ago, nearly."
CHAPTER VI.
"What makes you think there's a clue--in that?" he asked.
And after a while he took the book back to its shelf, and turned to the wall on which the charts and maps were hung.
"We are unexpectedly able to get some evidence of identity, gentlemen," he observed.
"All the same," retorted Campany, "I should make inquiry at Barthorpe. You've got to go on probabilities.
And within a minute he found the name he wanted--there it was plainly before him--Richard Jenkins, died March 8th, 1715: buried, in Paradise, March 10th.
Bryce made some fitting remark and went out and home to his rooms--there to spend most of the ensuing evening in trying to puzzle out the various mysteries of the day.
"I will send for him at once," said her father.
He jumped up and ran back to a little hollow and lay down to hide in a patch of tall red flowers.
But before they came to the beaten ring the youngest maiden spied the gopher, and called out to her sisters to look at it.
Don't think any more of the Star-maidens, or you will have much trouble."
"It does not sound so hollow as it did," she said, "The mice have a visitor."
She begged to be let out, but it was no use.
"Those must be the Star-people," said his mother, who was a great magician--the prairie was full of magic in those days, before the white man came and the buffalo went.
But she only said, "High-feather is a brave man, and he is very good to me, and I will never leave him."
The time is so short that I cannot even look for one."
The Prince himself began to mistrust the White Cat, but he instantly felt a cat's claw scratch him gently, so he persevered, opened the millet-seed, and found inside a beautiful piece of soft white muslin that was four hundred ells long at the very least.
"Take your sword, cut off my head and my tail, and cast them into the flames," she said.
Never was there a pleasanter hunting party, and day after day the time passed so happily away that the Prince forgot all about the little dog he was searching for, and even forgot his own home and his father's promise.
The appointed time passed happily away, and one evening the White Cat reminded the Prince that on the next day he must return home.
When he was ready, the hands led him into a brilliantly-lighted room, in which was a table spread for supper.
This when cracked held a cherrystone, inside the cherrystone was a grain of wheat, and in the wheat a millet-seed.
They were to have a whole year in which to search, and were all to return to the castle on the same day, and present the various dogs they had chosen at the same hour.
So he determined to set them a task to perform, and whichever should be the most successful was to have the kingdom as his reward.
Then the youngest Prince stepped into the great hall and produced his walnut.
So the poor old King felt that now he would be obliged to give up his kingdom.
So he journeyed on from day to day, not knowing where he was going, until one night he lost his way in a thick dark forest, and after wandering many weary miles in the wind and rain he was glad to see at last a bright light shining through the trees.
The two eldest met with many adventures on their travels, but the youngest saw the most wonderful sights of all.
So they bade their father good-bye, and after agreeing to be back at the castle at the same hour, and on the same day, when a year should have passed away, the three brothers all started together.
But the White Cat told him that all would be well, and giving him an acorn, bade him mount the wooden horse and ride away.
They were waited upon by the mysterious hands, but many of the dishes were not to the Prince's liking.
Well, the second year passed away as quickly as the first, and the night before the day on which the three Princes were expected at their father's court, the White Cat gave the young Prince a walnut, telling him that it contained the muslin.
At the end of the room was a raised platform, upon which a number of cats were seated, all playing different musical instruments.
The Prince at once fell deeply in love with the charming Princess, and begged her to accompany him to his father's court as his bride.
She wore a long black veil, and was accompanied by a number of cats, dressed in black, and carrying swords.
The hands led him up to a wooden horse, and seemed to expect him to mount.
They had an excellent day's sport.
For he was growing an old man, and began to think it would soon be time for him to let one of them reign in his stead.
All the beautiful little dogs he had taken so much trouble to collect had been lost in the forest, and he was thoroughly weary and disheartened.
As soon as the hands had dressed him in a hunting-suit of green, he hurried down to join his hostess.
The spell that had been cast upon her was broken, and at the same time her courtiers and attendants, who had also been changed into cats, hastened in in their proper forms again, to pay their respects to their mistress.
So once more the brothers set out upon their travels.
But be sure you do not open the fruit until you are in the King's presence."
Stewed rats and mice may be a first-rate meal for a cat, but the Prince did not feel inclined to try them.
It was some time before he could decide what the task should be.
Of course, the Prince went back to the White Cat, and told her how very unfairly his father had behaved to him.
The Prince thanked her, and having bidden her a sorrowful farewell, mounted his wooden steed and rode away.
During the journey, the Princess told her husband the story of her enchantment.
However, the King did not feel inclined to give up his throne just yet, so he told the brothers that there was one more task they must first perform: they must bring him a piece of muslin so fine that it would pass through the eye of a needle.
Then the White Cat told him that if only he would do as she bade him all would be well.
At length the White Cat reminded him that in three days he must appear at court, and the Prince was terribly upset to think that he had now no chance of winning his father's kingdom.
Now, the fairies wished her to marry the King of the Dwarfs, and were so angry when she declared she would marry no one but her own true love, that they changed her into a White Cat as a punishment.
No sooner had he cast the head and the tail into the fire than a beautiful Princess appeared where the body of the cat had been.
The Prince declared that on no account would he treat her so cruelly; but she begged him so earnestly to do as she asked that at last he consented.
When they reached the palace, everyone was loud in praise of the two lovely little dogs the elder brothers had brought back with them, but when the youngest opened his acorn and showed a tiny dog, lying upon a white satin cushion, they knew that this must be the prettiest little dog in the world.
"In my palace I have some very clever spinners," she said; "and I will set them to work upon the muslin."
He was young and handsome, and as clever as a Prince should be, besides being brave.
She came straight up to the Prince, and in a sweet, sad little voice bade him welcome.
However, the White Cat ordered the hands to serve the Prince with the dishes he liked best, and at once, without his even mentioning his favorite food, he was supplied with every dainty he could think of.
She consented, and together they rode away.
He cracked it carefully, and found inside a hazel-nut.
The White Cat, who rode a monkey, proved herself a clever huntress, climbing the tallest trees with the greatest ease, and without once falling from her steed.
Before he reached the castle, he met his two brothers, who made fine fun of the wooden horse, and also of the big ugly dog which trotted by his side.
THE WHITE CAT
A great number of lords and servants accompanied them out of the city, but when they had ridden about a league they sent everyone back, and after embracing one another affectionately, they all set out to try their luck in different directions.
Then she bade him good-by, and he mounted the wooden horse and rode away.
The Prince began to think he must be dreaming, when the door opened, and a lovely little White Cat came in.
The Prince thought she must be mocking him, but when she held the acorn to his ear, he heard quite plainly a little dog's bark.
Then she ordered supper to be served, and the whole company sat down together.
Here he found a splendid fire blazing, beside which stood a comfortable arm-chair; the hands pointed invitingly towards it, and as soon as the Prince had seated himself they proceeded to take off his wet, muddy clothes, and dress him in a magnificent suit of silk and velvet.
She was delighted to welcome him, and when the Prince told her that the King had now ordered him to find a piece of muslin fine enough to go through the eye of a needle, she smiled at him very sweetly, and told him to be of good cheer.
Wherever he went he enquired for dogs, and hardly a day passed without his buying several, big and little, greyhounds, spaniels, lap-dogs, and sheep-dogs--in fact, every kind of dog that you could think of, and very soon he had a troop of fifty or sixty trotting along behind him, one of which he thought would surely win the prize.
But at last he told them that he had a fancy for a very beautiful little dog, and that they were all to set out to find one for him.
It passed with the greatest ease through the eye of the smallest needle in the kingdom, and the Prince felt that now the prize must be his.
She comforted him as best she could, and told him not to be afraid, for she would introduce him to the loveliest Princess the sun had ever shone upon.
The Doctor was lying back in his chair.
There was her engagement ring, a few ornaments like her watch, and very little money!
I'm not going to say a word--yet.
"As realistic in subject, if not in treatment, as Zola."
If her mother had remained at home, she would never have been allowed to go.
Unluckily for him, also, the appearance of his bride-elect in such an unexpected place was so appalling to him that his nerve failed him entirely.
She had but one enemy in the world, her Jack's best friend, or at least, he was his best friend until the days of her engagement.
She imagined she heard voices in the hall--that some one laughed--was there still laughter in the world?
No answer.
"There's rain in the air."
There was a moment of surprised silence.
The face was not so very cunning.
Then that she had been helped into a carriage, and then she had jolted and jolted and jolted over the pavings, always with his pale face opposite, and she knew that his eyes were full of pity.
She knew that if she did not, she would not sleep that night, nor smile the next day--and that seemed so unfair to others.
She stumbled weakly as she ran toward him, crying hysterically, "Jack, dear Jack, how did you find me?
She wrote a few lines on a card, enclosed it and sealed the envelope.
She led the child across to it, entered, and asked for an envelope.
She was numb!
In spite of herself, she rushed to the door, and pounded on it.
She felt for the door, found it--it was locked.
All the more reason for returning in good season, and here it was dark!
I'll tell you."
"Wait there a minute--and mum--.
It was a large room with an alcove--a bedroom.
She was impatient with herself, the world, living,--and there was no cab in sight.
A ransom?
The child did not seem six years old.
Bidding the child hurry, she followed her up the hill, and down the other side to a part of the city with which she was not familiar.
The child nodded.
The air was piercing.
I tapped at the door.
She stooped down.
She did not explain, and the child would not have understood, that she vouched for a special donation for the case as a sort of commemorative gift.
The whole thing had seemed so simple.
So I went and sat in the window looking down the road, until he came, spick and span in white flannels, with his head not yet dried from the douching he had taken.
But, unluckily, she belonged to a society pledged not to give alms in the streets, and her sense of the power of a moral obligation was a strong notion of duty, which had descended to her from her Puritan ancestors.
But was this a burglar's method?
But time was no longer measured by her!
She had a vague recollection that he came back.
A key was inserted and turned in the lock.
"Is it a real German victory?" I asked.
In this realization there was a touch of self-reproach.
"You are perfectly safe," and he went out, and closed and locked the door behind him.
But I had to let off to some one.
The poor are born with a horror of organized charity.
She drew her hands quickly across her eyes, and was conscious that the man had flung his hat and coat on the bed before he turned to face her.
Life is inartistic.
It was merely the epitome of all that Miss Moreland tried to forget--the little one born without a chance in the world.
She never remembered much more of that evening.
When she returned to the door, one thing was certain, she was alone. The only danger she need apprehend must come through that one door.
Through all her terror one idea was strong within her.
Obviously the thing to do was to deliver the child up to the police. It would be at once properly cared for, and the mother also.
"Well, anyway," said the Journalist, as we gathered up our belongings and prepared to shut up for the night, "the Youngster's ghost story was a good night cap compared to that."
All that night she lay and tossed and wept and raved, and longed in her fever to die.
And the next morning, early, messengers were flying about with notices of the bride's illness.--Miss Moreland's wedding was deferred by brain fever.
The Violinist tried to save the situation by saying gently: "Well, I don't know.
"No imagination, all the same," answered the Critic.
"I suppose also that it is a proof of another of his pet theories. Scratch civilized man, and you find the beast."
"It isn't far from here," she said.
Then a new terror came over her.
She pursued the child.
Some one coughed.
"I only do that," laughed the Critic, "when I'm getting paid for it. After all, as the Violinist remarked, the situation is a favorite one in melodrama, from the money-coining 'Two Orphans' down.
She pulled her rather roughly to her feet.
He still leaned against the wall, where the shock had flung him.
It was the old story--a dying mother--no father--no one to do anything--a child sent out to cunningly defy the law, but it seemed to be only for bread.
If we were going in two days, where was the good of leaving the flowers to die alone?
She could never forget the misery she had seen.
She was in front of her own door.
He had not come to seek her.
She called to the child.
Besides, it was not yet so very late.
But he was a gentleman, and these were the days when men did not revenge themselves on women who frankly rejected the attentions they had never encouraged.
Yet, as she had seen misery, even that might be worth while.
Why all this mystery?
Like all doctors whose associations are so largely with women, and who are moderately intelligent and temperamental, he knew a great deal about the dangers of the imagination.
Every one admired her.
She knew that he felt responsible for his pupils, and this had an unpleasant look.
There had been no real news so far as we knew, except that Japan had lined up with the Allies.
"I am not going into that.
It is after all only symbolic of the duality of the soul--or call it what you like.
The next day was very peaceful.
He took the pains to verify the two statements.
As always happens in any school there was a popular teacher.
Then there was but one thing to do--to lay the matter before the parents of the girl.
"Not a bit," he answered, running his keen brown eyes over us to be sure we were listening before he began:
When she entered it, she was at once driven to the Park Street station, where she bought a round trip ticket to Waltham.
She always looked upon the incident as her worst moment of tactlessness.
Some of her comrades would have loved her if she had given them the chance.
It is a shocking tale for the operating room--I mean the insane asylum."
But no one could ever get intimate with her.
She taught history and literature, and I imagine girls get more intimate with such a teacher than they ever do with the mathematics.
At this private school, there was, at the time of which I speak, what one might almost call a "principal girl."
This all seemed simple enough, but it puzzled the father, it made him unquiet in his mind.
AS ONE DREAMS
Just can't help turning herself inside out for her idol, and when the heart of a girl of seventeen turns itself inside out, almost always something comes out that is not her business.
I imagine that there is no doubt that the adolescent finds it much easier to confide in some one other than the parents who would seem to be her proper confidants.
"Do you presume," said the Journalist, "to pretend that this is a normal incident?"
'Sire,' she answered, 'I do not wish to complain, only I beg of you do not make me marry at all.
With the earliest dawn they were on their way, and though the Mice were in constant fear of being overtaken or trapped, they reached the Golden Branch in safety.
He lost no time in opening it, but what was his horror when he found that it contained a man's hand, which was holding a portrait.
Instantly the lady opened her lustrous eyes, and saw the Eagle hovering near.
'I believe that this must open that little golden door in the middle,' said the Prince to himself.
However, he was more powerful than I, and succeeded, when for a moment I was off my guard, in changing me into an Eagle, while my Queen was left in an enchanted sleep.
'Princess,' said he, 'for two hundred years has a wicked enchanter kept me here.
When the guards found that the Prince did not ask for his supper as usual, they went into his room, and not finding him there, were very much alarmed, and searched the tower from turret to dungeon, but without success.
Thereupon the Fairy, in a rage, gave two strokes of her wand and filled the gallery with horrible goblins, against whom the Prince had to fight for his life.
At first he could not see any keyhole, but after a careful search he found one hidden in the carving, and the golden key just fitted it; so the Prince gave it a vigorous turn and the doors flew open.
'They seem to have taken a great delight in painting me since I came to this country,' she said to herself.
Try to give us our Queen again, for if you do you will be rewarded; if not, it will be the worse for you.'
To complete the resemblance, her flock of sheep appeared, grazing round her, and she found a gay crook adorned with flowers upon the bank of the river.
At last he said:
'You know the way then?' said the other.
'Where are you going yourself, Gaffer Cricket?' replied the Grasshopper.
And the Prince, seeing that it was of no use to remonstrate, bowed and retired.
In his hand he carried a whip made of twenty long snakes, all alive and writhing, and the Princess was so terrified at the sight that she heartily wished she had never come.
In despair he cried:
Become a Cricket!'
But the phantom did but fly the faster, and the Prince spent the whole day in this vain pursuit.
See, I have brought with me my white and yellow muff.
Taking one of them off the rope, she tied herself on in its place, and when the clock was wound, up she went triumphantly into the turret.
The Prince and Princess thanked her with all their hearts, and declared that to her they owed all their happiness, and then the two Princesses, who had so lately been Mice, came and begged that the Fairy would use her power to release their unhappy friends who were still under the Enchanter's spell.
Take care what you are about, for if you again refuse to marry me she shall be torn in pieces by two tigers.'
'Marry you, Madam,' cried the Prince, in horror.
The Prince thanked her heartily and set out.
Certainly beauty is short-lived, and this funny little face and a green crape dress are a comical end to it.
If you would only change me into a mouse too,' cried the Princess.
I had rather be the unhappy Princess Cabbage-Stalk all my life than inflict the sight of my ugliness on anyone else.'
'What am I to do?' said the Princess trembling.
But the King would not listen to her, and sent her away with the ambassadors.
The great clock was in the turret, as she knew, though the weights hung down into the gallery.
When night came he saw the castle before him all lighted up, and as he imagined that the Princess must be in it, he made haste to get there too.
'Ah! how dared you think to win my love by separating me from my beloved Florimond, and in my presence cutting off that dear hand that even you should have feared and honoured?'
'I only trust that we may escape cats and traps, and reach the Golden Branch soon,' said the fat Mouse.
How does your Highness find yourself?'
The Mice courteously assented, and after many polite speeches the whole party fell asleep.
'You might spend the rest of your life over that without doing any good, but as you are young, and quite the prettiest creature I have seen for a long time, I will marry you if you like, and I will give you those cats and mice that you see there for your own.
Silent from joy, the Prince kissed her hand to express his thanks, and when he rose and saw his new reflection in the mirrors which surrounded him, he understood that Curlicue was indeed gone for ever.
Every drawer was made of crystal, of amber, or of some precious stone, and was quite full of every kind of treasure.
He was still watching her admiringly when the Princess opened her eyes, and as she also recognised him they were soon great friends.
No sooner had she opened it than with a shudder of horror she tried to throw it down, but found that some mysterious power compelled her to hold it against her will.
Of course, the first thing she did was to look at her own reflection in the water, and she was extremely surprised to find that she was exactly like the shepherdess she had so much admired, and wore the same white dress and flowery wreath that she had seen in the painted windows.
We both loved the same Fairy, but she preferred me.
THE GOLDEN BRANCH
'Why should I not speak as well as you?
'Sire,' she replied, 'I know too well what I am like to be hurt by what you say, but I assure you that I have no wish to marry your son I had rather be called Princess Cabbage-Stalk than Queen Curlicue.'
'We drink your health, Curlicue.
Aha!
Breathe upon the white side and your looks will not alter, but you will grow better and happier day by day.
By this time her guards were seeking her everywhere, and they were amazed to find her up in the turret, for they said she could only have got there by magic.
'Little simpleton, you should have everything heart can desire.'
They used to love one another as much as they now hate one another.
The hangings were all of bats' wings, and from the ceiling hung twelve cats, who filled the hall with their ear piercing yells.
By this time it had grown dark, and the Prince had to go back to his own room, and to amuse himself he took up a quaint old book and began to look at the pictures.
When he entered it all the windows shook and clattered in the strangest way, but the Prince did not heed them; he was looking so carefully for the place where the sun shone most brightly, and it seemed to him that it was upon the portrait of a most splendidly handsome young man.
Now though the Princess Sunbeam appeared to be only a poor shepherdess, she never forgot that she was a real Princess, and she was not at all sure that she ought to marry a humble shepherd, though she knew she would like to do so very much.
At this moment Florimond and the Fairy Douceline appeared in great splendour, and the Fairy, as she descended from her chariot, said with a smile:
Don't hesitate, Princess, to tell your devoted shepherd how dearly you love him, as he is the very Prince your father sent you to marry.
'May we have the honour of travelling with you--this respectable Cricket and myself?' said the Grasshopper, stepping forward.
All at once she became aware that she was not alone, for behind her stood a tiny old woman in a cap, who was as ugly again as herself and quite as lame.
Out fell the broken stone, and with it the golden key.
At this juncture the guards, who were in great fear that they would be found out, sent to tell the King that his son was dead, which annoyed him very much.
'I know that it is to you I owe my deliverance from an enchantment which has held me for two hundred years.
The noise he made brought his guards to his aid, and as soon as he revived they asked him what was the matter.
The voice ceased, and though the Prince in his bewilderment asked various questions, he received no answer.
The Golden Branch itself had become as tall as a forest tree, and sparkled with ruby cherries to its topmost twig. No sooner had the Grasshopper and the Cricket touched it than they were restored to their natural forms, and their surprise and joy were great when they recognised each other.
And then it was not long before she had it open, and was admiring the treasures it contained as much as Prince Peerless had done before her, and at last she came to the carbuncle box.
This made King Grumpy very angry.
But the Eagle, uttering a dolorous cry, fluttered his broad wings and disappeared.
Shall I make you as beautiful as you deserve to be?'
Nevertheless she presently hit upon a plan.
'If I could but get up into the turret,' she thought, 'to see if any one is coming.' But to climb up there seemed impossible.
At these words the Prince, who had been growing more and more astonished, was fairly terrified, and dropping the book with a crash he sank back insensible.
'Oh! so you won't marry me?' said he.
Every day she walked up and down the long gallery, until she too was attracted and fascinated by the ever-changing pictures in the windows, and recognised herself in one of the figures.
The Prince took the hint, and lifting aside the picture without difficulty, found himself in a marble hall adorned with statues; from this he passed on through numbers of splendid rooms, until at last he reached one all hung with blue gauze.
'But where are you going now?
'Madam,' cried the Prince, flinging himself down at her feet, 'only look at my ugliness.
The Prince was distracted, for he fancied he heard his dear shepherdess weeping and begging him to save her.
And so saying he disappeared, and the Princess, without knowing how she got there, found herself walking under shady trees by a clear river.
He went up and examined it, and found that it rested against the ebony and gold panelling, just like any of the other pictures in the gallery. He was puzzled, not knowing what to do next, until it occurred to him to see if the windows would help him, and, looking at the nearest, he saw a picture of himself lifting the picture from the wall.
So he hastened to depart from the fatal castle, and sought shelter in a hollow tree, where he found a forlorn looking little Grasshopper crouching in a corner, too miserable to sing.
Fly from the tower, Prince, and remember that the Fairy Douceline will be your friend always.'
I cannot explain more at present.
When he answered firmly that he was, she called up the appearance of the Princess Sunbeam to the other end of the gallery, and said:
'I seemed to hear a voice in the air which said: "Be firm, happen what may, and seek the Golden Branch,"' answered the Grasshopper, 'and I thought the command must be for me, so I started at once, though I don't know the way.'
I am quite tired enough of seeing myself.'
If you wish to be pretty you shall have your way, but you will also be vain, capricious, and frivolous.
Tell me, Princess, what is it that you wish for most?
'We also are on a pilgrimage to the Golden Branch.'
King Grumpy was quite delighted to hear that his son was ill, for he thought that he would all the sooner be brought to do as he wished, and marry the Princess.
'Go that way, my son,' said the old woman, pointing towards the path that led to the castle.
Ugly and old as the cabinet was outside, nothing could have been more rich and beautiful than what met the Prince's astonished eyes.
But all the Princess guards were so fond of him that they did everything they dared, in spite of the King, to make the time pass pleasantly.
'Oh, certainly.'
'On Friday night, next, at half-past twelve.'
'In the kitchen, Master Stanley,' said she, courtesying again.
If anything crosses your mind, a word with Mr. De C. at the Hall, will clear all up.
Simply that he thoroughly likes you and enjoys himself.
Nature subserves the majority.
This is the reason why suspense is so intolerable, and the retrospect even of the worst less terrible.
He appeals imperceptibly to your affections, which cannot be stirred--such is God's will--ever so lightly, without some little thrillings of happiness; and through the subtle absorbents of your sympathy he infuses into you something of his own hilarious and exulting spirit.
He was kindly and enjoying.
Heaven forgive me!'
Pity it won't do everywhere!
Why did time limp so tediously away with him, prolonging his anguish gratuitously?
You mean Wylder, of course?'
I'll send down with pleasure to enquire.'
Fear hath torment--and fear is the worst ingredient in mental pain.
'DEAR LARKIN,--I write in haste to save post, to say I shall be detained in town a few days longer than I thought.
Why should the world be cheerful?
WYLDER,
'London.'
Have all ready to sign and seal when I come back--certainly, within a week.
It was good reason he should present to God that face which he had made.
The most companionable men are not always the greatest intellects.
Hypocrites are contrary to Moses.
'Wednesday.
Yes; it was selfish--and hating selfishness--he would have struck the sun out of the sky that morning with his walking-cane, if he could, and draped the world in black.
'I wonder how my sister is this morning.'
'Would you like a messenger?
He hated the fresh glitter of that morning scene.
'Are you sure?' said Captain Lake, peeping toward that apartment over the old woman's shoulder.
They were very busy talking.
He was not a great adept--yet, at least--like those gentlemen who can swallow five hundred drops of laudanum at a sitting.
'No letter.
I suspect there are very few mere hypocrites on earth.
'How do you do, Margery?
Little 'Fairy' used to walk, when parochial visits were not very distant, with his 'Wapsie;' how that name came about no one remembered, but the vicar answered to it more cheerily than to any other.
Is it witty, or wise, or learned?
It contained only these words:--
There had been more need of his veil to hide the glorious face of God from him than to hide his from God.
Larkin wore a mask.
'The question, certainly, does arise.
'His address is rather a wide one, too--London!
He was thinking, you may be sure, of his Brother Mark.
'By-the-bye, I had a letter this morning from that party--our common friend, Mr. W., you know,' said Larkin, gracefully.
No.'
Nothing for me, by-the-way?'
The greater part of mankind are, upon the whole, happier and more cheerful than they are always willing to allow.
Don't wait for me about the parchments; I am satisfied.
I don't know indeed, that he ever took it off.
Well, say I, out of my large acquaintance, there are not many men to whom I would go for wisdom; learning is better found in books, and, as for wit, is it always pleasant?
And in the same stealthy way, walking lightly and slowly, down the stairs they went, and Stanley entered the kitchen.
This he read twice or thrice, pausing between whiles.
Captain Lake wanted rest--sleep--quiet thoughts at all events.
'I'm going down to Redman's Farm, and any letters for my sister, Miss Lake, I may as well take with me.'
'Well, Tamar, how do you do?--how are all?
He was, perhaps, content to see it, even when he looked in the glass, and had not a very distinct idea what the underlying features might be.
This sort of inflexible merry-making in nature seems marvellously selfish in the eyes of anxious Captain Lake.
It struck me on the first perusal,' answered the attorney.
Children had once occupied that silent floor for there was a little balustraded gate across the top of the staircase.
It answers with the world; it almost answers with himself.
What is it that makes your dog so charming a companion in your walks?
Of course, I do not reckon those who are under compulsion to affect purity of manners and a holy integrity of heart--and there are such--but those who volunteer an extraordinary profession of holiness, being all the while conscious villains.
'Yours sincerely,
'When Moses went to speak with God,' says the admirable Hall, 'he pulled off his veil.
'We'll go down now, Tamar.'
Of course, his host was properly afflicted and sympathetic.
She smiled very brightly next morning.
'Yes; my good client, Mr. Mark Wylder.
Where is that girl Margery?'
I don't envy the man who is superior to the society of children.
'Certain sure, Master Stanley.'
And, with Wylder's great red seal on the back of the envelope, the letter ran thus:--
I am afraid our friend Jos.
They were not liquorice.
'That will do,' he said, awaking from his wandering thought.
The Pharisees, even while devouring widows' houses, believed honestly in their own supreme righteousness.
'And pray, Lady Chelford, what do you think of Mr. Mark Wylder?' pursued Miss Dorcas.
When Lake, with a little shudder, for it was growing chill, lifted up his yellow eyes suddenly, and recollected where he was, the common had grown dark, and was quite deserted.
The idea of Miss Brandon's seriously thinking of withdrawing from her engagement with Mark Wylder, I confess never entered my mind.
'What a beast that fellow is.
Several groups passed close by him, in their pleasant circuit.
All on a sudden Dorcas Brandon said--
I could not quite believe I had seen a ghost; but neither was I quite satisfied that the thing was altogether canny.
But the young lady showed no sign of excitement, and lay back in her chair in her usual deep, cold calm.
'Marriage?--why 'tis a divine institution.
Again I had serious thoughts of removing my person and effects to the Brandon Arms.
Some wondered what might be the disease of that pale, peevish-looking gentleman, who sat there so still, languid, and dejected.
The double-chinned and florid proprietor of the 'Brandon Arms,' with a brandy-and-water familiarity, offered Captain Lake two to one on the game in anything he liked, which the captain declined, and took his seat on the bench.
And the vulgar brute will be as rich as Croesus, I dare say.'
In fact, he could not have told the score at any point of the game; and, to judge by his face, was translated from the glare of that arena into a dark and splenetic world of his own.
As it was, however, I was resolved to maintain my position.
Do you play?'
'In an innocent way, my dear Captain Lake, you mean, of course--in an innocent way.'
I don't care, I hope, how poor a man may be, but do let him be a gentleman.
He stole away from Mr. Larkin's trellised porch, in the dusk.
'Do I think it may safely be contracted, solely to join two estates?' repeated the old lady, with a look and carriage that plainly showed how entirely she appreciated the amazing presumption of her interrogatrix.
My work is done: I am ready to start.
"No," I replied, puzzled by his great excitement.
At any rate, on my first trip I intend to take no chances.
"For several reasons," he replied, ignoring my first question.
"Watch," he said.
"This is Tom Faber, Doctor," I said.
Of course you have, and you have noticed that, when the north pole of the bar magnet was pointed toward the electromagnet, the bar was attracted.
At eleven it started again but after a few sentences the sound suddenly ceased and the receiver went dead.
He said that he would talk to you or no one and would just as soon talk to no one as to me any longer.
"So you had trouble with my guard, did you?"
I will repeat my message in one hour.
If I keep my polarity as it was when left the earth, both the earth and the moon repel me.
I was more or less used to that sort of talk from Barnes so I paid no attention to it.
"I regret more than ever that I did not install a transmitter so that I could learn from you whether you are receiving my messages," his voice said faintly.
"That, then, paves the way for what I have to tell you.
I carry food and water for six months and air enough for two months by constant renovating.
I was balked, until I noticed a pair of telephone wires running from the house to the tree to which one end of the chain was fastened.
The fact that the messages were on a lower wave length than any receiver then in existence could receive with any degree of clarity, and the additional fact that they appeared to come from an immense distance lent a certain air of plausibility to these ebullitions in the Sunday magazine sections.
"Good for him," chuckled the Doctor.
It was constructed of sheet steel, and while the lower part was solid, the upper sections had huge glass windows set in them.
I followed him inside and he climbed the ladder.
With this I will keep in communication with you, although I have made no arrangements for you to send messages to me on this trip.
However, when the bar was reversed and the south pole pointed toward the electromagnet, the bar was still attracted.
"It won't require a very deep knowledge to follow the thread of my argument," he went on.
"I expect that Joe would have drilled you if you had tried to force your way in," he remarked cheerfully.
It's been going on ever since he landed there.
As I rounded a bend in the road which brought me in sight of the building, I was forced to put on my brakes at top speed to avoid running into a chain which was stretched across the road.
I'd like to go up there myself and see what's going on, but I don't want to get shot at like old Pete Johnson did when he tried to drop in on the Doc and pay him a little call.
I intend to go to the moon and land.
"Hello, Tom," he greeted me heartily.
This is what causes the commonly known phenomena of gravity or weight."
"You won't have many luxuries here, Tom," he said, "but you won't need to stay here for more than a few days.
When I graduated from Calvada I was theoretically an electrical engineer.
The parallel between the two grows closer with each succeeding experiment.
A thirty-thirty bullet embedded itself in the post an inch or two from my head, and I changed my mind about taking down that chain.
Have you any question you wish to ask?"
"Can't I call him up and see if he still wants to see me?"
I had no trouble in picking him up with the telescope.
I assured him that I had.
It doesn't matter, though.
My father had insisted that I follow in his footsteps as an electrical engineer; as he was paying my bills, I had to make a show at studying engineering while I clandestinely pursued my hobby, literature.
You'd better take a run out to Calvada and see what he has to say.
"Exactly what I expected," he replied.
"Man alive," he cried, "it means that the problem of aerial flight is entirely revolutionized, and that the era of interplanetary travel is at hand!
At nine and at ten o'clock the message was repeated.
I nodded.
His explanation was too logical for me to pick a flaw in it.
Of course, I do not mean that such a craft would take off from the earth and land on the moon three hours later.
Forced to be satisfied with this meager information, I started old Lizzie and lit out for the ranch.
I thought that the fault was with the receiver and I toiled feverishly the rest of the night, but without result.
I have developed an electrical method of neutralizing the gravity of a body while it is within the field of the earth, and also, by a slight extension, a method of entirely reversing its polarity."
I have been over the whole thing and I find that it would take twenty-nine hours and fifty-two minutes to make the whole trip.
So the matter lapsed into oblivion.
I suppose that you are more or less familiar with imaginative stories of interplanetary travel?"
I followed the Doctor up the ladder and into the space flier.
I went back to the flier and waved him a final farewell, which he acknowledged through a window; then I returned to the receiver. A loud hum filled the air, and suddenly the projectile rose and flew out through the open roof, gaining speed rapidly until it was a mere speck in the sky.
If there is not, I will return to the earth."
"The whole hull beneath us," explained the Doctor, "is filled with batteries and machinery except for a space in the center, where a shaft leads to a glass window in the bottom so that I can see behind me, so to speak.
"Is that a telephone to the house?" I demanded.
"Oh, that's all right," he went on cheerfully.
It just explains how I came to be acquainted with Dr. Livermore, in the first place, and why he sent for me on September twenty-second, in the second place.
Then will be time enough to worry about what my body will stand."
As it is, I am ready to start at once.
"That is the crux of the discovery which I have made: that magnetism and gravity are one and the same, or, rather, that the two are separate, but similar manifestations of one force.
"That man I talked to got me so mad that I hung up on him before I told him.
"One objection I have seen frequently raised to the idea of interplanetary travel is that the human body could not stand the rapid acceleration which would be necessary to attain speed enough to ever get anywhere.
For some weeks the feature writers harped on the subject, but the hurried construction of new receivers which would work on a lower wave length yielded no results, and the solemn pronouncements of astronomers to the effect that the new celestial body could by no possibility have an atmosphere on account of its small size finally put an end to the talk.
He looked at me sharply as he spoke, but long sessions at poker in the San Francisco Press Club had taught me how to control my facial muscles, and I never batted an eye.
"No ketchum letter, no ketchum Doctor," he replied, and walked stolidly back to his post.
I nodded calmly.
"My dear boy, who knows what the human body can stand?
The door clanged shut and I hastened into the house.
"Have you got an invitation?"
If anyone else had been sent, he would have never got by Joe, I can tell you.
"Remember that the space traveled by a falling body in a vacuum is equal to one half the acceleration multiplied by the square of the elapsed time.
"Most decidedly.
Many of my readers will remember the mysterious radio messages which were heard by both amateur and professional short wave operators during the nights of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of last September, and even more will remember the astounding discovery made by Professor Montescue of the Lick Observatory on the night of September twenty-fifth.
When the locomotive was first invented learned scientists predicted that the limit of speed was thirty miles an hour, as the human body could not stand a higher speed.
On this level is my bedroom, kitchen, and other living rooms, together with a laboratory and an observatory.
"I nearly got murdered," I said ruefully.
I went to sleep hoping that the night would bring better reception, nor was I disappointed.
"Consider for a moment that the laws of magnetism, insofar as concerns the relation between distance and power of attraction, are exactly matched by the laws of gravitation."
"Now let me ask you a question. Have you ever seen a small bar magnet placed within the field of attraction of a large electromagnet?
"All right," I assented, "I'll promise."
I joined with him in his laughter.
His voice came plainly enough.
The Indian debated the question with himself for a minute and then nodded a doubtful assent.
"You got letter?" he inquired.
"So you're going up to Doc Livermore's, are you?" asked the Postmaster, my informant.
I have a right to abuse my birth-place.
'I'll tell you what,' said her father, anxious to indulge her in this fresh subject of interest, 'I think I must spare you for a fortnight just to run up to town and see the travellers.
He was depressed and sad at this partial cessation of an intercourse which had become dear to him; and he used to sit pondering over the reason that could have occasioned this change.
Only I won't bait you with it any more just now.
He felt pretty sure that, if this interview took place, his mother's account of what passed at it would only annoy and chagrin him, though he would all the time be aware of the colouring which it received by passing through her mind.
Yes! he came very seldom, even for the dull cold purpose of lessons.
'We were thinking,' said Mr. Hale, 'that you and Mr. Thornton had taken Margaret's advice, and were each trying to convert the other, you were so long in the study.'
'I don't believe they would.
'A letter from Henry Lennox.
But the idea of a change took root and germinated in Margaret's heart, although not in the way in which her father proposed it at first.
'Does she?' said her father.
But he could not help looking at her, and he saw a sigh tremble over her body, as if she quivered in some unwonted chill.
He was not in a mood for joking.
Now wasn't it so, Margaret?'
However, I am willing to do my part now.
Margaret was red as a rose when Mr. Thornton looked at her.
but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,--all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
Many things might be good for them which would be very disagreeable for other people.'
'To tell the truth,' said he, 'he fairly bamboozles me.
'What are they'--began Mr. Hale; but Margaret, touching his arm, showed him her watch.
'Are you not a Milton man yourself?' asked Margaret. 'I should have thought you would have been proud of your town.'
I don't believe a cousin of yours could exaggerate.'
'I am not sure whether to consider that as a compliment or not.
'I think that must be one of Edith's exaggerations.
She forced herself to say something.
The moment he had done so, he could have bitten his tongue out.
'That Margaret of yours has gone deep into my heart.
He'll be coming to-night, I reckon, about them childer's schooling.
Such a thing has never entered her head.'
'If we do not reverence the past as you do in Oxford, it is because we want something which can apply to the present more directly.
We hate to have laws made for us at a distance.
What do you want it for?'
'I don't set up Milton as a model of a town.'
What was he? And why should he stab her with her shame in this way?
He can't bear a word; a jest of any kind.
I don't believe there's a man in Milton who knows how to sit still; and it is a great art.'
I'll not be beat by it, though.
'Not in architecture?' slyly asked Mr. Bell.
'I am sure she says so, papa.'
He did not speak easily of Mr. Thornton.
'Is Miss Hale so remarkable for truth?' said Mr. Thornton, bitterly.
They were very quiet and still for some minutes.
Would you Milton men condescend to send up your to-day's difficulty to Oxford?
It's the bustle and the struggle they like. As for sitting still, and learning from the past, or shaping out the future by faithful work done in a prophetic spirit--Why!
Fancy Edith a mamma!
I wish I could show you our High Street--our Radcliffe Square.
There were the regular hours of reading with his pupils, but that all giving and no receiving could no longer be called companion-ship, as in the old days when Mr. Thornton came to study under him.
'Mr. Bell!
'Very true, Miss Margaret.
You are my child, Margaret.
He told us not to wait.'
'What then?'
How them two chaps is bound up in one body, is a craddy for me to find out.
'Yes; I believe--oh papa, I should have told you.' And she dropped her work, and hid her face in her hands.
It would be a very good thing if they mixed a little more.'
'I would rather have the nature of the enjoyment defined.'
Take care of her, for she is a very precious creature,--a great deal too good for Milton,--only fit for Oxford, in fact.
'It is nearly seven,' she said.
Here I stay out my life; and here will I be buried, and lost in the crowd.'
It makes Margaret very hopeful.'
Mr. Thornton was annoyed more than he ought to have been at all that Mr. Bell was saying.
I hope and trust he is not thinking of her, for I am sure she would not have him.'
Margaret did not answer immediately; but by the bent drooping of her head, he guessed what her reply would be.
Pooh!
Margaret felt, rather than saw, that Mr. Thornton was chagrined by the repeated turning into jest of what he was feeling as very serious.
I am very sorry.' She sate down on the ground, and laid her head on his knees.
She did not get up and leave the room, as she had done in former days, when his abruptness or his temper had annoyed her.
He had known what love was--a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling!
He shrank from hearing Margaret's very name mentioned; he, while he blamed her--while he was jealous of her--while he renounced her--he loved her sorely, in spite of himself.
But I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it is in others; we retain much of their language; we retain more of their spirit; we do not look upon life as a time for enjoyment, but as a time for action and exertion.
'No!
Mr. Thornton had determined that he would make no inquiry of his mother as to how far she had put her project into execution of speaking to Margaret about the impropriety of her conduct.
A long sigh; a more helpless, nerveless attitude, and another 'Yes.' But before her father could speak, Margaret lifted up her face, rosy with some beautiful shame, and, fixing her eyes upon him, said:
'Mr.
Remember I am a Milton man.
But there is a difference between being the representative of a city and the representative man of its inhabitants.'
I don't mean to despise them, any more than I would ape them.
What do you think of it?'
'I never saw a fellow so spoiled by success.
Or else I should say there were very pretty symptoms about her!'
Seriously, Hale!
Well!
The town, I mean; not the men.
And I reckon he's taken aback by me pretty much as I am by him; for he sits and listens and stares, as if I were some strange beast newly caught in some of the zones.
You are all striving for money.
'I confess, I don't see what there is to be proud of.
We are Teutonic up here in Darkshire in another way.
Thornton is coming to drink tea with us to-night, and he is as proud of Milton as you of Oxford.
'Well!
'Margaret! had you ever any reason for thinking that Mr. Thornton cared for you?'
'And does he not answer you?' asked Mr. Hale.
As the three prepared for bed, Mr. Bell muttered forth a little condemnation of Mr. Thornton.
Margaret was conscious of the want under which he was suffering, unknown to himself; the want of a man's intercourse with men.
'I don't know Oxford.
'Well! enjoyment of leisure--enjoyment of the power and influence which money gives.
I dare say I was wrong.
Mr. Hale politely enlightened him.
He dreamt of her; he dreamt she came dancing towards him with outspread arms, and with a lightness and gaiety which made him loathe her, even while it allured him.
She tried to change the conversation from a subject about which one party cared little, while, to the other, it was deeply, because personally, interesting.
Are you sure of it, Margaret?'
Did he speak to you about it?'
You are neither of you representative men; you are each of you too individual for that.'
I'm afraid I must own, that I think your opinions are the oldest and mustiest I have met with this long time.'
She began to consider how desirable something of the kind would be to her father, whose spirits, always feeble, now became too frequently depressed, and whose health, though he never complained, had been seriously affected by his wife's illness and death.
'By living, I suppose you mean enjoyment.'
We've been too busy to attend to mere outward appearances.'
The round lines in her face took a lengthened, straighter form, and her whole appearance was that of one who had gone through a day of great fatigue.
'Well!' said Mr. Hale, 'Mr.
You have not tried us yet.'
Mr. Bell nodded.
'No, papa, you cannot spare me, and what's more, I won't be spared.' Then after a pause, she added: 'I am losing hope sadly about Frederick; he is letting us down gently, but I can see that Mr. Lennox himself has no hope of hunting up the witnesses under years and years of time.
'Either to tea or soon after.
T'other chap hasn't an ounce of measter's flesh about him.
'In short, you would like the Heptarchy back again.
'He is not vain now,' said Margaret, turning round from the table, and speaking with quiet distinctness.
She's a democrat, a red republican, a member of the Peace Society, a socialist--'
But she!--why, Margaret would never think of him, I'm sure!
Margaret had not expected much pleasure to herself from Mr. Bell's visit--she had only looked forward to it on her father's account, but when her godfather came, she at once fell into the most natural position of friendship in the world.
And then to speak to Margaret as he had done!
I could be very happy in such a life.
He gave short sharp answers; he was uneasy and cross, unable to discern between jest and earnest; anxious only for a look, a word of hers, before which to prostrate himself in penitent humility.
And I'd shave the wild-beast skins and make the wool into broad cloth.
'Hear this daughter of yours, Hale.
I am almost certain you are mistaken.
Oh, how strange it will be!
'Well!
Her residence in Milton has quite corrupted her.
Remember the misfortunes that ensued; and besides, I can't spare Margaret.'
And Captain Lennox--I wonder what he will do with himself now he has sold out!'
'I beg you'll do no such thing.
'I believe I was talking with reference to a good deal that has been troubling us of late; I was thinking of the strikes we have gone through, which are troublesome and injurious things enough, as I am finding to my cost.
Something must have annoyed him before he came here.'
'Edith says she finds the printed calicoes in Corfu better and cheaper than in London.'
'It is not every one who can sit comfortably in a set of college rooms, and let his riches grow without any exertion of his own.
'I don't give up my plan yet.
I hoped the whole thing was but an imagination; but I knew too well what your real feelings were to suppose that you could ever like Mr. Thornton in that way.
'Hale! did it ever strike you that Thornton and your daughter have what the French call a tendresse for each other?'
'Ah!
'And so you see, Mr. Thornton, we ought to have been improving each other down-stairs, instead of talking over vanished families of Smiths and Harrisons.
'I don't want to be more liberal-minded, thank you,' said Mr. Bell.
Is your information to be depended upon?"
How did we see them?
'"Warrigal the half-caste!
By George! warrants out for him also," says Sir Ferdinand.
Then, Warrigal says, out came Sir Ferdinand, very polite.
He roused me up about one o'clock, and I could hardly make any explanation to my mates.
The chances are against it.
'Exactly.
Listen to this, from the "Turon Banner":--
"But can't you be mistaken?
'"Guard, turn out," he roars out first; then, dropping his voice, says out, "My dear Mrs. Mullockson" (you should hear Warrigal imitate him), "you have made my fortune--officially, I mean, of course.
He doesn't like you and Jim over much--bad taste, I tell him, on his part--but I suppose he looks upon you as belonging to the family.
"Turon Star"!
There was nothing to do, for one thing; and we hadn't made up our mind what our line was to be.
'She waited a bit.
'"The affair is in no way ludicrous," says Clifford, very stiff and dignified.
If we went outside there were ten times more men looking out for us than ever, ten times more chance of our being tracked or run down than ever. That we knew from the newspapers.
He'd seen Warrigal and me ride away.
'Most true, Richard.
James Marston had recently married a young person of most respectable family and prepossessing appearance.
'While rejoicing, as must all good citizens, at the discovery of evil-doers and the capture of one member of a band of notorious criminals, we must state in fairness and candour that their conduct has been, while on the field as miners, free from reproach in every way.
'Suddenly information was furnished to the police respecting all three men.
'We're all here again, it seems,' I said, sour enough.
It may be that they had resolved to forsake the criminal practices which had rendered them so unhappily celebrated.
Every one would be tried that we had ever been known to be friendly with.
He's worse off than either of us, poor fellow.'
Most remarkable man of his day.
How is Jim?
Good-bye, Clifford.
'STARLIGHT AND THE MARSTONS AGAIN.
He is regarded rather as a victim than as an active agent in the many criminal offences chargeable to the account of Starlight's gang.
'Don't seem to have the pluck, any on ye, to tackle a big touch again.
For James Marston, who was married but a short while since to a Melbourne young lady of high personal attractions and the most winning amiability, great sympathy has been expressed by all classes.
'"What, Frank Haughton?" says he.
Why he should be so confoundedly anxious about my welfare I can't make out--I can't, really.
We didn't do much for a few days, you may be sure.
He had every reason to believe that he would have had no difficulty in arresting the famous Starlight, who, under the cognomen of the Honourable Frank Haughton, has been for months a partner in this claim.
Well, the country had changed, and we were bound to change with it. We couldn't stop boxed up in the Hollow day after day, and month after month, shooting and horse-breaking, doing nothing and earning nothing.
We must play our parts gallantly, as demons of this lower world, or get hissed off the stage.'
There's no help for it, Dick.
That's the worst of these new inspectors, they are so infernally zealous.'
Clifford and Hastings.
'"Stop, Sir Ferdinand, you must pardon me; but I don't exactly understand your tone.
'I had all kinds of trouble to tell them I was going away with Warrigal, and yet not to tell too much.
'BUSH-RANGERS!
'"Good-bye, in case," I said.
I mean Starlight--Starlight the cattle stealer, the mail robber, the bush-ranger, whose name is notorious over the three colonies, and New Zealand to boot--your intimate friend and partner for the last nine months!"
"But, soft," as they say in the play, "where am I?" I thought I was a virtuous miner again.
'Jim's very bad.
He was standing about near the Prospectors' Arms, late on Friday night, doing nothing and seeing everything, as usual, when he noticed Mrs. Mullockson run out of the house like a Bedlamite.
We had long talks and barneys over the whole thing--sometimes by ourselves with Starlight, sometimes with father.
"How should I know his infernal purser's name?
We all suffer from some madness or other.'
'Poor old Jim, he's a deal too good for the place.
We dropped in to breakfast here at daylight, and I felt sleepy enough for another snooze.'
'Yes, much in that way.
'Ha! Richard, here we are again!
"He did not say, but he left about an hour since."
Here we are at this devil-discovered, demon-haunted old Hollow again--first cousin to the pit of Acheron.
'Come, come, governor,' says Starlight, 'none of that.
I shall never forget your kindness.
It would pay better than driving us to desperation.
Sooner or later we began to see the secret of the Hollow would be found out.
Thanks, a thousand times."
"Rouse him up, or you'll be sorry for it."
I half thought you might have been nailed.
'The faithful Warrigal, as usual, gave me timely warning, and brought a horse, of course.
'He's all right,' I said.
I have a great mind to apply to the Government for compensation.
'"Yes, another horseman."
In the confusion that ensued the prisoner escaped.
'How did you come; by Jonathan's?'
'Hurrah! look here.
I'm afraid Dick's dropping the policeman won't add to our popularity, though.'
'"You perfectly amaze me," says Clifford.
'And so Sir Ferdinand rode off.'
'Warrigal had heard quite enough.
First he brought us in a handbill that was posted in Bargo, like this:--
After all, I had no intention of hurting your feelings, and apologise if I did.
The comparative lull observable in such exciting occurrences of late has been proved to be but the ominous hush of the elements that precedes the tempest.
'How the blazes did he know the police were laid on to the lot of us?' I said.
If you can send me word to-morrow what I shall say to him, I will settle matters, and bring the poem with me for the press, which, as the town empties, we cannot be too quick with.
'Nothing in poverty so ill is borne, As its exposing men to grinning scorn.'
'Your most humble servant,
There is one passage in the original, better transfused by Oldham than by Johnson:
I propose, if my calculation be near the truth, to engage for the reimbursement of all that you shall lose by an impression of 500; provided, as you very generously propose, that the profit, if any, be set aside for the authour's use, excepting the present you made, which, if he be a gainer, it is fit he should repay.
SIR,
OLDHAM.
'SAM.
CAVE.
The history of its publication I am enabled to give in a very satisfactory manner; and judging from myself, and many of my friends, I trust that it will not be uninteresting to my readers.
I am, Sir,
Pray send me word when you will begin upon the poem, for it is a long way to walk.
JOHNSON.
and,
'TO MR.
'I have only to add, that as I am sensible I have transcribed it very coarsely, which, after having altered it, I was obliged to do, I will, if you please to transmit the sheets from the press, correct it for you; and take the trouble of altering any stroke of satire which you may dislike.
OLDHAM'S, though less elegant, is more just:
CAVE.
We may be certain, though it is not expressly named in the following letters to Mr. Cave, in 1738, that they all relate to it:
JOHNSON.'
'SIR,
Boileau had imitated the same satire with great success, applying it to Paris; but an attentive comparison will satisfy every reader, that he is much excelled by the English Juvenal.
OLDHAM.
I beg, therefore, that you will favour me with a letter to-morrow, that I may know what you can afford to allow him, that he may either part with it to you, or find out, (which I do not expect,) some other way more to his satisfaction.
'SIR,
'To MR.
'SIR,
I am, Sir,
A young lady at once corrected this with good critical sagacity, to
I knew not what answer to make till I had consulted you, nor what to demand on the authour's part, but am very willing that, if you please, he should have a part in it, as he will undoubtedly be more diligent to disperse and promote it.
[No date.]
As to the printing, if it can be set immediately about, I will be so much the authour's friend, as not to content myself with mere solicitations in his favour.
I am very sensible, from your generosity on this occasion, of your regard to learning, even in its unhappiest state; and cannot but think such a temper deserving of the gratitude of those who suffer so often from a contrary disposition.
And since the expense will be no more, I shall contentedly insure it, as I mentioned in my last.
'SAM.
JOHNSON.
He was the first English historian who had recourse to that authentick source of information, the Parliamentary Journals; and such was the power of his political pen, that, at an early period, Government thought it worth their while to keep it quiet by a pension, which he enjoyed till his death.
'Your very humble servant,
'Of all the griefs that harass the distrest, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.'
'To MR.
He has marked upon his corrected copy of the first edition of it, 'Written in 1738;' and, as it was published in the month of May in that year, it is evident that much time was not employed in preparing it for the press.
'SAM.
If we did, we could not but feel an indignant regret; but how painful is it to see that a writer of such vigorous powers of mind was actually in such distress, that the small profit which so short a poem, however excellent, could yield, was courted as a 'relief.'
I beg that you will let one of your servants write an exact account of the expense of such an impression, and send it with the poem, that I may know what I engage for.
which is an exquisite remark on the galling meanness and contempt annexed to poverty: JOHNSON'S imitation is,
Where, or in what manner this poem was composed, I am sorry that I neglected to ascertain with precision, from Johnson's own authority.
CAVE.
'To MR.
Though Johnson was often solicited by his friends to make a complete list of his writings, and talked of doing it, I believe with a serious intention that they should all be collected on his own account, he put it off from year to year, and at last died without having done it perfectly.
There are, in Oldham's imitation, many prosaick verses and bad rhymes, and his poem sets out with a strange inadvertent blunder:
I am, Sir,
JOHNSON.'
'By exerting on this occasion your usual generosity, you will not only encourage learning, and relieve distress, but (though it be in comparison of the other motives of very small account) oblige in a very sensible manner, Sir,
Whether Johnson had previously read Oldham's imitation, I do not know; but it is not a little remarkable, that there is scarcely any coincidence found between the two performances, though upon the very same subject.
'SAM.
'DEAR SIR,
JOHNSON.'
'DEAR SIR,
'Affectionately yours,
'If all your fear be of apparitions, (said the Prince,) I will promise you safety: there is no danger from the dead; he that is once buried will be seen no more.
There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed.
Let us endeavour to see things as they are, and then enquire whether we ought to complain. Whether to see life as it is, will give us much consolation, I know not; but the consolation which is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from errour must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive.
Have you any more notes on Shakspeare?
That it is doubted by single cavillers, can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears.'
He that dies before sixty, of a cold or consumption, dies, in reality, by a violent death; yet his death is borne with patience only because the cause of his untimely end is silent and invisible.
THOMAS WARTON.
I am, dear, dear Sir, your most humble servant,
The only reason why we lament a soldier's death, is, that we think he might have lived longer; yet this cause of grief is common to many other kinds of death which are not so passionately bewailed.
'Say, then, physicians of each kind, Who cure the body or the mind, What harm in drinking can there be, Since punch and life so well agree?'
When would that man have prepared himself to die, who went to seek death without preparation?
He has time but for a short stay, and will be glad to have it filled up with as much as he can hear and see.
'DEAR SIR,
I have swum thrice, which I had disused for many years.
'In recommending another to your favour, I ought not to omit thanks for the kindness which you have shewn to myself.
What then can be the reason why we lament more him that dies of a wound, than him that dies of a fever?
“How did it get into the garden?” asked Eshley.
This time it seemed as if the worm had turned; Eshley began striding away.
“If it was anxious to go,” said Adela Pingsford rather angrily, “I should not have come here to chat with you about it.
“You seem to forget that the cook has neuralgia,” said Eshley; “she may be just dozing off into a merciful sleep and your outcry will waken her. Consideration for others should be the guiding principle of people in our station of life.”
“Implements?
He discontinued his attempt to interfere with its choice of surroundings.
“A common or garden ox, to use the slang expression.
“To fetch implements,” was the answer.
“Mr. Eshley,” said Adela in a shaking voice, “I asked you to drive that beast out of my garden, but I did not ask you to drive it into my house. If I must have it anywhere on the premises I prefer the garden to the morning-room.”
“An ox,” said Eshley blankly, and rather fatuously; “what kind of ox?”
“Since you have been so frank about the variety of the chrysanthemum,” said Eshley, “I don’t mind telling you that this is an Ayrshire ox.”
“Cattle drives are not in my line,” said Eshley; “if I remember I told you so at the outset.” “I quite agree,” retorted the lady, “painting pretty pictures of pretty little cows is what you’re suited for.
“It was your suggestion,” said Eshley, setting his canvas in position.
Eshley noticed its restlessness and promptly flung it some bunches of Virginia creeper leaves as an inducement to continue the sitting.
“I imagine it came in by the gate,” said the lady impatiently; “it couldn’t have climbed the walls, and I don’t suppose anyone dropped it from an aeroplane as a Bovril advertisement.
“Oh, I don’t know what kind,” snapped the lady.
In due succession there came “Where the Gad-Flies Cease from Troubling,” “The Haven of the Herd,” and “A-dream in Dairyland,” studies of walnut trees and dun cows.
I’m practically all alone; the housemaid is having her afternoon out and the cook is lying down with an attack of neuralgia.
But the artist marched out of the garden.
His home was in a park-like, villa-dotted district that only just escaped the reproach of being suburban.
His remarkable picture, “Ox in a morning-room, late autumn,” was one of the sensations and successes of the next Paris Salon, and when it was subsequently exhibited at Munich it was bought by the Bavarian Government, in the teeth of the spirited bidding of three meat-extract firms.
The episode was the turning-point in Eshley’s artistic career.
In a couple of minutes he returned, laden with easel, sketching-stool, and painting materials.
“I shall go to the Public Library and get them to telephone for the police,” announced Adela, and, raging audibly, she departed.
The room will be wrecked if there’s a struggle.”
At noonday in summertime the cows stood knee-deep in tall meadow-grass under the shade of a group of walnut trees, with the sunlight falling in dappled patches on their mouse-sleek coats.
A moment later it was Adela herself who appeared to go mad.
Anything that I may have learned at school or in after life about how to remove a large ox from a small garden seems to have escaped from my memory now.
The immediately important question is not how it got in, but how to get it out.”
I won’t have you use a lasso.
It was normally a fair-sized garden, but it looked small in comparison with the ox, a huge mottled brute, dull red about the head and shoulders, passing to dirty white on the flanks and hind-quarters, with shaggy ears and large blood-shot eyes.
Eshley took a step or two in the direction of the animal, clapped his hands, and made noises of the “Hish” and “Shoo” variety.
As a matter of fact, it has got six chrysanthemums in its mouth at the present moment.”
“There is an ox in my garden,” she announced, in explanation of the tempestuous intrusion.
If the ox heard them it gave no outward indication of the fact.
On a fine afternoon in late autumn he was putting some finishing touches to a study of meadow weeds when his neighbour, Adela Pingsford, assailed the outer door of his studio with loud peremptory knockings.
I’ve seen it done on a cinema film, of course, but there were always horses and lots of other accessories; besides, one never knows how much of those pictures are faked.”
“Do you mean to say that you’re going to sit quietly down and paint that brute while it’s destroying my morning-room?” gasped Adela.
The icy calm broke down; Adela Pingsford used language that sent the artist instinctively a few feet nearer to the ox.
Adela gazed with equal concentration and more obvious hostility at the same focus.
Have any lives been lost?”
“Exactly; the poll is on Wednesday, and the poor man will have worked himself to a shadow by that time.
“I didn’t know there was a reservoir at Brinkley,” said Latimer.
“Wouldn’t they be happier somewhere outside?” he asked, tactfully expressing his own preference in the matter in an apparent solicitude for theirs.
Imagine what electioneering must be like in this awful soaking rain, going along slushy country roads and speaking to damp audiences in draughty schoolrooms, day after day for a fortnight.
Latimer was moderately fond of animals, and particularly interested in small livestock rearing from the economic point of view; in fact, one of the pamphlets on which he was at that moment engaged warmly advocated the further development of the pig and poultry industry in our rural districts; but he was pardonably unwilling to share even a commodious bedroom with samples of henroost and stye products.
The hens are all in the pantry, and I think I could pick out Hartlepool Helen; she’s his favourite.”
Latimer undressed and got into bed with all due speed, judging that the pig would abate its inquisitorial restlessness once the light was turned out.
He’ll have to put in an appearance at some place of worship on Sunday morning, and he can come to us immediately afterwards and have a thorough respite from everything connected with politics.
A series of slaps directed at the pig’s body were accepted more as an additional and pleasing irritant than as a criticism of conduct or a hint to desist; evidently something more than a man’s firm hand was needed to deal with the case.
I’d try and grapple with him myself, only I’ve got my chow in my room, you know, and he goes for pigs wherever he finds them.”
“We can’t,” said Vera decidedly, “we haven’t any boats and we’re cut off by a raging torrent from any human habitation.
The restful lull which his hostess enforced on him was decidedly welcome, and yet the nervous excitement of the contest had too great a hold on him to be totally banished.
My aunt particularly hoped you would keep to your room and not add to the confusion, but she thought it would be so kind of you if you would take in Hartlepool’s Wonder, the gamecock, you know, for the night.
As a substitute for a cosy, straw-bedded sty the room offered, at first inspection, few attractions, but the disconsolate animal suddenly discovered an appliance in which the most luxuriously contrived piggeries were notably deficient.
“That remains to be seen,” said Vera, but she said it to herself.
I won’t let him even think of them.
More than that we cannot do.”
Latimer Springfield was a rather cheerless, oldish young man, who went into politics somewhat in the spirit in which other people might go into half-mourning.
“These” were a small black pig and a lusty specimen of black-red gamecock.
“I know he’s going to sit up half the night working up points for his final speeches,” said Mrs. Durmot regretfully; “however, we’ve kept politics at arm’s length all the afternoon and evening.
A light, drizzling rain was falling, but there was not the faintest trace of any inundation.
Latimer had scarcely shut his bedroom door before he was immersed in a sheaf of notes and pamphlets, while a fountain-pen and pocket-book were brought into play for the due marshalling of useful facts and discreet fictions.
“You’ll take every care of Hartlepool’s Wonder, won’t you?” said Vera. “His mother took three firsts at Birmingham, and he was second in the cockerel class last year at Gloucester.
Latimer slipped out of bed in search of a weapon of dissuasion.
You see, there are eight other gamecocks, and they fight like furies if they get together, so we’re putting one in each bedroom.
During the long wakeful hours which ensued Latimer tried to distract his mind from his own immediate troubles by dwelling with decent sympathy on the second housemaid’s bereavement, but he found himself more often wondering how many Boy Scouts were sharing his Melton overcoat.
“Heaps, I should say.
“But we ought to go out and do rescue work, oughtn’t we?” said Latimer, with the instinct of a Parliamentary candidate for getting into the local limelight.
“I thought he was in the throes of an election,” remarked her husband.
The deflected energies of the gamecock found new outlet in a sudden and sustained attack on the sleeping and temporarily inoffensive pigling, and the duel which followed was desperate and embittered beyond any possibility of effective intervention.
“Boy Scouts?”
“On state occasions I always wear a black ribbon in my hair,” said Vera with crushing dignity.
I’ve had the picture of Cromwell dissolving the Long Parliament taken down from the staircase, and even the portrait of Lord Rosebery’s ‘Ladas’ removed from the smoking-room.
He gets that from his mother—not that I like to say things against her when she’s lying dead and drowned in her stye, poor thing.
A cold suspicion was stealing over Latimer’s mind; he went to the window and drew up the blind.
There was sufficient light in the room to enable the pig to detect this manœuvre, and the vile temper, inherited from the drowned mother, found full play.
“It’s a new overcoat,” said Latimer, with every indication of minding dreadfully.
“There is no outside,” said Vera impressively, “nothing but a waste of dark, swirling waters.
The rôle of Saint Martin malgré lui was not one which appealed to him.
“Couldn’t the pig go in the bathroom?” asked Latimer faintly, wishing that he had taken up as determined a stand on the subject of bedroom swine as the chow had.
The reservoir at Brinkley has burst.”
“I’ve asked Latimer Springfield to spend Sunday with us and stop the night,” announced Mrs. Durmot at the breakfast-table.
Either she’s engaged to a large assortment of the population round here or else she’s very careless at identification.
Some half-hour later he met Vera on the way to the breakfast-room.
“If Miss Vera’s dog sees that pig—!” exclaimed the maid, and hurried off to avert such a catastrophe.
And then I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking in this wee piggie; he’s rather a little love, but he has a vile temper.
The willow-bushes over the stream hung as if they were angling with tasseled floats of gold and silver, bursting like a bean-pod.
Many a time I longed to be no bigger than John Fry was; whom now (when insolent) I took with my left hand by the waist-stuff, and set him on my hat, and gave him little chance to tread it; until he spoke of his family, and requested to come down again.
'I am John Ridd,' I answered; 'the boy who gave you those beautiful fish, when you were only a little thing, seven years ago to-day.'
And this he did, not only because I happened to say very little, but forasmuch as he disbelieved half of the truth I told him, through his own too great sagacity.
Thus much however, he learned aright, that I had been in the Doone valley several years before, and might be brought upon strong inducement to venture there again.
And what of all things scared me most was the thought of my own size, and knowledge of my strength, which came like knots upon me daily.
Few mothers have such a son as me.
And so I could not answer her, but was overcome with thinking and feeling and confusion.
But she had not the least idea of what was going on with me, any more than I myself had.
For, of course, I knew what a churl I was compared to her birth and appearance; but meanwhile I might improve myself and learn a musical instrument.
Now taking for good omen this, that I was a seven-year Valentine, though much too big for a Cupidon, I chose a seven-foot staff of ash, and fixed a loach-fork in it, to look as I had looked before; and leaving word upon matters of business, out of the back door I went, and so through the little orchard, and down the brawling Lynn-brook.
'And do you remember how kind you were, and saved my life by your quickness, and went away riding upon a great man's shoulder, as if you had never seen me, and yet looked back through the willow-trees?'
LORNA GROWING FORMIDABLE
The winter (as I said before) had been a very mild one; and now the spring was toward so that bank and bush were touched with it.
'Only show me where it is.
But as to the mode of my getting in, the things I saw, and my thoughts upon them, he not only failed to learn the truth, but certified himself into an obstinacy of error, from which no after-knowledge was able to deliver him.
And on either bank, the meadow ruffled as the breeze came by, opening (through new tuft, of green) daisy-bud or celandine, or a shy glimpse now and then of the love-lorn primrose.
She knew me at once, from my manner and ways, and a smile broke through her trembling, as sunshine comes through aspen-leaves; and being so clever, she saw, of course, that she needed not to fear me.
Neither could I look again; only waited for the melody which made every word like a poem to me, the melody of her voice.
Not being now so much afraid, I struck across the thicket land between the meeting waters, and came upon the Bagworthy stream near the great black whirlpool.
The pale gleam over the western cliffs threw a shadow of light behind her, as if the sun were lingering. Never do I see that light from the closing of the west, even in these my aged days, without thinking of her.
The valley into which I gazed was fair with early promise, having shelter from the wind and taking all the sunshine.
The words were of an ancient song, fit to laugh or cry at.
And still the great rocky slide was dark and difficult to climb; though the water, which once had taken my knees, was satisfied now with my ankles.
But I could not help smiling at one thing, that according to his point of view my own counsel meant my own and Master Reuben Huckaback's.
Unless themselves should fill with love, which is the spring of all things.
'Yes, I know enough of that; and I am frightened greatly, all the time, when I do not look at you.'
Upon one point, however, he succeeded more easily than he expected, viz. in making me promise to visit the place again, as soon as occasion offered, and to hold my own counsel about it.
But scarcely knowing what I did, as if a rope were drawing me, I came from the dark mouth of the chasm; and stood, afraid to look at her.
If any rogue shot me it would grieve you; I make bold to say it, and it would be the death of mother.
'I thank you heartily,' said Lorna; 'but you need not come to see me. You can put them in my little bower, where I am almost always--I mean whither daily I repair to read and to be away from them.'
'Mistress Lorna, I will depart'--mark you, I thought that a powerful word--'in fear of causing disquiet.
But all the time I kept myself in a black niche of the rock, where the fall of the water began, lest the sweet singer (espying me) should be alarmed, and flee away.
And none of them more sheepish or innocent than I myself, albeit twenty-one years old, and not afraid of men much, but terrified of women, at least, if they were comely.
Having reconnoitred thus the position of the enemy, Master Huckaback, on the homeward road, cross-examined me in a manner not at all desirable. For he had noted my confusion and eager gaze at something unseen by him in the valley, and thereupon he made up his mind to know everything about it.
'I think, Master Ridd, you cannot know,' she said, with her eyes taken from me, 'what the dangers of this place are, and the nature of the people.'
Nothing amazed me so much as to find how shallow the stream now looked to me, although the pool was still as black and greedy as it used to be.
And to tell the truth, I grew afraid; perhaps from a kind of sympathy, and because I knew that evil comes more readily than good to us.
But, if so thou ever Strivest to be free, 'Twill be my endeavour To be dear to thee.
But you seem not to remember, sir, how perilous this place is.'
For she had kept her eyes upon me; large eyes of a softness, a brightness, and a dignity which made me feel as if I must for ever love and yet for ever know myself unworthy.
Therefore I waited for nothing more than the slow arrival of new small-clothes made by a good tailor at Porlock, for I was wishful to look my best; and when they were come and approved, I started, regardless of the expense, and forgetting (like a fool) how badly they would take the water.
Thrice a day I will come and stop--'
But only to myself I cried for anything at all, having enough of man in me to be bashful with young maidens.
'Oh, yes, I remember everything; because it was so rare to see any except--I mean because I happen to remember.
'Nay, Master Ridd, I would never show thee--never, because of peril--only that so happens it thou hast found the way already.'
'Yes, the poor boy who was frightened so, and obliged to hide here in the water.'
After some labour, I reached the top; and halted to look about me well, before trusting to broad daylight.
Try to think of me now and then, and I will bring you some new-laid eggs, for our young blue hen is beginning.'
Though I am so blank of wit, or perhaps for that same reason, these little things come and dwell with me, and I am happy about them, and long for nothing better.
To me it was a thing of terror to behold such beauty, and feel myself the while to be so very low and common.
But presently I ventured to look forth where a bush was; and then I beheld the loveliest sight--one glimpse of which was enough to make me kneel in the coldest water.
"Won't you take the book, Kilmeny?
I knew it was because he thought me so ugly, and I have always hidden when he came ever since."
It makes me feel sorry and spoils everything.
I am too ugly."
CHAPTER IX.
She was naturally quick and clever.
"Thousands of them," said Eric, laughing.
It is strange that Neil has never told her the truth.
But your book teaches that it is a blessing.
She rarely spoke of her mother.
Do not let us speak of this again.
I forget it at other times.
And it IS ugly--very ugly."
Mother told me that I was very ugly and that nobody would ever like to look at me.
"I do not know much of the world, but I do not think there are many people like you in it."
Here every evening he met Kilmeny; in that old orchard they garnered hours of quiet happiness together; together they went wandering in the fair fields of old romance; together they read many books and talked of many things; and, when they were tired of all else, Kilmeny played to him and the old orchard echoed with her lovely, fantastic melodies.
"Yes, I like it.
I wonder if Margaret Gordon could have been quite sane.
"Do you like it, Kilmeny?" he asked.
Her mind and heart, utterly unspoiled of the world, were as beautiful as her face.
Delightful little flashes of wit and humour sparkled out occasionally.
"I am not vexed," said Eric, "and I think you will take it some day yet--after I have shown you something I want you to see.
"Have you ever loved?" asked Kilmeny, with the directness of phrasing necessitated by her mode of communication which was sometimes a little terrible.
But it hurt me, too.
"I never knew there was such a thing until after mother died, and I read about it in a book. Then I asked Aunt Janet and she said mother had broken all the looking glasses in the house when I was a baby.
I do not know why it hurt me.
But I did not understand the book very well, you see.
"There is a false love which IS a curse.
I wonder if there is another such in any civilized country in the world. What could have possessed her mother to tell her such a falsehood?
I do not want to read it again.
Then when you look at it you will always remember me, and the white buds opening on that rosebush beside you, and the rush and murmur of the wind in the tops of those old spruces."
You like me because of my beautiful music, don't you?"
Mother told me once that love is a curse, and that I must pray that it would never enter into my life.
On it was a hurt, bitter look, such as he remembered seeing once before, when he had asked her if she would not like to see the world for herself.
Will you let me give you this book?
Why not?"
Of Neil, she wrote frequently at first, and seemed very fond of him. Later she ceased to mention him.
In the intervals of absence it seemed to him that she could not possibly be as beautiful as he remembered her; and then when they met she seemed even more so.
This was one of my mother's books.
It says that it is the most splendid and wonderful thing in life.
I am sorry.
Very slowly she took her slate and wrote,
Thrawn and twisted the old Gordon stock might be, but it had at least this one offshoot of perfect grace and symmetry.
She told him her simple history freely.
It is an old book, Kilmeny.
I should like to have him so much!' said the farmer, begging very hard.
That was why the sexton had gone to say good-day to the farmer's wife when he knew that her husband was not at home, and the good woman therefore put in front of him the best food she had.
How the wind whistled in my ears as you threw me from the bridge into the cold water!
'Well, I must lie down outside,' said Little Klaus; and the farmer's wife shut the door in his face.
'Oh, no! Don't be so hard on me!' Then they went to the river.
The wife could say nothing, but she put the food at once on the table, and they ate the fish, the roast meat, and the cakes.
'You shall pay for this!' said Big Klaus as he drove home.
If he saw one he was made quite mad.
'You are mad!' said the apothecary.
Little Klaus gave the farmer his sack with the dry skin, and got instead a good bushelful of money.
Then he took the chest with one hand and lifted it up a little, as if he were going to throw it into the water.
'It is my grandmother,' said Big Klaus. 'I killed her in order to get a bushel of money.'
oh, dear!' groaned Little Klaus in the sack, twisting and turning himself.
First I killed my horses, then my grandmother!
The water flowed so rapidly that you could scarcely swim against the stream.
She was filling up his glass, while he stuck his fork into the fish which was his favourite dish.
Little Klaus' grandmother had just died.
'Now you won't get the best of me again!' And he went home.
Who will buy skins?' he cried through the streets.
But the dead woman did not answer a word, and sat still.
'Oh, that was from my horse-skin.
'Look how they are running!' said Little Klaus. 'They want to go to the bottom again!'
Little Klaus could not get out, and everybody was in church; so he went in.
The host was very rich. He was a very worthy but hot-tempered man.
'I will gladly do that,' said the cattle-driver; and he opened the sack, and Little Klaus struggled out at once.
'Don't mention such things, or you will lose your head!' And he began to tell him what a dreadful thing he had done, and what a wicked man he was, and that he ought to be punished; till Big Klaus was so frightened that he jumped into the cart and drove home as hard as he could.
'Don't you hear?' cried the host as loud as he could.
And this is just what happened; for when he got his measure back, three new silver five-shilling pieces were sticking to it.
Then he heard someone riding along the road towards the house.
'Thank you,' said Big Klaus; 'but if I don't get any sea-cattle when I come there, you will have a good hiding, mind!'
'It goes all right!' said Little Klaus; but still he laid a big stone in the sack, fastened it up tight, and then pushed it in.
'Skins! skins!' they cried mockingly; yes, we will tan YOUR skin for you!
'That you shall,' said the farmer.
He was driving a herd of cows and oxen.
''Are you Little Klaus?
The wife received them both very kindly, spread a long table, and gave them a large plate of porridge.
Look! there is a great hole in her forehead!'
'I am going to the town with my grandmother. She is sitting outside in the cart; I cannot bring her in.
So he went himself to Little Klaus with the measure.
'I should very much like to be allowed to spend the night there,' thought Little Klaus; and he went and knocked at the door.
Come with me into the house.'
'Can he conjure up the Devil?' asked the farmer.
One he had had already from the farmer, and now he had his wheelbarrow full of money.
A great new bridge had been built over it, on the middle of which Little Klaus stopped, and said aloud so that the sexton might hear:
'Oh! I'm not at all afraid.
You must know that I can't bear to look at a sexton!
'Alas!
'Yes,' said Little Klaus.
But he could not undo the string.
'He is still in there!
I fell on this, and immediately the sack opened; the loveliest maiden in snow-white garments, with a green garland round her wet hair, took me by the hand, and said!
'Oh!' said Little Klaus, 'that was just so politic of me.
'Yes,' said Little Klaus; 'my wizard can do everything that I ask.
These pushed against the sack so that it was overturned.
There came by an old, old shepherd, with snow-white hair and a long staff in his hand.
So he sent a boy to Big Klaus to borrow a bushel measure from him.
He says ''Yes;'' but that the Devil looks so ugly that we should not like to see him.'
'It all comes from my hot temper!
'You MUST sell me the wizard,' said the farmer.
He was a very worthy man; but he had one great peculiarity--namely, that he could not bear to see a sexton.
'Good morning!' said he to Little Klaus. 'You are early on the road.'
He had a long way to go, and had to pass through a great dark forest.
'Yes; but help me first,' said Big Klaus, 'or else you shall have a beating!'
What does he look like?'
'I say!' said the farmer, 'he must be ugly!
'Do you think we have money by the bushel?'
'How easy he is to carry now!
He did so, as he knew the poor man could not bear to see a sexton.
'Who is it, and how did you get it?' asked the apothecary.
The wife had to fetch the wine which she had hidden, and the farmer drank and grew very merry.
The wife hastily hid all the beautiful food and the wine in her oven; for if her husband had seen it, he would have been sure to ask what it all meant.
'Oh, dear!
The window-shutters were closed, but the light came through the chinks.
That must be because I heard part of the service.'
You heard what I told you, that the sea-maiden said to me a mile farther along the road--and by the road she meant the river, for she can go by no other way--there was another herd of cattle waiting for me.
'Open the sack,' called out Little Klaus; 'creep in here instead of me, and you will die in a moment!'
'Here is a glass of mead from your son,' said the host.
"His love for wine and brandy is at the bottom of all this hostility to the temperance cause," was boldly said of him by individuals in and out of his church.
IN a village not a hundred miles from Philadelphia, resided the Rev. Mr. Manlius, who had the pastoral charge of a very respectable congregation, and was highly esteemed by them; but there was one thing in which he did not give general satisfaction, and in consequence of which many excellent members of his church felt seriously scandalized.
Mr. Manlius?" was eagerly inquired.
It was more the principle of the thing, as he said, that he stood upon, than any thing else, that prevented his signing a temperance pledge.
There was an unusual number of vacant pews during service, both morning and afternoon.
It was all over the village by the next day.
"A minister indeed!"
The parson was pretty ready with the tongue, and rarely came off second best when his opponents dragged him into a controversy, although his arguments were called by them, when he was not present, "mere fustian."
"No, sir."
"He said there was a drunken minister there, and Mr. Manlius, I have ascertained, was the only clergyman present."
"I say so," cried Perkins in a loud voice.
Burton appeared to grow strongly excited.
The grave deacon in the chair looked around with frowning wonder at such indecorum, and felt that especially ill-timed was the levity of the minister.
This occurred near the close of the week, and Sunday arrived before the powers that be in the church were able to confer upon the subject, and cite the minister to appear and answer for himself on the scandalous charge of drunkenness.
"On the day after the dinner-party.
"And, pray, what is the difference?"
"Oh, yes--perfectly."
But especially were the members of other churches severe upon him.
This is a serious matter, and we should like to have your authority for a statement so injurious to the reputation of the minister and the cause of religion."
And so the two deacons settled the matter.
"Never!"
Who says that I made so scandalous an allegation?"
"Did you see Mr. Manlius coming from the house intoxicated?"
For Peter the spiritual world had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had witnessed.
But for Silvester it was not so.
The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it down His face.
III
Their nakedness was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their weakness demanded God's strength, and found it.
Sanity sat on the solid benches of materialism.
There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God.
"That place, father," He said, "what is its name?"
He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated the internal.
But it was very much as it had been a hundred years ago.
The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth.
And as for His inner life, what can be said of that?
It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some old picture-book designed centuries ago.
He lay now back in his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.
It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court outside.
"Yes."
Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him.
But that, at least, He never failed to cry.
Further, He saw well enough that the failure of Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time. Besides, He happened to believe it.
He was not worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no more than the crowned dunces of the world's school.
They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and their God.
"The horses, Holiness," said the man.
There was no little cloud here, as a man's hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in this very sky.
"That is Megiddo," he said.
Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon's scarlet garments might not be compared.
His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....
But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of his control.
It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was as the sun in heaven.
"That among the palms, Holiness?"
He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought. But the centre of His position was simple faith.
Here was no crowd of roofs, no pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort.
There was no whisper from the Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.
One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation.
Yet there was this difference, and it was a significant one.
He apprehended the power of the Resurrection, therefore Christ was risen.
"Some call it Armageddon."
The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light. Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David.
Certainly, historically speaking, Christianity was true--proved by its records--yet to see that needed illumination.
And now it was come to this.
A Transcendent God Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard no longer in wind nor seen in fire!
He said His mass each morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and heard a mass after.
Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions.
In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.
He had done what He could.
Of these, nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had accepted.
The Order of Christ Crucified was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished mostly at the hands of the mobs.
Every priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection, or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now permitted to be wood.
It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago.
It was impossible for a hundred reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of communications.
It resembled, He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the Great, without His worldly importance or pomp.
That was all.
There was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned.
Bishops were being consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all told, and of priests an unknown number.
It had all been done in a few minutes by the dying man's bedside.
He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the night.
Christianity had smouldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God, had been acclaimed as divine.
An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be done.
The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed.
In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order's existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were doing good work.
There were left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome.
The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries.
To these were entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject only to the Holy Father Himself.
And far away to the south lay Jerusalem....
The more perilous tasks--the work of communication between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity--all the business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order.
There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the world who constituted the Sacred College--two Englishmen, of whom Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian.
The world had leaped forward; social science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too, the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or, rather, they said, in spite of Him.
As regarded the Pope's own life very little need be said.
They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and with that and the sacraments were content.
Catholicism survived; but no more.
The two old men had insisted.
He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the year, and was the third of that title.
He had one Syrian priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants.
The Pope's private life was as simple as His room.
He then took His coffee, after changing into the tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business. He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years ago.
It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come--the land where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer of the ground.
It was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.
Listen to Ferao, and be glad!"
"The Man-Pack do not love jungle-tales, nor do I think, Mysa, that a scratch more or less on thy hide is any matter for a council.
I did not know that the Man-cub no longer lay upon the ground.
What do ye here?"
The spring hum broke out for a minute, and was silent, but all the Jungle Folk seemed to be giving tongue at once.
"There is no one here." The night noises of the marsh went on, but never a bird or beast spoke to him, and the new feeling of misery grew.
In his excitement, as he remembered the fight on Waingunga bank, he shouted the last words aloud, and a wild buffalo-cow among the reeds sprang to her knees, snorting, "Man!"
When I must go empty for two days I am very angry.
They sing and howl and fight, and run in companies under the moon, and I--Hai-mai!--I am dying in the marshes, of that poison which I have eaten." He was so sorry for himself that he nearly wept.
This time Mowgli was frightened.
The branch that was yellow-leaved the day before dripped sap when Mowgli broke it.
They only grew more and more interested and excited; and that was one of the things that Bagheera himself did not understand.
The Jungle People are very busy in the spring, and Mowgli could hear them grunting and screaming and whistling according to their kind.
The Four shall come with me, for they grow as fat as white grubs."
Does he fly, then?"
Oh, Mowgli, why dost thou not kill them both?"
The two leaped forward and dashed him aside, and without word to waste rolled over and over close locked.
Who so wise?" There was a curious drawl in the voice that made Mowgli turn to see whether by any chance the Black Panther were making fun of him, for the Jungle is full of words that sound like one thing, but mean another.
Mowgli's bad temper seemed to have boiled itself away.
Yes, I will go.
No, he was trumpeting and running and roaring through the valleys in the moonlight. His trail was like the trail of three elephants, for he would not hide among the trees.
There seem to be only two--the wet and the dry; but if you look closely below the torrents of rain and the clouds of char and dust you will find all four going round in their regular ring.
Spring is the most wonderful, because she has not to cover a clean, bare field with new leaves and flowers, but to drive before her and to put away the hanging-on, over-surviving raffle of half-green things which the gentle winter has suffered to live, and to make the partly-dressed stale earth feel new and young once more.
Nay, I will go back to my own Jungle, and I will die upon the Council Rock, and Bagheera, whom I love, if he is not screaming in the valley--Bagheera, perhaps, may watch by what is left for a little, lest Chil use me as he used Akela."
"Oh, Mowgli, is it danger?" the boy called back mockingly.
But that spring, as he told Bagheera, his stomach was changed in him. Ever since the bamboo shoots turned spotty-brown he had been looking forward to the morning when the smells should change.
I sent a runner--I sent thee!--to Hathi, bidding him to come upon such a night and pluck the sweet grass for me with his trunk."
I have hunted too easily too long.
"I have drunk good water.
The two baffed under Mowgli's nose so close that a pinch of downy white feathers brushed away.
"I said the Time of New Talk is near," growled the panther, switching his tail.
"The smells have changed," screamed Mor.
"But, indeed, Little Brother," Bagheera began, "we do not always----"
"It was the Time of New Talk," said the panther, always very humble. "Perhaps, Little Brother, thou didst not that time call him by a Master-word?
He killed early that evening and ate but little, so as to be in good fettle for his spring running, and he ate alone because all the Jungle People were away singing or fighting.
"Let us sleep, Bagheera.
A large, warm tear splashed down on his knee, and, miserable as he was, Mowgli felt happy that he was so miserable, if you can understand that upside-down sort of happiness.
Their voices then are different from their voices at other times of the year, and that is one of the reasons why spring in the Jungle is called the Time of New Talk.
All except Mowgli.
Nor does my throat burn and grow small, as it did when I bit the blue-spotted root that Oo the Turtle said was clean food.
"It is here also!" he said half aloud. "It has followed me," and he looked over his shoulder to see whether the It were not standing behind him.
My stomach is heavy in me.
He could swing by one hand from a top branch for half an hour at a time, when he had occasion to look along the tree-roads. He could stop a young buck in mid-gallop and throw him sideways by the head.
"Wolf!
"I do not know--nor do I care," he said sleepily.
The Four did not follow him on these wild ringings of the Jungle, but went off to sing songs with other wolves.
So he ran, sometimes shouting, sometimes singing to himself, the happiest thing in all the Jungle that night, till the smell of the flowers warned him that he was near the marshes, and those lay far beyond his farthest hunting-grounds.
Mowgli leaped forward, caught one outstretched throat in either hand, expecting to fling the creatures backward as he had often done in games or Pack hunts.
It is very good."
The marsh was awake all round him, for in the spring the Bird People sleep very lightly, and companies of them were coming or going the night through.
Man goes to Man!
There was a yelling and scattering of Bandar-log in the new-budding branches above, and there stood Mowgli, his chest, filled to answer Mor, sinking in little gasps as the breath was driven out of it by this unhappiness.
"Have I done wrong?
Then there is another day--to the eye nothing whatever has changed--when all the smells are new and delightful, and the whiskers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long, draggled locks.
That leaf knows.
"HE has not forgotten.
"Little Brother, good hunting!" whistled Chil the Kite and his mate, swooping down together.
"And after," he went on, "they will find me lying in the black water.
"It was a naked cow-herd's jest.
Let us go beyond the swamp and see what comes.
"Let the Red Dhole come from the Dekkan, or the Red Flower dance among the bamboos, and all the Jungle runs whining to Mowgli, calling him great elephant-names.
My strength is gone from me, and presently I shall die.
By the Bull that bought me! am I the Master of the Jungle, or am I not?
"The year turns," he said.
And this she does so well that there is no spring in the world like the Jungle spring.
Make me a rest for my head."
"I have eaten good food," he said to himself.
Now I, too, must remember my song," and he began purring and crooning to himself, harking back dissatisfied again and again.
Here soliloquised Stanley Lake in that gentleman's ordinary vein.
Old Lady Chelford coughed, and then rallying, said--
'And pray what do you think of marriage, Lady Chelford?'
The apparition, whatever it was, seemed to persecute me with a mysterious obstinacy; at all events, I was falling into a habit of seeing it; and I felt a natural desire to escape from the house which was plagued with its presence.
'Family prayers indeed! and such a pair of women--witches, by Jove!--and that rascally groom, and a hypocritical attorney!
With a shrug, and a stealthy glance round him, Captain Lake started up. The instinct of the lonely and gloomy man unconsciously drew him towards the light, and he approached.
A bat, attracted thither like himself, was flitting and flickering, this way and that, across the casement.
'I am not going, at present, to say any more upon these subjects, because Lady Chelford prefers deferring our conversation,' said this very odd young lady; 'but there is nothing which either she or I may say, which I wish to conceal from any friend of Mr. Wylder's.'
The gallant captain, her brother, was also absent.
What can the child mean?'
But no--there was no need to tap at the wooden window-pane.
There are people there whom one could not associate with comfortably.
Lady Chelford, perhaps, knew more of the capricious and daring character of the ladies of the Brandon line than I, and may have discovered some signs of a coming storm in the oracular questions which had fallen so harmoniously from those beautiful lips.
Old Major Jackson, with his glass in his eye, was contending in his shirt-sleeves heroically with a Manchester bag-man, who was palpably too much for him.
He marched into the town rather quickly, like a man who has business on his hands; but he had none--for he walked by the 'Brandon Arms,' and halted, and stared at the post-office, as if he fancied he had something to say there.
But somehow the whole thing seemed to Lake to say, 'Do allow me this once to prescribe; do give your poor soul this one chance,' and Lake answered him superciliously and irreverently.
Others, again, supposed he might be that Major Craddock who had lost thirty thousand pounds on Vanderdecken the other day.
'Very good, Miss!'
There was a little pause.
'I don't see, Miss Brandon, that my thoughts upon that subject can concern anyone but myself,' retorted the old lady, severely, and from an awful altitude.
The old viscountess was flushed (she did not rouge), and very angry, and, I think, uncomfortable, though she affected her usual supremacy.
Then for nearly ten minutes he smoked--an odd recreation for a man suffering from the cigars of last night--and after that, for nearly as long again, he seemed lost in deep thought, his eyes upon the misty grass before him, and his small French boot beating time to the music of his thoughts.
'I have been awfully dissipated since I saw you.'
That chastened and entreating look it was hard to resist.
As for me, I was puzzled.
'Might I, perhaps, venture to beg, just this one night----'
Captain Lake, waiting, with his hand on the door-handle, for the stroke, heard the smack of the balls, and the score called by the marker, and entered the hot, glaring room.
'Oh! no; billiards, I assure you.
I own to that prejudice.
'Well, then, if you permit me, being a little tired, I'll go to my bed-room.'
At the same time I had an odd sort of reluctance to mention the subject to my entertainers.
Stanley opened the door.
She'll be home immediately.
Lake had no very high opinion of men or women, gentle or simple.
These, indeed, were even in Stanley's childhood old-world, hazy, traditions of the servants' hall.
there--I say--a passenger for the "White House?"'
Old Tamar shook her head and groaned.
At that dread hour, Captain Lake, about a mile on the Dollington, which was the old London road from Gylingden, was pacing backward and forward under the towering files of beech that overarch it at that point.
IN WHICH CAPTAIN LAKE MEETS A FRIEND NEAR THE WHITE HOUSE.
I write to Chelford to say the same.'
'She listens, I dare say, the little spy,' said he.
'And keep the hall door shut and bolted?'
Even so, he had a longer wait than he expected, sounds are heard so far by night.
And should they call, you must say the same; and if Miss Dorcas, Miss Brandon, you know--should wish to go up to see her, tell her she's asleep.
'I did not mean anything, upon my honour, Tamar, that could annoy you.
It's no use--I can't read it.'
'No, Master Stanley!
I'll come to-morrow and tell you exactly--maybe to-morrow evening--will that do?
Stop that hypocritical grimacing, will you.
There was here a little subsidence in his speech.
His cool impertinence, and especially this cunning precaution, incensed old Lady Chelford.
He did not like the tone and look which accompanied this.
Stanley Lake did not like waiting any more than did Louis XIV.
I'll see you in the morning.'
'She quite believes her mistress is up stairs, eh?'
He was thinking of giving her a crown, but there were several reasons against it, so that handsome coin remained in his purse.
'Yes, Sir.'
They are all asleep in the "White House." I'll be with you in five minutes, and you shall have something for yourself when we get into Dollington.'
She nodded sadly.
I think that is all.
CHAPTER XXII.
She's a good little girl.'
He merely mentioned it, and made no comment; but Lake perceived that he was annoyed at his unexplained absence.
'Don't speak of the Bible now; but you needn't fear me, Master Stanley,' answered the old woman, a little sternly.
You have Miss Radie's secret in your hands, I don't think you'd like to injure her, and you used to be trustworthy.
Again she nodded.
'Feed him here, then.
I think you are half mad, Tamar; but think what you may, it must be done.
But Mark had a decided objection to many letters: he had no fancy to be worried, when he had made up his mind, by prosy remonstrances; and he shut out the whole tribe of letter-writers by simply omitting to give them his address.
This note was as unceremonious, and still shorter.
'It is not for the child I nursed to say that,' said Tamar.
'All right, Sir.
There were scandalous stories of wicked old Tiberius--bankrupt, dead, and buried--compromising the fame of Tamar--not always a spectacled and cadaverous student of Holy Writ.
'I don't know why she's gone, nor why it's a secret--I don't, and I'd rather not.
'You come from Johnson's Hotel--don't you--at Dollington?'
That does not strike me as any part of your religion.'
'Now, my good old Tamar, you really can't be such an idiot as to fancy there can be any imaginable wrong in keeping that prying little slut in ignorance of that which in no wise concerns her.
You are not very tired, are you?
'I'm going up to the Hall, and I'll tell them she's much better, and that I've been in her room, and that, perhaps, she may go up to see them in the morning.'
There was a vile sarcasm in his tone and look.
As he walked down the mill-road toward the town, he met Lord Chelford on his way to make enquiry about Rachel at Redman's Farm; and Lake, who, as we know, had just seen his sister, gave him all particulars.
Have not you read of straining at gnats and swallowing camels?
'Yes; the Lord forgive me--I'm deceiving her.'
She placed her hand on his, and stepped to the ground.
'How long is all this to go on for, Master Stanley?'
Like most rustic communities, Gylingden and its neighbourhood were early in bed.
Chelford, like the lawyer, had heard from Mark Wylder that morning--a few lines, postponing his return.
I don't think your Bible teaches you anywhere to hurt your neighbour and to break faith.'
'You sit up stairs chiefly?'
I left it behind; so stupid!'
'Keep the hall-door bolted.
Wylder plainly wrote in great haste, and merely said:--
Lake addressed the driver--
'How long--a very short time, I tell you.
You need not talk of this.
As has been already stated, the first of the great snow-storms that replenish the Yosemite fountains seldom sets in before the end of November.
Most of the way I sank waist deep, almost out of sight in some places.
They are developed on canyon and mountain-sides at an elevation of from nine to ten thousand feet, where the slopes are inclined at an angle too low to shed off the dry winter snow, and which accumulates until the spring thaws sap their foundations and make them slippery; then away in grand style go the ponderous icy masses without any fine snow-dust.
But I was not to get summit views of any sort that day, for deep trampling near the canyon head, where the snow was strained, started an avalanche, and I was swished down to the foot of the canyon as if by enchantment.
Hundreds of broad cloud-shaped masses may also be seen, leaping over the brows of the cliffs from great heights, descending at first with regular avalanche speed until, worn into dust by friction, they float in front of the precipices like irised clouds.
When the avalanche started I threw myself on my back and spread my arms to try to keep from sinking.
Those of Clouds' Rest descend like thunderbolts for more than a mile.
The fertile clouds, drooping and condensing in brooding silence, seem to be thoughtfully examining the forests and streams with reference to the work that lies before them.
In politics he was a Whig: his religious opinions leaned towards Presbyterianism: but his temper was cautious and moderate.
The slaughter in London was about to begin.
But the honest man was incapable of betraying one who, in extreme peril, had come under the shadow of his roof.
He was saved from death by an ancient matron of the Baptist persuasion, named Elizabeth Gaunt.
She procured a boat which took him to Gravesend, where he got on board of a ship bound for Amsterdam.
His son and daughter stood by him at the bar.
The oppressed Puritans reckoned up, not without a gloomy satisfaction the houses which had been blown down, and the ships which had been cast away, and derived some consolation from thinking that heaven was bearing awful testimony against the iniquity which afflicted the earth.
I did but relieve a poor family; and lo!
She left a paper written, indeed, in no graceful style, yet such as was read by many thousands with compassion and horror.
He died with courage and with many pious expressions, but showed, by look and gesture, such strong resentment at the barbarity and injustice with which he had been treated, that his enemies spread a calumnious report concerning him.
Even after all the horrors of that year, many thought it impossible that these judgments should be carried into execution.
Both were impelled by the strongest pressure of hope end fear to criminate him.
The bar and the bench united to browbeat the unfortunate Whig.
By his own confession he had been present when the design of assassination was discussed by his accomplices.
Unhappily it was soon noised abroad that the anger of James was more strongly excited against those who harboured rebels than against the rebels themselves.
It was to little purpose.
He delivered himself up to the government; and he gave information against Fernley and Elizabeth Gaunt.
William Penn, however, who stood near the gallows, and whose prejudice were all on the side of the government, afterwards said that he could see in Cornish's deportment nothing but the natural indignation of an innocent man slain under the forms of law.
Both were, by their own confession accomplices in the plot with which they charged the prisoner.
The jury, named by a courtly Sheriff, readily found a verdict of Guilty; and, in spite of the indignant murmurs of the public, Cornish suffered death within ten days after he had been arrested.
In the case of Grey and of men situated like him, it was impossible to gratify cruelty and rapacity at once; but a rich trader might be both hanged and plundered. The commercial grandees, however, though in general hostile to Popery and to arbitrary power, had yet been too scrupulous or too timid to incur the guilt of high treason.
Her life was passed in relieving the unhappy of all religious denominations, and she was well known as a constant visitor of the gaols.
When Oates, after his scourging, was carried into Newgate insensible, and, as all thought, in the last agony, he had been bled and his wounds had been dressed by Bateman.
The slaughter in the West was over.
Fernley was very poor. He was besieged by creditors.
He was drunk, they said, or out of his mind, when he was turned off.
He had attended Shaftesbury professionally, and had been a zealous Exclusionist.
He had, indeed, when Sheriff, been very unwilling to employ as his deputy a man so violent and unprincipled as Goodenough.
Fernley was sentenced to the gallows, Elizabeth Gaunt to the stake.
None of them had yet got his pardon; and it was a popular saying, that they fished for prey, like tame cormorants, with ropes round their necks.
This was an offence not to be forgiven.
Among the persons concerned in the Rye House plot was a man named James Burton.
The case against him rested wholly on the evidence of Rumsey and Goodenough.
The government was peculiarly desirous to find victims among the great Whig merchants of the City.
Bateman was arrested and indicted.
The malignity with which so obscure a man, guilty of so slight an offence, was hunted down, while traitors far more criminal and far more eminent were allowed to ransom themselves by giving evidence against him, seemed to require explanation; and a disgraceful explanation was found.
But the King was without pity.
When the conspiracy was detected, a reward was offered for his apprehension.
The government was bent on destroying a victim of no high rank, a surgeon in the City, named Bateman.
He had publicly declared that of all forms of treason the hiding of traitors from his vengeance was the most unpardonable.
It is indeed but too true that the taste for blood is a taste which even men not naturally cruel may, by habit, speedily acquire.
The villain whose life they had preserved had the heart and the forehead to appear as the principal witness against them.
This woman, with the peculiar manners and phraseology which then distinguished her sect, had a large charity.
It is not proved by trustworthy evidence that he ever approached the verge of treason.
He may possibly have been privy to the Whig plot; but it is certain that he had not been one of the leading conspirators; for, in the great mass of depositions published by the government, his name occurs only once, and then not in connection with any crime bordering on high treason.
Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at Tyburn on the same day on which Cornish suffered death in Cheapside.
Since that terrible day no woman has suffered death in England for any political offence.
Fernley was hanged.
They were wealthy; and their wealth was not, like that of many noblemen and country gentlemen, protected by entail against forfeiture.
The witnesses against him were men of infamous character, men, too, who were swearing for their own lives.
Evidence was produced which proved that Goodenough was also under the influence of personal enmity.
One of the conspirators, indeed, John Rumsey, was ready to swear anything: but a single witness was not sufficient; and no second witness could be found.
They were brought to trial.
Cornish thought himself safe; but the eye of the tyrant was upon him.
They had, in the last reign, been a formidable part of the strength of the opposition.
Burton knew this.
"My fault," she said, "was one which a prince might well have forgiven.
More than two years had since elapsed.
In so far as they had injured herself, she forgave them: but, in that they were implacable enemies of that good cause which would yet revive and flourish, she left them to the judgment of the King of Kings.
It was not thought that Goodenough had yet earned his pardon.
They were convicted.
When the Rye House plot was discovered, great hopes were entertained at Whitehall that Cornish would appear to have been concerned: but these hopes were disappointed.
They read as well as they could some notes which he had set down, and examined his witnesses.
But these things were urged in vain. On the bench sate three judges who had been with Jeffreys in the West; and it was remarked by those who watched their deportment that they had come back from the carnage of Taunton in a fierce and excited state.
One of the most considerable among them was Henry Cornish.
Black as this case was, it was not the blackest which disgraced the sessions of that autumn at the Old Bailey.
Her political and theological opinions, as well as her compassionate disposition, led her to do everything in her power for Burton.
He had been an Alderman under the old charter of the City, and had filled the office of Sheriff when the question of the Exclusion Bill occupied the public mind.
The prisoner, stupefied by illness, was unable to articulate, or to understand what passed.
Come with me, Karl, my dear.
She lifted them in her arms, and Karl saw their sunny heads nestling against her dark one.
Why, it's your destiny."
"I've waited for this from the moment I saw you last.
Some new plenitude had come to him since Kate had seen him last.
"Oh, but, Karl, aren't there ways of arranging such things?
Are you going to be my wife, Kate?"
Their arms were outstretched; their eyes burning like the eyes of seraphs.
We'd lose ourselves--and find ourselves--laboring for one of the kindest, lovingest ideas the hard old world has yet devised.
Oh, it was no little thing for which she was fighting!
Will you come and help me, Karl, man?"
They heard the children running down the hall and pounding on the door with their soft fists.
A fine seriousness invested him--a seriousness which included, the observer felt sure, all imaginable fit forms of joy.
It's a higher one than the soldier's, I think.
"You know all that I have thought and felt," she said; "you know--for I have written--what my life may be.
He drew up his restless, home-bound horses, and she leaped to the ground.
But deep within my heart I shall, as you say, be both lonely and sad.
I take my chance and my honor just as you would take your chance and your honor.
As she ran toward her little ones on swift feet, the two who watched her were convinced that she had regained her old-time vigor, and had acquired an eloquence of personality which never before had been hers.
"Does it seem that way to you?
Kate tried to console herself with that.
It's come my way to be the banner-carrier, and I'm glad of it.
As she left the room, moving unseeingly, she heard the hard-wrung groan that came from his lips.
"You have stolen my word," she said with an accent of finality.
She was a girl, very lonely, facing a task too large for her, needing the comfort of her lover's word.
She chose to believe that he was running to meet her, his eyes aflame, his great arms outstretched; she thrilled to the rain of his kisses; she thought those stars might hear the voice with which he shouted, "Kate!"
"You know I shall not!
But am I for that reason to be false to my destiny?"
She saw the road of life they would take together; how they would stand on peaks of lofty desire, in sunlight; how, unfaltering, they would pace tenebrous valleys.
"Wait!" said Kate.
In the darkness, Kate heard Honora stealing away to her room.
"We who love are those who suffer; We who suffer most are those who most do love."
She stretched herself upon the sand, face downward, weeping, because she was afraid of life--because she was wishful for the joy of woman and dared not take it.
If you refuse to marry him, I believe you will frustrate a great purpose of Nature.
Your lives would go on together, widening, widening--"
She, who had forced herself so relentlessly to face the world as a woman faces it, with the knowledge and the courage of maturity, felt her wisdom slip from her.
"Kate!
They sat on their little low, sand-swept balcony, facing the sea.
The eternally flowing sea, the ever-recurrent night gave them courage, though they were women, to speak the truth.
I married David the same way."
And a secret, wonderful knowledge came to her--the knowledge of lovely spiritual ecstasies, the realization of rich human delights.
No, nor any other soul.
As the darkness deepened, they grew unashamed and then reticences fell from them.
Sitting in the twilight, watching the light reluctantly leave the sea, they spoke of many things.
Why, Kate, it will be a crime against Love.
After this, there was a change in Honora's attitude toward her.
Their laughter would chime and their tears would fall in unison.
Aren't there other things than love, Honora,--better things than selfish delight?"
Then Kate spoke brokenly.
Honora sighed heavily.
If to long to house with him, to go by the same name that he does, to wear him, so to speak, carved on my brow, is to love, then I do."
The rising tide filled the world with its soft and indescribable cadence. The stars came out into the sky according to their rank--the greatest first, and after them the less, and the less no more lacking in beauty than the great.
No; you mustn't say that.
"But I have an opportunity to serve thousands--maybe hundreds of thousands of human beings.
"Accept," she said, "my profound commiseration." Her tone seemed to imply that she included contempt.
Then her bolder thought died.
"I will not say that you are speaking falsely, but I think you know you are setting out only a little part of the truth.
Sorrow and cruel loss might be on their way, but Joy was hers now.
You must forgive me, Kate.
If to want to work with him, and to feel there could be no exultation like overcoming difficulties with him, is love, then truly I love him.
The winds of the sea enfolded her in an embrace.
With you to aid him, Karl may become a distinguished man.
Where one failed, the other would redeem; where one doubted, the other would hope. They would bear their children to be the vehicle of their ideals--these fresh new creatures, born of their love, would be trained to achieve what they, their parents, had somehow missed.
The Pacific thundered in upon them; they could hear the winds, calling and calling with an immemorial invitation; they knew of the little jewelled islands that lay out in the seas and of the lands of eld on the far, far shore; and they dreamed strange dreams.
I would no more have turned from it than I would have turned from food, if I had been starving; or water after I had been thirsting in the desert.
"I understand," said Kate.
You two would need room--like great beautiful buildings.
"I think so," answered Kate.
"No!
"'Bitter, alas,'" she quoted to the rising trouble of the sea, '"the sorrow of lonely women.'" The distillation of that strange duplex soul, Fiona Macleod, was as a drop of poisoned truth upon her parched tongue.
You must not think because I cannot marry him that he will always be unhappy.
If just to see him, at a distance, enriches the world and makes the stream of time turn from lead to gold is anything in the nature of love, then I am his lover.
But you and Karl--such mates--the only free spirits I know!
All was as it should be--all was ordered--all was fit and wonderful.
Kate felt herself more alone than she ever had been in her life.
"Can you suspect him of a passion or a fealty less than your own?
The tongues of the sea came up and lapped her feet.
"Then I foresee that you will be one of the happiest women in the world."
She feigned that Karl was waiting for her a little way on in the warm darkness--on, around that scimitar-shaped bend of the beach.
And I should rejoice that you were living in that savage world instead of in a city.
XXXII
Who would wish to see you in the jumble of a city?
Why, Kate, to marry him was inevitable!
For the first time in her life, freely, without restraint, bravely, as sometime she might face God, she confronted the idea of Love.
So Honora waited.
In time he will find another woman--"
"So," went on Honora, after a silence which the sea filled in with its low harmonies, "if you loved Karl--"
Any man would be an anticlimax to me after him."
It does what it was created to do.
Will you find another man?"
Another silence fell.
Honora scrutinized the face of her friend.
Then, calmer, yet as if she had run a race, panting, palpitant, she seated herself on the sands.
"Oh!" interrupted Kate with a sharp ejaculation; "we'll not talk of it any more, Honora.
Alone she walked there, and the only figures she saw were those of the mirage.
She let her imagination roam through the years.
Always they would be together.
It would be epic.
Admit it, Honora."
After Wander?
Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity,
One even wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture oneself as
The thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and brutality and drunkenness--all of those things to which builders of Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone--he never dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed, to be regretted.
And even those who resisted his call to adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking "shop." He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room, the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon of omniscience.
Rolling down the Ratcliff Road, Drunk, and raising Cain,
Aft and walk away with her! Handsome to the cathead, now!
At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men.
He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day's work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with which he referred to them.
It might have frightened the clergymen away.
And, similarly, his Imperialism is a mean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view of humanity.
His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of the music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, too knowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit.
Tear 'im, puppy!
It was Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as a needless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense of reality--too much humour, indeed--to want to portray Empire-builders as a company of plaster saints.
In one breath he would give you an invocation to Jehovah.
Winds of the world, give answer!
Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as a gorgeous poster-artist of Empire.
He mistakes knowingness for knowledge.
This jumble--which seems so curious nowadays--of delight in piety and delight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty and respite to the oppressed race of Victorians.
He even mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships, but of women.
though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been the consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a back-street public-house.
The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into his poetry.
Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go, bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.
He sang of Imperialism as it was, or was about to be--vulgar and canting and bloody--and a world that was preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and bloody bade him welcome.
Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.
He, more than any other writer of his time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not stay at home--the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a thousand miles away from the home of his fathers.
"Take up," he would sing--
No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to the new music--music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its revivalistic purpose.
Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade-- Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?
Cursed with the curse of Reuben, Seared with the brand of Cain,
Those "seven men from out of Hell" who went
Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of miles and thousands of places through keyholes.
THE POET OF LIFE WITH A CAPITAL HELL
His knowing attitude to women makes some of his verse--not very much, to be quite fair--absolutely detestable.
He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God.
Every oath he loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in literature.
With what delight they would quote the verse:--
began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination.
As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he said that Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes.
That is quite true.
In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting round the roguish side of you with the assurance that:--
Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of self-sacrifice.
In him, wide wanderings have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing as the hoard in a miser's garret.
Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. Rudyard Kipling was once a modern.
It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet.
They are whimpering to and fro-- And what should they know of England who only England know? The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!
Mr. Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merely dramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room.
They loved him for his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a leading article in verse.
He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature.
Tally on.
If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back, If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line, If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack, You will understand this little song o' mine.
were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands.
Hitherto they had been building up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, many reprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly: outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved.
Loot!
Unfortunately, no sooner had the old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp, and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty.
Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.
Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!
He might, indeed, have been described at the time as a Post-Imperialist.
O tally on the fall! Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy. Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!
That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poetic wisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes.
Many of his poems are simply miser's shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened.
He cannot even praise the flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:--
Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain.
He excited the imagination of youth with deft questions such as--
Remembering what their punishments were, I had the prospect of a second long separation from Yoletta, and the thought of such excessive severity, or rather of such cruel injustice, made me wild.
Tell me if this is not so?"
"Punished for being ill--who ever heard of such a thing!
You are still feeble, and perhaps a little confused in mind concerning the events of the last few days: I do not therefore press you to give an account of them, but shall simply state your offense, and if I am mistaken in any particular you shall correct me.
"Have you nothing more to ask?" she said at length, with an accent of surprise.
But she made no further reply to my words; and as I lay there watching her, the drowsy spirit the fever had left in me overcame my brain, and I slept once more.
"I would rather endure many punishments than give you pain.
"It is only just," I replied, "that I should suffer for my fault, and you have tempered justice with more mercy than I deserve."
I did not, on awakening, find myself in my own familiar cell, but in a spacious apartment new to me, on a comfortable bed, beside which Edra was seated.
"I did not sleep that night," I replied, somewhat huskily.
At length I was pronounced well enough to go about the house, although still very feeble, and I was conducted, not to the judgment-room, where I had expected to be taken, but to the Mother's Room; and there I found the father of the house, seated with Chastel, and with them seven or eight of the others.
"Yes, dear, exceeds all others, as the light of the sun exceeds that of the moon and the stars.
"But there is more to tell you, Smith.
I suppose that by-and-by it will be discovered that the bridge of my nose is not quite straight, or that I can't see round the corner, and that also will be set down as a crime, to be expiated in solitary confinement, on a bread-and-water diet!
She regarded me with an expression almost approaching to horror on her gentle face, and for some moments made no reply.
They all welcomed me, and seemed glad to see me out again; but I could not help remarking a certain subdued, almost solemn air about them, which seemed to remind me that I was regarded as an offender already found guilty, who had now been brought up to receive judgment.
She was disturbed at this outburst, but quietly and gravely repeated that I must certainly be punished for my illness.
Punished for being ill!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright in my bed.
No, you shall not punish me; rather than give in to such tyranny I'll walk off and leave the house for ever!"
Here he paused, as if expecting me to make some reply.
"What!
I looked in surprise at Chastel, for this was very unexpected: she was gazing at my face with the light of a strange tenderness in her eyes, never seen there before.
It is in me like greenness in the leaf--that beautiful color which can only be changed by sere decay."
For a while she was silent, but I misjudged her when I imagined that she would now leave me, offended, to my own reflections.
I never heard such outrageous nonsense in my life!"
"A little while ago you told me that you loved me: has that feeling faded so soon, or do you take any pleasure in wounding those you love?"
For several days, which brought me so little strength that I was not permitted to leave the sick-room, I heard nothing further about my punishment, for I purposely refrained from asking any questions, and no person appeared inclined to bring forward so disagreeable a subject.
With her hands folded idly on her lap, and her face half averted, she sat gazing at nothing.
My love for you cannot fade while I have life and understanding.
He had reproved me so gently, even approving of the emotion, although still entirely in the dark as to its meaning, which had caused my illness, that I was made to feel very submissive, and even grateful to him.
Her words, and, more than her words, her tender, pleading tone, pierced me with compunction, and I could not resist.
Did she not understand my meaning now--had not my words brought back some sweet and sorrowful memory?
It seemed impossible that this woman, so tender and so beautiful, should never have experienced in herself or witnessed in another, the feeling I had questioned her about.
"By Heaven, I shall not submit to it!" I exclaimed.
"Edra, my sweet sister, do not imagine such a thing!" I said.
"My king, my lord, and mine uncle," said Sir Gawain, "bear witness now that I make you a promise that I shall hold by my knighthood, and from this day I will never fail Sir Launcelot until the one of us have slain the other.
So, by means of this bishop, peace was made for the space of one year; and King Arthur received back the queen, and Sir Launcelot departed from the kingdom with all his knights, and went to his own country.
Will you now turn back, now you are so far advanced upon your journey?
Then the king made great clerks to come before him, that they should chronicle of the high adventures of the good knights.
"Then Arthur made vast banquets, and strange knights From the four winds came in: and each one sat, Tho' served with choice from air, land, stream and sea, Oft in mid-banquet measuring with his eyes His neighbor's make and might."
But he would not believe it to be true without proof.
--Guinevere.
But King Arthur's host was too great for Sir Launcelot to abide him in the field; and he was full loath to do battle against the king.
Then anon both parties withdrew to repose them, and buried the dead.
Then Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawain departed a great way asunder, and then they came together with all their horses' might, and each smote the other in the middle of their shields, but neither of them was unhorsed, but their horses fell to the earth.
Then Sir Launcelot and the knights that were with him fell upon the troop that guarded the queen, and dispersed them, and slew all who withstood them.
"Truly," said the man, "Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris are slain." "Alas!" said Sir Gawain, "now is my joy gone." And then he fell down and swooned, and long he lay there as he had been dead.
"Modred's narrow foxy face, Heart-hiding smile, and gray persistent eye: Henceforward, too, the Powers that tend the soul To help it from the death that cannot die, And save it even in extremes, began To vex and plague."
When Sir Perceval and Sir Bohort saw Sir Galahad dead they made as much sorrow as ever did two men.
Then Sir Launcelot hastened to his friends, and told them what had happened, and withdrew with them to the forest; but he left spies to bring him tidings of whatever might be done.
Then said Sir Gawain, "I will not hear your tales nor be of your counsel." "No more will I," said Sir Gareth and Sir Gaheris, and therewith they departed, making great sorrow.
Why hidest thou thyself within holes and walls like a coward?
Now Sir Gawain had this gift from a holy man, that every day in the year, from morning to noon, his strength was increased threefold, and then it fell again to its natural measure.
So Sir Launcelot escaped, but the queen remained in the king's power, and Arthur could no longer doubt of her guilt.
But when the year was passed, King Arthur and Sir Gawain came with a great host, and landed upon Sir Launcelot's lands, and burned and wasted all that they might overrun.
--Pelleas and Ettarre.
So they shipped at Cardiff, and sailed unto Benwick, which some men call Bayonne.
And if they had not been good men they might have fallen into despair.
Then Sir Agrivain told the king all that was said in the court of the conduct of Sir Launcelot and the queen, and it grieved the king very much.
And all the people of those lands came to Sir Launcelot, and received him home right joyfully.
So the queen was led forth, and her ghostly father was brought to her to shrive her, and there was weeping and wailing of many lords and ladies.
"Fall of it what fall may," said Sir Agrivain, "I will disclose it to the king." With that came to them King Arthur.
So Sir Agrivain laid a plot to entrap Sir Launcelot and the queen, intending to take them together unawares.
Thereof heard Sir Launcelot, and collected all whom he could; and many good knights held with him, both for his sake and for the queen's sake.
So then Sir Launcelot's fellowship came out of the castle in full good array.
So Sir Launcelot drew him to his strong castle, with all manner of provisions.
"I doubt you not," said Sir Gawain, "for to all mischief ever were ye prone; yet I would that ye left all this, for I know what will come of it."
Then was there great joy made of him in the whole court, for they feared he had been dead.
"Now, brothers, hold your peace," said Sir Gawain.
And one went and told Sir Launcelot that the queen was led forth to her death.
"We will not," said Sir Agrivain.
"Then will I," said Sir Modred.
When he arose out of his swoon Sir Gawain ran to the king, crying, "O King Arthur, mine uncle, my brothers are slain." Then the king wept and he both.
Then there came one to Sir Gawain and told him how that Sir Launcelot had slain the knights and carried away the queen.
Then came forth Sir Gawain from the king's host and offered combat, and Sir Lionel encountered with him, and there Sir Gawain smote Sir Lionel through the body, that he fell to the earth as if dead.
SIR AGRIVAIN'S TREASON
All this was made in great books, and put up in the church at Salisbury.
And during that time Sir Gawain gave him many sad brunts, that all the knights that looked on marvelled how Sir Launcelot might endure them.
And Sir Bohort told him of the adventures that had befallen him, and his two fellows, Sir Perceval and Sir Galahad. And Sir Launcelot told the adventures of the Sangreal that he had seen.
"O Lord, defend my brethren!" said Sir Gawain.
And the law was such in those days that they who committed such crimes, of what estate or condition soever they were, must be burned to death, and so it was ordained for Queen Guenever.
After the birth of Mary, her mother resided in the country for three or four years, until her money was all spent, and her ingenuity was set at work to contrive how to obtain a supply.
A mutual attachment took place, and, as soon as convenient, women's clothes were provided for her, and they were publicly married.
Both her comrade and the rest of the regiment deemed her mad.
Though in every action she conducted herself with the greatest bravery, yet she could not obtain a commission, as they were in general bought and sold.
Being with child at the time of her trial, her execution was delayed; and it is probable that she would have found favor, but in the mean time she fell sick and died.
Though no esteem or love had formerly existed, this action was sufficient to have kindled the most violent flame.
It, however, happened, that her comrade was a handsome young Fleming, and she fell passionately in love with him.
Rackam was enjoined to secrecy, and here he behaved honorably; but love again assailed the conquered Mary.
She, however, presented Mary in the character of her grandson.
The husband not returning, she again found herself with child, and to cover her shame, took leave of her husband's relations, and went to live in the country, taking her boy along with her.
The attention of our readers is now to be directed to the history of two female pirates,--a history which is chiefly remarkable from the extraordinary circumstance of the softer sex assuming a character peculiarly distinguished for every vice that can disgrace humanity, and at the same time for the exertion of the most daring, though brutal, courage.
The grandmother, however, dying, the support from that quarter failed, and she was obliged to hire her out as a footboy to a French lady.
The fruit of that marriage was a sprightly boy.
The singularity of two troopers marrying caused a general conversation, and many of the officers honored the ceremony with their presence, and resolved to make presents to the bride, to provide her with necessaries. After marriage they were desirous to quit the service, and their discharge being easily obtained, they set up an ordinary under the sign of the "Three Shoes," and soon acquired a considerable run of business.
But this was not necessary, for the lover's attachment was equal, if not stronger than her own; they pledged their faith, which was esteemed as binding as if the ceremony had been performed by a clergyman.
She accordingly quitted that service, and enlisted into a regiment of horse; there she behaved herself so valiantly, that she gained the esteem of all her officers.
Her conduct was generally directed by virtuous principles, while at the same time, she was violent in her attachments.
She was vain and bold in her disposition, but susceptible of the tenderest emotions, and of the most melting affections.
The strength and manly disposition of this supposed boy increased with her years, and leaving that servile employment, she engaged on board a man-of-war.
The old woman proposed to take the boy to live with her, but the mother would not on any account part with her boy; the grandmother, therefore, allowed a crown per week for his support.
The violence of her feelings rendered her negligent of her duty, and effected such a change in her behaviour as attracted the attention of all.
It was usual with the pirates to retain all the artists who were captured in the trading-vessels; among these was a very handsome young man, of engaging manners, who vanquished the heart of Mary.
Among these was Mary Read.
He was both surprised and pleased, supposing that he would have a mistress to himself; but he was greatly mistaken, and he found that it was necessary to court her for his wife.
She indeed, frequently declared, that the life of a pirate was what she detested, and that she was constrained to it both on the former and present occasion.
Though she was inadvertently drawn into that dishonorable mode of life which has stained her character, and given her a place among the criminals noticed in this work, yet she possessed a rectitude of principle and of conduct, far superior to many who have not been exposed to such temptations to swerve from the path of female virtue and honor.
Accordingly she quarrelled with the man who challenged her lover, and called him to the field two hours before his appointment with her lover, engaged him with sword and pistol, and laid him dead at her feet.
The ingenuity of the mother being successful, she reared the daughter as a boy.
During the voyage, the vessel was captured by English pirates, and as Mary was the only English person on board, they detained her, and having plundered the vessel of what they chose, allowed it to depart.
The mother had not resided long in the country before Mary Read, the subject of the present narrative, was born.
But Mary Read's felicity was of short duration; the husband died, and peace being concluded, her business diminished.
She replied, that, "As to hanging, she thought it no great hardship, for were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate, and so infest the seas; and men of courage would starve.
Her son in a short time died, and she was relieved from the burden of his maintenance and education.
Nor was Mary less modest than brave; for though she had remained many years in the character of a sailor, yet no one had discovered her sex, until she was under the necessity of doing so to Anne Bonney.
Esteem and friendship were speedily converted into the most ardent affection, and a mutual flame burned in the hearts of these two lovers.
Mary Read was a native of England, but at what place she was born is not recorded.
The reason of this was, that Anne, supposing her to be a handsome fellow, became greatly enamored of her, and discovered her sex and wishes to Mary, who was thus constrained to reveal her secret to Anne.
Mary Read was of a strong and robust constitution, capable of enduring much exertion and fatigue.
An occurrence soon happened that put the attachment of Mary to a severe trial.
The volatile disposition of the youth did not permit her to remain long in this station, and she next went into Flanders, and joined a regiment of foot as a cadet.
In a short time her love became so violent, that she took every opportunity of enjoying his company and conversation; and, after she had gained his friendship, discovered her sex.
Captain Rackam one day, before he knew that she was a woman, asked her why she followed a line of life that exposed her to so much danger, and at last to the certainty of being hanged.
THE ADVENTURES AND HEROISM OF MARY READ.
But it seemed impossible to impose upon an old experienced mother.
Love, however, is inventive, and as they slept in the same tent, she found means to discover her sex without any seeming design.
'I see you do not think the Prince handsome, but look at yourself, and see if you have any right to complain about that.'
He found that the pictures seemed to be scenes from the life of a man who appeared in every window, and the Prince, fancying that he saw in this man some resemblance to himself, began to be deeply interested.
So she resolved to consult an Enchanter of whom she had heard a great deal since she had been a shepherdess, and without saying a word to anybody she set out to find the castle in which he lived with his sister, who was a powerful Fairy.
I had better have married my amiable shepherd.
"Left it on the dressing-table." He took a deep breath.
Didn't I say good-bye?"
"I've had an awfully jolly time," I said, "and I'll come again."
"Yes, yes; but can I? I've only got about one pound six."
Give me time, give me air."
"I'll tell it you while you pack--that will be nice for you.
I mentioned Herbert diffidently.
Well, the money would last longer that way, but unless I could overcome quickly the distrust which I seemed to inspire in station-masters there would not be much left for lunch.
"But I haven't got a waistcoat on, silly."
Herbert is a man who knows all about railway tickets, and packing, and being in time for trains, and things like that.
The most expensive cigarette I've ever smoked."
I sat up in bed and directed operations.
I gave my luggage to a porter and went off to the station-master.
What they want is a well-known name as a reference.
It would haunt you."
Extremely annoyed I strode out, and bumped into--you'll never guess--Herbert!
"No.
He had never even heard of Herbert.
He got the two pounds.
His watch is only nickel and his cigarette case leather, but luckily that sort of thing doesn't weigh much with station-masters.
"This is a most interesting game," I said bitterly.
A COLD WORLD
The idea didn't appeal to him.
This is a matter which requires thought.
I knew what it meant.
Cheers of sorrow.
"It was too late?"
There was no help for it.
"Did you give up your ticket, Sir?" he asked Herbert.
"Well, that just shows you," said Herbert.
"The best thing you can do," he said, "is to take a ticket to the next station and talk to them there.
He hadn't any money on him.
"You've got the ticket all right?"
"I'll pay now," and he began to feel in his pockets....
"I told you you would."
"Hi!" he shouted to me, and then we swung round a bend out of sight....
Because I had left my ticket on the dressing-table after all.
He thought for a moment, and then asked if I knew anybody who would vouch for me.
It was half-an-hour's drive to the station.
"You've saved my life.
"You remind me of a little story," I said.
At that moment a porter came up.
The station-master was evidently moved.
"Right," said Herbert.
This station-master was even more unemotional than the last. He asked me if I knew anybody who could vouch for me.
"What is 'home'? When you speak to the station-master at London, I suppose?
You'll be late. Here, get up, and I'll pack for you while you dress."
I mentioned Herbert confidently.
"My dear fellow!" he said.
I was just thinking about getting up when he came into my room.
"Bless you," I said, as I got happily into my train.
And a month afterwards I met a man--a man like you who knows all about tickets--and he said, 'You could have got the money back if you had applied at once.' So I said, 'Give me a cigarette now, and I'll transfer all my rights in the business to you.' And he gave me a cigarette; but unfortunately----"
I shall be happy to lend you any of those."
So that was what I had to do.
I don't believe it's enough.
This is only a branch line, and I have no power to give you a pass."
I began to see myself taking a ticket at every stop and appealing to the station-master at the next.
"Well, I shall put the ticket here on the dressing-table, and then you can't miss it." He looked at his watch.
"Which one are you going to put on?"
Once upon a time I lost my return ticket, and I had to pay two pounds for another.
"The best thing you can do," he said, walking with me to the door, "is to take a ticket to Plymouth, and speak to the station-master there----"
I showed him my gold watch, my silver cigarette case, and my emerald and diamond tie-pin--that was the sort of man I was.
"I hadn't time to get one," said Herbert, quite at his ease.
He won't talk quite so much about tickets in future.
I say, do you know, I've met two station-masters already this morning who've never even heard of you.
Half an hour later I was saying good-bye to Herbert.
"First of all, what clothes are you going to travel in?"
"Your ticket." He produced it.
You mustn't forget that."
A look of horror came over Herbert's face.
The train moved out of the station.
I've had an awful time.
"Here's your ticket.
"And you haven't even packed!
You must enquire into it."
"I don't know yet.
He didn't seem intensely excited.
I gave the porter all I could afford--a ha'penny, mentioned apologetically that I was coming back, and stepped into the train.
Put it in your waistcoat pocket now."
He looked eagerly at this strange sight, and the blood sang in his veins.
On the pallets under the wall he saw men lying as if dead.
But he felt that some power drew him aside through the desolate ways of a hoar forest, where all the trees were ancient and big, and all bearded with long moss.
When Perceval went towards the dais of the hall he saw a tall and stately lady in the high seat, old of years and reverend of aspect, though sorrowful.
'Nay, that will I not,' said Perceval, and mounted the dead knight's horse.
For there are none in Britain to compare with us for the knowledge of warfare.'
And he saw that it was of shining white, but whiter than the whiteness of his own, and in the centre thereof was a heart.
Then she gave him a horse and a full suit of black armour.
'Thou knowest not who it is thou fightest,' said the Black Knight, with a scornful laugh.
And soon, as the wind shrilled, and the rain began to beat down like thin grey spears, he saw a vast castle rise before him, and when he made his way towards the gate, he found the way so overgrown with weeds that hardly could he push his horse between them.
And I knew not that thou wert here, or I and my sisters would have avoided thee.
Daily he went to divert himself in the great dark forest that climbed the high mountains beside his home, or he roamed the wide rolling moors.
After a little while a voice came from above the gateway, and glancing up he saw a damsel looking through an opening in the battlements.
Then he beat upon the door with the butt of his lance, and the door opened, and he entered into the wide dark hall.
'For the nuns feared ye might not win through the poison of your wound which the dragon knight did give you.
The stranger knight had alighted before the chair of Gwenevere, and all had seen that full of rage and pride was his look.
'I fear not, my daughter, that they will take thy life,' she said, 'but I dread this--that they will destroy thy soul!'
The boy wondered greatly to see the two deer which had no horns, while the goats had two each; and he thought they had long run wild, and had lost their horns in that way.
Perceval caused his horse to pick its way through the hall, and he approached the shield.
Forthwith strength seemed to nerve his arm mightily, and lifting his sword he struck at the shield of the knight, and so vehement was the blow that he cut down the shield even to the head of the dragon. Feeling the wound, the dragon gave forth a great flame, and Perceval wondered to see that now his own sword burned as if on fire.
He helped Perceval put on his armour, and when he was fully dressed Owen marvelled to see how nobly he bore himself.
And the lad rejoiced to recognise him.
'Ah, Sir White Knight!' said the man, whose tears fell as he spoke, 'surely thou art an angel of heaven, not of the pit, such as have ravened and slaughtered throughout this fair land since good King Pellam was struck by the Dolorous Stroke that Balin made.
Therewith she led him to the castle, and the lady thereof came out to him.
The sacred relics of the Crucifixion fled our land, our king sickened of a malady that naught could heal, our crops rotted, and our cattle died.
And I helped to take Him from the cross.
Yet marvel it was to see that the trees in that hoar wood did not wave their branches, but all were still.
And Tod wept, but when he was well again the countess would not suffer him to stay, but said he should leave the hall and never come there again.
The countess was greatly wroth that Tod had taught him how to slay, and she said that never more should the dwarf serve her.
Going to the meadow beside the ford, he saw a knight riding up and down, proud of his strength and valour.
Then when thou comest back clad in his armour, we will speak further with thee.'
His six elder sons did likewise, and all were famed for their knightly prowess.
And he asked her how she had fared, and why she was a nun.
'Sirs, I thank you for your courtesy.
And Perceval began to thrust and strike full valorously and skilfully, but naught seemed to avail him.
But it is fated,' she went on, 'that thou come with us to learn all that may be learned of the use of arms.
Then, in her grief, the widow dame resolved that she would fly with her little son, and make a home for him in some wilderness, where never sounds or sights of war or death would come, where knights would be unknown, and no one would speak to him of arms and battles.
But in thy purity, thy humility, is thy strength.
In a little while he strengthened and rose from his pallet, and fared forth towards the north where his widowed mother sat in her lonely hall, waiting for him whose fame was sweet in every man's mouth.
The sorrow she was ever dreading smote her at length.
'By my faith,' said Perceval, 'whether thou art willing or unwilling, it is I that will have thy horse and arms and the goblet.'
And now that I know ye live, I go to your lady mother to tell her the good news, for she is weary to know tidings of you.'
And there at the Castle of the Circlet thou shalt fight a battle for the Saviour of the world.
In a proud rage the knight ran at him with uplifted lance, and struck him a violent blow with the shaft between the neck and the shoulder.
Yet did some among us strive to live and do as brave men should in all adversity.
And on the very threshold the grass grew thick and high, as if the door had not been opened for a hundred winters.
Much did Perceval marvel at this strange sight, but most of all he marvelled to see where a shaft of light from a narrow window gleamed across the hall full upon a shield hung on the fire-pillar beside the high seat in which the king sat like one dead.
'He was a full evil knight,' said the other, 'and deserved death richly for his many villainies and oppressions of weak orphans and friendless widows.'
But Perceval dashed upon the foremost witch, and with his sword beat her with so great a stroke that she fell to the ground, and the helm on her head was flattened to the likeness of a dish.
'For,' said he, 'thou hast earned thy sleep, and others shall carry on thy work and reveal the mercy of God and his Christ to these poor heathens, and they shall turn to God wholly.
And it befell that a little while after Perceval had left the court, Sir Owen came in, and was told of the shameful wrong put upon the queen by the unknown knight, and how Sir Kay had sent a mad boy after the knight to slay him.
'I will answer gladly,' said Sir Owen, smiling, yet wondering at the fearless and noble air of this youth in so wild a waste.
But the mother sat at home, sad of mood.
The knight took the body of the dead knight to be buried in a chapel, and told Perceval he could have the horse.
For daily doth the evil knight slay my poor knights, and cometh and casteth their blackened and burned bodies before my hall.
'Silence, prating fool!' shouted the knight, 'go back to the court and tell Arthur to come himself, or to send a champion to fight me, or I will not wait, and great will be his shame.'
And she cried out:
And the king will give thee knighthood.
It was Tod, who had been his friend among the trolls of the mountains, and with Tod was his wife.
Once he overheard his mother say that she yearned for fresh venison, but that the hunter who was attached to her house was lying wounded by a wild boar.
He journeyed southwards two days and two nights along the great straight road, which went through the deep dark forests, over desert places and over the high mountains.
And Perceval looked about and saw a knight more richly dressed than the others, and, turning to Kay, he said:
And the man knelt before him, and bared his breast, and said, 'Strike, sir knight, and end my misery!'
It is a man's duty, a man's nobility, to bear sorrows bravely, and still to work, to do all and to achieve.
Then they sat at meat, and gave the young man the best cheer that they had.
Then a dwarf pressed forward between the laughing crowd and saluted Perceval.
Fare thee well!'
'For this is he who shall do great deeds,' he said.
He thought he would please his mother if he caught them, so that they should not escape again.
'Twas I who had followed you, lord, since that you did leave the hold of the witches, and when you swooned I brought you here, to the convent of the White Nuns.
Tod ever bade them treat the young lord with reverence.
'What strange youth art thou?' asked Sir Owen.
She had an old garment of satin upon her, which had once been rich, but was now frayed and tattered; and fairer was her skin than the bloom of the rose, and her hair and eyebrows were like the sloe for blackness, and on her cheeks was the redness of poppies.
'Are knights then so easy to slay?' asked the lad.
'Mother,' he said, 'I have seen a great and wonderful sight on the great road across the moor.'
But by reason of the prophecy which the trolls knew of concerning the great renown which Perceval was to gain, they had been dumb of speech since they had last seen the young man.
And by that time I was wearied and very old, and wished to die.
'They were three honourable knights,' he said.
Perceval took the shield and left his own.
All were clad in garments of an ancient kind, as if they had lived and died a thousand years agone, yet had not rotted into dust.
In His good time He will cut him down.'
Soon the maiden came back and opened the door for him, and his horse she led into the stable, where she fed it; and Perceval she brought into the hall.
"What! not even a spring-cart?
I might let that to you, for what matters it to me?
The wheelwright had seen at the first glance that the tilbury was a hired vehicle.
The excellent beast had travelled five leagues in two hours, and had not a drop of sweat on his loins.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Yes."
As he meditated, he whipped up his horse, which was proceeding at that fine, regular, and even trot which accomplishes two leagues and a half an hour.
"Well, by taking post-horses, Monsieur cannot reach Arras before to-morrow.
While he was questioning the wheelwright, some people who were passing back and forth halted around them.
"Do me the service to go and fetch him."
"Make haste!" said he; "I must start again; I am in a hurry."
He stopped his horse, and asked the laborer:--
He who gave to all so readily thought this demand exorbitant and almost odious.
Each time that he passed one of those isolated dwellings which sometimes border on the highway, he said to himself, "And yet there are people there within who are sleeping!"
"You are a wheelwright?"
"How so?"
After listening for a few minutes, a young lad, to whom no one had paid any heed, detached himself from the group and ran off.
He thought that he beheld the hand which had relaxed its grasp reappear in the darkness behind him, ready to seize him once more.
This caused another loss of twenty minutes; but they set out again at a gallop.
"How is that?
Why was he hastening? He did not know.
"The best thing is to let me repair the wheel like an honest man, and set out on your journey to-morrow."
The season for ploughing is just beginning; heavy teams are required, and horses are seized upon everywhere, from the post as well as elsewhere.
"To-morrow!"
He followed the road-mender's advice, retraced his steps, and, half an hour later, he passed the same spot again, but this time at full speed, with a good horse to aid; a stable-boy, who called himself a postilion, was seated on the shaft of the cariole.
"No."
Still, he felt that he had lost time.
"Impossible, sir."
"My friend," he said to the stableman, "is there a wheelwright here?"
Of what was he thinking?
He sprang out of the tilbury.
He followed the woman, who had a rosy, cheerful face; she led him to the public room where there were tables covered with waxed cloth.
But will this horse bear the saddle?"
"Well?"
"Try, nevertheless."
It seemed to him that God was for him now, and was manifesting Himself.
He returned to the stable and remained near the horse.
"Because, though this wheel has travelled five leagues, it certainly will not travel another quarter of a league."
How many things shiver beneath these vast breaths of the night!
"If I set ten men to work."
Master Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing on his own threshold. He came, examined the wheel and made a grimace like a surgeon when the latter thinks a limb is broken.
"Where?" interpolated the wheelwright.
The hour struck from a distant tower; he asked the boy:--
These things are charming when one is joyous, and lugubrious when one is sad.
"Impossible."
You would have to buy it to begin with, because no one knows you.
He cut a branch from a tree and made a whiffle-tree of it.
The cart was very heavy, and in addition, there were many ascents.
What did he do during this journey?
"And, besides, it is all cross-roads; stop!
"I will take two post-horses."
"When can I set out again?"
"What if the spokes were to be tied together with ropes?"
Whither? To Arras, no doubt; but he might have been going elsewhere as well. At times he was conscious of it, and he shuddered.
And then, it was no longer the tilbury.
"Is there another wheelwright?"
"Why not?"
He watched the horizon grow white; he stared at all the chilly figures of a winter's dawn as they passed before his eyes, but without seeing them.
"Certainly there is," said the old woman.
They turned into the cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to the postilion:--
The poor beast was, in fact, going at a walk.
"Yes."
"Not all wheels fit all axles, sir."
None of the actions of his conscience had been decisive. He was, more than ever, as he had been at the first moment.
I have nothing to sell but cart-wheels.
"In a very great hurry.
Some one can surely sell me a saddle in the neighborhood."
As he left Hesdin, he heard a voice shouting to him: "Stop!
"I have no wheel on hand that would fit your cabriolet.
A big Flemish servant-maid placed his knife and fork in all haste; he looked at the girl with a sensation of comfort.
"Lovely things we will buy As we stroll the faubourgs through.
She was livid and her lips were blue.
"The portress told me that he could not come to-day."
Between seven and eight o'clock the doctor came; not hearing any sound, he thought Fantine was asleep, entered softly, and approached the bed on tiptoe; he opened the curtains a little, and, by the light of the taper, he saw Fantine's big eyes gazing at him.
Half an hour passed, then an hour, no one came; every time the clock struck, Fantine started up and looked towards the door, then fell back again.
Why are you talking so low?
"Gone!" she cried; "he has gone to get Cosette."
"'Wash this linen.'--'Where?'--'In the stream.
to-morrow will be a festival day; to-morrow morning, sister, you must remind me to put on my little cap that has lace on it.
The sister dared not speak to her.
All at once she began to sing in a voice as feeble as a breath.
She lay down again, with the nun's assistance, helped the nun to arrange her pillow, and kissed the little silver cross which she wore on her neck, and which Sister Simplice had given her.
Fantine took the sister's hand in her moist hands, and the latter was pained to feel that perspiration.
The doctor thought that she was delirious.
"To-morrow!
Five o'clock struck.
These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent the building from seeming to be deserted.
CHAPTER VI--THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA
It seemed as though those walls had been built of the deaf stones of which the Scriptures speak.
At the expiration of a quarter of an hour it seemed as though that species of stormy roar were becoming more distant.
At the moment when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of angels was approaching through the gloom.
The bottom of the garden was lost in mist and darkness.
Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.
Cosette trembled and pressed close to him.
This garden was oblong in shape, with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well.
A man who is fleeing never thinks himself sufficiently hidden.
That which had menaced, that which had reassured him,--all had vanished.
Jean Valjean could not have told.
He no longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky.
The building was a sort of ruin, where dismantled chambers were distinguishable, one of which, much encumbered, seemed to serve as a shed.
Jean Valjean's first care had been to get hold of his shoes and put them on again, then to step under the shed with Cosette.
The upper story had scuttles like prisons.
There was no longer anything in the street; there was nothing in the garden.
Not a gleam of light was visible at any one of them.
Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden which was very vast and of singular aspect; one of those melancholy gardens which seem made to be looked at in winter and at night.
While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing.
The alleys were bordered with gloomy and very erect little shrubs.
Jean Valjean held his breath.
They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that they must kneel.
It was a supernatural chant in an uninhabited house.
However, the solitude in which he stood was so strangely calm, that this frightful uproar, close and furious as it was, did not disturb him by so much as the shadow of a misgiving.
Here and there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss.
Nothing more wild and solitary than this garden could be imagined.
The child, whose thoughts were still on the Thenardier, shared his instinct for withdrawing from sight as much as possible.
All the windows were grated.
The song died away.
It may have lasted a long time.
The grass had half taken possession of them, and a green mould covered the rest.
All fell silent again.
It seemed to him that he felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.
No other house was visible.
The old principal lodger, a cross-looking creature, who was thoroughly permeated, so far as her neighbors were concerned, with the inquisitiveness peculiar to envious persons, scrutinized Jean Valjean a great deal, without his suspecting the fact.
The old woman was in the chamber, putting things in order.
Thus the inhabitants of the house reached the last days of winter.
The old woman attended to the housekeeping and cooking and went to market.
Jean Valjean was prudent enough never to go out by day.
The old woman recognized, with terror, the fact that it was a bank-bill for a thousand francs.
One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the uninhabited compartments of the hovel.
She followed him with the step of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through a crack in the door, which was directly opposite him.
He liked to go to Saint-Medard, which is the nearest church.
"He did not go out until six o'clock in the evening, and the government bank certainly is not open at that hour." The old woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises.
The lining had been sewed up again.
This had its disadvantages.
She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous tete-a-tetes with Catherine.
There remained to her from her past, two teeth,--one above, the other below,--which she was continually knocking against each other.
More thousand-franc bank-bills, no doubt!
Cosette was occupied in admiring the wood as it was sawed.
Jean Valjean had made no alterations in the furniture as it was the first day; he had merely had the glass door leading to Cosette's dressing-room replaced by a solid door.
The old woman caught sight of the coat hanging on a nail, and examined it.
They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like people in very moderate circumstances.
The old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a case, scissors, and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of the skirts of his coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish paper, which he unfolded.
She fled in alarm.
She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets. Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big pocket-book, a very large knife, and--a suspicious circumstance--several wigs of various colors.
She was alone.
Jean Valjean had his back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no doubt.
She was a little deaf, which rendered her talkative.
It also happened occasionally that he encountered some poor wretch asking alms; then he looked behind him to make sure that no one was observing him, stealthily approached the unfortunate man, put a piece of money into his hand, often a silver coin, and walked rapidly away.
He held her hand as they walked, and said sweet things to her.
When he did not take Cosette with him, she remained with the old woman; but the child's delight was to go out with the good man.
"Where?" thought the old woman.
He began to be known in the neighborhood under the name of the beggar who gives alms.
It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.
Sometimes he spoke to him.
He never passed this man without giving him a few sous.
Nevertheless, Jean Valjean blew out his candle.
This struck him as singular.
"Bah!" said Jean Valjean, "I am mad!
On the following day, at nightfall, he went back.
This movement was like a flash of lightning.
As far as we are concerned, I have a material guarantee that he has been scrupulously honest.
'"Slight, dark man, youngish, good-looking."
'"In case you never see me afterwards," I said, "we'd better say good-bye.
I feel very seriously ill-treated, I assure you.
As far as may be inferred from this step and his subsequent conduct, he had cut loose from his former habitudes.
Let's see what this paper says.
'I heard most of this from that young devil, Billy the Boy.
Just see what this miscalculation has cost your friends!'
The elder Marston had also eluded the police.
We are not at present aware of the source from which the clue was obtained.
"My word, that missis big one coolah!" was his expression, and made straight for the camp.
But in two cases the birds were flown.
I am not going to do so, of course.
All I know is that he lived with us since we came here, and that no fellow could have behaved more truly like a man and a gentleman.
They have been fairly successful, and as miners, it is said, have shown themselves to be manly and fair-dealing men.
'"Never better," he said.
I might have known she would, though.
I never saw him so down in the mouth this years.'
They must take the consequences, d--n them!'
'"What was he like?"
What a godsend to it!
Would I not?" says he.
He will appear on the Judgment Day leading Rainbow, I firmly believe.
'She whispered something into his ear.
The papers were something to see.
Well, she knocked, and a constable opened the outer door.
So much for the "Star".
A long time it was before we settled upon any regular put-up bit of work to do.
Well, it seems Warrigal took it into his semi-barbaric head to ride into Turon and loaf about, partly to see me, and partly about another matter that your father laid him on about.
'That was how it was, then?'
I'd give my eyes to put the bracelets upon him."
I only say I could.
'"I want to see Sir Ferdinand," she says.
We've got quite enough devil in us yet, without your stirring him up.
'"On horseback."
If they found the colour of gold, the least trace of it in a dish of wash-dirt, they would at once settle down themselves.
"I don't know what we shall do without you. But, of course, you're not going very far?"
Having been lately married, he was apparently unwilling to leave his home, and lingered too long for prudence.
But we're losing time. When did he leave the claim, and which way did he go?"
'"I have no idea which way he went," says Clifford.
Hardly think I shall, either.
He saw Sir Ferdinand ride up, so he hid close by, just for the fun of hearing how he got on.
Suffice it to say that Sir Ferdinand Morringer promptly arranged for the simultaneous action of three parties of police with the hope of capturing all three outlaws.
'"Mine came from a jealous woman," says Sir Ferdinand.
'BUSH-RANGING REVIVED.
"Any message I can deliver?"
One thing was certain: there would be more row made about us than ever.
I wonder whether I shall ever associate with gentlemen again?
It will have to be a thousand a piece if they don't look a little sharper.'
You must give us time, you know.
No doubt money would be spent like water in bribing any one who might give information about us.
Mr. Clifford and Mr. Hastings, an aristocratic society in which the manners and bearing of this extraordinary man permitted him to mingle without suspicion of detection.
Now Warrigal had seen you come out just before.
As for that rascal Starlight, he would deceive the very devil himself."
But now the whole colony swarmed with miners, who were always prospecting, as they called it--that is, looking out for fresh patches of gold.
'Confound her!
"Do what I tell you, and don't stand there like a fool."
'Pleasing way of drawing attention to a gentleman's private residence,' says Starlight, smiling first and looking rather grim afterwards.
You'll hear news of your friend before long, or I'm much mistaken."
'We called nowhere.
He can't get over being away from Jeanie.
"Just ask him to come out, will you?"
The Civil Service regulations do not permit of duelling at present, and I found it so deuced hard to work up to the billet that I am not going to imperil my continuance therein.
'"Where's the fourth man, Clifford?" says Sir Ferdinand.
For him sympathy has been universally expressed.
'"Any one with him?"
I must say, Dick, that if you are so extremely fond of--well--studying the female character, you should carry on the pursuit more discreetly.
I'm glad I didn't finish the poor beggar.
'Of the Marston brothers, the elder one, Richard, would seem to have been similarly apprised, but James Marston was arrested in his cottage in Specimen Gully.
'"No, it won't," says she, stamping her foot.
'The good old days have apparently not passed away for ever, when mail robberies and hand-to-hand conflicts with armed robbers were matters of weekly occurrence.
We are not among those who care to judge their fellow-men harshly.
Society should make a truce occasionally, or proclaim an amnesty with offenders of our stamp.
Follow him up as a matter of form.
"They may generally be depended upon for a straight tip.
How the deuce did you get the office in time?'
Sir Ferdinand surrounded the hut about an hour later, and made them come out one by one--both of them and the wages man.
He, with his brother, Richard Marston, worked an adjoining claim to the Arizona Sluicing Company, with the respected shareholders of which they were on terms of intimacy.
'Never mind, boys, they'll increase that reward yet, by Jove!
"Don't look so indignant.
'"I have important information," says she.
"Can I trust myself to write of Valeria?
"I send the chaise to Mr. Benjamin's house; and I sincerely trust that you will not take your place in it.
I made no answer--I was crying behind my veil.
Besides, some allowance is surely to be made for the solitary, sedentary life that he leads.
Not mad, after the exhibition he made of his unfortunate cousin? Not mad, after the song that he sang in your honor, and the falling asleep by way of conclusion?
I have got his letter with me--his last letter from Spain.
As long as I lived, moved, and thought, my one purpose now was to make Miserrimus Dexter confide to me his ideas on the subject of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death.
The one chance for both of us, and the one consolation for poor Me, was to hold to my desperate resolution more firmly than ever.
Say nothing, when you see her, which can recall me to her memory.
I firmly believe you will repent it if you return to that house."
"She spoke of reading the Trial when I saw her last.
It cost me a hard struggle to restrain myself from kissing the paper on which the dear hand had rested.
My son admitted to me that he was courting you under an assumed name, but he never told me what the name was.
I wish I could persuade you, Valeria, how truly I am your friend.
"But, speaking for myself, I'm not quite sure that he is mad."
It is too late to ask.
Write him an excuse. Valeria!
Strike a light!"
My child, if you come to any harm, I shall feel (indirectly) responsible for it.
"And you are going to take him into your confidence?
Not a day passes but I mourn the loss of her.
Let me say for myself that I was really touched by the kindness of my mother-in-law's letter, though I was not shaken by it in the smallest degree.
Mrs. Macallan set me down at Benjamin's door.
Well said the wisdom of our ancestors--there are none so blind as those who won't see."
to open your whole mind to such a man as the man we have just left?"
The old lady agreeably surprised me.
But now I have recovered from my amazement, and can think it over quietly, I must still venture to doubt whether this strange man is really mad in the true meaning of the word.
She said but little on her side.
To those ideas I looked as my guiding stars along the dark way on which I was going.
"In the one object which I have in view--the object, dear Mrs. Macallan, which I regret to say you do not approve."
Don't go to Dexter!
I am always thinking of her.
Why do I trouble you with an old woman's vain misgivings and regrets?
"Yes, if I think of it to-morrow as I think of it to-night.
But I noticed that when his imagination cooled down he became Miserrimus Dexter again--he no more believed himself than we believed him to be Napoleon or Shakespeare.
Or who you were, or where your friends lived.
At least he had not forgotten me; he thought of me, and he mourned the loss of me every day of his life.
"You provoke me," said the old lady, "into showing you what your husband thinks of this new whim of yours.
It is this uneasy state of mind which sets me writing, with nothing to say that can interest you.
Oh, if she had never discovered the miserable truth!
I handed his letter back to his mother in silence.
Was I too easily satisfied?
"Begin on the second page, the page devoted to you.
That was encouragement enough--for the present. "If Ariel calls for me in the pony-chaise to-morrow," I thought to myself, "with Ariel I go."
The morning came.
"I don't know how I may feel about it tomorrow morning," I said; "but my impulse at this moment is decidedly to see him again.
Mrs. Macallan made no further remonstrance in words.
Know Miserrimus Dexter?
"May I ask on what subject?"
I met the old lady last night at a party, and I tried hard to discover whether she were coming to you as your friend or your enemy.
"Don't speak of that dreadful subject!
Yes, Lady Clarinda shall be one of us; and you shall sit next to her, Mr. Benjamin, as a proof of my sincere regard for you.
He is a mixture of the tiger and the monkey.
At one moment he would frighten you, and at the next he would set you screaming with laughter.
My dear lady, the man's mind is as deformed as his body.
Let us laugh and lunch."
"I don't ask after your health," said the old gentleman; "your eyes answer me, my dear lady, before I can put the question.
With a letter of introduction, I might have seen Miserrimus Dexter that afternoon.
"Yes," said Benjamin.
Benjamin, why does she persist in dwelling on that dreadful subject?"
"I can tell you what my object is in two words," I interposed.
"Mr.
We all three looked around toward the door.
The Major looked piteously at Benjamin, and shook his head.
Shall we say this day week," asked the Major, taking out his pocketbook, "at eight o'clock?"
"I think you said so, my dear."
"I have not been so long in my bed, Major, as you suppose.
"In all England you could not have picked out a person more essentially unfit to be introduced to a lady--to a young lady especially--than Dexter.
I have tried to be of some use to you and have failed."
It was all my doing, and he too had no choice but to submit.
Benjamin, have I taken too much of your excellent wine?
The Major reflected.
"I want you to give me an introduction to Miserrimus Dexter."
Benjamin looked at me in some bewilderment on his side, and answered, quite seriously,
"Command me, my dear lady--I am yours and yours only," said the gallant old gentleman.
It was quite cheering to meet the modern Don Juan once more.
"Put it down in your book."
Very well; there is our party complete!
As it was, the "little dinner" compelled me to wait in absolute inaction through a whole week.
My mother-in-law coming to see me!
"A delicious hand," he said; "you don't mind my looking at it--you don't mind my kissing it, do you?
"She appears to insist on it."
Something must be done.
The fear and shame of it haunted her like a nightmare; she shrank every morning from the thought of all the mail that was coming that day, fearing that there would be an angry, puzzled letter from Gilbert.
Now that the worst had come, she felt quite strong to meet it.
Alma had at first no thought of answering it, yet her fingers ached to do so.
What splendid big grey eyes she had!
She was the acknowledged beauty of five settlements, and she went forward on her career of conquest quite undisturbed by the jealousies and heart-burnings she provoked on every side.
Nothing else, not even the fact that Anna had married shiftless Charlie Moore, seemed worth while considering beside this.
It was the first proposal Anna had ever had, and she managed it quite cleverly, from her standpoint.
I used to wish she was more like you--quieter, you know, and not so sparkling.
I wanted to surprise you all," he answered, laughing.
Now that Anna was gone, her loneliness was unbearable.
He must certainly soon hear of Anna's marriage; he would see it in the home paper, other correspondents in Exeter would write him of it.
It was I that wrote the letters."
Anna shut the door, her departing laugh rippling mockingly through the dusk.
At first she wrote rather constrainedly but, reflecting that in any case Anna would have written a merely friendly letter, she allowed her thoughts to run freely, and the resulting epistle was an excellent one of its kind.
Honestly, I wasn't thinking much about her at all. Then came the letter--and it was a splendid one, too.
Gilbert Murray had grown up with Alma; they had been friends ever since she could remember.
You might as well forgive me and be nice right off, Alma, because you'd have to do it anyway, in time.
She would tell Gilbert the truth, and he would go away in anger and never forgive her, but she deserved it.
She realized how much Gilbert's letters had meant to her, even when written to another woman.
Where's Anna?"
I had never thought that Anna could write a letter like that, and I was as pleased as Punch about it.
Gilbert went, but before going he had asked Anna to marry him.
Still standing there, Alma told the whole story, giving full explanations, but no excuses.
To be sure, she knew that she would have to confess to Anna some day, when the latter repented and began to wish she had written to Gilbert, but that was a very different thing from premature disclosure.
It was left to her to tell him; surely, she thought apathetically, that was punishment enough for what she had done.
She had always taken a keen, strange delight in furthering his wishes.
She could bear her life well enough, she thought, if she only had his letters to look forward to.
She had deliberately done evil that good might come, and now the very imaginations of her heart were stained by that evil.
Alma would have given much if she could only have induced Anna to answer Gilbert's letter, but coaxing Anna to do anything was a very sure and effective way of preventing her from doing it.
"You may read it if you want to; it isn't really a love letter.
"I am not going to answer it tonight or any other night," she said, twisting her full, red lips in a way that Alma had learned to dread. Mischief was ripening in Anna's brain when that twist was out.
Her handwriting was much like Anna's.
Anna had had one like it a year ago, when she had cast Gilbert off for three months, driving him distracted by flirting with Charlie Moore.
"Gilbert will find out about the letters now, and despise me."
She had a taking way with her.
She did not even feel lonely, and reproached herself for lack of proper feeling in missing Anna so little.
But she was afraid that Anna was in earnest.
These two years had improved her.
She felt his gaze on her.
She could not understand it.
But she did not flinch.
But, somehow, even then, when I wasn't with her she seemed to kind of grow dim and not count for so awful much after all.
She had always been desirous, even in the old, childish play-days, that Gilbert should get just exactly what he wanted.
I let him think so, because I hated to hurt his little feelings.
Her once frequent visits across the yard to chat with old Mrs. Murray became few and far between.
Alma loved Gilbert with a love which she herself believed to be purely sisterly, and which nobody else doubted could be, since she had been at pains to make a match--Exeter matrons' phrasing--between Gil and Anna, and was manifestly delighted when Gilbert obligingly fell in love with the latter.
One moonlight night she went for a sleigh-drive with Charlie Moore of East Exeter--and returned to tell Alma that they were married!
Even if she could have shook her, it would only have made her more perverse.
Well, you do look surprised!"
There was something odd about her, now that he noticed, as she stood rigidly there, with that queer red spot on her face, a strange fire in her eyes, and that weird reflection from the maple enveloping her like an immaterial flame.
He was working in a remote district where newspapers seldom penetrated.
Just took time to hug my mother, and here I am.
Come, pussy, I'm going to get ready for prayer meeting.
Gilbert might not prove forgiving a second time.
She could not learn to live without them until she had to.
He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek in his frank delight at seeing her again.
She told herself recklessly that she would keep on writing to him until he found out.
When a year had passed Alma was still writing to Gilbert the letters signed "A.
Wasn't that practically understood when he left?"
Alma sat down by her window and looked out over the lane where the slim wild cherry trees were bronzing under the autumn frosts.
Alma's hands lay limply in her lap, and her eyes were cast down, with tears glistening on the long fair lashes.
Gilbert had never discerned that Anna was not like the other Exeter girls, but was a law unto herself.
"She has been married for a year," said Alma steadily.
I wanted to get acquainted all over again, before she grew beyond me altogether--I wanted to find the real Anna the letters showed me.
When she had finished there was a silence lasting perhaps ten seconds. To Alma it seemed like hours.
Alma grew sick at heart thinking of the complications in front of her.
It was a humiliating thing to confess, but that did not matter--nothing mattered now.
But she would have taken a tenfold larger risk in the hope of holding secure Anna's place in Gilbert's affections until Anna herself should come to her senses.
I thought it was Anna, but since you wrote the letters, it must have been with you, Alma.
It was never of any avail to show impatience with Anna.
This is final, Alma, and you need not scold or coax, because it would be a waste of breath.
Her memory worked automatically, and her tongue obeyed it promptly.
She kissed him goodbye, and Gilbert, honest fellow, was quite satisfied.
I thought it was because she was growing more womanly that she could write such letters.
But meanwhile everything might be spoiled.
Gilbert sat down suddenly on a chair and looked at Alma in bewilderment.
Gilbert looked at Alma doubtfully.
Alma balanced pros and cons, admitting the risk.
When it grew quite dark and Anna had gone lilting down the lane on her way to prayer meeting, Alma lighted her lamp, read Gilbert's letter--and answered it.
Two years ago I did honestly think I was in love with Anna--at least when I was round where she was.
The farm was rented, so that Alma's only responsibilities were the post office which she kept, and that harum-scarum beauty of an Anna.
He wrote to Gilbert to come too, promising him plenty of work and good pay.
His last letter, dated three weeks back, had not hinted at it.
His exile had improved him.
It was so much more romantic, too.
I'd always said I'd never be married in any of your dull, commonplace ways.
Alma coldly asked him in.
"Anna, you are talking foolishly.
She could not bear to hear the old lady talking about Gilbert, and she was afraid that some day she would be told that he was coming home.
She wanted to cry, since she could not shake Anna.
But Anna had as yet given no sign of such repentance, although Alma looked for it anxiously.
Anna's falseness would surely break his heart, and Alma winced at the thought of his pain.
Her lips were very firmly set.
Exeter matrons thought this hardly proper, since Alma, in spite of her grave ways, was only twenty-four.
The correspondence slipped back into its old groove.
Gilbert was standing on the big round door-stone under the red maple--a tall, handsome young fellow with a bronzed face and laughing eyes.
It was useless to consider that plan for a moment. It would not help him to reach the Sanctuary--without leading them there behind him!
He edged away from the window, and, as cautiously as he had come, retraced his steps across the cellar and up the stairs--and then, the possibility of being heard from without gone, he broke into a run.
His fingers were working now with feverish haste, telegraphing their message to his brain.
No; he could communicate with Jason from downtown in the morning.
"Listen, Jason." Jimmie Dale was speaking rapidly, earnestly.
Yes, sir--there he is again!"
"Good-night, Jason."
It was a means of defense and offense against these men who lurked now outside his doors.
Was that why the car had stopped that time--that those with him might be told that the work here had been completed, and he need no longer be kept away?
This could only have been done--they had had no interest in him before then--while they held him at the Crime Club, while he was spending that two hours in the car!
Jason, white, frightened, bewildered, touched his lips with the tip of his tongue.
The telephone rang again--imperatively, persistently.
"That'll be her again, sir," he said hoarsely.
He had been caught once before as Larry the Bat without funds! There was plenty of money now hidden in the Sanctuary, enough for any emergency, enough to last him indefinitely.
The strongest weapon in his hands now was his secret knowledge that he was being watched.
And then Jimmie Dale spoke again:
"Nothing else, Jason?"
"I thought I saw a man move behind a tree out there across the road a minute ago, sir.
The car stopped, the door was opened, he was pushed toward it--and even as he reached the ground, the door was closed behind him, and the car was speeding on again.
"Yes--yes!
Jimmie Dale snatched the receiver from Jason, and put it to his own ear.
Wires!
Jimmie Dale moved to the rear of the room--to the window overlooking the garage and yard.
He stepped forward along the hall, his tread noiseless on the rich, heavy rug, passed into the rear of the house, descended the back stairs, and reached the cellar.
Or the basement, say, of that apartment house across the driveway?
The telephone on the desk was ringing vibrantly, clamourously, through the stillness of the room.
"She didn't say anything, Master Jim.
There was no need to wonder long what those wires meant.
He smiled with bitter irony.
"Yes, sir.
Nothing at all, sir--except to keep asking each time if she could speak to you."
Jimmie Dale groped his way to the big lounging chair in which he had found Jason asleep, and flung himself into it.
Where had he come from?
"I'm sure, Master Jim.
HOW!
Jimmie Dale stepped to the switch and turned off the light; then stood hesitant in the darkness.
Don't show yourself. Tell me if you see anything."
Was there anything to be gained by rousing Jason now and telling him what he intended to do--to instruct him to answer any inquiries by the statement that "Mr.
There was not a sound.
"Then say 'Good-night.'"
"It'll be about half-past four, sir."
"Good Lord, Master Jim, what's wrong, sir?
That was it, of course.
But escape--and leave them in possession of a sort of guarantee or assurance that he was still there! That would give him the freedom of action that he must have.
The house was already watched, would be watched now untiringly, unceasingly; not a movement of his henceforth but would be under their eyes!
Was there anything else before he went?
Jason lifted the receiver from the hook.
"How long ago was it since she telephoned last?" asked Jimmie Dale quickly.
"Jason, what are you doing here?" Jimmie Dale demanded sharply.
"I don't see anything, sir," Jason called.
He stopped in his walk, and, after a moment, dropped down into the lounging chair again.
Was the game, all, everything, she herself, at their mercy already?
Leverett moved the muzzle of his rifle a hair's width to the left, shivered, moved it again.
No human power could have blocked the frantic creature thrashing toward solid ground.
I told him I was honest.
Someone lies.
One shot from behind,--and twenty thousand dollars,--or, if it proved a better deal, the contents of the packet.
No answer.
Leverett, in a state of collapse, sagged back against an oak tree. Quintana's nervous grasp fell from his arms and they swung, dangling.
"Jake?"
Then he picked up the packet with its loosened string, slipped it into his side pocket, gathered together the arsenal which had decorated Quintana, and so, loaded with weapons, walked away a few paces and seated himself on a fallen log.
Always in his mean and busy brain he was trying to figure to himself what that packet must contain.
Tamaracks, sphagnum, crimson pitcher-plants grew thicker; wet woods set with little black pools stretched away on every side.
Let us examine your rifle----"
"And Jake?
Smith walked slowly up behind him, relieved him of two automatics and a dirk.
Quintana turned white, then deeply, heavily red.
Smith pushed him aside.
He cut another sapling and pushed the body until only the shoes were visible above the silt.
"You lie!"
Say, Jake, be you a man or be you a poor dumb critter what ain't got no spunk?"
Look at his foot-marks there in the mud!"
To his alarm, Kloon did not sink far.
He did not start when Smith's sharp warning struck his ear: "Don't move! I've got you over my rifle, Quintana!"
"You think I'm lyin'?" blustered Leverett, trying to move around Quintana's extended arm.
"There were three of you, then."
"We gotta travel a piece, yet....
The water was dark but scarcely an inch deep over its black bed of silt.
And, as he stooped, he noticed more blood on a fallen leaf.
Merely another stream of tobacco soiling the crimson pitcher.
The swimming minutes passed; his mind ceased to live for a space.
He unwrapped the paper.
Then, warily, he lifted his head and looked into the muzzle of Smith's rifle.
It would have been a vain and dangerous attempt to impose a monarch on the armed freemen, who were impatient of a magistrate; on the bold, who refused to obey; on the powerful, who aspired to command.
The emperor could not even be enriched by the casualties of forfeiture and extinction: within the term of a year, he was obliged to dispose of the vacant fief; and, in the choice of the candidate, it was his duty to consult either the general or the provincial diet.
The army with which he passed the Alps consisted of three hundred horse.
It is in the fourteenth century that we may view in the strongest light the state and contrast of the Roman empire of Germany, which no longer held, except on the borders of the Rhine and Danube, a single province of Trajan or Constantine.
Their unworthy successors were the counts of Hapsburgh, of Nassau, of Luxemburgh, and Schwartzenburgh: the emperor Henry the Seventh procured for his son the crown of Bohemia, and his grandson Charles the Fourth was born among a people strange and barbarous in the estimation of the Germans themselves.
At the foot of these popular ramparts, the pride of the Caesars was overthrown; and the invincible genius of liberty prevailed over the two Frederics, the greatest princes of the middle age; the first, superior perhaps in military prowess; the second, who undoubtedly excelled in the softer accomplishments of peace and learning.
There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.
During sixty years, no emperor appeared in Italy, and the name was remembered only by the ignominious sale of the last relics of sovereignty.
The court of Rome had slumbered, when his father Henry the Sixth was permitted to unite with the empire the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; and from these hereditary realms the son derived an ample and ready supply of troops and treasure.
The recent discovery of the Pandects had renewed a science most favorable to despotism; and his venal advocates proclaimed the emperor the absolute master of the lives and properties of his subjects.
A crowd of princes and prelates disputed the ruins of the empire: the lords of innumerable castles were less prone to obey, than to imitate, their superiors; and, according to the measure of their strength, their incessant hostilities received the names of conquest or robbery.
Far different was the situation of the German Caesars, who were ambitious to enslave the kingdom of Italy.
The death of his competitors united the electoral college, and Charles was unanimously saluted king of the Romans, and future emperor; a title which, in the same age, was prostituted to the Caesars of Germany and Greece.
Yet Frederic the Second was finally oppressed by the arms of the Lombards and the thunders of the Vatican: his kingdom was given to a stranger, and the last of his family was beheaded at Naples on a public scaffold.
The German emperor was no more than the elective and impotent magistrate of an aristocracy of princes, who had not left him a village that he might call his own.
As long as the emperors retained the prerogative of bestowing on every vacancy these ecclesiastic and secular benefices, their cause was maintained by the gratitude or ambition of their friends and favorites.
The pride of birth and dominion, of the sword and the mitre, wisely adopted the commons as the third branch of the legislature, and, in the progress of society, they were introduced about the same aera into the national assemblies of France England, and Germany.
If the dukes, margraves, and counts of Germany, were less audacious in their claims, the consequences of their success were more lasting and pernicious to the state.
But the flying Persians were overcome by the belief, that the last day of their religion and empire was at hand; the strongest posts were abandoned by treachery or cowardice; and the king, with a part of his family and treasures, escaped to Holwan at the foot of the Median hills.
"Be of good courage," said the caliph; "your life is safe till you have drunk this water:" the crafty satrap accepted the assurance, and instantly dashed the vase against the ground.
Strangers to the name and properties of that odoriferous gum, the Saracens, mistaking it for salt, mingled the camphire in their bread, and were astonished at the bitterness of the taste.
God was then neuter: since he has espoused your quarrel, you have subverted our kingdom and religion." Oppressed by this painful dialogue, the Persian complained of intolerable thirst, but discovered some apprehension lest he should be killed whilst he was drinking a cup of water.
In the public anarchy, the independent governors of the cities and castles obtained their separate capitulations: the terms were granted or imposed by the esteem, the prudence, or the compassion, of the victors; and a simple profession of faith established the distinction between a brother and a slave.
They advanced along the Tigris and the Gulf; penetrated through the passes of the mountains into the valley of Estachar or Persepolis, and profaned the last sanctuary of the Magian empire.
Regardless of the merit of art, and the pomp of royalty, the rigid Omar divided the prize among his brethren of Medina: the picture was destroyed; but such was the intrinsic value of the materials, that the share of Ali alone was sold for twenty thousand drams.
She hinted, with many a mysterious look and nod, that secrets endangering the domestic happiness of every family in the square were known to her, and appealed to the fact that such families still lived in harmony as a proof that she was to be trusted.
"Well, she lets rooms," explained Miss Greeb in a very definite manner, "and those who live in them supply their own food, and pay for service and kitchen fire."
"What is his name--or her name?"
But, alas! for the prosaicness of this workaday world, they had to assume the attitudes of lawyer and client; and discourse of crime instead of love.
She's as sharp as a needle, but an idle slut, for all that, Mr. Denzil.
"W-r-e-n-t!" spelled Lucian.
"I don't quite understand."
Therefore, the person must be known to the owner of that house, and I must discover who the owner is.
"No," replied Miss Greeb, shutting her eyes to conjure up the image of her friend's premises.
No!" replied Lucian, smiling at this highly-coloured description. "Do not jump to conclusions, Miss Greeb.
I never heard much about him," replied Miss Greeb regretfully.
"Can you keep a secret, Miss Greeb?" he asked, with impressive solemnity.
So far as I am aware, this Mr. Wrent you speak of is innocent.
His heart beat violently and his colour rose as he was ushered into the little sitting-room, and he thought less of the case at the moment than of the joy in seeing Miss Vrain once more, in hearing her speak, and watching her lovely face.
"Do you think Mrs. Vrain took it?"
"Who is with her now?"
The position of the house in question; the name of its owner; the character of its tenants; she was thoroughly well posted up in every item, and willingly imparted her knowledge with much detail and comment.
"You don't say, sir, that Mr. Wrent is a murdering villain, steeped in gore?"
"I found this on the fence at the back of No. 13," he said.
"But Link was told that she spent Christmas in the Manor at Bath."
I mean, to gain Mrs. Bensusan's back yard is it necessary to go through Mrs. Bensusan's house?"
"Well, then, tell me," continued the barrister, "is the house built with a full frontage like those in this square?
"Not if he chose a dark night for the climbing."
Lucian hesitated, as he rather dreaded the chattering tongue of his landlady, and did not wish his connection with the Vrain case to become public property in Geneva Square.
She was not in Berwin Manor on Christmas Eve, but in town."
Now that his divinity had returned, and he was about to see her again, the sun shone once more in the heavens for Lucian, and he arrayed himself for his visit with the utmost care.
"Here is a sheet of paper and a pencil.
Therefore, after a moment's reflection, he resolved to secure Miss Greeb as a coadjutor, and risk her excessive garrulity.
"Really!" said Lucian much amazed.
Miss Greeb will know."
He would escape then being seen by the landlady and her servant."
Her last lodger left about Christmas."
"So she did.
Mrs. Vrain went up to town on Christmas Eve and returned on Christmas Day; but," said Diana, with emphasis, "she spent the night in town, and on that night the murder was committed."
Do you know Mrs. Bensusan and her house well?"
"Who took it away?"
"The servant.
"It is a veil--a portion of a velvet-spotted veil."
"I daresay; but he'd be seen climbing over the fence from the back windows of the houses on each side of No. 13."
"There you are, Mr. Denzil," said Miss Greeb, placing this work of art before the barrister, "that's as good as I can draw."
Mr. Wrent.
"No!
THE VEIL AND ITS OWNER
But it had something to do with quarter-days.
He was with Mrs. Bensusan six months; came to her house about the time Mr. Berwin hired No. 13."
"Lord!" cried Miss Greeb, taken by surprise.
"What is the name of the tenant?" interrupted Lucian, cutting short this rapid sketch of Peacock's life.
"Is the gate of this passage locked at night?"
No.
"Not that I know of."
I don't know how rich he is!
"That complicates matters."
"Very strange!" assented Lucian, to stop further comment.
Building houses cheap and letting them dear; he has made more out of that than in sanding his sugar and chicorying his coffee.
I must say I do, too, Mr. Denzil," ended the lady, with a fascinating glance.
"I've visited both several times, Mr. Denzil."
She also was inclined to like Lucian more than was reasonable for the peace of her heart; so these two people, each drawn to the other, should have come together as lovers even at this second meeting.
"Very good," said Lucian, explaining just as much as would serve his purpose.
"Well?" asked Miss Vrain, getting to business as soon as Lucian was seated, "and what have you found out?"
Lucian produced his pocketbook and took therefrom the fragment of gauze, which he handed to Diana.
Of course you'll repeat our conversation to no one?"
"With time and inquiry and observation we can do much.
"A velvet-spotted veil!" cried Diana, looking at it.
"Then it belongs to Lydia Vrain.
CHAPTER XII
"Oh, pretty good," said the little woman, shrugging her shoulders, "though they do say she overcharges and underfeeds her lodgers."
"Who is Rhoda?"
He----"
"You can go round the back through the side passage which leads in from Jersey Road."
Wrent!
"She keeps a boarding-house, then?"
She turns the scale at eighteen stone, and has pretty well broke every weighing machine in the place."
"I swear to breathe no word," said Miss Greeb dramatically, and left the room greatly pleased with this secret understanding, which had quite the air of an innocent intrigue such as was detailed in journals designed for the use of the family circle.
And you?"
"May I ask why you want to know all this, Mr. Denzil?"
"It is excellent, Miss Greeb," replied Lucian, examining the plan.
At the present time Diana was at Bath, taking possession of her ancestral acres, and consulting the family lawyer on various matters connected with the property.
"Never mind just now, Miss Greeb.
As may be surmised, Lucian was considerably startled by the discovery of this important evidence so confirmative of Diana's suspicions.
"Oh, yes; but I don't think a person could without being seen by Mrs. Bensusan or Rhoda."
"No one knows.
"To whom does it belong?" asked Lucian.
"I never could sketch," said Miss Greeb regretfully, "and I am no artist, Mr. Denzil, but I think I can do what you want."
I can't find out, although I asked all the servants; but it has been missing from its place for some months."
"What kind of a man was this Mr. Wrent?"
"No one," replied the landlady promptly.
But she would have nothing to do with Lady Midlothian, unless, indeed, Mr. Grey should order it.
You know what he'll want, and for my sake you'll let him have it.
"Of course I shall sit up for him," said Lady Glencora to Alice, "but I will do it in my own room.
"I would join with Lady Midlothian in putting you into a madhouse, if you did.
He seemed to show no care, as others did, as to the special spot which they should occupy.
He seemed to assume no right, as he took that position apparently because it was the one which came naturally to his lot.
One of the croupiers had said a word, as though calling his attention to the game, but he had merely shaken his head.
She felt that she owed it to them that they should be told by herself that they had been right and that she had been wrong.
His companion followed him, and laid a hand upon his shoulder; but Burgo shook him off, and would not turn round.
As he could not be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as, by the nature of his disposition, some employment was necessary to him, he was looking to the cording of the boxes.
"Is that a friend of Mr. Palliser?" said Mr. Grey.
By this time most of those who stood around were looking at him.
He knew how a Minister looked when he lost or gained a tax.
CHAPTER LXXV.
He made no loud assertion as to his property and his rights, as some men do.
Mr. Palliser declared that he would grant her any particular favour,--only premising that he was not to be supposed to have thereby committed himself to any engagement under which his wife should have authority to take any exertion upon herself.
"He is taking it," said Alice, not at all knowing the cause of her cousin's anxiety.
Then the caution was repeated, the mother of the future duke was kissed, and Mr. Palliser went off on his mission about the carriage, its cushions, and its springs.
The croupier who had paused for a moment now went on quickly with his cards, and in two minutes the fate of Burgo's wealth was decided.
But Burgo shook him off, speaking to him some word roughly, and then again he steadied the rolls upon their appointed place.
Mr. Palliser, as he slowly handed his wife in, was a triumphant man; as was also Mr. Grey, as he handed in his lady-love, though, in a manner, much less manifest.
She had found her master, as we sometimes say, and laughed to herself with a little inward laughter as she confessed that it was so.
On the following morning they went on to Baden-Baden, and there they stopped for a couple of days.
Mr. Grey, you must not ask any questions. He,--Mr.
They both walked to the end of the row of buildings, and then Burgo, leaving the broad way, turned into a little path which led up through the trees to the hills.
"The gambling-rooms!" said Mr. Palliser in dismay.
Lady Glencora had positively refused to stop a day at Basle, making so many objections to the place that her husband had at last yielded.
Don't I know you, Alice?"
Alice was happy, very happy; but she was still disposed to regard her lover as Fate, and her happiness as an enforced necessity.
"Well, old Buffer, what do you want?" said he, accosting the man in English.
"I am going up to the station to see after a carriage for to-morrow.
Used as he was to the world and to misfortune, he was not successful in his attempt to bear his loss with a show of indifference.
"She isn't in earnest," said Mr. Palliser, almost fearing the result of the experiment.
Many were very particular in this respect, placing their ventures on the lines, so as to share the fortunes of two compartments, or sometimes of four; or they divided their coins, taking three or four numbers, selecting the numbers with almost grotesque attention to some imagined rule of their own.
If you had been with me before, I should not have made a fool of myself by putting my piece of money on the table.
The gold again went under his hand, and he lounged forward with his hat over his eyes.
But this man let his gold go all together, and left it where his half-stretched rake deposited it by chance.
"Yes;--that is, he knows him, and is interested about him.
His hat was now pushed back, and his countenance had lost its listlessness.
"Do you see that little Frenchman?" said Lady Glencora.
After he had won his money, he had allowed the game to go on for a turn without any action on his part.
No one disturbed her in the churchyard,--no steps were heard along the tombstones,--no voice sounded through the cloisters.
Through this door Burgo went without pausing, and Mr. Palliser went after him.
Mr. Palliser, who was behind her, could not see them at all.
As to Lady Midlothian, she would do nothing.
"Of course she has," said Lady Glencora.
How am I to thank you for forgiving me?"
Was she happy, now that the manner of her life to come was thus settled for her; that all further question as to the disposal of herself was taken out of her hands, and that her marriage with a man she loved was so firmly arranged that no further folly of her own could disarrange it?
Terrible troubles had afflicted him as he went, which seemed now to have dissipated themselves altogether.
He watched narrowly the face of the man as he told out the amount of the cards as they were dealt. He did not try to hide his anxiety, and when, after the telling of some six or seven cards, he heard a certain number named, and a certain colour called, he made some exclamation which even Glencora could not hear.
There was no expenditure that he would not willingly incur for her, nothing costly that he would grudge.
The big gendarme simply walked on through the door, and said nothing.
A little exercise after an early dinner was, he had been told, good for his wife; and he agreed therefore that, on their second evening at Baden, they would all walk up and see the play.
Lady Glencora and Alice had left their places, and had shrunk back, almost behind a pillar.
"Of course; I knew that was the way you would treat me."
Alice and Glencora did the same at first, but as they gained courage they glanced round upon the gamblers.
Burgo looked up and smiled at them all round the table.
"You are thinking of something, Alice," he said.
"It was here," she said--"here, on this very balcony, that I first rebelled against you, and now you have brought me here that I should confess and submit on the same spot.
"I shouldn't have said that;--not now."
Mr. Finespun wanted to do something, now in the recess,--to send some political agent over to France,--to which Lord Brock would not agree; and no one knew what would be the consequence of this disagreement.
"In what way would you have me treat you?
"What can I do?
"Yes, vanquished; if you like to call it so," said Alice.
"Yes, Plantagenet; the gambling-rooms.
But what was the favour?
On this occasion he had won his money, and Alice saw him drag it in as lazily as he had pushed it out.
But Lady Glencora said not a word,--not as yet.
"I've a particular favour to ask of you," Lady Glencora said to her husband, as soon as they were alone together in their rooms at Baden.
I do confess.
And how happy you will be!
There; he is going.
It is Burgo," said Lady Glencora.
Mr. Palliser has something to do," said Lady Glencora to Mr. Grey, as soon as the two men had disappeared from her sight.
Can I do anything? Look at him, Alice.
"You are so good," said she.
He had never given her up for a day, and now the event proved that he had been right.
She would write to her father at once,--to her father and Lady Macleod,--and would confess everything.
He has got you in his power now, and I don't think even you can go back."
If she would only ask for jewels,--though they were the Grand Duchess's diamond eardrops, he would endeavour to get them for her.
Mr. Palliser had come abroad with a feeling that all the world had been cut from under his feet.
And then another croupier put down, close to Burgo's money, certain rolls of gold done up in paper, and also certain loose napoleons.
He was going about the house, with a nervous solicitude to do something, and was flattering himself that he was of use.
If he were to destroy himself, what should I do then?"
If there is to be a tragedy at these places,--and tragedies will sometimes occur,--it is always as well that the tragic scene should be as far removed as possible from the salons, in order that the public eye should not suffer.
But don't let him gamble.
She was happy, and she was resolute in this,--that she would now do all she could to make him happy also.
"No; I shall not go back again."
Encouraged by her silence, Mrs. Mosey went on.
'Elizabeth,' she says, 'you know how wildly people talk in Miss Letitia's present condition.
God knows I meant well."
Now that she had regained the power to think, she felt a hateful doubt pressed on her by Mrs. Mosey's disclosures.
Shocking suspicions are lying in wait for me in that bedroom, as it were.
EMILY.
Emily did interrupt, nevertheless.
'Let it go in at one ear and out at the other,' she says.
"Allow me to explain myself."
I won't be inhuman enough to leave you alone in the house to-night; but if this delirium goes on, I must ask you to get another nurse.
CHAPTER XV.
Sorely tried already by the cruel perplexities of her position, Emily's courage failed to resist the first sensation of horror, aroused in her by the climax of the nurse's hysterical narrative.
There was but one way of escaping from this dilemma--and Emily deliberately took it.
Having adopted this conclusion, she resolved to face the prospect of a night's solitude by the death-bed--rather than permit Mrs. Mosey to have a second opportunity of drawing her own inferences from what she might hear in Miss Letitia's room.
Mrs. Mosey looked at her in vacant surprise.
"Many and many a person have I nursed in fever," she announced.
"Listen, miss--listen!
I don't say she didn't warn me--speaking, you will please to understand, in the strictest confidence.
She entered the room--pale and trembling.
'Whoever you are, good people' (she says), 'a hundred pounds reward, if you find the runaway murderer.
Miss Letitia muttered and mumbled, poor soul.
One of them was murdered--what do you think of that!--and the other (I heard your aunt say it, in so many words) committed the crime.
If she bursts into fits of crying that are dreadful to see, pity her, poor thing, but take no notice.' All very well, and sounds like speaking out, doesn't it?
Emily crossed the room.
Even that vague allusion was enough for Emily.
"Don't tell me of it!" Emily interposed.
Mrs. Ellmother warns me to expect this, that, and the other.
For the moment, Mrs. Mosey was petrified.
"I wish to say, miss, that your aunt has frightened me."
Remain here, if you please; I have something to suggest in your own interests. Wait, and compose yourself."
Mrs. Ellmother has expected impossibilities of me; and Mrs. Ellmother must take the consequences.
"You forgot your duty when you listened to what my aunt said."
"I know but too well how my aunt's mind is affected by the fever."
Those were her anticipations--and how had they been fulfilled?
Did you hear her scream?
Never yet, miss, in all my experience--!"
You'll know him, my friends--the wretch, the monster--you'll know him by his voice.' That was how she put it; I tell you again, that was how she put it.
"Do you mean to keep me waiting much longer, miss?"
"You are not the first person," Emily answered, quietly releasing her, "who has done wrong with the best intentions."
"Not a moment longer, now you are composed again," Emily answered.
She called out, like a person making public proclamation, when I was in her room.
The purpose which had taken a foremost place in Emily's mind rested on the firm foundation of her love and pity for her aunt.
"May I say a word?" Mrs. Mosey inquired.
She lifted one hand with theatrical solemnity--and luxuriously terrified herself with her own horrors.
She turned her back on her own convictions; and persuaded herself that she had been in the wrong, when she had attached importance to anything that her aunt had said, under the influence of delirium.
Pay no heed to it,' she says.
If she's frightened--you know nothing about it.
'If Miss Emily asks questions--you know nothing about it.
I think she called them 'gentlemen'; but I can't be sure, and I wouldn't deceive you--you know I wouldn't deceive you, for the world.
Having taken for granted that there was a foundation in truth for what she herself had heard in her aunt's room, could she reasonably resist the conclusion that there must be a foundation in truth for what Mrs. Mosey had heard, under similar circumstances?
In some degree at least she had recovered herself.
Seeing that ominous change, Emily dropped back into her chair.
In speaking of the disaster which had compelled Mr. and Mrs. Rook to close the inn, Cecilia had alluded to an inquest held on the body of the murdered man.
Wakeful on the warm side of the pillow, Emily remained wakeful on the cool side--thinking again and again of the interview with Alban which had ended so strangely.
It is only the superior human being who tries the hopeless experiment of making Sleep submit to the Person.
An exhibition of agricultural implements had been opened in the neighborhood, only two days since; and a public competition between rival machines was to be decided on the coming Monday.
She began reading the back numbers of the newspaper at haphazard, without any definite idea of what she was looking for.
He had, as he supposed, allowed too long a time to pass (after an early breakfast that morning), without taking food: he could only attribute the fainting fit to that cause.
Not only was the Hand-in-Hand inn crowded, but even the accommodation offered by the nearest town had proved barely sufficient to meet the public demand.
"I have had a dreadful fright; and I don't believe I shall get over it for the rest of my life."
The younger stranger (excepting little half-whiskers) was clean shaved.
On Monday the first of October she met with some encouragement at last.
He then secured the house door, and the shutters over the lower windows.
Excepting the case of supper, which could be easily provided, the landlord had no choice but to disappoint both his guests.
The doctor sent his groom, on horseback, to the police-office in the town.
The coroner helped him by a question: "What did you see when you opened the door?"
"Did you notice the door, leading into the yard?"
The travelers agreed to occupy this makeshift bed-chamber.
Passing over the preliminary remarks, Emily read the evidence with the closest attention.
At a quarter to seven the next morning, he got up; his wife being still asleep.
In the number for the Wednesday following, she found a full report of the proceedings at the inquest.
After adding a table and a basin, for the purposes of the toilet, the accommodation which Mr. Rook was able to offer came to an end.
Approaching the village, he had been startled by seeing the dark gentleman (a total stranger to him) stretched prostrate on the grass at the roadside--so far as he could judge, in a swoon.
He was not liable to fainting fits.
While the meal was being prepared, the rain held off for a while.
ROOK.
At the top of a column appeared a telegraphic summary of all that was then known of the crime.
The dark gentleman went to bed first; the fair gentleman followed, after waiting a while.
She tried September, next--with the same unsatisfactory results.
A mattress on the floor could be provided for the other.
"What did you do, after making these discoveries?"
What purpose (if any) had brought him into the neighborhood of Zeeland, he did not state.
Next to the kitchen, and communicating with it by a door, was an outhouse; used, partly as a scullery, partly as a lumber-room.
"I closed the yard door.
There were signs in the heavens of a stormy night.
In despair of her capacity to remove the obstacle that stood in her way, she decided on resuming her regular work at the Museum--turned her pillow to get at the cool side of it--and made up her mind to go asleep.
He was a grave, quiet sort of person, and (unlike the other one) not much of a talker.
Having a flask with brandy in it, he revived the fainting man, and led him to the inn.
The gentlemen looked at each other and agreed that there was no help for it but to hurry the supper, and walk to the railway station--a distance of between five and six miles--in time to catch the last train.
His companion, older, taller, and darker--and a finer man altogether--leaned on his arm and seemed to be exhausted.
"Give me a moment, gentlemen," he said to the jury.
No discovery rewarded her.
He had been instructed to wake the gentlemen early; and he knocked at their door.
It was one of her better days, and she was full of praises of the water-bed.
It's no use telling him, fools will always break out o' bounds.
In twenty-two days I shall see my boy.' She fell back, and for a short time she took no notice of the fact that Margaret sat motionless, her hand shading her eyes.
How dared he say that he would love her still, even though she shook him off with contempt?
In Lennox's case, he seemed for a moment to have slid over the boundary between friendship and love; and the instant afterwards, to regret it nearly as much as she did, although for different reasons.
'His strong idea wandered through her thought.'
'Your father was not there, was he?' said Margaret, colouring deep.
He knows it himself; he has said so many a time. He would do anything for me; you don't mean he would refuse me this last wish--prayer, if you will.
'And, Margaret, if I am to die--if I am one of those appointed to die before many weeks are over--I must see my child first.
I cannot pray till I have this one thing; indeed, I cannot.
Sharp, decisive speeches came thronging into her mind, now that it was too late to utter them.
An involuntary comparison between Mr. Lennox and Mr. Thornton arose in her mind.
She disliked him the more for having mastered her inner will.
Why, I should not be ill--be dying--if he had not taken me away from Helstone, to this unhealthy, smoky, sunless place.'
She saw her father's anxiety lay deeper than the source of his latter cheering words.
He has left the room.
'Revenge may have her own; Roused discipline aloud proclaims their cause, And injured navies urge their broken laws.' BYRON.
There could be no danger in five minutes.
Dear Margaret, you have done what is right about it; and the end is beyond our control.'
'I don't understand.'
Let us ask him how best to do it.'
Did he ground it upon the miserable yesterday?
Oh, no! to be sure.
Margaret gently rose up and stood opposite to her frail mother; so that she might gather the secure fulfilment of her wish from the calm steadiness of her daughter's face.
She did it because it was right, and simple, and true to save where she could save; even to try to save.
'Shall I read you a chapter, now?'
'Why, Margaret, you must not be hurt, but he was much prettier than you were.
I'm easier in my mind for having spit it out; but I want some thoughts of the world that's far away to take the weary taste of it out o' my mouth.
Their opinions clashed; and indeed, she had never perceived that he had cared for her opinions, as belonging to her, the individual.
I'm thankful it is as it is; I should have hesitated till, perhaps, it might have been too late to do any good.
Don't lose time, dear, dear Margaret.
I am as sure that he will come directly to us, as I am sure of my life.
It was more daring than became a man to threaten her so.
She crept away, and hid from his idea.
So I don't think I'm a competent witness.
But this wish of Mrs. Hale's was so natural, so just, so right to both parties, that Margaret felt as if, on Frederick's account as well as on her mother's, she ought to overlook all intermediate chances of danger, and pledge herself to do everything in her power for its realisation.
Though Bessy's eyes were shut, she was listening for some time, for the moisture of tears gathered heavy on her eyelashes.
I remember, when I first saw you in Dixon's arms, I said, "Dear, what an ugly little thing!" And she said, "It's not every child that's like Master Fred, bless him!" Dear! how well I remember it.
Margaret would not be alone.
'But why?' asked Margaret.
It was all very well; but her father's account of the relentless manner in which mutinies were punished made Margaret shiver and creep.
'You will write to-night?
It will waken up all the poor springs of health left in me.
'I love to hear about him, mamma.
'I'm afraid you're much worse.
It makes me think very badly of Captain Reid when I know that he disliked my own dear boy.
Had she not the power to daunt him?
If, by an effort, she attended for one moment, it seemed as though she were convulsed into double restlessness the next.
'All these years since the mutiny, papa?'
FREDERICK
'He did na' speak words.
Then I could have had Fred in my arms every minute of the day, and his cot was close by my bed; and now, now--Margaret--I don't know where my boy is, and sometimes I think I shall never see him again.'
Go on.
Poor Fred! Everybody loved him.
At last, she burst out 'Don't go on reading.
Did I do wrong?' Mr. Hale did not reply at first.
And she shrank and shuddered as under the fascination of some great power, repugnant to her whole previous life.
'I thought I should na' ha' seen yo' again,' said she, at last, looking wistfully in Margaret's face.
Oh, Margaret! the post goes out at five--you will write by it, won't you?
Write by this very next post.
Your poor father, Margaret.
The observance of justice, though useful among them, is not guarded by so strong a necessity as among individuals; and the moral obligation holds proportion with the USEFULNESS.
His step-mother and her children were as much shut up from him as the woman of any other family, and there was as little danger of any criminal correspondence between them. Uncles and nieces, for a like reason, might marry at Athens; but neither these, nor half-brothers and sisters, could contract that alliance at Rome, where the intercourse was more open between the sexes.
But nations can subsist without intercourse.
This principle is also the foundation of most of the laws of good manners; a kind of lesser morality, calculated for the ease of company and conversation.
The long and helpless infancy of man requires the combination of parents for the subsistence of their young; and that combination requires the virtue of chastity or fidelity to the marriage bed.
They may even subsist, in some degree, under a general war.
Why create magistrates, where there never arises any disorder or iniquity?
Too much or too little ceremony are both blamed, and everything, which promotes ease, without an indecent familiarity, is useful and laudable.
To repeat, to a man's prejudice, anything that escaped him in private conversation, or to make any such use of his private letters, is highly blamed.
OF POLITICAL SOCIETY.
The rules of justice, such as prevail among individuals, are not entirely suspended among political societies.
What is the reason, why, by the Athenian laws, one might marry a half-sister by the father, but not by the mother?
Human nature cannot by any means subsist, without the association of individuals; and that association never could have place, were no regard paid to the laws of equity and justice.
Even in repeating stories, whence we can foresee no ill consequences to result, the giving of one's author is regarded as a piece of indiscretion, if not of immorality.
So far is there a material difference between them and the rules of justice, fidelity, and loyalty.
We may only learn from it the necessity of rules, wherever men have any intercourse with each other.
What need of positive law where natural justice is, of itself, a sufficient restraint?
That those who are going to the capital take place of those who are coming from it; this seems to be founded on some idea of dignity of the great city, and of the preference of the future to the past.
One Lockier, having carried his sedition further, was sentenced to death; but this punishment was so far from quelling the mutinous spirit, that above a thousand of his companions showed their adherence to him, by attending his funeral, and wearing in their hats black and sea-green ribbons by way of favors.
Ross, though strongly garrisoned, was surrendered by Lord Taffe.
He gathered followers in Holland and the north of Germany whom his great reputation allured to him.
Jones himself, the brave governor of Dublin, died at Wexford.
Jones, an excellent officer, formerly a lawyer, had sallied out with the reenforcement newly arrived; and attacking the party employed in repairing the fort, he totally routed them, pursued the advantage, and fell in with the army, which had neglected Ormond's orders.
About four thousand assembled at Burford, under the command of Thomson, a man formerly condemned for sedition by a court martial, but pardoned by the general.
One person alone of the garrison escaped to be a messenger of this universal havoc and destruction.
Cromwell soon after arrived in Dublin, where he was welcomed with shouts and rejoicings.
The parliament judged it necessary to enlarge the laws of high treason beyond those narrow bounds within which they had been confined during the monarchy.
Colonel Reynolds, and afterwards Fairfax and Cromwell, fell upon them, while unprepared for defence, and seduced by the appearance of a treaty.
Fluxes and contagious distempers crept in among the soldiers, who perished in great numbers.
The English had no further difficulties to encounter than what arose from fatigue and the advanced season.
They now practised against their officers the same lesson which they had been taught against the parliament.
The women applied by petition for his release; but were now desired to mind their household affairs, and leave the government of the state to the men.
His liberty was at this time as ill relished by the parliament; and he was thrown into prison, as a promoter of sedition and disorder in the commonwealth.
These proposals the commissioners, after passing some time in sermons and prayers, in order to express the more determined resolution, very solemnly delivered to the king.
The earls of Cassilis and Lothian, Lord Burley, the laird of Liberton, and other commissioners, arrived at Breda; but without any power of treating: the king must submit without reserve to the terms imposed upon him.
All opposition was overborne by the furious valor of the troops. The town was taken sword in hand; and orders being issued to give no quarter, a cruel slaughter was made of the garrison.
He made himself master of Kilkenny and Clonmel, the only places where he met with any vigorous resistance.
Every town before which Cromwell presented himself, now opened its gates without resistance.
Cromwell, having received a reenforcement from England, again took the field early in the spring.
The garrison, after a slight defence, offered to capitulate; but before they obtained a cessation, they imprudently neglected their guards; and the English army rushed in upon them.
Four hundred were taken prisoners; some of them capitally punished, the rest pardoned.
The people in the United Provinces were much attached to his interests.
Even a few, who were saved by the soldiers, satiated with blood, were next day miserably butchered by orders from the general.
But though the public in general bore great favor to the king, the states were uneasy at his presence.
But Cromwell knew the importance of despatch.
Having led the army without delay to Wexford, he began to batter the town.
Having made a breach, he ordered a general assault.
His policy, however, had the desired effect.
He hastened to Tredah.
They apprehended the most precipitate resolutions from men of such violent and haughty dispositions.
They even comprehended verbal offences, nay, intentions, though they had never appeared in any overt act against the state.
That town was well fortified: Ormond had thrown into it a good garrison of three thousand men, under Sir Arthur Aston, an officer of reputation.
The same severity was exercised as at Tredah.
"Cruel Princess!" said the King, "would you make my life horrible to me by marrying another before my eyes?"
"You know best," answered the Mermaid, smiling kindly at him.
"You may trust me: I am not trying to entrap you.
"You need not be afraid of that," answered the Mermaid, "the Princess thinks of no one but you, and the frightful Dwarf cannot persuade her to look at him."
A little way off stood a splendid palace, the walls of which were of transparent emeralds.
Never has there been a gayer Court.
Four-and-twenty pretty and graceful nymphs advanced toward him, holding garlands of flowers, with which they barred the way.
As soon as the swans which drew the Fairy's chariot had alighted under a porch, which was paved with diamonds and had arches of rubies, they were greeted on all sides by thousands of beautiful beings, who came to meet them joyfully, singing these words:
Make up your minds at once what you will do, for I vow that you shall marry the Yellow Dwarf.
"Bellissima," she said, "I do wish you would not be so proud.
I am so frightened.
"Ah!
The Queen, her mother, by her caresses and flatteries, helped to make her believe that there was nothing too good for her.
"I know quite well," said the Mermaid, "that the Princess is sitting by the brook-side, just where you saw her as you passed, but as you will have many enemies to fight with before you can reach her, take this sword; armed with it you may dare any danger, and overcome the greatest difficulties, only beware of one thing--that is, never to let it fall from your hand.
But when she got as far as the same fatal orange tree, and saw it covered with flowers and fruit, she stopped and began to gather some of the oranges--and then, putting down her basket, she sat down to eat them.
"What do I see?" she cried.
"What a fatal mistake! What is to be done to undeceive her?"
Do you think you are going to break with impunity the promise that you made to my friend the Yellow Dwarf?
The King, who was quite deceived by her altered appearance, replied:
The malicious Dwarf looked at her and began to laugh spitefully.
This cake she prepared with her own hands, and putting it in a little basket, she set out to seek the Fairy. But as she was not used to walking far, she soon felt very tired and sat down at the foot of a tree to rest, and presently fell fast asleep.
You see it is not difficult to do if you really care for me."
So walking up to a great mirror, he said to it, "Trusty counsellor, let me see what I can do to make myself agreeable to the charming Fairy of the Desert; for I can think of nothing but how to please her."
"Pray go on with your story," said the King.
The Queen, your mother, has promised you in marriage----"
I wish you to marry one of them, and you do not try to please me."
The King of the Gold Mines was quite overcome by the Princess's good-natured way of taking his interference, and, throwing himself at her feet, he kissed her hand a thousand times and begged her to forgive him.
"Alas!
"Oh!" cried she, "the lions are coming.
The Fairy came back so delighted that she could not conceal her joy.
You may imagine how much these had cost; but then nothing could have been more brilliant, except the beauty of the Princess!
"I should be sorry," answered Bellissima, "if you had not noticed how much I pitied these princes who were leaving me for ever; but for you, sire, it is very different: you have every reason to be pleased with me, but they are going sorrowfully away, so you must not grudge them my compassion."
And the King used to write songs for Bellissima.
The King, motionless with horror, looked on despairingly at this dreadful occurrence, which he was quite powerless to prevent, and to make matters worse his sight failed him, everything became dark, and he felt himself carried along through the air by a strong hand.
Not because he did not wish very much to escape, but he was afraid that this might be only another device by which the Fairy of the Desert was trying to deceive him.
I have looked at you enough.
"Alas!" cried the Princess, "must you die?
She wore a ruff of black taffeta, a red velvet hood, and a farthingale all in rags, and she leaned heavily upon a crutch. This strange old woman, without saying a single word, hobbled three times round the gallery, followed by the basilisks, then stopping in the middle, and brandishing her crutch threateningly, she cried:
As for the Princess, the more she saw of the King the more she liked him; he was so generous, so handsome and clever, that at last she was almost as much in love with him as he was with her.
"That you should marry that little wretch would be far more terrible," answered the King.
"Not so," replied the Yellow Dwarf; "you are a rival of whom I am too much afraid; you shall not see our marriage." So saying, in spite of Bellissima's tears and cries, he stabbed the King to the heart with the diamond sword.
"Bellissima is pretty enough, but I don't particularly want to marry her--you can keep her."
"She believes that I love her!" cried the King.
"No one can tell you what you wish to know better than I can," said he.
Twenty delightful kings did everything they could think of to make themselves agreeable, and after having spent ever so much money in giving a single entertainment thought themselves very lucky if the Princess said "That's pretty."
So saying, she quickly collected a bundle of sea-weed, and, blowing it three times, she said:
At last the happy day came.
At least that is what the King of the Gold Mines thought, and he was never happy unless he was with her.
But while they were collecting jasper and porphyry, agate and marble, gold and bronze, statues and devices, to immortalize the King's memory, he was thanking the good Mermaid and begging her still to help him, which she graciously promised to do as she disappeared; and then he set out for the Castle of Steel.
What have you promised?"
But he had hardly turned to continue his search when he met six dragons covered with scales that were harder than iron.
"Look at me well, Princess, before you give me your word," said he.
The King sighed, but made no answer--indeed, what was there to be said to such a clear-sighted person?
THE YELLOW DWARF
What misfortune has brought you to this dismal place?"
"Ah! madam," the King of the Gold Mines said to her "how is this?
"I'm really glad to hear that, for I've been looking for a wife all over the world.
When she found that the King did not return, she hastened out to look for him, and reached the shore, with a hundred of the ladies of her train, loaded with splendid presents for him.
Just try to take it off, and you will soon find out that I am more powerful than you are!"
The King of the Gold Mines, indignant at being kept from his happiness by this wicked old woman, went up to her, and threatening her with his sword, said:
"I must make up my mind to die," said the poor Queen.
While she was saying this, the King, who really loved her as much as ever, was feeling terribly sad at being so rapidly torn away from his beloved Princess, but he knew too well how powerful the Fairy was to have any hope of escaping from her except by great patience and cunning.
"Get away out of my country at once, and for ever, miserable creature, lest I take your life, and so rid myself of your malice."
As he hesitated the Mermaid, who guessed his thoughts, said to him:
"Must all my happy days come to an end like this?"
The Fairy of the Desert, quite taken in by these words, resolved at once to transport the Prince to a pleasanter place.
"What are you crying about?"
Upon her head she wore a splendid crown, her lovely hair waved nearly to her feet, and her stately figure could easily be distinguished among all the ladies who attended her.
"My heart is still more wild than thine, For Fate is cruel unto me. Why must I thus in exile pine? Why is my Princess snatched from me?
"This chance meeting with an unhappy princess for whom I once had a passing fancy, before I was lucky enough to meet you, has affected me a little, I admit, but you are so much more to me than she is that I would rather die than leave you."
She looked all round her, and then up the tree, and there she saw a little tiny man, who was eating oranges.
"Wretched little monster!" said the King; "do you dare to call yourself the Princess's lover, and to lay claim to such a treasure?
"What shall I do?" she cried; "I shall be eaten up," and being too frightened to run a single step, she began to cry, and leaned against the tree under which she had been asleep.
I don't want to care for anyone."
I am so angry with the Yellow Dwarf and the Fairy of the Desert that I am not likely to wish to help them, especially since I constantly see your poor Princess, whose beauty and goodness make me pity her so much; and I tell you that if you will have confidence in me I will help you to escape."
We must now go back to the Fairy of the Desert.
The cake was all gone!
Princess," said the Queen, weeping, "what is this that I hear?
But the Princess thought so much of herself that she did not consider any one of her lovers clever or handsome enough for her; and her mother, who was getting really angry at her determination not to be married, began to wish that she had not allowed her to have her own way so much.
So, without reply to the nymphs, he rushed forward instantly, breaking their garlands, and scattering them in all directions; and then went on without further hindrance to the little wood where he had seen Bellissima.
When they saw this portrait they fell in love with the Princess--every one of them, but upon each it had a different effect.
That faithless Princess who would have married you is promised to me.
Preparations were begun at once for the grandest wedding that had ever been held at the palace.
The trumpets sounded, all the streets of the town were hung with flags and strewn with flowers, and the people ran in crowds to the great square before the palace.
The Queen and the Princess were just ready to set out with the King when they saw, advancing toward them from the end of the long gallery, two great basilisks, dragging after them a very badly made box; behind them came a tall old woman, whose ugliness was even more surprising than her extreme old age.
Presently, after walking wildly up and down, he wrote these verses upon the sand with his stick:
Then all at once she saw before her the Yellow Dwarf.
I am your enemy and your rival.
We beg you not to insist upon going on.
The King, who had his own reasons for wishing to keep the old Fairy in a good humor, did not spare pretty speeches, and after a time he was allowed to walk by himself upon the sea-shore.
"Indeed it was, Princess," he answered; "the wicked Fairy of the Desert, not content with chaining me to a rock, carried me off in her chariot to the other end of the earth, where I should even now be a captive but for the unexpected help of a friendly mermaid, who brought me here to rescue you, my Princess, from the unworthy hands that hold you.
"And then Aunt Allison explained all about King Arthur and his Round Table, and gave us the motto: 'Live pure, speak truth, right the wrong, honour the king, else wherefore born?'"
Two bright faces appeared at the same instant at different windows, and two voices called in the same breath, one answering, "Yes, godmother," and the other, "Yes, Cousin Elizabeth."
There was not a house or a human being in sight.
She resolutely turned her attention to the charades, until all at once she seemed to hear Miss Allison's voice saying, "I like this little hand.
"I've seen your picture taken in that costume, and it is lovely."
After that they took to their heels, leaving the poor despoiled traveller looking mournfully at his empty pockets, which were turned wrong side out.
Several times she started up and then sank back before she could make up her mind.
You know you promised. There's time yet to slip away and post that letter before the mail train goes by."
One carried a dark lantern and the other a toy pistol, which he held at Jim's head.
The train whistled nearer.
We had tableaux, you know, and Malcolm and I were knights in one of them."
Still, there was that promise, and it must be kept--to the utmost.
"Oh, Miss Mattie!" sounded an anxious little voice at the delivery window, "is it too late to send this letter?
Betty watched until she saw the mail-bag tossed aboard, and then gave a deep sigh of thankfulness.
"Thieves" wrote Rob, and any one looking over the shoulders of the group would have seen several cards which bore the same word, but more which their puzzled owners had left blank.
Miss Allison had invited them all to a picnic at the old mill on the following day.
"I know plenty of names that I wouldn't mind cutting here in this tree with mine."
The next charade was easier.
Eugenia's hand, she said, showed its owner to be extravagant and wilful; Malcolm's, vain and overbearing; Keith's, disorderly; and Rob's, lacking in judgment.
Betty nearly screamed in her terror at this sudden appearance.
Betty was the only one who had guessed it.
They will be given in five separate acts."
"Come on, Eugenia," they called, but she shrugged her shoulders with what the girls called a "young ladified air," and turned to Malcolm with a coquettish glance of her big black eyes.
"I'm a few minutes late, anyhow, and there's barely time to stamp it and slip it in, so!" She acted while she spoke, so that with the last word she had turned the key.
As each syllable is acted, write down the word you think is meant.
"I'm not it!" shrieked Joyce, racing past her.
The bonfire blazed higher and higher.
"It seems like some sort of witches' work to me, the way she guessed things about the rest of you; and I suppose it's just as true what she said about me,--at least the part about being too sensitive and imaginative is true, I know.
In front, a swinging sign-board announced it as the "Traveller's Rest" and offered refreshment within for man and beast.
Now, all ready!"
It was the seven o'clock mail train.
Miss Allison came out in front of her audience.
Betty's face shone.
The ponies, already saddled and bridled, were waiting in front of the house.
"Too sensitive and too imaginative by far," she said.
'It will keep its promises to the utmost,' she said, and I feel that it will have to do it now, just because she said so."
Malcolm went on cutting, without an answer.
But her conscience kept troubling her.
She could not remember which way to turn.
Doors and windows had been roughly outlined in charcoal.
It wouldn't be right to ask any one else to go with her, and miss the chance of winning the prize, too.
While Miss Allison marshalled her flock of little darkies behind the great rock, Mrs. Sherman called the children to seat themselves in a semicircle on the camp-stools and rugs in front.
Nobody could be very dangerous, she knew, who could go along the road whistling "My Old Kentucky Home" in such a happy fashion.
It will always be faithful in little things as well as big, and will keep its promises to the utmost.
Stir the bonfire, Alec.
"Aunt Allison gave them to us.
"Yes'm, I'll do it," answered each girl again, almost in the same breath.
Mrs. Sherman and Miss Allison were down at the far end of the wide porch, where the moonlight was stealing through the vines and shimmering on the floor.
Next morning in her "Good times" book, Betty carefully wrote every word she could remember that Keith had said the evening before, about knights and knightly deeds.
The moon was not high enough yet to dispel much of the gloom of the twilight, and bullbats were circling overhead, dipping so low at times that once they almost brushed her face.
Go and behead him at once.
When they had finished eating Noureddin asked the old man to bring them a bottle of wine.
On the return of Scheih Ibrahim they begged him to open it, and to allow them to enter and admire the magnificence within. Consenting, he brought not only the key, but a light, and immediately unlocked the door.
Now the Caliph had caused a bend in the river to form a lake in his garden.
When she ceased he went softly downstairs and said to the vizir:
"Scheih Ibrahim, I am the fisher Kerim.
"If only," she said, "I had an instrument upon which I might play."
Scheih Ibrahim spread the table in front of a sofa, and all three ate together.
Farewell."
Noureddin and the beautiful Persian, finding the wine excellent, drank of it freely, and while drinking they sang.
A clear head is worth more than an honest heart.
This man is declared to be unfit for any position of note, because he always shows temper.
Mr. Daubeny detracted something from this triumph by the overstrained and perhaps ironic pathos with which he deplored the loss of his right honourable friend's services.
Lord Drummond at the War Office, and Mr. Boffin from the Board of Trade, did, however, actually resign; and Mr. Boffin's explanations in the House were heard before the debate was resumed.
Ratler sighed instead of answering.
Perhaps no leader of the House was ever more devoutly worshipped by a small number of adherents than was Mr. Gresham now; but such worship will not support power.
The House cheered very loudly, and Mr. Boffin was the hero of ten minutes.
The parsons in the country, and the little squires who but rarely come up to London, spoke of it all exactly as did the Ratlers. There were parishes in the country in which Mr. Boffin was canonised, though up to that date no Cabinet Minister could well have been less known to fame than was Mr. Boffin.
Only two resignations;--whereas it had been expected that the whole House would fall to pieces!
He told Ratler that he wished gentlemen to vote altogether in accordance with their opinions; and it came to be whispered in certain circles that he had resigned, or was resigning, or would resign, the leadership of his party.
Mr. Turnbull began by declaring that he did not at all like Mr. Daubeny as a Minister of the Crown.
When men wanted power, either to grasp at it or to retain it, then they offered bribes to the people.
They have not expected relief from the hands of Greeks, but will take it when it comes from Greeks or Trojans.
In a matter of horseflesh of what use is it to have all manner of good gifts if your horse won't go whither you want him, and refuses to stop when you bid him?
Of all possible Ministers of the Crown at this period, Mr. Daubeny was he thought perhaps the worst, and the most dangerous.
He would not, he said, feel himself justified in refusing the Address to the Crown proposed by Ministers, simply because that Address was founded on the proposition of a future reform, as to the expediency of which he had not for many years entertained a doubt.
There will always be a number of untrained men ready to take the gift without looking at the giver.
On the fourth night the House was divided, and Mr. Daubeny was the owner of a majority of fifteen.
Education would receive the bulk of what was left after existing interests had been amply guaranteed.
The Ministers held a Cabinet Council on the Monday morning, and it was supposed afterwards that that also had been stormy.
The whole line of defence was indicated by the gentlemen who moved and seconded the Address.
Now this right honourable gentleman had never been specially serviceable.
Indeed, might it not be said of all the good things obtained for the people, of all really serviceable reforms, that they were gathered and garnered home in consequence of the squabbles of Ministers?
It was acknowledged also that as regarded the question of oratory Mr. Daubeny had failed signally.
He was not in the habit of attaching himself specially to any Minister of the Crown.
It would be lost as far as it could be lost by a majority in that House on that motion; and it was by that majority or minority that Mr. Daubeny would be maintained in his high office or ejected from it.
It seemed to be almost a matter of surprise that really good Churchmen should have endured so long to be shackled by subservience to the State.
Mr. Boffin had certainly not joined the present Ministry,--so he said,--with the view of destroying the Church.
Things had come to that pass that Mr. Gresham was the only possible leader.
The rumours were, of course, worthy of no belief, as the transactions of the Cabinet are of necessity secret.
Was it possible that these earls, that marquis, and the two dukes, and those staunch old Tory squires, should remain in a Government pledged to disestablish the Church?
Mr. Gresham had been very indiscreet, and had especially sinned in opposing the Address without arrangements with his party.
We want practical results rather than truth.
After all, the success or failure of Mr. Daubeny must depend, not on his own party, but on them. It must always be so when measures of Reform are advocated by a Conservative Ministry.
The thing was to be done in the cause of religion.
He had no other remark to make, and he was sure that the House would appreciate the course which had induced him to seat himself below the gangway.
The Church, as a Church, would own increased power when it could appoint its own bishops, and be wholly dissevered from State patronage.
But in the taking of such bribes there was no dishonesty, and he should willingly take this bribe.
And he made the matter worse by retreating within his own shell during the whole of that Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning. Lord Cantrip was with him three or four times, and he saw both Mr. Palliser, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer under him, and Mr. Ratler.
Mr. Monk spoke also.
He could not allow it to be said of him that he had voted for the permanence of the Church establishment, and he must therefore support the Government.
But he went amidst no congregation of Liberals, and asked for no support.
Anything can be done with another man,--he can be made to fit almost any hole,--because he has his temper under command.
But the wonder of the world arose from the fact that only two gentlemen out of the twenty or thirty who composed the Government did give up their places on this occasion.
Ratler himself almost felt that he loved the Church.
With what a force of agony did all the Ratlers of the day repeat that inappropriate name!
"But who should lead our House?" asked Bonteen.
But the thing now offered was too good to be rejected, let it come from what quarter it would.
And this was a Conservative Government!
Mr. Turnbull was the people's tribune, of the day; Mr. Monk had also been a tribune, then a Minister, and now was again--something less than a tribune.
The debate was long and stormy, but was peculiarly memorable for the skill with which Mr. Daubeny's higher colleagues defended the steps they were about to take.
As to the connection with the State, the time for it had clearly gone by.
Experience had taught him to doubt them all.
Two gentlemen had certainly resigned their seats in the Government before the House met at four o'clock, and there were rumours abroad that others would do so if the suggested measure should be found really to amount to disestablishment.
What would Mr. Turnbull say in this debate,--and what Mr. Monk?
As to the endowments, there was some confusion of ideas; but nothing was to be done with them inappropriate to religion.
"My lord," said the steward, "I beg a thousand pardons for interrupting you, but what I have long foreseen has taken place.
"Wretched son!
Now it was not the custom to show a slave to a private bidder, but as no one dared to disobey the vizir his request was granted.
He, however, only laughed at her advice, saying, that his father had always kept him in too great constraint, and that now he rejoiced at his new-found liberty.
In vain the Persian protested against the wrong he did himself; he continued to scatter with the same lavish hand.
"Charming Persian," answered Noureddin, "how could I be guilty of such baseness?
Throughout the entire kingdom there was no one who did not esteem and praise him as he deserved.
I am so struck by its results, that I would try it on myself."
Leaving the beautiful Persian shut up in the room alone, he went out to seek the slave merchants, announcing to them that he had found the pearl among slaves, and asking them to come and put a value upon her.
"I don't know if that motive is quite strong enough to justify this woman in risking her neck," responded the barrister.
So much mischief is done in the world by people repeating idle tales of which they are not sure."
In the first place, the female shadow on the blind seen by Lucian, showed that a woman had been in the habit of entering the house by the secret way of the cellar, and during the absence of Vrain.
My head is too confused just now with this conflicting evidence to plan any line of action.
Now, if the woman was Mrs. Vrain, she must have been in the habit of visiting your father by the back way."
As such, do you consider her evidence reliable?"
Diana assented, and touched the bell.
"I always suspected Lydia as indirectly guilty," she declared in concluding her speech for the prosecution, "but I was not certain until now that she had actually struck the blow herself."
CHAPTER XIII
Is it possible to prove that Mrs. Vrain removed this dagger?"
Thirdly, Diana had discovered that Lydia had spent the night of the murder in town; and, lastly, she also declared that the fragment of gauze found by Lucian on the dividing fence was the property of Mrs. Vrain.
Then, seeing the look of anger on Diana's face, he hastened to apologise.
"On the evidence of that piece of gauze," she said, "it was Lydia who entered the house.
Altogether, she was about as venomous a specimen of an unappropriated blessing as can well be imagined.
GOSSIP
"But did she?" said Denzil, by no means convinced.
"Was the letter from him?"
She did, and stayed all night, and came down next morning to keep Christmas.
Her own were of a cold grey, her lips were thin, her waist pinched in, and--as the natural consequence of tight lacing--her nose was red.
I brought her up with me, so that you should get her information at first hand.
"She wanted to marry Ferruci," said Diana, driven to another point of defence.
"Upon my word, sir, you seem inclined to defend this woman!"
"And Ferruci also?"
On the day before Christmas she received a letter by the early post which seemed to upset her a great deal, and told me she would have to run up to town on business.
"You can't prove that," interrupted Lucian decidedly.
"Oh, I'm not blind!" cried Bella, shrilly laughing.
"But circumstantial evidence----"
She invited me for my singing and playing, you know: and as we all have to make ourselves agreeable, I came to see her.
"I must think.
"I saw two shadows," corrected Lucian hastily, "those of a man and a woman."
Lucian shrugged his shoulders in despair.
"But why should she take all that trouble, and run the risk of being seen, when it is plain that your father expected her?"
"Didn't I tell you so? I was asked by Lydia--alas!
"A friend of mine--Miss Tyler.
"Excuse me, Miss Vrain," he said nervously.
We will tell her nothing, so she can suspect as much as she likes; if we do speak freely she will spread the gossip, and if we don't, she will invent worse facts; so in either case it doesn't matter.
If Mrs. Vrain killed her husband she must have had a strong motive to do so."
With much explanation and an exhibition of Miss Greeb's plan, he gave an account of his discoveries, beginning with his visit to the cellar, and ending with the important conversation with his landlady.
Again, you saw her shadow on the window blind."
What is it you have to tell me?"
She is rather--well, to put it plainly, Mr. Denzil--rather a gossip."
"Let us say Count Ferruci," suggested Denzil.
The whole thing is beyond me."
"Well," said Diana impatiently, "there is the assurance money."
"Oh, I couldn't say that, Mr. Denzil, as I don't know, and I never speak by hearsay.
"Who is this person?" asked Lucian, looking up.
"No," said Diana promptly.
"In plain English, Mr. Denzil, those of Mrs. Vrain and Count Ferruci."
Why should she risk losing these advantages to gain more money?"
"Oh, dear me, no, Di!
"But the veil?"
"I am not sure if the male shadow was Ferruci, no more than I am certain the other was Mrs. Vrain."
Diana pointed to the fragment of the veil lying on the table.
"I do not think it is wise to take her into our confidence.
This quartette of charges was recapitulated by Diana in support of her accusation of her stepmother.
"I have not told her directly," said Diana, with some bluntness, "but as she is no fool, I fancy she suspects.
Why do you ask?"
The situation was a trifle ironical, and must have provoked the laughter of the gods.
"I have discovered that the stiletto with the ribbon is gone from the library."
Will you sketch me the houses as clearly as you can?"
"I may discover even that," replied Lucian, not choosing to tell Miss Greeb that he had already discovered the entrance.
Thank you, Miss Greeb," he continued, slipping the drawing of the plan into his breast coat pocket. "I am much obliged for your information.
With much reflection and nibbling of the pencil, and casting of her eyes up to the ceiling to aid her memory, Miss Greeb in ten minutes produced the required sketch.
"How so, sir?" demanded the curious landlady.
"What is his name, Miss Greeb?" repeated Lucian, quite impervious to the hint.
Since her going and coming a week had elapsed.
"What reputation has she, Miss Greeb?"
She usually wears velvet-spotted veils.
"Then what is to prevent any one coming in under cover of darkness and climbing the fence?
Once she wrote to Lucian, advising him that she had heard several pieces of news likely to be useful in clearing up the mystery; but these she refused to communicate save at a personal interview.
"Yes.
"Mrs. Bensusan prefers gentlemen, who are out of doors all day, to ladies muddling and meddling all day about the house.
No, it wasn't that, although it does suggest an account. Quarterday?
"I don't know.
"A great deal likely to be of service to us.
"Oh, it was a 'he,'" said Miss Greeb, smiling.
"I see that anyone can get into Mrs. Bensusan's yard through the side passage."
Denzil was thus kept in suspense, and unable to rest until he knew precisely the value of Miss Vrain's newly acquired information; therefore it was with a feeling of relief that he received a note from her asking him to call at three o'clock on Sunday at the Royal John Hotel.
"Let me see," said Miss Greeb, discomfited at the result of her failure. "A queer name that had to do with payments.
"I!" replied Miss Vrain in a satisfied tone.
"I can't say," replied Diana, "but I have made one discovery about Mrs. Vrain which implicates her still more in the crime.
For the next day or two Lucian mused over the information he had obtained, and made a fresh drawing of the plan for his own satisfaction; but he took no steps on this new evidence, as he was anxious to submit his discoveries to Miss Vrain before doing so.
Link asked generally, and was answered generally.
"Fat, Mr. Denzil.
I know it as well as I know my ten fingers."
"Wild horses wouldn't drag out of me what I know!" cried Miss Greeb earnestly.
He set it on the mantelpiece, and sat down on the stool.
Curse him, O God!
His anger had ebbed, his fury had dashed itself against a rock.
Pete recalled the letters--the first one that he had put into Philip's hand, the second that he had read to him, the third that Philip had written to his dictation.
Not his merely, but himself.
Bit by bit Pete pieced together the history of the past months.
There are moments which are not to be measured as time.
He took up the mallet and chisels again, intending to work.
Jealousy was far beneath him, but, like all great souls, this simple man had known something of the grandeur of friendship.
The moon was scudding through an angry sky, sometimes appearing, sometimes disappearing.
He would strangle Philip, and then he would kill everybody in his way, merely for the lust of killing.
There was a harsh sound like a groan.
She had given up all for that man--husband, child, father, mother, her friends, her good name, the very light of heaven.
A shaft of bleared moonlight came and went at intervals.
The fire, which had only slid and smouldered, was now struggling into flame, and the child looked up at him with Philip's eyes.
The room was not entirely dark.
Not to have felt anger, he must have been less than a man or more.
There is a kind of mental shock which, like an earthquake under a prison, bursts open every cell and lets the inmates escape.
When hope is entirely gone, anguish will sometimes turn a man into a monster.
Two streams running into them and taking heaven into their bosom.
A company of people were coming in at the gate.
O God! O God!
Pete did not hear.
He remembered the night of Kate's disappearance, when he had gone to Ballure and shouted up at the lighted window, "I've sent her to England," thinking to hide her fault.
"He's here," they answered.
He saw himself holding the Deemster by the throat, and crying aloud to the people, "You think this man is a just judge--he is a whited sepulchre.
Presumptuous man, stand back.
Why had he not killed her?
Curse him!
In his blurred vision confused forms floated about him.
"Where is he?" he roared.
In the heat of his great anger Pete thought of himself also.
He had split it in half.
He always worked at it in silence.
The golden threads that had bound him to life were broken.
Beloved for his mercy!
There was a sudden calm, and Pete dropped back in awe and horror.
With the mallet hanging from his hand he continued to sit in the drifting moonlight, feeling as if everything in the world had been shivered to atoms.
Deemster too!
His two idols had been scattered at one blow--his wife and his friend.
But wifeless, friendless, deceived where he had loved, betrayed where he had worshipped, he was bankrupt, he was broken, and a boundless despair took hold of him.
The clamour in his brain was so loud that he thought some one was making a noise in the house.
But Philip had kept him apart, had banked him off, and yet drained him to the dregs.
"I'm going stupid," he thought, and he blew out the first one.
But the pity of it--the pity of it!
There was a thunderous noise outside, such as the waves make in a cave.
Curse him! Curse him!
You think he is as true as the sun--he is as false as the sea.
"It doesn't matter now," he thought. Nothing mattered.
He has robbed me of wife and child; at the very gates of heaven he has lied to me like hell.
In the uncertain handling of the chisel and the irregular beat of the mallet something gave way.
When he came back with another lighted candle, he perceived that there were two.
A crack like a flash of forked lightning had shot across the face of the stone.
"Hush, my child, hush!" he said, without thinking.
"My hands, my hands," he thought.
The hour of justice has struck, and thus I pay him--and thus--and thus."
God forgive him!
He was sitting with these in his hands when his eyes fell on the other candlestick, the one in which the candle had gone out "I meant to light a candle," he thought, and he got up and took the empty candlestick into the hall.
But the power of words was lost in the drunkenness of his rage.
I have no friend," cried Pete, in a broken roar.
When poverty had come, he had met it without repining; when death had seemed to come, he had borne up against it bravely.
Death the liberator, the deliverer, the pardoner, the peace-maker!
A frantic thought had flashed on him of killing Philip as he sat on the bench which he had disgraced, administering the law which he had outraged.
Nothing sacred remained. The world was a howling wilderness of boundless license.
Worshipped for his justice!
How she must have loved him!
Oh, she had hidden her secret.
Curse him!
A bolt out of heaven seemed to have fallen at his feet, and he trembled as if lightning had blinded him.
A wild vision rose before him of killing Kate, and then going to the Deemster and saying, "Take me; I have murdered her because you have dishonoured her.
Curse him!
Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, heart of his heart.
By a quick revolt of tenderness he recalled Kate as he had just seen her, crouching at the back of the cradle, like a hunted hare with uplifted paws uttering its last pitiful cry.
Dead?
The fatal line was past.
She had thought it was safe.
Curse him!
At that moment Philip had known all--where she was (for it was where he had sent her), why she was gone, and that she was gone for ever.
When at length the candle was lighted, he took it in his hand and went into the parlour like a sleepwalker.
The flower that he would have been proud to wear on his breast Philip had buried in the dark.
That solace was gone.
He remembered her altered face, so pale even in the firelight, so thin, so worn, and his anger began to smoke against Philip.
A moment afterwards he forgot that he had done so, and seeing the second still burning, he blew that out also.
God forgive him, where he was gone!
After a time, Pete remembered that he was sitting in the dark, and he got up to light a candle.
A lie, a mockery, a delusion, a deception!
Pete returned to the stool, and then he was in the light, but the nameless stone, leaning against the wall, was in the shade.
The little forgeries' to keep her poor name sweet, the little inventions to make his story plausible, the little lies of love, the little jests of a breaking heart!
Dead!
There are passions so overmastering that they stifle speech, and man sinks back to the animal.
His towering rage had shrunk to nothing in the face of this awful presence. The Dark Spirit had gone before him and snatched his victim out of his hands.
"Yet I've seen her kneel by the cot and pray, 'God bless my baby, and its father and its mother'-----"
The wild justice of this idea made the blood to bubble in his ears.
Anger came to save his reason.
He had none.
Some were walking with the heavy step of men who carry a corpse. Others were bearing lanterns, and a few held high over their heads the torches which fishermen use when they are hauling the white nets at night.
Oh, mighty and merciful Death!
He was more desolate than he had thought.
Curse him!
His sense of his degradation is the sense that has parted him from me.
He bent his head, and sighed resignedly.
"I love him with my whole heart."
I did my best to hide the outward betrayal of it.
"Without any necessity for it?"
"Well?"
Do you know why?"
CHAPTER XXVIII.
"You know already how any reference to events at Gleninch excites and shakes me.
I saw his hands tremble as he laid them on the coverlet; I saw his face grow paler and paler, and his under lip drop. What dead and buried remembrances had I brought to life in him, in all their olden horror?
There was a moment of silence.
"It is absolutely necessary," I answered.
He resumed his childish ways; he recover, his innocent smile, with the odd little puckers and wrinkles accompanying it at the corners of his eyes.
"I found it for myself in a book."
Tie me down in my chair.
Our parting has cost bitter sorrow, Mr. Dexter, to him and to me."
"But it was not the opinion of the Jury.
Don't take me seriously.
I reminded him quietly, by my manner more than by my words, of the respect which he owed to me.
He obeyed me mechanically.
"Am I far enough away yet?" he asked, with a rueful look.
Instead of answering, he suddenly put his embroidery back in the basket, and moved the machinery of his chair, so as to bring it close by mine.
"Is this one of my dreams?" he asked, faintly.
"There can be only one reason for you're taking it as seriously as you do.
"Ladies are not generally in the habit of troubling their heads about dry questions of law," he said.
The tone in which he spoke was low and threatening; it warned me to be careful.
I began to doubt whether I might not have been unreasonably hard on him.
"You agree with me in believing Eustace to be absolutely innocent of the crime for which he was tried.
He passed his hand restlessly over his forehead, as if he were trying to brush some delusion out of his brain.
He lifted the sea-green coverlet.
And yet for Number One they will go through fire and water, and for Number Two they won't so much as turn their heads to look at him.
"Say nothing more, and do nothing more; I accept your apologies," I said.
"Who told you this?" he asked.
He was the first to speak again.
I refuse to submit to the Scotch Verdict."
"No."
"Has he appointed no time for his return to you?"
Why?
Was he disappointed?
His beautiful blue eyes rested on me with a look of innocent surprise.
He submitted to be set right with ironical resignation.
IN THE DARK.
"Well!
By look and word, I showed him, as firmly as I could, that I resented the liberty he had taken with me.
"Do I still frighten you?
Mrs. Valeria! you are fond of your husband."
For the first time he raised his head from his embroidery--with a sudden appearance of interest.
Please excuse me."
His friends (so far as I know) are resigned to it--"
"I am still as far as ever from understanding what your interest is in investigating that hideous tragedy at Gleninch.
"You are entirely mistaken," I said.
There are some men whom the women all like, and there are other men whom the women never care for.
In plain English, the Jury who tried my husband declined to express their opinion, positively and publicly, that he was innocent.
She opened a capacious pocket in front of the carriage, and took from it a box of matches and a railway reading-lamp.
Oh, if she had only been contented to let matters rest as they were!
"I don't presume to dispute your opinion," I answered.
"If you persist in going back to Dexter, you certainly shall not go to him from my door," she said.
Read straight down to the last line at the bottom, and, in God's name, come back to your senses, child, before it is too late!"
For her sake, for my sake, leave no means untried to attain this righteous, this merciful end.
I fully expected an explosion of anger to follow this bold avowal of my plans for the next day.
The lamp having been lighted, and fixed in its place between the two front windows of the carriage, Mrs. Macallan produced her son's letter. There is no folly like the folly of love.
I have been thinking about you anxiously in the wakeful hours of the night.
On the contrary, help her to forget me as soon as possible.
I sicken as I write of it.
"You have seen Miserrimus Dexter, and I hope you are satisfied.
Tell me how she is, how she looks, what she is doing.
I followed my instructions, and read these words:
"Of use to you in what?" interposed my mother-in-law.
The kindest thing I can do--the one atonement I can make to her--is to drop out of her life."
"Does this learned discourse on Dexter mean that you are going to see him again?" asked Mrs. Macallan.
I honestly thought I did my duty in expressing my disapproval, and in refusing to be present at the marriage.
I confess I have often fancied myself transformed into some other person, and have felt a certain pleasure in seeing myself in my new character.
Let us leave it there, and say no more."
She proved that she had really taken a liking to me: she kept her temper.
Perhaps I ought to have taken measures to find this out.
I dare say it is a risk; but I must run risks.
With those wretched words it ended.
"There!" said my mother-in-law.
"Not mad!" cried Mrs. Macallan, "after those frantic performances in his chair?
A little before noon the arrival of the pony-chaise was announced at the door, and a letter was brought in to me from Mrs. Macallan.
Ever since she had informed me of Eustace's departure to Spain I had been eager for more news of him, for something to sustain my spirits, after so much that had disappointed and depressed me.
And yet, what more I could have done I don't really know.
The neck was a sharpened stick on which the pumpkin head was set, and the eyes, ears, nose and mouth were carved on the skin of the pumpkin, very like a child's jack-o'-lantern.
The black dots grew larger as they advanced and although the light was dim Dorothy thought they looked like big kettles turned upside down. Just beyond this place a jumble of huge, jagged rocks lay scattered, rising to the mountains behind them.
"Who are you?"
"Who carves the faces on them?" inquired the boy.
"How big a measure?"
"My cotton stuffing had sagged a good deal with the day's walking and they've loosened it up until I feel as plump as a sausage.
But I guess we'll have to go, if we want that gill of water from the dark well."
So here's the proposition: you let us alone and we'll let you alone."
That slapping hurts like sixty; some of my folks are crying about it.
Toto kept an eye open, however, and uttered low, threatening growls whenever the racket made by the creatures outside became too boisterous; and the Scarecrow and the Patchwork Girl sat leaning against the wall and talked in whispers all night long.
Presently another imp seized Scraps and began to throw her about, in the same way.
"And where is that?" asked Ojo.
Twilight had fallen by the time they came to the trees, beneath which were the black, circular objects they had marked from a distance. Dozens of them were scattered around and Dorothy bent near to one, which was about as tall as she was, to examine it more closely.
Perhaps she would not have accomplished this victory so easily had not Toto helped her, barking and snapping at the bare legs of the imps until they were glad to flee from his attack.
"But--goodness me!--the Quadling Country is full of dangers," declared Jack.
There was a door, and several windows, and through the top was stuck a stovepipe that led from a small stove inside.
These remarks were greeted with shouts of laughter by the impish creatures and one seized the Scarecrow's arm and was astonished to find the straw man whirl around so easily.
"Tell you what we'll do," said Dorothy.
"Well, I'll ask Dorothy."
"I've never been there myself, but--"
"Six of them sat on me," said Ojo, "but as they are so little they didn't hurt me much."
"I know!" cried Scraps.
Jack had made it himself and was very proud of it.
The Pumpkinhead considered the matter gravely.
Ojo kept close to the Scarecrow and the Scarecrow kept close to Dorothy; but the little girl turned to the queer creatures and asked:
As for Ojo, some of the creatures had attempted to toss him, also, but finding his body too heavy they threw him to the ground and a row of the imps sat on him and held him from assisting Dorothy in her battle.
"To be sure.
But if the Tottenhots slept there all day the children thought they could sleep there at night, so Ojo lowered himself down and found it was not very deep.
"Well, as for that, my head is stuffed with pumpkin-seeds," declared Jack.
"That's a bargain!" cried the Tottenhot eagerly, and he gave a queer whistle that brought his people popping out of their houses on all sides.
"I have," said the Scarecrow.
"There is no accounting for tastes," remarked the Pumpkinhead, with a sigh.
"No, no; that's wrong," interrupted the Scarecrow.
"Glad to meet you, Tottenhots," said the Scarecrow solemnly.
By this time Dorothy had discovered they were people, tiny and curiously formed, but still people.
"In the Quadling Country, which lies south of here," replied the Scarecrow.
The little girl wore a plain gingham dress and a checked sunbonnet, as she knew they were best fitted for travel.
This wooden framework was covered by a red shirt--with white spots in it--blue trousers, a yellow vest, a jacket of green-and-gold and stout leather shoes.
"They have given my straw a good shaking up and taken all the lumps out of it.
"So do I," added Scraps.
"I use them for brains, and when they are fresh I am intellectual.
"No; a measure."
"It's against the Law."
The door was reached by a flight of three steps and there was a good floor on which was arranged some furniture that was quite comfortable.
The house of this interesting creation stood in the center of a vast pumpkin-field, where the vines grew in profusion and bore pumpkins of extraordinary size as well as those which were smaller.
"I do that myself.
Some of the pumpkins now ripening on the vines were almost as large as Jack's house, and he told Dorothy he intended to add another pumpkin to his mansion.
During the conversation the Scarecrow explained their quest for a dark well, and asked Jack's advice where to find it.
The little brown folks were much surprised at being attacked by the girl and the dog, and one or two who had been slapped hardest began to cry.
The adventurers now found themselves alone, and Dorothy asked anxiously:
Then suddenly they gave a shout, all together, and disappeared in a flash into their various houses, the tops of which closed with a series of pops that sounded like a bunch of firecrackers being exploded.
Jack gazed around the landscape, for he was standing in the doorway of his house.
"Can't you take a joke?" he asked, reproachfully; "haven't you any fun in you at all?"
"I adore stuffing," said the Patchwork Girl.
Toward evening of the second day they reached a sandy plain where walking was difficult; but some distance before them they saw a group of palm trees, with many curious black dots under them; so they trudged bravely on to reach that place by dark and spend the night under the shelter of the trees.
So they said good-bye to the Pumpkinhead and resumed their travels, heading now directly toward the South Country, where mountains and rocks and caverns and forests of great trees abounded.
It was a two days journey from Jack Pumkinhead's house to the edge of the Quadling Country, for neither Dorothy nor Ojo could walk very fast and they often stopped by the wayside to rest.
As she did so the top flew open and out popped a dusky creature, rising its length into the air and then plumping down upon the ground just beside the little girl.
"I fear that wouldn't do," replied the Scarecrow.
"Oh; do you change your head?" asked Ojo.
I forgive you."
There seemed no furniture in the round den, but soft cushions were strewn about the floor and these they found made very comfortable beds. They did not close the hole in the roof but left it open to admit air. It also admitted the shouts and ceaseless laughter of the impish Tottenhots as they played outside, but Dorothy and Ojo, being weary from their journey, were soon fast asleep.
The body of this remarkable person was made of wood, branches of trees of various sizes having been used for the purpose.
Toto, of course, slept beside his little mistress.
So next morning they asked Dorothy, and she said:
"Is anybody hurt?"
May we come out again?
Chapter Nineteen
"You are quite handsome," she said; "but not as really beautiful as the Scarecrow."
"Well, you ended it, so we won't argue the matter.
"The well must be naturally dark, and the water must never have seen the light of day, for otherwise the magic charm might not work at all."
Jack turned, at this, to examine the Scarecrow critically, and his old friend slyly winked one painted eye at him.
The Patchwork Girl was greatly interested in Jack and examined him admiringly.
"An old crow once told me I was very fascinating, but of course the bird might have been mistaken.
"How much of the water do you need?" asked Jack.
"Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch--"
"I feel much the same way," said Scraps.
"But you mustn't expect us to play with you all night, for we've traveled all day and some of us are tired."
But the play was a little rough and I'd had quite enough of it when you interfered."
Ojo also had brought along his basket, to which Ozma had added a bottle of "Square Meal Tablets" and some fruit.
Scraps began to mutter something about "hoppity, poppity, jumpity, dump!" but no one paid any attention to her.
"Come on in."
"That is, if you behave yourselves after this."
It is certain that Jack Pumpkinhead might have had a much finer house to live in had he wanted it, for Ozma loved the stupid fellow, who had been her earliest companion; but Jack preferred his pumpkin house, as it matched himself very well, and in this he was not so stupid, after all.
Pumpkins are not permanent, more's the pity, and in time they spoil.
Only two days before, said Mr. Chilstone--that was, on the day previous to his death--Mr.
He got no more light on them then, and he was still exercising his brains on them when he went to the inquest next morning--to find the Coroner's court packed to the doors with an assemblage of townsfolk just as curious as he was.
For it was soon evident, from certain remarks made by the Coroner, that the theory which Archdale had put forward at the club in Bryce's hearing the previous day had gained favour with the authorities, and that the visit of the jurymen to the scene of the disaster had been intended by the Coroner to predispose them in behalf of it.
But I don't remember this man at all--in fact, I'd go as far as to say that I'm positive I've never--knowingly--set eyes on him in my life."
If you dream of being kissed by or being very intimate with a woman friend, it means a disagreement.
Write names on slips of paper and pull them out.
To dream of carrying a child is unlucky.
WEDDINGS AND FUNERALS.
EGGS.
To dream of white or red is unlucky.
COLORS.
To dream of a baby is a sign of death.
To dream of
TEETH.
If you dream of a negro, you will surely quarrel.
To dream of fire means hasty news.
To dream of a funeral means a wedding.
To dream of cherries is evil.
To dream of a cat means an enemy.
DEAD PERSONS.
If a back tooth, a distant relative.
To dream of black is lucky.
Dream on a piece of wedding cake.
Dreaming of running water means approaching death to the dreamer or some near relative.
MONEY AND METALS.
HUMAN BEINGS.
FIRE AND SMOKE.
METEOROLOGICAL PHENOMENA.
To dream of raw meat is a sign of ill luck.
WATER.
To dream of onions is good.
To dream of walking in a garden is a sign of a graveyard.
To dream of silver money is a sign of sickness.
It is the peculiarity of public offices that they are planned with the idea of supplying the margin of space above all requirements and that on their completion they are found wholly inadequate to house the various departments which mysteriously come into progress coincident with the building operations.
It was the outrageous practice of Mr. Meredith to insist upon his associates calling him by his initials, a practice which had earnt disapproval in the highest quarters.
"There is nothing thrilling about it," growled the older man, rising, "but I remember the Macedonian shooting case in South London and I don't want a repetition of that sort of thing.
His language was, as I say, under great provocation, violent and unusual.
"Very little," said T. X. "I've had Mansus on the job."
He nodded curtly to Mansus.
"Let me think," said T. X., looking up at the ceiling.
"Then he'll be hung," said the Chief, rising.
At this outrageous insult Mr. Mansus was silent; what he might have said, or what further provocation he might have received may be never known, for at that moment, the Chief himself walked in.
T. X. nodded to Mansus and with something of gratitude in his eyes the inspector took his leave.
Sir George smiled grimly.
"Funny business?" interrupted T. X., "not a bit.
He had a trick of using words which never were on land or sea, and illustrating his instruction or his admonition with the quaintest phraseology.
The house was an old one facing the Board of Trade and the inscription on the ancient door told passers-by that this was the "Public Prosecutor, Special Branch."
CHAPTER II
But if that is the extent of your information I can supplement it.
He is very rich, has no relations, and has a passion for power."
The Chief Commissioner was interested.
Sir George Haley grunted.
"By all means," said T. X., "let them.
"Any more?" he asked.
"I doubt it," said the other, "people with lots of money seldom get hung.
People said of him--and like most public gossip, this was probably untrue--that he was the head of the "illegal" department of Scotland Yard.
Personally, I don't care where they go.
"And you've found nothing, eh?" growled the Chief.
"Curious Mike!"
"Listen," said T. X., grasping an ivory paperknife savagely in his hand and tapping his blotting-pad to emphasize his words, "you're a pie!"
The duties of T. X. were multifarious.
The window is unreachable, there are no communicating doors, and altogether the room is planned to stand a siege."
He has announced his intention of spending three months of the year in England and nine months abroad.
You only get hung for wanting money."
"T.
"I'm a policeman," said the other patiently.
Assistant Commissioner of Police T. X. Meredith did not occupy offices in New Scotland Yard.
T. X. nodded.
If people want to have blood feuds, let them take them outside the metropolitan area."
X.," as he was known by the police forces of the world, had a big suite of offices in Whitehall.
"Nothing is to be found!" he repeated wrathfully.
"Is there any--er--?" began the Chief.
"A safe," he repeated.
In his early days he had been something of a poet, and had written a slight volume of "Woodland Lyrics," the mention of which at this later stage was sufficient to make him feel violently unhappy.
"How do you know all this?" asked the Chief Commissioner.
House and man are quite normal save for these eccentricities.
Sir George dropped heavily into the arm-chair, and stretched out his long thin legs.
Sir George raised his eyebrows.
"Well, T. X.," he said, "what have you discovered about our friend Kara?"
"Count Peter Kirilovich!
He's a brave fellow."
"But if I were right, I should be rendering a service to my Fatherland for which I am ready to die."
"He has been degraded, you know.
Pierre stopped some thirty paces from Kutuzov, talking to Boris.
Those are his quarters," and he pointed to the third house in the village of Gorki.
"And should your Serene Highness require a man who will not spare his skin, please think of me....
We are just going to the left flank.
Kutuzov noticed Pierre's figure and the group gathered round him.
"Yes, yes.
"Well, you can do that later, but the chief thing is the left flank."
"He's a creature that wriggles in anywhere!" was the answer.
"This is what you must do," said Boris.
"So you want to smell gunpowder?" he said to Pierre.
"Ah... a wonderful, a matchless people!" said Kutuzov; and he closed his eyes and swayed his head.
"Yes, very much," replied Pierre.
"Call him to me," said Kutuzov.
"Prince Andrew's?
My quarters are at your service."
It was Dolokhov.
"I will do the honors of the camp to you.
He wore a long coat and like Kutuzov had a whip slung across his shoulder.
"Yes, exactly; the left flank is now extremely strong."
"I should like to start from the Moskva River and ride round the whole position."
Can you point it out to me?"
'I am happy when I can do good, but to remedy injustice is the greatest happiness,'" Rostov fancied the sovereign saying.
"If only I were to hand the letter direct to him and tell him all... could they really arrest me for my civilian clothes?
Tomorrow.
"I cannot do it, General.
"No, I won't miss my opportunity now, as I did after Austerlitz," he thought, expecting every moment to meet the monarch, and conscious of the blood that rushed to his heart at the thought.
"To hand in a letter, a petition, to His Majesty," said Nicholas, with a tremor in his voice.
He would understand on whose side justice lies.
Rostov, in dismay, began justifying himself, but seeing the kindly, jocular face of the general, he took him aside and in an excited voice told him the whole affair, asking him to intercede for Denisov, whom the general knew.
"I come from Major Denisov," answered Rostov.
And passing people who looked after him with curiosity, he entered the porch of the Emperor's house.
"Later... later!
"I will fall at his feet and beseech him.
Rostov had come to Tilsit the day least suitable for a petition on Denisov's behalf.
It was a cavalry general who had obtained the Emperor's special favor during this campaign, and who had formerly commanded the division in which Rostov was serving.
A petition?"
"Tell him to come later.
"What are you doing here, sir, in civilian dress?" asked a deep voice.
"Another petitioner," answered the man with the braces.
Give me the letter."
"Whom have you come from?
Who can be more just, more magnanimous than he?
Who are you?"
He understands everything, knows everything.
Having heard Rostov to the end, the general shook his head gravely.
And the feeling of enthusiasm and love for his sovereign rose again in Rostov's soul in all its old force.
"What is it?
This way, to the officer on duty" (he was shown the door leading downstairs), "only it won't be accepted."
He will lift me up, will listen, and will even thank me.
This man was speaking to someone in the adjoining room.
"A good figure and in her first bloom," he was saying, but on seeing Rostov, he stopped short and frowned.
"Are you an officer?"
He spoke a few words to some of the generals, and, recognizing the former commander of Rostov's division, smiled and beckoned to him.
Rostov turned and was about to go, but the man in the braces stopped him.
The Emperors were to be present at that banquet.
All the suite drew back and Rostov saw the general talking for some time to the Emperor.
On that day, June 27, the preliminaries of peace were signed.
A broad staircase led straight up from the entry, and to the right he saw a closed door.
"What is it?" asked the person in the other room.
"After all, people do go in....
And go along with you... go," and he continued to put on the uniform the valet handed him.
"What audacity!
He could not himself go to the general in attendance as he was in mufti and had come to Tilsit without permission to do so, and Boris, even had he wished to, could not have done so on the following day.
Stopping beside his horse, with his hand on the saddle, the Emperor turned to the cavalry general and said in a loud voice, evidently wishing to be heard by all:
"Lieutenant Count Rostov."
"I may see him at any moment," thought Rostov.
"A petition?
"Whom do you want?" someone inquired.
Surely not!
On hearing this indifferent voice, Rostov grew frightened at what he was doing; the thought of meeting the Emperor at any moment was so fascinating and consequently so alarming that he was ready to run away, but the official who had questioned him opened the door, and Rostov entered.
The Emperor!...
Below, under the staircase, was a door leading to the lower floor.
Now he hoped his difficulties were over, but at the next turning he was met by one which he did not know how to overcome.
It is true that I love a charming princess, but if the Fairy should set me free my gratitude would oblige me to love her only."
I see no more My Love, who yet my sadness cheers.
You may imagine how hard-hearted her lovers thought her; and the Queen, who wished to see her married, did not know how to persuade her to think of it seriously.
Let me explain everything.
"And what do you want with her, pretty one?" said the little monster, "for I am a friend of hers, and, for the matter of that, I am quite as clever as she is."
When she revived she found to her great surprise that she was lying in her own bed at home, and, what was more, that she had on the loveliest lace night cap that she had ever seen in her life.
"At last may I upon this shore Lighten my sorrow with soft tears. Alas! alas!
But when it was time to go on again the basket had disappeared and, though she looked everywhere, not a trace of it could she find. The more she hunted for it, the more frightened she got, and at last she began to cry.
"You!" cried Bellissima, starting back.
The King of the Gold Mines hardly knew what answer to make to this proposal.
I am the Fairy of the Desert; without the Yellow Dwarf and his orange tree my great lions would soon have eaten you up, I can tell you, and in Fairyland we do not suffer ourselves to be insulted like this.
Now, if you will promise that she shall marry me, not one of the lions, tigers, or bears shall touch you."
I should not care so much if only my dear daughter were married."
The Fairy of the Desert had also seen Bellissima, and she tried to read in the King's eyes the effect that this unexpected sight had had upon him.
They said good-by to the Princess so sadly that she could not help being sorry for them.
Could anything be more terrible?"
"What's the matter with you, my pretty one?" said he.
"At least," said he, "you have the satisfaction of dying unmarried.
If you don't, may I burn my crutch!"
A lovely Princess like you must surely prefer to die rather than be the wife of a poor little dwarf like myself."
With these thistles and nettles she can feed a donkey which she can ride whenever she likes; under this humble roof no weather can hurt her; she will drink the water of this brook and eat frogs--which grow very fat about here; and then she will have me always with her, handsome, agreeable, and gay as you see me now.
Bellissima knew quite well that something was being hidden from her--and that neither of these was the real reason of the Queen's uneasiness.
See if she has not upon her finger a ring made of one of my hairs.
She was laid upon a couch covered with cloth of gold, embroidered with pearls as big as nuts."
Her mother, who, since the death of the King, her father, had nothing in the world she cared for so much as this little Princess, was so terribly afraid of losing her that she quite spoiled her, and never tried to correct any of her faults.
So, with great care, she made some of the proper cake to pacify the lions, and one night went up to her room very early, pretending that she was going to bed; but instead of that, she wrapped herself in a long white veil, and went down a secret staircase, and set off all by herself to find the Witch.
And, as he spoke, the Queen saw the lions, which were running down a hill toward them.
"Ah!" interrupted the King of the Gold Mines, "if Bellissima forgets me, and consents to marry him, I shall break my heart."
What makes you despise all these nice kings?
and, to make matters worse, at that moment she heard the roaring of the great lions, who had found out that she was near and were coming to look for her.
At first she thought that all her adventures, the terrible lions, and her promise to the Yellow Dwarf that he should marry Bellissima, must have been a dream, but there was the new cap with its beautiful ribbon and lace to remind her that it was all true, which made her so unhappy that she could neither eat, drink, nor sleep for thinking of it.
The Queen was so overjoyed that she had hardly been able to sleep at all, and she got up before it was light to give the necessary orders and to choose the jewels that the Princess was to wear.
I am too much interested in the matter for her to promise anything without my consent--you must be mistaken."
She was dressed almost always in the prettiest frocks, as a fairy, or as a queen going out to hunt, and the ladies of the Court followed her dressed as forest fairies.
"Oh! well," he replied, "out of charity I will take her; but be sure and don't forget that she is mine."
But they were all taken in by the image of the King, for, clever as they were, the Mermaid was still cleverer, and all they could do was to help the Fairy of the Desert to make a wonderful monument over what they thought was the grave of the King of the Gold Mines.
Save me this minute, or I shall die of terror."
Everything was ready for Bellissima's wedding.
"Let me have the satisfaction of dying for you, my Princess," said he.
Do you want to kill four-and-twenty girls who have never displeased you in any way?"
"What! you hesitate, madam," cried the Dwarf.
"Rash youth!" he cried, rushing between the Fairy of the Desert and the King.
The consequence was that this little person, who was as pretty as possible, and was one day to wear a crown, grew up so proud and so much in love with her own beauty that she despised everyone else in the world.
But who can my rival be, whose fatal beauty is greater than mine?"
All this admiration vastly pleased the Queen.
"What shall I do?" she cried.
So for all these reasons I wished to talk to the Fairy."
Without seeming to have noticed anything, he said, in a confidential way:
Princess," he cried, "do not be angry with me.
"My mother wishes me to marry you!
Why do you waste your pity on these princes, who love you so much that all their trouble would be well repaid by a single smile from you?"
At last they reached a vast meadow, gay with all sorts of flowers; a deep river surrounded it, and many little brooks murmured softly under the shady trees, where it was always cool and fresh.
"At least," continued she, "let us die together."
"Time will show, madam," replied the King; "but if you wish to convince me that you have some regard for me, do not, I beg of you, refuse to aid Bellissima."
He could not find words to express his gratitude, but he begged her to believe that he fully appreciated the importance of her gift, and would never forget her help and kindness.
Do not refuse the aid of your most faithful lover." So saying, he threw himself at her feet and held her by her robe.
The Yellow Dwarf, deeply enraged at these words, set spurs to his cat, which yelled horribly, and leaped hither and thither--terrifying everybody except the brave King, who pursued the Dwarf closely, till he, drawing a great knife with which he was armed, challenged the King to meet him in single combat, and rushed down into the courtyard of the palace with a terrible clatter.
The Queen was so confused that at first she did not notice another little door in the orange tree, but presently it opened and she found herself in a field of thistles and nettles.
You see it is so much more flattering to my vanity to be loved by a fairy than by a simple princess.
So, making him mount her chariot, to which she had harnessed swans instead of the bats which generally drew it, away she flew with him.
Farewell; now I will wait by that rock, and if you need my help in carrying off your beloved Princess I will not fail you, for the Queen, her mother, is my best friend, and it was for her sake that I went to rescue you."
When the Princess saw all these things, and remembered what had happened, she, too, fell into the deepest sadness, which surprised and alarmed the whole Court, and the Queen more than anyone else.
She thought that if she carried him off to some frightful cavern and chained him to a rock, then the fear of death would make him forget Bellissima and become her slave.
The Fairy of the Desert had by her enchantments raised such a terrible storm that the boldest pilot would not venture out in it, so she was not afraid of her prisoner's being able to escape; and he found it some relief to think sadly over his terrible situation without being interrupted by his cruel captor.
The King did not know what to do or to say.
Here she was received by the prettiest girls it was possible to find, who had been carried there by the Yellow Dwarf, who hastened to wait upon her and showed her every possible attention.
"I trust you absolutely," cried the King, "and I will do whatever you tell me; but if you have seen my Princess I beg of you to tell me how she is and what is happening to her.
When she awoke she was dismayed to find her basket empty.
While he was still writing he heard a voice which attracted his attention in spite of himself.
In spite of the blow which the Fairy of the Desert gave her, the Yellow Dwarf compelled her to mount behind him upon his terrible Spanish cat; but she soon fainted away with pain and terror, and did not recover till they were within the walls of his frightful Castle of Steel.
"Surely," replied the Prince; "how could I deceive you?
"Ah!
"Oh! noble sir," said the Queen in great distress, "do not refuse her. She is the most charming Princess in the world."
She would have told me if she had.
"Strike! strike! and do not spare, or your Princess is lost for ever!"
Must I also be made to know that the King of the Gold Mines ceased to love me as soon as he lost sight of me?
"Alas! beautiful Fairy, the fairy who brought me here first took away my sight, but by her voice I recognized her as the Fairy of the Desert, though what she should have carried me off for I cannot tell you."
"I don't want you to promise me in a hurry."
"But you would be very happy with any of these Princes," said the Queen, "and I shall be very angry if you fall in love with anyone who is not worthy of you."
"Oh! no. I'm sure she has not.
"Let me die a thousand times rather," cried the unhappy King.
Frightful as this encounter was the King's courage was unshaken, and by the aid of his wonderful sword he cut them in pieces one after the other.
I am not faithless or to blame for what has happened.
Once upon a time there lived a queen who had been the mother of a great many children, and of them all only one daughter was left.
"What!" she cried; "was I not unhappy enough in this lonely castle to which that frightful Yellow Dwarf brought me?
"I can tell you all you want to know better than she could.
The Queen looked at him and was almost as much afraid of his ugly little face as she had been of the lions before, so that she could not speak a word.
And to make her more vain than ever the Queen caused her portrait to be taken by the cleverest painters and sent it to several neighboring kings with whom she was very friendly.
The Fairy of the Desert was delighted to hear them sing of her triumphs; she led the King into the most splendid room that can be imagined, and left him alone for a little while, just that he might not feel that he was a prisoner; but he felt sure that she had not really gone quite away, but was watching him from some hiding-place.
"Now," said she, "I have time to tell you about the Princess.
Forgive me if the inquiry is impertinent.
Our excellent Starkweather has written to her--to what purpose I have not been informed.
Why, my charming friend, profane your lips by talking of such things?
You insist on my introducing you to Dexter, and I refuse to trust you alone with that crack-brained personage.
Yes, we will have Madame Mirliflore.
My powers of persuasion were completely thrown away on her.
I don't deny that he is clever in some respects--brilliantly clever, I admit.
Shall we say Lady Clarinda?
Benjamin kept the conversation going in the interval.
"A little dinner," the Major reiterated, "at my house.
I only know that on receipt of his letter she has decided on paying you a visit.
"I have reason to hope that Miserrimus Dexter can help me to clear my husband's character of the stain which the Scotch Verdict has left on it.
"Major Fitz-David brings you some news, my dear," he said.
I have studied old lace.
He had evidently made up his mind; and further opposition on my part would be of no service to me.
He turned to me.
Let us be cheerful.
"Punctually at eight, Mr. Benjamin," reiterated the Major.
I have known him for more years than I like to reckon up.
"I wish to ask if you know Miserrimus Dexter."
"Doesn't daunt you?
After a moment's consideration a new idea seemed to strike him.
"I won't take the responsibility, Mr. Benjamin, of sending her alone to Miserrimus Dexter."
He led me to the table, and filled my plate and my glass with the air of a man who considered himself to be engaged in one of the most important occupations of his life.
"The book," I answered, "is the Trial of my husband for the murder of his first wife."
Tiger and monkey as he may be, I am ready to run the risk of being introduced to him.
Forgive my weaknesses.
My good old friend did not relish meeting a man at dinner who was described as "half tiger, half monkey;" and the privilege of sitting next to Lady Clarinda rather daunted than delighted him.
"It is later than I thought," he said.
"Mr.
I promise to repent and amend one of these days."
The old soldier was not easily taken by surprise.
But, for all that, he is mad, if ever a man were mad yet.
"A little dinner?" I repeated, not in the least understanding him.
I will shut myself up this evening and approach the question of dinner with my cook.
There stood my husband's mother, smiling satirically, with Benjamin's shy little maid-servant waiting to announce her.
She is pretty; she will assist in obscuring the deformity of Dexter.
"Shall I go with her, sir?"
"On the subject of my husband's Trial."
I consented to the proposed compromise--but not very willingly.
I study everything that can make me useful or agreeable to your enchanting sex.
Who shall we have to meet you besides?" pursued the Major, brightening with hospitable intentions. "We want a perfect galaxy of beauty around the table, as a species of compensation when we have got Miserrimus Dexter as one the guests. Madame Mirliflore is still in London.
Who else?
"What is there so very surprising in my request?"
You a little remind me of her, my dear lady--you resemble her in complexion: the same creamy paleness.
Why frighten away the Loves and the Graces that lie hid in your smile.
"The man is mad!" cried the Major.
"I have an appointment with a friend--a female friend; a most attractive person.
He looked the brightest and the youngest of living elderly gentlemen, with his smart blue frock-coat, his winning smile, his ruby ring, and his ready compliment.
"I want to consult him?"
Let us treat this difficulty about Dexter from a social point of view.
"I have heard of it--and it doesn't daunt me."
"I certainly said so," I rejoined.
And I ask you again--rashly and obstinately as I fear you will think--to give me the introduction.
And I don't say that he has ever committed any acts of violence, or ever willingly injured anybody.
Another charming person, Mr. Benjamin!
My impression is that the Major turned pale under his paint.
As I was saying, I have an appointment with my friend; she does me the honor to ask my opinion on some very remarkable specimens of old lace.
However, there was no help for it but to submit.
Those words offered me the opportunity for which I was waiting.
"Please to take another glass of wine."
Have you heard of his horrible deformity?"
"Don't mention that horrid book!" he exclaimed.
Major Fitz-David, in his polite way, could be as obstinate as I was.
"What do you wish to ask me?"
"Punctually at eight, sir," said poor old Benjamin, obediently recording his formidable engagement.
With that answer the incorrigible Major kissed the tips of his fingers to us and walked out.
To tell the truth, I have been up all night, reading."
I am one of the other people.
It will put you to no inconvenience.
"You can be of the greatest use to me," I said, "if you will allow me to presume, Major, on your past kindness.
The only alternative under the circumstances is to invite him to meet you, and to let you form your own opinion of him--under the protection of my roof.
"Has Mrs. Macallan heard anything of my husband?" I asked.
"My charming friend," he said, "be more charming than ever--consent to a compromise.
I determined not to lose it.
"What is the happy book which has interested you so deeply?" he asked.
I won't trouble you to escort me; a letter to Mr. Dexter will do."
I adore creamy paleness.
Major Fitz-David lifted his well-painted eyebrows in polite surprise.
"Your mother-in-law, Mrs. Macallan, is coming here to see you to-day."
"She appears to insist on it," said the Major.
Major Fitz-David set down his wine-glass on its way to his lips, and looked at me with an appearance of breathless interest.
Take the will for the deed, my sweet friend.
Lad, knowing that he was going home, dashed down the road, choosing his own direction when the lonely highway branched.
"Inn" wrote Betty, quickly guessing the second syllable.
Climbing into the saddle, she gave one regretful look at the party she was leaving behind her, and resolutely turned his head toward home.
"But I like this little hand.
"Oh, Lad, hurry!" she urged.
"Nobody knows how much she has helped Malcolm and me by giving us these, and expecting us to live up to them." He touched a little badge on the lapel of his coat, as he spoke.
It is very important that the letter should go on to-night's mail train, and if one of you will drop it in the box as you go by, I'll be so much obliged."
We're too late for the charades, but maybe we'll get back to the mill in time for the cake-walk."
"I told you so!" she cried, presently, as a large capital L appeared under Malcolm's initials.
"Eugenia's last!
It is a hand that can be trusted."
"Yes, with a heart around them," he repeated.
"It consists of two words.
When I discovered what heathen they were, I turned missionary and taught them an hour every Sunday afternoon.
Mrs. Sherman said it must go, if possible, on this train."
"You're elegant, I must say!" she exclaimed, scornfully.
"At any rate, a silver arrow.
Cousin Hetty says I go about with my head in the clouds half the time.
I'm so afraid we won't get there in time."
"It's a close shave, my dear," said Miss Mattie, reaching out to take the letter eagerly thrust through the bars.
Now he stood still, not caring which way she chose so long as he had to travel away from his stall and feed-bin.
Piloted by Lloyd, they reached the place just as Mrs. Sherman drove in from the opposite side of the woods.
"How does your Aunt Allison know?" she asked, without looking up.
It did not take long for him to learn the whole story of her lonely ride, and the fright she had had, for his questions were fired with such directness of aim that truthful Betty could not dodge them.
They will do anything for me now, and are such clever little mimics that I know they can act the charades charmingly.
It was twilight in the woods, and it would be dark before she could get back to the picnic-grounds.
He knew the way better than his little rider.
The train came thundering down the track, and he jumped across in front of the locomotive.
Betty repeated it softly.
The ponies were hitched below in the ravine.
Not having had the experience of the gypsy tent, Betty awaited her turn with more interest than the others, and thrust her little brown hand through the opening, half afraid.
Miss Allison held Betty's hand a moment, not certain to whom it belonged, although she might have guessed, considering how brown and hardened by work it was.
It would have been quite dark by the time she reached the cross-roads again, if it had not been that the moon was beginning to rise, and cast a faint whiteness over the dusky fields.
"But it is Eugenia's fault every bit as much as it is mine," she thought, looking across the semicircle, where Eugenia sat serenely unconscious of forgotten promises.
Miss Allison arranged them.
Besides, they will give us a cake-walk afterward, and sing for us like nightingales."
How manly he looked in the moonlight, his handsome face aglow with the thought of his noble purposes!
They proceeded to go through the traveller's pockets, stealing watch, purse, carpet-bag, and umbrella.
It was by its weird light that the charades were played, when the feast had been cleared away.
Little Jim Gibbs, his white teeth and gleaming eyeballs making his face seem as black as night by contrast, strode out with a high silk hat, a baggy umbrella, and an old carpet-bag.
"This word is the name of a favourite book," she announced.
"I know whose initials you are going to cut with yours," she said.
Oh, maybe you think I haven't seen her wear it, and blush when I teased her about it."
The vacant windows of the old mill seemed staring in surprise at the gay party gathering on the hill above it, although it should have been accustomed to all kinds of picnics by this time, considering the number of generations it had watched them come and go.
They had forgotten their promise.
He sat down beside her.
Lad looked around at her and stopped still in the road.
What Miss Allison had said pleased her more than the fortune which followed, although it foretold a long life full of as many interesting happenings as if she had Aladdin's wonderful lamp to use as she chose.
"I have been wondering why you and your brother both wear them."
Eugenia switched her skirts disdainfully through the hall, and mounted in dignified disgust.
All these thoughts went on, swaying her first to one decision and then another.
And assuredly nothing would happen except what he should choose.
"The deuce!"
He halted in front of the inn, to allow the horse a breathing spell, and to have him given some oats.
"Then--"
"Monsieur," said the woman, "my boy tells me that you wish to hire a cabriolet."
He breathed again.
"There's the whiffle-tree broken, sir," said the postilion; "I don't know how to harness my horse now; this road is very bad at night; if you wish to return and sleep at Tinques, we could be in Arras early to-morrow morning."
"No."
He paid what was asked, left the tilbury with the wheelwright to be repaired, intending to reclaim it on his return, had the white horse put to the cart, climbed into it, and resumed the road which he had been travelling since morning.
He shuddered.
"What is that you say, my friend?"
Hey! Master Bourgaillard!"
"Monsieur," said the latter, "it was I who got the cart for you."
The relays are badly served, the horses are in the fields.
What man is there who has not entered, at least once in his life, into that obscure cavern of the unknown?
"Yes, sir."
No one could have told what was taking place within him; every one will understand it.
"Well, in two hours, then."
The wheel really had suffered serious damage.
"You will take the road on the left, leading to Carency; you will cross the river; when you reach Camblin, you will turn to the right; that is the road to Mont-Saint-Eloy which leads to Arras."
He wanted to make it good. The little horse was courageous, and pulled for two; but it was the month of February, there had been rain; the roads were bad.
Both the posts pass at night; the one going as well as the one coming."
The shock administered by the mail-wagon had split two spokes and strained the hub, so that the nut no longer held firm.
Any colloquy in the street inevitably attracts a crowd.
He whipped up his horse and set off at full speed.
"Really?"
And he hastened to add:--
He did not get out of the tilbury.
Why should he feel joy at turning back? After all, he was taking this trip of his own free will.
He could not have told.
No one was forcing him to it.
"Yes, my good woman; I am in search of a cabriolet which I can hire."
"Nearly seven good leagues."
Just see here!"
But you will not find one for sale nor to let, for five hundred francs, or for a thousand."
The man thus hastening on was the one whom we have just seen struggling in convulsions which are certainly deserving of pity.
Something urged him forward; something drew him on.
The stableman who brought the oats suddenly bent down and examined the left wheel.
But they travelled at a very rapid rate.
He said himself that he had done all he could, and that now he had nothing to do but retrace his steps quietly.
"What!
"And Monsieur wishes to reach there to-day?"
However, he had resolved on nothing, decided nothing, formed no plan, done nothing.
"Are you going to Arras?" added the road-mender.
The horse belonged, as Scaufflaire had said, to that small race of the Boulonnais, which has too much head, too much belly, and not enough neck and shoulders, but which has a broad chest, a large crupper, thin, fine legs, and solid hoofs--a homely, but a robust and healthy race.
It will take you a day to mend this wheel?"
"You treat the cabriolets that people let you so well!
It was broad daylight when he arrived at Hesdin.
It was not the act of his own conscience, but the act of Providence.
"What time is it?"
In proportion as the cabriolet advanced, he felt something within him draw back.
There are always people who ask nothing better than to become spectators.
There is, in truth," added the wheelwright, "an old calash under the shed yonder, which belongs to a bourgeois of the town, who gave it to me to take care of, and who only uses it on the thirty-sixth of the month--never, that is to say.
"Have you come from a great distance?" went on the man.
In one of the jolts, the whiffle-tree broke.
"Does not Monsieur wish to breakfast?"
"Does it make any difference whether Monsieur arrives at four o'clock to-morrow morning?"
But the bourgeois must not see it pass--and then, it is a calash; it would require two horses."
He clung to this thought.
At the moment when the cart moved off, he admitted that he had felt, a moment previously, a certain joy in the thought that he should not go whither he was now proceeding.
He did not see them; but without his being aware of it, and by means of a sort of penetration which was almost physical, these black silhouettes of trees and of hills added some gloomy and sinister quality to the violent state of his soul.
Unharness the cabriolet.
If his conversation with the wheelwright had taken place in a chamber of the inn, it would have had no witnesses, no one would have heard him, things would have rested there, and it is probable that we should not have had to relate any of the occurrences which the reader is about to peruse; but this conversation had taken place in the street.
"At my house," replied the old woman.
I am not hard to please, as you see."
"Ah!"
"Is there any one in this village who lets out teams?"
"We live in a poor country.
Then I could start again at once."
"That horse is very much fatigued."
"Come, that is true; I even have a good appetite."
He was driving at random, straight ahead.
I must set out again in an hour at the latest."
And, then, they drive at a walk. There are many hills to ascend."
"If you set two men to work?"
"There is a long day's work on it.
His breakfast was served; he seized the bread, took a mouthful, and then slowly replaced it on the table, and did not touch it again.
The plain was gloomy; low-hanging, black, crisp fogs crept over the hills and wrenched themselves away like smoke: there were whitish gleams in the clouds; a strong breeze which blew in from the sea produced a sound in all quarters of the horizon, as of some one moving furniture; everything that could be seen assumed attitudes of terror.
"Without doubt.
"Certainly not."
"Seven o'clock, sir; we shall reach Arras at eight; we have but three leagues still to go."
"I have none."
The morning has its spectres as well as the evening.
"To Arras."
"Yes, sir."
"Ah!" returned the road-mender, "so you don't know that the road is under repair?
Mr. Rook took his knapsack into the outhouse; and arranged on the table his appliances for the toilet--contained in a leather roll, and including a razor--ready for use in the morning.
Not knowing their names, the landlord distinguished them, at the coroner's suggestion, as the fair gentleman, and the dark gentleman.
There was an old truckle-bed among the lumber, on which one of the gentlemen might rest.
"It was wide open, sir.
Soon afterward, he and his wife went to bed.
The dark man asked his way to the post-office and went out by himself.
Having previously barred the second door of the outhouse, which led into the yard, Mr. Rook fastened the other door, the lock and bolts of which were on the side of the kitchen.
There was some little discussion between the two travelers, as to which of them should take possession of the truckle-bed.
I saw an open razor, stained with smears of blood, at his side."
It was simply impossible that two strangers to the neighborhood could find their way to the station, through storm and darkness, in time to catch the train.
Nothing happened to disturb Mr. and Mrs. Rook during the night.
The thunderstorm passed away; but the rain continued to fall heavily. Soon after eleven the guests at the inn retired for the night.
The dark gentleman endeavored to explain what had happened to him.
Then I locked the other door, and put the key in my pocket.
In the case of the wiser animals, the Person submits to Sleep.
CHAPTER XXIV.
When I was able to look round me, the other traveler--I mean the man with the fair complexion, who carried the knapsack--was nowhere to be seen."
A flash of lightning startled the gentlemen when they went to the window to look out: the thunderstorm began.
This serious question troubled her all through the evening, and kept her awake when she went to bed.
Emily's first day in the City library proved to be a day wasted.
The jury having viewed the body, and having visited an outhouse in which the murder had been committed, the first witness called was Mr. Benjamin Rook, landlord of the Hand-in-Hand inn.
Returning to the kitchen, he noticed that the time was ten minutes short of midnight.
On accosting the landlord, the fair gentleman volunteered the following statement:
In every respect they were singularly unlike each other.
This statement was confirmed by a laborer, who was on his way to the village at the time.
It was put an end to by the fair gentleman, in his own pleasant way.
As the darkness came on, the rain fell again heavily; and the heavens were black.
He came back in about ten minutes, and sat down afterward to supper with his companion.
Having already given up their own room to their lodgers, the landlord and landlady had no other place to sleep in than the kitchen.
Alban's conduct in keeping his secret, in the matter of the newspapers, now began to associate itself with Alban's conduct in keeping that other secret, which concealed from her his suspicions of Mrs. Rook.
With or without bedrooms, they must remain at the inn for the night.
Incapable of giving exact dates, Cecilia had informed her that the crime was committed "in the autumn." The month to choose, in beginning her examination, was therefore the month of August.
He had no intention of remaining at the inn, except for refreshment; and he asked for a carriage to take him to the railway station.
Conscious of the error into which her own impatience had led her, she was at a loss how to retrace the false step that she had taken.
Had the inquest been mentioned in the newspapers, at the time?
He proposed to "toss up for it"--and he lost.
On the evening of Sunday, September 30th, 1877, two gentlemen presented themselves at Mr. Rook's house, under circumstances which especially excited his attention.
Receiving no answer, after repeatedly knocking, he opened the door and stepped into the outhouse.
As for beds, the few rooms which the inn contained were all engaged; including even the room occupied by himself and his wife.
MR.
Led by the new light that had fallen on her, Emily returned to the library the next morning with a definite idea of what she had to look for.
The fair gentleman, seeing the signs of bad weather, desired to remain in Mr. Rook's house for the night, and proposed to resume his walking tour the next day.
Two sisters, girls like herself, stopped to rest on the bench.
The one thing certain is, that these unfortunate people resist discovery.
Oh, if the girls at the school were to see her now--the girls who used to say in their moments of sadness, "Let us go to Emily and be cheered"--would they know her again?
The first words spoken by the servant, on opening the door, informed her that the unknown gentleman had called again.
This time he had boldly left his card.
We know that they are strangers in London--and we know no more.
One of them said, "Polly, I'm too happy!" and danced as she walked away.
Mrs. Mosey could not forget that she had been (no matter how politely) requested to withdraw.
In Italy, among the lake s and mountains, happy in the company of her light-hearted friend.
The other cried, "Sally, for shame!" and laughed, as if she had hit on the most irresistible joke that ever was made.
By some mysterious influence which she was unable to trace, the boisterous merriment of the two girls had roused in her a sense of revolt against the life that she was leading.
As the hours wore on, she pursued her weary way, down one column and up another, resigned at least (if not quite reconciled yet) to her task.
And Emily was one of them.
She sat down to rest and recover herself on the nearest bench.
Where was Cecilia at that moment?
To feel this was to be inevitably reminded of Sir Jervis Redwood.
Her labors ended, for the day, with such encouragement as she might derive from the conviction of having, thus far, honestly pursued a useless search.
Happily for herself, her neighbors on either side were no idlers.
"The old gentleman has no mercy on himself, and no mercy on others," he explained, "where his literary labors are concerned.
"I shall only cry," Emily thought, "if I stay at home; better go out."
You must spare yourself, Miss Emily.
Who, in Emily's position, could have read that joyously-written letter from Switzerland, and not have lost heart and faith, for the moment at least, as the inevitable result?
On leaving the cottage that morning she had given certain instructions, relating to the modest stranger who had taken charge of her correspondence--in case of his paying a second visit, during her absence at the Museum.
Too joyfully restless to remain inactive any longer, they jumped up again from the seat.
Solitude in the Park!
They were full of their own interests; they hardly looked at the stranger in mourning garments.
A buoyant temperament is of all moral qualities the most precious, in this respect; it is the one force in us--when virtuous resolution proves insufficient--which resists by instinct the stealthy approaches of despair.
CHAPTER XXI.
No passing footsteps were audible on the remote path to which she had strayed.
Emily wrote gratefully to Miss Ladd, and asked to be excused.
News was waiting for her when she reached home, which raised her sinking spirits.
There was no other creature who could be a companion to the friendless girl. Mrs. Ellmother had never shown herself again since the funeral.
Again and again she resolutely cleared her eyes, under the shelter of her veil, when passing strangers noticed her; and again and again the tears found their way back.
Soon, too soon, she could hardly see where she went.
The worthy schoolmistress had written to her with the truest kindness.
Solitude at home!
Change, speedy change, to some occupation that would force her to exert herself, presented the one promise of brighter days that she could see.
Observant persons, accustomed to frequent the London parks, can hardly have failed to notice the number of solitary strangers sadly endeavoring to vary their lives by taking a walk.
It is not only absurd, it's cruel, to expect you to ransack old newspapers for discoveries in Yucatan, from the time when Stephens published his 'Travels in Central America'--nearly forty years since!
Accepting this friendly advice, Emily began with the newspaper-volume dating from New Year's Day, 1876.
Among the other forlorn wanderers in the Parks, there appeared latterly a trim little figure in black (with the face protected from notice behind a crape veil), which was beginning to be familiar, day after day, to nursemaids and children, and to rouse curiosity among harmless solitaries meditating on benches, and idle vagabonds strolling over the grass.
Emily rose and went home.
The younger sister was to be married, and the elder was to be bridesmaid.
POLLY AND SALLY.
The woman-servant, whom the considerate doctor had provided, was the one person in Emily's absence left to take care of the house.
The first hour of her search strengthened the sincere sense of gratitude with which she remembered the bookseller's kindness.
Without a care to trouble her; abroad or at home, finding inexhaustible varieties of amusement; seeing new places, making new acquaintances--what a disheartening contrast did Cecilia's happy life present to the life of her friend!
Other days had passed drearily since that time; but the one day that had brought with it Cecilia's letter set past happiness and present sorrow together so vividly and so cruelly that Emily's courage sank.
It was unoccupied.
No! Mother Nature is stepmother to the sick at heart.
To whom could Emily say, "Let us go out for a walk?" She had communicated the news of her aunt's death to Miss Ladd, at Brighton; and had heard from Francine.
In fact, in huge free milling works, where hydraulic machinery crushes the gold-bearing quartz and screens it to fineness before catching the gold on delicate sieves, the process is only a complex refinement of the bar-washer cradling his gold.
Into this box the gravel was shovelled by one miner.
Distress or a find was to be signalled by a gunshot or by heliograph of sunlight on a pocket mirror; but many a man strayed beyond rescue of signal and never returned to his waiting 'pardners.' Some were caught in snowslides, only to be dug out years later.
Up-stream, then, headed the prospectors on the Fraser in that autumn of '58.
They might have to bring the stream from miles distant to sluice out the gravel; and the largest nuggets might not be found till hundreds of feet had been washed out; but always the 'float,' the pebbles, the specks that shone in the sun, lured them with promise.
Where the turbid yellow flood began to rise and 'collect'--a boatman's phrase--the men would scramble ashore, and, by means of a long tump-line tied--not to the prow, which would send her sidling--to the middle of the first thwart, would tow their craft slowly up-stream.
I asked him why he did not use pack-horses.
Prospecting during the winter in a country of heavy snowfall did not seem a sane project.
Nor does the light gradually rise above the eastern horizon.
Trees and crags are mirrored in the lake so clearly that one can barely tell which is real and which is reflection.
We threw ourselves down to sleep.
Spanish moss, grey-green and feathery, hung from branch to branch of the huge Douglas firs.
With claims filed on all gold-bearing bars, what were the ten thousand men to do camped for fifty miles beyond Yale?
Those who had oxen killed the oxen and sold the beef.
The sun sets early in the mountains with a gradual hushing of the voice of glad waters and a red glow as of wine on the encircling peaks.
'Threw chips of stone ahead and listened,' he answered, 'and let me tell you that only the greenest kind of tenderfoot ever takes risks on a precipice.'
At first colts try to rub packs off on every passing tree, but a few tumbles heels over head down a bank cure them of that trick.
I crawled over the ledge, and by sticking my fingers and toes in the rocks got down to about fifteen feet from the drop to a soft grassy level.
I laughed!
He came crawling over the ledge and peeked down.
'Was it luck or was it perseverance?' I asked the man who found one of the richest silver-mines in the Big Bend of the Columbia. 'Both and mostly dogged,' he answered.
I cried!
Naturally enough, the pack-train unconsciously follows the game-trail of deer and goat and cougar and bear across the slope to the watering-places where springs gush out from the rocks.
Half a dollar was the smallest coin used, and clothing was so scarce that when a Chinaman's pig chewed up Walter Moberly's boots while the surveyor lay asleep in his shack, Mr Moberly had to foot it twenty-five miles before he could find another pair of boots.
Before Christmas of '59 prospectors had spread into Lillooet and up the river as high as Chilcotin, Soda Creek, Alexandria, Cottonwood Canyon, Quesnel, and Fort George.
Timber-line is passed till the forests below look like dank banks of moss.
It dropped to that shelf we had seen from the gully below.
The man farthest upstream in spring would be on the ground first for the great find that was bound to make some seeker's fortune.
Many signs guided the experienced prospector.
Governor Douglas estimated that before April of '59 as many as three hundred boats with five men in each had ascended the Fraser.
I thought I would let myself down over the ledge and see what was below, for there were no mineral signs where we were.
Moss is on the north side of tree-trunks.
It is so often just the one pace more that wins or loses the race.
Sometimes the trail would lead for miles round the edge of some precipices beyond which could be glimpsed the eternal snows.
There was the healing regeneration to body and soul.
Then I looked up! The sun had just come over that east ridge and hit the rocks.
Of butter there was little; of milk, none. Wherever a sand-bar gave signs of mineral, it was tested with the primitive frying-pan.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Rockies, that man became one of the famous guides.
He set his traps round the mountains and hunted till the snow cleared.
Between Yale and Hope remained two thousand miners during the winter.
Along went Colonel Moody, with a company of his Royal Engineers, Lieutenant Mayne of the Imperial Navy with a hundred bluejackets, and Judge Matthew Begbie, to deal out justice to the offenders.
The party carried along a small cannon.
Somebody had to go back down to Cariboo Lake for food.
For seven miles along William's Creek worked four thousand men. Cariboo Cameron took a hundred and fifty thousand out of his claim in three months.
The gold-fever, which had subsided when all the bars of the Fraser were occupied, mounted again.
He was fined fifty dollars for contempt of court.
Deer and caribou tracks were everywhere.
They put shafts and tunnels through the clay and sluiced in more water for hydraulic work.
He went up the river in a small cruiser and reached Hope on the 1st of September.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Each man staked out a claim.
They slept under their blankets and awoke at daybreak below twelve inches of snow.
As usual, the white man's fire-water was found to be the chief cause of the trouble. Without waiting for legislative authority, Douglas issued a royal proclamation against the sale of liquor and left a mining recorder to register claims.
Men who did not know a canoe from a row-boat essayed to run the maddest rapids in America.
They were out of provisions.
Frost and rain split away loose debris.
Marmots stabbed the lonely solitude with echoing whistle.
Wind came up from the valley in the sibilant sigh of a sea.
The saloons should be abolished, they decreed.
September had settled disorder among the Indians.
A standing committee of twelve was appointed to enforce the law till the regular government should be organized.
It was not long, however, before the formal organization of the new colony took place.
Dark was falling.
Great rumours began to float out from the up-country.
It took forty-eight hours to dig down.
The lost people had not eaten for three days.
Of the disappointed, countless numbers filled unknown graves, and thousands tramped their way out starving and begging a meal from the procession of incomers.
This was far above the benches of wash-gravel.
Crossing a creek one party of prospectors was overtaken by a terrific thunderstorm, with rock-shattering flashes of lightning.
With a number of companions they had been driven down-stream from the Thompson by Indians and had been sniped all the way for forty miles.
He would take no chances.
But when these two packed back over the hills on snowshoes, they were trailed. Followers came in with a whoop behind them on Antler Creek.
The possibility of American occupation had become an obsession at Victoria.
At Fort Langley, on November 19, 1858, the colony of British Columbia was proclaimed under the laws of England.
Perhaps too great an air of secrecy.
Going up one of the nameless peaks, they stepped out on a ledge and viewed the white, silent mountain-world.
The outside world thought that gold could be picked up amid the rocks of British Columbia.
And, while two built a log cabin, the other two set off over the hills for food.
Men on the gold-bars were jostled and hustled, and pegs marking limits were pulled up.
By '65 hydraulic machinery was coming in and the prospectors were flocking out; but to this day the Cariboo mines have remained a freakish gamble.
By the autumn of '59 a thousand miners were at work round Quesnel Lake.
It seemed to go down to a valley benched by gravel flanks.
The excited prospectors forgot time.
Back surged the miners to William's Creek.
Salutes were fired as he landed.
William's Creek was panning poorer and poorer and was being called 'Humbug Creek,' when miners staked near by decided to see what they could find beneath the blue clay.
In every camp is a species of human vulture living off other men's risk.
It was doubtful if even Indians had ever hunted this ground.
Bank facings seemed to indicate that the richest pay-dirt lay at bed-rock.
Hardly had Douglas returned to Victoria when ships from England arrived bringing his commission as governor of British Columbia.
This was the spring of '61; and Antler Creek proved only the beginning of the rush to Cariboo.
All liquor, wherever found, was ordered spilled.
The one thing these prospectors were determined on was secrecy till they could get their claims registered.
Then convulsive changes shook the earth's surface.
There were fights and there was killing, and sometimes the river cast up its dead.
He set out alone and was never again seen alive.
CHAPTER III
Mines for which capitalists have paid hundreds of thousands have suddenly ended in barren rock.
Sure enough "the Lord" was just turning a point a short distance up the river, and while they looked the lights winked out and the coughing diminished by degrees and presently ceased altogether.
There can't be two!"
A huge shape developed itself out of the gloom, and from its tall duplicate horns dense volumes of smoke, starred and spangled with sparks, poured out and went tumbling away into the farther darkness.
The river astonished the children beyond measure.
"What is it!
Don't I know it!
"Do you reckon he saw, us, Uncle Dan'l?
"Goodness sakes, mars Clay, don't de Good Book say?
All in an instant a fierce eye of fire shot out from behind the cape and sent a long brilliant pathway quivering athwart the dusky water.
Dat mean business, honey.
The flaming and churning steamer was right abreast the party, and not twenty steps away.
It was not necessary to say it twice.
"I don't know but what they were girls.
Uncle Dan'l headed a cautious reconnaissance in the direction of the log.
At the end of nearly a week of travel, the party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi.
Whatever the lagging dragging journey may have been to the rest of the emigrants, it was a wonder and delight to the children, a world of enchantment; and they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales the negro slaves were in the habit of telling them nightly by the shuddering light of the kitchen fire.
Dat's it.
All crowded close together and every heart beat faster.
Dey ain't two, mars Clay--days de same one.
CHAPTER III.
"Does I reckon?
"Did you feel scared, Uncle Dan'l?"
Uncle Dan'l pointed down the river with his bony finger.
A deep coughing sound troubled the stillness, way toward a wooded cape that jetted into the stream a mile distant.
Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a continent which surely none but they had ever seen before.
chow!
The coughing grew louder and louder, the glaring eye grew larger and still larger, glared wilder and still wilder.
"But how should I know whether they were boys or girls?"
Oh, what is it, Uncle Dan'l!"
I think they were."
Suddenly Uncle Dan'l exclaimed:
There was a moment of throbbing suspense, and then, to the surprise and the comfort of the party, it was plain that the august presence had gone by, for its dreadful noises were receding.
Nearer and nearer the thing came, till its long sides began to glow with spots of light which mirrored themselves in the river and attended the monster like a torchlight procession.
"It's de Almighty!
"H'wsh!
"Uncle Dan'l" (colored,) aged 40; his wife, "aunt Jinny," aged 30, "Young Miss" Emily Hawkins, "Young Mars" Washington Hawkins and "Young Mars" Clay, the new member of the family, ranged themselves on a log, after supper, and contemplated the marvelous river and discussed it.
"Well what did you run for?"
They were all kneeling, in a moment.
And then while the mysterious coughing rose stronger and stronger and the threatening glare reached farther and wider, the negro's voice lifted up its supplications:
The awful thunder of a mud-valve suddenly burst forth, drowning the prayer, and as suddenly Uncle Dan'l snatched a child under each arm and scoured into the woods with the rest of the pack at his heels.
Git down on yo' knees!"
"Said like a true man," said one.
"Come, come, little chap, you mustn't be going to sleep before sundown"
They didn't 'pear to live at all, only when they was together, looking at each other, loving one another.
Six or eight middle-aged country people of both sexes were grouped about an object in the middle of the room; they were noiselessly busy and they talked in whispers when they spoke.
The old lady said to Hawkins:
And Clay, he--Oh, the po' motherless thing--I cain't talk about it--I cain't bear to talk about it."
CHAPTER II.
If he will go with me I will give him a home, and loving regard--I will do for him as I would have another do for a child of my own in misfortune."
And now the new mother came again, and helped him to dress, and combed his hair, and drew his mind away by degrees from the dismal yesterday, by telling him about the wonderful journey he was going to take and the strange things he was going to see.
He said:
It was a poverty stricken place.
"Friends, I am not very well provided for, myself, but still I would not turn my back on a homeless orphan.
Tell me--is anything the matter?"
A few minutes afterward, while the preparations for the funeral were being concluded, Mr. Hawkins arrived at his wagon leading his little waif by the hand, and told his wife all that had happened, and asked her if he had done right in giving to her and to himself this new care?
"His mother, po' thing.
All eyes were turned inquiringly upon him.
Hawkins approached, expecting his footfall to attract attention, but it did not. He halted a moment, and then said:
A coffin stood upon two backless chairs.
An old lady motioned, toward the door and said to Hawkins in a whisper:
The boy signified with a scarcely perceptible gesture that the trouble was in the house, and made room for Hawkins to pass.
"Ah, I'm sorry I spoke so, my boy.
One after another the people stepped forward and wrung the stranger's hand with cordial good will, and their eyes looked all that their hands could not express or their lips speak.
Toward the close of the third day's journey the wayfarers were just beginning to think of camping, when they came upon a log cabin in the woods.
And after breakfast they two went alone to the grave, and his heart went out to his new friend and his untaught eloquence poured the praises of his buried idol into her ears without let or hindrance.
Then he put his face in his hands again and rocked himself about as one suffering a grief that is too deep to find help in moan or groan or outcry. Hawkins stepped within.
She said:
He leaned upon the open coffin and let his tears course silently.
These neighbors had just finished disposing the body of a woman in it--a woman with a careworn, gentle face that had more the look of sleep about it than of death.
With a tired expression the small face came up out of the hands,--a face down which tears were flowing.
Come to me; you poor motherless boy, and let me take your grief and help you carry it."
Died of the fever, last night.
Clay had disappeared from the door; but he came in, now, and the neighbors reverently fell apart and made way for him.
Hawkins drew rein and entered the yard.
"You got to camp in my house as long as you hang out here," said one. "If tha hain't room for you and yourn my tribe'll turn out and camp in the hay loft."
Hawkins understood.
A boy about ten years old was sitting in the cabin door with his face bowed in his hands.
Hawkins uncovered and approached.
The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations, his terrors.
An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise without being conscious of it.
She was, on the contrary, somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual.
He caused her the same good and the same evil.
Her father had never refused her anything.
Nothing is more real than these great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of that spark.
There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the tenderness of a mother.
Her figure was formed, her skin had grown white, her hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had been lighted in her blue eyes.
At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old Toussaint saying: "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?" Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words caused a sort of commotion within her.
He kept to his back yard, like a dog.
"Do you realize what this means?" he cried.
Practically I had a pretty good knowledge of contemporary literature and knew almost nothing about my so-called profession.
"I forgot to tell him that you were coming to-day.
Come in."
"But in that case the magnetism of the electromagnet was so large that the polarity of the small magnet was reversed!" I cried.
"There is no air a few miles from the earth.
"Dr. Livermore telephoned me to come and see him," I said.
"Perhaps, considering just what your college career really was, I might better say that you are supposed to be familiar with them."
It measured perhaps fifty feet in diameter and was one hundred and forty feet high, the Doctor informed me.
For the rest of the afternoon and all of that night I received his messages regularly, but with the coming of daylight they began to fade. By nine o'clock I could get only a word here and there.
Once over it, I expected to reverse my polarity and fall on the moon.
"Are you really going?" I asked.
If I later take another trip, say to Mars, I will have to find a means of increasing my acceleration, possibly by the use of the rocket principle.
The University authorities used to remonstrate with him, but his ability as a research worker was so well known and recognized that he was allowed to go about as he pleased.
In fact, I have asked you here to witness and report the first interplanetary trip to be made."
I first made contact with him when I was a freshman at Calvada, and for some unknown reason he took a liking to me.
We will go back to the house for a few minutes while I show you the location of an excellent telescope through which you may watch my progress, and instruct you in the use of an ultra-short-wave receiver which I am confident will pierce the Heaviside layer.
I wasn't sure you would get here at all, in point of fact, for I didn't know whether that old fool I talked to in your office would send you or some one else.
Come in.
"Perfectly," I assented.
You doubtless remember that experiment."
"My business is with Dr. Livermore," I said tartly.
In fact, I could see the Doctor through one of the windows.
Good-by!"
The space above is filled with storerooms and the air purifying apparatus.
Now don't ask any questions; it's nearly lunch time."
"Air resistance would--"
Good-by, Tom.
However, all this has nothing to do with the story.
In point of fact, I had often harbored such a suspicion.
"If two magnets are placed so that the north pole of one is in juxtaposition to the south pole of the other, they attract one another," I said.
All he could tell me was that a "lot of junk" had come for the Doctor by express and that a lot more had been hauled in by truck from Redding.
A ladder led from the floor to a door about fifty feet from the ground.
I cranked the old coffee mill type of telephone which I found, and presently heard the voice of Dr. Livermore.
"The story writers have worked out all that sort of thing in great detail, and there is nothing novel in my arrangements.
That pancake receipt must be a jookalorum, the way they hold on to it.'
He turns around to get a glass on the table, and I see a forty-five in his hip pocket.
But the boys kept the racket up."
"I swallowed the peach seed and the two damson seeds.
She ambled out into the other room, and directly Uncle Emsley comes in in his shirt sleeves, with a pitcher of water.
"They're living on the Mired Mule Ranch now. But I haven't seen either of 'em since.
You've got excited, and that wound in your head is contaminating your sense of intelligence.
During the progress of Jud's story he had been slowly but deftly combining certain portions of the contents of his sacks and cans. Toward the close of it he set before me the finished product--a pair of red-hot, rich-hued pancakes on a tin plate.
"The boys hollered pancakes till they got pancake hungry, and I cut this recipe out of a newspaper.
"I never had believed in harming sheep men.
"'Haven't ye heard the news?'
"No, Jud," I said, sincerely, "I meant it.
If you ever saw that ranch of mine!
"When I said 'pancakes' Uncle Emsley sort of dodged and stepped back.
Mr. Judson, did you ever taste the pancakes that Miss Learight makes?'
Miss Learight and you being closer friends, maybe she would do for you what she wouldn't for me.
I didn't wonder that Jackson Bird found it uphill work.
The sheep person helped her off; and they stood throwing each other sentences all sprightful and sagacious for a while.
What did you say was the name of that street in Saint Louis, Mr. Odom, where you lost your hat?'
He said you was in camp once where they was cooking flapjacks, and one of the fellows cut you over the head with a frying pan.
"Why don't you have some, too, Jud?"
"'Excuse me for a moment, please,' says Miss Willella, and she gives me a quick kind of sideways look, and slides off the stool.
"I went back and said to Uncle Emsley: 'Did you say a sheep man?'
How does the catalogue of constituents run?'
"'Cattle up?' I asks.
"They're delicious," I answered.
'Why not?
"That bronc of mine wept, in his way.
"I slid over the counter after Uncle Emsley.
Try not to think about pancakes.'
And then this feathered Jackson flies up in his saddle and raises his little stewpot of a hat, and trots off in the direction of his mutton ranch. By this time I had turned the sand out of my boots and unpinned myself from the prickly pear; and by the time he gets half a mile out of Pimienta, I singlefoots up beside him on my bronc.
"'Why, Mr. Judson,' says he, 'you've got the wrong idea.
"I was punching then for old Bill Toomey, on the San Miguel.
I do my own cooking and mending.
I see one, one day, reading a Latin grammar on hossback, and I never touched him!
"Did you make these cakes by the famous recipe?" I asked.
I guess somebody held the counter by the bridle while I got off; and then I walked out straight ahead till I butted against the mesquite where my roan was tied.
I was sure I heard a sigh.
Pancakes is just whirling in my head like wagon wheels.
Jud was mollified at once when he saw that I had not been dealing in allusions.
It seems to me I'd swap my pony and saddle for a stack of buttered brown pancakes with some first crop, open kettle, New Orleans sweetening.
I'd give two years of my life to get the recipe for making them pancakes.
Elegant fine rain that was last week for the young grass, Mr. Judson?' says he.
"'You keep on trying for it,' I tells him, 'and I'll do the same.
That's what I went to see Miss Learight for,' says Jackson Bird, 'but I haven't been able to get it from her.
Miss Willella and me passed a gratifying evening at Uncle Emsley's.
I got him by the front of his shirt and shoved him in a corner.
We was getting along in one another's estimations fine.
"Jud, can you make pancakes?"
I've called on Miss Learight a few times; but not for the purpose you imagine.
I was feeling like Adam before the apple stampede, and was digging my spurs into the side of the counter and working with my twenty-four-inch spoon when I happened to look out of the window into the yard of Uncle Emsley's house, which was next to the store.
On the third day of my compulsory idleness I crawled out near the grub wagon, and reclined helpless under the conversational fire of Judson Odom, the camp cook.
"'To convince you that I am sincere,' says the sheep man, 'I'll ask you to help me.
'You've rid too far to-day, Jud, and got yourself over-excited. Try to think about something else now.'
Tell me /that/.'
'Entering her heart would do.
'Fresh and young in warmth and kindness, I mean.
'To-night he has not been like himself.
'Wait a little while,' said Mr. Thornton. 'Remember, we are of a different race from the Greeks, to whom beauty was everything, and to whom Mr. Bell might speak of a life of leisure and serene enjoyment, much of which entered in through their outward senses.
'I too, am sorry, my dear.
But I am very sorry.'
You two must try and make each other a little more liberal-minded.'
I am sure you would have told me if you had felt that you could return his regard.
But I'm none daunted.
We wish people would allow us to right ourselves, instead of continually meddling, with their imperfect legislation.
'It is a home question.
All your lives seem to be spent in gathering together the materials for life.'
When he had somewhat abruptly left the room, Margaret rose from her seat, and began silently to fold up her work; the long seams were heavy, and had an unusual weight for her languid arms.
'And you refused him?'
I shall have to lay myself open to such a catechist, and I am not sure that I am prepared to do it.'
OUT OF TUNE
Where's the Pearl?
He almost blushed as he put this question; but Mr. Bell's scouted idea recurred to him, and the words were out of his mouth before he well knew what he was about.
Mr. Bell went on--
'Never!' said Mr. Hale, decidedly.
I wonder when you Milton men intend to live.
But Mr. Hale resolved that he would not be disturbed by any such nonsensical idea; so he lay awake, determining not to think about it.
'To-morrow--yes, to-morrow they will be back in Harley Street.
I knew that could never be.
Mr. Thornton laughed outright at this.
He felt as the mother would have done, in the midst of 'her rocking it, and rating it,' had she been called away before her slow confiding smile, implying perfect trust in mother's love, had proved the renewing of its love.
So they fell back into the monotony of the quiet life they would henceforth lead.
So don't offend me by talking of being able to spare me, papa, for I assure you you can't.'
They found Margaret with a letter open before her, eagerly discussing its contents with her father.
Then he said, 'I really don't know.
Everybody rushing over everybody, in their hurry to get rich.'
He startled Margaret, one evening as she sate at her work, by suddenly asking:
'A respectable strike!' said Mr. Bell. 'That sounds as if you were far gone in the worship of Thor.'
To Mr. Hale he said,--
Remember that, and 'God bless you!'
No answer at first; but by-and-by a little gentle reluctant 'Yes.'
I can't match her yet.
But she neither looked nor spoke.
We stand up for self-government, and oppose centralisation.'
Pray whose opinion did you think would have the most obstinate vitality?'
'No!' said Mr. Hale; 'don't let us be personal in our catechism.
He could not tell.
'It might be good for the Miltoners.
I should like to be the representative of Oxford, with its beauty and its learning, and its proud old history.
As he touched her, she sprang up, and smiling with forced brightness, began to talk of the Lennoxes with such a vehement desire to turn the conversation, that Mr. Hale was too tender-hearted to try to force it back into the old channel.
'They impress us all, from childhood upward--every day of our life.'
'Milton people, I suspect, think Oxford men don't know how to move.
I'm a bachelor, and have steered clear of love affairs all my life; so perhaps my opinion is not worth having.
Come, Margaret, give me a farewell kiss; and remember, my dear, where you may find a true friend, as far as his capability goes.
Don't exaggerate, missy.
Our glory and our beauty arise out of our inward strength, which makes us victorious over material resistance, and over greater difficulties still.
'I beg your pardon.
'Yes, enjoyment,--I don't specify of what, because I trust we should both consider mere pleasure as very poor enjoyment.'
On the entrance of the gentlemen, it was immediately put aside; but Mr. Thornton's eager senses caught some few words of Mr. Hale's to Mr. Bell.
Mr. Thornton had not a notion what they were talking about, and disdained to inquire.
'Papa, it's all because I'm standing up for the progress of commerce. Mr. Bell would have had it keep still at exchanging wild-beast skins for acorns.'
And yet this last strike, under which I am smarting, has been respectable.'
'No, I am sure you are wrong.
Mr. Thornton was silent.
'No; on second thoughts, we'll have her to nurse us ten years hence, when we shall be two cross old invalids.
'The evenings are getting longer now. Come, papa.' She did not breathe freely till they were some distance from the house.
You could learn more, by half an hour's conversation with Mr. Henry Lennox, about Frederick's chances, than in a dozen of these letters of his; so it would, in fact, be uniting business with pleasure.'
I am leaving out our colleges, just as I give Mr. Thornton leave to omit his factories in speaking of the charms of Milton.
Everything seems to touch on the soreness of his high dignity.
I wish you'd leave Milton; which is a most unsuitable place for you, though it was my recommendation in the first instance.
Poor fellow!
She could not care for him, he thought, or else the passionate fervour of his wish would have forced her to raise those eyes, if but for an instant, to read the late repentance in his.
Margaret thought it would do the Milton manufacturers good to associate a little more with Oxford men.
When I can, I shall bring my young man to stand side by side with your young woman, just as the genie in the Arabian Nights brought Prince Caralmazan to match with the fairy's Princess Badoura.'
'A little; but he took it into his head that you--how shall I say it?--that you were not ungraciously disposed towards Mr. Thornton.
"He got into a sink-hole."
Leverett licked his dry lips.
I come and touch you, and, my God!--one would think I have stab you.
And what do you think of that, Quintana?"
No use; always the coward's "if" blocked him; and the coward's rage,--fiercest of all fury,--ravaged him, almost crazing him with his own impotence.
Enough's enough.
More interesting still--along comes Don Jose Quintana and his celebrated gang of international thieves, and steals from the Grand Duchess of Esthonia the Flaming Jewel and all her rubies, emeralds and diamonds.
"Live," replied Quintana tersely.
No?"
Jake had it in his pocket."
Bills were absolutely safe plunder.
"Is that my packet?"
Because I don't want to hear anything from you."
Quintana dropped gracefully into the humiliating attitude popularly indicative of prayerful supplication.
"Where is it, my packet?"
"Where the hell do we meet up with Quintana?" growled Kloon, tearing a mouthful from a gnawed tobacco plug and shoving the remainder deep into his trousers pocket.
"Yes," said Quintana slowly, "I should have.
He bent over Kloon and, from the left inside coat pocket, he drew the packet and placed it inside his own flannel shirt.
Beside this sink hole the trap-thief dropped Kloon.
Strings of blood hung suspended in the clouding water.
Something left a red smear on his palm as he worked the ejector.
I was sick and scared like, so when you come up over the moss, not makin' no noise, an' grabbed me--God!--I guess you'd jump, too."
"Fool!
I'll let you take a modest peep at the Flaming Jewel----" busily unwrapping the packet--"just one little peep, Quintana----"
"Certainly," said Quintana, with a polite inclination of acknowledgment.
He got Quintana by one foot.
"I want that packet you picked up on Clinch's veranda," said Hal Smith.
The quicksand's got me,' sez he.
Quintana carefully placed the packet on a bed of vivid moss.
A single shot would settle all problems for him....
"Well," said Smith, laughing, "Clinch was more careless still.
As he crouched there, peering after Quintana, a man came swiftly out of the forest behind him and nearly stumbled over him.
I ain't got no use for no billion million dollar bills.
It was still nearly a mile from Drowned Valley when Jake Kloon halted in his tracks and seated himself on a narrow ridge of hard ground.
So!...
Not in the pants, either?
"Bogged?
"You do not believe me?" inquired Smith.
A coward dies many times before Old Man Death really gets him.
Sit very, very still, Quintana,--unless you want to lie stiller still....
As he rose from the pool's edge, somebody laid a hand on his shoulder.
The mistake was natural.
Then, turning his back to the dead, he squatted down and clutched Kloon's burly ankles, as a man grasps the handles of a wheelbarrow to draw it after him.
III
There might easily be half a million in bills pressed together in that heavy, flat packet.
"Down with you!"
"Swine," he said, calmly inspecting the whimpering creature who had started to crawl toward him.
Such an ass!"
Yes?
"You shall explain to me some things before you go."
"Signor Quintana, it is human for the human crook to err.
"No."
In a few minutes he discovered what he was looking for; took his bearings; carefully picked his way back over a leafy crust that trembled under his cautious tread.
"Where my packet?"
Quintana lowered his arms and started to rise.
Always, as Leverett crept on, pulling the dead behind him, the floor of the woods trembled slightly, and a black ooze wet the crust of withered leaves.
"Which way!" whispered Smith fiercely, shaking Leverett till his jaws wagged.
And still Leverett dared not budge, dared not search the dead and take from it that for which the dead had died.
Lemme loose!--I'm chokin'----"
And there lay Kloon's rifle.
"Quintana!"
The sapling was about twenty feet in height.
"My packet?"
Mule! Crazee fellow!
Bah!
"Where Jake Kloon?" demanded the latter.
"Bon!
"Jake?"
What is this you hide inside your shirt----?"
Kloon's dogged silence continued.
"Live, certainly," laughed Smith, "but not on the proceeds of this coup-de-main.
And then the Piper comes around holding out two itching palms."
"You may turn around now, Quintana," he said amiably.
"Ten thousand dollars hain't nothin' to a billion million, Jake."
Leverett, always a coward, had pursued his devious and larcenous way through the world, always in deadly fear of sink holes.
Yes?"
"Ah, bah!" he said tranquilly.
Bubbles rose, dully iridescent, floated, broke.
"Very interesting.
This he managed to accomplish, sustaining the cold intensity of Quintana's gaze as long as he deemed it necessary. Then he started toward his rifle.
For why you make jumps like rabbits!
What is that, then?"
And Kloon's, too!"
No notice.
With the sunset lights, deep shadows, the black islands and white bergs it was all very beautiful.
The lower part of the instrument is again attached to the silk thread, which is cunningly wound on coned bobbins from which the balloon unwinds it without hitch or friction as it ascends.
All ice gone. 30th.
To-night have been naming all the small land features of our vicinity.
He is allowed cocoa and sardines with bread and butter--the cocoa can be made over an acetylene Bunsen burner, part of Simpson's outfit.
The island had a good sprinkling of snow, which will all be gone, I expect, to-night.
It will be interesting to climb around these monsters as the winter proceeds.
We had an excellent game of football again to-day--the exercise is delightful and we get very warm.
The long night hours give time to finish up a number of small tasks--the hut remains quite warm though the fires are out.
There is an ominous black look to the westward.
It has been calm all day again.
We have an extraordinary diversity of talent and training in our people; it would be difficult to imagine a company composed of experiences which differed so completely.
This shows an inverted temperature.
To-day I allotted the ponies for exercise.
I'm much afraid it may go across our pony track from Hut Point.
We should have our party back soon.
wide.
The balloon at first went north with a light southerly breeze till it reached 300 or 400 ft., then it turned to the south but did not travel rapidly; when 2 miles of thread had gone it seemed to be going north again or rising straight upward.
In fact, everyone is extraordinarily busy.
The observer is to look round every hour or oftener if there is aught to be seen.
A balloon was sent up in the morning, but only reached a mile in height before the instrument was detached (by slow match).
As I returned from my walk the southern sky seemed to grow darker, and later stratus cloud was undoubtedly spreading up from that direction--this at about 5 P.M.
Wilson is very busy making sketches.
I am getting anxious to have the hut party back, and begin to wonder if the ice to the south will ever hold in permanently now that the Glacier Tongue has gone.
From the summit one has an excellent view of our surroundings and the ice in the Strait, which seemed to extend far beyond Cape Royds, but had some ominous cracks beyond the Island.
The ice outside the bergs has grown very thick, 14 inches or more, but there were freshly frozen pools beyond the Island.
Does the absence of pigment suggest absence of reserve energy?
Wanted to see more rainbows on Barrier.
Wilson and Bowers took our few dogs for a run in a sledge.
The faults in the dust strata in these surfaces are very mysterious and should be instructive in the explanation of certain ice problems.
The only comfort is that the Strait is already frozen again; but what is to happen if every blow clears the sea like this?
Night 24th-25th.
By tipping the tube the amount of calcium hydrate required can be poured into the generator.
Patches seem to be remaining south of the Glacier Tongue and the Island and off our own bay.
CHAPTER IX
The most attractive point raised was that of pigmentation.
This was probably due to the continual interference of frost smoke; since our return here and especially yesterday and to-day the sky and sea have been glorious in the afternoon.
Reports should note colours and relative width of bands of colour.
The agglomerates, kenytes, and lavas are much the same as those at Cape Evans.
Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, Hooper, Clissold, P.O.
Atkinson is by far the best player, but Hooper, P.O. Evans, and Crean are also quite good.
Shafts: take direction of dipping needle.
The Island is 540 ft.
Wright is wrestling with the electrical instruments.
Had Divine Service.
Corona: shafts meeting to form.
The generation is a simple process.
In the afternoon a double thread was tried, and this acted successfully.
I took the first turn last night; the remainder of the afterguard follow in rotation.
The ponds and various forms of ice grains interest us.
The Work and the Workers
One cannot see the result on the Strait, but I fear it means that the ice has gone out again in places.
We climbed round the ice foot after descending the hill and found it much broken up on the south side; the sea spray had washed far up on it.
The phenomenon further connects itself in form with lines of magnetic force about the earth.
Arch: centre of arch in magnetic meridian.
By the time we started homeward it was upon us, making a harsh chatter as it struck the high rocks and sweeping along the drift on the floe.
I hope this will get over the difficulty, but have some doubt.
Evans is busy surveying the Cape and its vicinity.
Ice all out, sound apparently open. 27th.
Bands and Curtains with convolutions--not understood.
Later.
We find one hut contains an experience of every country and every clime!
To-day have had our first game of football; a harassing southerly wind sprang up, which helped my own side to the extent of three goals.
Party intended to start on 11th, if weather fine.
Atkinson is unpacking and setting up his sterilizers and incubators.
The blow seems to have passed over to-night and the sky is clear again, but I much fear the ice has gone out in the Strait.
(Curious apparent connection between spectrum of aurora and that of a heavy gas, 'argon.' May be coincidence.)
The balloon is of silk and has a capacity of 1 cubic metre.
Does it increase the insulating properties of the hair or feathers?
Simpson has been practising with balloons during our absence.
Freezing over. May 4th.
It is experimentally shown that ions are given off by dried calcium, which the sun contains.
Have only seven hymn-books, those brought on shore for our first Service being very stupidly taken back to the ship.
Two theories enunciated:
It is filled with hydrogen gas, which is made in a special generator.
Broad lead opened along land to Castle Rock, 300 to 400 yds.
Or does the animal clothed in white radiate less of his internal heat?
If no further blizzard clears the Strait it can be said for this season that:
Had an interesting walk.
Ice forming mid-day 25th, opened with leads. 26th.
The sides of the galley fire have caved in--there should have been cheeks to prevent this; we got some fire clay cement to-day and plastered up the sides.
This morning he sent one up for trial.
Although we had very good sunset effects at Hut Point, Ponting and others were much disappointed with the absence of such effects at Cape Evans.
Ice over whole Strait. 29th.
The dark appearance of the ice is noticeable, but this has been the case of late since the light is poor; little snow has fallen or drifted and the ice flowers are very sparse and scattered.
Strait apparently freezing. Early 28th.
With me there is no need to draw a veil; there is nothing to cover.
One sees a remarkable reassortment of values.
Therefrom we derive a singularly exact preservation of time--an important consideration to all, but especially necessary for the physical work.
It is worthy of remark that a certain speculative writer of quasi-scientific repute, writing long before the Martian invasion, did forecast for man a final structure not unlike the actual Martian condition.
The Martians wore no clothing.
In this way the curious parallelism to animal motions, which was so striking and disturbing to the human beholder, was attained.
I take no credit to myself for an accident, but the fact is so.
A hundred diseases, all the fevers and contagions of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life.
Now no surviving human being saw so much of the Martians in action as I did.
These creatures, to judge from the shrivelled remains that have fallen into human hands, were bipeds with flimsy, silicious skeletons (almost like those of the silicious sponges) and feeble musculature, standing about six feet high and having round, erect heads, and large eyes in flinty sockets. Two or three of these seem to have been brought in each cylinder, and all were killed before earth was reached.
The mechanism it certainly was that held my attention first.
It piped and whistled as it worked.
Most of its arms were retracted, but with three long tentacles it was fishing out a number of rods, plates, and bars which lined the covering and apparently strengthened the walls of the cylinder.
At any rate, the seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths.
Yet though they wore no clothing, it was in the other artificial additions to their bodily resources that their great superiority over man lay.
Entrails they had none.
He pointed out--writing in a foolish, facetious tone--that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages.
Over that aspect we hung now on the very edge of the great circular pit the Martians were engaged in making.
Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.
They had little or no sense of fatigue, it would seem.
Our bodies are half made up of glands and tubes and organs, occupied in turning heterogeneous food into blood.
He wanted the slit, which permitted only one of us to peep through; and so I had to forego watching them for a time while he enjoyed that privilege.
I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place.
Then I turned to see how much of our rampart remained.
I recall particularly the illustration of one of the first pamphlets to give a consecutive account of the war.
It seemed infinitely more alive than the actual Martians lying beyond it in the sunset light, panting, stirring ineffectual tentacles, and moving feebly after their vast journey across space.
Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was unknown to them.
Moreover, I was concealed and motionless, and under no urgency of action.
Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels.
At first I scarcely noticed the pit and the cylinder, although it has been convenient to describe them first, on account of the extraordinary glittering mechanism I saw busy in the excavation, and on account of the strange creatures that were crawling slowly and painfully across the heaped mould near it.
But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching.
They have become practically mere brains, wearing different bodies according to their needs just as men wear suits of clothes and take a bicycle in a hurry or an umbrella in the wet.
He presented them as tilted, stiff tripods, without either flexibility or subtlety, and with an altogether misleading monotony of effect.
They were no more like the Martians I saw in action than a Dutch doll is like a human being.
Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . .
It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window.
Their undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment is partly explained by the nature of the remains of the victims they had brought with them as provisions from Mars.
And not only did the Martians either not know of (which is incredible), or abstain from, the wheel, but in their apparatus singularly little use is made of the fixed pivot or relatively fixed pivot, with circular motions thereabout confined to one plane.
The Martians had what appears to have been an auditory organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them.
It had behaved exactly like mud under the violent blow of a hammer.
They were huge round bodies--or, rather, heads--about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face.
The red creeper was quite a transitory growth, and few people have seen it growing.
Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps.
But the Martians were lifted above all these organic fluctuations of mood and emotion.
And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.
I gripped his arm, fearing he might cry out, and for a long time we crouched motionless.
Through the aperture in the wall I could see the top of a tree touched with gold and the warm blue of a tranquil evening sky.
I turned to a scowling face, and silent, eloquent lips.
On Mars, however, just the reverse has apparently been the case.
Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms.
And I assert that I watched them closely time after time, and that I have seen four, five, and (once) six of them sluggishly performing the most elaborately complicated operations together without either sound or gesture.
For a time, however, the red weed grew with astonishing vigour and luxuriance.
They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.
Such quasi-muscles abounded in the crablike handling-machine which, on my first peeping out of the slit, I watched unpacking the cylinder.
The pamphlet containing these renderings had a considerable vogue, and I mention them here simply to warn the reader against the impression they may have created.
On earth they could never have moved without effort, yet even to the last they kept in action.
The fifth cylinder must have fallen right into the midst of the house we had first visited.
I touched the curate's leg, and he started so violently that a mass of plaster went sliding down outside and fell with a loud impact.
While I was still watching their sluggish motions in the sunlight, and noting each strange detail of their form, the curate reminded me of his presence by pulling violently at my arm.
It was just as well for them, for the mere attempt to stand upright upon our planet would have broken every bone in their bodies.
The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity.
And this was the sum of the Martian organs.
In man, in all the higher terrestrial animals, such a method of increase has disappeared; but even on this earth it was certainly the primitive method.
They were heads--merely heads.
There is many a true word written in jest, and here in the Martians we have beyond dispute the actual accomplishment of such a suppression of the animal side of the organism by the intelligence.
It was one of those complicated fabrics that have since been called handling-machines, and the study of which has already given such an enormous impetus to terrestrial invention.
They did not eat, much less digest.
Its motion was so swift, complex, and perfect that at first I did not see it as a machine, in spite of its metallic glitter.
Almost all the joints of the machinery present a complicated system of sliding parts moving over small but beautifully curved friction bearings.
With that realisation my interest shifted to those other creatures, the real Martians.
And while I am engaged in this description, I may add in this place certain further details which, although they were not all evident to us at the time, will enable the reader who is unacquainted with them to form a clearer picture of these offensive creatures.
The fighting-machines were coordinated and animated to an extraordinary pitch, but nothing to compare with this.
The digestive processes and their reaction upon the nervous system sap our strength and colour our minds.
We men, with our bicycles and road-skates, our Lilienthal soaring-machines, our guns and sticks and so forth, are just in the beginning of the evolution that the Martians have worked out.
The building had vanished, completely smashed, pulverised, and dispersed by the blow.
The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
In three other points their physiology differed strangely from ours.
The artist had evidently made a hasty study of one of the fighting-machines, and there his knowledge ended.
And speaking of the differences between the life on Mars and terrestrial life, I may allude here to the curious suggestions of the red weed.
In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants.
The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple.
For a minute or so I remained watching the curate, and then I advanced, crouching and stepping with extreme care amid the broken crockery that littered the floor.
"No; she is sitting like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, in the room inside.
But I shall tell mamma everything before I go to bed." Then Mrs. Mountjoy came up and took Florence away, with a few words of most disdainful greeting to Harry Annesley.
Harry saw her as he got Florence to an opposite door, and there for the moment escaped with her.
"I don't care how much you laugh at me, Mrs. Armitage."
Here is mamma, and now I must leave you.
"I cannot tell.
"Oh yes, she has taken her away.
I have thought so often that I was a fool to love her, because everything was so much against me."
What have you got to say?
The sound of it will be the sweetest music that a man can possibly hear."
They had now got to the extremity of the room near an open window, and Florence found that she was able to say one word.
He greeted her with his pleasantest smile, to which Mrs. Mountjoy did not respond quite so sweetly.
That is what I cannot understand. Poor Mountjoy!
"Oh no!"
Harry, you will have to wait.
"Mamma is going on a visit to her brother-in-law."
"No, indeed; just now I am triumphant.
But he felt that for the full enjoyment of his triumph he must be alone somewhere with Florence for five minutes.
"Good heavens! you will not be back, I suppose, till ever so much after Christmas?"
"Is your daughter here?" asked Harry, with well-trained hypocrisy.
"Because she doesn't see with my eyes, Harry.
But she hasn't shut the stable-door till the steed has been stolen."
"How has it gone off?
Her silence now was as good as any speech.
He had not actually explained to himself why, but he knew that he wished to be alone with her.
"But now you are not in despair."
"What dance have you disengaged?
And though he had told Florence once about that dreadful midnight meeting, he could say nothing farther on that subject. "Of course mamma thinks that I am foolish."
And she would have gone farther if cross-questioned, and have declared that she regarded him already as her lord and master.
"I suppose she will tell you, though she has not been communicative to me in regard to your royal highness.
You don't mean to say that you will not give me one dance?"
"Oh, the steed has been stolen?"
I almost think that Florence must have suspected that Harry Annesley was to be there that night, or why should the two places have been kept vacant?
Her mother's eye was, she knew, watching her through the door-way all the way across from the other room.
Well, if I must, of course I must.
Mamma is, of course, attached to her nephew."
But now she had not a word to say to him.
That he should have had the start of me so long, and have done nothing!"
So there came upon his arm the slightest possible sense of pressure from those sweet fingers, and Harry Annesley was on a sudden carried up among azure-tinted clouds into the farthest heaven of happiness.
"Nothing," whispered Florence.
"What, after all that has passed?"
"And now what is this," he began, "about your going to Brussels?"
I do feel for him.
Oh, my wife, my wife!"
He had set his mind upon one thing of value, and he had got it.
By nothing that he could do or say could he prevent her going, and he could only use the present moment to the best purpose in his power.
"Oh yes."
"As soon as I heard that Mrs. Armitage was going to have a party I began to think of coming immediately." Then an idea for the first time shot through Florence's mind--that her friend Mrs. Armitage was a woman devoted to intrigue.
Nothing as yet has been settled.
"She has not gone?" said Harry, almost awe-struck at the idea.
"Mamma's brother is minister there, and we are just going on a visit."
After a moment he stood still, and passed his fingers through his hair and waved his head as a god might do it.
But future months were, to his thinking, interminable; the present moment only was his own.
"And I have done everything.
Mr. Armitage bade me give it all up, because he was sure you would never do any good."
"What does it signify though all the world knew it?"
"We shall be a month with Sir Magnus; but mamma is talking of going on afterward to the Italian lakes."
"And you with her?"
"I do not know that you can see me."
I should be sure to make a fool of myself. No, I don't want to dance even with you.
"But I want to hear it.
For Mrs. Mountjoy has taken Florence home."
You must tell me.
But I do flatter myself that if he had held his ground and kept his property the result would have been the same."
Mrs. Mountjoy could not but acknowledge that Florence was in the room, and then Harry passed on in pursuit of his quarry.
"Florence, you are now all my own." There came another slightest pressure, slight, but so eloquent from those fingers.
"Did I not?
I have been faithful to you for two-and-twenty years.
See, I am calm now, and he may strike me if he will."
"Come," cried Mogford again; "say, my lord, is this the villain?"
The sole aim of the coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine was to make money.
Oh, Richard, pray Heaven they may not meet."
"Forgive me, my son!
The fourth Lord Bellasis combined the daring of Armigell, the adventurer, with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the Tower.
I was in favour at Court.
"Do not do this, Richard.
Richard Devine gently loosed the arms that again clung around his neck, kissed the pale face, and turned his own--scarcely less pale--towards the old man.
"I am glad to see you are so well disposed.
No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he took to dice, drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the last century.
Come with me to yonder house, and I will prove to you that I have but just quitted it,"--to place his innocence beyond immediate question.
It seemed an hour to his excited fancy before he saw a light pass along the front of the house he had quitted, and knew that Sir Richard had safely reached his chamber.
Sir Richard Devine laughed again.
To his astonishment, however, Sir Richard passed swiftly on, with body bent forward as one in the act of falling, and with eyes unconscious of surroundings, staring straight into the distance.
At first the young man, so rudely assailed, did not comprehend his own danger.
"To-morrow you can settle with me for the sitting of last week.
"By Heaven, sir, you will not do this!" burst out the young man.
Your family are proud. Colonel Wade has other daughters.
He knelt, stupefied, unable to speak or move.
A shrewd man of business, a thorough master of his trade, troubled with no scruples of honour or of delicacy, he made money rapidly, and saved it when made.
I return in an hour, madam; let me find him gone."
The old man looked at her for an instant, and then said slowly, "That this impostor, who so long has falsely borne my name, has wrongfully squandered my money, and unlawfully eaten my bread, shall pack!
I have ruined you."
Then, we must push on, for it grows late."
Come, let me lead you in.
I will write.
No matter what strait or poverty you plead--if even your life should hang upon the issue--the instant I hear that there exists on earth one who calls himself Richard Devine, that instant shall your mother's shame become a public scandal. You know me.
"What is it, sir?" she asked, rising, but trembling with terror, as she stood with drooping arms and widely opened eyes.
Nothing was too low, nothing too high for him.
Let me share your burden that I may lighten it.
He would have had but to cry, "I am the son of Sir Richard Devine.
"You stare!
Two other men waited as eagerly.
You are pale, you faint!"
"Mother, dear mother, do not weep," he said.
Early left an orphan with a sister to support, he soon reduced his sole aim in life to the accumulation of money.
Between the houses of parvenu Devine and long-descended Wotton Wade there had long been little love.
You have confessed your shame.
It is fitting that I go.
His retirement was not a happy one.
I keep my word.
Lady Devine slipped through her son's arms and fell on her knees at her husband's feet.
You change your name; you never by word or deed make claim on me or mine.
"Not at all; with a parson."
It is I--impetuous and ungrateful during all your years of sorrow--who most need forgiveness.
I was a plebeian, a ship's carpenter; you were well born, your father was a man of fashion, a gambler, the friend of rakes and prodigals.
I tremble for the future.
"Silence, bastard!" cried Sir Richard.
Good night."
"For God's sake, my lord say--" then he stopped abruptly, and being forced on his knees by his captors, remained staring at the dying man, in sudden and ghastly fear.
The runaway horse had given the alarm.
One was an old man, whose white hair and wrinkled face gave token that he was at least sixty years of age.
His new life had begun already: for that night one, Rufus Dawes, charged with murder and robbery, lay awake in prison, waiting for the fortune of the morrow.
Well, he is only just ordained.
His mind, bent upon one hideous explanation of the crime, did not see another obvious one which had already occurred to the mind of the landlord of the Three Spaniards.
I will go.
Richard took up the book, and read, in gold letters on the cover, "Lord Bellasis."
"A parson!"
He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all the notorious "bloods" of the day.
But the old-man-of-the-sea burden of parsimony and avarice which he had voluntarily taken upon him was not to be shaken off, and the only show he made of his wealth was by purchasing, on his knighthood, the rambling but comfortable house at Hampstead, and ostensibly retiring from active business.
Marmaduke Wade was a Lord of the Admiralty, and a patron of Pepys, who in his diary [July 17,1668] speaks of visiting him at Belsize.
That he abandon for ever the name he has usurped, keep himself from my sight, and never set foot again in house of mine."
The web of circumstantial evidence had enmeshed him.
"You would preserve your good name then.
I paid the price he asked, but there was nothing of your cousin, my Lord Bellasis and Wotton, in the bond."
Half-terrified at this strange appearance, Richard hurried onward, and at a turn of the path stumbled upon something which horribly accounted for the curious action of the old man.
At half-past nine Richard Devine quitted his mother's house to begin the new life he had chosen, and so, drawn together by that strange fate of circumstances which creates events, the father and son approached each other.
You shall have your wish--upon one condition."
These three people were Sir Richard Devine, his wife, and his only son Richard, who had returned from abroad that morning.
Sir Richard Devine, knight, shipbuilder, naval contractor, and millionaire, was the son of a Harwich boat carpenter.
The literature teacher, who had been watching her carefully, had her theory.
She knew a lot about girls.
I only claim that more people know the condition than dare to confess it.
No one ever heard just what passed between the two.
The gods all seemed to have been very good to her.
It has not one rounded period."
When the Wife came back to the hammock, ten minutes later, the cloud was gone from her face, and she never mentioned the subject again.
THE TALE OF AN ADOLESCENT
She was terribly shocked.
"Why," declared the Critic, "I call mine a healthy story compared with this one.
She liked the Principal Girl--admired her, in fact.
And you may be sure that the literature teacher never did.
That has not a bit of literary merit.
Of course, my husband is a good man.
"Of course that appeals to him."
"Never!
The result of the investigation was at first consoling, and then amazing.
There was not that confidence between them which one traditionally supposes to exist between parents and children.
The Doctor's ears were sharp.
It was as well, for, as the literature teacher told the doctor afterward, it was one notch above her experience, and she absolutely could have found no word to say.
Imagination plays a great part in most of our lives--it is the glory that gilds our facts--it is the brilliant barrier which separates us from the beasts, and the only real thing that divides us into classes, though, of course, it does not run through the world like straight lines of latitude and longitude, but like the lines of mean temperature."
And she got up, and walked away.
Of course such a girl would be much talked over by the other type of girl to whom confidences were necessary.
She was charming to every one, but she kept every one a little at arm's length.
She was the daughter of a rich banker--his only daughter.
"All the same," persisted the Critic, "I think it a horrid story and--"
"For that little tale," shouted the Critic.
"I suppose you think me the most ungrateful woman in the world.
We were becoming habituated to the situation.
"All right," laughed the Doctor, "then we had all better go inside the sanitarium walls at once."
Wasn't she once one herself?
There are parents like that, you know.
The moon was at the full.
During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey.
She took note of the hour.
What did Cosette's soul contain?
The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.
She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to regain the steps.
It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.
There was no one there.
She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and laid her ear against it.
On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was strolling in the garden.
She opened the window.
It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.
Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature.
It was her father.
It was usually when money was lacking in the house that Jean Valjean took these little trips.
In point of fact, there was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand.
Cosette told him what she thought she had heard and seen.
Whose fault was it?
The disquieting point about it was, that the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom.
She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror.
From that time forth, was it chance?
There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back to the Rue de Babylone.
So Jean Valjean was absent.
It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was walking very softly.
There flowed in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs barefoot.
On the following day Jean Valjean returned.
she saw him pass nearly every day.
Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round face, was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius.
When she had finished, she remained wrapped in thought.
Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which had a round hat.
She thought that she had heard a noise.
There was no one there.
The truth is, that she hardly felt the painful and burning spot any longer.
Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the sky.
She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as the gate, and found nothing.
It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove. There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.
Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.
She glanced on the ground.
She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or stir, or turn her head.
Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.
Once only, on the occasion of one of these departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as far as a little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: Impasse de la Planchette.
Besides, she could see nothing.
She thought no more about it.
Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.
That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room.
"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look, there is your shadow with the round hat."
Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the garden.
The image of the handsome officer was reflected in the surface.
The figure had disappeared.
Where did he go?
Or was it merely that layers of ashes had formed?
No one's.
Two days in succession!
Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact, entered upon its convalescence.
He had said: "I shall return in three days."
Phantoms do not wear round hats.
Just as she was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile.
"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls who look at me?"
Was this another hallucination?
One hallucination might pass, but two hallucinations?
Jean Valjean grew anxious.
She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her window.
The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was visible was that the street was deserted as usual.
On the following day, she saw him pass again.
This, as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long intervals. He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost.
And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man wearing a round hat.
"Maybe some of the folk from Branksome-Bere have wanted to look over the place."
They were talking so earnestly that they did not observe us until they had passed through the avenue gate.
My sister shook her head.
"Then we may as well have speech with him now that we are here," I answered.
"I came up," I explained, "because I saw your lights in the windows, and I thought that something might be wrong.
"Besides, John, the keys are kept by the house-agent at Wigtown.
In front was a small lawn, girt round with a thin fringe of haggard and ill grown beeches, all gnarled and withered from the effects of the sea-spray.
"Good evening, Mr. McNeil," said I, stepping forward and addressing the Wigtown factor, with whom I had some slight acquaintance.
What is the meaning of it?"
It had been my habit to pull out of an evening in the laird's skiff and to catch a few whiting which might serve for our supper.
Behind lay the scattered hamlet of Branksome-Bere--a dozen cottages at most--inhabited by rude fisher-folk who looked upon the laird as their natural protector.
Such was our simple, uneventful existence, until the summer night when an unlooked-for incident occurred which proved to be the herald of those strange doings which I have taken up my pen to describe.
I could now see that a second fainter light followed a few paces behind the other.
"See, John," she cried, "there is a light in Cloomber Tower!"
Here at least there was no neighbour to pry and chatter.
"They are coming down, if I am not mistaken."
CHAPTER II.
Don't be alarmed!" said the little fat factor in a soothing fashion, as one might speak to a frightened child. "This is young Mr. Fothergill West, of Branksome, though what brings him up here tonight is more than I can understand.
For us its loneliness had no terrors.
"There is not one of them would dare to set foot within the avenue gates," she said.
Stumbling across the moor together, we made our way into the Wigtown Road, at the point where the high stone pillars mark the entrance to the Cloomber avenue.
A tall dog-cart stood in front of the gateway, the horse browsing upon the thin border of grass which skirted the road.
A man might walk many a weary mile and never see a living thing except the white, heavy-flapping kittiwakes, which screamed and cried to each other with their shrill, sad voices.
There it flickered for some time, and finally flashed past two successive windows underneath before the trees obscured our view of it.
The untimely visitor must either have used considerable violence in order to force his way in, or he must have obtained possession of the keys.
"Well, Seth, there is some one who has no fears about going into it," said I, pointing to the great, white building which flickered up in front of us through the gloom.
Jimmy dodged the blow and then both men sprang for him.
"I think," said Bince, "that there ought to be some way to prevent this man doing any further harm here."
"I think I can arrange it," he said, "but I would have to have fifty now."
Pete Krovac was a rat-faced little foreigner, looked upon among the men as a trouble-maker.
Krovac thought for a moment.
He nursed a perpetual grievance against his employer and his job, and whenever the opportunity presented, and sometimes when it did not present itself, he endeavored to inoculate others with his dissatisfaction.
Bince held out his hand.
Bince was very pale.
The following evening as Jimmy alighted from the Indiana Avenue car at Eighteenth Street, two men left the car behind him.
"Neither do I," said Bince.
"Yes," replied Krovac.
The same day the certified public accountants came.
Several times he had been upon the point of discharging him, but now he was glad that he had not, for he thought he saw in him a type that in the light of present conditions might be of use to him.
I suppose he is planning on cutting pay."
"Yes," replied the girl, "he has been here some time.
He's interfering with our accounting system and I don't want it interfered with just now."
"Yes," he said, "there is something beside Torrance's interference in the shop.
"Come on," said Bince, "hand over the fifty."
What we want to do is get rid of Torrance."
His first question, as he entered the small outer office where Mr. Compton's stenographer and his worked, was addressed to Miss Edith Hudson.
"It might be," said Bince.
"Krovac," he said, "you don't like this man Torrance, do you?"
"A fellow that hires another to croak a man for him for one hundred bucks ain't got no license to call nobody names."
Bince's eyes narrowed.
"I don't tackle that guy again."
Do you wish to see him?"
He did not notice them, although, as he made his way toward his boarding-house, he heard footsteps directly in his rear, and suddenly noting that they were approaching him rapidly, he involuntarily cast a glance behind him just as one of the men raised an arm to strike at him with what appeared to be a short piece of pipe.
Bince realized that he was compromised as hopelessly already as he could be if the man had even more information.
Mr. Bince did understand, but still he managed to control his temper.
With a resounding whack the attacker's head came in contact with the concrete, his arms relaxed their hold upon Jimmy's neck, and as the latter arose he saw both his assailants, temporarily at least, out of the fighting.
"All right," he said, "you might return the fifty then."
He looked straight into Krovac's eyes.
At last he spoke.
Jimmy glanced hastily in both directions.
Bince realized only too well that he was absolutely in the power of the fellow and immediately his manner changed.
There must be some other way to get around this."
Nor could the most fastidious have discovered aught to criticize in the appearance or deportment of Little Eva.
"It might be worth another fifty to you to know that I wasn't going to tell old man Compton."
"I wonder what's eating him," thought Miss Hudson to herself.
That afternoon Mr. Compton left the office earlier than usual, complaining of a headache, and the next morning his daughter telephoned that he was ill and would not come to the office that day.
"It would be worth something of course," suggested Bince.
"What a policeman don't know about you will never hurt you," was one way that the Lizard put it.
Edith thought that the "No" which he snapped at her was a trifle more emphatic than the circumstances seemed to warrant, nor could she help but notice after he had entered his office the vehement manner in which he slammed the door.
"Nobody would believe your story, but let's forget that.
In fact, for the past couple of weeks he had been using the man in an endeavor to get some information concerning Torrance and his methods that would permit him to go to Compton with a valid argument for Jimmy's discharge.
Poor old Compton!
He stood in silence for some minutes, apparently studying the man before him.
During the morning as Bince was walking through the shop he stopped to talk with Krovac.
"These C.P.A.s are going to find this a more interesting job than they anticipated.
When Jimmy appeared in the shop the next morning he noted casually that Krovac had a cut upon his chin, but he did not give the matter a second thought.
"Don't go callin' me names," admonished Krovac.
"Well?" he asked.
There was no one in sight. His boardinghouse was but a few steps away, and two minutes later he was safe in his room.
You can help me and I can help you.
"I haven't heard any one else complaining," said Bince.
To do more is to drag and fail, so defeating the end of your efforts.
If it turns out that you are not fit for the job you have undertaken, give it up and find another, or modify that one until it comes within your capacity.
It is a good thing to have a sound body, better to have a sane mind, but neither is to be compared to that aggregate of virile and decent qualities which we call character. THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
The man whose one idea is of making himself and his family materially comfortable, or even rich, may not be coming to nervous prostration, but he is courting a moral prostration that will deny him all the real riches of life and that will in the end reward him with a troubled mind, a great, unsatisfied longing, unless, to be sure, he is too smug and satisfied to long for anything.
The time comes, however, when the growing instinct toward right living is the thing to foster--not the details of life which will inevitably take care of themselves if the underlying principle is made right.
The attempt to catch up with life and with affairs that go on too fast for us is a frequent and harmful deflection from the rules of the game.
The child needs to be told, arbitrarily for a while, what is right, and what is wrong, that he must do this, and he must not do that.
It is a great temptation to go on multiplying the rules of the game. There are so many sensible and necessary pieces of advice which we all need to have emphasized.
It is true that nervous troubles may cause physical complications and that physical disease very often coexists with nervous illness, but it is better for us now to make an artificial separation.
That is the course we must try to avoid.
The rules we have wittingly or unwittingly broken are often unknown to us, but they exist in the All-Wise Providence, and we may guess by our own suffering how far we have overstepped them.
If a man runs into a door in the dark, we know all about that,--the case is simple,--but if he runs overtime at his office and hastens to be rich with the result of a nervous dyspepsia--that is a mystery.
Rarely, however, will it be necessary for us to give up if we will undertake and consider for the day only such part of our task as we are able to perform.
It demands of them and of ourselves an unselfishness that is born of a love that finds its expression in the service of God.
Such a stream will purify itself and neutralize the dangerous inflow along its banks.
And what is the service of God if it is not such an entering into the divine purposes and spirit that we become with God re-creators in the world--working factors in the higher evolution of humanity?
The habit of uncertainty in thought and action, bred, as it sometimes is, from a lack of faith in man and in God, is, nevertheless, a thing to be dealt with sometimes by itself.
It is true that great harm may come from the polluted inflows, but they will be less and less harmful as the increasing current from the good source flows down.
However inconsequential the habit of indecision may seem, it is really one of the most disabling of bad habits.
Such common rules should be well enough understood, but they are broken everywhere by the wisest people.
The nerves gave out because she did not give her faculties time to rest, and perhaps because of a love affair that supervened.
While we live we shall get and save, we shall use and spend, we shall serve the needs of those dependent upon us, but we shall not line the family nest so softly that our children become powerless.
It takes courage to do this--more courage sometimes than is needed to make us stick to the thing we are doing.
It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be. BEN JONSON.
We shall give and serve in secret places with our hearts in our deeds.
Probably only a very small proportion of these girls are strong enough physically or nervously to meet the growing demands of the schools.
I cannot argue in favor of business laxity,--I know the imperative need of exactness and finality,--but I do believe that if we are to possess the untroubled mind we must make our lives larger than the field of dollars and cents.
Tasks multiply and we are inadequate, responsibilities increase before we are ready. They bring fatigue and confusion.
The larger life leads us inevitably away from ourselves, away from the super-requirements of our families.
There are so many rules that no one will ever know them all, but it seems that we live in a world of laws, and that if we transgress those laws by ever so little, we must suffer equally, whether our transgression is a mistake or not, and whether we happen to be saints or sinners.
These laws are less well observed and understood than those which determine our downfall.
Here is a girl who "came out" last year.
There are laws also which have to do with the recovery of poise and balance when these have been lost.
It must be the ideal of moral teaching to make clear and pure the source of action. Then the stream will be clear and pure.
The trouble is that we look at our work or our responsibility all in one piece, and it crushes us.
The result was a year of invalidism, and then, because the rules of recovery were not understood, several years more of convalescence.
Then we may possess the untroubled mind, a treasure too rich to be computed.
Few of us avoid it.
Having done all you reasonably can, stop, whatever may be the consequences. That is a rule I would enforce if I could.
Strangely enough, the sense of effort and the feeling of our own inadequacy damage the nervous system quite as much as the actual physical effort.
Its continuance contributes largely to the sum of nervous exhaustion.
That meant four nights a week for several months at dances and dinners, getting home at 3 A.M. or later.
That is what I consider the brave thing to do.
Not infrequently it is a petty habit that can be corrected by the exercise of a little will power.
We shall not confine our charities to the specified channels, where our names will be praised and our credit increased.
The women's colleges are turning out hundreds of young women every year who naturally consider teaching as the field most appropriate and available.
The hold-up is severe, usually, and becomes in itself a thing to be managed.
After a while the worry and fret of the requirements and the constant nag of the schoolroom have their effect upon those who are foredoomed to failure in that particular field.
The charity that develops in us will make us truly generous and free from the reaction of hardness.
We cannot shirk and be true.
She was apparently strong and her mother was ambitious for her social progress.
Whatever its origin, whether it stands in the relation of cause or effect, it is an indulgence that insidiously takes the snap and sparkle out of life and leaves us for the time being colorless and weak.
The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when he is ill.
The more gross illnesses, from accident, contagion, and malignancy, we need not consider here, but only those intangible injuries that disable people who are relatively sound in the physical sense.
It is, after all, not so much the things we do as the way we do them, and what we think about them, that accomplishes nervous harm.
RULES OF THE GAME
Life comes at us and goes by very fast.
As a matter of fact, we may trust our decisions to be fair and true if our life's ideals are beautiful and true.
I believe it is better to decide wrong a great many times--doing it quickly--than to come to a right decision after weakly vacillating.
Next to uncertainty, an uninspired certainty is wrecking to the best of human prospects.
The plight of such young women is particularly hard, for they are usually dependent upon their work.
I know that some are so because of physical weakness over which they have no control, that some are suffering from the effects of carelessness, some from wilfulness, and more from simple ignorance of the rules of the game.
The only effective remedy against inexorable necessity is to yield to it. PETRARCH.
I would honor the factory superintendent, who, finding himself unequal to his position, should choose to work at the bench where he could succeed perfectly.
In this emergency, he remembered that in a forest near by had once lived an aged hermit, in whose cell he might possibly leave the corpse of the princess, until he should be able to dispose of it in a style suited to her rank.
The King of Exeter was at that time plunged into a most distressful war with a neighboring province, to whose prince he had refused to marry his only daughter and heiress.
Wrapped in a long veil, she stole along the green alleys of the wood, and soon reached the little hermitage.
To defend her borders he was ready to sacrifice his present rank and wealth, and be a simple knight again.
In Mr. Thornton's case, as far as Margaret knew, there was no intervening stage of friendship.
'Not he.
Then he said:
And yet it seemed so right at the time.
If she had decoyed her brother home to blot out the memory of his error by his blood!
She went to the window, and threw it open, to dispel the oppression which hung around her.
And we dare not; poor cowards that we are!
The deep impression made by the interview, was like that of a horror in a dream; that will not leave the room although we waken up, and rub our eyes, and force a stiff rigid smile upon our lips.
To parody a line out of Fairfax's Tasso--
Their intercourse had been one continued series of opposition.
She had been sorry that an expression of any other feeling than friendship had been lured out by circumstances from Henry Lennox.
'So he would; so he should!
'You promised, Margaret, not a quarter of an hour ago;--you said he should come.'
I think it a certain proof he had a bad heart.
Tell me all you like; you never can tell me too much.
'And so he shall, mamma; don't cry, my own dear mother.
Oh, Margaret, let me see him before I die!'
Hitherto she had not stirred from where he had left her; no outward circumstances had roused her out of the trance of thought in which she had been plunged by his last words, and by the look of his deep intent passionate eyes, as their flames had made her own fall before them.
Oh, mamma, don't cry so pitifully,--it cuts me to the heart.'
What should she do?
Then she went and opened the door, with a sort of impetuous wish to shake off the recollection of the past hour in the company of others, or in active exertion.
'That's not true,' said Margaret.
Do they give you a feeling of perfect repose when you lie down upon them; or rather, don't you toss about, and try in vain to find an easy position, and waken in the morning as tired as when you went to bed?'
I have so few hours left--I feel, dear, as if I should not recover, though sometimes your father over-persuades me into hoping; you will write directly, won't you?
Margaret read in her soft low voice.
She paused, and seemed to try and gather strength for something more yet to be said.
It's no use.
'You should have waited till I came in, Margaret.'
At last she slept; with many starts, and muttered pleadings.
Her voice was choked as she went on--was quavering as with the contemplation of some strange, yet closely-present idea.
'Only wait till papa comes in.
Then he may be here--here in twenty-two days!
'Yes.
And so she shuddered away from the threat of his enduring love.
Never mind.
'I don't know,' said Mr. Hale, after a pause.
As far as they defied his rock-like power of character, his passion-strength, he seemed to throw them off from him with contempt, until she felt the weariness of the exertion of making useless protests; and now, he had come, in this strange wild passionate way, to make known his love.
What did he mean?
Mrs. Hale was in the drawing-room on her daughter's return.
When she got there, she found Bessy lying on the settle, moved close to the fire, though the day was sultry and oppressive.
She would see.
'Mamma, I will write to-night, and tell Frederick what you say.
And away she went.
Tell me what he was like as a baby.'
'Yes; it is so, indeed.
He was born with the gift of winning hearts.
She was coming home when her father overtook her.
I'm sure Frederick himself, would run the risk.'
'I tried to persuade her--' and then she was silent.
Don't lose a single post; for just by that very post I may miss him.'
But then, you know, I never had the opportunity of trying Sir John Beresford's beds.
That regret was the predominant feeling, on the first occasion of her receiving a proposal.
But all was profoundly hushed in the noonday stillness of a house, where an invalid catches the unrefreshing sleep that is denied to the night-hours.
But it was of no use.
No cords or chains can keep him.
I cannot think how it must be managed; but I charge you, Margaret, as you yourself hope for comfort in your last illness, bring him to me that I may bless him. Only for five minutes, Margaret.
Mr. Hale suggested, that something of the merits of the featherbeds of former days might be attributed to the activity of youth, which gave a relish to rest; but this idea was not kindly received by his wife.
If need were, she would do the same to-morrow,--by a crippled beggar, willingly and gladly,--but by him, she would do it, just as bravely, in spite of his deductions, and the cold slime of women's impertinence.
It was poor darling Fred I took with me, I remember.
'Go and see Bessy Higgins, of course,' thought she, as the recollection of the message sent the night before flashed into her mind.
'And where have you been, my pretty maid?' asked he.
And among all these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed to bore him so much as that of his pretty wife.
The elderly lady who had been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook Prince Vasili in the anteroom.
Before he looked round Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance with whoever was touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre's beaming face he gave him an unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile.
Although Prince Vasili listened reluctantly and not very politely to the elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an ingratiating and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might not go away.
Anna Pavlovna smiled and promised to take Pierre in hand.
I won't let you go!
"My dear benefactor!
That would be the best way."
Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if it is to last.
She had now come to Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her only son.
In the first moment of Pierre's outburst Anna Pavlovna, despite her social experience, was horror-struck.
But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her.
Prince Andrew kept looking with an amused smile from Pierre to the vicomte and from the vicomte to their hostess.
"The sovereigns will not be able to endure this man who is a menace to everything."
"Yes, yes, of course!" Pierre chimed in, pleased at the arrival of this reinforcement.
"What?
"The Emperor Alexander," said she, with the melancholy which always accompanied any reference of hers to the Imperial family, "has declared that he will leave it to the French people themselves to choose their own form of government; and I believe that once free from the usurper, the whole nation will certainly throw itself into the arms of its rightful king," she concluded, trying to be amiable to the royalist emigrant.
He explained this to her with as much gravity as if she had asked him to do it.
The people only gave him power that he might rid them of the Bourbons and because they saw that he was a great man.
"That is doubtful," said Prince Andrew.
"And believe me, they are reaping the reward of their betrayal of the Bourbon cause.
Prince Andrew, who had evidently wished to tone down the awkwardness of Pierre's remarks, rose and made a sign to his wife that it was time to go.
The Revolution was a grand thing!" continued Monsieur Pierre, betraying by this desperate and provocative proposition his extreme youth and his wish to express all that was in his mind.
Oh yes!
All were silent.
I think it will be difficult to return to the old regime."
So it seems to me."
Why, they are sending ambassadors to compliment the usurper."
"Besides, in the actions of a statesman one has to distinguish between his acts as a private person, as a general, and as an emperor.
"At the present time it is difficult to know the real state of French public opinion."
Though it was unintelligible why he had told it, or why it had to be told in Russian, still Anna Pavlovna and the others appreciated Prince Hippolyte's social tact in so agreeably ending Pierre's unpleasant and unamiable outburst.
Revolution and regicide a grand thing?...
"Won't you come over to the other table?" suggested Anna Pavlovna.
Pierre wished to make a remark, for the conversation interested him, but Anna Pavlovna, who had him under observation, interrupted:
It was a swindle, and not at all like the conduct of a great man!"
The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders.
"I was told a charming Moscow story today and must treat you to it.
She must have two footmen behind her carriage, and very big ones.
And so the anecdote ended.
That was her taste.
Here Prince Hippolyte paused, evidently collecting his ideas with difficulty.
It was evident that he did not like the vicomte and was aiming his remarks at him, though without looking at him.
Well, after that...
"Bonaparte has said so," remarked Prince Andrew with a sarcastic smile.
She said..."
"'I showed them the path to glory, but they did not follow it,'" Prince Andrew continued after a short silence, again quoting Napoleon's words.
"I am not speaking of regicide, I am speaking about ideas."
The princess listened, smiling.
She said, 'Girl,' to the maid, 'put on a livery, get up behind the carriage, and come with me while I make some calls.'"
I do not speak of Russia," said the vicomte, polite but hopeless: "The sovereigns, madame...
Here Prince Hippolyte spluttered and burst out laughing long before his audience, which produced an effect unfavorable to the narrator.
On the contrary.
Everyone waited, so emphatically and eagerly did he demand their attention to his story.
Pierre, not knowing whom to answer, looked at them all and smiled.
"She went.
Pierre looked solemnly at his audience over his spectacles and continued.
"'I opened my antechambers and they crowded in.' I do not know how far he was justified in saying so."
That was horrible!" said the little princess, shrugging her shoulders.
Suddenly there was a great wind.
Even our Saviour preached liberty and equality.
Before Anna Pavlovna and the others had time to smile their appreciation of the vicomte's epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and though Anna Pavlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she was unable to stop him.
By intrigues, violence, exile, and executions, French society--I mean good French society--will have been forever destroyed, and then..."
"I hope this will prove the last drop that will make the glass run over," Anna Pavlovna continued.
His smile was unlike the half-smile of other people.
"He could not do that.
And she had a lady's maid, also big.
The sovereigns!
Several persons, among them the elderly lady and Anna Pavlovna, did however smile.
"How do you expect him to answer you all at once?" said Prince Andrew.
Who does not love liberty and equality?
"She said...
Nothing!" and he became more animated.
Ever since Aldous Raeburn's hesitating revelations, she had been liable to this sudden invasion of a hot and shamed misery.
There were sounds first of footsteps in the hall, then of some scolding of William, and finally Mr. Boyce entered, tired and splashed from shooting, and evidently in a bad temper.
"I am not going, but I shall send her."
She put her hands on the mantelpiece, and dropped her head upon them, and so stood silent for long.
Mrs. Boyce came up and took note and cards from her daughter's hand. Marcella watched her with quick breath.
I can arrange it, I think," said Mrs. Boyce.
"Miss Raeburn's proceedings are a little unexpected.
"I don't remember--ought I?"
During these recent weeks of close contact, her mother's singularity had risen in her mind to the dignity at least of a problem, an enigma.
"It must be all true what Mr. Raeburn said--probably a great deal more.
"We have, it seems, no right to be proud."
And raising his heavy lids he looked at her full.
She fell asleep cradled in dreams.
Presently Mrs. Boyce rose and put the scones down by the fire.
Let them say it.
Then a thought flashed upon her.
"There--don't you come.
The stately lady had died while she was still a child at her first school; she could recollect her own mourning frock; but that was almost the last personal remembrance she had, connected with the Merritts.
We have been here four months, within two miles of her, and it has never occurred to her to call.
Would you like Dr. Clarke sent for?"
Papa told me that Lord Maxwell had written him an uncivil letter and--"
There could be no question but that he was specially interested in her.
But her own character had been rapidly maturing of late, and her insight sharpening.
We must show him some civility."
The three sat on together for a little while in silence.
Raeburn--" said Mrs. Boyce, quickly.
So, at least, it had been always held concerning him.
She need never give offence if she has decent wits.
Then moral discomfort lost itself in physical.
There was something childlike and touching in the voice, something which for once suggested the normal filial relation.
I've asked him to come to tea here on Saturday, Evelyn.
When she entered the drawing-room, she caught her mother standing absently at the tea-table.
He glanced round at her in a quick nervous way, and then looked back again at the fire.
One might be the ruler, the regenerator of half a county!"
He went, and Mrs. Boyce remained alone in the great fire-lit room.
It was her mother's voice.
They do say she was an Irish girl, out of a gang as used to work near here--an' she let him drop one day when she was in liquor, an' never took no trouble about him afterwards.
Mrs. Westall curtsied low, and hoped she might be excused, as it had grown so dark.
When Miss Boyce had gone, Minta Hurd went to the fire and put it together, sighing all the time, her face still red and miserable.
Very soon she had begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort.
He's shown me the place many a time!
Two little figures came pattering up the street in the moist October dusk, a third, panted behind.
Westall's menacing figure darkened all his sky for him.
I ran away and I took against him there and then.
The girls ran in to their mother chattering and laughing.
The quarrel with Westall seemed to have sunk out of his mind.
Her tone was smooth and servile, and Marcella disliked her as she shook hands with her.
Why do yer let that boy out so late?"
The keeper--big, burly, prosperous--would speak to him with insolent patronage, watching him all the time, or with the old brutality, which Hurd dared not resent.
I acted for the best.
He became excited, unmanageable.
"You see Jim, miss, how he's made?
"Are you comin', mother?" repeated Isabella.
She threw down her apron with a gesture of despair as she stood beside him, in front of the fire, watching the pan.
Marcella replied that she could certainly understand.
"'Jim, my chap,' says he, mockin', 'I'm sorry for it, but I'm going to search yer, so take it quietly,' says he.
His poaching, besides a means of livelihood, became more and more a silent duel between him and his boyhood's tyrant.
He never spoke to or of him.
Only in his excitable dwarf's sense hate grew and throve, very soon to monstrous proportions.
"What do you spose I'd tell her?
"And he told no one else?--he never complained?" asked Marcella, indignantly.
He must needs go on to those woods of Lord Maxwell's, which girdled the Mellor estate on three sides.
But I'm sick o' this!
Then she looked after the carriage.
Don't you trouble yourself--an' hold your tongue!"
"Yes, it wor long ago, but you don't forget them things, miss!
But she persisted.
She had been for some time trying to arrange their lives for them.
But he come and told me.
But he caught me lookin' at a snare this mornin'--it wor misty, and I didn't see no one comin'.
For the old woodcraft revived in Hurd, and the old passion for the fields and their chances which he had felt as a lad before his "watcher's" place had been made intolerable to him by George Westall's bullying.
But for years he had borne his load with extraordinary patience.
Family affection--and the satisfaction of the simpler physical needs--these things make the happiness of the poor.
He had hardly greeted Marcella, who had certainly looked to be greeted. Ever since her arrival in August, as she had told Aldous Raeburn, she had taken a warm interest in this man and his family.
For some weeks after the harvest was over she struggled.
It was known to him in an incredibly short time that that "low caselty fellow Hurd" was attacking "his" game.
"Now look here," he said resolutely, "it don't matter.
Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta's wails which happened to reach him.
Where's them chillen?
Well, mak' eeaste, do, for I'm starvin'.
So you can understan', miss, can't you, as Jim don't want to have nothing to do with Westall?
"I'll help you home if you've a mind."
Hurd turned round and looked at his wife full.
Hurd lifted the boy in his arm.
And it seemed to him that Westall pursued him into these low dens.
"Tyrant and bully!" she thought to herself with Mrs. Hurd's story in her mind.
He took little heed of her.
"There is not a word of papa!"
I Can look after myself."
But he would not ask her; he did not want it; he wanted something that never on this earth would she give him again.
Would not most men have gone to the bad altogether, after such a lapse?
"Wharton?" said his wife, interrogatively.
And now this note of intense personal and family pride, under which Mrs. Boyce's voice had for the first time quivered a little!
Then Mrs. Boyce said drily--
There was a pause.
Then with a delicate handkerchief she rubbed away a spot from the handle of a spoon near her.
And she laid her fingers almost piteously on the note upon her knee.
"Yes."
"You shall go," she said presently--"you wish it--then go--go by all means.
You are very different from me--but for you also I believe it would be the happiest answer."
Yet it would be awkward too.
But the women were silent.
"It is for you, mother--from the Court."
He was feeling ill and reckless; too tired anyway to trouble himself to keep up appearances with Marcella.
Her modern realism played with the thought quite freely; her maidenliness, proud and pure as it was, being nowise ashamed.
But Mrs. Boyce did not waver.
I shan't go out any more.
So these were the terms he was to be on with them--the deuce take them and their pharisaical airs!
People with base minds must think basely; there was no help for it. Those whom she would make her friends would know very well for what purpose she wanted money, power, and the support of such a man, and such a marriage.
If you have chosen your line and wish to make friends here--very well--I will do what I can for you so long as you do not expect me to change my life--for which, my dear, I am grown too crotchety and too old."
I will write to Miss Raeburn and send you over in the carriage. One can put a great deal on health--mine is quite serviceable in the way of excuses.
She would stoop and kiss him if he asked her; he knew that.
I have always been able to meet it with a No!
The cards dropped from her hand on the billiard table, and she stood looking at them, her pride fighting with her pleasure.
Marcella only looked quietly at the beauty which might easily prove to be so important an arrow in her quiver.
Her dress was very different from Marcella's, which, when they were not in mourning, was in general of the ample "aesthetic" type, and gave her a good deal of trouble out of doors.
Marcella felt an instant's fear--fear of the ironic power in the sparkling look so keenly fixed on her offending self; she shrank before the proud reserve expressed in every line of her mother's fragile imperious beauty.
At the very moment when Lord Maxwell had written him a quelling letter, he had become aware that Marcella was on good terms with Lord Maxwell's heir.
Marcella dared not look over her.
What had he said to Lord Maxwell?--and to the Winterbournes?
Her mother looked through the cards, slowly putting them down one by one without remark.
And if I were you, Marcella, I would hardly discuss the family affairs any more--with Mr. Raeburn or anybody else."
The note was courteously and kindly worded.
There was a dignity about her mother's lightest action, about every movement of her slender fingers and fine fair head, which had always held the daughter in check, even while she rebelled.
Oh yes, there is a note," and she pounced upon an envelope she had overlooked.
I won't vote for him; but I'll see fair play.
Why will you not change your things directly you come in?
He read the note by the firelight, and it produced the most contradictory effects upon him.
The sight of her delicate blanched face had in some respects a more and more poignant power with him as the years went on. His anger sank into moroseness.
But, all the same, there is nothing to be got out of empty quarrelling and standing alone.
The cottages should be rebuilt.
The place has been clean swept by some of those brutes in the village--your friends, Marcella.
She was just dropping to sleep when her own words to Aldous Raeburn flashed across her,--
As she opened the oak doors which shut off the central hall of Mellor from the outer vestibule, she saw something white lying on the old cut and disused billiard table, which still occupied the middle of the floor till Richard Boyce, in the course of his economies and improvements, could replace it by a new one.
The newspapers had told her something at intervals of her Merritt relations, for they were fashionable and important folk, but no one of them had crossed the Boyces' threshold since the old London days, wherein Marcella could still dimly remember the tall forms of certain Merritt uncles, and even a stately lady in a white cap whom she knew to have been her mother's mother.
"Then why do you let Marcella go?
"I have lost the habit of going out," she said quietly, "and am too old to begin again."
I like him.
He knew all--at any rate, more than she did--and yet it might end in his asking her to marry him.
"Why don't you go?" he asked her aggressively, rousing himself for a moment to attack her, and so vent some of his ill-humour.
The tacit assumption of many years with her had been that her mother was a dry limited person, clever and determined in small ways, that affected her own family, but on the whole characterless as compared with other people of strong feelings and responsive susceptibilities.
He had passed his first weeks at Mellor in a tremble of desire that his father's old family and country friends should recognise him again and condone his "irregularities." All sorts of conciliatory ideas had passed through his head.
"I'm all right," he said shortly--"as right as I'm likely to be, anyway. As for the shooting, it's nothing but waste of time and shoe leather.
"Why, the Liberal candidate for the division, of course," he said testily.
She wished with leaping pulse that she could see him again quickly.
Poor, poor mamma!
Marcella started.
As the door closed behind her, Mrs. Boyce held out Miss Raeburn's note, which Marcella had returned to her, to her husband.
There was a great repulsion and impatience in her heart, an angry straining against circumstance and fate; yet at the same time a mounting voice of natural affection, an understanding at once sad and new, which paralysed and silenced her.
The Cravens had never seen that, but Marcella saw it.
A passionate hunger leapt within him.
Marcella went up to the fire and, kneeling before it, put the logs with which it was piled together.
"It seemed so horrid to feel everybody standing aloof--we were walking together--he was very kind and friendly--and I asked him to explain."
And in the silence a proud and broken heart once more nerved itself to an endurance that brought it peace with neither man nor God.
What we have to think for is the transition period.
He, on the contrary, had recovered himself, had neither drunk nor squandered, nor deserted his wife and child.
People will only despise her for a girl of no spirit--as they ought."
"I did not foresee many, outside this house and land.
She wished she could know.
Marcella had never heard it before, and it thrilled her.
We would have a parish committee to deal with the charities--oh! the Hardens would come in.
"Your father will be in, I suppose.
As she spoke she took off her velvet cloak, put it carefully aside on a sofa, and sat down again, still in her bonnet, at the tea-table.
Presently she got up and went away to take off her things.
Marcella followed, reading.
There's no grace in it now; I don't know that one isn't inclined to think it an intrusion."
There was no sound audible in the room, or from the house outside.
What then?
Mrs. Boyce read it, and then handed it to Marcella.
"Well, what are you going to do about those cards?" he asked his wife abruptly when she had supplied him with tea, and he was beginning to dry by the fire.
"I must go and make the tea," she said, in a light, cold tone, and turning, she went back to the drawing-room, whither afternoon tea had just been carried.
And it was so long ago."
"Marcella, is that you?"
But Socialism, as a system, will not come in our generation.
I made Redding late that night; the next day I drove on to Burney and asked for directions to the Doctor's ranch.
"Good!" he replied.
"He says that he has a good story ready to break but he won't talk to anyone but you," went on Barnes.
He took down the chain and I drove on up to the house, to find the Doctor waiting for me on the veranda.
I told him you would be here yesterday, but yesterday isn't to-day to that Indian.
You'll have to go there if you want to see him."
Where's your bag?"
"From your college work you are familiar with the laws of magnetism," he said.
After I had turned off the main trail I met no one until the ranch house was in sight.
In the second place, I have always found that you had the gift of vision or imagination and have the ability to believe.
I will take atmosphere samples through an air port and, if there is an atmosphere which will support life, I will step out on the surface.
"What's the story, Doctor?" I asked after lunch as I puffed one of his excellent cigars.
On the point was a mushroom shaped protuberance.
"No ketchum letter, no ketchum Doctor," said the Indian laconically as he pumped another shell into his gun.
There is no doubt that I am crazy, but my craziness is not of the usual type.
The moon, to which I intend to make my first trip, is only 280,000 miles, or 1,478,400,000 feet, from us.
I drove my flivver down to Calvada and asked for the Doctor.
Tell him to talk to me."
"I heard the shot, but didn't know that he was shooting at you.
If the magnetism were neutralized and held exactly neutral, it would be neither repelled nor attracted, but would act only as the force of gravity impelled it.
The Doctor chuckled.
At the time, some inspired writers tried to connect the two events, maintaining that the discovery of the fact that the earth had a new satellite coincident with the receipt of the mysterious messages was evidence that the new planetoid was inhabited and that the messages were attempts on the part of the inhabitants to communicate with us.
Suppose that I construct an airship and then render it neutral to gravity.
Hardly knowing what to believe, I followed him from the house and to a huge barnlike structure, over a hundred feet high, which stood nearby. He opened the door and switched on a light, and there before me stood what looked at first glance to be a huge artillery shell, but of a size larger than any ever made.
I nodded.
"Dr. Livermore?" said the bursar.
The door led us into a comfortable living room through a double door arrangement.
There is a central control room located on an upper level, but it need seldom be entered, for the craft can be controlled by a system of relays from this room or from any other room in the ship.
"This is absurd," I shouted, and drove Lizzie up to the chain.
If I had equipped my space flier with a rocket so that I could move a few miles, or even a few feet, from the dead line, I could proceed, but I did not do so, and I cannot move forward or back. Apparently I am doomed to stay here until my air gives out.
"In that case, I'll tell you all about it.
No doubt you, like the rest of the world, think that I'm crazy?"
Similarly each gravitized particle, to coin a new word, had two poles, one positive and one negative.
A few minutes was enough for me to grasp the simple manipulations which I would have to perform, and I followed him again to the space flier.
He was a man of some local prominence, but he had no more than a local fame, and few papers outside of California even noted the event in their columns.
Naturally I tried to find out what was going on but evidently the Postmaster, who was also the express agent, didn't know.
But I am not, and never will be. I am caught at the neutral point where the gravity of the earth and the moon are exactly equal.
"There are none so blind as those who will not see," he quoted with an icy smile.
"I haven't one," I replied.
The morning of the twenty-second the City Editor called me in and asked me if I knew "Old Liverpills."
"I had relied on my momentum to carry me over this point.
To repeat, I would have started yesterday, had you arrived.
He seemed satisfied, and went on.
"I offered to send out a good man, for when Old Liverpills starts a story it ought to be good, but all I got was a high powered bawling out.
In the third place, you are the only man I know who had the literary ability to write up a good story and at the same time has the scientific background to grasp what it is all about.
My momentum did not do so.
Is that clear?"
That is the rate of acceleration due to gravity and is the rate at which a body increases speed when it falls.
The tiniest propeller would drive it at almost incalculable speed with a minimum consumption of power, for the only resistance to its motion would be the resistance of the air.
How do you overcome this?"
The Indian grunted an assent.
"I guess I forgot to tell where I was," he said.
We know that the body can stand an acceleration of thirty-two feet per second without trouble.
"But there the similarity between the two forces ends," I interrupted.
"No," I answered.
"And why did you pick me to tell it to?"
With an acceleration of thirty-two feet per second, I would pass the moon two hours and forty minutes after leaving the earth.
You may write your story as soon as you wish.
I nodded an assent.
"If the position of the magnets be reversed so that the two similar poles are opposite, they will repel.
I am going to make some observations now, but I will call you again with a report of progress in half-an-hour."
If I reverse it, they both attract me, and again I cannot move.
In fact, I would have started yesterday instead of to-day, had you arrived.
The entire thing is perfectly possible.
"Have you constructed such a device?" I cried.
"You know, of course, that the force of magnetic attraction is inversely proportional to the square of the distances separating the magnet and the attracted particles, and also that each magnetized particle had two poles, a positive and a negative pole, or a north pole and a south pole, as they are usually called?"
You know, for example, that each magnetized particle has two poles.
"You go in," he agreed when he hung up the receiver.
"How are you going to get it out?" I asked.
"I can prove the fallacy of that in a moment," I retorted.
The Doctor used to meet me on the campus and laughingly scold me for my absence, but he was really in sympathy with my ambition and he regularly gave me a passing mark and my units of credit without regard to my attendance, or, rather, lack of it.
I reflected for a moment.
"Exactly, and the field of gravity of the earth is so great compared to the gravity of a man that when he stands on his head, his polarity is instantly reversed."
It is now thirty hours since I left the earth and I should be on the moon, according to my calculations.
I can have a good man rewrite your drivel when you get back."
The Indian took the telephone at my bidding and listened for a minute.
I saw that it was merely hooked to a ring at the end, and I climbed out and started to take it down.
Every particle on the earth is so oriented that the negative poles point toward the positive center of the earth.
"I have no idea of whether you can hear me or not, but I will keep on repeating this message every hour while my battery holds out.
Dr. Livermore's courses were the easiest in the school and they counted as science, so I regularly registered for them, cut them, and attended a class in literature as an auditor.
"If that same bar magnet were held in the field of the electromagnet with its north pole pointed toward the magnet and then, by the action of some outside force of sufficient power, its polarity were reversed, the bar would be repelled.
A short calculation verified the figures the Doctor had given me, and I stood convinced.
About eight o'clock I received a message, rather faintly, but none the less distinctly.
"What kind of junk?" I asked him.
By noon I could hear nothing.
It vanished.
I knew better than to report back to Barnes without the story, so there was nothing to it but to drive up to Hat Creek, and a long, hard drive it was.
"I have passed beyond the range of the atmosphere, Tom," came his voice over the receiver, "and I find that everything is going exactly as it should.
Understand that unless I have your promise not to write this story until I tell you that you can, not a word will I tell you."
"I do not dispute that, but it cannot be denied that court privileges have attained the same end," returned Prince Andrew.
"Every courtier considers himself bound to maintain his position worthily."
His arguments were concise, simple, and clear.
The faces of the unimportant people awaiting their turn for an audience showed embarrassment and servility; the faces of those of higher rank expressed a common feeling of awkwardness, covered by a mask of unconcern and ridicule of themselves, their situation, and the person for whom they were waiting.
Count Arakcheev's anteroom had quite a special character.
"I know myself that one cannot help one's sympathies and antipathies," thought Prince Andrew, "so it will not do to present my proposal for the reform of the army regulations to the Emperor personally, but the project will speak for itself."
A few days later Prince Andrew received notice that he was to go to see the Minister of War, Count Arakcheev.
Prince Andrew heard the nickname "Sila Andreevich" and the words, "Uncle will give it to us hot," in reference to Count Arakcheev.
Some walked thoughtfully up and down, others whispered and laughed.
The field marshal made an appointment to see him, received him graciously, and promised to inform the Emperor.
"He is Minister of War, a man trusted by the Emperor, and I need not concern myself about his personal qualities: he has been commissioned to consider my project, so he alone can get it adopted," thought Prince Andrew as he waited among a number of important and unimportant people in Count Arakcheev's waiting room.
In the summer of 1809 Pierre returned to Petersburg.
To favor revolutions, overthrow everything, repel force by force?...
No!
Such were Willarski and even the Grand Master of the principal lodge.
A solemn meeting of the lodge of the second degree was convened, at which Pierre promised to communicate to the Petersburg Brothers what he had to deliver to them from the highest leaders of their order.
He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the bachelor circles in which he moved.
Finally, to the fourth category also a great many Brothers belonged, particularly those who had lately joined.
His heart was not in the mystical aspect of Freemasonry.
We are drowsing, but we must act." Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.
At the same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank under him the closer bound he involuntarily became to the order.
But in these great endeavors we are gravely hampered by the political institutions of today.
He supported almost singlehanded a poorhouse the order had founded in Petersburg.
When he put his foot down it sank in.
Our Freemasons knew from correspondence with those abroad that Bezukhov had obtained the confidence of many highly placed persons, had been initiated into many mysteries, had been raised to a higher grade, and was bringing back with him much that might conduce to the advantage of the masonic cause in Russia.
He divided the Brothers he knew into four categories.
His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations and dissipations.
He gave money for the erection of temples and supplemented as far as he could the collection of alms, in regard to which the majority of members were stingy and irregular.
We are very far from that.
After the usual ceremonies Pierre rose and began his address.
The Petersburg Freemasons all came to see him, tried to ingratiate themselves with him, and it seemed to them all that he was preparing something for them and concealing it.
CHAPTER VII
Joseph Alexeevich was not in Petersburg--he had of late stood aside from the affairs of the Petersburg lodges, and lived almost entirely in Moscow.
Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing.
And so toward the end of the year he went abroad to be initiated into the higher secrets of the order.
When he had joined the Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who confidently steps onto the smooth surface of a bog.
What is to be done in these circumstances?
In the third category he included those Brothers (the majority) who saw nothing in Freemasonry but the external forms and ceremonies, and prized the strict performance of these forms without troubling about their purport or significance.
Freemasonry, at any rate as he saw it here, sometimes seemed to him based merely on externals.
Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence.
Only then will our order have the power unobtrusively to bind the hands of the protectors of disorder and to control them without their being aware of it.
Both, however, were disappointed, as both of us were fled.
He purchas'd me at all Adventures, without enquiring what, or who I was.
Their gross Blunder at first incens'd his Majesty to the last Degree; but after he had view'd the Lady with an attentive Eye, he found she was extremely pretty, and was soon pacify'd.
And pray, if you will be so good as to inform me, with what View, are you searching after a Creature so very difficult to be met with?
At last, she gave him a particular Detail of her own Misfortunes, and again requested to know his.
You must kick this Bladder, Sir, once a Day about your Hall for a whole Hour together, with all the Vigour and Activity you possibly can.
The Case, being thus circumstantiated, Sir, I hope you will not interrupt me any longer, lest my Rivals here in the Field should happen to circumvent me.
I talk'd as big as a Queen; but I was treated like the most servile Domestic.
And in Effect, she was so: She had as much Art, however, as Caprice.
He is a perfect Debauchee; his sole Delight lies in good Eating, Wine, and Women; and is one, who imagines, that the Almighty sent him into the World for no other Purpose but to gratify his unruly Appetites.
The Couriers, who flew after me, knew nothing of me.
For she pleas'd the King of Kings: In short, she had such an Ascendancy over him, that he didn't scruple in publick to own her as his Wife.
I answer'd him with all the Resentment becoming one of my high Character and unspotted Virtue.
In short, our Doctor in about eight Days Time, perform'd an absolute Cure.
You know very well too, that indulgent Heav'n inspir'd, as it were, my little Dwarf, with artful Means to give me timely Notice of the rash Resolutions of the King, my cruel Husband.
The Proposition was readily embrac'd.
He took the Freedom to approach one of them, and ask her, in the most courteous Manner, if he might have the Honour to assist her in her Researches.
He threw himself prostrate on the Ground, and kiss'd the Dust of her Feet.
You'll smile, doubtless, when I tell you the Prince look'd upon me as the most amiable Captive of the two; but then, I presume you will be sorry to hear, that my hard Fate doom'd me to be a Vassal in his Seraglio.
Every now and then she wip'd her Eyes, as the Tears trickl'd down afresh her lovely Cheeks.
What a shocking State was I in for the first Queen of the Universe!
He is excessively fat, and puffs and blows every Moment, like one half choak'd.
I am a Physician by Profession.
Whereupon I was taken from my magnificent Prison, the Bowels of his God, and set up at the Head of a very powerful Party.
In short, in a few Days he became a perfect Mad-man.
Whereupon she gave his Post to her favourite Dwarf, and made her Fop of a Page the Keeper of his Majesty's great Seal, and Confidence.
I, with an audible and distinct, but hollow Tone, address'd my self thus, like an Oracle, to the King of Kings.
Judge the dreadful Apprehensions I was under, upon his making such a peremptory Declaration.
When he has gorg'd himself so unmercifully that he is ready to burst, his chief Physician can persuade him to take any Thing for his Relief; tho' he laughs at him, and despises his Advice when he's well and sober.
All the World deplor'd the Loss of me their former Queen. The King, who never acted the Part of a Tyrant, till the Moment he would have imprison'd me, and strangled you, seem'd to have drown'd all his good Qualities in his Dotage on that capricious Enchantress. He came to the Temple on the solemn Festival of the sacred Fire.
May immortal Health descend from Heaven to preserve a Life, Sir, so precious as yours is.
Her Caprice, which seem'd a Judgement from above, portended a sudden Revolution.
But as he came to the Banks of a Rivulet, at the remotest part of the Meadow, he perceiv'd another young Lady, reclin'd on the Grass, and entirely disengag'd.
She was found alone, and in a very disconsolate Condition.
Each of the pontifical Gallants observ'd their Summons to a Moment.
He put the Question to her, in short, at once, and agreed to sign upon her Compliance.
She ponder'd upon this weighty Affair very seriously; but said nothing to any one whomsoever.
Blasted, Madam, said the luscious Pontiff; No!
Now the Reader shall hear with how much Benevolence and Discretion this amiable Widow behav'd on this emergent Occasion.
What could tempt me, in short, to a Prolongation of my Life, I can't imagine, I, who am grown a perfect Skeleton, all wrinkled and deform'd.
With all my Soul, said the amorous Pontiff, provided----you'll be kind, my dearest.
In the first Place, she made use of the most costly Perfumes; and drest herself to the utmost Advantage to render her Charms as conspicuous as possible; And thus gaily attir'd, demanded a private Audience of the High Priest of the Stars.
I only ask--How much of that unfavourable judgment ought in justice to be set down to the fallacies connected with an imperfect appreciation of facts?
I do not think that in the special scheme which the novelist set himself here he can be accused of any failure.
Miss Matthews in her earlier scenes has touches of greatness which a thousand French novelists lavishing "candour" and reckless of exaggeration have not equalled; and I believe that Fielding kept her at a distance during the later scenes of the story, because he could not trust himself not to make her more interesting than Amelia.
"Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning--Her smiles and her tears are worth evening's best light."
I have used the word "preparations," and it in part indicates Fielding's virtue, a virtue shown, I think, in this book as much as anywhere.
I have not their usual design in this epistle, nor will I borrow their language. Long, very long may it be before a most dreadful circumstance shall make it possible for any pen to draw a just and true character of yourself without incurring a suspicion of flattery in the bosoms of the malignant.
This, I believe, will be readily granted; nor will the public voice, I think, be more divided to whom they shall give that appellation.
At least we are allowed to see in Mr. Booth no qualities other than these, and in her no imagination even of any other qualities.
Colonel Bath has necessarily united all suffrages.
Dr Harrison is not perfect.
People have been unwilling to tell and to hear the whole truth even about Wolfe and Nelson, who were both favourable specimens of the type; but Fielding the infallible saw that type in its quiddity, and knew it, and registered it for ever.
James to some extent is--quite estimable and harmless; but even as it is, they are not to be wholly ill spoken of.
The life is as vivid as ever; the minor sketches may be even called a little more vivid.
DEDICATION.
One could have better pardoned her forgiveness of her husband if she had in the first place been a little more conscious of what there was to forgive; and in the second, a little more romantic in her attachment to him.
Miss Sedley, must, I fear, be pronounced to be, an amiable fool, there is really too much of the milk of human kindness, unrefreshed and unrelieved of its mawkishness by the rum or whisky of human frailty, in her.
The palace of his work is the hall, not of Eblis, but of a quite beneficent enchanter, who puts burning hearts into his subjects, not to torture them, but only that they may light up for us their whole organisation and being.
But it cannot be denied that the book, now as always, has incurred a considerable amount of hinted fault and hesitated dislike.
I do not urge these things in mitigation of any unfavourable judgment against the later novel.
To put what I mean out of reach of cavil, compare Imogen and Amelia, and the difference will be felt.
It begins instead of ending with the marriage-bells; and though critic after critic of novels has exhausted his indignation and his satire over the folly of insisting on these as a finale, I doubt whether the demand is not too deeply rooted in the English, nay, in the human mind, to be safely neglected.
"I am paid for it all."
Sir William Brodrick, when that fearful operation was performed in London, thought that a month would see the end of it.
Early on the following morning his father again sent for him. "Mountjoy," he said, "I have thought much about it, and I have changed my mind."
"I have certainly expected nothing, and there could be no reason why he should."
"Do not joke with me.
What do you think of him as a man generally?
"The governor thinks that you have behaved uncommonly well to him."
"No, not about my will at all.
I have always regarded your father as a most excellent man, but thoroughly dishonest.
"Do you mean that you could prolong his life?"
He would rob any one,--but always to eke out his own gifts to other people.
"If you will have an answer, I do not consider him an honest man.
"But I think that he has within him a capacity for love, and an unselfishness, which almost atones for his dishonesty; and there is about him a strange dislike to conventionality and to law which is so interesting as to make up the balance.
"Who can say?
"You mean about Merton?"
He could have given himself the same counsel, and would certainly live longer by obeying it than the reverse.
Do you call him an honest man?"
"How long will he live?"
As there is no difficulty in the matter, there need be no conceit on my part in saying that so far my advice might be of service to him."
That shall remain as it is.
In neither case can one look upon him as honest."
He has, therefore, to my eyes been most romantic."
Miss Scarborough seldom came to table at that hour, but remained in a room up-stairs, close to her brother, so that she might be within call should she be wanted.
"It will be quite unnecessary," said Mr. Merton.
"Just the truth."
"And as to his health?"
"Ah, as to that I cannot answer so decidedly.
"If you choose to cut up rough you can do so.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. "Will he live or will he die?"
There!
He will do nothing because I tell him."
"What is it?" said Mountjoy, in a tone of much surprise.
"About your will?"
Give him five hundred pounds, and he ought to be satisfied.
I would propose that we should fix upon some sum which shall be yours at his death,--just as though he had left it to you.
All this story about your brother is true or is not true.
"He has entertained an idea of late that he wishes to make what reparation may be possible to me; and therefore, as he says, he does not choose to burden his will with legacies.
He has exerted himself this morning, whereas I have advised him not to exert himself.
But I know you would not joke on such a subject. And my question did not merely go to the state of his health.
Indeed, he shall fix the sum himself."
He has told me to look after you."
"He will die, certainly."
"Just so."
"I don't think I can tell you now.
Later on in the evening Mountjoy Scarborough began again.
There is some provision made for my aunt, who, however, has her own fortune.
The sickly greenish hue changed in Leverett's face as the warmer tide stirred from its stagnation.
It was my mistake."
One shot!
Something in Leverett's unsteady voice made Kloon turn his head.
It was blood.
Quintana smiled.
"Now, my gay and nimble thimble-rigger," said Smith genially, "while I take ten minutes' rest we'll have a little polite conversation.
Then, as through the swirling waters of the last dark whirlpool, a dulled roar of returning consciousness filled his being.
You should have killed them."
Quintana gazed curiously at his soiled hand.
Suddenly Leverett's knees gave way and he dropped to the ground, grovelling at Quintana's feet in an agony of fright:
"What!"
Jake, he wanted me to steal it.
Quintana shook him into speechlessness.
'What the hell's the trouble?' I yells.
Ah, bah!
He looked at the back of Kloon's massive head.
"He got bogged."
"No!--damn it all----"
Quintana's fingers had instantly ceased operations.
"I'm tellin' you, ain't I?" retorted the other, raising a voice now shrill with the strain of this new crisis rushing so unexpectedly upon him: "I heard Jake give a holler.
"Now your gun!" continued Smith.
These, however, were very slowly sinking, now.
By the birch sapling he paused and picked up Leverett's rifle.
After he had contemplated the crimson traces of murder for a few moments, he turned and looked at Leverett with faint curiosity.
So!...
Yes?
If it were a minute or a year he stood there he could never have reckoned the space of time.
Well, then, still more interesting to relate, a gentleman named Clinch helps himself to these famous jewels.
That was the most real death that Leverett ever had died.
There was the back of Kloon's bushy head.
Or, rather, a monologue.
"Kneel down with your hands up and your back toward me!" said Smith.
"Sit down!" said Smith.
"No."
Somebody was shaking him, shouting at him.
Finally he managed it.
At the quaking edge of a little pool of water, Leverett halted.
One shot!--and fear, which had shadowed him from birth, was at an end forever.
Like most liars he realised the advisability of looking his victim straight in the eyes.
The sun's level rays glimmered ruddy through the woods.
He hesitated, lifted his automatic, then, as though annoyed by Leverett's deafening shriek, shrugged, hesitated, pocketed both pistol and packet, and turned on his heel.
I am going to return this packet to its rightful owner, the Grand Duchess Theodorica of Esthonia.
The arm swerved and clutched him by the collar of his flannel shirt.
"Yes.
"What you do by that pond-hole?
"Stay put," he said sharply, as Quintana started to turn his head.
"Say, Jake?"
Quintana unbuttoned the grey wool shirt, thrust in his hand and drew forth the packet for which Jake Kloon had died within the hour.
Quintana blocked his way.
He had halted and he was fumbling at the twine which bound a flat, paper-wrapped packet.
Quintana's dark, tense face was expressionless when Leverett ventured to look at him.
"Where is he, then, this Jake?" repeated Quintana impatiently.
"Ah!
Now I search the other pocket....
"Careless, certainly," assented Quintana politely.
I gotta take a peek.
"You rat," he said, "if you're lying to me I'll come back and settle your affair.
Tiens!
A green fly appeared, buzzing about the dead man.
For example, what do you suppose I am going to do with this packet in my pocket?"
Others appeared, whirling, gyrating, filling the silence with their humming.
Quintana shrugged and laid Leverett's rifle beside the packet.
"Jake's got it." Leverett's voice was growing stronger.
"Jake, I wanta take a peek at them bills."
When Quintana disappeared among the tamaracks, Leverett ventured to rise to his knees.
Like all cowards, he had always been inclined to bold and ruthless action; but inclination was all that ever had happened.
There were broken ferns, but he could not straighten them.
A little breeze came by and stirred the bushy hair on Kloon's head and fluttered the ferns around him where he lay.
And, to make the bribe worth while, Leverett had concluded that only a solid packet of thousand-dollar bills could account for the twenty thousand offered.
One shot would blow that skull into fragments, he thought, shivering.
"Lay that packet on the ground."
He settled himself comfortably on the log:
"You did not shoot?
Recognition was instant and mutual as the man jerked the trap-robber to his feet, stifling the muffled yell in his throat.
Diverted and gratified by the accuracy of his aim, he took other shots at intervals.
"My frien'----"
Quintana smiled again.
But there Quintana held him in his wiry grip.
"It's the unusual that happens in life, my dear Quintana.
Then he spat, as answer.
"Didn't you kill Kloon?"
In the intense stillness of the place, suddenly the dead man made a sound; and the trap-robber nearly fainted.
Almost imperceptibly he moved it, moved it again, froze stiff as Kloon spat, then, by infinitesimal degrees, continued to edge the muzzle toward Kloon.
"Oh, come, that won't do at all," said Harry, who had already got her hand within his arm.
I cannot dance again, and will not.
"Don't say that, Florence."
Then, however, it came to his turn to dance, and he had a moment allowed to him to collect his thoughts.
"Hush!" said Florence, afraid that the very walls might hear the sound of Harry's words.
Mrs. Mountjoy certainly looked as though no special communication as to Florence's future movements ought to be made to Harry Annesley.
"A fellow is always entitled to five minutes, and then I am down for the next waltz."
"I am told that you are going away to Brussels."
"You are my hero." The sound of this nearly drove him mad with joy.
"I do mean it.
"I hate dancing.
I declare, Florence, you have not spoken a single word to me, though there is so much that you must have to say.
"Come and take a walk," said Harry.
She has got horrible news to tell you."
"Oh, heavens!
The dance was now finished.
What a question to ask!
"But I am, and you can't get out of it now.
What might not happen to a girl who was passing the balmy Christmas months amid the sweet shadows of an Italian lake?
"I dare say."
"Yes, I think so; I do think so."
"I have wondered that you continued.
"And that poor man who has disappeared is nowhere."
What could he want with a word more?
"Why not?
She did not wish to declare to this lover that that other lover was as nothing to her.
Is he to blame for what his father has done?" Harry felt that he could not press the case against Captain Scarborough without some want of generosity.
"I shall think so, unless you can be discreet.
And Mrs. Mountjoy was already prowling round the room after her daughter.
"I think not, because I trust you.
I shall run against everybody.
Oh, you know what you have got to tell me!
We need not say anything more about it at present.
"That I should have been so fortunate!
"And how long are you to be away?" asked Harry.
What news?"
I can see no one.
But as he did want more she would, after her own way, reply to him.
There was her mother still looking at them; but for her Harry did not now care one straw.
"Oh, Mrs. Armitage, I am so obliged to you! no fellow was ever so obliged to a friend before."
I am so proud of myself that I think I must look almost like a hero."
"Nor I,--nor I."
Florence had promised to be his, and he was sure that she would never break her word to him.
The news is simply that her mother is going to take her to Brussels, and that she is to live for a while amid the ambassadorial splendors with Sir Magnus and his wife."
"Don't suppose, Mrs. Armitage, that I am taking any pride to myself.
All she knew was that he had now pledged himself to her, and that she intended to keep him to his pledge.
"But why?" he asked.
Fielding's third great novel has been the subject of much more discordant judgments than either of its forerunners.
His alternate persecution and patronage of Booth, though useful to the story, repeat the earlier fault of Allworthy, and are something of a blot.
I do not think that we could fully understand Fielding without it; I do not think that we could derive the full quantity of pleasure from him without it.
But he is individually much more natural than Allworthy, and indeed is something like what Dr Johnson would have been if he had been rather better bred, less crotchety, and blessed with more health.
Of the peers, more wicked and less wicked, there is indeed not much good to be said.
They might have been--Mrs.
It would be invidious, and is noways needful, to single out any critic of our own time to place beside these great men.
The good-natured reader, if his heart should be here affected, will be inclined to pardon many faults for the pleasure he will receive from a tender sensation: and for readers of a different stamp, the more faults they can discover, the more, I am convinced, they will be pleased.
The best man is the properest patron of such an attempt.
Less amusing but more delicately faithful and true are Colonel James and his wife.
Only Swift, by combination of experience and genius, has given us live lords in Lord Sparkish and Lord Smart.
They are not in the least the worse for it, and we are infinitely the better.
But though she is by no means what her namesake and spiritual grand-daughter.
I do not mean that he has ethical faults, for that is a merit, not a defect; but he is not quite perfect in art.
But as a study of the brave man who is almost more braggart than brave, of the generous man who will sacrifice not only generosity but bare justice to "a hogo of honour," he is admirable, and up to his time almost unique.
But Mrs. Ellison and Mrs. Atkinson are very women, and the serjeant, though the touch of "sensibility" is on him, is excellent; and Dr Harrison's country friend and his prig of a son are capital; and Bondum, and "the author," and Robinson, and all the minor characters, are as good as they can be.
Nor will I assume the fulsome stile of common dedicators.
INTRODUCTION.
It is, however, usual to detect a lack of vivacity in the book, an evidence of declining health and years.
Ordinary writers and ordinary readers have never been quite content to admit that bravery and braggadocio can go together, that the man of honour may be a selfish pedant.
But I must say he's a good farmer.
"Queer chap, Jeff," said Alec Churchill reflectively.
Only a woman could fully understand what I mean.
But their former comradeship was now impossible; they could be friends, but never again companions.
But that couldn't prevent my loving you--just humbly loving you, asking nothing else.
I just want you to know it."
She and Jeffrey were always friends, although they met but seldom.
Jeffrey drew nearer, absently patting his dog's head.
"I thought everybody knew that.
"How lovely they are!
He turned and went down through the orchard lane, taking the old field-path across the valley and up the hill, which he had traversed so often and so joyfully in boyhood.
But, as the years went by, this thing he dreaded did not happen.
Jeff had missed her sorely.
I know--I have always known--that you are far above me.
I oughtn't to tell you now.
"That I could care for you?" said Sara, looking round at last.
He looked these facts unflinchingly in the face until he had grown used to them, and then he laid down his course for himself.
Some impulse that would not be denied made him lean over and take her hand.
I've hidden it for eighteen years because I didn't think you wanted to hear it, but I'll give myself the delight of saying it frankly now."
Do you remember the first day we spent picking mayflowers together?"
The boy was thrilled with delight.
He belonged to her from the day they had hunted arbutus on the hill.
I should not have let you waste all these years.
As the light shot up she stood clearly revealed in it--a tall, slender woman in a trailing gown of grey.
"Is there any particular reason for her to do anything?" asked Alec Churchill.
He's got the best farm in Bayside, and that's a real nice house he put up on it.
I have no friends left."
Then his heart rebuked him.
Sara's parents placed no bar to their intimacy.
That's another unnatural thing about him."
"Is there anything I can do?" muttered Jeffrey miserably.
Probably she'll go and live in town.
When the sun began to lower over the beeches she had gone home with her arms full of arbutus, but she had turned at the edge of the pineland and waved her hand at him.
She won't stay there, not likely.
She came and took them from him, and her hands touched his, sending a little thrill of joy through him.
You always bring me the first, don't you, Jeff?
"Father has gone.
Perhaps she needed him--perhaps she had wondered why he had not come to offer her such poor service as might be in his power.
"If--if you have loved me, Jeff, why did you never tell me so before?"
"There ain't no such dirty pride about Jeff," pronounced Christopher conclusively.
"Are you angry, Sara?" he questioned sadly, after a silence.
Her eyes brightened when she saw the mayflowers he carried.
Sara had turned away her head.
Jeffrey caught Sara's name and paused on the outskirts of the group to listen.
"Sara," he whispered, wondering, bewildered, half-afraid to believe this unbelievable joy.
"Then you were more modest than a man ought to be, Jeff.
"Little boy," she had said, with a friendly smile, "will you show me where the mayflowers grow?"
He had not intruded on her since her father's death, thinking her sorrow too great for him to meddle with.
It overjoyed him to give the choicest dusters he found into her slim, waxen little fingers, and watch her eyes grow round with pleasure in them.
Sara lighted the lamp on the table.
Strange she never married.
He followed her into the room where they had always sat in his rare calls.
Sara had not forgotten her old friend.
That is how I feel now.
All through their childhood they had been fast friends.
It were better to love her, whom he could never win, than to love and be loved by any other woman.
Even a stranger, not knowing her age, would have guessed it to be what it was, yet it would have been hard to say what gave the impression of maturity.
"Sara!" he said, aghast.
"There is nothing anybody can do, Jeff," she said piteously.
"Maybe she'll stay on at Pinehurst," said Job Crowe.
Sometimes she sent him a book; it was his custom to search for the earliest mayflowers and take them to her; once in a long while they met and talked of many things.
She kept her stately head averted.
"I--I--you were as far above me as a star in the sky--I never dreamed--I never hoped----"
Sara turned her eyes on him.
How could he dwell in the valley knowing that she had gone from the hill?
Jeffrey groaned aloud.
"No, I understand they're not on very good terms.
His great office in life was to be her friend, humble and unexpectant; to be at hand if she should need him for ever so trifling a service; never to presume, always to be faithful.
Jeff smiled.
Jeffrey went around to the garden door and knocked.
Such love as mine ought to anger no woman, Sara.
Sara was going away.
"I don't know whether I can forgive you for not telling me before," said Sara steadily.
That night, when he told his mother of the little girl he had met on the hill, she had hoped anxiously that he had been "very polite," for the little girl was a daughter of Colonel Stuart, newly come to Pinehurst.
How could he live without her?
Jeffrey thought that Sara must often be lonely, but she never said so; she remained sweet, serene, calm-eyed, like the child he had met on the hill.
"Well, she'll have to leave Pinehurst.
He was gentle, well-behaved, and manly.
"Perhaps so," he said simply, "but not because I have loved you.
Well, she's left pretty lonesome."
I ask nothing now but your friendship.
Sara don't like Charles Stuart or his wife--and I don't blame her.
I love you--I love you!
"I knew I could never win you--that I had no right to dream of you so.
"I learned that tonight for the first time," he answered.
She lifted her delicate, high-bred face, fearless love shining in every lineament, to his, and they exchanged their first kiss.
Perhaps she needed the advice or assistance only he could give.
Wonder what she'll do?"
And last, but not least, quietly inserted among all these fooleries and harmless humbugs, are two or three recipes which promise the safe gratification of the basest vices.
It is some little comfort to know that this gentleman, who is so much opposed to the present prevailing methods of spelling, lost the three cents which he invested in seeking "fratage." But a good many sensible people have carelessly sent away the small amounts demanded by letters like the above, and have wondered why their prepaid parcels never came.
I have already given an account of the way in which lottery dealers operate.
Having, therefore, about two hundred dollars in his pocket, and trade slackening, he coolly observes, with a terseness and clearness of oratory that would not discredit General Sherman:
This Frenchman is perhaps a relative of the equally celebrated Russian traveller, Toofaroff.
He really is licensed as a peddler, and though arrested more than once, has consequently not been found legally punishable.
Greasing your cheeks is just as good as trying to whistle the hair out, but not a bit better.
This chap sends round a list of two hundred and fifty recipes at various prices, from twenty-five cents to a dollar each.
There are such, however, and a great many of them.
Pleas forward the same.
I do not propose to cooperate with them, if I know it.
He now began, without any further promises, to sell a lot of bogus lockets at five dollars each, and in a few minutes had disposed of about forty.
It is, perhaps, one of the safest swindles ever contrived.
This liberal trader now drove slowly a little way along, and the crowd pressed after him.
Most of these recipes are for sufficiently harmless purposes--shaving-soap, cement, inks--"five gallons of good ink for fifteen cents"--tooth-powders, etc.
Some are only to cheat you out of money, and others offer in return for money some base gratification.
Next, is an account by a half amused and half indignant eye-witness, of what happened in a well known town in Western New York, on Friday, January 6, 1865.
It is headed "The Gypsies' Seven Secret Charms." These charms consist of a kind of hellbroth or decoction.
You are then to go about and peddle it, and swiftly become independently rich.
One observation will sufficiently show what an impudent mess of lies this story is, namely;--If the manufacturers of New England wanted to give money to the Sanitary Commission, they would give money; if goods, they would give goods.
I have carefully refrained from giving any names or information which would enable anybody to address any of these folks.
If I give you your money back you will think me a lunatic.
Good morning!"
Do not try to get money without giving fair value for it.
They certainly would not put their gifts through the additional roundabout, useless nonsense of a lottery, which is to turn over only the same amount of funds to the Commission.
I will specify only one more of my collection, of yet another kind.
I am a licensed peddler.
More than one foolish youth has received, instead of the vile thing that he sent five dollars for, a nice little New Testament.
His scheme appeals at once to benevolence and to greediness.
You receive in return a second circular, saying that they work a great deal better all together, and so the man will send you all of them when you send the rest of the money.
I shall send it Per Express Your recpt."
And sure enough, he drove off.
There have been some cases where a funny sort of swindle has been effected by these peddlers of pruriency, by selling some dirty-minded dupe a cheap good book, at the extravagant price of a dear bad one.
"Gentlemen--I have sold you those goods at my price.
He says: "The profits of the distribution are to be given to the Sanitary Commission;" and secondly, "Every ticket brings a prize of at least its full value, and some of them $5,000."
These precious conceits are set forth in a ridiculous hodge-podge of statements.
You send the money, we will say, for one of these charms--for they are for sale separately.
Know whom you deal with.
The next paper I can copy verbatim, except some names, etc., is a letter as follows:
A number of these recipes are barefaced quackeries; such as cures for consumption, cancer, rheumatism, and sundry other diseases; to make whiskers and mustaches grow--ah, boys, you can't hurry up those things.
"But," somebody says, "how can you afford this arrangement, which is a direct loss of the whole cost of working your lottery, and moreover of the whole value of all prizes costing more than a ticket?"
A personage described as "dressed in Yankee style," drove into the principal street of the place with a horse and buggy, and began to sell what is called in some parts of New England "Attleboro," that is, imitation jewelry, but promising to return the customers their money, if required, and doing so.
Of the nasty ones, I can give no details.
This is a printed circular appealing to a class of fools, if possible, even shallower, sillier, and more credulous than any I have named yet.
But whatever means are used, and whatever purpose is sought, they are all alike in one thing--they depend entirely on the monstrous number of simpletons who will send money to people they know nothing about.
I do not imagine that there are many of these addlepates among my readers; but there is no harm in giving once more a very plain and easy direction which may possibly save somebody some money and some mortification.
But here is the point, after all.
After a number of transactions of this kind, he bawls out, like the sorcerer in Aladdin, who went around crying new lamps for old, "Who will give me four dollars for this five-dollar greenback?"
He found a customer; sold a one-dollar greenback for ninety cents; then sold some half-dollar bills for twenty-five cents each; then flung out among the crowd what a fisherman would call ground bait, in the shape of a handful of "currency."
Send it, if you choose!
Some of them are arrant nonsense; such as "tea--better than the Chinese," which is as if he promised something wetter than water; "to make thieves' vinegar;" "prismatic diamond crystals for windows;" "to make yellow butter"--is the butter blue where the man lives?
Those are what he really hoped to get money for.
It does really seem as if an independent fortune could be made simply by putting forth circulars and advertisements, requesting the receiver to send five dollars to the advertiser, and saying that "it will be all right."
Everybody scrambled for the money.
He became permanently weak and grew more and more helpless day by day.
Other children flocked around the merry youngster, seeking to emulate his play of voice and the oldsters smiled as they saw and heard the joyous confusion about the tiny reveler.
But that made him think more and more.
She hovered over him like a distressed mother bird over its youngling fallen from the nest, but, with all her efforts, she could not bring back even his usual slight measure of health and strength to the poor Little Mok.
Go to sleep, and you will see him."
At last a fever attacked her and the end of her patient, busy life came.
There with them the crippled boy was often to be found.
Humor is one of the latest, as it is one of the most precious, grains shaken out of Time's hour-glass, but Little Mok somehow caught a tiny bit of the rainbow gift, long before its time in the world, and soon, with him, it was to disappear for centuries to come.
The veteran stared in surprise.
She only said: "I want to see him in the daytime."
Just as in life, she saw him, with all his familiar looks and motions.
The man and woman were faithful to each other with the fidelity of the higher animals and their children were cared for with rough tenderness in their infancy.
He felt drawn closer to Lightfoot, his wife, no longer a young girl, but the mother of Little Mok, who was dead, and of all his children.
"What do you mean?" cried Lightfoot.
The mother love of Lightfoot warded off the last pitiless blow of nature, although the child, a hopeless cripple, never after walked.
LITTLE MOK.
He may have been the first child ever so cherished from such impulse.
From his mother the child inherited a joyous disposition which nothing could subdue.
The child owned that great gift, the memory of sight, and his hand was cunning.
And at last Little Mok died, and was buried under the stones, and the snow fell over the lonely cairn under the fir trees outside the Fire Valley where his grave was made.
His cherished excursions to the river, even his little journeys on old One-Ear's strong arm to the cliff top, from whence he could see the whole world at once, had all to be abandoned.
The time of absolute dependence was made very short, though, and children very early were required to find some of their own food, and taught by necessity to protect themselves.
When the child, strong and joyous, was scarcely two years old, he fell from a ledge off the cliff where he had climbed to play, and both his legs were broken.
He was not always gay and joyous.
"Bless you, Lizard," cried the girl.
"All right," said the girl, "I'll be there.
A man stepped out and peered through the glass of her machine.
It was after two o'clock in the morning when the Lizard entered an apartment on Ashland Avenue which he had for several years used as a hiding-place when the police were hot upon his trail.
Once within his room the Lizard sank into a chair and wiped the perspiration from his forehead, although it was by no means a warm night.
"It looks pretty bad for him, don't it?
Tad, with keen satisfaction, heard him utter a grunt as he struck.
The man's left leg was jerked free of the ground, and before he was able to catch his balance the fellow fell heavily on his side.
From the growl of rage that followed, Tad had the satisfaction of knowing that his tactics had not been without effect.
However, before the fellow was able to put his desperate plan fully into execution, Tad, with the resourcefulness of a born wrestler, suddenly formed a plan of his own.
Tad Butler hesitated only for the briefest instant.
His firm jaw assumed the set look that it had shown when he won the championship wrestling match at the high school.
Then Tad, rising, slipped to the opening of the tent and looked out wonderingly upon the impressive scene.
"A mountain storm coming up," answered the boy, who for some time had lain wide awake listening to the ever increasing roar.
And what he saw this time thrilled him through and through.
All his faculties were instantly on the alert.
Once more, impenetrable darkness settled over the scene, and, when the next flash came the camp had resumed its former appearance.
"What about the ponies?" roared Ned Rector, quickly collecting his wits and following in the wake of the fleeing Tad.
As his body swung by that of his captor, the boy threw out his hands, clasping them about the left leg of the other and instantly locking his fingers.
At any second the boy might find himself flying through space--perhaps over a precipice.
"Stolen!
He had figured--had hoped--that a certain thing might occur.
The boy paused with one hand raised above his head, prepared to pull the tent flap quickly back in place in case the stranger chanced to glance that way, all the while gazing at the man with unbelieving eyes.
So, resorting to every wrestling trick that he knew, he sought to prevent the fellow from getting the right arm free.
However, the most the lad could hope to accomplish would be to delay the dreaded climax for a minute or more.
He had not long to wait.
Tad gave a quick start as a flash of lightning disclosed something moving on the far side of the camp.
Though thoroughly at home in a wrestling game, Tad knew that he would be no match for the superior strength of his antagonist.
The shouts of the others at his rear, warning him of the danger and calling upon him to return, fell upon unheeding ears.
Tad's blood was up.
So skilfully had the move been executed that Tad Butler found himself dangling, head down, before he really understood what had occurred.
"Where are you, Tad?"
"The ponies!
Was he dreaming?
So heavily did Tad strike that, for the moment, the breath was fairly knocked from his body.
His head was whirling dizzily.
So intent was the boy upon the accomplishment of his purpose that he gave no heed to the fact that the sounds ahead had ceased, and that only the soft patter of his own feet on the rocks broke the stillness between the loud claps of thunder.
And the result, though wholly unexpected by the mountaineer, was not entirely so to Tad.
Tad wondered, pinching himself to make sure that he really was awake.
Tad, groping for a wrestler's hold, felt his hand close over the hilt of a knife in the man's belt.
He no longer saw the brilliant flashes of lightning that at intervals lighted up the scene, nor heard the voices of his companions frantically calling upon him to come back.
It was a brave and joyous band that had set out from the Colorado city in khaki trousers, blue shirts and broad-brimmed sombreros for an outing over the wildest of the Rocky Mountain ranges.
It was followed after an interval by a low rumble of distant thunder that buffeted itself from peak to peak of the Rockies.
Yet Tad held on desperately.
For a few moments the boys lay thus.
It plainly was the intent of the man to hurl the boy far from him, as soon as Tad's body should have attained sufficient momentum to carry it.
Each flash appeared to light up the mountains for miles around, their crests lying dark and forbidding, piled tier upon tier, the blue, menacing flashes hovering about them momentarily, then fading away in the impenetrable darkness.
The camp appeared to be wrapped in sleep, and, by the bright flashes, Tad observed that the burros of the pack train were stretched out sound asleep, while, off in the bushes, he could hear the restless moving about of the ponies, their slumbers already disturbed by the coming of the storm.
It seemed as if the jolt would wrench his arms from their sockets.
By this time the entire camp, with the exception of Professor Zepplin and Stacy Brown, had set out on a swift run, following on the trail of Tad.
The Pony Riders stirred restlessly on their cots and tucked the blankets up under their chins.
With a snarl of rage the boy's captor suddenly released his hold around the waist and grasped Tad quickly by the knees.
Wake up!"
A man was cautiously leading two of the ponies from camp, just back of Professor Zepplin's tent.
"Coming!" answered the voice of the guide, its strident tones carrying clearly to Tad, filling him with a feeling as near akin to joy as was possible under the circumstances.
Yet, even if Tad had sensed this, its meaning doubtless would have been lost upon him, unused as he was to the methods of mountaineers.
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, Tad felt himself encircled by a pair of powerful arms, and, at the same time, he was lifted clear of the ground.
Accompanied by the sound of breaking ropes and ripping canvas, the tent that had covered Professor Zepplin was wrenched loose.
And it did.
But not even with this deadly weapon in hand did Tad Butler for a second forget himself.
It shot up into the air, disappearing over a cliff.
And, as the boy was hauled upward, the blade came away from its sheath, clasped in Tad's firm grip.
He flung the knife as far from him as his partly pinioned arms would permit, and, with keen satisfaction, heard it clatter on the rocks several feet away.
The mountaineer might now have hurled the boy from him.
The Pony Riders had been out three days from Pueblo, to which point they had journeyed by train, the stock having been shipped there in a stable car attached to the same train.
"Wake up!
"Go to sleep."
He realized from the sound that he was slowly gaining on the missing animals.
Besides the four ponies of the boys there were the Professor's cob, Thomas's pony and a pack train consisting of six burros, the latter in charge of Jose, a half-breed Mexican, who was to cook for the party during their stay in the mountains.
Yet, instead of following his own advice, Tad lay with wide-open eyes awaiting the moment when the storm should descend upon their camp in full force.
To do this, however, would have been giving Tad an opportunity to escape, of which he would have been quick to take advantage; and so, gulping quick, short breaths, and struggling with his slightly built adversary, Tad's captor finally managed to throw the lad over on his back.
Two of them gone!" was the startling announcement thrown back to them by the freckle-faced boy.
Yet the mountaineer's move had not been entirely without results favorable to his captive.
Recovering himself with an effort, he raised a piercing call for help.
By this time the boys had learned to pitch and strike camp in the briefest possible time--in short, to take very good care of themselves under most of the varying conditions which such a life as they were leading entailed.
Close upon the first report followed another and louder one, that sent a distinct tremor through the mountain.
All grew black about him.
Ahead of him, the boy could hear the ponies' hoofs on the rocks, and now and then a distant crash told him they were working up into the dense second growth that he had seen in his brief tour of inspection earlier in the evening.
To this wild spot it was that Fate had brought my father, my sister, and myself.
I had risen in the boat, and was gazing round in delight at the broad panorama of shore and sea and sky, when my sister plucked at my sleeve with a little, sharp cry of surprise.
Evidently two individuals, the one with a lamp and the other with a candle or rushlight, were making a careful examination of the building.
Jean Valjean had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine.
Jean Valjean shuddered to the very bottom of his soul.
"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean.
On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--
Should she ever find him again?
He asked Cosette:--
Another day he spoke to the porter.
What was taking place in Cosette's soul?
Without knowing just what was the matter with her she was convinced that there was something in it, and that it must be concealed.
They went thither.
The day on which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there.
Does not everything begin with indifference?
It is I who have pointed him out to her."
Three months had elapsed.
The reader knows the rest.
An adventure!
No ill-temper, no harshness.
He came, saying: "Hey! Why not?" He came to prowl about his, Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl about his happiness, with the purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!
What was on its way there within?
Jean Valjean's manners were more tender and more paternal than ever.
However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this, except her pallor.
Old and eternal Mother Nature warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius.
If anything could have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.
His face was always serene and kind.
He no longer came quite close to them as formerly.
So Marius had disappeared; all was over.
He seated himself at a distance and pretended to be reading; why did he pretend that?
She still wore her sweet face for him.
He, who had finally come to believe himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which had formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up against that young man.
Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible glacier of virtue!
All situations have their instincts.
He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy.
"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"
"What is the matter with you?"
How he said to himself, "What have I done?"
"She had not noticed him.
Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him.
What was to be done?
On her side, Cosette languished.
Nothing," said he.
Once he made a trial.
It might be accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.
Cosette allowed nothing to be divined.
Marius no longer went there.
Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he passed whole nights asking himself: "What has Cosette in her mind?" and in thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.
Jean Valjean added: "Yes, that's it!
When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their customary strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more.
"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"
As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.
"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"
It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy surveying an enemy.
It was a dog scanning a thief.
A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure.
The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean: "Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?" On the morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last perceived.
On his side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.
A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.
Formerly he had come in his old coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.
She replied, sadly and gently:--
"With me?
What! he was there, that creature!
Marius was not there.
Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural.
Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this gentleness.
"Yes," said she.
She suffered from the absence of Marius as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly being conscious of it.
He came creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying!
He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger.
He rose from his seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: "What, already?"
She regretted it. It was too late.
CHAPTER VII--TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF
However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette.
None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor.
You are right!"--At the moment in life and the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with replying, with supreme calmness: "That young man!"
A love affair!
One day, however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair, he said to her: "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"
What was he there for?
"No."
But days, weeks, months, elapsed.
What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so impenetrable?
It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles, that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap whatever, and that the young man falls into every one.
How he adored that Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly emerged!
The minute when Cosette would love might strike at any moment.
Marius pursued his senseless course.
He exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring.
oh, the depth of children!
Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent.
It almost seemed to him that unknown craters were forming in his bosom.
How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having brought Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled to the earth by his very self-devotion!
Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself.
"No; nothing more.
"Do you not know that you are giving me pain?" she said at last, drawing a little closer to me.
What you have told me has made me very happy--what more can I wish to know?"
She also told me that Yoletta had watched day and night at my side, that at last, when the fever left me, and I had fallen into that cooling slumber, she too, with her hand on mine, had dropped her head on the pillow and fallen asleep. Then, without waking her, they had carried her away to her own room, and Edra had taken her place by my side.
This, however, you neglected to do; for when you had fallen insensible to the earth, and Yoletta had called the dog and sent it to the house to summon assistance, the food you had taken with you was found untasted in the basket.
"What do you mean, Edra?
But the despondence and sullen rage into which I had been thrown made me proof even against the medicine of an admonition imparted so gently, and, turning my face away, I stubbornly refused to make any reply.
Then Edra began to speak again, and gravely and sorrowfully, but without a touch of austerity in her tone or manner, censured me for making use of such irrational language, and for allowing bitter, resentful thoughts to enter my heart.
"Unrefreshed by sleep and with lessened strength," he continued, "you went to the woods, and in order to allay that excitement in your mind, you labored with such energy that by noon you had accomplished a task which, in another and calmer condition of mind and body, would have occupied you more than one day.
She don't love little girls when she has 'the nervous.'"
Do you get your shaker, and march home as quick as ever you can! I must go with you, I suppose."
"O, it's for the girls, is it?"
"O dear," said poor aunt Louise to her sister, "what shall I do all this long day with three noisy children?
"Only think what a trifling thing it is for a little child to soil her dress! and what a great thing to have her keep her word!
"You know I didn't mean any harm.
"No, we don't," cried Prudy; "she wants us to 'take care' all the time.
"I don't know," said Prudy, coolly.
"O, I'm so glad I'm alive!" cried little Prudy, hoping on one foot; "I do hope I shall never die!"
Aunt Martha and Bridget were taking up the dinner when Prudy went down into the kitchen, calling out,--
Going!'"
"Don't say a word," said aunt Louise, briskly.
This is my little nephew, Lonnie Adams.--Shake hands with the little girls, my dear."
"Aunt Madge ironed it this morning."
"Why, yes, auntie," said Grace, looking quite grieved and surprised.
Poor little Susy had to go home in the noonday sun, hanging down her head like a guilty child, and crying all the way.
It----"
Tears came into aunt Madge's kind gray eyes, and she made up her mind that the poor child should be comforted.
She was a very young lady, hardly fifteen years old.
I'm Mr. Nelson, riding horseback," said he, jumping up on a stand.
"O, auntie," said Susy, "did you think we were going to be naughty?"
You see if something awful doesn't happen before we get back."
O yes!
That's a ninepence, ma'am.
"O, how unjust I have been!" said aunt Louise, who did not mean to be unkind, in spite of her hasty way of speaking.
What is to be done?"
"Ah!" said aunt Louise, drawing on her gloves, "I see Prudy isn't going to mind me."
Won't you promise not to tell?"
Lonnie was a fair-haired, sickly little boy, seven years old.
"I just mean to be careful, and not get a speck of dirt on my clean apron," whispered Susy to Grace.
"Let me take it," cried Lonnie, seizing it out of Prudy's hand, "I'm going to put it up at auction.
"O, nothing but Susy's.
"Now, do give it to me, Lonnie," said Susy, climbing into a chair, and reaching after it; "you ain't fair a bit."
It was so pleasant in aunt Martha's shaded parlor, and the children took such delight in looking at the books and pictures, that they were all sorry when aunt Louise "got nervous," and thought it was time they went off somewhere to play.
She was ashamed of me, I looked so!"
"Blessings on the blessed children!" said aunt Madge, one morning soon after this.
Bridget listened at the foot of the stairs in a very angry mood, muttering,--
"Stop a minute!" cried Grace.
"So we little folks are going out to spend the day, are we?"
I wish we had some," said Susy; "how can we get it?"
try not to cry," said aunt Madge, as she took off Susy's soiled clothes.
The children very soon felt at ease with him.
They let me have it every little once in a while."
"O, I hope not," replied sister Madge, laughing.
PRUDY'S WHITE TEA
"Why, Bridget does, of course."
"Come, Prudy," said she, smiling, "please run up stairs and get my parasol--there's a darling."
"No, you'll mean to be good, I dare say," answered aunt Louise, speaking more kindly,--"if you don't forget it.
Lonnie was dreadfully frightened.
"Soap makes it worse--ma puts on milk."
"Please give it to me," cried Grace; "it isn't yours."
"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Grace; "we'll send Prudy down stairs to Bridget, to ask for some milk to drink."
"Of course it got tipped over--but not without hands, you careless girl!
"O, Bridget, may I have some white tea?"
"O, auntie," said Grace, "she wasn't to blame.
Knocked off to Miss Parlin.'"
"There, there!
"It got tipped over," answered Susy, in a fright, but not forgetting her promise.
"Well, get that," said Grace, "it's just as good; and come right back with it, and don't tell about the ink."
"I'm ringin' a bell.
Somehow, in "knocking it off," out came the stopper, and over went the ink on Susy's fair white apron.
When they had almost reached aunt Martha's house, aunt Louise stopped them, saying,--
I'm all the time making some kind of trouble. Sometimes I wish there wasn't any such girl as me!"
"O dear!
"O, dear, O dear!
"It's not much like the child's mother she is.
"But I can't stop crying, I feel so bad.
"O, aunt Madge," sobbed she, when they had got home, "I kept as far behind aunt Louise as I could, so nobody would think I was her little girl.
Little black streams were trickling down the apron on to the dress. Grace pulled Susy to the washing-stand, and Prudy thought she meant to lift her into it, and tried to help.
Susy has a tender heart, and it grieves her to be unjustly scolded; but she would bear it all rather than tell a falsehood.
"Who owns it?" said Prudy, putting in both hands.
Going!
And you'll be a nice, dear little girl, won't you, Prudy?"
"Ink spilled?" cried aunt Martha, and she stopped beating the turnip.
"Well, I'm sure I hope you'll do the very best you can," sighed aunt Louise, "and not make any body crazy."
It's yours; going, gone for a ninepence.
By this time they had gone up the nice gravel walk, and aunt Martha had come to the door, opening her arms as if she wanted to embrace them all at once.
"Well, I'll tell aunt Louise, you see if I don't.
'O yes!
Almost while they were talking, their aunt Louise came into the room, looking prettier than ever in her new pink dress.
That dress and apron ought to be soaking this very minute."
I'm afraid some of them will get drowned, or run over, or break their necks.
"Now, tell me if you are going to be good children, so I shan't be ashamed of you?"
"Dear little souls," said she, "come right into the house, and let me take off your things.
"Here is your parasol, auntie," said Prudy, coming back.
"Look here, Prudy Parlin," said Grace, "you mustn't open that drawer."
"'As green as a pea!
"I wish you could go with us, aunt Madge," said Grace, almost pouting; "we don't have half so good times with aunt Louise."
"This minute!" cried Grace.
So she quietly put away the silk dress she was so anxious to finish, and after dinner took the fresh, tidy, happy little Susy across the fields to aunt Martha's again, where the unlucky day was finished very happily after all.
"So have I," said Dorothy.
Another and another popped out of the circular, pot-like dwelling, while from all the other black objects came popping more creatures--very like jumping-jacks when their boxes are unhooked--until fully a hundred stood gathered around our little group of travelers.
Yet I have noticed that the crows usually avoid the Scarecrow, who is a very honest fellow, in his way, but stuffed.
Then she said gently:
Soldier, release Ojo the Lucky and--"
But Ozma sat silent and motionless and it was the little Wizard who answered Scraps.
Then she said:
"I prefer to remain here," said the cat.
At Ozma's feet crouched two enormous beasts, each the largest and most powerful of its kind.
You're a stranger here, Miss Patches, and so you don't know that nothing can be hidden from our powerful Ruler's Magic Picture--nor from the watchful eyes of the humble Wizard of Oz.
"I beg your pardon; I'm Ojo the Unlucky," said the boy.
May I go?"
"I will," promised Ozma.
The girl Ruler now asked Ojo to sit down and tell her all his story, which he did, beginning at the time he had left his home in the forest and ending with his arrival at the Emerald City and his arrest.
Ojo was so ashamed, both of his disgrace and the fault he had committed, that he was glad to be covered up in this way, so that people could not see him or know who he was.
"A dark well can only be discovered in some out-of-the-way place, and there may be dangers there."
Also I feel it is wrong to leave those two victims standing as marble statues, when they ought to be alive.
"That is, I have the Woozy, and the hairs are in his tail.
"Well, we're bound to search for it, anyhow," said the Scarecrow.
Ozma smiled more brightly, then, and nodded graciously.
"Very well," replied Ozma.
"Thank you!" cried Ojo gratefully.
"Would you like to?" returned Ozma.
The Patchwork Girl looked at the clover and said: "Oh, so you've found it.
All these came to the vacant space before the throne and stood facing the Ruler.
"Better take me along," said the Woozy.
Dorothy had been listening with interest to this conversation.
From the mouth of the vase a plant sprouted, slowly growing before their eyes until it became a beautiful bush, and on the topmost branch appeared the six-leaved clover which Ojo had unfortunately picked.
"Why, it seemed to me a foolish law, unjust and unreasonable.
Now she turned to Ozma and asked: "May I go with Ojo, to help him?"
"So the clover hasn't been picked, eh?" he said.
"Then you'd better begin your journey at once," advised the Wizard.
"I suppose a good many laws seem foolish to those people who do not understand them," she said; "but no law is ever made without some purpose, and that purpose is usually to protect all the people and guard their welfare.
"Oh, there must be!" returned Ojo, positively; "or else the recipe of Dr. Pipt wouldn't call for it."
The six-leaved clover I--I--"
"All this fuss is about nothing at all," she said, facing Ozma unabashed.
"As for finding it, we must trust to luck."
When Ojo was escorted into the great Throne Room of the palace he found hundreds of people assembled there.
I know Oz pretty well, but Ojo doesn't know it at all.
"My eyes can flash fire, you know, and I can growl--a little."
"You may take it and keep it," said Ozma.
Therefore I made another Law forbidding anyone from plucking a six-leaved clover or from gathering other plants and herbs which the Witches boil in their kettles to work magic with.
But I am guilty of this act and whatever punishment you think I deserve I will suffer willingly."
Still lower, but nearly in front of Ozma, sat the wonderful Wizard of Oz and on a small table beside him was the golden vase from Dorothy's room, into which Scraps had dropped the stolen clover.
"One of the Laws of Oz forbids anyone to pick a six-leaved clover.
Then he continued: "The next thing I must find is a gill of water from a dark well."
"I think it has.
The inhabitants of the Emerald City were polite people and never jeered at the unfortunate; but it was so long since they had seen a prisoner that they cast many curious looks toward the boy and many of them hurried away to the royal palace to be present during the trial.
"You are forgiven," she said.
"Don't do that," begged Ojo, earnestly.
As you are a stranger, I will explain this Law which to you seems so foolish.
Ojo knew she was right and felt greatly mortified to realize he had acted and spoken so ridiculously.
"Release him, Soldier, and let him go free."
Look, all of you!" With these words he waved his hands toward the vase on the table, which Scraps now noticed for the first time.
"Now tell me, please, what magic things must you find?" continued the Wizard, addressing Ojo.
"Yes.
"I've nearly been nicked half a dozen times, already, and if they're going into dangers it's best for me to keep away from them."
But he raised his head and looked Ozma in the face, saying:
Very well; prove he picked it, if you can."
"What caused you to think that?" asked the Ruler.
"You have my permission to accompany Dorothy," said Ozma.
The people of Oz listened to this defiance in amazement and wondered at the queer Patchwork Girl who dared talk so boldly to their Ruler.
So I propose we allow Dr. Pipt to make the magic charm which will save them, and that we assist Ojo to find the things he is seeking.
Toto knew the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger and often played and romped with them, for they were good friends.
"But after the Crooked Magician has restored those poor people to life you must take away his magic powers."
I'm sorry for his uncle and poor Margolotte and I'd like to help save them.
I promised Ojo to help him find the things he wants and I'll stick to my promise."
Even now I can see no harm in picking a six-leaved clover.
Search him, if you like, but you won't find the clover; look in his basket and you'll find it's not there.
"Yes," he replied.
If it's in the wild parts of the country, no one there would need a dark well.
The next morning the Soldier with the Green Whiskers went to the prison and took Ojo away to the royal palace, where he was summoned to appear before the girl Ruler for judgment.
Ojo hung his head and while he hesitated how to reply the Patchwork Girl stepped forward and spoke for him.
"Did you pick the six-leaved clover?" she asked.
Again the soldier put upon the boy the jeweled handcuffs and white prisoner's robe with the peaked top and holes for the eyes.
After consulting together they decided that Ojo and his party should leave the very next day to search for the gill of water from a dark well, so they now separated to make preparations for the journey.
That has almost put an end to wicked sorcery in our land, so you see the Law was not a foolish one, but wise and just; and, in any event, it is wrong to disobey a Law."
"Let Jellia Jamb keep her till Ojo returns," suggested Dorothy.
"For, although you have committed a serious fault, you are now penitent and I think you have been punished enough.
"If Dorothy goes, then I must go to take care of her," said the Scarecrow, decidedly.
Ozma listened attentively and was thoughtful for some moments after the boy had finished speaking.
He followed the Soldier with the Green Whiskers very willingly, anxious that his fate might be decided as soon as possible.
"I'll take care of myself," announced Scraps, "for I'm going with the Scarecrow and Dorothy.
Ozma regarded him musingly, her chin resting upon her hand; but she was not angry.
"That will not be breaking the Law, for it is already picked, and the crime of picking it is forgiven."
Claims on William's Creek produced as high as forty pounds of gold in a day.
Douglas knew how to use all the pomp of regimentals and formality to impress the Indians.
The gold did not pan a dollar a wash; but in wild haste came the rush to William's Creek.
Then a packer emerged from the storm with word that five women and twenty-six men were snowbound half a mile ahead.
On Horse Fly Creek up from Quesnel Lake five men washed out in primitive rockers a hundred ounces of nuggets in a week.
Bands of nondescript men hung round the provision-store of Cariboo Lake awaiting a breath to fan their flaming hopes of fortune.
But, when they arrived at Hope, the whole affair looked like semi-comic vaudeville.
He opened a solemn powwow with the chiefs of the Fraser.
Before they had gone far their eyes shone like the wet pebbles in their hands.
The company's trader at Yale was reluctant to supply arms, for the company's policy had ever been to conciliate the Indians.
At Yale he considered the price of provisions too high, and by arbitrarily reducing the price at the company's stores, he broke the ring of the petty dealers.
All eyes turned towards Cariboo; and no wonder!
The gravel was pitted with little yellow stones. Where rain and spring-wash had swept off the gravel to naked rock, little nuggets lay exposed.
From another creek, only four hundred feet long, fifty thousand dollars' worth of gold was washed within a space of six weeks.
This won him the friendship of the miners.
A high wind was blowing and it was bitterly cold.
The marvel is that there were not more crimes.
The game was so tame, it did not know enough to be afraid.
What became of the lucky prospectors?
It was at this stage of the comedy of errors that Moody, Begbie, and Mayne came on the scene.
It was July '58 when the miners on the river-bars formed their committee.
So the miners at Yale formed a vigilance committee and established self-made laws.
Claims were staked faster than they could be recorded.
The New England States, Canada, the Maritime Provinces, the British Isles--all were set agog by the reports of the new gold-camps where it was only necessary to dig to find nuggets.
On snowshoes Ireland and three others set out to find the lost men and women on the lower trail.
At Spuzzum there was a fight.
On the instant the Indians shot both the white men where they stood.
Ed Stout and Billy Deitz and two others found signs that seemed very poor on a creek which they named William's after Deitz.
Pockets of gravel in the banks of both lakes yielded as much as two hundred dollars a day.
John Rose, who was one of the men to find Cariboo, set out in the spring of '63 to prospect the Bear River country.
The East was hard up.
Perhaps too strenuous denials.
The man who tried to arrest the negro was insolent and was jailed by the Yale magistrate.
Governor Douglas could not regulate prices here, and they jumped to war level.
Where gold-seekers tramped six hundred miles over a rocky trail, it is not surprising that boots commanded fifty dollars a pair.
In the upheaval these subterranean creek beds were hoisted and thrown towards the surface.
Dried apples brought two dollars and fifty cents a pound; and for lack of fruit many miners died from scurvy.
But so, for that matter, were illegal all his actions on this journey; yet by an odd inconsistency of fact against law, they restored peace and order on the river.
Man after man had fallen, and the five survivors in the bank were all wounded.
Diggings from which nuggets worth five hundred dollars have been taken have petered out after a few hundred feet.
Out of the heavy snowfall came another party struggling like themselves.
The same claims were staked over and over, the corner of one overlapping another.
The warrant was sent after him to the local peace officer for execution, but this officer had already issued a warrant for the arrest of the negro at Yale; so there it stood--each fighter making complaint against the other and the two magistrates in lordly contempt of each other!
They began wandering down that creek and testing the gravel.
Then he went on to Yale.
By the opening of '62 six thousand miners were in Cariboo, and Barkerville had become the central camp.
In one year gold to the value of two and a half million dollars was shipped from Cariboo.
The reward was a thousand dollars' worth of wash-gravel.
Bursting with rage, the astonished dignitary at Yale was bundled into a canoe.
Flags of truce were displayed on both sides and a peace was patched up till Governor Douglas could come up from the coast. Not, however, before there occurred an unfortunate incident.
The whole world took fire.
I have talked with some of them on the lower reaches of the Cariboo Road.
At China Bar five miners were found hiding in a hole in the bank.
Yale, too, was as quiet as a church prayer-meeting; and Colonel Moody preached a sermon on Sunday to a congregation of forty in the court-house--the first church service ever held on the mainland of British Columbia.
And the explanation of this is entirely theoretical.
At Yale a miner of Hill's Bar, some miles down the river, had beaten up a negro.
There were undoubtedly those among the American miners who made wild boasts.
People without provisions started blindly from Winnipeg across the width of half a continent.
Indians barred the way; but they were routed and seven of them killed in a running fire, and Indian villages along the river were burned.
It was in the autumn of the year '60 that Doc Keithley, John Rose, Sandy MacDonald, and George Weaver set out from Keithley Creek, which flows into Cariboo Lake, to explore the cup-like valley amid the great peaks which seemed to feed this lake.
A danger lay in the rows of saloons along the water-front--the well-known danger of liquor to the Indian.
Flour was three hundred dollars a barrel.
Arrived, also, Matthew Baillie Begbie, 'a Judge in our Colony of British Columbia,' and a detachment of Royal Engineers under command of Colonel Moody.
Floods from the eternal snows then grooved out watercourses down the scarred mountainsides.
And man found gold in these prehistoric, perhaps preglacial, creek beds.
They halted at a negro's cabin.
She is also the hard foster-mother of desperation and folly.
Douglas appointed magistrates to try the case.
By way of Panama, by way of San Francisco, by way of Spokane, by way of Victoria, by way of Winnipeg and Edmonton came the gold-seekers, indifferent alike to perils of sea and perils of mountain.
Snyder then led his men up the river and joined the first company at Spuzzum.
In October '62 a Mr Ireland and a party were on the trail when snow began falling so heavily that it was unsafe to proceed.
The trial was of course illegal, for colonial government had not been formally inaugurated in New Caledonia or British Columbia, as it was soon to be known, and Douglas's authority as governor did not extend beyond Vancouver Island.
The first pan gave an ounce; the second pan gave nuggets to the weight of a quarter of a pound.
Douglas gathered up all his panoply of war and law.
They are old and poor to-day, and the memory of their fortune is as a dream.
Sale of liquor to any person whomsoever was forbidden.
In six months of '63 William's Creek yielded a million and a half dollars, and this was only one of many rich creeks.
However this may be, there was no possible scientific way of knowing how the gold-bearing area would run.
Only Chinamen remained on the lower bars.
The Yale magistrate had issued a warrant for the miner's arrest--poor magistrate, he had found little to do since his appointment in September!
Men on the upper diggings were making from sixty to a hundred dollars a day.
The men began washing the gravel.
From '59 to '71 came twenty-five million dollars in gold from the Cariboo country.
Late in '59 men reached Quesnel Lake and Cariboo Lake.
They found them at sundown camped in a ravine beside a rock, with their blankets up to keep off the wind, thawing themselves out before a fire.
Farming did not pay.
At Long Bar, when an Indian chief came with a flag of truce, two of the white men snatched it from him and trampled it in the mud.
January settled disorder among the whites.
Many of the treasure-seekers holding the richest claims had gone to Cariboo owning nothing but the clothes on their backs.
The miners had learned that an English judge and a field force could be put on the ground in a week.
Meanwhile a hundred and sixty volunteers at Yale formed a company to go up the river under Captain Snyder.
Only the genii of the hidden earth held the secret; and modern science derides the invisible pixies of superstition, just as these invisible spirits of the earth seem to laugh at man's best efforts to ferret out their secrets.
This kind of mining required sluicing, and long ditches were constructed to bring the water to the dry diggings.
Ned M'Gowan, the Californian down on the bar, then came up to Yale with a posse of twenty men to arrest the magistrate for arresting the man who had been sent to arrest the negro.
The miner, now sobered, fled back to his bar.
Mountains heaved up where had been sea bottom and swamp and watery plain.
Some arrived by pack-train, some by canoe, but the majority afoot.
But it was not of the perils of the trail that the outside world heard. The outside world heard of claims which any man might find and from which gold to the value of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could be dug and washed in three months.
It's worth paying for, isn't it?
I don't know how you feel about female faces, but to my mind these sixteen years, these childish eyes, shyness and tears of bashfulness are better than beauty; and she is a perfect little picture, too.
She is bound to want to 'save him,' to bring him to his senses, and lift him up and draw him to nobler aims, and restore him to new life and usefulness--well, we all know how far such dreams can go.
From the first hour the town reeked of its familiar odours.
For, you know, I am a gloomy, depressed person.
Raskolnikov walked out after him.
One doesn't see clearly.
Afraid of you?
How funny it was!
"Did I? I've forgotten.
Svidrigailov laughed heartily; finally he called Philip, paid his bill, and began getting up.
That's so for all stages of development and classes of society.
The day after we'd been betrothed, I bought her presents to the value of fifteen hundred roubles--a set of diamonds and another of pearls and a silver dressing-case as large as this, with all sorts of things in it, so that even my Madonna's face glowed.
His manner to Raskolnikov had changed during the last few minutes, and he was ruder and more sneering every moment.
But if all, to the last note, is false in flattery, it is just as agreeable, and is heard not without satisfaction.
You probably notice that I am not in a hurry to renew acquaintance with my old friends.
The girl was ashamed, blushed, at last felt insulted, and began to cry.
She comes in, curtseys, you can fancy, still in a short frock--an unopened bud!
Svidrigailov struck the table with his fist impatiently.
What if I am fifty and she is not sixteen?
We went there.
There was sometimes a light in them which frightened her and grew stronger and stronger and more unguarded till it was hateful to her.
I saw at once that the bird was flying into the cage of herself.
"The fact is this monstrous difference in age and development excites your sensuality!
"From some words you've dropped, I notice that you still have designs--and of course evil ones--on Dounia and mean to carry them out promptly."
And that Resslich is a sly hussy, I tell you.
I took them home and got to know them.
I, of course, threw it all on my destiny, posed as hungering and thirsting for light, and finally resorted to the most powerful weapon in the subjection of the female heart, a weapon which never fails one.
Sometimes she steals a look at me that positively scorches me.
CHAPTER IV
Perhaps you have already heard a great deal that was ridiculous and absurd about Marfa Petrovna.
You can understand a great deal... and you can do a great deal too.
And she would have gone to it of herself.
I don't mind betting that you too have heard something of the sort already?"
Do you think I'm light-hearted?
Who thinks of that?
I am a sinful man.
You can fancy how frantic I was when I heard that Marfa Petrovna had got hold of that scoundrelly attorney, Luzhin, and had almost made a match between them--which would really have been just the same thing as I was proposing.
"Stop!
The first day I came here I visited various haunts, after seven years I simply rushed at them.
Think what the passion for propaganda will bring some girls to!
"It's been a pleasure."
Svidrigailov was not however very drunk, the wine had affected him for a moment, but it was passing off every minute.
Only wait a bit."
It's simply delicious!
I offered to assist in the young girl's education in French and dancing.
I really began to think that I might become epileptic.
Haven't you noticed it?
I understand it all now."
It was essential, indeed, to be reconciled, but by then it was impossible.
Flushing like a sunset--she had been told, no doubt.
If you like, we'll go and see them, only not just now."
It was worth paying to have seen me at that moment.
Everyone thinks of himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself.
"Why, I told you... besides your sister can't endure me."
Yes, upon my soul!
Philip brought the water.
Her face is like Raphael's Madonna.
You have to go to the right and I to the left.
Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the truth and nothing easier than flattery.
There's always a little corner which remains a secret to the world and is only known to those two.
He's probably a divinity student.
They came out on to the pavement.
It's stimulating!"
Svidrigailov looked at him attentively and Raskolnikov fancied he caught a flash of spiteful mockery in that look.
It's not my fault.
You should have seen how I talked to the papa and mamma.
Well, she's something in that line.
I don't know what it was she wanted!
Upon my soul!
But what nonsense....
I've drunk too much though, I see that.
"But I can answer you in one word and annihilate all your suspicions.
"No doubt it is a pleasure for a worn-out profligate to describe such adventures with a monstrous project of the same sort in his mind--especially under such circumstances and to such a man as me....
There's no need.
I've talked to her twice, she is far from a fool.
Ha-ha!
In fact, it began on my side with a most irresistible physical desire.
No, I'm gloomy.
But it ended in the catastrophe of which you know already.
And however coarse the flattery, at least half will be sure to seem true.
And the lady really had principles--of her own, anyway.
"You told me so before."
You're bored, she said, you want something to fill up your time.
It was almost our first conversation by ourselves.
Each person, in fact, worshipped whichever he pleased.
They could raise a druidical or magic fog, which hid things from view, or bring on darkness in the day, like the blackest night; they could bring down showers of fire or blood, cause a snowfall even in summer, till the ground was covered half a yard deep; and bring on storms and tempests on sea or land.
He is in his glory on a stormy night, and on such a night, when you look over the waste of waters, there before your eyes, in the dim gloom, are thousands of Mannanan's white steeds careering along after their great chief's chariot.
We must not judge those old people, whether Greek, Roman, or Irish, too severely for believing in these prophets; for although there are no druids or soothsayers now, we have amongst us plenty of palmists and fortune-tellers of various kinds, who make a good living out of those people who are simple enough to believe in them.
Whenever they made themselves visible to mortals--and that was only seldom--they were seen to be very small, hardly the height of a man's knee.
When Ireland was pagan the people were taught their religion, such as it was, by Druids.
CHAPTER IV.
HOW THE ANCIENT IRISH LIVED AS PAGANS.
Poets, physicians, and smiths had three goddesses whom they severally worshipped, three sisters, all named Brigit.
The people also worshipped the elements--that is to say, water, fire, the sun, the wind, and such like.
He generally lived on the sea, riding in his chariot at the head of his followers.
By some or all of these means they professed to be able to tell the issue of a coming battle, or whether a man's life was to be long or short, and what were the lucky or unlucky days for beginning any work, or for undertaking any enterprise; besides many other matters lying in the future.
No one saw this strange being save Connla alone, though all heard the conversation: and the king and the nobles marvelled, and were greatly troubled.
The idols worshipped by the pagan Irish were nearly all of them stones, mostly pillar-stones, which were sometimes covered over with gold, silver, or bronze.
Many other instances of the power of their spells are related in old Irish tales.
These druids were the only learned men of the time, and they had in their hands all the learned professions--they were not only druids, but judges, prophets, poets, and even physicians.
And it was usual for individuals, or a tribe, to choose some idol, or element, or pagan divinity, which they held in veneration as their special guardian god.
It was inhabited by fairies, but it was not for human beings, except a few individuals who were brought thither by the fairies.
At last the fairy chanted the following words in a very sweet voice: and the moment the chant was ended, the poor young prince stepped into the crystal boat, which in a moment glided swiftly away to the west: and Prince Connla was never again seen in his native land.
The Greeks and Romans of old had--as we know--their augurs or soothsayers, who forecasted the future, like our druids, and by much the same observations, signs, and tokens.
It must not be supposed that each of the objects mentioned above was worshipped by all the people of Ireland.
There were also many fairy queens, who were considered as goddesses and worshipped in their several districts, all living in their palaces under fairy mounds or rocks.
There were many other gods; and there were goddesses also.
The pagan Irish had many gods and many idols.
People had to be careful of them, for they often did mischief when interfered with.
"No--" he flung out, starting toward her.
"You know that all my work is here, Kate.
"Oh, I know what you say is true, Karl.
With a shrug of half-bared shoulders they dismissed all those who, painfully, nobly, gravely, were fighting to restore woman's connection with reality--to put her back, somehow, into the procession; to make, by new methods, the "coming lady" as essential to the commonwealth as was the old-time chatelaine before commercialism filched her vocations and left her the most cultivated and useless of parasites.
She did not meet him again that day.
As they came out of the pinon grove, Honora discovered her babies.
If that "no" thundered in Karl's ears the night through while he kept the company of his ancient comforters the mountains, no less did it beat shatteringly in the ears of the woman who had spoken it.
There was but one door to this room and Wander closed it.
"Yes, by heaven," he said, his eyes blazing, "I ask it."
Clothed in gray, save for the inevitable sombrero, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, capable, renewed with hope, he took both women with a protecting gesture into his embrace.
They were in white, fresh as lilies, or, perhaps, as little angels, well beloved of heavenly mothers; and they came running from the house, their golden hair shining like aureoles about their eager faces.
His full manhood seemed to be realized.
Kate and Honora left the train at the station of Wander, and the man for whom it was named was there to meet them.
The three rejoiced together in that honest demonstration which seems permissible in the West, where social forms and fears have not much foothold.
Kate crossed the room as if she would move beyond that aura which vibrated about him and in which she could not stand without a too dangerous delight.
Kate had not many minutes to wait in the living-room before Wander joined her.
This is a woman's form of patriotism.
Think how we could work together in Washington--think what such a brain and heart as yours would mean to a new cause.
"I am so blessed in you," whispered Karl, "so completed by you, that I cannot let you go, even though you go on to great usefulness and great goodness.
"Kate!
"My answer is 'no,'" cried Kate, holding out her hands to him.
I warned you of its danger; you told me of its glory.
Kate smiled sadly.
Then you haven't learned to respect me, after all."
Look at it how she would, throb as she might with a woman's immemorial nostalgia for a true man's love, she could not escape the relentless logic of the situation.
She gathered her treasures in her arms and walked with them to the house.
It is safe here.
"I worship you," he cried.
Their sandaled feet hardly touched the ground, and, indeed, could they have been weighed at that moment, it surely had been found that they had become almost imponderable because of the ethereal lightness of their spirits.
"Stop!" cried Honora to Karl in a choking voice.
XXXIV
I mean to do my work with all the power there is in me, and I shall be rejoicing in that and in Life--it's in me to be glad merely that I'm living.
"I know," she said, "but worship passes--"
"I may as well know my fate now," he said.
Moreover, no other woman in the country had at present had an opportunity that equaled her own.
They had been, through all the ages, willing martyrs to the general good.
A moment later, as she mounted the stairs, she saw him striding up the trail which they, together, had ascended once when the sun of their hope was still high.
He stood facing her, breathing rather heavily, his face commanded to a tense repose.
She kissed his brow and his eyes; he felt her tears upon his cheeks.
If she passionately desired to create an organization which should exercise parental powers over orphaned or poorly guarded children, still more did she wish to set an example of efficiency for women, illustrating to them with how firm a step woman might tread the higher altitudes of public life, making an achievement, not a compromise, of labor.
Vanity and prettiness, dalliance and dependence were their characteristics.
This is my home, these mines are mine, the town is mine.
She was very pale, but she carried her head high still--almost defiantly.
It was a long room, with triplicate, lofty windows facing the mountains which wheeled in majestic semicircle from north to west. At this hour the purple shadows were gathering on them, and great peace and beauty lay over the world.
But I repeat my warning now, for I see you venturing on to that precipice of loneliness and fame on which none but sad and lonely women stand."
He moved toward her, his hands outspread with a protesting gesture.
They talked as happily of little things as if great ones were not occupying their minds.
Yet now, if ever, women must be true to the cause of liberty.
When Kate opened to them, they clambered up her skirts.
Be my wife.
It was as if the spiritual essence of them, mingling, had formed the perfect fluid of the soul, in which it was a privilege to live and breathe and dream.
Now it was laid upon them to assume the responsibilities of a new crusade, to undertake a fresh martyrdom, and this time it was for themselves. Leagued against them was half--quite half--of their sex.
To listen, one would have thought that only "little joys" and small vexations had come their way.
It would be by looking into their faces that one could see the marks of passion--the passion of sorrow, of love, of sacrifice.
It is not only my own money which is invested, but the money of other men--friends who have trusted me and whose prosperity depends upon me."
It was not the hour for her to choose her own pleasure.
"No, there's no comfort at all for me in that, Kate.
"Tell me your answer now, you much-loved woman--tell it, beloved."
"To thousands and thousands of children.
"Would I?" said Kate.
But I could resign the glory, Karl, for your love, and count it worth while."
He took the hands she had extended.
"No," to the deep and mystic human joys; "no" to the most holy privilege of women; "no" to light laughter and a dancing heart; "no" to the lowly, satisfying labor of a home.
If there's any comfort in that for you--"
"But the thing to which I am faithful is my opportunity for great service.
For her the steep path, alone; for her the precipice.
She and Honora ate their meals in silence, Honora dark with disapproval, Kate clinging to her spar of spiritual integrity.
Stay with me, stay with me!
How can I? Do you want me to be a supplement to you--a hanger-on? Don't you see that you would make me ridiculous?"
Some influence had gone out from them which seemed to create a palpitant atmosphere of delight in which they stood.
I tell you, your place is here in my home.
"Kate--"
"I mean to be the mother to many, many children, Karl," she said in a voice which thrilled with sorrow and pride and a strange joy.
I am going on to Washington in the morning, Karl.
"Sorry to rout you out so late, but I need a cab.
Providing payment is not stopped on it, Harris, you will hear no more of this incident.
Such fatuity seemed incredible.
Now do be nice and stop protesting!
"You brought me in with you, assaulted me, blackmailed that cheque out of me!
"Thanks, Harris.
Victor suspended operations with the handkerchief to bend upon his tormentor a louring, distrustful stare.
"This gentleman," he said, consulting the signature to the cheque, "is Prince Victor Vassilyevski.
Really, monsieur le prince should be more careful.
But if by any chance the cheque should come back from his bank--I may ask you to testify to what you have seen and heard here to-night."
He cocked a critical eye.
Then why try?
As he switched up the lights it bounded to its feet and dived through the portieres with such celerity that he saw little more of it than coat-tails level on the wind.
"I fancy," he said with a leer, "you'll find that all right."
"Thanks, no. Prince Victor and I have compromised.
Excellent!
Lanyard sat down and wagged a reproving head.
The man retired cheerfully, rewarded for many a night of broken slumber. Prince Victor got up from the desk and proffered Lanyard the cheque.
"Wicked thing," he commented--"loaded, too.
"Yes, Harris." Lanyard tossed him a sovereign.
"Calm yourself, monsieur le prince." Lanyard repeated the warning gesture. "He is a nobleman of Russia, or says he is, and--strangely enough, Harris!--a burglar.
"Didn't catch," he said; "perhaps it's just as well, though; sounded like bad words.
Hand steady enough to write me a cheque, do you think?"
I know I'm too good, but I really can't help it, it's my nature--and there you are!
"I am--quite composed."
"To call a cab for you, of course.
He bounced up, however, with a surprising amount of animation and ambition, and flew back to the offensive with flailing fists.
You may judge from his appearance what difficulty I had in subduing him."
Victor swore fretfully and lashed out a random fist, which struck Lanyard's cheek a glancing blow that carried just enough sting to kindle resentment. So the virtuous householder was rather more than unceremonious about yanking the princely housebreaker inside and lending him a foot to accelerate his return to the living-room; where Victor brought up, on all-fours again, in almost precisely the spot from which he had risen.
"Do let me help you."
PAID IN FULL
"That's good!
"You don't know how to thank me--do you?
Lanyard fetched glasses, a decanter, a siphon-bottle, and supplied his guest with a liberal hand before helping himself.
A knock sounded.
The suggestion was acceptable: Victor signified as much with an ungracious mumble.
Another knock: Harris returned.
"Don't forget yourself, monsieur le prince. Remember ..."
"Sorry," Lanyard cut in; "but it so happens, that the gentleman who has the rooms immediately above came in when I did, and can testify that I was alone.
"I'll draw the cheque."
"It is a lie!" Prince Victor shrilled.
A searching look round the room confirmed him in this error.
She must have forgotten it, then, when she fled from what she probably thought was murder, and what might well have been.
Then slowly the look of doubt gave way to the ghost of a crafty smile.
In this his judgment was grievously in fault.
He smiled charmingly and darted through the portieres, returning with the articles in question.
Dropping hat and canvas, Lanyard gave chase and overhauled the marauder as he was clambering out through the open window, where a firm hand on his collar checked his preparations to drop half a dozen feet to the flagged court.
What a blazing fool the fellow was (he thought) to accept a cheque on which payment could be stopped before banking hours in the morning--!
Whistle up a growler, will you?"
Half a moment: I want a word with you.
Lanyard pressed the hat into his hand, picked up the canvas, replaced it in its frame, and tucked both under the princely arm.
I want no services of you!"
"Let me be," the other snapped as Lanyard offered good-naturedly to thrust him back into the chair.
But he does want what he broke in to steal--that painting you see under his arm--and I've agreed to sell it to him.
His head was still heavy, hot, and painful, his mental processes thick with lees of coma; but now he began to appreciate, what naturally seemed apparent, that Lanyard must be unacquainted with the cause of his injuries.
Of course, if you'd rather ...
No, not a word!" He forbade inflexibly a wholly imaginary interposition on the part of Prince Victor.
That's all, monsieur le prince.
The prince struggled into the coat and grunted an acknowledgment of the service.
"Thanks ever so ...
You may have to bear witness against him in court."
If I had for one instant imagined you cared enough about it to burglarize my rooms ...
Victor confided his sentiments to a handkerchief with which he was mopping his face.
Seeing his finger on it Prince Victor started from his chair, but Lanyard hospitably waved him back.
For a moment longer the prince stared, hate and perplexity in equal measure tincturing his regard.
Victor took the drink without a word of thanks and gulped it down noisily. Lanyard drank sparingly, then crossed the room to a bell-push.
Besides, you mustn't forget I've got your pistol and your dirk and the upper hand and a sustaining sense of moral superiority and no end of other advantages over you."
Yet there it was, egregious, indisputable. Why not profit by it, turn it to his own advantage?
I caught him burglarizing my rooms when I came home just now.
Lanyard sidestepped, nipped a wrist, twitched it smartly up between the man's shoulder-blades (with a wrench that won a grunt of agony), caught the other arm from behind by the hollow of its elbow, and held his victim helpless--though ill-advised enough to continue to hiss and spit and squirm and kick.
Please remember him.
Now where did you leave your coat and hat?
He dissembled his exultation--or plumed himself on doing so.
You see, you've touched my heart.
It was late when Lanyard got home, but not too late: when he entered his living-room enough life lingered in the embers in the grate to betray to him a feline shape on all-fours creeping toward his bedchamber door.
She hesitated.
He produced from a pocket a packet of papers.
The intruder stood within arm's-length, collected, amiable, debonair, nothing threatening in his attitude, merely an easy and at the same time quite respectful suggestion of interest.
The house door closed with a dull bang, and from the entrance hallway came a sound of voices.
Involuntarily she deferred, her arm dropped.
More blood discoloured his right temple, welling from under the matted, coarse black hair.
She could but laugh; and laughter rings the death-knell of constraint.
"They tell too much, madame, those letters.
What his game?
His smile of impersonal courtesy failed.
Victor had been beforehand with her, had purloined the letters and restored the canvas to its frame.
Her face was soft with an elusive bloom of unwonted feeling.
He was right and reasonable enough, this impudent and imperturbable young elegant.
"I had a reason--"
She was quick to accept his gage.
She had need henceforth to be swift and wary and shrewd....
Her hands rose unconsciously, with an uncertain movement.
"Perhaps to beg madame's permission to offer her what may possibly prove some slight consolation."
Half the world were not too much to put between them if she were now to sleep of nights in comfortable consciousness of security from his quenchless hatred.
Natasha, on the other hand, having put on her best gown, was in the highest spirits.
"I am so glad you should get to know one another... very sorry the prince is still ailing," and after a few more commonplace remarks he rose.
"Dear Natalie," said Princess Mary, "I want you to know that I am glad my brother has found happiness...."
Despite the uneasy glances thrown at her by Princess Mary--who wished to have a tete-a-tete with Natasha--Mademoiselle Bourienne remained in the room and persistently talked about Moscow amusements and theaters.
Then a maidservant ran into the hall and hurriedly said something, mentioning the princess.
Natasha noticed this and guessed its reason.
When the count was already leaving the room, Princess Mary went up hurriedly to Natasha, took her by the hand, and said with a deep sigh:
The count had devised this diplomatic ruse (as he afterwards told his daughter) to give the future sisters-in-law an opportunity to talk to one another freely, but another motive was to avoid the danger of encountering the old prince, of whom he was afraid.
"I think, Princess, it is not convenient to speak of that now," she said with external dignity and coldness, though she felt the tears choking her.
She did not at all realize that before having seen her future sister-in-law she was prejudiced against her by involuntary envy of her beauty, youth, and happiness, as well as by jealousy of her brother's love for her.
She knew what she ought to have said to Natasha, but she had been unable to say it because Mademoiselle Bourienne was in the way, and because, without knowing why, she felt it very difficult to speak of the marriage.
She greeted the father and daughter with special politeness and showed them to the princess' room.
When they had been announced a perturbation was noticeable among the servants.
"Wait, I must..."
She had decided to receive them, but feared lest the prince might at any moment indulge in some freak, as he seemed much upset by the Rostovs' visit.
She thought her too fashionably dressed, frivolously gay and vain.
Kiss me," said Sonya.
Oh, why doesn't he come?..."
Natasha suddenly shrank into herself and involuntarily assumed an offhand air which alienated Princess Mary still more.
Apart from this insuperable antipathy to her, Princess Mary was agitated just then because on the Rostovs' being announced, the old prince had shouted that he did not wish to see them, that Princess Mary might do so if she chose, but they were not to be admitted to him.
It will all pass, Natasha."
I beg you to excuse me, to excuse me...
"I can't tell you, I don't know.
"Madam, Countess...
Mademoiselle Bourienne was the first to recover herself after this apparition and began speaking about the prince's indisposition.
I beg you to excuse me...
Next day, by Marya Dmitrievna's advice, Count Rostov took Natasha to call on Prince Nicholas Bolkonski.
The count did not set out cheerfully on this visit, at heart he felt afraid.
I did not know, madam.
"Don't talk about it, Natasha.
The footman who had gone to announce them was stopped by another in the large hall and they whispered to one another.
"What do they matter to you?
God is my witness, I did not know," muttered the old man, and after looking Natasha over from head to foot he went out.
The first person who came to meet the visitors was Mademoiselle Bourienne.
Princess Mary looked frightened.
"I beg you to excuse me, excuse me!
Mademoiselle Bourienne alone smiled agreeably.
Natasha and Princess Mary looked at one another in silence, and the longer they did so without saying what they wanted to say, the greater grew their antipathy to one another.
"They can't help liking me," she thought.
She did not like Princess Mary, whom she thought very plain, affected, and dry.
"Natasha, what is it about?" she asked.
They drove up to the gloomy old house on the Vozdvizhenka and entered the vestibule.
When the count returned, Natasha was impolitely pleased and hastened to get away: at that moment she hated the stiff, elderly princess, who could place her in such an embarrassing position and had spent half an hour with her without once mentioning Prince Andrew.
Of course you know Dmitri Sergeevich?
Perhaps I may prove useful to your Serene Highness."
Though Kutuzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Boris had contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes.
The icon was carried further, accompanied by the throng.
"To tell you the truth, between ourselves, God only knows what state our left flank is in," said Boris confidentially lowering his voice.
"But I should like to see the right flank.
He knew Kutuzov's attention would be caught by those words, and so it was.
He meant to fortify that knoll quite differently, but..." Boris shrugged his shoulders, "his Serene Highness would not have it, or someone persuaded him.
He explained his wish to be present at the battle and to see the position.
Is she well?
"Yes, yes."
"Yes, yes."
"It is not at all what Count Bennigsen intended.
I have the honor to be one of your wife's adorers.
Now the decisive moment of battle had come when Kutuzov would be destroyed and the power pass to Bennigsen, or even if Kutuzov won the battle it would be felt that everything was done by Bennigsen.
"A matchless people!" he repeated with a sigh.
We shall pass it and I'll take you to him."
So Boris was full of nervous vivacity all day.
I am in attendance on him, you know; I'll mention it to him.
Staggering amid the crush, Pierre looked about him.
But a militiaman got there before him.
"I am very glad to meet you here, Count," he said aloud, regardless of the presence of strangers and in a particularly resolute and solemn tone.
"Preparing for tomorrow, your Serene Highness--for death--they have put on clean shirts."
"How did that fellow get here?" asked Pierre.
Then when we get back, do spend the night with me and we'll arrange a game of cards.
An immense and brilliant suite surrounded him.
In any case many great rewards would have to be given for tomorrow's action, and new men would come to the front.
I beg you to forgive me."
What heroism, Count!"
Then, evidently remembering what he wanted, he beckoned to Andrew Kaysarov, his adjutant's brother.
"What are you saying about the militia?" he asked Boris.
"On the eve of a day when God alone knows who of us is fated to survive, I am glad of this opportunity to tell you that I regret the misunderstandings that occurred between us and should wish you not to have any ill feeling for me.
"Yes...
His eyes became pin-points under his grey eyebrows and his mouth tightened.
His house at Langley was a great one, standing in a park, and showing no signs of poverty; his servants were largely Catholic; he entertained priests and refugees of all kinds freely, although discreetly; and he laughed at the notion that the persecution could be of long endurance.
He said that repayment should follow so soon as the fleet should come.
"True?"
Life here at Langley was more encouraging than the furtive existence necessary in the north of Derbyshire.
"First," he said, "no man knows whether it will come.
And lo! when we looked again, the bag was gone!"
The grey old man smiled, while his eyelids twitched a little.
The other said nothing.
They had gone through into Staffordshire, as had been arranged, and there had moved about from house to house of Catholic friends without any trouble.
But he saw another side of him presently.
Mr. John glanced at him doubtfully.
So I take it that I feel the joy that I have a son who is ready to suffer for it, more than the pain I have in thinking on his sufferings.
Yet he did not know what to say.
Robin looked round him in wonder: he had no idea that his host was a man of such learning.
I have had no word from Mr. Anthony, but I hear that he said that he was glad that his father was not taken, and that his own taking he puts down to his brother's account, as yourself, sir, also did.
I do not hold that we are so ruled by these that we have no action of our own, any more than we are compelled to be wet through by rain or scorched by the sun: we may always come into a house or shelter beneath a tree, and thus escape them.
The evening before the two left for the north again, Mr. Bassett took them both into his own study.
They had not arrived till late, missing again, by a series of mischances, the scouts Marjorie had posted; and, on discovering their danger, had further discovered the house to be already watched.
"Listen," cried the other suddenly, "and tell me what you would have done.
In the morning he could not be sure but that he would be fleeing before evening.
I have told Mr. Fenton's fortune here, and Mr. FitzHerbert's, only they will never listen to me."
As he fell asleep, he could not be sure that he would not be awakened to a new dream.
The one may perhaps atone for the sins of the other, and yet help him to repentance."
I knew that a fleet of ships will come to England this year, before ever an anchor is weighed.
"Why, yes; I made shift that a servant should throw down a bag with ten pounds in it, into a bush, and that Brittlebank--your brother's man--should see him do it!
"All the books are ranged in their proper places," went on the other.
Then, suddenly, an intense curiosity overcame him.
Robin was silent.
A shelf ran round the room, high on the wall, and was piled with manuscripts to the ceiling. Beneath, the book-shelves that ran nearly round the room were packed with volumes, and a number more lay on the table and even in the corners.
Then he was taken again, and condemned.
"And the stars, too?" he asked.
"I have no taste to be a Spanish subject."
"No, sir; I think it does not.
Robin sat silent: it was not only for priests, it seemed, that life presented a tangle.
"They say that when a man is whipped he feels no more after awhile.
The place seemed to him sinister.
Yet he felt uneasy.
"I could put my finger on any of them blind-fold.
He took him to one that was behind the door, holding up the candle that he might see.
Mr. Bassett laughed loudly.
Then, as I would never have any part in the death of a priest for his religion, another was appointed to carry the execution through.
It was dark outside long ago; they had supped at sunset, and sat for half an hour over their banquet of sweetmeats and wine before coming upstairs.
Mr. John put his hand over his eyes and nodded without speaking.
But I have very heavy news, for all that; for there had come to the house after dark Mr. Anthony FitzHerbert, with two of his sisters, Mrs. Thomas FitzHerbert and Mr. Fenton himself, and they have carried the two gentlemen to the Derby gaol.
Her Grace will have to turn her coat once more, I think, when that comes to pass."
They judged it better, therefore, as Marjorie said in her letter, to feign unconsciousness of any charge against them, since there was no priest in the house who could incriminate them.
But this is the shelf I wished you to see."
Then his host touched him on the breast with one finger, and recoiled, smiling.
His life was a strange and perilous one; he carried it in his hand every day.
Mr. John was silent.
Mr. Sutton was taken, and was banished, and came back again, as any worthy priest would do.
And I would have you notice that here are Mr. FitzHerbert and your Reverence, too, fleeing for your lives; and here sit I safe at home; and all, as I hold, because I have been able to observe by my magic what is to come to pass."
Further, Mr. Fenton himself, hearing of their coming, had ridden up from Tansley, and missed the messenger that Marjorie had sent out.
There will be no subjection of England beyond that."
"Well, sir, I hold that God has written His will in the stars, and in the burning of herbs, and in the shining of the sun, and such things. There is no black magic here.
"This is my own privy chamber," said Mr. Bassett to the priest.
All this the travellers learned for the first time at Langley.
And the room, too, was as dark as night, except where far off in the west, beyond the tall trees of the park, a few red streaks lingered.
Mr. John had wandered off to one of the windows and was humming uneasily to himself.
And they found none of the hiding-holes, which is good news.
"Why, I heard from Sir Thomas but a week ago, to ask for a little money to pay his fines with.
Then why should God's foreknowledge any more hinder our free-will, when He chooses to communicate it to us?"
Robin looked round the room.
For it seemed that, entirely unexpectedly, there had arrived at Padley the following night no less than three of the FitzHerbert family, Mr. Anthony the seventh son, with two of his sisters, as well as Thomas FitzHerbert's wife, who rode with them, whether as a spy or not was never known.
It was when at last they thought it safe to be moving homewards, and had arrived at Langley, that they found Marjorie's letter awaiting them.
"I have another piece of bad news, too--which is no more than what we had looked for: that Mr. Simpson at the Assizes was condemned to death, but has promised to go to church, so that his life is spared if he will do so.
"What was that matter of Mr. Sutton, the priest who was executed in Stafford last year?" asked Mr. John suddenly.
I sent the messenger away again, and said that I would listen to no such tales.
He felt oppressed and miserable.
The capture of Mr. Anthony was, indeed, one more blow to his father; but Robin was astonished how cheerfully he bore it; and said as much when they two were alone in the garden.
"John here does not like it; neither did poor Mr. Fenton when he was here; but I hold there is no harm in such things if one does but observe caution."
It was addressed to Mr. John FitzHerbert and was brought by Robin's old servant, Dick Sampson.
"It was reported that you might have stayed the execution, and would not.
"My other friends have seen it many a time, but I thought I would show it to your Reverence, too."
"This is my magic," he said.
He inspected them gravely, but was not invited to touch them.
God's foreknowledge doth not hinder the use of our free-will (which is a mystery, no doubt, yet none the less true).
He wagged his face fiercely from side to side.
Mr. Bassett had a confident way with him that was like wine to fainting hearts, and he had every reason to be confident; since up to the present, beyond being forced to pay the usual fines for recusancy, he had scarcely been troubled at all; and lived in considerable prosperity, having even been sheriff of Stafford in virtue of his other estates at Blore.
"You sent the money, then?"
She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere. Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to think Marius handsome.
That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius' glance set Cosette to trembling.
She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly.
He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the back garden.
On the books of profane music which entered the convent, amour (love) was replaced by tambour (drum) or pandour. This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the big girls, such as: Ah, how delightful is the drum!
She did not look at herself again, and for more than a fortnight she tried to dress her hair with her back turned to the mirror.
He said to himself: "How beautiful she is!
She had all the fears of children and all the fears of nuns combined.
He who felt that he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings sprouting on Cosette.
But as he paid no attention to her, the young man was nothing to her.
It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute contemplation, the deification of a stranger.
On their return home, he asked Cosette:--
The spirit of the convent, with which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything tremble around her.
The rest is nothing, but the rest comes afterwards.
Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in the exaggerated mists of the cloister.
That must not be!
But that is abominable!" She would not have understood, and she would have replied: "What fault is there of mine in a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?"
A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl does not dress in damask.
This took place in Cosette's chamber.
You do not eat?
The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.
That is the way people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way.
On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself: "Decidedly I am beautiful!" Cosette began to pay attention to her toilet.
She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with Toussaint and her mirror.
Her whole person, permeated with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty, breathed forth a splendid melancholy.
Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.
Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety.
Marius went away confident, and Cosette uneasy.
In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's sweet face.
She had never heard the word uttered in its terrestrial sense.
You have oppressions and palpitations of the heart?
This vexed Cosette.
Love is the other.
She did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved.
The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown and mantle, and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant, rosy, proud, dazzling.
Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon.
"Father," she said, "how do you like me in this guise?" Jean Valjean replied in a voice which resembled the bitter voice of an envious man: "Charming!"
It melts in love, which is its sun.
They wound themselves.
At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also launched a look which disturbed Cosette.
It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the day before.
She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see what he would say, and to "teach him a lesson!"
Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became aware of it herself.
That Cosette might continue to love him!
Cosette turned towards the wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.
In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool or did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean Valjean read beside her.
"Father, what do you want me to do with it? Oh no, the idea!
Is any one the less ill because one does not know the name of one's malady?
I shall never put on those horrors again.
One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two beings fell in love because they looked at each other.
What is to become of me?"
He remained on his bench and did not approach.
The words heady woman were invented for the Parisienne.
He felt that it was a change in a happy life, a life so happy that he did not dare to move for fear of disarranging something.
Why, that is very bad!
Cosette did not know what love was.
But what she had lost in ingenuous grace, she gained in pensive and serious charm.
But that is forbidden!
And then, strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness.
This is surprising, and yet nothing is more simple.
With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her. She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat.
Beloved by Cosette, it was well with him!
In this situation he was not a lover, he was not even an admirer, he was a vision.
Women play with their beauty as children do with a knife.
"That disguise!" said she.
With that machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."
The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.
Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable oppression at heart.
Certain little proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by Cosette.
A substratum of war stirred within her.
It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to the state of her soul.
She would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: "You do not sleep?
From that day forth, they adored each other.
The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally fallen into disrepute.
It is the two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming, each the other's qualities.
That God would not prevent the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him! Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded with benefits, recompensed, crowned.
She returned thoughtfully to the house in the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had come to spend six weeks.
He asked nothing more!
What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have gazed upon with joy.
CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN
Jean Valjean, who was shy, never set foot in the garden.
Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface, made him shudder like the beginning of something new.
She had just dazzled herself.
The whiteness of soul in young girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow.
She no longer recognized it.
Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade back and forth in front of the railed fence.
She replied: "There is nothing the matter with me."
Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl, would have replied: "Why, no, he is charming." Ten years later, with the love of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "A pedant, and insufferable to the sight!
In short, I loved you, Armand.
To-day I am ill; I may die of this illness, for I have always had the presentiment that I shall die young.
This morning I stayed in bed.
You are witness of what I felt as the hour of our separation approached; your father was no longer there to support me, and there was a moment when I was on the point of confessing everything to you, so terrified was I at the idea that you were going to bate and despise me.
Did I do right?
"Do you believe that I had made this love the hope, the dream, the forgiveness--of my life?"
She loves, and she, too, has made this love the dream of her life.
He has gambled, I know; without telling you of it, I know also, but, in a moment of madness, he might have lost part of what I have saved, during many years, for my daughter's portion, for him, and for the repose of my old age.
At that there was only one thing to do, to show him the proof that since I was your mistress I had spared no sacrifice to be faithful to you without asking for more money than you had to give me.
What would you do then?
But he can not accept this sacrifice, because the world, which does not know you, would give a wrong interpretation to this acceptance, and such an interpretation must not tarnish the name which we bear.
"My child, do not take what I have to say to you amiss; only remember that there are sometimes in life cruel necessities for the heart, but that they must be submitted to.
You are good, your soul has generosity unknown to many women who perhaps despise you, and are less worthy than you.
It was quite natural, Armand.
"Tell me, sir," I said to your father, wiping away my tears, "do you believe that I love your son?"
Well, be happy; I owe you the only happy moments in my life.
You know how I insisted on your returning to Paris next day.
During the six months that he has known you Armand has forgotten me.
You told me that your father was the most honest man in the world.
The exaltation of the moment perhaps exaggerated the truth of these impressions, but that was what I felt, friend, and these new feelings silenced the memory of the happy days I had spent with you.
I won't say what impression his severe face made upon me.
I wrote to him four times, and he has never once replied.
Far from Paris, far, far, they tell me, and perhaps you have already forgotten Marguerite.
Who would ever have said that I, Marguerite Gautier, would have suffered so at the mere thought of a new lover?
"Oh, be at rest, sir; he will hate me."
"Are you sure, besides, that the life which you are giving up for him will never again come to attract you?
"With a disinterested love?"
I might have died and he not known it!
He inquired of me what it contained.
You had only been gone an hour when your father presented himself.
"You are young, beautiful, life will console you; you are noble, and the memory of a good deed will redeem you from many past deeds.
I trembled at this beginning.
Think, then, what you would suffer in the presence of a father who should call on you to render an account for the life of his son!
I think of you, Armand.
"Yes.
"Implicitly."
My mother died of consumption, and the way I have always lived could but increase the only heritage she ever left me.
And you, where are you, while I write these lines?
His letter, which I inclose with this, begged me, in the most serious terms, to keep you away on the following day, on some excuse or other, and to see your father, who wished to speak to me, and asked me particularly not to say anything to you about it.
Who knows what he would do then!
Are you sure, you who have loved him, that you will never love another?
Would you not-suffer on seeing the hindrances set by your love to your lover's life, hindrances for which you would be powerless to console him, if, with age, thoughts of ambition should succeed to dreams of love?
"Finally, my dear child, let me tell you all, for I have not yet told you all, let me tell you what has brought me to Paris.
But remember that there is not only the mistress, but the family; that besides love there are duties; that to the age of passion succeeds the age when man, if he is to be respected, must plant himself solidly in a serious position.
At supper I still had need of aid, for I could not think of what I was going to do, so much did I fear that my courage would fail me.
Your father embraced me once more.
But I do not want to die without clearing up for you everything about me; that is, if, when you come back, you will still trouble yourself about the poor girl whom you loved before you went away.
Your father came over to me, took both my hands, and continued in an affectionate voice:
I wrote all that to Armand, but, absorbed in you, he made no reply.
Think over all that, madame. You love Armand; prove it to him by the sole means which remains to you of yet proving it to him, by sacrificing your love to his future.
What might have happened may yet happen.
This is what the letter contained; I shall like writing it over again, so as to give myself another proof of my own justification.
You remember, Armand, how the arrival of your father surprised us at Bougival; you remember the involuntary fright that his arrival caused me, and the scene which took place between you and him, which you told me of in the evening.
I had to set up between us, as much for me as for you, an insurmountable barrier.
I have been ill three or four days.
In the name of your love and of your repentance, Marguerite, grant me the happiness of my child."
That is the whole truth, friend.
"Your son's welfare," I answered.
"Well, sir, embrace me once, as you would embrace your daughter, and I swear to you that that kiss, the only chaste kiss I have ever had, will make me strong against my love, and that within a week your son will be once more at your side, perhaps unhappy for a time, but cured forever."
No one would consider whether Armand loves you, whether you love him, whether this mutual love means happiness to him and redemption to you; they would see only one thing, that Armand Duval allowed a kept woman (forgive me, my child, for what I am forced to say to you) to sell all she had for him.
No misfortune has yet arrived, but one will arrive, and perhaps a greater one than those which I foresee.
The heart is a strange thing; I was almost glad at hearing it.
"Perhaps that was only in order to put off the fatal moment."
I travelled; love affairs, habits, work, took the place of other thoughts, and when I recalled this adventure I looked upon it as one of those passions which one has when one is very young, and laughs at soon afterward.
"What is the matter?"
Chapter 7
She was elegantly dressed; she wore a muslin dress with many flounces, an Indian shawl embroidered at the corners with gold and silk flowers, a straw hat, a single bracelet, and a heavy gold chain, such as was just then beginning to be the fashion.
"I shall never see this woman again, and if I liked her before meeting her, it is quite different now that I know her."
I did not know who she was, and I was afraid lest she should guess why I had come in and be offended. Nevertheless, I did not think I should ever see her again.
"Do you know if she likes them?"
The doctor had allowed him to get up, and we often sat talking at the open window, at the hour when the sun is at its height, from twelve to two.
A moment after my friend returned.
She asked me for some."
I was far from having given up thinking about Marguerite.
Spring was profuse in its flowers, its leaves, its birds, its songs; and my friend's window opened gaily upon his garden, from which a reviving breath of health seemed to come to him.
"Are you in love with her?"
The first person I saw in one of the boxes was Marguerite Gautier.
"Come with me.
He turns his head, crosses the street, and goes sadly back to his own house.
I tried (sublime childishness of love!) to string together the words I should say to her.
Before the performance was over Marguerite and her friend left the box. I rose from my seat.
We men are built like that, and it is very fortunate that the imagination lends so much poetry to the senses, and that the desires of the body make thus such concession to the dreams of the soul.
Don't imagine it is a duchess.
"What a way you behaved!" he said, as he sat down.
I rose to my feet, saying in an altered voice, which I could not entirely control:
I had scarcely closed the door when I heard a third peal of laughter.
A murmur of admiration greeted her as she entered the shop.
At that moment Marguerite turned her opera-glass in our direction and, seeing my friend, smiled and beckoned to him to come to her.
"I could not help saying 'Happy man!'"
"I will go and say 'How do you do?' to her," he said, "and will be back in a moment."
The signal for raising the curtain was given. Ernest came back to his place beside me.
I would rather that she had been sad.
The body was too much weakened by the attack of fever, and even by the process of its cure, to permit him any violent emotions, and the universal joy of spring which wrapped him round carried his thoughts instinctively to images of joy.
I had noticed that ever since his last visit to the cemetery, and the sight which had brought on so violent a crisis, sorrow seemed to have been overcome by sickness, and Marguerite's death no longer appeared to him under its former aspect.
However little one may have known women like Marguerite, one can not but know the delight they take in pretending to be witty and in teasing the people whom they meet for the first time.
One of the two men was leaning over her shoulder and whispering in her ear.
I met Gaston and asked after her.
"Do you mean that you wash your hands of me also, if I stand by Rachel?"
Come home with me at once, and let us lay our plans together."
"It is impossible.
All but Christie obeyed, yet no one touched a needle, and Mrs. King sat, hurriedly stabbing pins into the fat cushion on her breast, as if testing the hardness of her heart.
The good soul had ventured South and tried to buy her mother.
Among the girls was one quiet, skilful creature, whose black dress, peculiar face, and silent ways attracted Christie.
Will you be my friend, and let me be yours?"
"Christie, you have done enough for me," she said.
"I shall be solitary all my life, perhaps; so the sooner I make up my mind to it, the easier it will be to bear."
"I never can go back; you have saved me, Christie, for you love me, you have faith in me, and that will keep me strong and safe when you are gone.
I must love somebody, and 'love them hard,' as children say; so why can't you come and stay with me?
But remember I didn't ask it first," said Rachel, half dropping the hand she had held in both her own.
"Go back, and keep the good place you need, for such are hard to find.
It appears that Rachel, whom we all considered a most respectable and worthy girl, has been quite the reverse.
"No, dear; if I wouldn't go when you first asked me, much less will I go now, for I've done you harm enough already.
But Rachel always answered steadily: "Not yet, Christie, not yet.
"Miss Devon, I'm surprised at you!
"It was perfectly right and proper, Miss Devon; and I thank her for her care of my interests." And Mrs. King bowed her acknowledgment of the service with a perfect castanet accompaniment, whereat Miss Cotton bridled with malicious complacency.
With the same indefinable misgiving which had held her aloof, Christie turned to Rachel, lifted up the hidden face with gentle force, and looked into it imploringly, as she whispered: "Is it true?"
Mrs. King, please forgive and let poor Rachel stay here, safe among us."
"You proud creature!
It clings to me; it won't be shaken off or buried out of sight.
"Take off your bonnet, Cotton; I have no intention of offending you, or any one else, by such a step.
But presently she became aware that Rachel watched her with covert interest, stealing quick, shy glances at her as she sat musing over her work.
Your Magdalen Asylums are penitentiaries, not homes; I won't go to any of them.
I never can thank you for your great goodness to me, never tell you what it has been to me.
I forgive you, Rachel, and I pity you; but I can't think of allowing you to stay.
Only love me, trust me, pray for me, and some day you shall know what you have done for me.
"I'm tired of thinking only of myself.
Another hundred she gave to Hepsey, who found her out and came to report her trials and tribulations.
Her evenings at home were devoted to books, for she had the true New England woman's desire for education, and read or studied for the love of it.
"Yes.
It makes me selfish and low-spirited; for I'm not a bit interesting.
"I thank you for your polite insinuations, miss," returned the irate forewoman.
Coming to her work late one morning, she found the usually orderly room in confusion.
"I'll not go back!" cried Christie, hotly.
Mrs. King, think of your own daughters, and be a mother to this poor girl for their sake."
Ask the creature herself if all I've said of her isn't true.
"Then I will leave it!" cried Christie, with an indignant voice and eye.
"I want the sound of a loving voice; the touch of a friendly hand."
What hurts me now more than all the rest, what breaks my heart, is that I deceived you.
"Miss Cotton does not like Rachel because her work is so much praised.
She missed Helen, and longed to fill the empty place.
Young ladies, take your seats."
For a while it diverted Christie, as she had a feminine love for pretty things, and enjoyed seeing delicate silks, costly lace, and all the indescribable fantasies of fashion.
I did not seek you, did I? I tried to be cold and stiff; never asked for love, though starving for it, till you came to me, so kind, so generous, so dear,--how could I help it?
Among her companions was one, and one only, who attracted her.
You can do as you please, Miss Devon, but I prefer to wash my hands of the affair at once and entirely."
I'm very sorry, but my young ladies must keep respectable company, or leave my service," was the brief reply, for Mrs. King grew grimmer externally as the mental rebellion increased internally.
"I do.
"You must take it, Hepsey, for I could not rest happy if I put it away to lie idle while you can save men and women from torment with it.
Strangely haunting eyes to Christie, for they seemed to appeal to her with a mute eloquence she could not resist.
He then showed the propriety of undertaking the war; and that if it had not been commenced by the Florentines in Romagna the duke would have assailed them in Tuscany.
He assured them they ought not to be alarmed by impending expenses and consequent taxation; because the latter might be reduced, and the future expense would not be so great as the former had been; for less preparation is necessary for those engaged in self-defense than for those who design to attack others.
He advised them to imitate the conduct of their forefathers, who, by courageous conduct in adverse circumstances, had defended themselves against all their enemies.
CHAPTER II
Rinaldo degli Albizzi addressed the assembly, describing the condition of the city, and showing how by their own negligence it had again fallen under the power of the plebeians, from whom it had been wrested by their fathers in 1381.
To effect this they might proceed either openly or otherwise, for some of them belonging to the Council of Ten, forces might be led into the city without exciting observation.
These burdens were very grievous to the nobility, who at first, in order to conciliate, did not complain of their own particular hardships, but censured the tax generally as unjust, and advised that something should be done in the way of relief; but their advice was rejected in the Councils.
Seeing the discontent so prevalent, the Signory resolved to assemble a few citizens, and with soft words endeavor to soothe the popular irritation.
Giovanni de' Medici was not among them either because being under suspicion he was not invited or that entertaining different views he was unwilling to interfere.
Rinaldo was much applauded, and his advice was approved of by the whole assembly.
The advocates of war considered it improper to await the enemy in their houses, and better to go and seek him; that fortune is always more favorable to assailants than to such as merely act on the defensive, and that it is less injurious, even when attended with greater immediate expense, to make war at another's door than at our own.
This circumstance gave so much gratification to the mass of the people (the multitude thinking they had now found a defender), that not without occasion the judicious of the party observed it with jealousy, for they perceived all the former feelings of the city revived.
Niccolo da Uzzano did not fail to acquaint the other citizens with the matter, explaining to them how dangerous it was to aggrandize one who possessed so much influence; that it was easy to remedy an evil at its commencement, but exceedingly difficult after having allowed it to gather strength; and that Giovanni possessed several qualities far surpassing those of Salvestro.
CHAPTER I
He therefore sent ambassadors to Florence to signify his desires.
The question having been strongly debated, an amicable arrangement was at length effected, by which Filippo engaged not to interfere with anything on the Florentine side of the rivers Magra and Panaro.
That the duke's people might not relieve it, they hired Count Alberigo, who from Zagonara, his own domain, overran the country daily, up to the gates of Imola.
Thus daily renewing the hatred of a mass of the people by their sinister proceedings, and either negligent of the threatened dangers, because rendered fearless by prosperity, or encouraging them through mutual envy, they gave an opportunity to the family of the Medici to recover their influence.
The first families that suffered in this way were the Alberti, the Ricci, and the Medici, which were frequently deprived both of men and money; and if any of them remained in the city, they were deprived of the honors of government.
With such excellent laws and institutions, many of those ancient republics, which were of long duration, were endowed.
This embassy produced no other effect than that of dividing the citizens; one party, that in greatest reputation, judged it best to arm, and prepare to frustrate the enemy's designs; and if he were to remain quiet, it would not be necessary to go to war with him, but an endeavor might be made to preserve peace.
He did not think it advisable to attempt this, or any other enterprise, till he had renewed amicable relations with the Florentines, and made his good understanding with them known; but with the aid of their reputation he trusted he should attain his wishes.
These things disturbed the minds of the citizens, and made them, apprehensive of new troubles, consider the means to be adopted for their defense.
They were fully aware of the advantages he would derive from a war with Genoa, and the little use it would be to Florence.
Many citizens were opposed to his design, but did not wish to interrupt the peace with Milan, which had now continued for many years.
AN INDIAN DISH OF FOWL (an Entree).
It is seldom or ever that hens will lay during the moult; while the cock, during the same period, will give so little of his consideration to the frivolities of love, that you may as well, nay, much better, keep him by himself till he perfectly recovers.
THE WILD GOOSE.--This bird is sometimes called the "Gray-lag" and is the original of the domestic goose.
When the bird is getting well, put half a spoonful of sulphur in his drinking-water.
This part of the coast appears to have been a favourite resort of these birds from time immemorial, where they have always received the name of Ware geese, no doubt from their continually feeding on marine vegetables.
Should a very highly-flavoured seasoning be preferred, the onions should not be parboiled, but minced raw: of the two methods, the mild seasoning is far superior.
All kinds of cold meat and solid fish may be dressed a la Mayonnaise, and make excellent luncheon or supper dishes.
You may know when a bird is so afflicted by his crop being distended almost to bursting. Mowbray tells of a hen of his in this predicament; when the crop was opened, a quantity of new beans were discovered in a state of vegetation.
They are thus called the "fowls of the sultan," a name which has the twofold advantage of being the nearest to be found to that by which they have been known in their own country, and of designating the country whence they come.
Its size is about the same as that of a common hen, but it stands higher on its legs.
A sudden alteration in diet will cause it, as will a superabundance of green food.
the pair.
Though domesticated, it retains much of its wild nature, and is apt to wander.
First-rate birds command a high price.
It is gregarious in its habits, associating in flocks of two or three hundred, delighting in marshy grounds, and at night perching upon trees, or on high situations.
I have seen ignorant keepers plunge a bird, stricken with the "turn," into cold water; but I never saw it taken out again alive; and for a good reason: the sudden chill has the effect of driving the blood to the head,--of aggravating the disease indeed, instead of relieving it.
THE MOULTING SEASON.--During the moulting season beginning properly at the end of September, the fowls will require a little extra attention.
HASHED FOWL--an Entree (Cold Meat Cookery).
HASHED FOWL, Indian Fashion (an Entree).
Before taking the rice out, remove the spices.
Be careful to serve the goose before the breast falls, or its appearance will be spoiled by coming flattened to table.
They are also known in different parts of the country, as Chitteprats, Creoles, or Corals, Bolton bays and grays, and, in some parts of Yorkshire, by the wrong name of Corsican fowls. They are imported in large numbers from Holland, but those bred in this country are greatly superior in size.
The hens of both should have the body clearly pencilled across with several bars of black, and the hackle in both, sexes should be perfectly free from dark marks.
Cut off the claws; dip the legs in boiling water, and scrape them; turn the pinions under, run a skewer through them and the middle of the legs, which should be passed through the body to the pinion and leg on the other side, one skewer securing the limbs on both sides.
Both of these varieties are extremely beautiful, the hens laying freely.
If in any fowl the moult should seem protracted, examine it for broken feather-stumps still beaded in the skin: if you find any, extract them carefully with a pair of tweezers.
The fine time is between both; from the second week in June to the first in September." It is said that the Michaelmas goose is indebted to Queen Elizabeth for its origin on the table at that season.
Cover a piece of paper over the pie, to prevent the crust taking too much colour.
Oysters, white sauce, or a little cream, may be stirred into the rice before it cools.
A ragout, or pie, should be made of the giblets, or they may be stewed down to make gravy.
The sauce should not be poured over the fowls until the moment of serving.
When not liked, the vinegar may be omitted.
Some fanciers prescribe for this disease half a spoonful of table salt, dissolved in half a gill of water, in which rue has been steeped; others, pills composed of ground rice and fresh butter: but the remedy first mentioned will be found far the best.
"The finest," says the writer whom we have consulted as to this breed, "we have ever seen, were in Sir John's poultry-yard, adjacent to Turnham-Green Common, in the byroad leading to Acton."
The female is yellow, or orange-brown, the feathers in like manner being margined with black.
Should a very large Mayonnaise be required, use 2 fowls instead of 1, with an equal proportion of the remaining ingredients.
SKIN-DISEASE IN FOWLS.--Skin-disease is, nine times out of ten, caused by the feathers being swarmed by parasites.
It is, according to Pennant, the only species which the Britons could take young, and familiarize.
INGREDIENTS.--The remains of cold roast fowl, 3 or 4 sliced onions, 1 tablespoonful of curry-powder, salt to taste.
Pluck, singe, draw, and carefully wash and wipe the goose; cut off the neck close to the back, leaving the skin long enough to turn over; cut off the feet at the first joint, and separate the pinions at the first joint.
Beat the breast-bone flat with a rolling-pin, put a skewer through the under part of each wing, and having drawn up the legs closely, put a skewer into the middle of each, and pass the same quite through the body.
The hens lay abundantly, and the eggs are excellent.
Mr. Selby states that a very large body of these birds annually resort to the extensive sandy and muddy flats which lie between the mainland and Holy Island, on the Northumbrian coast, and which are covered by every flow of the tide.
ROAST FOWLS.
THE TURN.--What is termed "turrling" with song-birds, is known, as regard fowls, as the "turn." Its origin is the same in both cases,--over-feeing and want of exercise.
They are, however, bad nurses; consequently, their eggs should be laid in the nest of other varieties to be hatched.
Let it boil slowly until it is nearly done; then add the rice, which should stew until quite tender and almost dry; cut the onions into slices, sprinkle them with flour, and fry, without breaking them, of a nice brown colour.
ROAST FOWL, Stuffed.
When firmly trussed, singe them all over; put them down to a bright clear fire, paper the breasts with a sheet of buttered paper, and keep the fowls well basted.
INGREDIENTS.--The remains of cold roast goose, 2 onions, 2 oz. of butter, 1 pint of boiling water, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, pepper and salt to taste, 1 tablespoonful of port wine, 2 tablespoonfuls of mushroom ketchup.
Have ready the slices of bacon curled and grilled, and the eggs boiled hard.
A moulting chicken makes but a sorry dish.
When quite hot, serve, and garnish the dish with rolled ham or bacon toasted.
In drawing them, be careful not to break the gall-bag, as, wherever it touches, it would impart a very bitter taste; the liver and gizzard should also be preserved.
He knew the next moment the signal would be given that was to bring him either glory or shame from that iron statue. He ground his teeth together with stern resolve to do his best in the coming encounter, and murmured a brief prayer in the hallow darkness of his huge helm.
A blow perfectly delivered upon the helm was of all others the most difficult for the recipient to recover from, but then a blow upon the helm was not one time in fifty perfectly given.
All his grim coldness was gone, and he flung his arms around the young man's neck, hugging him heartily, and kissing him upon either cheek.
Upon that motionless figure his sight gradually centred with every faculty of mind and soul.
"Then keep thy head cool and thine eye true.
As he turned his horse's head towards his own end of the lists, he saw the other trotting slowly back towards his station, also holding a broken spear shaft in his hand.
He gathered himself together, and the next moment a bugle sounded loud and clear.
The spectators had somehow come to the knowledge that this was to be a more serious encounter than the two which had preceded it, and a breathless silence fell for the moment or two that the knights stood in place.
Gascoyne had picked up Myles's fallen helmet as the Sieur de la Montaigne moved away, and Lord George and Sir James Lee came walking across the lists to where Myles still sat.
Before, he had been conscious of the critical multitude looking down upon him; now it was a conflict of man to man, and such a conflict had no terrors for his young heart of iron.
A red spot of excitement still burned in either cheek, and it flamed to a rosier red as he bowed his head to her before turning away.
The senior squire drew his dagger, cut the leather points, and drew off the helm, disclosing the knight's face--a face white as death, and convulsed with rage, mortification, and bitter humiliation.
Through all the clashing of his armor reverberating in the hollow depths of his helmet, he saw the mail-clad figure from the other end of the lists rushing towards him, looming larger and larger as they came together.
"Then belike he meaneth to strike at thy helm.
Thou dost bring honor to me, for I tell thee truly thou dost ride like a knight seasoned in twenty tourneys."
"I myself saw the stitches were some little what burst, and warned him thereof before we ran this course.
Again he saw the iron figure of his opponent rushing nearer, nearer, nearer.
CHAPTER 27
In one blinding rush he drove his spurs into the sides of his horse, and in instant answer felt the noble steed spring forward with a bound.
Who says otherwise lies!"
"My dear boy," said he, gripping the hand he held, "never could I hope to be so overjoyed in mine old age as I am this day.
Myles saw the two squires of the fallen knight run across to where their master lay, he saw the ladies waving their kerchiefs and veils, and the castle people swinging their hats and shouting in an ecstasy of delight. Then he rode slowly back to where the squires were now aiding the fallen knight to arise.
When he had reached his own end of the lists, he flung away his broken spear, and Gascoyne came forward with another.
This time as they met midway the Sieur de la Montaigne reined in his horse.
He heard a great shout arise from all, and thought, with a sickening, bitter disappointment, that it was because he had lost.
I did not believe that thou couldst do half so well.
The charge that Sir James Lee had given to Myles to strike at his adversary's helm was a piece of advice he probably would not have given to so young a knight, excepting as a last resort.
When, in answer to the command of the Marshal, he took his place a second time, he found himself calmer and more collected than before, but every faculty no less intensely fixed than it had been at first.
It was of seasoned oak, somewhat thicker than the other, a tough weapon, not easily to be broken even in such an encounter as he was like to have.
The huge cylindrical tilting helm was so constructed in front as to slope at an angle in all directions to one point.
"Did he indeed so say?" said Sir James.
"Sir," said the Marshal calmly, and speaking in French, "surely thou knowest that the loss of helmet does not decide an encounter.
Nevertheless, on account of thy youth, I give thee this warning, so that thou mayst hold thyself in readiness."
Was it not right knightly for him so to do?"
"It is the truth he speaketh," said Myles.
He balanced the weapon, and found that it fitted perfectly to his grasp. As he raised the point to rest, his opponent took his station at the farther extremity of the lists, and again there was a little space of breathless pause.
Now I shall do my endeavor to unhorse thee as I would an acknowledged peer in arms.
Gascoyne had just removed Myles's breastplate and gorget, when Sir James Lee burst into the pavilion.
There, in a tangle of his horse's harness and of embroidered trappings, the Sieur de la Montaigne lay stretched upon the ground, with his saddle near by, and his riderless horse was trotting aimlessly about at the farther end of the lists.
Myles, with Gascoyne running beside him, rode across to his pavilion, and called to Edmund Wilkes to bring him a cup of spiced wine.
He felt his horse stagger under him with the recoil, and hardly knowing what he did, he drove his spurs deep into its sides with a shout.
Myles, his heart swelling with a passion of triumphant delight, looked up and met the gaze of Lady Alice fixed intently upon him.
"Oh, Myles!" he said, with sob in his voice, "it was nobly done.
"Nevertheless," said the Sieur de la Montaigne, in the same hoarse, breathless voice, "I do affirm, and will make my affirmation good with my body, that I fell only by the breaking of my girth.
If he then was justified in doing so of his own choice, and wilfully suffering to be unhelmed, how then can this knight be accused of evil who suffered it by chance?"
After Gascoyne had taken off his helmet, and as he sat wiping the perspiration from his face Sir James came up and took him by the hand.
Once more the Marshal raised his baton, once more the horn sounded, and once more the two rushed together with the same thunderous crash, the same splinter of broken spears, the same momentary trembling recoil of the horse, and the same onward rush past one another.
Then he realized that he had met his opponent, and had borne the meeting well.
Never did I see a better ridden course in all my life.
"Not now," answered Myles.
"Sir Myles," said the Earl, suddenly, breaking the silence at last, "dost thou know why I sent for thee hither?"
The rugged exposure in camp and field during the hard winter that had passed had roughened the smooth bloom of his boyish complexion and bronzed his fair skin almost as much as a midsummer's sun could have done.
"I do hope that thy deeds be as bold as thy words."
The Earl of Mackworth stroked his beard softly.
I am here."
Now, with his eyes trained to the bigness of Devlen Castle, he looked around him with wonder and pity at his father's humble surroundings.
He had never appreciated before how low and narrow and poor the farm-house was.
The Earl waited for a little while, as though to give him the opportunity to answer.
It was a bright day in April when he and Gascoyne rode clattering out through Temple Bar, leaving behind them quaint old London town, its blank stone wall, its crooked, dirty streets, its high-gabled wooden houses, over which rose the sharp spire of St. Paul's, towering high into the golden air.
It was the first time that Myles had seen famous London town.
His beard and mustache had grown again, (now heavier and more mannish from having been shaved), and the white seam of a scar over the right temple gave, if not a stern, at least a determined look to the strong, square-jawed young face.
A little space of silence followed, during which the Earl sat musingly, half absently, regarding the tall, erect, powerful young figure standing before him, awaiting his pleasure in motionless, patient, almost dogged silence.
To Myles it seemed somehow very strange that his Lordship's familiar face and figure should look so exactly the same.
It was with a great deal of interest that Myles and his patron regarded one another when they met for the first time after that half-year which the young soldier had spent in France.
Methinks no one may justly call me coward."
He was there for only six months, but those six months wrought a great change in his life.
"When didst thou land, Sir Myles?" said the Earl.
"From which I gather," said the Earl, "that many adventures have befallen thee.
The Earl nodded his head.
Meseems thou takest all this with marvellous coolness."
Two weeks of that time Myles spent at Crosbey-Dale with his father and mother.
It was not until more than three weeks after the King had left Devlen Castle that Lord George and his company of knights and archers were ready for the expedition to France.
Then one day a courier came, bringing a packet.
Nay, Myles, I do know thy father well, and have known him for many years, and this of him, that few men are so honorable in heart and soul as he.
Haply my father was Bolingbroke's enemy, but, sure, thou dost not believe he is justly and rightfully tainted with treason?"
The strong, sinewy hands were clasped and rested upon the long heavy sword, around the scabbard of which the belt was loosely wrapped, and the plates of mail caught and reflected in flashing, broken pieces, the bright sunlight from the window behind.
"That," said Myles, "thou must ask other men.
"Nay," answered the priest, "how canst thou ask me such a thing?
"I have seen such things, my Lord, in France and in Paris," said he, quietly, "as, mayhap, may make a lad a man before his time."
Now he jogged along with Gascoyne, gazing about him with calm interest at open shops and booths and tall, gabled houses; at the busy throng of merchants and craftsmen, jostling and elbowing one another; at townsfolk--men and dames--picking their way along the muddy kennel of a sidewalk.
So Myles went to France in Lord George's company, a soldier of fortune, as his Captain was.
The time is now nearly ripe, and I will straightway send for thy father to come to London.
"Have I then my Lord's permission to speak my mind?"
Myles was the first to break the silence.
Myles smiled somewhat grimly.
Prior Edward added many things to those which Myles already knew--things of which the Earl either did not know, or did not choose to speak.
Meseems even an evil thing is sometimes passing good when rightfully used."
"Well, then, what have you decided?"
Nekhludoff meant to rearrange the whole of his external life, to let his large house and move to an hotel, but Agraphena Petrovna pointed out that it was useless to change anything before the winter.
Evidently, in spite of his being so used to it, he still felt pleasure in listening to his own productions.
It will be most interesting.
Well, as to your case, or, rather, the case you are taking an interest in.
Now as to your fees?"
"I have freed one insolvent debtor from a totally false charge, and now they all flock to me.
Nekhludoff thanked the advocate's wife with extreme politeness for the honour she did him in inviting him, but refused the invitation with a sad and solemn look, and left the room.
"I do know some."
In this case, too, I am at your service; I mean as to the working of the petition, not the influence."
There is no good reason for appealing.
Well, now, there it is.
"It is a ground for appeal, though.
Still," he continued, "we can but try to get the sentence revoked.
This, too, depends on the private influence you can bring to work.
Not only did everything remain as it was, but the house was suddenly filled with new activity.
But the governor is away at present; a vice-governor is in his place.
At this moment a horribly ugly, little, bony, snub-nosed, yellow-faced woman flew into the room.
If you have any influence there you can but try."
"Yes."
Yet, as has been repeatedly pointed out by the Senate, the elucidation of the criminal's characteristics and his or her moral standpoint in general has a significance of the first importance in criminal cases, even if only as a guide in the settling of the question of imputation.' That's point two," he said, with a look at Nekhludoff.
"I know him," said Nekhludoff, and got up to go.
It has been conducted abominably.
"He has worried me to death--a fearful scoundrel.
"Thanks; I have come about Maslova's case."
"And now the fourth point," the advocate continued.
Yet every such case costs enormous labour.
"You see what a lot I have to do," said Fanarin, spreading out his hands and smilingly pointing to his wife, as if to show how impossible it was to resist so charming a creature.
Fanarin was also a middle-aged man of medium height, with a worn look on his face.
Maslova is accused of wilfully poisoning Smelkoff, her one object being that of cupidity, the only motive to commit murder she could have had.
"But it's not worth while altering my manner of life now," he thought, "while Maslova's case is not decided.
"My assistant will hand you the petition and tell you."
The Procureur gave me a pass for visiting this person in prison, but they tell me I must also get a permission from the governor in order to get an interview at another time and in another place than those appointed.
"All right; only be quick about it.
"Is it Meslennikoff?"
"Yes, yes; directly!
She opened the cabinet door and said, "Anatole, you must come to me.
"I, too, should like to know why," Fanarin said, laughing.
"One thing more.
"You saw this here fellow.
When Nekhludoff crossed the yard or looked out of the window and saw all this going on, he was surprised at the great number of things there were, all quite useless.
"One moment.
This was an author.
"But it was the prosecuting side that demanded this reading," Nekhludoff said, with surprise.
"Then the Senate will, of course, correct this error?"
And so all his efforts to change his manner of life (he meant to live more simply: as the students live) led to nothing.
"Your own fault, you know, my dear sir," Fanarin said, smiling.
"That does not matter.
"The form of the answer given by the jury contained an evident contradiction.
The gate-keeper, the boy, the cook, and Corney himself took part in this activity.
Both faces bore the expression which you see on the faces of those who have just concluded a profitable but not quite honest transaction.
There; all that can be done is done, but, to be frank, I have little hope of success, though, of course, it all depends on what members will be present at the Senate.
It was our mistake."
This is a decided and gross violation of the basic principles of our criminal law.
It will alter of itself when she will be set free or exiled, and I follow her."
Why, don't we, too, 'lose bits of flesh in the inkstand?' as some writer or other has said.
"Then why did the president not do it?"
M. Fanarin will read."
"That will all depend on who will preside there at the time.
She stepped out triumphantly into the ante-room, followed by a tall, smiling man, with a greenish complexion, dressed in a coat with silk facings, and a white tie.
This is point one."
"Thank you.
This is what I have noted down." He took up several sheets of paper covered with writing, and began to read rapidly, slurring over the uninteresting legal terms and laying particular stress on some sentences.
I mean that greenhorn of an advocate has left no valid reason for an appeal."
"Well, how about your case? I have read it attentively, but do not approve of it.
She was attired in the most original manner; she seemed enveloped in something made of velvet and silk, something yellow and green, and her thin hair was crimped.
To continue: 'Secondly,' he went on reading, 'when Maslova's advocate, in his speech for the defence, wishing to characterise Maslova's personality, referred to the causes of her fall, he was interrupted by the president calling him to order for the alleged deviation from the direct subject.
"But he won't agree."
"Well, no matter," and the advocate frowned.
Their only use, Nekhludoff thought, was the providing of exercise for Agraphena Petrovna, Corney, the gate-keeper, the boy, and the cook.
In the waiting-room, just as in a doctor's waiting-room, he found many dejected-looking people sitting round several tables, on which lay illustrated papers meant to amuse them, awaiting their turns to be admitted to the advocate.
All that was made of wool or fur was taken out to be aired and beaten.
Sometimes he felt that he must turn back--that his pain was going to master him; then he forced himself to go on.
For four years he saw her only in the summers, and each year she had seemed taller, statelier, further from him.
He had loved Sara Stuart from childhood.
It mattered nothing to me that the world may have thought there was some social difference between us.
There were exclamations of surprise from the other men on hearing this.
Shyly enough he had assented, and they set out together for the barrens beyond the field, where the arbutus trailed its stars of sweetness under the dusty dead grasses and withered leaves of the old year.
"Maybe he thinks the Bayside girls ain't good enough for him."
Youth can never acquire it.
But he's queer sartainly--not like other people--kind of unsociable.
They pitied him for the lonely life he must lead alone there at the Valley Farm, with only a deaf old housekeeper as a companion, for it did not occur to the Bayside people in general that a couple of shaggy dogs could be called companions, and they did not know that books make very excellent comrades for people who know how to treat them.
Pinehurst goes to the oldest male heir.
"And I will think myself a proud and happy and honoured woman to be so, Jeff.
She would despise him.
Presently he would say something foolish or selfish in spite of himself.
There were no lights in it.
"It'd only be right for her cousin to give her a home there."
One of Jeffrey's dogs was with him now--the oldest one, with white breast and paws and a tawny coat.
Her mother had died, and Sara was the gracious, stately mistress of Pinehurst, which grew quieter as the time went on; the lovers ceased to come, and holiday friends grew few; with the old colonel's failing health the gaieties and lavish entertaining ceased.
"You have me," said Jeffrey quietly.
As for Jeff, he worshipped her and would have done anything she commanded.
I never meant to tell you so, but it is the truth.
She was a fairy queen who thus graciously smiled on him and chattered blithely as they searched for mayflowers in the fresh spring sunshine.
Who was he that he should have dared to love her?
When Sara was fifteen she had gone away to school.
That's all.
"Why, Jeff," she said, with pleasure in her tones.
He don't care for a thing 'cept dogs and reading and mooning round woods and fields.
Never to see her light shine down on him through the northern gap in the pines at night!
Never to feel that perhaps her eyes rested on him now and then as he went about his work in the valley fields!
"I have thought about you every hour--but I feared to intrude."
Must be a kind of relief for Sara--she's had to wait on him, hand and foot, for years.
Sara ain't as young as she used to be, neither.
How could he bear his life if she went away?
I have asked nothing.
He loved Sara--and he did not wish to conquer his love, even if it had been possible.
Of course, there's plenty of money and Sara'll get that.
He knew now that he had made a mistake in coming tonight; he could not help her. His own pain had unmanned him.
He had not known it either.
Sara put the flowers in a vase on the table, but slipped one starry pink cluster into the lace on her breast.
She came and sat down beside Jeffrey; he saw that her beautiful eyes had been weeping, and that there were lines of pain around her lips.
I did not know that you loved me, or I should have found some way to make you speak out long ago.
I never cared for anyone else--although I tried to, when I thought you didn't care for me.
It was dark now, and a few stars were shining in the silvery sky.
He was so old that he was half-blind and rather deaf, but, with one exception, he was the dearest of living creatures to Jeffrey Miller, for Sara Stuart had given him the sprawly, chubby little pup years ago.
"I think I am," said Sara.
Don't take that from me, Sara.
He had forfeited her friendship for ever.
But no doubt she'll feel pretty lonesome.
It looked like a home left soulless.
To whom else in Bayside could she turn for it but to him, her old friend?
Christopher shook his head.
I've loved you--ever since we picked mayflowers on the hill, I think--ever since I came home from school, I know.
It was one of the moist, pleasantly odorous nights of early spring. There was a chill in the evening air, but the grass was growing green in sheltered spots, and Jeffrey Miller had found purple-petalled violets and pink arbutus on the hill that day.
But now there is nothing. And I must go away."
"I'm not half worthy of you--but--but"--he bent forward and put his arm around her, looking straight into her clear, unshrinking eyes.
Silence alone had justified his love, and now he had lost that justification.
I shouldn't have said that.
I can't recollect of Jeff Miller's ever courting anybody.
They came down the hill together.
It rushed to my lips in spite of me. Forgive me."
At first he had thought only of her pain, but now his own filled his heart.
Jeff ain't no fool nor loafer, if he is a bit queer."
"Yes." She said the word clearly and truly.
Her long, light brown curls fell over her shoulders and rippled sleekly back from her calm little brow; her eyes were large and greyish blue, straight-gazing and steadfast. To the end of his life the boy was to carry in his heart the picture she made there under the pines.
Jeffrey's calendar from year to year was red-lettered by these small happenings, of which nobody knew, or, knowing, would have cared.
But just now I have no strength left. I feel like a lost, helpless child.
"I shall be braver--stronger--after a while.
A group of men were standing on the bridge in the hollow, discussing Colonel Stuart's funeral of the day before.
Every sob cut Jeffrey to the heart.
Some day Sara would marry--a man who was her equal, who sat at her father's table as a guest.
Her face was quite unlined--a little pale, perhaps, with more finely cut outlines than those of youth.
Oh, I don't shrink from telling you the truth, you see.
Sometimes he thought that if he were lying dead under six feet of turf and Sara Stuart's name were pronounced above him, his heart would give a bound of life.
The wind sighed among the pines as he walked under them.
"Sara, will you be my wife?"
There, Jeff, you cannot accuse me of not making my meaning plain."
"I am very lonely now, Jeff," she said sadly.
They had soon concluded that little Jeff Miller was a very good playmate for Sara.
Sara was very lonely because she had no playmates. So Jeff, overjoyed, had gone to his divinity's very home, where the two children played together many a day.
While I had Father to live for it wasn't so hard.
"Yes.
You may be angry with my presumption, but I can't help telling you that I love you.
A few days later a message came from Mrs. Stuart on the hill to Mrs. Miller in the valley.
So he and Sara drifted out of youth, together yet apart.
Never seemed to have no notion of it.
He must go to her at once.
But you have a right to be angry with me for presuming to put it into words.
Between the Hill and the Valley
Well, well,' says Uncle Emsley, 'that Jackson Bird is sure a seldom kind of a snoozer.'"
Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience.
If I could get that recipe, so I could make them pancakes for myself on my ranch, I'd be a happy man,' says Bird.
Did you get that, old Leather-and-Gallops?'
"'Well, I'm not as apprised in the anatomy of them as some,' says Uncle Emsley, 'but I reckon you take a sifter of plaster of Paris and a little dough and saleratus and corn meal, and mix 'em with eggs and buttermilk as usual.
But every time I would say 'pancakes' she would get sort of remote and fidgety about the eye, and try to change the subject.
"I went out and sat on the ground in the shade of the store and leaned against a prickly pear.
"'They're golden sunshine,' says he, 'honey-browned by the ambrosial fires of Epicurus.
"How long ago did these things happen?" I asked him.
No,' I told him.
"'She's gone riding,' I whisper in my bronc's ear, 'with Birdstone Jack, the hired mule from Sheep Man's Canada.
That is a bad habit you have got of riding with young ladies over at Pimienta.
"'Drink this here down,' says Uncle Emsley, handing me the glass of water.
Well, so- long, Jacksy.'
"Just then one of my eyes saw a roadrunner skipping down the hill with a young tarantula in his bill, and the other eye noticed a rabbit-hawk sitting on a dead limb in a water-elm.
I don't mind telling you.
"'Talk pancakes,' says I, 'or be made into one.
Start her off, now--pound of flour, eight dozen eggs, and so on.
"About three in the afternoon I throwed my bridle rein over a mesquite limb and walked the last twenty yards into Uncle Emsley's store.
I got up on the counter and told Uncle Emsley that the signs pointed to the devastation of the fruit crop of the world.
Jud laid down his six-shooter, with which he was preparing to pound an antelope steak, and stood over me in what I felt to be a menacing attitude.
Yes, it looks like Jackson Bird has gone and humbugged you some.
Jackson said that whenever you got overhot or excited that wound hurt you and made you kind of crazy, and you went raving about pancakes.
I've known outfits that wouldn't do that much by a family feud.'
Inside of eight minutes me and Miss Willella was aggravating the croquet balls around as amiable as second cousins.
What would I do with a wife?
"One week I slipped in a third trip; and that's where the pancakes and the pink-eyed snoozer busted into the game.
"'Married yesterday,' says Uncle Emsley, 'and gone to Waco and Niagara Falls on a wedding tour.
It's an old recipe that's been in the family for seventy-five years.
"One day I galloped over to the store with a fine bunch of blue verbenas that I cut out of a herd of wild flowers over on Poisoned Dog Prairie.
Was there a story about pancakes?"
"Jackson Bird flushed up some, and then he laughed.
'I don't seem to have any success in getting hold of it.
I never thought it was worth while to be hostile with a snoozer.
"'Me?
My object is purely a gastronomical one.'
They hand it down from one generation to another, but they don't give it away to outsiders.
"'You ain't such a bad little man,' says I, trying to be fair.
He brought some mysterious bags and tin boxes from the grub wagon and set them in the shade of the hackberry where I lay reclined. I watched him as he began to arrange them leisurely and untie their many strings.
"'I said a sheep man,' says Uncle Emsley again.
I believe you know.
"'Willie,' says I, riding over close to his palfrey, 'your infatuated parents may have denounced you by the name of Jackson, but you sure moulted into a twittering Willie--let us slough off this here analysis of rain and the elements, and get down to talk that is outside the vocabulary of parrots.
"'Are you sure,' I says to him, 'that it ain't the hand that mixes the pancakes that you're after?'
Did you try?'
"'Well, no,' says Jackson.
"'Sure,' says Jackson.
'Miss Learight is a mighty nice girl, but I can assure you my intentions go no further than the gastro--' but he seen my hand going down to my holster and he changed his similitude--'than the desire to procure a copy of the pancake recipe,' he finishes.
From some secret hoarding he also brought a lump of excellent butter and a bottle of golden syrup.
"I never was shy about women.
"'Nice shooting,' says the sheep man, without a flutter.
Jackson Bird has been courting Willella ever since that day he took her out riding.'
And then Miss Willella came and said 'Good-night,' and I hit the breeze for the ranch.
Is old Bill going to ship beeves to Kansas City again this spring, Jud?'
Oh, I got over it after a while.
If you will get me a copy of that pancake recipe, I give you my word that I'll never call upon her again.'
One of us is bound to get a rope over its horns before long.
Jackson Bird told me he was calling on Miss Willella for the purpose of finding out her system of producing pancakes, and he asked me to help him get the bill of lading of the ingredients.
"That was how I acquired cordiality for the proximities of Miss Willella Learight; and the disposition grew larger as time passed.
THE PIMIENTA PANCAKES
He grabbed at his gun, but it was in a drawer, and he missed it two inches.
Thinks I, if Jackson Bird can now be persuaded to migrate, I win.
'You must have heard tell of Jackson Bird.
Why, didn't you see none of the signs all along?
"'Got the bill of particulars for them flapjacks yet?' I asked him.
'I was thinking some of making orphans of your sheep, but I'll let you fly away this time.
How does the truck taste?"
"'Slack up your grip in my dress shirt,' says Uncle Emsley, 'and I'll tell you.
'I never was advised that she was up to any culinary manoeuvres.'
He further endorsed my impression that his pose was resentful by fixing upon me with his light blue eyes a look of cold suspicion.
You wouldn't go to work now, and impair and disfigure snoozers, would you, that eat on tables and wear little shoes and speak to you on subjects?
But you stick to pancakes,' says I, 'as close as the middle one of a stack; and don't go and mistake sentiments for syrup, or there'll be singing at your ranch, and you won't hear it.'
"You see, by this time we were on the peacefullest of terms.
'But don't you sometimes ever miss the third shot?
"I dropped them flowers in a cracker-barrel, and let the news trickle in my ears and down toward my upper left-hand shirt pocket until it got to my feet.
He'd been raised a cow pony and he didn't care for snoozers.
"'Why,' says Uncle Emsley, 'she's gone riding with Jackson Bird, the sheep man from over at Mired Mule Canada.'
'Just got a letter this morning.'
She sang some, and exasperated the piano quite a lot with quotations from the operas.
'Calm down now, Jud--calm down.
I popped over one after the other with my forty-five, just to show him.
Miss Willella,' says I, 'don't ever want any nest made out of sheep's wool by a tomtit of the Jacksonian branch of ornithology.
"That was all the pancake specifications I could get that night.
"'Wait a minute,' says this Bird, 'till I explain.
They say Jackson Bird was fixing his ranch up fine with rocking chairs and window curtains all the time he was putting me up the pancake tree.
In order to help out the ambitions of his appetite I kept on trying to get that receipt from Miss Willella.
I gave imitations of a rattlesnake, and told her about Snaky McFee's new way of skinning cows, and described the trip I made to Saint Louis once.
And because I'd been lenient, and let 'em live, here was one going around riding with Miss Willella Learight!
So, I gets on my bronc and pushes the wind for Uncle Emsley Telfair's store at the Pimienta Crossing on the Nueces.
Eating--that's all the pleasure I get out of sheep raising.
"Miss Willella gives a little jump on the piano stool, and looked at me curious.
Eric's lips twitched.
He read it to her, lying in the grass at her feet; she listened with her hands clasped over her knee and her eyes cast down.
Then she gave her head a quick decided little shake.
Once she asked him naively,
It is about love and I do not know anything about love.
Influenced by curiosity he had sought the lad's acquaintance.
An expression would leap into her laughing face, a subtle meaning reveal itself in her smile, that held all the lore of womanhood and all the wisdom of the ages.
I have known it for a long time.
Some day I shall waken from a supposed hour's lingering here and find myself an old man with white hair and ragged coat, as in that fairy tale we read the other night.
He left her playing there, and all the way through the dim resinous spruce wood her music followed him like an invisible guardian spirit.
Your namesake of the poem was a somewhat uncanny maid, if I recollect aright, and thought as little of seven years in elfland as ordinary folk do of half an hour on upper earth.
But she was always charming.
"I do not think so," she wrote.
I suppose you will think that is very foolish of me, but it is true.
Yet now and again she was as old as Eve.
"Are there many people like you out in the world?"
But I would rather not take the book.
He stared at me so.
I believe you bewitch the moments away, Kilmeny.
She said it very earnestly, and so I believed her.
She could be whimsical--even charmingly capricious.
It is about love, and there is no use in my learning about love, even if it is all you say.
Now and then she punctured some harmless bubble of a young man's conceit or masculine superiority with a biting little line of daintily written script.
Eric's face went down into the grass.
"No," said Eric--honestly, as he thought, "but every one has an ideal of love whom he hopes to meet some day--'the ideal woman of a young man's dream.' I suppose I have mine, in some sealed, secret chamber of my heart."
"But, Kilmeny, do you think yourself ugly when you look in a mirror?" he asked smiling.
"But you do like me, even though I am so ugly, don't you?
He knew everything about her life.
For his life he could not help laughing; and for his life he would not let Kilmeny see him laughing. A certain little whimsical wish took possession of him and he did not hasten to tell her the truth, as had been his first impulse.
She knew of no reason why love might not be discussed with Eric as other matters--music and books and travel--might be.
Now she was grave, now gay, now stately, now pensive.
Ugly!" exclaimed Eric.
But I have seen my face reflected in the spoons, and in a little silver sugar bowl Aunt Janet has.
"I have never looked in a mirror," she wrote.
Her way of smiling enchanted him.
All the ugliness of existence had passed her by, shrined in her double solitude of upbringing and muteness.
A girl of eighteen who has never looked in a mirror!
It was the first thing of the kind he had ever read to her, for in the first novel he had lent her the love interest had been very slight and subordinate.
"Kilmeny," he said in astonishment, "you don't really think yourself ugly, do you?"
At every meeting her beauty came home afresh to him with the old thrill of glad surprise.
A sullen look crept into his big black eyes and he drew his bow across the violin strings with a discordant screech, as if to terminate the conversation.
Perhaps your mother believed it was that which had entered her life and ruined it; and so she made the mistake.
"I don't think you are ugly, Kilmeny."
Instead, when he dared to look up he said slowly,
Let me play you some good-bye music, and do not feel vexed because I would not take your book.
But this life was a dream of workaday.
A new book, savouring of the shop and market-place, however beautiful it might be, would not do for you.
Eric had met Neil Gordon a few evenings before this, at a country dance where Neil had played the violin for the dancers.
He held out the book to her, but, to his surprise, she shook her head, with a deeper flush on her face.
And that is why I do not want to go out into the world and meet people.
Perhaps he doesn't want her to find out."
She was never in the same mood twice.
I shall not need anything to make me remember you because I can never forget you.
He was on the point of going off into a peal of laughter at the idea when a glimpse of her half averted face sobered him.
THE STRAIGHT SIMPLICITY OF EVE
In one, he taught the Lindsay district school diligently and painstakingly; solved problems; argued on theology with Robert Williamson; called at the homes of his pupils and took tea in state with their parents; went to a rustic dance or two and played havoc, all unwittingly, with the hearts of the Lindsay maidens.
That was a very silly feeling, was it not?
"Oh, but I am sure you must," she wrote protestingly.
It would only make me unhappy to read it."
Nobody will ever love me.
Beauty isn't everything."
"You!
She assimilated the ideas in the books they read, speedily, eagerly, and thoroughly, always seizing on the best and truest, and rejecting the false and spurious and weak with an unfailing intuition at which Eric marvelled.
I felt as if I had lost something that I never had.
It hurts me much worse to know I am ugly than it does to know I cannot speak.
"Love--real love--is never a curse, Kilmeny," said Eric gravely.
"Oh, it is a great deal," she wrote naively.
Time does certainly fly in this enchanted orchard.
"Oh, yes, I am sure I could never care for an ugly woman," said Eric, laughing a little as he sat up.
I hated to think that YOU would think me ugly.
"I suppose your ideal woman would be beautiful, like the woman in your book?"
I did not know that a person could like anything that hurt her.
"Our ideals are always beautiful, whether they so translate themselves into realities or not.
I should never commit the sacrilege of reading it in any other place than this.
The smile always began far down in her eyes and flowed outward to her face like a sparkling brook stealing out of shadow into sunshine.
"I like you very much, Kilmeny," answered Eric, laughing a little; but there was in his voice a tender note of which he was unconscious. Kilmeny was aware of it, however, and she picked up her violin with a pleased smile.
She looked gravely at him.
"Oh, yes, I know that I am.
This was a beautiful, passionate idyl exquisitely told.
Hers was the spear of Ithuriel, trying out the dross of everything and leaving only the pure gold.
In manner and outlook she was still a child.
Sarcasm, even, was not unknown to her.
In spite of his pity for the real suffering displayed in her eyes, he could not help feeling amused over the absurd idea of this beautiful girl believing herself in all seriousness to be ugly.
She nodded, without looking at him, and then wrote,
Neil was friendly and talkative at first; but at the first hint concerning the Gordons which Eric threw out skilfully his face and manner changed.
"Even Neil does. He tells me I am kind and nice, but one day I asked him if he thought me very ugly, and he looked away and would not speak, so I knew what he thought about it, too.
It was not a long story; and when he had finished it he shut the book and looked up at her questioningly.
There had not been between them the natural beautiful confidence of mother and child.
She was nearly always there before him and she always showed that she was glad to see him with the frank delight of a child watching for a dear comrade.
For the next three weeks Eric Marshall seemed to himself to be living two lives, as distinct from each other as if he possessed a double personality.
He looked secretive and suspicious, almost sinister.
"Do not be offended with me.
But the sun is going down.
She took her pencil and wrote slowly, unlike her usual quick movement.
Eric came somehow to understand, less from what she said than from what she did not say, that Kilmeny, though she had loved her mother, had always been rather afraid of her.
Perhaps--for she was marvellously quick to catch and interpret every fleeting change of expression in his voice and face--she discerned what Eric did not know himself--that his eyes clouded and grew moody at the mention of Neil's name.
He learned to watch for the undisguised light of welcome that always leaped into her eyes at the sound of his footsteps.
There is nothing in the world--or in heaven either, as I believe--so truly beautiful and wonderful and blessed as love."
You owe him something, Plantagenet; do you not?"
"Alice," said Lady Glencora, "it is Burgo Fitzgerald." Mr. Palliser had gone so deep into that question of German finance that he had not at all noticed the gambler.
Each table was closely surrounded by its own crowd, made up of players, embryo players, and simple lookers-on, so that they could not see much as they walked.
"We will go home.
It was well for her that he who was to be captain was one whom she respected as thoroughly as she loved him.
No one would have been made aware that Alice was his own simply by seeing his arrangements for her comfort.
"Alice, what can we do for him?
"Don't let him out of your sight.
His companion, whoever he might be, had slunk away from him, not caring to share the notoriety which now attended him.
Oh!
He knew the excitement of a near division upon the estimates.
On the following morning they all started together, a first-class compartment having been taken for the Palliser family, and a second-class compartment close to them for the Palliser servants.
I shall never see him again; but if you could save him!
"I feel that I ought to stand before him always as a penitent,--in a white sheet."
You needn't be afraid."
Lady Glencora, as she went on quickly, got hold of her husband's hand, and caressed it.
But you are hard to yourself, and, upon my word, you have been hard to him. What a deal you will have to make up to him!"
"I'll tell you what, Alice; you shall come and be married at Matching, in August, or perhaps September. That's the only way in which I can be present; and if we can bespeak some sun, we'll have the breakfast out in the ruins."
And her request was, at last, of this nature: "I want you to take me up to the gambling-rooms!" said she.
The corner answering to theirs at the other end was the part of the table most removed from their sight, and that on which their eyes fell last.
To this he made no objection, and, on reaching the inn, met Mr. Palliser in the hall.
Palliser, will tell you everything when he sees you,--that is, if there is anything to be told." Then they all went home, and soon separated for the night.
In the course of their walk Mr. Palliser suggested that, as things were settled so pleasantly, Mr. Grey might as well return with them to England, and to this suggestion Mr. Grey assented.
They started together, Mr. Palliser with his wife, and Mr. Grey with Alice on his arm, and found all the tables at work.
He was familiar with millions and tens of millions in a committee of the whole House.
But to Alice,--and to Mr. Grey, had he cared about it,--every face at the table was visible except the faces of those who were immediately close to them.
I don't mean hard to me, dear.
His eyes she could see were bloodshot, and his hair, when he pushed back his hat, was rough and dishevelled; but still there was that in his face which no woman could see and not regard.
That hillside among the trees is a popular resort at Baden, during the day; but now, at nine in the evening, it was deserted.
But he had never yet seen a poor man stake his last napoleon, and rake back from off the table a small hatful of gold.
"Good morning! good morning!" he said to Grey, hardly looking at him, as though time were too precious with him to allow of his turning his eyes upon his friend.
"I don't know that," said Lady Glencora.
Lady Midlothian, of course, would triumph;--would jump upon her, as Lady Glencora had once expressed it, with very triumphant heels,--would try to patronize her, or, which would be almost worse, would make a parade of her forgiveness.
He knew that men and women were looking at him, and therefore he smiled faintly as he turned his eyes round the table. Then he got up, and, putting his hands in his trousers pockets, whistled as he walked away.
"What is it?"
"All right," said a voice in English.
Go;--go." She pushed him forward, and then retreating, put her arm within Mr. Grey's, still keeping her eye upon her husband.
"That's because you don't understand things of that sort," said his wife.
Many eyes were now watching him.
He was quiet and subdued in his joy, but not the less was he triumphant. From the day on which Alice had accepted his first offer,--nay, from an earlier day than that; from the day on which he had first resolved to make it, down to the present hour, he had never been stirred from his purpose.
I need hardly tell the reader that the gambler was Burgo Fitzgerald.
But I am so glad; I am, indeed.
Mr. Palliser was explaining to Mr. Grey, behind them, something about German finance as connected with gambling-tables, and did not hear the voice, or see his wife's motion.
"Tell Mr. Palliser," whispered Alice.
He shook him off, and walked on whistling, the length of the whole salon.
As she did so her friend enjoyed it with her, and at last they had something of the comfort and excitement which such an occasion should give.
She was from henceforth altogether in his hands.
Rouge et Noir.
You have never been half hard enough to me.
"You are in trouble, I fear, Mr. Fitzgerald," said Mr. Palliser, as soon as he was close at Burgo's feet.
I want to see the place; but then I saw nothing, because I was so frightened when I found that I was winning."
"But you are not a milkmaid, my dear.
I will go home with Mr. Grey. I will be ever so good; I will, indeed.
By every word that he had said, and by every act that he had done, he had shown himself to be unmoved by that episode in their joint lives, which Alice's other friends had regarded as so fatal. When she first rejected him, he would not take his rejection.
Then Burgo also passed out, and Mr. Palliser quickly went after him.
"In very truth," said Glencora.
Hitherto she had not mentioned to either of them the fact that Mr. Grey was with them in Switzerland.
"I really didn't think she would," said he.
But when she asked for a favour, he was always afraid of an imprudence.
Then she laughed at herself again with that inward laughter, and, rising from her seat, proceeded to walk down the hill to the hotel.
A great change was needed for his wife, and he had acknowledged at once that everything must be made to yield to that necessity.
It was all drawn back by the croupier's unimpassioned rake, and the rolls of gold were restored to the tray from whence they had been taken.
She knew now that she must follow his guidance.
Both Alice and Glencora could see that a man at his elbow was dissuading him,--had even attempted to stop the arm which held the rake.
"I believe in my heart you would;--that, or something like it.
Perhaps you'll come with me." To this proposition Mr. Grey assented.
"Why doesn't he take it?" said Lady Glencora.
Burgo, conscious that he was the regarded of all eyes, turned round upon his heel and again walked the length of the salon.
She was anxious to know what these men and women were doing,--to see whether the croupiers wore horns on their heads and were devils indeed,--to behold the faces of those who were wretched and of those who were triumphant,--to know how the thing was done, and to learn something of that lesson in life.
"He has just made half a napoleon, and has walked off with it.
If you could only get him home to England, and then do something.
Very possibly she might want to drink beer in an open garden.
"What shall I do, Alice?" said Lady Glencora, with her eyes still fixed on him who had been her lover.
Alice remained alone for nearly an hour, looking out upon the rough sides and gloomy top of Mount Pilate.
"Do something for him;--do, do. Unless I know that something is done, I shall die.
Burgo had paused a moment, and then prepared to rake the money to him; but as he did so, he changed his mind, and pushed it all back again,--now, on this occasion, being very careful to place it on its former spot.
"It is not what I call it, but what you feel it," said the other. "Do you think that I don't know you well enough to be sure that you regard yourself now as an unfortunate prisoner,--as a captive taken in war, to be led away in triumph, without any hope of a ransom?
Then Lady Glencora started and clutched Alice's arm with her hand.
And there must now, she acknowledged, be an end to her pride,--to that pride which had hitherto taught her to think that she could more wisely follow her own guidance than that of any other who might claim to guide her.
She was happy, though she was slow to confess her happiness to herself.
Rapidly she told her story,--with such rapidity that Mr. Palliser could hardly get in a word.
One piece had got beyond its boundary, and the croupier pushed it back with some half-expressed inquiry as to his correctness.
"God bless you, dearest!
He certainly had his reward,--now in his triumphant return.
"If money can do anything, he shall have it."
I was afraid to the last,--terribly afraid; you are so hard and so proud.
And Mr. Grey was triumphant, as he placed himself gently in his seat opposite to Alice.
Mr. Palliser, as he took his place opposite his wife, was very triumphant.
"A year's labor will be necessary to pay for the garments you require."
"May I explain my meaning?" said I, greatly distressed.
At length the old gentleman, pointing to the gold pieces, said: "What are these?"
You cannot exchange these trifles for clothes, because clothes are the fruit of much labor of many hands."
"I am strong," I answered, "and will gladly undertake labor of the kind you speak of.
"Only before you speak, let me put this plain question to you: Do you ask us to provide you with garments--that is to say, to bestow them as a gift on you?"
What can you do in return for the garments you are anxious to possess?
I am not particular about what I eat, as with me good digestion waits on appetite, and so long as I get a bellyful--to use a good old English word--I am satisfied.
"No," said he.
He had perhaps expected something more or something entirely different from me, as he continued standing with his eyes fixed on me.
I don't know yet what your currency is, and whether you have the dollar or the rupee"--here I paused, seeing that he did not follow me.
One little fellow, most lively in his motions, was remarkably like my old friend the robin, only the bosom was more vivid, running almost into orange, and the wings and tail were tipped with the same hue, giving it quite a distinguished appearance.
"If I bind myself to work one year," said I, "shall I have to wait until the end of that time before I get the clothes?"
My desire is to change these clothes for others which will be more pleasing to the eye, at once; but the work I shall have to do in return will not be finished in a day.
"Perhaps not," he answered gravely.
We had fruits, too, of unfamiliar flavors, and a confection of crushed nuts and honey.
It was cold and somewhat bitter to the taste, but hunger compelled me to eat it even to the last green leaf; then, when I began to wonder if it would be right to ask for more, to my great relief other more succulent dishes followed, composed of various vegetables.
He was put out in more ways than one, and tried to comfort himself by saying that there would soon be another dissolution--thinking of his own, possibly, being an old man.
"You seemed even to approve of the offer I made.
"Then," said I, taking the desperate plunge, "I should like to have them as soon as possible, and I am ready to commence work at once."
I began once more to see light, although my skill, I knew, would not count for much.
A long and uncomfortable silence ensued, which was perhaps not strange, considering the nature of the request.
"I am glad to hear your explanation," he answered, "for it has completely removed the unpleasant impression caused by your former words.
Nor was wild life wanting in this natural park; some deer were feeding near the bank, while on the water numbers of wild duck and other water-fowl were disporting themselves, splashing and flapping over the surface and uttering shrill cries.
"This being so," I continued, "may I ask you if it is in your power to provide me with the necessary garments, so that I may cease to be an object of aversion and offense to every living thing and person, myself included?"
"Can you not read the letters?" I asked.
Can you explain to us what you mean by dressing in accordance with the fashion?"
We also had some pleasant drinks, made, I suppose, from the juices of fruits, but the delicious alcoholic sting was not in them.
And really I had some reason to hope.
Perhaps not in--well, several days."
That is to say, ex-Member; for, being a Liberal when the great change came at the last general election, he was ignominiously ousted from his seat, the Scrubbs proving at the finish a bitter place to him.
My fears, however, proved quite groundless.
Chapter 4
Certainly, I had always lived comfortably, spending money, eating and drinking of the best, and dressing well--that is, according to the London standard.
On this particular occasion, with or without a pretty girl at the table, I could have consumed a haggis--that greatest abomination ever invented by flesh-eating barbarians--I was so desperately hungry.
He then motioned me to a seat at his own table, where I was pleased to have a place since the lovely Yoletta was also there.
"Oh no, not at all strange," she replied, with surprising readiness, showing that she too had noticed it.
So great was my desire to possess the clothes that I was about to double the offer, which struck me as poor, and add that I would give ten sovereigns; but when I had spoken he dropped the piece he held in his hand upon the table, and stared fixedly at me, assisted by all the others.
I remembered that I had rather looked forward to such a contingency, thinking how pleasant it would be to have all that money, and cruise about the world in my own yacht, enjoying myself as I knew how.
"What do you mean by that?
What is money?"
The people of the house were already assembled, standing and sitting by the small tables.
"Surely----" I began, but fortunately checked myself in time, for I had meant to suggest that he was pulling my leg.
"They are frightened at your appearance."
And, besides, it would be very hard to get back from a place where even the name of London was unknown.
Do you wish to confine yourself to the finishing of some work in a particular line--as wood-carving, or stone, metal, clay or glass work; or in making or using colors? or have you only that general knowledge of the various arts which would enable you to assist the more skilled in preparing materials?"
We sat at table--or tables--a long time, and the meal was enlivened with conversation; for all now appeared in a cheerful frame of mind, notwithstanding the melancholy event which had occupied them during the day.
There is, however, one difficulty.
And here, let me remark, I approve highly of your wish to escape, with the least possible delay, from your present covering.
Let me examine them again.
We were now on the opposite side of the house and looked upon the river, which was not more than a couple of hundred yards from the terrace or platform on which it stood. The ground here sloped rapidly to the banks, and, like that in the front, was a wilderness with rock and patches of tall fern and thickets of thorn and bramble, with a few trees of great size.
Presently, in the profound silence which ensued, a low, silvery gurgling became audible, as of some merry mountain burn--a sweet, warbling sound, swelling louder by degrees until it ended in a long ringing peal of laughter.
Then with a sigh, and looking round him, he said in a dissatisfied tone: "My children, let us begin, and for the present put out of our minds this matter which has been troubling us."
"No, of course not," said he.
If you will do these things some one else will be released to perform works of skill; and as these are the most agreeable to the worker, it would please us more to have you labor in the fields than in the workhouse."
"There are trees to be felled, land to be plowed, and many other things to be done.
"Surely I did not say that!
"I fancy I must have been making ducks and drakes of a lot of cash before--before--well, before I was--I don't know what, or when, or where."
The bird that really seemed most like a common sparrow was chestnut, with a white throat and mouse-colored wings and tail.
It was, in fact, a kind of supper, and the one great meal of the day: the only other meals being a breakfast, and at noon a crust of brown bread, a handful of dried fruit, and drink of milk.
These pieces of metal, as you call them, are money, and represent, of course, so much buying power.
"You shall commence to-morrow morning," he answered, smiling at my impetuosity.
"Have you never seen any like them before?"
Besides, I could not answer the question, having always abhorred the study of political economy, which tells you all about it; so that I had never learned to define money, but only how to spend it.
Little notice was taken of this somewhat incoherent speech, for all were now gathering round the table, examining the gold and notes with eager curiosity.
This staggered me; for if the clothes were given to me at the beginning, then before the end of the year they would be worn to rags, and I should make myself a slave for life.
"We understood what you said so well on this occasion that it seems a pity you should suddenly again render yourself unintelligible.
Yes, these eleven are of gold.
"Why, everything.
But it was really hard to believe that a person of his years did not know what money was.
This was from the girl Yoletta.
I was sorely perplexed in mind, and pulled about this way and that by the fear of incurring a debt, and the desire to see myself (and to be seen by Yoletta) in those strangely fascinating garments.
"Yes, I know I am," I said, and then added: "I'm sure, sir, I appreciate your kindness in bringing me here."
At the conclusion of the repast, during which I had been too much occupied to take notice of everything that passed, I observed that a number of small birds had flown in, and were briskly hopping over the floor and tables, also perching quite fearlessly on the heads or shoulders of the company, and that they were being fed with the fragments.
"Surely this is very little for me to have about me!" said I, feeling greatly disappointed.
These pretty little pensioners systematically avoided my neighborhood, although I tempted them with crumbs and fruit; only one flew onto my table, but had no sooner done so than it darted away again, and out of the room, as if greatly alarmed.
I took them to be sparrows and things of that kind, but they did not look altogether familiar to me.
I wish some kind person would suggest a remedy for this state of things; for just now my greatest desire is to be dressed in accordance with the fashion."
"Sovereigns," I answered, not a little amused.
The closer ties of family life, as we know them now, existed but in their outlines to the cave man.
But he did not stay long.
Here, when no one else remained in the weary darkness of night and the half light of stormy days Old Mok beguiled the time with stories, and sometimes in a hoarse voice even attempted to chant to his little hearer snatches of the wild singing tales of the Shell People, for the Shell People had a sort of story song.
The master was delighted.
CHAPTER XXVII.
And at last, after many days and nights, Lightfoot, when asleep, saw Little Mok.
His joy and pride infected all as he exhibited his prize and boasted of what he would catch in the river next, and when, on the return, Old Mok saluted him as the "Great Fisherman," the elf's elation became too great for any expression.
Sometimes he lay for days on his bed of leaves at home, in weakness and pain, silent and unlike himself. Then when Lightfoot's care had given him back a little strength, he would beg to be taken to Old Mok's cave.
The picture was wonderfully life-like in grasp and detail.
No one ever forgot the day when Little Mok, then about six years old, caught his first fish.
When the winter snows began to whirl in the air Little Mok was lying quietly on his bed, his great eyes looking wistfully up at Lightfoot, who in vain taxed her limited skill and resources to tempt him to eat and become more sturdy.
Then came hours and days of sketching and etching in the old man's cave.
She longed for Little Mok, and did not eat or sleep.
Lightfoot was silent and sad, and could not smile nor laugh any more.
But Little Mok, unable to take up for himself the burden of an independent existence, was not slain nor left to die of neglect as might have been another child thus crippled in the time in which he lived.
Old Mok, crippled and disabled for the hunt and defense, was nevertheless a power not to be despised, and Little Mok, the helpless child, had been still strong enough to win and keep the love of all the stalwart and rough cave people.
But Lightfoot could not sleep yet and for many a night her eyes closed only when extreme fatigue compelled sleep toward the morning.
Strange to say he survived the accident in that time when the law of the survival of the fittest was almost invariable in its sternest and most purely physical demonstration.
It was soon after this great event of the first fish-catching that Red-Spot, Ab's mother, died.
And, as time passed, the young artist excelled the old one, and became the pride and boast of his friend and teacher.
It was a strange thing for the time.
After her death One-Ear was much in Old Mok's cave, the two had so long been friends.
The laugh of the cave man was not a common event, and when it came was likely to be sober and sardonic, at least it was so when not simply an evidence of rude health and high animal spirits.
Encouraged by his success, the boy drew on, delighting Old Mok with his singular fidelity and skill.
The name Little Mok was naturally given him, and before long the child had won the heart, as well as the name, of the limping old maker of axes, spearheads and arrows.
She became more sedate and grave of bearing.
The advantage of the bow is that it requires no swing of space for its work as is demanded of the flung spear.
Yet, one day, came a difference and a hurt.
But, though they worked earnestly, they did not care so much for the prospective shelter as they might have done.
The months went by and there were tranquil hours in the cave as, at night, the weapons were shaped, and Lightfoot boasted of the arrowheads she had learned to make so well.
Lightfoot, bearing her load gallantly, was not less jubilant.
But it was far different from either journey that he had made.
In the morning there were no signs of the lurking beasts of prey.
He taught her, too, the use of his new weapon, and in all his life he did no wiser thing!
Even the bones had been dragged into the forest by the ravening creatures who had fed there during the night.
CHAPTER XXIV.
They were the only human beings within a radius of miles.
There were no adventures on the journey worth relating.
It could not well be otherwise with human beings thus bound and isolated and facing and living upon the rest of nature, part of it seeking always their own lives.
He may, in that moment, have thought of what followed the slaying of the other who had been close to him. There was no death done, but, thenceforth, Lightfoot never uttered aloud the name of Oak.
And so began the home life of these two people.
She, but to tease him, sprang up with a face convulsed and agonized, and with staring eyes and hands opening and shutting, had cried out "Oak!
There he had found safety and great comfort.
He became so absorbed in his own thoughts on this great theme that the woman who was his could not understand his mood, but, one day, he told her of what he had been thinking and of what he had resolved upon. "I am going to the Fire Country," he said.
The woman shrieked and shrank to the ground.
He said that in the Fire Valley they would be safer and happier, and told her how he had found an opening underneath the cliff which they could soon enlarge into a cave to meet all wants.
Even in their joint hunting, when there was a half rivalry, he was happy in her.
Yet the two cared little for these fearful surroundings of the darkness.
She remained close to the cave, and when early dusk came she lugged the stone barriers into place and built a night-fire within the entrance.
But never did the hunter leave the cave without a fear.
She was a plucky young matron, but there were extremes.
She would have sport with her bow.
And the two troubled themselves about nothing.
They were safe enough.
It may be that because of this ever present peril the two grew closer together.
There with him was his wife, and he was all equipped and was to begin a new sort of life which would, he felt, be good.
He found it as comfortable and untenanted as when the leap through the ring of flame had saved his life. He clambered up the creek and wandered along its banks, where the grass was green because of the warmth about, and studied all the qualities of the naturally defended valley.
Her arrows flew with greater accuracy than his, though the buzzing shaft had not as yet, and did not have for many centuries later, the "gray goose" feather which made the doing of its mission far more certain.
"It is our home!" she cried.
Here they had both, out of doors and under the clear sky.
With a shudder and then with a glare in his eyes the man leaped toward her, snatching his great ax from his belt and swinging it above her head.
It was a new and glorious life.
Her mimic terror was changed on the moment into reality.
They became a wonderfully loving couple, as love went in that rude time.
THE FIRE COUNTRY AGAIN.
The incident of the talk of Oak may have brought to his mind again more freshly and keenly the memory of the Fire Country.
The man returned to his cave and his lonely mate again and told her of the Fire Country.
Early in their married life Lightfoot, to whom the memory of the dead man, so little had she known him, was a far less haunting thing than to her husband, had suddenly broken a silence, saying "Where is Oak?" There was no answer, but the look of the man of whom she had asked the question was such that she was glad to creep from his sight unharmed.
Not that a cave was really needed in a fire valley, but they might have one if they cared.
The two were very close, as the conditions under which they lived demanded.
An arrow may be sent through a mere loophole with no probable demerit as to what it will accomplish.
There was a certain comfort in the work, though it could not affect her condition in one way or another.
What a cave had given was warmth and safety.
The man whirled the weapon aloft and then, his face twitching convulsively, checked its descent.
Who better than they could daily win the means of animal subsistence?
And Lightfoot was glad of the departure.
"I will make my home here," he said. "Lightfoot shall come with me."
And she learned the woods about them well, and, though ever dreading when alone, found where were the trees from which fell the greatest store of nuts and where, in the mud along the river's side, her long and highly educated toes could reach the clams which were excellent to feed upon.
The fierce and hungry beasts of the wood came, as usual, lurking and sniffing harshly about the entrance, and when she ventured there and peered outside she saw the wicked and leering eyes.
The maidens jumped out of the basket and began to dance round and round the ring-trail, one behind the other, drumming with their fingers on little drums of eagle-skin, and singing such beautiful songs as High-feather had never heard.
High-feather's mother was glad to see them both; but she whispered in his ear: "You must never let her out of your sight if you want to keep her; you must take her with you everywhere you go."
He was fond of the red flowers and the blue sky; and when the rest of the Indians went out to hunt in waistcloths of skin he put on his fringed leggings all heavy with blue beads, and painted red rings and stripes on his face, till he was as gay as the earth and the sky himself.
His mother begged him to tell her what the matter was; and at last he told her, and said he would never be happy till he brought one of the maidens home to be his wife.
Then she began to weep; and she wept so much that the cloud began to weep too, and it was weeping itself quite away.
So they all jumped out to have their dance.
And he shut her up in a white cloud and said she should stay there till she promised never to go back to the prairie.
So he sent the basket down empty, and it rested in the middle of the dancing ring.
Then they all gathered round her, and begged her to go home with them.
High-feather had never seen or heard of a red swan before; all the red feathers he wore he had had to paint.
So they all got out of the basket, and began to dance round the ring, drumming and singing as they went.
"If you must, you must," said his mother.
"I will not stay here," she said, "unless my husband comes and lives here too."
"No," said the Star-man, "because then I should never see her again. If you stay with us you will soon forget the dull old earth."
It is a conjuror in disguise!"
"No gopher would dare to come on our dancing ground.
It went up and up, and at last it came into the Star-country, where his wife was waiting for him.
"Away! away!" cried the eldest maiden.
As soon as he was inside the ring he turned into a little mouse, and made friends with the family of mice that lived in a hole under the grass; and the mother mouse promised to help him all she could.
And she tapped again, and called out, "Come and show yourselves, you little traitors, or we will dig you up!"
"I care little how much trouble I have, so long as I get a Star-maiden for my wife," he said; "and I am going to get one, if I have to wait till the world ends."
The young man went home to his wigwam, and his mother roasted buffalo meat for his dinner; but he could not eat, and he could not think of anything but the twelve beautiful maidens.
The young man went home very miserable; but when his mother heard what had happened she said: "It is a hard thing you want to do; but if you must, you must.
But just come up for an hour, to let your father see you, because he has been mourning for you ever since you went away."
The Star-wife finished embroidering her dancing-cloth that day; and whenever the Indians danced she danced with them.
Next morning High-feather asked for his breakfast; but his mother said, "You must not have any buffalo meat, or it will spoil the magic. You must not eat anything but the wild strawberries you find on the prairie as you go."
He shot two with one arrow, and then all the rest flew away. He picked up the two swans and hurried back to his tent, and there lay the dancing-cloth with the feather stars on it half finished, but no wife could he see.
While he lay thinking, he saw a little speck up above him in the sky, and thought it was an eagle.
"What must I do for you," he said, "to make you stay with us here and be happy?"
It came from nowhere, and it went to nowhere.
Her sisters came rushing round her, and begged her to go back home to the sky with them; but she looked into the young man's eyes, and said she would go with him wherever he went.
"There is no man here," she said.
Presently he saw a speck up in the sky, and the speck grew larger and larger till it became a basket, and the basket came down and down till it rested on the earth in the middle of the ring.
So next morning she sewed a bit of gopher's fur on to his feather; and he ate a good breakfast of buffalo meat and tramped away over the prairie to the dancing ring.
So she took her youngest sister by the arm and pulled her away to the basket, and they all jumped in and the basket went sailing up into the sky before High-feather could get out of his gopher skin or say a word.
"I will wait till she comes back," he said to himself, "if I have to wait till the world ends." So he threw himself down on the grass and lay looking up at the stars till he went to sleep.
Then she remembered that she ought to have gone home long before.
There was nobody there; and when he began to climb out again he found that the basket was half way up to the sky.
The maidens were frightened, and ran to the basket and jumped in, and the basket flew up into the sky, and grew smaller till at last he could not see it at all.
"What sort of animal has made this?" he said.
Twelve beautiful maidens were leaning over the edge of the basket.
"That you shall never do!" said her father.
"There is no man here," she said, "and I do not see any gopher; but you must be very careful."
The maidens turned round and ran after them; all but the youngest sister, who did not want any one to be killed; and High-feather came out of the hole and turned himself into what he was, and caught her by the arm.
He called her, but she did not answer.
He rushed out, with the two red swans still slung round his neck and hanging down his back, and ran to the dancing ring, but nobody was there.
But when they came near the mouse's nest the eldest sister held up her hand, and they stopped dancing and held their breath.
When they saw they could not make her leave her husband, the eldest sister said: "If you must stay, you must.
THE STAR WIFE
So the other maidens went weeping and wailing up into the sky, and High-feather took his Star-wife home to his tent on the bank of the Battle River.
Then High-feather jumped up and ran towards the ring, crying out, "Let me dance and sing with you!"
But the speck grew bigger, and sank down and down, till he saw it was a great basket coming down out of the sky.
The Star-wife did not wish to go, but she wanted to see her father once more, so she got into the basket and it sailed away up into the sky.
And he lay down in the middle of the ring to think, looking up into the blue sky.
Then she tapped on the ground and listened.
And he did so.
She only ate berries and crushed corn.
High-feather was his name, and he always wore a red swan's feather on his head.
To-night I will make some fresh magic, and you can try again to-morrow."
One day, when High-feather was out with his bow and arrows, he came on a little beaten trail that he had never seen before, and he followed it--but he found that it went round and round and brought him back to where he had started.
The eldest sister put her head over the edge, and looked all around, north and west and south and east and down on the ground.
As soon as he came into the ring he turned into a gopher; but there were no gophers' holes there for him to hide in, so he had to lie in the grass and wait.
If you come quickly and quietly you can catch them before they fly away; but do not tell your wife, for red swans cannot bear the sight of a woman, and they can tell if one comes within a mile of them."
He jumped up, with the two red swans still slung round his neck, and climbed into the basket.
Her father gave them a beautiful blue tent to live in, and High-feather was happy enough for a while; but he soon grew tired of the cloud-berries that the Star-people ate, and he longed to tramp over the solid green prairie, so he asked his wife's father to let him take her back to the earth.
Early in the morning he heard a rustling on the grass, and when he opened his eyes he saw the great basket close beside him.
"You had better take an Indian girl for your wife.
"Now I must go back to my husband," she said.
A flash of eagerness suffused the face of Alexey Alexandrovitch as he rapidly wrote out a synopsis of these ideas for his own benefit.
Getting up and walking about the room, he glanced again at the portrait, frowned, and smiled contemptuously.
Having filled a sheet of paper, he got up, rang, and sent a note to the chief secretary of his department to look up certain necessary facts for him.
Act 18, and the note to Act 36.
Besides, he was the chief sufferer from his failings, like a sick man from his sores.
Instead of being led by boredom and some sort of misunderstanding to look for degeneracy, extinction, heredity, and other such incomprehensible things in each other, would they not do better to stoop a little lower and turn their hatred and anger where whole streets resounded with moanings from coarse ignorance, greed, scolding, impurity, swearing, the shrieks of women. . . .
He hoped God would not punish him for keeping company with infidels, and even going to look at their duels.
A good story, told or written, was more than meat and drink to his father-in-law.
"How do you know all about it?" the zoologist would ask.
"It may be learned manners to be late, but to my thinking it's hoggish."
Why were they going to fight a duel?
By what standard must one measure men's qualities, to judge rightly of them?
"Stop!" said Sheshkovsky.
The deacon walked cautiously over the narrow bridge, which by now was reached by the topmost crests of the dirty water, and went up through the little copse to the drying-shed.
Why, how few even outwardly decent people there were in the world!
"A fine head--God grant him health; only there is cruelty in him. . . ."
They went further up the river and soon vanished from sight.
The sound of a carriage interrupted the deacon's thoughts.
"It's to be hoped that the mountaineers won't attack us," thought the deacon, hearing the tap of the stick on the pavement, and noticing how loud and lonely the taps sounded in the stillness of the night.
"Smuggling, perhaps," thought the deacon.
Here was the fallen tree with the dried pine-needles, here was the blackened patch from the fire.
"Strange," thought the deacon, not recognising Laevsky's walk; "he looks like an old man. . . ."
"Though they are infidels they are good people, and will be saved," he assured himself.
Why did he hate Laevsky and Laevsky hate him?
One could hear the infinitely faraway, inconceivable time when God moved above chaos.
All three got out of the carriage and looked at one another.
Here and there in the black sky there were dark cloudy patches, and soon a star peeped out and timidly blinked its one eye.
"Well, there you are!
He remembered his wife and the "Days past Recall," which she played on the piano.
"A splendid head," he thought, stretching himself on the straw, and thinking of Von Koren.
"Had I realised it, I would not have come."
He stopped and wondered--should he go back?
It began to get light.
But an intense, restless curiosity triumphed over his doubts, and he went on.
His wife had been introduced, betrothed, and married to him all in one week: he had lived with her less than a month when he was ordered here, so that he had not had time to find out what she was like.
It was dark, and for the first minute when he went into the street, he could not even see his white stick. There was not a single star in the sky, and it looked as though there would be rain again.
The valley of the Yellow River opened before him.
Till the show begins, let us go and find a suitable spot; there's not room to turn round here."
"Disgraceful!" he muttered, picking up his wet and muddy skirt.
If human life was so artlessly constructed that every one respected this cruel and dishonest inspector who stole the Government flour, and his health and salvation were prayed for in the schools, was it just to shun such men as Von Koren and Laevsky, simply because they were unbelievers?
The stream was broader and fiercer for the rain, and instead of murmuring as before, it was raging.
He glanced out of the door and saw a carriage and in it three persons: Laevsky, Sheshkovsky, and the superintendent of the post-office.
Near the cart stood a pair of asses hanging their heads.
Soon he heard voices and caught sight of them.
The grey, dingy morning, and the clouds racing towards the west to overtake the storm-clouds, the mountains girt with mist, and the wet trees, all struck the deacon as ugly and sinister.
Laevsky was walking rapidly to and fro in the small glade with bowed back and hands thrust in his sleeves; his seconds were standing at the water's edge, rolling cigarettes.
As before, nothing could be seen, and in the darkness one could hear the languid, drowsy drone of the sea.
He remembered the picnic and all its incidents, the fire, the singing of the mountaineers, his sweet dreams of becoming a bishop, and of the Church procession. . . . The Black River had grown blacker and broader with the rain.
What fun they would have next day! The deacon imagined how he would sit under a bush and look on, and when Von Koren began boasting next day at dinner, he, the deacon, would begin laughing and telling him all the details of the duel.
All the same, he rather missed her.
The deacon was weighing this question, but he recalled how absurd Samoylenko had looked yesterday, and that broke the thread of his ideas.
"I must write her a nice letter . . ." he thought.
There was a smell of wet sand and sea.
The duel would be nonsensical, bloodless, absurd, but however that might be, it was a heathen spectacle, and it was altogether unseemly for an ecclesiastical person to be present at it.
Fever is an argument that cannot be answered, and Raoul had an attack.
"Yes, monsieur."
"Did I reproach you, Raoul?"
Raoul passed his hand trembling across his forehead to remove the perspiration that collected there.
We need talk no more on the subject, therefore.
Come and see my new plantations, Raoul."
"You overpower me with your kindness, monsieur."
"Authority to draw my sword against the man who has inflicted this injury upon me."
Athos looked at him, and his heart was touched by pity.
"Look, Raoul, at that beautiful lily of the valley," said Athos; "observe how the shade and the damp situation suit it, particularly the shadow which that sycamore-tree casts over it, so that the warmth, and not the blazing heat of the sun, filters through its leaves."
"Towards me, monsieur?"
"What need is there that you should know his name; the offense was directed against myself, and the permission once obtained from his majesty, to revenge it is my affair."
"Are conditions necessary with me, monsieur?
I wish to speak, I ought to speak, to the king, and I will do so.
"I will not allow you to expose yourself."
"Nothing whatever, monsieur, only it would be very kind if you would take the trouble to write to the king, to whom I belong, and solicit his majesty's permission for me to marry Mademoiselle de la Valliere."
oh, forgive me," murmured the young man, sinking at once from the lofty tone he had assumed.
Place in a frying pan as many pieces of butter, large like a nut, as there are eggs to be cooked.
Put at once in the oven.
176
Then take a pie-dish and without greasing it, spread a layer of noodles on the bottom, then pour part of the mixture, then another layer of noodles and continue until there remains no more material, trying to have the tart at least one inch thick.
Mix slowly and scatter on the mixing the almonds and the cubes of candied and preserved fruit.
179
Rub the pickled pieces at the sieve and place it and the trout in a baking-tin.
(Trota fritta)
Pour the mixture in a smooth and round mold, greased with butter and sprinkled with powdered sugar.
178
The mold must not be all full. Bake in the oven and serve cold.
For these biscuits it would be necessary to have a tin box about four inches wide and a little less long than the oven used.
(Pasta Margherita)
Leave back the almonds and pine-seeds to add them afterward, and mix everything with four eggs, so as to use the fifth if it is necessary to make a soft dough.
Shell half a pound of hazelnuts in warm water and dry them well at the sun or on the fire, then grind them very fine, together with sugar, of a weight somewhat less than the nuts.
CRISP BISCUITS
TROUT WITH ANCHOVIES
CURLY TART
TROUT LOMBARD
Pastry cooks usually leave them with the skin but it is much preferable to skin them.
Flour, six ounces. Sugar, six ounces. Butter, five ounces. Sweet almonds and pine-seeds, two ounces. One whole egg. Four egg-yolks. A taste of lemon peel.
188
PUDDING OF HAZELNUTS
175
When the liquid has boiled the trout is cooked.
Let cook for ten minutes on a moderate fire.
Mix two eggs with flour, flatten the paste to a thin sheet on a bread board and cut into thin noodles.
If desired these can also be roasted on both sides.
183
Cut the sides and place to pickle with salt, pepper berries, garlic, parsley and onions chopped fine; with mushrooms chopped fine with thyme, bay-leaf and mint, all seasoned with good olive oil.
184
Divide into four cakes half an inch thick and as large as a hand, place them in a receptacle greased with butter and sprinkled with flour.
(Torta Mantovana)
Prepare some hard boiled eggs, shell and cut into disks one third of an inch thick.
Glaze the cakes with yolk of eggs.
182
Bake in the oven, but only as much as will still permit cutting the cakes into slices, which you will do the day after, as the crust will then be softened.
EGGS WITH TOMATO SAUCE
Serve hot with a little grated cheese.
MARGHERITA CAKE
Prepare some hard boiled eggs, cut them through the middle lengthwise, place in good order upon a plate and pour some good tomato sauce, taking care not to cover the upper part of the eggs, which must emerge from the sauce.
BISCUITS SULTAN
Put the mixture in a pie-dish greased with butter and sprinkled with flour or bread crumbs ground.
SOFT BISCUITS
In a corner of the bread board make a heap of the almonds with the sugar, the candied fruit cut in pieces and the grated lemon peel.
Potato meal, three ounces. Sugar, six ounces. Four eggs. Lemon juice.
Finally beat well the whites, and mix the rest, stirring continually but slowly.
Just before serving add to the sauce a teaspoonful of cream and stir carefully.
(Biscotti teneri)
The ingredients needed are:
Bake in the oven and cut the biscuits the day after.
(Trota fritta)
FRIED TROUT
The scrambled eggs can be served with points of asparagus, truffles, mushrooms, etc. which are prepared just as if they were to go in an omelet.
Granulated sugar, six ounces. Flour, four ounces. Potato meal, two ounces. Currants, three ounces. Candied fruits, one ounce. Five eggs. A taste of lemon peel. Two tablespoonfuls of brandy.
A good fish-sauce ought to accompany it.
Skin the almonds, cut them in half lengthwise and dry in the sun or at the fire.
177
When it is melted pour the egg and scramble them with a fork on a low fire.
Beat well the white of the eggs and pour them on the sugar and yolks.
Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve cold.
Just when you take them away from the fire and before serving add a tablespoonful of milk or liquid cream.
Rub everything through a sieve and put back on the fire with the nuts to dissolve the sugar.
MANTUA TART
Beat well the egg-yolks with the sugar, add the potato meal and the lemon juice and stir everything for half an hour.
180
This dose will be sufficient for eight or ten persons.
Then add to the butter two teaspoonfuls of flour, mix but don't allow to brown, thin with a cup of hot broth, add salt and pepper and let simmer for ten minutes.
186
Put the sliced eggs in the sauce to warm them, stir a little, but carefully to avoid breaking them, and do not boil again.
Salt and leave for half an hour. Fill with water half a fish-kettle; add half a lemon, two bay-leaves, one carrot light or ten berries of pepper, one onion divided into four parts, salt and three cloves.
All this cut and crush so as to reduce the mixture in little pieces.
EGGS WITH HAM
Clean, scale, wash and wipe the trout.
Scale, clean, wash and wipe. Then dip in flour and fry like the other fish in oil or in butter.
Small and young trouts are best for frying.
185
SCRAMBLED EGGS
(Torta ricciolina)
54).
Grease and sprinkle the tin box with flour.
As soon as the butter is melted break an egg on each slice of ham.
When the eggs are cooked season moderately with salt and butter.
This tart must not be thicker than one inch, so that it can dry well in the oven, which must not be too hot.
(Biscotti croccanti)
In this way the biscuits will have a corner on both sides and, if cut a little more than half an inch, they will be of the right proportion.
Melt in a saucepan a piece of butter about as big as an egg.
(Biscotto alla sultana)
Remove the onions and the bunch of greens and serve the trout with its gravy and some parsley.
When the water is lukewarm, dip in the trout.
"Are you in the same scrape with my wife?" Mr. Romsey asked.
"I can't go to sleep, grandmamma."
The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes.
"Including the headache she has got to-night?" Mr. Romsey suggested.
"About what, Kitty?"
Restrained by a sense of conjugal duty, Mrs. Romsey only indulged in an exclamation. Lady Myrie, independent of restraint, expressed her opinion, and said: "Quite impossible!"
Mr. Romsey apologized.
"The Mrs. Norman whom I mean," Mr. Romsey went on, "has, as I have been told, a mother living.
Lady Myrie's sense of duty expressed itself, with the strictest adherence to the laws of courtesy.
Mrs. Norman, expected to follow, was represented by a courteous note of apology.
She was a widow; and it was notorious among her friends that the death of her husband had been the happiest event in her married life.
The health of the children had greatly improved; the famous air had agreed with them, and the discovery of new playfellows had agreed with them.
"It means," Lady Myrie interposed, "what we poor women are all exposed to--scandal." She had not yet forgiven Mr. Romsey's allusion, and she looked at him pointedly as she spoke.
"Of course your girls mustn't go.
Mrs. Romsey took a more compassionate view of the disclosure.
Mrs. Presty was established, in her own proper person, with her daughter and grandchild at the hotel.
At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a little wooden pier, sadly in want of repair.
The one hotel in Sandyseal was full, from the topmost story to the ground floor; and by far the larger half of the landlord's guests were invalids sent to him by the doctors.
Lady Myrie corrected his language.
"Her little girl Kitty gives a farewell dinner to-morrow to our children; and I've promised to take them to say good-by."
"Or heard of him?"
She was not well that evening, and she begged to be excused.
"I have been deceived in the same way," she said.
Mr. Romsey agreed with his wife, on grounds of expediency.
Think of their reputations when they grow up!"
To persons of excitable temperament, in search of amusement, the place offered no attractions.
The time was evening; the scene was one of the private sitting-rooms in the hotel; and the purpose in view was a little tea-party.
Vessels of any importance kept well out of the way of treacherous shoals and currents lurking at the entrance of the bay.
"Never make a row if you can help it," was the peaceable principle to which this gentleman committed himself.
"Isn't that a little hard on her?" said merciful Mrs. Romsey.
Mr. Romsey was one of them.
Mrs. Romsey.
"Not even illness can spoil her beauty!"
"What will this child do next?" Mrs. Presty exclaimed.
"Have you made the lady's acquaintance here?" he inquired.
No excuses!
I shall send a note and tell Mrs. Norman why she doesn't see my boys to-morrow."
"I'm so excited, mamma."
Situated at the innermost end of a dull little bay, Sandyseal--so far as any view of the shipping in the Channel was concerned--might have been built on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean.
Rich Mrs. Romsey, connected with commerce as wife of the chief partner in the firm of Romsey & Renshaw, was staying at the hotel in the interests of her three children.
Daughters!
"That's the worst of it!" Mrs. Romsey declared.
Almost at the same moment, innocent little Kitty astonished her mother and her grandmother by appearing before them in her night-gown, after she had been put to bed nearly two hours since.
I have heard of her--never mind how or where. She is a lady who has been celebrated in the newspapers.
Owing a return for hospitalities received from Lady Myrie and Mrs. Norman, Mrs. Romsey had invited the two ladies to drink tea with her in honor of an interesting domestic event.
Mr. Romsey persisted in being ill-natured.
The departure will not be an early one; and I shall find an opportunity, my dear, of introducing you to my friend and her sweet little Kitty."
Lady Myrie described Mrs. Norman, in one dreadful word, as "Classical." By comparison with this, Mrs. Romsey's reply was intelligible.
Mrs. Romsey answered in the negative once more, and added a question on her own account.
She rose, smiled resignedly, and said, "Good-night."
"Why not, my darling?" her mother asked.
Both the ladies answered the question together.
Lady Myrie looked at her friend in astonishment.
"What am I to do?" she asked, helplessly.
Lady Myrie yielded to the force of evidence; she lifted her hands in horror: "This is too dreadful!"
Lady Myrie pronounced sentence without hesitation.
The two ladies looked at each other in blank dismay.
"And so do I," Lady Myrie added.
But she understood her duty to herself as a respectable woman.
"Do nothing," was the wise reply.
"About my dinner-party to-morrow.
She is no less a person than the divorced Mrs. Linley."
At the back of the hotel, two slovenly rows of cottages took their crooked course inland. Sailing masters of yachts, off duty, sat and yawned at the windows; lazy fishermen looked wearily at the weather over their garden gates; and superfluous coastguards gathered together in a wooden observatory, and leveled useless telescopes at an empty sea.
"Send word that the children have caught colds, and get over it in that way."
"Though my children are boys (which perhaps makes a difference) I feel it is my duty as a mother not to let them get into bad company.
The old lady has been twice married.
Don't be alarmed.
The anchorage ground was good; but the depth of water was suited to small vessels only--to shabby old fishing-smacks which seldom paid their expenses, and to dirty little coasters carrying coals and potatoes.
Lady Myrie had arrived, and Mr. Romsey had been presented to her.
"My dear, you must have forgotten what the judge said about her.
Lady Myrie entered a protest.
They had made acquaintance with Lady Myrie's well-bred boys, and with Mrs. Norman's charming little Kitty.
After that, he slowly stirred his tea, and seemed to be thinking, instead of listening to his wife.
"Surely the poor lady is to be pitied?" she gently suggested.
His lordship declared that he had a great mind not to grant the Divorce at all.
"What did he not say!
"This is a great disappointment," Mrs. Romsey said to her husband.
Her name is Mrs. Presty."
What did all this mean?
Surely you read the report of the case in the newspapers?"
"No."
They were of delicate constitution; their complete recovery, after severe illness which had passed from one to the other, was less speedy than had been anticipated; and the doctor had declared that the nervous system was, in each case, more or less in need of repair.
"You would have been charmed with Mrs. Norman--highly-bred, accomplished, a perfect lady.
"Connected with her husband?" he asked.
Leslie had to strain her ears to catch the words.
I did not betray you."
Leslie considered this with bent head and knitted brows.
"How good it is to have a whole afternoon's real rest," she said; "and this book is splendid.
"Tell me exactly what occurred before I say anything more," she said in a low, tremulous voice.
Oh, you angel!
Oh, you darling; you brave darling!"
I did think that you were above all the petty wants and caprices of your sex; but if you do want to look pretty and charming, why, my dear, I have more money than I know what to do with. Here"--he fumbled in his pocket--"would you like another twenty pounds, for I have got some bank-notes?
"Get up, Annie; don't kneel like that.
You have not been a bit like yourself for the last hour or two."
How could she take the sin of another and bear it bravely on her young shoulders?
If Mr. Parker really showed her that letter, written by Annie but signed in her name, she knew that she could not trust herself, she knew that she must say something which would betray her miserable friend.
Was it right for her to stand it?
Leslie wondered that Annie did not take alarm when she heard that her visitor had come from London; but the possibility of Mr. Parker's appearing at Wingfield had evidently never entered her brain.
Rupert is about as bad a lot as I have ever met.
Annie stifled a sigh, and once more resumed her book.
"I do not understand you.
"Then, that is a relief.
She uttered a piercing cry, and fell forward on her face and hands.
"You are not making much of a toilet this evening," said Annie.
What did occur?
Do you think I love you now?
"What is up!" cried Leslie.
Perhaps I should give up my whole life to my beautiful face, and spend all my time devising means to make it still more attractive."
You cannot mean this, Annie?"
To take a letter purporting to be written in her hand to Mr. Parker, to borrow money in her name, to get Mr. Parker to think so badly of her.
I have known her brother for a year or two.
Leslie waited until she had gone.
Her books, papers, and problems were pushed aside; her hair was rumpled, her cheeks slightly flushed; nevertheless, there was an expression of rest about her face that Leslie had never before seen there.
"She will be going out presently," thought the girl.
Leslie made no reply.
Parker, for the sake of my father, let me have five pounds,' or ten, or fifteen, or whatever supply you want.
You are putting it on, and that does not suit a man of my caliber at all.
I had letters from her now and then, and she always spoke of you with great affection.
You cannot mean quite to ruin me, Annie."
"Oh, God help me to bear it!" she said, raising a piteous cry to the One who alone could help her.
Her career in life would be practically ruined.
"We will discuss the beauties of nature and the beauty of those fair companions of yours later on," he remarked.
"Perhaps I have a headache; but I don't quite know," replied Leslie.
She could guess, and the thought of what would happen caused her to tremble.
"I have lived through such awful agony--misery beyond words was mine; and just when I thought myself safe.
"I shall stay with you." said Leslie in a dogged sort of voice.
"We shall be going down to dinner in less than an hour."
You will go, will you not?"
I was restless and miserable about you, and I went out to look for you.
I have always been kind to you--that is, I have tried to be kind.
Well, the old man has paid up.
What right have you?"
"It was Annie Colchester who came to me.
The one rope she had to cling to was a blind sense of honor.
"Don't," said Leslie.
"Yes, I do mean it; and so would you if you had a brother like Rupert, and you felt that all his future depended on your helping him.
"She has done it; I am mistaken in her.
He is a rascal; a scoundrel."
"Yes, I will.
"Please, go on," said Leslie.
I am in a mighty good humor, I can tell you, and as hungry as a hawk.
She turned away from her, feeling that she could scarcely bear to inhabit the same room.
Cheer up, cheer up."
"I don't mind in the least at the present moment whether you hate me or not.
How can I help it, child?
I could not keep that sort about me, you understand."
"I am going out for a stroll.
"Not yet, anyhow," she said to herself.
"Let me assure you once for all that your family are in the best of health; but, Miss Leslie, I did think that you--well, I will say it, I felt hurt at what occurred yesterday."
Oh, there, the clock has struck ten, and he will be waiting for me.
"Don't," she said.
I thought she was like my Jenny. She had the same voice, and something the same ways, and very much the same expression; but I am mistaken.
Annie had hurt her too deeply.
In her immense effort for self-control, for repression of her feelings, she even thought that she was going to faint.
Then, feeling a little better, she went downstairs, and took her place at table.
There was a break in her voice.
"I was down by the river," replied Leslie coldly.
Whatever you may have done wrong, you stand in Jenny's place to me now.
"What can be the matter with you?" she said, turning to her companion. "You do look very queer.
Was it an ordinary debt you wanted the money for?"
He would certainly not stand the knowledge that he had been befooled by a girl twice as clever as himself.
You are like the rest, Miss Leslie; just like the rest.
Your mother shall never know, nor that brave brother of yours.
You look queer."
After the meeting at East Hall I came back to our room and found you absent.
Had she done so, she must have burst out with the truth.
"It is so hot to-night," she said.
Leslie shrank away from him.
"To ruin you--to ruin you, Leslie?
No, I am not going to be angry.
"You know where I am going, and I have got a chance--what do you mean? How very queer you look!"
"At any rate, don't keep me now," she said, a shiver passing through her frame.
A dormouse (or doormouse) is one that crawls out under a door, you know, to get away from the cat.
It was the day after the bunny rabbit had been caught in the mosquito hole, where he swelled up too big to get out, after eating cake from the glass box, as I told you in the first story.
All of a sudden the Mad March Hare caught up the bunny uncle's red, white and blue striped rheumatism crutch, and cried:
CHAPTER II
"We haven't come to that yet," Alice spoke gently.
"What do you s'pose was in the cake to make you swell up so large?" asked Nurse Jane.
"But as the Hatter's watch only keeps tea-time we're always at the tea table, and the cake and tea were eaten long ago."
"And what was in the bottle to make you grow smaller?"
UNCLE WIGGILY AND THE MARCH HARE
"And there's a party," he went on, as he saw the little girl named Alice, a March Hare (which is a sort of spring rabbit), a hatter man, with a very large hat, much larger than Uncle Wiggily's, on his head, and a dormouse.
"Oh, yes, to be sure," said Uncle Wiggily.
"You've come for Uncle Wiggily, have you?
"London Bridge is falling up, On Yankee Doodle Dandy! As we go 'round the mulberry bush To buy a stick of candy."
This looks like an adventure already!" said the bunny uncle to himself.
"That's very shrinking, you know, and puckery."
"Only there isn't anything to eat," said Alice.
"That's what I do when I dance," interrupted Uncle Wiggily.
"Oh, here's Uncle Wiggily!" cried Alice.
Now I suppose you're off again?"
"Ha!
Pretty soon, as Uncle Wiggily hopped along, he came to a little place in the woods, all set around with green trees, and in the center was a large doll's tea table, all ready for a meal.
So he was saved from the Wabberjocky.
"I didn't remember him at first, because I was so jolly excited when he shook hands with me," decided Henry.
"It's now or never," thought Henry.
Henry shook hands with him before he sat down, but he kept glancing at the stranger all through the meal.
Often Henry thought he had caught hold of his truant memory.
He was too young, to begin with.
"How long you going to stay here?" Benny piped up.
"I've got to know!"
And above all, when Violet is so ill."
It was impossible.
Henry easily caught up with him, breathing with difficulty. The man turned around.
"Would you, indeed?" said Mr. Cordyce, delighted.
"Where have I seen that man before?" he thought.
Benny was fascinated.
But she had not added the man's name.
He stuck his head in the open door.
When he had finished the flower bed he thought he heard the young doctor moving in the office.
Henry was interested.
"Couldn't I see them?" begged the man, almost like a boy.
"You could cook for the King of England!
"Because she knows him so well, she thinks we do."
It was clear to every one, even to the anxious nurse, that the stranger was not tiring the sick child.
CAUGHT
"She forgot," thought Jess.
Mrs. McAllister had given the children's names clearly when she introduced them--Jess, Benny, and Henry.
"That might do," said Dr. McAllister.
"Don't you worry, Mary Bridget Flynn," said Dr. McAllister with emphasis.
That is, he threw his head back and shut his eyes, and breathed very heavily.
He repeated it over and over in his mind, trying to remember where he had heard that same voice say "my boy." He made an excuse to work in the flower beds along the veranda, in order to glance occasionally at the man's face, as he sat under a tree reading.
"Do you know who presented the prizes Field Day?" asked Henry curiously. "Know what his name was?"
And when at last, one day, he was allowed to see Violet, and came softly into her room with a nosegay of fragrant English double violets, for her, they loved him.
But all the time, he knew in his soul that it was not only possible, but really true.
"I'd love to see him," said Violet earnestly.
"If they grew to like you before they knew who you were, it would make things easier, certainly."
"We'll bring it to Violet," agreed Mr. Cordyce, resuming his shortcake.
Henry James, she had added.
He walked eagerly after the man who was going toward the garden with his back turned.
Dr. McAllister, to all appearances, returned to his notes.
"As long as they'll let me, my boy," answered the stranger quietly.
After lunch he went to sleep in the easy-chair in the doctor's big office.
It is a wonder he did not pull up geraniums instead of weeds, his mind was so far away.
His eyes were lowered, at any rate.
It was so gently done that even if he had been really asleep, he would never have wakened.
He sat with his weeder on his knee and his mouth open.
"And we'll bring it to Violet?" asked Benny, waiting breathlessly for an answer.
But the moment she saw the stranger asleep, she stopped her singing abruptly and tiptoed the rest of the way.
"Same man exactly," he said.
He withdrew his head and sat still on the step.
But something in the man's last sentence rang in Henry's ears.
Then he left the sick room, for he knew he should not stay long.
I would promise not to tell them until you consented."
"J. H. Cordyce--over in Greenfield."
The instant they had crawled out into the outer chamber they realized that all was not as it should be.
"Another case of being buried alive, eh?" questioned Stacy.
Those men wouldn't trifle with us, were they to catch us.
"Now, Chunky, keep your nerve.
We should be buried alive."
Come, we must be quick!
We wouldn't be getting out of that hole, right smart, should we, Tad?"
Don't make a sound on your life."
"Maybe we've discovered another gold mine, or perhaps a German dugout," suggested Chunky.
"Still, there may be some other opening to the place.
"Hark!
If so, we don't want to leave any clues---"
Place them so they won't slide off.
"Yes.
Then they discovered something else.
"You get up on the tree again and I'll pass the rocks up to you.
He saw nothing to encourage him.
At the opening they paused, glancing apprehensively at the great roots towering above them.
"At least I don't try to shave the professor with my revolver," retorted Tad sharply.
They could see but a few feet ahead of them, but saw that they were in a huge crevice in the rocks, a sort of cave formed by the splitting apart of the rocks themselves, perhaps from some long past earthquake disturbance.
"A great discovery," breathed Stacy tensely.
I am inclined to think that is what has happened.
There may be more to this than either of us think.
Then a faint ray of light appeared under the bottom of the mass of roots.
"I'll be prudent, but I wish I had a sandwich.
"Let's open it," suggested Stacy eagerly.
"We won't do that just yet.
Stacy was speechless.
"Yes, but how?"
I don't want to get crushed by them falling on me."
You may need it."
Chunky was trotting along behind him, the fat boy full of importance over the discovery they had made.
"I think I must be by the feel of my skin.
"I---I guess I begin to.
They think I can't keep out of trouble.
What was that?"
But I don't think I shall.
The two lads stood listening.
For once in your life be prudent."
"Nu---nu---no."
"Hurrah!"
Hurry!"
"Yep."
"I think so, but that remains to be seen.
Our very lives may depend on our doing so."
We can do it.
The boys started briskly for the opening.
I've helped discover that hole and I'm going to reap my reward by exploring the inside."
Perhaps we can make them stay on so the top will be held down."
But I know enough to know when I've got enough.
Why, were any one to come in here, he would discover instantly that strangers had been here."
One little slip might be the death of us.
"And I think something else, too."
"Well, we have made a discovery, Stacy Brown!" breathed Tad.
"I am afraid we are in here for a long stay, old chap," Butler said finally.
"It strikes me that I am in the same fix.
Tad struck a match, taking a long, careful look about the outer chamber of the cave.
"We must think of everything.
Stacy repressed an "ouch" with some difficulty.
By the time the third stone had been put in place the top of the tree began to settle.
Have you looked to see if there's anything to eat in this hole?"
"I'd rather leave clues than to leave my dead body in here," wailed Chunky.
"I'm going in there.
The boys stepped inside.
"They would fill us full of lead, that's what they would do.
"How do you mean?"
"I'm going to investigate," declared Tad.
"I told you so.
He held a burning match in his hand until the match burned up to his finger, whereat Chunky dropped the match with an exclamation.
The tree top remained on the ground leaving a wide opening in the rocks.
"Stand perfectly still until I tell you to move."
"I---I'm scared.
Remember, whatever occurs, you are to leave your revolver in its holster.
The boys were obliged to stoop in order to continue their explorations further.
"Light a match, Stacy."
In places the roof was all of ten feet high. But as they penetrated further in, moving cautiously, lighting the way with every step, the walls sloped toward the back, approaching nearer to the floor.
Now see what a fix you've got me into, Tad Butler!"
"No, I am not scared, but I realize that we are in danger every minute we stay here.
They had more important matters on hand than observing the atmosphere of the place.
Some---somebody's been here."
"Somebody is coming," whispered Tad.
Stacy ran back to the roots, once more clambering to the trunk, along which he ran clear to the outer end.
"I don't know, but I'll find a way."
After creeping under the low-hanging rock they found that they were able to stand erect once more.
Those stones may have slipped off.
The two Pony Rider Boys sat up rubbing themselves and looking into each others' faces.
"Oh, my dear Paganel, you must stay with the reserve corps," replied the Major.
Robert," said Glenarvan.
"Oh, my Lord, take me," said Robert, as if it were a question of some pleasure party.
The two other horses seemed to catch their comrade's meaning, and, inspired by his example, made a last effort, and galloped forward after the Indian.
Thalcave did not understand Thaouka, it turned out, though Thaouka understood him.
"Don't come back whatever you do," called Paganel after them.
"Yes, my Lord," replied the boy, standing up, gun in hand.
"You will find him?" said Robert again, after a few minutes' silence.
Hunger and fatigue were forgotten in the face of this imperious necessity.
"Poor father," said Robert; "how he will thank you for saving his life."
So it does to Mary, too.
Are you ready, Robert?"
There could be no entrapping such an animal, and the Indian did not attempt it.
"Thalcave is a brave Indian, isn't he?" said the boy.
"The one won't hinder the other.
"Oh, you insufferable Major; it would serve you right," replied Paganel, laughing.
"Water!" exclaimed Glenarvan.
"Come, then, my boy," said Glenarvan, delighted not to leave Robert behind.
Disdaining the feathered tribes when more substantial game was at hand, the hunters' first shots were fired into the underwood.
"Drink moderately, my boy," said Glenarvan; but he did not set the example.
Please, my Lord, to take me."
"Well, it is time you did, my Lord," said the boy, seizing his lordship's hand, and covering it with kisses.
"Yes, into two parties.
"But couldn't we go to meet them?
The leather bottles were left with Wilson.
"And what will we do then?" asked Austin.
Next morning, at six o'clock, the horses of Thalcave, Glenarvan and Robert were got ready.
The Indian had not made his capture for the mere pleasure and glory of such a novel chase.
"I fancied he was advising us to separate."
Glenarvan began to be uneasy.
"That indeed he is."
"Thalcave is evidently congratulating you, my boy, and paying you compliments."
Indeed, it comes naturally."
If all cavaliers wouldn't make good sailors, there is no reason why all sailors should not make good horsemen.
Accordingly they took possession at once, and stretched themselves at full length on the ground in the bright sunshine, to dry their dripping garments.
The time sometimes comes back to me, but very confused like.
"For your good horsemanship."
Thalcave drank very quietly, without hurrying himself, taking small gulps, but "as long as a lazo," as the Patagonians say.
It would spare them several hours' suffering and anxiety."
"Yes, my Lord, dearly.
"What would papa say to that?" said Robert, laughing.
He put me to sleep on his knee, crooning an old Scotch ballad about the lochs of our country.
"What for, my Lord?"
Thalcave positively talked to the beast, and Thaouka understood perfectly, though unable to reply, for, after a great deal of arguing, the noble creature yielded, though he still champed the bit.
"What does he say?" asked Glenarvan.
Well, I do think one needs to be little to love one's father like that."
"What is it, and then I will tell you?"
Glenarvan shook his head, but said no more, as a gesture from Thalcave made them spur on their horses and hurry forward.
"No, most certainly I don't know that."
Mary is most like him.
"I resign myself," said the geographer, much flattered at having supreme command.
In a few seconds it lay flat on the ground.
"He wants me to be a sailor."
"Do you know something, my Lord?"
"We'll have supper first," rejoined Glenarvan, "and then sleep, if we can, till it is starting time."
My horse is in tolerable good trim, and I volunteer to accompany Thalcave."
He has a soft voice, like hers.
"But would you be able for it, my boy?"
But it was soon evident that, with the exception of Thaouka, the wearied animals could not go quicker than a walking pace.
"I wonder what made me grow so large all of a sudden?
Now you can get out!"
"Good-bye!" answered Nurse Jane.
It was dark inside, but the bunny uncle did not mind that, being able to see in the dark.
"What for?" asked the bunny uncle, puzzled like.
"Ha!
Good-bye!" he called to his muskrat lady housekeeper, with whom he lived in a hollow stump bungalow.
"But it's very nice.
Come on!" And away ran Uncle Wiggily with Wonderland Alice, who had saved him from being bitten.
"Oh, my!" exclaimed Uncle Wiggily.
That's queer," said Uncle Wiggily to himself.
Uncle Wiggily took a long drink from the bottle.
My adventure begins!" cried Uncle Wiggily.
I hope it wasn't any of their cake.
And I haven't my talcum powder pop gun that shoots bean-bag bullets!
But alas!
"This is certainly remarkable!" cried Uncle Wiggily.
"So you would grow so big that you couldn't get out of this hole," was the answer.
"I think I'll just hop along and look for a few," said Uncle Wiggily to himself one morning.
He hopped down the front steps, with his red, white and blue striped crutch under one paw, and his tall, silk hat on his head.
Can't I get out as I got in?"
"I guess I am caught!
Smaller and smaller he shrank, until he was his own regular size, and then the little girl took him by the paw and cried:
"Am I really to drink this?" asked the bunny.
Likewise sorrowfulness!
"Oh, dear!" thought Uncle Wiggily.
"EAT ME!"
Come on, now, before the mosquitoes catch us!
And then, all of a sudden, he began to feel very funny.
"You can get out!"
"Good-bye, Miss Fuzzy Wuzzy!"
I'm in a book, but this is my holiday, so I came out.
Down in one corner was a hole, partly underground.
"Oh, no, I can't!" the bunny said.
"I'll open that glass box and see what is in it."
"I hope you have some nice adventures!"
"Oh, dear!" thought Uncle Wiggily.
"Thanks, I wish you the same," answered Uncle Wiggily, and away he went over the fields and through the woods.
"Ha!
"Good-bye, Nurse Jane!
And no wonder!
Quickly he hopped to the front of the hole.
Besides, he could make his pink nose twinkle when he wanted to, and this gave almost as much light as a firefly.
"DRINK ME."
For Uncle Wiggily had suddenly begun to grow very large. His ears grew taller, so that they lifted his tall silk hat right off his head.
CHAPTER I
Nurse Jane would like to hear all about it."
"But who are you?" he asked the little girl.
Perhaps I may have an adventure here.
So Uncle Wiggily, folding back his ears in order that they would not get bent over and broken, began crawling down the rabbit hole, for that is what it really was.
Oh, dear!"
I must take a look.
It tasted like lollypop ice cream soda, and no sooner had he taken a good sip than all of a sudden he found himself shutting up small, like a telescope.
"Ha!
He twinkled his pink nose, and then he was all ready to start.
"Come on!
"No, this isn't the burrow where I used to live," said Uncle Wiggily to himself, when he had hopped quite a distance into the hole.
Who knows?"
"And now you can't!
UNCLE WIGGILY AND WONDERLAND ALICE
We'll have a lot of funny adventures with some friends of mine.
He had not hopped very far, looking this way and that, before, all of a sudden, he came to a queer little place, near an old rail fence.
She was holding out to him a bottle with a tag that read:
He was only about a foot high, but his head was as big as a cocoanut, and he had great, bulging eyes, like a frog, and a ridiculous turned-up nose.
Davy watched this alarming meal, expecting every moment to see the little man burst into a blaze and disappear; but he finished his coals in safety, and then, nodding cheerfully at Davy, said:--
At this the Goblin jumped down off the knob of the andiron, and skipping briskly across the room to the big Dutch clock, rapped sharply on the front of the case with his knuckles, when, to Davy's amazement, the great thing fell over on its face upon the floor as softly as if it had been a feather-bed.
I'm a goblin myself,--a hobgoblin,--and I've come to take you on a Believing Voyage."
"Ask the Colonel."
"Now, all that," said the little man, shaking his finger at him in a reproving way,--"all that is very foolish and very wrong.
Then, as it grew darker, he laid aside the book and sat watching the blazing logs and listening to the solemn ticking of the high Dutch clock against the wall.
HOW THE GOBLIN CAME.
"Do you?" said Davy, faintly.
Quintana seated himself on the moss, facing Smith.
No.
"Oh, pardon.
He passed one dirty hand over his mouth to mask any twitching.
In the first clump of hard-wood trees Smith saw Quintana.
He lifted his head and tried to look at Quintana.
"Let me assemble for you, Senor Quintana, the interesting history of the jewels which so sparklingly repose in the packet in my pocket.
He straightened up in his seat as the machine came to a halt--but the man at his side laid a restraining hand upon him.
His own had not been very badly torn.
He had not, in a sense, been murdered at all.
It was certainly a prearranged meeting place.
And these clothes that he now wore--why had they made him change?
Another half hour passed, that, curbing his irritation and impatience, was filled with the conjectures and questions that anew came crowding in upon his mind.
They might have started FROM New York itself--only to return to it when they had satisfied themselves that he was sufficiently duped.
To strike, and strike quickly--to strike FIRST!
What was this death feud between the Tocsin and these men?
He had decided that once before!
It was rather curious.
He could tell, of course, the nature of the roadbed.
It must be his move next--not theirs!
He had thought all that was ended.
They must have been fully an hour and a half on the road already, and--ah, the car was stopping now!
The man beside him, at the sudden start, lifted a hand and felt hurriedly over the bandage across Jimmie Dale's eyes.
They did not know where to find the Tocsin; the package that she had said was vital to them was still beyond their reach; the chauffeur was dead; and he, Jimmie Dale, alone remained--a clew that they had still to prove valid or invalid it was true, but the only clew in their possession.
He could see absolutely nothing.
In a suburban town?
It seemed as though a year had passed since, in the early evening, as Larry the Bat, he had burrowed so ironically for refuge in Chang Foo's den--from her!
And then Jimmie Dale, in the darkness, smiled again grimly as the leader's reference to the Gray Seal recurred to him.
Did she know where the Crime Club was? Who and where was John Johansson?
The knowledge that the chauffeur possessed, that they KNEW he possessed, was evidently life and death to them.
They were clever enough, ingenious enough, powerful enough to watch him henceforth at every turn--and from now on, day and night, they were to be reckoned with.
And, gaining nothing from him by a show of force, to throw him off his guard, they had let him go--meaning him to believe they were convinced he knew nothing, and that the episode, the adventure of the night, was, as far as they were concerned, ended, finished, and done with!
He sat up suddenly with a jerk.
The car was speeding at a terrific rate along a straight stretch of road.
But to Jimmie Dale, the car itself, the ride, its duration, these three strange companions, were for the time being extraneous.
Phantoms!
There was a man beside him, and he could feel the legs of two men on the seat facing him.
He was still well guarded! The car itself was a closed car--not hooded, the sense of touch told him--therefore a limousine of some description.
Yes, he saw it now!
Even that sick giddiness in his head had, at least temporarily, gone from him.
But he had never ridden blindfolded in a car before!
He could almost have sworn, guided by some intuitive sense, that they were in the country.
He could not--his lips curled in grim derision--have been any more convincing.
On a country road?
Convincing!
And so, all unsuspectingly, he was to lead them to the Tocsin and fall into the trap himself!
And as for a sense of direction, he had none whatever--even if the car had not been persistently swerving and changing its course every little while.
Not one of the men in the car had spoken a word.
It was strange, curious!
These facts, in a sense inconsequential, were absorbed subconsciously; and then Jimmie Dale's brain, remorselessly active, in spite of the pain from his throbbing head, was at work again.
These, with the driver, would make four.
Their backs were against the wall, they were at their wits' end, these men!
Well, even if it were so, what did that prove!
But it was not supposition.
How much longer was this to last!
He had had neither time nor opportunity to think before; it had been all horror, all shock when he had entered that room.
Time passed, a very long time, as he sat there.
The man at his side felt again over the scarf to see that it was in place.
What did this package, that had already cost a man his life to-night, contain?
The car door opened, and one of the men got out.
Jimmie Dale was scarcely conscious of the act.
And if that increased or accentuated his sense of hearing, it helped little--the roar of the racing car beat upon his eardrums the more heavily, that was all.
Well, at least, the odds were not all in the Crime Club's favour.
By morning, Jimmie Dale would be Larry the Bat, and inhabiting the Sanctuary again.
Either he was right now, or these men were childish, immature fools--and, whatever else they might be, they were not that!
Who was the chauffeur?
It seemed childishly absurd that he could not at least differentiate to that extent; and yet, from the moment he had been placed in the automobile in which he now found himself, he was forced to admit that he could not tell.
Or they might have started legitimately from outside New York, and be going toward the city now.
Well, perhaps, who knew, they would have reason more than they dreamed of to wish the Gray Seal enrolled in their own ranks!
His hands, thrust deep in his pockets, were tightly clenched.
And the hour instead, the hours since then, had brought a nightmare of events so incredible as to seem but phantoms of the imagination.
Why?
And yet would it have made any difference?
With these conclusions finally thrust home upon him, Jimmie Dale philosophically subordinated the matter in his mind, and, leaning back, composed himself as comfortably as he could upon his seat.
Suppose that in some way, as it might well have happened, for it was now vitally necessary that she should communicate with him and he with her, he had played blindly into their hands, and through him she should have fallen into their power!
A sort of savage elation fell upon Jimmie Dale.
He shook his head.
Why had the car made that stop?
Jimmie Dale sat for a long time quite motionless.
What was the ulterior motive behind that pretence?
It might have been an hour--he could only hazard a guess.
God knew there was no phantom there!
Traffic?
His brain, that had been stagnant, confused, physically sick with pain and suffering, was working now with its old-time vigour and ease, mapping, planning, scheming the way ahead.
If peace was possible, it would be on no other.
But Mr. Clay, on reading the note, "manifested some chagrin," and "still talked of breaking off the negotiation," even asking Mr. Adams to join him in so doing, which request, however, Mr. Adams very reasonably refused.
Such were, in substance, the only points touched upon by this document.
It is an interesting illustration of the slowness of communication which our forefathers had to endure, that the treaty crossed the Atlantic in a sailing ship in time to travel through much of the country simultaneously with the report of this farewell victory.
The British troops had taken and held Moose Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, the rightful ownership of which was in dispute.
His relations with a cabinet in which the principles of Castlereagh and Canning predominated could hardly be cordial, yet he seems to have been treated with perfect civility.
The five Commissioners had done themselves ample credit.
There were, however, some three weeks more of negotiation to be gone through before the consummation was actually achieved, and the ill blood seemed to increase as the end was approached.
Not only so, but I would at this moment cheerfully give my life for a peace on this basis.
"We so fondly cling to the vain hope of peace, that every new proof of its impossibility operates upon us as a disappointment," wrote Mr. Adams.
"The chance is," wrote Mr. Adams, "that before that time the whole negotiation will be at an end." The banquet, however, did come off, and a few more succeeded it; feasts not marked by any great geniality or warmth, except perhaps occasionally warmth of discussion.
This little having been done, they departed and left him as Minister at the Court of St. James.
There was, however, no provision for indemnification.
Of his stay in Great Britain little need be said.
But the question, whether the British should restore possession of the island pending the arbitration, aroused bitter discussion.
The Americans satisfied themselves with the reflection that circumstances had rendered these points now only matters of abstract principle, since the pacification of Europe had removed all opportunities and temptations for England to persist in her previous objectionable courses.
The title was to be settled by arbitrators.
Even on the dry pages of Niles's "Weekly Register" occurs the triumphant paragraph: "Who would not be an American?
England, it was said, "had attempted to force her principles on America, and had failed." Foreign powers would say that the English "had retired from the combat with the stripes yet bleeding on their backs,--with the recent defeats at Plattsburgh and on Lake Champlain unavenged." The most gloomy prognostications of further wars with America when her naval power should have waxed much greater were indulged.
Mr. Adams said it was only an exchange of privileges presumably equivalent.
Dissension seemed to have become the mother of amity; and antipathies were mere preliminaries to a good understanding; in diplomacy as in marriage it had worked well to begin with a little aversion.
The relationship between the mother country and the quondam colonies, especially at that juncture, was such as to render social life intolerably trying to an under-paid American minister.
He had few duties of importance to perform.
The next day Mr. Clay notified his colleagues that they were going "to make a damned bad treaty, and he did not know whether he would sign it or not;" and Mr. Adams also said that he saw that the rest had made up their minds "at last to yield the fishery point," in which case he also could not sign the treaty.
Upon a fair consideration, it must be admitted that though the treaty was silent upon all the points which the United States had made war for the purpose of enforcing, yet the country had every reason to be gratified with the result of the negotiation.
That the navigation of the Mississippi, on the other hand, was an object of immense importance, and he could see no sort of reason for granting it as an equivalent for the fisheries." Thus spoke the representative of the West.
On the following day, however, the Americans were surprised by receiving a note from the British Commissioners, wherein they made the substantial concession of omitting from the treaty all reference to the fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi.
But, in truth, this consummation was largely due to what had been going on in the English Cabinet.
It was an astonishing as well as a happy result.
Long live the Republic!
Mr. Adams thought the British perfidious, and suspected them of not entertaining any honest intention of concluding a peace.
He thought "the British right of navigating the Mississippi to be as nothing, considered as a grant from us.
On August 21 the Englishmen invited the Americans to dinner on the following Saturday.
But he succeeded in obtaining, towards the close of his stay, some slight remission of the severe restrictions placed by England upon our trade with her West Indian colonies.
Mr. Adams remained in England until June 15, 1817, when he sailed from Cowes, closing forever his long and honorable diplomatic career, and bidding his last farewell to Europe.
The differences between the American Commissioners waxed especially serious concerning the fisheries and the navigation of the Mississippi.
Thus he fulfilled Washington's prophecy, by reaching the highest rank in the American diplomatic service.
This was not consoling for the representatives of that side which had declared war for the purpose of curing grievances and vindicating alleged rights.
Mr. Clay, however, was firmly resolved to prevent all stipulations admitting such a right of navigation, and the better to do so he was quite willing to let the fisheries go.
But that fortunate battle was not fought until a few days after the eight Commissioners had signed their compact.
The loss of prestige in Europe, "the probable loss of our trans-Atlantic provinces," were among the results to be anticipated from this treaty into which the English Commissioners had been beguiled by the Americans.
Peace is signed in the arms of victory!"
No amount of pride could altogether conceal the fact that the American Commissioners represented the worsted party, and though they never openly said so even among themselves, yet indirectly they were obliged to recognize the truth.
It is evident that the United States could ill have spared either Mr. Adams or Mr. Clay from the negotiation, and the joinder of the two, however fraught with discomfort to themselves, well served substantial American interests.
Mr. Clay had also been anxious to stand out for a distinct abandonment of the alleged right of impressment; but upon this point he found none of his colleagues ready to back him, and he was compelled perforce to yield.
This negotiation had been brought so far towards conclusion by his colleagues before his own arrival that Mr. Adams had little to do in assisting them to complete it.
Two such good pieces of news coming together set the people wild with delight.
The Americans were content to have nothing said about impressment; nor was any one of the many illegal rights exercised by England formally abandoned.
Of the many subjects mooted between the negotiators scarcely any had survived the fierce contests which had been waged concerning them.
In the London "Times" of December 30 appeared a most angry tirade against the treaty, with bitter sneers at those who called the peace an "honorable" one.
But Lord Liverpool had been equally solicitous on the other side, and was said even to have tendered his resignation to the Prince Regent, if an accommodation should not be effected.
On December 12, after an exceedingly quarrelsome conference, he records his belief that the British have "insidiously kept open" two points, "for the sake of finally breaking off the negotiations and making all their other concessions proofs of their extreme moderation, to put upon us the blame of the rupture."
He should be glad to get it if he could, but he was sure the British would not ultimately grant it.
He remarks of Castlereagh, after one of his first interviews with that nobleman: "His deportment is sufficiently graceful, and his person is handsome.
This the English Commissioners denied.
I myself think it probable."
At the outset Lord Castlereagh had been very unwilling to conclude peace, and his disposition had found expression in the original intolerable terms prepared by the British Commissioners.
He was utterly averse to admitting it as an equivalent for a stipulation securing the contested part of the fisheries.
His endeavors were fortunately aided by events in Europe.
It was natural that most of the ecstasy should be manifested concerning the military triumph, and that the mass of the people should find more pleasure in glorifying General Jackson than in exalting the Commissioners. The value of their work, however, was well proved by the voice of Great Britain.
For the future it was hardly to be feared that she would again undertake to pursue a policy against which it was evident that the United States were willing to conduct a serious war.
Hence, at last, came such concessions as satisfied the Americans.
"I felt so sure that [the home government] would now gladly take the state before the war as the general basis of the peace, that I was prepared to take on me the responsibility of trespassing upon their instructions thus far.
I had indeed no hope that the proposal would be accepted."
These latter were reviled with an abuse which was really the highest compliment.
The New Englander--the son of the man whose exertions had been chiefly instrumental in originally obtaining the grant of the Northeastern fishery privileges--naturally went to the other extreme.
"I wanted pansies for you, but not one would bloom; so I did the next best, since you don't like roses," said David, as Christie stood looking at the violets with a thoughtful face, for something in the peculiarly graceful arrangement of the heart-shaped leaves recalled another nosegay to her mind.
"I wish I could forget what I have been!" muttered David, turning his back to her and kicking a log that had rolled out of place.
Kitty was puzzled and piqued by these changes, and being a born flirt tried all her powers on David, veiled under guileless girlishness.
"If I get through this parting without disgracing myself, I don't care what happens to me afterward," she said; and, in order that she might do so, she assumed a cheerful air, and determined to depart with all the honors of war, if she died in the attempt.
Kitty looked offended, and turned to the mirror for comfort; while Christie went on shovelling tea, quite unconscious what she was about till David said gravely:
David put his finger under Kitty's round chin, and lifting her face looked into it, trying to discover if she really cared for this suitor who seemed so providentially provided for her.
Next, that the restless ambitions of all sorts were quite gone; for now Christie's mission seemed to be sitting in a quiet corner and making shirts in the most exquisite manner, while thinking about--well, say botany, or any kindred subject.
So, when Mrs. Sterling called her down, she went humming into the parlor, smiled as she read the note silently given her, and then said with an effort greater than any she had ever made in her most arduous part on the stage:
But the next minute she was sitting on a stool at his feet petting the cat, while she told her adventures with girlish volubility.
"I never did see any thing like it; every one is so queer and cross to-day I get snubbed all round.
Power told me to come to him when I got tired of this.
"Then why don't you ask her to come back."
"Not yet, mother, not yet.
It may not be easy; but all the sacrifices shall not be his, and I won't be a fool."
What David answered Christie did not stay to hear, but went into the kitchen, and had her first pang of jealousy out alone, while she beat up the buckwheats for breakfast with an energy that made them miracles of lightness on the morrow.
My old housekeeper likes you, and will let you take a duster now and then if you don't find enough other work to do.
As she finished she looked up at him; and, though his face was perfectly grave, his eyes laughed, and with a sudden conviction of the truth, Christie exclaimed!
David sprung to help her, tied up the wound, put her in the big chair, held water to her lips, and bathed her temples with a wet napkin; silently, but so tenderly, that it was almost too much for poor Christie.
"Mr.
Then, as autumn ended out-of-door work, she tried to make home more comfortable and attractive than ever.
Don't say any thing to worry your mother; I'll put on a bit of court-plaster, and no one will be the wiser," she said, hastily removing all traces of the accident but her own pale face.
The two young women nodded to each other, took a swift survey, and made up their minds before David had poked the fire.
Mrs. Sterling was very kind to her, but never treated her as she did Christie; and though not a word was spoken between them the elder women knew that they quite agreed in their opinion of Kitty.
She came to take your place, and we got so fond of her we could not let her go," answered David with a gesture of introduction, quite unconscious that his position just then was about as safe and pleasant as that of a man between a lighted candle and an open powder barrel.
A soft brightness shone in her eyes, a fuller tone sounded in her voice, and her face grew young and blooming with the happiness that transfigures all it touches.
"How stupid of me!
I longed to speak to you, but didn't dare, so dropped the flowers and got away as fast as possible.
Where shall I live?" asked Christie, with an expression of relief that said much.
Mr. Power would send for her on the morrow, and she busied herself in packing her own possessions, setting every thing in order, and making various little arrangements for Mrs. Sterling's comfort, as Kitty was a heedless creature; willing enough, but very forgetful.
She was very pretty, very charming, and at times most lovable and sweet when all that was best in her shallow little heart was touched.
Kitty rose as she spoke, and stood before him with a beseeching little gesture, and a confiding air quite captivating to behold.
CHAPTER XIII.
"It's nothing: I'm all right now.
This made the hardest task of all easier to perform; and, when David met her in the evening, Christie was ready to play out her part, feeling that Mrs. Sterling would help her, if need be.
After the birthnight confessions, David found it easier to go on with the humdrum life he had chosen from a sense of duty; for now he felt as if he had not only a fellow-worker, but a comrade and friend who understood, sympathized with, and encouraged him by an interest and good-will inexpressibly comfortable and inspiring.
"Won't that be rather strong?"
"How handsome you look!
As she came quietly in one evening from a stroll in the lane, and stood taking off cloak and hood, she caught a glimpse through the half-open parlor door of David pacing to and fro with a curiously excited expression on his face, and heard Mrs. Sterling say with unusual warmth:
Christie had won her heart long ago, and now was as devoted as a daughter to her; lightening her cares so skilfully that many of them slipped naturally on to the young shoulders, and left the old lady much time for rest, or the lighter tasks fitted for feeble hands.
Speaking little, and unusually gifted with the meditative habits of age, she seemed to live in a more peaceful world than this.
When can you come?"
Christie also she shunned without appearing to do so, and when alone with her put on airs that half amused, half irritated the other.
"That is easily done;" and Christie rubbed her pale cheeks till they rivalled Kitty's in their bloom.
WAKING UP.
David saw this, and felt it more attractive than any gift of beauty or fascination of manner would have been.
Did you think it very rude?"
Christie often called her "Mother," and felt herself rewarded for the hardest, humblest job she ever did when the sweet old voice said gratefully, "I thank thee, daughter."
My heart warmed to thee from the first: it has taken thee to itself now; and nothing can ever come between us, unless thee wills it.
Christie answered with a long breath of satisfaction: "To-morrow, if you like."
As George MacDonald somewhere says, "Her soul seemed to sit apart in a sunny little room, safe from dust and noise, serenely regarding passers-by through the clear muslin curtains of her window."
"So you don't want to marry this Miles because he is not handsome. You'd better think again before you make up your mind.
"How well you women know how to conceal your wounds," said David, half to himself.
"We won't have any sentimental demonstrations; no wailing, or tender adieux.
"I'm trying to brighten up my wits," she said, and went on trying to stifle her affections.
"Thee is a good gardener, Davy," the old lady would reply, and when he was busy would watch him with a tender sort of anxiety, as if to discover a like change in him.
"I believe and love and honor thee, my child.
"I would if I could!"
She also--alas, for romance!--cooked the dishes David loved, and liked to see him enjoy them with the appetite which once had shocked her so.
Christie was suddenly seized with a strong desire to shake the girl and call her an "artful little hussy," but crushed this unaccountable impulse, and hemmed a pocket-handkerchief with reckless rapidity, while she stole covert glances at the tableau by the fire.
"Why?" asked Christie, feeling as if she could embrace the speaker for the words.
Things were in this prosperous, not to say paradisiacal, state, when one member of the family began to make discoveries of an alarming nature.
He had fought many a silent battle there; won many a secret victory; and tried to cheer his solitude with the best thoughts the minds of the bravest, wisest men could give him.
"Your work.
But though "the absurdity," as she called the new revelation, was stopped externally, it continued with redoubled vigor internally. Each night she said, "this must be conquered," yet each morning it rose fair and strong to make the light and beauty of her day, and conquer her again.
"Getting up early don't seem to agree with either of you this morning: I wonder what you've been doing?"
One of my good Dorcases is tired out and must rest; so you shall take her place and visit my poor, report their needs, and supply them as fast as we can.
David spoke quietly; but Kitty looked as much surprised as if he had boxed her ears, for he had never used that tone to her before.
"I know what all this means: I'm beginning to like David more than is good for me.
"Oh, there's another lover, is there?"
"Will you be kind enough to write, and ask Mrs. Sterling if she can spare me?
She did her best and bravest, but was forced at last to own that she could not "put a stop to it," because she had already reached the point where "it was all over with her."
Why not try it, Kitty?
She smiled as her eye went from the scentless daisies, so pertly pretty, to her own posy full of perfume, and the half sad, half sweet associations that haunt these blue-eyed flowers.
"Entirely, sir.
She did not smile at the dilapidated idols now, but touched them tenderly, and let no dust obscure their well-beloved faces.
"Yes, I did say to Mr. Power that I thought I'd better be moving on. I'm a restless creature as you know; and, now that you don't need me, I've a fancy to see more of the world.
I shall be very glad to come;" but her eyes were full, and she held his hand an instant, as if she clung to it sure of succor and support.
"She's dreadful good; but I'm glad she's gone: ain't you?"
This wounded Christie terribly; for all of a sudden a barrier seemed to rise between them, and the old friendliness grew chilled.
Mrs. Sterling saw these changes with her wise, motherly eyes, but said nothing; for she influenced others by the silent power of character.
As she shut the door, Christie heard Kitty say softly:
By the light of the late confessions, his life and character looked very different to her now.
"Never mind," said Jasper, looking over his armful of presents, to investigate his paper of grapes; "if we don't lose but one, we're lucky."
"You had better sit down," advised Mother Fisher, "else when the car starts you may go over the railing."
"How else would you go, Jasper?" asked his father.
Then I should want to hop out with all my might, I just know I should."
So do I mark my Baedeker; it's the only way to jot things down in any sort of order.
Jasper nodded back again.
"I'm of your mind," said Jasper, coming back to his seat on the sand again.
"Oh, I don't want to, I really and truly don't, Jasper," Polly made haste to cry.
"See, Jasper, there isn't a brown branch, even.
No, indeed, we must go in carriages, or not at all."
"This journey is the very thing," he declared to himself, and his hard-worked hand slipped itself over her toil-worn one as it lay on her lap.
"And what a perfect arch!" And she bent forward to glance down the shaded avenue.
"What's all this?" demanded Mr. King, who never could speak French in a hurry, being very elegant at it, and exceedingly careful as to his accent.
"This is fine," he kept saying to himself, "the boy knew what was best," and he smiled more than once over at Jasper, who was pointing out this and that to Polly.
"Now, then, all scramble up here.
"Oh, aren't they good, though!"
"Those are chairs," answered Mr. King, "and by and by we will go down and get into some of them."
"Oh, some grapes, please, Jasper," said Polly.
And just then old Mr. King was saying to Phronsie, "We will come out here again, child, and stay a week.
"And isn't it better than a stuffy old carriage?"
"I was only going to remark that I don't believe I ever saw so many people together before.
Mr. King, in looking from one to the other, was dismayed and a good bit annoyed to find that his plan wasn't productive of much happiness after all.
"Was anything ever more beautiful?" exclaimed Mother Fisher, drawing in long breaths of delight.
"Well, we must go, for Mr. King is going down to the Boulevard."
How fine!"
"Mr.
"Now, then, do begin on your grapes, Polly."
"And see what queer patches there are all up and down the sides of some of them," cried Polly.
"Adoniram, I never imagined anything like this," she said simply.
"So had I," he confessed, running back and throwing himself down beside her.
"They must be very stuffy, Polly.
O dear me, there goes one!"
At any rate, it was time to be going, so he took a bee-line for the nearest stairway and plunged down. But he gave the little doctor the compliment of his parting regard.
"Dr. Fisher--"
Look, Polly! look!"
Polly's face had drooped, too.
"I hope we are going to stay there ever so long, Jasper."
"Now, then, what will you have, Polly?"
"I'm going to hop into one of the chairs just a minute before we go," said Polly, nodding at the array along the beach, and eating her grapes busily, "to see how they feel."
But the Frenchman being there, thought that he could get still further into the seat.
"On the contrary," said the little doctor, throwing down his napkin and getting out of his chair.
As they looked back in the distance to the receding ducal estate, Polly said: "It isn't one-half as beautiful as this delicious old wood is, Jasper.
"Don't mind it, Polly," said Jasper, her next neighbour, "I want to do the same thing.
The Frenchman, unable to get his balance, sat down in Jasper's lap.
"Yes, I do, my boy," answered his father, frankly.
Little Dr. Fisher also skipped up.
"Now, father, don't you like it?" he cried.
"We shall feel just as badly to leave every other one, I suppose, Polly."
"You take yourself off," commanded Mr. King, in an irate voice to the French individual, "or I'll see that some one attends to your case."
So he twisted and edged, but Jasper slipped neatly in, and looked calmly up at him.
"I rather think they will," laughed Polly.
What is it, Samuel?"
"Yes, indeed,--'Lipton Teas,'--I got so tired of that.
Now then," as Jasper bounded off to execute the command, "get on your bonnets and hats, all of you, and we'll try this wonderful tram-car.
Phronsie turned pale and clung to his hand.
"Whatever can they be, Jasper?"
Polly, who sat next, had turned around to view the scenery from the other side, and hadn't seen his advance.
She began to look rested and young already.
"I know--I forgot--'twas silly in me to ask such a question," said Jasper, with a laugh.
"I am going, for there is a marine hospital for children there, that I wouldn't miss for the world."
"Oh, he is off long ago," said his wife, "to his beloved hospital.
One of them immediately put up his monocle and regarded her as if she had been a new kind of creature displayed for his benefit.
"Oh, by the tramway; oh, by all means," cried Jasper, perfectly delighted that he could get his father even to listen to any other plan.
With one look he glanced around to see if there were any more such specimens.
"Do you really want to go in a dirty old tram-car, Phronsie, instead of in a carriage?" Old Mr. King pushed back his chair and looked steadily at her.
The parson turned to address his neighbour, but there was no little doctor.
"No more did I," he answered.
And then he saw another gentleman in the person of the parson, who was just as big as the doctor was small.
"Nothing," said Jasper, in English, "only this person chose to try to take my seat, and I chose to have it myself."
And it will do some of those starched and prim people good to hear a little enthusiasm." Polly knew whom he meant,--some young Englishmen.
I just mark things in my Baedeker and let it go."
"What makes the trunks look so green?" Polly was crying as they rumbled along.
"Now run off with you, you've planned it well." So Jasper, made happy for the day, rushed back to his seat.
"See here you, Frenchy, stop your parley vousing, and march down those stairs double quick," cried the little doctor, standing on his tiptoes and bristling with indignation.
"How you always do see funny things, Polly."
"There is the Boulevard," said Grandpapa. "See, child," pointing to it; but Phronsie had no eyes for anything but the hundreds and hundreds of Bath chairs dotting the sands.
They were at breakfast, and everybody in the vicinity turned and stared at their table.
But he bounded up again, blue with rage.
"Oh, I can't fall, Mamsie," said Polly, carelessly, yet she sat down, while Jasper got out of his seat and ran up to old Mr. King.
"Frenchy" stared at him in amazement, unable to find his tongue.
"Yes, we'll go to Scheveningen this morning," repeated Mr. King, smiling approvingly at poor Polly, which caused her to lift her head; "the carriages are ordered, so as soon as we are through breakfast we will be off."
Wait a bit, Polly, I'm going to buy you some fruit." They stopped at the top of the stone stairway leading down to the sands, where some comely peasant women, fishermen's wives, held great baskets of fruit, and in one hand was a pair of scales.
"How can you ask it, Jasper?
She turned to him with a smile.
"Don't let him bother you to see everything, Polly," called Grandpapa. "Take my advice--it's a nuisance to try to compass the whole place on the first visit." But Polly laughed back, and the advice went over her head, as he very well knew it would.
Everything is green."
And as everybody had regained composure, he was beginning to feel very happy himself as the car rumbled off.
"I suppose I must say 'yes, I know it' to that," said his father.
Polly and Jasper, running in and out of the fascinating shops by the Concert terrace, had minds divided by the desire to stay on the sands, and to explore further the tempting interiors.
"Oh, how fine!" exclaimed Polly.
Yes," he said to himself, "I will engage the rooms before we go back this afternoon."
Phronsie sat opposite him almost lost in the depth of another Bath chair, similarly occupied.
Looking for candlestick and matches, he went from table to dresser, from dresser to table, and from table back to dresser, doing the same thing over and over again, and not perceiving that he was going round and round.
"Your friend," said somebody.
This task was sacred.
With a dismal roar he flung the mallet away, and it rolled on the ground in narrowing circles.
The secret had spoken from the child's own face.
And then Philip was brought up the path in the arms of four bearers, his head hanging aside and shaking at every step, his face white as the wig above it, and his gown trailing along the earth.
The presents to the child!
There was a fretful cry from the cradle, and, still in the stupor of his despair, he went out to rock it.
First Deemster now, and held high in honour!
Its great pieces fell to the floor on either side of him.
And then the messages!
He had come out to kill this man, and here he met him being brought home dead.
Then he remembered that the stone had been useless.
Then he stopped suddenly.
He had uncovered his nakedness--the nakedness of his soul itself.
His ears were hearing noises--they were making a fearful tumult inside his head.
So dull were his senses that he did not realise that anything was amiss. His eyes were seeing objects everywhere about--they were growing to awful size and threatening him.
Curse him!
Condemn me to death; yet remember God lives, and He will condemn you to damnation."
Why not?
Presently, in feeling for his keys, his fingers touched an unfamiliar substance in his pocket.
This recalled a possession yet more painful, and going to a desk, he drew out the packet of his father's letters and proceeded to hide them away with the medallion.
III.
Yet now that it was his, he could not have it.
The Deemster who slapped the conventions in the face would suffer for it.
It was shrieking, it was frantic!
When the dishes had been brought in and the man dismissed, Philip, taking his place at the table, drew from his button-hole a flower which he had picked out of his water-bowl at lunch, and, first putting it to his lips, he tossed it on to the empty place before the chair which had been drawn up opposite.
Because this woman is an obstacle in your career, you would sacrifice her.
Then his bolder spirit seemed to say, "What is all this childish fuming about?
It is boundless, pitiless selfishness. Suppose you abandon her, dare you think of her without shame!
Philip tore open the envelope and read--
In this temper he returned to his chambers.
He remembered what it was.
You mean self-love and self-interest.
He felt as if all the angels and devils together must be making a mock at him.
It was impossible to believe that.
The bell rang from the street door, and he stood listening with the wine-glass in his hand.
Again, he could see himself too powerful to offend, too dangerous to ignore, going out on his duties without cheer, and returning to his wife without company.
At the next moment he had drawn up sharply, with pangs of self-contempt, hating himself, loathing himself, swearing at himself for a mean-souled ingrate, as he kicked up the grass and the turf beneath it But the idea had taken root.
Bury his love of you, his hopes of you, his expectations and dreams of you.
"What a fuss you are making of things," said the voice again, but more loudly.
This was how Philip put it to himself at length, and the daylight had gone by that time, and he was walking in the dark.
Then he sat down to eat.
He ate little; and, do what he would, he could not keep his mind from wandering.
When he knew anything more, a voice at his elbow was saying out of a palpitating gloom, "The gentleman can't come, seemingly; he has sent a telegram."
"Don't worry me with silly efforts to draw a line so straight.
I'll take my heart in my hand and go right forward."
He would be taboo to half the life of the island--in public an official, in private a recluse.
He could not bear to look at it.
There was not much comfort in that counsel, for it made no reckoning with the certainty that, if marriage with Kate would prevent him from being Deemster, it would prevent him from being anything in the Isle of Man.
An icy picture rose before his mind's eye of the woman who would be his wife in her relations with the ladies he had just left.
He could not help it; the Governor's interest went for nothing in his reckoning.
God bless her!"
And was it not conceivable that, besides the unselfish interest which the Governor had shown in him, there was even a personal one that would operate more powerfully than fear of the old-fashioned Manx conventions to prevent any recommendation of the husband of the wrong woman?
His proper name was Cottier; he had always been known as Jemy-Lord.
She has given you all.
"What is the time?" said Philip.
The man was a solemn, dignified, and reticent person, who had been groom to the late Bishop.
He knew that she would be taking her supper at Sulby at that moment, thinking of him and making believe that he was with her.
"Struck eight; but clock two minutes soon."
The thing he had worked for through five heavy years, the end he had aimed at, the goal he had fought for, was his already--his for the stretching out of his hand.
His gravity he had acquired from his horses, his dignity from his master; but his reticence he had created for himself, being a thing beyond nature in creature or man.
He could see them leaving their cards at his door and driving hurriedly off.
"Bury him deep! Bury your father out of all sight and all remembrance.
Fortune comes to you with both hands full.
"Don't prate of duty and necessity.
The servant was laying the cloth.
His voice startled and his words horrified him.
She loves you.
"This hubbub only means that you can't have your cake and eat it.
Oh, the mockery of his fate!
It was dear, delicious fooling.
Oh, God, what end could come of such an abject life but that, beginning by being unhappy, they should descend to being bad as well?
The rooms fronted to Athol Street, but backed on to the churchyard of St. George's.
Affectionate pity swept down the selfish man in him.
She loves you, she trusts you, and she has given you proof of her love and trust. Hold your tongue.
He thought of his father, of his grandfather, of his lost inheritance, and how nearly he had reclaimed the better part of it, and then once more of Pete, crying aloud at last in the coil of his trouble, "Oh, if Pete had only lived!"
But the voice which had been pleading on his side now protested on hers.
It was the bitter pill which the Deemster's doings made them swallow.
"Company not arrived, sir," he said.
Man, be honest.
"Lay covers for two, Jemmy," said Philip.
Had he not admitted that he stood in some fear of the public opinion of the island?
It was the cracked medallion of his father.
He could have fancied there was a perfume of lace and dainty things. "Sweetheart!" He laughed--he hardly knew if it was himself that had spoken.
As he did so his hand trembled, his limbs shook, he felt giddy, and he thought the voice that had tormented him with conflicting taunts was ringing in his ears again.
"Serve the supper at once," said Philip.
In the midst of these memories, all sad and some bitter, suddenly he remembered again that he was supping with Kate.
At one moment a vague memory rose before Philip, as he crossed the fields, of the lunch at Government House, of the Governor's wife and daughter, of their courtesy and boundless graciousness.
Then he began to hum something.
They must do that much.
"Wait or serve?"
As the lights of the town appeared on his path, he was saying to himself boldly, "Since either way there is trouble, I'll do as I said last night--I'll leave Heaven to decide whether I'm to be a great man or a little man, and decide for myself whether I'm to be a true man or a happy man.
If he married Kate, the Governor would not recommend him as Deemster.
Very well, take Kate, and let the Deemstership go to perdition."
Bury and forget him for ever."
As it had happened with his father, so it would happen with him--there would be no standing ground in the island for the man who had deliberately put himself outside the pale.
Oh, the irony of his life!
To wipe out both in the first moment of recovered consciousness, he filled his glass to the brim, and lifted it up, rising at the same time, looking across the table, and saying in a soft whisper, "Your health, darling, your health!"
She might be their superior in education, certainly in all true manners, and in natural grace and beauty, in sweetness and charm, their mistress beyond a dream of comparison. But they would never forget that she was the daughter of a country innkeeper, and every little cobble in the rickety pyramid, even from the daughter of the innkeeper in the town, would look down on her as from a throne.
"Twenty voteless millions we, Voteless all against our will, Twenty years hence we shall be Twenty voteless millions still."
But imagine what life would be like if one saw that erection confronting one wherever one went.
"But the Suffragettes," interrupted the nephew; "what did they do next?"
"After the bird fiasco," said Sir Lulworth, "the militant section made a demonstration of a more aggressive nature; they assembled in force on the opening day of the Royal Academy Exhibition and destroyed some three or four hundred of the pictures.
And of course the great idea for their master-stroke of strategy came from a masculine source.
The ballot- box was temporarily forgotten in the cult of the collecting-box.
Turning his gaze westward along the Mall, towards the setting sun and Buckingham Palace, he was silent for a moment, and then said significantly, 'You have expended your energies and enterprise on labours of destruction; why has it never occurred to you to attempt something far more terrific?'
Their plight might have been summed up in a perversion of Gilbert's lines--
The secret on this occasion had been well kept. Certain transactions that leaked out from time to time only added to the mystery of the situation.
They gave up worrying Ministers and Parliament and took to worrying their own sympathisers and supporters--for funds.
You don't mean to fortify them, do you?'
Lena followed his gaze, and then turned to him with a puzzled look of inquiry.
"Waldo shook his head, and continued to look westward along the Mall. He's rather good at acting in an amateur sort of fashion.
"The Prime Minister always declared himself an opponent of anything savouring of panic legislation, but he brought a Bill into Parliament forthwith and successfully appealed to both Houses to pass it through all its stages within the week.
Anyhow, when Lena gave a rather gloomy account of the existing state of things in the Suffragette World, Waldo was not merely sympathetic but ready with a practical suggestion.
"'Which memorial?' he asked; 'not the one in front of Buckingham Palace? Surely not that one?'
In fact, the bird in politics is a factor that seems to have come to stay; quite recently, at a political gathering held in a dimly-lighted place of worship, the congregation gave a respectful hearing for nearly ten minutes to a jackdaw from Wapping, under the impression that they were listening to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was late in arriving."
"Oh dear, no. An Act which made it a penal offence to erect commemorative statuary anywhere within three miles of a public highway."
Altogether it was one of the most successful and popular exhibitions that the Academy had held for many years.
THE THREAT
"'Don't you long to know what we are going to do with our treasure hoard?' Lena asked the Prime Minister one day when she happened to sit next to him at a whist drive at the Chinese Embassy.
As a rule they were a nuisance and a weariness to the flesh, but there were times when they verged on the picturesque.
We've been doing nothing else for months,' she said.
"Before he could finish the sentence she had kissed him.
"'But--how can we create?' she asked; 'it's been done already.'
In the process of recapture the birds learned a quantity of additional language which unfitted them for further service in the Suffragette cause; some of the green ones were secured by ardent Home Rule propagandists and trained to disturb the serenity of Orange meetings by pessimistic reflections on Sir Edward Carson's destination in the life to come.
What they were going to do with it no one seemed to know, not even those who were most active in collecting work.
"'What do you mean?' she asked him eagerly.
It happened shortly after the coal strike, of unblessed memory.
"'My dear lady,' he cried, 'you can't be serious.
"'Do you mean create disturbances?
"A measure conferring the vote on women?" asked the nephew.
"Within the next day or two a new departure was noticeable in Suffragette tactics.
"'Exactly,' said Waldo, in answer to her look.
"'That one,' she said.
Imagine the effect on people with tired, harassed nerves who saw it three times on the way to Brighton and three times on the way back.
Take, for instance, one of the most dramatic reforms that has been carried through Parliament in the lifetime of this generation.
She declared afterwards that he was the first man she had ever kissed, and he declared that she was the first woman who had ever kissed him in the Mall, so they both secured a record of a kind.
"'Something more insidious than that,' she said; 'you could prevent us from building forts; you can't prevent us from erecting an exact replica of the Victoria Memorial on each of those sites.
"'Create.'
They're all private property, with no building restrictions attached.'
Also it is possible, though I should think highly improbable, that he admired Lena Dubarri.
"'They have refused us the vote,' said Lena bitterly.
The governor's jaw dropped.
And such was Warder Slater's agitation, that he could scarcely sign at all.
"Add 'Inspector of Prisons.'"
Mankell seemed, as ever, completely at his ease.
Thus urged, the Major did read it.
"I should go."
But at last the "testimonial" was complete.
His voice was very musical.
"Go?
What do you say, Hardinge?"
"I will convey it to Colonel Gregory," he said.
There was again a suspicion of a smile in his eyes and about the corners of his lips.
A piece of paper fluttered from the ceiling.
"Oliver Mankell, I am a clergyman.
He signed.
I am but beginning, you perceive."
Stretching out his arm, Mankell pointed at it with his hand.
"The undersigned persons present their compliments to Colonel Gregory. Oliver Mankell, sentenced by Colonel Gregory to three months' hard labour, has been in Canterstone Jail two days.
"A testimonial!
The governor looked up from the paper-knife with which he was again trifling.
"Your signature, Major Hardinge, should head the list."
"Oh, sir!
The governor took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.
"I always placed a literal interpretation on the twenty-eighth chapter of the first book of Samuel.
"There we are!" Rostopchin shouted at Pierre louder than before, frowning suddenly.
But that's not the point.
Speranski and Magnitski have been deported to their proper place.
It has now come to my knowledge that you lent him your carriage for his removal from town, and that you have even accepted papers from him for safe custody.
A short man was saying something, but when Pierre entered he stopped speaking and went out.
Pierre dressed hurriedly and, instead of going to see them, went to the back porch and out through the gate.
Pierre remained silent.
My head is sometimes in a whirl.
"Yes, I am a Mason," Pierre replied.
Good-bye, my dear fellow.
Simplicity is submission to God.
"They, the soldiers at the battery, Prince Andrew killed... that old man...
Suffering is necessary... the meaning of all... one must harness... my wife is getting married...
Be off as soon as you can, that's all I have to tell you.
When left alone at last he opened and read his wife's letter.
"I have none," replied Hans; "thou hast had thy share of life." He strode over the prostrate body and darted on.
Its tongue was out, its jaws dry, its limbs extended lifelessly, and a swarm of black ants were crawling about its lips and throat.
Their sound came mightier and mightier on his senses; his brain grew giddy with the prolonged thunder.
HOW MR.
Hans struggled on.
I am dying."
He paused for a moment to breathe, and sprang on to complete his task.
He turned, and saw a gray-haired old man extended on the rocks.
On this object, and on this alone, Hans's eyes and thoughts were fixed. Forgetting the distance he had to traverse, he set off at an imprudent rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before he had scaled the first range of the green and low hills.
The roar of the Golden River rose on Hans's ear.
And a dark gray cloud came over the sun, and long, snakelike shadows crept up along the mountain sides.
The King of the Golden River had hardly made the extraordinary exit related in the last chapter, before Hans and Schwartz came roaring into the house very savagely drunk.
The sun was sinking, but its descent seemed to bring no coolness; the leaden height of the dead air pressed upon his brow and heart, but the goal was near.
Intense thirst was soon added to the bodily fatigue with which Hans was now afflicted; glance after glance he cast on the flask of water which hung at his belt.
The discovery of the total loss of their last piece of plate had the effect of sobering them just enough to enable them to stand over Gluck, beating him very steadily for a quarter of an hour; at the expiration of which period they dropped into a couple of chairs and requested to know what he had got to say for himself.
He opened the flask and was raising it to his lips, when his eye fell on an object lying on the rock beside him; he thought it moved.
Gluck told them his story, of which, of course, they did not believe a word.
He saw the cataract of the Golden River springing from the hillside scarcely five hundred feet above him.
The noise of the fray alarmed the neighbors, who, finding they could not pacify the combatants, sent for the constable.
Schwartz gnashed his teeth with rage and shook the bars with all his strength, but Hans only laughed at him and, advising him to make himself comfortable till he came back again, shouldered his basket, shook the bottle of holy water in Schwartz's face till it frothed again, and marched off in the highest spirits in the world.
Its waves were filled with the red glory of the sunset; they shook their crests like tongues of fire, and flashes of bloody light gleamed along their foam.
Far above shot up red, splintered masses of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow traced down their chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far beyond and far above all these, fainter than the morning cloud but purer and changeless, slept, in the blue sky, the utmost peaks of the eternal snow.
It was a small dog, apparently in the last agony of death from thirst.
How to get the holy water was the question.
When Hans heard this, he was much delighted, and determined to set out immediately for the Golden River.
Next morning he got up before the sun rose, put the holy water into a strong flask, and two bottles of wine and some meat in a basket, slung them over his back, took his alpine staff in his hand, and set off for the mountains.
His eyes were sunk, his features deadly pale and gathered into an expression of despair. "Water!" he stretched his arms to Hans, and cried feebly, "Water!
It was indeed a morning that might have made anyone happy, even with no Golden River to seek for.
On his way out of the town he had to pass the prison, and as he looked in at the windows, whom should he see but Schwartz himself peeping out of the bars and looking very disconsolate.
"Only pray don't drink it all," said Gluck.
"Why didn't you come before," continued the dwarf, "instead of sending me those rascally brothers of yours, for me to have the trouble of turning into stones? Very hard stones they make, too."
"Thank you," said the monarch.
CHAPTER V
Gluck stood watching it for some time, very much disappointed, because not only the river was not turned into gold, but its waters seemed much diminished in quantity.
But as he raised the flask he saw a little child lying panting by the roadside, and it cried out piteously for water.
HOW LITTLE GLUCK SET OFF ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE GOLDEN RIVER, AND HOW HE PROSPERED THEREIN, WITH OTHER MATTERS OF INTEREST
And the dwarf shook them into the flask which Gluck held in his hand.
And Gluck climbed to the brink of the Golden River, and its waves were as clear as crystal and as brilliant as the sun.
Do you suppose I'm going to allow that?"
"But don't be frightened; it's all right"--for Gluck showed manifest symptoms of consternation at this unlooked-for reply to his last observation.
And as Gluck gazed, fresh grass sprang beside the new streams, and creeping plants grew and climbed among the moistening soil.
Then Gluck struggled with himself and determined to bear the thirst a little longer; and he put the bottle to the child's lips, and it drank it all but a few drops.
"O dear me!" said Gluck, "have you really been so cruel?"
Then Gluck took some bread in his basket, and the bottle of water, and set off very early for the mountains.
He had several very bad falls, lost his basket and bread, and was very much frightened at the strange noises under the ice.
Then he bade him good speed, and Gluck went on again merrily.
"The little king looked very kind," thought he.
Then it smiled on him and got up and ran down the hill; and Gluck looked after it till it became as small as a little star, and then turned and began climbing again.
"Cruel!" said the dwarf; "they poured unholy water into my stream.
Yet, when he had climbed for another hour, his thirst became intolerable again; and when he looked at his bottle, he saw that there were only five or six drops left in it, and he could not venture to drink.
Young flowers opened suddenly along the riversides, as stars leap out when twilight is deepening, and thickets of myrtle and tendrils of vine cast lengthening shadows over the valley as they grew.
As he spoke the figure of the dwarf became indistinct.
So, after a month or two, Gluck grew tired and made up his mind to go and try his fortune with the Golden River.
Its tail disappeared; its ears became long, longer, silky, golden; its nose became very red; its eyes became very twinkling; in three seconds the dog was gone, and before Gluck stood his old acquaintance, the King of the Golden River.
"Poor beastie," said Gluck, "it'll be dead when I come down again, if I don't help it." Then he looked closer and closer at it, and its eye turned on him so mournfully that he could not stand it.
"Very probably," replied the dwarf, "but" (and his countenance grew stern as he spoke) "the water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven; and the water which is found in the vessel of mercy is holy, though it had been defiled with corpses."
The colors grew faint; the mist rose into the air; the monarch had evaporated.
The dog sprang up and stood on its hind legs.
And when he came in sight of the Treasure Valley, behold, a river, like the Golden River, was springing from a new cleft of the rocks above it and was flowing in innumerable streams among the dry heaps of red sand.
And thus the Treasure Valley became a garden again, and the inheritance which had been lost by cruelty was regained by love.
When Gluck found that Schwartz did not come back, he was very sorry and did not know what to do.
And the path became easier to his feet, and two or three blades of grass appeared upon it, and some grasshoppers began singing on the bank beside it, and Gluck thought he had never heard such merry singing.
"Cast these into the river," he said, "and descend on the other side of the mountains into the Treasure Valley.
"Confound the king and his gold too," said Gluck, and he opened the flask and poured all the water into the dog's mouth.
"Why," said Gluck, "I am sure, sir,--your Majesty, I mean,--they got the water out of the church font."
And so good speed."
And Gluck went and dwelt in the valley, and the poor were never driven from his door, so that his barns became full of corn and his house of treasure.
He had no money and was obliged to go and hire himself again to the goldsmith, who worked him very hard and gave him very little money.
'SAM.
I wish your brother would take the same trouble.
He was humble enough to desire my assistance on this occasion, though he and I were never cater-cousins; and I gave him to understand that I would make application to my friend Mr. Wilkes, who, perhaps, by his interest with Dr. Hay and Mr. Elliot, might be able to procure the discharge of his lacquey.
A violent death is never very painful; the only danger is lest it should be unprovided.
At least record it to yourself before custom has reconciled you to the scenes before you, and the disparity of your discoveries to your hopes has vanished from your mind.
I am sorry, dear Sir, that where you have parents, a man of your merits should not have an home.
'I love, dear Sir, to think on you, and therefore, should willingly write more to you, but that the post will not now give me leave to do more than send my compliments to Mr. Warton, and tell you that I am, dear Sir, most affectionately,
'Your very humble servant,
This, indeed, I do not only from complaisance but from interest; for living on in the old way, I am very glad of a correspondent so capable as yourself, to diversify the hours.
I restrain myself from quoting passages from this excellent work, or even referring to them, because I should not know what to select, or rather, what to omit.
Voltaire, I am afraid, meant only by wanton profaneness to obtain a sportive victory over religion, and to discredit the belief of a superintending Providence: Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal.
'DEAR SIR,
He says the boy is a sickly lad, of a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in his throat, which renders him very unfit for his Majesty's service.
'Chelsea, March 16, 1759.
It was, at my first coming, quite new and handsome.
'That the dead are seen no more, (said Imlac,) I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages, and of all nations.
'You will receive this by Mr. Baretti, a gentleman particularly intitled to the notice and kindness of the Professor of poesy.
'SAM.
'Though I might have expected to hear from you, upon your entrance into a new state of life at a new place, yet recollecting, (not without some degree of shame,) that I owe you a letter upon an old account, I think it my part to write first.
'[London,] June 1, 1758.'
It ends,--
JOHNSON.'
JOHNSON.'
'SAM.
I am half afraid of him; but he is no less amiable than formidable.
Let me know what you expected, and what you have found.
'T.
'[London] April 14, 1758.'
A man unconnected is at home every where; unless he may be said to be at home no where.
It would be hard if the man might not choose his own wife, who has a right to plead before the Judges of his country.
The truth is, that every death is violent which is the effect of accident; every death, which is not gradually brought on by the miseries of age, or when life is extinguished for any other reason than that it is burnt out.
The fund of thinking which this work contains is such, that almost every sentence of it may furnish a subject of long meditation.
I am, my dear Sir,
JOHNSON.'
It is a rule never to be forgotten, that whatever strikes strongly, should be described while the first impression remains fresh upon the mind.
'Your notes upon my poet were very acceptable.
I shall be glad of them.
'If you married imprudently, you miscarried at your own hazard, at an age when you had a right of choice.
You are not the only friend that has had the same mischance.
'I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality.
But they who think justly, and feel with strong sensibility, will listen with eagerness and admiration to its truth and wisdom.
'I should be sorry to think that what engrosses the attention of my friend, should have no part of mine.
Neither the great nor little debts disgrace you.
Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.
I beg that you will be so kind as to continue your searches.
He now refreshed himself by an excursion to Oxford, of which the following short characteristical notice, in his own words, is preserved:--
'To THE REVEREND MR.
But if a man can be supposed to make no provision for death in war, what can be the state that would have awakened him to the care of futurity?
The truth, however, is, that we judge of the happiness and misery of life differently at different times, according to the state of our changeable frame.
'TO THE SAME.
You must, therefore, be enabled to discharge petty debts, that you may have leisure, with security, to struggle with the rest.
I hope, in a few days, to be at leisure, and to make visits.
I am not satisfied if a year passes without my having read it through; and at every perusal, my admiration of the mind which produced it is so highly raised, that I can scarcely believe that I had the honour of enjoying the intimacy of such a man.
'DEAR SIR,
I have been invited, or have invited myself, to several parts of the kingdom; and will not incommode my dear Lucy by coming to Lichfield, while her present lodging is of any use to her.
It would be superfluous to say more on the subject, which I leave to your own consideration; but I cannot let slip this opportunity of declaring that I am, with the most inviolable esteem and attachment, dear Sir,
'If your imprudence has ended in difficulties and inconveniences, you are yourself to support them; and, with the help of a little better health, you would support them and conquer them.
In the design offered by Mr. Mylne the elliptical form was adopted, and therefore it was the great object of his rivals to attack it.
Mr. Wilkes, who upon all occasions has acted, as a private gentleman, with most polite liberality, applied to his friend Sir George Hay, then one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty; and Francis Barber was discharged, as he has told me, without any wish of his own.
He will, if the forwardness of his spring be not blasted, be a credit to you, and to the University.
'Your affectionate, obliged, humble servant,
I am sure you have my esteem for the courage with which you contracted them, and the spirit with which you endure them.
A commentary must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in devious walks of literature.
'SAM.
'SAM.
I wish my esteem could be of more use.
At this time, there being a competition among the architects of London to be employed in the building of Blackfriars-bridge, a question was very warmly agitated whether semicircular or elliptical arches were preferable.
JOHNSON.'
Though the proposition illustrated by both these works was the same, namely, that in our present state there is more evil than good, the intention of the writers was very different.
The loss is nothing, if nobody has found them; nor even then, perhaps, if the numbers be known.
His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has been pressed on board the Stag Frigate, Captain Angel, and our lexicographer is in great distress.
Your debts in the whole are not large, and of the whole but a small part is troublesome.
is, in many respects, more than poetically just.
You, who are very capable of anticipating futurity, and raising phantoms before your own eyes, must often have imagined to yourself an academical life, and have conceived what would be the manners, the views, and the conversation, of men devoted to letters; how they would choose their companions, how they would direct their studies, and how they would regulate their lives.
Surely, that want which accident and sickness produces, is to be supported in every region of humanity, though there were neither friends nor fathers in the world. You have certainly from your father the highest claim of charity, though none of right; and therefore I would counsel you to omit no decent nor manly degree of importunity.
He was preoccupied with something of importance and was frowning.
But it's fascinating, isn't it?
Her mother was sitting on a chair by the wall.
I, of course, was only too pleased to obey her wishes, tried to appear disconcerted, embarrassed, in fact played my part not badly.
The present betrothed condition is perhaps better than marriage.
Wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?
"Me--afraid?
I was almost saying too much again.
A vestal virgin might be seduced by flattery.
"But you have provided for the children of Katerina Ivanovna.
Well... listen, we'll go to see my betrothed, only not just now!"
I dare not guess what impression it made on her, but in any case it worked in my interests.
Well, he'd better look after your sister!
What fun it was and how little trouble!
And imagine what I did then!
Where are you off to? Going again?"
She was an honest woman, and very sensible, although completely uneducated.
Then came interviews, mysterious conversations, exhortations, entreaties, supplications, even tears--would you believe it, even tears?
But enough.
"Oh, nonsense," said Svidrigailov, seeming to rouse himself.
Damn the wine!
"Not at all?
"Yes, it was.
I found out that they had nothing of their own and had come to town upon some legal business.
For you'll soon have to be off.
He became very suspicious of Svidrigailov and resolved to follow him.
Isn't it fascinating?
It's the well-known resource--flattery.
"Why, you are dropping them even now.
Do you know that I am going to get married?"
It may be a coarse satisfaction, but still a satisfaction.
Never mind my being drunk at this moment and having had a whole glass of wine.
It is fascinating, ha-ha!
She was for me.
To what a pitch of stupidity a man can be brought by frenzy!
See, look at the watch.
Will you really make such a marriage?"
They were lodging in a miserable little hole and had only just arrived from the country.
Her mamma of course impresses on her that this is her husband and that this must be so.
The mamma, she said, was a sensible woman.
"I have.
No need to go into detail, but we parted.
"Was that the footman who came to you after death to fill your pipe?... you told me about it yourself." Raskolnikov felt more and more irritated.
"I should rather think it must be a pleasure!" cried Raskolnikov, getting up.
"No, I'm not going away now."
And he walked to the right towards the Hay Market.
But I must tell you, for it's an interesting story, my marriage, in its own way.
Yes, there you have progress.
"Why, of course.
I fell to jeering in the coarsest way at all such propaganda and efforts to convert me; Parasha came on to the scene again, and not she alone; in fact there was a tremendous to-do.
She arranged it all for me.
There's no need to go into particulars how Marfa Petrovna bought me out; do you know to what a point of insanity a woman can sometimes love?
Raskolnikov noticed all this, and he too was uneasy.
Though... though you had your own reasons....
Have mercy on me, my good friend.
There I acted stupidly again.
I proffered my services and money.
Shouldn't bring children!' Well, it's not my business whether that consoling reflection was logical or not.
I learnt that they had gone to the dancing saloon by mistake, believing that it was a genuine dancing class.
But your sister she couldn't put up with, anyway.
"I dare say.
"Yes, I am certain that she can't, but that's not the point."
There is a son serving in the provinces, but he doesn't help; there is a daughter, who is married, but she doesn't visit them.
"I was told too about some footman of yours in the country whom you treated badly."
My explanation is that Marfa Petrovna was an ardent and impressionable woman and simply fell in love herself--literally fell in love--with your sister.
She told me that she and her daughter could only regard my acquaintance as an honour.
No, I'm talking of the way you keep sighing and groaning now.
Here they are...
About your brother, what am I to say to you?
Ah, you refuse?
Would you like a lift?
Dounia shuddered and came to herself.
You are only exciting yourself uselessly."
Never mind, you have another charge there.
"Yes, I did.
Again they stood for a minute facing each other.
There were still two charges and one capsule left in it.
I purposely refrained from referring to your affair, though I am devoured by curiosity.
He murdered them to rob them and he did rob them.
Has she gone out?
It was your doing.... It must have been your doing.... Scoundrel!"
Wait a little: I saw him and was talking to him just now.
I don't believe you!
Now, now are you going to follow me?"
He looked stubbornly out of the window.
Alas! how illness improvises old-age!
She added:--
No one entered; the door did not open.
At mid-day the physician returned, gave some directions, inquired whether the mayor had made his appearance at the infirmary, and shook his head.
"My child," said the sister, "try to rest now, and do not talk any more."
You are whispering it to each other there.
Why does he not come?"
The servant stammered:--
On the other hand, it seemed to her that the mere communication of the truth to the invalid would, without doubt, deal her a terrible blow, and that this was a serious matter in Fantine's present state.
He returned to Fantine's bed, and she went on:--
The sister drew the curtains together again, hoping that she would fall into a doze.
As exactness is kindness, he was exact.
Stop! this morning I was looking at the dust on the chimney-piece, and I had a sort of idea come across me, like that, that I should see Cosette again soon.
The sister, accustomed as she was to austerities, felt a tear spring to her eyes.
I am extremely happy; I am doing well; I am not ill at all any more; I am going to see Cosette again; I am even quite hungry; it is nearly five years since I saw her last; you cannot imagine how much attached one gets to children, and then, she will be so pretty; you will see!
Her eyes were hollow and staring.
Fantine did not seem to hear it.
All at once she cried:--
Fantine fell back on her pillow.
Then she raised her arms to heaven, and her white face became ineffable; her lips moved; she was praying in a low voice.
"Dear Holy Virgin, beside my stove I have set a cradle with ribbons decked.
The doctor was surprised; she was better; the pressure on her chest had decreased; her pulse had regained its strength; a sort of life had suddenly supervened and reanimated this poor, worn-out creature.
And then, without stirring, without even moving her head, she began to stare all about her with wide-open eyes and a joyous air, and she said nothing more.
All the morning she was melancholy, said but little, and laid plaits in her sheets, murmuring the while, in a low voice, calculations which seemed to be calculations of distances.
Fantine was still motionless and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.
You know the reason.
She remained thus for a quarter of an hour, her eyes riveted on the door, motionless and apparently holding her breath.
"See! there is just room."
This creature of five and twenty had a wrinkled brow, flabby cheeks, pinched nostrils, teeth from which the gums had receded, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, prominent shoulder-blades, frail limbs, a clayey skin, and her golden hair was growing out sprinkled with gray.
The sister, who had no idea of distances, replied, "Oh, I think that he will be here to-morrow."
What is he doing?
to-morrow!" said Fantine, "I shall see Cosette to-morrow! you see, good sister of the good God, that I am no longer ill; I am mad; I could dance if any one wished it."
"Well," resumed the nun, "now that you are happy, mind me, and do not talk any more."
Sister Simplice blushed faintly, for it was a lie that the maid had proposed to her.
The servant-maid hastened to say in the nun's ear, "Say that he is busy with the city council."
In the course of twenty minutes, she asked the nun more than ten times, "What time is it, sister?"
it is very cold! it is true; he had on his cloak, at least?
"Be calm, my child," said the sister; "lie down again."
"You see, when she wakes up in the morning, I shall be able to say good morning to her, poor kitten, and when I cannot sleep at night, I can hear her asleep; her little gentle breathing will do me good."
If you only knew what pretty little rosy fingers she had!
I want to know it."
They seemed almost extinguished at intervals, then lighted up again and shone like stars.
"Roses are pink and corn-flowers are blue, I love my love, and corn-flowers are blue.
Fantine raised herself and crouched on her heels in the bed: her eyes sparkled; indescribable joy beamed from that melancholy face.
"Lovely things we will buy As we stroll the faubourgs through, Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue, I love my love, corn-flowers are blue."
She said nothing, but began to plait the sheets once more.
'Madame, what shall I do with this linen fine?'--'Make of it clothes for thy new-born babe.'
But she coughed in a melancholy way. One would have said that something dark was descending upon her.
About half-past two, Fantine began to be restless.
She no longer seemed to pay attention to anything about her.
The doctor recommended silence, and that all painful emotions should be avoided; he prescribed an infusion of pure chinchona, and, in case the fever should increase again during the night, a calming potion.
The girl returned in a few minutes.
Her voice was so abrupt and hoarse that the two women thought they heard the voice of a man; they wheeled round in affright.
The clock struck six.
But at that moment Fantine was joyous.
Each time that Sister Simplice asked her how she felt, she replied invariably, "Well.
This is what Fantine was singing:--
"He cannot come?
As he took his departure, he said to the sister:--
She said to him, "She will be allowed to sleep beside me in a little bed, will she not, sir?"
they will give back Cosette, for they have been paid; the authorities will not allow them to keep the child since they have received their pay.
"Give me your hand," said the doctor.
Then Fantine turned and looked at the door.
This song was an old cradle romance with which she had, in former days, lulled her little Cosette to sleep, and which had never recurred to her mind in all the five years during which she had been parted from her child.
Why not?
Three o'clock struck.
"He set out this morning for Paris; in fact, he need not even go through Paris; Montfermeil is a little to the left as you come thence.
The nun listened.
The clock struck a quarter past three.
"Lovely things we will buy As we stroll the faubourgs through. Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue, I love my love, corn-flowers are blue.
"Answer me!" cried Fantine.
What a place that Montfermeil is!
That when he went away he had been very gentle, as usual, and that he had merely told the portress not to expect him that night.
She smiled now and then.
Physical suffering had completed the work of moral suffering.
Make of it, soiling not, spoiling not, a petticoat fair with its bodice fine, which I will embroider and fill with flowers.'--'Madame, the child is no longer here; what is to be done?'--'Then make of it a winding-sheet in which to bury me.'
A person who had seen her a quarter of an hour previously would not have understood the change; she was all rosy now; she spoke in a lively and natural voice; her whole face was one smile; now and then she talked, she laughed softly; the joy of a mother is almost infantile.
She stretched out her arm, and exclaimed with a laugh:--
Do you remember how he said to me yesterday, when I spoke to him of Cosette, Soon, soon?
Her thought was clearly perceptible, but she uttered no name, she made no complaint, she blamed no one.
She seemed to be endeavoring to recall something.
In the meantime, Fantine was staring at the tester of her bed.
Her flush did not last long; the sister raised her calm, sad eyes to Fantine, and said, "Monsieur le Maire has gone away."
Do not make signs to me that I must not talk, sister!
Fantine, without changing her attitude, continued in a loud voice, and with an accent that was both imperious and heart-rending:--
She sang it in so sad a voice, and to so sweet an air, that it was enough to make any one, even a nun, weep.
It seems as though, at the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of heaven fills those who are quitting the light of earth.
The drought was constantly increasing, and the heat none the less for the wind being north, this wind being the simoom of the Pampas.
"You believe that, Paganel?"
For two days they plodded steadily across this arid and deserted plain. The dry heat became severe.
There were not only no RIOS, but even the ponds dug out by the Indians were dried up.
"Well, Thalcave was mistaken this time," retorted Paganel, somewhat sharply.
But the travelers could not fall back on this resource, not having the necessary implements.
"The Gauchos!" cried Paganel; and, turning to his companions, he added, "we need not have been so much on our guard; there was nothing to fear."
"That's my opinion too," said the Major, "for if I am not mistaken, instead of being harmless, the Gauchos are formidable out-and-out bandits."
They took us for robbers, and fled in terror."
"The cowards!" exclaimed Paganel.
"That's not exactly what I said."
Thalcave took them for robbers, and he knows what he is talking about."
But Paganel, in a towering rage, would not give up the contest, and turned upon Glenarvan, whose intervention in this jesting manner he resented.
"And I think you are very crabbed."
They came within a hundred yards of them, and stopped.
THE Argentine Pampas extend from the thirty-fourth to the fortieth degree of southern latitude.
As the drought seemed to increase with every mile, Paganel asked Thalcave when he expected to come to water.
"Sir, I think you are very annoying to-day."
"To-morrow evening."
"The Gauchos are agriculturists and shepherds, and nothing else, as I have stated in a pamphlet on the natives of the Pampas, written by me, which has attracted some notice."
"At Lake Salinas," replied the Indian.
The soil is composed of sand and red or yellow clay, and this is covered by a layer of earth, in which the vegetation takes root.
"And so, my Lord, my nervous system is irritated?" he said.
"Come, now, there is no doubt one of you is very teasing and the other is very crabbed, and I must say I am surprised at both of you."
"Yes.
"Indeed!
When the Argentines travel in the Pampas they generally dig wells, and find water a few feet below the surface.
They halted at evening after a course of thirty miles and eagerly looked forward to a good night's rest to compensate for the fatigue of day.
"I rather think they did not dare to attack us," replied Glenarvan, much vexed at not being able to enter into some sort of communication with those Indians, whatever they were.
"They scampered off too quick for honest folks," said McNabbs.
He rather sought to avoid them, and gave orders to his party to have their arms in readiness for any trouble.
"Gauchos."
"Do I look like a man that would commit crimes?"
The Patagonian, without understanding the cause, could see that the two friends were quarreling.
Glenarvan thought it was high time to interfere, for the discussion was getting too hot, so he said:
"Wrong?" replied Paganel.
"The idea!" exclaimed Paganel.
"I believe you are wrong, Paganel."
"Tell me at once that I want to assassinate you?"
And forthwith commenced a lively discussion of this ethnological thesis--so lively that the Major became excited, and, quite contrary to his usual suavity, said bluntly:
Even these petty ills of life could not ruffle the Major's equanimity; but Paganel, on the contrary, was perfectly exasperated by such trifling annoyances.
There was a brief interruption this day to the monotony of the journey. Mulrady, who was in front of the others, rode hastily back to report the approach of a troop of Indians.
He abused the poor mosquitoes desperately, and deplored the lack of some acid lotion which would have eased the pain of their stings.
But their slumbers were invaded by a swarm of mosquitoes, which allowed them no peace.
"And when shall we get there?"
I have heard that, in South America, the wind greatly irritates the nervous system."
Their presence indicated a change of wind which shifted to the north.
Lady Helena, whom I love so, and the Major, with his calm manner, and Captain Mangles, and Monsieur Paganel, and all the sailors on the DUNCAN.
"Yes, and to be grown up, my child, to venerate him," replied Glenarvan, deeply touched by the boy's genuine affection.
He seemed as if he were never going to leave off, and really there was some danger of his swallowing up the whole river.
"I see him still," the boy went on, as if speaking to himself.
There the fertility is splendid; the pasturage is incomparable.
It was very fat and would make an excellent dish, the Patagonian said.
We were his only thought: and whenever he came home from his voyages, we were sure of some SOUVENIR from all the places he had been to; and, better still, of loving words and caresses.
At noon they were obliged to let them rest for an hour.
"Good, brave papa.
"If we three don't manage to find out fresh water somewhere," he added, "we must be very stupid."
"But how will you manage to understand what Thalcave says, Glenarvan?" he continued.
"See what has come of it!"
He had, he said, never undertaken to pay the cost of the trial, but he had, unfortunately, given the lady a thousand pounds to enable her to pay the expenses herself.
If anybody can summon anybody, nobody can ever be sure of herself!"
Mrs. Toff was of opinion that the bit of paper should be burned, and that no further notice should be taken of the matter at all.
And yet this awful document seemed to her and to her sisters-in-law to be so imperative as to admit of no escape.
A man came all the way down from London for the purpose of serving Lady George with a subpoena to give evidence at the trial on the part of the Baroness.
I never patronised anything.
You need not trouble yourself about it at all.
How she did work!
They all believed that he was dying, and, if so, surely he could not be made to come.
And then there was new cause for wonderment.
"Does it mean nothing."
The Baroness, as she heard of this, became louder and louder.
"It wasn't wicked to go," said Mary, "and I won't be scolded about it any more.
He wrote an angry letter to Miss Fleabody, as he called her, complaining bitterly of the insertion of his wife's name.
This occurred just previous to her going down to Manor Cross,--that journey which was to be made for so important an object.
During the month the Disabilities created a considerable interest throughout London, of which Dr. Fleabody reaped the full advantage.
Then Lord George did--just what he ought not to have done.
I went there once when I came to London first, because Miss Mildmay asked me."
Who could say whether the Dean would let her come away again?
The man could simply say that he was only a messenger, and had now done his work.
She was, however, of opinion that if Mary was concealed in a certain room at Manor Cross, which might she thought be sufficiently warmed and ventilated for health, the judges of the Queen's Bench would never be able to find her.
"Why shouldn't she have gone?" asked the Dean.
The consternation of the ladies may be imagined.
Lady Susanna was full of the original sin of that unfortunate visit to the Disabilities.
I'm quite sure of one thing.
What a condition was this for a Marchioness to be in at the moment of the birth of her eldest child! "But I don't know anything about the nasty women!" said Mary, through her tears.
Looked at in any light, the thing was very terrible.
What a feather it would be in the Dean's cap if the next Popenjoy were born at the deanery.
I'll never have anything more to do with disabilities.
It was explained to her that in no other way could she see her husband.
It was not this that she wanted.
She wouldn't care where she went.
They won't attempt to examine half the people they have summoned.
"But won't they come and fetch me?"
What did they want her to say? All she had done was to go to a lecture, and to give the wicked woman a guinea.
It was a small room lined with shelves of books, except in one spot, where was suspended a portrait of Lady Barbara, which she had bequeathed him in her will.
'On that score my conscience is clear,' replied Glastonbury.
They arrived the day after the Gazette.
'I am your debtor for this great service.'
'It is easy to count your obligations to me,' said Glastonbury, 'but mine to you and yours are incalculable.'
Yet a little time and Adrian Glastonbury must be gathered to his fathers.
Believe me, dearest friend, it was no feeling of false pride that for a moment influenced me; I only felt-'
Glastonbury advanced, and gently took his other hand.
'I would rather learn its contents from yourself, if you positively desire me,' replied Sir Ratcliffe.
'It is, then,--it must be then as I suspect,' rejoined Sir Ratcliffe.
Mr. Glastonbury looked at Sir Ratcliffe steadily; then rising from his seat he took the baronet's arm, and without saying a word walked slowly towards the gates of the castle where he lodged, and which we have before described.
After dinner, during which Ferdinand recounted all his adventures, Lady Armine invited him, when she rose, to walk with her in the garden.
'As the Almighty pleases,' said Glastonbury, crossing himself.
'May you never repent your devotion to our house!' said Sir Ratcliffe, rising from his seat.
the consciousness that, to be really serviceable to those he loves, it is not necessary for him to cease to exist.'
'Time was we could give them who served us something better than thanks; but, at any rate, these come from the heart.'
'I have left everything to our child,' said Glastonbury; for thus, when speaking to the father alone, he would often style the son.
It was then, with an air of considerable confusion, clearing his throat, and filling his glass at the same time, that Sir Ratcliffe said to his remaining guest,
They accordingly entered his chamber.
Why, then, deprive him of the greatest gratification of his remaining years?
I could not expect the Duke, deeply as I feel his generous kindness, to purchase a commission for my son: I could not permit it.
'Excellent, kind-hearted man!' said Sir Ratcliffe, pressing the hand of Glastonbury in his own; 'I accept your offering in the spirit of perfect love.
The commission is purchased.
'My dear Glastonbury, you cannot suppose that I believe that the days of magic have returned.
They found Sir Ratcliffe waiting for them at the town, and the fond smile and cordial embrace with which he greeted Glastonbury more than repaid that good man for all his exertions.
He put it up, and then said:
And directly they came back from church the prince, overcome with joy, kissed his bride, and gave her back her wings.
And as soon as it was dawn mass was said; the bells began ringing from several far-distant churches; and at sunrise the corpse was decently buried.
Some set about making a coffin, others began digging a grave, and the head-keeper rode off to fetch a priest.
Two of them soon had on both their white dresses and their wings; but the youngest could not find hers.
In the midst of the confusion the prince made his escape, and having the boots on he went seven miles at every step, and was soon far enough away from the robbers' den.
I am so unhappy!" she replied.
But at last he came to whence the light proceeded--from a solitary hermitage.
"Ho! Magical Whip! To right and left skip! And do what I will!"
He went in; but found the hermit lying dead, with six wax candles burning around him.
The prince, having put on the invisible cap, was able to walk among them, and talk to them; and they all heard, though they could not see him.
I love to think of him, and I am so sorry for him, poor fellow!
THE PRINCESS OF THE BRAZEN MOUNTAIN
"I forgive you, I forgive you everything, darling!" exclaimed the prince throwing off the invisible cap, and embracing her rapturously.
Though it flew like a bird, the prince was quite able to keep pace with it, because he had on the seven-league boots.
What are you doing there?"
He now began to consider whether he could not use all these treasures to help him to find the Brazen Mountain.
"Who are you? and what are you fighting about?"
While he was thinking over this, something fell from a peg in the wall, close beside him; it was a leather whip.
"What are you thinking of, sister?" asked the two elder princesses.
The prince took it up, and read on the handle these words:
There was a young prince, who was not only most handsome and well-grown, but also most kind-hearted and good.
The prince was not going to be satisfied with this; so he gave his usual orders to the Magical Whip, which forthwith became invisible, and began to lash the miller soundly.
"We are robbers," they replied, "and we are fighting for these boots, which were the property of our deceased leader.
As you are a stranger we will abide by your decision, as to whom this pair of boots shall belong, and give you a heap of gold into the bargain for your trouble."
The prince looked into the kettle.
The king and queen welcomed them joyfully, and all was greatest joy and happiness henceforward.
"Stop, you fellows!" exclaimed the prince.
"That's no business of yours," replied the miller.
Late one evening he saw a twinkling light before him, which he followed, in the hope of coming to some habitation.
"That's my own business," replied the miller gruffly.
The three princesses, having drawn up their supply of flour, put it into their storehouse, and went back to their dwelling.
"What mill is this?" the prince next asked.
"Very well," she said; "I consent, only you must give me back my wings at once."
He travelled for a long time, inquiring about it of every one he met; but nobody had ever heard of such a mountain; and he began to give up all hope of ever finding it.
When the funeral was over all the people dispersed to their homes, and the Magical Whip returned of itself to the prince's hand.
And having alighted on the ground they dropped their wings and their garments, and left them lying on the shore and leaped into the cool water, and began splashing and playing about in it, like so many waterfowl.
In half an hour he came to a mill, with twelve millstones.
So he set the Magical Whip, as before, to work; and there was a nice confusion among these robbers, for not seeing where the blows came from they fell upon one another; and at last, frightened out of their senses, they took flight, and scattered in all directions.
The prince drew on the boots, took the Magical Whip from his girdle, and said:
It led him on a long way, across level plains, through deep defiles, and at length some way into a dark forest.
"The Magic Whip."
The whip sprang from his hand.
In an hour or two they arrived in his father's kingdom.
The prince made ready; and when the usual sack of wheat flour was bound fast in the loop, he climbed upon it, having first put on his invisible cap, and was thus drawn up to the top of the Brazen Mountain.
As soon as the prince saw this he came out from his hiding-place in the bushes, picked up one pair of wings and hid himself again.
The two eldest were weaving golden threads in their looms; but the youngest, the prince's wife, sat silently apart from her sisters, listening to the murmur of a fountain, her head leaning on her hand, in deep thought.
"I am a prince," he replied; "this is my father's kingdom; be my wife, and I will give you back your wings."
Their palace was most beautiful, all silver without, and all gold within.
"They let down a rope here every day, and draw up all the flour they want by the rope."
The miller was an old wizard, with a long beard down to the ground.
But as he was no nearer to finding out where the Brazen Mountain was, he had no need to go quite so fast; so he took off the seven-league boots, put them under his arm, and the Magic Whip in his girdle, and went at his ordinary pace, till he came to a narrow path between some rocks, where again he came upon twelve men fighting.
"I am a princess of the Brazen Mountain; my sisters and I came here to bathe in the lake; and somebody has stolen my wings; so I must wait here, until they bring me another pair."
One summer's evening the prince was walking on the banks of a lake, when he looked up, and saw to his great surprise, in the air, against the rosy clouds of the sunset, three beautiful beings with wings--not angels, nor birds--but three beautiful damsels.
He had evidently been dead for some time.
Oh! sisters!
However, he thought there must be some way up after all; so taking off his boots and cap, he set off to walk round the base of the mountain.
At first the prince was overjoyed at having reached the goal of his wishes; but when he looked more closely at its smooth perpendicular sides, hard as adamant--its summit lost in the clouds--he was in despair; for how was he ever to get to the top of it?
In a short time there was the hum of a multitude through the forest; and the head-forester entered, breathless, followed by a crowd of under-keepers, and many more people with them.
As he knew its virtue, he called out:
"What are you crying for, you lovely maiden?" asked the prince, emerging from the bushes.
The whip jumped from his hand, became invisible, and flew away.
It did not become invisible this time, but glided rapidly a little above the ground, like a boat over a calm sea.
"It belongs to the three princesses of the Brazen Mountain," replied the miller.
I shall have to leave you, and go back to him; only I fear he will never forgive me, however I entreat him, for having behaved so unkindly to him."
As he said this a thick silken rope came down, with a loop at the end, which struck the threshold of the mill.
"Whose mill is this?"
Now sooner or later kindness always meets its reward, though it may not seem so at first.
And as she sat there two pearly tears coursed down her lovely face.
"Let us first go to church, and get married," he answered, and taking the lovely princess by the hand, he brought her to his father and mother, and asked their permission to marry her.
They soon vanished in the blue sky; but she remained alone, wringing her hands, and crying.
"Oh!
He was scarcely aware of the fact, when in less than a quarter of an hour they came to a standstill--at the Brazen Mountain.
Not good, said these knights.
So departed Sir Tristram from that dolorous lady, and had much evil lodging.
Ye say well, said Sir Tristram, now I assign you to meet me in the meadow by the river of Camelot, where Merlin set the peron.
Fair sir, said Sir Tristram, to drink of that water have I courage; and then they alighted off their horses.
As for that, said Sir Tristram, I will answer you; this shield was given me, not desired, of Queen Morgan le Fay; and as for me, I can not descrive these arms, for it is no point of my charge, and yet I trust to God to bear them with worship.
But, fair knight, said Sir Sagramore, tell us your name.
And therewith Sir Tristram kneeled adown, and yielded him up his sword.
Truly, said he, my name is Sir Tristram de Liones.
And this is the cause why I am so loath to have ado with you; for I must fight within these three days with a good knight, and as valiant as any is now living, and if I be hurt I shall not be able to do battle with him.
What tidings with you, said Sir Tristram, with you knights?
Sir, said Sir Tristram, that is me loath to tell any man my name.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
And there King Arthur brake his spear all to pieces upon Sir Tristram's shield.
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And then or I might recover my horse this Sir Breuse slew the damosel.
By the good lord, said Sir Tristram, yonder lieth a well-faring knight; what is best to do?
But Sir Tristram hit Arthur again, that horse and man fell to the earth.
So Sir Tristram awaked him with the butt of his spear.
And in that same place was the fair lady Colombe slain, that was love unto Sir Lanceor; for after he was dead she took his sword and thrust it through her body.
And when he saw them lie on the earth he took his bridle, and rode forth on his way, and his man Gouvernail with him.
That me repenteth, said Sir Tristram, of your great anger; an it please you tell me your husband's name.
Then for pity I made the damosel to leap on her palfrey, and I promised her to be her warrant, and to help her to inter her lord.
And then were they ware by them where stood a great horse tied to a tree, and ever he neighed.
Fair knight, said Sir Launcelot, tell me your name?
And when I saw her making such dole, I asked her who slew her lord.
Well, said Sir Tristram, as at this time I will not fail you till that ye be out of the danger of your enemies.
And so either told other their names, and then departed Sir Tristram and rode his way.
And there he had almost slain me, and from us he took his horse and departed, and in an evil time we met with him.
And then this strange knight left them there, and took his way through the forest.
And then they both forthwithal went to the stone, and set them down upon it, and took off their helms to cool them, and either kissed other an hundred times.
Then shall ye and I do battle together, said King Arthur.
By my head, said Sir Tristram, I will follow this strong knight that thus hath shamed us.
Well, said Sir Tristram, now I understand the manner of your battle, but in any wise have remembrance of your promise that ye have made with me to do battle with me this day fortnight.
And at that time Merlin prophesied that in that same place should fight two the best knights that ever were in Arthur's days, and the best lovers.
O Jesu, said Sir Launcelot, what adventure is befallen me!
Then when Sir Uwaine saw his lord Arthur lie on the ground sore wounded, he was passing heavy.
And so either gave other the degree.
And there was King Arthur wounded on the left side, a great wound and a perilous.
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And there withal King Arthur dressed his shield and his spear, and Sir Tristram against him, and they came so eagerly together.
And if ye meet with him it is an hard adventure an ever ye escape his hands.
When he came nigh Sir Tristram he said on high: Ye be welcome, sir knight, and well and truly have ye holden your promise.
He beareth, said Sir Tristram, a covered shield close with cloth.
For I would wit, said Arthur. Sir, ye shall not wit as at this time.
O Jesu, said Sir Tristram, thou hast a fair grace of me this day that I should rescue thee, and thou art the man in the world that I most hate; but now make thee ready, for I will do battle with thee.
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And then Sir Gawaine asked him his name.
Then at the last spake Sir Launcelot and said: Knight, thou fightest wonderly well as ever I saw knight, therefore, an it please you, tell me your name.
To what intent? said Sir Tristram.
CHAPTER II.
Nevertheless, by Saint Cross, said Sir Uwaine, he is a strong knight at mine advice as any is now living.
My name is Sir Tristram, your mortal enemy.
And therewith Sir Launcelot kneeled down and yielded him up his sword.
Truly, said Sir Launcelot, an I were required I was never loath to tell my name.
Then Sir Tristram asked Sir Gawaine and Sir Bleoberis if they met with such a knight, with such a cognisance, with a covered shield.
Then he said: My name is Sir Tristram.
And then anon after they took off their helms and rode to Camelot.
So they mounted upon their horses, and rode together unto that forest, and there they found a fair well, with clear water bubbling.
And then they rode together, and so he hurt my fellow.
Why so? said Sir Tristram; I pray you tell me, for I ride to seek a knight.
And there he saw ten knights fighting together.
Fair sir, said these knights, such a knight met with us to our great damage.
Fair lady, said Sir Tristram, who hath slain your lord?
Fair knight, he said, my name is Sir Launcelot du Lake.
So they were agreed.
And when he had done so I might not for shame but I must joust with him.
What is your name? said Sir Tristram.
So they stood and wept both, and made great dole when they saw the bright swords over-covered with blood of their bodies.
And then were they ware of a fair knight armed, under a tree, lacking no piece of harness, save his helm lay under his head.
And so I took my horse again, and I was sore ashamed, and so began the medley betwixt us: and this is the cause wherefore we did this battle.
And then he dressed his shield and his spear, and cried aloud unto Sir Tristram and said: Knight, defend thee.
By my faith, said Sir Tristram, I shall never rest till that I find him.
And then Sir Tristram asked them their names, and so either told other their names.
The Baroness had taken herself off, and when enquiries were made it was found that she was at Madrid.
And why should she go to the deanery?
But Lady Sarah could not look at the matter in that light. She was sure that if a witness were really wanted, that witness could not escape by paying a fine.
Mary made the journey in perfect safety, and then was able to tell her father the whole story.
"Not particularly;--though if there be any rights which they haven't got, I thoroughly wish that they might get them.
"We have had all that before, and you need not scold me again.
When George is here we will get Dr. Loftly, and he will make it straight for us.
"Of course it will.
She had obtained full though by no means undisputed possession of the great hall in the Marylebone Road, and was undoubtedly for the moment the Queen of the Disabilities.
Mary's letter was almost hysterically miserable.
She knew nothing about the horrid people.
Lady Sarah wrote very sensibly, suggesting that he should go to Mr. Stokes, the family lawyer.
"Oh George, are we to have that all again?"
Snape and Cashett.
CHAPTER LX.
"How could I tell, George?
It was in vain that Lady Sarah, with considerable circumlocution, endeavoured to explain to the messenger the true state of the case.
On the next morning Lord George himself came down to Brotherton, and Mary with a carriage full of precautions, was sent into the deanery to meet him.
"But is it not horrible," said Lady Susanna, "that people of rank should be made subject to such an annoyance!
You went to a lecture yourself when you were in town, and they might just as well have sent for you."
The business had now been brought into proper form, and the trial was to take place in March.
But then what would become of a baby--perhaps of a Popenjoy--so born?
It was, however, suddenly understood that Mr. Philogunac Coelebs, who was a bachelor and very rich, had taken her by the hand, and intended to bear all the expenses of the trial.
Poor Mary was certainly not in a condition to go into a court of law, and would be less so on the day fixed for the trial.
There were still ten days to the trial, and twenty days, by computation, to the great event.
"You should not have gone," said he.
"Fetch you?
Among these names, which were very numerous, appeared that of Lady George Germain.
What right have they to say so?
Mr. Snape, one of the lawyers, was the person who first informed Mr. Coelebs, and did so in a manner which clearly implied that he expected Mr. Coelebs to pay the bill.
The Baroness, on her arrival in London, had anticipated the success which this low-bred American female had achieved.
She lectured twice a week to crowded benches.
The Marchioness discovered that the journey was to be made, and was full of misgivings and full of enquiries.
"I suppose I must go, papa?"
They who best knew Mr. Philogunac Coelebs thought that he had escaped cheaply, as there had been many fears that he should make the Baroness altogether his own.
It was certainly the case that Dr. Fleabody had made proselytes by the hundred, and disturbed the happiness of many fathers of families.
THE LAST OF THE BARONESS.
Lord George came and was very angry.
Nasty fat old woman!
"I never heard of anything so absurd in my life," said the Dean.
And the whole expense, according to Aunt Ju, would fall upon her; for it seemed to be the opinion of the lawyers that she had hired the Baroness.
Wouldn't George come and take her away.
Those women at Manor Cross are old enough to have known better."
Dr. Fleabody was quite clever enough to make fresh capital out of this.
Lord Brotherton had been summoned, and would Lord Brotherton come?
The Baroness, when she desired to be-little the doctor, always called her a female.
"Are you in favour of rights of women?"
The attornies who had the case in hands, found themselves unable to secure themselves against her.
She was quite sure that it would kill her,--and it would certainly ruin her.
Lord George might probably even yet be able to run away with her to some obscure corner of the continent in which messengers from the Queen's judges would not be able to find her; and she might perhaps bear the journey without injury.
"Very little.
How it was that she got an introduction to Mr. Philogunac Coelebs was not, I think, ever known.
"Not a yard."
And then, in a happy hour, she came at last across an old gentleman who did appreciate her and her wrongs.
If he didn't come she thought that she would die.
At this time Dr. Olivia Q. Fleabody had become quite an institution in London.
No."
She was very sorry that Lady George should have been so troubled;--but then let them think of her trouble, of her misery!
And as for the American female----.
It is not improbable that having heard of his soft heart, his peculiar propensities, and his wealth, she contrived to introduce herself.
The rest of the party they let go free again for the present.
"Look more hearty!" he cried.
Now, sir, what would you have done in my place?"
So, too, I hold, with the stars.
Those were his very words."
The shelf had a box or two on it, besides books, and these he opened and set on the table.
His misfortunes were as proverbial as his bravery, or as his energetic complaints of "ill luck" could make them.
That the founder of Luckenough was Alexander Kalouga, a Polish soldier of fortune, some time in the service of Cecilius Calvert, Baron of Baltimore, first Lord Proprietary of Maryland.
"Well, comrade!
"Yes, this is luck enough! luck enough to repay me for all the past!" Be it as it may, from time immemorial the place has been "Luckenough."
Edith was placed upon her pony and attended by her old maid Jenny and her old groom Oliver.
But their rest of security was broken by a tremendous shock.
It was in vain--her nerves were fearfully excited.
Commodore and Mrs. Waugh entered the family carriage, which they pretty well filled up.
"Back to Luckenough to guard the dear old house, and take care of you two."
And then he called up the two old negroes and charged them to see their young mistress safely at Hay Hill and then to return to Luckenough and take care of the house and such things as were felt behind in case the British should not visit it, and to shut up the house after them in case they should come and rob it and leave it standing.
He was a perfect beauty about this time, no doubt, but that did not prevent him from receiving the hand of his cousin Henrietta Kalouga, who had waited for him many a weary year.
The sun was high when they entered the forest shades again.
While these things were brewing in Edith's mind, she rode slowly and more slowly, until at length her pony stopped.
Reluctantly and cautiously the old man obeyed.
She was violently shocked out of a fitful doze.
It had been arranged that as Edith was too delicate to bear the forced march of days' and nights' continuance before they could reach Montgomery, she should proceed to Hay Hill, a plantation near the line of Charles County, owned by Colonel Fairlie, whose young daughter Fanny, recently made a bride, had been the schoolmate of Edith.
The sound of the unbarring of the door had deprived her of the last remnant of self-control.
"Miss Edith!
And when at the call of social duty she did go into company, she exercised a refining and subduing influence, involuntary as it was potent.
This man had, previous to his final emigration to the New World, passed through a life of the most wonderful vicissitudes--wonderful even for those days of romance and adventure.
She might possibly save the mansion, though these two old people were not likely to be able to do so--on the contrary, their ludicrous terrors would tend to stimulate the wanton cruelty of the marauders to destroy them with the house.
Edith passed her slender fingers through her curls, stringing them out as was her way when absent in thought.
Trembling all over, Jenny essayed to do as she was bid, but only succeeded in putting out the expiring light.
Delicate, dreamy and retiring, and tinged with a certain pensiveness, the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her.
This man had the constitution and character, not of his mother's, but of his father's family--a hardy, rigorous, energetic Montgomery race, full of fire, spirit and enterprise.
A ride of three miles through the old forest brought them to the open, hilly country.
Edith suddenly took her resolution, and turned her horse's head, directing her attendants to follow.
Edith struck a light, while the sound of footsteps and voices in the hall warned her that several persons had entered.
Here, at the fork, the party halted to take leave.
If among the marauding band of licensed pirates and assassins there was one name more dreaded, more loathed and accursed than the rest, it was that of the brutal and ferocious Thorg--the frequent leader of foraging parties, the unsparing destroyer of womanhood, infancy and age, the jackal and purveyor of Admiral Cockburn.
Violent knocking and shaking at the outer door and the sound of voices.
At the age of twelve Nickolas lost his father.
If anywhere there was a beautiful woman unprotected, or a rich plantation house ill-defended, this jackal was sure to scent out "the game" for his master, the lion. And many were the comely maidens and youthful wives seized and carried off by this monster.
With very few exceptions, the farms and plantations were evacuated and left to the mercy of the invaders.
Is this luck enough?"
All men capable of bearing arms rapidly mustered into companies and hastened to put themselves at the disposal of the government.
"Those are fugitives--not foes--listen--they plead--they do not threaten--go and unbar the door, Oliver," said Edith.
Maryland, as usual, contributed her large proportion of volunteers to the defense of the country.
"Oh!
Miss Edith, don't ask me, honey--don't!
The lawn was filled with baggage wagons, horses, mules, cows, oxen, sheep, swine, baskets of poultry, barrels of provisions, boxes of property, and men and maid servants hurrying wildly about among them, carrying trunks and parcels, loading carts, tackling harness, marshaling cattle and making other preparations for a rapid retreat toward Commodore Waugh's patrimonial estate in Montgomery County.
Here the road forked. And here the family were to separate.
I cannot even imagine danger."
The British fleet under Admiral Sir A. Cockburn suddenly entered the Chesapeake.
The Patuxent and the Wicomico, with the coast between them, offered no strong temptation to a rapacious foe, and the inhabitants reposed in the fancied security of their isolation and unimportance.
And the whole family party set forward on their journey.
But the soldier of fortune was ill-paid by his mistress.
None remained to guard the homes but aged men, women, infants and negroes.
The traditions of the neighborhood assert the origin of the manor and its quaint, happy and not unmusical name to have been--briefly this:
Old men, women, children and negroes were all that remained in charge of the farms and plantations.
The owner in 1814 was Commodore Nickolas Waugh, who inherited the property in right of his mother, the only child and heiress of Peter Kalouga.
CHAPTER I.
The arguments of the old negroes waxed fainter and fewer.
The academicians at the little college pursued their studies or played at forming juvenile military companies. The farms and plantations were cultivated chiefly under the direction of ladies whose husbands, sons and brothers were absent with the army.
Two wretched old negroes would be in little personal danger from the soldiers.
We shall be murdered in our beds!"
Edith on reaching Luckenough retired to bed, and addressed herself to sleep.
At the age of seventeen Edith was brought home from school and established at Luckenough as the adopted daughter and acknowledged heiress of her uncle.
His choice fell at length upon his orphan grandniece, the beautiful Edith Lance, whom he took from the Catholic Orphan Asylum, where she had found refuge since the death of her parents and placed in one of the best convent schools in the South.
The lower counties of Maryland were left comparatively unprotected.
you two alone!" exclaimed Edith, looking from one to the other.
It was said that he was born in one quarter of the globe, educated in another, initiated into warfare in the third and buried in the fourth.
He afterwards returned to Europe, and then followed years of military service wherever his hireling sword was needed.
No one thought of danger to St. Mary's.
At fifteen he began to weary of the tedium of Luckenough, varied only by the restraint of the academy during term.
It is stated that when the old soldier went with some companions to take a look at his new possessions, he was so pleased with the beauty, grandeur, richness and promise of the place that a glad smile broke over his dark, storm-beaten, battle-scarred face, and he remained still "smiling as in delighted visions," until one of his friends spoke and said:
"Open! open! let us in! for God's sake, let us in!"
She was turning the whole matter over in her mind.
In vain she tried to combat her terrors--they completely overmastered her.
"It's Nell, and Liddy, and Sol, from Hay Hill!
At sunrise all was noise, bustle and confusion at Luckenough.
Yet remote from the scenes of conflict and hitherto undisturbed by the convulsions of the great world, they reposed in fancied safety and never thought of such unprecedented misfortunes as the evils of the war penetrating to their quiet homes.
Then she noticed for the first time the heavy, downcast looks of her attendants.
But if I fail and lose my life, they will say that Edith was a cracked-brained girl who deserved her fate, and that they had always predicted she would come to a bad end."
And the quiet, lonely shores of the bay became the scene of a warfare scarcely paralleled in atrocity in ancient or modern times.
But no alteration appeared, except more cheerfulness and less silence; for now there was no need to hide his real self, and all the social virtues in him came out delightfully after their long solitude.
I'm in no hurry to be married; and you won't make me: will you?"
Presently, however, Christie saw a change in him, and suspected that he had discovered that Kitty was a child no longer, but a young girl with her head full of love and lovers.
"I loved to do it," was all Christie trusted herself to say.
"Now we'll be comfortable as we used to be: won't we?"
You will believe this and love me still, though I go away and leave you for a little while?" prayed Christie, with a face full of treacherous emotion.
"I can't go on so much longer," she thought despairingly. "Polypodium aureum, a native of Florida," is all very interesting in its place; but it doesn't help me to gain self-control a bit, and I shall disgrace myself if something doesn't happen very soon."
When she told Mrs. Sterling of the new arrival, the placid little lady gave a cluck of regret and said with unusual emphasis:
"Father found me, and took me home, and wanted me to marry a dreadful man, and I wouldn't, so I ran away to you.
She grubbed in the garden and green-house, and learned hard botanical names that she might be able to talk intelligently upon subjects that interested her comrade.
Kitty laughed, and said in her pert little way:
"It is only for a time, else I couldn't let thee go, my dear," said Mrs. Sterling, with a close embrace.
As if prompted by an evil spirit, Kitty unconsciously tried and tormented her from morning to night, and no one saw or guessed it unless Mrs. Sterling's motherly heart divined the truth.
"Yes."
"Don't think me ungrateful.
David laughed and looked at Christie as if inviting her to be amused with the freaks and prattle of a child.
"No, thank you," he answered absently, looking out over her head, as he stood upon the rug in the attitude which the best men will assume in the bosoms of their families.
"Here for the present.
After recording that last fact, it is unnecessary to explain what was the matter with Christie.
Thirdly, that home was woman's sphere after all, and the perfect roasting of beef, brewing of tea, and concocting of delectable puddings, an end worth living for if masculine commendation rewarded the labor.
I will write to-morrow, and you can come whenever you will, sure of a welcome, my child."
I shall find it hard to tell her myself, for I fear she may think me ungrateful after all her kindness."
"I'm sure I wish you would: I love to stay here, you are always so good to me.
The first snow-fall had made the world wonderfully lovely that morning; and Christie stood at the window admiring the bridal look of the earth, as it lay dazzlingly white in the early sunshine.
By many indescribable but significant signs he showed that he considered Kitty a woman now and treated her as such, being all the more scrupulous in the respect he paid her, because she was so unprotected, and so wanting in the natural dignity and refinement which are a woman's best protection.
A thousand little coquetries were played off for his benefit, and frequent appeals for advice in her heart affairs kept tender subjects uppermost in their conversations.
We shall see thee sometimes, and spring will make thee long for the flowers, I hope," was Mrs. Sterling's answer, as Christie gave back the note at the end of her difficult speech.
In her present uplifted state, Christie could no more help regarding David as a martyr and admiring him for it, than she could help mixing sentiment with her sympathy.
Christie crept upstairs, and, sitting in the dark, decided with the firmness of despair to go away, lest she should betray the secret that possessed her, a dead hope now, but still too dear to be concealed.
Suppose you bring in the kettle: Christie has hurt her hand."
"Thee is too hard upon thyself, Davy.
She was up early, and went about her usual work with the sad pleasure with which one performs a task for the last time.
"I do: can you be spared so soon?"
On the morrow, Mr. Power's note came, and Christie fled upstairs while it was read and discussed.
Only a flower by their plates; but it meant much to them: for, in these lives of ours, tender little acts do more to bind hearts together than great, deeds or heroic words; since the first are like the dear daily bread that none can live without; the latter but occasional feasts, beautiful and memorable, but not possible to all.
This morning David laid a sprig of sweet-scented balm at his mother's place, two or three rosy daisies at Kitty's, and a bunch of Christie's favorite violets at hers.
For a week Christie suffered constant pin-pricks of jealousy, despising herself all the time, and trying to be friendly with the disturber of her peace.
"I thought it the sweetest thing that ever happened to me.
"Just the pretty, lively sort of girl sensible men often marry, and then discover how silly they are," thought Christie, taking up her work and assuming an indifferent air.
Forget the past and be happy as other men are.
"No one will take thy place with me, my daughter."
"That won't do, Kitty: you are too young for much of such nonsense. I shall keep you here a while, and see if we can't settle matters both wisely and pleasantly," he said, shaking his head as sagely as a grandfather.
I want a secretary to put my papers in order, write some of my letters, and do a thousand things to help a busy man.
"Not the first maiden Who came but for friendship, And took away love."
Kitty smiled and blushed, and dimpled under that grave look so prettily that it soon changed, and David let her go, saying indulgently:
She talked while she sewed instead of indulging in dangerous thoughts, and Mrs. Sterling was surprised and entertained by this new loquacity.
Kitty was pleased at the prospect of reigning alone, and did not disguise her satisfaction; so Christie's last day was any thing but pleasant.
Then she drove away, smiling and waving her hand to the old lady at her window; but the last thing she saw as she left the well-beloved lane, was David going slowly up the path, with Kitty close beside him, talking busily.
He had no time to alter the expression of his face for its usual grave serenity: Kitty saw the change at once, and spoke of it with her accustomed want of tact.
"Why, Kitty, what's the matter now?" asked David, putting back her hood, and looking down at her with the paternal expression Christie had not seen for a long time, and missed very much.
Dropping the knife, she tried to get her handkerchief, but the blood flowed fast, and the pain of a deep gash made her a little faint.
At this point Christie paused; and, after evading any explanation of these phenomena in the most skilful manner for a time, suddenly faced the fact, saying to herself with great candor and decision:
"He thinks I am ungrateful, and is offended," she said to herself. "Well, I can bear coldness better than kindness now, and it will make it easier to go."
"No: she is used to parting with those whom she has helped, and is always glad to set them on their way toward better things.
Remember that, and go in peace with an old friend's thanks, and good wishes in return for faithful service, which no money can repay."
Then quite steadily she added:
One evening she sat studying ferns, and heroically saying over and over, "Andiantum, Aspidium, and Asplenium, Trichomanes," while longing to go and talk delightfully to David, who sat musing by the fire.
If I'm weak enough to break my heart, no one need know it,--least of all, that little fool," thought Christie, grimly, as she burnt up several long-cherished relics of her love.
"I couldn't help it: you seemed so touched and troubled.
She meekly obeyed; and David added with a smile to Christie:
Just at this critical moment an event occurred which completed Christie's defeat, and made her feel that her only safety lay in flight.
If she had heard the short dialogue between them, the sight would have been less bitter, for Kitty said:
A few words which she accidentally overheard confirmed this idea, and showed her what she must do.
She only said: "Thank you, sir.
Let the lovers go, and stay and play with me, for I've been rather lonely lately."
Mr. Power's keen eye searched her face for a moment, as if to discover the real motive for her wish.
That was my first step along a road that you have strewn with flowers ever since.
He is respectable, well off, and fond of you, it seems.
"I hope you will be very happy.
She watched over his buttons with a vigilance that would have softened the heart of the crustiest bachelor: she even gave herself the complexion of a lemon by wearing blue, because David liked the pretty contrast with his mother's drabs.
Lazy little Kitty never appeared till the bell rang; and Christie was fond of that early hour, busy though it was, for David was always before her with blazing fires; and, while she got breakfast, he came and went with wood and water, milk and marketing; often stopping to talk, and always in his happiest mood.
"No."
If folks ain't good to me, I'll go and marry Miles!
"Had you rather have her here than me?"
If you want me back again in the spring, I'll come."
I promised to be one to him, and I'll keep my word like an honest woman.
David seemed to enjoy the girl's lively chat, her openly expressed affection, and the fresh young face that always brightened when he came.
She evidently was rather afraid of the old lady, who said so little and saw so much.
"I am thinking that you look more like a rose than ever," answered David turning her attention from himself by a compliment, and beginning to admire the flowers, still with that flushed and kindled look on his own face.
I see this clearly, and won't dodge any longer, but put a stop to it at once.
The blue eyes grew shy, the pretty face grew eloquent with blushes now and then, as he looked at it, and the lively tongue faltered sometimes in speaking to him.
"I shall see you at church, and Tuesday evenings, even if you don't find time to come to us, so I shall not say good-by at all;" and David shook hands warmly, as he put her into the carriage.
When, therefore, they had slain many ten thousands of the Philistines, they fell upon spoiling the camp of the Philistines, but not till late in the evening.
However, he advised them to be righteous, and to be good, and ever to remember the miseries that had befallen them on account of their departure from virtue: as also to remember the strange signs God had shown them, and the body of laws that Moses had given them, if they had any desire of being preserved and made happy with their king.
And when Samuel had told them that he ought to confirm the kingdom to Saul by a second ordination of him, they all came together to the city of Gilgal, for thither did he command them to come.
Now the lot appeared to fall upon Jonathan himself.
And when the armor-bearer had readily promised to follow him whithersoever he should lead him, though he should be obliged to die in the attempt, Jonathan made use of the young man's assistance, and descended from the hill, and went to their enemies.
Then did Saul give order that a great stone should be rolled into the midst of them, and he made proclamation that they should kill their sacrifices upon it, and not feed upon the flesh with the blood, for that was not acceptable to God.
Now the enemy's camp was upon a precipice which had three tops, that ended in a small but sharp and long extremity, while there was a rock that surrounded them, like lines made to prevent the attacks of an enemy.
You have been guilty of great impiety against God, in asking you a king.
How The Philistines Made Another Expedition Against The Hebrews And Were Beaten.
But Saul sent to the prophet, and called him to consult with him about the war and the public affairs; so he commanded him to stay there for him, and to prepare sacrifices, for he would come to him within seven days, that they might offer sacrifices on the seventh day, and might then join battle with their enemies.
By which means they snatched him out of the danger he was in from his father's curse, while they made their prayers to God also for the young man, that he would remit his sin.
Those also who had fled to dens and caves, upon hearing that Saul was gaining a victory, came running to him.
When Saul, the king of the Hebrews, was informed of this, he went down to the city Gilgal, and made proclamation over all the country, that they should try to regain their liberty; and called them to the war against the Philistines, diminishing their forces, and despising them as not very considerable, and as not so great but they might hazard a battle with them.
They also took a great deal of prey and cattle, and killed them, and ate them with their blood.
But, in the mean time, he was informed with what a curse his father had forbidden them to taste any thing before sun-setting: so he left off eating, and said his father had not done well in this prohibition, because, had they taken some food, they had pursued the enemy with greater rigor and alacrity, and had both taken and slain many more of their enemies.
And he found the number of those that were gathered together, besides that of the tribe of Judah, to be seven hundred thousand, while those of that tribe were seventy thousand.
There it so happened, that the out-guards of the camp were neglected, because of the security that here arose from the situation of the place, and because they thought it altogether impossible, not only to ascend up to the camp on that quarter, but so much as to come near it.
But when the people about Saul observed how numerous the Philistines were, they were under a great consternation; and some of them hid themselves in caves and in dens under ground, but the greater part fled into the land beyond Jordan, which belonged to Gad and Reuben.
So they came together, out of fear of the losses they were threatened with, at the appointed time. And the multitude were numbered at the city Bezek.
This was told to the king by the scribes, that the multitude were sinning against God as they sacrificed, and were eating before the blood was well washed away, and the flesh was made clean.
So he promised them that he would beseech God, and persuade him to forgive them these their sins.
Now after Saul had denounced this curse, since they were now in a wood belonging to the tribe of Ephraim, which was thick and full of bees, Saul's son, who did not hear his father denounce that curse, nor hear of the approbation the multitude gave to it, broke off a piece of a honey-comb, and ate part of it.
To be sure there is some sin against him that is concealed from us, which is the occasion of his silence.
But he said, that if they should grow careless of these things, great judgments would come from God upon them, and upon their king.
But when the messengers were come to the city of king Saul, and declared the dangers in which the inhabitants of Jabesh were, the people were in the same affliction as those in the other cities, for they lamented the calamity of those related to them.
They also made a clamor against those that pretended he would be of no advantage to their affairs; and they said, Where now are these men?--let them be brought to punishment, with all the like things that multitudes usually say when they are elevated with prosperity, against those that lately had despised the authors of it.
He gave them their choice, whether they would cut off a small member of their body, or universally perish.
Now the people fell into tears and grief at the hearing of what the ambassadors from Jabesh said; and the terror they were in permitted them to do nothing more.
Now Saul's son agreed with his armor-bearer, that they would go privately to the enemy's camp, and make a tumult and a disturbance among them.
Now the Philistines divided their army into three companies, and took as many roads, and laid waste the country of the Hebrews, while king Saul and his son Jonathan saw what was done, but were not able to defend the land, having no more than six hundred men with them.
Hereupon Samuel, when such a testimony had been given him by them all, said, "Since you grant that you are not able to lay any ill thing to my charge hitherto, come on now, and do you hearken while I speak with great freedom to you.
But they desired that he would give them seven days' respite, that they might send ambassadors to their countrymen, and entreat their assistance; and if they came to assist them, they would fight; but if that assistance were impossible to be obtained from them, they said they would deliver themselves up to suffer whatever he pleased to inflict upon them.
And on account of this prohibition it was that the husbandmen, if they had occasion to sharpen any of their tools, whether it were the coulter or the spade, or any instrument of husbandry, they came to the Philistines to do it.
So the prophet anointed Saul with the holy oil in the sight of the multitude, and declared him to be king the second time.
We may have disturbed some one."
It was a rough chest, bound with iron bands that looked as if they might have been used on cotton bales.
"Then you light a match when we get inside.
But we're going to get out of it, Stacy---"
"Well, what do you think of that?" jeered Stacy Brown.
"Perhaps it has.
We had better be getting back to camp as quickly as we can.
Then you may come down."
"No, I have something of more importance than food to think about at present."
I know I've got enough of this bandit-chasing business.
"I'm not yellow.
Got your matches?"
Who would have thought it? But get away from here!
The lads quickly scrambled up and, skulking into the bushes, crouched down, watching the roots of the tree, almost expecting them to rise into the air again.
Now we are in a nice pickle."
The top of the tree sprang up with such force, when relieved of the weight of the fat boy, that Tad Butler lost his hold and was catapulted to the ground, which he struck with a force that made his bones ache.
Tad shook his head.
"I don't know."
In one corner stood a chest securely padlocked.
"We're caught!" he cried.
"Wait until we investigate.
It is my opinion that the very men Captain McKay is looking for have been here.
"What are you going to do?"
"Fortunately for us."
Tad motioned for Chunky to descend.
"Don't you understand yet?"
Aren't you?" stammered the fat boy apprehensively.
Tad laid a restraining hand on the fat boy's arm.
"Fits as if it had been here before," declared Chunky.
"The tree has closed the opening to the cave.
The air was cool, though a little damp in the cave.
Particles of dirt were rattling from the roots of the fallen tree, sounding like hailstones as they fell to the rocks in the cave.
"I saw some rocks there near the top.
We will take a chance.
"You aren't throwing your matches on the floor, are you?" demanded Tad turning sharply.
"Tighten your belt.
"No, sir, I guess not!
"Why, we'll starve to death in here.
"I guess not.
"Yes, why not?"
This may have been an accident.
"Show me a light here," commanded Tad going down on his knees and gathering up all the burnt matches he could find.
We shall see.
THE CAVE OF THE BANDITS
I ought to have known better than to go out with you.
To this the boys gave no heed.
"Here's another."
The cave they found was much larger than they had had any idea of.
Let's dig through the roots.
"Come along then.
Tad was the first to make the discovery of what had occurred.
Don't show a yellow streak, Chunky!" commanded Tad sharply.
The fourth rock brought the tree down to the ground, exposing the opening in the rocks once more.
"In the first place we have no business to do anything of the sort. In the second place I don't want to stay here much longer.
"I---I'll tell you what let's do.
"Buck up!
"Wha---what are you going to do?" whispered Stacy, his teeth chattering audibly.
Come on."
Are you ready?"
The fat boy did so.
Do you know what they would do to us if they caught us here, Chunky?"
I can keep out of trouble all right if other folks don't lead me into it.
Butler leaped back out of the way, but Stacy recovered himself in time and after some effort succeeded in placing the rock in the limbs of the tree.
I think perhaps it might be the wiser plan for you to remain out here and keep watch."
The birds were singing in the trees, the sun was shining brightly, the heat was intense.
Don't move till I get enough up there to equalize your weight.
Tad was ready with a heavy, flat rock which he carefully raised by main strength.
Light another match while I look into this niche.
He motioned that they were to go back.
Nothing of the sort happened.
"Keep still.
The rock nearly got away from the fat boy.
I'll have my revolver ready in case there is anything in there."
Then we will be making tracks for the outside."
Except for the light from the matches, the boys were in darkness, so that they were not able to observe that the opening to the cave had closed.
There it goes!"
"I think we got a fine tumble," replied Tad, grinning.
"Duck, if I get half a chance.
But I wasn't when I trusted myself to you. You can get into more trouble, and faster than---"
Tad was back by Stacy's side a moment later.
"Neither do I want to get thrown off again.
The boys, without knowing it, were prisoners.
A strong breeze, swaying the upper limbs of the tree, had dislodged the stones and allowed the roots to slip quietly into place again.
The remaining stones were quickly laid in place.
Of course we can't do anything until Captain McKay returns, but the more quickly we get away from here the better it will be for us."
Taking a final glance about, Tad moved toward the opening in the rocks with brisk step.
Rocks everywhere, with here and there a discolored spot where tiny streams had trickled through, perhaps during a heavy rainstorm.
While this communication was being made to him, Athos maintained the profoundest silence and reserve.
"Monsieur, my sword was in my hand immediately, my adversary placed himself on guard, I struck his sword over the palisade, and threw him after it."
"I believe you are already acquainted with my views respecting this alliance?"
Does any secret repugnance, or any hereditary dislike, exist between you and her family?"
"Excellently well disposed."
"So much the better."
As he traveled along, he marshaled his arguments in the most becoming manner.
He rose and said,--
It is my wish, therefore, to marry her, monsieur, and I have come to solicit your consent to my marriage."
"It is no matter.
"That is the second time you have said so, Raoul; it was quite unnecessary; you require my formal consent, and you have it.
I have reason to believe that, vanity apart, I stand well with his majesty."
"On the condition, I repeat," continued Athos; "that you tell me the name of the man who spoke of your mother in that way."
"Yes."
"For Paris."
"Your passion," continued Athos, tranquilly, "must indeed be very great, since, notwithstanding my dislike to this union, you persist in wanting it."
Bragelonne, therefore, collecting all his courage, suddenly exclaimed,--
He bowed his head, and followed his father into the garden.
"You mistake my position, Raoul; it is not respectful that a simple gentleman, such as I am, should write to his sovereign.
"Certainly."
This perfect repose of manner disconcerted Raoul extremely; the affection with which his own heart was filled seemed so great that the whole world could hardly contain it.
He mounted his horse in the courtyard, and followed the road to Blois, while the marriage festivities of Monsieur and the princess of England were being celebrated with exceeding animation by the courtiers, but to the despair of De Guiche and Buckingham.
"The Vicomte de Wardes."
"If I did not act as I ought to have done, I beg you to forgive me."
Do not make me bitterly regret having listened to a feeling stronger than anything else."
"Very well," said Athos, tranquilly, "I know him.
"On what occasion?"
"I demand it."
Tell me what you want."
"I will implore his majesty to sign your marriage-contract, but on one condition."
"You insist upon it?"
"Speak, Raoul."
"Still, the permission you are going to ask from the king?"
Keen-sighted and penetrating, a mere glance at his son told him that something extraordinary had befallen him.
"Paris, monsieur?"
"Tell me his name, monsieur."
"Yes, monsieur," replied the young man; "and I entreat you to give me the same kind attention that has never yet failed me."
Raoul quitted the Palais Royal full of ideas that admitted no delay in execution.
My own personal feelings are not to be taken into consideration since yours are concerned; I am ready to give it.
"We shall set off in a few hours."
Raoul kissed as devotedly as a lover could have done the hand he held in his own.
"The king has prohibited duelling, and, at the moment, I was an ambassador of the king."
"I present the case to you, monsieur, free from all preface, for that would be unworthy of you.
"Come, come," said Athos, "I am quite ready; what do you wish me to sign?"
"It is impossible, monsieur, you can have any reason to reject Mademoiselle de la Valliere!
The count approached the window, and leaning out, called to Grimaud, who showed his head from an arbor covered with jasmine, which he was occupied in trimming.
Command, and you shall be obeyed."
"Whither?"
"Is not the king at Paris?"
"Why this order, monsieur?" inquired Raoul.
Come, monsieur."
The young man knew very well, that, after the expression of his father's wish, no opportunity of discussion was left him.
Athos fixed upon Bragelonne a searching look, overshadowed indeed by a slight sadness.
Mademoiselle de la Valliere is in Paris as one of Madame's maids of honor.
"Forgive me!
"What do you intend to ask him?"
Athos turned pale; then, knitting his brows like the greatest of all the heathen deities:--"I am waiting to learn the reply you made," he demanded, in an imperious manner.
"Why did you suffer him to live?"
"Well, ought we not to go there?"
I begged you to wait the opportunity of forming an illustrious alliance.
"Do you take me for a Don Diego?
Athos was in his study, making additions to his memoirs, when Raoul entered, accompanied by Grimaud.
I would have obtained a wife for you from the first ranks of the rich nobility. I wish you to be distinguished by the splendor which glory and fortune confer, for nobility of descent you have already."
"But I entreat you, monsieur," pursued Raoul, "not to maintain towards me your present grave and serious manner.
"How do you think his majesty is affected?"
"You have mistaken my feelings, Raoul, I have more than mere indulgence for you in my heart."
"You do persist, then?"
His name, I say."
"Yes, monsieur," said Raoul, almost alarmed by this kind condescension. "I do not ask you to put yourself to such inconvenience, and a letter merely--"
"I was reproached the other day for not knowing who my mother was."
But our horses are ready, I see; and, instead of delaying our departure for a couple of hours, we will set off at once.
"The king has himself told me so."
This light formed a sort of sinister star in the blackness of the door and the wall.
After the expiration of a rather long interval, he turned round, as he heard nothing more, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his chamber, he saw a light through the keyhole.
Jean Valjean felt completely reassured.
That night, on thinking the matter over, he regretted not having questioned the man, in order to force him to raise his head a second time.
He saw no one.
When darkness came on, he descended and carefully scrutinized both sides of the boulevard.
"How the deuce could I have thought that I saw Javert there?" he thought.
The man was of lofty stature, clad in a long frock-coat, with a cudgel under his arm.
When the old woman had taken her departure, he did up a hundred francs which he had in a cupboard, into a roll, and put it in his pocket.
Near Saint-Medard's church there was a poor man who was in the habit of crouching on the brink of a public well which had been condemned, and on whom Jean Valjean was fond of bestowing charity.
It was a man, in fact, who passed, this time without pausing, in front of Jean Valjean's chamber.
Jean Valjean threw himself, all dressed as he was, on his bed, and could not close his eyes all night.
He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice, "Get into bed very softly"; and as he kissed her brow, the steps paused.
The good woman appeared as usual.
He recoiled, terrified, petrified, daring neither to breathe, to speak, to remain, nor to flee, staring at the beggar who had dropped his head, which was enveloped in a rag, and no longer appeared to know that he was there.
Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be quiet. He heard some one ascending the stairs.
The boulevard appeared to be absolutely deserted.
One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing by, when he had not Cosette with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place, beneath the lantern which had just been lighted.
He experienced the same impression that one would have on finding one's self, all of a sudden, face to face, in the dark, with a tiger.
Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, with his back towards the door, seated on the chair from which he had not stirred, and holding his breath in the dark.
It is true that a person can conceal himself behind trees.
The beggar raised his head, and replied in a whining voice, "Thanks, my good sir." It was unmistakably the ex-beadle.
"Come." he said to Cosette.
The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered:--
The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same appearance as he had every day.
The formidable neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.
Jean Valjean thought he perceived one.
The man seemed engaged in prayer, according to his custom, and was much bent over.
"A gentleman of property, like yourself."
The step was approaching. He sprang off the bed and applied his eye to the keyhole, which was tolerably large, hoping to see the person who had made his way by night into the house and had listened at his door, as he passed.
"Am I going to lose my eyesight now?" And he thought no more about it.
Those who envied this mendicant said that he belonged to the police.
He hardly dared to confess, even to himself, that the face which he thought he had seen was the face of Javert.
A few days afterwards,--it might have been at eight o'clock in the evening,--he was in his room, and engaged in making Cosette spell aloud, when he heard the house door open and then shut again.
What was the meaning of this?
At this strange moment, an instinct--possibly the mysterious instinct of self-preservation,--restrained Jean Valjean from uttering a word.
At that age, and on that boulevard, eight o'clock in the evening was the dead of the night.
But he heard no sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the person who had been listening at the door had removed his shoes.
"Who was it?"
When the old woman came to do the work, at seven o'clock in the morning, Jean Valjean cast a penetrating glance on her, but he did not question her.
The beggar was at his post.
He went up stairs again.
"I don't know exactly; Dumont, or Daumont, or some name of that sort."
He began to laugh.
Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning.
He was an ex-beadle of seventy-five, who was constantly mumbling his prayers.
I am dreaming! Impossible!" And he returned profoundly troubled.
"That is true, by the way," he replied, in the most natural tone possible.
CHAPTER V--A FIVE-FRANC PIECE FALLS ON THE GROUND AND PRODUCES A TUMULT
"Possibly Monsieur may have heard some one come in last night?"
It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and like himself. Who had given him that key?
Jean Valjean stepped up to him and placed his customary alms in his hand.
"But I do not."
Yes, I recollect you."
At length he exclaimed:--
Did you fall from heaven?
Save your life!
CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL
Jean Valjean drew near to the old man, and said to him in a grave voice:--
You have a chamber?"
The person who thus addressed him was a bent and lame old man, dressed almost like a peasant, who wore on his left knee a leather knee-cap, whence hung a moderately large bell.
"What! so it is you, Father Madeleine!" said the man.
"You saved my life," said the man.
Jean Valjean accosted him with the cry:--
He multiplied his questions.
What!
I know that you can do nothing that is not honest, that you have always been a man after the good God's heart.
"In the first place, you are not to tell any one what you know about me. In the second, you are not to try to find out anything more."
Jean Valjean, finding himself known to this man, at least only under the name of Madeleine, thenceforth advanced only with caution.
"What! so that you may be avoided?"
Fauchelevent took in his aged, trembling, and wrinkled hands Jean Valjean's two robust hands, and stood for several minutes as though incapable of speaking.
Father Madeleine!
"I am the person for whom you got the place here, and this house is the one where you had me placed.
How come you here, Father Madeleine?
Mr. Romsey's wife appealed to him in despair.
"No; I heard of the trial, and that's all.
Her husband, absent on the Continent for some time past, on business connected with his firm, had returned to England, and had that evening joined his wife and children at Sandyseal.
"Didn't you say she was going away to-morrow?"
Mr. Romsey looked interested for a moment, when he first heard Mrs. Norman's name.
"Just the thing!" she said, with an air of relief.
"Say?" Lady Myrie repeated.
Mrs. Norman is here by the advice of one of the first physicians in London; she has suffered under serious troubles, poor thing."
The most cordial good-feeling had established itself among the mothers.
What did the judge say?"
And more besides, that I don't remember."
"I think, Mr. Romsey, you might have spared that cruel allusion," she said with dignity.
He had his reasons for wishing to know something more about Mrs. Norman; he proposed to withdraw his last remark, and to put his inquiries under another form.
Kitty told the truth.
To arrive at this conclusion, and to recommend a visit to Sandyseal, were events which followed each other (medically speaking) as a matter of course.
And she leaves us to-morrow.
I do nothing myself in an underhand way.
She had encouraged the abominable governess; and if her husband had yielded to temptation, it was her fault.
He spoke of this dreadful woman who has deceived us in the severest terms; he said she had behaved in a most improper manner.
This settled the question.
"Yes--and I hope I have made a friend for life," Mrs. Romsey said with enthusiasm.
There are some impenetrable men on whom looks produce no impression.
Mr. Romsey went on with his inquiries.
"This is only a bluff to let her get away.
I really can't see what's to do," he went on with something of anguish in his tones.
It would only drag me into the mud deeper.
"So she is.
"Somewhere around your mother's home, or in Sidham, I think.
I laughed at him then, but now I believe it.
Can't you trust me when I tell you that I am speaking for your own good?
But--"
It's--it's out of all reason." He drew a quick breath.
He has never yet failed to accomplish anything he has undertaken!"
"Yes, but do not say I said so."
"And they think--they suspect--that that drug was used?
"But it is not such an easy thing to do.
He was much downcast and with good reason.
"I think--But no, it can't be.
He gave a groan.
A short silence followed and she saw that he was thinking, deeply, swiftly.
I--I know many things of which you are ignorant."
Is it fair for you to keep silent?"
"I was only gone a few minutes," said the nurse.
Where is she?" cried the man, and Tom Ostrello recognized Raymond Case.
"Margaret's hat!" cried Raymond.
"Now you understand, Tom.
The conversation had lasted over two hours, and in that time the girl had learned many of the young man's secrets, and in return had told him a few things which had astonished and disturbed him.
I can find out for you,"
"Margaret!
"Tom, I tell you the best you can do is to make a clean breast of it and get Uncle Adam to help you."
"No, but--"
CHAPTER XXIII
It was a girl's summer hat.
Soon the news spread and the chief of police came hurrying to the scene.
"I will, Tom," Letty looked much relieved.
And now--"
"But he is working for Margaret."
He shook his head.
"I know the truth now!
"Yes, I know.
Raymond heard some of these remarks and they made his face burn.
"Very well, I will go to him and ask him if he is willing to side with me as well as with Margaret.
"Letty, do you mean to insinuate that Mr. Adams imagines--"
"Only a few minutes ago.
"And, poor girl, she seems to have suffered more than her share already.
"I don't believe she was as sick as they pretended," said one of the number.
It may be."
And yet--"
It was dark by the time they came back to the river, to cross to the town side.
He caught her by the wrist and looked fearfully, frightfully, into her face.
Tom Ostrello joined in the search as diligently as the rest, and he and Raymond ran through the woods from end to end several times.
"I am certain the very best thing you can do is to go to Uncle Adam and tell him everything.
He will help you and clear up this great mystery."
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MARGARET
"I know he is working for her and I hope he clears her.
"Perhaps she pulled the wool over the doctor's eyes," came from another.
"Yes, but Tom, you--you--Oh, how can I explain?
"If she wanders off in her present state of mind there is no telling what will happen to her."
"What's the use?
He was just in sight of the place when he heard a cry, and a man came running out of the cottage, followed by a woman and a policeman.
The young commercial traveler stopped short.
She is gone!" cried Raymond.
But then he determined to learn exactly how she was, anyway, and turned his footsteps toward the cottage, which stood on a side street of the town, backed up by a patch of woods leading to the river.
Poor Dick is deep enough in the mud as it is, and it will not be to my credit to mention my connection with Matlock Styles."
"Margaret gone?
CHAPTER I.
"I know you!"
His mouth was so wide that when he smiled it seemed to go quite behind his ears, and there was no way of knowing where the smile ended, except by looking at it from behind, which Davy couldn't do, as yet, without getting into the fire.
It was as warm and springy, and smelt as deliciously, as a morning in May.
"They make prime cushions, you know, and we can eat 'em afterwards."
It happened one Christmas eve, when Davy was about eight years old, and this is the way it came about.
He had quite finished fancying the first part of his feast, and was just coming, in his mind, to an extra large slice of apple-pie well browned (staring meanwhile very hard at one of the brass knobs of the andirons to keep his thoughts from wandering), when he suddenly discovered a little man perched upon that identical knob, and smiling at him with all his might.
"Rubbish!" said the Goblin.
"I know you perfectly well.
"Why, certainly!"
This little man was a very curious-looking person indeed.
Then there stole in at the door a delicious odor of dinner cooking downstairs,--an odor so promising as to roast chickens and baked potatoes and gravy and pie as to make any little boy's mouth water; and presently Davy began softly telling himself what he would choose for his dinner.
That particular Christmas eve was a snowy one and a blowy one, and one generally to be remembered.
DAVY AND THE GOBLIN;
People come to this church from all over the world, and the American cousins think as much of it as the English themselves.
From Stratford, our friends went to Warwick, which is most interesting, not only on account of the picturesque old town with its ancient houses, but because of its great castle as well.
"No more lessons," said Edith, as she danced around the schoolroom.
Edith's papa and mamma had spent the preceding summer on the "Norfolk Broads." The "Broads" are really lakes or rivers, nearly all connected, so they had taken a sailboat and sailed from one to another, living meanwhile on their boat.
It had been repaired many times, but always to look as nearly like the original as possible.
Around the room were hung many plates and dishes of fine and rare old English china.
"How funny some of the words are, papa," she said.
Edith enjoyed the eggs with crisp slices of bacon, and buttered toast, while the neat maid cut for Colonel Howard slices of cold ham from one of the huge joints of cold meat which stood on the sideboard.
This is a most enjoyable way of spending some weeks, and they had promised to go again some time and take Edith.
It was difficult to realize that under this lay the ashes of the great Shakespeare.
The beautiful, rare, white peacocks were also to be seen strutting about the courtyard, spreading their great white tails to be admired.
There is a great contrast between the great bustling city of Boston and this little old English town.
That's a long time, isn't it?
"I think I will let papa take you over the castle, while I rest here and write some letters," said Mrs. Howard.
They saw the great cedars of Lebanon, which were brought from the Holy Land, and planted in the garden about 800 or 900 years ago.
Colonel Howard also told his little daughter of other beautiful houses he had visited, among them Haddon Hall and Welbeck Abbey, which has a number of the rooms built under ground.
Over the door was another favourite decoration, a model of an enormous trout.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS
Soon, however, she rushed up to Miss Green.
I wish you were going with us," and the warm-hearted little girl threw her arms around her governess.
5.
ANON.
SPRING.
3.
O how shall summer's honey breath hold out, Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?
1.
A belt of straw and ivy-buds With coral clasps and amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my Love.
A gown made of the finest wool, Which from our pretty lambs we pull, Fair-lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold.
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss, and loss with store.
THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE.
A MADRIGAL.
6.
8.
WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.
--This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
SUMMONS TO LOVE.
7.
By absence this good means I gain, That I can catch her, Where none can watch her, In some close corner of my brain: There I embrace and kiss her, And so I both enjoy and miss her.
9.
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of out-worn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage.
PRESENT IN ABSENCE.
"It was quite an adventure."
"They're very swell-like, you know."
"I dare say they'll get soaked in time.
"Of course," agreed Nurse Jane.
"You see, the Hatter's watch only keeps one kind of time--"
"Why, she's out of a book," said Nurse Jane.
"Cream puffs," answered Uncle Wiggily.
I wonder where she lives?"
"I hope I meet Alice again.
"I wonder what happened to the rest of them?
"Well!
"Of course," spoke Nurse Jane again, "I might have guessed it.
We didn't expect you!"
"Oh, yes, there's plenty of room--more room than there is to eat," said the spring rabbit.
"Yes, I had a wonderful time with Alice," said the rabbit gentleman.
He no longer had to practice being a soldier and stand on guard against them.
"I've come to take him off to my den, and then--"
"I've come for Uncle Wiggily!" cried the Wabberjocky.
It were unworthy to triumph over me--It is a poor deed to crush a worm."
"Seize him and strip him, slaves," said the knight, "and let the fathers of his race assist him if they can."
"Have mercy on me, noble knight!" exclaimed Isaac; "I am old, and poor, and helpless.
"And Cedric also," said Rowena, repeating his words; "my noble--my generous guardian!
"I pray you, Sir Knight," said Rowena, "to cease a language so commonly used by strolling minstrels, that it becomes not the mouth of knights or nobles.
"I can--I will--it is my purpose," said De Bracy; "for, when Rowena consents to be the bride of De Bracy, who is it shall dare to put forth a violent hand upon her kinsman--the son of her guardian--the companion of her youth?
"Flatter thyself, then, with that belief," said De Bracy, "until time shall prove it false.
"Proud damsel," said De Bracy, incensed at finding his gallant style procured him nothing but contempt--"proud damsel, thou shalt be as proudly encountered.
"And yet," he said to himself, "I feel myself ill framed for the part which I am playing.
I am not romantic fool enough to further the fortune, or avert the fate, of one who is likely to be a successful obstacle between me and my wishes.
Know, lady, that this rival is in my power, and that it rests but with me to betray the secret of his being within the castle to Front-de-Boeuf, whose jealousy will be more fatal than mine."
They suffocated some in mud, and suspended others by the feet, or the head, or the thumbs, kindling fires below them.
"You are unjust, Lady Rowena," said the knight, biting his lips in some confusion, and speaking in a tone more natural to him than that of affected gallantry, which he had at first adopted; "yourself free from passion, you can allow no excuse for the frenzy of another, although caused by your own beauty."
He had, in truth, gone too far to recede; and yet, in Rowena's present condition, she could not be acted on either by argument or threats.
I would she had retained her original haughtiness of disposition, or that I had a larger share of Front-de-Boeuf's thrice-tempered hardness of heart!"
Her disposition was naturally that which physiognomists consider as proper to fair complexions, mild, timid, and gentle; but it had been tempered, and, as it were, hardened, by the circumstances of her education.
"Wilfred here?" said Rowena, in disdain; "that is as true as that Front-de-Boeuf is his rival."
His beard was closely shaved, his doublet reached to the middle of his leg, and the girdle which secured it, and at the same time supported his ponderous sword, was embroidered and embossed with gold work.
She could scarce conceive the possibility of her will being opposed, far less that of its being treated with total disregard.
They squeezed the heads of some with knotted cords till they pierced their brains, while they threw others into dungeons swarming with serpents, snakes, and toads." But it would be cruel to put the reader to the pain of perusing the remainder of this description.
We have already noticed the extravagant fashion of the shoes at this period, and the points of Maurice de Bracy's might have challenged the prize of extravagance with the gayest, being turned up and twisted like the horns of a ram.
"Alas! fair Rowena," returned De Bracy, "you are in presence of your captive, not your jailor; and it is from your fair eyes that De Bracy must receive that doom which you fondly expect from him."
"I know you not, sir," said the lady, drawing herself up with all the pride of offended rank and beauty; "I know you not--and the insolent familiarity with which you apply to me the jargon of a troubadour, forms no apology for the violence of a robber."
Agitated by these thoughts, he could only bid the unfortunate Rowena be comforted, and assure her, that as yet she had no reason for the excess of despair to which she was now giving way.
I deserved the evil I have encountered, for forgetting his fate even in that of his son!"
This had been settled in a council held by Front-de-Boeuf, De Bracy, and the Templar, in which, after a long and warm debate concerning the several advantages which each insisted upon deriving from his peculiar share in this audacious enterprise, they had at length determined the fate of their unhappy prisoners.
His long luxuriant hair was trained to flow in quaint tresses down his richly furred cloak.
"To thyself, fair maid," answered De Bracy, in his former tone--"to thine own charms be ascribed whate'er I have done which passed the respect due to her, whom I have chosen queen of my heart, and lodestar of my eyes."
De Bracy looked at her steadily for an instant.
Desolate, however, as it was, this was the apartment of the castle which had been judged most fitting for the accommodation of the Saxon heiress; and here she was left to meditate upon her fate, until the actors in this nefarious drama had arranged the several parts which each of them was to perform.
But it is thy love must buy his protection.
"Courtesy of tongue," said Rowena, "when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a base clown.
CHAPTER XXIII
He saluted Rowena by doffing his velvet bonnet, garnished with a golden broach, representing St Michael trampling down the Prince of Evil.
"Save him, for the love of Heaven!" said Rowena, her firmness giving way under terror for her lover's impending fate.
Know then, that I have supported my pretensions to your hand in the way that best suited thy character.
Cedric also--"
"That I am unknown to you," said De Bracy, "is indeed my misfortune; yet let me hope that De Bracy's name has not been always unspoken, when minstrels or heralds have praised deeds of chivalry, whether in the lists or in the battle-field."
The apartment to which the Lady Rowena had been introduced was fitted up with some rude attempts at ornament and magnificence, and her being placed there might be considered as a peculiar mark of respect not offered to the other prisoners.
Hitherto, Rowena had sustained her part in this trying scene with undismayed courage, but it was because she had not considered the danger as serious and imminent.
His green cassock and vizard were now flung aside.
He paced the apartment to and fro, now vainly exhorting the terrified maiden to compose herself, now hesitating concerning his own line of conduct.
Another suitor might feel jealousy while he touched this string; but my firm purpose cannot be changed by a passion so childish and so hopeless.
And here we cannot but think it necessary to offer some better proof than the incidents of an idle tale, to vindicate the melancholy representation of manners which has been just laid before the reader.
What will it cost beyond the blow of a poniard, or the thrust of a javelin, to silence his opposition for ever?
After casting her eyes around, as if to look for the aid which was nowhere to be found, and after a few broken interjections, she raised her hands to heaven, and burst into a passion of uncontrolled vexation and sorrow.
By what other means couldst thou be raised to high honour and to princely place, saving by my alliance?
"I guess your meaning, lady," said De Bracy, "though you may think it lies too obscure for my apprehension.
With this, he gently motioned the lady to a seat; and, as she still retained her standing posture, the knight ungloved his right hand, and motioned to conduct her thither.
Of them all, perhaps, De Bracy least regretted the interruption; for his conference with the Lady Rowena had arrived at a point, where he found it equally difficult to prosecute or to resign his enterprise.
Thy lover lies wounded in this castle--thy preferred lover.
But in this task of consolation De Bracy was interrupted by the horn, "hoarse-winded blowing far and keen," which had at the same time alarmed the other inmates of the castle, and interrupted their several plans of avarice and of license.
I cannot look on so fair a face while it is disturbed with agony, or on those eyes when they are drowned in tears.
It is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity.
The interval had not entirely been bestowed in holding council with his confederates, for De Bracy had found leisure to decorate his person with all the foppery of the times.
At length he roused himself and looked around him.
In a distant part of the room I saw her place some cushions on the floor, and settle herself on them to do her work.
Thus did they thirst, and drink again, and were crazed; being inflamed with the desire to learn the secrets of nature, hesitating not to dip their hands in blood, seeking in the living tissues of animals for the hidden springs of life.
This is his desire; for in all his works, and that knowledge which is like pure water to one that thirsts, and satisfies and leaves no taste of bitterness on the palate, we learn the will of him that called us into life.
"Thus, at the beginning of our journey to the far south, where we go to look first on those bright lands, which have hotter suns and a greater variety than ours, we come to the wilderness of Coradine, which seems barren and desolate to our sight, accustomed to the deep verdure of woods and valleys, and the blue mists of an abundant moisture.
On his invitation I now rose, put by my money, and followed him.
I noticed that there were books on a low stand near me.
I had hoped that she was going to talk to me, and with keen disappointment watched her moving across the floor.
I was just thinking what some of the great London book-buyers--Quaritch, for instance--would be tempted to give for it.
"The end of every day is darkness, but the Father of life through our reason has taught us to mitigate the exceeding bitterness of our end; otherwise, we that are above all other creatures in the earth should have been at the last more miserable than they.
But what a wonderfully beautiful book it is!
"You are not reading," she said, looking curiously at me.
Chapter 5
For in their madness they hoped by knowledge to gain absolute dominion over nature, thereby taking from the Father of the world his prerogative.
All the knowledge we seek, the invention and skill we possess, and the labor of our hands, has this purpose only: for all knowledge and invention and labor having any other purpose whatsoever is empty and vain in comparison, and unworthy of those that are made in the image of the Father of life.
"Yet does this moonlight dance, which is the chief glory of the House of Coradine, grow pale in the mind, and is speedily forgotten, when another is seen; and, going on our way from house to house, we learn how everywhere the various riches of the world have been taken into his soul by man, and made part of his life.
And over it all was the roof of white or pale gray glass tinged with golden-red--the roof which I had seen from the outside when it seemed to me like a cloud resting on the stony summit of a hill.
I regretted too late that I had not exercised more restraint; but the hungry man does not and cannot consider consequences, else a certain hairy gentleman who figures in ancient history had never lent himself to that nefarious compact, which gave so great an advantage to a younger but sleek and well-nourished brother.
She said nothing in reply, and only looked a little surprised--disgusted, I feared--at my ignorance, then walked away.
Some one then rose and brought a tall wax taper and placed it near him. The flame threw a little brightness on the volume, which he now proceeded to open; and here and there, further away, it flashed and trembled in points of rainbow-colored light on a tall column; but the greater part of the room still remained in twilight obscurity.
"He is our teacher.
For in the irrational world, between the different kinds, there reigns perpetual strife and bloodshed, the strong devouring the weak and the incapable; and when failure of life clouds the brightness of that lower soul, which is theirs, the end is not long delayed.
Thither in past ages some of our pilgrims journeyed, and have brought a record of these things; nor in our house only are they known, but in many houses throughout the world have they been written for the instruction of all men and a warning for all time.
Thus by increasing their riches they were made poorer; and, like one who, forgetting the limits that are set to his faculties, gazes steadfastly on the sun, by seeing much they become afflicted with blindness.
At one side, somewhere about the center of the room, there was a broad raised place, or dais, with a couch on it, on which the father was reclining at his ease.
Thus also does the ever-living earth from the dust of dead generations of leaves re-make a fresh foliage, and for herself a new garment.
"Thus we know that in the past men sought after knowledge of various kinds, asking not whether it was for good or for evil: but every offense of the mind and the body has its appropriate reward; and while their knowledge grew apace, that better knowledge and discrimination which the Father gives to every living soul, both in man and in beast, was taken from them.
Then the august Mother, in a brazen chariot, is drawn from field to field by milk-white bulls with golden horns; then her children are gathered about her in shining yellow garments, with armlets of gold upon their arms; and with voice and instruments of forms unknown to the stranger, they make glad the listening fields with the great harvest melody.
Here is a part of his discourse:--
The father alone did nothing, but still rested on his couch, perhaps indulging in a postprandial nap.
These globes varied in size, the largest being not less than about twelve feet in circumference.
When he was gone, and Yoletta had followed, leaving some of the others still studying those wretched sovereigns, I sat down again and rested my chin on my hand; for I was now thinking--deeply: thinking on the terms of the agreement.
After a while Yoletta came slowly across the room, her fingers engaged with some kind of wool-work as she walked, and my heart beat fast when she paused by my side.
All the glory seemed now to have gone out of the leaves of the volume, and I continued turning them over listlessly, glancing at intervals at the beautiful girl, who was also like one of the pages before me, wonderful to look at and hard to understand.
Thus the life that has lasted many days goes out with a brief pang, and in its going gives new vigor to the strong that have yet many days to live.
They appeared to be gifted with an owlish vision, able to see with very little light.
"These things are written for the refreshment and delight of those who may no longer journey into distant lands; and they are in the library of the house in the seven thousand volumes of the Houses of the World which our pilgrims have visited in past ages.
For then do we rejoice beyond others, rising like bright-winged insects from our lowly state to a higher life of glory and joy, which is ours for the space of three whole days.
"There is no melody in our hearts this evening, my children," he said. "When another day has passed over us it will perhaps be different. To-night the voice so recently stilled in death forever would be too painfully missed by all of us."
They were all folios, very much alike in form and thickness; and seeing presently that the others were all following their own inclinations, and considering that I had been left to my own resources and that it is a good plan when at Rome to do as the Romans do, I by-and-by ventured to help myself to a volume, which I carried to one of the reading-stands.
Then, remembering that I had come to supper with an extravagant appetite, it struck me that my host, quietly observant, had, when proposing terms, taken into account the quantity of food necessary for my sustenance.
Occupied with these reflections, I had failed to observe that the company had gradually been drifting away until but one person was left with me--the young man who had talked with me before.
"For the house is the image of the world, and we that live and labor in it are the image of our Father who made the world; and, like him, we labor to make for ourselves a worthy habitation, which shall not shame our teacher.
And yet how unlike in that something ethereal in its aspect, as of a nave in a cloud cathedral, its far-stretching shining floors and walls and columns, pure white and pearl-gray, faintly touched with colors of exquisite delicacy.
"Have you indeed?" said I, not knowing whether to feel flattered or not. "No, unfortunately, I can't read this book, as I do not understand the letters.
And, seeing this, all those things in which we ourselves excel seem poor in comparison, becoming pale in our memories.
Oh, I am forgetting--you have never heard his name, of course; but--but what a beautiful book it is!"
"We only, of all things having life, being like the Father, slay not nor are slain, and are without enemies in the earth; for even the lower kinds, which have not reason, know without reason that we are highest on the earth, and see in us, alone of all his works, the majesty of the Father, and lose all their rage in our presence.
Returning by the hall we went through a passage and entered a room of vast extent, which in its form and great length and high arched roof was like the nave of a cathedral.
On coming in I had the impression of an empty, silent place; yet the inmates of the house were all there; they were sitting and reclining on low couches, some lying at their ease on straw mats on the floor; some were reading, others were occupied with some work in their hands, and some were conversing, the sound coming to me like a faint murmur from a distance.
Therefore, when the night is near, when life is a burden and we remember our mortality, we hasten the end, that those we love may cease to sorrow at the sight of our decline; and we know that this is his will who called us into being, and gave us life and joy on the earth for a season, but not forever.
The sun had set by this time, and the interior was growing darker by degrees; the fading light, however, seemed to make no difference to those who worked or read.
"I have been watching you for some time."
"But their vain ambition lasted not, and the end of it was death.
There a stony soil brings forth only thorns, and thistles, and sere tufts of grass; and blustering winds rush over the unsheltered reaches, where the rough-haired goats huddle for warmth; and there is no melody save the many-toned voices of the wind and the plover's wild cry.
"Assuredly you may," he replied with dignity.
Besides, I was not quite sure that my prospects were really worth thinking about just now.
It was therefore a disappointment when nothing more substantial than a plate of whitey-green, crisp-looking stuff resembling endive, was placed before me by one of the picturesque handmaidens.
I looked up: they were all once more studying the coins and notes, and exchanging remarks about them.
"Smith," said he, "of all the extraordinary delusions you appear to be suffering from, this, that you can have garments to wear in return for a small piece of paper, or for a few bits of this metal, is the most astounding!
"Never.
At all events, by closing with the offer I should have a year of happiness in her society, and a year of healthy work in the fields could not hurt me, or interfere much with my prospects.
"I must indeed appear strange to them," said I, with some bitterness, and recalling the adventures of the morning.
And there was my dear old bachelor Uncle Jack--John Smith, Member of Parliament for Wormwood Scrubbs.
We came to a large portico-like place open on three sides to the air, the roof being supported by slender columns.
Certainly they had not made me shine much during the last few hours.
"My idea is this," I resumed, and coming down to very plain speaking: "I can give one of these five-pound notes, or its equivalent in gold, if you prefer that--five of these sovereigns, I mean--for a suit of clothes such as you all wear."
I stared at her, surprised at her unseasonable levity; but the only effect of my doing so was a general explosion, men and women joining in such a tempest of merriment that one might have imagined they had just heard the most wonderful joke ever invented since man acquired the sense of the ludicrous.
"Or, rather let me say, I hope not."
Thus encouraged, I dashed boldly into the middle of matter; for now, having dined, albeit without wine, I was inflamed with an intense craving to see myself arrayed in their rich, mysterious dress.
"Allow me to interrupt you for one moment, Smith," said the old gentleman, who had been listening attentively to my words.
Eleven bright sovereigns and three half-crowns or florins, I forget which, rolled out; then, unfolding the papers, I discovered three five-pound Bank of England notes.
Finding the silence intolerable, I at length ventured to remark that I feared he had not understood me to the end.
"My wish is to obtain them somehow from somebody, since I cannot make them for myself, and to give in return their full value."
The letters--if these marks are letters--are incomprehensible to me.
I caught the pretty girl's eye just then, and having finished eating, and being anxious to join the conversation, for I hate to sit silent when others are talking.
That I had a decent figure, and was not a bad-looking young fellow, I was pretty sure; and the hope that I should be able to create an impression (favorable, I mean) on the heart of that supremely beautiful girl was very strong in me.
The old gentleman was the first to recover a decent gravity, although it was plain to see that he struggled severely at intervals to prevent a relapse.
"Certainly not!" I exclaimed, turning crimson with shame to think that they were all taking me for a beggar.
Hardly had he done so when the animal began to exhibit signs of excitement.
Rod could hear his heart throbbing within him.
Or he might take his own time, and explore it alone.
Anyway, the contents of the buckskin bag represented but a few days' labor.
"That means the Woongas are on our trail," declared Rod presently.
And sixty feet away Wolf crouched, watching the gathering of his clan, helpless, panting from his choking efforts to free himself, and quieting, gradually quieting, until in sullen silence he looked upon the scene, as though he knew the moment was very near when that thrilling spectacle would be changed into a scene of direst tragedy.
He read ".35 Rem."
I followed back on their trail and found after a time that the Indians had come from the north, which leads me to believe that they were simply on a hunting expedition, cut a circle southward, and then returned to their camp.
Those skeletons had once been men.
Swiftly the wolves closed in.
The gloom of early evening was enveloping the wilderness by the time the three wolf hunters reached the swamp in which Rod had slain the buck. While he carried the guns and packs, Mukoki and Wabigoon dragged the buck between them to the huge flat-top rock.
He had set eighteen traps and had shot two spruce partridges.
For a moment his head turned to the moonlit sky, his long nose poised at right angles to the bristling hollows between his shoulders.
But I don't believe they know we are here.
"I believe we did a good job, Mukoki!"
It was not the blood of the camp, of the slaughtered game dragged in by human hands before his eyes.
"Why, that's--"
From that hour was born in Roderick Drew's breast a strange, imperishable desire.
I don't believe they will come farther south.
His nerves tingled.
Mukoki clutched at the shell as though it had been another newly found nugget of gold.
A hundred and five dollars in a night isn't bad, is it?"
Wabi's description of the manner in which the strange trail turned gave great satisfaction to Mukoki, who nodded affirmatively when the young hunter expressed it as his belief that the Woongas would not come so far as their camp.
Mukoki called attention to these symptoms with a gloating satisfaction.
For a few moments Rod and Mukoki stared at the young Indian in blank amazement.
To him the story of the old cabin, the skeletons and the treasure of the buckskin bag was complete.
It was the blood of the chase!
Then he settled upon his haunches at the end of his babeesh thong.
In a flash he had solved that mystery.
A third of this blood he scattered upon the face of the rock and upon the snow at its base.
He trotted about nervously, sniffing the air, gathering the wind from every direction, and his jaws dropped with a snarling whine. Then he struck one of the clots of blood in the snow.
They slipped back among the shadows of the spruce and watched Wolf in unbroken silence.
Making a circuit around the back of the rock, Mukoki paused near a small sapling twenty yards from the dead buck and secured Wolf by his babeesh thong.
"A shell from Rod's gun!"
He made another effort, tore up the snow in his frantic endeavors to free himself, to break loose, to follow in the wild glad cry of freed savagery in the calling of his people.
Mukoki was standing as rigid as a statue in the moonlight, his face turned into the north.
But the discovery of their presence chilled the buoyant spirits of the hunters.
His head was level with his quivering back, his ears half aslant, his nostrils pointing to a strange thrilling scent that came to him from somewhere out there in the moonlight.
Nearer and nearer came the responses of the leaders, and there were now only momentary rests between the deep-throated exhortations which he sent in all directions into the night.
Three Indians on snow-shoes were traveling north.
He looked out over the endless plains, white and mysteriously beautiful as they lay bathed in the glow of the moon.
Hardly had he spoken when a series of excited howls broke forth from the swamp, coming nearer and nearer as the hunger-crazed outlaw of the plains followed over the rich-scented trail made by the two Indians as they carried the slaughtered deer.
This great orb of the Northern night seemed to hold a never-ending fascination for Rod.
The venison had begun to burn, and Mukoki quickly transferred it to the table.
He forgot the intense cold.
The trail I struck was about five miles from camp.
It was nine o'clock before the moon rose above the edge of the wilderness.
They were gone.
A flashing memory of his captors turned the animal's head for an instant in backward inspection.
There followed now the ominous, waiting silence of an awakened wilderness.
And that treasure ground was somewhere near. No longer was he puzzled by the fact that they had discovered no more gold in the old log cabin.
Wolf had received nothing to eat since the previous night, and with increasing hunger the fiery impatience lurking in his eyes and the restlessness of his movements became more noticeable.
The game was very near.
Rod was sure of that.
They would be constantly on the lookout for the Woongas, and if a fresh trail or a camp was found they would begin the man-hunt themselves.
All over that wild desolation the call of the wolf had carried its meaning.
And then the silence was broken.
There are only three guns like that in this country.
CHAPTER IX
It was at least two days old.
The others followed, and hastened across to the rock.
Each moment added to his excitement He ran about the sapling, gulped mouthfuls of the bloody snow, and each time he paused for a moment with his open dripping jaws held toward the dead buck on the rock.
But we must keep our eyes open."
There were at least a score of wolves at the base of the rock.
"Seven!" exclaimed the Indian youth.
In the shelter of a big rock a small fire was built, and during their long wait the hunters passed the time away by broiling and eating chunks of venison and in going over again the events of the day.
Brute sense told him that.
"That is one of the best shoots we ever had.
A sixth was dragging himself around the side of the rock, and Mukoki attacked it with his belt-ax.
Mukoki had slipped back and half lay across his support in shooting attitude.
The blood held him--and the strange scent, the game scent--that was coming to him more clearly every instant.
"It certainly is proof that they are, or have been quite recently, on this side of the mountain.
Wolf knew that his cries were assembling the hunt-pack.
He crunched about cautiously in the snow.
By the time complete darkness had fallen the "trap" was finished, with the exception of a detail which Rod followed with great interest.
For five seconds the edge of the spruce was a blaze of death-dealing flashes, and the deafening reports of the two rifles and the big Colt drowned the cries and struggles of the animals.
"I don't want to stir up any false fears, or anything of that sort--but I found that on the trail to-day!"
Although his eyes were constantly on the alert, Rod could see no way in which a descent could be made into the chasm from the ridge they were on.
The animal now stood rigidly over the blood clot.
What was more logical than that?
From afar--it might have been a mile away--there came an answering cry; and at that cry the wolf at the end of his babeesh thong settled upon his haunches again and sent back the call that comes only when there is blood upon the trail or when near the killing time.
The shell was empty.
This was now her best consolation.
What this woman will do I don't know. If she prosecutes you, and you are true to me, I'll stand by you, but I won't stand another false step or a false word from you."
Alida waved it away as she said indignantly, "I won't believe ill of my husband.
She waved him off.
I--"
Take a seat nearer the fire, and when Mr. Ostrom comes from his work he'll take you to your friends."
A tall, thin, pale woman entered, carrying a child that was partly hidden by a thin shawl, their only outer protection against the chill winds which had been blustering all day.
I and my brother have tracked you here.
At last, in slow, icy utterance, came the words, "So you are--HER!"
Paying no heed to her, Alida's eyes rested on the man whom she had believed to be her husband.
From Home to the Street
No matter how rash and silly you may have been, if you have a spark of honesty you'll be open to proof.
Never for an instant had Alida taken her eyes from him; and now, with a long, wailing cry, she exclaimed, "Thank God, thank God!
Show me that there's some horrible mistake."
"You are willfully blind now, miss, if you don't see it's true," was the stranger's biting comment.
You are not a young, giddy girl if I may judge from your face.
Take away this awful woman!"
She was facing the door; the terrible stranger sat at one side, with her back toward it.
But you have nothing to fear from me.
When Ostrom entered he first saw Alida looking pale and ill.
You are playing a bold game or else you have been deceived, and very easily deceived, too.
"I don't know," she replied.
They say some women are so eager to be married that they ask no questions, but jump at the first chance.
What else could you expect when you took up with a stranger you knew nothing about?
He was speechless.
There's one little point you'll do well to consider," she continued, in bitter sarcasm, "he married me first.
"YOUR husband!" exclaimed the stranger, with an indescribable accent of scorn and reproach.
Ferguson, from your manner more truly than from this woman, I learn the truth.
"I see that you both hope to get through this affair with a little high tragedy, then escape and come together again in some other hiding place.
I'm sorry for you, my good woman," she began kindly.
You took advantage of my misfortunes, my sorrow and friendlessness, to deceive me.
He courted and won me as other girls are courted and married.
"Yes, Henry Ferguson; it's very proper you should take me away from a place like this."
You can't escape.
"Yes," replied Alida with quiet dignity.
I have my certificate and can produce witnesses.
"We'll soon see how LAWFUL it was," replied the woman, with a bitter laugh.
But you and he shall learn that there is a law in the land which will protect an honest woman in her sacred rights.
Oh, that Wilson would come!
"Come in!" she cried, as she adjusted the shade of the lamp.
You'd be taken at the very door.
"Is this woman insane?" thought Alida.
He hastened toward her exclaiming, "Why, Lida, dear, what is the matter? You are sick!"
If you are sick and in trouble, I and my husband--"
As the shadows of the gloomy March evening deepened, Alida lighted the lamp, and was then a little surprised to hear a knock at the door.
Let me tell you, miss, that this man was also married to me by a minister.
For a moment or two longer there was no response other than the same cold, questioning scrutiny, as if, instead of a sweet-faced woman, something monstrously unnatural was present.
Then, when I lost my rosy cheeks--when I became sick and feeble from child-bearing--he deserted and left me almost penniless.
Alida looked at the stranger inquiringly and kindly, expecting an appeal for charity.
No presentiment of trouble crossed her mind; she merely thought that one of her neighbors on the lower floors had stepped up to borrow something.
She appeared consumed by a terrible curiosity.
There's no use of your putting on such airs any longer.
He promised me all that he ever promised you.
I suppose you are not so young and innocent as not to know where this fact places YOU.
You've come.
Well, I can wait till you recover and till HE comes," and she coolly sat down again.
As the man who had called himself Wilson Ostrom heard that voice he trembled like an aspen; his clasp of Alida relaxed, his arms dropped to his side, and, as he sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands, he groaned, "Lost!"
You can't leave these rooms without going to prison.
His name is Henry Ferguson.
You know how false are your wife's words about my eagerness to be deceived and married.
"MY husband will be home soon and he will protect me.
I am Mrs. Ferguson, and I have my marriage certificate, and--What!
She began gently, "Can I do anything for you?"
Are you going to faint?
"Why else does she look at me so?
Speak, explain!
She took an irresolute step toward him. "Speak, Wilson!" she cried.
She might have fainted, but at that awful moment she heard a familiar step on the stairs.
Ferguson had again sunk into his chair, buried his face in his hands, and sat trembling and speechless.
"You are laboring under some mistake.
"By lawful marriage, by my pastor."
Whether deceived or deceiving, it doesn't matter now.
It was so intent, so searching, yet so utterly devoid of a trace of good will.
But I give you one more chance.
She rushed into her bedchamber, and a moment later came out, wearing her hat and cloak.
"Where are you going?" Ferguson exclaimed, seeking to intercept her.
All the while she was speaking the woman regarded her with a hard, stony gaze; then replied, coldly and decisively, "You are wrong, miss"--how that title grated on Alida's ears!--"I am neither insane nor drunk.
Alida had glanced at the proofs which the woman had thrust into her hands, then staggered back to a lounge that stood near.
"Found out, you mean," was the woman's reply.
You needn't think you will have to take my word for this.
The woman sank into a chair as if exhausted, and fixed her dark hollow eyes on Mrs. Ostrom.
"No, miss," interrupted the woman sternly, "you are right for once. You won't indeed believe ill of YOUR husband, but you'll have to believe ill of MINE.
Alida wondered at the strange chill of apprehension with which she encountered this gaze.
"What do you mean?" cried Alida, with a sudden flash in her blue eyes. Then, as if reproaching herself, she added kindly, "Pardon me.
You needn't look so shocked and bewildered.
You do not realize what you are saying or where you are.
"Lida," said the man, lifting his bloodless face, "if you knew all the circumstances--"
"We have, then, an account of what happened from an eye-witness whom we trust--that is yourself.
That, for instance, of the ermine collar embroidered with emeralds.
So Adam went on:
All such difficulties should be--must be--avoided for Mr. Salton's sake, for Adam's own sake, and, most of all, for Mimi Watford's sake.
"The monster must be destroyed."
When he did speak, Adam at first thought that his friend was wavering in his intention, or "funking" the responsibility.
Lady Arabella, be she woman or snake or devil, owned the ground she moved in, according to British law, and the law is jealous and swift to avenge wrongs done within its ken.
"Absolutely certain, sir, otherwise I should have gone to her assistance."
Her lies point to other things besides the death of the African.
There is no impossibility in this; it is only the natural process of evolution.
"That seems beyond dispute, sir."
"So far as I know, yes.
"That the whole difficulty already assumes practical shape; but with added dangers, that at first I did not imagine."
In the beginning, the instincts of animals are confined to alimentation, self-protection, and the multiplication of their species.
"Soon, at all events.
Already we are mixed up in robbery, and probably murder, but--a thousand times worse than all the crimes in the calendar--in an affair of ghastly mystery which has no bottom and no end--with forces of the most unnerving kind, which had their origin in an age when the world was different from the world which we know.
"I do, with all confidence."
We are going back to the origin of superstition--to an age when dragons tore each other in their slime. We must fear nothing--no conclusion, however improbable, almost impossible it may be.
Result . . .
As time goes on and the needs of life become more complex, power follows need.
We may lean towards a belief that great animal strength may be a sound base for changes of all sorts.
"Then," said Sir Nathaniel, "let us think justly and boldly and fear nothing, however terrifying it may seem.
I am in a whirl already; and want to attend carefully to what you say; so that I may try to digest it."
It may have been, of course, that some of them were worn originally by water; but in time they all found a use when suitable for living monsters.
Therefore the only reason which could actuate her would be to convince someone else that she was blameless. This 'someone' could not be you, for you had the evidence of your own eyes.
Self-interest may prompt falsity of the tongue; but if one prove to be a liar, nothing that he says can ever be believed. This leads us to the conclusion that because she said or inferred that there was no snake, we should look for one--and expect to find it, too.
"We must, therefore, try to find a reason for her lying.
"Tell me now, Adam, what is the outcome, in your own mind, of our conversation?"
Before he spoke again, Sir Nathaniel had made up his mind that he must try to postpone decisive action until the circumstances on which they depended--which, after all, were only problematical--should have been tested satisfactorily, one way or another.
"Apparently, sir."
That is a true and fearless conclusion.
However, his respect for Sir Nathaniel was so great that he would not act, or even come to a conclusion on a vital point, without his sanction.
"After all, the mediaeval belief in the Philosopher's Stone which could transmute metals, has its counterpart in the accepted theory of metabolism which changes living tissue.
"This brings us to another point, more difficult to accept and understand than any other requiring belief in a base not usually accepted, or indeed entered on--whether such abnormal growths could have ever changed in their nature.
We have also another account, written by Lady Arabella under her own hand.
Now, all these things require much thought, and we want to apply the knowledge usefully, and we should therefore be exact.
"At once?"
"I quite agree, sir.
Of course I may be mistaken in recollection of some detail or another, but I am certain that in the main what I have said is correct."
Life and death is hanging on our judgment, not only for ourselves, but for others whom we love.
"You feel sure that you saw Lady Arabella seize the negro round the neck, and drag him down with her into the hole?"
Her presence in this neighbourhood makes the danger immediate."
If this be so, what could be a more fitting subject than primeval monsters whose strength was such as to allow a survival of thousands of years?
CHAPTER XX--METABOLISM
They may have progressed intellectually in process of time.
He is the only one who fills the bill.
Therefore we must take it that one of the two is lying."
She evidently wanted it to be accepted that his falling into the well was his own act. I cannot suppose that she expected to convince you, the eye-witness; but if she wished later on to spread the story, it was wise of her to try to get your acceptance of it."
In an age of investigation like our own, when we are returning to science as the base of wonders--almost of miracles--we should be slow to refuse to accept facts, however impossible they may seem to be.
He came close and whispered in his ear:
There were all sorts of legal cruxes to be thought out, not only regarding the taking of life, even of a monstrosity in human form, but also of property.
There was no one else present; therefore it must have been an absent person."
"First, that Mimi Watford should be taken away at once--then--"
She used the nigger, and then dragged him through the snake's hole down to the swamp; she is intent on evil, and hates some one we love.
Adam, who was by nature of a more militant disposition than his elderly friend, was glad to see that the conference at once assumed a practical trend.
"Yes?"
If they had in any way so progressed, or even got the most rudimentary form of brain, they would be the most dangerous things that ever were in the world.
As he spoke, Sir Nathaniel's mouth hardened and his eyebrows came down till they met.
"Now let me digress.
"You certainly are, sir."
"Yes, the result?"
There was no doubting his concurrence in the resolution, or his readiness to help in carrying it out.
Now, it is a scientific law that increase implies gain and loss of various kinds; what a thing gains in one direction it may lose in another.
She has nothing to fear from Oolanga, who is dead.
"Bravo!
I live, and have for many years lived, in Derbyshire, a county more celebrated for its caves than any other county in England.
These two accounts do not agree.
A developing thing may expand in any given way or form.
Both men seemed fresher and better for the "easy," and when they met in the afternoon each of them had something to contribute to the general stock of information.
"We will prepare our plans to combat and destroy this horrible menace, after we have cleared up some of the more baffling points.
"Apparently--as I am not."
May it not be that Mother Nature may deliberately encourage decrease as well as increase--that it may be an axiom that what is gained in concentration is lost in size?
Remember, I count on you as I hope you count on me."
Such creatures may have grown down as well as up.
Some day the study of metabolism may progress so far as to enable us to accept structural changes proceeding from an intellectual or moral base.
If an understandable reason be required for this, it would be to draw attention away from the green lights which were seen in the room, and especially in the well-hole.
We have been long accustomed to consider growth as applied almost exclusively to size in its various aspects.
"There is only one other person whose good opinion she could wish to keep--Edgar Caswall.
Sir Nathaniel recognised this, and, like an old diplomatist, turned it to present use.
But he was an elderly man with much experience and knowledge of law and diplomacy.
At whatever cost, it must be carried out."
Why, such a being would devastate a whole country.
"We little thought when first we met that we should be drawn into such a vortex.
When he sank into the hole, I was rushing to the iron door, which I pulled behind me.
Whilst I live, I shall always thank you for my freedom.
You really must let me thank you for the friendliness, the help, the confidence, the real aid at a time of deadly danger and deadly fear which you showed me.
I do not doubt that, with your longer experience, you will be able to dissipate some of the fog which envelops certain of the things which we have to consider."
I asked because it seems to me that we are coming to a point where my questions might be painful to you."
But you must not let me bring any unhappiness into your life.
The result had been that not only was he familiar with the facts in all their bearings, but he had already so far differentiated them that he was able to arrange them in his own mind according to their values.
I have known what it is to love and to lose.
It is one of my most valued treasures--an ermine collar studded with emeralds.
Adam laughed a low, sweet laugh, such as ripples from a happy heart.
"The same way in which I now propose that you should," he replied, lifting into view the object we had seen at one side of the passage, and which now showed itself to be a pair of folding steps.
It was just before the noise you made falling down into this hole."
"In a minute," I said.
It is all simple enough on this side of the trap; the puzzle is about the other.
That is why I made the search which has ended in this discovery.
THE ECCENTRICITIES OF GHOSTS AND COINCIDENCES SUGGESTING SPIRITUAL INTERFERENCE
Annoyed at his manner, which was that of a man personally aggrieved, I turned to Ellen.
"You have just been up-stairs," I said.
Out!
"Do you still wish to go on, or shall we return and explain this accident to the girls whose voices I certainly hear in the hall overhead?"
"I've had an accident and a great adventure, but I've solved the mystery of the ghost.
Nixon grumbled something and moved off.
"Well, leave everything as it is," I commanded, despite the rebellion in Nixon's eye.
When she was quite gone, Mr. Steele spoke:
Her lack-luster eyes fell; her fingers closed on the hat whose feathers she had been trifling with, and, lifting it, she moved softly into the reception-room and from there into the hall and up the front stairs.
We could all see that they had suffered greatly from their fall.
I closed the little volume with very strange thoughts.
"Some time I will tell you," I replied, putting my foot on the step. "O girls!" I exclaimed, as two screams rang out above and two agitated faces peered down upon us.
"I shall leave you to make the necessary explanations," said he.
As I endeavored to pass the door, I inadvertently struck the edge of a little taboret standing in my way.
It will be such a comfort to me--and how much more to the mayor!"
Struck forcibly by a coincidence suggesting something quite different from spiritual interference, I allowed the book to open in my hand, which it did at this evidently frequently conned passage:
The next day I received news of a fatal accident to my husband.
The old lady's eyes met ours without purpose or intelligence.
The thing you feared hasn't any meaning.
Do assure me that I have.
I had to reach up my arms twice before either of them would lend me a helping hand.
Shall I show you where the place is?"
"I am so curious.
It toppled and a little book lying on it slid to the floor; as I stooped to pick it up my already greatly disconcerted mind was still further affected by the glimpse which was given me of its title.
They used to come up through this trap.
By the time I had recovered my equanimity enough to follow, she had disappeared into her own room.
A book was in my hand and a strong light was shining on it and on me from a lamp on a near-by table.
"Canny enough to discover or perhaps to open this passage, they were canny enough to provide themselves with means of getting out of it.
It was plain that she did not see us; also plain that she was held back in her advance by some doubt in her beclouded brain.
How do you suppose they worked this trap from here?
It was enough to keep me quiet for the three long hours I sat there with my face to the window, watching for the first sight of her figure on the crossing leading into our street.
"She was, but not more than five minutes ago she slipped down-stairs and went out.
Where is Mrs. Packard?"
It could not have been in a very comfortable condition, for there were evidences about the hall that it was being thoroughly swept.
I could simply wait.
But it was a happy waiting.
They were too speechless with wonder to answer me.
How did they manage to have all this mechanism put in without rousing any one's attention?
I felt a chill.
HARDLY A COINCIDENCE
She can blame nobody but me, if she is displeased at what she sees."
But when I was once up and Mr. Steele after me, the questions they asked came so thick and fast that I almost choked in my endeavor to answer them and to get away.
It was just one of the two poor old ladies next door.
Romantic, to be sure.
When it came, it was already lunch-time, but there was no evidence of hurry in her manner; there was, rather, an almost painful hesitation.
And why so much trouble?"
But when I had drawn her through the library into the side hall, and shown her the great gap where the cabinet had stood, I thought she brightened a little and showed some of the curiosity I expected.
I wanted to rid you of your forebodings.
Nixon, with a face as black as the passage from which I had just escaped, muttered some words about queer doings for respectable people, but said nothing about his mistress unless the few words he added to his final lament about the cabinet contained some allusion to her fondness for the articles it held.
But it was very easily appeased, and before I could have made the thing clear to her she was back in the library, fingering her hat and listening, as it seemed to me, to everything but my voice.
A secret entrance we knew nothing about and the Misses Quinlan using it to hunt about these halls at night!
Yes, let me see the place.
He pointed to one side of the opening, where part of the supporting mechanism was now visible.
"I am really rushed with business and should be down-town on the mayor's affairs at this very moment."
"O Mrs. Packard," I cried, "I have such good news for you.
We could see her hover, as it were, at her end of the dark passage, while I held my breath and Mr. Steele panted audibly.
She might stay away an hour and she might stay away all day.
If it was interest she felt it was a very forced one. She even paused to take off her hat.
"We must go back," I reluctantly consented.
They did not press the spring in the molding."
The girls, full of talk, ran up-stairs to have it out in the nursery with Letty, and I went toward the front.
"You must be satisfied now," he said.
I should see a renewal of joy in her and a bounding hope for the future when once I told any tale.
It proves it a myth, a product of your own imagination, something which it must certainly be impossible for you ever to fear again.
Suddenly Hal thought he heard a call!
"It hasn't rained hardly since we came down, and they only come in to land out of the rain."
"I know where I can get a pail of nice clean water."
"But the winds blow everything away regularly, and they all have to be carted back again each spring.
"What can we use for cups?" asked Nan.
The girls had "dragged him" down to the ocean, he said, when he had intended first going to Aunt Emily's.
Hal and Bert were sorry, indeed, to have Harry go, for Harry was such a good leader in outdoor sports, his country training always standing by him in emergencies.
Nan, Nellie, and Dorothy had been detained by somebody further up on the road, but were now coming down, slowly.
"Nothing!
"I'll buy the lemons," offered Harry.
"I would like to live at the beach all summer," remarked Harry.
"And come down next year," insisted Dorothy.
The whole family sat around on the sands, and it was like being in the country and at the seashore at the one time, Flossie declared.
OLD FRIENDS
Such a delight as the ocean was to the country children!
"I must see the others," he insisted; "Freddie and Flossie."
"Well, you will have lots of company, and if Uncle Daniel shouldn't meet you, you can ride up with the Hopkinses or anybody along your road."
"Down to the beach!
All three boys were fine swimmers, and they promptly struck off for the water that was "straightened out," as Bert said, beyond the tearing of the breakers at the edge.
"Hello there!
Then Nan filled his gourd from the dipper that stood in the big pail of lemonade, and he smacked his lips in appreciation.
"Freddie boy!
"Oh, they are all coming down," Nan assured him.
"Here, there, you boy," he called, and Hal came in to the edge, but hardly recognized the man in street clothes.
"This little fellow"--pointing to Hal--"brought--me up--almost--from--the bottom!" and he caught his breath, painfully.
An hour later the millionaire was walking the beach looking for the life-savers.
"Come on, fellows!" he called.
"Nobody likes a good time better than Jack."
Freddie boy!" exclaimed Uncle Daniel, giving his nephew a good long hug.
Yes, indeed, I want your name," and as he insisted, Hal reluctantly gave it, but felt quite foolish to make such a fuss "over nothing," as he said.
"Even in winter it must be fine here."
Why, I was about dead, and pulled on you with all my two hundred pounds.
But it did not come up again.
Well, Harry, you look like an Indian.
Of course Harry and Aunt Sarah were all "packed up" and had very little to do at Aunt Emily's before starting.
"I'll wait awhile.
"I want your name," demanded the stranger.
Then the boys got long boards and arranged them from bench to bench in picnic style, so that all the Meadow Brook friends might have a pleasant time eating their box lunches.
When the boys came back they had a dozen of the funny drinking cups.
"No wonder you got cramps."
I can buy them for five cents each, and after the picnic we can bring them home and hang them up for souvenirs."
"Mine is ----," and he gave the name of the famous millionaire who had a magnificent summer home in another colony, three miles away.
"All right, then," agreed Uncle Daniel.
"I hope Jack Hopkins comes," said Bert, for Jack was a great friend.
As he was sitting on the sands the shock almost brought him down.
Can you see through that coat of tan?"
"What's them?" asked Freddie, with an ear for anything that sounded like a menagerie.
This explanation made Uncle Daniel laugh heartily.
Where's that sea-serpent you were going to catch for me?"
Santa Claus could hardly have been more welcome to the Bobbseys at that moment than was Uncle Daniel.
Hello there!" called everybody at once, for, of course, all the children knew Harry and many also knew Bert.
"I'll get him yet," declared the little fellow.
"I'm sure I will come again if I can."
Of course the boys did not stand around, being satisfied they could be of no more use.
"And I'll do the mixing," declared August Stout, while all set to work to produce the wonderful picnic lemonade.
"Dorothy, my cousin, is so jolly, and here's Nellie--you remember her?"
It seemed quite a while to Bert and Harry before Hal came up again, but when he did he was trying to pull with him a big, fat man, who was all but unconscious.
"Now, don't go putting in white sand instead of sugar," teased Uncle Daniel, as the "caterers," with sleeves rolled up, worked hard over the lemonade.
August Stout had not learned much about swimming since he fell off the plank while fishing in Meadow Brook, so that out in the waves the other boys had great fun with their fat friend.
As each roller slipped out on the sands the children unconsciously followed it, and so, many unsuspected pairs of shoes were caught by the next wave that washed in.
You knew, too, you had hardly a chance to bring me up.
"Now, Aunt Sarah," pleaded Nan the next morning, "you might just as well wait and go home on the excursion train.
Of course Nettie did remember her, and now all the little girls went around hunting for fun in every possible corner where fun might be hidden.
There were few people in the surf and the boys made their way around as if they owned the ocean.
CHAPTER XVII
All Meadow Brook will be down, and it will be so much pleasanter for you.
Presently somebody jumped up on Uncle Daniel's back.
The train will be here by noon and leave at three o'clock."
"A very bad kind of spider, that sometimes comes in fruit from other countries," explained Uncle Daniel.
They simply overpowered him, as the surprise of his coming made the treat so much better.
"Oh, Nan!" called Nettie, in delight, "I'm just as glad to see you as I am to see the ocean, and I never saw that before," and the two little girls exchanged greetings of genuine love for each other.
"Let's make lemonade," suggested Hal.
"Oh, he will be along," Harry remarked.
"Yes--they saved--my life!" gasped the half-drowned man.
The Meadow Brook Bobbseys had secured good seats in the middle car,--Aunt Sarah thought that the safest,--and now the locomotive whistle was tooting, calling the few stragglers who insisted on waiting at the beach until the very last minute.
It was now about time for the excursion train to come in, so the boys left the water and prepared to meet their old friends.
"Oh, I know," said Harry, "over at the Indian stand they have a lot of gourds, the kind of mock oranges that Mexicans drink out of.
"I had such a lovely time," declared Nettie.
And think of the fruit that's waiting to be preserved!"
There was so much to do and so much to see that the few hours allowed the excursionists slipped by all too quickly.
"Do you know there are medals given to young heroes like you?"
Finally Dorothy came back with the girls from their ride, and the people were beginning to crowd into the long line of cars that waited on a switch near the station.
"But think of the hour that would bring us to Meadow Brook!" objected Aunt Sarah.
"Or tarantulas," put in Uncle Daniel.
Harry laughed and said he had been an Indian in having a good time.
"That is a fine trail you are leaving.
The Reformers of the sixteenth century affirm that the Church did fall into error; that the gates of hell did prevail against her; that from the sixth to the sixteenth century she was a sink of iniquity.
Who is to be believed, Jesus or the Reformers?
But as this privilege of Infallibility was a very extraordinary favor, our Savior confers it on the rulers of His Church in language which removes all doubt from the sincere inquirer, and under circumstances which add to the majesty of His word.
When it receives instructions from its mother's lips it never doubts, but instinctively believes.
But we may rest assured that an all-wise Providence who commands His Church to speak in His name will so guide her in the path of truth that she shall never lead into error those that follow her teachings.
Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.
The prerogative of infallibility is clearly deduced from the attributes of the Church already mentioned.
It is, therefore, incapable of reform.
Second--A promise that His presence with the Church will be continuous, without any interval of absence, to the consummation of the world.
It is time enough for little men to take charge of the Ship when the great Captain abandons the helm.
The Church has authority from God to teach regarding faith and morals, and in her teaching she is preserved from error by the special guidance of the Holy Ghost.
The Church is the work of an Incarnate God.
Nay, He is an impostor, and all Christianity is a miserable failure and a huge deception, since it rests on a false Prophet.
He begins by asserting His own Divine authority and mission.
When the mother stretches forth her hand the child follows unhesitatingly.
Jesus sends forth the Apostles with plenipotentiary powers to preach the Gospel.
He does not instruct them to scatter Bibles broadcast over the earth, but to teach by word of mouth.
This commission evidently applies not to the Apostles only, but also to their successors, to the end of time, since it was utterly impossible for the Apostles personally to preach to the whole world.
The Roman Pantheon was dedicated to all the gods of the Empire, and their name was legion.
It is the property of the human mind to embrace truth wherever it finds it.
INFALLIBLE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH.
The New Testament was not completed till the close of the first century.
Preaching the same creed everywhere and at all times; teaching holiness and truth, she is, of course, essentially unerring in her doctrine; for what is one, holy or unchangeable must be infallibly true.
When the infant seeks nourishment at its mother's breast it does not analyze its food.
You admit infallible certainty in the physical sciences; why should you deny it in the science of salvation?
Her record in the past ought to be a sufficient warrant that she will tolerate no doctrinal variations in the future.
He can tell what point in the heavens a planet will reach on a given day.
The following text of the same import forms the concluding words recorded of our Savior in St. Matthew's Gospel: "All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth.
The astronomer can predict with accuracy a hundred years beforehand an eclipse of the sun or moon.
A Pantheon as vast as Westminster Abbey would hardly be spacious enough to contain life-sized statues for their accommodation.
It would, therefore, be not only an act of irreverence, but of sheer folly, to disobey the voice of this ever-truthful Mother.
"Whosoever will not receive you, nor hear your words, going forth from that house or city, shake the dust from your feet.
If so, you are in doubt whether you are listening to truth or falsehood.
He is not even a prophet, since He predicted falsehood.
She is the organ of the Holy Ghost. She is the Representative of Jesus Christ, who has said to her: "He that heareth you heareth Me; he that despiseth you despiseth Me." She is the Mistress of truth.
If your church is not infallible it is liable to err, for there is no medium between infallibility and liability to error.
If she is our Mother, where is our love and obedience?
If, as we have seen, the Church has authority from God to teach, and if she teaches nothing but the truth, is it not the duty of all Christians to hear her voice and obey her commands?
But besides these presumptive arguments, we have positive evidence from Scripture that the Church cannot err in her teachings.
If your church and her ministers are fallible in their doctrinal teachings, as they admit, they may be preaching falsehood to you, instead of truth.
"All power is given," etc.
There is no just ground for denying to the Apostolic teachers of the nineteenth century in which we live a prerogative clearly possessed by those of the first, especially as the Divine Word nowhere intimates that this unerring guidance was to die with the Apostles.
We all carry "this treasure (of innocence) in earthen vessels."
She will never suffer her children to be ensnared by these impostures, how specious soever they may be.
God loves us as much as He loved the primitive Christians; Christ died for us as well as for them and we have as much need of unerring teachers as they had.
I do not mean, of course, that the Pastors of the Church are personally impeccable or not subject to sin. Every teacher in the Church, from the Pope down to the humblest Priest, is liable at any moment, like any of the faithful, to fall from grace and to stand in need of moral reformation.
The mariner, guided by his compass, knows, amid the raging storm and the darkness of the night, that he is steering his course directly to the city of his destination; and is not an infallible guide as necessary to conduct you to the city of God in heaven?
I became as a little child, and rushed like a lisping babe into the arms of my mother." By Baptism Christians become children of the Church, no matter who pours upon them the regenerating waters.
The one cannot exist without the other.
But it is a marvelous fact worthy of record that in the whole history of the Church, from the nineteenth century to the first, no solitary example can be adduced to show that any Pope or General Council ever revoked a decree of faith or morals enacted by any preceding Pontiff or Council.
My meaning is that the Church is not susceptible of being reformed in her doctrines.
But when I became a Catholic all my doubts ended, my inquiries ceased.
They found one familiar spot in a strange land. They stood in the church of their fathers, in the home of their childhood; and they seemed to say in their hearts, as a tear trickled down their sun-burnt cheeks, "How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts!
Once more they were at home.
The prophecies were fulfilled.
It is no credit to us to belong to the body of the Church Catholic if we are not united to the soul of the Church by a life of faith, hope and charity.
They flocked from Damascus and Mount Libanus and from the Holy Land, sanctified by the footprints of our blessed Redeemer.
But the delusion is so transparent that the attempt must provoke a smile even among themselves.
One righteous soul that reflects the beauty and perfections of the Lord, is more precious in His sight than the mass of humanity that has no spiritual life, and is dead to the inspirations of grace.
They observed the Priest at the altar in his sacred vestments.
All parts of the habitable globe were represented at the Council.
It is said, with truth, that the sun never sets on British dominions.
The sectarians of the fourth and fifth centuries, as St. Augustine tells us, used to attempt the same pious fraud, but signally failed:
My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord.
Secret societies, of whatever name, form but a weak and counterfeit bond of union compared with the genuine fellowship created by Catholic faith, hope and charity.
They were gathered together from different parts of Africa and Oceanica.
CATHOLICITY.
They spoke every civilized language under the sun.
Afraid of going so far, they gratify their vanity by privately calling themselves Catholic.
Ours is the only Church which adopts this name as her official title.
We possess not only the name, but also the reality.
Quite recently a number of European emigrants arrived in Richmond.
The Roman Catholic Church, then, exclusively merits the title of Catholic, because her children abound in every part of the globe and comprise the vast majority of the Christian family.
Of the thousand Bishops and upwards now comprising the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, nearly eight hundred attended the opening session, the rest being unavoidably absent.
This Catholicity, or universality, is not to be found in any, or in all, of the combined communions separated from the Roman Catholic Church.
Every object that met their eye sadly reminded them that they were far from their own sunny Italy.
But we must remember that when they were uttered the true God was known and adored only in an obscure, almost isolated, corner of the earth, while triumphant idolatry was the otherwise universal religion of the world.
This because when dried they diminish considerably in size.
(Pane di fegato)
Cut each artichoke into four parts and put them to boil in salt water for only five minutes.
96
Take some lean veal (quantity in proportion to the squashes) cut it into pieces and place it on the fire in a saucepan with a hash of onion, parsley, celery, carrot, a little corned beef cut in little pieces, a little oil, salt and pepper.
86
This is an excellent soup, but as it requires boiled or roast breast of chicken or turkey it is well to make it only when these ingredients are handy.
One of the beneficial results of the Great War has been the teaching of thrift to the American housewife.
Poach two eggs for each person, one on each slice of bread and place the slices on a large and deep dish (not in a soup tureen).
3
Cut the sticks in little pieces about half an inch long and put them in boiling water. Five or six minutes' cooking will be sufficient.
PAVESE SOUP
The ravioli are then to be served hot seasoned with cheese and butter or with brown stock or tomato sauce.
LENTIL SOUP
1
Cut from this sheet of paste rounds measuring about three inches in diameter.
Fry croutons of stale bread in oil and serve them in the soup.
Add to the meat some pieces of bones and "soup greens" as, for instance, celery, carrots and parsley.
(Zuppa di fagiuoli)
Mash the potatoes and mix them with chicken or turkey breast well ground, grated cheese (Parmesan or Swiss), two or more yolks of eggs, salt and a small quantity of nutmeg.
Roll it as thin as an eighth of an inch.
VEGETABLE SOUP
The minestrone is equally good eaten cold.
(Zuppa Sante)
SOUP OF "CAPPELLETTI"
BEAN SOUP
VEGETABLE CHOWDER
RAVIOLI
Pour cold water upon them, so that they are entirely covered.
When the vegetables are a delicate brown add to them two cups of the broth from the beans and 1 cup of tomatoes (canned or fresh).
Then add broth and cook until the vegetables are very tender.
5
7
To the meat and almond add some bread crumbs, first soaked in milk or broth, in the proportion of about one fifth of the quantity of the meat.
This soup may be served as it is or rubbed through a sieve before serving.
Allow about a cup of flour to an egg.
Prepare a certain quantity of boiled potatoes, the mealy kind being preferred.
(Zuppa di lenticchie)
Cover the saucepan so that it is hermetically closed and place on the cover a receptacle containing water, which must be constantly renewed.
One slice of stale bread may be cut into cubes, fried in deep fat, and the croutons put in the soup.
For patriotic reasons and for reasons of economy, more attention has been bestowed upon the preparing and cooking of food that is to be at once palatable, nourishing and economical.
All these ingredients are to be rubbed to a very smooth paste and hot broth is to be added to them.
Cut as many thin slices of bread as are needed in order that each person may have at least two of them.
Then place it on a low fire and stir gently.
To give a brown color to the broth, some sugar, first browned at the fire, then diluted in cold water, may be added.
Put them over the fire with a small quantity of cooking oil or butter substitute, and let them fry until they have absorbed the fat.
The best and most tender paste is made simply of eggs, flour and salt, water may be substituted for part of the eggs, for economy, or when a less rich paste is needed.
A good combination is that of lentils and rice.
Pour the compound on the bread board with a quantity of flour sufficient to make a paste and roll it in little sticks as thick as the small finger.
This is made with the white meat of chicken, which is to be ground in a meat grinder together with blanched almonds (5 or 6) for one quart of chicken stock.
6
Any vegetable left over may be added.
Chop and grind pieces of roast or boiled chicken meat: add to it an equal part of marrow from the bones of beef and pieces of brains, three yolks, some crumbs of bread soaked in milk or broth and some grated cheese (Parmesan or Swiss).
9
Rub through a sieve and make little balls as big as a hazel-nut, which are to be placed at equal distances (a little more than an inch) in a line over the sheet of paste.
If you wish the soup to be richer and have a more milky consistency, use the yolk of an egg, which should be beaten, and have a few tablespoonfuls of hot broth stirred into it before adding to the soup.
Send it to the table with a dish of grated cheese.
These slices are then to be toasted and browned with butter.
PREFACE
In the middle of each circle place a spoonful of filling that must be made beforehand, composed of cooked meat (chicken, pork or veal) ground very fine and seasoned with grated cheese, grated lemon peel, nutmeg, allspice, salt.
(Panata)
Then spread the paste to a thin sheet, as thin as a ten-cent piece.
It is preferable to put the beans to cook in cold water with a pinch of soda.
Cut off a small slice of the pork and beat it to a paste with two or three sprigs of parsley, a little celery and one kernel of garlic.
10
The soup stock, besides being used for soups, is a necessary ingredient in hundreds of Italian dishes.
One cup of dried beans, kidney, navy or lima is to be soaked over night. Then boil until tender.
While it is not considered that the broth has much nutritive power, it is excellent to promote the digestion.
And who could deny, knowing the thriftiness of the Italian race, that it is economical?
Cover these with another sheet of paste, press down the intervals between each ball, and then separate each section from the other with a knife.
GNOCCHI
Put on the bread board about two pounds of flour in a heap; make a hollow in the middle and put in it a piece of butter, three egg-yolks, salt and three or four tablespoonfuls of lukewarm water.
To obtain good broth the meat must be put in cold water, and then allowed to boil slowly.
Any kind of vegetables may be used for this soup: carrots, celery, cabbage, turnips, onions, potatoes, spinach, the outside leaves of lettuce or greens of any variety.
Moisten the edges of each section with the finger dipped in cold water, to make them stick together, and press them down with the fingers or the prongs of a fork.
First a thin sheet of paste is made according to the following directions:
Nearly all the Italian soups are made on a basis of broth.
The ground meat is to be mixed with an equal amount of curds or cottage cheese.
Add this paste to the pork and water.
It is composed of bread crumbs and grated bread, eggs, grated cheese, nutmeg (in very small quantity) and salt, all mixed together and put in broth previously prepared, which must be warm at the moment of the immersion, but not at the boiling point.
QUEEN'S SOUP
8
(Zuppa Regina)
Croutons or triangles of dry toast make an excellent addition.
11
Put the flour on a bread board, make a hollow in the middle and break in the egg.
Knead it thoroughly, adding more flour if necessary, until you have a paste you can roll out.
Make a paste and knead it well, then let it stand for an hour, wrapped or covered with a linen cloth.
(Brodo)
It is not a pretentious book, and the recipes have been made as clear and simple as possible.
Some of the dishes described are not peculiar to Italy.
Jane had, however, made efforts in behalf of the drawing-room, in which her mistress spent her days.
"Please come back.
On the other hand, she presents to you the manner and aspect of a woman who is absolutely not dubious, and who is merely anxious on the one point a dubious person would be indifferent to.
Emily blushed to her ears with embarrassment.
Perhaps she ought to have courage to say nothing.
Dr. Warren had seen the change wrought, and had noted evidences that money was not unobtainable.
"Captain Osborn has detained your letter.
She stood trying to smile, and looking so entirely nice and well-behaved even in her agitation.
Warren turned quickly and looked at her.
Emily answered all his questions with her usual sweet, good sense.
'I want to keep safe.' That was it.
And perhaps now in her terror she had put herself into a ridiculous position.
The maid also was a young woman whose manner towards her mistress was not merely respectful and well-bred, but suggestive of watchful affection bordering on reverence.
"I ought to have remembered how strange it would sound," she said in her amenable voice.
Dr. Warren was evidently following the thought seriously.
if--
She did not look as poor Mrs. Jerrold had looked, but she was not in a normal state.
I will go and see her again to-morrow.
I hope you won't mind my troubling you.
Jane Cupp herself was a certificate of decorum and good standing.
She walked to the writing-table and picked up a number of letters.
Isn't it, then, possible that over-wrought physical condition may have driven her to the belief that she is hiding from danger."
I was Emily Fox-Seton.
He had been asked such things before by women, but they usually added trying detail accompanied by sobs, and appealed to his chivalry for impossible aid.
"Far from it.
"Was there any disturbing reason for the faint?" he inquired.
"That must not go on," he said.
Mrs. Jameson was sitting at a writing-table.
"She has had a shock," he thought.
Tea was brought up, and he drank it with her.
"She said," reflecting, "that all that mattered was that she should be safe.
"Yes, yes.
He wondered if the time had not come when she would confide in him.
"I can see that," was his answer.
Sometimes they implored him to go to people and use his influence.
But Mary had been right.
Good heavens!
Perhaps only a silly woman would have done such a queer, unconventional thing.
She brought them to him almost composedly.
He himself saw that her mood was not normal.
I am--I am Lady Walderhurst."
"I am so thankful," she said devoutly.
"Yes," she answered.
I--oh!--I really think I ought to tell you."
She looked nervously undecided, but let him go towards the door.
"It was because I was--very much disappointed," she answered, hesitating.
Her move forward was curiously sudden.
He did not believe her.
"The information you sent him is the most important, and moving, a man in his position could receive."
You are very enlightening, Mary, always.
"I am so anxious, and I am sure it must be bad for one to be anxious always.
But it was so lonely not to dare to ask anyone's advice, that she was getting frightened.
It was not unlikely that presently she would ask him what she should do.
Her frank face was only a little more troubled than it had been before.
The unadorned straightforwardness of the relation made it an amazing thing to hear, even more amazing than it would have been made by a more imaginative handling.
It was not explainable that what she had written did not matter at all, that James should have made no reply.
It might be safer.
How could she send for Lady Maria to Mortimer Street and explain to her?
She had introduced palliations by degrees and with an unobtrusiveness which was not likely to attract the attention of neighbours unaccustomed to lavish delivery by means of furniture vans.
He barely managed to restrain a start.
"No, no," she said.
Mrs. Warren warmed with her subject.
"I was awake all night," she added.
"Poor woman!"
That was an Extraordinary Case too."
"There is something you want to tell me?" he said quietly.
Anxiety might make her ill before she could receive a reply to a second letter.
Her obvious inability to cope with the unusual and villainous, combined with her entire willingness to obliterate herself in any manner in her whole-souled tenderness for the one present object of her existence, were things a man could not be unmoved by, even though experience led him to smile at the lack of knowledge of the world which had left her without practical defence.
The yellowish marbled paper on the walls depressed the mind as one passed it; the indeterminate dun paint had defied fog for years.
"It is impossible that it should be otherwise.
"I was thinking--and thinking," nervously.
One of her charms is the nice respect she seems to feel for the remarks of others."
She realised also that her ladyship's sense of humour might not be a thing to confide in safely.
The stairway was of the ordinary lodging-house type, its dinginess somewhat alleviated by the fact that the Cupps had covered the worn carpet with clean warm-coloured felting.
The day was dull and cold, but the front room was warm and made cheerful by fire.
Lord Walderhurst has not seen it."
She was not well.
He saw this in her ingenuous troubled face.
It was not such young women who secluded themselves with questionable situations.
He turned towards her, wishing that Mary were with him.
Her face was a little dragged, and the first thing he noted in the eyes she lifted to him was that they were bewildered.
If excitability is liveliness, she is dull."
Life began to come back to her.
My name is not Mrs. Jameson, Dr. Warren.
She did not any longer bloom with normal health.
I was married last year.
She looked straight into his eyes without a doubt of his presently believing her.
She lifted her head with new courage and her colour returned.
Gran just back on ski; left party at 5 1/4 miles.
Taylor and Atkinson went up to the Ramp thermometer screen.
A FRESH MS.
There was an excellent picture showing the find of sponges on the Koettlitz Glacier.
I think it would be good to have a renewal of air at bed time, but don't quite know how to manage this.
Backlash caused an unreliable record, and this arrangement had to be abandoned.
CHAPTER XII
Although I felt somewhat annoyed, I had no serious anxiety at this time, and as several members came out of the hut I despatched them short distances to shout and show lanterns and arranged to have a paraffin flare lit on Wind Vane Hill.
Our people have been far out on the floe.
One may well wonder how such a phenomenon is possible.
The blizzards proper seem to be always preceded by an overcast sky in accordance with Simpson's theory.
We found that our loose dogs had been attacking a seal, and then came across a dead seal which had evidently been worried to death some time ago.
Heaps of large sponges were found containing corals and some shells, all representative of present-day fauna.
Estimate 8 tons to return of ship.
Taylor gave a most interesting lecture on the physiographic features of the region traversed by his party in the autumn.
We miss the Crozier Party.
Confident of his good intentions but doubtful of his fortitude.
One must wear finnesko on the Barrier, and with finnesko alone a loose binding is necessary.
The contributors are anonymous, but I have succeeded in guessing the identity of the greater number.
The timekeeper is perfectly placed.
We brought a self-recording instrument from New Zealand, but this was passed over to Campbell.
It will cross the meridian at night, worse luck, but such days as this will be pleasant even with a low moon; one is very glad to think the Crozier Party are having such a peaceful time.
Mention was made of the difference of water found in Lake Bonney by me in December 1903 and the Western Party in February 1911.
It is a very good little volume, bound by Day in a really charming cover of carved venesta wood and sealskin.
It has not been an easy matter to manufacture one for our own use.
Coal remaining 20 1/2 tons.
Says Meares and Simpson are returning on foot.
The wind fell within an hour almost as suddenly as it had arisen; the temperature followed, only a little more gradually.
The long spell of fine weather is very satisfactory.
If we can perfect this arrangement it should be of the greatest use to us.
All good luck go with them.
How on earth did they get to the place where found?
There is little doubt, however, that the water movement is erratic and irregular inside the islands, and I have been anxious to get observations which will indicate the movement in the 'Strait.' I went with him to-day to find a crack which I thought must run to the north from Inaccessible Island.
In the jokes of a small community it is rare to recognise one which would appeal to an outsider, but some of the happier witticisms of this article seem to me fit for wider circulation than our journal enjoys at present.
The moon is rising again; it came over the shoulder of Erebus about 5 P.M., in second quarter.
With helping contingent I went round the Cape.
The Editor has taken a statistical paper of my own on the plans for the Southern Journey and a well-written serious article on the Geological History of our region by Taylor.
Say 190 days at 106 lbs. per day.
This will be disturbing to our theories unless the wind drops again very soon.
If it does, 'evaporation' becomes a matter of primary importance.
Evans, P.O., has arisen well to the occasion as a boot maker, and has just completed a pair of shoes which are very nearly what we require.
Awaiting the Crozier Party
Such speculations are interesting.
I feel sure these gravity results are going to be very good.
After these parties got away, Meares and Debenham started with a lantern to search to and fro over the surface of our promontory.
This is in excess of 4 blocks per day as follows:
In the afternoon the wind modified slightly.
It is good to find the seals so close, but very annoying to find that the dogs have discovered their resting-place.
There was a good deal of discussion on the point and no very satisfactory solution offered.
No weather to be in the open.
I had by this time learnt that Atkinson had left with comparatively light clothing and, still worse, with leather ski boots on his feet; fortunately he had wind clothing.
A shoe weighs 13 oz. against 2 lbs. for a single ski boot--so that shoe and finnesko together are less weight than a boot.
At length Clissold and I were left alone in the hut, and as the hours went by I grew ever more alarmed.
Already such signs of day are inspiriting.
I unhesitatingly attribute this effort to Taylor, but Wilson and Garrard make Meares responsible for it.
His mind is very luminous and clear and he treated the subject with a breadth of view which was delightful.
The only difficulty is the low temperature, which freezes his breath on the glass window of the protecting dome.
It is impossible to listen to such a tale without appreciating that it has been a close escape or that there would have been no escape had the blizzard continued.
Wright has been swinging the pendulum in his cavern.
A quiet day.
We should have 13 or 14 tons for next year.
He made this 200 yards in the direction he supposed correct, and found nothing.
Whilst this desultory search proceeded the wind sprang up again from the south, but with no great force, and meanwhile the sky showed signs of clearing and the moon appeared dimly through the drifting clouds.
Total estimate for year, 17 tons.
Sunday routine and nothing much to record.
The motion of the wire was then made to actuate the recorder through a hinged lever, and this arrangement holds, but days and even weeks have been lost in grappling the difficulties of adjustment between the limits of the tide and those of the recording drum; then when all seemed well we found that the floe was not rising uniformly with the water.
We are now getting good records with the tide gauge after a great deal of trouble.
BOOK
It seems certain that water must go on accumulating in the lake during the two or three summer months, and it is hard to imagine that all can be lost again by the winter's evaporation.
Simpson, Meares and Gran continued and have not yet returned.
Coal Consumption
Ponting tells me that Debenham knows quite a lot about photography and goes to work in quite the right way.
Ponting photographed them by flashlight and attempted to get a cinematograph picture by means of a flash candle.
'Where the (Queen's) Law does not carry it is irrational to exact an observance of other and weaker rules.'--RUDYARD KIPLING.
Thin stratus cloud forming and dissipating overhead, curling stratus clouds over Erebus.
Day has given much of his time to the matter, and after a good deal of discussion has pretty well mastered the principles.
And with a shrill laugh to point this sour-grape sentiment, and mark her disdain for Lucian, the fair Bella took herself and her lean form out of the room.
"Mr. Wrent left me shortly after Christmas.
"Where did he go to, Miss Tyler?"
If I were you I would not even see Mrs. Vrain."
"Yes, I think that is the next step to take.
"So may Abraham, Jacob, and all the fathers of our people assist me," said Isaac, "I cannot make the choice, because I have not the means of satisfying your exorbitant demand!"
Each had in his hand a small pannier; and, when they entered the dungeon, they stopt at the door until Front-de-Boeuf himself carefully locked and double-locked it.
I deemed that yonder black-browed girl had been thy concubine, and I gave her to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, after the fashion of patriarchs and heroes of the days of old, who set us in these matters a wholesome example."
He paused within three steps of the corner in which the unfortunate Jew had now, as it were, coiled himself up into the smallest possible space, and made a sign for one of the slaves to approach.
At the rate of a mark of gold for each six pounds of silver, thou shalt free thy unbelieving carcass from such punishment as thy heart has never even conceived."
"Robber and villain!" said the Jew, retorting the insults of his oppressor with passion, which, however impotent, he now found it impossible to bridle, "I will pay thee nothing--not one silver penny will I pay thee, unless my daughter is delivered to me in safety and honour!"
I thought your race had loved nothing save their moneybags."
"I would," said the Norman, somewhat relenting, "that I had known of this before.
My daughter--O my ducats--O my daughter! ------O my Christian ducats! Justice--the Law--my ducats, and my daughter! --Merchant of Venice
I can bear the reproaches of a loser, even when that loser is a Jew.
"I crave pardon, noble lord," said Isaac timidly, "but wherefore should I rely wholly on the word of one who will trust nothing to mine?"
The good God of nature never made a heart capable of exercising such cruelty!"
My daughter is my flesh and blood, dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty threatens.
The unhappy Jew returned a feeble affirmative.
"It is impossible," exclaimed the miserable Jew--"it is impossible that your purpose can be real!
This dungeon is no place for trifling.
But for thee is reserved a long and lingering death, to which theirs were luxury."
The assistants, taking their directions more from the Baron's eye and his hand than his tongue, once more stepped forward, laid hands on the unfortunate Isaac, plucked him up from the ground, and, holding him between them, waited the hard-hearted Baron's farther signal.
But Front-de-Boeuf only laughed, and himself filled up the blank at which the Jew had hesitated.
The Saracens produced from their baskets a quantity of charcoal, a pair of bellows, and a flask of oil.
The poor Jew had been hastily thrust into a dungeon-vault of the castle, the floor of which was deep beneath the level of the ground, and very damp, being lower than even the moat itself.
Fitzdotterel drew his poniard upon me in mine own chamber, because I craved him for mine own silver.
Front-de-Boeuf himself opened the scene by thus addressing his ill-fated captive.
The whole appearance of the dungeon might have appalled a stouter heart than that of Isaac, who, nevertheless, was more composed under the imminent pressure of danger, than he had seemed to be while affected by terrors, of which the cause was as yet remote and contingent.
He had no weapon, excepting a poniard at his belt, which served to counterbalance the weight of the bunch of rusty keys that hung at his right side.
"There will, there must!" exclaimed Isaac, wringing his hands in agony; "when did Templars breathe aught but cruelty to men, and dishonour to women!"
The Jew remained, without altering his position, for nearly three hours, at the expiry of which steps were heard on the dungeon stair.
The unhappy Isaac was deprived not only of the power of rising to make the obeisance which his terror dictated, but he could not even doff his cap, or utter any word of supplication; so strongly was he agitated by the conviction that tortures and death were impending over him.
"I swear to you, noble knight," said the Jew "by all which I believe, and by all which we believe in common---"
"Because thou canst not help it, Jew," said the knight, sternly.
He had therefore experience to guide him, as well as hope, that he might again, as formerly, be delivered as a prey from the fowler.
"Think not so vilely of us, Jews though we be," said Isaac, eager to improve the moment of apparent sympathy; "the hunted fox, the tortured wildcat loves its young--the despised and persecuted race of Abraham love their children!"
The lovers of the chase say that the hare feels more agony during the pursuit of the greyhounds, than when she is struggling in their fangs.
"Yet hear me," said the Jew--"for the sake of that very wealth which thou wouldst obtain at the expense of thy---" Here he stopt short, afraid of irritating the savage Norman.
At one end of this ghastly apartment was a large fire-grate, over the top of which were stretched some transverse iron bars, half devoured with rust.
On the other hand, the stately form of the Norman appeared to dilate in magnitude, like that of the eagle, which ruffles up its plumage when about to pounce on its defenceless prey.
Tell down thy ransom, I say, and rejoice that at such rate thou canst redeem thee from a dungeon, the secrets of which few have returned to tell.
"In these very scales shalt thou weigh me out," said the relentless Baron, "a thousand silver pounds, after the just measure and weight of the Tower of London."
Neither was it the first time that Isaac had been placed in circumstances so dangerous.
Take my life if thou wilt, and say, the Jew, amidst his tortures, knew how to disappoint the Christian."
And thus it is probable, that the Jews, by the very frequency of their fear on all occasions, had their minds in some degree prepared for every effort of tyranny which could be practised upon them; so that no aggression, when it had taken place, could bring with it that surprise which is the most disabling quality of terror.
This formidable baron was clad in a leathern doublet, fitted close to his body, which was frayed and soiled with the stains of his armour.
I waste no more words with thee--choose between thy dross and thy flesh and blood, and as thou choosest, so shall it be."
This is MY treasure-chamber.
The motions of these men were slow and solemn, as if there impended over their souls some preconception of horror and of cruelty.
"I am, then," said Isaac, "only to be set at liberty, together with mine wounded friend?"
"I swear by the Talmud," said the Jew, "that your valour has been misled in that matter.
CHAPTER XXII
"And what is to be my surety," said the Jew, "that I shall be at liberty after this ransom is paid?"
These apertures admitted, even at mid-day, only a dim and uncertain light, which was changed for utter darkness long before the rest of the castle had lost the blessing of day.
"Let my daughter Rebecca go forth to York," answered Isaac, "with your safe conduct, noble knight, and so soon as man and horse can return, the treasure---"
The term of payment was due at the Passover."
The Jew groaned deeply.--"Grant me," he said, "at least with my own liberty, that of the companions with whom I travel.
The only light was received through one or two loop-holes far above the reach of the captive's hand.
He was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged him back energetically into the hovel.
Let us arrange this matter in an amicable way.
Now, if you will permit me, we will converse quietly.
You know where you left the team?"
Here Thenardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words, and casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--
"For whom is this letter?"
At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up from the corridor.
I see that you understand your situation.
You have not made an outcry; that is because you don't care to have the police and the courts come in any more than we do.
It is because,--I have long suspected it,--you have some interest in hiding something.
The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen and wrote:--
I only ask one thing of you.
"I will dictate."
"We can come to an understanding.
"My feet are cold!" said he.
As they set off, Thenardier thrust his head through the half-open door, and shouted into the corridor:--
"Good!" growled Thenardier.
"Be easy.
'Murder!' That, too, is said occasionally, and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken it in bad part. It is very natural that you should make a little row when you find yourself with persons who don't inspire you with sufficient confidence. You might have done that, and no one would have troubled you on that account.
The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thenardier's voice shouted:--
I only want two hundred thousand francs."
"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted to be in it.
I don't demand that.
A herculean struggle had begun.
"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thenardier, and he continued to dictate:--
I'm not extortionate.
"What!
"How do you expect me to write?
There's no business going on."
"Address it, 'Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house.
Come with confidence."
He said "the Lark," he said "the little one," but he did not pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man guarding his secret from his accomplices.
For example, because you are a millionnaire, I told you that I exacted money, a lot of money, a deal of money.
At such a gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters of an hour."
Thenardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.
To mention the name was to deliver the whole "affair" into their hands, and to tell them more about it than there was any need of their knowing.
"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thenardier, "you are quite right."
"Here's the letter.
It's a handy lodging.
It was the group composed of Pontmercy and Thenardier; the sergeant the rescuer, the colonel rescued.
"I do not know what you mean."
They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window, and there they held him in awe.
And after the police?
All retired towards the door.
It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.
Thenardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for Marius the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular person on whom Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.
"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our discretion, that no human power can get you out of this, and that we shall be really grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable extremities.
You will say to me: 'But I haven't two hundred thousand francs about me.' Oh!
Justice.
The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had been carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his own life, that resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature, which is to utter a cry, all this, it must be confessed, now that his attention had been called to it, troubled Marius, and affected him with painful astonishment.
And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.
But, in short, you did not shout, and it is better so.
I have it in my bosom."
He went on:--
"For fun," retorted the man.
Thenardier warmed his feet.
The person who will deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me.
Two hundred thousand francs--it's surely worth all that.
I am not one of those people who, because they have the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make themselves ridiculous.
The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all those monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.
"Is Boulatruelle dead?"
Write it yourself."
A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.
What is your name?"
And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--
"You'll tear your shawl."
"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee.
"You address her as thou, do you not?"
Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror, and which did not know the meaning of despair.
I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you, that you will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the letter which you are about to write shall have returned.
As you have not lied about your name, you will not lie about your address.
Thenardier continued:--
"They're going at a fine pace.
"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"
Moreover, his language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated, subdued insolence and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice, and in that rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time previously, one now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."
On our side we have the same interest.
Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish, or of destroying the colonel's saviour?
Thenardier continued:--
Thenardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few moments his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil and cunning sweetness.
I am bound."
"Don't harm him!"
The old man on the bed, who seemed under the influence of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up, with a stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.
The police.
Thenardier went on:--
In the first place, I must communicate to you an observation which I have made which is, that you have not uttered the faintest cry."
But she drove him to look for employment, and lived in tears when he failed.
Standing there in her tall vigorous youth, her furs wrapped about her, she had the air of protecting and guiding this poverty that could not help itself.
He was a poor sickly lad, he was!
"I shan't get took to prison, I tell yer.
And taking up a bit of half-burnt wood which lay on the hearth, he threw it violently back into the grate.
Her wavering eye seemed to interrogate her companion.
I could always do something."
The mother and wife felt herself shy, intimidated.
He stopped on the threshold, straining his eyes to see through the fire-lit gloom.
You'll trust me?
You go and get it.
"I don't know what you're at, I'll swear," he said after a pause.
I'd kill him or myself first.
But their own men on the estate would come first, and there were plenty of them out of work.
His brutality was mostly assumed.
She was far better born and better educated than her husband.
And then suddenly, as though something unexplained had upset her self-control, the poor patient creature utterly broke down.
The door opened and her husband came in.
He and his could just exist, and the man who had been in youth the lonely victim of his neighbours' scorn had found a woman to give him all herself and children to love.
The tears came back to her brown eyes.
The same shudders and terrors, the same shames before the gentry and Mr. Harden!--the soft, timid woman with her conscience could not endure the prospect.
Nevertheless, as she sadly came and went, preparing the supper, she saw that he was appeased, in a better temper than before.
And here he came once more across his enemy.
"I ain't in any pertickler trouble just now--if yer wouldn't send a fellow stumpin' the country for nothink.
"Did you hear of anythink?"
Now, Jim, what's wrong with you--why shouldn't I tell?"
As to the advertisement she had brought down, he put it aside almost without looking at it.
He had thought the matter at first too dangerous to touch.
There was a sound outside.
"He can't bear no talk about Westall--it seems to drive him silly.
The wife sat in some agitation a moment, then she resumed.
"Oh, thank you, thank you kindly, miss," said Mrs. Hurd, raising her apron to her eyes to staunch some irrepressible tears, as Marcella showed her the advertisement which it might possibly be worth Hurd's while to answer.
Hurd, notwithstanding, was cunning itself, and Westall lay in wait for him in vain.
With his deformity, his earth-stains, his blue eyes, his brown wrinkled skin, and his shock of red hair, he had the look of some strange gnome crouching there.
The curtains were close-drawn; the paraffin lamp flared on the table, and as the savoury smell of the hare and onions on the fire filled the kitchen, the whole family gathered round watching for the moment of eating.
I was frightened of him. I duresn't trust myself, and I said to Jim I'd take him.
He carried some potatoes in his great earth-stained hands.
Thank you kindly, all the same," she added, breaking off her narrative with the same uncertainty of manner, the same timid scrutiny of her visitor that Marcella had noticed before.
Then she inquired if he had been to ask the steward of the Maxwell Court estate for work.
And for years after their marriage Hurd had allowed her to govern him.
A small, elderly lady, in a very large mushroom hat, drove past her in the dusk and bowed stiffly.
Daisy!--Nellie!"
Meanwhile, all the old hatred between the two men revived. Hurd drank this winter more than he had ever drunk yet.
He had begun to go out again at nights.
"Will!--you come in at once!
I might go and inquire of Westall--I know him a little."
"Yet no doubt he is a valuable keeper; Lord Maxwell would be sorry to lose him!
I'm always thinkin' for you!" she said as though with a little cry, "or we'd soon be in trouble--worse trouble than we are!" she added miserably.
The clatter of a pony carriage disturbed her thoughts.
It is the system makes such men--and must have them."
"Nothink!" he laughed out.
my word.
Mrs. Jellison grumbled, gibed at her, and made long leave-takings, while the daughter stood silent, waiting, and every now and then peering at Marcella, who had never seen her before.
It was necessary to keep on good terms with one or two publicans who acted as "receivers" of the poached game of the neighbourhood.
And as for Mrs. Hurd, as soon as she saw the keeper's wife, she turned her back abruptly on her visitor, and walked to the other end of the kitchen.
"But that was long ago, surely," she said.
I don't want nothing to do with Westall."
Soon the old people were dim chattering shapes in a red darkness.
you'd wonder how he grew up at all.
Low wages, the burden of quick-coming children, the bad sanitary conditions of their wretched cottage, and poor health, had made their lives one long and sordid struggle.
Hence years of submission, a hidden flowering time for both of them.
Mrs. Hurd still plaited, silent and upright, lifting her head every now and then at each sound upon the road.
She took Mrs. Hurd's hand with a sweet look and gesture.
Marcella barely nodded.
But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she made the tea.
So, in spite of his dumb resistance, she lingered on, questioning and suggesting.
Mrs. Hurd's expression was one of miserable discomfort, and she kept twisting her apron in her gnarled hands.
For George Westall was now in the far better-paid service of the Court--and a very clever keeper, with designs on the head keeper's post whenever it might be vacant.
"You see, miss, they don't speak, don't Jim and George Westall.
But after the first relief Minta had gone in fear and trembling.
Then he turned angrily, and went out of the cottage by the back door into the garden.
And opening the door he stood on the threshold looking up and down the village street, while Minta once more gave up the struggle, dried her eyes, and told herself to be cheerful.
At last there was a knock at the door.
In the case of a poacher he had the scent of one of his own hares.
He sat by the fire quivering and thinking.
But it was hard.
"And I will." Against her will she reddened a little; but she had not been able to help throwing out the promise.
And now, after seven months of regular field-work and respectable living, it was all to begin again with the new winter!
Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them.
"What?" she said breathlessly.
What did she want to stay all that time for?
"Oh! no, miss, no," said Mrs. Hurd as she went hurriedly to fetch a fur tippet which her visitor had laid down on the dresser.
"He'll try, you may be sure.
For Hurd had risen, and as he and his wife looked at each other a sort of mute conversation seemed to pass between them.
Mrs. Hurd flew to the door, and a short, deformed man, with a large head and red hair, stumbled in blindly, splashed with mud up to his waist, and evidently spent with long walking.
"Mother, I'm going your way," said a strident voice.
Meanwhile, in the lane outside, Marcella, as she walked home, passed a tall broad-shouldered man in a velveteen suit and gaiters, his gun over his shoulder and two dogs behind him, his pockets bulging on either side.
"But we'll see.
"But--Michael Carstairs was never married!" declared Mr. Portlethorpe.
ALL IN ORDER
Now that I saw the Smeaton letter and the signature of the first witness to Gilverthwaite's will, side by side, I had no hesitation in thinking as Mr. Lindsey did.
When did you last see Sir Gilbert Carstairs?"
It was an exceptionally curious, not to say eccentric, handwriting--some of the letters were oddly formed, other letters were indicated rather than formed at all.
"And what I say, Portlethorpe," retorted Mr. Lindsey, "is that I'm going to be convinced that it is his own property!
He told me that he was intending to sell off a good deal of the Carstairs property, and that he wanted to reinvest his proceeds in the very best American securities.
And--there's no need for any very close or careful looking, either!--no need for expert calligraphic evidence, or for the use of microscopes.
Mr. Lindsey picked up Gilverthwaite's will and the Smeaton letter, and carefully locked them away in his drawer.
"Everything is in order, you see, Lindsey!
"And surely he would know!"
"Just that," said Mr. Lindsey.
This telegram he left with his housekeeper--to be dispatched as soon as the post-office was open.
I'll stake all I'm worth that that signature and that letter are the work of the same hand!"
CHAPTER XXIX
"Quite well known!
Mr. Portlethorpe had listened--so it seemed to me--with a good deal of irritation and impatience; he was clearly one of those people who do not like interference with what they regard as an established order of things, and it evidently irked him to have any questions raised as to the Carstairs affairs--which, of course, he himself had done much to settle when Sir Gilbert succeeded to the title.
"Take your time, Portlethorpe," remonstrated Mr. Lindsey, who was unlocking a drawer in his desk.
Anyway, there was an undeniable, an extraordinary similarity, and even Mr. Portlethorpe had to admit that it was--undoubtedly--there.
So now come to your beds."
"That's very strange, and uncommonly important, Lindsey!" he said. "I--yes, I am certainly inclined to agree with you.
And talking of beds, it's time I was showing you to yours, and that we were all between the sheets, for it's one o'clock in the morning, and we'll have to be stirring again at six sharp.
"Then I'll ask you a question at once," said Mr. Lindsey.
"Then in that case--that young fellow at Dundee is Michael Carstairs' son?" exclaimed Mr. Portlethorpe.
Perhaps," he continued, glancing from one gentleman to the other, "I had better tell you all the facts.
I'm going to see Paley whether you do or not--and you'll be a fool if you don't come."
"Michael Carstairs!"
Sir Gilbert Carstairs came in here, introducing himself, some months ago.
The manager, evidently, was also surprised--by the signs of Mr. Lindsey's surprise.
And that's all--and get your bit of sleep."
"It conveys nothing to me!"
I've set that implement for five o'clock.
That's about it, Portlethorpe."
"Precisely!--then you know as much as I can tell you," replied the manager.
As I say, Sir Gilbert can make what disposal he pleases of his own property."
He found out where the child was hidden, and threatened to take him away.
He left the lodge and went up to the house about two-thirty, was admitted at the east entrance and came out again very soon.
Thomas had a key to the east entry, and gave it to her.
One hand had been badly cut, and it was that, poisoning having set in, which was killing her.
She drooped and fretted, and on the birth of her baby boy, she had died.
Mr. Jamieson almost choked to death.
As he fell, somebody in the billiard-room screamed and ran.
The money was for Lucien's board until she recovered.
There she found Lucien's father, this time under his own name.
"What did I tell you?" she said dramatically.
I was conscience-stricken.
Briefly, then, the housekeeper's story was this:
For three months everything went fairly well.
It was different with the young wife, however.
There she went sometimes to see the boy, and there he had taken fever.
The positions became reversed.
He was going east, after spending the summer at a celebrated ranch in Wyoming--one of those places where wealthy men send worthless and dissipated sons, for a season of temperance, fresh air and hunting.
On one thing she was determined, however: that was that Aubrey Wallace should educate his boy.
Then he realized that Lucien was the ruling passion in this lonely woman's life.
Indeed, for a time, he did so.
Anne took the child, and named him Lucien.
The lower Arnold sank in the scale, the heavier his demands became.
Aubrey took his bride to Chicago, where they lived at a hotel.
I promised to look after little Lucien, and sat with her until the intervals of consciousness grew shorter and finally ceased altogether.
Pursued, she had fled madly, anywhere--through the first door she came to.
She drifted around, doing plain sewing and keeping a home somewhere always for the boy.
It was Arnold Armstrong.
And so she came east.
Mrs. Watson tried to hide from Arnold, but he was ugly.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were doing that very thing, Liddy," he said, when he got his breath.
I left Mr. Jamieson and the day detective going over every inch of the circular staircase, pounding, probing and measuring.
There was only one sister left, the baby, Lucy.
From the fourth step she fired.
She picked it up and turning, ran part way down the circular staircase.
Thomas and she had got Louise quiet, and a little before three, Mrs. Watson started up to the house.
The sisters, of course, knew nothing of this, and the young man's ardor rather carried them away.
There, in a gray-walled room in a high iron bed, lay Mrs. Watson.
Liddy discovered the fresh break in the trunk-room wall while we were at luncheon, and ran shrieking down the stairs.
She left the big house and went down to the lodge.
He had been far from a model husband, even for the three months, and when he disappeared Anne was almost thankful.
But things went so fast there was no time to carry it into effect.
On the way across the lawn she was confronted by Arnold, who for some reason was determined to get into the house.
As sure as you sit there, there's the smell of the graveyard on them.
It was quite dark, but she could see his white shirt-bosom.
With the rupture between him and his family, things were worse.
So all we had for our afternoon's work was this: some one had been shot by the bullet that went through the door; he had not left the village, and he had not called in a physician.
Annie Morton is going to Scotland next week, and you shall go right with her."
I was as certain as possible that he did.
If any such case comes to you, will it be too much trouble for you to let me know?"
Just as we turned from the drive into the road we passed a woman.
River courses, they say, are not temporary--in the main they are archaic.
Mock moons with prismatic patches of colour appeared in the radiant ring, echoes of the main source of light.
It seems more and more certain that a very simple fare is all that is needed here--plenty of seal meat, flour, and fat, with tea, cocoa, and sugar; these are the only real requirements for comfortable existence.
Everything seems to depend on these animals.
We were soon on the floe to welcome the last remnant of our wintering party.
To-night Debenham gave a geological lecture.
It is delightful to contemplate the amount of work which is being done at the station.
Another smaller one is to go on top of the Ramp.
At such times the Bay seems strangely homely, especially when the eye rests on our camp with the hut and lighted windows.
Later on Taylor will deal with the effects of ice and lead us to the formation of the scenery of our own region, and so we shall have much to discuss.
The ice is 9 inches thick, not much for eight or nine days' freezing; but it is very solid--the surface wet but very slippery.
He needs two years here to fully realise these things, and with all his intelligence and energy will produce little unless he has that extended experience.
As a rule we have neither the time nor the desire to look beneath it, and so it is that commonly we accept people on their own valuation.
It is a great comfort to have the men and dogs back, and a greater to contemplate all the ten ponies comfortably stabled for the winter.
With this sentiment the whole company appeared to be in sympathy.
Adjacent to the physicist's corner of the hut Atkinson is quietly pursuing the subject of parasites.
Once or twice in the night a light northerly wind, soon dying away.
Exercised the ponies and held the usual service.
Already he is in a new world.
I would describe him as sustained by artistic enthusiasm.
It is probably air borne, and though no bacteria have been found in the air, this may be carried in upper currents and brought down by the snow.
Everyone was interested naturally.
I have not been far from the hut, but had a great fear on one occasion that the ice had gone out in the Strait.
The laying out of the fish trap was his action and the catches are his field of labour.
Everyone seems to distrust the dogs when it comes to glacier and summit.
Hence modification in positions of river courses and the fact of different parts of a single river being in different stages of cycle.
Landslips have caused the isolation of Lake George and altered the watershed of the whole country to the south.
Here we have a well-trained, sturdy worker, with a quiet meaning that carries conviction; he realises the conceptions of thoroughness and conscientiousness.
There are no strained relations in this hut, and nothing more emphatically evident than the universally amicable spirit which is shown on all occasions.
Yesterday, Friday evening, Taylor gave an introductory lecture on his remarkably fascinating subject--modern physiography.
Some more forage had been fetched in from the depot.
Active mind and active body were never more happily blended.
Taylor's intellect is omnivorous and versatile--his mind is unceasingly active, his grasp wide.
Under ordinary conditions it is so easy to carry a point with a little bounce; self-assertion is a mask which covers many a weakness.
There is only one known place of ascent; it will be interesting to try and find others.
Meares reported everything well and the ponies not far behind.
He has Gran for assistant.
The Strait has been frozen over a week.
This Island is very steep on all sides.
In fact there is no one idle, and no one who has the least prospect of idleness.
The Russian Plains--Examples of 'senility.'
To Bowers' practical genius is owed much of the smooth working of our station.
I have not seen the meteorological record brought back, but it appears that the party had had very fine calm weather since we left them, except during the last three days when wind has been very strong.
They must, in consequence, have their special language.
It was no easy task, and I was glad to get down with only one slip, when I brought myself up with my ice axe in the nick of time to prevent a fall over a cliff.
I do not think there can be any life quite so demonstrative of character as that which we had on these expeditions.
Other details as to the carbide consumed in making acetylene gas may be briefly quoted.
This vehicle is not easily turned, but may be very useful before there is much snowfall.
Yet I wish he would come.
Yesterday we had a game of football; it is pleasant to mess about, but the light is failing.
Such a task completed, he is away to exercise his pony, and later out again with the dogs, the last typically self-suggested, because for the moment there is no one else to care for these animals.
Evans and Crean are repairing sleeping-bags, covering felt boots, and generally working on sledging kit.
I cannot understand why the Hut Point party doesn't return.
Science--the rock foundation of all effort!!
So the current meteorological and magnetic observations are taken as never before by Polar expeditions.
Cherry-Garrard is another of the open-air, self-effacing, quiet workers; his whole heart is in the life, with profound eagerness to help everyone.
I have asked everyone to give thought to the problem, to freely discuss it, and bring suggestions to my notice.
Perhaps the unsettled look stops the party, or perhaps it waits for the moon, which will be bright in a day or two.
Wilson has a charming sketch of the phenomenon.
One wonders why the Hut Point party does not come.
To complete the records a thermometer is to be placed in South Bay.
It is a restless activity, admitting no idle moments and ever budding into new forms.
Instead of this I came to an impossible overhanging cliff of lava, and was forced to descend as I had come up.
It is a strange fact that none of the returning party seem to greatly appreciate the food luxuries they have had since their return.
It was evident that there had been no movement in consequence of yesterday's blow.
Here the outward show is nothing, it is the inward purpose that counts.
It is a triumph to have collected such men.
The party does not come.
We had fish for breakfast this morning, but an even more satisfactory result of the catches has been revealed by Atkinson's microscope.
Simpson, master of his craft, untiringly attentive to the working of his numerous self-recording instruments, observing all changes with scientific acumen, doing the work of two observers at least and yet ever seeking to correlate an expanded scope.
Any way I wish it would return, and shall not be free from anxiety till it does.
Pretence is useless.
Half an hour later Day, Lashly, Nelson, Forde, and Keohane arrived with the two ponies--men and animals in good form.
It's going to be a tough job; that is better realised the more one dives into it.
It would have been the same with us had we not had a day or two in tents before our return.
Such a state of affairs would be delightfully surprising under any conditions, but it is much more so when one remembers the diverse assortment of our company.
So the 'gods' dwindle and the humble supplant them.
Therefrom also, and including more labour, we have an accurate survey of our immediate surroundings and can trust to possess the correctly mapped results of all surveying data obtained.
I am promised the sea-freezing record to-morrow.
After tea Atkinson came in with the glad tidings that the dog team were returning from Hut Point.
It was elementary.
Cherry-Garrard is experimenting in stone huts and with blubber fires--all with a view to prolonging the stay at Cape Crozier.
Now in a similar manner he is spreading thermometer screens to get comparative readings with the home station.
I suppose Meares waits for 12 inches in thickness, or fears the floe is too slippery for the ponies.
Oates' whole heart is in the ponies.
I want to get into his head the larger bearing of the problems which our physical investigations involve.
The wind is dropping this evening, and I have been up to Wind Vane Hill.
Our lectures are a real success.
I now think the ice has remained fast.
It's no use taking up a job you are not fit for.
Having satisfied himself that Raskolnikov was not frightened at his threat, he assumed a mirthful and friendly air.
There followed a moment of terrible, dumb struggle in the heart of Svidrigailov.
A thief steals and knows he is a scoundrel, but I've heard of a gentleman who broke open the mail.
He sprinkled some water over her.
It's a disgusting and ridiculous suspicion.
"Take it!
But we've talked of this more than once before.
Why, you used to reproach me with breadth!
She shuddered and once more looked about her distrustfully.
I told her too the story of Sofya Semyonovna in full detail, suppressing nothing. It produced an indescribable effect on her.
"Aha!
Do you want to betray him?
Is he like that?"
"We couldn't be shouting all over the flat on such a subject.
I have money and friends.
"Even if that were true, it would have been for your sake... you would have been the cause."
And his sister was standing close by him.
"Ah, then you are lying!
The shooting lessons I've given you in the country have not been thrown away."
Here is some water. Drink a little...."
You know my opinions in general, though.
"Cruel man!
I'll do anything--anything!
"You listened?"
Do you remember what a lot of talk we had together on this subject, sitting in the evenings on the terrace after supper?
I am at least twice as strong as you are and I have nothing to fear, besides. For you could not complain afterwards.
But everything is divine in you....
Well, how are you?
It must be interesting.
"No matter, I'll come all the same."
Razumihin brought it to me."
Well, come to my room; you wanted to come and see me, didn't you?
She gasped for breath. "It cannot be.
But if you are convinced that one mustn't listen at doors, but one may murder old women at one's pleasure, you'd better be off to America and make haste.
Let me tell you, he is already being watched; they are already on his track.
Open it!" she called, shaking the door.
"But remorse?
But most likely she is.
"You couldn't have heard anything.
Open the door at once, at once, base man!"
Of course I should not have believed it myself if I'd been told of it as you have, but I believe my own ears.
And that's humiliating for a young man of any pride, in our day especially...."
She fancied he was signalling to beg her not to speak to her brother, but to come to him.
"There is no one at home," he said quietly and emphatically.
You promised to prove it.
"Well, you missed!
Dounia understood it, snatched up the key, flew to the door, unlocked it quickly and rushed out of the room.
He too was trembling all over.
What did you think of him?"
"I know his theory.
"But how could he steal, rob?
Is there such an article?
Now, see!
You seem to have forgotten how you softened to me in the heat of propaganda.
Hey, what?
"I have lost the key and cannot find it."
And as for the murder, he will do all sorts of good deeds yet, to atone for it.
I only spoke to show you that you need have no remorse even if... you were willing to save your brother of your own accord, as I suggest to you.
Her voice now was quite different.
Svidrigailov remained three minutes standing at the window.
I'll send him away at once.
Suddenly she pulled out of her pocket a revolver, cocked it and laid it in her hand on the table.
Besides, she knew him.
Her breath literally failed her.
He picked it up and examined it.
Now come back to my room; we can't sit down here."
When he was alone, he had not gone twenty paces before he sank, as usual, into deep thought.
Raskolnikov decided that his suspicions were at least for that moment unjust.
But I know she may come quite soon.
She had not the slightest doubt now of his unbending determination.
Speak, speak!"
How do you feel?"
I believe it will come on to rain.
The very rustle of it is too much for me.
"You are lying!
If she's gone out, it can only be to see a lady about the orphans.
I know the story and why and how it was invented.
It could be fired again.
Her lower lip was white and quivering and her big black eyes flashed like fire.
On the bridge he stood by the railing and began gazing at the water.
"Where are you going?"
I'll get a passport, two passports, one for him and one for me.
"And...
He took it out of the left pocket of his coat and laid it on the table behind him, without turning or looking at Dounia.
The girl put it beside the other in her pocket, the only trustworthy article of dress she wore.
Baby can laugh in your face, and crow in your ears, and make you feel so happy.
The gentleman walked away, but turning round a few paces off, saw Diamond give his penny to the girl, and, walking slower heard him say:
"He's not right in the head, you know.
"And when you have learned to read, come to me, and I'll give you sixpence and a book with fine pictures in it."
You should hear her swear.
If I choose to be their friend, you know, they can't prevent me.
"Well, here's a penny for you."
"You're a useful little man," said the gentleman.
"Why?" asked Diamond.
It's a good thing she's so blind, though."
You must put her in a passion first, you know.
"How does he know your grandmother, then?
"Doesn't she watch you, then?"
"No, sir."
"Well, they're friends of mine," said Diamond.
You would have to leave out baby then."
"Give it to cripple Jim."
Her grandmother always took care that she had a stout pocket.
"Much the same.
"What else can you do?"
And he took his hands from his pockets, and spreading out the fingers of his left hand, began to count, beginning at the thumb.
"Yes, sir.
"There," he said, "your father will be able to read that, and tell you where to go."
And first of all he strolled with his hands in his pockets up to the crossing, where the girl and her broom were to be found in all weathers.
His father laughed.
Although she called her wicked, the child spoke so as plainly to indicate pride in her grannie's pre-eminence in swearing.
He made no answer to this last appeal, and Diamond ended off with saying:
"No.
He's a good boy--quite."
Here she tapped her forehead with her finger in a significant manner.
"I don't know."
"What's his name!"
"You shouldn't call your grannie wicked," said the gentleman.
A tile loose."
"But you don't want it!"
"Thank you, sir."
"Well--and what else?"
"I don't know his name."
Don't she just!
He does not look like one of her sort."
"Is this your brother?" asked the gentleman of the girl.
The gentleman looked very grave to hear her, for he was sorry that such a nice little girl should be in such bad keeping.
"Surely she's a friend anyhow, father.
"Well, go on," said his father.
But when she gave him a sweet smile in return, and made him a pretty courtesy, he looked at her again, and said:
What could it matter what people called him, so long as he did nothing he ought not to do?
How she do make them laugh, to be sure!"
He was pleased to find it so clean, for the streets were muddy, and he had nice boots on; so he put his hand in his pocket, and gave the girl a penny.
"Can you read?"
Still Diamond, though he heard every word, and understood it too, kept on smiling.
CHAPTER XIX.
"Then there's Jack and Mr. Stonecrop, and, deary me!
"Where do you live, my child?"
"Still you shouldn't say so," he insisted.
Thank you, sir," said Diamond, and put the card in his pocket.
"I can't curry a horse, except somebody puts me on his back.
"They're no friends of mine," said his father.
"Much good they'll do you!" he said.
Just as he was going to speak to her, a tall gentleman stepped upon the crossing.
DIAMOND'S FRIENDS
"We must hold fast to the Christian religion and to the communion of that Church which is Catholic, and which is called Catholic not only by those who belong to her, but also by all her enemies.
We have possession, which is nine-tenths of the law.
Should a stranger ask them to direct him to the Catholic Church they would instinctively point out to him the Roman Catholic Church.
But when they saw the cross surmounting our Cathedral they hastened to it with a joyful step.
The Schismatic churches of the East have no claim to this title because they are confined within the Turkish and Russian dominions, and number not more than sixty million souls.
God forbid that I should write these lines, or that my Catholic readers should peruse them in a boasting and vaunting spirit.
I saw and heard a group of them giving earnest expression to their deep emotions.
They saw the baptismal font and the confessionals.
They saw a multitude of worshipers kneeling around them, and they felt in their heart of hearts that they were once more among brothers and sisters, with whom they had "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all."
The Patriarch Abraham was dearer to Jehovah than all the inhabitants of the corrupt city of Sodom.
They traveled to Rome from Mossul, built near ancient Nineveh, and from Bagdad, founded on the ruins of Babylon.
They beheld the altar and the altar-rails where they received their Maker.
God estimates men not by their numbers, but by their intrinsic worth.
The Bishops assembled from Great Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland and from almost every nation and principality in Europe.
Every day she develops before me new spiritual charms.
I do not wonder that the Church is hated by those who learn what she is from her enemies.
They heaped accusations against you which I will not here repeat.
It is not of their hostility that I complain, but because the judgment they have formed of her is based upon the reckless assertions of her enemies, and not upon those of impartial witnesses.
It is not uncommon for a dialogue like the following to take place between a Protestant Minister and a convert to the Catholic Church:
He held back some points which he knew would be objectionable to you.
You exchange opinion for certainty.
Your knowledge of the truth is not only complete and harmonious, but it becomes fixed and steady.
You acquire a full and connected knowledge of God's revelation.
I could not hope for an eternal reward by deceiving you, for I would thereby purchase for myself eternal condemnation by gaining proselytes at the expense of truth.
You come back like the Prodigal Son to the home of your father and mother.
INTRODUCTION.
There is no Freemasonry in the Catholic Church; she has no secrets to keep back.
We cannot exaggerate the offense of those who thus wilfully malign the Church.
You do not surrender your manhood or your dignity or independence or reasoning powers.
In a large portion of the press, and in pamphlets, and especially in the pulpit, which should be consecrated to truth and charity, she is the victim of the foulest slanders.
But the antidote often comes too late to counteract the poison.
In coming to the Church, you are not entering a strange place, but you are returning to your Father's home.
Instead of the bread of truth, they extended to you the serpent of falsehood.
MY DEAR READER:--Perhaps this is the first time in your life that you have handled a book in which the doctrines of the Catholic Church are expounded by one of her own sons.
You asked for fish, and they reached you a serpent.
Those papers have represented you as men who always appeal to the sword and pistol, instead of the law, to vindicate your private grievances.
Study her history in the pages of truth.
You asked for bread, and they gave you a stone.
It is true that he has been successfully refuted by Lingard and Gairdner.
It is true that the falsehood of those illustrated periodicals has been fully exposed.
Then you enjoy that profound peace which springs from the conscious possession of the truth.
I have made her history and theology the study of my life.
I have seen a picture representing Columbus trying to demonstrate the practicability of his design to discover a new Continent before certain monks who are shaking their fists and gnashing their teeth at him.
You gain everything that is worth having.
Don't you know that in Europe they are taught differently?
Instead of taking these publications as the basis of my information, it was my duty to come among you; to live with you; to read your life by studying your public and private character.
It was thought sufficient to devote but a brief space to such Catholic doctrines and practices as are happily admitted by Protestants, while those that are controverted by them are more elaborately elucidated.
She has not one creed for the initiated and another for outsiders.
You have, no doubt, heard and read many things regarding our Church; but has not your information come from teachers justly liable to suspicion?
It is natural for an honest man to loathe an institution whose history he believes to be marked by bloodshed, crime and fraud.
The garment of joy is placed upon you, the banquet of love is set before you, and you receive the kiss of peace as a pledge of your filiation and adoption.
Though the writer has sought to be exact in all his assertions, an occasional inaccuracy may have inadvertently crept in.
You get possession of the whole truth as it is in Jesus.
They are afraid to tell the truth of her, for
You no longer see it in fragments, but reflected before you in all its beauty, as in a polished mirror.
We have been vilified so long, that they think we have no right to complain.
Not temporal reward, since I seek not your money, but your soul, for which Jesus Christ died.
She would be revealed to you, "Bright as the sun, fair as the moon;" with the beauty of Heaven stamped upon her brow, glorious "as an army in battle array." You would love her, you would cling to her and embrace her.
What motive can I have in misleading you?
There is a commandment which says: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."
PREFACE.
In coming back to the Church, you worship where your fathers worshiped before you, you kneel before the altar at which they knelt, you receive the Sacraments which they received, and respect the authority of the clergy whom they venerated.
Examine her creed.
The longer I know her, the more I admire and venerate her.
The Catholic Church is persistently misrepresented by the most powerful vehicles of information.
You will find them everywhere on the shelves of booksellers, in the libraries of her clergy, on the tables of Catholic families.
This, at least, is the case with thousands of my countrymen whom I have met in the brief course of my missionary career.
She is assailed in romances of the stamp of Maria Monk, and in pictorial papers.
Ask not her enemies what she is, for they are blinded by passion; ask not her ungrateful, renegade children, for you never heard a son speaking well of the mother whom he had abandoned and despised.
Consider what you lose and what you gain in embracing the Catholic religion.
This, friendly reader, is my only motive.
Read her authorized catechisms and doctrinal books.
It substantially embodies the instructions and discourses delivered by him before mixed congregations in Virginia and North Carolina.
I know these charges to be false.
Instead of wishing to bury this treasure in my breast, I long to share it with you, especially as I lose no part of my spiritual riches by communicating them to others.
She has not one set of doctrines for Bishops and Priests, and another for the laity.
Hence, without intending to be unjust, is not your mind biased against us because you listened to false witnesses?
With her children, you would rise up in reverence "and call her blessed."
As autumn drew near Peter discovered that his friends were gathering in flocks, roaming here and there.
Peter looked a little puzzled.
Those eggs would stay there all winter and in the spring hatch out into lice and worms if it were not for me.
It was a lovely throaty little chuckle.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
His back was ashy.
"I guess you guess right," replied Tommy Tit.
The only time I ever get really worried is when the trees are covered with ice.
"I like winter.
It didn't seem to make the least difference to Tommy whether he was right side up or upside down.
In fact he actually failed to recognize some of them at first.
Downy and Hairy the Woodpeckers, Seep-Seep the Brown Creeper and Yank-Yank the Nuthatch are others.
Now Tommy Tit had not gone north in the spring.
It was one of the first signs that summer was nearly over, and it gave him just a little feeling of sadness.
He heard few songs now, for the singing season was over.
I'm not the least bit afraid of Farmer Brown's boy.
Tommy Tit hung head downward from a twig while he picked some tiny insect eggs from the under side of it.
"I know Farmer Brown's boy is the friend of all the little people, and I'm not much afraid of him myself, but just the same I wouldn't dare go near enough for him to touch me."
"I never happened to think of it before.
It was Tommy Tit the Chickadee.
It's just the same way with your own self, Peter.
I want Farmer Brown's boy to feel that I have earned that suet I am sure he will put out for me as soon as the snow and ice come.
At least I can.
I'm thankful I don't have to take that long journey most of the birds have to.
Every time Peter visited the Old Orchard he found him there, and as Tommy was always ready for a bit of merry gossip, Peter soon ceased to miss Jenny Wren.
"Don't you dread the winter, Tommy Tit?" asked Peter one day, as he watched Tommy clinging head down to a twig as he picked some tiny insect eggs from the under side.
Each day saw some slip away. As Peter thought of the dangers of the long trip before them he wondered if he would ever see them again.
But some there were who lingered even after Jack Frost's first visit.
It makes a fellow feel good from the tips of his claws to the tip of his bill.
I like cold weather.
Sammy Jay was one.
"Food makes heat and a warm coat keeps the heat in the body.
"Certainly," said he.
"That's no way of showing true friendship. You've no idea, Peter, what a comfortable feeling it is to know that you can trust a friend, and I feel that Farmer Brown's boy is one of the best friends I've got.
Tommy Tit nodded his little black-capped head vigorously.
If it were not that Farmer Brown's boy is thoughtful enough to hang a piece of suet in a tree for me, I should dread those ice storms more than I do.
You know you are never really warm in winter unless you have plenty to eat..."
He knows I like chopped-up nut-meats, and last winter I used to feed from his hand every day." Peter's eyes opened very wide with surprise.
They were starting on the long journey, planning to take it in easy stages for the most part.
"Now I can't stop to talk any longer.
His tiny bill was black, and his little black eyes snapped and twinkled in a way good to see.
All summer long they were going to school all about him, learning how to watch out for danger, to use their eyes and ears, and all the things a bird must know who would live to grow up.
"Why not?
"I've noticed," said Peter, "that birds who do not sing at any other time of year sing in the spring.
If we didn't stay right here on the job all winter, I don't know what would become of the Old Orchard."
And one there was whom Peter loves dearly.
Downy and Hairy the Woodpeckers were others.
"Dee, Dee, Chickadee! Leave that matter just to me,"
I discovered a secret a long time ago, Peter; shall I tell it to you?"
Chuckled Tommy Tit.
What's the good of having friends if you can't trust them?
"What I mean is, if a fellow has plenty to eat he will keep the cold out, and I've found that if a fellow uses his eyes and isn't afraid of a little work, he can find plenty to eat.
The more you trust them the better friends they'll be."
I guess that is because you whistle it."
Do you have a spring song, Tommy Tit?"
"That's so," replied Peter thoughtfully.
I had just as soon take food from his hand as from anywhere else.
"Please, Tommy," cried Peter.
As he saw them keeping the trees of the Old Orchard free of insect pests working in Farmer Brown's garden, and picking up the countless seeds of weeds everywhere, he began to understand something of the wonderful part these feathered folks have in keeping the Great World beautiful and worth while living in.
It was the softest, sweetest little whistle, and Tommy had rightly called it a love call.
I am one of the policemen of the trees.
Oh, there is plenty for me to do in the winter.
Merriment and happiness bubble out of him all the time, no matter what the weather is.
Others came to stay, and Peter was kept busy looking for and welcoming them.
But the heat has got to be there first, or the feathers will do no good.
Sad indeed and lonely would these days have been for Peter had it not been that with the departure of the friends he had spent so many happy hours with came the arrival of certain other friends from the Far North where they had made their summer homes.
The top of his head, back of his neck and coat were shining black.
Why, sometimes in a single day I find and eat almost five hundred eggs of those little green plant lice that do so much damage in the spring and summer.
Also he discovered that many of the most beautifully dressed of his feathered friends had changed their finery for sober traveling suits in preparation for the long journey to the far South where they would spend the winter.
He is the friend of everyone and seems to feel that everyone is his friend.
September came, and as the days grew shorter, some of Peter's friends bade him good-by.
A few old friends there were who would stay the year through.
"Not a bit," replied Tommy.
Not one among all Peter's friends is such a merry-hearted little fellow as Tommy Tit the Chickadee.
"Well, I don't know as you would call it a song, Peter," chuckled Tommy. "No, I hardly think you would call it a song.
Tommy Tit chuckled.
His sides were a soft cream-buff, and his wing and tail feathers were edged with white.
"I thought it was your coat of feathers that kept you warm," said Peter.
Just the same, I don't see how you find food enough on the trees when they are all bare in winter."
As I said before, plenty of food keeps a fellow warm."
Some of these stopped for a few days in passing.
Then there are little worms that bore in just under the bark, and there are other creatures who sleep the winter away in little cracks in the bark.
Welcome and Mrs. Robin, Winsome and Mrs. Bluebird.
Presently Dandy flew down to a lower branch and there he was joined by Mrs. Waxwing.
Across the end of each tail was a yellow band.
One of them had a plump cherry which he passed to the next one.
He was on guard, for in that tree was his nest, though Peter didn't know it at the time.
"You were right, Jenny Wren; he isn't black at all," confessed Peter.
He didn't have any doubt whatever that this was a member of the Blackbird family, but which one it could be he hadn't the least idea. "Jenny Wren will know," thought Peter and scampered off to hunt her up.
They were slim and trim and quite dandified, and in a quiet way were really beautiful.
"There isn't any new member of the Blackbird family living in the Old Orchard," retorted Jenny Wren tartly.
It was quite clear to him why they are often called Cherrybirds.
They rubbed their bills together as if kissing.
"I saw him with my own eyes.
Peter couldn't think of another couple who appeared quite so gentle and loving.
"He isn't black, he isn't even related to the Blackbird family, and he hasn't any business in the Old Orchard.
"If they stay long, Farmer Brown won't have any cherries left," remarked Peter.
A flock of modestly dressed yet rather distinguished looking feathered folks had alighted in a cherry-tree and promptly began to help themselves to Farmer Brown's cherries.
"There is too," contradicted Peter.
On top put the almonds and the pine-seeds.
Put the squashes in only when the butter is beginning to brown.
When the veal is cooked, untie, dry it and keep it for two or three days in the following sauce in quantity sufficient to cover it.
Tie the piece of meat not very tight and boil it for an hour and a half in enough water to cover it completely.
STEWED MUSHROOMS
Take thick slices of good lean veal, weighing about a pound, beat it and flatten it well.
After that roll tight the meat together with the omelet and tie it with thread.
Throw them into boiling water with a pinch of salt and when they are half cooked take them away and put them in cold water.
(Sformato di cavolfiore)
(Vitello tonnato)
STUFFED ITALIAN SQUASH
When this is melted put in another piece and season with salt and pepper.
(Funghi fritti)
(Funghi secchi)
STRING BEANS IN MOLD
Take them from the kettle, drain, and brown with butter, salt and pepper.
Take one pound of string beans, seeing that they are quite tender.
99
To make the stuffed zucchini first cut them lengthwise in two halves and remove the interior pulp, leaving space enough for the filling.
94
Drain and put the brown stock, adding grated cheese and two beaten eggs, when the rice has cooled a little.
The string beans so prepared can be served with boiled beef.
Then cut them in rather large slices and dip them in flour before putting in the frying pan.
(Zucchini ripieni)
Brown the rice equally in butter, then complete the cooking with hot water.
First of all wait until there is a sunny day.
Mushrooms are an excellent condiment of various dishes and for this reason it is well to have some always at hand.
These must be washed and boned and cut lengthwise, after opening them, making in all eight pieces.
DRIED MUSHROOMS
Cut off the ends and remove the strings.
When the oil begins to splutter, put the mushrooms in without dipping in flour, season with salt and pepper and when they are half cooked pour in some tomato sauce. Be sparing however, with the seasoning, in order that the mushrooms do not absorb it too much and so lose some of their own delicate flavor.
Olive oil is best for frying mushrooms and the seasoning is composed exclusively of salt and pepper to be applied when they are frying.
A taste of mushrooms will be found useful.
STRING BEANS WITH EGG SAUCE
Remove from the mold when cool and serve cold, with gelatine.
Finally mix in some capers soaked in vinegar.
Keep these pieces exposed in the sun for two or three days, then thread them on a string (practising a hole in them) and keep in a well ventilated room or in the sun until they become quite dry.
Then rub them through a sieve.
Brown in butter some string beans, that have been previously half cooked in water and some raw squashes cut in cubes.
Take a smooth mold, grease it evenly with butter and put on the bottom a sheet of paper, cut according to the shape of the bottom and equally greased with butter.
Serve the veal cold, in thin slices, with the sauce.
CAULIFLOWER IN MOLD
Scrape the stems, wash them carefully but do not keep in water, for then they would lose their pleasant odor.
92
Scrape the stem, clean them well in order to remove the earth and, without washing cut them in big pieces.
(Sformato di carciofi)
Choose young mushrooms middle sized or big, but not too soft.
They can also be dipped in beaten eggs after being sprinkled with flour, but this is superfluous.
95
(Sformato di fagiolini)
Previously put into the water one quarter of an onion larded with clover, one leaf of laurel, celery, carrot and parsley.
88
98
If you have brown stock complete the cooking with this and with butter, otherwise brown a piece of onion, some parsley, a piece of celery and olive oil.
89
Fry the eggs in butter in the form of an omelet about the size of the meat over which it will be laid, cutting it where it overlaps and putting the pieces where it lacks so as to cover the meat entirely.
Remove from the water, drain them, grind or pound and rub them through a sieve.
MEAT GENOVESE
Place in a mold with brown stock or meat gravy (in that case use a mold with a hole) and cook in double boiler.
Chop the cooked meat fine and grind it in the grinder and make a hash of it and one egg, a little grated cheese, a crumb of bread boiled in milk or in soup stock and just a taste of nutmeg.
90
In the gravy that remains in the saucepan put a big crumb of bread, cut into small pieces and make a paste that will also be ground with the liver.
93
Cook in a greased mold and serve hot.
RICE PUDDING WITH GIBLETS
Cut about one pound of veal liver in thin slices and four chicken livers in two parts and put all this in a saucepan with rosemary and a piece of butter.
Stir it often with a spoon and when the meat is brown pour in a cup of water and then another after a while. Then rub the gravy through a sieve and put it aside.
Clean, wash and cut as for the preceding.
97
When the onion is browned put in the string beans and complete the cooking with a little water if necessary.
If left longer on the fire they become too soaked in water and lose their taste.
Pour over the above ingredients and cook in a vessel immersed in boiling water (double boiler).
STRING BEANS AND SQUASHES SAUTE
Finally put in a smooth mold with a sheet of paper in the bottom, all evenly greased with butter and cook in a double boiler.
91
Choose middle-sized mushrooms, which are also of the right ripeness: when they are too big they are too soft and if small they are too hard.
ARTICHOKES IN MOLD
FRIED MUSHROOMS
Then rub everything through a sieve, add one whole egg and two yolks and a pinch of grated cheese, diluting with brown stock or water.
Take two pounds of meat without bones, remove the fat and tendons, then lard it with two anchovies.
(Budino alla genovese)
VEAL WITH TUNNY
(Fagiuolini in salsa d'uovo)
Make a good brown stock (see No. 13) and use the same for the rice as well as for the giblets.
Cook in a double boiler and serve hot.
Put a saucepan on the fire with olive oil, one or two cloves of oil and some mint leaves.
When taken from the mold, remove the paper and in its place put a gravy formed with chopped chicken giblets cooked in brown stock.
LIVER LOAF
When the liquid has become, through the cooking, like a cream, pour it on the string beans that you will keep on the fire a little longer, with the sauce.
87
Serve hot.
"I have something to say." Her quiet was over; she knew that the time for action had come.
"Oh, don't, Mr. Parker," cried Leslie.
"I am so thirsty."
Have you a headache?
She took up a book, but she could not read.
She heard his retreating footsteps as he went along the towing-path to Wingfield.
"No; I cannot go this evening," said Annie; "but it will be all right for you, Leslie.
He looked hard at Leslie, then he looked away.
Her religious principles did not come to her aid in this crisis; she felt a sense of being crushed, she felt sure that because of this thing she must go halt and maimed for the remainder of her days.
By the way, here it is."
"Tell me the whole truth, little girl."
I shall watch her.
It was now Annie's turn to look pale; her eyes, startled and alarmed, glanced from Leslie to the ground.
They walked slowly down the towing-path.
I could let you have three or four.
"For your father's sake, and for the sake of old times," he said.
"I am going to speak," said the merchant.
Now, Leslie, don't be tempted in that way again.
Don't go into debt for it, that's all."
Mr. Parker and Leslie went in the direction of the river.
"We wanted you to come on the water with us this lovely afternoon.
We will say no more about it.
She felt stunned; all her life up to the present had been bright.
You felt hurt at what occurred yesterday!
"Do!
Good-by, my dear.
For nearly an hour Leslie Gilroy sat on that seat alone.
He wanted money; I heard him say so.
"I never will," said poor Leslie.
Come, now, that's putting it on too fine.
"Come along, take my arm.
"Don't show you your own letter?
No; I am scarcely sorry for you.
Mr. Parker's voice changed again.
Her voice had sunk to the lowest whisper.
What is up, my dear--what is up?"
"Yes, my dear.
Annie, in some wonder, went downstairs alone.
They said nothing more, however; and Leslie and Annie went upstairs once more to their own room.
"I do, child.
She found herself all of a sudden, through no fault of her own, in the position of one who is degraded, dishonored; she, who had always been upright, respectable, and respected.
"Oh, I cannot explain things now, and I know you must think dreadfully of me."
I was standing near the boat-house when you landed with--with----"
Annie Colchester called at my office yesterday; she brought me a note from you.
"I don't care about tea to-night," replied Leslie.
I wouldn't vex her nor give her another care for all the money I possess. You did wrong in spending that money before you got it; you did very wrong to go into debt.
Why, Leslie Gilroy, you are quite glaring at me; your eyes have got the queerest expression."
"Don't," said Leslie in a sharp voice.
You went into debt for sixty pounds, and were afraid, and sent that other girl, Annie Colchester, whose shoes you are not fit to black, for the money.
To sin gravely, to commit a really great sin, was impossible to a nature like Leslie's. Direct temptation would shrink away from one so pure, so innocent, so generous, so loving; and now she was stained just as if she had really committed the sin which she loathed.
I won't say another word when I have had my say out today; but, my dear, let me ask you just once, why did you do it?"
Oh, please, tell me the truth at once."
A queer sense of heartsickness came over her; she seemed partly to guess already what was coming. Making a violent effort not to show the alarm which was paling her cheeks, and almost causing her heart to stop beating, she said quickly: "Please speak."
"Not without me," said Leslie with sudden firmness.
Oh, I know," she added, her face turning pale, "that you are hiding something dreadful from me.
Now that you know what it is to me, you must--you must make restitution.
"We were looking for you, Leslie," she cried.
"You ran in debt, child; the temptations here were too much for you.
"Yes, I saw you.
Why was I ever born?"
You have got a chance, one chance; will you take it?"
I will never tell your mother.
She could clear herself, but at what a cost!
I see you did not want to pain me."
He liked her; he was kind to her for her dead father's sake and because he imagined that she bore a likeness to the child he had lost; but he had spoken with a certain harshness of the Colchesters.
She would give Annie a chance, she would not betray her, she would get Annie herself to make her own confession.
If you want money come to me straight.
"You cannot bear me to touch you!
The child was like her in the external features only."
Let me go, let me go."
How could she stand it?
"Yes.
"Did you say," she continued, "that Annie took you that note herself?"
Another, a stranger had approached Mr. Parker on her behalf.
I expect that chap will go to the dogs as fast as he can.
The man to whom she was indebted for so much believed her guilty.
What are you compared to Rupert?
There never could have been two Jennies in this wicked old world.
Her heart beat fast.
"I cannot understand," said poor Leslie.
"I cannot bear you to touch me just now."
Leslie went and sat with her back to her.
Leslie struggled hard to regain her ordinary calmness; but, try as she would, she could not get it back.
She ran back just when they reached the door.
I gave it to her, of course, for your letter was so pitiable; but I did not tell her that I was coming down the next day to inquire into this matter myself."
For the first time in her gentle life hatred of another was visiting her.
"Had a good time?" she asked in a light, careless sort of voice.
She turned another page of her novel, and read on contentedly.
The old grey house where Sara lived seemed bleak and stricken in the dull light, with its leafless vines clinging to it.
She was reckoned handsome, and had plenty of beaus at one time."
And now this long friendship was to be broken.
Could he forget?
Don't be angry with me."
Never to stoop with a glad thrill over the first spring flowers because it was his privilege to take them to her!
"Jeff's all right," said Christopher in a patronizing way.
Let me see--she must be thirty-eight.
And the first I have seen this spring.
Only one thing Jeffrey had found it impossible to contemplate calmly.
Jeffrey Miller was considered a handsome man, and Bayside people had periodical fits of wondering why he had never married.
Meanwhile, the object of these remarks was striding homeward and thinking, not of the men behind him, but of Sara Stuart.
"But, no, it couldn't seem so to a man.
This was selfishness; this was putting his own feelings before hers--a thing he had sworn never to do.
Sara never went to the district school which Jeff attended; she had her governess at home.
He thought it a wonderful thing that it had so chanced.
"I can't bear to see you suffer so.
In spite of himself, Jeffrey's heart filled with hot rebellion at the thought; it was like a desecration and a robbery.
"Oh, yes," said Christopher, enjoying all the importance of exclusive information.
She put her slender hands over her face and sobbed.
Come into the library."
"Don't--don't, Sara," he said huskily.
The men idly watched his tall, erect figure as he went along the valley.
Jeffrey, reflecting, had not been certain that he had been polite; "But I am sure she liked me," he said gravely.
But I guess she'll feel pretty bad at leaving her old home.
Sara did not marry, although gossip assigned her many suitors not unworthy of her.
Her eyes, those clear child-eyes, filled with tears.
Perhaps it was the fine patience and serenity in her face that told her tale of years.
But something held him back from speech.
"Oh, sir, you are too good," said Bertie with a choke in his voice.
And I suppose he never had any Christmas either."
Edith understood better, and she changed the subject.
I thought you'd rather have me home, but I'll go, if you want me to."
"That's just what I expected.
How will that do?"
Bertie shook his head.
"Oh, dear me!
"And here's a picture-book for William John," said Amy, "and there is a sled out in the kitchen for him.
Goodness, if I don't settle that boy!"--as the sound of fretful crying came from the kitchen behind her.
I didn't miss them--much."
"I've an invitation to dinner," said Bertie timidly, "me and William John.
I suppose you'll soon be leaving Sampson's.
He did not know but that the lady might consider it a grave crime to be mittenless.
He shivered, and looked up at his aunt's hard face as she stood wiping her dish-pan with a grim frown which boded no good to the discontented William John.
He laid his hand on her dark curls inquiringly.
"The plot deepens.
The doctor poked the fire energetically and looked very wise.
The frosty air had crimsoned his cheeks and his hair was curling round his face.
He looks so cold." And she drew her sister out into the hall, where the housekeeper was taking Bertie's parcels.
As he went out Amy came through the hall with a red sled.
It was with the same expression that he opened the door at home in the evening.
Bertie patiently reaccounted for William John's non-appearance.
"Have you any brothers or sisters, Bertie?"
You can live here, and go to school.
"Oh, a cousin or something, didn't he say Edie?
"Well, William John, how are you?"
She held out a pair of warm-looking mittens.
"So Mr. Sampson can't keep you?"
"Why, he wants to go out coasting with those Robinson boys, but he can't.
Papa says that is my 'normal condition,' but I don't know what that means."
"Oh, I'm not going since you can't," said Bertie cheerily.
"No Christmas!" said Amy, quite overcome.
You're never out without mittens a day like this!"
"No mittens!" exclaimed Amy in dismay.
"No, sir.
"It's early yet," said Bertie cheerfully.
Amy was silent from sheer amazement.
The door behind him opened jerkingly, and a scowling woman came out with a pan of dishwater in her hand.
"I s'pose you've only got one day more at the store," said Mrs. Ross. "Sampson didn't say anything about keeping you longer, did he?"
"Well, you've only yourself to thank for it," returned his mother.
"I thought maybe George Fraser'd be along and I'd get a lift as far as the store."
"It's a bad time for colds," said the doctor, sitting down and attacking the fire.
That evening Doctor Forbes noticed a peculiarly thoughtful look on Edith's face as she sat gazing into the glowing coal fire after dinner.
"Come, William John, I want to rub you."
He stood on the sagging doorstep and looked out on the snowy world. His hands were clasped behind him, and his thin face wore a thoughtful, puzzled look.
Poor William John!" said Amy in a disappointed tone.
"Well, you are rather small--but no doubt you will grow.
But just then the girls came up and carried Bertie off to display their holiday gifts.
Don't be a goose."
"Well, that is settled," said the doctor genially.
He says I'm too small for the heavy work."
Goodbye."
And this was how it came to pass that Bertie received the next day his first invitation to dine out.
"Off, are you?" said the doctor, looking up from his paper.
He hasn't got any mittens and he would catch his death of cold again."
"Oh, such a dear little boy," broke in Amy eagerly from the corner, where she was playing with her kitten.
I must be off to the store now.
"I heard you out there--you needn't think I didn't.
"And--but, why, where is William John?"
Step by step, with horror-stricken eyes, Alida retreated from the man to whose protection and embrace she had flown.
I do know what I am saying and where I am.
"I gave you my whole faith and no one shall destroy it but yourself.
Mother's dead."
My husband--"
I shall not prosecute you as she suggests, and I charge you before God to do your duty by your wife and child and never to speak to me again." Turning, she hastened toward the door.
"She shall know them!" half shrieked the woman, as if at last stung to fury.
Instinctively she sprang to his arms, crying, "Oh, thank God!
The name of the man you are living with is not Wilson Ostrom.
If you and he try to brazen it out, the law will open both your eyes.
Good-bye.'
Yet she became Hans' wife.
'I tied it to a rope, and dragged it home.
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
What have you brought me?'
'Tied up in the stable with a rope.'
'I've brought you nothing.
Hans takes the knife, and sticks it in his sleeve, and goes home.
Grettel gives him a knife.
Where have you been?'
She gave me something.'
Hans comes to Grettel.
'Never mind, Mother; I'll manage better next time.'
Clever Hans
The dogs come after him, and eat it up.
'I gave her nothing.
'Where is the knife, Hans?'
But she gave me something.'
'Good morning, Hans.
You should have stuck it in your sleeve.'
But I brought away something.'
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
You should have carried it on your head.'
'She gave me a knife.'
'Good-bye, Grettel.'
Grettel gives him a young kid.
What have you brought me?'
'Good-bye, Hans.'
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
'That was stupid, Hans.
Hans comes to Grettel.
'Good-bye, Grettel.'
'I gave her nothing.
What have you got for me?'
'Good evening, Mother.'
'What did you do with the kid?'
'Good evening, Mother.'
'Been to see Grettel, Mother.'
'Never mind; I'll do better next time.'
'Good-bye, Hans.'
'Where are you going, Hans?' asked his Mother.
But I brought something away.'
'What did she give you?'
But she made me a present.'
Grettel got angry, broke the rope, and ran away.
Hans takes the bacon, ties a rope round it, and drags it along behind him.
'All right, Mother.
'What did you do with the bacon, Hans?'
'Good evening, Hans.
'Good morning, Hans.
'Never mind, Mother; I'll do better next time.'
Then he goes into the house to his Mother.
'What did Grettel give you?'
Where have you been?'
Where have you been?'
I want a present.'
'Good morning, Hans.
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
'I took nothing.
You should have cast sheep's eyes at her.'
'What did you take her?'
'Put it in my pocket, Mother.'
'Good morning, Grettel.'
'What did you give her?'
'Behave well.'
'Good morning, Grettel.'
I want to take away something.'
'Good morning, Hans.
'What did she give you, Hans?'
Where have you been?'
'I've brought nothing.
'Good evening, Mother.'
Grettel gives him a piece of bacon.
'Behave properly, then.'
'Never mind, Mother; I'll do better next time.'
'I gave her nothing.
'That's a stupid place, Hans.
"Oh! Elsie, I am so glad you have come at last.
"Not half so angry as if you refuse to give me your confidence.
Elsie felt in better spirits in the morning; her sleep had refreshed her, and she arose with a stronger confidence in the love of both her earthly and her heavenly Father.
I want no one to love but my little girl; and you must not let the gossip of the servants disturb you."
He took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly.
Caroline Howard was in Elsie's room, waiting to show her bracelet, which had just been handed to her by her maid; Pomp having brought it from the city late the night before.
Don't you think it will be pleasant?"
"I must speak to papa first," Elsie said in a half whisper, "but don't wait for me."
She found her papa ready, and waiting for her.
"That is my own darling child," said he, returning her caress, "your ready obedience deserved a reward.
"Are you going to stay at home, papa?" she asked presently.
you have so many that one would never be missed."
"Nothing," replied Elsie, with an arch smile, "I am not going, Lucy," she added.
"Yes, do, do!" cried several of the little ones, clapping their hands.
No, indeed, neither of you nor them.
"I cannot quite, though; but I can put things together and make a pretty good guess, sometimes."
"My precious little daughter," he said, "papa is very glad to see you looking so bright and cheerful this morning.
"Very nice, daughter," he answered, in an absent way.
But several of the little ones were looking quite disconsolate.
"No, Miss Lucy," said Mr. Dinsmore, looking at them over his paper, "you can't have one of my curls; I can't spare it."
Elsie, what do you think?" with a questioning look down into her glad face, "will they want me?"
"Elsie, daughter, you are more precious to me than aught else in the wide world, and you need not fear that any other can ever take your place in my heart, or that I will make any connection that would render you unhappy.
"Well, you are a queer girl!" was Mary's comment, while Caroline expressed her disappointment and vainly endeavored to change Elsie's determination.
Presently Lucy jumped up.
please say yes."
"Dear papa, you are very kind," she said, "but if you please, I would much rather have you decide for me, because I am only a silly little girl, and you are so much older and wiser."
"Oh, then, papa, please let me stay with you!
The little girls soon established themselves in a group on the opposite side of Miss Adelaide's window, and she very good-naturedly gave Elsie the assistance she needed.
"You may," he said, "and if you want to stay with me, you may ring the bell and tell the servant to bring your writing desk here."
I had forgotten!
"Do you wish me to go, papa?" she asked.
"Don't tell him, then," whispered the tempter, "he is not likely ever to miss it."
"I wanted to very much, papa," she said, looking down and blushing deeply, "but I knew it would be very wrong."
I think something was wrong with my little girl last night.
"Never mind," replied Elsie, taking the bracelet from her hand, and examining it.
Wouldn't you, Elsie?"
He paused a moment, looking down at the little blushing face, half hidden on his breast, then went on:
She feared that something in the letter had displeased him.
He took up his pen, and Elsie collected her thoughts once more, worked busily and silently for another half hour, and then brought her sheet to him for inspection; presenting it with a timid, bashful air, "I am afraid it is very full of mistakes, papa," she said.
"I beg your pardon, Miss Lucy, if my ears deceived me," said he, with mock gravity, "but I was quite certain I heard you asking for one of my curls.
"Not going!
I have something for you;" and he put his hand into his pocket and brought out a letter.
"Oh! take care, Elsie; are you not afraid of hurting his feelings?"
Perhaps, though, you are not aware of the fact that my curls grow on two heads."
"Will you build houses?"
We've been playing keeping house, but Enna will be mother all the time, and she scolds and whips us so much that we are all tired of it."
"I don't like them either, Mr. Travilla, because I see so little of papa. I haven't had a ride with him since the company came."
He looked very grave, and Elsie studied his countenance intently while, for some moments, he sat with his eyes bent thoughtfully upon the carpet.
"What do you say, Travilla, to a ride on horseback with the four young ladies you took charge of yesterday, and myself?"
Elsie looked up in unfeigned astonishment.
Elsie watched him while he read, almost as intently as he had watched her; for she was anxious that he should be pleased with Miss Rose's letter.
"I am afraid you will be angry with me, papa," she said, almost under her breath.
"Papa! you seem to know everything about me.
what ailed you then?"
He smiled, and stroked her hair softly, but said nothing.
"You shall have one this afternoon, if nothing happens," said her father quickly.
A servant put his head in at the door.
Would you like to go?"
He watched with deep interest the varying expression of her fine open countenance as she read.
"Never mind, daughter," he answered, encouragingly; "I know that it takes a great deal of practice to make perfect, and it will be a great pleasure to me to see you improve."
Then, handing it back, he said, "You had better put it in your desk now, and leave the copying until to-morrow, as it will soon be your bedtime, and I want you on my knee until then."
Elsie's face grew very bright, and she hastened to do his bidding.
Her father had one hand, and Mr. Travilla soon possessed himself of the other.
"Why, then, did you not put off your confession until after the ride?" he asked, looking searchingly into her face.
"But you know I cannot talk to you, or let you talk; so that it will be very dull," he said, pushing back the curls from the fair forehead, and smiling down into the eager little face.
"Elsie doesn't own any," said he; "they all belong to me.
Now tell me what troubled you, my own one?"
But now that Christmas is gone, I think I will keep it for a New Year's gift.
"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Dinsmore," replied Lucy, laughing again, "but it was one of Elsie's curls I asked for."
Elsie was turning over the books with eager delight.
Mayn't I, papa?"
"Ashamed of you, darling?
"And may I talk, papa?" she asked, as he pushed away his writing, wheeled his chair about toward the fire, and then took her on his knee.
"What are you going to wear to Isabel Carleton's party, to-night, Elsie?" asked Lucy, at the dinner table.
"Bravo!
"If you please, papa, I would rather answer Miss Rose's letter."
Can you read my thoughts?"
"Elsie," said her father, when they had finished the morning lessons, "there is to be a children's party to-night, at Mr. Carleton's, and I have an invitation for you.
"Very well, Jim, tell him I will be there in a moment.
Elsie glanced hastily around as they entered, and gave a satisfied little sigh on perceiving that Miss Stevens was not in the room, and that her Aunt Adelaide was seated with her embroidery near one of the windows, while her papa sat near by, reading the morning paper.
"Your own choice, Elsie?
don't you like parties?"
She put it into his hand instantly, saying, with a blush, "I did not know you would care to read it, papa."
"She isn't at all polite to visitors, is she, Flora?"
Deprive you of your ride?
He pointed to the table, where lay a pile of prettily bound books, which Elsie had not noticed until this moment.
"Not nearly so well as a quiet evening with papa," replied Elsie, smiling.
"I am so glad that I may tell you everything, my own papa," she answered, putting her arm around his neck, and laying her cheek to his.
"I am going down to the drawing-room to ask Aunt Adelaide to show me how to crochet this mitten for mammy," Elsie answered.
"Sit still and read it here, darling," he said, "I love to have you on my knee, and if there are any hard places I can help you."
"Will you play 'O sister, O Phebe?'" asked Elsie.
"I cannot half enjoy my breakfast without your bright face to look at."
"Is it not a nice letter, papa?" asked the little girl, as he refolded and gave it to her again.
"I said you should do as you pleased, darling, and I always love to have my pet near me."
"I did.
I confess Mr. Steele has not inspired me with the confidence that Mr. Packard feels in him and I rather shrink from this interview.
"Is Mrs. Packard in a hurry?" I asked.
"You want to see him governor?
"You are a thinking person, I see, and what is more, a conscientious one.
But if we let one innuendo pass, how can we prevent a second?
I took advantage of her preoccupation to scrutinize her features more closely than I had dared to do while she was directly addressing me.
"It means so much this year.
Observing the breathless interest her manner evoked, or possibly realizing how nearly she had come to an unnecessary if not unwise self-betrayal, she suddenly smoothed her brow and, catching up a piece of embroidery from the table, sat down with it in her hand.
"I am so glad!" Her tone was almost hysterical.
Indeed I did not; the sweet baby-face full of glee was irresistible; so was the pat-pat of the two dimpled hands on her mother's shoulders.
No skeleton hangs in the Packard closet. I am a happy wife and a happy mother.
"I can give you three names now. Those of Judge Whittaker, Mr. Dumont, the lawyer, and the two Mowries, father and son."
She stirred impulsively.
"And you represent a large class who feel the same?"
"I see.
He was very respectful; I wonder how I ever got the idea he could be anything else."
I had seen nothing on his part to justify it and but little on hers.
"You are right.
The lie must be met and grappled with.
"Mr. Packard has given you a task, concerning the necessity of which I should be glad to learn your opinion.
This morning I shall issue invitations for a dinner to be given the first night you can assure me Mr. Packard will be at home.
Tears sprang to Mrs. Packard's eyes, and it was with difficulty that she passed the clinging child over to the nurse waiting to take her out.
Wondering what errand had taken her to the study, which she was supposed not to visit, I turned to join her and caught a glimpse of the old man's face.
"While I feel like it I must busy myself in making out my list.
An interval of silence, and then I heard her voice.
This, with her eyes on his face, of this I felt sure.
I wish to speak to him about the commission intrusted to him by my husband.
He seemed to resent this, for he turned a baleful look back at me and purposely delayed his steps without giving me the right of way.
"Mrs. Packard, your fears are very natural.
"On Friday week he has no speech to make." Mrs. Packard seemed to consider.
Finally she said: "When you see him, tell him to leave that evening free.
"A wife is naturally heart and soul with her husband," she observed, with an assumption of composure which restored some sort of naturalness to the conversation.
"That was the happiest moment of my life!" fell unconsciously from Mrs. Packard's lips as the two disappeared; but presently, meeting my eyes, she blushed and made haste to remark:
Do you wonder at my happiness?"
"Thank you.
The piece--some operatic aria--was sung in a way to thrill the soul.
"One can not say." Thus appealed to, the man seemed to weigh his words carefully, out of consideration for her, I thought.
She had thrown herself down at the piano and was singing gaily, ecstatically.
"I have an interest in Mayor Packard's election," I smilingly assured her; "and I know that in this I represent a great number of people in this town if not in the state."
IN THE LIBRARY
Anxious myself about this very fact, I attempted to reply, but she gave me no opportunity.
Stopping her dance, she peered round at the baby's face and laughed.
I am indebted to you, Mr. Steele, for the patience with which you have met and answered my doubts."
Yet in the absence of every other convincing cause of trouble I allowed myself to dwell on this one, and congratulated myself upon the chance she now offered me of seeing and hearing how he would comport himself when he thought that he was alone with her.
It will give me something new to think about."
It was false, of course, but--" She started, and her work fell from her hands.
"I think so, Mrs. Packard."
"I certainly do, Mrs. Packard. The hesitation I expressed when he first spoke was caused by the one consideration mentioned,--my fear lest something might go amiss in C---- to-night if I busied myself otherwise than with the necessities of the speech with which he is about to open his campaign."
There are many, many such in town; many amongst the men as well as amongst the women.
I had very little reason for entertaining such a possibility.
You are under Mr. Packard's orders, but a word from so experienced a man would be welcome, if only to reconcile me to an effort which must lead to the indiscriminate use of my name in quarters where it hurts a woman to imagine it used at all."
Will you be good enough--rather will you show me the great kindness of sitting on that low divan by the fireplace where you will not be visible--see, you may have my work to busy yourself with--and if--he may not, you know--if he should show the slightest disposition to transgress in any way, rise and show yourself?"
"I wonder if she will come to me?" said I.
So am I--for him.
"These half-hearted voters, their easily stifled convictions are what make majorities," she stammered.
The paragraph reflecting on me must be traced to its source.
Then I heard her ask him the very question she had asked me.
"You do agree with Mr. Packard in this?"
I do not suppose she had what is called a great voice, but the feeling back of it at this moment of reaction gave it a great quality.
I would give--" there she paused, caught back, it would seem, by some warning thought.
"She's in the library." And, turning on his heel, he took his deliberate way down-stairs.
As we reached the lower step, she passed us on her way to the library.
On entering the library I was met by Mrs. Packard with the remark:
"And now for those dinner invitations!" she gaily suggested.
"No real admirer of the mayor's would go over to the enemy from any such cause as that. Only the doubtful--the half-hearted--those who are ready to grasp at any excuse for voting with the other party, would allow a consideration of the mayor's domestic relations to interfere with their confidence in him as a public officer."
"But these--" How I wish I could have seen her face!
Then she began to dance, holding the baby in her arms and humming a waltz.
"Yes." The tremble in this ordinary monosyllable was slight but quite perceptible.
What lay beyond that give?
Her voice thrilling with anticipated triumph rang through the room, awaking echoes which surely must have touched the heart of this man if, as I had sometimes thought, he cherished an unwelcome admiration for her.
Assured by the sounds in the hall that Mr. Steele was approaching, I signified my acquiescence with her wishes, and, taking the embroidery from her hand, sat down in the place she had pointed out.
He was terribly motionless.
"It's so humiliating!" she protested with racial ingenuousness--one of her most compelling charms.
She was silent another instant, in a wide stare comprehending the incredible, the utterly impossible fact of his presence there.
"Madame?"
His bow was humorous without mockery: "Madame la princesse does me much honour."
"Monsieur Lanyard!"
"Perhaps it was to see madame la princesse alone--secretly--without exciting the jealousy, which I understand is supernormal, of monsieur le prince."
VIII
At first, in her mad anxiety, she could hear nothing.
Long before she left him Sofia had lost count of the blows she had taken at his hands, the insults worse than blows, the lesser indignities innumerable.
"I'm sorry," he repeated; "but somebody seems to have taken advantage of madame's confidence.
To-night--if she had one regret it was that she had struck so feebly: not that she desired his death, but that she knew it was now her life or his.
Lanyard's mouth twitched, slow colour mounted in his face, the light in his eyes was lambent.
He looked back, coolly quizzical.
"But really, you must believe me.
Her glance wavered and fell.
Two years ago she would not have dared to lift a hand to Victor, no matter how sore the provocation.
Lanyard's laugh offered amends for the rudeness, as if he said: "Sorry--but you asked for it, you know." He stepped aside, caught up a handful of her jewels that had been left, a tempting heap, openly exposed on her dressing-table (as much her own carelessness as anybody's, Sofia admitted) and tossed them lightly upon the face of the fraudulent canvas.
She found herself standing, partly resting upon the table.
And I see you have a fire in the grate ..."
Then, appreciating that she had yielded where he had no right to command, she mutinied.
He said nothing more, made no offer to comfort her by those futile and empty pats on the shoulder which are instinctive with man on such occasions, but simply sat him down and waited.
In panic she knelt beside the body, threw back Victor's dinner-coat, and laid an ear above his heart.
She looked down in consternation at the exquisite trinkets he had condemned so bluntly.
But presently a beating registered, slow and harsh but steady-paced.
He returned a twisted smile, an apologetic shrug.
Before long a cruising four-wheeler overhauled her.
He cocked an eye of mocking significance toward the purloined "Corot," and in sharp revulsion of feeling Sofia had need to bite her lip to keep from laughing.
Callously enough she switched off the lights and left him lying there, in darkness but for the ash-dimmed glimmer of a dying fire.
She was glad of that.
"The Lone Wolf!"
"Why?" she demanded, resentfully.
In the final glance she bent upon Victor's beaten and insensible body there was no pity, no regret, no trace of compunction.
Somehow her hands had found the way to his.
And your advice--?"
The princess gathered them up tenderly and faced him, blazing with resentment.
So she exercised much circumspection in shutting and bolting the door, mounted the stairs without making any unnecessary stir, and at the door of her boudoir waited, listening, for several moments, in the course of which she heard, or fancied she heard, a slight noise on the far side of the door which made her suspect Therese might after all still be up and about.
That waywardness which was a legitimate inheritance from generations of wilful forebears, impatient of all those restraints which a fixed environment imposes upon the individual, an impatience which had always been hers though it slumbered in unsuspected latency, asserted itself of a sudden, possessed her wholly, and warmed, her being like forbidden wine.
The one conceivable explanation voiced itself without her volition:
She stood petrified in dread till the voices fell and she heard stairs creak under an ascending tread.
What was this consolation?
Sofia laughed breathlessly.
"And what shall one say of madame la princesse?"
"The fortunes of war ..."
None saw her enter.
"Why ring?" he countered, smiling.
But Lanyard remembered uneasily that somebody--Solomon or some other who must have led an interesting life--had remarked that the lips of a strange woman are smoother than oil.
I find it ajar--one assumes, through oversight on the part of one of the servants--it opens to a touch, I walk in--et voila!"
"You are a strange man, monsieur...."
She weighed his words in dark distrust.
"I haven't thanked you."
In time the tempest passed, Sofia sat up and dabbled her eyes with a web of lace and linen.
She moved aside, lifting a hand toward the bell-cord.
"If she will be so amiable as to accept them from me, with my compliments and one little word of advice...."
I was so sure no one would ever know."
"Oh, come now!" he remonstrated, indulgently--"that's downright flattery."
He exerted himself to break the spell upon his senses which this woman, wittingly or not, was weaving.
With a sob of relief she sat back on her heels, and after a little while got unsteadily to her feet.
GREEK
In this humour she was set down at her door.
She was one of those rare women who can afford to cry.
But seemingly the noise of their struggle had not carried beyond the door. There was no one about.
Thus reminded that Lanyard's return might occur at any moment, she made all haste to patch up the disarray of veil and coiffure.
She might be detained, Heaven alone knew how late she might be; but she had her latch-key and was quite competent to undress and put herself to bed.
"How dare you say they're paste?"
"To call my servants--to have them call in the police."
"Wait!"
If he breathed, Sofia could detect no sign of it.
Necessity at a stroke had set her free.
But in those abolished days she had never once struck back, she had been faint of heart, cowed and terrified, and had lacked what two years of separation had given her, that spiritual independence which never before had been able to realize itself, lift up its head, and grow strong in the assurance of its own integrity.
With a shudder she dropped the bronze, and looked down.
"What was it?"
In its obscure and stuffy refuge she sat hugging her precious canvas and pondering her plight.
In spite of herself, she smiled in sympathy.
Not till on the point of leaving did she remember the painting.
His face was bruised and livid; the cheek laid open by the bronze was smeared with scarlet, accentuating the leaden colour of his skin.
For treating myself to an amusing adventure?"
His mouth was ajar; his eyes, half closed, hideously revealed slender slits of white.
"Too late," she uttered in despair.
A singular elation began to colour her temper, a quickening sense of emancipation.
"But how did you get in?"
His levity was infectious.
"By the front door, madame.
"The counterfeit jewels of a titled adventuress!"
She might have suspected as much if she had only had the wit to draw a natural inference from the way the painting had parted company with its frame when she dropped it.
"But surely madame la princesse must appreciate the police might be at a loss to know which housebreaker to arrest."
The up-flung trunk was darkly stained and sticky....
She knew the man too well to flatter herself that he would rest before he had compassed such revenge as the baseness of his degenerate soul would deem adequate.
"But is it?" she asked in a tone so intimate that it was barely audible. And she laughed once more.
Yet she could not afford to concede so much to him.
It lay unharmed where it had fallen when Victor seized her veil.
GREEK VS.
Fortunately her costume, protected by the cloak of heavy and sturdy stuff, was quite undamaged.
"What are you doing?"
Fix, stupefied, followed; it seemed as if he were attached to Mr. Fogg by an invisible thread. Chance, however, appeared really to have abandoned the man it had hitherto served so well.
"It's the same thing."
At this moment a man who had been observing him attentively approached. It was Fix, who, bowing, addressed Mr. Fogg: "Were you not, like me, sir, a passenger by the Rangoon, which arrived yesterday?"
The Tankadere was a neat little craft of twenty tons, as gracefully built as if she were a racing yacht.
But Mr. Fogg, far from being discouraged, was continuing his search, resolved not to stop if he had to resort to Macao, when he was accosted by a sailor on one of the wharves.
"On the 11th, at seven in the evening.
"Only sixteen hundred," said Mr. Fogg.
It was all very well for an Englishman like Mr. Fogg to make the tour of the world with a carpet-bag; a lady could not be expected to travel comfortably under such conditions.
"No; for a voyage."
"Not with you, Mr. Fogg," was her answer.
"Without you, madam?" answered the detective.
Are you the master of the boat?"
"Pilot," said Mr. Fogg, "I must take the American steamer at Yokohama, and not at Shanghai or Nagasaki."
"Very much so."
Her two masts leaned a trifle backward; she carried brigantine, foresail, storm-jib, and standing-jib, and was well rigged for running before the wind; and she seemed capable of brisk speed, which, indeed, she had already proved by gaining several prizes in pilot-boat races.
"It is a bargain.
"I am sorry to have nothing better to offer you," said Mr. Fogg to Fix, who bowed without responding.
"Is he not with you?"
It was then eight o'clock; at half-past nine, it being then high tide, the Carnatic would leave the harbour.
The sailor leaned on the railing, opened his eyes wide, and said, "Is your honour joking?"
"Excuse me, did you intend to sail in the Carnatic?"
"If it would not put your honour out--"
"By going to Nagasaki, at the extreme south of Japan, or even to Shanghai, which is only eight hundred miles from here.
"Yes."
The pilot now returned, shuffling his hat in his hands.
"It is in the interest of my journey--a part of my programme."
"I shall do all I can to find him," replied Phileas Fogg.
"Here are two hundred pounds on account sir," added Phileas Fogg, turning to Fix, "if you would like to take advantage--"
In half an hour we shall go on board."
The same formalities having been gone through at the French consulate, and the palanquin having stopped at the hotel for the luggage, which had been sent back there, they returned to the wharf.
"I am sorry," said the sailor; "but it is impossible."
But the Frenchman did not appear, and, without doubt, was still lying under the stupefying influence of the opium.
"But," added the pilot, "it might be arranged another way."
"So did I, madam, and I am excessively disappointed.
"He has not made his appearance since yesterday. Could he have gone on board the Carnatic without us?"
"And when does the boat leave Shanghai?"
Fix was in mortal suspense.
"You are sure of that?"
The accommodation was confined, but neat.
"How?" asked Mr. Fogg.
"Are you in earnest?"
"Have you a boat ready to sail?"
"Why not?" returned the pilot.
"Between eight and nine knots the hour.
Her shining copper sheathing, her galvanised iron-work, her deck, white as ivory, betrayed the pride taken by John Bunsby in making her presentable.
The crew of the Tankadere was composed of John Bunsby, the master, and four hardy mariners, who were familiar with the Chinese seas.
"What!" responded Fix, feigning surprise.
Fix breathed more freely.
The Carnatic, its repairs being completed, left Hong Kong twelve hours before the stated time, without any notice being given; and we must now wait a week for another steamer."
We have, therefore, four days before us, that is ninety-six hours; and in that time, if we had good luck and a south-west wind, and the sea was calm, we could make those eight hundred miles to Shanghai."
Fix ceased to breathe at all.
"Very well.
I have missed the Carnatic, and I must get to Yokohama by the 14th at the latest, to take the boat for San Francisco."
His horror may be imagined when he heard Mr. Fogg say, in his placid voice, "But there are other vessels besides the Carnatic, it seems to me, in the harbour of Hong Kong."
Fogg detained at Hong Kong for a week!
"Thanks, sir; I was about to ask the favour."
"Yes, will you agree to take me to Yokohama?"
Fix felt his heart leap for joy.
The detective had a feeling akin to humiliation in profiting by the kindness of Mr. Fogg.
Mr. Fogg then learned that the Carnatic had sailed the evening before.
"And you could go--"
"But I have not the honour--"
"No.
"Pardon me; I thought I should find your servant here."
Is it for a sea excursion?"
"It's certain," thought he, "though rascal as he is, he is a polite one!"
"In an hour; as soon as provisions could be got aboard and the sails put up."
Fix began to hope again.
Had he been capable of being astonished at anything, it would have been not to see his servant return at bedtime.
For three hours Phileas Fogg wandered about the docks, with the determination, if necessary, to charter a vessel to carry him to Yokohama; but he could only find vessels which were loading or unloading, and which could not therefore set sail.
"I was, sir," replied Mr. Fogg coldly.
IN WHICH FIX COMES FACE TO FACE WITH PHILEAS FOGG
John Bunsby, himself, a man of forty-five or thereabouts, vigorous, sunburnt, with a sprightly expression of the eye, and energetic and self-reliant countenance, would have inspired confidence in the most timid.
Will you look at her?"
"Yes, sir."
"Yes; John Bunsby, master of the Tankadere."
"Would you like some earnest-money?"
"Well, pilot?" said Mr. Fogg.
The pilot walked away a little distance, and gazed out to sea, evidently struggling between the anxiety to gain a large sum and the fear of venturing so far.
"Your honour will be satisfied with her.
It puts in at Yokohama and Nagasaki, but it starts from Shanghai."
Below deck was a square cabin, of which the walls bulged out in the form of cots, above a circular divan; in the centre was a table provided with a swinging lamp.
"The San Francisco steamer does not start from Yokohama.
"Does she go fast?"
Fix was not without his fears lest chance should direct the steps of the unfortunate servant, whom he had so badly treated, in this direction; in which case an explanation the reverse of satisfactory to the detective must have ensued.
"I offer you a hundred pounds per day, and an additional reward of two hundred pounds if I reach Yokohama in time."
"Is your honour looking for a boat?"
As he said "a week"
"A voyage?"
"Perfectly."
He acquitted his task with characteristic serenity, and invariably replied to the remonstrances of his fair companion, who was confused by his patience and generosity:
'Hoo speaks plain out what's in her mind.
No one would give him work here, and he'd to go on tramp toward Greenfield.
'Margaret,' said her father, in a low and warning tone, for he saw the cloud gathering on Higgins's face.
And I remember at the time I agreed with him.'
He might---- '
He did you no good; and you drove him mad.'
Made him what he is!
'I canna do it,' said Higgins.
I'll speak truth.
'I teach in order to get paid.'
Who will take up your cause?' The widow opened her eyes wide, and looked at the new speaker, of whose presence she had not been aware till then.
I'll bide inside these four walls, and she'll bide out.
They drew very close to each other in unspoken sympathy.
She cannot breathe, poor thing, with this crowd about her.'
She looked round for Nicholas Higgins.
'If I could--if I had time to think of what I had better say; but all at once---- ' Margaret saw that her father was indeed unable.
He was trembling from head to foot.
Open it quick,' said she to the eldest child.
I'm out o' work because I ne'er asked for it.
'No; you, you,' said Margaret.
Then, after a moment's silence, he added, looking up for the first time: 'I'm not wanting brass.
'Are you out of work?' asked Margaret.
At the time arranged the previous day, they set out on their walk to see Nicholas Higgins and his daughter.
There was a little pause.
'It would be some very hard pressure that would make me even think of submitting to such dictation.'
This helpful neighbour was a great relief to Margaret; she was evidently a stranger to the house, a new-comer in the district, indeed; but she was so kind and thoughtful that Margaret felt she was no longer needed; and that it would be better, perhaps, to set an example of clearing the house, which was filled with idle, if sympathising gazers.
Oh, where is my strength gone to?
Margaret saved her from falling by catching her in her arms.
'Oh, my God!' said she, understanding the meaning of that tearful look.
What was he?
'Why?
He was in a mood to take a surly pleasure in giving answers that were like riddles.
They were all drawn towards the house-door by some irresistible impulse; impelled thither--not by a poor curiosity, but as if by some solemn blast.
He looked up again, with a sharp glance at the questioner; and then tittered a low and bitter laugh.
'And bad words are refusing you work when you ask for it.'
They awaited her perfect recovery in silence.
'Neighbour,' said she, 'your man is dead.
'Who is with you?
'We thought we should have a good chance of finding you, just after dinner-time,' said Margaret.
'What is it?' asked she.
She sank back into the chair.
At last out it came.
'Only our good friend here,' replied her father, 'hit on a capital expedient for clearing the place.'
Their eyes met.
'We'n done a deal in bringing him here--thou take thy share.'
Nicholas was sitting by the fire-side in his accustomed corner: but he had not his accustomed pipe.
'Strike's ended.
Guess yo' how he died?'
'Open it.
They set up such a cry of despair as they guessed the truth, that Margaret knew not how to bear it.
'But we owe her many thanks for her kind service,' began Mr. Hale again.
He was leaning his head upon his hand, his arm resting on his knee.
'The steps of the bearers, heavy and slow, The sobs of the mourners, deep and low.' SHELLEY.
What has he been doing?
But it's in force now.
It's a long time ago; but when he were in life and with us, he did love us, he did.
'He loved him,' said she.
UNION NOT ALWAYS STRENGTH
Some one mun, though.
'To teach folk.
Sure!
'Not alone,' said Mr. Hale, solemnly.
'Would it not be worth while,' said Mr. Hale, 'to ask your old master if he would take you back again?
Chapter XX
But, knowing that the steamer was not to leave for Yokohama until the next morning, he did not disturb himself about the matter.
The least they would do would be to throw you into jail."
"I'll tell you what," said the horseman: "we'll just exchange.
When he was at length come to the village, there stood in the street a scissors-grinder with his truck.
Luckily a butcher came by just then, wheeling a young pig in a barrow.
They have sent people out, and it would be a bad business if they found you with the pig.
"If you could only hear money rattling in your pocket every time you got up, your fortune would be made."
"And the gold?"
The youth told him he was taking the goose to a christening feast.
The butcher passed him his bottle and said:
"Now," said the grinder, lifting up an ordinary heavy field-stone, which lay beside him.
All you want is a grindstone: the rest comes of itself.
"I obtained him for a cow."
That would taste far different, to say nothing of the sausages!"
Then he felt so hot that his tongue was parched with thirst.
"Yes," said the scissors-grinder; "the work has gold at the bottom of it.
What more could I desire?"
"But I warn you, you'll have a job to carry it."
"All that I desire comes to me, as to a Sunday-child."
"I shall be the luckiest fellow on earth.
"I shall be running great risks," said the youth, "but at least I will prevent your getting into trouble."
I'll give you my horse and you give me your lump of gold."
It will be a rich morsel when roasted."
"I must have been born lucky," he cried out.
Meanwhile, having been on his legs since daybreak, he began to feel tired; besides which, he was tormented by hunger, for he had eaten up all his provision in his joy over the exchange of the cow.
At length he could only proceed with great trouble and must needs stop every minute; the stones, too, crushed him terribly.
"There you have a capital stone, which will be just the thing to hammer your old nails straight upon.
With a bright heart and free from all care, he sprang upon his way, until he was home at his mother's.
"Who would have thought it?
"And the pig?"
Then he could not conceal the thought: "How nice it would be now to have nothing to carry!"
He felt very downcast, and said to the peasant: "It's a poor joke, that riding, especially when one lights upon such a brute as this, which kicks and throws one off so that one comes near to breaking one's neck.
"I had her for a horse."
With his two last farthings, he bought himself half a glass of beer. Then he drove his cow towards his mother's village.
His wheel hummed, and he sang the while:
Meanwhile the lad was looking thoughtfully around, shaking his head. "Listen," he said, "I don't think it's all right about your pig.
It is real gold, you know; but, all the same, I can scarcely hold up my head, it weighs so terribly on my shoulders."
"First, I shall have a good roast; then there is the quantity of dripping that will fall out, which will keep me in bread-and-dripping for a quarter of a year; and lastly, the splendid white feathers, with which I will have my pillow stuffed; then I shall fall asleep without rocking.
"Just hold it," he continued, seizing it by the wings, "and feel how heavy it is: yet it was only fattened for eight weeks.
"For him I gave a lump of gold as big as my head."
"I did not buy it, but exchanged it for my pig."
That cow will never give any milk; she is an old animal and, at the best, is only fit for the plow or the butcher."
Now, there's more sense in a cow like yours, behind which you can walk in peace and quietness, besides having your butter, milk, and cheese every morning for certain.
"For your sake, I will exchange, and let you have my pig for your cow."
I have one which is a little damaged indeed, but for which I would ask nothing more than your goose; would that suit you?"
I have just to get a bit of bread (and that isn't a difficult matter) and then, as often as I like, I can eat my butter and cheese with it.
"And the cow?"
"There is no man under the sun," he cried out, "so lucky as I."
But where have you bought that fine goose?"
And he went to work so clumsily that the impatient brute gave him such a kick with her hind leg that he was knocked over and quite dazed, and for a long time did not know where he was.
"Why, that was my reward for seven years of service."
If I have money as often as I feel in my pocket, what else shall I have to care about?" And he handed over the goose, and took the grindstone in receipt.
"There, drink and revive yourself.
As he went on his way, always putting one foot before the other, he met a man galloping briskly along on a fine horse.
Like a snail he crept up to a well, wishing to rest himself and enjoy a refreshing drink.
"You must become a grinder, like me.
"Because I must," answered he; "for I have this big lump to carry home.
The man untied the pig from the wheelbarrow, and gave the rope with which it was bound into Hans's hand.
"What a lucky fellow I am!" he said to himself.
When he came to an inn, he made a stop, and in his great joy ate all the food he had with him right up, both dinner and supper.
Take it and lift it up carefully."
"You must be doing well since you are so merry over your grinding."
"And the horse?"
It is all right indeed when you can slaughter such a beast in your own house.
In order not to spoil the stones in setting them down, he laid them carefully on the ground one beside the other, and bent himself down to drink, but by an accident he gave them a little push, and both stones went splashing down.
You don't catch me on his back again.
But I don't think much of cow's flesh; it is not tender enough.
"You have certainly done well for yourself each time," said the scissors-grinder.
Now, if one had a young pig!
He tied the cow to a withered tree, and as he had no pitcher he placed his leathern cap underneath her; but in spite of all his trouble not a drop of milk could be got.
I fear it is the one you have.
How glad my mother will be!"
As soon as anything goes wrong, something turns up and all's right again."
In the village I have just come through, one has lately been stolen from the magistrate's own sty.
"Are you going to read the paper next?"
And the curious thing was that the pin remained, stuck in the same place.
The clock will soon strike twelve.
In accordance with the instructions received from Moncharmin a few minutes earlier, Mercier took the good lady to the acting-manager's office and turned the key on her, thus making it impossible for her to communicate with her ghost.
For I dropped you in my cab.
A safety-pin!"
Last time, we left at the last stroke of twelve."
"Then what we are doing is absurd!"
"Then," said Richard, who was trying to collect his memory, "then I must certainly have been robbed on my way home from the Opera."
For, after all, after all, after all, there is no one here except you and me, and, if the notes disappear and neither you nor I have anything to do with it, well, we shall have to believe in the ghost ... in the ghost."
"Of course, as you said, we can't be robbed without noticing it."
THE POCKET WAS EMPTY.
"That's so.
"Well, I can feel the pin."
"I should hope not, indeed!" declared Moncharmin.
"The ghost!" continued Richard, in a low voice, as though fearing lest he should be overheard by invisible ears.
After a few days a battle was fought, in which Eliduc's knowledge of the art of war and his bravery, as well as that of his ten followers, helped to decide the fortunes of the King of Exeter, who had the satisfaction of seeing the foe put to flight.
Immediately there were signs of life.
Laying down his sword before the sovereign, he resigned command of the Exeter troops, and, in spite of the king's rich offers and temptations, hurried to take ship for France.
Just then a weasel, running from behind the altar, passed near the bier, which angered the knight, who, at one blow, struck the little animal dead upon the ground.
Then she bent forward, and laid the stem of the flower between the rosy lips of the entranced Guilliadun.
On the other hand, the Princess Guilliadun was by far the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, and her love for him was strong.
The girl stirred, a blush came into her cheeks, and her lips parted.
The image of his promised wife arose clear and bright before him, and he forgot the lovely Guilliadun, who, for a time, had so dazzled his imagination with her charms.
The effect was magical.
In a few hours he might hope to reach the court of his king; but what, meantime, should he do with the body of the unfortunate princess?
All Sir Eliduc's love for his own land stirred within him.
For a moment she hesitated, for her love for the knight was very great.
Lifting up a curtain of closely woven vines which drooped before it, she entered the chapel door.
She was beautiful as ever, and looked like a waxen image.
In vain were the efforts of the sailors to manage the vessel, and all prepared for immediate death, as wind and waves beat furiously upon them.
The knight, kneeling beside her, shed many bitter tears, and then, springing to his saddle, galloped off to place himself at the service of his king.
But the king's order was law; and, taking a fond leave of his promised wife, while vowing ever to be faithful, Sir Eliduc called to him ten of the bravest of his followers, and set sail for the English coast.
Directly the weasel came back again, carrying a beautiful red flower from the wood, which was carefully inserted in the mouth of his companion.
Among his attendants was a youth muffled in a long mantle, who, when they were fairly out at sea, revealed to the knight's astonished gaze the face and form of the wilful Guilliadun.
Dismissing the boy with a piece of gold, the lady resolved herself to unravel the mystery.
He mounted his palfrey, took the body in his arms, rode to the hermit's retreat, and, gaining entrance to a little chapel, laid on a slab in the centre of it the unhappy Guilliadun.
There was no time for discussion, for, at that moment, arose a mighty tempest which threatened to engulf the ship.
They were married with great rejoicings; but when the blessing was said over them by the priest, the knight fancied he heard a sigh breathed close in his ear.
He found the affairs of his country in a bad way, but the mere mention of his name sufficed to inspire the Breton soldiers with new courage. Marching at the head of the king's troops, he led them to battle, and in a short time had put the foe to confusion and rout.
They had a short voyage with fair winds, landing at Totness, in Devonshire, and proceeded at once to Exeter.
She had thus disguised herself to follow him, and now vowed that unless he took her to be his wife, she would die by her own fair hand.
Sir Isumbras clasped his only remaining treasure to his heart, and followed the vessel with his eyes until it vanished from sight.
Sir Isumbras was not satisfied to remain quiet long, though he had slain the heathen king.
He fell on his knees, and offered what remained of his life to the God he had offended.
Scarcely had the knight left his son, when an enormous lion burst from a neighboring thicket and bore away the child.
But flight was in vain; three and twenty thousand unbelievers were soon laid dead upon the plain by the lion, leopard, and eagle, fighting with tireless fury, and driving all before them, until the entire heathen army was utterly put to rout.
Very soon after this miraculous event Sir Isumbras found his wife, who had dwelt, holy and charitable, in a secluded castle, where she had been shut up by the Saracen king.
His heart beat with wild joy when he saw the foe before him.
Here they stood, and, through eyes that were full of tears, saw a great fleet of three hundred ships coming toward them.
By nightfall Sir Isumbras, single-handed, had killed the heathen king and many of his followers.
Sir Isumbras hastened to the aid of his beloved family, stripping himself of his scarlet mantle and his surcoat to clothe them.
He entered their service, and bound himself for seven long years to learn their trade. During this time he forged a complete suit of armor for himself, being determined at the first opportunity to take up arms against the Saracens, whose king had not only done him such a cruel wrong, but was oppressing God's people.
One day when mounted on his favorite steed, surrounded by his dogs, and having his hawk on fist, Sir Isumbras cast up his eyes to the sky, and there saw an angel, who reproached him with his pride, announcing that Heaven had in store for him a speedy punishment.
So, affecting to treat the poor couple with respect, he offered them gold and treasure if the knight would renounce Christianity and consent to fight under the Saracen banners. This offer was at once declined, and the angry king made up his mind to revenge himself by carrying away the knight's wife.
Scarcely had the next day's sun risen upon the earth, when an eagle, attracted by the red cloth, darted down, carrying off mantle, child, and purse in his talons.
Once upon a time there lived a knight so handsome, so rich, and so valiant that all eyes were turned upon him.
These were three splendid knights, the first mounted upon a lion, the second upon a leopard, and the third upon an eagle.
The Christian army was to fight the Saracens on a field not far from the forge.
She welcomed him with rapture, and together they shed many tears over their lost children.
They lived together for some years, until Sir Isumbras was again summoned to do battle with the Saracens, who had determined at all cost to kill him. The fight was again hot and long, and just when Sir Isumbras was about to be overpowered by numbers of the enemy, three new champions appeared in the field, declaring themselves on the side of the Christians.
Uttering a fervent prayer, he dashed into the thick of the combat, attracting all eyes at first by his sorry steed and rough armor, and again by the splendid skill and courage of his charge.
His name was Isumbras, and fortune had given him everything that the heart of man could wish for. He had a splendid castle, surrounded by vast forests, where every day he went hunting or hawking; and so generous he was with his wealth that the poor flocked to him from every quarter and never went away empty-handed.
Sir Isumbras had laid the fatal present of the heathen king, the purse of gold, in the scarlet mantle which he wrapped around his child.
Sir Isumbras fell to his knees in prayer; but hardly had the angel vanished from his sight when, on remounting his horse, the noble creature fell dead beneath him; the hawk dropped lifeless from his fist; and the faithful hounds expired in agonies at his feet.
This was the navy of a famous heathen king, and no sooner had he landed than the travellers, who had not touched bread or meat for seven days, hastened to implore his charity.
Once, during this time, when he was starving upon the banks of a stream, there appeared to him a cheering visitor.
Then, coming back to Sir Isumbras, the three champions knelt before him, announcing themselves his long lost sons, mercifully protected and befriended by the savage creatures by whom they had been carried off.
In like manner the second son became the prey of a fierce leopard; and the poor mother, who saw them so cruelly torn from her sight, fainted away, with her baby on her breast. Sir Isumbras bowed to the will of God; and when his wife revived they journeyed on to the shore of the Greek sea.
They took pity on him and fed him.
The Saracen cavalry, terror-stricken at sight of them, dispersed in all directions.
At length his opportunity came.
Hastening on foot to his castle, he was met by a servant, who informed him his horses and oxen had been suddenly struck dead by lightning, and that his fowls had all been stung to death by adders.
He then proposed to his wife that, as a sign of repentance for their sins, they should all go on foot to the holy city, Jerusalem, begging their bread from land to land.
The Christian king enriched the entire family, restoring them to their former rank.
The poor knight was at last in utter despair.
Night found him still there, until father and babe fell asleep upon the bare ground, too weary to keep awake.
He went to the Holy Land, and for seven years wandered about a pilgrim, as before, sleeping upon the ground by night, and vainly seeking tidings of his wife by day.
He cut with his knife upon his bare shoulder the pilgrim's sign of the cross, and then the afflicted family set forth on their travels.
Sir Isumbras embraced his valiant sons, and led them to their mother.
Sir Isumbras buckled on his awkward armor and, mounting a horse that had been used by the smith to carry coals, proceeded to the field of battle.
And now wealth, titles, honors, and all that he had lost, came back to Sir Isumbras, and the remainder of his days was spent in blessed peace.
Just then he heard the noise of a blacksmith's forge, and saw, not far off, some men at work.
All that day the battle raged.
His pen was moving rapidly over the paper, but ere long there was a pause, and laying his hand caressingly on the curly head, he said, "How quiet my little girl is; but where is your book, daughter?"
Elsie was almost in despair; but Herbert, who was lying on a sofa, reading, suddenly shut his book, saying, "I tell you what, Elsie! tell us one of those nice fairy stories we all like so much!"
Elsie thought a moment.
She joyfully availed herself of the permission, and soon her pen was vainly trying to keep pace with her father's.
"Well, what shall we play?" asked Elsie, good-naturedly.
I let her wear them, to be sure, but that is all; she has no right to give them away."
"Why! what ails my darling?" he asked tenderly.
At last she had finished.
She had spoken low, but not so low that his quick ear did not catch the sound.
no, indeed, I feel far more like rewarding than punishing you.
How could you bear to read them?"
why, how strange!
"Won't you come along, girls?"
"Set your heart at rest, my darling," he said, tenderly, "there is no danger of such a thing.
Your hair is very pretty, too, but it would be quite too short."
"But you are not going to punish me?" she asked, beginning to tremble again.
See what I have for you this morning."
My little daughter's confidence and affection are worth more to me than the finest gold, or the most priceless jewels."
I think I should die," she said, dropping her head on his breast, with almost a sob.
Once or twice she asked him to tell her a word, but the most of it she got through without any difficulty.
Elsie opened a drawer and laid it carefully in, and they ran off to the nursery.
"Yes, perhaps--but I want to tell you, Carry, what papa says.
"I was sorry for your disappointment yesterday," he said, "but I hope these will make up for it, and they will give you a great deal of useful information, as well as amusement; while it could only be an injury to you to read that trashy book."
"I think it's really mean of your papa; he never lets you go anywhere."
Carry and Mary readily assented.
Lucy looked a little ashamed, while Mary Leslie exclaimed:
But I must go and show my bracelet to Lucy. Hark! no, there's the bell, and I'll just leave it here until after breakfast."
But we won't talk any more about her.
Elsie, dear, put away your books, and go down to your little friends."
Now put on your hat, and we will take our walk."
I have been waiting for half an hour, I should think, to show you these," she said, as Elsie came in from her walk.
"Yes," he said, smiling, "that is exactly what I want you to do.
"Please, papa, don't be very angry with me," she pleaded, speaking very low and hesitatingly.
They were Abbot's works.
I could not do it, if I wished."
"That's a sweet child, Mr. Dinsmore," he remarked.
Herbert drew a deep sigh.
"Yes, papa, a good deal," she answered faintly; "and I feel so weak. Please take me in your arms, papa, I want to lay my head against you."
"Please, papa, don't ask," she pleaded in a faint voice.
What will you have?
"Was she much hurt?" Mr. Dinsmore asked, his voice trembling a little in spite of himself.
Carry was the only one who seemed to have any presence of mind.
"Thank you, dear papa, you are so kind," Elsie said, gratefully.
Well, mamma, I had not been there very long when I heard voices near me, on the other side of some bushes, that, I suppose, must have prevented them from seeing me.
"Arthur," said several voices.
At length, some of the older ones, seeing that the sun was getting low, called to the others that it was time to return, and all turned their faces homeward, walking more soberly and silently along than at first, for they were beginning to feel somewhat fatigued.
She gave one frightened cry as she fell, and the next instant was lying pale and motionless at the bottom.
"Not permanently, I hope; indeed, I feel quite sure of it, if she is well taken care of, and not allowed to use it too soon; but these sprains are tedious things, and she will not be able to walk for some weeks. Good-night, sir; don't be too anxious, she will get over it in time, and you may be thankful it is nothing worse."
"And so I will, dearest," he said, leaning fondly over her, and stroking back the hair from her forehead.
"But what did Arthur do?" asked Herbert anxiously.
The tea-bell rang, and Elsie half started up.
"Yes," sobbed Lucy, "we all thought she was dead, it was so long before she spoke, or moved, or even opened her eyes."
"Oh, no, dear papa, I would much rather bear it myself," she answered quickly.
"Well, then, Aunt Chloe, go down and bring up whatever good things are there, and she can take her choice.
Mr. Dinsmore leaned back in the carriage with a groan and did not speak again.
"Are you quite sure, doctor, that her spine has sustained no injury?" asked the father anxiously, adding, "there is scarcely anything I should so dread for her as that."
"You need not, darling," he answered, kissing her cheek.
They were climbing a steep hill.
"Shall I, papa?--then you will have to stay by me all day long."
Jim had brought the doctor, and Mr. Dinsmore immediately requested him to make a careful examination of the child's injuries.
"If you please, sir, I would rather not tell," she replied, while the color rushed over her face, and then instantly faded away again, leaving her deathly pale.
She was suffering great pain, but bearing it bravely.
He did so, and reported a badly sprained ankle, and a slight bruise on the head; nothing more.
I don't know where she could have been; she always thinks of my lameness, and walks slowly when I am along, but this time they all walked so fast that I soon grew very tired, indeed, with trying to keep up.
But Elsie was not with us.
"But, Lucy dear," said her mother, wiping her eyes, "you haven't told us anything yet.
"My ankle, papa; it pains me terribly; and I think I must have hit my head, it hurts me so."
"Really, Mary, you seem quite stupid sometimes."
Harry "did not know, but feared she was pretty badly injured."
"Jim," she said to the black boy, who stood blubbering by her side, "run quickly for the doctor.
"Yes, yes, here, here!
"Was she insensible?"
"But what has that to do with Elsie's fall?" asked Mary Leslie.
All was now terror and confusion among the children; the little ones, who all loved Elsie dearly, began to scream and cry.
What did Arthur do?
The last day of the old year had come; the afternoon was bright and warm for the season, and the little folks at Roselands were unanimously in favor of a long walk.
They had not heard of the accident, and were quite startled by Lucy's excited manner.
"Yes, she was when I left," Harry said.
"Her papa brought her home, and Jim went for the doctor, and they're doing something with her now in her own room--for Pomp said Mr. Dinsmore carried her right up there!
"What is it, Herbert dear, what is it?" she asked in alarm; for he had fallen back on his pillow, and seemed almost ready to faint.
MILTON'S PARADISE LOST.
THOMSON'S EDMUND AND ELEONORA.
"How did you happen to fall, my dear?" asked the doctor.
"She had fallen down the hill," he said, "but he did not see what made her fall."
"That I shall, you may rest assured, sir; but tell me doctor, do you think her ankle very seriously injured?"
Mr. Dinsmore followed him to the door.
quick!
Besides it was evident enough that Arthur felt guilty from the way he acted when Mr. Dinsmore came, and when he spoke to him.
"I am, indeed, doctor," Mr. Dinsmore said, warmly grasping the hand the kind-hearted physician held out to him.
Are you in pain?"
Harry, Lucy, Carry, and Mary, rushed down the path again as fast as they could, and were soon standing pale and breathless beside the still form of their little companion.
"My precious one," he murmured in a low, moved tone, as he gently lifted her in his arms; "are you much hurt?
Harry could not tell much about it.
But Elsie opened them only for an instant, moaned as if in great pain, and relapsed again into insensibility, so like death that Carry shuddered and trembled with fear.
One voice was Arthur's, but the other I didn't know.
Mr. Hale went out to his bookseller's, and to call on a friend or two.
You are a kind girl.
He rose, and walked nervously up and down the room.
But at last the four packers went into the kitchen to their tea; and Margaret moved stiffly and slowly away from the place in the hall where she had been standing so long, out through the bare echoing drawing-room, into the twilight of an early November evening.
It would be infinitely worse to have known you a hypocrite.' She dropped her voice at the last few words, as if entertaining the idea of hypocrisy for a moment in connection with her father savoured of irreverence.
Even the pretty lawn at the side of the house was made unsightly and untidy by the straw that had been wafted upon it through the open door and windows.
'No, father,' said Margaret, looking straight at him, and speaking low and steadily.
She had never been along it since she paced it at Henry Lennox's side.
A small branch--it might be of rotten wood, or it might be broken by force--came heavily down in the nearest part of the forest, Margaret ran, swift as Camilla, down to the window, and rapped at it with a hurried tremulousness which startled Charlotte within.
But when she heard her father's step on the gravel outside, she started up, and hastily shaking her heavy black hair back, and wiping a few tears away that had come on her cheeks she knew not how, she went out to open the door for him.
Now and then, a cottage door in the distance was opened and shut, as if to admit the tired labourer to his home; but that sounded very far away.
You must try and write to me, if I can ever give you any little help or good advice.
He had often spoken to Margaret of these hasty walks, snatched in the intervals between study and dinner.
We can't either of us talk about it to-night, I believe,' said she, finding that tears and sobs would come in spite of herself.
Her eyes were on that late-blowing rose as she was trying to answer; and she had caught the idea of the vivid beauty of the feathery leaves of the carrots in the very middle of his last sentence.
They did not make much progress with their work.
They were to stop in London all night at some quiet hotel.
Margaret started forwards, and as quickly fell back, half-smiling at herself for the sudden motion.
She says little Susan has kept watch down the lane for days past.--Nay, Margaret, what is the matter, dear?' The thought of the little child watching for her, and continually disappointed--from no forgetfulness on her part, but from sheer inability to leave home--was the last drop in poor Margaret's cup, and she was sobbing away as if her heart would break.
Every one they saw, either in the house or out in the streets, appeared hurrying to some appointment, expected by, or expecting somebody.
The leaves were more gorgeous than ever; the first touch of frost would lay them all low on the ground.
FAREWELL
'I had better go and take mamma up this cup of tea.
'I cannot bear it.
Yet within a mile, Margaret knew of house after house, where she for her own sake, and her mother for her aunt Shaw's, would be welcomed, if they came in gladness, or even in peace of mind.
Almost before they had settled themselves into the car, sent from Southampton to fetch them to the station, they were gone away to return no more.
They alone seemed strange and friendless, and desolate.
She leant back and shut her eyes, and the tears welled forth, and hung glittering for an instant on the shadowing eye-lashes before rolling slowly down her cheeks, and dropping, unheeded, on her dress.
Oh, is there no going back?'
The men would have wanted you to tell them how to go on.
She heard Charlotte shutting the windows, and fastening up for the night, unconscious that any one had gone out into the garden.
These two last, crying between whiles, wondered how the young lady could keep up so this last day, and settled it between them that she was not likely to care much for Helstone, having been so long in London.
I shall be sorry to leave you.
Only a fortnight ago! And all so changed!
I shall always be glad to get a letter from Helstone, you know.
The evening, without employment, passed in a room high up in an hotel, was long and heavy.
A stealthy, creeping, cranching sound among the crisp fallen leaves of the forest, beyond the garden, seemed almost close at hand.
Here, at this bed of thyme, he began to speak of what she must not think of now.
The study was all ready for tea.
Not she.
'Oh, there's Harrison's, where I bought so many of my wedding-things. Dear! how altered!
Here there was no sound.
They've got immense plate-glass windows, larger than Crawford's in Southampton.
She heard him talking, as if to himself.
Besides, was Margaret one to give way before strange men, or even household friends like the cook and Charlotte!
Margaret tried to check herself, but would not speak until she could do so with firmness.
'Oh, miss, I should have been sure to have missed you soon.
Let me in!
Moreover, if she gave way, who was to act?
Margaret went along the walk under the pear-tree wall.
'As far as Fordham Beeches.
There was a good blazing fire, and unlighted candles on the table.
I shall be sure and send you my address when I know it.'
Mr. Hale was distressingly perplexed.
I think I could go through my own with patience.
'It is bad to believe you in error.
'Thank you, Charlotte.
In London,--going through the old round; dining with the old Harley Street set, or with gayer young friends of his own.
Mrs. Hale's dressing-room was left untouched to the last; and there she and Dixon were packing up clothes, and interrupting each other every now and then to exclaim at, and turn over with fond regard, some forgotten treasure, in the shape of some relic of the children while they were yet little.
He showed far more depression than she did.
'Have you been a very long walk to-day?' asked she, on seeing his refusal to touch food of any kind.
The rooms had a strange echoing sound in them,--and the light came harshly and strongly in through the uncurtained windows,--seeming already unfamiliar and strange.
Margaret knew it was some poacher.
I cannot bear to see the sufferings of others.
There she stood, very pale and quiet, with her large grave eyes observing everything,--up to every present circumstance, however small.
Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved Helstone, the next morning.
Down-stairs, Margaret stood calm and collected, ready to counsel or advise the men who had been called in to help the cook and Charlotte.
She could hardly get him to talk, although she tried to speak on subjects that would interest him, at the cost of an effort every time which she thought would be her last.
The wild adventurous freedom of their life had taken her fancy; she felt inclined to wish them success; she had no fear of them.
Poor Mrs. Hale had cried in her way nearly all day long; and Dixon showed her sorrow by extreme crossness, and a continual irritable attempt to keep her petticoats from even touching the unconscious Mr. Hale, whom she regarded as the origin of all this suffering.
Where was he now?
But with the increase of serious and just ground of complaint, a new kind of patience had sprung up in her mother's mind.
"I have an isolated hovel yonder, behind the ruins of the old convent, in a corner which no one ever looks into.
"Ah, goodness!
Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat once more; his hat, which he had flung over the wall, had been found and picked up.
there are only women in this house--many young girls.
"And what is this bell which you wear on your knee?"
The man's head was bent down, and he did not see him approaching.
It was this operation which had caused him to execute the peculiar movements observed from the shed by Jean Valjean.
His face, which was in the shadow, was not distinguishable.
He turned.
The bell gives them warning.
"One hundred francs!"
"Still," said Jean Valjean, "I must stay here."
But how do you come here?"
But they remember you!
There is no trouble about that: if ever you do fall, it will be from there.
"Oh! that would be a blessing from the good God, if I could make you some little return for that!
You don't recognize me?"
Memories recurred to Jean Valjean.
"You certainly are here."
"What do you wish me to do?" he resumed.
When I come, they go."
"Answer me as though I knew nothing."
"Well, you can do to-day for me that which I did for you in the olden days."
"What house is this?"
He continued:--
Less than half an hour afterwards Cosette, who had grown rosy again before the flame of a good fire, was lying asleep in the old gardener's bed.
That name, thus pronounced, at that obscure hour, in that unknown spot, by that strange man, made Jean Valjean start back.
"That is very lucky," said the old man, in a reproachful tone.
Old Fauchelevent winked with an indescribable air.
I am at your service."
"Who are you? and what house is this?" demanded Jean Valjean.
"Now I am going to ask two things of you."
"No," said Jean Valjean; "and how happens it that you know me?"
A wonderful joy had transfigured this old man.
It was he, the intruder, who interrogated.
The man gave a start and raised his eyes.
Lord God! Are the saints going mad nowadays?
That concerns you.
The two men were warming themselves with their elbows resting on a table upon which Fauchelevent had placed a bit of cheese, black bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man was saying to Jean Valjean, as he laid his hand on the latter's knee: "Ah!
"But to come to the point, how the deuce did you manage to get in here, you, Father Madeleine?
In fact, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, old Fauchelevent held in his hand the end of a straw mat which he was occupied in spreading over the melon bed.
During the hour or thereabouts that he had been in the garden he had already spread out a number of them.
"There is no one but me."
"You can earn a hundred francs," went on Jean Valjean, "if you will grant me shelter for this night."
"And what are you doing here?" resumed Jean Valjean.
It appears that I should be a dangerous person to meet.
No coat!
He repeated, as though talking to himself:--
Strange to say, their roles seemed to be reversed.
"Good," said Jean Valjean.
He had expected anything but that.
"Ah, good God!
"That I will explain to you.
We will go and get the child."
Do you know, you would have frightened any one who did not know you?
In a few strides Jean Valjean stood beside him.
And then, moreover, you it was who placed me here.
His countenance seemed to emit a ray of light.
"Why, I am covering my melons, of course!"
"That is settled then.
"Ah!" said Jean Valjean, "so it is you?
And what a state you are in! You have no cravat; you have no hat; you have no coat!
Monsieur le Maire, dispose of the old man!"
All this was uttered with a mixture of stupefaction and naive kindliness.
The moon shone full upon Jean Valjean's terrified countenance.
His words tumbled over each other.
But how did you get in here?"
No matter if you are a saint; you are a man as well, and no man enters here."
"Not when you got me the place here as gardener?"
"As you please.
That is bad!
"Come, you know well enough."
He had taken in his hand the roll of silver which was in the pocket of his waistcoat.
Now, come with me.
My honour is at stake, and that is more precious to me than all my wealth.
But how can he or any one else know what takes place in this house?
"Certainly, but Noureddin has just been to tell me that his father has changed his mind and has bestowed me upon him.
As soon as they saw her they agreed that less than 4,000 gold pieces could not be asked.
The Persian thanked him for his advice, and promised to profit by it.
"Madam," replied the vizir, "what you say is very just, but I cannot pardon Noureddin before I have mortified him as he deserves."
Noureddin, convinced at length of the truth of her words, yielded, and reluctantly led her to the slave market, where, showing her to a dealer named Hagi Hassan, he inquired her value.
The two little slaves barred the entrance, saying that his mother had given orders that he was not to be admitted.
Then, seeing the beautiful Persian, he confided to her the statement of the steward, with many expressions of regret for his own carelessness.
This advice Noureddin was not slow to follow, and soon he formed little society of ten young men all about his own age, with whom he spent all his time in continual feasting and merry-making.
The friend, who had been listening behind the curtain, immediately hastened to communicate the news to the rest of the company.
"If this is so," they said, "we must cease to come here."
There is now no other resource left but to sell your slaves and your furniture."
On learning that it was so, he promised to obtain the highest possible price for her.
If you wish me to remain in your service, furnish me with the necessary funds, else I must withdraw."
In the evening, when he returns home, lie in wait for him and pretend that you will slay him.
With the sale of my jewels I will obtain 10,000 gold pieces, and with this sum you will buy another slave."
"Tell him, every time he calls, that I am not at home." The same thing happened at the second door, and also at the third, and so on with all the ten.
Then they rushed to the bath, informing their mistress with shrieks and tears that Noureddin had driven them away by force and gone in.
Finally this resource also came to an end, and again he sought counsel from the beautiful Persian.
His mother, though knowing very well that he returned to the house every evening, dare not ask her husband to pardon him.
Do not therefore hesitate to sell me, and with the money you obtain go and establish yourself in business in some distant town."
The improvement is not due to the dress alone, but largely to the beautifying effects of the bath.
Shortly afterwards he expired, leaving universal regret throughout the kingdom; rich and poor alike followed him to the grave.
What added to the confusion in his affairs was that he refused to look into his accounts with his steward, sending him away every time he appeared with his book.
"Sir, as she is destined for the king, I would have you observe that she is extremely tired with the long journey, and before presenting her to his Majesty you would do well to keep her a fortnight in your own house, and to see that a little care is bestowed upon her.
Her price, however, is too high."
"You owe your life to your mother.
"Had I but followed your advice, beautiful Persian," he said, "all this would not have happened, but at least I have this consolation, that I have spent my fortune in the company of friends who will not desert me in an hour of need.
"Do not suppose," replied her husband, "that it is the loss of the money that affects me.
When his wife was at length sufficiently calm to inform him of what had happened, his rage and mortification knew no bounds. Wringing his hands and rending his beard, he exclaimed:
She had no sooner gone than he arrived, and not finding his mother in her apartment, would have sought her in that of the Persian.
At length she took courage and said:
So saying, she wept bitterly, and all her slaves wept with her.
Accordingly next morning early Noureddin went to seek his ten friends, who all lived in the same street.
The friend, curious to hear what passed between them, hid himself behind the hangings, and heard the following words:
"My lord," said his wife, "I am quite aware of Saouy's baseness, and that he is capable of playing you this malicious trick.
One of his friends had risen at the same time, but Noureddin was before him, and finding the intruder to be the steward, he went out and closed the door.
I ask no more than the sum it has cost me to make her such as she is."
Taking each by an arm, he put them out of the anteroom, and shut the door.
"My lord," she replied, "I am well aware of your love for me, which is only equalled by mine for you, but a cruel necessity obliges us to seek the only remedy."
I myself hardly recognised you.
I would die rather than part from you whom I love better than my life."
Nothing remains of the sums you gave me for your expenses, and all other sources of income are also at end, having been transferred by you to others.
Overwhelmed with grief, he sought consolation from the beautiful Persian.
I have, however, to warn you of one thing. I have a son, who, though not wanting in sense, is young, foolish, and headstrong, and I charge you to keep him at a distance."
More than a year after these events the minister took a chill, leaving the bath while still heated to go out on important business.
This resulted in inflammation of the lungs, which rapidly increased.
Kissing her hand, the beautiful slave said: "Madam, I do not know how you find me in this dress that you have had prepared for me; your women assure me that it suits me so well that they hardly knew me.
Knocking at the door of the first and chief, the slave who opened it left him to wait in a hall while he announced his visit to his master.
Before bidding adieu to the fair Persian, he said to her: "No happiness can be greater than what I have procured for you; judge for yourself, you now belong to the king.
She is in every way fit to be the slave of a king; she plays every musical instrument, she sings, she dances, she makes verses, in fact there is no accomplishment in which she does not excel."
Noureddin and the Fair Persian
"How!
At length a day came when, one of his friends being admitted, urged him strongly to be consoled, and to resume his former place in society.
The vizir, feeling that his end was at hand, sent for Noureddin, and charged him with his dying breath never to part with the beautiful Persian.
"But, madam," inquired the Persian, "what harm is there in that?"
This news caused great consternation to the lady, who, dressing herself as quickly as possible, hastened to the apartment of the fair Persian, to find that Noureddin had already gone out.
I believed him, and so great is my affection for Noureddin that I would willingly pass my life with him."
Throughout one entire year Noureddin did nothing but amuse himself, and dissipate the wealth his father had taken such pains to acquire.
"He will be sufficiently punished," answered the lady, "if you do as I suggest.
Taking them into a room apart, Hagi Hassan exclaimed as soon as she had unveiled, "My lord, is not this the slave your father bought for 10,000 pieces?"
The Persian was equally captivated by Noureddin, and said to herself: "The vizir does me too great honour in buying me for the king.
As soon, then, as Khacan returned home he sent for the dealers in female slaves, and charged them directly they had found such a one as he described to inform him.
He will relate all this to the king, and you will see the consequences that will ensue."
The slaves having been sent away, Noureddin went to open it himself.
"My lord," she said, "I know that the late vizir, your father, bought me for 10,000 gold pieces, and though I have diminished in value since, I should still fetch a large sum.
Noureddin re-entering at that moment, they plainly saw, in spite of his efforts to dissemble, that what they had heard was the truth.
"Sir," was the answer, "for less than 10,000 gold pieces he will not let her go; he declares that, what with masters for her instruction, and for bodily exercises, not to speak of clothing and nourishment, he has already spent that sum upon her.
Noureddin showed every mark of the deepest grief at his father's death, and for long refused to see any one.
Sometimes the fair Persian consented to appear at these festivities, but she disapproved of this lavish expenditure, and did not scruple to warn Noureddin of the probable consequences.
He did not return home till after his father had gone to bed, and went out early next morning before the vizir awoke, and these precautions he kept up during an entire month.
Do you not consider the harm you may be doing yourself, and fear that malicious people, seeking the cause of your estrangement, may guess the real one?"
The king will shed not only thy blood but mine." His wife tried to console him, saying: "Do not torment thyself.
If it is the truth they tell me, and not flattery, it is to you I owe the transformation."
When he got home and went to his own room, his little dog Bibi ran to meet him, jumping round him with pleasure.
"You see a good action always brings its reward," and the Prince found himself changed into a beautiful white dove.
The Prince began to think that the best thing he could do would be to get as far away from the lake as he could, then at least he would not be continually reminded of his terrible ugliness.
His bad friends, when they heard him, resolved to turn his wrath upon an old nobleman who had formerly been his tutor; and who still dared sometimes to tell the Prince of his faults, for he loved him as if he had been his own son.
"I would return good for evil," he said to himself, "and save the unhappy man's life." He had hardly wished this when his iron cage flew open, and he rushed to the side of the keeper, who was awake and was defending himself against the tiger.
That night, when he was alone in his room, a beautiful lady suddenly appeared before him; her long dress was as white as snow, and she had a crown of white roses upon her head.
He flew on and on for several days, till he came to a great desert, where he saw a cavern, and, to his delight, there sat Celia, sharing the simple breakfast of an old hermit.
While she was speaking, they found themselves in Suliman's hall, and his delight was great at seeing his dear master once more.
"I don't want you, you are in the way."
At the same instant he found himself in a great forest, beside a clear lake, in which he could see plainly the horrible creature he had become, and a voice said to him:
I thank you for the kindness you have shown me, which has made me your friend for ever.
"Do you dislike me?" asked the Prince, who was very much vexed at this answer.
"But," said Prince Darling, "would it not be a shame if I had an innocent girl put to death?
"Rise, my children," said the Fairy, "and I will transport you to the palace, and Prince Darling shall have back again the crown he forfeited by his bad behavior."
"Look carefully at the state to which your wickedness has brought you; believe me, your soul is a thousand times more hideous than your body."
The advantage of possessing a great empire is not to be able to do the evil that one desires, but to do all the good that one possibly can."
After giving this order he went to his own room, but he had scarcely got into it when there was a clap of thunder which made the ground shake, and the Fairy Truth appeared suddenly before him.
So he ordered him to retire from his Court, though he still, from time to time, spoke of him as a worthy man whom he respected, even if he no longer loved him.
If you are really good enough to wish to do me a favor, I beg that you will become his friend."
Prince Darling roared with anger when he heard this; but it was still worse for him when he reached the great square before his own palace.
"I laugh at your powerlessness and anger, and I intend to punish your pride by letting you fall into the hands of your own subjects."
Celia and Prince Darling threw themselves at the Fairy's feet, and the Prince was never tired of thanking her for her kindness.
You know well he would still be unhappy.
"I am the Fairy Truth.
"With all my heart," answered the Fairy.
"I promised your father that I would be your friend, and to keep my word I have come to bring you a present." At the same time she put a little gold ring upon his finger.
"Madam," said the good King, "since you are a fairy you no doubt know all my wishes.
For Celia has done nothing to deserve punishment."
But just now his first care was for Celia, and rising into the air he flew round and round the house, until he saw an open window; but he searched through every room in vain.
"Take care what you are saying, Celia," said the old hermit; "are you prepared to keep that promise?"
One of the Prince's favorite companions was his foster-brother, whom he trusted entirely; but he was not at all a good man, and gave Prince Darling very bad advice, and encouraged him in all his evil ways.
Only a good man can be really contented."
Two days afterward, when the Prince had gone to bed, the Fairy suddenly appeared to him and said:
But he was surprised to find that the brook was gone, and where it had been stood a great house that seemed to be built of gold and precious stones.
But what seemed very strange was that those people who came out of the house were pale and thin, and their clothes were torn, and hanging in rags about them.
Prince Darling fancied that Celia would think herself only too happy if he offered to make her a great queen, but she said fearlessly:
"Celia has loved you ever since she first saw you, only she would not tell you while you were so obstinate and naughty.
Celia was delighted to hear how sorry he was for all his past follies and misdeeds, and promised to love him as long as she lived.
The good King was very much surprised to see her, for he knew his door had been tightly shut, and he could not think how she had got in.
And he took it home to his palace and had it put in a pretty little house, with all sorts of nice things to eat.
So saying, the Fairy disappeared, leaving Prince Darling very much astonished.
It is time that I should fulfil my promise, and begin your punishment.
The Queen petted and took care of him, but she was so afraid that he would get too fat that she consulted the court physician, who said that he was to be fed only upon bread, and was not to have much even of that.
One day, when the Prince was walking about, he saw a young girl who was so very pretty that he made up his mind at once that he would marry her. Her name was Celia, and she was as good as she was beautiful.
The Prince, in great anger, sent his foster-brother with a number of soldiers to bring his tutor before him, in chains, like a criminal.
"I believe the Fairy is laughing at me," he thought.
"You are very kind to trouble yourself about this little girl; if I were you I would soon make her obey me.
So poor Prince Darling was terribly hungry all day long, but he was very patient about it.
At first Prince Darling had thanked him, but after a time he grew impatient and thought it must be just mere love of fault-finding that made his old tutor blame him when everyone else was praising and flattering him.
"I do not ask either of these things for my son," replied the good King; "but if you will make him the best of princes, I shall indeed be grateful to you.
"I am not making fun of you," said a voice, answering Prince Darling's thoughts.
But she said to him:
You have made yourself like the lion by your anger, and like the wolf by your greediness.
The King stroked it gently, and said to it:
The poor little dog, who didn't understand this at all, pulled at his coat to make him at least look at her, and this made Prince Darling so cross that he gave her quite a hard kick.
He gave up the throne joyfully to the Prince, and remained always the most faithful of his subjects.
She soon seemed to be quite well again, and the Prince, delighted to have been able to help her, was thinking of going home to the palace, when he heard a great outcry, and, turning round, saw Celia, who was being carried against her will into the great house.
Touched with compassion, he said to himself:
Not that he was naturally of a bad disposition; he was truly sorry when he had been naughty, and said:
So he ran toward the wood, but before he had gone many yards he fell into a deep pit which had been made to trap bears, and the hunters, who were hiding in a tree, leaped down, and secured him with several chains, and led him into the chief city of his own kingdom.
He was very much surprised, and sat down in a corner of his room feeling quite ashamed of himself.
"Well, bunny, as you have come to me for protection I will see that nobody hurts you."
"I can make your son the handsomest prince in the world, or the richest, or the most powerful; choose whichever you like for him."
I condemn you to resemble the animals whose ways you have imitated.
He had a lion's head, a bull's horns, a wolf's feet, and a snake's body.
He left off tearing at the iron bars of the cage in which he was shut up, and became as gentle as a lamb.
What is the good of my being ruler of a great kingdom if I am not even allowed to beat my own dog?"
"You promised to love me always; tell me that you really mean what you said, or I shall have to ask the Fairy to give me back the form of the dove which pleased you so much."
He remembered that white was the favorite color of the Fairy Truth, and began to hope that he might at last win back her favor.
Unfortunately, this man was very rough and unkind, and though the poor monster was quite quiet, he often beat him without rhyme or reason when he happened to be in a bad temper. One day when this keeper was asleep a tiger broke its chain, and flew at him to eat him up.
"Don't touch it, my poor little dog--that house is the palace of pleasure, and everything that comes out of it is poisoned!"
At the same moment a voice said:
The Prince was very angry at this speech, and commanded his officers to make Celia a prisoner and carry her off to his palace.
The Prince saw how naughty he had been, and promised to try and do better in future, but he did not keep his word.
The good King was quite satisfied with this promise; and very soon afterward he died.
No trace of Celia was to be seen, and the Prince, in despair, determined to search through the world till he found her.
Prince Darling went up to a young girl who was trying to eat a few blades of grass, she was so hungry.
"I am very unhappy to have to struggle against my anger and pride every day; if I had been punished for them when I was little they would not be such a trouble to me now."
When the Prince grew old enough to understand, he soon learned that there could be nothing worse than to be proud, obstinate, and conceited, and he had really tried to cure himself of these defects, but by that time all his faults had become habits; and a bad habit is very hard to get rid of.
"You have committed three faults.
"Sire, I am only a shepherdess, and a poor girl, but, nevertheless, I will not marry you."
She had been so horribly bewildered as to think at moments that perhaps it might be that a man who was very much absorbed in affairs--
He made his visit a long one purposely.
Warren's strong, amiable personality was good for her.
But I could think of nothing else so likely to be quite safe, until Lord Walderhurst could advise me. And when his letter came yesterday, and he did not speak of what I had said--" Her voice quite failed her.
Perhaps you remember."
But," as the result of another memory, "how sane she seems!"
Yesterday she had fainted.
India was thousands and thousands of miles away, and letters took so long to come and go.
I have not dared to tell anyone.
He was thinking of this possible aspect of the matter as he mounted the staircase of the house in Mortimer Street the next day.
A delusion?" He stood and thought it over.
It served to aid her to normal reasoning.
She had been too anxious and too much afraid.
"I hope I am not doing wrong in speaking.
They were all stamped with the same seal.
"Rather the reverse.
Her visitor watched her with great interest and no little curiosity.
She was thinking desperately.
Every detail points to one painful, dubious situation.
The whole house presented only such features as would encourage its proprietors to trust to the sufficing of infrequent re-decoration.
"Perhaps I was wrong to run away.
She could understand nothing.
She was not flighty or indignant.
He wanted to give her time to make up her mind about him. When at last he rose to go away, she rose also.
"I had a letter which--It was not what I expected."
And there she was, in a neat gown and apron,--evidently a fixture because she liked her place,--her decent young face full of sympathetic interest.
After which she told him her story.
She had been startled more than once by finding her near when she had not been aware of her presence.
No one would have seen or heard me if you had not come."
"They may be as innocent as I am.
He tried the other.
Captain Osborn might not know. She breathed again as this thought came to her.
Her!" Emily felt as if she was passing through another nightmare.
"I don't understand any of it.
"The bridge is so slight and old," she said to him, "that it has just occurred to me that it might not be quite safe.
She held her basket on her knee, her hand resting on it.
Captain Osborn is of his family.
A jealous native woman might be capable of playing stealthy tricks, which, to her strange mind, might seem to serve a proper end.
"On--on what?"
She sat, and tried to recover herself.
He stamped upon the end nearest and it remained firm.
The gardener went away, still looking less ruddy than he had looked when he arrived on the spot.
If she had leaned upon the rail and fallen into the black depths of water below, what could have been blamed but a piece of rotten wood.
She held her head in her hands as her mind depicted to her Lord Walderhurst's countenance, Lady Maria's dubious, amused smile.
There was but one thought which remained clear in her mind.
Of that, and of the rising of the white figure from the ground last night she thought, and she clutched her neat side as she ran.
Partly through physical exhaustion and breathlessness, and partly through helpless terror, she fell on her knees.
And yet, what would she appear to her husband, to Lady Maria, to anyone in the decorous world, if she told them that she believed that in a dignified English household, an English gentleman, even a deposed heir presumptive, was working out a subtle plot against her such as might adorn a melodrama?
And with Jane following her at a respectful distance, she returned to the house and went to her room to lie down.
"Thank you, Jane," she said rather faintly.
And she had heard the story about the village girl.
She sat quite still while Jane was absent in search of the man.
It broke in his big grasp.
Something had happened to it.
She sat, and thought, and thought.
"Ameerah," wailed poor Jane.
And they may be murderers in their hearts.
She could not run screaming all the way.
She faltered at this point, because she had suddenly remembered that this was a habit of hers, and that she had often spoken of it to the Osborns.
She could scarcely see it, because suddenly tears had filled her eyes.
"She!
Never had she been much more amazed in her life.
It would have been so lonely, so lonely!
She was close to the bridge.
There was a point on the bridge at which, through a gap in the trees, a beautiful sunset was always particularly beautiful.
She began to feel choked and trembling.
Her eyes were fixed upon the moss-covered ground, and her breath came quickly and irregularly several times.
She thought of nothing whatever but the look in Ameerah's downcast eyes when the servants had talked of the bottomless water,--the eerie, satisfied, sly look.
She did not reflect that gardeners would naturally think she had gone mad.
And yet, if she had been flung headlong down the staircase, if the fall had killed her, where would have been the danger for the man who would only have deplored a fatal accident.
Emily heard her and turned round.
"Oh, my lady! if you please!"
"White ones have no chance against black. Oh, my lady!" her sense of the possibility that she might be making a fool of herself after all was nearly killing her.
I should be accusing him of being a criminal.
"If I were to die now," she said with a touching gravity, "he would care very much."
It was a piece of rotten wood which had fallen from the balustrade upon the stairs, to be seen and picked up by Jane just before she would have passed down on her way to dinner.
"He would think I was vulgar and stupid, that I was a fussy woman with foolish ideas, which made him ridiculous.
There was nothing to prove that the whole thing was not mere chance, mere chance.
"They're all right on this side, my lady," he said.
The Ayah who so loved Hester might hate her rival.
Jane's heart seemed to herself to roll over.
She must keep herself safe--she must keep herself safe.
I found her here last night."
"Look at the railing well," said Lady Walderhurst.
How strange everything seemed to-day.
It was this which turned her cold.
She had leaned upon the rail often lately; one evening she had wondered if it seemed quite as steady as usual.
He could not know; it would be too insane, too dangerous, too wicked.
"Don't you see what this does to the phantasm you professed to have seen yourself once in this very spot?
Will you tell Nixon, please, to have this passage closed?"
I stood aghast; she had not even heard what I had been saying.
Shall I help you?"
"I will wait in the reception-room till she returns and then tell her at once.
Then gradually she drew back and disappeared behind the door, which she forgot to shut, as we could tell from the gradually receding light and the faint fall of her footsteps after the last dim flicker had faded away.
"Is Mrs. Packard still in the nursery?"
Making one more effort I came up close to her and impetuously cried out:
It is very interesting and very inconvenient.
"They worked that.
It was this:
I did not understand it.
How long I should have to stay there before Mrs. Packard's return I did not know.
I was sorry; I wanted to disburden myself at once.
Careful to forestall Nixon in his duty, I opened the front door, and, drawing her into the room where I had been waiting, I blurted out my whole story before she could remove her hat.
I shall have them at my table--I shall let them see that the shadow which enveloped me was ephemeral; that a woman can rise above all weakness in the support of a husband she loves and honors as I do Mr. Packard."
"Are you glad to have mama merry again?
You are very desirous that Mr. Packard should win in this election?"
I am going to be merry all the time now.
"Was that good?" she asked.
"You are honest with me?" she urged.
She must have looked majestic.
Do you know anything about the subject?"
You desired this before you came to this house?
I found them set in the stern mold of profound feeling--womanly feeling, no doubt, but one actuated by causes far greater than the subject, serious as it was, apparently called for.
But though I got a smile, the little hands closed still more tightly round the mother's neck.
He gave no appearance of having heard me; his attention had been caught by something going on at the rear of the hall we were now approaching. Following his anxious glance, I saw the door of the mayor's study open and Mrs. Packard come out.
My husband is very ambitious.
"My heart is set on this election," she ardently explained.
The calm even tones of the gentleman himself, modulated to an expression of utmost deference, were the first to break the silence.
He made some reply, added something about not seeing her again till he returned with the mayor, then I heard the door open and quietly shut. The interview was over, without my having felt called upon to show myself.
I never knew, for she never finished her sentence.
Letty, who stood waiting in the doorway, showed a countenance full of surprise. Mrs. Packard was the first to feel tired.
Mr. Steele may have bowed; he probably did, for she went on confidently and with a certain authority not observable in the tone of her previous remarks.
"Have you any interest in politics?
There was a pause--how filled, I would have given half my expected salary to know.
The man who did this thing should be punished.
Not that I mean to deter you.
"Mama dear!" she cried, "mama dear!" and the tender emphasis on the endearing word completed the charm.
With a longing all women can understand, I held out my own arms.
In this I agree with Mayor Packard."
I could hear the rustle of her dress as she moved, probably to lessen the distance between them.
"I certainly do, Mrs. Packard."
Opening with a burst, it ended with low notes of an intense sweetness like sobs, not of grief, but happiness.
Do you think it wise to--to probe into such matters?
I was conscious of flushing slightly, but she was not looking my way, and the betrayal cost me only a passing uneasiness.
"Mama busy; mama sing."
His answer was firm, straightforward, and, as far as I could judge, free from any objectionable feature.
But the opportunity for doing this did not come that morning.
I followed hard after him, and, being brisk in my movements, was at his back before he was half-way to the bottom.
She would give--
"Your idea is a happy one," said he.
Do you think I am in earnest about this--that Mr. Packard's chances could be affected by--by anything that might be said about me?
As I stood on one side in my own mood of excited sympathy, I caught fleeting glimpses of their two faces, as she went whirling about. Hers was beautiful in her new relief--if it was a relief--the child's dimpled with delight at the rapid movement--a lovely picture.
To any response he might give of the same nature I had no clue, but his tone when he answered was as cool and deferentially polite as was to be expected from a man chosen by Mayor Packard for his private secretary.
I was surprised that Mrs. Packard had not noticed it.
darling! my darling!" she exclaimed in a burst of mother-rapture, crushing the child to her breast and kissing it repeatedly.
"You wish to see me, Mrs. Packard?"
"Miss Saunders," she hurriedly interposed with a great effort to speak naturally, "I have told Nixon that I wish to see Mr. Steele if he comes in this morning.
You believe him to be a good man--the right man for the place?"
"If so, you had better let me pass."
Let them come here and see.
"I certainly did Mr. Steele an arrant injustice.
I was not well last week and showed it, but I am perfectly well to-day and am resolved to show that, too.
And, Mr. Steele, if you will be so good, give me the names of some of those halfhearted ones--critical people who have to see in order to believe.
"Do you think that in the event of your not succeeding in forcing an apology from the man who inserted that objectionable paragraph against myself--that--that such hints of something being wrong with me will in any way affect Mr. Packard's chances--lose him votes, I mean?
Surely it was not the countenance of a mere disgruntled servant.
It was more puckered, scowling and malignant of aspect than usual.
Her tone was much too level for her not to be looking directly at him.
"Mrs. Packard wants you," he declared with short ceremony.
Petersen was at one time in charge of this station; he is now seeking out his old acquaintances.
He was sitting in his room reading at the time, when he heard a loud noise like the discharge of a cannon; immediately afterwards a tremulous motion was felt, some glasses upon the table began to dance about, and papers lying upon the window-sill fell down: after a few seconds it ceased.
The Governor told me of an unusually severe shock which occurred a winter or two ago.
From these men I obtained much information about this part of the coast; within a range of 20 miles upon the Disco shore there are four distinct coaling places; but at this early season two of them are deeply covered with snow.
Poor puss has been killed; tempted on deck by the unusually warm weather, she was pounced upon by the dogs.
Two days ago I sent a note off to a whaler by a kayak, requesting her captain to lend me some newspapers; the note reached Captain J. Walker, of the 'Jane,' and yesterday his ship, accompanied by the 'Heroine,' Captain J. Simpson, approached us, and they both came in to call upon me, each of them bringing the very acceptable present of some newspapers, besides a quarter of beef, with vegetables.
The only ornaments about the room were portraits of his unfortunate wife and two children: they embarked at Copenhagen last year to rejoin him, and the ill-fated vessel has never since been heard of.
Eider-ducks, looms, and dovekies are abundant, as well as hares and ptarmigan.
I visited to-day a small lake at the foot of Mount Cunningham; it is said to occupy the centre of an extinct volcano: but I saw nothing to bear out the assertion.
We have left letters to go home in her, and they ought to be in England by the end of June.
This is the only part of Greenland where earthquakes are felt.
I visited the Governor to-day, and found his little wooden house as scrupulously clean and neat as the houses of the Danish residents in Greenland invariably are.
It proved to be only a christening.
Nevertheless it is mortifying to find that ships had reached as far as Pond's Bay, and with but little difficulty.
The day has been a busy one: we have completed our small purchases and closed our letters; I have added another Esquimaux lad to our crew, taking with him his rifle, kayak, and sledge.
The world, it appears, is at peace.
On closing the land again, we regained the off-shore wind, and bright weather.
The whalers are all within a dozen miles of us, unable to penetrate further north.
Christian looks immensely happy: his countrymen regard him as a man whose fortune is made, and the women gaze with admiration upon his neat sailor's dress, and his good-natured, full, round face, and huge, fat, shining cheeks; Mr. Petersen is in great request to interpret between the English, Danes, and Esquimaux.
Governor Elberg has promised to get me some fossil fish, to be found only in North Strom Fiord: they are interesting, as being of unknown geological date.
Upon the green slopes our sportsmen found nothing but a few ptarmigan and a hare.
Governor Fliescher says the winter has been mild; there has been but little wind, and that chiefly from the southward.
Captain Simpson has most handsomely presented the 'Fox' with a sail and yards, which, after some slight alterations, will enable us to add a main topsail to our spread of canvas.
I recommended that he should have his betrothed in her own home, with her mother and family. His asking a passage for her, in order to leave her with his mother, is strong proof of the sincerity of his engagement, not only to his lady love, but to the 'Fox' also.
It is wonderful to see how closely a man can assimilate his habits to those of a fish.
This evening there has been a brisk interchange of presents between us and our Danish friends.
He asked me to-day to give her a passage up to Godhavn, as he wished to leave her in charge of his mother until his return there with us next year, when his engagement for the voyage would be fulfilled.
There are many intelligent whaling captains who possess much valuable knowledge of these lands and seas, and even in the terra incognita of Frobisher's Straits, whalers have wintered, whilst our charts scarcely afford even a vague idea of the configuration of these extensive islands.
With good reason shall we remember Godhavn; we have certainly been treated as especial favorites.
In the preceding year (1856) some of the whalers got through Melville Bay as early as the 15th June, only a few days after the commencement of the summer's thaw.
We were received with much kindness by our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Olrik, and were presented with a file of late English papers.
This mountain scenery is really charming; but a little more animal life--reindeer, for instance--would make it far more pleasing in our eyes.
Captain Walker says ships could not have reached Lancaster Sound, as there was much ice north of Pond's Bay which he thought extended quite across to Melville Bay.
The season appears forward, and the ice much decayed; but southerly winds prevail, retarding its disruption and removal.
On the evening of the 10th we stood off from the inhospitable barrier of ice, prepared to meet the storm; snow fell so thickly that we could hardly see the icebergs in time to avoid them.
On Sunday afternoon, hearing the church bell ringing I went on shore.
I found Mrs. Olrik without a fire in her sitting room; it was unnecessary; the windows looked to the south, and the sun shone brightly in upon a profusion of geraniums and European flowers, at once reminding one of home, and refreshing the senses by their perfume and beauty; the merry voices of the children were also a most pleasing novelty.
On the 11th the weather improved, and in the evening we came to our present anchorage.
Ravens seem very abundant, also large grey falcons: perhaps the dead whales may have attracted an unusual number.
Most of the young people had hymn-books in their hands, printed in the Esquimaux language.
We are refitting, shooting, and devouring quantities of excellent mussels; eider ducks are very abundant, but extremely shy.
The ice in this strait broke up as long ago as the 3rd April; it has all drifted out to the northward, only a few icebergs now remain.
The account they give of last season is as follows: the whalers reached Devil's Point, near Melville Bay, as early as the 21st of May; southerly winds then set in, and blew incessantly for six weeks, during all which time they were closely beset, and the ships 'Gipsy' and 'Undaunted' were crushed.
These ladies can dance in the least possible space, their costume being particularly well adapted for the purpose, partaking as it does much more of the "Bloomer" than the "crinoline."
We supposed ourselves to be well to leeward of the Whalefish Islands, but were deceived by the tides; suddenly a small, low islet was seen on the lee bow; not being able to pass to windward, we were obliged to wear ship, and, in doing so, passed within the ship's length of destruction--for we were certainly within that distance of the rocks!
The gallant M'Clintock, when he penned his journal amid the Arctic ices, had no idea whatever of publishing it; and yet there can be no doubt that the reader will peruse with the deepest interest the simple tale of how, in a little vessel of 170 tons burthen, he and his well-chosen companions have cleared up this great mystery.
OFFICIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF THE SERVICES OF THE YACHT 'FOX.'
Hence it devolved on Lady Franklin and her friends to be the sole means of endeavoring to bring to light the true history of her husband's voyage and fate.
SIR,
The immediate bestowal of the Arctic medal upon all the officers and men of the 'Fox' is a pleasing proof that this interest is well sustained.
HARVEY, Chief Quartermaster. HENRY TOMS, Quartermaster. ALEX.
To the honor of the British nation, and also let it be said to that of the United States of America, many have been the efforts made to discover the route followed by our missing explorers.
This great fact must therefore be inscribed upon the monument of Franklin.
M'Clintock has also laid down the hitherto unknown coast-line of Boothia, southwards from Bellot Strait to the Magnetic Pole, has delineated the whole of King William's Island, and opened a new and capacious, though ice-choked channel, suspected before, but not proved, to exist, extending from Victoria Strait in a north-west direction to Melville or Parry Sound.
The following narrative of the bold adventure which has successfully revealed the last discoveries and the fate of Franklin, is published at the request of the friends of that illustrious navigator.
Neither has the expedition been unproductive of scientific results.
Next, though most scantily provided with steam-power, Franklin navigated round Cornwallis' Land, which he thus proved to be an island.
"I suppose you can look," said the old woman, and pulled the comb out and held it up.
Then her envious heart had rest, so far as an envious heart can have rest.
She called a huntsman, and said:
"I shall soon get rid of my apples.
As a young boar just then came running by he stabbed it, and cut out its heart and took it to the Queen as a proof that the child was dead.
And the red looked pretty upon the white snow, and she thought to herself:
Then she began to run, and ran over sharp stones and through thorns, and the wild beasts ran past her, but did her no harm.
Then, as she was so tired, she lay down on one of the little beds, but none of them suited her; one was too long, another too short; but at last she found the seventh one was just right, and so she stayed in it, said her prayers, and went to sleep.
I will honor and prize her as the dearest thing I have." As he spoke in this way the good dwarfs took pity upon him, and gave him the coffin.
Then the first looked round and saw that there was a little hole in his bed, and he said:
"My name is Snow-white," she answered.
The third, "Who has been taking some of my bread?"
The seventh, "Who has been drinking out of my mug?"
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?"
The first said, "Who has been sitting on my chair?"
"How have you come to our house?" said the dwarfs.
And it happened that they stumbled over a tree-stump, and with the shock the piece of apple which Snow-white had bitten off came out of her throat.
But now the poor child was all alone in the great wood, and so afraid that she started at every bush, and did not know what to do.
"Let me have it as a gift, for I cannot live without seeing Snow-white.
A year after, the King took to himself another wife.
The girl was alone the whole day, so the good dwarfs warned her and said:
Snow-white stood before her, and let herself be laced with the new laces.
Then he said to the dwarfs:
She did not stir or move, and seemed to be dead. They lifted her up, and, as they saw that she was laced too tightly, they cut the laces; then she began to breathe a little, and after a while came to life again.
"Let me have the coffin, I will give you whatever you want for it." But the dwarfs answered:
Come, I will lace you properly for once."
When the dwarfs heard what had happened they said:
"Run away, then, you poor child." The wild beasts will soon kill her, thought he; and yet it seemed as if a stone had been rolled from his heart, since it was no longer needful for him to kill her.
"If you will take care of our house, cook, make the beds, wash, sew, and knit; and if you will keep everything neat and clean, you can stay with us, and you shall want for nothing."
The cook had to salt this, and the wicked Queen ate it, and thought she had eaten the heart of Snow-white.
"You are with me," and told her what had happened, and said, "I love you more than everything in the world; come with me to my father's palace; you shall be my wife."
She went into a quiet, secret, lonely room, where no one ever came, and there she made an apple full of poison.
"Go away; I cannot let any one come in."
So she went over the seven hills to the seven dwarfs, knocked at the door, and cried, "Good things to sell, cheap, cheap!" Little Snow-white looked out and said:
As she was sewing and looking out of the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow.
"O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see, But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell, Snow-white is still alive and well, And no one else is so fair as she."
She ran as long as her feet would go, until it was almost evening; then she saw a little cottage, and went into it to rest herself. Everything in the cottage was small, but neater and cleaner than can be told.
"Snow-white shall die," she cried, "even if it costs me my life!"
"Oh, heavens!
There, I will give you one."
When the apple was ready she painted her face, and dressed herself up as a country-woman, and so she went over the seven hills to the seven dwarfs.
It pleased the girl so well that she let herself be coaxed and opened the door.
But iron slippers had already been put upon the fire, and they were brought in with tongs, and set before her.
"Who has been getting into my bed?"
Scarcely had they taken it out when Snow-white came to herself, and told them what had happened.
"No," said Snow-white, "I dare not take anything."
"We will not part with it for all the gold in the world." Then he said:
And as she was so beautiful the huntsman had pity on her and said:
And when she asked of the Looking-glass at home:
"Thou art fairer than all who are here, Lady Queen, But more beautiful by far is Snow-white, I ween."
The second, "Who has been eating off my plate?"
Then they warned her once more to be upon her guard and to open the door to no one.
When she had put on her beautiful clothes, she went before the Looking-glass, and said:
"It is all the same to me," said the woman.
As soon as he got inside the house, he found everything was marble and gold; and the hangings were of velvet, with great golden tassels.
She was surrounded by princes and dukes.
When he hauled it up there was a great flounder on the end of the line.
Kings and emperors were on their knees before her, kissing her shoe.
Then the fisherman got up and went back to his wife in the hovel. "Husband," she said, "hast thou caught nothing to-day?"
I don't like to tell him."
That's more than the flounder can do."
She looked at him so wildly that it caused a shudder to run through him.
"Yes," said the man; "and so let it remain.
To him thou must go, and that right quickly.
There is only one pope in Christendom.
Such a storm was raging that he could hardly keep his feet; houses and trees quivered and swayed, mountains trembled, and the rocks rolled into the sea.
Beyond this there was a great garden filled with the loveliest flowers, and fine fruit trees.
"Now, what does she want?" said the flounder.
"We will see about that," said the woman, and with that they ate something and went to bed.
It's no good; it's too monstrous altogether.
"Well," said the woman, "it was thou who caught him and let him go again; for certain he will do that for thee.
"Flounder, flounder in the sea, Prythee, hearken unto me: My wife, Ilsebil, will have her own way Whatever I wish, whatever I say."
Everything went well for a week or more, and then said the wife: "Listen, husband; this cottage is too cramped, and the garden is too small.
I will be lord of the universe."
So he was frightened, and went; but he was quite dazed.
Still she was not content, and could not sleep for her inordinate desires.
Go back to the flounder."
"Now, what does she want?" said the flounder.
"Alas, wife," said the man, "what should we be king for?
Then he pulled on his trousers and tore away like a madman.
A few days later there was a great performance at the Opera Comique.
"No."
The recollection of this vision, for it was really a vision, would not leave my mind like so many visions I had seen, and I looked everywhere for this royally beautiful woman in white.
At one in the morning Marguerite got into her carriage with her three friends.
I went out.
I dropped my eyes and blushed.
I will introduce you."
"You will tell me all about it later on, my friend," I said to him; "you are not strong enough yet."
If any one had said to me, You shall have this woman to-night and be killed tomorrow, I would have accepted.
Though we were in Paris, the verdure which surrounded us seemed to shut us off from the world, and our conversation was only now and again disturbed by the sound of a passing vehicle.
"Ask her if you may."
I remember the words as if they had been spoken to me yesterday.
At the entrance to the theatre they were met by a footman.
The young man whom I was with recognised her immediately, for he said to me, mentioning her name: "Look at that pretty girl."
Another feeling had taken possession of me.
"Why?"
"Here they are."
"Marguerite Gautier," he said.
I did not answer. Then turning toward me, he said:
They do not know what politeness and ceremony are.
She returned to her carriage and drove away.
Only to kiss her hand he felt that he had the strength to undertake anything, the will to conquer anything, the courage to achieve anything.
"After all, what does it matter to me?" I said, affecting to speak in a nonchalant way.
"Poor girl, she is very ill," he answered.
"Really, there is no need to be particular with her; come."
I would have cried like a child who sees the castle he has been dreaming about vanish away as he awakens from sleep.
Nothing that dame from her was indifferent to me.
"They will think you are mad."
What he said troubled me.
I took up my position at the Maison-d'or, in one of the first-floor rooms, and did not lose sight of the window for an instant.
However, you are right, she hasn't been well brought up; but she would be a charming mistress to have."
"She is consumptive, and the sort of life she leads isn't exactly the thing to cure her.
Without knowing why, I turned pale and my heart beat violently.
Every day I went to ask after her, without leaving my name or my card.
At last a fortnight passed without my meeting her.
"Yes."
She looked at me as she took them.
One evening we had sat at the window later than usual; the weather had been superb, and the sun sank to sleep in a twilight dazzling with gold and azure.
At that moment he saw that the box was empty.
"If that were true," I said, "I should not have begged Ernest to ask your permission to introduce me."
"We must go and get some sweets.
Marguerite ate her raisins glaces without taking any more notice of me. The friend who had introduced me did not wish to let me remain in so ridiculous a position.
"Are you going?" said Ernest.
It was no doubt a mere chance, but the chance filled me with delight.
I took a cab and followed them.
"Go, go," he said, "and good luck, or rather better luck."
All the same, I wished to know her; it was my only means of making up my mind about her.
Thereupon I bowed and quitted the box.
"Come, then."
I returned to my seat.
It is certainly the fact that she made a very definite impression upon me, that many of my friends had noticed it and that they had been much amused when they saw who it was that made this impression upon me.
I was careful not to refer to Marguerite, fearing lest the name should awaken sad recollections hidden under the apparent calm of the invalid; but Armand, on the contrary, seemed to delight in speaking of her, not as formerly, with tears in his eyes, but with a sweet smile which reassured me as to the state of his mind.
"With another woman."
"Ah," he went on when we had left the shop, "do you know what kind of woman it is that I am going to introduce you to?
"Tell the coachman to wait at the door of the Cafe' Anglais," said Marguerite.
"She laughed, and said she had never seen any one so funny.
It seemed to me that I had her insult and my absurdity to wipe out; I said to myself that if I spent every penny I had, I would win her and win my right to the place I had abandoned so quickly.
"Since you really wish it, I will listen."
Marguerite got out and went in alone.
"She eats no other kind of sweets; everybody knows it.
I could not possibly tell you what they were acting.
"I should say, on the contrary, that he has only come with you because it would have bored you to come here by yourself."
A few minutes afterward I saw Marguerite from the street at a window of one of the large rooms of the restaurant, pulling the camellias of her bouquet to pieces, one by one.
My friend introduced me; Marguerite gave me a little nod, and said, "And my sweets?"
When I entered the box Marguerite was in fits of laughter.
We went out during one of the entr'actes, and a tall woman passed us in the corridor, to whom my friend bowed.
Happily, the curtain rose and my friend was silent.
Yes (Armand went on, letting his head sink back on the chair), yes, it was just such an evening as this.
It is simply a kept woman, very much kept, my dear fellow; don't be shy, say anything that comes into your head."
I don't despair of seeing you one day at the back of her box, and of bearing that you are ruining yourself for her.
I might have gone in, but I dared not.
"Mademoiselle Marguerite Gautier," he replied.
"Is she alone?" I asked.
I could see her through the shop windows selecting what she had come to buy.
It would not have been well for anybody who had elbowed me at that moment.
"She is expecting us," he said.
Evidently I was the cause of their mirth, and my embarrassment increased.
"Why?"
Illnesses like Armand's have one fortunate thing about them: they either kill outright or are very soon overcome.
During the whole course of his illness I had hardly left his side.
Always there was the same gaiety in her, the same emotion in me.
This is what he told me, and I have scarcely changed a word of the touching story.
"There are no men?"
As for me, I was rivetted to the spot from the moment she went in till the moment when she came out again.
To answer them properly, one requires a certain knack, and I had not had the opportunity of acquiring it; besides, the idea that I had formed of Marguerite accentuated the effects of her mockery.
"To go and see that woman."
I must tell you, my friend, that for two years the sight of this girl had made a strange impression on me whenever I came across her.
I therefore said to my friend that I insisted on having her permission to be introduced to her, and I wandered to and fro in the corridors, saying to myself that in a moment's time she was going to see me, and that I should not know which way to look.
"What did Marguerite say after I had gone?"
But don't look upon it as a lost chance; only do not do these women the honour of taking them seriously.
I heard the rustle of dresses, the sound of voices, on the staircase. I stood aside, and, without being seen, saw the two women pass me, accompanied by two young men.
"No," I said, flushing, for I really did not know what to say; "but I should very much like to know her."
One of the shopmen stood at the door looking after his elegant customer's carriage.
If any one had said to me, you can be her lover for ten pounds, I would have refused.
"We will walk there."
A kind of consolation had sprung from the certainty of which he was now fully persuaded, and in order to banish the sombre picture which often presented itself to him, he returned upon the happy recollections of his liaison with Marguerite, and seemed resolved to think of nothing else.
"She has been ill; the poor girl won't last long."
I dared not ask him for her address, and went on my way.
You will simply be giving him away.
Women ought not to be reminded of such things," he smiled.
"It all depends on you, on you, on you alone," he began with glowing eyes, almost in a whisper and hardly able to utter the words for emotion.
I was so happy indeed as to interest you in my opinions....
"No, I have not said a word to her and am not quite certain whether she is at home now.
"Where is the key?
Well, it teaches one to show delicacy!"
Perhaps she..."
I saw it in your eyes.
Would you like me to take him abroad?
Run, young man!
He stood still and laughed softly.
He killed an old woman, a pawnbroker, with whom he had pawned things himself.
"I'm not thinking of that at all," Raskolnikov interrupted with disgust.
"I know you will shoot, you pretty wild creature.
Lead the way," she said with apparent composure, but her face was very pale.
She has come in, perhaps.
I'll call the police!"
"Well... at three paces you can hardly help it.
She leaves the key with him.
I was on the look-out.
"Open it!
"Don't torment me.
If that's how you feel, go and inform the police that you had this mischance: you made a little mistake in your theory.
But there seemed a terrible significance in the tone of that "make haste."
Well, you'd better shoot yourself, or don't you want to?"
She has buried her stepmother to-day: she is not likely to go visiting on such a day.
"It's not your revolver, it belonged to Marfa Petrovna, whom you killed, wretch!
"If you go on like that, I shall have time to seize you before you cock again."
He seemed to be approaching cautiously.
His rooms were not entered directly from the passage, but through the landlady's two almost empty rooms. Unlocking a door leading out of his bedroom, Svidrigailov showed Dounia the two empty rooms that were to let.
But he had turned the corner and could see nothing.
"I want to see Sofya Semyonovna," Dounia articulated faintly.
"You seem trying to enrage me, to make me leave you."
"What a queer fellow!
At the best someone will make them up somehow for himself out of books or from some old chronicle.
You must look into them with some attention."
Control yourself!
Dounia stopped in the doorway, not knowing what she was called to look upon, but Svidrigailov hastened to explain.
"Here is your letter," she said, laying it on the table.
"The town is not the country.
"Let me go," Dounia implored.
She seemed to be imploring Svidrigailov; she had entirely forgotten her fear.
You poisoned your wife, I know; you are a murderer yourself!" She held the revolver ready.
Come for a drive!
Let me go..."
Svidrigailov shuddered.
You deny him any moral feeling then?
Dounia was looking about her mistrustfully, but saw nothing special in the furniture or position of the rooms.
"What's this?" cried Svidrigailov turning round, "I thought I said..."
CHAPTER V
I never blame anyone.
He looked at her with an indescribable gaze.
The slightest indiscretion is as bad as betrayal in a thing like this.
Where?
But she has had no share by word or deed in the murder; she was as horrified at it as you are now.
She is a woman who is always busy, an excellent woman I assure you....
How unfortunate!
"There's no denying that you are a brave girl.
I must tell you that I'd heard of this stupid story before you wrote and don't believe a word of it.
For goodness' sake, explain it, my dear boy.
There was nothing of yours in her house.
now, of course she would kill him, at two paces!" Suddenly she flung away the revolver.
"It cannot be," muttered Dounia, with white lips.
He met her at the entrance to the bridge, but passed by without seeing her.
You can tell it all in the street."
She seemed not to understand what she was doing and what was going on.
Dounia sat down.
Why, it's my revolver, an old friend! And how I've hunted for it!
Dounia shook her head.
But do sit down!"
"You haven't loaded it properly.
"I swear I'll shoot again.
There was not the slightest cause, no sort of ground.... It's a lie, a lie!"
I made it up.
"Can it be true what you write?
I mustn't waste any more time.
Well, shoot away!"
Make haste!"
Dounia went up to the table to take the key.
I should like to make certain myself."
At last Svidrigailov's face changed.
If you dare to advance one step, I swear I'll kill you." She was frantic.
I'll take this carriage.
"You... one word from you, and he is saved.
She stopped her ears.
This day--oh, it must not be, John!
A third in which to say good-bye and be outside the front-door."
"Yonder in Balliol," he suavely said, "you will find the matter of my death easier to forget than here." He took her hat and gloves from the arm-chair, and held them carefully out to her; but she did not take them.
The wave of her returning memory swept on--swept up to her with a roar the instant past.
"Quick in more than meets the eye, John.
"If I do that," she said after a pause, "you may not be pleased by the issue.
"Ah, say that again!" she murmured.
So many other names you have, too.
"Admirably," he allowed.
"Take them," he said.
So I am all right again.
"Had you not better get up from the floor?" he said.
Use your sense of proportion."
He had no choice but to grasp her by the wrists, cast her aside, and step clear of her into the room.
I telescoped my toilet and came rushing round to you.
After all, he is going to die for you, like the rest of us.
Had to be done, though.
I looked you up in Debrett while I was waiting for you. That seemed to bring you nearer to me.
No other way out.
"You will not."
"I give you three minutes," he told her.
He wondered what deep game she was playing.
"You love me?"
"If I do?"
Miss Dobson, it has to be.
She laughed hysterically.
"Balliol is quite near.
He looked down at her over his folded arms,
So I just used my sense of proportion, as you rashly bade me, and then hardened my heart at sight of you as you are.
"With all my soul."
I remember you told me them all yesterday, here in this room--not twenty-four hours ago.
"I am not going to back out of my promise," he repeated.
"You want to be rid of me?" asked Zuleika, when the girl was gone.
"That is unworthy of you," she said.
She took her things from him, and laid them by the mirror.
But some other, sharper analogy hovered to him).
Far from here?"
"John, don't you see why I won't stop talking?
"I could never forget that once they were both black." She flung them into the fender.
Might not the pearls have gone back to their natural state simply through being yours no more?
It was in vain that he tried to disentangle himself of her by standing first on one foot, then on the other, and veering sharply on his heel: she did but sway as though hinged to him.
But "What proof have I?" he asked her.
"Yes," said the Duke.
I am not going to back out of my promise."
"No," she shuddered.
But it happens to be otiose."
"Your ear-rings?
Don't torture me!"
Forget it, forget it, for pity's sake!"
How many hours have I been waiting for you?"
Then, after a few swift touches and passes at neck and waist, she took her gloves and, wheeling round to him, "There!" she said, "I have been quick."
Vengeance was his, and "Yes, there," he said, "is the ineluctable hard fact you wake to.
What ought he to have SAID?
He dipped his hand, and sprinkled the upturned face (Dew-drops on a white rose?
Don't forbid me to call you John.
When I undressed, they must have rolled on to the carpet.
"The door is open, and any one who passed might see you."
The dispiteous and humorous gods have spoken.
Oh John, John, if I thought you small, my love would but take on the crown of pity.
That was just after she came back from bringing you my first letter.
"If I refuse?"
You think you can drive me out of your life.
She put a hand to her face, then looked at the wet palm wonderingly, looked at the Duke, saw the water-jug beside him.
"Will--" she hesitated, "will Miss Dobson be--"
Yes, and a quite unlovable unit.
Impatiently she pointed to two white pearls that fastened the front of her blouse.
Just after she had risen, a figure appeared in the doorway.
I may find that what I had taken to be a great indifference is nothing but a very small hate...
Nor did she rise.
If she spoke truth, then indeed vengeance was his!
The gods have spoken.
I am but one of a number, you know.
"Two minutes, that is, in which to make yourself tidy before the mirror.
"Aye, happy the very women that wove the threads that are trod by the feet of my beloved master.
"Your voice is music."
"Oh John," she cried, turning to him and falling again to her knees, "I do so want to forget what I have been.
If you need proof, produce it. Where are my ear-rings?"
"Release you?
I want to atone.
"Proof?
Propped on one elbow, with heaving bosom and parted lips, she seemed to be trying to realise what had been done to her. Through her undried tears her eyes shone up to him.
"Happy carpet!" she crooned.
The water-beads broke, mingled--rivulets now.
Some measure of force was the only way out of an impossible situation.
With a high hand she quelled the excesses of her hair--some of the curls still agleam with water--and knowingly poised and pinned her hat.
She looked well at him.
There was in her eyes a look that made the words sound as if they had been spoken by a dumb animal.
"All this is very well conceived, no doubt," said he, "and well executed.
Her poor little jest drew to the Duke's face no answering smile, did but make hotter the blush there.
He put it to her.
The owls have hooted.
With a stern joy he watched her reading it.
When I heard how you had torn it up, I knew, I knew that the pearls had not mocked me.
It was the telegram sent by his steward.
This day your wish is to be fulfilled."
It was in vain that he commanded the young lady to let go: she did but cling the closer.
Zuleika flushed.
The Duke looked searchingly at her.
Become interested in things outside of yourself.
"What shall I do to get rid of it?" asks a victim.
He always carries about an injured air, a feeling that he has been imposed upon, which greatly detracts from an otherwise agreeable personality.
He will realize that he must be a man and give and take with the others, or get out.
Morbid sensitiveness requires heroic treatment.
She takes it for granted that if any criticism is made in the department where she works, it is intended for her, and she "flies off the handle" over every little remark that she can possibly twist into a reflection upon herself.
A man who appreciates himself at his true value, and who gives his neighbors credit for being at least as good as he is, cannot be a victim of over-sensitiveness.
He shows what his real style is.
The great majority of people, no matter how rough in manner or bearing, are kind-hearted, and would much rather help than hinder a fellowbeing, but they have all they can do to attend to their own affairs, and have no time to spend in minutely analyzing the nature and feeling of those whom they meet in the course of their daily business.
Their thoughts are always turned inward; they are always analyzing, dissecting themselves, wondering how they appear and what people think of them.
A college course is of inestimable value to a boy or girl of over-refined sensibilities.
Everything must be swallowed up in his zeal, fused in the fire of his genius,--then, and then only, can he really create.
Do not have such a low and unjust estimate of people as to think they are bent on nothing but hurting the feelings of others, and depreciating and making light of them on every possible occasion.
It will make all the difference in the world to you whether you are with people who are watching for ability in you, people who believe in, encourage, and praise you, or whether you are with those who are forever breaking your idols, blasting your hopes, and throwing cold water on your aspirations.
Within six months the Russians had become almost the equals of the American artisans among whom they worked.
Our Indian schools sometimes publish, side by side, photographs of the Indian youths as they come from the reservation and as they look when they are graduated,--well dressed, intelligent, with the fire of ambition in their eyes.
Take him back to the farm, John, and teach him how to milk cows!"
Great possibilities of usefulness and of achievement are, all unconsciously, going to waste within them.
"If others can do such wonderful things," he asked himself, "why cannot I?"
GETTING AROUSED
She came to herself; her faculties were aroused, and in a few days she leaped forward years in her development.
If brought up from infancy in a barbarous, brutal atmosphere, it will, of course, become brutal.
You are a little different,--modified somewhat from what you were before,--just as Beecher was never the same man after reading Ruskin.
They have developed only a small percentage of their success possibilities.
This may make all the difference to you between a grand success and a mediocre existence.
What caused the revolution in his life? The hearing of a single lecture on the value of education.
Keep close to those who are dead-in-earnest.
But when he went to Chicago and saw the marvelous examples around him of poor boys who had won success, it aroused his ambition and fired him with the determination to be a great merchant himself.
The men had lost the desire to improve; they were again plodders, with no goal beyond the day's work.
He is now sixty, the owner of the finest library in his city, with the reputation of being its best-read man, and one whose highest endeavor is to help his fellow man.
You will catch the spirit that dominates in your environment.
We predict great things for them; but the majority of those who go back to their tribes, after struggling awhile to keep up their new standards, gradually drop back to their old manner of living.
Our faculties become dull and soon lose their power if they are not exercised.
Success was in the air.
There are, of course, many notable exceptions, but these are strong characters, able to resist the downward-dragging tendencies about them.
Everywhere we see people who have reached middle life or later without being aroused.
The best thing in them lies so deep that it has never been awakened.
The ambition aroused by stimulating environment had sunk to sleep again.
It is very stimulating to be with people whose aspirations run parallel with your own.
Of course, there was the making of a great merchant in Mr. Field from the start; but circumstances, an ambition-arousing environment, had a great deal to do with stimulating his latent energy and bringing out his reserve force.
Almost in a day she passed from childhood to budding womanhood.
If you interview the great army of failures, you will find that multitudes have failed because they never got into a stimulating, encouraging environment, because their ambition was never aroused, or because they were not strong enough to rally under depressing, discouraging, or vicious surroundings.
It is doubtful if he would have climbed so rapidly in any other place than Chicago.
Most of the people we find in prisons and poor-houses are pitiable examples of the influence of an environment which appealed to the worst instead of to the best in them.
They are still in a dormant state.
Stick to those who are trying to do something and to be somebody in the world,--people of high aims, lofty ambition.
A few years before it had been a mere Indian trading village.
Some years ago a party of Russian workmen were sent to this country by a Russian firm of shipbuilders, in order that they might acquire American methods and catch the American spirit.
Ambition is contagious.
The success of those about you who are trying to climb upward will encourage and stimulate you to struggle harder if you have not done quite so well yourself.
Whatever you do in life, make any sacrifice necessary to keep in an ambition-arousing atmosphere, an environment that will stimulate you to self-development.
It does not take much to determine the lives of most of us.
A year after their return to their own country, the deadening, non-progressive atmosphere about them had done its work.
I have known several men who never realized their possibilities until they reached middle life.
Most of us have an enormous amount of power, of latent force, slumbering within us, as it slumbered in this girl, which could do marvels if we would only awaken it.
Keep close to people who understand you, who believe in you, who will help you to discover yourself and encourage you to make the most of yourself.
Some time ago there appeared in the newspapers an account of a girl who had reached the age of fifteen years, and yet had only attained the mental development of a small child.
It had then only about eighty-five thousand inhabitants.
If we constantly allow opportunities to slip by us without making any attempt to grasp them, our inclination will grow duller and weaker.
If Marshall Field had remained as clerk in Deacon Davis's store in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he got his first position, he could never have become one of the world's merchant princes.
Then they were suddenly aroused, as if from a long sleep, by reading some inspiring, stimulating book, by listening to a sermon or a lecture, or by meeting some friend,--someone with high ideals,--who understood, believed in, and encouraged them.
We naturally follow the examples about us, and, as a rule, we rise or fall according to the strongest current in which we live.
But the city grew by leaps and bounds, and always beat the predictions of its most sanguine inhabitants.
There is a great power in a battery of individuals who are struggling for the achievement of high aims, a great magnetic force which will help you to attract the object of your ambition.
But it is a passion that responds very quickly to cultivation, and it requires constant care and education, just as the faculty for music or art does, or it will atrophy.
Many people seem to think that ambition is a quality born within us; that it is not susceptible to improvement; that it is something thrust upon us which will take care of itself.
He weren't cut out for a merchant.
Everybody felt that there were great possibilities there.
Everything--every sermon or lecture or conversation you have heard, every person who has touched your life--has left an impress upon your character, and you are never quite the same person after the association or experience.
The judge of the municipal court in a flourishing western city, one of the most highly esteemed jurists in his state, was in middle life, before his latent power was aroused, an illiterate blacksmith.
This was what stirred the slumbering power within him, awakened his ambition, and set his feet in the path of self-development.
The poet's "I am a part of all that I have met" is not a mere poetic flight of fancy; it is an absolute truth.
In 1856, when young Field went there, this marvelous city was just starting on its unparalleled career.
Even the strongest of us are not beyond the reach of our environment. No matter how independent, strong-willed, and determined our nature, we are constantly being modified by our surroundings.
CHAPTER XXXV
"What is the matter?" she asked.
Yet in that lovely, fragile form, in that dreaming, poetical soul, lay undeveloped a latent power of heroism soon to be aroused into action. "Darling of all hearts and eyes," Edith had been at home a year when the War of 1812 broke out.
"No! what?
"Back to Luckenough."
"Light another candle, Jenny--that is dying in its socket--it will be out in a minute."
"What the Master in heaven wills!"
In his boyhood he was the friend and pupil of Guy Fawkes; he engaged in the Gunpowder Plot, and after witnessing the terrible fate of his master, he escaped to Spanish America, where he led for years a sort of buccaneer life.
But that is no answer to my question.
The rest sat down again.
Once Marjorie went to the door and listened, but there was only the faint wail of the winter wind up the stairs to be heard.
They went to Mr. Columbell's own house, and indoors of it.
Mr. John glanced round.
Yet he would seem to have failed.
"Mr.
She had given in at last.
The minutes passed, yet no one returned.
Well, I will dispatch my man who brought the news to Mr. Eyre to bid him to avoid the place; and we two, Mr. Alban and myself, will make our way across the border into Stafford."
"There is one more matter," said Robin presently, uncrossing one splashed leg from over the other.
The serving-men held the horses at the door.
"I have never set eyes on him from that day to this--to this," he added. "And this morning in the open street in Derby whom should I meet with but young Merton and his father.
"How did the news come?" asked Robin.
But her spirit seemed broken altogether.
"And I took the liberty of seeing where they went.
III
So the party sat round the fire in the same little parlour where they had sat so often before, with the lutes and wreaths embroidered on the hangings and Icarus in the chariot of the sun; and Robin, after telling his tale, answered question after question, till silence fell, and all sat motionless, thinking of the woman who, while dead, yet spoke.
It was his servant that told one of mine.
He had already again and again told the tale of Fotheringay so far as he had seen it in this very parlour.
She lamented, however, the fewness of the priests, and attributed to this the growing laxity of many families--living, it might be, in upland farms or in inaccessible places, where they could but very seldom have the visits of the priest and the strength of the sacraments.
But to have had strange business at Fotheringay a year ago is a suspicious circumstance; and--"
Alban," broke in the old man, "you had best do nothing at all.
"If you please, sir," she said to Mr. John, "one of your men is come up from Padley; and wishes to speak to you alone."
Marjorie was looking full at him now.
"Mistress Manners," he said, "you remember my speaking to you after Fotheringay, of a fellow of my lord Shrewsbury's who honoured me with his suspicions?"
"We can do no more."
I watched them awhile from Mr. Biddell's window; but they were still there when I came away at last."
The smile left his mouth.
Mistress Alice was there, quiet as ever, yet paler and thinner than in former years (Mistress Babington herself had gone back to her family last year).
(Her Grace's servants have suffered horribly since last year.
Mr. John gave a quick glance at the others.
Mr. Fenton will be at Tansley: he told me so."
It was the kind of interruption that might be wholly innocent; yet, coming when it did, it affected them a little. There seemed to be nothing but bad news everywhere.
They will come in sometimes without warning; but I cannot help that.
Well; it was all over....
"None that I know of.
He had learned a hundred lessons in these wanderings of his.
"I had wondered we had not had news of him!
"We shall not get our candles then, this year either," smiled Mr. Thomas.
At first he had hardly found himself able to speak of it without tears.
My lord would surely be dining with Mr. Columbell.
Mr. Thomas had been quiet for many months, no doubt in order to strike the more surely in his new function as "sworn man" of her Grace.
Before midnight, therefore, the two travellers had complete directions for their journey, as well as papers to help their memories, as to where the news was to be left.
CHAPTER I
It rather pierces down to the further point, Why was my lord Shrewsbury dining with Mr. Columbell?
"What of yourself?" she said sharply; "you were speaking of yourself."
"It is my son that is behind it," he said.
There was not much time to be lost.
But that is a tale for another day.) Well: I stopped to speak with these two.
And what party?" said Marjorie, quietly enough, though she must have guessed its character.
She nodded.
Now, my lord Shrewsbury's man knows nothing of me except that I had strange business at Fotheringay a year ago.
Robin laughed.
Mr. John FitzHerbert was there; he had ridden up an hour before with heavy news from Padley and its messenger.
"That would be after dinner-time.
"I had forgotten myself for once!...
Marjorie bowed her head in assent.
There is to be a general search for seminarists in the High Peak" (he glanced at Robin), "by order of my lord Shrewsbury.
"There is no more to be said, then," said Marjorie, and leaned back, with a white, exhausted face.
She seemed a little perturbed.
"Why, yes!
I had dined early; and I met them afterwards.
He had had an eventful year, yet never yet had he come within reach of the pursuivant.
I fear he will be a-preparing his sermons to us, all for nothing."
"It seems that the preacher Walton, in Derby, hath been warned that we shall be delivered to him two days hence.
There is a party coming to us from Derby--to-morrow or next day: it is not known which."
The news that he had now brought with him was of the worst.
He smiled bitterly again.
"What hour was that?" asked the old man.
He stopped short.
All this he had told, little by little; and of the Queen's noble bearing upon the scaffold, her utter fearlessness, her protestations that she died for her religion and for that only, and of the pesterings of Dr. Fletcher, Dean of Peterborough, who had at last given over in despair, and prayed instead.
"And now for the news of her Grace's servants."
My lord hath his own house in the country, and there be good inns in Derby."
"I will do precisely as you say," said Robin easily.
"It will not be necessary.
"It is." She flicked the horse's stubby mane with the whip.
CHAPTER XXIV
"I shall not keep you from your patient.
He looked sufficiently surprised at seeing me.
But as it happens, it was.
"Shot!" he said.
I think they came into the village.
The reception-room was empty, but from the consulting-room beyond came the sound of two voices, not very amicable.
"Please don't mention it; we wish to make as little of it as possible."
"I am going to get out."
Get up, Flinders."
If Halsey had only taken me fully into his confidence, through the whole affair, it would have been much simpler.
"Lucien Wallace?" he repeated.
Mr. Jamieson promised to come out that night, and to bring another man with him.
"I was up there myself at the fire," he said volubly.
"Stop here, Gertrude," I said.
"To see Louise?" she asked.
A fire and shooting in one night is rather lively for a quiet place like that."
"Good afternoon, Doctor," I said formally.
Rang that bell so hard I hadn't time scarcely to get 'em on."
"Not at the train, ma'm," he said.
The voices ceased at once: a door closed somewhere, and the doctor entered from the hall of the house.
"I shan't stir a foot." She was equally decided.
Gertrude finally got a trap from the Casanova liveryman, and we went out.
Then the doctor's quiet tone, evidently not arguing, merely stating something.
There are plenty of Wallaces around, but I don't know any Lucien."
There was none until six A.M.
"No, I want to ask this young Walker something."
But young people refuse to profit by the experience of their elders, and sometimes the elders are the ones to suffer.
He was on his guard again in a moment.
One was a short fellow.
I didn't get a look at their faces, but I know every chick and child in the place, and everybody knows me.
I wish merely to ask you a question."
Clever as he was, his face changed and stiffened.
"He didn't look like a livery horse, and the liveryman said he had bought him from the Armstrongs when they purchased a couple of motors and cut down the stable.
"Won't you sit down?"
"Please try to remember: we are trying to trace a man who was seen loitering around Sunnyside last night before the fire."
Then, more lightly: "Why, you and Liddy need me to arbitrate between you every day in the week."
Our reception was entirely different at Doctor Stewart's.
FLINDERS
Of the more serious part of the night's experience, of course, we said nothing.
The next question required more diplomacy.
To my surprise, she flushed painfully.
"Is that the horse's name?"
I shall dream of it to-night.
You'll be sure to send me the newspaper?"
"You and me's about of a build," he remarked.
He had rightly sized up the situation.
That knowledge, of course, made me in a still more light-hearted mood.
And for what purpose?"
It seemed all wrong, somehow--and all right in another way.
There was no sign of land in the west.
She was one of the ugliest vessels that ever left a shipyard, but I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life as she looked in those moments, and I had certainly never been so thankful for anything as for her solid and dirty deck when willing and kindly hands helped me up on it.
And after thinking it all over I sent Mr. Lindsey a telegram in the following words, hoping that he would fully understand:--
It seemed years since I had laughed--and yet it was only a few hours, after all.
"Four days," he answered.
It'll be something in their pockets when my friend comes along."
And--don't tell anybody here of what's happened, and pass the word for silence to your crew.
She was a very slow-going craft that--not able to do more than nine or ten knots at best--and another hour passed before she was anywhere near me.
"Man!--you'll not spare him--promise me you'll not spare him!
Yet there she was at last--coming bows on, straight in my direction.
"Where are you going?"
I was numbed and shivering with cold--but I was alive and safe.
"I don't want that man to know I'm alive--yet.
I must let my mother and Maisie know of my safety--at once.
I never strained my eyes for anything as I did for that patch of grey against the cloudless blue!
I clung to that heaven-sent bit of wreckage, exhausted and weary, until the light began to break in the east.
That square yard of good and solid wood was as much to me as if it had been a floating island.
"But you'll be dealing with him yourself!" said he.
He was a cute man, and he understood that my object was to keep the news of my escape from Sir Gilbert Carstairs, and he promised to do what I asked.
"You'll be for fetching him along here, then?
THE SAMARITAN SKIPPER
I wandered up and down and about Dundee till I was leg-weary, and it was nearly six o'clock of the afternoon.
But what is it you're going to do?"
We'll be in Dundee early in the afternoon, anyway.
That name was Gavin Smeaton.
H.M."
But I did not want him to know I was safe--I did not want the town to know.
"Dundee," he replied.
It made me grind my teeth and long to get my hands at his lying tongue when I thought of what Maisie and my mother must have suffered after hearing his tales and excuses.
I must let Mr. Lindsey know, too.
The truth was--if you want to analyse the sources--I was vastly relieved to be able to get in touch with my own people.
And that accomplished, I left him again and went sight-seeing, having been wonderfully freshened up and restored by my good sleep of the morning.
And what'll you do there?
And in the meantime, let me have a sleep."
Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy.
But the odes of Keats and of Wordsworth, a poem or two by Coleridge, a few more by Shelley, discovered vast realms of the spirit that none had explored before.
Of course, much of it was.
But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification.
I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets.
He was a famous poet in his day, and the world recognised his genius with a unanimity which the greater complexity of modern life has rendered infrequent.
Some were modern and some were old-fashioned.
There is no last word. The new evangel was old when Nineveh reared her greatness to the sky.
The pendulum swings backwards and forwards. The circle is ever travelled anew.
I was very young when I wrote my first book.
I was introduced to this celebrated person after that one, and the kind words they said about my book made me excessively uncomfortable.
The spade was not invariably called a bloody shovel.
The venue is different.
I lived near Victoria Station, and I recall long excursions by bus to the hospitable houses of the literary.
I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and rapacious eyes, who wore their clothes as though they were armour; and of little, mouse-like spinsters, with soft voices and a shrewd glance.
What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude?
Woman had not yet altogether come into her own.
In their chastened smile is an indulgent mockery.
These gallant words which seem so novel to those that speak them were said in accents scarcely changed a hundred times before.
It is not without melancholy that I wander among my recollections of the world of letters in London when first, bashful but eager, I was introduced to it.
What would we not give for the reminiscences of someone who had been as intimately acquainted with El Greco as I was with Strickland?
A painter's monument is his work.
I felt they expected me to say clever things, and I never could think of any till after the party was over. I tried to conceal my embarrassment by handing round cups of tea and rather ill-cut bread-and-butter.
The younger generation, conscious of strength and tumultuous, have done with knocking at the door; they have burst in and seated themselves in our seats. The air is noisy with their shouts.
When so much has been written about Charles Strickland, it may seem unnecessary that I should write more.
Chapter II
I find myself in a position to throw light on just that part of his tragic career which has remained most obscure. If they who believe in Strickland's greatness are right, the personal narratives of such as knew him in the flesh can hardly be superfluous.
Of their elders some, by imitating the antics of youth, strive to persuade themselves that their day is not yet over; they shout with the lustiest, but the war cry sounds hollow in their mouth; they are like poor wantons attempting with pencil, paint and powder, with shrill gaiety, to recover the illusion of their spring. The wiser go their way with a decent grace.
In my timidity I wandered up and down the street while I screwed up my courage to ring the bell; and then, sick with apprehension, was ushered into an airless room full of people.
There, as is notorious, he spent the last years of his life; and there I came across persons who were familiar with him.
And the successful books are but the successes of a season.
But I seek refuge in no such excuses.
I wanted no one to take notice of me, so that I could observe these famous creatures at my ease and listen to the clever things they said.
Then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the poets sang new songs. Mr. Crabbe continued to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. I think he must have read the verse of these young men who were making so great a stir in the world, and I fancy he found it poor stuff.
But all this is by the way.
They remember that they too trod down a sated generation, with just such clamor and with just such scorn, and they foresee that these brave torch-bearers will presently yield their place also.
Some advertised badly and some well.
The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
I do not like them. I am on the shelf.
It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them.
He had learnt his craft at the school of Alexander Pope, and he wrote moral stories in rhymed couplets.
I cannot tell.
The artist has this advantage over the rest of the world, that his friends offer not only their appearance and their character to his satire, but also their work. I despaired of ever expressing myself with such aptness or with such fluency.
Who now, for example, thinks of George Crabbe?
It was obvious that he had no social gifts, but these a man can do without; he had no eccentricity even, to take him out of the common run; he was just a good, dull, honest, plain man.
There was blue delft on the chimney-piece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner.
The daughter was fourteen.
He was a man of forty, not good-looking, and yet not ugly, for his features were rather good; but they were all a little larger than life-size, and the effect was ungainly.
"She finds them amusing.
I no longer wondered that Mrs. Strickland felt a certain embarrassment about him; he was scarcely a credit to a woman who wanted to make herself a position in the world of art and letters.
"He's on the Stock Exchange, and he's a typical broker. I think he'd bore you to death."
I think he was beginning to doubt it."
"Is there a Mr. Strickland?" I asked
It was because the Member of Parliament found that he could not leave the House that I had been invited.
When at last we were all assembled, waiting for dinner to be announced, I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to "take in," that civilised man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life.
Their moral eccentricities, like their oddities of dress, their wild theories and paradoxes, were an entertainment which amused her, but had not the slightest influence on her convictions.
Mrs. Strickland asked me for my address, and a few days later I received an invitation to luncheon.
"Does he bore you?" I asked.
Her eyes grew tender.
He was bigger than I expected: I do not know why I had imagined him slender and of insignificant appearance; in point of fact he was broad and heavy, with large hands and feet, and he wore his evening clothes clumsily.
Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders.
Turning to him gaily, she attempted a small jest.
At last she rose and shepherded the ladies out of one room. Strickland shut the door behind her, and, moving to the other end of the table, took his place between the K.C. and the Government official.
Chapter IV
You'll meet him if you dine there. But she doesn't often have people to dinner.
I like her for it."
Once or twice Mrs. Strickland's eyes rested on him somewhat anxiously.
"But why does she want them?"
I was led up to Mrs. Strickland, and for ten minutes we talked together.
It was, of course, a purely social function. The Stricklands "owed" dinners to a number of persons, whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them; these persons had accepted.
It was very severe.
It was chaste, artistic, and dull.
"Yes; she has a boy and a girl.
Her flat was always neat and cheerful, gay with flowers, and the chintzes in the drawing-room, notwithstanding their severe design, were bright and pretty.
The K.C. remarked on the excellence of the wine, and Strickland told us where he got it.
You felt that you obliged her by accepting her sympathy.
I'm very fond of him."
She wrote:
More than Teacher, I do believe; and she doesn't mind how many questions we ask.
I'd like to go there; it's a real splendid place, they say."
She is so nicely asleep, it is a pity to wake her.
Of Ben Brown the elder's death there was little to tell, except that he was killed in some wild place at the West, and a stranger wrote the fact to the only person whose name was found in Ben's pocket-book.
"There, now, I've forgotten something, too!
I'll hunt it up to-night.
"He has gone further away than that, to a lovelier country than California, I hope." And Miss Celia's eyes turned to the deep sky, where early stars were shining.
Poor Sancho could only whine and lick away the tears that wet the half-hidden face, questioning the new friend meantime with eyes so full of dumb love and sympathy and sorrow that they seemed almost human. Wiping away her own tears, Miss Celia stooped to pat the white head, and to stroke the black one lying so near it that the dog's breast was the boy's pillow.
Throwing himself down beside his dog, Ben clung about the curly neck, sobbing bitterly,--
"Is Ben coming, too?" asked Bab, as Betty trotted off in a silent rapture with the big darling bobbing over her shoulder.
"You can't, you didn't know him!
I like folks that will tell me things," added Bab, whose inquisitive mind was always hungry.
Squire sent you a letter; and I'm having such a jolly time, I never thought of it."
"Don't lie on that cold stone, Ben; come here and let me try to comfort you," she said, stooping to wipe away the great drops that kept rolling down the brown cheek half hidden in her dress.
"Tell me all about it; I'll be good."
Mr. Smithers offered to take the boy back and "do well by him," averring that the father wished his son to remain where he left him, and follow the profession to which he was trained.
"The Squire has heard about your father, and this is the letter Mr. Smithers sends."
I'd rather ride bareback.
"I guess I could,--but you don't mean it?
She Says we may come over every night and play with her and Thorny."
Remind me, Thorny."
Oh, daddy!
"You may take a turn round my field on Lita any day.
Where's he gone?
Seems as if I could see his mane blow in the wind, and hear him whinny to that small feller trotting down to see if he can't get over and be sociable.
"No; I brought the book, but in the hurry of my tea-party forgot to unpack it.
Sancho felt that he must follow suit; and gravely put his paw upon her knee, with a low whine, as if he said, "Count me in, and let me help to pay my master's debt if I can."
Then, as kindly as she could, Miss Celia read the brief letter which told the hard news bluntly; for Mr. Smithers was obliged to confess that he had known the truth months before, and never told the boy, lest he should be unfitted for the work they gave him.
"Won't we have splendid times?
She would like it, and Thorny's saddle will be here next week," said Miss Celia, pleased to see that the boy appreciated the fine pictures, and felt such hearty sympathy with the noble animals whom she dearly loved herself.
I guess the letter I brought was a recommend from the Squire."
"Went further on, I s'pose.
Don't send me back!
Presently the sobbing ceased, and Ben whispered, without looking up,--
There was no need of any more words, no need of tears or kind arms around him.
Something in Miss Celia's voice, as she said the last two words with her hand on Ben's shoulder, made him look up quickly and turn red with pleasure, wondering what the Squire had written about him.
"Hooray! where is he, please?" cried Ben, wishing she would hurry up; for Miss Celia did not even offer him the letter, but sat looking down at Sancho on the lower step, as if she wanted him to come and help her. "He went after the mustangs, and sent some home, but could not come himself."
Oh, ma'am, he isn't dead?" cried Ben, with a cry that made her heart ache, and Sancho leap up with a bark.
Miss Celia put her arms about him, and answered very tenderly,--"Ben, dear, if I were to tell you that he was never coming back, could you bear it?"
"Didn't he send for me?
"Not yet; I've several things to settle with my new man.
But Ben put his arm over his face, and sobbed out with a fresh burst of grief,--
Tell mother he will come by-and-by."
"She's like the good fairies in the books, and has all sorts of nice, pretty things in her house," said Betty, enjoying a last hug of the fascinating doll whose lids would shut so that it was a pleasure to Sing, "Bye, sweet baby, bye," with no staring eyes to Spoil the illusion.
daddy! if I'd only seen you jest once more!"
"No, no; I'd rather tramp and starve.
No one did look; no one saw how pitifully her eyes rested on Ben's happy face when the letters were put away, and no one minded the new gentleness in her manner as she came back, to the table.
Hans eyed it deliberately, drank, and passed on.
It was past noon and the rays beat intensely upon the steep path, while the whole atmosphere was motionless and penetrated with heat.
The path became steeper and more rugged every moment, and the high hill air, instead of refreshing him, seemed to throw his blood into a fever. The noise of the hill cataracts sounded like mockery in his ears; they were all distant, and his thirst increased every moment.
So Hans went to vespers in the evening for the first time in his life and, under pretense of crossing himself, stole a cupful and returned home in triumph.
And he did not know how it was, but he thought that a strange shadow had suddenly come across the blue sky.
He went to the priest, but the priest could not give any holy water to so abandoned a character.
And a flash of blue lightning rose out of the East, shaped like a sword; it shook thrice over the whole heaven and left it dark with one heavy, impenetrable shade.
He stopped to open it, and again, as he did so, something moved in the path above him.
They beat him again, till their arms were tired, and staggered to bed.
"Three drops are enough," at last thought he; "I may, at least, cool my lips with it."
"Good morning, brother," said Hans; "have you any message for the King of the Golden River?"
The sun was setting; it plunged towards the horizon like a redhot ball.
He stood at the brink of the chasm through which it ran.
Its eye moved to the bottle which Hans held in his hand.
At this instant a faint cry fell on his ear.
He raised it, drank, spurned the animal with his foot, and passed on.
The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice.
He was, moreover, surprised, on surmounting them, to find that a large glacier, of whose existence, notwithstanding his previous knowledge of the mountains, he had been absolutely ignorant, lay between him and the source of the Golden River.
Another hour passed, and he again looked down to the flask at his side; it was half empty, but there was much more than three drops in it.
CHAPTER III
Shuddering he drew the flask from his girdle and hurled it into the center of the torrent.
"The old peddler-woman was no one else than the wicked Queen; take care and let no one come in when we are not with you."
Kill her, and bring me back her heart as a token." The huntsman did as he was told, and took her away; but when he had drawn his knife, and was about to pierce Snow-white's little heart, she began to weep, and said:
He saw the coffin on the hill, and the beautiful Snow-white within it, and read what was written upon it in golden letters.
Once upon a time it was the middle of winter; the flakes of snow were falling like feathers from the sky; a Queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony.
Then the wicked woman gave a scream, and was so wretched, so utterly wretched, that she knew not what to do.
They laid her upon a bier, and all seven of them sat round it and wept for her, and wept three whole days.
Snow-white was willing, and went with him, and their wedding was held with great show and splendor.
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?"
The Queen, at home, went in front of the Glass, and said:
When it was quite dark the owners of the cottage came back; they were seven dwarfs who dug in the hills for gold.
the Looking-glass answered:
When the dwarfs came home in the evening, they found Snow-white lying upon the ground; she breathed no longer, and was dead.
The fifth, "Who has been using my fork?"
"We could not bury her in the dark ground," and they had a coffin of glass made, so that she could be seen from all sides, and they laid her in it, and wrote her name upon it in golden letters, and that she was a King's daughter.
it answered:
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?"
Against the wall stood seven little beds side by side, covered with snow-white coverlets.
Then she told them that the Queen had wished to have her killed, but that the huntsman had spared her life; she had run for the whole day, until at last she had found their house.
Then they were going to bury her, but she still looked as if she were living, and still had her pretty red cheeks.
"Pretty things to sell, very cheap, very cheap." Little Snow-white looked out of the window and called out:
"Oh, heavens, where am I?" she cried.
When she heard the Glass speak thus she trembled and shook with rage.
The wicked Queen was also bidden to the feast.
When they saw Snow-white lying as if dead upon the ground, they knew at once the Queen had been there, and they looked and found the comb.
Then the Queen looked at her with a dreadful look, and laughed aloud and said:
Then she took the shape of another old woman.
"Are you afraid of poison?" said the old woman.
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?"
And now the King's son had it carried away by his servants on their shoulders.
The Glass answered:
it answered at last:
"Now I am the most beautiful," said the Queen to herself, and ran away.
It was white with a red cheek, so that every one who saw it longed for it; but whoever ate a piece of it must surely die.
"White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony-wood!
Now Snow-white grew up, and became more and more beautiful; and when she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the day, and more beautiful than the Queen herself.
They said:
"Ah, dear huntsman, leave me my life!
"Yes," said Snow-white, "with all my heart," and she stayed with them. She kept the house in order for them; in the mornings they went to the hills and looked for gold; in the evenings they came back, and then their supper had to be ready.
She was beautiful but proud, and she could not bear to have any one else more beautiful. She had a wonderful Looking-glass, and when she stood in front of it, and looked at herself in it, and said:
"Good things, pretty things," she answered; "stay-laces of all colors," and she pulled out one which was woven of bright silk.
The King's son, full of joy, said:
"I cannot let any one in; the seven dwarfs have told me not to."
Then the Queen was angry, and turned green with envy.
Then it answered as before:
"Take the child away into the wood; I will no longer have her in my sight.
It happened that a King's son came into the wood, and went to the dwarfs' house to spend the night.
"Beware of the Queen; she will soon know that you are here; be sure to let no one come in."
At last she was well pleased, for she knew the Looking-glass spoke the truth.
She knocked at the door.
"O Queen, in this land thou art fairest of all."
The dwarfs said:
At first she would not go to the wedding at all, but she had no peace, and must go to see the young Queen.
Then they put the coffin out upon the hill, and one of them always stayed by it and watched it.
And the seventh dwarf slept with the others, one hour with each, and so got through the night.
And it answered as before:
But as good luck would have it, it was almost evening, and the seven dwarfs soon came home.
But the wicked woman, when she was at home again, went in front of the Glass and asked:
"Child," said the old woman, "what a fright you look!
"O Queen, thou art fairest of all I see, But over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell, Snow-white is still alive and well, And no one else is so fair as she."
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?"
And so she thought and thought again how she might kill Snow-white, for so long as she was not the fairest in the whole land, envy let her have no rest.
From that hour, whenever she looked at Snow-white, her breath came and went, she hated the girl so much.
But they were friendly and asked her what her name was.
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is fairest of all?"
And once when the queen asked her Looking-glass:
But the Queen, thinking she had eaten Snow-white's heart, began to suppose she was again the first and most beautiful person in the world; and she went to her Looking-glass and said:
This time the dwarfs cannot wake you up again."
The fourth, "Who has been eating my fruit?"
"Good-day, my good woman, what have you to sell?"
Little Snow-white was so hungry and thirsty that she ate some fruit and bread from each plate, and drank a drop of milk out of each mug, for she did not wish to take all from one only.
"Would that I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the window-frame!" Soon after that she had a little daughter, who was as white as snow, and as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony; so she was called Little Snow-white. And when the child was born, the Queen died.
"You piece of beauty," said the wicked woman, "you are done for now," and she went away.
"Looking-glass, Looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?"
oh, heavens!" cried they, "what a lovely child!" and they were so glad that they did not wake her, but let her sleep on in the bed.
I will run away into the wild wood, and never come home again."
Then she went over the seven hills to the seven dwarfs, and knocked at the door and cried:
And when she went in she knew Snow-white; and she stood still with rage and fear, and could not stir.
Not long after, in the evening, the seven dwarfs came home, but how shocked they were when they saw their dear little Snow-white lying on the ground!
When she heard that, all her blood rushed to her heart with fear, for she saw plainly that little Snow-white was again alive.
The sixth, "Who has been cutting with my knife?"
In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two, Lincoln, looking out of a window (before lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed) on one of the streets of Washington, saw a workingman in shirt-sleeves go by.
Here and there are straight rows of cheap houses, evidently erected by staid, broad-brimmed speculators from across the river, with eyes on the main chance.
The first home was made when a woman, cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby.
Printed in several languages, its sales have mounted to a hundred thousand volumes, and the author's net profit is full forty thousand dollars.
Lincoln in his early days was a workingman and an athlete, and he never quite got the idea out of his head (and I am glad) that he was still a hewer of wood.
Many of the domiciles are frame and have the happy tumbledown look of the back streets in Charleston or Richmond--those streets where the white trash merges off into prosperous colored aristocracy.
And with Horace L. Traubel I assert that Whitman was the sanest man I ever saw.
His plain, check, cotton shirt was open at the throat to the breast; and he had an independence, a self-sufficiency, and withal a cleanliness, a sweetness and a gentleness, that told that, although he had a giant's strength, he did not use it like a giant.
But what I object to is Professor Hermann's disciples posing as Sure-Enough Materializing Mediums, and Professor Lombroso's followers calling themselves Scientists, when each goes forth without scrip or purse with no other purpose than to supply themselves with both.
Walt Whitman was essentially a citizen of the world: the world was his home and mankind were his friends.
He weighed an even two hundred pounds and was just six feet high.
Through it all he held the healthy optimism of boyhood, carrying with him the perfume of the morning and the lavish heart of youth.
Engineers, dockmen, express-drivers and mechanics largely make up the citizens of Camden.
Some men make themselves homes; and others there be who rent rooms.
It requires two to make a home.
But the Assize of Public Opinion denied the petition, and the dear people bought the book at from three to five dollars a copy.
Camden is separated from the city of Philadelphia by the Delaware River. Camden lies low and flat--a great, sandy, monotonous waste of straggling buildings.
Through caring for wounded, sick and dying men, hour after hour, day after day, through the long, silent watches of the night.
Whitman used no tobacco, neither did he apply hot and rebellious liquors to his blood and with unblushing forehead woo the means of debility and disease.
Parallel with Mickle Street, a block away, are railway-tracks.
He had the look of age in his youth and the look of youth in his age that often marks the exceptional man.
All the tender sentimentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred thought that we live there with some one else.
When a funeral takes place in one of these houses, the shutters are tied with strips of mournful, black alpaca for a year and a day.
Lovers make a home, just as birds make a nest, and unless a man knows the spell of the divine passion I hardly see how he can have a home at all.
If Doctor Talmage is the Barnum of Theology, surely we may call Doctor Nordau the Barnum of Science.
His long, flowing beard was snow-white, and the shock that covered his Jove-like head was iron-gray. His form was that of an Apollo who had arrived at years of discretion.
No wonder is it that, with pockets full to bursting, Doctor Nordau goes out behind the house and laughs uproariously whenever he thinks of how he has worked the world!
Whitman was fifty-one years old then.
He loved men as brothers, yet his brothers after the flesh understood him not; he loved children--they turned to him instinctively--but he had no children of his own; he loved women, and yet this strongly sexed and manly man never loved a woman.
Turning to a friend, the President said, "There goes a MAN!"
When the children of Count Tolstoy endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia: A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish than he who saves it.
He only rents a room.
But the Corsican's remark was intended for the poet's ear, while Lincoln did not know who his man was, although he came to know him afterward.
Max Nordau wrote a book--wrote it with his tongue in his cheek, a dash of vitriol in the ink, and with a pen that scratched.
The exclamation sounds singularly like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe.
But he did not wither at the top.
Up to his fifty-third year he had never known a sick day, although at thirty his hair had begun to whiten.
How?
Yet Plato explained that the opposites of things look alike, and sometimes are alike--and that was quite a while ago.
He once told George William Curtis that he more than half expected yet to go back to the farm and earn his daily bread by the work that his hands found to do; he dreamed of it nights, and whenever he saw a splendid toiler, he felt like hailing the man as brother and striking hands with him.
But they reckoned ill, for the town did not boom.
There was a quality in the man peculiarly universal: a strong, virile poise that asked for nothing, but took what it needed.
Could anything be more foolish and short-sighted than to allow a morbid sensitiveness to interfere with one's advancement in life?
He is cut to the very quick by the slightest criticism, and regards every suggestion for the improvement of his work as a personal affront.
Timid, shy people are morbidly self-conscious; they think too much about themselves.
Many a good business man has been kept back, or even ruined, by his quickness to take offense, or to resent a fancied slight.
In such an environment he will soon learn that everyone has all he can do to attend to his own business.
Think less of yourself and more of others.
No singer ever captivated her audience until she forgot herself, until she was lost in her song.
I know a young lady with a superb mind and a fine personality, capable of filling a superior position, who has been kept in a very ordinary situation for years simply because of her morbid sensitiveness.
No painter ever did a great masterpiece when trying to keep all the rules of his profession, the laws of drawing, of perspective, the science of color, in his mind.
If these people could only forget themselves and think of others, they would be surprised to see what freedom, ease, and grace they would gain; what success in life they would achieve.
Mingle freely with people.
Do not brood over what is said to you, or analyze every simple remark until you magnify it into something of the greatest importance.
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND TIMIDITY FOES TO SUCCESS
One of the best schools for a sensitive boy is a large business house in which he will be thrown among strangers who will not handle him with gloves.
If they do not, they doom themselves to unhappiness and failure.
It is when the orator's soul is on fire with his theme, and he forgets his audience, forgets everything but his subject, that he really does a great thing.
He will be ashamed to play "cry baby" every time he feels hurt, but will make up his mind to grin and bear it.
Writers, authors, and other people with artistic temperaments, are usually very sensitive.
Over-sensitiveness, whether in man or woman, is really an exaggerated form of self-consciousness.
A sensitive person feels that, whatever he does, wherever he goes, or whatever he says, he is the center of observation.
If anything has gone wrong in his business and he feels vexed, he knows that he is liable to give offense to these people without ever intending it.
When he thinks they are aiming remarks at him, putting slights upon him, or trying to hold him up to the ridicule of others, they may not be even conscious of his presence.
No one has ever done a great thing while his mind was centered upon himself. We must lose ourselves before we can find ourselves.
The result is that she makes it so unpleasant for her employers that they do not promote her.
Some of our best writers never found themselves, never touched their power, until they forgot their rules for construction, their grammar, their rhetorical arrangement, by losing themselves in their subject. Then they found their style.
Self-consciousness is a foe to greatness in every line of endeavor.
Timidity, shyness, and self-consciousness belong to the same family. We usually find all where we find any one of these qualities, and they are all enemies of peace of mind, happiness, and achievement.
CHAPTER XIX
But after they have been in college a term, and have been knocked about and handled in a rough but good-humored manner by youths of their own age, they realize that it would be the most foolish thing in the world to betray resentment.
And she can not understand why she does not get on faster.
Many schoolteachers are great sufferers from over-sensitiveness. Remarks of parents, or school committees, or little bits of gossip which are reported to them make them feel as if people were sticking pins in them, metaphorically speaking, all the time.
It is far removed from conceit or self-esteem, yet it causes one's personality to overshadow everything else.
They shrink from exposing their sore spots and sensitive points, which smart from the lightest touch.
"Supposing we were to sign that document, what would you propose to do with it?" inquired the governor.
And yourself--what sort of action might we expect from you?"
"I will read it aloud," said Mr. Hewett.
The prisoner smiled.
"Mr. Mankell, you are over hasty.
"May I ask you for paper, pens, and ink?"
Perhaps that was because their nerves were already so disorganised.
"It is an error which can easily be rectified."
The chaplain was holding the testimonial loosely between his finger and thumb.
What do you mean?"
"Is it possible that you suspect me of hanky-panky?
When the governor ceased, the prisoner seemed to be considering what answer he should make.
His words and manner, though evidently sincere, were not particularly impressive.
The doctor thrust his hands into his trousers' pockets.
"Perhaps I was too hasty," he confessed.
The governor leaned back in his seat.
MANKELL WITH A TESTIMONIAL.
CHAPTER IV.
"Same 'ere!" cried Warder Slater.
Yes, sir, I will show you how it's done.
"I should convey it to Colonel Gregory."
"I see.
"You might give me a testimonial."
The Major shrank from taking it.
Well, you seem to be a pleasant kind of man!" The criticism seemed to have been extracted from the governor almost against his will.
"I have sent for you, for the second time this morning, to ask you frankly if you have any reason to complain of your treatment here?" The prisoner stretched out his hands with his familiar gesture.
I know that, for causes which are hidden from me, the Almighty may permit evil to take visible shape and walk abroad upon the earth; but I also know that, though evil may destroy my body, it cannot destroy my soul."
The chaplain pulled up.
The prisoner smiled again. "For--for pretending to tell fortunes?"
"Indeed!
The smile became more pronounced.
The Major shuffled in his chair.
He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.
"Your character?
He advised me, for my character's sake, to prove it during my sojourn here."
What have you?
"Oh, you're but beginning!
The prisoner dropped his hands to his sides, looking the governor steadily in the face.
"Hanky-panky!"
"Now, doctor, it is you."
"Exactly.
His self-possession in the presence of their evident uneasiness gave him the appearance, in a sense, of being a giant among pigmies; yet the Major, at least, was in every way a bigger man than he was.
If you wish it, you shall be torn asunder where you stand."
This is to testify that he has proved, to the entire satisfaction of the undersigned inspector of prisons and officials of Canterstone Jail, that he is a magician of quite the highest class."
The chaplain, who was caressing the hand which had been scorched by the flames, burst out with what was for him a passionate appeal:
The prisoner seemed lost in reflection.
"Quite so.
It fell upon the table.
It is singular how my faith is justified!"
The proposition thus refused will not be made again.
The prisoner drew himself straight up.
Might we indeed!
The chief warder placed his spectacles upon his nose, where they seemed uneasy, and made quite a business of signing.
Mr. Paley took his turn, with a really tolerable imitation of being both ready and willing.
He did so--for the benefit, probably, of Slater and Mr. Murray.
The inspector, leaning forward in his chair, seemed engrossed by his boots.
The officials seemed lost in reflection too; but their reflections were probably of a different kind.
I'll sign."
Mr. Paley found inscribed, in a beautifully fair round hand, as clear as copperplate, the following "testimonial":--
The chaplain cleared his throat.
The chaplain releasing it, it was consumed to ashes before it reached the floor.
"Am I to understand that the testimonial is to take the shape of a voluntary offering?"
Then, inclining his head with that almost saturnine grace, if one may coin a phrase, which seemed to accompany every movement he made:
"Tell you how it is done?
That short space of time has, however, convinced them that Colonel Gregory acted wrongly in distrusting his magic powers, and so casting a stain upon his character.
The prisoner merely smiled.
"You will, will you?
You retired ten years ago.
I'm boss of the Blue Star Navigation Company, am I not? The man was in charge of the Shanghai office before you ever opened your mouth to discharge your cargo of free advice."
By the Holy Pink-toed Prophet!
I'm the goat.
Answer me that.
"Then," quoth Matt Peasley, rising, "I wash my hands of the job of selecting Henderson's successor.
"Well, the only man I would consider for the job is Andrews and he is too young--about thirty, I should say."
I hope you do not expect me to abandon mental as well as physical effort.
Mr. Skinner received this information in silence.
Actually--no.
"And he had gone through every job in this office, from office boy to sales manager in the lumber department and from freight clerk to passenger agent in the navigation company," Matt Peasley supplemented.
"I think he'll do."
"Well, I must admit your far-sightedness in that instance will keep the Shanghai office out of the red ink this year," Matt Peasley replied. "However, we face this situation, Cappy.
Not a peep.
"You did."
"Have you got a misery in your back, or is Herbert Hoover the wrong man for Secretary of Commerce?"
"He's the best lumber salesman we've ever had," Mr. Skinner defended.
We couldn't foresee that.
"Yes sir, but then Andrews has never been tested----"
All of the men in my department are quite young--too young for the responsibility."
You have nothing to do with it.
"I accept the nomination, Skinner.
If Matt makes a mistake, it's your job to remind him of it before the results manifest themselves, is it not?
"Why do you think he'll do?"
And now he's gone south with a hundred and thirty thousand taels of our Shanghai bank account."
Why are we maintaining untested material in this shop, anyhow?
You say Andrews has never been tested.
We argued me into it.
Why, he wasn't twenty-six years old.
What's the matter with you, Matt?
Matt Peasley leveled an accusing finger at Cappy Ricks.
Mr. Alden P. Ricks, known in Pacific Coast wholesale lumber and shipping circles as Cappy Ricks, had more troubles than a hen with ducklings.
"I regret to say, sir, I have not.
"Because he ought to do.
All the troubles in the marine end of this shop belong on my capable shoulders, old settler."
Great Wampus Cats!
When we send a man out to the Orient to be our manager there, we have to trust him all the way or not at all.
A lot of our business is so far away we can't control it."
This is a young man's world, Skinner, and don't you ever forget it.
"I know nothing of his courage.
How old was Matt Peasley when I turned over the Blue Star Navigation Company to him, lock, stock and barrel?
"It's a mighty lucky thing I didn't go away for a year," Skinner protested respectfully, "because the market broke--like that--and if you don't think we have to hustle to sell sufficient lumber to keep our own ships busy freighting it--"
His head sank on his breast and he closed his eyes.
"Of course not.
"We never argued you into taking over the management of those Shipping Board boats.
The go-getters of this world are under thirty years of age.
Have you two boobs lost your ability to judge men or did you ever have such ability?"
Why?
"Yes, indeed," Skinner agreed.
"I admit all of that.
"Not a peep out of you, Skinner.
I know he has a pleasing personality."
He was not related to Cappy Ricks.
Why hasn't he been tested?
And vice versa.
"I am, Skinner.
Because we're breaking into a game that can't be played on the home grounds.
"You're referring to Henderson, of the Shanghai office, I dare say," Mr. Skinner cut in.
Am I to be denied a sentimental interest in matters where I have a controlling financial interest?
I admit you two boys are running my affairs and ordinarily you run them rather well, but--but--ahem!
Skinner, you're a dodo!
"Skinner, how dare you contradict me?
But did you consult me when you decided to send him out to China on his own?"
But Matt Peasley sat down, crossed his legs and matched glares with his mercurial father-in-law.
It's the fact that in my old age I find myself totally surrounded by the choicest aggregation of mental duds since Ajax defied the lightning."
He does possess sufficient force and initiative for his present job, but--"
Our job is to select a successor to Henderson and send him out to Shanghai on the next boat."
Not a peep out of you, sir.
And you, also, Skinner?
That's what we want to know, Skinner."
So there is no use weeping over spilled milk, Cappy.
"About thirty, eh?
"You and Skinner."
"I suggest, sir," Mr. Skinner replied with chill politeness, "that you conduct the examination."
"Theoretically--yes.
"Why, what have we done?"
September 1, 1913.
The faithful, self-sacrificing faculty, now numbering two hundred and fifty-three professors, have done the real work.
I addressed picnics, Sunday-schools, patriotic meetings, funerals, anniversaries, commencements, debates, cattle-shows, and sewing-circles without partiality and without price.
Yet this period of lecturing has been, after all, a side issue.
I had from childhood felt that I was "called to the ministry." The earliest event of memory is the prayer of my father at family prayers in the little old cottage in the Hampshire highlands of the Berkshire Hills, calling on God with a sobbing voice to lead me into some special service for the Saviour.
So I sought for other professions and for decent excuses for being anything but a preacher.
He did me the greatest kindness when he suggested my name to Mr. Redpath as one who could "fill in the vacancies in the smaller towns" where the "great lights could not always be secured."
Fifty years!
The work of lecturing was always a task and a duty.
God bless them all.
General Benjamin F. Butler, however, advised me to "stick to the last" and be a good lawyer.
The way is not always smooth.
For the first five years the income was all experience.
But Mr. Gough's kind words of praise, the bouquets and the applause, made me feel that somehow the way to public oratory would not be so hard as I had feared.
It filled me with awe, dread, and fear, and I recoiled from the thought, until I determined to fight against it with all my power.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.
Sometimes I had to hire a special train, but I reached the town on time, with only a rare exception, and then I was but a few minutes late.
I may not be in until half-past ten, or even later.
I am sorry.
Oh, the sin was too dark; it cut too sore; it lay too deep.
"What train must you go back by?" she said suddenly.
"Oh, he is my brother!" cried Annie; "the only one I love in all the world; and you dare not abuse him.
No. Leslie felt she could not betray her.
Leslie sat down on it just as if somebody had shot her.
She did not speak for some time.
"We must talk now," cried Leslie; "it will be too late when you come back.
"If you cannot tell me, well, there's no more to be said," he remarked. "I am cut up a bit, that's all.
"Because--oh, don't ask me." She felt cold and sick.
Don't ask me in Jenny's name, for Jenny would not have done that sort of thing; but, for Gilroy's sake, I--I'll never refuse you, child.
"Don't show it to me," said Leslie suddenly.
"You would not speak those words to me if you knew what I felt in my heart.
"Mr. Parker came to see me to-day, and he told me everything."
Several of the college girls were out in their different boats.
Don't fret too much.
Leslie looked at Annie with a sort of suppressed eagerness.
The merchant held up his hand to stop her.
"Oh! and I thought myself safe," she continued.
But understand this, Leslie, I'll have no more fooling.
"I will go upstairs and lie down." Leslie ran past Eileen, who stared after her in some wonder.
I see you cannot put the thing straight, as I had hoped just for a moment: but, after I have asked you one or two questions, we will never allude to the matter again.
Annie glanced at her again.
All my life, as long as I live, I will live for you, and devote myself to you.
She was glad of this, if she could be said to be glad of anything at that moment.
You cannot mean to go on with this.
Leslie again felt as if she had got a dash of cold water.
Why not?"
I am the last man, Leslie, to uphold young rascals of that sort.
There was a seat close by; it faced the river.
"If you go, I shall go; but if you refuse, I will speak to----"
"But what can you mean?
I declare now, and I shall always maintain it, that you are the noblest girl in the world."
I assure you I am absolutely in the dark."
You told me in it that you particularly wished to get the money in notes and gold; so I sent notes and gold.
The thought that Mr. Parker also supposed that she was vain enough and despicable enough to go into debt for fine clothes returned to her memory with Annie's words.
Leslie shivered as she returned slowly to the house.
"You don't know about that sixty pounds.
I helped Rupert, took him into my own office; but afterwards I had to give him the sack.
The girl is different.
"Believe it of you?
We can talk over--over what you mean (I am sure I cannot imagine what it can be) when I come back."
"I can't; not at present."
"Oh, you don't," said Leslie.
You don't look well."
The man who was with you----"
Annie flung herself suddenly on her knees; she covered her face with her shaking hands.
He is a scoundrel, and the least said about him the better.
Leslie bent her head in apparent acquiescence.
"Please speak," repeated Leslie.
"Go on; don't wait for me," said Leslie.
How could she live under this terrible imputation?
I was mistaken.
You always seemed to me to be Jenny come back again; but there, once for all, I will not drag Jenny into this.
"Then, all is well," said Annie.
None of her companions came by.
You forged a letter in my name, and you took it to my friend, Mr. Parker."
She waited for Annie to speak again.
I know everything. There is time yet.
"I will tell you in a few words exactly what I mean.
There is a limit even to my endurance, and, when roused, I can be hard and very just.
The strain was becoming intolerable.
"Never mind about my eyes," replied Leslie.
As a rule, it was Leslie's task and privilege to get tea for them both. Annie missed her companion's gentle attentions.
With her and open sin there was nothing whatever in common.
Say to me, 'Mr.
Annie went and stood by the open window.
"She will be going to meet that bad fellow, to give him the money--the money which has ruined my life.
You saw us, and you----"
"You did not betray me?
You are pretty enough to look charming in the simplest dress; but if you think otherwise, why----"
"Oh, that's all easy enough," said Mr. Parker.
If they suddenly want a little money and remember that their father's old friend can be befooled, being an old man himself, and tender-hearted, they yielded to temptation.
"But, Annie, do you quite understand?
He is the only one in the world I passionately love.
I hate being with her, and yet I cannot keep away from her."
"I have every right, Annie; I know the truth.
"I am disappointed.
Do speak."
I simply feel that I cannot betray you."
Leslie began to remark about them.
"If she will confess, I think Mr. Parker will forgive her, but I cannot be the one to ruin her whole life."
When Leslie entered her room, Annie, still buried in her novel, was crouched up on the window-sill.
I stood in the shadow, and I heard what you said.
The girls who had invited them looked somewhat surprised and disappointed.
Mr. Parker patted her on the arm.
By the way, have you read it--'The Caxtons,' by Bulwer Lytton?"
Women have views now they are no longer content to be looked at merely; they must see for themselves; and the more they see, the more they wish to domesticate man and emancipate woman.
Who's going to feed 'em?
"Morgan is right, admiral!" put in Conrad the corsair, acting temporarily as bo'sun.
This is no time for divisions in our councils.
You cannot nowadays find it on the high seas.
"I'm blessed if in all my experience I ever sailed athwart anything like it afore!
"And the crew, what did they say?"
I opens the bag, an' it's the one I was after--but the twelve millions!"
"The whole situation is rather contrary to etiquette, don't you think?" suggested Conrad.
"When did you flourish, if ever, colonel?" he asked.
Every woman is a milliner at heart."
Take 'em back, or land them in Paris.
The Roman Gynaeceum would be an impossibility to-day.
She is hardly what she is, much less what she was.
"What fearful luck!
But you had the prima donna's jewels."
"You have guessed correctly," replied Morgan, icily.
The conditions of the day of which I speak are interestingly shown in the experience of our friend Hawkins here.
Pirating with a lot of low- down ruffians like you gentlemen is bad enough, but on a craft loaded to the water's edge with advanced women--I've half a mind to turn back."
"The times are sadly changed, and woman is no longer what she was.
You said something about feeding them, and dressing them, and keeping them in bonnets.
"Gentlemen!
"There's nobody to introduce us, and I can't really see how we can do otherwise than ignore them.
I met death in all its most horrid forms.
"Where can we go without attracting attention?
"Weren't there?" cried Conrad.
There are but two things to do.
It's my private opinion that if we are to get along with them at all the best thing to do is to let 'em alone.
"By Jingo!" cried Morgan.
Modern civilization," said Kidd, "has ruined the pirate's business.
Tell them to spend a week on shore while we are provisioning.
Now I, for one, do not fear a woman.
Therefore it was my plan to visit the cities and do a little freebooting there, where solid material wealth is to be found."
"No.
"Not the slightest, Captain Kidd," returned Captain Hawkins, who was a recent arrival in Hades.
"They killed you?" cried Morgan.
"If that could be, it would be excellent," said Morgan; "but it is impossible.
"Nor I," sighed Kidd.
For a pirate of the Byronic order, my dear Conrad, you are strangely unversed in the ways of the sex which cheers but not inebriates.
"I have quite forgotten your date; were you a success in the year one, or when?"
"But go on, Hawkins."
"By the beards of all my sainted Buccaneers," began Morgan, springing angrily to his feet, "I'll have your life!"
Learnin' at an early period that virtue was its only reward, an' a-wish-in' others, I says to myself: 'Jim,' says I, 'if you wishes to become a magnet in this village, be sinful.
"A dozen times," nodded Hawkins.
Gentlemen--my noble ruffians!" expostulated Kidd. "Come, come; this will never do!
"I didn't get that in all my career."
I am out for business.
The study of women, my dear Peter," said Morgan, with a wink at Conrad, which fortunately the seventh-century pirate did not see, else there would have been an open break--"the study of women is more difficult than that of astronomy; there may be two stars alike, but all women are unique.
"Exactly, and we'll have to pay the milliners.
For years I was the terror of the Venezuelan Gulf, the Spanish Main, an' the Pacific seas, but there was precious little money into it.
"I stand corrected.
I have great respect for you, sir, as a ruffian.
"Well?
We can no more ignore their presence upon this boat than we can expect whales to spout kerosene.
"That's what I thought," said Morgan.
Morgan laughed sarcastically.
Why, I venture even to say that no individual woman is alike."
An entirely unexpected element has entered into our affairs, and it behooveth us to act in concert.
"And have them steal the ship!" retorted Kidd.
If you had thirty thousand women on board, still should I not turn back."
"I have no desire to be mutinous, Captain Kidd, but I have not embarked upon this enterprise for a pleasure sail down the Styx.
They were worthy, but they were not august.
Precipices are to be distinguished there.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.
France free and strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of Europe.
These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them.
Thus it proceeded until 1830.
They departed, that is all.
On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering.
Each one demands a bed.
But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to all forms of progress.
They have a revolutionary grandeur.
These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to convert them to profit.
CHAPTER I--WELL CUT
A sad thing!
This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--
They laid down the crown, and retained no aureole.
For a space of fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions.
They lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune.
Great things had been accomplished, with it alongside.
It did not perceive that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.
The populace was admirable.
In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition, to be small.
A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle.
But, at the same time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in their turn.
A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a glimpse of in 1814.
"What a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out.
They have it.
The Restoration fell.
And how should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reigned on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the battle of Marengo?
These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried shining there.
A shelter.
It thought that it had roots, because it was the past.
This house was churlish to the nineteenth century.
We shall make the attempt.
At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand guarantees.
They take possession of peace, of tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content.
The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word.
This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the ordinances of July.
It touched the royal personages only with sadness and precaution.
Dredge in the flour, shake the ingredients well round, then add the stock and peas, and stew till the latter are tender, which will be in about 20 minutes; put in the pounded sugar, and serve, placing the chicken round, and the peas in the middle of the dish.
GIBLET PIE.
The best geese are found on the borders of Suffolk, and in Norfolk and Berkshire; but the largest flocks are reared in the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridge.
Serve with a little gravy in the dish, and a tureen of the same, and one of well-made bread-sauce.
OBSTRUCTION OF THE CROP.--Obstruction of the crop is occasioned by weakness or greediness.
When liked, mushrooms may be substituted for the peas.
CROQUETTES OF FOWL (an Entree).
TO DRESS A GREEN GOOSE.
Poor feeding will induce this, even if cleanliness be observed; uncleanliness, however liberal the bill of fare, will be taken as an invitation by the little biting pests, and heartily responded to.
Brahmas or Cochins will clear the crop of a grass-run long before they will, and, with scattered food, they soon satisfy themselves and walk away.
Owing, possibly, to the little care taken to preserve this variety from admixture, it is now not frequently seen.
THE BRENT GOOSE.--This is the smallest and most numerous species of the geese which visit the British islands.
This dish should be garnished with water-cresses.
Remove the skewers, and serve with a tureen of good gravy, and one of well-made apple-sauce.
Part birds so affected from the healthy ones, as, when the disease is at its height it is as contagious as glanders among horses.
CHIP.--If the birds are allowed to puddle about on wet soil, or to be much out in the rain, they will get "chip." Young chicks are especially liable to this complaint.
A pure white Bantam, possessing all the qualifications just named, is also bred in the royal aviary at Windsor.
The mince should be rather thick.
When this sort of Bantam is pure, it yields in courage and spirit to none, and is, in fact, a game-fowl in miniature, being as beautiful and graceful as it is spirited.
ROAST GUINEA-FOWL, Larded.
HASHED GOOSE.
If the head is much swollen, bathe with warm brandy and water.
Its varieties are numerous; but in England there is only one species, which is supposed to be a native breed.
MINCED FOWL--an Entree (Cold Meat Cookery).
Wash and dry the water-cresses, pick them nicely, and arrange them in a flat layer on a dish.
Cover over with rice, dip the balls into egg, sprinkle them with bread crumbs, and fry a nice brown.
INGREDIENTS.--Goose, 3 oz. of butter, pepper and salt to taste.
As there is a doubt respecting the wholesomeness of the eggs laid by roupy hens, it will be as well to throw them away.
For a town fowl, they are perhaps better adapted than any other variety.
After it has been singed and trussed, the same as in the preceding recipe, put into the body a seasoning of pepper and salt, and the butter to moisten it inside.
ROAST GOOSE.
INGREDIENTS.--A Guinea-fowl, lardoons, flour, and salt.
A little gravy should be served in a tureen.
The pip is a white horny skin growing on the tip of the bird's tongue.
Now cut off the end of the vent, and make a hole in the skin sufficiently large for the passage of the rump, in order to keep in the seasoning.
THE SPECKLED HAMBURG.--Of the speckled, or spangled Hamburg which is a favourite breed with many persons, there are two varieties,--the golden-speckled and the silver-speckled.
Dish them, and garnish with fried parsley.
INGREDIENTS.--A pair of fowls; a little flour.
The ordinary symptoms,--swollen eyes, running at the nostrils, and the purple colour of the wattles.
If a fowl is hearty and strong, six weeks will see him out of his trouble; if he is weakly, or should take cold during the time, he will not thoroughly recover in less than three months.
SIR JOHN SEBRIGHT'S BANTAMS.--Above all Bantams is placed, the celebrated and beautiful breed called Sir John Sebright's Silver Bantams.
of cinnamon, 1/2 oz. of peppercorns, 4 onions, 6 thin slices of bacon, 2 hard-boiled eggs.
The veins of the palate should be opened, and a few drops of mixture composed of six parts of sweet nitre and one of ammonia, poured down its throat.
Mix half a teaspoonful of hydro-oxalic acid with twelve teaspoonfuls of water,--apply to the itching parts with an old shaving-brush.
FOWL AND RICE CROQUETTES (an Entree).
Their flesh is very agreeable.
After larding and trussing it, put it down to roast at a brisk fire; keep it well basted, and a short time before serving, dredge it with a little flour, and let it froth nicely.
Insert another skewer into the small of the leg, bring it close down to the side bone, run it through, and do the same to the other side.
Keep them dry and warm, and feed them liberally on warm and satisfying food.
It should be removed with the point of a penknife, and the place rubbed with salt.
Without a moment's warning, a fowl so afflicted will totter and fall from its perch, and unless assistance be at hand, speedily give up the ghost.
The first-mentioned is the most common of all, and results from cold.
The hens do not sit, but lay extremely well; hence one of their common names, that of Dutch every-day layers.
This sauce is, by many persons, considered an improvement.
"My back does not hurt me at all, papa; I don't think I struck it," Elsie said, looking up lovingly into his face.
"I don't know, papa; whatever you please."
"Dear papa, please take me home, and don't scold poor Arthur," pleaded Elsie's sweet, gentle voice; "I am not so very badly hurt, and I am sure he is very sorry for me."
"There, darling, is that better?" he asked, soothingly, as she laid her head wearily down on his breast, and he folded his arms about her.
"Mamma," he said with a shudder, "mamma, I believe I know.
And where is poor little Elsie now?"
Arthur quailed beneath the terrible glance of his brother's eye, as he turned it upon him, exclaiming bitterly: "Yes, I understand it all, now! I believe you will never be satisfied until you have killed her."
He reminded Arthur that he had promised to pay that day, and said Dick must have it to pay some debts of his own.
"I don't know how any one could be so wicked and cruel; especially to such a dear, sweet little girl as Elsie," remarked Carry Howard.
"Who was near her?" he asked, glancing sternly around the little circle.
Again Elsie opened her eyes, and smiled faintly as she saw him bending over her.
Mary looked hurt.
They set out soon after dinner, all in high good humor except Arthur, who was moody and silent, occasionally casting an angry glance at Elsie, whom he had not yet forgiven for her refusal to lend him money; but no one seemed to notice it, and for some time nothing occurred to mar their enjoyment.
"Yes, papa," she answered feebly.
He gave her a loving, pitying look, but paid no other heed to her remonstrance.
And you, Harry Carrington, go for her father, as fast as you can.
quick!
"Revenge, at first though sweet, Bitter, ere long, back on itself recoils."
"He talked very angrily, saying he knew that was only an excuse, because she didn't wish to do him a favor, and he'd pay her for it some day.
"He pushed her down that steep hill that you remember you were afraid to try to climb the other day; at least we all think he did."
"Where, darling?"
She looked her happiness and thanks, and the doctor praised her patience and fortitude; and having given directions concerning the treatment of the wounded limb, bade his little patient good-night, saying he would call again in the morning.
Elsie stooped to pick up a pebble, and Arthur, darting quickly past her, managed to give her a push that sent her rolling down the bank.
"Yes, daughter, and all the evening, too; perhaps all night."
You may ask for anything you want."
"Tis easier for the generous to forgive, Than for offence to ask it."
Everybody was asking what the doctor had said, and how much Elsie was injured, and Mr. Dinsmore stepped into the drawing-room a moment to answer their inquiries, and then hastened back to his child again.
"I will tell you, mama, as well as I can," he said, "and then you must tell me what I ought to do.
Elsie still lay with her head in Carry's lap.
She sat down on the ground, and lifting Elsie's head, laid it on her lap, untied her bonnet-strings, and loosened her dress.
"Thank you, papa," she said, gratefully, then whispered, "Won't you stay with me till tea-time, if you are not busy?"
But perhaps he did not do it quite on purpose."
No one replied.
"Arthur acknowledged that he had promised, expecting to borrow the money from somebody.
Herbert was crying, too, now, as bitterly as his sister.
Where did it happen?
The moment they were off he began questioning the boy closely as to the cause of the accident.
The doctor was dressing the injured ankle, and her father sat by the sofa holding her hand.
what troubles my own sweet child?" he asked, in a tone of mingled surprise and alarm, as he hastily laid aside his book and drew her to his knee.
"What do you want, Arthur? tell me quickly, please, because I must soon go to papa, and I have a lesson to look over first," she said, mildly.
"And so they put upon you all the trouble of entertaining both your own company and theirs, eh?
But as she stood a moment irresolute, he looked up from his book, and seeing who it was, smiled and held out his hand.
But stop crying now," he added, wiping her eyes with his handkerchief.
"I don't know; perhaps we could; but papa said I mustn't play it," replied Elsie, shaking her head doubtfully.
She noticed at breakfast that Arthur seemed in an uncommonly bad humor, preserving a sullen and dogged silence, excepting once when a sly whisper from Harry Carrington drew from him an exclamation of fierce anger that almost frightened the children, but only made Harry laugh.
"It is beginning to grow dark," he said.
Elsie smiled faintly, then drew a deep sigh.
"That's none of your business," he answered, fiercely.
"Is it so very hard to give up jack-stones?" he asked.
"Yes, papa," she replied, dropping her face on his breast and bursting into tears; "I thought you were going to leave me there all night."
"Did I give that reason?" he asked gravely.
Where were Louise and Lora?"
It seemed a long, long time; so long that she began to think it must be night, and to fear that perhaps her papa had forgotten all about having sent her there, or that he considered her so very naughty as to deserve to stay there all night.
"No, papa," she replied, hanging her head.
"Let us play jack-stones, too," said Flora.
"Please don't ask me, papa," she begged imploringly.
The closet was large, and there was a stool she could sit on; but when she had shut the door, it was both dark and cold.
"No, Flora, I cannot indeed, for papa says I must not play that game, because he does not like to have me sit down on the floor," replied Elsie.
"Partly because I was uncomfortable, papa, but more because I was sorry I had been naughty, and displeased you, and afraid that I can never learn to be good."
"Tell papa, indeed; never!
"Did you? and were you afraid?"
I would not deceive papa so for any money; and even if I did he would be sure to find it out."
"I hate concealments, Elsie, and shall be very much displeased if you try them with me," he answered, almost sternly.
She burst into tears, and sobbed quite violently.
Is it getting night, papa, or morning?"
"We must try to think of something else."
She had a trying time that day, endeavoring to keep the children amused; and her ingenuity and patience were taxed to the utmost to think of stories and games that would please them all.
Next she tried the library, and was more successful; he was in an easy chair by the fire, reading.
But remembering that he had said that her assistance was his only hope for escaping detection, she at length decided that she need not speak about the matter to any one.
"Will you give me the money then?" he asked angrily.
She was trying to amuse Enna's set, while her three companions and Herbert were taking care of themselves.
"Then you had no right to think so.
"What do you want it for, Arthur?" she asked in a troubled voice.
Elsie became very pale.
Several other little ones joined their entreaties to Flora's, and at length Elsie said, "Well, I will go and ask papa; perhaps he may let me, if I tell him we are not going to sit on the floor."
"I shall speak to Lora and Louise, and tell them they must do their share of the work."
They had sat down on the floor, and were playing jack-stones.
CHAPTER II.
"Why, what is it, darling?
I think the children will all want to go to bed early to-night," he added, "and then you can come here and sit by me while you copy your letter; shall you like that?"
She led the way and Arthur followed.
"And suppose they are! they shall not hurt you," he said, drawing her closer to him; "and they have no reason to be.
Elsie had to make haste, for the tea-bell rang almost immediately.
It was a dismal place to be in, and poor Elsie wondered how long she would have to stay there.
Presently after, as they were about dispersing, Arthur came to her side and whispered that he had something to say to her in private.
"Yes sir," she replied, and he pulled off her shoes and stockings, and moving his chair closer to the fire, held her feet out toward the blaze, and rubbed them in his warm hands.
"I want you to lend me some money," he replied, speaking in a rapid and determined manner; "I know you've got some, for I saw your purse the other day, and it hadn't less than five dollars in it, I'm sure, and that's just the sum I want."
"There comes Forever something between us and what We deem our happiness."
He glanced hastily around on entering and then locked the door and stood with his back against it.
"But tell me why you cried, if you were not afraid."
"Nothing, papa; at least, nothing very bad; I believe I am very silly," she replied, trying to smile through her tears.
She went to his dressing-room, but he was not there.
"I don't know how; but Elsie, you can teach me, can't you?"
"You have been crying a good deal," he said, looking keenly into her face.
"Ah!" he said, in a sympathizing tone; "and had you all the burden of entertaining them?
"Very much, papa, thank you."
The task of getting the mules together was simple enough, the irritable beasts making their usual objections, but following their old leader Skeeter quietly enough in spite of the bell not being in use; and in a short time they were trudging along with their loads down the steep slope till the gulch was reached, and Chris came after them with the ponies, to bring his charge to a halt.
The next minute Chris was standing by his mustang's head, watching the mules file away.
By the time this was finished the sun had sunk far below the rocks on his left, and the dreamy, restful state into which the boy had been falling passed away.
Griggs finished off with a loud chuckle.
That will be the signal for us to mount and ride for our lives.
They can go so fast that no Indian can catch them--if they like."
They won't ride."
"Think so, sir?
Well, suppose you wait and see."
It'll be grand for the poor beasts.
"No; they could see me, and they forgot to be in doubt in the heat of the pursuit.
"But have they turned off somewhere?
It was too horrible to think of.
So horrible became the silence at last that Chris felt that if it lasted much longer he must mount his mustang and ride forward to learn the worst.
Impossible in this darkness."
"Father!" he whispered.
"The firing, father--I heard two volleys.
"We have heard nothing of the enemy," he said.
"Even if they kill me," he muttered, and he mentally saw himself falling beneath the enemy's blows.
"Take care of yourself, Ned."
"We must chance that, sir, for the sake of making horse, mule, man and boy fit for what more he has to do."
He did not say what was a pity, for the sharp crack of a rifle brought him out of his musings to gaze sharply in the direction of the barrier, far away from where he was waiting, and wondering now whether there was any more fighting on the way.
"Because they'll be, as Indians mostly are when they can't see their quarry, horribly suspicious of being led into an ambush."
"And I don't like you to go, Mr Bourne," said Chris, holding out his hand, which was warmly grasped.
But Griggs was positive.
He heard with deep distress the dreadful tidings of suffering that came from the Crimea, and his heart responded instantly to the call for help.
THE RESPONSE.
Miss Nightingale, simply dressed in black, was very quiet, very serene, with a cheerful word for everyone; no one who saw her parting look and smile ever forgot them.
"Who is Miss Nightingale?" people cried all over the country.
"Oh, dreadful!" said some people; "Miss Nightingale is a Unitarian!"
Only a few relatives and near friends stood on the railway platform on that evening of October 21, 1854.
Her face is exceedingly lovely; but better than all is the soul's glory that shines through every feature so exultingly. Nothing can be sweeter than her smile.
Mr. Sidney Herbert (afterwards Lord Herbert of Lea) was at this time at the head of the War Department in England.
"Miss Nightingale is a Roman Catholic!" And so it went on.
Everybody who could write verses (and many who could not), began instantly to write about nightingales.
This it is which makes it so important that the experiment should be carried out by one with administrative capacity and experience."
"I must not conceal from you that upon your decision will depend the ultimate success or failure of the plan....
He was a man of noble nature and tender heart, whose whole life was spent in doing good, and in helping those who needed help.
He knew Miss Nightingale well; she was a dear friend of himself and his beautiful wife, and had again and again given them help and counsel in planning and managing their many charities, hospitals, homes for sick children, and so forth.
Singing bandages and lint; salve and cerate without stint, Singing plenty both of liniment and lotion, And your mixtures pushed about, and the pills for you served out With alacrity and promptitude of motion.
He did not make light of the task.
Great was the amazement in England.
Some thought it was improper for women to nurse in a military hospital; others thought they would be useless, or worse; others again thought that the nurses would ruin their own health and be sent home in a month to the hospitals of England.
He went on to assure Miss Nightingale that she should have full power and authority, and told her frankly that in his opinion she was the one woman in England who was capable of performing this great task.
The fishwives of Boulogne had heard what was doing across the Channel, and were on the lookout.
It is like a sunny day in summer."
You cannot hear her say a few sentences--no, not even look at her, without feeling that she is an extraordinary being.
Pay?
"Miss Nightingale is one of those whom God forms for great ends.
Though well known among a large circle of earnest and high-minded persons, Miss Nightingale's name was entirely new to the English people as a whole, and--everything else apart--they were delighted with its beauty.
"The selection of the rank and file of nurses would be difficult--no one knows that better than yourself.
While England was still wondering how they could go, and whether they ought to be allowed to go--behold, they were gone! slipping away by night, as if they were bound on some secret errand.
In a knowledge of the ancient languages and of the higher branches of mathematics, in general art, science, and literature, her attainments are extraordinary.
CHAPTER VII.
Would she, he asked, go out to Scutari, taking with her a band of nurses who would be under her orders, and take charge of the hospital nursing?
Yes, the women of England must rise up and go to that far, desolate land to tend and nurse the sick and wounded and dying; but who should lead them?
"Oh, shocking!" said others.
When Miss Nightingale and her nurses stepped ashore they were met by a band of women, in snowy caps and rainbow-striped petticoats, all with outstretched hands, all crying, "Welcome, welcome, our English sisters!"
So, in night and silence, the "Angel Band" whose glory was soon to shine over all the world, left the shores of England.
Simple, intellectual, sweet, full of love and benevolence, she is a fascinating and perfect woman. She is tall and pale.
He knew that she possessed all the qualities needed for this work, and he wrote to her, asking if she would undertake it.
She has visited and studied all the various nations of Europe, and has ascended the Nile to its remotest cataract.
There is scarcely a modern language which she does not understand, and she speaks French, German and Italian as fluently as her native English.
Another picture represented one of the bird-nurses flying through the air, carrying in her claws a jug labeled "Fomentation, Embrocation, Gruel." This was called "The Jug of the Nightingale," for many people think that some of the bird's beautiful, liquid notes sound like "jug, jug, jug!"
They shouldered bag and baggage; they swung the heavy trunks up on their broad backs, and with laughter and tears mingled in true French fashion, trudged away to the railway station.
But while they were talking and exclaiming, drawing pictures and singing songs, Miss Nightingale was getting ready.
There was no flourish of trumpets.
One who knew our heroine well wrote in a more personal vein:
Asking himself this question, Mr. Herbert answered without a moment's hesitation: "Florence Nightingale!"
What one woman had the strength, the power, the wisdom, the tenderness, to meet and overcome the terrible conditions?
Of course there were some people who shook their heads; there always are when any new work is undertaken.
In six days from the time she undertook the work she was ready to start, with thirty nurses, chosen with infinite care and pains from the hundreds who had volunteered to go.
They were answered by the newspapers.
Nothing of this kind had ever been heard of before.
It says that there is something very important, very secret, very delicate, that the queen wants his help about.
This statement very quickly elicited from the now startled German a story which astounded the lady.
In the beginning of August 1785, Boehmer took the trouble to call on Madame Campan at her country-house, somewhat to her surprise.
She burnt them, I suppose.
Madame Campan, one of the Queen's confidential ladies, happened to meet Boehmer one day, and the necklace was alluded to.
It would hardly have been a safe noonday plaything in moral Gotham, let alone the dissolute Paris of eighty years ago!
Of course, then, after their first delight had subsided, they were most anxious to sell an article that had to be constantly and painfully watched, and that might so easily disappear.
It was in 1782 that this grand work was finally completed, and the happy owners gloated with delight over a monument of skill as matchless in its way as the Pyramids themselves.
He is overflowing with zeal.
These are written in imitation of the Queen's handwriting, by that Villette de Retaux who personated the Queen's valet, and who was an expert at counterfeiting.
After triumphs which had given them world-wide fame during the reign of Louis XV, and made them fabulously rich, they determined, with the advent of Louis XVI, to eclipse all their former efforts and crown the professional glory of their lives.
Their correspondents in every chief jewel market of the world were summoned to aid their enterprise, and in the course of some two or three years they succeeded in collecting the finest and most remarkable diamonds that could be procured in the whole world of commerce.
He went however, and from that time onward, for year after year, lived the life of a persevering Adam thrust out of his paradise, hanging about the gate and trying all possible ways to sneak in again.
Well: after a time the cardinal is at Strasburg, when he receives a note from the countess that brings him back again as quick as post-horses can carry him.
But that is not the last of the rest of the parties to the affair, by any means.
Suddenly a conception is in the mind, whence, or how, we do not know, any more than we know Life.
After some more affected shyness, Cagliostro allowed himself to be seen.
The Cardinal sent an intimation that he would like to see the quack.
This was Villette de Retaux, a "pal" of Jeanne's and of her husband Lamotte, who had, by the way, become a low-class gambler and swindler by occupation.
Rich clusters and festoons spread from the loop over each shoulder, and the central loop on the back of the neck was joined in a pattern of emblematic magnificence corresponding with that in front.
A wonderfully cunning and hardy scheme!
But he was only laughed at for his pains; the porter was turned off, and the poor silly miserable cardinal remained "out in the cold," breaking his heart over his exclusion from the most tedious mess of conventionalities that ever was contrived--except those of the court of Spain.
But the interview, and the lovely little notes that came sometimes, "fixed" the necklace business!
She consented--it was not much--and was so kind as to carry the cash herself.
The unfortunate Queen never entirely escaped some shadow of disrepute from the necklace business.
The countess began to hint to the cardinal that she was fast getting into the Queen's good graces, by virtue of being a capital gossip and story-teller; and that she had frequent private audiences.
What is it?
And if further encouragement had been needed, Cagliostro gave it.
It was almost the head of an angel shining in the glory of the spheres.
Rather too large a sum to keep locked up in a casket, the reader will confess!
Everybody at Paris knew about the Diamond Necklace, and about de Rohan's desire to get into court favor.
She reflected--hesitated. The cardinal urged.
So the quack set up his tabernacles of mummery in a parlor of the cardinal's hotel, and conducted an Egyptian Invocation there all night long in solitude and pomp; and in the morning he decreed (in substance) "go ahead." And the cardinal did so.
Next Jeanne talked about the Queen's charities; and on one occasion, told how much the amiable Marie Antoinette longed to expend certain sums for benevolent purposes if she only had them--but she was out of funds, and the King was so close about money!
He was just the man to captivate the Cardinal, and they were quickly intimate personal friends, practising transmutation, alchemy, masonry, and still more particularly conducting a great many experiments on the Cardinal's remarkably fine stock of Tokay wine.
For the cardinal now consulted him about the future of the affair, having indeed kept him fully informed about it for a long time, as he did of all matters of interest.
I am crazy after money.
And then it seems that Messrs.
"No!" said the lady; "What message should she give?"
Boehmer is crazy to sell his necklace.
Now for the Cardinal.
"There is no answer, the Queen burned the note.
She does not even understand what you meant by writing that note."
The family had run down and become poor and rascally, one of Jeanne's immediate ancestors having practiced counterfeiting for a living.
Cagliostro was acquitted.
Yet the interview had scarcely more than begun before steps were heard.
On a further suggestion, he presently drew up a letter or memoir humbly and plaintively stating his case, which the countess undertook to put into the Queen's hands.
Soon she added intimations that the Queen was far from being really so displeased with the cardinal, as he supposed.
Gay d'Oliva appeared to have known nothing except that she was to play a part, and she had been told that the Queen wanted her to do so, so she was let go.
"Has the Queen given you no message for me?" he inquired.
Madame remembered a note which the Queen had received from Boehmer a little while before, along with some ornaments sent by his hands to her as a present from the King.
Madame Campan therefore replied,
This piece of impudence made the fool of a cardinal more eager than ever.
He had been ambassador at Vienna a little after Marie Antoinette was married to the Dauphin, and while there had taken advantage of his official station to do a tremendous quantity of smuggling.
He had also further and most deeply offended the Empress Maria Theresa, by outrageous debaucheries, by gross irreligion, and above all by a rather flat but in effect stingingly satirical description of her conduct about the partition of Poland.
Villette was banished for life.
They had ten creditors on the diamonds in different countries, and an immense capital still locked up in their other jewelry.
"What is the state of affairs about the necklace," asked the lady.
As for Cagliostro, he was also imprisoned, some accounts saying that he ostentatiously gave himself up for trial.
De Rohan was arrested and put in the Bastile, having barely been able to send a message in German to his hotel to a trusty secretary, who instantly destroyed all the papers relating to the affair.
This was a public trial before the Parliament of Paris, with much form.
This was Cagliostro, who at that time came to Strasburg and created a tremendous excitement with his fascinating Countess, his Egyptian masonry, his Spagiric Food (a kind of Brandreth's pill of the period,) which he fed out to poor sick people, his elixir of life, and other humbugs.
The swindle was consummated, but there is no whisper of the disposition of the spoils.
"An answer to my note," said the jeweler.
"No," said the man of sparklers decisively, "It is you who are deceived. She is decidedly friendly to the cardinal.
The Queen could make nothing of it, and destroyed it.
Time passed on again.
This the lady thought rather curious, but she was glad the thing was disposed of, and said no more.
The next idea was to combine all these superb fragments in one grand ornament to grace the form of beauty.
The devil himself might have furnished that which now popped into the cunning, wicked mind of this adventuress.
She herself being very soon afterwards summoned to the Queen's presence, the affair came up, and she told the Queen all she knew about it.
With infinite shyness and circumspection, the countess gradually, half unwillingly, lets him find out that it is the diamond necklace that the Queen wants.
During that time countess Jeanne was smoothing as well as she could, with endless lies and contrivances, the troubles of the perplexed cardinal, who "couldn't seem to see" that he was much better off in spite of his loyal performance of his part of the bargain.
Farewell!" And away they went--Mademoiselle d'Oliva to report to her employers, and the cardinal, in a seventh heaven of ineffable tomfoolery, to his hotel.
And Boehmer said, she had employed the Cardinal de Rohan to buy the necklace for her, and it had been delivered to him for her, and by him to her.
And sure enough he did, and quite a number of times too; contributing in all to the funds of the countess in this manner, about $25,000.
I have myself the documents with her own signature authorizing the transaction, for I have had to let the bankers see them in order to get a little time on my own payments."
The poor German (for Boehmer was a native of Saxony) departed in deep distress, but accepted neither his own suggestion nor the Queen's.
No mortal knows where ideas come from.
She was a quick-witted, bright-eyed, brazen-faced hussy, not beautiful, but with lively pretty ways, and indeed somewhat fascinating.
For to the very last, both on the trial and afterwards, Jeanne de Lamotte impudently stuck to it that at least the Queen had known about the trick played on the Cardinal at the Trianon, and had in fact been hidden close by and saw and laughed heartily at the whole interview.
The King was really delighted at this act of the Queen's, and the incident soon becoming widely known, gave the latter immense popularity for at least twenty-four hours after it occurred.
His purse is all that is needed.
The cardinal would only be too happy to do so again.
In fact, the amount was really applied to the construction of a grand line-of-battle ship called the Suffren, after the great Admiral of that name.
Marie Antoinette was profoundly distressed by the evident existence of a great scandal and swindle, with which she was plainly to be mixed up through the forged signatures to the documents which Boehmer had been relying on.
At their next meeting she reported that the Queen was delighted, telling a very nice story about it.
The payment was to be by instalments, at six months, and quarterly afterwards; the Queen to furnish the money to the cardinal, while he remained ostensibly holden to the jewellers, she thus keeping out of sight.
"I have sold it to the Sultan at Constantinople, for his favorite Sultana."
It congratulated her on having the finest diamonds in Europe, and hoped she would remember him.
Time passed on.
A last and sublime summit of impudent pretension is reached by a secret interview which the Queen, says the countess, desires to grant to her beloved servant the cardinal.
The poor cardinal bit again--"If the Queen would only allow him the honor to furnish the little amount!"
De Rohan is crazy after the Queen's favor.
"Victory, jewels and dancing but please thy fancy.
Then said the King:
"All knowledge is with the King."
And it was on the morning of a festival and the King came robed in white, with all his prophets and his seers and magicians, all down the marble steps to bless the land and all that stood therein as far as the purple hills, because it was the morning of festival.
Then a journey of many crystal steps lieth before him again with nought to guide him but the light of Omrazu.
"He too hath offended, for he was angry as thy horse struck him, and the gods smite anger.
Then said the King:
Then said King Ebalon:
"The gods have spoken hard above the snowy peak of this mountain Ahmoon."
And the King answered:
"All knowledge is with the King.
Then said the King:
On the moon's edge beneath the shadow of Mount Angises he shall rest awhile and then shall climb the crystal steps again.
And from star to star along the Track of Stars the soul of a man may travel with more ease, and there the journey lies no more straight forward, but curves to the right."
"As a man looks across great lakes I have gazed into the days to be, and as the great flies come upon four wings of gauze to skim over blue waters, so have my dreams come sailing two by two out of the days to be.
"Of this beggar whom my horse smote down thou hast spoken much, but I sought to know by what road a King should go when he taketh his last royal journey, and what princes and what people should meet him upon another shore."
And Monith said:
"If this hard tale be true, how shall I find the beggar that I must follow when I come again to the earth?"
"A mad prophet."
Then said the King:
Pestilence, heat and cold, ignorance, famine and anger, these things shall grip their claws upon all men as heretofore in fields and roads and cities but shall not hold thee.
Until a knowledge come to us that either is wrong I have wider realms, I King, than thee and hold them beneath no overlords."
And the King answered:
Then said the King:
And Monith said:
And as the King raised up his hand over the beggars' heads to bless the fields and rivers and all that stood therein, I dreamed that the quest was ended.
"I like not this grey doom, for dreams are empty.
Evening darkened and above the palace domes gleamed out the stars whereon haply others missed the secret too.
Then answered Monith:
What is the sparkle of the gem to thee without thy fancy which it allures, and thy fancy is all a dream.
And the Prophet answered:
And outside the palace in the dark they that had borne the wine in jewelled cups mocked in low voices at the King and at the wisdom of his prophets.
And Monith answered:
And the Prophet answered:
And the King shouted:
Then a great journey lies before him before he may rest again till he come to that star that is called the left eye of Gundo.
Whatever was strange or odious, whoever was guilty or suspected, might hope, in the obscurity of that immense capital, to elude the vigilance of the law.
The African Christians soon formed one of the principal members of the primitive church.
The clergy, at that time, consisted of a bishop, forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, as many sub-deacons, forty-two acolythes, and fifty readers, exorcists, and porters.
It was at first embraced by great numbers of the Theraputae, or Essenians, of the Lake Mareotis, a Jewish sect which had abated much of its reverence for the Mosaic ceremonies.
The number of widows, of the infirm, and of the poor, who were maintained by the oblations of the faithful, amounted to fifteen hundred.
The church of Rome was undoubtedly the first and most populous of the empire; and we are possessed of an authentic record which attests the state of religion in that city about the middle of the third century, and after a peace of thirty-eight years.
In this more important circumstance, Africa, as well as Gaul, was gradually fashioned to the imitation of the capital.
And it is since I knew him entirely--for during my mother's life he never quite opened himself to me--since I knew the value and splendor of that affection which he bestowed upon me, that I have come to understand and pardon what, I own, used to anger me in my mother's lifetime, her jealousy respecting her husband's love.
Your obliged friend and servant,
My dear mother died in 1736, soon after our return from England, whither my parents took me for my education; and where I made the acquaintance of Mr. Warrington, whom my children never saw.
In all bodily exercises he excelled, and showed an extraordinary quickness and agility.
WILLIAM BINGHAM, LORD ASHBURTON.
PREFACE.
'Twas a gift so precious, that no wonder she who had it was for keeping it all, and could part with none of it, even to her daughter.
I did not see our other relative, Bishop Tusher's lady, of whom so much is said in my papa's memoirs--although my mamma went to visit her in the country.
LONDON, October 18, 1852.
At sixty years of age she still looked young, and was quite agile.
My father was of a dark complexion, with a very great forehead and dark hazel eyes, overhung by eyebrows which remained black long after his hair was white.
With a clear conscience, and a heart inexpressibly thankful, I think I can say that I fulfilled those dying commands, and that until his last hour my dearest father never had to complain that his daughter's love and fidelity failed him.
No one ever thought of taking a liberty with him (except once a tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never forgave him): he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him, and brought down the most arrogant by a grave satiric way, which made persons exceedingly afraid of him.
The estate of Castlewood, in Virginia, which was given to our ancestors by King Charles the First, as some return for the sacrifices made in his Majesty's cause by the Esmond family, lies in Westmoreland county, between the rivers Potomac and Rappahannock, and was once as great as an English Principality, though in the early times its revenues were but small.
Wherever I am, I shall gratefully regard you; and shall not be the less welcomed in America because I am,
How well I remember it, and how little any description I can write can recall his image!
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
MY DEAR LORD,
His nose was aquiline, his smile extraordinary sweet.
By William Makepeace Thackeray
Hans went into the stable, plucked the eyes out of the cows and calves, and threw them in Grettel's face.
Good-bye.'
Hans ties Grettel to a rope, and leads her home, where he puts her in a stall, and ties her up.
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
'Good morning, Grettel.'
What have you got for me?'
Hans takes the kid, ties its legs together, and puts it in his pocket.
'She gave me a piece of bacon.'
"Shrink from YOU?"
"See," he cried, "I kneel to you in gratitude for all you've been to me and are to me."
I cannot stay here any longer.
"Yes.
How much trouble I might have saved if I had told you my thoughts!
She bowed her head upon his shoulder in answer.
After the service they followed the clergyman home, where Alida again told him her story, though not without much help from the farmer.
Jane emerged from the barn door with a basket of eggs, and Alida sped away to meet her.
Even Mrs. Watterly eventually entered its portals.
"Well, love is blind, I suppose, but it don't seem to me that mine is. There never was a man so taken in at his marriage.
"Yes," she replied with averted face.
And, Alida, dear, I thought at first that I was taken by your good traits and your education and all that, but I found out at last that I had fallen in love with YOU.
It will be better for us both, and our minds will be more at rest.
After some kindly reproach that she had not brought her troubles to him at first, the minister performed a ceremony which found deep echoes in both their hearts.
I thought you saw I was loving you and that you couldn't bear to think of such a thing in an old, homely fellow like me.
"You'll understand some day."
"Say," said Jane in an impulse of good will, "if you're only half married to Mr. Holcroft, I'd go the whole figure, 'fi's you.
His answer was a peal of laughter.
"Lie down on the lounge and I'll bring your supper to you."
"Don't speak that way," she said, almost harshly, under the tension of her feelings.
You're boss now, sure enough."
"But--but HE'S been here," she faltered; "you don't realize--"
As soon as they were alone, he began gently, "Alida--"
"I--I can't stand it.
"No, not till you promise to go with me to a minister and hear me promise to love, cherish--yes, in your case I'll promise to obey."
Before you went away I understood it all, and this afternoon the truth has been burned into my soul.
"I don't believe I do or can, yet, Alida, dear, but that blessed Jane's spying trait has served me the best turn in the world.
Having tied his horses, he brought in an armful of bundles and said kindly, "Well, Alida, here I am again, and I guess I've brought enough to last well through haying time."
"You've had enough to wear a saint out," he continued kindly.
I don't blame you that you shrink from me as if I were a leper.
"Happiness never kills, after all," she said.
Looking up shyly, she replied, "I think it was the MAN in you--and--then you stood up for me so."
Please rise.
It will do me more good to go on and act as if nothing had happened."
I feel as if I were one."
It's too much."
"I shrink from YOU!" he exclaimed.
When I thought of that man--especially when he came today--I understood WHY too well.
It's your right."
I've endured all I can.
That horrible man has been here--the man I thought my husband--and he has made it clearer, if possible.
"Oh, well!" laughing pleasantly, "you shall have your own way.
"I've done more than threaten him. I've whipped him within an inch of his life, and it was the thought of you that led me, in my rage, to spare his life.
Can you think I haven't seen the repugnance growing in spite of yourself?
Chapter XXXIII.
Let Jane do the work."
In a moment he was on his knees beside her, with his arm about her waist.
"Please don't speak so to me today.
"Oh, James!
Suddenly she looked up and said fearfully, "James, he threatened you. He said you'd never be safe a moment as long as I stayed here."
The first thing the child knew the arms of her mistress were about her neck and she was kissed again and again.
"Well, perhaps the sooner it's over the better," she said faintly and huskily.
Come with me into the parlor, Alida."
"No, please!
You feel better now, don't you?"
I'll tell you all--I'm going to tell you everything now.
"What did you do that for?" she asked.
He'll take care of me always."
I wouldn't mind getting much supper tonight.
"Shouldn't be alive if it did," he replied.
What I resolved to do, when I started for town, was to tell you that I had learned to love you and to throw myself on your mercy.
What was there, Alida, in an old fellow like me that led you to care so?"
"No, no!!" she cried, with an imploring gesture, "if it must be said, let me say it.
I couldn't endure to hear it from you.
"I'd rather do it," she replied.
So I tried to keep out of your way.
That was all that was in my mind, so help me God!"
"Yes, Jane, I know.
There never was a man so in love with his wife."
"Yes," she breathed softly.
Who has a better right than you, I'd like to know?"
Springing up, he clasped her close and kissed away her tears as he exclaimed, "No more business marriage for me, if you please.
It would not be safe for you and it would not be right for me to stay, either, and that settles it.
She sunk on the lounge and looked at him with such despairing eyes that tears came into his own.
The next morning Holcroft and Alida drove to town and went to the church which she and her mother used to attend.
Holcroft soon came driving slowly up the lane as if nothing unusual was on his mind.
Speak and look as you did before you went away."
"The birds seem to sing as if they knew."
This did not trouble him any now, but her extreme pallor did and he added, "You don't look well.
I can't keep up another minute unless you let things go on as they were. Tomorrow I'll try to tell you all.
If I was to slip ashore without anybody seeing me, they would know it inside of an hour."
"Think of the smartness and coolness of that blatherskite!
We done up the di'monds in a paper and put our names on it and put it in the keep of the hotel clerk, and told him not to ever let either of us have it again without the others was on hand to see it done; then we went down town, each by his own self--because I reckon maybe we all had the same notion.
I don't reckon the julery people know they've been robbed yet.
"What--one take everything, after all of you had helped to get it?"
"Twelve-thousand-dollars!" Tom says.
You might search him a year and never find--Well, right there I catched my breath and broke off my thought!
He set there and took his own time to unscrew his heelplates and cut out his plugs and stick in the di'monds and screw on his plates again.
And then he went on.
He put up that scheme on us and reasoned out what we would do, and we went ahead and done it perfectly exact, like a couple of pudd'nheads.
I was glad, you bet.
He told us to describe them better.
At last, when Tom was describing one of the roughest and raggedest ones, he gave a shiver and a gasp and says:
So I got the false whiskers and the goggles and this countrified suit of clothes, and fetched them along back in a hand-bag; and when I was passing a shop where they sell all sorts of things, I got a glimpse of one of my pals through the window.
"Was they really worth all that money, do you reckon?"
I sort of hoped I had got away, but I never believed it.
We got the di'monds and went aboard the boat.
"Cert'nly."
"Huck, ain't it bully!" says Tom.
But I didn't have no real hope.
It made me shiver, because I ain't as brave as some people, but if I showed the white feather--well, I knowed better than do that.
We never said a word, but went straight up onto the hurricane-deck and plumb back aft, and set down on the end of the sky-light.
I seen our other pal lay in HIS stock of old rusty second-handers.
"Every cent of it."
I says to myself, I'll see what he buys.
One was for going one way, one another, so we throwed up, heads or tails, and the Upper Mississippi won.
We had to set up and watch one another.
Hal Clayton dropped off pretty soon, but I didn't; I wasn't ever so wide awake in my life.
It turned out just so.
"That's what I thought.
"Oh, lordy, that's one of them!
"You see, the trouble was, you couldn't divide up two di'monds amongst three.
Well, I reckon!
A DIAMOND ROBBERY
For an idea went ripping through my head that tore my brains to rags--and land, but I felt gay and good!
He allowed we would steal the bogus swag and wait all night for him to come up and get drownded, and by George it's just what we done!
But Jake Dunlap said it warn't unusual in the profession.
But he warn't satisfied; we warn't particular enough.
At last Bud Dixon he dropped off.
You remember about that puzzlesome little screwdriver?"
It clean stumped me.
I loafed along the back streets studying and studying.
Now what do you reckon it was he bought?"
It was Bud Dixon.
See, it's bottomed with a steel plate, and the plate is fastened on with little screws.
It was curious.
It disgusted Tom Sawyer, and he said it was the orneriest, low-downest thing he ever heard of.
The way it come about was this: He got to asking us, kind of indifferent like, about the passengers down on deck.
But the thing to do, straight off, was to make a plan; and we done it.
Before long I spied out the plug's mate.
"It was a confidence game.
He says:
He says:
"There warn't nobody stirring anywhere, and the boat was slipping along, swift and steady, through the big water in the smoky moonlight.
I says to myself, what can he want with that thing?
What WAS it he bought, Jake?"
They're aboard sure--I just knowed it.
"To rob the others."
I was spying out from under the shade of my hat brim, searching the floor for leather.
We played it on a julery-shop in St. Louis.
As soon as he was snoring a good regular gait that was likely to last, and had his chin on his breast and looked permanent, Hal Clayton nodded towards the di'monds and then towards the outside door, and I understood.
I don't know for certain, but I reckon maybe we had."
Now there wasn't a screw about that feller anywhere but in his boot heels; so, if he needed a screwdriver, I reckoned I knowed why."
I kind of hoped the boat would land somers, and we could skip ashore and not have to run the risk of this row, I was so scared of Bud Dixon, but she was an upper-river tub and there warn't no real chance of that.
You see, I had had my boots off, to unswell my feet, and just then I took up one of them to put it on, and I catched a glimpse of the heel-bottom, and it just took my breath away.
Well, when he come out I stood back out of sight, and then tracked him to a second-hand slop-shop and see him buy a red flannel shirt and some old ragged clothes--just the ones he's got on now, as you've described.
Smart?
I knowed we could get him drunk--he was always ready for that--but what's the good of it?
You look at this boot heel, now.
Tom done it.
"But now we was up a stump, for we couldn't go to bed.
Both of us knowed what that meant, without having to explain to one another.
You see, they've got spies on me. They've got a right to come up and buy drinks at the bar yonder forrard, and they take that chance to bribe somebody to keep watch on me--porter or boots or somebody.
Said when a person was in that line of business he'd got to look out for his own intrust, there warn't nobody else going to do it for him.
Presently when Tom was describing another mangy, rough deck passenger, he give that shiver again and says:
He was poking along through his ups and downs, and when he come to that place he went right along.
CHAPTER III.
Go on."
"Goggles?"
"You bet I do," says Tom, all excited.
We was dressed up fine, and we played it on them in broad daylight.
If there'd been three--But never mind about that, there warn't three.
"Oh, keep still, Huck Finn, can't you, you're only just hendering all you can.
"That's him!--that's the other one.
"What notion?" Tom says.
If it would only come a good black stormy night and I could get ashore.
"As easy as nothing.
And, besides, God's baby was surely the best of names!
"She never give me no more."
"They can't help themselves then, if they would.
You may have my penny."
This took him nearly a fortnight.
"Go away! go away!" said Little Boy Blue; "I'm sure I don't want you--get away--do."
And for rats and bats and the world and his wife, Little Boy Blue was afraid of his life.
Then he resolved to begin at the beginning, and read them all straight through.
And he said to the clouds, "I want you there." And down they sank through the thin blue air.
CHAPTER XX.
Said the mole, "Two hundred worms--there I caught 'em Last year, and I'm going again next autumn."
"If you don't get out of my way," he said, "I tell you, snake, I will break your head."
Take me back to my mother."
He said to the shadows, "Come after me;" And the shadows began to flicker and flee,
And all the creatures they marched before him, And marshalled him home with a high cockolorum.
The dragon-flies melted to mist with their hurrying. The mole in his moleskins left his barrowing burrowing.
"That's where I live," said the sack-backed squirrel, And he turned his sack with a swing and a swirl.
They run and they fly, they creep and they come, Everything, everything, all and some.
And the wind wound round at his desire, As if he had been the gold cock on the spire.
Little Boy Blue found it tiresome to sit, And he thought he had better walk on a bit.
Householder snails, and slugs all tails, And butterflies, flutterbies, ships all sails;
All went running, and creeping, and flowing, After the merry boy fluttering and going;
He sang, "This wood is all my own, Apples and cherries, roses and honey; So here I'll sit, like a king on my throne, All so jolly and funny."
Squirrels that carried their tails like a sack, Each on his own little humpy brown back;
And they flew through the wood all flattering and fluttering, Over the dead leaves flickering and muttering.
And the cock itself flew down from the church, And left the farmers all in the lurch.
Blowing his horn, and beating his drum, And crying aloud, "Come all of you, come!"
He had looked through and through the book several times after he knew the letters and a few words, fancying he could tell the look of it, but had always failed to find one more like it than another.
Back to the woods fled the shadows like ghosts: "If we stay, we shall all be missed from our posts."
He came where the apples grew red and sweet: "Tree, drop me an apple down at my feet."
The bees went buzzing, so busy and beesy, And the midges in columns so upright and easy.
"You must follow me, follow me, follow, I say Do as I tell you, and come this way."
The snake coiled up; and the bird flew down, And sang him the song of Birdie Brown.
After him leaning and straining and bending, As on through their boles he kept walking and wending,
"I am going that way as fast as I can," Said the brook, as it sank and turned and ran.
The gay wasp forgot his rings and his waist, He never had made such undignified haste.
The dappled fawns fawning, the fallow-deer following, The swallows and flies, flying and swallowing;
Little Boy Blue lost his way in a wood. Sing apples and cherries, roses and honey; He said, "I would not go back if I could, It's all so jolly and funny."
If that you won't do,
"We cannot for nothing come here, and away. Give us some work, or else we stay."
So up he got, his way to take, And he said, "Come along, little bird and snake."
Then Little Boy Blue, he said, quite low, "What to do with you all I am sure I don't know."
And waves of snake o'er the damp leaves passed, And the snake went first and Birdie Brown last;
But he had never come upon the poem he thought he had heard his mother read from it that day.
When he had almost reached the end, he came upon the following verses, which took his fancy much, although they were certainly not very like those he was in search of.
But Little Boy Blue was not content, Calling for followers still as he went,
And the boughs bow down, and the apples they dapple The grass, too many for him to grapple.
The very trees they tugged at their roots, Only their feet were too fast in their boots,
DIAMOND LEARNS TO READ
He met a little brook singing a song. He said, "Little brook, you are going wrong.
Little Boy Blue he tried to go past him; But wherever he turned, sat the snake and faced him.
"Oh dear! and oh dear!" with sob and with sigh, Said Little Boy Blue, and began to cry.
So he wisely gave up the search till he could really read.
And he said to the sunset far in the West, "Come here; I want you; I know best."
Then Little Boy Blue began to ponder: "What's to be done with them all, I wonder."
The snake fell down as if he were dead, And Little Boy Blue set his foot on his head.
Followed him, followed.
"Why do you hustle and jostle and bother? Off with you all!
LITTLE BOY BLUE
Then Birdie Brown began to sing, And what he sang was the very thing:
He came where the cherries hung plump and red: "Come to my mouth, sweet kisses," he said.
"Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it.
A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip was heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.
Thenardier began to dictate:--
When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thenardier dipped the pen in the ink and presented it to him.
Thenardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.
"Come instantly--"
No pocket-book?" he demanded.
As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could examine this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize a battle, a background of smoke, and a man carrying another man.
"My father," he thought, "forgive me!"
You might have shouted 'stop thief' a bit, and I should not have thought it improper.
The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--
That would not be reasonable.
"Write," said he.
Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph in the presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did not stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled and tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.
"Sign.
"You know well," retorted Thenardier, "for the little one I just told you so."
At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made its appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited not teeth, but fangs.
"Sweep him into a corner," said Thenardier.
You know what you have to do.
There existed in him two men, the ferocious man and the adroit man.
Marius could not resist this sight.
He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms, and presenting his muddy boots to the brazier.
Here a cannon would make a boum, and the thunder would make a pouf.
Now, be so good as to write."
Well!
"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key, in the voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."
"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thenardier in a rage.
"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress.
"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"
You might have broken your leg.
These were the three "chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him.
These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces, and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes, or demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either wrath or mercy, with a sort of ennui.
"Monsieur--" said Thenardier.
Have the goodness to write what I am about to dictate to you."
Extreme as was the crisis, inevitable as was the catastrophe, there was nothing here of the agony of the drowning man, who opens his horror-filled eyes under the water.
"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."
"Wife!" he cried.
"I continue," said he.
"My daughter--"
"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window.
I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy fellow, after all.
Thenardier resumed:--
He looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.
Thenardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had escaped Marius in his agitation.
Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile of a man in official life the almost bestial mouth which had been foaming but a moment before; he gazed with amazement on that fantastic and alarming metamorphosis, and he felt as a man might feel who should behold a tiger converted into a lawyer.
You will get up behind the fiacre.
"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate.
"Now," said Thenardier, "search him, you other fellows!"
And I will tell you why. This room is very private.
So we can come to an understanding."
That done, Thenardier resumed:--
Why, I'm taking things into consideration and making a sacrifice on my side.
"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged, and to paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the case disappeared, and who, in the face of this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting a while longer.
"U.
There is a carriage at the door.
"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thenardier.
This trifle once out of your pocket, I guarantee you that that's the end of the matter, and that you have no further demands to fear.
You might fire off a mortar and it would produce about as much noise at the nearest police station as the snores of a drunken man.
He paused:--
This is a bad season.
He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing six francs, and his handkerchief.
I present you my compliments, and I will tell you the conclusion that I draw from that fact: My dear sir, when a man shouts, who comes?
It was evident that Thenardier avoided naming the young girl in question.
Well, sign it U. F."
"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."
"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me, I will fold it."
"Yes," said the man.
That's its only recommendation, but it has that in its favor.
In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this lugubrious sarcasm from the corridor:--
"What?" demanded the prisoner.
"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."
What's your name?"
Thenardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle of ropes and threw them at the men.
The prisoner spoke at last.
Here was one of those men who command amazement in desperate circumstances.
I was wrong to lose my temper just now, I don't know what I was thinking of, I went a great deal too far, I said extravagant things.
"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry two hundred thousand francs with you!"
He went on:--
They searched him.
It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.
The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity.
The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste.
CHAPTER VII--THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF INDIA
Nevertheless the police keep an eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the eleusiac chant of the Panathenaea, and in it one encounters again the ancient Evohe.
"Why are you doing that at the gate?" a passer-by asked.
The word passed into circulation.
The lady, sir, whom I am so happy as to love, and in whom my dreams of life-long happiness are centred, is Mimi Watford!"
Strangely enough he slept well, and awoke at dawn with his mind clear and his nerves in their usual unshaken condition.
He read it over carefully several times, before he was satisfied that he had taken in its full import.
Apart from that, there are the unpleasant details we discussed the other day."
"Will you kindly begin, sir?
He confined himself rigidly to the narration of circumstances, taking care not to colour events by any comment of his own, or any opinion of the meaning of things which he did not fully understand.
SALTON,
It will help us to understand what is before us, in the way of difficulty."
"I take it then, Adam, that at the right time I may be allowed to know who the lady is?"
"Certainly!
"ARABELLA MARSH."
The maid brought up, with his early morning cup of tea, a note which had been found in the letter- box.
I must live on--as I have lived--alone, and, in addition, bear with other woes the memory of this latest insult and horror.
"Yes.
Sir Nathaniel went to the door, looked outside it and returned, locking it carefully behind him.
He was a little embarrassed as to telling his uncle, for affairs had so vastly progressed beyond his original view that he felt a little doubtful as to what would be the old gentleman's attitude when he should hear of the strange events for the first time.
But, before I begin to draw deductions, let me ask you a few questions.
"I hope so, my dear boy.
"I shall be most happy to see you on my return--or earlier, if my good fortune sends you on any errand to London.
"Perhaps you have noticed a fur collar I occasionally wear.
His black, malignant face will shut out all memory of sunshine and happiness.
That may have been the cause that lured the poor man to his doom.
Mr. Salton would certainly not be satisfied at being treated as an outsider with regard to such things, most of which had points of contact with the inmates of his own house.
"When I tore myself out of the negro's grasp as he sank into the well- hole; I realised what freedom meant.
"There need not be an hour's, a minute's delay.
In the meantime, I must get away as quickly as possible from Diana's Grove.
On the very brink of the abyss he tore the collar from my neck--that was the last I saw of him.
Then I may take it that my question as to your heart-wholeness is answered in the affirmative?"
"I see, Adam, that something has occurred, and that you have much to tell me."
Freedom!
With all my heart, I congratulate you.
"Could you--would you mind giving me the reason now?
Adam was surprised by this effusive epistle, but he determined to say nothing of it to Sir Nathaniel until he should have thought it well over. When Adam met Sir Nathaniel at breakfast, he was glad that he had taken time to turn things over in his mind.
I shall stay at the Mayfair Hotel.
Unhappily, I wore it yesterday.
Forgive me if you can, and do not think too hardly of me.
His companion answered at once, each looking the other straight in the eyes during question and answer.
I shall eternally see his evil eyes as he threw himself into that well-hole in a vain effort to escape from the consequences of his own misdoing.
I had often seen the nigger's eyes gleam covetously when he looked at it.
He did not say anything to him then of what had happened, but contented himself with arranging that they would walk together in the early morning, as he had much to say that would require serious attention.
"Then, my dear Adam, I need not wait to offer congratulations.
I am grieved beyond measure that I should be, however remotely, a cause of this horror coming on you.
"That is so, sir.
Adam, are you heart-whole, quite heart-whole, in the matter of Lady Arabella?"
"Yes; and now, sir, may I ask in turn why the question?"
When Adam got home after his walk, he found Sir Nathaniel just going to bed.
"Her enemy?"
My reason, on which I can fully depend, is that I love another woman!"
I am not a sentimental girl, who merely likes to thank a man; I am a woman who knows all, of bad as well as good, that life can give.
Not only from that noisome prison-house, which has now such a memory, but from the more noisome embrace of that hideous monster.
Indeed, I hardly knew them myself, as definite, till this moment."
Freedom!
I shall be glad to share my secret with you, sir.
That awful man--I shall see him for ever in my dreams.
The more I think of it, the more apparent it seems to me that he had premeditated the whole thing--of course, except his own horrible death.
I suppose I had better begin by telling you all I know--all that has happened since I left you yesterday?"
A rank and unscrupulous enemy who is bent on her destruction."
In the morning I shall go up to town, where I shall remain for a week--I cannot stay longer, as business affairs demand my presence here.
Breakfast had been a silent function, so it did not interfere in any way with the process of thought.
When I heard that soul-sickening yell, which marked his disappearance in the chasm, I was more glad than I can say that my eyes were spared the pain and horror which my ears had to endure.
I do not think I ever saw a girl who united in such perfection the qualities of strength of character and sweetness of disposition.
"Certainly, sir.
Finally, when Adam folded up the letter and put it, in its envelope, back in his pocket, as an intimation that he had now quite finished, the old diplomatist carefully made a few notes in his pocket-book.
"Your narrative, my dear Adam, is altogether admirable.
"Lady Arabella, sir, is a charming woman, and I should have deemed it a privilege to meet her--to talk to her--even--since I am in the confessional--to flirt a little with her.
"DEAR MR.
Adam Salton went for a walk before returning to Lesser Hill; he felt that it might be well, not only to steady his nerves, shaken by the horrible scene, but to get his thoughts into some sort of order, so as to be ready to enter on the matter with Sir Nathaniel.
Thenceforth, he contented himself with quick looks and glances, easily interpreted, or by some acquiescent motions of his hands, when such could be convenient, to emphasise his idea of the correctness of any inference.
CHAPTER XIX--AN ENEMY IN THE DARK
So soon as the door was closed, Sir Nathaniel began:
A woman must sometimes express her gratitude; otherwise it becomes too great to bear.
At first, Sir Nathaniel seemed disposed to ask questions, but shortly gave this up when he recognised that the narration was concise and self-explanatory.
Over the tops of them was seen a green light, something like the danger signal at a railway-crossing.
For myself, I should like to shout it from the house-tops!
When they were alone, Sir Nathaniel explained that he had taken his old friend, Mr. Salton, into full confidence, and that in future all would work together.
"To carry this into practice, sir, one preliminary is required--unless harm of another kind is to be faced.
I never thought this fighting an antediluvian monster would be such a complicated job.
"I should like to read you a few letters, but, of course, I shall not send them unless you approve.
"It is all right; you may speak, but speak low.
It will not do to take acquiescence for granted--although we act for her good."
"It is important for you to be extremely careful.
"Painful to you, though to me it would be all joyful."
Adam, I hope you know that you can count on me to help in any way I can!"
She had, of course, agreed to keep all secret until Adam should give her leave to speak.
"To her?" asked Adam, in momentary consternation.
To whom?"
To that I am pledged; my dear boy, we who are interested are all in the same danger.
He had several letters in his hand. Sir Nathaniel sat up in bed.
But we must be discreet; untimely knowledge to our enemy might work incalculable harm."
"How?
If she agrees, all is well and good.
When this was done not a gleam of light from the tower could be seen from outside.
"And that someone?"
Yet there seemed to be nobody near him, nor any inhabitants at all in this desolate region.
The whip jumped from his hand, became invisible, and well thrashed the robbers.
Then she gave him wings like her own, and they flew away together.
He stuck it into his girdle, and went on, till after an hour or two he came to a clearing in the forest, where twelve men were fighting desperately among themselves.
Whoever has them can go seven leagues at one step; and he who gets them will be our leader.
So he drew on the seven-league boots, settled the invisible cap on his forehead, and taking the Magical Whip from his girdle, said:
To think I left him for no fault at all; and when we loved one another so dearly!
"I am thinking of the prince, my husband.
He tried to run away; but it was no use; till the prince took pity on him, and called the whip back again.
All the windows were of crystal; the chairs and tables were made of diamonds, and the floors of looking-glass.
He stood beside a stove--whereupon a kettle was boiling--stirring the contents with a long iron spoon, and piling wood on the fire.
"Good morning to you, gaffer.
It seemed an hour, during which every ear was on the strain, but probably it was not a fourth of that time, before the fierce yell of the savages was heard; but it only reached the fugitives as a faint whisper, followed by another.
"Oh, quick, quick!
"Will they?" whispered Chris.
"That's the worst of it," said Chris.
"Good-bye, Chris, my lad," said Bourne sadly.
Another sharp crack, and Chris's excitement increased, as he first looked anxiously at his charges to see if they were startled by the firing.
"Will it be safe?" said the doctor.
"Ah, there I can't say anything, sir, only that they may be.
"Yes; and you," said the boy sadly.
"Well, as a rule they don't like."
"What about to-morrow?"
"I don't like going off and leaving you."
We'll follow close behind."
"Yes?"
It would not be long before it was night, and with the darkness an exciting time would arrive.
"No," he said, "we can't have over-run them."
Ned turned to wave his hand just before a bend in the gulch hid the mule-train from sight, and then Chris mounted and rode towards the pointed rock close to which the spring gurgled out of the rock.
But on a night like this, and after the way in which we have shot them down, they are bound to feel their way step by step if they follow at all.
But perhaps not.
Not a word.
"Come on as fast as they can run, sir.
Most likely they'll wait till morning, when they'll pick up our trail."
They've been following the mules' trail ever since we started."
They're coming on!"
For the thoughts that came fast now were beginning to grow troublous.
I've listened till it has given me a feeling like toothache."
"Look at that," said Chris, as he noted that his charge displayed no desire to follow the mules.
"I can't do anything more," he said to himself.
But in response to a desperate effort to recall his duty those thoughts grew dull and distant, and straining his eyes to gaze into the darkness he obeyed a sudden impulse to slip the ponies' bridles into their mouths, fasten a strap or two, and then tighten the saddle-girths, the animals submitting patiently enough, and allowing themselves to be placed in readiness for a start.
"They did not seem so when they followed you."
"The Indians may follow us and overtake us on foot."
"Good lad.
Now, Griggs--Wilton; take two each, and lead on.
Here he took the precaution of drinking deeply himself before letting the ponies have their fill of the refreshing water, after which they began grazing in their quiet, inoffensive way, leaving their guardian to his thoughts, which were many and troubled.
But there was evidently no immediate danger, for quite an hour passed before there was another shot fired to raise the echoes, and this proved to be single.
No further words were spoken, but there was the sound of hoofs passing over the stony bottom of the gulch, and the next minute Chris and his father, each leading his pony, were walking together side by side, the animals stepping instinctively in the footprints of those in front, and, saving for the faint sound of tramping, the silence seemed to the boy perfectly awful.
"I say they won't come now," said Griggs decisively.
"Right.
"I suppose so," said Chris.
"Oh, how terribly dark!"
"But there's a good side to everything.
Indians are swift of foot, boy."
"No, but we treated them as if they were, just to show them that we were waiting for an attack, and then came on to join you at once.
"A volley!" he said aloud, and the words had hardly passed his lips before there was a repetition of the reports.
"What!
"We don't know it--at least, I don't suppose you did, for I fancy I do--but if the mules had turned off anywhere our clever mustangs would have done the same.
At last Chris could keep back a question no longer.
They're ridden nearly to death; now they'll have a good rest with plenty of fine pasture."
"But about to-morrow, Griggs?" said Chris.
"Say, Chris," he added, "won't they be mad at not being able to get out their ponies!"
I don't remember any side valley, but we may have passed one."
He deserves to be kicked for his conceit."
"And then?"
"No, sir.
For gloomy and forbidding as the place looked by night, even awful in its black solemnity, it was striking enough now in its effects of brilliant sunshine and shade to make the boy think it was one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen in his life.
"No, we mayn't, sir," said Griggs coolly.
"Like to change places, Ned?" he said archly.
"Yes, but this time they've got to like; and I know how to make them."
"No; I'm going to do my part without that."
I don't like being a brute to a dumb beast, but if I'm driven to it I may have to be a bit hard to some of those mules.
"We'll halt, sir, at the first water, and have a good rest and feed."
"Well, there's a funny thing about that bill," replied Jenny.
Jenny Wren was right.
At once it came over Peter that this was a stranger to him, and of course his curiosity was aroused.
That's what he is--a foreigner."
Just the same, the rest of us would be better satisfied if he were not here.
His rather large bill was yellow.
Peter hurried back to Jenny Wren and it must be confessed he looked sheepish.
At least, that is what Peter thought at first glance.
"In winter it turns almost black.
In fact, Peter mistook him for Creaker. That was because he didn't really look at him.
Thank goodness he hasn't such a quarrelsome disposition as Bully.
"Of course I was right.
Go over there and take a good look at him; then come back and tell me if you still think he is black."
"I couldn't very well help noticing it."
"Don't worry," replied Jenny Wren.
On each, the forehead, chin and a line through each eye was velvety-black.
He's a foreigner.
"I don't believe it was politeness at all. I guess if you got at the truth of the matter you would find that each one was stuffed so full that he thought he didn't have room for that cherry and so passed it along."
"Huh!" exclaimed Jenny Wren.
In short he changed color as he turned.
In fact, if you ask me, he hasn't any business in this country anyway.
"He comes from across the ocean the same as Bully the English Sparrow.
Quite by chance he discovered Dandy sitting on the tiptop of an evergreen tree, as if on guard.
They were in a cedar tree and were picking off and eating the cedar berries as busily as the five Waxwings had picked Farmer Brown's cherries in the early summer.
As Peter watched them he began to wonder if Farmer Brown would have any cherries left.
Late in the fall Peter saw Mr. and Mrs. Waxwing and their family together.
Butcher the Shrike was not the only newcomer in the Old Orchard.
"But you haven't told me who he is," protested Peter.
All over he was speckled with tiny light spots. Underneath he was dark brownish-gray.
Now just look at that performance, will you?"
"The first one might have dropped the cherry if he couldn't eat it instead of passing it along." Just then the Waxwings flew away.
His feathers were like those of Creaker the Grackle--iridescent.
There was another stranger who, Peter Rabbit soon discovered, was looked on with some suspicion by all the other birds of the Old Orchard.
There were five of the Waxwings and they were now seated side by side on a branch of the cherry tree.
Jenny turned her back on Peter and went to hunting worms.
It was the very middle of the summer before Peter Rabbit again saw Dandy the Waxwing.
He has taken possession of one of the old homes of Yellow Wing the Flicker, and that means one less house for birds who really belong here.
I don't know anybody equal to them for roaming about.
They smoothed each other's feathers and altogether were a perfect picture of two little lovebirds.
He's sitting in that tree over yonder this very minute. He's all black, so of course he must be a member of the Blackbird family."
The first time Peter saw him, he was walking about on the ground some distance off.
I can see him now.
"They won't stay long.
"Never in my life have I seen such politeness," said he.
Each wore a very stylish pointed cap, and on the wings of most of them were little spots of red which looked like sealing-wax, and from which they get the name of Waxwings.
In fact, it was so late in the summer that most of Peter's friends were through nesting and he had quite lost interest in nests.
"Well, he seems to be pretty well fixed here, and I don't see but what the thing for the rest of you birds to do is to make the best of the matter," said Peter.
Hello!
"Well, I think that was politeness just the same," retorted Peter.
There's Dandy the Waxwing and his friends."
CHAPTER XXXVI.
"He is Speckles the Starling, and he isn't really an American at all," replied Jenny.
Did you notice that yellow bill of his?"
His wings and tail were of the same color, with little touches of buff.
He looked positively sleepy.
Her breast was a dull buff with a faint tinge of red.
They are near enough to Farmer Brown's garden, and the Old Orchard is right here.
Peter looked eagerly.
CHAPTER XXVII.
"Did you pass a pleasant winter down South?" asked Peter.
"Who is it, Jenny?
"Well, you needn't think that of Glory," declared Jenny in her vigorous way.
"He ought to be glad to have me about.
I pride myself on being useful.
"Huh!
I'm hoping that, if I practice enough, some day I can be as good.
"It's very nice of you to say that, Peter. If you are glad to see me I am still more glad to get back."
He fusses over them as if they were the only children in the world.
He had come up to the Old Orchard for his usual morning visit and just as he hopped over the old stone wall he heard a beautiful clear, loud whistle which drew his eyes to the top of an apple-tree.
There was no danger of mistaking him for anybody else, for there is no one dressed at all like him.
Kitty's face cleared, his throat swelled and he began to sing.
In fact she was almost as good a singer as her handsome husband.
As I said before, I don't often envy any one's fine clothes, but when I see Glory I'm sometimes tempted to be envious.
"Thank you," responded Kitty.
Once in a while I take a little fruit, but I pay for it ten times over by the number of bugs and worms I get in his garden and the Old Orchard.
I do hope he is going to stay here.
They were very harsh and unpleasant and Peter understood perfectly why their maker is called the Catbird.
Peter stopped short with a little gasp of sheer astonishment and delight.
But all the time his eyes were twinkling and snapping, and Peter knew that these changes in appearance were made out of pure fun and mischief.
When Jenny returned she was so excited she couldn't keep still a minute. "They like here, Peter!" she cried.
Who is that beautiful stranger with such a lovely song?" cried Peter, as soon as he caught sight of Jenny.
"By the way, Peter, I picked up some new songs down there.
Excuse me, Peter, I'm going over to find out if they are really going to stay."
He did not hurry in among the bushes at once but waited expectantly.
He's a model husband.
"Why do you want to be near Farmer Brown's garden?" he asked.
Probably he would have sat there the rest of the morning had he not caught sight of an old friend of whom he is very fond, Kitty the Catbird.
When it ended Peter had a question all ready.
Then he dropped his tail as if he hadn't strength enough to hold it up at all. It hung straight down.
"I certainly am," replied Kitty.
It contained the clear whistle of Glory, and there was even the tinkle of Little Friend the Song Sparrow.
"He's just as fine as he is handsome.
Peter looked somewhat uncertain.
"Fairly so.
Fairly so," replied Kitty.
Would you like to hear them?"
"Are you going to build somewhere near here?" he asked.
I told them that it is the very best place in the world.
"There's a fellow I really envy," said he.
I think we shall build in these bushes here somewhere.
He had no mittens, and his hands were almost frozen.
"Come now, William John, don't be so cross.
"He couldn't come," answered Bertie anxiously--he was afraid he might not be welcome without William John.
It was a feast to be dated from.
"He's used to the cold, I warrant you," said the housekeeper rather impatiently.
Bertie shyly followed her to the kitchen.
"Just look at that poor little boy, Amy," said the taller of the two. "He is almost frozen, I believe.
"It won't hurt him."
"The fingers would freeze off you.
"Here is William John's present.
If you like, I'll try you.
"Honest, now?"
Pudding, indeed!
And perhaps we can do something for that other little chap, William, or John, or whatever his name is.
Have you anything in view?"
But as I said, please yourself.
"He was so pretty, Papa.
Edith slipped from the room as he spoke, and met him again at the door.
Then he hastened home to William John.
"Sit up to the fire," said Caroline, placing a chair for him, while Edith and Amy came round to the other side of the stove and watched him with friendly interest.
He caught cold and has to stay in bed; but he wanted to come awful bad."
He had almost forgotten his responsibilities.
"Goodbye--and thank you," stammered Bertie, as the door closed.
Perhaps Edith's reference to her mother softened Caroline, for she turned to Bertie and said cordially enough, "Come in, and warm yourself before you go.
"I lent them to William John--he hadn't any," faltered Bertie.
"Well, girlies, you seem interested in this little fellow so, if you like, you may invite him and his cousin to take dinner with you on New Year's night."
He forgot his shyness; his face flushed hopefully, and he looked straight at the doctor with his bright, earnest eyes.
It was very cold, and he would have a great many errands to run.
You're mean as mean can be."
I almost always do."
Stop crying, now.
He could not have eaten another mouthful after such wonderful and unexpected good fortune.
"They wouldn't eat you.
"It's all right," persisted Bertie.
I've tied all the other things on so that they can't fall off."
He wondered whether he was dreaming.
I'll tell William John.
"His name was Bertie Ross.
Goodnight."
"Here are some nuts and candies for William John," she said.
"I guess there's enough of us without that.
"There are plenty who haven't," said the doctor, taking up his paper with a sigh.
"I dare say, though, you have to run so fast these days that a cold couldn't catch you.
"No.
I think you know how to make yourself useful.
Bertie's New Year
"I've had a splendid time.
He was not likely to forget.
And who is William John?"
"He's real sick.
"Why, I have three pairs.
He had to stop a great many times that day to breathe on his purple hands.
He thought this would comfort William John, but it had exactly the opposite effect.
"Write him a nice little note of invitation--you are the lady of the house, you know--and I'll see that he gets it tomorrow."
"Well then, since you have so little breeding, and are so disobliging, I give you for gift, that at every word you speak there shall come out of your mouth a snake or a toad."
As for her sister, she made herself so much hated that her own mother turned her off; and the miserable wretch, having wandered about a good while without finding anybody to take her in, went to a corner in the wood and there died.
O, it is that wretch her sister who has occasioned all this; but she shall pay for it"; and immediately she ran to beat her.
"I will give you for gift," continued the Fairy, "that at every word you speak, there shall come out of your mouth either a flower, or a jewel."
One day, as she was at this fountain, there came to her a poor woman, who begged of her to let her drink.
The King's son, who saw five or six pearls, and as many diamonds, come out of her mouth, desired her to tell him how that happened.
"In good faith," cried the mother, "I must send my child thither.
She was no sooner at the fountain, than she saw coming out of the wood a lady most gloriously dressed, who came up to her, and asked to drink.
Among other things, this poor child was forced twice a day to draw water above a mile and a half off the house, and bring home a pitcher full of it.
"Alas! sir, my mamma has turned me out of doors."
"Well, mother?" answered the pert hussey, throwing out of her mouth two vipers and two toads.
There was, once upon a time, a widow, who had two daughters.
Thou hast nothing else to do but go and draw water out of the fountain, and when a certain poor woman asks thee to let her drink, to give it her very civilly."
"O mercy!" cried the mother, "what is it I see!
How happens this, child?" (This was the first time she ever called her child.)
The poor child fled away from her and went to hide herself in the forest, not far from thence.
The youngest, who was the very picture of her father, for courtesy and sweetness of temper, was withal one of the most beautiful girls ever seen.
I suppose the silver tankard was brought purely for your ladyship, was it?
They were both so disagreeable, and so proud, that there was no living with them.
However, you may drink out of it, if you have a fancy."
As people naturally love their own likeness, this mother even doated on her eldest daughter, and at the same time had a horrible aversion for the youngest.
The King's son, then on his return from hunting, met her, and seeing her so very pretty, asked her what she did there alone, and why she cried.
When this pretty girl came home, her mother scolded at her for staying so long at the fountain.
She made her eat in the kitchen, and work continually.
The poor creature told her frankly all the matter, not without dropping out infinite numbers of diamonds.
She thereupon told him the whole story; and so the King's son fell in love with her; and, considering with himself that such a gift was worth more than any marriage-portion whatsoever in another, conducted her to the palace of the King his father, and there married her.
This was, you must know, the very Fairy who appeared to her sister, but had now taken the air and dress of a princess, to see how far this girl's rudeness would go.
"You shall go, hussey," said the mother, "and this minute."
"Am I come hither," said the proud, saucy slut, "to serve you with water, pray?
"You are so very pretty, my dear, so good and so mannerly, that I cannot help giving you a gift" (for this was a Fairy, who had taken the form of a poor country-woman, to see how far the civility and good manners of this pretty girl would go).
The Fairy
The eldest was so much like her in the face and humour, that whoever looked upon the daughter saw the mother.
"What is this I see?" said her mother quite astonished, "I think I see pearls and diamonds come out of the girl's mouth!
The good woman having drank, said to her:
"I beg your pardon, mamma," said the poor girl, "for not making more haste," and, in speaking these words, there came out of her mouth two roses, two pearls, and two diamonds.
Five bodies lay motionless in the snow.
But his frenzy no longer betrayed itself in futile efforts to escape from the babeesh thong.
And it was Mukoki who had first said that this was the vengeance of Wolf upon his people.
From the dead buck's neck the babeesh rope was now stretched across the intervening space between the rock and the clump of cedars in which the hunters were to conceal themselves.
The hunters would not wait to be attacked and then act in self-defense, possibly at a disadvantage.
In the trees there sounded the metallic clink of loading shells.
It was then that Mukoki, speaking softly, beckoned the others to follow him, and with Wolf at his side went down the ridge.
Three times that blood-thrilling cry went up from the captive wolf's throat, and before those cries had died away the three hunters were perched upon their platforms among the spruce.
Now for the first time the city youth began to understand the old pathfinder's scheme.
Without a word the three sat down to their meal.
When those five seconds were over fifteen shots had been fired, and five seconds later the vast, beautiful silence of the wilderness night had fallen again.
He was reasonably sure that from somewhere on the opposite ridge a descent could be made into it.
As flies gather upon a lump of sugar the famished animals now crowded and crushed and fought over the deer's body, and as they came thus together there sounded the quick sharp signal to fire from Mukoki.
Mukoki had grinned and shrugged his shoulders with an air of stupendous doubt when Rod had told him that the gold lay between the mountains, so now the youth kept his thoughts to himself.
That was the time when they were most likely to quarrel.
From inside his clothes, where it had been kept warm by his body, Mukoki produced the flask of blood.
About the rock was the silence of death, broken only faintly by the last gasping throes of the animals that lay dying in the snow.
He failed again, panting, whining in piteous helplessness.
The sun was just beginning to sink behind the distant hills in the southwest when the hunters again left camp.
"See here," he said.
He found other spots of blood, and to the watchers there came a low long whine that seemed about to end in the wolf song.
From out of the swamp there came a pack of three, and now about the rock there grew a maddened, yelping horde, clambering and scrambling and fighting in their efforts to climb up to the game that was so near and yet beyond their reach.
It was Rod's turn with the big revolver, and he had practised aiming through a crotch that gave a rest to his arm.
WOLF TAKES VENGEANCE UPON HIS PEOPLE
Soon he nosed one of the trails of blood, and a moment later the watchers saw a gaunt shadow form running swiftly over the snow toward Wolf.
Mukoki's reply was to slip down his tree.
Oh, the longing that was in him, the twitching, quivering longing to kill--kill--kill!
The lettering on the rim was still very distinct.
It was then that the whole world was lighted up under it.
When the year had quite come to an end, the third Prince came out of the wood to ride to his beloved, and through her to forget all his past sorrows.
The sick King waited a long time for him, but he never came back. Then the second son said, 'Father, let me go and find the Water of Life,' thinking, 'if my brother is dead I shall have the kingdom.'
'No,' said the Prince.
So he had the Court assembled to give judgment upon him, and it was decided that he must be secretly got out of the way.
The Prince did not want to go home without his brothers, and he said, 'Good Dwarf, can you not tell me where my brothers are?
He was delighted to see his brothers when they came back, and told them all that had happened to him; how he had found the Water of Life, and brought a goblet full with him.
'Do you know where it is to be found?'
One day when the Prince was going out hunting, thinking no evil, the King's Huntsman was ordered to go with him.
The Prince thanked him, took the rod and the loaves, and set off.
The clock struck just as he reached the iron gate, and it banged so quickly that it took off a bit of his heel.
The Prince also gave him his sword, and he smote the whole army of his enemies with it, and then he was able to live in peace and quiet.
So he rode away, and when he saw the beautiful golden road he thought it would be a thousand pities to ride upon it; so he turned aside, and rode to the right of it.
Then they rode away together, and came to a land where famine and war were raging.
It flows from a fountain in the courtyard of an enchanted castle; but you will never get in unless I give you an iron rod and two loaves of bread.
When he woke it was striking a quarter to twelve.
As he was bewailing himself, his two elder sons came to him and accused the youngest of trying to poison him, and said that they had the real Water of Life, and gave him some.
So on he went, thinking only of her, and wishing to be with her; and he never even saw the golden road.
The old King was very angry with his youngest son, thinking that he had tried to take his life.
Then the Prince begged so hard that they might be released that at last the Dwarf yielded; but he warned him against them, and said, 'Beware of them; they have bad hearts.'
In the great hall he found several enchanted Princes, and he took the rings from their fingers.
Let me have your dress, and you shall have my royal robes.'
You will be able to strike down whole armies with the sword, and the loaf will never come to an end.'
They waited till he was asleep, and then they emptied the Water of Life from his goblet and took it themselves, and filled up his cup with salt sea water.
Their marriage was celebrated without delay, and with much rejoicing.
She also told him where to find the fountain with the enchanted water; but, she said, he must make haste to get out of the castle before the clock struck twelve.
The little man was very angry, and made an evil vow.
But any one who came either on one side of the road or the other would not be the right one, and he was not to be let in.
Our father will certainly not believe you, and if you say a single word you will lose your life; your only chance is to keep silence.'
They were sent by the Kings who had been saved by the Prince's sword and his miraculous loaf, and who now wished to show their gratitude.
But when he reached the gate the people told him that he was not the true bridegroom, and he had to go away.
Then the old King thought, 'What if my son really was innocent?' and said to his people, 'If only he were still alive!
During the passage the two elder brothers said to each other, 'Our youngest brother found the Water of Life, and we did not, so our father will give him the kingdom which we ought to have, and he will take away our fortune from us.'
But when he reached the gate he was also told that he was not the true bridegroom, and, like his brother, was turned away.
They went in search of the Water of Life before I did, but they never came back.'
So he set off, and when he had ridden some distance he came upon a Dwarf standing in the road, who cried, 'Whither away so fast?'
'They are both stuck fast in a narrow mountain gorge.
With the rod strike three times on the iron gate of the castle, and it will spring open.
'No,' said the King. 'The danger is too great.
Then the Prince took back his sword and his loaf, and the three brothers rode on.
After that they took a ship and crossed the sea.
He again passed the Dwarf, who said, when he saw the sword and the loaf, 'Those things will be of much service to you.
'Little Snippet, what does it matter to you?' he said, and rode away without looking back.
This is what happens to the haughty.
So the Prince started on the same road as his brother, and met the same Dwarf, who stopped him and asked where he was going in such a hurry.
No sooner had he drunk it than he felt better, and he soon became as strong and well as he had been in his youth.
How he had released a beautiful Princess, who would wait a year for him and then marry him, and he would become a great Prince.
When it was over, she told him that his father had called him back and forgiven him.
'He is still alive,' said the Huntsman. 'I could not find it in my heart to carry out your commands,' and he told the King what had taken place.
The Prince went to him and gave him the loaf, and with it he fed and satisfied his whole kingdom.
He sprang up in a fright, and ran to the fountain, and took some of the water in a cup which was lying near, and then hurried away.
I cast a spell over them because of their pride.'
He also took a sword and a loaf, which were lying by them.
Inside you will find two Lions with wide-open jaws, but if you throw a loaf to each they will be quiet.
And they blessed him aloud as he passed and called upon Almighty Allah to bless him.
Now, by the life of my head I will marry her to the meanest of my men in spite of the nose of thee!
On this wise Nur al-Din ceased not to counsel his son Badr al-Din Hasan till his hour came and, sighing one sobbing sigh, his life went forth.
I have lately heard that my brother died at Bassorah, where he married the daughter of the Wazir and that she bare him a son; and I will not marry my daughter but to him in honour of my brother's memory.
"The world's best joys long be thy lot, my lord!
The THIRD BEHEST is, Learn to be silent in society and let thine own faults distract thine attention from the faults of other men: for it is said:--In silence dwelleth safety, and thereon I have heard the lines that tell us:--
Now the cemetery was haunted day and night by Jinns who were of the True Believers, and presently came out a Jinniyah who, seeing Hasan asleep, marvelled at his beauty and loveliness and cried, "Glory to God!
His grandfather the old Wazir had bequeathed to him the whole of his property when he was but four years of age.
Then he wept with exceeding weeping and night came upon him; so he leant his head against his father's grave and sleep overcame him: Glory to him who sleepeth not!
Now the cause of his departure was that one night, as we were sitting together and talking of wives and children to come, we had words on the matter and he went off in high dudgeon.
And as another also said:--
It was dark night when he alighted at the Khan, so he spread out his prayer-carpet and took down the saddle-bags from the back of his mule and gave her with her furniture in charge of the door-keeper that he might walk her about.
And thenceforward Nur al-Din ceased not so to administer the Wazirate that the Sultan would not be parted from him night or day; and increased his stipend and supplies until his means were ample and he became the owner of ships that made trading voyages at his command, as well as of Mamelukes and blackamoor slaves; and he laid out many estates and set up Persian wheels and planted gardens.
As for the Minister's daughter she sitteth among her nurses and tirewomen, weeping and wailing; for they have forbidden her father to come near her.
When the Divan was dismissed Nur al-Din returned to his house and related what had passed to his father- in-law who rejoiced.
Then the Sultan rose up to honour them, and thanking Nur al-Din for his fine compliment, asked the Wazir, "Who may be this young man?"; and the Minister answered, "This is my brother's son," and related his tale from first to last.
When it was the Twenty-first Night,
Thereupon Shams al-Din despaired of finding his brother and said, "Indeed I went beyond all bounds in what I said to him with reference to the marriage of our children. Would that I had not done so!
And he fell to weeping over his father and at parting with him, and he but a boy.
And I have heard a poet say:- -
Then the Wazir bade his servants take Nur al-Din to the Hammam-baths and sent him a suit of the best of his own especial raiment, and napkins and towelry and bowls and perfume-burners and all else that was required.
Now it so happened that the Wazir of Bassorah, a man shot in years, was sitting at the lattice-window of his palace opposite the Khan and he saw the porter walking the mule up and down.
The man took her and did as he was bid.
"Your name is Oliver Mankell?"
Apparently at a loss for words with which to comment upon the paper he had read, the governor handed it to the inspector.
What sort of testimonial do you allude to?"
"Have you any objection, Mankell, to being transferred to another prison?"
The ground began to shake.
The Major only groaned.
"You cannot return to town.
"In the first interview with which you favoured me, I ventured to observe that it would be my endeavour, during my sojourn within these walls, to act upon the advice the magistrate tendered me."
The doctor silently, having read it, passed it to the chaplain.
"It is perhaps within your recollection, sir, that I have my reputation to redeem, my character to reinstate."
I know that there are such things as good and evil.
"How you do that hanky-panky, of course."
May I ask if you have any intention of going on?"
"That would never do: it is for you to lead the van.
We have reached a point at which we shall be glad to receive any suggestion--from you."
I should like to search the registers of remarkable cases, to know if such an application has ever been made to the governor of an English jail before.
In that case he would have as high an opinion of our characters as of yours.
He wrote "William Hardinge" in great sprawling characters.
It was he who, temporarily usurping the governor's functions, addressed the prisoner.
"It is a gratification to me to have been able to retrieve my character in so short a space of time."
The prisoner bent over the table and wrote on the paper which was handed him.
The Major left his seat, apparently not rejoicing in his freedom.
"He said I claimed to be a magician.
The prisoner smiled as he carefully folded it in two.
"I am bound to tell you, Mankell, judging from the experiences of the last two days, if this sort of thing is to continue--with gathering strength!--the end will not be long."
"Have you any complaint to make?
"You might give me a testimonial."
What he had written he passed to the governor.
"You might testify that I had regained my reputation, redeemed my character--that I had proved to your entire satisfaction that I was the magician I claimed to be."
Dismiss the idea from your mind."
The same phenomenon was observable in the chief warder, who followed close upon the prisoner's heels.
"Mr. Paley, it is your turn."
As he said this Mankell drew himself up in such a way that it almost seemed as though some inches were added to his stature.
"Your suggestion has at least the force of novelty.
"Oh, sir, I have still nearly the whole three months in front of me! Until my term expires I shall go on, with gathering strength, unto the end."
Oliver Mankell was again in the charge of Warder Slater.
He raised his hand.
"Thank you,--you needn't trouble.
"Let's have it by all means.
"Sir, I conceive that answer to convey a negative.
"Sir!" the prisoner's voice rang out, and his hearers started--perceptibly.
You are free to leave your seat."
"My character regained, for what have I to stop?"
His upturned eyes seemed to pierce through the ceiling to what there was beyond.
The doctor kept glancing, perhaps unconsciously, at his hat.
"For my character's sake!
The question is, What did you do it for?"
The room grew darker.
The chaplain shook his head and sighed.
The darkness, the rumbling, and the shaking ceased as suddenly as they began.
"There is one suggestion I might offer."
The Major winced.
He appeared to be making futile efforts to rise from his seat.
The governor looked at the prisoner, then at his friends.
You call this but beginning, do you?
It was immediately in flames.
His bearing was in striking contrast to that of the officials.
Mankell, I am not a clergyman." The prisoner's smile almost degenerated into a grin.
Warder Slater looked very queer indeed--he actually seemed to have lost in bulk.
How what is done?"
It only remains for me to continue earnestly my endeavours to retrieve my character--until the three months are at an end."
There was a rumbling in the air.
The governor fumbled with a paper-knife which was in front of him.
The Major added "Inspector of Prisons," with a very rueful countenance.
"Then tell me, quite candidly, what is the cause of your behaviour?"
It was the testimonial.
Of what value is a testimonial which is not voluntary?"
Lucian saw that little good was to be gained from this prejudiced witness, so thanking Miss Tyler courteously for her information, he arose to go.
"My rooms are most comfortable, an' much liked," said Mrs. Bensusan, sighing, "but I have not had many lodgers lately.
But if she does, you may be sure that I will be most judicious in my remarks."
"Ah!" groaned the fat woman, looking tearfully over her double chin, "I see you have heard of it."
As soon as I am in possession of any new evidence I shall call again."
"Good-bye, Miss Vrain.
I wonder at your taste, Mr. Denzil, indeed I do.
"Murder!" she repeated.
Lucian foresaw that he was not likely to have much trouble with this mountain of flesh.
Mr. Vrain!
With another gasp Mrs. Bensusan threw up her fat hands and raised her eyes to the ceiling.
"Then if she did not know his whereabouts, how could she kill him?" asked Denzil pertinently.
"Only this, that she drove him out of the house by her scandalous conduct.
"Who is Mrs. Bensusan?"
Still, on recalling Miss Greeb's description of the Bensusan household, he concluded that the red head was the property of Rhoda, the sharp servant, and argued from her appearance in the background, and rapid disappearance, that she was in the habit of listening to conversations she was not meant to hear.
Mrs. Bensusan proved to be quite as stout as Miss Greeb had reported.
"And there is a passage leading from Jersey Street into your yard?"
Shall we see Mrs. Vrain?"
But by accomplishing the desire of Diana, and solving the mystery of her father's death, Lucian hoped to win not only her smiles but the more substantial reward of her heart and hand.
"Leaving the room?
"I don't know; nobody knows.
"There is, Mr. Denzil; it's useful for the trades-people."
I'm a lone widow, sir, and not over strong."
What fools men are!
I'm glad I never married one!
"And I daresay useful to others," said Lucian drily.
"Of the murder!" wept Mrs. Bensusan, now dissolved in tears.
"Is it about the lodgings?"
"Everybody has heard of it," replied Lucian, "and I was one of the first to hear, since I live in Miss Greeb's house, opposite No. 13."
"Rhoda said----"
"Yes," answered the barrister boldly, for he guessed that Mrs. Bensusan would scuttle back into the house like a rabbit to its burrow, did he speak too plainly at the outset, "that is--I wish to inquire about a friend of mine."
Yes, indeed; although you may not believe me, Di.
From a legal point of view this spiteful gossip of a jealous woman was worth nothing, but in a broad sense it was certainly useful in showing the discord which had existed between Vrain and his wife.
In this case the bitter came before the sweet.
"Very true," answered Lucian, with great composure, "but you know the saying, 'All is fair in love and war.' I will be plain with you, Mrs. Bensusan," he added, "I am here to seek possible evidence in connection with the murder of Mr. Vrain, in No. 13, on Christmas Eve."
"Wait for a moment, Mr. Denzil," said Diana hurriedly.
He therefore dismissed all ideas of asking Link to intervene, and resolved to risk a personal interview with the tenant of the Jersey Street house.
"We must secure proofs of Mrs. Vrain's being in that yard before we can get any confession out of her. If you will leave it in my hands, Miss Vrain, I shall call on Mrs. Bensusan."
"The murder of Vrain in No. 13?"
"Excuse me," interrupted Lucian, who wanted to get into the house, "but don't you think you could tell me about my friend in a more convenient situation?"
It is true that he had no legal authority to make these inquiries, and it was possible that Mrs. Bensusan might refuse to answer questions concerning her own business, unsanctioned by law; but on recalling the description of Miss Greeb, Lucian fancied that Mrs. Bensusan, as a fat woman, might only be good-natured and timid.
Mr. Vrain--that murder!" she repeated over and over again.
"Oh, yes, sir--certainly, sir," wheezed Mrs. Bensusan, rolling back up the narrow passage.
But on reaching his rooms in Geneva Square he made a mighty effort to waken from these day dreams, and with a stern determination addressed himself resolutely to the work in hand.
"Indeed, sir!" grunted Mrs. Bensusan, stiffening a little at the sound of a rival lodging-house keeper's name.
"I want to ask you something.
"Don't answer, missus!" she cried shortly.
THE HOUSE IN JERSEY STREET
Mrs. Bensusan gave a kind of hoarse screech, and stared at Lucian in a horrified manner.
Before calling on Mrs. Bensusan the barrister debated within himself as to whether it would not be judicious to call in again the assistance of Link, and by telling him of the new evidence which had been found place him thereby in possession of new material to prosecute the case.
"Miss Tyler," interrupted Lucian sternly, "you must not speak so wildly, for as yet there is nothing to prove that Mrs. Vrain is guilty."
"Nothing.
Brought to a point which she could not evade, Bella declined to answer this question, but tossed her head and bit her lip, with a fine colour. All her accusations of Mrs. Vrain had been made generally, and, as Lucian noted, were unsupported by fact.
"It is not like a gentleman to say that another gentleman's his friend when he ain't," she said, with an attempt at dignity.
Mrs. Bensusan gasped like a fish out of water, and patted her fat breast with her fat hand, as though to give herself courage.
"As I am a Christian woman, sir," she cried, "I am as innocent as a babe unborn!"
Pretty!" reflected Bella scornfully, "I never could see it myself; a painted up minx, dragged up from the gutter.
"Concerning Mr. Wrent."
It would be time enough to invite Link's assistance, he thought, when Mrs. Bensusan--as yet an unknown quantity in the case--proved obstinate in replying to his questions.
"And a fence divides your yard from that of No. 13?"
Pretty, the idea!
"I don't want to hear what Rhoda said," interrupted Lucian impatiently, "and I am not accusing you of the murder.
A kind gentleman, but timid; he----"
Diana and the barrister were too deeply interested in their business to take much notice of Bella's hysterical outburst, but looked at one another gravely as she departed.
But--your house is at the back of No. 13."
"Yes, the murder of Mr. Vrain in No. 13 Geneva Square on Christmas Eve. Now do you understand?"
"Not yet," replied Lucian quickly.
"Of the way in which Lydia treated her poor dear husband I know little," cried the fair Bella.
"She is guilty enough for me, Mr. Denzil; but like all men, I suppose you take her side, because she is supposed to be pretty.
"Good-bye, Mr. Denzil, and thank you for all your kindness."
"About what, sir?" said Mrs. Bensusan, visibly alarmed.
Why, Mr. Vrain remonstrated with Lydia, and ordered Count Ferruci out of the house, but Lydia would not let him go; and Mr. Vrain left the house himself."
"As you love me, mum, don't!"
"Well, Mr. Denzil," said the former, repeating her earlier question, "what is to be done now?
Rhoda thinks it must be on account of that horrible murder."
Bella, would you mind----"
"But did my father tell his wife that he was in Geneva Square?"
CHAPTER XIV
However, on diplomatic grounds he suppressed his mirth, and followed his ponderous guide into a sitting-room so small that she almost filled it herself.
"Yes.
Yet she seemed to have some activity about her, too, for she opened the door personally to Lucian, who was quite amazed when he beheld her monstrous bulk blocking up the doorway.
"Yes.
Then, two weeks later, when I had it with me, I got caught in that hotel fire in Buffalo.
He steered toward the object and picked it up.
He realized that no argument he might advance would make an impression where opinions were so set.
"No, not for a month.
"And I am sure she did not go through the kitchen."
The one bright spot had been Lefty's love for him, pure and strong, helping him to carry his burdens.
"Have you carried any of It lately?"
"No, but then you must remember that I am Mr. Adams' private clerk, and he is working on this case in the interests of Miss Langmore."
"Then why don't you tell me, Letty?
Arriving at the town, he speedily learned that Margaret had been taken to the home of Martha Sampson and was said to be in a serious if not dangerous state.
"It was that drug--Letty, are you sure they have found out about that drug?"
"Yes, but I know he will work for you--after he has heard your story. But you must tell him everything."
"Where is she?
"It will only make her condition worse," he mused.
The cold perspiration stood out on his forehead but he did not appear to notice it.
He started.
"Where is he now?"
You can send word to Mr. Adams that I want to see him. Tell him I will be at the Beechwood Hotel.
He longed to knock some of the speakers down, but held his temper in check as best he could.
What's up?" queried the commercial traveler.
He can send me a message there.
I said all along she was a sly one."
"Letty!
"Was any of it sold or used in the vicinity of Sidham?"
Then the gathering crowd scattered through the woods and along the river.
"That's an easy thing to say, Letty," he answered.
"What, Tom?" she asked eagerly.
Oh, we must find her," answered Raymond.
"Oh, I am sure he will help you!
The four scattered, and a vigorous search was instituted for the missing girl.
"She was that sick, sir, I didn't think she could get out of bed, much less walk off."
I always thought she was a pretty nice kind of a girl, and I can't believe that she is guilty."
"Me?
Perhaps I had better wait until I hear from Adam Adams."
"I did the best I could, sir," was the nervous answer.
"She didn't pass me, that I'll swear to."
"She could not have gone far," said Raymond.
For the past month many things had gone wrong with him.
After that a vial once broke on me and if I hadn't gotten away in a hurry I should have been smothered.
"Perhaps she is hiding in the house."
My God!"
"Cannot you trace where the drug went to, Tom?"
We got rid of it, and I was glad of it." He bit his lip meditatively.
The building was searched from cellar to garret, and so were several other buildings in that vicinity, but without avail.
"Then it has gone as far as this?"
Tell him I can clear up some points which may seem queer to him."
"What causes these cries?" said the King wearily.
The wicked knight was pleased that the people wished him to be their king.
Sir Bedivere took the sword and went down to the lake.
"Say to the knight that the King would speak with him alone," said Arthur.
So when he heard that the knight had raised another army, he thought, "I will meet this traitor who has betrayed me. When he looks in my face, he will be ashamed and remember his vow of obedience."
And when the letters came the people read, "King Arthur is dead," and they believed the news was true.
"Nothing but the ripples of the waves as they broke on the beach," repeated the knight.
When King Arthur saw that his army was lost and all his knights slain but two, he said, "Would to God I could find Sir Modred, who has caused all this trouble."
He saw the hand seize the sword, and shaking it three times, disappear again under the water.
Again the knight went to the water's edge.
He would cause letters to be written from beyond the sea, and the letters would tell that the great King Arthur had been slain in battle.
"You have betrayed me twice," said the King sadly, "and yet you are a noble knight!
Then come quickly and tell me what you see."
"You have not told me the truth," said the King.
And he sent two bishops to Sir Modred.
And Arthur smote him under the shield, and the spear passed through his body, and he died.
Then, wounded and exhausted, the King fainted, and his knights lifted him and took him to a little chapel not far from a lake.
"If you love me, go again to the lake, and throw my sword into the water."
"What did you see?" asked the King eagerly.
He would do the King's will, for he loved him.
And as the knight watched, an arm and a hand appeared above the surface of the lake.
But because he did not altogether trust the King he said he would take fourteen men with him to the meeting-place, "and the King must have fourteen men with him too," said Sir Modred.
"And our armies shall keep watch when we meet, and if a sword is lifted it shall be the signal for battle."
Sir Lucan hastened back, and told the King what he had seen.
Many of the people began to forsake the false knight now, and saying that he was a traitor, they went back to King Arthur.
But no army would have been strong enough to keep Arthur and his knights away from the country they loved so well.
He would go through the counties of Kent and Surrey and raise a new army.
"He is yonder," said Sir Lucan, "but remember your dream, and go not near him."
And those that were only wounded, the robbers slew, that they might take their jewels too.
"We must find a new king," they said.
But still Sir Modred wished to conquer the King.
But Arthur had still two knights with him, Sir Lucan and Sir Bedivere.
And Sir Lucan lifted the King on one side and Sir Bedivere lifted him on the other.
And the traitor thought, "The King wishes to give me gold or great power, if I send my army away without fighting,"
"What did you see?" asked the King.
But again the beauty of the sword made him pause.
Go again to the lake, and do not betray me for a rich sword."
And when he reached the battle-field, he saw in the moonlight that robbers were on the field stooping over the slain, and taking from them their rings and their gold.
"I will hide it carefully here among the rushes," thought the knight.
Then she looked round with a tentative smile that was wholly captivating.
Dropping the knife, she caught a loose edge of the canvas and with one swift tug stripped it clear of the unpainted fabric beneath.
Then the young man proved himself tolerably instructed in the ways of womankind.
Fortune had failed her, then, the jade had tricked her heartlessly.
"But what do you expect, monsieur, when I find you in my rooms--?"
This strange access in her of haunting loveliness, the gentle shadows that lay beneath her wide--yet languorous eyes, the almost imperceptible tremor of her sweetly fashioned lips, all troubled him profoundly.
And Therese had taken her at her word.
It was borne in upon her that she would do well to leave London, yes, and England, too, before Victor recovered sufficiently to scheme and put a watch upon her movements.
He found himself looking deep into other eyes that were like pools of violet shadow troubled by a deep surge and resurge of feeling for which there was no name.
So the letters for which she had risked and suffered so much must be back there, in Lanyard's lodgings, in Victor's possession--lost irretrievably, since she would never find the courage to go back for them, even if she dared assume that Victor had not yet recovered and escaped or that Lanyard had not yet come home.
Excellent imitations, I grant you, but articles de Paris none the less."
Because she must fly and hide to save her life, society had no more hold upon her, she need no longer fight to keep up appearances in spite of her status as a woman living apart from her husband, little better than a divorcee--an estate anathema to the English of those days.
She eyed rather wildly her hands.
"So had I."
"Birds of a feather," was his comment, whimsical; "coals to Newcastle!"
With success within her grasp, it had trickled like quicksilver through her fingers.
It was her intention to rip the canvas off with a knife, to get at the letters; and a long, thin-bladed Spanish dagger that now did service as a paper-knife was actually in her hand when she noticed how slightly the painting was tacked to its stretcher, and for the first time was visited by premonition.
Victor lay at her feet, supine, grotesquely asprawl.
"It has cost you dear!"
One held torn and ragged folds of the veil ripped from her throat, the other the weapon with which she had cheated death: a bronze paperweight, probably a miniature copy of a Barye, an elephant trumpeting.
She rose, went to the fireplace and, half kneeling, thrust the letters one by one into the incandescent bed of coals.
What he had suffered he had ten times--no, a hundred, a thousand--earned.
"I think madame la princesse is interested in these," he said.
Nor did she answer from the bedchamber when the princess called her.
An interruption brusque enough to silence her; or else it was its innuendo that struck the princess dumb with indignation.
"You are too kind!
In a moment of vaguely prophetic foresight she had bidden Therese not to wait up for her and to tell the other servants there was no necessity for their doing so.
But though the maid had left the lights on, she was nowhere to be seen.
He was becoming more sensitive than he liked to her charm and the warm sentiment she was giving out to him.
She was calm enough now to consider herself fortunate in finding it so poorly secured in its frame; without the latter it would be far easier to smuggle the canvas away under her cloak.
In the entrance hallway she hesitated, coldly composed and alert.
A ceremony of sentiment at any other time, but not now: her thoughts were far from the man with whose memory these letters were linked, they were in fact not wholly articulate. Just what was passing through her mind she herself would have found it hard to define; she was mainly conscious of a flooding emotion of gratitude to Lanyard; but there was something more, a feeling not unakin to tenderness....
I'm so sorry."
The sound was not repeated, but to make sure Sofia slipped out of her cloak and wrapped it round the canvas before she went in; which last she did sharply, with head up and eyes flashing ominously beneath scowling brows--prepared to give Therese a rare taste of temper if she found she had been disobeyed.
Ripe, mellow with long experience of men and matters, their comments were notable for wisdom and sagacity.
And now, quoth he, I am grown so prosperous that when I need money I can't afford to borrow less than two hundred dollars.
You have all known that gilded envelopment of sunshine and dainty air.
Query, was she part of the picture, or only the aristocratic owner of the house, dismayed at finding her home suddenly become part of a celluloid drama?
He had hoped to see leaping from windows and all manner of hot stuff.
By this time they were touching upon religion, from which they moved lightly to the poems of Louise Imogen Guiney.
Dactyl, meanwhile, was digging out some volumes of Gissing, and on the faces of both these creatures might have been seen a pleasant radiation of innocent cheer.
They lunched (one brushes away the mist of time to recall the details) where the bright sunlight fell athwart a tablecloth of excellent whiteness.
He was disappointed in the tranquil outcome of the scene.
PASSAGE FROM SOME MEMOIRS
Issuing upon the street, Dactyl said something about going back to the office, but the air and sunlight said him nay.
Spondee had always had a soft spot in his heart for Miss Dorothy, esteeming her a highly entertaining creature.
DOROTHY GISH, said he to Dactyl.
The observers concluded that Miss Gish was to do a little galloping shortly. Dactyl and Spondee moved away.
It was near here that I used to borrow a quarter, the day before pay-day, to buy my lunch.
While this portion of the meal was under discussion their minds moved free, unpinioned, with airy lightness, over all manner of topics.
Lexington Avenue lay guileless beneath their rambling footfalls.
The other contributed similar recollections.
A swift car drew up before the large house at the southeast corner.
In the blue upwardness stood the tower of the Metropolitan Life Building, a reminder that humanity as a whole pays its premiums with decent regularity.
She dismounted--lifted down (so unnecessarily it seemed) by the rogue.
Suppose one had to explain to the pallid people of the thither moon what a noonday sunshine is like in New York about the Nones of May?
She stood there a moment and Spondee was convinced.
They talked, a little soberly, of thrift, and of their misspent years.
They conned the nice gradations of tint in the spring foliage of Gramercy Park.
Mr. Goldsmith also exhibited (it is still remembered) a beautiful photo of Walt Whitman, which entertained the visitors, for it showed old Walt with his coat-sleeve full of pins, which was ever Walt's way.
From this revolving orb, said they, they would squeeze a luncheon hour of exquisite satisfactions.
It could not be done to carry credence.
Does Miss Dorothy still act for the pictures? Does Chris, the amiable Scots terrier, still enjoy his bones?
They moved gently, not without a lilac trailing of tobacco fume, across quiet stretches of pavement.
Then they embarked upon some salty crackers, enlivened with Camembert cheese and green-gage jam.
It seemed no effort at all to talk.
One of these books was "Salt of the Sea," a volume of tales by Morley Roberts, and upon this Spondee fell with a loud cry, for it contained "The Promotion of the Admiral," being to his mind a tale of great virtue which he had not seen in several years.
Up stood the blithe creature--how neatly breeched, indeed, a heavenly forked radish--and those shining riding boots!
Near by stood a coloured groom with a horse.
Upon a wall these observant strollers saw a tablet to the memory of William Lloyd Garrison.
Here they were startled to hear Mr. Goldsmith cry: "Well, Chris, here are some nice bones for you." One of these visitors assumed this friendly greeting was for him, but then it was explained that Mr. Goldsmith's dog, named Christmas, was feeling seedy, and was to be pampered.
They gazed sombrely at Union Square, and uttered curious reminiscences of the venerable days when one of them had worked, actually toiled for a living, upon the shores of that expanse.
How long ago it all seems.
At this moment in came the postman with a package of books, arrived all the way from Canada.
Ah, said one, this is hallowed ground.
This is ever a comely doctrine, adds the chronicler.
They ate (may one be precise at so great a distance?)--yes, they ate broiled mackerel to begin with; the kind of mackerel called (but why?) Spanish.
Let it be said it was a Day, and leave it so.
Spondee quoted a poem he had once written about Miss Dorothy.
These pitiful creatures arose from the subway at Fourteenth Street and took the world in their right hands.
How long ago it seems, that spring noonshine when two young men (we will call them Dactyl and Spondee) set off to plunder the golden bag of Time. These creatures had an oppressive sense that first Youth was already fled.
Rather, remarked Spondee, let us fare forward upon this street and see what happens.
Strange, said they, we never noticed this before.
Thrill upon thrill: something being filmed for the movies!
Does old Dactyl still totter about his daily tasks?
Miss Gish and her escort darted into the house, the camera man reeling busily.
It was a day--well, it is fortunate that some things do not have to be described.
The waiter, overhearing shreds of their discourse, made a private notation to the effect that these were Men of Large Affairs.
He recollected only two lines:
Peering again into the dark backward and abysm, it seems that the two rejuvenated gossips trundled up on Lexington Avenue to Alfred Goldsmith's cheerful bookshop.
Queer to think that it happened only yesterday.
In the car, a handsome young rogue at the wheel, and who was this blithe creature in shiny leather coat and leather cap, with crumpling dark curls cascading beneath it?
Up got the young man, and hopped out of the car.
It is all quite distinct as one looks back upon it.
A squint is highly esteemed.
He does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from 1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he scrawled pears on the walls.
The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent.
CHAPTER VIII--IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE LAST KING
He reads the souls of the police like an open book.
A man condemned to death is listening to his confessor in the tumbrel.
The horror was lively.
They hoot at the victim in order to encourage him.
If Jehovah himself were present, he would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot.
Sometimes it is a defect.
A certain state of violence pleases him.
Homer repeats himself eternally, granted; one may say that Voltaire plays the gamin.
The boy replied: "There is a cure there." It was there, in fact, that the Papal Nuncio lived.
The fist is no mediocre element of respect.
"Politicians" are confused with assassins in the same legend. They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment.
One might almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can do so.
Measure that spread of wings which reaches from Moliere to Barra.
This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal.
Gaminerie is a shade of the Gallic spirit.
All beliefs are possible to him.
There are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he always desires without ever attaining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his trousers sewed up again.
Sometimes this gnat--that is what he calls himself--knows how to read; sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub.
They sometimes admire him.
To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses himself, because he is unhappy.
A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin.
He calls it by all sorts of pet names: The End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the sky), The Last Mouthful, etc., etc.
He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers.
One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut one's self very deeply, "to the very bone."
This word gamin was printed for the first time, and reached popular speech through the literary tongue, in 1834.
Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to the latter, as alcohol does to wine.
One of the things that the gamin is fondest of saying is: "I am fine and strong, come now!" To be left-handed renders you very enviable.
There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the fish-market; Beaumarchais had something of it.
In order not to lose anything of the affair, he scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees, he suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys.
The child of Paris exclaims: "He is talking to his black cap!
He studies their habits, and he has special notes on each one of them.
Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite possible that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass civilly.
He shows himself at the guillotine, and he laughs.
And, to soften the heart of the authorities he added: "I will not fall." "I don't care if you do," retorted the gendarme.
To be strong-minded is an important item.
To be present at executions constitutes a duty.
CHAPTER IX--THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL
For I was sent for unto my lady your queen, I wot not for what cause; but I was not so soon within the chamber door, but anon Sir Agravaine and Sir Mordred called me traitor and recreant knight.
So when the Bishop was come to Joyous Gard, there he shewed Sir Launcelot how the Pope had written to Arthur and unto him, and there he told him the perils if he withheld the queen from the king.
And therewith he brought the queen to the king, and then Sir Launcelot took his leave and departed; and there was neither king, duke, nor earl, baron nor knight, lady nor gentlewoman, but all they wept as people out of their mind, except Sir Gawaine.
And this shall I perform while I have any livelihood in Christendom; and there nis none of all these religious places, but they shall be performed, furnished and garnished in all things as an holy place ought to be, I promise you faithfully.
For they that told you those tales were liars, and so it fell upon them; for by likelihood had not the might of God been with me, I might never have endured fourteen knights, and they armed and afore purposed, and I unarmed and not purposed.
But in this land thou shalt not abide past fifteen days, such summons I give thee: so the king and we were consented and accorded or thou camest.
Then all knights and ladies that were there wept as they were mad, and the tears fell on King Arthur's cheeks.
And thus departed Sir Launcelot from the court for ever.
For else, said Sir Launcelot, I dare adventure me to keep her from an harder shour than ever I kept her.
And therefore wit thou well, Sir Gawaine, I may live upon my lands as well as any knight that here is.
How Sir Launcelot passed over the sea, and how he made great lords of the knights that went with him.
And so Sir Launcelot rode throughout Carlisle, and so in the castle, that all men might behold; and wit you well there was many a weeping eye.
So the Bishop departed and came to the king at Carlisle, and told him all how Sir Launcelot answered him; and then the tears brast out of the king's eyen.
For ever I dread me, said Sir Launcelot, that Sir Mordred will make trouble, for he is passing envious and applieth him to trouble.
And then Sir Launcelot himself alighted and avoided his horse, and took the queen, and so led her where King Arthur was in his seat: and Sir Gawaine sat afore him, and many other great lords.
And then say ye unto my most redoubted king, that I will say largely for the queen, that I shall none except for dread nor fear, but the king himself, and my lord Sir Gawaine; and that is more for the king's love than for himself.
So they were accorded to go with Sir Launcelot to his lands; and to make short tale, they trussed, and paid all that would ask them; and wholly an hundred knights departed with Sir Launcelot at once, and made their avows they would never leave him for weal nor for woe.
It was never in my thought, said Launcelot, to withhold the queen from my lord Arthur; but, insomuch she should have been dead for my sake, meseemeth it was my part to save her life, and put her from that danger, till better recover might come.
And therewithal Sir Launcelot kissed the queen; and then he said all openly.
CHAPTER XVI.
It shall not need you, said the Bishop, to dread so much; for wit you well, the Pope must be obeyed, and it were not the Pope's worship nor my poor honesty to wit you distressed, neither the queen, neither in peril, nor shamed.
But in nowise Sir Gawaine would not suffer the king to accord with Sir Launcelot; but as for the queen he consented.
How the Pope sent down his bulls to make peace, and how Sir Launcelot brought the queen to King Arthur.
CHAPTER XIV.
How Sir Launcelot departed from the king and from Joyous Gard over seaward, and what knights went with him.
This is sure enough, said Sir Launcelot, for full well I dare trust my lord's own writing and his seal, for he was never shamed of his promise.
And then the Bishop had of the king his great seal, and his assurance as he was a true anointed king that Sir Launcelot should come safe, and go safe, and that the queen should not be spoken unto of the king, nor of none other, for no thing done afore time past; and of all these appointments the Bishop brought with him sure assurance and writing, to shew Sir Launcelot.
Now let see what he be in this place that dare say the queen is not true unto my lord Arthur, let see who will speak an he dare speak.
My lord Sir Gawaine, said Sir Launcelot, in their quarrel they proved themselves not in the right.
Of the communication between Sir Gawaine and Sir Launcelot, with much other language.
And this shall I perform from Sandwich unto Carlisle; and every house shall have sufficient livelihood.
And so when he came to Joyous Gard he called his fellowship unto him, and asked them what they would do Then they answered all wholly together with one voice they would as he would do.
Then all the people of those lands came to Sir Launcelot on foot and hands.
And then ever after he called it the Dolorous Gard.
They called thee right, said Sir Gawaine.
And then Sir Launcelot stuffed and furnished and garnished all his noble towns and castles.
And when the noble Sir Launcelot took his horse to ride out of Carlisle, there was sobbing and weeping for pure dole of his departing; and so he took his way unto Joyous Gard.
CHAPTER XVII.
And so when he had stablished all these countries, he shortly called a parliament; and there he crowned Sir Lionel, King of France; and Sir Bors [he] crowned him king of all King Claudas' lands; and Sir Ector de Maris, that was Sir Launcelot's youngest brother, he crowned him King of Benwick, and king of all Guienne, that was Sir Launcelot's own land.
And he made Sir Ector prince of them all, and thus he departed.
So the king sat still, and said no word.
So when Sir Launcelot saw the king and Sir Gawaine, then he led the queen by the arm, and then he kneeled down, and the queen both.
And she and Sir Launcelot were clothed in white cloth of gold tissue; and right so as ye have heard, as the French book maketh mention, he rode with the queen from Joyous Gard to Carlisle.
CHAPTER XVIII.
And as Jesu be my help, said Sir Launcelot, I slew never Sir Gareth nor Sir Gaheris by my will; but alas that ever they were unarmed that unhappy day.
I have never seen the big dog that could catch and kill a wolf by himself.
But don't take your dogs out in summer, as it will be sure to be the time when you will find a hard race, and there is where you will hurt some of your best dogs.
Great size, including height and shoulder and proportionate length of body is the desideratum to be aimed at, and it is desired to firmly establish a race that shall average from 32 to 34 inches in dogs, showing the requisite power, activity, courage and symmetry."
There are plenty of dogs that will hunt and trail wolves all right, but very few that will hunt the pups.
Almost any good fox dog will hunt old wolves, but very few will hunt pups, and my experience has been that a bitch will hunt quicker than a dog.
"The coat should be rough and hard on body, legs and head; especially wiry and long over the eyes and under the jaws.
Sometimes if the pups are quite young you will find the mother in with them and for the first few days she will be found near them, but as they grow older she will be found farther away.
I want a dog that will weigh 75 pounds, with long legs and short back so he can gather himself up quickly.
Training a dog to hunt young wolves is a harder task, and unless your dog is born for it, you will fail to make anything like a first class dog out of him.
The Russian wolfhound has a reputation for being a most capable wolf-catcher in his native country, but so far the pure bred hound of that family has not held his own with the American wolf.
I have no doubt but that they could have taken the wolf several times in the race, but all they could do was to bark.
I use a pack of from three to five, but the more the better.
Anything below this should be debarred from competition.
I will not say a full blood stag hound is not all right, in a level, unobstructed country, but in many parts of the country many large dogs would not be able to get thru the fences or over the rough ground with the ease that the smaller ones do.
I have seen thirty-five of them start after the same wolf, in good weather and four hours afterward there were only two, the smallest of the pack, still in the race.
Other combinations have also been tried, with more or less good effect.
The minimum height and weight of dogs should be 31 inches and 120 pounds; bitches 28 inches and 90 pounds.
THE RUSSIAN WOLFHOUND.
I always hunt on a horse, and they should be the best of horses, well broken and not afraid of wire.
I have killed them with two, but would rather have four or five.
I only hunt in spring and late in fall, but any time is good when you can find them.
I never carry a gun of any kind, but always have a hammer, and if I want to succor the dogs in the race, I will ride up to the dogs and kill the wolf for them.
CHAPTER VI.
I don't think foxhounds are any good for wolves.
English blue are very fast and the stag are long winded and have the grit to make a good fight.
Sometimes when your dog trails in near the pups you will get a fight, and sometimes they will jump out and run for it.
WOLF AND COYOTE HUNTING.
The Irish wolfhound of history is no more, the breed having become extinct years ago.
The recognized colors are gray, brindle, red, black, pure white, fawn or any color that appears in the deerhound."
Some hunters successfully locate them, by the aid of dogs, in their dens or burrows and capture them in the day-time.
All the foregoing has more or less application to the present topic. We are still dealing with the nocturnal wanderers.
Only those who hunt for profit, care to take the skunk, and he must needs learn the finer points by experience.
Teach the dog to bark by hissing him on and clapping, whooping to him and such like.
In this connection a contributor writes: "We walk right up to the skunks and pick them up by the tails; then hit them on the head with a club and kill them or put them in the bag and take them home alive, as the occasion may suit."
You can teach the habit of tongueing after night or silence on the trail as you prefer.
The Scotch Terrier and Beagle should be mink dog.
A Pennsylvania hunter contributes the following to the general fund: a good cross for mink as well as rabbit.
This is a cut and dried operation that requires none of the resourceful tactics of man and dog in the chase, and is, therefore, dismissed from the discussion. Now, what are the dog's duties?
I believe what I have told will generally break any dog.
Loose your dog and let him trail until he finds it.
Many hunters pick up many of the skunk on the field, without even being touched by the dogs.
Don't use a stick unless necessary.
"Before taking him out you can teach the young dog when 8 or 10 months old, what to do by catching an animal that you wish to train your dog on and leading it around.
The skunk is a foolish, unresourceful animal and were it not for its natural, unique means of defense, would be utterly at the mercy of dogs and hunters.
Use judgment, the same as you would want some one to use you, and in a few nights' training your dog will be catching game.
These two breeds are good ones for any kind of night hunting.
CHAPTER V.
Always pet him and be friendly after chastising him, and a good scolding with a couple of light smacks with open hand will take the place of a whipping.
If for skunk, kill one and drag it around, place it out of pup's reach, and teach him to bark when he comes upon his game.
This combination gives the requisite agility needed in coping with mink.
Many dogs object to the scent and will trail and bring to bay a skunk only with reluctance.
Occasionally any of the above may be discovered abroad in the full glare of day.
Some even advise a strain of water Spaniel with the above breed for ideal.
It is easy sailing after a few are caught, and your dog is your greatest friend you have.
But he was not with you nor anywhere near.
That's why Sofya Semyonovna has been invited to call to-day at the X. Hotel where the lady is staying for the time."
I will wait here."
But if you don't... then." His eyes flashed and he took two steps forward.
You have hardly been able to sit still all this time....
He had never seen her so handsome.
These are my two rooms.
I don't believe you!"
I don't believe you!" cried Dounia, completely losing her head.
Without answering a word he turned and walked back towards the Hay Market.
But how can you go in such a state?
He can still be saved.
Add to that, nervous irritability from hunger, from lodging in a hole, from rags, from a vivid sense of the charm of his social position and his sister's and mother's position too.
The bullet grazed his hair and flew into the wall behind.
I love you beyond everything....
He took a step forward and a shot rang out.
"Scoundrel!" whispered Dounia indignantly.
Do you remember that moonlight night, when the nightingale was singing?"
If Sofya Semyonovna does not come back in ten minutes, I will send her to you, to-day if you like.
Svidrigailov jumped up.
Don't, don't look at me like that.
The bureau is locked, the flat is locked, and here we are again on the stairs.
I am far from jeering; it's simply that I'm sick of talking like this.
She did not scream, but she fixed her eyes on her tormentor and watched every movement he made.
"Have you prepared Sofya Semyonovna?"
"He robbed her, that was the cause, he took money and things.
"Never!"
"Yes, I should have been surprised if you had let that pass after all that has happened.
"What... were the causes?"
"Let me be," she cried in despair.
I'll shoot!
It's a fantastic affair.
I didn't know.
It's my personal conviction that you are perfectly right--violence is hateful.
Never mind, we'll put down the hood...."
You hint at a crime committed, you say, by my brother. You hint at it too clearly; you daren't deny it now.
If you like, I'll take a passport for you... for your mother....
Let me kiss the hem of your dress, let me, let me....
What's this? Blood?" he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the blood, which flowed in a thin stream down his right temple.
"Inform, if you want to!
It was a little pocket three-barrel revolver of old-fashioned construction.
He is a murderer.
Believe me, he has friends.
It wasn't you who told him, of course, but if not you, who then?"
So that's it, is it?" he cried, surprised but smiling maliciously. "Well, that completely alters the aspect of affairs.
Lay them all aside.
I... I'll save him.
"It means that I am not going to lose sight of you now."
But Dounia did not notice this peculiar excitement, she was so irritated by his remark that she was frightened of him like a child and that he was so terrible to her.
He has somehow heard of my letter to you and suspects something.
"In the first place, I can't say it in the street; secondly, you must hear Sofya Semyonovna too; and, thirdly, I will show you some papers.... Oh well, if you won't agree to come with me, I shall refuse to give any explanation and go away at once.
"A lie?
"But your brother?
I haven't a flat to myself; Sofya Semyonovna's room is next to mine--she lodges in the next flat.
He came here on two successive evenings to see Sofya Semyonovna.
"To him.
Dounia stood still, hesitating, and looked at Svidrigailov with searching eyes.
Never?" he whispered in despair.
He took money and various things....
I will do the impossible.
"You did!
Who knows, perhaps we were talking at the very time when he was lying here thinking over his plan.
Perhaps I am quite behind the times and can't understand.
I... I'll kill you."
I have friends... capable people....
"What a fellow!
"No, not on that, but on his own words.
Dounia shot again: it missed fire.
"How can you save him?
I love you too....
I understand the questions you are worrying over--moral ones, aren't they?
I'll do everything.
Dounia jumped up and rushed to the door.
"What?"
Don't come nearer!
She was in great distress.
I see... you were lying... lying all the time....
I hated you always, always...."
Dounia drew back from him in alarm.
He made a full confession to her.
I live there in that house, we are coming to it.
But where did you get the revolver?
I read that article of his about men to whom all is permitted.
I have to tell you that I am going no further with you. Speak to me here.
We will save him.
Of course he lost no time in hunting up Jenny Wren.
The notes of other friends were in that song, and with them were notes of southern birds whose songs Kitty had learned while spending the winter in the South.
Then there were notes all his own.
Sometimes they raise two families.
Kitty had disappeared among the bushes along the old stone wall, but Peter had no trouble in finding him by the queer cries he was uttering, which were very like the meow of Black Pussy the Cat.
It was not loud, but it was charming.
"You are some imitator yourself.
When they do that, Glory takes charge of the first lot of youngsters as soon as they are able to leave the nest so that Mrs. Cardinal has nothing to worry about while she is sitting on the second lot of eggs.
In contrast with Glory, Kitty seemed a regular little Quaker, for he was dressed almost wholly in gray, a rather dark, slaty-gray.
Instead of the glorious red of Glory, Mrs. Cardinal wore a very dull dress.
Altogether she was very soberly dressed, but a trim, neat looking little person. But if she wasn't handsomely dressed she could sing.
You don't need to envy him," retorted Peter.
There's nothing like being useful in this world, Peter."
He wore a beautiful red crest which made him still more distinguished looking, and how he could sing! Peter had noticed that quite often the most beautifully dressed birds have the poorest songs.
Everybody loves Glory.
"Isn't he the loveliest thing you've ever seen?
There she is in the very same tree with him. Did you ever see such a difference?"
If they make their home around here you'll find him doing his full share in the care of their babies.
You would have thought that Kitty was scolding Peter for coming to see him instead of being glad. But that was just Kitty's way.
"They like here so much that if they can find a place to suit them for a nest they're going to stay.
They like an evergreen tree to build in, and I think they've got their eyes on those evergreens up near Farmer Brown's house.
"I don't know of any one of my feathered friends I would miss so much as you."
"I'm pretty good at imitating others, but Mocker is better.
He couldn't quite believe that he saw what he thought he saw.
Then he rubbed his eyes and looked again.
Her wings and tail were tinged with dull red.
At the mention of Mocker a little cloud crossed Kitty's face for just an instant.
I saw a lot of him in the South and he certainly is clever."
Her throat was a grayish-black.
That's just the kind of a combination that suits me."
Peter forgot all about Glory in his pleasure at discovering the returned Kitty and hurried over to welcome him.
Peter listened until the song ended, then scampered in among the bushes. At once those harsh cries broke out again.
"It's Glory the Cardinal," replied Jenny Wren promptly.
"Mrs. Catbird was delayed a day or two. I hope she'll get here to-day and then we'll get busy at once.
Even his bill was red.
Peter nodded as if he quite agreed.
How about those new notes you got when you were in the South?"
He was a little smaller than Welcome Robin.
He dropped his wings and all in a second made himself look fairly disreputable.
He felt sure that he would find company there besides Tommy Tit, and he was not disappointed.
Sammy Jay was there also, and his blue coat never had looked better than it did against the pure white of the snow.
He was walking head first down the trunk of that tree, picking tiny eggs of insects from the bark and seemingly quite as much at home and quite as unconcerned in that queer position as if he were right side up.
Once in a while he would cry in a thin little voice, "Seep!
It was the voice of Yank-Yank the Nuthatch, and while it was far from being sweet there was in it something of good cheer and contentment.
In a night Peter Rabbit's world was transformed.
When he reappeared Peter had another question ready.
As Peter approached, Yank-Yank lifted his head and called a greeting which sounded very much like the repetition of his own name.
The sides of his head and his breast were white.
Tommy seemed to be in just as good spirits as ever he had been in summer.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
There is too much ice and snow up there, so I have come down here to spend the winter."
He was dressed in grayish-brown above and grayish-white beneath.
By the way, Peter, have you seen anything of Dotty the Tree Sparrow?"
I'm glad you reminded me of him.
You know home is where you raise your children, and my home is in the Great Woods farther north.
It really is quite easy when you know how.
Across each wing was a little band of buffy-white, and his bill was curved just a little.
Each toe has a sharp claw.
At once Peter hurried in the direction from which it came.
"I don't see how such a little fellow as you can eat such hard things as acorns and beechnuts," protested Peter a little doubtfully.
Yank-Yank laughed right out.
He was just a trifle bigger than Jenny Wren but not at all like Jenny, for while Jenny's tail usually is cocked up in the sauciest way, Seep-Seep's tail is never cocked up at all.
"Welcome home, Yank-Yank!" cried Peter, hurrying up quite out of breath.
I haven't seen him since we were together up North.
The outer feathers of his tail were black with white patches near their tips.
If they want to come down a tree they have to back down.
"I discovered a long time ago, Peter," said he, "that the people who get on best in this world are those who make the most of what they have and waste no time wishing they could have what other people have.
"I want to know how it is that you can walk head first down the trunk of a tree without losing your balance and tumbling off."
When I go up a tree the three front claws on each foot hook into the bark.
Did you have a pleasant summer? And if you please, Yank-Yank, tell me where you built your home and what it was like."
Tommy Tit's cheery voice greeted Peter the very first thing that morning after the storm.
I've simply come down here for the winter.
The top of his head and upper part of his back were shining black.
"Yes," retorted Peter promptly.
He likes to run about in it, and so he followed Tommy Tit up to the Old Orchard.
The Old Orchard wouldn't be quite the same without you.
He knew it was quite useless to try to get Seep-Seep to talk, He knew that Seep-Seep wouldn't waste any time that way.
But Peter didn't need to see how Yank-Yank was dressed in order to recognize him.
It had become a new world, a world of pure white.
Still Peter was not lonely.
Now Peter rather likes the snow.
Rough Brother North Wind and Jack Frost were not far behind Honker the Goose.
On the trunk of an apple-tree he caught sight of a gray and black and white bird about the size of Downy the Woodpecker.
They have become so dependent on them that they don't dare move about on the trunk of a tree without using them.
"No," he replied.
In fact, it bends down, for Seep-Seep uses his tail just as the members of the Woodpecker family use theirs.
His way of climbing that tree was very like creeping, and Peter thought to himself that Seep-Seep was well named the Brown Creeper.
"You're mistaken Peter," said he. "This isn't home.
The last laggard among Peter's feathered friends who spend the winter in the far-away South had hurried away.
He wasted no time exploring the branches, but stuck to the trunk.
The rest of his back was bluish-gray.
His home was not far from mine."
As Yank-Yank spoke, a little brown bird alighted at the very foot of the next tree.
"I should say not!" exclaimed Yank-Yank.
"Not yet," replied Peter, "but I think he must be here.
"I like acorns and beechnuts and certain kinds of seeds."
Hello!
Downy and Hairy the Woodpeckers were getting their breakfast from a piece of suet Farmer Brown's boy had thoughtfully fastened in one of the apple-trees for them.
Yank-Yank chuckled happily.
In behind this he tucks his nest made of twigs, strips of bark and moss.
When the Princess heard what was going on, she came to the window, and asked him how he did, and whether he would sell the golden wool-winder?
Well! there was no help for it; she had to let him get into bed, where he slept both sound and soft; but a little while after the Princess had a child, at which the king grew so wild with rage, that he was near making an end of both mother and babe.
But as the night wore on he began to freeze.
'We don't know much of this old wife of Hacon Grizzlebeard's, I think we'd best see if she has taken anything away with her.'
the beggar's answer was still the same: 'Oh: they are Hacon Grizzlebeard's.' And the Princess was in a sad way that she had not chosen the man who had such broad lands.
So he began to feel and search her pockets, and when he found the pieces he was in a rage, and began to stamp and scold at a great rate, while she wept and said:
Just after this happened, came Hacon Grizzlebeard tramping that way once more, as if by chance, and took his seat down in the kitchen, like any other beggar.
Then she told him the whole story, and swore, through thick and thin, it should be the last time he got her to do such a thing.
So when the Princess rose up in the morning, she came to the window and threw it up, and called out to the beggar if he would sell his golden spinning-wheel?
'I bake!' said the Princess; 'I can't bake, for I never did such a thing in my life.'
This is the first time I ever stole, and this shall be the last'; and with that she told him how it had gone with her, and what the Prince had said.
'You've lost your wits outright, I think', said the Princess.
She stood by while the tailor was cutting out the gown, and she swept down all the biggest scraps, and stuffed them into her pockets; and when she was going away, the Prince said:
When she came home, he was busy nursing the baby.
So it went now just as it had gone before, and when she got back to the cabin, the beggar was there before her.
So, whenever they came to grand castles, and woods, and parks, and she asked whose they were?
After a bit, he put on a great beard of moss, threw a great fur cloak over his clothes, and dressed himself up just like any beggar.
And the Prince's will is, that you should go up to the palace and be measured instead of the bride; for he says you are just the same height and shape.
'I can't steal', said the Princess.
But after you have been measured, mind you don't go away; you can stand about, you know, and when the tailor cuts out the gown, you can snap up the largest pieces, and bring them home for a waistcoat for me.'
'Well!' she cried, 'I never saw the like of this in all my life; the keen north wind that blows here has taken the ears off one of your horses, and the other has stood by and gaped at what was going on till his jaws have split right up to his ears.'
hold your tongue!' said the Princess; 'if my father were to know that there was a man in the house, I should be in a fine scrape.'
'I think you've lost your wits, both the Prince and you', said she. 'Do you think I look fit to stand in the bride's place?
She began to weep and bewail, and said:
'Oh, God bless your royal highness; do let me off!
'Oh yes!
Sometime after, Hacon came home to the cabin at even and said:
The bridal train went to church, where she stood for the bride, and when they came back, there was dancing and merriment in the palace. But just as she was in the midst of dancing with the Prince, she saw a gleam of light through the window, and lo! the cabin by the wood- side was all one bright flame.
The beggar made me do it', she said, and wept bitterly.
'Well, you must go', said Hacon, 'since the Prince has said it.
She had to let him in, and when he was, he lay on the ground and slept like a top.
A few days after Hacon Grizzlebeard came home at even and said:
'Nay, but I can't steal them', she said; 'you know how it went last time.'
Well! she gave him leave, only he was to be sure to lie still, and not to shiver and call out 'hutetu', or any such stuff.
'Hush! hush!
When she was well on her way, he threw off his robes, put on his skin cloak, and his false beard, and reached the cabin before her.
'Well, the Prince said you were to go, and so go you must', said Hacon Grizzlebeard.
So when she was about to go home at even, the Prince said:
So the Princess stood by when the pig was killed, and made sausages with the rest, and did as Hacon bade her, and stuffed her pockets full of sausages.
'Here is the beggar, and there is the babe, and so let the cabin burn away', said Hacon Grizzlebeard.
'The beggar made me do it, and I couldn't help it.' 'Well', said the Prince at last, 'it ought to have gone hard with you; but all the same, for the sake of the beggar you shall be forgiven this once.'
'Well, you can learn to steal; who knows but you may have better luck next time', said Hacon Grizzlebeard.
So when she was well on her way, Hacon ran by a short cut and reached the palace long before her, and threw off his rags and beard, and put on his princely robes.
Well, the Princess thought it a good bargain; there could be no danger in letting him sleep outside her door.
'I make sausages!' said the Princess; 'I can't do any such thing.
'You can learn then', said Hacon, 'and you may have better luck, perhaps.'
'This beggar's wife was long-fingered last time; we may as well just see if she hasn't carried anything off.'
So she got the wheel, and at night Hacon Grizzlebeard lay down outside her bedroom.
She thought it bad, but still she went and did as she was told.
There was no help for it, go she must; and when she reached the palace, they dressed her out so finely that no princess ever looked so smart.
So he drove home; but as he went, he thought to himself that he would pay her off one day.
Now, it fell out a little time after, when the man came back from the palace, he said:
Then came the old story over again.
I'm almost frozen to death; only let me come inside and lie on the floor', said Hacon Grizzlebeard.
it's all the same to me how you get it, or whether you get it at all', she said; 'only let me be with you, for if I stay here any longer, my father will be sure to take my life.'
Yes! there was no help for it.
'We may as well see if this old girl has not been long-fingered this time too.'
'It is not to be had for money; but if you'll give me leave to sleep to-night in your bedroom, with my head on your bedstead, you shall have it for nothing', said Hacon Grizzlebeard.
'Hush! hush! be still for God's sake', said the Princess; 'if father knows there is a man in here, I shall be in a sad plight.
As for not knowing how, she was only to do what the others did, and at the same time Hacon bade her steal some sausages for him.
The look was transient.
Her art--how had she forgotten that?
Only last night she had badly fumbled, more than once.
Each of the two covered her face with her hands.
He loved me"...
Yet, in their happiness, rose and floated a shadow between them.
The maid hastened to her side, and with quick light fingers began to undress her.
Here was solace, purpose.
Came also the horrid little ghost of one who had died late and unseemly.
Let the world whisper and insinuate what it would.
Now she would perfect herself.
She was a wretch to have repined.
The wardrobe was a yawning void, the carpet was here and there visible, many of the trunks were already brimming and foaming over...
And good heavens! If there were a doubt as to the Duke's motive, why not doubts as to theirs?...
She remembered how marvellously last night she had manipulated the ear-rings and the studs.
"He kissed me in the public street.
At a gesture from her, Melisande brought to a close the rhythmical ministrations, and--using no tissue paper this time--did what was yet to be done among the trunks.
Should it not suffice her?
And of course any really impartial person who knew anything at all about the matter at first hand would be sure in his own mind that it was perfectly absurd to pretend that the whole thing wasn't entirely and absolutely for her... And of course some of the men must have left written evidence of their intention.
But the thought insisted.
Then lo! the light died out of her eyes, and her face grew rigid.
"And he kissed me in the open street"--excellent, excellent!
To slur and sully, to belittle and drag down--that was what the world always tried to do. But great things were still great, and fair things still fair.
"Then in went a lot of others," Clarence was saying.
'Zuleika!'--like that," added the boy, with a most infelicitous attempt to reproduce the Duke's manner.
Speak, boy, can't you?"
I aim at truth.
"Threw himself in.
She rose and came uncertainly towards her brother, half threatening, half imploring.
He told me so," she said.
"All right," said he, strong in his advantage.
Katie, remembering it simultaneously, uttered a loud sob.
Katie, by bickering with Clarence, had thrown away the advantage she had gained by fainting.
But it was not thus that Mrs. Batch and Katie greeted Clarence when, lamentably soaked with rain, that Messenger appeared on the threshold of the kitchen. Katie was laying the table-cloth for seven o'clock supper.
She came of good sound peasant stock.
Of this omission he was glad.
But, as Clarence had not come home since afternoon-school, they had assumed that he was at the river; and they now assumed from the look of him that something very unusual had been happening there.
But credibility is not enough for Clio's servant.
The sound of the rain had long ceased.
She was able to take the rough with the smooth.
"That Miss Dobson that's been here."
She had been stricken: now let her be racked.
Mrs. Batch was not going to let her retrieve it by shining as a consoler. I hasten to add that this resolve was only sub-conscious in the good woman.
She stood with wide-spread arms, silent, gaping.
No. But Katie, at Clarence's first words, fainted outright.
Are you not begging the question? I admit there were, that evening in Oxford, many people who, when they went home from the river, gave vivid reports of what they had seen.
She had not had education enough to spoil her nerve.
And it was not the less so because with it was mingled a certain joy in the greatness of the calamity.
Certainly, I might have pieced together a dozen of the various accounts, and put them all into the mouth of one person.
Her grief was perfectly sincere.
Mrs. Batch had a keen sense of the deportment owed to tragedy.
The mother was loth to have been outdone in sensibility by the daughter, and it was with some temper that she hastened to make the necessary ministrations.
She did not flinch.
"Katie's fainted," added the Messenger, not without a touch of personal pride.
Mrs. Batch gave a low moan.
Whom?
Blank verse, yes, so far as it went; but delivered without the slightest regard for rhythm, and composed in stark defiance of those laws which should regulate the breaking of bad news.
"You wretched little whipper-snapper!" flashed Katie.
Modern Katie did.
Abiding in her was the spirit of those old songs and ballads in which daisies and daffodillies and lovers' vows and smiles are so strangely inwoven with tombs and ghosts, with murders and all manner of grim things.
Did you feel faint at any moment in the foregoing chapter?
"A mother's support indeed!
As to what this was, they were not quickly enlightened.
And so, as I by my Zeus-given incorporeity was the one person who had a good view of the scene at large, you must pardon me for having withheld the veil of indirect narration.
"No! Mercy on us!
"He did?" exclaimed Clarence.
Mrs. Batch capped this with a much louder one.
"And you let him?"
Clarence was of degenerate mould.
"He didn't love HER," she murmured. "That was all over.
Intensive Katie recked little of all these other deaths.
Clarence curbed the brotherly intention of telling her she looked "a sight" in them.
She staggered to the door, leaving her actual offspring to their own devices, and went heavily up the stairs, her mind scampering again before her....
Mrs. Batch's mind, while she listened, ran ahead, dog-like, into the immediate future, ranging around: "the family" would all be here to-morrow, the Duke's own room must be "put straight" to-night, "I was of speaking"...
His clothes steamed briskly.
"Too late," you will say if I offer you a Messenger now.
Mrs. Batch through her tears called Katie a bad girl, and Clarence a bad boy.
On purpose.
The Duke was dead.
"Katie," she said, in the same voice, "get up this instant." But Katie did not hear her.
"It isn't true," said Katie.
"No other man shall ever do that."
"Why didn't he come to me in his trouble?"
Some one?
"The Duke, he's drowned himself," presently gasped the Messenger.
This was the stupendous outline she had grasped: now let it be filled in.
Mrs. Batch had risen from her chair, the better to cope with such magnitude.
Clarence stood before the fire, slowly revolving on one heel.
Come, do you really think your grievance against me is for a moment comparable with that of Mrs. and Miss Batch against Clarence?
It promised him a new lease of importance. Meanwhile, he described in greater detail the Duke's plunge.
There was the noise of a gathering wind.
Such had ever been the Duke's magic in the household that Clarence had at first forgotten to mention that any one else was dead.
If he was safe and sound, dear young gentleman, heaven be praised! and she would break the awful news to him, very gradually.
Well!
Mr. Noaks!
She stood staring into vacancy.
Katie had shut her eyes, and clenched her hands.
You, please remember, were carefully prepared by me against the shock of the Duke's death; and yet I hear you still mumbling that I didn't let the actual fact be told you by a Messenger.
Mrs. Batch herself did not faint, but she was too much overwhelmed to notice that her daughter had done so.
It was at least two miles high.
There was once a fisherman who lived with his wife in a miserable little hovel close to the sea.
There was also a park, half a mile long, and in it were stags and hinds, and hares, and everything of the kind one could wish for.
I am emperor, and thou art but my husband, and thou must obey."
On each side of her were two rows of candles, the biggest as thick as a tower, down to the tiniest little taper.
"Flounder, flounder in the sea, Prythee, hearken unto me: My wife, Ilsebil, will have her own way Whatever I wish, whatever I say."
What good will it do you to kill me?
"Alas!" said his wife; "isn't it bad enough always to live in this wretched hovel?
With that he came to the sea, but now he found it quite black, and heaving up from below in great waves.
In one hand she held the scepter, and in the other the ball of empire.
On each side of her stood her ladies in a long row, each one a head shorter than the next.
I can't bear it any longer.
"Alas," said the man, "she wants to be king now."
Then he looked at her for some time, and said, "Alas, wife, how much better off art thou for being emperor?"
With that they went in and found a great hall paved with marble slabs, and numbers of servants in attendance, who opened the great doors for them.
He found the sea no longer bright and shining, but dull and green.
"Go back," said the flounder.
The man was still not very willing to go, but he did not want to vex his wife, and at last he went back to the sea.
"Alas, wife," said the man, "what wilt thou not want?
"Oh, yes," said the man; "and so let it remain.
Go back to the flounder.
His wife was sitting on a lofty throne of gold and diamonds; she wore a golden crown, and carried in one hand a scepter of pure gold.
"Why not?" said the woman.
The sky was pitchy black; it thundered and lightened, and the sea ran in black waves, mountains high, crested with white foam.
There was a sentry at the door, and numbers of soldiers were playing drums and trumpets.
"What does she want now?" said the flounder.
So the man went back, and when he got to the door, he found that the whole palace was made of polished marble, with alabaster figures and golden decorations.
Inside the palace, counts, barons, and dukes walked about as attendants, and they opened to him the doors, which were of pure gold.
"Go home again, then," said the flounder; "she has her wish fully."
Her husband, who was still more than half asleep, was so shocked that he fell out of bed.
I pray thee, control thyself and remain pope."
The flounder came swimming up, and said: "Well, what do you want?"
I must be pope this very day."
"Now, what does she want?" asked the flounder.
Pope thou canst not be.
"We will think about that," said his wife, "and sleep upon it."
"Now," said the woman, "is not this worth having?"
I want to live in a big stone castle.
Then she flew into a terrible rage.
Go back and call him; tell him I want a pretty cottage; he will surely give us that!"
With that they went to bed.
Go to the flounder.
"Wife," said the man, looking at her, "art thou now pope?"
Emperor I will be, so quickly go."
"Flounder, flounder in the sea, Prythee, hearken unto me: My wife, Ilsebil, will have her own way Whatever I wish, whatever I say."
Husband!" she cried, digging her elbow into his side, "wake up and go to the flounder.
When the dawn reddened the sky, she raised herself up in bed and looked out of the window, and when she saw the sun rise she said:
She took him by the hand, and said: "Come and look in here--isn't this much better?"
He stood there and said:
So the man went back, and when he reached the palace he found that it had grown much larger, and a great tower had been added, with handsome decorations.
Go to the flounder, and tell him to give us a castle."
I shall never have another happy moment."
"Go home again," said the flounder; "she is standing at the door of it."
"Husband," she said, "if I cannot be lord of the universe, and cause the sun and moon to set and rise, I shall not be able to bear it.
He went to fish every day, and he fished and fished, and at last one day, when he was sitting looking deep down into the shining water, he felt something on his line.
"Husband," said the woman, "don't talk nonsense.
"Go, all the same," said the woman.
Her husband was still asleep, but she pushed him with her elbow, and said, "Husband, get up and peep out of the window.
We will be king."
So the man went; but he was quite sad because his wife would be king.
When he reached the sea, he found it dark, gray, and rough, and evil-smelling.
"Alas, wife," said the man, "why dost thou now want to be emperor?"
The man slept well and soundly, for he had walked about a great deal in the day; but his wife could think of nothing but what further grandeur she could demand.
She took him by the hand and said, "Come in with me."
In despair, he stood and said;
A great wind arose over the land, the clouds flew across the sky, and it grew as dark as night; the leaves fell from the trees, and the water foamed and dashed upon the shore.
Outside the house there was a great courtyard, with stabling for horses, and cows, and many fine carriages.
Then he said, "Now, wife, be content with being pope; higher thou canst not go."
He stood looking at her for some time, and then he said, "Ah, wife, it is a fine thing for thee to be king; now we will not wish to be anything more."
"It is not right," he said; "it is not right."
Her hair stood on end; she panted for breath, and screamed:
"She is emperor."
We will live in this beautiful palace and be content."
"Husband," she said, "what art thou standing there for?
"No," said the man; "all I caught was one flounder, and he said he was an enchanted prince, so I let him go swim again."
She is king already," said the flounder.
We can live here very happily."
"Well," said the fisherman, "you need not make so many words about it. I am quite ready to put back a flounder that can talk." And so saying, he put back the flounder into the shining water, and it sank down to the bottom, leaving a streak of blood behind it.
"Now, what do you want?" said the flounder.
"Flounder, flounder in the sea, Prythee, hearken unto me: My wife, Ilsebil, will have her own way Whatever I wish, whatever I say."
He said he had been so lonesome, and it was such a comfort to him to have company, and somebody to talk to in his troubles.
We told him about them.
So I kept shady, and watched.
I think it was powerful smart."
"Whiskers?" said I.
He had had them two papers all fixed and ready, and he had put one of them in place of t'other right under our noses.
He would come, and we would heave him overboard, or get killed trying.
"We felt pretty cheap.
It was a little round plug about as thick as the end of your little finger, and I says to myself there's a di'mond in the nest you've come from.
It was only just a screwdriver--just a wee little bit of a screwdriver."
"Well, I got my boots on, and we went down and slipped in and laid the paper of sugar on the berth, and sat down soft and sheepish and went to listening to Bud Dixon snore.
So then he got to wandering along, and pretty soon, sure enough, he was telling!
What we was after was a couple of noble big di'monds as big as hazel-nuts, which everybody was running to see.
THAT'S the reason he could set there and snooze all night so comfortable.
"They're in considerable trouble down there, and they think you and Huck'll be a kind of diversion for them--'comfort,' they say.
Who are the Dunlaps?"
They used to hear about him robbing and burglaring now and then, but that was years ago.
I reckoned Tom would fly at his aunt and hug her head off; but if you believe me he set there like a rock, and never said a word.
She says:
He's dead, now.
By this time his aunt Polly was all straight again, and she let fly.
Now take yourself off and pack your traps; and if I hear another word out of you about what you'll be excused from and what you won't, I lay I'LL excuse you--with a hickory!"
He got to robbing when he was nineteen or twenty, and they jailed him; but he broke jail and got away--up North here, somers.
"You'll be excused!
Says your uncle Silas is like a changed man, on account of all this quarreling.
They don't hear about him any more."
"Tom, I reckon you've got to pack up and go down to Arkansaw--your aunt Sally wants you."
After what she's said, her pride won't let her take it back."
It just makes a boy homesick to look ahead like that and see how far off summer is.
There's a neighbor named Brace Dunlap that's been wanting to marry their Benny for three months, and at last they told him point blank and once for all, he COULDN'T; so he has soured on them, and they're worried about it.
She was setting there in a brown study, with it laying in her lap.
"The thing that is mostly worrying your aunt Sally is the tempers that that man Jubiter gets your uncle into."
Don't you know what that is?
At least that's what they say.
Land, you must be joking!
"Aunt Polly, it beats anything I ever heard of.
Where'd he get it?"
Why, he's just as gentle as mush."
He's tall, and lazy, and sly, and sneaky, and ruther cowardly, too, but kind of good-natured, and wears long brown hair and no beard, and hasn't got a cent, and Brace boards him for nothing, and gives him his old clothes to wear, and despises him.
But he was right.
-- M. T.]
That is the idea; you want to go and be a wanderer; you want to go wandering far away to strange countries where everything is mysterious and wonderful and romantic.
And when you've got it, you want--oh, you don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
I reckon he's somebody they think they better be on the good side of, for they've tried to please him by hiring his no-account brother to help on the farm when they can't hardly afford it, and don't want him around anyhow.
We was setting on the front steps one day about sundown talking this way, when out comes his aunt Polly with a letter in her hand and says:
Now I never would 'a' thought of that.
That is what the name of it is.
But he set there and studied and studied till I was that distressed I didn't know what to do; then he says, very ca'm, and I could a shot him for it:
[Note: Strange as the incidents of this story are, they are not inventions, but facts--even to the public confession of the accused.
Up in his room he hugged me, he was so out of his head for gladness because he was going traveling.
Why, we might lose it if he didn't speak up and show he was thankful and grateful.
It's spring fever.
She hit his head a thump with her thimble as we dodged by, and he let on to be whimpering as we struck for the stairs.
"Jake."
Sp'iling such a noble chance as this and throwing it away?"
There wasn't anything more said for a considerable while; the old lady was thinking.
Why, Benny's only half as old as he is, and just as sweet and lovely as--well, you've seen her.
"Well," he says, "I'm right down sorry, Aunt Polly, but I reckon I got to be excused--for the present."
"Tempers?
"Huck Finn, do you want me to let her SEE how bad I want to go?
At last she says:
Well, I never heard the like of it in all my days!
"What a name--Jubiter!
And if you can't do that, you'll put up with considerable less; you'll go anywhere you CAN go, just so as to get away, and be thankful of the chance, too.
I judge he thought he could have any girl he wanted, just for the asking, and it must have set him back a good deal when he found he couldn't get Benny.
"What was his name?"
"Well, she's worried, anyway.
But he warn't disturbed.
Uncle Silas?
His aunt Polly was knocked so stupid and so mad at the cold impudence of it that she couldn't say a word for as much as a half a minute, and this gave me a chance to nudge Tom and whisper:
He's twenty-seven, now, and has had it ever since the first time he ever went in swimming.
WELL, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free, the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom's uncle Silas's farm in Arkansaw.
And he says:
He mumbled back:
Jubiter is a twin."
We set down, and she says:
I have added some details, but only a couple of them are important ones.
"Ain't you got any sense?
I reckon they've forgot his real name long before this.
Much of that they'll get out of you and Huck Finn, I reckon.
"Works him up into perfect rages, your aunt Sally says; says he acts as if he would really hit the man, sometimes."
Then we went down, being in a sweat to know what the letter said.
"Just exactly like Jubiter--so they say; used to was, anyway, but he hain't been seen for seven years.
"Before we get away she'll wish she hadn't let me go, but she won't know any way to get around it now.
Poor old Uncle Silas--why, it's pitiful, him trying to curry favor that way--so hard pushed and poor, and yet hiring that useless Jubiter Dunlap to please his ornery brother."
I didn't know he HAD any temper."
"They live about a mile from Uncle Silas's place, Aunt Polly--all the farmers live about a mile apart down there--and Brace Dunlap is a long sight richer than any of the others, and owns a whole grist of niggers. He's a widower, thirty-six years old, without any children, and is proud of his money and overbearing, and everybody is a little afraid of him.
You lemme alone; I reckon I know how to work her."
He drove them from the seashore, and then he came back to where he had left Abderus with the fierce horses.
Then Heracles took the cattle out, and the cup of Helios sank in the sea.
He had grown and his strength had grown too.
Then Heracles took up the body of his companion and he buried it with proper rights, and over it he raised a column. Afterward, around that column a city that bore the name of Heracles's friend was built.
And upon the rocks and the steep place he saw the warrior women standing with drawn bows in their hands.
Heracles sprang on it and put his great hands upon its throat.
He heard the roar of the lion.
Through his heralds he sent word to Heracles, telling him what the other labors would be.
Now on this mountain a band of centaurs lived, and they, knowing him since the time he had been fostered by Chiron, welcomed Heracles.
Fearful he was that some piece of guile was being played upon him, but then he looked into the open eyes of the queen and he saw that she meant no guile.
Thou shalt go to Eurystheus, thy cousin, in Mycenae, and serve him in all things.
"Is it for the girdle given me by Ares, the god of war, that you have come, braving the Amazons, Heracles?" asked the queen.
How wild and laborious was the world he had come from, Heracles thought!
Back from the ends of the earth came Heracles, back from the place where Atlas stood holding the sky upon his weary shoulders.
On he went toward the king's palace.
Not pleased was Eurystheus; rather was he angry that one he hated could win such wonderful things.
He remembered that it was told of him that, while still a child of eight months, he had strangled a great serpent that had come to his cradle to devour him.
Then he drove the bull down to the seashore.
Mounted upon the bull given Minos by Poseidon, Heracles fared across the sea.
Have I not slain the lion of Nemea and the great water snake of Lerna?"
So he stood, measuring his strength and the size of the lion.
With the lion's skin over him--that skin that no spear or arrow could pierce--and carrying the club in his hand he journeyed on until he came to the palace of King Eurystheus.
And Heracles said, "I have come to take up the labors that you will lay upon me; speak now, Eurystheus, and tell me what you would have me do."
Artemis, the goddess of the wild things, would have punished Heracles for capturing the deer, but the hero pleaded with her, and she relented and agreed to let him bring the deer to Mycenae and show her to King Eurystheus.
He shouted out against the sun, and in his anger he wanted to strive against the sun. Then he drew his bow and shot arrows upward.
For days Heracles tried to hack his way through.
It grew into such a rage that it came through the swamp to attack him.
Then the centaurs that were without smelt the wine and came hammering at the door, demanding the drafts that would make them wild.
"Have I not performed two of the labors?
He saw three maidens.
The maidens cried in their grief; Heracles went to the tree, and he plucked the golden apples and he put them into the pouch he carried.
Cerberus bayed at him from the place where the dead cross the river.
These she clashed together.
All around were trees that bore flowers and fruit, but this tree had golden apples amongst its bright green leaves.
But Heracles went on.
By accident Heracles dropped a poisoned arrow on his foot.
Then toward the Euxine Sea he went.
They attacked him.
He carried him on and upward toward the world of men.
There, where the River Themiscyra flows into the sea he saw the abodes of the Amazons.
Then, as he went through the forest, he pulled up a young oak tree and trimmed it and made a club for himself.
Then to the brink of Acheron came Persephone, queen of the Underworld. She declared to Heracles that the gods of the dead would not strive against him if he promised to bring Cerberus back to the Underworld, carrying the hound downward again as he carried him upward.
Now he would send him oversea and make him strive with fierce tribes and more dread monsters. When he had it all thought out he had Heracles brought before him and he told him of these other labors.
Heracles broke into the stable where the horses were; he caught three of them by their heads, and although they kicked and bit and trampled he forced them out of the stable and down to the seashore, where his companion, Abderus, waited for him.
Then Heracles appeared.
He looked full upon Eurystheus and he said, "Tell me of the other labors, and I will go forth from Mycenae and accomplish them."
The lion roared three times, and then it went within the cavern.
And so saying she drew off the girdle of bronze and iridescent glass, and she gave it into his hands.
Heracles came forth to drive them away.
Now, with his hands he tore it off, and he placed this head under a great stone so that it could not rise into life again.
As he came near he felt an undreamt-of perfume being wafted toward him.
Then, thinking he might not be able to accomplish this labor, he sat upon the ground in despair.
First he went to Thrace, that savage land that was ruled over by Diomedes, son of Ares, the war god.
The three heads grinned at Eurystheus; he gave a cry and scrambled into the jar.
Then while Heracles stood still, holding himself back from striking him, Eurystheus ran away and hid himself in the jar.
Three bodies he had instead of one; he attacked Heracles by hurling great stones at him.
The jar rolled over, and Heracles looked upon the body that was all twisted with fright.
The king, seeing coming toward him a towering man all covered with the hide of a monstrous lion, ran and hid himself in a great jar.
Against the rock Heracles held the beast; strongly he held it, choking it through the skin that was almost impenetrable.
Far into that dismal cave he went, and then down, down, until he came to Acheron, that dim river that has beyond it only the people of the dead.
Most dangerous did they seem to Heracles.
But for every head knocked off two grew upon the Hydra.
Heracles was hurt by the stones.
The servants came to the king; Eurystheus lifted the lid of the jar and they told him how Heracles was feasting and devouring all the goods in the palace.
Heracles looked upon them when he came to the cavern.
Heracles was the son of Zeus, but he was born into the family of a mortal king.
He went within.
Then the lion yawned.
The waters flowed through the stables, and in a day all the uncleanness was washed away. Then Heracles turned the rivers back into their own courses.
"For the girdle you wear," said Heracles, and he held his hands ready for the struggle.
He went back to Mycenae with the tale of how he had cleaned the stables. "Ten labors remain for me to do now," he said.
But he roused himself, and he journeyed on toward where the perfume came from.
He could not get to where the birds were.
He took into his hands the golden apples of the Hesperides.
Then he turned around and made his way back to the Underworld.
It was Athena who came to him.
He did not know how to approach them; he might shoot at them with his unerring arrows, but when his arrows were all shot away, the Amazons, from their steep places, might be able to kill him with the arrows from their bows.
Then Heracles went north to where the Coryneian deer took her pasture. So swift of foot was she that no hound nor hunter had ever been able to overtake her.
But Heracles was content to be left alone.
Heracles swung his club.
"The sky is so lovely this afternoon that I meant to stop and look at it.
Examine it carefully to make sure."
She put out a shaking hand to the basket of sewing.
He was a big, young man with a simple rustic face and big shoulders and hands.
He touched his cap and looked blankly at Lady Walderhurst.
A few moments later she said, "It does not matter what happens to me, how ridiculous or vulgar or foolish I seem, if I can keep myself safe--until after.
She started on her pillow.
I can prove nothing, I can prevent nothing.
The young man touched his forehead and began to look the supports over. Jane watched him with bated breath when he rose to his feet.
The under-gardener's heavy step and Jane's lighter one roused her.
I should have fallen into the water, which they say has no bottom.
His sunburnt skin changed colour by at least three shades.
Her eyes wandered over the avenue of big trees, which no one but herself came near at this hour.
She touched her forehead with her handkerchief because it felt cold and damp.
But something for the first time made her begin to quail.
"Bring one of the men here," she said, after a few moments.
The big, young gardener looked at the left-hand rail and shook it with his strong hands.
To her they seemed inhuman and uncanny.
"The bridge!" she said.
"Tell him that I am a little uncertain about the safety of the bridge."
She caught Jane's hand and held it hard.
Her kindly, slow-working mind was wakening to strange thoughts.
There's things being plotted and planned that looks like accidents.
She scarcely dared look at her mistress, but when she took courage to do so, she found her so white that she hurried to her side.
She lifted her eyes to watch the pair as they came.
Then Jane realised how mad she looked, how insane the whole scene was, and she gave way to her emotions.
Through that she darted, and flew across paths and flowerbeds towards the avenue of limes.
There was no way out.
She had so lost her breath that she was almost speechless.
She swallowed hard, and without warning sat down on the roots of a fallen tree, her cheeks blanching slowly.
"Don't speak to me yet, Jane," she said.
But the woman's eyes had frightened her.
She rose quite slowly.
Was it because good, faithful, ignorant Jane had been rather nervous about Ameerah that she herself had of late got into a habit of feeling as if the Ayah was watching and following her.
What could she say, whom could she accuse, because a piece of rotten wood had given away.
It was the right-hand rail facing these special trees she rested on when she watched the evening sky.
Would you believe it, I made this very morning two suits to the Prince, and he has rejected them both; what do you think of it?'
As he entered the apartment he unbuckled his broadsword, and throwing it down with such violence that the weapon rolled to the other end of the room, 'I know not what,' he exclaimed, 'withholds me from taking a solemn oath that I will never more draw it in his cause.
I had settled the thing entirely in my own mind.'
In a short time the Chief's voice was heard on the stair in a tone of impatient fury: 'Callum! why, Callum Beg!
'And what did you do?'
'O, we should easily have arranged all that.
'What can I think,' answered Waverley, 'till I know what your requests were?' 'Why, what signifies what they were, man?
Leave us, Evan, but be within call.'
The veins of his forehead swelled when he was in such agitation; his nostril became dilated; his cheek and eye inflamed; and hislook that of a demoniac.
'So, Waverley, you are there,' said the Chief, after a moment's recollection.
'Yes, I remember I asked you to share my triumph, and you have come to witness my disappointment we shall call it.' Evan now presented the written report he had in his hand, which Fergus threw from him with great passion.
'I have as much affection for Miss Bradwardine, my good friend, as I think it necessary to have for the future mistress of my family and the mother of my children.
Every person of consequence had some separate object, which he pursued with a fury that Waverley considered as altogether disproportioned to its importance.
Load my pistols, Callum, and bring them hither instantly-- instantly!' Callum, whom nothing ever startled, dismayed, or disconcerted, obeyed very coolly.
But I propose, as a natural consequence, to assume the rank which the patent bestowed.
'And what did the Prince answer?'
FERGUS A SUITOR
'Perhaps the same that your sister makes to me, you being satisfied.'
And as to Rose, I don't see what objection she could have made if her father was satisfied.'
I know he intends to marry her to some of his rascally Frenchmen or his Irish officers, but I will watch them close; and let the man that would supplant me look well to himself.
CHAPTER LIII
After this, put your faith in princes!'
"So, my dear Fergus," said he, with his most gracious cast of smile, "as the marriage is utterly out of question, there need be no hurry, you know, about the earldom." And so he glided off and left me plante la.'
I tell you it was I that made them--I to whom he owes more than to any three who have joined the standard; for I negotiated the whole business, and brought in all the Perthshire men when not one would have stirred.
But I had a particular reason for assuming this cursed title at this time.
'And did your audience end here?'
However, I am now cool.
So, sir, I craved a private interview, and this morning was assigned; and I asked you to meet me here, thinking, like a fool, that I should want your countenance as bride's-man.
Almost all had their reasons for discontent, although the most legitimate was that of the worthy old Baron, who was only distressed on account of the common cause.
I am not likely, I think, to ask anything very unreasonable, and if I did, they might have stretched a point. Well, but you shall know all, now that I can draw my breath again with some freedom.
Having escaped from the old gentleman, Waverley went to Fergus's lodgings by appointment, to await his return from Holyrood House. 'I am to have a particular audience to-morrow,' said Fergus to Waverley overnight, 'and you must meet me to wish me joy of the success which I securely anticipate.'
As to her father, he is an original, it is true, and an absurd one enough; but he has given such severe lessons to Sir Hew Halbert, that dear defunct the Laird of Balmawhapple, and others, that nobody dare laugh at him, so his absurdity goes for nothing.
'To what purpose?
It contained, as they say an acorn includes all the ramifications of the future oak, as many seeds of tracasserie and intrigue as might have done honour to the court of a large empire.
Evan Dhu, upon whose brow the suspicion that his Chief had been insulted called up a corresponding storm, swelled in sullen silence, awaiting to learn where or upon whom vengeance was to descend.
These appearances of half-suppressed rage were the more frightful because they were obviously caused by a strong effort to temper with discretion an almost ungovernable paroxysm of passion, and resulted from an internal conflict of the most dreadful kind, which agitated his whole frame of mortality.
I tell you there could have been no earthly objection--none.
why--it is well it is written, "Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought!"--why, he answered that truly he was glad I had made him my confidant, to prevent more grievous disappointment, for he could assure me, upon the word of a prince, that Miss Bradwardine's affections were engaged, and he was under a particular promise to favour them.
'Answer?
I resist this pretext, and offer to procure their written acquiescence, in virtue of the date of my patent as prior to their silly claims; I assure you I would have had such a consent from them, if it had been at the point of the sword.
I see, Waverley, you think I am mad.
And, to leave this miserable driveller without a pretence for his cowardice, the Prince asks it as a personal favour of me, forsooth, not to press my just and reasonable request at this moment.
'I know, Waverley,' he said, 'that Colonel Talbot has persuaded you to curse ten times a day your engagement with us; nay, never deny it, for I am at this moment tempted to curse my own.
'I wish to God,' he said, 'the old den would tumble down upon the heads of the fools who attack and the knaves who defend it!
'And what becomes of the homage?'
I have the old story of the jealousy of C----and M----trumped up against me.
'But had you asked the Baron's consent,' said Waverley, 'or Rose's?'
When this officer left the room, the Chieftain gradually reassumed some degree of composure.
'But, Fergus,' said Waverley, 'I had no idea that you had any affection for Miss Bradwardine, and you are always sneering at her father.'
'He usually lets blood for these fits,' answered the Highland ancient with great composure.
Well, I state my pretension --they are not denied; the promises so repeatedly made and the patent granted--they are acknowledged.
'Curse the homage!
Down below ran a level road.
"Precisely," he said, bursting into a laugh.
"I don't know," said Polly, "because I haven't seen it yet, Jasper."
I want to get a pair of those wooden shoes for Joel." And they hurried in.
At that Jasper got out of his seat again and went to his father's side.
"It's not as big as mine," said Polly, holding up hers to the light. "You made me take that one, Jasper."
"But anything like this might not happen again in a hundred times, father," said Jasper.
"We'll begin together," she said, poking open the paper.
"The dirty tram-cars," ejaculated Mr. King, in disgust.
"I should rather say they were," declared Jasper; "dear me, what a bunch!"
Henderson might like to," said Polly, in a glow, "let's ask him sometime, anyway, Jasper.
"We've had such fun," sighed Polly, and she and Jasper cast their bundles on the soft sand; then she threw herself down next to them, and pushed up the little brown rings from her damp brow.
Oh, I forgot; he won't leave the hospitals."
"Oh, Polly, let me get you a chair now," begged Jasper, setting down the remainder of his bunch of grapes, and springing up.
But perhaps I can fix it, Phronsie, so that you can have this identical one," mentally resolving to do that very thing.
Jasper never heard such a welcome command as that Mr. King was just issuing.
"Oh, father," exclaimed Jasper, in dismay, "must we go in carriages?"
You know Holland is full of manufactories of it."
"Father will come over to Scheveningen again and stay a few days, maybe," said Jasper, "if he takes a fancy to the idea.
"Well," ejaculated Mr. King, when his party had regained their seats and the car started off, "if this is to be the style of our companions, I think my plan of carriages might be best after all.
"That's the good of our coming, wife."
I only want to see for a minute what it's like to be in one of those funny old things.
"Well, hurry now, all of you--and we will be off."
"Then we sha'n't get on to all the other places," said Jasper.
"Well, we'll go in this shop.
Just see that perfectly beautiful walk down there and that cunning little trail.
"You'll find that everything is plastered up in that way abroad."
He was surprised to find that he liked this sort of thing, mixing with a crowd and hurrying for seats just like common ordinary individuals.
"Some day, let us ask Dr. Fisher to come out with us, and we will tramp it.
Jasper glared back at him.
See her face!"
Just look!" he pointed down to the Boulevard and off to the sands along the beach.
"Did you ever see anything so fascinating?" cried Polly Pepper, clasping her hands in delight, and not stopping to sit down, but looking all around.
The little doctor leaned back in his seat, and beamed at her over his big glasses.
A hand not over clean was laid on it, and a tall individual, who was pouring out very bad provincial French at a fearful rate, was just about to worm himself into it.
"We'll do it now, Polly," whispered Jasper, in a transport, "when Phronsie looks like that.
"Oh, goody!" cried Polly, clapping her hands; then blushed as red as a rose.
"That's what makes it so pretty," said Jasper.
And these,--cocoa or chocolate.
"But, father," and Jasper's face fell, "don't you see the upper deck of the tram-car is so high and there are fine seats there, and we can see so much better than driving in a stupid carriage?"
His big spectacles had slipped to the end of his nose, his sharp little eyes blazing above them.
"But you are always copying off the things into your journal," said Jasper, "afterward.
"Oh, Grandpapa, what are they?" she cried, pulling his hand and pointing to them.
"Go to the office and countermand the order for the carriages, my son; tell them to put the amount on my bill, the same as if I'd used them, unless they get a chance to let them to some one else.
"Don't try," said Polly, "to pronounce it, Jasper.
One can't be whipping out a note-book every minute.
"Well, I declare," exclaimed old Mr. King, peering out of his Bath chair, "if you children aren't loaded down!" He was eating black Hamburg grapes.
He soon learned, however, when Old Ben stopped in front--or, rather, at the end--of a long covered wagon that looked like an omnibus, except that it was considerably longer, and the seats inside were divided by arms, padded, to make them comfortable to lean against.
"Thank you, ma'am," said Toby, as he sat timidly down on the edge of the seat, hardly daring to sit back comfortably, and feeling very awkward meanwhile, but congratulating himself on being thus protected from the pouring rain.
"You've been makin' so many acquaintances here that you hain't willin' to do any work," he said, savagely, as he redoubled the force of his blows.
He hardly cared to go through the ordeal of another state dinner; and besides, he wanted to go off to the woods with the old monkey, where he could enjoy the silence of the forest, which seemed like a friend to him, because it reminded him of home.
He rubbed his eyes just enough to make sure that he was thoroughly awake, and then jumped down from his rather lofty bed, and ran around to the door of the cage to assure himself that Mr. Stubbs was safe.
"Oh!
I s'pose I deserve it for runnin' away from Uncle Dan'l."
"Here's the boy," said Ben, as he lifted Toby up on the step, gave him a gentle push to intimate that he was to get inside, and then left him.
As Toby stepped inside he saw that the wagon was nearly full of women and children; and fearing lest he should take a seat that belonged to some one else, he stood in the middle of the wagon, not knowing what to do.
"Bless me!" said Ben, as if the thought had just come to him, "it won't do for you to ride outside on a night like this.
"I'll make you understand that all the friends you've whined around in this show can't save you from a lickin' when I get ready to give you one!
"Did it hurt you much?" she asked, feelingly.
"It's all right," he said, and this time in a gruff voice, as if he were announcing some misfortune; "you're to ride in the women's wagon.
While he was standing by the side of the wagon, wondering how he should get along, Old Ben came in.
The water was pouring from his clothes in little rivulets, and he afforded most unmistakable evidence of the damp state of the weather.
The wagon started, and as each one talked with her neighbor, Toby felt a most dismal sense of loneliness, and almost wished that he was riding on the monkey-cart with Ben, where he could have some one to talk with.
During the entire week he was thus equally fortunate.
Now, Toby noticed that each one of the drivers was clad in rubber clothing, and, after listening for a moment, he learned the cause of their water-proof garments.
Mr. Job Lord lifted the poor boy entirely clear of the ground, and each blow that he struck could be heard almost the entire length of the circus train.
Toby knew by the tone of her voice that he had fallen considerably in her estimation by not being one of the performers, and it was some little time before he ventured to speak; and then he asked, timidly, "What do you do?"
"Toby Tyler."
She had learned from him all about the accident to the monkey-cage, and about Mr. Stubbs, and in return had told him that her name was Ella Mason, though on the bills she was called "Mademoiselle Jeannette."
The angry man gave a quick glance around, to make sure that none of Toby's friends were in sight, and then caught him by the coat-collar and commenced to whip him severely with the small rubber cane that he usually carried.
Toby had resolved to keep awake and watch her, for he was struck with admiration at her face; but sleep got the better of him in less than five minutes after he had made the resolution, and he sat bolt-upright, with his little round head nodding and bobbing until it seemed almost certain that he would shake it off.
This done, his preparations for the journey were made.
When Toby awoke it was nearly dark, and the bustle around him told very plainly that the time for departure was near at hand.
"It did when he was doin' it," replied Toby, manfully, "but it don't a bit now that you've come."
Don't I do it nicely?"
"Come right here," said the lady, as she pointed to a seat by the side of a little girl who did not look any older than Toby; "the lady who usually occupies that seat will not be here to-night, and you can have it."
The old man hurried off to the other end of the tent, and almost before Toby thought he had time to go as far as the ring he returned.
The little girl whose acquaintance he had made the night previous was still sleeping; and, wishing to say good-bye to her in some way without awakening her, he stooped down and gently kissed the skirt of her dress.
"Yes, I am.
"Don't cry, Toby.
"What do you do in the circus?"
A STORMY NIGHT.
She was quite as young as Toby, and small of her age; but there was an old look about her face that made the boy think of her as being an old woman cut down to fit children's clothes.
Mr. Lord was thoroughly enraged when Toby left the wagon, and saw the boy just as he stepped to the ground.
Toby would have hesitated before meeting his angry employer but that he knew it would only make matters worse for him when he did show himself, and he mentally braced himself for the trouble which he knew was coming.
"I guess I'll get wet," said Toby, ruefully, as he looked up at the lofty seat which he was to occupy.
"Why don't you sit down, little boy?" asked one of the ladies, after Toby had remained standing nearly five minutes and the wagon was about to start.
Toby had looked at her so earnestly that she observed him, and asked, "What is your name?"
Come with me."
Each day added something to his fund, and each night it seemed to Toby that he was one day nearer the freedom for which he so ardently longed.
Three dollars and twenty-five cents was the total amount of his treasure, and, large as that sum appeared to him, he could not satisfy himself that he had sufficient to enable him to get back to the home which he had so wickedly left.
This praise seemed to please the young lady, and in a short time the two became very good friends, even if Toby did not occupy a more exalted position than that of candy-seller.
The skeleton had invited him to another dinner-party; but Toby had declined the invitation, agreeing to present himself in time for supper instead.
But the seventh, when he looked in his bed, saw Snowdrop there, fast asleep.
"Paragon of beauty!" said the wicked woman, "all is over with thee now," and went away.
Now the fruit was so cunningly made, that only the rosy side was poisoned.
After a year had gone by, the king took another wife.
They lighted their seven candles, and as soon as there was a light in the kitchen, they saw that some one had been there, for it was not quite so orderly as they had left it.
The evil-hearted woman uttered a curse, and could scarcely endure her anguish.
The sixth, "Who has cut with my knife?"
Every morning they went out among the mountains, to seek iron and gold, and came home ready for supper in the evening.
"Snowdrop," answered she.
Again she crossed the seven hills to the home of the seven dwarfs, knocked at the door, and cried, "Good wares, very cheap!"
The mirror answered:
The maiden being left alone all day long, the good dwarfs warned her, saying, "Beware of thy wicked stepmother, who will soon find out that thou art here; take care that thou lettest nobody in."
"Lady queen, you are grand and tall, But Snowdrop is fairest of you all."
Once upon a time, in the middle of winter, when the flakes of snow fell like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window set in an ebony frame, and sewed.
"Little glass upon the wall, Who is fairest among us all?"
Snowdrop looked out of the window and cried, "Good morning, good woman: what have you to sell?"
"Oh, heaven!" cried she, "where am I?"
"Very well," replied the peasant-woman; "I only want to be rid of my apples.
She had scarcely tasted it, when she fell lifeless to the ground.
Snowdrop being so hungry and thirsty, ate a little of the vegetables and bread on each plate, and drank a drop of wine from every cup, for she did not like to empty one entirely.
Pride and envy grew apace like weeds in her heart, till she had no rest day or night.
But there was little need to guard it, for even the wild animals came and mourned for Snowdrop: the birds likewise--first an owl, and then a raven, and afterwards a dove.
She had a wonderful mirror, and whenever she walked up to it, and looked at herself in it, she said:
Immediately she opened her eyes, raised the coffin-lid, and sat up alive once more.
When the dwarfs came home in the evening, they found Snowdrop lying breathless and motionless on the ground.
He called the others, who flocked round with cries of surprise, fetched their seven candles, and cast the light on Snowdrop.
Snowdrop longed for the pretty apple; and when she saw the peasant-woman eating it, she could resist no longer, but stretched out her hand and took the poisoned half.
Richly dressed, she stood before the mirror, and asked of it:
"I will, right willingly," said Snowdrop.
Soon afterwards she had a little daughter, who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and had hair as black as ebony.
She made the cook dress them with salt, and then the wicked woman ate them, and thought she had eaten Snowdrop's lungs and liver.
They searched, and found the poisoned comb; and as soon as they had drawn it out, Snowdrop came to herself, and told them what had happened.
And when she asked the mirror at home,
When she heard the mirror speak thus, she quivered with rage. "Snowdrop shall die," she cried, "if it costs my own life!"
The fourth, "Who has touched my vegetables?"
The mirror replied:
The queen, however, after having, as she thought, eaten Snowdrop's lungs and liver, had no doubt that she was again the first and fairest woman in the world; so she walked up to her mirror, and said:
Then they placed the coffin on the mountain above, and one of them always stayed by it and guarded it.
Then the first dwarf looked about, and saw that there was a slight hollow in his bed, so he asked, "Who has been lying in my little bed?"
She ran as long as her feet could carry her, and when evening closed in, she saw a little house, and went into it to rest herself.
And when the child was born, the queen died.
Then the mirror replied:
But the dwarfs answered, "We would not part with it for all the gold in the world."
Then two iron shoes, heated burning hot, were drawn out of the fire with a pair of tongs, and laid before her feet.
"Lady queen, so grand and tall, Here, you are fairest among them all; But the young queen over the mountains old, Is fairer than you a thousandfold."
So she dwelt with them, and kept their house in order.
They lifted her up, and, seeing that she was laced too tightly, cut the lace of her bodice; she began to breathe faintly, and slowly returned to life.
When she came, and found that it was Snowdrop alive again, she stood petrified with terror and despair.
The first said, "Who has been sitting on my stool?"
"Lady queen, so grand and tall, You are the fairest of them all."
"Lady queen, so grand and tall, Thou art the fairest of them all."
Come with me to my father's castle, and be my wife."
The seventh, luckily, was just right; so there she stayed, said her prayers, and fell asleep.
The huntsman obeyed, and led the child away; but when he had drawn his hunting-knife, and was about to pierce Snowdrop's innocent heart, she began to weep, and said, "Ah! dear huntsman, spare my life, and I will run deep into the wild forest, and never more come home."
At last the son of a king chanced to wander into the forest, and came to the dwarf's house for a night's shelter. He saw the coffin on the mountain with the beautiful Snowdrop in it, and read what was written there in letters of gold.
The girl was so pleased with it that she let herself be cajoled, and opened the door.
Snowdrop looked out and said, "Go away--I dare let no one in."
Then, being very tired, she laid herself down in one of the beds, but could not make herself comfortable, for one was too long, and another too short.
They happened to stumble over a bush, and the shock forced the bit of poisoned apple which Snowdrop had tasted out of her throat.
Then she changed her dress and took the shape of another old woman.
So she called a huntsman and said, "Take the child out in the forest, for I will endure her no longer in my sight.
LITTLE SNOWDROP.
She first resolved not to attend the wedding, but curiosity would not allow her to rest.
"Little glass upon the wall, Who is fairest among us all?"
"Art thou afraid of being poisoned?" asked the old woman.
Then the good dwarfs took pity on him, and gave him the coffin.
And she was satisfied, for she knew the mirror always told the truth. But Snowdrop grew ever taller and fairer, and at seven years old was beautiful as the day, and more beautiful than the queen herself.
"Look here; I will cut the apple in two, and you shall eat the rosy side, and I the white."
When the bargain was struck, the dame said, "Now let me dress your hair properly for once." Poor Snowdrop took no heed, and let the old woman begin; but the comb had scarcely touched her hair before the poison worked, and she fell down senseless.
When she had planned what to do, she painted her face, dressed herself like an old pedlar-woman, and altered her appearance so much, that no one could have known her.
He said again, "Yet give it me; for I cannot live without seeing Snowdrop, and though she is dead, I will prize and honour her as my beloved."
"Child," said the old woman, "what a figure thou art!
"You may surely be allowed to look!" answered the old woman, and she drew out the poisoned comb and held it up.
The queen placed herself before the mirror at home and said:
When it was morning, Snowdrop woke up, and was frightened when she saw the seven dwarfs.
The poor child was now all alone in the great forest, and she felt frightened as she looked at all the leafy trees, and knew not what to do.
The highly deserving men who have so zealously searched the Arctic seas and lands in this cause must now rejoice, that after all their anxious toils, the merit of rescuing from the frozen North the record of the last days of Franklin, has fallen to the share of his noble-minded widow.
Lady Franklin has, indeed, well shown what a devoted and true-hearted English woman can accomplish.
With such a leader she could not but entertain sanguine hopes of success when the fast and well-adapted little vessel sailed from Aberdeen on the 1st of July, 1857, upon this eventful enterprise.
PREFACE.
This it is well known was the favorite theory of Franklin, who had himself, along with Richardson, Back, Beechey, Dease, Simpson, and Rae, surveyed the whole of that same North American coast from the Back or Great Fish River to Behring Strait.
The natural modesty of this commander has, I am bound to say, prevented his doing common justice, in the following journal, to his own conduct--conduct which can be estimated by those only who have listened to the testimony of the officers serving with and under the man, whose great qualities in moments of extreme peril elicited their heartiest admiration and ensured their perfect confidence.
The last discovery of a navigable channel throughout, between Cornwallis and Bathurst Islands, though made in the very summer he left England, has remained even to this day unknown to other navigators!
Going to bed here, only means lying down with your clothes on, upon a reindeer skin, wherever you can find room, and pulling another fur-robe over you.
The last letters for home were landed, fourteen dogs and a quantity of seal's flesh for them embarked, and the ship's head was turned seaward.
Some kayaks soon came off to the ship, bringing salmon-trout, both fresh and smoked.
I am very anxious to complete my stock of these our native auxiliaries, as without them we cannot hope to explore all the lands which it is the object of our voyage to search.
Our only wants were sledge-dogs and a native to manage them.
The officers amuse themselves in trying new guns, and shooting sea-birds for our dogs.
It was then blowing a southerly gale, with overcast murky sky, and a heavy sea running.
There is much to excite intense admiration and wonder around us; one cannot at once appreciate the grandeur of this mighty glacier, extending unbroken for 40 or 50 miles.
Formerly Disco was famed for the large size and abundance of its reindeer; but for some unexplained reason they now confine themselves to the mainland.
All that we know of Melville Bay navigation in August, is derived from the experience of Government and private searching expeditions during eight or nine seasons.
I expressed a wish to see the interior of an Esquimaux tent.
We have got thus far without any difficulty, sailing along the edge of the middle ice; but here we find it pressing in against Browne's Islands, and covering the whole bay to the northward, quite in the steep face of the glacier.
When four miles outside the outer island, breakers were suddenly discovered ahead, only just in time to avoid the ledge of sunken rocks upon which the sea was beating most violently.
We soon obtained ten of the former, but were advised to go into Disco Fiord, where many of the Esquimaux were busy in taking and drying salmon-trout, and where some would most probably be obtained.
Having now closely examined it for an extent of 40 miles, I was satisfied that we could not force a passage through it across Baffin's Bay, as is frequently done in ordinary seasons; therefore, taking advantage of a fair wind, we steered to the northward, in order to seek an opening in that direction.
I came away enriched by some fossils from the fossil forest of Atanekerdluk, also with specimens of native coal.
It is very remarkable that southward of Disco northerly winds have prevailed.
The "North Passage" is made by sailing round the north end of this pack; the "Middle Passage," by pushing through it; and the "Southern Passage," by passing round its southern extreme; but seasons do occur when none of these routes are practicable.
An occasional iceberg is seen.
Almost adjoining Godhaab is the Moravian settlement of New Herrnhut.
Many such rocks lie at considerable distances beyond the islands which border this coast, and greatly add to the dangers of its navigation.
From observing closely the variations in the glacier surface, I think we may safely infer that where it lies unbroken and smooth, the supporting land is level; and where much crevassed, the land beneath is uneven.
We were not long in discovering that his absence was a loss to us.
Here, on the spot, it does not seem incorrect to compare the icebergs to mere chippings off its edge, and the floe-ice to the thinnest shavings.
When passing out to the north of the Kookornen Islands, the wind suddenly failed, and at the same time a swell from to seaward reached us; we therefore had considerable difficulty in towing the ship clear of the rocks; for nearly half an hour our position was most critical.
However, we are standing out to make the attempt.
The scenery is charming, lofty hills of trap rock, with unusually rich slopes (for the 70th parallel) descending to the fiord, and strewed with boulders of gneiss and granite.
I presented a letter from the Directors of the Royal Greenland Commerce to the Inspector of North Greenland, Mr. Olrik, authorising him to furnish us with any needful supplies.
The whalers either get through in June or July, or give up the attempt as being too late for their fishing.
I cannot imagine that within the whole compass of nature's varied aspects, there is presented to the human eye a scene so well adapted for promoting deep and serious reflection, for lifting the thoughts from trivial things of every day life to others of the highest import.
Here we anchored, and immediately commenced coaling.
Upon the moss-clad slopes many fragments of quartz and zeolite were met with.
Yesterday's gale has given place to calm foggy weather.
They greatly impeded our progress up Davis' Strait, but we cheered ourselves with the hope that they would effectually clear a path for us across the northern part of Baffin's Bay.
We found the blue campanula holding a conspicuous place amongst the wild flowers.
We have already passed what is usually the most difficult and dangerous part of the Melville Bay transit.
The boys brought us handfuls of rough garnets, some of them as large as walnuts, receiving with evident satisfaction biscuits in exchange.
After despatching the pilot to announce our arrival to his countrymen at their fishing station, 7 or 8 miles further up, the Doctor and I landed upon the north side to explore.
Some seven or eight individuals lay within, closely packed upon the ground; the heads of old and young, males and females, being just visible above the common covering.
The crevassed parts are of course impassable, but, by following the windings of the smooth surface, I think the interior could be reached.
All this over, the uncertain future loomed ominously before me.
There is an unusual dearth of birds and seals; everything around us is painfully still, excepting when an occasional iceberg splits off from the parent glacier; then we hear a rumbling crash like distant thunder, and the wave occasioned by the launch reaches us in six or seven minutes, and makes the ship roll lazily for a similar period.
The far-off outline of glacier, seen against the eastern sky, has a faint tinge of yellow; it is almost horizontal, and of unknown distance and elevation.
My own three previous transits across it were made in this month.
Its sea-cliffs, about 5 or 6 miles from us, appear comparatively low, yet the icebergs detached from it are of the loftiest description.
Petersen pulled aside the thin membrane of some animal, which hung across the doorway, and served to exclude the wind, but admitted light, for, although past midnight, the sun was up.
I had been up all the previous night, naturally anxious about the ship threading her way through so many dangers, uncertain about being able to complete the number of our sledge-dogs, and much occupied in closing my correspondence, to which there would be an end for at least a year.
She gave me coffee, and some seeds for cultivation at our winter quarters; these were lettuce, spinach, turnips, caraway and peas, the latter being the common kind used on board ship; usually they have only produced leaves on this spot, but once the young peas grew large enough for the table.
After steaming out of our predicament (a matter which we could not accomplish under sail) we ran on to the southward until evening, but found the pack edge still composed of light ice very closely pressed together.
The drift-ice of various descriptions about us is constantly in motion under the influence of mysterious surface and under currents (according to their relative depths of floatation), which whirl them about in every possible direction.
The north end of Disco is almost a precipice to its snow-capped summit, which is 4000 feet high.
Adam did so, and immediately shrank back as though his eyes had opened on pressing danger.
"Yes, yes."
"Go on!" said the other kindly.
The shutters were up and the blinds down.
"It seems to me, sir, that we are in an exceedingly tight place.
"Painful duty!"
The only form recognised by convention is marriage!"
He went with him to London, and, with his influence, the young man obtained the license of the Archbishop of Canterbury for a private marriage.
I wanted especially to talk with you to-night, for I cannot help thinking that the time is fast coming--if it has not come already--when we must take your uncle into our confidence.
So we ought to have some sort of warrant, something to show that we have been mindful of her feelings.
"I have already counted on you, sir, when I ventured to make such a suggestion.
His companion set his mind at rest by saying in a low voice:
"How, I know not; but I am beginning to have an idea."
But that was only the first step in their plans; before going further, however, Adam took his bride off to the Isle of Man.
On the western side of the tower stood a grove of old trees, of forest dimensions.
And that husband should be you."
"Yes, that is so."
Moreover, heavy curtains were drawn across the windows. When Adam commented on this, Sir Nathaniel said in a whisper:
So they both turned in.
We cannot murder Lady Arabella off-hand.
Doom Tower was a lofty structure, situated on an eminence high up in the Peak. The top commanded a wide prospect, ranging from the hills above the Ribble to the near side of the Brow, which marked the northern bound of ancient Mercia.
"Tell me all, and count at any rate on my sympathy, and on my approval and help if I can see my way."
In fact"--with a smile and a blush--"there are several things which I want to do; but I hold my hand and my tongue till I have your approval."
Now we dare not; consideration for his feelings might cost his life.
There is no danger here--at present!"
"Well!"
That semi-human monster out of the pit hates and means to destroy us all--you and me certainly, and probably your uncle.
It was of the early Norman period, less than a century younger than Castra Regis.
She is a thing of the night; and the night may give us some ideas."
Sir Nathaniel then persuaded old Mr. Salton to allow his nephew to spend a few weeks with him at Doom Tower, and it was here that Mimi became Adam's wife.
"The White Worm--yes!"
It was striking ten when Sir Nathaniel left the house, Adam seeing him quietly off.
As the young man followed him with wistful eyes--almost jealous of the privilege which his kind deed was about to bring him--he felt that his own heart was in his friend's breast.
When their cigars were lighted, Sir Nathaniel began.
The sequence is obvious."
It seemed at first quite still; but presently, when Adam's eye became accustomed to it, he could see that it moved as if trembling.
"That is so--but being feminine, she will probably over-reach herself. Now, Adam, it strikes me that, as we have to protect ourselves and others against feminine nature, our strong game will be to play our masculine against her feminine.
For, you see, this is to be a somewhat unusual transaction, and it may be embarrassing to the lady, even to myself.
Be satisfied that my first care is, and shall be, the protection of Mimi Watford.
"I am with you, sir.
Adam grew red and moved uneasily.
They were not grouped closely, but stood a little apart from each other, producing the effect of a row widely planted.
Adam leaned forward, taking care, however, not to press his face against the glass.
Mimi should have some protector whom all the world would recognise.
"When I told you the conclusions at which I had arrived, I put in the foreground that Mimi Watford should, for the sake of her own safety, be removed--and that the monster which had wrought all the harm should be destroyed."
Mimi could not for a long time think at all, or recollect anything, except that Adam loved her and was saving her from a terrible danger.
"And how would you suggest, Adam, that we could combine the momentous question with secrecy?"
"Is this a sudden idea, Adam, a sudden resolution?"
This is a new kind of duty to take on--at my time of life.
"And it is to be kept a secret amongst ourselves?"
"All shall be as you wish, Adam.
It is a duty--and no light or pleasant one, either.
"To marry, a husband is required.
When old Mr. Salton had retired for the night, Adam and Sir Nathaniel returned to the study.
Sir Nathaniel smiled in a fatherly way.
"God bless my soul!
Well, we all live and learn. I suppose the sooner I go the better.
Things went with great regularity at Lesser Hill, so they knew that there would be no interruption to their talk.
The main and crowning recollection was her saying goodbye to Sir Nathaniel, and entrusting to him loving messages, straight from her heart, to Adam Salton, and of his bearing when--with an impulse which she could not check--she put her lips to his and kissed him.
Accordingly Adam proceeded:
"Someone must ask her--as soon as possible!"
"I thought that you, sir, would be so good!"
Sir Nathaniel switched off the electric light, and when the room was pitch dark, he came to Adam, took him by the hand, and led him to a seat set in the southern window.
Adam knocked at Sir Nathaniel's door in the grey of the morning, and, on being bidden, came into the room.
Would the young lady be agreeable to that proceeding?"
"A sudden resolution, sir, but not a sudden idea.
CHAPTER XXI--GREEN LIGHT
The advice and assistance of Sir Nathaniel was a great help to Adam in carrying out his idea of marrying Mimi Watford without publicity.
Also that our unscrupulous opponent will not betray herself!"
Instinctively he laid his hand on his revolver, and stood up ready to protect his wife.
Sir Nathaniel shivered perceptibly.
"I suppose that we--or one of us--must ask her."
"Then how are we to proceed?"
Our first difficulty is to know where to begin.
Adam noticed that from now on, his friend never spoke of Lady Arabella otherwise, except when he wished to divert the suspicion of others.
Perhaps we had better sleep on it.
So the two talked it over and agreed as to points to be borne in mind by the ambassador.
"Yes," said Adam boldly.
Then, seeing that nothing happened, and that the light and all outside the tower remained the same, he softly pulled the curtain over the window.
Everything, every recollection however small, every feeling, seemed to fit into those elemental facts as though they had all been moulded together.
He wished to place a stretch of sea between Mimi and the White Worm, while things matured.
The windows of the study were barred and locked, and heavy dark curtains closed them in.
Then he softly drew back a piece of the curtain and motioned his companion to look out.
"And the marriage should be immediate and secret--or, at least, not spoken of outside ourselves.
"It is a strange job for an early morning!
I mean to go through this business to the bitter end--whatever it may be.
When she had time to think, later on, she wondered when she had any ignorance of the fact that Adam loved her, and that she loved him with all her heart.
With his special knowledge, it was appalling--though the night was now so dark that in reality there was little to be seen.
You had better write a line for me to take with me.
Things have changed since we agreed to keep him out of the trouble.
I have not a shadow of doubt that he will want to be one with us in this. But remember, we are his guests; his name, his honour, have to be thought of as well as his safety."
Therefore we shall have to put things in order for the killing, and in such a way that we cannot be taxed with a crime."
"I do not know, sir!"
This thought made them very vindictive, and they made up their minds to get rid of him.
In the meantime, the Princess had caused a road to be made of pure shining gold leading to her castle, and told her people that whoever came riding straight along it would be the true bridegroom, and they were to admit him.
So he went to him and told him everything; how his brothers had deceived him, and how they had forced him to keep silence.
'Stupid little fellow,' said the Prince, proudly; 'what business is it of yours?' and rode on.
But they had to pass through two more countries where war and famine were raging, and each time the Prince gave his sword and his loaf to the King, and in this way he saved three kingdoms.
The King thought he would be utterly ruined, so great was the destitution.
Soon after, the Prince came to a gorge in the mountains, and the further he rode the narrower it became, till he could go no further. His horse could neither go forward nor turn round for him to dismount; so there he sat, jammed in.
On passing into the next room he found a beautiful Maiden, who rejoiced at his coming.
I would rather die.'
As soon as they got home the youngest Prince took his goblet to the King, so that he might drink of the water which was to make him well; but after drinking only a few drops of the sea water he became more ill than ever.
She embraced him, and said that he had saved her, and should have the whole of her kingdom; and if he would come back in a year she would marry him.
The King at first refused to let him go, but at last he gave his consent.
The Prince said, 'Say it out; whatever it is I will forgive you.'
After a time three wagon loads of gold and precious stones came to the King for his youngest son.
The Prince was horror-stricken, and said, 'Dear Huntsman, do not kill me, give me my life.
'Alas!' said the Huntsman, 'I am to shoot you dead; it is the King's command.'
But he persisted so long that at last the King gave his permission.
Then he went on, and came to a room where there was a beautiful bed freshly made, and as he was very tired he thought he would take a little rest; so he lay down and fell asleep.
'I was carried through the streets at lightning speed, and taken to the room of a Soldier, whom I had to serve as a maid, and do all kinds of menial work.
In the morning when the Princess got up, she went to her Father, and told him that she had had an extraordinary dream.
But before leaving she hid one of her shoes under the bed.
'Oh ho!' she said.
As he stood at his window in the prison, loaded with chains, he saw one of his comrades going by.
'Nothing at this moment,' answered the Soldier. 'You can go home; only be at hand when I call.'
I will keep you one night more, and to-morrow you shall split up some logs for firewood.'
'What do you mean?' the Soldier asked in amazement.
At night, when he again carried off the Princess, the peas certainly fell out of her pocket, but they were useless to trace her by, for the cunning Little Man had scattered peas all over the streets.
The Soldier did not know what to do for a living, and he went sadly away.
Next day the Witch led him to the well, and let him down in a basket.
Again the Princess had to perform her menial duties till cock-crow.
Of course, it was only a dream, and yet I am as tired this morning as if I had done it all.'
My light, which burns blue, and never goes out, has fallen into it, and I want you to bring it back.'
On approaching it, he found a house inhabited by a Witch.
The Little Man heard this plan also; and when the Soldier told him to bring the Princess again, he advised him to put it off.
'That I may smoke a last pipe.'
Then the Little Man flew about like lightning, zig-zag, hither and thither, and whomever he touched with his cudgel fell to the ground, and dared not move.
'Ah ha!
When he was led out to execution he asked a last favour of the King.
'Set about your work at once.
He walked all day, till he reached a wood, where, in the distance, he saw a light.
'You may smoke three,' answered the King. 'But don't imagine that I will therefore grant you your life.'
Then the Soldier drew out his pipe, and lighted it at the Blue Light.
When she had finished, he sat down and ordered her to take his boots off.
What further orders have you, Master?'
But I will be merciful and take you in, if you will do something for me.'
'Pray give me shelter for the night, and something to eat and drink,' he said, 'or I shall perish.'
'What do you wish me to do?' asked the Little Man.
Next day a trial was held, and although the Soldier had done no harm, the Judge sentenced him to death.
When the King said this, the Little Man was standing by, invisible, and heard it all.
The poor Soldier fell on to the damp ground without taking any harm, and the Blue Light burnt as brightly as ever.
I shall be sure to find it.'
At the first cock-crow, the Little Man carried her away to the royal palace, and put her back in bed.
Then he threw them at her, and made her pick them up and clean them.
He had but one ducat in his pocket.
The Little Man soon after appeared, and said: 'Everything is done as you commanded, and the Witch hangs on the gallows.
'Who gives anything to a runaway Soldier, I should like to know.
I can only pay those who serve me.'
The Little Man took him by the hand, and led him through an underground passage; but the Soldier did not forget to take the Blue Light with him.
On the way he showed the Soldier all the treasures the Witch had amassed there, and he took as much gold as he could carry.
Next morning the King ordered the whole town to be searched for his Daughter's shoe, and it was soon found in the Soldier's room.
The Soldier took the whole day over this task, and in the evening the Witch proposed that he should again stay another night.
Fetch the broom and sweep the floor.'
His comrade hurried off and brought him the bundle.
He tapped on the pane, and said:
He saw that he could not escape death.
But what was the good of that?
'I want you to dig up my garden to-morrow.'
'The dream could not have been true,' said the King. 'But I will give you a piece of advice.
'I must do anything that you command,' said the Little Man.
She did everything he ordered without resistance, silently, and with half-shut eyes.
He said he knew no further means against their craftiness; and if the shoe were found, it would be very dangerous for his master.
As soon as the Soldier was alone, he lighted his pipe and summoned the Little Man.
'What is your wish?' asked the King.
He himself, at the request of the Little Man, had gone outside the gates; but before long he was seized and thrown into prison.
'I see,' said the Witch, 'that you can do no more this evening.
He sat for some time feeling very sad, then happening to put his hand into his pocket, he found his pipe still half full.
'There is an old, dry well behind my house.
Now I will have my revenge.'
'You shall only have a very light task to-morrow,' she said.
I have no further need for you.
Before long she came by riding at a furious pace on a tom cat, and screaming at the top of her voice.
'What is it?' asked the Soldier.
There you are!' cried the Soldier.
William John had cried until he could cry no more, but he turned around and sobbed.
Oh, there's the dinner-bell.
"And you're Sampson's errand boy just now?
He told me he didn't need you after the holiday season was over.
"No, thank you," said Bertie.
"We didn't have any."
I'm awfully hungry.
"I don't want to be rubbed--g'way," sobbed William John.
I must be going now.
His back was turned towards the big bay window at one side, and he was busy trying to warm his hands, so he did not see the two small faces looking at him through the frosty panes.
The snow crackled and snapped, the stars were keen and bright, but to Bertie, running down the street with William John's sled thumping merrily behind him, the world was aglow with rosy hope and promise.
I'll get on without them well enough."
"Well, I never saw such laziness!
"Thank you," said Bertie.
Anyway, he is sick, and he wanted to go coasting, and Bertie gave him his mittens.
Edith was at the door-with a parcel.
It was frostier than ever.
The doctor laughed.
"No'm," returned Bertie cheerfully.
He stepped out.
I know Papa will say it is all right.
"Caroline," whispered Edith timidly, "please tell that poor little fellow to come in and get warm--he looks very cold."
"Ain't you gone yet, Bert?" she said sharply.
"Oh, you're Mrs. Ross's nephew then," said Caroline, breaking eggs into her cake-bowl, and whisking them deftly round.
"Well, I didn't expect he would.
He caught cold coasting yesterday.
I'll go anywhere to please you.
"There she goes now," said Amy.
He handed her the little note, and Mrs. Ross stooped down and read it by the fitful gleam of light which came from the cracked stove.
"Yes, honest.
His aunt was stirring some oatmeal mush on the stove.
Listen to him barking in the bedroom there."
It was sunset when Bertie laid an armful of parcels down on the steps of Doctor Forbes's handsome house.
"No'm, I guess not.
William John had already heard it, and when his mother went in to rub his chest with liniment, she found him with the ragged quilt over his head crying.
"Here--he can have mine.
Caroline opened the door and showed him into the parlour, where Edith and Amy were eagerly awaiting him.
I'm very much obliged to you."
Little boys who won't do as they're told always get into trouble.
"What are you musing over?"
"Oh, Papa!" said Edith, her eyes shining like stars.
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Ross, but less unkindly.
"You're a goose!" said his aunt.
He read the little note through three times in order fully to take in its contents, and then went around the rest of the day in deep abstraction as though he was trying to decide some very important question.
Thus committed, Bertie took his courage in both hands and went.
Boys have a queer habit of doing that.
I dare say if Bertie goes they'll send you some candy, or something."
When the plum pudding came on, the doctor, who had been notably silent, leaned back in his chair, placed his finger-tips together, and looked critically at Bertie.
And there was a fur cap and a pair of mittens for him!
He said he couldn't--I asked him."
Bertie's going to Doctor Forbes's to dinner and I can't go."
"And tell him we all wish him a 'Happy New Year.'"
"Yes, sir," said Bertie happily.
I told him he would, but he was bound to go, and now he's laid up for a week.
I need a boy here to run errands and look after my horse.
Her voice seemed to imply that William John had died of cold several times already.
No wonder old Sampson won't keep you longer than the holidays if you're no smarter than that.
"I ain't any better," replied William John mournfully.
"But it is Christmas week," said Edith gravely, "and you know, Caroline, when Mamma was here she used to say that we ought to be particularly thoughtful of others who were not so happy or well-off as we were at this time."
"These are for William John," she said simply, "so that you can have your own.
"Well, I'll expect you on Monday, remember."
"No, sir; but," he added more cheerfully, "I guess I'll find something if I hunt around lively.
Then he suddenly pulled off his mittens and held them out.
"Come on Monday then.
"I've heard of him; a pretty hard time he has of it, I think."
"How do you do?" he said, giving Bertie's hand a hearty shake.
Goodbye, Bertie."
"I wouldn't go there all alone."
"Robert Ross, ma'am."
Bertie's face sobered at once.
"Well, you can please yourself," she said as she handed it back, "but William John couldn't go if he had ten invitations.
And William John doesn't hardly ever get out."
He was quite sure he could never forget this wonderful New Year.
"Happy New Year, Bertie," cried Amy.
The caution came too late.
Still, he did not regret having lent his mittens to William John--poor, pale, sickly little William John, who had so few pleasures.
As for that dinner--Bertie might sometimes have seen such a repast in delightful dreams, but certainly never out of them.
"There now!" he said in tearless despair.
Bertie shook his head sorrowfully.
Bertie looked soberly down at his old, well-darned mittens.
After dinner they played games, and cracked nuts, and roasted apples, until the clock struck nine; then Bertie got up to go.
He brought up the parcels, and we asked him in to get warm.
He was carefully dressed in his well-worn best suit and a neat white collar.
And Edie gave him her blue mittens for William John."
"I don't need them--much.
But William John refused to be comforted.
"Oh, well, I suppose you are going to have a good time on New Year's instead."
Who is William John?"
You'll have a holiday on New Year's anyhow; whether you'll have anything to eat or not is a different question."
I reckon yo're right.
'No, I see.
'Don't let us talk of what fancies come into your head when you are feverish.
Mary Higgins, the slatternly younger sister, had endeavoured as well as she could to tidy up the house for the expected visit.
I lived there for some years.
I will come again as soon as I can; but if it should not be to-morrow, or the next day, or even a week or a fortnight hence, don't think I've forgotten you.
A SOFT BREEZE IN A SULTRY PLACE
'In London,' said Margaret, much amused.
'But, papa,' said Margaret, with hesitation, 'do you know, I think that is the flush of pain.'
'Then, you see, she can't be fretting after them, eh?
And now I must go.
I am quite sure she would not.
Sometimes I'm so tired out I think I cannot enjoy heaven without a piece of rest first.
'Fluff?' said Margaret, inquiringly.
'But you'll let me know if you are worse.
'Bessy--we have a Father in Heaven.'
And we, on divers shores now cast, Shall meet, our perilous voyage past, All in our Father's house at last!' R. C. TRENCH.
'Yes!
'I wish father would not speak as he does.
I wish you could see it. I cannot tell you half its beauty.
We have an old faithful servant, almost a friend, who wants help, but who is very particular; and it would not be right to plague her with giving her any assistance that would really be an annoyance and an irritation.'
'No, papa,' said Margaret, sadly.
'Yes!
I know it,' moaned she, turning her head uneasily from side to side.
'London!
Bessy herself lay on a squab, or short sofa, placed under the window.
And now that Margaret was there, and had taken a chair by her, Bessy lay back silent, and content to look at Margaret's face, and touch her articles of dress, with a childish admiration of their fineness of texture.
'How old are you?' asked Margaret.
'Did not your father know about it?' asked Margaret.
I began to work in a carding-room soon after, and the fluff got into my lungs and poisoned me.'
'Thank you, dear papa.
He walked uneasily up and down the room.
From that day forwards Mrs. Hale became more and more of a suffering invalid.
'Don't be afraid, Bessy,' said Margaret, laying her hand on the girl's; 'God can give you more perfect rest than even idleness on earth, or the dead sleep of the grave can do.'
'Nonsense, Margaret.
Although the day was hot, there burnt a large fire in the grate, making the whole place feel like an oven.
There had been rough-stoning done in the middle of the floor, while the flags under the chairs and table and round the walls retained their dark unwashed appearance.
I'll not mistrust yo' no more.
She could not speak for a moment or two for the emotion she was trying to keep down.
'And I too am nineteen.' She thought, more sorrowfully than Bessy did, of the contrast between them.
'That doubt and trouble, fear and pain, And anguish, all, are shadows vain, That death itself shall not remain;
You are the person not well, I think.
God knows I should be the first to take the alarm if your mother were really ill; we always saw when she had her headaches at Helstone, even without her telling us.
That's all.'
Send for the doctor to-morrow for yourself; and then, if it will make your mind easier, he can see your mother.'
But my home was in a forest; in the country.
And yet, though every leaf may seem still, there is a continual rushing sound of movement all around--not close at hand.
She saw it in dreams more vivid than life, and as she fell away to slumber at nights her memory wandered in all its pleasant places.
Margaret had never spoken of Helstone since she left it, except just naming the place incidentally.
'Then, here and there, there are wide commons, high up as if above the very tops of the trees--'
She was very much more feeble than on the previous day, and tired with raising herself at every step to look out and see if it was Margaret coming.
So don't let me hear of these foolish morbid ideas.
'Nineteen, come July.'
'I know it!
As she went along the crowded narrow streets, she felt how much of interest they had gained by the simple fact of her having learnt to care for a dweller in them.
'I never knew why folk in the Bible cared for soft raiment afore.
She never would conceal anything seriously affecting her health from me: would she, eh, Margaret?
Bessy moved uneasily; then she said:
I would not harm a hair of your head.
'Indeed, Margaret, you are growing fanciful!
CHAPTER XIII
I tell you, you are too fanciful.
Now on these commons I reckon there is but little noise?'
'I dunno.
I felt smothered like down below.
'About Mary,' said Bessy.
'I'm glad of that.
There are great trees standing all about it, with their branches stretching long and level, and making a deep shade of rest even at noonday.
I've spoken very wickedly.
I may be busy.'
Yet, if we will one Guide obey, The dreariest path, the darkest way Shall issue out in heavenly day;
It will make me happier, indeed.' And she went up to him to kiss him.
'I'm very wicked.
One morning Mrs. Strickland sent me round a note to say that she was giving a dinner-party that evening, and one of her guests had failed her.
The respectability of the party was portentous. The women were too nice to be well dressed, and too sure of their position to be amusing.
"Why have you never let me meet him?" I asked.
During the summer I met Mrs. Strickland not infrequently. I went now and then to pleasant little luncheons at her flat, and to rather more formidable tea-parties.
But he's awfully good and kind."
He doesn't even make much money on the Stock Exchange.
We began to chat about vintages and tobacco.
"Why do nice women marry dull men?"
It was impossible not to see that Mrs. Strickland was an excellent housekeeper. And you felt sure that she was an admirable mother.
"I think I should like him very much."
They talked of the political situation and of golf, of their children and the latest play, of the pictures at the Royal Academy, of the weather and their plans for the holidays.
She wants to be in the movement. I fancy she's rather simple, poor dear, and she thinks we're all wonderful.
I was very young, and perhaps she liked the idea of guiding my virgin steps on the hard road of letters; while for me it was pleasant to have someone I could go to with my small troubles, certain of an attentive ear and reasonable counsel.
"Would you like to?"
The dining-room was inconveniently crowded.
He passed round the port again and handed us cigars.
New arrivals claimed my host's attention, and I was left to myself.
She had a flat in Westminster, overlooking the unfinished cathedral, and because we lived in the same neighbourhood we felt friendly disposed to one another. The Army and Navy Stores are a bond of union between all who dwell between the river and St. James's Park.
"He doesn't pretend to be a genius.
Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk.
Now and then she invited members of it to her house if they showed an appreciation of her talent and entertained with proper lavishness.
Rose Waterford was a cynic.
Mrs. Strickland had the gift of sympathy.
I was conscious of my ignorance, and if Mrs. Strickland was a well-known writer I thought it as well to ascertain the fact before I spoke to her.
After all, it pleases her to ask us to luncheon, and it doesn't hurt us.
The dining-room was in the good taste of the period.
I had nothing to say and so sat silent, trying politely to show interest in the conversation; and because I thought no one was in the least concerned with me, examined Strickland at my ease.
"I don't know that he's very clever," she said one day, when I was looking at the photograph, "but I know he's good.
He looked commonplace.
She asked me to stop the gap.
They're both at school."
He had his mother's candid brow and fine, reflective eyes.
He looked clean, healthy, and normal.
"Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable."
"She gives luncheon-parties.
It was the kind of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come. There were ten people.
There are bosoms on which so many tears have been shed that I cannot bedew them with mine. Mrs. Strickland used her advantage with tact.
Her dark hair was elaborately dressed. She was the only woman of the three whose face was free of make-up, and by contrast with the others she seemed simple and unaffected.
"They adore one another.
It was only neighbourly to accept.
I told her that if she wanted writers she must feed them well."
He gave you somewhat the idea of a coachman dressed up for the occasion.
"Yes; I think they are more like me than their father."
He has a charming character."
The men were solid. There was about all of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.
It was a thoroughly dull party from the beginning, but if you will come I shall be uncommonly grateful. And you and I can have a little chat by ourselves."
She looked upon life as an opportunity for writing novels and the public as her raw material.
I noticed nothing about her except that she had a pleasant voice.
He was clean shaven, and his large face looked uncomfortably naked. His hair was reddish, cut very short, and his eyes were small, blue or grey.
She smiled to cover her shyness, and I fancied she had a fear that I would make the sort of gibe that such a confession could hardly have failed to elicit from Rose Waterford. She hesitated a little.
They met with indifference, and would part with relief.
He's very quiet. He's not in the least interested in literature or the arts."
I believe he's a stockbroker.
When, in the enthusiasm of my youth, I remarked on this to Rose Waterford, she said:
"You see, I happen to be his wife.
Why?
"Oh yes; he's something in the city.
Perhaps he did not talk very much, and I fancied there was towards the end a look of fatigue in the faces of the women on either side of him. They were finding him heavy.
I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs. Strickland had children.
My engagements were few, and I was glad to accept.
When Mrs. Strickland introduced me to her husband, he gave me a rather indifferent hand to shake.
"You know, he's not at all literary," she said.
"Admirable advice," I answered.
"Because intelligent men won't marry nice women."
When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine day and her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.
No one could say such bitter things; on the other hand, no one could do more charming ones.
But when at last I met Charles Strickland, it was under circumstances which allowed me to do no more than just make his acquaintance.
The K.C. told us of a case he was engaged in, and the Colonel talked about polo.
Perhaps her naivete was her greatest charm.
When I arrived, a little late, because in my fear of being too early I had walked three times round the cathedral, I found the party already complete.
"Did you think the food was good?
We took a fancy to one another.
"What does she do?" I asked.
"It's only decent to warn you that you will be bored to extinction.
"He's a perfect philistine."
There was never a pause, and the noise grew louder.
Miss Waterford was there and Mrs. Jay, Richard Twining and George Road.
But there was no general conversation. Each one talked to his neighbour; to his neighbour on the right during the soup, fish, and entree; to his neighbour on the left during the roast, sweet, and savoury.
Everyone seemed to be talking, and I, sitting in silence, felt awkward; but I was too shy to break into any of the groups that seemed absorbed in their own affairs. Miss Waterford was a good hostess, and seeing my embarrassment came up to me.
His opinion, for example, of Sir Henry Wotton's "Verses on the Queen of Bohemia"-that "there are few finer things in our language," is untenable and absurd.
In such lines we can perceive not one of those higher attributes of Poesy which belong to her in all circumstances and throughout all time.
With the two former ethics were the end-with the two latter the means.
But in this view even the "metaphysical verse" of Cowley is but evidence of the simplicity and single-heartedness of the man.
We can not bring ourselves to believe that the selections of the "Book of Gems" are such as will impart to a poetical reader the clearest possible idea of the beauty of the school-but if the intention had been merely to show the school's character, the attempt might have been considered successful in the highest degree.
Words and their rhythm have varied.
Here every thing is art, nakedly, or but awkwardly concealed.
The criticisms of the editor do not particularly please us.
The poet of the "Creation" wished, by highly artificial verse, to inculcate what he supposed to be moral truth-the poet of the "Ancient Mariner" to infuse the Poetic Sentiment through channels suggested by analysis.
A vigor apparent only when we keep in mind the artless character of the speaker and the four feet of the favorite, one for each wind.
There are long passages now before us of the most despicable trash, with no merit whatever beyond that of their antiquity..
"And trod as if on the four winds!"
Almost every devout admirer of the old bards, if demanded his opinion of their productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight; on being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and in general handling.
They used little art in composition. Their writings sprang immediately from the soul-and partook intensely of that soul's nature.
No prepossession for the mere antique (and in this case we can imagine no other prepossession) should induce us to dignify with the sacred name of poetry, a series, such as this, of elaborate and threadbare compliments, stitched, apparently, together, without fancy, without plausibility, and without even an attempt at adaptation.
Something more of this will be found in Corbet's "Farewell to the Fairies!" We copy a portion of Marvell's "Maiden lamenting for her Fawn," which we prefer-not only as a specimen of the elder poets, but in itself as a beautiful poem, abounding in pathos, exquisitely delicate imagination and truthfulness-to anything of its species:
His enthusiasm is too general and too vivid not to be false.
The one finished by complete failure what he commenced in the grossest misconception; the other, by a path which could not possibly lead him astray, arrived at a triumph which is not the less glorious because hidden from the profane eyes of the multitude.
And he was in this but a type of his school-for we may as well designate in this way the entire class of writers whose poems are bound up in the volume before us, and throughout all of whom there runs a very perceptible general character.
"Had it lived long, it would have been Lilies without, roses within."
Walled about with disrespect; From all these and this dull air A fit object for despair, She hath taught me by her might To draw comfort and delight."
Verses which affect us to-day with a vivid delight, and which delight, in many instances, may be traced to the one source, quaintness, must have worn in the days of their construction, a very commonplace air.
This quaintness is, in fact, a very powerful adjunct to ideality, but in the case in question it arises independently of the author's will, and is altogether apart from his intention.
"And its pure virgin limbs to fold In whitest sheets of lilies cold,"
No general error evinces a more thorough confusion of ideas than the error of supposing Donne and Cowley metaphysical in the sense wherein Wordsworth and Coleridge are so.
How exceedingly vigorous, too, is the line,
and these things being its "chief" delights-and then the pre-eminent beauty and naturalness of the concluding lines, whose very hyperbole only renders them more true to nature when we consider the innocence, the artlessness, the enthusiasm, the passionate girl, and more passionate admiration of the bereaved child--
His Grace thought of his game.
It was not its length nor its breadth,--but its height--ah, that was appalling!--There was no ceiling--certainly none--but a dense whirling mass of fiery-colored clouds.
There were some foils upon a table--some points also.
The corners of the room were rounded into niches.
Hereupon his Grace rubbed his eyes, yawned, shrugged his shoulders, reflected.
But the chances--the chances!
The hand is out.
KEATS fell by a criticism.
Astoreth!--a thousand and the same! And Rafaelle has beheld them!
"Ha! ha!
But the Duc's heart is fainting within him.
A spectator would have thought of Francis and Charles.
Unable to restrain his feelings, his Grace swallows an olive.
The clock strikes!
"Who am I?--ah, true!
The cards were dealt.
He is not, however, as you suppose, dizzy with magnificence, nor drunk with the ecstatic breath of those innumerable censers.
Assist me, Spirit of Apicius!
In the fourth niche the statue was veiled; it was not colossal.
They play.
I took thee, just now, from a rose-wood coffin inlaid with ivory.
O love!--who, gazing on those forbidden beauties, shall have eyes for the dainty devices of the golden frames that besprinkled, like stars, the hyacinth and the porphyry walls?
Who was it died of "The Andromache"?
He could not help imagining that the glorious, the voluptuous, the never-dying melodies which pervaded that hall, as they passed filtered and transmuted through the alchemy of the enchanted window-panes, were the wailings and the howlings of the hopeless and the damned!
He buries his face in the pillow.
De L'Omelette placed his hand upon his heart.
no, sir, I shall not strip.
His Grace was all care, all attention--his Majesty all confidence.
Astarte!
His Majesty counts heavily, smiles, and is taking wine.
At this moment the door gently opens to the sound of soft music, and lo! the most delicate of birds is before the most enamored of men!
The apartment was superb.
A golden cage bore the little winged wanderer, enamored, melting, indolent, to the Chaussee D'Antin, from its home in far Peru.
"I have sinned--c'est vrai--but, my good sir, consider!--you have no actual intention of putting such--such barbarous threats into execution."
O luxury!
Yes, Rafaelle has been here, for did he not paint the--? and was he not consequently damned?
"Why, surely you are not serious," retorted De L'Omelette.
I am Baal-Zebub, Prince of the Fly.
"Strip, indeed! very pretty i' faith!
He measures two points, and, with a grace inimitable, offers his Majesty the choice.
His Majesty looked chagrined.
His Majesty did not think; he shuffled.
"No what?" said his majesty--"come, sir, strip!"
Thou wast curiously scented, and labelled as per invoice.
Having become satisfied of his identity, he took a bird's eye view of his whereabouts.
Three of these were filled with statues of gigantic proportions.
But the paintings!--Kupris!
The paintings--the paintings!
"No," said the man; "what was there to wish for?"
He found the sea was no longer green; it was still calm, but dark violet and gray.
On each side of her stood the gentlemen-at-arms in two rows, each one a little smaller than the other, from giants two miles high, down to the tiniest dwarf no bigger than my little finger.
"I won't bear it any longer; wilt thou go?"
"Nay, husband," she answered, quite uneasily, "I find the time hangs very heavy on my hands.
"Look!" said the woman, "is not this nice?"
The flounder might have given us a bigger house.
"I will think about that," said the woman, and with that they both went to bed.
"Ha! can I not cause the sun and the moon to rise?
"Husband," she answered, "go to the flounder.
Soldiers marched up and down before the doors, blowing their trumpets and beating their drums.
He stood by it and said:
Then the man went away, thinking he would find no house, but when he got back he found a great stone palace, and his wife standing at the top of the steps, waiting to go in.
"He can do it easily enough, and willingly into the bargain.
He shrieked out, but could hardly make himself heard:
He rubbed his eyes and said:
"What?" said the woman.
So he stood there, and said:
The man went home and found his wife no longer in the old hut, but a pretty little cottage stood in its place, and his wife was sitting on a bench by the door.
I don't want to be king."
THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE
"Yes," said she; "now I am emperor."
I will be king."
"Yes," said she; "now I am pope."
"Didst thou not wish for anything then?" asked the good wife.
If he can make a king, he can also make an emperor.
The flounder said to him: "Look here, fisherman, don't you kill me; I am no common flounder, I am an enchanted prince!
If he can make an emperor, he can make a pope.
Emperor I will be."
"No, wife," he said, "I dare not tell him.
"Flounder, flounder in the sea, Prythee, hearken unto me: My wife, Ilsebil, will have her own way Whatever I wish, whatever I say."
"Go back.
He stood before her, and said, "Alas, wife, art thou now king?"
The man's heart was heavy, and he was very unwilling to go.
They went inside and found a pretty sitting-room, and a bedroom with a bed in it, a kitchen, and a larder furnished with everything of the best in tin and brass, and every possible requisite.
So there he stood gazing at her, and it was like looking at a shining sun.
Go to the flounder.
"I am king, and thou art but my husband.
Be off now!"
"Alas, wife," he said, "art thou better off for being pope?" At first she sat as stiff as a post, without stirring.
"Alas, wife," said the man, "whatever dost thou want to be king for?
"Alas," said the man, "what am I to go back there for?"
See here, now, could we not be king over all this land?
I will be king."
Just go!"
Outside there was a little yard with chickens and ducks, and a little garden full of vegetables and fruit.
He said to himself: "It's not right." But at last he went.
There is only one emperor in the country; and emperor the flounder cannot make thee, that he can't."
"Alas!" said the man; "I had to call you, for my wife said I ought to have wished for something, as I caught you.
"Husband," she said, "pope I will be; so go at once.
"Never mind," said his wife; "do thou but go to the flounder, and he will manage it."
"Alas," he said, "she wants to be Lord of the Universe."
He stood by it and said:
Go immediately.
The doors of the saloon were thrown wide open and he saw the whole court assembled.
He went in, and saw his wife sitting on a huge throne made of solid gold.
I don't want to go back; as likely as not he'll be angry."
Now I am emperor, I mean to be pope!
It tossed to and fro, and a sharp wind blew over it, and the man trembled.
The flounder cannot make thee pope."
The walls were hung with beautiful tapestries, and the rooms were furnished with golden chairs and tables, while rich carpets covered the floors, and crystal chandeliers hung from the ceilings. The tables groaned under every kind of delicate food and the most costly wines.
He shivered and shook, and his knees trembled.
"Now she must go back to her old hovel," said the flounder; "and there you will find her."
Emperor and pope he can make, but that is indeed beyond him.
In the distance the ships were being tossed to and fro on the waves, and he heard them firing signals of distress.
"Go thou must.
He had to go, but he was quite frightened.
"Go back.
There was still a little patch of blue in the sky among the dark clouds, but toward the south they were red and heavy, as in a bad storm.
He thought he must have heard wrong.
Pope she is," said the flounder.
Her husband stood still, and said, "Wife, art thou now emperor?"
Next morning the wife woke up first; day was just dawning, and from her bed she could see the beautiful country around her.
"Yes," she said; "now I am king."
"Alas, wife!" said the man; "the cottage is good enough for us; what should we do with a castle?"
"Alas," said the man, half scared, "my wife wants a big stone castle."
"Alas, flounder," he said, "my wife wants to be emperor."
She doesn't want to live in our miserable hovel any longer; she wants a pretty cottage."
And as he went, he thought, "This won't end well; emperor is too shameless.
"Nay, wife," said the man; "the flounder gave us the cottage.
To which it answered, as usual:
Here, I will give you one of them!"
"How have you found your way to our house?" further asked the dwarfs.
The wicked stepmother was invited to the feast.
They were very friendly, however, and inquired her name.
The second, "Who has eaten off my plate?"
So she told them how her stepmother had tried to kill her, how the huntsman had spared her life, and how she had run the whole day through, till at last she had found their little house.
it answered:
Long, long years, did Snowdrop lie in her coffin unchanged, looking as though asleep, for she was still white as snow, red as blood, and her hair was black as ebony.
Then he said to the dwarfs, "Let me have the coffin!
So she began to run, and ran over the sharp stones, and through the thorns; and the wild beasts passed close to her, but did her no harm.
Snowdrop, well pleased, went with him, and they were married with much state and grandeur.
So her envious heart had as much repose as an envious heart can ever know.
The cruel stepmother walked up to her mirror when she reached home, and said:
Be careful of thyself, and open the door to no one if we are not at home."
The third, "Who has taken part of my loaf?"
The prince answered joyfully, "Thou art with me," and told her what had happened, saying, "I love thee more dearly than anything else in the world.
the mirror at last replied,
"This time," said she, "I will think of some means that shall destroy her utterly;" and with the help of witchcraft, in which she was skilful, she made a poisoned comb.
The others came running, and each called out, "Some one has also been lying in my bed."
Then she went to a secret and lonely chamber, where no one ever disturbed her, and compounded an apple of deadly poison.
Ripe and rosy cheeked, it was so beautiful to look upon, that all who saw it longed for it; but it brought death to any who should eat it.
Let me lace thee for once properly." Snowdrop feared no harm, so stepped in front of her, and allowed her bodice to be fastened up with the new lace.
The seventh, "Who has drunk out of my little cup?"
"Oh, heaven!" they cried, "what a lovely child!" and were so pleased that they would not wake her, but let her sleep on in the little bed. The seventh dwarf slept with all his companions in turn, an hour with each, and so they spent the night.
She was a handsome lady, but proud and haughty, and could not endure that any one should surpass her in beauty.
There stood a little table, covered with a white tablecloth, on which were seven little plates (each little plate with its own little spoon)--also seven little knives and forks, and seven little cups. Round the walls stood seven little beds close together, with sheets as white as snow.
When the apple was ready, she painted her face, disguised herself as a peasant-woman, and journeyed over the seven hills to where the seven dwarfs dwelt.
When they had found a spring that was dancing brightly over the stones, the brother stooped down to drink; but his sister heard a voice in its murmur, which said, "Whoever drinks of me will become a tiger." Eagerly the little sister cried, "I pray thee, brother, do not drink, lest thou become a wild beast and tear me to pieces."
"How is my baby?
But when it was midnight, and all the world was asleep, the nurse who was sitting beside the cradle, and who was the only person awake, saw the door open and the true queen come in.
When the king and his huntsmen saw the white roe with the gold band once more, they all rode after him, but he was too quick and agile for them.
But the king looked kindly at her, took her hand and said, "Wilt thou go with me to my castle, and be my dear wife?"
At last the maiden said, "Never mind, dear Roe, I will never forsake you." So she took off her golden garter and put it round the roe's neck, then pulled some rushes and wove them into a cord.
His sister cried and said, "Now you will go and be killed, and leave me here alone in the forest, forsaken by all the world; I will not let you go out."
The king replied, "He shall remain with you as long as you live, and shall want for nothing."
A brother took his sister by the hand and said, "Since our mother is dead we have no more happy hours: our stepmother beats us every day, and whenever we come near her she kicks us away.
At this moment he came springing in, his sister tied the cord of rushes round his neck, led him with her own hand, and they all left the little house together.
She changed her also into the shape of the young queen, all except her one eye, and she could not give her another.
The nurse could not answer her; but when she had disappeared she went to the king, and told him all about it, upon which he cried, "What does it mean?
But under the bath they had first lighted a great furnace-fire, so that the beautiful young queen could not save herself from being scorched alive.
The little sister was greatly alarmed when she saw her white roe was wounded; she washed off the blood, laid herbs upon the place, and said, "Go now to thy bed, dear Roe, and get well."
She then shook up the pillows, laid it down again, and covered it with the counterpane.
Come, we will go out into the wide world together."
The brother did not drink, but said, "I will wait till I come to the next spring, but then I must drink, say what you will, for my thirst is getting unbearable."
When the sun was set the king said to his huntsman, "Now come and show me the little house you saw in the wood." And when he was before the door he knocked and cried, "Dear little sister, let me in." Immediately the door opened, the king entered, and there stood a maiden more beautiful than any one he had ever seen.
Now off sprang the roe, and was so happy to find himself in the open air.
This time she said--
"We will have another hunt to-morrow," said the king.
The little sister cried over her poor bewitched brother, and the roe cried also as he rested mournfully beside her.
"How is my baby?
She replied, "Yes, I am thy dear wife;" and as soon as she had spoken these words she was restored to life, and became once more fresh and blooming.
The next morning, when they awoke, the sun was already high in the heavens, and shone down very hot on the tree.
After this she passed out, quite silently, through the door; and the nurse inquired next morning of the sentinels whether any one had gained entrance into the palace during the night, but they answered, "No--we have seen nobody." She continued to come in the same way for several nights, though she spoke never a word: the nurse always saw her, but never dared to mention it.
Through the trees might be heard the blowing of horns, the barking of dogs, and the joyous cries of the hunters, which when the little roe heard he was almost beside himself with delight.
She gives us hard crusts and nasty scraps to eat, and the dog under the table fares better than we do, for he does sometimes get a nice bit thrown to him. It would break our mother's heart if she knew it!
How is my roe? I can come but this once, then for ever must go."
She took the baby out of the cradle, laid it in her arms, and nursed it tenderly.
In the evening he came to the nursery, and there at midnight the dead queen appeared, and said--
She was now queen, and they lived a long time very happily together; while the roe was petted and taken care of, and played all day about the palace-garden.
BROTHER AND SISTER.
How is my roe? I can come but once more, then for ever must go;"
Next morning the hunt began again, and when the roe heard the blast of the horns, and the "Ho! ho!" of the hunters, he could not rest, and cried, "Sister, open the door; I must go."
When some time had passed, the queen at last began to speak, and said--
Upon which the king could no longer contain himself, but sprang forward and cried, "Thou canst surely be no one but my own dear wife!"
The king did not dare to address her, but watched again the following night.
When that was done the old witch took her own daughter, put a cap on her, and laid her on the bed in the queen's room.
I will myself watch by the child to-night."
This chase lasted the whole day; at last, towards evening, the hunters surrounded him, and wounded him with an arrow in the foot, so that he was forced to limp and go slowly.
Her own daughter, who was as ugly as the night and had only one eye, was continually reproaching her, and saying, "It is I who ought to have been made queen."
The king and his huntsmen saw the beautiful beast and set off after him, but they could not catch him; for when they thought they had certainly got him, he sprang over a bush and disappeared.
How is my roe? I can come again twice, then for ever must go."
Upon which said the brother, "Sister, I am thirsty; I would go and have a drink if I knew where there was a spring: I think I can hear one trickling." He got up, took his sister by the hand, and they went to look for the spring.
They had lived alone in this way during a long time, when it happened that the king of the country held a great hunt in the forest.
The daughter was taken forth into the woods, where the wild beasts tore her in pieces, and the witch was burnt.
"Never mind," said the old witch to console her; "when the time comes I will manage it."
"But," said she, "when you return at evening I shall have shut my door against the wild huntsmen, and in order that I may know you, knock and say, 'My little sister, let me in;' but if you do not say so, I shall not open the door."
We are about to pay a visit to the very bottom of the crater.
After some moments he spoke out.
Because the monster has slept soundly since 1219, does it follow that he is never to wake?
I could not lie down in search of sleep without dreaming of eruptions.
"I heartily agree with you, my dear uncle," was my somewhat hopeful rejoinder.
Good, still.
I laid before him my fears, and then drew back in order to let him get his passion over at his ease.
Well and good.
I sought him.
"That, however, is not the whole matter to be considered.
I however made no remark.
It was almost too much happiness to be true.
In fact, I was only too anxious not to interrupt him, and allowed him to reflect at his leisure.
Now, we have no evidence to prove that Sneffels is really extinct.
"Let us consider the matter," I said to myself; "we are going to ascend the Sneffels mountain.
"It is now six hundred years since Sneffels has spoken, but though now reduced to a state of utter silence, he may speak again.
"If he does wake what is to become of us?"
"I have been thinking about the matter," he resumed.
Others have done it and did not perish from that course.
"I have been thinking about the matter," he said, in the quietest tone in the world.
What proof have we that an eruption is not shortly about to take place?
These were questions worth thinking about, and upon them I reflected long and deeply.
So it isn't quite built on the ten-to-one ratio of your high-speed steamers; but its lines are sufficiently long, and their tapering gradual enough, so that the displaced water easily slips past and poses no obstacle to the ship's movements.
You're able to lie flush with the surface of the ocean, that I understand. But lower down, while diving beneath that surface, isn't your submersible going to encounter a pressure, and consequently undergo an upward thrust, that must be assessed at one atmosphere per every thirty feet of water, hence at about one kilogram per each square centimeter?"
"Here, Professor Aronnax, are the different dimensions of this boat now transporting you.
"I'm all ears, captain."
Consequently, I'd have to increase my weight from 1,507.2 metric tons to 1,513.77.
"What's that, sir?"
In fact, thanks to this cellular arrangement, it has the resistance of a stone block, as if it were completely solid. Its plating can't give way; it's self-adhering and not dependent on the tightness of its rivets; and due to the perfect union of its materials, the solidarity of its construction allows it to defy the most violent seas.
Clear?"
"Now then, if water isn't absolutely incompressible, at least it compresses very little.
Some Figures
"Fine, captain, but now we come to a genuine difficulty.
"The Nautilus is made up of two hulls, one inside the other; between them, joining them together, are iron T-bars that give this ship the utmost rigidity.
So the added weight would only be 6.57 metric tons."
It's a very long cylinder with conical ends. It noticeably takes the shape of a cigar, a shape already adopted in London for several projects of the same kind. The length of this cylinder from end to end is exactly seventy meters, and its maximum breadth of beam is eight meters.
"Precisely, sir."
"I accept your calculations, captain," I replied, "and I'd be ill-mannered to dispute them, since your daily experience bears them out. But at this juncture, I have a hunch that we're still left with one real difficulty."
"That's obvious," I replied.
"These two dimensions allow you to obtain, via a simple calculation, the surface area and volume of the Nautilus.
captain placed before my eyes a working drawing that gave the ground plan, cross section, and side view of the Nautilus.
Then he began his description as follows:
These ballast tanks exist within easy access in the lower reaches of the Nautilus.
In fact, according to the most recent calculations, this reduction is only .0000436 per atmosphere, or per every thirty feet of depth.
So I was obliged not to exceed this weight while building it to the aforesaid dimensions.
"Clear," I replied.
"That's all?"
"Then unless you fill up the whole Nautilus, I don't see how you can force it down into the heart of these liquid masses."
The other children, clustered together in affright, began to understand the mystery of the scene; but the ideas came slowly, for their brains were dull and languid of perception.
It might be a poor chance, but it would be a chance.'
Margaret said something, she hardly knew what, her throat and mouth were so dry, and the children's noise completely prevented her from being heard.
We wasn't friends; and now he's dead.'
You have made him what he is!'
Listen!
He had that grace.
'We have had our sorrow too, since we saw you,' said Mr. Hale.
The men spoke together, and then one of them came up to Higgins, who would have fain shrunk back into his house.
All the street turned out to see, and, seeing, to accompany the procession, each one questioning the bearers, who answered almost reluctantly at last, so often had they told the tale.
They put the door down carefully upon the stones, and all might see the poor drowned wretch--his glassy eyes, one half-open, staring right upwards to the sky.
But very poorly, I'm afraid.'
'Asking for work.
Margaret was hesitating whether she should say what was in her mind; she was unwilling to irritate one who was already gloomy and despondent enough.
He lay with his face downwards.
Johnny's cry was loudest of them all, though he knew not why he cried, poor little fellow.
But Margaret saw that he would like to be asked for the explanation.
'I cannot say.
'I will go,' said she.
He was rather disorderly, to be sure, with a black unshaven beard of several days' growth, making his pale face look yet paler, and a jacket which would have been all the better for patching.
She sate down in the rocking chair, and held the woman upon her knees, her head lying on Margaret's shoulder.
'You are quite right.
He was resting his head on his two hands, and looking down into the fire, so she could not read the expression on his face.
Margaret laid her hand on the woman's arm to arrest her attention.
'Oh, don't blame him,' said Margaret. 'He felt it deeply, I'm sure---- '
It's the only way working men can get their rights, by all joining together.
'How long is it since he went away?'
He did not get up when he saw them, though Margaret could read the welcome in his eye.
Neither of them spoke for a moment or two.
'We owe Mary some money,' said Mr. Hale, before Margaret's sharp pressure on his arm could arrest the words.
'If hoo takes it, I'll turn her out o' doors.
'He were found drowned.
'But he is dead--he is drowned!'
'No; to be sure not!'
Six men walked in the middle of the road, three of them being policemen. They carried a door, taken off its hinges, upon their shoulders, on which lay some dead human creature; and from each side of the door there were constant droppings.
Fire's welly out,' said he, giving it a vigorous poke, as if to turn attention away from himself.
I think he said it was the worst tyrant of all.
He was not there.
'You're quite welcome,' said Mr. Hale.
'But I've getten six children, sir, and the eldest not eight years of age.
'He did you harm?' asked Margaret.
'Sit ye down, sit ye down.
I'm but an ailing creature mysel'--I've been ailing this long time.'
It was a long while before he spoke.
Well!
Margaret heard a noise at the door.
She looked round, and saw a smile pass between her father and the woman.
'I reckon yo'n some way of earning your bread.
Where's John?' Weak as she was, she shook Margaret to force out an answer.
'Yes,' replied Mr. Hale, smiling.
The fore part of his head was bald; but the hair grew thin and long behind, and every separate lock was a conduit for water.
'No: to be sure not!'
'Is it because of the strike you're out of work?' asked Margaret gently.
'And good words are--?'
'Then would it not have been far better to have left him alone, and not forced him to join the Union?
'No,' said Margaret; 'I could not tell her all at once.'
Why, to Hamper's.
Gathering, gathering along the narrow street, came a hollow, measured sound; now forcing itself on their attention.
I have some independent property, but my intention in settling in Milton was to become a private tutor.'
Anything fresh?'
Margaret took up the child and put him into her arms.
It's a great power: it's our only power.
Many voices were hushed and low: many steps were heard not moving onwards, at least not with any rapidity or steadiness of motion, but as if circling round one spot. Yes, there was one distinct, slow tramp of feet, which made itself a clear path through the air, and reached their ears; the measured laboured walk of men carrying a heavy burden.
She tried again.
Do you know?
Welcome to the staircase.
But it was too tiresome and unbearable to go on thinking and thinking about this.
Suddenly he withdrew his arm, turned quickly to the window and stood facing it. Another moment passed.
Why is this door locked?
"That's as you like, but Sofya Semyonovna is not at home.
You're making it all up!"
Upon my word, I thought you would have asked Mr. Razumihin to escort you here.
Here is Madame de Kapernaumov herself.
In that case you may be sure I've taken measures.
But the secluded position of Svidrigailov's lodging had suddenly struck her.
Do you know that you are killing me?..."
"Why, you know him, and you've seen him, can he be a thief?"
He went to Dounia and gently put his arm round her waist.
Their mother is dead.... I've been meddling and making arrangements for them.
Here we are.
The bullet seemed to have just grazed the skin.
Fire again, I'll wait," said Svidrigailov softly, still smiling, but gloomily.
He was almost beginning to rave....
Something seemed suddenly to go to his head.
"Open it!
Haven't you the money?
Is there no one there?"
Well, if you like, it's a lie.
It struck you as extraordinary; I don't mind betting it's that.
And even in the country you did me more harm than I did you."
I am not blaming him, please don't think it; besides, it's not my business.
Above all, vanity, pride and vanity, though goodness knows he may have good qualities too....
I'll give you the fare."
You may have unearthed a wife on the way, but that means nothing.
I've put it off till another time, but you're enough to rouse the dead....
"And... and you can't?
I will show you my chief piece of evidence: this door from my bedroom leads into two perfectly empty rooms, which are to let.
"Then you don't love me?" he asked softly.
His still trembling lips slowly broke into an angry mocking smile.
Excuse my putting things so coarsely.
Don't be anxious, she won't betray him."
Speak!
He stood facing her, two paces away, waiting and gazing at her with wild determination, with feverishly passionate, stubborn, set eyes.
Both stood still and gazed at one another, as though measuring their strength.
I have money, I can get a ticket in three days.
You can have no proofs.
Dounia saw that he would sooner die than let her go.
Think about it.
She wanted to ask whether his landlady at least were at home, but pride kept her from asking.
What do you want with Razumihin?
"Allow me to inquire whether she is at home....
"Let us make haste away," Svidrigailov whispered to her, "I don't want Rodion Romanovitch to know of our meeting.
That was what Dounia did.
"And to listen at doors!"
Now, look this way.
You would be simply submitting to circumstances, to violence, in fact, if we must use that word.
But I beg you not to forget that a very curious secret of your beloved brother's is entirely in my keeping."
She aimed straight at my head.
Get it ready, I'll wait."
The fire glowing in her eyes at the moment she raised the revolver seemed to kindle him and there was a pang of anguish in his heart.
"As you like, but observe I was only speaking by way of a general proposition.
Besides, no one would believe you.
You hinted it yourself; you talked to me of poison....
But let me warn you that I don't believe you!
Can he really be saved?"
"Make haste!
Sofya Semyonovna is not at home.
She is not.
You will drive him to fury, and he will give himself up.
I do nothing at all, I persevere in that.
He told all this, word for word, to Sofya Semyonovna, the only person who knows his secret.
Duties of citizen and man?
Simply from curiosity?"
At last he slowly turned, looked about him and passed his hand over his forehead.
The mocking smile did not leave his face.
Expound the latest theories!"
He killed her sister too, a pedlar woman called Lizaveta, who happened to come in while he was murdering her sister.
It's galling too, of course, for a young man of gifts and overweening pride to know that if he had, for instance, a paltry three thousand, his whole career, his whole future would be differently shaped and yet not to have that three thousand.
Svidrigailov was already in the carriage.
Look, there is no one at home. Don't you believe me?
She is not in and won't be till late in the evening probably.
"Sofya Semyonovna will not be back till night, at least I believe not. She was to have been back at once, but if not, then she will not be in till quite late."
Tell me, 'do that,' and I'll do it.
Moreover, she had another trouble in her heart incomparably greater than fear for herself.
This is my flat.
Raskolnikov walked after him.
"Upon my word!
But here we are.
"I'm coming to your lodgings, not to see you but Sofya Semyonovna, to say I'm sorry not to have been at the funeral."
Your brother's article?
It's because I dare not think."
Have men absolutely NO intuition?
Forgive me, a weak woman, talking at random in her wretchedness.
"The owls have hooted.
"I mean you may set your mind at rest.
"Help!" he vaguely cried--was she not a fellow-creature?--and rushed blindly out to his bedroom, whence he returned, a moment later, with the water-jug.
"I shall send for a policeman."
Why?"
But hark! he bids his slave rise and stand before him!"
He dipped and sprinkled.
But this, he furiously felt, did not make him look the less a fool.
He prayed, as he followed the victorious young woman downstairs, that l'esprit de l'escalier might befall him.
The gods have spoken.
The Duke had drawn her ear-rings from his waistcoat pocket, and was contemplating them in the palm of his hand.
You saw me putting on my hat; you did not see love taking on the crown of pity, and me bonneting her with it, tripping her up and trampling the life out of her.
"Yes," she slowly said, "I think you would do that."
Yes, he had controlled himself.
He asked: "To what am I indebted for this visit?"
"Music!" she said dreamily; and such is the force of habit that "I don't," she added, "know anything about music, really.
You think I would struggle?
He repeated his question.
Try me." She let herself droop sideways, in an attitude limp and portable.
"That is unworthy of you.
"Try me," she repeated.
But I know what I like."
His heart leapt.
As if you were ever bound!
Very real, though, her anguish seemed; and, if real it was, then--he stared, he gasped--there could be but one explanation.
That is why I wrote again to you, my own darling--a frantic little questioning letter.
I doubted.
"I will ring when I am ready." And it dawned on him that this girl, who perhaps loved him, was, according to all known standards, extraordinarily pretty.
"Of course.
At the end of this street in fact.
Oh, a most cold-blooded business, John!
Blanched, both of them, yes. He laid them on the table.
"Then take me," she cried, throwing back her arms, "and throw me out of the window."
"These are your studs.
She read it.
Heaven have mercy on me!"
He dipped and flung, then caught the horrible analogy and rebounded.
Always I shall follow you on my knees, thus."
"No, I have forgotten him."
For what happened a few moments later you must not blame him.
Her hat, gauzily basking with a pair of long white gloves on one of his arm-chairs, proclaimed that she had come to stay.
"Oh," she cried, staggering to her feet, "the owls, the owls!"
"You mean that you now wish to release me from my promise?"
I can show it to you from the front-door."
One of a number?
Years!"
"The unerring owls have hooted.
"You think I don't mean it?
Spiritually quick.
I was bewildered.
He smiled coldly.
"He put them in with his own hands!"--the words rang again in her ears, making her cheeks tingle.
"Tell him he may tell every one that they were given to me by the late Duke of Dorset, and given by me to you, and by you to him."
For her, when she fled the Broad, Noaks' window had blotted out all else.
She stood awhile on the threshold, watching Melisande dart to and fro like a shuttle across a loom.
"I shan't," said Zuleika.
Can't you see that I am waiting to be undressed?"
It wasn't anything to do with HER. I'm told on the very best authority," and so forth, and so on.
No more?
That was something.
It was the ghost of that one man who--THEY knew--had died irrelevantly, with a cold heart.
What if--no, she must not think of that!
Do I mix myself in that?" she cried, waving one hand towards the great malachite casket.
XXIV
"Mademoiselle?"
THEY knew, these two.
The protest died on Melisande's lips.
After all, it didn't so much matter what the world thought.
What if she essayed for Paris that which again and again she had meant to graft on to her repertory--the Provoking Thimble?
She drew his attention to them when--
She confessed to herself that she had too often been slack in the matter of practice and rehearsal, trusting her personal magnetism to carry her through.
Her bravura business with the Demon Egg-Cup had been simply vile.
"Be quiet," said Zuleika.
Nothing, she reflected, could undo what the Duke had done.
She ground her teeth.
She would work as she had never worked yet.
We always repulse, at first, any one who intervenes between us and Bradshaw.
And these doings must have been fresh in his mind when she overtook him and walked with him to the house-boat!
Was it not enough?
"Then you shall give him these," said Zuleika, holding out the two studs.
That memory had brought other memories in its wake.
Already the main part of the packing seemed to have been accomplished.
And yet--well, at least, good-bye to Oxford!
It did, oh it did.
It had sufficed them.
The audience hadn't noticed it, perhaps, but she had.
"He put them in with his own hands." HER ear-rings!
Do leave off!
Now she saw again that higher window, saw that girl flaunting her ear-rings, gibing down at her.
Oh, there would be proof positive as to many of the men.
With no thought for the world's opinion had these men gone down to the water to-day.
From the shifting gloom of the stair-case to the soft radiance cast through the open door of her bedroom was for poor Zuleika an almost heartening transition.
She went very calmly to it.
We always end by accepting the intervention.
She flushed at the possibility.
Their deed was for her and themselves alone.
"But, in that case," exclaimed Richard, "they will never steal our twenty-thousand francs!"
"I hope," he said, "that the notes are still there?"
Once more, this novel method of walking behind the scenes, adopted by the managers of our National Academy of Music, attracted attention; but the managers themselves thought of nothing but their twenty-thousand francs.
"To fasten you up with! ...
"I can feel the pin, but I can't feel the notes!"
The two managers turned the pocket inside out.
"We remained locked up like this, last time," he said, "until you left the Opera to go home."
"No, Richard, no!
"A little patience, Richard," said Moncharmin.
Moncharmin shrugged his shoulders, as though to say that he did not wish to enter into details, and Richard began to think that Moncharmin was treating him in a very insupportable fashion.
He put them back in the tail-pocket and pinned them with great care.
"I think we can go now," said Moncharmin.
"And what might you think?" asked Moncharmin, crimson with rage.
"We have only a few minutes to wait ...
"A safety-pin! ... somebody give me a safety-pin!"
Moncharmin himself put the key in his pocket:
"No one."
Or rather she was conjured away.
"Like last time?"
Chapter XVII The Safety-Pin Again
"You want to fasten me with a safety-pin?"
"I refuse to touch them."
Then, whether it's here, or on the drive from here to your place, or at your place, you will feel the hand that pulls at your pocket and you will see if it's mine!
"Do you dare to suspect me?"
This isn't the time for it."
But Moncharmin, whose hands were still fumbling, bellowed:
A safety-pin!"
"Yes, Richard, until I take you home."
"So do I," said Richard.
Last time, I joined you as you were leaving the stage and followed close behind you down this passage."
"That's what I think," declared Moncharmin, unfolding a newspaper and ostentatiously studying its contents.
"No one but you has touched my pocket!
A safety-pin! ...
"The ghost!
The two managers shuddered.
"Moncharmin, I've had enough of this!"
"Before we go, do you mind if I look in your pocket?"
"Look for yourself," said Richard.
Then he knelt down behind Richard's back.
Then he sat down behind Richard's coat-tails and kept his eyes fixed on them, while Richard, sitting at his writing-table, did not stir.
Moncharmin, who had his own ideas, did not want Richard to come to him presently, when the twenty-thousand francs were gone, and say:
At that moment, the clock on the mantlepiece gave its warning click and the first stroke of twelve struck.
"Oh!" he shouted.
Then somebody knocked at the door.
But Moncharmin replied.
"The real ones?" asked Moncharmin, resolved not to be "had" this time.
Richard snatched the paper from Moncharmin's hands.
"I am sure that nobody has touched me ...
"It's incredible!" protested Richard.
"I shall end by believing in the omnipotence of the ghost," he said. "Just now, don't you find something uncomfortable, disquieting, alarming in the atmosphere of this room?"
"Oh, I shall have all the patience necessary!"
Richard and Moncharmin turned pale.
"You're quite right," said Moncharmin, who was really impressed.
"What are you doing?" asked Richard.
Richard tore off his coat.
Richard tried to laugh.
"The ghost!" muttered Moncharmin.
"Yes, of a silly joke."
Well?" he asked, as Moncharmin was feeling at the pocket.
"One doesn't joke with twenty-thousand francs."
"Well, feel for yourself."
When the clock stopped, they gave a sigh and rose from their chairs.
Moncharmin leaped up at the suggestion.
The perspiration streamed from their foreheads.
There was no longer any doubt about the witchcraft.
"Yes, to fasten you to the twenty-thousand francs!
And that was the moment when Moncharmin opened the door on the passage and shouted:
He felt reassured on finding that they were all there and quite genuine.
Having begun by walking backward in order to bow, Richard continued to do so from prudence, until he reached the passage leading to the offices of the management.
Moncharmin stood up, more irritated than ever, and found himself faced by an exasperated Richard, who, crossing his arms on his chest, said:
"That's true!" sighed Richard, shaking his head and passively obeying Moncharmin.
"Come, no joking, Moncharmin! ...
The time passed, slow, heavy, mysterious, stifling.
The twelfth stroke sounded strangely in their ears.
"Richard, I've had too much of it!"
And we also know how, at the same moment, Remy, who had no safety-pin, was received by Moncharmin, while a boy procured the pin so eagerly longed for.
And what happened was this: Moncharmin first locked the door again.
"A safety-pin!"
But Richard suddenly sprang upon his partner.
"Yes, like last time."
"Perhaps it was the ambassador ... or the manager of the Credit Central ... or Remy."
"I might think that, as you hadn't left me by a foot's breadth and as, by your own wish, you were the only one to approach me, like last time, I might think that, if that twenty-thousand francs was no longer in my pocket, it stood a very good chance of being in yours!"
Two minutes later, the joint managers locked themselves into their office.
"We are doing exactly what we did last time ...
Give me back my twenty-thousand francs! ... Give me back my twenty-thousand francs! ..."
"Look here, I'm thinking of this, I'M THINKING OF WHAT I MIGHT THINK if, like last time, after my spending the evening alone with you, you brought me home and if, at the moment of parting, I perceived that twenty-thousand francs had disappeared from my coat-pocket ... like last time."
I won't leave you by a step!"
On reaching the half-dark passage, Richard said to Moncharmin, in a low voice:
"I am sure of my servants ... and if one of them had done it, he would have disappeared since."
You walk ahead and I'll walk immediately behind you!
No one came and disturbed us, I suppose?"
In this way, he was constantly watched by Moncharmin from behind and himself kept an eye on any one approaching from the front.
Of course exercise is a necessity, but it is not considered good policy to allow a dog in training to gambol about either on the roads or in the fields.
In some quarters the idea is prevalent that Whippets are delicate in their constitution, but this is a popular error.
The Borough grounds at Oldham and the Wellington grounds at Bury are also noted centres for races.
It is a remarkable but well recognised fact that bitches are faster than dogs, and in consequence the terms upon which they are handicapped are varied.
As a rule the contests are handicaps, the starting point of each competitor being regulated by its weight; but the winners of previous important events are penalised in addition, according to their presumed merit, by having a certain number of yards deducted from the start to which weight alone would otherwise have entitled them.
FEET--Round, well split up, with strong soles.
BACK--Broad and square, rather long and slightly arched over the loin, which should be strong and powerful.
Any distance between six and a dozen miles a day, according to the stamina and condition of the dog, is supposed to be the proper amount of exercise, and scales are brought into use every few days to gauge the effect which is being produced.
One of the fastest dogs that ever ran was Collier Lad, but he was almost a Greyhound as regards size.
EARS--Small, fine in texture and rose shape.
NECK--Long and muscular, elegantly arched and free from throatiness.
FORE-LEGS--Rather long, well set under the dog, possessing a fair amount of bone. HIND-QUARTERS--Strong and broad across stifles, well bent thighs, broad and muscular; hocks well let down.
The distance covered in the race is generally 200 yards, minus the starts allotted, and some idea of the speed at which these very active little animals can travel may be gleaned from the fact that the full distance has been covered in rather under 12 seconds.
CHAPTER XIX
In order to induce each dog to do its best, the owner, or more probably the trainer stands beyond the winning post, and frantically waves a towel or very stout rag.
COLOUR--Black, red, white, brindle, fawn, blue, and the various mixtures of each.
This sport has been mainly confined to the working classes, the colliers of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Durham, and Northumberland being particularly devoted to it.
Each dog is taken to its stipulated mark according to the handicap, and there laid hold of by the nape of the neck and hind-quarters; the real starter stands behind the lot, and after warning all to be ready, discharges a pistol, upon which each attendant swings his dog as far forward as he can possibly throw him, but always making sure that he alights on his feet.
The South Durham and Yorkshire Show at Darlington has the credit for first introducing classes for Whippets into the prize ring.
HEAD--Long and lean, rather wide between the eyes and flat on the top; the jaw powerful yet cleanly cut; the teeth level and white.
Colour in the Whippet is absolutely of no importance to a good judge, though possibly what is known as the peach fawn is the favourite among amateur fanciers.
COAT--Fine and close.
For elegance of style, cleanliness of habit, and graceful movement, few dogs can equal the Whippet, for which reason his popularity as a companion has increased very greatly within the past decade.
EYES--Bright and fiery.
SHOULDERS--Oblique and muscular.
Choice mutton-chops, beef-steaks and similar dainties comprise their daily portion.
CHEST--Deep and capacious.
Long before David coveted Zion there was a citadel there.
And to that period and that market the reader is now to be transferred.
The massive valves had been wide open since dawn. Business, always aggressive, had pushed through the arched entrance into a narrow lane and court, which, passing by the walls of the great tower, conducted on into the city.
Scarcely less blatant are the dealers in birds--doves, ducks, and frequently the singing bulbul, or nightingale, most frequently pigeons; and buyers, receiving them from the nets, seldom fail to think of the perilous life of the catchers, bold climbers of the cliffs; now hanging with hand and foot to the face of the crag, now swinging in a basket far down the mountain fissure.
CHAPTER VI
Their merchandise is contained in a number of earthen jars, such as are still used in the East for bringing water from the wells, and some leathern bottles.
Nothing can be simpler than his costume--sandals, and an unbleached, undyed blanket, crossed over one shoulder and girt round the waist.
Here stands a donkey, dozing under panniers full of lentils, beans, onions, and cucumbers, brought fresh from the gardens and terraces of Galilee.
The area outside of them is one of the notable places of the city.
The scene is at first one of utter confusion--confusion of action, sounds, colors, and things.
As a passing acquaintance with the people of the Holy City, strangers as well as residents, will be necessary to an understanding of some of the pages which follow, it will be well to stop at the gate and pass the scene in review.
Grapes of En-Gedi!" When a customer halts one of them, round comes the bottle, and, upon lifting the thumb from the nozzle, out into the ready cup gushes the deep-red blood of the luscious berry.
Nearly three thousand years have passed, and yet a kind of commerce clings to the spot. A pilgrim wanting a pin or a pistol, a cucumber or a camel, a house or a horse, a loan or a lentil, a date or a dragoman, a melon or a man, a dove or a donkey, has only to inquire for the article at the Joppa Gate.
Their dress is that common to the humbler classes of the country--a linen frock extending the full length of the person, loosely gathered at the waist, and a veil or wimple broad enough, after covering the head, to wrap the shoulders.
Sometimes the scene is quite animated, and then it suggests, What a place the old market must have been in the days of Herod the Builder!
It is especially so in the lane and court. The ground there is paved with broad unshaped flags, from which each cry and jar and hoof-stamp arises to swell the medley that rings and roars up between the solid impending walls.
As Jerusalem is in the hill country, the morning air on this occasion was not a little crisp.
He wears a faded tarbooshe, a loose gown, sleeveless, unbelted, and dropping from the neck to the knee. His feet are bare.
The camel, restless under the load, groans and occasionally shows his teeth; but the man paces indifferently to and fro, holding the driving-strap, and all the time advertising his fruits fresh from the orchards of the Kedron--grapes, dates, figs, apples, and pomegranates.
Better opportunity will not offer to get sight of the populace who will afterwhile go forward in a mood very different from that which now possesses them.
A little mixing with the throng, however, a little familiarity with the business going on, will make analysis possible.
At the corner where the lane opens out into the court, some women sit with their backs against the gray stones of the wall.
The rays of the sun, with their promise of warmth, lingered provokingly far up on the battlements and turrets of the great piles about, down from which fell the crooning of pigeons and the whir of the flocks coming and going.
In an aperture of the western wall of Jerusalem hang the "oaken valves" called the Bethlehem or Joppa Gate.
In Solomon's day there was great traffic at the locality, shared in by traders from Egypt and the rich dealers from Tyre and Sidon.
Then Heracles cried out.
But this fruit was not for such as he.
The screams of the fierce horses were heard by the men of Thrace, and they, with their king, came after Heracles.
He left the horses in charge of Abderus while he fought the Thracians and their savage king.
Heracles dipped his arrows into the gall of the monster, making his arrows deadly; no thing that was struck by these arrows afterward could keep its life.
Heracles ordered the servants to tell the king that he had returned and that the second labor was accomplished.
She stood apart from Heracles, holding in her hands brazen cymbals.
They were all slain with the unerring arrows.
To Thrace, that savage land, they came.
The king flew into a rage, but still he was fearful of having the hero before him.
He called to Eurystheus, and when the king looked up he held the hound toward him.
His next labor was to take away the herd of red cattle that was owned by the monster Geryoneus.
Countless herds of cattle and goats had been in the stables for years, and because of the uncleanness and the smell that came from it the crops were withered all around.
Then the monster Geryoneus came upon him.
Down on the ground sank the Hesperides, the Daughters of the Evening Land, and he heard their laments as he went from the enchanted garden they had guarded.
It was to slay the great water snake that made its lair in the swamps of Lerna.
But he did not stay to speak with Eurystheus.
The breath from its mouth and nostrils came heavily to him as the beast slept, gorged with its prey.
When Eurystheus bad looked upon them the boar was slain, but the deer was loosed and she fled back to the Mountain Artemision.
Heracles swung his club and struck the two heads off the hound.
He lifted up his head and he said with a frown:
Heracles viewed the terrible bulk of the lion, and then he looked upon his own knotted hands and arms.
He would not speak with Heracles nor have him come near him, so fearful was he.
Again he came to Eurystheus's palace, and Eurystheus, seeing him, ran again and hid himself in the jar.
Insolently he spoke.
[1658.]
BALLARD.
Her father, who soon perceived the bent of her genius, took particular care in her tuition, and she applied herself with great diligence to the study of divinity and philosophy, under the direction of the celebrated Mr Locke, who was a domestic in her family for many years, and at length died in her house at Oates.
Damaris, Lady Masham, the daughter of the famous Dr Cudworth, and second wife of Sir Thomas Masham of Oates, in Essex, was born in 1658.
He then desired her ladyship to break off, and in a few minutes afterwards expired.
LADY MASHAM.
It is recorded that, as she sat by Mr Locke's side the night before he died, he exhorted her to regard this world only as a state of preparation for a better; that she desired to sit up with him that night, but he would not permit her.
Then Zeus called upon the artisan of the gods, lame Hephaestus, and he commanded him to make a being out of clay that would have the likeness of a lovely maiden.
Then Hephaestus, the lame artisan of the gods, left down his tools and went to seek her.
Oh, very foolish was Epimetheus the Earth-born One!
They had well-shaped tools to dig the earth and to build houses.
Jason and the Argonauts went from Hypsipyle's hall.
We see you as a foolish man upon stilts."
They were black and gray and red; they were crawling and flying things. And, as the women looked, the things spread themselves abroad or fastened themselves upon them.
Once the lid had been fixed tightly down on the jar.
Beautiful would she have seemed to any being who saw her, but now she had strayed away from the houses of men and Epimetheus was not there to look upon her.
There was a glint of gold all around her.
And as they went, Heracles spoke to each of the heroes, saying that they were forgetting the Fleece of Gold that they had sailed to gain.
And now because of Hope they could see an end to their troubles.
He would take her into the houses of men.
While he pondered there was a hush on high Olympus, the mountain of the gods.
A story was told; Castor began it and Polydeuces ended it.
But the lid was shifted a little now.
So the women went to that place.
Also he gave Hermes a great jar to take along; this jar was Pandora's dower.
He stood upright in the hall, and his comrades gathered around him.
They were standing on the deck when the light came, and they saw the Lemnian women come to the shore.
Before she spoke Jason cried out: "What Heracles said is true, O Argonauts!
Epimetheus would have every one admire and praise her.
By the coming of the morning's light the Argonauts had made all ready for their sailing.
He rose up and he hurried away from that place, leaving Pandora playing by herself.
And I think that the means that she has of keeping lovely are all in that jar that Epimetheus brought with her."
A beautiful, living thing was in that jar also.
He found Pandora, and he took her back to Olympus.
Go, then, to the Argo.
He also smiled, but his smile had something baleful in it.
And the men and women roused themselves in the midst of their afflictions and they looked toward gladness.
On their way they stopped at a pool and they bent over to see themselves mirrored in it, and they saw themselves with dusty and unkempt hair, with large and knotted hands, with troubled eyes, and with anxious mouths.
The Golden Maid
And this beautiful, living thing had got caught under the rim of the jar and had not come forth with the others. One day a weeping woman found Hope under the rim of Pandora's jar and brought this living thing into the house of men.
Their homes were warmed with fire, and fire burned upon the altars that were upon their ways.
As for Pandora, the Golden Maid, she played on, knowing only the brightness of the sunshine and the lovely shapes of things.
The other was a maiden.
The maidens took their hands; the heroes unloosed those soft hands and turned away from them.
All things that belonged to the Golden Maid were precious, and Epimetheus took the jar along.
As the hands of the women grasped it to take off the lid the jar was cast down, and the things that were inside spilled themselves forth.
And it had been filled, not with salves and charms and washes, as the women had thought, but with Cares and Troubles.
Zeus smiled to himself when he looked upon her, and he called to Hermes who knew all the ways of the earth, and he put her into the charge of Hermes.
Leave Lemnos, she cried, and draw Argo into the sea, and depart for Colchis.
And Epimetheus showed Pandora the wonderful element that his brother had given to men, and she rejoiced to see the fire, clapping her hands with delight.
He rose from where he sat upon the broken pillar and he stood to watch the pair. Hermes, he saw, was carrying by its handle a great jar.
Then the herald of the gods gave her speech that was sweet and flowing.
And Pandora, knowing nothing except the brightness of the sunshine and the lovely shapes and colors of things and the sweet taste of the fruits that Epimetheus brought to her, could have stayed forever in that garden.
Then said Hypsipyle, the queen, "I, too, am a ruler, Jason, and I know that there are great commands that we have to obey.
"What you told us I have remembered--how you will come to the dangerous passage that leads into the Sea of Pontus, and how by the flight of a pigeon you will know whether or not you may go that way.
But now we think about ourselves, and we say to ourselves that we are harsh and ill-favored indeed compared to the Golden Maid that the Titan is so enchanted with.
Out of the jar that has been with her ye have taken forgetfulness of your honor.
Epimetheus the Titan had a brother who was the wisest of all Beings--Prometheus called the Foreseer.
When Polydeuces had ended the story that Castor had begun, Heracles cried out: "For the Argonauts, too, there has been a Golden Maid--nay, not one, but a Golden Maid for each.
"That is true," the women said.
And then they found two men struggling, their strife being on account of a possession that they had both held peaceably before.
Jason blushed to think that he had almost let go out of his mind the quest that had brought him from Iolcus.
Before the women came to it one Trouble had already come forth from the jar--Self-thought that was upon the top of the heap.
Now one day, as he was sitting on a fallen pillar in the ruined place that was now forsaken by the rest of the Titans, he saw a pair coming toward him.
One had wings, and he knew him to be Hermes, the messenger of the gods.
They went on, and they came at last to the place where Epimetheus had left the jar that held Pandora's dower.
The heroes looked at each other, and they stood up, and shame that they had stayed so long away from the quest came over each of them.
It was Self-thought that had afflicted the women, making them troubled about their own looks, and envious of the graces of the Golden Maid.
All day the Argonauts stayed by themselves, hunting the bulls.
They frowned as they looked upon their images, and they said in harsh voices that in a while they would have ways of making themselves as lovely as the Golden Maid.
A day came when Heracles left the Argo and went on the Lemnian land.
As he looked upon the Golden Maid who was sent by Zeus he lost memory of the wars that Zeus had made upon the Titans and the Elder Gods; he lost memory of his brother chained by Zeus to the rock; he lost memory of the warning that his brother, the wisest of all beings, had sent him.
It stood high as a woman's shoulder.
There came into his scattered mind Regret and Fear.
Do not go from us in the night, Jason."
The Lemnian maidens would have held out their arms and would have made their partings long delayed, but that a strange cry came to them through the night.
The jar stood forgotten for long, and green plants grew over it while Epimetheus walked in the garden with the Golden Maid, or watched her while she gazed on herself in the stream, or searched in the untended places for the fruits that the Elder Gods would eat, when they feasted with the Titans in the old days, before Zeus had come to his power.
What Heracles said was brave and wise, said Atalanta. Forgetfulness would cover their names if they stayed longer in Lemnos--forgetfulness and shame, and they would come to despise themselves.
The Hours brought her a girdle of spring flowers.
He took the hands of Pandora, and he thought of nothing at all in all the world but her. Very far away seemed the voice of Hermes saying, "This jar, too, is from Olympus; it has in it Pandora's dower."
Epimetheus was troubled by the hard looks and the cold words of the men who once had reverenced him.
This was Hope.
Hermes came and stood before him.
She showed a pigeon held in her hands.
And we hate to see our own men praise and admire her, and often, in our hearts, we would destroy her if we could."
And in his brazen house she stays, though sometimes at the will of Zeus she goes down into the world of men.
Epimetheus lived in a deep-down valley.
On the Quest of the Golden Fleece our lives and our honors depend.
They knew that they must go to her now or stay from the voyage for ever.
When the other Lemnian women slept she put her head upon her nurse's, knees and wept; bitterly Hypsipyle wept, but softly, for she would not have the others hear her weeping.
But Epimetheus himself was slow-witted and scatter-brained.
The jar, like Pandora herself, had been made and filled out of the ill will of Zeus.
Each looked at her friend aboard the Argo, and spoke, and went away.
And as they went on they saw Pandora.
In the hall that night the heroes and the Lemnian maidens who were with them were quiet.
The jar that Epimetheus brought he left in an open place.
Epimetheus marveled at the crown upon her head and at her lovely garments.
As they drew near to the houses they saw a woman seated on the ground, weeping; her husband had suddenly become hard to her and had shut the door on her face.
Prometheus, the wise Titan, had saved men from a great trouble that Zeus would have brought upon them.
She loosed it, and the pigeon alighted on the ship, and stayed there on pink feet, a white-feathered pigeon.
The Graces put necklaces around her neck and set a golden crown upon her head.
All the gods and goddesses had given gifts to her, and for that reason the maiden of Hephaestus's making was called Pandora, the All-endowed.
In wonder and delight he looked upon the maiden.
So when Epimetheus came amongst them, tall as a man walking with stilts, they welcomed him and brought him and the Golden Maid to their hearths.
Aphrodite, the goddess of love, put a charm on her lips and in her eyes.
There was a storm in all her body; her mouth was shaken, and a whole life's trouble was in her great eyes.
They came upon a child crying because of a pain that he could not understand.
He gathered the heroes about him, and they, seeing Heracles come amongst them, clamored to go to hunt the wild bulls that were inland from the sea.
And then a young woman cried out in a most yearnful voice, "O tell us, you who are wise, how can we make ourselves as beautiful as Pandora!"
Not everything had been spilled out of the jar that had been brought with Pandora into the world of men.
Hope, that had been caught under the rim of the jar, stayed behind the thresholds of their houses.
In every house they went to Epimetheus would say, "I am the brother of Prometheus, who gave you the gift of fire." But instead of giving them a welcome the men would say, "We know nothing about your relation to Prometheus.
So, for once, the heroes left the Lemnian maidens who were their friends.
His wise brother once sent him a message bidding him beware of the gifts that Zeus might send him. Epimetheus heard, but he did not heed the warning, and thereby he brought upon the race of men troubles and cares.
Greatly they reverenced Prometheus, who had given them fire, and greatly they reverenced the race of the Titans.
So Heracles said, and he went from Hypsipyle's hall.
As he went on he stumbled.
Jason, too, left Hypsipyle in the palace and went with Heracles.
He fell from the edge of a cliff, and the sea washed away the body of the mindless brother of Prometheus.
And as the women looked on it they thought that there were things enough in it to keep them beautiful for all the days of their lives.
On their way back from the chase they were met by Lemnian maidens who carried wreaths of flowers for them.
He heard the clear voice of Atalanta as she, too, spoke to the Argonauts.
And now the others spread themselves out--Sickness and War and Strife between friends.
Lest she should weary of her play he called to her.
Epimetheus had seen no lovely thing for ages.
And the maidens knew that there was something in the cry of the ship that might not be gainsaid, and they put their hands before their faces, and they said no other word.
Well did the Argonauts know that cry--it was the cry of the ship, of Argo herself.
Very silent were the heroes as the maidens greeted them.
And the story that Helen's brothers told was:
At first the men and women looked upon the beauty of Pandora, upon her lovely dresses, and her golden crown and her girdle of flowers, with wonder and delight.
And seated on that throne she spoke to Jason and to Heracles as a queen might speak.
They spread themselves abroad and entered the houses, while Epimetheus, the mindless Titan, gathered flowers for Pandora, the Golden Maid.
All strove to add a grace or a beauty to the work of Hephaestus.
The maidens who were left behind wept together.
As for me, I go back to the Argo lest one of these Golden Maids should hold me back from the labors that make great a man."
The race of men at the time were simple and content.
We can practically get the same results while eliminating even the operator, if we can contrive to influence the imagination or to affect the physical condition of the subject by any one of a great number of contrivances.
The regularity of the action of the brain and the sanity and completeness of the thought which is one of the functions of its activity depend upon the healthy regularity of the quantity of blood passing through all its parts, and upon the healthy quality of the blood so circulating.
He will point out one by one the new strokes and omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous the next strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged.
We are not conscious of the mechanism producing the arterial contraction and the bloodlessness of those convolutions related to natural sleep.
In a like manner it is possible to produce coma and prolonged insensibility by pressure of the thumbs on the carotid; or hallucination, dreams and visions by drugs, or by external stimulation of the nerves.
And if we continue the pressure, all those automatic actions of the body, such as the beating of the heart, the breathing motions of the lungs, which maintain life and are controlled by the lower brain centers of ganglia, are quickly stopped and death ensues.
First, what is the character of the delusions apparently created in the mind of a person in the hypnotic condition by a simple word of mouth statement, as when a physician says, "Now, I am going to cut your leg off, but it will not hurt you in the least," and the patient suffers nothing?
A Scientific Explanation of Hypnotism.--Dr.
Says he:
It is in these upper convolutions of the brain, as we also know, that the will and the directing power are resident; so that in sleep the will is abolished and consciousness fades gradually away, as the blood is pressed out by the contraction of the arteries.
We now see that ideas arising in the mind of the subject are sufficient to influence the circulation in the brain of the person operated on, and such variations of the blood supply of the brain as are adequate to produce sleep in the natural state, or artificial slumber, either by total deprivation or by excessive increase or local aberration in the quantity or quality of blood.
This proves that it has impressed his sensibility.
He has felt but not perceived it.
"What does all this mean?
"Here, then, it is seen that we have a mechanism in the body, known to physiologists as the ideo-motor, or sensory motor system of nerves, which can produce, without the consciousness of the individual and automatically, a series of muscular contractions.
I will take the excellent illustration quoted by Dr. B. W. Carpenter in his old-time, but valuable, book on 'The Physiology of the Brain.' When a hungry man sees food, or when, let us say, a hungry boy looks into a cookshop, he becomes aware of a watering of the mouth and a gnawing sensation at the stomach.
In short, Dr. Hart's theory is that hypnotism comes from controlling the blood supply of the brain, cutting off the supply from parts or increasing it in other parts.
Certain other ideas will make them turn pale.
Now, if the brain or any part of it be deprived of the circulation of blood through it, or be rendered partially bloodless, or if it be excessively congested and overloaded with blood, or if it be subjected to local pressure, the part of the brain so acted upon ceases to be capable of exercising its functions.
The like effects will follow more slowly upon the absorption of a drug, such as opium; or we may induce hallucinations by introducing into the blood other toxic substances, such as Indian hemp or stramonium.
CHAPTER XI.
"Here, then, we have something like a clue to the phenomena--phenomena which, as I have pointed out, are similar to and have much in common with mesmeric sleep, hypnotism or electro-biology.
I will give another example of this, which completes the chain of phenomena in the natural brain and the natural body I wish to bring under notice in explanation of the true as distinguished from the false, or falsely interpreted, phenomena of hypnotism, mesmerism and electro-biology.
So, also, the consciousness and the directing will may be abolished by altering the quality of the blood passing through the convolutions of the brain.
He seems to minimize personal influence too much--that personal influence which we all exert at various times, and which he ignores, not because he would deny it, but because he fears lending countenance to the magnetic fluid and other similar theories.
We may introduce a volatile substance, such as chloroform, and its first effect will be to abolish consciousness and induce profound slumber and a blessed insensibility to pain.
Hart's Theory.
What does this mean?
At the base of the brain is a complete circle of arteries, from which spring great numbers of small arterial vessels, carrying a profuse blood supply throughout the whole mass, and capable of contraction in small tracts, so that small areas of the brain may, at any given moment, become bloodless, while other parts of the brain may simultaneously become highly congested.
The nerves which pass from the various organs to the brain convey with, great rapidity messages to its various parts, which are answered by reflected waves of impulse.
We retire into a darkened room, we relieve ourselves from the stimulus of the special senses, we free ourselves from the influence of noises, of strong light, of powerful colors, or of tactile impressions.
Dr. Ernest Hart, an English writer, in an article in the British Medical Journal, gives a general explanation of the phenomena of hypnotism which we may accept as true so far as it goes, but which is evidently incomplete.
I will refer to one or two facts in relation to the structure and function of the brain, and show one or two simple experiments of very ancient parentage and date, which will, I think, help to an explanation.
He had actually ignored it; refused to recognize it, as it were."
Most people know something of what is meant by reflex action.
There is no doubt that hypnotism is a complex state which cannot be explained in an offhand way in a sentence or two. There are, however, certain aspects of hypnotism which we may suppose sufficiently explained by certain scientific writers on the subject.
First, let us recall something of what we know of the anatomy and localization of function in the brain, and of the nature of ordinary sleep.
But we are not altogether without control over them. We can, we know, help to compose ourselves to sleep, as we say in ordinary language.
This theory is borne out by the well-known fact that some persons can blush or turn pale at will; that some people always blush on the mention of certain things, or calling up certain ideas.
If the soles of the feet be tickled, contraction of the toes, or involuntary laughter, will be excited, or perhaps only a shuddering and skin contraction, known as goose-skin.
The irritation of the nerve-end in the skin has carried a message to the involuntary or voluntary ganglia of the brain which has responded by reflecting back again nerve impulses which have contracted the muscles of the feet or skin muscles, or have given rise to associated ideas and explosion of laughter.
Next, he not looking, surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly like it, and ask him what he sees.
"Make a stroke on a paper or blackboard, and tell the subject it is not there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or board.
Thought is abolished, consciousness lost.
In the introduction to this book the reader will find a summary of the theories of hypnotism.
"We know by observation in cases where portions of the skull have been removed, either in men or in animals, that during natural sleep the upper part of the brain--its convoluted surface, which in health and in the waking state is faintly pink, like a blushing cheek, from the color of the blood circulating through the network of capillary arteries--becomes white and almost bloodless.
For racing purposes there is a wide margin of size allowed to the dogs, anything from 8 lbs. to 23 lbs., or even more, being eligible; but in view of the handicap terms those dogs which possess speed, and scale 9 to 12 lbs. amongst the light-weights, and over 17 lbs. in the heavy ones, are considered to have the best chance.
The following is the standard of points adopted by the Whippet Club:--
The speed at which they are travelling makes this movement necessary in many cases to enable the dog to avoid accident, particularly where the space beyond the winning mark is limited.
No more affectionate creature is to be found, yet he possesses considerable determination and pluck, and on occasion will defend himself in his own way.
It was probably owing to this habit, which is common to all Whippets, that they were originally known as Snap-Dogs.
THE WHIPPET
So weary was he with his journey and all his toils that he would fain sink down and dream away in that evening land.
But then he remembered that the crime that he had committed in his madness would have to be expiated by labors performed at the order of this man.
The hound Orthus bayed and ran toward him; the two-headed hound that was the brother of Cerberus sprang at Heracles with poisonous foam upon his jaws.
King Eurystheus sat hidden in the great jar, and he thought of more terrible labors he would make Heracles engage in.
One was slain, Pholus, the centaur who had entertained him.
He stood before his cousin who hated him; he, a towering man, stood before a king who sat there weak and trembling.
Heracles drank wine and spilled it.
Around the mouth were strewn the bones of creatures it had killed and carried there.
"For that," said Heracles.
Up the mountain and away to far rivers the centaurs raced, pursued by Heracles with his bow.
Heracles held him by the neck of his middle head so that Cerberus was neither able to bite nor tear nor bellow.
Then Heracles drove the cattle and the goats out of the stables; he broke through the foundations and he made channels for the two rivers Alpheus and Peneius.
The life of the Hydra was in its middle head; that head he had not been able to knock off with his club.
Beside its trunk a dragon lay, and as Heracles came near the dragon showed its glittering scales and its deadly claws.
Far did Heracles journey; weary he was when he came to where Atlas stood, bearing the sky upon his weary shoulders.
Heracles came to the tent of the queen.
Heracles came to the marshes of Stymphalus.
And Artemis took charge of Golden Horns while Heracles went off to capture the Erymanthean boar.
"Twelve labors you have to accomplish for me," said he to Heracles, "and eleven yet remain to be accomplished."
Nine heads it had, and it raised them up out of the water as the hero and his companion came near.
An eagle snatched the branch from his hand, and the eagle flew and flew until it came to where the Daughters of the Evening Land wept in their garden.
Heracles put upon him the impenetrable lion's skin and set forth once more.
There the eagle let fall the branch with the golden apples, and the maidens set it back upon the tree, and behold! it grew as it had been growing before Heracles plucked it.
They stood with wreaths upon their heads and blossoming branches in their hands.
And the servants told him that it was Heracles come back with the skin of the lion of Nemea.
So Heracles set out on a long and perilous quest.
"There is a lion in Nemea that is stronger and more fierce than any lion known before.
And the sun god, Helios, was filled with admiration for Heracles, the man who would attempt the impossible by shooting arrows at him; then did Helios fling down to Heracles his great golden cup.
One of them, Pholus, took Heracles to the great house where the centaurs had their wine stored.
He and the bull rested there.
Proud and fierce as a mountain eagle looked the queen of the Amazons: Heracles did not know in what way he might conquer her.
At the sound of this clashing the Stymphalean birds rose up from the low bushes behind the jungle.
And as he struggled with the monster a huge crab came out of the swamp, and gripping Heracles by the foot tried to draw him in.
Eurystheus, that weak king, looking on the young man who stood as tall and as firm as one of the immortals, had a heart that was filled with hatred.
Heracles shot an arrow; then a tremor went through Ladon, the sleepless dragon; it screamed and then lay stark.
Far, far out of sight the arrows of Heracles went.
Down, and into the Stream of Ocean fell the great golden cup of Helios. It floated there wide enough to hold all the men who might be in a ship.
Then he saw the guardian of the tree.
Heracles made his way up the mountain to hunt it.
Kill that lion, and bring the lion's skin to me that I may know that you have truly performed your task." So Eurystheus said, and Heracles, with neither shield nor arms, went forth from the king's palace to seek and to combat the dread lion of Nemea.
And where the foam of the hound's jaws dropped down a poisonous plant sprang up.
They had thrown Abderus upon the ground, and they were trampling upon him.
They could not cross the swamp to come to the monster, for man or beast would sink and be lost in it.
The maneating birds fell, one after the other, into the marsh.
Enter her tent and declare to the queen what has brought you amongst the never-conquered Amazons."
And at last he went to Chiron on the Mountain Pelion, and Chiron told Heracles what journey he would have to make to come to the Hesperides, the Daughters of the Evening Land.
The Hydra remained in the middle of the swamp belching mud at the hero and his companion.
"How?" said Heracles.
Heracles stayed to feast another day, and then, with the lion's skin across his shoulders and the great club in his hands, he started off.
"Eleven," said Eurystheus.
He was not given the reward he had bargained for, however.
He came even to the straits that divide Europe from Africa, and there he set up two pillars as a memorial of his journey--the Pillars of Heracles that stand to this day.
He felt that it would be hard for him to return to that world.
It was then that one of the immortals appeared to him; for the first and only time he was given help from the gods.
This Heracles promised.
Heracles shot his deadly arrows amongst them, and then he fought with their king.
He turned around and he carried Cerberus, his hands around the monster's neck while foam dripped from his jaws.
When the labors he shall lay upon thee are accomplished, and when the rest of thy life is lived out, thou shalt become one of the immortals." Heracles, on hearing these words, set out for Mycenae.
Then he shot at them with his unerring arrows and he drove them away.
As the Hydra came near he knocked head after head off its body.
When the maidens saw him they came toward him crying out: "O man who has come into the Garden of the Hesperides, go not near the tree that the sleepless dragon guards!" Then they went and stood by a tree as if to keep guard over it.
Then he rounded up the red cattle, the bulls and the cows, and he drove them down to the shore and into the golden cup of Helios where the bull of Minos stayed.
Heracles took up his bow and he shot arrow after arrow at the monster, and he left him dead in the deep grass of the pastures.
The apples were within reach, but the dragon, with its glittering scales and claws, stood in the way.
Heracles shot at them with those unerring arrows of his.
In the Island of Erytheia, in the middle of the Stream of Ocean, lived the monster, his herd guarded by the two-headed hound Orthus--that hound was the brother of Cerberus, the three-headed hound that kept guard in the Underworld.
Heracles took the beautiful girdle into his hands.
Outside the tent the Amazons stood; they struck their shields with their spears, keeping up a continuous savage din.
Looking up he saw the beast standing at the mouth of a cavern, huge and dark against the sunset.
And then the monster beheld the cup of Helios, and he began to hurl stones at the golden thing, and it seemed that he might sink it in the sea, and leave Heracles without a way of getting from the island.
The king agreed to this reward.
Long did he search, but he found no one who could tell him where the garden was.
Heracles took up the body of the hound, and swung it around and flung it far out into the Ocean.
And there the sun beat upon him, and drew all strength away from him, and he was dazed and dazzled by the rays of the sun.
He sat down in the palace and feasted himself.
The Hydra's life was now destroyed.
For the whole of a year Heracles kept Golden Horns in chase, and at last, on the side of the Mountain Artemision, he caught her.
Seldom did the centaurs drink wine; a draft of it made them wild, and so they stored it away, leaving it in the charge of one of their band. Heracles begged Pholus to give him a draft of wine; after he had begged again and again the centaur opened one of his great jars.
It was sleeping.
The labor that followed was not dangerous.
'Oh! this is Hacon Grizzlebeard's, if you must know', said he.
'Indeed!' said the Princess; 'I might have married him if I chose, and then I should not have had to walk about like a beggar's wife.'
'Nay, but I can't steal', she said; 'besides, you know how it went last time.'
look at me! Can any beggar's trull look worse than I?'
I have eaten sausages often enough; but as to making them, I never made one in my life.'
But when she was about to go home at even, the Prince said:
Once on a time there was a princess who was so proud and pert that no suitor was good enough for her.
'Oh! the beggar, and the babe, and the cabin', she screamed out, and was just going to swoon away.
'Oh!
When the prince went out to drive next day, the Princess stood in the porch and looked at him.
Well, there was no help for it; the Prince had said it, and go she must.
When she was gone, he changed his clothes again, ran by the short cut, and when she reached the cabin, there he was before her.
And with that she burst out into a roar of laughter, ran in, slammed to the door, and let him drive off.
But take care that the Prince doesn't see you, for he has eyes at the back of his head.'
Oh, do let me get into bed and warm myself a little', said Hacon Grizzlebeard.
'Now, the Prince's will is, that you should go up to the palace and stand for the bride, old lass! for the bride is still sick, and keeps her bed; but he won't put off the wedding; and he says, you are so like her, that no one could tell one from the other; so to-morrow you must get ready to go to the palace.'
'Oh, Heaven help me', she said; 'you will be the death of me at last, by making me nothing but what is wicked.
So Hacon Grizzlebeard lay alongside the Princess' bed, and slept like a top.
There was no help for it; she had to give him leave, lest the king should hear the noise he made.
The Princess took her turn in the bakehouse, and did as Hacon bade her, for she stole bread till her pockets were crammed full.
'Dear me!' cried his wife, 'how you think of everything!
Yes! the friend was ready to bet; so Gudbrand stayed there till evening, when it began to get dark, and then they went together to his house, and the neighbour was to stand outside the door and listen, while the man went in to see his wife.
What should we do with the cock?
We are our own masters, I should think, and can lie a-bed in the morning as long as we like.
Once on a time there was a man whose name was Gudbrand; he had a farm which lay far, far away upon a hill-side, and so they called him Gudbrand on the Hill-side.
'Well', said the owner of the house, 'how did things go with you in town?'
Besides, we shall gain a little in another way, for then I shall get off with only looking after one cow, instead of having, as now, to feed and litter and water two.'
A cock! think of that! why it's as good as an eight-day clock, for every morning the cock crows at four o'clock, and we shall be able to stir our stumps in good time.
When I got to the town there was no one who would buy the cow, so you must know I swopped it away for a horse.'
'Good evening!' said Gudbrand on the Hill-side.
Run out, child, and put up the goose.'
'Thank you! thank you! with all my heart', cried his wife; 'what should I do with a sheep?
Well, Gudbrand thought his wife talked right good sense, so he set off at once with the cow on his way to town to sell her; but when he got to the town, there was no one who would buy his cow.
'Ah!' said Gudbrand, 'but you see I've not got the horse after all; for when I got a bit farther on the road, I swopped it away for a pig.'
'Nay, but I haven't got the goat either', said Gudbrand, 'for a little farther on I swopped it away, and got a fine sheep instead.'
'Oh! only so so', answered Gudbrand; 'not much to brag of.
Heaven help you, I wouldn't stand in your shoes for something.'
Run out, child, and put up the sheep.'
A little farther on he met a man walking along and driving a fat pig before him, and he thought it better to have a fat pig than a horse, so he swopped with the man.
just as I should have done myself.
So the wife asked how things had gone with him in town?
'Now, God be praised that you did so!' cried his wife; 'whatever you do, you do it always just after my own heart.
After that he went on home till he reached his nearest neighbour's house, where he turned in.
'Bless us!' cried his wife, 'how well you manage everything!
'Well! well!
'Do you know, dear, I think we ought to take one of our cows into town, and sell it; that's what I think; for then we shall have some money in hand, and such well-to-do people as we ought to have ready money like the rest of the world.
'Rather so so', said Gudbrand, 'I can't praise my luck, nor do I blame it either', and with that he told the whole story from first to last.
But when he had gone a bit of the way, a man met him who had a horse to sell, so Gudbrand thought 'twas better to have a horse than a cow, so he swopped with the man.
The farm was their own land, and they had a hundred dollars lying at the bottom of their chest, and two cows tethered up in a stall in their farm-yard.
'Ah!' said Gudbrand, 'but I haven't the goose either; for when I had gone a bit farther I swopped it away for a cock.'
What do we want with a horse?
'Shall we lay a bet upon it?' asked Gudbrand on the Hill-side. 'I have a hundred dollars at the bottom of my chest at home; will you lay as many against them?'
'Oh! is that you?
Now I think it over, what should I do with a pig?
People would only say we had got so proud that we couldn't walk to church.
Yes! it was he.
now God be praised.'
'Ah!' said his friend, 'you'll get nicely called over the coals, that one can see, when you get home to your wife.
Then he went on a good bit till he met a man who had a sheep, and he swopped with him too, for he thought it always better to have a sheep than a goat.
What should we do with a goose?
'Good evening, Hans.
Hans comes to Grettel.
It kicks his face.
'Where did you leave Grettel?'
She came with me.'
Where have you been?'
What have you brought me?'
What have you got for me?'
When he got home, it was suffocated.
Where have you been?'
'She gave me nothing.
'Manage well, then.'
'She gave me a needle.'
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
'All right, Mother.
'She gave me a calf, Mother.'
'I've brought nothing.
'Good evening, Mother.'
But I want something.'
'I've brought nothing.
'What did you do with it?'
'She gave me a young kid.'
Have you brought me anything nice?'
'Good-bye, Grettel.'
You should have put it in your pocket.'
'Where are you going, Hans?'
Grettel gives Hans a calf.
'Where are you going, Hans?'
'I'll go with you myself, Hans.'
'Good-bye, Grettel.'
'I've not brought you anything.
'I've been to Grettel's.'
'Good-bye, Hans.'
'Behave well, then.'
'What did you give her?'
'All right, Mother.
When he got home he had the rope in his hand, but there was nothing at the end of it.
'What did you take her?'
'To see Grettel, Mother.'
'What did you take her?'
'I've brought you nothing.
'That was very stupid.
'All right, Mother.
Hans takes the calf, and puts it on his head.
Good-bye.'
'Good-bye, Hans.'
'Stuck it in the hay-cart.'
'What did you give her?'
'Where are you going, Hans?'
'Good-bye, Hans.'
You should have led it by a rope, and put it in the cow-stall.'
'Good evening, Mother.'
'That was very stupid, Hans.
'To see Grettel,' answered Hans.
'What did Grettel give you?'
'Good evening, Mother.'
'Good morning, Grettel.'
'Good evening, Hans.
'Been to see Grettel.'
'Where are you going, Hans?'
Grettel gives him a needle.
'Never mind, Mother; I'll do better next time.'
'Put it on my head, Mother, and it kicked my face.'
'Where are you going, Hans?'
'What did you do with the calf?'
'I stuck it in my sleeve.'
Hans takes the needle, and sticks it in a load of hay, and walks home behind the cart.
'That was stupid.
'What did she give you?'
Good-bye.'
'All right, Mother.
'All right, Mother.
'I took nothing.'
Good-bye.'
Hans comes to Grettel.
Hans comes to Grettel.
But the dogs ate it.'
'Never mind, Mother; I'll do better next time.'
What have you brought me?'
What have you brought me?'
'What did she give you?'
'I took her nothing, Mother.
'Good morning, Grettel.'
You should have led it by a rope.'
'Been to see Grettel, Mother.'
'Good morning, Grettel.'
Good-bye.'
"What is the secret of its popularity?" I could never explain to myself or others.
The realities are like dreams to me.
It is a marvel to me that no such event ever brought me harm.
There were many sad failures and tears, but it was a restful compromise with my conscience concerning the ministry, and it pleased my friends.
What a glorious galaxy of great names that original list of Redpath lecturers contained!
I have ever felt that the writers concerning my life were too generous and that my own work was too hastily done.
What a foolish little school-boy speech it must have been!
AN Autobiography!
I was a young man, not yet of age, when I delivered my first platform lecture.
What an absurd request!
FIFTY YEARS ON THE LECTURE PLATFORM
It was a remarkable good fortune which came to me as a lecturer when Mr. James Redpath organized the first lecture bureau ever established.
Blessings on the loving hearts and noble minds who have been so willing to sacrifice for others' good and to think only of what they could do, and never of what they should get!
Accidents have preceded and followed me on trains and boats, and were sometimes in sight, but I was preserved without injury through all the years.
By Russell H. Conwell
Then voluntary gifts began to come occasionally in the shape of a jack-knife, a ham, a book, and the first cash remuneration was from a farmers' club, of seventy-five cents toward the "horse hire."
Conwell was living, and actively at work, when these pages were written.
I see nothing in it for boasting, nor much that could be helpful.
The lecture is vibrant with his energy.
Many had come from miles away.
I remember how fascinating it was to watch that audience, for they responded so keenly and with such heartfelt pleasure throughout the entire lecture.
It is packed full of his intensity.
It was not that there were privations and difficulties, for he has always found difficulties only things to overcome, and endured privations with cheerful fortitude.
Thereupon he worked and studied so hard and so devotedly, while he daily taught, that within a few months he was regularly employed there.
The demand for it never diminishes.
It is packed full of inspiration, of suggestion, of aid.
Last year, 1914, he and his work were given unique recognition.
Always he talks with ease and sympathy.
In the circumstances surrounding "Acres of Diamonds," in its tremendous success, in the attitude of mind revealed by the lecture itself and by what Dr. Conwell does with it, it is illuminative of his character, his aims, his ability.
Always he stands for self-betterment.
The last time I heard him was the 5,124th time for the lecture.
"But it is mainly," he went on, "that I do not wish to hold over their heads the sense of obligation."
Don't think that I put in too much advice," he added, with a smile, "for I only try to let them know that a friend is trying to help them."
And it is a lecture, when given with Conwell's voice and face and manner, that is full of fascination.
He told me of it one evening, and his voice sank lower and lower as he went far back into the past.
He has delivered it over five thousand times.
Always his heart is with the weary and the heavy-laden.
He has what may be termed a waiting-list.
On that list are very few cases he has looked into personally.
It was of his days at Yale that he spoke, for they were days of suffering.
And I tell them that I am hoping to leave behind me men who will do more work than I have done.
THE STORY OF ACRES OF DIAMONDS
It amuses him to say that he knows individuals who have listened to it twenty times.
It was not that the work was hard, for Russell Conwell has always been ready for hard work.
When I suggested that this was surely an example of bread cast upon the waters that could not return, he was silent for a little and then said, thoughtfully: "As one gets on in years there is satisfaction in doing a thing for the sake of doing it.
For he had not money for Yale, and in working for more he endured bitter humiliation.
He alters it to meet the local circumstances of the thousands of different places in which he delivers it.
And what an unselfishness!
"There is such a fascination in it!" he exclaimed.
His face lighted as he spoke.
And something in his earnestness made him win a temporary appointment.
But the base remains the same.
Yet the lecture had scarcely, if at all, been advertised.
"I determined," he says, "that whatever I could do to make the way easier at college for other young men working their way I would do."
Infinitely busy man that he is, he cannot do extensive personal investigation.
The success grows never less.
I feel strongly, and I try to make every young man feel, that there must be no sense of obligation to me personally.
It stands for the possibilities of success in every one.
Doesn't it seem incredible!
The bread returns in the sense of effort made."
He is an orator born, and has developed this inborn power by the hardest of study and thought and practice.
When we got there, a neighbor had to find him.
And how the choir themselves like it!
Yet it is never by a striking effort that attention is gained, except in so far that his utter simplicity is striking.
And there is something more than happiness; there is a sense of ease, of comfort, of general joy, that is quite unmistakable.
There is never a straining after effect.
Then he goes on, taking this change as a matter of course, "'Thou shalt meet a company of singers coming down from the high place--'"
His gestures are usually very simple.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he began making patriotic speeches that gained enlistments.
But that would be a mistake.
Music is one of Conwell's strongest aids.
When he speaks, men listen.
He makes everybody feel happy in coming to church; he makes the church attractive just as Howells was so long ago told that he did in Lexington.
There is nothing of stiffness or constraint.
Always, whether in the pulpit or on the platform, as in private conversation, there is an absolute simplicity about the man and his words; a simplicity, an earnestness, a complete honesty.
Now and then, when he works up to emphasis, he strikes one fist in the palm of the other hand.
"Be intensely in earnest," he writes; and in writing this he sets down a prime principle not only of his oratory, but of his life.
It is quality, temperament, control--the word is immaterial, but the fact is very material indeed.
It is seldom that he uses an illustration from what he has read; everything is, characteristically, his own.
"'Singers,' it should be translated," he puts in, lifting his eyes from the page and looking out over his people.
Jim!' he called.
'Jim!
And as a preacher he uses persuasion, power, simple and homely eloquence, to draw men to the ranks of Christianity.
And the man who had worked this miracle of control by evoking out of the past his memory of a meeting with two of the vanished great ones of the earth, stood before his people, leading them, singing with them, his eyes aglow with an inward light.
Like all great men, he not only does big things, but keeps in touch with myriad details.
HIS POWER AS ORATOR AND PREACHER
With him even a very simple pun may be used, not only with-out taking away from the strength of what he is saying, but with a vivid increase of impressiveness.
Some quarter of a century ago Conwell published a little book for students on the study and practice of oratory.
EVEN as a young man Conwell won local fame as an orator.
And with it all there is full reverence.
He never fears to use humor, and it is always very simple and obvious and effective.
"A speaker must possess a large-hearted regard for the welfare of his audience," he writes, and here again we see Conwell explaining Conwellism.
They occupy a great curving space behind the pulpit, and put their hearts into song.
The vast number of places he has visited and people he has met, the infinite variety of things his observant eyes have seen, give him his ceaseless flow of illustrations, and his memory and his skill make admirable use of them.
She came out victorious from that war, and fully prepared to take advantage of the industrial revolution which had been going on the while, and which I now ask you to note.
Indeed, I confess that it is with a strange emotion that I recall these times and try to realize the life of our forefathers, men who were named like ourselves, spoke nearly the same tongue, lived on the same spots of earth, and therewithal were as different from us in manners, habits, ways of life and thought, as though they lived in another planet.
Nevertheless, the Revolution was not dead, nor was it possible to say thus far and no further to the rising tide.
A German traveller, writing quite at the end of the mediaeval period, speaks of the English as the laziest and proudest people and the best cooks in Europe.
Well, the reasonable part of those hopes were realized by the revolution; in other words, it accomplished what it really aimed at, the freeing of commerce from the fetters of sham feudality; or, in other words, the destruction of aristocratic privilege.
The very face of the country has changed; not merely I mean in London and the great manufacturing centres, but through the country generally; there is no piece of English ground, except such places as Salisbury Plain, but bears witness to the amazing change which 400 years has brought upon us.
Commerce, which had created the propertyless proletariat throughout civilization had still another part to play, which is not yet played out; she had and has to teach the workers to know what they are; to educate them, to consolidate them, and not only to give them aspirations for their advancement as a class, but to make means for them to realize those aspirations.
The necessities of this destiny drove her into the implacable war with France, a war which, nominally waged on behalf of monarchical principles, was really, though doubtless unconsciously, carried on for the possession of the foreign and colonial markets.
I remember three passages, from contemporary history or gossip, about the life of those times which luck has left us, and which illustrate curiously the change that has taken place in the habits of Englishmen.
On this side of the movement opinion is growing steadily.
No one therefore would dispute with a man the possession of what he had acquired without injury to others, and what he could use without injuring them, and it would so remove temptations toward the abuse of possession, that probably no laws would be necessary to prevent it.
The only reward that you CAN give the excellent workman is opportunity for developing and exercising his excellent capacity.
And I believe that Ireland will show that her claim for self-government is not made on behalf of national rivalry, but rather on behalf of genuine independence; the consideration, on the one hand, of the needs of her own population, and, on the other, goodwill towards that of other localities.
Understand that that MUST be the result of the possession of RICHES.
So working, his work must always be profitable, therefore no obstacle must be thrown in the way of his work: the means whereby his labour- power can be exercised must be free to him.
There must be no contention of man with man, but ASSOCIATION instead; so only can labour be really organized, harmoniously organized.
Simply because of the class system, which with one hand plunders, and with the other wastes the wealth won by the workman's labour.
If the workman had the full results of his labour he would in all cases be comfortably off, if he were working in an unwasteful way.
Society will thus be recast, and labour will be free from all compulsion except the compulsion of Nature, which gives us nothing for nothing.
It is clear that, quite apart from Socialism, the idea of local administration is pushing out that of centralized government: to take a remarkable case: in the French Revolution of 1793, the most advanced party was centralizing: in the latest French revolution, that of the Commune of 1871, it was federalist.
Why therefore should he be otherwise than in a comfortable condition?
The privilege of the proprietary class must come to an end.
But in order that his labour may be organized properly he must have only one enemy to contend with-- Nature to wit, who as it were eggs him on to the conflict against herself, and is grateful to him for overcoming her; a friend in the guise of an enemy.
Well, then, he has a right to claim the wealth produced by his labour, and in consequence to insist that all shall produce who are able to do so; but also undoubtedly his labour must be organized, or he will soon find himself relapsing into the condition of the savage.
From all that has been said already it follows that labour, to be attractive, must be directed towards some obviously useful end, unless in cases where it is undertaken voluntarily by each individual as a pastime.
In other words, all labour, even the commonest, must be made attractive.
We should, individually, be emulous to sacrifice quite freely still more of our time and our ease towards the raising of the standard of life.
Will it be possible to win peace peaceably?
Alas, how can it be?
But such acts of miserly folly are just what our present society is doing daily under the compulsion of a supposed necessity, which is nothing short of madness.
All this they do by the way, while they pile up the profits of the employers of labour, or force them to expend those profits in bitter commercial war with each other.
All this has now quite disappeared from the work of civilization.
We must begin to build up the ornamental part of life--its pleasures, bodily and mental, scientific and artistic, social and individual--on the basis of work undertaken willingly and cheerfully, with the consciousness of benefiting ourselves and our neighbours by it.
Nothing but the tyranny of profit-grinding makes this necessary.
This art, I repeat, no longer exists now, having been killed by commercialism.
Socialists are often asked how work of the rougher and more repulsive kind could be carried out in the new condition of things.
We should be contented to make the sacrifices necessary for raising our condition to the standard called out for as desirable by the whole community.
If the work is to be so refined, will not the goods made be very expensive?"
There is no reason why they should not follow their occupations in quiet country homes, in industrial colleges, in small towns, or, in short, where they find it happiest for them to live.
This element of obvious usefulness is all the more to be counted on in sweetening tasks otherwise irksome, since social morality, the responsibility of man towards the life of man, will, in the new order of things, take the place of theological morality, or the responsibility of man to some abstract idea.
Well, then, let us see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it undone, for it were better that they should.
Besides the short duration of labour, its conscious usefulness, and the variety which should go with it, there is another thing needed to make it attractive, and that is pleasant surroundings.
And yet if there be any work which cannot be made other than repulsive, either by the shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness (and therefore honour) in the mind of the man who performs it freely,--if there be any work which cannot be but a torment to the worker, what then?
No very heavy sacrifice will be required for attaining this object, but some WILL be required. For we may hope that men who have just waded through a period of strife and revolution will be the last to put up long with a life of mere utilitarianism, though Socialists are sometimes accused by ignorant persons of aiming at such a life.
The amount of talent, and even genius, which the present system crushes, and which would be drawn out by such a system, would make our daily work easy and interesting.
So, you see, I claim that work in a duly ordered community should be made attractive by the consciousness of usefulness, by its being carried on with intelligent interest, by variety, and by its being exercised amidst pleasurable surroundings.
To attempt to answer such questions fully or authoritatively would be attempting the impossibility of constructing a scheme of a new society out of the materials of the old, before we knew which of those materials would disappear and which endure through the evolution which is leading us to the great change.
It is Peace, therefore, which we need in order that we may live and work in hope and with pleasure.
While it lasted, everything that was made by man was adorned by man, just as everything made by Nature is adorned by her.
How can this be done?--is the question the answer to which will take up the rest of this paper.
One thing which will make this variety of employment possible will be the form that education will take in a socially ordered community.
Peace so much desired, if we may trust men's words, but which has been so continually and steadily rejected by them in deeds.
But from the beginning of man's contest with Nature till the rise of the present capitalistic system, it was alive, and generally flourished.
These must be considered as being given without any intention of dogmatizing, and as merely expressing my own personal opinion.
In giving some hints on this question, I know that, while all Socialists will agree with many of the suggestions made, some of them may seem to some strange and venturesome.
Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and pleasure in the work by the workman was a matter of more importance still, for it stamped all labour with the impress of pleasure.
To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning his life into a prison-torment.
People engaged in all such labour need by no means be compelled to pig together in close city quarters.
The misery and squalor which we people of civilization bear with so much complacency as a necessary part of the manufacturing system, is just as necessary to the community at large as a proportionate amount of filth would be in the house of a private rich man.
It is clear that with work unwasted it CAN be short.
A man might easily learn and practise at least three crafts, varying sedentary occupation with outdoor--occupation calling for the exercise of strong bodily energy for work in which the mind had more to do.
Persons, either by themselves or associated for such purposes, would freely, and for the love of the work and for its results--stimulated by the hope of the pleasure of creation--produce those ornaments of life for the service of all, which they are now bribed to produce (or pretend to produce) for the service of a few rich men.
There is nothing of it--there is nothing which could come of it that could satisfy the aspirations of men set free from the tyranny of commercialism.
I beg you to bring your commission of lunacy against civilization without more delay.
Nor only so.
We shall no longer be hurried and driven by the fear of starvation, which at present presses no less on the greater part of men in civilized communities than it does on mere savages.
What the cost may be, who can tell?
But we have seen also that the work of the world might be carried on in hope and with pleasure if it were not wasted by folly and tyranny, by the perpetual strife of opposing classes.
All labour is not yet driven into factories; often where it is there is no necessity for it, save again the profit-tyranny.
I mean that side of art which is, or ought to be, done by the ordinary workman while he is about his ordinary work, and which has got to be called, very properly, Popular Art.
The factories might be centres of intellectual activity also, and work in them might well be varied very much: the tending of the necessary machinery might to each individual be but a short part of the day's work.
The experiment of a civilized community living wholly without art or literature has not yet been tried.
There are few men, for instance, who would not wish to spend part of their lives in the most necessary and pleasantest of all work--cultivating the earth.
Beginning by making their factories, buildings, and sheds decent and convenient like their homes, they would infallibly go on to make them not merely negatively good, inoffensive merely, but even beautiful, so that the glorious art of architecture, now for some time slain by commercial greed, would be born again and flourish.
We have weighed the work of civilization in the balance and found it wanting, since hope is mostly lacking to it, and therefore we see that civilization has bred a dire curse for men.
Next, the day's work will be short.
On the other hand, the ornamental part of modern life is already rotten to the core, and must be utterly swept away before the new order of things is realized.
Due education is a totally different thing from this, and concerns itself in finding out what different people are fit for, and helping them along the road which they are inclined to take.
Variety of work is the next point, and a most important one.
Meantime, in any case, the refinement, thoughtfulness, and deliberation of labour must indeed be paid for, but not by compulsion to labour long hours.
If that must be, we will accept the passing phase of utilitarianism as a foundation for the art which is to be.
Such absolutely necessary work as we should have to do would in the first place take up but a small part of each day, and so far would not be burdensome; but it would be a task of daily recurrence, and therefore would spoil our day's pleasure unless it were made at least endurable while it lasted.
The other work might vary from raising food from the surrounding country to the study and practice of art and science.
This need not be insisted on.
They are called "labour-saving" machines--a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect.
I do admit, as I have said before, that some sacrifice will be necessary in order to make labour attractive.
It may be said, "How can you make this last claim square with the others?
Now we have seen that the semi-theological dogma that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer, is hypocritical and false; that, on the other hand, labour is good when due hope of rest and pleasure accompanies it.
For all our crowded towns and bewildering factories are simply the outcome of the profit system.
Once more I say, that for a man to be the whole of his life hopelessly engaged in performing one repulsive and never-ending task, is an arrangement fit enough for the hell imagined by theologians, but scarcely fit for any other form of society.
It is a matter of course that people engaged in such work, and being the masters of their own lives, would not allow any hurry or want of foresight to force them into enduring dirt, disorder, or want of room.
All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would "pay" the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community.
The education of the masters is more ornamental than that of the workmen, but it is commercial still; and even at the ancient universities learning is but little regarded, unless it can in the long run be made TO PAY.
But I have also claimed, as we all do, that the day's work should not be wearisomely long.
The past degradation and corruption of civilization may force this denial of pleasure upon the society which will arise from its ashes.
It is clear also that much work which is now a torment, would be easily endurable if it were much shortened.
But for us, let us set our hearts on it and win it at whatever cost.
I mean that, if we COULD be contented in a free community to work in the same hurried, dirty, disorderly, heartless way as we do now, we might shorten our day's labour very much more than I suppose we shall do, taking all kinds of labour into account.
Capitalistic manufacture, capitalistic land-owning, and capitalistic exchange force men into big cities in order to manipulate them in the interests of capital; the same tyranny contracts the due space of the factory so much that (for instance) the interior of a great weaving-shed is almost as ridiculous a spectacle as it is a horrible one.